Subtle Blood

by KJ Charles

  Lack of action, lack of Kim. He wanted to be right there, involved, knowing what was going on; he needed to be there if the news was bad and the hope forlorn. He wanted to be with Kim, full stop. Boredom made you horny, he supposed, but he hadn’t been able to stop thinking about their night at the Savoy. Kim had been flown on wine but drunk on happiness, glittering with hope and pleasure, and the way they’d made love afterwards... Kim had whispered, Make me burn, and Will had done his best, and the way Kim had responded was still tingling through him.

  On that thought, he fished out the book of poems Kim had given him from his desk drawer. He’d made it a brown paper jacket earlier, since people in bookshops were blasted nosey about books, and he didn’t particularly want to be caught with an obscene publication, still less have someone try to buy it off him.

  He went back to the first poem Kim had read him. He’d done that a few times now.

  God! I shall faint with pain, I hide my face

  For shame. I am disturbed, I cannot rise

  I breathe hard with thy breath; thy quick embrace

  Crushes; thy teeth are agony—pain dies

  In deadly passion. Ah! You come—you kill me!

  Christ! God! Bite! Bite! Ah Bite! Love’s fountains fill me.

  He didn’t quite know how to think of it. It was obscene, he supposed, but it wasn’t dirty. Erotic, maybe. It was... Honestly, it was bloody like how Kim was when Will fucked him, taking a kind of deliberate pleasure in things he wasn’t meant to like. It gave him a disturbingly bare sensation, as if someone else had witnessed the intimacy between them in all its rawness.

  He hadn’t realised you could write about fucking like that. There was cheap filth, and there was stuff like Women in Love, which had been accused of obscenity as if anyone could find the good bits in all that waffle. Will had given up on page seventeen. The point was, he’d always thought you could have Pornography or you could have Literature. He hadn’t believed you could do both at once.

  Things I might say myself if I could write love poems, Kim had said. It felt like he had written these, for Will.

  He still couldn’t believe anyone had published this, especially twenty years ago or however long it was. The blighters had nerve. He leafed idly to the front of the book to check the imprint page, and stopped dead.

  There was writing on the title page. He hadn’t seen that before. It wouldn’t have occurred to him anyone would be fool enough to write their own sodding name in a book like this.

  Will—

  I hope you find some of these as snugly up your alley as I find you up mine.

  ‘I will neither delay nor dissemble’

  —Kim

  Will clapped the book shut, as though the mere existence of the words might make them visible to his customers. Jesus. What had Kim been thinking, writing that down? He must be off his rocker.

  He reopened it cautiously to check. Yes: it was that bad. And what was the message supposed to mean? The second part, that was. He got the first half well enough, just like anyone else who read it would. Bloody idiot.

  ‘I will neither delay nor dissemble’. Dissemble meant lie, and Kim had promised not to lie to him any more after the Etchil business. He’d said it seriously, and Will had chosen to trust him, and that had mattered a lot to them both. He didn’t need it repeating, and he wasn’t sure why Kim would.

  It was a quotation, so context would probably help. He flicked through White Stains, trying not to remember the many other books he’d searched because of bloody Kim, and found the line half way through.

  I will neither delay nor dissemble

  But utter my love in thine ear

  Though my voice and my countenance tremble

  With a passion past pity and fear...

  Will was still looking at that when the phone rang.

  He put the book back in its drawer alongside the Messer before answering. “Darling’s Used and—”

  “We’ve got him.”

  “Kim?”

  “We—have—got—him,” Kim enunciated. “Fairfax. We have the bastard. Get over here. Come in round the back. The vultures seem to have gone, and to hell with them if they haven’t.”

  HE ARRIVED AT KIM’S place at a flat run, to find the rest of them gathered with cocktails. “What’s going on?” he demanded. “What have you done? How?”

  “Hello, darling,” Phoebe said, giving him a kiss. “Sit down, have a drink, and let us tell you all about it. Maisie’s been quite brilliant. Start from the beginning, darling, he needs to know how clever you are.”

