“I am planning on wearing nothing at all, Connor, and I expect you to be in a state to appreciate it.”
Connor eased him over onto his side and pulled him back against the long warm length of him, one thick arm curling across Vidal’s chest. Vidal let himself be arranged. His thighs were going to feel like minced meat in the morning. There was a damp patch spreading slowly under his hip, and he could still feel Connor’s come shifting inside him with every movement he made. He had never, in any of his cosmopolitan adult life, felt more agreeably used.
Connor’s sticky thumb was drawing slow idle circles against the dip of his waist. It was, Vidal thought vaguely as he looked up at the plaster rose on the ceiling, really very pleasant.
Chapter Fourteen
Thecoffee machine was a feat of Italian engineering the size of a small cathedral organ, all brushed steel and brass dials. It had a portafilter handle that Beauchamp could not, for the life of him, get to seat properly in its housing. His first attempt had produced a thin dribble of brown water and a hiss of aggrieved steam. The second had produced nothing at all, on account of his having forgotten to tamp the grounds. The third was in progress, and the machine was making a noise that struck him as not entirely promising.
He tightened his grip on the handle and leaned into it with his full weight. Behind him came the sound of footsteps that landed too heavily to be Vidal’s, followed by the soft scrabble of claws on oak. Mercè arrived at his ankle and leaned her bald flank against his shin in cordial greeting.
“Morning, Major.”
Connor’s voice came from the kitchen doorway. Beauchamp didn’t turn around. The third shot had, by some small mercy, resolved itself into a thin ribbon of something that was at leastthe correct colour of coffee. He slid the cup off the drip tray and onto a saucer, then set his own cup up beneath the spout.
“Good morning.” He kept his voice level and his eyes on the machine. “Would you like your coffee black, or —”
“Black’s grand.”
He carried both cups across the kitchen to where Connor had settled himself at the end of the long scrubbed table. Connor was in yesterday’s shirt with the sleeves rolled to his forearms. He smelled of sweat and skin and Vidal’s bed. Beauchamp put the coffee into Connor’s hand before he’d quite finished sitting down, which had the dual effect of offering hospitality and occupying Connor’s mouth with something other than conversation.
Connor took it with an amused lift of one eyebrow, and Beauchamp turned smartly back towards the fridge. He took out the eggs, the butter, the last of the good sourdough, and a wedge of the manchego that had survived yesterday’s picnic, and began to cook.
Vidal arrived in the kitchen ten minutes later trailing the scent of bergamot. He stopped in the doorway, took in the tableau of Connor at the table and Beauchamp at the hob, and pressed both hands to his chest as though he had been pierced by an arrow through the heart.
“My two favourite men. In one room.Connor, you have stayed for breakfast, this is the most romantic thing that has happened to me in living memory.”
He crossed the kitchen and took Connor’s mouth in a kiss, one hand cupped briefly under Connor’s jaw before he moved on towards his chair. Beauchamp kept his eyes on the eggs. He gave the pan a turn it didn’t need. Section 7.1 of the cohabitation protocols required one hour’s notice for any guest. He’d had none.
“Beauchamp! These eggs! I can smell the butter from here, you have been generous with it for once!”
“They’re on the way, sir.”
Vidal took his seat at the head of the table and began to dismantle the breakfast that had been laid out on it. He took the heel off the sourdough with his fingers, and dragged it through the dish of oil, balsamic vinegar and salt at his elbow. Beauchamp slid the eggs onto a warmed plate and set it down in front of him.
“Beauchamp.” Vidal seized his wrist before he could retreat. “This is exquisite. You have an Englishman’s hands and a Catalan’s soul. I have said it before and I shall continue to say it until you accept the compliment with grace.”
“Thank you, sir.”
He extracted his wrist and took a seat at the corner of the table where the angles of approach to both the front door and the service stairs were within his line of sight.
Vidal got through a few forkfuls before he set the cutlery down with a theatrical clatter and turned the full beam of his attention on Connor. “You must take me out,” he declared. “Or I will surely die!”
Connor, who had a mouthful of bread, paused mid-chew.
“I cannot stay trapped in this flat for one moment more, Connor, I shall expire. I shall lie down on this rug and I shall give up the ghost, and Mercè will be left to inherit my robes and my crucifix. Take me out, Connor Evans. Let me see the seamy underbelly of your East London world. Show me the places where the men with the gold teeth congregate.”
“No, sir. I am going to need you to —”
“I am telling you, Major, with the greatest possible respect for your protocols, that I would sooner take my chances with the entire Cardonan general staff than spend another afternoon inhere with nothing to look at but the bland neutral walls of this flat.”
“There is at present a non-trivial risk —”
“BEAUCHAMP! I am going to start gnawing at the skirting boards if I do not see another human face!”
Connor had been following the exchange like a spectator at a tennis match, his coffee cup held loosely between his thumb and forefinger. “Major. Hear me out.”
He fixed Beauchamp under his steady gaze. “One of my shops, the one in Bow, is a fifteen-minute drive from here. There’s a back entrance off the alley you can pull the car right up to. We go in the back, he has a poke around, I let him serve a customer if he behaves himself, and then I take the pair of you round the corner to a caff I’ve been going to since I was eleven years old. The owner’s name is Sandra, she’s been making the same fry-up for forty years, and the only people in there at lunchtime on a Tuesday are old boys who’ve been coming in even longer than I have. Nobody under the age of sixty. Nobody on TikTok. I’ll have one of my lads on the door of the shop and another on the door of the caff, and you can sit in the corner with your back to the wall and watch the room like the bloke from the Bourne films.”
