Ben held it, turning it in his hands.
His face crumpled with disappointment.
Nikolas pulled him into his arms.“This isn’t fiction, Ben.You aren’t going to pick up something and have your memory rush back in.It doesn’t work like that in real life.”
“But why can’t I remember now if I remembered before?”
“The memories aren’t gone.Only the pathways to them are unclear at the moment.It’s like early morning fog.It will lift.”
Ben pulled away, his brow furrowed with effort to connect to Nikolas’s words.“Fog?It did lift.”He swallowed.“Were we…camping?Why were we camping?It was really misty.Then the mist lifted, and there was a princess with bright red hair!Fucking hell!Am I confusing my life with a fairytale?”
Nikolas couldn’t help a small laugh and made a mental note to text Emilia and tell her Ben thought she was a princess.He could imagine her response.He brushed his thumb over Ben’s cheekbone, removing a tear of anger.“No.That was a real memory.”
“I went camping with a princess?”
“You had dinner with a prince once—the heir to the throne.”
“No.”
“You did.”
“Fuck.”
“You did that, too.”
Ben laughed, despair and confusion evaporating from his perfect features.For one moment, Nikolas understood what Andrea Gillian had meant about premorbid tendency.Ben now had a lightness of spirit once more—something Nikolas hadn’t seen for many years.He supposed it was inevitable.People alter and develop together, and change had been something of a feature of their lives since they’d met.He’d not seen the alterations in Ben because they’d happened slowly—many of them under his tutelage and deliberate.Ben had grown up, become more mature, more sophisticated, quieter, more intense.Had he also become defeated…depressed?It was a sobering thought presented with this raw, unformed version of the same man, now rummaging in the fridge and complaining at not finding anything for a proper breakfast, despite it being four o’clock in the afternoon.
“Would you like to go out for tea?You like scones—and cream.You eat a lot of cream.”
Ben obviously didn’t get this, because he was busy agreeing that yes he would very much like to go out for tea.
Nikolas felt his heart melt and wondered if he was falling in love with Ben Rider all over again.
* * *
Chapter Nineteen
The confusion in Nikolas’s mind about the various versions of Ben Rider only continued that evening when they returned from tea with some takeaway to eat later.Nikolas suggested they watch a film—something easy and non-threatening for Ben’s mind.Ben readily agreed, but when they sat on the sofa together he resisted, embarrassed, when Nikolas tried to pull him to lie back against him.
He wasn’t fucking cuddling with another man!Nikolas reflected wryly that it had takenhimalmost four years of their acquaintance to lie thus on a sofa, and even then he’d done it for another year under protest, lying stiff and unhappy with the arrangement.
Then an awful realisation hit him.
He rose swiftly and went to the kitchen, making the excuse he was going to select a bottle of wine and put the food on to reheat.
This Ben didn’t love him.
It was obvious really, and he knew it shouldn’t be so painful to realise.
Ben had had sex with him, but he didn’tlovehim.Not yet.That was eight years of shared experiences away.
But he loved Ben.
For the first time, Nikolas Mikkelsen was in a terrifying country called love on his own.Ben had coaxed him to this unexpected land slowly and by sure steps, easing him out of the shadows of his denial until lying on a sofa, wrapped in Ben’s arms, had been his choice, his preference.
He felt arms slide around his waist and turned into the embrace.
“Whatcha thinking?”
