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Francis Crozier does not suffer fools gladly. Having spent most of his life taking orders from men whose folly can – and regularly does – cost men arms and legs and hearts and lives, he is disinclined to let that particular trait go.
Francis Crozier does not suffer fools gladly, and he is glad of it.
The word ‘fool’ comprehends a dizzying array of types and modes of behaviour. Men who think that a Bible and a sanguine heart are any match for scurvy, starvation and a landscape that will swallow you whole unblinkingly. Men who think that vowel sounds are a determinant of fitness for scientific operations. Men who think that glory is a worthwhile pursuit for a grown man with more wit than hair.
James Fitzjames has, at various points in his life, been all three. And Francis suffered him [1], and suffers him, and at some point discovered that he forgave him long ago.
Unfortunately, James is another sort of fool, one that Francis finds much harder to endure: a man who thinks Francis Crozier is beautiful.
And Francis suffers James … not gladly, never gladly. Fiercely, hungrily, almost entirely against his will. He suffers him like the poor monster that he is, an aching dumb thing with his teeth sunk into James’s long white throat.
He hoards James’s bright eyes and the tremble in his hands when they touch his face. He swallows the shiver down his spine when Francis presses a kiss to the small of his back. He licks up the sweat pooling in the well between his collar-bones and tells himself keep this.
Altogether a different matter when James’s thumbs are resting in the cleft of Francis’s chin and his voice is rumbling ‘Lovely’.
Francis knows the word, has used the word: most recently, for example, in the past minute when contemplating the mark his own thumb left on the dip at the base of James’s throat. It sounds different (and worse, it sounds unsettlingly the same) in James’s baritone.
Francis thinks, for a moment, that it is mockery. For more than a moment, wishes it were mockery. Mockery he knows what to do with. It is a part for which he is well-prepared. He knows the lines, he knows the entrances and exits.
But Francis knows James’s voice, and he has not it in him to pretend that its startled tremulousness is anything but sincere.
And candour is another thing, a heavy wonderful terrible thing. Candour coupled with the word ‘lovely’ is a thing with knives.
James is in earnest. Which means James is in error. And an error is a thing that can be mended. An error is a thing James is adept at mending. Francis has seen James mend errors, one by one. He has seen James learn, he has seen him discard old selves of prismatic surfaces for a new thing: beautiful still, but sharper and worn, harder and softer at once.
James is a veteran to desire, but a novice in love. He has much to learn. And he will not learn by repeating an error.
‘Lovely’ is an error, and not to be repeated. Francis is lovely, and lovely is an error, and Francis is enough of a natural philosopher to understand the transitive property.
So Francis flinches, recoiling away from the long hand cupping his face.
‘Francis?’
Francis opens his eyes – when had they shut? – and says ‘Don’t call me that.’
‘Lovely?’
Francis flinches again. ‘Don’t.’
There is a crease between James’s brows. ‘But you are.’
‘James,’ says Francis, ‘do not.’
‘Why am I not permitted to say so,’ says James, with his unerring knack for finding and pressing on Francis’s sorest spots, ‘when you are?’
‘Because,’ says Francis, ‘I am not, and I dislike having you say so.’
He sees the set of James’s jaw, and groans inwardly. ‘James - ’
‘Is it my sincerity you doubt,’ says James, ‘or my judgement?’
He is sitting back, arms folded over his chest, and Francis spares a sad thought for his prick, half-hard still and hopeful. ‘I think,’ he says with some reluctance, ‘that you are not to be trusted in this matter.’
James’s eyes snap. ‘Not to be trusted?’
‘I meant,’ says Francis hastily, ‘that your judgement might be … I think you are in error.’
‘About finding you lovely?’
About finding Francis … about finding Francis, thinks Francis, but nods instead.
‘I see,’ says James, and Francis looks at him. James shrugs – an elegant dilettante’s moue of the shoulder – and moves closer to Francis. ‘I am not in error,’ he says, with the amused certainty that used to set Francis’s teeth on edge.
‘James - ’
‘I am not in error,’ says James, and Francis’s eyes widen, then narrow, at the emphasis.
‘You are lovely,’ says James, and his hands shoot out to seize Francis’s shoulders when he jolts away.
‘Curious,’ says James, in a tone so like Goodsir that Francis’s head shoots up, half-expecting a very different pair of brown eyes to look back at him.
‘You recoil when I say it,’ says James, and Francis casts his eyes heavenwards.
