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He thought it probably was.
He’d heard about weird people who didn’t eat to gain insight into their lives. Never seemed to work for Nikolas, he’d noticed.
It was raining now, the drops falling steadily onto them. This was good in some ways, as the walls of the mine shaft were running with water, which meant he could collect it in the tin cup from Nik’s pack. The air temperature was also slightly warmer.
But there wasn’t much else looking good about their situation.
Nikolas was fading in and out of consciousness now. He hadn’t spoken a word since he had tried to explain his actions—tried to explain leaving him.
Ben could still not get his head around the fact that they had survived things that would kill most people, and yet they were stuck in a hole within walking distance of home.
His mind told him they were in a very perilous situation indeed, but also told him at exactly the same time that he was fine and could walk home from here. He could not reconcile the contrast, and the attempt made his head hurt on top of feeling nauseous from hunger.
But he had nothing else to do but think.
Which, he reflected, was somewhat novel, but then he was stuck in a hole and couldn’t get out. He was smart enough to see the connection between these two things: he didn’t just live his life at a hundred and ten miles per hour because he had an abundance of energy; he did it because it stopped him having to think too much about things. Don’t think, just do, could also be twisted around todoand don’thaveto think.
Nikolas was very badly hurt indeed.
Nikolas was in a life-threatening situation.
And yet…Nikolas had not once mentioned his injury.
Ben knew very well that Nikolas only complained about being injured or hurting when he wasn’t actually either. He did it for a little sympathy when he was feeling wrong-footed; he did it to distract Ben from something he’d done and didn’t want known; he did it because minor things like bites, splinters, or bruises were non-threatening and within his control, and despite often giving the impression that he was indolent and easy going, Nikolas achieved this fiction by a rigid discipline over everything in his life. So that Nikolas had not spoken of his fractured leg told Ben that things were very bad indeed—even Nikolas was scared.
Ben was desperate, therefore, to take off in furious flight, or push himself beyond pain in the gym to not have to think about this infuriating man whom he loved beyond reason.
So starving, unable to sleep for fear, Ben’s mind was doing the furious for him this time—churning, selecting, rejecting, free-falling through the confusion of Nikolas’s ideas, hearing snatches of words in Nikolas’s accent, untangling his odd way of thinking, balancing his apparent intelligence with his obvious total inability to understand himself or his own life.
Ben sometimes wondered if Nikolas made sense inside his own head, because he didn’t make much out of it.
Neither could Ben forget the things Squeezy had said to him. He knew, deep down, that it was true—he did put Nikolas on a pedestal. He loved him. He loved himliterallybeyond reason, and wasn’t that the very definition of worship? He wished he’d defended himself by arguing back to his annoying friendbut you’re up there too—wherever he is, he keeps you safe there with him.
And on the back of that image, Ben saw that Nikolas, in fact, did this to everyone in their family.
As he tried to bring some feeling back into his injured hand by squeezing and releasing the knife handle, he thought about Nikolas’s wry suggestions for the surgery with Miles. Ben had always found Nikolas’s obvious love for the strange little boy hard to fathom. On the surface, they didn’t appear to have much in common. But over the years, Ben had come to a deeper understanding about their complex relationship. In Miles, Nikolas saw a reflection of the little boy he had once been before life’s realities changed him. Miles was Nikolas’s unfettered enthusiasm, his naivety, his sweetness. But Miles was also his anxieties and his vulnerability.
So Nikolas kept Miles close, and he kept him safe.
Babushka was Nikolas’s Russian soul; her emotions, so near the surface, gave vent when his could not. Even Enid with her courtesy, graciousness and high standards represented a facet of Nikolas that he craved: an ordered life, lived quietly.
And now they, too, were both with Nikolas, sheltered and safe.
And there was Tim, his intelligence, his knowledge—and an openly gay man.
And Squeezy. Squeezy was Nikolas’s infuriating, shifting persona. He was his manic energy, his indolence, his rock-hard instability. Squeezy was the enigma you never saw behind the riddle that was Nikolas Mikkelsen.
And then Ben turned these insights to himself. What did he represent to Nikolas? He’d always known (and suspected Nikolas thought this too), that if he and Nikolas compared their history together, they would probably remember it very differently. Ben cast his mind back over the near decade they’d lived openly together as a couple, and further back to the strange years when their addiction to each other had been more complex, hidden from themselves and the world.
Two men, same height, staring at each other and knowing that nothing, not even death, could separate them.
He was the core at the very heart of Nikolas. He was his missing half.
Nikolas had created a small snow-globe perfect life in a few acres of Devon woods because he could not go back and relive his actual life, make it better: make it how itshould havebeen.
So the fractured man kept the fractals of his shattered life close and protected them.
Ben swallowed deeply, his throat constricting with pain. He was crushed by the knowledge of their predicament, but also by the weight of this new knowledge. The responsibility of it all.
