Rhapsody on a Theme (34 page)

Lillian reached the altar, and the music died away in the faint shimmers and twinkles, like the dying sun after a long and brilliant dusk. It is said that every bride looks beautiful on her wedding day, but Jayden didn’t even see her in the church that day.

He watched Darren, for the entire ceremony, and was aware of nothing else. As though it had never happened before, and even more strongly than the first time, Jayden Phillips fell in love. All over again.

Paul’s best man speech brought the house down.

Lillian, looking surprisingly beautiful in a stunning white dress and hair perfectly styled, hung on to Ethan’s arm through the speeches, toasts and sit-down, three-course meal, looking so happy it was almost indecent. Ethan simply looked floored, drunk on ecstasy, and Paul completed the happiness by spending the entire speech obeying tradition, and ripping the piss out of the obliviously cheerful groom, much to the glee of his new in-laws. (Lillian’s sister appeared to be taking notes.)

Darren had been taken up to the high table with the wedding party for the speeches and toasts and glanced Jayden’s way for the first one. When Jayden bit his lip and then nodded, Darren smiled and downed the flute of champagne before putting it aside and very clearly filling a glass with water for the next one. Jayden’s heart swelled and felt overly large and achy.

He came down for the meal itself, though, sliding into the seat beside Jayden and exchanging dull, upper-middle-class pleasantries with assorted relatives of Lillian’s before helping himself to another (small) glass of wine and sliding his fingers into Jayden’s.

“You didn’t stop staring at me for the entire time,” he said lowly.

“Because you were so utterly amazing, it
hurt
,” Jayden replied, equally lowly, and smiled at the waitress who brought their starters. Tiny starters. Jayden rolled his eyes at the posh food, and decided that he might have to sneak out of the hotel later and find a chippie or something.

Darren hummed, squeezing Jayden’s fingers again, before letting go and picking up his salad fork.

“Are you friend of Ethan’s, then?” one woman at their table asked.

“Yes,” Darren said.

“We went to school with him,” Jayden clarified helpfully.

“And you’re, ah…” she indicated their hands delicately, even though they had separated.

“Darren’s my partner, yes,” Jayden said, politely but shortly, and Darren gave him a sideways glance.

“I see,” said the woman, and then Darren seemed to brush her off, turning back to Jayden.

“So what did you think?” he asked.

“I told you.”

“About the
music
,” Darren said tartly and flicked him on the forehead. “Flirt.”

“Oh, that was pretty good too.”

Darren snorted; Jayden laughed, leaning over to kiss him on the cheek, and fighting to contain himself from doing more, right there. “You were amazing and you know it,” he murmured and curled his fingers into Darren’s sleeve. “And I’ll prove it later. Do some, um. Appreciation.”

Darren grinned, looking supremely pleased with himself, and Jayden let go to focus on the small-portioned food. It wasn’t a particularly long meal, and felt shorter thanks to the space between courses being filled with more speeches—one from the bride’s brother, another from her father, and one from
Ethan’s
father, surprisingly, who told the entire room about how convinced ‘Kathleen and I’ were that ‘our Ether’ (at which Darren and Paul simultaneously snorted, and Ethan went a very strange shade of purple) was ‘one of them gay types’ (at which
Jayden
snorted and went purple) and so ‘young Lilly here’ had come as a ‘comp-er-
lete
surprise, my dear friends!’

“So that’s where Ethan gets it,” Darren murmured lowly in Jayden’s ear, and Jayden stifled a laugh.

By the time dessert was served, Jayden was tempted just to put the ice cream in his lap to ward off the inevitable. Darren was just too stunning in that suit, and had been too world-shatteringly beautiful and talented at that piano, and Jayden was beginning to physically
hurt
with the need. Darren kept giving him—and his lap—sideways looks and smirking, and Jayden wanted to hit him, right before dragging him off and just…just…just
fucking
him in a corner somewhere. Maybe not even an actual room, just…behind an oversized plastic plant or something.

