Chapter Text
Nick Nelson was doing fine.
Yes, he did currently have streaks of dirt on his face from when he dragged his hands down his cheeks in frustration after he messed with the drip irrigation line and it sprayed in his face. And yes, the mixture of water and dirt on his face did turn into mud he could feel slowly oozing down to his neck. He almost wished Amy was here this week so she could first take a picture of him to make fun of him and then offer help, which was what a true friend would do (as she often claimed), because he knew he looked ridiculous. And he looked even more ridiculous a moment later when he forgot himself and went to wipe the mud off his face, just mixing more dirt in in the process. Farmer Nick. Who would have thought?
Not Nick, not even a few years ago.
Nick had been surprised at first when his mum Sarah had purchased a lovely but ageing estate house and its large fields with her long-coming divorce settlement from his dad. In just a few months, though, Nick wondered how his mum had actually gone so long not doing this. He’d always been impressed by Sarah Nelson, but she went to another level with this new undertaking. She’d thrown herself into Google and home improvement books, pouring hours of research and effort into converting the house into a bed and breakfast, and hiring help when it was something that went beyond what she could reasonably do, like ploughing the fields. Nick had been surprised when she had declared that she was going to turn it into a working farm; he’d (foolishly, he now realised) thought she’d just, you know, live there and rent out a few rooms.
Nick was there on his first visit during one of his breaks from the Sale Sharks academy where he was playing for their Juniors team, fighting for a spot in the League. He’d come expecting to haul furniture, unpack boxes and have his mum repeatedly coo when she came across an old photo of him or his brother, exclaiming that little Nicky was just so handsome. He had not been expecting to park behind a massive tractor, or step cautiously around a series of pumps and generators.
He had opened the door to the manor (at least, that’s what it was called on the listing - in reality, it was a large farm home) and called for his mum, wandering around until he found her in one of the upstairs bedrooms, paint roller in hand.
“Mum?”
“Hello, darling.”
“Mum… what’s going on out there?!”
“We’re getting the fields ready, baby,” said Sarah, looking at Nick like he was the nutter. “I have the shipment of lavender cuttings coming in just a few weeks, so I need to have the field itself ready to go.”
“Lavender?” Nick asked. “You’re planting lavender? Why?”
“Because it’s lovely,” Sarah had said brightly. Nick smiled and raised an eyebrow. He knew her pragmatism better than that. “And it’s one of the lower-maintenance crops to grow with some of the best margins.”
“Why even grow a crop at all, though?” reasoned Nick. “You have the house that you’ll turn an income from. Why bother with all the planting and harvesting and - and do you even know how to farm? Our garden at home didn’t…” He cut himself off, Sarah giving him a look. He knew not to bring up the mass grave of flowers and vegetables that seemed to be an annual tradition since Nick had gone into secondary.
“This is different,” said Sarah, dipping the roller into more paint and nodding to another roller, Nick taking the hint. “I was working 45 hours a week, and looking after you and David and Nellie and Henry, and I didn’t have time to do the other things that I loved because I was taking care of who I loved.”
Nick felt a little twinge of guilt even though she had turned a warm smile at him along with her words. His mum had always just been - mum. It felt tremendously stupid, but that had been the first time his twenty-one year old brain had ever thought about his mum… liking things. He knew she liked things, like reading and book clubs and wine, but he’d never really… well, never really thought about the fact that she’d had to give up any passions in order to do the things she was obligated to do. Even if it came from a place of love. He tried to get something out, struggling with how to even start to acknowledge all of the things she’d done or gone through to pretty much raise him and David as a single mum, but she was already talking again.
“Imagine waking up to a field of flowers everyday, Nicky,” said Sarah, looking out the window at the muddy fields like she could see it. “There’s so much land there, and it seems silly to do nothing with it.”
“That’s fair,” said Nick. “I-”
“Besides,” she said, fixing him with earnest eyes. “Bees love lavender. And their populations are declining, you know.”
“Yeah, I guess I’ve heard that,” said Nick. “Will it-”
“I might as well give them a home too, you know, not just one for myself,” she finished, nodding firmly.
And she had.
Nick had watched from afar as she sent hundreds of pictures, the farm home looking better and more homey every day. There was a small one-bedroom, two-story flat attached to the main house, and that would be where she would live. The flat had its own door that opened into an entryway, with a large, airy bedroom and bathroom off the hall, as well as a lockable door that opened to the main house. Up the stairs was the living room for the flat, complete with a fireplace and large windows overlooking both sides of the property. The living room also connected to the second story of the large main home.
