Stuff (The Bristol Collection) (26 page)

“Nah, don’t make excuses for her. That’s rough. Your own mum sending you away. They’re meant to wipe up your snot and kiss you better.”

Oh God, he had to rein in the poor-little-rich-boy stuff. “It wasn’t that unusual. My brother was sent off to boarding school at seven, but I hated the idea, and since Aunt Betty lived near a good school, it was easy enough for me to live with her and be a day pupil.” And going home to Aunt Betty’s had always meant warmth, good, simple food and plenty of affection, albeit of a rather bluff and hearty sort.

“You really loved her,” Mas said, sounding far more thoughtful than Perry had heard him before.

“She was great. Bit of a no-nonsense type, but she got me outdoors more and played games with me. No one had ever done that before. I hardly ever caught a cold after that. My father said it must have simply been the fresh air. She lived on the edge of Exmoor.”

“That’s a bloody long way from Tunbridge Wells. Did your folks visit you often?”

“Often? Try never. I’d been there eight years before they paid their one and only visit. I’d get a phone call on my birthdays and at Christmas, but otherwise they seemed glad to be rid of me.”

Mas frowned, but his hand moved reassuringly on Perry’s knee. He didn’t seem to have been put off by Perry’s tale of genteel woe, thankfully. Perhaps telling it all in a hammock added a down-to-earth touch, despite them being suspended above the floor. “So what happened after eight years?” Mas asked.

“Aunt Betty had a stroke. She was pretty much bedridden after that and couldn’t really string together a coherent sentence, but she still understood exactly what was going on. I wanted to stay and look after her, but my parents considered her to be too incapacitated to care for me properly, so I boarded at school after that. I still went back to her every weekend, though. And any other chance I got to sneak out of the school grounds. They weren’t all that big on security.”

Memories of helping his aunt apply her lipstick before Theresa arrived swam up through Perry’s mind. He chuckled. “She really fancied her nurse. It was rather endearing, really. For the first time, I realised that her friend in all the old photos around the place had been the love of her life. But Frances had died in a car crash when they were in their twenties, and Betty had lived alone ever since.”

“So you were brought up by a lesbian? And you never once wondered if it might have made you gay?”

“Don’t be ridiculous!”

“Hey, I’m just playing devil’s advocate. Or I dunno. Maybe preacher’s advocate. There was one at the Baptist church Mum took me to for a while; he used to say children should be rescued from same-sex parents so they could be brought up in the ways of righteousness and not fall under the spell of Satan.”

“He sounds deranged.” It was a world away from the polite, intellectual Church of England that had been Perry’s only close encounter with religion. “I think the vicar at school would have been too embarrassed to even refer to same-sex couples. He mainly stuck to esoteric stuff like the Eucharist, as far as I remember.”

“Wish I’d had a bit more of that. Mum seemed to go for the more happy clappy, hands-on kind of churches.” Mas shuddered, and the whole hammock vibrated. “The music was bloody awful, I’m telling you. And most of the congregations were so small, they didn’t even have a proper building. Had to meet up in Scout huts and portacabins. I fucking hate portacabins. Spent most of my childhood in one.”

“You lived in a portacabin?” Surely no one actually did that.

“Nah, but my school had loads of them as classrooms. Couldn’t afford to build new ones, and every year there were more and more pupils. Bloody ridiculous, it got. And they never had proper heating, did they? Just one of them awful kerosene stoves that stank the place out and gave me a headache. No wonder I didn’t bloody bother turning up most days, was it?”

And there it was again. An upbringing light years away from Perry’s own. He recalled his beautiful old classrooms complete with stained glass and wooden panelling. He let his head fall back and stared up at the ceiling. “Compared to you, I had it easy.”

“Don’t sound like it. I mean, I’m not saying we weren’t so fucking poor we had to shop at Asda last thing at night when they’d reduced everything that was going out of date, but at least I always knew my mum loved me. Had a funny way of showing it at times, but she definitely loved me.”

“You say that like it’s the most important thing.”

“Isn’t it? What the hell’s all this for if it isn’t for love?”

