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"A room for the night, if you please," says Dick to a pouting, ginger-haired young man who must be the innkeeper's son.
"Oooh," says his companion in a low, throaty purr, "just imagine those lips on your cock. Bet he's wild to be fucked by someone so lordly and bold as yourself."
Dick blushes like a milkmaid and thanks his lucky stars, not for the first time, that it's only he who can hear Puss. A glance at the people around him is evidence enough of that. Not only are they unappalled by the lewd suggestions, they're about their business as though there's no nine-day wonder, no Eloquent Beast, there amongst them. Dick can imagine their dirty hands grabbing at Puss, and no doubt ending up with nothing but a handful of ginger fur and a set of bloody stripes for their trouble.
And imagining that scene lets him get his guilty blush under control as he hands his shilling to the innkeeper's son. True, the lad's mouth is made for sin, but Dick swears to himself that he'd never have thought of it if not for Puss. Who'd have though that a cat, gifted by some suspect magic with human speech, would have such a filthy mouth? Such an inappropriate interest in human lechery?
Sometimes Dick wishes that the ginger tom would simply never return from his nightly adventures. But the cat always comes back, sometimes with a tattered ear or with blood on the soft creamy fur of his belly: more often strutting like any gallant, full of stories of fighting and fucking. And he's good company on the road, when Dick walks for days without meeting anybody except ostlers and ploughboys.
Not that ploughboys are necessarily dull company, once he's got past the mud and the surliness. Dick is in the prime of youth, and walking all day with only the cat's erotic tales for entertainment is all the more reason to persevere with the wooing of a reluctant lover.
Once they're in the private room he's paid for, he hisses to Puss, "I wish you'd not do that."
"Do what?" says the cat, with a jaw-splitting yawn.
Dick sets his teeth. "Your lewd speech. You make me blush to hear you."
"Not so shy when it suits you, now are you?"
"That's not the point!"
"You were thinking it anyway, or I'd not have said it."
"I was --" Dick turns his back on the bed, cat couchant, and takes a long steadying breath. "I can't believe," he says over his shoulder, "that I am arguing with a -- with an animal about what takes my fancy."
One green, green eye cracks open to stare balefully at him. "No more animal than yourself, Dick."
Dick makes a rude noise. "Which of us walks on two legs? Which of us has map and monies and the will to take us both to London Town? Which of us is the heir to --"
"Twelve generations of a noble house: I believe you've mentioned it," says the cat, yawning in a way clearly meant to insult. "My breeding is as good as yours. Probably better."
Dick chooses to ignore this. "I'd like to see you get twenty miles without being made into gloves," he says darkly. "Or worse. Poor folk'll stick anything in a stew, these days."
"I'll find my way to London Town with or without you," says the cat, curling himself more tightly. "If the streets are paved with gold as they say, I'll smell the stink of greed before I'm a day nearer. I'm merely travelling with you for my own amusement."
"Then you won't mind if I leave you here."
"How, pray, do you propose to prevent me from following you?"
"I could tie you in a bag," says Dick, "and tip you into the river."
"You could try," says Puss, stretching out an elegant silky paw and flexing his claws. Dick winces at the sight, having a series of parallel stripes on various parts of his person: for tickling the cat's belly, for asking how he learnt to speak, for suggesting that he took his half-eaten meal off the pillow.
"Very well," says Dick with a sigh. "Since we're stuck with one another's company, might I share the bed I've paid for?"
"Better get some rest before your friend comes to bed," says the cat, resettling himself a scant inch from where he'd been. "You wouldn't want to be too tired to give him your best, now would you?"
Dick wakes suddenly, long after dark. He didn't hear the creak of the door, or the lad's heavy tread on the splintery floorboards, but now there's a warm, heavy body -- much too heavy to be Puss, who's doubtless off looking for trouble somewhere -- lying next to him on the narrow bed. His forward companion's breath reeks appallingly, but Dick has never let that stop him, and he rolls and pins the other man beneath him.
Abstractedly, even as he's unbuttoning and untying and kissing and fingering, he tries to remember his bedmate's looks. All that comes to mind is red hair and pale eyes, and bony hands that are roving over his own body with telling confidence.
It's not as if looks matter, in the dark.
The lad's not shy. He puts his mouth on Dick's dick, and his tongue rasps against the sensitive skin in a way that's just shy of pain. It makes Dick wild, and he finds himself gagged by none-too-clean fingers. If he were with someone more respectable -- someone he might ever see again -- he'd be embarrassed by how quickly that rough tongue-work makes him come.
