“I want to feel it,” Alan said quietly. “This all right?”
Jack stared down at him—trapped between Jack’s arms and skewered on Jack’s cock, ravaged and sweaty and lip-bitten, the most arousing sight Jack could imagine.
“Cesare,” he said hoarsely, “I am completely at your mercy.”
One of those expressions like a stone thrown through stained glass passed over Alan’s face. Uneven edges, colour and light. When he spoke, Jack wondered for a blank second if it was possible for a fuck to be so good it destroyed that part of the mind responsible for understanding speech. None of the words were words.
Ah. It wasn’t English at all. Alan was speaking quiet, deliberate Italian.
He’d never slipped into the tongue before: not when Jack was at the Clerkenwell house, not when furious, not when consumed by pain. Not even in the throes of passion. He had utter control over who was allowed to see and hear this part of himself. And now he was showing it to Jack.
“—kiss me,” he finished. “Is what the last part meant.”
Jack’s heart gave a hard thump. “And the rest of it?”
“I’ll translate,” Alan said, and drew Jack down.
Alan’s kiss tasted of something sour and something sweet, and it was flecked with sharpness. Jack’s tongue kept finding teeth, their chins scraped roughly against one another, and every drag of Alan’s lips was as wicked as the way he smiled when he didn’t care to make a good impression. But beyond the sharpness was something dizzying, an abyss of need with no bottom to it. Alan made rough, desperate sounds like he was dying. Like he would die if Jack stopped.
At some point Jack’s softening prick did slip out of Alan entirely, and he broke the kiss to look an inquiry down at Alan. They’d ended up more on their sides, Jack’s leg now heavy across Alan’s body, Alan’s hand buried in Jack’s hair.
When Jack went to remove some more of his weight, Alan grabbed Jack’s topmost arm and pulled it over himself, keeping their bodies pressed together.
“Fuck, I love how big you are,” Alan said. Again sounding pleasure-drunk. “Actually, no. I hate it.” His sigh was palpable against Jack’s chest. “Size and strength, station and wealth. All the advantages possible. Do you know how hard it is to believe someone won’t use any of that against you? To put your heart in someone’s hands, knowing that?” His voice was a mere breeze by the end, hardly audible over the sound of his fingers shifting Jack’s hair against his scalp.
Jack had quite honestly had no idea that hearts were on the table at all.
But he’d shaken apart with his head in this man’s lap and never once feared that Alan might speak a word of it or use it against him. This thing between them was weighty and alive and seductively, terrifyingly easy. They fit in ways they shouldn’t ever have fit. Even when they fought, they fit—there was no mockery falling on soft, miserable ground as there had been with Edwin. Only the knowledge that any volley would be met and thrown back, brighter and better.
Jack could have said: If there are days in the rest of my life when I don’t have you there to pick fights with, they will be the poorer for it.
I could walk into any room, anywhere, and always be glad to see you there.
He said: “I would take your heart between my ribs and guard it like my own. Is there any way I could make you believe it?”
Alan shifted to look at him. His throat moved, swallowing. Naked in Jack’s arms he was as beautiful as frost-tipped grass, or a bruise left by loving hands on eager skin. Untrusting, because he had to be. Because despite all that was easy, there was still so much tipping the scales against them.
“I don’t know,” said Alan. “You’re the magician. Is there?”
The instant denial—I am not—sprang to Jack’s mouth, but died there. He couldn’t say it. Not in this place. Not after what had happened tonight.
And so the next thing he said was a magician’s promise, the familiar rhythm finding him easily.
“I’d put my blood into any oath you care to name,” he said.
In fact—
“Come on.” Jack untangled himself from Alan and sat up. He was still nowhere close to sleepy, and his blood was jubilant in his sated body. “Clean up and get dressed, and come with me.”
33
Alan stole one of Jack’s shirts and a woollen jumper. The clothes hung loose on him, swamping his hands, but his body hugged the heat of recent intimacy to itself as he followed Jack out into the grounds of Cheetham Hall.
The night was punctured by nature sounds that Alan had no hope of recognising. Cheetham Hall’s guidelights were now too weak to leave the Hall itself, so Jack had hunted out a proper handheld lantern with thick glass walls, which cast a small golden pool onto their path up the hill and to the Lady’s Oak.
Jack set the lantern by the base of the tree and seated himself on that low, looping branch that might have been grown for exactly that purpose. Perhaps it was.
Alan sat next to him, closer than he’d have allowed himself to sit before. He felt wildly, insatiably greedy for everything of Jack’s that he was allowed to take, even if part of him still dug in its heels at the idea of taking a damned thing. This, though. The warmth of Jack’s body bleeding through clothing and into his own.
He was so glad to be alive. His blood sang with it.
He tucked a foot up and wrapped his arms around the bent leg. The cold cleanness of the country air was no longer strange. Up here it had the faintest tinge of leaves, and of dirt, and strangely of pepper. The jumper he was wearing added only a vague wool-and-mothballs note; it didn’t smell of Jack. His lordship’s clothes were kept too meticulously for that. The garment was probably aired thoroughly between every wearing. Alan swallowed his ludicrous disappointment.
“What are we doing up here?” he asked eventually.
“This was Elsie’s favourite part of the grounds,” Jack said. “If there’s a place here to make promises, this is it.” He paused and then lifted his own feet, one at a time, to remove shoes and socks. His feet looked very white against the grass. When he spoke, it was still Jack’s bored, deep voice, but he had a similar air to Edwin talking his way through a problem. “Like Violet in Spinet, I never actually put my own blood into this place. My parents did it when we were born—most families don’t bother anymore. It was a choice made on my behalf. As we made a choice for all magicians tonight.”
Perhaps no response or contribution was expected. But Alan had interviewed people who were cagey, and also people who were desperately waiting for the right question to be asked—for the truth to be uncorked.
He said, “Do you think it was the wrong choice?”
A long pause. Really quite long indeed. Jack shifted his bare feet. “No.” He looked at the lantern and stretched out a hand as if to warm it.