Day One of the Car Show


"...and tell him if I see him petting Hamster once more I'm going to punch his lights out."

Jeremy had actually nodded and taken a step away before James' words sank in. He turned back. "Who?"

"Needell." He said it like it was obvious.

"James... are you seriously telling me you think Tiff's coming on to Richard?"

The indignant expression on James' face was almost comical. "Haven't you been watching them?"

He shrugged. "Well, I have been quite busy and.... That's not the point! It's Tiff! And Richard! It's preposterous!"

"Why is it preposterous?"

"Because...." He was waving his arms about, he realised, and he deliberately brought them calmly to his sides, resorting to gesturing the ridiculousness of the suggestion with just his hands. "Because Tiff's old, and married, and... and he's got bad hair!"

James' rising eyebrows didn't do much for his ego, but then it only took one of those looks from Richard to inflate it to the size of a small moon so he thought he could probably survive the insinuation that he was old and balding too.

"You don't think we're enough for Richard to cope with?" he reasoned gently.

"I'm not saying he's doing anything, am I? I'm telling you, Jeremy, Tiff's been touching him, putting his arm around his shoulders, leaning in to murmur sweet nothings to him." Jeremy couldn't help the scepticism, but he could feel a spark of jealousy in himself now. "I'm serious. Just watch them."

He nodded. "All right. And on the singularly tiny-weenie chance that he is coming on to our Hamster, he's a dead man."


It was just the three of them on stage in the afternoon - he, Richard and James. They were so completely in sync it was almost art; bouncing jokes off one another, anticipating opinions, one playing devil's advocate to the other two. There was a moment when Jeremy stepped back, watched James and Richard trying to stop laughing, and wondered what he'd done in a previous life that had been so good he'd deserved these two men in this one.

Throughout the show, James was laying claim to Richard - marking his territory in a way that was so obvious to Jeremy, it was surprising Richard hadn't slapped him. But the youngest one of their triad seemed to be oblivious to the friendly nudges, the steering hand on his back, the light touches. Jeremy even saw him leaning back into the press of a hand at the small of his back, catching himself at the last moment and straightening with a guilty expression flitting across his smiling face.

Afterwards they split up for a photo shoot - posing with the cars, chatting to journalists, throwing rude comments at one another when their paths crossed and making impolite finger gestures across the room when they happened to catch each other's eyes. All in all, it was fun.


It was early evening before Jeremy realised he hadn't spotted Richard around for a while. It was getting more crowded with people coming in after work, and Richard was an easy man to lose in a crowd. But still it was usually fairly easy to trace the rising levels of shrill female voices and flashing camera-phones and find him at the centre of it all.

He found James drooling over the shiny new Bentley and posed the question, but James hadn't seen him either.

"Have you tried looking for the gaggle of giggling teenagers?"

"Yes - lots of teenagers and nubile young women but sadly no flailing Hamster amongst them." He unfolded a sizable pile of paper scraps from his jacket pocket. "Got quite a lot of phone numbers though." He wiggled his eyebrows.

James laughed. "I think you might have enough on your plate at the moment."

"True, but it's not bad for an old, balding broadcaster...."

"Shut up, Jeremy. Have you tried the bar?"

"Good point. No."

"Come on then, I could do with a drink."


The first words out of James' mouth when they stepped inside the large, makeshift pub, were, "I told you so!"

Richard was sitting at the far end of the bar, a half-empty pint in front of him, Tiff at this side, leaning in to him, smiling and listening while Richard no doubt was talking his ear off about the joys of Porsche ownership or raving on about his new bike.

Jeremy couldn't help but laugh. The whole situation was insane. "They're just talking!" He pulled himself together. "Seriously, they're grown men. If the three of us weren't.... Admit it, the idea wouldn't have even occurred."

He started towards the two and without missing a beat he rested his forearm on Richard's shoulder as he leaned in to order two pints of the closest thing to beer they were serving. "We lost you," he told Richard smoothly, turning a winning smile on Tiff, who bristled just slightly and replied,

"I'm trying to steal Richard from you."

If James hadn't planted the idea... but he had. Jeremy's eyes widened as he glanced from James' triumphant face to Richard who was watching him expectantly; then almost spat his drink over the bar.

"From the show!" he clarified quickly, "Tiff was trying to poach me for Fifth Gear."

Rolling his eyes in an 'I get it but I don't believe it' way, James shook his head. Jeremy smiled at him, gave Richard a knowing nod and finally turned to Tiff.

"Hands off."

Tiff shrugged. "He's already turned down the offer of a substantial pay raise, a chance to drive the new Ferrari and a week on a boat in Monaco for the Grand Prix." Which wasn't a bad idea, Jeremy thought to himself, storing the idea away for later consideration. When was Richard's birthday? "I don't know what else to offer him."

Richard was grinning, playing along. Momentarily lost for words, Jeremy picked his pint up off the bar and drowned a good quarter of it; he hadn't realised how thirsty he'd been.

As James reached his own pint, he said, "Give it up. He's priceless." Standing at Richard's side, Jeremy caught his wink, hidden from Tiff by the tilt of his head. Richard's response - a blown kiss - was also masked.

