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“And I selected the bed linens,” James notes cheerily, hand light on the small of Francis’ back as he leads him down the hallway toward the master bedchamber, “with you in mind.”
Thank Christ, Francis thinks, envisioning cotton sheets stretched snugly beneath a simple woven blanket, lightweight enough for the merciless swelter of late August in London. Perhaps the blanket will be beige and the walls white—a respite from the clanging carnival of jewel tones that has so far graced their newly decorated home. And so it is double the affront when when he opens the door to their bedchamber and his eyes are assaulted by a thousand shades and textures of blue, and what is not blue—like the coordinated Persian rug and runner—is a sickeningly sumptuous palette of deep reds and tawny golds. The ceiling is the inky indigo of a clear night sky, a shade echoed in the brocade upholstery of a pair of ridiculously spindly chairs that face one another across an equally precarious table. Such fragile furniture may be fine for a whippet like James, but Francis, whose build is more bullish than ever since he’s returned to England and its inescapable society dinners, would pulverize such rickety things the moment he shifted position. But the bed is the most ludicrous part: four thick amboyna bedposts gird up a lush cobalt canopy, curtains parted to reveal layer after layer of plush blue.
Francis inhales deeply, his nostrils flared. “In which why, may I ask, did you have me in mind?”
James looks at him. “It complements your eyes,” he says, as though this is the most rational basis for the selection of bedding.
Francis approaches, folds back the blankets—velvet, heavy with capering gold arabesques embroidered hem to hem—to run his fingertips across the shimmering silk sheet. This is a gentler blue, something of salt air and wave cap glimmering in its warm depths.
“My bloody toenails will snag,” he complains.
“Tend to them, then,” James answers, tugging the door shut behind him. “Or perhaps I’ll tend to them myself.”
“You’ll do no such thing!”
“Well, I’ll not have those... gnarled talons of yours shredding our sheets. They’re very fine.”
“Ridiculous, James. Very fine sheets... to snore and sweat in.”
“Mmm,” James hums, stepping closer to Francis and laying his elegant hands on his hips. “You’ve a bleak vision of our future if that’s all you envision taking place upon these sheets. And besides...” his voice deepens—a rich, intimating tenor—as he rubs firm little arcs with his thumbs against the soft swell of Francis’ belly, “...you deserve this luxury.” He sends his hands around to cup Francis’ generous buttocks, curling his fingers into the delectable heft of them. “You should cherish this body.”
Francis stiffens and backs away, patting his belly. “I cherish it overmuch, I think,” he grumbles. “That’s the trouble.”
“You cannot be cherished enough.” He walks Francis backwards, as graceful as a waltz, until the backs of his knees tap the mattress’s edge and James gentles him down. “Every bit of you warrants it.”
“Please, James. It is enough that you desire me—absurd though that is. You needn’t make a spectacle of it.”
“When have you known me to make a spectacle of things?”James’ voice is teasing as he coaxes Francis onto his back and lowers his lips to the juncture of ruddy jaw and broad neck, tasting the cosseted beat of his love’s pulse.
“I’ll not be made a spectacle of.”
“No,” James murmurs against his neck, then the edge of his lips. “Not a spectacle. A wonder.”
Francis’ lips twist into a pained pantomime of a smile, and James thinks against his will of a different time, a different realm—I may, I may beg you, he’d said, but he was beautiful even then, a kind of vitality at play in the curves and creases of his face even then. Not beauty, precisely—not James’ own stylized, patrician elegance, nor Jopson’s obvious princeliness. This was different: the quiet radiance of an adamantine heart. Even at the worst of it. Even at the eleventh hour, when the weakest of them (James included) were driven round the wheel of breath by brute instinct alone, dead men with beating blood, Francis emanated the kind of muddy half-light that precedes the rising sun. His indefatigable will made manifest in the flesh.
“Don’t be cruel, James,” he is saying now. “I am fat, decrepit. My better days, if ever I had them, are long behind me.”
