Page 25 of All of Us Murderers

“I didn’t when I said it, but I should have.

It was what I wanted to have meant, because it was what I wanted to have.

I lay awake all night working out how to explain that to you.

I thought, if I could just explain it, we could make things right.

” He smiled mirthlessly at the wall. “And then there we were at Cubitt’s the next day, with you pretending not to look at me, and I had no idea how to broach matters, and the not speaking was unbearable.

I had to say something. And, you know, I really did just pull you into that stock cupboard to talk, only the way you looked at me—I just wanted to kiss you, and I thought I’d latched the door, or maybe I forgot about it, but either way, I didn’t latch it, and there we were.

First I panicked and grossly insulted you, and then I decided that I was going to make things work, and managed to go about eight hours before I ruined your life. Sorry.”

Gideon’s free arm shifted. Zeb rather thought he was putting his hand over his face. “Oh, Zeb. Dear God.”

“I’m sorry,” Zeb said again. “I’m an idiot.”

“No. I let you drag me into that stockroom. I let you kiss me, when I was well aware how stupid that was. And I shouldn’t have pushed you as I did that evening.

I knew at the time that I was going about it wrong, but I wanted to make a grand gesture instead of, I don’t know, helping you find whatever you’d misplaced without complaining about it, which I expect you would have preferred. ”

“Well. Yes.”

“I’m sorry,” Gideon said softly. “I did know I was being a prick. I was so worried for my sister and her family, and Ellison was pushing for your dismissal and giving me a hard time for not supporting him—”

“You didn’t tell me that!”

“No. I probably should have, but you were already so unhappy and nervous at work, I felt like it would only have made things worse. The fact is, I should have stopped being your supervisor as soon as we started. But if I’d passed you to anyone else—”

“They’d have sacked me.”

“Probably. Yes. I was constantly on edge because of it, and I didn’t know what I was doing with you. I couldn’t seem to get it right. So I got it catastrophically wrong, and then you responded badly, so I got upset, so you did that at Cubitt’s, and—God almighty, we’re not fit to be let out.”

Zeb snorted. “It does sound that way.”

“And if that’s anyone’s fault, it’s mine,” Gideon said. “I spent a long time trying to blame you for everything that happened, but the truth is, I precipitated the whole mess.”

“You were trying your best.”

“You were trying when you dragged me into that storeroom,” Gideon pointed out. “One can have good intentions and still make a pig’s ear of things.”

“Can’t one just,” Zeb said with feeling. “But I really wouldn’t have objected to a grand gesture of a different kind. It’s just, I don’t like promises. And the bigger the promise, the worse it feels, and it felt like you were asking me for so much.”

“I was. I wanted so much. And…ugh. When you said what you did, I assumed you meant—well, that you were seeing other men. I know you are a great deal more, uh, free with your, uh, physical—”

“Slutty.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“No, I did. I wasn’t, though. Seeing anyone else.”

“I know that,” Gideon said. “You’d have told me. But I couldn’t see it at the time. I put you on the spot, knowing you don’t do well on the spot, and then I thought the worst because I was jealous, and therefore I didn’t ask some simple questions that could have saved us both a lot of pain.”

Zeb had never really been able to unpick the horrible mess of last year through the morass of guilt, self-blame, and regret. He let out a long breath now, with the sensation of a fog finally blown away. “You’re right. It was both our faults, and we’re not fit to be let out.”

“Some sort of nursemaid is clearly required. Could you explain something?” Gideon said. “I heard what you said about promises, but I don’t really understand. All I know is that you have a random but deep-seated fear of them that gets worse when they’re larger. Are you confusing them with spiders?”

Zeb really did laugh then. He lay, shoulders shaking, under Gideon’s arm, because with Gideon holding him, even the worst things seemed possible to be laughed at.

“Swine,” he said. “It’s not—not random, though.”

“No?”

Gideon didn’t ask more. He just waited. Zeb nuzzled back into him, blinking. He didn’t much want to tell this, but the alternative was Gideon not understanding, and that was infinitely worse.

“I was brought up to take promises seriously. My word as my bond, the eternal disappointment caused by breaking either. It was one of my father’s bugbears.

Promise you’ll do better at school. Promise you won’t lose this one.

Promise you’ll remember to go, that you’ll get there on time, that you will be more like your brother.

Why aren’t you more like your brother? And I’d make the promise because he made me, and be punished for not keeping it—untrustworthy, irresponsible, feckless.

And then—do you recall asking why I was a clerk and Bram a wealthy man of letters? ”

“You said your father left him all the money.”

“I was eighteen when Father took ill, and Bram twenty-eight. Father announced he was leaving everything to Bram because I wasn’t fit to manage my own life.

Impulsive, incapable of applying myself, all that.

But the thing is, in the same breath, he charged Bram to set me up in life and give me a kindly steadying hand.

He specifically wasn’t cutting me out: he was passing on his paternal responsibility.

Bram swore to stand in the place of a father to me at Father’s deathbed, and Father joined our hands as a sign of that pledge.

