Cabin Pressure fic: Wonder By Wonder, R, Martin/Douglas
Title: Wonder By Wonder
Fandom & Pairing: Cabin Pressure, Martin/Douglas
Rating: R
Warnings: none
Genre: humour
Word Count: Around 10 900
Beta: the ever obliging imachar
Author's Note: Written for this prompt on the Cabin Pressure prompt meme: I've read a lot of lovely fic with Douglas admiring Martin's appearance but can we have some Martin appreciating his First Officer?
Thanks to Anon on the prompt meme chatter post for suggesting the song Douglas sings to Martin.
Summary: Martin has some things to say on the subject of one Douglas Richardson. He would like to make it clear that he doesn't like Douglas, he definitely doesn't have a crush on Douglas, and he absolutely isn't gay. Not even a little bit.
Honestly, the whole thing was desperately unfair. It wasn't as if his life wasn't hard enough already without adding this on top. And he didn't even like Douglas. No really, he didn't. He'd even made a list of all the reasons why he didn't. At the top of the list was Qikiqtarjuaq. In fact, despite the difficulty of spelling it, Qikiqtarjuaq reappeared a number of times in the list, sometimes underscored and coloured in with a pink highlighter pen.
And then Douglas would do that thing where he half turned towards Martin with the edge of his mouth crooked up in a shadow of a smile and gleam of mischief in his deep brown eyes and say in his velvet voice so Captain and the list would crumble to ash like a vampire caught in the first rays of the rising sun, and he was oh so fucked.
It hadn't happened all at once. It had snuck up on him in an entirely unsportmanslike manner, positively cowardly in the way it had ambushed him an inch a time and alright so hunting metaphors weren't his strong point, he was a pilot, what did you expect? So maybe it had caught him like a rising cloud, just the odd misty tendril across a clear blue sky, until suddenly he was enveloped by it with nothing but the artificial horizon to show him which way was up and sinking feeling that even there he couldn't trust G-ERTI's electronics.
He hadn't thought much of Douglas when they'd first met up. Really, he hadn't. The man was smug and patronising and full of himself, and frankly a bit tubby around the middle - oh yes, he was - and those wings of hair on either side of his face were more than a bit ridiculous on a man of his age. And he really really didn't understand the concept of the chain of command or of the respect due to a superior officer or to be honest the concept of respect at all. He was full of it, that's what he was, and Martin had no time for such unprofessional attitudes.
And then he'd watched Douglas land G-ERTI. And yes, alright, Martin did think of G-ERTI as a her and he did have opinions about her personality and he did want her to like him - not that he'd ever tell anyone any of this - but that was still absolutely no excuse for Douglas to seduce her. He has mentioned how Douglas just doesn't understand the concept of respect, has he not?
Martin had thought of her at that point as a bit of an avatar of Carolyn, getting on in years, rather crotchety in her behaviour, but basically sound and sensible. And then Douglas had treated her like a virgin bride - or frankly rather less than virgin, she and Douglas had seemed to be on very intimate terms, given the way Douglas had caressed her controls and masterfully flicked her switches and cooed to her in an undertone as he coaxed her through crosswinds and awkward turns and brought her down as gently as a butterfly landing on a rosebud. Not that Martin was in any sense jealous of Douglas and G-ERTI, of course not, that would clearly be nonsensical, and he prided himself on being a rational adult.
But you have to understand, it was Douglas's hands. That was where the rot started, looking back he was sure of it. His hands were big, like the rest of him, but not awkwardly so. His fingers were long and dexterous and so certain in their movements as they manipulated G-ERTI's controls. Martin would watch those hands out of the corner of his eye, watch their confident authority when Douglas was in control, watch them weave patterns in the air when Douglas telling tall stories, watch them beat out a rhythm on the console when Douglas was lost in music in his own head.
And yes, just possibly, he might have wondered what it would feel like to be the one being gently controlled by those hands, but he doesn't think about that often, you understand, just now and then, on a whim, nothing to worry about. Because if he thought about it often, well that would be gay, and Martin is definitely definitely not gay. No he's not.
Still, if it was just the hands, he'd be able to cope. After all, no sensible person was going to be put off their stride by a pair of hands, and Martin privately considered himself to be rather more sensible than anyone else who worked at MJN Air. But there was the voice and he really did feel that the voice was a low blow, the voice just wasn't fair.
Believe it or not, he hadn't noticed at first. After all he wasn't the sort of chap who went around having opinions about other men's voices, that would just be strange. The matter had been brought to his attention a few weeks after he started flying for MJN, by a hen party they were ferrying to Dubrovnik. That was back in the days when he still thought hen parties were a lovely idea - friends gathering together to wish one of their number well in a rite of life. Now of course he knows them to be the work of the devil that they are.
But leaving that to one side, he and Douglas had been waiting on the tarmac to welcome the honoured - which he was learning was a Carolyn euphemism for paying-through-the-nose - guests. It went the way it usually did, although back then he'd yet to realise just how painfully usual it would become. The girls took Douglas for captain, Martin spluttered and stammered indignantly as he corrected them, Douglas stepped in effortlessly to smooth everything over and the world kept turning. Except when Douglas did his thing the girls all began to giggle and one said oh my god, that voice and another said oooh, captain, you can give me orders any time and a third began to fan herself exaggeratedly, and Douglas just smirked at then all in that infuriating way of his.
Martin had been appalled, women these days, such utterly shameless behaviour, what would their mothers think? Although he gave up on that line of thought once they'd flown a few groups of middle-aged my-god-did-I-screw-him-in-the-divorce parties and he'd discovered exactly what the mothers thought of Douglas's honeyed tones.
Anyway, the point is that once it had been pointed out that Douglas's voice was basically a aphrodisiac on legs, there was no unknowing that fact - or unhearing it. In fact he had to hear it every damned day, hear it as Douglas teased and taunted, or gave crisp orders, or hummed to himself. Hear the dark chocolate and smooth rum tones call him Captain and sir and even on occasion supreme commander and sure, to start with, it had been so heavily laced with derision that it wasn't a problem.
But since then, as they'd slowly got to know each other, there'd gradually been less disdain and more teasing, until there was almost an easy affection in Douglas's sir. Of course what there still wasn't, and apparently never would be, was any respect or any intention to follow orders but Martin was coming to realise that you couldn't have everything. These days his standards of command had fallen so appallingly far that as long as Douglas wasn't actively strafing polar bears, Martin was reasonably happy.
So all in all, Martin might've slowly come to terms with the voice if it hadn't been for the singing. The first time Douglas had casually burst into song, Martin had been confounded. The first time Douglas had asked him to sing along and then declared himself approving of Martin's voice, he'd been left with strange fluttery feelings in his stomach that had apparently never entirely gone away. In fact he still kept his memory of the two them singing We're Busy Doing Nothing as a special place to go to when he was feeling particularly down.
Now, you mustn't think that he was getting sentimental about Douglas, good Lord, of course not. It was just a, you know, a connoisseurs' thing, being able to appreciate a beautiful voice, just part of being a man of the world. Although the piano - the piano really did take it a step too far and it didn't help that Martin had been at a bit of a low-point at the time. Ankle broken, customer waiting, directions left behind, Arthur's yellow car! an incessant echo in his head and Douglas... serenading their boss.
That voice wrapped around Italian words for love, those fingers skimming effortlessly over the keys - when that night Douglas's voice had followed him into his dreams, and those fingers had played a very personal sonata across his skin, he knew for sure that some deity, somewhere up there, had it in for him in an excruciatingly personal way. He has mentioned, has he not, that it just isn't fair?
Nevertheless, Martin might have been able to cope with the potent combination of hands and voice if it hadn't been for the size. Admiring the hands, that was just, just, oh you know, admiration for Douglas's competence as a pilot and while the man might have a curious blind spot over risk assessment and should never be let loose with a jet in the Arctic, no one could deny that he was a very fine pilot indeed. Martin was an adult, he could give credit where credit was due, so nothing to worry about there.
And the voice, well, Douglas clearly had a gift in that department and it would be churlish to pretend otherwise. He might resent the sheer abundance of Douglas's gifts just a teeny tiny bit, it was as if God had accidentally tripped over a bucket of talents he was supposed to be doling out one by one and the entire contents had cascaded onto the head of one frankly underserving Douglas Richardson, but what could you do? Douglas's voice was deep amber honey on toast and there was no getting away from it. Anyway, it did harmonise rather nicely with Martin's so he could always console himself with that.
But the size thing, now that was patently utterly unfair. Can we please be clear about this? Martin was not short. No, he was not. He was only a little under the height of the average British male and to be honest he suspected that the average was skewed unfairly high by a few outrageous outliers at the seven foot end who should be shipped off to the USA to play basketball and so taken out of the reckoning altogether.
Martin was quite tall enough, thank you very much, and the only reason that wasn't apparent was that Arthur and Douglas were both over that magic marker of masculinity, the six-foot line, and in his opinion it was utterly wasted on both of them. But the trouble with Douglas - one of many troubles with Douglas, the man was infuriatingly troublesome - was that he wasn't just tall, he was big.
Martin hadn't really noticed it at first, had just observed that here was a pilot who perhaps needed to do a little more exercise than stroll from the door of his Lexus to the steps of the plane and who wouldn't be much good should he ever need to shift furniture to supplement his living. And yes, alright, there might have been just a sliver of envy that Douglas filled out his uniform jacket with such easy authority, when Martin's hung on him as if he was a scarecrow dressed up to frighten off the birds.
But the thing was G-ERTI was really not very big. To call the flight deck snug would be generous and the passage into the galley was pretty narrow and Martin seemed to spend an unconscionable amount of time squeezing past Douglas one way or another, reminded every time just how broad his chest and shoulders were, and what an imposing presence he had. And don't get him started about Douglas's habit of leaning over his shoulder, one broad hand on the back of his chair, mocking Martin about studying flight manuals in the captain's seat or doing paperwork in the portacabin, his breath a warm whisper on Martin's neck and his bulk a comforting heat sheltering Martin's back.
Not that he thought about being protected by Douglas, no, no, he absolutely didn't. He was a grown man, a qualified professional, and it wasn't as if he often curled up in his bed in the middle of the night, feeling vulnerable and lonely and desperately wishing that a safe solid presence could be spooned around him, sheltering him from the trials of his daily life while whispering warm words of approval in a honey-drenched voice... Surely everyone had something they used to get them through the dark hours of the early morning and Martin really didn't consider that it was anything he needed to be analysing in the bright light of day, furniture to deliver, planes to fly, no time to waste on pointless introspection.
So Martin could cope with it all, he really could, he'd had a lot of practising coping in his life, he could deal with the hands and the voice and the size, if only he didn't keep getting tripped up by the unanticipated details - like the smell of Douglas. He has mentioned, has he not, the squeezing past Douglas to get in and out of the flight deck thing. And somehow in the process of squeezing, he'd become aware that his co-pilot had a very particular scent, a soft warm scent that seemed to linger in the cockpit even after Douglas had left.
Martin had sneaked a peek into Douglas's toiletry bag once when they'd shared a room on layover and found the bottle of Givenchy Monsieur, a slightly old-fashioned scent targeted at manly men, and once Martin knew what it was he could pick up the hints of lavender and sandalwood and musk, but what was in the bottle bore only a passing resemblance to the smell of Douglas, a unique blend of the cologne and his natural scent, melted together by the heat of his body....
Yes, well, suffice it to say that Douglas's scent was disconcertingly distracting, but the fact that the scarf the first officer had worn through much of that cold snap last winter had somehow ended up in Martin's attic and he kept forgetting to return it, well, that was the merest of coincidence and had no bearing on anything.
The colour of Douglas's eyes was another thing that caught him off-guard at times. Martin was not a man to go around staring into other people's eyes, he couldn't tell you the colour of Carolyn's or Arthur's, but somehow he might have noticed that Douglas had deep brown eyes, deep velvet brown, Belgian chocolate brown, dark warm brown and his eyes crinkled at the edges when he teased and lit up when he laughed and Martin was pretty sure that he really shouldn't be quite so taken with another man's eyes, and oh god, he was so fucked. Because it was hard to argue that it wasn't just a teeny, tiny bit gay to buy expensive chocolate that he couldn't really afford just because it was the same colour as his male co-worker's eyes, and then lie in bed eating it very slowly while thinking about dexterous hands and broad shoulders and musky scent and that voice.
