Blood, Dirt, And Sucked Sugar-Stick

For all his searching he sees little of Tom in this man’s face; all his striving over the smallest signs of kinship has turned up only fragments, the way he turns his head or the color of his hair. That dissimilarity is a relief he can hardly make into words. What had he carried in his mind on that mad search, what face had he held in his mind’s eye? Officer’s stripes, and Tom’s merry eyes peering out from another man’s face, his stout good humor settling in the bow of another man’s mouth. It had been a tremendous relief to find that no, this is not another Tom, it is another man entirely.

“He told me your mother keeps an orchard,” Schofield says.

“Did he?”

“We passed through one on the way to Écoust, a cherry orchard. The Germans knocked them all down when they retreated. That was someone’s livelihood, I expect. God knows what they’re doing now, if they’ve replanted them, if the trees have all grown back wild. He told me all the different kinds of cherry-tree—”

And he trails off, unsure. His cigarette is in his hand, untouched. Blake’s rooms are narrow and airless, cold as the tomb even on a late summer’s night; somewhere it must be raining. Once this place must have been a sitting-room, or an old man’s haunt to smoke his cigars and read his books at the great desk with its chipped leather top. Now the place is as worn and scrubbed as a hospital ward.

“I’d like to go there if you’d have me. I’d like to see the trees. I’d like to meet his mother.”

“Our mother,” Joseph says.

“He thought a great deal of you,” Schofield says, but this is the wrong thing to say. Blake’s handsome face crumples.

“Oh, don’t start with that. I’m sick of it — I don’t need it from you.”

The elder Blake is already quite drunk, Schofield realizes; his complexion hadn’t made it obvious, but there is a redness beneath his eyes that is suggestive of an unfamiliar heat. The glass in his hands rattles against the tabletop. The older Blake is a well-made man, dark-haired and light-eyed with a strong man’s body; even in undress, he wears his uniform well, and he has the clear intense gaze of a martyr at the scaffold. If this man were Schofield’s commanding officer, he’d follow him to hell. Seeing him like this is a bitter shame.

Schofield takes a pull on his cigarette, rising from his rattan chair. “You should get some sleep.”

“That’s not in the cards for me, I’m afraid. Haven’t been able to get a wink since Tuesday last.” Blake gives a joyless laugh; across the desk, his back is turned, his expression unreadable. “Haven’t you heard? They’ve gone and made me a captain. Can’t bloody see why.”

Schofield hasn’t asked him how he made his promotion to begin with — even Tom hadn’t known, though he burned with pride for it. That must be why Blake sent for him — only he didn’t make it to Blake’s door quick enough.

“Where are they sending you?”

“I’ll be fucked if I know.”

Blake goes to take up the glass decanter — he handles it like a precious thing, like a family heirloom, and Schofield is struck again how unlike the commissioned officers he is, how he is conscientious as only a working man’s son can be. Once this war is over he will take his stripes and go home again to a mother and a father, to Myrtle and her puppies — they should be full-grown dogs now, steady on their legs. The elder Blake does not wear a wedding ring. He has beautiful hands, broad and strong hands, and they linger unsteadily against the cut crystal.

“Think you’ve had enough?” Schofield asks quietly, crossing over behind the table to take him by the arm. Joseph pulls him closer, making a fist in his sleeve; Schofield braces for a blow and studies his eyes for something like a resemblance.

But the elder Blake isn’t drawn up to strike him; there are tears in his eyes, the bitter blear of a man who is beyond help, and Schofield wishes he would turn his face away. Blake is studying his mouth.

“Christ,” Joseph says, “you look half-dead already. I can’t stand to look at you, with a face like that.”

“Why did you ask for me? We’re alone here, aren’t we?”

Blake laughs. “That we are.”

Schofield lowers his voice. “You miss him too, don’t you?”

This is the peak of wildness, the cutting edge of the animal liberty that has seized him since Ecoust and after — he feels like a man who might do anything, now that he has survived, if it only means not going home again just yet.