The attached farmhouse had a large porch, with the main door to the house that opened into a massive dining room, which Sarah had painted a lovely blue. Sarah had worked with the arborists who had to take down a large, dying tree, connecting them to a furniture maker who had made slices of the trunk into an enormous live edge wooden table for the dining room. Nick had smiled to himself as she had described it to him over the phone, talking aloud about how she’d set the table and all the ways she’d use lavender to decorate each place setting. The dining room connected to a huge but older kitchen, with a door off the kitchen that stepped out onto another porch, this one overlooking the lavender fields.
Off another wall, the dining room connected to a parlour with two fireplaces, with original wood floors, the planks huge and smooth with years of use. A door off the parlour led to a hall, where you could either go up the stairs to four more bedrooms, or cross the hall to get to the fifth guest bedroom. The house had been built in the 1850s and was large and draughty and outdated, and Nick was continually amazed at how Sarah fixed and spruced and changed it. He hadn’t gotten a chance to go back for another four months with the rugby season, and he was truly astonished when he did.
Nick pulled up to the house, inhaling audibly when he saw the burst of colour as he navigated a bend in the road and the house came into view. The white of the farmhouse was brilliant against the sea of purple behind, Sarah’s plant cuttings clearly having taken root. The sun was setting and Nick admired the way that the purple of the flowers created a bright line against the pink of the setting sun and the deepening inky blue of the sky above. He parked and laughed aloud when his mum opened the door, gesturing to the blossoming fields.
“You send me 15 pictures of off-white paint colours to get my opinion and you don’t send me any pictures of this?”
“I wanted it to be a surprise,” laughed Sarah, hugging him on the porch.
“Well, I’m surprised,” said Nick, shaking his head. He should have known that she’d go into this as fully as she had anything else. She’d honestly been the one who’d made his rugby career happen - constantly taking him to and from practices and tournaments and training camps and one on one coaching. Clearly she had thrown herself into this with the same firm-eyed determination that she had for her sons.
“Come on, you need to see the rest of it, darling,” said Sarah, directing them into the house. She led Nick through all of the rooms, and he had been truly taken aback by the transformation. All of the beds were fitted with bright, comfortable-looking bedding and there were just tiny touches everywhere. Little vases of flowers, a few lavender eye pillows that Sarah had experimentally made using a sewing machine the former owners had left, and clocks with USB chargers, since, “I wasn’t born in the 18th century, Nicky.”
It all looked amazing. Well - except some of the pictures on the wall. Nick shivered at some of the black and white photographs, filled with Victorian-era subjects who seemed to judge every action Nick had ever taken in his life from their flat, glazed eyes behind the glass.
“Mum?” asked Nick, looking at one of the pictures suspiciously. He swore to god, if it winked at him, he was out of here.
“Yes, baby?”
“When are you going to replace the pictures?”
“Oh, I could never,” said Sarah, looking up the picture of the soul-stealing woman Nick was skirting around. “These are pictures of the original family who lived in the home! I have to keep them.”
“Because you’re too afraid of them possessing you if you try to force them out of here?” muttered Nick under his breath.
“What was that?”
“Nothing,” said Nick, shuddering as he edged quickly away from where some other poultergeist’s soul was trapped behind glass.
That week, Nick had helped Sarah put the finishing touches on the house, working long hours. It had been the most time that they had spent together in years, and though it was wildly different from the nights out with his rugby mates, Nick honestly loved it. At the end of the week, they had stood together, admiring the gold-letter, wood-carved sign that Nick had hung up on the white post outside the house. It was time. Sarah had activated the website after that and taken an online course in marketing, and off she went, enthusiastically telling Nick about “SEO” and other terms that he never thought would come out of his mum’s mouth.
That had been ten years ago. So much had changed since then: Nick had made it to the Premiership rugby league, spending another five years in Sale before eventually landing on the Leeds Badgers team. That was where he’d found his starting spot and his home. It was a totally different team of lads than he’d played with in the past. Nick had never been lonely - he’d always had a ton of mates. But everything and everyone had always been a bit transitory and always centred around the same thing - rugby. Nick sometimes felt like he had mates, but he had only a few people who actually really knew him. Nick sometimes didn’t know if Nick really knew himself.
