This Other Country (26 page)

“What? Beautiful, intell—”

“Stop it. It’s like…fucking someone wearing body armour.”

“Intriguing. Have you ever done—?”

The hand clamped over his mouth prevented him finishing that question. He took his gaze from the tor and fixed it on Ben. Ben raised his brows; the “are you going to stop pissing around” message in them clear. Nikolas nodded and Ben removed his hand. “It’s like you’re one of those ninja warriors—I ask you something but you see a weapon being thrown at you and you deflect it all
hah ya hah
.” He made suitable small chopping motions.

“Hah ya hah?”

“Fucking hell! There you go again! Do you do this with me all the time? Seriously?”

Nikolas sighed and rummaged in the sheets for his cigarettes.

Ben plucked the lighter away. “And then you light up to avoid talking.”

Nikolas frowned and snatched his lighter back—lighting up, just as Ben had predicted. “You’re more annoying now than before and that’s saying something.”

“That’s more like it. What else?”

“What do you mean?”

“Yep. Ask me a question you bloody well know the answer to so you can gain some time to think up more excuses and deflections.”

“I’m not—”

“Go on. Answer my question.”

“Which one! You’ve been bombarding—no, seriously, I’m not trying to—no!” He almost bit his cigarette in two, trying to stop the tickling. He couldn’t believe it. Of all the things Ben could have recalled, he’d remembered this—that
he
hated to be tickled. He wondered if he elbowed Ben Rider in the head he might forget some more things! They struggled for a while, but with a lit cigarette Nikolas quickly had the upper hand. No one wants one of those pressed to delicate places, and once Ben got Nikolas wasn’t joking—that he was more than willing to press it to him—he surrendered and lay chuckling quietly, watching the play of light on the colours of the tor.

“This house is absolutely
incredible
. I
love
it.”

Nikolas lay alongside him, cigarette happily being smoked and smoke being shared with Ben. “I know. It’s yours.”

Ben was very quiet for a long time, wreathed in smoke. “Mine?”

“Uh-huh. I live in your house, not the other way around.”

“How can this be mine? I only earn thirty thousand a year…I suppose that’s gone up a bit now? Inflation in ten years?”

“I gave the house to you. I had it built and gave it to you.”

Ben jerked his head over.

Nikolas wondered if he’d said too much too soon on top of all the other things he knew Ben was having to compute. He should have been more cautious, more aware of Ben’s fragility.

“So I pissed in my
own
swim lane?”

Nikolas laughed, and it wasn’t cynical or defensive or any of his other deflections he produced to fit into the world’s norms. He mirrored Ben’s position, their faces close on the ruined sheets. He leant even closer still and gently bit Ben’s bottom lip then sucked the bite, easing the lip into his mouth, their tongues coming together, stubble scratching on stubble and creating delicious friction of need. At the same time they rolled, pressing their bodies together as they kissed. Their eyes were wide open, watching the other’s reactions. Ben was hard again, and their cocks were doing a similar dance below, rubbing, joining, playing. They left them alone, hands too busy elsewhere, and let the kissing and the hot connection bring them off one last time. When the last drops of pleasure had been wrung out, almost as one they fell asleep, tangled and illuminated by the overhead sun.

§ § §

Debauched wasn’t a word Ben had ever applied to himself before. He was in the army—squared away, disciplined, even in his private life. Waking up some time in the afternoon in Nikolas Mikkelsen’s bed—huh,
his
bed—his first thought was that such depravity could only exist in fiction. The place was filthy. He had slices of cold toast stuck to him with congealed butter. There was a spilt pot of tea with loose leaves in a huge flood of cold brown over the sheet (at least, he hoped it was tea) and he was covered in sweat, blood and other substances he, again, hoped had something to do with tea or toast, but suspected didn’t.

He poked his equally guilty partner. Nikolas grunted and turned over. Ben could see he was getting nothing there for a while yet. He crawled across the bed and discovered the vodka bottle and glasses as he knelt on them, pressing them into the mattress, and then tipped onto the floor. He reckoned once, just once, in the mess in Fallingbostel after an RTR initiation he’d woken up in a worse state. But that hadn’t included sex. At least, he hoped it hadn’t; he didn’t actually remember.