“Ever the curmudgeon. You’ve no idea how ... splendid you are. I, for one, think these are your finest days.” He does not think of how bitterly each one of these days was bargained for, at what cost won. They nearly never were. He bows his head and pins the beat of Francis’ heart with his tongue, sucks and laps the sweat-slick bit of flesh there. Only when a tiny gasp escapes Francis’ lips does he sit up, pivot on one knee so as to seat himself astride Francis, and cup his belly in his palms.
“Disgusting,” Francis mutters, covering his face.
“None of that. Perfect.” He thinks of how the generous sweep of that belly fills the fine curve of the small of his back just so, what warm shelter that broad and shaggy chest is against his own sharp shoulders. He has a way like shoreline of brooking James’ flow, containing and shaping what once felt like a constant and terrible flood. With deft fingers he begins the intricate work of unbuttoning, unfastening, opening the other man up. Francis tries to shoo his hands away—he normally undresses himself, or they fumblingly strip one another, wriggling free between nips, kisses, filthy murmurings. Or they divest one another of bedclothes with somnolent clumsiness in the earliest washes of dawn or last dregs of night. Francis loves it this way; there’s a kind of ancient innocence to it, half awake and fumbling, they’re falling apart and mending and falling apart again and glad for it.
This is the opposite of that. There’s nothing soft about it, nothing joined. It is being done to him and he’s unaccustomed to it. But James lightly seizes him by the wrist when he tries to stop him. “Lie still,” he orders softly, and, too stunned to do otherwise, he does.
“What is this, James Fitzjames?” he rasps irritably.
James only gazes at him, dark eyes glittering. In the long afternoon light, he looks at once predatory and ethereal.
“Please, James—“ he makes to sit up but James’ long fingers are spread over his chest instantly. He’s far stronger than he looks, so Francis cedes for now and with the petrified docility of a rabbit caught by the scruff of the neck he slumps this way and that as he’s carefully, methodically stripped. He covers his face with his hands as though doing so hid his entire naked self, from the soft freckled breadth of his shoulders to his lazily thickening prick. But he can’t hold back a soft oh as he’s laid back down on the sheets: they’re cool and smooth against his bare shoulders and the mattress cups his curves just so.
Then James is dragging his fingers lightly through the hair on Francis’ chest, a lacework of curls in honey and silver. “You deserve this,” he says firmly. “You deserve every good thing. Because you are beautiful and fine, and I adore you.”
“Speak plainly, by all means,” Francis grumbles, his cheeks blazing.
“I mean it, Francis.” He bows and kisses his lips softly, almost chastely. “We spoke once of the end of vanity: surely self-denial, too, has its necessary end.”
Before Francis can protest—surely, this is different; I deny myself only what ought be denied me— James’ mouth is on his, parting his lips with that intrepid tender intensity so unlike anyone else he’s ever kissed. He fancies he can taste the full measure of the man there: all calculation and fierce, bewildering grace. Francis’ own mouth is scant-lipped and resembles, for his money, a knife slit in raw dough, and within that goddamned clownish gap between his two front teeth. But even this James has said he adores, and the way he now flicks his tongue across it the fool must adore it still.
He’s smirking when he breaks the kiss, something wicked in his eyes and the curl of his reddened lips. It’s then that Francis realizes that James is still mostly dressed, down to a burgundy jacquard waist coat, shirtsleeves, and trousers. He reaches for James’ collar but his hand is slapped away.
“Do you know what I’m going to do, Francis Rawdon Moira Crozier?” His rich voice caroms from one syllable to the next, all those murmuring consonants and starched vowels—even the slack heft of his name is transformed by James’ mouth into something limber, lovely. “I’m going to worship this body. I am going to lay my mouth upon every inch.” His fingers glide down to ghost Francis’ perineum and puckered hole. “Every inch.”
Francis jerks upright. “You will not!” He feels his whole body curl in on itself. To be invisible now—to be a small round stone at river’s bottom, a harmless flower nodding in a field, a pocket watch forthrightly ticking out the time. A bell, a book, a candle. Anything but a man, a man’s body; anything but visible and receptive flesh. This flesh: softening, bloated. Anathema. But his fear and his revulsion does not quite coalesce into no, if for no other reason than that this is James’ will, James’ desire. And that, he will always bow to. James kisses the edge of his mouth chastely: a question, an asking of permission. Francis nods, eyes downcast.