At least Puss isn't around to criticise Dick's performance, or to distract his bedmate with that glowing green stare. More than one partner has issued an ultimatum: either they go, or the cat does. "It's looking at us! Staring with those uncanny eyes!" Sometimes Puss would take himself off somewhere for the rest of the night, if it suited his mood. It was, he told Dick, enough to make a cat laugh.
The innkeeper's son isn't wasting any time. He swipes his hand across Dick's sticky belly, and slicks them both up with luke-warm seed. Then he's pressing in, and Dick sighs and leans back into the stretch and burn and the sheer pressure of it.
It's not long before he's gasping again, and he wants to beg: worse, far worse, he wants to bring the innkeeper's son along with him when he sets off in the morning. Only the image of himself trailed by a wide-eyed adolescent as he makes his grand entrance into London Town dissuades him.
But the redhead is hanging over him, some faint reflection of the young moon making his eyes shine in the darkness, and he's running his nails across Dick's chest, just hard enough to make Dick gasp and push harder against that delicious pressure …
Dick wakes late, with the cat's weight heavy on his chest and a spiked paw batting tenderly at his cheek.
"Were we thinking of moving, at all, today?" enquires Puss. "Or have we tired ourselves with pretty boys?"
Dick blinks and scowls at the cat. There's sun streaming past the single heavy curtain, and the bed is rumpled and sticky and empty save for himself. Puss is moulting and there's ginger fur everywhere.
Dick has a desultory wash at the stable-yard pump, and keeps an eye open for red hair, but the innkeeper's son is nowhere to be seen. Probably sleeping off his nocturnal exertions, thinks Dick sourly, stretching. He winces at the ache in his arse, but it's not so bad that it'll stop him tramping the twenty-odd miles that lie between him and the next town.
Puss struts at his side, tail held high. The sunlight brings out the stripes in his fur, like a miniature tiger's markings, and his white bib is dazzlingly clean. Mid-morning, he catches a rabbit in the bramble-hedge, and the two of them share it at noon, beside a pedlar's fire. It costs Dick a penny to roast his dinner, but regardless of the cat's opinion he won't eat it raw.
They pass the afternoon's long, hot walk by comparing their night's entertainment. Puss, it seems, found himself a willing partner too: he's remarkably pleased with himself, though he doesn't recount the act in detail.
"He was good," Dick says, staring off into the dusty distance. "Really good. I almost asked him to come with me." 'Almost' is an exaggeration, but he wants to hear what Puss thought of that.
The cat sneezes, twice. "Come with us? He'd think you mad, talking to a cat all the time. Though I'm better company, I'm sure, than an innkeeper's son from the middle of nowhere."
"I didn't want him for his conversation," says Dick, with a fond leer. In fact, now that he thinks of it, he can't remember the lad saying anything at all. Maybe 'More', or 'Yes', or 'Harder'. Of course, he'd had Dick's dick down his throat -- oh, that tongue -- more than once. Dick feels himself hardening at the memory.
"We'd have had the whole village after us if we'd taken the innkeeper's son," says Puss, batting at a butterfly. "Most people only steal the spoons."
"I hope our lodging tonight's as comfortable," says Dick. The afternoon sun is slanting painfully into the corners of his eyes -- perhaps he should have napped after lunch, to make up for his wakefulness last night -- and he's aching with the thought of that bed and its unexpected delights.
"I smell smoke up ahead," says Puss. "Smoke and horses."
"I don't think I'm in any shape to ride a horse," says Dick ruefully.
"I'm sure you'll get your ride," says the cat, and Dick could swear that Puss winks at him.
He needs more sleep.
The smoke turns out to mark a gipsy encampment, far enough from the crossroads that the smell of gibbeted highwayman doesn't reach them. Dick parts with a silver shilling -- it's a small encampment, no more than a family and their grown sons, but there are still more of them than of him, so he doesn't argue the cost -- and is given half a jug of rough cider and a bowl of savoury stew.
"Fit for the king, that is!" declares the man who shows him where to spread his blanket. He's a fine-looking fellow, all gold-toothed grin and flashing eyes, his hair reddened with henna like a whore's. Dick gets to see the gold teeth again and again, for this fellow spends the evening smiling at him and laughing at his stories.
Puss curls up against Dick's thigh, head tucked into the soft place under his hip-bone, and Dick strokes the soft fur and feels the cat's purr throbbing through his flesh. At least the beast is quiet, and not making salacious suggestions as to what Dick might offer in exchange for such good company.
