by KJ Charles
“Pinch your nipple.”
“You’re trying to kill me,” Rowley said. “I knew you were angry and now you’re trying to kill me. Oh Jesus.”
“Harder. Squeeze it. And stroke yourself. I love the way you can do that with both hands at once.”
“Not sure—I can—you know. God, I’m going to spend.”
“You’d better stop, then.”
Rowley’s noise of anguish was probably only audible to dogs. He released himself and stood, blind, obedient, in agony, and glorying in it.
“Lovely,” Clem said. “How would you feel about a blindfold?”
“Blindfold?”
“So you couldn’t see.”
“Yes. Uh. I don’t know.”
There was a slight pause. “I think you do know, don’t you?”
Christ. The idea was deeply disturbing. Rowley did want to say yes, if this was something Clem wanted, but to be unable to see? Would he be tedious if he said no? “Kind and patient” in another form if he said yes?
Tell the damn truth. “It’s a bit unnerving, honestly. I…maybe?”
“Not if you don’t like the idea. Just a moment, tell you what.” Clem’s shape rose. “Shut your eyes.”
Rowley could do that. He stood, ears straining, and felt the whisper of air as Clem came close, behind him. “What we could do,” Clem suggested softly, breath on Rowley’s ear, “is, you could keep your eyes shut for me, but only while you like. Because I thought you might enjoy not knowing or seeing what—” A hand closed briefly around Rowley’s shaft. He yelped. “Like that, you see,” Clem said with some satisfaction. “But if you don’t like it, don’t do it.”
Rowley concentrated on breathing, in and out, as Clem moved around him, tugging off his coat and slipping his braces over his arms. There was nothing alarming in it, with nothing to stop him opening his eyes, and yet the thrill prickled through his nerves. He had to be still and obedient, and Clem was taking his sweet time with the limited undressing till Rowley was stripped to the waist, stopping to bestow kisses and licks and the occasional tweak, to rustle with his own clothing for a painfully long time, to run his hand unexpectedly over sensitive parts and keep Rowley straining to the mark.
“You were right,” he whispered. “I like it.”
“Well, I did wonder if you would.” Clem pressed his chest—warm, naked, rough with hair—against Rowley’s back, hands exploring and settling on his hips, then pushing his drawers and trousers down. “You do have a lovely bum, you know. You always say you’re nothing special to look at, but I do think you should remember that you can’t see very well. My eyes are perfect,” he added, in a mock-superior tone that made Rowley snort.
“You’re all perfect.”
Clem swatted him on the side of his arse, an unexpected assault that made Rowley jump. “Kneel down, lovely.”
Rowley knelt, a little awkwardly, with clothing round his knees and no vision. Clem settled right behind him, tugging him upright when he went to hands and knees. “No, up. That’s right.” He settled one arm round Rowley’s waist, keeping him close, pressing his prick hard against Rowley’s arse. The other hand moved to delve between his legs, caressing, stroking, working his prick with a circle of finger and thumb just enough to make him gasp, and moving away, again and again till Rowley’s thighs were trembling from effort and frustration, and his balls felt explosive. “Mmm. I love the noises you make when you’re desperate. Are you desperate?”
“Really,” Rowley panted.
“How desperate?”
“Entirely. Oh God, Clem, please, I’m begging you. It hurts. Please, please.”
Clem withdrew his questing hand, and Rowley felt a push between his shoulder blades. “Down.” He went forward, to his hands, felt another push. “On the floor.”
Oh God. Rowley lowered himself, with some difficulty, until he was prone on the rug, stiff prick wincing at the contact with the rough surface, with Clem sitting over his calves. Clem’s fingers skimmed his arse. “Really lovely, I can’t tell you. Oh, bother. Just a moment.” He rose, leaving Rowley there, and resumed his position a moment later. “Here.”
“Jesus!” Rowley hadn’t expected the cold dribble of oil along the crease of his arse. Clem’s fingers followed it, sliding and rubbing. “God. What are you doing? I mean, please do it, but what is it?”
