It was so hard. He had thought Ben would capitulate by now. He had underestimated God—how much He must want this beautiful man for Himself. Well, Nikolas wanted him more, and he still had some fight left in him.
“I’m sorry.” It felt good to be the one saying it for once. “I can’t promise that. And I’ve been thinking, too…I think you need to make an appointment to visit the court again. Remember that word they gave you—uncoupling. It’s very apt in our case. You need to do that, Ben. Literally. No hyphen. You can’t be Rider-Mikkelsen anymore. It’s not fair on me—not fair on anyone I ask to m—”
“No.” Ben jerked his head away from Nikolas’s hold.
Nikolas’s eyes widened. “Yes. It’s my name and you can’t have it.” Shit, was he eight years old?
“But…” Ben sank down on his back, staring up at the dark. “That’s my name. That’s who I am.”
“That’s who you w—”
“Shut up! For once, just shut the fuck up, Nikolas, and let me think.”
Nikolas’s brows shot up. Where had Ben Rider-Mikkelsen just sprung from?
After a few moments, Ben ripped the thin blanket away and lurched to his feet, as if he was being suffocated. He began to stride across the tiny room, occasionally coming to a standstill, glaring at the blank wall, as if forgetting what he was doing and then resuming the angry pacing.
Nikolas sat up and began feeding small twigs to the fire. It was something to do. He watched their tiny conflagrations, their fleeting lives, as his own was decided behind him.
Finally, Ben sat down alongside him. He even picked up a long splinter of pine and caught it alight. The familiar intimacy overwhelmed Nikolas, and his hand reached almost automatically for his cigarettes, his security, his lifeline. Pulling out the packet, he saw they’d been entirely crushed, their fragile contents now spilling into his palm. Ben took his hand and swept the remains away.
“I think I may have made a terrible mistake. I’m not allowed to say I’m sorry, am I?”
“No.”
“Okay.” Ben took a deep breath, then seized Nikolas’s face. “Then I’ll have to show you.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Every cell in Nikolas’s body responded to Ben’s first touch, aching to feel the rasp of his stubble, taste his mouth, smell his hair and his skin, as if for the last few weeks he had been comatose, enduring relentless darkness only Ben could save him from. They rolled together on the floor, no thought to comfort, just the need to join, to couple their individual selves back into one entity. Ben’s mouth found his, and Nikolas let him in, opening wide, as strong, cold hands roamed under his coat, into his jacket, seeking, always seeking.
Nikolas’s brain fired off random thoughts suppressed by urgency, by Ben’s insistence. Usually the one who initiated sex, always the one who wanted it hard, fast and visceral, Nikolas could now sense that level of desperation in Ben. His own hands, in contrast, became stiller. Ben’s increased their fevered attempts to get to skin.
Nikolas held Ben’s wrists. “Stop.”
Ben didn’t listen. It wasn’t a word he’d heard before—maybe once or twice, but those had been exceptional circumstances.
Ben couldn’t stop, apparently. He came back to Nikolas’s mouth, as if by kissing he could take control again, but Nikolas turned his head away. “Stop. Ben, stop. I…can’t.”
Ben seized his chin to force him back. “You’re just saying that. To punish me, to make me…”
“No.” He smacked Ben’s hand away from his face and crawled to his feet, backing away a little.
Ben stood too, and the room suddenly seemed far too small for this kind of confrontation. Ben visibly swallowed. He ran a hand through his hair. “I made a mistake. You won’t let me say I’m sorry—but I am. Isn’t this what you want? Us together again.”
It was.
It was what it had all been for—all the lying, all the games, all the heartache.
Before he knew what he was going to say, which was something of a first for Nikolas as his words were always chosen just so, he admitted, “Yes. But I don’t trust this.”
Ben took this as if he’d been stabbed. He actually staggered. Nikolas almost reached out to steady him, but he didn’t have the strength. He closed his eyes so he couldn’t see Ben’s expression and repeated, “I don’t trust what is happening here.”
