Palace: At Your Service.

Christian rolled over onto his stomach, tugging free the sheet that became tangled underneath him and, with a forefinger, drew an invisible line down Johnny's chest from his throat to the tip of his cock. "You awake?" he said loudly.

Johnny came awake about a handspan off the mattress, wide-eyed, gasping and half-hard. "What?! Awake?" He stared blearily at Christian, then fell back into a shuddering sprawl. He could still feel the path of Christian's finger down his body in a warm, tingling afterimage. "I really hope you're ready to make good on that," he muttered, his eyes closed and his awareness focused on feeling.

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Johnny fed Hera the last chunk of gingerbread he'd filched from one of the saddlebags before Christian snagged it, then left her to graze with Pan and Nebula. Christian and Caeline were already eating by the time he flopped down on the blanket and began rummaging around in the bags. He came out with a couple pieces of cold chicken, a banana, a little plastic tub of apple-walnut salad, a piece of garlic bread and a bottle of grape juice. "This is great," he said with a happy sigh, spreading his food out on a linen napkin. "Perfect weather, great spot, horses!" He opened his bottle and then added, as though as an afterthought, "Oh, and good company. That too." He winked at Caeline and took a bite of chicken.

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[A few hours after Johnny and Harry have lunch and a few minutes after Harry and Christian talk.]

Johnny was kicking back on the sofa, idly scritching Obie with one hand but mostly staring at the ceiling. His talk with Harry at lunch had bothered him. He'd thought of telling Liam about it, but somehow he'd never found the right place in their afternoon talk to bring it up. It just... it sounded like the wrong problem.

Harry'd said Johnny was "self-deprecating" but that wasn't really it. It wasn't so much that Johnny was surprised that someone liked him, it was that someone who liked him -- which meant a regular person, not some asshole like Carstairs or Jake or whoever -- didn't like Harry. It meant something was wrong with the world and it was nagging off in the corner of Johnny's brain, irritating and demanding to be solved. If Gwyn hadn't liked either of them, if she'd been as nasty to him as she'd apparently been to Harry, then he'd be able to just write her off as a nut job or something and that'd be that. But why would she be normal and nice to him and so awful to Harry?

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