Trowchester Blues 01 - Trowchester Blues (14 page)

“Oh ye of little faith.” Finn sat down opposite him, cradling his own coffee between both hands. There was a bruised darkness to his eyes that Michael didn’t like, as though Finn felt just as fragile this morning as Michael did. “So what brings you to my door at this ungodly hour?”

“I . . .” Michael turned away from the man’s riddling green gaze as too much emotion choked him. He wanted to tell Finn everything, have the man piece him back together in such a way that he too was better than before. He just didn’t know where to start. Didn’t dare. “I had a bad night. With my ghosts, you know? In the house.”

“And you came to me to soothe your pain?” Finn reached over and snatched the last bite of croissant from Michael’s plate, licking his fingers delicately to catch the crumbs after. “Good choice.”

He leaned into Michael’s space, close enough to bring his mouth within whispering distance of Michael’s ear. The stir of his warm breath and the faint butterfly wing graze of his lips made every inch of Michael’s skin shiver with sensitivity.

“Do you know what I suggest?”

Right now, Michael could only think of one thing. He swallowed, turned quickly, and managed to catch the edge of Finn’s smile between his lips before Finn drew away. The little touch still filled his mouth with the taste of tin, spiking him through with the intensity of his need.

“Let’s go to the fair.” Finn stood, smiling down on him as though he knew exactly what had just happened and it delighted him to know he was a vicious, ball-breaking tease.

“The fair?” Michael managed at length, steadying his voice by a heroic application of will.

“Farnham Food Festival.” Finn picked his overcoat from the back of the door and folded it over his arm. “Twenty minutes away by car. I can ask young Kevin to man the shop—he appreciates the hazard pay of working alone—and they always have three good secondhand book stalls that are worth a look. New stock for me. Candy floss and duck races and guess the weight of the marrow for you. It’ll be . . . educational. You can win me something in the shooting gallery. I’m sure the reading room could do with a stuffed plush giraffe.”

“I’ve never actually trained with a weapon.” Michael followed Finn back downstairs, feeling bemused but already a great deal happier. “I might disappoint you.”

“You missed my sarcasm there?” Finn had drawn humour back on like armour, like Michael’s stoic calm. He appreciated it. “If you do win an enormous stuffed toy, you should feel free to keep it all to yourself. I’ll simply enjoy your prowess. I’m driving, by the way.”

The morning sunlight only broadened as they drove through wooded valleys where trout streams glistened, up onto the high moor and then down again into the next valley over. Michael’s dark mood had lifted, and the purr of Finn’s MG engine and the occasional brush of the man’s shoulder against his felt raw and intense in a way he couldn’t completely attribute to too little sleep and too much coffee.

Farnham was a little grey town around a little grey church. The Kings Arms pub faced the village fish pond, where a couple of keen anglers sat hunched over their rods. Between the church and the pub spread the village green, smooth enough for cricket in the warmer weather and now occupied by a score or so of trestle tables, ice cream and kebab vans, a hog roast, and a marquee. Finn and Michael arrived so early the stallholders were still setting out bunting, and the hog roast had not yet begun to sizzle.

“Business first.” Finn dragged Michael into the marquee and up to one of the larger stalls, where a rotund lady with bottle-glass spectacles blinked at them both in half recognition.

“Dorothy, my love, my sweet. What have you got for me today?”

Dorothy rolled her eyes at Michael, who smirked back. “See for yourself,” she said, indicating the spread of books on the table, and the pile of plastic crates behind her that held hundreds of others. “And in the meantime your friend will . . .?”

Finn raised his eyebrows at Michael as though astonished at the idea that he might need occupying, but he reached out and snagged a copy of
Kraken
by China Miéville and pressed it into Michael’s hands. “Have you read this one?”

“No.” Michael turned it over to read the blurb. He preferred action/adventure to be honest, but this looked weird enough to take his mind off his own troubles.

“There we go, then. I will browse through Dorothy’s stall, and then move on to . . . is Rob here today?”

