by Harper Fox
The cross, the smudge on the glass, wouldn’t last long in this heat. Across the room, Meredith was finishing up, the printer beginning to whirr. With that one lie accomplished—a lie to his husband as they’d sat face to face in their Eden orchard—the rest of the truth could go hang as far as Lee was concerned. “He’s here,” he announced, with just the right mix of fear and relief to suit the occasion. “I’ve got to go.”
“Wait. Here’s your letter. I’ve booked you in for two o’clock tomorrow afternoon—just as an outpatient, you can go home afterwards and sort out anything you need to. But I’m requesting your surgery on Friday. I’ll phone you as soon as I know.”
“Right. Thanks.” Suddenly that seemed a poor return to this old friend for her years of kindness, and he stopped by her chair on his way to the door: took the letter, then leaned over her and pressed a kiss to her cheek. “I mean it. Thank you, Meredith. All of this must have been so hard for you to do.” He crumpled the letter into his jacket pocket, and he ran.
***
Monday night was chef’s night at Chy Lowen. Gid and Lee had used to cook for one another daily, but Tamsyn’s arrival had stealth-bombed that civilised arrangement, and weekends could devolve into takeaways and ready meals from Tesco. Now that their girl was old enough to sit with them at the table and enjoy proper food, they’d both made the effort to start their week off right with a home-cooked speciality meal, taking turns to rustle up old favourites and invent new. These endeavours usually ended up with the whole family in the kitchen, Tamsyn suggesting hideous flavours for ice cream for dessert, the dog taking advantage of each moment of chaos to snitch scraps from tabletop and counters.
Gideon, resplendent in a 1950s flowered pinafore, strode about the kitchen. Szechuan chicken in chilli garlic sauce was his goal this evening. His own turn at chef’s night had used to make him nervous, but like most other things it came easily to him now. All it took was good prep, a scientific approach, confidence and a big dash of flair. Nice free-range birds from the farm down the hill. The recipe book Lee had bought him as encouragement when he showed signs of culinary talent. The pinafore he’d found in the back of a drawer when they’d first moved in, worn first to make Lee laugh and then in the hope that the spirit of its previous owner would guide and domesticate him, keep him no less and no more than the good dad and husband he aspired to be. He cherished such outward symbols. Sometimes he had strange longings for garments that would contain and restrict him, a suit of armour or some kind of whole-body corset, but he dismissed these visions as an idle BDSM fantasy, and wondered at the workings of his brain.
He’d thought he might enjoy the peace of an empty house, but his skin was crawling with unease. He’d had the strangest of days. Lee would help him decompress, take thorns out of his paws. When he’d started his sabbatical, he’d offered to take over Gideon’s chef’s-night duties, but there’d been no need. What with renovating Jory’s boat, looking after his kid and listening to his husband rant and moan, the poor bugger was hardly on holiday at all, and Gideon had more than enough energy to work and cook too.
He glanced at his watch. He wasn’t worried. Lee had texted to say his appointment had gone fine, and he was treating himself to an afternoon of idleness in Falmouth. He and Tamsyn were both due back around six, by which time Gid’s chicken ought to have reached a state of tender perfection. He put together the ingredients for the sauce: rice-wine vinegar, soy, sesame oil. The kitchen was a bit of a wreck, though by contrast to Rufus Pendower’s it was a haven of hygiene and contentment. All the mess was evidence of happy family life: Tamsyn’s toys, Lee’s books and script notes piled on the table and chairs, his own trail of chef’s-night destruction. For the second time that day, he set himself to tidy up.
He wouldn’t draw any further comparisons between this world and Pendower’s. He’d left Liskeard in a squeal of tyres, shaken to the bone. Stupid of him to have succumbed. Rufus was delusional, that was all. He’d picked up on Kerdrolla and run with it, his obsession with etymology fuelling the fantasy. Try as he might, Gideon couldn’t imagine Lee—who guarded his subconscious as faithfully as he did his waking mind—sitting down with Rufus to chat about his husband’s fever dreams.
As soon as he was back, Gideon would tell him all about it. Together they would explode the mystery in loving common sense. Having settled that with himself, he switched on the radio, flicked it to Kernow FM and allowed the undemanding banter and hits from the noughties to disengage his brain while he worked.
