Chapter Ten
Barnaby lowered himself onto his bed and immediately regretted the speed at which he’d done it.
A sharp, specific ache radiated upward from the base of his spine.
He shifted his weight onto one hip, then the other, and discovered that favouring either didn’t bring him any relief.
He settled for a position that distributed the damage across the broadest possible surface area and sat very still.
His thighs were sore. Not in the way that they often were following a training session or a long ride.
This was a deep, bruised tenderness in the inner muscles that he used to grip the saddle, which meant that he was going to feel this for days.
His left hip flexor was tight from being held in a position it was never designed to sustain.
He could, of course, present himself to the team physiotherapist to have his aches and pains addressed.
Spice up the man’s day a bit with: Hello, Richard.
I’m feeling a bit of tightness in the adductors.
No, not from the saddle. I was penetrated by a man with the dimensions of a fire hydrant, and my body has responded by seizing up from the waist down.
Could you work on the hip flexor first, please?
I’ve got a gold medal ceremony photoshoot today and I’d rather not be visibly limping.
They’d tried again. After a frank post-mortem between the two of them about what the fuck had gone wrong the night before, Lex had suggested they try a different position.
He’d rolled Barnaby onto his side, hooked one hand under his knee, and lifted his leg to change the angle.
The logistics of this had required Barnaby to lie with his face pressed into the pillow while Lex negotiated entry from behind, which was marginally less awkward than face-to-face but compensated for this advantage by making Barnaby feel like a suitcase being opened from the wrong end.
It hadn’t helped. Lex had been patient, again.
Careful, again. He’d gone slowly, checked in, murmured reassurances into the back of Barnaby’s neck that were individually tender and collectively devastating in their implication that Barnaby required this much management.
Every you all right? was both a kindness and an indictment.
He was not all right. He was lying on his side in a narrow Olympic Village bed being gently, attentively split in half.
Then Lex had tried him on his belly. This was, in theory, the path of least resistance.
Barnaby didn’t have to coordinate his limbs, or time his breathing, or remember which direction to push.
He just had to lie there. The equestrian community would have called it a long rein: hand over the reins, trust the partnership, let the rider do the work.
The rider had done the work. Barnaby had lain face-down with his fingers twisted in the sheets and his teeth buried in the pillow, and Lex had fucked him with a steady, rolling rhythm that was technically impeccable and physically excruciating.
Every thrust pushed a dull, burning pressure deep into his abdomen, a fullness so total that it crowded out everything else.
His body couldn’t decide whether it was pain or just too much, and in the absence of a clear verdict it defaulted to rigid, clenching panic that made the next thrust worse than the last.
At one point Lex’s hand had slid under his hips to take hold of his cock, and Barnaby had wanted to want it, had willed himself to feel the grip of Lex’s fingers as anything other than a secondary event happening to a body that was already fully occupied.
He’d come eventually, through sheer mechanical persistence on Lex’s part, and the orgasm had felt like something extracted rather than given.
Barnaby pressed his palms flat against his thighs and stared at the opposite wall.
The body he’d spent twenty-five years training, the body that could sit a twelve-hundred-pound horse in perfect stillness through a Grand Prix dressage test, that could absorb the impact of jumping a cross-country fence at thirty miles an hour and recover in a stride, could not accommodate a well-endowed man inside it without falling apart.
He was broken. Some fundamental mechanical component was missing, and he was simply not built to the specification that sex with Lex Murphy required.
He’d done everything right. He’d relaxed, or tried to.
He’d breathed, or tried to. He’d lain in three different positions and handed over every scrap of control, and none of it had mattered, because his body had rejected the entire enterprise like a horse refusing a fence.
He sat with it for as long as he could stand, and then he called the Privy Council.
It was not the sensible thing to do. The sensible thing to do was to shower, take two ibuprofen, and present himself at breakfast with the British equestrian team looking composed, freshly minted and entirely un-fucked.
The sensible thing was to file the entire experience away under lessons learned and move on with the quiet, private dignity that his station in life demanded.
