Love is a Stranger

by John Wiltshire

  “Think about it now.”

  “Well, she’s ideal, I guess, but that’s—”

  “Well, there you go. You agree with me, so it is just as well I did not waste your time or mine by asking—consulting—you.”

  Ben thought about this answer—this patronising, annoying, provoking answer—for a while, contemplating all the bad things he wanted to do to Nikolas. Instead of acting on any of them, he said casually, “I considered asking her to marry me once.”

  Nikolas shrugged. “I am married. Your point?”

  “Fuck you.” He pulled out into the outer lane and broke the speed limit by some considerable margin until he could see this bothered Nikolas as much as his attempt to make him jealous, not at all. He slowed down and turned the radio back on—to Radio 1. Nik chuckled and turned it off. “Stop trying to be annoying, Ben. You are annoying enough without any effort on your part, and if you say fuck to me again in any context, I will put you out of the car.”

  “You are not my fuc—boss anymore! Stop treating me like a bloody child!”

  “I treat you as you deserve to be treated.” He twisted around in the seat to face Ben, and Ben could see Nikolas wasn’t as calm or as detached as he’d tried to give the impression he was. “Where have you been the last three days, Benjamin? Who am I sharing you with now?”

  Ben frowned and glanced over. “What do you mean? I’ve been nowhere. Just here—I mean at home, with you.”

  “No. Wherever you were, it was not with me, and you were not at home. You were not at home to me. So, I treat you accordingly.”

  Ben gave him an incredulous look. “Is this about us not having sex? Jesus fucking Christ, it is! Three nights without sex and you’ve gone totally psychotic.”

  “That is exactly where your mind would go. Because you have never seen anything else between us but sex. I did not say sex, and I did not mean sex. You are such a child sometimes. You do nothing but take emotionally and you do not give back. Everything is fall—Stop the car.”

  “What? We’re doing ninety.”

  “At the next services. Pull over.”

  Ben did as he was asked. Nikolas got out of the car and slammed the door as he headed toward the coffee stand. Ben watched him walk away. The dog stuck his head between the seats, and Ben patted him absently, then he clipped on the lead and took him out, keeping a wary eye on Nikolas, who was now leaning casually against the wall, drinking coffee, face tipped to the sun. When the dog was done, Ben climbed back in and waited for Nikolas. Nikolas returned, his earlier, totally uncharacteristic outburst seemingly forgotten. Ben sat staring out of the windscreen. Nikolas frowned. “Come on. We have a long way to go.”

  Ben nodded. “Yeah. I think we do. I do.” He closed his eyes for a moment then opened them to see Nikolas’s eyes, dark and unreadable, watching him intently before the gaze was flicked away. Ben turned to look out of his side window, wishing he wasn’t trapped in the car for this conversation. “I do act like a child. I don’t know why. I just let you do everything—make all the decisions. I’m not like that with other people, so why am I like it with you? I just take and take from you, and then as soon as I get crossed in the slightest, I treat you like shit. On your birthday, too. I didn’t even know it was your birthday…”

  Nikolas sighed and put his hand on Ben’s thigh. “Don’t. I lied to you, Benjamin.”

  Ben turned, his eyes wide. “Don’t say it. Please, whatever you do, don’t say it. Let’s just stay as we are now, please, Nik.”

  “Don’t say what?”

  “I don’t know! Whatever you were going to say—that you don’t love me. That you’re going back to your wife. That you’ve found someone else to do my job. I don’t know!”

  “Dear God, you are foolish sometimes. I was referring to something else entirely.” It was Nikolas’s turn to stare out of his window. “Look, this is neither the time nor the place to have this conversation. I—Do you trust me?”

  “You keep asking me that! Yes! You know I do.”

  “Then trust me now and just drive, and perhaps when we get where we are going, things will sort themselves out more easily than we can see at present.”

  Ben put his hand over Nikolas’s. “Tell me you love me first.”

  Nikolas eased his own hand away. “That is not—”

  “I don’t fucking care about whether that’s what you do or don’t do. I need to hear it.”

  Nik turned to him. “I would have thought all this would say it for me. Would I bother with all this for anyone else?”

  “Why can’t you just say it?”

  A fleeting expression passed over Nikolas’s face. Ben thought he wasn’t going to reply, but he said with so much stress in his voice that his accent almost totally mangled the words, “Everyone I have said that to has left me. Do not make me lose you, too.”

  Ben took Nikolas’s face in a painful hold. “I will never leave you.”

  Nikolas eased his hands off with a sad expression. “Sometimes we have no choice in this world. We are left alone by those who would so very much prefer to stay with us.”

  Ben leant his forehead to Nikolas’s. “All right. I’m sorry.” He straightened in his seat then started the car and pulled back out onto the motorway. Nikolas’s hand returned to Ben’s thigh, his thumb occasionally stroking the outside seam of his jeans, and Ben was content to let that uncharacteristic gesture be all the declaration of love he needed.