Alright, alright, he could admit it, maybe, just maybe, he wasn't entirely, 100 percent straight, but that was okay these days, wasn't it? That was being in touch with your feminine side, being a coolly self-confident metrosexual professional, being sophisticated enough to accept the inherent fluidity of human sexuality. Hadn't that pervy American sex researcher said there was a scale, 0 to 6 or something, and Martin had always thought he was firmly at one end of it, 0 or 6, he could never remember which way round it went, but firmly heterosexual nonetheless.
And maybe it wasn't quite as firmly firm as he had once thought but it wasn't as if it was anything much, just sneaking an occasional glance and after all everybody agreed - with Douglas as the chief agree-er, of course - that Douglas was a particularly fine specimen. He wasn't even really bi-sexual, just a touch, what was the word, he'd seen it in a women's magazine abandoned on the plane once - heteroflexible! That was it. That would be okay, he could live with that. But what he definitely wasn't was gay.
Not that he had anything against gay people, you understand, some of his best friends were gay people. Or he was sure they would have been if he'd had best friends, or any friends at all really, or if he'd ever met any gay people, Fitton not really being a bustling cosmopolitan community and Martin not having a lot of time free for a social life. One of the students might be gay, what with all the metalwear in his face and the plethora of tattoos, and those jeans hanging off his arse-crack but then again maybe that was just what was fashionable these days, Martin really couldn't tell.
And it wasn't that he thought there was any wrong with gay people, each to their own, anyone lucky enough to find love should be able to celebrate it, in his opinion. It was just that, well, if he was being absolutely honest, his life was just so damn hard already. He wasn't the brightest bulb in the box, as his dad had so often told him, and he was a ridiculous skinny little runt of a thing, as Simon had frequently reminded him, and he was obsessed with a profession that really wasn't for their kind of people, as Caitlin had kindly, repeatedly, pointed out.
His boss openly, cheerfully, despised him, and his junior pilot was older, a better pilot and far more charismatic than he was. Admittedly his steward thought he was brilliant but then Arthur thought just about anyone other than his dad was brilliant and when you considered just what an arse Gordon was, that set the bar pretty low, not much of a compliment really. He really, really hoped that there wasn't a supreme being and that the entire universe was just an utterly random happenstance, because if there was somebody up there then that would mean all his troubles were deliberately inflicted and if that was the case, he'd have some very strong words to say to someone should he ever arrive at anything resembling pearly gates.
He just wanted to be normal, nice and normal in an ordinary sort of way, decent job, decent wage, a few friends, a wife and perhaps a cat. Maybe not kids, he wasn't sure about kids, they made him nervous and he never knew what to say to them. He knew this all seemed to come naturally to most people, but to him it all felt like a bit of a tall order. He wasn't much good at being a heterosexual bloke, he did realise that, he never knew how to talk to women, what on earth were you supposed to say and why did it always feel as if they were laughing at him before he'd even opened his mouth?
He'd thought Hester was amazing, he really had, but he'd been a fan ever since he'd seen Fardels Bear, you have seen her in that right? She was, to borrow a phrase, brilliant! Linda, well, that had been pretty embarrassing, he'd hardly even noticed she was a woman, so focused was he on getting his CV to one of the Cal Air pilots, and then of course Douglas had to bring it up and then he had to do something, and honestly he'd been trying to impress Douglas more than he'd been trying to impress Linda. And that had all worked out about as well as it normally did for him.
So given all that, he just knew he'd be utterly appalling at being a gay bloke, didn't they all need to be buff and toned and sexually voracious? Weren't they supposed to be worse than girls for being all about youth and beauty? Eventually some girl might be desperate enough for a husband to look at him twice, but there was no chance of him ever finding a nice boy.
So obviously it was in no sense in Martin's best interests, or any interests at all really, to be obsessed with just how devastatingly charismatic his co-pilot was. His three-times married, stewardess-count into four figures, hostie in every port, the Oxford dictionary definition of heterosexual, so straight you could use him as a spirit level, co-pilot. And even if, by some extraordinary chance, Douglas did turn out to bend in the breeze on occasion, it wasn't as if Martin was ever going to get a look-in.
Not when Douglas could snap his fingers at any of the young steward twinks they encountered waggling their tightly uniformed arses in every airport, or tip the wink at the likes of Herc, all smooth confidence and movie-star looks, and the two of them could seduce each other with those velvet voices of theirs.... no, no, he was not going to think about Douglas and Herc, absolutely, definitely not. Carolyn would rise up in his nightmares - even more so than she did routinely, that is - and remove his eyeballs with a teaspoon.
Therefore, best all round not to waste any time fixating on his first officer, and Martin could have stuck with that, he really could, he was good at being disciplined and well experienced at not getting what he wanted in life - if it hadn't been for the hair. Again, the hair was one of those odd things that caught him unaware over time. After all, the hairstyle was frankly ridiculous, those floppy wings that framed Douglas's face. Martin's dad had always said - and Martin was entirely in agreement with him on this point - that the only suitable hairstyle for a professional man was short-back-and-sides. Martin kept his own hair closely clipped, not least because it helped to keep his rather girly curls out of sight, and he considered any man who didn't ridiculously affected.
But the trouble with those wings was they did tend to get dishevelled and flop forward over Douglas's forehead and then he'd have to push them back by running his long fingers through that gorgeously thick salt-and-pepper hair and Martin's eyes would follow those fingers and he'd find himself wondering what would happen if he leaned across the cockpit and took care of the dishevelment himself and let those silky strands tickle across his own palms.... Yes, so, well, the hair was a problem, that much was clear.
And it had become even more of a problem when it had finally dawned on Martin that all that lovely hair on Douglas's head went with being rather generously furry elsewhere. It wasn't something he'd ever thought about much, with his own chest so naturally hairless it would have driven a professional waxer to tears, and it wasn't as if he ever got the chance to see Douglas in anything less than his short-sleeved uniform shirt. Or at least he hadn't until Carolyn had gone on yet another economising drive and decided they could share a hotel room.
Douglas's righteous fury had actually been quite funny to behold - Martin could really appreciate the creative use of language when it wasn't aimed directly at himself - and Douglas's epic sulk that followed once Carolyn had proved herself yet again to be an utterly immovable object that rendered her first officer's irresistible force as futile as a spring breeze, had left Martin in rather a good mood. Until Douglas had strode out of the shower, still muttering furiously to himself, dressed in nothing but a towel, and given how cheap the hotel was, it wasn't a very generously sized towel either. Martin was ashamed to admit that he may actually have squeaked and Douglas had shot him a nasty look and claimed that the bathroom was so small you couldn't swing a mouse in it and he was going to get dressed where he had room to manoeuvre, thank you very much.
And Martin had nodded breathlessly and tried very hard not to stare at the generous carpet of curls that covered Douglas's broad chest and then slimmed down to a suggestive trail down the swell of his tummy and into the towel below. And yes, he did notice that those were definitely love handles and there was a hint of man-boob under the curls, but all he could think was how warm Douglas would be, how warm and solid and furry and utterly comforting and how one woman had had the lack of sense to walk away from that, he'd never know, let alone three.
And lying alone in his attic room staring at the ceiling Martin had the honesty to admit that he was completely, utterly fucked. Just thinking about Douglas made him feel giddy, with arousal simmering in his belly in a way he'd never experienced before, a shimmering heat itching under his skin. He was as gay as gay could be for his utterly straight first officer and wasn't that just the story of his life?
Still, given that it was indeed the story of his life, he kind of knew how to deal with it, and that was to make denial into a vast river worthy of the Pharaohs, ignore his own feelings, buckle down and make the best of it. He was good at making the best of things, a quick look around his attic flat told him that, and while we are on the subject, can we just clear up a few misconceptions about said attic?
It was in no way a shabby, dingy, untidy or otherwise depressing dive. It might be small, that was a fair comment, he wasn't going to deny it, Douglas might have difficulty swinging a cat in it, but then that was Douglas's fault for being so big to start with and Martin didn't approve of cruelty to animals anyway. Personally, he felt snug and cosy and homelike were better words for it, and for that he took all the credit himself. He may have learnt his electrical skills from his dad but it was his mum who'd been a dab hand with a sander and a paint brush, and who'd had an eye for design, and of all the children it had been Martin who'd had the patience to sit by her side and listen and learn.
Did everyone forget that he moved furniture for a living and quite a lot of those jobs involved taking broken things to the dump and he had a sharp eye for what could be salvaged with some hard work and imagination. His little attic space was filled with a selection of choice pieces, painstakingly restored with tender, loving care in his spare time. Of course he didn't have his own tools but he got to use the landlord's, in exchange for doing odd jobs around the house, and that got him the last of any pots of paint or wood stain too, and the inside of his attic was painted a lovely warm white that glowed when the rising sun shone in through his skylight.
So there was a throw over the sofa to cover some dubious stains, and the curtains came from Oxfam, but what of it? There was some lovely stuff to be picked up at Oxfam if you knew what to look for, particularly if you chatted up the old ladies that ran it with a bit a shy charm so they held things back for you from the deliveries. His home was his castle and it might be a very miniature castle, and it was unlikely that the Queen and her retinue would be popping around for tea any time soon, but still, it was his and he was proud of it.
And while we're on the subject of misconceptions, Martin would just like to make it clear that he had never, ever, been late on a rent payment. The very idea of such a thing left him feeling utterly mortified, the rent money was the first thing to be put away every month, and the landlord had told him on many occasions that Martin was a god-send in helping to keep an eye on things, because let's face it, the students were barely semi-human at the best of times. Martin did feel this was a little unfair to some of the students, who were perfectly nice people once you got to know them, although he and they didn't have that much in common, but they did bring back produce from the college and with the help of some recipe books loaned from the Oxfam ladies, he'd actually become quite a dab hand at cooking when he had the time.
But getting back to the money, Martin had that under control, thank you very much. Oh of course he'd have liked to be paid by Carolyn, he deserved it, to start with, and it would make things easier, not having to chase down delivery jobs in his spare time and go out in all weathers and be looked down on as a man of no ambition and limited intelligence by people who couldn't pass their CPL if they were given a hundred goes, let alone know how to land a plane on one engine because they'd made a goose smoothie with the other.
If money was sometimes very tight, it was because five percent of every penny he earned went straight into his rainy day fund, even if that meant living off the cheese tray plus the over-abundance of courgettes that the students had somehow produced. He was good at the delivery business - of course, that was as long as he had both ankles in working order and wasn't being hampered by the help of Douglas and/or Arthur. He was careful and polite and hard-working and always made an extra effort to help his older customers and it had to be said he did rather well in the tips department.
And every penny earned, and every penny spent, was written down in a small notebook with meticulous care, even those ridiculously expensive chocolate bars the colour of Douglas's eyes that he only allowed himself on special occasions and even then never at the expense of the rent or of his five percent fund. And yes, he knew other people called him anal-retentive and obsessive and a stick-in-the-mud, but that was what had got him through seven tries at his pilot qualifications without getting loaded down with a lifetime of debt, and he was proud of that achievement, dammit, even if the only person he could acknowledge that pride to was himself.
So he knew how to make the best of a bad situation and he knew all about denial and self-control and making do, and he was not going to let his professional life be derailed by an unfortunate but doubtless quite temporary crush on his co-worker. And if in the privacy of his home, he let himself indulge just a little, lay back on his bed, tucked up nice and warm under that rather lovely patchwork quilt Mrs Burrows had set aside for him last winter at Oxfam, and sucked ever so slowly, piece by delicious bitter-sweet piece, at his bar of chocolate and let his mind wander back to Douglas in nothing but that rather small towel, tucked tight over that rather luscious arse, that was his right.