He was hanging the last copper pan on its rack when Lee’s Escort bumped onto the drive with its characteristic roar. Have to get him a better car, he thought affectionately, and then: don’t go out to meet him. He wants to make an entrance.
Where on earth had that come from? Gideon leaned back against the sink, wiping his hands on a towel. The signal had been so strong, there was hardly any credit due to him for picking it up, but still he was pleased with himself, and more than happy to cooperate. What had Lee been up to?
The kitchen door swung open, and he saw. He folded his arms, exhaled in a long, appreciative whistle, then broke into a grin. Lee flushed in pleasure and embarrassment. He’d stopped in the doorway to allow Gid’s inspection. He’d been to the barber, for once not just for a haircut but to get his couple of days’ growth of beard elegantly shaped. His neat frame was picked out in a new, closely tailored sea-green shirt. “Well,” he said, spreading his hands. “I couldn’t go and visit Ma, so I had to put my time in somehow. And I just thought, what with running around after Tamsie and being a house-husband, I might’ve... let myself go a bit.”
To Gideon, Lee looked like pure domestic heaven whether he’d just rolled out of bed or was ready to fall into it at the end of a long exhausting day. Still, this was the cherry on top and no mistake. Even the silver chain he wore around his throat was gleaming brightly against his tan, so familiar a sight to Gideon that he’d ceased to take conscious notice of it years ago. Seeing the direction of his glance, Lee raised a hand and touched the links. “I even got this polished up at the jeweller’s.”
He would have had to take it off to do that. For some reason the idea filled Gideon with unease. “I only ever saw you without it once,” he said, as lightly as he could. “You were scared I’d... thrown down the gauntlet to a hostile spirit in your Falmouth flat, and you put it around my neck to protect me.” He chuckled. “Even though I started it.”
“Well, as you said this morning, who the hell cares who started it? Come on, you big dork. Are you just gonna stare at the goods, or come over here and get ’em?”
Gideon pushed off the sink. He took two strides towards him, and Lee broke stillness and dashed to meet him more than halfway. Gasping, Gid caught him. The sensation was extraordinary. If Lee had been an air-drowned fish and Gideon deep still waters, or a warm safe bed for a man deadbeat with exhaustion, a hole in the earth for a fox... Lee dived into him; there was no other way of feeling this impact, this reunion. The honour and joy of it almost knocked Gideon down, but he didn’t understand: if Lee had been away for weeks in mortal peril of his life, they might have met like this at the end of it. “Didn’t I just see you this morning?” he asked breathlessly, laughing into the fragrant, freshly cropped hair.
“So? Isolde does this to you when you’ve been away for five minutes.”
“Once upon a time. I could drop off the face of the earth now and she wouldn’t bat an eyelid.” Deciding that he didn’t have to understand, Gideon put both arms around him tight. If Lee needed him to be water, he’d part like the Red Sea to let him in. He’d be the most welcoming of beds, the deepest of foxholes. “You weren’t letting yourself go, for godsakes. What made you think that?”
“I dunno. Just stupid. I love you so much.”
Gideon tightened his hold. He lifted until Lee’s spine popped, eliciting a grunt of relief from him. Lee’s feet left the ground, and Gideon swung him slowly, powerfully round in a full circle, then because he’d started t
o laugh, made another turn and then a third. “Christ, I love you too,” he affirmed, when they were both dizzy and disoriented. The lowering sun flashed a gilded beam through the kitchen, and just for one lucid instant Gideon knew that the haircut and the new shirt were distractions, shields. He couldn’t hold on to the awareness, which Lee was guarding with tigerish energy, but he set him carefully back on his feet, pushed him to arm’s length and held his shoulders. “Lee, sweetheart. What on earth’s wrong?”
“Wrong?” Lee’s smile was tearstained and too bright. “I’m fine. I think it just hit me when I got back, how... how fine everything is here. I smelled your Szechuan chicken and saw how you’d spruced the place up, and then I saw you. The finest thing of all.”
