by Harper Fox
Chapter Five: Turning Tide
Thomas spared one moment to glance over at Belle, who had appeared in the doorway. She could be unpredictable when people touched him. “Belle, bed,” he ordered her hoarsely, and after giving him one look of benign curiosity, she turned herself around and disappeared into the kitchen’s shadows.
He was not sure how he had got here. Could not recall any one moment when he had decided to sit up on the sofa, reach round Flynn to grab the back of it and move to straddle him. It wasn’t at all his usual MO. He vaguely remembered being considered a good lover, unless that handful of long-ago acquaintances had been lying to him, and he’d never been afraid to initiate. To shift like this, though, powerful, smooth, and kneel across his lap, the gesture explicit, almost—in Thomas’s small experience of the genre—bloody pornographic.
Flynn gasped, pupils expanding with excitement once more, their darkness almost drowning the green. This time when Thomas’s hands closed on his T-shirt, he arched his back in an explicit gesture of his own, the muscles down his belly contracting into shapely patterns as he drew his shoulders forward. Yes. Take it off. But Thomas was not ready for that yet, wanted badly before he did so to run his hands up under the fabric, to touch without seeing the silk-skinned pectorals, to find with blind precision the nipples he’d felt hardening at his first caress. He closed thumb and finger on them, gently squeezing, and felt Flynn leap like a fish beneath him. A hand on his nape—careful still, but this time brooking no resistance—and Thomas let himself plunge back into the interrupted kiss, capturing Flynn’s lower lip between his teeth for one instant in the lightest teasing nip before meeting him, mouth to mouth, tongue to tongue, unrestrained now and dead serious.
Flynn made a sound whose urgency he recognised, and he unlocked one hand from its grip on his shoulder and ran it, slowly, searching, down over his heaving chest and belly, down again. Some part of Thomas wanted to give up and die of the pleasure, the intimacy and companionship, of the kiss, but he had to see. Sitting back, hearing Flynn moan as their contact broke, he looked down. Nice button-fly Levis, tight-fitting and soft with wear, their dirty-denim shade acquired the hard way. Straining across the crotch…
“Oh, God, look at you,” Thomas whispered, smiling as Flynn dazedly obeyed, and both watched in ragged-breathed intentness as Thomas slipped the first silver button from its hole, then the next and the next. Black cotton boxers underneath, lifting immediately to the swell of his erection. Their hands tussled briefly over the task of easing back the elastic, pulling those and his jeans down far enough. “Look at you.”
Thomas hadn’t spent the best part of the week just gone thinking about this man’s cock, although he now accepted that he had spent most of it thinking about him. If he had allowed himself such speculation, though, he might have come up with a vision like this. Long, hard, in graceful proportion with the rest of him. Sharing some of his colours—bronze in the lamplight, indigo veins patterning. At full stretch, Thomas thought, mouth drying out in excitement, but then as he stared rising harder still, the head darkening.
Flynn shuddered beneath him. A glimmer appeared in the opening of his glans, the sensitive meatus, rose and spilled. “Thomas…”
“Yes. What is it?”
“I want to see you. Take your shirt off.”
“You do it.”
“Oh Christ.” Flynn jerked forward, visibly did his best to be polite with the buttons of the nice linen shirt, then gave up and ripped. He shoved the garment off Thomas’s shoulders, moaned as Thomas at last grabbed hold of his T-shirt and tore it over his head for him. “Yes,” Flynn whispered. “God, look at your beautiful skin.”
Helplessly Thomas obeyed him, glancing down, seeing Flynn’s beauty—and, yes, astonishingly, his own—by contrasts. Growing up, he had always been as brown as Flynn by this time of the year, and he knew he had marks of desert burning almost branded into him, but otherwise he was pale. He never so much as took off his jacket outside if he could help it, even on the beach—didn’t want to be seen.
“Like satin,” Flynn told him, and Thomas, leaning to lock them both tight into the next kiss, felt his belt blindly unfastened, his cords unbuttoned, unzipped. Felt his shaft gently seized through the fabric of his briefs. The sound this gesture wrung from him was to his own ears so desperate and carnal that he tried to recoil, but Flynn stilled him with a touch to his shoulder. “No. It’s all right. Do what you want.”