And then Paul doomed him, by at the end of the meal, standing up with a final glass of champagne. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he boomed. “We would like to take you into the knees-up part of the party now, and please raise a glass to our pianist, Darren Peace. Oi, stand up,” he ordered, and Darren rose grudgingly from his seat, nodding awkwardly at the crowd who raised glasses to him, looking somehow young and awkward and putting his hands in his pockets for lack of something better to do with them. “Darren has had the pleasure of our company for probably a decade now, or somewhere around it, and the minute Ethan said he was getting hitched, Daz and I got
plotting
, didn’t we, Daz?”

Ethan looked alarmed. Lillian, by contrast, looked delighted. Darren just smirked knowingly.

“When Lillian learned her loving but daft then-boyfriend had a trained pianist for a best friend, she wanted some stuff playing. Some of it you heard. But she also wanted a live performance for her first dance as a married woman and
sadly
, Lillian did have a stipulation. Something a little bit
unusual
.”

Ethan looked
very
alarmed. Lillian, by contrast, looked delighted and puzzled at the same time. Darren’s smirk grew wider, and Jayden found himself starting to smile, all without knowing the joke.

“I spent Boxing Day with our newly-weds,” Paul told the assembled audience. “And I had the, er,
pleasure
of watching Lillian trying to teach Ethan to dance. And ladies and gents,
this man
cannot dance. Slow romantic wedding dances are well beyond his, er,
skills
.” Ethan hit him, but Paul carried on obliviously. “He
could
, however, do a very lively dance with his new bride, both in their pyjamas admittedly, to a particular song that came on the radio that gluttonous and hilarious afternoon.”

Lillian suddenly started giggling. “Oh, you
didn’t
!” she cried, looking delightedly to Darren, whose expression didn’t change.

“So without further ado, ladies and gentlemen, please proceed to the ballroom for the first dance of this wedding: Ethan and Lillian Summerskill, with Ethan’s only danceable song, performed by Darren Peace and Ruby de Souza.”

Ruby, Paul’s heavily pregnant sister, heaved herself out of her chair and led the charge into the ballroom, a cavernous space beautifully decorated in blue and white, and a dance floor the size of the entire ground floor of Jayden’s house. Another piano—not a grand one, but still a piano—was set up by the as-yet silent DJ’s booth. Darren seated himself without any fanfare, spreading his hands over the keys and waiting, looking over his shoulder.

“Go for it, then, you fucking wanker,” Ethan told him, dragged onto the floor by his new wife, who looked thrilled and wound her arms around his neck, beaming.

Within the first chord, Jayden began to laugh, as did most of the assembled crowd.

A harmonious duet and a hotel piano performed the controversial Christmas classic
Fairytale of New York
at a summer wedding, and Ethan’s dancing skills were lambasted as passable, but still somewhat poor.

* * * *

Jayden felt
itchy
, hot with arousal and barely able to keep himself distracted enough to not just get a hard-on in his suit trousers. He was semi-hard already, and as Darren’s playing wound down and the DJ took over, the first ‘dance’ dissolving into a kind of hug-and-sway between the married couple, Jayden leaned against the ballroom door and stared unabashedly at Darren’s lean form as he rose from the piano and straightened his waistcoat. He was utterly beautiful, and Jayden burned with the need to touch him.

He watched, waiting impatiently as Paul clapped hands with Darren and pulled him into a half-hug briefly, offering a glass of wine that was waved away. Darren turned towards the bar, and one of the bridesmaids—a beautiful girl Jayden vaguely remembered to be Lillian’s sister—caught his arm, smiling up at him and raising another glass towards him. Darren smiled down at her, and Jayden’s blood was suddenly too far up to wait any longer.

He pulled himself away from the door, weaving through the abandoned tables towards the dance floor with fierce purpose. Darren glanced up and smiled at him, and Jayden didn’t pause, shouldering the bridesmaid out of the way and seizing Darren’s face in both hands, plundering his mouth in a deep, demanding kiss.

Darren tried to smile against his lips, but Jayden didn’t give him the freedom, pushing into his mouth and only breaking off to breathe, pressing his forehead to Darren’s with his eyes closed and whispering, “Come upstairs.”

He pulled by the lapels; Darren followed, and they stumbled out into the lobby, still kissing almost sporadically, and into the lift, where Jayden fumbled for the buttons on the lift wall and on Darren’s suit jacket at the same time, and blindly. They staggered out with Darren laughing breathlessly, and Jayden opening his jacket to slide his hands over the silk waistcoat and the crisp cotton of the shirt.

