Work Text:
“Sorry,” says Tommy. “Is that weird?”
He’s staring over Sol’s shoulder when he says it, though the match is long over and the telly has been running the same highlights for the last twenty minutes. There’s a bit of a blush across his cheeks, and he’s fidgeting with his sweating pint, smearing condensation across the tabletop. He is, plainly, obviously, embarrassed.
Sol wants to say it isn’t weird, but he worries his expression has already betrayed him. Anyway, it is a little—not weird, Solomon Tozer isn’t in the business of yucking anybody’s yum—but it is a bit of a singular proposal. Sol has done a lot in his time, and he’s never considered letting a bloke hunt him for sport in the pursuit of getting one off.
“S’not weird,” he says, and Tommy stares at him, miserably disbelieving. “S’just—I’ve never considered it, is all.”
“Christ,” says Tommy Armitage. “You think it’s weird.”
“I don’t!” He sounds a bit fretful even to his own ear. “I just—walk me through it.”
Tommy drains the remainder of his pint and stands. His face is flushed, and his dark brows are drawn tight together. “I’m getting another. You want another?”
“Tommy.” Sol snags him by the wrist, tugs him back down into his chair. He’s not immediately sure why he’s making such a big deal of this—he’s teased Tommy about sex before, and god knows Tommy’s not above going after Sol similarly—except that Tommy is so embarrassed it’s making Sol’s heart squeeze and he can't deny he’s…intrigued by the concept. “Mate. I’m bein’ serious. Walk me through it.”
Tommy sits, though he levels Sol with a look that communicates plainly that he is unhappy about it, that he suspects Sol is poking fun, and that Tommy will make him regret it if he is. The twist of his mouth is sullen, despite his charming blush.
“Dunno how much more there is to be walked through.” He chews too low on a cuticle in his affected misery, smears a bit of blood across his lower lip. Sol wants to pull his hand away—Tommy is always savaging his fingers, and he has a bad habit of not noticing it until he’s gnawed most of the skin off—but Tommy has accused him of mothering before, so he doesn’t. Sol gestures with his mostly empty pint instead. “You and a bloke go out to the woods, and one of you chases the other down through ‘em. And then you fuck.”
It is not, as far as explanations go, particularly eloquent or erotic. Sol takes a long draught of his beer, and finds it empty save for foam. “Right,” he says, throat dry. “And do you do the chasing, Tommy lad? Or are you bein’ chased?”
Tommy Armitage stands abruptly again from his seat. He says, “Forgot it’s your turn to buy the round anyway,” and when he holds out his palm Sol puts his wallet into it, sweet and willing as anything.
:
He’s a bit drunk, at the start. Not enough to be sick, and certainly not enough that he figures he’ll be having any trouble performing, but enough that Sol reckons he's going to have a hell of a time staying off his arse and on his feet, once they get to the running part.
“What happens when I slip and roll my ankle?” He looks back at Tommy, who’s still sat on top of the borrowed company van, beer in hand, tugging at the laces of his trainers.
“Think I could probably drag you back,” says Tommy Armitage, optimistically. He tips the bottle to his mouth, tilts his head to get the last dregs of it. It’s the kind of shit lager Tommy likes, which is fine, because Tommy’s the one that had bought it, and Sol will drink anything as long as it doesn’t taste too strongly of piss. “You planning on twisting an ankle?”
Sol grumbles. He stretches his right arm across his chest, and he watches Tommy Armitage watch him. “M’thinking practically, s’all.”
“Don’t slip,” says Tommy. His eyes are very pale, which always makes every Tommy expression look twice as intense. Right now, he looks deadly serious. “Sol.”
“Ta.” Sol tugs a knee to his chest, grimaces at the stretch in his thigh. He feels inexplicably old suddenly, taking the time to stretch his hamstrings in anticipation of a fuck, while Tommy Armitage swigs beer atop the site van. “Cunt.”
Tommy snorts. He gestures loosely at Sol with the mouth of the bottle and says, “Good with a thirty second head start?”