“What I want.” He could hear Clem’s grin. “Pleasing myself.” His hands came either side of Rowley’s shoulders, and he lowered himself so his stand rubbed along Rowley’s arse, gliding over the oil, settling as if it was made to be there. “Oh, that feels good.” He moved, a little jerkily at first, then finding more rhythm, sliding his prick, thick and hard and hot, against Rowley’s skin, lowering his head to Rowley’s ear. “I’m going to bring myself off like this, while you just lie there. Is that all right?”
“Just—”
“Lie there. I don’t want you to move at all.” Clem pushed a little harder, with more of his weight, pressing Rowley into the rug. “I want you to lie there with your prick aching for it while I take my time.”
“Oh God. Oh Christ.” Rowley could barely breathe. Clem rubbing against him, using him, and the pressure against his cock…“Please, Clem,” he panted, begging for a relief he didn’t want because the denial was exquisite torture.
“Have you got your eyes shut?”
“Yes. Promise.”
“You’re not moving, are you?”
“Oh God. Please let me move.”
“Shan’t.” Clem’s hands closed on Rowley’s shoulders, his prick driving harder, pausing now and then to rock his hips a little, left and right. “Oh. Oh, I love this. I think a bit more oil, don’t you?”
“Fucker! Don’t stop!”
“There’s no need for bad language. You swear terribly when you’re worked up.”
Rowley’s response dissolved into a “Fff…” at the dribble of oil, and the sensation of Clem’s fingers probing a little more intimately, smearing it deep, and then the slide and push of his prick once more as he humped against Rowley, hard and heavy.
“God. I’m going to—”
“Please come,” Rowley begged. “Please.”
“You can move if you like. Oh God.” He was gasping in Rowley’s ear now, heaving against him, as Rowley writhed, pressing back, all skin and nerve endings and throbbing need. Clem was sweat-damp and jerkily uncoordinated, and spending now on Rowley’s back, splattering his skin. “Oh. Oh sweet heaven. Oh God, that was good.” He laughed breathlessly into Rowley’s ear. “Sorry. Hips up and I’ll—”
“Um. Too late.”
“Oh! You already—”
“I did, yes.” Untouched by human hand, unable to stop himself for the friction and the helplessness under Clem’s weight and the pleasure of it all.
“Good heavens. Was that all right?”
“Yes,” Rowley said, understating the matter considerably. He’d rarely felt less in control of his own body, overwhelmed by sensation. “Yes, it really was. The rug may have suffered, though.”
“Cat’s left worse things on it. I don’t think I said, did I?”
“Said what?”
Clem kissed his neck. “I love you too.”
“You said so before,” Rowley whispered. “And I didn’t know what to do. I can’t—why would you?”
“Why wouldn’t I?”
“There’s so much about you to love. Your heart, and your kindness, and your eyes. And I’m just…I’m nothing special. I’ve tried to be nothing special for my whole life—”
“You failed,” Clem said. “And I’ve been falling in love with you for at least as long as you have with me, because you’re wonderful and quiet and clever and kind, but I don’t need any more reason to love you than that you’re Rowley Green. Do you know ‘My Star’ by Robert Browning?”
“I don’t know why you even ask.”
“The poet says he watches one star. All his friends are stargazing and doing astronomy and studying planets, and he just pays attenti
on to one single star in the whole firmament, one star that’s marvellous to him, and he says, ‘What matter to me if their star is a world? Mine has opened its soul to me; therefore I love it.’ ”
Rowley mouthed the last words to himself. “Uh…I see. I think. Really?”
“My star,” Clem said, and bent to kiss him.
—
The year’s first fog came that night. The temperature had dropped; London’s chimneys and the river vapours and the city’s foul exhalations had at last reached the point of no return; and Rowley opened his shutters in the morning to see a yellow-brown wall of murk shifting and writhing outside the glass.
“That’s a London particular for you,” he observed to Clem at breakfast. “It’s going to be a ripe winter.”
“Isn’t it awful. I don’t want to leave the house in this. I’ll get lost before I reach St. John Street.”
“It’ll get worse before it gets better this year,” Mr. Rillington prophesied gloomily. “It’s thickening yet, I can feel it in my bones.”