Regardless, the Badgers had ended up being home for him, and Leeds became home, too. The Badgers had ended up being a groundbreaking team when two of Nick’s teammates, Danny and James, had ended up coming out publicly as a couple during Nick’s first year on the team. That had opened the door for several other players in the league to come out and Nick had been incredibly proud of how the team had supported Danny and James - and just… each other. Nick wouldn’t have traded the Badgers’ middling results for any other team, even though he’d gotten offers from the top tier teams over the course of the years he’d spent in Leeds. It has been the right people. He’d met some of his closest friends on the team, Danny and James among them. He’d also gotten close with a lot of the team staff, including Amy, who was an overwhelming powerhouse of a woman in so many ways. Nick had become friends with Imogen, too - she had been one of their marketing professionals who was always game for a laugh. And of course, he’d been very close with his co-captains Trevor Wilcox (who everyone called Wilco) and Seamus Reilly, though Seamus had sadly been traded before the last year that Nick had been on the team. It was the first time Nick felt like he belonged somewhere. It was the first time that something had felt… permanent.
Nothing ever was, though.
Nick retired after ten years in the league, his body not up to the rigours of impact like it used to be at the old age of thirty-one. The head coach of the Badgers told Nick in confidence that he would be retiring after the next season, and Nick would come on as an assistant coach when one of the assistant coaches was promoted to the head coaching spot as was planned. Nick was thrilled - but also a little perplexed in the interim. He’d never not had something to do, and now he was faced with a full year and change before he had any obligations. Nick was truly anxious at the idea of not having anything for a year, and especially a year away from the only thing that had ever fully made sense to him - rugby. People and thoughts were perplexing and complicated, but rugby was simple, at its core. Rugby kept him out of his head, out of his stewing mind, and it had kept him tremendously busy for over a decade. Before he could get too mired in worry, though, Nick realised what he could, and honestly should, do.
His mum had been doing incredibly well with the bed and breakfast. She was booked up most of the year, with quieter periods in the fall and winter. Even with all her success, though, Sarah had consistently blocked out days on the booking calendar so that she was able to come to as many of his matches as possible, particularly those close to the farm, tucked into a lovely area of Hampshire in the south of England. She was a well-known fixture to the team throughout Nick’s time there, becoming a bit of a surrogate mum to Danny (whose family was in Australia) and other players who needed a maternal figure. She had proudly positioned the inn as an LGBTQ-friendly business after everything that happened with Danny and James, ending up with a queerer-than-average clientele. It was so essentially his mum - she loved to welcome people, especially those who might not have always felt welcomed in other places. The lavender fields continued to flourish, and Sarah was endlessly creative, selling her ever-popular lavender eye pillows, inventing and perfecting new recipes, and receiving rave reviews.
In his conversations with his mum during the last year that Nick played, he noticed how tired she sounded. She loved the bed and breakfast and the farm, but she had been working nearly nonstop for the last thirty-five years. She’d of course taken some long weekends off to see Nick or his brother David, but Nick couldn’t remember the last time she’d taken a holiday for herself. They’d gone on family holidays when Nick and David were growing up, but Nick knew both that those had really been focused on the boys and that even those had been few and far between with how intense their sport schedules had been.
As soon as Nick had decided that he was going to retire and figured out the coaching role for the following year, he knew what he could do in the gap year. He could take care of the bed and breakfast for a year while Sarah went on a yearlong holiday, paid for by Nick. They had argued about it endlessly - or at least, Sarah had argued. Nick had been resolute and utterly impassable to all her protests.
- But it’s too much money, Nicky! (Nick had plenty, and Sarah knew that.)
- What would I even do for a year? (Go to Menorca and lounging in the sun, visiting her sister, going on holiday in Switzerland, travelling to Yellowstone National Park - literally all things she’d wistfully said she wanted to do for years.)
- What about Nellie and Henry? (Nick would take care of them, she knows how much Nick loves both of them and how much both of them love Nick, and Sarah would be back regularly between legs of her holiday to visit.)
- What if you get lonely, baby? (Mum, it’s literally a house full of people. And pretty much every one of the lads from the team have said that they’re going to come. Mum, that is very generous, but they do not need a discount; they make plenty of money.)
