The Ministry of Time, page 21
Mornings are the worst. The sealskin sleeping bags freeze overnight, and then in the light of the dawn the frost evaporates, mists on the canvas ceiling, and drips onto their heads. All their clothing is several exhausting pounds heavier, because they sweat into the wool and they cannot get the wool dry.
No, mealtimes are the worst. They put cold things into their mouths, and the cold walks around their stomachs. The camp was running low on spirit fuel, and Gore gave his men a choice between no grog or cold rations. They all chose grog—Jack was ever a jolly tar. But water needs to be melted too, and they’re even thirstier than they are hungry or tired. He’s had to stop more than one man eating snow and scorching his throat. Des Voeux and the Marine Sergeant Bryant shot a hare two days ago and knelt to drink the blood from the welt in its flank.
No, what’s worst is that there are no Esquimaux. This is their seasonal hunting ground. Last year they’d come aboard the ships to trade seal meat and furs for knives and wood. They’d patted sailors’ faces and cheerfully resisted conversion to Christianity (hell sounded too delightful—a land of eternal heat). This year, the natives are nowhere to be seen. They have leaped into the sky, sunk into the earth.
Gore thinks his trigger fingers might be going. They are swollen, sheening enamel white. It takes him longer than he’d like to get his gloves on because he can’t feel what he’s doing. Still, he’s dealt with worse than this. He’ll give himself another week unless his fingers start to blacken. He still wants to bag an ox.
When it happens, it happens very quickly. Later, he will hardly be able to line the words up to describe it.
“The—flash of lightning, I thought it was. Then that—doorway of blue light.”
The horizon splits like a knuckle. A bright blue slit in the world. He raises his gun. He will wonder, some time from now, what would have happened if he hadn’t, if he’d met his future another way.
CHAPTER SEVEN
I put the pad of my thumb to my lip and flattened it. Pulled it back. Stared. No blood, though it felt like there should have been. Not even the sensation of burning. The kiss had gone with the dawn.
“Don’t,” murmured Adela.
“I wasn’t biting.”
She made a conciliatory noise in her throat, the sort you make to ratty old cats who are trying to climb up the stairs. It was the closest she’d ever come to kindness, and it bowled me over, literally. My forehead bounced gently off my knees.
I was sitting on a horrible, cheek-thin mattress in a Ministry safe house. After I’d heard Graham’s door lock, I’d shivered dumbly against the wall until a handful of brain cells formed a committee to remind me that the man my boss had identified as a spy had tried to assassinate us in broad lamplight, using a futuristic weapon that put the late Quentin’s cryptic hint about “not the past” into perspective.
I’d called Adela, who had answered immediately and stepped in to fix things. The night had teemed. There had been some logistical kerfuffle—vans with blackout windows, decoy vehicles, even a brief but impressive subterranean roadway. I was given to understand that the other bridges and expats were also being moved, into off-the-books safe houses in considerably worse nick than our original abodes. Graham and I had been placed in a knackered flat in the garret of an old government building, stifled from all sides by the city. The beautiful heath where I’d taught him to ride a bike was far away. The window in my room looked out onto a jungle of chimneys and vent fans, turning silvery in the proleptic dawn light. I could hear something dripping and I knew, with resignation, that I would always hear something dripping for as long as I lived here. The adrenaline high had worn off, and I was feeling tired to my marrow.
Graham’s room was along from mine, reached via a long corridor that had abandoned-asylum energy. Back at our old house he’d been bundled into a separate van with his motorbike and a shoulder bag of clothes. He’d glanced at me once, a quick searching look to check that I was being wrangled, and then he hadn’t been able to meet my eyes again. As he ducked into the car, I saw how slight he was, how much shorter than the field heavies they’d sent into my now ex-neighborhood. He was diminished in some way; he’d seemed to hold his charm close to his body, like a broken arm. I hadn’t seen him since we’d been brought to the safe house.
Adela was opening the top drawer of the bedside table. It was old, and it stuck. She coaxed it out with far more patience than I had ever seen her exhibit.
“You trained on a Walther?” she asked.
I turned my head, on my knees, to look. She was holding a handgun. I noted this with the same resignation as I’d noted the dripping.
“When I failed the field exams, I was using a Walther, yes.”
“This is yours now.”
“Oh. Cool.”
“I’m putting it in this top drawer.”
“Okay.”
