by Anna Martin
“How was your second time, then?” Alex asked. “Better than the first?”
“Hmm.” George buried his face in Alex’s hair, inhaling the familiar scent of it. “I guess so. I actually came this time.”
“You probably will from now on, then. It sometimes takes a while for it to happen, then after the first time, it happens more regularly.”
“Oh.”
“You don’t have to, though, because I can hear you stressing about it from down here. When you’re ready, okay? Just ask for it. I don’t mind.”
“Okay.”
“Are you worried about tomorrow?”
George had almost forgotten about the newspaper article. Actually, that was a lie. He’d completely forgotten about it. He lifted his foot out of the water, let it cool, then dunked it back into the hot water.
“A bit. I want to know what they write about us, what they have to say about me and my family. I’m not worried about what I was worried about yesterday, though.”
“What was that?”
“What my family would think.”
“Oh.”
“Because I think they might like you more than they like me.”
Alex poked him in the arm. “Idiot.” But George could tell he was pleased.
“My nan especially.”
“I like your nan a lot. I want to introduce her to mine.”
“She’d love that. Don’t know if it’s such a great idea, though, introducing my old nan to royalty.”
“No, not like that,” Alex said. He rubbed his wet palms up and down George’s forearms, pushing all the hairs the wrong way, then smoothing them back out again. “Not like in a formal setting. My nan is brilliant as well. I think they’d get on.”
“Does she speak English?”
“Of course she does.”
“Oh. Then yeah. We should make that happen.”
Alex tipped his head back and kissed George’s chin. “We will.”
That night, George slept better than he usually did in unfamiliar beds. Alex was naked too, because he hadn’t bought pyjamas, and for a few hours their skin stuck together while they slept.
In the morning, George was nudged awake by Alex’s nose pushing against his arm until he lifted it, barely aware of anything other than the familiar warmth next to him, and he wrapped his arm around Alex’s shoulder. He held his boyfriend, content with that label and the man who wore it while Alex pressed his cheek to George’s chest and dozed contentedly.
No one else knew about this, and it brought George more comfort than he’d expected. No one outside the two of them knew that Alex snuggled in close in the mornings and wrapped his leg around George’s. No one knew about how they fit together, no matter what The Sun wrote about them. And that mattered.
From his perch on George’s strong, broad chest, Alex yawned contentedly. Even though the bed and the room were unfamiliar he felt no discomfort.
“We should get up in a minute,” he said, his voice gruff with sleep.
“No,” George groaned. “Noooooo.”
Alex chuckled. “You paid for breakfast. And I don’t want to wait too long before leaving to get home in case there’s a lot of traffic on the roads.”
“Okay. I can drive back.”
“I don’t mind.”
“I was thinking,” Alex started, then another yawn attacked him and he was forced to stop talking. George brushed his hand down Alex’s back, the palm flat, stopping to squeeze his bum. “I was thinking, as long as we get on the road by nine, we can be home by one. Then we could go for a pub lunch and get home in time to watch the rugby this afternoon.”
“That sounds pretty good, actually.”
“Good ideas. I’m full of them.”
“You’re full of something,” George said and dug his fingers into Alex’s side in a hard tickle.
“Oof! Fuck! Get off me, you monster.” Alex shrieked and rolled away, laughing like an idiot. George followed him, refusing to give up the teasing, laughing too until Alex almost fell off the bed.
“Saved your life,” George said, grabbing hold of Alex and squeezing him tight.
“My hero.” Alex gave him a deadpan stare, which only made George laugh more.
“Love you,” he said easily. Too easily. As soon as the words escaped he froze, the laughter quickly fizzing out.
Alex pressed his lips to George’s cheek, fuzzy with the overnight growth of his beard. “I love you too. Come on, let’s go get breakfast.”
He didn’t want to make a big deal of the “love you,” just in case it freaked George out. He’d let it go and maybe try the words again later, or in a few days, just to see if they fit. Right now it felt right.
They got dressed in comfortable silence, and Alex made sure all their stuff was collected up from the room. He had a ritual, when staying in hotels, to check under all the beds and in all the drawers, even if that was the first time he’d opened them. Just in case.
“Ready?” George asked, watching him in amusement from the door.
“Yep.”
They took the lift back down to the ground floor, both of them staring silently ahead. If it weren’t for the tiny, back and forth brushes of hand on hand, arm on arm, shoulder on shoulder, to an outsider it might look like they were nothing more than strangers.
George broke first, laughing and wrapping his arm around Alex’s shoulder as the door opened. He was going to go in for a noogie, Alex could tell, and dodged out of the way.
“Hang on,” Alex said, slipping out from under George’s arm. He quickly crossed to the reception desk and smiled politely at the young girl sitting behind it. “Excuse me, I don’t suppose you have a copy of today’s Sun?”
“Sure.” She grabbed a newspaper from under the desk and handed it to him.
“Great. Thank you. We’re just going to grab breakfast, but here’s our room key.”
“Thanks. Hope you enjoyed your stay.”