Sol yanks his other knee up too fast and hisses thin between his teeth. He’d taken the plug out in the backseat of the van, because he’ll be damned if he’s running for his life with a plug up his arse, but he feels discomfitingly empty now. “Fifteen.”
“S’no fun if I catch you right away.” Matter-of-fact, Tommy taps the bottle against the aluminum roof. He swings his legs over the side of the van and slides off, nearly graceful. His trainers impact with a soft crunch onto the gravel, and he rolls his shoulders like a fighter in the ring. “I’m giving you thirty seconds.”
“M’not some kinda wounded animal,” Sol protests, a touch offended, and Tommy Armitage grins. It’s sharp, though less smug than it is hungry, and he says, “Sure, Solly,” low and indulgent. Hardly sincere.
Ah. Something warms in his belly, triggers a flush in his cheeks. So this does work for Solomon Tozer, maybe.
“Want a countdown, then?” Tommy is also stretching, though he moves fluid and confident-like—a runner that knows the name of the muscles he’s stretching and precisely how to best warm them up.
Sol’s not a runner. He’s thick with muscle, but it’s the manual labor kind more so than the gym kind, and he’s admittedly grown a bit of a gut edging into the back half of his thirties. He’s wearing jeans and workboots. It’s looking increasingly likely that Tommy Armitage is going to eat him alive.
“Sure,” he says, thickly, and swallows.
Tommy is no longer grinning. He says, “Five.”
Cold seeps through Sol then, like a bucket of icewater turned over his head. He’s never experienced something that he could identify as a prey instinct before, though maybe this is it. Silly, that. Top of the food chain, and all. And he knows Tommy, has watched him vomit in a ginnel more times than he could say and let him crash on Sol’s couch every time after that. They’ve made out sloppy on a dancefloor, fucked on Tommy’s sagging mattress—back when it was still on the floor, even—and tucked somewhere in Sol’s phone is a video of Tommy sucking on his fingers, drunk and eager and drooling. It doesn’t stand to reason that Sol’s suddenly afraid.
“Four,” says Tommy. Sol’s mouth is dry. He shifts on his heels, then bounces on his toes. Difficult, in steel-toes. “Three.”
“Um,” says Solomon Tozer, though he doesn’t know where he’s going with it. His mind is racing, though it’s empty of anything one could reasonably call thought . He wants to run. Needs to run. His heart beats fast.
“Two,” says Tommy. “You ready, Sol?”
“Uh—” begins Sol, and Tommy Armitage says, “One.”
It’s instinct, something purely atavistic, that makes him go. Sol runs blind, nearly tripping over his boots in the first stride, and were he less frightened he might have listened for Tommy’s laugh at his expense, and been surprised not to hear it. Tommy is counting again, down from thirty (twenty-eight, twenty-seven), and Sol tears for the woods faster than he’s run since he was twenty-six, when a stranger and his mates called Sol a poof over losing at pool and Sol enumerated in detail all the things poofs didn’t usually do to the likes of those strangers’ mothers and sisters. (He’d broken two noses that night—the fact that one had been his own remains irrelevant.) Sol Tozer sprints, before it occurs to him that sprinting is unwise, and barely clears the treeline before he’s winded.
Tommy is still counting, loudly enough that Sol can hear him from back at the van. He’s on fourteen. (Thirteen.) (Twelve.) Sol braces himself with one hand against a tree to gulp oxygen, and then shoves off and starts again, just as Tommy says four.
And Sol can understand the appeal, a bit. His blood is up (three) and he’s breathing fast (two) and even though the experience of running with a hard-on is an admittedly uncomfortable one, and he’s frightened out of his goddamn mind, he can’t deny that he’s buying in. Just a little.
“One,” Tommy says, way back at the van, and Sol thinks fuck fuck fuck so loud that he nearly clips a tree. Maybe he doesn’t have a prey instinct—surely an animal with a long evolutionary history of being hunted like this would handle the experience better. Sol Tozer is blind with adrenaline, so hard it hurts, and when he places his foot wrong on a tree root and his ankle gives beneath him, he doesn’t feel when he hits the ground.
