black beetles in amber

He couldn’t have been so green as this at Jay’s age — couldn’t have been. At sixteen he hadn’t been a little Scottish lord with soft hands and big curious eyes, come halfway around the world chasing after a girl like it were some adventure story in the newspapers and not a matter of life and death — how many times could he have gotten himself killed, if not for Silas coming after him to save his hide? Silas doesn’t think, where’d I be without the kid, because he’d be dead in the ground. Jay’s clever

The next town they reach is full of heavily armed young men — the regulars are all there too, serious women and nervous old men, but the young men have the run of it clearly enough and everyone else is in a hurry to keep out of their way. Silas asks a pair of them for directions to the nearest lodging-house and they look at him with the snot-nosed pride of a couple of kids who’ve got themselves a gang.

Jay has left behind his three-piece suit for a sack coat and a pair of canvas trousers, but he still looks every inch the little prince. The loitering young men give him a look midway suspicion and envy as he passes them by on his way to see to their horses, but there’s still the gun worn on his hip to let them know he’s not some lawyer’s son.

Silas is aching for a sit-down and a place to sleep that isn’t out under the stars. Back in the last town’s post office, he’d promised Jay a bed of his own, and now it’s time to make good. He’s a little heartsick about it, in truth — Jay’s been a faithful partner to bed down beside for nearly a year now, long enough that he’s watched him grow into the habits the two of them now share, and the closeness of his narrow body is a comfort. Waking up with Jay beside him he doesn’t have to worry about where he’s gotten to or who’ll find him next — whoever stumbles into their way will have to reckon with the both of them.

This is how it’ll go: he’ll lay his blanket down beside Jay’s bed and keep watch from there. The boy will have to step over him in the night, sure, but it’ll keep him from getting into too much trouble.

This place must have been a class joint once upon a time — carpets and gilt lamp fittings, a marble slab for a bartop. Now there isn’t a single customer in it who isn’t under thirty or packing iron. The gentlemanly thing to do would be to ask the pair of them to leave their guns at the door, but the owner of the place must be too scared to enforce it and risk his clientele turning to mutiny. It looks like the kind of place for old men to sit and smoke, like the mess of young toughs is an aberration on it. They’ve had to roll up the carpets to keep the mud off them. Christ.

Silas whistles for the owner of the place, a nervous-looking fellow whose hat perches uneasily atop an incredible mass of hair.

“We’ll be needing a room for the night,” Silas says, and then as if Jay’s pretty manners have rubbed off on him, Silas thinks to add, “If you’ll have us. Please.”

“Why, sure, if you don’t mind sharing with your boy.” (Silas frowns, thinking of his promise, but the man quails in the face of it.) “—Or of course, I can have my girl make up a pallet for him,” the proprietor adds with pitiful haste. “You’re in luck, you see, if you came in an hour later you’d be bedding down with the horses.”

Not the worst thing in the world. “Lot of people in here tonight.”

“As you might guess, sir, this ain’t our usual crowd. But you’re from out of town, I expect.”

“Some occasion?

“You could say that.” The man lowers his voice confidentially. “You’ll find your rooms upstairs, cards downstairs, ladies in the parlor. I only ask that you be polite.”

Silas tries a smile, but it doesn’t seem reassuring under the circumstances. “We’ll be sure to mind our manners.”

*

This way money changes hands — they’re cash-rich right now after some business in Wyoming Territory. The two of them take their supper at a table in the corner — there’s not much to recommend it besides fresh bread and good salt but Jay lays his napkin out in his lap and Silas sits with his back to the wall, watching.

The barroom’s been taken over by a bunch of ragged dandified boys, looking like someone’s stable of hired hands turned loose or a convention of the West’s finest-dressed killers. They’ve dragged an old table in and gotten a card game going, someone’s brought around a couple of girls — some of them done up to do business in satin and ribbons, others in boots and waistcoats looking as pleased to be there as their fellows.

