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Aleksey twisted around as much as he was able in Ben’s arms and regarded the indistinct features. “We are seriously going to have to have a talk about your cheek, Benjamin Rider-Mikkelsen.”
“When we get home?”
That silenced him. He hated being outmanoeuvred, so turned stonily back to face front. It appeared as if this was exactly the time and place they needed to have a conversation about love.
“Go on. I’m listening. Now.”
“How did we get from where we were to here? That’s what I’ve been thinking about. I knew nothing about love, and yet it seems you knew even less. So, how did we get here?”
Aleksey knew that if they compared, he and Ben would have very different recollections of their time together. He found it confusing to talk about these things, but ventured hesitantly, “In some ways, my life was always full of love.”
Ben began to protest this so Aleksey ploughed on over him, “I loved my mother. I loved my brother. I sort of adored Sergei, as he was my father. You resented your mother and you didn’t love your stepfather.”
Ben was lost to his own thoughts for quite a while after this. Aleksey was used to the way Ben processed information and was waiting for an entirely random non sequitur to follow, possibly something about running or the dogs, or even food, which he would then have to patiently untangle and try to answer.
“I’m not really sure what one is, but you really are a complete and total wassock.”
Aleksey was saved making an annoyed reply when, with another soft, yet more distant crump, a huge fall of peat and grass, peppered with rocks, cascaded onto them.
He knew Ben Rider had quick reactions. He’d been the beneficiary of his skills many times, both vertical and horizontal, but when the fall stopped, he’d never been more grateful for them than when he realised they were now entirely under the sleeping bag and Ben’s upper body was covering his head. If it hadn’t been for the unbearable agony below, he’d have said it was quite cosy.
Ben coughed and muttered, “Okay?”
“Yes. You?”
“Yeah. Leg?”
“Still there.”
“Unfortunately?”
Aleksey snorted, then brightened. “We have two knives. If the worst comes to—“
“I am not cutting off your leg, Nikolas.”
“No, seriously, you should ask Miles. There is a mine of fascinating things you can learn on YouTube. We have watched many DIY surgery videos together.”
Ben was gingerly picking rocks off them, not easy in the dark, and he gamely joined in the let’s-distract game. He knew what they were playing. After all, Ben had just removed the rock that had fallen on his shattered leg.
“Hmm. Better than the videos you sent him when he asked you if it was possible to split the atom for his Year Six science experiment?”
Aleksey winced.
“No harm done. They confiscated his supplies before he got the uranium.”
Aleksey laughed lightly at the memory of the phone call he’d had from the school, and he didn’t think he’d be doing that for a while. “Last week he asked me what was the easiest kind of car to steal.”
“Oh, God. And you told him…?”
It was so hard spinning good stories without a cigarette, but he smirked and replied, “One that wouldn’t be missed.” At what he clearly heard in Ben’s muttered response to this, he added a little testily, “I learn from my own mistakes. I was caught because I stole my mother’s car. She missed it.”
“I suspect she missed her eight-year-old sons just as much.”
Aleksey was intrigued by this idea. It had not occurred to him before. He had always assumed his mother preferred it when they, or at least he, wasn’t there.
“Okay, that’s the best I can make it.” Ben peeled the sleeping bag off their heads. “We’re a bit muddy, but…your wound stayed clean.”
Aleksey swallowed, then tried to breathe deeply to see if that would help. It didn’t. Reflecting that a bit of sympathy might go a long way, he murmured, “Would it make any of this better if I apologised again?”
