With this in mind, Nikolas was about to comment on Ben’s startling declaration without any added humour, when Ben asked, “Have you ever heard that description of death? The one about the ship?”
Nikolas closed his eyes and rested his head against the back of the cushion. “I have heard a great deal said about death, Ben, by those about to discover it and those sending them on that final journey.”
“Watching a boat leave your harbour, it seems to disappear over the horizon and is lost to view. Sailing on that ship seems to be such a terrifying thing, but to those watching on a distant shore the sails suddenly appear and departing has become arrival.”
Nikolas was at a loss for something to reply to this until, entirely without his volition, he heard himself say, “One day you might pull us both from this darkness.”
Ben leant back too, their heads side by side on the back of the couch, warmth growing between them physically and slowly in other ways, too. “I will. I will make that journey one day, Nik, and you will be on that distant shore waiting for my arrival.”
“I hope it won’t be foggy. Your sense of direction is woeful.”
Ben rolled his head on the cushion and Nikolas felt himself under scrutiny. “I have had a north star guiding me since I met you, Nikolas Mikkelsen. I’ve never strayed, never not loved you, never not wanted to be by your side. My only fault is wanting you too much, wanting you beyond this life, which is something you can’t control or give me. I realise that now. It was too much to ask of you.”
Nikolas sighed. The intense focus on his profile didn’t waver. He shrugged. That usually worked. He twitched his nose then muttered, exasperated, “I suppose I could try.” He sensed a shift in something, possibly the fabric of the universe but it could have just been Ben’s position on the couch. “I will defeat death for you, Ben, if I can. That seems like a small request in comparison to the things I would do for you.” He turned his head as well and they were facing each other at last. “I have also never strayed, never not loved you, never not wanted to be by your side.” He made a tiny movement with his hand and then brought it up to rest on Ben’s thigh. The ring, replaced on his finger, was still heavy, but in a different way now. It was his anchor, his tether, his gravity.
Ben took the spread fingers in his own, eased forward slightly, and their foreheads rested together.
“So, partner and father of my children, am I forgiven?”
It was hard to either agree or disagree whilst being kissed, so Nikolas decided he’d let Ben know later.
He seemed to remember saying later some months previous, so he just picked up where he’d left off, took Ben’s hand, rose, and led him toward their bedroom. The only safe harbour he had ever needed or wanted.
Ben, he noted with some satisfaction, put up no resistance whatsoever.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
The irony didn’t escape Nikolas that for all their talk of safe harbours and difficult journeys, walking to their own bedroom, which should have been the easiest trip two men such as themselves could make, seemed more fraught than the longest of sea voyages, metaphorical or not. But then Nikolas realised that in many significant ways he wasn’t leading Ben at all. He was holding the hand of a different man entirely.
Although Nikolas had recently declared that Ben was his true twin, his soul mate, their relationship had still been uneven—after all, he was the one announcing these things, while Ben was the one accepting his decisions. He was always in control—if they were twins, then he was the elder one, just as he had been for real.
But Nikolas was fairly sure that this wasn’t the case now. He had expected Ben to capitulate, but he hadn’t. He’d stuck to his purpose, despite considerable hardship and anguish to himself, and knowledge of the pain he was inflicting on Nikolas. Ben had more balls than Nikolas had given him credit for, and he always considered himself something of an expert on Ben’s anatomy, in all ways.
Nikolas couldn’t have done it.
He’d only pretended to cheat on Ben with Jackson Keane, because, when push had come to shove, he could never hurt Ben. He was weak. Ben wasn’t.
As Nikolas passed the perfectly smooth expanse of the water in his swim lane, glowing enticingly blue, he had something of a revelation. It occurred to him that far from being unstable, as Squeezy had postulated and he had perhaps misunderstood, Ben was in fact the solidest of things. He was ground to be traversed. But Ben wasn’t the soft easily trod pathways of this Earth; he was its steep climbs and rocky outcrops, the soaring cliffs and impossible reaches. He was the route you had to take if you wanted to be tested and have the very best there was at the end. And you needed to be exceptionally fit and ready to take on such challenges. Ben wasn’t unstable at all. He was exactly as he was meant to be: a trial, which demanded and then rewarded unremitting effort.
