Chapter Thirty-Five
Beauchamp’s flat occupied the second floor of a red-brick mansion block off Marylebone High Street, and Vidal made it three steps past the door before he stopped on the parquet and turned a slow, full circle.
The sofa cushions sat at identical angles.
The coffee table held a single coaster, centred, with the remote control aligned to the table’s edge beside it.
A lamp stood in each corner above a rug the colour of wet slate, and nothing, not a shoe, or a stray mug, was out of place anywhere in his field of vision.
“This is a lovely flat, Beauchamp.”
“Thank you.”
“It is also deeply disturbing. It looks like the show flat they use to sell the other flats in a high-rise building. Where is your mess? Where are the signs that you are actually living, Beauchamp? Like…a wilting plant, or the mug that you used for this morning’s tea?”
“I take care of my plants, and wash my mugs the moment I’m done with them.” Beauchamp lifted the camel overcoat from Vidal’s shoulders, working it carefully down over the sling. “I like to keep my quarters inspection-ready.”
“Nobody is coming to inspect you, Beauchamp.”
“You’re doing it right now,” Beauchamp pointed out.
“As is my right. I have had sexual contact with you now. The state of the premises where we are likely to have further encounters is very much my concern.” He drew himself up, sling and all.
Beauchamp watched him drift towards the kitchen. “So you’re expecting to have sex in the kitchen, then.”
Vidal laughed at him as though he’d asked whether water was wet. “Of course. The kitchen is for food and fucking, Beauchamp.”
Vidal left him to hang the coat and went, one-armed, to conduct an inspection of his own. A drawer yielded keys, batteries, a wind-up torch, and a folded Ordnance Survey map of the Chilterns. A green mug with a chip on the rim sat alone on the draining board, hand-washed. Then he opened the fridge.
He stood in the cold light of it without speaking. The shelves held stacked containers, each labelled in block capitals with its contents and a date. CHILLI, TUES. CHICKEN, WEDS. There were six eggs, a block of butter, a bag of spinach, and, on the middle shelf, a plastic packet of wafer-thin ham.
He drew the packet out and turned, holding it at arm’s length.
“What is this?”
“Ham.”
“This is not ham, Beauchamp. Jamón is ham. Jamón is a leg that has hung in a cellar for three years, to give it time to contemplate its journey. This is compressed offcuts of pork that is eighty per cent water. The pig has died for nothing.”
“It’s for sandwiches.”
“It is for the bin.” He returned it to the shelf with the tips of his fingers and shut the door on it. “We will address your sandwiches another time. I cannot fix everything in one evening, as I have only one functioning arm. I am disappointed, Beauchamp. But I have decided I can work with you.”
Beauchamp bit back a smile. “Thank you.”
Vidal waved his gratitude away with his good hand, with all the benevolence of a dictator granting an audience, and moved on to the bookshelves.
They filled the alcove beside the chimney breast, and Vidal worked along them with his head tipped sideways.
The collection was history-heavy, almost without exception.
Thick volumes on the Peninsular War, Stalingrad, a fat biography of Wellington, and three different accounts of the retreat from Kabul in 1842.
He drew one out and thumbed it open across the back of the armchair.
The margins carried small pencil annotations in a hand so level it could have been set with a ruler.
“You annotate your own books.”
“A habit from the MA.”
“Even your marginalia stands to attention.” He slid the book back home onto the shelf. “It is one of the great mysteries of my life that I find this attractive.”
The records lived in two wooden crates beneath the window, and Vidal lowered himself to one knee beside them and flicked through them with his good hand. Fleetwood Mac, Bowie, Kate Bush, the Stones, and a long run of things he did not recognise. Then his hand stopped on one.
“Beauchamp. This is an original pressing of Rumours.”
“It was my Dad’s twenty-first birthday present to me.”
Vidal eased it from the crate, turning it to the light to read the runout. “Your father has taste. I will tell him so at Christmas, and he will be unbearable about it until Easter.”
He slotted the record and rose, steadying himself on the windowsill, and that was when he saw them at the end of the lowest shelf, past the history and the field guides: a long run of slim spines in white, cream, and gold.
Theatre programmes, Royal Opera House most of them: Tosca, Peter Grimes, three seasons of La Bohème.
The spines were worn soft at the heads from handling, and there was no dust on any of them.
“Those were Julian’s.” Beauchamp had come to stand at the kitchen doorway with a tea towel in hand. “He’s got one for every production he ever worked on. I tried to contact him to take them — twice, actually. No response, but it seemed wrong to throw them out.”
