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He had known the ship they took carried valuable cargo, had paid handsomely for the intelligence telling him that it transported a noble who would fetch a fine ransom, but Michael had not expected – him.
Michael has tangled with Admiral Jesse Manes often enough – the man seemed to have made it his personal mission to rid the West Indies of pirates, starting with one Captain Michael Guerin. Now, he cannot believe his stroke of luck when his men bring their valued prize to the captain’s cabin and Michael recognizes the admiral’s youngest son.
The previous times Michael had seen him, he’d been decked out in finery, standing stiffly next to the Admiral at more than one execution and formal navy occasion that Michael had dared to disrupt. He’d heard the rumors, too, ones no one would dare mention in front of the admiral himself, but which swirled around behind his back, about the shame of his son’s predilections.
Now, he wears nothing but a shirt and breeches and sports a head of dark, lustrous hair, but even without the embroidered waistcoat and heavy wig, those sharp features are unmistakable, the delicate cheekbones and dark eyes all the more striking when he stands so bare and unadorned. He doesn’t struggle against the hands holding him, but squares his shoulders the second he’s released and meets Michael’s gaze, unflinching.
He is breathtaking.
“Alexander Manes,” Michael says in wonder. If he believed in any gods, he’d think they favored him.
Manes returns his gaze with a piercing one of his own.
“My name,” he says, an edge of danger to his voice, “is Alex.”
Michael closes the distance between them in several easy strides. In his boots, he towers over Alex, as the man insists on being called, resting a hand on his sword hilt for added effect as he stares him down. But Alex stands his ground, coolly returning the challenge in Michael’s eyes with one of his own, and for a moment Michael finds himself lost in the dark pools of those eyes. They are deep, yet instead of calm, they hold turmoil and fire and something else Michael does not entirely recognize.
“Well, Alex, you’re going to bring us a king’s ransom.” Michael can’t stop the glee from entering his voice.
The smile that quirks the corner of Alex’s lips is bitter. “I assure you, my father would rather see me dead than ransomed,” he says.
Michael raises an eyebrow.
“That’s a rather stupid thing to say when your life is in the hands of pirates.”
This time, Alex’s smile is gleeful.
“I can offer you something much more valuable than a ransom.” His dark eyes sparkle with mirth, and Michael thinks he has never seen anything so beautiful, not for all the sunsets and storms he has witnessed on the deck of his ship.
“And what is that?” he drawls.
“Intelligence,” Alex says coolly. “I know the defenses of Port Royal, the numbers of the garrison, the weaknesses of its walls. The schedule for when the most appealing prizes enter and leave port and their cargo, the routes of the ships that patrol the waters, the weakest ports, the locations of reinforcements,” he enumerates, as if he does not hold hundreds of lives in his dainty hands. “And, the course to be taken by the ship carrying the most illustrious of visitors to West Indies several weeks from now.”
He pauses for effect, as if he were an actor on the stage and not a hostage making a deal with lions.
“But I want more than my life in exchange. I want to join your crew.”
….
He spends the next several hours exhaustively explaining everything to Captain Guerin, his quartermaster Max, and a sharp woman named Isobel, who seems to share equal power with the other two. How he is here of his own volition, that he had memorized every scrap of intelligence he could reach in his father’s office, maps and reports and schedules; that he had convinced his father to allow a visit to his brother Flint, who was at the moment failing pathetically to enforce order in Nassau; how such a journey entailed taking a ship through notoriously pirate-infested waters, to which his father had not objected too assiduously. And how he had not been able to believe his own luck when their ship was captured on the first day out of port.
The reputations of all three are fearsome – Guerin in particular – and now Alex discovers why. They leave no stone unturned, no question unasked. There is skepticism and veiled threats in their eyes, and he knows with the utmost certainty that there is a chance he might not leave here alive.
“And why should we trust any intelligence you have?” Isobel asks sharply after he has laid all this out.
“I’m on your ship,” Alex points out. “If it burns, I burn with you.”
Guerin exchanges glances with Max and Isobel beside him and an unspoken conversation passes between the three of them.
“We will make a try for Port Royal,” Guerin announces. “And if your intelligence pans out, we shall consider allowing you to join us.”
With that, they lock him in the captain’s cabin, a luxury he had not been expecting. But also logical, he supposes – they can hardly let him wander, but he is much too valuable for the brig.
