Smirking, but only inwardly, he stretched out his legs to the fire and commented to Ben when she was out of ear shot, ‘I have no intention of us both being tied up for three weeks, but there were odd tensions there I did not like, and so we can come and go, monitor the situation.’
‘Three weeks on Light Island mooching around in your new boat and causing mischief for Emilia. Yeah, that sounds about right.’
‘Ack, causing mischief, as you so cheekily put it, for you for the last fifteen years has made you the man you are now. I keep telling you: imagine how boring your life would have been without me.’
Ben scoffed lightly but then began to toy with his empty glass. ‘I guess it’s an indication of something then that I don’t—imagine it. Can’t. I can’t even form a single impression of what my life would be like without you in it exactly as you are.’
‘Excellent. Two votes in my favour. I shall ask the baby tyrant when she gets home from school, and if she concurs that will be a full house.’
Ben rolled his eyes. ‘I sometimes wonder if she had to choose between us, which one she’d go for.’
Aleksey stretched out a finger and placed it on Ben’s knuckle. ‘That choice would be impossible for her, for without one of us there is not the other.’
Ben grinned shyly and tapped his finger back. Then he leaned back in his seat, watching the flames. ‘And you’re forgetting Miles. His vote counts.’
Aleksey snorted. ‘He is my covert operator, my enemy behind lines—the one consistently overlooked but the most loyal of all.’
‘The most in your thrall, you mean. We’re all hoping that will wear off one day and he’ll see what’s behind the façade.’
‘I sincerely hope not. He might start being cheeky and thinking he’s the superior one in our relationship.’
Ben kicked his ankle and then left his foot there, boots just touching. His legs looked incredibly long in his faded jeans. Aleksey raised his gaze from studying them to Ben’s face, which was in profile as he watched the fire. Every once in a while, he could look at Ben Rider and remember what it felt like to be a stranger to this man—to be the one who saw him but did not have him. No, to be the one who saw him butlongedfor him. The intensity of the yearning was a pain stabbing the heart. The gap between want and have was vast. And Aleksey could admit to himself now that for the four years they had circled each other in the shadows, he had not had Ben Rider in any meaningful way at all. They’d had sex. And for every single one of those four years he had wanted more. He had wantedthisbut had not known how to name it—would even have derided it if anyone had described it to him.
‘Stop thinking so much.’
Aleksey snorted softly. ‘I was thinking about you.’
‘I know you were. I have spooky spidery awareness of you at all times, remember. God, I wish Ems would hurry up. I’ll pass out soon.’
‘How was the food in the café you fitted in between shopping?’
‘I only had a pasty and—very funny. I did ten miles this morning before you rolled over and graced the world with your consciousness once more.’
‘You will miss that on Light Island. At Christmas.’
‘I could always take up swimming. I’ve heard that’s a pastime down there.’
Aleksey recalled the new challenge to anyone attempting the swim they’d done but decided not to mention this. Instead, he offered lightly, ‘Apparently,marinearchaeology is the in thing for archaeologists, if such archaic people can beinabout anything, so the blond wonder’s students taking part will get dive qualified as a bonus.’
‘You could as well then.’
Before Ben could bring up the tricky subject of fake qualifications and the unfortunate outcome of their last dive together, Aleksey changed the subject. ‘Morwenna Eames is growing on me. Did you know her father was murdered?’
Ben swivelled around to face him. ‘What? No. How? Why?’
‘I don’t know. I didn’t get a chance to ask her, as she left in a rush to catch her train. But there was this unpleasant little nonentity at the meeting, some museum thingy or other, and he murdered her father. Lynched him. She told me.’
Ben was staring at him. ‘Your brain is very weird.’
Emilia returned with another round, and half a dozen packets of crisps, which she cheerily informed him she’d put on the tab with the food. As she sat down and handed them their glasses, she said, #
‘We have a lot of people like Jerome Barthrop at college—in the tutorials mainly. There’s always this tension about what you can and can’t say. It’s so weird. You’d think we’d be able to say anything really and then get argued down if they were bad ideas. But you can’t. It’s like Bluebeard’s wife—forbidden knowledge.Don’t open that door. It’s the central foundational myth across all cultures, isn’t it? Forbidden knowledge that we, mortals, decided we had a right to and sostole, and we’re being punished for ever since. The Prometheus myth as a good example. Icarus? Eden, obviously. Some of our professors seem to think they’re the new gods of keeping the forbidden knowledge.’
For once, Ben wasn’t the only one not following this conversation, and Aleksey had a sudden, awful vision of what he’d just signed himself up for in the spring: three weeks with people who knew more than he did about things. To his complete astonishment, Ben came back with, ‘It was a good thing though, wasn’t it—Bluebeard’s wife? Not to look behind that door. That got her killed. And the apple got us all kicked out of paradise.’
Emilia frowned. ‘No, he was going to kill heranyway. By looking behind the door, she discovered her fate and was able to prevent it. It wasn’t an apple but the fruit of knowledge, and by tasting of it we were given our sense of ourselves as creatures separate from God—not his pets. Prometheus gave us fire—which led to us reaching the moon with our technology.’
Aleksey looked to Ben to see what the wise one would come back with next. He was idly twisting his bracelets around his wrist. ‘Squeezy reckons the world is flat, and thateveryoneis keeping it secret from us—says he can prove it.’