It was utterly nauseating. But he promised. ”

Gideon’s body had stilled. “So what happened?”

“Father died. The will was executed. And in the space of a few weeks, Bram went from ‘I will pay your university bills and give you a generous allowance’ to ‘You cannot expect me to fund all your entertainments’ to ‘You should be grateful for anything’ to ‘You are wasting your education and must be made to grow up’. And that was it. He cut me off in the middle of the university term. I had about thirty pounds to my name. I had to leave off my studies and find work, with not the faintest idea what I might do. So, of course, I went around family friends, in the hope of at least finding a nice office job, and discovered that Bram had got there first. He’d told them all he’d been forced to take this step because of my gross unreliability and whatnot. ”

“Why? Why would he do that?”

“Why tell them? So people wouldn’t think ill of him when I complained about his behaviour.

Why do it in the first place?” Zeb made a face.

“If you ask me, he made the promise because he wanted to be the family patriarch, and he broke it because he liked having twenty-five thousand pounds in the bank, and he lied so he could reconcile the two in his head.”

“Which is why you don’t want the Wyckham inheritance,” Gideon said. “In case you do the same.”

“Anyone can renounce money they don’t have. I sometimes wonder, if Bram had shared, if I was living prosperously on Wyckham money when Jerome called on me, would I have listened? Or would I have told him to clear off? I should probably be grateful Bram saved me the moral test.”

“Christ. Why didn’t you tell me before?”

“I didn’t tell anyone for years. I was too ashamed.”

“You aren’t the one who should feel shame about this.”

“But I do. It’s humiliating that my father had so much contempt for me, and it’s hideously embarrassing that Bram could be so petty and greedy and small. I’m ashamed for him. The prick.”

Gideon nodded slowly. “If I may say so, your family are some of the most awful people I’ve ever met in my life.”

“Aren’t they just.”

“And I don’t believe for a moment that you would behave like your brother,” Gideon added. “You should think more of yourself. A lot more. You were the best thing in my life, and I was a damned fool to let you go.”

“That’s funny,” Zeb said. “Because so were you, and so was I.”

“Oh God. Zeb, could we—please—”

He sounded wretched and yearning and hopeful all at once. Zeb twisted urgently round in his arms, and then they were kissing frantically, a mess of flailing limbs and tangling clothes and trapping quilt, hands and lips and longing, and the bitterness of a wasted year.

Gideon ended up on top of him after a few overwhelming minutes, his long body sprawled over Zeb’s, his light eyes looking down with the same confused mix of pain and joy and wanting that Zeb felt.

“God damn it,” he said softly. “I missed you so much. I persuaded myself you were playing with me all along. That I would never have been enough.”

“How could you not be?”

“How could I be? You’re all charm and heart and exuberance, and I count pennies and tidy things up.

You’ve so much joy, and I felt so joyless for so long that when you did share your joy with me, I couldn’t embrace it even though I wanted to.

” He cupped Zeb’s cheek. “It was a great deal easier to decide that you had brought my orderly life chaos and I didn’t want it any more, rather than to realise you’d offered my trammelled existence freedom and I’d been afraid of it. ”

Zeb’s heart was thudding oddly now, arrhythmically, as if it wasn’t quite in his own control. “I…didn’t know you thought that. And I did bring chaos.”

“You are excessively chaotic,” Gideon said. “I’m excessively orderly. On average, we could work.”

“Could we?” Zeb asked on a breath. “I know what you said about being stuck here, with me in London—”

“I don’t think I will be staying at Lackaday House much longer, and we need to talk about why at some point very soon. But right now—”

“Sod Lackaday House and all who sail in her. I want you. And that’s not just for tonight or It doesn’t mean anything or any such rubbish. I want you back, which we can discuss later, and I want you now.”

“Yes,” Gideon said. “Yes. Oh, Zeb. License my hands—what is it?”

Zeb knew exactly what he meant, and what he was asking. He’d quoted Donne’s poem to Gideon a very long time ago, a request and a seduction in one: “License my roving hands and let them go, Before, behind, between, above, below.”

“I really must memorise that. Before,” Gideon murmured, fingers skimming down Zeb’s chest.

“Behind.” Zeb slipped his own hand round to Gideon’s arse, tense, a little thinner than it had been.

Gideon spent a pleasant moment on before, palming Zeb’s prick, flattening his hand, touching, stroking, feeling. Connecting them, skin to skin, closing his hand possessively, finally sliding it down between Zeb’s thighs. “Between?”

Zeb curled up and forward, getting his mouth to Gideon’s neck, his ear, kissing, licking. “Above,” he mumbled against the warm skin.

Gideon cupped his balls. “Below. I will definitely remember that. If we practice enough.”

“Let’s,” Zeb said, and got his mouth to Gideon’s, and then it was nothing but breath and touch, hands and lips, and the joy of Gideon’s touch, Gideon’s response, and its echo in his own shuddering pleasure.