‘But,’ says James, ‘it inflames you too.’
‘What are you - ’ and then Francis hisses as James’s hand closes around his cock, stiff against his thigh.
And, thinks Francis, in a long line of humiliations which James has made a point of witnessing, this surely is the front and head of his offending. The offer of himself – his long, haughty, improbable self – is bad enough, but can be borne if he consents to play his role as assigned: spread out for Francis to marvel at and feast on and besmirch. For him to want to touch in turn is a step too far, but Francis can indulge him. For him to want to look is absurd, but Francis has already said yes to so much.
And now, when James has breathed out his error – his crass, calamitous error – and has been given the chance to correct it, he has refused. Worse, he has observed Francis’s shameful stirring at his tremulous, ecstatic tones and made it impossible for Francis to deny or ignore.
Might as well take my cock out and slap it onto the dinner-table, thinks Francis, and then looks at the gleam in James’s eye and decides not to say the words out loud.
‘What do you expect with you pawing at me like that?’ is what Francis does say. James smiles.
‘You like it, old boy,’ he says, and Francis thinks very seriously of striking him. ‘This lovely beast,’ and Francis’ traitorous prick jerks in James’s hand, ‘likes me to tell you what I think of you.’
‘I can assure you,’ says Francis, as dryly as he can contrive with his cock nestled in a warm seeking hand, ‘that you have been – ahh – free of your opinion of me in the past, without counting on … this … reaction.’
James bends forward and scrapes his teeth against Francis’s earlobe. ‘Are you sure?’
‘Quite,’ says Francis, and grabs James’s face to kiss him. That’s one way of stopping his mouth, at the very least.
Francis needs to find other ways, rapidly, over the next few weeks. James is apparently profuse with opinions about Francis’s hands, his hair, his eyes, the freckles on his shoulders, his voice after tending to James’s prick. He is, as Francis is entirely and gloomily unsurprised to learn, as hard to silence on this subject as any.
He tries to slip ‘lovely’ past Francis’s defences one afternoon when they are lying in their bed. Francis, half-drunk with kisses, almost misses it, but nearly bucks James off the bed when the word sinks in. The man, affronted and temporarily abashed, clambers back onto Francis with an aggrieved sniff and a thoughtful gleam in his eye.
The next time, he is lying beneath Francis, who moves his elbow across his throat quickly. James’s eyes roll back into his head at the pressure, his prick fattens and jerks against Francis’s belly, and his plans of oratory are – at least temporarily – shelved.
After that, James seems to appreciate the tactical sensitivity of his position. He lays careful snares for Francis: little feints towards his fundament while he purrs about Francis’s fetching blush, one long finger circling his hole as he murmurs something about Francis’s eyes. Francis, having been caught dozing at the wheel once, exercises exacting vigilance. James is silenced with Francis’s fingers, his mouth and his cock, plied in inventive permutations and combinations.
‘Don’t gloat,’ says James, having let Francis’s softening prick fall from his lips. He wipes his chin and looks narrowly up at him. ‘It doesn’t become you.’
Francis lifts an unrepentant eyebrow. He is deliquescent with satisfaction, both from an extended and violent release, and – more importantly – having successfully thwarted the man in his bed.
‘I certainly have no impulse to say anything remotely gentle to you now,’ says James, crawling up the length of Francis’s body and flopping onto him with considerably more force than necessary.
‘I’ll hold you to that, shall I, lad?’ says Francis, once he has recovered his breath.
‘Odious man,’ says James, which Francis knows with glum certainty is no answer at all.
James, a man of some resource, decides that his next best avenue of attack involves the use of ciphers. Francis has James pinned on their sopha, warm and pliant and undulating in a fashion both demanding and distracting. Francis is occupied in licking over a bruise he left on James’s throat, purpling enticingly in the twilight, when he hears that well-loved voice sigh out a word in a language Francis thinks he recognises: an almost-familiar burr and scratch, furring an almost-familiar sound into something alien.
His head snaps up and he looks at James, who is looking back with the dancing eyes that make Francis ache to think he never knew Lieutenant James Fitzjames.
‘You can’t use Portuguese either,’ says Francis at length, lifting his head to draw in breath and leaving a trail of spittle behind him.
‘You don’t know that I was praising you,’ says James, eyes half-lidded and lips swollen. ‘I could have been cursing the land that begat you.’