“But first I’d like to see you unload and reload,” she added, passing me the handgun.
It weighed as much as a gun did, neither heavier nor lighter than what I was expecting.
“I haven’t done this for a while,” I said, but I did it anyway.
Adela nodded approvingly and took it back off me to settle it in the drawer. My thoughts fired sluggishly—electricity through ooze.
“Ma’am. The Brigadier. I think he’s from the future.”
“Yes.”
I didn’t know what to do with myself, so I lifted my face to drop it into my hands—a childish urge to vanish my problems by shutting off my eyes.
“What do you mean ‘yes’? You knew? The Ministry knew?”
“We’ll talk about this the day after tomorrow,” she said. “I’ll send a car. You’ll receive a phone call from a withheld number to let you know when it’s coming—”
“Day after tomorrow? After I’ve been shot at? Why not tomorrow? Why not now?”
“Because I said so,” snapped Adela, so quickly she can’t have intended to say it. She sucked her teeth and her strange face wobbled. “You need to rest,” she added, more neutrally.
“Yes, Mai.”
We sat in a rubble of silence. “A joke,” I mumbled. “It means ‘Mum’ in Khmer.”
She rocked back like I’d spat at her, then got up quietly and left the room.
* * *
I slept deeply and briefly, a plunge pool of REM. I was not familiar with how people sleep after someone has tried to kill them, so I assumed this was within the bounds of normal. When I woke up, it was already the afternoon, and Graham was gone. The flat held his absence like a hole in the earth.
I reloaded the Walther, stuck it into a coat pocket, and sat in the mold-framed window of my bedroom like a gargoyle, staring at the view.
The local area felt hostile to human engagement. There was not much space for pedestrians and far too many cars. Every other turning gave onto the blank stare of concrete or glass buildings. It was the kind of area that makes pigeons extra ugly. But it was crowded with people, living on top of one another, working around one another, some in suits and some in uniforms. I could see why the Ministry thought we’d be hidden here. There were so many unhappy people that a gun wouldn’t suffice. You’d have to drop a bomb to ensure I was the right sad soul to die.
* * *
I knew he’d come back when the rich emerald smell of tobacco filled the hall. Something twitched in my chest—a muscle, a nerve, I wasn’t sure, but it hurt.
He was sitting at the noisome kitchen table, staring at nothing. Rogue Male was lying splayed and face down by the ashtray. The thing in my chest kicked again as I realized he must have grabbed it as we left our home. When I came in, he didn’t move anything but his gaze, which swung up like a whip.
“Where have you been?” I asked sharply.
“I went out on the bike.”
“I don’t know if this is some kind of shock reaction, or if you’re just completely bloody-minded, but are you aware two people from the future tried to kidnap you and kill me yesterday?”
“It did not escape my notice.”
“And you went on a solo road trip?”
He had the grace to look embarrassed, though the expression was half shielded by the hand that held the cigarette. “I needed to think,” he said carefully. “And I do not think so well when I am static.”
I walked four trembling, stork-stiff strides to stand in front of him. His gaze wavered again. I vibrated furiously. My knees were jumping like a pair of boxed frogs. I said, “We were almost murdered, in cold blood, in the street, and you’re acting weirdly because you regret kissing me. Is that right? Have I got it right?”
He cleared his throat awkwardly and ashed without looking, missing the ashtray. “I rather think you kissed me,” he suggested.
“Whatever. You’re about to tell me that it was an awful mistake, that it shouldn’t have happened, et cetera.”
He pulled hard on the cigarette, so that its tip glowed like a warning signal, then plucked nervily at his packet for another. He used the burning cigarette to light the next one and glumly swapped them. At length he said, “It should not have happened. And I’m terribly sorry for the way that it did.”
“Right.”
“You’re angry.”
“No shit. It’s humiliating to be treated like a child after being kissed like a—”
“Please—”
He colored and blew a long stream of smoke at me. At length he muttered, “I have been trying to court you.”
I blinked.
“What?”
He frowned at me over the cigarette. “Evidently I mismanaged this. I don’t have very much experience in courting.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Neither, it must be said, do I. I don’t understand what you want, nor what any woman of this era wants. I don’t know what I have to offer you. You are perfectly independent. You’re occupied to an almost violent degree by your own career. But, well, I thought, you do eat everything I cook… so perhaps…”
“You were planning on feeding me until I… what?”
He frowned more deeply. He looked as if he was having a bad time.
