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The crew descended on them a few days later.
The inn only had three rooms, but when they were alone, without guests or friends, it seemed...wide. The broadest space Ed had ever felt safe in.
From the beach to the edge of the woods, from the garden to the stream; four corners of the earth. And within, their home and farmyard, dairy, and dovecote. The docks and the dory he went fishing in. Endless open skies above their heads as they shared a pot of tea on the porch.
Then, the ship docked and the crew rowed in, and a bonfire blazed on the shore. Lanterns were lit, fireworks set off. Chest after chest of loot and treasure was dragged up the walk, spilled over in the doorways. Linens and fabrics lay draped over sofas, and the colours and cuts were endlessly fingered and discussed. Candleholders and cutlery; silver and bronze and crystal, rattled and clattered and clinked. In the kitchen, pots bubbled over, and from the boards, the scents of freshly cut herbs and new spice blends wafted upwards.
Music and song echoed above the slam of doors and the tramp of booted feet, the shouts of laughter, and the endless rounds of “do you remember when?”
Drinks flowed and tongues wagged. Gifts were exchanged and toasts were drunk and the evening rolled into midnight and on into the dawn.
Ed spent the night on his feet, in the midst of the crowd. Now helping in the kitchen, now spinning out onto the dancefloor (the trampled patch of grass near the bonfire). He ate his fill, he steered clear of the drink, and he chatted with everyone.
Not once did the sky come down on him, the space close in on him, the walls hem him inside unyielding stone.
Giddy with the realisation of freedom, he skipped down the walk to where the bonfire had guttered to ashes, but Archie and Jim danced on, and Frenchie, leaning against a drowsing John on a log, plucked softly at his lute.
There across the grass stood Stede, rocking from foot to foot, possibly to Frenchie’s tune, possibly to some melody in his own head. Ed could hear it, somehow, because when he took Stede into his arms, and they swayed together, they didn’t falter once, but flowed. As if the song and the movement, the stars and the dawn, had been put together for this one moment, for them alone.
Still entwined, they moved up the hill as the dew of early morning settled on the grass and flowers. They paused on the porch by unspoken agreement, to survey the remnants of the party.
Hammocks had been strung up under the cover of the trees; other crewmembers were tucked away in the inn rooms. From the parlour came the soft murmurs of Lucius and Pete and Fang, puddled all together on the sofa.
“Do you remember when we were at Jackie’s,” Pete was saying.
“I don’t,” Fang said, a pout in his voice.
“I don’t,” Lucius said, and there was a bit of a bite to his voice.
“You’re right, babes, sorry,” Pete said. “It’s just... I missed you both, you know? I told you before, I cried every night. I’d wake up in the morning thinking I heard your voice. So I kinda... Well, I got into the habit of talking to you sometimes. In my head. And now it’s all mixed up, and I feel like you were there with me.”
“Aww,” Fang said, and there was a space of silence, the kind that left room for kisses.
Ed was about to sidle himself and Stede past the parlour door, towards their bedroom, when Pete added, “You oughta be glad you weren’t there some nights. Between John farting and Stede complaining, and Buttons and Olu yelling at him to shut up... Plus all those times Stede woke up out of some dirty dream, moaning ‘Ed, oh, Ed’ all night long—”
“That’s enough!” Lucius cried. “Don’t need anymore, thanks!”
Fang giggled.
Stede slipped out of Ed’s grasp and scurried off to their bedroom, in the worst approximation of stealth Ed had ever seen.
An instant after he’d passed the open parlour door, Lucius said, “I swear to God, if he brings this up tomorrow—”
“Nah, we’re heading to town bright and early,” Fang said. “He’ll have time to forget and get over it.”
Ed didn’t want Stede to forget. Rather than try to sneak past the parlour himself, he went back out and around, and entered the inn through the kitchen, passing a dozing Roach by the hearth, and Buttons roosting on the windowsill.
He shed most of his clothes as he entered their dark bedroom, hanging them up on their hooks by feel. He washed up in the basin, and cracked open a shutter, letting in a bit of the growing dawn, because even if they planned to sleep in, he knew Stede liked to have a sense of the sun and the time of day.