Francis bends his head and bites James’s lip. ‘Were you?’ he says, rubbing his thumb over the marks of his teeth.
‘My point is,’ says James, after nipping at Francis’s thumb, ‘that I could have been.’
Francis grins and falls upon him again.
‘I could just gag you,’ says Francis the next time.
James’s voice is muffled around Francis’s fingers, but his tone is plain.
More out of spite than anything else, they try the gag. They like it well enough to agree to try it again at some point, but Francis knows that its utility as a threat is virtually nil.
James’s voice. That drawling baritone, lowering to a rumble that vibrates against Francis’s chest, the gasp of almost-affronted pleasure when Francis breaches him with finger, or tongue, or prick, and – above all – the many hues of Francis’s name on his lips: startled, worshipful, playful, wheedling, demanding, tender and numinous and reverent.
Francis could not, with any credibility, promise to silence James.
James then moves on to the next manoeuvre beloved of embattled generals: an attack from the rear. Francis has James behind him, chest pressed to his back, and his hand covering Francis’s as they both slowly, lazily frig him. James’s prick is rubbing against Francis’s arse, a hot promising weight, and James is mouthing at Francis’s shoulder.
‘Francis,’ sighs James, ‘do you know how beautiful - ’
Oh, the little jackal. Francis growls and snatches James’s hand off his prick, giving him an ungentle elbow in the ribs in the bargain.
When he turns to face James, he has an eyebrow and a few choice words at the ready, but James’s face stays him.
‘Why won’t you let me?,’ says James, and Francis’s stomach drops. James’s voice has the wretched stillness Francis remembers from a long-ago tale of fathers who would not stay, of the base matters that founded James’s being and the bargains he had to strike to be allowed to be his own thrusting beautiful self.
‘You don’t need to,’ says Francis, knowing that he’s not answering James’s question and despising himself, ‘you have me, James, you needn’t.’
‘Why won’t you let me?’ says James again, because James only knows to dig and push and poke with Francis, and why would he trouble to learn anything else when he knows that Francis will emerge to strike him or to confide in him?
‘Why won’t you let it go?’ says Francis in reply.
‘Because,’ says James, at length, ‘I have been waiting some time to say it. Because I have a store of things I have thought about, and things I wished to say to you. Because I never thought I would have the opportunity, and,’ he swallows, with Francis watching with a convulsive covetousness the movement of his long throat, ‘I am not in the habit of … squandering … opportunities when I do get them, Francis.’
He smiles – a quick, bitter thing – and shrugs. ‘So,’ he says, ‘it’s a private matter. A foolish one perhaps, but - ’
‘All right,’ says Francis. James looks at him.
‘All right?’
‘We’ll do it,’ says Francis. ‘I’ll not complain, or shy, or jib. We’ll – whatever you need.’
A smile is beginning on James’s face, a gawky sunshine thing that deepens the furrows in his cheeks and threatens to make his eyes disappear entirely. Francis finds the corners of his own lips tugging upwards irresistibly in response.
‘In practical terms,’ says James, ‘I don’t think you can entirely speak for what you cannot control.’
Francis grunts. His body is at present drawing his attention to that circumstance with ill-bred clarity: he has been endeavouring to wipe the smile from his face for some moments with extremely limited success. ‘What do you suggest, then?’
He looks across at James, who is considering him with an appraising look and his head on one side, and finds his smile disappearing like breath on a window. ‘James?’
The solution they hit on is, Francis supposes, in the spirit of their experiment with the gag.
Francis has his hands bound with James’s softest Kushmeer cravats. James has used a double column tie, and fussed and clucked interminably about the bind, the give and rigour before Francis ordered him to whisht his blethering and finish the job. James combines a finicking particularity about his personal appearance with an extravagant indifference to his own bodily integrity, but he treats Francis like something rare and precious and frighteningly breakable.
James stands before Francis, eyes skittering over his prone and naked form in a way that makes Francis want to unfurl in the heat of his gaze and throw himself out of the window.
‘Francis,’ says James quietly, and passes his tongue over his lips. Francis raises his head to meet his eyes and swallows.
‘Well, then,’ he says, lifting his chin, ‘let’s be having you. You didn’t want me tied up and laid out for you just to gawp at me, did you?’
‘Gawping at you would be no mean reward,’ comes to the soft response, and Francis swallows again. ‘But no, since you ask.’