Despite the hot looks that Dick and the gipsy -- to the merriment of the others -- have spent all evening exchanging, Dick finds himself alone when the fire's banked and the others have wandered off to their various sleeping-places. His gold-toothed friend has disappeared, and Dick doesn't know where he's gone.
"Maybe he'll come back for you," suggests Puss, sotto voce (and how else would a cat speak?) into Dick's ear. His whiskers tickle Dick's neck, and he shivers. "Maybe he'll come back and spread you out and taste you until you're screaming for more, and the rest of them are yelling for you both to keep the noise down."
"Oh, be quiet," says Dick, shifting uncomfortably on the hard ground. He's hard again himself, and the cat's teasing words are making it worse. Not for the first time he wonders why Puss seems so astute at guessing his fantasies.
He drifts off to sleep with his hand wrapped around himself, thinking of that golden smile and the way the firelight caught the gipsy's eyes. Imagining …
When he wakes, suddenly, there's another man's hand on his dick, and the gipsy's free hand is covering his mouth so that he won't cry alarm. Then that hand is replaced by a hot, gilt-garnished mouth. The gipsy's mouth tastes foul at first, but Dick pushes up, moaning, into the kiss and into the man's caress.
It's very dark, and the moon has not yet risen. Dick can just about see the gleam of the gipsy's dark eyes. His skin is darker than his grubby shirt, and when the shirt's cast aside Dick closes his eyes and relies on his hands to guide him. Soon the two of them are lying on their sides, hands on each other's dicks, Dick's other hand curled around the gipsy's scarred, striped back to hold him close. He runs his fingers over the ridges and the smooth lines, and the gipsy shivers and makes a sound that Dick would call a purr if it came from Puss.
This one's nails are just as sharp as the innkeeper's son's, and Dick gasps and pants as his nipples are pinched and scratched. The gold teeth feel strange against his neck, and then the other man bites down hard, bucking against Dick so that they slide together. The rub of the gipsy's cockhead against his own makes Dick's shout of completion a strangled noise. This isn't enough, he thinks even as he pours and spurts over their hands, and feels the gipsy tensing against him. This isn't enough. I need more.
He lets the gipsy pull him to his knees and turn him around. No question but that this is easier on the ground than in a creaking bed with threadbare mattress-ropes. His arse still hurts from last night's adventures, but he can't resist the hot mouth and quick hands that are pulling him apart. It's their combined seed, tonight, that eases the way, but Dick still winces as the gipsy presses inside him, unyielding and red-hot and too big, surely, too much … But he takes it all, rocking forward onto his hands so that they're at it like beasts. The gipsy's hands are never still, scratching him, overloading his senses, and that huge dick stretches him impossibly -- surely it's just because he's still sore that it feels so much larger inside him than it did in his hand -- and that mouth is kissing and licking and biting. All Dick can do is open up, take it all, push back and moan. He wants to beg but he's wary of Puss's prediction: waking the others wouldn't be wise, even if all they did was to complain.
Later, when he's lying there bonelessly, too limp in every part of his body to take the gipsy in return -- but regretting, already, that he can't accept the invitation -- he remembers that good things come in threes. Puss (where is that damned cat?) has assured him of that many a time.
The moon's rising over the hedge, and the night air is cold on his bare skin. The gipsy pulls him closer, keeping him warm, and there's that weird trick of the moonlight again: a grass-green flash from eyes that Dick would swear were black as sin.
The birds are terribly loud the next morning, and Dick finds himself regretting the cider as much as anything. He groans when he moves -- then looks around, worried that he's disturbed someone, to find that they've all upped and gone and left him here alone.
Not quite alone, of course. Puss is sitting on Dick's pack, licking his paw and cleaning behind his ear. All cats wear a permanent smile, of course, but this cat's smile seems especially pronounced today.
"You like seeing me suffer," says Dick accusingly, shading his eyes against the bright young sun.
"You do it so charmingly," says the cat, twisting around to lick his soft, pale belly. There's a dead rabbit next to the pack, but the sight of it makes Dick's stomach heave.
That taken care of, and Dick having drunk deeply from the brook, they set off south again. The road's not as empty today, and on the horizon Dick can see … clouds?
"That's London Town, mate," says a farmer who gives Dick and Puss a ride in his cart. "For the company," he says, though he never stops talking about his young wife and the various men he suspects her of fancying. Dick nods and smiles and tries not to fall asleep. The sun's warm, he aches all over in a way that would be unpleasant if it didn't evoke such delightful memories, and they'll reach London Town by nightfall.
The farmer leaves them a few miles north of the city. He's visiting his brother in the little village of Highgate. "Fair wicked types in the town, there are," he says darkly, as Dick carefully climbs down from the cart. Puss uses him as a ladder, leaping elegantly to the grassy verge.