The elder Blake is gripping him so tightly that it hurts. Some essential barrier has broken, some tether is snapped, and everything that is forbidden has begun to pour out of him — all the grief rushes forth in a torrent, fit to choke him, and Schofield’s recognition of that urgent pressure is reflexive even as it stops the elder Blake’s throat.

“What am I going to tell my mother? What am I going to say, coming home a captain, when I couldn’t,” Blake says, faltering, “I couldn’t—”

—and Schofield doesn’t have to ask him what it is he could not do.

“You couldn’t have done more than you did.”

“You were there with him when he died. You were there. I wasn’t looking out for him. I promised our mother we’d come back to her in one piece, and now Tommy’s dead, and I’m no man at all.”

“I turned my back on him,” Schofield says. “I went to bring water for a German and turned my back and it got him killed. I was a bloody fool.”

Blake shuts his eyes, shaking his head as if he can cast away the image from his mind.

“He would never have joined up if he weren’t following after me.”

“Of course he would have. He did his duty. He would have done it without you. He was a good man, your brother.”

He’d held Tom in his arms, he’d felt the blood ebb out of him, he’d felt his body go cold, and he’d prayed — why hadn’t he kissed him, like a brother would, like a mother? Why hadn’t he given Mrs. Blake more of her dying son to keep than rings and tags? It seems like a shame, to have nothing more to give.

Blake’s bright eyes are glittering with tears; his face is savage, and the sudden flare of fierceness is enough to send Schofield backing up into the desk’s hard edge. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“He was my friend.”

Blake crushes his mouth in a kiss, and Schofield can only reciprocate, opening against him with brittle readiness. Joseph Blake has a day’s worth or so of new beard on his cheeks and the rasp of whiskers is painful-sweet against Schofield’s bottom lip. He catches and nips at his mouth as if trying to press the last comfort from him — Schofield doesn’t know what to do with his hands, so they flutter against the elder Blake’s broad chest, crushed between their bodies as he staggers for his balance.

He should turn and run, he should leave this place. He should never have come at all, never to remind a man like this of what he’d lost. Does Joseph Blake look at him and seek signs of Tom,

“I should go—”

“Don’t leave me here,” Blake says.

Joseph presses him to his mouth again, kissing him roughly until the stubble has him smarting. The smell of salt is fresh around him, the smell of tears — his cheeks are burning against Schofield’s mouth, and his erection is like an iron bar.

He’s an officer — how long since he’s known what it’s like to be held by another man, to share a blanket or to turn the pages of another man’s book? Men need one another. Schofield brings his hand to Blake’s cheek, levering him off to the side long enough to catch a breath and make his consideration of the matter. His own face is hot.

“Can I go down on you?” His hands go only so far as Blake’s buttons, no further. That is one way for two men to help one another — cheaper than strange women and without the dread of disease. He has done it before, and the regret only comes afterward.

“No,” Blake says. “I want you to fuck me.”

This is all right. Schofield traces Blake’s bottom lip; he has a wide, sweet, unsmiling mouth.

“Show me what to do, then.”

The elder Blake takes his fingers into his mouth, and the gesture is hot and wet and lewd — his tongue rasps against the callused lengths of Schofield’s fingers, and when he withdraws them he makes a rough sound like a caught breath. His lips have begun to flush red — Schofield’s mouth is burning, and the flush of blood in his face makes him feel like a schoolboy again, fairly ashamed of how fiercely he wants what he wants. More than anything, he wants this to happen properly— he wants to see this man put to rights again, he wants to see what a man he must have been in fairer days before the war. He wants to see him beneath a blossoming cherry-tree.

Joseph situates himself on his back with his drawers down past his knees and the broad white muscle of his thighs pressed back — Schofield thrusts into him with his fingers and feels him clutch and whimper, jostling back into the tabletop detritus and sending pencil-ends tumbling to the carpet. His prick is rosy-red and sweetly hard, curving back against his belly now and bigger than it had felt through the tented folds of his uniform.