James swings his leg over so that his knees are bracketing Francis. He bends forward, eyes dark and intent, and brushes Francis’s hair with the tips of his long fingers.
‘You took off your hat when you came in to Erebus,’ he says, ‘and ran your hands through your hair. The most cursory attempt to restore order. I wondered why you even made the attempt. It certainly wasn’t for the benefit of Sir John or me.’
Francis thinks of James’s dark mane, a-gleam in the candle-light, and the meagre strands clinging bravely to his own scalp, clears his throat, and says nothing.
‘It looked like spider silk,’ says James, ‘springing through your fingers.’
‘My hair?’ says Francis, looking pointedly at the dark hair falling across James’s narrow cheek, ‘give you joy of it, lad. What there is of it.’
‘I wanted to touch it,’ says James, ignoring Francis, ‘I left marks on my thigh, once, with how hard I gripped it to keep from reaching for you and smoothing your hair down for you.’
Francis swallows. ‘You can touch now.’
‘I know,’ says James on a sigh. ‘I shall.’
He slides his hand into Francis’s hair for a firmer grip. Francis thinks he can feel the way each thin strand strains towards those long white fingers, bending and straightening under their touch.
And then he bends in closer, close enough to bury his nose in the hair just over Francis’s ear and sigh. This has the happy effect of leaving Francis himself with a mouthful of sweet-smelling brown hair.
‘Mmmph,’ he says, in as strong accents of protest as he can contrive, more or less for form’s sake. He is at the same time noisily breathing in the scent of James’s hair, so the man treats his interjection with exactly the consideration it merits.
James nuzzles his way deeper into Francis’s hair, and lets out a deep sigh that makes Francis shiver. He noses his way to the stray lock of hair curling on Francis’s forehead and takes it between his lips.
‘It doesn’t taste of anything in particular,’ says Francis, widening his eyes at how softly the words come out, ‘I ought to know, I’ve had your hair flying into my mouth often enough.’
James says nothing, seeming to sip and nibble at the hair, lips against Francis’s forehead. He lets it go at length and smiles down at Francis.
‘You enraged me,’ he says, ‘with your cloud of wretchedness and the curl of your lip and your soft hair. It never seemed just, that I should ache so to taste it.’
Francis thinks of the pained glowering fascination with which James’s long fingers and thin mouth had plagued him for so long, and looks ruefully up at James.
‘It’s softer even than I could have imagined,’ says James.
Francis twitches and James nods down at him, bending to give him a kiss.
‘Your hair infuriated me,’ says James when he lifts his head, ‘but then there were these.’ There is a thumb on the rise of his cheek.
‘Were what?’
‘You have freckles,’ says James. ‘They faded in winter, but you had them still at Greenhithe. They sprout under the least encouragement.’ The thumb brushes the bridge of Francis’s nose. ‘Here, and across your cheeks. Your ears had a spattering of the things one summer, and I don’t think I slept a wink the night I spotted them. And these …’ and his fingers brush Francis’s shoulder, where he knows there is a stubborn burst of the cursed things that will not fade no matter how long and impregnable the winter.
‘I thank heaven fasting I never knew of their existence,’ says James, ‘or I think I would have stabbed you with your own protractor.’
Francis grins. ‘You were within ames ace of doing so anyhow.’
‘Oh, I was,’ says James. ‘Many times.’
He runs his tongue lightly over the little line of brown spots marching from cheek to cheek across his nose, as Francis squirms and jerks beneath him. Then he bends and mouths at one shoulder, then the other.
‘They’re beautiful,’ he says, and Francis jolts. ‘Ssshhhh, Francis, we are but beginning.’
‘I am aware,’ says Francis, through his teeth.
‘They’re tender,’ says James, and absorbs Francis’s shudder with his hands, ‘but they persist. They endure through wind and ice and death and privation and other men’s obduracy.’
Francis takes in a breath. ‘Only,’ he says, ‘because they know no better.’
‘They need know no better,’ says James, his thumbs curving over Francis’s freckles as though to shield them. ‘They’re lovely.’
Francis’s cock leaps and he hisses. ‘James, Christ, there’s nothing so wonderful about the damned things, you must have seen them before.’
‘These are yours,’ says James, in the tones of a village schoolmaster instructing a particularly dull member of his class. Francis bristles as he blushes.
‘The blush is another thing,’ says James, beginning to grin, ‘Another thing I am glad I was spared the burden of truly knowing.’ His grin widens as Francis scowls and turns away, knowing the red is spreading. ‘Though I was not spared the burden of speculating.’