Vidal said nothing, and let the silence stand open for him.
“When we were breaking up, he wanted to…contextualise, I suppose, how absent I’d been.
So he went through the lot and made a stack of the ones I’d actually attended with him.
” He folded the tea towel over the back of a chair, squared it, and looked at the shelf rather than at Vidal.
“It was a very small stack compared to the ones I hadn’t. ”
Beauchamp’s eyes ranged over the theatre programmes.
“I think,” Beauchamp said, “that it’s time I got those out of the flat.”
“Good.” Vidal crossed the rug to him. “I should like the shelf. I have a great many candles, Beauchamp, and they will need somewhere to live.”
He took Beauchamp’s hand in his good one, laced their fingers together, and kissed him. Then he rolled his hips up against Beauchamp in a long, deliberate grind.
Beauchamp’s breath went out of him against Vidal’s mouth, and Vidal quirked a brow towards the kitchen.
“No.” Beauchamp shook his head once. “The last time, I disgraced myself in three minutes flat in the Princess Royal’s meeting room. I intend to take rather longer over you tonight, Vidal.”
“Listen to you.” Vidal was laughing as Beauchamp drew him by the hand down the short corridor. “Now you have standards.”
The bed was made to precision, the corners folded at forty-five degrees, the pillows plumped and squared. Vidal looked at it with enormous satisfaction. “We are going to ruin this bed, Beauchamp.”
“There are clean sheets in the airing cupboard. I’ll show you how to do the corners properly afterwards.”
Beauchamp came round in front of him and undid the buttons of Vidal’s trousers, easing them down over his hips along with his silk boxers, steadying Vidal by his elbow when he stepped out of them. When his hands moved up to the front of Vidal’s shirt, Vidal caught his wrist.
“Leave it. The cast makes the sleeves a production, and I have wanted your mouth on me since the corridor.” The wanting had gone past patience; it sat low and insistent under his skin. “Tonight you take what’s on offer.”
“Yes, sir,” Beauchamp said, and the old address in this new context landed like a firm hand on Vidal’s cock.
Beauchamp turned Vidal with a hand at his waist, walked him backwards to the bed, and laid him down onto the duvet with the sling settled against his chest and a pillow already under his bad shoulder.
Vidal got his good hand into Beauchamp’s hair and mourned his loss of the other.
He wanted both arms around this man, so he could hold on with everything he had.
Instead his arm lay strapped uselessly across his chest while Beauchamp knelt on the rug between his knees and unknotted his own tie with one hand.
“The cast comes off in a fortnight,” Vidal said. “I am warning you now. You will be held properly then, at length.”
“Noted.” Beauchamp smiled and folded his tie over the bedpost.
Then his mouth was on Vidal’s cock. His tongue worked flat along the underside of Vidal’s shaft on every withdrawal, and at the crown he turned his head and pressed the sensitive tip deliberately into the slick heat of his inner cheek, dragging it there.
His lips slid wet and shameless down the shaft while he watched Vidal’s face.
“Beauchamp.” Vidal’s hand tightened in his hair. His thighs began to shake, and his own breathing went high and broken. “Beauchamp— ”
Beauchamp came off him in one long pull, and on the way up let his teeth graze, just barely, along the vein running up the underside of Vidal’s cock.
He sat back on his heels, his mouth wet and glistening.
Vidal’s cock smacked back against his belly, slick and aching, suddenly cold where the warmth of Beauchamp’s mouth had been.
“No.” Vidal’s whole body protested against this development. “You cannot — you absolute SADIST — ”
“Patience.” Beauchamp stood and unbuttoned his cuffs. “I told you. I intend to take rather longer over you tonight.”
Beauchamp came back from the drawer with a bottle of lube, set it on the duvet beside Vidal’s hip. His shirt went over the chair, the trousers were folded along their crease before they joined it, and then he was standing at the foot of the bed in nothing at all, letting Vidal take his fill of him.
“You have been hiding all of that under your unremarkable grey suits, my love,” Vidal sighed, taking in the broadness of Beauchamp’s chest, and his impressive cock rising towards his stomach.
Beauchamp smiled at him, taking his length into his hand and giving it a few slow pumps for Vidal’s benefit. “This is a crime against the public.”
Beauchamp knelt back onto the bed, took Vidal by his hips, and moved him up the mattress, onto the diagonal. He worked a pillow under his lower back and made all the adjustments needed to make sure his arm stayed safe.
