Driftwood Read online

  Tom’s concern—and sobriety—lasted as long at it took Flynn to stand up, brushing at the grass stains on his knees. He looked up at Tom, who had pressed a hand to his mouth in a poor attempt to conceal laughter. He shook his head, called out, “That’s like falling off the platform edge in Brief Encounter,” and resumed his course.

  Belle wove a couple of joyful figures of eight around them, then somehow the last few yards disappeared all at once. Tom had one flash of Brief Encounter’s Laura pelting out of the station café after a vanishing train, and then he was clasped in Flynn’s arms, clinging to his shirt, one hand starfishing over his hair, as if they’d been torn apart at birth.

  Inexplicable. Tom heard his own ragged breathing, which threatened to crack into sobs, and tried to find perspective, sense. He’d known him for a fortnight, not his whole bloody life. They’d had one night. And he was… “Flynn,” he gasped, struggling reluctantly out of the kiss which was bearing him back against the quoit’s huge southern upright. “I’m not scared of bloody Robert Tremaine…”

  Flynn snorted faintly. “I’ll say. He was white to his gills. What did you do?”

  “…but I’m not about to mess with him, or you, if you’re still involved.”

  They had subsided onto the turf in the megalith’s shadow. Flynn’s gaze on him was luminous, his grasp deep and hungry. His eyelashes were caught together with tears, which might have been stung there by the wind, but his voice too was unsteady as he said, “God, Tom. You’re so warm. You’re—real, real as the earth. I’ve never wanted anything as much as I want you now.”

  Tom swallowed. But he was deadly serious. He knew that Rob Tremaine’s backlash, whatever form it took, would hit Flynn first, if they were still tied. “Flynn. I mean it.”

  “I know. I finished it. It’s over.”

  Tom let go. He hauled a breath of the intoxicating air and let the sunlight evaporate the last traces of his fear. If he was hearing what he wanted to hear, so be it—for once in his life he would allow himself the luxury, and believe it too. He reached up, smiling, and gave himself over into Flynn’s hands.

  “I thought… You told me not to trust any man, to let him do this unprotected.”

  Tom shivered. Flynn’s whisper was hot against his ear. His trousers were down round his thighs, at whose instigation he couldn’t quite recall, and Flynn was behind him, ready. He heard his own words, echoing round his stone bedchamber. They were just as true out here in the sun but he somehow couldn’t feel them. All he could feel was the warmth and the push of Flynn’s body as he angled him, took hold of his hips in his hands. He was on his knees, chest and belly lightly pressed against the quoit’s upright, hands grasping at its grey flanks, which were warm as a beast’s in the sun. His ice was melting—the outer layer, which calmed his fears by distraction, pouring all his energies into countless domestic repetitive tasks, and the deep inner core, which defended him from all loss of control. Which kept him safe and frozen away from such events as unprotected sex with a relative stranger at the foot of a public monument.

  He said faintly, “I know. But I do trust you. There’s… There’s some sun cream in my pack.”

  He laid his brow to the stone and closed his eyes as Flynn pushed into him. The cream wasn’t the best lubricant, even liberally applied, even rubbed inside his body on the tips of clever fingers whose probing, stroking touch he had had to beg to be reprieved from before he made a fool of himself. It hurt. The stretch, and then the inner straining hurt him badly for a second, and he jolted and his hands made involuntary fists on the stone. But it was simply that he had been lonely and unused, and Flynn, after an attentive pause, kissing his neck, gently squeezing his upright cock, had gone on.

  In the red-flashing dark behind his eyelids, Tom remembered how he had looked, how he had risen up like sunrise on his sofa, and envisaged that long, powerful shaft disappearing into him, higher and higher, inch by inch. He spread his thighs. He was almost straddling the stone, his cock lightly brushing it as Flynn pushed. When he came, he would come on it. He shuddered, felt himself almost break apart in choked laughter and bitten-back moans. Would the old gods tip the capstone down on top of them in wrath, or would they rejoice with him? Too far gone to mind, Tom got his head up for one look across the moor. Still deserted, and Belle was keeping watch, but that wouldn’t have mattered either.

