Lex opened his mouth, then said, like an absolute pillock, “Thank you, too.”
They both went silent. The awkwardness hung between them like a bad smell.
Lex kissed him before either of them could make it worse. Barnaby kissed him back, and there was heat in it still, real heat. When Lex pulled him closer he could smell it: Barnaby’s sweat layered over his own, the expensive soap Barnaby used mixing with Lex’s cologne and the musk of what they’d just done. It shouldn’t have worked. But it did, and Lex fucking loved it.
He just hated the actual fucking itself.
Lex grabbed a towel from the floor and cleaned them both up. Then he pulled Barnaby into his arms. Barnaby went willingly, curling into Lex’s chest, and within minutes his breathing had evened out into sleep.
Lex lay there, staring at the ceiling. Barnaby was warm against him, soft and boneless in a way he never was when he was awake, and Lex felt something close in his chest like a door shutting.
Sex had always been a big part of his relationships. A good part. The part that made everything else click into place. And he and Barnaby had utterly failed in finding a rhythm. Which meant that whatever this was with Barnaby had a ceiling. A limit. And Lex didn’t feel good about that, because hereallyliked Barns, to the point where he was pretty sure there was no ceiling to his liking.
His mobile was on the bedside table. He reached for it, careful not to wake Barnaby. Then he grabbed his Team GB jacket from where it had been tossed over the chair and draped it across Barnaby’s shoulders. The MURPHY surname sat visible across his pale back. Barnaby didn’t stir.
Lex snapped a photo. Barnaby was sprawled across Lex’s chest, the jacket covering him like a blanket. It was a good photo. Suggestive without being explicit. Barnaby looked gorgeous, with his gold lashes lying in a dark smudge against his cheeks. It was the kind of detail the lads would howl at.
He opened the Tokyo Tumble Tally group chat and sent the photo.
Lex:god tier: bagged. 100 points. cheers lads
He locked his mobile. The group chat was still quiet. No one had seen it yet. There were no reactions or flurry of messages.
He opened the photo and zoomed in. He looked at those gold lashes dark against Barnaby’s cheeks, and the unguardedness of his face in sleep. Lex could already see it, the messages from the lads:Pretty princess. Look at Sleeping Beauty. Did you tuck him in after?The lads would tear into it, and him, and they’d be laughing, but it wouldn’t be funny. He couldn’t let them laugh about this. Not about Barnaby.
He held his thumb over the photo, and deleted it.
The message went with it. The photo vanished from the thread, and Lex stared at the empty space where it had been for along moment. Then he locked his mobile, set it face-down on the table, and closed his eyes.
Chapter Ten
Barnabylowered himself onto his bed and immediately regretted the speed at which he’d done it.
A sharp, specific ache radiated upward from the base of his spine. He shifted his weight onto one hip, then the other, and discovered that favouring either didn’t bring him any relief. He settled for a position that distributed the damage across the broadest possible surface area and sat very still.
His thighs were sore. Not in the way that they often were following a training session or a long ride. This was a deep, bruised tenderness in the inner muscles that he used to grip the saddle, which meant that he was going to feel this for days. His left hip flexor was tight from being held in a position it was never designed to sustain.
He could, of course, present himself to the team physiotherapist to have his aches and pains addressed. Spice up the man’s day a bit with:Hello, Richard. I’m feeling a bit of tightness in the adductors. No, not from the saddle. I was penetrated by a man with the dimensions of a fire hydrant, andmy body has responded by seizing up from the waist down. Could you work on the hip flexor first, please? I’ve got a gold medal ceremony photoshoot today and I’d rather not be visibly limping.
They’d tried again. After a frank post-mortem between the two of them about what the fuck had gone wrong the night before, Lex had suggested they try a different position. He’d rolled Barnaby onto his side, hooked one hand under his knee, and lifted his leg to change the angle. The logistics of this had required Barnaby to lie with his face pressed into the pillow while Lex negotiated entry from behind, which was marginally less awkward than face-to-face but compensated for this advantage by making Barnaby feel like a suitcase being opened from the wrong end.
It hadn’t helped. Lex had been patient, again. Careful, again. He’d gone slowly, checked in, murmured reassurances into the back of Barnaby’s neck that were individually tender and collectively devastating in their implication that Barnaby required this much management. Everyyou all right?was both a kindness and an indictment. He was not all right. He was lying on his side in a narrow Olympic Village bed being gently, attentively split in half.
Then Lex had tried him on his belly. This was, in theory, the path of least resistance. Barnaby didn’t have to coordinate his limbs, or time his breathing, or remember which direction to push. He just had to lie there. The equestrian community would have called it a long rein: hand over the reins, trust the partnership, let the rider do the work.
The rider had done the work. Barnaby had lain face-down with his fingers twisted in the sheets and his teeth buried in the pillow, and Lex had fucked him with a steady, rolling rhythm that was technically impeccable and physically excruciating. Every thrust pushed a dull, burning pressure deep into hisabdomen, a fullness so total that it crowded out everything else. His body couldn’t decide whether it was pain or just too much, and in the absence of a clear verdict it defaulted to rigid, clenching panic that made the next thrust worse than the last.
At one point Lex’s hand had slid under his hips to take hold of his cock, and Barnaby had wanted to want it, had willed himself to feel the grip of Lex’s fingers as anything other than a secondary event happening to a body that was already fully occupied. He’d come eventually, through sheer mechanical persistence on Lex’s part, and the orgasm had felt like something extracted rather than given.
Barnaby pressed his palms flat against his thighs and stared at the opposite wall.
The body he’d spent twenty-five years training, the body that could sit a twelve-hundred-pound horse in perfect stillness through a Grand Prix dressage test, that could absorb the impact of jumping a cross-country fence at thirty miles an hour and recover in a stride, could not accommodate a well-endowed man inside it without falling apart.
He was broken. Some fundamental mechanical component was missing, and he was simply not built to the specification that sex with Lex Murphy required. He’d done everything right. He’d relaxed, or tried to. He’d breathed, or tried to. He’d lain in three different positions and handed over every scrap of control, and none of it had mattered, because his body had rejected the entire enterprise like a horse refusing a fence.
He sat with it for as long as he could stand, and then he called the Privy Council.
It was not the sensible thing to do. The sensible thing to do was to shower, take two ibuprofen, and present himself at breakfast with the British equestrian team looking composed, freshly minted and entirely un-fucked. The sensible thing was to file the entire experience away underlessons learnedandmove on with the quiet, private dignity that his station in life demanded.