“I was hoping you might be able to explain that to me. If you found me suitable.”
“Suitable for what?” I exclaimed, exasperated.
“Well, I thought, maybe—I don’t know. In my time, you know, things progressed very differently. I didn’t know what you wanted.”
I gawped at him. I said, “Graham. Not to labor the point here. But I kissed you. Very enthusiastically. Is that not maybe the tiniest hint about what I wanted?”
“We were in our cups, and you were frightened. I took advantage of your reaction, and the time it took to bring myself under control—”
“In this era, you don’t have to go around controlling yourself if it’s coming at you on a silver platter—”
“I am not from this era!” he cried—one of the very few times I ever heard him raise his voice. He leaned forward, gesturing agitatedly with the cigarette. “Understand that, as far as I’m concerned, you would have been in your rights to strike me, or chase me from the house, or vanish without a trace—”
“Well, I don’t want to. I certainly didn’t want you locking yourself in your room. What the hell? What were you doing in there?”
“Praying.”
“You’ve got to be kidding me.”
He leaned back. He was wildly flushed, but he’d brought his voice under control, and his smoking hand hid the lower half of his face. “Well, yes, ‘kidding’ somewhat,” he muttered.
We stared at each other. The room was embarrassingly quiet after our joint outburst. I said, as levelly as I could manage, “Tell me what you want. Not what might or could happen or go wrong. Just, right now. What do you want?”
I watched the smoke beckon the air. He took a slow, deep breath, like a man preparing to leap from a windowsill.
“Will you take off your gansey,” he said.
I pulled my wool jumper over my head. Its neck was narrow and on its departure it disarrayed my makeshift chignon. I felt my hair unsettle slowly down my neck.
“Your chemise.”
It was a T-shirt. I removed that too, dropped it to the floor.
He cleared his throat nervously and said, “Your, uh,” then gestured at my bra with the nonsmoking hand.
I took off my bra.
He’d only moved to pull on the cigarette. His head was wreathed in the smoke. I could just see that his eyes were bright and feverish.
“I wondered…” he murmured.
“Yes?”
“If they would be the same color as your mouth.”
“They?”
He leaned forward and quickly pinched one of my nipples, hard, between the knuckles of his middle and forefinger. I made a noise like a slapped canary.
He leaned back and took another drag on the cigarette, staring thoughtfully. The fingers that had pinched me trembled, almost imperceptibly.
“Take off your shirt,” I said.
He raised his eyebrows, and for a moment, I thought he was going to refuse. But he put the cigarette between his lips and began to unbutton the serge shirt. He shrugged himself out of it without looking at me.
“Put out the cigarette.”
He ground it into the ashtray.
“Stand up.”
I was talking very softly. I gave this last instruction at such a volume I could hardly hear it myself. But he stood. He was close to me. I didn’t need to straighten my arm to touch him, which was the next thing I did. I flattened a hand on the middle of his chest. He was looking at me with the same mild, politely engaged expression that he always wore—as if this was a moment of no more import than any moment pulled from the pocket of our year—but his heart gave him away. Under my hand, it was pounding.
He had a cumulonimbus of black curls across his chest. I ran my hands over his ribs, white as bleached stone, scattered with brown moles. I scrubbed my thumbs across his nipples and he swallowed.
“Okay?”
“Yes.”
I moved my hands round and clasped the bookends of his back muscles, his winged bones.
“May I touch you? The way you are—like this—”
“Like—?”
“All over.”
“Yes. Please.”
He ran his fingertips up my arms, stroked my neck. His touch was frustratingly light. He let his fingers rest on my collarbones. We met each other’s eyes. He moved his hands down, abruptly, over my breasts. It was such a blunt motion—so much that of a man who had really, really wanted to touch my breasts—that I scoffed, then grinned, and he lit up with a smile as sudden as the winter sun. He looked relieved.
“Is that—?”
“Please just—kiss me.”
He pulled me into him.
It was a much better kiss than last time. I clung to him while pinwheels dazzled and spun in my skull. His skin was hot.
He kissed me so hard and with such tempestuousness that it bore me back across the kitchen. I hit the fridge and he broke from me, breathing unsteadily.
“Oof. Cold.”
“Sorry.”
“Don’t be. Kiss me again.”
He started to kiss me but then stopped to make a small, seared noise when I slid my thumbs under his waistband and curled them.
“Should we go somewhere else?”
