Edwin nodded. His eyes were dark as dusk and he looked drunk. Effortfully, Robin held himself still. He was aware of his size in comparison to Edwin’s, aware of the muscles of his arms and chest and legs. He had a near-delirious moment of knowing how this must feel from Edwin’s perspective: being both absolutely trapped and absolutely secure.
Then Edwin lifted his head and kissed Robin, very light, finding Robin’s mouth and landing a little off-centre. Warmth like summer noon flooded through Robin and he chased the kiss down to the pillow, his cock sinking further into Edwin, inch by inch. He was greedy; he took every sound of Edwin’s into his own mouth, a kiss that demanded all of Edwin’s attention.
Then he was all the way in, the two of them flush together. Robin drew out, perhaps halfway. He shoved in again at once, harder than he’d meant to, and Edwin gave a shout that was nearly a sob. And everything began to blur.
Who needed magic for this? Pleasure shot through Robin as though painted on his skin at every point of contact; as though something older and more guttural than magic was struck, tinder to flint, by his hands at Edwin’s wrists, by the sudden and wonderful clench of Edwin’s legs lifting to wrap around his back, driving him further in. All of these mingled with the sensation of fucking, liquid heat winding tight in his groin whenever he sank into the slicked grip of Edwin’s body.
Sweat ran into Robin’s eyes and stung them. He wouldn’t have closed them for the world. Edwin was unravelling fully beneath him, thrust after brutal thrust. Edwin’s fair head tossed back and forth in snaps. Edwin’s own sweat gathered in the dip of his throat as he made short, ragged gasps that became ever more frantic, and which seemed to find their way directly to Robin’s cock.
Robin had wanted to hold out, to wring Edwin’s orgasm from him first, but his own came in a rush that couldn’t be stopped, like fire from Edwin’s hands engulfing dry thorns, hotter and wilder than anything had been before. Robin gasped, and sucked in a breath that nearly hurt, as his body brimmed with fading pleasure.
“Robin,” Edwin was saying, broken and writhing beneath him, “Robin.”
Robin wrenched his wits back together. He wanted to see this happen. He released one wrist, wrapped his hand around Edwin’s cock and stroked once, twice, three times, rocking his hips with the same rhythm—and Edwin’s eyes flew open, startled and blue and sure.
He was surprisingly quiet when he came, as though all the noise had been wrung out of him already. In the jubilant flare of the candlelight he was the loveliest thing Robin had ever seen.
“Good morning, Edwin.”
“Good morning, Adelaide. Is he in?” Edwin inquired, as though the door into the Office of Special Domestic Affairs and Complaints weren’t flung wide open, and as though he couldn’t hear the sound of Robin’s boot thumping against the leg of the desk.
They were still professionals, after all.
“Don’t be daft,” said Adelaide Morrissey, who had an alarming tendency to treat one like a childhood intimate as soon as one agreed to be on first-name terms. Robin had said she treated them like siblings; Edwin had argued that Robin was coming from a position of possessing an unfairly superior example of a sibling.
Robin had made a face and accused Edwin, amiably, of playing the lawyer just because his brother was a murdering sadist.
“Edwin!” Robin called now. “Is that you? It’s past nine, you’re late.”
Edwin hung up his coat and hat, and came into the office, Adelaide on his heels. Robin was seated on the desk. He’d recently passed out of the mourning period, which meant they were all being treated to Robin’s startling—and yet absolutely unsurprising—fondness for colour. In a building full of civil servants whose ventures out of the usual black-and-white office attire were constrained to the occasional necktie in respectable shades of olive and navy, Robin was the man wearing a maroon waistcoat with gold buttons. He looked as bright and warm as ever. Edwin nearly tripped on the edge of the rug, simply enjoying the sight of him, and enjoying even more the tiny kernel of possession inside him that split and sent out a green shoot of happiness. Mine. This one’s mine.
“I lost track of time at breakfast. I was reading,” said Edwin.
Adelaide mimed genteel shock. Robin grinned. “The diaries again? Any leads on the cup and the knife?”
“It’d be going a lot faster if she hadn’t insisted on using code names for everything, as though she were some sort of intelligence agent engaged in high-level treason,” said Edwin ruefully. “Even in her private diaries. Not that I’m surprised.”
Edwin was learning that Flora Sutton had been as busy and brilliant as she was untrusting and suspicious. In the previous century, when women were even less likely to be taught anything in the way of systematic magic, she and three of her friends had formed a kind of ladies’ club and simply . . . done it themselves. They’d looked into the land as a source of magic, and thus into the story of the Last Contract, and spent years tracking the items to a medieval church in a small town in Yorkshire. And then years more trying to erase that fact, because they’d realised what could be done with the contract by those without scruples.
“Speaking of magical items.” Robin pulled a shilling from his pocket and held it out. “My very own pass token for the Barrel.”
“You had another meeting? How did this one go?”
Robin shrugged. “I gave them enough excruciating details about that vision of a horse race that I nearly bored myself to death. That chap Knox they’ve roped in as my handler looked rather glad to see the back of me, by the end of it.” Robin’s visions had become much less frequent since he’d begun to learn the trick of allowing them in at will. He still only had the barest amount of control over what he would see. They were working on it, as on so many things.
“I saw that blond woman again,” Robin added. “I’m thinking of giving her a name, for reference—how do we feel about Harriet? She was on a ship. One of those big ocean liners. Just as Lord Hawthorn was, the first time I saw him.”
Edwin had been on a ferry exactly once in his life and had felt the shade of green he’d turned. “I’m not convinced that any boats are in my future,” he said. “And I’d prefer if Hawthorn wasn’t either.”
Robin smiled. “I’ll tell you at once if I ever see myself punching him, how’s that?”
“Could you pretend you did see that, and describe it for me in excruciating detail?”
“Could you instead set the violent fantasies aside until morning tea?” said Adelaide. “And ditto for any imminent lectures on liminality, thank you, Edwin. They’re easier to digest when delivered with biscuits.”
Liminal spaces were the basis of Flora Sutton’s system of magical practice, and Edwin was still teasing out the extent to which she and her friends had learned it in pieces or developed it themselves. Life and death. Night and day—oh, that too had been in that silly poem all along. The gifts of the dawn. Seasons and solstices. It was all highly agricultural. Edwin was having to develop a keen interest in gardening to follow along with her notes.
And Edwin had thought, at one time, that there was nobody in England doing truly original work.