Blue Steel Chain (Trowchester Blues Book 3)

by Alex Beecroft

  James plopped down next to him, nudging him in the shoulder like a friend. And asexual or not, that wasn’t quite enough for Aidan. He wanted more than that. What, exactly, he didn’t know, but he wanted to be special to James. He wanted James to look at him and realize that he was the universe too.

  “There’s a melodeon tester session going on in the blue tent,” James said happily. “If you were interested. But I think we should find something to eat because Bellowhead are on in an hour, and in about half an hour people are going to realize they need food first. At which point the queues will stretch to the next county.”

  So they ate lamb kebab, followed by Nutella-filled crepes, and when the milling public packed themselves into the marquee, and he was squeezed tight against James by the press of bodies, he took James’s hand and held it. Every so often, when the music was particularly good, James would grab tight as if he needed Aidan to catch him or he would float away.

  Although he felt no great rapport with the music, that reaction and James’s joy meant that he came out of the concert determined to learn to love it.

  Bellowhead’s session ended, and a band called The Unthank took over. Thanks to Aidan’s efforts in the direction of becoming what James would want him to be, he enjoyed this one much more. When this turn was also ended, they weaved out of the mass of people into surprise darkness, found the moon already risen over the hill.

  James wore the glazed, woozy look of someone who’s drunk on glory, and Aidan wanted to hug him so hard.

  “Can I walk you home?” asked James, still polite, still thoughtful despite his exhilaration. “And can we come back tomorrow? It’s a two-day thing, but you might be bored?”

  “I really enjoyed it.” Aidan didn’t even have to lie. “Of course.”

  Steadily through the quiet streets they walked home together, falling into step quite naturally, speaking when there was something to say and being silent the rest of the time. Comfortable in a way Aidan didn’t think he’d ever been before.

  Outside his door, a kind of panic came over him. He didn’t want James to go away. He thought of picking an argument, so that James would maybe call him names and then need to apologise with hugs and he could put off closing the door on him for at least another hour.

  But that scared him, because what if James hit him first? He didn’t think he would, but he didn’t want to know for sure.

  “Are you all right?” Of course James had noticed, was reaching out as if to take both of Aidan’s hands. Daringly, Aidan stepped forward until he was pressed up against James’s chest, wound his arms around the man’s waist—warm and breathing and safe and him—and clung on, burying his face in James’s shoulder.

  James exclaimed in surprise, and then his arms came up around Aidan’s waist, one hand spread in the hollow of Aidan’s spine, and it was all perfect for a moment, as though the stars had aligned.

  Raising his other hand, James coaxed Aidan’s face upwards, landed a kiss he hadn’t seen coming on his mouth. It sent a shock through him all down his spine to the soles of his feet, unexpected, not unpleasant, but unsettling. He would have preferred warning—to be able to brace for it.

  “Mmm.” James’s noise of deep sensual satisfaction seemed a little overdone. Aidan might have spent some time contemplating whether it really could have felt that good for him, if he had not been taken by surprise again when James cradled the back of his head and licked his way into Aidan’s mouth, pushing his unresisting jaw open.

  That wasn’t so bad either. Certainly not as awful as it had been when Piers did it. It was wet and undignified, but not horrible. And James was very clearly enjoying himself a lot, his breath coming in little moans and his prick hard against Aidan’s thigh.

  Perhaps . . . perhaps he could do something that would make it better? Maybe if he got involved he wouldn’t feel this was quite so dehumanizing. He stroked a tentative hand down James’s back, enjoying the beauty of the curve of it.

  That, as it turned out, was a mistake because James responded by sliding one hand over Aidan’s buttocks and stroking his other thumb beneath Aidan’s chin. The arse-grab and the feel of something at his throat flung him right back with Piers, chained and abused and not even having the sense to know that was what it was.

  “No!”

  Terrifying and brilliant—the picture of Piers coming after him with a golf club. He pushed the guy away from him with both hands, confused when it worked and his oppressor reeled stumbling away.

  “Don’t touch me! Go away!”

  That wasn’t actually what had happened, had it? He shook his head, got a brief glimpse of James with his hands raised, surrendering, placatory, before Piers lunged forward again and he heard the tearing swish of the metal stick slicing through the air. It was going to hit him in the face.

  “Aidan. Aidan, I’m sorry!”

  “No!” He turned and ran. A door got in his way from somewhere. He wrenched at it and it opened. Someone was behind it who he thought he recognised, but he didn’t have time or resources to wonder about that right now. It had all become jumbled except the vivid, vivid figure of Piers running after him, of the agony when the head of the club came down on his ribs. He ran past her, down the corridor, looking for somewhere to hide. Found the bathroom, locked himself in, folded himself small on the floor and whimpered as it all happened again.

  Sometime later, dizzy, freezing cold and shaking, he became aware of someone knocking on the door, and when he raised his head he saw that this was not Piers’s bathroom with the stone tiles and the chrome fittings. It was pink and faded, cluttered with bubble bath and shampoo and sponges.

