Chapter Forty
Back then
James’s hand hung in the air where Tristan’s chin had been.
“No,” Tristan said again.
James heard the word, and couldn’t connect it to anything that had come before it. He’d been describing a future that was, by any reasonable measure, a happy one. He couldn’t have heard Tristan correctly. Or maybe the American in Tristan had misunderstood something in the King’s English.
“No?” James asked.
Tristan’s arms were at his sides. His bow tie hung loose and his jaw had its stubborn set. “I’m sorry, James. But no. I can’t.”
Through the walls, the bass line of the band’s next song thumped steadily. Someone in the marquee shrieked with laughter, high and bright.
James held up an appeasing hand. “You’re overwhelmed,” he said.
“That’s completely understandable. I’ve just thrown an enormous amount of information at you in the space of a slow dance.
I was swept away in the moment, I’ll grant you.
” He took a step towards Tristan. “We don’t have to decide anything tonight.
There’s no deadline on this. The whole thing can wait until you’re ready. ”
“I won’t be ready.”
“Tristan. Let’s talk about this during our next weekend at Windsor.
I’ll clear the Saturday, and we’ll sit down properly.
You can ask me whatever you need to ask, and we’ll make our plans together.
That’s what I should have done in the first place, but Cecil and I got to talking… How does that sound?”
“James.” Tristan’s voice was very steady. “I’m saying no. Not no for now. No. I’m telling you that I don’t have it in me to be the one standing next to King James III.”
“Where is this coming from?” James asked, bewildered. “Tris, we’ve been going well. Better than well. I’ve been hinting towards this for months, and you’ve been…you were right there with me.”
“We’ve been going well inside our own little bubble, James,” Tristan corrected him. “What we have, it won’t survive out in the real world and you know that.”
“No, Tristan. You need to give us a chance.”
“I have, James, and I’m glad that I did.
But I have a whole life that I love in California.
My family misses me. I have my friends, and my work, and I’m good at it.
” Tristan’s chin came up. “I know I’m good at it.
And people are only just starting to see it now.
The reviews and the offers that are coming in are what I’ve been working towards my entire life, and it’s all happening right now.
Brad says these moments don’t come around twice.
You ride them or you watch them go, and I can’t watch it go. Not for anyone.”
James shook his head, and kept shaking it, trying to dislodge the ‘no’, and the ‘not for anyone’.
“I love you,” Tristan said. “And this has been the most extraordinary time of my life. But we both knew this had an ending.”
“I don’t accept that, Tristan,” James said. “I’ve been working at building something for us, and you knew that. You sat across from me while I talked about Caroline curtsying to you, and you ate your pasta, and you let me carry on dreaming about something that you knew had an ending?”
“I didn’t ask you to do any of that.”
“No. But you also didn’t stop me from dreaming,” James pointed out.
“I didn’t know how to tell you,” Tristan admitted. “Every time I tried to bring it up, you’d say something about next year, or the spring programme, and you looked so happy that I couldn’t bring myself to say anything.”
“So you waited until my best friend’s wedding.”
“I waited until I couldn’t anymore, because I wanted to stay with you for as long as I could.
Because even you have to admit that we’ll never have what Lex and Barnaby have.
It’s not a possibility for us. I’m twenty-five, James.
I love my acting. I know your people might not think it’s a ‘proper job’, but I want to see how far I can take things. ”
James let out an ugly moan. He reached for Tristan with both hands, hauling him forward by the shirt front because if he could just get his arms around him then he could stop this.
He got a fist in Tristan’s lapel and pulled him close, pressing his forehead against Tristan’s temple, breathing him in.
“No, Tris. No.”
Tristan’s hands came up to James’s wrists, pulling at his grip.
“James—”
The doors flew open.
Vidal came through first, backwards, with a hand fisted in Beauchamp’s shirt and Beauchamp’s mouth on his throat.
Beauchamp had an arm braced against the doorframe and the other clamped around Vidal’s waist, steering them into the room.
Vidal’s fingers were already scrabbling at Beauchamp’s belt, working the buckle. Beauchamp saw them first.
He went rigid in the doorway, his hand still on Vidal’s hip, his belt half undone.
Vidal peeled himself away to follow Beauchamp’s line of sight, took in the scene, and grinned.
“I see the two of you have had the same idea as us,” he announced, entirely delighted. “Beauchamp, we have competitors for the morning room. I blame you for dawdling at the bar.”
“We were just leaving,” Tristan said lightly. He stepped sideways out of James’s grip. “Enjoy yourselves.”
Tristan slipped past Vidal and through the open door. His footsteps were quick on the corridor’s stone floor. James stood in the lamplight and listened to them go.
“Sir?” Beauchamp had a hand holding his belt together.
James smiled at them both. “Excuse me,” he said, and walked past them into the corridor.
He caught up with Tristan near the entrance to the south lawn. Tristan had stopped walking. His palm rested on the door handle, and he stared through the glass panel at the marquee’s lit canvas.
“Tristan.”
Tristan turned to face him and James saw that his eyes were wet.
He stopped three feet from Tristan, which was as close as he could stand without giving in to the impulse to reach for him again.
“Okay,” James said. The word cost him everything he had. “I’m just asking you…No one can know. Not tonight. You go into that marquee, and you finish the evening. You dance, and you laugh with Caroline, and you give Barnaby and Lex nothing to worry about on their wedding night.”
James looked at him. The lamplight from the corridor caught the dampness on his lashes, and his loose bow tie.
He crossed the three feet and took both ends of the bow tie in hand.
Tristan went very still as James’s fingers worked the silk into shape, crossing the fabric, folding, then pulling it through.
He’d tied his own thousands of times. Tying someone else’s required the same motions in reverse, which meant looking directly at the person wearing it, so that he was looking at Tristan’s face from six inches away while he said what he needed to say.
“You’re right,” James said. He settled the knot against Tristan’s throat and tugged it straight. “The Crown requires total commitment. It always has, so thank you for telling me how you feel now. I needed to hear it.”
Tristan didn’t answer.
“I thought—” James smoothed the wings of the bow tie flat against Tristan’s collar, taking his time.
“Well. It doesn’t matter what I thought.
You have extraordinary things ahead of you, Tris.
You’re going to be brilliant, and I’m not going to be the reason you don’t get every last thing you want out of your life.
Because I love you, Tris. I want you to remember that, no matter what. ”
He gave the bow tie a final, precise adjustment that it didn’t need.
“So that’s it,” James said. “A clean break. That’s best for both of us.”
He dropped his hands from Tristan’s collar and stepped away.
“Can you go out there?”
“Yes,” Tristan said.
“Good,” James said. “Then go.”
Tristan pulled the door open. The sound of the band swelled in and then the door swung shut behind him, and James was alone in the corridor with the muffled noise of a party he would have to walk back into and pretend to enjoy for the remainder of the evening.
He straightened his white tie, then pressed the heel of his hand against the centre of his chest, where his heart had come loose and was sitting wrong against his ribs. He held it there long enough to catch his breath, then he returned to the wedding.