‘What,’ says Francis, cursing the blood running through his veins and gathering up his prick, ‘what did you speculate about?’
‘Oh, Lord,’ says James, ‘oh, all manner of things.’ He bends and opens his mouth against one of Francis’s hot cheeks. ‘but I suppose that you’re asking about your blushing.’
Francis scrambles together the wherewithal to scowl at James, who smiles back. ‘I had grounds enough for idle ponderings, you know. I saw you often enough red from drinking, or choler, or both. I used to wonder …when that blush vanishes below his collar, how far does it go? Below main topsail for certain,’ and his finger strokes beneath Francis’s chin, ‘and almost certainly upper deck, but how much farther?’ A hand smooths over Francis’s shoulder. ‘Quarterdeck?’ And a finger pinches Francis’s nipples, and Francis hisses. ‘Gun deck?’ The hand moves down to Francis’s belly, and Francis sucks in a breath. ‘Berth deck?’ And he stops a mere inch short of Francis’s prick, twitching towards the heat of his hand. ‘Lower still? The orlop?’
Francis, red and furious and stiffening, says ‘Well? You have your answer.’
‘Mmmmm,’ says James and bends his head for an unhurried, lush kiss. ‘It plagued me, you understand. Where does the blush go? How far? Is it the same red all through, or is it rose by the time it enters the Bay of Biscay, and near gone by the time it reaches the Doldrums?’
Francis contrives to level a sincerely withering stare at James, the effect only slightly spoiled by the grin he cannot quite smother, and a still-sanguine prick. ‘You’d better have devoted yourself to the magnetic readings you had charge of.’
‘Probably,’ says James, ‘God knows both seemed like equally fruitless pursuits.’
‘Pursuit?’ says Francis, eyebrow raised. ‘That’s what you were doing, was it?’
James clears his throat, a blush rising in his own cheeks [2]. ‘I think, you know, that it was.’
Francis looks back at their storied and troublesome history and snorts.
‘You needn’t credit me,’ says James, with an insufferably forbearing air, ‘but it is true, nevertheless.’
‘Well, you have me trussed up and at your mercy,’ says Francis, and James wets his lips quickly at the words, ‘so I suppose I’ll have to credit you.’
‘Mmmm,’ says James, and bends his head for another kiss. This one is longer and hungrier, with James’s own prick rubbing insistently against Francis’s. His mouth is an urgent wet weight on Francis’s, and Francis sucks on his tongue, and when James lifts his head Francis pulls at his bounds to chase him.
‘Don’t,’ says James quickly. His lips are swollen and his breath is coming fast. ‘You’ll hurt yourself.’
He reaches up to cradle one of Francis’s hands, and slip a thumb and finger beneath the tie to examine his wrist.
‘You have me bound in the same wool you use to swaddle your precious neck,’ says Francis, ‘I doubt I’ll take harm from it.’
‘This, too,’ says James, ignoring Francis utterly and tracing his thumb over the veins on the inside of Francis’s wrist, ‘this little sliver of skin, this little isthmus between your sleeve and your glove. I saw it once, only once, and it gave me no peace.’
He examines the tie and then runs his attention back to Francis. ‘It never seemed right,’ he says, ‘for you to dog me so. Some cursed humourless thing that lived in my glass and lullabied me to bed with an inventory of my failings every night, and that I wanted so desperately to unwrap and shelter.’
‘James - ’ says Francis. He is unwrapped, he thinks, and feeling in want of shelter with every glorious terrible word out of James’s mouth.
James thumbs at the corner of Francis’s lips. ‘Lovely,’ he says. Francis jolts and pulls at his bounds, eyes shutting.
‘Look at me, Francis,’ says James. ‘I want you to look at me.’
Francis obeys, and swallows. There is a weight to James’s ardent intent gaze that Francis is never quite prepared for.
‘Francis,’ says James, and that lost, helpless sound Francis knows, oh he knows intimately.
‘James,’ he says, echoing the sound and returning it with interest. James bends and kisses Francis again, and again, and again until his lips are sore and shapeless and he is panting into James’s mouth. ‘James,’ he says again, more insistently.
James nods. He presses another quick kiss – more teeth than tongue – to Francis’s mouth before shinning down the length of his body.
‘Here you are,’ he says.
