Nally winced inwardly. Timothy had been their friend back in their first year of uni. For a while, they had been the Three Musketeers. Then things had heated up between Jude and Timothy. They’d had a hot, intense, three-week relationship before Tim had decided he didn’t want to be tied down after all. He’d dumped Jude hard, Nally had been caught in the middle, and for the first and only time in their tenure as besties, it had looked like Nally and Jude would go their separate ways, too.
Fortunately, that hadn’t happened. Instead, they’d gotten drunk and cried on each other’s shoulders about how they would be friends forever and never let anyone come between them. Bridges were patched up, and Timothy was declared the wanker for fucking and running.
“Things never got close enough for Sam to pull a Timothy,” Nally said. “No harm, no foul.”
“Good. I don’t want to go through that again.”
“Neither do I,” Nally said, then rushed right into, “Want to attend a posh film premiere?”
“With you?”
“In the general proximity of me, yes,” Nally said, grabbing the side of the door as his mum made a particularly nail-biting turn onto the M2. “I suddenly find myself with an extra ticket.”
“Just what every boy wants to hear,” Jude said with a laugh. “Second choice for a night at the cinema.”
“If it makes you feel better, there’s a red carpet,” Nally said with a grin. “Apparently, I get to walk it as the film’s composer.”
“Really? Why didn’t you lead with that?” Jude asked.
“I assumed that you knew how these things work, gigantic social media influencer as you are.” When Jude laughed, Nally went on with, “They only told me this morning. Someone told them people are interested in the score to this thing, so the studio rang me this morning to tell me I’ll be walking the red carpet.”
“In that case, how can I say no?” Jude said, sounding genuinely excited. “Where and when?”
“The Odeon, Leicester Square, in an hour,” Nally said.
“I’ll be there,” Jude answered.
They said goodbye, and Nally relaxed back into his seat. That took care of that. And actually, he liked the idea of Jude walking any sort of red carpet with him a thousand times more than he would have liked Sam filling that role. Not only did Jude know everything there was to know about presenting oneself to the media, he really was Nally’s best friend. The two of them had met in primary school. Maybe because he was the last of the Hawthorne children, or maybe because his musical talent had made itself known early, but instead of attending the same local school as the rest of his family, his parents had sent him to a posh arts school in central London.
Nally and Jude had hit it off immediately. Mostly because they were both bullied by the other kids for being genuine aristocrats and nowhere near as tough as the other boys. Even in an arts school where half the student body was as queer as a tambourine, there were cool kids and dorks. He and Jude had never minded being dorks as long as they could be together.
Nally had progressed with his music and composing far faster than Jude had advanced with his acting. Jude was good, but he had never quite achieved the sort of greatness his parents expected of him. Which summed up Jude’s relationship with his family in a nutshell. They let him stay in the arts school in the hopes that he’d at least score character roles, but by the time they graduated and moved on to uni, Jude had become more interested in computers, web design, and being a social media influencer.
Which he was incredibly successful at doing.
“So Jude will be joining us after all?” Janice asked, glancing at Nally in the rear-view mirror.
“Yep,” Nally answered with a smile. “He’ll meet us there.”
“He still lives in Mayfair with his parents, doesn’t he?” Rebecca asked.
Nally winced a little, mostly because it was a sore subject for Jude. “He does.” And he hated it. Nally couldn’t figure out for the life of him why Jude didn’t simply get his own place and move out. He spent more time at Hawthorne House than in Mayfair anyhow. He should have just taken one of the empty flats in the family wing.
“We should invite George and Margaret to supper sometime,” Nally’s dad said, putting on his posh, “Earl Voice” as he liked to call it.
“Goddess, no!” Janice snorted. “The two of them are absolute nobheads.”
The conversation continued as they wound their way into London amidst traffic and the growing excitement of attending a film premiere. The minutes seemed to drag by, and while everyone else discussed everything from snobbery to whether Matt Bloom should have done the nude scene or not, Nally’s nerves got worse and worse.
What if peopledidnotice the soundtrack forTo Serve Him? What if they thought it was terrible? His entire career might be over before it began. Or potentially worse, what if people loved the soundtrack and he was dragged into some sort of high-profile situation he wasn’t ready for? Aside from the fact that he burst out in hives when he was the center of a crowd’s attention, he certainly didn’t want to get sucked into Hollywood. Yes, it was the epicenter of the film world, but the very last thing he wanted to do was go within a hundred miles of America.
At least Jude would be with him now to help him navigate the mess. His dad was right. He should have just invited Jude to begin with.
It was a good thing the studio had arranged a special area for those with invitations to the premiere to park near Leicester Square. They never would have gotten anywhere close otherwise. While the rest of the family fussed and fawned over each other, Nally stepped to the side of the building and pulled out his phone to send Jude his exact location. He could see Jude’s dot on the map of the program they used to spy on each other moving ever closer from the other side of the square. In just a few minutes?—
“Excuse me, you’re Ronald Hawthorne, aren’t you?”
Nally glanced up from his phone, smiling, and found a middling attractive, early middle-aged man in a suit approaching him with wide eyes and a cautious gait. “I’m Ronald Hawthorne, yes,” he said.
