Chapter Two
The Olympic Village was not, as Barnaby had been led to believe by a combination of shrill tabloid journalism and James’s extremely graphic letter, a bacchanalian fuck resort.
There were no gymnasts copulating in stairwells.
No one had offered him a prophylactic at registration.
The welcome pack contained a lanyard, a map of the dining hall, a pin badge shaped like the Olympic rings, and a reusable water bottle with the mascot stamped on its side.
A blue creature of indeterminate species so conceptual and inoffensive in form that it looked like it had been designed by committee, and then approved by a second, even more cautious committee.
Barnaby loved it, and was on the lookout for a stuffed toy that he could bring home to his Irish Setter, Florence.
The first two days were manageable. He found his room, and unpacked his trunk.
He established a routine that kept him moving through the Village on a predictable circuit: dining hall, equestrian briefing, gymnasium, room.
He found his structure, and clung to it, trained to crave the safety of habits by Eton’s never-changing rhythms.
The problem was not, as James had promised, the bacchanalian free-for-all fuck fest. The problem was the nakedness.
The ordinary, practical, unavoidable nakedness that happens when you housed several hundred elite male athletes in a building with shared corridors and communal showers, and a laundry system that ran on a rota nobody had bothered to explain.
Men walked from the showers to their rooms in towels that were, uniformly, too small. Men changed in doorways. Men stood in the corridor in compression shorts and nothing else, having entire conversations about split times while their quadriceps caught the light and Barnaby’s gaze in equal measure.
Barnaby now kept his eyes trained on the middle distance and navigated the building like a man crossing a minefield.
He had thought, naively, that he had got his body’s responses to the male form under control.
He’d been methodical about it. Given himself controlled exposure to online pornography, administered in careful doses like a course of antibiotics.
Just enough to have a casual wank that maintained the equipment, but not enough to devolve into an absolute degenerate who ended up seeing arseholes everywhere.
He had a method. He worked through the major categories: twinks, bears, otters, jocks, the confusingly specific subcategory of men in hard hats who never actually seemed to be on a construction site. He sampled broadly and without prejudice, and inevitably discovered that he had a type.
Embarrassingly, structurally, inconveniently large men. Men who could make him feel, for reasons he refused to psychoanalyse, small. Whose cocks made him close his laptop, stare at the ceiling, and seriously ponder the limitations of his own body.
That sexual inoculation, clearly, wasn’t strong enough to hold up under the environment of the Olympic Village, where several thousand of the finest male specimens on the planet had been pre-selected for physical supremacy by their respective nations.
It wasn’t the gymnasts that were an issue. The gymnasts were compact and shiny and moved in ways that defied the constraints of the human skeletal system, but they weren’t Barnaby’s thing.
God help him, it was the boxers.
They moved through the gym in packs, vast and unhurried, trailing the particular musk of men who had been doing something violent and physical for the better part of two hours.
They all, without exception, had shoulders like architectural features, arms that could have been repurposed as load-bearing columns, and arses that tested the structural integrity of the lycra heroically stretched across them.
Barnaby was in one of the smaller gymnasium spaces, the one tucked behind the main weights area. He had chosen it because it was quiet, underused, and populated almost exclusively by fencers, who were lean and polite, and kept their clothes on.
He was explaining his name to a half-naked Canadian cyclist.
“Bicester,” Barnaby said, for the second time. “Like the town.”
The cyclist stared at him. His legs looked inhumanly muscular, as though someone had inflated his thighs with a bicycle pump. He was wearing cycling shorts and absolutely nothing else, and Barnaby was working extremely hard to maintain eye contact.
“Biss-ter,” Barnaby repeated more slowly. “Not Bi-chess-ter. Not Bitchster. Bicester.”
“Right,” said the cyclist. “And the first bit?”
“Fitznorman.”
“Fitznorman-Bicester.”
“Yes.”
The cyclist considered this for a moment, then said, “That’s a lot of name, mate,” and walked away. His name was Dan Wolf.
Barnaby picked up his hand weights, three kilograms each, which were shamefully, pathetically light compared to what the rest of the room was grunting and straining over, and began his prescribed set of lateral raises.
His training programme had been designed by his coach.
It was all about upper-body maintenance, nothing heavy, everything calibrated to keep his riding muscles engaged without adding bulk that would throw off his balance in the saddle.
Three kilograms. He might as well have been lifting a pair of tangerines.
A group of boxers had migrated into the far corner and were doing something with kettlebells that involved a great deal of grunting and a small but meaningful amount of congratulatory arse-slapping, all done while maintaining eye contact and hollering out earnest hype statements.
Barnaby watched this out of the corner of his eye, fascinated and horrified in equal measure.
The slaps were firm, companionable, delivered with an open palm to the meat of the glute, and received without comment.
It appeared to be a system of positive reinforcement.
Like clicker training, but for enormous men.