  Maisie looked immensely pleased with herself. “Oh my goodness, Will, you have no idea how much work that was. I shall never become a private detective. First we asked dozens of milliners about Florrie. Everyone I know, and almost everyone they knew: I think I’ve spoken to half the hat girls in London. And we got nowhere at all. It was extraordinary, as if she’d dropped off the face of the earth. I started to feel quite worried.”

  “It was awfully odd,” Phoebe agreed. “I even had dear Harry check that delightful little Devon place for us. You know, where they keep notes on what everybody does.”

  “Somerset House,” Kim said. “Births, marriages, and deaths. It’s on the Strand.”

  “She knows,” Maisie said. “And Florrie wasn’t registered dead, so we kept on asking. And finally someone said they thought she’d gone to Clapham.”

  “Exactly where one would install a mistress,” Phoebe put in. “It’s so perfectly bourgeois.”

  “And since that was the best we had, we went to Clapham this morning, to see what we might find out.”

  “Just Clapham?” Will said. “That was your only lead?”

  “Brace yourself,” Kim told him. “It gets worse.”

  Maisie looked remarkably smug. “Well, on the way there, it struck me that she must have needed a black hat. Or at least, she would if she was still with him, and if she wasn’t then it wouldn’t be much use finding her, would it? But even if they hadn’t made it official—”

  “—which we thought not, because I went back to Somerset House myself and had a lovely little man check weddings for me under Mr. Fairfax’s other name, whatever it was again, and there wasn’t one—”

  “—she would surely do the decent thing. And one wouldn’t want to be trimming and dyeing under those circumstances, would one, or going into Town either, and Florrie would never wear an outdated hat, not for mourning. So we started asking at every milliner’s in Clapham for a very beautiful woman who’d just bought a black hat.”

  “I know,” Kim said, answering Will’s expression. “I stand amazed at their work ethic.”

  “You can stand us lunch,” Phoebe told him. “Honestly, my feet.”

  “And we managed to get some customer addresses out of a few shops, which wasn’t easy but we were dreadfully chic at them and talked about Paris and bought hats to soften them up—”

  Phoebe made a noise suggestive of suffering. “Too hideous, darling.”

  “And we went to two wrong houses, which was awfully discouraging and rather embarrassing, walking in on people in mourning like that. And then at the third one there was Florrie at the door.”

  “Positively tear-stained, the poor child,” Phoebe said. “Really, that man, abandoning her like that without a word. I’m furious with him.”

  “He couldn’t help being murdered,” Will protested.

  “Nonsense. She was hopelessly bewildered and really desperate to talk to someone—”

  “Oh, she was not,” Maisie said. “She tried to shut the door on me, and she was positive she couldn’t speak to us or anyone at first. But Phoebe got to her. Everyone adores Phoebe.”

  “Darling, it was you,” Phoebe said. “You’ve a positive genius for understanding people, and making them understand. She trusted you.”

  “But you utterly charmed her—”

  “You both put the Spanish Inquisition in the shade,” Kim said. “Get on with it before Will explodes.”r />
  Phoebe pulled a face at him. “Anyway, once she’d started talking, she blurted it all out. She’s very pretty indeed, but perhaps not awfully bright.”

  “Thick as day-old porridge,” Maisie said. “She told us all about how he’d set her up in the villa. ‘He was so good to me,’ she kept saying. He came to her twice a week usually, but said she wasn’t to worry if he didn’t turn up for a while, and she was never to look for him or contact anyone about him, just to trust he’d come back when he was ready. He said it was to protect her because of him being married. And she believed him! Not just that, but she was proud of herself about it. Even when she read about the murder in the papers, with photographs of him under a different name, for heaven’s sake, she didn’t contact the police, or try to find out what would happen to her or anything! She just sat there! She kept saying he’d promised she’d always be looked after and she wasn’t to tell anyone about him, so she hadn’t. I’ve never seen anything so hopeless in my life.”

  “We asked if he had a study or papers at her house and she said, yes, he used to work here,” Phoebe said. “I said my friend could help look at them—I’d already telephoned Kim, of course—and she refused point blank. Nobody was ever to look inside his study, and that was that.”