He rose unsteadily to his feet and discovered Nikolas’s shower—huh,
his
shower—and not for the first time stood in awe at the wealth and luxury of this house. It was one vast wet room with showerheads that blasted down with incredible pressure, and in one corner stood a huge hot tub, Scandinavian style, with a door to a sauna. The far side of the bathroom led to the gym.
His gym
! It was so un-English he laughed as the water cascaded over him.

Arms slid around his waist. “Hello, Benjamin.”

“You were unconscious.”

“Never. I was assessing my surroundings.”

Ben slicked drops off his face. “How about assessing me for a while?”

Nikolas hitched in his breath and slid his hands lower, cupping Ben’s cheeks, parting them so the stream ran into his cleft, tickling, teasing him. Ben moaned and leant back a little in Nikolas’s embrace. Nikolas increased the tease with one finger, Ben came back up sharply with a hiss of pain, but Nikolas persevered until he could see the very obvious evidence of Ben’s considerable pleasure. He eased his finger out and Ben opened his eyes. Nikolas laid his palm over Ben’s lips to quell his imminent complaint and ran some soap into his hands. It smelt of coconut and vanilla, something Ben would never have risked in the showers in the mess. Nikolas began with Ben’s short, dark hair, soaping him from head to foot—he actually knelt under the stream of hot water and washed Ben’s feet, still a little muddy from his night time excursion to the stable. When he was done, he rose, slicking the suds off as he went.

Ben knew what this man was doing. Nikolas was trying to find the familiar in the unfamiliar. To Ben this was all new anyway. He could only imagine how it must be for Nikolas to have nine years of intimate knowledge of personality blown away and be left with the shell that remained. He seemed satisfied with the shell though and finally stood with Ben soaped, rinsed, and squeaky clean in front of him. Erect, too. Roaming hands over his slick body had kept Ben’s interest high.

Nikolas returned to his knees and took Ben’s long, blood-swollen erection into his mouth. Ben slid his fingers into the water-darkened strands of blond hair, and for the first time in his life, according to his curtailed knowledge of those years, he was sucked off by a man in a shower. Although his whole body was aching from Nikolas’s challenging idea of fun in bed, it was also thrumming with need, these sensations so hard to separate that when he came into Nikolas’s mouth it was relief from exhaustion as much as intense excitement, and he sagged, Nikolas just catching him in time, holding him and then pressing their lips together for a kiss.

He mouthed Ben’s cum back to him.

Ben snatched away, slipping on the wet floor. “What the fuck! That’s disgusting!”

§ § §

Ben began to spit theatrically.

Nikolas laughed unconcerned—Ben Rider-Mikkelsen liked the taste of spunk well enough; he’d just forgotten—and started to make a mental list of other things Ben had subjected him to over the years
he
didn’t like. Revenge
was
best served cold. Bored with Ben’s theatrics, he snagged him closer and handed him the shampoo, bending his head like an imperious monarch demanding service. Ben huffed but did as commanded, rubbing and twisting the long strands into ridiculous shapes. He’d obviously never washed another man’s hair for him before and was treating it like a novel experience. He paused in his ministrations and felt more carefully. “A raised scar?”

Nikolas nodded, uninterested in discussing more scars. Ben narrowed his eyes. “No, this one…was important.”

Nikolas tipped his head to one side, watching the straining expression. He put a hand up to Ben’s cheek. “Don’t force it, Ben. Let it come naturally.”

“You don’t know what it’s like! Everything is familiar and really, really good now, but I don’t know why. I know this scar…terrified me, but I don’t know
why
.”

Nikolas began to rinse his own hair, twisting and turning under the water. “You once found a little blue tin. When you held it, you remembered being in a kitchen, someone cooking, the smell of the bread, eating it, the taste of the unfamiliar stuff on the bread—marmite, which you hated, still hate—all of that from one blue tin. But you’d lived in that same kitchen for weeks and hadn’t remembered it at all.”

“Where is it—the tin? Do I still have it?”

