CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Ben lay back on the warm granite and relished the hot sun on his face. He undid a couple more of his shirt buttons and spread his fingers on the rocks, scratching idly at the lichen. He’d spent some of his most formative years training on these moors at Okehampton camp, so he supposed it wasn’t so odd he felt at home here. But there was something else, something about the house, perhaps, that stirred feelings deep within him. He sensed Nikolas’s presence and squinted up through the sun to see him sitting down next to him. He had changed into the old jeans and T-shirt that he had worn the previous evening. He lay back next to Ben, shielding his eyes from the sun. His arms were beginning to go brown without burning first—that irritating ability only some blond-haired, brown-eyed Nordic people have. Ben tensed in the angry silence but decided to make the first move to reconciliation. Arguing with Nikolas was very unpleasant. “I’m sorry. I just wanted it. I don’t have a single photograph of you.” He retrieved the photo and held it out.
Nikolas didn’t take it. Instead, a hand came over and rested on Ben’s belly, the thumb idly playing with a button. “I should not have gone to the house. That was a mistake. It has all tumbled down around me, Benjamin, and the dust of that collapse is choking me. Keep the photo if you want it so much, but you must promise me one thing. You must promise me that whatever happens in the future you will look at it and know that is the real me. If you promise me that then you can have it.”
Ben stared into the familiar, yet at the same time disturbingly unfamiliar eyes of the teenager looking back at him and nodded.
Nikolas lay back on the rocks, staring up at the sky. “I am so tired of it all.” He didn’t elaborate on this slightly unsettling statement.
Ben felt poised on the brink of a huge chasm, the past behind him full of Nikolas’s threatening dust clouds, the future ahead in this sunlit valley, but he didn’t know the way to lead Nikolas across to this place of greater safety. He felt a wash of despondency settling upon him until Nikolas said more conversationally, “This house has no stables.” Nikolas sat up and propped his chin on his hand, staring at the vast reaches of the moors all around them. “But the riding would be superb.” Ben said nothing, but a small stab of hope made the corners of his lips quirk. He pictured Nikolas on his horse, windswept and wild, and a shiver of lust so powerful swept through him that he had to sit up to hide the evidence. “The whole house probably has no electricity. But the fireplaces looked very solid.” Ben now saw Nikolas naked in firelight and ducked his head, grinning. “It is ridiculous to think of travelling to London from here. Impossible.” Ben thought about Nikolas trapped here during a Dartmoor winter, snowed in, unable to leave his side and couldn’t suppress a small chuckle. Nikolas glanced over at him. “This is the one you want.” He looked away again. “I could hold you to the letter of our agreement and say that this one was not on the list and so does not count.” He turned and studied Ben’s profile for a long time. “It may not be for sale.” He sighed. “But we can make enquiries.”
Ben then felt guilty, as if he was forcing Nikolas to do something he didn’t want to do on the basis of a false promise. He lifted his face to find the dark eyes staring off into the distance once more. The wind caught at Nik’s longish hair, and he ran his fingers through it distractedly. He closed his eyes and tipped his face to the sun. “You were right, Ben. You do have good taste.” Ben had to agree, looking at Nikolas’s blond hair glinting in the sun, that he did. He twisted around slightly and lay down with his head in Nikolas’s lap.
Automatically, Nikolas’s hand came down and his fingers began to comb through Ben’s hair. It was a rare and precious moment of intimacy they had never really explored before, and all the more welcome for their recent argument. Their relationship, begun with mindless sex, had never developed along normal patterns of slow exploration and growing familiarity. They seemed to be going backward to a beginning that in some ways was also a destination. They’d never had a date or eaten together in a restaurant—other than hotels, which they’d booked for sex. They’d never been on holiday together. They’d never held hands in public. They’d never shopped together, had no friends in common; and, in some ways, they knew very little about each other—or Ben did about Nikolas. He had been alarmed to discover that Nikolas knew more about his childhood than he did himself. He looked up at Nikolas, not surprised to find that Nik was watching the way his fingers were running through his hair.
“I think I’ve been here before.”
Nikolas nodded. “It is called spirit of place. I have felt it in places also. I saw that you were feeling it as soon as you saw the house.”
“Have you just voluntarily told me something about yourself?”
Nikolas smiled. “I must be slipping. Perhaps it is this place. Perhaps it is just you lying where you are.”
