Track Eight: “Father and Son”
“Can I ask you something?” Alfie said eventually. “You don’t have to answer it.”
“Go on.”
“Why did you leave? Actually.” He kept his voice level. “The version in that letter was that the band was taking off and you had to choose. That’s a great story, Theo. I’ve told it to about nine people. But you’ve just told me you closed your file. Nobody closes their file for a tour. You close it when you’re not coming back.”
Theo picked up a fragment of dead coral and turned it over in his fingers. “I was failing,” he said.
Alfie did not move.
“Not slightly. Not a bad semester.” Theo’s voice stayed even, which was how Alfie knew. “I failed my first-year composition module. They gave me a resit, and I failed that too. I was behind on everything. There was a portfolio submission I missed entirely because I couldn’t make myself open the file. I sat in my room for two days while the deadline went past. I couldn’t tell you now what I did instead. I only know I didn’t open it.”
The coral turned between his fingers.
“By the middle of second year I was on a formal warning. I hadn’t attended a seminar in five weeks. My personal tutor sat me down and told me, very kindly, that she didn’t think I was well. She said I should think about whether it was the right time.”
Alfie slid an arm across Theo’s shoulders and pulled him in against his side, tight, the way they’d done it since they were small and one of them was cut up about something. Theo didn’t look at him, but he leaned into it. “Theo,” Alfie said quietly, into his brother’s hair.
“And I couldn’t work out how to be failing.” He said it almost with wonder. “That’s the honest answer. I’ve never in my life not been good at something. Top set for everything on the Odyssey. I was the one who got the solo. Everyone always said, ‘Theo, he’s the musical one, he’ll go far.’ Then I went to an actual conservatory full of people who had each been the musical one at their school. Half of them could sight-read pieces I couldn’t play in a week. I sat in a theory class in my first month, understood roughly a third of it, and decided the correct response was to stop going.”
Henri said nothing, which meant he had heard this before.
“So when the band started getting attention,” Theo continued, “I’d love to tell you I made a brave choice. I didn’t. I ran. There was a thing I was failing at and a thing I was succeeding at. I walked out of one and into the other and told everybody it was ambition.”
He threw the coral fragment into a pool.
“And it worked. That’s the joke. It worked so well that there are ninety-three worlds with my face on them, and I still can’t look Mom and Dad in the eye about it. If I tell them I left, eventually I have to tell them why. The answer is that their son couldn’t hack it.”
The sun sat lower. Out beyond the reef, the water had, without any of them noticing, stopped going away.
“Can I say something,” Alfie asked, “that will annoy you?”
“You will anyway.”
“You know what Dad would say to that.”
“Don’t.”
“He’d say it took him four attempts to pass advanced navigation.”
“That’s not the same thing.”
“He’d say the whole point of the Academy is that everyone arrives having been the best in their year group from wherever they came from, and then, in about a fortnight, discovers they’re average.” Alfie shrugged. “He said that to me in my first month. Word for word. I was crying in a comm relay junction about a systems exam, and my father, who is now a rear admiral, told me he’d spent his entire first year convinced someone was going to come and take his uniform back.”
“He was being nice to you.”
“He was, yes. That doesn’t make it untrue.”
“It’s Grandma and Grandad, isn’t it?” Henri said.
Theo stopped turning towards the pool.
“Go on,” Henri said. “Say it. It’s the real argument, and we’ve been circling it since Cestus.”
“…It’s a factor.”
“It’s the whole thing.”
“Fine.” Theo turned on the coral to face them properly for the first time. “Fine. Yes. Dad left home to join Starfleet. Grandma and Grandad barely spoke to him for years. Uncle Horatio and Uncle Conrad went the same way, and it happened all over again. That genuinely happened in our family. I’m not inventing the fear. Parents in our family do not take it well when their children walk away from the thing they were supposed to do.”
“Their children walked towards Starfleet,” Alfie said.
“And I walked away from a degree, so I’m worse.”
