Chapter Five: Turning Tide

Thomas spared one moment to glance over at Belle, who had appeared in the doorway. She could be unpredictable when people touched him. “Belle, bed,” he ordered her hoarsely, and after giving him one look of benign curiosity, she turned herself around and disappeared into the kitchen’s shadows.

He was not sure how he had got here. Could not recall any one moment when he had decided to sit up on the sofa, reach round Flynn to grab the back of it and move to straddle him. It wasn’t at all his usual MO. He vaguely remembered being considered a good lover, unless that handful of long-ago acquaintances had been lying to him, and he’d never been afraid to initiate. To shift like this, though, powerful, smooth, and kneel across his lap, the gesture explicit, almost—in Thomas’s small experience of the genre—bloody pornographic.

Flynn gasped, pupils expanding with excitement once more, their darkness almost drowning the green. This time when Thomas’s hands closed on his T-shirt, he arched his back in an explicit gesture of his own, the muscles down his belly contracting into shapely patterns as he drew his shoulders forward. Yes. Take it off. But Thomas was not ready for that yet, wanted badly before he did so to run his hands up under the fabric, to touch without seeing the silk-skinned pectorals, to find with blind precision the nipples he’d felt hardening at his first caress. He closed thumb and finger on them, gently squeezing, and felt Flynn leap like a fish beneath him. A hand on his nape—careful still, but this time brooking no resistance—and Thomas let himself plunge back into the interrupted kiss, capturing Flynn’s lower lip between his teeth for one instant in the lightest teasing nip before meeting him, mouth to mouth, tongue to tongue, unrestrained now and dead serious.

Flynn made a sound whose urgency he recognised, and he unlocked one hand from its grip on his shoulder and ran it, slowly, searching, down over his heaving chest and belly, down again. Some part of Thomas wanted to give up and die of the pleasure, the intimacy and companionship, of the kiss, but he had to see. Sitting back, hearing Flynn moan as their contact broke, he looked down. Nice button-fly Levis, tight-fitting and soft with wear, their dirty-denim shade acquired the hard way. Straining across the crotch…

“Oh, God, look at you,” Thomas whispered, smiling as Flynn dazedly obeyed, and both watched in ragged-breathed intentness as Thomas slipped the first silver button from its hole, then the next and the next. Black cotton boxers underneath, lifting immediately to the swell of his erection. Their hands tussled briefly over the task of easing back the elastic, pulling those and his jeans down far enough. “Look at you.”

Thomas hadn’t spent the best part of the week just gone thinking about this man’s cock, although he now accepted that he had spent most of it thinking about him. If he had allowed himself such speculation, though, he might have come up with a vision like this. Long, hard, in graceful proportion with the rest of him. Sharing some of his colours—bronze in the lamplight, indigo veins patterning. At full stretch, Thomas thought, mouth drying out in excitement, but then as he stared rising harder still, the head darkening.

Flynn shuddered beneath him. A glimmer appeared in the opening of his glans, the sensitive meatus, rose and spilled. “Thomas…”

“Yes. What is it?”

“I want to see you. Take your shirt off.”

“You do it.”

“Oh Christ.” Flynn jerked forward, visibly did his best to be polite with the buttons of the nice linen shirt, then gave up and ripped. He shoved the garment off Thomas’s shoulders, moaned as Thomas at last grabbed hold of his T-shirt and tore it over his head for him. “Yes,” Flynn whispered. “God, look at your beautiful skin.”

Helplessly Thomas obeyed him, glancing down, seeing Flynn’s beauty—and, yes, astonishingly, his own—by contrasts. Growing up, he had always been as brown as Flynn by this time of the year, and he knew he had marks of desert burning almost branded into him, but otherwise he was pale. He never so much as took off his jacket outside if he could help it, even on the beach—didn’t want to be seen.

“Like satin,” Flynn told him, and Thomas, leaning to lock them both tight into the next kiss, felt his belt blindly unfastened, his cords unbuttoned, unzipped. Felt his shaft gently seized through the fabric of his briefs. The sound this gesture wrung from him was to his own ears so desperate and carnal that he tried to recoil, but Flynn stilled him with a touch to his shoulder. “No. It’s all right. Do what you want.”

