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And, haply, Death unstrings his bow
And Sorrow stands apart,
And, for a little while, we know
The sunshine of the heart.
‘Oh. . .’ The storm that Mary has been brewing in her chest tempers with sudden grief. Outrage even. ‘Mister Little, where on God’s Earth ’ave you been?’
Edward’s shadow sways with the ivy in the straining midnight blue, deaf to whatever reprimands he ought to have heard, for unlike Mary’s change of heart the weather outside is not so forgiving. Gusts strike her cheeks and box her ears with such a force that she cannot place the muffled footfalls of her brother come to investigate, lurking and veiled in shadow.
With tattered slippers only half-covering his feet, John shuffles down the cold hallway with heavy limbs, watching intently as Mary tries to usher Edward in from the street—quietly, so as to not wake the house. Debris from snow-sunk hedges whisks through the doorway and gets tangled in her hair; ink-stubborn fingers flying to cup her candle flame. It whips about as mad as her bonnet ribbons, her nightjacket, all thwapping about her shoulders so violently she cannot help but squint.
A crueller blast of icy air rushes inside as Edward, a still looming presence, hesitates, boots crunching the compacted snow on the porch. Eyes like crystal and gust-led as if he weighed nothing.
Familiar, somehow.
Like that heart-thumping shadow that was once drawing aside the hinges of John’s berth, asking for a smoke, a glove, a spare moment. A thief in frozen slops who stole away only one honey-cold kiss when he should have stolen more!
As if on cue, Edward glances towards his unsleeping friend. Life only seen through crystallised breath. Two old statues, unmoving at the crossroads, forgetting everything but each other. It is a hypnotic, infuriating tick of time; the dark waves on a middle watch were always just so, or the lights which coloured a polar sky, once so beautiful.
Fixated like John is still a ghost.
Edward’s mouth opens torturously slow, as if it takes great effort to lick his marble lips, but before he is debilitated by guilt long enough to low some excuse about finding a dosshouse instead, a small hand grabs ahold of his forearm and tugs him inside before he can get a grip of his too-fast breaths, slighting his idleness.
Hearing gentle snores from the other rooms and not wishing to ruin Mary’s habits, John mimics the measured moves of a steward and shucks off Edward’s overcoat himself, leaden and grotesque by snowfall. Water wrings from the sodden wool, tangy with that familiar sheep-smell, and trickles to form a puddle on the stone. The pool lays predatory, black in the moon-dark and rippling as the door bolts the last of the wind behind them with three hollow thunks.
Now a perforating silence charms the room, as if floating beneath the surface of a rainy lake; hair unmoving and wind-greased into ferality. Only the smooth plume of Mary’s extinguished flame drifts up towards the high ceiling, the three of them stifled in unanswered questions.
Eventually, a brittle voice lacerates through the silence, strangled a little in their solitude of shame.
‘He looks feverish, Johnny.’
Mary’s concern is laced with level-headedness; eyes stoic and unflinching as she looks up towards her taller brother. Strangers and family alike have often considered them one and the same—tawny and severe and youthfully-rounded, separated as individuals strictly by height. And tonight John, weighed with every doubt in his fool’s mind, believes that once used to be so.
Tipping her barren candle off to one side, Mary pads past John’s frozen figure and rises, anchoring her purpling knuckles firmly to Edward’s forehead, feeling it searing before she’d even reached to touch, sweat and frost dripping down the dark curls stuck to his brow.
Edward’s eyes flatten to the side, looking at nothing in particular but feeling oddly compelled to pluck out the leaf in Mary’s ringlet.
‘Heavens, you’re burning.’ Her hand slides a few of Mr Little’s string-like curls away from his eyes before it drops, failing to seek assurance and believing him consumptive.
Edward, pensive and peculiar, nods, smiling appreciatively but absent of soul. His raised skin is chalky, weather-drenched, and any semblance of his usual brightness is washed-out by the soft moonlight seeping through the porch windows.
The wind continues to demand attention outside as the three bustle around, whispering to each other in secret.
