Anna Martin's British Boys Box Set: My Prince - The Impossible Boy - Cricket

by Anna Martin

“And whatever funk you’re in? Pull yourself out of it. I’m not going to take any of your ‘poor me’ bullshit today.”

  Doug hung up before Alex could come up with a witty reply.

  He looked down at himself and reluctantly (and silently) admitted Doug had a point. He was wearing pyjama bottoms with cartoon reindeer on them and a T-shirt that was stained with last night’s dinner. He hadn’t bothered getting changed before he went to bed. He’d been wearing the same outfit at home for… far too long.

  Alex hadn’t contacted Doug to let him know what had happened with George, though apparently Doug’s psychic, best-friend skills meant he knew far before Alex told him about it.

  Or maybe George had contacted him.

  The thought made Alex sit bolt upright.

  Maybe George had called Doug and asked for…. George didn’t ask for anything, Alex thought, and slumped back against the pillows. George wasn’t one of those super close, best-gal-pals sort of guy. He was stoic and grumpy and kept his emotions to himself.

  And Alex loved the miserable bastard.

  With that thought hovering like a cloud of angry bees around his head, Alex pulled himself off the bed and stumbled toward the shower. If he turned up looking anything less than perfect, Doug would roast him. And not in a good way.

  He showered, ignoring the dark blue bottles that definitely didn’t belong to him, which had appeared at some point over the last couple of months. No, he used the expensive crap his mother had bought for him at Christmas and slicked the good stuff through his hair to make it shine.

  When he was done, Alex wiped the steam off the bathroom mirror and checked his face. He needed to shave, but at this stage the fuzz on his cheeks read more like the start of a hipsterish beard than scruffy, so he let it be. He chose light jeans, a grey-striped shirt, and boots from his wardrobe, and he made sure to style his hair before spritzing on cologne.

  There were still dark circles under his eyes from nights of broken sleep, and his skin had taken on the saggy pallor of someone who had not eaten decent food in some time. That was the problem with his usual health and fitness routine. When he let it go, he looked like shit.

  By the time Alex arrived at the pub, Doug was already working his way through a bottle of wine.

  “You were here when I called, weren’t you, you shit,” Alex muttered as he slid into the seat opposite him.

  Doug made a noncommittal noise and blatantly checked Alex out.

  “Trouble in paradise?” he drawled.

  Alex shrugged and helped himself to a glass of wine. It was nice stuff; he wasn’t going to bother asking beforehand in case Doug said no.

  “It’s over, I think,” he said after taking his first sip.

  “Oh dear. And after that charming article was printed about you in The Sun. Did the publicity freak him out?”

  “No,” Alex said, and chugged the wine this time. “No, we sailed through that. I met his family.”

  “Oh?”

  “They’re wonderful.”

  “So?”

  “Mine aren’t,” Alex said dully.

  Doug—the bastard—laughed. “Really? That’s the best you can do?”

  “I might have inadvertently called his family scum.” He tilted his head to the side, thinking. “Poor, white trash scum.”

  “I thought you liked them?” Doug asked and topped off both their glasses. Alex was getting through his at quite the pace.

  “I do! I didn’t mean the way it came out. I was putting words into other people’s mouths, and he overheard me. And decided it was my opinion, I guess.”

  “You idiot.”

  “Not quite his words, but close enough,” Alex sighed.

  “Have you apologised?”

  “No. He won’t answer the phone to me.”

  “I’m not surprised,” Doug murmured. He pushed his hand through his short hair, messing with the silvery grey strands, and pulled his purple and red tartan scarf from around his neck. As always, he was perfectly coordinated.

  “What am I going to do?” Alex said, his words slipping into a whine despite his efforts to prevent that.

  “I don’t know, darling,” Doug said. “Did you come to me for answers or for someone to complain to?”

  “You’re a bitch,” Alex told him with a startled laugh.

  “Thank you.”

  “Will you talk to him for me?”

