False Colors (37 page)

They kicked off their breeches and went upstairs. Still speechless— incapable of saying anything more meaningful than a joke—Alfie clung stubbornly to John’s hand and refused to let go. It lay slender and strong in his grip, real. He needed its warmth and pressure, needed to feel the callous left by a sword and the faint pulse in the thumb. If he let it escape now he was sure to lose his way on the stairs, go stumbling through endless dark corridors only to wake in his own bed, alone.

He had suffered this dream before.
Wan light poured in from a window on the landing. The bare boards of the floor gleamed, scrubbed white as a quarterdeck, and as John lead him through into the bedroom, the sound of the ships in the harbor, ringing two bells in the middle watch, chimed sweet across the water.
The bed, almost exactly as Alfie had imagined it, sat neatly made in the center of a room bare and bright as the landing. In deference to the heat of the island, the colorful, home-made bedrug sprawled on the floor beside it, its colors dimmed to shades of pewter and grey. His unwillingness to release John’s hand occasioned much difficulty when it came to turning down the sheets, and John raised a skeptical eyebrow at him, tugging to get away.
Alfie looked down at their joined hands, his own tightening around John’s attempts to escape, then looked up again to find the ends of John’s full lips lifted in a fond, exasperated smile he’d never seen before, never even imagined. He let go reluctantly, and only so he could peel off the rest of his clothes, tugging his shirt over his head. Even to Alfie’s lax morals it seemed indecent to be altogether naked, but he was shaken to the core. He felt… new, defenseless as a babe. It was appropriate, then, to enter his second life in the same state in which he had been born into the first.
Lifting the thin sheet, the linen worn soft as cotton, he slid into his lover’s bed.
Who would have thought it?
Who would have thought some doors only slammed shut temporarily; that when you turned to trudge away they could be flung open again, and love come pelting down the path, shouting for you to come back?
He had thought himself prepared to achieve what he had spent his life hunting, but clearly he had only prepared for failure. Success left him stunned, close to frightened. “I’m finding this very difficult to believe,” he said as John peeked out of the thin, white curtains, his gaunt beauty silvered by the moon.
John’s head turned. He gave a smile of enormous innocence, then drew his own shirt off with blushing modesty, almost returned to the man with whom Alfie had fallen in love all those long months ago. “I too.”
“Come over here and let me prove it to us both.”
Shadows slid over skin pale as porcelain when John drifted closer, ghosted over his expression of mingled joy and amusement. He smelled of bergamot and salt. “You take a lot upon yourself, Mr. Donwell, assuming the man’s part in this.”
But he lifted the corner of the coverlet and slipped between the sheets, inching his way tentatively into Alfie’s arms.
“It’s not like that.” Alfie closed his eyes against the rush of sweetness and pulled John’s lean frame more closely against him until they were pressed full length together.
Oh! There
is
something to be said for being bare.
His skin could breathe in the touch of John’s skin, soak him up like sunshine. The axe scar on John’s side felt like exploring fingers, rougher, warmer than the silk of his flanks. He reached down and traced the shape of it, remembering Gibraltar, the usual stab of resentment transformed into nostalgia. He thought about soap and steam,
skin wet and slippery beneath him, John lying confiding and abandoned in his arms….
There would have to be more baths in their future.
Kissing behind John’s ear, then at the angle of his jaw, Alfie mouthed along the long, elegant throat to the Adam’s apple, licking at sweat and cologne. But as he pressed his lips there, John hissed in pain, his whole body tensing. The faint blue light, which sifted through the thin curtains, illuminated fear. Then a frown of determination. Alfie belatedly remembered the great black bruise, crawling with flies, that had swollen John’s throat on Tobago to the point where Bentley had considered cutting into the airway to let him breathe. Long healed, it seemed the wound left still a phantom impression.
“What a pair we are,” Alfie said gently, taking John’s hand to kiss the palm and the thick bracelet of ridged scars. “Lucky to be alive.”
“I bear the marks of my folly.” There was no joy in John’s smile now. “Was I punished enough, do you think?”
“Oh,
God!”
Collapsing back to the mattress, Alfie linked his arms about John’s thin frame, and pulled him almost violently into a protective embrace, feeling a horror and indignation he could not fully express.
Beautiful man!
