Chapter 25
Lando
The Bonnie Marie bobs gently on the water. It’s the Saturday of the bank holiday weekend, it’s boiling, and everyone who’s anyone is out parading along the harbour, taking in the last of the summer, and drinking to the end of the warm, light evenings.
Restaurants and bars are overflowing with al fresco diners, and folk line the embankments and jetties, dangling their legs over the edges as they sip rum-based cocktails and bottles of Italian beer.
The air smells of coconut sun cream and barbequed meat, and the bass from a hundred different speakers and the chatter and laughter of friends fills the sky.
Serasi is due to return to Cambridge for the final year of her history master’s next week, and Harry will be starting up training again for the Bath Centurions.
It’s the last weekend we can all hang out as a foursome, and we’re currently chilling out on my dad’s Sunseeker yacht, which is moored up in Poole Harbour.
I’m not allowed to sail it because I’m a twenty-year-old fuckhead with no respect or regard for anyone else’s property, and we’re talking about a million pound boat here.
Since Daisy and I had our talk four months ago, and since Harry and I decided we would keep our friendship on a platonic level, we haven’t even so much as kissed.
Okay, we have snuggled. But really, who can blame me? Harry is very snuggleable, and even though I sometimes feel his reactions to our snuggles—against my hip or ass—he never tries to take it any further.
Which must be killing him. It’s killing me, and I don’t get the same urges that he does.
He’s staring at me from the other side of the aft-deck dining table.
Every now and then he shoots Serasi and Daisy a glance like he’s waiting for something bad to happen, or to get told off for being too close to me.
The girls are sunbathing on the bow deck, and despite the rapid descent of the sun, the pair haven’t moved for a good few hours.
“So, your dad named the boat after your mum?” Harry says. He takes a sip of his champagne.
Beside us, the professional chef my father hired to cook burgers packs up her things and carries them out to her catering van nearby.
Originally, my dad had planned to spend the bank holiday on his beloved yacht with his slightly less beloved wife, Juliette, and his even less beloved son, moi, but at the last minute he was called away to Sofia in Bulgaria for some definitely non-reschedulable reason.
So he asked if I wanted to make use of it with my friends. It was a no-brainer.
“He loved her. My mum, I mean,” I say as though defending him, but I don’t know why. “I’m sure he loves me too, but he just . . . doesn’t show it in the way most parents do, I guess. He’d rather chuck a bunch of credit cards at me than pull himself away from work shit for ten minutes.”
“I’m not complaining. I’ve never been on a yacht before,” Harry says, swirling the Veuve Clicquot in his glass. He flashes the girls another furtive glance.
“Why do you keep looking at them?” I ask.
Harry rubs his lips together. Pauses. “Do you think . . . if we get them pissed enough, they won’t see us sleeping in the same bedroom?”
“Harry Ellis!” I pretend to be shocked. “Maybe.”
We had loosely agreed that Daisy and Serasi would take the master stateroom, while I would sleep in the VIP guest room, and Harry would have the third one with twin single beds. Only because Daisy was insistent we shouldn’t share.
“Lan. Boats, sunsets, booze? . . . It’s all sounding a little too romantic,” she’d said.
“No, not romantic at all. It’s a party boat if anything. But I only have three friends, so it’ll be a teeny party. We’ll get wrecked up, though, babes,” I’d replied.
She’d agreed to come after that, but only on the condition we all attend as friends and nothing more. Still, she’s been sucking Serasi’s face nonstop since we arrived, so it’s alright for some.
“It’s probably for the best if we don’t share a bed,” I say.
“No, you’re right. We definitely can’t let anything happen between us,” he says, and then winks at me.
“How many glasses have you had?”
Harry shrugs. I love tipsy Harry. He’s one of my favourites.
“Oh, before I forget. I did a thing for you . . .” I say. I’d been working on something for Harry for a while now and had finally made headway. The hardest part was being subtle, but not too subtle. “Don’t be mad, but I found Lionel’s IG account and we’ve been messaging back and forth for a while.”
“Oh my god, did you fuck him?” Wow, his mind went straight there.
“No, of course not.”
I haven’t fucked anyone since we met. I haven’t needed to. Not that I would tell him any of this.
“But we got chatting about you, and I casually dropped into the conversation how awesome you are, and beautiful, and how big your cock is.”