  Flynn found full reach inside him and began to ride him hard. Tom knew that he had within himself a compact, sturdy strength, diminished a little by the way he had been living but still there to call upon. His barricades down, he could brace, open himself up and let Flynn in, so receptive now he thought the delicious inward press would go on forever. His white-knuckle clench on the rock unfolded as he relaxed. Flynn placed one hand on top of his, and Tom heard him gasp as he seized it, interweaving their fingers, straining back, twisting round to seek a kiss.

  “God, Tom! Don’t!”

  “What?”

  “Rob never… Oh, Christ, the most I get from him when we do this is a slap to the hip, like I was a well-trained horse or…”

  “Forget him,” Tom growled. Flynn kissed him, briefly, fiercely, and he grabbed his free hand and pulled it round to clasp his cock. He could feel inside him the rhythmic pulse of muscle that signalled the finish, and he loosed a deep, raw shout, throwing his head back onto Flynn’s shoulder. He wanted to draw it out—feel, for as long as either of them could stand it, Flynn’s long strokes in and out of his core, making him buck his spine and rump powerfully back to meet him—but it was all he could do to hold on till Flynn hit his brink, groaning through gritted teeth.

  His last launching thrust drove Tom against the rock, grazing his belly and chest. Flynn rasped out his name, shuddering seismically against his back, pinning him—felt his muscle ring contract tight then begin a hot flutter round the base of Flynn’s shaft. For an instant Tom was afraid—of the force of what was happening, to him and to this perfect, fever-driven lover, whose desperate spending he could feel in him like rushing spring meltwater—that it would break both their backs or their hearts to get through this—but Flynn’s hand tightened hard on him, and he burst to a pleasure so bright that it put out the sun.

  Mustn’t go to sleep here. Tom’s week had been long, and the rich May sunlight, in this sheltered corner of the world, was almost irresistible. He tried to lift his head from Flynn’s shoulder, but his companion’s drowsy murmur drew him back. “Tom…”

  “Yes.” He turned and pressed an exhausted kiss to Flynn’s neck. “Still here, I think. Are you okay?”

  “Yes, I think. I don’t know.”

  Tom shifted a little, far enough to look at him. There had been pain as well as joy in his climaxing shout. “What is it, love?”

  Flynn twitched. “Oh, don’t. Don’t call me…”

  Tom, from whom the endearment had fallen truly but easily, stroked his chest. “All right.”

  “I mean, I want you to, but—I’m not entirely loveable.”

  “Matter of perspective,” Tom told him, smiling. “And opinion. What’s eating you? Does it bear talking about?”

  “If you don’t mind listening to a big sap.”

  “It’s what I live for. Come on.”

  “Okay. You asked for it.” Tom bit back the moan of contentment that would have distracted him, as Flynn tightened both arms around him and eased his tired, reverberating flesh against his own. “Rob and I do that—I mean, we have done, obviously, and it wasn’t like that. I didn’t know it could be.”

  Tom listened. He caught his lip between his teeth and pretended to be giving it thought. His heart was bumping with surprise and pleasure. “Mm, yes,” he said after a moment. “That is a very, very big sap.”

  “Screw you,” Flynn growled at him, laughter flickering in the muscles under Tom’s hand. “Last time I confide in you.”

  “Flynn?”

  “What, love?”

  “Do they make you live in bunk two, room six? Is it like a…”


  “A condition of my parole? No. It was just where I landed. Why?”

  “Come and land with me for a while. For… For as long as you like.”

  A silence fell. During it, Tom wondered if he had gone too far. Already he was astonished at what he had offered, or what he had dared say aloud, but he could see it, clearly as he could remember the night on which he had opened up at last the impregnable tower in which he lived. Bringing Flynn back through that door, securing it behind them. Seeing last summer light in the round chamber, following Flynn up to bed. Waking beside him that morning, and who knew how many mornings after. As many as he could possibly squeeze out of his time on earth. He swallowed hard as the prospect of death, which had danced like luring swamp lights round the edges of his mind since Afghanistan, became suddenly what it had been to him before—a necessity, not to be feared, but staved off as long as possible in the interests of life.

