Driftwood (8 page)

“No. I…I've been here for two years. You're just my first guest.” They exchanged a look, in which Flynn acknowledged the honour and Thomas some gratitude at not being taken for some lonely lunatic or serial killer. God, it
had
been two years, and in all that time he had never admitted anyone but electricians and plasterers beyond the vast black-oak door of his fortress. “Is the wine okay?”

Flynn, who appeared to have forgotten about it, lifted his glass. “Yes, great. Where's yours?”

Thomas smiled. He shoved his hands into the pockets of his jeans. “I have an alcohol problem, as so well advertised by Robert Tremaine. It's mostly under control, but…I have my moments. I have to take care. Having said that, I will have one glass with you over a meal, if you're hungry.”

Flynn trailed him into the kitchen. It was small, and for the first time Thomas found himself troubled by his visitor's presence. He supposed that when he came out here he was very focused—efficient, getting through the business of feeding himself because he needed to, not because it brought him any pleasure. Flynn's occasional comments, undemanding as they were, unsettled him, distracted him from his efficient assemblage of garlic, onions, chicken fillets. Here too, as in the Rover, he could not get away from his physical reality. Could not turn without his senses flaring to the sight of him, the clean vivid scent…

The second time he dropped his vegetable knife, Flynn shut up and took himself out of Thomas's way, as if sensing the disarray he was causing. He settled in a corner chair by the kitchen table and picked up the newspaper Thomas had left there that morning. Belle's gentle, inquisitive nosing around the room, back and forth between them like some mute messenger, kept their silence from becoming awkward, and Thomas began to relax. By the time he was ready to put down the two fragrant plates on the table, his hands were steady again, and he could find a real smile. “There you go.”

“My God. A doctor,
and
he cooks.”

Thomas gave this thought. He didn't really think of his meal preparations as cooking. He rotated six or seven basically nutritious recipes, that was all. But when he tried the chicken, it did seem to have a real flavour for once. He smiled at Flynn over the table, and poured him a fresh glass of wine. “Mmm. Highly eligible, apart from those few flaws your mate pointed out. Can't think why I haven't been snapped up.”

“Oh, God. I'm so sorry. I dragged you there and…”

“And he's not your responsibility. Neither am I. We don't even have to talk about him.”

“Don't we?” Flynn looked as if the possibility of not doing so came as a revelation as well as a relief. “You know, that would be nice. He's been in my face a bit lately.” He applied himself to the food for a few moments, then glanced around the kitchen, back into the living room's round cavern beyond it. “Okay. This is very good. I like your dog. I like your…I've already made it painfully clear that I like your house. How did you find it? It doesn't look derelict to me.”

Thomas gave him a glimmering look. “Well, you haven't seen upstairs yet. As for how I got it—very cheap, is the answer. There's actually a demolition order on it.”

“You're kidding. Isn't it listed?”

“It was. It's one of a chain of towers strung all the way round the north coast. They were used to keep a watch out for smugglers—or by them, to lure ships in with lights, depending on whose legend you listen to. Lots of history. But this one's about ready to crumble into the sea.”

Flynn's eyes widened. Thomas noted the expansion of their pupils, and smiled. He looked less fazed than allured by the concept of plunging off the cliff in a welter of masonry. Thomas recalled his own first response to the news of his home's drawback—a stir in his gut, a tug, like gravity, at the idea of life-terminating risk, a vision of the brief sweet avalanche such a conclusion would be—and he wondered at the qualities of a man who would share his moment of excitement. His ultimate indifference. Flynn said softly, “Will it go before we finish dinner, you reckon?”

“Oh, any time over the next century or so, according to the council surveyor. They don't seem in much more of a hurry than that to knock it down, which is useful for me—though I rent it by the month, just in case.”

Another easy silence fell. “How's your friend?” Flynn asked suddenly, breaking Thomas's reverie. “The one you were going to help the other week… Victor, was it? In the boathouse?”