Then he tore off his smalls and climbed into bed next to the blanketed huddle of his embarrassed husband.
“Hey. You okay?”
“Peachy!” Stede’s blanket-covered head belied the chirp of his voice. “Fab!”
“Anything you want to tell me?”
“Nope!”
“You know you dreaming about me is hot, right?”
An eye peeked out over the edge of the covers. Blinked a question.
“Definitely hot,” Ed told him. “Could use a lot more details.”
The second eye appeared. “The crew complained about it, though. They snickered.”
“Just teasing you, babe. Everyone has dreams like that once in a while.” He snapped a band off his wrist and tied up his hair.
The rest of Stede’s face came out into the open. His tongue darted out, licked his lower lip. “They do?”
“Sure. I woke up last week out of a dream that you’d dropped something under the table, and you were on your hands and knees on the floor, in those tight leather trousers...”
Stede sat up beside him. “Then what happened?”
“You woke up and I woke up. That’s the morning we had to be extra quiet because we overbooked and we had those cots in the corridor and the hammock just outside.”
“Oh, that morning.” Stede shifted where he sat, as if his body recalled quite viscerally the events of that morning. “That was because of a dream?”
“Yep. So, you gonna tell me about some of your dreams?”
“Ah.” Stede fiddled with the blanket, smoothing it over his chest. “There was only one, really.”
“Yeah?” He tugged the covers out of Stede’s hold, down to his lap. If Stede needed something to fidget with, he could have any bit of Ed that he wanted. “How’d it start?”
“Sunset,” Stede said promptly. “Or the hour before. There was a bit of dashing swordplay—” He waved that aside. “Not important anymore. Then, I was alone on the beach. And I heard you calling for me.”
“Sounds about right.”
“We ran towards each other at the water’s edge.”
“Aww.” He held out his arms. “Just like this?”
“Yes! How did you know?”
“Guessed. But I had a dream back then, where I was standing like that. Thought it meant something else.”
It had meant something else. Or at least, it had started out darker than anything. But he’d never really seen the end of that dream. Who’s to say the light hadn’t changed, shifted to the sunset of Stede’s dream? “Then what’d we do?”
Stede spread his arms and pushed their bare chests together. “We crashed into each other, fell in the surf. You were barefoot.”
“And you?” He splayed his hands on Stede’s back, kept him close.
Stede, mouth quirked at one side, playacted innocence. “Might’ve had a few extra shirt buttons undone. Or no buttons at all, just a deep cut—”
“Mm.” He slipped his hands around to the front and palmed Stede’s chest. “I like this dream already. Were we really lying in the sand, though?”
“It was a dream, Ed. We were half in the water, half in the sand, but we didn’t feel any of that. Though some nights, the dream got broken up by Wee John—”
“I don’t wanna know!”
Stede wrinkled his nose. “I didn’t either, so I had to get up early. Still, other nights were better. You called me ‘love’ and you kissed me.”
“Love that.” He nuzzled in and gave Stede a lingering kiss. Then another. Stede tasted of the rum-free pineapple coconut thing he’d been drinking. A retirement sort of flavour. “Love.”
“It felt different, though.”
He drew back and caught Stede’s eye. “Different how?”
Stede’s hands shifted about, from Ed’s shoulders to his elbows, then to Stede’s lap, as though he wanted to fiddle with something again but couldn’t settle on any one thing. “I was still the older me, then, when I kept having this dream. Not me now. So I didn’t really know... I kinda spent a lot of the dream... Doing this.” He raised a hand and grazed his fingertips down Ed’s snake, over to his chest. Circled a nipple, tantalizingly slow. Then, rather than slip downward, his fingers travelled up, and curved about Ed’s throat, a gentle caress at his jaw.
“I get it,” he told Stede. He liked the idea of being all in when it came to touches, making them last as long as possible. But Stede maybe hadn’t known where to go, even if he wanted that adventure, and had kept switching things up. “Whim prone.”