Too excited to sleep, he explores the cabin instead. It is neat and orderly, a desk piled with maps and charts and papers, while the walls are lined with books and nautical instruments. So many books that the cabin is practically a personal library, and Alex marvels that they have all survived the ravages of the sea and the fire of battle.
There are books in multiple languages, fine editions of the Iliad and the Odyssey, Don Quixote in the original Spanish, travelogues and stories of adventure and discovery (he finds Bacon’s New Atlantis and Cavendish’s The Blazing World) and scientific treatises, right alongside bawdy French novellas. The works of Shakespeare and John Donne, of course, and the poetry and drama of the French court. The expected texts on sailing and navigation, but also complex mathematical works, sheaves of technical diagrams, and what must be incredibly rare copies of the designs of Leonardo da Vinci’s inventions.
He has just met Guerin, knows nothing of him but the reputation of one of the most fearsome pirates in the Indies, and yet he feels now like he is staring into his soul, and it is that of a different man entirely.
Over the next several days as they sail to Port Royal, he remains confined to the cabin, with brief interludes for air. To his surprise, it is usually Guerin who takes him out for a stroll along the deck each day. “Can’t have you suffocating in there,” he says when Alex asks why he bothers.
The rest of the crew are less kind, but he had expected this. He, too, would feel disdain for the admiral’s’s son who has made himself at home in the captain’s own cabin, and he feels the suspicious glances they shoot his way, raking over his finery, his uncalloused hands, his pale skin.
He returns their gazes coolly, and most look away before he does.
Except for Guerin. Guerin, he finds, never looks away from him, but his gaze lacks the judgment or condescension shared by the rest of his crew. Instead, he watches with rapt fascination as Alex stares down his crew and sends them slinking away, one by one.
“Would you give me the honor of your company for dinner tonight?” Guerin asks after several days of this ritual.
“It’s your ship,” Alex says. “And your cabin.”
“But your company, if you wish to share it.” And damn it, Guerin suddenly looks so young, and so hopeful.
“I’d be delighted,” Alex says honestly.
He tells himself he acquiesces solely because of the boredom of having no one but Guerin’s books for company.
….
Guerin shows up promptly at seven o’clock, looking for all the world like an interloper in his own cabin, and it is disarmingly charming. Several crew members follow him, bringing an astonishing array of plates, glasses, serving platters, and bottles of wine. Alex gapes in astonishment.
Guerin thanks them, then dismisses them easily while Alex takes in the literal feast before him. He wonders vaguely where Guerin has acquired such delicacies, living on the seas as he does. Guerin evil pulls his chair out, as if he were a lady, and Alex raises an eyebrow.
Guerin shrugs and pops open the cork on a bottle of wine, filling Alex’s glass. He settles into his own seat, gesturing with an arm for Alex to help himself.
He has not exactly been starved these past few days – in fact, he has been fed much better than expected – but this meal is the kind of luxury he has not had since he left Nassau.
“You have quite the library,” Alex remarks as he takes delicate bites from the first course. Guerin, he notices, eats ravenously and with little respect for etiquette. “Why all the mathematics?”
“Calculus,” Guerin says, as if name-dropping it explains everything. Seeing Alex’s confusion, he continues his explanation. “To sail properly, it’s necessary to calculate angles and vectors, the wind hitting the sails, dozens of complex calculations for each maneuver. And,” he shrugs. “I like numbers. They calm the chaos.”
“Chaos?”
Guerin taps his head. “In here. There isn’t a lot of order, but equations, they make the world fit into some semblance of it. That, and music.” Guerin nods at the guitar that Alex had noticed sitting in the corner of the cabin, but which he’d been too afraid to touch.
“I’ve only ever played the harpsichord, I’m afraid,” he admits. He too had found the music calming, though the stern insistences of his music teacher that he must learn to play like a proper gentleman were less so.
Michael rises gracefully, taking hold of the guitar and plucking a soft, haunting tune from its strings. Alex holds his breath, clinging to every note at it competes with the sound of the wind and the sea. But when his eyes rise again to Guerin’s face, he has to stifle a gasp at what he sees there, a man carefree and at peace as he loses himself in the notes.
“That was beautiful,” Alex says honestly as the last of the chords fades into silence.
