But maybe Jack had seen all the way into him the way he looked deep into a tree he was felling. And maybe he was as disgusted as everyone else with what he’d found.
Jack passed back a full mug, hot water splashing out and blackening the gray dirt where it landed. Charlie took it and went to sit as far from the man as possible. He wasn’t here to make friends. He wasn’t here to make anything other than some quick money. Apparently that wasn’t going to be as quick as he’d imagined. He checked for snakes, then sagged down against one of the few trees still standing in their little clearing. By the time he looked up, Jack was already seated by the fire with his back to him, eating his breakfast.
The view was both a blessing and a curse.
He ate fast, but Jack ate faster and was soon heading into the forest, a small nod in his direction as he passed. No smile. But he couldn’t recall ever seeing one on Jack’s lips. Charlie couldn’t help himself and smiled back, whether out of nervousness or having forgotten for a brief moment that he was supposed to be a tough son of a bitch who didn’t need anyone’s good opinion. He tore his eyes away as soon as he realized what he’d done.
Jack kept walking.
Of course he did.
Once he was alone, Charlie doused the fire—bushfires would kill you as fast as the ants, snakes, and spiders—collected his kit, and trudged off to his waiting half-dismembered tree trunk to lose himself in the day’s work.
Within fifteen swings of the axe, sweat coated his body. He’d spent most of the afternoon before sawing the log to the necessary lengths, so that day’s task was to cut it away and carve out as many sleepers as he could without much waste. A relentless and repetitive job. By midmorning he’d chalked it up, hacked out some rough pieces, and was using the broadaxe to hew them down to the right dimensions. Before every swing, he hesitated, and the cut wasn’t clean enough or veered too close to chopping off more than required.
Christ. He would never see London.
He’d bankrupted himself buying the damn tools, and he’d starve to death before he reached 1913. Falling was not for him. There had to be easier ways to make money. But Perth city wasn’t going to be a welcoming place for him, and he’d never get an apprenticeship. He had no skills. No prospects. Working here would change all that. But every swing of the axe cut away a bit more of his delusion and reminded him that he was never getting out of this damned forest.
When the axe came down crooked and sheared an inch too far in, another sleeper was ruined. He hurled his axe into the nearby thicket and roared his frustrations into the forest.
He roared, and he roared…. The defeat, the hurt, the despair, and disappointment all wriggling out from where he’d tied it down with shitty knots inside his belly, and now, as good as alone with only God to witness, it all burst free and shredded his throat as it escaped. Misery brought with it a rushing satisfaction.
Until that rush eased, and he was left with… nothing.
He slumped to the ground and hugged himself, because no one else would do it.
What the hell was he doing here?
The ground vibrated with the thunder of footsteps and the bracken and twigs cracked as Jack exploded through the bush toward him, shuddering to a stop at the edge of the little space the fallen tree had created.
He panted, his eyes wild and searching. “Are you hurt?”
“What? No… I….”
Jack collapsed against the tree and fought for breath. “Jesus, I thought you’d chopped an arm off or something.”
Doug’s words from Jack’s quiet mouth.
“Didn’t want to miss the show?” The words were out before he could stop himself, but it felt good to snipe at someone. Everyone else had taken advantage of his stunned silence when they’d rejected him, but he didn’t have to hold back.
Not when he had nothing to lose.
“Because I’d have to sew the bloody thing back on!” Jack shouted back.
The image of this giant of a man sitting down to thread a needle and reattach his arm tickled at Charlie, wiggled in amongst the leftover rush from all the screaming, enough to spark a small chuckle that rippled up out of his belly into a full-throated laugh. So much so it half choked him. It wasn’t that funny, but it was good to laugh at something. Anything.
When he managed to stand upright, a wary smile hovered on Jack’s face, like some little forest creature poking its snout out of a hollow into the sunlight to see if it was safe. As smiles went, it was pretty ordinary, but since it was the only one he’d ever seen from Jack, he was taking it.