“No, you idiot. I mean the person you’re frightened of is the person it happened to.” Alfie leaned forward. “Theo. Dad knows exactly what it feels like to stand in front of his parents and say, ‘I’m not doing the thing you wanted, I’m doing this other thing, and I need you to be all right about it.’ He has been you. He was eighteen when he did it. It cost him years with his own mother and father. There is not a chance in this galaxy he would do that to one of us. Not a chance. That’s the whole reason he wouldn’t.”
Theo opened his mouth, then shut it again.
“He’s right,” Henri said. “That’s better than my version.”
“What was your version?”
“Mine was, ‘Don’t be daft, they love you.’ I’ve been running it for eighteen months. Turns out it needed a supporting argument.”
Theo let out a shaky, half-tearful laugh and pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes for a second.
“And Mom,” Alfie added, “is going to be upset about one thing, and it isn’t the university.”
“The lying.”
“The eighteen months you’ve spent sitting on it on your own. That’s what’ll get her. That’s the part she’ll cry about.
Then she’ll be fine. Give it a year, and she’ll start using it as a story at dinner parties, because that’s what she does. You’ll sit there while she tells the Banfields about the time her son became the most famous man in the Federation without mentioning that he’d left university.”
“She would as well.”
“She absolutely would.”
“Right,” Henri said after a while. “While we’re out here doing this, I want it noted that I have my own thing.”
“You’ve got a girlfriend,” Theo said. “We know. We’ve met her. Jordan’s adopted her.”
“I’ve got a girlfriend Mom and Dad don’t know about. And for four months I’ve been telling myself I’ll introduce her when the time’s right, and I’ve just heard Theo use the words ‘when the time’s right’ approximately nine hundred times in one afternoon, and I’ve realised, sitting on this rock, that I sound exactly like him.” Henri looked disgusted. “I’ve been doing his thing. I’ve been doing his thing while telling him not to do his thing.”
“That is,” Theo said with enormous satisfaction, “the single best thing that has ever happened to me.”
“Shut up.”
“No, no. Please. Continue. Tell me more about how the time hasn’t been right.”
“It’s different.”
“It’s identical.”
“It’s smaller!”
“It’s smaller,” Alfie agreed, “but it’s the same shape, Henri. You know it is. You don’t actually think they’ll disapprove of Maya. Nobody could disapprove of Maya. Mom will have her adopted inside a fortnight.” He tilted his head. “So what is it?”
Henri worked his jaw for a moment.
“It’s that I’m twenty-one and I know,” he said. “That’s the honest answer. Seven months and I already know. And I haven’t said it out loud to anybody, including her. The second I put her in a room with Mom and Dad, it becomes a real thing that other people can see and have opinions about. Right now, it’s mine.” He picked at the coral. “Also, Alfie got engaged. There is no version of me introducing a girlfriend in the same week where Mom doesn’t immediately start doing arithmetic.”
“Oh, she’s going to do arithmetic,” Theo said happily. “She’s going to do so much arithmetic.”
“I know.”
“She’ll ask Maya what her parents do.”
“I know, Theo.”
“She’ll ask about the Olympics schedule in a way that sounds like polite interest and is actually about grandchildren.”
“I’m aware, thank you.”
“Yeah, well, welcome to the club,” Alfie put in. “She’s been dropping the grandchildren line on me and Jordan since the day of the engagement. Every single conversation. She’s bought a book about it; I saw it on her PADD.”
Theo brightened considerably. “Oh, no, I wouldn’t worry about that any more.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning, honestly, after what Henri and I walked in on this morning, I’d be genuinely astonished if there wasn’t already at least one small McCallister-Reyas-Duncan-Court in the works.”
“Theo.”
“I’m only saying what we saw. It looked committed. Mom’s going to be delighted; she doesn’t even have to wait, you should just tell her when she arrives.”
“I will drown you.”
“You’d be drowning a future uncle, and honestly, do you want your child to grow up asking why they never met me? Think about the family portrait, Alfie.”
Alfie was laughing. Henri, after a moment, laughed too.
“What about you, then?” Henri said, turning on him. “You’ve been sitting there being wise at us for half an hour. Your turn.”
“I’m fine.”
“Alfie.”
