Chapter Five #2
and into attitudes of polite attention. “This morning, gentlemen,
we are going to solve the mystery of trig, I think. I must say I
feel very optimistic. Laurence, would you like to
begin?”
Wincing,
Laurie began where he always did—at what he’d been told was the
correct place, breaking the equation Sanderson was pointing at down
into its component parts. He could usually get so far as that, but
the trouble was, once he’d done so, he couldn’t see where to go
next. Why it mattered. Nevertheless, he gave his good-natured best
shot. Sandy had his living to make, and he lived in terror of Sir
William too.
Struggling with values, cosines, and tangents, Laurie was
vaguely aware that Sasha had slid the textbook out from under his
elbow and was running a thoughtful fingertip down the pages—not
over the text and explanations but the diagrams. A quick, assessing
triangular dance… Laurie flashed back to the feel of that fingertip
brushing the hair back from his brow, and lost the thread entirely.
“Sorry, Sandy,” he groaned. “Clara’s gonna get this before I
do.”
“Nonsense, Laurence. You’ll be fine. Let’s just start with the
next one, or…” Sanderson paused, clearly concerned by the etiquette
of asking a prince to do a sum for him. “Or perhaps your friend—er,
Sasha—would you…?”
Sasha
looked up. “Not that one,” he said quietly. “I’d need to see it as
a diagram, I think. But…” He scooped up a protractor from the desk,
got to his feet, and went to one of the two tall windows that
looked out over the Mayfair rooftops. It was a bleak December
morning, but to Laurie, who had stood up and followed him as if
entranced, the grim old slates seemed bathed in light. Sasha leaned
both hands on the sill. “Okay. I can see the Hilton tower from
here. Laurie, if you go and stand at the other window, which I
reckon is about three yards away…” He waited till Laurie had
obeyed, then smiled at him and said, “You and I are the baseline of
a triangle, A to B. I’m just going to take a rough measure of the
angle from my point to the tower, and…” He tossed the protractor to
Laurie, who caught it adroitly. “You do the same from yours. Hilton
tower is C. So we know the length of one side of the triangle, and
now we’ve got two of its angles, and if you do the tangent
equation…”
Laurie
went back to the desk. He grabbed a pencil and notepad and quickly
sketched out the line of the roof, the wall, the distant tower.
Couldn’t resist, even now, adding an ornamental chimney hood and
pigeon strutting on the sill.
Sasha
grinned as these additions vividly appeared. “All right, but put
the numbers in too,” he gently admonished.
Laurie
did so. He checked it with a calculator and turned to Sanderson,
bright with comprehension. “Yes,” he said. “It fits.”
Sanderson, frozen by the whiteboard, stared at them. Laurie
could not work out if his expression was more impressed or
chagrined. It must have come as a relief to him, surely, that his
least apt pupil had finally understood the point of
trigonometry—that his pupil’s infant sister had just got the grasp
of it too, to judge from her awestruck little face—but he must be
discomfited too. As if aware of this, Sasha gave a small,
deferential shrug and went to sit down again. “I still need to
learn how to state it mathematically, Mr. Sanderson. If you don’t
mind.”
Sanderson did not. He laid down his whiteboard marker and sat
with his students at the big table. For the rest of that afternoon,
he worked through the rest of the exercises in the chapter from the
diagrams, as if Sasha’s methods had come as a revelation to him
too.
The
class went more quickly than any Laurie had ever known before, fast
as the hours he spent backstage at the Twilight. He was astonished
to hear his watch beep four o’clock, and to see his tutor, looking
more relaxed than ever before, gathering up his books. “Well,
gentlemen!” Sanderson said. “I do feel we’ve made progress.” He
hesitated, looking at Sasha, then finished, pale cheeks flushing up
at his own daring, “I trust you’ll be joining us tomorrow,
sir.”
Laurie
followed Sasha out. The study-room door clicked shut under his
dampened fingers as he pulled it to. Clara and Sanderson were still
in there, comparing notes on what she thought Sandy should wear for
his dinner party that night. Sasha was at the far end of the
corridor, a graceful, tensely poised shape in the dim light. As
Laurie watched, he pulled open the door to the concrete stairwell
and slipped through.
It was not the movement he had made four days ago in the same
place. Not please don’t follow
me. His eyes had met Laurie’s for a
fraction of a second before he disappeared, dark lashes lowered, a
soft brilliance glimmering through. Heart lurching, Laurie sped
after him.
They
rounded the last flight of steps into the utility room at full
pelt, Laurie hard on Sasha’s heels. Choking with laughter, Sasha
grabbed him, whirled him around, and pushed him up against the
wall, banging the door shut behind them with one foot. “Help me out
of my princely disguise, then.”
