Chapter Twenty-Eight
Back then
They didn’t leave James’s apartments that Sunday.
The kiss at the door had led to another on the landing, and that one to a third in the corridor, where Tristan’s shoulders hit the wainscoting and he stayed there, pinned, not minding at all.
From there they’d migrated to the sofa, where Tristan had pulled James down on top of him and kept him there for an hour.
James kept things slow. Every time Tristan tried to speed things up, James’s palm would find the nape of his neck and hold there until Tristan stopped trying to steer.
At half four, Tristan’s mobile buzzed on the side table. He reached for it and found a text from his driver, confirming that he’d be at the pick-up point in half an hour.
James glanced at the screen. “You’re going, then?”
Tristan locked his mobile and set it aside. “The car can wait.”
“Yes,” James agreed, and kissed him again.
When Tristan finally extracted himself from the sofa, he had a mark coming up on the side of his neck that would need concealer and a creative explanation for Susan, his make-up artist, the next day.
James walked him to the door with a palm between his shoulder blades, then held him there and kissed him goodbye so thoroughly that Tristan had to grip the doorframe to keep his balance.
“Text me when you get home,” James said. “I want to know you got in all right.”
“It’s Berkshire, Jams. Not the Somme.”
“Tristan. Text me when you’re home.”
Tristan texted him from the car before he’d even cleared the Long Walk, and they didn’t stop their messaging until he was in his Berkshire flat.
? ? ?
Tristan was on set by six every morning, in the make-up chair by quarter past, with the first marks going down on the kitchen floor by seven.
They were shooting episode three at a clip, burning through the schedule that the production had mapped to the hour, and Tristan was grateful for it.
He ran his scenes, hit his marks, and leaned on Birrell in every two-shot, because Birrell’s whole performance was built to carry the room.
Ben was obedient in this episode, eager to please and desperate to earn the good version of the man he’d married.
Tristan played him from the gut. Everything Ben did in these scenes was a scramble to read Jay’s mood before it turned.
It should have eaten him alive. Instead he floated through the week on what was waiting at the end of it.
Because James was texting him constantly, from the most absurd corners of his schedule.
Visited a cheese factory in Wensleydale today. Very earnest people who are serious about their curds. I told them their operation was, in my view, truly GRATE, and Benton’s left eye actually twitched. Unfortunately, my audience missed the pun.
Then, twenty minutes later:
He’s still twitching. I think I may have broken him.
Tristan had been mid-blocking for a scene in which Jay pinned Ben against the fridge and made him recite the household budget with a hand on Ben’s cock, and Tristan had excused himself to the toilets to laugh until his eyes watered.
The texts kept coming. James had a schedule that held the internal logic of a fever dream — a veterans’ hospital in the morning, a charity gala for rare birds in the evening — and he reported from every stop.
I’ve been made an honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Plumbers. There was a ceremony. I have a certificate. Benton has had it framed, and I intend to have it hung over my toilet.
A nine-year-old at the youth centre asked me whether I could knight her hamster. I told her I’d look into the constitutional position and have my people follow up.
And then there were the texts that arrived last thing at night, once the final engagement had been ticked off and all the staff had gone.
Hands first, Tris. Getting the King out of my fingers.
The table. The chair. The book on my side table. The curtain…
Tristan had stared at that last one for a long time. He could picture James on his own bed, miles away, running through the de-roling exercises they’d been working on together, reaching the fifth grounding item.
Wish I could get my hands on you tonight, Tris.
go touch your pillow, James. Night.
Tristan pressed his face into his pillow, grinning like a teenager into the dark.
On set, his work improved, for reasons that should have mortified him. Half his attention was on the scene and the other half was at Windsor, replaying the sensation of James’s mouth on his.
Birrell clocked it during a two-shot in the hallway where Jay catches Ben coming out of the bathroom and pins him to the wall by the wrists.
They’d mapped the beat three times with Micaela, the grip pressure agreed, every finger placement locked.
Tristan went in braced for the same low-grade dread he’d carried since the first rehearsal. It wasn’t there.
Birrell held the pin for the duration of the shot, his forearms a dead weight on Tristan’s, and when the director called cut, he studied Tristan closely.
“That was different,” he said. “Whatever you’ve changed, keep at it.”
“I haven’t changed anything.”