“I am. That’s the thing. I’m actually fine, which is why I feel guilty saying any of it out loud.” He looked out at the water. “Final year starts in a few weeks. Then after graduation, this time next year, we get posted. Jordan and I have talked about it exactly twice, both times badly, because the honest position is that Starfleet does not care in the slightest that we’re engaged. We could get the same ship. We could end up four sectors apart. There’s a form we can submit, and they’ll tell us it’s taken into account, and everyone knows what that means.”
Theo had gone still. “I hadn’t thought about that.”
“No. Why would you?” Alfie shrugged. “And I keep looking at Mom and Dad, because they managed it. But I know exactly what it cost them, because I was there for the parts where it didn’t work. Dad left the Odyssey for about a year to command another ship when we were toddlers, and Mom stayed put and did the three of us, and Uncle Tobias was in and out of our quarters so often he might as well have moved in. Godfather duties. I remember what it was like, and I remember what she was like, and I remember Dad coming home at the end of it.” He paused. “And that’s the good version. That’s what it looks like when everything works out. They’re still married thirty years later, and he’s just made rear admiral, and she now commands his flagship. But it’s taken them a long time to get back to any of that.”
He scrubbed a hand over his face.
“So no, nothing’s wrong. I’ve just spent this entire holiday watching my fiancé be happy and doing arithmetic about how many months of the next five years we’re likely to spend on the same deck plate.”
Nobody said anything for a moment.
“Are you scared?” Theo asked. “About the wedding, I mean. Not the postings. The actual thing.”
Alfie thought about it properly, because it deserved that.
“Yes,” he said. “Not about him. That’s the strange part. I’m not scared about him for a single second. I don’t think I ever have been, not since the Odyssey. Not since before I even admitted what it was.” He turned a shell over in his hands. “I’m scared of the size of it. I’m twenty-one, and I’m promising somebody the whole of my life, and I don’t know what my life is yet. I don’t know where I’ll be posted. I don’t know who I’ll be at thirty. And I’ve just said to a man, in front of his fathers, that whoever that person turns out to be is his.” He shook his head. “Then I look at him across a room, and it stops being frightening for about an hour, and afterwards it comes back. That’s been the pattern for some months now. And through all of it, all of the fear and the arithmetic and the not knowing, the one thing I have absolutely never once doubted is how much I love him. That part’s the easy bit. That part I could do in my sleep.”
“That sounds about right,” Henri said quietly.
“The thing is, I want it.” Alfie’s voice steadied. “All of it. The boring parts. I want to be seventy and arguing with him about something stupid. I want to know what he’s like when he’s old and slow and even worse at idioms. I want the whole long, dull, marvellous middle of it. I’ve wanted that since I was nineteen years old and too much of a coward to say so.”
He set the shell down carefully on the coral beside him and leaned forward, forearms on his knees, and for a moment he looked out at the flats and not at either of them. Then he drew a long breath in, held it, and let it go.
“I had this planned, you know,” he said. “Not here. I was going to do it properly. I had this idea I’d get you both somewhere nice, put drinks in your hands, find us something decent to eat. I’d have thought it all through. I’d get the words right, because I wanted to get the words right. It felt like the kind of thing you only ask people once.”
He huffed a laugh at himself.
“And then I got here, and there’s a band and a bar and about forty pools, and I haven’t had a single sober private minute with the pair of you since I landed, and now we’re sat on a rock in the middle of the sea, and I’ve told you both about me and Jordan and our future with our postings, and Theo’s told us about the university, and Henri’s admitted he’s exactly as bad as Theo. So honestly, there isn’t going to be a better moment than this one, and I’m not waiting for the time to be right.” He glanced up. “Which I understand is the whole theme of the afternoon.”
“Alf,” Henri said, and there was a small smirk pulling at the corner of his mouth. He had worked out where his brother was going the moment Alfie set the shell down, and there was something quietly proud in his face about the whole thing, a fond, slightly exasperated pride that Alfie had cared enough to want the moment to be perfect and, being Alfie, had been unable to arrange it that way.
“Let me do it, or I’ll lose my nerve.” Alfie took a breath.