Then—
‘—John?’ As a mast splinters beneath ice, Edward shivers all at once and sways as if wanting to perch his head on John’s shoulder but then is roped back by some external force, unwilling to get his waistcoat any damper.
John steadies him with a knowing hand, failing to muster peace but guiding him to his shoulder nonetheless. For Edward, this is not simply a matter of physical weakness, or even superstition. Something John understands, but cannot explain: like the difference between red and blue. ‘It’s alright. You should get to bed, Mary, and I’ll—,’ John’s eyes flurry in thought, ‘I’ll fix Edward a bath to calm his fever. Then we’ll be up ourselves. We won’t take longer than an hour, I’ll keep an eye.’
Mary takes longer than a moment to acquiesce, tipping back her fogged glasses atop her nose. Undoubtedly she weighs the situation of her desire to stay and help with the probability of seeing an unmarried man without his trousers. ‘Right,’ her cheeks redden a little, back aching from holding herself stiff. ‘Please do take luxuries, Johnny, but not too ‘ot, nor too much water. I won’ allow it.’
Edward gently elbows John’s ribs before righting himself, looking urgently about ready to topple over but fighting to keep distant, and John wants to cry out his scarred lungs into the wind, to run until collapse.
Instead his voice falls softly upon the room. Alien. ‘I can use the snow outside if needs be.’
‘Good,’ Mary repeats with reserved conviction, flicking John lightly on his forearm before plucking back her useless candle and patting her way hurriedly and barefoot to the staircase. ‘I’ll tell pappa not to disturb ye if he wakes up. Lord kens he is a terrible, curious sleeper. Just like Lewie’s little girl,’ she motions upstairs and then covers her ears in a pantomime of pain.
John nods with an inch of guilty humour, but Mary hesitates, staring at the two men too intensely for comfort that Edward finally looks up, lovestruck by their resemblance. ‘Wake me if anything goes awry, but don’t be too long,’ she says deeply, aiming for John, ‘or ye’ll catch a fever too.’
Mary takes perverse pleasure in observing her brother’s face deform into an awkward, jittery thing—inflamed by embarrassment and firelight in equal measure.
—
Neptune cranes his frail head as the two men stagger into the living room, floorboards groaning beneath their feet, greeting them with one weary swish of his tail and a sticky yawn.
John manoeuvres Edward onto an armchair for the time being then staggers to the corner of the room—bending and viciously dismissing Edward’s pleas to help him—to haul the tin bath before the fire, metallic clunks muffled by, and crumpling, the rug beneath.
Neptune takes a painful while to raise himself, shaking his head with a slobbery smack of lips and ears, then claw-clicks over to sniff Edward’s familiar trouser-leg. This earns the great Newfoundland scratches to the underside of his greying muzzle, and then behind his floppy ears; though not without traces of childhood fear.
Satisfied by his curiosity, Neptune plops down to guard the door once more. To watch John hard at work, just as cautiously as Edward does.
Everyone in the household understands that the ground floor is Neptune’s domain, for living in such a narrow home full of polished staircases means he cannot muster strength to run up and down them anymore like he once did aboard the ship. (Even if he does still bowl over spaniels in the park with puppyish might.) And so, warm and content and forgiving when he ought not to be, Neptune sleepily surveys the open door, too spacious of a room for John mind you, before—
—Open door?
As if a surgeon is still pinning him down to the hardwood panelling—frets about Edward’s absent whereabouts begin to churn Irving’s stomach, having not realised he had left the room. Despite already feeling heratically burning, the cold air suffocates him, bears heavy upon his wren-weak chest, makes it feel as if every lightheaded breath is drawn underwater through a throat cut with glass.
Yes but what ifs.
John flinches out of a growing coughing fit as Edward materialises at the doorway, stifling a limp and supporting a bucket of snow.
John’s heart chokes back into action, descending from the summit. He can breathe and think once more. And oh how he just wants to be close!
Worry about it later, John waves off as Edward raises concerns about his wet bootprints, unaware of the malady he continues to inflict.
Eyes heavy and distant all the while, Edward whispers to himself and secures the room, careful not to catch Neptune’s claws or fur as he pulls the door to with one unsteady hand.
