Blue-Eyed Stranger, page 13
He’ll realize soon that you’re impossible to love, was all they could manage, though that was bad enough. Just think how much more it’s going to hurt when he leaves. How are you going to manage then?
Speaking of Martin . . . Billy snapped himself out of that potential downward spiral, made himself coffee, and found his phone, leaning a bare hip against the kitchen counter as he speed-dialled Martin’s number. It gave him a tiny frisson of joy to listen to Martin’s sleepy “Martin Deng?” while walking around his flat altogether in the nude.
“Hi,” he said, “it’s me.” That was . . . yeah. For a moment there he’d overlooked the fact that people forgot him when he wasn’t present. Automatically, his lips shaped his own name as he prepared to remind Martin of his existence.
“Billy.” Martin’s sleepy slur warmed and sharpened, and Billy hugged himself with one arm in happiness at the thought that Martin recognised his voice and was glad to hear it. “You okay?”
“I’m fine.” Billy frowned, not sure if he was imagining things or if Martin really did sound down. “How are you?”
“Oh, I’m all right, I suppose.”
No, that was definitely down: surly, self-pitying, borderline aggressive.
He doesn’t want to hear from you. I told you so.
“What’s the matter?”
Martin’s sigh sounded like a distant sea. There was a noise of shuffling—he must be pushing the bedclothes back, maybe getting up. They were both standing alone, naked, disgruntled, and Billy had never felt more acutely the wish that he could be giving someone a hug.
“Three rejections yesterday, and today my severance pay runs out.” Martin’s voice had grown flatter, some of its smooth depths replaced with hollowness. “I could fucking scream, to be honest. Scream and shout and hit something, except I know it wouldn’t help.”
Because it was a good day, Billy understood that it wasn’t about him at all, that Martin was not upset with him. He sighed in relief and then felt guilty about being happy about the way in which Martin was down.
He didn’t think twice before saying, “Listen, I know it’s Friday, but how would it be if you came over? Straight away. We could go into town. There’s a bookshop in Trowchester that might have something about ancient music. I played fiddle at a wedding yesterday, so I have a bit of cash. I could treat you to lunch out.”
Martin sighed again, like a storm wind through a wood. “I should really go and sign on.”
“You can do that on Monday,” Billy insisted, seized by the thought of walking around the city hand in hand with Martin, people looking and envying him, people looking and knowing they belonged together. “I think you ought to know I’m standing here without a stitch of clothes on, thinking about you.”
The flatness in Martin’s tone eased. “Yeah?”
“Yes. Wouldn’t it be better if we were naked together instead of apart?”
Martin laughed. “You’ve got me there. I’ll be around in about an hour and a half, packed for the weekend.”
“I’ll be waiting.”
Kaminski wouldn’t answer the door, Mrs. Webb couldn’t, so Billy judged it safe to pad downstairs later when he heard the sound of an approaching engine and open the door in the nude.
When he came inside, Martin’s expression took a sudden, comical turn from wearily grim to incredulous. His gaze swept Billy from the top of his head to his feet and back up again more lazily as he licked his parted lips. “You are having a good day.”
“Mmm.” Billy chuckled, taking hold of Martin’s arm and tugging him up the stairs. “But still, we’d better not push it.” He opened his door with one hand and shoved Martin in with the other, kicking the door closed while Martin stood bewildered on the living room floor.
Martin looked at him as though he didn’t know what he was seeing, as Billy hooked his fingers under the other man’s T-shirt and pulled it over his head, but the confusion had eased by the time the garment hit the floor. As Billy tackled his belt buckle, Martin stepped in closer so he could rub a hand across Billy’s chest, flicking a nipple with a sting and surge of delight.
“This is you as I first met you,” Martin said, wonderingly. “That cocky, springy bastard that danced a ‘fuck you’ to my whole army. Don’t get me wrong, I love you when you’re quiet, and when you need me, but God, I missed this.”
Billy undid Martin’s trousers, sunk to his knees, pulling them down with him. As he bent his head to unlace Martin’s shoes, Martin laid a hand on his shoulder to support himself and lifted first one foot then the other so Billy could free him of trousers and boxers, shoes and socks.
