Archive of Our Own

PART I

***

Things had started out uneventful when they had gone for their morning run. Chris wouldn’t call what he was doing running; he was probably doing more strolling than running, lagging several paces behind Tom as he kept an eye out for any strange activities. But it was that kind of morning: no paparazzi hidden behind bushes, or guys in suspiciously bulky trench coats following them around with a camera, or pointing an erection threateningly at Chris’ client; it was really rather nice. You could never afford to let your guard down when you were in the business of personal security, but Chris could spot no immediate threat in the vicinity and so allowed himself to relax. He enjoyed the moment for what it was: a slice of normalcy, which in Tom’s life were few and far in between.

It was early enough that the park was beautifully still, only early morning joggers and pigeons hunting for breakfast on the trail keeping them company. A couple of pigeons eyed them with disinterest before taking off in a flurry of white wings while a jogger zipped past, ignoring them completely.

The temperature was somewhere in the twenties, which meant Chris didn’t grease like a pig by the time they’d finished their second lap. He felt cool and refreshed though the AQI was relatively high that morning and it probably would’ve been healthier if he’d just stayed in and eaten a bag of crisps. Still, he couldn’t deny that a little exercise made him feel a million times better in general: towards others, the world, technology and small animals.

Tom, keeping a sedate pace, waited for him to catch up so they could jog side by side.

His little poodle terrier, Gnarls Bark Lee, ten pounds of brown-blond fur and as madcap as his owner, trotted happily in front of them, leading the way with his soft paws pitter-pattering, his leash dragging mud behind him.

Tom was decked out in expensive running gear which consisted of a pair of distractingly form-fitting shorts and shirt. He was like a walking (running) Nike ad: toned legs and long lean arms, one earbud plugged in, the cord a long looping line dangling from his armband where his iPod was strapped. Chris had already known beforehand, in an empirical way, that Tom was what a lot of people considered criminally attractive, but it was upsetting how gorgeous Tom tended to be when the cameras weren’t rolling.

Running had made him break into a little sweat, which made his hair stand up in damp little curls. His face was flushed, and so were his ears, and standing in such close proximity to him, Chris was all too aware of the smell of his sweat, which theoretically should’ve been disgusting as hell but in reality was somehow mildly arousing.

Tom’s sweat smelled good. He wore cologne all the time and this morning, combined with his often generally pleasant warm-skin smell, it formed a particularly heady cocktail that made Chris feel a little light-headed and want to do something very stupid.

Because that was the thing they never told you about celebrities: on the inside they were made of the same ugly pink mess of muscle and bone like everyone else, but on the outside they were still better than you, more beautiful. Tom’s sweat smelled good. And he was gorgeous, his nose aristocratic, his cheekbones sharp enough to cut cheese, his fingers carved like a sculptor’s, a far cry from Chris’ own veiny meaty monstrosities; and he ran like he was being filmed, his pert little arse the focal point of Chris’ vision, the very reason he was lagging behind.

This should’ve been the first warning sign; the red flag that meant Chris had gone too long without sex. It was against the golden rule: never bit the hand that fed you. Or alternatively: never hump it. The movie, The Bodyguard, with Kevin Costner and Whitney Houston, had gotten it all wrong. Basic training taught you to keep your eyes and ears peeled, not break protocol and molest your client on the couch.

They stopped to rest on a nearby bench, Tom leaning his elbows on his knees, his head ducked down. He was panting softly, wiping sweat off his eye, panting again, head still bent. Chris stood next to him, out of propriety if nothing else, pretending he was scanning the perimeter, and could hear the soft percussive hiss of music coming from one of Tom’s earbuds: his god-awful 80’s new wave electro pop.

Typical.

Chris was about to comment on Tom’s choice of running music when they were accosted by a gaggle of girls in running shorts. Giggling and blushing, they looked to be between the ages of fourteen and seventeen, or at least seemed too young to be out unaccompanied at this hour. Fans. Not for the first time, Chris stood there stupidly on the fringes as they asked Tom for an autograph and a picture.

“Oh god, but I’m all sweaty right now, are you sure?”

But Tom had already climbed up to his feet, his arms spread out to accommodate them, ever the gentleman. One of them fished out a camera from her purse, an expensive one, from the looks of it, the lens as thick as an arm, and as wide as a saucer. The blonde in pigtails tucked herself under Tom’s arm securely while her three friends huddled closer, standing on their toes to align their faces with his.

Click. Click. Click.

  Click-click-click-click.

“Who’s your friend Tom?” Pigtails.

“Oh, that’s just Chris,” Tom said, glancing at Chris over his shoulder, like he’d only just noticed his presence. “Say hi Chris.”

Chris didn’t. He wasn’t trained to be genial around potential threat, even if said threat were underage, spotty, and easily lifted over his head. There were a number of ways to conceal a firearm, and he was never fond of teenagers to begin with, especially as he was related to one. He watched them with a frown he did little to disguise and Tom laughed at him and thanked the girls after they’d finished taking their picture.

They waved and left shortly after, giggling amongst themselves like teen girls do. As soon as they were out of sight, Tom smiled up at Chris, a sincere little smile that made Chris feel a little... stupid. He huffed as he was elbowed in the ribs good-naturedly. Tom’s smile could potentially cure world hunger but most days whenever it was directed at Chris, Chris felt like nothing could be too bad if someone like Tom existed. The world could go up in flames tomorrow but if he had Tom...

“You didn’t say hi,” Tom said, like it was a tragedy. There was a pout in his voice.

“They weren’t here for me,” Chris said. Then a thought hit him: “Do you think they’ve been following us since we started running?”

Tom shrugged, a gesture that could’ve meant he didn’t care, or it didn’t matter, either way. Probably both, knowing him. He was nice to people, always. He believed in karma. And was strangely superstitious for someone who’d defected from the Catholic Church a long time ago.

Gnarls, who had been panting at their feet earlier, was now padding briskly south -- the direction of the man-made duck pond. Chris sighed and gave chase, Tom following close behind. By the time they caught up to the furry pain-in-the-arse, Gnarls was knee-deep in pond water, having deeply upset the flock of ducks that made their home there; there were feathers everywhere, and angry confused quacking.

Between his powerful little jaws, Gnarls held a duck by the scruff. His intent was clear: to maul the poor creature like a chew toy, but he released it immediately at the sound of Tom’s tutting. Gnarls lowered his head, shamefaced, as the duck, now presumably concussed, waddled back to the pond, wings twitching.

“Bad dog, bad dog,” Tom cooed, but he was laughing in amusement. He picked up Gnarls after the dog shook himself dry. Now he was petting the dog’s head fondly.

Tom was giving Gnarls mixed signals. Somebody ought to take that dog away from him, Chris thought. He shook his head.

They walked towards where they parked the car and where David, Tom’s driver, stood around drinking from a thermos, leafing through the morning paper. He was dressed in running gear too, to keep up with the theme. A blue thermos sat cooling on the roof of Tom’s Bentley, shining brand new under patches of leaf-shaped morning light. David folded the paper and tucked it under one arm as they approached, accepting the frisky dog as it was handed to him.

“Good run?” he asked, squeezing Gnarls and jiggling him like a little baby.

Chris shrugged, then rolled his eyes when he realized, that of course, the question wasn’t directed at him.

Tom grinned brilliantly at David, reaching for his sports bag in the backseat and grabbing a spare white shirt.

David poured a puddle of coffee on the ground for Gnarls to lap up.

“What are you doing?” Chris asked, panicking, a question that could have very well been directed at the three of them. They tended to be on the crazy side. But it was Tom Chris was most invested in. Being that he happened to be his client and Tom was the one signing his pay checks.

“What does it look like I’m doing?” Tom said. He bent at the waist, lifting both his arms, reaching behind himself to grab his shirt by the tail. Before Chris could stop him, the shirt had already come off, the collar snagging around Tom’s head so that he stood there for a good few beats like a headless chicken with the body of a Greek scholar.

Tom was all lean muscle, his smooth skin pebbling in goosebumps, his nipples, when Chris glimpsed them for a split second of a split second, stiff and peaky, a dusky brown just a shade darker than how he often took his tea. He shivered as a breeze blew past them, and then suddenly the shirt was puddled around his feet, everything happening at fast-forward speed.

Chris imagined he heard paparazzi snapping pictures from behind a bush somewhere and resisted the urge to throw himself in front of his client, shielding him with his body from potential perverts and voyeurs.

This job was making him paranoid.

Tom,  because he still a little sweaty, had damp patches on his shirt where it had glued to the skin. Chris could see his nipples, perky and uninhibited, through the flimsy over-washed material. Sprinkles of dark hair peeked feebly between the V of Tom’s collar. He didn’t even want to get started on Tom’s collarbones where a pool of sweat had gathered in the dip between.

David handed Chris the dog and opened the door for Tom once Tom was suitably dressed.

“Why, thank you David,” Tom giggled.

David curtsied, gave Chris a one-fingered salute, then slid into the driver seat where he started the engine.

Chris sighed wearily, gave Gnarls a squeeze, and the park a quick perimeter-check to appear like he was, at least, taking his job seriously. Nothing out of place, or suspect, though there was an old lady on a park  bench nearby watching them stiffly.

Tom rolled down the window, his voice shaking Chris out of his thoughts as did the soft tap he issued against the glass. “Are you coming Chris? We’re grabbing organic smoothies on the way.” His eyebrows were raised hopefully, like a little kid’s.

Chris shrugged and took his usual seat in the front, glancing in the rearview mirror a few times to make sure Tom was all settled in the backseat before clipping on his seat belt. In his lap, Gnarls barked twice, then stuck his head out the half-open window, his tongue lolling out the corner of his doggy mouth as he started panting.

***

Chris started working for Tom six months ago, shortly after Tom began receiving death threats in the mail, but right after he had spent a week in the hospital with a misdiagnosed case of mono. He’d been getting them for nearly a year, the threats, not the mono, but had brushed them off as isolated events until his flat was broken into a week before Christmas; nothing stolen but a few personal items. A signed baseball mitt, a horned helm -- once part of the famous costume he’d worn in those  movies that had brought him renown -- and an entire shelfful of underwear were all missing when  police did inventory.

The part with the underwear raised a few eyebrows, but it was the spray-painted message that the culprit left across Tom’s living room wall -- omnia mors aequat; death makes all things equal -- that gave everybody pause.

The people closest to Tom thought it then in his best interest to hire a personal bodyguard amidst Tom’s many reassurances he could take care of himself. He didn’t want to make a fuss, he could always just move to a new location, he said, but his protests went largely ignored. Chris’ agency was contacted a week later. Negotiations were made, and a mountain of paperwork signed and Chris showed up the next day to meet Tom for breakfast to introduce himself as head of security. He waited two hours at a fancy coffee shop that he hated and when he was about to give up waiting on Tom and go home, Tom called him over to his flat.

Tom was slurring, badly, and had forgotten to hang up after he’d given Chris his address. Chris could hear the patter of small feet in the background, like soft little paws. A small dog yipped above the noise of the telly playing the morning news.

Tom had sounded drunk over the phone but it was even worse when Chris met him in person. The doorman let Chris in immediately, giving him a bored look before nodding his head in acknowledgment -- it seemed like Tom was expecting him. 

Chris had been regaled with tales of Tom’s unrivalled kindness, his empathy and patience; his publicist said they were going to get along famously, and Chris had looked up a few of Tom’s interviews on YouTube and made assumptions about his character. He seemed like an affable kind of guy, not on par with Gandhi or anything though the comments section of his official website seemed to exalt him to sainthood. Which was why Chris was shocked as hell to find Tom lying facedown on the carpet, wearing nothing but white saggy underwear, a terrier poodle hybrid nosing his left armpit.

The door was open so Chris let himself in.

Tom moved groggily and sluggishly, blinking at Chris in confusion like a newly woken coma patient, or a baby bird.

Chris had assumed he was drunk, high, or a combination of both, which would not have been surprising given that he was a celebrity, but as Chris hauled Tom back on his feet, hooking his arms under his pits, he realized that that wasn’t the case.

There was a bottle of prescription medication on the floor, a cocktail of coloured pills scattered amid balls of dust and dog hair.

The place needed cleaning.

Chris remembered something he’d read on file about Tom having just been released from the hospital for something that was not mono. He assumed the medication was making his client a little loopy; Tom was sweating and drooling, skin clammy to the touch, all signs of... well, Chris wasn’t a doctor, but it had to be related, right?

Still, Tom looked attractive, even in his incoherent state. He looked like he worked out; he had the body of a runner.