John eventually moves to take the balanced bucket from Edward’s elbow, listening to the wind howling down the chimney as it provokes the fire into a frenzy. The tauntings of a spirit.
It seems an age before the bath is ready, despite the meagre level of water. As John unhooks the last bucket of melted, steaming snow from the hearth, Edward places his boots and sweat-heavy socks to the side with trembling hands. Trousers rolled up, his blistered and bruised feet balance on the bones of their heels, too cold, wet, and red-sore to rest fully on the wood. With sidelined weariness and carved circles beneath his eyes, Edward smiles and coos at Neptune whilst John pours the last of the water into the narrow tub, its controlled sloshing drowning out the crackles and spits of the fire.
Edward has always liked the rain: the earthy smell and quiet slap of wheels on wet, cobbled streets; the soft comfort of its nighttime patter in the mess. So he feels it apt that it is friendly still: a mask for tears, a familiar insomniac melody, something to trick cruelty into waiting but a second longer. A deep melancholy has fixated itself within him, he knows. Edward is not as dull as the people in his life make him out to be. But he hears the snow-rain battering against the glass now. Begging to be let in. And it reminds him of something living, melting the ice on the porch.
A creak of floorboards upstairs and Edward is lulled out of his dozing, instinctively squinting towards John. He must stay awake for that one extra second spent together, just one. Was he supposed to be doing something?
Edward’s first thought to fetch someone as he finally realises to undress himself torments him. But then, and with a frightful jump, John slaps away Edward’s hands from undoing his buttons anyway, captaining his own protective place. A shirt distinctively old-fashioned in style, it takes John a few breaths to know where to start. A mechanical pull, a shuck, a shake and then the starched white that was once the dominating colour of the room drains from the corner of John’s vision into watered peach and brown.
After all offending articles are removed and folded on the mantle with trying grace and decorum, albeit lacking in practised skill, John continues to avert his modest eye and raises to replace the bucket—
—But he is stuck, lodged in deep mud. His body is unable to move, forced to stand in a half-crouch and held back by a gripping weight on his sleeve. A third person?
‘Please,’ Edward utters, low in his sticky throat. As if he had not meant to act. And so… with a distant, fearful understanding and a curt nod, John allows a tentative Edward to undress him in turn.
Irving feels himself being drawn towards Edward; his ice-cratered fingers hook around the braces near John’s placket and his flesh rises like meadowflowers as Edward’s chilly fingertips teeter on his belly to unbutton him.
Lifting his stiff arms, Edward peels off John’s shirt which winds up nicking his red-hot ears—long tails unwinding from around his… business with that obscene relief one feels when stripping off a constrictive neckcloth—preceded by his checkered waistcoat, a thunk of woollen trousers, vest, garters, a clinck of metal here and there until John’s own fingers brush his bared raised and valleyed chest, all stringed with remembrances enough that John fears the warmth. Fears lapsing back into ignorance when he has witnessed Revelation. He longs to be warm, aches to hug as openly as those uncaring mourners let him, but he does not dare drag Edward down with him, unsure if he truthfully does want. Even now he resents at the memories of George with concern etching his brow over Edward taking advantage of him, of men flogged for only failing to cock their hat to their commander, let alone embarrass their father. And so he freezes in place, shivering and disjointed. Not anxious of what he could gain anymore, but terrified of what he could lose.
John must level with his paranoia noticably, since Little takes charge of the scene and guides them both with roughly gentle hands to clamber and contort into the narrow metal tub—a hushed din of slippery fumbles.
Irving’s whole body recoils as Edward’s legs knock his own, the icy-pink tip of his nose jabbing into Little’s damp neck. Craving to sink into that repulsive warmth. How they managed to accomplish this almost impossible feat is beyond either of their comprehension—even having once been so used to telling men apart by their sweat alone, or being kicked awake in the teeth by a hammockmate—lanky knees so high above the waterline and bodies pressed together so tightly in the wave-lurching space that more of their clammy skin is exposed above the water than submerged; goosebumped from the knawing air on one side of the room and ignited by the fire on the other.