  §§§

  They arrived at the edge of the Saddleworth moors, Nikolas now driving, by early evening. For the last few miles, Ben had had a fairly good idea of where they were going. When they drove past his childhood village, however, he frowned but kept quiet. He’d said he trusted Nikolas, and he meant it. Nikolas drove on to a town on the northern slopes of the moors and navigated using the satnav to a small churchyard. He climbed out, let the dog out, and began to walk through the graveyard, consulting a piece of paper. He finally stopped alongside a small marker. Ben came up to join him. The stone merely read, Now in heaven, and a date: 1992.

  Nik pursed his lips and began calmly, “My lie was one of omission. I have been aware of certain facts about your history for some time that I have not shared with you. I believe this is your mother’s grave. This unknown woman died the same year your mother went missing. I do not believe that your mother intended to leave you, as you were always told. She took her things that day and was waiting for you to return home to take you, too.”

  “I—”

  “Please. Just listen. Your father was very late coming home that night. You may not remember this, because you were so young. I believe he discovered what your mother intended and either by mistake or intent he killed her. Her body was never found, but I later discovered this unknown woman was found on the moors, and was buried here. Much of what you remember after that day—the running away and looking for her—was possibly more a result of your father’s guilt—his drinking and consequent treatment of you—than any real belief you had that she was still alive. Ben, it is possible that you feared what he had done. It is possible that is why you stopped talking. No one would listen to you.”

  “But…” Ben’s head was spinning with questions. “Why was she leaving? Why would he kill her for that?”

  Nik sighed and pushed his hands deep into his overcoat pockets. “The man you remember was not your father. You were not fond of him, so I hope this does not come as too much of a shock. Your mother came here with you when you were four. I do not know where she came from or what she was running away from; that remains something I am trying to discover for you. I do not know what attracted her to him. Possibly she was desperate for a home and security for you and took what she could find. Certainly they were very different. You joke about your name; you remember some of the things she wanted for you. She was not at home on a council estate—that seems very clear.”

  For one brief moment, Ben felt as if he were falling into a vast ocean of confusion and pain but then, just before that t
ip, he was filled with a sense of clarity and truth. It was as if something inside his head had always known these things, but it had waited to be given a voice for him to know them in his heart. Nikolas’s mangled English was that voice. He’d never felt a connection with his father. He’d never thought of his home as…home. All his life before the army he’d been searching. He’d thought he’d been searching for his mother. Perhaps he’d just been searching for a truth, which was now being told to him by this man—the man who had become his new certainty. He swivelled his eyes to Nikolas’s face. Truth? Lies? Knowledge? Power. It made him faintly sick to ask, but he had to. “How do you know this? Why are you doing this? Why now? What has this to do with us? Oh, God, is there an us?”

  Nikolas turned to him, his features indistinct now in the gathering dark. So many questions. He appeared to be considering which to answer—which he could answer, perhaps. Finally, he replied simply, “I had not fully appreciated how much the belief in your early abandonment had affected you until I saw how you have been these last few days. I have contributed to this by continuing to allow you to believe what you had been told by your father about her disappearance, and for this I apologise. I treat you like a child who has to be protected because I am afraid to lose you as I lost…But I now believe I will lose you if I do not let you grow up. Perhaps I have decided that I need—Anyway, your mother did not leave you. I believe she loved you a great deal and wanted to protect you. You have no reason to fear abandonment. So, there, I give you your freedom to use as you wish, only—” His voice broke slightly, but he forced himself to continue, “Only if you do decide to return, you come home whole and—”

  “Yours.”

  Nikolas frowned and seemed unable to pick up the train of his thought.

  “Nik, I don’t need to come home. I am home—wherever you are. And I am yours, your possession—if that’s what you want. That won’t ever change. What will change though…” He snagged the lapel of Nikolas’s overcoat and pulled him close. “Is you will be my possession as well. I’ve let you shoulder everything alone. Christ, have I actually let you mother me?”

  “That is a disturbing thought.”

  “Why? Because we like to do this?” He seized Nikolas’s face and kissed him, seeking entry with his tongue. Nikolas opened his mouth and let him in, and with that acquiescence, Ben knew a shift in power had occurred between them. They eased apart, reluctant to fully separate. “Some birthday this is for you.”

  “On the contrary, if you had asked me what I wanted,” Nikolas paused and gave Ben an amused look, “I would have replied you. However, I believe in making my own desires come true. You could not truly be mine until you felt safe not to be.”

  Ben glanced down. “Do you believe the dead can see us or hear us?”

  “No. Death is too absolute for that. But,” he tilted his head and appeared to be seeking something from the vast sky above them, “perhaps a love as strong as your mother had for you does live on somehow. I did not want to tell you this, but perhaps it is right you know, she fought, Ben. She fought to stay alive for you with everything she had. Perhaps your fighting spirit is hers, still with you.” Ben bit his lip. His face crumpled and he looked away. Nikolas sighed. “I’m sorry, I did not mean to make you cry.”

  “I’m not crying.”

  “It is your mother’s grave, Benjamin. Even you are allowed to cry here.” He walked slowly away, giving Ben the peace he needed to grieve. Hands in the pocket of his immaculate overcoat, Ben saw Nikolas waiting by the lychgate, apparently watching stars appear.