The smile Guerin shoots his way is soft and sweet and hopeful, but it turns in a flash into something more mischievous as he begins strumming the guitar again.
“This is what my crew prefers to hear,” he says, before launching into what is clearly a pirate shanty. “A pirate’s life for me…” he begins, the low and sultry voice with which he sings it at odds with the spirited words. Alex listens, rapt, as he makes his way through the arguably repetitive stanzas, so caught up in the voice itself that he hardly notices the words anyway.
“We're rascals, scoundrels, villains, and knaves.” Guerin’s gaze meets Alex’s and bores into his soul as he finishes the song.
“Well,” Alex remarks. “For a villain and a knave, you certainly know how to make your guests feel welcome. Do you serenade all your hostages?”
Something brief, almost imperceptible, flashes across Guerin’s face, but he recovers quickly.
“Not all,” Guerin says breezily as he refills Alex’s glass before returning to sprawl on his chair. He makes an attractive sight, his loose white shirt open at the chest to reveal a thick tangle of hair, his sword within reach, his easy nonchalance masking a predator alert to any danger. Alex should be frightened, but he finds himself strangely drawn to him instead, curiosity giving way to something more primal.
Perhaps this is another of his subconscious rebellions against his father: to want not only a man, but also the man farthest from anything respectable.
“So….” Guerin drawls. “Why is it you have fled from your privileged life?”
Alex sighs, the explanation on the tip of his tongue and yet, even after all these years, so difficult to put into words that someone might grasp.
“There is no place for me there,” he tries.
“You are the Admiral’s son,” Guerin points out. “Surely – “
Alex rises from the table in frustration. No one had ever been able to see beyond the privilege of his birth to the gilded cage it forges around him. Stupidly, he had hoped Guerin would understand, but how, when Alex was rejecting all the luxuries Guerin could never have hoped to have?
He makes his way over to the window. The moon is full tonight, blindingly bright as he gazes at it and sighs, wishing he had the freedom to answer to it and nothing else.
Quiet as a cat, Guerin comes to stand beside him, fixing him with an intent gaze.
“I am not the son my father wanted,” Alex attempts, again, to explain.
Their gazes lock together in that moment, tethered by something as instantaneous and ungraspable as a lightning bolt, and suddenly, Guerin is leaning forward with the clear intention of kissing him.
Everything falls into place. The sumptuous meal, the flowing wine, the careful attentions, all to mask the fact that Alex is his prisoner.
He makes up his mind in the split instant before Guerin’s lips meet his and turns away. He had escaped his pampered his life to be free, his own man, and he is no more willing to give himself in this way than he was willing to follow the path his father had so implacably laid out for him. He waits instead for Guerin to take what Alex will not give, and steels himself for the blow that is coming. Pain is a price he is used to paying for whatever fragments of choice are left to him.
At the very least, he will be able to disabuse himself for good of the notion that the men outside civilization are any better than the ones inside it. That is a naiveté he should never have allowed himself to entertain.
But the blow does not come, and when he glances towards Guerin again, his expression is abashed. “I’m sorry, I thought – “ Guerin clears his throat roughly, and suddenly he looks nothing like the fearsome pirate Alex first met. “It’s late; I’ll leave you to rest.”
And he leaves without another word.
Alex watches him depart and does not consider sleep for at least the next several hours. He knows it would be a futile attempt.
Instead, he paces and tries to categorize the chaotic riot of emotions within him.
His initial attraction to Guerin, self-explanatory: the man is an attractive one, and Alex had long ago stopped struggling against his desire for men, even if his life had never allowed him to act on it.
Then Guerin had accepted his rejection, without anger or violence, turning the thoughts in his head into an incomprehensible cacophony.
Has he really sunk so low that, after a life of cruelty, he is drawn to the first man who has shown him kindness? Surely he is less pathetic than settling for that?
But Guerin is also everything Alex has always wanted to be: free. He lives a life unfettered, unafraid of paying a price as high as death for it and yet willing to respect the choice of others. It is a courage Alex both admires and envies. And that is the root of it, isn’t it? Guerin is the man Alex wishes he could be, and for this reason, Alex wants him. As if being with him will help him to somehow be him.
