Chapter Thirty-Seven
Back then
His Moleskine lived in the bottom of his carry-on, underneath the Ziploc bag of adaptors and the noise-cancelling headphones he’d owned since his first transatlantic press tour at nineteen.
It was the fourth notebook he’d been through since he started the habit at twenty, each one identical, large, hardcover, ruled, in black, because Tristan believed in systems.
The first three were in a drawer at his dad’s house in Pasadena, filled with lists that had steered his adult life.
brAD — NON-NEGOTIABLES at twenty-two, after the Disney contract expired and he’d needed to establish boundaries before his agent steamrolled him into a reality-show deal.
CAREER TRAJECTORY (REALISTIC) at twenty-three, which he’d written on a flight to Toronto and revised six times, each revision a little less optimistic than the last, until Better Half had rendered the whole document irrelevant.
Now he was sitting cross-legged on his bed at one in the morning, with the notebook open on the duvet, doing what he’d always done when the variables got too complicated to hold in his head.
He drew a line down the centre of the page.
On the left, he wrote: STAY
On the right: GO
He started with GO. It was the column he could populate without thinking, and the strategic part of his brain, the part that had kept him employed since he was twelve and navigating audition rooms full of stage mothers who would have happily shoved him down a flight of stairs for a call-back, needed to go first. The strategic part was older. It had seniority.
The Kennedys. Bobby. Third on the call sheet. HBO. The role that breaks you out of the BBC bracket and puts you in the international conversation. Brad has the offer memo. The window closes.
Career momentum has a shelf life. Capital depreciates. You spend it now or you watch it rot.
You are twenty-five. You have been working towards this since you were twelve years old. You have crossed off all other options in this notebook. You circled Epic Romance, and you got one, and now the Epic Romance is asking you to prioritise it over your career.
Four months in Sydney is four months away from a man who cannot leave the country without briefing from the Foreign Secretary and Governor General of Australia. Long-distance with a normal boyfriend is hard. Long-distance with the King of the United Kingdom literally involves diplomatic affairs.
The consort wall. Cecil walked you through it. Alexandra gave up music. Eleanor gave up a fellowship. Amelia gave up painting. The pattern is not subtle. The institution does not accommodate.
You would be the first male consort in the history of the British monarchy. The first American. The first former Disney Channel star. Any one of those would generate a decade of tabloid scrutiny. All three together would bring on a fucking siege.
Your career. The thing you built from scratch, the thing your mother drove you to all your auditions for, the thing that kept you solvent and going after she died.
If this happens, it becomes “the King’s husband’s hobby.
” You become the answer to a pub-quiz question.
The novelty consort. The American who gave up Hollywood for a tiara.
You are not built for this. You are built for rooms where you control the narrative. Palaces are rooms where the narrative is a thousand years old and it doesn’t care what you think about it.
He put the pen down and flexed his hand. He’d been gripping it too hard, pressing the nib into the paper so that the words cut grooves into the page beneath.
The STAY column was blank.
He picked the pen up again.
James.
Caroline.
The GO column filled most of the page, its arguments running in tidy lines from the top to within an inch of the bottom, each point numbered, each one defensible. The logic was clean, and the conclusion obvious.
The STAY column had two names and a lot of white space.
He closed the notebook half an hour later and put it in the drawer of his bedside table, where it sat for the next three days while he pretended he hadn’t already made his decision.
On Wednesday, Brad called about the Kennedy pre-production schedule.
“They want you in LA for a week to meet the showrunner, do a table read with the cast they’ve locked in, and sit down with the dialect coach.
Bobby’s Boston accent is non-negotiable, and right now you sound like a man who’s spent too long drinking tea with earls.
” Brad paused. “Also, your dad called me. He says you haven’t been home in five months and he’s started talking to your headshot on the fridge. ”
Tristan booked the flight back home that afternoon.
He didn’t tell James he was going until the evening before, sitting in James’s Kensington kitchen while James made a carbonara. The pasta turned out overcooked, the egg had scrambled, but Tristan ate it anyway.
