Chapter Eight
Barnaby was absolutely famished. He hadn’t eaten since half one.
The British equestrian team had booked a restaurant in Ginza for the evening, somewhere with a tasting menu and a sommelier; the sort of place that Barnaby would normally have found deeply appealing.
He’d told Wes’s groom he’d meet them there, and then he’d walked to Ryōgoku Kokugikan instead, and sat in an arena full of screaming strangers for two and a half hours.
Now it was nearly midnight, and the last thing he’d consumed was a protein bar that had tasted like compressed sawdust made edible only by the faintest hint of chocolate.
He rearranged the convenience store bags, pushing the handles up to the crook of his elbow so that both hands were free, and fished the red packet of FIRE TASTE EXPLOSION RICE SNACKS from the top of the nearest bag.
He tore it open with his teeth, tipped a handful into his palm, and shoved them into his mouth.
The heat bloomed across his tongue. He chewed fast, swallowed, and immediately tipped more into his hand.
Lex was watching him sideways. “Fucking hell.”
“What.”
“You’re inhaling those. You look like a squirrel that’s found a bird feeder. A posh squirrel. One that lives in the grounds of a stately home.”
Barnaby ate another handful. “I missed dinner.”
“You missed dinner?”
“The team had a booking in Ginza. Fancy steak place. I didn’t go.”
Lex’s stride slowed by a fraction. Barnaby could feel the shift in his attention. He kept his eyes fixed on the pavement ahead because he knew exactly what was coming and he was not going to give Lex the reaction that he wanted.
“You missed dinner,” Lex said, and the delight in his voice was positively indecent, “so you could come and watch me.”
“I’d never seen a boxing game. I was curious about the sport. It happened to be one of your fights.”
“It happened to be one of mine.”
“There were other games on the card. I watched those as well.” Barnaby busied himself with eating another handful of crackers, because anything he said now would be used against him, and the flush creeping up the back of his neck was already damning enough.
“You skipped a fancy dinner in Ginza,” Lex continued, savouring every syllable, “to sit in a sumo arena and watch me punch a Kazakh. You, Barnaby Fitznorman-Bicester, who I’m fairly sure has never voluntarily missed a meal that came with a wine pairing and the promise of a cheese board—”
“I just wanted to watch a game!”
Lex stopped walking. “Mate. Mate. Stop calling it a game. It’s a boxing match.”
Barnaby turned. Lex was standing in the middle of the pavement with one hand pressed to his chest, his bruised face arranged in an expression of theatrical outrage. “All right. No big deal. It was a slip.”
“A slip. Do you even—do you know what a slip is in boxing? Do you know anything about the sport you voluntarily went to watch instead of eating top tier steak with your horse mates in Ginza?”
“Do you know what a fetlock is,” Barnaby asked, and regretted it instantly, because he could already see Lex’s face rearranging itself into the look that preceded one of his catastrophically wrong statements delivered with absolute conviction.
“A fetlock,” Lex said, nodding slowly. “Yeah. That’s the move.
That’s the move where the horse does the—” He made a gesture with his hand that bore no resemblance to any movement performed by any horse in the history of the species, or dressage.
It looked, if anything, like a dolphin attempting to breakdance.
“The little kick thing. In the dancing bit. The fetlock.”
“That’s not what a fetlock is.”
“It’s the special move. The signature move. The horse equivalent of a jab-cross combo. The fetlock.” He made the gesture again, adding a small flourish at the end that made it worse.
“A fetlock is a joint,” Barnaby said. “It’s the joint above the hoof. It’s part of the horse’s leg. It is not a move. It has never been a move. In no equestrian discipline in the history of organised sport has any horse performed a fetlock.”
“Are you sure? Because I’ve watched quite a lot of dressage videos now, and some of those moves look well fetlocky.”
“Fetlocky is not a word.”
“It should be. Some of those horses are dead fetlocky. The way they flick their little legs about—”
“Fuck off, Murphy. Do you even know what a pastern is?”
“Is that the one where they go sideways?”
Barnaby opened his mouth, closed it, and ate three more crackers in rapid succession to prevent himself from committing an act of violence on an injured man in a foreign country.
Lex was grinning at him. It was the grin from the ring, wide and stupid and distorted by the swelling beneath his left eye.
Barnaby elected to address the hot pressure behind his sternum by saying, “The pastern, actually, is the most structurally vulnerable joint in the equine lower limb. It articulates between the long pastern bone and the short pastern bone—”
“Shut up,” Lex said.
“No. You mock me, for not knowing a term in your discipline and then—”
“Shut up. I’m going to kiss you, Barnaby.
” He said it plainly, the way he might announce that he was going to cross the road.
“I’m telling you this now, because you’re not the sort of person who reacts well to surprises.
