God tier: bagged. 100 points.The words had the cadence of a punchline, which was the problem. They’d been written as a joke. Lex had typed them into a group chat with the same fingers that had wrapped Barnaby’s hands in a locker room in Barking with such tenderness.
The second day was worse, because by then the shock had metabolised into something more specific. The first day he’d been focused on the blunt-force impact of the situation. On the second day, he got properly analytic.
He couldn’t stop himself from mapping the timeline. Every late-night snack run, every conversation on the common room sofa, every moment he’d thought was theirs, slotted into a parallel narrative where those same moments were being reported to Darius and Mick in real time.
Lex M: i’m going to win this. watch me.
Had the sakura sweets just been strategy? The hair touch? The knuckle stroke after Wes’s fall, when Barnaby’s composure had cracked and Lex had held his fist and run his thumb across the ridges to pass on comfort?
He didn’t know. That was the worst of it. He didn’t know which parts had been reported back, which moments had been stripped down to anecdote and fed to the group chat for entertainment value.
Had Lex told them about the failed sex?
The question had been circling in his head since the first night. Did the men in the WhatsApp group know about the twoattempts where Barnaby’s body had locked rigid and refused to cooperate? Had Lex, at any point, said:Tried him three ways, lads. No dice. He just lies there.
Florence whined. Barnaby realised his hand had gone rigid against her flank, his fingers digging into her soft fur. He released his grip and stroked her ear, and she pressed her nose into his palm.
He didn’t cry. The urge was there; there was a persistent sting behind his sinuses, and a pressure in his throat that swelled and receded like a tide. But he refused to give in, because if he started, then he might never be able to stop.
? ? ?
Onthe third morning, he got up.
He didn’t ease into it. He swung his legs out of bed at six fifteen, planted his feet on the carpet, and stood. His body ached from two days of horizontal living. His shoulders were stiff, his lower back tight, and his right hip clicked when he shifted his weight.
He opened the curtains. The morning was grey and soft, the kind of London light that hung in a neutral wash across the rooftops. Chester Square’s private garden was still and damp. A jogger moved along the far pavement, earphones in, breath steaming.
Florence was already off the bed. She stood by the door with her tail swinging in low, measured arcs, knowing that opened curtains meant a walk soon.
Barnaby showered, and made himself ignore the fact that his Molton Brown body wash smelled nothing like Lex’s Dior Sauvage body wash. Then he dressed in wool trousers, a cable-knit jumper, and his navy peacoat. He looked at himself in the mirror for the first time in two days. His eyes were sunken, the skin beneath them thin and bruised-looking.
He clipped Florence’s lead to her collar and walked out of the front door of number twelve Chester Square with his spine straight and his shoulders back.
The paparazzi were not there. He’d expected them and had braced for a cluster of telephoto lenses and shouted questions. He’d composed his expression, and settled into a measured, unbothered stride that broadcast that he was a man going about his ordinary life, untroubled by any recent unpleasantness, thank you so much.
The pavement was empty. Two women walked past with shopping bags from Peter Jones. A man in a suit was arguing into his mobile at the corner of the square. Nobody looked at Barnaby. The modern attention economy ran on the same principle as a conveyor belt: yesterday’s scandal was already being pushed off the edge by today’s.
The Tokyo Tumble Tally had been a two-day story. Barnaby Fitznorman-Bicester, Marquess of Ashworth, had been a footnote in it; the posh victim and aristocratic punchline.
He should feel relieved. Instead, he was absurdly offended; the least the press could do was maintain some interest in the worst thing that had ever happened to him.
Florence pulled him down the pavement towards Eaton Square. She had a preferred route that she’d established within her first month at Chester Square and from which she deviated only under extreme duress or in the presence of a squirrel. The route took them south through the square’s garden, along EburyStreet, and then in a wide loop back through Belgravia’s white-stuccoed terraces.
In the forty minutes that it took to make this circuit, he came to the unavoidable conclusion that he needed to end things with Lex. He’d known this since the first night of his seclusion, curled under the duvet with his mobile off and Florence’s warm weight behind his knees. The knowledge that the relationship was no longer viable had been there, fully formed, from the moment he’d swiped through the screenshots on Perry’s mobile.
The problem was the photograph.
That was the part he couldn’t understand or forgive. The photograph of his sleeping face, taken without his knowledge after a shockingly intimate moment, posted to prove a conquest.
He rehearsed what he’d say once.
Standing at the corner of Ebury Street with Florence’s lead wrapped around his wrist, he let himself run through the whole thing from start to finish. The opening line. The middle, where Lex would try to explain and Barnaby would have to not listen, or at least not listen in a way that changed anything. The ending, which he’d already thought out, because endings were the part of any performance he’d always been best at. Clean dismounts.
Once was enough. If he rehearsed it again, he’d start editing, and if he started editing, he’d find the version where he forgave Lex, because that version existed and it was closer to the surface than he wanted to admit.
He took his mobile from his pocket and turned it on.
The screen loaded slowly. Notification after notification stacked up in a silent cascade, the phone vibrating steadily against his palm as two days’ worth of the outside world poured back in. He didn’t read any of them. He scrolled to Lex’s name in his contacts, pressed call, and lifted the mobile to his ear.