  “After you just called me a bitch?”

  “You know I didn’t mean it like that.”

  Doug leaned back in his chair and cradled the glass of wine to his chest. “You can’t go with grand gestures, not with George. He won’t appreciate them, and you’d likely embarrass him.”

  “So… no going back to The Sun and asking them to print an apology for me?”

  “Fuck no. No, Alex. George is a normal guy. Brain-achingly normal,” he said, rolling his eyes. “You don’t have the emotional or social skills to deal with a guy like him.”

  “Ouch.”

  “I’m serious. Your backgrounds are too different. Your education and upbringing and all those different societal influences are all polar opposites. I told you back at the beginning, to make this work you have to find your common ground.”

  “Yeah, but I just set a bomb off in our common ground.”

  “Then you need to rebuild it,” Doug said with a smug little smile.

  “Easier said than done when he won’t even talk to me.”

  “I don’t know the answer,” Doug said. “I got laid last night, by the way. Thanks for asking.”

  Alex huffed a laugh. “That’s nice for you.”

  “By the same guy who fucked me the last three times.”

  “Really?”

  “Mhmm.”

  “That’s… new.”

  “It is. I think I might like him.”

  “Well, what do you know. It turns out all the lost boys do grow up in the end.”

  “We’ll see,” Doug said with a self-depreciating shrug. “As for George… you might have to go outside your own comfort zone if you want to make this work. Figure out what your long-term goals are—with him and without him. What do you want from your life, Alex? It’s time you stopped being a spoiled little princess and make some decisions.”

  “Fucking ouch,” Alex said again.

  “I’m serious,” Doug said, draining his glass of wine and reaching for his scarf to wind it back around his neck. “You say you don’t want to live that pampered, precious, privileged life that your family has laid out for you, but you still survive on their money and their influence.” He stood and leaned over to kiss Alex’s cheek in his usual good-bye gesture. “If you want George—really want him—you’re going to have to make some changes to your attitude, darling. Think about that.”

  And he left, sweeping elegantly out of the pub and into the bustling rain.

  It had been two painful weeks since George had thrown his epic tantrum and stormed out of Alex’s flat. Two weeks of being annoyed that he’d left certain items there that he needed—his Kindle, for one, which had a half-finished novel sitting on it. And some toiletries, and his spare phone charger, and a whole bunch of underwear.

  His dignity.

  George was annoyed that he could go and get his stuff back, but it would mean answering one of Alex’s constant phone calls, and he was too childish and too stubborn to do that.

  His housemates had learned not to ask why he’d suddenly moved back in after spending nearly all his time at Alex’s flat over the past couple of months. It was a shock to the system, suddenly being surrounded by people again after the calm peace of Alex’s place. He was thrown right back into the midst of epic Xbox battles and screaming arguments about the state of the kitchen and whose turn it was to buy more toilet paper. It was back to the hard, lumpy single bed that he’d never liked and his cramped, cold room and no sweet, snuggly boy to sleep next to.

  It sucked.

  George rolled over on the bed and grabbed his charger to plug his
laptop back in. He’d been outed in a national newspaper, which was one thing; another was knowing that none of his friends from back home had known he was gay.

  For a couple of days he’d watched his Facebook friend count steadily decline and his Twitter followers increase at an accelerated rate. The final tally was something along the lines of thirty Facebook friends lost—mostly kids he’d gone to school with and not seen in almost a decade. One or two friends of his brother’s. Those had hurt a bit, but he was sure Maggie would be sticking up for him. On Twitter, he’d gained over three hundred new followers. He was trying to “rebrand” on that platform to talk about his work much more, interacting with the sportsmen and women who were fans of his product.

  All of that had taken time. He’d been looking at blogs, sorting through the advice, then methodically going through the people he followed and culling the ones who didn’t make sense. Following that, he’d gone on a spree, cross-referencing his list of Olympic supporters with their Twitter usernames and trying to build up a following and a name for himself.

