Chapter Forty-Two
Now
Afine spray of fuchsia glitter preceded James through the apartment door, catching the hall light and drifting onto the parquet in a shimmering arc that would have been festive if James’s expression hadn’t been so stony.
He was covered in the stuff. It sat in the weave of his navy suit, dusted the tops of both shoulders, and clung to the left side of his neck in a concentrated streak.
Then came Benton’s voice from the corridor behind him, clipped and careful. “Sir, are you quite all right?”
James shut the door in his face rather than answer.
Tristan looked up from the sofa, where he’d been annotating his Series 2 script with a highlighter.
He’d come straight from a production meeting in Hammersmith and had let himself in through the mews entrance, where Walters had greeted him with the usual “Good evening, Mr Whitlock” and a quiet update on the contents of the fridge that Tristan hadn’t asked for but appreciated nonetheless.
He’d been sitting here since half four, his stockinged feet tucked beneath him on the cushion, settling into the familiar quiet of James’s rooms while the light outside thinned from grey to charcoal.
James stood in the hallway.
“Did you come from a school visit?” Tristan closed the script over his highlighter and checked the time on his mobile.
Quarter past seven. Far too late for a nursery or a primary school, and James’s morning texts had outlined a day packed with meetings that didn’t typically involve craft supplies: a bilateral with the Australian High Commissioner, a Privy Council audience, something about agricultural subsidy reform that James had described as “thrilling, in the way that having a root canal done on you is thrilling.”
“Youth centre,” James said. “Peckham. Arts programme. They were making protest banners.”
“With glitter?”
“They make the letters of their ‘Not My King’ signs stand out.” James glanced down at his shoulder as though noticing the glitter for the first time. “A girl named Destiny gave me a hug. She’d been working with glitter glue. I didn’t have the heart to redirect her.”
Tristan set the script down and went to him, reaching up to brush at the worst of the damage along the shoulder seam. The glitter transferred immediately to his fingers. This was craft-grade stuff that would turn up in James’s bedsheets for weeks.
“Right,” James said, catching Tristan’s wrist before he could get any further. “De-roling. I need it. Properly, Tris, the full thing.”
James shook out his arms, sending a fresh constellation of fuchsia onto the parquet.
“Five things I can touch. Floor. Wall. Sofa arm.” He was ticking them off too fast. “Lamp. Your face.” He reached out and pressed his palm flat on Tristan’s cheek, his fingers cool from the April air outside.
“Tristan. Not Ben. There we are. Done. Shall I put the kettle on?”
Tristan covered James’s hand with his own, holding it in place against his face, and stepped in close enough that James had nowhere left to look but at him.
“James.” He kissed the hinge of James’s jaw.
A fleck of fuchsia glitter clung to James’s lower lip.
“What happened? You’re very upset. I can tell. ”
James kissed him. His hand slid from Tristan’s cheek to his nape, fingers curling into his hair, and for half a second it nearly worked, because James’s mouth had always been deeply, unfairly persuasive.
Tristan pulled away. “No. Nice try.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” James tried for another kiss, and Tristan planted both palms flat on his chest and held him away.
“You’re deflecting.”
“I’m kissing my boyfriend.”
“You’re only doing it to avoid answering a direct question.” Tristan kept his hands where they were, pressed to the fine wool of James’s jacket, and felt the tremor that ran along his muscles beneath.
Tristan gripped James’s arms and tightened his hold. Under his palms, James’s biceps were rigid. Every muscle Tristan touched was braced for impact in a room where James should be feeling completely safe.
“You’re shaking!”
James’s composure was thinner than Tristan had ever seen it.
“It’s fine, Tristan. I’m fine.” He stepped out of Tristan’s grip, and began loosening his tie in short, jerky movements that contradicted everything he was saying.
“It’s just…people have moved on from the thoughts-and-prayers phase of my outing to the ‘Not My King’ and glitter-bombing section.
That’s all. It’s an entirely natural progression.
First they feel sorry for you, then they decide you’re a moral failing after a Church of England higher-up implies that you maybe are, and then they throw glitter at you on the steps of St James’s Palace.
