“You didn’t answer questions because I never asked any—not any that mattered anyway. Things have changed. You’ve changed them. Maybe you should stop poking tigers.”
Nikolas chuckled softly. “I’m thinking about poking something else soon, if for no other reason than to shut you up.”
The third question, he had a feeling, was going to put a distinct dampener on Nikolas’s mood, but he was going to ask it anyway. “Who else have you told you love, and why did you lose them?”
“That is enough, Ben. I am not prepared to be questioned like this.”
“Have you ever heard an English expression ‘be careful what you wish for’?”
“Of course. We have that expression in Danish, too.”
“Well, there you are, you know what it means. You wanted this. You wanted me to be more…I don’t know…in tune with you? Well, here I am. You can’t have it both ways. I want to know why you are so afraid to love.”
“I am afraid of nothing. It is you who has to shed emotional—”
“Are you trying that trick of turning this conversation back to me?”
“Is it working?”
Ben leant back. “Why don’t you like birthdays?”
“Enough! Stop this, Ben. Good God, the irony of this does not escape me. I have created a monster. Come to bed.” He stood up and held out his hand. “Please.”
The please was so unexpected Ben almost fell for the distraction. He rose and climbed onto the well-used sheets, but before he let Nikolas press him down, he twisted away, smiling at the grunt of annoyance. “One thing. I want to know one thing about your past that is true.”
Nikolas lay back, regarding the ceiling as if seeking divine help. His swollen cock lay leaking on his belly. “A monster child.”
“Stop being melodramatic. One thing—for now.”
“All right. What do you want to know?”
Ben remembered his last free question and how he had wasted it. He wanted to make this worthwhile. “Is Nikolas Mikkelsen your real name?” This seemed very important somehow in this game of identities. Nikolas hesitated. Ben clenched his jaw. “You’re going to lie to me.”
Nikolas pursed his lips. “If I say no you will only want to know my real name, and then you are no further forward, for I would not tell you. If I say yes you will not believe me. Ask something else.”
“Damn it! Will you tell me the truth if I do?”
“…Yes.”
“Promise me.”
“Yes! Jesus, Ben, this is not a tail I am wagging here. I need for you to turn over and shut up.”
“I will. Okay, then if you promise to…okay, okay…What question should I ask you? That’s my question. You tell me what the real question about you is.”
Nikolas held his gaze for a moment, calculation behind his dark eyes. Then he blinked and sat up, swinging his legs off the bed, back to Ben. “That is not fair.”
“No. It’s not. You’re not being fair to me. But most importantly, you’re not being fair to yourself. You wanted me to be here for you, but the thought of turning around and actually seeing me here in your real life terrifies you. So, answer my bloody question.”
Nikolas turned his head to look at him. “Then I think the question you should ask me is not if Nikolas Mikkelsen is my real name but who Nikolas Mikkelsen really was. There, you have had your one question, and now you cannot actually ask it.”
Ben left the bed and went to stand by the window, leaning on the wall, gazing out at the beautiful grounds. He felt Nik come up behind him and embrace him lightly, his straining need very evident in the hard press against Ben’s backside. “There is a fairytale in my country, Ben, a story about a young man who falls in love with a mysterious stranger who comes to his cottage one day. He is so entranced and dazzled by this stranger that he wants to tell everyone. When he does, they laugh at him, and that laughter reveals what really came to his door that day in the guise of the beautiful stranger—something grotesque and so damaged by its past that it had died inside a long time ago. What did he gain, Ben, in seeing the truth?”
Ben began to stroke his thumb over Nikolas’s hands, which were spread on his chest. “But that’s not where the story ends. He couldn’t get over loving the stranger. Although he could now see the monster, he remembered loving the man, and his love was so strong and so constant that the monster felt it as a real force, and one day he looked in a mirror, and he too saw the beautiful stranger—alive and vibrant. The end.”
Nikolas chuckled. “You totally made that up.”
Ben lifted up one of Nikolas’s hands and kissed it. “And you only know that because you made the first dumb part up.”