  If The Sun newspaper didn’t think Maguire style helmets were a joke, then George Maguire wasn’t going to either.

  With his teeth gritted in determination, he plugged the charger in and opened his laptop, bringing up his e-mail first out of habit.

  One message.

  Alexander van Amsberg: “I miss you.”

  It felt like a sucker-punch to his gut.

  The message was time-stamped from a few hours earlier, probably when George was napping. He didn’t reply, of course, just marked the message as read and flicked over to the tab with his Twitter account open. Every few minutes he switched back, looked at the e-mail again, and dealt with the resulting twinge of pain.

  I miss you too.

  George hovered at the top of the stairs as Dev opened the door. His room looked out over the street and he’d seen Alex’s car pull up. Actually, it had gone up and down the road a few times before Alex had finally parked and gotten out.

  “Is George here?” Alex asked.

  George curled his fingers around the banister and squeezed until his knuckles turned white.

  “Are you Alex?”

  There was a long, excruciating pause before Alex muttered, “Yeah.”

  “George doesn’t want to see you,” Dev informed him.

  George was straining so hard to hear the conversation it was giving him a headache.

  “Okay,” Alex said after another long moment. “Can you tell him I was here?”

  “Sure,” Dev said and shut the door.

  Before Dev could call up to him, George ducked back into his room and silently locked it from the inside. He wasn’t ready to deal with this yet. Any of it.

  The week dragged on. Dev and the rest of his housemates learned to stay out of George’s way, and he started picking up takeaway to eat in his room rather than cooking downstairs in their shared kitchen. He was miserable, irritable, and dull as hell to be around.

  More than once he’d picked up his phone, determined to call Alex and finally sort out whatever it was that needed sorting out, but fear or cowardice prevented him from actually dialling the number.

  George tilted his head back against the wall and stretched his feet out along the bed. Slowly, deliberately, he rocked his head from side to side, letting the textured wallpaper massage the back of his skull.

  He ached. His heart, his head, his ass. It was numb from spending so much time sitting down.

  He picked up his phone, unlocked the screen, then stared at it for a moment. George opened his list of contacts and his thumb hovered, once again, over Alex’s name.

  Instead, he called Maggie.

  “Alright, wanker?” Maggie asked when he answered, and something lifted from George’s chest.

  “Yeah, I’m not too bad, dickhead,” he replied affectionately. “What are you doing?”

  “Eugh. I just finished replacing the cam belt on a piece of shit Polo that won’t last another five years and is turning into a fucking money pit. The stupid twat owner insists on getting it fixed every time something falls off it, even though the thing is damn near as old as me, and keeps blaming me every fucking time something else goes wrong.”

  George chuckled, his heart warmed by his brother’s grumpy complaining and foul language. “Nice.”

  “What’s up with you?”

  “Nothing.”

  George heard the rattley-slam that told him Maggie had just ducked into the tiny, smelly office in the garage.

  “Stop being such a fucking pussy. What’s wrong? You never call me like this.”

  He didn’t. George hummed and hawed for a moment. “Is it weird if I tell you about shit between me and Alex?”

  “As long as I don’t need to know anything about butt-fucking, I’m fine,” Maggie said easily.

  “Yeah, well, I don’t think there’s any chance of that ever happening again,” George mumbled.

  “You two had an argument?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What about?”

  “He was being a stupid, stuck up, arrogant, posh twat, and I called him out on it.”

  “Right,” Maggie said. “Then what?”

  “I left.”

  “Did you punch him in the gob?”

  “What?”

  “I dunno,” Maggie said. “That’s mostly how I settle arguments.”

  “With Jaz?” George asked with a laugh, thinking of Maggie’s pretty, curvy girlfriend and how she’d likely punch him right back.

  “No, not with her. But with mates.”

  “Alex isn’t a mate, Maggie. He is—was—I dunno. My partner.”

  “Right.”

  George questioned his logic on calling Maggie to help with this.