Chris deposited Tom on the couch, tastefully upholstered to look like a pair of red red lips. He rolled Tom onto his back, and Tom obediently followed though his underwear did not; at this point in time Chris thought he’d seen everything, he’d walked out of a burning building six years ago and completed several courses that included intense physical training, but nothing prepared him for the sight of his client’s shaved... apparatus. Tom’s underwear had ridden low over his thighs, revealing the prized Hiddleston goods.

Chris gawped, blinked, then gawped some more.

It was at that time that somebody else showed up, somebody who was wearing a cheery chauffer’s cap and matching livery. The man barrelled into the living room like he owned the place, gave Chris a snotty look before turning his attention back to Tom.

“Are you Chris?” he asked, grabbing the dog that was sniffing Chris’ shoe. He set the mutt down on the coffee table where it stood on shaky legs and started whimpering.

“Yes,” Chris said. “Hi.”

“David!” Tom beamed, rolling around. “David, I can’t feel my toes. Is that normal?”

“Probably not,” said ‘David’. He gave Chris another look Chris didn’t quite appreciate, one that wasn’t completely friendly.

“You must be the bodyguard,” said David, tugging his leather gloves off by the teeth. “My name’s David. I’m his chauffer--”

“You look a little bit young to be his chauffer--”

“And you’re going to help me carry him to the bathroom. Oh god, he’s wearing ratty underwear again. You know how some people have a comfort item? Well, this is it for Tom. You’re looking at it now.” David shook his head like it was a tragedy indeed. “This is bad. Well, come on. He’s not going to carry himself. He’s still got a photoshoot with Nylon this afternoon. I’ll take the legs, you take the head or whatever you can carry. On three. One, two--”

They heaved him off the couch and hauled him to the bathroom, a state of the art gleaming fresco with marble walls and flooring.

It was bigger than Chris’ kitchen and bedroom combined.

Tom’s  flat was like something you only ever saw on television or movies, exempt from the laws of the real world; it was furnished tastefully and well-lit, though every now and then there were hints of it being a shared dwelling. A dog basket here, a ragged chew toy there. Two pairs of dog-sized boots, a shelf full of dog treats. An open door Chris had passed on the  way looked like a study, filled with authentic leather seating and floor-to-ceiling mahogany shelves.

Tom moaned softly, head lolling.

They lowered him into the spacious claw-foot tub which David filled rapidly with soapy bath water. Somewhere between the couch and tub, Tom had lost his underwear, which meant everything was hanging out in full view.

Chris averted his eyes, embarrassed for him, and must’ve been too obvious about it, too, because David gave a derisive snort.

“You act like you’ve never seen a naked man before.”

Chris stared at David for a long time, not completely comprehending the absurdity of the situation. Usually the only naked men he saw where about to have sex with him; none of them had been his clients or were as good looking as Tom.

David didn’t wait for a response and turned his gaze back to Tom whose chin was submerged in water. They stood there in awkward silence for a minute or two, watching as Tom fell asleep in the bath, his snores echoing in the tiled room.

From the living room, they heard a dog barking shrilly, a small thump ensuing and then a loud resounding crash. None of this seemed to bother David who stood with his hands planted on his hips, surveying the spectacular human disaster that was Chris’ new client.

“Do you think he’ll be functional in a couple of hours?” David asked.

Chris shrugged. “Probably not. Best to call a doctor, maybe. He doesn’t look too good.” He could die, he thought worriedly. Go into cardiac arrest from overdose.

David ignored the suggestion and patted Chris on the shoulder. “Eh,” he said dismissively. “I’m calling his assistant to rebook the shoot. You keep an eye on him. Make sure he doesn’t drown or die in his sleep.”

“What,” said Chris.

“Do what you’re paid to do, cap: guard his body.”

David winked, saluted, and walked out the door. A minute later he reappeared, holding up a finger. “Also make sure he doesn’t stay in there too long. Don’t want him wrinkling up like a prune. You can carry him to the bedroom. It’s the third door in the hallway, the one with the gold plated T.H. in front.”

“Right,” said Chris dryly. “I’ll be sure to remember that.”

“Gold plated,” repeated David, then left.

For good.

***

New York was Chris’ least favourite city in the world: over-crowded and cramped, the foot traffic was just as bad as the road traffic. But it was not without its quirks: Chris had never been anywhere with so much colour or culture.

LA always depressed him, filled as it was with people wanting to be famous for  nothing; he was often grumpy when Tom had to fly out there to do press work or promote whatever it was that he was endorsing at the moment, be it a brand of perfume or a book.

They were only in New York for a week because Tom had been invited to watch some obscure musical called Three Guys Naked From The Waist Down! which Chris fervently hoped did not involve three guys naked from the waist down.

The show wasn’t even on Broadway but some equally obscure community theatre in Brooklyn. Normally, Chris was wary of anything that advertised itself with an exclamation point. Like Wham! and Yahoo!, Three Guys! seemed like the kind of overhyped and pretentious bullshit that the none too discerning ate up with a spoon. Being the kind of person that Tom was, he went.

Chris wished he were more surprised.

It was only during the cast after party that Chris realized why Tom seemed intent on coming, why he’d braved traveling x number of miles even though he was filming his new movie next week. The show was nowhere near spectacular, marked by a minimalist set and grating musical numbers, peopled by broad outlandish characters in 80’s clothing, but Chris hadn’t been hired for his discriminatory tastes in musical theatre, rather for a more specific set of skills for which he’d been trained.

By the time the show had finished, Tom had gone on a total of three bathroom breaks, which Chris chalked up to an overactive bladder. It was only when they were being ushered to the lobby after curtain call that Chris noticed Tom was holding a slip of paper. Tom looked embarrassed at being caught, tucking the slip back into his breast pocket-- it was the address to the after party.

“Slight change of plans,” he announced, breathily. He often got breathy when he was excited. It shouldn’t have been so endearing. “We’re going somewhere.”

“We?” Chris repeated. No doubt wherever it was, he’d be sorely underdressed. Not that he walked around all the time in muscle shirts but it was that kind of day. Tom told him to dress ‘casual’.

“I’ll bring the car around,” Chris said.

“No, wait.” Tom grabbed his arm, yanking him back. “Don’t tell David where we’re going.”

Chris gave him an incredulous look. “Why not? Were you invited to an after party?”

Hesitantly: “...Yes.” Tom blushed, and scratched at the tip of his nose, obviously stalling for time. “Don’t hate me. But I er, happen to know the director. From a long time ago. He invited me. To the party.”

Chris hated it when Tom put a lot of periods in his statements. It meant he wasn’t being entirely honest. He couldn’t even look at Chris without blushing, another sure sign he was leaving something unsaid.

Chris pocketed his phone with a sigh, ending the call abruptly. “Your personal affairs are your personal affairs,” he said diplomatically.

“I suppose,” laughed Tom. Then he deigned to continue the thought. “...I suppose I maintained the hope that we were... that we were sort of friends. I don’t want you to feel like I’m dragging you everywhere, Chris. I mean you may work for me but--”

Chris shrugged, cutting him off before he could continue. “It’s my job to follow you around,” he said, ending the conversation before it could really begin.

Tom said nothing in reply and Chris was much too cowardly to look in his direction. It took half an hour to flag a cab and even longer to arrive at the address Tom specified. Chris felt bad about lying to David, telling him they were going to head out for a quick coffee and come back right away, but he owed Tom his fealty; he was the client, he signed the pay checks.

Also, Chris found that if Tom looked at him imploringly for more than five seconds, it was hard to deny him anything. Chris was royally fucked, he knew.

Tom promised they would only be there for ten minutes but ten minutes stretched past an hour and pretty soon Chris lost sight of Tom in the sweaty overdressed throng of theatre people. He tried calling Tom’s phone but Tom wasn’t picking up. Worse still, Chris knew Tom had a tendency to leave events without bothering to inform him first, shaking Chris off his trail like a thing that shook off something nasty that it didn’t want.

Tom didn’t do it out of pettiness or irresponsibility; he honestly just forgot, too caught up in the moment, unused to having his every movement monitored. Get enough drinks in him and he would recite soliloquies off the top of his head. Get him sloshed and he’d sit in your lap for the rest of the evening and forget his own name. Chris knew this from firsthand experience.

Chris searched the place for Tom but without a name to his face, he had limited access to areas deemed for VIP only. The after party was in a sprawling townhouse, with a spiralling staircase and a back deck with a built-in jacuzzi. Chris normally hated the kind of crowd, but he’d worked for a number of celebrities over the years and it was easy to turn off his dislike.

He navigated through the crowd, bumping elbows with beautifully dressed women and well-tended men wearing smoking jackets and decorative specs. Everybody acted like they were being filmed, eating too little, drinking too much, and finally, after another hour of futile searching, flitting from one room to the next, Chris hit the jackpot. Tom was on the deck, his back turned to Chris, talking to somebody Chris swore he’d seen before, though Chris knew without a doubt that the other person was Tom.

Chris recognised that head of hair anywhere. He also knew what it felt like to have the head attached to it rest peacefully on his shoulder but that was beside the point.

Tom and his friend looked like they were in the middle of an argument. If Chris hadn’t drunk on the job, he would have noticed that they were standing a little too close than was appropriate, that their shoulders were almost rubbing, and that Tom’s eyes were a little wetter than usual.

The man whirled around all of a sudden, shrugging Tom off, shouldering past Chris in the doorway.

“Who was that guy?” Chris asked, miffed. He rubbed his elbow which he had knocked into the wall during the collision. Tom ignored him and strode past, disappearing down the hall after the man. Chris’ presence didn’t even register.

Chris followed him, partly because he didn’t want to lose sight of Tom again, and partly because he had a bad feeling about Tom’s new friend.

And he was right: their argument continued well into the empty hallway, escalating quickly and getting physical. The man gave Tom a hard shove, in the middle of an impassioned speech Chris was too far away to hear, which sent Tom toppling back. He would’ve fallen flat on his arse if Chris hadn’t dragged him up by the elbow, in the nick of time.

“What the hell?” said Chris.

Tom looked embarrassed, which made him look ten years younger. His voice had gotten all quiet, his face leeched of colour. He kept rubbing at the corner of his eye with his thumb.

“Come on, Chris. Let’s go. Don’t make a scene.” He tugged at Chris’ wrist, refusing to look up from the floor.

“I’m making a scene?” Chris repeated. “I’m making a scene?”  He was, Chris knew, but he could barely hide how pissed off he was. Tom was such a nice guy that it was so hard to imagine anyone wanting to hurt him. Apparently arseholes like that existed, arseholes that probably got off torturing small animals and watching reality television for leisure. Chris wanted to bury his foot in the guy’s torso, inflict so much damage even reconstructive surgery couldn’t fix it. He realised a little later why the guy’s face looked so familiar: he’d seen it on his copy of the program.

“Come on,” said Tom a little more insistently. There was a bite to his voice which made Chris glance in his direction. The man gave them a bored look, and raised his eyebrows at Chris in challenge. Chris clenched his fists.

Fuck this, Chris thought, and strode off after Tom. Fuck you and your moustachioed face and the tangerine-sized lump in your pretentious leotards. He was fuming all the way to the car.

Chris had phoned David in his panic and right on cue he had parked the rental across the street.

“What happened?” David asked, rolling down the window. He jumped out of the driver seat and let Tom into the back but Tom didn’t even wait for Chris, just threw himself in and slammed the door after him, keeping his gaze moodily fixed forward. His arms were crossed in front of him, his jaw set in concentration. Like he was trying hard not to--

Chris got into the passenger seat and turned the radio on.

There was no talking all the way to the hotel where some fans had gathered to catch a glimpse of Tom.

“What happened?” David asked a little later, at the lobby.

“Some guy with a moustache...” said Chris.

“Did he look like Tom Selleck?”

“What?”

“Did he look like Tom Selleck, only a little slimmer? Was he wearing leotards?”

“I guess?” said Chris, not sure how any of this mattered.

“Chett.” David slammed his fist into an open palm. “Tom’s... er, special friend. They were in Cambridge together. He was a year or two above Tom and unbearably pretentious. Does he still speak with a French accent? God, that guy spent a year in Haiti and suddenly he’s French.” David threw up his hands in exasperation. “I thought he’d died from a venereal disease or something. I guess I should’ve known better. He’s still around, directing plays?”

Chris stared at him for a long moment.

“Who are you?” Chris asked, after some time.

“I’m a man of many mysteries.”

David let out an amused laugh when Chris continued to stare at him. “I’m joking, dude. I’m just a chauffeur, relax. I know nothing about life. Or do I?” He winked and then swung a companionable arm around Chris’ shoulder.  “Come on, you look like you need a drink, or several. I’m buying. Failing that, we could always go to a strip club to wind down.”

