“Why don’t you try and make me?” Pasha’s sharp inhale suggested he’d spoken without thinking again. Then he let it out before drawing in another that was deeper. “You can, if you want. Make me shut up, I mean.” From this close, his swallow was audible. “I thought about it last night.”
“Yeah?”
Pasha’s response was a softly exhaled “Yes.” His gaze lifted from Ed’s mouth to his eyes. “I thought about what it would have felt like if I hadn’t stopped you.”
Ed had wondered the same thing.
“And I wondered on the way here if I should have let it happen.” The cheery departingpip-pipof Ed’s mother’s car horn punctuated Pasha’s words. “Only then it would have been about the contest.”
He said exactly what Ed had been thinking.
“Everything we’ve done so far has been about staying in. If I’d reacted differently last night when you crossed the stage and grabbed me”—he raised a hand to the nape of Ed’s neck—“it would only have been to adjust our positioning for the cameras.” He shuffled sideways, and Ed turned his face in the same direction. “It would have been to make sure they could focus on both our faces.” Pasha lowered his hand from Ed’s nape and shoved it in the pocket of his jeans. “It would have all beenfor the public. I don’t want that. The first time I—” He swallowed again.
“The first time you kiss a man you don’t want other people watching?”
Pasha nodded, saying nothing else for once.
“You haven’t doneanythingwith a man before?”
Pasha shook his head and then shrugged. “Not unless you count having monster crushes on Jack Twist and Ennis Del Mar.Brokeback Mountainslayed me.”
“Pick one.”
Pasha didn’t hesitate. “Ennis.” There was his wide smile again, even if only for a moment. “Turns out I’m all about the blond hair.” He met Ed’s gaze and held it. “I’ve had girlfriends, but they’re hard to keep when a second job to pay for vocal coaching is more important than taking them out. To be honest, I didn’t exactly try too hard. I never felt a burning urge to put anyone else first. I’m not dead from the waist down.” He looked at his feet where dark soil dirtied the white toes of his trainers. “Far from it. I was busy, that’s all. One-night stands were easier.” He sounded defensive. “I’ve had plenty of them.”
“But not with a man.”
That defensiveness was gone as quickly as it had come. “No.”
Ed shifted so his back was to the wall instead of caging Pasha. The view from here was so familiar. He hadn’t picked up a paintbrush for over a year, but he could recreate it with his eyes closed—sea mist curling around the cove below and blue sky touching the green of clear Cornish seawater. It had featured in dreams so often while deployed. This conversation felt dreamlike as well.
“Sounds like we had very different priorities,” Ed said. “When I was a teen, my number one priority was stalking Tracey Wonnacott’s big brother Lee. I wanted him to touch my dick so bad.” He glanced sideways. Pasha was smiling again. “I wentout with Tracey for months. Spent a lot of time hanging around her house hoping Lee would be there. She kept ‘accidentally’ showing me her tits. I kept making excuses not to touch them. Not my proudest moments.”
“Boobs are fun.”
“Cocks are even better.” Ed watched that smile slip. “I mean, I always knew what I liked. Some people are more… flexible.”
The sound Pasha let out was noncommittal. Ed looked out to the sea where the white tops of tall waves were visible. His feet might be on dry land, but this conversation reminded him of learning to surf—trying to stand but falling over and over. He felt just as unbalanced right now, but back then persistence had paid off. He might as well keep going now they were actually talking.
“It’s true,” Ed said. “My first boyfriend was bi.” That caught Pasha’s attention. “Well, boyfriends probably isn’t how he’d describe us, but I thought he was the dogs bollocks.”
Good, Pasha was smiling again.
“He was called Dominic Dymond. His dad converted the stable block into a house the year I turned sixteen, and Dom came home to help him. He was almost done with university when I’d barely finished my GCSEs, but I was already six foot tall. Pretty sure he thought I was older.”
“What happened?”
“I spent a summer replacing roof beams in the stable with him. It was hot, sweaty work. I spent a lot of time shirtless. Or bent over. Sometimes both. Dom split up with his girlfriend after the first week, and the rest is history.”
“You can’t stop there.”
The garden formed a natural amphitheater that meant Ed’s laugh carried a long way. “One day he asked what I wanted, so I manned up and said, ‘You.’ He sat on those steps over there”—Ed pointed at the short flight only a few feet away—“and he told me I could take whatever I wanted. That was my first real kiss.”
“Pretty memorable, then?”
“Very.” Ed twisted his body to lean like Pasha, shoulder pressed against a wall that might be crumbling right now, but had stood before his father had been born. “Memorable, and special because it happened right here at home. I had my fair share of hookups later when I signed up, but I knew one day I’d leave the Army and come back here. When I did, I wanted what I’d felt that summer. Not with Dom, exactly.” He reached out and brushed a smudge of palest yellow pollen from the sharp line of Pasha’s cheekbone. “And I don’t say that because he was bi. I just mean that kissing him made me feel like I was riding my first wave, and that feeling was all that mattered. I’m not letting go of the next person who makes me feel like that again.” Pasha was leaning into his hand. “The last I heard, he was living up country with someone. I’ve no idea if it’s with a man or a woman. I just hope he’s as happy as I felt for those few weeks of the summer we worked together.”
Bees buzzed above blooms that would already be long-gone elsewhere, nurtured in this sheltered spot by the balmy Gulf Stream sea breeze. It felt a million miles away from London when Pasha stepped closer to him and said, “Ask me the same thing.”