Chapter 17 #5
He realised he was shouting again so calmed his voice, going closer to Nikolas. Very cautiously, he put a hand on Nikolas’s arm. “What can I do to make this better? I’ll do anything.”
Nikolas straightened and considered him. “You could go and take a shower. You stink of her.” He shook off the hand and walked away, back out into the dark.
Ben felt as if he’d been slapped. He actually staggered a little. He hardly knew this man, couldn’t understand why his words had affected him as they did. He hung his head, looking at his filthy feet but then sensed a presence alongside him, and a hand fixed on his bare arm.
“I’m sorry. That was not fair of me. I don’t take betrayal very well.
I had forgot how it felt. I’ve become soft in someone’s unswerving loyalty to me; it has weakened me.
This was not your fault. Do you understand me?
When you regain your memory, you must remember that. Not your fault. Promise me.”
“What—?”
“Ben! Promise me!”
“Okay, sheesh. I’ve no idea what you’re talking about, but I promise.” He stared down at the hand still on his arm and laid his over it. He felt an overwhelming sense this man needed something more from him. Apology? Contrition? Friendship?
He slowly put his arms around Nikolas and felt rigidity melt, heard a whispered, “Don’t.
” But he did. He hugged tighter. And then the unbelievable, unforgivable happened.
He’d come from a bed tumbled with sex. He was only wearing a sheet.
These were contributing factors, maybe, but he felt himself hardening with desire for a lot more than a simple embrace.
His nose was at the man’s neck; the smell made Ben want to open his mouth, bite him, taste him, swallow him whole—the unthinkable utterly and completely right.
He didn’t even shock himself. He’d wanted to do this when they’d been standing together on the moors with the horses.
This was the happiness he’d sensed hovering so close.
Everything surged and pulsed and came to life in the smell and feel of this man’s skin.
He pulled him closer, despite knowing what Nikolas would do now—what any man would do in the same circumstance, when a hug with another man changed. When it all went badly wrong between friends. It was going to be awful and bloody, but he couldn’t help it.
“Ben…stop. Please.” It was whispered. It was heartfelt. The man is six foot four, built like a brick shit house, but he whispers please when another man tries to fuck him?
Ben jerked his head back, his eyes wide. “That’s all you say?” Realisation hit him. “I’ve wanted this before! This has happened between us before!”
* * *
Nikolas heard a car door slam and a crunch of tyres on gravel. He guessed Kate had worked out for herself what his message to her might be. Ben shook him to make him focus again.
“Ben, stop? How many times have you had to say that to me?”
Nikolas looked back at him. “I don’t recall ever saying stop to you before.”
Ben stepped back. Blood draining from his face. “You and me. We’ve…?” His sheet slipped and he grabbed at it.
Nikolas said nothing.
“I don’t believe you.”
Nikolas still said nothing.
Ben seized the front of the white shirt.
“Show me.” He slammed Nikolas against the wall of the stable and took his mouth in a searing kiss, grinding himself shamelessly against every inch of the hard body.
The sheet came loose again, fell off. He was naked.
Nikolas reversed them, Ben’s back to the wall.
He slid his hands beneath Ben’s naked arse cheeks and lifted him.
Afterwards, he couldn’t work out how he’d done this and released himself at the same time—perhaps Ben had done that for him—but he held Ben lifted and spread against the wall and entered him.
Ben cried out in pain. But then he always did, and it was incredibly familiar despite being the first time they’d done it this way—Ben suspended, held up only by the power of his cock.
* * *
Ben came first. For him, it was the first time climaxing like this, being brought off from the intense pleasure of being penetrated.
At the same time though it was not the first, for even in his fog of confusion, he didn’t find it strange or frightening—his body remembered, even if his conscious mind did not.
It was all pleasure, and he wanted more as soon as it was over.
They fell to the ground. Ben knew Nikolas had come too.
He could feel the hot spill inside him, on him, leaking from him.
He levered naked over the dressed man and ground into him again, mouth, cock, hands.
He ripped the shirt open, unbuckled the belt, came back in for a kiss and then bit hard into the neck he’d been thinking about all through the fucking.
Nikolas arched in pain beneath him but rolled them so he was on top, and bit back, teeth around Ben’s nipple.
The bite drew blood and Nikolas sucked it, nuzzling in, and even this wasn’t weird, although Ben knew he’d never been bitten by a girlfriend or sucked, so couldn’t understand the familiarity.
He grabbed the blond hair, anchoring his fingers in the long strands and tugged Nikolas up to kiss. He wanted to feel the stubble again.
Suddenly, he held Nikolas off, ignoring the grunt of protest, and stared at him—the dishevelled stranger above him—and Ben saw with startling clarity the contrast between what had just happened in the white bed in the pale room and this—on the floor of the stable, in the muck and the straw.
He groaned, threw Nikolas off, turned him face down, ripped the tailored suit trousers lower and entered him.
This too should have given him pause. Where? How? Can I?
There was no hesitation at all. He knew exactly what to do and how to do it, where to angle each thrust, how to lift the hips and make it so good that this silent man scrunched his fingers in the straw and groaned and ejaculated again, his release wetting Ben’s fingers, which had been there at just the needed moment to catch it.
Ben fell onto Nikolas’s back, panting, feeling Nikolas breathing equally raggedly beneath him. Suddenly, Ben slapped the back of the blond head.
“You fucking bugger!”
Nikolas extricated himself, his face a study in outrage. “What the—?”
“Why didn’t you fucking tell me?”
“Don’t swear at—”
“Why not? I’ll swear if I want! You don’t bloody own me!”
* * *
Nikolas was trying to regroup, to point out how untrue this was—but Ben hit him again. “We’ve done this before and you kept it from me!”