He should leave. He should absolutely leave before the arse-slapping escalated, or before one of them caught him staring. More importantly, he had to go before his own body visibly betrayed him through his sensible gym shorts.
He thought of James’s letter.
Get fucked, his sovereign had written. An actual command, from his actual King, delivered on Buckingham Palace stationery.
Barnaby had read it four times on the flight over, once more in the taxi, and then hidden it in the false bottom of his trunk, which was where he kept things that couldn’t exist in public.
He wondered if the instruction carried constitutional weight.
Whether he was now, technically, parliamentarily bound to the cause.
It wasn’t something one could just raise with the Lord Chamberlain.
Excuse me, sir, His Majesty has issued me a direct order regarding my sexual activity. Am I obliged to comply?
No. Best not.
Barnaby completed his lateral raises, set the weights down, and moved to the shoulder press.
Three kilograms, again. His arms moved through the repetitions mindlessly.
He’d been doing the same for the last six years.
Nobody was going to slap his arse in congratulation over these.
Nobody was going to slap his arse at all.
He was going to complete his programme, return to his room, review his dressage test for the fourteenth time, and fall asleep to the sound of someone in the corridor having a much more interesting evening.
A hand pressed against the small of his back.
Barnaby’s spine went rigid. The hand was warm and enormous. Then it moved south and gave him one firm, companionable pat, squarely on his right arse cheek.
Barnaby turned, his mouth agape at the unexpected touching.
Lex Murphy was standing behind him in shorts and nothing else.
There was nothing between his skin and the recycled gymnasium air but a thin sheen of sweat and a cologne-adjacent deodorant that hit Barnaby with the force of a clean right hook to the jaw.
He smelt like something aggressively masculine and vaguely chemical.
Like he’d doused himself in a deodorant that was probably called TITANIUM THUNDER or WOLF SURGE.
“All right, Barns?”
“It’s Barnaby.”
“Right, well.” Lex crossed his arms over his chest, his bare, obscenely sculpted chest, and grinned. “We’re mates now, so I don’t need to say the full thing every night. You’ve got a proper long name. Like a little princeling.”
Barnaby’s jaw tightened. “I’m a marquess.”
Lex’s mouth twitched. “A what?”
“A marquess. Well…It’s a courtesy title, really. I don’t hold it in my own right. My father is the Duke of Chatham, so I hold the subsidiary title of Marquess of Ashworth until—”
“Mate, I literally do not know what any of those words mean.”
Barnaby exhaled through his nose, set down his weights with deliberate care, and turned away. The treadmills were on the other side of the room. He could do his cardio there. Alone. In peace. Away from this man: his hands, his smell, his complete, bewildering refusal to take a hint.
But Lex was already moving, stepping around him so that he was standing directly in Barnaby’s path, taking up more space than one human being should be permitted to occupy.
“Hang on,” Lex said. “You need to sort out your form.”
“My form is fine.”
“It’s not fine. No wonder you’ve got arms like that.
” Lex nodded at Barnaby’s biceps, which were lean and functional and exactly the size they needed to be for a man whose sport required finesse rather than brute force.
“You’re not positioning yourself right. You’re working the wrong muscles. Here.”
He reached over and picked up one of Barnaby’s three-kilogram weights, holding it with two fingers as though it were a novelty keychain.
Then he demonstrated the lateral raise: feet planted, shoulders down, a slow, controlled lift to the side with his elbow at a precise angle.
His deltoid flexed. His obliques shifted visibly under his skin.
A bead of sweat tracked down the groove between his pectorals and disappeared somewhere south of his navel.
Barnaby put on his headphones. He settled them over his hair, and within seconds the gymnasium dissolved into the opening bars of Satie’s Gymnopédies, which he kept on a playlist labelled Training - Focus and used for exactly this kind of emergency.
Lex was still talking. Barnaby could see his mouth moving. He could see Lex’s mates, two of them, both equally enormous, both watching from the bench press with the delighted expressions of spectators at a bear-baiting, laughing and nudging each other.
Barnaby walked to the treadmill, set it to a six-minute kilometre pace, and began to jog.
Behind him, Lex was saying something. One of his friends was howling.
The other one had his mobile out, and Barnaby dearly hoped he was not being filmed.
If footage of him fleeing a conversation via treadmill made it onto the internet, he would have to withdraw from competition and seek asylum in a country where nobody had ever heard of eventing or the Marquess of Ashworth.
Vidal would offer Cardona, because Vidal always offered Cardona.
And he loved Vidal with his whole heart, but that was a clear no.
Three days under that man’s hospitality and Barnaby would end up walking into the sea.
He increased the pace to five-forty. Then five-twenty.
He could still see Lex in the mirror on the far wall, leaning against the weight rack with his arms crossed, watching him.
Just five more minutes. He stared straight ahead, wearing headphones as armour against a man he could still see in his peripheral vision, sweating into gym shorts that he desperately hoped were dark enough to conceal whatever his treacherous body was doing beneath them.
Barnaby ran faster.