However, Nikolas wasn’t entirely sure he liked being a small speck roving over Ben’s magnificence. It wasn’t how it was supposed to be. He owned Ben Rider. He always had. Now, it occurred to him, as they reached their bedroom, that even Ben’s spectacular and very satisfactory name change could be viewed in an entirely different light. It wasn’t Mikkelsen-Rider, after all. No, he was almost an afterthought, hitched up to and being towed along by Ben Rider…
Nikolas felt diminished in this stranger’s presence, this new Ben, who had returned from the war so confident. Ben was radiant. Nikolas was dimmed in his shadow.
When they came to the bed, Nikolas faltered entirely in his certainty and the urgency that he should have been showing, meeting, matching, was lost to self-doubt. Ben didn’t seem to notice. He pulled away from trying to rip off Nikolas’s shirt to tear off his own, throwing it thoughtlessly to the chair. He turned back and only then did he stop, as if he’d run into something hard which took his breath away.
“Oh, my God, Nik…”
Nikolas had completed the removal of his own shirt and had stepped almost reluctantly out of his jeans. Now, naked in the soft light, he heard something in Ben’s tone—no, in his deliberate choice of words that brought his world back onto its right orbit. He saw completely artless, honest worship in Ben’s eyes. Ben never lied, and in those four words the truth of their relationship was clear between them once more.
Ben closed the gap. Nikolas knew that although Ben was not burdened by the metaphorical very often, even he would see that tiny step for the significant journey it was.
Ben fell to his knees. It may have been a totally unconscious reaction to seeing his rising cock, just a position to be able to take it in his mouth, but Nikolas didn’t think so. Ben got the unspoken meaning behind the obeisance, too. Ben was deliberately kneeling to him, and he laid his hands upon the lowered head and took the worship that was offered. They were only playacting upon their own private stage, but Nikolas knew he was Ben’s god once more.
When Ben’s mouth closed around him, slid down his cock, Nikolas laid down his battered armour and accepted that the war was over.
§§§
Later, stretched boneless and happy upon the bed, Ben propped up on one elbow beside him, drawing and tracing his defined body idly with one finger, Nikolas risked a quiet murmur. Even gods have to be sure. “Have you entirely renounced purity? I have to know.”
Ben trailed his finger lower. “Not at all. What do you think I’m admiring right now?”
“But…”
“Who’s to tell us what God wants? Seems to me that if I were God, and I’d created man, I’d be pretty pleased if he looked like you.”
“But…”
They heard a click, clicking from the doorway and both rolled over to see the dogs arriving.
Radulf was apparently allowing the younger dog to lead him across the swim lane.
“What’s he called? He looks like a husky.”
Nikolas smiled. “I thought we’d let our children name him.”
Ben switched his gaze slowly from the dogs to Nikolas. By his expression, Nikolas knew Ben had got both the momentous thing
s implied by what he’d just said.
§§§
The next day, Ben told Nikolas that he needed to go to the cottage and start moving his stuff back.
They were still in bed, tangled and hot in the afterglow of early morning orgasm, so Ben knew Nikolas wouldn’t take too much notice of this deceit. It had occurred to Ben that a relationship with only one person who lied was extremely unbalanced, and it was his duty to even things up a bit.
He went to Plymouth.
Despite his words to Nikolas the previous night, he wasn’t at all sure about purity.
Walking up the pathway to the big house in Hartley, he felt the doubts and fears he had hidden from Nikolas roiling in his belly.
Martin opened the door and was clearly surprised to see him.
“Oh, hello, stranger. Good show. Loved the picture of that scary creature. The bear was frightening, too, of course.”
“Can I come in?”
“Of course, please…” Martin stood back, and Ben slid past him then went into the front room.
“How are you? You look…you look really good.”
