The Neverloving Dead, page 7
Patrick’s eyes followed the movement. He hadn’t missed the I wouldn’t have asked. Obviously someone like Gethin would never ask someone like him. He positioned the book over his groin, not wanting Gethin to know that he, at least, was aroused. He should keep everything as professional as possible, he decided. Push down any feelings he might have, and just help the man.
After what had happened to the poor fellow, he did deserve help.
He arranged his face. He was more than two centuries old. He’d sucked tens of thousands of penises. This one wasn’t any different, he told himself. He didn’t need to worry about it – any more than he needed to worry about killing Gethin. If anyone knew how to be careful when fellating a chap, he did.
He reached out, touching Gethin’s hip with his knuckles. They looked hideous there: white and knobbly against the tanned golden skin. He looked up, cringing with humiliation. “Would you still like to try?”
Gethin frowned, but didn’t move away. Eventually, he huffed heavily, as if trying to ease something. “Mm,” he managed. Not a resounding yes.
Patrick’s eyes dropped back to the lovely shape, which was easier to look at than Gethin’s judgement. Perhaps he should just lick the cock or something, he thought. Suck it, but gently. Give Gethin plenty of time to see him there and change his mind.
What the hell am I thinking? he chided himself. He could almost feel Gethin watching. Every few seconds, a wisp of warm colour bled from his hip, his hands. Patrick could see a potted yucca through his midriff. Gethin did need this – that was obvious. Patrick should just get on and do it. If he did it right, Gethin might even conquer his problem and, after a couple of ‘meals’ from Patrick, begin feeding himself. From the living. Then Patrick could resume his plans for corporeality, and all would be well.
Those plans seemed suddenly very far away.
He curled his fingers lightly around the cockhead. He didn’t push back the skin. He could barely feel it between his fingers as it was. Gethin was completely still.
Patrick opened his mouth, wondering if he should make himself watch the Welshman anyway, for signs – not of waking, for a change, but of disintegration. Instead, he licked the tip. Barely a touch, really. Just enough to test whether it might cause an outpouring of energy into his mouth. Gethin seemed calm now, but Patrick had seen how volatile he could be...
He looked up, despite himself.
Gethin’s expression was intense. Concentrated. The brown eyes seemed paler – caramel or honey-coloured – though there was no extra light in the room.
He licked again, more carefully than he ever had, hoping he wasn’t doing something terrible and wrong. Hoping, equally, that Gethin wouldn’t find him so foul that he pushed him away after all. He wished he knew some way to make the experience more pleasant for him. He tried to remember what the incubus he’d fed from had said and done, when Patrick had been at his weakest – never in danger of passing ‘on’, since damnation prevented that, but starved far beyond the point an undamned ghost could have ‘survived’.
The creature had been absolutely filthy. He remembered that. A natural at what they now called ‘dirty talk’ and able, astonishingly, to transform into different beings to seek out the fantasies of those it fed from for its energy. It had grown so strong, it could travel not just London but the entire globe to do so, never killing anyone. Just bringing pleasure. It had turned itself into all manner of things for Patrick: some exotic, others commonplace, some pleasing, others gross and off-putting, gradually refining its forms until Patrick had been sucking with abandon, guzzling the ghost’s energy like a calf at its mother’s teat. Its energy had been so powerful that when it had come, Patrick had seen his own body gain in form – watched his spidery hands, splayed in front of him, emerge from the dust.
It was the moment he’d seen his future. He’d never have those sorts of skills, but he could eventually be free of the interminable, bodiless loneliness of limbo. With discipline.
He kept licking Gethin’s penis, thinking again of the dirty talk.
“You have a splendid prick,” he muttered, feeling like a fool. In all his years arousing strangers, he’d never once had to speak to them. Now he was trying, the words sounded stiff and formal.
Not that they weren’t true. It was splendid – the tone muted and even, the head gorgeously defined inside its shroud of skin, and all of it a fine size, even semi-transparent and less than half-hard, as it was.
