My Prince (22 page)

For a couple of days he’d watched his Facebook friend count steadily decline and his Twitter followers increase at an accelerated rate. The final tally was something along the lines of thirty Facebook friends lost—mostly kids he’d gone to school with and not seen in almost a decade. One or two friends of his brother’s. Those had hurt a bit, but he was sure Maggie would be sticking up for him. On Twitter, he’d gained over three hundred new followers. He was trying to “rebrand” on that platform to talk about his work much more, interacting with the sportsmen and women who were fans of his product.

All of that had taken time. He’d been looking at blogs, sorting through the advice, then methodically going through the people he followed and culling the ones who didn’t make sense. Following that, he’d gone on a spree, cross-referencing his list of Olympic supporters with their Twitter usernames and trying to build up a following and a name for himself.

If
The Sun
newspaper didn’t think Maguire style helmets were a joke, then George Maguire wasn’t going to either.

With his teeth gritted in determination, he plugged the charger in and opened his laptop, bringing up his e-mail first out of habit.

One message.

Alexander van Amsberg:
“I miss you.”

It felt like a sucker-punch to his gut.

The message was time-stamped from a few hours earlier, probably when George was napping. He didn’t reply, of course, just marked the message as read and flicked over to the tab with his Twitter account open. Every few minutes he switched back, looked at the e-mail again, and dealt with the resulting twinge of pain.

I miss you too.

G
EORGE
HOVERED
at the top of the stairs as Dev opened the door. His room looked out over the street and he’d seen Alex’s car pull up. Actually, it had gone up and down the road a few times before Alex had finally parked and gotten out.

“Is George here?” Alex asked.

George curled his fingers around the banister and squeezed until his knuckles turned white.

“Are you Alex?”

There was a long, excruciating pause before Alex muttered, “Yeah.”

“George doesn’t want to see you,” Dev informed him.

George was straining so hard to hear the conversation it was giving him a headache.

“Okay,” Alex said after another long moment. “Can you tell him I was here?”

“Sure,” Dev said and shut the door.

Before Dev could call up to him, George ducked back into his room and silently locked it from the inside. He wasn’t ready to deal with this yet. Any of it.

T
HE
WEEK
dragged on. Dev and the rest of his housemates learned to stay out of George’s way, and he started picking up takeaway to eat in his room rather than cooking downstairs in their shared kitchen. He was miserable, irritable, and dull as hell to be around.

More than once he’d picked up his phone, determined to call Alex and finally sort out whatever it was that needed sorting out, but fear or cowardice prevented him from actually dialing the number.

George tilted his head back against the wall and stretched his feet out along the bed. Slowly, deliberately, he rocked his head from side to side, letting the textured wallpaper massage the back of his skull.

He ached. His heart, his head, his ass. It was numb from spending so much time sitting down.

He picked up his phone, unlocked the screen, then stared at it for a moment. George opened his list of contacts and his thumb hovered, once again, over Alex’s name.

Instead, he called Maggie.

“Alright, wanker?” Maggie asked when he answered, and something lifted from George’s chest.

“Yeah, I’m not too bad, dickhead,” he replied affectionately. “What are you doing?”

“Eugh. I just finished replacing the cam belt on a piece of shit Polo that won’t last another five years and is turning into a fucking money pit. The stupid twat owner insists on getting it fixed every time something falls off it, even though the thing is damn near as old as me, and keeps blaming me every fucking time something else goes wrong.”

George chuckled, his heart warmed by his brother’s grumpy complaining and foul language. “Nice.”

“What’s up with you?”

“Nothing.”

George heard the rattley-slam that told him Maggie had just ducked into the tiny, smelly office in the garage.

“Stop being such a fucking pussy. What’s wrong? You never call me like this.”

He didn’t. George hummed and hawed for a moment. “Is it weird if I tell you about shit between me and Alex?”

“As long as I don’t need to know anything about butt-fucking, I’m fine,” Maggie said easily.

“Yeah, well, I don’t think there’s any chance of that ever happening again,” George mumbled.