Ben nodded. “I am. I wanted to say I’m sorry, but I also want to thank you. Despite what you may think, I do appreciate what you did for me.”
“What I may think?”
Ben frowned. “Well, that I betrayed you…abandoned you? Escaped…?”
Martin raised his brows. “Oh, goodness, no. Quite the opposite in fact. Look, come into the kitchen and have a cup of tea.”
As the kettle was boiling, Martin, elbows propped on the counter and staring into the long garden, murmured, “This weather is superb. My mum loved this time of year. Her birthday was in May, and we used to take a trip up to Wiltshire where she’d been born, and we passed all these fields of rape, and she’d say the sun had come down and touched the earth. Like a finger of God illuminating the world.”
“You must miss her.”
“Every day, but anyway, that’s sort of what I was thinking…about you.” Martin poured the tea, and they sat together at the little table. “We were praying for you. For you to be happy, to find what you were looking for, to come closer to God. All of those things and more. And here you are, so happy and healthy. Surely then you are living proof of the power of prayer? Oh, Ben, please…don’t…”
Martin got up and snatched the tea towel off the draining board, offering it to Ben.
Ben didn’t even try to stem his tears—Martin had seen them before, after all.
Martin scrunched up the unwanted cloth and sat uneasily across the table from Ben. “I think—”
“You have no idea the things I’ve done, the things that have been done in my name.”
“When you were in the—you were a soldier, Ben, that’s a—”
Ben shot to his feet and leant into Martin’s face. “Not when I was in the army. Since I met Nikolas. I set fire to a man and let him burn because he knew things about Nikolas I didn’t. I burnt him to death because I was jealous! I tortured an old man and I enjoyed it. I made him cry and beg, and I only wished I had him for longer and could have made it last until he’d taken his pain into the next life with him because he’d hurt Nikolas. Do you see a pattern here, Martin? Do you?
“Maybe it wasn’t God calling to me on the ice. I think now that maybe it was the man I was before Nikolas. Ben, where are you? The fuck, Martin, I don’t know. I just don’t know. He killed his only son for me!”
“God made that sacrifice so—”
“Not God! Nikolas! For me, Martin, he fucking kissed him and snapped his neck. Where is it going to end? What are we becoming?”
Martin twitched the end of the tea cloth closer and began twisting it around his finger. After a moment, he ventured, “It wasn’t the sun, of course, coming down and touching the earth. It was just bright flowers. But mum wouldn’t listen to us. She would try to compose her face as we crested the ridge, pretend she’d gone along with dad’s scientific explanations, but then…” His expression softened and for a moment, Ben could see a young boy, eagerly watching his mother’s face, mirroring her wonderment at the beauty of the world. Martin roused a little. “What do you want to become, Ben? That’s the thing…You can believe that the sun leaves the sky and touches the earth to share with us its illumination or you can argue rods and cones and wavelengths. Which makes for a happier world? For a better inner life?”
“You’re not even bothered by what I’ve just told you? About—”
“Being bothered by things comes from fear. I’m afraid of nothing because I believe in God’s ultimate grace and forgiveness—but I preferred your confessions about the sex, I’ll give you that…”
Ben sank down heavily once more in his seat and gave a wry hiccup.
“Ben? What did you do in the army when you were lost?”
Ben twitched his lips. “Blamed an officer?”
“And then?”
“Stop, made a brew, took the readings again.”
“And if the readings were exactly the same as the last time you took them?”
“Then I carried on and trusted the map and the compass.”
“Have you ever hurt a good person, Ben? Do you leave a shadow at your passing or a bright trail? Perhaps you’re not lost at all but on the path God wants you to be on. After all, He can’t actually intervene in this war Himself, can He? That would be a little one-sided and unfair. He chooses warriors, exceptional people who can fight the good fight for Him. We were sent a text, Ben. Sarah and I. And it said, ‘Come.’ All we can do in life is be open to the possibility that one day we will hear God’s call. You heard it and you answered it. You’re not lost. I see that bright illumination on you just as it was on my mum. I’m thinking of writing to the people who are doing the study on the power of prayer. Looking at you, I think my evidence is unequivocal.”
