Driftwood

by Harper Fox

  Flynn broke into laughter. It was the first unpleasant sound that Tom had heard from him—bitter, full of pain. “Who the fuck are you—Oprah bloody Winfrey?” He seized a corner of the rumpled bedspread and pulled it over his thighs, as if his own lax cock suddenly shamed him. “The Navy deals with that kind of shit in-house, I promise. And if I am—which I’m not—you’d better believe, it goes two ways. I’m not a hurt lamb, Tom. I ask for it. I fucking beg.”

  Tom sat back on his heels. He transfixed Flynn on one dark look. “Well,” he said stonily. “The difference with me, sunbeam, is that you’re not gonna get it.”

  He dragged out blankets from the linen basket, a cotton sheet. Picked up a pillow from the bed and did not quite throw it at him. Flynn, not meeting his eyes, took the things from him and made for the stairs. Tom turned his back on him.

  He got almost as far as the bed before his brow contracted, and he turned and padded silently to the third stair down, where he could watch without being seen. He knew how cold the stone flags were to bare feet. Naked, he crouched, wrapping his arms round his knees. He saw Flynn stumble over to the sofa and lie down, curling himself up in the blanket. He saw Belle pad cautiously across the living room towards him and stand apprehensively for almost a minute before jumping up beside him. Flynn started violently and made a sound that accurately reflected the shock of having a dog the size of a small pony leap on him out of the dark, but Belle laid herself placidly down beside him, and after a moment, he buried his face in her coat. Tom got up, stiff and cold to the bone, and went back to the rumpled bed.

  Tom had adopted Belle just before he moved into the watchtower. He had never known the place without her, and its unbreathing silence, as he made his way downstairs in the dawn light, sent a chill through him. The pillow, shaken out, was placed neatly on the sofa, the sheet folded on top. The dinner dishes from last night had been washed and were gleaming in the rack.

  Flynn was sitting outside on one of the rocks that dotted the narrow strip of turf that divided the tower’s foot from the cliff. He had both blankets wrapped around his shoulders. Tom wondered how long he had been there. Belle, if not exactly leaning on him, was sitting close enough to shed some body warmth and had an air of being on guard. When she heard the back door open, she got up and came over to greet Tom, waving her long tail, but then circled straight back to Flynn. Looking after him, aren’t you? You’re a better host than I was.

  He said his name gently, and Flynn turned around. For a moment his face was a blank, his eyes as empty as the grey sea horizon on which they had been fixed. Then he smiled, far more warmly than Tom thought he deserved. Real, Tom asked himself, or a reflex of self-defence? After last night he couldn’t be sure. “Morning.”

  “Morning,” Tom said, taking up a diffident position on the rock beside him. “Here. Made you a cup of tea. Wasn’t sure how you took it, but…”

  “But you’ll have observed that, although I am clearly fit and trim, I have my weaknesses, and I enjoy my food. You therefore made it nice and strong, with milk and sugar, which is exactly right. You’re a perceptive man.” Their eyes met in wry acknowledgement of what his acuity had cost them both last night.

  “Listen,” Flynn continued after an interval, gratefully wrapping cold fingers round the mug. “Some of that bruising is from the other week. That wave knocked the holy crap out of me. And I’ve done a rescue since, a tough one. Some of it’s from then.”

  “Not… Not all, though.”

  “No. Not all.” They sat for a while in silence, and once more somehow it was not uncomfortable. Despite everything. A rosy May dawn was trying to get itself born through the mists on the moors to the east, every moment the air was soaking up more and more light. Flynn said, beginning a smile that promised to be brighter still, “That was some great sex we nearly had, wasn’t it?”

  Tom snorted. He shifted his backside closer to Flynn’s and put an arm around him. “Yeah. The best.”

  “What I wouldn’t give for another crack…”

  Tom said nothing, but tried to indicate by his posture that the world was very wide, and Flynn a free agent within it. That he, Tom, was both available and open to suggestion. Flynn sighed and leaned lightly into him, as if seeking his warmth. “Oh God. You don’t understand.”

  “Ready to tell me,” Tom said, not as a question. “Come on.”

