Driftwood Read online

  “Oh my God. Tom. Are you all right?”

  Slowly Tom got his head up. He wiped his mouth with his hand and beamed exhaustedly up at Flynn. “Fine. You?”

  “Do you have to ask?” Flynn leaned and kissed him, sending a hot shiver through Tom at the thought of how he must be tasting his own come. He tried not to let him feel the locked-iron effort it was taking him to stay still, but Flynn’s touch became listening, attentive. “You’re not fine. What have I been doing to you?”

  “Nothing I didn’t wholly and joyously ask for.” Tom ran an unsteady hand through his hair. “But I admit, sweetheart…I’m about done for tonight.”

  Flynn glanced down. The fire was burning brightly now, throwing sharp shadows. Tom’s jeans were still slightly damp too, and clinging to him. Flynn said softly, “Not quite.”

  “Oh, that. Just help me up to bed, or…dump me here by this nice fire. Ignore it. It’ll go away.”

  Flynn extended gentle fingertips. He ran an exploratory, moth-like touch over Tom’s face. “I think we can do better for you than that.”

  He went upstairs. Tom, laid out on sofa cushions by the fire where Flynn had put him, took in the beautiful naked sight of him padding up the spiral staircase, too worn out to be other than mildly curious as to his purposes. He was aching with unsatisfied desire, but really didn’t think there was much hope for him. Would be happy, he thought, if Flynn would only come and stretch out and sleep here beside him.

  Happy? He’d be fucking ecstatic. Watching him come back down the tower’s spiral, he said, “I thought I’d lost you. When Vic told me you’d gone out with Rob… I thought I’d lost you.”

  “You found me.” Flynn knelt beside him. He opened his palm and let Tom see the tube of lubricant he’d gone up to find. There were tears in his eyes again. Smiling unsteadily, he cast a glance back towards the stairs. “We started something up there. You and me. And we didn’t finish it, because of Rob.”

  “Flynn, wait. You don’t have to…”

  “Hush.” Flynn reached out and pressed the pads of his fingers to Tom’s lips. He moved to straddle him, clumsily undoing the buttons of his jeans with his free hand. “It’s all right. I’m better now. Unless he forced me, I never let him touch me again, you know, after we… Not like that.”

  “He must’ve been delighted,” Tom said hoarsely.

  “Yeah. He was a real gent about it. But I’m fine.” He uncapped the lubricant, seized avid hold of Tom’s shaft as it rose. “I know how tired you are, love. You don’t have to do a thing.”

  He moved with cautious passion, bearing his weight on his thighs. Tom knew a moment’s uncertainty, a fear that he would not be able to manage, or would not know how, but Flynn reached round behind himself and placed a guiding grip on his cock. This time his face betrayed no pain as Tom slipped inside, only a hunger that increased with every inch of his progress, deeper and deeper until Tom knew he was at full engagement, stretching him to his limits.

  “Flynn,” he whispered, trying to thrust up.

  “No. Lie still, lie still, let me…” He shifted himself up a little, then back down, breathing shallowly, never for one instant taking his eyes off Tom’s. After a few more repeats of this shy, hampered movement, his control faltered, and he jerked forward, shuddering, trying not to lose balance. “Tom… Sorry.”

  “All right. Got you.” Tom seized his wrists, showing him where he could rest his hands without hurting. “Come on. Let me have you.”

  “I thought I’d lost you too. When I came out on deck, and there he was with a gun on you… It was like time stopped for me, and his went on. He was gonna shoot you.”

  “You stopped him. It’s over.”

  Flynn groaned and arched his spine. Tom was in him to the root, so deep that he could feel the warm squeeze of his balls when Flynn pressed down. Nowhere further to go. Flynn’s smallest shift sent lightning bolts of pleasure through him. Despite having come so long and hard down Tom’s throat not half an hour before, his cock leapt.

  The sight of it tore Tom apart. He reached and seized Flynn’s shoulders, crying out his name, writhing up unstoppably to find him, to meet him, stroke for stroke, passion for passion. The shocks of pain that went through him at each thrust bonded themselves to his pleasure till the two were inextricably entwined and he was coming, yelling in triumph and anguish as Flynn convulsed to orgasm around him.

