Page 34 of Your Pace or Mine
“Hi Jamie,” Darius replied. His head was cocked to the side like he wasn’t quite sure what was happening, and he had a pair of reading glasses resting on the bridge of his nose.
“Am I interrupting anything?”
“No, I was just reading.”
“Anything good?”
Darius waved a book in front of the screen. It was a beat-up-looking paperback on athlete mindset.
“No, then?” Jamie replied with a smirk, earning himself an eye roll from Darius. They slipped into silence for a moment. “I wanted to apologise for yesterday,” he said slowly. “It wasn’t fair to call you out like that.”
“You still think it’s true, though,” Darius stated. Jamie had the distinct impression he was trying to come across as completely unbothered, but the way his shoulders seemed to hunch up around his ears told a different story.
Jamie took a breath. “I think you probably went from some posh boarding school to being a professional athlete and maynot understand what the rest of us deal with on a day-to-day basis. But I didn’t mean to imply you were a bad person or have no value.”
“Sure.” There was a tightness to Darius’s jaw when he replied. “And I suppose I didn’t intend to imply you don’t take things seriously. I don’t know you well enough to make that judgment. It was unfair.”
“So, we’re both arseholes…and that means we’re ok, right?” Jamie asked, tentatively hoping to avoid any further awkwardness. Training was rough enough with Mark making a general nuisance of himself; he didn’t need to alienate Darius. And he respected him, really. He was disciplined and still kind. He was clearly dealing with a lot of professional shit right now, but didn’t seem to be letting it deter him from his performance. Jamie wished he’d had that kind of focus when things went wrong in his career, but generally, one sign that someone didn’t like him and he was jumping to see what he could do to fix it, whatever it took.
“We’re ok, yeah,” Darius replied softly. “Are you really going to take it easy this week?”
It was like he’d somehow seen through all of Jamie’s half-truths in just a two-minute conversation. “I’d love to, but taking it easy isn’t an option for me right now.”
“What do you do while you’re in between shows?”
“I teach, mostly. Though I’ve been running by-donation classes as fundraisers lately, so that’s added a lot to my schedule. And I have an evening job. Plus, like, auditions, if I ever get another one that is.” He mumbled the last part under his breath, but Darius caught it.
“Dry spell?”
“Something like that.”
Darius nodded, clearly sensing Jamie’s hesitation in discussing his career any further.
“What’s the deal with you and Anders?”
Darius sighed. “I don’t know exactly. There’s the politics thing, my grandfather, he…wasn’t great. It feels more personal than that, though. Something to do with my father, probably. They were at university together, and I imagine Dad was even more of a stuck-up dick then than he is now.”
“Maybe they were secret lovers.” Jamie waggled his brow, and a look of utter revulsion passed over Darius’s face.
“That was absolutely not an image I needed in my head, thanks.”
“Do you actually have an issue with two men being together?” Jamie challenged. And look, he knew he was being a dick, and he really had thought there’d been a flirtatious edge to some of their banter, but if those articles had been true and Darius was going to turn out to be homophobic after all, then this conversation was fucking over.
That head tilt came back, confusion looking strangely adorable on Darius’s patrician face. “No?”
Jamie felt his neck heat up and was sure his face had turned pink. “That’s good,” he said with a tight nod.
“Yeah,” Darius replied. “Would make my dating life really fucking awkward if I had a problem with that.”
Oh.Oh.
Jamie had always prided himself on being able to tell if someone was into men. It was the little things. Typically, the way their eyes lingered on him. It had been a useful skill in his early days in theatre, letting him know when he should flirt a little more and when it wasn’t worth it. With Darius, though, he’d firmly put any thoughts in that direction into thewishful thinkingboxand slammed the lid shut.
Determined not to linger too long on the topic lest he seem like an opportunistic lech. Jamie swiftly changed course. “So, is thatwhy you were volunteering at the clinic then? To try to get in good with Anders?”
Darius sighed. “Yeah, fat lot of good that did.”
“I think you were being too obvious about it.”