“All this? You mean the shop?”

“Not the bloody shop. Jesus, you really are away with the fairies sometimes, aren’t you?” Mas shoved him, but he grinned playfully. “Life, I mean. Our purpose. It’s to find true love.”

“You really think so.”

“I know so.” Mas sounded so certain, it was almost enough to convince him. “And then you have to trap that true love—or loves, I’m not against polyamory if you can make it work—and make sure you get a gert big wedding day with plenty of booze and cake and presents, and everyone telling you you both look lush and wanting to take photos of you snogging and everything. Your sister’s got the right idea.”

“My sister’s marrying the man my parents picked out for her before she was born.”

“Fuck. You mean like, an arranged marriage? I didn’t think white people did that. Was he a mail-order husband?”

“It’s not like they brought him over from another country or anything. He’s their friends’ son. They’ve known each other all their lives, and it was their free choice to get married.”

“Yeah? You don’t sound so sure.”

Perry sighed. “I don’t know. It’s just sometimes I look at my life, and I can’t help thinking that I might have escaped my parents’ machinations, but I’m just doing what Aunt Betty wanted me to now.”

“She wanted you to sell all her old stuff in a secondhand shop? Seriously?” Mas took a bite out of a custard cream, his eyebrows raised in a way that suggested he was after some juicy gossip.

“Believe it or not, yes. Or rather, she wanted me to run some sort of store while I was studying art. This is her building. Used to be a hat shop she owned, although she never actually worked here. She left it to me, along with the contents of her house. I think she wanted me to keep running it as a milliners, but the lady that worked here was ready to retire by then, and I couldn’t face interviewing new staff. I couldn’t handle going to university at the time, either, so I started selling Aunt Betty’s stuff just because it seemed like the easiest thing to do. I kept the things from my old room separate, though. They’re not for sale. I go there when I need to remember her clearly. When things get particularly difficult.” It had been often in the early days, although he’d been needing that solace less often as the years had raced by.

“You really own this whole building?”

“Near enough. There’s some clause in her will that says I have to run a successful business here for seven years before the freehold is signed over to me, but I’ve only got another few months to go.”

“Fuck. That’s just… That’s kind of weird.”

“Not so weird. I think she did it to annoy my father. And to make sure I had some kind of grounding in the real world by giving me a trade. She didn’t approve of the lifestyle of the rest of her family. She ran Ledborough Lodge as a working smallholding. Always busy. Always getting her hands dirty.”

“So how come she didn’t just leave you the smallholding? You not into farming?”

“Not really, though I did enjoy helping her out with things like feeding the chickens. But it wasn’t in my blood. And besides, she couldn’t have left me Ledborough Lodge, as it wasn’t hers to give. She died when I was eighteen, and her house passed on to my father. First thing the bastard did was kill all her animals and plough up her vegetable garden.” Perry had watched, hands clamped under his arms so as not to reveal how he was trembling with rage. He wouldn’t give the bastard the satisfaction of seeing him rattled. “I phoned the removal men and got them to come and pick up the furniture the next day. Wouldn’t have put it past the man to burn the whole place down just to stop me getting that bit of independence from him.”

“Your dad sounds like a proper bloody nutter.”

“He’s a sociopath. Or at least, I’m pretty sure he is. I’ve read up on it, and he fits the profile. That need to control the people around him. Ruthlessness, cruelty, bullying. It’s all there.”

“Poor baby. Wish I could make it all better for you.”

“There’s nothing you can do.”

Mas pursed his lips and reached out for Perry’s cup. “There might be something I can do.”

Mas leaned down to place both cups on the floor. The hammock rocked wildly but then Mas was back up again, his lips twisted in a wicked smile.

Suddenly all Perry could focus on was Mas’s hands, now kneading Perry’s inner thighs and moving closer and closer to his crotch. “What are you doing?”

“What do you think I’m doing?”

“Not here.” Perry watched, spellbound as Mas undid his zip. “There’s not enough room.”

“There’s plenty of room for what I’m planning.”

Best just to give up and let Mas do his thing. And if the hammock broke, so be it. Perry let his head fall back again and surrendered himself to Mas’s expert touch.

