Chapter Seven
A woman stacking onigiri on the far shelf looked up at the sound of the door opening, saw him, and made a small involuntary sound of alarm. Lex gave her his best smile, which pulled on his battered eye and probably made things look even worse.
He grabbed a basket and got to work.
Tokyo’s convenience stores operated on a principle that Lex deeply respected, which was that anything could be a snack if you were brave enough to put it in your mouth.
Tonight’s mission required range. He’d just put a man on the canvas in front of twelve thousand people, and in approximately four hours he was going to be sitting on a sofa celebrating with Barnaby Fitznorman-Bicester.
He moved through the aisles with purpose. Sakura Kit Kats went in first, three packets, because Barnaby had devoured them two nights ago. A bag of prawn crackers shaped like tiny sea creatures. Something labelled CHEESE CURRY CORN PUFF that had a cartoon dog on the packet.
An elderly man in the next aisle stopped and stared at him.
Lex was used to being recognised in London, where his face was on billboards and bus stops and the occasional protein powder advert that his agent had talked him into doing shirtless.
This man wasn’t staring because he knew who Lex was.
He was staring because Lex looked like he’d crashed face first into a lorry.
“Boxing,” Lex said, miming a jab with his free hand. “Olympic boxing. I won.”
The man’s face broke into a grin. He bowed, then gave Lex a thumbs up, then bowed again.
Lex bowed back, which sent a sharp bolt of pain through his ribs that he absorbed without flinching, because he was a winner, and winners didn’t wince at little aches and pains that placed him one step closer to the gold.
He was reaching for a packet of melon-flavoured gummy sweets when a young couple rounded the end of the aisle, saw him, and froze.
The girl grabbed her boyfriend’s arm. There was a rapid exchange in Japanese, then she held up her mobile and pointed at Lex and then at herself, her eyebrows raised in the universal language of can I get a photo.
“Yeah, go on,” Lex said, setting his basket down on the floor. “Come here.”
The boyfriend took the photo. Then the boyfriend wanted a photo.
Then the boyfriend wanted a photo where Lex pretended to punch him, so Lex cocked his fist and the lad threw himself backward into a display of rice crackers with a commitment to the bit that Lex respected enormously.
Two more people materialised: a teenage boy in a Team Japan shirt who was vibrating with excitement, and an older woman who Lex was fairly sure had no idea who he was but had seen a queue forming for a photo op with a foreigner, and didn’t want to miss out.
He posed with all of them. He let the teenage boy feel his bicep, which was a request he got a lot and had stopped finding weird by now.
He signed a receipt with a biro the cashier produced from behind the counter.
His eye was throbbing. His ribs were screaming.
He kept grinning, because the alternative was admitting that he was in a significant amount of pain in front of a group of well-wishers, and Lex Murphy didn’t do that.
He was crouching to pick up his basket when he saw him.
Barnaby was standing at the entrance of the 7-Eleven with a basket hooked over one arm, looking at Lex with an expression that was carefully, precisely, neutral.
He was wearing a jumper that was too big for him, the cuffs pulled over his knuckles, and his hair was dishevelled where he’d been running his hands through it, something that Barnaby habitually did whenever he was thinking hard.
Lex clocked the pink wrapper of a Sakura sweets packet, something green, and what looked like a bag of the chilli crackers that Barnaby ate with casual indifference towards their effect on his taste buds.
Barnaby Fitznorman-Bicester, Marquess of Ashworth, heir to the Duke of Chatham, a man who by his own admission had never set foot in a convenience store before the age of twenty-five, had walked himself to a 7-Eleven on a Tuesday night in Tokyo to buy snacks for their sofa. After the day Lex had just had.
“Barns,” he said, and his grin pulled the split lip wide open again. He tasted the coppery tang of blood, but didn’t care.
Barnaby’s gaze tracked across Lex’s face, taking in the damage. His eyes lingered on the swelling beneath Lex’s left eye, then dropped to where Lex was holding his right hand slightly away from his body because closing his fingers hurt.
He said nothing. He drew closer, and stopped beside Lex with a cushion of deliberate space between them. He looked into Lex’s basket and his forehead furrowed.
Another cluster of people had formed near the door. A pair of women in their mid-twenties drew closer, one of them already holding up her mobile. “Excuse me,” she said in careful English. “You are the boxer? From today?”
“That’s me,” Lex said, straightening up. The movement cost him. “You want a photo?”
They wanted a photo. Of course they wanted a photo.
Lex set his basket down again, opened his arms wide, and one of the women ducked under his arm while her friend took the shot.
