The Queer Principles of Kit Webb

by Cat Sebastian

“Fucking difficult,” Kit said so promptly that Percy forgot himself and glanced up at him. He looked disheveled and badly shaven and as if he hadn’t run a comb through his hair since God was a boy. In other words, he looked as he always did. And he was glaring down at Percy, if glaring could be accomplished without any malice. Was there such a thing as an affectionate glare? Percy found that he very much hoped so, because Percy was an idiot.

  “In that case I certainly am always like this,” Percy said as snappishly as he could in the circumstances, which probably wasn’t very snappish at all. “Except for when I’m worse,” he added.

  “Drink your coffee and then come along,” Kit said.

  “I beg your pardon?” Percy hadn’t come all this way, hadn’t ransacked the attics and given his valet nightmares, just to be thrown out on his ear.

  “Drink your coffee,” Kit repeated slowly, “and then go to the back room.”

  “There’s still an hour until you close,” Percy said.

  “Betty will work the shop.”

  Which had to mean that Percy wouldn’t be fighting Betty, which in turn meant that Kit had listened to Percy’s objections and taken them seriously. “Oh,” Percy said, and drank his coffee as slowly as possible so as not to seem too eager.

  Chapter 21

  Kit couldn’t stop staring. It was a blasted waistcoat, or at least something along those lines. And it was made of leather, which on its own shouldn’t be enough to give Kit palpitations. Maybe it was the combination of leather and all those little buttons? Maybe it was the fact that the garment fitted so closely over Percy’s chest?

  Maybe, if he were honest, he had this reaction to everything Percy wore.

  “We’ll try again, just you and me,” Kit said, shoving the few pieces of furniture against the walls to clear a space for sparring. Finally, he took his walking stick and stood it up in the corner. He walked to the center of the room without it, conscious of his limp and the pain in his hip. The other night, Percy had said that Kit’s balance was off, and the more Kit thought about it, the more he thought that was the problem. If he could shift his weight to his good leg and rely less on moving, he could probably hold his own. And if he couldn’t, then they’d figure something else out. “We’ll try to fight, and then from there work up to disarming.”

  He stood in the middle of the room without his cane and felt horribly exposed. His leg could give way at any moment.

  “All right,” Percy said, coming to stand before him. “How do you want to start this?”

  “I ought to tell you that I’ve never taught anyone how to fight,” Kit said. “And I’ve never fought anyone without needing to, so I’m not sure how—”

  Percy punched him in the gut.

  Kit used his bad leg to sweep Percy’s feet out from under him, and Percy hit the floor. Percy sprang up with more speed than Kit would have thought possible and hit Kit in the jaw.

  Kit grabbed Percy’s wrist and used it to spin him around, then pinned it behind his back.

  “Well,” Percy said, his back flush against Kit’s chest. “We’ve established that you can fight.” He elbowed Kit in the belly and then got free.

  “And so can you,” Kit said, dodging a fist. “Your punches are weak. I can’t tell if you’re pulling them or if nobody’s ever taught you how to properly hit someone.”

  “I assure you it’s the latter.”

  Kit was out of breath, but Percy plainly wasn’t. He decided that later on, he’d let himself have a good long sulk about being old and out of shape. For now, he held his hand to the side of his body, at shoulder height. “Hit my palm, as hard as you can.”

  He watched as Percy pulled his arm back and swung.

  “Not horrible,” Kit said. “Give me your hand.” He took Percy’s hand and folded the fingers in, one by one, then tucked the thumb. His fingers were long and fine boned and looked frail in Kit’s own far larger hands. But there were calluses on his palm and the side of his thumb, which Kit hadn’t expected. “Now that’s a proper fist. You do the other hand.” He watched as Percy copied exactly what Kit had done and then held both hands out for Kit’s approval.

  Kit hadn’t expected that, either, hadn’t thought Percy would be an eager student, or that he’d take orders from a commoner. In his experience, rich people went out of their way to avoid listening to anybody else.