"I'll be careful," Dick promises, and in truth -- despite the adage about things coming in threes -- he doesn't believe he has the energy to be anything else.
The farmer's offered him a bed for the night, and a good night's rest would refresh him before he enters London proper. But Puss has set off, trotting along the grass verge as though he too is eager to reach the city, and almost without thinking about it Dick finds himself drawn towards the smoke, the tall spires and the distant, jubilant sound of bells.
The city gates are broad and tall, and Dick stares up uneasily at the traitors' heads adoring the top of the gatehouse. He passes through without any of the guards looking twice; he's a poor traveller, after all, and the layer of dust disguises any lingering signs of wealth or breeding. Puss has slipped in ahead of him, and Dick loses sight of his furry companion. The cat can fend for himself, of course, but Dick's worried. There are so many wagons with vicious-tempered horses, so many people, so many turnings in the city-maze. And, he admits to himself at last, he's lonely without Puss.
There's no sign of the cat, and Dick's afraid that if he starts calling to Puss he'll be taken up as a sorcerer. Puss has found him in the unlikeliest of places before: in doss-houses, in the middle of a military camp, in a wood on a rainy night. The cat will come back.
Dick finds an inn that has a room for the night. He has to part with his last florin, double the rate of that country inn with the excellent hospitality, and the girl who takes his money and lights him up the stairs is ugly and bad-tempered. He won't be bothering with her, at any rate. And he's too tired, too stunned by London -- too lonely, really -- to seek company in the noisy common-room.
Instead, he opens the window and gazes out at a whole new city of roofs and spires and turrets. Twilight lends a softening, magical glow to smoke-blackened chimneypots and rotting thatch. The stench is appalling. He'd shut the window, were it not that Puss must find him somehow.
The bed's cold without company -- furry or otherwise -- and Dick curls up into himself, seeking sleep and lulling himself with memories of the last two nights. He's not usually one to submit so readily to another man, but the innkeeper's son was strong and keen, and unexpectedly masterful. And that gipsy, with his gilded smile and clever hands … well, it's a shame Dick couldn't rise to the occasion, but he'd spent himself three times already in the other man's arms, so 'twas to be expected.
So much for things in threes. At least tonight he'll sleep well: and perhaps in the morning he'll be able to move without wincing.
The watch is crying midnight outside, but that isn't what's woken Dick. At first he thinks it's the sudden weight of Puss arriving on his bed, but the long arm that comes around him is hairy rather than furry, and the murmur in his ear -- "Good evening" -- is not, really, very much like the cat's light voice.
Dick struggles, a little, more for the fun of it than anything else. The soothing hands on his skin, and the kiss that's bestowed upon him, make him much less inclined to resist. He ends up on his back, with the intruder stretched out full length atop him: the blankets have fallen aside, and Dick's body is reacting favourably to the weight and press of his mysterious visitor. Mysterious, and very male. Dick arches up against him.
"Who are you?" he says breathlessly, while the other man's mouth explores his throat.
A rough tongue licks the place where the gipsy had bitten him. "You don't need to know my name."
"I should like -- ah! -- to know how you came here," says Dick, writhing. "To my chamber."
"I sought you," the other murmurs into his ear. The light reflects from his green eyes as he looks askance at Dick, very close. A clever long-fingered hand wraps itself around both their dicks, pressing them together, and Dick takes a long, wavering breath.
"But why did --"
He's silenced with a kiss: a thorough and passionate and well-practiced kiss, a kiss that makes his arse throb at the anticipated burn even as he crooks his knee around his seducer's legs.
After that neither of them speaks, or at least not in sentences. Once, Dick has the other man on his back, practically purring as Dick's tongue circles his nipples. Hearing that purr reminds Dick that Puss is still out there, somewhere, in the unfamiliar city night: he glances up, checking that the window is still open in case the cat should return. The man beneath him makes a protesting noise: then they're rolling over, almost off the bed, and Dick holds on tight as he's laid out, wide open, pinned and teased and bitten. When his moans become louder, two long fingers slide into his mouth, and he licks and sucks until the man above him swears -- some foreign tongue, all hiss and spit -- and drags his fingers free to push them into Dick.
And then it's everything from the last two nights over again, and Dick is being fucked, hard and fast, taking it and still wanting more and more, could get used to this every night and never want to turn things around, could take this and never mind how sore it left him, he'll ache for more by morning …
His last thought, falling asleep with his arms around his mysterious visitor, is that it'd be a shame if he were gone when Dick awakes.
