He recognised it before his brain had finished processing what it meant. His own face, slack in sleep, his lashes dark against his cheeks. Lex’s Team GB jacket pulled up to his chin, the red and blue piping bright against the white pillow. The Olympic Village bedsheets, institutional and thin, bunched beneath his shoulder.
Beneath the photograph, a message from a number saved asLex M:
god tier: bagged. 100 points.
Barnaby’s thumb scrolled down.
The spreadsheet was colour-coded. Columns for name, sport, nationality, and a scoring system that assigned numerical value to each conquest based on difficulty metrics. Brazilianbeach volleyball: 15 points. Finnish swimmer: 20. A Dutch sprinter who’d been crossed out and annotated withdoesn’t count, she was already going home with someone else. The cells were populated with shorthand and in-jokes that Barnaby could follow without context because the context was athletic men being crude about the people they’d slept with, and that language was universal.
His own entry was at the top of a separate tab labelledGOD TIER.
Barnaby Fitznorman-Bicester. Eventing. UK. Male (ambiguous). Best friends with the actual King of England. Lex is obsessed. 100 points.
The leaked WhatsApp messages ran alongside the spreadsheet in a parallel thread. Barnaby read them in the order they’d been screenshotted, each one timestamped and attributed.
Darius: mate have you actually pulled the horse bloke yet or are you still following him around like a golden retriever
Mick: he’s buying him snacks. every night. from the 7-eleven. he’s COURTING him
Lex M: fuck off both of you
Darius: lex murphy. two time olympic gold medallist. brought low by a posh boy in white trousers
Mick: those trousers tho
Lex M: i’m going to win this. watch me
Darius: that’s not winning mate that’s catching feelings
There were more. Barnaby scrolled through them with a thumb that had gone numb. The messages spanned the full two weeks of the Games. Early entries showed Lex’s other targets — a Canadian diver, an Australian rower, a French judoka whose name appeared three times before being replaced by Barnaby’s — dropping off one by one as the late-night trips to the commonroom became nightly, became a ritual. From then on, his was the only name Lex mentioned in the chat.
Mick: so are you still doing the tally or have you retired to become barnaby’s personal snack butler
Lex M: yes.
Darius: you absolute simp
And then, after a gap of three days that Barnaby could date precisely because it was the night of Lex’s gold medal win, there was the photograph of his sleeping face, Lex’s jacket draped over him, and the message.
Barnaby closed his eyes. The screen went dark against the inside of his eyelids and the afterimage stayed, bright and throbbing, his own sleeping face in a rectangle of light.
He had been a line item. A target with a point value and a difficulty rating, filed underMale (ambiguous)in a spreadsheet that ranked human beings by how hard they were to fuck. Every late-night 7-Eleven run, every squid ink crisp and sakura sweet, every hour on the common room sofa while Lex catalogued his tells and reported back to a group chat, all of it had been gameplay. Strategy. The accumulation of points towards a leaderboard that Lex’s friends had maintained with the attention to detail of a Fantasy Premier League.
His chest hurt, and not in the abstract way people described heartache when they wanted to be poetic about it. His sternum ached as though something behind it had been struck, a deep, physical percussion that radiated outwards through his ribs and settled in his throat. His breathing had gone shallow without his permission, the kind of breathing his body defaulted to in the moment before a cross-country fence when the distance was wrong and the horse was already committed.
Perry’s mobile shook in his hand. He looked down at it and realised there’d been no incoming message notification. He was really just shakingthatbadly.
He shoved the device back at his brother. Perry caught it against his chest, both hands coming up around it, and Barnaby saw a protective fury on his younger brother’s face, so naked that it frightened him.
Perry crossed the room in three strides and wrapped his arms around Barnaby’s shoulders. The hug was tight and fierce, entirely graceless, Perry’s chin digging into the top of Barnaby’s head because his brother had two inches on him now. Barnaby’s arms stayed at his sides. His hands were still shaking.
He let himself lean in. Just enough to feel the solid warmth of Perry’s chest against his forehead and the vice of his arms holding him upright. Perry smelled of the body spray he’d been wearing since he was sixteen.
“Perry.” His voice was steady. “I don’t want to see him. I don’t want to talk to him.”
Perry’s hands stayed on his shoulders. His grip tightened once, hard enough that Barnaby felt the press of each individual finger through his shirt.
“Okay,” Perry said. “I’ll…run interference.”