“You two had an argument?”

“Yeah.”

“What about?”

“He was being a stupid, stuck-up, arrogant, posh twat, and I called him out on it.”

“Right,” Maggie said. “Then what?”

“I left.”

“Did you punch him in the gob?”

“What?”

“I dunno,” Maggie said. “That’s mostly how I settle arguments.”

“With Jaz?” George asked with a laugh, thinking of Maggie’s pretty, curvy girlfriend and how she’d likely punch him right back.

“No, not with her. But with mates.”

“Alex isn’t a mate, Maggie. He is—was—I dunno. My partner.”

“Right.”

George questioned his logic on calling Maggie to help with this.

“Are you really okay?” George asked. “With the whole gay thing?”

The awful squeak that came through the phone told George Maggie had leaned back in that old, ratty office chair that his dad had owned since he opened the garage. He was too superstitious to get rid of it.

“Yeah,” Maggie said. “I don’t give a fuck who you fuck, you know? That’s your business. I figure you’ve probably been gay your whole life, I just didn’t know about it. You were my brother then, and you’re my brother now. It doesn’t matter what you do in the bedroom or who you do it with.”

George huffed a laugh. “Thanks.”

“And I clearly know absolutely nothing about gay relationships. But I like Alex. He seems alright, for a posh twat. And you seem to like him. So… you probably know what you need to do to fix it. You don’t need me to tell you that.”

George thought about that for a moment. “Yeah. Maggie?”

“What?”

“Does anyone back home ever ask you? About me, I mean.”

“A few people,” Maggie said, not sounding particularly bothered by this. “I tell’em gay or not, you could probably kick the shit out of them, so they should probably keep their fucking noses out of other people’s business.”

“Nice.”

“Well, they should,” Maggie protested. “Are you going to go make up with your boyfriend now?”

This time, George didn’t need to think about it. “Yeah. I am.”

“Good. And since you called, I can tell you to come home and visit Nan again soon. And bring Alex with you. Nan thinks he’s posh as bloody napkins and won’t stop banging on about how ‘George is going out with the Prince of bloody Denmark.’”

“The Netherlands,” George corrected with a grin. “The Prince of Denmark was Hamlet.”

“Alright, alright. I’m going back to work. See you soon, yeah?”

“Yeah. Love you, Mags.”

“Now that is fucking gay,” Maggie said and hung up. George laughed and dropped the phone.

Maggie was, without a doubt, the worst person in the world to get advice from. And the best brother in the whole world.

Chapter Thirteen

A
LEX
OPENED
the door and his jaw dropped.

The last thing he expected on this sunny afternoon was George standing there, wearing navy blue tailored shorts and leather flip-flops and a long-sleeved shirt open at his throat. He’d buzzed his hair short again and there was a crease in his forehead as he scowled beautifully up at Alex.

“Hey,” George said.

Alex blinked. “Hi.”

Asking “what are you doing here?” was right on the tip of his tongue. He forced it back, not wanting George to think he wasn’t wanted. He was.

“Um, come in,” Alex said instead, stumbling over the words.

The expression on George’s face said he might refuse. It was only after a long moment’s struggle that he nodded and stepped into the hallway. Alex shut the door behind him.

They stood in the dim light for a moment, not quite looking at each other as the awkward tension grew. Alex felt like his mouth was full of cotton wool—his words wouldn’t quite come, and all he could do was look and smell and
feel
George close to him.

George cleared his throat. “I, uh, I wanted to apologize.”

Alex’s eyebrows shot up. “Really?”

“Yeah. I haven’t really given you a chance.”

“Oh.”

“I’m still really upset with you.”

Alex nodded. It felt like his heart was beating too hard in his throat, like he couldn’t take a whole breath. And for some reason there was a pricking in the corners of his eyes.

“I miss you too,” George said in a broken voice.

Alex bit down hard on his lip.