“You two have known me longer than anybody alive. You knew me before I knew myself, which isn’t a figure of speech in our case. For the first four years, I genuinely could not tell which one of us was which in a photograph.” He smiled at his hands. “You were both there when I told the family. Well. Not there. I wrote to you. The message took eleven days to reach Cestus, and eleven days for your replies to come back, and I spent every one of those twenty-two days convincing myself I’d ruined everything.” He shook his head. “And then your replies arrived on the same day. Henri, do you want to tell him what yours said?”
“I don’t remember,” Henri said, in the voice of a man who remembered perfectly.
“He wrote back,” Alfie told Theo, “and the first thing he asked, the very first line, was whether I meant I was actually with Jordan, or whether I meant Jordan and I had been, and I’m quoting him exactly here, ‘crossing a line after lights out and calling it stress relief.’”
Theo made a delighted noise.
“It was a reasonable question!” Henri protested.
“It was not a reasonable question.”
“It was an extremely reasonable question. I’d known Jordan for two years. You two were inseparable. You had a track record.” Henri counted it off. “I’d already sat through the Beatrice situation, which nobody has ever properly explained to me, so forgive me for wanting to establish whether my brother had fallen in love or simply run out of other options in a confined space.”
“You wrote it in a letter. You put it in writing. Mom could have read that.”
“Mom would have asked the same thing. She’d just have phrased it better.”
“She would as well,” Theo said.
“And then,” Alfie went on over both of them, “because he can’t help himself, the second paragraph was three pages about how much he liked Jordan and how he’d been waiting for one of us to notice, and how obvious it had been since we were about fifteen, and how I was, and again I’m quoting, the least subtle person he had ever met.”
“You were the least subtle person I have ever met.”
“And Theo’s reply,” Alfie said, more quietly, “just said, ‘About time. Tell him we said yes.’”
Nobody said anything for a second.
“Well, we had,” Theo said, shrugging. “We’d said yes years before. Nobody had asked us, but we had.”
“And when it all went wrong,” Alfie continued, “when I made an absolute disaster of everything and hurt people I loved and couldn’t explain it even to myself, neither of you ever once made me feel small about it. Not once. You just kept writing.” His voice had thickened, and he pushed on through it. “I have one life. I’m going to spend it with a man I would follow anywhere. And there isn’t a version of that day, whenever it is and wherever it is, where the two of you are sitting in the audience.”
He looked up properly then, at both of them.
“So. I want you two to be my best men. Both of you. Together.”
The pause was not long.
“Obviously,” said Henri.
“Was that a question?” Theo demanded, turning on Henri. “Did he actually just ask that as a question? Out loud? In this century?”
“He did,” Henri confirmed. “I heard it too.”
“As though there was an alternative. As though there was some scenario in which he asked one of us and not the other, or asked neither of us at all, or found somebody else on the planet more suitable than his own two brothers.”
“I had a whole speech,” Alfie protested.
“You had a speech, Alfie. You’ve had eighteen months, and you’ve done it on a rock.” Theo was up on his feet now, brushing sand off the backs of his thighs. “On a rock. In wet shorts. In front of the sea. Henri.”
“Mm.”
“I think he needs to be reminded which brothers we are, don’t you?”
Henri got to his feet unhurriedly, cracked his neck the way he did before a match, and gave Alfie the entirely unreadable expression of a man who was already picturing exactly how it was going to happen. “I think you might be right.”
“Guys.”
“Legs or arms?”
“Legs,” Henri decided. “You’ve got the smoothest hands in the family; you take the shoulders. And, Theo, be careful of the shirt; you love that shirt.”
“I hate this shirt now. It’s associated with a traumatic event this morning. Take it. Take the shirt.” Theo shrugged the white linen off his shoulders in one smooth practised motion, tossed it aside onto the coral, and then, because he was Theo and could not help himself, planted his feet, flexed both arms overhead and rolled his chest, holding the pose for a solid two seconds like a man in a magazine advert.
Which, given that he was standing between an actual Olympic water polo player, all shoulders and back and functional muscle, and Alfie, who was slim and wiry and toned in the particular way of a Starfleet cadet who did his morning drills reluctantly, looked slightly ridiculous.
“Nice,” said Henri, entirely deadpan. “Very impressive. Are you finished?”
“I’m in incredible shape.”