He was a beautiful man, and delicate like the best porcelain, half transparent, letting light shine through from elsewhere. But sometimes—from wherever it was he got his radiance—he also came out with the most terrifying ideas. “You didn’t go through this for me. This is nothing to do with me. It never was.”
“But still, it is in this bed with you.”
“John,” Alfie bent his head to whisper into John’s dark hair, “did they…?” He didn’t know what he would do; couldn’t kill them all—it had already been done—didn’t really want to know. John had been hurt, they had both been hurt, but it was over.
“You may not want to ask that question, Alfie. Or I will have to ask the same of you.”
Thank God, they understood one another on that at least. “It’s a new year. A new moment,” he said, running a hand down the ridges and furrows of John’s ribs, planning a regime of big meals. “And you have to admit it’s a good one. We have better things to worry about now.”
John laughed, his muscles softening from their stiff-as-a-board rigor. He heaved himself to his elbow, watching his own hand as it traced the lines of Alfie’s shoulders, as though he was a naturalist, and Alfie some fascinating new creature, unknown to the learned gentlemen of the Royal Society. He watched it as though he didn’t know what it would do next, and when it stroked down Alfie’s neck to tweak the sparse hair on his chest, John’s smile twisted into unexpected wickedness, astonished at his own actions.
His hand raised, hovering with curiosity and interest just above Alfie’s nipple, but the absorbed eyes—grey as Toledo steel—flicked up to Alfie’s spellbound gaze. “And this question of who is to be the boy?”
“You read too much Greek.” Alfie mentally egged on the descent of those exploring fingertips, but still jerked with surprise and pleasure when they landed and pinched the little nub. “Oh! Um…they were very clever, I’ve no doubt. But I hope we are—
please do that again
—more enlightened nowadays.”
“What do you mean?” John’s head tilted, the same curious, almost dispassionate look on his face as his hand slid down Alfie’s ribs to his belly, and found the trail of hair that lead like an arrow to his yard.
It raised itself, straining up to be touched, and he could sympathize with its frustration.
This is like a bloody lieutenant’s exam, firing questions at you while you were disconcerted and….
But no, Alfie still remembered his lieutenant’s exam with a shudder; all those lined leathery faces and squinting eyes peering at him. It was enough to wilt any man’s ardor, but this?
Please just stop talking! Talk after, please, not….
“I mean you rescue me, I rescue you. You comfort me, I comfort you. I don’t give a shit about anything else. Please just fuck me!”
“It seems a filthy act.” Despite the faint tremble Alfie could feel sweeping through the fibers of John’s boyish frame, the man paused, still as a marble statue, looking worried. If it had not been for his prick, which also resembled marble in its hardness, Alfie might have panicked. As it was, he groaned, aching. “Is it worth death? What we’ve done so far only earns us the pillory. I could be satisfied with nothing more than that forever, couldn’t you? Why run the risk?”
Alfie shifted on the mattress, the very sheet beneath him making him itch with need as it slid across his skin. He lifted one hand to rub his thumb along John’s cheek and lips. John’s mouth opened obediently, he licked the end of Alfie’s finger, and bit, and Alfie scrunched his eyes shut and whined.
“You’ll understand…when you do it. John, I want you...in me. I want…
please!”
The mattress ropes creaked beneath him as John leaned down for a kiss. John’s scent and warmth enveloped him. Alfie twisted his fingers in the thick silk of John’s hair, just as John wrapped his hand around Alfie’s prick, and stroked down, tentative, amazing. Arching off the bed, Alfie yelped—“Oh, thank
God!”
which made the little bastard laugh—but at his rushing, tightening, frantic reaction Alfie abandoned all thoughts of leisurely foreplay—they had the rest of the night for that. He pushed John’s exploring hand away and sat up to fumble for the tallow candle in the corner of the room. Taking the dish beneath it—full of warm fat—he pressed it into John’s hands. “Grease. Goes on here. Then you just insert and push, understand? Nature does the rest.”
