Driftwood (11 page)

“Several. I was out of commission for months. His family's loaded, but I know he paid for a lot of it himself. And it wasn't just that, Tom—he transferred down to Hawke to be with me, got a post with SAR. All right, he's possessive, but…if you think about it, that's fair enough. He pretty much owns me.”

Bollocks.
Tom bit that back too. If that was Robert's line, he could see how Flynn had come to be caught on it. He settled for a gentle, “Nobody owns you, Flynn,” rubbing one thumb across the back of his tight-clenched hand.

“I know. I'm sorry. I'm still fucked up, I suppose—I don't always see things right. Either way, he deserves better than he gets from me. I mess with his head at least as much as he does mine. He hates my surfboard, hates my stupid little sports car. I drive him crazy by volunteering for the rescue winch in storms. Like he said, my hundred different ways of committing suicide. He feels like I'm always at the end of my leash, pulling to be away.”

“And…are you?”

“Yes. But not the way he thinks. I'd pull away from it all if I could work out how.”

Flynn turned his face to Tom's shoulder. After a moment in which his heart and chest ached so much that he couldn't move, Tom closed both arms around him. He didn't know what to say—knew anyway, from bitter experience, the point at which words failed. He kissed the top of Flynn's head, pulled the blankets up tight round him, and wondered after a while if the telling of this story had worn the poor bastard back to sleep, he was so still and silent in his arms.

Then, suddenly, Flynn sat up. He put both hands to Tom's shoulders and eased him back, just far enough to see him properly. To Tom's astonishment, his face was alight with compassion. “You think I'm lost in this, don't you?” he whispered, brushing a fingertip touch to Tom's brow, his lips, the corners of his eyes. “You think I don't see anything else. But I do. You've learned about my kind of pain the hard way. I can see…” Soft, searching kisses followed the touch. Tom shuddered, almost unable to bear them. They targeted every mark that grief had carved into him, and he had thought his own story safely buried far away, subsumed in the better, easier business of dealing with Flynn's. He should have known, shouldn't he, that such a man would not tolerate the one-sided world Tom had built to contain himself. “I can see your cairn,” Flynn said, nodding towards the mound of glimmering quartz stones on the turf a few yards away. “Who's it for?”

“David,” Tom told him, shocked into truth. “David Reay. He was my assistant medical officer in Helmand. We did three tours together.”

“Your lover?”

“Once. He always wanted it, but I couldn't face being gay, not in the army, not out there. Then I realised how stupid that was, and we had one night. He was so bloody happy. Next day he went out with a convoy, to help at the hospital in Lashkar Gar. They were ambushed. He never came back.”

Flynn reached for him. Tom thought it was only in comfort. Looking into Flynn's eyes, he saw that was all he intended—the touch that would bridge the gap when words failed, a hand to his shoulder and the side of his face. Tom could hardly bear the kindness of it. The understanding, the compassion—too much, and suddenly, when Flynn's grip tightened, not what he wanted anymore. He gasped. Need seared through him, everything he'd put on hold last night and during the chained-up years just gone. “Flynn…”

“What is it?”

No need to explain. Tom saw the same change transfiguring him. Grief flashing off into hunger, like oil on water catching fire. If they'd had the chance—if life had bound them together, given them some years, was this how they would have solved all their pains? Their joys too, triumphs and disasters, all finding solace or celebration in bed, or out on the flower-starred turf? “That second crack you wanted,” he rasped, and waited until Flynn's attention was on him so keenly he felt it like a burn. “For God's sake grab it now.”

They crashed down from the rock onto the grass. Flynn's blanket tore loose from his shoulders and Tom caught him, grunting in winded pleasure as his weight impacted, warm and sweet and naked as the day. “Flynn. You'll catch your death.”

“Don't care. Just love me. Have me. Do it.”

Tom groaned. He snatched the kiss Flynn was fiercely offering and struggled on top, mindful of his lover's bruises, but only just. Flynn resisted briefly then rolled luxuriantly under, stretching out in an ecstasy of surrender. Joyfully he grabbed Tom's pyjama bottoms, dragged them down around his hips and opened his thighs for him. “Come on! Come here!”

Tom stared down in a mix of lust and concern at the tanned, bare flesh on the wet turf. “Oh, I don't want to hurt you.”

