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“I can’t believe your own father let you go to prison for him.” I also couldn’t believe how furious even the thought of it made me.Furious and guilty, given my own parents were so delusionally supportive they’d encouraged their only child to become an artist. As if this was remotely reasonable behaviour on my part.
Leo shrugged. “Look, prison’s awful and I’m not here to defend it or glorify it, but I deserved to be there.”
“How long were you…were you”—Apparently it was not possible to casually discuss someone’s time behind bars—“in for?”
“I got two years, so one and a bit in practice. And then I lived at home while I was on parole and that was almost worse.”
“You mustreallynot get on with your family.”
“Well”—Leo matched my tone with a sardonic look of his own—“they’re pretty terrible people, Marius.” But he quickly grew serious again. “And prison changed me.”
“I think it’s supposed to.”
“Yeah, but it doesn’t usually work. You have to be a pretty toxic combination of rich, shitty, and lucky for getting locked up to actually help you turn your life around.”
Once again, I wasn’t sure what to say. But I did know that having him sitting on the opposite side of a boat, even a boat that was by definition narrow, was too far away. “Can you…” I flapped a hand self-consciously. “Can you come here?”
I’d expected him to slide in next to me again. Instead, he turned and put his back to the sofa instead of the wall, tilting his head so he could look up at me. It was intimate enough to make me briefly catch my breath, but he didn’t crowd me I reached out and let a strand of hair that had slipped free of his man bun weave between my fingers like the stamen of a spider lily.27
His eyes had gone a little wide. “I wasn’t sure you’d still want anything to do with me.”
“If you recall,” I said, “I fucked you last night when I had no idea what you’d done.”
His mouth curled into a smile so sweet it probably gave me spontaneous diabetes. “Actually, you were very responsible. You checked to make sure I hadn’t raped or murdered anyone first.”
“Yes, responsibility is definitely one of my primary characteristics.”
He leaned a little closer. “And you really don’t think less of me?”
“Because you went to prison?”
“Because of who I used to be.”
I teased another lock free. It spun in my palm, a lackadaisical ballerina. “As far as I can tell, you’ve just admitted to being secretly mega-rich.”
“My dad’s mega-rich. I own this boat.”
“He should have been on his knees with gratitude after what you did.”
Reaching up, Leo undid the band from his hair, letting it pour into my hands. “I’ve been him. You don’t feel anything.”
There was so much I could have said. But I didn’t know how to say any of it. So instead, I just sat with him in silence, his hair falling through my fingers, rough and smooth and softly honeyed by the light from the stove.
6
I wasn’t the sort of person who fell asleep by the fire. I didn’t want to be the sort of person who fell asleep by the fire. But apparently, I had fallen asleep by the fire, my hand still tangled in Leo’s hair. He was sitting where I’d left him, cross-legged on the floor by the sofa, his head bent over a book.
“What are you reading?” I asked, doing a flawless impression of someone who had been awake the whole time.
Marking the page with his thumb, he let the cover close so I could read the title.
“Meditationsby a dead bearded guy.”
It was hard to tell from the angle, but I thought he was smiling. Somehow I hadn’t expected him to smile so much. “Marcus Aurelius.”
“Like I said, dead bearded guy.” I affected sudden fascination. “How is it? Have you worked out whodunnit yet?”
“It was probably the Greeks. It was usually the Greeks to the Romans.”