  The first thing Tom saw, by late-morning light pouring through the tower’s east window, was the blue-green crest of a wave. He lay for a long time, watching the elegant shape through the net of his eyelashes. He was still half-asleep. The fire had died down to its ashes, but these glowed a bright, extraordinary pink in the sunlight, radiating heat into the room. He had been made comfortable on the sofa cushions, the blanket tucked around him, a pillow pushed under his head. When finally he understood what he was looking at, he broke into a broad smile.

  “Morning, handsome.”

  The other pleasure tugging at his mind had been the scent of fresh-made coffee. He sat up as Flynn crouched beside him, or tried to. “Ow. Christ.”

  Quickly Flynn set the two mugs down on the hearthside and took hold of his shoulders. “Yeah. Anyone would think you’d been in a car crash. Take it easy.”

  “I will. I thought that had gone back to the Marazion studio.”

  “Well, not quite. It got as far as the boot of my Mazda, and then I just drove it around. Suppose I was hoping I might get another chance to ambush you with it.”

  Tom shifted, got enough balance to take hold of the mug Flynn passed him. Not all his aches and pains were bad. On reflection, he felt thoroughly, expertly ambushed. “Well, it’s bloody beautiful.”

  “Can it stay this time?”

  “Yes. Can you?”

  Flynn knelt in front of him. For a moment Tom wondered if, even now, he had said too much. Flynn had endured for two years the worst griefs and humiliations one man could inflict on another. Perhaps it would take him longer than this, to learn how to deal with kindness. With love, because that was what was going on here, what had been going on since they had struggled together out of the Porth Bay surf. Perhaps it would take him forever.

  Flynn said unsteadily, “I’ve got to go to Hawke to debrief. Mike Findlay’s coming out here to check you over, and do whatever one doctor does to another for absconding from his ICU, I should think.”

  He paused. Tom gazed at him. His presence seemed to him as fragile and unlikely as that of the sea-glass wave. Then Flynn leaned in and kissed him. “Then I’ll come home, and…I’ll pick up your dog on my way.”

  The first real gale of winter, and Belle would not hush up. Tom had never known her to behave like this. He and Flynn watched her prowling the bounds of the living room and kitchen, raising her eerie, seldom-heard bark every few strides. “Belle, what’s got into you?”

  “Do you think she’s ill?”

  “Maybe.” Tom called the dog over, and the two of them checked her from nose to tail, looking for swollen gums, injured paws, a tender belly. She submitted patiently to the examination, then moved gently but inexorably away from them and resumed her prowl.

  Maybe it was the weather, though Tom had never known her disturbed by the wildest of storm nights before. It wasn’t good timing. He and Flynn both had an early start the next morning, and the early night they had promised themselves had turned into a bruising, happy, hours-long struggle round the tower’s upper room. An early start and a new job, for Flynn, who after the investigation into Rob Tremaine’s death had received a startlingly thorough military apology and reinstatement to the Maritime Security squad. He had been offered his old berth at Portsmouth, but had turned it down. Cornwall was his home now. Cornwall and Tom. The watchtower too, although both of them had begun tentatively to discuss moving out, to a place not under a demolition order, which did not run with damp from October to May and cost so much to heat they would toss coins for the privilege of not opening the bill.

  Tom’s exile
was over. He did not need his fortress anymore, but anxiety would still touch him at the prospect of the move, for reasons he could not define. The habit of defence, he supposed. Flynn, who knew by now his every fear, was in no hurry. Told him, between kisses, that he would live with him forever in his world’s-edge ruin.

  Belle kept on barking. Aware that Flynn was watching him in tired amusement, Tom sat her down in front of him and talked to her as he would to an intelligent teenager, patiently explaining that, since everything was all right, and he and Flynn needed their sleep, she should really settle down now. It shouldn’t have worked, but the poor dog listened to him with every appearance of comprehension, and when he was finished, went and lay down in her bed in the kitchen, tail tucked, ears clamped tight to her skull.