He tries this explanation on, but the edges do not fit. No, when he thinks of Guerin’s easy smile and wild curls and the fire in his eyes, it is not just that he sees an ideal that he longs to live up to. Guerin is the first thing he can truly choose for himself. He is both a man and a pirate, his person a criminal and his touch a sin, and Alex wants the wild, easy exhilaration of letting himself have the thing both longed for and twice-forbidden. He may be a hostage, but he still feels more his own man than he has ever been in his life, and he stills his pacing with the realization that he wants to give himself to the man who is a brash rejection of all he should hold sacred.
His mind made up, he falls asleep with feverish thoughts but a smile upon his lips.
…..
Guerin does not check on him the following day; instead, the task of taking him out for air falls to Max, rather later in the day than Alex has come to expect.
“I need to speak with the captain,” he insists after they pass an uncomfortable quarter of an hour in complete silence.
Max is taller than Guerin, and there is something darker, more thunderous about him, hidden behind the mild mannerisms of a quartermaster. He crosses his arms in front of his chest and asks “what do you want with him?”
“I remembered more intelligence that the captain would appreciate, prior to attempting an attack on Port Royal,” he lies.
“I can pass it along to him,” Max says gruffly. Alex is again convinced that while Guerin may see something in him, Max is thoroughly unimpressed by his person.
“You’ll forgive me if I don’t trust anyone with it but the man who gave me his word that my life is safe,” he deadpans.
Max sighs and says nothing else until he locks Alex the cabin again at the end of their brief constitutional around the deck of the ship. Alex paces for the hours until Guerin enters his cabin – the captain’s cabin, that Alex had come to think of as his.
Guerin holds himself with an unyielding, impenetrable nonchalance as he faces Alex. “Max informs me that you have additional intelligence to convey regarding the defenses of Port Royal,” he says, sounding half-disinterested.
Alex exhales nervously. The many hours he has spent alone today have done nothing to dispel his certainty that he wants this, and now, face-to-face with the man himself, the excitement he had tasted in his thoughts the night before creeps in and takes hold of his insides. But he is also painfully unpracticed at taking what he wants, and there is no trace of the man who had courted him in Guerin’s guarded eyes.
He has not come this far to be cowed by fear, he decides. He is in the lion’s den, staking his life on the hope that he is capable of living up to being the man he wishes to be. This might be the first test on that journey.
Before he can lose his nerve, he kisses Guerin. He is met with momentary stillness, and then Guerin’s hands come up to hold him as he returns the kiss. His lips are rough from salt and sea, but his curls are soft when Alex tangles his hands in them.
Alex had always wanted his first kiss to be special; he had never thought it would be at the hands of a pirate who held Alex’s life in his hands; he had never dared imagine it would have the searing passion of this kiss.
Then those hands grip him tighter and he cannot hold back a wince and a pained whine against Guerin’s lips. Guerin pulls away and drops his hands from Alex’s body, and Alex feels the loss keenly. He tries vainly to chase the kiss.
“I’m sorry,” Guerin says, his voice raw and a frown creasing his forehead. “Did I – “
Alex grips Guerin’s wrist to stop him from pulling away entirely.
“It wasn’t anything you did, I swear,” he tries to reassure, but Guerin looks unconvinced. Alex sighs, and for the first time since he had decided to kiss him, he is struck with overwhelming doubt.
He bites his lip and hesitates. If this is truly going the way he thinks, then Guerin will inevitably discover it. Still, it is not easy to drop his hand from Guerin’s and reach for his own shirt.
This time, it is Guerin’s hand that rests on his wrist to stop him.
“Alex – “ Meeting Guerin’s eyes, he finds pained uncertainty there. “I only want this if you do.”
“I want this,” he insists. “I just – “ Instead of searching for words he knows he will not find, he takes a breath and pulls the shirt over his head, its folds masking his wince at the movement.
He hears Guerin’s sharp, pained intake of breath the moment he registers what he sees: the bruises that cover Alex’s ribs and stomach, yellowed now with time (he has become an expert by now at telling apart those that will heal quickly from those that will turn a sickly yellow-green that mars his skin for weeks), the smaller bracelets of bruises around his wrists, the fading marks of a belt what wrap around from his back to his waist.
“Who did this to you?” The undercurrents of Guerin’s voice are unfamiliar to him after having known him for only days, but when he meets his eyes he recognizes what they are: fury.
“My father.”
The noise that escapes Guerin is akin to that of a wounded animal.
“You’re his son – “
“I told you that I am not the son my father wanted.”