“You’re in stage shape, Theo. It’s different. I could throw you into the sea from here.”
“Yes, and if you did, I would fall gorgeously. I would fall like a magazine cover.” Theo dropped the pose, rolled his shoulders back in a business-like way, and gestured across at Alfie without looking. “Anyway, focus, we have a mission to accomplish with this one.”
“Right.”
“Guys,” Alfie tried again, edging backwards on the coral, which had nowhere to go, because it was coral, in the sea. “Guys, no, listen, I love you both, I take it back, you don’t have to be my best men, we can find other people, we can find literally any other people, there’s a whole band on the planet, take Nael, Nael would be great—”
“Nael would be terrible,” said Theo, closing in from one side.
“He’d get distracted by the sea,” Henri agreed, closing from the other.
“No,” Alfie said, and got up fast, and got nowhere at all. A professional water polo player took his ankles the way he took a ball out of a passing lane. A man who spent two hours a night on a stage took his shoulders like he was preparing to lift a costume rack. And between them they hoisted him clean off the coral like a rolled carpet, walked him over to the deepest of the tidal pools with an unhurried dignity that made it worse, and stopped to look down at him for a beat, both of them grinning identical grins, while Alfie shouted increasingly urgent things about them being unbelievable and about there being fish in the water and about how, if they did this, he genuinely would find other best men, he would ask Jib, he would ask Payn, he would ask a stranger on the street.
“He’s lying,” said Theo.
“He’s definitely lying,” Henri confirmed.
They threw him into the deepest of the tidal pools, which took him to the waist, and he came up spluttering and outraged and laughing too hard to stand. Then they jumped in after him, one from each side, and the pool briefly ceased to be a pool at all.
And then, standing in warm knee-deep water half a kilometre out to sea on a planet none of them had ever been to, the three of them ended up in a knot with their arms round each other, soaked, heads together, saying nothing much for a while.
“Both of us,” Theo said, into somebody’s shoulder. “Obviously both of us.”
“We’ll be insufferable,” Henri added. “There’ll be two speeches.”
“There’ll be one speech that we do together,” Theo corrected. “That’s funnier. And I’m not letting him do it on his own; he’ll get emotional, and Mom will start.”
“You’ll get emotional.”
“I get paid to be emotional. It’s completely different.”
Alfie, in the middle, said nothing at all, because he could not have managed it, and because he did not need to.
“Right,” Henri said eventually, releasing them and pushing his wet cap back off his forehead. “Practical question. Jordan’s having Will, presumably.”
“Jordan’s having Will.”
“Good. That’s correct. That’s the only correct answer.”
“It is the only correct answer,” Alfie agreed. “And it’s going to be slightly more complicated than that, because we haven’t asked him yet.”
“Why not?”
“Because we’re still working out how to explain what a best man is.”
Theo stopped wringing out his shirt. “He’s nineteen.”
“He’s nineteen, and he’s only been human for four years, and there’s no Ryslanti equivalent.” Alfie spread his hands, entirely serious and entirely delighted. “Jordan tried it last month. He got as far as, ‘You stand next to me and hold the rings,’ and Will asked what the rings were for. Jordan said he wasn’t sure; they just were. Then Will asked whether that meant the ceremony wouldn’t work without them, and whether there was a backup pair, and whether he’d be liable if he dropped them.”
“Liable,” Henri repeated.
“He asked if there was a regulation.”
“There isn’t a regulation.”
“I know there isn’t a regulation, Henri, but try telling him that. He’s been through the Federation cultural archive. He’s got a list. He came to me a fortnight ago and asked me, in complete sincerity, whether he was supposed to give a speech insulting his own brother in public, because he’d read that this was traditional, and he wanted to know how offensive he was permitted to be and whether Jordan would be upset afterwards.”
Theo had sat down in the water.
“And the worst part,” Alfie went on, “is that they’re both like it, so there’s nobody to ask. Jordan doesn’t know either. They’re two brothers with a spectacular amount of shared trauma and absolutely no idea what a garter is, and every so often one of them looks something up and comes back with a question that stops the whole room.” He shook his head fondly. “Last week it was confetti. Jordan wanted to know why we’d be throwing paper at ourselves at the end.”
