Page 46 of Once a Gentleman
That hit Andrew like a slap to the face. “Your trunk?” he repeated, the words sounding absurd, meaningless. “Yourtrunk?”
Utterly nonplussed, he hardly resisted as Kit began sliding out from under him, Andrew’s cock sliding free too as he did. “You are rather heavy,” Kit said, not meeting his eyes, still trying to extricate himself, though Andrew made something of a large obstacle between his legs. “If you wouldn’t mind—”
“No,” Andrew protested, though he lifted his weight, carefully withdrawing the rest of the way, because bewildered and terrified and desperate or not, a gentleman didn’t remain inside his lover when the other fellow wished him gone. “No, you can’t—Kit, your trunk? You cannot possibly be still thinking of going. It is out of the question!”
Kit managed to maneuver himself off the edge of the bed, evading Andrew’s gaze the while. “Of course I shall go,” he said, with a stubborn lift of the chin—though his voice shook badly. “If you will excuse me to wash and dress. Though you must wash and dress too, I hadn’t thought.”
And he stopped, standing partway between the bed and his open trunk, half turned away, and laid a hand over his brow and eyes as if his head ached. His hand shook too.
In the watery sunlight flowing through the window, Kit looked impossibly beautiful, otherworldly, even, with his flawless skin glowing pink and alabaster, his rumpled curls hanging about his face, the long flowing curves and angles of his back and his buttocks and his legs.
Impossibly beautiful, and impossibly young, and weary, and vulnerable.
The thought of Kit leaving him, now that they’d lain together, now that Andrew knew why he would rather die than lose him—unthinkable. But it was equally unthinkable that Kit should go alone. That he should be cast adrift on the bosom of a cruel, uncaring world that would think nothing of using and abusing and wasting that beauty, of allowing Kit to sink beneath the waves.
And what in the bloody hell had he done wrong, anyway, to make Kit still want to leave him? He thought back frantically over everything that had happened in the past hour, trying not to linger too much on his favorite moments lest he rouse again, and could think of nothing he had done to deserve this coldness.
They’d been quarrelling, of course, but had that not been resolved when they came together as lovers, for God’s sake?
Andrew scrambled off the bed. “You must not, and you shall not go,” he said, approaching Kit near enough to touch. He reached out, but drew his hand back and clenched it at his side. He knew all too well how skittish Kit could be. “How could you even consider leaving after—”
“How could I not?” Kit demanded, looking up sharply at last. “Nothing has changed, Tur—”
“Andrew,” he gritted out, at the limit of his patience, and yanked Kit into his arms, bending his head back and kissing the argument from his swollen lips. He lifted his head. “For the last time, Andrew, and you’re not bloody well going anywhere.”
“Nothing has changed between us!” Kit’s eyes glittered—wet with unshed tears, perhaps, and Andrew felt like a monster. “You must see that now, more than ever, I—I must leave.”
“Both of those statements are utterly false, and they contradict one another besides. Kit, love—”
“Don’t call me that!”
Cold apprehension began to well up, churning in Andrew’s gut and making it difficult for him to think clearly. He had to do something, say something—and the right thing, that much was clear—but Kit seemed to be slipping through his fingers, and he had no idea what to do.
Kit tried to pull away, but Andrew only tightened his arms, spreading his hands over the smooth skin of Kit’s back, pressing against him from the front.
“Why shouldn’t I call you that, when I love you!”
Kit went rigid, staring up at Andrew with his eyes as round as saucers.
“What did you say?” he choked out.
Oh, God, whathadhe said? Apprehension exploded into panic. He had never in his life spoken those words to anyone, not even his mother, and now that he had felt the weight of them on his tongue and heard them leave his lips, he understood how momentous it really was to declare himself so.
And he had no experience at all in such an affair, but he did know that a disbelieving, startled demand for clarification was not at all what one hoped for when declaring oneself.
Something like happiness, or at least gratification, would be more the thing.
And while he stood there frozen, his mouth hanging open and his mind reeling, Kit was waiting—waiting for him to explain himself. Waiting without any sign of either happinessorgratification.
“I love you,” he said again. Kit only stared, his expression morphing into one more closely resembling horror. Andrew thought he might be sick. “I—Kit, I am entirely yours. I adore you. And perhaps you don’t love me, but if you will only—”
“No!” Kit tore himself from Andrew’s hold and stumbled back, face gone sheet white. Yes, that was clearly horror, and perhaps disgust to boot. “No, you don’t bloody well love me, and of course I don’t love you, and this is nonsense, utterly absurd, I—I cannot credit that even you would sink so low as this!”
Kit reached down into his trunk, pulling out a pair of smalls, and began to yank them onto his legs with jerky motions.
Sink as low as…even he? Had Andrew become Kit’s standard for low character? “What?” Andrew demanded, his panic transmuted in an instant into fury, and Kit jumped, fumbling the strings. “What do you—nonsense? I don’t love you? How on earth do you pretend to know my own feelings better than I do? And sink—what the devil are you talking about?” Andrew shouted.
Kit straightened and looked him in the eyes, his own glittering with anger, their green gone some unnamable, poisonous shade. “I am talking about you, and your, your endless parade of lovers and whores, and the fact that you would think to induce me to remain in this house by—do you tell every man who spreads his legs for you that you love him, after, to keep him sweet?”