  “Rob was my copilot,” Flynn began. That much told, he paused, but Tom didn’t need him to elaborate on the significance. He had seen the bond in action, over and over again. It instantly threw new light on Tremaine—promoted him from dangerous nuisance to Flynn’s brother-in-arms. He nodded, and Flynn went on, with an odd little flicker of gratitude at having been so understood. “Not on search and rescue. We used to do maritime security over at Portsmouth.”

  “Drugs and weaponry?”

  “Yeah. I was good at it, believe it or not. Lieutenant Commander, Airborne Surveillance and Control. I had a six-man team, and…I had Rob.” He shivered, shook his head. “Or Rob had me. I’m not sure which. He was always a bit of a force of nature, Tom, but back then I didn’t mind so much. We started practically the first night after we’d flown together. You’re high as a kite after a risky op, you know? And it doesn’t feel like anyone can bring you down except…”

  He faded out. Tom gave him a break, from his own attention and the painful narrative, reaching round behind him to pull up the blanket which had started to slip off his shoulder. He finished for him, after a moment, “Except someone who was out there too.”

  “Yes. Yes, exactly. Happened every time. For him I think it became like a ritual, something he had to do, and as soon as I felt that, it—well, it wasn’t good anymore. A couple of times—I should’ve busted him in the chops after the first one—I said no, and either he wasn’t listening or he didn’t take me seriously, but… God, Tom.” Flynn turned a little to look at him. “Why didn’t I stop him? I’m not soft, and I’m not anybody’s patsy. I…”

  “He is a force of nature,” Tom interrupted him gently. Maybe the question had been rhetorical, but Tom’s years as soldier and doctor had showed him a lot of men, a lot of jungle paths. “I know you’re a proper hard-arse, Flynn, but blokes like that, once they get into the habit, I think it’s like trying to stop a bloody hurricane. And I’ve known a fair number of pilots. Seconds too. They’d go a long way, do pretty much anything, to protect their bond.”

  “Is that what I was doing?” Flynn whispered, lifting his hands to his mouth. “Maybe. God, when I listen to you, it doesn’t sound so bloody pathetic, but…” He took his hands down, and Tom sensed in the movement of his shoulders his effort to brace and go on. “Anyway. I didn’t have much more time to worry about it. Our next callout, my helicopter ditched. She was a Lynx, brand new, top of the range. I got one warning light on the board, and—thirty seconds later she was down.”

  Down. Tom released a breath. He had seen how they went, these unlikely contraptions of blade and spin, had watched one hit by a missile over a compound in Helmand. A plane, structurally aerodynamic anyway, would sail on briefly, but the birds just dropped when their rotors stopped, pitched down in a screaming flail of metal and howling engines. “Thirty seconds? Did anyone have time to bail?”

  “No. I don’t remember it, not even hitting the water. I was out cold. All I know about it is what Rob’s told me—he was thrown clear. Fuck knows how, but I wouldn’t be here otherwise. She wallowed for a minute. Air pocket in the cockpit. Rob shot the glass out, pulled me free. He risked everything to get me, Tom. When they start to haul under, they suck everything round them down too. I don’t know how he did it. I don’t know…”

  Nor did Tom. He couldn’t imagine the superhuman effort it would take for a shocked air-crash victim, dumped unprepared into dark waters, to fight his way back in time to make the save. But weird things happened in combat, in the throes of frightened love. Miracles, if you looked at things that way, and God knew Flynn’s presence now, a warm, breathing li
fe in the curve of his arm, seemed pretty much a marvel. It wasn’t the time to question Rob Tremaine’s heroism, and Flynn wasn’t finished—Tom sensed the rest of the story building up in the tensions of his shoulders. He knew what it was. To help him end it, he said, very softly, “All right. What about the others? Your crew?”

  “They were in the cabin. It flooded straightaway. They drowned. I lost them all.”

  Yes, Tom had known. But shock still rocked him. It convulsively tightened his grip on Flynn’s shoulders, and he laid a hand to the back of his neck as he lowered his head, curling up. “Oh, fuck, Flynn. Oh, no.”