Silas watches Jay watching the girls — there’s more curiosity in his face than heartstruck lust at the sight of a woman’s legs in trousers, and good thing too. The girl Rose is behind them now, keeping house with her brave lover, and Jay hasn’t spoken a word of her since.

The young toughs appear to be of two distinct parties — and there are maybe twenty-five of them, filling the poor old establishment until the timbers creak. The two groups are reluctant to mix, and yet that reluctance has been conditionally overcome — here two fellows teach a third to play dice, two others share a pipe between them.

“What’s the occasion?”

The rawboned kid with the pipe in his mouth takes it out long enough to answer. “Haven’t you heard? There’s a truce signed between us fellows, now we’re friends again. O’Grady’s boys and the Red Gulch gang.”

“Friendship and brotherhood,” his counterpart says.

Jay’s eyes are enormous and thoughtful. Silas frowns. The names aren’t entirely unfamiliar from a season spent riding all over the damn territory picking off especially egregious horse thieves and sweeping up hundred-dollar rewards two at a time — but they’ve been at one another’s throats all summer. A truce is news.

Good fortune for some, bad luck for others. When crooks fall in together it’s all smiles. Most likely they’ll be shooting each other again before the sun is up. The most Silas can hope for is a couple of hours of sleep before then.

*

“Don’t let me keep you from the party.”

“It feels like I’m already there.” Jay flinches a little at the sound of a clatter the floorboards can’t drown out.

Their room must be directly above the impromptu dance floor and things are picking up— the muffled but distinct sound of boots on floorboards rattles the brass bedframe. There’s a bed and mattress, just as promised, a beaten-up chair and a mirror on the wall and a picture in a frame and even a washstand in the corner; he’s been assured of the use of a tin bath in the morning, and the pleasant thought of it is pillowing all the edges of his uneasiness. Let Jay have his customary wash-up, and Silas will soak the weariness from his bones like dropping into a pot of soup.

A place like this is paradise for a boy Jay’s age, if the rowdiness downstairs doesn’t end up burning the establishment down in the middle of the night. Silas takes off his hat. “Bed’s all yours, Jay.”

He’ll make do on the floor. What would a man do with a luxury like that, a bed of his own? Jay’s face is wonderfully open, full of unwarranted remorse. He’s getting older now, and he wants more; soon he’ll want things Silas can’t give him, and then they’ll be in trouble.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” the kid says.

“I promised you a bed, didn’t I?”

Jay flushes just a little. “I didn’t mean it had to be alone.”

“Have it your way, then.”

Silas washes his face at the basin, rubbing away the salt and grit of a long ride. Jay strips out of his trousers and folds them carefully before depositing them over the back of the chair; with the same methodical care, he unbuttons his waistcoat but leaves it hanging open as Silas’ eyes linger on the dexterity of his slim fingers.

Clever hands, hands with their own intelligence in them. He’s shown Jay all his best tricks with a pistol, and Jay takes a boyish delight in playing the showman. In one town they’d passed a flea-bitten company of actors had been putting on a show, and the kid had convinced Silas to stay long enough for them to catch a performance, Shakespeare’s The Tempest amended for the tastes of the locals and the limitations of the cast. Despite the ragged look of it all, the hobbled material and the bright costumes dropping spangles and tarnished braid, Jay’s face had shone. He almost lost him then — lost him to a theater troupe with a broken-down wagon and a couple of wigs. Jay could have been a performer in another life.

Twenty years ago the man called Payne had shown Silas how to put a bullet through a playing card, and how to draw a pistol quick without snagging on his own clothes. He’d been an actor too, like any great bullshit artist — he appreciated a cast of characters, and he’d loved a costume piece. But that was a long time ago, a time before Jay was even born, and Silas doesn’t want to think about it now.