That might be true, but it was quite thick enough to be getting on with. The air was tangible, brown, and hard to breathe. It tasted of fog, harsh and sour, catching at Rowley’s mouth and nose with its cold wet claws and coiling in his lungs, and when he pushed open the shop door that morning, it left faint black stains on his bare fingers. That would get worse too. Soon the windows would be streaked with long, oily smudges and the pavements would be caked in sooty deposits, not to mention that you would struggle to see more than a dozen yards in front of you. Rowley loathed that, when the fog muffled the whole world and made his spectacles useless.
If it hadn’t been for the fog, he would have been singing for sheer quiet glee, but you’d be a fool to inhale more of this air than you had to. A really bad fog would creep through the cracks in doors and window frames, coiling its way into homes like a silent, staining secret. This one wasn’t that bad, yet, but Rowley couldn’t see the Charterhouse on the other side of Wilderness Row from his shop, and it wasn’t a wide street either.
He therefore didn’t, as he’d planned, go out to order supplies to replace what had been damaged by smoke, fire, and water. He wrote lists and letters, not bothering to post them yet because he could quite easily get lost on the way to the pillar box, and postmen were no more able to see their way in this murk than anyone else. He did some more tidying up, knocked off early, and had a thoroughly delightful evening at home with Clem, sitting in front of the fire, talking quietly or happily silent.
I love you. Such small words to make such a huge change. Not the kind of change other people had, with a wedding in fine clothes and people cheering, but a change that would do very nicely for the two of them. Mr. Talleyfer and his lodger, privately and unobtrusively domestic, left to themselves. It was very close to Rowley’s idea of paradise.
He didn’t ask what Clem had decided about the page from the register, and Clem didn’t mention it.
The fog was thicker the next day. The air was wetter, and colder too, and it was anybody’s guess where the sun was in the sky, or if it was there at all and hadn’t slunk off to the other side of the globe. “Darkness at noon,” Mr. Morris had used to say of the fogs, and that was about right: Rowley had the gaslight burning throughout the morning, and his only indication of the time of day was the muffled tolling of St. Thomas’s bells in the Charterhouse opposite.
For lack of anything more productive to do, he made up some arsenical soap. It took camphor, chalk, soap, potassium carbonate, and arsenic, and he’d had those in jars, which had survived the damage. It wasn’t his favourite part of the work, and the odour wasn’t pleasant, but at least the camphor cut the smell of fog.
Clem worried about him using arsenic, Rowley reflected as he mixed the stuff with chalk and set it boiling with soap. It was common knowledge—which was to say, completely untrue—that preservers regularly dropped off their perches as a result of using arsenic, and Clem wouldn’t have it in the lodging house at all. He said it was in case Cat should eat a poisoned rat, but Rowley was fairly sure he was afraid of a scullery mix-up. Twenty-one people had died in Bradford a few years back when a confectioner had made up peppermints with “daft,” sugar mixed with plaster of Paris to save a few pennies, only to learn too late that the druggist’s apprentice had adulterated his sugar with the wrong powder. Rowley, who’d been using arsenic since he was twelve, could tell it from other household stuff at a glance, dense and heavy as it was, but he wouldn’t dispute it if Clem didn’t want the arsenic pot next to the sugar bowl. As for arsenical soap, he’d got it under his fingernails often enough and suffered nothing more than a bit of soreness. He had a healthy respect for arsenic, but he felt no fear.
Nevertheless, the fumes of boiling arsenical soap were not ambrosia. Rowley opened the back door to let the smell out, even if the fog came curling in, and saw a black, bedraggled shape on the ground of the yard. Inspection showed him it was a raven. A magnificent bird, too, with a vicious black beak, and still slightly warm to the touch.
Waste not, want not. There was no demand for ravens in the normal way of things, but Clem’s scene leapt to his mind, the great feathery death rising over chimney pots, and this would make a superb mount. And, frankly, it would settle his nerves to do a bit of work. He had his tools back in order, so he decided to take the raven as a good omen, and brought it in.
“Poor fellow,” he told the dead bird, making his first incision with a sure cut. “Was it the fog did for you? You won’t be the last this winter, I reckon.” The fog would bring death with it, as the old and the young and the weak-chested struggled to breathe, let alone from all the accidents as people stepped into holes or ditches or the Thames. “As long as your brothers at the Tower of London are still there.” Not but what it felt as though the Tower ravens had flown and the city fallen already, London taken out of space and time by the mephitic vapours that held it and its people trapped.