It was too easy. A snowy night, trapped together, forced into sharing a bed—God needed to improve his fucking script-writing skills, because Nikolas wasn’t having any of it. He’d almost fallen for it, almost surrendered to his own desperate need to have Ben home again. But he didn’t trust it.
He opened his eyes to find Ben staring at him wide-eyed, whether in recognition of a truth or in horror he couldn’t tell.
“You mean you don’t trust me. Oh God, what have I done? What the fuck have I gone and done? I made you so many promises, and I’ve failed every one. I promised you I’d never hurt you, but—”
“Ben…Ben, listen to me. I do trust you. But not this…this situation with us here tonight…it’s too…Do you remember what my previous job was?” Ben frowned but before he could reply, Nikolas continued quickly, “The trick was to break people mentally before you broke them too much physically—we needed information, not corpses. The easiest way to destroy spirit is to offer people exactly what they want and make them believe it—freedom; to know their loved ones are safe; relief from pain—offer it but then snatch it away again, just when they allow themselves to hope…He’s doing that to me now, with this tonight. He’s done it to me before. I recognise the signs.”
Ben was frowning deeply, obviously not following any of the logic of this anymore than Nikolas understood Ben’s talk of signs and promises. He countered with a low, “Do you remember what you told me about your brother when he confronted you at the hotel in Moscow? Remember what you thought? When he said you should take the blame for the boy? That it wouldn’t hurt your career—given what you were?”
Nikolas did recall that. He remembered his brother saying it to him as clearly as he heard Ben now. “Yes. I thought, fuck you, why should I?”
“But that was such a small thing, given what you’d already done for him, wasn’t it? You’d sacrificed your childhood, suffered your father…the others…and then you’d gone to prison for him! But it was that last thing on top of all the rest.”
Nikolas nodded. “The last straw.”
Ben came close. He was searching for something around his shirt collar and pulled out a chain, which he slipped off over his head.
A ring. His ring.
Ben pressed it into Nikolas’s hand. It was warm from his body and felt almost alive.
“I sacrificed it all, Nik. I offered it willingly to God in exchange for your life now and our life together after this one, but I won’t give that up. Not my name, which is my identity now. That’s the last straw. It’s who I am. Half of you. Yours. I’m yours, Nikolas, not God’s. Put it back on, please.”
Nikolas continued to hold it in his palm. “So, you now think it was all…what? A delusion? Like…before?” He didn’t need to glance at Ben’s wrist scar. They both knew what he was referring to.
Ben hung his head. “What did you do in the Philippines when Nika came to you and told you to climb?”
“I realised it was all a figment of my imagination and stayed very sane and rational. I hedged my bets and realised my own common sense was telling me to get the fuck up that cliff. And that’s what I then told you to do.”
Ben’s head came up, and he was smiling broadly, and the spark of vitality that had held Nikolas captive all these years was very evident. “There you go then. I did the same on the ice on Svalbard. I stayed very rational and sane, and my own common sense told me that something, someone, had saved your life and brought you back to me and that I needed to say thank you. Well, I’ve said it enough. He brought you back, Nikolas, so I guess He doesn’t want you to go to waste…”
Bright lights suddenly b
athed them in a white glow. Nikolas squinted into the yard. “Fuck.” The tow truck had arrived.
Ben caught at Nikolas’s arm, even as they heard the doors slam and voices. Ben said softly, “I will make this right.”
Nikolas nodded, although he had no idea why, as he couldn’t for the life of him work out what he was agreeing to. He wasn’t sure, but he thought he’d just fended off the very thing he’d been fighting so very hard to achieve.
But he didn’t trust it.
Ben came up very close and whispered against his ear, “I got us across the ice. Let me do this.”
Nikolas could think of nothing but the feel of the warm stubble against his cold face and murmured, “We’re still there, Ben. I don’t think we ever left.”
