To Mend a Broken Wing, page 17
“That’s more like it. I need to see you properly.”
Removing the duvet exposed my significantly less impressive physique, thankfully covered in a white T-shirt. My bloody arm was on show, too, not that Noah appeared remotely bothered by it. His dick bulged heavily in his sweatpants, and he kneaded it as he swept his tongue across wet lips.
“Come on, you too. Take that off.”
As Noah nestled between my legs, pale, freckled ordinariness contrasted with honeyed perfection. Once more, he captured my mouth in his, and stroking my hand down the smooth sweep of his back, I hooked my withered arm around his neck and out of sight. Hot skin melded into hot skin as our heartbeats galloped against each other. I licked at the heat of him, at his neck and the dip of his collar bones, tasting salt and fresh sweat. Underneath the fabric of his sweatpants, Noah’s hardness stood ramrod straight, his frustrated moan when I arched up against him, lost in the tangle of our tongues.
“Not enough,” he panted. “I need to touch you there too.” His hand slipped under the waistband of my boxers and teased them down. My dick sprang free, sliding against him, dribbling wetness against his flat belly. With his mouth not leaving mine, he shoved his own underwear down onto his thighs, too, so our dicks rubbed. The velvet skin of his balls kissed mine, and he let out a hiss, grinding himself against me like he was trying to close every tiny gap between our bodies. For a guy who’d never been with another guy, his confidence was sexy as fuck. Contagious too. I squeezed my hand down between us and took hold of us both, our natural lubrication easing the way. Not expecting it, Noah pulled off my mouth, his firelit brown eyes shot with wonder as they stared incredulously into mine.
“I didn’t know we could do this.”
With a grin, I licked off the beads of sweat gathered on his upper lip and breathed hot air into the open cave of his mouth. “We can do all sorts of things.” I panted as, in time to the shuttling of my hand, I fucked and stroked my tongue against his.
A deep moan of discovery and desire escaped his throat as we thrust together into my fist. “Christ, Toby, that feels so fucking good.”
I wasn’t going to last long; I’d been half-hard and aching for release all evening. A flood of heat unfurled from the base of my spine and spread to my tightening balls, warning me I was close. I quickened the pace and tightened my grip.
“Coming.” Noah shuddered, his whole body taut above me.
I caught a glimpse of him stretched like a bowstring, lean sinews straining, honeyed flesh darkening before my vision whited out. His liquid heat spilled between our bellies sent me crashing over the edge to join him; I came, too, leaping from a great height, hard and fast.
“Oh my God,” he panted, crashing all his weight down on top of me. With a loud groan, I sank, boneless, into the mattress, letting myself be crushed. Like a spent ragdoll, I flung my arms out to the sides, my head lolling back on the pillows. I had a vague awareness of Noah kicking off our remaining clothing, then pulling the duvet over us and slightly shifting his weight—thank God—to the side. If any seismic world events had chosen to occur at precisely that moment, I’d have missed them entirely.
*
“ARE YOU AWAKE?” Noah asked.
Five minutes or five hours could have passed. Long enough for a rather unpleasant crustiness to have glued our pubes together but not sufficiently unpleasant I wanted us to separate. I shook my head, a sudden rush of shyness keeping my eyes closed.
Pliant lips landed on my jaw, trailing a path down my neck as I hid behind my eyelids. If I played dead, the delicious nibbling and sucking might never stop. Noah, with one heavy thigh slung across mine, rolled his hips against me. Light fingers confidently waltzed a path across my soft belly. He chuckled lightly at my happy noise of appreciation and brushed the backs of his knuckles against my fast-growing dick.
“No, not awake,” he whispered and ground his hips against me once more. So fucking nice. “I’d better be quiet, then.”
From his shuffling around, I sensed he’d propped himself up on one elbow the better to explore with his eyes and his hands. I kept my own eyes shut, embarrassed that his were tracking every average pasty inch of me—my non-existent abs, every imperfect freckle covering them, and my small-to middling-sized knob. My repulsive arm. With his hardness rammed against my hip, his fingertips traced slow circles over my belly, advancing towards my slender shaft. Without hesitation, his soft palm curled around it.
