They watched the rest of the episode. Barnaby ate seven more chilli crackers. Lex ate three sakura biscuits to cool his mouth down and accepted that his digestive system was going to make him pay for the FIRE TASTE EXPLOSION in six to eight hours.
At half three, Barnaby turned from the screen. The episode was between segments, the presenters bantering in Japanese over a graphic that seemed to be advertising the next round.
“Your fight is tomorrow,” Barnaby said.
“Quarter-final,” Lex said. “Yeah.”
“Then why are you here? You should be sleeping.”
Barnaby was right. His coach would have had him in bed by ten. His nutritionist would have confiscated the bowl of snacks and dumped them in the toilet. He shouldn’t be on a sofa at half three in the morning, eating Japanese snacks that were chemically restructuring his intestinal lining, watching a game show he couldn’t understand with a man who still technically qualified as a stranger.
He looked at Barnaby, at his pale hair falling across his forehead, and the way the blue light from the television caught his jaw and made him look younger. Softer.
“Maybe you’re my good luck charm, Bitchster,” Lex said.
He reached over and rubbed the top of Barnaby’s head. Just once. He let himself have one slow pass of his palm across that pale, fine hair. It felt like silk under his hand, cool and soft. His fingers trailed through it, and Barnaby went absolutely still beneath his touch.
Lex pulled his hand back, stood up, and stretched.
“Right,” he said. “I actually should get to bed. I’ve got an early start. Don’t eat all the sakura ones.” He walked out of the common room without looking back, and made it to the stairwell before his grin split his face wide open.
Chapter Six
Barnabyhad never been to a boxing match, and it showed.
He’d arrived twenty minutes early, which was his first mistake, because it meant he had to sit in the stands at Ryogoku Kokugikan and absorb the atmosphere without the buffer of the event itself. The arena was designed for sumo, and it carried that history in its bones: the high ceiling, the raked seating, the sense of ritual built into the architecture. But the Olympic organisers had stripped the sumo trappings and replaced them with a raised boxing ring at the centre of the floor, surrounded by a press of officials, cameras, and television cables that snaked across the ground like exposed veins.
The noise was extraordinary. This was not the contained enthusiasm of an equestrian crowd, where the applause was polite, and nobody would dream of shouting while a horse was on course. The arena thrummed with a low, sustained roar. Music blared between bouts as people stamped their feet in time to its beat. A group of men four rows ahead of Barnaby werealready standing, shirtless, with flags painted on their chests, and the fights hadn’t even started yet.
He sat very still in his seat, grossly overdressed, and held his accreditation lanyard in both hands. His internet rabbit hole deep-dive had been a mistake.
He’d done it the previous evening, after Lex had left the common room, because the alternative was lying in his narrow Village bed thinking about Lex’s hand on his hair. So he’d opened his laptop and typedLex Murphy boxinginto the search bar, and what came back rearranged something fundamental in his understanding of the man he’d been sharing a sofa with.
Lex Murphy was not, as Barnaby had lazily assumed, a moderately successful athlete who’d been tapped on the shoulder for the Olympics because other more commercially successful British boxers were busy doing whatever boxers did on their downtime. He was one of the highest-paid heavyweight fighters in the world. His professional record was twelve wins, no losses, nine by knockout. He headlined cards in Las Vegas. His last fight purse, reported by a tabloid that Barnaby would normally never read, was somewhere north of fifteen million pounds. He had endorsement deals with Nike, and with a watch brand Barnaby recognised from airport advertising.
Barnaby had sat with this information for a long time.
Fifteen million pounds for one fight. He tried to reconcile that figure with the man who had rubbed the top of Barnaby’s head last night with a tenderness that had no business existing inside those punch roughened hands, and then walked out of the room as though he hadn’t just dismantled every defence Barnaby had spent a week constructing.
Barnaby’s frame of reference for wealth was ‘inherited’, and that came with a very specific set of behaviours: restraint, discretion, and the quiet assumption that money would always just kind of be there. You might not be very liquid, but youcould sit in your draughty old manor home surrounded by masterworks of art, priceless furniture, thousands of acres of countryside, and have a few tiaras in the family vault. The Fitznorman-Bicesters had six.
Lex wore his success like the Louis Vuitton luggage he’d hauled through Narita: visibly, and unapologetically. He didn’t modulate himself for the room or perform humility. He was exactly as loud and exactly as present as he wanted to be, and he had the bank balance to back up every square inch of space he occupied. It was, Barnaby was forced to admit, impressive. Deeply, uncomfortably impressive.
The arena lights shifted. The announcer’s voice cut through the noise in Japanese, then English, introducing the quarter-final of the men’s super-heavyweight division.
Lex’s opponent entered first. He was Kazakh, tall and rangy with a long reach, and the Kazakh contingent in the upper tier erupted as he climbed through the ropes. He bounced on his toes, rolling his shoulders, his face set in the flat, sealed-off focus that preceded any serious competition. Barnaby knew that face. He wore it himself in the start box before the countdown began.
Then there was Lex.
He came down the aisle with his hood up and his hands wrapped, with his corner team flanking him. The British section of the crowd surged to their feet, and the noise shifted register, becoming sharper and more fervent. Lex moved through it without acknowledgement. His eyes were fixed on the ring. His jaw was set.
Barnaby’s breath caught when Lex climbed through the ropes and shed his robe. Under the overhead lights, every line of him was amplified. The broad shelf of his shoulders. The thick slabs of his pectorals, tapering to an economical waist. His arms, wrapped to the wrist, the tape pulling taut over the tendons of his forearms when he flexed his hands.
Barnaby had spent a week watching Lex clown around the Village, and none of it had prepared him for Lex in that ring. All of it had been built toward this single, precise use.
He was still staring when the bell rang.
Lex stayed in the centre of the ring and let the Kazakh come to him. His guard was high, his feet planted, and he moved with a patience that bordered on insolence. He was waiting. Barnaby could see it in the stillness of his hips, the way his weight sat just behind his front foot. He was inviting the attack, daring it, and when the Kazakh threw a right hand that Barnaby saw coming from three postcodes away, Lex slipped it. His head moved two inches to the left and the punch sailed past his jaw. Lex came back with a short and sharp jab that connected with the Kazakh’s ribs and made the man’s body fold inward.