Ben hugged him, even as the old front door reverberated with sharp knocks. “Then I will bring us home.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Nikolas didn’t get back to the glass house until the early hours of the morning.
Squeezy was waiting up for him.
There was hardly any snow on the ground in their sheltered valley. It hadn’t snowed in London at all.
“So?”
Nikolas leant on the counter, watching the kettle boil. He was wondering how he’d explain this. “Ben wanted to come back. He’s sorry. He tried to make love to me.” And then, “I said no.”
Nope, it wasn’t sounding good in his head, and he was pretty sure it would be a lot worse out loud. The ring sat heavy in his pocket with almost Tolkienesque foreboding.
Squeezy suddenly grunted and began rummaging around his shirt, eventually pulling out his phone. He glanced at it quickly, then again more carefully. “Text from Diesel.”
“What?” Nikolas came over and joined him at the table. “What does he want?”
“I don’t fucking know, do I? I haven’t opened it yet.” Squeezy did then, pursing his lips as he read. “Huh.” He stowed his phone away, chuckled at Nikolas’s furious expression and said, “He wants to sell his bike. Asked me if I want to buy it.”
“What?”
“He wants to sell his—”
“No, I got that. What does it mean?”
“How the hell should I know? My guess would be he wants some money. Maybe he wants to move.”
Nikolas drummed his fingers on the table. This was out of his control, and he knew it. If Squeezy didn’t buy it, Ben would only find someone else. “How much does he want for it?”
“Six.”
“Is that…a lot?”
Squeezy shrugged. “Full service history, one anally-retentive-about-his-bike owner? It’s cheap.”
“Okay, buy it.”
“I’ve got a—Okay, okay.”
Nikolas suddenly had a horrible thought. “Wait.” Six thousand pounds could buy a very nice birthday present for someone who had specifically said don’t get anything—which everyone knew meant exactly the opposite.
No.
He hadn’t trusted that little scenario in the snow God had engineered, but he did trust Ben Rider. Rider-Mikkelsen.
“Buy it.”
But what did Ben want six thousand pounds for?
§§§
The next day, tired from the sleepless night, enduring yet another workout and being threatened with his first run because, apparently, his cardio was shot to hell, Nikolas wondered whether he had, in fact, gone about things all wrong.
The strategy of war—it was all he knew. But had it been right for that moment when Ben had said we need to talk…Was any we need to talk conversation ever made better by immediately going onto battle footing? A relationship with Ben shouldn’t be psychological warfare—so why had he seen it as such?
He trusted Ben. He still did, despite this latest swerve.
Perhaps he should have trusted him a little more and let him work through this thing on his own. Fuck. Perhaps he should have helped him…
Nikolas let his arms give out on a push-up and sat up. Squeezy was executing a set of one-arm pull-ups, and he dropped off the bar. “What?”
Nikolas didn’t reply, just kept plucking at an annoying thread on his shorts. Then he switched his attention to his new scar and began picking at that. A hand came down over his to stop him, and Squeezy hunkered down, facing him. “You’re almost there.”
Nikolas nodded. “Don’t say the glute word.”
“Not this, pillock. With Ben.” He considered Nikolas for a while, watching him make his scar bleed. “What’s the most important fucking virtue a soldier needs?”
“Oh, God—where’s the dog? I need some philosophising.”
“You don’t know, do you? Useless fucking Russian—”
“It’s courage. I can—”
“Nope. It’s endurance. Courage is the second thing. I reckon you’re doing just fine—enduring.”
Before Nikolas could respond to this oddly uncharacteristic encouragement, Squeezy added, “So, how about that shag now? Cheer you up a bit? Test that endurance…” On Nikolas’s annoyed expression, he added cheerfully, “Yeah. Thought so. In that case…”
Nikolas was forced out for his first experience of just how challenging the Dartmoor terrain could be.