“You don’t even know what I want,” Thomas chided him softly, touched to the marrow by his willingness, at the same time almost scared at how soon it had been offered. Now Flynn’s caressing hand was reaching down and under to cup his balls. “You don’t know… Easy, Flynn. We don’t need to go so fast.”
“Why not? I do know what you want,” Flynn breathed. “Stand up and let me take the rest of your clothes off. Come here and… Oh, you don’t know me. You can fuck yourself on me till you’re bone dry. Till you’re drained, and burned out, and you can’t feel a thing anymore. I can hold on for you forever. I don’t need—I don’t even need—”
“Flynn!” Thomas cut him off, appalled. He couldn’t escape the insistent pressure being brought to bear between his legs, but he reached and took Flynn’s face in his hands. “My God, is that what you want?”
Flynn sobbed. Thomas froze in horror. They both did. The sound had come without contortion of Flynn’s flushed and eager face, as if someone behind his mask had spoken. A message from a hostage at gunpoint. “No!” he choked out, whether in denial or an answer to his question Thomas couldn’t work out. “Oh…Thomas…”
“Tell me. For God’s sake, Flynn—talk.”
“It’s not what I sodding well want. But…”
“But what?” Carefully, Thomas pulled away the hand that was still clumsily trying to force the situation on, and Flynn cried out and flung his arms around his neck.
Jesus Christ. “It’s all right,” Thomas whispered, throat closing in astonishment. His cock ached at the sudden cessation of touch, a brief pang, but then all he could feel was the terrible heat of tears not his own against his cheek. “What is it? What’s wrong?”
“Don’t. I can’t…”
Thomas gave it thought, distractedly but thoroughly holding him. He reckoned that Flynn probably could, if undisturbed by whatever preconceptions about performance and delivery he imagined Thomas had, or memories of what he was used to having to deliver to someone else.
“It’s all right,” he repeated, an old mantra, worn almost to meaninglessness. Often a lie too. Thomas didn’t know. But it was still of service—Flynn relaxed a little. “All right,” Thomas murmured against his ear. “You’re all right.”
He pushed his hand down into the space between their bodies. Flynn was still erect. Awkwardly, but without hesitation, Thomas took hold of him.
Long, slow strokes, easy as sunlight, never relinquishing the embrace. By the tenth or eleventh of them, Flynn was melting, undone. He managed, on a half-choked rasp, “Got to make it good for you too,” but Thomas only shook his head, brushing a hot smile against Flynn’s neck.
“What’s good for me,” he whispered, not missing a beat of the inexorable stroking, “is if you come. Just come for me. Come…”
It shouldn’t have worked. Little as he knew about him, Thomas was sure that Flynn was used to stronger meat than this. Just to kiss him, and clumsily jerk him off… But Flynn’s eyes flew open, and he seized Thomas’s shoulders, his cock pulsing hard in his grasp. His climaxing shout was shot through with fear, as if he were trying and failing to ride a wave, plunging towards unimaginable wipeout. He jolted forward. “Thomas, no. It’ll tear me apart.”
“I’ll pick up the bits,” Thomas said against his ear, holding him painfully hard. He worked up the beat to a brief, rough frenzy, and felt Flynn convulse in his embrace. Gasped in pleasure and relief as the hot splash hit his wrist and spilled over his hand. “There. There. Come on.”
“There’ll be nothing—nothing lef
t…”
But there was. Thomas kept tight hold of the remains, while Flynn’s cries faded and his respiration climbed back down from assault-course wild to a rhythm that would allow for ragged laughter, and, after an interval, speech. “God almighty. Thomas, I’m sorry. What did you…? What did you do?”
Thomas smiled. A strange thought occurred to him, triggered by who knew what associations in his fractured memory. Intimacy, perhaps. Warm skin against his own. He said, unsteadily, “I used to have friends, you know. They used to call me Tom.”
“Oh.” Flynn shivered with an aftershock, and said the name softly, just a movement of his lips on Thomas’s skin. Yes, Thomas thought. That was who I was to everyone—to myself, even—before I joined up, before Captain Thomas Penrose got himself born. “Tom,” Flynn repeated, and Tom let his eyes close, burying his face in Flynn’s hair.