“Yes.”
He didn’t move, though. I was starting to tremble, out of need, which was thrilling and embarrassing. Also because the fridge was against my back.
“You may have some… expectations,” he murmured.
“Hm?”
“That I don’t… that I have little experience in meeting. As I… as men of my time…”
“You’re worried you won’t make me come.”
“Good grief.”
“Is that it?”
“Yes. Is that how you would say it? ‘Make me come…’ ”
“God,” I mumbled, because even hearing him say it experimentally, like a vocabulary exercise in a foreign language, was a lot to handle. “Yes. Don’t worry. I’ll teach you.”
“I would like that,” he said earnestly, and I covered my face.
“Take me to bed, then,” I said. He quite literally picked me up and carried me down our dreary flat. He chose my room and put me down on the bed, like a parcel.
“You have a very modern body,” he said.
“What does that mean?” I asked. I was wrenched by burst upon burst of tiny convulsions. I wondered if I was visibly shaking.
“I can see how you are put together.”
He didn’t elucidate, just dropped his head onto my chest. I felt the rough paddle of his tongue then the edge of his teeth against my nipples. He pushed his face against my neck and found the place where the skin streamed with nerves. His head was heavy and warm.
“I want to ‘make you come,’ ” he murmured, and it was exciting even with the inverted commas around it.
“You’ll have to get your face wet.”
He laughed and blushed ferociously. Even his shoulders heated under my hands. “Oh, I see.”
He stripped me of my skirt, tights, and underwear in a few neat movements.
“Show me where.”
“Here.”
“Show me how. Slowly.”
He came down of his own accord. I tangled my hands into his hair. He worked well on both instinct and instruction. He learned fast. A very good officer, and the sweetest of tempers.
He lifted his head to say something to me. I was not in a state to hear it. I pushed him back down, and I felt him laugh again. He worked on me, firmly and seriously, until my thighs started to shake. When I came, my back arched off the bed. I pulled his hair, I think, and I made a fair amount of noise, I think, though I am hazy on detail.
He cupped me gently and waited for the aftershocks to pass. When he saw me refocus my eyes, he nuzzled my stomach, smearing it.
“That was… pretty good.”
“Glad to hear it.”
“What did you say, when you were—?”
“I said that you taste like the sea.” He smiled up at me, then added, “I could feel you.”
“Oh?”
No, mealtimes are the worst. They put cold things into their mouths, and the cold walks around their stomachs. The camp was running low on spirit fuel, and Gore gave his men a choice between no grog or cold rations. They all chose grog—Jack was ever a jolly tar. But water needs to be melted too, and they’re even thirstier than they are hungry or tired. He’s had to stop more than one man eating snow and scorching his throat. Des Voeux and the Marine Sergeant Bryant shot a hare two days ago and knelt to drink the blood from the welt in its flank.
No, what’s worst is that there are no Esquimaux. This is their seasonal hunting ground. Last year they’d come aboard the ships to trade seal meat and furs for knives and wood. They’d patted sailors’ faces and cheerfully resisted conversion to Christianity (hell sounded too delightful—a land of eternal heat). This year, the natives are nowhere to be seen. They have leaped into the sky, sunk into the earth.
Gore thinks his trigger fingers might be going. They are swollen, sheening enamel white. It takes him longer than he’d like to get his gloves on because he can’t feel what he’s doing. Still, he’s dealt with worse than this. He’ll give himself another week unless his fingers start to blacken. He still wants to bag an ox.
When it happens, it happens very quickly. Later, he will hardly be able to line the words up to describe it.
“The—flash of lightning, I thought it was. Then that—doorway of blue light.”
The horizon splits like a knuckle. A bright blue slit in the world. He raises his gun. He will wonder, some time from now, what would have happened if he hadn’t, if he’d met his future another way.
CHAPTER SEVEN
I put the pad of my thumb to my lip and flattened it. Pulled it back. Stared. No blood, though it felt like there should have been. Not even the sensation of burning. The kiss had gone with the dawn.
“Don’t,” murmured Adela.
“I wasn’t biting.”
She made a conciliatory noise in her throat, the sort you make to ratty old cats who are trying to climb up the stairs. It was the closest she’d ever come to kindness, and it bowled me over, literally. My forehead bounced gently off my knees.