“Damn you. Get on with it.”

Shuddering, Tom obeyed. Spine dissolving in heat, he let his rigid cock shove hard between Flynn's thighs.
Once and once only,
he told himself.
A first time and a last with this perfect and forbidden man.
He thought of David, whose funeral he had not attended, whose name had never passed his lips in three dry-mouthed years, and he reached for Flynn, a gift given him for the night. They were into extra time now, the sun piercing clouds, kissing his bare back with the first real heat of summer—
injury time
, Tom thought, thrusting hard, taking his weight on his arms to spare those bruises, which looked to him like fist marks, not wave tumble or harness. He wouldn't question Flynn's devotion—or thraldom—to Robert Tremaine. He would let him go.

Flynn's hands closed round his backside. His lovely face contorted to a mask lovelier still, the beginnings of orgasm, calling up Tom's own like thunder from the place where he had boxed it up the night before. He noticed irrelevantly that the thyme was flowering, dust-pink blossoms giving off an aromatic tang under the crush of their bodies. Milkwort too, tiny flashes of heaven-blue. Soon all the headlands would be starred with them.

He groaned and stiffened, and Flynn in his extremity surged up beneath him, knocking him down onto his back. Tom yelled inarticulately, heaving up against his weight, feeling his own strength as almost inhuman, this close to the peak. Flynn snarled his name, face contorting, and slammed him back down so hard that the turf abraded skin off him. His shaft was trapped and starting to erupt against Tom's belly. Clenching his fingers in the short hair at his nape, Tom let go and climaxed incandescently, morning sunlight tearing into bloodstained silver fragments in his eyes.

They rolled and tangled halfway to the bloody cliff's edge before they had wrung the coming out of one another. Tom was glad, folding bonelessly down into his lover's arms, that their nearest land-based observer would have to have been in New York.

Chapter Six: Undertow

They managed, somehow, a peaceful and prosaic breakfast. Tom sent Flynn up to shower the grass stains off while he made toast and tea. He had seen the idea of sharing the shower glitter in Flynn's eyes, but it would have been a step too far, brought their one shared night tumbling into this day. It was Sunday, and Flynn due on a long shift at Hawke. Tom would run him up there, and that would be it.

He had told Flynn to help himself from his wardrobe. Flynn's T-shirt from last night was sweat-damped and crumpled beyond redemption, and had been beer-stained even before its ordeal. He looked nice in one of Tom's many identical plain grey Ts. He looked nice, Tom thought, sitting opposite him at his breakfast table. He topped up Flynn's mug from the pot, squaring his shoulders. “Do you… Do you think you'll stay in Cornwall, then?”

Flynn smiled. “Yes,” he said, taking his cue. This was their first official polite conversation, Tom's effort, despite their wild night, to send them on their separate ways as friends. “It was just a posting, at first. Everywhere looked the same for a while, you know?” Tom nodded, cradling his mug between his palms—he did. “But I can't imagine being anywhere else now. The surf, and the cliffs, and…at the risk of sounding like a complete hippie, the standing stones. When I saw my first one, I nearly crashed the car. Sat and stared at it for hours.”

“They're quite something. Do you remember which one it was?”

“The quoit. The one any blundering tourist can find, right by the road. Lanyon, is it?”

“Yes. Lanyon. That's Belle's favourite too—I take her there every other day for a run.”

Flynn looked up from his toast. He absently sucked marmalade from one finger in a gesture which almost wiped Tom's good intentions to oblivion. Their eyes met.
Lanyon Quoit.
Damaged, randomly put back together. None the less lovely for that. Not a promise. Not even a breath of suggestion. Just a place that they both knew.

A faint, strange sound began to filter through their silence. Tom frowned. He knew most of his home's noises by this time, and this was new to him. It sounded like a wasp caught in a jam jar. It seemed to be coming from near the front door where Belle was sitting, her back to the room. Tom got to his feet and went over to her. Unusually, she didn't respond to his voice or his caress, and he saw, with a mix of alarm and amusement, that she had rucked up her normally placid and dignified face into a kind of gargoyle's mask. As he crouched by her, it got worse. She kept her gaze fixed on the door, and slowly, as if having trouble remembering how, she wrinkled her long snout and drew back her lips to reveal both rows of white wolfhound teeth. Belatedly Tom realised that the tiny, high-pitched sound was coming from her. “My God, Belle,” he enquired, voice fracturing with laughter. “Is that your
snarl
?”