- Nick, do you… have any idea what it’s like to run a bed and breakfast? (No… but could it honestly be harder than tackling that massive prop on the Harlequins?)
He’d finally worn her down, and she’d admitted that she really did need a rest. Once she had worked through all of her worries, Nick saw a version of his mum that he hadn’t before - one that was focused entirely on planning something for herself. It was wonderful to see –this more rich view of who Sarah Nelson was. Apparently, one part of who Sarah Nelson was included the sort of person who was renting a camper van for the first part of her trip, a portion Nick did not see coming.
After a month-long apprenticeship in which Nick learned just what it was like to run a bed and breakfast, Nick had taken the helm. That meant Sarah had been there for the May and June lavender blooms and had taught Nick how to manage the harvesting, how to direct the local kids that she hired each year to gather the blooms and dry them, as well as how to press the lavender into oil. Sarah had taught Nick how to manage the online booking system and introduced him to the small team of cleaners who came twice a week to turn over the rooms. Nick had learned the routines that he needed to have with guests; how to welcome them in, what to recommend in the local area and the best response of yes, yes, you do recognize me from TV. (In the Venn diagram of people who stay at LBGT-friendly bed and breakfasts and people who were deeply immersed in rugby, the overlap was not huge, so Nick didn’t have to deal with too much attention, fortunately.) They’d spent hours in the kitchen together, Sarah reading him into her three-ring binder of recipes, all handwritten on scraps and sheets of paper and held together with plastic protector sheets.
In July, Sarah left with tears in her eyes, hugging Nick over and over and saying that she’d call often. Nick had been caretaking the bed and breakfast ever since, which was a mix of interesting, laborious, and boring. And honestly - fucking exhausting, too. Now that it was nearly October, bookings had slowed down tremendously. Nick was glad for the break - he had truly underestimated the amount of work that went into it all. Every morning, he rose early to make something for breakfast to serve to the two or eight or twelve guests he might be hosting any given day. Nick would chat with them, using his well-honed interviewing skills to put them at ease and provide light, breezy conversational topics. Then he’d clean (unless the cleaners were there that day) and tend to the fields and Nellie and Henry. He’d head back inside to bake a little something for any new guests arriving that day, freshen up rooms, go back to the fields and tend to the animals again, and then check in anyone who arrived that afternoon or evening. Nick would get something to eat, prepare whatever he could to make breakfast easier the next day, shower, and then fall into bed, dead tired. In July and through August, he went 43 days without a break before he had a single day where there were no guests. Nick had no idea how Sarah had done this for so long, uncomplainingly. Not that he was complaining. It kept Nick from stewing on the things that swirled in his brain when he had quiet moments. Body busy, mind quiet. And Nick was doing fine.
And now, on the last day of September, he stood in the field in the unseasonably warm sunshine, laughing at himself with the mud and dirt dripping down his face. Nick smiled to himself as he headed inside to clean up, shaking his head ruefully. There had been a stretch of guests coming all through September, though in lower numbers than in the summer months. His last guests had checked out yesterday, and Nick had enjoyed the 24 hours of quiet. He had two guests coming this evening, and something pricked at his brain. What was it about the guests coming tonight? He felt like there was something important…
Nick mulled it over in the shower, far too muddy to open the laptop and check the bookings notes. How the hell did Sarah stay ahead and on top of all of this? Nick felt like he was constantly scrambling to catch up, even with nearly four months under his belt. He dried off and changed, snickering when he picked up his phone to scroll through the team group chat, which he was still on. Fuck, he missed them. He missed playing. He missed… belonging to something. No, none of that - back to his phone. Nick sent the group back a picture of his muddy face from earlier, captioning it with, “Look! It’s a Jolly Rancher!”, knowing that it would make James and Seamus groan. He opened his laptop to check the reservation and felt his heart nearly skip a beat when he saw the entry.
C. Spring and B. Hope
- 7 nights (30.9.22 - 6.10.22)
- Arrival time: 9:00 pm - is that too late? Please let me know if it is.
- Email: [email protected]
- Contact: 07333 555 637
- Specific Room Request?: No
- Dietary Restrictions: No white sugar (B. Hope), Paleo (B. Hope)
- Is there a special occasion you’ll be celebrating?: It’s our honeymoon!