“Is that good?” His thumb circled my slit, dipping into the steady stream of wetness and spreading it around the head. I made an incomprehensible sound in response, and he laughed softly. “I’ll interpret that as a yes.”
He brought me off with steady assuredness, almost lazily, taking his own pleasure by frotting against my thigh. My withered arm rested on the sheet alongside us, my hand trapped behind him. I made a half-hearted attempt to retrieve it and reciprocate before he stilled me with a determined press on my shoulder.
“No.” His voice sounded gravelly and determined. “You stay just as you are. Like an earl.”
I came with less force than the first time, but no less satisfactorily. Then almost came again, despite being wrung out twice, because I dared open my eyes to find Noah straddling me, lips parted, broad chest heaving, and energetically bringing himself to climax.
“Christ,” he gasped as the first jet painted my neck. “Christ, Toby.”
*
“CAN I ASK you a question?”
“Yeah,” I answered, amused at the hesitation in his voice.
We’d cleaned up, taking turns alone in the bathroom, neither of us yet ready for that degree of intimacy. I’d assumed he’d head back to his bed next door, but he spread himself in the middle of mine as if he owned it, then stretched an arm out wide, inviting me in for a snuggle. Needless to say, I accepted his invite.
“Why do we have two saucers of cress growing in the bathroom?”
I vaguely wondered if Lucien and Jay’s postcoital conversations were as prosaic and decided they were probably much filthier.
“To surreptitiously swap them with Gandalf’s saucers of marijuana being cultivated next to the Aga. I don’t know whether you’ve noticed, but every time a leaf grows on the plants downstairs, we’re trimming them with nail scissors so that they’re shaped more like cress.”
He laughed with delight. “This place is fucking crazy.”
I agreed. Good crazy, though, and especially so since Noah had been thrown into the mix. “It’s proving a challenge, but we’re hoping the kids get bored and forget about it. So they won’t notice the difference when we swap them.”
He gave me a nudge. “Hey, do you reckon anyone else living in this massive country pile is having sex tonight?”
I snorted. “That question’s crazier than having dope growing in the kitchen. Of course they bloody are. Have you seen Lucien and Jay together?”
“Yeah, I guess.”
“And your dad was in a very frisky mood when we left the pub.”
He gave me a shove. “Ugh, that’s gross.”
“What? Calling him your dad, or that he’s probably balls deep in Marcel right now?”
I squealed and wriggled away as a sharp poke in my ribs turned into a full-on tickling match. Noah won, of course. Pleased with himself, he grinned down as he pinned me to the bed with his body, holding both my arms above my head. He followed the grin with a kiss.
“I’d like to be balls deep inside you.”
Oh, God, could he read my thoughts? I felt my skin turn a hitherto unreached shade of crimson. “I’d…um, yeah,” I squeaked.
“Kissing you is pretty good, too, though,” he said softly. “I’m fond of kissing.”
Relaxing, I kissed him back, heat fading from my face. “I’d noticed.” I tipped my head up, surveying his tight grip on my arms. “Are you going to give those back?”
He shrugged. “Maybe. They need tasting first.”
Making a biting sound, he sank his teeth into the ticklish fleshy part of my upper right arm. I squirmed with laughter as he licked and soothed it better. He travelled farther down the limb; the sensitive diamond of flesh at my inner elbow received the same rough treatment, and then my forearm and wrist before he sucked and nibbled the tip of every finger. Popping off my thumb with another heart-stopping grin, he turned his attention to my withered arm, and I automatically stiffened.
“You don’t have to do it to that one,” I mumbled, looking away.
He said nothing, but neither did he release his grip. I braved a glance to find him inspecting it curiously. From shoulder to elbow, my arm looked perfectly normal—not top of the pile if arms were being dished out, but totally normal. Beyond, my forearm was thinner than it should be. The muscle and bone held in Noah’s loose fist tapered and faded to nothing, the skin colour gradually turning a purplish unhealthy hue as it puckered unevenly around the stump. Arthur once charmingly described it as cauliflower painted the wrong colour. Even I preferred not to look too often.