“It’s three in the morning,” Chris said.

“It’s New York,” David told him.

A few pints later and Chris was feeling marginally better, though he was still rankled whenever he thought about Chett. Chett with his grubby little hands on Tom, right before he pushed him, Chett and his ugly moustache that he probably oiled and brushed every morning because he was that much of an arsehole.

The alcohol was oddly sobering, but it made Chris thoughtful. David had let slip that Chett and Tom had been special friends though what that even meant was anyone’s guess. David tended to be indecipherably cryptic at best, and entirely unhelpful at worst. He had his own everyday lexicon and called overcoats gogols, alcohol grog. It was more annoying than mysterious, which was probably his intent, and Chris may sometimes hate him for it, but he couldn’t deny that it added a layer of mystique to his character.

David, whose tongue had been loosened by vodka shots and several bowls of peanuts, was in no condition to drive so they took a cab back to hotel. On the way back, Chris had an idea, partly inspired by the song playing on the radio: Nirvana’s Lithium. He felt vengeful, petty. Mostly he felt stupid and impotent because he’d failed to protect Tom. The one thing he was paid to do and he just stood there like an idiot.

But what he hated most of all was the way Tom had looked that night, what Chett had reduced him to: he had looked like he wanted the ground to bury him alive, inconsolably miserable like he was on the verge of throwing up.

Chris told the cabbie to drive them to the townhouse, David rattling off the address from memory. Two streets later, and after several traffic violations, Chris was storming into the townhouse, ready to spill blood. He couldn’t find Chett anywhere, and probably because of the murderous look on his face, wasn’t allowed anywhere further than the living room. Dejected, he made his way back to street but looked up at the sudden din to his right.

Chett was stumbling back to his car, an arm around a particularly buxom woman who kept pawing at him and calling him daddy. Chett looked drunk, but that didn’t make Chris any more sympathetic for what he was about to do.

“Hey Chett!” he called out.

Chett looked up, lifting the sunglasses off his face.

A blink.

Chris looked down at his knuckles, flexing his fingers at the searing pain. It happened so fast. Chett crumpled to his knees, clutching his bleeding nose.

Chris walked calmly back to the cab, ignoring Chett’s girlfriends indignant shrieks.

“Arsehole!”

Chris let the insult roll off of him.

“Did it feel good?” David asked excitedly from the passenger seat.

Chris shrugged. “Yeah, a little,” he admitted, staring at his hand.

“My god that was the most bad ass thing I’d ever seen in my life,” David said. “I wish Tom were here to see it. You were like a knight, defending his honour. I think my dick got a little hard. Fuck, I may have even peed.”

“Get out,” said the cabbie in accented English.

***

Traveling was part of the job, one of its many perks aside from the excellent dental plan.

Chris may not travel business class like his clients but he was brought along for the ride in style, booked a room in the same hotel as the people he was paid to protect, always just a text message away.

Tom was completing the last leg of his press tour for his steampunk post-apocalyptic noir film Cobalt Sextant, where he played a half cyborg-half human detective fallen on hard times. He was half-dressed in a lot of the scenes, wearing a monocle that hid his secret shame: his ever-fixed robot eye.

Chris had been there during the first half of filming but still couldn’t say what the plot of the movie actually was.

Still, it was a box-office hit, out-grossing Honey, There Are Pirates In Our Yard! III. The press tour took Chris around the world: to St. Petersburg where they’d lost most of Tom’s luggage due to a mix-up at the airport, to Seoull where Tom was nearly mauled to death by a horde of screaming fan girls, all wanting a piece of him, and back to LA again in time for the American premiere where Tom had worn a suit, a bowtie and a waist coat, a gift from Dolce and Gabbana, that made him stand out from the rest of the crowd.

Everybody looked plain in comparison, like they were trying too hard to be noticed. And then there was Tom, with his funny way of laughing and his smooth long-fingered hands, just standing amidst it all, his hair full of product, looking equally baffled and humbled by the turnout. Looking, Chris would be a liar not to admit, like the most beautiful thing in the room.

The crowd in Tokyo was more reserved than their international counterparts. Chris escorted Tom to every function, every interview, every landmark he felt like visiting though Tom didn’t have time to climb Tokyo Tower which Chris wasn’t sure a civilian could do, anyway. No one had grabbed or flung themselves at Tom at the premiere, which Chris counted as the makings of a good day.

Chris woke with a start to his phone vibrating crazily in his pocket. He’d fallen asleep on the goddamned massage table. It’d been a day. He glanced to his left. Tom was no longer on the table next to him. The masseuse was looking at him with obvious relief: finally, the stupid gaijin was awake.

Chris pressed his phone to his ear. “I’m craving tonkatsu,” said Tom. “I know it’s really late at night...”

Chris closed his eyes. He knew what was coming. He didn’t even wait for Tom to finish before telling him he was heading up to his room to pick him up. Tom had dressed down for the evening: jeans and a comfortable cotton jacket and a dark blue beanie that flattened his curls and elongated his head. Chris felt tempted to hold out his hand as Tom stepped out into the hallway, smiling softly at him, looking tired but excited.

“Where to?” Chris said.

They ended up at a restaurant in Meguro, upon the recommendation of the hotel concierge. The place had a kind of homey atmosphere to it, the lighting soft and cozy, the mood quiet save for the constant hiss of oil bubbling in the vats. No background music but the low hum of conversation around them, that because neither of them could understand a word, felt like music to the ears. The furnishings were sparse: the walls were bare and there were no tables, just a long wooden counter running three sides of the open kitchen where the chefs were hard at work, preparing food with efficient grace, all in full view of the customers. They wore white overalls, matching white caps.

Chris ordered sake and toasted to Tom’s success. “Thank you,” Tom said in English, and then in a lower voice, because he was worried he’d botched up the words: “Arigatou.”

They both laughed at the mispronunciation.

They ate their deep-fried pork heartily, clumsily picking through sticky grains of rice with their chopsticks, slurping down bowls of murky powdery miso soup. You had to eat at the counter, sitting next to other people, so it was hard not to bump elbows with complete strangers. Literally. Still, it was a good night. A great night. More sake, more deep-fried pork goodness. And the company -- Tom -- was delightful. He sat really close and smelled really good, and the tea steam that clouded his face made him look even more dreamy.

Stop. Snap out of it. But it was already too late. Chris was too drunk on good cheer to care, letting Tom lead him down the maze of throbbing streets lit wonderfully by billboards rippling advertisements for everything from movies to furniture.

They sang Karaoke at a dive bar wedged between a pachinko parlor and an electronics store, then found themselves, inexplicably, at a sex shop in Omotesando Hills, where wandering from aisle to aisle brought them to an S&M club at the back, cordoned off for customers with a membership card.

At three AM, realizing they were a good two hour drive from the hotel, they walked and walked, rather aimlessly, as dawn crawled sleepily across the sky, until they came upon what Chris later learned was a love hotel, an establishment that catered specifically to couples wishing to have a little one on-one time, away from home.

The rooms were relatively cheap, and they had their pick of themes: space age, western, disco, NYC cab, train station. The list went on. Chris was pretty sure there was even a dungeon-themed one. He wanted to see what that one looked like but didn’t think it was up for discussion. Tom leafed through the laminated hotel brochure for several minutes before deciding they were going to go space age. He’d left his credit card in his room at the Hyatt, and it was all they could afford after an expensive dinner and Karaoke.

Tom had assumed, rather naively, that the hotel was your usual tourist trap, overpriced and designed to lure unsuspecting gaijin in its hungry niche-marketed maws. But it was actually even worse than that: this was where people went to have sex. The walls were soundproofed, a blessing in disguise. It only hit Chris later that there were a suspicious number of happy-looking couples milled about in the lobby. The medicine cabinet of condoms and lubricant were suspect too, as was, in hindsight, the rotating sign outside the hotel, like a striped barber’s pole: two people holding hands, standing inside a pink heart. 10 rooms currently available!

By the time the realisation sunk in, Tom was already washing up in the bathroom. He’d hung his jacket on the hook outside the door and Chris could hear the water running in the sink. Chris sat on the circular bed, shaped like a satellite dish, a silver space-ship about to take off, tilted slightly upwards.

The domed ceiling was specked with glowing celestial bodies. The rest of the room was utilitarian and clean, the shelf and bureau sleek and geometric, the drawer pulls smoothed to a shiny chrome finish; the only spare seating in the room was a pod chair facing a decorative window that looked out into a background of fake space.

Chris looked up just as the bathroom door opened, the sound of the toilet flushing alerting him to attention. Tom was only in his undershirt, clumps of wet hair trailing lines of water down his long neck and shoulders. He held up a tube in his hand, eyeing it like it held the secrets to the universe.

“Everything all right?” Chris asked, concerned.

Tom shrugged.

“I don’t think this is facial wash,” he said. Chris examined the tube and squeezed out a glob, the contents clear and cool to the touch, the consistency and smell unmistakable. He almost wanted to laugh, but Tom still looked confused. Tom hadn’t known, of course. The tube was labeled in kanji, not English.

“You put lubricant on your face, Tom.” Chris said.

“What?”

Chris laughed, and noticed for the first time how shiny Tom face looked under the light. Tom shook his head, blushing, laughing himself, before disappearing into the bathroom to wash the stuff off with soap.

Chris examined the contents of the medicine cabinet when Tom was finished and noted nothing of interest except the shelf of complimentary condoms and a variety of flavoured lube.

He shook his head, rinsed his mouth, and walked back to the bedroom to tell Tom what kind of establishment he thought this was when he found the man in question sprawled in the middle of the bed, his face tilted up as he studied the stars that swirled and soared above him.

His throat was distractingly pale and smooth, a long lean line hiccupped by the bump of his Adam’s apple, as upsettingly perfect as the coffee-colored mark below his left ear which Chris knew for a fact, and from standing behind Tom a number of times at public events, actually existed. It was the size of a tear drop, shaped like one too.

Tom turned to him and smiled, oblivious to the inner workings of Chris’ twisted mind. “I think I know what kind of place this is,” he said.

Chris swallowed. “Yeah,” he said, stupidly. “Maybe we should call Luke.”

Luke was Tom’s publicist, on the verge of developing a drug habit because Tom could never stay put and never did what he was told. “We can call him in the morning.”

“It’s four thirty. In the morning.”

“Let’s let the man sleep some more, all right?” Tom laughed. He patted the empty space next to him. “He’s had a long day.” He gave Chris a meaningful look.

Chris just stood there, giving him one back. This was highly inappropriate, he tried to communicate with his stare. I’m not your friend, Tom. I’m your bodyguard. Don’t give me looks like that.

“I’m not going to bite,” said Tom. “Besides, there’s only one bed here and that chair over there doesn’t look too comfortable.”

“I don’t know, I’ve always wanted to sleep in a pod chair,” said Chris.

“Oh do shut up and just come here. Lay with me, Chris. Come on.”

“I wish you didn’t say things like that,” Chris muttered.

“Hmm?” said Tom, softly, resting his chin on a fist. He was giving Chris bedroom eyes though that was probably more a projection than anything. Tom wouldn’t want someone like Chris; they existed on alternate planes of reality, were as far apart as Pluto and Mars.

“I’m laying, I’m laying.” Chris waved a hand wearily, shucked off his jacket and folded it in the pod chair before sliding into the bed with the grace of a fish on land. Tom lay on his side, his hands folded across his stomach. He had a diagonal cut across his middle knuckle, just about an inch in length and not too deep. Chris wondered how that had happened under his watch. Well, a lot of things have probably already happened under his watch without him knowing. He wished, not for the first time, that Tom told him things, as a client, that Tom actively sought out his help so he didn’t feel like a useless prop, the arsehole whose job it was to drag Tom away from his loving crowd. He’d seen the way Tom interacted with fans, how he tried to appease them, make sure they knew they weren’t overlooked. He’d spoiled them viciously and some of them who didn’t know their boundaries, abused that.

Chris sighed, gritting his teeth. Even working for Jennifer Lopez wasn’t this difficult.

Chris hadn’t even been aware that he’d dozed off until he woke up from a confusing dream where Gnarls was sitting on his face, trying to kill him. He looked down and saw, blearily, that that wasn’t the case, that he had instead a noseful of Tom’s hair which meant sometime in the last hour or so Tom had crawled across the bed and used his shoulder as a pillow.

Chris wrapped an arm around him reflexively, then felt silly for doing so and let his arm fall limply back to the bed. Tom stirred against him, eyes blinking open, making a soft snuffling noise that Chris wouldn’t mind waking up to everyday of his life.

