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James had just performed a spectacularly well-placed kick when he heard footsteps coming up the drive at Aston Abbotts house.
“Shall we see how your father and Captain Crozier have fared in their hunt?” he said to Thomas Ross, who caught James’ punt square in the chest.
A pack of hounds bounded onto the lawn, yapping eagerly. Behind them were Francis and James Ross, streaked with mud from tip to toe.
“What in God’s name happened out there?” James called.
They met at the center of the lawn. “Just a spot of trouble with one of the dogs,” Ross said, picking a bit of mud off his nose. “He got hold of a scent as we were coming back. Frank and I had to wrangle him lest he set the whole pack off. And with last night's tempest, well. Things got rather mucky.”
Francis sighed. “Damn dog. Look at us.” All of him was in disarray: collar askew, cravat untied, suit wrinkled and open at the neck. Mud striped his cheeks. His hair stuck up wildly, a sheet of corn silk frayed into ribbons.
“Like proper ruffians, eh?” Ross barked out a laugh. “God, Ann will be tickled.”
James compelled himself to smile, but he could not speak. His tongue felt overlarge and parched in his mouth. He clasped his hands, which had begun to tremble, behind his back. The immediacy of his desire was extraordinary, ruinous.
“Thomas, go inside and tell your mother to order baths for us, please,” Ross said, tucking his gun under one arm. Then he turned and clapped Francis on the shoulder. “You first, Frank.”
“Ah.” James cleared his throat. “Francis, if you would. There’s a rather urgent matter which requires your attention.”
“James?”
“I—er.” James was certain they could hear his heart battering away. He scrambled for something halfway sensible to add. “I misplaced my pocket watch—you know, the one William gifted to me some years ago—somewhere out here earlier, and I thought it might be in the temple. I was hoping you could assist me. You know how much I prize that thing.”
Francis’ brow shot up in perplexity. “Can it not wait?”
“Well, look at these clouds,” James said, thrusting a finger up at the blue sky, fleeced with snow-white smears. The day was warm and light, the kind of breezy June afternoon that seemed to stretch on to the point of invincibility. “Showing us their friendly faces now, but in an hour they’ll be heavy and grey, ready to unleash a torrent.”
Francis opened and closed his mouth, flattened his lips, and gestured obscurely to Ross, who shrugged. “Well, go on, then, Frank.” He flashed a wink. “Don’t mind if I take your turn anyway.”
When Ross had vanished around the back of the house, dogs in tow, James looped his arm through Francis’ elbow and steered him toward the trees at the lawn’s edge.
“James, what is all this about? How did you lose your watch?”
James burned where the skin of Francis’ forearm brushed up against his sleeve. “You’ll see. Just humor me, Francis.”
The temple, comprised of six ionic pillars and an ornate domed top in the Grecian style, was nestled in the woods scarcely two minutes' walk from the house. Francis, the first up its steps, shook his head. “It’s not here, James. Perhaps it slipped out of your pocket somewhere along the walk. I’m sure you—"
James draped himself along the stout line of Francis’ body, buried his face in Francis’ neck, snaked his arms around Francis’ waist to hold him tight. He breathed in, soaking up pine, soil, the lingering perfume of rain after a storm.
“James, what on earth—”
James could not pull away, not once his lips had grazed the expanse of Francis’ throat. He began to scatter frenzied kisses there.
“Not here. Thomas might come seek us out. James. James.”
“I can’t wait, Francis. I can’t,” James said, nipping at the line of Francis’ jaw.
Francis pinched the back of James’ neck—James melted, shoulders drawing in and down—and frowned. “What’s come over you?” His voice was like gravel. “We were together not twelve hours ago.”
“Do you not see yourself, Francis? My God, you—” James flung his head back and exhaled through his teeth, long and low. “The way you look. It is unbearable.”
“You don’t mean all this mess, surely.”
“I do, Francis. I do.” James dragged a fingertip down the bare triangle unveiled by Francis’ open shirt, eyed the flush that had crept up Francis’ neck. “I shall go mad if I don’t have you this instant.”
Francis' shoulders sagged, which James knew signaled surrender. It was impossibly soft, the springy place right under the hinge of Francis’ jaw. James affixed his mouth there, letting Francis’ pulse trip vitally under his lips: alive, alive, alive and well. He wanted to taste it on his tongue, ingest it, hoard it inside him. A twin to the pounding in his own chest. “Let me suck you, Francis. Right here. I can be quick.” A kiss there turned to two, three, four, then a bite.
“Bloody hell, James!” When James did not remove his teeth, Francis said, in the tone one might employ to chide a child or gentle a horse, “All right, all right.”
James sank to his knees. He wrapped his hands around the trunks of Francis’ thighs and mouthed at the swelling in Francis’ trousers. “How hard you are already,” he murmured. “All from my talk.” He took the clothed tip of Francis’ cock between his lips and sucked. Francis groaned.
“Tease.”
James did it again.
“James. Christ’s sake.”
“Get yourself out,” James said.
Francis’ hands were caked with dirt. He gazed down at James, brow creased. “I’ve got—”
“Do it.”
Sighing, Francis unbuttoned his trousers and gave himself a brisk pump.
A rich, dark scent bloomed in James’ nose. “The smell of you.” He let a bit of spit dribble onto the head of Francis’ cock, where it mingled with the slickness beading at the tip. “God, I could eat you. Stuff myself full of your prick. Choke on it.” When Francis started—a shudder of his hips, a sharp inhale—James hurried to say, “Damn, I only meant, ah.” He did not mean that. The thing too monstrous to name which had, for a while, seemed imminent. But the closeness he sought from Francis was another kind of desperate, wolfish hunger. “Good God. You must think me a lunatic.”