“You don’t even know what I want,” Thomas chided him softly, touched to the marrow by his willingness, at the same time almost scared at how soon it had been offered. Now Flynn’s caressing hand was reaching down and under to cup his balls. “You don’t know… Easy, Flynn. We don’t need to go so fast.”

“Why not? I do know what you want,” Flynn breathed. “Stand up and let me take the rest of your clothes off. Come here and… Oh, you don’t know me. You can fuck yourself on me till you’re bone dry. Till you’re drained, and burned out, and you can’t feel a thing anymore. I can hold on for you forever. I don’t need—I don’t even need—”

“Flynn!” Thomas cut him off, appalled. He couldn’t escape the insistent pressure being brought to bear between his legs, but he reached and took Flynn’s face in his hands. “My God, is that what you want?”

Flynn sobbed. Thomas froze in horror. They both did. The sound had come without contortion of Flynn’s flushed and eager face, as if someone behind his mask had spoken. A message from a hostage at gunpoint. “No!” he choked out, whether in denial or an answer to his question Thomas couldn’t work out. “Oh…Thomas…”

“Tell me. For God’s sake, Flynn—talk.”

“It’s not what I sodding well want. But…”

“But what?” Carefully, Thomas pulled away the hand that was still clumsily trying to force the situation on, and Flynn cried out and flung his arms around his neck.

Jesus Christ. “It’s all right,” Thomas whispered, throat closing in astonishment. His cock ached at the sudden cessation of touch, a brief pang, but then all he could feel was the terrible heat of tears not his own against his cheek. “What is it? What’s wrong?”

“Don’t. I can’t…”

Thomas gave it thought, distractedly but thoroughly holding him. He reckoned that Flynn probably could, if undisturbed by whatever preconceptions about performance and delivery he imagined Thomas had, or memories of what he was used to having to deliver to someone else.

“It’s all right,” he repeated, an old mantra, worn almost to meaninglessness. Often a lie too. Thomas didn’t know. But it was still of service—Flynn relaxed a little. “All right,” Thomas murmured against his ear. “You’re all right.”

He pushed his hand down into the space between their bodies. Flynn was still erect. Awkwardly, but without hesitation, Thomas took hold of him.

Long, slow strokes, easy as sunlight, never relinquishing the embrace. By the tenth or eleventh of them, Flynn was melting, undone. He managed, on a half-choked rasp, “Got to make it good for you too,” but Thomas only shook his head, brushing a hot smile against Flynn’s neck.

“What’s good for me,” he whispered, not missing a beat of the inexorable stroking, “is if you come. Just come for me. Come…”

It shouldn’t have worked. Little as he knew about him, Thomas was sure that Flynn was used to stronger meat than this. Just to kiss him, and clumsily jerk him off… But Flynn’s eyes flew open, and he seized Thomas’s shoulders, his cock pulsing hard in his grasp. His climaxing shout was shot through with fear, as if he were trying and failing to ride a wave, plunging towards unimaginable wipeout. He jolted forward. “Thomas, no. It’ll tear me apart.”

“I’ll pick up the bits,” Thomas said against his ear, holding him painfully hard. He worked up the beat to a brief, rough frenzy, and felt Flynn convulse in his embrace. Gasped in pleasure and relief as the hot splash hit his wrist and spilled over his hand. “There. There. Come on.”

“There’ll be nothing—nothing left…”

But there was. Thomas kept tight hold of the remains, while Flynn’s cries faded and his respiration climbed back down from assault-course wild to a rhythm that would allow for ragged laughter, and, after an interval, speech. “God almighty. Thomas, I’m sorry. What did you…? What did you do?”

Thomas smiled. A strange thought occurred to him, triggered by who knew what associations in his fractured memory. Intimacy, perhaps. Warm skin against his own. He said, unsteadily, “I used to have friends, you know. They used to call me Tom.”

“Oh.” Flynn shivered with an aftershock, and said the name softly, just a movement of his lips on Thomas’s skin. Yes, Thomas thought. That was who I was to everyone—to myself, even—before I joined up, before Captain Thomas Penrose got himself born. “Tom,” Flynn repeated, and Tom let his eyes close, burying his face in Flynn’s hair.

