by Jules Jones
“Because it draws such heavy current,” Patrick said and started burbling away about house wiring. He’d obviously been having fun with the collection of DIY books Martin had bought them.
George and Patrick wouldn’t be able to do all of the rewiring themselves. But if they knew how to do it safely, they could do a lot of the preparation work. They were patient and careful, making sure they understood what they were doing rather than rushing in.
It had been like that for the last month. They had methodically worked through the house, first going through with a checklist of the faults to be found in an old house and making doubly certain that the surveyor hadn’t missed anything that needed urgent attention, then doing the initial treatment of the small patches of rot to stop it spreading. After that they had tackled the windows, removing the boarding and repairing the windows according to the DIY manual’s instructions. Then they had focused on the kitchen; but alongside that they had started to work on the rest of the house one room at a time, cleaning it and doing the repairs that could be done by two untrained but careful workers who had good reference books and a lot of time and patience.
He knew how important this house was to them by the amount of effort they’d put into it. The three of them had been fortunate to find the house structurally sound in spite of twenty or thirty years of neglect, but there had still been a great deal of work to be done, and even now they’d only got part of the ground floor into reasonable order.
It was going to be home. A home for the three of them, one that gave them access to both worlds. A grass track to a paved road leading to the village and then the city; a stone passage leading to a sea cave and then the open water.
As the Land Rover bumped its way down the one, he felt a yearning to walk the other. “Let’s go swimming after lunch.”
“Taking a break now that you don’t have to be back at work on Monday?” Patrick asked.
“It’s going to be really hot this afternoon, there isn’t anything else that has to be done on the outside of the house for now, and we might as well enjoy not having to rush things before I go back to work.” There’d be more contract work along soon, so he should enjoy the break while he had the chance.
George sat back and stretched. “Sounds good to me. It won’t take long to get the kitchen things set up, and then we’ll have one room completely done other than the rewiring.”
Only one room finished, but it was still quite an accomplishment. One room, and the exterior of the house protected against further damage. They had the beginnings of their home.
He parked the Land Rover by the kitchen door, then strolled around to the front door, looking the house over as he went. What a difference a month had made. He knew that the inside of the house still needed months of work, but the outside was clean and bright with fresh paintwork where not so long ago there had been boarded-up windows displaying years of neglect. There was still a great deal of work to be done, but now it was starting to look like a place where people lived, and not just a building site.
There were still no curtains behind those windows, but someone had put a pair of fossils on the windowsill in the front room, marking it as their house. Something George and Patrick had brought in, or had they found a relic of Mr Parker’s time in the boxes in the cellar?
George and Patrick had followed him and now stood either side of him. “It’s going to be our home, isn’t it?” Patrick said, his voice wistful.
“Yes.” He put his arms around their waists. “And this time next year we’ll have a garden as well.”
Maybe even with roses around the door. He’d never really thought of himself as settling down in a country cottage with his husband. Now he had not just the cottage, but two potential husbands. It might be tight financially, but he’d buy it at the end of the year’s lease. This was where he wanted to be.
They stood together in silence for a moment or two. Then Patrick said, “Time to get the things out of the car!” and headed towards the front door.
Martin and George watched him unlock the door and run into the house, then smiled at each other. “Let him have first go with the new toys,” George said quietly.
“I thought you liked cooking as well?” He’d certainly had the impression that both men had discovered the joys of cooking as a hobby, even with only a minimum of camping equipment.
“Yes, but for me it’s the food that’s important, not the equipment.” George grinned at him. “Although I could get to be fond of a set of those really good knives.”
“We’ll get the place kitted up properly. But we’d better stop admiring it.” He let go of George and headed to the house. “Patrick’s going to need help getting the stuff out of the car.”
George followed him into the house and through to the kitchen, then held the door open for him. “What do you think?”
“Impressed” was what he thought. The kitchen hadn’t been quite finished when he’d last seen it. Now the walls were a freshly painted white, with a cheerful frieze around them at waist height and matching curtains at the window. The table had been stripped back to the wood and refinished. He looked around at the cupboard doors that were now all hanging straight, and knew that if he opened a drawer it would run freely without sticking or jamming. There was a gap in the layout where the old fridge had been, and the wall and floor there were as clean as the rest of the room, all ready to receive the new fridge. The only flaw in the room was the lighting, still only a single bare bulb on a wire dangling from the ceiling. But at least when he flicked the switch the light came on, and that switch was lovingly polished brass.
“It’s wonderful.” Just one room for now. But in a year’s time there would be a whole house like this. Their house.
“Do you think Mr Parker will like it?” Patrick asked.
“I hope so.” He hadn’t told them the whole story, but they did know that the house had been abandoned by the family after too many of them had never come home from the war.
“We owe him for this,” George said, putting a hand on his shoulder. “We’ll cook him dinner, as soon as we have a working cooker. Though we’ll want a couple of days first to practice.”
