Hammer & Air (2 page)

On nights like this one, those inches seemed like an impossible chasm, and one I would never breech.

“If you don’t, we’ll find summat you do like,” he’d returned laconically, and it were all I could do not to plaster my slight body against his broad one and touch him all over with my mouth and my hands, so I could show him what I wanted, and what I’d
really
like.

But me and Hammer didn’t work that way. He thought he were slow, and I thought he were coarse, and I thought I were cowardly, and he thought I were cold. We saw the blue and the red of each other, but not the gold, not back then.

And not now, as the girl ran off gaily back to her work, Hammer’s seed drying on her skin. As I had that thought, feeling a little queasy about it, Hammer looked into the trees and called my name.

I clambered down from the tree, my sketchbook tucked in the front of my pants to hide the fact that my cock—a little shorter and more slender than Hammer’s by a bit—were still hard and aching, and that my balls hung heavily in my loose trews.

“So,” he said, squinting at me like he did when he were trying to give me something, “did she do anything for you?”

“No,” I muttered, half-angry, all the way mortified. “Not a blessed thing. What, Hammer, did you think if I liked seeing you fuck, she’d spread her legs for me next time?” I shifted uneasily, because I had a vision of myself, bent over the tree, and Hammer hammering into
my
arse as he’d pounded into the girl’s.
He wouldn’t have to be gentle,
an insidious voice whispered.
His face could go slack and sweet with giving. He could look that way at you.

Hammer shrugged. “Or both of us,” he said casually, and the thought of being naked with Hammer, girl or no girl, were enough to make it even harder to stand still.

His squint intensified, and he grabbed my shoulder. He were a bluff boy, a physical boy. He touched or tasted everything, from new cookies to worms to the sweat on his shoulder when he’d been working especially hard. I were used to his hands on my person—my elbow or my bicep or my back. He didn’t mind his own sweat, and he seemed not to notice mine, and so I came to crave the way he smelled when he were salty with perspiration, and now, when he smelled of both sweat and come?

It were all I could do not to moan as he stepped into my personal space.

“You lied!” he accused, and his hand cupped my crotch without apology. “It made your prick hard, I can feel it!”

At the attention from his hand, the thing tightened to the point of pain and jerked in his grasp, and he looked at me, surprised.

“Not her,” I said roughly, although I figured that should be obvious by now. “Not her, idiot. You.”

He pulled my sketchbook and dropped it, letting it fall to the ground in its bindings, and I gave thanks that they held. Still holding my shoulder with one hand, he pulled me to him then, and thrust his other hand, the one that were cupping my swollen prick, down my pants.

I groaned, and he pulled my face into his shoulder and grabbed it, wrapping his fist around it and feeling the slickness that preceded climax with his thumb.

I whimpered against his shoulder, and he jerked on it. It weren’t rough, exactly, just… excited. Enthusiastic. I whimpered again, and he started a rhythm. I collapsed into his arms and clung to him, just clung to him, while my vision went white with the summer sun, and my whole body convulsed around his grasping, pumping fist.

When he were done, the only thing I could hear were the hot wind in deep yellow summer grasses, and our labored breathing as he held me around the shoulders and pumped my now flaccid, dripping cock.

He pulled his hand from my pants, and we both stared at it, almost in wonder. It were covered in fluids both clear and thick white, and he held it to his mouth and sucked on the webbing again. Then he wrapped that big, broad, blunt-fingered hand around my jaw, leaving his thumb, covered in my spend, to thrust inside my mouth.

“Taste,” he ordered, and I closed my eyes and suckled, and he thrust against me and grunted. His enormous cock were, unbelievably, becoming hard again. I suckled harder, the taste bitter and salty, and he clutched me by the hips and rutted against me. I felt the thing grow large and stiff against my stomach, and then he rutted it harder and harder, biting my shoulder and crying out as it spat one final blast inside his trousers, and then I were supporting him, only I couldn’t, and we both sank into the grasses at the bole of the old, great maple.

Our breathing seemed never to still.

“Mine,” he grumbled in my ear. “You stay in my bed. I’ll fuck you. No other boys.”

“No women,” I snapped waspishly, and he grunted affirmative.