An interval passed. Gradually the room fell again into its accustomed sea-whisper silence. Flynn sat curled in Tom’s arms, or perhaps it was the other way round—it was hard to tell from their tangle. Either way, Tom was still hard, his erection pressing warmly to Flynn’s thigh. It seemed to him a distant concern. For the moment it felt to him as if seeing and feeling Flynn come—crashing whatever barricades that had involved—had been enough. Then embarrassment stirred, and he tried to shift back a little.

“Hoi,” Flynn whispered hoarsely. “Where are you off to?”

“Nowhere. Just… Not everyone likes to be prodded after…”

“After?” Flynn interrupted him, easing away far enough for Tom to see his puzzled, frowning smile. “Do you somehow think we’re done here?”

“Well, I know things aren’t simple for you.” Not even the animal reflex of orgasm, Tom thought. The simplest thing in the world, snarled up inside you till it looked less like pleasure than pain. “We can be done, if you like.”

Flynn shook his head. His breath was still unsteady, a damp flush painting his cheeks. “You’re a one-off, aren’t you?” he said, running a hand over Tom’s hair. “That’s a first for me, at any rate. Look, if you haven’t got any plans for all that potential, I do, and…” He paused, raising glowing eyes to Tom’s. “Something was said about an upstairs.”

Their hand-in-hand ascent of the watchtower’s stairs should have been awkward, a comedy. But Flynn put out a hand and led him, negotiating the steep curve backwards, smiling down on him, and his presence made a small ritual, a circle dance, of the climb. Tom felt as if he could see them from outside, as if he was the tower, watching them. Shadow puppets on a wall. Shaking his head, he tried to restore a sense of reality. A tumble on the sofa was one thing—he didn’t recall one second when he felt he’d had a choice. But taking Flynn to bed…

They stood together in the round upper chamber. Flynn, who had not let go of his hand, surveyed its moonlit circle. “Beautiful,” he said, then turned to look straight at Tom and repeated it—beautiful—on such a note that Tom thought few human creatures must ever have heard, let alone one man from another. Let alone him.

He felt his joints try to slacken, his cock grow taut and hard, trying to lift to his belly in the confines of his pants. Taking Flynn to bed was the only thing in the wide wild world to do, and if it damned him, did nothing but remind him of his losses, so be it. Flynn had led him up the stairs, but it was Tom who kissed him, said, “Come on,” and pulled him down after him onto the bed.

When matters became urgent—which they soon did; Tom could hold his fire for a more than respectable time but was entirely male and human—he murmured a laughter-shaken wait a second against Flynn’s mouth and rolled out from under him. In the bathroom, he knew a moment’s near panic, then took a breath and pulled out a box at the back of the cabinet’s bottom drawer. The lubricant was near to hand, from the rare nights when he needed to jerk off and his own dry touch was unpleasing to him. But he hadn’t, for God’s sake, always lived like a sodding monk, had he? No, there, right at the back, and just within their sell-by date…

When he returned from the bathroom, Flynn was watching. He had taken the opportunity to skin out of his clothes and array himself on Tom’s bedspread, flat on his stomach, propped on his elbows. He had the air of a man who knew from long experience that the inviting pose would work. Tom, freezing to a halt at the foot of the bed, tried not to let it. Whatever sexual routine Flynn employed—whatever had made him astonished, that Tom could give without immediately needing to grab back—he didn’t want to fall in with it. But Flynn’s gaze had settled on him, front, down and centre, and he supposed his persistent erection, his hypnotised stare, hardly conveyed a refusal. “God, Flynn…”

“Yes. Come here,” Flynn said, then paused, as if to judge his next words carefully. As if gauging him. “Get your clothes off. And come and shove that in me before it explodes.”

The crudity was deliberate. Delicate somehow too. Tom knew that, by the standards of soldiers and Navy men, his own language was restrained—comically so, according to those with whom he’d shared barracks and field-hospital surgeries. He didn’t consider himself more than ordinarily decent—just shy of rough words out of context or for their own sakes. Flynn’s context was new to him. Flynn, who looked as if he possessed a bone-deep decency of his own, could stir him profoundly with a well-judged obscenity or two. Tap a vein of raw sexuality he wasn’t sure he could bear to confront.

“Tom, come here.”