I’m going to put my hand on the back of your stupidly long neck, and I’m going to kiss you. ”
Barnaby frowned at him. His mouth was full of FIRE TASTE EXPLOSION RICE SNACK. His hands were full of convenience store bags. His heart was hammering so hard he could feel it in his teeth. He swallowed what he was chewing.
Lex stepped forward, slid his hand around the back of Barnaby’s neck, and kissed him.
His mouth was warm and firm and tasted faintly of melon gummy sweets.
His fingers spread across Barnaby’s nape, thumb resting just behind his ear, and the weight of his hand was so steady and so certain that Barnaby’s eyes closed without permission.
The bags swung against his hip. He felt Lex’s split lip catch against his own, noticed the careful way Lex angled his jaw to accommodate the tilt of Barnaby’s face.
Then Lex jerked backward. His hand left Barnaby’s neck and flew to his mouth. His eyes were streaming. He pressed both palms against his lips and made a noise that was part profanity, and part the involuntary keen of a man whose cut lip had just been chemically assaulted.
“Fuck—oh, fuck, that’s—Christ, Barnaby, your whole mouth is a fucking weapon—”
He bent double, spitting onto the pavement, scrubbing at his lips with the back of his hand. The capsaicin from the chilli crackers had found the split in his lip, and the tissue was already flushing an angry red.
Barnaby stood on the pavement, still holding his bags, still tasting melon gummy sweets, and watched Lex Murphy writhe in pain.
He smirked. Then he reached into the packet and ate another cracker.
“You absolute bastard! You couldn’t have mentioned—”
“You told me to shut up.”
“I didn’t mean…fuck, it’s getting worse, it’s spreading, my whole—” Lex straightened up, eyes watering, lips swollen and tingling and furious, and looked at Barnaby with an expression that was split evenly between outrage and something much more dangerous.
His chest was heaving. His pupils were blown wide.
He looked like a man who had just discovered that pain and want could occupy the same space quite nicely.
Lex grabbed the packet of rice crackers from Barnaby’s hand and threw it on the ground. Then he seized Barnaby’s jaw with both hands and kissed him again.
This kiss had intent behind it, and a heat that had nothing to do with capsaicin.
Lex’s thumbs pressed into the hollows beneath Barnaby’s cheekbones, tilting his face upward, and his mouth moved against Barnaby’s with a slow, deliberate thoroughness that made Barnaby’s knees soften.
The bags slid down his arms. He could taste the sting of chilli transferring between them, could feel the swollen edge of Lex’s mouth dragging across his lower lip, and he didn’t care.
He didn’t care about any of it. He leaned in, and Lex made a low sound against his mouth that Barnaby felt in the base of his spine.
A sharp, scandalised noise cut through the silence.
Barnaby pulled back. Lex pulled back and they both turned towards the source of the noise.
A woman who could not have been younger than seventy-five was standing three metres away on the pavement, clutching the lead of a very small, very fluffy white dog. The dog was vibrating with indignation, much like the woman herself.
She wasn’t looking at them. Her eyes were on the ground, where the packet of FIRE TASTE EXPLOSION RICE SNACKS lay scattered across the pavement in a spray of red crumbs and torn foil.
She spoke rapidly and emphatically, in Japanese.
“Oh God,” Barnaby said. He released Lex, stepped back, and bowed. “Sumimasen.” He bowed again, deeper. “Sumimasen, sumimasen.”
The woman was not finished. She gestured at the packet, then at the pavement, then at a bin that was visible on the corner twenty metres away, the implication of which was devastating in its clarity.
She had standards. This was her neighbourhood.
Whatever these two enormous foreign men had been doing with their mouths was their own concern, but the wilful desecration of a public footpath was a matter for immediate and vocal correction.
Barnaby reached up, grabbed the back of Lex’s neck, and forced his head down into a bow.
“Ow. What—”
“Bow. Now. You threw the packet.”
Lex bowed. It was graceless and shallow, and Barnaby pressed harder until he was bent almost in half at the waist.
“Sumimasen,” Lex said, to the pavement.
They dropped to their knees and began picking up rice crackers. The woman supervised, arms folded, delivering a running commentary in Japanese that neither of them understood but both of them felt in their bones. Her dog strained at its lead, sniffing at the debris.
Barnaby gathered crumbs into his palm. Lex scooped the torn packet off the ground and stuffed it into one of the convenience store bags. A cracker had rolled into the gutter, and Barnaby crawled forward to retrieve it, his knees scraping on the pavement.
The poodle lunged. It snatched a cracker from the ground and crunched it between its tiny teeth. It swallowed, licked its chops, and looked around for another one.
The woman gave them one final look. Then she tugged her dog’s lead, turned on her heel, and walked away down the street. The poodle trotted along beside her, tail high, having eaten the cracker without breaking stride.
Barnaby stood up. He brushed off his knees, looked at Lex, who was still on the pavement with a handful of chilli crumbs and a split lip that was now swollen to twice its original size, and said: “That poodle takes spice better than you do.”