I was sitting on a horrible, cheek-thin mattress in a Ministry safe house. After I’d heard Graham’s door lock, I’d shivered dumbly against the wall until a handful of brain cells formed a committee to remind me that the man my boss had identified as a spy had tried to assassinate us in broad lamplight, using a futuristic weapon that put the late Quentin’s cryptic hint about “not the past” into perspective.
I’d called Adela, who had answered immediately and stepped in to fix things. The night had teemed. There had been some logistical kerfuffle—vans with blackout windows, decoy vehicles, even a brief but impressive subterranean roadway. I was given to understand that the other bridges and expats were also being moved, into off-the-books safe houses in considerably worse nick than our original abodes. Graham and I had been placed in a knackered flat in the garret of an old government building, stifled from all sides by the city. The beautiful heath where I’d taught him to ride a bike was far away. The window in my room looked out onto a jungle of chimneys and vent fans, turning silvery in the proleptic dawn light. I could hear something dripping and I knew, with resignation, that I would always hear something dripping for as long as I lived here. The adrenaline high had worn off, and I was feeling tired to my marrow.
Graham’s room was along from mine, reached via a long corridor that had abandoned-asylum energy. Back at our old house he’d been bundled into a separate van with his motorbike and a shoulder bag of clothes. He’d glanced at me once, a quick searching look to check that I was being wrangled, and then he hadn’t been able to meet my eyes again. As he ducked into the car, I saw how slight he was, how much shorter than the field heavies they’d sent into my now ex-neighborhood. He was diminished in some way; he’d seemed to hold his charm close to his body, like a broken arm. I hadn’t seen him since we’d been brought to the safe house.
Adela was opening the top drawer of the bedside table. It was old, and it stuck. She coaxed it out with far more patience than I had ever seen her exhibit.
“You trained on a Walther?” she asked.
I turned my head, on my knees, to look. She was holding a handgun. I noted this with the same resignation as I’d noted the dripping.
“When I failed the field exams, I was using a Walther, yes.”
“This is yours now.”
“Oh. Cool.”
“I’m putting it in this top drawer.”
“Okay.”
“But first I’d like to see you unload and reload,” she added, passing me the handgun.
It weighed as much as a gun did, neither heavier nor lighter than what I was expecting.
“I haven’t done this for a while,” I said, but I did it anyway.
Adela nodded approvingly and took it back off me to settle it in the drawer. My thoughts fired sluggishly—electricity through ooze.
“Ma’am. The Brigadier. I think he’s from the future.”
“Yes.”
I didn’t know what to do with myself, so I lifted my face to drop it into my hands—a childish urge to vanish my problems by shutting off my eyes.
“What do you mean ‘yes’? You knew? The Ministry knew?”
“We’ll talk about this the day after tomorrow,” she said. “I’ll send a car. You’ll receive a phone call from a withheld number to let you know when it’s coming—”
“Day after tomorrow? After I’ve been shot at? Why not tomorrow? Why not now?”
“Because I said so,” snapped Adela, so quickly she can’t have intended to say it. She sucked her teeth and her strange face wobbled. “You need to rest,” she added, more neutrally.
“Yes, Mai.”
We sat in a rubble of silence. “A joke,” I mumbled. “It means ‘Mum’ in Khmer.”
She rocked back like I’d spat at her, then got up quietly and left the room.
* * *
I slept deeply and briefly, a plunge pool of REM. I was not familiar with how people sleep after someone has tried to kill them, so I assumed this was within the bounds of normal. When I woke up, it was already the afternoon, and Graham was gone. The flat held his absence like a hole in the earth.
I reloaded the Walther, stuck it into a coat pocket, and sat in the mold-framed window of my bedroom like a gargoyle, staring at the view.
The local area felt hostile to human engagement. There was not much space for pedestrians and far too many cars. Every other turning gave onto the blank stare of concrete or glass buildings. It was the kind of area that makes pigeons extra ugly. But it was crowded with people, living on top of one another, working around one another, some in suits and some in uniforms. I could see why the Ministry thought we’d be hidden here. There were so many unhappy people that a gun wouldn’t suffice. You’d have to drop a bomb to ensure I was the right sad soul to die.
* * *
I knew he’d come back when the rich emerald smell of tobacco filled the hall. Something twitched in my chest—a muscle, a nerve, I wasn’t sure, but it hurt.