Tom fell on him. He tried not to—not in the sense of a lion falling on a bloody antelope, but knew he hadn’t been much gentler. He pushed him down onto his belly, feeling the sense of fit, of blessed homecoming, as his cock slid up between strong male thighs. Panting, bracing to one arm, he reached for the box of condoms, and felt Flynn suddenly close one hand on his wrist.

“Don’t bother. I’ll take the lube—you’re a big lad, Dr. Tom, in case nobody’s told you—but…I trust you.”

Good luck with the novel fucking ways he comes up with of committing suicide every other week…

Tom took hold of his shoulders. With the exception of his mother’s, Rob Tremaine’s was the last voice he wanted to hear in his head at this moment. “Flynn. Don’t be soft. You shouldn’t trust any man, not like that.”

“Any?” Flynn, glancing back at him wide-eyed, tried for a weak grin. “How often do you think I—”

“I don’t care how often. I’m not a saint, and even if I had been, I’m a doctor. I do a shift in Penzance casualty every week—I’m exposed to blood all the time. I get myself checked, but, Flynn…”

“All right, all right,” Flynn capitulated. For a second, Tom thought there were tears in his eyes. Of frustration? Maybe. If it was Tremaine he was getting compared to, he had no doubt that Flynn could launch him like a cruise missile, no questions asked.

Tom flashed back helplessly to that vulpine grin, raw-boned build. Yes, Rob would have ploughed his way up Flynn so hard the poor bastard would be tasting his come by now. Tom wondered if any other approach seemed tame to Flynn by comparison—if Rob expanded to fill his horizon, blocking the light…

“Tom, for God’s sake. What are you waiting for? Come here. Let me do the honours.”

Tom struggled back into the moment. Flynn’s deft attentions with condoms and lubricant kept him there, breathing deeply for control, but as soon as the practicalities had been seen to and Flynn had stretched out on his stomach, doubts assailed Tom once more. Yes. Eclipsed. Flynn had said he was big, but maybe it wasn’t enough. Safely sheathed and drenched in lube, straining at Flynn’s entrance, Tom slipped a hand beneath him. Said, as gently as he could, “You’re not hard.”

Flynn shivered. He rubbed his forehead on his folded arms. “Are you…are you surprised, after the wring-out you gave me before? I will be, once you’re inside me. Come on. Please.”

Carefully Tom explored his softened shaft. He uncapped the lubricant once more and eased back, sliding two fingers down between his buttocks. Finding and circling his hole. He heard Flynn suck a breath. “That okay?”

“Mm. God, yes. Better than.” Flynn moaned, arched his back. Drew his legs up to accommodate the touch, and Tom pushed the caress forward, slipping one slick fingertip inside, exerting gentle pressure just inside the rim. “Yes. Don’t stop that. I’m just… I’ll be better in a minute.” Suddenly he lifted his head and glanced back at Tom over his shoulder, his smile nervous, hard to read. “You’re different, you know. When you touch me, when you look at me…you make the world seem different. Less of a battlefield.”

Tom didn’t know what to say. His throat was closing. “Good,” he whispered, for want of anything better, and brought a second fingertip to bear, gingerly stretching.

Flynn jumped. It was a tiny movement, repressed a fraction of a second too late. Tom read it instantly—pain, too sharp to hide. Immediately, involuntarily, his touch became medical. “Flynn, for God’s sake. You’re hurt down here. You’re swollen.” Not waiting for Flynn to move or speak, he sat up, reached over him and switched on the bedside light. “Let me see.”

“Tom… What the fuck?” Flynn scrambled backward, raising a hand to shield his eyes. The light was stark. Tom read away insomniac nights here, propped against the headboard where Flynn was now hopelessly trying to retreat. Trying, at the same time, to pull up a sheet, because both of them knew that Tom, who had picked up a tiny swell of muscle in the dark, was not about to miss the bruises with which he was painted from stomach to groin. Couldn’t pretend to, even if he wanted. “Shit,” Flynn groaned, drawing his knees up to his chest. “Couldn’t you have just left well alone?”

Tom would have liked to. Shock was taking care of his erection, but the sudden shut-off from an arousal so massive and sweet was sending nausea through him, and a cold dull ache. “Sure,” he said unsteadily, coming to kneel beside Flynn. He tugged off the condom, abruptly sickened by it. “If anything had been well, I’d have left it. Jesus, Flynn.” He ran a bewildered hand into his hair. “If you’re in an abusive relationship, there’s people who can help you. I’ll help you.”