With clumsy limbs and red-blotched faces—flush only visible where there are no unkept chops or fringes or brows—John wrings a sudsy cloth and washes Edward’s arms with an amusing splat, dark hair ebbing back and forth like seagrass with the drag of the cloth. He supports the weight of Edward’s stiff fingers, numb and vein-translucent, on his forearm, mapping the blue-green roads to Edward’s heart in the way all others lead to Rome.
Whether closer to a dream or to comfort, their minds drift astray.
As John teases the dirt from beneath Edward’s bloodless nails, he wonders how Edward bathed as a midshipman. What a strange fancy, eh? It is often where his mind wanders off in Edward’s company. He wonders all about Edward—whether he was the playful type, laughing the way awkward youths do and dunking others beneath the salty sea. Or if perhaps he was more reserved, finding a sheltered cove or empty cupboard of the ship for any privacy impossibly allowed in such intimate quarters. Or if the young Mister Little was a normal, boring boy who doused himself with navy-issued soap and was dry within the span of four minutes, ready and sparkling to follow orders. Or if he was…like himself. Being horrified no matter how hard he scrubbed himself or flayed himself and hating himself for it. Even now, he wonders if his affectionate boyhood friends knew, even when he didn’t; if they tolerated an invert only because of such obliviousness, and prayed instead for their God to reprimand. To lead him on the right path. And if nature had been reciprocated, well, John would have sold his friends out for lashes and be glad for it. Prided himself in it. Besides, he knows Edward has always been a better man than he. Edward would never have needed to tense and fidget to make himself look stronger, or less interested, than he actually was. There would never have been the need for pretence. To be admired by the people he admired himself would have come as naturally as the sun rises high and bright each morning.
Ah, what a bitter hypocrite John is! And he is overstaying his welcome so much that Edward’s hands have become water-wrinkled.
Feigning an inch more tiredness as the reason for lingering, John decides to make himself useful. He hinges forward to wipe down Edward’s spine, to shuck off the soap and memories and oil frothing down from his greying hair. A whiff of rosemary and some flower or another he cannot tell, and a soft, gurgling stomach, thawed now. Warm.
When, and with a sudden sneeze-like jolt, springing awake as if someone had just launched a bucket of ice-water into his face, John’s unstirring cockstand drags against Edward’s ankle, hips lurching forward of their own command.
Oh. God.
A pang of nausea inflates his chest, his throat, and he feels just about ready to sick-up, gaze flickering madly to the closed door. He dare not look his friend in the eye, though he can feel the electric current of Edward’s own buzzing across his skin like a swarm of bees—oh, and after what blasphemies he was just thinking!
As much as John wants to direct otherwise, his reaction towards Edward is not a lone occurrence. He and Edward are bound, after all; married in all but legality. God’s lone, vicious apology; for John cannot wholly feel anymore, even when he loves. A rose he waits patiently to water.
But before John can apologise or act on anything untoward, Edward whispers from some cavity deep in his throat, words spilling out like blood.
‘You look damnably handsome, Johnnie.’
Uncharacteristically balmy in the face of his own boldness, Edward slumps forward to rest his chin on John’s scarce-freckled shoulder, barely awake and yet hungry to please. He feels John shiver as shock licks up his spine at the coldness of his beloved’s drying hair, his sand-like stubble.
Since part of John died, Edward mourns a death that has not yet come; cradling him now in a way that was denied to the likes of Aeneas and Odysseus in the land of the dead. With John tangible to him now, Edward carries his composure without guilt, tipsy-like; sentimental without even being conscious of it. As if the only purpose of myth was to become truth.
Tentatively, and with abstract telling, Edward’s fingertips dloop beneath the snowwater to brush John’s limp manhood in a sloppy way of asking, yes?
‘A proper gentleman. All flushed and beautiful. God. What I would do for you now, in all things, in all lives. . .’
And John tries to believe his words, because every creature who has ever met him knows that Edward Little cannot tell a lie—no matter how sweet or small. It is not in his nature.
