Chapter 13 #2
Everard took one step forward. “Not trusting you.”
D’Arcy began to back slowly into the apartment, one hand still curled beneath Everard’s left elbow through the linen; his only beckon.
The only physical beckon. There was much to be said about the state of his eyes, the deep rough of his voice.
“Mmhm. There’s a lot you don’t know, true. But keep on.”
Everard took two more steps. “I’m sorry for dragging you along here, to the Sévère. For the loss of the Brigitte.” His career, like Everard’s, gone in a single shot. “The Wanderer, too.”
D’Arcy grunted. “Acceptable losses, and neither of them your fault, mind. Especially the Wanderer. That decision you made under orders, with myself and four others to consult.”
By now they stood half-deep in the apartment, close together in near-total darkness. Everard’s breathing had begun to stutter, take thought to regulate. D’Arcy’s too.
Everard whispered, “Mostly, I’m sorry for being impulsive, with Vee. Perhaps not thinking the agreement—the matelotage quite through.” What had it got them? Any of them?
D’Arcy reached over his shoulder, pushed the door shut. He didn’t take his eyes off Everard, not once, even as the dark shuttered close around them.
“It’s your decision, Ever, and it’s done. Here we are now.” He stepped closer, breathed in Everard’s air as quickly as he let it out. “I’ll take standby. I’ll take whatever you’ll give. Just don’t go on to apologise for forgetting me, hmm?”
“I couldn’t do that. I tried. To no avail.”
D’Arcy put his forehead on Everard’s shoulder and groaned.
“If I’m shit at lists, you’re shit at apologies.
” He laughed, soft in Everard’s ear. “An apology for that would be ‘I’m sorry, Preston, for denying both of us… this…” His hand found Everard’s left wrist, pulled it close beneath the hem of his shirt, to his arse. “… for the past year and more.”
“That’s what you wished me to apologise for?” Everard said, disbelieving. “I’m sorry, then. For your poor, poor, neglected prick.” His hand squeezed of its own accord. “Come on, now. I’m sure you had plenty of company to help you through such a trial.”
“Maybe I did. Stubborn ass. Come here.”
He kissed Everard. A fierce, biting kiss, harshly breathless, strangely goading. It was all D’Arcy: You think I can’t make you feel?
Everard returned it in kind. You think I don’t feel?
He pulled D’Arcy’s nightshirt between his thumb and knuckles. Slid it against D’Arcy’s upper thigh, the hollow of his hip, higher, pushed it up, up, up.
D’Arcy wrenched his mouth free, gasping; he shrugged, and the shirt was gone over his head, his curls skewed even wilder than before. “Please fuck me.”
D’Arcy, fearless and direct and demanding as always. It worked extraordinarily well on Everard.
“Yes,” he said.
He pulled D’Arcy’s mouth back against his and rucked up his own shirt.
Unbuttoned his breeches only so far as was necessary, and shuffled them backward.
They bumped into what served as the apartment’s little desk.
It was narrow, not more than a foot wide, more a part of the wall than actual furniture. It would suffice.
“Find aught to hang on to,” Everard muttered into D’Arcy’s neck, and then spun him.
D’Arcy groaned. “Christ. God.”
But he obeyed, raising his arms, clutching onto the shelving above them. His arms flexed, corded and taut. Everard watched the shoulders bunch in the darkness, and hoped the fixtures could take it.
He knew D’Arcy could.
Everard knelt.
“Oh, my God.” D’Arcy looked down over his shoulder. “Really, the cot is right there—”
“Don’t,” Everard said roughly. He drew his hands up smoothly furred thighs and splayed them. Tugged on the hollows of D’Arcy’s hips, the narrow, muscular arse, until D’Arcy reneged, cursing, and arched the small of his back.
Then, in his second-favorite manner, Everard applied himself to another man.
D’Arcy breathed hard. “You could have—some time ago—turned me over and…” He moaned; a hand came down onto Everard’s head, wove through his hair, urging him and his tongue forward. “Ff… thaa-at. Done that.”
D’Arcy, in his most intimate place, was as hot as sin, silky with sable curls, mild and salty: from seawater, or maybe half a night’s sleep worth of clean sweat.
Everard wondered what the clear green Lake Ontario would have tasted like, there and elsewhere on his skin—after a night swim, a rock-beach picnic, a breathtaking forest cliff dive—
D’Arcy had asked to be put on the Lakes Service for a reason. Was this the reason?
Maybe he should apologise for denying them a year’s worth of assignations.
Too late now. And beyond time to stop thinking, besides.
After a little while, D’Arcy was cursing and trembling above him, very close to release, and thoroughly ready for fucking. Everard drew back, satisfied with his work, and bit gently onto the firm curve of arse, breathed deep through his nose to calm his own arousal a bit.
“Preston,” he muttered. “You’re lovely. Who’ve you been keeping yourself so neat for?”
D’Arcy detached his clenched fingers from Everard’s hair, lifted his head from between taut, trembling shoulders. “Wha?”