Missing the interplay between the three of them, Tiff endured. "Everyone has a price. The creators of 'The Five O'clock Show' must have found it."

James turned away, biting his bottom lip while Jeremy cringed, watching Richard's crestfallen face and eagerly awaiting the play of Tiff's 'Get Out Of Jail Free' card. Just like so many before him, just as they had a couple of years ago, Tiff was rapidly learning that Richard could do some very, very bad things with those huge, liquid chocolate eyes.

Tiff back peddled impressively quickly. "Not that it isn't fabulous entertainment, of course!"

Of course. Jeremy smirked. Even he and James had told Richard categorically that they thought the show was a pile of rubbish, and they were sleeping with him.

Richard's ability to use silence as a tool to get exactly what he wanted from someone was up to his high standards of ocular manipulation.

"The family loves it. It's the perfect antidote to a day at work...." Not that anyone who did work got to watch it - starting as its name suggested at five in the afternoon, ending just as most non-shift workers walked in through their front doors. And it was more than likely that they were grateful for this small mercy.

Jeremy shook his head. "Like James said, give it up, you're just digging yourself in deeper. There's nothing you can offer him that'll get him to quit our award-wining show for your obscure televised car magazine."

"There is something, actually."

James' head snapped round, just as he'd been about to wander off in the general direction of the Silver Shadow - Jeremy knew, he'd been watching him closely; his eyes had lit up as soon as he'd realised the bar's proximity to it.

Tiff's whole face lit up at Richard's apparently serious tone. "What?"

"I want an exec role. A hand in writing the script. Absolutely no height jokes or teeth jokes." Tiff inclined his head in agreement, smiling from ear to ear while Richard pointedly ignored the other two. "I want a dressing room rather than a patch of grass with a view better than the runway of an old airfield where they used to land planes during World War II. Faster cars to drive than the Pagani Zonda and the Aston Martin DB9. I want to do something more exhilarating then having to trudge through France in a Supercar with these two tagging behind just to drive over the most incredible piece of civil engineering in Europe. And something more exciting than freezing to death off the coast of Norway - having to clamber from a broken speedboat to a glorified dinghy in a force four gale only to have that blow up on us and end up stranded in an abandoned town on the edge of nowhere, just to see if its possible to drive to Oslo faster than it is to go by boat." Richard's smile finally broke out on his face. "No offence, but I've watched Fifth Gear and the most exciting thing I've seen is Vicki Butler-Henderson driving a Detroit muscle car around the bowl."

It was impossible to get offended by a sentence punctuated by Richard's smile. Jeremy had tried it once.

The smile stayed on Tiff's face as he engaged in round two. "What's wrong with Fifth Gear?"

"There's nothing wrong with it, if you like that kind of thing. It's exactly what Top Gear used to be - but we evolved."

"We've evolved!"

It was difficult to hide his amusement, he had no idea how Richard was keeping a straight face. "Four disparate people sitting around a table in an office talking about cars like it was the world's least interesting topic of conversation."

"Disparate?"

"There's no chemistry between you. No..."

"Sparkage," James supplied helpfully.

"Thank you."

Tiff leaned across the bar, closing the gap between he and his original companion. "We can't all be that lucky."

Jeremy almost choked on his beer and he heard James have the same problem. It sounded to him as if Tiff had lowered his voice, slipped suddenly from general banter to what Jeremy would definitely describe as sensual aural massaging. One glance at Richard though, and Jeremy thought he must have been mistaken.

He was still sitting, beer in hand, that incorrigible smile on his face. "No, I suppose not."

Tiff sighed. "No chance then?" And Richard shook his head slowly. "Can't blame a man for trying."

~

"He was coming on to you."

"He was not coming on to me."

"He was flirting with you."

"He wasn't!"

It was a moot point really. Standing together under the cascade of hot water from the dinner-plate head of the walk-in shower, who was making what advances towards whom didn't seem to matter anymore. The feel of Richard, wet and soapy, pressed against him from head to foot was too perfect for him to care about anything else.

That Richard was allowing James to wash his hair was one of the small things, the ones Jeremy treasured and looked back on as rare moments of absolute peace with the world around him.

He watched James' long fingers card between the flat, dark strands, chasing the shampoo from them, away from Richard's face with his screwed closed eyes, and his mouth tightly shut.

Jeremy's hands were wandering, casually exploring. All three of them were rock hard - Richard's dick was banging against his thigh - but right then they just wanted to touch; the intimacy without the sex. One of Jeremy's very favourite things.

James got all of the vaguely fruit scented shampoo from Richard's hair and closed the gap, wrapping his arms around the younger man so that Jeremy could feel them pressing against his stomach, kissing the back of his head as water poured down over the three of them.

"I think you broke his heart," he murmured into Richard's ear, gaze sparkling with mischief locking with Jeremy's.

"I think you break a lot of hearts," Jeremy took up the mild teasing.

"I'll break both your feet if you don't shut up."

Laughter filled the small, tiled room, soon silenced by the sounds of wet kisses.