“Shit,” he hisses, and then, “Fuck.” He can’t hear Tommy in pursuit over the beating blood in his ears, and that makes him more afraid than anything. He’s seen Tommy Armitage in a sprint, and moreover he’s seen him with the singular focus of competition in his face—and he’s seen both at once too, during a friendly footy match that had Jimmy Daly elbowing Sol in the ribs and saying, “Fuckin’ Christ, Tozer, where’d you find the skinny scary one anyway?”
The toe of his boot is wedged beneath a raised tree root, and Sol Tozer grips his ankle in both hands and yanks pitilessly, in a manner that will surely hurt in the morning. Sweat drips down his nose, off his brow and into his eyes. He uses the raised root to shove himself onto his feet, and then—miserably, blindly terrified as a rabbit—he starts running again.
He doesn’t get far. He sprints through a thicket and earns a lash of a branch against his face for it, just beneath his eye. It’s enough to make him bleed, which he knows because he can taste the blood mingling with the sweat that drips into his open, panting mouth, and because he can feel his pulse in his fucking eyes now, and the sudden smarting pain of it makes him nauseous. When something collides heavily with Sol Tozer’s shoulder, knocking him hard back onto the ground, he’s too winded to shout—but had he the breath, he would have.
Instead, he gags. Instead, Tommy Armitage grips him by the shoulder and the hair, and hauls him bodily over, right onto his arse.
“Sol,” says Tommy, very close to his face. His expression is intense, hungry like Sol’s only seen the night when Tommy asked Sol to push his fingers down his throat as far as he could, and won’t you record it, Sol? For me, for later. He smells like beer. His eyes are wild. “Caught ya.”
Caught me, Sol might have agreed, were he not so winded, and had Tommy not chosen this moment to fasten his teeth to Solomon Tozer’s neck and bite hard , enough that Sol curses. “Fuck, Tom—”
Tommy growls like a dog with a bone and shakes his head. Sol thinks, Fuck. Alright.
But Tommy had wanted him to run. And Sol’s got his blood up, got running for his life on the brain now, and it’s easy to twist onto his front, shaking Tommy Armitage off of his throat. He pushes to his hands and knees. Makes to run.
“No,” says Tommy, wrapping his hand around Sol’s ankle and yanking, and Sol is caught up enough in the rush of it all that he kicks, hard with his steel-toes, and Tommy has to dodge. Might’ve cracked his sternum, had that blow landed. Tommy laughs, sharp and frightening.
But he’s let go, and Sol is up again, running for his life, and behind him Sol hears Tommy haul to his feet and give chase again, and he’s so lightheaded about it all that he runs right into a tree.
It’s a branch, really, not the whole damned tree, and so his teeth are fine and his nose is alright, but there’s a hot pain across his brow and a wrench in his neck, because his head has snapped back on impact and he’s surely pulled something. He goes down hard, sprawls over hard forest floor, and says with a mouth of coppery blood, “Fuck—“
There’s a weight on him then. Startling, though Sol knows, on some level, that it’s Tommy Armitage and that skinny, fawning Tommy Armitage is no real threat to Sol Tozer. His mouth is open and overly wet. He drools a bit onto the ground.
“Didn’t take long,” pants Tommy, right against Sol’s ear. “Alright, Sol?”
Sol’s got a mouthful of dirt, flat on his belly, and he’s so winded he couldn’t say anything even if Tommy had let up and allowed him to roll over. But clearly the question is rhetorical, clearly Tommy doesn’t expect nor really want an answer, because he throws one long leg over Sol’s waist without waiting for one. Settles his weight at the small of his back and leans, threading a hand in Sol’s hair and sinking his teeth in the back of his neck.
Sol has seen wolves do this kind of thing in nature documentaries, seen dogs do it in real life, and he’s not proud of what it does to him now. He whines, and when Tommy pushes his face into the wet, mossy ground, he whines a bit louder. He grinds against the damp, uneven ground. Something hot trickles down his temple.
