“I’d never seen a boxing game. I was curious about the sport. It happened to be one of your fights.”
“Ithappenedto be one of mine.”
“There were other games on the card. I watched those as well.” Barnaby busied himself with eating another handful of crackers, because anything he said now would be used against him, and the flush creeping up the back of his neck was already damning enough.
“You skipped a fancy dinner in Ginza,” Lex continued, savouring every syllable, “to sit in a sumo arena and watch me punch a Kazakh.You, Barnaby Fitznorman-Bicester, who I’m fairly sure has never voluntarily missed a meal that came with a wine pairing and the promise of a cheese board—”
“I just wanted to watch a game!”
Lex stopped walking. “Mate. Mate. Stop calling it agame. It’s a boxingmatch.”
Barnaby turned. Lex was standing in the middle of the pavement with one hand pressed to his chest, his bruised face arranged in an expression of theatrical outrage. “All right. No big deal. It was a slip.”
“Aslip. Do you even—do you know what a slip is in boxing? Do you know anything about the sport you voluntarily went to watch instead of eating top tier steak with your horse mates in Ginza?”
“Doyouknow what a fetlock is,” Barnaby asked, and regretted it instantly, because he could already see Lex’s face rearranging itself into the look that preceded one of his catastrophically wrong statements delivered with absolute conviction.
“A fetlock,” Lex said, nodding slowly. “Yeah. That’s the move. That’s the move where the horse does the—” He made a gesture with his hand that bore no resemblance to any movement performed by any horse in the history of the species, or dressage. It looked, if anything, like a dolphin attempting to breakdance. “The little kick thing. In the dancing bit. The fetlock.”
“That’s not what a fetlock is.”
“It’s the special move. The signature move. The horse equivalent of a jab-cross combo. The fetlock.” He made the gesture again, adding a small flourish at the end that made it worse.
“A fetlock is ajoint,” Barnaby said. “It’s the joint above the hoof. It’s part of the horse’sleg. It is not amove. It has never been a move. In no equestrian discipline in the history of organised sport has any horse performed afetlock.”
“Are you sure? Because I’ve watched quite a lot of dressage videos now, and some of those moves look well fetlocky.”
“Fetlockyis not a word.”
“It should be. Some of those horses are dead fetlocky. The way they flick their little legs about—”
“Fuck off, Murphy. Do you even know what apasternis?”
“Is that the one where they go sideways?”
Barnaby opened his mouth, closed it, and ate three more crackers in rapid succession to prevent himself from committing an act of violence on an injured man in a foreign country.
Lex was grinning at him. It was the grin from the ring, wide and stupid and distorted by the swelling beneath his left eye. Barnaby elected to address the hot pressure behind his sternum by saying, “The pastern, actually, is the most structurally vulnerable joint in the equine lower limb. It articulates between the long pastern bone and the short pastern bone—”
“Shut up,” Lex said.
“No. You mock me, for not knowing a term in your discipline and then—”
“Shut up. I’m going to kiss you, Barnaby.” He said it plainly, the way he might announce that he was going to cross the road. “I’m telling you this now, because you’re not the sort of person who reacts well to surprises. I’m going to put my hand on the back of your stupidly long neck, and I’m going to kiss you.”
Barnaby frowned at him. His mouth was full of FIRE TASTE EXPLOSION RICE SNACK. His hands were full of convenience store bags. His heart was hammering so hard he could feel it in his teeth. He swallowed what he was chewing.
Lex stepped forward, slid his hand around the back of Barnaby’s neck, and kissed him.
His mouth was warm and firm and tasted faintly of melon gummy sweets. His fingers spread across Barnaby’s nape, thumb resting just behind his ear, and the weight of his hand was so steady and so certain that Barnaby’s eyes closed without permission. The bags swung against his hip. He felt Lex’s split lip catch against his own, noticed the careful way Lex angled his jaw to accommodate the tilt of Barnaby’s face.
Then Lex jerked backward. His hand left Barnaby’s neck and flew to his mouth. His eyes were streaming. He pressed both palms against his lips and made a noise that was part profanity, and part the involuntary keen of a man whose cut lip had just been chemically assaulted.
“Fuck—oh,fuck, that’s—Christ, Barnaby, your whole mouth is a fuckingweapon—”
He bent double, spitting onto the pavement, scrubbing at his lips with the back of his hand. The capsaicin from the chilli crackers had found the split in his lip, and the tissue was already flushing an angry red.
Barnaby stood on the pavement, still holding his bags, still tasting melon gummy sweets, and watched Lex Murphy writhe in pain.