‘Ned,’ Irving exhales in confession, a slight whistle from his missing molar, his rasping chest, and clenches his hand tighter around the washcloth on Edward’s back. Where he would frequently be embarrassed around others by any sound or motion which spotlights him, even those he similarly loves, he never feels shame around his Edward—never truly has learned to. Even when they first met and John cursed himself for fumbling a handshake, clammy and gritty with shot from training the marines, the model lieutenant never took anything to heart; to the point where John wanted him angry. Always smiled politely when John would take the room to recite catechism, even ask him questions despite now knowing he would rather have eaten his own liver. After his only confidant disappeared and John built up the courage to confess his loneliness and hatred to his most trusted colleague, Edward would extend his hand so kindly, so tiredly. And, eventually, when their world toppled over, John would find the only comfort was that he may possibly repay him for it all. His purpose: that he would burden Edward’s pain for him.
It is especially endearing now, or perhaps plain wrong of Edward to carry on this way, for John refutes appearances and is selfish now. He cannot bring himself to worry about the constant marriage jibes his brothers greet him with every morning, their jests at liberal papers; dinner talks from his aging father so lost in a different world than he; ‘Any other extraordinary new plans and adventures for the future, John?’ These illusions of past vanity he was engrossed with since he was a lad sleeping with a Bible tucked under his pillow and weeping as his teeth grew wobbly. He knows how much his brothers—well anyone, really, would have the capacity to detest him, if they knew anything about him other than the superficial. And yet why can he not push them away? Truthfully, when once he relied on his dictatorial temper to feel for him, his egotism, now he does not know what or how to think and feel at all. About anything in life. What trivial things one does in the world does not seem to matter so much when one already believes themselves to be dead. When the glinting sunrise and chirp of sparrows matters more than a counterfeit career. Faith? And yet no longer does Edward just accept this, accept him for who he is, he accepts to try and live in spite of it. Other God-fearing men would do well to emulate such a degree of humanity as his beloved. If only they could do what John failed at, and burden his suffering therein.
‘It’s alright,’ Edward begins to move his hand in earnest, eyelashes drifting shut like flytraps, ‘it’s alright, you’re ah—you’re a good boy. You’re so good, John. I’ve got you.’
John flings his rag into the fire-dark water, completely overwhelmed by an ever-growing love and need for the man in front of him. He favours to cling and claw at Edward’s broad back, ghosting its pock-marks as Edward tends between his legs. ‘P—poor Neptune,’ John chatters in genuine guilt, unmentioning of those who would actually cause ruin. His voice crackles like a boy on the cusp of manhood, flattening as thinly as parchment and slipping into his jumbled accent which Edward adores so casually. Only a few splashes of water flood over the side of the tub as John’s nerves spark, not fully healed, driving him to kick his feet against Edward’s flanks and squirm about as if ill.
And perhaps he believes he is.
Edward huffs the smallest, instinctual smile against John’s clavicle, his body twitching manically due to the labour of Edward’s fingers, and lathers the rosy bone in wet, languid kisses.
John chews his wrist in a struggle to stifle noise as Edward quickens and tightens his grip to the tune of his bubbling breaths, knees aching from their strict positioning yet shuddering and parting as wide as he can manage all the same—hinging left to right in such a way that Edward compares, with loopy affection, to the churning of a locomotive’s coupling rods. He steams as much anyway.
And then Edward stops. Some newfound torture craze it seems! And Oh! How John Irving drowns in its mercy.
‘O-on second thought,’ Edward’s heart drums as manically as the wind outside, ‘I daresay we shouldn’t dirty the water before we’ve finished cleaning ourselves.’
John buries his scalding face into Edward’s neck, biting with pretend malice. He manages a muffled cruel man as his defunct cock throbs as forcibly as his own heart, the hair due north and foresting his thighs being scratched and teased in Edward’s soft grip, like how one pats moss on a dewy day.
Saddened by how literally Edward took this jest, John bestows a litany of chaste kisses upon his face, mirroring his actions on each side with stiff equity: Edward’s ridged hairline, his knitted brow, the bridge of his strong nose, each sunken eyelid, his plump cheekbones, the delicate skin just below his ears, and finally his spit-glistening lips; still unpracticed and imperfect in his own view, the ringed, sagging scars adorning them and disfiguring his likeness something they both carry.