Honeymoon. Fuck. Fuck! Nick knew there was something for this reservation, and shit, he completely forgot it was for a honeymoon. Sarah always made it so special for people’s birthdays and anniversaries and honeymoons, and Nick had promised himself he wouldn’t do anything that would change the inn’s stellar reputation. Thankfully the guests were arriving late, which made Nick’s job much easier. It was only 6 in the evening now, so Nick would hopefully have time to get the room ready and prepare a treat to welcome them with.
Nick hurried to room 5, the largest room. It was the one that was downstairs and was most separated from the other guest rooms. Nick knew it would be best for honeymooning guests. He had learned that the hard way after Danny and James had come for a visit in August, finally banishing them to that room so the other guests could be less horrified by the noises coming from under the door. He scattered fresh lavender sprigs in a path from the door to the bed, and then put some on the bed. He tried to arrange them in the shape of a heart and accidentally squashed one when he leaned over, leaving a purple streak on the white linen.
“Fuck,” said Nick, shaking his head at himself. He considered for a moment and then just lumped a bunch of sprigs over that spot to cover it up, assuming that the couple would be less focused on the top of the sheets than getting under them. Although Danny and James hadn’t been much fussed about a bed. The amount of furniture he had found in various places in that room had been a perplexing thing to walk into. Nick set a few candles around the room and left a book of lavender-themed matches nearby to let the couple set some ambiance. Nick thought for a moment and then got one of the bottles of essential lavender oil that Sarah steeped and made, figuring he’d throw it in as a gift, setting it on the bedside table along with a bouquet of flowers with a “Congratulations!” card from the stash that Sarah kept. Nick dimmed the lights to give the room a romantic look, and would set a fire before the couple arrived. He paused for a moment, admiring the room. It looked cosy, welcoming. Nick pushed the niggling thought aside, the one that felt like a bruise, reminding him of that feeling when Danny and James had left. Not the reprehensibly loud sex (though Nick was slightly jealous of anyone who could let themselves go like that). But more so the closeness. Danny and James were just so… intimate. The emotional side, though. They truly knew each other and read one another, supported each other and were comfortable with themselves and as a couple. That was - that seemed really nice. Nick heard the clock strike in the parlour and jumped a little, snapping out of his daze.
Room job done, Nick hurried to the kitchen. He tried to have a baked good ready for when guests checked in on the first day, many guests mentioning that as something that made them feel truly welcome. He rifled through Sarah’s recipes, muttering to himself as he searched for something Paleo-friendly. He wondered who B. Hope was and if they knew that there were actually millions of true paleo diets based on where on the planet the palaeolithic people lived. Nick found a vegan lemon muffin recipe and threw them together quickly, popping them in the oven and then preparing some foods for breakfast tomorrow, chopping sweet potatoes and veg for a hash that he’d mix with chicken sausage for whoever this paleo person was. He stayed busy, mind focused entirely on the cooking and baking, body constantly moving. Nick looked up once when he heard tapping on the window, rain starting to fall. It got heavier while he worked, the rain now drumming against the window. Nick rolled his eyes, just so glad he messed with the irrigation today. Definitely worth it.
Nick pulled out the muffins when the timer dinged, grinning at the scent in the air. It was only 8:00, so he was a little surprised when he heard the timid knock on the front door. Sarah had a bright sign on the door that told guests to “Come Inn!”, but Nick knew that most first-time guests were shy about entering through the front door without being welcomed. Nick set the muffins down quickly on one of the trivets on the dining room table and threw open the door, really to usher in the happy couple.
Nick opened the door and saw a man about his age, maybe a little younger, standing there with his shoulders slumped. The man had dark hair, curls dripping. Nick could see his car in the drive behind him, its lights off, no movement, no one else with him and no one else in sight. The man’s long, slender fingers were wrapped so tightly around the handle of a suitcase that Nick could see his knuckles turning white. The man looked up, and Nick was taken aback by how blue his eyes were, rimmed with red. The man’s eyes widened a little when he saw Nick, and Nick wondered distantly if the man recognized him from rugby. But far more importantly, he wondered if the man was… okay. He looked utterly devastated, exhaustion and sadness etched into every part of his striking face. The man’s eyes met Nick’s, and he opened his mouth to speak.
“Hi,” said the man in a tremulous voice, his blue eyes looking watery.
“Hi,” echoed Nick, his voice catching, a little hoarse. He cleared his throat. “Welcome to Lavender Fields Bed and Breakfast.”