He was sitting at the noisome kitchen table, staring at nothing. Rogue Male was lying splayed and face down by the ashtray. The thing in my chest kicked again as I realized he must have grabbed it as we left our home. When I came in, he didn’t move anything but his gaze, which swung up like a whip.
“Where have you been?” I asked sharply.
“I went out on the bike.”
“I don’t know if this is some kind of shock reaction, or if you’re just completely bloody-minded, but are you aware two people from the future tried to kidnap you and kill me yesterday?”
“It did not escape my notice.”
“And you went on a solo road trip?”
He had the grace to look embarrassed, though the expression was half shielded by the hand that held the cigarette. “I needed to think,” he said carefully. “And I do not think so well when I am static.”
I walked four trembling, stork-stiff strides to stand in front of him. His gaze wavered again. I vibrated furiously. My knees were jumping like a pair of boxed frogs. I said, “We were almost murdered, in cold blood, in the street, and you’re acting weirdly because you regret kissing me. Is that right? Have I got it right?”
He cleared his throat awkwardly and ashed without looking, missing the ashtray. “I rather think you kissed me,” he suggested.
“Whatever. You’re about to tell me that it was an awful mistake, that it shouldn’t have happened, et cetera.”
He pulled hard on the cigarette, so that its tip glowed like a warning signal, then plucked nervily at his packet for another. He used the burning cigarette to light the next one and glumly swapped them. At length he said, “It should not have happened. And I’m terribly sorry for the way that it did.”
“Right.”
“You’re angry.”
“No shit. It’s humiliating to be treated like a child after being kissed like a—”
“Please—”
He colored and blew a long stream of smoke at me. At length he muttered, “I have been trying to court you.”
I blinked.
“What?”
He frowned at me over the cigarette. “Evidently I mismanaged this. I don’t have very much experience in courting.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Neither, it must be said, do I. I don’t understand what you want, nor what any woman of this era wants. I don’t know what I have to offer you. You are perfectly independent. You’re occupied to an almost violent degree by your own career. But, well, I thought, you do eat everything I cook… so perhaps…”
“You were planning on feeding me until I… what?”
He frowned more deeply. He looked as if he was having a bad time.
“I was hoping you might be able to explain that to me. If you found me suitable.”
“Suitable for what?” I exclaimed, exasperated.
“Well, I thought, maybe—I don’t know. In my time, you know, things progressed very differently. I didn’t know what you wanted.”
I gawped at him. I said, “Graham. Not to labor the point here. But I kissed you. Very enthusiastically. Is that not maybe the tiniest hint about what I wanted?”
“We were in our cups, and you were frightened. I took advantage of your reaction, and the time it took to bring myself under control—”
“In this era, you don’t have to go around controlling yourself if it’s coming at you on a silver platter—”
“I am not from this era!” he cried—one of the very few times I ever heard him raise his voice. He leaned forward, gesturing agitatedly with the cigarette. “Understand that, as far as I’m concerned, you would have been in your rights to strike me, or chase me from the house, or vanish without a trace—”
“Well, I don’t want to. I certainly didn’t want you locking yourself in your room. What the hell? What were you doing in there?”
“Praying.”
“You’ve got to be kidding me.”
He leaned back. He was wildly flushed, but he’d brought his voice under control, and his smoking hand hid the lower half of his face. “Well, yes, ‘kidding’ somewhat,” he muttered.
We stared at each other. The room was embarrassingly quiet after our joint outburst. I said, as levelly as I could manage, “Tell me what you want. Not what might or could happen or go wrong. Just, right now. What do you want?”
I watched the smoke beckon the air. He took a slow, deep breath, like a man preparing to leap from a windowsill.
“Will you take off your gansey,” he said.
I pulled my wool jumper over my head. Its neck was narrow and on its departure it disarrayed my makeshift chignon. I felt my hair unsettle slowly down my neck.
“Your chemise.”
It was a T-shirt. I removed that too, dropped it to the floor.
He cleared his throat nervously and said, “Your, uh,” then gestured at my bra with the nonsmoking hand.
I took off my bra.
He’d only moved to pull on the cigarette. His head was wreathed in the smoke. I could just see that his eyes were bright and feverish.
“I wondered…” he murmured.
“Yes?”
“If they would be the same color as your mouth.”
“They?”
He leaned forward and quickly pinched one of my nipples, hard, between the knuckles of his middle and forefinger. I made a noise like a slapped canary.
He leaned back and took another drag on the cigarette, staring thoughtfully. The fingers that had pinched me trembled, almost imperceptibly.