“Then something’s changed you.” Birrell collected his tea from the runner who’d been holding it and wandered off with his cup balanced on his script.
? ? ?
By the time the car turned up the Long Walk on Saturday afternoon, Tristan was already back in his last visit, James’s mouth on his throat and his fingers tangled in James’s dark hair.
Caroline was in the hall when he came through. She kissed him on the cheek, studied him, and her eyes crinkled in exactly the same way that James’s did.
Tristan bowed to her awkwardly and murmured, “Your Royal Highness.”
“Oh, Tristan,” she said. “He’s got you properly, hasn’t he?”
Tristan opened his mouth to tell her that he had the situation firmly under control, but Caroline’s thumb was already stroking along his jaw, and he’d never been good at lying to her. “I’m sorry, Caroline. I never set out to get James involved in this. He wasn’t supposed to be a part of the plan.”
“But he is now.” She smoothed his collar down. “And you’re not running the plan to boost your career any more, are you, Tristan?”
“No,” Tristan said.
“Be kind to him, Tristan,” Caroline said. “And be careful with yourself. Take it slowly, and start thinking very carefully about what you can live with.” She patted his cheek once. “You need to take care of each other.”
James came down the staircase in a jumper with the sleeves shoved to his elbows.
He stopped two steps from the bottom. Tristan bowed. “Your Majesty.” Then he grinned. “Hello, Jams.”
Caroline had got her coat on and buttoned. “I’m going across to Benton’s,” she said, kissing her brother’s cheek on her way past. “Don’t burn the place down.” The front door clicked shut behind her, and then it was just the two of them in the hall.
They ran the routine. Hands first, shaking out the week — Tristan’s filming, James’s schedule — all of it worked loose from the wrists and sent down through the floor.
Five things to touch, named aloud, James’s voice going lower and steadier with each one, until the room held nothing but Tristan: the last object left to reach for.
James’s thumb settled over the pulse point on his neck. “Tristan.”
Tristan kissed the heel of James’s palm. “Are you feeling like Jams now?”
“Getting there,” James said, and closed the distance between them.
This kiss had none of the frantic edge of last weekend’s.
Tristan kept his palms flattened to James’s chest, feeling the steady thud of his heart under the wool.
When they broke apart, James kept hold of him, his thumb tracing the line behind Tristan’s ear.
“Come and have tea with me,” he said. “I’ve had the kitchen lay it out. ”
This turned out to mean finger sandwiches on a three-tiered stand, scones with clotted cream and the Highgrove blackberry preserves Tristan had developed an embarrassing dependency on.
He sat opposite James in the small sitting room with his feet tucked up under him, eating his way through the cucumber sandwiches while James described the thirteen-minute conversation he’d endured that week with a man who bred New Zealand rabbits competitively.
Tristan reached for a scone and split it open, loading both halves with an amount of cream that had James raising an eyebrow. “You’re good at this, you know,” Tristan said. “At making people feel seen.”
James watched him apply the preserves. “You’ve put the cream on first.”
“Yeah.”
“In Devon, Tristan, that would constitute an act of war.”
“Good thing we’re in Berkshire.” Tristan bit into his scone, and a clot of cream landed on his chin. The look on James’s face was worth the indignity.
James reached across, swiped the cream off Tristan’s chin with his thumb, and ate it. “You American heathen,” he said.
They tramped the grounds all afternoon, then ate dinner with Caroline and Benton in the oak-panelled dining room that seated forty and felt absurd with just four.
Tristan watched them over the table: how Caroline’s touch found Benton’s wrist when she laughed, how Benton always reached for exactly the thing she wanted before she made a move for it.
After dinner they migrated to the sitting room, where the conversation drifted to Vidal’s latest adventure.
He’d sent the Privy Council group chat a seven-minute voice note from a thermal bath in Budapest, narrating his spiritual rebirth, while Beauchamp could be heard in the background ordering a club sandwich.
At ten, Caroline untangled herself from Benton and got to her feet, collecting her man by the elbow on the way up. “We’re going across. Goodnight, both of you.”
She kissed James’s cheek, then Tristan’s. Benton inclined his head to James on the way past with a “Goodnight, Your Majesty”, managed half a nod at Tristan, and followed her out.
The door latched. James left his whisky on the side table and held out his hand, palm up.