Page 44 of The Moon & His Tides
I cocked an eyebrow at him, but he only grinned. “I grew up poor, okay? If there’s free food, I’m eating as much of it as I possibly can.”
“How you keep that eight-pack is a real wonder,” I grumbled as I took my own sparse plate of protein and some veg and led him away from the tent deeper into the maze of Pinewood Studios.
“I think it’s my youthful metabolism,” he quipped, easily falling into step with me on those long legs when most people struggled to keep up. “When did you lose that, do you reckon,vecchietto? A decade or so ago?”
I almost choked on my unexpected laughter. “You wanker, I’m twenty-eight, thank you very much.”
He peered at me and then risked losing his plate of food to poke at my temple. “Bit of grey hair there, though.”
“It’s distinguished,” I said haughtily.
“Sure.” He crunched the breadstick and ate it carefully without the use of his hands.
It was quite entertaining.
The gardens at Pinewood Studios were a massive appeal of filming at the lot. They had the forest abutting the back of the property that had stood in for France, The Balkans, andmystical woods like the ones inHarry Potter. But I led Sebastian to Heatherden Hall, a magnificent manor home ringed in cultivated gardens with a small pond and pretty stone bridge crossing it.
We were both quiet as we stood on the bridge and looked out over the water, the sound of the fountain a quiet trickle in the background. The house itself rose from the pretty gardens in all its pale yellow and cream splendor.
“It’s gorgeous,” Sebastian said quietly, as if in reverence to the grandeur of the faux estate.
I grinned, but it felt a little wrong on my face as I settled on the steps facing the house, and Sebastian followed suit. “I grew up on an estate much like this.”
“I could pretend to be surprised by that, but I did do some research before I agreed to be your live-in house boy,” he admitted unashamedly, before ripping a mammoth bite out of his turkey sandwich.
“It wasn’t quite as pastoral as this lot. Cornwall is all cliffs and vivid greenery and crashing ocean waves. It smells like salt, and the wind always bites, even on a balmy summer’s day.”
“It sounds like you love it there.”
“Does it?” That surprised me. I hadn’t been to my father’s estate near Falmouth in over half a decade. “I didn’t as a boy. That’s certain.”
Sebastian slid me a careful look as he chewed before saying, “I didn’t grow up enjoying Naples very much, but I love it. The heat in midsummer, the stink of the ocean and the sear of the pavement through your thin-soled shoes. The food. Uh, English food is nothing in comparison.” He made such a face of disgust I had to laugh. “I think loving and hating our hometown is the same kind of necessary tension we have with our parents. We love them because we have to, wewantto, and we’re wired andraised to. But we can hate them for all the ways they’ve wronged us.”
He was silent then, looking out over the gardens, lost in his own reverie. Shockingly, I found myself wanting to join him there. Savannah and I had something of a silent agreement about our pasts: we didn’t talk about them. As though they would cease to exist by not acknowledging them.
It was unlike me to even mention my childhood home, let alone indulge in conversation about it, but Sebastian seemed to stir up the murky banks at the bottom of my gut, revealing things I’d thought long since lost.
“Shall we share our sad little histories, then?” I suggested casually, as though my heart wasn’t doing something funny in my chest. “Tit for tat.”
He looked down at his plate, fingered the edge of a spring roll, and then put his plate to the side. “All right, then, if you want.”
I wanted to talk about my own life like I wanted hemorrhoids, but I was too curious about his to be cautious.
“What do you want out of life?” I asked, casting a wide net, not because I wanted a generic answer but because I wantedeveryanswer he had to give me.
Surprisingly, he ducked his head to smile secretively at his hands.
“What?” I pressed, hooked by his uncharacteristic bashfulness. “Don’t think I’ll shame you for saying fame and fortune, mate. It would be rather hypocritical of me.”
His laugh was an exhale. “No, no. I mean, of course, I’d love to have the pick of films to star in. Funding for any screenplay I write. But truly? My dream will seem childish to you, and I may only be eighteen, but I don’t want you to see me as naive.”
“Well, you did willingly enter into a scandalous affair with a married couple, so I think the ship sailed on your naivety long ago,” I quipped just to see him grin.
“Va bene,” he murmured, tipping his head to the rare sight of the British sun bright in the sky. “I wantl’amour che move il sol e l’altre stelle.”
Before I could translate the beautiful phrase using my grade school Latin, he looked at me with those sun-gold eyes and repeated in English, “I want a love that moves the sun and the stars.”
I blinked, struck physically by his confession.
