Perfect Duet's paid account and the Oakum Meme (II)
Some lovely person was so kind to gift perfect_duet with two months of paid time. Whoever it was, please pm me, so I can thank you properly. :D The gift makes the Oakum Meme so much easier because it brought the subject headers back.
So, once more onto the breach:
Here at this post you will find all prompts/requests we have so far received on LJ and on DW ( Read more... )
So, once more onto the breach:
Here at this post you will find all prompts/requests we have so far received on LJ and on DW ( Read more... )
“I shall send Pardsham the sample as soon as ever you can permit the ship to re-establish contact with the mainland,” Stephen said. “He was most obliging and I should be glad to make him such a handsome present.”
Jack nodded amicably with the last of his waking mind and drifted gently into a doze as Stephen’s discourse ran on through xerophytes and birds’-egg colouration to the preservation of pickled barnacles. He woke an unknown time later at the thud and scuffle of a puffin rejoining its mate in a rabbit-burrow not a yard distant, and as he listened he remembered with sudden clarity waking early at the Red Lion, and the noise that had woken him then. It had seemed to come from the adjacent chamber, and it had been not unlike the rhythmic thumping and muffled gasps of his own encounter with Betsey the previous evening. A handsome present followed by a grateful farewell, perhaps? He scratched himself thoughtfully.
“Did I not advise you to forbear from scratching, for all love?” said Stephen waspishly. “You will accomplish nothing but to exacerbate the pruritus.”
“Oh, there are so few pleasures left to a grizzled fellow like me, Stephen. You must allow me a good old scratch now and then,” Jack said, and paused for a moment, slightly puzzled. Then he remembered why the phrase was familiar, and his face cracked in a huge grin. He glanced at Stephen and saw that he was enjoying the joke in his own way, lips pursed and expression disapproving. Jack laughed aloud, stretched out his limbs and sighed. “But really, Stephen, I think we must return to the ship and save poor Tom the trouble of sending a party after us. Besides, I begin to think fondly of my dinner.”
Stephen flung out a limp arm to still him. “Ten minutes, I beg of you, Jack. You cannot be hungrier than I, in my unbreakfasted state. Ten more minutes.”
“By all means.” Jack laid his head back down and closed his eyes. Even through his eyelids he was half-dazed by the sunshine’s orange glare; his skin must already be flushed with sunburn, and against his side the knuckles of Stephen’s outstretched hand felt like embers. For a while he lay still, keeping his gaze on a seagull far overhead, neither turning his head nor reacting, though the pressure of the fingers irritated him. One could not say to a friend ‘take your hand away’ without insulting him, an innocent gesture defiled, but as soon as he tried to forget it, that slight touch seemed to burn worse than the ant-bites had. Annoyance made his heart-rate climb; surely Stephen must feel the blood beating against his skin, or hear the quickening of his breath.
Despite himself, he thought again of the inn at Shelmerston and of the barmaid’s breath in his ear, how his own breathing had caught in his chest and his whole being had been flooded and tense with a joyful lust. And then the yielding of her lips, the solidity of a body pressed against his, its fierce urgency, hands grasping at him, pawing at his clothes, pulling him in and further in, and the soft gasps of pleasure. And then those other noises, later on: the moan through the wainscoting, the unearthly abandonment of it, mixed with his own half-waking arousal, how he had... he must have known it was Stephen, even if his conscious self had not admitted the knowledge, and he had listened, and through all his aversion at least part of his mind wished he had been the one provoking that moan, that whimpering, that he had been the one who had been wanted, and when he had touched himself it had not been the barmaid he had thought of, after all.
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There was a weight on his shoulder, Stephen’s hand, that touch again.
For a lurching moment Jack thought he might be sick. To be so brought by the lee-his eyes were hot with the shame of it. He ought to try for a convenient excuse, but could not bear to, not when Stephen might read the truth in his eyes. He sagged over the gunwale. If Stephen knew, if he understood, it would be the end of everything, the end of this precarious balance they had maintained for a dozen years by never acknowledging its fragility. To turn around now would be to watch it collapse.
He felt Stephen’s fingertips curl very softly into the hollow above his collarbone.
He stood another moment, waiting motionless as the world shifted and he found himself unchanged. It might, he realised with wary bewilderment, be possible to live with this. It might even-
“Jack?” said Stephen, and the question was so obvious that Jack could not believe it had never been spoken aloud before, nor that he had waited for it to be.
He turned and pulled Stephen roughly against him, with no time for anything but fierceness after so much time lost. One hand was in Stephen’s hair, forcing his head back to be kissed, the other tearing at Stephen’s waistband. He would have been shocked at the force of the longing, if there had been room in his mind for shock, but the one unthinkable thought was excluding all others.
They might only have a few minutes of privacy left to them, but those few minutes would be worth the living.
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What a beautiful, sensuous and wholly believable thing this is. I love the details of Jack scratching, the touch of Stephen's hand, the sun and plants ... the stillness of it all.
It's just wonderful. Thank you for posting it.
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But as you showed well, the change is undoubtedly for the better of them. :D
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But if you would like to write part 5, by all means go for it! :-D
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But 'and then they fucked like bunnies' just doesn't sound as elegant next to your lovely prose!
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It's... efficient :-D
Tho' you have been more prolix in the past. Not, obviously, that I know who you are, as we are all utterly anonymous.
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If there were more than three or four of us here, it might even work! Possibly there are a few lurkers out there who don't know who's who???
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*sighs*
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