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Not Child, Nor Ghost (Shall Hold You)

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There was a knock at the door. “Go away!” Macduff called.

The door creaked open. “I brought you supper.”

The Scottish lord took a deep steadying breath, knuckles whitening on the window ledge. “Thank you Malcolm, but I would like to be left alone right now.”

The king’s son didn’t move. Macduff was standing at the darkened window with his back to the blond boy, but he could sense his gaze. “Please,” he repeated, voice thick. “Please go.”

“… You’ve been crying,” Malcolm said, setting the tray down and strolling around the end of the bed to stand beside the older man. When there was no response he continued, “I just lost my father. I know how you feel.”

Macduff shook his head violently. “You’re a child. You can’t know how a man feels for his wife, how I loved her.”

If he had looked up, he would have seen Malcolm’s eyes darken in the shadow of the room. “I’m not a child. I’m sixteen.”

“You said it yourself,” Macduff said wearily, not glancing around. “You’ve never known a woman. You’re a child.”

Suddenly Malcolm was close, so close Macduff could feel the heat from his body against his back, the warm waft of breath in his ear. “I said I’d never known a woman. I’m not a child.”

Macduff’s eyes widened, and his head snapped around to look at the young prince in the feeble orange light of the torches in their wall sconces. A small grinned twitched Malcolm’s mouth, and then he caught Macduff’s head in his hands and claimed his lips in a rough, wet kiss.

There was nothing childish about it.

As they broke apart, breathing hard, the prince was flushed with the quick lust of youth, eyes hooded and black with desire, glistening lips parted. He ran his hands down Macduff’s chest, insinuating warm, wriggling fingers under his belt and Macduff groaned because he simply did not have the will or energy to resist this beautiful boy, this pretty, pretty princeling, who on the morrow, God willing, would be his king.

Fingers fumbled his trousers open, yanking them down, and he was almost ashamed to be fully hard for this bonny blond boy with his wife not yet a day dead and her ghost still wailing in his ears. But he dropped his hands to that golden head, because it was easier than objecting. Malcolm’s mouth felt good, slick and hot, and suckling as eagerly as a piglet at teat, and it was sloppy and wet and damn the boy had done this before, but it wasn’t enough, not enough to make him forget.

Macduff tilted his head back against the cold stones, but he couldn’t close his eyes, because when he did, it was no longer the prince pleasuring him but his Lady, his sweet Lady Ceilidh, her auburn curls bouncing as she bobbed on his length, her eyes shining, her red lips stretched and gleaming – he dug his fingers into short blond hair, fiercely, desperately, as if he could cling to reality, until he felt his mind begin to unravel and wash away in the first waves of orgasm. The bright nothingness inside his head was sweeter than the release.

Through slitted eyes he saw Malcolm spit come into his own hand, stringy sticky white fluid filling his palm, and fumble one handed with the fastenings to his own trousers. Limbs slack and thoughts torpid, he felt the boy push him forward and he stumbled until his knees hit the edge of the bed. The smell of wool filled his nostrils and the rough fibers of the coverlet scratched his cheek as he lay face down. There was a chill draft across the exposed skin of his backside, making him shiver a little.

Then there were hands on him, slick hands, soft hands, a prince’s hands, a woman’s hands, and for one sickening moment his world tilted and it was his Lady, his wife, except the fingers were touching him, probing him, in places she would never… never… he pushed himself up on hands and knees, so suddenly he almost fell off the bed.

“Please,” he croaked. “M – Malcolm. Please. Now!”

He needed… he needed to know… that it wasn’t her, that it couldn’t be her. Malcolm. Malcolm, Malcolm, Malcolm, he chanted to himself, over and over, as he felt the fingers withdraw, and something else, Malcolm’s cock, slick with his own seed, pushing into him, quickly, as he had demanded, and it hurt and he was glad because it drove those images out of his head.

He could hear the Prince panting and grunting above him, the raggedness in his breath an uneven counterpoint to the steadiness of his thrusts. There was something soothing about the bright, burning ache, and he took more pleasure in it than in the shivering thrills that ran through his groin whenever Malcolm hit that sweet spot inside him.

The boy’s rhythm was speeding up and breaking down, his fingers digging painfully into Macduff’s hips, slamming into him with enough erratic force to rock him forward into the lumpy straw mattress. Then Malcolm cried out, thrusting in one last time, and Macduff felt his body stiffen, and then the pulses of hot liquid inside him.

After a long moment, Malcolm pulled out, leaving a desperate emptiness, and the chill trickle of cooling semen down the back of his thighs. Macduff shuddered, collapsing forward onto the bed, sweat almost immediately turning clammy and cold in the nighttime draft. He heard Malcolm’s footsteps, shuffling across the room, toward the door, gathering his clothes. The memories, the visions surged back, her soft touch, her glossy hair, her sweet voice her green-grey eyes, her smell, her taste…

“Wait!” he cried, voice ragged, lifting his head up from the bed with effort.

Malcom turned back, suddenly looking very young, the torchlight gilding his hair an unreal golden hue.

And the words choked in his throat because Malcolm was breathtakingly beautiful, angelic, and sprawled naked on the bed he suddenly felt guilty for sullying something so perfect, as if it had been him who had done the seducing. And he’d be damned if he’d beg for one more thing tonight, not to a boy, not to his king.

But Malcolm didn’t need telling. He smiled, a sweet, boyish, tired smile, and simply nodded.

Macduff closed his eyes briefly as the bedframe trembled with the weight of a second person. And then strong arms came around him, holding him tightly, and it was no child’s embrace. And Macduff took a shaky breath of the smell of him, musky and sweaty and unfamiliar, and finally, finally relaxed, letting his limbs loosen and his eyes drift closed, and feeling – for the first time in days – years? – truly safe, because this young prince, this young man would protect him tonight as surely as he would protect their homeland tomorrow. And soon they slept, and Malcolm’s warm embrace kept the fiends and witches and ghosts at bay.