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When his mother had told the TV show host that he was going to be playing the lead in his faculty play, Raffy’s heart had sunk deep into his stomach and he’d walked off set with a creeping sense of nausea and embarrassment.
Of course she couldn’t just be pleased that he’d been cast at all, of course she presumed he’d be the star. She always was, after all, and she’d moulded Raffy—little Raf—in her own image since childhood.
She’d dressed him well and fussed over his hair, promised him the world would come to him easily, and that he’d grow up happy and talented. He’d be the actor son she always wanted.
There never seemed to be any other option.
The truth is that Raffy isn't even sure he wants to be an actor, and yet, here he is, enrolled in a theatre degree, poring over scripts and watching interviews with acting coaches and hoping he can be good enough for her one day. Here he is, taking on a bit-part after losing out to Dean, trying to walk with his shoulders high, even though he can see it in Jack’s eyes that Jack doesn’t consider him an emerging talent. Jack barely considers him at all.
People rarely consider him without his mother’s name attached, which is something he realised a long time ago. He has nothing of his own, and now he is sitting in his mother’s dressing room, in an outfit his mother picked, reeling from an announcement his mother made that isn’t even true.
Rome smiles at him. “Maybe they’ll cut that part from the interview,” he says. His hand is warm and heavy on Raffy’s shoulder.
“Yeah, maybe.” Raffy knows they won’t cut it. He shakes off Rome’s hand, even though he doesn’t actually want to. “Are you gong to tell anyone?”
“Like who?” Rome raises an eyebrow. “You mean Jack?”
“I mean anyone.” Raffy tries to work his hair out of the stiff style his mother’s team had styled it into. He looks like an overgrown child, dressed up by his mom for a fancy dinner. “I don’t even know why you stayed and watched.”
”I stayed and watched because it was funny,” Rome tells him. A little more quietly, he adds, “And so you wouldn’t be lonely afterwards.”
Raffy opens his mouth to say he isn’t lonely, but Rome is already turning away. “I’ll wait for you outside while you get changed,” he says, before he slips out of the dressing room and into the corridor, and then Raffy does feel lonely after all.
He hangs the suit back up on the rail along the wall and dresses in his casual clothes. He wishes he’d said no to this interview, wishes he could say no to his mother. But, how can he? He’s never been able to before. Saying yes to her has shaped his whole life to date, and what is he without her?
Without acting running in his blood, he is nothing, no one. And he might not be anyone’s first choice right now, but he has to keep trying, because he doesn’t have anything else.
Rome is on a phone call when Raffy heads into the corridor, but he nods at Raffy in acknowledgement, and matches his step as they leave the set together.
“Friday? Yeah, I’ll be there.” He continues the conversation as they walk. Raffy listens to his side of it as they head back to the car, watching Rome conduct his business with his usual confidence. “Yeah. No, I’ll come alone this time.” He glances, briefly, Raffy’s way. “Thanks, P’Joe.”
Raffy pretends he isn’t listening, gets out his own phone, opens and closes instagram, tells himself it’s not embarrassing that Rome is reassuring a client he won’t bring Raffy to another gig, but it is, and—worse than that—it feels like rejection.
When Rome ends the call, Raffy says, “Where are you playing this time?”
“Why? Are you going to give me a handjob and beg me to let you come with me or do you not have any info to fish for this time?”
Raffy scowls. He shouldn’t have asked. “I said I was sorry,” he lies.
“You haven’t said sorry even once,” Rome tells him, but he is smiling when he says it, like it doesn’t matter, like he’s enjoying this, despite everything that’s happened over the last 24 hours.
Raffy wants to know what goes on inside Rome’s head.
He wants to understand how he can live so transparently, how he goes through life saying the things he wants to and just admitting to things. Admitting when he’s mad, when he’s disappointed, and then just carrying on afterwards, slate wiped clean.
The thought of being that honest, that see-through, either with himself or other people, is fucking terrifying to Raffy.