Ben relaxed back and turned his face to the bright light streaming into the kitchen. He could hear the soft tick of a clock somewhere and when he tuned his hearing a little, birdsong from the garden. He thought back to the reunion the previous night—Nikolas’s wary reception of him, the knowledge of the pain he’d put Nikolas through. Nikolas Mikkelsen, for all his assurances, was a man lost and floundering in the darkness. Ben, for his dumbness, had an unswerving sense of direction. He would bring Nikolas home—kicking and screaming if that’s the way it had to be. He smiled a little at the image and knew it wasn’t far off the mark of how their whole relationship had actually been. He stretched and commented casually, “This house is too small for your church. Have you ever thought of finding somewhere better?”
“Of course, we’d love to. We can’t expand until we do, and there are so many people who need prayer. The world seems to be going to hell in a hand basket.”
Ben chuckled. “Pity you don’t know someone who owns an empty chapel.”
§§§
Over the next few weeks, Ben reflected on the notion of purity. It was the final thing he had asked Martin. Even if he accepted Martin’s other comforting contentions, what about purity? It was, after all, the Church of New Hope through Purity. Hard to ignore.
Martin had replied he was rethinking that one, too. After all, if Ben brought him a glass of the purest, clearest water anyone could possibly ever want to drink, who was he to declare that offering polluted, unclean? Science was science, after all. Purity could be measured…it was just another proof of the power of prayer…
Ben didn’t really need Martin’s reassurances. He reckoned he was something of an expert on the concept—having lived purity in one form or another his whole life.
Nothing, he had decided, now matched the unsullied perfection of his current life.
They had an exceptional, mellow spring that year, May coming in with a heatwave that turned Dartmoor into a place of golden shimmer, their grounds a profusion of colour; flowers, shrubs and trees watered religiously by the old codger and his team. The sun glinted off the glass of the house from early morning to late warm evenings, and they spent
most of their time outdoors, running, riding, or making love in the shelter of a tor, rolling and finding their own definitions for the abstractions that had torn them apart.
The houses were finished, and Babushka and Enid moved in. Emilia and Miles came for half term. The day before they arrived, Ben drove to St Albans and fetched Molly Rose. He said he wanted her with her family for the holiday.
Ben told them all that evening that the movie started shooting in October. Before the chorus of dismay at his absence became too loud, he added shyly that he hoped they all knew how to ski—Enid aside, of course. But he wanted to see her take a sled ride with huskies to the glacier…
They were all coming with him.
He’d already spent some of his advance.
He’d booked out the entire cabin from Claire. Twenty bedrooms, he reckoned, would be big enough even for his large family.
Enid murmured, terribly politely, about school, but Ben waved away her worries. He’d arranged permission. Miles and Emilia were going to help with a Cambridge University study—on polar bears. It was that sort of school.
Later, listening to the children splash around in the pool, Nikolas pushed some papers he was reading over to Ben and said casually, “Sign here.”
Ben did whilst watching the puppy chewing Radulf’s ear. “Have they named him yet?”
“They have come up with a few suggestions. There…” Nikolas was blowing on Ben’s signature and smiled at him. “We are joined.”
Ben’s eyes widened, and he glanced at the paper.
Nikolas leant back, giving him a sly smirk. “In banking terms, anyway. How does it feel to be a billionaire?”
“W—What?”
“Joint bank account. It is all yours now as much as mine.”
“Good God.”
Suddenly, Radulf collapsed.
Ben was out of his chair in a second. “What’s wrong?” Radulf gave a feeble groan and his tongue lolled. “Nik! What’s wrong with him? Did the puppy bite too hard?”
“I have absolutely no idea.” Nikolas toed the dog, who recovered surprisingly quickly and returned to his game with soggy ears.
John Wiltshire - [More Heat Than the Sun 07] Page 25