  “So it was just us two.” Long minutes had passed, of intense sea-whisper silence. Flynn had one hand on Belle’s collar, the dog having made her way to his distress like some kind of hairy emergency service, the way she always did to Tom on his dark days. His other hand was held in Tom’s, bone-crackingly hard. When he had raised his head, his eyes were empty, his voice hollow and calm. “Me and Rob. The enquiry found pilot error. They couldn’t check the wreckage—we were out too deep for salvage—and even if there’d been a fault, it still would’ve been mine. I made all my checks. I thought she was clean. But she was my bird, my ship, and I just wish…I just wish Rob had let me die with her.”

  Thank God he didn’t. Tom wouldn’t have said it aloud. It would have been facile, and even if somehow in the course of their brief acquaintance Flynn had become so bright and clear a presence in his life that Tom would have meant it, he didn’t expect Flynn to have found any such corresponding comfort in him. He pressed a rough kiss to his temple, and it was as if Flynn had heard the repressed grateful prayer.

  “You don’t know what it was like,” he said roughly. “I was in hospital for weeks, fucking comatose, and—when I woke up, I had every single one of those men’s wives, partners, families at my bedside, trying to absolve me, tell me I wasn’t to blame, or if I was, they—forgave me.”

  “Jesus, Flynn.”

  He released Belle but retained his grip on Tom’s hand, wiped a palm across his eyes. “And when they went home, there was just Rob. Day in, day out. I sound like I’m complaining, don’t I?”

  “No. No, just telling me. Did he help?”

  “You have no idea. He just took me over. He hired me a shit-hot Navy lawyer, challenged the enquiry on grounds of lack of evidence. Overturned them too, so instead of being out on my arse I was given retraining and a non-piloting role down here with SAR.” He paused, brief laughter shaking him. “Couldn’t have got me much further out of the way, unless they’d sent me to Orkney, but I was bloody grateful for the gig. Not that I got here before I’d chucked a spectacular nervous collapse. Psychiatrists, specialist clinics, the lot. Rob paid for it all.”

  “Didn’t the service do anything for you?”

  Flynn shrugged. “I saw a couple of Navy shrinks. Got short shrift from them, though. I think I was meant to accept my dishonourable discharge and clear out. I’d taken six of their best down with me, hadn’t I?”

  Tom nodded bitterly, thinking of Victor. The forces looked after their own, until certain harsh and deep-carved lines of perceived honour or courage were crossed. In Helmand, he’d been expected to kick arse as much as offer counsel to the troubled soldiers who found their way into his office. “Okay. Yes, I can imagine. But—lawyers, that kind of care… It must have cost Robert a fortune.”

  “Several. I was out of commission for months. His family’s loaded, but I know he paid for a lot of it himself. And it wasn’t just that, Tom—he transferred down to Hawke to be with me, got a post with SAR. All right, he’s possessive, but…if you think about it, that’s fair enough. He pretty much owns me.”

  Bollocks. Tom bit that back too. If that was Robert’s line, he could see how Flynn had come to be caught on it. He settled for a gentle, “Nobody owns you, Flynn,” rubbing one thumb across the back of his tight-clenched hand.

  “I know. I’m sorry. I’m still fucked up, I suppose—I don’t always see things right. Either way, he deserves better than he gets from me. I mess with his head at least as much as he does mine. He hates my surfboard, hates my stupid little sports car. I drive him crazy by volunteering for the rescue winch in storms. Like he said, my hundred different ways of committing suicide. He feels like I’m always at the end of my leash, pulling to be away.”

  “And…are you?”

  “Yes. But not the way he thinks. I’d pull away from it all if I could work out how.”

  Flynn turned his face to Tom’s shoulder. After a moment in which his heart and chest ached so much that he couldn’t move, Tom closed both arms around him. He didn’t know what to say—knew anyway, from bitter experience, the point at which words failed. He kissed the top of Flynn’s head, pulled the blankets up tight round him, and wondered after a while if the telling of this story had worn the poor bastard back to sleep, he was so still and silent in his arms.