Then they swapped. Then one of them wanted a photo where Lex flexed his biceps, which he did, because he was incapable of being asked to flex and not flexing, even when the act of raising his arms above shoulder height made his intercostals feel like they were being peeled apart with pliers.
Worth it, though. Because he clocked Barnaby looking.
The teenage boy from earlier had come back with two friends.
They wanted a photo too. One of them put up his fists, and Lex squared up to him.
The kid threw a slow-motion punch that Lex slipped with exaggerated drama, dropping his shoulder and weaving sideways, and the boy’s friends erupted into wild cheers.
Barnaby stood to the side with both baskets at his feet, watching this all unfold. Then one of the women turned to him, held out her mobile, and said, “You take?”
Barnaby took the mobile. He held it with both hands, considered the framing for a moment, and said, “Chin up. Both of you. And you,” this to Lex, “stop hunching. Put your shoulders back.”
Lex straightened his shoulders. It hurt. He did it anyway, because Barnaby had told him to and his body apparently now followed instructions from the Marquess of Ashworth without consulting his brain first.
“Now do the face,” Barnaby said.
“What face?”
“The one you did when the referee raised your arm. The roaring one.”
Lex threw his head back and roared. The women screamed with laughter. Barnaby took three photos in rapid succession, checked them, and handed the mobile back with a satisfied nod.
The teenage boy and his friends wanted one too. “Can he take it?” one of them asked, pointing at Barnaby, who had been promoted to official photographer through the sheer force of his competence.
“He’s very good,” Lex said. “Professional. Does all my headshots.”
Barnaby’s jaw tightened, but he took the mobile. “Arms around each other’s shoulders,” he said. “And you—” to Lex, “—pretend to put him in a headlock. Gently. Don’t actually squeeze.”
Lex put the kid in the gentlest headlock of his career. The kid’s mates crowded in. Barnaby took the photo, checked it, adjusted one boy’s position by tapping him lightly on the shoulder and pointing to where he should stand, and took it again.
“Better,” he said, and handed the mobile back.
The cluster of people thinned. The last two lingered, bowing and thanking Lex in a mix of Japanese and English that he returned with the same bows and the same split-lipped grin, and then they were gone, and the 7-Eleven returned to its usual state of calm.
Lex turned to Barnaby, who was already bending to pick up both baskets, stacking Lex’s on top of his own and carrying them towards the till.
“Oi,” Lex said. “What are you doing?”
“Paying.”
“No, you’re not.”
“I am.”
“Barns—”
“You’ve just been punched in the head for twelve minutes straight,” Barnaby said, not turning around. “You can barely close your right hand. You’ve posed for photographs with every person in this shop. I am buying the snacks for tonight.”
Lex looked at him. Barnaby was already at the counter, setting both baskets down and pulling his wallet from his back pocket.
He was braced for a fight. Lex could see it in the way his fingers tightened on his wallet.
He was ready for the polite back-and-forth, the oh no, I couldn’t, the three rounds of performative refusal that Lex imagined constituted the upper-class protocol for settling a bill.
“Yeah, alright,” Lex said.
Barnaby turned. His eyebrows shifted a fraction upward.
“Go on, then,” Lex said, leaning against the end of the aisle and crossing his arms, which hurt, but looked good. “Treat me, Marquess Cashworth.”
Barnaby stared at him for a beat, visibly recalibrating.
Then he turned back to the cashier. It went badly almost immediately.
He put the first basket on the counter whole, like he was handing luggage to a bellhop.
The cashier stared at it. Barnaby stared at the cashier.
There was an excruciating standoff before Barnaby clued in that he was supposed to take the items out himself, and began removing them one at a time.
Finally the woman clocked that she was dealing with a noob here, and she began to help.
She took over the scanning, gently extracted the second basket from his grip, and pointed to the small tray on the counter where payment was supposed to go.
Barnaby placed his yen notes in the tray with a nod that conveyed both gratitude and the firm intention to never go through this ordeal again.
Fucking cute, Lex thought, and pressed his tongue against his split lip to feel the sting of it.
He loved keeping Barns on the back foot.
He loved the fraction of a second where Barnaby’s careful choreography stumbled, when the script he was running in his head didn’t match the line Lex had just delivered, and his composure flickered before it reset.
He loved being the thing Barnaby Fitznorman-Bicester couldn’t predict.
Barnaby paid. He collected the bags, two of them, and walked past Lex towards the door without making eye contact.
“You’re welcome,” Barnaby said.
Lex pushed off the aisle and followed him out into the warm Tokyo night, grinning so hard his lip split open for the third time, and he couldn’t have cared less about the pain.