Francis nudges him with his knee. ‘No grand dithyrambs about wanting to protect this, then?’ He winces at how eager the words sound, how his prick is twitching under James’s warm breath.
James looks up at Francis and smiles, a slow thing that has Francis’s toes curling despite himself. ‘Protect?’ he says and purses his lips. ‘Oh, my imaginings wouldn’t let me get that far, Francis.’
Francis cocks an eyebrow. James’s faults have never included a dearth of ambition or imagination. ‘Really?’
‘I wondered,’ says James, eyeing Francis’s prick with a hungry gleam that has the thing fattening so quickly Francis feels weak, ‘what it looked like. How you liked to be touched. What you permitted. What you preferred. Whether it stirred of a morning, and what it needed to be quieted.’
Francis draws in a very long breath to keep from moaning. James has broached this subject before, with heated whispers of his hand frigging his poor exhausted prick with his repeated, filthy experiments that never brought him any solace or resolution except ruined smallclothes and a chafe he was extremely disinclined to explain to Dr Stanley.
‘As to what I wanted,’ says James. He rubs his cheek, first one then the other, against Francis’s cock, with a catlike voluptuousness that has Francis squirming and panting beneath him. He licks a delicate path from the root up to the tip, mouthing quickly at the head before tracing a path back down. One hand takes Francis’s bollocks, weighing and rolling and squeezing them while Francis curses. Then James places his hands on Francis’s thighs and moves them unceremoniously apart so that he can make space for himself between them.
‘This brute of a thing,’ he says, on a wondering leer, watching Francis jerk and twitch.
‘James, Christ.’
‘This lovely monster.’
‘James.’ This hot and trembling purgatory cannot surely be prolonged much more.
He moves his hands up so that his thumbs are digging painfully into Francis’s hips before he lowers his head over Francis’s prick. Francis bites his lips and swears at the brush of James’s long hair over the sensitive flesh before his mouth closes over the head and he nearly swallows his tongue.
This he knows well: how that thin contemptuous mouth, that bafflingly expressive mouth, is hot and wet inside and possessed of a ferocious intensity that makes Francis pale to contemplate it. How James swallows Francis down as though he is the wellspring of answers that have been kept from him all his life – answers that Francis, specifically, is keeping from him. The desperation in that nimble quicksilver tongue. The gluttonous, extravagantly impolite slaver and wetness of it, as though James’s finicking delicacy has been forced out of him by Francis’s prick.
Francis’s hands are clenching and unclenching themselves, almost feeling the phantom shift of James’s soft dark hair beneath them. When he feels the familiar tightness in his belly, he calls out a warning that has James take Francis in even deeper, throat bobbing as he does.
He spends into James’s mouth, thighs rigid under James’s hands. As his faculties return, he sees James cradling his softening cock in his mouth.
‘Don’t,’ he says on an urgent rasp, ‘don’t swallow me down yet.’
James eases off Francis’s prick and sits up, eyebrows raised but jaw held obediently loose.
‘I think,’ says Francis, looking at the sheen of James’s lips, ‘that you should keep me there until I make you spend.’
James’s eyes widen and his prick twitches under Francis’s eyes. Francis grins.
‘Untie me then,’ he says, and James scrambles over, cock swinging between his long legs. He cannot forbear from brushing his lips, sticky with Francis’s spend, over the soft skin on the inside of Francis’s wrists, first one then the other, while Francis noses at his damp shining hair.
‘Lie down,’ he says, and James obliges, moving carefully so as not to spill his cargo. Francis grins at him and reaches out a hand for a pillow, placing it under James’s narrow arse. He palms James’s prick and smiles at the wet sigh he receives. Then he turns to their bedside table and returns with a bottle of rapeseed oil. He pours some into his palm and warms it, watching James’s fingers tighten on the sheets.
‘There’s another way to silence you,’ he says, and is rewarded with a glare that contrives to be impressively haughty considering the damp brow and weeping prick of their possessor. Francis runs his thumb around James’s rim, rubbing and circling gently until the muscle relaxes and there’s another rich sigh from James. The first finger slips in easily, and – after a few moments – so does the second.
Francis takes his time. There is a quiet joy to exploring the hot tight confines of James’s body with no master but his own curiosity and James’s pleasure, to the slow rich sounds of James’s hole sucking his fingers back in when he makes to retreat, to the tremble of James’s stomach and the slick gleam of his leaking prick.