“Were we, though? It feels like... Anyone who called us that didn’t seem to understand where you and I were coming from. No one ever cared about the reasons why we wanted certain things. Running off to become a pirate might’ve been dramatic, but it wasn’t a whim,” he added.
Stede’s tone was suddenly vehement, as if he was talking, not to himself or to Ed, but someone else. But Stede waved that away, too, as though he also didn’t want to dwell on past darknesses right now. “Whim prone,” he repeated. “Maybe, in that you’d kissed me, once, and that was all I knew. So my dream... In my dream, I touched you a lot.” His fingers tightened at Ed’s nape.
“Sounds like a good dream.” He arched into Stede’s grasp, brushed his thumbs over Stede’s nipples.
“I wanted more,” Stede said. Adamant, but now in a different way; the voice he used when he got all, “that’s the captain’s chair!”
“Yeah?” He reached under the blanket, nudged Stede to swing his legs over his lap. “What’d you do about it?”
“Well, it was a dream. So between one wave and the next, we were naked.”
His turn to scrunch up his nose. “On the sand!”
Stede chuckled, settling his legs more comfortably over Ed’s. “We didn’t feel it! You wouldn’t have anyway; you rolled on top of me.”
“Nice. Very good. Love that.” He lowered a hand to Stede’s waist. “Was there more kissing?”
“Lots and lots.”
Ed frowned then, and turned his gaze away. The coos of doves came in through the window, along with the sounds of Jim and Archie, last of the partygoers, noisily making their way to the room they shared with Zheng and Olu.
“Ed?”
“I didn’t get dreams about kisses,” he mumbled. He counted the freckles in the patch of Stede’s skin that he refused to shift his gaze from.
“D’you want to hear about my dreams of guilt instead? Or of running through the woods?”
“No.” He left off at freckle 33 and snapped his gaze back up to Stede. Stede was right; they’d gone over the recriminations and regrets, and they might need to do it again, but this conversation wasn’t about that, not at all. “No, I don’t.”
“Did you have a good dream or two, then?” Stede asked gently.
“Yeah.” As much as they’d talked about, and revealed to each other, this had never come up. “I did, a couple of times. Dreamt of those figurines...dancing.”
“Oh, Ed, that’s beautiful!”
He tilted up his chin, and Stede met him with another kiss, soft, malleable, demanding.
“You squirmed a bit,” Stede said quietly. “On top of me. In my dream.”
“Like this?” He wriggled into Stede, at shoulder and hip.
“Kind of, but more of a lying down thing.”
“Can do.”
The blankets got shoved aside and that’s when he discovered that Stede hadn’t worn any of his usual underthings, but was already naked.
Ed stretched out on top of him, arms bracketing Stede’s head, and looked down at his face, gauging his reaction as he did exactly what Stede had said his dream self had done; rolled his hips, and ground their lengths together. “I guess, in the dream, there were a lot more layers between us “
“I think so,” Stede hedged, and his gaze skittered to the side.
“Oh? Well, what happened next?”
“I usually woke up at this point.”
“Oh. You never...went further?”
“Not in the dream, no.” Stede stared up at the ceiling.
It took Ed half a moment, watching the rosy blush deepen on Stede’s cheeks in the golden early morning light, and then he got it.
“So, after you woke up...did you keep dreaming? Fantasising?”
“A little bit.”
Ed rolled his hips again, grinding down harder this time, though he was trying not to be affected by the skin on skin, and to focus on Stede instead. “Yeah? What’d you picture us doing?”
“I, um... I thought of this, mostly, at first.” Stede squirmed back, shunting his hips up to meet Ed. “Then I thought of, er, positions I’d seen now and again— Unwittingly! But they were all variations on this.” Again he thrust upward, this time in approximation of a rhythm, then stilled. “I wanted something different, something more.”
“What kind of more?” he asked, and couldn’t prevent the catch in his voice, desperate to hear Stede speak his fantasy into life.
“I’d never loved before, and now I knew I loved you,” Stede said, lashes fluttering. “And I wanted to touch you all over, I knew that. Explore everything. But I also wanted to taste—”
He didn’t let Stede finish after all, but fell on him and kissed him, wanting. Stede opened for him, then pursed his lips and pushed up into Ed, kissing him just as eagerly, as if the morning was wearing away and they had to get as many kisses in as they could before the sun rose to the noon, for some reason or other. There was no reason, ever, to stop kissing Stede; it was just something Ed had to do, like nourishment for him.