Distractions, shields, misdirections. They bounced off Gideon’s consciousness like the sunlight now blazing back from every polished surface in the room. “Stop it, you flatterer. Here I am in my pinafore, and you look ready for the cover of Esquire, the Kernowek special. I love this shirt. Where did you get it?”
“The new menswear place by the harbour. Very trendy and sophisticated—I give ’em three months tops.”
“Mm, they might’ve overreached themselves in Falmouth. Feels lovely, though. I hope it was good and expensive.”
“Tamsyn can forget her college fund. It’s bamboo silk.”
“Wow.” Gideon gathered a pinch of the fabric at Lee’s waist and rubbed it appreciatively between his finger and thumb. He was delighted that his man had gone out and spent some money on relative frivolities. Life-affirmation, he thought, and shook his head in puzzlement: why would a gorgeous, healthy thirty-seven year old need to do that? “Well, it’s a perfect fit. You should go get five more in different colours.”
Lee snorted. “Sergeant Rockefeller! You do realise I paid for it out of your hard-earned copper’s wages, don’t you?”
That wasn’t true. Their account was a joint one, and anyway Lee had ploughed so much into their household with his TV work that he could go on a spree any time he liked.
It was just that he so seldom did. Gideon couldn’t remember the last time. Not for himself, anyway: he’d been known to let rip on Tamsie’s behalf when cute new kids’ clothes arrived in the shops, and he seldom came home without a book or a pair of comedy socks for Gid. “I’d be pleased if you had,” he said, lifting Lee’s chin and turning it to admire the neat manscaping along the line of his jaw. “Go get yourself oiled and pampered at my expense any time you like. Makes me feel rich.”
“Like you did at Rufus’s house today. Then you remembered you weren’t, and you were upset.”
He hadn’t altered his tone or his expression. Gideon stared. “Jeez, love. Changing-room door!”
“Then Rufus was upset too. The visit didn’t go well.”
The green shirt had been a perfect match for Lee’s eyes when he’d first arrived. Gideon wondered if the shop sold a version in silver. “All right, you,” he said. “You’re okay. Come and sit down with me.”
He steered him to the battered sofa by the aga, where he, Lee, Isolde and Tamsyn often piled up together on chilly nights. Lee settled quietly at his side, then flinched back into the moment. “Oh, God. I’m sorry.”
Gideon put an arm around him. “Don’t be. I’m sure I was broadcasting on all channels.”
“Still.”
“Anyway, you’re right. It didn’t go well. I tidied up his house and left him some money for an unpaid bill.”
Lee gave him a sidelong glimmer. “You monster.”
“I know, I know. But the thing is, I didn’t ask him first, and I think I should have. Especially about the money.” Suddenly Gideon realised that he too could distract and shield. This topic, Rufus and his domestic problems, was painful but safe. What had made him think he could talk to Lee about Kerdrolla? The prospect felt like a chasm at his feet, ready to swallow them both. Quickly he tucked Story Town away behind lurid images of Pendower’s kitchen. “The place was filthy. But I do get that not everyone wants to be helped. I didn’t mean to ride all over him rough-shod.”
Lee took hold of his hand and laced their fingers together. “Of course you didn’t. Please tell me Daisy and the baby weren’t in the midst of all this.”
“No. She left him.” That was a good piece of mental armour, although Gideon would have to choose his words carefully: Lee’s mouth had dropped open in shock. “I think he’s still in mourning for Amber, and Daisy got tired of competing with a ghost.” And with you, he could never add, because Lee would hate to know he’d been the innocent means of breaking up a friend’s marriage. “So things aren’t great for him, no. Having already stuck my nose in where it wasn’t wanted and patronised him, I went the whole hog and called welfare services.”
“Bloody hell.”
“Do you think I was wrong?”
“No, just very bold and decisive.”
“Not what you’d have done, though. You reckon we should go straight over there and help him out ourselves, not leave him in the hands of strangers.”
“Is that not what you’re thinking, love?”
“No. Okay, yes. Maybe.”
A ripple of laughter shook Lee’s shoulders. “That about covers it. As a matter of fact you’re wrong. I’m sure I should want us to jump in the car and go rescue him, but I don’t. The trouble is that I’ve got everything I want in the world right here. And I’ve recovered from whatever was ailing me this morning, so...”