Charlie sobered, wiped the tears out of his eyes, and leaned against the log that never seemed to end.
“Sorry for the fright,” he said. “But thanks for coming running. What would you have done if I had chopped something off?”
Jack shrugged. “Probably carry you to town. You don’t look like you’d weigh very much.” Brown eyes roved over him. “Couple of pounds. Easy.”
Charlie’s mouth dried at the thought of being carried by Jack through the forest, even if he were bleeding to death. Enough to take the sting out of the unflattering assessment.
Jack’s smile faltered, and his hand went to the back of his neck, massaging along it and keeping his head down. Charlie wanted the laughing Jack back. But that would be dangerous. They’d just spoken more than in the past three weeks combined, and he wasn’t about to become matey with the man. In his experience, that would lead to trouble. Better to stick to their separate parts of the forest.
Very separate.
“I suppose I’d—”
“Look, would you—” Jack spoke at the same time.
“Sorry, Jack. You first.”
“I’m ahead on my order. Do you want a hand?”
Charlie blinked at him, not sure he’d heard right. “I…. But….”
Jack twisted awkwardly where he leaned. “I’m not offering to do all the work, mate. But you’re way behind, and I don’t like to see a fella struggling. Plus, your technique is bloody awful.” He misread the silence as disapproval. “Sorry for the language.”
And he looked it. All these words pouring forth out of him like some broken dam. What else did Jack Tapper keep bottled up?
“I’d be—” He was about to say grateful, but he wasn’t sure he’d be able to say it without bursting into tears. Jack’s generosity was one step too close to kindness. And being grateful was a step far too close to being vulnerable. Nobody liked to see a man cry. He took a long breath. “I wouldn’t say no to learning from the best.”
Jack blushed—an honest-to-goodness blush. The color darkened his already rich skin and spread toward his ears, and he mumbled something that sounded like “hardly.” Jack picked up the ruined sleeper like it was made of straw, measured it with his eyes, and then cut it down to a smaller size that might not get Charlie the full price, but could be sold for less elsewhere. All fixed with three sure and sharp strokes. Jack hefted it up and threw it to the side for moving later, then picked up a rough piece, laid it down, and signaled for Charlie to squat beside him as he drew on it with chalk.
Heat pumped off Jack’s skin. Charlie’s head swam with the rich scent of Jack’s sweat, tinged with the dried combustible aroma of eucalyptus leaves. He steadied himself against the log.
Jack’s eyes brimmed with passion for his trade. For all his solitude and quietness, Jack loved what he did, and despite the toughness of his own personal bark, sharing that love was clearly not a chore. It was in the eager way he eyed the piece of timber, in the gentle slide of his hand over its surface, getting to know it. It was in the almost shy glance he threw up to make sure Charlie was ready.
Jack was going to enjoy this. And for the first time since arriving, Charlie thought he was going to as well.
“You see, the thing about cutting these bastards is….”
THEY’D WORKED right through lunch, and Charlie didn’t care. No rumbling stomach was going to distract him from this rush. After hours of working with Jack, he
still wasn’t up to the eight sleepers a day that many boasted, but he’d more than doubled his own output. He’d cut five with increasing ease, but it had been hard to stick with a course of improvement when continued failures brought almost greater rewards.
At least three times, Jack’s arms had enclosed him as he repositioned Charlie’s hands and stance. With that axe-hewn body pressed against him, Charlie had stiffened rather than relaxed, until Jack had barked at him to loosen up. Orders were orders, and it became easier to relax, to take on the teaching, and tuck away the little sensations for his own private thoughts.
For all his muscle, Jack was incredibly gentle, and Charlie leaned back a bit to steal what it would be like to be held by such a man. Jack didn’t seem to notice or care. But he’d moved in closer to force him back into the proper position for the cut.
Words flowed out of Jack like a brush fire, unstoppable now that they’d started, caught with a zeal that Charlie hadn’t heard from many people, especially not those talking about carving tree trunks into timber. He’d expected it to be backbreaking and mind-numbing work, but seeing Jack this animated…. He was ashamed to have dismissed it as an unthinking man’s work.