She looked at him once, reprovingly, then fixed her attention front-centre once more. Thinking he should probably do the same, Tom went to the tower's south window and looked out. He rested his hands on the broad white sill and let go a sigh. “Black Bull Mercedes pickup truck,” he said resignedly. “Huge, top of the range, silver trim.”

Flynn dropped his face into his hands. “Oh
fuck
.”

The truck had been at the far gate when Tom saw it, and God only knew how much farther away when Belle's mysterious alarm system had been triggered. Now it was rolling slowly over the turf track, a growing black monster. Tom and Flynn stood in the watchtower's open doorway, at painful standoff. “Tom, please,” Flynn said for the third time. “Just let me walk down and meet him. It'll be fine.”

Tom knew he had to say something. Just holding Flynn back by the waist of his jeans was not enough. It wasn't easy. His throat felt full of grit, all his calm acceptance of the situation evaporated in the reality of having to let him go. “This is my home,” he managed at length. “It was incredibly hard for me to find one. I'm not ashamed of having had you here, and I'm not about to bloody hide.” He turned to him. “Flynn, do this for me. Go inside and take Belle with you. Just for a minute.”

He stood out on the sun-blown turf, hands in his pockets. He was astonished and touched by Flynn's compliance, which had been given with set-muscled, gritted-teeth reluctance, and an expression nearly as frightening as Belle's. The thought of it distracted Tom as the vast Mercedes Bull lumbered over the last few yards between them.

He had no idea what he was going to do or say to Rob Tremaine, and he wasn't getting any advance cues. Typically, the truck's windshields were one-way black, giving him only a view of his own insignificant stance against the backdrop of endless moors. Huge metal roll bars, as if the damn thing would ever tip up. Waist-high tractor tyres, a rack of searchlights, the whole thing wrapped up in glossy brand-new metal and shimmering chrome. Might as well have had a deer roped to the grille. Tom could not understand what anyone not towing horses every day could possibly want with such a vehicle. In the narrow Penwith single lanes, they took up a lane and a half.

He stood up straighter, lifting his chin.

An anomaly which had been tugging at his mind since dawn abruptly surfaced. Tom had a fair idea what those brutes cost. What good psychiatry cost too. Rob's family was wealthy, Flynn had said—the branch that had left to make money in London, and apparently succeeded.

Except that Tom was more or less certain they were not. He was pretty sure that Lizzie Tremaine and the string of random men who fathered her children were still living in borderline poverty on the Bay estate. It was the one bloody thing that Tom disliked about Cornwall, and fought with increasing futility to rectify—the gap between rich and poor, the pattern by which more and more homes were sold off for holiday cottages while the estates became ghettoes, hidden from visitors' eyes. Well, it looked as if Rob had found his own solution. More power to him, Tom supposed, watching the truck door swing portentously open.

Suddenly there was warmth at his shoulder, and he realised with a sinking gut that Flynn's cooperation had worn off. At least he'd left the dog indoors.

Rob Tremaine jumped down onto the turf. He looked smaller this morning—possibly only in contrast with his own vast vehicle, but he was holding his hands out in front of him too, angled, palms down. He was cleanly and quietly dressed, and had tamed his red hair back into a neat ponytail. “My God,” he said, approaching Tom and Flynn, looking from one to the other. “I do not even know where to
begin
apologising.”

There was still some tea in the pot. Tom gave it to Tremaine graciously enough, while he sat on the sofa—in the exact spot, Tom thought with a shudder and a sense of disbelief, where he had stroked Flynn to orgasm barely twelve hours before—and explained, big disarming grin flashing, how he had had a rough few days and hit the cider. Not that that was any excuse for his behaviour, which although he didn't remember most of it, had been described to him in lurid detail by his mates, and he gathered he deserved the shiner Tom had left him by way of souvenir. He had said some appalling things. He was grateful to Tom for looking after Flynn, and had come out to collect him to save Tom the trip. They were due on duty in an hour's time.