“Diolch,” muttered Gethin. “Thanks.” There was a subtle change in his energy: fractional relaxation, possibly, coupled with the faintest increase in density around his groin. Patrick could still see the yucca through him, but less clearly.
He began to stroke the skin lightly, circling a finger underneath, running it softly down to the balls and back again. The line lit white in the finger’s wake, like a fingernail drawn over living skin. Gethin’s hips shifted. As if he found it interesting.
Patrick did it again, letting his thumb brush the balls this time, a little ham-handedly. His brain seemed to have stuck. He was usually so confident in his movements. The outline of Gethin’s penis flickered, filling in as it grew a little, despite Patrick’s clumsiness.
That was encouraging, especially as it wasn’t blood filling it, but Gethin’s own memories of arousal. Living bodies could respond regardless of desire. But Gethin was a ghost. Any arousal now was all his.
Nervously, as if handling the relics of a saint, Patrick eased back the foreskin, revealing a glans only a few shades duskier and mauver than the air. He ran a thumb over the slit. If his heart could still have thumped, it would be pounding like hooves of death. He followed the thumb with his tongue. Again, just the tip.
Lightly, he circled the head, checking along the shaft for signs Gethin was either fading or losing additional ribbons. It was difficult to say this close whether it was getting any denser, but it was certainly firming up. Gethin plainly had plenty of good memories of sex prior to his ordeal.
Which just made Patrick feel even more inadequate.
It struck him, for perhaps the first time since he’d become an incubus, that he was inexperienced. Not in terms of numbers. Not even in terms of technique – though he wasn’t sure arousing a man so indiscernibly he stayed asleep, said much. But in terms of this: having a man standing in front of him. Watching. Interacting. In life, Patrick had only had one lover – and he’d run off for a life in France when his dalliance with Patrick had been discovered. Patrick had felt too unworldly to go with him. Too afraid of his feelings. After all, he and Julius had hardly explored each other.
He concentrated, burning with embarrassment, wishing he could think of something to say before he filled his mouth. Most of what the filthy ghost had said to him was long forgotten. The rest would sound all wrong coming from him.
He wondered, as his mouth engulfed Gethin’s cock, how many lovers Gethin had had.
Gethin hissed.
Patrick set to, watching the man’s belly studiously for any changes in solidity – either towards formlessness and death, or in the opposite direction: towards some strong emotion, such as disgust, that might render Gethin abruptly solid and drain Patrick. There was no taste, no warmth as he bobbed. He could feel the shaft but not as strongly as if they’d both been solid. Even so, Patrick’s own erection began to poke at his robes. Gethin looked sumptuous looming above him, naked but for the denim merging with his sizeable thighs. Everything shaven.
When he eventually summoned the courage to glance up fully, Gethin was still frowning, but now as if something was puzzling him. Patrick’s neat, sparing technique, perhaps. He wished he could suck harder, more vigorously, but he was both unfamiliar with how to do so and afraid of sucking Gethin away. And anyway, Gethin wouldn’t want him to, he told himself. Gethin didn’t want him.
“Stop.”
Patrick halted, halfway along Gethin’s cock. It didn’t mean he’d been doing it badly, he told himself. There could be any number of reasons why Gethin had halted things after barely three minutes.
He looked up – not moving in case movement caused Gethin to lose control – readying himself for solidity the moment that looked like happening. He felt ridiculous, speared on the man’s prick like a harpooned fish.
In fact, Gethin just looked concerned. It was a few seconds before Patrick saw why.
Gethin’s cock might be hard, but his form was fading. A long strip of colour was drifting eerily from his neck, lifting in the air like a veil in a breeze. Another was unravelling from his golden hair. One side of his body was blurring. Patrick immediately released his cock.
Gethin looked like he might be sick.
Patrick felt the noose again. He retreated from Gethin’s penis, giving the man space. He didn’t know what was causing it: aversion to Patrick, a memory from Gethin’s murder, or perhaps the act reminded Gethin of Patrick doing the same thing to Stuart. He ought to feel relieved, he thought: he had been doing it poorly. He’d been thrown by the realisation that, other than the incubus, this was only the second conscious man he’d ever fellated – and that the last had been more than two centuries ago. Gethin would have had far better, countless times, even without the paltry sensations of limbo.
