Chapter Eighteen #2
“No, you don’t.” Barnaby kept his eyes on the page, even though the words had stopped meaning anything.
“If you did, you would let me have him to myself.” He turned the next page with enough force to crease the corner.
“Instead, you pull your little stunt. You put us under scrutiny and feed the BLEX fire. Joint ambassadorships, announced with clever little tongue-in-cheek comments through the King’s Trust socials.
” He closed the book on his thumb and looked at James.
“I would have expected something like that from Vidal. But not from you.”
James was quiet for a long time. He was sitting with his hands in his lap, his shoulders dropped. He looked, for a moment, like the boy who’d sat on Barnaby’s bed at Eton and told him his father had had another heart attack.
“I hadn’t thought about it like that,” James said.
“You hadn’t thought.” Barnaby heard the ice in his own voice and didn’t soften it.
“The King of the United Kingdom, who thinks about everything, who runs every decision through three advisors and a private secretary before he orders his lunch, hadn’t thought about what it would mean to formally, publicly, institutionally pair me with a man on Palace letterhead. ”
James rubbed the bridge of his nose. “I was excited. That’s the truth of it, and I know it’s not good enough, but it’s the truth.
I saw the two of you at the reception. You were feeding him canapés, Barnaby, you were putting food in his mouth and your face was—” He stopped.
“I just wanted to give you a reason to stay close to each other. You have to admit that the two of you don’t exactly run in the same logical circles.
Without something structural, you’d have drifted.
A boxer from Barking and the Marquess of Ashworth don’t share a social calendar. ”
“So you forced it.”
“I built you a bridge.” James turned to face him. “It’ll make things easier, Barnaby. For people to get used to the idea of the two of you. So that when it becomes official—”
Barnaby sat up. The O’Brian slid off his lap and hit the floor, and Florence flinched.
“It will never be official, James.” His voice was tight. “We have a situationship. That’s all. We’ve decided to be friends, because we don’t work as anything more than that.”
James looked at him with an expression that was entirely too knowing. “Oh, Bash.”
“Don’t.”
“Things change. Vidal tells me you’ve been learning each other. That there are ways—”
“I need to stop fucking talking to Vidal.”
“Well, you could try,” James said. “But that won’t stop him from talking at you. You know that. He’s got diplomatic immunity and no concept of boundaries. It’s his greatest charm.”
Barnaby pressed his palms flat against his thighs.
He stared at the wall opposite, at a watercolour of the estate that his grandmother had painted in the seventies.
It was terrible. The proportions were wrong and the lake was the colour of pond scum.
His father kept it because she’d been dead for twenty years and he missed her.
“Part of the reason I did it,” James said, “is that I don’t entirely trust you not to run away from whatever this is.”
Barnaby’s jaw tightened.
“You bolt, Bash. It’s what you do. When something gets too close, you retreat behind the manners and the composure and you wait for the other person to get bored and leave.
I’ve watched you do it since we were fourteen.
You did it with that boy at Cambridge. You would have done it with Lex, given enough time and enough silence between visits. ”
The worst part was that James was right.
“Now you can’t,” James said. “You’re joint ambassadors. You have commitments together. You have to be in the same room, on a schedule, with photographers present, for at least two years. I’ve made it structurally impossible for you to ghost Lex Murphy, and I’m not sorry.”
Barnaby sat with that. Florence shifted at his feet, pressing her nose against his ankle.
“Now I can’t,” Barnaby said. He picked at a thread on the sofa cushion. “Now…I don’t want to, James.”
James was still. Then he reached over, lifted Barnaby’s legs, sat down properly at the end of the sofa, and settled Barnaby’s feet across his lap. It was a position they’d sat in a thousand times. James’s hand rested on Barnaby’s ankle, warm through his sock.
“I told you to get fucked in Tokyo,” James said. “I didn’t expect you to fall in love in the process, like a complete and utter sap. Why couldn’t you just be a proper lad and go on a fuck frenzy without catching feelings?”
“Because I’m broken,” Barnaby said.
“Because you’re a nervy bugger.” James squeezed his ankle. “And Lex is perfect for you, because he’s thick enough to keep at you. Any sensible man would have given up after the first attempt. He came back for a second go. That’s either devotion or brain damage. In a boxer, it could really be both.”
Barnaby pressed his knuckles against his mouth. The laugh that came out was wet and ragged and surprised him.
They sat there together. The sun room was quiet, the light grey and steady through the windows, and Florence snored softly at the end of the sofa. James’s thumb traced small circles on Barnaby’s ankle, absent and familiar.