“Not even if you’re here to watch.”

I laughed a little, without humor, and he pulled back, meeting me with his brilliant blue eyes. “Next half-day then. You be here. Blanket, olive oil. You’re mine, Eirn. I’ll make you feel it, ye ken?”

An old expression. He used them sometimes; mostly, I think, because they meant he didn’t have to use many words at all.

“I’ll feel it,” I told him earnestly. “Anything. You do anything you want to me.” And then, I gave him something. It were an important something, something he clung to later, when anything I gave him seemed in doubt. “All I’ve wanted my whole life is for you to do anything you want to me.”

He grinned then, his eyes hooded, and the clutch of his hands on my shoulders promising all sorts of joys. “Right, then. I promise.”

He kissed me then, his mouth hard and bruising—more a sock in the arm than a kiss—but it were what he had. That were Hammer. Sometimes he’d have to bruise a thing before he learned to stroke it nice. I were no exception.

Part II
The Arc of the Swing

My next half-day were in four days. Nothing seemed to change between us in that time, but it didn’t seem to change at the same time the world rumbled, re-made at our feet.

He didn’t attack me at night, pin me to the bed by the neck and drive himself into me like a piston in an engine. I’d heard the sobs of some of the boys who lived this, so I were damned grateful. He didn’t place his palm across my stomach and bring me back against him in quiet moments, as I’d seen men do with their women; but then, he hadn’t done that with any of the women I knew he’d fucked, so that didn’t seem to matter. There were no hidden kisses, no whispers in my ear, no surreptitious touch of hands as we reached for sundries in the morning.

But none of that hurt, and none of that mattered, because at night, the fathom-deep chasm between our sleeping bodies had filled, closed, become nonexistent. What were left were the blissful heaviness of his arm, anchored around my hips or my shoulders or my chest.

I woke up every morning feeling as though I had been branded by him, the heat of his body having seeped through my skin like the smell of leather and now I wore Hammer as my own personal tattoo.

It were that invisible mark, the mark of Hammer on my skin if not yet in my flesh, that gave me the courage to put on a blank face the morning we were to meet by the tree.

Summer were fading now, but that didn’t mean it weren’t hot in the room with the printing press, and the smell of ink were stifling. I didn’t mind so much; today’s job were a newspaper, and the newspaper were running a short piece I had written on why earthworms made for more fertile farmland. I’d run an experiment out where the maple tree stood, and there were two flats of carrots, turnips, and tubers there, one bigger and grander than the other, and all, I were sure, for the extra bucket of earthworms I’d added to the soft soil.

It were a small thing, but large enough to tell Hammer, in broken sentences, over dinner at the orphanage the day we’d met at the tree.

He’d given me a gift in return. A smile. He didn’t often smile—his face tended to set itself in surly lines, hiding his eyes behind his high brow and the squint of his cheeks. But he smiled, and his face were transformed into a thing of beauty, and my heart seemed to beat twice as rapidly as before. It were probably a scientific impossibility, but the feeling were enough to stop up my tongue, and I’d had no voice to tell him about the article itself. He’d smiled at me. I’d write volumes for such a smile.

They were so rare, that I might as well have.

So I were happy this day, as I set the letters with gentle taps of the hammer, and me and Linus, the other boy in the shop, placed the big sheet of paper and set the rollers over it. Linus glared at me, and I looked innocently back.

“Yer in a good mood today.” He were a sour boy, for the most part. He’d been sold into apprenticeship by his parents so that his younger siblings would not starve. They visited him on his half-days and brought him baked goods and fresh blankets, and in all, he had the most comfortable pallet at the printers. Of course, I had a bed in an orphanage, until Hammer turned nineteen in two months. Hammer had promised me he’d gain his majority and his mastership at the smithies, and rent a flat above the inn. Before that day at the tree, even, he’d said I could stay with him, and we’d both be quit of the orphanage forever.

“It’s my half-day,” I told Linus now, wishing I could say something, anything, about Hammer, meeting me at the tree. Such a small thing, but it felt like the sky.

“Yeah, well, let’s still hope we get them after Master Will takes over. That bugger’ll likely ream us in the closet and call it a lunch break.”