The lube clicked open. Beauchamp pushed the hem of Vidal’s shirt up out of the way, smoothing it clear of his stomach with the flat of his hand, then worked him open, two fingers and then three, until Vidal was fisting the duvet one-handed.
Beauchamp settled back on his heels between Vidal’s thighs and took his cock in his fist. He stroked himself into full hardness, his foreskin sliding wet over the head.
“You are killing me, Beauchamp,” Vidal moaned.
Beauchamp huffed a breath through his nose, hooked Vidal’s knee up over his hip, notched the head of his cock against him, and pushed in, splitting Vidal open. He set an even pace. When Vidal’s hips came up to chase his thrusts, Beauchamp pressed a palm flat to his belly and held him down.
“Lie still,” Beauchamp said, and Vidal, who had never obeyed anyone in his life without at least putting up a token resistance, let his hips go slack.
Once Beauchamp was sure of his arm, and judged that Vidal was loose and open to him, his pace intensified. He got a hand under Vidal’s raised thigh, hauled it higher against his ribs, and started fucking him in earnest, hard enough that the headboard knocked the wall.
“There it is.” His voice had dropped low. “I’ve been wanting to fuck you quiet for months now.”
“Déu meu — Beauchamp — ”
“Well, that was a good ten-second run,” Beauchamp laughed, even as he drove deep into Vidal, keeping up his rapid, grinding pace. He wrapped his fist around Vidal’s cock, and stroked him in time with his own thrusts. “Go on, then. Let me hear how you’re liking it, Vidal.”
“You do not give the — ah — the orders here — ”
“Tonight I do.”
Vidal got as far as “I swear on the bones of every Montcada — ” before he came, hard. His heel dug into the small of Beauchamp’s back, and Beauchamp buried himself deep within him.
He dropped his forehead to Vidal’s good shoulder as he chased his own finish, his rhythm gone ragged at last, and then, to the genuine astonishment of Vidal, Beauchamp began to talk.
“Christ. Christ, Vidal, you feel — you’ve no idea, have you, you’ve been walking round that flat for months — fuck — months of you. In that robe, or completely starkers, and I just had to stand there without being able to do anything about it…”
Vidal lay very still beneath him and listened. Beauchamp had been his perfect shadow, and had never once given anything away. It turned out the man’s composure had a single point of failure, and Vidal’s body was it.
“— wanted you since I broke that bottle of Fonte di Foiano — ” Beauchamp drove into him deep and came mid-sentence, the confession lost in a long groan against Vidal’s shoulder.
The room settled around them. Vidal lay there grinning at the ceiling, his good hand drifting up to scratch at the short hair at the back of Beauchamp’s head. “Beauchamp, you are a proper TALKER. You are a filthy little commentator. I like this.”
“You bring it out in me, Vidal.” Beauchamp eased out of him with care, and kissed the inside of Vidal’s knee. Beauchamp busied himself with settling the pillows around Vidal and his bad arm before climbing in behind him and drawing the duvet up over them both.
“Your fingers.” Beauchamp picked up Vidal’s plastered hand and pressed the tips, one at a time. “Any pins and needles?”
“My fingers are in transcendent condition, Beauchamp. Every part of me is, thanks to your attentions.”
“Mm.” Beauchamp settled him back against his chest and pressed his mouth into Vidal’s hair. Around them the flat was very quiet.
Vidal lay in the circle of his arm and tried to stay quiet…but there were important things to be talked through. “Beauchamp, we must discuss the cohabitation protocols.”
Beauchamp lifted his head off Vidal’s shoulder, his face going serious. “Yes. Good idea. It’s just best practice to align expectations as early on in the relationship as possible.”
“These are my terms this time, and I shall be accepting amendments from no one. Clause one. The thermostat is to be set at twenty-four degrees in all seasons, to the approximate climate of Cardona in late May. I will not live in an English climate indoors as well as out.”
Beauchamp nodded.
“Clause two. The house olive oil will always be Fonte di Foiano, single estate. Nothing else can cross your threshold.”
“All right.”
“Clause three is on cured meats. Jamón comes from the deli on Moxon Street, and that atrocity in your fridge is to be relegated to the bin when you go to the kitchen to fetch me some water shortly. Clause four. Mercè is to have the armchair by the window as her spot.”
Beauchamp was grinning against the back of his neck.
“Agreed, sir.”
“Clause five—”