Chapter Ten #3
lock of his arse around the penetration. More oil came, Fen
releasing his embrace long enough to pour it over his shaft where
it was holding Cai open. His fingers pushed gently against the ring
of strained flesh, rubbing the oil in. Fen said something in his
own language, deep and rough, and once more Cai almost understood
it, the words following Fen’s touch, the fullness inside which
suddenly was not unbearable but essential, perfect, the one thing
that Cai had to have.
“Fuck me,” he commanded
again, this time knowing exactly what he was demanding. “Yes. God,
all the way, Fen. Now!”
Fen moved, a deep thrust that drove
the heat into Cai’s core. Cai gave a cry of astonished relief. He
stopped crushing the hay in his hands and flattened them to the
barn floor, taking his weight on his palms, lifting his hips to
meet Fen’s next great push, up and in, then drawing slowly back so
that the strange golden fruit swelled up again beneath the
friction, throbbed and threatened to burst. He moaned and shook his
head, the pleasure harder to endure than the pain had
been.
Fen began a rhythmic movement. He kept
his grip on Cai’s shaft, wrapped the other arm tight round his
waist and secured him. His breath came and went against Cai’s
ear—shuddering breath and more words in that wild tongue that
sounded like the sea, and then a low growl of oncoming
release.
Cai couldn’t tell him to wait or to
let go. He wanted both—to make the pounding fuck go on forever, and
to have Fen explode into his body now. Then all choice and words
dissolved as a climax like nothing he had ever felt before began to
claw its way up out of his bones. It seemed to come from every inch
of him—his marrow, his lungs, the place where his backside was
locked and convulsing round Fen’s shaft—tearing him up by the
roots, ripping raw shouts from him as bolt after thunderbolt of
ecstasy hit. His cock spent into Fen’s hand, into the grip that
never faltered even when Fen choked out his name, broke rhythm and
rammed to completion.
They hit the barn floor hard enough to
skin Cai’s belly. Fen landed on top of him, knocking the air from
his lungs, and redeemed the pain of withdrawal with an impassioned
clasp of his shoulders, tenderly brushing back the hair from his
face with his free hand. “Caius!”
Cai grunted. His face was buried in
the crook of Fen’s arm, and he never wanted to see daylight again.
Fen’s skin was as fine as a butterfly’s wing beneath his lips. Life
streamed in the pulsating vein. The salt of his sweat lay on Cai’s
tongue like a benediction. “Yes,” he managed, raising his head a
reluctant fraction. “Here. Alive.”
Fen’s laughter held a note of relief,
as if he might have been in doubt. Gasping for breath, he rolled
onto his back, pulling Cai with him to lie in his arms. “You bloody
beautiful thing.”
Chuckling, Cai wrapped an arm across
Fen’s broad chest. Unlike Cai’s it was hairless, ivory smooth
except where the nipples rose, brown as hazelnuts, contracting even
now when Cai’s fingers brushed them. “You’re not so hideous
yourself.”
“Better than your
first?”
“My first was…” Cai had to
stop for a moment. His lungs were still labouring, his throat sore.
“One of Broc’s lecherous old cronies, up against a wall when I was
barely fifteen. So you didn’t have much competition
there.”
“Oh.” Fen’s embrace
tightened. He pulled a face and gave Cai a look of wry, grim
sympathy. “Sorry.”
“There were others after
him. Better. Nobody who…” He pushed up onto one elbow, picked a
hayseed out of Fen’s hair with unsteady fingers. “Nobody who
reached in and almost ripped the soul from me. Nobody who nearly
stopped my heart.”
Fen took Cai’s face between his hands.
Fen’s mouth was red, deliciously swollen with excitement, nothing
of the wolf left in those depthless eyes but a trace of glowing
amber. He drew Cai down. Their mouths met—carefully at first,
almost with delicacy. Then Cai pressed passionately down. Words
like flickering lamplight went through his mind. He wanted to say
them and was glad his tongue was paralysed, pushing against Fen’s
in a silent battle that ended only when scarlet splashed across his
vision and he had to break away to breathe.
Not words he could say to a
Viking, not now. Maybe not ever. He mouthed them for his own
satisfaction, invisibly against Fen’s shoulder. Sleep was washing
over him, and Fen had made them comfortable in their hollow,
pulling the nearest discarded cassock over both of them to keep
them warm. The words made a shape against Fen’s skin—a shape in
Cai’s own language, not chilly Latin, which Fen might have read and
understood. Not te amo, te amo, te amo…
Fen groaned deeply, a sound of
exhaustion, relief, some indefinable yearning thing that made Cai’s
sinuses prickle with tears. He buried his face in Cai’s
hair.
The lantern had almost burned out. In
its very last light, blue summer dawn shining through a gap in the
barn roof, Fen stirred and sat up. He ran his hands and then his
mouth over Cai’s chest, and then when Cai was hoarsely protesting
that he couldn’t—not again, not so soon—lithely straddled his
lap.
“You can.”
No point in further argument, not when
Cai’s cock was rigid and straining to lift against Fen’s thigh.
“What do you do to me?”
“Very little. You woke up
with this one.”
