Chapter Fourteen
Barnaby watched Lex take in all five floors of the Fitznorman-Bicester’s Chester Square house from the pavement. His mouth was agape as his eyes raked over the white stucco and the black railings.
“Fucking hell,” Lex said.
“It’s just a house.”
“It’s not just a house, Barns. A house has a wheelie bin out front and a satellite dish. This has got columns and five floors. In Central London.”
“They’re pilasters.”
“What?”
“They’re pilasters. They’re flat. Columns are freestanding.”
Lex looked at him, his lips curled in a smirk. “Right. Your house has pilasters, then. They’re very nice.”
Barnaby unlocked the front door and let him in.
The entrance hall was tiled in black and white marble with a console table against one wall and a mirror above it that had been in the family since the house was built in 1831.
Mrs Gregson had left fresh flowers on the table.
White roses, which was his mother’s standing order at the local florist.
Lex walked through the hall slowly, as if afraid he’d break something, then stopped in the doorway to the dining room and stared.
Barnaby tried to look at the room with the objective eye of someone who hadn’t been raised in a gilt-forward country home or palace.
He could see how the chandelier might catch his eye.
The portraits on the far wall. The table that seated fourteen.
“That your mum?” Lex asked, nodding at the portrait above the sideboard.
“That is my great-great-great-great-grandmother. The third Duchess of Chatham.”
“She’s hot.”
Barnaby barked out a laugh. “I’ll make sure to tell her that at the next family séance.”
A bark from the first floor announced Florence three seconds before she arrived.
She came down the stairs at a velocity that Irish Setters should not have been capable of achieving on polished wood, her legs sliding wide on every step, ears streaming behind her.
She hit the hallway tiles at a skid and launched herself at Barnaby’s knees.
“Yes, hello. Yes. I know. Settle down.” He crouched and took her face in both hands, and she vibrated against him.
Lex dropped to one knee beside them. “Oh, hello. Who’s this?”
“Florence.”
Lex extended his hand. Florence sniffed it once, and transferred her entire body weight onto Lex’s side. She rolled onto her back and presented her belly with the confidence of an animal who had never, in her pampered life, been denied anything she wanted.
“She’s gorgeous.” Lex rubbed her belly with both hands, and Florence’s back leg kicked in the involuntary spasm that signalled deep satisfaction. “Proper beautiful girl. How old?”
“Four. She’s a pest. She steals socks and buries them in the garden.”
“Course she does. She’s perfect.” Lex scratched behind her ears, and Florence closed her eyes in bliss. “I always wanted a dog. Couldn’t have one growing up. Our flat was too small.”
Florence followed them up the stairs, her claws clicking on the wood.
Barnaby nearly tripped over a pair of trainers at the top of the stairs.
They were enormous, garish, and abandoned at the precise angle required to send someone to their death on the landing below.
A backpack had been dumped against the banister with its zip open, spilling a laptop charger and a half-eaten packet of Haribo.
He picked up the trainers and set them against the wall. “Sorry about the mess. That’s all from my brother, Peregrine. He goes to uni in the City.”
Lex smirked. “Peregrine.”
“Yes.”
“Like the falcon.”
“Like the saint, actually, but yes, everyone thinks he was named after the falcon.”
“What’s he studying?”
There was no dignified way to say it. The words existed in a register so far removed from the Fitznorman-Bicester tradition of Classics, History, and Land Economy that Barnaby had to physically brace himself each time the subject came up.
Peregrine, who had their father’s jaw and their mother’s cheerful disregard for convention, had sat the family down at Christmas dinner and announced his chosen degree with the serene confidence of someone with a trust fund fat enough to cushion most of life’s blows.
“Digital Marketing,” Barnaby said. “He…wants to be a social media marketer.” Barnaby heard the tightness in his own voice. He pushed through it. “He wants to build brands online. He’s very good at it, apparently. His tutors say he has a natural instinct for audience.”
“That’s brilliant.”
“It’s a perfectly legitimate career path.”
“I said it’s brilliant, Barns. I wasn’t being sarcastic.”
Barnaby looked at the photograph of Peregrine on the pub steps and felt the familiar tug of affection laced with bewilderment.