” The tie came free. He folded it once and set it on the hall table.
“My great-grandparents had the Blitz. I can survive being pelted with craft supplies.”
The lightness was pitch-perfect. If Tristan hadn’t been touching him thirty seconds ago, hadn’t felt the trembling locked into the long muscles of his arms, he might have believed that James had already moved on from what had happened.
“Right,” Tristan said. “Stay there.”
He crossed the apartment to the en suite and turned the bath taps on full, testing the temperature with his wrist until the water ran hot enough to steam.
He found the bottle of Penhaligon’s bath oil that James kept on the shelf beside his shaving kit, a scent Tristan associated so completely with James’s skin that smelling it in a department store six thousand miles away had once undone him during their break, and poured a measure under the stream.
The bathroom immediately filled with warmth and the clean, woody smell of the oil.
He returned to where he’d left James. The glitter was still everywhere.
“You’re having a bath,” Tristan said. He pushed the suit jacket off James’s shoulders, easing it down both arms until James let it go, and caught it before it hit the floor.
The glitter had made its way into the weave and onto the lining.
He draped it over the back of the nearest chair and started on James’s shirt buttons.
James let him work. His arms hung at his sides while Tristan moved down the placket, each button revealing another inch of skin dusted with a fine layer of glitter. It had got under the collar, into the hollow of his throat, and along the edge of his collarbone where his shirt had gaped.
Tristan peeled the shirt off him and dropped it on top of the jacket. James’s chest rose and fell in slow, measured breaths. He was broader across the shoulders than his suits let on. Tristan put his face in the groove between his pecs and breathed him in.
Then he undid James’s belt, pulled it from the loops, and let it coil onto the chair. He knelt to work off James’s shoes and socks, then unfastened his trousers and pushed them down, and James was naked in the hallway of his own apartment, having let Tristan take every layer of the day off him.
“Come on.” Tristan took his hand and led him to the bathroom, where the tub was three-quarters full and the steam had fogged the mirror above the basin.
James climbed in and sank into the water. His knees drew up towards his chest as the heat closed around him. He curled in on himself in the bath like someone who’d only just learned what it felt like to be struck.
Tristan sat on the edge of the tub and handed him the flannel. “Scrub,” he said. “Start with your neck. Get all of it off.”
James took the flannel without argument. He wet it, soaped it, and began lifting the glitter from his skin in slow passes, starting at his throat and moving over one shoulder, then the other. The fuchsia lifted off in streaks and settled on the surface of the water in a thin, glittering film.
Tristan watched him long enough to be sure he was doing it properly, actually scrubbing. “I’ll be back,” he said. “Keep going.”
He left James in the bath and pulled the door half-closed behind him. Tristan made it as far as the kitchen before reaching for his mobile.
He searched for King James. The algorithm did the rest, serving him a wall of results topped by a BBC News banner that read KING TARGETED AT ST JAMES’S PALACE PHOTOCALL, with a red brEAKING tag that had probably been live for the past couple of hours while Tristan sat there highlighting dialogue cues and wondering whether James would want Thai or Italian for dinner.
He leaned on the counter and pressed play on the pool footage.
The setting was the east courtyard at St James’s, bright and formal under an April sky that had managed a grudging hour of sunshine.
A row of flags hung behind a low stage where James stood with two men Tristan didn’t recognise.
A crowd pressed against the barriers on the far side of the courtyard, phones raised, a few Union Jacks held aloft.
James raised a hand to the crowd, and a woman near the front shouted something that made him smile.
Then a figure in a dark hoodie broke from the left side of the frame.
The attacker moved fast, closing the distance before the nearest protection officer could react, and his arm came up in a sharp overhand arc.
Something left his hand, a bag or a packet, Tristan couldn’t tell, and burst on James’s chest in a cloud of fuchsia that engulfed his torso and face.
The ugly word that came with it carried clean to the rota press.
The protection detail got to the man before the glitter had even finished settling. Two officers took him to the ground in a coordinated motion, and a third reached James with both arms already extended to shield and redirect.