“Does me holding it like this hurt?” he asked eventually, and I shook my head, my mouth dry.
He studied it a second longer. “Good.”
Dipping his head, he slid his grip farther back towards my elbow and pressed his lips against the ugly skin of my forearm. My heart thudded in my chest as I tried not to squirm.
He did it again, slightly farther along, and once more after that, until his tongue tickled the blunted end of my stump, where my wrist and hand should have been. Rob had always pretended my stump didn’t exist, deliberately avoiding looking at it, and I’d been complicit by hiding it behind my back or up the sleeve of my sweater. I’d done the same the few times I’d hooked up with a man in a club. After one guy had recoiled in horror and another had asked to take a photo, I’d purposefully begun buying oversized knitted sweaters with baggy sleeves. My face burned as Noah worked his way along, and I closed my eyes, shrinking inside myself. A second later, when I thought I couldn’t bear it for another second, his lips left my stump and landed back on mine. When he’d thoroughly reacquainted himself with those, he pulled off, rearranged me under his arm to his exact liking, and yawned.
“I’m knackered. Your arm tastes good, like the rest of you. Can we do this all over again in the morning?”
Chapter Eighteen
Noah
LIFE CARRIED ON as before, except in between pulling pints and practising my bowling, I now had the vicar’s boy to kiss. All three activities were going well, especially the last one, so God knew why my brain burbled with unease. Why couldn’t I just be content to ride along on a simple future which seemed to be taking care of itself? I’d scraped a little cash together and had the offer of more steady work—Lizzie-the-landlady told me I could keep my shifts at the pub after Donna returned, and I promised I’d let her know. The more I kissed the vicar’s boy, the more I wanted to stay at Rossingley. And a benevolent man had offered to lend me the money to go to college. So exactly what was my fucking problem?
Pride was my fucking problem. And a masochistic tendency to treat kindness and generosity with an unhealthy dose of suspicion. I might be reluctant to accept Marcel’s offer, but love and kisses did not pay for college courses. Nor did they cover the cost of a roof over my head. Toby would say I had one already, here at Rossingley for as long as I needed, so what was I worried about?
The simple truth was, I didn’t belong in this vast mansion amongst all its priceless treasures, however much the other permanent residents tried to persuade me otherwise. I scurried around Rossingley like a rat in a palace. Being catered for made me uncomfortable. Lucien’s culinary skills extended to making a pot of tea. If Jay felt like cooking, he cooked for everyone. If he didn’t, the food appeared anyhow because a very nice lady called Mary miraculously produced it. My clothes were mysteriously laundered within a day of discarding them, and unseen hands tidied my room in my absence. Lucien knew nothing different; Jay indulged it; Toby had grown accustomed to it. Yet my skin prickled even at the thought of it.
So, what to do? How did I keep Toby, but not stay? How did I learn a trade without borrowing money from Marcel? How did I accept my father but forget what he’d done?
*
I FOUND TOBY kneeling on the floor in the playroom, patiently building a tower block out of plastic bricks for a very snotty and irritable Orlando to gleefully knock down. From Orlando’s drooly chortling, it was evidently the funniest game ever invented, temporarily distracting him from his heavy cold. Toby wouldn’t let me kiss him when he was working, so in the gaps between shifts at the pub, I had to content myself with following him and Orlando around like a weird, sexually frustrated groupie.
“Have you had any more thoughts about enrolling for the course in September?”
A week had gone by since the open day. A week filled with kissing Toby late at night when I came home from work and waking with him tucked under my arm every morning. I touched his cock and brought him off every chance I could get, and he touched mine. We’d become competent at both activities simultaneously. Tonight was my night off from work (not from touching his cock), and we both had a free day tomorrow, which hopefully meant exploring more.
“It’s brilliant they would be happy to accept a few of your Level 1 credits from elsewhere,” he carried on. “Which will make it a bit cheaper overall. Has Marcel mentioned his loan again?”
He hadn’t; he didn’t need to. He’d left the ball firmly in my court. “Nah, it’s up to me now.”