Flynn broke into laughter. It was the first unpleasant sound that Tom had heard from him—bitter, full of pain. “Who the fuck are you—Oprah bloody Winfrey?” He seized a corner of the rumpled bedspread and pulled it over his thighs, as if his own lax cock suddenly shamed him. “The Navy deals with that kind of shit in-house, I promise. And if I am—which I’m not—you’d better believe, it goes two ways. I’m not a hurt lamb, Tom. I ask for it. I fucking beg.”

Tom sat back on his heels. He transfixed Flynn on one dark look. “Well,” he said stonily. “The difference with me, sunbeam, is that you’re not gonna get it.”

He dragged out blankets from the linen basket, a cotton sheet. Picked up a pillow from the bed and did not quite throw it at him. Flynn, not meeting his eyes, took the things from him and made for the stairs. Tom turned his back on him.

He got almost as far as the bed before his brow contracted, and he turned and padded silently to the third stair down, where he could watch without being seen. He knew how cold the stone flags were to bare feet. Naked, he crouched, wrapping his arms round his knees. He saw Flynn stumble over to the sofa and lie down, curling himself up in the blanket. He saw Belle pad cautiously across the living room towards him and stand apprehensively for almost a minute before jumping up beside him. Flynn started violently and made a sound that accurately reflected the shock of having a dog the size of a small pony leap on him out of the dark, but Belle laid herself placidly down beside him, and after a moment, he buried his face in her coat. Tom got up, stiff and cold to the bone, and went back to the rumpled bed.

Tom had adopted Belle just before he moved into the watchtower. He had never known the place without her, and its unbreathing silence, as he made his way downstairs in the dawn light, sent a chill through him. The pillow, shaken out, was placed neatly on the sofa, the sheet folded on top. The dinner dishes from last night had been washed and were gleaming in the rack.

Flynn was sitting outside on one of the rocks that dotted the narrow strip of turf that divided the tower’s foot from the cliff. He had both blankets wrapped around his shoulders. Tom wondered how long he had been there. Belle, if not exactly leaning on him, was sitting close enough to shed some body warmth and had an air of being on guard. When she heard the back door open, she got up and came over to greet Tom, waving her long tail, but then circled straight back to Flynn. Looking after him, aren’t you? You’re a better host than I was.

He said his name gently, and Flynn turned around. For a moment his face was a blank, his eyes as empty as the grey sea horizon on which they had been fixed. Then he smiled, far more warmly than Tom thought he deserved. Real, Tom asked himself, or a reflex of self-defence? After last night he couldn’t be sure. “Morning.”

“Morning,” Tom said, taking up a diffident position on the rock beside him. “Here. Made you a cup of tea. Wasn’t sure how you took it, but…”

“But you’ll have observed that, although I am clearly fit and trim, I have my weaknesses, and I enjoy my food. You therefore made it nice and strong, with milk and sugar, which is exactly right. You’re a perceptive man.” Their eyes met in wry acknowledgement of what his acuity had cost them both last night.

“Listen,” Flynn continued after an interval, gratefully wrapping cold fingers round the mug. “Some of that bruising is from the other week. That wave knocked the holy crap out of me. And I’ve done a rescue since, a tough one. Some of it’s from then.”

“Not… Not all, though.”

“No. Not all.” They sat for a while in silence, and once more somehow it was not uncomfortable. Despite everything. A rosy May dawn was trying to get itself born through the mists on the moors to the east, every moment the air was soaking up more and more light. Flynn said, beginning a smile that promised to be brighter still, “That was some great sex we nearly had, wasn’t it?”

Tom snorted. He shifted his backside closer to Flynn’s and put an arm around him. “Yeah. The best.”

“What I wouldn’t give for another crack…”

Tom said nothing, but tried to indicate by his posture that the world was very wide, and Flynn a free agent within it. That he, Tom, was both available and open to suggestion. Flynn sighed and leaned lightly into him, as if seeking his warmth. “Oh God. You don’t understand.”

“Ready to tell me,” Tom said, not as a question. “Come on.”