  “Would you believe, she didn’t even know whose name the house was in, or if it would be hers!” Maisie bristled with outrage. “I asked if she was the beneficiary on his insurance, and you won’t believe this: she said his wife would get that. I said, why? And it turned out she didn’t know he was divorced! She was sure he was still married, because he’d told her he couldn’t get a divorce, and if he was free he’d have married her. Honestly, I could have shaken the girl.”

  “At this point, I turned up,” Kim said. “Whereupon I was given the pleasure of informing Miss Jacobs that the will and insurance documents under his real name had been found, that she was not mentioned, and that he’d been a free man for some years. She took it poorly.”

  “Oh, it was far better for you to tell her,” Phoebe said. “That way we could comfort her and agree on how dreadful men are. And she was quite right to be furious, although perhaps not at you. But once we had her angry at Fairfax rather than at Kim for telling her about him, which I admit did take a little while, she said he could look in the study to see if there was any useful information there. Of course it was locked, and she didn’t even have a key to the room. In her own house! Really, the whole business made me want to chain myself to railings and throw myself under a horse.”

  “You got in?” Will asked.

  “Picked the lock and found Aladdin’s cave,” Kim said. “There was correspondence with various interesting people, including names I knew. Account books that showed a great deal of money moving around, names and sums in a notebook, a fascinating-looking ledger kept entirely in code for which I have very high hopes, and a stash of banknotes. He was Zodiac, Will.”

  “And we think he was planning to run away, like you guessed,” Maisie added. “For one thing, he hadn’t visited Florrie for a fortnight before he died, which Kim said sounds like he didn’t want to lead anyone there. For another, it turns out he’d put a whacking great lot of money in her bank account just last week, which might be why he needed to make more.”

  “That calmed her down a little, once Kim told her,” Phoebe said. “And made me feel I could forgive him. At least he’d thought about her.”

  “Well, yes,” Kim said. “Although, if that was what led to him getting killed—”

  “Do shush, darling.”

  Will looked between the ladies. “This is incredible. Blimey. You two.”

  “We are rather wonderful,” Phoebe said modestly.

  “All in a day’s work,” Maisie added. “Anything else we can do while we’re about it?”

  “If there is, we’re not doing it tonight. We have dinner with Lucile in—oh my goodness!” Phoebe shrieked. “Maisie, we have to be there in an hour and we aren’t dressed! Kim, you are the most awful nuisance.”

  “And you are a miracle,” Kim told Phoebe, as Will gave Maisie a hug that didn’t come close to conveying his feelings. “A pair of miracles, and I will buy you a lunch to end all lunches. Give Lucile my love.”

  The girls hurried off in a whirl of goodbyes. Will turned to Kim as the door shut. “Bloody hell.”

  “Quite. We’re ahead, Will, for the first time in all this. I could sing. I won’t, to spare you distress, but I could.”

  “So what do we do now? Take it to the police? The Private Bureau?”

  “I’ll tell you what we’re going to do.” Kim grabbed his lapels. “We are going to celebrate, which is to say I’m going to suck you till you can’t bear another second, and then you are going to fuck me through the floor.”

  He slid to his knees as he spoke. Will shut his eyes for a few moments, enjoying the feel of Kim’s hands sliding over his thighs, between and up, stroking him through the cloth. Taking his time, so Will was hard and ready before Kim undid the first button. He had to look then, because he loved watching Kim suck him, and inhaled sharply as Kim’s mouth made contact and his lips slid along Will’s length. He really did like a prick in his mouth, a fact that never failed to get Will going.

  He took a hold of the sleek hair. “Jesus. That’s good. Ah God, Kim, you bloody beauty. Tell me you love it.”

  “You know I do,” Kim mumbled around him. “Make me feel it.”

  Will tightened his grip, thrusting forward into Kim’s half-strangled groan. Fucked that tender, greedy mouth, and pushed Kim’s head forward too as he did it, just a little bit rough because Kim liked it rough, and he’d be stiff as a post being handled like this. A strong man’s love is my delight.