“I’m so sorry,” he said. This was the chance he’d been begging for, the chance to explain it all. He stepped up closer and touched George’s wrist, right on the edge of his dark red shirt. The color looked good on him. “I really didn’t mean to hurt you. I was….” He thought back to what he’d said to Doug and shook his head. “Putting words in other people’s mouths. Not that that’s an excuse. Your family—”

“Please don’t.”

“George.” Something twisted in his belly. “I want you here. I want us to be together, whatever that means.”

George rubbed his hands over his face. “I was so angry with you. I don’t normally have a temper, but you made me so fucking mad, Alex. I couldn’t even get to the end of the road before I had to pull over because my hands were shaking so bad.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I want us to be together too. But I don’t know if it’ll work. We’re too different.”

“It’ll work if we want it to. If we work at it. Same as any relationship.”

“But we’re
not
the same as any relationship,” George said. “We can’t undo our past before we met each other. And you were right about some of it. I didn’t go to a posh school. I don’t have a rich family. My parents
do
breed like bloody rabbits.”

Alex took another step closer and put his hands on George’s waist. Just his fingertips. Just lightly.

“You know that doesn’t matter to me. I don’t look at you and see your family, George, or your background, or your upbringing. I see this man, who I’m falling in love with.”

George screwed his eyes shut and skimmed his palms down Alex’s arms, then lifted his hands to wrap around his neck. Their slight height difference meant this was a familiar position to them, for early morning breakfast hugs, or when one or the other of them got in from work.

“The press will have a field day.”

“The injunctions are already in place. They can’t write about you, or anyone in your family.”

“I won’t be able to hide forever.”

“We can deal with that when we come to it. I want to be with you. I want to make this work.” He could feel George’s resolve start to crumble. It was almost heartbreaking to feel the resistance, how much effort George was putting in to holding back. “Please kiss me,” Alex whispered.

George closed his eyes but leaned in and brushed their mouths together. It was soft and sweet, the lightest reconnection. Then he twisted to put his head on Alex’s shoulder. For a while, they held each other and the world outside stopped.

T
HIS
WASN
’
T
what he’d expected. The feel of Alex in his arms again was too perfect and too fragile and too tempestuous for George’s liking. The smell of him, though, that soft, clean, crisp smell, with the woodsy stuff he used in his hair, and the feel of his expensive cotton shirt under George’s hands, that was right. Even if it was going to take a while to rebuild what they had before.

Alex slipped his hand into George’s and led him through to the living room. He had the History Channel on, some documentary about the pharaohs of ancient Egypt. It was muted, though, and his laptop lay abandoned on the coffee table.

“Sorry, were you working?”

“It’s fine. I can finish it later.”

“I can go,” George said. “I should probably go.”

“No,” Alex said. His lower lip jutted out in a familiar stubborn pout. “Stay. I’ll make dinner for us.”

George grinned. “Or we could get a takeaway?”

“Or that,” Alex agreed. “Please don’t go. I only just got you back.”

There it was—that twisting in George’s stomach that warned him things were still so incredibly breakable. Still.

He pushed it to one side and took his preferred corner of the sofa, kicking his flip-flops off and tucking his feet up underneath himself. That seemed to reassure Alex, and he curled up opposite.

“What next?” Alex asked.

“What do you mean?”

“I’m not sure,” Alex admitted. “I don’t know where we go from here.”

George played with the cuff of his shorts and didn’t look at him. “Me either.”

“I want you to move in.”

That made George look up. He shook his head slowly. “I’m not sure, Alex.”

“Well, that’s what I want. I thought I’d get it on the table.”

“Don’t you think it would be better to give us some time? Some space?”

“It’s up to you,” Alex said, though George could hear the familiar stubbornness in his voice. It was the tone Alex used when he was used to getting his own way and things weren’t going like that. He could be an entitled asshole at times, but he was
George’s
entitled asshole.

“You’re thinking mean things about me, aren’t you?”

George laughed and shook his head. “No. I think we need to decide if this is something we’re serious about. Right now I feel like I could walk away from this, and it would hurt like fuck, but I’d get over it, given some time. If we go on….”