“Do you own the town?”
Barnaby said nothing.
“You look the type. You look like you grew up in a big fucking house. On a bit of land, with a village named after your great-great-great-great-great-grandfather.”
Still nothing. Barnaby’s face had gone perfectly, immaculately blank.
They reached the coaches in silence. A row of white buses idled at the kerb with TOKYO 2022 plastered on the side in blue and red, and a woman with a clipboard and a lanyard was directing athletes towards the correct vehicle.
Lex’s trolley went to the luggage handlers. Barnaby’s trunk went to the luggage handlers. The battered leather case and the pristine Louis Vuitton bags were loaded side by side into the belly of the same bus.
Barnaby boarded without looking back at him.
Lex watched him go. Halfway up the aisle, Barnaby produced a pair of enormous over-ear headphones from his backpack. The kind that said:I am no longer available for conversation, andsettled them over his hair, effectively armouring himself against further social interaction with Lex.
He took a window seat and very deliberately placed his backpack on the aisle seat next to him.
Lex climbed on after him, dropped into a seat three rows back, and stretched his legs into the aisle because there was never enough room. He pulled out his mobile and opened his group chatThe Tokyo Tumble Tally:
just met the poshest man alive. eventing. asked me if i was annoying on the plane. I’m pretty sure he owns a town
Darius replied in four seconds:shag him
Mick:what’s eventing
Darius:shag the horseboy
Lex locked his mobile and looked up the aisle. Three rows ahead, Barnaby Fitznorman-Bicester sat perfectly still, headphones on, a small and deliberate fortress of silence in a bus full of athletes who were already shouting excitedly across the aisle at each other.
Chapter Two
TheOlympic Village was not, as Barnaby had been led to believe by a combination of shrill tabloid journalism and James’s extremely graphic letter, a bacchanalian fuck resort.
There were no gymnasts copulating in stairwells. No one had offered him a prophylactic at registration. The welcome pack contained a lanyard, a map of the dining hall, a pin badge shaped like the Olympic rings, and a reusable water bottle with the mascot stamped on its side. A blue creature of indeterminate species so conceptual and inoffensive in form that it looked like it had been designed by committee, and then approved by a second, even more cautious committee. Barnaby loved it, and was on the lookout for a stuffed toy that he could bring home to his Irish Setter, Florence.
The first two days were manageable. He found his room, and unpacked his trunk. He established a routine that kept him moving through the Village on a predictable circuit: dining hall, equestrian briefing, gymnasium, room. He found his structure,and clung to it, trained to crave the safety of habits by Eton’s never-changing rhythms.
The problem was not, as James had promised, the bacchanalian free-for-all fuck fest. The problem was the nakedness. The ordinary, practical, unavoidable nakedness that happens when you housed several hundred elite male athletes in a building with shared corridors and communal showers, and a laundry system that ran on a rota nobody had bothered to explain.
Men walked from the showers to their rooms in towels that were, uniformly, too small. Men changed in doorways. Men stood in the corridor in compression shorts and nothing else, having entire conversations about split times while their quadriceps caught the light and Barnaby’s gaze in equal measure.
Barnaby now kept his eyes trained on the middle distance and navigated the building like a man crossing a minefield.
He had thought, naively, that he had got his body’s responses to the male form under control. He’d been methodical about it. Given himself controlled exposure to online pornography, administered in careful doses like a course of antibiotics. Just enough to have a casual wank that maintained the equipment, but not enough to devolve into an absolute degenerate who ended up seeing arseholes everywhere.
He had a method. He worked through the major categories: twinks, bears, otters, jocks, the confusingly specific subcategory of men in hard hats who never actually seemed to be on a construction site. He sampled broadly and without prejudice, and inevitably discovered that he had a type.
Embarrassingly, structurally, inconveniently large men. Men who could make him feel, for reasons he refused to psychoanalyse,small. Whose cocks made him close his laptop,stare at the ceiling, and seriously ponder the limitations of his own body.
That sexual inoculation, clearly, wasn’t strong enough to hold up under the environment of the Olympic Village, where several thousand of the finest male specimens on the planet had been pre-selected for physical supremacy by their respective nations.
It wasn’t the gymnasts that were an issue. The gymnasts were compact and shiny and moved in ways that defied the constraints of the human skeletal system, but they weren’t Barnaby’s thing.
God help him, it was theboxers.
They moved through the gym in packs, vast and unhurried, trailing the particular musk of men who had been doing something violent and physical for the better part of two hours. They all, without exception, had shoulders like architectural features, arms that could have been repurposed as load-bearing columns, and arses that tested the structural integrity of the lycra heroically stretched across them.
Barnaby was in one of the smaller gymnasium spaces, the one tucked behind the main weights area. He had chosen it because it was quiet, underused, and populated almost exclusively by fencers, who were lean and polite, and kept their clothes on.