“Mm-hmm. And Steven.”

“And then move on to Rob and Steven, hoping for bargains that they are undoubtedly too savvy to afford me. And Michael will get himself a second breakfast, read his book in the sunshine, and accompany me into the garden of delights once I’m done.”

It proved a good plan. Michael found a bench in full sunshine, began the book, stretched out to get more comfortable, and nodded off. By the time he awoke, Finn had finished his wheeler-dealing and locked his purchases in the boot of the car. They spent the afternoon going round the rest of the stalls together, barbequed pork rolls in hand. They drank mulled wine and sampled homemade fudge and salted liquorice—which was both bizarre and moreish but sent them into the beer tent with a powerful thirst.

If he’d been asked to guess, earlier, how Finn would take to an event like this, Michael would have imagined the man disapproving, in some elitist, superior, cynical way. But the reality was far from that. Finn rarely stopped smiling, picking up the handcrafted knickknacks to feel their quality, laughingly losing a pound on the hoopla stall, and making Michael squirm by sampling every bottle of wine there was to sample without buying a single one.

There was alas no shooting range, but Michael made up for it by winning a bottle of shampoo and an egg cosy on the tombola and pressing them earnestly into Finn’s hands.

The laugh he got as a result stopped the day for him, held him suspended in a timeless moment surrounded by trees and rustling flags, bright against the bright-blue sky, and Finn’s face brighter, open for once, with the sunlight picking out his freckles and being put to shame by his warmth.

Michael tried to shake the revelation off, but it wouldn’t budge—the crisis point when something that had been tipping in his chest finally reached the point of no return and fell. He closed his hands tighter over Finn’s and held on until the man was looking at him properly, a little startled, a little vulnerable, pushed out of comfort and into intimacy. Then he used the grip to pull Finn in and kiss him properly, nipping Finn’s upper lip between his own.

For a hot, glorious second Finn kissed back, but when Michael stepped in to close the distance between them, he set a hand on Michael’s chest and pushed him back, his mouth still soft and his eyes wary. “Not in public. This isn’t London.”

“Okay.” But it
wasn’t
. Michael needed to strip Finn out of those clothes, to know what he felt like underneath, to touch him everywhere and fold all the pain and grief and uncertainty into his refuge, to be held and healed. “Is there somewhere private we can go?”

“Keen, are we?” Finn gave him a stronger version of his smug, teasing expression from the kitchen and waved an admonishing finger in his face. “Uh-uh. I want to poke around the church here. It’s Anglo-Saxon, apparently. And then I expect dinner, which you will pay for because I don’t go out with cheapskates. And then you’ll prove to me that you can keep your hands to yourself on the drive home, because you’re a big guy and I don’t want a big guy with no self-control.”

He put his hand back on Michael’s chest, in between the open flaps of his jacket and his shirt, right where there was only a thin layer of soft cotton between his skin and Michael’s. Michael’s heart thundered beneath his palm, but he took a deep breath, ignored his tingling lips and the ache of pleasure in his cock, and said, “Yeah. Okay. Wise policy there. I can see that.”

Finn’s approval was laced with ruthlessness. He dropped his hand to Michael’s belt and tugged him in, closing the distance with the swagger of a lion tamer putting his head in the lion’s mouth, daring it to disobey. With the small part of Michael’s mind still capable of rational thought, it occurred to him that Finn had put himself very firmly in charge, and oh God.
Oh God
. He liked that.

The rest of the day passed in snatches. The cool of a little church, Finn’s hands moving in expressive curves as he said something Michael didn’t catch about a faded triptych and a knot of carving about an arched stone door. Beautiful hands; clever, expressive fingers. They climbed to the bell tower, and he stood too close to Finn at the balustrade—Finn looking out on the yellow-leaved trees below, Michael closing his eyes and feeling the warmth of Finn’s body through two layers of clothes, trying to imagine what it would be like when there were none.