Michael Heathcote took no prisoners. He could have been Spetsnaz, Nikolas reflected. And he didn’t give that compliment lightly.
And running gave him plenty of time to worry over the six thousand pounds.
§§§
A week later, Nikolas visited the cottage again.
Ben wasn’t there.
The place didn’t appear to have been lived in for a few days, for there had been another heavy snowfall three days previous, but it was undisturbed around the ramshackle building. No footprints.
Nikolas called Tim Watson. He even texted Jackson on the very unlikely off chance that Ben might be staying with him. Neither had seen nor heard from him.
The bike, however, was now in Tim’s garage, and Squeezy, he said, had given Ben the money he’d wanted for it.
Nikolas called Jennifer Armstrong. He rang Enid and spoke with Babushka. She was too cross with both of them to do more than lecture him for fifteen minutes—but, no, Ben was not in Scotland.
Finally, he texted Ben.
Once or twice in their long relationship, Ben had texted him and he’d deliberately not replied, but those were very rare occasions. They always replied; it’s just how they were together.
When he’d had no response by the evening, Nikolas rang Peyton. “Find Ben.”
Peyton was eating something—Nikolas could tell by the slurping, chomping sounds. “He’s in the States.”
“What!”
“Flew there yesterday, and don’t ask me how I know.”
“I wasn’t going to. Where—?”
“And don’t ask me where he is now ’cause I don’t know. He’s gone off grid. Cash only I’d say. He went through JFK at two o’clock and he’s gone to black, man. Awesome.”
“Fuck!”
“What you want me to do?”
“Swallow?”
“Oh, okay. So?”
“Just…keep looking.”
“Always am, always am.”
There was a lot you could do in New York with six thousand pounds.
§§§
Nikolas had never liked running. He’d taken it up with Ben on their return from Russia, mainly because he liked watching Ben’s arse as he pumped along the pavement and then having it during post-exercise activities in the shower. Running with Squeezy on Dartmoor was a little different. It was more challenging. It involved climbing rocks, wading rivers, and occasionally swimming through natural pools, which more resembled bogs than his pristine swim lane. He enjoyed none of this. But he did relish the return to health and fitness, and the fact that should he so wish, he could take Squeezy down to the soft Dartmoor grass and beat the fuck out of him. Well, he could contemplate this much-desired thing, as he endured another tirade of mockery and abuse.
Occasionally, when he stopped to throw up, Squeezy
would jog back to him and put a hand upon his neck. A gesture between comrades. At one of these halts, with Nikolas bent over wishing he didn’t smoke and Squeezy standing with one hand lightly on his shoulder, staring off into the vast distances of Dartmoor without even being out of breath, Nikolas straightened and said, “I’m not sure I can trust him anymore.”
It was out there.
It had been hovering around in the cottage when Nikolas had realised he didn’t believe what was happening between him and Ben, but he hadn’t actually voiced it.
It had fluttered around him all day and night since then, when he’d been telling himself that he did trust Ben but he just didn’t trust this or that or any of the other things in his life he actually had more reason to depend upon than the one person he should have been able to rely on completely.
It wasn’t God’s little snowy screenplay he distrusted—it was Ben.
Why he should say this now to this man at this time defeated him, however, and he immediately wished he could call the words back, or that he’d said them in one of his other languages to hear them out loud but not have them understood.
Squeezy brought his gaze back from the cold, windswept moors and regarded Nikolas through narrowed eyes. When he didn’t comment, Nikolas realised that Squeezy was playing his trick—the silence thing—but even though he saw this he fell for it anyway. He needed to say it. “What if he comes back and then just does it all over again?”
“Some new fad? Some whim that takes his fancy? Some poking of a small crack that breaks the whole fucking world apart?”
Nikolas nodded.
Squeezy continued to study Nikolas for a moment then said, “He’s unstable.”
John Wiltshire - [More Heat Than the Sun 07] Page 23