Ned discovers that John tastes like a different brand of tobacco, a hint of iron now lingering on his gums of the only pasttime he allows himself, and Edward grows lightheaded from it; swirling back to a memory he hopes is real, of themselves arguing over an illegal stash of snuff John eventually reported. (John had knocked on Edward’s berth the following week, a forced apology and singular tin in hand, stepping in before realising Peddie was inside too, turning around with his back towards him. Monkey stole the rest, Lieutenant? The Doctor had asked with a slanted grin, subsequently gifting Edward the knowledge of both his crewmate’s capital vice and the limit for how red human cheeks could glow).
Edward Little leans his well-loved head onto John’s shoulder as if it never left, listening to the tub-water sway up past his belly-button, and moves his mouth lower, lower. Until he nudges John’s arm up like a zealous hound and wedges himself against his underarm, breathing in the scent of his sweat so doggedly that John thinks this the most obscene act they’ve done all evening; fine hair tickling Edward’s nose; his cracked lips and tongue catching on John’s skin.
John mewls in shock and almost elbows Edward in the cheek. A soprano fit for the opera. And Edward grasps another shaky chuckle into his warm, damp skin.
—
After a comb is strung gently through his wind-knotted hair, and after having reached for the pitcher near the embered hearth, Edward’s closing blot of wakefulness is spent fumbling around for the bar of soap slipped somewhere in the tub. Once captured, Edward suds his hands to rub on the crown of John’s head, careful at the roots of hair that has yet to, or perhaps never will, grow back.
With John’s fine hair waxed up in all directions, reminding him that John never liked using a mirror on wash day, Edward plonks the jug under the frothy water and covers John’s eyes with his left hand like a sun shield. The water pours gently over John’s hair, flattening and darkening the waves which never sit right.
With soaked hair parted boyishly like a Gable hood, it is Edward’s turn to cover his own stinging eyes. John dunks the ceramic and rests one hand on Ned’s peaked shoulder to pour. Then in an instant those pragmatic hands appear on Edward’s head; lathering his burnsides until Edward almost falls asleep, then up, playing and twisting his hair between his fingers like modelling clay. Rinsing and dunking, rinsing and dunking. A lulling motion as suds gather and swirl in the bath like seafoam.
Edward pries his eyes back open as he senses John still, raising his heavy head to wash the rest of him, having waited his turn. Edward drags the rag—still greased with rosemary—around John’s body with no strength at all, still quite delirious. But John notices how well it does to calm his heartbeat, moving in assured circles across his neck, his clavicle, his shoulders, his bony knees still jutting out of the water like two tree-barren islands: a task to focus on.
John stares through bloated, hooded eyelids as Edward reaches his chest, Edward’s own scarred face subdued by shattered concentration. His wonky lips are parted and jewelled in the firelight, like how the moon shines on the ocean.
John keeps his hands busy—after Edward tended to each disfigured finger, the oil and charred flour beneath his fingernails—picking at the bare skin, the bubbles of frostburns, wanting to touch Edward but stopping himself. He is not as…comfortable initiating or generous with touching as his Edward is.
But he cannot hold out for much longer. His body besieged. At some point, as he feels Edward by some miracle still hard and hot and beating against his own sorry prick, with no room to escape being surrounded by the heat, the smell, his crisp breaths, his thoughts, the eternal beauty of Edward all Edward his Edward—John’s terror and penitence dissolves entirely, and his heart—wrongly, he knows, but cannot change—no longer wishes to flee.
As Edward slumps forward to wash John’s spiny back, his semi-plump backside, the near-last parts of his body left to clean, John jumps upon the chance to retaliate with all the gusto of a thirty-odd year old man about to keel over from sleep at any moment and teeths a sloppy kiss just below the scruff of Edward’s jaw.
He cannot keep away.
