Cold Fusion (20 page)

“You haven’t given me a chance to find out. Why?”

“Because you should never point a gun at a living creature unless you know you can kill it quickly.” He took the rifle out of my hands. Easily he hefted it and sighted down the barrel. His movement was so deadly sure that I almost shouted a warning to the unsuspecting coney now washing its ears in the sun. But having locked on to his target, Viv hesitated, and after a moment he let the barrel drop.

I watched him, puzzled. “Are
you
a good shot?”

“Excellent.”

He would be. No doubt he’d trodden the August moors for years, knocking off hecatombs of poor pheasants and grouse.

“Do you enjoy it, then? Hunting?”

“Not at all. I just know how to do it.”

“Oh, okay.” I leaned my elbows on the wall beside him. “Why is Flopsy over there still enjoying the light of day?”

“I’m not quite sure. I’ve often thought about becoming a vegetarian.”

“Really? You ate my sausage happily enough last night.”

I’d actually meant no mischief. As soon as the words were out, I realised what I’d done. Viv set the rifle down carefully on a tree stump and rested his elbows on the wall. His shoulder brushed mine.

“God,” he said unsteadily, wiping his eyes. “You’re unreal. The truth is, I really don’t want anything else to die for me, not today. Life seems precious. I’ll gladly continue to consume your tinned sausages, though.”

“Good.” I knew what he meant about the life. My own was thrumming through my veins. The rabbit loped calmly away, flashing its scut at me without a trace of concern. Viv’s quiver of bitten-back laughter was as delicious as an unexpected kiss. “Did we do anything last night to make you feel bad?” I asked, while the lines of communication were open and I still had the courage. “We went pretty far pretty fast. It doesn’t have to be that wild, you know.”

He laced his fingers together. “Have you ever tried something,” he began, then drew a steadying breath. “Tried something, and it was just so good, so much better than you ever imagined it could be, that you’re frightened, because there’s only so much time, and you can’t imagine ever having enough of it?”

Please God let him mean the sex, not the tinned sausage.
My throat clenched. Something in the diamond-bright morning air was making my sinuses prickle. “But we’ve got time,” I said, covering his clenched fists with my hand. “And the way I feel about you, I doubt there’ll be any shortage. Is that why you ran off—because you were frightened?”

“I thought if I was out of sight of you, I might feel normal again.”

“What does normal feel like?”

“Living in my head. Not minding not being touched. Not really minding the idea of letting everything go.”

I put an arm around his waist. “Don’t you dare let anything go. Viv, what’s wrong? Losing the cold fusion thing isn’t the end of the world, if that’s what you’re worried about. You’ll have a rest, find some other metal you can work with, and—”

“It’s not what I’m worried about. And I do bloody mind now. I don’t want to let go of anything at all.”

I tightened my grip. He stiffened against me for an instant, then turned and seized me so hard in his arms that he knocked the breath from me. I clutched him frantically in return, grunting as he made my ribs creak. This was nothing to do with sex, although I was vividly aware of every inch of him pressed against me—more like two drowning men each mistaking the other for the lifesaving spar.

Or maybe not mistaking. There was a gun behind me. I’d use it, and anything else that came to hand, to shield Viv. And I was losing count now of the ways in which he’d saved me. I kissed his cheek, shivering with relief as he immediately sought my mouth with his own. White heat shot into our brotherly embrace. He opened up a little for my tongue, the signal sweet and clear—met my ingress with a shy push of his own. My exhaustion burned away like morning mist in the desert. He gave up his desperate hold on me and ran a caress down my spine instead, not stopping at my waist. My muffled cry was no more than a vibration in his mouth as he closed a beautiful double-handed grip on my backside. He hitched me against him. My cock surged despite last night’s pounding. Through floating scarlet flags in my mind, I tried to work out our best course—back into the house, a stand-up squeeze and grind here against the wall, or maybe I could kneel for him in the snow, fight my way past his zips and thermals, and…

He gave my tongue one last yearning flicker and pulled back. “Mallory.”

“Yes? What?” I was breathless, warm as toast from head to foot in the Valley of the Snowdrifts. “Anything.”

“That serious talk you said we’d have to have, if we wanted to…”

“Oh, God.”

“Yes. What would it involve?”

I swallowed hard. “It involves telling one another about the people we’ve slept with before.”

