Page 16 of Not Your Golden Boy

Nikky shrugged and racked his brains to come up with something to say that didn’t make him sound like a hypocrite. He settled on, “Making music is a wonderful thing. So is acting. Doing anything creative adds so much to the planet.”

“But?” Harry asked in a way that called him out.

“But a lot of things come with the job that are—” Scary. He wanted to say scary. “Challenging,” he said instead.

Harry huffed. “Tell me about it.” He thrust his hands into the pockets of his jacket like he needed to contain his fists or he would punch something. “But it’s better than being stuck at a desk all day or driving a train or a bus or something.”

“I wouldn’t mind driving a train,” Nikky said with a half-smile.

“You’d hate it,” Harry replied, surprising him. “Cooped up in a box all day? Driving the same track all the time? No one to talk to?”

“At least you know where the tracks are going,” Nikky said, hoping he didn’t sound too ungrateful.

Harry surprised him by reaching an arm around his shoulders as they walked and pulling him close for what might have been a hug if they’d been stationary. “You’d hate it,” he said. “You’re like me. You need to create to be happy.”

A dozen different emotions blossomed in Nikky’s chest and gut. Harry thought the two of them were alike. Harry wanted him to be happy.

Harry was touching him.

Nikky did not expect the subject change that Harry bombarded him with two seconds after he let go and thrust his hand into his jacket pocket again.

“What do you want from your life, Nikky Smith?” he asked.

The question was so big and so urgent that Nikky stopped several feet before they reached the crossing, where the light was already green. “I—I don’t know,” he said, panic welling up inside of him.

Harry stopped and turned back to him. “Are you sure?” he asked, a wicked little smile pulling at his alluring mouth and glittering in his dark eyes.

Butterflies filled Nikky’s stomach. Was it appropriate to say that he wanted to be horizontal in Harry’s bed while the idol of his younger years railed him into the mattress? Probably not. Especially on a crowded London street at midday.

“Like you said,” he began, his voice wavering with uncertainty as they rushed to cross the street before the lights changed, “I want to create. That’s all I’ve ever wanted.”

“Is it?” Harry asked, sending him an almost teasing, sideways smile.

“It is,” Nikky insisted, like he had to defend himself for some reason. “I love music and I love acting. And I’m good at them. Pamela, my foster mother, recognized my talent when I was pretty young and always encouraged it.”

Harry didn’t stop, but he glanced at Nikky, brow shooting up. “You were in foster care?”

Nikky suddenly felt sick. “Um, yeah,” he said. Inwardly, he winced and hoped Harry would let the subject drop.

But Harry continued to watch him expectantly.

“My mother was Russian, which is why my full, legal name is Nikolai” he blurted, glancing around and praying no one was listening in. “She was one of those Russian brides. My dad went over to Russia to pick her out at some shady event and bring her to the US. He was a lot older than her, and he was abusive.” Harry’s eyes went wide. “I never knew my father,” Nikky continued in a hurry. “When Mom got pregnant with me, he accused her of cheating on him and kicked her out. He is my biological father, though. Mom had the tests to prove it.”

“Shit, Nikky,” Harry said.

Nikky hunched in on himself under the weight of his origin story. “She was supposed to go back to Russia, but she stayed illegally with some friends. I was born, and she tried to take care of me, but since she couldn’t legally get a job, she ended up…doing things to survive. She also ended up doing drugs. That’s why CPS took me when I was five.”

“Fuck,” Harry went on. “Is any of that public knowledge?”

Nikky shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s not hidden. I don’t focus on it at all in my bio, but I’m sure people know at least part of the story.”

In fact, way back when things were starting to pick up during Cooked, he’d asked his team not to focus on his childhood at all. He liked Pamela and Brad enough, but he didn’t have some flowery story about how they felt like real parents to him. And any discussion of where he came from would mean talking about the awful story of his parents.

It took a few seconds for Nikky to realize Harry was watching him in thought. “What?” he asked, bristling with self-consciousness.

“Nothing,” Harry said, shrugging. “It just seems, I don’t know, kind of…sad that you grew up in foster care and now you’ve made this massive career for yourself, but your manager didn’t come with you to London or send any kind of a team with you.”

Nikky’s chest hurt with those words. “Well, when you put it that way,” he pretended to take the comment as a joke and did some of his very best acting to look like he was amused. “It’s not like I’m here for some big publicity campaign, so I don’t need a whole team. And Charlotte is coming in a few days, so I’ll be coddled by the end of the week.”