Although even there it was surprisingly difficult to get things to go his way, which did seem terribly unfair. If a man couldn't take charge of his own sexy fantasies in the privacy of his own home, then he really had to be a bit hopeless, or maybe said man had never had to put up with Douglas bloody Richardson strolling through said fantasies. It wasn't as if Martin was short of material to work with, what with the hands and the voice and the size and the hair, and that towel! - he has mentioned that towel, has he not? But in fantasy, as in life, Douglas just would not do what he was told.
Martin thought he'd start out with something simple, just a little blowjob fantasy, nothing complicated and, if he can put it this way, not too gay. He wasn't entirely comfortable yet with the whole gay thing, some of the activities they apparently got up to seemed a bit unhygienic to him and he couldn't quite see the attraction, but a blowjob was sort of comfortably unisex and the kind of the thing that every red-blooded male liked, right?
It didn't really help that he'd always found masturbation a bit, well, awkward somehow, a bit embarrassing really, rather undignified when you thought about it and somehow unacceptably self-indulgent. He'd thought some of his squeamishness about it might have been down to that unfortunate time when he'd been fourteen and his mother had come bursting through the door into his bedroom at just the wrong moment, but now he'd begun to suspect part of the problem might've been his basic lack of interest in the female forms that he'd dutifully tried to fantasise about.
Certainly in recent weeks - oh okay, fair enough, maybe recent months - he'd let his imagination roam through disembodied images of hands and a voice, of thick hair and a warm broad body, while carefully not letting himself put all the pieces together. But now, now he was going to let go, he was going to seize the bull by the horns, bravely grasp the nettle, carpe diem and all that good stuff. He was going to rip away that towel that had been tormenting his imagination for so long and let his newly discovered rainbow festooned gay fantasy life go to town on his co-pilot.
Except that in his fantasy Douglas was leaning casually against a pillar, buttoned up in that FO uniform that he filled so well, one eyebrow raised in quiet disdain at the very idea that he'd ever get down on his knees for one Martin Crieff, let alone do that with his mouth. God, even in Martin's own fantasies Douglas was insisting on having it his own way and wasn't that just typical of the man. Fine, fine, Martin could roll with the punches and bow to the inevitable and get down on his knees himself and reach up and... except that he couldn't.
It wasn't just that he couldn't quite get past his apprehension about putting that into his own mouth, he was sure Douglas would be as big there as he was everywhere else and Martin really didn't want to sprain his jaw doing this, and he had a horrible feeling he'd end up drooling, and besides his sense of hygiene was demanding that he imagine Douglas having been very recently and very thoroughly showered. God, even in his own filthy fantasies he couldn't help but be fastidious.
The real problem was that he just couldn't get down on his knees, not even for Douglas, especially not for Douglas, he'd fought far too long and far too hard for whatever microscopic iota of respect he'd managed to wrench forth from his utterly unwilling first officer, he wasn't giving it up, not even for hot sex in the privacy of his own mind, a man had to have standards.
So really it wasn't going all that well so far, there had to be something else he could think of... Well, there was that but he just couldn't get that to feel sexy at all, certain bits were clearly designed for sex and certain bits just weren't and it wasn't as if Douglas was going to let him do that and he was quite sure that if Douglas tried that it would never fit and the whole thing was making him feel squicky inside and wilt rather dramatically.
And, well, that was rather it for sex, wasn't it? Let's be clear here, Martin was not a virgin, that would have been pathetic in a man of his age and while he acknowledged that his life might not be ready to be turned into a motivational biography, he refused to consider himself that pathetic. There'd been three girls - well, three if you counted some hurried fumbling in his last year at school where he'd come far too fast and he really had no idea whether she'd come at all - oh okay then, there'd been two girls and he knew for sure one of them had definitely come, mostly because she'd been bouncing away on top of him in an utterly terrifying manner while making a horrid caterwauling noise and he'd fled into the night the minute she'd slumped over sideways and started snoring.
And one of them had actually been his girlfriend, a proper long-term girlfriend who'd met his mum and everything, and who'd honestly seemed quite happy that his job and his flying classes and his studying for attempt number three at his CPL had meant that sex just hadn't happened all that often. In retrospect he couldn't work out if she'd not been terribly interested in sex or not terribly interested in him, or maybe a bit of both, but it had all come to an amiable enough end when she'd got a job offer all the way around the world in Perth.
So here he was, all alone in his attic, failing to be a gay stud even in the safety of his own imagination, he'd just known he was going to be awful as a gay bloke, he'd never find himself a nice boy and he sucked resentfully on a square of his precious chocolate and decided that it just wasn't fair. He let his mind drift as he usually did and thought instead about G-ERTI and flying, about wind and clouds and blue horizons that never ended, and thought about his co-pilot and that amused laugh and quirked up mouth, that subtle musky scent and those stupid wings of hair, and his hand slid back down under the quilt and found that things had perked up quite nicely.
So he sucked on another square of chocolate and thought about a broad chest pressed against his shoulders and a long arm reaching around him, thought about quicksilver fingers playing love-songs on the piano and a honey-rich voice singing about amore, thought about a trail of damp curls leading down to a small towel wrapped tight around a richly rounded arse and imagined the mischief in Douglas's eyes as he let that towel drop.... and suddenly he was grabbing for tissues to save the sheets from stains and then rolling over onto his side with the sleepy lassitude of the post-orgasmic, letting thoughts of Douglas laughing carry him into his dreams.
He woke up feeling really quite perky about life, he had a quick moving job that morning which would bring him nicely into the black for the month, and then a flight to Turin that afternoon which was luckily cargo only, which meant neither Carolyn nor Arthur would be going - not that he disliked their company, of course not, he had the utmost respect for both of them, sort of, some of the time - but without them he'd get Douglas all to himself and maybe Douglas would even agree to have dinner together in Turin. Martin had a little bit saved up just in case and luckily the pound had bounced back against the euro recently so he might even be able to throw in a glass of wine.
It was an easy moving job too, just picking up boxes from that Big Yellow Self Storage place outside Fitton and taking them to a flat in Grantham Street, so only one set of possible grumbling to deal with rather than two and anyway, the young woman had sounded rather nice on the phone, all fluttery with excitement and he'd got the impression she was moving in with her young man for the first time and her pleasure had leaked over to him. He had to admit that there were days when he felt rather jealous that all the world seemed paired off into couples except him - for heaven's sake, even Carolyn had got herself a beau and the less said about Arthur's string of pony club girls the better.
But today was a day when he was happy to wish romance on all the world, and maybe if he was lucky he'd get over the whole hopeless Douglas crush thing and find himself a nice boy, and if he was even luckier the whole gay thing would just be a passing phase and he could still find a nice girl who'd give him that same pleasurable flutter in his stomach he currently got from Douglas, because there was no doubt that'd be a whole lot easier when it came to taking someone home to meet mum.
A pretty young woman opened the door for him and he followed her up the stairs as she chattered, clearly excited, and he entered the living room to find not the boyfriend he'd expected but another woman - a sister? a friend helping out? Except she bounced over to the other woman and grabbed her hand and started gesturing to the box and they were - oh, oh - they were like that. Martin could feel his face freezing with surprise because it was one thing to know in theory that there were girls that were like that and quite another to see it in practise, and he didn't understand because neither of them were big or butch or ugly in any way, they were both the sort of girls that would turn the head of Douglas or Arthur and why wouldn't they prefer a nice boy?
And the other woman was glaring at him now, her face hard with suspicion and he realised all his thoughts must have been showing on his face and if he opened his mouth to apologise he just knew he'd splutter out a whole lot of nonsense that would make it all so much worse so he fled back down the stairs instead, and then realised as he leaned against his van that that might not have been a much better reaction after all. Oh god, what was he going to do? It wasn't as if he minded, after all he had no room to talk, he'd just been surprised, that was all.
He spotted a box that wasn't properly closed and there was a vase visible at the top and the house next door had an amazing array of yellow roses tinged pink at the edge spilling out into the street and he was sure the owner would never notice if he clipped a few from the outside, using the handy penknife that he always carried, he knew the value of being prepared. He filled the vase with water from the guest loo and then cautiously reentered the living room, carrying the next box with the vase balanced on top, to find the girls engaged in a tense, quiet argument which they abruptly stopped to turn on him with faces frozen with mistrust.
"A flat-warming gift, for, you know, the two of you."
He bit down on the inside of his lip to stop himself spilling out any further nervous nonsense and before he knew it they were both chattering to him with relieved excitement and helping him carry boxes and telling him all about how they'd met and the taciturn father who hadn't spoken a word to one of them since getting the news and the long-suffering mother of the other who was trying so hard to understand and only thinking of what was best and so sure she hadn't brought her up that way that it was difficult to find any understanding in it at all.
At the end he found himself being kissed on a cheek by each of them and heading out the door with an extra twenty pounds pressed into his hand, warm as toast inside from the reflection of their happiness, thinking that maybe a boy of his own really wouldn't be such a bad thing, his mum would just have to learn to cope, honestly she'd put up with worse what with the whole implosion of Simon's marriage over all those affairs on the side. He'd just have to get over Douglas first.
He pulled up at the airfield to see G-ERTI parked outside, the fluffy clouds that had been obscuring the sun parting so that for a moment she was caught in a ray of light against the shadow of the grass, and his breath caught as he stared. Ignoring the portacabin for once, he walked across to her, circling round her first and then laying his hand gently on her fuselage. She was his girl, his one and only, she always had been, it'd just taken him a while to realise. She was his ride into the sky, his escape from the rule of gravity and the two-dimensional disappointment of the earth. And she wasn't second best, it wasn't as if he'd rather fly without her, paragliders and such frankly gave him the heebie-jeebies, they seemed so insubstantial, and he wasn't going to be stepping out of a perfectly functional plane to go sky-diving any time in this lifetime, thank you very much.
He loved the solidity of her, he loved the physics that let her bulk soar as if she was lighter than air itself, he loved the complexity of her controls and the fact that he knew how to weave a way through them to make her climb or dive or simply float in the sky, as if suspended in the vast blueness and yet traveling at hundreds of miles an hour. He loved the checks and procedures and the sense of safety and order that they brought with them and he loved the freedom that came with knowing that he could turn her nose to any corner of the globe and let her fly free.
He stroked his hand over her metal flank and reflected that his life really wasn't all that bad, when you thought about it. Oh sure, it wasn't perfect, this wasn't what he'd imagined when he'd first fantasised about being a pilot, this wasn't striding through the corridors of Heathrow in the uniform of an Air England captain or landing the inaugural flight of the Airbus 380 in Sydney. And while he had always sort of known he wasn't going to be the kind of pilot who reached such exalted heights, he had rather expected he'd be good enough to actually get paid for what he did.
But still, he got to do what he loved and not everyone could say that much. He was a pilot and a captain and he got to fly most days, and by now he knew Herc well enough to have heard quite a few stories about life at Air Cal. Honestly, it didn't always sound that great, the same old routes week in and week out, Newcastle to some Spanish airport and back again, but with a different crew each time, little chance to get to know people or make friends, co-pilots hidden away behind newspapers or ipads, and the process of piloting limited by fly-by-wire and automated flight controls. Herc had once admitted that he only got to manually operate the plane for about 80 seconds out of a typical two-hour flight.
Say what you like about G-ERTI and her temperamental ways, and while he was at it, Carolyn and her temperamental ways, but each day was different, each destination was different, and he and Douglas really did work with G-ERTI to keep her up in the air. Douglas might call her a difficult old bitch who was far too inclined to cry wolf but Martin knew she just got a bit tetchy some days, just like all of them, suffering the aches and pains of life, and he was getting much better at coaxing her to perform in the air rather than diverting in a panic every time.
"Why, Captain, you are rubbing up against our old girl with a particularly besotted look in your eye. Am I interrupting your private time?"
It was Douglas, of course it was Douglas, Douglas was pretty much guaranteed to be around any time he was making a fool of himself, it was just one of those laws of nature things, along with the basic principles of physics, nothing to be done about it. Douglas, strolling across the airfield, no sign of his hat, those silly waves of hair ruffled in the light breeze, in a short-sleeved shirt with his jacket over his arm, looking as handsome and authoritative and casually amused by life as he always did and Martin realised there and then that really, there was simply nothing to be done about it.