The other ghost dropped to his knees, pressing his palms to his eyes as if holding them in. Patrick held his book, not knowing what else to do. Afraid to touch him again.
After a while, the scraps of colour began gathering back in.
Gethin’s face emerged from his hands, expression determined. “Do it,” he muttered.
Patrick had almost forgotten why they’d begun. He couldn’t mean... “You’re too weak–”
“I’m not gonna get stronger any other way, am I?” He grimaced, as if his stomach was in pain – which wasn’t possible. “I have to lie down, though.” He crawled away, twisting onto his back over the coffee table, closing his eyes, hovering there, preserving energy.
Patrick wasn’t sure what Gethin wanted him to do. For once, Gethin looked more dead than he did. He couldn’t just crawl over him.
Have his way...
“Please, Patrick.” It was a bare mutter. The colours were starting to leak again, spooling out thinly then looping back in. Gethin looked exhausted.
The absurd thought struck Patrick that it was the first time since he’d died that anyone had used his name.
He wasn’t sure why it mattered – only that it did. He couldn’t remember ever feeling more discomposed. Not just the name, but this ghost. He seemed to be turning everything upside-down. All of Patrick’s plans. All his separation.
He remembered telling Gethin he didn’t ‘go in’. Not in any sense. He just sucked. And sucked and sucked. That was all he ever did. Because he had no body. Because, as he’d told Gethin, no one could consent if they couldn’t see him.
And because nobody would if they could.
Except this man was asking. Asking.
This was purely functional, he told himself. Nothing felt upside-down and he wasn’t discomposed. He felt nothing. It was a transaction, exactly as Gethin had implied: cost and gain. He, Patrick, was merely helping a fellow ghost as he had once been helped: ‘paying it forwards’ as they said now...
And besides, he needed the practice, he thought. He could look at this as learning how to enjoy his body once he finally had it.
He felt horrible.
Gethin just lay there. Half-dead, it seemed.
Pulling his robes up to his hips, exposing his shamefully hard penis, Patrick lifted a leg and straddled Gethin’s neck, taking care to keep himself as insubstantial as possible so as not to absorb anything from the ghost; wishing, for the first time in a long time, that he’d just died on the hangman’s scaffold.
“...the cassock off,” Gethin mumbled. His eyes were, in fact, open a crack. Patrick couldn’t read his expression, couldn’t tell if he was mocking. Gethin was beautiful. Patrick was colourless and cadaverous-looking. “All knees and elbows,” his grandmother used to put it, more kindly. The Welshman was right, though. If Patrick left it on, it would be in the way.
Mortified, he hitched the garment over his head, where it dangled behind him as if on a short string. As with Gethin’s jeans, it wouldn’t disappear entirely – this was as close as he’d ever managed to get. Ordinarily, he wanted almost nothing more than to be rid of the entire godly outfit. Right now, he was already looking forward to pulling it back on. He’d never felt more naked.
His cock was just there – drifting above Gethin’s mouth.
He looked at it now: long, bent and thin. The balls were streaked with dark hair, as was his belly. Not enough to make it a feature and call himself an ‘otter’ or a ‘bear’, as he’d heard men do these days. As Stuart was, he supposed. He, Patrick, just looked wraithlike and wan.
“Well, there you go,” Gethin said. Did that mean he was disappointed? Repulsed? He opened his mouth. Huffed. Lay there.
Fighting his humiliation, Patrick leaned forwards, lowering his hips above Gethin’s head, looking down to line up with Gethin’s mouth. Before he could back out entirely, he slid his cock in a few inches, watching it disappear. This was to stop Gethin dying, he reminded himself, beginning to move. Patrick was doing him a favour. It didn’t matter if the Welshman was disgusted or underwhelmed by him.
Gethin didn’t try to turn away anyway, which was a blessing. He closed his mouth around Patrick’s cock, opened his throat with an ease born of significant experience, and took it. He frowned, but didn’t look up. Patrick could see from here that the man’s dick was soft.
