Instead, Barnaby picked up his mobile from the bedside table, opened WhatsApp, and called the group chat that contained himself, the King of the United Kingdom, and His Serene Highness Prince Vidal of Cardona. It was half past six in the morning in Tokyo, which made it half past ten at night in London and half past eleven in Cardona, and Barnaby did not give a fuck.
James answered on the second ring.
“Bash?” His voice was sharp with concern, the way it always was when Barnaby called outside of their usual rhythm. James had been conditioned by a lifetime of receiving bad news by telephone: the call about his father’s heart attack, the call about Windsor Castle aflame because of faulty wiring. “Are you all right?”
“This is your fault.”
A pause. “What?”
“This is yourfault, James. You wrote me a letter on Buckingham Palace stationery commanding me to go and get fucked, and I have followed the instruction of my sovereign, and it was a literal fucking disaster.”
There was another pause, longer this time. Barnaby could hear James recalibrating, and the careful exhalation of breath that preceded the voice he used before deciding how to react.
“Barnaby.” James’s tone had shifted to something low and controlled. “I need you to tell me what happened. Are you hurt? Was it…did you consent to—”
“Yes, I consented. Of course I consented. Nobody forced me to do anything. He was perfectly decent about the whole thing, which somehow makes it all worse. And I like him. Ireallylike him…” Barnaby pressed the heel of his free hand against his eye socket. His voice was climbing. He could hear it, the pitchthinning out at the edges, and he forced himself to breathe through his nose and bring it back under control. “But he’s too big. We tried three times, and he’s too big, and my body won’t cooperate. Now I’m sitting on my bed at six in the morning unable to move without wincing.”
“Who is too big?” James asked.
The third tile on the video call lit up. Vidal’s face appeared, backlit by something golden and ornate that was almost certainly a Baroque wall sconce. His dark hair was loose around his shoulders, and he was wearing what looked like a silk robe in a shade of emerald that no one outside a lush Mediterranean principality like Cardona could carry off. His eyes were sharp with interest, and Barnaby immediately regretted every decision that had led to this late-night conflab.
“Who is this well-endowed man you speak of, Bash?” Vidal said.
He still couldn’t answer. He could sayit doesn’t matter whoand steer the conversation back to the mechanical problem at hand. But James would find out, because James found out everything, and Vidal would find out because Vidal had an almost supernatural talent for extracting information that people were actively trying to withhold from him.
“Lex Murphy.”
James made a strangled noise. “Theboxer?”
“Yes, James. The boxer.”
“Barnaby, he’shuge.”
“I know that. I am intimately aware of that. I have recent and comprehensive evidence of exactly how huge he is, thank you.”
“Our little Bash has beenmounted!” Vidal’s voice split the word across two delighted syllables, his Cardonan accent thickening the way it always did when he was enjoying himself at someone else’s expense. His grin was wolfish and taking up most of his tile on the screen. “He has beencoveredlike oneof his broodmares!” Vidal was incandescent. “Oh, Bash. I did not send you a gift for your gold. I feel terrible about this. However, for this occasion, I will commission something. I know a glassblower in Murano who does the most exquisite custom dildos. I will make it a reasonable size, yes. Something you can ease right in.”
“Vidal!” James and Barnaby said it at the same time, in the same scandalised register, which was the kind of synchronised reaction that only twenty years of jointly managing Vidal could produce.
Vidal was unmoved. He settled deeper into whatever piece of furniture he was draped across and tilted his head. “Tell me, Bash. Would you say he was hung like a—”
“Don’t.”
“—ahorse?”
The cackle that followed was prolonged and delivered with the joy of a man who had been waiting his entire life to deploy that line against an equestrian. Vidal tipped his head back and laughed, the silk robe slipping off one shoulder, and Barnaby wanted to reach through the screen and throttle him with the sash.
“Fuck you, Vidal. Fuck you, and I hope Cardona continues eroding into the sea and leaves you stateless.”
He was starting to sound hysterical. He could hear it happening, his voice rising and thinning, the vowels sharpening in ways that only occurred when his composure had been stripped back to the load-bearing walls. He pressed his knuckles against his mouth and breathed.
“I don’t understand.” His voice came out thick, the consonants blunted. He swallowed against it. “I like him. So why isn’t it working? What am I supposed to do to make it work? He feeds me squid ink crisps and we watch people in inflatable sumo suits tackle other people into slime pits, and I—” Histhroat closed around the rest of the sentence. He pressed his fingers hard against his eyelids. “I just want it to work.”
“Is this a new sexual kink of the British?” Vidal asked. “The squid ink, the sumo suits. Is this what happens when a nation represses itself for eight hundred years?”
Barnaby tried to laugh. What came out was closer to a sob, and the silence that followed it on both ends of the call was the worst kind: the kind where two people who loved you were deciding how to handle the fact that you were falling apart.
Vidal spoke first, and when he did, the showmanship in his tone was all gone. His voice had dropped to the register he used so rarely that Barnaby sometimes forgot it existed — quiet and stripped of performance.