“A week,” James said, not looking up from his own plate. “That’s fine. That’s nothing. A week is just seven days.”
“That is traditionally how weeks are structured, yes.”
“I’ve got the Commonwealth Secretariat on Tuesday and the Lord Mayor’s dinner on Thursday, so I’d barely notice you were gone.” James shrugged. “Barely notice. Then you’ll be right back here for the BLEX wedding.”
? ? ?
His father opened the front door in a Hawaiian shirt and cargo shorts, with Darcy the golden retriever shouldering past his knees to get to Tristan first. “You’re too thin, son,” Raymond said, pulling him into a hug. “Are they not feeding you over there?”
“They’re feeding me fine, Dad.”
“Because based on my own experience, British food is all gravy and the taste of sadness.”
Ren arrived an hour later with his girlfriend and a bag of tacos from the place on Lake that Tristan had been dreaming about since the spring.
William came straight from the gym, still in his workout gear, and ate four tacos standing up at the kitchen counter before sitting down and eating two more.
Darcy worked the room, guided by who was dropping the most taco filling onto the floor.
They wanted to know about London. About the show. Whether Daniel Birrell was as big in person as he looked on screen (bigger, Tristan confirmed, and gentler than anyone would expect). Whether Tristan had been to any good restaurants, and if the rumours about the Princess Royal were true.
“We weren’t together,” Tristan said, which was true, as far as it went. “She’s a friend. She looked out for me when I first got there.”
Tristan sat at the kitchen table with his family and let them fill him back up.
He didn’t mention James. Raymond had taken his sons to Pride in West Hollywood every year since Tristan was nine, so it wasn’t that they’d react badly.
It was that talking about James would mean explaining what James was to him.
What would he say? I’m sleeping with the King of the United Kingdom.
We’re at the point where he’s started explaining the order of precedence to me over pasta, and Sir Cecil walked me through a gallery of consorts who gave up everything they were in order to stand beside the throne, and I’ve been going back to look at the blank wall where my portrait would hang.
It’s really scary, and I’m pretty sure I have to break up with him…
Instead, Tristan ate his tacos and changed the subject to the Kennedys.
? ? ?
The table read was held in a production office on the Warner Brothers lot in Burbank, a windowless room with a conference table where bottles of Pellegrino had been set out in neat rows down the centre. The showrunner, Anna Callahan, sat at the head in a black linen shirt.
Afterwards, in the corridor, Ethan Lanzer, two-time Oscar nominee, clapped him on the shoulder and said, “That Senate scene was fucking great, man.” Tristan thanked him, waited until he’d turned the corner, and then stood there grinning at a fire extinguisher.
Everything about the production said Awards Magnet.
The scripts were the best he’d read since Better Half.
The people attached were operating at the highest possible level of their industry.
And everyone he met treated him like he belonged at the table.
They’d seen the screeners from Better Half and decided he was worth the bet.
Brad took him to dinner at Matsuhisa on Thursday night, where they sat at the counter eating omakase and Brad walked him through the next eighteen months of his career as though they were planning a military campaign.
The audition pipeline was the healthiest it had been since Tristan signed with him.
Three A-list directors had put in general meetings, and the trades were calling him a breakout.
Someone at CAA had called Brad’s office to feel out a potential poach, which Brad found hilarious and Tristan found flattering and terrifying.
“You’re having a moment, kid,” Brad said, dipping toro into soy sauce. “These moments don’t come around twice. You ride it now, or you end up thinking of it wistfully as you live out your days in a retirement village in Florida.”
“Why would I end up in Florida, Brad?”
“Because that’s where people go when they’ve given up, Tristan. That’s why Florida’s at the bottom of the US.”
Tristan ate his toro and kept to himself the thought that he was, in fact, already riding someone he’d grown quite fond of, and wasn’t entirely sure he wanted to dismount in favour of his ‘moment’.
It would never work. Tristan knew this with the same cold clarity that had filled every numbered point in the GO column of his notebook.
James’s life was a fixed orbit, and Tristan’s was built to move, and the distance between those two facts was not a problem you could solve with love or good intentions.
It would never work, but he wanted it to.