Tommy fumbles with the back of Sol’s belt, curls his fingers beneath his waistband. He curses. The sound makes Sol pause, and he nearly sits up, before remembering that the full weight of Tommy Armitage is positioned over his spine. He drags his face through the dirt instead, starts to say, “Tom—”
“S’nothin’,” says Tommy, as he slides off Sol’s back down over his calves, kneels to free his weight, and ragdolls Sol Tozer over onto his back by his beltloops.
“Jesus,” gasps Sol when his shoulders hit the ground. He can’t remember when exactly Tommy Armitage got so strong. “Fuck, Tommy.”
Tommy pants. On his back, Sol can see the flush in his pale face, the half-wild look in his eyes. Sol Tozer and Tommy Armitage haven’t been anything but friends with some notable benefits ever in their lives—despite whatever the lads purport that Tommy thinks—but Sol can’t deny Tommy’s a pretty thing. He looks a bit scary now, but that’s not making him any less pretty. Sweat gleams on his brow, and his jaw is tight. He gnaws on his plush lower lip, slick with spit. “Talkin’ too much. Here.”
Tommy’s fingers taste like bitter soil and moss and beer when he shoves them into Sol’s mouth. He’s not expecting it, and the intrusion is deep enough that it makes him cough, then gag a bit. It’s a shock enough, too, that he doesn’t realize that Tommy’s got a hand on the fly of his trousers until he’s undone it and yanked Sol’s kecks down to his knees.
His boots present a problem—one which Tommy avoids by leaving Sol’s trousers bunched around his ankles. Tommy’s gaze is fever-bright, and Sol is caught in it; he only remembers their purpose here when Tommy presses his free hand against Sol’s belly, grinds his palm unforgivingly against his hard cock.
Christ, Sol wants to say—but his mouth is full, so he doesn’t. He whines instead. His eyes water. Tommy leans in and licks a wet stripe up Sol’s sweat-damp neck. He tugs Sol’s legs up with a hand shoved underneath his knees, and then he pulls his fingers from Sol’s mouth and slides them hot and slippery-wet between his legs, into the cleft of his ass.
“Fuck,” Sol does gasp, finally. Tommy Armitage makes a sound best taxonomized as a snarl, right in the hollow beneath Solomon Tozer’s ear. Sol smells beer and sweat and soil and something fresh and green, like a newly snapped sapling, and when Tommy slides two fingers in—near effortless, still, because Sol hadn’t lasted long at all on his feet after he’s taken the plug out in the backseat of the van—he thinks he yelps like a dog. (He can’t help it. Sol’s always been easier than he cares to admit. His heart beats loud in his ears.)
Tommy doesn’t even bother to sit up to muck about with his own fly; he leans heavy over Sol instead, pinning his cock between them, and unzips his trousers with little grace or ceremony. Sol hisses through his teeth. Tommy mutters, “Bein’ loud as all hell, Sol,” which Sol thinks is probably unfair.
(He allows it anyway. He’s not sure he’d dare speak, with Tommy’s jaws snapping so close to his throat.)
Tommy drags the edge of his bitten littlest fingernail over Sol’s perineum, taking no care to be gentle. Sol had lubed himself thoroughly enough to be positively dripping, some hours ago, and evidence of this exercise in practiced whoredom prevails. Tommy says, “Jesus, Solly. You ever been this wet all your life?”
“Mmgph,” says Sol, eloquently. That sharp green smell settles like a heavy perfume over his skin, makes him dizzy. He’s so turned on he can’t think. He’s just afraid enough of Tommy Armitage at the present moment that he wonders if Tommy had ever entertained an interest in eating Sol, were he given the opportunity. Sol reckons, whether he has or not, that it wouldn’t take much convincing on Tommy’s end right now.
He thinks vaguely too about biting, and the kind of diseases one gets from wild animals. Could one catch rabies from sex? Tommy might know. Then again, Tommy might treat such a hypothetical proposal as a challenge right about now. Sol doesn’t ask.