Rolled over onto his stomach, he conceded that this was not the romantic coupling he’d put together in his daydreams for John’s deflowering. That could be done another time, once the pledge was sealed; once they had both learned enough to be comfortable with one another. With careful strokes he kept himself just on the edge, and spread his legs further, the pull of his thigh muscles a burn of delicious tension, the vulnerability of the posture just on the pleasurable side of terror. Then John slid oil covered hands between his buttocks and the wave of sensation made him tilt his arse upwards in offering and bite the pillow rather than demand or plead, waiting for the…
oh god, yes,
the blunt, insistent probe at his hole.
“You could,” he panted, “you could…use….” The word “fingers” came out as a squeak of surprised pleasure as his body yielded and the head of John’s prick nudged inside, being held for a moment in the ring of muscle where he could feel it; the shape and heat and slickness. Then a careful thrust, and the tingling drag of sensation as John pushed further in, till he could feel balls against his balls, and his back was covered by the weight of John. His belly felt full, a core of hard heat within him. Even gasping for breath made little tremors race across his skin. He ground down against the sheet, eyes closed, mouth open, feeling bestial and glorious and on fire. A moan encouraged John to move.
Alfie twisted his neck round, forcing himself to haul up his heavy eyelids so he could watch John’s face. The ferocity on it broke something cautious inside him, and opened new reservoirs of need. He let out a long, keening moan, raised himself on his hands again, and drove himself back to meet the febrile, possessed strength of John’s thrusts.
“Hand!
Your hand—on me! God!
Please!
”
Long fingers on his cock squeezed him like a trigger and he went off, then collapsed, sobbing incoherent noises into the pillow. The hand around him smeared through semen before clamping around his hip like a vise. John thrust twice more and came with that cry of his that sounded as though his heart had broken.
If it had, however, there was no evidence of it when Alfie turned over and pulled him down onto his chest. The look he received was more shock than heartbreak, struck through by revelation. John held on tight to Alfie’s shoulders as if to stop himself floating away. Basking in the aftermath, Alfie memorized his every throbbing ache with delight. Possessed. Marked.
At last.
He kissed John’s sharp cheek, bone hard against his teeth, and belatedly it occurred to him to fear the religious backlash, the storm of self-reproach and shame. But as he stroked both hands down John’s long back it softened beneath his palms, muscles unknotting, until John lay boneless and trusting against him, utterly relaxed.
“You were right.” John shifted down, tucking his head beneath Alfie’s chin. The movement of his eyelashes as he closed his eyes was a tickling caress against the hollow of Alfie’s throat. “I understand now. I understand why God made us physical beings…why He gave us flesh….”
His drowsy voice wound through Alfie’s state of drunken animal bliss like the enveloping wallow of the bed beneath him, their mingled scent, the prospect of sleeping, here, together, breathing one another’s air, becoming one.
“It was because of this.”
“If I’d thought this qualified as a consolation of religion,” Alfie murmured, weary and happy, feeling the corners of John’s mouth graze his throat as they lifted up in amusement, “I’d have long since become a minister.”
“How will I live with your blasphemy?”
Though it almost felt his rough hands would tear the silken skin on John’s half-hard prick, Alfie could not stop himself from touching again, stroking it like a responsive, affectionate pet. “You’ll manage.”
“I will.” John raised his head and smiled dreamily, tousled and sated. “Yes, I will. And Alfie?”
“Hm?”
“Happy New Year.”
Reaching up, Alfie tangled his fingers in sweat-pointed umber hair, pulled, and when John landed beside him with a
woomph
and a scattering of down from the pillows, he thought,
“A new year
.” A new beginning.
Pray God the ending would be equally fine.

I’d like to start by acknowledging my immense debt to my mum, who, at the age of eighty-five, found out for the first time that her daughter wrote gay romance, with sex scenes. To her eternal credit, she said, “Well, everyone has to have love,” before going around to her neighbours to boast of her daughter the author. Sadly, she died before this book could see the light of day, but I like to think she’d be as happy with it as I am.

I don’t think it’s any secret that I owe an enormous amount of inspiration, entertainment and information to Patrick O’Brian, the master of the Age of Sail novel. But for his Aubrey-Maturin series of books, I doubt if I would have written this at all. To N.A.M Rodgers and his in depth research into the Georgian navy, I owe Hall, the corrupt purser, as well as innumerable facts and figures that his fine scholarship made it fun to learn. And John Harland’s
Seamanship in the Age of Sail
stopped me crashing into the reefs of my complete ship-handling ignorance.