Page 75 of Darling
“You know any porn stars called Asher?” Felix asks his boyfriend.
“I don’t know the names of any porn stars, princess. That’s your area of expertise. Does he look anything like me?” Nico asks me.
“What? No, he’s… well, no. Not at all.”
“Then Felix won’t know him, all the porn stars he likes are the ones who look like me. Isn’t that right, baby?” He winks at Felix, who rolls his eyes.
The tub of cold pasta in his hand, Nico comes toward us. “Okay, I’m going to take a long, hot shower. Nice seeing you,” he says to me, “and congratulations on the porn star.” He smooths a tender hand over Felix’s jaw as he passes and heads upstairs, leaving us alone again. I give Felix a chiding look.
“Oh, don’t be angry at me, daddy,” he pleads. “I’m just excited for you.”
“Stop calling me that. Anyway, it’s still as impossible as it was an hour ago.”
“Only if you say yes to the job offer,” he points out. “Only if you come back to this fucking clown show. Otherwise, who cares? You could take your hot young boyfriend and go live in Scotland, or wherever it is you always talked about building that house. Leo would be the only person whose opinion mattered, and he’d still love you.”
“I wouldn’t be so sure about that.” Right now, Leo feels as distant to me as though he were living on Mars, and introducing Asher into our lives would do nothing to help that, I’m sure. “What happened, you were very excited about my being Prime Minister before?”
“Yeah, that was because I liked the idea of fucking the Prime Minister.Andbecause I think you’d be a good one. But now, that party—my father’s party—after what they did to you? They can fucking rot, the lot of them. You deserve to be happy, and that place would ruin you. I remember it turned Damien Ellis bald and ugly in like two years, and he was the only other good-looking one besides you.”
“You don’t think I would look good bald?” I say through laughter.
“Christian, you know I don’t think anyone looks good bald.” He visibly shivers. “Anyway, that job would ruin you. And I doubt you’d be happy.”
Happy.
What a strange word. Blunt and simple when the feeling was anything but, when most of the time it felt like trying to catch a rainbow in your hands. I stare down at my wedding band. It feels tight this evening. The sensation of it constricting in a way I don’t remember it ever feeling before.
“She’d want you to be happy,” Felix says. I lift my head and find his eyes fixed intently on me. “If she’s the person you always told me she was, then she’d want you to be happy, whatever that looks like.”
He isn’t wrong. She would. I can almost hear her voice urging me to be happy, to choose myself and Leo above everything else. But I don’t think she would even recognise me now. If shewereto walk back through the door now, I’d be a stranger standing in front of her. True happiness feels like an impossible fantasy.It has been years since I’ve felt it, so how do I go about trying to bestow it on someone else? Asher deserves someone who can make him happy. Not someone who only knows how to worry and grieve, living every moment like the worst of times is just a little farther up the road. I’ve filled years and years with work since she passed, because work is easy to control; work blocks out everything else. To work is to put one foot in front of the other and do the task in front of you, breathe and eat and work. Work so hard that you sleep without dreams. Work is a reason to keep moving forward. Work is a reason to wake up every day and keep bloody going. To walk away from that constant and pin everything, once again, on another living soul who could be ripped away from me. Whose entire essence could disappear from my life in the blink of an eye. That is where the true fear lies. It is too terrifying to comprehend. And I am scared. I’ve been scared for years. But I also know what a life without Asher would look like, without his particular brand of sunshine in it, without the colour of his rainbow, and the idea of that is equally terrifying. Suddenly, I’m hit with the immense urge to see him. Be near him. Wrap my arms around him and hold him tight.
Twenty four
Asher
Ispend the rest of Sunday in a sort of panicked catatonia.The London Timeshas pictures of us together. Or was itTheSunday Times? Why didn’t I write it down? Stephen Gardiner. That was his name, I remember that much, but when I Googled it, I couldn’t find any Stephen Gardiner, but I did discoverThe London Timeswasn’t a paper. So it wasTheSunday Times.