He could work him like this, pressing into him with his fingers like men do with women; a pearl bead of jism is already forming at the tip of his prick, swelling wetly, and when Schofield lowers his head to mouth it away Blake gives a deep raw groan that seems to radiate from the very bones of him. The taste of him is deeply salty, like wet washing, and impossible to forget. He could fuck him with his fingers and make him come that way; but that isn’t the promise he’s made, that isn’t enough. Schofield chafes at his prick, bringing it up to standing; Blake draws him in by both elbows, fumbling for him.

“I want you to make me feel it, do you understand? I want to feel it, I want it to hurt."

Blake spreads his knees apart; the spit-slick heat of his arsehole is a welcome, and the soft track of hair beneath his fingers marks the way like an arrow. As Schofield slips himself inside, he can feel the tug of resisting flesh. Blake sucks a breath between his teeth — the passage of him is exquisitely tight, all flinching muscle, and the pleasure of the first few hesitant presses is tempered by resistance. He is frightened; Schofield can feel it, vibrating in him alongside his cutting grief.

“You’re all right,” Schofield says, rubbing at his great broad shoulder like a man gentling down an animal. “Breathe.”

“I know how to breathe,” Blake says sharply. “So do it.”

What can Schofield do but what he is ordered? There is nothing else for the two of them any more but to come together, and as the conjunction grows slickly easier the hard lines of their bodies cleave together — his mouth to Blake’s throat, Blake’s bruising-tight fingers digging into the soft part of his upper arm. Their bodies come together with the percussion of skin against skin — Schofield’s breath comes sharp and shallow, and his thrusts are rough and jolting to match Blake’s merciless grip, the press of his arse and his arched back, the way he turns his head to grimace into his shoulder.

Whatever will drive the misery from him, he will do it. Fucking him hard and rough, feeling him struggling not to cry out — Blake presses the back of his fist to his mouth, almost convulsively, and sucks in a sharp breath as if something has caught within him, some inner stronghold has been breached. How in God’s name can two men do this to one another, and not come through it changed?

Joseph Blake carries an immense strength in his body, a bitter anguished animal strength. The muscles of his legs clamp against him as he presses in, and his hands make fists in Schofield’s shirt. Soon he is weeping again, tears without a sound, great gulps of breath without a whimper. Schofield grips his thighs to bring him in closer and quickens his pace. Will has never been overly enamored of his own prick before, but driving deep to the hilt in this man’s body it seems fit to split him apart, enough to hammer the grief from him.

Blake gives a low groan, as if he’s hit the mark, and that is enough, piercing like a spur to the heart of him. Schofield withdraws but not quickly enough; he finishes against the hot crease of Blake’s thighs, pouring out all his desire in a blind and helpless shot.

The salt taste of sex is everywhere, and the smell of Blake in his mouth and nose and his own eyes; the terrible intimacy that clutches at his heart could be hate, as easily as love. When Blake comes it’s with a muffled cry; he spunks against his belly in a hot hard jet and spoils his shirt.

Schofield is staggered by it, by the fierceness of his own release and how it leaves him all bloodless and nerveless. Cast adrift against Blake’s body, he could be a dead man himself.

“Thank you for that,” Blake says. There is a soft burr of brokenness in his voice, gentler now.

Schofield can only breathe, wordless. The elder Blake is transformed, as if all the sadness has been wrung out of him — his face is flushed, and his mouth is rubbed red. He looks like a wild man, as though he might do anything.

The two of them slump together, worn-out and reeling, and sort themselves out with guilty slowness. It is Blake who steadies him now as he cleans up with a spit-dampened handkerchief, feeling absurd. He’ll have a wash later if he gets the chance. Somewhere there must be a basin and a washrag — officers are owed these things, even when there are no servants to be spared them.

“Take me to bed, then,” Schofield says. “Where do you sleep in this place?”

“It’s me you want to put to bed,” Blake says, fumbling with his shirttails and dabbing at his eyes without shame. He is not so far gone that he doesn’t grasp that he is being bundled off. Schofield does up his braces for him like a nursemaid, like a servant, with a reverence.

“That’s right.”

“Well then. One good turn deserves another, I think.”

The elder Blake can walk without staggering, but he permits Schofield to take him by the arm and to bear his weight. Blake’s hand is on the small of his back.