He felt about Douglas the way he felt about flying, the way he just knew it was what he wanted and needed and was born to do. Over the decades he'd lost count of the number of people who'd told him he'd get over his obsession with flying, but they just hadn't understood. It was in the very marrow of his bones and now it turned out that so was Douglas. He was helplessly, hopelessly, irredeemably in love with his co-pilot and he knew that that wasn't ever going to change. There wasn't going to be a nice girl or a nice boy in his future, and while that wasn't what he'd hoped for, a bit like his flying career, it wasn't that bad either.
It wasn't as if they had different jobs and he had no excuse to spend time with the other man, or as if they flew for Cal Air and might only share a cockpit once in a blue moon. He got to spend many hours of most days in the company of Douglas, working, teasing, playing games, sitting in silence, sharing the thrill of flying.
Of course he'd fall hopelessly in love with an utterly straight man, and there was going to be heartache when Douglas inevitably found himself a new girlfriend, that was just the story of his life. But he was in love with a man who was his friend and his co-pilot, who joked with him and smiled and every so often actually approved of something he'd done, and Martin wouldn't swop it for anything in the world.
"Something you've not been telling me, Martin? You've been staring at me with almost as much of a besotted look as you were gazing at G-ERTI."
Oh god, of course Douglas was going to work it out. He had his head tilted a little to one side and a small frown of concentration between his eyebrows, just the way he did when he was figuring something out, something that would lead to a tease or a scheme and either way would inevitably mean trouble for Martin. He'd never be able to hide this from Douglas. But then again, it didn't matter; being teased by Douglas was part of the whole package.
"Douglas, if you were a plane, you'd be a Super Guppy and I'm definitely not qualified to fly one of those." And he took off towards the airstairs before he could ruin his snappy comeback with a stuttering run-on.
"Oh really! Good one, sir."
And he could feel that warm glow light inside him that he got every time he did something Douglas approved of, every time he impressed Douglas with a witty remark or a clever contribution to a game. He knew Douglas, in fact he'd come to know Douglas remarkably well over the years. He knew when he heard that sharp-edged tone in Douglas's voice that he'd inadvertently hit a sore spot in the other man's surprisingly thin shell of ego and he needed to back-pedal fast, whether he thought he was in the right or not. And he knew that at other times to back off would just feed Douglas's need to niggle and he had to stand up for himself with a quick putdown or a clever twist to the joke.
He knew that there were days when Douglas's insouciance was a thin veneer over sadness and he needed to tread lightly and there were days when Douglas's disdainful putdowns were a cover for disappointment and needed to be turned aside with a clever quip or quick distraction. He didn't always read it right but he enjoyed the challenge of trying, and letting Douglas tease him over a harmless crush would be far from the worst thing ever to happen to him.
"Martin."
He paused on the stairs, the sound of Douglas's deep rich voice holding him by invisible bonds, the way it always did. He could feel from the shake of the railings that Douglas was climbing up behind him, standing on the step directly below him, putting his broad warm hand on Martin's shoulder.
"I happen to know of a surprisingly good little sushi place in Turin, very quiet and intimate. May I take you out for dinner?"
He couldn't mean.... could he? No, of course he couldn't, he couldn't possibly. Things like this just didn't happen to Martin, Arthur would be made the Oxford emeritus professor for economics first or Carolyn would start volunteering at the local bake sale to raise money for the Fitton abandoned dogs' home. But the subtlety of it was quintessentially Douglas, all he had to do was take one step upwards, let Douglas's hand slide off his shoulder, refuse or even accept in a jokey manner and it would just be an invitation among the boys, a blokes' night out, no embarrassment, no undercurrents, nothing to see here, move along.
But Martin hadn't taken a step upwards and the thumb of Douglas's hand was rubbing softly across the fabric of his jacket and if this was a tease, it was an oddly gentle one. Martin half turned and then started as he found himself at eye level with Douglas for the first time in their acquaintance, looking into those rich warm brown eyes, which were watching him intently with a mix of amusement and curiosity.
"I don't know about sushi, Douglas, I mean... raw fish... It doesn't sound hygienic, and what if the fish is off, I have to fly the next day, I'm sure I've read something about parasitic worms that can burrow into your intestines and besides.... it looks a bit squidgy and I've got this thing about textures in food and...."
And please no, his mind had stalled completely and his mouth was running off with itself, the way that it did when he got really, really nervous and he knew how this would pan out, he'd seen it a hundred times. The other person's smile would go stiff and plastic and then their eyes would get that hunted look and they'd start to back away very slowly, casting around for some kind of excuse as they began to wonder whether Martin had been taking his medication recently and another brief moment of opportunity would be lost in the face of his utter ineptness with any other member of the human race....
Except that Douglas wasn't pulling away, in fact his hand had slid round to the back of Martin's collar and his fingertips were lightly tickling the short hair at the nape of his neck, and he was watching Martin with a look of fond amusement. Because he knew Martin! He knew that Martin got like this and he knew that didn't stop Martin being an adequate pilot or a generally okay human being or apparently someone he might want to have an intimate sushi dinner for two with in Turin.
"Oh God, Douglas, please shut me up."
"With pleasure, Captain."
And those chocolate eyes were so close he was going cross-eyed trying to focus and that beautifully mobile mouth was closing over his own and his gabble of words were swallowed by soft lips and a warm firm tongue that had very clear ideas about what it wanted to do inside Martin's mouth, and he was breathless and suddenly dizzy and he might have tipped over the railings of the stairs - and wouldn't that have been an ignominious end, airline captain falls to his death from the steps of his plane - except that clever, clever Douglas had slid an arm firmly round his waist and was holding him securely in place pressed against Douglas's broad chest and that lovely smell of cologne and heat and Douglas was filling his senses....
"Straight!" He pulled himself away abruptly. "But you're... you know... what about all those women? The thousand stewardesses? I don't understand." He was almost pleading now, please don't let this be a mistake, Douglas going short-sighted with age and mistaking him for someone else entirely or....
"Why would I be anything as boring as straight?" Douglas's amused tones jerked him out of the spiral of panic. "I admit I look at women more often than men, but I've never been one to limit my field of operation. Why deny oneself any of the many lovely variations of the human form? And you, young sir? I don't recall you being quite this fond of me when we were first introduced. When did your mind turn to thoughts of carnal delights with your charming first officer?"
Oh god, carnal delights, it was very hard to think straight with that image lodged in his brain, but when had he first thought of Douglas that way? It was hard to tell, it was as much a part of his life now as flying had ever been. Maybe the first time he'd watched Douglas land G-ERTI, coaxing her so masterfully with those dexterous hands, or maybe a few minutes ago when Douglas's mouth had settled over his and for the first time his crush moved from the realms of misty pastel fantasy into glorious fully-coloured sunbathed reality. Or maybe....
"The piano. When you played the piano for Carolyn and were singing that Italian thing."
"Oh! You're a closet romantic. Why am I not surprised?"
Douglas took two steps back down the airstairs, so he was looking up at Martin with a mischievous twinkle in his eyes. He spread out his arms, sucked in a deep breath and opened his mouth.
I can open your eyes
Take you wonder by wonder
Over, sideways and under
On a magic carpet ride
A whole new world
And Martin had his hands over his face, skin burning with embarrassment but still he was watching every moment of Douglas through the gaps in his fingers. Somewhere in the distance Carolyn was exclaiming indignantly and Arthur was clapping excitedly and somewhere beyond them was a whole world that didn't know that Martin's life had just been turned quite upside down and he couldn't remember why he'd ever thought that he didn't like Douglas. He loved Douglas, he was completely and utterly infatuated with Douglas and judging by the sparks of arousal coursing through his body just from the memory of that kiss, he suspected the gay sex thing might just work itself out after all. Maybe, just maybe, it was all going to be okay.
* * *
Martin lay awake in their hotel room in Turin - Douglas having cleverly exchanged two single rooms for one rather nice double, quite unfazed by the scandalised looks given them by the young lady at the reception - and watched over Douglas in the moonlight. If he was being honest, Douglas looked a bit like a beached whale, taking up two thirds of the bed and almost all of the duvet and snoring lustily as he slept. But Martin was far too giddy with happiness to care one bit, so keyed up with joyful surprise that he couldn't possibly sleep. It had all been so... so.... well, beyond words really.
It hadn't been quite the idyll of his fantasies, there was quite a bit of wobble on that luscious arse and tufts of hair in unexpected places, but it had in fact been far, far better. Martin had always suspected that he wasn't terribly good at sex, all his experiences had been a mixture of nervous embarrassment, sure that he was somehow doing it wrong, and vague distaste at how squigdy it all was. But he had always thought that when the time came that he got it right, sex would be solemn and special and significant.
But apparently Douglas hadn't read the rules, which when you thought about it was just like Douglas, he'd always thought the rule book simply existed so that he had something to put his cup of coffee down on. It turned out Douglas thought sex meant being utterly undignified while laughing as much as possible. It was when Douglas had wriggled halfway down Martin's body and then stopped to compose a dirty limerick in honour of Martin's belly button, that he'd finally realised that he had no control whatsoever over what was happening and he'd best just go with the flow. Which had been a very good idea, one of the best ideas he'd ever had really, because it'd turned out that letting Douglas have control was the most erotic thing that had ever happened to him.
In all the time he'd spent obsessing over Douglas's many attributes, he couldn't get over the fact that he'd forgotten about that mouth. Always in the cockpit the first sign that he'd amused Douglas was in the way that beautiful mobile mouth quirked up at the corner. And it turned out that that lovely mouth wasn't just good for charming generous smiles or bubbling laughter or scathing vocabulary or glorious singing. It was very very good at other things too. Things like kissing, and licking, and nibbling, and sucking.... It had turned out that Douglas was remarkably creative about what he was prepared to put in his mouth and was perfectly happy to suck on that as if it was the world's most delicious lollipop.
They hadn't done any of the more advanced things that were apparently on the gay menu, but Douglas had lubed up his fingers and stuck them in a place that Martin was quite sure fingers weren't meant to go and it had felt so unexpectedly good that he'd completely forgotten to worry whether he was entirely clean down there. In fact the combination of Douglas's fingers and his mouth had so badly fried Martin's synapses that for the first time in as long as he could remember, the slightly anxious inner monologue that followed every moment of his existence had stuttered into shocked silence and he had surfed unthinking across wave after wave of sensation until he had finally washed on the shore, utterly wrung out and held safe and secure in the circle of Douglas's arms.
He rather thought Douglas had ambitions about putting more than just his fingers up there, and the thought made him feel terribly nervous and yet oddly excited, Douglas had completely demolished all his ideas about which bits of his body were designed for sex and which weren't, he'd been left feeling as if every one of his cells was up for it. He'd been right to suspect that Douglas would be generously proportioned everywhere, and he didn't quite see how he'd ever get it to fit, but nevertheless he was fairly certain he could be coaxed into it, he'd found he liked being coaxed by Douglas, which was very fortunate as it was clear that Douglas enjoyed coaxing him.
He reached out gently to let his hand run over the warm expanse of Douglas's soft skin, the comfortable padding giving under his fingertips, and that was another thing he'd not even begun to realise how much he appreciated until he'd found himself rubbing up against all that silky skin like a cat, trying to make up for a lifetime of loneliness with as much touching as he could possibly manage. And Douglas had teased him for it, just the way he always did, except with that twinkle in his eye that said that he and Martin were on the same side of the joke.
It was just like it'd always been and it was all utterly new, and for the first time in his life he felt right in a way he never really had before, with Douglas to hold him at night and G-ERTI waiting for him in the morning and a whole new world out there to explore, and at long last he didn't have to make his way through it alone. Softly, very softly, he began to sing to the sleeping Douglas the same song Douglas had sung for him on the steps of G-ERTI.