“Rob was my copilot,” Flynn began. That much told, he paused, but Tom didn’t need him to elaborate on the significance. He had seen the bond in action, over and over again. It instantly threw new light on Tremaine—promoted him from dangerous nuisance to Flynn’s brother-in-arms. He nodded, and Flynn went on, with an odd little flicker of gratitude at having been so understood. “Not on search and rescue. We used to do maritime security over at Portsmouth.”

“Drugs and weaponry?”

“Yeah. I was good at it, believe it or not. Lieutenant Commander, Airborne Surveillance and Control. I had a six-man team, and…I had Rob.” He shivered, shook his head. “Or Rob had me. I’m not sure which. He was always a bit of a force of nature, Tom, but back then I didn’t mind so much. We started practically the first night after we’d flown together. You’re high as a kite after a risky op, you know? And it doesn’t feel like anyone can bring you down except…”

He faded out. Tom gave him a break, from his own attention and the painful narrative, reaching round behind him to pull up the blanket which had started to slip off his shoulder. He finished for him, after a moment, “Except someone who was out there too.”

“Yes. Yes, exactly. Happened every time. For him I think it became like a ritual, something he had to do, and as soon as I felt that, it—well, it wasn’t good anymore. A couple of times—I should’ve busted him in the chops after the first one—I said no, and either he wasn’t listening or he didn’t take me seriously, but… God, Tom.” Flynn turned a little to look at him. “Why didn’t I stop him? I’m not soft, and I’m not anybody’s patsy. I…”

“He is a force of nature,” Tom interrupted him gently. Maybe the question had been rhetorical, but Tom’s years as soldier and doctor had showed him a lot of men, a lot of jungle paths. “I know you’re a proper hard-arse, Flynn, but blokes like that, once they get into the habit, I think it’s like trying to stop a bloody hurricane. And I’ve known a fair number of pilots. Seconds too. They’d go a long way, do pretty much anything, to protect their bond.”

“Is that what I was doing?” Flynn whispered, lifting his hands to his mouth. “Maybe. God, when I listen to you, it doesn’t sound so bloody pathetic, but…” He took his hands down, and Tom sensed in the movement of his shoulders his effort to brace and go on. “Anyway. I didn’t have much more time to worry about it. Our next callout, my helicopter ditched. She was a Lynx, brand new, top of the range. I got one warning light on the board, and—thirty seconds later she was down.”

Down. Tom released a breath. He had seen how they went, these unlikely contraptions of blade and spin, had watched one hit by a missile over a compound in Helmand. A plane, structurally aerodynamic anyway, would sail on briefly, but the birds just dropped when their rotors stopped, pitched down in a screaming flail of metal and howling engines. “Thirty seconds? Did anyone have time to bail?”

“No. I don’t remember it, not even hitting the water. I was out cold. All I know about it is what Rob’s told me—he was thrown clear. Fuck knows how, but I wouldn’t be here otherwise. She wallowed for a minute. Air pocket in the cockpit. Rob shot the glass out, pulled me free. He risked everything to get me, Tom. When they start to haul under, they suck everything round them down too. I don’t know how he did it. I don’t know…”

Nor did Tom. He couldn’t imagine the superhuman effort it would take for a shocked air-crash victim, dumped unprepared into dark waters, to fight his way back in time to make the save. But weird things happened in combat, in the throes of frightened love. Miracles, if you looked at things that way, and God knew Flynn’s presence now, a warm, breathing life in the curve of his arm, seemed pretty much a marvel. It wasn’t the time to question Rob Tremaine’s heroism, and Flynn wasn’t finished—Tom sensed the rest of the story building up in the tensions of his shoulders. He knew what it was. To help him end it, he said, very softly, “All right. What about the others? Your crew?”

“They were in the cabin. It flooded straightaway. They drowned. I lost them all.”

Yes, Tom had known. But shock still rocked him. It convulsively tightened his grip on Flynn’s shoulders, and he laid a hand to the back of his neck as he lowered his head, curling up. “Oh, fuck, Flynn. Oh, no.”

