Chapter Three #2
Darius: adding to the tier list now. barnaby ftz blah blah. Eventing. Male (Ambiguous). God Tier. 100 points. note: mates with the actual King of the United Kingdom. note: treadmill runner. note: Lex is obsessed and might actually cry if someone else pulls him first
Lex: I am not obsessed I am STRATEGICALLY INTERESTED
Darius: ??
Lex locked his mobile and dropped it on his chest.
He wasn’t obsessed. He was strategically interested.
There was an important distinction between the two, and the fact that he’d spent the better part of ten minutes trying to articulate it was not evidence to the contrary.
It was thoroughness. A demonstration of professional rigour.
The same quality that had won him an Olympic gold four years ago in Rio and kept him at the top of the heavyweight rankings for three consecutive seasons.
He was also, if he was being completely honest with himself, a little bit rattled by the treadmill thing.
People didn’t run away from Lex Murphy. People came towards Lex Murphy.
He was six-one, fourteen stone of earned muscle, and he’d been told by three separate women and one very drunk Swedish javelin thrower that he had, and this was a direct quote, “dangerous eyes.” He’d been on the cover of Men’s Health.
He had a cologne deal. He had a cock that had made a grown woman say “absolutely not” before changing her mind eleven minutes later.
People gravitated to him because he was charming and loud and very, very good at making them feel like they were the most interesting person in the room, even when they weren’t.
Barnaby Fitznorman-Bicester had put on headphones when he’d tried it on with him.
Barnaby Fitznorman-Bicester had looked at him with those flat grey eyes and assessed him and found him. What? Annoying? Loud? Common?
That last one stuck. Lex turned it over in his head, prodding at it like a bruise.
He knew what he looked like to people like Barnaby.
He’d met enough of them at charity events and sponsorship dinners: the upper classes, the old-money crowd, the people who could tell within thirty seconds of conversation exactly where you’d grown up and exactly how far below them you were on the ladder.
They were perfectly pleasant and immovably certain that the distance between their world and yours was fixed and permanent, not to be crossed even if you were fully kitted out in LV.
He should leave it. Hundred points or not, God Tier or not, there were easier targets in this Village. The Brazilian beach volleyball squad had arrived that morning and were already being sociable in the dining hall in a way that meant the Tally was about to get very competitive very quickly.
But Lex had never, in his entire career, chosen the easier fight. He wasn’t about to start doing so now.
? ? ?
He saw Barnaby again the next morning in the dining hall.
The equestrians had commandeered a cluster of tables near the far wall, which was exactly the territorial behaviour Lex would have expected from people whose sport involved controlling a twelve-hundred-pound animal with their thighs.
He knew this now because he’d spent forty-five minutes on YouTube the night before watching dressage highlights, which he maintained was strategic research and not at all obsessive.
The horses did little sideways steps. They did a thing called a piaffe, which was essentially trotting on the spot, and the riders sat dead still while it happened, thighs clamped, spines locked, every micro-adjustment invisible.
It was, against every expectation Lex had brought to the exercise, genuinely impressive.
Though he’d never tell Barnaby that. At least not until he’d cracked a proper smile at him.
The horse dancers now sat in a loose formation, talking quietly among themselves, surrounded by the clutter of athletes in training: water bottles, protein bars, tablets propped up showing diagrams.
Barnaby was at the edge of the group, eating something that looked like it had been assembled by a nutritionist with a grudge against flavour. He was reading from a printed sheet of paper, running one finger down the margin.
He was wearing breeches.
Christ alive, he was wearing the breeches.
They were white. Tight. Cut close through the thigh and calf, and tucked into tall black leather boots that were polished to a shine Lex could see from across the hall.
The fabric sat flush against his legs, outlining every lean muscle from hip to ankle.
The seam ran down the inside of his thigh.
The material pulled taut across his arse when he shifted forward to reach for his water bottle, and Lex watched the fabric stretch and resettle and thought, with perfect clarity: fuck.
Just…fuck.
The breeches left absolutely nothing to the imagination.
They weren’t designed to. They were designed for function, for grip in the saddle, for the clean line that dressage judges apparently cared about.
The fact that they also happened to make Barnaby Fitznorman-Bicester look like he’d been poured into them by a benevolent and sexually progressive god was, presumably, incidental. A happy byproduct.
Lex stood in the doorway of the dining hall with his tray, fully stationary, staring.
Mick materialised at his elbow. “You’re blocking the door, mate.”
“He’s wearing the breeches.”
“I can see he’s wearing the breeches.”
“Mick.”
“I see them.”
“Mick.”
“Move your legs. Sit down and eat your breakfast and stop looking at the horse man’s arse.”
Lex walked. He sat and ate his breakfast. He did not stop looking at the horse man’s arse, because the horse man’s arse was directly in his line of sight and not having it in view would have required him to rotate his entire body a hundred and eighty degrees.
An extremely conspicuous move that he just didn’t want to make, frankly. Happy where his eyes were.
Barnaby turned a page of whatever he was reading. He crossed one boot over the other under the table. His thigh flexed beneath the white fabric, and Lex bit into his toast so hard he nearly cracked a molar.
A hundred points. God Tier. Male, ambiguous. Mates with the actual King of the United Kingdom.
And those fucking breeches.
Lex chewed his toast and planned his next move.