He gets into the car, front seat this time, and Rome smiles even wider. “So, where are we heading to now?”
“I don’t know.” Raffy wishes he’d sat in the back, now. This seat reminds him of the things they did in it at the party.
Maybe it reminds Rome of that, too, because he cocks his head and asks, “Back to my place?”
Raffy crosses his arms. “Are you trying to kidnap me again like last night?”
Rome scoffs. “I rescued you last night. You were trying to go home with men you don’t even know. You kept yelling that you wanted to go wild.” He laughs. “You know I was in the middle of a set? You know how hard it was to just hand my set over like that? I had some insane transitions lined up, and I couldn’t play them, because someone was being self-destructive.”
The words reverberate in Raffy’s mind. Maybe being friends with Rome is dangerous. Maybe he’s too good at reading people, as well as getting under their skin. No one has ever been this good at reading him, certainly not his parents, nor any friend he’s ever had, and he doesn't know what to do with it.
It makes him want to run away.
“I’m not self destructive. I was having fun,” he lies. “I wanted to fool around, like I thought you liked to.”
“I do like to.” Rome starts up the engine. “Tell the chauffeur where to drive to, Little Raffy, or we’ll end up parked here all afternoon.”
Raffy inhales a deep breath. “Your place, then,” he says, and he ignores the satisfied little smile that flickers over Rome’s stupid, handsome, face.
Back in Rome’s room, Raffy spots the tee and shorts he’d been wearing the night before still in a pile at the end of the bed, where he’d left them to change back into his jeans and shirt earlier.
Waking up in Rome’s bed that morning had been a relief, not that he’d admitted that to Rome, since he can barely admit it to himself.
His head had been pounding, and his mouth was dry, and he knew he looked terrible, but Rome hadn’t said anything about his bloodshot eyes. He’d smiled, and handed him breakfast, and made fun of him like everything was normal, and Raffy had felt like crying, confused and tired, and more grateful for coffee than he’s been in forever.
“We didn’t do anything,” Rome had made clear. “Although you thought I was bringing you home to ravage you. You need to have more self preservation, Mr Actor. You thought we were in an elevator at one point, but it was just my car. You kept telling me to press the button for the penthouse floor.”
Raffy had felt himself blush. “You’re lying.”
Rome had softened, then. “I’m not,” he’d replied. “But you wouldn’t know because you were too drunk to remember.”
Raffy hadn’t found a way to form the words Thank you or I’m sorry.
Now, back in the same room, Raffy drops his bag and sits down on the bed, next to the clothes he’d woken up in.
He watches as Rome slips on his headphones at his decks. He really does look at home behind the decks, and Raffy tries not to find it endearing. “If you want to study, I can clear a space at my desk for you.” He nods at a desk on the other side of the room.
“Why, so I can study the script for my 3 lines?” It’s actually double that, but still less lines than he can count with two hands. It’s shameful, really, and now his mother has told the world that he’s the lead.
Rome shrugs. “They could be the best 3 lines in the play,” he says, without any hint of sarcasm.
“They won’t be.” Raffy wants to change the subject. “I subscribed to your channel, by the way. You seem to have a lot of fans.”
Rome smiles. “Not as many as you do. Have you seen your insta following count lately?”
”They’re not my fans, not really. My mom tags me sometimes and then I get an influx of followers— aunties who want to introduce their daughter to me, and celeb-chasers, and modelling scouts.” He reaches out for the t-shirt and unfolds it, reading the slogan again. It would be kind of funny to post an insta pic in this.
“Well, let’s make a deal. When I hit my first million, I’ll give you a shout out,” Rome says. “And when you hit yours, you gotta do the same back.”
“Can I tag you as my chauffeur?” Raffy asks, and he waits for a teasing comment to come his way. It’s what he’s come to expect from Rome and he craves it. Snarking at each other is a game he can play, and it’s safe and familiar, like Rome himself is becoming.
“Sure.” Rome puts down his headphones and crosses the room. “You can say I drive you wild with lust.”