Tom’s eyes looked red, however, devoid of any restful sleep. He smiled, still in that timeless space between wakefulness and sleep where possibilities were limitless and pots of gold existed at the end of every rainbow guarded by diminutive men in green felt. Then Tom woke for good, jolting out of this dream, his smile melting off his face as quickly as it appeared.

“Sorry,” Tom muttered, embarrassed. “I er, I move in my sleep.”

“It’s all right,” Chris said, trying not to let his disappoint show. He flexed his arm, rubbing the feeling back to his muscles. Ants, an army of them crawling up his arm. The pins-and-needles sensation took longer to disappear; Tom had a particularly heavy head.

“I do other things in my sleep that I’m not particularly proud of,” said Chris.

“How long have you been up?” Tom asked, sitting up slowly. He unspooled himself gracefully and Chris only just noticed the pillow creases on his cheek.

Chris shrugged. “Not too long. You all right?” Tom looked shaken.

Tom stared at Chris like he was seeing him for the first time. Chris wondered if he could read his mind; he wouldn’t put it past Tom. The guy could do everything, just name it.

“I had the strangest dream...” Tom said.

“Don’t even get me started on mine,” laughed Chris, but stopped at the look of seriousness on Tom’s face.

This was not the time for jokes. Tom asked if Chris wanted to hear what he’d dreamt about. Chris told him to go ahead.

***

Tom had always made it seem like his life was no different from Chris’, but besides the fact they were nearly the same age and nearly the same height and belonged to the same species, that didn’t seem entirely true. Tom had grown up in privilege, the son of a successful chemist and a stage manager. He received top-notch education, attending the finest schools money could buy, deviating eventually from studying law to act in theatre.

Chris grew up in the dusty outback with geckos for pets and was pretty sure that until age nine he routinely ate sand. He’d wanted to surf professionally but was told by his surfing coach that he was simply not good enough.

Over the years he’d tried and failed to prove the fact wrong, but by age seventeen realised this piece of advice would actually be his salvation. He noticed a trend: whatever he applied his mind to he could do competently -- kick box, wrestle, mix cocktails, telemarket -- but he never excelled at any of them, and was never the best. Which meant that whatever he did in life, whatever profession he chose to undertake, he was never going to be more than mediocre; tasks required only the barest amount of effort, there was no need to go the extra mile. He could ski, become a matador, an actor or a juggler, and it still wouldn’t matter. He had neither knack nor talent.

But back to the dream: Tom had attended boarding school during his formative years and while he was trying to find his niche, had tried everything from rugby to rowing. But he didn’t have the upper body strength to join the CUBC, the prestigious Cambridge University Boat Club, not even the CULRC, its lightweight division, with his scrawny chicken arms and predisposition to vomit whenever on board a sea vessel.

Rugby made him tired and he noticed his grades started to slip because of poor time management. Then, one spring term, he was roped into a production of A Streetcar Named Desire, where after playing a stagehand, he realised just how much he longed to be part of the world of theatre; he knew, then, that he’d found his raison d'être, that the stage was where his heart truly belonged. So he started auditioning, getting small parts here and there, until he was shortlisted to play Romeo on a “modernised” production of Romeo and Juliet.

But the world of theatre was not without its perils: there was a hierarchy, as with everything, and the upper echelon, actors accustomed to landing titular roles, didn’t appreciate Tom, a newcomer, encroaching on their territory. He’d come in and upset the system, which was entirely unheard of in the world of theatre where seniority was given precedence over talent. 

Tom said his memory wasn’t very reliable, that 50% of the time his dreams were memories and vice versa. He had trouble, sometimes, telling the two apart.

Really, all Tom had wanted to do, back then, and even now, was act. That night in a bed shaped like a space ship, miles away from home, he’d dreamt he was in school again, seventeen or eighteen, alone backstage with the actor he’d beat for the part of Romeo. It was not the first time he was accosted like this, and he had gotten used to the taunts and jeers, but then not-Romeo’s friends appeared too, all three of them equally as menacing, older, bigger, their arms crossed in front of them like bouncers as they blocked Tom from the exit.

And then the dream faded and Tom found himself back in boarding school: awful uniform, even more awful skin, fourteen or fifteen. Two feet shorter. Knobby-kneed and buck-toothed. An upperclassman had caught him watching him while taking off his shirt and hosing himself down. The upperclassman had been playing football on the field to pass the time with his mates and Tom had hidden himself under the stands so he could watch them through the slats. The upperclassman became his friend, eventually, Tom was vague on the details, but just before he graduated, he said he wanted Tom to meet his friends.

Tom went to boarding school and there were many unoccupied buildings on the school grounds, constantly under construction or in the process of being renovated. The school was old, and the groundskeeper did a lousy job of keeping everything in check. Anyway, Tom was invited to a “party” behind the old infirmary. He’d hoped for alcohol and contraband, a great time with these “new friends” of his but there was nobody else there. He’d been duped. The upperclassman had been waiting for him. He came with his friends, as promised. And they had a camera.

Years later he would feel the same impotent rage churn in his gut upon relinquishing the role of Romeo.

“I wanted them to like me,” Tom finished, shrugging and wrapping up his story. He sounded far too casual that Chris suspected for a moment that it was fake: an act. “It was stupid, but having friends, being thought of as ‘cool’ meant more to me at the time than...” He stopped abruptly. “I think there may be something wrong with me. I feel as if I’ve got a defect or something. I feel desperate sometimes. Well, no, all the time. Desperate to be loved, wanted, admired. Just: wholly desperate in every aspect of life. Do you ever get that feeling, like everything you do, is in a way, to be loved more?”

“All the damn time,” Chris said and forced himself not to reach out and touch Tom. The only thing stopping him was the fact that Tom looked like he would shatter like glass.

PART II

Sydney was the last stop on the press tour. Cobalt Sextant was getting mixed reviews but it was making more money than the studio had anticipated which meant a sequel could well be in the works.

Still, it was hard to tell this early into the game.

Chris watched Tom on a television mounted on the wall backstage. He was being interviewed on The Morning Show, wearing his favourite blue button-up, his posture relaxed and casual though Chris knew he was anything but. He looked tired, bags under his eyes disguised by the thick coat of makeup somebody had daubed on his face before the cameras started rolling.

David was peeling an apple and feeding bite-sized chunks of it to Gnarls who sat at his feet, excitedly wagging his tail.

It was hard to keep up with Tom’s crazy schedule but at least the tour was finally winding down. Chris thought it would never end. He wondered how Tom managed to keep the smile on his face without going mad in the attempt. If it had been him, he’d have lost it ages ago. He didn’t think he could dredge up enough false cheer to fool the world. Then again that was probably why he was a bodyguard and not an actor.

After a series of interviews and autograph signings that seemed to blur together, Tom finally called it a day, lounging about in a complementary bathrobe in his hotel room and sipping a pint of Guinness. It was a quarter after eleven and Gnarls had his head stuck in a box of Weet-Bix.

Luke, Tom’s publicist, looking harried as usual but determined, freed Tom from any responsibility for the next two days. Tom was scheduled to fly back home on Sunday but until then could do pretty much whatever he wanted, short of committing a felony.

“You’ll behave if you know what’s good for you,” Luke said, then closed the door behind him but not before giving Chris a pointed look that clearly stated: you better keep him in check or your job is on the line, my friend. Sometimes it was the little guys that sent you running with your tail between your legs.

David, who had made himself comfortable on the armchair facing the television, was filing his nails.

“I want to go to exploring tomorrow,” Tom said.

“Exploring?” David repeated. “Do you mean like swimming with the sharks?”

“You’re from here, aren’t you,” said Tom, pointing at Chris. He looked comfortable in his fluffy robe, and Chris was momentarily distracted by the sliver of skin between the part of his robe. Thigh. Long, smooth, covered with a filmy layer of hair. His foot was long and slim.

“What gave that away?” said Chris. “Is it the accent?”

“More or less,” said Tom, then he smiled. “Take us somewhere. Come on, somewhere nice.”

“With crocodiles or koalas,” supplied David, not looking up from his nails. “Kangaroos and all that.”

Chris could see Tom was getting excited too. His eyes were lighting up, like a kid’s at a toy store. “And I don’t mean somewhere crowded. Take us to a place that means something to you, Chris. Somewhere special.”

Chris looked between them, then at the dog happily munching on a cardboard box on the floor, and sighed.

Chris was glad to be back on Australian turf, but he was still nervous about bringing Tom and his... retinue along. He hadn’t been home in three years so it was a nerve-wracking to pick up the phone and inform his parents he was in the area. Also, he was bringing some people over, and they had a dog, would his mum be willing to maybe cook lunch for two more people, plus a dog?

They pulled up in the driveway, behind Chris’ dad’s old Ford truck. Nothing had changed since he’d left. Doonside was still the same sleepy town he’d spent half of his life trying  to escape. Property values had gone up though and Chris could see new establishments had taken up old family-owned businesses. There was a distressing number of fast food chains in the area, and a strip club stood where the old Baptist Church used to be, but otherwise it looked more or less the same: a long strip of suburbia where nothing remotely interesting happened. This was the kind of town where the primary source of entertainment was standing around road kill and ogling house fires. Chris was glad he’d left before he got comfortable.

At the porch, Chris’ parents stood waiting. Chris opened the passenger door out of habit than anything else and out Tom stepped, cradling Gnarls to his chest, having a polite look around. He wore wayfarers, like a total celebrity. That or he just couldn’t stand the blinding brightness of the Australian sun and the muggy heat it generated. Belatedly, Chris wondered what Tom thought of his hometown. They’d passed enough Hungry Jack’ses to for him to make an accurate assessment.

“Chris!” Chris’ mum threw his arms around him. She was short and stocky and she smelled like hairspray. He took comfort in that. His dad clapped him on the shoulder and squeezed him too, cutting off his air. He looked tan and fit and wore cargo shorts and floppy sandals.

“Are these your friends?” said his mum, smile frozen in place as Tom stood in the fringes carrying a yapping terrier poodle hybrid.

Chris knew what it looked like. “He’s...”

“Have I seen you before?” Chris’ dad squinted at Tom.

“Actually,” Chris said, wondering how he could make this any less awkward.

Tom introduced himself without preamble, saving Chris the embarrassment, pushing his wayfarers up over his hair and grinning at Chris’ parents. Ah, a total charmer. Sometimes Chris believed he was genetically engineered in a lab. He was perfect.

“Just a friend, Mr. and Mrs. Hemsworth,” said Tom right when Chris said, “He’s a client/employer/actor/tourist.”

“An actor?” Chris’ dad asked. He looked impressed as he shook Tom’s hand, nodding his head emphatically when Tom explained that he’d never been on Australian soil before and he had a little part in a little movie called Cobalt Sextant that had premiered last night.

 “Never heard of it,” Chris’ dad said, scratching his temple. “I don’t even know what a sextant is, quite frankly. It sounds a bit... lewd now, doesn’t it?”

Tom laughed, looking relieved. Chris wanted to throw himself into the creek behind the house. And then the sound of running engine died and they all looked to where David was emerging from the driver side of the car, doffing his straw hat and smoothing out his I love NZ shirt. “Does anybody know where I can buy cigarettes?” he asked.

Lunch consisted of sirloin steak, potatoes, corn bread and peas. Tom had probably been expecting a vat of vegemite to make an appearance some time during the proceedings because he spent a good half hour peering into cabinets and kitchen drawers while Chris’ mum mashed the potatoes with an electric mixer. He’d hoped, he said, to get a glimpse of Australian life. He wanted to know where the vegemite was.

Chris told him they didn’t have any and Tom looked like Chris had doused his apartment in gasoline and torched it while his family still slept in their beds. Some things were just priceless.

Seated at the head of the table, Tom led most of the conversation, charming Chris’ parents completely as he wooed and complimented and seduced them with funny anecdotes. He didn’t talk about his movie, or his sprawling property in Florence, where he kept wine in an old family cellar and hosted lavish two-day parties. Instead he gushed about Australian hospitality and Chris’ efficiency as a bodyguard. He confessed his initial misgivings as he’d never taken to the idea of being under surveillance all the time, escorted by security only to public events, but he enjoyed having Chris around, surprisingly. Mainly because he made him laugh, and partly because his grumpiness scared off potential stalkers.

Chris wasn’t sure whether he was supposed to laugh at that because Tom had never told him any of this. A part of him felt confused, then betrayed. Tom smiled at him from above the rim of his orange juice, that smile that said he knew something Chris didn’t. And it rankled, like an itch Chris couldn’t quite scratch without getting dirty looks in public.