  “You like it like this?” he whispered.

  “All of it. Harder.”

  “I’ll give you harder. Ah, no, too much, stop.”

  Kim pulled his mouth away. Will had left it a bit late, and was forced to give himself a sharp squeeze and a few seconds to force the surge of desire down. “Jesus. Got something?”

  “Oil.”

  “Then get over that table.”

  Kim kicked off clothing that deserved better treatment as Will stripped with equal lack of ceremony. He bent forward. Will opened the bottle and dribbled a few drops down the base of his spine, then ran his fingers up and down the smooth skin, caressing the vertebrae. “Christ, your back’s gorgeous,” he murmured, half to himself.

  More oil, this time applied lower, so it dripped into the divide of his arse. Kim whimpered. Will pushed his fingers down, up and down, enjoying the slide over skin, then gave in to temptation and pushed his spit-wet cock up to rub against the slickness. “Oh, yes. I’m going to have you so hard.”

  “Promises,” Kim said, strangled.

  “Give me time.” He slid his hand over and down, found his way, and pushed his prick into Kim’s tight heat.

  “God!”

  “This is the bit I love,” Will told him, leaning in. “When I’ve got you like a glove puppet.”

  Kim choked. Will said, “What? It’s exactly like. I can make you move just how I—”

  “Jesus!” Kim yelped, as Will hit the sweet spot. “Bastard!”

  “Give it up,” Will whispered. “All of it. I want you desperate.”

  “I—need—this.” Kim was jerking the words out. “And I gave it up to you—a long time ago.”

  Will had an arm round his waist, holding him close. Kim’s body was hot and yielding, and Will’s skin felt a size too tight. “Christ. I want to see your face. How you look when I do this.”

  “How do I look?”

  Will could have said something harsh or vulgar then; Kim enjoyed that. What came out of his mouth was, “Beautiful.”

  There was a tiny, endless silence, then Kim said, “Floor,” which was reasonable, since the table was more expensive than sturdy. Will hauled him up and around, and kissed him hard enough to bruise. Kim pulled him down so they crashed to the rug, kissing wildly, l
imbs everywhere, Kim wrapping himself around Will with octopus urgency. Cock to cock, mouth to mouth, heart to heart. The need and longing pulsed through him, dizzying.

  Kim’s hand slid over his arse and squeezed. Will knelt up over him. “Tell me what you want.”

  “Fuck me. Watch me. Make me beautiful.”

  Will’s chest closed like a fist. He pushed himself up in silence, reached for the oil to slick himself again, took the weight of Kim’s long legs over his shoulders. Watched his face as he waited; watched as he pushed in, as Kim’s lean torso arched and flexed, and that pain-pleasure expression of willing sacrifice transfigured his features.

  “So beautiful,” he whispered. “Perfect. When you give yourself up to me.”

  “All yours. Every bit.”

  Will got his hands to Kim’s shoulders, pushing them down onto the floor, using his weight. Kim curved under him, legs tightening around his neck, and they moved together in a silence broken only by gasps and murmurs and the slap of flesh, until Kim’s spasms sent Will over the edge, and he gave himself up to the brief, blinding pleasure of climax, driving into Kim’s body like he could drive away the world.

  They collapsed in a sweaty heap of limbs, untangling just enough to avoid spraining anything. Kim’s legs wrapped around Will’s, preventing him moving further. Will inhaled his smell, face buried in his shoulder, and held on, until Kim let out a very long breath.

  “Ah, Will. Will. Don’t let go.”

  “Not planning to.”

  “Good Lord, what you do to me. You have no idea what you’re missing.”

  “About that,” Will said. “Could I have a go some time?”

  “Really?” Kim craned his neck to look at him. “I didn’t think that was your cup of tea.”

  “I don’t know if it is. Never tried. But if the way you look when I fuck you is anything to go by—”

  “I can’t promise to achieve that. I know my limitations.”

  Will nudged him. “Berk. Or do you not like to do it that way?”

  “It’s not my first choice, but I very much like the idea of watching you get fucked, now you mention it.”