“Then what happened?” he asked eventually, as some of his thoughts came back to him. He turned kisses to nibbles and scattered them along Stede’s jaw, his throat. “How did you, you know?”
“Finish?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, when I said taste, I meant that all over, too. So I kind of... Started with thinking of your fingers. In my mouth.”
Ed’s bodily processes stuttered to a halt. A moment—or a year—later, he gasped in a breath, and his heart started beating again. One stray thought made its way to the forefront. “I think I might like that,” he said, quieter than quiet, and set his palm to Stede’s cheek.
Slowly, he slid his hand over, wrist and palm and thumb. Stede gazed up at him, hopeful and eager. The instant the tip of his index finger touched Stede’s lip, Stede opened his mouth for him, then closed his lips about two fingers at once.
He kissed Ed’s fingers, delicately, because that was Stede all over, sweet and unbearably sexy at once. Then he took Ed in deeper, an echo of the countless times he’d taken Ed’s cock. And because it was less intense, though the heat did rush straight down to Ed’s cock, he was able to focus on the feel of Stede himself. The softness of Stede’s lips, the wet roughness of his tongue. The slight meep he let out around Ed’s fingers as he sucked harder, and slid his tongue up and down a bit.
He bobbed his head—and seemed to realise, just as Ed did, that he was mimicking his own usual movements on Ed’s cock. He let go, and opened his eyes.
“Then what?” Ed asked, still quiet.
“Hm?” Stede had apparently forgotten what they’d been talking about. “Oh! My fantasy. Well, to be frank, that’s as far as I ever got. If it was at night, I was too tired from working at Jackie’s, and I’d fall asleep. If it was in the morning, I never had long enough to imagine any further before I had to get up and start the day. So, when it came to a finish... It only happened once.”
“Once?”
“Yeah. The night before the day we convinced Swede to help us steal Jackie’s chest. Our second night out in the open. Olu brought us some soup from Zheng’s stand, John lit a fire... We were all worried about what we might do next. I, er, went off in the rain...”
He dropped to Stede’s side, then cosied right into him, their bodies pushed together from shoulder to ankle, half-hard cocks barely an inch away from each other. As if he could feel the cold and wet that had surrounded them both while they’d been apart, and needed to be warm. And Stede took him in, pressed right back. “Where’d you go?”
“I used to tear down your broadsheets, you know. The wanted posters. Some I kept, to help me work out where you might be. Others I... Well, I drew on them. Fixed the horrid sketch to make it look more like you.”
“I love that you did that.”
“Kind of like your cake toppers.”
“I suppose.” He curled his lip at the memory. Easier now, to recall, but only if he didn’t dwell on the images, because it was even easier to dredge up all the darkest feelings from back then, if he wasn’t careful. “Those didn’t make me feel good.”
“I know. I know that.” Stede tucked loose strands behind Ed’s ears, and his hand lingered, cupped about Ed’s ear. “Sometimes, before I tore a poster down, I’d talk to you.”
“Oh?”
“And you’d talk back to me, in my mind. But I might say your bit out loud.”
That made him snicker. “You’d do my voice?”
“I would. I— You were on my mind constantly, Ed.”
“I missed you so fucking much. I had no answers, and I had to get out there and be the Kraken every day—”
“How did we get onto this? I was trying to describe my excited wank in the rain!”
He laughed, and the dark cloud dissipated. What did three months in the past matter, when they already had years to set against it? He might as well wish they’d met in their youth—which he did—for all the change it would make to what had actually happened. Better to focus on now. “What do you mean, in the rain?”
