Conscious Decisions of the Heart by John Wiltshire

fuck off, which I enjoyed, and then he started to remind―Well, I won’t tell you all of what he said about me, because I don’t now believe it to be true. But I believed it more then—before I’d met you and been given the benefit of your seemingly unshakable faith in my lovability. But I wanted him to shut up, so I pushed him. I didn’t realise how very slow and unused to such things he was. He just fell backward. His legs hit the—fuck, what’s the word for the thing that runs around a balcony? Anyway, he hit it, and that was that, I was a twin no longer. Just me. I went back into the room and was very sick. I sat with the dead boy for a long time until the sun came up and didn’t know what to do. I thought about all the things he’d said to me. All my life wasted for him. And then I saw his clothes and his passport, and suddenly it was easy. I thought I was owed.”
     
    “You were.”
     
    “Maybe, maybe not. We make our own destinies, as I’ve told you, but I stole his. Whatever he was or wasn’t, that wasn’t right.” He closed his eyes and leant his head back on the sofa. “There, I’ve told you everything. You know all there is to know. Perhaps you would’ve preferred a recitation of all the men I slept with while I was away.” He opened his eyes and added quickly, “But there were none, you understand.”
     
    Ben just smiled wanly and folded his legs up onto the sofa, running his fingers along the stubble of hair at the back of Nikolas’s neck.
     
    “How did you do it? Becoming him? It can’t have been easy.”
     
    Nikolas laughed a bitter sort of sound. “Actually, it was. I just thought what would Nikolas do?” He looked to Ben.
     
    “Run away. Let someone else sort it all out?”
     
    “Exactly. I called his embassy—as he’d have done. I invoked diplomatic immunity—as he’d have done. I blamed it all on my brother, Aleksey—as he’d have done. I left everyone else to sort the mess. Yes, as he’d have done. I actually drank a glass of champagne to Aleksey on the plane home to Denmark.”
     
    “As he’d have done.”
     
    “So, that’s the story of Nikolas. Which now brings me to the next thing I want to tell you. Ask you.”
     
    “Fucking hell, more?”
     
    “I think, maybe, I’m now Aleksey again. What do you think? I don’t need to live Nikolas’s life. I don’t want his life, and I don’t want his name.”
     
    “Okay…That’s going to take some getting used to. I’m not sure. I think of you as Nikolas.”
     
    “I know you do, which is why I asked you first. Think about it, maybe?”
     
    Ben did. He thought about it a lot over the next few hours. He went out to chop some wood, which was a cure for almost any amount of angst. It involved a regular, unthinking physical effort and enabled him to indulge his love of precision, each log chopped just so, stacked just so. As he worked, he thought about Nikolas…or Aleksey. Could he just make the change? To him, Nikolas was everything, and Aleksey was the dark shadow haunting them. After an hour of working so hard he’d stripped down to just jeans and boots despite the falling snow, he looked up to find Nikolas watching him. He jammed the axe into the chopping block and came over, wiping his face on his T-shirt. “You okay?”
     
    Nikolas shrugged. “I’ve been drinking vodka and wishing I smoked still, so maybe not so good.”
     
    Ben switched to Danish, which always made Nikolas laugh at his accent, if nothing else. “You want to go for a run?”
     
    Nikolas shuddered. “In the snow? No. Not particularly.” He stripped off his jacket and put it around Ben, zipping it up. “I was wondering…”
     
    Ben raised his eyebrows. “The answer to that is always yes, as you know.”
     
    “Well, for once, I wasn’t going to ask that. I wanted to know if you wanted to…go out. To eat, tonight.”
     
    Ben frowned. “Okay…not so hard to ask?”
     
    Nikolas seemed annoyed. “I’m trying to ask