“Oh, Victor…” Thomas sighed. He thought about reaching for the Riesling, but Flynn's glass was still full, and somehow the impulse was not as strong as usual anyway. “He's out of the boathouse, at any rate. For now. Vic's a combat-stress case. Army. Three tours in Afghanistan, and he's pretty much destroyed. Drinks too much, can't deal with people. Shuts himself up in his lair every so often. I'm not surprised it looks good to him.” He fell silent. It had struck him that, barring a few hard-won disciplines and social graces, he could have been describing himself, and he was suddenly afraid that Flynn had not missed the parallels, either. His expression was extraordinary. Thomas thought he had never seen such compassion—muted, bright-eyed, fierce—in a human face. He felt some dammed-up thing inside him start to strain behind its walls. “He'll be okay,” he said roughly. “If the bloody MoD coughs up his compensation, anyway. Are you finished there? Go and sit down and I'll make us some coffee.”

Flynn got up. If he minded their conversation's sudden ending, he didn't let it show. “Okay. Thanks for dinner.” He put out a hand to scratch behind Belle's ears, and she paced a little way after him as he left the kitchen, then cast an anxious backward glance at Tom and returned to sit at his feet.

Tom was glad that Flynn had obeyed him without question. He needed, fiercely, to be alone for a short time. He had forgotten the pains and joys of serious, significant human interaction—of talking, about something other than the weather, and of being heard. Barely aware of his own actions, he switched the kettle on and turned to start the washing up.

“Thomas?”

He froze. Damn, he should have tried not to let the cutlery clatter. He might have known that Flynn was too polite a guest to leave him to clear up, no matter how much he needed the break. He went through to the living room, wiping soap suds off his hands with a tea towel. Flynn was kneeling between two piles of his uncategorised books, apparently sharing a perusal of them with his wolfhound. “Yes? You okay?”

“Fine. But leave the dishes. I'll do them later.”

Thomas looked at him. His presence altered the room in ways Thomas could not account for. Always somehow numinous, now lit by a single lamp in the corner, it had even more of a solemn, waiting air about it, as if any moment it would be filled by the song of angels or mermaids. Well, he could hear the sea, a distant, almost subsonic booming in the cliff-caverns far below.

“It's okay,” he said. “I'll just run them through now. It won't take five minutes.”

“This is quite a collection,” Flynn commented, as if he hadn't heard him. He was carefully turning over the pages of a 1960s account of the Kennedy assassination. Fascinating, practically written on the day. Thomas found himself more interested in the movements his hands made. Capable, deft. Incredibly gentle. Thomas wanted, with a violence that shocked him, to feel their touch on his skin. His mouth dried out. “Henry James, Thackeray, DIY,” Flynn continued, glancing over the wildly eclectic mix. “And yet everything else is so organised and…” he gestured to the well-scrubbed flagstone floor, to the room's other surfaces, giving back the lamplight without a trace of dust, “…so beautifully clean.”

Thomas swallowed. He never spoke to anyone about his compulsion towards order. Barely acknowledged it to himself. But Flynn wasn't challenging him. His expression was kind, as if he already understood. “I know. I feel as if I have to.”

“Like the washing up.”

“Yes. I feel as if I have to.”

Flynn uncurled from the floor. Not taking his warm gaze from Thomas, he went to the sofa, sat down and stretched one arm along the back of it. Crossed one ankle over his knee. He smiled at Thomas, a long, slow smile that left no room for doubt. “Leave it,” he said huskily. “Come here.”

So Thomas came to sit beside Flynn. It was awkward—Flynn had not moved his arm, and the sofa was not large, but he thought he had made a reasonably casual job of it until he realised he was still clutching at the tea towel. The bloody undone dishes tugged and nipped at his mind, and he shivered, trying to push the compulsion away. Normally it would not matter; normally he would not miss much by giving in to it. Tonight, however, a handsome green-eyed man was sitting with him in his sea-washed eyrie—one of the loveliest things Thomas had ever clapped eyes on, now he let himself know it—and to turn away his attention seemed criminal.

Then where was he supposed to focus it? The sofa was quite small, but still there had been no need for him to settle within six inches of his guest, in flagrant violation of both their sets of personal space. If he looked down, there were Flynn's lean, powerful thighs, encased in their worn denim. If he looked up—if he tried to meet his eyes—they would be…oh, God, shockingly close, nose to nose, practically, one unthinking inch off a kiss.

He forgot about the dishes. Flynn said, “Look at me,” and his reflexive obedience closed the gap.

