the very milk and sperm of kindness

He has a small cock, pretty and red – redder still for being ground beneath Hickey’s heel. He can feel the uneven terrain of both cock and balls through the thin shoe-leather, and as he shifts his weight the captain groans. Almost blindly Crozier claws at the calf of his leg, blind with desire, and Hickey presses harder. His erection yields a little, bent back elastically, but there’s a curious springy firmness about his fat full stones that raises the question of whether they’d split like grapes with more force. For now they’re only playing, playing at hurting one another. Playing at a reversal of roles, a vulgar little carnivale of their own.

“Mr. Crozier,” he says chidingly, but the captain is no less a captain for being humbled like this – he could unman him, not in a spirit of fun, and let him bleed to death. Flat on his back and running to fat in his respectable middle age, Crozier wheezes red-faced and gets another lovely kick in the bags.

That prick, red and plump with veins like a little piece of gristle – the tender foreskin slips and slides over the wet pink head, as Hickey points his toe, and a bead of perfect white jism spills out against the boards. Rough stroking, hot blood, and a steady pressure, not the queerest way to bring a man off but not the fastest, either. But the captain has requested this in most explicit terms, just as the captain requests his presence on the pretense of some task or other too good for the hands of a steward – though not, it seems, for the narrow neat foot of a caulker’s mate.

He finds himself wondering, as he exhausts the ways he knows to crush flesh and for variety’s sake release it again, whether it is the pain that pleases or only the presence of the foot. If a sharp quick jolt of the knee would do it, or a bruising hand, or a knotted rope. Crozier is splayed out on the floor like a broken doll and he offers no explanations for himself. Only a sob, or a sigh, or a curse. His chest rises and falls. Hickey wants to caress the slope of his naked stomach, the hairy expanse between his nipples, perhaps with the back of a hand.

If it were the pain, he could throw him over the narrow bed and show him what men do to exhaust one another; he could beat him with fists. If it were the coarseness of the gesture he could show him a thing or two to shock him. The foot, however, he cannot account for. A high arch, a narrow span, a pretty ankle. Hickey can only prop up his balance against the headboard like a man readying to pull a tooth, and tread upon that wet springy flesh until it chooses to spring back up and spill letchwater on the captain’s hairy thigh in great white gouts, white against red like a maiden’s cheek.

If the two of them were only men, they wouldn’t leave it at that – Hickey would kiss away the mess, briny and male as ocean-water, and lay across his lap, and stroke his tortured member like a whipped puppy. But he is the captain of Crozier’s joys, now, and captains do not condescend to coax and fondle with their inferiors. He’ll be the one to wipe away the mess when all this play is over and done – on his knees again, with a rag in his hand, and Crozier buttoned up in wool and gilt-brass looking down.