“We’ve done that, haven’t we?”

“There’s more to it. For me, anyway.” I backed him up a fraction of an inch, holding his shoulders, trying to square up and find some common sense. “You’ve told me your history, and it wouldn’t cross my mind not to believe you. But…”

“I believe you too.”

I met his eyes. “You’d also need to believe that Peace Warrior gave me every kind of health check and blood test imaginable so I could get their insurance. You’d have to believe that I checked out clean, that Alan Frost was my only partner after that, and we both always used condoms.” He held my gaze quietly, as if waiting for me to say something controversial. I gave him a little shake. “Well?”

“I’m inexperienced, Mallory, not naive or poorly educated. You’re asking me to trust you, that you don’t have HIV or any other sexually transmitted diseases.”

The facts were harsh when laid down as flatly as that. “Yes.”

“Listen. You may have done things you’re ashamed of, but you don’t hurt people on purpose. You’d never have laid a hand on me if you hadn’t been absolutely sure of that.”

I couldn’t speak. I
was
absolutely sure. Even in the hottest throes of our affair—even while rutting on top of the wooden crates at Spindrift—neither Alan or I had ever felt so crazy in love that we’d wanted to dispense with the hygiene. To tell my truth to Viv, and have him so profoundly accept it, not as the words of my mouth but a manifestation of my soul…it didn’t hush the clamour of the things I was ashamed of, but it reminded me that until that day in the fjord, I’d thought of myself as a good person. Nobody’s saint, but decent. A man who’d never deliberately do harm.

“You’re right,” I said at last. “I’d never hurt you.”

“Then…was that the talk?”

“I guess it was.” New vistas opened up before me, together with a sweeping urge of energy to my groin. I could fuck him. I’d told him that any kind of sex was real sex as far as I was concerned, and I’d meant it, but pushing into that beautiful body—hotter still, opening up and letting him have me—oh, the sky was the limit, except… “Damn.” I took hold of his coat lapels and bumped my forehead off his shoulder in frustration. “Damn. Shit.”

“What on earth is wrong?”

“No lube.”

“Oh. Can’t we manage without?”

Inexperienced was right. “I probably could, with a bit of spit and gritted teeth, but not you, my freshly deflowered prince.”

“Right. Damn,” he echoed delicately. “Couldn’t we use something else?”

“I don’t know. Aunt Lil wasn’t much for olive oil, and I don’t fancy doing you with whatever kind of old pig lard she’s got stowed away down there. It kills me to say it, but this one might have to wait until we’re back in civilisation and I can… Oh, wait.”

“What is it?”

“KY, that’s what. In my rucksack.”

“Will I regret asking why you have KY in your rucksack?”

“Possibly. It was Alan’s. I chucked it in there to tidy up when we left.” I grabbed his wrist and turned away. “Oh, the game is on, mate. I’m dragging you back to my lair.”

I met with resistance. I glanced back, surprised. He was rooted by the wall, holding on to the snow-capped stones. “It’s nice out here too, isn’t it?”

I caught my breath. Yes, it was. The sun was blazing on the drifts, the pines giving off a heady scent of resin. The breeze brought messages of faraway mountains, of richly hidden life in the soil. “Oh, you wild child. You want to do it out here?”

“Not out in the open. I have been listening to you, you know.”

“Right. If anyone has managed to follow us, you don’t want to get shot.”

“Not at such a crucial moment, no.”

I chuckled. “We’d make a grand display for someone’s hunting lodge, though, wouldn’t we—stuffed and mounted? Where, then?”

“Up in the trees where your aunt liked to sit. It’s beautiful there.”

“Okay.” I had to pause and swallow. My mouth was dry. “Do you want to go there and wait for me?”

“Yes. Yes, I do.”

* * * * *

I hardly dared go back to him. I felt a clutch of nerves in my gut as if I’d been summoned by a priest to take my walk down the aisle, a journey into a future I’d never have predicted and couldn’t control. God, with any other man I’d have made a randy run for it, warming the KY tube in my hand. But this was Viv. In one short week I’d fallen so hard that Alan Frost was nothing but a ghost to me, my feelings for him a pale infatuation. I didn’t understand. I hadn’t thought those depths were in me. I climbed the slope in silence, entering the deep green shelter of the pines as if they’d been a church.