Dinner in the pub, then they drove back in the dark, a big harvest moon shining ivory pale on the horizon.

“Why did you leave the Met?” Finn asked, ever so slightly too casually as Michael shifted to keep his knee from accidentally brushing against Finn’s thigh.

They’d had more wine with dinner, enough to break Michael open and jimmy the locks he held tight around his soul. He put his head in his hands and let the flick flick flick of the streetlights shuttle past like prayer beads. “One too many failures,” he slurred. “One too many people I couldn’t protect. You get tired, you know? You get tired of it all being on you. You get tired of watching people get hurt and being able to do nothing.”

Finn looked at him in surprise as if he had expected something else and then slowly reached over and put a hand on his knee, squeezing in a touch that should have felt like lust but felt like absolution instead.

The moment the bookshop door closed behind them, Michael was driving Finn up against it, crushing him into the uneven planks with his weight, compressing his chest and making it hard to gasp a deep breath. Oh, but the man was a tank, and he liked that. He spread his legs so that Michael could drive one thigh between them, press upwards and take him onto tiptoe, his own weight forcing his cock against Michael’s leg. The security chain of the door pressed into his back, and when he wriggled it dug into his spine with a harsh-edged pressure that made him arch closer into Michael’s grasp.

Michael had one hand in his hair, fingers tangled at the nape of his neck, pulling hard to bend Finn’s head back, expose his throat. He leaned down to get those sensuous lips of his on Finn’s neck, lick his way across Finn’s collarbone, and suck hard at the pulse that hammered like a war drum under his skin.

“Mmm,” said Finn, forgetting that he’d ever had doubts about this and scrabbling to try to haul Michael’s coat off so he could get at those shoulders he had so admired. “Good, but . . .”

Always a problem with the big guys, in his experience—the responsible ones at least. They were just too scared of their own strength, scared of doing harm, of hurting him. But he liked a little hurt. “Bite.”

“Mmm?” Michael had his hand up under Finn’s jumper, undoing the buttons of his shirt and slipping inside. Calluses on his fingers dragged harsh and delicious over Finn’s skin, licked rough as the tongue of a cat over his nipples and made him lift the other leg from the floor and wrap it around Michael’s waist.

“Bite me.”

Michael shifted his grip, slid both hands under the waistband of Finn’s trousers, and cupped them around his arse, pulling him in closer, sending a flush of desire through him so strong it curled his hair. For a moment, Michael looked down on him in clear concern, and then he bent his head back to the bruise he had made on Finn’s throat, and suckling it into his mouth, he bit down on the already sensitive flesh.

“Ah!” said Finn. “Yes.”

He was going to say,
Not in the hall. Come on, have some class. I made the bed specially
, but Michael took all his weight on one arm—one arm!—and wound the other hand between their bodies to work at their clashing belt buckles and somehow it slipped his mind. Finn managed to push the coat far enough down Michael’s arms that Michael could shake it off onto the floor. He immediately got to work on the shirts, pulling Michael’s T-shirt out from his belt, hauling it over his head, taking the overshirt with it.

And oh yes. Michael’s shoulders were everything he’d promised himself. He stroked the strength of them with appreciative fingers. And that powerful chest, heavy with muscle. He wanted to rub himself all over it; instead, he sunk his hands into Michael’s black curly hair and tugged to make him let go of the little wound on Finn’s throat, force him to look up so that Finn could take possession of his soft mouth and remind him who was in control.

“Let me down. Not in the hall.”

Michael gave his arse a regretful squeeze and put him down. As soon as Finn had both feet beneath him, he headed for the stairs, pulling off his jumper and shirt as he went, feeling Michael’s fingertips skim down his spine as he followed. He dropped his trousers in the kitchen, made it to the bedroom only in boxers just in time to lay Tom’s picture facedown by the bedside so that Tom wouldn’t have to see.

Sitting on the edge of the bed, he managed to dispose of his socks before he raised his eyes and saw Michael standing irresolutely in the doorway, looking at the face-down photo.