Gloomily, Chris reached under the table and fed Gnarls his leftovers.

Liam, who’d moved out when his band had taken off locally, arrived in the beat-up Chevy that he’d inherited from their older brother, Luke. He’d grown facial hair and a mullet and had a tattoo of a snake on his bicep though he claimed it would wash off in a month or two. He was nineteen and a lot cooler than Chris was at his age, in a Black Sabbath shirt with the sleeves sawed off with a box cutter.

Liam took one look at Tom in the living room and then whipped out his phone. “Holy shiii-et. You’re the guy from that sexting movie!”

Actually, Chris took that back.

Liam had no tact and he wondered sometimes why he turned out the way he did when they were in fact raised by the same parents. Not wolves but upstanding members of the community. Chris was glad he had a modicum of self-respect at least. At age nineteen, he was already thinking about his future.

Then as if things couldn’t get any worse, Liam started taking pictures of Tom on the settee. “You’re a lot shorter in person,” he decided. “I haven’t gone out to see the sexting movie just yet but it looks great.”

“Sextant,” Tom corrected him, embarrassment colouring his tone.

Liam high-fived Chris’ bicep. “My friends are never gonna believe this. I wish Jenny were here. She’s my girlfriend,” he informed Tom who responded with a polite oh? and raised his eyebrows. “Big fan of your movies. She has a body pillow that she uh -- with you on it. Drives me nuts. Anyway, are you and Chris, you know--”

Chris drew his mum aside before he could hear the rest of it. “You called him over? I thought we had a deal! We don’t bring Liam anywhere near any of my clients!” He caused enough grief as it is, with his changeable moods and his ‘phases’.

“We haven’t seen you in three years, Chris,” said his mum. “Three years. That’s a long time.”

“I’m well aware of that.” Chris sighed. “Mum, seriously, did you drop him as a baby?”

“What?”

Chris shook his head and peered into the living room. Liam was flailing wildly and showing Tom his guitar-hero moves, standing on the coffee table like it was a surfboard. His balance looked shaky at best but Tom looked absolutely delighted, laughing at all his cues, clapping as Liam preened. Tom threw his head back, bared his throat, absorbed and amused.

It was times like these Chris wished his mum kept a jar of vegemite handy. He watched them sulkily from the kitchen until Tom caught sight of him and smiled, waving him over.

“Chris,” he said. “Liam here has got a wonderful idea...”

The cinema was empty by the time they’d arrived. Nobody gave a crap about movies anymore, not in Doonside, which worked in Chris’ favour because that meant there was less for him to do. No crowd control. No horde of screaming fans. There were about ten other people there including the cashier who rang up their tickets and took forever to count their change. A teenager in a striped vest led them inside the theatre then left to chain-smoke outside after glancing at their tickets.

Thankfully, Liam had enough social graces to sit next to dad, leaving Tom flanked by Chris and David on either side. David left before the trailers started to run, claiming he needed to use the toilet but they never saw him again until after the credit sequence and by then he smelled heavily of pot. Gnarls had been left in mum’s care because she’d never been the movie-going type. Plus, lunch seemed to have upset Gnarls’ appetite and Tom didn’t want to bring him along when he could potentially defecate at any moment’s notice.

The movie ran for two hours. Chris had already seen parts of it in the trailers, the exciting bits cut out of the main feature, but it was a whole new experience to see the entirety of it on screen. The movie was so well imagined. It wasn’t going to win an Oscar but Chris could see a lot of people buying it on BluRay, or at the very least downloading it illegally off the internet.

The setting was a post-apocalyptic world, a popular theme these days, where technology was both archaic and advanced. People used sextants to measure distance; gas lamps illuminated cobbled streets populated by extras in anachronistic Victorian clothing; there were airships, key-punch machines, endless political turmoil, and steam-powered trains powered by mechanical men. And amidst all this there seemed to be an abundance of leather clothing everywhere. Leather bustiers, leather gloves, leather trousers, leather oven mitts, leather, leather, leather.

Tom’s character Detective Jasper Blackshaw wore a shiny black long-coat, and an equally black weather-beaten  leather waistcoat on top of a black cotton shirt riddled with bullet holes he’d mended  himself, entirely by hand. A black cravat and a pair of black leather gloves completed his whole look.

All in all, it made for an interesting movie. Chris couldn’t take his eyes off the screen. Blackshaw wore his hair a little long, curling over his ears, a sleek oil colour that looked more brown than black under daylight. Fortunately for him, it was always night where he lived. Chris couldn’t remember Tom looking this good when he’d filmed the movie back in July. Probably because Chris was only allowed on set when it was time to bring Tom home, when he’d taken off the costume and rubbed off the eyeliner and was himself again, sans the manufactured glamour.

Blackshaw’s pants were tight, his ideas giant, and his leather boots, lined with silver buttons, reached mid-calf. He commandeered a stolen zeppelin and was nothing like Tom himself: ruthless, cunning, vengeful and mean-spirited. But it had to be said: he was hot as fuck. He wasn’t all that villainous though.

Once, he’d been good too...

They filed out of the theatre in twos, an awed silence descending over them, broken only by David’s loud yawn. “Right, that was just depressing.”

Chris ignored him in favour of turning back to Tom whose hands were pocketed in his jacket. He looked hopeful, eyebrows raised and waiting, his cheeks flushed, his body angled to face Chris. “Yeah?” he said.

Chris shrugged. “That was good,” he said. That was really good.

Tom nodded, looking dismayed by this response. But what Chris meant to say was this:

“You were great in it, really great, and your cheekbones are better than Keira Knightley’s. So was your acting, and even though I know so little about movies, I can honestly say you were better than she was. I wish I’d had the chance to see you in costume, in person. I bet you looked great in it. I bet it looked even better in real life than on film. I like you with black hair but I like you blonde just fine. You look sadder with dark hair, you know? Older, tired, like you have the weight of the world on your shoulders, I guess. But I still kind of want to kiss you anyway no matter what hair colour you have. Doesn’t matter; I always get this weird urge to slip my hand in your back pockets and squeeze myself palmfuls of arse, seat you on the kitchen sink and stand between your open thighs. I have this recurring dream where I’m making breakfast, a full English breakfast, bacon, eggs, beans, your favourite, and you put your chin on my shoulder and I turn around and look at you and you smile at me and we kiss over and over--”

Tom and company were walking away.

***

It took Chris a month to adjust to the fact that he was working for Tom Hiddleston.He knew him from vague accounts of people ‘in the biz’; he knew him from those movies for which he’d been famous: the Marvel trilogy with the guy in the red cape and the big Norwegian hammer. Chris had worked for Dannii Minogue, Jennifer Lopez (briefly and after she’d dated Ben Affleck), two relatively famous reclusive writers, and a particularly offensive comedian who was convinced one of his many enemies had put a hit on him (he was mostly right; it was his sister), but none of his past experiences compared to working for Tom.

For one, Tom had trouble setting boundaries. He was under the impression Chris was there by choice. For him, everyone was a potential friend.

Chris was there at premieres, interviews, awards parties, at Tom’s annual birthday bash where he’d gotten drunk and danced on a pool table, stealing the headphones off the in-house DJ. Always in the background, and just slightly out of frame, Chris was the hand that dragged Tom out of swimming pools and a surging crowd of hot-blooded fans. A qualified babysitter, if you asked anybody.

“So this is your idea of rest and relaxation? Peace and quiet?”

Tom was draped along the couch, his face smothered in green facial crème, a warm beer in his lap. His legs were crossed underneath him; he had just finished a shower and Chris could smell, even from three feet away, the lavender-scented evidence. He was sifting through his fanmail with methodical efficiency, holding up the envelopes to the light to check the contents before opening them. He sorted them by size and heft, packages to the right, envelopes in the middle, parcels to the left. A box had been sent, straight from the agency, containing a month’s worth of letters. There were photographs, requests for nudes, autographs, sweets. This was a man loved dearly by his fans.

A fruit cake wrapped in greasy brown paper sat on the coffee table to Tom’s right, a gift from a fan who’d ambushed them on their way back to the hotel. Chris had already checked the letters for anything that seemed suspicious to him but so far had come up empty-handed in his search. They were just letters, nothing to be worried about.

Chris had creased most of them, however, and Tom didn’t seem to appreciate that. He’d opened about half of the envelopes, binning some he thought contained illicit material.

“I find this quite relaxing,” Tom said, not looking up from reading a particularly long fan letter. It seemed to have been written on parchment; the paper trailed down to the floor.

Chris resisted the urge to roll his eyes.

Tom smiled without sparing him a glance, like he knew precisely what Chris was thinking. His head was pillowed against the headrest, and though he wasn’t looking at all at Chris, his amusement was clearly evident underneath the cake of thick crème. He looked ridiculous, Chris thought. He was wearing track bottoms. Utterly ridiculous.

Gnarls sat in the couch opposite, head on his paws, watching the evening news unfold.

Tom reached for the cake on the table, unwrapped it, gave it a sniff. He seemed to deem it edible enough and was about to stuff a pinch into his mouth when Chris slapped his hand away.

“Chris!”

“I don’t think you’ll want to eat that,” Chris said.

“Why not?”

Tom look put out. Hurt. Though it was hard to tell with all the gunk on his face. Apparently it was supposed to give him baby-smooth skin.

Tom crossed his arms, waiting. “Well?”

“For all you know it could be contaminated,” Chris said.

Tom stared at him, then laughed like it was the most absurd thing he’d heard all day. “I largely doubt anyone would go through all the trouble to send me something ‘contaminated’. Imagine the effort. The sheer audacity.” He used quotation marks to drive his point home: the idea was just utterly mental.

“It could be,” Chris said, feeling stupider by the second. “You never know.”

In his experience, a cake could contain any number of things from fermented apples to human hair. People were crazy; that was the undeniable truth.

Tom shrugged, but said nothing more and continued to sort through his fanmail. He didn’t touch the cake, leaving Gnarls to lap up the crumbs from the carpet.

As the night wore on, Tom’s yawns grew frequent in coming, his posture slackening as he leaned his full weight against the armrest. His eyes closed and he settled in to sleep, curling himself into a little ball, comfortable and cozy, head ducked into his chin. “I’ll just... be resting... my eyes...” Then he was out, like a light. He started to snore, softly. Chris threw a blanket over him.

He kept an eye on Tom the whole time, because it was what he was paid to do, even though he didn’t have to be in the same room as Tom all the time, not since the threat on his life had... died a natural course. It had been a year since the incident; perhaps Tom was right all along and it had been nothing more than a prank.

If Chris weren’t doing such a half-arsed job of things, if he hadn’t gotten so complacent over the last twelve months, paying attention to the things that really mattered instead of watching the way Tom moved, he’d have noticed the letters Tom had jammed underneath the cushion seats. He’d have seen the tremor in Tom’s hands, the way his lips had parted in fright while Chris’ attention had been directed elsewhere, eyes blown wide, and body rigid with fear, and he would have known. Things were far from over.

***

Chris wasn’t sure why he had to be there for the ELLE photoshoot but Luke had insisted he come in case something happened on the way over. The venue for the shoot was a twenty minute cab ride from Tom’s flat and Chris didn’t understand what Luke thought could happen in such a short window of time but apparently the man had seen a lot of Bourne films and was convinced that Tom’s every move was being monitored. Better safe than sorry; Luke had a point.

Chris had to haul himself out of bed at five in the morning, because contrary to popular belief, he wasn’t paid to live in the same building as Tom. He picked him up from his flat, and they drove in sleepy silence, David humming at the wheel as Gnarls yipped in his sleep in Tom’s lap.

Tom looked tired and jet-lagged and it was clear from the way his jeans fit him that he’d lost some weight. He’d been doing a lot of traveling lately, all work-related, and had just returned from LA two days ago to meet with studio execs.

Tom fell asleep in the make-up chair right away. A PA appeared with coffee but it took him another half an hour to wake up fully, running laps around the venue to keep his blood pumping; then the transformation began.

“You look... nice,” Chris  commented. He lowered the magazine he was not reading to his chest. Tom stood in front of him in tight jeans and a shirt that hugged his lean torso. It had a decidedly artsy logo on it, a splash of colour that gave the impression someone had spilled a can of paint on it and called it a day.

Tom smiled and twirled for him, holding up his arms, twirling again. “Ha, thanks. I wonder if they’d let me keep the clothes. I really like these jeans.” He picked up a nearby jacket, adjusting the collar so that it covered his face.

Chris said, “I’m sure they would if you asked.” He’d let Tom have anything, quite frankly: his car, his pet goldfish. Hell, even his entire vinyl collection. He didn’t even have to ask.