“We need a room key,” Darren hissed, and peeled aside Jayden’s shirt collar to suck on his neck while Jayden swore and fumbled for the key card, pushing Darren up against the door and palming his crotch through those sinful trousers.

And paused.

“Wait.”

“You’re
kidding
,” Darren groaned, dropping his head back against the door with a bang. “Are you fucking
serious
?”

“Are you…” Jayden squeezed, and Darren bucked his hips and hissed. “You
are
. You’re not wearing any underwear!”

“You could see the waistband through the fucking trousers, now
open the fucking door
,” Darren snarled, and Jayden laughed, swiping the card and dropping it the moment they were inside, the door slamming heavily as he pushed Darren towards the bed, still joined to his mouth, and tumbled them down onto it. Jayden tore the belt open and pushed his hands into Darren’s trousers insistently, murmuring a breathless instruction around Darren’s tongue until he lifted his hips and let Jayden pull the suit trousers down and off entirely.

“Where’s your stuff?” Jayden whispered. “Where’s…”

“Waistcoat.”

Jayden fumbled in the pocket, freeing the condom and a tube of lubricant and buried his teeth in Darren’s neck to bite a possessive mark into the exact point where his collar met his skin, even as he pulled at his own trousers. This was not the time for pleasantries and romance and everything: he’d been
burning
for the entire fucking
ceremony
, and Darren had looked so stupidly fucking
hot
in that suit and that waistcoat and playing that church piano and…

It was messy, brutal, intense, and short. There had been too much build-up, too much waiting, and Jayden found himself too impatient to be kind or gentle; foreplay was non-existent, and preparation scant. It was only when Darren bit him harshly on the lip, dangerous and warning, that Jayden paused long enough even for the condom, the intensity of sensation almost too painful to allow it. Once inside, Jayden flattened his palms on Darren’s chest and pinched and rubbed at his nipples through the fabric of the waistcoat, kissing him fiercely around the muted groans and absorbing every shift and flex of Darren’s body. One of Darren’s heels ended up in his lower back, and he tasted slightly unpleasantly of a mixture of champagne and vanilla ice cream from dessert, and even the barrier of the condom between them felt like being too far away, yet
this was Darren
, and this was Jayden’s doing, and he came with a savage passion that ripped out everything from knees to scalp, and left Jayden gasping almost mutedly into Darren’s cheek, forcing his twitching and shaking hand to bring Darren to an equally vicious completion before collapsing into a breathless, wet sort of kissing, catching his breath from Darren’s mouth.

“Love you,” he breathed, and Darren pushed a damp hand into his hair. “Love you, really love you, and how stupidly hot you looked.”

Darren mumbled, brushing his nose against Jayden’s. When Jayden opened his eyes, Darren’s neck was bruised and swollen on one side, his collar was impossibly still buttoned, and his mouth scarlet and puffy. He was gorgeous, and Jayden’s chest felt tight.

“Love you,” he repeated. “Love you, love you, love you.”

Darren pulled on his hair lightly, kissing his jaw gingerly. “V’you too,” he mumbled, chest finally beginning to settle into a slower rhythm. His leg flexed and he grimaced.

“Okay?”

“Sore,” Darren admitted, and Jayden stroked his hip soothingly before kissing his neck gently and pulling out as carefully as possible. There were the faintest traces of blood, and after he threw the condom away in the bathroom, he returned to the bed to curl around Darren’s side and kiss one of the bruises.

“Okay?” he asked again. Darren hummed, nudging his head into Jayden’s and sighing deeply.

“I reckon I could stretch to ‘okay’, yeah,” he said and chuckled wearily. “Fucking hell, Jayden.” Jayden brushed his knuckles over Darren’s jaw. “I think you broke me.”

“You’re bleeding a bit,” Jayden murmured, but couldn’t bring himself to worry. He felt too pleasantly wrung-out, too content pressing little kisses into the top of Darren’s shoulder and the side of his neck, rubbing knuckles over the invisible roughness of stubble.

“We need to go back downstairs,” Darren said, finally opening his eyes. His pupils were huge, and Jayden smiled at the lazy hedonism there.

“In a minute.”

“Don’t even know if I can walk.”