“Nothing.” This was stupid. Calling her again this way would only worry her for nothing. He closed his eyes, but an image of his hand touching Pasha’s face, cupping his cheek like he was about to pull him in and kiss him, was right there on the inside of his eyelids. He blinked and then corrected his initial denial. “Something happened, kind of. There’s nothing wrong, exactly.” He left the wordyetunspoken.
A discordant sound of one of the boy band singing badly came from the bedroom next door, contrasting with the soothing sounds he heard over the phone. A familiarclick, followed by the soft scrape of a chair across quarry tile helped him picture the scene: his mum had switched on the kettle to make tea before pulling out a kitchen chair to sit at the table.
Home.
Talking this through there would be a whole lot easier. Ed levered himself away from the door and let himself out onto the narrow balcony where traffic noise was less distracting than his neighbor’s singing.
“There’s going to be something in the newspapers, Mum. Well, I’m guessing there will be.” Maybe this whole ‘shipping’ concept was a storm in a teacup. Perhaps, contrary to what Pasha said, nobody beyond some excitable fans would even pay attention.
“You’re in the papers already, Edward. I’m keeping all your cuttings. There was a lovely picture of you in one of the tabloids yesterday. I do wish you would smile more, though. You don’t have to look so serious all the time now.” Her voice dropped a little. “Steve would want you to enjoy this.”
Ed sat on a wrought iron chair, rested his elbows on his spread knees, and lowered his head.
“You know he would, darling. He’d be your number one fan, not just your songwriter.”
He nodded even though she couldn’t see him.
The huff of breath his mum let out was soft. “I saw Mandy yesterday. She sends her love.”
“Was the baby with her?”
“Of course. He looks so much like his dad now. More and more like Steve each time I see him. Did you know he started walking?”
“No way.” How was that even possible? It still seemed like no time had passed at all since Ed had come home from Afghanistan alone instead of with his best friend. The last time he’d spoken with Mandy, he’d had to explain why she’d be raising a month-old infant all on her own. “Listen, Mum.” The mention of Mandy and the baby brought him back to his point. “There’s a photo that someone put on the Internet today.”
“And?” A chair scraped against tile again, and the clink of the lid on the teapot filled the silence as Ed scrambled to explain what Pasha had made sound rational.
“I just wanted to warn you that it’s of me and a man. He’s… he’s one of the contestants. It looks like we’re kissing. Or going to kiss. I don’t know….”
A spoon clattered, and this time the scrape of the chair legs was much louder.
Ed spoke again quickly. “It only looks that way, Mum. I wanted to tell you first in case someone showed you, and you….”
“And I what, exactly, darling? Hoped you’d finally found someone nice? Someone you might bring home to meet me?”
“Mum.” Her acceptance still blew him away. He’d have come out a whole lot sooner than his early twenties if he’d known she’d suspected since the summer he turned sixteen. “It’s not what it looks like. That’s all I’m saying.”
“You don’t like him?”
Ed liked Pasha a whole lot more now than he had at the start of the contest. Maybe he wasn’t just a joker like the host of the show always suggested, or relied on a manufactured image like two of the boy band members. He’d been sure those black-framed glasses Pasha wore were fake until he’d watched him struggle with contact lenses. And he’d heard him sing enough songs by now to believe he tried hard. At least he hit more right notes than wrong ones. “I like him okay, I suppose.”
If he was honest, he’d taken one look at Pasha’s distinctive dark eyes and glossy black hair, and jumped to a conclusion. In Ed’s mind, he’d merged with men he’d tracked over and over via the scope on his SA80 or stopped and searched at the side of roads between base and Kabul. The mental box he’d consigned Pasha to had been labeled “Don’t Trust.” That assumption now made Ed uncomfortable. “He’s better than I thought at the start.”
It turned out Pasha was as smart as a whip—look how quickly he’d assessed their best chance to stay in the competition. That kind of strategic thinking was arresting—attractive in ways Ed would have a hard time explaining to a stranger, let alone to his mum. “He’s not as stupid as he looks, at least.”
“Edward Joseph Britten, if he was ‘all right’ enough to get caught almost kissing, you could try being kinder. ‘Not as stupid as he looks’ is no way to talk about someone you—” She broke off abruptly before pleading, “Please, God. Tell me it’s not one of the boy band, although I suppose the one who can sing is a cutie. Is it him?”
“No!” Cradle-snatching wasn’t his style, especially not coddled kids from posh boarding schools pretending to be streetwise rappers. He preferred men old enough to have some hair on their chests. “What do you take me for, Mum?”
“Well, darling, you called me, so I’m going to take a wild guess that you either want forgiveness or permission.”
“Both.” She could still read him so well. “And we really weren’t kissing. It doesn’t mean anything apart from us playing a game to stay in the contest for as long as we can.” This was the part of the conversation he’d been dreading. “I’m almost certain there’ll be retaliation, and I think the producers will bring up why I didn’t re-up.”
“Well, that’s none of their beeswax, is it.”
Ed loved that she phrased that particular sentence as a statement rather than a question. “Mum, you might get contacted. People might turn up asking questions. I just wanted to warn you.”
“I don’t care who asks. You’re a hero, Edward.” Her voice thickened. “A true British hero, and if anyone asks, that’s exactly what I’ll tell them. So what if you didn’t follow an order? So what? I love you for what you did. And the Army would have you back in a heartbeat. It was you who chose not to re-up. You, Ed.If anyone doesn’t like hearing the truth, they can stick it in their pipe and smoke it.”