“Take off your shirt,” I said.
He raised his eyebrows, and for a moment, I thought he was going to refuse. But he put the cigarette between his lips and began to unbutton the serge shirt. He shrugged himself out of it without looking at me.
“Put out the cigarette.”
He ground it into the ashtray.
“Stand up.”
I was talking very softly. I gave this last instruction at such a volume I could hardly hear it myself. But he stood. He was close to me. I didn’t need to straighten my arm to touch him, which was the next thing I did. I flattened a hand on the middle of his chest. He was looking at me with the same mild, politely engaged expression that he always wore—as if this was a moment of no more import than any moment pulled from the pocket of our year—but his heart gave him away. Under my hand, it was pounding.
He had a cumulonimbus of black curls across his chest. I ran my hands over his ribs, white as bleached stone, scattered with brown moles. I scrubbed my thumbs across his nipples and he swallowed.
“Okay?”
“Yes.”
I moved my hands round and clasped the bookends of his back muscles, his winged bones.
“May I touch you? The way you are—like this—”
“Like—?”
“All over.”
“Yes. Please.”
He ran his fingertips up my arms, stroked my neck. His touch was frustratingly light. He let his fingers rest on my collarbones. We met each other’s eyes. He moved his hands down, abruptly, over my breasts. It was such a blunt motion—so much that of a man who had really, really wanted to touch my breasts—that I scoffed, then grinned, and he lit up with a smile as sudden as the winter sun. He looked relieved.
“Is that—?”
“Please just—kiss me.”
He pulled me into him.
It was a much better kiss than last time. I clung to him while pinwheels dazzled and spun in my skull. His skin was hot.
He kissed me so hard and with such tempestuousness that it bore me back across the kitchen. I hit the fridge and he broke from me, breathing unsteadily.
“Oof. Cold.”
“Sorry.”
“Don’t be. Kiss me again.”
He started to kiss me but then stopped to make a small, seared noise when I slid my thumbs under his waistband and curled them.
“Should we go somewhere else?”
“Yes.”
He didn’t move, though. I was starting to tremble, out of need, which was thrilling and embarrassing. Also because the fridge was against my back.
“You may have some… expectations,” he murmured.
“Hm?”
“That I don’t… that I have little experience in meeting. As I… as men of my time…”
“You’re worried you won’t make me come.”
“Good grief.”
“Is that it?”
“Yes. Is that how you would say it? ‘Make me come…’ ”
“God,” I mumbled, because even hearing him say it experimentally, like a vocabulary exercise in a foreign language, was a lot to handle. “Yes. Don’t worry. I’ll teach you.”
“I would like that,” he said earnestly, and I covered my face.
“Take me to bed, then,” I said. He quite literally picked me up and carried me down our dreary flat. He chose my room and put me down on the bed, like a parcel.
“You have a very modern body,” he said.
“What does that mean?” I asked. I was wrenched by burst upon burst of tiny convulsions. I wondered if I was visibly shaking.
“I can see how you are put together.”
He didn’t elucidate, just dropped his head onto my chest. I felt the rough paddle of his tongue then the edge of his teeth against my nipples. He pushed his face against my neck and found the place where the skin streamed with nerves. His head was heavy and warm.
“I want to ‘make you come,’ ” he murmured, and it was exciting even with the inverted commas around it.
“You’ll have to get your face wet.”
He laughed and blushed ferociously. Even his shoulders heated under my hands. “Oh, I see.”
He stripped me of my skirt, tights, and underwear in a few neat movements.
“Show me where.”
“Here.”
“Show me how. Slowly.”
He came down of his own accord. I tangled my hands into his hair. He worked well on both instinct and instruction. He learned fast. A very good officer, and the sweetest of tempers.
He lifted his head to say something to me. I was not in a state to hear it. I pushed him back down, and I felt him laugh again. He worked on me, firmly and seriously, until my thighs started to shake. When I came, my back arched off the bed. I pulled his hair, I think, and I made a fair amount of noise, I think, though I am hazy on detail.
He cupped me gently and waited for the aftershocks to pass. When he saw me refocus my eyes, he nuzzled my stomach, smearing it.
“That was… pretty good.”
“Glad to hear it.”
“What did you say, when you were—?”
“I said that you taste like the sea.” He smiled up at me, then added, “I could feel you.”
“Oh?”