All this time and Silas still hasn’t managed to impart to the boy the importance of traveling light — Jay empties out the contents of his pockets, laying his personals out in the orderly line of one who’s never had to fear theft. He must still be thinking of the downstairs crowd because he looks up from laying out his comb and his knife to ask Silas a question.

“Do you ever think about getting a couple more men together? It might make for lighter work.”

“A gang’s not all it’s cracked up to be.”

All the arguments, the hurt feelings, sharing the same four blankets a dozen ways — schisms and breakaways, miscommunications, splitting up, and then inevitably painfully getting the gang back together. The friction, the stares, the saddle-worn familiarity with one another that only makes it hurt worse when you’re selling each other out or shooting at each other or dropping dead. It’s better to have a partner.

Jay looks heartstricken somehow at that. “I know that, I only meant — if you’re ever lonesome.”

“I’m not lonesome. What about you, Cavendish? Do you ever think of turning back?”

“Never.”

“Your people worry about you?”

“Why would they? I came West seeking Rose Ross. It was my people who paid out for the price on her head. I’ll never go back. Anyway, I like it here. I like this.”

“You weren’t cut out for it when I met you, all that killing and dying.”

“I’d seen men die before I met you,” Jay says, with an obstinate jut of his jaw. His cheeks are still smooth as a girl’s, but he has a sharp intensity in his face like the cut of a diamond.

“Not of old age or sickness, I mean. Violent ends.”

“I saw my uncle’s head bashed open on a stone by Rose Ross’ people. I saw my father break his neck, thrown from his horse. Do you think people don’t die except in America?”

Silas knows all the ways that isn’t true, and all the flavors of privation and suffering a landowner’s son can’t know. “You’re not seeing my point.”

“If I couldn’t hack it, I’d be gone by now, wouldn’t I?”

“You don’t owe this life anything. Don’t you think I’d give it up if I could? Go and leave and settle down somewhere out east? You should do it while you still can.”

“I don’t want to go anywhere without you.”

“Well, that’s damn nice of you.” Silas sets down his pistol on the tabletop with a heavy satisfying sound and slips back into his boots. “I’m going to the bar.”

But his mood is just as troubled with a drink in his hand as it was before, downstairs with all that worn brass and tarnished grandeur, and he can’t stand the racket of it all. All that camaraderie must seem intriguing to a boy like Jay, to whom all things are of interest, but it detracts from the pleasure he’s gone and paid for.

One day Jay’s going to wake up and realize he doesn’t need him any longer. He doesn’t know it yet, but he will, and when that happens Silas will be grateful either of them has lived long enough to see it. They’d both better sleep and get it over with.

On his way back up there’s a tow-haired fellow with a red beard, blocking the stairs with his stretched-out legs. He’s maybe all of twenty-four and leaning on the wooden banister like he thinks he’s something impressive — when he fixes his eyes on Silas his eyes are a funny kind of blue, and he thinks of the dead man Payne again despite himself. The creepy little punk with his ivory-gripped pistols and pimp’s duds could be Payne’s son, to look at him, though Silas doubts it.

His manner is all bullshit bravado, and he is very fucking drunk.

“Come down and drink with us,”

“No thanks. I’ve got all the company I can handle.”

“You got a lady? She can come too.” The man’s smile is something ugly, and the posture of his body shifts to be even more obstructive. If Silas had a woman he wouldn’t let him near her. Probably wouldn’t let Jay near him, a man with a look in his eye like that.

Another burst of cheering from downstairs — out in the street men are firing off their guns and the sound makes Silas’ backbone stiffen. Silas shakes his head mutely.

“Or are you not celebrating?” The punk kid grins like a dog, self-satisfied at having caught him out in something. Christ, had he ever been so loathsome as this at that age? Not just belligerent but stupid, too.

“It’s none of my business what you do.”

There’s an uproar from the downstairs, a clatter of dice and a turning-over of furniture. The little red-bearded bastard gives a shout —of encouragement or contrariness, hard to tell — and that pistol in his hand squeezes off a careless shot into the painted wall, sending down a rain of ugly-smelling plaster.

