Page 89 of Your Pace or Mine
“I get it,” Darius barked out. “I don’t need to hear the details.”
Jamie bit back a laugh. There was something oddly cute about a huffy, jealous Darius.
“Anyway, we were on tour together for months, and it sort of evolved. I thought, I thought I was in love.” Jamie nearly laughed. What he’d had with Stephen hadn’t been love. Now that he knew what real love could feel like, that time with Stephen, even before the curtain had been ripped back, well, it paled in comparison.
“It was Stephen. He told me we had to keep things quiet, for the sake of the show. And I agreed, because of course I did. Then his fiancée showed up at our Leicester show, and he introduced me to her as thekid he’d discovered.I wanted to die, Darius. I still let him into my dressing room after that show,though. I cried, and he told me I was being embarrassing and to pull myself together,“ Jamie sighed. It was both painful and mortifying to recall his lowest moment. “I left the tour early, got myself blacklisted in loads of theatres, lost most of my industry friends, and had to crawl my way back in, but I couldn’t do it the way that had always worked for me before. I couldn’t let any of them touch me, and I lost work, a lot of it.”
“Jamie, I…” Darius hung his head. “I’m sorry.”
“Not your fault, Darius,” he replied with a shrug. “I don’t want you to feel bad for me. I just wanted you to understand. Showing up with you felt like I’d finally got one over on him. I was fine after everything he did. I was winning.”
“And I ruined that for you,” Darius replied dejectedly. “Because I didn’t believe you when you said you loved me. I didn’t think it was possible, Jamie. It seemed so much more likely that you were using me, because that’s what everyone does.”
Twenty miles had passed, and Jamie was barely able to respond to Darius; his body was rebelling against him so much. Somehow anticipating the need, Darius pulled a gel out of one of the five hundred pockets on his running vest. Birthday cake flavour. Jamie knew it was his favourite.
“I should’ve stayed and talked to you about what bothered me about the whole…” Darius waved his hand like he couldn’t quite say it.
“Casting couch thing?” Jamie offered.
Darius snorted, looking startled that he’d laughed at that. “Yeah, that.”
“It was.” Darius sighed. “Did you Google my family like I told you to? When we first met?”
Jamie wasn’t sure where this was going. “Cressida did, a while back. Mostly just to check out your net worth,” he cringed.
“Yeah, that’s a thing.” Darius rolled his eyes. “So my parents, though, do you not know? I can’t imagine you were really following the society pages as a teenager, but my mother was anartist,“ he said it with a sort of derision that would normally have got Jamie’s back up, but he could see there was more to this.
“There was this gallery that was always taking her work. Father humoured her, funded her supplies, tours, whatever she wanted, while Selena and I were raised by a rotating army of nannies and au pairs,” he continued. “When I was about fifteen, the gallery owner sold his story to the press about how she’d been sleeping with him for years. Him and anyone she wanted to convince to buy her shitty work.”
“Fuck,” Jamie whispered.
“It destroyed my father, he stopped public appearances almost overnight and I was left to pick up the slack. Mother, though, fucked right off to Spain with her newest fling, and her share of the family estate. We never heard from her again until her sister reached out to me a few years ago to let me know she’d passed away. Breast cancer.”
“Oh my God, Darius,” Jamie replied.
“So, I, I lashed out, but it wasn’t about you, not really.”
Jamie tripped over his own feet. “How do you not hate me?”
Darius grabbed Jamie’s hand to steady him, then kept their fingers laced together as they ran. “I could never hate you, Jamie. Never.”
They ran the next few miles in silence. Only the sound of their feet on the pavement and the cheers of the crowd around them interrupted Jamie’s defeatist thoughts.
“I, I want to try again, Darius, for real,” Jamie said eventually. “I just don’t know how we can be together, especially now that my whole life has become tabloid fodder.”
“I think we can figure it out together, Jamie. I really do,” Darius whispered. “Can we at least give us a chance? For real this time?”
Despite everything, Jamie found himself nodding. The grin that took over Darius’s face felt like a reward for everything he’d put his mind, body and heart through to get to this place.
“The press will be horrible, Darius.”
“I know,” Darius replied, but there was a strange light in his eyes. “I think we can handle it, though, don’t you?”
Jamie looked down at their intertwined hands, and he did. For the first time, he thought that maybe he could hold on to something good in his life. No matter how difficult it was. He nodded.
“Now let’s finish this bloody marathon.”
Jamie nodded resolutely and let himself fall silent as he ran beside the man who believed in him. Believed in them. Together.
