“Yeah, it is.”
At the same time they seemed to realise this was a very familiar conversation between them, only it was reversed—each saying the other’s lines.Nikolas pouted, having trouble working this out.It added to the other confusions in his life.As far as he was concerned, a lot of things were suddenly happening to him that shouldn’t be—given who he was.What he was.Just shouldn’t…He sniffed.“I’d rather have taken out the president.Easier.”
Ben snorted.“You told me once that you liked him.”
“You may have noticed I have a tendency to lie.Are we going to keep this up, Ben?—because if we are, I’m much better at it than you.”
“Keep what up?”
“That’s right, ask a question you know the answer to.Now ask me something irrelevant or annoy me so I lose the thread of my thought.I’ve been doing it for eight years with you.I know every tactic in the book to avoid being forced to think about things I don’t want to think about.”
“Like talking about your father to a bunch of strangers—and saying cock for the first time in your life?”
Nikolas folded his arms.“Just the first time in English.”
Ben was better at this than he’d given him credit for.They were almost back tohisstartling declaration at the pub.It was Ben they needed to be talking about.Nikolas made a conscious effort to unfold his arms and turned back to look at the perfect profile next to him.
It was the most effective tactic of all.Nikolas had never met anyone who didn’t fill an uncomfortable silence with talking.Ben was no exception.Finally, he just made an exasperated noise, checked in his rear view mirror and suddenly pulled the car over to the side of the road.He stuck the hazard lights on and twisted around to Nikolas who remained silent.“I went into the chapel.I still didn’t remember anything.I sat down at the front and then the sun came through the stained glass window and hit the empty pew across the aisle, and it all just righted itself.It was all still in my head, just like you promised it would be.And I know I should have felt revulsion for what I did, but I didn’t.It had been kinda knocked off top-horror spot by the awfulness of losing you.”Ben took hold of Nikolas’s arm, forcing him to concentrate on his words.“I lostyou—everything you were to me, had been to me for eight years, and when it came backthatwas all I could think about.Nothing is worth losing you again.Nothing.If I think about the other things I might, so I’m not going to think about them.I’m going to do a Nikolas Mikkelsen for once.How’s that?”
Nikolas pouted.“It’s not easy to do.It takes years of practice and a particular skill to get to my level of denial, Benjamin.I’m not sure you’re ready for it.”
Ben tapped him on his nose.“I have a superb role model.”
Nikolas nodded thoughtfully.“This is true.You’ve parked in a very dangerous place.Thoughtless of you.You’ve already cost me one expensive vehicle; perhaps we could move?”
Ben pulled back out and they carried on in the dark.
After a while, Ben put Radio 1 on.
Nikolas turned it to Radio 4 and listened to a debate about the visit of the Russian president.There had been a protest at the Russian embassy by a gay and lesbian rights group.
The protesters were being interviewed.
He turned it back to Radio 1.
* * *
Chapter Twenty-three
Both working on the theory of denial being the better part of valour, they didn’t discuss the event that had caused Ben’s loss of memory at all, but they individually thought about it and both knew it had sparked a number of interesting changes in their relationship.
Nikolas had already seen the differences in Ben with him forgetting ten years—that he’d shed ten years of care and worry along with his table manners.What he hadn’t appreciated was that Ben had seen something similar in him.
Ben had been shocked to discover how much he’d reined Nikolas in, tried to normalise him over the years he’d known him.Most people, he knew, would say this was a good thing: that Nikolas definitely needed leashing.But he’d seen a side of Nikolas over the last week he’d not seen before.Nikolas hadn’t been reset to a previous version; this Nikolas had been entirely himself—as if he’d allowed Ben to see him as he was in the privacy of his own mind.
It had been like a holiday from the people they pretended to be to ease their way through the minefields of each other’s lives.After all, what do you say to a man who confused rape and abuse with love?Ben had no idea, so they’d never discussed Nikolas’s childhood other than the basic fact it had happened.
Nikolas had never told Ben what his father had made him do—what his father’s friends, invited along for the fun, had made him do.Why?What could Ben do about it if he told him?So they never talked about it.
Ben had never told Nikolas the terrible thoughts that haunted him after a night in a bathroom in Denmark, the thought he wasn’t the man everyone saw, ex-Special-Forces-expert Ben Rider, but that he was merely a ghost of a man walking around in a borrowed body he wished he could return for his own—less beautiful, less perfect, ruined.
What reply would Nikolas make to this?Ben didn’t want to find out so he’d never told him.
But Ben had enjoyed something of an epiphany upon his return from forgetting.He realised now in some tiny part of himself he’d always blamed Nikolas Mikkelsen for what he’d become—dependent?Needy.Infantile?He’d always held Nikolas responsible for seducing him and making him what he was.But it had only taken him three days of being with Nikolas, not knowing who this blond man was, for him to thrust Nikolas against a stable wall and take him down to the ground to possess him from the inside.He accepted now, therefore, he was what he was by choice, through a passion for Nikolas nothing—not even total loss of memory—could alter.He realised for the first time that the belief in his own inferiority, dependency, had been nothing more than a self-fulfilling prophecy.He believed Nikolas had caused everything to happen between them, so he allowed Nikolas to run everything between them—to have all the power.It had just been easier—the way things had always been between them.
For the first time, he saw this didn’t have to be.Nikolas was free to walk any time he wanted.He clearly didn’t want to.Ben, therefore, saw no reason to return to the subservient version of himself he’d been before he’d lost his memory.
No reason at all.