Guerin’s hands are gentle has he cradles Alex’s face, but his gaze blows Alex away with its intensity. “I will never hurt you,” he says.
When Alex was young – before he had given his father one final reason to hate him, among all the others – he had caught butterflies. They were delicate creatures, and he had been drawn to the intricate patterns of their black-and-yellow wings. But he’d learned quickly that they would not be able to fly again unless Alex used the gentlest of touches to trace those enticing patterns.
Now, Guerin’s calloused pirate’s hands touch his yellowing bruises like they are butterfly wings, whisper-soft.
And Alex believes him.
“I want you,” he says firmly. “I want this, Guerin.”
Guerin flashes an unabashed grin. “Call me Michael,” he says, and steers Alex to the bed with gentle hands upon his hips; the push backwards onto the sheets is equally light. They reach for Alex’s breeches at the same time, their hands knocking together in their haste to undo the last piece of clothing that covers him.
Atop him, Michael kisses every inch of his exposed skin, feather-light as his lips trail from the curve of his neck and across his chest to map the marks that cover his body. Forgetting arousal, Alex drowns in the novel and heady sensation of gentleness. His eyes slip closed and his breathing evens out; he does not remember when he last felt so profoundly peaceful.
It is only when Guerin’s – no, Michael’s - lips reach the inside of his thigh that his eyes flutter open again. The scruff of his face is rough against Alex’s skin and his curls tickle and Alex’s breath catches as arousal begins again to fill his half-hard cock.
Michael glances up at him through golden eyelashes, a question evident in his eyes. In answer, Alex tangles a hand in those curls and guides his mouth the last few inches to his cock.
Michael takes him in his mouth and –
Oh. Oh.
He had not known pleasure could feel like this. The wet heat of Michael’s mouth, so different from his own hand, sets him alight, but mostly, it is the visceral, undeniable knowledge that another cares for his pleasure.
He throws his head back, not bothering to hold back a guttural moan as his hand tightens in Michael’s curls. He wonders idly if the crew can hear, if they have suspicions about what their captain is doing with his hostage, and finds that he wants them to.
If Michael takes issue with the shameless noises that spill from him, well, his mouth is too occupied to offer protests.
It feels like mere moments later that he tugs at Michael’s hair again, and Michael goes where Alex leads, letting himself be pulled up for a rough and messy kiss.
“What do you want, Alex?” he asks. His voice is raw, his pupils dark and his curls messier than ever.
Alex has explored his own body enough to have some idea of how these things go, among men. In the silence and the darkness of his bedchamber, late at night, he had probed himself with his own fingers, stifling his gasps in the pillows and biting his lips. He had both wondered about and craved the sensation of another man replacing his fingers with their own, or better yet, with their cock. But he does not know how to voice those desires, and meeting Michael’s eyes in that moment is like staring at the sun. He deflects his own gaze as he answers.
“I want you to fuck me,” he manages in a voice smaller than he’d hoped for. He feels the blush creeping up his cheeks and curses it.
Michael’s sharp inhale is followed by another rough and messy kiss. He is already settled between Alex’s legs, but now he spreads them wider, and some instinct in the core of Alex’s being tells him to resist allowing himself to be splayed out like this, his most intimate parts on display and his body for the taking.
“Alex, look at me,” Michael orders, and he does. Michael’s hands rest on his thighs, thumbs circling, oh so close to his entrance, each brush against his skin a tantalizing hint of what could be. “You don’t have to – “
“I want this,” Alex interrupts. “I do,” he insists, Michael’s delicacy having snapped something in him until he finds the steel with which he had first faced this man, while butterflies flutter traitorously in his stomach. He remembers suddenly that he is dancing on a precipice, toying with a pleasure whose punishment is death.
There is no other man he wants to do this with.
Michael nods, slicking his hands in oil before entering him with a finger. The sensation is familiar, yet the vulnerability of allowing his pleasure to be subject to another is new and intoxicating. Michael is clearly experienced, and Alex is happy to surrender himself to that experience and let Michael do what he will. Michael watches his face intently as he works him open, and Alex realizes that he is attempting to read his reactions. Used to hiding them in darkness, he feels more naked at this scrutiny than when he’d first taken off his clothes. That was Michael seeing his body; this feels like him seeing his soul.