Instead, Barnaby picked up his mobile from the bedside table, opened WhatsApp, and called the group chat that contained himself, the King of the United Kingdom, and His Serene Highness Prince Vidal of Cardona.
It was half past six in the morning in Tokyo, which made it half past ten at night in London and half past eleven in Cardona, and Barnaby did not give a fuck.
James answered on the second ring.
“Bash?” His voice was sharp with concern, the way it always was when Barnaby called outside of their usual rhythm.
James had been conditioned by a lifetime of receiving bad news by telephone: the call about his father’s heart attack, the call about Windsor Castle aflame because of faulty wiring. “Are you all right?”
“This is your fault.”
A pause. “What?”
“This is your fault, James. You wrote me a letter on Buckingham Palace stationery commanding me to go and get fucked, and I have followed the instruction of my sovereign, and it was a literal fucking disaster.”
There was another pause, longer this time. Barnaby could hear James recalibrating, and the careful exhalation of breath that preceded the voice he used before deciding how to react.
“Barnaby.” James’s tone had shifted to something low and controlled. “I need you to tell me what happened. Are you hurt? Was it…did you consent to—”
“Yes, I consented. Of course I consented. Nobody forced me to do anything. He was perfectly decent about the whole thing, which somehow makes it all worse. And I like him. I really like him…” Barnaby pressed the heel of his free hand against his eye socket.
His voice was climbing. He could hear it, the pitch thinning out at the edges, and he forced himself to breathe through his nose and bring it back under control.
“But he’s too big. We tried three times, and he’s too big, and my body won’t cooperate.
Now I’m sitting on my bed at six in the morning unable to move without wincing. ”
“Who is too big?” James asked.
The third tile on the video call lit up.
Vidal’s face appeared, backlit by something golden and ornate that was almost certainly a Baroque wall sconce.
His dark hair was loose around his shoulders, and he was wearing what looked like a silk robe in a shade of emerald that no one outside a lush Mediterranean principality like Cardona could carry off.
His eyes were sharp with interest, and Barnaby immediately regretted every decision that had led to this late-night conflab.
“Who is this well-endowed man you speak of, Bash?” Vidal said.
He still couldn’t answer. He could say it doesn’t matter who and steer the conversation back to the mechanical problem at hand.
But James would find out, because James found out everything, and Vidal would find out because Vidal had an almost supernatural talent for extracting information that people were actively trying to withhold from him.
“Lex Murphy.”
James made a strangled noise. “The boxer?”
“Yes, James. The boxer.”
“Barnaby, he’s huge.”
“I know that. I am intimately aware of that. I have recent and comprehensive evidence of exactly how huge he is, thank you.”
“Our little Bash has been mounted!” Vidal’s voice split the word across two delighted syllables, his Cardonan accent thickening the way it always did when he was enjoying himself at someone else’s expense.
His grin was wolfish and taking up most of his tile on the screen.
“He has been covered like one of his broodmares!” Vidal was incandescent.
“Oh, Bash. I did not send you a gift for your gold. I feel terrible about this. However, for this occasion, I will commission something. I know a glassblower in Murano who does the most exquisite custom dildos. I will make it a reasonable size, yes. Something you can ease right in.”
“Vidal!” James and Barnaby said it at the same time, in the same scandalised register, which was the kind of synchronised reaction that only twenty years of jointly managing Vidal could produce.
Vidal was unmoved. He settled deeper into whatever piece of furniture he was draped across and tilted his head. “Tell me, Bash. Would you say he was hung like a—”
“Don’t.”
“—a horse?”
The cackle that followed was prolonged and delivered with the joy of a man who had been waiting his entire life to deploy that line against an equestrian.
Vidal tipped his head back and laughed, the silk robe slipping off one shoulder, and Barnaby wanted to reach through the screen and throttle him with the sash.
“Fuck you, Vidal. Fuck you, and I hope Cardona continues eroding into the sea and leaves you stateless.”