My fingers fumbled for a bit with the paper, and I had to pick them up right quick or they’d be crushed.

“Master Will?” The words felt cold as they fell from my numb lips.

Linus smiled evilly. “Not such a blessing being pretty, now is it?”

He could talk. He were a thin, sallow looking boy with a scraggly blond beard and stringy hair to match. Master Will, with his preference for boys, had never looked at him twice. But me, well, I looked like Hammer. I weren’t vain, but being told we looked like brothers our whole lives, and knowing he were beautiful, it did tell me that I weren’t tough to look at.

I remembered the last time the man were here. He were a bluff, red-faced man, with grizzled black hair, a chest like an oxen yoke, and punishing packs of muscle in his shoulders and biceps. I’d seen him break a boy’s arm once, when the boy simply stood and wept after being ordered to go around the back of the building. He’d ended up going to the back of the print shop anyway, but he’d needed his arm wrapped afterwards. The action had been no more difficult for Master Will than snapping a branch in hard fists would be for Hammer, but even then, for as little as I truly fathomed Hammer’s heart, I knew Hammer would never hurt someone by forcing him or hurting him for sport.

As if to seal my fate, at that moment, a shadow darkened the door, and there were Master Will, along with the current printer, Master Lea. Poor Master Lea—he were a stooped, kind, gray-haired, old man with rheumy eyes, and the things he did not know about the different men who’d come to assess the estate of this print shop were many and profound. He’d been a kind master. I’d be sorry to see him go; but I’d be sorrier to see that it were Master Will who would take over.

“Here they are, hard at work!” Master Will laughed jovially, and I kept my eyes on my business. The fact that something I’d written, a piece of knowledge I’d painstakingly documented, were being printed out on the press I’d set up, ceased to mean anything.
Hammer claimed me,
I thought resentfully.
I’m Hammer’s. Master Will will not touch me. Not today.

“Yes, and you mind that young Eirn, now. He’ll be one of your writers and a master printer of his own right, you will see.”

I smiled weakly at Master Lea. Gods—he only meant to pay me a compliment, to set up my place in the future. He had no ken that he might as well have trussed me to an archery target, with a big red circle around my waiting arse.

“Thank you, Master Lea,” I said quietly. “I’m proud of the faith you’ve shown in me.”

I were unprepared for the crack of a fist across my cheek. Master Lea sputtered, but he were small and old, and I think that some of the gold must have already changed hands.

“I’ll watch this one,” Master Will snarled, and I glared at him through the stars in my vision. “I’ll watch he doesn’t get above himself. Writing? Leave that for the scholars. This one… this one will have to be buggered to know his place.”

My jaw were swelling rapidly, and the vision in my swollen eye were going red with blood. At that moment, Linus, bless him, squealed pitifully and said, “Oh, help, the roller’s gone skittish!” And I rushed to assist him like any good printer’s lad would.

We worked in silence then, our eyes grimly met. Master Lea feigned confusion about how much gold had really been paid, so Master Will were obliged to go back to his rooms to find the signed contract. As he stumped out of the room, his feet thumping on the bare boards of the floor, Master Lea drew near.

“Take your half-day, Eirn,” he said quietly. “I’ll not expect you back.”

“I’ll miss you,” I muttered, and then, bobbing my head in farewell to Linus, fled the place I’d thought to work for most my life.

I wanted to go get Hammer, but I couldn’t. Running through town would put me in too much proximity with the fucker who’d just broken my face. I had to console myself with the thought that Hammer would come to me.

I’d packed us a lunch; it were wrapped in a blanket and stashed by the door of the press. All I had to do were grab it, as I’d planned, and run for the tree… for
our
place, and then sit there, trembling, until Hammer walked up.

I couldn’t do that, though. The tree were not far off from a stream, and with the stream came a blackberry bush. After I’d trembled out my nerves and run flat into a blank sheet when I tried to write up a plan, I went to pick a shirt’s worth of berries. Hammer savored them. For some reason, it were all I could think about as I pulled the ones waiting for me as purple and juicy as a ripe girl off their spear-guarded clusters. When I were done, I rinsed out my shirt and used it to soothe the right big bruise the side of my face had become.