“So it was just us two.” Long minutes had passed, of intense sea-whisper silence. Flynn had one hand on Belle’s collar, the dog having made her way to his distress like some kind of hairy emergency service, the way she always did to Tom on his dark days. His other hand was held in Tom’s, bone-crackingly hard. When he had raised his head, his eyes were empty, his voice hollow and calm. “Me and Rob. The enquiry found pilot error. They couldn’t check the wreckage—we were out too deep for salvage—and even if there’d been a fault, it still would’ve been mine. I made all my checks. I thought she was clean. But she was my bird, my ship, and I just wish…I just wish Rob had let me die with her.”

Thank God he didn’t. Tom wouldn’t have said it aloud. It would have been facile, and even if somehow in the course of their brief acquaintance Flynn had become so bright and clear a presence in his life that Tom would have meant it, he didn’t expect Flynn to have found any such corresponding comfort in him. He pressed a rough kiss to his temple, and it was as if Flynn had heard the repressed grateful prayer.

“You don’t know what it was like,” he said roughly. “I was in hospital for weeks, fucking comatose, and—when I woke up, I had every single one of those men’s wives, partners, families at my bedside, trying to absolve me, tell me I wasn’t to blame, or if I was, they—forgave me.”

“Jesus, Flynn.”

He released Belle but retained his grip on Tom’s hand, wiped a palm across his eyes. “And when they went home, there was just Rob. Day in, day out. I sound like I’m complaining, don’t I?”

“No. No, just telling me. Did he help?”

“You have no idea. He just took me over. He hired me a shit-hot Navy lawyer, challenged the enquiry on grounds of lack of evidence. Overturned them too, so instead of being out on my arse I was given retraining and a non-piloting role down here with SAR.” He paused, brief laughter shaking him. “Couldn’t have got me much further out of the way, unless they’d sent me to Orkney, but I was bloody grateful for the gig. Not that I got here before I’d chucked a spectacular nervous collapse. Psychiatrists, specialist clinics, the lot. Rob paid for it all.”

“Didn’t the service do anything for you?”

Flynn shrugged. “I saw a couple of Navy shrinks. Got short shrift from them, though. I think I was meant to accept my dishonourable discharge and clear out. I’d taken six of their best down with me, hadn’t I?”

Tom nodded bitterly, thinking of Victor. The forces looked after their own, until certain harsh and deep-carved lines of perceived honour or courage were crossed. In Helmand, he’d been expected to kick arse as much as offer counsel to the troubled soldiers who found their way into his office. “Okay. Yes, I can imagine. But—lawyers, that kind of care… It must have cost Robert a fortune.”

“Several. I was out of commission for months. His family’s loaded, but I know he paid for a lot of it himself. And it wasn’t just that, Tom—he transferred down to Hawke to be with me, got a post with SAR. All right, he’s possessive, but…if you think about it, that’s fair enough. He pretty much owns me.”

Bollocks. Tom bit that back too. If that was Robert’s line, he could see how Flynn had come to be caught on it. He settled for a gentle, “Nobody owns you, Flynn,” rubbing one thumb across the back of his tight-clenched hand.

“I know. I’m sorry. I’m still fucked up, I suppose—I don’t always see things right. Either way, he deserves better than he gets from me. I mess with his head at least as much as he does mine. He hates my surfboard, hates my stupid little sports car. I drive him crazy by volunteering for the rescue winch in storms. Like he said, my hundred different ways of committing suicide. He feels like I’m always at the end of my leash, pulling to be away.”

“And…are you?”

“Yes. But not the way he thinks. I’d pull away from it all if I could work out how.”

Flynn turned his face to Tom’s shoulder. After a moment in which his heart and chest ached so much that he couldn’t move, Tom closed both arms around him. He didn’t know what to say—knew anyway, from bitter experience, the point at which words failed. He kissed the top of Flynn’s head, pulled the blankets up tight round him, and wondered after a while if the telling of this story had worn the poor bastard back to sleep, he was so still and silent in his arms.

Then, suddenly, Flynn sat up. He put both hands to Tom’s shoulders and eased him back, just far enough to see him properly. To Tom’s astonishment, his face was alight with compassion. “You think I’m lost in this, don’t you?” he whispered, brushing a fingertip touch to Tom’s brow, his lips, the corners of his eyes. “You think I don’t see anything else. But I do. You’ve learned about my kind of pain the hard way. I can see…” Soft, searching kisses followed the touch. Tom shuddered, almost unable to bear them. They targeted every mark that grief had carved into him, and he had thought his own story safely buried far away, subsumed in the better, easier business of dealing with Flynn’s. He should have known, shouldn’t he, that such a man would not tolerate the one-sided world Tom had built to contain himself. “I can see your cairn,” Flynn said, nodding towards the mound of glimmering quartz stones on the turf a few yards away. “Who’s it for?”