“I do not understand the fascination, to be plain,” Francis said haltingly. “Never have.” He threaded a hand through James’ hair, scratched at James’ scalp with his nails. “I’ve no idea what compels you to say these things. About me, of all people.”
“I could tell you, but I suspect I would only mortify you. Well. No matter.” When James made to take the head into his mouth, he felt a hand clamp down on his shoulder, staying him. His eyes peeled upward.
Francis wore a thoughtful expression; his cheeks were pink. “James. Would you like it if I used you?”
A ragged noise tore through James. He nodded, over and over, in frantic bursts. There was no map for the course this surge of arousal took, flushing out everything else in his body. He breathed out, “Yes,” then opened his mouth wide—waiting, like a chick, to be fed.
Francis gripped himself in a loose fist. The tip of his cock rested on James’ lower lip. James swallowed, thinking of its heft, how close it was to slipping inside, the way it could stop up his throat. His tongue flicked out for a taste, but Francis cuffed the back of his head and said, “Patience, James.”
James rocked back on his heels. “I can be patient, Francis, just—please, I need—”
“Hush, James. I know.” Francis rubbed his cock back and forth along James’ lip. His hips canted forward. One hand on the root of his cock, another cupping the back of James’ skull. He pushed in, slowly, slowly, until the head of his cock bumped the back of James’ throat. “Very good. Now stay.” Francis’ face was bedaubed in scarlet. He retreated an inch so James could swallow—a tiny, pathetic motion, no more than a hitch—and pushed back in.
James’ eyes watered; his hands flittered at his sides. Francis’ thumb brushed wetness away from his cheek. He swallowed again, as hard as he could, compressing himself around Francis’ cock, knowing Francis would feel it.
“Starving for it, weren’t you,” Francis muttered. “See how far you can take it.” He bent forward to pull James flush against him and shoved in deeper.
James gagged and whimpered but did not choke. His nose dug into the plush of Francis’ belly, the coarse and wiry hairs there. He would take Francis deeper if he could. Penetrate all the way down into his chest, his heart, the marrow of him.
“There you are, James. Just a little longer.” Francis tucked a stray curl, leaden with sweat, behind James’ ear, and stroked the crown of his head soothingly, as though James were a beloved dog. “You’re doing so well.”
James’ breaths came in quick, frantic bursts through his nose. The fringes of his vision blistered and darkened; he thought, then, that he might faint. But the pulse of blood between his legs was hot and heavy, and he would not dream of begging for mercy so soon. He did not curl his tongue or hollow his cheeks, only remained there on his knees, immobile, letting Francis find a home in him.
Francis did not move much either. His hips stuttered minutely from time to time, but he did not ask James to suck him properly; the warm cocoon of James’ throat alone seemed to please him. When, finally, he leaned back and slid out, James gasped and sipped the air in heaving gusts. His throat felt scraped raw.
Overhead, Francis began to stroke himself violently. His hands shook with impending release, and soon he let out a high keening noise. James lurched forward.
He had just suckled the tip of Francis’ cock between his lips when Francis finished. His mouth flooded with spend, which he drank down eagerly. It tasted, somehow, of the seal meat Francis had massaged into his slack mouth three thousand miles northwest of here. What he could not keep inside spilled over in frothy trickles, leaking from the corners of his mouth, down his chin. He heard a stifled string of invocations: James, God, yes, Christ.
That was enough. Suddenly something wet and viscid pooled in James’ trousers. He moaned around Francis’ cock and slapped a hand to the ground, taut and trembling all over. Once the fluttering sensation in his muscles had waned, he looked up. Francis’ head was tipped back beatifically. His cock was losing its stiffness, but James liked it that way: soft and shy, easy to keep tucked away in his mouth. He made a plaintive sound when Francis started to withdraw.
“You’ve had your fill. Come now,” Francis said, sounding mostly amused and a little dazed. James let it slip from his lips, grieving the vacancy, and sprawled back on his elbows. His body was sapped of all vigor; his limbs felt loose and gelatinous. He watched as Francis tucked the tails of his shirt in, buttoned his flies, tugged down his waistcoat. Just below Francis’ jaw, a red-purple bruise flowered.
“You’ve got—” James waved indistinctly. “Your throat. A mark.”
“Oh, damn it. Would you do me up?”
James held out a hand, and Francis lugged him to his feet. He tended to Francis’ crooked collar and tamed the unruly straw of Francis’ hair, neatening him into some semblance of respectability; then, he stepped back and rolled his neck, wincing at the crackle. “I feel a hundred years old. Could lay down and sleep right here, I think.”
Francis snorted. “You’re not the one who’s past the shady side of fifty.”
“Too right.” James sighed at the state of his trousers—irreparably stained—and buttoned his coat. “Hurry, now, we’ve got to get father time into the bath before he crumbles to dust.”
“Oh, shove off,” Francis said, but he was smiling. “I trust you are satisfied?”
“Quite,” James said. “Thank you for indulging me.”
The clouds shifted, and a beam of sunlight shot through the temple, irradiating Francis in white-gold light. The faint spray of sweat on his forehead was glistening. He looked hale and strong, a bit of fleshy clay molded from the earth itself. “Hardly an indulgence. I enjoyed myself very much. Though I will say that you are shameless, James.”
“Well, I have contracted what our Dr. Goodsir might call a fatal ailment.”
“Oh?”
“Neither reason nor good sense will ever prevail where you are concerned.”
Francis splayed his fingers across James’ jaw. “I’m afraid,” he said, rubbing a smear of dirt into James’ cheek, making no move to efface it, “that I find myself similarly afflicted.”