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Kids got caught up in this business all the time. Nobody paid them much attention and they were good at lying and brilliant at holding their lives cheap: they made natural spies.
He was no good at being a peacetime spy;
He never meant for it to be a lie, but somehow even Leo’s attempts at honesty twisted their way into untruth.
The more Leo thought about it, the less he liked it. Leo had read this detective story and he had seen the film and knew that when you made the heirs gather together, they immediately started putting exotic poisons into one another’s tea. They simply couldn’t help themselves.
He knew that he was inclined to be overly suspicious, but that inclination had kept him alive this long.
Perhaps he believed that suicide shouldn’t be alluded to in a civilized drawing room, or perhaps he believed that James would go to pieces at the slightest provocation. Or maybe he just didn’t like being reminded of a patient he had lost.
If this had been a job, he would have blown his cover in that unguarded half second.
“I’m quite well,” Leo said. And he was. No serious injuries, no imminent likelihood of foreign governments trying to assassinate him in his sleep—he was as well as he’d ever been.
James was determined to fling open the door to his cozy life as if Leo could simply walk in and make himself at home. And Leo didn’t know how to explain to James that this wasn’t possible without thoroughly disillusioning the man.
Over half an hour passed, and still Leo hadn’t returned. James’s first thought, naturally, was that the car had exploded.
Historically, his mind was not much inclined toward anything resembling ease in the first place,
Surely James didn’t get to have someone like Leo in his life and keep him there just because he wanted it.
“Ah. I see. You came for the entertainment potential.” Leo breathed out a laugh and rolled his head to face James. His tired eyes were still mostly closed and he regarded James through dark eyelashes. “You know why I came.”
Sometimes it was a kindness to let unpleasant things rest, but sometimes silence transformed an ordinary event into something darker, something taboo.
He was intensely aware of Leo looking at him, something careful and warm in his gaze, and he wished that he wasn’t the kind of person who needed to be looked at quite so carefully.
“You like to take care of me,” Leo said. “If you’re only figuring that out now, you must be a terrible spy.”
It was the sort of behavioral tic that in anyone else Leo might have found silly, but he felt fiercely defensive of James’s carefully ordered world. He would cheerfully shoot anyone who mislaid James’s toothbrush, and was only stopped by the consideration that this would displease James and also cause a great deal of annoyance for both of them.
He needed to quit, but first he needed to sort out the next few decades of his life. From this end, thirty seemed terribly young, with too much blank space stretching out before him.
There was really no question that James loved him; the fish in the sea and all the mute beasts had that one figured out, and so did Leo. Leo loved him back, which was entirely immaterial.
It was a little terrifying, how quickly he had let himself get attached to these people. To James’s people. They weren’t his own—they were borrowed, in the same way that his half of James’s bed was borrowed. But they still felt like his own. In reality, Leo didn’t have any people and he would do well to remember it.
“So, I’m trying to decide whether gently born young ladies murder one another over failure to wear proper frocks,”
“And people get disappeared all the time. But because they’re poor, nobody pays attention. Everybody’s used to poor people disappearing. Maybe they ran off, maybe they went to prison, maybe they got involved with the wrong kind of man. Maybe home was dangerous. Maybe they were—” He lowered his voice. “Maybe they were like us and needed to go someplace new, someplace safe, and knew nobody at home would want to hear about it. We disappear all the time.”
he was in the rare position of hoping he looked sufficiently honest while actually being honest.
“The world is filled with people who prefer to ignore unpleasantness, but most of them manage to cope when the alternative is being cruel to an orphan they’re actually related to.”
“I think they’re all so used to keeping secrets that they hardly know how to go about thinking about the truth, much less telling it.”
Most people, when forced to choose between lying and informing, became annoyed at having been backed into that corner.
“To say that I like you best may be understating the case.”
“I like you so much that I feel certain you shouldn’t allow it. Somebody, at least, ought to stop me.”
You could invite a snake into your home and that didn’t mean it was a good idea.
The realization that his list of priorities began and ended with national secrets and James Sommers, and probably not even in that order, didn’t come as a surprise.
“He’s too kind to hold a grudge about such a thing even if he ought to,” Camilla went on. “Daresay you’re right.” Leo, on the other hand, would happily carry all James’s grudges for him.
Leo knew about secrets. Professionally his life revolved around secrets, but privately it did as well. What he and James were to one another was, and had to be, a secret. There were secrets that destroyed, but there were also secrets that created.
if it were possible, I’d have had you at the registrar’s office weeks ago.” James could almost hear Leo’s blush. “Nobody would marry you in a registrar’s office,” Leo finally said, sounding strangled. “It’d be a church or nothing.”
You’ve made me totally unfit for that life. I can’t go around putting bullets in people when you look at me like—fuck, like I’m something special. And I can’t very well let other people put bullets in me when all the while I know how you’d feel about that. I’m just developing a strong anti-bullet stance all around, it seems.”
“I’m not sure whether to apologize,” he said, his back to Leo. “No, scratch that. You are something special and I’m not going to apologize for letting you know that I think so.
“The trouble is that I love you,” he said. “And it’s ruined me for gainful employment.”