I love you, Billy thought, swallowing around a sudden lump in his throat, wondering if it had been a slip of the tongue. If it had been meant. If it was only for this Billy and not the other. He rested his cheek against Martin’s thigh a moment, then slid his hands up to get a grip on Martin’s hips, relishing the solid, sturdy strength of them, kissed up Martin’s inner thigh until he could lick the crease between groin and leg, lave Martin’s balls with long smooth strokes of his tongue.
Martin growled low in his chest, and Billy smiled as he was taken by the hair, his face tilted up so he could lick along the shaft of Martin’s prick. He looked up as he sucked it into his mouth, saw Martin gazing down, dazed and flushed and happy. I did that, he thought. Maybe I can’t fight my own sadness, but his doesn’t stand a chance against me.
It was a good feeling. Powerful. He smiled as far as he could without baring his teeth and plunged in, filling his mouth and throat with Martin’s heat, choking himself on cock as he swallowed to get it further down.
Martin cried out, his hips jerking forward, his knees almost giving way. When he caught himself, straightened up, his fingers wound into fists in Billy’s hair, tightening almost painfully. Billy laughed for joy, and Martin cried out again at the vibration around his shaft, holding Billy still and fucking his mouth, gently at first and then wilder as Billy gave him little moaning grunts of encouragement, digging his fingers into Martin’s arse and clinging on tighter.
When Martin came, Billy managed to swallow most of it, just a little trickle escaping from the corner of his mouth, sliding down to pool in the hollow of his collarbone.
“Oh. Oh,” Martin panted, catching his breath, and then he swiped his fingers through the goo, and collapsing down, curling around Billy, he brought him off with long firm strokes of his wet hand, their cum mingling on his fingers as Billy came hard almost instantly at the touch.
Billy snuggled into Martin’s body as it surrounded him, raised his arms to lock around Martin’s waist, tucked his face into Martin’s shoulder, and gave himself up to a long moment of satiated bliss, warm and sticky and safe. Smug too, because for once in his life he was pretty sure he’d done well.
They lay a long time, curled together, blissed out, while Billy enjoyed the sensation of Martin’s breathing as it lifted his chest and belly, rocking Billy to and fro with each inhale and exhale. He must have closed his eyes and drowsed a little, because Martin was shaking him lightly when he opened them again. The carpet was suddenly rough and prickly under his knees, and his spilled cum had turned tacky.
“Hey.” Martin shook him again. “Shower time, before we’re glued together.”
Billy smiled up at him, stretching, feeling as energized as if he’d had a good night’s sleep. “Okay. You scrub my back, and I’ll do yours?”
“And the front too. Call it a special offer.” Martin got stiffly to his feet, helping pull Billy up with him. His eyes had brightened since he walked through the door and the lines of tension on his face had eased.
Billy could imagine it as the face of a pharaoh—the same tip-tilted almond eyes and the strong but elegant lines he’d seen before in the statue of Khafre, on whom the Sphinx was modelled. It gave him a chill to think that maybe, maybe through Martin’s father there really was a link there, back into twenty thousand years of civilized power.
He laughed. “It’s a deal. Then breakfast and then we go out.”
An hour later, still sleek and glowing from the shower, they stepped off the Rosebery Wood bus into the walled market town of Trowchester.
“Who on earth are all of these?” Martin asked, as the fourth dreadlocked, woad-painted aspiring Celt pushed past them, beating a dull rhythm on a heavily painted bodhran.
Billy looked out from the bus stop with a sinking feeling. The place was heaving. A small tribe of Picts, no doubt lost fifteen centuries ago in the depths of an enchanted forest, had reemerged and were sitting on the pavements all around the Salmon of Wisdom fish-and-chip shop. They were clad in colourful rags of clothing probably woven in Nepal. Uniformly, their hair was long and matted and sometimes multicoloured, their skin the hard worn brown of people who do not have regular access to baths.
A man with a beard like Merlin and the caste mark of a Brahmin was lazily playing the didgeridoo, while the bodhran player gamely attempted to accompany him, but couldn’t quite work out the rhythm.