Another man's mouth under his own. Thomas sucked in an astonished breath and felt Flynn laugh and choke as it was snatched up from his lungs.

“Sorry,” Thomas mumbled against Flynn's smile. God, Flynn tasted of sea salt. He was so warm. He reached up and placed a hand on Thomas's shoulder—an open hand, no restraint, just a palm circling his clavicle, tenderly round and round the protuberant bone, even when its fingers closed, no restraint. And so the choice was Thomas's, when the hundred reasons why he shouldn't flickered like sheet-lightning through his mind and he leaned hungrily forward anyway, into Flynn's taste of sunlight and salt, the evanescent sweetness of the Riesling.

He moaned, taking hold of the edge of Flynn's T-shirt. His fingers felt clumsy and damp, but Flynn briefly touched the back of his hand in a gesture of assent and suggestion, his mouth opening under Thomas's, slow as a sea anemone. Instinct stirred in Thomas, and he shyly let his tongue press inward, feeling the welcoming flutter of Flynn's before he could recoil at his own daring.

How long since he had touched human skin not brought to him for diagnosis, healing? How long since he had… Oh God, rhetorical bloody questions. Thomas always knew almost to the minute when he had last had sex. A shudder ran through him. “Flynn… Flynn, no. Stop.”

Flynn had closed his eyes, as if in concentration. Now he opened them in concern. “You're pale,” he said. “You all right?”

“Yes. No, of course not.” Now that his mouth was off Flynn's—an inch off, anyway—all he wanted to do was press it back, restore the kiss that had made his heart ache and race. Which, perversely, now he had decided that this was an impossibility, had called up his erection as hot and strong as could be managed in the confines of his cords. God, he ached. He wanted Flynn, wanted to fuck him, be fucked by him—he didn't much care which. “We can't,” he said, his voice unsteady with regret. “You're with someone, and I…I'm screwed up, Flynn, beyond bloody human imagination. Not fit to be with anybody.”

Flynn sat in silence for almost a minute, watching him. He reached up the pads of his fingers and ran them over Thomas's brow. Thomas knew that ineradicable marks of pain had gathered there, and hated them. He didn't mind looking older, but not like that. Flynn didn't seem to mind them, though—was targeting them with his caress. “I know,” he said, gently. “You've told me—some of it, anyway. And it takes a nutter to know one. You must've gathered that I'm not renowned for sanity myself.” He pushed his fingers back from Thomas's temple, into his hair. He smiled. “As for Robert—yeah, you're right. It's a mess, and it's not over. But technically, for tonight at least, he…gave me to you.”

Chapter Five: Turning Tide

Thomas spared one moment to glance over at Belle, who had appeared in the doorway. She could be unpredictable when people touched him. “Belle, bed,” he ordered her hoarsely, and after giving him one look of benign curiosity, she turned herself around and disappeared into the kitchen's shadows.

He was not sure how he had got here. Could not recall any one moment when he had decided to sit up on the sofa, reach round Flynn to grab the back of it and move to straddle him. It wasn't at all his usual MO. He vaguely remembered being considered a good lover, unless that handful of long-ago acquaintances had been lying to him, and he'd never been afraid to initiate. To shift like this, though, powerful, smooth, and kneel across his lap, the gesture explicit, almost—in Thomas's small experience of the genre—bloody pornographic.

Flynn gasped, pupils expanding with excitement once more, their darkness almost drowning the green. This time when Thomas's hands closed on his T-shirt, he arched his back in an explicit gesture of his own, the muscles down his belly contracting into shapely patterns as he drew his shoulders forward.
Yes. Take it off.
But Thomas was not ready for that yet, wanted badly before he did so to run his hands up under the fabric, to touch without seeing the silk-skinned pectorals, to find with blind precision the nipples he'd felt hardening at his first caress. He closed thumb and finger on them, gently squeezing, and felt Flynn leap like a fish beneath him. A hand on his nape—careful still, but this time brooking no resistance—and Thomas let himself plunge back into the interrupted kiss, capturing Flynn's lower lip between his teeth for one instant in the lightest teasing nip before meeting him, mouth to mouth, tongue to tongue, unrestrained now and dead serious.