As we created the mother of all plastic brick towers, Toby waited for me to say what I should have said. That, of course, I would take Marcel up on it because, of course, it would mean more of what Toby and I had together. But me being me, I kept my gob shut, and Toby being Toby, bit his lip.
Orlando had recently started treating me like his own private jungle gym, and eventually, I gave up helping Toby with the tower and lay on my back so Orlando could crawl and drool his steaming germs all over me.
“Well, for what it’s worth,” Toby said finally, “I think you should accept Marcel’s offer. I…I want you to stay.”
He focused on a precarious outpost of the main tower, balancing four bricks on an improbably narrow base. For an unlovable bloke like me, Toby wanting me to stay should have been more than enough, shouldn’t it?
“I dunno. It’s like they’re trying to buy me into their lives. Bribing me.”
I felt slightly foolish. I didn’t even know if I believed that any longer. A forcefield of distrust prevented me from accepting people’s motives at face value. Anyone else in my position would have bitten Marcel’s arm off. Toby paused, a brick in his hand and a puzzled expression on his face.
“No, they’re not. They’re trying to help you; that’s all. And anyway, if that were the case, then surely Marcel would have offered to give you the money outright?”
“Maybe he can’t afford to do that.”
Toby threw me a look. “Er…it’s Marcel. Yes, he very much can.”
I had given the course plenty of thought—pretty much every second that wasn’t spent thinking about Toby. I’d even filled in the online application form, minus the funding section. As I lay awake, my mind had run away with dreams of working for old Mick-the-mechanic up at the Rossingley garage and coming home each evening to the patient man currently trying to talk sense into my thick skull without losing his rag. Listening to Toby now, saying yes to Marcel seemed such a small thing, so why couldn’t I just bloody do it?
“I said I’d chew it over and let them know.”
I paused, exasperated I couldn’t articulate my mental hurdles to Toby, probably because I struggled to frame them clearly in my own mind. “I don’t know why Marcel would make such an offer,” I ended up saying. “What’s in it for him?”
“Oh my God! Nothing, you idiot!” Toby frowned. “Or everything, depending on how you want to view it.”
My skin prickled with annoyance. I didn’t appreciate being called an idiot, even if, coming out of Toby’s mouth, it sounded close to an endearment. No one except Toby would have got away with it. “Nothing and everything? You’re not making sense.”
Orlando chose that moment to sneeze explosively, and by explosively, I mean all over my face. Surprised by the force of it, he sat back suddenly on my chest, in awe of the baby snot plastered across my cheek. Toby snorted with laughter.
“Oh my, that’s absolutely gross.”
Swiftly, I handed him back to Toby, who swooped on Orlando’s face with a wad of tissues, managing to make nose-wiping fun. Meanwhile, I swiped gingerly at the sticky goo on my cheek.
“Christ, I don’t know how you do your job.”
Orlando was the sweetest baby ever, but on this occasion, he’d only added to my general irritability.
Toby chuckled. “Because Orlando is adorable. And that sneeze was Orlandish for ‘I agree with Toby that Noah is being idiotic’.”
He was trying to be funny, to diffuse the situation, yet my annoyance skyrocketed. We needed to end this conversation now before I said something I’d regret. Outwardly, I remained calm, inwardly, I was boiling over. It was all right for Toby, with his cosy nest here at the big house and a slew of relatives down the road. He’d never failed at anything or let anyone down. He could make any decision he liked, even a really poor one, and the Rossingley safety net would always be here to pick up the pieces when everything went tits up. His family would still love him afterwards.
If a delightful baby hadn’t been distracting him, perhaps my growing irritation might have been more obvious to Toby. Instead, he chatted on obliviously.
“I’m sure Marcel would gladly pay for the whole course upfront, but he knew you wouldn’t accept, so he’s offering you a loan instead.”
He handed me a clean tissue—part of his job seemed to incorporate having an ever-ready supply of them. I snatched it from him ungraciously.
“He’s right, I wouldn’t have accepted. But I still don’t understand his angle.”