Billy’s carefully honed musicianship winced as he tried to filter it out.
“Oh. It’s coming up to the summer solstice. I forgot.”
“Forgot?” Martin took his elbow, which gave him such a hit of pride and pleasure that he almost didn’t mind when across the street a Scottish piper in full regalia struck up “Molly Malone” on the bagpipes. The piper was perhaps attempting to drown out the didgeridoo, but all that happened was that his rhythm formed a third in the disharmonious, out-of-time racket.
Billy flinched and headed up the street away from them all as fast as humanly possible, Martin trailing after, looking concerned. “Yeah. We have a Bronze Age hill fort, locally known as Wednesday Keep.” He gestured at the skyline just to the right of the castle on its conical hill, and Martin dropped his elbow as he turned to look.
“A hill fort?”
“Don’t you know this stuff? We’re only an hour’s drive away from where you live. It’s practically your back doorstep.”
Rather than take his arm again when they began walking, Martin pushed his hands into his jeans pockets, alternating looking where he was going with little glances up at the mysterious past he couldn’t quite see from here.
The sound of the pipes faded as Billy strode up the old paved high street, but the crowds didn’t thin. A motorcycle gang were revving their engines outside Marks and Spencer, laughing pointedly at the backs of a snake of dancing Hare Krishna devotees, all with hand drums and bells around their ankles.
The noise itched up his back and got itself under his hair, began working down through the layers of his skin. The orbit of his right eye grew tight with the tension that preceded a headache. He dropped closer to Martin, needing his solid, sturdy presence as the world shivered with too much input around him. Martin helped make things quiet.
“History has always been my thing . . .” Martin looked up at him with a rueful smile. “But I’ve mostly ignored geography. Has there been a dig there? Is there a museum?”
“Both.” A car went by with its windows open and the relentless beat of dubstep pulsing out, shaking the air around Billy, shaking the particles that made up his body. Out of time. Out of time with everything else. He was beginning to feel sick.
He bowed forward and pressed his hands over his ears, but all that did was bring to mind how bright everything was. Planters hung off the lampposts up the street, garish with flowers. All the windows glittered. The clothes outside the hippy shops were covered in flames where stitched-on mirrors reflected the glaring sky. The colours of the cobbles were supersaturated, and he could see every particle of dirt like a boulder, jagged-edged and in his way.
“Billy?” Martin took his arm again, which helped. He tried sliding his hand up, but he had barely got his fingers intertwined with Martin’s before Martin was pulling away, looking around himself as if afraid he’d been spotted doing something dire.
Right, Billy thought, remembering with a shock of desolation, he’s ashamed of me. He’s ashamed to have anyone see that he’s with me. And who can blame him?
He did, though. He shut his eyes and firmed his mouth and waited in his own private darkness for disappointment and overload to ease up alike.
“Billy, are you okay?”
Fat lot you care, Billy thought, as Martin’s arm came around his waist. Not like a lover—that would have been welcome—but like a man supporting his mate when he’s too drunk or high to walk on his own.
They shambled forward, through an oppressive noise-scape in which the shrill tones of an ice-cream van jarred against Radio 2’s Golden Hour and canned wolf song and panpipes and fifty different conversations at once and footsteps and snapping flags overhead and two jets high in the summer sky and pub jukebox music and car engines and a horn and the bagpiper still droning, and someone saying something about bookshops and how could they expect him to filter it all out and make sense of it when it was under his fucking skin and under his skull and inside his bones and he couldn’t, he couldn’t . . .
He drove a foot hard into some kind of step. “Come on, up here,” Martin said quietly, his voice still blessedly rounded and right. Billy raised his foot, passed over some kind of threshold. The light shining in his face dimmed and some of the tense, aching panic passed out of his muscles. Then there was a definite, pointed snick, and the cacophony stopped.
Taking his hands away from his ears, he found he could still hear it, reduced to a distant, manageable murmur. He covered his eyes instead and sucked in the scent of dehumidified air and coconut matting, coffee and paper and books.