  Although his vision was blurred by the strong emotions he’d been at pains to conceal from Nikolas, Ben couldn’t reconcile Nikolas’s belief in the finality of death with the expression now upon that striking face. Nikolas looked to Ben as if he was a man haunted by his own dead, a man rarely spared their endlessly terrifying presence.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Nikolas drove once more, this time to a hotel he had booked on the edge of the moors. It was secluded, and theirs was not the only brand new Range Rover parked outside. When a liveried man came out to park the vehicle for them and another to take the dog to his appointed kennel for the night, Ben felt the same sense of bewilderment and dislocation he’d felt in the cemetery—discovering that everything he’d grown up believing was a lie—swell to almost unbearable proportions. Who the hell was Benjamin Rider? Nikolas hardly seemed to notice the men and took the wealth and privilege of the place in his stride—as he always did.

  They didn’t make love that night, either; not through lack of desire on either side but through a shared need for some more profound connection. They just curled around each other, knee between thighs, Ben half-lying on Nikolas, head on chest, arm tight around waist, and emotionally exhausted, they fell asleep, entwined.

  It was different when they woke. Ben opened his eyes with his face pressed into the rumpled, longish hair at the back of Nikolas’s head. He was achingly hard. He closed his eyes and concentrated on the familiar and deeply erotic smell of Nikolas’s shampoo, making his cock twitch and leak. He cupped one firm buttock then bit the back of Nikolas’s neck—hard. “Happy Birthday for yesterday.”

  Ben then gave Nikolas the present he would have given him the day before had he not been a childish prick. He’d done this so many times before over the years of their relationship—slid into Nikolas’s body—but he’d never eased out again immediately and then used a finger to make Nikolas arch and cry out. He’d never made Nikolas writhe before. This was new. When he heard a moan that was as close to begging as Ben reckoned Nikolas would ever get, he slid back in up to the hilt, pausing to let Nikolas feel the full weight and size of his cock. Once more, he pulled out. Nikolas twisted around looking so unpolished, so lacking in his usual elegant detachment that Ben laughed, kissing him as he slid back in. He braced himself on one strong arm, held Nikolas’s head down and began to work him.

  Four days without release for either of them and the sensation of being inside Nikolas’s body overwhelmed Ben. His entire body seemed to hover on the edge of an explosive orgasm. He changed the angle a little and knew the moment he’d got it just right. Nik’s shoulders lifted from the bed, his long, lean back a pale arc of need. Ben snagged his fingers into Nik’s hair and gripped him like reins and rode him hard. Sweat poured down his body making them slick. He held on, shifted position and knew Nikolas was close. Ignoring his own need to just release hard, he pulled Nikolas’s hips higher and began strokes so long and deep his balls slapped in a delightful rhythm against Nikolas’s hard flesh. Ben slid his hand around and took Nikolas’s aching need in his fist. It twitched once and then everything was spill and release and throb of pure pleasure inside and out. Ben lost track of where sensation came from. It was all bliss as they came together, one crashing orgasm fuelling the other and keeping it going until their bodies were utterly spent and drained. Ben fell on top of Nikolas with a grunt. Nikolas didn’t even manage that much small talk. He put a hand back to hold Ben in and passed back into sleep.

  They dozed together in the early morning light until Ben’s rumbling stomach was actually vibrating between them. He heard a chuckle from somewhere deep in the body beneath him. “Go shower. I will order room service. Your abomination of congealed blood, I expect, is on the menu.”

  Ben began to run light kisses down Nikolas’s back. “You order something as well. You’re too thin. Some European girl’s blouse breakfast.”

  He could feel Nikolas’s frown of confusion, kissed him once more, then ripped their stuck skin apart and went into the bathroom for a long, blissful shower.

  When he came out, Nik was sitting by the open balcony doors in a complimentary bathrobe, drinking coffee and reading the paper. Ben’s breakfast was magnificent. He realised he was almost faint with hunger so he occupied himself with refuelling. Nik was picking at a bowl of fruit. Ben huffed with derision but was too busy eating to comment more. When he was done, he leant back and regarded the man sitting opposit
e him. The first question seemed obvious. It was the others he wasn’t so sure about.

  “How did you know all that about my mother and my dad?”

  Nikolas glanced up. “I knew some of it from police reports which I saw when I wanted you for the department.”

  “When you wanted me for the department? Seriously.”

  Nikolas allowed himself a small smirk. “As you wish—when I wanted you. The rest I had Kate confirm for me over the last week. It was why I did not tell you that I had asked her to come work for us. I did not want her to tell you I was investigating this until I was sure—one way or the other.”

  The second question was relatively obvious, too. “Why the hell would you want Kate to work with us? Given I almost married her once.”

  Nikolas looked faintly annoyed at being questioned and pretended to be engrossed with pouring more coffee. Ben waited patiently. “Either your relationship with her was an aberration, or the aberration is us. I am not perfect, Ben; I chose to poke the sleeping tiger.”