“It’s been great,” he said, nodding his thanks.
George was frowning when Alex fell back into step beside him. “Is that it?”
“This is it,” Alex said grimly.
“Fuckers,” George muttered under his breath.
To make him smile, Alex swatted him with the paper. For half a second, it worked, then the frown slipped back onto his face.
They found a table and reserved it with their coats over the backs of the chairs. The breakfast was served buffet-style and was proving popular. The dining room was about half-full, an even mix of families, couples, and businessmen.
Alex watched with growing amusement as George loaded up his plate with a full English: two sausages, several rashers of bacon, fried and scrambled eggs… toast, fried bread, tomatoes, baked beans, and hash browns. Tomato ketchup on the side.
“Hungry, darling?” Alex teased.
“Yeah,” George answered. The frown was back in full force. Alex decided not to tease him further.
Back at the table, George ducked his head and started to decimate his breakfast in a way that Alex had almost come to expect. He looked fondly at him for a moment, then decided George’s appetite might have something to do with nerves. Or stress.
“Okay, I’m going to look at it,” he said in a rush.
He pushed his own plate to the side, grabbing one triangle of toast to nibble on as he flicked through the pages.
Page five. That was pretty big.
The pictures themselves were nowhere near as bad as he’d been expecting. They’d been taken while they were walking across the Meadows, the stretch of park that connected his home in Marchmont to the Old Town. People took photos on that path all the time, it was fairly picturesque, so he wouldn’t have paid any attention to someone with a camera.
In the photos, they were walking side by side, not holding hands or even touching. In one of the pictures, Alex was laughing.
“What does it say?” George asked through a mouthful of food.
“I haven’t read it yet,” Alex said soft
ly. “The pictures aren’t bad at all.”
He spun the paper around to show George, who stopped chewing to stare at it briefly, then resumed eating his breakfast with a shrug.
“It could have been worse,” he said after a moment.
“Yeah, I think so too.”
“Read what it says,” George said. “You read quicker than me.”
Alex nodded and leaned back in his chair to skim over the article. Most of it was taken up with reminding the general public who he actually was. Despite his title, he wasn’t that well known in this country.
Nephew of the current king of the Netherlands…. Openly gay…. Educated at the exclusive Harrow School in London before transferring to Eton….
“Fuck,” Alex said.
“What?”
“This was Harrington.”
“What do you mean?”
“Listen to this,” Alex said. “Van Amsberg, twenty-three, previously dated British aristocracy before deciding to slum it with commoner George. While at Cambridge University, he attended several exclusive events with Laurence Harrington, twenty-four, who is the second Earl of Somerset.”
George pushed his own plate away and took the last piece of toast from Alex’s.
“How do you know it was him? I mean, it wasn’t a secret that you went out with him, right?”
“He’s trying to get back at me,” Alex said, shaking his head, “because of what happened the other week. I’m so sorry, George.”
George shrugged. “Not your fault, is it? You couldn’t know he would do something like this.”
“I should have anticipated it, though. It’s exactly the sort of thing he’d do. To get back at me.”
“What else does it say?”
“Not much,” Alex admitted. “They reached out to my representative and got a generic statement about my privacy. That’s about standard. They don’t out and out slander you, which is a shame because if they did, I would fucking sue them.”
George huffed a humourless laugh. “Thanks, love.”
“It says your dad’s a mechanic and your mum works in a shop. Where you went to school… just the name of the school, nothing else. And that you’re now the designer behind a highly desirable brand of winter sports helmets.”
“Seriously?”
“Yeah.” Alex couldn’t help but grin at his reaction. It was adorable. “Apparently you’re famous too.”
“I’m so not. No one would care who I am if it weren’t for you.”
“What they’ll argue is that you’re in the public eye too. People know who you are. Granted, you need to move in the right circles, very specific circles, but the name George Maguire means something to some people.”
“Does that mean you can’t sue the pants off them?”
“Not in the slightest,” Alex said grimly and folded the paper. He was sure George would want to look at it in detail later, and he’d have to report back to his mother about the story. She wouldn’t read it herself, but she’d still demand a full rundown of the article’s contents. “I’ve already sent an e-mail to my legal rep to start putting the wheels in motion regarding a media blackout on your name.”
“You can do that?”
“We’ll see. I can try and argue it’s not in the public interest to print anything about you. It’s worked in the past.”
“I’m guessing Harrington didn’t have a media blackout against his name.”
Alex laughed out loud at the thought. “God, no. He’s such a society princess. I’m sure he’s been in Tatler and Good Housekeeping at least twice each.”
He reached for his coffee and drained it, then pushed away from the table. A young girl, probably doing her first Saturday job, cleared tables around the dining room, so he didn’t bother to clear his own plate.
When they headed out to the car, George slipped his hand into Alex’s.
Alex looked up at him in surprise.
“All the way out, now,” he murmured softly. “I’m not ashamed to be with you.”