“That is,” Theo said from the water, “a completely fair question.”
“It is a completely fair question. That’s the thing. Four years in and he asks better questions about human beings than any human I know.” Alfie was smiling stupidly at nothing. “So yes. Will’s having the job. We just need about a week and a diagram.”
“I’ll do it,” Theo said.
“You will not.”
“I’ll write him a briefing. Slides. I’ve got people, Alfie. I’ve got an entire management team who do nothing but prepare me for events I don’t understand.”
“Theo.”
“I’ll get him a lanyard.”
The tide turned while they were sorting themselves out, and none of them noticed for several minutes, because it did not announce itself. The pools simply stopped being separate. A channel that had been a damp seam in the sand had water moving along it. Out past the reef the bright line had thickened and drawn closer, and the wind had changed, and the whole enormous flat had a different sound to it, a low hiss that had not been there before.
Henri looked up, and his face changed. “That’s us,” he said. “Now, please. Not in five minutes.”
They walked back fast. It was harder going than the way out, the sand softer, the channels filling behind them, the light stretching long and copper across the flats.
Theo had given up on the linen shirt entirely and carried it balled in one fist. Alfie peeled off his sodden Academy t-shirt somewhere around the halfway mark and slung it over his shoulder. Henri’s vest went the same way. The three of them came back across the flats bare-chested and dripping and steaming faintly in the warm air, identical from the neck up and, from the neck down, a fairly comprehensive illustration of what three different lives will do to the same starting material.
Twice they had to divert around water that had not been there an hour before.
And because everything serious had been said, the talk came back light.
“I’m still thinking about it,” Theo announced to the horizon.
“Don’t,” Alfie said.
“Well chosen.”
“Theo.”
“I’m going to have to sit across a dinner table from that man for the next fifty years knowing what I know.”
“You saw him for one second.”
“It was a very informative second. I’m a professional, Alfie. I notice things. It’s the eye for a stage.” Theo shook his head. “Mom’s going to love the wedding photos. Best-looking couple in the family, easily. Present company at a slight disadvantage on the day, obviously, because two of us will be in matching suits standing next to you both. But I’ve made my peace with playing the supporting role.”
“You’ve never played a supporting role in your life.”
“I’ll be brave about it.”
“You’ll upstage my wedding.”
“I will absolutely upstage your wedding, but only during my speech, and only for about four minutes, and Henri will rein me in. That’s what the second best man is for.”
“I will not rein you in,” Henri said. “I’ll be too busy trying to work out how to introduce a girlfriend to two parents who’ll already be crying about their other son.”
“See, that’s the beauty of the plan,” Theo said. “By the time we get through the wedding, my dropout thing will be old news, your girlfriend thing will be adorable by comparison, and Alfie will have provided somebody the family can be extremely proud of. We’ll have got it all out of the way in one summer. Very efficient. Mom’s been saying for years we should communicate more.”
“This is not what she meant,” Alfie said.
“It’s what she’s getting.” Theo threw an arm round each of them, and the three of them came up onto the dry sand with the water perhaps forty metres behind them.
Alfie turned round and looked at it: the whole vast flat they’d walked out across, the reef where they’d sat, all of it gone, all of it under, as though the conversation had happened somewhere that no longer existed.
Which, he supposed, it had.
Up on the terrace above them, somebody, probably Jib, had spotted them and was waving with both arms. Music came down over the cliff edge. Someone had started lunch without them, and someone else was shouting about it. And at the front of the terrace, small at this distance but unmistakable, a figure in swim shorts was leaning on the rail watching the three of them come up out of the sea. Alfie lifted a hand, and Jordan lifted one back.
“Go on,” Theo said, following his eye-line, and for once there was nothing in it but warmth. “Your well-chosen fiancé is waiting.”
“I’m going to kill you before the wedding.”
“You need me for the wedding. I’m best man. There’s a regulation.” Theo grinned. “Ask Will.” He clapped Alfie once on the shoulder and gave him a shove in the direction of the cliff path. “Off you go. Go and get pregnant again. Mom will be delighted, and I want a niece I can spoil rotten.”
