2023 Top Ten Gay Romance

The Wedding by T.J. Blackley-2

“Are you alright?” Roger’s father, Joseph Millbourne, asked him over breakfast the next morning. “You look a bit peaky.”

“I had an interrupted night’s sleep last night,” Roger said, cursing his face, which had always shown every minor variation in his health on his cheeks. “It will pass once I get my energy for the day.”

“Alright,” Joseph said, worried as always—Roger had been a sickly child, and even now was a touch weaker in constitution than his father, or his friends—but willing to be easily reassured. “How were the races?”

“Splendid,” Roger said, buttering a piece of toast and heaping jam upon it. “I won a few dollars.”

“Which you’ll give to the bookseller, no doubt,” Joseph said, but he was smiling, so Roger didn’t blush quite as hard as he might have otherwise.

He did pay a visit to the bookseller, trading most of his winnings for the books he had asked to be reserved for him, and took them home to place them into empty spots on his bookshelves—of which there were vanishingly few.

He was deep into one of them when a knock came on the sitting room door. “Lord Chesburn, sir,” said the maid, and Roger stood to greet Edward as he came in.

“Oh, sit, sit,” Edward said, flapping his hands at him as he came to take over the chair opposite Roger. “I didn’t mean to make you get up.”

This was a long-familiar argument, and one which neither of them seemed poised to win anytime soon. “It’s only polite,” Roger said mildly, “even for those as close as we are.”

“It makes me feel like a stuffed popinjay,” Edward muttered, but he subsided as Roger did take his seat again. “What are you reading?” Roger passed him the tome, his place marked with a scrap of paper, and Edward flipped through it. “You’ll have to tell me if it’s any good,” he said, passing it back.

“Taking a turn for the romantic in your reading preferences?” Roger asked, not realizing his folly until the words made his heart start to race. He forcibly quieted the traitorous organ and kept his face clear of all emotion.

“I might,” Edward said, grinning, as though he knew Roger doubted him. “Romance is in the air, after all.”

Roger frowned, confused even as Edward’s words made his treacherous heart pound again. “How so?”

Edward’s face went through a complicated dance of emotions, before settling on an airy dispassion that it did not wear entirely convincingly. “Oh, this and that,” he said, waving his hand. “There are always elopements and engagements this time of year. And of course, there’s Vincent—”

He stopped himself, visibly attempting to eat their friend’s name back into his mouth. He looked abashed.

Roger seized his chance. “Will you tell me what happened between you two?” he said carefully. “It is only, I find it dreadfully uncomfortable not to know, you two being my closest friends, and he will not tell me either.”

Edward’s face sharpened suddenly. “You’ve spoken to him?”

Roger blinked, taken aback at Edward’s sudden energy. “Yes, we met at the races briefly, and spoke a bit before he had to depart. Should I not have?”

Edward subsided, but Roger could tell it took an effort. “No, of course not,” he said, with grace that appeared ill-won. “He is your friend; of course, you may speak to him as you wish.”

Roger waited, gazing Edward down, and eventually the man shifted and said, “As for what happened between us…I can’t imagine he’ll mind me telling you, but perhaps it oughtn’t go beyond this room.” Roger nodded, and Edward went on, “He went and fell in love with Matsui, quite against all his plans.” Matsui was the unmarried name of Vincent’s husband, Eiji, whom Vincent had married for business—Vincent had long sworn off love, Roger remembered, due to his parents’ unhappy, tragic relationship when he was a boy.

Oh, how romantic, was Roger’s first thought, but he suppressed it, remembering the topic of their conversation. “And this has…enraged you?” he prompted, when Edward fell silent. “I cannot think why that would drive an estrangement between you.” An awful thought occurred to him, and then another. “Do you…You do not—that is, surely you would have said before they married—”

Edward watched him stumble with increasing confusion before understanding bloomed across his face and he hastily said, “No, no, heavens no, I’ve no designs on Matsui. Or Vincent, for that matter. No, nothing remotely like that.” He sighed, leaning his elbows on his knees, and clutching his hands together. “It’s only that Vincent has treated the poor man abominably, and I cannot find it in myself to forgive him for that.”

“Oh,” Roger said. His breath was still coming quicker from his panic, and he took a moment to get it under control. “I see.”

“Perhaps I was a little unfair to him,” Edward said, seeming as though he were talking to himself more than Roger, his eyes fixed on the fireplace over Roger’s shoulder. “But it struck a nerve, you know.”

Roger did not know, in fact, but he could not bring himself to ask for clarification. There were any number of possible conclusions to be drawn from Edward’s statement, and Roger suddenly found that he couldn’t bear to know which one of them it was.