  “Are you really okay?” George asked. “With the whole gay thing?”

  The awful squeak that came through the phone told George Maggie had leaned back in that old, ratty office chair that his dad had owned since he opened the garage. He was too superstitious to get rid of it.

  “Yeah,” Maggie said. “I don’t give a fuck who you fuck, you know? That’s your business. I figure you’ve probably been gay your whole life, I just didn’t know about it. You were my brother then, and you’re my brother now. It doesn’t matter what you do in the bedroom or who you do it with.”

  George huffed a laugh. “Thanks.”

  “And I clearly know absolutely nothing about gay relationships. But I liked Alex. He seems alright, for a posh twat. And you seem to like him. So… you probably know what you need to do to fix it. You don’t need me to tell you that.”

  George thought about that for a moment. “Yeah. Maggie?”

  “What?”

  “Does anyone back home ever ask you? About me, I mean.”

  “A few people,” Maggie said, not sounding particularly bothered by this. “I tell ’em gay or not, you could probably kick the shit out of them, so they should probably keep their fucking noses out of other people’s business.”

  “Nice.”

  “Well, they should,” Maggie protested. “Are you going to go make up with your boyfriend now?”

  This time, George didn’t need to think about it. “Yeah. I am.”

  “Good. And since you called, I can tell you to come home and visit Nan again soon. And bring Alex with you. Nan thinks he’s posh as bloody napkins and won’t stop banging on about how ‘George is going out with the prince of bloody Denmark.’”

  “The Netherlands,” George corrected with a grin. “The Prince of Denmark was Hamlet.”

  “Alright, alright. I’m going back to work. See you soon, yeah?”

  “Yeah. Love you, Mags.”

  “Now that is fucking gay,” Maggie said and hung up. George laughed and dropped the phone.

  Maggie was, without a doubt, the worst person in the world to get advice from. And the best brother in the whole world.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Alex opened the door and his jaw dropped.

&n
bsp; The last thing he expected on this sunny afternoon was George standing there, wearing navy blue tailored shorts and leather flip-flops and a long-sleeved shirt open at his throat. He’d buzzed his hair short again and there was a crease in his forehead as he scowled beautifully up at Alex.

  “Hey,” George said.

  Alex blinked. “Hi.”

  Asking “what are you doing here?” was right on the tip of his tongue. He forced it back, not wanting George to think he wasn’t wanted. He was.

  “Um, come in,” Alex said instead, stumbling over the words.

  The expression on George’s face said he might refuse. It was only after a long moment’s struggle that he nodded and stepped into the hallway. Alex shut the door behind him.

  They stood in the dim light for a moment, not quite looking at each other as the awkward tension grew. Alex felt like his mouth was full of cotton wool—his words wouldn’t quite come, and all he could do was look and smell and feel George close to him.

  George cleared his throat. “I, uh, I wanted to apologise.”

  Alex’s eyebrows shot up. “Really?”

  “Yeah. I haven’t really given you a chance.”

  “Oh.”

  “I’m still really upset with you.”

  Alex nodded. It felt like his heart was beating too hard in his throat, like he couldn’t take a whole breath. And for some reason there was a pricking in the corners of his eyes.

  “I miss you too,” George said in a broken voice.

  Alex bit down hard on his lip.

  “I’m so sorry,” he said. This was the chance he’d been begging for, the chance to explain it all. He stepped up closer and touched George’s wrist, right on the edge of his dark red shirt. The colour looked good on him. “I really didn’t mean to hurt you. I was….” He thought back to what he’d said to Doug and shook his head. “Putting words in other people’s mouths. Not that that’s an excuse. Your family—”

  “Please don’t.”

  “George.” Something twisted in his belly. “I want you here. I want us to be together, whatever that means.”

  George rubbed his hands over his face. “I was so angry with you. I don’t normally have a temper, but you made me so fucking mad, Alex. I couldn’t even get to the end of the road before I had to pull over because my hands were shaking so bad.”