“St. Clare?” Everard murmured. He brought his right hand round, to D’Arcy’s front, and stroked the slick length of him, slow and careful.
D’Arcy laughed, breathless. He let his forehead fall to the partition wall. “Bell? No, I don’t think this is… quite… what he likes.”
“Mmm? No? Seguro?” Are you sure? He kissed and nipped, because he could. “Has he tried it?”
D’Arcy groaned and rocked, forth and back. “Not with me.”
Everard, mildly surprised, let him fuck his hand for a few more thrusts, then pulled away.
“Who, then?”
D’Arcy grunted at the loss. “Oh, that was a serious question? Not just possessive banter?” He raised his head and gave Everard a damp-curls, darkened-brow glare over his shoulder. “Who for? Would you not be so utterly dense?”
“What?”
“Christ, Everard.” D’Arcy had been pliable and loose in his hands; now he stiffened all over.
“Oh. Not for me?” Everard stared up. “No. Really?”
“Of course for you, sod it all.” D’Arcy sighed and used his free hand to rub at his sweat-slick face.
“Ugh,” he muttered. “I’m going to lose my stand.
And it was an impressive one. This was going so well.
” He straightened, and let go the shelving.
“There, it went. I don’t know why you must always look so disbelieving,” he said, to the wall.
“Disbelieving?” Everard managed.
“Horrified, then.” D’Arcy sidestepped away, out of reach. “And here I thought it was only that I was your lieutenant that put you off.”
“Put me… Of course it was that!” Everard protested. “There was a clear imbalance— I was your superior—”
“And then you weren’t. But no,” D’Arcy went on, “it was your complete and utter distaste towards affection. Mine, my affection. Since you have accepted and disseminated your pirate’s showy commitment just fine.”
The Eton schoolboy had returned; a bad sign. Everard stood creakily, rubbing at his knees. “That isn’t real.”
“Horseshit it isn’t.” D’Arcy stooped to pick up his shirt. “If it weren’t, he wouldn’t have done it. And what is real?” he demanded. “Does your repetitive denial of my feelings negate them into nothing? Make this”—he gestured between them, a swooping shadow in the dark—“somehow illegitimate?”
Everard opened his mouth, but D’Arcy held up a hand. “Do not you dare say it’s only real when reciprocated and that you do not. I’ll take standby, Everard, but by God—not that.”
Everard winced. “You’re not... standby. Of course it is real. And…and reciprocated,” he admitted. “You realise I wouldn’t have been much use to you, just now, if it weren’t. I am terribly fond of you. I always have been.”
D’Arcy huffed. “You’ll excuse me if I don’t quite believe it.”
Everard’s chest squeezed. “I’m sorry you didn’t realise.”
D’Arcy crossed his arms over his own chest.
“Well, no,” Everard revised hastily. “That wasn’t it. I didn’t let you realise it. I didn’t make it known.”
“In fact,” D’Arcy said, “you made the opposite well known to me. Went out of your way, I’d say. Three years.”
“That’s fair.” Everard swallowed. He had no excuses that weren’t utterly caddish, selfish, cowardly. But maybe D’Arcy wanted them regardless. “It was a bit excessive. I realise that. But it wasn’t intentional.”
D’Arcy raised disbelieving eyebrows.
“Really,” Everard insisted. “I hadn’t meant to let it go so long.
And they kept arriving. Each one made it more difficult to write back.
Made the gap larger. Not that I didn’t welcome them!
I treasured them.” He gestured to his head.
“They’re here, Preston. Forever. I don’t need to carry them with me, and not only because my brain is the way it is. ”
“You kept C’s letters,” D’Arcy said, almost inaudible.
Everard gestured helplessly. “He died before I was in the habit of not keeping things. Personal property. Afterward, I couldn’t rid of them, it’d be like to kill him twice. I don’t… You weren’t going to die,” he said fiercely.
“But I could have.”
Everard resolutely ignored this.
“And then you made post of your own, and that seemed right. It was vindication. I knew… I thought maybe I had held you back from promotion, those years. From your seeking it.”
D’Arcy laughed, somewhat bitterly. “Promotion in the art of war. Against this. Against us. Absolutely, that’s what I wanted.”
“Well, wasn’t it?” Everard demanded. “Why else accept the posting?”
D’Arcy spread his hands. “Admiralty demand? Money? Paternal order? Yes, why else accept a dead-end posting in the great wilderness of peacetimes Canada, I wonder.”
“Oh, now, really.”
“Probably I knew you’d wished I were your equal.” D’Arcy raised his chin. “And then I was, and you still wanted nothing doing. What d’you think of that?”
Everard didn’t have an idea what to think. “Don’t tell me that is why,” he rasped.
“Then I shan’t tell you.”
“I… One doesn’t just uproot their whole life for another! Not for nothing!”
D’Arcy reared back.
“No. Not for nothing,” he said coldly. He sidestepped around Everard with quick, stiff movements, wrenched open the door. “Only you are allowed that, matelot.”