A new fantastic point of view
No one to tell us no
Or where to go
Or say we're only dreaming
A whole new world
A dazzling place I never knew
- THE END -
Fandom & Pairing: Cabin Pressure, Martin/Douglas
Rating: R
Warnings: none
Genre: humour
Word Count: Around 10 900
Beta: the ever obliging imachar
Author's Note: Written for this prompt on the Cabin Pressure prompt meme: I've read a lot of lovely fic with Douglas admiring Martin's appearance but can we have some Martin appreciating his First Officer?
Thanks to Anon on the prompt meme chatter post for suggesting the song Douglas sings to Martin.
Summary: Martin has some things to say on the subject of one Douglas Richardson. He would like to make it clear that he doesn't like Douglas, he definitely doesn't have a crush on Douglas, and he absolutely isn't gay. Not even a little bit.
Honestly, the whole thing was desperately unfair. It wasn't as if his life wasn't hard enough already without adding this on top. And he didn't even like Douglas. No really, he didn't. He'd even made a list of all the reasons why he didn't. At the top of the list was Qikiqtarjuaq. In fact, despite the difficulty of spelling it, Qikiqtarjuaq reappeared a number of times in the list, sometimes underscored and coloured in with a pink highlighter pen.
And then Douglas would do that thing where he half turned towards Martin with the edge of his mouth crooked up in a shadow of a smile and gleam of mischief in his deep brown eyes and say in his velvet voice so Captain and the list would crumble to ash like a vampire caught in the first rays of the rising sun, and he was oh so fucked.
It hadn't happened all at once. It had snuck up on him in an entirely unsportmanslike manner, positively cowardly in the way it had ambushed him an inch a time and alright so hunting metaphors weren't his strong point, he was a pilot, what did you expect? So maybe it had caught him like a rising cloud, just the odd misty tendril across a clear blue sky, until suddenly he was enveloped by it with nothing but the artificial horizon to show him which way was up and sinking feeling that even there he couldn't trust G-ERTI's electronics.
He hadn't thought much of Douglas when they'd first met up. Really, he hadn't. The man was smug and patronising and full of himself, and frankly a bit tubby around the middle - oh yes, he was - and those wings of hair on either side of his face were more than a bit ridiculous on a man of his age. And he really really didn't understand the concept of the chain of command or of the respect due to a superior officer or to be honest the concept of respect at all. He was full of it, that's what he was, and Martin had no time for such unprofessional attitudes.
And then he'd watched Douglas land G-ERTI. And yes, alright, Martin did think of G-ERTI as a her and he did have opinions about her personality and he did want her to like him - not that he'd ever tell anyone any of this - but that was still absolutely no excuse for Douglas to seduce her. He has mentioned how Douglas just doesn't understand the concept of respect, has he not?
Martin had thought of her at that point as a bit of an avatar of Carolyn, getting on in years, rather crotchety in her behaviour, but basically sound and sensible. And then Douglas had treated her like a virgin bride - or frankly rather less than virgin, she and Douglas had seemed to be on very intimate terms, given the way Douglas had caressed her controls and masterfully flicked her switches and cooed to her in an undertone as he coaxed her through crosswinds and awkward turns and brought her down as gently as a butterfly landing on a rosebud. Not that Martin was in any sense jealous of Douglas and G-ERTI, of course not, that would clearly be nonsensical, and he prided himself on being a rational adult.
But you have to understand, it was Douglas's hands. That was where the rot started, looking back he was sure of it. His hands were big, like the rest of him, but not awkwardly so. His fingers were long and dexterous and so certain in their movements as they manipulated G-ERTI's controls. Martin would watch those hands out of the corner of his eye, watch their confident authority when Douglas was in control, watch them weave patterns in the air when Douglas telling tall stories, watch them beat out a rhythm on the console when Douglas was lost in music in his own head.
And yes, just possibly, he might have wondered what it would feel like to be the one being gently controlled by those hands, but he doesn't think about that often, you understand, just now and then, on a whim, nothing to worry about. Because if he thought about it often, well that would be gay, and Martin is definitely definitely not gay. No he's not.
Still, if it was just the hands, he'd be able to cope. After all, no sensible person was going to be put off their stride by a pair of hands, and Martin privately considered himself to be rather more sensible than anyone else who worked at MJN Air. But there was the voice and he really did feel that the voice was a low blow, the voice just wasn't fair.
Believe it or not, he hadn't noticed at first. After all he wasn't the sort of chap who went around having opinions about other men's voices, that would just be strange. The matter had been brought to his attention a few weeks after he started flying for MJN, by a hen party they were ferrying to Dubrovnik. That was back in the days when he still thought hen parties were a lovely idea - friends gathering together to wish one of their number well in a rite of life. Now of course he knows them to be the work of the devil that they are.
But leaving that to one side, he and Douglas had been waiting on the tarmac to welcome the honoured - which he was learning was a Carolyn euphemism for paying-through-the-nose - guests. It went the way it usually did, although back then he'd yet to realise just how painfully usual it would become. The girls took Douglas for captain, Martin spluttered and stammered indignantly as he corrected them, Douglas stepped in effortlessly to smooth everything over and the world kept turning. Except when Douglas did his thing the girls all began to giggle and one said oh my god, that voice and another said oooh, captain, you can give me orders any time and a third began to fan herself exaggeratedly, and Douglas just smirked at then all in that infuriating way of his.
Martin had been appalled, women these days, such utterly shameless behaviour, what would their mothers think? Although he gave up on that line of thought once they'd flown a few groups of middle-aged my-god-did-I-screw-him-in-the-divorce parties and he'd discovered exactly what the mothers thought of Douglas's honeyed tones.
Anyway, the point is that once it had been pointed out that Douglas's voice was basically a aphrodisiac on legs, there was no unknowing that fact - or unhearing it. In fact he had to hear it every damned day, hear it as Douglas teased and taunted, or gave crisp orders, or hummed to himself. Hear the dark chocolate and smooth rum tones call him Captain and sir and even on occasion supreme commander and sure, to start with, it had been so heavily laced with derision that it wasn't a problem.
But since then, as they'd slowly got to know each other, there'd gradually been less disdain and more teasing, until there was almost an easy affection in Douglas's sir. Of course what there still wasn't, and apparently never would be, was any respect or any intention to follow orders but Martin was coming to realise that you couldn't have everything. These days his standards of command had fallen so appallingly far that as long as Douglas wasn't actively strafing polar bears, Martin was reasonably happy.
So all in all, Martin might've slowly come to terms with the voice if it hadn't been for the singing. The first time Douglas had casually burst into song, Martin had been confounded. The first time Douglas had asked him to sing along and then declared himself approving of Martin's voice, he'd been left with strange fluttery feelings in his stomach that had apparently never entirely gone away. In fact he still kept his memory of the two them singing We're Busy Doing Nothing as a special place to go to when he was feeling particularly down.
Now, you mustn't think that he was getting sentimental about Douglas, good Lord, of course not. It was just a, you know, a connoisseurs' thing, being able to appreciate a beautiful voice, just part of being a man of the world. Although the piano - the piano really did take it a step too far and it didn't help that Martin had been at a bit of a low-point at the time. Ankle broken, customer waiting, directions left behind, Arthur's yellow car! an incessant echo in his head and Douglas... serenading their boss.
That voice wrapped around Italian words for love, those fingers skimming effortlessly over the keys - when that night Douglas's voice had followed him into his dreams, and those fingers had played a very personal sonata across his skin, he knew for sure that some deity, somewhere up there, had it in for him in an excruciatingly personal way. He has mentioned, has he not, that it just isn't fair?
Nevertheless, Martin might have been able to cope with the potent combination of hands and voice if it hadn't been for the size. Admiring the hands, that was just, just, oh you know, admiration for Douglas's competence as a pilot and while the man might have a curious blind spot over risk assessment and should never be let loose with a jet in the Arctic, no one could deny that he was a very fine pilot indeed. Martin was an adult, he could give credit where credit was due, so nothing to worry about there.
And the voice, well, Douglas clearly had a gift in that department and it would be churlish to pretend otherwise. He might resent the sheer abundance of Douglas's gifts just a teeny tiny bit, it was as if God had accidentally tripped over a bucket of talents he was supposed to be doling out one by one and the entire contents had cascaded onto the head of one frankly underserving Douglas Richardson, but what could you do? Douglas's voice was deep amber honey on toast and there was no getting away from it. Anyway, it did harmonise rather nicely with Martin's so he could always console himself with that.
But the size thing, now that was patently utterly unfair. Can we please be clear about this? Martin was not short. No, he was not. He was only a little under the height of the average British male and to be honest he suspected that the average was skewed unfairly high by a few outrageous outliers at the seven foot end who should be shipped off to the USA to play basketball and so taken out of the reckoning altogether.
Martin was quite tall enough, thank you very much, and the only reason that wasn't apparent was that Arthur and Douglas were both over that magic marker of masculinity, the six-foot line, and in his opinion it was utterly wasted on both of them. But the trouble with Douglas - one of many troubles with Douglas, the man was infuriatingly troublesome - was that he wasn't just tall, he was big.
Martin hadn't really noticed it at first, had just observed that here was a pilot who perhaps needed to do a little more exercise than stroll from the door of his Lexus to the steps of the plane and who wouldn't be much good should he ever need to shift furniture to supplement his living. And yes, alright, there might have been just a sliver of envy that Douglas filled out his uniform jacket with such easy authority, when Martin's hung on him as if he was a scarecrow dressed up to frighten off the birds.
But the thing was G-ERTI was really not very big. To call the flight deck snug would be generous and the passage into the galley was pretty narrow and Martin seemed to spend an unconscionable amount of time squeezing past Douglas one way or another, reminded every time just how broad his chest and shoulders were, and what an imposing presence he had. And don't get him started about Douglas's habit of leaning over his shoulder, one broad hand on the back of his chair, mocking Martin about studying flight manuals in the captain's seat or doing paperwork in the portacabin, his breath a warm whisper on Martin's neck and his bulk a comforting heat sheltering Martin's back.
Not that he thought about being protected by Douglas, no, no, he absolutely didn't. He was a grown man, a qualified professional, and it wasn't as if he often curled up in his bed in the middle of the night, feeling vulnerable and lonely and desperately wishing that a safe solid presence could be spooned around him, sheltering him from the trials of his daily life while whispering warm words of approval in a honey-drenched voice... Surely everyone had something they used to get them through the dark hours of the early morning and Martin really didn't consider that it was anything he needed to be analysing in the bright light of day, furniture to deliver, planes to fly, no time to waste on pointless introspection.
So Martin could cope with it all, he really could, he'd had a lot of practising coping in his life, he could deal with the hands and the voice and the size, if only he didn't keep getting tripped up by the unanticipated details - like the smell of Douglas. He has mentioned, has he not, the squeezing past Douglas to get in and out of the flight deck thing. And somehow in the process of squeezing, he'd become aware that his co-pilot had a very particular scent, a soft warm scent that seemed to linger in the cockpit even after Douglas had left.
Martin had sneaked a peek into Douglas's toiletry bag once when they'd shared a room on layover and found the bottle of Givenchy Monsieur, a slightly old-fashioned scent targeted at manly men, and once Martin knew what it was he could pick up the hints of lavender and sandalwood and musk, but what was in the bottle bore only a passing resemblance to the smell of Douglas, a unique blend of the cologne and his natural scent, melted together by the heat of his body....
Yes, well, suffice it to say that Douglas's scent was disconcertingly distracting, but the fact that the scarf the first officer had worn through much of that cold snap last winter had somehow ended up in Martin's attic and he kept forgetting to return it, well, that was the merest of coincidence and had no bearing on anything.
The colour of Douglas's eyes was another thing that caught him off-guard at times. Martin was not a man to go around staring into other people's eyes, he couldn't tell you the colour of Carolyn's or Arthur's, but somehow he might have noticed that Douglas had deep brown eyes, deep velvet brown, Belgian chocolate brown, dark warm brown and his eyes crinkled at the edges when he teased and lit up when he laughed and Martin was pretty sure that he really shouldn't be quite so taken with another man's eyes, and oh god, he was so fucked. Because it was hard to argue that it wasn't just a teeny, tiny bit gay to buy expensive chocolate that he couldn't really afford just because it was the same colour as his male co-worker's eyes, and then lie in bed eating it very slowly while thinking about dexterous hands and broad shoulders and musky scent and that voice.
