‘Feet—just washing up?’ Ben turned back to regard the object lying innocently on the patio, as if it could talk and tell them it’s tale.
‘So it seems. How very perplexing.’
Ben toed it with his boot. ‘Do you think Radulf dug it up somewhere?’
‘It doesn’t look dirty, does it? Rather spanking clean really—for a poor chap’s missing foot.’
Aleksey nodded. ‘He was nosing around on the beach beneath the light this evening.’
‘Ah, well, there you go. The currents from the west do pass the island to the south—as I’m sure you have discovered. Michael has filled me in on some of your adventures recently, so this is probably a little unfortunate revisiting of the past we shall explore no further. Would you like me to dispose of it?’ Aleksey looked up at the old man’s lowered head. He heard something in this outwardly kind offer that pricked some innate senses that lay dormant these days—not gone entirely, just hibernating until they were needed again. He glanced across the lawn to the woods where he’d seen the shadowy figure lurking and played the events back in his head. The moron had seen the foot. He’d left. Harry had suddenly appeared, and the idiot, this thorn in his side, had obviously fetched him but didn’t want this known. Now he was quietly lurking in the woods, minding his own business, which was so entirely unlike him that it was genuinely unnerving.
Distracted, therefore, he replied simply, ‘Yes. Thank you.’ He nodded more sharply than he intended to Ben. ‘Come.’ Catching the recalcitrant Radulf by his collar, he began to return to the house.
Before they had gone very far, Ben murmured for his ears alone, ‘I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt thatcomewas aimed at the dog, not me.’
Aleksey paused and hung his head, toeing the ground. ‘Yes. Sorry.’
‘What’s wrong—other than the obvious? Even if you weigh them down, bodies float to the surface after a few days. Gulls and currents and fish and stuff break them up pretty quickly. It’s one foot, Nik. We got off lightly when you think about it. Imagine if it had been a head…’
Aleksey couldn’t put his fears into words—he often couldn’t, for it wasn’t one thing, one word, or one expression that set his teeth on edge, made his scalp prickle, never one obvious fact that he could point to and say, there, that’s what’s wrong. His understanding was more…ethereal, he supposed. Just as he had once stood on the banks of the Volga sensing the million dead voices calling to him, most of his forebodings were felt like vibrations in his bones. Being told he was going extinct, the stranger in the graveyard, the howling across the moors under a snow-grey dome of bitter sky, an old professor being lynched and his grandchild just disappearing off the face of a hillside through a moment’s inattention—it felt as if, once again, there was a pattern he wasn’t seeing. And now Squeezy and Harry. The old admiral had saidwould you like me to dispose of it for you, but that is not what he’d been thinking. Harry, like Ben, was his anchor. He and the old man had survived the same bitter personal winters and were now out in the sunlit uplands together. If Harry wavered, then he, Aleksey, staggered on the shaking ground in his wake. He could explain it no better, even to himself.
He put his free arm over Ben’s shoulders and kissed his temple, resting his chin on the hard shoulder for a moment. Ben lifted his hand and ran his cool fingers into his blond strands, and Aleksey could not help but smile to himself. Fingers tugging his hair were not unknown to him at Christmas either, but now it was Ben, and the gesture was so entirely different than it had once been that he felt again the intense surge of happiness he had experienced on the lighthouse steps. Happiness this deep needed contrast to be appreciated. He could only see what he had now because of what had gone before. And, he supposed, he ought to take Tim Watson’s view of him as the perfect man in the same light. He knew he was so far from perfect it was ludicrous, but, compared to what he had once been, he could almost call himself on the way to being occasionally good.
Being a sporadically good man and being happy were not to be dismissed lightly.
He was not about to fuck any of it up by staring into the abyss again. Even one which had apparently just regurgitated a rotting human foot.
* * *
Chapter Twenty-Two
The next day Ben suggested they all go to St Mary’s for the Boxing Day sales. Aleksey couldn’t think of anything he’d rather do less, but given the idea was presented to him as Ben was placing slow bites across his shoulders as he lay prone and stretched in the warmth of their bed, he couldn’t summon the energy needed to object. Each bite sent a tingle straight to his cock, which he’d believed entirely wrung out and empty, as they’d begun on this indulgent start to the day before dawn. Ben had woken suddenly, entirely revived from his rare over-indulgence of the Christmas feast, and raring to do something extremely physical. Perhaps the additional calories had just needed to be burnt off, and not having his usual outlets for his excessive energy, he’d poundedhimfor what had seemed like hours, instead of the soft peat of Dartmoor, which was Ben’s usual victim at such times.
Another bite brought him back to the moment, this one more serious and possibly breaking skin, presumably to elicit some response to the shopping plan. ‘Ow.’ He squirmed in genuine pain as another bite came lower on a prominent rib.
‘Stop thinking then and tell me how much you like my suggestion. Reginald said he’d treat us all to lunch in the Castle Hotel.’
‘Well, there you go. You do not need me to come as well.’
He heard a very quiet huff from behind. ‘Poor baby, are you feeling…redundant?’
Ben was clever like this. He appeared not to be noticing the subtle undertones of the events going on around him whilst at the same time getting them only too well. And then, when he knew the time was right, when defences were down, he aired the issue, brought it into the sunlight. To disinfect it, Aleksey assumed. He indicated that he wanted to turn over and did so, Ben now straddling his waist, sitting where he was most appreciated. They regarded each other expectantly. It was hard, Aleksey knew, for any two men to have heart-to-heart conversations. It just wasn’t really what men did. Any attempt at such a thing was usually met with bluff and banter—especially amongst the English, he had noticed.
‘Jennifer would prefer I did not exist at all. I think you would have married Kate if you had not met me.’ If Ben wanted frank talk, he’d give it to him.
Ben rested his elbows on the pale chest beneath him, swirling a finger idly around one nipple.
‘Yeah, probably. But if I had, I don’t think we’d have been together very long.’
This was not the response Aleksey had expected. He’d been thinking more along the lines of Ben ridiculing this idea and persuading him how utterly preposterous it sounded—which is why he’d said it in the first place. He wanted to remonstrate with this extremely unsatisfactory reply but couldn’t think of anything that wouldn’t ruin the moment entirely. To his astonishment, Ben only laughed and slid up to kiss him. ‘See, if I’d not met you, I would have spent my life searching for you, and I wouldn’t have stopped until I found you.’
‘Uh-huh. That doesn’t make a lick of sense. If you’d not met me, you wouldn’t know to look for me, would you?’ He was more than willing to play this game with Ben. It was, he had to admit, a far more enjoyable one than the ones of pain and pleasure they’d mistaken for love in the old days. He rolled them so he was on top, lying long and lean over Ben’s solid body.
Ben, still kissing him, moving his lips around from cheekbones to eyelids, mumbled, ‘I had a deep hollow inside me which would have stayed empty until I found you. A hunger.’
‘Uh-huh. A bacon sandwich usually appears to sort you out.’
Ben tapped him on the nose. ‘Don’t be cheeky.’ Before he could respond to this unbelievable transgression upon the Lord of Light Island’s dignity, Ben added seriously, ‘This hunger was like a void in myhead. I couldn’t ever fill it, whatever I did—however fast I ran or rode my bike, it was always inside me, eating me alive. Until I met you. So if you hadn’t come to Wales when I was on that exercise, I’d still be searching for you.’