The sound of rain and human noise -- lavender-sellers, drovers, the ostler in the yard -- drag Dick out of a pleasant dream. In the dream, someone was stroking him just as he strokes Puss, following the curves of his body with their hand, and he was arching into the caress, making a sound that he knew was a purr even though it sounded nothing like the noise that Puss made at such times. It's a glorious, sensuous, delicious dream and he's reluctant to awake.
It's a considerable surprise to find that his dream has, in all important respects, come true.
His last-night's lover -- or so Dick presumes, though he never saw the man's face -- is lying beside him, running his hands over Dick's chest: occasionally he lowers his head, smiling, to lick the skin. He is thus occupied now, and doesn't notice that Dick's eyes have opened.
Dick studies his unchosen, but certainly not unwelcome, bedmate. The man has long reddish hair and freckled, muscular shoulders; his arse is shapely enough to make Dick twitch, and the skin there is much paler than the tan of his back.
With colouring like that, Dick expects his eyes to be blue, but they're green when he glances up and grins at Dick.
"Hello," says Dick, unable to prevent himself from grinning back, although he's certain he's never met this man before. His back, well-muscled and tanned though it is, bears the marks of a flogging: a criminal, then, maybe a thief, and Dick's perchance no more than his latest victim. How did he get in? The window's open, but --
"Damnation!" Dick sits bolt upright, dislodging his companion, who hisses. "Where's my cat?"
"Cat?" says the man, curling himself around Dick and flexing his fingers. His voice is familiar, or perhaps it's just the accent that makes it sound so: it's not unlike that of the gipsy whose fire (and more) he shared the night before last. A fingernail catches Dick's nipple and it's his turn to hiss, though much of the rest of his body is sore, or aching, or aflame. "What would you want with a cat?"
"I've lost him," says Dick, genuinely distressed despite the distractions offered by his bedmate. He thinks, and then tries not to think, of the perils that might befall a country-bred cat in an unfamiliar town. "He's my --" He stops, because this man will think him mad if he claims a cat as 'friend' or 'companion'. "I lost him when we came through the gate."
"Maybe he's off on some adventure of his own," suggests the man, pulling Dick down beside him again. "Maybe he's not what he seems. Maybe --"
"Don't mock --" Dick begins, scowling.
"Maybe," repeats the other man, laying one long, salty finger across Dick's lips to silence him, "he's overcome his misfortune and the ill-wishing of others, hoping to return to you in another form."
In Dick's state of mind, that sounds like a threat.
"What have you done with him?" says Dick, and he's furious enough that he gets the redhead pinned beneath him, despite the other's wiry strength. "Where is he?"
"I'm right here."
"Not you, the cat," says Dick fiercely, tightening his hold.
His victim blinks slowly, and smiles at him.
"… The cat," says Dick at last, adding up voice and eyes and striped back and, not least, the way his bedmate's claws -- fingers, fingers -- are flexing against his chest, scratching lightly over the marks left by --
"Was it all you?" he demands. "The innkeeper's pretty son? That gipsy with the gold teeth?"
"I knew you had a weakness for redheads." That smile's very close to his face, and it's the cat's smile on a human mouth. Dick's being rolled over again, and he lets it happen. He feels like prey.
"How did you," he begins, and then, "what are you really? Cat? Man? What?"
"You see me as I truly am," says his lover, stretching out atop Dick again. Already this feels familiar and comfortable and erotic. He bats at Dick's face, and lets his finger rest at the corner of Dick's reluctant smile.
"How did you come to be my --"
"Ill-wishing made me a cat. There was a foreign girl I knew once, a lass from China." Dick bristles at the mention of a girl. "She works down in Limehouse. I'd hoped she'd help me, and so she did, when I went to her yesterday. I'm afraid," his lover continues, pressing distractingly against Dick, "that you -- that is, we -- owe her a great deal of money. Curse-breaking is seldom easy, and thus it's never cheap."
"What if I have no money?" says Dick, running his hand down the splendid curve of the other man's scarred back. "What if I'd rather have a cat?"
The man laughs out loud. His tongue is smoother than the cat's, but just as wicked, and his smile makes Dick think of the phrase about cats and cream. What an image! Dick blushes.
"What if I persuade you I'm worth keeping?" murmurs the former cat into Dick's ear, still chuckling.
"And how will you do that?" says Dick. "I'm open to suggestions."
His lover raises an elegant eyebrow at the word 'open'. "I could tell you," he says. "But sometimes it's better not to talk."
Dick pulls him down and lets him demonstrate, instead.
-end-