‘Ah,’ Edward hiccups, conscious of their not being alone, and tries and fails to twist to chase after John’s lips. Like a horse stretching for an apple, Edward only manages delicate half-kisses, shut-eyed and improvised. Too focused on John’s hot mouth and scratchy whiskers, the beauty of motion, Edward does not notice John’s travelling fingers until they port at his furred fundament; spreading and spearing and weakening under the veneer of cleanliness and having no business being that tender and fond! Edward twitches and teeters forward as best he can, crushing John’s ribs no doubt, just for that little extra allowance. He whimpers and nods, fiercely, after realising John is waiting for an answer. He would do anything John asked of him.
Panting quietly, for neither have ever been particularly noisy people to begin with, Edward’s hand remembers to return to where it left off, oil slicking his hands in uncoordinated fortune. A reciprocation. Their hands and fingers nudge against each other’s beneath the water and it is insufferable they cannot be closer: knees arching higher; fingers deeper, lower, lower, a small tug of that delicate hair to remind themselves the other is still alive. Though both dislike the sensation of their water-creased fingertips on skin, and so take to using the rough of their palms or nails, testing the waters and figuring things out as they go.
Ned’s free hand compulsively rests upon John’s scarred chest, rising and falling in beat with his own hips as if he’d just ran a marathon, and is surprised John does not shy away. It stutters there, unwanting to stir bitter emotions, and for a brief, shameful moment he wishes his fingers were in John’s mouth instead. Pressing down on his tongue to tilt his head at his own whim, hollow-cheeked and—Warm.
As dreamers do, both Edward and John feel certain memories disconnected in their current state. They float beneath the sea, suspended in refracted sunwaves yet to surface; yet to feel the biting, misty air and the pop of everything being too loud. But deep down, although he cannot place it exactly, John feels the touch is a kiss where Edward cannot reach.
They work and feel in tandem. Edward jolts his hips faster, which quickens John’s still-trembling hands, which quickens his own from sheer adrenaline.
Edward imagines John in a place of their own, bound atop a mass of blankets of their own, squirming and beautiful and draped in marital plaid, perhaps still covered in dye from his latest projects, twigs and grass-stained from wrestling Neptune outside, or maybe John is beckoning him into a secluded carriage, a clearing in the heather, his hand coiling around Edward’s thigh in a torturously wooden pew. Or he is in him. A gargled whine emerges from Edward’s throat because above all he pictures John happy—wanting and pink-flushed and mussed up and being doted on, whatever form that would take. And he knows, as true as anything, that John is imagining that too.
As if by premonition, an undercurrent to his volcanic swell, it is John who releases first with a spluttering gasp, Edward guiding and tugging his unrisen cock beneath the lap of water. With his typical unintelligible mantra, Edward can feel the muscles of John’s stomach spasm and contort beneath his knuckles, squeezed between his thighs like a boa. He tingles as if in seizure for quite some time; eyes closed, quiet aside from his too-hot breaths, and mouth hinged open in silent sacrament, stuttering on Edward’s shoulder and trying not to cough.
With John commanding his every thought, Edward Little follows dutifully. Beautifully. A learned behaviour, yet always surprising. John’s hands remain unmoving and tense from exhaustion, still weighted adoringly all around his Edward. The three fingers of his other hand stay swaying deep inside him as Edward waxes and wanes a gentle rhythm around John’s bitten-nails. Hips aching after having pitched like a rider in trot.
Edward hollows his puffed-out cheeks, not realising he has been holding his breath, and licks his lips through habit — so out of his mind with exhaustion and want to show this man how terrifyingly much he adores him.
And so he does.
Or rather, he is beaten to it.
With tearful eyes, closed and sleep-drunk, Edward feels John’s pruney palms cup his face and lead him nervously into their third kiss that evening; boiler-hot, sweaty, and fueled by a pure, sacred devotion—fingertips purposely kept out of touch as Edward clings impossibly closer. A love so heavenly, yet human in a manner that feels undeserved.
—
Unbeknownst to the two men adrift, or to the snoring Newfoundland besides, Edinburgh’s gales grow stronger, battering and tormenting its empty city streets. The disjointed shadows of blowing trees and slanted rain behind the curtains hover between sleet and pitiful snow as the two men grow lost inside their own safe harbour—in a place they do not belong; God-given and imperfect and all their own.