Hands on his shaft, squeezing, massaging. And then lower, teasing his testicles. Perry groaned and shifted. It felt good letting Mas do his thing, but he couldn’t help wanting to be able to touch him in return. All he could reach were Mas’s arms and shoulders. And then the back of his head as Mas leaned right down and licked the tip of Perry’s prick.

“Dear God! You’re bendy.”

Mas grinned wickedly. “Not quite bendy enough to do myself, though, more’s the pity. Took yoga classes for a while in the hope I’d figure it out, but I reckon you have to have some weird extrastretchy ligaments or something. Met a bloke who could once, though. Surprised the lucky bastard ever made it out of the house.”

Perry didn’t even want to think about that. “How about you show me some more of what you can do?”

Thankfully Mas took the bait, and it appeared the bait was Perry’s groin. He licked, sucked and kissed his way all over Perry’s most sensitive organs until it felt like he was about to burst open with pleasure.

Perry flapped his arms as he desperately tried to reciprocate. It was better when they came together. “Please,” he pleaded. “Kiss me.”

Mas looked up in surprise, his lips all swollen and wet. “Here,” Perry insisted, tugging him closer.

They fell together in a hot heap of entwined tongues and limbs. There was barely enough room for them to move. Perry could feel the packet of biscuits getting squashed beneath him, but he couldn’t bring himself to care. Somehow Perry found his way to Mas’s fly and got his trousers unbuttoned before slipping his hand inside to feel Mas’s cock through the slippery Lycra. The contrast of modern underpants and vintage wool was becoming an unlikely turn-on, perhaps even a kink. But he wanted skin on skin, so he pushed them down, freeing Mas’s shaft. It sprang out and hit his own.

“Ohhh, up for a bit of a frot are we?” Mas breathed, his voice husky and sinful.

“A frot? What’s that?”

“Just hold on and you’ll find out.”

Frotting turned out to be a delightfully tactile pastime involving rubbing their genitalia against each other until they were lubricated by sweat and precome. And best of all, they could kiss all the while. Mas had the most decadent mouth with those salacious lips and his agile tongue. Perry would never grow tired of kissing him. And he’d never grow tired of the delicious friction at his crotch, sending his arousal fizzing towards completion, like a well-shaken bottle of Dom Perignon.

But he held on, held back, until Mas shuddered and cursed, and he felt the first rush of wet heat exploding between them. Perry let himself go, let it all go, riding out the surges of a pleasure so intense it was almost painful.

“Mmmm, so good,” Mas moaned as he finally slumped down into Perry’s arms. Perry held on to the man who’d come to mean so much to him in such a short space of time. So much more than Perry ever would have expected, and so much more than was probably wise. Mas was just a party boy, after all. He’d already confessed as much to Perry. He had to be on his guard against feeling too strongly.

Yes, that was the best course of action. When emotions confused, guard against them. Perry shored up his heart’s defences and tried to relax, but it was hard when all he really wanted to do was lavish kiss after kiss on Mas’s face. He even wanted to kiss his pretty eyelids, for goodness’ sake. Perry dug around for the uncomfortable lump digging into his side instead.

“Fancy a biscuit?” he asked Mas when he’d freed the packet of custard creams. “I’m afraid they’re a little worse for wear after our, erm, activities.”

“So am I, mate, so am I.”

Mas didn’t seem to want to move anywhere, so Perry nibbled on a half biscuit himself, and tried not to think about anything much. It was tougher than it sounded, when the only thing on his mind was Mas.

Chapter Twenty-Nine

The trouble with falling in love with a man like Perry, Mas decided, was that he came from another world. And it wasn’t just down to the difference in their backgrounds. A large part of the problem was Perry’s sheer lack of connection with the wider world around him. It was all well and good for their first couple of weeks together, Perry working on his crazy creations most of the day, with a stint downstairs helping Mas during the busiest part of the day, then cocooning themselves in a hot, sweaty nest of duvet upstairs every evening, but after two weeks of this, Mas knew something had to change. Besides, his feet were itching to dance.