Barnaby exhaled through his nose, set down his weights with deliberate care, and turned away. The treadmills were on the other side of the room. He could do his cardio there. Alone. In peace. Away from this man: his hands, his smell, his complete, bewildering refusal to take a hint.
But Lex was already moving, stepping around him so that he was standing directly in Barnaby’s path, taking up more space than one human being should be permitted to occupy.
“Hang on,” Lex said. “You need to sort out your form.”
“My form is fine.”
“It’s not fine. No wonder you’ve got arms like that.” Lex nodded at Barnaby’s biceps, which were lean and functional and exactly the size they needed to be for a man whose sport required finesse rather than brute force. “You’re not positioning yourself right. You’re working the wrong muscles. Here.”
He reached over and picked up one of Barnaby’s three-kilogram weights, holding it with two fingers as though it werea novelty keychain. Then he demonstrated the lateral raise: feet planted, shoulders down, a slow, controlled lift to the side with his elbow at a precise angle. His deltoid flexed. His obliques shifted visibly under his skin. A bead of sweat tracked down the groove between his pectorals and disappeared somewhere south of his navel.
Barnaby put on his headphones. He settled them over his hair, and within seconds the gymnasium dissolved into the opening bars of Satie’s Gymnopédies, which he kept on a playlist labelled Training - Focus and used for exactly this kind of emergency.
Lex was still talking. Barnaby could see his mouth moving. He could see Lex’s mates, two of them, both equally enormous, both watching from the bench press with the delighted expressions of spectators at a bear-baiting, laughing and nudging each other.
Barnaby walked to the treadmill, set it to a six-minute kilometre pace, and began to jog.
Behind him, Lex was saying something. One of his friends was howling. The other one had his mobile out, and Barnaby dearly hoped he was not being filmed. If footage of him fleeing a conversation via treadmill made it onto the internet, he would have to withdraw from competition and seek asylum in a country where nobody had ever heard of eventing or the Marquess of Ashworth. Vidal would offer Cardona, because Vidal always offered Cardona. And he loved Vidal with his whole heart, but that was a clear no. Three days under that man’s hospitality and Barnaby would end up walking into the sea.
He increased the pace to five-forty. Then five-twenty.
He could still see Lex in the mirror on the far wall, leaning against the weight rack with his arms crossed, watching him.
Just five more minutes. He stared straight ahead, wearing headphones as armour against a man he could still see in hisperipheral vision, sweating into gym shorts that he desperately hoped were dark enough to conceal whatever his treacherous body was doing beneath them.
Barnaby ran faster.
Chapter Three
TheTokyo Tumble Tally had been Darius’s idea, which meant it was structurally unsound, morally indefensible, and already in full swing by the time Lex got back to his room after dinner on the second night.
The premise was simple. You had nineteen days. You had a Village full of the most physically elite human beings on the planet, pre-sorted by nation and sport. You had condoms distributed by the crate, a shared dining hall the size of an aircraft hangar, and the implicit understanding that what happened in the Olympic Village stayed in the Olympic Village.
The Tally ran on a points system. Darius had built it on a shared Google Doc during the flight over, and the rules were straightforward:
log your conquests
tag the sport
assign the base score
attach a picture
