Page 46 of The Moon & His Tides

But then, there he’d been, devastating Savannah’s iron control and razing my own the moment I saw him embody a dead soldier in an indie production at Finborough Theatre.

Something in him called to me, beautiful and deadly as a siren’s song.

I wanted to disregard my rules and throw myself boldly into his arms.

The worst part of it was I thought he would catch me.

Reputation be damned, the irreparable damage to his fledgling career would take a back seat to the desire I saw so blatantly in his gaze.

Social constructs and the petty injustices of our industry would not rein in this man of passion.

But he deserved more than that.

Just being our driver and live-in lover.

He deserved a golden statue the same shade as his eyes for acting and writing.

He deserved fame and acclaim and whatever his heart desired because he was a good man, and I had the awful feeling he’d been exceedingly unlucky in life thus far.

And here I was, ready and shockingly eager to change that.

So maybe this was a date.

Maybe I wanted to go on three dozen more, with him, with my wife, our marriage revived by his rawness and fire and honesty.

But for him, for her, for me… my career, I wouldn’t.

We had all, in our own ways, worked too hard to give it all up now for something that had no guarantees, no money to live on or success to soothe our brittle insecurities.

“It’s a business lunch,” I corrected Sebastian, but softly, the words tempered by the hand I clasped on his knee, the squeeze I gave that firm thigh. “And we best be going.”

“Okay,” he said easily because I was discovering he was just like that, good-natured and easygoing except when he was riled. “Don’t think I won’t remember you owe me something about your history when I shared and you haven’t. But… thank you, Adam, for doing this. I know you said my work merits it, but I don’t think I’ll ever be able to express how much your faith in me means. It’s… well, it’s everything.”

He looked at me then a little differently than he had in the car on the way up from London. Not like I was Adam Meyers, the actor, but more like I was Adam Meyers, his friend. A little warm, a little possessive.

The sentiment was punctuated by the hand he lifted to squeeze my shoulder, closing the loop between us, a current running through my hand to his thigh and back up through his hand to me.

I wanted to kiss him more than I wanted my next breath.

But we were in public. Though the gardens seemed deserted, you could never trust a setting rife with film folk not to capture something interesting on their phones and sell it to the paps.

“It’s my pleasure,” I told him sincerely, and then, risking it a bit, I pushed my hand up his thigh to squeeze again near his groin. “Or it soon will be.”

Sebastian had laughed, bright and happy, so he didn’t see the way I looked at him and wondered what it might be like to prioritize this… friendship over all the fears I had that lay between us.

13

ADAM

It was dark when I pulled the Aston through the gates into the car park before the house. I didn’t immediately alight from the car and neither did Sebastian, as though we were both afraid the magic of the day, complete with an afternoon of walking the lots and then watching the last of Andrea’s shoot before grabbing dinner together at his hotel, would dissipate the moment we opened the doors to the brisk London air.

“Thank you again for today,” he said, turning to face me, his eyes animal yellow in the shadows. “No one has ever been so kind to me as you and Savannah. It’s… well, I hope I’m worthy of it.”

“I think the fact that you’re even worried says you are. Most people in this industry become arrogant or entitled quicker than you can imagine.”

“I won’t be like that,” he said, quiet but fierce, as if the idea offended his very core.

And I thought maybe it did.