  Flynn drew a breath, and somehow Tom heard in it all his uncertainty. He sat up, knelt in front of him. “Don’t,” he said softly. “Don’t say anything. It’s there if you want it, that’s all.”

  “I do. I do, but I have to… Rob’s away on leave this week, and I can’t just ditch out on him. Let me just—”

  “No. No promises.” Tom stood up stiffly, feeling the tug of long-unused muscles, and put out a hand for him. “Come on. Walk my dog with me. I’ll buy you lunch somewhere.” Flynn struggled upright, and stood staring at him as if dazed. “It’s not a thing to hurt you, Flynn. It’s just there if you want.”

  Chapter Seven: Vortex

  Tom lay on his side in the round upper room, looking at the vacant half of the bed beside him. He was awake but not restless. The sea music that always resonated here was quiet tonight.

  If he put out a hand, he could almost imagine a trace of body warmth in the sheets. He had thought Flynn was going to come back with him, after their walk and lunch up at the Mermaid in Zennor. The little green Mazda had turned out to be his, so low in Tom’s rearview she sometimes disappeared as he led the way along the snaking cliff-top road. They had sat outside, the tables round them too crowded now for anything other than general conversation, but even that had felt good. A taste of ordinary life. Flynn’s foot had rested lightly against his.

  There had been a moment in the sunny car park afterward, when many things had seemed to hang in the balance. Then Flynn’s eyes had darkened with an anxiety Tom would not have added to for the world, and he had risked both their reputations, pulling Flynn into the shelter of the Land Rover to kiss him. “It’s all right,” Tom had told him again, the reassurance formless but broad, and he had watched with a weird, painful clutch at his heart while Flynn drove away.

  He allowed himself to imagine how it might have been, otherwise. Flynn was not hard to conjure. Tom could feel the shape of him inside, a vivid memory. Even the slight soreness was a source of pleasure. Alone, he blushed and felt a smile crease his mouth at the sensation of having been richly and memorably ploughed… They would have come back here, and straight upstairs this time. If Flynn was healed, he would have tumbled him straight down onto the bedspread and… And that brought Tom too close to thoughts of pain, injury, Robert bloody Tremaine, who, away on leave or not, could make Flynn twitch with nerves whenever anyone of similar build and colouring had come near their table at the Mermaid, so he reversed it, let the fantasy meet the physical echo, the velvety stretch inside him.

  Unexpectedly, some inner wall fell. Before Flynn, it was David who had fucked him last. Lieutenant David Reay, assistant army medical officer, on the 28th of January three years gone, in a bunk room in Camp Bastion. These details, which rushed over Tom in an unstoppable dam-burst of memory, should have paralysed him. Balled him up hopelessly in the bed, snatching at the duvet to drag over his head and obliterate him, and then, when they became unbearable, send him stumbling downstairs to tear open a bottle. He had got round all this recently by ceasing to think of David at all, and he had called this avoidance a form of adaptation, healing.

  Not Flynn on top of him, opening him with gentle, unsteady fingers, pushing inside. David. David had been so pent-up it hadn’t lasted long. Tom had felt the frantic thrusting and rush of his coming before he was even properly engaged, and then the poor sod had been so mortified, sitting hunched on the edge of the bunk with his head in his hands. Tom had teased him, gently, and persuaded him back for another go, and things had been better after that. For one night, most of which Tom had spent with one eye fixed on the bunk-room door. David had waited for him for three years, and Tom had not given him so much as his full attention.

  Falling walls. Pain swept through Tom, and he turned his inner vision back to Flynn, whose arrival in his life, whose touch and voice, had brought them down and yet somehow made the consequences bearable. Because Tom was holding on. He was remembering. Flynn became David, then himself again, and merged, and Tom placed a chilled, sweat-damped hand on his own cock and caressed himself to hardness and sudden orgasm, tearing and sweet, way too soon. He could taste blood from his own bitten lip, blood and salt from his tears. Sleep instantly seized him. He heard a voice—David’s, Flynn’s, he did not know. It said—that old lie, but Tom was floating painlessly in the truth of it—it’s all right, love.