He wants to simultaneously look away and lose himself in Michael’s unyielding attention.
Finally, Michael deems himself satisfied; slicking himself up, Michael pushes into him, slow and steady and -
“Fuck,” Alex moans.
Michael grins. “For a nobleman, you sure do know how to swear like a sailor.”
Alex just moans again, the very notion of words lost to him with the feel of Michael inside him. Michael takes the hint, rocking into him with gentle movements that send lightning through Alex’s limbs. He is swiftly drowning in an uncharted sea of pleasure, but Michael is his lifeline, his port in the storm. The more experienced of the two, Michael guides him surely into this uncharted territory, until this becomes a thing they share, and he wants no other companion he wants on this journey of discovery.
But he also wants more. He wants to plunge headfirst into a sea of sensations and drown in them. He has known gentleness at Michael’s hands and now he wants something else that only he can give.
“Harder,” he demands with newfound boldness, his fingers a death-grip on Guerin’s arms. “Take me like you’re a pirate and I’m your prize.”
Michael makes a strangled sound and the world whirls around him as he finds himself flipped over by strong, sure arms. Calloused hands find his hips, tugging him onto all fours, and there is nothing dignified about the position, but he does not care when Michael pushes into him again, harder this time. The shift in position has changed the angle, forcing the last vestiges of thought from his mind. All he can do now is feel: feel Michael inside him, feel Michael’s hands desperately grabbing at every part of his body – his hips, his chest, a hand even snaking up to his neck. They are not gentle, catching sometimes on Alex’s bruises, but with the pleasure he’s drowning in, the flashes of pain are an exquisite aftertaste.
“Yes, yes, yes,” he manages breathlessly. “Take me just like tha – “
“My crew will hear,” Michael growls, fisting his hand in Alex’s hair. “They will know exactly what I’m doing to you.”
“Let them,” Alex gasps out, his words a stuttering, breathless staccato in between Michael’s thrusts. “Let them - know - I’m – oh - yours.”
Michael lets out a guttural sound and starts to slam into him so hard and fast it knocks the air from him. One of his hands, Alex realizes, is on his cock, swift, practiced movements guiding him surely to climax. He feels consumed by a veritable storm, and all he can do is hang on for dear life as Guerin thrusts so far inside him that Alex feels like wonders if he wants to fuse the two of them together into one being. “Mine,” Michael growls. “No one else will ever touch you.”
Alex comes with a shameless cry and goes limp in Michael’s arms. Several seconds later, he feels Michael’s climax inside him. He’s floating mindlessly, only Michael’s strength holding him up, and he thinks he does not care what Michael does with his body now. He just wants to float in this ocean of bliss, the physical world be damned.
But Michael coaxes him gently down onto the bed, cleans them both up and settles beside him. Alex goes where Michael guides him, sleepy and pliant. He never wants to move from this bed, or from Michael’s arms around him, a hand in his mussed hair. Glancing up, he sees Michael smile down at him and closes his eyes happily. The silence wraps around them, soft and comfortable as an old blanket.
Eventually, though, Michael disentangles himself from Alex and rises.
“Stay,” he pleads as Michael begins to dress.
“I can’t. We’re almost to Port Royal. I have to go be the captain.” He tilts Alex’s chin up, planting a soft kiss on his lips. “I’ll be back tonight.”
It’s a statement as much as it is a question, and Alex nods, hope blooming in his chest.
…..
Eventually, Alex rises and dresses, then curls up by the generously-sized window and gazes at the ocean as he carefully catalogues every single moment of what just happened. He runs his fingers over his own lips, red and swollen from endless stubbly kisses. The pleasant soreness is a completely alien sensation, so different from the kind he is used to feeling. It is an echo of Michael inside him, reverberating through his entire being every time he moves, and he wants to sink into it and never surface. Michael took him, left a mark on him that goes far beyond the physical, and yet he feels so free he thinks he could soar.
Michael returns again several hours later, after the sun has pained the horizon in achingly beautiful colors and the moon has risen. Alex rises, and Michael strides over to him, drawing him into a kiss that Alex gives himself to eagerly. But when Michael pulls away to look at him, Alex finds his eyes flitting about at anything but Michael’s face.