“I am going to savor that cunt of yours,” James continues, the word sharp and gleaming on his crisp, clean tongue. “Devour it. Make a sodden, squirming mess of you. What do you think of that?”
“James, please.”
“Please what, Francis? Use your words.”
But Francis has nothing to say as James drags his nail up the underside of his now hardened length before cupping his full belly in his hands. His palms curved, he presses in and up so the curve of his gut is accentuated, creasing crookedly in on itself. “Please, no,” he says, for it’s obscene to see. Grotesque. Yet he can’t tell the heat in his cheeks from the heat in his cock, and watches, fascinated, as James lowers his mouth and garlands his belly with little kisses, nips, suckling here and licking there.
Then he dips his tongue into the narrow well of Francis’ belly button. Francis jerks up against—no, into it, for it feels wonderful, a spire of ticklish heat pressing into him. There are nerves down there, he surmises hazily, a little bundling of them. And it feels almost like James is inside of him, somehow, the way the sensation hums and flickers into his core from the out. James drags his fingers through the smattering of spit around his lips before grabbing palmfuls of Francis’ chest and squeezing. Then he lets go only to take Francis’ pale, sharp nipples between thumb and forefinger, rolling them softly in rhythm with his tongue. Francis undulates beneath him, chasing—what? He’s not certain, for there’s no more he could grab hold of than what’s being done to him, beautiful in itself, and strange.
James lifts his mouth and once again cups Francis’ chest in his palms. “Look at you,” he says, his voice thick with wonder. “If only you could see yourself as I see you. Every freckle, every hair—look how your chest colors up, how you flush. Pink as a maiden. And these tits—Christ alive, Francis. Beautiful tits, rosy proud little nipples.” Francis presses his shoulders and hips into the mattress, willing it to open and swallow him, but he’s also certain he’s never been harder; never more ardently wished for a touch, any touch, on his prick. With no small hope (but knowing better) he arcs his hips up on his powerful thighs and buttocks, but James only laughs a low, buttery laugh and uses the strength of his own well-muscled thighs to pin him back down. Then his mouth is on Francis’ nipples, one at a time, rolling each in turn between his teeth, then sucking where he’s rendered it tender. “I could linger here all day,” he murmurs against Francis’ chest, “like a suckling babe. I could never, in a thousand years, get enough, Francis. Not of these tits, this belly, that wondrous fat prick of yours. And your cunt. Tight, I bet, and mild as milk.”
“The mouth on you, James!”’ Though always truth he’s never quite heard James talk like this before: he hears himself in it, the casual dirtiness and the irreverence mingled with adoration. “You’re thoroughly depraved.” He tries to sound playfully scolding but what comes out is a low, rasped plea. Stop, or more, or just all the words he’s never been able to summon in these moments at the tilting edge of what James does to him. It’s as though something survives of what was once enmity, a harrowing duality of obsession and trepidation. A last bracing breath before diving into dark water. Yet James brings him to take this breath again and again and again, never quite filling his lungs and always teetering at the edge of the fathomlessness on the other side of the familiar.
“Indeed,” James smirks. “The mouth on me.” And then with no further prelude he is backing down, hand over hand, til his narrow, elegant face, his shining hair set neatly hours before now all a-mess, hovers above Francis’ waist. One last look—half a smirk—then he is sliding his able hands beneath the fullness of Francis’ buttocks, lifting just so his thighs fall open (by their own volition, it seems, for Francis’ incorporeal being is doing its best to contract into nothingness. A seed, a cell.) But his body pours toward James, his hips tilting up as his thighs splay open. Shameless, he thinks, mortified. But how many times has he taken James this exact way? Conversely—and the revelation humbles him—how many times has James bared himself to his mouth, his fingers, his gaze? Excruciating, he realizes now, to be seen in whole. The anguish of rendering oneself visible. He feels it strike his heart like an anvil and swiftly closes his thighs.