  The phone rang two hours later, jolting him out of his sleep’s deepest cycle. Moaning, he got his head up out of the pillows and shoved onto one elbow, mouth dry, heart thumping. Penzance Casualty on the caller ID. He grabbed for the receiver. “God almighty. What?”

  “Tom, it’s Mike. I’m sorry. We’ve had some kind of boat wreck—gunshot wounds, near-drownings. Looks like a couple of drug-running gangs had a set-to. And a pileup on the A30. Can you possibly…?”

  Tom was already out of bed, reaching for the shirt he’d left crumpled on the floor in Flynn’s honour. His supper dishes were unwashed downstairs, as well. It had been a day of freedom. “I’ll be there,” he said, and hung up. Peaceful bloody Cornwall, he thought, distractedly, grabbing jeans and car keys, running for the stairs.

  An ex-army doctor was a blessing to an overstretched rural casualty department, and Tom was sure of a fervent welcome on nights like this. The casualty consultant, Mike Findlay, grabbed him by the arm as soon as he appeared in the chaotic assessment unit and pointed him straight at the car-crash victims. Nature and experience had combined in Tom to make him a kindly, absolutely dispassionate force for good, and he dealt with broken children, blood and horror much better than some of Mike’s full-time casualty staff. Tonight, if Mike had been looking, he might have seen an unprecedented tremor in his swiftly working hands, might have noticed that, for once, he was pale—but there was no time for observation, for anything other than the frantic dash from trolley to incoming trolley.

  The pile-up had happened just after the arrival of six bits of human wreckage from some kind of boat collision off Morvanna point. Two separate small craft had been involved, the violence of the impact suggesting to observers—a handful of shocked night fishermen on the pier—that it had been deliberate. Shots had been fired. Officers from the armed-response unit in Exeter were waiting in the hospital corridors until they could question the survivors.

  No one had deliberately prioritised the pileup over what was probably fallout from a trafficking war. Neither Findlay nor Tom would have allowed it, any more than Tom had ever succumbed to pressure from his army superiors to deal with non-urgent Allied troops before critically injured Afghanis. It was simply that the crash victims were greater in number and more inclined to die, and by the time the casualty staff had stemmed some of this tide, the men from the boat collision had been set up in a side ward, under the care of stressed nurses and anyone else who could be called in from their off duty. When the worst of the crisis in the main wards had passed, Tom went through to see what he could do to help.

  He found that he was looking around for Flynn. This was the kind of nightmare that would call out the rescue choppers, and the Maritime Security Lynxes too. Unease p
ulled at him. He had not considered, when opening his fortress, how it would be to have someone in there with him whom he could not protect, someone as vulnerable in his own way as David had been.

  “Did the Hawke Lake SAR bring this lot in?” he asked one of the nurses, but the woman shook her head. It had happened so close to shore that the lifeboat and a police launch had gone out to pick up the bits. They’d found assault rifles on board, and a small fortune in cocaine. “Great,” Tom said wryly. “Bet they don’t put that in the Penwith visitors’ guide. Do they need help mopping up?”

  “You could relieve Dr. Francis. She’s been on for eighteen hours.”

  The man in the first side-ward bed had third-degree burns and a bullet wound to his arm. Either he spoke no English or had found it expedient to forget what he knew. Tom could see the coppers out in the corridor, restlessly pacing up and down. Well, they could wait. Until the man’s fever came down, he was a patient, not a prisoner, no matter what his sins. He did what he could for him and moved on to the next bed.

  No one had got round to cleaning this one up. He wasn’t high priority, his injuries not severe, just bashed across the head with a rifle butt in the fight, brought in to sleep it off and be arrested in due course. He looked as if he’d been in oil-slicked water, his hair matted, black stains obscuring his features. He was lying on his side in the ward’s farthest corner. When Tom touched his shoulder, he came round immediately. His eyes flicked wide and fixed themselves on the wall.