Rowley was fleshing out the bird’s skull when the doorbell chimed, a sound so unexpected on a day like this that he struggled to place it for a second. He put down his knife, but gave his pocket a quick pat to be sure his little folding knife was there. An absurd thing to do, with its tiny blade, but it felt like some sort of reassurance.
He went through to the shop and saw a small boy by the door, looking damp and filthy.
“Good…” He had to think about it. “Morning?”
“It’s all of three o’clock, mate,” the urchin said. “Though if that’s three in the a’ternoon or three in the morning, dunnask me. You Mr. Green the stuffer? I got a message. You’re to come to Charterhouse Gardens straight off, Mr. Talleyfer says, ’cos he needs you there.”
“What? Why?”
“Dunnask me. He says, get Mr. Green the stuffer, and tell ’im to ’urry, and that’s what I done, so you’ve ’ad yer pennyworth. See yer.”
“Hoi!” Rowley said, but the lad had already darted out. Rowley cursed, reaching for his coat and hat.
What on earth was Clem doing in the gardens in this weather? He liked to walk there, but nobody took a promenade in a pea-souper. You could get frighteningly lost even in an enclosed garden space, even if it ought to be just a few moments’ walk to a fence or wall; people began to panic and veer off paths very quickly, and Clem could do that in clear air. Why would he risk it?
He locked the shop door and stared into the fog. Clem wouldn’t have sent for him like this if it wasn’t urgent, so he had to go. He looked up and down the street, though any cab or van would have a light burning, and the driver would be leading his horse at a slow walk. There was nothing.
Straight over, he told himself, attempting to fix the direction in his senses, because there was nothing else to fix it to. He’d cross the road, and he’d see the wall and the gate. It wasn’t the worst fog he’d ever seen; probably as Mr. Rillington kept insisting, it wouldn’t be the worst one this winter.
He plunged forward into the rolling grey-brown shroud, counting his ste
ps. That was a useful trick, because fog dilated time, and if you lost concentration for a moment, you could feel like you’d been walking for hours. He found himself imagining what walking in fog was for Clem, who had only the most nodding acquaintance with timekeeping as it was, and no sense of direction at all.
Why the devil had Clem come out in this? Nobody else had—probably, at least; Rowley couldn’t see or hear a damn thing, and there could be a dozen people within twenty yards without him knowing it. But fog meant deserted streets for good reason.
He almost tripped on the kerb, and his foot skidded on some slimy deposit as he fought for balance. But he could see the garden wall now, and was reasonably sure the gate was to his left. He went that way, one hand light on the damp brickwork so as not to walk off the pavement, and was pleased to meet the gate not more than ten feet sooner than he’d have guessed.
He pushed it open. “Clem? Clem!” His voice was flat, thin, and muffled. “Cle-em!”
Silence. Damn it. Where was he? Rowley put a hand to the gatepost to anchor himself as he turned left and right. “Clem!”
There was an answering cry, ahead and to his left. Rowley saw a shadowy shape, seeming to loom far larger than Clem would. Another gift of the fog. “Clem?”
The figure waved its hand urgently, and then either the fog thickened or he stepped back, wisping out of sight. Rowley cursed and hurried forward. “Hey! Where are you?” He was well into the gardens now, and had a nasty feeling that the wall behind him would have sunk into the murk, but if he looked round he’d lose his direction in a trice. “Hey—”
An arm came round his throat.
He hadn’t heard any approach, had no warning at all. Just the brutal arm of a strong man—not Clem, smelling different, bigger—so hard and fast that the motion almost pulled Rowley off his feet. He scrabbled for balance, grabbing at the powerful arm, tried to shout, felt the pressure on his throat increase. A voice by his ear hissed, “Shut your mouth. And don’t struggle or it’ll be the worse for you.”
Rowley stopped struggling. He was on tiptoes, with the arm wedged under his chin and pulling him up, and now he could feel something in his back. The prick of a sharp point.