When he had made the decision the previous night to throw himself headfirst into this, he had not thought far beyond the initial meeting of their bodies, had not dared build castles in the air of what might be, after. Now, he does not know how to fill the silence that hangs between them as he remembers the obscenities he had spewed while Michael was – inside him. And that, in itself, is still a thought he can hardly wrap his mind around even after hours of attempting to.
“What is it?” Again Michael’s eyes are full of concern, and an unkind voice in the back of Alex’s mind wonders when he will run out of patience for Alex’s hesitations and incompetencies.
“I just – don’t know where this goes from here,” he confesses. Or even what this is, the delicate, nebulous thing between them. Does Michael want to take him to bed again? He’s not sure he’s quite ready for it, not yet when it is so new and he still feels traces of Michael linger inside him every time he moves. Surely Michael, with his experience, will not want to wait patiently while a naïve and pampered noble tries to figure out what it is he even wants -
Michael breaks into those thoughts by cradling his face in his hands and pressing a kiss to his lips.
“What do you want?” he asks, and the answer to that, at least, is simpler.
“Sleep with me tonight?”
A smile brightens Michael’s face. He tugs Alex toward the bed, shucking his clothes easily until he remains only in his drawers. Alex, however, hesitates.
Michael’s hands come to rest on his where he clutches at his tucked-in shirt. “You have nothing to be ashamed of, Alex,” he says kindly.
Tentatively, Michael untucks his shirt. Alex lets him, allows him to draw the fabric over his head – obviating the need to stretch painfully at his injuries in the process of divesting himself of clothing. It is another of those small kindnesses of which Alex had known so few that he collects each one, shutting them up in a small treasury of memories.
Undressing the rest of the way, he joins Michael in the small bed – a tight fit, but comfortable enough. He rests on his side, pillowing his head on an arm while the other traces over Michael’s skin.
Alex has learned his own body, but that of another man is still strange and unfamiliar, however much it resembles his own. Too swept up in their lovemaking earlier, he had not had the chance to explore Michael’s body, but now he can run his hands over its firm planes, hard and muscular from a life of unforgiving toil. He has long known he desires men, but only now does he discover what he desires in men. There are scars here and there on Michael’s body, none too serious, but they add that je ne sais quoi that Alex’s romantic mind finds titillating. His nipples harden like Alex’s own when touched, Alex learns to his delight, and he learns, too, that he likes the tufts of hair on Michael’s chest that he can tangle his hands in.
Michael merely sprawls, one hand behind his head and an amused smile playing on his face.
“Like what you see?” he inquires with almost infuriating insouciance, but Alex can read the other, more hesitant, question hidden behind it.
“Yes,” he says honestly. He brushes his thumb over a nipple again and is delighted to see Michael respond with a slight exhale. “You were my first,” he confesses.
“Your first what?”
Alex feels himself blush as he looks away from Michael.
“Alex – “ Michael shifts until he’s propped up on an elbow, and when Alex meets his gaze again, he sees surprise and awe and definitely uncertainty and something else that he has not yet learned to read in Michael’s eyes.
He places a soothing hand on Michael’s chest.
“It was perfect,” he says. “And I have no regrets.”
Something seems to settle in Michael at those words. He kisses Alex, and Alex realizes it is a way to hide the confused jumble of emotions that he can nonetheless feel in the way Michael’s lips meet his, gentle and needy and longing all at once.
“Why me?” Michael asks in the smallest voice Alex has ever heard a pirate use.
Alex doesn’t know how to put into words the complicated web of reasons he had spent hours of the previous night disentangling.
“I think…you were the thing I was looking for, without even knowing it,” he offers.
“You too,” Michael confesses before capturing his lips in another kiss. Alex loses himself in it, but Michael pulls back before it gets too heated and coaxes Alex to rest his head on his chest.
Alex settles in, and for the first time in his life, he feels safe.
….
Ten years later, Captain Alex Manes is crowned the Pirate King, forever tarnishing his once-illustrious name.
Beside him, Michael beams with pride as they place they the crown on his head, but another man occupies his thoughts: the young Alex that Michael had first taken to his bed. That one had been unfamiliar with pleasure and unused to asking for what he wanted, his dark lashes fluttering shyly as blushes crept over innocent features.
Michael loves them both with a fire that could burn down the British Empire itself if it dared to lay a hand on them. But this Alex has no need of his protection: he could bend the world to his will with but a look, and the world knows it.
Michael knows it too, intimately.