Tom smiled again and buttoned up his jacket. He left when one of the photographers beckoned him over to look at something on his computer.

Chris watched from the sidelines as Tom’s pictures were taken. He crossed his arms, leaning against the wall, feigning a casualness he didn’t feel. The outfits changed, but the theme stayed the same: casual everyday street wear.

Tom did his thing in front of the camera, taking on a persona, screwing his face into a look of intensity and practiced boredom. He was amazing and practically unrecognisable; he seemed like a different person altogether. Leading Man material. It was depressing.

Three hours later, they were wrapping up and Tom was shaking hands with everybody and tweeting a selfie to update his fans.

The entire shoot was being filmed, the segments scheduled to be posted on the website to tease the readers. Chris walked in on a part of the interview while he was walking back from the refreshments table, Pepsi in hand:

“... currently seeing anybody?”

Chris stopped before he could reach the door. That got his attention. Tom was sitting in the make-up chair, wearing a black hoodie, legs casually splayed open, his hands folded in his lap. The question made Tom laugh and his only response was to wink salaciously at the camera. Laughter all around. A beat. And cut. Perfectly rehearsed. It felt dishonest and made Chris a little angry.

Later, when Chris asked David about it, David laughed too, longer than Chris felt was necessary.

“Oh, he’s gone on dates, Chris. Just not under your watch. Why do you ask?”

Chris shrugged. He wasn’t sure of the answer himself. Or: he knew the answer and just didn’t want to admit it.

Still, David picked up on it. His smile was as sly as a fox’s, his gaze frozen on Chris’ face. “I’m joking, you know. He doesn’t have the time. He barely has any time for himself, much less other people. Besides,” David  continued, shrugging, turning his attention back to his phone screen where he was shooting down zombies. “I believe someone’s already caught his eye...”

***

Halloween.

Taste of lint in his mouth. 

Chris woke up with a crick his neck and the distinct feeling that he was late for something important. A glance at his phone confirmed that fact: he was expected over an hour ago to pick Tom up for his friend’s party. He sighed and turned the screaming thing off.

The apartment was an utter disaster: unmade bed and clothes everywhere in piles, dishes in the sink, unwashed and growing god-knew-what. It was depressing to live in a mess but more depressing to clean it all up.

Chris had spent more time at Tom’s place in the last year than he did at his own; he’d forgotten where his toaster was, what his couch looked like underneath all the bags of laundry. He navigated through the detritus, showered, shaved, and changed all under half an hour. He was still drying his hair with his fingers when he showed up at Tom’s flat in his Indiana Jones costume that he’d ordered online after Tom announced he was going to his friend’s Halloween party and Chris was coming along.

It was part of the job.

Still, he felt giddy, pleased that Tom had extended an invitation even though it had been a year since anybody had heard from his stalker. There really wasn’t any need for Chris to be there. But he came, anyway, he always did, when summoned. He really need to look into that, some time.

Tom answered the door as Ziggy Stardust: shiny silver body suit, futuristic shoulder pads, red vinyl boots. He had the hair down pat (a wig) and the crazy eye make-up that slanted across the whole of his face and made David Bowie the icon he was today.

“Hi,” said Chris. He blinked. Again and again. The image will forever burn itself into the back of his eyelids. Tom as Ziggy Stardust. He wondered where the suit’s zipper was. It looked like it had been spray painted on, moving like second skin, rippling like water whenever Tom so much as breathed.

“Wow, god. Hi!” Tom threw up his arms. “You look nice.” He pointed to Chris’ hip after giving him another once-over. “I see you’ve got the whip and everything.”

“Yep. Wouldn’t be complete without it,” said Chris proudly.

Tom nodded. “It’s nice.” He didn’t take his eyes off the whip whereas Chris kept his gaze glued fixed to Tom’s... knees.

“Yeah,” Chris agreed eloquently. “You.. I mean. That’s very creative. You look... very shiny.”

That was the truth. Tom had either no shame or a lot of gall, but it didn’t matter either way; he was beautiful, even in that reflective silver suit. He would get away with it, and people would chalk it up as ‘eccentric’ and ‘quirky’, because as Chris was beginning to learn, beautiful people often got away with things, like showing up late to important meetings or grand theft auto.

“I‘m hoping to win this year,” Tom confessed, sounding shy all of a sudden.

“Best costume?” Chris asked.

“Most outrageous.” Tom winked. He laughed, probably realising how crazy he looked in a silver space suit, and Chris laughed along with him for an entirely different reason.

“I’m sorry I’m late,” said Chris, sobering. “There was uh... traffic on the way here.”

“Yeah,” said Tom. “No, it’s fine. It gave me more time to get my costume right. The make-up is such a pain. I nearly blinded myself with the eyeliner. But I’m glad you made it. Look at you. Indiana Jones.”

Then without warning, Tom reached out and touched the whip. The actual whip, not a euphemism, running his finger down the rubbery grooves with such painstaking slowness it took a toll on Chris’ self-restraint. Death in tiny tiny increments.

Chris watched, stock-still, holding his breath as Tom moved his hand. Then Tom stepped away and there was a bark behind him, right on cue, as if Gnarls were sensing somebody was putting the moves on his owner.

Tom startled, looking like he’d only just remembered he’d left the kettle on. He smiled sheepishly, taking another step back.

“Let me get Gnarls,” he said, disappearing and reappearing later with the dog in question, dressed like a small furry astronaut in his arms.

Gnarls looked at Chris with barely concealed disappointment before burying his nose into Tom’s neck.

Chris shook his head. “You’ll love David’s costume,” he told Tom as they took the lift to the basement car park. “He’s dressed as Severus Snape.”

The party was at a glamorous hotel in the business district, one of those newly opened hotel chains that dominated the city skyline. It was both ostentatious and awe-inspiring, peopled by celebrities and socialites, anybody who was anybody, and you had to have a pink wristband to get in or the bouncers left you standing in the rain.

Chris affixed his to his wrist with some degree of disgruntlement before he was forcibly dragged into the fray by the whip, a metaphor he didn’t care to examine at the moment. He looked behind him and saw David almost a million miles away, but what was probably in reality only five feet, clutching Gnarls like a purse, a sea of people between them. Then David shrugged, and headed in the direction of the open bar even though he was the designated driver that night and supposed to keep a clear head.

Chris let himself be led.

Tom bopped from table to table, from person to person, always in cheerful form despite the odd looks he was getting, the interested stares. Chris doubted he noticed, too absorbed in saying hello to everyone he knew.

There were about a dozen Cleopatras, Batmans, pirates, and pop culture references walking around. The place was decorated in nightmare orange and black, in shades of ghoulish green, fake cottony cobwebs wreathing the marble balustrade of the ballroom, the lights dimmed myopically low. A makeshift glass stage towered ten feet above everyone where a DJ stood hunched over a number of turn tables, taking requests, putting a techno/electro-pop twist on 80’s songs.

Chris tried to summon a degree of enthusiasm but this was the kind of affair that he’d always felt out of place in, being neither his crowd nor his idea of a good time. Until Tom, he kept to the fringes as per instruction and never actively participated. He watched his clients, made sure they didn’t do anything stupid like injure themselves or other people but didn’t, as a rule, fraternize with them. He wasn’t there to fool around; he was there to keep them safe.

But Tom had other ideas, it seemed like. Tom always did.

He took Chris by the wrist and introduced him to people, his hand low on Chris’ elbow in a way that Chris was finding all too welcome.

Chris realized with growing understanding that Tom never really took his job seriously, that Tom didn’t see him as his bodyguard, but rather, something else. A prop, a friend, a babysitter. It was all very upsetting and confusing. Chris didn’t think he’d ever felt so ineffectual in his entire life.

“Are you having fun?” Tom yelled, above the crowd, the din. His face, smeared with sweat, made his make-up run down to his chin.

Chris pressed his hand over one ear.  “Did you say you wanted rum?”

Tom laughed. “I asked if you were having fun!”

Oh. Right, right. “Are you?” Chris asked. Better fend off the question with another than disappoint Tom with the truth.

Tom shrugged. “Yeah, a little.” He looked happy and excited, his cheeks flushed from the cocktails. How could Chris ever resist him?

“Do you want a drink?” Tom asked. Chris wanted to take him home.

Chris excused himself to the bathroom, shouldering his way past a man on his way out. He washed his face in the sink, grabbed a handful of toilet paper and wiped his hands, and spent a good five minutes having an epiphany. This had never happened before. He wondered when it had happened and how.

You’ve let your guard down Hemsworth, he told his reflection. A toilet flushed behind him, and a man in full armor staggered out of a stall.

Chris returned to join the congregation and found Tom where he’d left him, sipping a beer and swaying to music behind the mermaid ice sculpture. Tom’s face lit up as soon as their eyes met and he flagged down a waiter dressed as a Roman guard to take care of his drink.

“You’re back,” said Tom once Chris had gotten close enough to hear. He looked tipsy even though he’d only had about two cocktails and half a beer and usually could drink a Russian under the table. Chris caught him by the waist before he fell over and toppled the ice sculpture and Tom giggled and put his arms around Chris’ shoulders, pushing their hips uncomfortably close. He smelled nice. Like soap and fruit, like warm skin in the morning still dented with sleep.

“You’re really fit,” Tom said.

“...Thanks,” said Chris awkwardly.

Neither of them let go until finally Tom slipped out of Chris’ hold and wandered off.

There was nobody to see them behind the ice sculptures, the south wing totally empty, a welcome reprieve from the throbbing house music, the grind of sweaty bodies.

Chris followed, out of habit, if nothing else. A whole room of them: pagodas, sphinxes, carved in ice. Spots of light refracted. The room eerily still.  

Tom walked further in, quiet, under the watchful gazes of winged horses and long-dead emperors; Chris not too far behind, at his heels, two children playing hide and seek.

Tom stood under the shadow of a sculpted gryphon, touching his hand to the smooth furled wing.

“Aren’t these beautiful?” he said, the awe in his voice hushed but unmistakable.

“Yeah,” Chris said, gaze steady on him. He couldn’t look away.

They walked back to the party, neither of them speaking, only jarred back to reality as Thriller started to play.

It’s close to midnight and something evil’s lurking in the dark...

 Tom, always in the mood for dancing, snagged Chris’ wrist and tugged him to the dance floor where people were already standing in formation. “Come on,” he insisted. “Please tell me you know the steps to Thriller.”

“Oh god,” Chris said. “This is not happening.”

“Chris!” laughed Tom. “Come on.”

Chris let Tom dance, do his thing, because even though every fibre of his being was mortified beyond belief, watching Tom move was the most entertaining thing in the world. He danced like he didn’t care what people thought of him, with a kind of reckless abandon that was downright enviable. And that was beautiful. Plus, his arse looked especially lovely in that silver suit. Chris was tempted to smack it but he had a lot more self-control than that.

The song finished and everyone cheered and clapped, dispersing from the floor to look for refreshments. Tom was sweaty, make-up running, wig slightly askew, but Chris still wanted to kiss him. His little moment was cut short however when he spotted Chett, the Tom Selleck-lookalike, standing not too far away.

The man was wearing a blue pinstriped suit like a complete arsehole. Tom followed Chris’ gaze, pushed himself off of Chris, and walked over to say hi to Chett.

Whatever argument they were having before was water under the bridge now. Chett, with his metrosexual mustache and his snide little cackle, slung an arm around Tom’s waist and squeezed him in a one-armed hug. He was smoking a Djarum Black, blowing clouds of it right into Tom’s  face.

Tom looked pleased to see him. Their heads ducked low, their arms still around each other, they chatted like old friends, reminiscing on the good times.

Chris approached them with all the subtlety of an elephant. “Tom.”

“Don’t I know you?” Chett said, tilting his head to the side.

“Doubt it, bro,” Chris said. And then to Tom: “I think we should go. It’s late. You still have a photoshoot tomorrow.” A lie: Tom didn’t have to be anywhere for the next four days.

“Who is this guy, eh? Do you know him?” Chett scoffed, acted like Chris wasn’t even right in front of him.

Tom looked suitably embarrassed, looking everywhere but Chris. Chris felt like a man who had jumped overboard and the only one who could save him wouldn’t even bother throwing him a lifeline.

Chett looked at Tom expectantly.

Finally, in a breath, Tom said: “He’s my bodyguard.”

Chris felt about two feet tall. He didn’t know why it hurt that he was suddenly demoted. All this talk about being Tom’s friend and suddenly he was just the bodyguard. He nodded stiffly  at the both of them and left to give them some privacy. Tom must’ve sensed his distress because he went after him, pulling him aside and whispering.