  “Sweetheart.” And that was Zara’s voice. Not angry but concerned. Lowered and calming, but undercut with a little current of fear for him. “We think it’s just a flashback. All right? Just a memory of something you survived. Things are better now and you’re safe, okay? You’re safe. Now you could stay in there all evening but Molly has to pee, and besides, we have cake out here. You going to come watch TV with us? I’ll make you hot chocolate.”

  Aidan laughed and sobbed behind his hands, and then he got up and opened the door. Found Molly in a spotty dressing gown and Zara in Captain America pyjamas and sheepskin slippers. It occurred to him that they must have been asleep, must have been awoken by his yelling.

  “I’m sorry.”

  Molly shouldered him aside to go use the toilet, and Zara hauled him into the sitting room, where Lilo & Stitch was playing—one of the house’s go-to films for bad days. He’d hoped to see James there, but it was empty except for them—Carol being able to sleep through an air raid.

  The relief that it was over segued seamlessly into the familiar certainty that he had fucked everything up yet again. “Where’s James?”

  “Oh, we sent him away with a flea in his ear, don’t you worry.” Zara draped a throw around his shoulders as she headed towards the kitchen. “Pushing things too far, triggering you like that. He’d better not come around here again unless it’s on his knees, that’s what I say. We told him good.”

  Aidan drew the blanket around himself and huddled up, trying to be comforted by Stitch wearing a bra as a hat. But while it was good to have a word that explained what was so fucking wrong with him, it really didn’t make it any better when he failed again.

  What on Earth had James thought? What would he do now? Would he think Aidan was too much trouble for too little reward? Would the sex matter to him so much that he would discount everything else in favour of it? Aidan didn’t want to think so, hoped that James would see that love was so much more than that. What was so great about sharing fluids that looked like snot anyway? What did love have to do with that? But he knew by now that ninety-nine percent of the population would call that opinion weird. The mathematics of the situation were not in his favour.

  Why did fucking sex have to get in the fucking way all the time? Why did it have to ruin everything?

  Aidan scowled at his phone so fiercely he almost
felt the need to apologise to it. Did he dare text James to try to find out? Piers hadn’t liked it when he asked for affection or reassurance. Did he want to put James to that test? What if he failed?

  Molly returned from the loo to sink into the beanbag chair and watch him out of the side of her eyes as her head was turned towards the film. A moment later Zara returned from the kitchen with carrot cake and hot chocolate as advertised.

  He felt sick, but carefully chewing some of the cake and drinking some of the cocoa settled his stomach a little, enough to let him know he was grindingly tired. The flatmates were drooping too, panda-eyed with weariness. Best to give everyone a break, then. He would text James in the morning, find out then that James had been frightened away forever. It couldn’t hurt to have one more night of believing they might have had a chance.

  Run off the doorstep, a kind of rote indignation harried James most of the way back to his car. It wasn’t until he had sat in the driver’s seat, closed the door behind him, and was surrounded by the mossy smell of his ancient seats that the genuine heartbreaking reality of the evening began to soak in.

  He put both hands on the steering wheel, leaned forward, and rested his forehead just below the horn. Fuck. There wasn’t another word for it. Oh fuck. God damn it! He was the most stupid person in the entire universe. If there was an award for blithering idiot of the year, he should collect it from now until the day of his death.

  He squeezed his eyes closed and breathed through the desire to do something, anything, to work off the self-condemnation, the anger. What kind of a man would push it with someone who was recovering from an abusive relationship like that? Not a good one, obviously. And what kind of a man would then abandon his . . .

  His thoughts tripped up, trying to define what Aidan was to him. “Lover” didn’t seem appropriate for someone he had just frightened into a fit by kissing. But “friend” was far too lily-livered, had nothing of the right weight or significance.

  What kind of a man would abandon his . . . his Aidan, when the man was clearly in the grip of some torment of the mind? When he was reliving hell, when he needed James most of all.

  James’s kind of man, apparently. Accordingly, James put the key in the ignition and turned it. When the car coughed into life and the . . . whatever it was in the engine . . . made a high-pitched grinding noise, he felt the wrath of a sleeping neighbourhood upon him and was moved to drive away, to try to outdistance the racket and the disapproval.

  Habit got him home, while his misery quietly brewed in the back of his mind. It waited until he had parked, unlocked the garage door, and gone in to walk through the high-ceilinged rooms and past the ornate stair he and Dave had designed between them. It began to bubble up again as he passed the home cinema that was Dave’s baby and reached the library that was his own. There he recognised it curling around the stacks, rising up to follow him like a dark mist until he came to his inner sanctum. The room he called his office, the one room in the house where Dave had never come.

  A desk and a laptop and a sofa. At some point he’d stacked some of the least interesting finds from the local area in milk crates at the end of the room, and these had ramified until it became hard to open the door. When he really needed to calm down, as he did now, he would de-stack them and work through them crate by crate, picking out three unexpected beauties among the dross, though sometimes he had to look very hard to find anything among the scraps of pot and corroded metal that qualified.

  He took down the first crate and sat cross-legged next to it, unwrapped bubble wrap and tissue paper to reveal a scrap of Stamford ware scarcely larger than his thumbnail. Having percolated enough, his regrets came boiling up stronger and more bitter for the delay.