“Well, Ricky found me, the bastard, and told me about the Roman puzzle chest, and I brought him back to the crew, and we came up with the escape plan. And everyone was happy again, and Ricky had rum on him, and John built up the fire, and everything was great. Except... If I stepped out from under the half bridge, where we were huddled about the flames, the rain still pelted down, and you were still lost somewhere. So I wandered off on my own, under a belt of trees, and leaned up against the trunk of one, where it was relatively dry. And I thought about you, and thought about you, and about kisses and touches and how beautiful you are when you’re just being you, striding about and—”
Stede broke off, and looked down. And Ed followed his gaze, to where Stede had wrapped a hand about his own cock and was pulling lazily at it.
“And this is what happened,” he ended.
Ed set his hand atop Stede’s and halted his strokes. “And is this how you want to finish now?”
Stede shook his head. “I want you. The way I didn’t know I could have you back then.”
He rolled right over Stede and off the other side of the bed. Slammed the shutter closed, grabbed the vial of oil off its shelf as he skipped back, then leapt onto the bed.
Stede, laughing, took him in, and Ed melted into his arms.
Too easy. He’d had a plan, he’d had tactics, somewhere in between Stede talking about touches all over, then saying I want you. Focus, he had to focus.
“Lie back,” he said, and maybe it came out gruff.
But Stede could tell when he was about to start something. He dropped back, but kept himself propped up on his elbows. “Kiss me first,” he said simply. A holdover from the moment on the dock a few days ago. When Stede had been battling his own demons, and Ed been all too eager to show him how much he wanted to fight them for Stede, if Stede needed him to.
That night, Stede had come to him, so eager at being wanted, needed. Today, it was Stede’s turn.
He kissed his husband thoroughly, until his own lips were bruised and Stede’s were kiss-red. Then, in increments, he moved on to kissing Stede all over.
Stede’s skin glowed in the dim bowl of light that was their bedroom, with the morning sun filtering through the slats of the shutters, and no sounds at all, save Fang cooing to his goat and to the chickens in the yard. Then Fang moved on, the last to retire to bed, and the only sound was the drone of the cicadas starting up, as the day turned fine and hot.
And Stede, breathing deeply, all pale gold in clean white sheets, smelling of the bonfire in his hair, and fruity drinks on his lips, the traces of their party. Ed moved from collarbone to chest, to belly, and there came the lingering whiff of their lavender soap, the muskier scent of Stede’s skin at the angle of his crotch, where his skin was paler than pale, the most secret parts of him that never saw sunlight. Only Ed knew these spaces and, more than knowing, only Ed lavished attention on them. As if these stray spaces of Stede—a dimple here, a fold there—were made for Ed alone. He didn’t even know what those parts did, except that when he kissed Stede there, Stede wriggled, and arched towards him, and panted out his name.
He gloried in the way Stede roused to his touch, every time. The flush that suffused his skin, the little whimpers, now and then still with that surprised tone, as if baffled that anyone might want to nose into that crevice, rain kisses on this sensitive bit. But he wasn’t anyone, he was Ed, Stede’s husband, his co-innkeeper, co-adventurer; he could do anything.
He nuzzled his way back up and, through kisses, nudged Stede to turn over, lie on his front, a stray towel spread beneath him to spare the sheet. Then he played kiss the freckles in a pattern, while he oiled up his fingers and slipped them into Stede’s cleft.
Stede knew what he was doing. He giggled past his helpless groans. “What shape is that?”
“Dragon,” he said, with a dragon-y growl, as he kissed a row of freckles for a tail, then added a curl at the end, down in the dip of Stede’s waist. “Here be dragons on my treasure map.”
“Arr,” Stede growled back. He rose onto all fours, pushed back at the two fingers inside him as if eager to drive them in as deep as possible. “Well they’d better back off my treasure.”
He drew his fingers out, stroking at Stede’s rim, then slipped them in, smooth, and curled them. “I’ll get my gun.”
“Ed, don’t shoot them!” Stede arched his back, dropped his head between his elbows with a low moan. “We can just talk to them.”
“Yes, and do you speak dragon?” He alternated a dragging stroke at Stede’s rim with both fingers pressing hard inside him, the way Stede liked.
“You could. You can do anything.”
Ed lost the rhythm then, bending low to get at Stede’s neck, kissing and suckling. “So can you.”