A cry goes up from downstairs, and Silas barely has time to swallow down his annoyance before another bullet splinters the laths of the ceiling. Reflexively he throws himself back against the wall, grimacing and reaching for the shooting iron that isn’t there at his hip —

A door knocks open with a bang. Down the hall, Jay is standing there in his drawers and his socks, aiming his gun — two guns, one in each hand,

“Not another shot,” Jay says, and in his voice there’s real steel.

Only the little pimp’s precarious balance keeps him from firing off the next slug right in Jay’s face — Silas shifts himself between them, but his jaw tightens with the expectation of more struggle.

The fellow with the red beard makes a sort of choking sound like he’s swallowed his tongue or had the daylights surprised out of him by the very notion of a confrontation on the night of such a blessed event. Silas pushes him back against the banister with a hand.

Breathe in. Breathe out.

“Easy, Jay. Haven’t you ever been to a frontier wedding before?”

“What’s that?”

“Our friends are celebrating.”

“Oh.” Jay makes an awkward little gesture with the barrel of the gun in his left hand and lowers both.

The little pimp finds his tongue at last, jerking forward to snarl at Jay, or come to think of it, at both of them — “Who in hell do you think you are?”

Silas gives him another warning push with one big hand. “None of your business. No harm done. Go have a drink. And you — go back inside, Jay. Wait for me.”

*

The hotel room door has only the politest of locks on it and right about now, it seems regrettable they can’t just lock the boy upside for the night and be done with it.

“Sit down, Jay.” Silas pulls the chair out with a scrape of wood against wood, and the look on Jay’s face is pure hot humiliation.

“I will not.”

“First of all, that gun’s mine.” Silas takes the pistol from his hand like he’s taking it away from a child, opening the chamber and letting the bullets spill onto the tabletop. “I don’t need you pulling the trigger for me.”

“You’ve never complained before.”

“I haven’t brought you along this far only for you to bury you in some shit town that doesn’t even have a post office.”

“I wasn’t going to let him shoot me!”

“Ain’t nothing to do with letting him. And once you were done putting a bullet in our friend out there, what you were planning on doing for his thirty closest companions?”

“I wouldn’t have shot him, either. I thought you were in trouble.”

“Next time I’m in trouble, I’ll shout for you, all right? I’ve been doing this longer than you’ve been alive. I can handle myself.”

Jay’s shaking despite himself, he can see it in the tight trembling lines of his arms how he’s trying to hide it and not able to manage. He speaks like it’s paining him.

“Sometimes I can’t tell any more — since that day at the farmhouse I’ve just been waiting for someone to shoot you dead. I know I was foolish, but I’d rather be a fool than let that happen.”

Jay knows he’s said too much but then he’s never been very good at shutting up — his face flushes with embarrassment. But the kid’s right, and Selleck’s been waiting for it too. The past months have all had the shine of unreality on them, like they’ve gone and escaped their doom and now all the world is off-kilter by an inch or two. He’s felt it before in the moments after a close shave, but never like this.

“It’s all right, really. It’s sweet.”

“I’m not sweet,” Jay says, affronted. Standing in front of him in his wooly drawers and his bare feet, he couldn’t look like more of a kid.

“You’re plenty sweet, and you’ve got your mettle.” Silas takes him by the arm and feels his trembling go still.

Jay bites his lip and turns those strange eyes on him. “Did you mean what you said, about me turning back? Going East?”

“It might be better for you, some ways. But I can’t make you do anything, and I’m not going to try.”

What’s keeping him here without Rose Ross? What does any man come West for if not love nor lucre? They’ve made their tidy profit but it’s not for hope of winning the girl away from her own choice of man that keeps Jay from finding the nearest railway station and paying out for a ticket.

Jay squares his shoulders, like he’s about to do something conspicuously adult, and holds out his hand to be shaken.