Harry snort laughs. He and I both know his cock is distinctly average for a man of his height, but he’s as much of a compliment whore as I am, so he laps it up.
“Anyway, he’s going to message you next week or whenever and ask you out on a date. I hope that’s all right?”
He stares at me. Blinks a few times.
“I mean, if it’s not, you can always just tell him no. Or I can suggest I got the wrong end of the stick.”
Still, he’s quiet.
“Harry?”
“Um . . . What did he say about me?”
Okay, phew, at least he’s talking. “He said that you’re very cute, and that he’d always assumed we were together and didn’t want to step on any toes,” I say. Harry’s still processing, and it’s unnerving. “He said he wants to take you to Casks.”
He nods, very slowly at first, then a little less slowly, but still too glacial for it not to be entirely unsettling. “Why did you do this?”
“Because . . .” I’m going to be honest with him. Lay everything out. Tell him the complete truth. Well, the complete truth except for that one teeny weeny thing at the end. “You’re literally my most favourite person in the entire world, and I really, really want to see you happy.”
He swallows. “Lando . . . What about us?”
“What about us?”
“Is . . .” Harry looks off into the distance, to a crowd of white students playing reggae through a Sonos. He looks back at me without seeing them. “Is . . . there ever a chance for . . . us?”
Ouch. Fuck. Shit. My heart.
What do I say to that?
“Harry—”
“Boys!” Daisy yells, peering her head through the gaps in the boat’s bodywork. “Photos!”
“Come on, losers!” Serasi calls out, sitting herself on the edge of the deck, her legs dangling down the hull.
Harry spares me one last look before dragging himself to his feet to join them.
We snap some pictures, the girls all smiling and giggling. Harry fixes his face into his perfect “media day professionally cheerful” expression, but he keeps catching my eye, and I know there is meaning behind those glances.
All four of us stay out on the deck until the sun has well and truly set. Parties are still raging on the shoreline, and we’ve chatted about everything and nothing, and yet somehow, Harry and I have managed not to speak to each other directly.
He’s right there, within arm’s reach, but I keep my hands to myself, and I don’t touch him, no matter how much I want to.
Need to.
Eventually, after the girls have put away four lots of fifty-quid-a-piece champagne, they start talking about retiring to their stateroom.
I kiss them both on the cheeks and send them off to their beds.
Then, outside the kids’ stateroom, I make a big show of bidding Harry goodnight, loud enough to be heard in the cabin at the front of the boat, and I shut myself in my room.
Lana del Rey plays through my room’s Bluetooth speaker system, because the moment calls for Lana del Rey and only Lana del Rey.
My heart is beating in overdrive, and I’m sweating, adrenaline setting fire to every single cell in my body. I pace for five, six, seven minutes.
I can’t go in there. I can’t go in there. I can’t go in—
Fuck it. I’m going in.
He needs to understand it can never work between us. I need to resolve this.
End this, right now.
I yank open the door and Harry’s right there, still fully clothed, which is kinda jarring since I’m used to him stripping naked the second he’s alone. My fist closes around his shirt, and I tug him into my room.
“Lando, before you can tell me we can’t be together like that, I need to say one thing.” Harry’s out of breath, as though he’s been running laps. I wonder if he’d been pacing too, practicing what he needed to say.
It won’t make a jolt of difference. Whatever he’s going to say, however he’s about to convince me we could work, he’s wrong. Nothing can ever happen between us. We’re simply not compatible like that, and it wouldn’t be fair to anyone.
“Sure,” I say. I sit down at the end of the bed, leaving a gap for Harry, but he doesn’t join me.
“I just want to say that I . . . understand. You’ve told me before that we can’t be anything more than friends who fuck around now and then, and I thought, okay, maybe one day you might change your mind.”
I open my mouth to reply, but Harry holds up a palm.
“Please. You can say whatever you need to afterwards, but I’ve been thinking a lot of thoughts recently, and even though I don’t fully understand your reasons for not wanting to be together, and there are definitely some things you haven’t told me, I wanted to let you know that you don’t have to.
Tell me, that is. You don’t need to explain why you don’t want to be with me.
That maybe it’s not something for me to understand.
You’re my best friend, but you don’t owe me an explanation.
And you especially don’t owe me a relationship.
“I love you, Lando, as a mate of course, and it kills me to think you’re sacrificing some part of yourself just to stay as my friend.”
I’m on my feet already, but I can’t remember standing. “Harry, it’s not—”