Alright, alright, he could admit it, maybe, just maybe, he wasn't entirely, 100 percent straight, but that was okay these days, wasn't it? That was being in touch with your feminine side, being a coolly self-confident metrosexual professional, being sophisticated enough to accept the inherent fluidity of human sexuality. Hadn't that pervy American sex researcher said there was a scale, 0 to 6 or something, and Martin had always thought he was firmly at one end of it, 0 or 6, he could never remember which way round it went, but firmly heterosexual nonetheless.
And maybe it wasn't quite as firmly firm as he had once thought but it wasn't as if it was anything much, just sneaking an occasional glance and after all everybody agreed - with Douglas as the chief agree-er, of course - that Douglas was a particularly fine specimen. He wasn't even really bi-sexual, just a touch, what was the word, he'd seen it in a women's magazine abandoned on the plane once - heteroflexible! That was it. That would be okay, he could live with that. But what he definitely wasn't was gay.
Not that he had anything against gay people, you understand, some of his best friends were gay people. Or he was sure they would have been if he'd had best friends, or any friends at all really, or if he'd ever met any gay people, Fitton not really being a bustling cosmopolitan community and Martin not having a lot of time free for a social life. One of the students might be gay, what with all the metalwear in his face and the plethora of tattoos, and those jeans hanging off his arse-crack but then again maybe that was just what was fashionable these days, Martin really couldn't tell.
And it wasn't that he thought there was any wrong with gay people, each to their own, anyone lucky enough to find love should be able to celebrate it, in his opinion. It was just that, well, if he was being absolutely honest, his life was just so damn hard already. He wasn't the brightest bulb in the box, as his dad had so often told him, and he was a ridiculous skinny little runt of a thing, as Simon had frequently reminded him, and he was obsessed with a profession that really wasn't for their kind of people, as Caitlin had kindly, repeatedly, pointed out.
His boss openly, cheerfully, despised him, and his junior pilot was older, a better pilot and far more charismatic than he was. Admittedly his steward thought he was brilliant but then Arthur thought just about anyone other than his dad was brilliant and when you considered just what an arse Gordon was, that set the bar pretty low, not much of a compliment really. He really, really hoped that there wasn't a supreme being and that the entire universe was just an utterly random happenstance, because if there was somebody up there then that would mean all his troubles were deliberately inflicted and if that was the case, he'd have some very strong words to say to someone should he ever arrive at anything resembling pearly gates.
He just wanted to be normal, nice and normal in an ordinary sort of way, decent job, decent wage, a few friends, a wife and perhaps a cat. Maybe not kids, he wasn't sure about kids, they made him nervous and he never knew what to say to them. He knew this all seemed to come naturally to most people, but to him it all felt like a bit of a tall order. He wasn't much good at being a heterosexual bloke, he did realise that, he never knew how to talk to women, what on earth were you supposed to say and why did it always feel as if they were laughing at him before he'd even opened his mouth?
He'd thought Hester was amazing, he really had, but he'd been a fan ever since he'd seen Fardels Bear, you have seen her in that right? She was, to borrow a phrase, brilliant! Linda, well, that had been pretty embarrassing, he'd hardly even noticed she was a woman, so focused was he on getting his CV to one of the Cal Air pilots, and then of course Douglas had to bring it up and then he had to do something, and honestly he'd been trying to impress Douglas more than he'd been trying to impress Linda. And that had all worked out about as well as it normally did for him.
So given all that, he just knew he'd be utterly appalling at being a gay bloke, didn't they all need to be buff and toned and sexually voracious? Weren't they supposed to be worse than girls for being all about youth and beauty? Eventually some girl might be desperate enough for a husband to look at him twice, but there was no chance of him ever finding a nice boy.
So obviously it was in no sense in Martin's best interests, or any interests at all really, to be obsessed with just how devastatingly charismatic his co-pilot was. His three-times married, stewardess-count into four figures, hostie in every port, the Oxford dictionary definition of heterosexual, so straight you could use him as a spirit level, co-pilot. And even if, by some extraordinary chance, Douglas did turn out to bend in the breeze on occasion, it wasn't as if Martin was ever going to get a look-in.
Not when Douglas could snap his fingers at any of the young steward twinks they encountered waggling their tightly uniformed arses in every airport, or tip the wink at the likes of Herc, all smooth confidence and movie-star looks, and the two of them could seduce each other with those velvet voices of theirs.... no, no, he was not going to think about Douglas and Herc, absolutely, definitely not. Carolyn would rise up in his nightmares - even more so than she did routinely, that is - and remove his eyeballs with a teaspoon.
Therefore, best all round not to waste any time fixating on his first officer, and Martin could have stuck with that, he really could, he was good at being disciplined and well experienced at not getting what he wanted in life - if it hadn't been for the hair. Again, the hair was one of those odd things that caught him unaware over time. After all, the hairstyle was frankly ridiculous, those floppy wings that framed Douglas's face. Martin's dad had always said - and Martin was entirely in agreement with him on this point - that the only suitable hairstyle for a professional man was short-back-and-sides. Martin kept his own hair closely clipped, not least because it helped to keep his rather girly curls out of sight, and he considered any man who didn't ridiculously affected.
But the trouble with those wings was they did tend to get dishevelled and flop forward over Douglas's forehead and then he'd have to push them back by running his long fingers through that gorgeously thick salt-and-pepper hair and Martin's eyes would follow those fingers and he'd find himself wondering what would happen if he leaned across the cockpit and took care of the dishevelment himself and let those silky strands tickle across his own palms.... Yes, so, well, the hair was a problem, that much was clear.
And it had become even more of a problem when it had finally dawned on Martin that all that lovely hair on Douglas's head went with being rather generously furry elsewhere. It wasn't something he'd ever thought about much, with his own chest so naturally hairless it would have driven a professional waxer to tears, and it wasn't as if he ever got the chance to see Douglas in anything less than his short-sleeved uniform shirt. Or at least he hadn't until Carolyn had gone on yet another economising drive and decided they could share a hotel room.
Douglas's righteous fury had actually been quite funny to behold - Martin could really appreciate the creative use of language when it wasn't aimed directly at himself - and Douglas's epic sulk that followed once Carolyn had proved herself yet again to be an utterly immovable object that rendered her first officer's irresistible force as futile as a spring breeze, had left Martin in rather a good mood. Until Douglas had strode out of the shower, still muttering furiously to himself, dressed in nothing but a towel, and given how cheap the hotel was, it wasn't a very generously sized towel either. Martin was ashamed to admit that he may actually have squeaked and Douglas had shot him a nasty look and claimed that the bathroom was so small you couldn't swing a mouse in it and he was going to get dressed where he had room to manoeuvre, thank you very much.
And Martin had nodded breathlessly and tried very hard not to stare at the generous carpet of curls that covered Douglas's broad chest and then slimmed down to a suggestive trail down the swell of his tummy and into the towel below. And yes, he did notice that those were definitely love handles and there was a hint of man-boob under the curls, but all he could think was how warm Douglas would be, how warm and solid and furry and utterly comforting and how one woman had had the lack of sense to walk away from that, he'd never know, let alone three.
And lying alone in his attic room staring at the ceiling Martin had the honesty to admit that he was completely, utterly fucked. Just thinking about Douglas made him feel giddy, with arousal simmering in his belly in a way he'd never experienced before, a shimmering heat itching under his skin. He was as gay as gay could be for his utterly straight first officer and wasn't that just the story of his life?
Still, given that it was indeed the story of his life, he kind of knew how to deal with it, and that was to make denial into a vast river worthy of the Pharaohs, ignore his own feelings, buckle down and make the best of it. He was good at making the best of things, a quick look around his attic flat told him that, and while we are on the subject, can we just clear up a few misconceptions about said attic?
It was in no way a shabby, dingy, untidy or otherwise depressing dive. It might be small, that was a fair comment, he wasn't going to deny it, Douglas might have difficulty swinging a cat in it, but then that was Douglas's fault for being so big to start with and Martin didn't approve of cruelty to animals anyway. Personally, he felt snug and cosy and homelike were better words for it, and for that he took all the credit himself. He may have learnt his electrical skills from his dad but it was his mum who'd been a dab hand with a sander and a paint brush, and who'd had an eye for design, and of all the children it had been Martin who'd had the patience to sit by her side and listen and learn.
Did everyone forget that he moved furniture for a living and quite a lot of those jobs involved taking broken things to the dump and he had a sharp eye for what could be salvaged with some hard work and imagination. His little attic space was filled with a selection of choice pieces, painstakingly restored with tender, loving care in his spare time. Of course he didn't have his own tools but he got to use the landlord's, in exchange for doing odd jobs around the house, and that got him the last of any pots of paint or wood stain too, and the inside of his attic was painted a lovely warm white that glowed when the rising sun shone in through his skylight.
So there was a throw over the sofa to cover some dubious stains, and the curtains came from Oxfam, but what of it? There was some lovely stuff to be picked up at Oxfam if you knew what to look for, particularly if you chatted up the old ladies that ran it with a bit a shy charm so they held things back for you from the deliveries. His home was his castle and it might be a very miniature castle, and it was unlikely that the Queen and her retinue would be popping around for tea any time soon, but still, it was his and he was proud of it.
And while we're on the subject of misconceptions, Martin would just like to make it clear that he had never, ever, been late on a rent payment. The very idea of such a thing left him feeling utterly mortified, the rent money was the first thing to be put away every month, and the landlord had told him on many occasions that Martin was a god-send in helping to keep an eye on things, because let's face it, the students were barely semi-human at the best of times. Martin did feel this was a little unfair to some of the students, who were perfectly nice people once you got to know them, although he and they didn't have that much in common, but they did bring back produce from the college and with the help of some recipe books loaned from the Oxfam ladies, he'd actually become quite a dab hand at cooking when he had the time.
But getting back to the money, Martin had that under control, thank you very much. Oh of course he'd have liked to be paid by Carolyn, he deserved it, to start with, and it would make things easier, not having to chase down delivery jobs in his spare time and go out in all weathers and be looked down on as a man of no ambition and limited intelligence by people who couldn't pass their CPL if they were given a hundred goes, let alone know how to land a plane on one engine because they'd made a goose smoothie with the other.
If money was sometimes very tight, it was because five percent of every penny he earned went straight into his rainy day fund, even if that meant living off the cheese tray plus the over-abundance of courgettes that the students had somehow produced. He was good at the delivery business - of course, that was as long as he had both ankles in working order and wasn't being hampered by the help of Douglas and/or Arthur. He was careful and polite and hard-working and always made an extra effort to help his older customers and it had to be said he did rather well in the tips department.
And every penny earned, and every penny spent, was written down in a small notebook with meticulous care, even those ridiculously expensive chocolate bars the colour of Douglas's eyes that he only allowed himself on special occasions and even then never at the expense of the rent or of his five percent fund. And yes, he knew other people called him anal-retentive and obsessive and a stick-in-the-mud, but that was what had got him through seven tries at his pilot qualifications without getting loaded down with a lifetime of debt, and he was proud of that achievement, dammit, even if the only person he could acknowledge that pride to was himself.
So he knew how to make the best of a bad situation and he knew all about denial and self-control and making do, and he was not going to let his professional life be derailed by an unfortunate but doubtless quite temporary crush on his co-worker. And if in the privacy of his home, he let himself indulge just a little, lay back on his bed, tucked up nice and warm under that rather lovely patchwork quilt Mrs Burrows had set aside for him last winter at Oxfam, and sucked ever so slowly, piece by delicious bitter-sweet piece, at his bar of chocolate and let his mind wander back to Douglas in nothing but that rather small towel, tucked tight over that rather luscious arse, that was his right.