Ben couldn’t pretend he didn’t understand what Nikolas meant. He was lying in Nikolas’s lap, after all. He turned his cheek to the bulge then unzipped the soft jeans, freeing Nikolas’s erection. It was startlingly beautiful and natural in the bright sunlight. Nikolas lay back with a groan as if the feel of the sun and wind on his erection was painful but he swore in a hoarse whisper of delight as Ben took the cock deep to the back of his throat. He knew Nikolas loved this—it was one confession he had managed to drag out of him—so Ben had been practicing on him recently…a lot. He was getting pretty good. Too good almost. With a harsh cry, Nikolas came, scrabbling in Ben’s hair for a hold and jerking violently as he released. When he could breathe again, he lay flat on the rocks. Ben allowed the softening cock to slide from his lips, moved up to Nikolas’s mouth and fed him back his own spill, laughing at the outraged reaction and the consequent mess on their faces. But Nikolas didn’t seem to be in the mood to let anything Ben did annoy him now—perhaps this was his apology for his earlier temper. He wrestled Ben over onto his back and proceeded to return both favours he had just been given.
By the time they returned to the house, they were both more than a little dishevelled. Ben stripped off the remainder of his suit and changed into jeans as well. He sat on the tailgate of the vehicle, bare feet, knees drawn up to his bare chest, his arms wrapped around his legs, just staring at the house. He heard a soft expletive from Nikolas and turned a lazy, green-eyed gaze to him questioningly. Nikolas shook his head, looked down at the ground then raised his eyes and said unexpectedly, “You have no idea just how beautiful you are, do you?” A quick smile of embarrassment and pleasure flashed across Ben’s face before he could hide it. Nikolas came and sat on the tailgate with him, and they stared at the house companionably.
After a moment, and with a quick glance to gauge possible reactions to his question, Ben asked hesitantly, “Have you…? I mean, did you, when you were…? How many men have you slept with?”
Nikolas turned his head and regarded him for a long time before answering. “In the sense that you mean, you were the first.”
Ben held his gaze. “In the sense that I mean? What the fuck does that mean?”
“It means many things, but hopefully it means exactly what you want to hear. I have never truly kissed another man, and you are the only man I have wanted to give my body to. But I suspect it will take a great deal longer for you to tell me of past lovers, and now that you have somewhat inappropriately brought up the subject, I am actually curious. How many men have you slept with, Ben?”
Ben pursed his lips and shook his head, as if anxious at admitting the true number, but then stopped teasing and smirked. “I guess that night on the billiard table was a first for both of us then.”
Nikolas’s eyes widened. “Seriously, Benjamin, you had been in the army since you were sixteen, and you expect me to believe that—”
“Despite what you might read, mate, soldiers aren’t fucking each other in every foxhole. I admit, I got a hand job once or twice in the showers—mainly from paras, course; we all know about that…on the other hand there was the occasional marine, but we were always told it’s compulsory for them.”
“Stop trying to be funny and tell me truthfully—that first time at the house was literally your first time?”
Ben sobered. “Yeah, it was.”
“Incredible.”
“Surprised I knew what to do really.”
“I do not recall you having any difficulty working it out.”
“No, but then I’d had some weeks thinking about it.”
Nikolas turned his head slowly, incredulity on his face. “You were thinking about…before that weekend? With…me?”
Ben shrugged. “Come on. Have you seen yourself? That fucking interview in London? Asking all those questions in that bloody voice of yours? You say you fell—I almost took off. I was so hard I had to take my jacket off and lay it on my lap.”
Nikolas laughed. “Good God. I remember that. For the rest of the interview, I was hoping you would take your shirt off as well.”
They held each other’s gaze, and Ben said calmly, “It was fate, Nik, you know that. You can rationalise things as much as you like, but everything has led us to this place and to each other.”
Nikolas turned his gaze to the house and the moors and then the rooks circling the enormous fir trees by the stream. “I do not believe in fate. We make our own destinies through sacrifice and pain.” He patted Ben’s thigh to soften his words and smiled. “But I do not deny that when I am with you, I am willing to be persuaded to your view of the world. Come. I have one day left to commit adultery with you. We should not waste the opportunity.”
Ben chuckled. “We could stay here. Sort of camp out?”
There was a snort of derision. “I am not that fond of you.”
They drove away from the house, and when they finally came back out onto a proper road, it was like emerging from a dream. Ben actually glanced back anxiously. “What if we can’t find it again? What if it doesn’t—?”
“If you are actually going to finish that sentence and say really exist, then can you get out of the car and walk home.”