  “Good,” Kit said, his voice a bit gruff. And then they stood there like a pair of idiots, Percy’s fists in Kit’s hands. “Good,” he repeated, and watched Percy’s eyes open a bit wider. They weren’t a simple dark gray, as Kit had previously thought, but the same glittering steel as the buttons on his waistcoat.

  The late afternoon sun that filtered through the high, dusty windows of the back room lit Percy so he was all porcelain skin and cheekbones and hair the color of a new guinea, all golden and bright. Kit was thinking of how very badly he did not want to hit that face, when the next thing he knew Percy was aiming a punch at his jaw.

  “You can do better if you swing like so,” Kit said, blocking the blow and demonstrating the desired arc of his arm. Percy tried and didn’t quite manage it. “No, let me show you.” He stood behind the other man, moving their right arms as one. “Like that.” Kit used his left arm to wrap around Percy’s chest, holding him in place. “Now you do it.” Since they were so close, Kit naturally dropped his voice and found that he was all but whispering into Percy’s ear. Percy tried to duplicate Kit’s movement and got it on the first try. “Now try this.” He showed Percy how to punch upward, then how to hook his arm in from the side.

  These motions were second nature to Kit, easy as breathing, so he didn’t have to pay close attention. So it was only natural that he noticed the silkiness of the pale gold hair that had escaped from Percy’s plait, and the scent of soap and leather that seemed to come from the soft skin of Percy’s neck, or the way their bodies fit together. He couldn’t help but notice. It would be odd if he hadn’t noticed those things, really.

  Then Kit went through all those various punches again—purely in the name of thoroughness, that was all.

  On their next round, Percy knocked Kit flat onto the floor. He wouldn’t have fallen if it hadn’t been for his leg, but it was still a good effort.

  “Oh bugger,” Percy said, staring down at him, aghast. He held his hand out to help Kit up. Kit took it, and for an instant he let himself enjoy the surprising strength of the other man’s grip. Then he pulled hard, tumbling Percy onto the floor and using the momentum to get back to his own feet.

  After that, they were off. They were almost evenly matched, what with Kit’s injury and Percy’s inexperience, but he could see Percy catching up, right before his eyes. Occasionally Kit would call out an instruction—“You have two hands, use them both, God damn you” or “Tuck your chin down if you can’t dodge a hit”—but either Percy was a quick learner or he had more experience than he let on.

  “What do you think you’re doing with your feet?” Kit panted. “This isn’t a gavotte. Plant them both on the floor.”

  Percy did as he was told, dodged a punch, attempted to trip Kit, and then laughed. “How do you know what a gavotte looks like?”

  Kit tripped him. He was getting better at balancing on his good leg. “What, do you think poor people aren’t allowed to dance?”

  “Oh, don’t even try to convince me that you’re poor,” Percy said, springing to his feet. “I see how much money you take in. In fact,” he added, attempting to grab Kit’s wrist and winding up with both his hands pinned behind his back, “it’s a wonder that you ever bothered with robbery.”

  Just for that, Kit tightened his grip on Percy’s arms. “You do realize that you need capital to start a coffeehouse, right?”

  “So that’s why you did it? You needed capital? And then you stopped as soon as you had enough money to open a shop, not, say, three years after opening this coffeehouse?” Percy, attempting to get free, wriggled in a way Kit tried not to find quite so interesting.

/>   “No, I did it because I like taking things from people who have too much.”

  Percy stepped hard on Kit’s foot, but Kit didn’t let go. “Oh, so you’re an altruist, then. A modern-day Robin Hood.” He made a gagging noise, and Kit laughed despite himself.

  Kit realized that while Percy might not have walked into this room knowing what to do with his fists, he already understood the basics of fighting, or maybe strategy. He knew the importance of anticipating his opponent’s next move, and he didn’t make the beginner’s mistake of putting defense before offense. He didn’t underestimate Kit, and on the contrary seemed delighted when Kit surprised him.

  He also knew how to fall, and more importantly how to get up. He knew how to move. God, the way he moved—Kit wanted to watch Percy fight someone else, just to be able to savor every lithe movement, every turn and twist and blow.