His brother existed in a world where success was measured in followers and click-through rates, and he navigated it with an ease that Barnaby envied more than he would ever admit.
Peregrine would have walked into the Olympic Village and had six friends by the end of the first corridor.
Peregrine would have gone to the 7-Eleven without needing to be led.
“He’s a good kid,” Barnaby said. “He just lives on a different planet.”
Lex gave him a look that said he understood exactly which planet Barnaby was referring to, and that it was far closer to Lex’s own than Barnaby’s.
“Come on,” Barnaby urged, moving deeper into the house.
The sitting room was at the back of the house, overlooking the garden.
It was the most lived-in room, the one his mother hadn’t got to with her decorator, and it showed.
The sofa was deep and soft and covered in a fabric that had faded unevenly where the afternoon light hit it.
There were books stacked on the side table, a blanket folded over the arm, and a dent in the far cushion where Florence liked to sleep.
Lex sat down. He looked out of place and entirely at home simultaneously, his muscular frame sinking into the faded cushions, one arm slung across the back of the sofa. Florence settled at his feet and rested her chin on his trainer.
Barnaby sat in the armchair opposite. He crossed one ankle over the other. He pressed his palms flat against his thighs, lifted his chin, and looked directly at Lex. “I’d like to propose an arrangement.”
Lex’s eyebrows rose, but he didn’t speak. His body stilled in the way it did between rounds, his attention sharpening to a point.
“You have sexual experience,” Barnaby said.
“Considerable experience, by your own account and by the account of every tabloid I’ve had the misfortune of reading since Tokyo.
I have almost none. I was a disaster my first time with you.
” He paused, not for dramatic effect, but because the next sentence required him to look at the shape of his own failure and describe it aloud to the person who had witnessed it.
“I seized up. Both times. I couldn’t let go, even though you were patient, and it made no difference.
I’ve spent three weeks thinking about why that could be. ”
Lex’s expression hadn’t changed. He was listening with his whole focus, the way he listened in the common room at three in the morning. The steadiness of his attention was the only reason Barnaby could keep going.
“Sex isn’t limited to penetration,” Barnaby said.
“There are other things that can be done. A great many other things, presumably, that I have no experience of and no confidence in. I suspect I’d be less catastrophic if I had someone patient enough to practise with.
Someone who already knew my body and wasn’t going to be put off by the learning curve it needs. ”
He let the words settle between them.
“That’s what I’m proposing. You teach me.
I learn from you, and we stay friends. We have a — ” He hesitated, and the word cost him, because it belonged to Peregrine’s vocabulary and not his own.
“A situationship. A pleasant one. Where we get each other off in every way except the one that doesn’t work. ”
Lex looked at him for a long time. The room was quiet. Florence’s tail thumped once against the rug.
“You want to use me,” Lex said, slowly, “to learn to be better at sex.”
“We would be using each other,” Barnaby corrected.
“The situationship would be to our mutual benefit. You get regular access to someone who is, by your own repeated assertion, gorgeous, and I get a patient instructor who won’t make me feel like a failing student.
It’s practical. It’s contained. It doesn’t have to change anything. ”
Lex leaned forward, his elbows on his knees. The posture was familiar. It was how he’d sat on the common room sofa the night he’d told Barnaby to take the win. “And the friendship?”
“The friendship stays. That’s the whole point. The friendship is not negotiable.”
Lex sat with it. Barnaby watched him turn it over in his mind, his dark eyes tracking across the rug as he worked through whatever calculations were happening behind that broad, battered face. Barnaby held still and let him think, because he’d made his case, and the rest was not his to control.
Then Lex sat back. His knees fell open, his thighs spread wide against the cushions, and the posture was such a deliberate signal that Barnaby’s mouth went dry.
“Come here, then,” Lex said.
Barnaby stood. He crossed the distance between the armchair and the sofa, and knelt. The carpet was thick beneath his knees. He settled between Lex’s legs, his hands resting on his own thighs, his chin level with Lex’s belt.
Lex’s hand came up. His palm cupped Barnaby’s jaw, thumb settling against his cheekbone. His fingers were warm and rough. Carefully, he tipped Barnaby’s face upward, holding him there.
“You sure about this, Barns?” His voice was low. “I really like being your friend.”