Chapter Twelve
The phone had rung three times in a row now. Alex had ignored it the first two times, more than content to be stretched out on the sofa with George, paying no attention to anything other than the TV and his man. It was good to be home. But, it could be something important, so he reached over and saw his mother’s name on the screen.
“Sorry,” he murmured to George, pulling himself off the sofa.
He went downstairs rather than taking the call in the living room. Alex guessed that by now someone had caught his mother up on the article and probably the social media reaction too. He was willing to bet half a dozen or more gay “news” sites had rehashed and reported on the article by now.
The call had ended by the time he got into the bedroom, but he called her back straight away.
“Sander,” she said instead of hello, using his family’s childhood nickname for him.
“Hi, Mum.”
“How are you?”
“Fine. Did you see the paper?”
“We’ve been brought up to speed, yes. Your father and I have been discussing it.”
Alex leaned back on the pillows and stretched his legs out. He was pretty sure there wouldn’t be a lecture, not from his mum. She didn’t care about his sexuality, and there wasn’t anything sordid in the article that would upset her.
“Oh? Is everything okay?”
“I think so,” she said, her voice crisp on upper-class vowels. “We’d like to make a statement as a family. There’s going to need to be some considerable media spin here.”
“I don’t think so,” Alex argued. “George and I aren’t going to stop going out together. I’m going to get an injunction taken out to stop this again in the future, and if we do need to drip-feed information to the media, we can make sure it comes from us instead of some enterprising journalist.”
“I disagree, Sander,” his mother said easily. “You can’t always hide and pretend the world outside isn’t there. The media—properly controlled—can be a useful tool for us.”
“You want to use me as a tool?” he said, slightly incredulous. “To what purpose?
“It will be good to raise our profile in Britain. We can get you involved in some LGBT charity work. It’s about time you started doing some work for the family.”
“You know that’s not my thing,” Alex said, trying hard to keep the instinctive whine from his voice. “I hate all of that shit.”
“Sander,” she said sharply, her own kind of reprimand. “I’ll need to speak to George’s family, to ask them to what extent they want to be involved. We can, of course, offer them protection if they want it. But I think it would be nice for us to all get together and discuss this.”
“We’re not a business arrangement,” Alex snapped. His family knew how he felt about courting the media, selling stories and pictures in order to satisfy some public appetite no one was sure even existed. “I really don’t think this is a good idea, Mum.”
“Of course it’s a good idea. If we address the relationship ourselves, then it takes away any potential for scandal. We’re not embarrassed of you, we’re supportive of your relationship. Et cetera, et cetera.”
Alex could see, so clearly, his mother waving away his concerns.
“Mum,” he tried again. “George’s family are different than us. I really don’t think it’s a good idea to invite anyone to write about them unless everyone is absolutely in agreement on it.”
Too many people were involved now. Good people, wonderful people, like the Maguires and all the different branches of that family. Alex couldn’t just use them to raise the profile of his own.
“So we’ll talk to them,” his mum said.
“Yes, but as soon as we give their names out, then it gives the media implied permission to write whatever they like. And that’s not okay.” Alex swung his legs over the side of the bed and ran his hand over his face. “I told you, Mum, they’re not like us. We can’t go blindly into this and not expect so
me kind of backlash from certain media outlets. You know how they’ll spin it—there’s no air of Kate Middleton, middle class acceptability for us to fall back on. They’re working class, benefits claiming, white trash.”
“You cunt.”
George stood in the doorway to the bedroom, his face ashen and furious.
“Are you quite done, Sander?” his mother asked from the phone.
“I’ve got to go,” Alex muttered and threw the phone onto his bed. “George….”
“How fucking dare you?” George said. He was practically vibrating with rage.
“George, please listen to me for two seconds.”
“You and yours can rot in hell. I’ll go back to my white trash family now, thanks.”
He turned and stormed up the stairs, feet echoing loudly on the polished Scandinavian wood. For a few, hideous seconds Alex felt frozen to the spot while nausea churned in his belly. He was convinced he was going to puke for real, until the front door upstairs slammed shut and the familiar roar of George’s Golf echoed between the houses on their street.
For the next two days, Alex skipped his classes and rang George every ten minutes or so, day and night. Every time it was the same: six rings, then it cut to voice mail.
On the second day, George deactivated that voice mail. Probably as a result of the forty or so, increasingly desperate messages Alex had left for him the day before. Now, instead of the recorded message picking up and George’s voice telling Alex he’d call back, the line would ring and ring with no answer.
On Wednesday, Alex went back to class. He’d missed stuff—important stuff—though his excuse of being “sick” for the past two days didn’t seem to hold. Apparently his tutor had seen the article in the paper, along with everyone else in the world.
On Friday Alex called Doug.
“Meet me at the baths.”
“Fuck no, I’m not going in there, Doug. Come over to mine and I’ll make dinner and we can destroy a couple of bottles of wine.”
“To borrow an expression, darling, fuck no. If you’re wallowing, I’m not going to let you drag me down with you. Meet me at the pub in an hour.”
“Fine,” Alex sighed.