Patrick nodded. “We’ll have to eat around the kitchen table, but I don’t suppose he’ll mind. It should be fun.”
Light and love and laughter returning to this house with its weight of sad memories. It might be too much for the old man, but it might give him a little bit of happiness. “As soon as we can.”
“Well, we’d better get the things in from the car,” Patrick said, unlocking the back door. “Get them set up properly, and then we can have our first proper meal in our kitchen.”
Lunch was only bacon and baked beans on toast, with a mug of tea, and they ate it sitting around the kitchen table; but it was lunch in their kitchen. They savoured the food, did the washing up, and then had another mug of tea.
Finally George stretched and said, “Swimming?”
“Sounds good to me.” He got up and ceremonially put away the milk in their brand new fridge.
Then they locked the back door and headed down to the cellar. No need for a torch down here now, but they’d need one in the quarry passage. There was wiring for electrical lighting in the passage, but only as far as the gate to the garden. Mr Parker had told him that the gate had been used to get heavy things in and out of the cellar without carrying them down the stairs from the kitchen.
George paused at the gate. “I suppose we could open this up now, as long as we kept it locked.”
“It’ll be useful once we buy a washing machine. It’ll be easier to bring it in this way.” His long-term plans included a washing machine and tumble drier installed alongside the laundry sink in the cellar, but it wasn’t a high priority when they could use Simon’s for now. “But it’s not urgent.”
Patrick nudged him. “I think the most urgent thing right now is relaxing for a bit.”
True. The rest of today was for relaxing with his partners and enjoying what
they’d created together. Right now they could enjoy the fact that they could walk through a door in the cellar and find themselves back in a world where dolphins walked as men. He switched off the torch. “Take me downstairs.”
There was ample light here by the gate, and he could see George’s pupils dilate with interest. “Time to play?”
“Literally or metaphorically. I wouldn’t mind just a swim. But I want to be with you two. I miss you when I’m away.”
George reached out and brushed across his hand. “Put the torch back on; it would be too dangerous on the stairs. But we miss you, too.”
Partners. They had physical abilities beyond his; he had a wealth of experience with a culture that still bewildered them at times, perhaps always would. But they made a good team, in bed and out.
He led the way down the stairs and into the sea cave. When he saw the water with the afternoon sun glinting off the ripples by the entrance, he knew that what he wanted most right now was to strip off and run into their pool. So he did.
He struck out for the middle of the pool, hearing a splash behind him, and then another. By the time he turned to look, there was one golden shock of hair visible -- and one sleek grey shape. It startled him, for all that he’d just been thinking about their dual nature. It was the first time in nearly a month that he’d seen either of them in dolphin form.
George swam over to him with a few rapid strokes. “Oh, it’s good to swim just for fun!”
“You’ve only gone out to hunt?”
“That and see the family. Or exercise. But it’s not the same.”
“I know. This is much more fun than doing laps in the municipal swimming pool.” Especially as he couldn’t swim nude in the municipal swimming pool. “You haven’t been working too hard, I hope.”
George shook his head. “It’s just been a novelty to be able to spend days at a time in human shape without worrying about anything.” He grinned. “We had food and a pile of books and jigsaws, and light to read by at night. We didn’t have any particular reason to go back to the sea just because it was too dark to work on the house.” He backed off a little and flipped over, diving to touch the bottom of the pool.
Something nudged Martin in the back. He turned around and found Patrick looking at him. At least, he assumed that it was Patrick. Even knowing, believing, that Patrick and George weren’t entirely human, he had trouble thinking of this ... person ... as the man he knew. “Patrick?”
The dolphin whistled at him. Behind him, George said, “Yes, it is.”
George moved around to tread water next to Patrick, and put an arm over him. “I suppose it’s difficult for you, even if you believe.”
“I believe, all right. I’ve been on the receiving end of your echolocation.” He reached out a hand and carefully laid it on Patrick’s head. It felt warmer than he’d somehow expected. “I just find it difficult to think of this as Patrick.”
More whistling. He was already used to thinking of it as language, because they’d so clearly understood at least simple English back before he’d found out that they were more than dolphins. So he wasn’t surprised to hear George laugh at whatever it was that Patrick had said. “What did he say?”
“Something very rude. The gist of it was that it’s a pity we can’t change just a bit at a time, or he’d make sure there was a bit of him you recognised.”
The shock hit him all over again. They hadn’t mentioned it at all since that first time. But that made the idea a little bit easier to take this time. They’d left him alone, not trying to push him into it, and this was a casual remark. “All right. What does it look like in this shape?”
They both stared at him.
“Look. I’m not promising anything. But I’d like to know what I could be getting myself into.”
Patrick whistled at him and rolled over. He wasn’t sure what he was supposed to be looking at at first, and then it became obvious as Patrick’s cock slowly extended from a slit in his belly back near his tail. Very obvious. If Patrick had been that size in human shape, he could have earned a fortune modelling for Viagra ads. There must have been a good ten or twelve inches of it, and he could do tricks with it. The damn thing was curling around at the tip, and it was clearly doing so under conscious control.
