Page 61 of Darling
“So you’re… kinda depraved, huh?” I grin.
He laughs a low, sexy laugh and turns his head to meet my eyes. “Oh, I contain multitudes,darling.”
He helps me into the bath and leaves me to it while he calls room service and checks his work emails. After, we eat in bathrobes on the floor in front of the TV. Well, I do while he takes a few phone calls in the other room. After the third, he comes back in looking like he’s just been run over by a truck.
“Everything okay?” I ask as he reaches for a slice of pizza. I’ve laden it with everything on the extras section and extra sauce.
He takes a seat next to me on the floor. “Not in the slightest. Mmmm this is rather good.” While he eats, he has his eyes on the TV, though I can tell he isn’t watching it. Mind miles away and filled with whatever politicians think about, I guess. There’s a dollop of pizza sauce on the side of his lip that I lean over and swipe with my finger before sucking it into my mouth. I’d hoped it would get his attention, take his mind off whatever news he’s just gotten, and it works. He smiles fondly, before bending tokiss me fully on the mouth. It turns heated as he slips a hand inside my robe and thumbs at my nipple. My cock stirs to life again. I have to pull back to breathe, then I push the pizza out of the way and climb over his thigh so that I’m kneeling between his legs and facing him. “I have to return to London tomorrow evening.”
I feel my chest cave in, heart battered against my ribs like loose cargo in a ship’s hold. I stare at him.
“There’s been some kind of mass walkout at the FCDO which requires ‘urgent crisis intervention’.” At my blank look, he says, “It’s my office in London, formally the Foreign, Commonwealth, and Development Office. It sounds like there’s about to be another shake-up in the cabinet. I thought I’d be lucky enough to be kept out of that sort of thing, but the FCDO is my remit.”
“You’re leaving?” I manage. I couldn’t give a shit about cabinets or FCDOs.
He reaches out a hand, stroking it over the shell of my ear, soothingly. “Oh, Asher, for the week, two at most, not for good.”
I sit back with relief, letting out a breath. “Fuck… shit, I thought…”
“Come here,” he says softly, and motions for me to climb onto his lap. It’s a place I’ve been spending a lot of time lately, and I’m growing to like it. “You know, when I return to work properly—which is looking likely to be after I return from London—I expect I’ll be rather busy.” He sounds as depressed about it as I feel.
“Yeah, I know.”
“It will be a lot harder to do things like this.”
“Eat pizza in bathrobes and watch Disney movies?”
He smiles. “Exactly.”
“Well, maybe you should quit your job.”
“I have the same thought a hundred times a day,” he sighs wistfully.
“You do?”
He nods, stroking his fingers absently over my hip. “These days, yes. I had similar thoughts in my previous role, too.”
“You mean, you don’t enjoy politics?” I say it with a raised brow. Sceptical. I don’t know how anyone could enjoy a job like that, honestly, but for a guy like him, decent and caring and still grieving, politics seems like hell on earth.
“I used to enjoy it,” he says. “I used to genuinely see it as a place where I could help people. As a lawyer, you come to understand that the law isn’t always designed to help victims. So I decided to put myself in a place where I could affect the laws themselves. A place where my experience and my ambition could come together and I could really,trulyhelp people.” His voice is passionate, his eyes hard, but the exhaustion is all over him. “But that turned out to be quite idealistic, and completely unachievable.”
“Why is it unachievable?” I want to take it back. It’s probably the dumbest question anyone’s ever asked a person who works in politics.
“Because most people don’t go into politics with those kinds of ideals. Certainly not in my party: we’re becoming quite reviled, and I understand why. I was one of very few who thought my job in government was to serve the people and not myself.”
“Well, surely that means you’re exactly the sort of person who should be in politics, then? There needs to be more people like you, not less.”
“You sound like Felix.”
“Felix?”
He shifts, glancing away awkwardly. “He was… well… before you. He and I...”
“He was your ballet dancer.”
“Not mine. Not anymore.”
“So I sound like him, then?”