Chapter 1
Now
Barnaby opened the door before James could knock, which rather undermined the casual arrival he’d been rehearsing in the lift. Barnaby dropped into his usual bow, then shifted immediately into ‘friend’ mode.
“You came,” he said, in the tone of a man greeting a burns victim who had, against medical advice, discharged himself from hospital.
His pale eyes swept James from collar to cuff, checking his appearance for any outward manifestation of his internal distress, and his hand found James’s elbow, steadying him as if he expected him to come apart right there in front of him.
“I did tell you I was coming.”
“You did, yes.” Barnaby steered him into the hallway, sticking close to his side as if to make sure he could be right there in case James’s knees buckled. “How are you?”
“Perfectly well.”
“Are you, though?”
James gave him the smile he’d spent thirty minutes practising in his bathroom mirror that evening; an expression of benign serenity that would stand up against the prospect of seeing his ex-secret-boyfriend’s face on a hundred-inch television screen.
He’d practised it until the muscles on his face stopped twitching.
Until Benton knocked on the door to ask whether everything was all right and forced him out of there.
“I’m fine, Bash.”
Barnaby didn’t look convinced either, but his breeding forbade him from pressing the point more than twice. He settled for maintaining a light, steadying hold on James’s arm and gesturing down the corridor with his free hand.
“I should apologise for the flat,” he said, leading James through a hallway that gleamed like the inside of a new car. “It’s rather — well. You’ll see.”
James saw. Lex and Barnaby’s flat occupied the entire thirty-second floor of a glass tower in Canary Wharf, and every surface had the aggressive shininess of money recently and enthusiastically spent.
The floors were a pale engineered oak. The kitchen island was a slab of marble so vast it could have doubled as an altar, and behind it, mounted on the wall, stood a gold-leaf horse in mid-canter, three feet tall, rearing heroically towards the recessed lighting.
“He bought me that,” Barnaby said, following James’s gaze to the horse. “For my birthday.”
“It’s magnificent.”
Barnaby’s nose wrinkled in distaste. “It’s solid resin and weighs four stone. The movers nearly herniated their spines getting it up in the service lift.” Barnaby paused. “He thinks it looks like Meridian.”
“It looks nothing like Meridian.”
Barnaby pressed his lips together and regarded the horse. “All I wanted for my birthday was a long weekend away and a proper shagging. Instead I got this horse and, God help me, James, a diamond-encrusted Rolex.”
He said Rolex the way other people said STI.
James laughed. He couldn’t help it. Two years ago, Barnaby would sooner have set himself on fire than said the word shagging in front of another human being, and now here he was, standing in a Canary Wharf penthouse in his socks, mourning the orgasms he’d been denied in favour of Swiss horology and statuary.
Lex had not so much corrupted him as unsealed him, and the man who’d emerged was funnier, filthier, and unexpectedly forthcoming on the specific subject of what he wanted done to him in the bedroom.
James let himself be led through to the living room, where the television dominated the far wall like a small cinema screen.
Below it, spread across the coffee table and most of the available floor space, lay a proper feast. There were burgers in greaseproof paper sat in stacked formation beside a fortress of chip boxes, three pizza cartons fanned open to reveal their cooling contents, and at the centre of it all, Vidal stood behind a marble chopping board, conducting Lex and Beauchamp through the assembly of a crudités platter.
“The radishes go in concentric circles, Lex. Concentric. That means one inside the other.”
“I know what concentric means.”
“Then why are they in a line, Lex?”
Beauchamp, who had been tasked with fanning out the bresaola, was arranging each slice carefully, as Lex pinched a single radish between his thumb and forefinger and scowled at the radish line he’d formed.
James stood in the doorway and watched them; Vidal gesturing with a sprig of rosemary, Lex’s enormous hands fumbling a cherry tomato into position, Beauchamp quietly correcting everything Lex had done the moment Vidal’s back was turned.
These four people were the reason he’d come tonight, instead of watching alone in his rooms at the Palace with the curtains drawn.
If he could get through this at all, it would be because of them.
Vidal reached beneath the coffee table and produced a Waitrose bag. “I have purchased marshmallows,” he announced, upending the bag to reveal four packets of pink and white miniatures, “for throwing at the television whenever the American appears.”
He shot a filthy look at Lex, who was still wrestling with the radishes. “I had come prepared with tomatoes past their best-by date. However, Lex had concerns.”
“Yeah, I had concerns. My concerns were about my one-hundred-inch Samsung, Vidal.”
“You cannot put a price on catharsis.”
“It’s seven grand. That’s the price.”
James lowered himself onto the sofa next to Beauchamp and picked up a bottle of lager from the cluster on the side table.
“There will be no marshmallow throwing,” he said, to the room at large.
“There are no hard feelings whatsoever. We weren’t even really —” He took a sip. “We weren’t together together.”
Vidal scoffed audibly. “Darling,” he said. “You have been a limpet for six months. You’ve had your funeral face on at every single society wedding that you’ve attended since!”
James shrugged. “It’s the turn of the seasons.”
Vidal crossed the room and enveloped him in a fierce hug. James let himself be held against his friend’s chest, because resisting Vidal was impossible, and because, if he was being honest with himself, he needed it.
“Beauchamp, move,” Vidal commanded, without releasing James. “I need to sit beside him. He requires monitoring, and loving.”
“I don’t require monitoring. And be kind to Beauchamp. The man tolerates quite enough from you as it is.”