He subsided onto his back, taking hold of Gideon’s pinafore straps and hauling him down too. “Everything?” Gideon echoed a hot minute later, muffled against his neck.
“Mm. Just... Oh, yeah. Push your tongue a bit harder there.”
Gideon, on top, had been better placed to hear any sounds from outside. He rose onto his arms, Lee grunting in protest and reaching to recapture him. “I would, if your in-laws and your kid weren’t about to walk in the front door.”
“Oh, shit.”
“Yep. Everything and second helpings too, right?”
“An embarrassment of riches.”
“Come on, soldier—on your feet. Respectable family men on parade.”
Lee always responded willingly to such calls to action. The very best of family men, even with untucked shirt and a flush of arousal fading from his face and throat, he launched himself off the sofa and ran to intercept. Gideon watched in pleasure and pride as he went tumbling into the stream of kids and dogs on the lawn. Toby and Mikey adored him and would flail to get their hands on him whenever he appeared. They were toddling now, and made unsteady beelines for him the moment Ezekiel released them from their car seats and set them down. The dogs shared their partiality. Isolde knocked Lee sideways with a charge, and Buster, a child-safe, bomb-proof butterball of a mutt, came rollicking in for the kill. Tamsyn gave a shout of laughter and threw herself into the heap.
Eleanor and Zeke watched this display indulgently from the driveway. Gideon leaned in the doorway and looked on in amusement too. This was about seven times more family than he’d ever thought could belong to him. If you’d told the lonely copper six years ago that he’d be watching his nephews and daughter rolling about with his husband on the lawn of this beautiful house... He shook his head. It seemed so unreal at times.
Eleanor broke the spell, turning towards the door and inhaling hungrily. “Oh, goodness, Gideon. Is that your speciality chicken?”
They were at the chaotic, hand-to-mouth, permanently exhausted stage of their child-rearing. Gid remembered it well, though Tamsyn had given him the easiest of rides. Lee sat up in a tangle of kids, all of them trying to tell him at the top of their voices about the fossils they’d found on the beach. He placed a careful hand across the two nearest mouths to reduce the racket. “Any chance,” he said, still laughing, “your Szechuan for two could stretch a bit?”
“Oh, no,” Eleanor protested weakly. “We couldn’t possibly. Could we, Zeke?”
Zeke too cast a longing glance towards the kitchen. “Oh, no. We should
get the children home. I’m sure we’ll find a... tin of soup and a few scraps of bread for their supper.”
She elbowed him fiercely in the ribs. “Ezekiel!”
Gideon held the door wide, grinning. “I chopped extra veg, and there’s loads of rice. I had a feeling a visitation like this might occur.”
“Like locusts upon Egypt,” Zeke surprisingly observed, and marched past his brother into the house. The kids and Eleanor followed on, then Isolde and Buster, clearly the best of friends even after a long car ride, huffing and bustling at each other playfully.
Lee brought up the rear. He stopped in the doorway beside Gideon. He picked up one of Gid’s hands and kissed the knuckles, wild lights of sanctity and joy in his eyes. “Who could want more than this?” he whispered, smiling up at him. “How could there even be more?”
“I don’t know,” Gideon told him honestly, although for him, on some deep level, every part of it but Lee could have vanished forever. “It’s pretty bloody good, isn’t it?”
“The best. Everything, every part of it. Just this, right now. And everything is gonna be all right.”
He began to move past Gideon, who stopped him with a gentle hand against his chest. “That’s what you tell Tamsyn, when she’s seen a horror movie with the Kemp kids or some dreadful news on TV. Whether you believe it or not.”
Lee flashed him a quick, brilliant smile. He was warm from his tussle with the kids, or some other inner fire: his beautiful new shirt was damp with sweat beneath Gideon’s palm. “Well,” he said fervently. “What decent parent doesn’t do that?”
***
“I’m a bad husband,” Lee suddenly declared, clambering back up the bed to collapse against Gideon’s shoulder.
Gideon couldn’t agree less. He was still getting breath back into his lungs from the majestic blow-job Lee had just delivered. His flesh was vibrating like a cello at the end of a symphony. “Dear God. What the... bloody hell makes you say that?”