“You watch it,” Alfie shot back, without missing a beat, “or I will personally send Jordan into your room tonight and let him make you pregnant, and then you can add that to the list of things you have to tell Mom and Dad. Dropped out of uni, lied about it for eighteen months, and got in the family way by your brother’s husband-to-be. Full house.”
Henri made a strangled noise somewhere behind them that might have been a laugh and might have been an actual gasp.
“I take it back,” Theo said, holding up both hands. “I take back all of it. I don’t want a niece. I don’t want anything. I’m going to go and lie down in a dark room and forget this conversation ever happened.”
“You started it.”
“I know I started it. That’s the shame of it.” He shook his head, half-laughing, half-serious. “And, look, in all honesty, I’m flattered. As invitations go, ‘naked cuddles with Jordan’ is not the worst offer I’ve had this week. But I saw what I saw this morning, and I’m not going to be over it for at least a fortnight, and I don’t think I could keep a straight face through the negotiations.”
“You shouldn’t get too flattered, actually,” Alfie added, entirely unable to help himself. “Jordan doesn’t like your new hair. He was very clear about it this morning. Said something along the lines of it being an unforgivable haircut and he wouldn’t be touching you until it grew out. So the invitation was, at best, provisional.”
Theo closed his eyes briefly, in the manner of a man taking a deep breath and choosing, for the sake of the greater good, not to fight the battle he wanted to fight. Then he opened them.
“I am not,” he said, with immense dignity, “going to reply to that. I am not going to reply to any of it. I love you both far too much to say what I am currently thinking. So instead, please, tell Jordan from me that I am absolutely heartbroken to hear it, and that I always thought he had beautiful hair, and that if he ever wants tips I have a stylist he could see.” He gave Alfie a small formal bow. “ Now go on. Go and enjoy the man you’re going to marry. I’ll find somebody else to annoy for the rest of the day. There’s a whole villa full of them.”
He clapped Alfie on the shoulder one more time, warmer still, and turned him bodily towards the cliff path.
“Go.”
Henri turned to Theo after Alfie went ahead of them. “You feel better now?”
Theo smiled and nodded as he watched Alfie finally reach the arms of Jordan and kiss his fiancé passionately for a second. “Yeah, it’s scary to think that Alfie has become the wise one out of all of us now.” He turned to Henri, even more sincere. “And thanks for pushing me to talk to him about it. I know you said exactly the same thing that he said earlier when I first told you about my dropping out back on Cestus Three, and you didn’t need to hide all of that from him. You have had my back for so long, and I am sorry for leaving that burden with you. I love you, bro.”
Henri pulled his brother into a soaking wet hug. “Nah, it’s fine; you needed to hear it twice to get the kick in the rear end you need to now actually tell Mom and Dad the truth. Plus I’m guilty as a willing accomplice in not telling them that I’ve known for so long, so we need Alfie to be the good one out of all of this when Mom and Dad hear all of it. We’re both in trouble for it, more you than me, but Alfie is now guilty of knowing before Mom and Dad. I love you too, Theo, and if we’re going down, then we’re taking Alf with us!”
“Totally!” Theo chuckled hard as he squeezed his brother back before letting go. “Now we have a bachelor party to organise, and it needs to be the best party of the century!”
“You better believe it, fellow co-best man!”
“We need to give Alf the best send-off!” Theo added, grinning. “He deserves it. What he has found with Jordan is real, and we can’t let him muck it up. They make such a great couple.”
“I hate to admit it, but if I can get the same with being with Maya, then I’d be one lucky guy,” Henri confessed with more chuckling. “Plus we know Alfie’s one lucky guy, based on our unfortunate viewing this morning.”
Theo paused and looked at Henri, deadpan. “Seriously, I don’t want to think of either Jordan or Alfie in that way for a long time.”
“Agreed! But it gives us a good place to start our speech.”
Theo considered the idea for one more second and nodded firmly once. “Agreed!”
They went up the cliff path together, laughing with their arms over each other’s shoulders, dripping wet and entirely unbothered about it, and behind them the halcyon sea came in over everything and made it flat and blue and new again, ready to be walked on tomorrow, if anybody needed to.