Everything in me wants to call Christian. He’d know what to do, how to handle this, and fucking hell, he needs to know. This had already happened to him, just before he’d come here; the ballet dancer had been some important guy’s son and that had landed him here in a job he hated. Now it was happening again.
I’m not really anybody’s son anymore, and neither am I important, but what I do for work certainly is—and put together with what he does for a job? Fuck. It could absolutely ruin him. Which is almost kinda funny because the first night he’d come to my place, black eyes and a hard dick, he’d said that to me, and I’d worn it like a badge of honour. He’d been scared to do this with me, and I’d invited him to Jersey City to watch a live fucking porn show, and he’d been papped. Before that, I was at his house… before that, I’d sneaked into his hospital room. He’sgoing to end this the moment he finds out about the photo, and I can’t blame him for it. I love him, and he can’t be with me, and it’s not even the worst thing about this. People thinking he paid me for sex is.
Ineedto talk to him.
I check the world clock on my phone. It’s almost 11pm in London. He’d said he was having dinner with a friend tonight, so maybe he’d still be awake, though when I try his number, it rings out and goes to voicemail. I don’t want to do this over a voicemail, but I also don’t want to hang up once it beeps, so I ramble some nonsense.
“Um, hey. It’s me. Obviously. Hope your dinner was good. Um, I just… wanted to say hi. I’m going to head out to the gym for a bit right now, so if you’re still awake and wanna give me a call back, I should be out in about an hour. But, like, tomorrow is fine, too. If you have time. So, yeah. Okay. Speak soon. Bye.”
It’s only when I’m leaving the building to go to the gym that it occurs to me Stephen Gardiner ofThe Sunday Timesmight still be outside in his car. A quick glance around tells me that he isn’t, so I toss my bag into the back seat and climb in and pull out into traffic, watching the rearview for a burgundy rental. My phone starts ringing before I pull into the gym parking lot, but a glance down at the screen tells me it’s Leah, not Christian, and since I can’t imagine anything she has to say will be urgent, it can wait until later.
At the gym, I keep the screen of my phone facing me as I run on the treadmill: 5k, then 10, and then 15, tension leeching off my bones to be replaced with exhaustion. Christian doesn’t call me back.
On the way home, I stop at the grocery store to buy some sugary snacks, which I open before I even get back to the car. Should I call Cole? Ask him not to speak to some guy calledStephen, who may or may not reach out to him to ask about last weekend. Surely that would only make him ask questions? Questions I haven’t a clue how to answer because no one can know who Christian is. For the first time, it occurs to me that Christian is a fucking idiot for messing around with me like this. He’s even more of an idiot for coming to Jersey with me and watching me get fucked. What was he thinking? It would have been so easy for someone intent on getting dirt on him to follow him from his house all the way to the hotel in Jersey City. In fact, someone could have been doing that for the last couple months.
Then it hits me: is that a part of this for him? The risk of getting caught? Before me, it had been this very important guy’s son. It’s like he wants to get caught. Maybe he does. Because he must know what it will look like if this gets out. Strait-laced and professional at work, polished and primed for the top tier of the British government, who in private slums it with guys half his age. It has to be part of the attraction for him since we have next to nothing in common. I’m not exactly the sort of partner a guy like him could bring to work events. But when we are together, it doesn’t feel like we are poles apart. Our connection feels strong and deep, and while initially it was about physical attraction, that only feels like part of the story now. I like how he makes me feel, safe and calm, cared for and cherished. I know people probably wouldn’t think that to look at us, but it’s more than sex—fuck, we haven’t even slept together. It’s more than sex. It’s real.Weare real.
Not for the first time, it makes me curious about his wife, the great and lasting love of his life. What they had together, and how he feels about her, is overwhelming sometimes to contend with, and I just… I want to know what she was like, even just so I can understand Christian a little better. I’m not sure that even makes sense, and I’d sworn never to do it, but my leg is bouncing so hard that the entire car is shaking, and I’ve eaten two fullpackets of peanut M&M’s, and he hasn’t called me fucking back.
I type into Google: Christian Darling Wife