“I know you think Chett’s a bad person, and to be honest he probably is, but I just need two minutes with him to discuss something important...” Tom held up his fingers. “Two.”

Chris sighed. “You don’t need my permission, Mr. Hiddleston.” He shrugged. “I’m just the guy paid to make sure nobody hurts you...”

Tom opened his mouth, then shut it with a click. He got this look on his face that Chris couldn’t describe because he’d never seen it on Tom’s face before. But it was something close to disappointment.

Tom left.

Chris wanted to tell him not to take too long but when he turned he saw that Tom and Chett were already deep in conversation.

The revelry continued. Champagne flowed in rivers. A popular Grammy winner arrived to provide entertainment. And then it was midnight. Tom didn’t win Most Outrageous costume; it had gone to someone dressed in full battle armour.

It took Chris twenty minutes to locate David, and even longer than that to locate the car because David had forgotten where he’d parked it.

David was, surprisingly, not drunk when Chris found him by the hotel swimming pool, having been sipping juice all night while he pickpocketed the guests.

The drive home was quiet, Tom half-asleep in the backseat as Gnarls snored in his lap. Chris escorted Tom back to his flat, staying behind to make him a cup of tea before he went to bed. He wondered exactly when he’d turned into Tom’s butler, on top of being his babysitter and  his bodyguard.

Chris knew how Tom took his tea, that he slept well after a cup or two. He knew Tom sometimes like to sleep to the sound of television because utter silence terrified him. Tom exerted a pull on him Chris knew would take a long time to sever.

“You didn’t have to come up,” Tom said, scrubbing his make-up off with a towel. His hair, not the wig, was matted down with sweat, plastered to his skull.

“It’s my job,” Chris said. Another lie.

Tom’s phone started going off on the coffee table. The screen read Chett R. but he didn’t pick it up.

Briefly, their gazes met. Chris was the one to look away first. “Had a good talk with Chett?” he asked, mostly because he couldn’t help himself.

Tom sighed. He tossed the towel aside and threw himself down onto the couch. “Ten years ago I wrote a play that Chett stole and took to Broadway. I was going to talk to him about that. At first he got angry and gave me a shove, which I suppose, you saw. Now, I think, he’s ready to see reason. We’re in the middle of negotiating... something.”

“A play?” said Chris. He felt stupid. And also: a little confused.

“It was about an English teacher who goes to New York and lives a double life as a drag queen.”

“David said he was your ‘special friend’.”

“Well, of course he is,” said Tom. “He was my co-writer. Granted I wrote the entire play myself but he’d contributed to some of the things I’d written in the past.” Then Tom smiled wryly. “God, this suit is such a pain. I feel like my skin has melted off and this entire thing is the only thing holding me together!” He stood to his feet. “I’m going to shower.”

“Okay,” said Chris. “Do you need help with the zipper or anything?”

Tom threw him a sideways glance, laughed, waved a hand. “I’m fine. Thanks for offering though. Help yourself to whatever’s in the fridge.”

Chris did: nothing in there but healthy fruit drinks and organic juices so he put a kettle on for Tom instead. He walked back into the living room, only noticing that the front door had been left slightly ajar. That was funny. He remembered being the one to shut it himself.

Chris chalked it up to lack of sleep and arranged all the magazines on the coffee table in a neat pile.

Gnarls was nowhere to be seen, his little basket by the couch empty, though Chris wasn’t particularly concerned. The little hellraiser was probably in Tom’s bedroom or maybe he’d followed Tom into the shower when Chris hadn’t been paying attention. It was when he was crouched there on his knees, leafing through a copy of ELLE magazine with Tom on the cover, that he saw something stuffed in the seat cushions.

Envelopes. A whole stack of them, regular-sized, no return address but sent to Tom’s agency.

Whomever had put them there did a bad job of trying to hide them.

Chris pulled them out, saw them to be fan letters and was about to set them aside when he realised one of them contained pictures. Pictures of Tom while he slept, fed Gnarls, drank milk straight from the carton in the kitchen, masturbated.

They were pixelated, like they were selected frames from a video feed that had been printed off.

Chris fished his phone from his pocket. His hands were shaking, his whole body tense. David wasn’t picking up. He tried Luke.

Just then Gnarls walked in with the remote between her jaws and set it down at Chris’ feet, slippery with drool. He lay his front paws on the remote, resting his head there, and suddenly the TV flickered to life.

Chris nearly jumped.

It was him on screen but from a different angle. He was on the couch, watching himself, and there was a black figure in the corner slowly approaching him.

Chris let the phone continue ringing in his hand. He grit his teeth, whipped around fast, but it was too late. The lead pipe connected with his skull and he could only stagger back from the impact, upsetting the contents on the coffee table.

Another hit, and then another, landing across his back. The pain, when it came, was almost secondary to the fear: don’t let him find Tom, don’t let him find Tom.

The last thing Chris heard before he blacked out was the kettle whistling in the next room.

Blackshaw had him strapped to the table, aboard his stolen ship  Alexia , a zeppelin of one hundred rooms, run by mechanical men. Self-sustaining. Copacetic. The perfect ship. It had once belonged to a sugar baron until Blackshaw emancipated it from the man’s grubby little clutches.  

Chris had climbed aboard while the ship had docked near port 44, overtaken by curiosity, unable to ever resist an open door. He hadn’t meant to get caught, only to have a quick look around, but here he was now, restrained, ropes burning welts into his skin as he struggled to loosen their hold. He’d heard the stories that surrounded the man, part fact, part myth, he was sure. 

Perhaps, deep down, Chris was hoping to get caught.

Perhaps...

Chris looked up at the sound of boots thudding the floor.

Thief, traitor, scoundrel, they called Blackshaw, but he was, looking at him now, despite the inhuman eye, so dangerously magnetic.

And he was about to end Chris’ life.

Blackshaw held a pistol, pressing the barrel into Chris’ stomach. His smile was sweet like poison. His velvety lips touched the back of Chris’ ear as he leaned down. He smelled of woodsmoke and leather and whiskey. He wore an awful amount of black.

“Any last words?” asked Blackshaw, voice low and smooth, like a panther’s, an appropriate comparison given the former detective’s favourite colour.

“Ride my dick,” said Chris.

***

Darkness.

Peace. 

Chris woke in an unfamiliar place, acutely aware of the aches in his body. His head throbbed; he wanted to go back to sleep but his eyes felt like it was filled with sand. He tasted blood in his mouth, wondered how it got there, then he remembered. He blinked his eyes open and saw he was in a warehouse, half expecting to be aboard a futuristic ship.

His hands were bound in front of him in duct-tape, cutting off blood flow but his feet were spared which allowed him some mobility.

It took his eyes another minute to adjust to the gloom and to his utter disappointment, he found Tom lying prone just a few feet away from him, on his side, cheek to the floor. He was in a grey tracksuit, his hair still damp from the shower, which meant they probably weren’t too far from his flat. He looked relatively unharmed.

Chris wriggled towards him, with a lot less grace than he had hoped. He nudged Tom awake, rolling him onto his back only to realise he had a nasty bruise on his cheek.

Chris winced, touched the purpling edges with his stiff fingers.

Tom moaned, snuffling awake.

“Tom,” Chris whispered. “Tom, it’s me.”

Tom woke with a violent jolt, gasping like he was drowning. He looked confused for a second, tried to push the hair back from his face but saw his hands were bound. His eyes met Chris’,  wet with renewed fear. He’d always been a bit of a crier, a trait Chris both admired and envied. At least Tom was honest about his emotions and didn’t try to bury them in denial like he did.

“Guns,” he murmured as Chris helped him sit up. “Chris, they had guns.”

They?

“Shit,” Chris hissed. “Shit shit shit shit shit.”

This was bad.

“I don’t have mine on me,” Chris confessed. “Fuck, I probably have a concussion because I’m seeing two of everything. How many did you say there were?”

Tom bit his lip. “Five.”

Chris let out a noisy breath. He needed to regroup. All right, remember your basic training, he thought furiously. He closed his eyes but that did nothing to stem the fear churning in his gut. He didn’t care what happened to him. He just wanted to do his job right which was to protect the client.

Protect Tom.

Chris sagged against the wall in defeat. “Why didn’t you tell me? The envelopes...”

Tom looked away, shamefaced. “I never saw what was in them. I read the letters, got scared, hid them. I was going to tell you eventually, or Luke, but so many things were happening all at once that I got overwhelmed. I didn’t think about it again after that. I guess I forgot. Or I guess I thought that if I ignored them it would all go away.” He started to cry.

Chris wanted to bang his head against the wall in frustration.

Instead he moved closer and gently butted heads with Tom, brushing his chin against Tom’s temple before pressing a hesitant kiss there. Lavender-scented shampoo. The sharp tang of sweat. He breathed it in. “That’s just stupid, Tom. You, of all people, should’ve known better. You should’ve come to me. Goddamnit, that’s what I’m here for! I’m supposed to protect you! Why won’t you let me do my job?” Also: “Please don’t cry. You’re making me feel like a dick here. I’ll find a way out of this, okay? I promise. I’ll protect you. I’ll figure something out.”

Tom nodded, and rubbed his face against Chris’ shoulder. He didn’t move away even when Chris shifted to loosen a cramp in his back. “Do you know what they want? Did they hurt you anywhere else?” 

Tom  shook his head.

“Good,” Chris said, and kissed him on the temple again. “Because I’ll kill them if they so much as try.”

They hadn’t been alone for more than five minutes when a corrugated door to their right slid open. Chris blinked against the light, moving to shield Tom’s body by instinct. But it was just a kid, a teenager, eighteen or nineteen probably, standing in the doorway in jeans and an ironic t-shirt. He looked bored already. He crouched in front of them, not saying anything, just staring, and it pissed Chris off so he headbutted him. 

Hard. 

The kid howled in pain. A second later two of his friends came flying in through the door, a redheaded girl in a red flannel t-shirt and a freckly boy in huge spectacles, not much older. They each had a gun and aimed both directly at Tom and Chris. They looked like they knew how to use their firearm.

Teenagers? Seriously?

Flannel and Freckles yelled for Chris to calm down, threatening to shoot Tom on the spot if Chris didn’t cooperate. They looked serious about it too, and it became clear to Chris that they weren’t just a bunch of kids who got roped into a prank gone terribly wrong.

They meant business; he couldn’t talk his way out of this.

Desensitised to the point of apathy, these kids seemed like they’d seen one too many Quentin Tarantino movies. Too much violence in the media, or coked out of their minds? Probably a combination of both though Chris never took kindly to teenagers to begin with.

They hauled Tom out of the room, gun pressed to Tom’s hip. Tom took it with surprising grace, head ducked down, obedient. He didn’t want to cause any trouble for either of them.

“Where are you taking him?” Chris screamed.  Then louder: “Where the fuck are you taking him?”

“Oh we’ll let you watch,” a voice said. “Juuuust give us a minute.”

Chris wasn’t sure how long he sat there in the room stewing in impotent rage but one thing he did know for certain was that it was longer than a minute. The door opened an eternity later to reveal the now-familiar silhouettes of Flannel and Freckles. They herded Chris to the main room, unmarked crates stacked floor-to-ceiling, the distinct smell of fish and canvas hitting Chris’ nostrils. No windows though or any other hints as to where they’d been taken.

Freckles knocked Chris on the shoulder with the butt of his gun when Chris wouldn’t walk any faster. They entered a smaller room, what looked like to be an office, well-lit though unused for some time.

Tom was on his knees, swaying a little from side to side, his eyes half-lidded, his movements sluggish. In front of him was a video camera mounted on a tripod. Another kid Chris had never seen before, whom he assumed was the ring leader, sat on a metal folding chair behind the camera, his arms crossed, his grin manic.

On the table next to him was a laptop.

“Nice of you to join us, Chris,” said the kid, in the most nasal voice Chris had ever heard on a seventeen year old. He had long greasy hair tied to pony tail.

Chris couldn’t stand him.

He glanced at Tom again but Tom wouldn’t even look at him.

Chris didn’t think Tom even noticed he’d entered the room.

It hit him: he’d been drugged.

“You can glare at me all you want, Chris, but that’s not going to change the fact that I’m here, running the show and you’re about to be in a world of pain. If you make any sudden movements, we shoot you in the head. If you try to escape, we shoot you in the head. Now, I know your life may not be important to you but imagine what we could do to Tom if you’re not around to protect him.” He smiled, a cruel smile that looked like he’d practiced it to perfection about a million times in front of the bathroom mirror. “So sit back, and try to enjoy what we’re about to show you.” He snapped a finger, and the kid in the ironic t-shirt stepped forward to turn on the camera. He shot Chris a dirty look; he’d staunched his bleeding nose with a wad of tissues.