“I’ve heard they eat snakes. We’ll distract them with a bit of snake snack. Your specialty.”
He hovered his lips over the hollow of Stede’s throat, feeling each gasp and swallow as he worked his fingers. “You distract them with that. I’ll dig up the treasure for you.”
“Then...”
“Then we run.”
Stede laughed, and his laugh became a moan of protest as Ed eased his fingers out and rose above him.
But Stede wasn’t bemoaning the sudden emptiness— He twisted about, craning his neck, angling for kisses. Ed bent low, and gave him about a hundred of them.
His hand roamed the planes of Stede’s back, curved at hip, his arse, then over a calf, swept back up. Stede’s skin was heated, Stede’s every inch was eager for him, his every little sound was for him.
Ed, husband Ed, adventuring Ed, was finally free enough to let fall all the broken noises that built up inside him. Ed, too, no longer held back when he needed.
He kissed his way down, and Stede wriggled into position, glowing in the deep-gold rays of sunshine through the slats.
“Ed?”
Ed, lining himself up, made some sort of noise, part moan, part gasp of need.
“I love you.”
“I love you, babe.”
He sucked in a deep breath, inhaling all Stede’s scents at once, pirating and vacation and retirement, and found his way home.
This was the best space, their space, the broadest space he’d ever felt safe in, with the way Stede took him in in that space, held him so, so tightly. Held Ed, just Edward.
“Ed?”
His movements faltered, and he shifted his hands up from Stede’s hips, curved them about his shoulders, holding on. His thighs shook behind Stede’s. “Yeah?”
“Stay. Stay inside of me.”
“Yeah. Yeah, I want—” He started up again, slower than slow, a dragging pull out, and a smooth thrust in. Their breaths, synchronised, heaved together. Stede glanced up, behind him, and Ed found an ounce of energy, enough to shake the loosened hair out of his eyes, meet his gaze. Both of them beyond words, he reckoned, just breathing the same air.
“Ed?” Stede’s head hung down, and his arms trembled. “Ed, oh, Ed.”
“Stede— I’m—”
“Ed, I need—”
Ed loosened the fingers gripping Stede at the shoulder, reached around and grasped his cock. He sped up, then slowed again. “Is this—”
“Yes, keep going, please.”
Ed drove in, and only a few beats later they were coming, still in harmony, still groaning, layered, one atop the other.
“Stay,” Stede said again, with a shivering breath.
Ed held him close around the waist as they slumped forward together, keeping himself inside as he collapsed over Stede. Plastered his mouth to the nearest bit of skin at Stede’s nape, trying to form a kiss even as his heart raced and his breaths stuttered.
“Mm,” Stede murmured happily, body rising and falling beneath Ed as he regained his breath.
Ed chuckled above him. “Love you.”
“Love you, too. I’m all right now. Just needed that extra hold.”
“Maybe I want to stay longer,” he said, but he was already slipping out, though he kept the rest of his body glued to Stede’s.
“Well, I wasn’t planning to get up,” Stede, drowsy and indulgent all at once. “Unless you want me to help you clean up? But I, um... I like feeling you.” He rolled his hips, and groaned. “I like feeling what you’ve given to me.”
Ed held himself perfectly still for a moment. Then he leapt up. Cracked open a shutter, so Stede could have his daylight. Dampened a towel and gave himself a quick clean, brought one over to the bedside in case Stede did want it later. Shook out the blankets, and crawled in, this time on the other side.
“Ed?”
“Little spoon,” he murmured, squirming and settling into Stede’s hold.
“Happy to.” Stede smoothed Ed’s hair off his cheeks with the tips of his fingers, tucked them back up towards the now-messy knot. Kissed him at temple, at cheek, at jawline. “You’re magnificent, Edward,” he whispered, and snuggled in close, cocooning Ed with himself and the blankets. “Kiss me last?”
Ed craned his neck about and they kissed, softly, sweetly, making each other happy.
Then Ed took the hand Stede had at his chest, raised it to his mouth, and kept it there, a sealed kiss as they fell asleep. The truest space, his greatest freedom, was to lie, intertwined, in Stede’s arms.