He couldn’t decide whether to shut his eyes or not. On one hand, it was mortifying: Gethin had been raped and here Patrick was, fucking his mouth with his unattractive dick whilst the man could barely move. On the other hand, he hadn’t had his prick in anything that wasn’t his own hand for two hundred years and it looked marvellous.
The latter only exacerbated the former.
So, of course, his eyes stayed open – glued to the act. He’d resisted sex for so long. He hadn’t even masturbated since 1924: a few minutes of weakness caused by drifting into a flat above the Strand Theatre and finding Ivor Novello pleasuring himself in the bath. He’d forgotten how wonderful it felt. Even in this lesser, non-solid form. Gethin’s mouth was like silk. He clamped his lips shut, trying not to make a noise – anything so that Gethin wouldn’t realise he was enjoying it.
Gethin’s mouth tightened just slightly, as if he were gaining energy already. Or possibly to encourage Patrick to get it over with. If so, he needn’t worry, Patrick thought: validating as it might feel to prove his stamina and prowess, he was going to finish in a demeaningly short time. Gethin’s open throat was superb. No warmth, of course, but Patrick was sliding in and out freely by now, the tip squashing itself into the tight passage each time.
Gethin’s cheeks tightened a little more, carving hollows under his cheekbones, creating a truly heavenly seal.
Patrick began fucking harder, hips moving of their own accord, trying to stop himself grunting like a common beast. He could feel his orgasm rising: not as strong as in life, but the sensations still seemed to blot out his thoughts as they grew. All he could think about was the energy coalescing in his groin, gathering and thickening there, heating him somehow. He didn’t speak. Even if he could have, he wouldn’t have.
Gethin mustn’t think he was taking pleasure from this.
All the same, the sight of his ugly cock in the Welshman’s perfect mouth was... stimulating. Hypnotising. He bit his lip hard, desire surging, urging him deeper into Gethin’s throat. Appalled, he resisted. Gethin looked up, gaze as steady as his suction. The energy changed, seeming to hang there for a moment, immobile, deepening. Then Patrick bit back another grunt, something swelling and rushing through him, relaxing as it poured from his balls and arse into the man’s gullet.
His first orgasm in a hundred years. Since Ivor Novello.
He’d never wanted to cry out so much. Not at anything. But he mustn’t. He shouldn’t even be feeling things – anything – he reprimanded himself as the Welshman’s eyes closed under a frown, mouth still clamped around his cock, sucking pulse after delirious pulse from him. Patrick let him. The man’s mouth was a miracle. He wanted to give him energy, wanted him to keep suckling...
At the idea, his throat constricted. Again, he had the sense of his future narrowing out of existence. Every second of this was weakening him, he reminded himself. Setting him back.
How had he let himself forget?
He looked down again, to the spectacular sight of Gethin gourmandising his penis. Still suckling. He glanced at his hand. A little less opaque than it had been.
“Enough,” he said. Gethin mustn’t take too much. He couldn’t kill Patrick in one go – Patrick was too strong for that – but he could already tell he’d need several meals to make up for it.
Gethin swallowed again, then relaxed. He, at least, looked stronger. More vibrant than Patrick had ever seen him. It increased the tanned glow of his face. Patrick tried not to notice it.
Carefully, he lifted his spent penis from Gethin’s mouth. It was still hard.
Then he pulled his robes down, gliding away from Gethin and off to one side, folding himself back into the Chesterfield armchair, setting his book on his lap again.
“Well? Was it okay?” Gethin said. “Did you lose too much?”
Patrick almost told him the truth – that in fact he’d lost quite a bit; that they probably shouldn’t do it again; that Gethin was going to have to try feeding from a living human next time, which would give him far more energy in any case.
But he suddenly didn’t want to think it might not happen again.
He paused, looking at his knees rather than Gethin. Was it just because it hadn’t happened for so long? Might it simply be surprise? He usually kept pleasure so firmly away from himself. In which case, wasn’t it possible the feeling might lessen with repetition? Hadn’t he just realised how inexperienced he was? How unready he was for doing this with the living...