In Jack’s massive hands, this was…. This was art.
And like any apprentice, he wanted to impress. So, despite desperately wanting to take advantage of the cozy position he found himself in, Charlie set his mind to every task Jack gave him. It was easy to blame Fred for the half-hour, halfhearted demonstration he’d reluctantly given weeks past, but really this was all about Jack. He was a master at felling and at teaching. So much so that, by the end of the day, Charlie realized he finally had what he’d been missing all this time.
Belief.
In the timber. In the axe. In himself.
True belief that he would eventually find himself on that London-bound ship after all. And on his way to a whole new beginning.
Sore, sweaty, and exhausted, he was nonetheless jubilant when Jack called a halt and suggested they return to camp. Not that supper would be any good, but he needed the fuel to come back out the next day. Carve out another five or six sellable sleepers. Buoyed by his new progress, all he wanted to do was wolf down whatever scraps he had and return to work.
He was mentally tallying up how much he could cut and what that would translate to in shillings when he heard the crash echo around their little clearing.
“Christ!” Jack shouted, and before Charlie could look up, he’d tackled him and hurled the two of them across the dirt. A ten-foot branch smashed to the ground right where Charlie had been standing, daydreaming about piles of money and ocean voyages, sending up a maelstrom of leaves and splinters.
Jack’s weight crushed the wind clear out of Charlie’s lungs, his bulk having smashed him half into the dirt and half up against the remnants of the cut trunk. Shrapnel peppered his body. Panic fired through him—even as his skin buzzed—and he struggled to breathe. He cranked his neck up to look over Jack at the limb, thicker than both of Jack’s thighs, lying in a cloud of dust, broken twigs, and shed leaves.
Widowmakers, they called them. Not that anyone would mourn him, widow or otherwise.
But while he was staring at what could have been his bloody end, a vaguely sensible part of him realized that Jack’s arms around his waist had failed to loosen. His head still burrowed into the back of Charlie’s neck and shoulders, and his muscles had locked tight. Ordinarily, Charlie’d be happy to find himself so deeply in a man’s arms, but something about the tension with which Jack held him wasn’t right.
And it wasn’t good.
He patted Jack’s forearm, but it didn’t budge. He stroked it instead, like he’d stroke a frightened dog, and spoke softly.
“I’m all right, Jack. You can let go now.” But the big man held tighter.
The danger had passed—he scanned the sky above for any signs of widowmakers still to fall—and Jack didn’t seem to be letting go any time soon, so he lay in the dirt and let the man hold him.
Jack pulled him closer as his legs came up, seeming to cocoon him like he still had to protect Charlie. Jack’s breath blew hot through the linen of the shirt on his back and it jerked like he held back tears. That seemed unlikely, impossible even, but at a loss of how else to help, Charlie stroked the part of Jack’s shoulder he could reach, slow and long. Soothing him into relaxing.
Then, as suddenly as it had come, Jack’s grip loosened and he was gone, ripping his arm out from under Charlie’s body and thrusting him back against the trunk.
Like so much rubbish.
After the day they’d had—after the near-miss he’d had—that was too much. Even for a man who was used to being treated like scraps. Charlie leaped to his feet and chased Jack down, limping from where he’d hit the ground.
“Hey!” He grabbed Jack’s arm as soon as he caught up to his massive strides.
Jack dashed him away like a blowfly and marched on, but Charlie chased him again, caught him again, shouted at him again.
“Jack, st—”
The faller spun so fast that Charlie collided hard into him, and before either of them had a moment to think about what was happening, Jack hauled him up into his arms and kissed him. Charlie froze as a powerful mouth sealed over his, but Jack’s embarrassed withdrawal was all the impetus he needed.
He had a choice in that moment. He could do nothing—he’d gotten really good at that—and Jack would pull away and never, ever reach out again. The awkwardness would eventually pass, and they could go back to chopping trees down together in simmering silence.
