Page 43 of The Moon & His Tides
No, not that.
A bloodybrilliantday.
The best I’d had in a fucking age.
I felt… light, filled with something cool and clean like the moonlight turning the nightscape around the speeding car to silver.
We’d meant to spend an hour, tops, on set with Andrea, but somehow, time and enthusiasm had colluded to make us lose track of time.
Even when Andrea went back to shooting the final scenes for his upcoming drama, Sebastian’s raw joy at being on a film set had rooted me in place. There were meetings to be at, people to hobnob with if I wanted to secure my BAFTA win in a few weeks, my agent blowing up my phone with new film offers now that the nominations had been released… Endless tasks to see done.
Yet I was transfixed by the Italian actor/writer/chauffeur who stood beside me with the kind of wide-eyed zeal I hadn’t seen on a film set in years, if at all. I’d forgotten, looking atSebastian, what it felt like to be new to the scene. To watch the mechanics of filmmaking, the multiple camera angles, and the drudgery of repeating your lines again and again to obtain the right nuances for the master shot, for the individual shots, how many people were needed on set for such a variety of reasons a civilian would have no hope of guessing their purpose.
And all of it, Sebastian ate with a proverbial spoon.
“È meraviglioso,” he breathed as Willa Trombley cried repeatedly for the camera, each shot absolutely exquisite.
I didn’t speak much Italian, though I took Latin at Eton long enough to parse his meaning.
“It is through your eyes,” I agreed, unable to look away from the Italian enough to appreciate the harmony on set. “You seem to have the ability to find beauty in everything.”
His grin was free, a boyish kind of contentment that he’d earned my praise. The expression made me want to lavish him with poetry in a way I’d never done before. It made me want to put him on his knees and teach him how to earn it from me.
“I learned young. My twin sister and I made it our motto, really. We became determined to find beauty in the darkness.”
“Was your childhood so bad?” I couldn’t help but give voice to my curiosity.
His tone was so casual for the words that came next. “There was a lot of darkness in our lives for a long time. It was either see the beauty in the shadows or give up and let that hungry blackness swallow you whole. It taught me to be grateful every day for the small joys.” He shot me a cheeky grin. “And for the big ones like here, today.”
I thought about my own sense of ennui, how my life seemed to blur day by day into a kind of stagnant, grey-toned reel of B footage. Nothing to punctuate it, nothing to make me sit up and take notice.
How embarrassing it seemed now, in the face of Sebastian’s gratefulness and optimism, to be so jaded when I had untold privilege.
He caught my wince and pulled his attention from the scene to put a hand on my elbow, discreetly enough that no one would notice. Still, his touch was… nice. Savannah wasn’t particularly affectionate outside the bedroom nor had my parents ever been anything close to the touchy-feely types.
But it seemed Sebastian was.
A hand on the elbow, a bump of shoulder into shoulder. Little things that somehow added up to something large enough to weigh pleasantly in my hollow chest.
“Did I say something to upset you?” he’d asked.
It wasn’t his fault that his youthful earnestness made me feel eighty-two and at the end of my life instead of twenty-eight and at the height of it.
“No,” I murmured, but I gave in to my own impulse to touch him and clasped him strongly on the shoulder. “Should we steal something from the craft services table and take it to a place I know?”
Sebastian’s grin turned coy, making my gut clench. For someone who’d never been with a man before, he was shockingly good at flirting with one. “Aprivateplace you know?”
“Exactly,” I agreed, already shoving him forward to the entrance.
Andrea was busy, so I didn’t bother with goodbyes. However, I figured we would pop by later to see if he was still filming. In the meantime, I focused on the beauty in the grim blankness of my life that was one Sebastian Lombardi.
He chatted with me freely as we left the warehouse and moved to the craft services tent set up outside. His hands waved to and fro, talking just as eloquently as his words as he told me about his thoughts forBlood Oath. He only paused briefly tocontemplate the loaded food tables with slack-jawed awe before grabbing a paper plate and loading it so high that the thin material buckled in his grip, and he had to carry it with two hands.
“Hey, Meyers, looking good,” a friendly, familiar grip called to me as he walked by.
I jerked my chin up in his direction but didn’t take my eyes from Seb as he contemplated his wobbly plate, plucked a breadstick from the masses of food, and stuck it between his lips like a cigarette as though that would help level the load.
“Ready?” he mumbled around the bread.