“I owe you a great deal, Silas Selleck.”

Talk about owe, like that’s how grown-ups talk. Neither of them owes the other anything. They’re square. Funny how solemn he is when he wants to be — [trained up on poetry, full of wonder for the world around him however dirty and mean it may be.

Silas takes that hand and tugs him in close. Jay’s still slim as a girl, long-limbed as a colt, and his luminous face has only grown sharper with age. He’s still terribly pretty, even when the last year has taken some of the roundness out of him and left the faintest shadow of stubble beneath the skin — he has to shave in earnest now, and Silas has watched him do it, watch him go about the careful passes of the blade down the curve of his cheek, down the sharp ledge of his jaw. Always careful, just as Silas taught him, and before that the way Silas himself was taught. A fatherless boy has to learn these things somewhere.

He’s not going to think about Payne now. Payne never gave a damn what anyone wanted but himself, and looking at Jay now Silas has a damn good idea of what it is the kid wants. Silas kisses him — a glancing kiss at a funny angle but full on the mouth, feeling his soft lips come apart with silent surprise. Jay’s whole body angles into it with pleasure, like he’s all but lifting up off the ground.

“So now we’re even,” Silas says when they’ve broken apart. Jay gives a terrific sigh and pushes him back against the wall to add to the score.

This isn’t the first time Silas has found himself with his back to the wall. Jay crushes against him breathlessly, forcing his long leg between Silas’ thighs in an effort to get closer. His mouth is open, expressive and obscene, but he’s looking Silas in the face like he can’t believe what his own body is doing, as though he can’t believe what he wants.

Jay’s mouth is open to him and Silas takes it, hitching him close in a kiss that leaves him burning and breathless.

Why did it have to be someone who’s so God-damned earnest — skinny as a rail and clever as a snake, half-naive and half-knowing. It’s the knowing half that’s got Silas’ blood singing in his ears. From lovelorn virgin to half-wild bandit in less time than it takes to break in a pair of new boots — he’s a jackrabbit, a bird, some living thing quicker and cleverer than the ones who’d try to kill it.

Jay has at least an inch of height on Silas these days but he’s climbing him like a tree, grinding against his hip with all the ardor of a true lover — their hips knocking together like chipped flint, body against body and all grasping hands, hot breath, hot blood. Jay’s kisses stray from his lips to his chin, to the corner of his jaw, where he lingers as if scouting out the territory of Silas’ bare throat — Silas cups his cheek in his hand, still smooth as a lady’s, and brings him back to draw more kisses out of that curious and willing mouth.

Embracing him, he makes fists in the back of Jay’s shirt until his shirttails come untucked —sliding his hands down to grab the kid by the hips, he feels Jay gasp out against his mouth, and for a moment Silas thinks he’s gone and shot his load already. He could hardly blame him if he had.

With his back to the plaster, Silas can shut out the sounds of rowdiness downstairs and focus on Jay’s slim body against his. Drawing apart from the kiss, Jay makes a sound of hesitation, as if he’s just noticed that they’re both hard. His big hand with the scar on its back hollows around the shape of Silas’ cock there in his jeans.

Silas lets his gaze lower. “You know what to do about that, don’t you?”

Jay’s eyes are shining, and his cheeks are flushed, but not from shame — there’s a look of intention in his keen young face. “Will you let me?”

He doesn’t know a nice way to say it, because there isn’t one — what does an aristocrat like Jay know about what men do together? No one else has ever laid a hand on him. There are no words for this but raw words, and he wants to hear Jay Cavendish say them.

Silas draws a rasping breath. “Will I let you what?”

That intention turns to sly pleasure, and Jay’s face lights with the wicked joy of a first transgression; he licks his lips, and his voice is the slightest bit hoarse with desire. “Silas, will you let me suck your cock?”

“With pleasure, kid. Kneel down and I’ll show you.”