James sits up, quirks an eyebrow, and with held breath and closed eyes Francis permits himself to be spread bare once again. “I shall be ever so gentle,” James says. Francis is too muddled to tell if there’s irony in his tone.
Yet he is, sweeping the flat of his tongue lightly from the divot where his stones meet his taint. “Oh, Jesus and Mary,” Francis rasps, for he can imagine nothing better—that is, until James’ ministrations quicken, grow sharper: his tongue blazing concentrically tighter rings around his entrance, which, as though striving for equilibrium, is slowly loosening. He feels himself falling open—a picked lock, a worked-at knot. As though from a distance he feels himself bucking, whining; feels his bare and callused heels scrabbling against the rich slickness of the sheets. “Christ, oh, James, Christ—“ he keeps saying, babbling nearly. Even in his moments of greatest pleasure, he has always held himself back somehow. If he has taken half this much pleasure in anyone (and never from, not once, not even when Sophia brought him off with her mouth with that look of hassled pity in her eye) it has been a byproduct of his efforts to please. Certainly pleasure has never been bestowed upon him as a gift is.
James’ tongue slows to a stop and he sits up, slipping his finger into the sudden slack stillness left behind. He watches with rapt concentration as he draws the finger in and out again, then glances up at Francis, who feels pinned beneath his gaze like a curious specimen beneath glass, but is unable to stop himself from crying out as, with a deft twist of his wrist, James slips a second finger in. “My, my,” he purrs. “You’ve gone positively feral. Do you understand now what does to me? To look at you—to see you openly take your pleasure—you are a feast, Francis. A veritable feast.” And with that he lowers his mouth again, this time drawing circles around Francis’ stretched rim as his fingers slip in and out.
“Ah, Jesus, James, that’s—I can’t bear it. I’m—oh—fit to burst—“
“So you are,” James says mildly, sitting up to eye Francis’ straining reddish cock. With feigned diffidence he gathers Francis’ copious pre-ejaculate onto his fingertips and licks it off with all the lazy pleasure of a cat. “You’re a banquet for all the senses,” he says. He looks Francis in the eye, his gaze dark with desire. “I need you to know this, Francis: you are the most beautiful thing I’ve seen.” He skates his fingers along Francis’ length a couple times before wrapping firmly around it and beginning to stroke in earnest, keeping pace with his plundering fingers. He lowers his mouth once again to Francis and resumes his—worship, he’d called it. Francis shivers at the thought and that shiver takes on heat, wells in the base of him, grows and gathers over itself—and before he knows it he’s arcing up off the bed as James holds on desperately, his fingernails digging into the soft give of his hips. He feels James hum with satisfaction into him and spends with a hoarse cry, painting his own chest and belly with more jism than he thought he’d even had in him.
Finally he’s still again, panting and pink, his fingers toying with James’ hair—the glossy rich brown of coffee against the milky expanse of his thigh. Then something occurs to him. “You must be aching, James.”
James is quiet a moment. “No,” he says finally. “I... well.” He rocks up onto his knees, showing off an amorphous darkening of the cloth across his lap. “You were too much for me,” he says.
“Christ,” Francis murmurs. “Without even—“
“—Not one finger. Just watching you, pleasing you.”
“At least we saved the sheets the mess,” Francis intones, deadpan.
“Mmm. I was right, by the way.”
“Oh?”
“This blue—it really brings out your eyes.”
“Mmm. Ridiculous, James. And thank you.”
“It was my pleasure, my dear. Always.”
James allows himself to be undressed and cleaned off, Francis’ hands gliding over his body and kisses trailed down the nape of his neck and shoulders. If they were younger men, they might have worked their way to another round: for there’s an untapped reservoir in them, the self-renewing appetite of the young yoked to tired bodies. But as they lie down, Francis feels with conscious appreciation for the first time how finely they fit. His belly against James’ back, his sturdy hips brooking the lean musculature of James’ ass. Contain one another: harbor.