“Ahhh…but you do not deny the loving part. Beauchamp, you heard him. Now move.”
Beauchamp surrendered his seat without protest, and Vidal installed himself at James’s right with their shoulders pressed together.
Lex, meanwhile, had already heaped food onto a plate and set it on James’s lap without comment, which was Lex’s version of a rib-cracking hug. The plate was rather radish forward.
“Right.” Barnaby stood at the edge of the sofa with the remote in his hand, addressing the room but watching James. “Ready?”
James took another fortifying swig of his lager. “Ready.”
Barnaby pressed play.
The opening title of Better Half was a sweeping aerial shot of the English countryside, a string arrangement, and a serif font that managed to convey both prestige drama and you should be watching this on a Sunday evening with a glass of wine.
The title card dissolved into a wide shot of a candlelit dining room, and then the camera found its subject, and James’s carefully rehearsed composure met the test it had been built for.
Tristan looked very good. His dark hair was slightly longer than the last time James had seen it in person, swept back from his brow in a way that made his pale eyes enormous, and the freckles across the bridge of his nose were visible even in the low light of the scene.
On-screen, Tristan as his character ‘Ben’ was making dinner. The kitchen was small and warm and artfully cluttered with copper pans, a sourdough starter on the counter, a small herb garden in the window.
“He’s had his teeth whitened,” Vidal observed, with a sniff of distaste. “They are almost luminous. I could read by them.”
“His teeth are fine,” James said.
“His teeth are a navigational hazard, darling. Ships could steer by those teeth. If those teeth approached you on a dark road, you would be dazzled. You would veer into a ditch!”
Beauchamp shot James a look of quiet sympathy across the crudités platter and cleared his throat. “The cinematography’s rather good, actually. The lighting in this scene is—”
“The lighting is irrelevant, Beauchamp, because his teeth are providing their own. He is on full beams. A one-man hazard to oncoming traffic.”
The camera pulled back, and then the apron became the whole story.
It was a very nice apron, striped linen, ties knotted at the small of his back, and it was also the only thing Tristan was wearing.
The shot widened to include the full length of him: bare legs, bare arms, bare everything except for the rectangle of fabric that covered him from chest to mid-thigh, and even that was doing its job with a certain reluctance.
Vidal let out a scandalised gasp. He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, eyes fixed on the television, even as he scowled to show that he was very much morally committed to disapproving of what he was seeing.
On-screen, Ben crossed the kitchen with a plate balanced on one hand.
On it were seared scallops, a smear of something green, and a single edible flower.
He set it down in front of his co-star. The co-star’s suit was sharp, and he had a haircut that telegraphed that he was someone who had opinions about cryptocurrency and was the type to express them at length during dinner parties.
The co-star pushed his chair back, took hold of Ben’s hips, and pulled him down onto his lap.
The camera found the line of Ben’s spine beneath the apron strings, the shift of his hips as he settled, the slow deliberate roll of his body as his co-star’s hands disappeared beneath the linen.
The apron rode up and the scallops went forgotten.
The cinematography was, as Beauchamp had noted, rather good, and it captured everything with a tasteful explicitness that would no doubt win a BAFTA and make the Daily Mail sidebar combust.
James studied the gold-leaf horse across the room, which stared back at him with its glassy eyes. He needed something else to look at as he was confronted by the fictional rendering of something he had actual, physical memories of being on the receiving end of.
The sounds were worse than the visuals. He took a long pull of his lager, kept his eyes on the horse, and thought about cricket and tax policy as he listened to Tristan’s breathless little gasps.
“What the fuck is this?” Lex said, gesturing at the screen with a chip as Ben reached behind himself for a scallop and fed it to his co-star without breaking the rhythm of their lovemaking.
“What am I watching right now? Is this — is this food porn? Like, actual food and actual porn, at the same time?”
“It’s on the BBC, Lex.” James set his lager down. “It’s a prestige drama about a gay trad influencer and his manosphere-obsessed husband.”
On-screen, Tristan’s co-star came with a groan, and Ben stayed where he was, settled across his lap, reaching for the plate of scallops as though nothing of particular consequence had occurred beneath the apron.
“Did you have a good day, baby?” Ben murmured, and fed his husband another scallop with his fingers.
His co-star said something about a meeting, and Ben listened with his chin on the man’s shoulder, tidying the collar of his suit jacket. The camera held on them in a long, quiet take.
It was the little acts of care on-screen that got to him.
Ben wiping his co-star’s mouth with his thumb, refilling his wine, or leaning into him whenever he laughed.
Tristan had done every single one of those with him.
He’d been on the receiving end of the thumb across his lip after a mouthful of wine.
He’d had Tristan’s quiet laugh pressed into the side of his neck, and he still craved it six months on.
Lex laughed to defuse the tension as Tristan dismounted from his co-star and treated the camera to a lingering view of his arse. He leaned back against the sofa and shook his head.
“Well,” he said. “I can see now why you had to make him choose between his work and you, mate.”
Barnaby kicked him, his toe connecting with Lex’s shin hard enough to make Lex yelp and grab his leg, while Barnaby glared at him with clear murderous intent.
“What the fuck, Barns?!”
James kept his eyes on the screen, where Tristan was smiling, the sunlight catching the freckles on his nose. “I didn’t make him choose, Lex,” James said. “He did that all on his own.”
He reached for his lager, and drank, and watched the man he’d been in love with smile at someone else.