Cai laughed painfully. He didn’t doubt
it. A besetting problem for him, that, sending him scrambling down
to the rock pools to plunge his errant flesh neck-deep in their
chill. He’d even told Theo about it—not in so many words,
stumbling, awkward—and the abbot had listened kindly, prescribed
him meditations and prayers to redirect his dreams. They’d helped a
little for a while.
But he was strongly made and full of
life, and it was so damn good to ride with his body’s energies
instead of quelling them. To have a destination, an immediate use,
for this big morning erection… Fen shifted, releasing him. His
shaft sprang up, probing into the crack of Fen’s arse, seeking a
target Fen was already offering, his powerful crouch angled just
right to receive him. Cai grabbed for the oil, and their hands met
clumsily over the task of spreading it. The bottle had gone over
during their exertions last night, and there wasn’t much
left.
“Is it enough?” Cai rasped,
sitting up, easing Fen’s buttocks gently apart and drawing him
down. “Can you...”
“Yes. I’ve dealt with worse
with none at all.” He groaned, Cai’s tip pushing into him. “Nothing
bigger, though. Gods, I take back…everything I said about…castrated
monks.”
To be conjoined with him like
this—slowly, lit by common day—was more shattering to Cai than
their wild encounter in the lantern’s flame. Fen sank down on him
until Cai was buried in him to the root. For a long time both sat
still, the only sound their ragged breathing, Fen plying unsteady
fingers through Cai’s hair. Then he began to rock himself. The
movements were tiny, but Cai felt each one as a sweet, wrenching
grind, crushing his cock in its tight engagement. He wrapped his
arms round Fen’s waist. A ray of dusty sunlight found its way
through the window to the east, setting the pale skin alight with
unearthly radiance.
Cai kissed his collarbones, sucked
briefly at the hollow of his throat. “You look like the god of
dawn.”
“That’s a goddess. ēostre.
And…not very Christian of you.”
“I don’t care. Come for me.
Come.”
Fen rose up, arching his spine. He put his
head back and let go in a silence more intense than any scream. His
cock jetted hard, whiplashing Cai’s stomach and chest with his
seed. When he was done, the last spasm finished, his flesh hot and
tight all up and down the length of his impalement, he took hold of
Cai’s shoulders. “Lie down with me,” he whispered, his voice in
rags. “Lie down, like we said.”
“But you’re finished.
I…”
“Just come here.” He fell
back, lithe and irresistible, part of the force that drew all
things down into the earth. Cai went with him, shuddering, still
buried deep. Fen opened his thighs, wrapped his legs round Cai’s
hips. “That’s it. God, yes—put your weight on me. Fuck me till I
can’t see or think anymore. Do it, Cai, beloved—do it
now.”
The dew was still heavy on the
grass when they left the barn. Cai looked at the glistening strands
of marram in disbelief—that a world could be transformed before the
day had properly begun. Cai, beloved—he had taken the words, folded them carefully and
placed them in the back of his mind. Endearments blurted out in
passion’s extremity were too sweet, too fleeting to set store by.
And yet still the world was transformed. He yawned, stretching, and
Fen came and caught him from behind, nuzzling the side of his
neck.
“Stop it,” he said
half-heartedly, watching a spider swing one silver thread from fern
to flowering bramble. “We have to be monks again. Our day’s labours
start now.”
“We just mucked out a
cowshed. What more do you want?”
Cai grinned. It hadn’t been the most
poetic termination to such a night, but he’d felt guilty about the
beasts he’d supposedly been out here to tend. The calves were none
the worse for the strange noises that had issued from the back of
their barn all night. Dagsauga, however, had bestowed upon them
sly, placid looks from under her lashes, making Cai laugh as he and
Fen shook out the straw and filled the manger. “Well, I’m certain
it will go downhill from here.”
“Until tonight, perhaps. Can you
find more pregnant oxen to look after? Kindly remember—I
never was a
monk.”
“Fen. Let go of me. Maybe we have time to
go and wash in the rock pools.”
“Mmm. I like the sound of
that much more now than when you first suggested it.”
“Bloody insatiable,” Cai
said wonderingly, aware his struggle to be away was unconvincing,
his disapproval undermined by the new rush of blood to his groin.
“Wait till I get you in that water. The sun hasn’t touched it yet.
The last thing on your mind will be—”
“Caius! Cai!”
They sprang apart at the voice, just
in time to see Brother Gareth come pelting through the gorse
bushes, his cassock hitched inelegantly up above his knees. “Oh!
Cai, there you are. Thank God. Brother Hengist’s gone and chopped
off his finger with a butcher’s knife. And, Fenrir, begging your
pardon, but Wilfrid says, if you’re back from your hunt, please to
help him fetch back the goats, which ate their way out of their pen
last night.”
Cai exchanged a look of weary
amusement with Fen. He set off down the track, the Viking falling
into place at his side as if he’d walked there all his life, Gareth
jogging impatiently ahead. “Hengist has actually cut his
finger off,
Gareth?”
“Well—maybe not all the
way off.
But there is an awful lot of blood, and he’s fainted, and Eyulf is
screaming. And Wilf doesn’t know how the goats chewed a hole
through a new willow fence. But the moon was full last
night—everything was strange. Brother Demetrios swears he heard
wolves howling.”