  And after what had to be half an hour, the blasted man still wasn’t out of breath. Kit was panting. Not only did his leg ache, but so did the entirety of Kit’s person, from his neck to his toes. When Percy got in a solid hit to Kit’s jaw and followed it up with a punch to his stomach, it felt inevitable. Kit felt himself crumple, bending at the middle, and the last thing he did before falling to his knees was pull Percy down with him.

  “Mercy,” Kit said, breathing hard. “No more.”

  “Oh, thank God,” Percy said, collapsing onto his back. “Christ.”

  “I take it you were having me on when you said you hadn’t ever been in a fistfight,” Kit said, tipping forward so he was on his stomach, his cheek resting on his arm.

  Percy turned his head. “No,” he said, sounding surprised. “I’ve done some fencing, but I’ve never fought anyone with my hands. It always seemed a very common thing to do.”

  Percy’s face was streaked with dirt, and he had blood on his upper lip. “You look like a proper ruffian right now, so I think you might have been right,” Kit observed.

  “My valet will have fits,” Percy said.

  Kit lay still for a moment, catching his breath and watching Percy. “My mother had a garden,” he said.

  Percy turned toward Kit at this non sequitur, but didn’t say anything.

  “She mostly grew herbs, but also the usual country flowers: foxglove, larkspur, you know. When they were first married, my father brought her cuttings from a rosebush.” The rosebush had been in Percy’s father’s rose garden, a fact Kit had forgotten but which now brought him up short. He was lying on the floor with the heir to the Duke of Clare, after tussling like a pair of schoolchildren.

  “That’s not a very good story,” Percy remarked after Kit had gone silent. “The next time you choose to regale me with the tales of gardens or horticulture or mothers, or whatever you were doing, do strive to be more entertaining.”

  Kit snorted. “She hated that rosebush. She had a garden filled with flowers that bloomed without any special treatment, but that rosebush needed careful pruning and daily watering. She had to put eggshells and iron nails in the soil. I used to hear her out in the garden, muttering under her breath at it. But every summer, the wretched thing bloomed. And every summer, she acted like she had personally brought those blossoms back from hell itself.” He swallowed. “That’s how I feel when I get my hands on a gentleman’s purse. When that purse goes from being theirs to not being theirs anymore, I feel like I’ve done something.”

  He was speaking in the present tense, as if tomorrow he might get Bridget from the stables and hold up a traveling coach.

  “When it goes from being theirs to being yours, you mean,” Percy said.

  “Some of it, aye,” Kit said, gesturing at the building around them. “But my partner—”

  “Fat Tom? Whistling Nell?”

  Kit laughed. “No, my friend. Rob,” he said, immediately feeling the wrongness of speaking Rob’s name to this man. It felt like a betrayal to share Rob’s secret with a man Rob would have counted as an enemy. A man Kit, too, should have counted as an enemy, and indeed would have, if they hadn’t shared an even greater enemy. “He was also Gladhand Jack. Don’t trust everything you hear in a ballad.”

  “Never tell me you didn’t hold up two carriages at once in Newcastle, and then escape from prison with your arms tied behind your back. I’m crushed.”

  Kit snorted. “Rob took the money and gave it away. He was—good, I suppose. I stole because I wanted revenge and I liked adventure.” It was an oversimplification but not a lie—Kit had begun to steal because he couldn’t have revenge against the one man he wanted to punish, so he settled for spreading his revenge thin, across the entirety of the duke’s class. The Duke of Clare wasn’t the only landowner who destroyed lives; Kit would just have to take his revenge on the targets he had available to him. “But Rob stole because he wanted to do right.”

  “He died?” Percy asked, his voice careful and quiet.

  “A year ago.”

  “Is that why you don’t do it anymore? I thought it was your leg, but is it because it doesn’t feel like you’d be doing right without him?”

  The truth of that statement shot through Kit’s veins like ice. He felt like he had spent months trying to figure out what was wrong, what was missing in this new life he was trying to live. And this man had figured it out after hearing not three sentences about Rob.