“Gonna put your cock in me, Tom?” He’s panting, and he’s not even doing anything. Drooling, and there’s nothing in his mouth. He hardly manages to sound brattish, but Tommy narrows his eyes anyway.
Tommy grabs him by the jaw, and Christ, whatever spirit of slightly feral lust that’s possessed him must also have lent Tommy some of its herculean strength, because he grips Sol hard. Squeezes enough that Sol opens his mouth to protest, and Tommy spits down his throat, unbidden and unasked for.
Sol sputters, coughs. Tommy doesn’t apologize, preoccupied as he is with overflexing Sol’s hips to better situate himself between his knees. It’s not working, tangled as Sol’s legs are in his trousers, and he’s fairly certain there’s a twig or two up his arse. It’s been some time since Sol felt young enough to make excuses for fucking in the woods.
“Damn,” mutters Tommy. “Fuck. Let me—” He yanks at his own trousers and pants, kicks his feet to dislodge his trainers (his knee knifes up dangerously close to Sol’s testicles), and then clambers atop Sol again to straddle his waist. “Think I’m not gonna put my cock in you, no.”
He braces himself with a long-fingered hand on Sol’s sternum and lines up their hips. Sol watches Tommy lower himself down onto his cock, and stupidly, quite belatedly, only then realizes what he intends. Tommy’s prepped too, having apparently anticipated this plan B so that it takes very little time or effort to slide onto Sol’s prick. This is good, because Tommy seems disinclined to be either gentle or careful at the moment, and Sol doesn’t think he’d take well to any reminder to be. He’s still looking at Solomon Tozer like he’s the fox and Sol’s the rabbit, and Sol’s thinking—objectively, beyond the thick horny haze—that he may not be very fond of being the rabbit. Or maybe he’s just not very fond of being made to sprint laps and crack his temple on tree branches in the process of being the rabbit—things to consider, next time he’s not got his cock in Tommy Armitage in the woods in the bright afternoon. Sol whines as Tommy settles, and he feels his mouth fill with saliva.
“Gonna lie still for me, Solly?” Tommy says, only a touch more meanly than Sol had said it. Tommy’s reputation for being Sol Tozer’s most sullen friend isn’t all inaccurate—he’s sulking more often than not, and Sol suspects that's partially because the lads clearly find it so entertaining—but his rare smiles are usually nice. This one isn’t. “Don’ think you’ve got it in you to get up and run again, so I guess you’ve gotta, yeah?”
“Jesus, Tommy,” says Sol, and throttles the sudden instinct to roll his hips. He lies still, and watches Tommy move.
It’s actually not the most animal of sex he’s had. Sol’s gotten on his knees and barked on command before, let Bill Heather cuff him to a table leg and check his teeth ( best dog in show , Bill’d said, and Sol had ridden that high for hours). One memorable occasion, he allowed a pretty blonde to step on his cock on a Persian rug more expensive than everything in Sol’s toolbox and call him breeding bitch, which was good in a way he hasn’t bothered to unpack (and also mostly why Solomon Tozer doesn’t fuck wealthy Londoner girls paying their rent with a trust fund anymore).
By comparison, this is mostly just sex in the woods, with all of its discomforts—there is a stalk of some growing thing pushing insistently up his rucked shirt—and it’s Tommy, and Sol has a rich history of fucking his friends anyway. Tommy Armitage drives his chewed nails into Sol’s chest hard enough that he feels the bite through his shirt. Sol gasps a laugh, then shifts. His trousers catch on the heels of his workboots.
And Tommy’s hot and wet and tight in the sort of way that Sol might have praised, had he the words. Tommy likes praise, Sol’s praise especially, and typically Sol likes very much to give it. He simply lacks the breath and the brains at the moment. He’s fairly certain his eyes have crossed. He’s sweaty, and exhausted, and there’s a hint of pink mist where his brain ought to be, and this at least is something that he likes. When he tells Tommy later, politely as can be, that he doesn’t think he wants to get chased down in the woods as preamble to a fuck ever again, at least he can say he enjoyed this part.