  Tom shrugged, holding out a hand to Flynn. “God knows. Come on, love. Big day for you tomorrow. Today, actually, in about five hours’ time.”

  “Tom, would you think I was off my head if I didn’t take it?”

  “What—the reinstatement?”

  “Yeah. I loved it, but…I love the rescue work too. Better, I think.”

  Tom smiled. It hadn’t been his place to talk to Flynn about it, and he had wanted to see him fully compensated by the service which had been so quick to send him down, but… “Whatever you want,” he said, and Flynn came to him, as if he was fire in the darkness, sunshine in winter’s heart. “You’re a good lad, Flynn.”

  And this wouldn’t get them to bed any sooner, either, or at least not there to sleep. Carefully, deliberately, he disentangled them, pushed him in the direction of the stairs.

  Quarter to four in the morning. Tom registered the time at the same instant as a warm, wet press against his ear, and rolled onto his side, moaning. “Flynn, love… What the fuck?”

  Something by the bed. Tom jolted upright in visceral panic, limbic brain seeing only the wolf in the fold, a beast with glowing eyes. It took him a moment to recognise Belle, who was too well-mannered ever to invade his room uninvited, and never came up during the night. He felt Flynn’s waking movement at his side, and he sat, gazing out at the red-tinged waning moon, at its eerie light reflected in Belle’s pupils. Her silence was eloquent.

  “Flynn,” he said, after a few seconds. “There’s something not right.”

  “Other than the fact that you mistook your bloody dog for me?” Flynn enquired politely, making him snort with laughter but then put out a hand to Flynn’s arm, immobilising him, listening.

  “I’m serious. Something…”

  A tremor struck the tower. The hairline crack on the far wall, which over the past month had expanded unnoticed to a rift an inch wide, gaped suddenly huge, in a gunfire-roar of falling masonry. The floor lurched.

  Tom leapt out of bed. He grabbed Flynn, grabbed his dog and shoved them ahead of him down the tower’s spiral stairs. He tore open the great wooden door, which in these days of healing was not always locked, any more than the dishes were always done or the bed linen ironed. He pushed Flynn out into the night, barefoot out onto the wet turf, and together they ran in Belle’s wildly barking wake until they stumbled and fell in a tangle, catching at each other, scrambling a desperate few yards farther from the cliff’s crumbling edge.

  The tower went down in majesty. Her seaward side had collapsed, but she held her ghostly moonlit form for five more seconds, while the cliff top avalanched away, cutting her foundations from beneath her. Then, with a thunderous howl, she was gone.

  Flynn and Tom clung together on the turf. Belle, having made her point, transformed to her mute self and calmly came to sit beside them. Tom could not get breath into his lungs—or, when he could, it exited straight away in drowning gasps that suddenly for some reason began to break into laughter. “Oh…fuck,” he managed eventually. “Flynn… God, Flynn, I love you!” And Flynn, who over the last months had said it to him, affectionately and often, never seeming to expect reply, turned to him in wonder.

  Epilogue

  Tom walked on the edge of the sea, which had restored the world to him. He was working full-time in the Penzance casualty department now, and had less opportunity to wander the lonely Porth beach with Belle, but the journey home was shorter, only ten minutes or so, in the replacement Land Rover he had bought when his insurance company finally decided he had not flipped his last one off the road on purpose and paid up.

  Wrestling a slimy stick from Belle’s jaws so that he could throw it again, Tom cast an amused look up to the car park where the vehicle was parked. She was similar in all respects to the last, except that, to Flynn’s bewilderment, he had chosen an older model still. Well, where was the point in knocking the crap out of new models on these roads, he had explained to him, and he had spent the rest of the payout on a custom-built rack for the Mazda to carry Flynn’s surfboard.

  Ten minutes home, to the house on the beachfront he shared with Flynn. Neither of them had lost their taste for world’s-edge living, but this one was built on firm foundations, and although it stood in stern isolation near the dunes, was within sight and a short drive of friends. Of Victor Travers, whose business was once again Porth’s main employer but did not keep Vic from his duties as volunteer helmsman on the lifeboat; of Florrie’s frequent dinner invitations, to which Chris Poldue and Gavin Wilkes would turn up too, shy and formal with each other even in this friendly company, but together at least.