Although even there it was surprisingly difficult to get things to go his way, which did seem terribly unfair. If a man couldn't take charge of his own sexy fantasies in the privacy of his own home, then he really had to be a bit hopeless, or maybe said man had never had to put up with Douglas bloody Richardson strolling through said fantasies. It wasn't as if Martin was short of material to work with, what with the hands and the voice and the size and the hair, and that towel! - he has mentioned that towel, has he not? But in fantasy, as in life, Douglas just would not do what he was told.
Martin thought he'd start out with something simple, just a little blowjob fantasy, nothing complicated and, if he can put it this way, not too gay. He wasn't entirely comfortable yet with the whole gay thing, some of the activities they apparently got up to seemed a bit unhygienic to him and he couldn't quite see the attraction, but a blowjob was sort of comfortably unisex and the kind of the thing that every red-blooded male liked, right?
It didn't really help that he'd always found masturbation a bit, well, awkward somehow, a bit embarrassing really, rather undignified when you thought about it and somehow unacceptably self-indulgent. He'd thought some of his squeamishness about it might have been down to that unfortunate time when he'd been fourteen and his mother had come bursting through the door into his bedroom at just the wrong moment, but now he'd begun to suspect part of the problem might've been his basic lack of interest in the female forms that he'd dutifully tried to fantasise about.
Certainly in recent weeks - oh okay, fair enough, maybe recent months - he'd let his imagination roam through disembodied images of hands and a voice, of thick hair and a warm broad body, while carefully not letting himself put all the pieces together. But now, now he was going to let go, he was going to seize the bull by the horns, bravely grasp the nettle, carpe diem and all that good stuff. He was going to rip away that towel that had been tormenting his imagination for so long and let his newly discovered rainbow festooned gay fantasy life go to town on his co-pilot.
Except that in his fantasy Douglas was leaning casually against a pillar, buttoned up in that FO uniform that he filled so well, one eyebrow raised in quiet disdain at the very idea that he'd ever get down on his knees for one Martin Crieff, let alone do that with his mouth. God, even in Martin's own fantasies Douglas was insisting on having it his own way and wasn't that just typical of the man. Fine, fine, Martin could roll with the punches and bow to the inevitable and get down on his knees himself and reach up and... except that he couldn't.
It wasn't just that he couldn't quite get past his apprehension about putting that into his own mouth, he was sure Douglas would be as big there as he was everywhere else and Martin really didn't want to sprain his jaw doing this, and he had a horrible feeling he'd end up drooling, and besides his sense of hygiene was demanding that he imagine Douglas having been very recently and very thoroughly showered. God, even in his own filthy fantasies he couldn't help but be fastidious.
The real problem was that he just couldn't get down on his knees, not even for Douglas, especially not for Douglas, he'd fought far too long and far too hard for whatever microscopic iota of respect he'd managed to wrench forth from his utterly unwilling first officer, he wasn't giving it up, not even for hot sex in the privacy of his own mind, a man had to have standards.
So really it wasn't going all that well so far, there had to be something else he could think of... Well, there was that but he just couldn't get that to feel sexy at all, certain bits were clearly designed for sex and certain bits just weren't and it wasn't as if Douglas was going to let him do that and he was quite sure that if Douglas tried that it would never fit and the whole thing was making him feel squicky inside and wilt rather dramatically.
And, well, that was rather it for sex, wasn't it? Let's be clear here, Martin was not a virgin, that would have been pathetic in a man of his age and while he acknowledged that his life might not be ready to be turned into a motivational biography, he refused to consider himself that pathetic. There'd been three girls - well, three if you counted some hurried fumbling in his last year at school where he'd come far too fast and he really had no idea whether she'd come at all - oh okay then, there'd been two girls and he knew for sure one of them had definitely come, mostly because she'd been bouncing away on top of him in an utterly terrifying manner while making a horrid caterwauling noise and he'd fled into the night the minute she'd slumped over sideways and started snoring.
And one of them had actually been his girlfriend, a proper long-term girlfriend who'd met his mum and everything, and who'd honestly seemed quite happy that his job and his flying classes and his studying for attempt number three at his CPL had meant that sex just hadn't happened all that often. In retrospect he couldn't work out if she'd not been terribly interested in sex or not terribly interested in him, or maybe a bit of both, but it had all come to an amiable enough end when she'd got a job offer all the way around the world in Perth.
So here he was, all alone in his attic, failing to be a gay stud even in the safety of his own imagination, he'd just known he was going to be awful as a gay bloke, he'd never find himself a nice boy and he sucked resentfully on a square of his precious chocolate and decided that it just wasn't fair. He let his mind drift as he usually did and thought instead about G-ERTI and flying, about wind and clouds and blue horizons that never ended, and thought about his co-pilot and that amused laugh and quirked up mouth, that subtle musky scent and those stupid wings of hair, and his hand slid back down under the quilt and found that things had perked up quite nicely.
So he sucked on another square of chocolate and thought about a broad chest pressed against his shoulders and a long arm reaching around him, thought about quicksilver fingers playing love-songs on the piano and a honey-rich voice singing about amore, thought about a trail of damp curls leading down to a small towel wrapped tight around a richly rounded arse and imagined the mischief in Douglas's eyes as he let that towel drop.... and suddenly he was grabbing for tissues to save the sheets from stains and then rolling over onto his side with the sleepy lassitude of the post-orgasmic, letting thoughts of Douglas laughing carry him into his dreams.
He woke up feeling really quite perky about life, he had a quick moving job that morning which would bring him nicely into the black for the month, and then a flight to Turin that afternoon which was luckily cargo only, which meant neither Carolyn nor Arthur would be going - not that he disliked their company, of course not, he had the utmost respect for both of them, sort of, some of the time - but without them he'd get Douglas all to himself and maybe Douglas would even agree to have dinner together in Turin. Martin had a little bit saved up just in case and luckily the pound had bounced back against the euro recently so he might even be able to throw in a glass of wine.
It was an easy moving job too, just picking up boxes from that Big Yellow Self Storage place outside Fitton and taking them to a flat in Grantham Street, so only one set of possible grumbling to deal with rather than two and anyway, the young woman had sounded rather nice on the phone, all fluttery with excitement and he'd got the impression she was moving in with her young man for the first time and her pleasure had leaked over to him. He had to admit that there were days when he felt rather jealous that all the world seemed paired off into couples except him - for heaven's sake, even Carolyn had got herself a beau and the less said about Arthur's string of pony club girls the better.
But today was a day when he was happy to wish romance on all the world, and maybe if he was lucky he'd get over the whole hopeless Douglas crush thing and find himself a nice boy, and if he was even luckier the whole gay thing would just be a passing phase and he could still find a nice girl who'd give him that same pleasurable flutter in his stomach he currently got from Douglas, because there was no doubt that'd be a whole lot easier when it came to taking someone home to meet mum.
A pretty young woman opened the door for him and he followed her up the stairs as she chattered, clearly excited, and he entered the living room to find not the boyfriend he'd expected but another woman - a sister? a friend helping out? Except she bounced over to the other woman and grabbed her hand and started gesturing to the box and they were - oh, oh - they were like that. Martin could feel his face freezing with surprise because it was one thing to know in theory that there were girls that were like that and quite another to see it in practise, and he didn't understand because neither of them were big or butch or ugly in any way, they were both the sort of girls that would turn the head of Douglas or Arthur and why wouldn't they prefer a nice boy?
And the other woman was glaring at him now, her face hard with suspicion and he realised all his thoughts must have been showing on his face and if he opened his mouth to apologise he just knew he'd splutter out a whole lot of nonsense that would make it all so much worse so he fled back down the stairs instead, and then realised as he leaned against his van that that might not have been a much better reaction after all. Oh god, what was he going to do? It wasn't as if he minded, after all he had no room to talk, he'd just been surprised, that was all.
He spotted a box that wasn't properly closed and there was a vase visible at the top and the house next door had an amazing array of yellow roses tinged pink at the edge spilling out into the street and he was sure the owner would never notice if he clipped a few from the outside, using the handy penknife that he always carried, he knew the value of being prepared. He filled the vase with water from the guest loo and then cautiously reentered the living room, carrying the next box with the vase balanced on top, to find the girls engaged in a tense, quiet argument which they abruptly stopped to turn on him with faces frozen with mistrust.
"A flat-warming gift, for, you know, the two of you."
He bit down on the inside of his lip to stop himself spilling out any further nervous nonsense and before he knew it they were both chattering to him with relieved excitement and helping him carry boxes and telling him all about how they'd met and the taciturn father who hadn't spoken a word to one of them since getting the news and the long-suffering mother of the other who was trying so hard to understand and only thinking of what was best and so sure she hadn't brought her up that way that it was difficult to find any understanding in it at all.
At the end he found himself being kissed on a cheek by each of them and heading out the door with an extra twenty pounds pressed into his hand, warm as toast inside from the reflection of their happiness, thinking that maybe a boy of his own really wouldn't be such a bad thing, his mum would just have to learn to cope, honestly she'd put up with worse what with the whole implosion of Simon's marriage over all those affairs on the side. He'd just have to get over Douglas first.
He pulled up at the airfield to see G-ERTI parked outside, the fluffy clouds that had been obscuring the sun parting so that for a moment she was caught in a ray of light against the shadow of the grass, and his breath caught as he stared. Ignoring the portacabin for once, he walked across to her, circling round her first and then laying his hand gently on her fuselage. She was his girl, his one and only, she always had been, it'd just taken him a while to realise. She was his ride into the sky, his escape from the rule of gravity and the two-dimensional disappointment of the earth. And she wasn't second best, it wasn't as if he'd rather fly without her, paragliders and such frankly gave him the heebie-jeebies, they seemed so insubstantial, and he wasn't going to be stepping out of a perfectly functional plane to go sky-diving any time in this lifetime, thank you very much.
He loved the solidity of her, he loved the physics that let her bulk soar as if she was lighter than air itself, he loved the complexity of her controls and the fact that he knew how to weave a way through them to make her climb or dive or simply float in the sky, as if suspended in the vast blueness and yet traveling at hundreds of miles an hour. He loved the checks and procedures and the sense of safety and order that they brought with them and he loved the freedom that came with knowing that he could turn her nose to any corner of the globe and let her fly free.
He stroked his hand over her metal flank and reflected that his life really wasn't all that bad, when you thought about it. Oh sure, it wasn't perfect, this wasn't what he'd imagined when he'd first fantasised about being a pilot, this wasn't striding through the corridors of Heathrow in the uniform of an Air England captain or landing the inaugural flight of the Airbus 380 in Sydney. And while he had always sort of known he wasn't going to be the kind of pilot who reached such exalted heights, he had rather expected he'd be good enough to actually get paid for what he did.
But still, he got to do what he loved and not everyone could say that much. He was a pilot and a captain and he got to fly most days, and by now he knew Herc well enough to have heard quite a few stories about life at Air Cal. Honestly, it didn't always sound that great, the same old routes week in and week out, Newcastle to some Spanish airport and back again, but with a different crew each time, little chance to get to know people or make friends, co-pilots hidden away behind newspapers or ipads, and the process of piloting limited by fly-by-wire and automated flight controls. Herc had once admitted that he only got to manually operate the plane for about 80 seconds out of a typical two-hour flight.
Say what you like about G-ERTI and her temperamental ways, and while he was at it, Carolyn and her temperamental ways, but each day was different, each destination was different, and he and Douglas really did work with G-ERTI to keep her up in the air. Douglas might call her a difficult old bitch who was far too inclined to cry wolf but Martin knew she just got a bit tetchy some days, just like all of them, suffering the aches and pains of life, and he was getting much better at coaxing her to perform in the air rather than diverting in a panic every time.
"Why, Captain, you are rubbing up against our old girl with a particularly besotted look in your eye. Am I interrupting your private time?"
It was Douglas, of course it was Douglas, Douglas was pretty much guaranteed to be around any time he was making a fool of himself, it was just one of those laws of nature things, along with the basic principles of physics, nothing to be done about it. Douglas, strolling across the airfield, no sign of his hat, those silly waves of hair ruffled in the light breeze, in a short-sleeved shirt with his jacket over his arm, looking as handsome and authoritative and casually amused by life as he always did and Martin realised there and then that really, there was simply nothing to be done about it.