Raffy pretends not to find him funny, exaggerates a sigh and rolls his eyes. Rome just keeps grinning at him.
Raffy re-folds the T-shirt to distract him from the fact that Rome is standing over him. “I’ll have these clothes laundered and get them back to you.”
“Keep them,” Rome says.
Raffy stops folding. “Thanks, but they’re not my style.”
”No.” Rome leans in closer. Raffy can smell the faint scent of whatever cologne he put on before uni this morning. “I meant you should keep them for the next time you sleep over.”
“Who says I’ll be sleeping over again?”
Rome stands upright again. “You can,” he says. “If you ever need to. That’s all.”
Raffy feels like crying again. He feels vulnerable, and he hates feeling vulnerable.
His mother once said to him, “In this industry, you can’t show any cracks. If you show them cracks, they’ll break you, and this family, we’re better than that.” But Raffy isn’t sure if he is better, not really, not anymore.
Sleeping next to Rome again - and remembering it - would be nice, he thinks, but he can’t admit that, not now, so instead he says, “I don’t want to study my three lines.”
“What?”
“You don’t need to make space for me to study my lines. I don’t want to read through them today.”
“So what do you want to do?”
“How about you show me how you’ve put the decks I paid for to good use, and then maybe, if you ask me nicely, I’ll let you fuck me.”
There’s a hesitation in Rome’s voice when he says, “You know I didn’t ask you back here for that, right?”
Raffy looks at him. “Are you saying you don’t want to?”
“No, I’m not saying that.” Rome turns to his desk and stacks a pile of books up on it, leaving space for someone to sit down and work at it. “Here - if you decide you want to study, this space is yours,” he says, and then he heads back to the decks and slips his headphones back on.
Raffy doesn’t bother moving from where he sits, the T-shirt that Rome carefully dressed him in the night before still folded in his lap.
He really isn’t in the mood to read lines. He doesn’t know what he’s in the mood for. There’s a prickling heat under his skin, and he’s restless, and he keeps replaying his mother’s words about him being the lead in the play she’s never even bothered to listen to him talk about. The interview will go out this evening.
He briefly considers deactivating his instagram in advance of the inevitable flurry of new commenters who will call him Little Raffy and pretend to be impressed with the role he hasn’t even got, but she’ll only scold him for messing up his public profile if he does, so instead he does nothing but sit and watch while Rome works on a mix, his brow furrowing as he replays a transition, pushing the slider a little further up or down every few seconds.
Raffy has no idea what Rome’s doing, but it isn’t boring. He takes a photo of Rome lost in the music, and smiles as he saves it. Luckily, Rome doesn’t seem to notice.
They don’t fuck.
When Rome finishes up, he catches Raffy’s eye and asks, “You hungry?“ and Raffy realises he is, that he hasn’t eaten since breakfast, and, in the rush of classes and then trying to make the interview, he’s forgotten to eat lunch.
He remembers Rome giving him his own lunch a few days earlier and it makes him feel exposed again, like what he needs is obvious to Rome, like he can see what Raffy needs before he even knows it himself.
Raffy is tempted to lie and say no. No, I’m not hungry. No, you don’t see me.
Instead, he nods. “Yeah, I guess I am,” he says, and then he follows Rome out to his car, where he pretends he’s going to sit in the back again, just to see the look on Rome’s face.
Maybe he will end up a disappointment to his mother, to himself, and the whole cast of the play, and to a hoard of middle aged lakhorn fans blowing up his instagram, he thinks, but he can try to forget about that tonight, so he turns off his phone and loses himself in listening to Rome talk about his dream Tomorrowland set as he drives them to some hole-in-the-wall noodle place he says does amazing chicken khao soi.
Why are you being so nice? He wants to ask Rome, but he isn’t sure he could handle the answer right now, whatever it may be, so he doesn’t ask any questions, just accepts the ride and the food and the annoyingly good company, and takes a night off from being inside his own head.