Martin guided him across a second threshold and then pushed him down onto a padded bench, where he bent forward, pulled his knees up, and hugged himself tight, taking long, deep breaths of relief.
“I’m sorry,” Martin murmured to someone. It sounded like he was standing between the newcomer and Billy, guardian-like and protective. “It was just a little . . . hectic, I think.”
“Oh, Lord, it’s a zoo out there,” came a man’s voice in reply. The faint Irish accent, lilting and amused, soothed down some of Billy’s raised prickles. He began to uncurl. “I don’t blame you at all. You’ll be wanting something to drink, I expect. Let me see what I have.”
“That’s very kind of you,” said Martin, and the stranger laughed.
“No, no. It’s not kindness, I assure you. I’m just guilting you into buying a book before you leave. I make no bones about that.”
Billy took another breath of the soft air and opened his eyes in time to catch the disappearance of a small, dapper-looking man as he ducked through to the hallway and the flight of steps there. Then Martin lowered himself onto the window seat where Billy had been deposited. Looking round first to make sure they were alone, he took Billy’s hands in his.
It would have been a more touching gesture if it hadn’t been so furtive, but something inside Billy unfurled at it regardless.
“Are you all right?”
Billy nodded, feeling more solid by the second, the bookshop’s cool silence soothing his aching head and shredded nerves. He tried his voice, and it held firm. “Yes. It was a bit much but . . . Sorry. I was telling you about the hill fort. There’s a dig going on up there now—”
“I would love to take part in one of those.” Martin shuffled closer, so that Billy could put his head down on his shoulder. “It must be so exciting, turning up things that no one has touched but you for thousands of years.”
“Mmm.” Even Martin was not immune to interrupting him, apparently, but he was still too grateful for the reprieve to object. “There’s also a spring up there, which some crackpot in Victorian times claimed was where the waters of Urd’s well push up from the underworld.”
As expected, Martin gave him a sceptical grimace, his look of frozen worry beginning to melt back into enjoyment. “I’m pretty sure there’s no mention of that in the sagas.”
Billy gave a little huff of amusement, pleased to find it didn’t aggravate his head. The ache was fading. He was going to be fine. “Maybe not, but various movements got hold of the idea in the sixties, so now it’s a place of pilgrimage. We’re not quite Glastonbury yet, but we’re getting there.”
Martin laughed too, tilting his head so that his cheek rested against Billy’s hair. “So that’s why your little town’s full of ‘alternative’ types? I rather like it, to be honest. It’s interesting.”
“They’re book lovers, most of them. The more obscure the better. Free thinkers. You have to admire that in a man.”
Billy jumped and then scowled as Martin let go of his hands and scrambled away to put a modest foot of distance between them. The stranger, having reappeared in a silence appropriate for an assassin, raised his eyebrows and gave Billy a sympathetic look. “I’m sorry to startle you. Here, drinks.”
They smelled of hedgerows. Elderflower cordial, with bubbles fizzing over the surface of the pale-yellow liquid. They tasted sweet and green, as cooling as the bookshop’s shade.
“Better?” The little man’s mossy green eyes watched them both with amusement. Faded freckles dusted the bridge of his aquiline nose and were echoed on his spotted waistcoat. “Then can I interest you in a book? I run the best—though sadly the only—gay book club in Trowchester if you happen to have nothing to do on a Friday evening.”
Billy caught the man’s eye and couldn’t help smiling at the obvious support, the well-executed needling. Ignoring Martin’s obvious discomfort, he held out his hand to be shaken. “Billy Wright. I live in Rosebery Wood, but I might just do that if I can make the buses work.”
“Fintan Hulme.” The man gathered up the bookshop with a gesture. “This is my kingdom, in which lovers are always welcome.”
Ooh, rub it in, Billy thought as he watched Martin’s face grow rigid, and then crumple into hot embarrassment. “Thank you,” he said. “It’s nice. It’s so nice, when people aren’t ashamed of you.”
He felt a certain amount of unworthy glee when Martin frowned at that, because he didn’t want to be invisible, relegated to the shadows like a dirty secret. But then he also felt guilty because the purpose of today was not to make Martin feel worse.
