Nikolas leant back and took a deliberate drag on the cigarette and blew smoke in Ben’s face. “And you don’t like this new me?”
Ben put his head in his hands. “Christ. Christ on a stick. You are bloody fuckingperfectlike this. How can this be happening to me? I wanted you exactly like this, right now, even wearing that old damn T-shirt of mine…in every bloody fantasy…”
“You fantasise about T-shirts? How peculiar.”
“Stop making fun of me! See? This is what I mean!” He got up and leant right into Nikolas’s face. “The minute I relax into this and start to enjoy it, it’s going to go, isn’t it?”
Nikolas sighed and turned to stare out of the window. “I cannot promise you certainties, Ben. We have both lost many things.”
“But I’m going to loseyou.” He’d said it at last. He swallowed deeply. “I’d never had you, see? Before. It was just something we did.”
“Sex?”
“Yes. Sex.”
“And now?”
Ben gave him a look. “It’s not just sex now, is it? It’s—I—I can’t lose you.”
Nikolas smiled. “Maybe I could wear a tag.”
“Don’t. It’snotfunny.”
“It is a little, Benjamin. Even you must see that.”
“Even me. What does that mean?”
Nikolas raised an eyebrow, turned the page in the paper, and said cautiously, “I am not the only one who has changed, am I?”
“Huh?”
He glanced up then back to the paper. “No. I want to—as you would no doubt charmingly put it—get laid tonight, so I think I have said enough.”
The paper was removed. Nikolas sighed. “You were the cold one, Ben. Not me. I was…” He looked up as if for inspiration and apparently found it in the sunlight, continuing, “I was undercover as a bastard. You actually were one.”
Ben was speechless. Until he wasn’t. “Bollocks!”
“You saw me only when it suited you. You had other…lovers.”
Ben was so outraged he actually slammed his fist into the wall. “Youaremarried! And you ordered me to fuck other people whenever it suited you!”
“I didn’t order you to move your lover into your cottage though, did I, Ben?”
“Wow. My God.”
Nikolas shrugged. “So, I have not really changed all that much, Benjamin. I believe I am very much what I once was.” He looked across the table. “Totally obsessed with you.”
Whatever Ben had been about to say—the cruel, possibly irrevocable things he’d been about to say—died on his tongue. He frowned. “No. You’re totally twisting the truth. That’s me. I mean…I loved you first…You…”
Nikolas began to laugh. “I made you say it. It has been three weeks, Ben. It has been bottled up in that amusingly muddled brain of yours for three weeks. Now it is out; you cannot take it back, and can I now please have some peace and quiet? You love me. I am still here, and I think the world will continue to turn.”
Ben was so thoroughly outmanoeuvred he sat for some time staring out into the tiny walled garden. After half an hour, he realised he hadn’t been watching Nikolas, but in that time the annoying man hadn’t disappeared. He’d not changed. He was still there with bed-mussed hair, an old T-shirt, and yet another cigarette. Ben leant across the table and removed it from Nikolas’s fingers. “Apparently, I love you, so you’re giving this up. As of today.”
§§§
The first time they had a client, Nikolas was more his old self. He was the perfect ambassador for the new office of dubious activities they were in the process of establishing. As they couldn’t advertise, word spread slowly about their services, but eventually, one Wednesday afternoon in early April, they sat in a restaurant awaiting their first client’s arrival. Nikolas wanted a cigarette so he was in a bad mood, but outwardly he was calm and detached. Ben was nervous about being involved in this phase of the operation. He preferred being told where to point his gun and what to shoot. Negotiating contracts was not his forte. “Do you think those men over there are sleeping together?”
“What?” Ben resisted the urge to look wildly around. “What the—?”