“You’re not very fast, Sol,” pants Tommy Armitage, and he leans forward to brace an arm against Sol’s chest. The new angle makes Sol’s jaw slack, and the elbow in his sternum makes him squirm. “An’ it’s a shame you’re not as flexible as you used to be. I’d have liked to—t’get your knees up to your ears, I think, though we’d’ve had to get your kecks all the way off for that—” He leans more heavily into his sharp elbow, directly into Sol’s chest. “Lucky ye aren’t really a sheep or a deer or something, aren’t ye? The old, slow ones get picked off at the back of the herd, don’t they?”
Sol is fairly certain that isn’t true, actually, and that herd animals tend to protect their oldest and their weakest in the center, which is something he admires—and he doesn’t much care for Tommy calling him old. He says hey, though the sound that leaves him is faint and sweet enough that it might as well have been an affirmative. Tommy grins.
“But that makes you good for somethin’ like this, don’t it? Bein’ easy to catch?”
Jesus, Tommy, Sol thinks. He slurs: “Yeah. Guess so.”
“And you’ve certainly got—a face for it, Solly.” Tommy’s own face is rosy, beatific as one can be with sweat dripping down their neck and a moderate sunburn developing on their cheeks and nose. “Got those pretty brown eyes. Go blank as anything when ye get scared.”
Now he does say Jesus, Tommy, and Tommy tilts his head back—showing Sol the unreachable pale slope of his throat—and laughs. Some large white-flowered greenery bobs lazily over his head. Despite his injured pride and his sweaty discomfort, Sol finds the vision quite compelling. Sol’s gut twists, tightens.
“Tommy,” he pants. “Tommy—Tom—”
Tommy Armitage leans forward, and sinks his teeth deep into Sol’s shoulder.
“Not yet,” growls Tommy, but the picture painted of Sol, with his frightened prey eyes and his newly bloodied temple, and of scary pretty Tommy sat astride him, is too much. Sol’s hand flies to his sternum and wraps tight around Tommy’s wrist, and he says, “Fuck—”
He’s loud when he comes—a menace to discreet public sex enthusiasts everywhere—and he gets stupid after. Tommy rides him through it, though even through the pink haze Sol can tell he’s a bit miffed about being left to come alone. When Sol starts to grow soft, Tommy strokes himself off, leaning forward again to mouth at Sol’s face, very sharp and slightly too wet. He bites his lower lip, and his upper one, and then he drags his fingers down Sol’s slightly tacky temple and licks the blood going thick like jam off his fingers.
“Tryna eat my face,” mumbles Sol, watching the white flowers sway above Tommy’s head vaguely. Tommy’s breath is sharp and fast, and he doesn’t argue the point.
Then he goes still and minutely shivery ( spooky way to him, when he’s gettin’ off, Will Pilkington had said over too many pints once, and Tommy had snapped oh, you’d hardly know, and Jimmy Daly had spilled his beer into his own lap) and tilts heavy over Sol Tozer’s chest. He doesn’t try to eat Sol’s face, nor even gnaw on his neck, which Sol understands to mean that they’re finished. He doesn’t mind that, really.
Sol gives it a moment, and then he says, “What d’ye reckon those flowers are, Tom? They look familiar to you?”
Tommy Armitage groans, but he rolls onto his back and off of Sol to look blearily. Sol, for whom that minorly irritating twig-in-his-arse and burning-across-his-thighs sensation has been escalating for the last twenty minutes, hears Tommy mutter, “Oh, fuck,” and feels the bitter resignation of suspicions confirmed.
He’ll call it a learning opportunity, or a teaching moment, or whatever he’s got to do to keep from hitting Tommy with the company van when he gets the inevitable litany of r u mad at me texts tonight at three in the morning. Perhaps Sol will even learn his lesson, though odds aren’t looking good—this won’t be the first time adventurous sex has landed Solomon Tozer in A&E. Still, next time Sol’s got to ask, he may not want to know.
He sighs, and sits up to pull his jeans on.