He was starting to sound hysterical. He could hear it happening, his voice rising and thinning, the vowels sharpening in ways that only occurred when his composure had been stripped back to the load-bearing walls. He pressed his knuckles against his mouth and breathed.
“I don’t understand.” His voice came out thick, the consonants blunted.
He swallowed against it. “I like him. So why isn’t it working?
What am I supposed to do to make it work?
He feeds me squid ink crisps and we watch people in inflatable sumo suits tackle other people into slime pits, and I—” His throat closed around the rest of the sentence.
He pressed his fingers hard against his eyelids. “I just want it to work.”
“Is this a new sexual kink of the British?” Vidal asked. “The squid ink, the sumo suits. Is this what happens when a nation represses itself for eight hundred years?”
Barnaby tried to laugh. What came out was closer to a sob, and the silence that followed it on both ends of the call was the worst kind: the kind where two people who loved you were deciding how to handle the fact that you were falling apart.
Vidal spoke first, and when he did, the showmanship in his tone was all gone. His voice had dropped to the register he used so rarely that Barnaby sometimes forgot it existed — quiet and stripped of performance.
“Bash. Listen to me. It is not like the romance books, sex. It is hardly ever perfect in the beginning. You are learning a new body, and he is learning yours, with you having been previously unplundered territory. You will learn each other. These things take time, and patience, and a great deal of practice, which I know you are very good at, because you have spent your entire life practising things until they are perfect.”
Barnaby’s jaw ached from clenching. His eyes burned. He pressed his knuckles harder against his mouth and breathed through his nose until he trusted himself to speak.
“But it hurts,” he said. The word cracked open in the middle, and he hated himself for how small it made him sound.
“Vidal’s right. Early sex is often awkward, and it does get better with familiarity.
” James paused. “But I’m also going to say the thing you don’t want to hear, because I love you and someone has to.
Bodies have limits, Bash. And sometimes, two people can like each other enormously and still not be sexually compatible.
That isn’t a failure. It’s just a fact. It doesn’t diminish what you have with him. ”
The words settled over Barnaby like a cold compress on a wound.
James would know. James, of all people, would know exactly how it felt to love someone whose body yours couldn’t answer.
They’d been sixteen, and gentle with each other, and wholly wrong in every way that mattered between the sheets.
They’d never spoken about it since. They’d never needed to.
“Will you be all right, Bash?” James asked.
Barnaby looked at the ceiling, and he thought about the common room sofa, and the Lucky Dip bowl. He thought of Lex searching the crowd between rounds, and the grin that had split his face when he found him.
“We can be friends,” he said quietly. “That’s — I can have that.” He stopped. Swallowed. “We can still be friends.”
“Yes,” James said. “You can. And that’s more than most people get, Bash. A friendship with someone who makes you laugh and feeds you terrible snacks at three in the morning; that’s worth protecting.”
“Even if the sex is a catastrophe?”
“Especially then. Because if the friendship survives the sex being a catastrophe, it’s a bloody good friendship.”
Barnaby almost smiled.
“I want you at Kensington the moment you land,” James said.
His voice shifted, threading the warmth with something firmer.
“That is not a request, Barnaby. That is a sovereign command. You will come to the Palace, and we will sit in the kitchen, and Mrs Finch will make scones, and you will tell me everything while I make extremely inappropriate comments about the boxer’s anatomy until you feel better. Is that understood?”
“Yes, Your Majesty.”
“Don’t be a prat.”
“Bash.” Vidal leaned closer to the screen.
His robe had slipped further off his shoulder, and his dark eyes had lost their mischief.
He looked, for once, like someone who meant every word he was about to say.
“You are my favourite Englishman. Do not tell James. Come to Cardona after London. I will feed you wine, put you in the sun, and nobody will ask you to do anything difficult for at least a week. Yes?”
Barnaby nodded. His throat was too tight to answer.
“Good,” Vidal said. “Now go and take a very hot bath. And Bash, do not, under any circumstances, attempt to ride a horse today.”
Barnaby ended the call. He set his mobile face-down on the bedside table and sat in the silence of his room. Then he got up very carefully, and went to run the bath.