“David,” Tom told him, shocked into truth. “David Reay. He was my assistant medical officer in Helmand. We did three tours together.”

“Your lover?”

“Once. He always wanted it, but I couldn’t face being gay, not in the army, not out there. Then I realised how stupid that was, and we had one night. He was so bloody happy. Next day he went out with a convoy, to help at the hospital in Lashkar Gar. They were ambushed. He never came back.”

Flynn reached for him. Tom thought it was only in comfort. Looking into Flynn’s eyes, he saw that was all he intended—the touch that would bridge the gap when words failed, a hand to his shoulder and the side of his face. Tom could hardly bear the kindness of it. The understanding, the compassion—too much, and suddenly, when Flynn’s grip tightened, not what he wanted anymore. He gasped. Need seared through him, everything he’d put on hold last night and during the chained-up years just gone. “Flynn…”

“What is it?”

No need to explain. Tom saw the same change transfiguring him. Grief flashing off into hunger, like oil on water catching fire. If they’d had the chance—if life had bound them together, given them some years, was this how they would have solved all their pains? Their joys too, triumphs and disasters, all finding solace or celebration in bed, or out on the flower-starred turf? “That second crack you wanted,” he rasped, and waited until Flynn’s attention was on him so keenly he felt it like a burn. “For God’s sake grab it now.”

They crashed down from the rock onto the grass. Flynn’s blanket tore loose from his shoulders and Tom caught him, grunting in winded pleasure as his weight impacted, warm and sweet and naked as the day. “Flynn. You’ll catch your death.”

“Don’t care. Just love me. Have me. Do it.”

Tom groaned. He snatched the kiss Flynn was fiercely offering and struggled on top, mindful of his lover’s bruises, but only just. Flynn resisted briefly then rolled luxuriantly under, stretching out in an ecstasy of surrender. Joyfully he grabbed Tom’s pyjama bottoms, dragged them down around his hips and opened his thighs for him. “Come on! Come here!”

Tom stared down in a mix of lust and concern at the tanned, bare flesh on the wet turf. “Oh, I don’t want to hurt you.”

“Damn you. Get on with it.”

Shuddering, Tom obeyed. Spine dissolving in heat, he let his rigid cock shove hard between Flynn’s thighs. Once and once only, he told himself. A first time and a last with this perfect and forbidden man. He thought of David, whose funeral he had not attended, whose name had never passed his lips in three dry-mouthed years, and he reached for Flynn, a gift given him for the night. They were into extra time now, the sun piercing clouds, kissing his bare back with the first real heat of summer—injury time, Tom thought, thrusting hard, taking his weight on his arms to spare those bruises, which looked to him like fist marks, not wave tumble or harness. He wouldn’t question Flynn’s devotion—or thraldom—to Robert Tremaine. He would let him go.

Flynn’s hands closed round his backside. His lovely face contorted to a mask lovelier still, the beginnings of orgasm, calling up Tom’s own like thunder from the place where he had boxed it up the night before. He noticed irrelevantly that the thyme was flowering, dust-pink blossoms giving off an aromatic tang under the crush of their bodies. Milkwort too, tiny flashes of heaven-blue. Soon all the headlands would be starred with them.

He groaned and stiffened, and Flynn in his extremity surged up beneath him, knocking him down onto his back. Tom yelled inarticulately, heaving up against his weight, feeling his own strength as almost inhuman, this close to the peak. Flynn snarled his name, face contorting, and slammed him back down so hard that the turf abraded skin off him. His shaft was trapped and starting to erupt against Tom’s belly. Clenching his fingers in the short hair at his nape, Tom let go and climaxed incandescently, morning sunlight tearing into bloodstained silver fragments in his eyes.

They rolled and tangled halfway to the bloody cliff’s edge before they had wrung the coming out of one another. Tom was glad, folding bonelessly down into his lover’s arms, that their nearest land-based observer would have to have been in New York.