  Then, suddenly, Flynn sat up. He put both hands to Tom’s shoulders and eased him back, just far enough to see him properly. To Tom’s astonishment, his face was alight with compassion. “You think I’m lost in this, don’t you?” he whispered, brushing a fingertip touch to Tom’s brow, his lips, the corners of his eyes. “You think I don’t see anything else. But I do. You’ve learned about my kind of pain the hard way. I can see…” Soft, searching kisses followed the touch. Tom shuddered, almost unable to bear them. They targeted every mark that grief had carved into him, and he had thought his own story safely buried far away, subsumed in the better, easier business of dealing with Flynn’s. He should have known, shouldn’t he, that such a man would not tolerate the one-sided world Tom had built to contain himself. “I can see your cairn,” Flynn said, nodding towards the mound of glimmering quartz stones on the turf a few yards away. “Who’s it for?”

  “David,” Tom told him, shocked into truth. “David Reay. He was my assistant medical officer in Helmand. We did three tours together.”

  “Your lover?”

  “Once. He always wanted it, but I couldn’t face being gay, not in the army, not out there. Then I realised how stupid that was, and we had one night. He was so bloody happy. Next day he went out with a convoy, to help at the hospital in Lashkar Gar. They were ambushed. He never came back.”

  Flynn reached for him. Tom thought it was only in comfort. Looking into Flynn’s eyes, he saw that was all he intended—the touch that would bridge the gap when words failed, a hand to his shoulder and the side of his face. Tom could hardly bear the kindness of it. The understanding, the compassion—too much, and suddenly, when Flynn’s grip tightened, not what he wanted anymore. He gasped. Need seared through him, everything he’d put on hold last night and during the chained-up years just gone. “Flynn…”

  “What is it?”

  No need to explain. Tom saw the same change transfiguring him. Grief flashing off into hunger, like oil on water catching fire. If they’d had the chance—if life had bound them together, given them some years, was this how they would have solved all their pains? Their joys too, triumphs and disasters, all finding solace or celebration in bed, or out on the flower-starred turf? “That second crack you wanted,” he rasped, and waited until Flynn’s attention was on him so keenly he felt it like a burn. “For God’s sake grab it now.”

  They crashed down from the rock onto the grass. Flynn’s blanket tore loose from his shoulders and Tom caught him, grunting in winded pleasure as his weight impacted, warm and sweet and naked as the day. “Flynn. You’ll catch your death.”

  “Don’t care. Just love me. Have me. Do it.”

  Tom groaned. He snatched the kiss Flynn was fiercely offering and struggled on top, mindful of his lover’s bruises, but only just. Flynn resisted briefly then rolled luxuriantly under, stretching out in an ecstasy of surrender. Joyfully he grabbed Tom’s pyjama bottoms, dragged them down around his hips and opened his thighs for him. “Come on! Come here!”

  Tom stared down in a mix of lust and concern at the tanned, bare flesh on the
wet turf. “Oh, I don’t want to hurt you.”

  “Damn you. Get on with it.”

  Shuddering, Tom obeyed. Spine dissolving in heat, he let his rigid cock shove hard between Flynn’s thighs. Once and once only, he told himself. A first time and a last with this perfect and forbidden man. He thought of David, whose funeral he had not attended, whose name had never passed his lips in three dry-mouthed years, and he reached for Flynn, a gift given him for the night. They were into extra time now, the sun piercing clouds, kissing his bare back with the first real heat of summer—injury time, Tom thought, thrusting hard, taking his weight on his arms to spare those bruises, which looked to him like fist marks, not wave tumble or harness. He wouldn’t question Flynn’s devotion—or thraldom—to Robert Tremaine. He would let him go.

  Flynn’s hands closed round his backside. His lovely face contorted to a mask lovelier still, the beginnings of orgasm, calling up Tom’s own like thunder from the place where he had boxed it up the night before. He noticed irrelevantly that the thyme was flowering, dust-pink blossoms giving off an aromatic tang under the crush of their bodies. Milkwort too, tiny flashes of heaven-blue. Soon all the headlands would be starred with them.

  He groaned and stiffened, and Flynn in his extremity surged up beneath him, knocking him down onto his back. Tom yelled inarticulately, heaving up against his weight, feeling his own strength as almost inhuman, this close to the peak. Flynn snarled his name, face contorting, and slammed him back down so hard that the turf abraded skin off him. His shaft was trapped and starting to erupt against Tom’s belly. Clenching his fingers in the short hair at his nape, Tom let go and climaxed incandescently, morning sunlight tearing into bloodstained silver fragments in his eyes.