  He checked his phone. Someone would tell him if Aidan was all right, wouldn’t they? Or would they? The girls had been very angry with him and rightly so. He should have known better than to trigger some kind of flashback by . . .

  It hadn’t been a particularly aggressive kiss.

  The memory of being berated on the doorstop by three ferocious, high-pitched voices made him go hot and cold with shame again, but his anger and his horror were now ebbing enough to permit thought, and thought was leading him in many strange directions all at once.

  When he recovered, Aidan would phone or text to say he was fine, wouldn’t he? He’d be in contact to say they were still on for tomorrow. Wouldn’t he?

  James rewrapped the fragment and put it in the junk pile. Admittedly some ancient potter must have worked hard on this, and therefore it was priceless, but Stamford ware was not exactly rare. This was not an outstanding example of the type. He couldn’t even sell it to a trader in antiquities to raise funds for the museum. No one would mourn or even notice if he took it outside and reburied it in the garden. Poor little thing.

  Maybe Aidan had had to go to bed, though. He should be sensible about this. Maybe Aidan had been sufficiently washed out by his episode to fall straight asleep afterwards, and James should not expect a call until the morning. By that logic he should not phone, himself, either, shouldn’t take the risk of waking Aidan.

  He took out the next piece of rejectamenta. This was slightly better—a fragment of iron that might be a nail, might be a cloak-pin, red and lumpy with rust. He could send it for x-ray, see if it had writing or decoration on it, under the decay. He used it for the start of his “possibles” pile.

  Sorting and thinking had taken the tremble out of his fingers, helped him to put the fragments of himself back together. But his thoughts had only strengthened, and they were not encouraging.

  Was there anywhere better to start than with that kiss? It needed to be unpacked. It needed all its aspects laid out so they could be considered both separately and together, so that he could make a stab at figuring out where all the pieces went.

  It had been so good. James hadn’t wanted anyone as badly as that for years and the feel of Aidan against him—his shy little gasp at first and then the slow, uncertain melt of him, like he was a virgin, like he’d never experienced such a kiss before . . . That had been unexpected and intoxicating and marvellous, at the time.

  Now it read differently. What if Aidan hadn’t been shy at all, but reluctant. The little tentative stroke down his back, which he had taken for encouragement—could it have been something else? An attempt to calm him down, maybe?

  Aidan hadn’t pulled back until James touched his throat, and yes, he should have known better than to go anywhere near where that necklace had been, but even so . . . Aidan would only have had to say something and James would have stopped.

  Did he know that, though? Did he, after his experience with Piers, have any reason to believe that? Was he in fact just bracing himself for something he believed was inevitable?

  James’s breath caught. He wanted to snatch up the box and throw everything against the wall. He wanted to go and sit in the dark with the dead boy and the dead king until he too starved and slipped into inoffensive bone.

  Had Aidan only continued because he didn’t know he could refuse?

  James unwrapped another piece of pottery, larger but of lower quality than the last, and rewrapped it and put it in the reject pile, while he turned this new concept around in his mind and saw how compelling it was, how damningly the evidence fitted. Not just from this evening, but also from the night at Finn’s house, when Aidan had also turned away from his kiss.

  Now he thought about it, it couldn’t be more clear. James wanted Aidan very much. But Aidan did not want James in the same way. Not like a lover, but like . . .

  Like what?

  James knew a great deal about the rituals of gift giving and food exchange. Aidan had cooked him food and brought it to him almost every day. That was deeper than friendship—that was a family thing, a religious thing. Breaking bread together was a “one flesh” deal, symbolically.

  It made very little sense outside the context of a man establishing himself as a potential mate.

  Now James though
t about it, he had mentioned that his favourite colour was grey and Aidan had worn grey ever since—and looked great in it. James had been frustrated because he had wanted to talk about anthropology and Aidan hadn’t had the background to make a decent contribution to the debate. A week afterwards Aidan had turned up carrying Witchcraft, Oracles, and Magic among the Azande.

  James clutched at both sides of the crate and bent his head over it, sighing. A creeping sensation crawled up the inside of his back and took residence in his hair as his analysis of the situation took a shape he didn’t want to see but could not refuse.

  Aidan had been making himself into someone that James might fall in love with. Yet Aidan didn’t desire him—kissed him coldly, reluctantly, and panicked when he thought James wanted more.

  The clock on his desk tracked the movements of the solar system. It took some squinting at it to work out that it was quarter to two in the morning, and that therefore he didn’t want to phone Finn either. The guy gave very good advice but not when woken up in the middle of the night.

  Besides, Finn had already said what needed to be said. He and Michael had seen it at once, the clear-sighted bastards. They had tried to warn him: Aidan had grown up with a protector who took care of everything in his life, so that all he needed to think about was how to please Piers. It was the only way he knew how to deal with the world. Now, subconsciously or not, he must be looking for that kind of relationship again.

  Of course he would come to his rescuer for it, despite not really wanting him. And of course James, if he was to continue considering himself a decent man, should discourage this. James should carefully and gently, with an open and willing heart, help Aidan to find someone he did desire. Someone with whom he could have a rich and fulfilling life. Someone who wasn’t James.