Nikolas stepped away from the water and handed Ben a towel, taking one for himself and tying it around his waist. He went around the other side of a partition made from coloured glass bricks, and Ben followed him to a granite counter upon which sat two graceful bowls and elegant curving taps to fill them. Nikolas began to brush his teeth, perched on the counter, still watching Ben.

Eventually, he nodded.

When they were dressed, he produced it—the little blue tin, burnt and misshapen as it was.

Ben held it, turning it in his hands.

His face crumpled with disappointment.

Nikolas pulled him into his arms. “This isn’t fiction, Ben. You aren’t going to pick up something and have your memory rush back in. It doesn’t work like that in real life.”

“But why can’t I remember now if I remembered before?”

“The memories aren’t gone. Only the pathways to them are unclear at the moment. It’s like early morning fog. It will lift.”

Ben pulled away, his brow furrowed with effort to connect to Nikolas’s words. “Fog? It did lift.” He swallowed. “Were we…camping? Why were we camping? It was really misty. Then the mist lifted, and there was a princess with bright red hair! Fucking hell! Am I confusing my life with a fairytale?”

Nikolas couldn’t help a small laugh and made a mental note to text Emilia and tell her Ben thought she was a princess. He could imagine her response. He brushed his thumb over Ben’s cheekbone, removing a tear of anger. “No. That was a real memory.”

“I went camping with a princess?”

“You had dinner with a prince once—the heir to the throne.”

“
No
.”

“You did.”

“Fuck.”

“You did that, too.”

Ben laughed, despair and confusion evaporating from his perfect features. For one moment, Nikolas understood what Andrea Gillian had meant about premorbid tendency. Ben now had a lightness of spirit once more—something Nikolas hadn’t seen for many years. He supposed it was inevitable. People alter and develop together, and change had been something of a theme of their lives since they’d met. He’d not seen the alterations in Ben because they’d happened slowly—many of them under his tutelage and deliberate. Ben had grown up, become more mature, more sophisticated, quieter, more intense. Had he also become defeated…depressed? It was a sobering thought presented with this raw, unformed version of the same man, now rummaging in the fridge and complaining at not finding anything for a proper breakfast, despite it being four o’clock in the afternoon.

“Would you like to go out for tea? You like scones—and cream. You eat a lot of cream.”

Ben obviously didn’t get this, because he was busy agreeing that yes he would very much like to go out for tea.

Nikolas felt his heart melt and wondered if he was falling in love with Ben Rider all over again.

CHAPTER TWENTY

The confusion in Nikolas’s mind about the various versions of Ben Rider only continued that evening when they returned from tea with some takeaway to eat later. Nikolas suggested they watch a film—something easy and non-threatening for Ben’s mind. Ben readily agreed, but when they sat on the sofa together he resisted, embarrassed, when Nikolas tried to pull him to lie back against him.

He wasn’t fucking cuddling with another man!

Nikolas reflected wryly that it had taken
him
almost four years of their acquaintance to lie thus on a sofa, and even then he’d done it for another year under protest, lying stiff and unhappy with the arrangement.

Then an awful realisation hit him.

He rose swiftly and went to the kitchen, making the excuse he was going to select a bottle of wine and put the food on to reheat.

This Ben didn’t love him.

It was obvious really, and he knew it shouldn’t be so painful to realise.

Ben had had sex with him, but he didn’t
love
him. Not yet. That was eight years of shared experiences away.

But he loved Ben.

For the first time, Nikolas Mikkelsen was in a terrifying country called love on his own. Ben had coaxed him to this unexpected land slowly and by sure steps, easing him out of the shadows of his denial until lying on a sofa, wrapped in Ben’s arms, had been his choice, his preference.

He felt arms slide around his waist and turned into the embrace.

“Whatcha thinking?”

“You’re missing the film.”

“I’ve seen it before.”

“But you don’t remember it.”

“That’s not the point. And you’re doing that thing again.”

“Yes. I know. It’s a deliberate tactic to get you to stop questioning me. It’s been very effective for eight years.”

“Well, I saw through it after one day, so stop it. Tell me. What are you thinking about?”

“You. I was thinking about you and what
you
think about all this.”

“Good luck with that then. Let me know if you have any insights.”

“I always do.”

“Thought you might.”

“You are very cheeky, Ben Rider-Mikkelsen.”