And it is a quiet joy. Unaccustomedly quiet. James in these moments is a concerto, all ripple and sigh and groan. Francis looks at James sharply and finds that his brows are knitted with concentration, knuckles white against the bedspread, mouth held in a tight line.
‘You don’t want to spill me,’ says Francis, and he reaches up to thumb James’s jaw. ‘Is that the way of it?’
James’s eyes are very dark. They meet Francis’s and he dips his chin carefully.
‘I want to hear you,’ says Francis, slipping his thumb into James’s mouth, into the hot pool of his own seed. He withdraws it and sucks himself off the tip, watching James’s eyes track the movement with a glittering avidity. He lifts an eyebrow at James, who parts his lips. A brief soft gurgle emerges.
‘Good lad,’ says Francis, and bends to kiss James’s forehead.
When he pushes his third finger into James’s hole, he is rewarded with James’s writhing hips, the abundant dribble from his prick, and a low wet whine. Three fingers, drumming mercilessly on the place inside James’s walls that makes him buck and gasp. Four fingers, squelching in and out, have James’s head flung back, long throat bared. When Francis leans his weight on his other hand and looks, he sees a trail of his spend leaking from the corner of James’s mouth, shapeless and open in a wordless cry.
James’s prick is red and leaking profusely. Francis twines a strand of hair around his finger and says ‘Will you spend?’
James’s eyes find his, not without difficulty. Francis says ‘Spend. Come on now.’ And he finds the place again and beats on it.
James’s back arches off the bed and he spends with a long bubbling scream, spraying his own seed up his belly and chest and splattering his chin, where it mixes with the fat trail of Francis’s spend running out of his mouth.
He subsides, drenched and heaving. Francis pumps his fingers in twice, thrice, four more times, to punch the last few drops from James’s twitching prick and grin at James’s wet, half-mad pleas. He eases his fingers out and crawls up James’s trembling body. He licks up his spend from James’s lips and cheeks and chin with inelegant swipes of his tongue, and kisses it back into his mouth.
‘There,’ he says when he lifts his head, ‘you have leave to swallow now.’
‘Did you say what you needed to say?’ Francis asks James afterwards.
James turns his head to look at Francis. ‘Say when?’
‘Before,’ says Francis. ‘When you had me bound. You said that you had stored up things you wanted to say to me. Did you say them?’
Is it finished now, he does not say. Do I know the extent of your error?
James blinks and then scrambles upright. ‘Dear God, man,’ he says, with profligate amusement, ‘not even close.’
To Francis’s appalled face, he says ‘that was – Francis, you have tormented me for years. That was not a tithe of what I wanted to say. Not a tithe of a tithe.’
‘James - ’
‘Did I mention your knees?’ says James, gesturing. ‘Or your ankles, my God, man, your ankles. Did I venture below-decks at all?’
‘I seem to recall - ’
‘Oh, you know I like your cock,’ says James, who has the gall to sound impatient. ‘Stop twitching, that is hardly new intelligence.’
‘You still - ’
‘Your arse,’ says James. ‘That ill-tempered stump of yours fore and aft on Terror, time and time again. I watched you as though it held the secret to the Passage.’
He meets Francis’s cocked eyebrow and twitching lip and holds his countenance for a full twenty seconds before smacking Francis’s thigh and saying ‘You know perfectly well that’s not the passage I meant.’
‘I don’t,’ says Francis, with a grin. ‘And I should have known you’d have more to say.’
James nods emphatically. Then he looks at Francis and says ‘Thank you.’
‘Ah, don’t,’ says Francis, immediately. ‘You’ve no need.’
‘Thank you,’ says James, ‘for … permitting me.’
Francis snatches up James’s hand and bites at the heel. ‘You can get more cravats,’ he says, admiring the marks his teeth leave, ‘an excuse to return to the Burlington Arcade, you’ll like that.’
‘I’ll get some in silk,’ says James, ‘blue, to match your lovely eyes.’ Francis twitches, and glares into an improbably innocent countenance.
‘It’ll give you an opportunity to practise your knots,’ he says. ‘You need it sorely.’
He catches James’s outraged squawk in his mouth.
[1] With the barest minimum, and in fact absolute opposite, of gladness.
[2] Francis watches the pink spread to the tips of his ears and down to his neck, and thinks that he could have spent many seething, bootless hours plotting a course for them in his own imagination. He sends silent thanks to all the powers that be for James’s high collars and extravagant cravats.