Jay gets down on his knees — it’s been a long time since Silas has set foot in a church, and he’d be surprised if the boy is more than passingly acquainted with Popery, but there’s something sweetly sacramental in the tall straightness of his back and the way he brings up his eyes to look at him from below.

Silas’ blood is pounding in his ears. His prick is hot in his hand, thumbed out of his drawers and as stiff as anything; Jay’s eyes widen, his lips parting in a silent oh, and he puts up a wondering hand to touch.

“What do I do now?”

“First you’ve got to open your mouth.” His roughened thumb presses against Jay’s lower lip — but Christ, why does he have to look like that, all clever and soft and ready to be ruined?

Jay’s full lips part, with the tip of his tongue worrying at his teeth. There’s no shame there any longer, only filthy curiosity. “Show me.”

Silas would feel worse about debauching him if the boy didn’t seem so damn eager for it — the lad is gazing up at him with intent, and it’s certain he’s ready to learn. It’s his first time, let him have a little patience.

Jay takes him in his hands like he’s marveling at the feeling of him — with a devilish kind of initiative he drops down and lets the pink pad of his tongue swipe over the head of Silas’ cock. Silas guides him against his lap, and Jay takes the head of him between his lips, pulling at him with the sweet wetness of his mouth. His teeth bump against the sensitive head of Silas’ cock, and his motion is unsteady — his head moves up and down with the sweetest simplicity, and his grip is tight on Silas’ thigh.

“Easy, now.” Silas isn’t used to being tender, to letting his voice drop low — he rubs his thumb against Jay’s smooth cheek.

If he’s always as diligent as this Jay should have no trouble making a woman very happy someday. His hair has grown long, and it falls across his forehead to shade his eyes — Silas strokes it back from his face as the kid works on pleasing him, letting the dark strands trail between his callused fingers.

The kid is hungry for this. Down there on the floor Jay’s hand is pressing down past the waistband of his drawers, working avidly in the way of all young men — Silas exhales a breath of laughter and lifts his boot to give Jay a teasing nudge, and Jay lifts his hips to grind against him.

“That’s good,” Silas says; he can feel Jay whimper and press close.

Silas shuts his eyes and lets himself sink into that feeling of wanting and being wanted — Jay’s warm soft mouth, eager and inexpert, and the pooling heat of pleasure down in the pit of him. The boy’s hesitation takes a moment or two to settle into a rhythm, but when the underside of his tongue grazes the sensitive place just beneath Silas’ cock-head Silas can’t keep himself from groaning. That seems to embolden him, slipping back and forth until tongue and mouth together make a hot sheath.

The two of them are joined tight together here, drawn close and flush — Jay has taken him in as far as he’s able, and Silas can feel the fluttering of the muscles in his cheeks, stretched full by the thickness of him.

Jay’s breath hitches as the spit wells up around Silas’ cock — his mouth is too-wet and his chin is shining. It’s been too long since Selleck has fucked anybody like this, since he’s had someone whose sweetly clumsy motions speak to enthusiasm and not desperation or haste to get the thing over with. They could stay here together like this but only a few tight moments of this and he’s about ready to shoot.

“I’m close now,” Silas says, warningly. His hand is on Jay’s cheek, blunt fingers tangling in that soft black hair, and Jay clasps it in his own hand. “Go slow for me.”

Silas is near the brink, with that coiling tightness in the pit of him that says it’s too far to turn back — his silence is threatening to crumble, with each light touch making his ragged breathing quicken. Those clear eyes are fixed on him now, impossibly wide and dark-lashed; the tip of his tongue begins to move with paralyzing deliberation. The boy’s always been a quick study.

“Christ, Jay,” Silas manages, but his voice is thick with desire — all the muscles of his thighs have gone tense, and there’s nothing left in him to withstand this. He can feel himself spilling in long pulses, he can feel Jay whimper and jerk against him, drinking him down. He can feel him cry out, feel the jerking of his hips, and then he knows for certain that Jay’s crossed that point of no return right alongside him.