But the camera stayed on James for three more seconds before the security cordon tightened.
James stood perfectly still with his arms held away from his body, palms turned upward.
He looked down at his hands, at the fuchsia glitter coating his fingers and the cuffs of his suit, and his face went blank.
Tristan watched as James’s chin came down to his chest and his cheeks went red. Then the protection team closed around him and he was gone, bundled through a service door out of frame, and the footage cut to a studio anchor looking grave.
Tristan set his mobile down on the counter and returned to James. Steam curled through the gap in the bathroom door, carrying the woody, clean scent of the Penhaligon’s oil.
James was exactly where he’d left him, his knees drawn up, the flannel now resting on the rim of the tub.
He’d scrubbed his neck and chest clean, but his hair was dusted with fuchsia along the hairline, caught in the dark strands above his left ear.
The bathwater had taken on a faint pink shimmer. He looked up when Tristan came in.
Tristan knelt on the bathmat beside the tub, took the flannel from the porcelain edge, and wrung it out.
He cupped warm water in his free hand and poured it over James’s head, darkening his hair and sending a thin rivulet of pink down the side of his neck.
Then Tristan reached for the shampoo on the shelf, squeezed a measure into his palm, and worked it into James’s hair.
He started at the temples, where the glitter was worst, massaging through the strands until the last flecks of fuchsia lifted free.
James’s head tipped forward under the pressure. His shoulders, which had been locked rigid since he’d walked in, dropped.
“I’m fine, really.” James said it lightly. “It’s barely anything.”
Tristan’s thumbs paused at the base of his skull. He’d done this. He’d taught James that showing Tristan how bad it actually got was a risk he couldn’t afford to take. That the honest answer to how are you might be the thing that sent Tristan looking for the exit again.
Tristan didn’t press. Not tonight, with James still shaking while he sat folded into water hot enough to pink up his skin.
There would be a time to say you can tell me the truth, and I’ll still be here in the morning, but it wasn’t now.
It would only ever land as months and months of staying, showing James every day that he wanted to this time.
So he did what he could. He dug his thumbs into the rigid cords at the base of James’s neck and said, “Jams. Jams, I need you to put me in touch with whoever runs your version of the CIA.”
James’s head came up. “I beg your pardon?”
Tristan grinned at him and dropped his voice into Barnaby’s plummiest register.
“I need access to one of those spy canes. The ones with the little injectable poison tip.” He kneaded along the curve of James’s trapezius, pressing until the muscle gave.
“And I need you to get me placed undercover in whatever hellhole prison they’ve put that man in, because I intend to handle this situation personally. ”
James shifted in the bath to better meet Tristan’s eye. “His Majesty’s prisons are not hellholes, Tris. They are institutions of rehabilitation overseen by a dedicated inspectorate, and I’ll thank you not to malign them.”
“Fine. I need to be placed undercover in a well-maintained correctional facility, then.”
“No. You wouldn’t last a day.” James’s voice was steadier now, his head tipping into Tristan’s hands as the pressure found the knot beneath his left ear.
“You’re far too pretty. And also, you’d try to assert your dominance over your cellmate within the first five minutes by instituting a toileting schedule, and you’d get yourself shanked by lunch. ”
Tristan poured another handful of warm water over James’s hair, rinsing the last of the shampoo in a slow cascade that carried the final traces of fuchsia down his neck and into the bath.
The glitter was out of his hair. The water had turned a pale, shimmering pink, and James sat in the middle of it with his eyes half-closed and his breathing finally, finally beginning to even out. He’d need a shower to get the rest off.
Tristan stayed where he was, moving the heel of one palm in slow circles over James’s shoulders. James’s head dropped forward, his chin nearly touching his chest.
“Tristan.”
“Mm?”
“Can’t send you to prison to take care of that arsehole for me. Yes, it could open things up to some sexy dropped soap scenarios, but I’ve only just got you back. Do you think Vidal could do undercover work?”
“Don’t be stupid, James. Obviously it has to be Caroline.”
“Obviously.”
Tristan pressed his mouth to the crown of James’s head and stayed by him.