More reverently still than that. No church in my experience had contained so electrical a silence. Rills and ripples of music from unseen birds only served to counterpoint the hush. The thick carpet of needles—viridian from the pines, the larches a rich umber—absorbed my tread. Sunlight drifted in shafts. There in the brightest of them was Vivian, curled in the curve of the great larch branch where Lilian had used to sit. The place felt utterly sacred. Then he shattered it all to brilliant shards with one of his quick smiles and soft, nerve-racked announcements. “I know all about the prostate, Mallory.”

I stopped a couple of yards away from him. I didn’t want to laugh. He was pale, his arms wrapped around his knees. I’d only been gone for a minute, but he could travel a long inner distance away from me and planet Earth in that time. “Do you, now?”

“Yes. I’ve done some reading.”

“And what do you know about it?”

“It’s what makes the sex good when we do it this way.”

“Well, to tell you the truth…” I sat beside him on the branch, not worrying this time about his three-inch rule. “Not from a cold start, it doesn’t. If someone just grabs you and shoves in there, it’s only a gland.”

“Oh.”

“Don’t sound so worried. I mean, some guys like the grabbing and shoving, and that’s fine. But the point is that they’d be hot for it, excited, and when you’re excited, then the prostate’s a…” I struggled for words, and his sun-and-shadow gaze probed mine so expectantly that I couldn’t help finishing, as if at the end of the world’s weirdest bedtime story, “…a happy little gland. It lives happily ever after, or at least till the end of the fuck.”

“
Mallory
.” He exploded into laughter, doubling up and muffling the sound in his hands. “You can’t. I’m serious. This is serious.”

Yes, it was. A first try for someone like Viv was going to be dead serious. “Okay,” I said contritely, taking him in my arms. “I know. But it doesn’t have to be grim.”

“Do you have the…?”

“The what?” I kissed the side of his neck, and a wave of responsive warmth rolled right off him. It wouldn’t take long to call him back.

“The stuff you went back into the house for.”

“Viv, if you can’t say its name, I’m not gonna use it on you.”

Another heat wave. He pushed an exploratory hand under my jacket, and I quickly unzipped it so he could find warm skin beneath my jumper. That was well-known territory for him, all my exterior self, the places he’d seized and conquered last night.

“Lubricant, then,” he said resentfully against my ear. “I just don’t like calling it lube.”

“Oh, I see.” Everyone drew the line somewhere, I supposed. “You could call it KY. Or Mallory’s magical love juice, or—”

“If you don’t stop it, I’ll leave you alone here in the pines.”

I held him tighter. I drew him down into a kiss and did long, breathless penance for my sins. My vision was sparkling blue and gold by the time he let me go.

“You’ve solved the problem of my cold start,” he said huskily. “I want you. All my glands are ready for you.”

“That’s good, then.”

“But I haven’t changed. I’m not cured.”

“Didn’t we decide you didn’t need a cure?” I pushed his hair back from his brow, leaned mine against it and tried to read the quantum flicker of his thoughts. “I don’t want to change one bloody thing about you, okay? You’re nuts, but I love you as you are.”

Well, that had popped out easily. We stared at one another, both of us startled. Too much, too soon? I didn’t know. My words dissolved to join the birdsong and the wind-music in the pines.

“I’m glad,” Viv said. “Because I don’t think I can let go enough for you to do this to me.”

“Because you couldn’t control it.”

“That’s right. If you can see it so clearly as that, can you forgive me?”

“What’s to forgive?” I had a moment’s hesitation, then took the plunge. “Anyway, who says it has to be me doing anything to you?”

His mouth opened slightly, reddened by passion and the cold. He looked delicious when he was nonplussed. Then he got it—grasped it wholesale, his lights coming on so bright they dimmed the sun. “Really? You’d let me… I could do it to you?”

“Yes.” I handed him the tube of KY to emphasise my consent. “You could do it to me right now. This place feels sacred now I’m here with you. Please, Viv.”

He didn’t have a clue, so I showed him. I held him close, kissing him, unzipping his jeans. I stroked him erect inside the cotton of his briefs, and when he was more than ready, writhing against my hand, I got up and turned away from him. I hitched one knee up onto the low branch, planted my other foot firmly in the frosty soil and leaf mould. “Come on.”

“Where do I start?”

“Undo my belt. Take my pants down. Take what you want.”