“Tell us your name...” instructed Ponytail.

“Tom,” slurred Tom. “Tom Hiddleston.”

“Good.”

Chris couldn’t look away. Every muscle in his body was tense. He was filled with immense rage. For the first time in his life he felt like he wanted to hurt somebody, like he was capable of feats of great violence.

Flannel and Freckles pulled on matching black masks and walked in behind Tom to start undressing him. Tom looked confused but let it all happen, pliant as a rag doll, slipping his arms from his sleeves. He shivered as the cold hit him. He looked ten years younger.

“Now, say hi to your fans, Tom,” Ponytail said. “This is going viral.”

Something inside Chris went quiet though it would have been more accurate to say that something inside of him had snapped.

He lost a good chunk of the next five minutes; another blackout. All he knew was that his body had filled with a sudden electrifying rush of adrenaline and there was nothing he wanted more than to get Tom out of there alive and unscathed. He heard the gunshot before he even felt the wound on his shoulder and touched the hole it made there with grim curiosity.

It brought him back to the present to a roomful of incapacitated teenagers sprawled across the floor, two unconscious with superficial wounds, one whimpering and scrabbling for the door. He felt a tremendous pain in his back but ignored it in favour of lumbering towards Tom who looked at him with a hint of childlike recognition.

Chris saw the mess around him: the video camera knocked askew and the metal folding chair lying on the floor like someone had used it as a weapon. Fucking amateurs. He propped Tom against the wall.

Tom made an incoherent noise and tipped forward into him, breathing fast against his neck. He wasn’t hurt, only frightened by the loud noises around him though his arms came around Chris’ shoulders as they hugged in shared relief.

Chris shrugged him off gently, stood in front of him, a protective barrier in case any of those little miscreants did anything stupid.

“You’ll drop that gun if you know what’s good for you,” Chris told Ponytail whose gun, responsible for Chris’ shoulder wound, was still pointed at Chris.

Ponytail kept a staunch face though it was clear that his hands were shaking. He was alone now, cornered. Finally, after a stare down, he relinquished his grip on the gun, sat quietly in a corner where he started to mumble to himself as he rocked back and forth.

Chris looked down at his hands for the first time: bloodied, the knuckles split. He held a gun in each. A hissing noise to his left alerted him to another presence in the room. A kid, a boy in an oversized Loki t-shirt, someone he hadn’t seen before, stood in the door paralyzed with shock. He’d pissed himself in fright, dropping the bag of snacks he held in his arms.

The cans of fizzy drinks clattered and sprayed an orange puddle around his feet. He opened his mouth but no sound came out.

“Kid,” Chris said. He tried to calm himself down. He was still breathing rapidly, still floating on that cloud of adrenaline-fueled rage. But his exhaustion caught up to him eventually once he realised Tom was under no immediate threat, not anymore.

The ground was slowly moving under his feet. He was so tired. Chris slumped down next to Tom on the floor, head thumping the wall behind it. “I’m gonna need to borrow a phone,” he said.

***

Chris woke in a hospital bed. He wasn’t sure how much time had passed since the incident, only that he’d been having vivid dreams of being aboard a hundred-room zeppelin and it felt like he’d died and gone to heaven. He tried sitting up but was assaulted by pain and a familiar head of hair.

Brown-blond curls.

Lavender smell.

Tom.

Tom had fallen asleep at his bedside, keeping vigil, face pillowed in his arms.

Chris didn’t want to wake him but he must’ve sensed Chris shifting about because he quickly righted himself and smacked his lips.

“Chris, hi. Hi! You’re awake,” Tom croaked. He looked happy enough that he attempted to hug Chris, stopping himself just in time once he realised the act would only further injure him. In addition to the shoulder wound he had sustained from the fracas, Chris had taken a bullet in the side. It missed any vital organs because the Ponytail kid had been a crap shot, but it still hurt fiercely. The drugs might have been wearing off.

“How are you feeling?” Tom asked, taking his hand and rubbing his thumb along Chris’ knuckles.

“Like I was dipped in honey and dragged through gravel?”

Tom laughed but there was rueful edge to it.

Chris tried not to remember what was almost done to him in that warehouse; it would probably take him a long time to forget though.

“Are you thirsty?” Tom asked all of a sudden, breaking the silence.

Chris nodded.

Tom poured him bottled water into a cup and had him drink it through a red bendable straw like a little kid. Chris had never known real thirst until that moment and asked for another refill, chucking the straw completely and slurping water till it poured down his hospital gown.

“I wanted to thank you,” Tom said softly, watching Chris make a mess of himself. “For saving my life.”

Chris stopped, his grip nearly crushing the plastic cup. “All in a day’s work,” he said coolly. “Are you all right?”

Tom shrugged. “Still a little shaken, you know.” He made a wobbly hand gesture. “I’m seeing a therapist tomorrow. I’m also probably moving house.”

“C’mere,” Chris said.

Tom took the cup from him and slid onto the bed, the mattress sagging to one side. Chris slipped a hand up Tom’s elbow, but it was Tom who bent down and cradled his face. His thumbs swept up Chris’ cheekbones and he kissed him, soft and open, and trembling.

Chris felt like he’d come alive for the first time in his life.

“You could’ve died that night,” Tom whispered. “Protecting me.”

“I’ll make sure that doesn’t happen again,” said Chris though that was an outright lie. Chris would do anything for him.

Tom pressed their heads together, brushing their lips, touching Chris’ face again. No tongue. His eyes were so blue. His eyelashes passed Chris’ cheek.

“I’ve always wondered what kissing you would feel like,” Chris said, afterwards, running his hand through Tom’s hair.  He felt high, peaceful, though that could’ve easily been the morphine. Chris was breaking protocol, forgetting his training, but undeniably giddy despite a possible imminent forfeiture of his job. “Now I know what it’s like,” he said and laughed.

***

Post script or

Ten Months Later…

A lot of things happened in the months following Chris’ hospitalisation.

Chris quit his job, and moved out of his one-room flat; Tom came out with another movie and the two of them started dating.

There was a lot of hubbub surrounding Tom’s almost-kidnapping.

People expected him to write a book about it, detailing the harrowing experience, milk it for all it was worth, fodder for the masses, but Tom declined and said very little about the matter when asked about it in interviews. He didn’t want to be reminded. He didn’t sign a book deal.

Eventually, the whole world moved on and found other things to talk about and Tom was asked about the incident less and less when invited to talk shows.

Chris went flat-hunting with him shortly after being released from the hospital. They had penetrative sex for the first time in Tom’s unfinished kitchen in August, and then again in his bathroom which was still, upsettingly, bigger than Chris’ bedroom and living room combined. You’d think they’d be having a lot of sex all the time, everywhere, but that wasn’t the case. Chris could count the number of times Tom had touched his dick which was depressing in itself.

Neither of them knew how to broach the subject of sex, or go from being sort-of friends to... boyfriends, Chris supposed. And Tom was always busy, promoting this and that, traveling overseas.

Chris didn’t want to ruin anything prematurely by throwing Tom down onto floor and fucking the Shakespeare out of him. He always came home tired. Chris let him be.

The sequel to Cobalt Sextant, Cobalt Sextant II: Electric Sea was scheduled to film in the fall and Tom and Chett were planning his Broadway debut shortly after that. There was maybe an animated movie somewhere between those two, or a blues album. Chris wasn’t sure. All he knew was that Tom was a very busy man.

Neither of them were any good at relationship talk which was why when Tom sat him down one afternoon to ask him if he were seeing anybody, Chris laughed hysterically for about five minutes straight.

“Honestly?” he said, in the silence that followed. “What gave you that idea?”

Tom shrugged and described Chris’ reluctance for any frisky below-the-belt activity. He used a lot of euphemisms which were lost on Chris until finally he let out a frustrated huff and threw his arms up in exasperation. “The point is we’re not doing a lot of fucking.”

“What was that now?”

“Fucking,” Tom said, in crisp Etonian English.

“Oh, we can do that,” Chris told him. “In fact, we can do that now.”

One of the things that had surprised Chris about Tom was his lack of inhibition during sex. You took one look at the man and pegged him for a conservative, the type to have sex with all the lights turned off, the blankets pulled up to the chest, only in the evenings and never at any other time of day.

Chris had never been more wrong in his entire life.

Tom was, in fact, the very opposite. He liked it rough and dirty, fast and hard. He was pretty much into anything that brought him pleasure, and he liked it best when Chris rolled him onto his hands and knees, spreading his cheeks with his thumbs so he could lick him sloppy and open until he was writhing up and hissing like a cat in heat. He got pushy though, sometimes. Like right now.

“Use your finger, fuck, fuck, fuck. Ah, yeah.”

Chris slid another one in there to join the first one, slick with a generous amount of lube. Tom whimpered as he was fingered, good and thorough until his cock started to leak and he made a noise like he’d been wounded. He fisted the sheets, his breath speeding up, his hips moving to chase the burn of penetration. His knees were trembling, a sure sign he was almost there.

“You gonna come yet?”

“No, not yet,” Tom panted, shaking his head fiercely. He let out a gasp when Chris thrust his fingers in particularly deep. 

Chris rolled on the condom, slicking himself with lube, gritting his teeth at his own touch as he lined the tip of his cock against to Tom’s hole. They groaned simultaneously at the first thrust as Chris nudged the fat head of his cock deeper and deeper still, pushing in until he couldn’t anymore.

Tom shook even harder as Chris closed his hands around his hips, angling himself, seating his cock inside fully. Chris started to move, slow at first, a gentle rhythm that had Tom panting out little puffs of breath and clenching the sheets reflexively. Then Chris’ thrusts started picking up speed, adapting a surety that rattled the bedframe until he was pounding Tom with all he had, fucking him into the mattress. Just how Tom liked it.

Chris leaned forward, his chest pressed to Tom’s back, and brushed a solid kiss to his neck. “Feel good?”

Tom nodded, guiding Chris’ hand along his side, letting Chris’ fingers splay flat against his belly where his cock curved, wet and angry.

“Show me how much you love it, baby,” Chris panted. “Show me how much you love my cock.”

Neither of them lasted after that. Their fucking took a feverish pitch, every rough thrust sending Tom into a frenzy. He seemed desperate for it in a way that was addicting to watch, begging and shivering in an effort not to come, to make the moment last.

Chris spread him wide, pushed his thighs apart, swivelled his hips like he was stirring him up and the two of them started to grind. Back and forth, on and on until Tom sagged forward in defeat, his elbows giving out from underneath him. His breath had evened. He rubbed his cock feebly against the sheets.

Chris surged forward, almost crushing Tom with his weight, yanking him back up and swiping his tongue between the sweat of his shoulder blades. He came with a grunt, pumping his hips, emptying himself inside the condom and relishing the way Tom’s body seemed to respond in kind: tightening around him and squeezing until Chris was spent and had nothing left to give. He suspected this was some kind of metaphor but he was too blissed out to give it much thought.

After, they crawled towards the centre of the bed, Tom’s head pillowed against Chris’ shoulder. Chris kissed him, because even after everything else, that was the only thing that made him brave.

Tom made a funny little face at that, wrinkling his nose, rubbing something off of the corner of Chris’ face with the pad of his finger. “Make me breakfast,” he said in the sweetest voice imaginable.

Chris said, “I’m not your slave, make your own damned breakfast,” but left the bed anyway and pulled some pants on to work something up in the kitchen. He was about to open the can of beans for a full English breakfast when he felt Tom’s arms come around him from behind, wrapping around his middle.

Tom dug his chin into Chris’ shoulder, his curls scratching Chris’ cheek. He was such a cuddler. He held Chris for about a minute before he said, “I love you,” whispering it right into the meat of Chris’ shoulder, muffled but loud and unmistakable. No preamble whatsoever. Just the truth. I love you. 

It hit Chris like a punch in the gut.

“Say something,” Tom said, starting to look nervous.

Chris panicked. He was never good at articulating how he felt, and Tom’s eyes, he noticed not for the first time, were so warm and full of affection.

“Wanna get engaged?”

Tom blinked in surprise.

Chris blinked back. Tom laughed softly and when Chris turned around to face him, Chris slipped his hands into the back pockets of Tom’s track bottoms and squeezed himself palmfuls of arse. He studied Tom’s face intently for any signs of doubt, but found his own gaze reflected back at him: hopeful, unafraid, slightly manic. A bit perturbed. He smiled and found he was all right with that.

Then Tom said, rather breathlessly, cupping Chris’ face in his hands, putting Chris’ very future on the line, “Yeah, sure, why the hell not?”

END