“For your own good!”
“How could that be for my own good? How many times?”
“What? How many times did I keep it from you?”
“No, you moron! How many times have we fucked? How many times?”
“I don’t know!” What was four times a day, multiplied by three hundred and sixty five, times eight years? No, five times a day. Six? Minus—“Occasionally. Occasionally a lot. Often. Most of the time. We’re—”
“We’re what?”
Nikolas rested his forehead for one moment against the smooth stable wall, his eyes closed. No one came to help him so he just pointed out as calmly as he could, “We’re on the floor of the stable, Ben, and it’s cold. Shall we get up and return to the house?”
* * *
They sat at the counter, Ben rewrapped in his sheet, examining his feet, and Nikolas picking straw out of his dishevelled shirt and trousers.
Ben began eying him.
Nikolas thought he might.
It was an awkward situation; there was no denying that.
It was exactly what he’d tried to avoid happening by not telling Ben what their relationship had been.
Worried what this might be doing to Ben’s fractured mind, he asked tentatively, “Do you feel all right? Andrea Gillian insisted—” He was silenced by a sudden kiss.
Ben slid off his stool and pressed against him.
Nikolas opened his thighs and took Ben between them, lifting his legs, wrapping them around the knotted sheet.
Incredibly, Ben lifted him. They tumbled to the floor.
Nikolas tried to say he didn’t fuck in the kitchen, but it was too late.
Ben had freed him and taken him into his mouth.
It was Nikolas’s favourite thing, and he lay staring up at his perfect chrome pans, freshly polished by his cleaning service that day, and couldn’t have stopped what happened if he’d been a saint.
He was far from that so it did happen. He shot hard and fast. He would have returned the favour, but he wasn’t sure he could move.
He heard a rustle and click-clicking then saw Radulf from upside down.
Radulf licked his face. Nikolas would have advised him not to if he’d thought about it.
The dog sneezed at the odd taste and padded over to the door, wagging his tail hopefully.
Ben stood up and offered Nikolas his hand.
Nikolas accepted the gesture and waved at Ben’s sheet, which had slipped once more.
“I’ll take him out.”
“Wait for me.”
They were awfully polite.
Ben shot back to the bedroom he was occupying and re-emerged wearing some jeans and pulling a sweater over his head, then hopping into shoes.
Nikolas handed him his jacket. Ben thanked him civilly once more, and they stepped out onto the moonlit gravel.
Radulf went off to conduct his own business, and they stood together under the vast dome of stars, stamping for warmth, while Nikolas lit a cigarette.
He tipped his head back and blew a stream of smoke into the cold air.
Ben was still watching him.
Again, Nikolas thought he might be.
Finally, he sighed. “Just say it, Benjamin. Whatever is on your mind. I’ve heard most of your odd pronouncements over eight years. I don’t think anything you say will shock me.”
“Me fucking Kate shocked you.”
Nikolas winced and began to turn away. Ben caught his arm. “I thought so. That kinda answers my question about what we are, doesn’t it?”
“Does it?”
“Tell me!”
“We’ve been together nearly nine years.”
Ben staggered slightly. “Nine years! You and me? Together? In a rel…That’s…and Kate knew? Why did she do it?”
Nikolas took another drag on his cigarette.
“It goes back a long way. It’s my fault in some ways. I deliberately pushed us under her nose. I’m a bad man, Benjamin. You’ll remember this when you regain your memory. I was…impressed with myself that I had you and she didn’t. And I think recently it has been playing on her mind.”
“Huh.”
It was Nikolas’s turn to eye Ben warily for a moment.
“I wish now I’d told you when you first came into the kitchen in London.
When you asked me who I was, perhaps I should have told you.
You don’t seem as disturbed by this as I thought you would be.
You were more surprised after the first time we fucked, I think.
Shocked, I seem to recall. Actually, I think you might have vomited. ”
Ben shook his head. “Bollocks. That’s not true.”
Nikolas grabbed his arm. “You remember?”
Ben shook his head. “No. But I know that’s not true.
I must have been thinking then what I’m thinking now…
” He demonstrated what this was by taking Nikolas’s face firmly in his hands and kissing him, his tongue demanding entry.
He mumbled something into the kiss then pulled further away, his nose wrinkling.
“Are you sure I like you smoking?”
Nikolas nodded. “Very much so.” He took a long drag and resumed the kiss, the smoke now shared between them. Ben laughed and plunged his cold hands into the back of Nikolas’s trousers, and that was so familiar Nikolas had to stop for a moment and just hold him to regain his equilibrium.
Ben embraced him tightly until they heard Radulf returning and they began to accompany him back to the house. “I’m not staying in that other room.”
Nikolas ruffled his hair. “No. You’re not.”
“But this is going to be difficult for you, isn’t it? I mean, this is all new to me, so everything is confusing…but it’s me but not me for you. Does that make sense?”
“Yes, it does, because I’ve already thought it myself. You but not you.”
“I may do things that hurt you but I don’t know I’m doing them—like Kate. Fuck, I can’t believe I did that now and in your house. That’s not like me.”
“No, it’s not. I suspect you were very expertly manipulated.”
“She—” Ben idly scratched the back of his neck, apparently realising just in time that this might not be the best topic of conversation.
Nikolas caught him around the neck and ruffled his newly shorn, dark hair again. “Don’t worry. I’m not as upset as I was earlier when I arrived home. In fact, when Kate and I have had our conversation, I might even thank her. She precipitated this. In a way.”
“Why do I get the impression when you say you’re going to talk to her that isn’t going to actually involve words?”
“I’ve no idea. You are very strange sometimes, Benjamin. I’m head of a small charity. What else could I possibly mean?”
* * *