An interval passed. Gradually the room fell again into its accustomed sea-whisper silence. Flynn sat curled in Tom’s arms, or perhaps it was the other way round—it was hard to tell from their tangle. Either way, Tom was still hard, his erection pressing warmly to Flynn’s thigh. It seemed to him a distant concern. For the moment it felt to him as if seeing and feeling Flynn come—crashing whatever barricades that had involved—had been enough. Then embarrassment stirred, and he tried to shift back a little.
“Hoi,” Flynn whispered hoarsely. “Where are you off to?”
“Nowhere. Just… Not everyone likes to be prodded after…”
“After?” Flynn interrupted him, easing away far enough for Tom to see his puzzled, frowning smile. “Do you somehow think we’re done here?”
“Well, I know things aren’t simple for you.” Not even the animal reflex of orgasm, Tom thought. The simplest thing in the world, snarled up inside you till it looked less like pleasure than pain. “We can be done, if you like.”
Flynn shook his head. His breath was still unsteady, a damp flush painting his cheeks. “You’re a one-off, aren’t you?” he said, running a hand over Tom’s hair. “That’s a first for me, at any rate. Look, if you haven’t got any plans for all that potential, I do, and…” He paused, raising glowing eyes to Tom’s. “Something was said about an upstairs.”
Their hand-in-hand ascent of the watchtower’s stairs should have been awkward, a comedy. But Flynn put out a hand and led him, negotiating the steep curve backwards, smiling down on him, and his presence made a small ritual, a circle dance, of the climb. Tom felt as if he could see them from outside, as if he was the tower, watching them. Shadow puppets on a wall. Shaking his head, he tried to restore a sense of reality. A tumble on the sofa was one thing—he didn’t recall one second when he felt he’d had a choice. But taking Flynn to bed…
They stood together in the round upper chamber. Flynn, who had not let go of his hand, surveyed its moonlit circle. “Beautiful,” he said, then turned to look straight at Tom and repeated it—beautiful—on such a note that Tom thought few human creatures must ever have heard, let alone one man from another. Let alone him.
He felt his joints try to slacken, his cock grow taut and hard, trying to lift to his belly in the confines of his pants. Taking Flynn to bed was the only thing in the wide wild world to do, and if it damned him, did nothing but remind him of his losses, so be it. Flynn had led him up the stairs, but it was Tom who kissed him, said, “Come on,” and pulled him down after him onto the bed.
When matters became urgent—which they soon did; Tom could hold his fire for a more than respectable time but was entirely male and human—he murmured a laughter-shaken wait a second against Flynn’s mouth and rolled out from under him. In the bathroom, he knew a moment’s near panic, then took a breath and pulled out a box at the back of the cabinet’s bottom drawer. The lubricant was near to hand, from the rare nights when he needed to jerk off and his own dry touch was unpleasing to him. But he hadn’t, for God’s sake, always lived like a sodding monk, had he? No, there, right at the back, and just within their sell-by date…
When he returned from the bathroom, Flynn was watching. He had taken the opportunity to skin out of his clothes and array himself on Tom’s bedspread, flat on his stomach, propped on his elbows. He had the air of a man who knew from long experience that the inviting pose would work. Tom, freezing to a halt at the foot of the bed, tried not to let it. Whatever sexual routine Flynn employed—whatever had made him astonished, that Tom could give without immediately needing to grab back—he didn’t want to fall in with it. But Flynn’s gaze had settled on him, front, down and centre, and he supposed his persistent erection, his hypnotised stare, hardly conveyed a refusal. “God, Flynn…”
“Yes. Come here,” Flynn said, then paused, as if to judge his next words carefully. As if gauging him. “Get your clothes off. And come and shove that in me before it explodes.”
The crudity was deliberate. Delicate somehow too. Tom knew that, by the standards of soldiers and Navy men, his own language was restrained—comically so, according to those with whom he’d shared barracks and field-hospital surgeries. He didn’t consider himself more than ordinarily decent—just shy of rough words out of context or for their own sakes. Flynn’s context was new to him. Flynn, who looked as if he possessed a bone-deep decency of his own, could stir him profoundly with a well-judged obscenity or two. Tap a vein of raw sexuality he wasn’t sure he could bear to confront.
“Tom, come here.”
Tom fell on him. He tried not to—not in the sense of a lion falling on a bloody antelope, but knew he hadn’t been much gentler. He pushed him down onto his belly, feeling the sense of fit, of blessed homecoming, as his cock slid up between strong male thighs. Panting, bracing to one arm, he reached for the box of condoms, and felt Flynn suddenly close one hand on his wrist.