He felt about Douglas the way he felt about flying, the way he just knew it was what he wanted and needed and was born to do. Over the decades he'd lost count of the number of people who'd told him he'd get over his obsession with flying, but they just hadn't understood. It was in the very marrow of his bones and now it turned out that so was Douglas. He was helplessly, hopelessly, irredeemably in love with his co-pilot and he knew that that wasn't ever going to change. There wasn't going to be a nice girl or a nice boy in his future, and while that wasn't what he'd hoped for, a bit like his flying career, it wasn't that bad either.
It wasn't as if they had different jobs and he had no excuse to spend time with the other man, or as if they flew for Cal Air and might only share a cockpit once in a blue moon. He got to spend many hours of most days in the company of Douglas, working, teasing, playing games, sitting in silence, sharing the thrill of flying.
Of course he'd fall hopelessly in love with an utterly straight man, and there was going to be heartache when Douglas inevitably found himself a new girlfriend, that was just the story of his life. But he was in love with a man who was his friend and his co-pilot, who joked with him and smiled and every so often actually approved of something he'd done, and Martin wouldn't swop it for anything in the world.
"Something you've not been telling me, Martin? You've been staring at me with almost as much of a besotted look as you were gazing at G-ERTI."
Oh god, of course Douglas was going to work it out. He had his head tilted a little to one side and a small frown of concentration between his eyebrows, just the way he did when he was figuring something out, something that would lead to a tease or a scheme and either way would inevitably mean trouble for Martin. He'd never be able to hide this from Douglas. But then again, it didn't matter; being teased by Douglas was part of the whole package.
"Douglas, if you were a plane, you'd be a Super Guppy and I'm definitely not qualified to fly one of those." And he took off towards the airstairs before he could ruin his snappy comeback with a stuttering run-on.
"Oh really! Good one, sir."
And he could feel that warm glow light inside him that he got every time he did something Douglas approved of, every time he impressed Douglas with a witty remark or a clever contribution to a game. He knew Douglas, in fact he'd come to know Douglas remarkably well over the years. He knew when he heard that sharp-edged tone in Douglas's voice that he'd inadvertently hit a sore spot in the other man's surprisingly thin shell of ego and he needed to back-pedal fast, whether he thought he was in the right or not. And he knew that at other times to back off would just feed Douglas's need to niggle and he had to stand up for himself with a quick putdown or a clever twist to the joke.
He knew that there were days when Douglas's insouciance was a thin veneer over sadness and he needed to tread lightly and there were days when Douglas's disdainful putdowns were a cover for disappointment and needed to be turned aside with a clever quip or quick distraction. He didn't always read it right but he enjoyed the challenge of trying, and letting Douglas tease him over a harmless crush would be far from the worst thing ever to happen to him.
"Martin."
He paused on the stairs, the sound of Douglas's deep rich voice holding him by invisible bonds, the way it always did. He could feel from the shake of the railings that Douglas was climbing up behind him, standing on the step directly below him, putting his broad warm hand on Martin's shoulder.
"I happen to know of a surprisingly good little sushi place in Turin, very quiet and intimate. May I take you out for dinner?"
He couldn't mean.... could he? No, of course he couldn't, he couldn't possibly. Things like this just didn't happen to Martin, Arthur would be made the Oxford emeritus professor for economics first or Carolyn would start volunteering at the local bake sale to raise money for the Fitton abandoned dogs' home. But the subtlety of it was quintessentially Douglas, all he had to do was take one step upwards, let Douglas's hand slide off his shoulder, refuse or even accept in a jokey manner and it would just be an invitation among the boys, a blokes' night out, no embarrassment, no undercurrents, nothing to see here, move along.
But Martin hadn't taken a step upwards and the thumb of Douglas's hand was rubbing softly across the fabric of his jacket and if this was a tease, it was an oddly gentle one. Martin half turned and then started as he found himself at eye level with Douglas for the first time in their acquaintance, looking into those rich warm brown eyes, which were watching him intently with a mix of amusement and curiosity.
"I don't know about sushi, Douglas, I mean... raw fish... It doesn't sound hygienic, and what if the fish is off, I have to fly the next day, I'm sure I've read something about parasitic worms that can burrow into your intestines and besides.... it looks a bit squidgy and I've got this thing about textures in food and...."
And please no, his mind had stalled completely and his mouth was running off with itself, the way that it did when he got really, really nervous and he knew how this would pan out, he'd seen it a hundred times. The other person's smile would go stiff and plastic and then their eyes would get that hunted look and they'd start to back away very slowly, casting around for some kind of excuse as they began to wonder whether Martin had been taking his medication recently and another brief moment of opportunity would be lost in the face of his utter ineptness with any other member of the human race....
Except that Douglas wasn't pulling away, in fact his hand had slid round to the back of Martin's collar and his fingertips were lightly tickling the short hair at the nape of his neck, and he was watching Martin with a look of fond amusement. Because he knew Martin! He knew that Martin got like this and he knew that didn't stop Martin being an adequate pilot or a generally okay human being or apparently someone he might want to have an intimate sushi dinner for two with in Turin.
"Oh God, Douglas, please shut me up."
"With pleasure, Captain."
And those chocolate eyes were so close he was going cross-eyed trying to focus and that beautifully mobile mouth was closing over his own and his gabble of words were swallowed by soft lips and a warm firm tongue that had very clear ideas about what it wanted to do inside Martin's mouth, and he was breathless and suddenly dizzy and he might have tipped over the railings of the stairs - and wouldn't that have been an ignominious end, airline captain falls to his death from the steps of his plane - except that clever, clever Douglas had slid an arm firmly round his waist and was holding him securely in place pressed against Douglas's broad chest and that lovely smell of cologne and heat and Douglas was filling his senses....
"Straight!" He pulled himself away abruptly. "But you're... you know... what about all those women? The thousand stewardesses? I don't understand." He was almost pleading now, please don't let this be a mistake, Douglas going short-sighted with age and mistaking him for someone else entirely or....
"Why would I be anything as boring as straight?" Douglas's amused tones jerked him out of the spiral of panic. "I admit I look at women more often than men, but I've never been one to limit my field of operation. Why deny oneself any of the many lovely variations of the human form? And you, young sir? I don't recall you being quite this fond of me when we were first introduced. When did your mind turn to thoughts of carnal delights with your charming first officer?"
Oh god, carnal delights, it was very hard to think straight with that image lodged in his brain, but when had he first thought of Douglas that way? It was hard to tell, it was as much a part of his life now as flying had ever been. Maybe the first time he'd watched Douglas land G-ERTI, coaxing her so masterfully with those dexterous hands, or maybe a few minutes ago when Douglas's mouth had settled over his and for the first time his crush moved from the realms of misty pastel fantasy into glorious fully-coloured sunbathed reality. Or maybe....
"The piano. When you played the piano for Carolyn and were singing that Italian thing."
"Oh! You're a closet romantic. Why am I not surprised?"
Douglas took two steps back down the airstairs, so he was looking up at Martin with a mischievous twinkle in his eyes. He spread out his arms, sucked in a deep breath and opened his mouth.
I can open your eyes
Take you wonder by wonder
Over, sideways and under
On a magic carpet ride
A whole new world
And Martin had his hands over his face, skin burning with embarrassment but still he was watching every moment of Douglas through the gaps in his fingers. Somewhere in the distance Carolyn was exclaiming indignantly and Arthur was clapping excitedly and somewhere beyond them was a whole world that didn't know that Martin's life had just been turned quite upside down and he couldn't remember why he'd ever thought that he didn't like Douglas. He loved Douglas, he was completely and utterly infatuated with Douglas and judging by the sparks of arousal coursing through his body just from the memory of that kiss, he suspected the gay sex thing might just work itself out after all. Maybe, just maybe, it was all going to be okay.
* * *
Martin lay awake in their hotel room in Turin - Douglas having cleverly exchanged two single rooms for one rather nice double, quite unfazed by the scandalised looks given them by the young lady at the reception - and watched over Douglas in the moonlight. If he was being honest, Douglas looked a bit like a beached whale, taking up two thirds of the bed and almost all of the duvet and snoring lustily as he slept. But Martin was far too giddy with happiness to care one bit, so keyed up with joyful surprise that he couldn't possibly sleep. It had all been so... so.... well, beyond words really.
It hadn't been quite the idyll of his fantasies, there was quite a bit of wobble on that luscious arse and tufts of hair in unexpected places, but it had in fact been far, far better. Martin had always suspected that he wasn't terribly good at sex, all his experiences had been a mixture of nervous embarrassment, sure that he was somehow doing it wrong, and vague distaste at how squigdy it all was. But he had always thought that when the time came that he got it right, sex would be solemn and special and significant.
But apparently Douglas hadn't read the rules, which when you thought about it was just like Douglas, he'd always thought the rule book simply existed so that he had something to put his cup of coffee down on. It turned out Douglas thought sex meant being utterly undignified while laughing as much as possible. It was when Douglas had wriggled halfway down Martin's body and then stopped to compose a dirty limerick in honour of Martin's belly button, that he'd finally realised that he had no control whatsoever over what was happening and he'd best just go with the flow. Which had been a very good idea, one of the best ideas he'd ever had really, because it'd turned out that letting Douglas have control was the most erotic thing that had ever happened to him.
In all the time he'd spent obsessing over Douglas's many attributes, he couldn't get over the fact that he'd forgotten about that mouth. Always in the cockpit the first sign that he'd amused Douglas was in the way that beautiful mobile mouth quirked up at the corner. And it turned out that that lovely mouth wasn't just good for charming generous smiles or bubbling laughter or scathing vocabulary or glorious singing. It was very very good at other things too. Things like kissing, and licking, and nibbling, and sucking.... It had turned out that Douglas was remarkably creative about what he was prepared to put in his mouth and was perfectly happy to suck on that as if it was the world's most delicious lollipop.
They hadn't done any of the more advanced things that were apparently on the gay menu, but Douglas had lubed up his fingers and stuck them in a place that Martin was quite sure fingers weren't meant to go and it had felt so unexpectedly good that he'd completely forgotten to worry whether he was entirely clean down there. In fact the combination of Douglas's fingers and his mouth had so badly fried Martin's synapses that for the first time in as long as he could remember, the slightly anxious inner monologue that followed every moment of his existence had stuttered into shocked silence and he had surfed unthinking across wave after wave of sensation until he had finally washed on the shore, utterly wrung out and held safe and secure in the circle of Douglas's arms.
He rather thought Douglas had ambitions about putting more than just his fingers up there, and the thought made him feel terribly nervous and yet oddly excited, Douglas had completely demolished all his ideas about which bits of his body were designed for sex and which weren't, he'd been left feeling as if every one of his cells was up for it. He'd been right to suspect that Douglas would be generously proportioned everywhere, and he didn't quite see how he'd ever get it to fit, but nevertheless he was fairly certain he could be coaxed into it, he'd found he liked being coaxed by Douglas, which was very fortunate as it was clear that Douglas enjoyed coaxing him.
He reached out gently to let his hand run over the warm expanse of Douglas's soft skin, the comfortable padding giving under his fingertips, and that was another thing he'd not even begun to realise how much he appreciated until he'd found himself rubbing up against all that silky skin like a cat, trying to make up for a lifetime of loneliness with as much touching as he could possibly manage. And Douglas had teased him for it, just the way he always did, except with that twinkle in his eye that said that he and Martin were on the same side of the joke.
It was just like it'd always been and it was all utterly new, and for the first time in his life he felt right in a way he never really had before, with Douglas to hold him at night and G-ERTI waiting for him in the morning and a whole new world out there to explore, and at long last he didn't have to make his way through it alone. Softly, very softly, he began to sing to the sleeping Douglas the same song Douglas had sung for him on the steps of G-ERTI.
A new fantastic point of view
No one to tell us no
Or where to go
Or say we're only dreaming
A whole new world
A dazzling place I never knew
- THE END -