“Bloody show-off,” George said, and slapped Patrick, who rolled back over. Patrick was definitely grinning at him. “All you had to do was show him the size, not wave at him with it.”
“Was ... was that all of it?” he asked.
Patrick whistled at him. “Yes,” George translated. “And it really is a muscle with us.” He stroked Patrick’s head.
More whistling. After a few seconds, he recognised it as what a certain folk song would sound like if sung by a dolphin trying to keep within human hearing range. He was fairly sure that the words intended to accompany it were not the ones normally heard in public. He’d heard Patrick singing that song with somewhat bawdier lyrics, apparently picked up from hanging around in a harbour. They revolved around how useful a prehensile penis could be.
“All right. You’re definitely Patrick.” Now he knew why the song had so amused the shapechanger. “Can you carry things with it?”
“Well, it’s not as versatile as an elephant’s trunk,” George said. “At least, not going by the pictures we’ve seen. It’s only the end that can curl round, and not all the way round. But we can pick some things up with it.”
Patrick whistled in a way that sounded like snickering. George glared at him and didn’t translate.
“Let me guess. You can pick up men with it.”
“That’s the polite version, but yes.”
“I take it I don’t want to know the impolite version.” He gave Patrick a hard stare. “I seem to remember someone saying something about not minding if I’d gone swimming with dolphins instead of lecturing them about fossils.” Hell, if they could get the positioning right, they could pick up men literally as well as metaphorically, or at least the matching piece of male anatomy.
Patrick backed off slightly, muttering to himself, and George laughed at him. “Martin knows you well enough by now to guess what you’re saying, even if he can’t understand you.” Then he glanced at Martin. “He’s feeling randy after all that. Would it be too much for you if Patrick and I ...?”
He thought about it. The idea certainly disturbed him, but not as much as it had. The last couple of minutes had made it easier to accept that this really was Patrick, that in some sense it was just Patrick wearing a costume. “As long as you don’t mind if I decide that I don’t want to keep watching once I actually see it.”
“That’s why I asked first.” George moved close enough to put a hand on his shoulder. “I know this might be outside your limits, so don’t try to keep going if you feel too uncomfortable.” Patrick whistled, and George added, “And if you get too cold, start moving around or get out of the water.”
“All right.”
George turned back to Patrick. “Back off a bit. I don’t want to have to drag Martin out just because you got overexcited and slapped him with your tail.”
He hadn’t thought about that aspect of it. Patrick was bloody big even in human form, and his dolphin shape was about the same length but even more solidly built. George had the weight to be a match for Patrick, but Martin didn’t. He was glad to see that Patrick did as he was told, easing away from him slightly and swinging around.
“He almost certainly wouldn’t,” George said to Martin, “but the idea of you watching is turning him on, and I don’t want to take the risk of him losing control.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Just give him a quick wank, so you can see how things work.” George paddled around to the other side of Patrick. “It’s almost the same, but we’re a lot faster in that shape unless we deliberately hold back.” He slapped Patrick again. “Right. Over you go.”
Patrick obediently rolled over onto his back. George took hold of his cock, and that drove home ju
st how big Patrick’s cock was in dolphin form -- even George’s big hand covered less than half the length.
He felt uncomfortable seeing them like that, but reminded himself that this was Patrick, not just a dolphin. He kept watching as George gave a hard stroke along the full length. It was easier when George started talking to Patrick, telling him to try to hold back for a few seconds, and Patrick answered him. Even if Martin couldn’t understand what Patrick was saying, it was clearly a conversation. That made it easier to hold on to the knowledge that there was a human mind in that body.
A few more strokes, then Patrick whistled urgently.
“All right,” George said. “You can come now.”
Patrick’s body shuddered, then arched, and then he came. That was enough to give a merely human male an inferiority complex. The volume wasn’t all that special, but the distance was impressive.
He might have wondered why they bothered doing it in human shape at all, but they’d already made that clear. Human bodies had their own physical advantages -- hands and mouths and an ability to make it last. Patrick had rolled the right way up again, and George was cuddling him.
It only took him a couple of strokes to join them. He put an arm over Patrick, just ahead of his fin. Patrick whistled at him.
“Are you all right?” George asked.
“Still feels a bit weird.” Martin looked down at Patrick. Definitely his lover, even if not the way he was used to seeing him. “It’ll take a while, but I can get used to it, I think.”
“Good,” George said. “I don’t think we’ll try you on doing it yourself today. Maybe tomorrow.” He bent and quickly kissed the top of Patrick’s head. “You had plenty this morning, so don’t complain.”
Patrick whistled again, and George said, “You’d better start moving around again before you get cold.”
The water was warm enough for him, but they were right to check when they couldn’t judge whether it was comfortable for him. He let go of Patrick, turned around, and swam the length of the pool to loosen up. When he turned back, Patrick was back in human shape and was swimming towards him. He stopped and waited.