Page 43 of A Gentleman Never Keeps Score
“Blast,” Hartley said. “I don’t have any oil.” It had been a while and he wasn’t shoving any cocks up his arse without oil. As much as he trusted Sadie and Alf, he wasn’t going to ask for cooking oil to be sent to his library.
“I have—” Sam took his coat off the floor where he had dropped it and retrieved a small jar from the inside pocket. Hartley recognized it as the salve he had used at the inn. “It worked when you used it on me, so I thought...” His dark skin flushed to a deeper color.
“Thank you,” Hartley said, taking the jar. He made fast work of his cravat, tugged off his trousers, pulled the shirt over his head, and then he was bare. Sam’s eyes were wide, his fingers pressed hard into the brocade of the armchair, and he looked at Hartley as if he were trying to memorize the sight. Hartley stood beside the matching chair, a few feet away. He had given this some little thought while stripping. If Sam wanted to watch, Hartley was going to put on a show. But he wasn’t going to make himself ridiculous. Not that there was a way to bugger oneself with dignity—dignity was quite a moot point now that he was standing naked on his hearthrug. But he wasn’t bending over the sofa and going at himself. If he was going to do this, he was going to do it beautifully, which probably meant he was compounding perversions with vanity, but so be it.
He sat, slinging one leg over the arm of his chair and tucking his other foot up beside him. He was totally on display, and when he saw Sam shift in his seat, he knew he had achieved precisely the reaction he sought. His own prick started to harden at the idea of what he might look like, what it must feel like for Sam to be able to look but not touch. He took the glass prick and teased it down his length, and heard Sam mutter an oath. Good. He needed to know that Sam liked what he saw. He spread his legs a bit further and brought the cock to the sensitive skin beneath his bollocks. It was cold, and very hard, and altogether nothing like a real cock, which was good because Hartley would have shied at a real cock. This was different, and Sam didn’t want anything that Hartley hadn’t freely offered.
When he scooped out some salve, spreading some on the cold glass and some on his skin, Sam loosened his neckcloth. Hartley pushed inside himself with the tip of one finger and flinched a little at the sensation. It had been a very long time since he had touched himself this way, and even longer since anyone else had. He managed another finger, but this angle was terrible, so he lined the glass cock up with his entrance.
“Hartley,” Sam breathed. He was fully hard, Hartley could tell, but he still hadn’t moved his hands from the arms of the chair. “You’re beautiful.” He said it as if he were watching Hartley do something wonderful. As if there was nothing profane about this. Maybe there wasn’t.
When he got the tip of the cock inside him, he had a moment of panic, but he made his body relax and accept the intrusion, and it slid in. “Oh God.” He had been exaggerating when he called it enormous; in truth it was no larger than the average prick, but it felt quite sufficiently gigantic at the moment. It always felt like too much, he recalled, and that was part of what he liked about this act, the sense of being stretched and filled, the bite of pain that came along with the pleasure. This was what he had wanted. He twisted the cock to search out the spot that would make him feel like he was about to reach his crisis, and when he found it he moaned. Sam let out a choked sound and gripped the arms of his chair so tightly the muscles bulged beneath the thin cloth of his shirt. That was when Hartley stopped putting on a show and started... something else.
“Are you imagining that it’s you inside me?” he asked, his voice thready and low.
Sam cleared his throat. “No. This is you. You’re doing this. And I’m watching the most gorgeously filthy thing I’ve seen in my life.” He ran a finger beneath his collar. “Because you’re letting me.”
Oh God, why did he have to be so good? It would be easier if he didn’t always know what to say. Then Hartley might have some defenses left. As it was, his heart was as bare as his body, and it was too late to go back.
“I’m imagining it’s you,” he whispered, because at that moment it was true. He was imagining what it would be like to have Sam inside him, to share this pleasure equally. He imagined what it would be like to be able to have that. Not only the touching, but all of it—knowing how to care about a person, and how to let a person care about oneself. He tried to stroke himself, but his hands were shaking and he couldn’t get it right. “Would you—” He swallowed, not able to form the words. “Help me, Sam.”
Sam was on his feet at once, only pausing when he reached Hartley’s chair. “You mean it?” Hartley was naked, open, doing unspeakable things to himself with a glass prick and still Sam didn’t touch him without asking.
“Please,” he said, his mouth dry. He reached for Sam’s trousers, but Sam batted his hand away and got to his knees. Hartley nodded, because he didn’t have any more words, and Sam bent his head. The feel of Sam’s mouth on him, the feel of—oh God—that thing he was twisting inside Hartley’s body, it was so much, and it was so good, that Hartley let his pleasure crest. He held Sam’s head, calling out his name while spilling into his mouth.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to—” Hartley was babbling.
“Shh.” Sam wiped his mouth against the back of his hand, then carefully removed the glass prick and put it aside.
“Let me touch you?” Hartley asked.
“Anything you want.” There was something in Sam’s face that made Hartley’s stomach do a flip. “Always.”
Hartley dropped to the floor beside him, tore open his trousers, and had his hands wrapped around him, hard and warm and all Sam. Sam hissed and swore and lay back to let Hartley have his way. Hartley licked and touched and in general gave him every bit of attention that a man could bestow on another man with a willing mouth and a pair of slick hands, because that was the least he could do.
“We have to eat downstairs,” Hartley said after they had gotten cleaned up. “In the housekeeper’s room. Otherwise Sadie and Alf have to go to a lot of trouble.”
Sam imagined that servants generally went to a good deal of trouble, because that was the point of servants, but didn’t question why Hartley seemed averse to this. Indeed, Sam would have eaten in a ditch, or on the roof, or just about anywhere Hartley required, and was baffled that Hartley didn’t seem to know this.
So they went downstairs to the housekeeper’s room and ate roast partridges and drank warm cider. It was perhaps the strangest company Sam had broken bread amongst: a disgraced gentleman, his cockney manservant, an exceedingly pregnant and unmarried cook, and himself, a black pugilist turned barman. Conversation oughtn’t to have come easily but somehow it did.
When Sam put on his coat and reached for his hat, the servants made themselves scarce, which more or less confirmed that they knew what Sam and Hartley had been about upstairs.
“Come to the Bell tomorrow,” Sam whispered, not sure why he was being quiet, except that they were standing so near to one another that a normal speaking voice would be too loud. They were still in the kitchen, near the back door that Sam would soon leave through, but neither of them were making any move to actually open the door.
“I’m not sure I can ever show my face there again, after that errand Kate ran for you.” But he was smiling, if a little shyly.
“Nah, in Kate’s mind that’s the sort of thing every gentleman ought to have at his bedside.”
Hartley snorted and looked up at Sam. Sam wondered why until now he hadn’t fully appreciated their height difference. Maybe it was because they seldom stood this close. If they stood any closer, Hartley’s head might tuck neatly beneath Sam’s chin. Sam found that he wanted very much to find out whether it would.
“Hartley?” Sam asked when they had been standing there for several minutes saying nothing of importance.
“Yes, Sam?”
“Thanks for tonight.”
Hartley’s pale eyes sparkled in the dim light. “I ought to thank you. For my present.” He stood on his toes and kissed Sam’s cheek. “I’ll thank you for not making jokes about relevant body parts,” he murmured.