Edward stayed for dinner, and drew Roger into an embrace before he left. This was twice now in two days that he had done so, when Roger could count on one hand the number of full embraces Edward had indulged in with him in the past year. Arms over his shoulders, yes; casual touches, a cuff on the back of the head, a gentle shake when Roger got off a decent quip, plenty; but Edward and Roger had never been friends who embraced often, a fact for which Roger was usually quite thankful. Touching Edward in any way was a trial of self-control, after all.

Roger went back to his novel once Edward had gone, but he could no longer focus on it, his mind instead swirling around the morass of Edward, and Edward and Vincent, and Vincent’s sins against his husband, and why Edward could not forgive Vincent, when he and Vincent, so far as Roger knew, had never quarreled for longer than a day in the whole of their friendship.

He knew they had been lovers, when they were younger, and so he spent some time considering whether, despite his words, Edward did harbor feelings for Vincent. But Edward had never lied to him before, and he had flatly denied it, so Roger put that aside, as did the prospect of Edward having feelings for the newly-minted Eiji Pennsbury.

Could Edward have feelings for someone else, and Vincent’s apparently cruelty toward Eiji wounded a newfound romantic sensibility?

Vincent’s words from the day before swam through Roger’s head again. Vincent, Roger knew in his bones, would never have spoken to Roger about Edward’s supposed feelings if he had not been certain of them, but just because Vincent was certain did not mean Vincent was correct.

But where had Vincent gotten the idea? He had been in the country for months before his brief return and fight with Edward, and Roger did not have the sense that Vincent had suspected Edward’s feelings before his marriage. There must have been something that happened after his wedding that made him believe as he did. But Roger had no idea what it might have been.

Roger’s wonderings kept him occupied through the whole of the afternoon and evening, and he only managed to shake them off with difficulty the next morning. He’d dreamed, a low, hot dream that lingered; clearly his preoccupation had gone on long enough, and it was time to put it aside, as he had so many times before.

He even managed it, for four whole days—until the next time he saw Edward again. It was not a personal visit, but a party; a dinner gathering given by someone or other higher in society, which Roger had only netted an invitation to on the strength of his relationship with Edward. He wouldn’t have gone, but Edward had asked him specifically, and Roger had never had the heart to refuse him anything.

Edward was busy socializing—the demands on a marquess’ time at an event like this were numerous and, Roger knew from Edward’s complaining on former occasions, quite taxing—and it took Roger less than half an hour to determine that he had been asked to come solely so Edward would have a friendly face to look to in between conversations with people he liked less, but was duty-bound to talk to. Every time Edward moved from conversation to conversation, he sought Roger out, to throw a face at him or roll his eyes, and waited for Roger to laugh or smile before moving on.

Warmth filled Roger’s chest when he realized, and a sort of buzzing took over the back of his mind. Damn Vincent—his assumptions about Edward’s feelings for Roger wouldn’t leave him alone. He and Edward were friends, and cousins by law; it made perfect sense that Edward would find comfort in his presence, and seek him out.

But, the devilish voice in the back of his head that now sounded an awful lot like Vincent purred, what if it meant more? What if Vincent was correct, and Edward sought Roger out because he loved him?

It was impossible, Roger told himself savagely, mustering up another smile for Edward as he passed between a countess and a baronet. Unthinkable. Edward loved Roger as a friend, as family, but as a lover? It could not be. It was not.

Roger watched with a roaring in his ears as a man—a young man he did not know, with a handsome face and the sort of elegant smile Roger had only ever dreamed of—put a casually intimate hand on Edward’s arm, and Edward all but snatched his limb away, throwing Roger a panicked look. Something, some shell of doubt and self-protection that had encircled Roger’s heart until now, cracked open, leaving the organ bare and beating faster in his chest than it ever had before.

It was still early in the party—it was still early in the day—but Roger could bear it no longer. He fled the house, barely stopping to give Edward an apologetic look and receive a concerned nod in response. No doubt Edward thought him suddenly unwell; it had happened before, and Edward had never begrudged his early departures.

And after all, Roger thought hysterically as he sat in his father’s carriage as it took him home, was he not unwell? Was not the sudden realization that his closest friend, the man he loved more than anything, loved him back, cause for a certain infirmity?

He could think of no other reason for that look on Edward’s face, for the fact that he had looked at Roger at all in that moment, let alone with sudden worry, as though Roger would have been upset. He was upset, but Edward would have had no reason to know that, unless he was thinking of Roger as another man made a pass at him.

And Roger was tired, suddenly, and yet not suddenly at all. He had carried his torch for Edward for years—almost two-thirds of his life—and he was bone-weary of trying to hide it. Vincent had seen, and it had felt like relief after a lifetime of carrying heavy things around; even if Roger was wrong and Edward did not think of him that way, perhaps Edward knowing the strength of Roger’s feelings would feel like relief, too.