Jay presses his face to the hollow of Silas’ hip, breathless like a shipwrecked man, and for a long moment, Silas holds him there. The floorboards creak beneath their weight; the wind whistles by outside, and everything else in the world seems to have gone hushed and dark. The fragrance of sex is in the room now, smudged over the smells of shucked clothes and wet leather.

Jay draws back, flushed and trembling, with his mouth raw and red from fucking. Silas runs his hand down that finely-drawn pale throat and feels him swallow, feels the pulse trembling there in the soft corner of his jaw. Wrecked like this he’s fearsomely beautiful, all dark and light, red and white. Jay rises up on shaky legs, stumbling against him in an ardently clumsy embrace. Silas holds him in his arms.

There are no good words for what has passed between them, nothing right and fitting for a boy as brave as this.

*

Jay strips off and settles in beside him on the bed, arranging his long limbs carefully against Silas’ back — he must like it more than being the one who’s held, and Silas quietly cherishes the weight of him, the way the crook of Jay’s arm fits against his side.

How long has it been since that divide between them began to shrink smaller and smaller, when was it that Jay first set down his bedroll not six inches from Silas’ and Silas had allowed it? The two of them ought to be doing this under the open sky. How long’s it been since someone’s held him? Too long. Not so long past, he’d been lashing Cavendish to a tree to keep the kid from barreling into a gunfight with nothing but his lion heart to defend him — and only by God’s good grace and Kotori’s good aim had they survived it. Rose Ross had broken the kid’s heart and saved his life all in one.

They’ve tramped all over the West together and there’s still more to be seen, more open country and more bad men to be laid low. Once upon a time, he might have counted himself among those bad men, and if not for Jay he still would. It’s good to have company on the road. It’s good to come together and to rest.

But Jay can never keep quiet for long.

The boy lifts his head up from Silas’ shoulder and asks, very seriously, “Is that always how it is? With another person in the mix, I mean.”

“So you know a thing or two, at least.” In the low light, Silas makes the universal gesture indicating self-abuse; Jay laughs and holds him tighter. That’s good, hearing him laugh, knowing he’s resting easy beside him and not frightened stiff by the way of it all. Silas turns his head away. “You’re brave as anything, Cavendish. It’s like that and better.”

Jay slithers in close to him, breast to breast and hip to hip with the reassuring pressure of a slim warm body. The sound of his breathing is comforting in itself, winded at first and then steadier — there in the narrow bed Silas can watch his face in the thin light, to study the soft delineation of his profile.

Jay’s resting face is so angelic and his manner so tenderly companionable that the evidence of his arousal comes as a shock— his prick curving back flushed and shining against his bare belly.

Silas huffs with surprise and not a little pleasure. “You’re ready for another go? Christ, to be young again.”

Jay’s face flushes. “I can’t do that to you.”

Silas glances downward. “You seem ready and able to me.”

“I mean to say, I’ve never—“

“Everyone starts somewhere, kid. You’d never done that either before tonight, had you?”

“This is different,” Jay says, with all the wounded dignity of youth. “We’re both men of the world.”

“It’s not as bad as people say. Come on and screw me already or I’ll never forgive you.”

Jay’s eyes go wide. “Really?”

“Of course not. A man’s entitled to his scruples.”

If Jay’s serious, of course, no harm done — only awkwardness, and they’ve gone through plenty of that together already. Jay hoists himself up on an elbow.

“No, I mean, is it good — is it better than people say?”

In the dark Silas can’t keep from grinning. “Give it a try and I’ll show you. Come on and fuck me.”

Silas rolls over onto his hip, the better to see Jay’s face — though with the curling black hair hanging over his forehead like a prize pony and the kerosene lamp’s yellow light, Jay is cast in soft focus, like ink in water. Like a drawing scrubbed-out.

