“Once,” interrupted Paris. He didn’t usually like interrupting people, but with Morag you interrupted or held your peace like an extra at a movie wedding. “I said that once. Because I’d had wine and I was feeling hubristic.”
“Aye, and I listened. Because I’m great with people, me. Also I might like to go on that TV show one day isn’t hubristic. It’s at best mildly ambitious. Anyway it soon became extremely clear that he wasn’t going to enter himself, so I entered him— I mean I entered him into the competition, not with one of my many strap-ons— and out of thousands of contestants he’s been selected as one of Britain’s ten best amateur bakers.”
Slinking over to the sitting area, Paris shrank down into an armchair and tried to hide behind Neferneferuaten, who had finally emerged from naked-stranger-induced hiding. “Don’t. I’m really not. It’s just it’s series seven, and they’re obviously scraping the bottom of the barrel a bit.”
“Shut up, Paris.”
“You know what I think?” offered the naked man. “I think you’ve got a shot. These are good biscuits. They’ve got a decent crunch to them, and the rose is coming through.”
Morag stared at him in utter bewilderment. “Who do you think you are? Marianne fucking Wolvercote?”
“Marianne who?” asked the naked man, whose name Paris was pretty sure he’d now left it too late to ask.
“You know, the mean judge on the show we’re all talking about?”
The naked man gave a shrug, which wound up being a very different gesture when attached to a buff man with his wang hanging out. “Never really watched it. And anyway I was just trying to be nice.”
“He doesn’t need you to be nice. He needs to get his head out of his arse.” Morag waved a frustrated hand in Paris’s direction. “It’s not just the baking, he’s like this with everything. He says he’s having an essay crisis and it comes back with a first. He’ll buy some new kecks and be all, do these make my bum too apricoty.”
“I did not say that,” insisted Paris, blushing. “I was just worried they’d make me come across like I was trying too hard.”
“Like that time you sat me down and asked me very sincerely if I thought your cheekbones were too high?”
In his mind, at the time, it had been a very sensible thing to ask, so Paris tried not to sound too flustered when he replied, “A guy said I looked like an elf.”
“He was a LARPer. He was trying to pull you.”
Paris peeped between Neferneferuaten’s ears. “No he wasn’t.”
“Yes, he was.” Morag joined him in the sitting area, drawing her still-not-ready-for-furniture guest with her. “That’s why he asked for your phone number.”
“He said he was going to invite me into his D&D game.”
“That’s nerdspeak for ‘I want to fuck you.’ I know, because I’ve fucked a lot of nerds and never played a single game of Dungeons and Dragons.”
“That’s you.” To Paris’s dismay, Neferneferuaten had got bored of being emotionally supportive and gone to investigate the naked man. “Everyone’s attracted to you.”
“Well, I’d say that’s because I’m a fat Glaswegian sex goddess, but mostly it’s because I fucking ask them if they want to have sex with me.”
The naked man raised one hand while using the other to shield his genitals from Neferneferuaten’s scrutiny. “Worked for me.”
Paris glanced at him. “Where did you two even meet?”
“Sainsbury’s.”
Paris gave a little moan. “I could never do that. I’d go up to someone and say, hello, do you want to come home with me, and they’d say, no, you’re clearly unwell, I’m calling the police.”
“You don’t have to be on my level yet,” said Morag, “but there are places you can go and apps you can download full of horny boys who’d be happy to stick one up your bumhole.”
“Um ...” Paris could feel himself getting blushy again. “That’s not actually what I’m looking for.”
“You should try it. It’s great fun.”
“She’s right,” agreed the naked man. “Anal’s not just for gays anymore.”
Paris’s blushing gave way to squirming. “I’m not saying I’ve never. I’m just saying I’m looking for more than a bumhole.”
“That’s your problem,” Morag told him, for about the hundred and fortieth time. “You can’t just look for things. You have to go out and get them.”
“Yes, but what if— ”
She folded her arms. “What if what?”
And, for about the hundred and fortieth time, Paris couldn’t answer.
Saturday
EARLY NEXT MORNING, Morag dropped Paris off at Patchley House, the sprawling stately home where Bake Expectations was filmed. It felt unnervingly like his first day of school, partly because he’d just been taken to a strange place full of strangers by somebody who had their shit far more together than he did and partly because, in many ways, his old school had looked quite a lot like Patchley House.
Hawton Abbey was one of those private schools so old that it was called a public school because it had been founded back when the idea of sending your kids away to be taught instead of paying for teachers to come to your kids had seemed terribly, terribly common. Paris’s years there had been by far the worst of his life, and while he was sure the crew and contestants of Bake Expectations would be at least twenty percent less sociopathic than English public school boys, he was getting that same I-hope-they’ll-like-me-they-won’t-like-me-will-they feeling that had crept up on him every time he’d been introduced to a new social situation. At least, every time since he’d first looked on the gabled cloisters of Hawton. He sometimes remembered being different before.
Trying not to over-gloom, Paris trudged his way up the long path to the house and, to his surprise, found his mood lifting. He’d been a fan of the show since— well— since school. And as awful as the other boys had been, as little common ground as they had shared in every other aspect of their lives, everybody loved Bake Expectations. They’d gather in the common room on a Tuesday evening and watch the new episode, and for a while Paris would feel like he belonged. At least until they went back to their rooms and the other boys started yammering on enthusiastically about which of the contestants they’d most like to have sex with despite, Paris belatedly realised, being children and knowing about as little about sex as they did about baking.
So Patchley House felt— not like home exactly— but ephemerally familiar, like a place he’d seen in a dream, or a person that you’ve heard so many other people talk about that you forget you’ve never met them.
He’d never seen it like this, of course, with the camera operators moving around in some dance whose steps he didn’t know (in Paris’s experience, that was all dances). With crew swarming everywhere pointing at things and shouting instructions that Paris couldn’t help but think were meant for him, even when they couldn’t be.