Highly Strung (Food Of Love 1)

“I prefer mine to treat me like a human being, not a toy.”

“Touché. I’m sorry you feel that way. Now can you go back to your room, please?”

“We need to talk.”

Milan sighed.

“You’re right. We do need to talk. Okay, we have rehearsals from ten, breaking at one for lunch. Let’s have lunch together. We can talk then. Yes?”

“Okay,” said Evgeny sulkily.

“So we can get up and showered in peace now, yes?”

Evgeny said nothing, but flounced out of the room, slamming the door behind him.

Milan sat back down on the bed, reaching out a hand for Lydia before lying down beside her, seemingly intent on resuming their early morning activities. But she batted away the hand that delved down between her thighs and sat up, tossing hair out of her eyes.

“You’re going to break his heart,” she said.

Milan lay flat on his back, exhaling heavily at the ceiling.

“Am I?”

“Unless…what? Are you going to invite him to stay here too?”

“Do you think I should?”

Lydia held her tongue. She had never felt close to Evgeny. If she was honest, she had always seen him as a threat—not because he was Milan’s other lover, but because he had never got over his hostility and jealousy towards her. A permanent ménage dynamic between them didn’t seem viable.

“You don’t,” Milan deduced. “It’s okay.

I agree with you. Evgeny is too angry and too difficult. He exhausts me. He needs an exclusive lover, and I can’t be that person.”

“That’s hard on him,” said Lydia quietly.

“In the short term, yes. In the long term, he will come to see that it’s for the best.”

“And you’re going to break it to him at lunchtime? He won’t be in a very good frame of mind for the concert.”

Milan frowned.

“That’s true. Maybe my timing could be better. You think I should wait until tonight, after the concert?”

“It might make more sense.”

“But my mother is coming. I don’t want her arriving backstage to some almighty drama.”

“Would she understand, about your having a male lover?”

“I don’t know. I think she’d be okay. I like to think she would. But I don’t know.”

“Hmm, difficult. Well, you’ve told him lunchtime now. I guess you’ll have to talk about something.”

“We’ll talk about you.” Milan kissed her extravagantly.

“Please don’t. You’ll drive him even wilder.” Lydia shivered, sensing impending doom, even though everything in her garden should be rosier than ever. She reminded herself that the future was bright. It was true that the Evgeny situation was unsustainable. She felt for him, but it couldn’t carry on.

Nonetheless, she felt too unsettled to eat much breakfast, and barely heard Vanessa’s chatter about her night out in Prague with the other percussionists.