He guides Jay to the split of him, tugging his drawers down past his thighs to admit him — the brush of Jay’s hand over the skin of his hip makes Silas’ cock throb, and at this rate, he’ll be hard again just in time for the kid to have already finished.

It’s no sin for a young man to be quick to fire his shot, just one of life’s small comedies, that small tender indignity at the age when a fellow desperately wants whatever scrap of dignity he can get his hands on.

“You see now, don’t you?” The muscles of his stomach rise and fall with that familiar ache. Silas lets the memories wash from him, and spreads his knees.

Propped up on his elbow, Jay bites his lip and nods. “Aye.”

Jay’s kisses are enough to break your heart, all sweet eagerness and no coyness or withholding — cupping the back of Silas’ neck and letting his other hand rove over his body, drawing his leg up tight to Jay’s side and driving his urgency higher.

The slick head of Jay’s cock is rubbing between Silas’ thighs there at the apex of him, and soon he’s more than just half-hard at the slick friction of it — he doesn’t have too much time to marvel over that because Jay is tracing his hand over the length of his hard-on, letting those long spidery fingers explore the heat and shape of it. Silas guides him into place.

“Grease makes it easier. Spit if you’re hard up.” Silas demonstrates, slicking up first his fingertips and then himself, but Jay’s reaction is all delight like he’s shown him one of the secrets of the universe. Soon it’s Jay’s fingers finding their way inside him, pressing at Silas’ eager hole with exploratory uncertainty.

“Like this?”

Throat tight, eyes practically crossed with impatience for the pleasure of it: “Harder than that’s fine. You won’t hurt me.”

Silas’ voice is grown rough with need. The boy’s a natural learner, and encouragement just makes him bolder. Jay presses him to the mattress with kisses and slips inside him.

It occurs to Silas at that moment that if he’d meant to go easy on the boy he could have let Jay rub one out between his thighs, but no. With his legs tangled around him, Silas has no trouble letting Jay in, letting his first tentative thrusts press through the band of tight strain that turns quickly to pleasure. Jay makes a faint sound against his mouth, like a cry of surprise, and Silas gives a ragged laugh, rocking back to better field the pressing of Jay’s hips.

Jay drives into him with quick eager strokes — Silas can feel the trembling of his muscles where Jay grips him, and he knows he’ll have some fingerprints to show for the effort later, knows he’ll have to return the favor. Some time he’ll show Jay how this feels, and the pleasure that’s in it for the one being fucked as well as the one fucking — all the pleasure that’s in it and not the pain he’s afraid of. It can be a fine thing, and Silas wants to make it fine for him.

Jay fucks him quick and hard, and when he calls his name, all breathless, Silas arches back to let him in. The boy’s a quick study in this too but it doesn’t take him more than a few strokes to finish off — he pours himself out between Silas’ thighs, and Selleck manages a second round after all, shortly after. Not bad for an old man.

*

It takes a while to catch his breath after all that — Jay flopped down beside him flat on his back, flushed and mortified, and both of them naked as the morning.

Silas rolls out of bed for just long enough to snag his tobacco pouch, but Jay’s spidery hand reaches out after him, like a silent request, and when Silas clambers back in between the sheets Jay catches him in a kiss that sends his skull knocking against the headboard.

“Was that all right?”

“Better’n all right.” The clarity that comes after climax has left him pleasantly unstrung rather than melancholy. Silas goes through the ritual of lighting one of the gritty little cigars he’s smoked for twenty years since coming out west.

There’s damn little romance in an outlaw hotel bed with another man’s sweat running down your body and lots else besides. The kid deserves something more than this for his second time, and Selleck is going to give it to him. They lie there together in the sweat of their exertions; Silas settles in on his elbows and lets Jay take a pull from his cigar.

“We could go north,” Jay says, exhaling smoke. “Find work there. Honest jobs. It’s supposed to be beautiful country.”

Silas watches him. “Us?”

“You never know.”