“Don’t bother. I’ll take the lube—you’re a big lad, Dr. Tom, in case nobody’s told you—but…I trust you.”
Good luck with the novel fucking ways he comes up with of committing suicide every other week…
Tom took hold of his shoulders. With the exception of his mother’s, Rob Tremaine’s was the last voice he wanted to hear in his head at this moment. “Flynn. Don’t be soft. You shouldn’t trust any man, not like that.”
“Any?” Flynn, glancing back at him wide-eyed, tried for a weak grin. “How often do you think I—”
“I don’t care how often. I’m not a saint, and even if I had been, I’m a doctor. I do a shift in Penzance casualty every week—I’m exposed to blood all the time. I get myself checked, but, Flynn…”
“All right, all right,” Flynn capitulated. For a second, Tom thought there were tears in his eyes. Of frustration? Maybe. If it was Tremaine he was getting compared to, he had no doubt that Flynn could launch him like a cruise missile, no questions asked.
Tom flashed back helplessly to that vulpine grin, raw-boned build. Yes, Rob would have ploughed his way up Flynn so hard the poor bastard would be tasting his come by now. Tom wondered if any other approach seemed tame to Flynn by comparison—if Rob expanded to fill his horizon, blocking the light…
“Tom, for God’s sake. What are you waiting for? Come here. Let me do the honours.”
Tom struggled back into the moment. Flynn’s deft attentions with condoms and lubricant kept him there, breathing deeply for control, but as soon as the practicalities had been seen to and Flynn had stretched out on his stomach, doubts assailed Tom once more. Yes. Eclipsed. Flynn had said he was big, but maybe it wasn’t enough. Safely sheathed and drenched in lube, straining at Flynn’s entrance, Tom slipped a hand beneath him. Said, as gently as he could, “You’re not hard.”
Flynn shivered. He rubbed his forehead on his folded arms. “Are you…are you surprised, after the wring-out you gave me before? I will be, once you’re inside me. Come on. Please.”
Carefully Tom explored his softened shaft. He uncapped the lubricant once more and eased back, sliding two fingers down between his buttocks. Finding and circling his hole. He heard Flynn suck a breath. “That okay?”
“Mm. God, yes. Better than.” Flynn moaned, arched his back. Drew his legs up to accommodate the touch, and Tom pushed the caress forward, slipping one slick fingertip inside, exerting gentle pressure just inside the rim. “Yes. Don’t stop that. I’m just… I’ll be better in a minute.” Suddenly he lifted his head and glanced back at Tom over his shoulder, his smile nervous, hard to read. “You’re different, you know. When you touch me, when you look at me…you make the world seem different. Less of a battlefield.”
Tom didn’t know what to say. His throat was closing. “Good,” he whispered, for want of anything better, and brought a second fingertip to bear, gingerly stretching.
Flynn jumped. It was a tiny movement, repressed a fraction of a second too late. Tom read it instantly—pain, too sharp to hide. Immediately, involuntarily, his touch became medical. “Flynn, for God’s sake. You’re hurt down here. You’re swollen.” Not waiting for Flynn to move or speak, he sat up, reached over him and switched on the bedside light. “Let me see.”
“Tom… What the fuck?” Flynn scrambled backward, raising a hand to shield his eyes. The light was stark. Tom read away insomniac nights here, propped against the headboard where Flynn was now hopelessly trying to retreat. Trying, at the same time, to pull up a sheet, because both of them knew that Tom, who had picked up a tiny swell of muscle in the dark, was not about to miss the bruises with which he was painted from stomach to groin. Couldn’t pretend to, even if he wanted. “Shit,” Flynn groaned, drawing his knees up to his chest. “Couldn’t you have just left well alone?”
Tom would have liked to. Shock was taking care of his erection, but the sudden shut-off from an arousal so massive and sweet was sending nausea through him, and a cold dull ache. “Sure,” he said unsteadily, coming to kneel beside Flynn. He tugged off the condom, abruptly sickened by it. “If anything had been well, I’d have left it. Jesus, Flynn.” He ran a bewildered hand into his hair. “If you’re in an abusive relationship, there’s people who can help you. I’ll help you.”