Or… he could do something. Take the chance he was always so afraid to. He could trust that this big-hearted, big-fisted man wasn’t setting him up, but opening up. In a way that almost shamed Charlie for his own lack of courage. So, yes, he could do something.
Charlie gripped the back of Jack’s head and held him, kissed him.
Opened for him.
Jack backed him against the trunk of a tree wide enough to hide his whole body, and hefted him against its warm bark. His feet cleared ground and Jack’s massive thigh wedged into his crotch. Kisses devoured him, hungry, desperate, grateful, Jack’s mouth working hard like it had been starved of life the same way it had been starved for words. Charlie tried to keep up, but Jack’s pull was too strong. His passion overwhelmed him, and Charlie succumbed.
Jack dove for Charlie’s neck, his lips and tongue sucking at the sensitive skin. Charlie swallowed his first moan, always so afraid of being heard, but nothing listened except trees and beasts, so he gave voice to the second and pushed himself harder into Jack’s mouth. Jack descended to his knees. Even so, he was still perfectly positioned. Impatience plucked Charlie’s shirt from his trousers, bunched it up high in his big fist, and kissed its way down his sweaty chest to his belly, to the hair trailing below his waistband. With a few pulls more, Jack had him exposed and more than ready.
Jack swallowed him hungrily, and Charlie buckled at the combination of tongue and spit and suction and force. He anchored his fists in Jack’s curls and held on as Jack worked him, spasms shooting up from his groin into his belly, shooting out of his mouth as grunts of pleasure.
“Wait…. Jack!”
But Jack didn’t stop. He worked harder, and the pressure built dangerously in Charlie’s balls. He tried to shove Jack off him, but he was so much the bigger man, so much stronger and more determined. Powerless not to, Charlie shot deep into Jack’s mouth. His body jerked as Jack swallowed it all, as each release unleashed everything he had pent up for weeks in this lonely forest. His body hummed, and he drooped forward, panting, his cock still filling Jack’s mouth, sensitive to his tongue, until Jack finally sat back on his heels. He made a torturously careful business of buttoning Charlie back up, before rising to sag forward against him, his big body holding Charlie upright where his legs were no longer capable of the job.
Would Jack think him selfish for not immediately returning the favor? But he didn’t seem to mind. He hel
d tight, hugged him, kissed his hair like that was all he wanted, and the longer they stayed like that, the more Charlie became comfortable with it.
“I’ve been thinking about that since the moment I saw you,” Jack murmured against his hair.
Charlie stiffened. Had Jack known why he was there? What he was? His disgrace? Had he pegged Charlie as one of those nancy boys, good for a tumble but nothing more? Then again, it was his cock in Jack’s mouth, not the other way around.
“I wanted it too,” Charlie whispered.
Jack relaxed his hold and bent to kiss him again, before taking his hand and leading him through the forest to their camp. The gruff giant was gone; the silence and the distance between them, which Charlie had read as contempt, had evaporated like a puddle on a hot day.
Yet sadness shadowed those deep brown eyes.
“HE WAS eighteen, like you,” Jack said.
They lay together in Jack’s camp bed. A blanket beneath them softened the coarse canvas against their naked bodies. Charlie was half-draped over the older man. The warmth—inside and out—made it hard to do anything else but lie there. His fingers circled lazily through the hair on Jack’s chest.
“Then again, I was younger then too. Widowmaker came down as he was walking away from me. I called out and he spun, but it was too late. I can still see his smile turning to terror as he realized that too.”
He didn’t say much else. What else was there to say?
“I’m sorry, Jack. That I reminded you of him.” He didn’t mean it in a jealous way, just that Jack had probably done his best to forget, and he’d come barreling in with his boots and his ghosts.
“Hardly your fault. Any more than it was the tree’s. You remind me of his good qualities too, the time we shared. It’s been tough to see you every day and remember what I’d lost.”
Jack kissed the top of his head, then brushed fingers through his hair.
The Faller Page 2