  If Rob had been alive, Kit would have figured out how to work around his bad leg. Even if he hadn’t been able to ever sit on a horse again, he’d have managed to do something. But without Rob, without Rob’s conviction that what they were doing was right and good, then Kit had nothing to spur him on but anger. Kit had found comfort in Rob’s unshakable, albeit lunatic, belief in the righteousness of what they were doing. Not being a madman, he hadn’t agreed himself, but Rob’s principles washed their actions of some of their less savory qualities.

  Percy propped himself up on his elbow and looked down at Kit. Kit felt his breath catch in his throat.

  “Where did you learn to fight?” Percy asked.

  Kit didn’t remember a time when he hadn’t tussled with his brothers, Jenny’s brothers, and Rob. And with Jenny, too, come to think. “In the country, children learn to hold their own,” he said.

  “Where in the country did you grow up?”

  Kit swallowed. He didn’t want to tell Percy the whole story; he didn’t want to talk about it to anybody, and especially not to the Duke of Clare’s son. But the thought wasn’t as distasteful to him as he thought it should be. “Oxfordshire,” he said.

  Percy didn’t say anything, but his eyes searched Kit’s face. He was making a choice, Kit realized—he could ask where in Oxfordshire Kit came from, and from there it was only a short distance to the truth coming out. Percy was so close that Kit could see his pulse beating in his throat. They had been even closer when they were sparring—back against chest, cheek against cheek—but this was different.

  “What did you want revenge for?” Percy finally asked.

  And, Christ, Kit couldn’t answer that, not when he could smell the man’s soap and sweat. Not when the mere inches separating them felt both too near and too far. He put a palm flat on the ground to push himself up to his feet.

  Percy stopped him with a hand to Kit’s chest. “Wait,” he said. “I shouldn’t have asked that. It’s none of my business. What I should have said is that—” He hesitated, obviously struggling for words. “I should have said that I can imagine a good number of reasons why a person might want revenge, and I find myself living through one of those reasons.” He didn’t move his hand from Kit’s chest, even though Kit had stopped trying to get up. “I used to think that revenge was about defending one’s honor, but it turns out that honor is just spite dressed up for Sunday.”

  Kit placed his hand over Percy’s, holding it in place over his chest, so the other man could feel the rapid thrumming of Kit’s heart. “And are you not a spiteful man?” Kit asked.

  “I’m afraid I’m very spiteful indeed,” Percy murmured. “I just didn’t have a
ny reason to find that out about myself until recently. It’s amazing how high-minded one can be when everything goes one’s way.”

  “Spite is underrated,” Kit said, embarrassed at how rough his voice was.

  Percy slid his hand out from under Kit’s, long fingers dragging across the linen of Kit’s shirt and the heated skin beneath, and brushed a few sweaty strands of hair off Kit’s forehead. “You’re a lovely man,” he said, and it sounded like a reproach.

  “Haven’t we just been telling one another how unlovely we are?”

  Percy shook his head, his hand coming to rest on Kit’s jaw, his thumb at the corner of Kit’s mouth. He glanced at Kit’s mouth and bit his own lip.

  “I—” Kit started without any idea of what he wanted to say. All he knew was that he liked Percy’s hand on him, and that this was a complication neither of them needed.

  Percy took his hand away and sat back on his heels. “I know, I know. You don’t do that sort of thing. Well, my loss,” he said lightly, springing to his feet, leaving Kit on the floor looking up at him, unsure whether he was relieved or disappointed.

  Kit struggled to his feet and made his way to the corner where his walking stick rested and felt the handle fit into his palm.

  “We’re done for the day,” Kit said, and went through the door to the coffeehouse without looking back over his shoulder.

  Chapter 22

  When Percy, uncomfortably sweaty and with a pulled muscle in his shoulder, opened the door to his room, he wasn’t expecting to see Marian sitting on the edge of his bed. As she had the previous time she visited Percy’s room, she once again wore a pair of his dark breeches and had her hair in a plait down her back.

  “It took you long enough,” she said. “Where were you?” She gave him a curious look. “I hope nobody saw you coming in looking like that.”

  Despite himself, he blushed. He could only imagine what she saw—his hair was unbound, and he still wore the buckskins and jerkin in which he had sparred with Kit.