Laurie
drew a ragged breath and took hold of the close-fitting black
cashmere—his own, but which became Sasha so well. He pulled it up
over Sasha’s shoulders, ran both hands over his finely articulated
collarbones, the shoulder blades that shifted like wings to seek
his touch. “Oh, God. I thought you were never coming
back.”
“I know.” Sasha abruptly sobered. “I’m sorry. I got scared. But
I missed you so much, and…”
Laurie
lurched forward, silencing him with a kiss. He felt, with
disbelieving, vertiginous pleasure, Sasha’s knee push up to part
his thighs, and pressed himself, gasping, against the invasion.
Running his palms down Sasha’s chest, he brushed both
nipples—accident only, but when Sasha twitched and cried out,
Laurie repeated the caress, fascinated at how the tissue tightened
and came up against his palms. “Is that good?”
“Yes. Everything you do…” Sasha shut up, and Laurie, who had
dared duck down to suck one taut little mound into his mouth, held
him while Sasha slammed a hand to the wall and muffled a shout
against Laurie’s shoulder. “But we can’t do it here, you
idiot.”
“No?” Laurie came up for air for a second, then went to attend
to the other nipple. His cock was hard and tight inside his jeans,
aching where it pressed against Sasha’s firm thigh. He could feel
Sasha too, trapped and ready. A rush of need swept through him. “I
think I’ve got to. God, come here!”
Wrapping
both hands around Sasha’s backside, he ground them together, Sasha
now kissing him frantically, throwing out a hand to grab at the
washing machine for balance. The imperfect feel of baffled contact,
sealed off behind layers of fabric, was at once terrible and
beautiful. They had to push hard, hard, and the touch was packed
with so much promise of how it would be when briefs and boxers,
jeans and Savile Row trousers finally got themselves unzipped and
out of the way.
“Laurie, stop.”
It was
urgent. Laurie went still at the pitch of one thrust, though it was
like jamming the brakes on at eighty miles an hour. His heart
almost clawed its way out of his chest with the effort, but he
would rather die, he knew, than impose on Sasha one touch he didn’t
desire. “What? What is it? What’s wrong?”
“I can hear someone.”
“Fuck.” Laurie let him go and spun to face the door, listening.
For a moment all he could hear was his own blood rushing, and
then…yes, footsteps scraping on the concrete stairs. At the very
best-case scenario, Clara, though she found the old staircase
spooky and usually avoided it. Even then, some adjustments were
required. Handing Sasha his sweater back, Laurie ran both hands
through his hair and willed his erection to subside.
No. Oh, God. A male tread, slow and heavy. Glancing around, he
saw Sasha bone white—more terrified even than Laurie himself, and
in a worse way, as if whatever was beyond the door might not be
human. It’s all right, Laurie mouthed to him, seizing his wrist and drawing him
into the shelter of the old larder cupboard, no place to hide but
perhaps enough cover to shield them from a cursory glance into the
room. They clung together, barely breathing. Then Laurie heard the
back door open and Charlie call out cheerfully up the stairs, “Back
in half an hour, Mabel. Just gonna pick the old goat up from his
club.”
The door
slammed. A moment later, the garage door creaked, and the Daimler’s
distinct purr began. Laurie subsided against the wall, limp with
relief. “It was Charlie.”
Sasha
stared at him, eyes so dilated with shock Laurie could not
distinguish sable iris from fathomless jet-black pupil. “Who’s
Charlie?”
“My driver.”
“Your… Okay. Who’s Mabel?”
“The housekeeper.”
“You really are like something out of a book, you know. And…the
old goat?”
“My father, I suppose. I had no idea they called him
that.”
A snort
of laughter escaped Sasha. Laurie, who’d been seriously frightened,
made a desperate grab for sobriety, but the sound infected him in a
flash, and they fell to their knees together, tangling in the
cramped space. “Oh, God!” he choked. “We can’t do this. We can’t do
this, Sash. We’re gonna get caught. We can get away with the
classes maybe, but not the fooling around afterward.”
He
trailed off, wondering what sort of a spectacle he presented,
flushed and sprawled in his corner, erection dying an uncomfortable
death in his jeans. But however he looked, Sasha didn’t seem to
find it off-putting. Instead he smiled at him as if he were the
loveliest sight in the world and said, on a note of rough longing,
“I think I’d rather have the fooling around.”
“Oh, me too,” Laurie whispered, embarrassed by the longing in
his voice. Sasha would always look bloody elegant, wouldn’t he?
Dying on the pavement in Gyorgy’s arms, he had formed a sort of