  Tom came to a halt on the sand. A familiar ragged-edged thump was beginning on the edge of the wind, more a vibration than a sound, disturbing his eardrums and the marrow of his bones. He looked up, instinctively reaching for Belle. He would never get used to it, he knew. Never be able to see the Hawke Lake SAR chopper sweeping seaward without a pain like ice in his heart. All the fears in Tom’s life now were rational and quite real. Flynn, restored to himself, was a force of nature, a fire that burned so brightly Tom could scarcely look. No storm daunted him, no winter night so bitter that he would not haul himself reluctantly out of Tom’s arms to answer the call.

  No. The cliffs here were steep and had bounced back the sound of the rotors from their grey flanks—Flynn was coming home. The Sea King appeared on the horizon, and he braced up, grinning, waving wildly. It was Flynn’s great joy in life to buzz him if he saw him on the beach, to swing the great roaring craft as low as he dared over his head. Tom set off at a run for the car park, Belle bounding in silent delight at his heels. The roar of the engines got into Tom’s blood. He and Flynn would race to intercept one another, at a mission’s end, to be the first one home, the one who got to tear open the door for the other’s arrival and tackle him onto the sofa, the carpet, the stairs, sometimes even the bed if they could wait.

  Great breakers crashed on the Porth Bay shore. The only non-living thing Tom would have salvaged from the watchtower was the sea-glass wave. Their home had its other treasures now, but by tacit agreement they had not replaced it—it was a phenomenon that had belonged to its time. All things were so, Tom knew, and he no longer tried to hold on. All things could fall and be lost: David’s cairn, a handful of quartz in an avalanche, scattered, unforgotten. Flynn was the tide of Tom’s life now, the wave that surrounded him, that surged beneath him bringing ecstasy, that delivered him safely to shore. On lifeboat nights, search-and-rescue nights, nights of storm, when he was off duty, Tom went to the harbourside RNLI station and helped Florence make tea, talked quietly to the others waiting there.

  You made the best of every second you could spend with them, and then…you let them fly.

  About the Author

  Harper Fox has spent most of her adult life laying siege to the ice castle of British paper publishing, and has only recently stumbled out into the warmth and light of the online world. She was delighted (and shocked) to have her first M/M submission accepted by Samhain.

  Harper loves to weave M/M romances against the backcloth of her favourite locations in Britain, some of them picturesque, others picturesquely horrible. She is currently working on an archaeological mystery set
in Salisbury, and plans as her next project a story of warrior monks battling it out with Viking raiders on the Northumbrian coast. She likes to think that she brings the discipline and elegance of her long ice-castle apprenticeship to her M/M stories. Her theory is that all that suffering can’t have been for nothing. Her novels and novellas are powerfully sensual, with a dynamic of strongly developed characters finding love and a forever future—after the appropriate degree of turmoil. She loves to try and show the romance implicit in everyday life, but she writes a sharp action scene too, and can never resist a good helicopter.

  Harper lives with her Significant Other in beautiful rural Northumberland, where she receives broadband when there are no trees on the cable. During this launch period of her writing career, she is also holding down a nine-to-five as a television subtitler. Many ideas for stories come to her during the hallucinations caused by lack of sleep. When not writing, she enjoys worrying about it, and hoping she will soon start again.

  Damn it, a man shouldn’t always have to be afraid…

  Shining in the Sun

  © 2010 Alex Beecroft

  Alec Goodchilde has everything a man could want—except the freedom to be himself. Once a year, he motors down to an exclusive yacht club on the Cornish coast and takes the summer off from the trap that is his life.

  When his car breaks down, leaving him stranded on the beach, he’s transfixed by the sight of a surfer dancing on the waves. The man is summer made flesh. Freedom wrapped up in one lithe package, dripping wet from the sea.

  Once a year, Darren Stokes takes a break from his life of grinding overwork and appalling relatives, financing his holiday by picking up the first rich man to show an interest. This year, though, he’s cautious—last summer’s meal ticket turned out to be more pain than pleasure.