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The voice bored through the closed door, seeping into Dominic despite thick oak and Dominic’s best attempts at being conveniently deaf.
“You are the second, Richard. I need not tell you what that means, not again.”
The marquess was correct, inasmuch as Dominic had heard him expound upon the duties of the marquessate on more than one occasion. (He wondered, more often than he wished, how often Richard himself heard such a thing, if it were a daily occurrence.) The second son served the first, and the first served the crown, and so on, a chain of duty Dominic appreciated, even if part of him suspected that the marquess appreciated the chain of privileges more than that of duties. There was enough chaos in France without importing their terrifying leveling of so many roles into England, let alone Tarlton March, where Dominic had found such delightful frisson over the past month in just how much he and Richard could pursue their delight in one another, despite the fundamental difference between gentry and nobility.
Richard was nonetheless bound to be shaken, as he always was, and when he barreled out of the marquess’s study moments later, his blue eyes blazed with a fury that had grown colder over the years, more adult.
“It is a fine day,” Richard said after a moment, shoving a lock of hair out of his eyes. “Shall we?”
Shall we go to the pond? he meant, and Dominic agreed and followed him outside without issue. The blood at the back of his skull was already humming, with something even more liquid and alive than the great pond where they had spent so many innocent days. Shall we fuck?
They had begun their melting of souls in that innocence, which was the main reason Dominic did not fret much about the many verses that always came to mind when he thought of Richard’s broad hands, the darkening hair across his thighs, the tautness of his buttocks as they pressed themselves together behind locked doors. It was difficult to compare the taste of Richard’s bright laughing mouth or the warmth of his fingers against the tip of Dominic’s stand to lying with mankind as with womankind, difficult to label the sweetness of Dominic's fluttering heart as abomination.
On this particular high summer afternoon the sun was bright but not dazzling, a lazy gold he might have expected of early autumn. The light breeze caught Richard’s curls and spun them across the nape of his neck, and Dominic shivered and did not stop looking there every few minutes, their comfortable silence laden with sparks of delight at the base of Dominic’s spine.
The pond was empty, surrounded by woods, thoroughly protected as it had been any other afternoon that blessed month, the endless charmed life that Dominic knew, down to the soles of his feet, was theirs, all theirs, theirs for the taking as long as they could have it. Richard grumbled something about the need for a swim, still tense, and Dominic covered his smile with the back of his hand because he knew that this dour Richard was a Richard no one else was allowed to see.
He waited until Richard had stripped down to his breeches and was scowling at the far side of the water before beginning his own disrobing. He held his voice steady, reassuring, as he asked, “Shall we?”
It was tentative, as Richard probably did want to swim. (Dominic wanted to swim, eventually.) The fire came through anyway, since it was always only a few steps away from the tip of Dominic’s tongue, even in the most absurd situations. Richard turned to him at once, eyes wide, and laughed in disbelief.
“You cannot.”
Dominic showed his teeth, proud despite the shuddering that wanted to take hold of his arms, the close close close of his hand pausing in its unbuttoning to reach out for Richard’s hairy forearm. Richard closed his eyes as he made contact.
“You needn’t—serve me, make me feel better. In that way.”
How could Dominic explain the ferocious need within him to do just that, no matter his family’s wealth or Richard’s breeding? He turned it selfishly instead, as that was far easier for Richard, hardening under his breeches, to understand.
“Perhaps I am simply trying to serve myself.”
Richard laughed, fingers fumbling against his own buttons in renewed haste. Dominic’s joined him, his throat going dry at the bulge he could feel beneath two layers of fabric. “I am not sure you know how, Dom.” He smiled. “It’s why you are you. Why we are….right.”
Never wrong, impossible to be incorrect. A mere month into this elaborate, titanic, Achillean feeling, impossible to ruin or to be ruined, and Dominic’s veins thrilled at Richard’s smile, Richard’s strong fingers taking over the disrobing for them both, leaving them naked and trembling, breathless with the holiness they felt in joining their hearts, the rightness of this instinct.
Richard was at a half stand already, Dominic somehow still soft despite the fire in his mind. He led Richard back to one of the many willows nearby, where they could be particularly alone, particularly set apart in their delight behind the riotous drooping curtains of leaves. Richard’s bare back had scarcely touched the trunk before Dominic put his own meager fingers against the flushed head of Richard’s prick.
“Oh, Dom.”
Richard’s head went back with an ungainly thud, sweat shining on the golden summer skin of his exposed throat, and Dominic bit the tip of his tongue, relishing the sweet rush down his spine. He had done this every day for the past week, at least, marveling in the velvet over iron of a cock in his hands, the twitching life beneath each stroke of his thumb, the warmth of skin and surging blood. It was familiar, and sweet because of it, though perhaps now lacking that hiss and shine, that metallic shimmer of purest love that would set him at his most attentive.
He had read the unexpurgated Catullus, as had nearly every boy of their year, passed from room to room over the course of a particularly miserable February. (Richard had watched them, shaking his head but not disapproving, just…Richard. Benignly uninterested, as he was with so many things Dominic read.) He had promptly tried to make himself forget all of the many whispered suggestions they had all had, attempting to guess the particular flavor of irrumābō, when what most of them knew was simply their own sinful and mostly solitary fumbling in the night.
A boy in his final year had told Dominic and two others the exact meaning, with the smirk that suggested he had done it himself.
Dominic could not imagine smirking upon doing such a thing, which was, of course, unclean in the highest degree. It would be more valiant to make the sacrifice himself, for another, if the twitch of his cock was any such guide.
It would be most distracting for Richard, which was what Richard needed, to chase the last of his misery away.
Dominic leaned forward, breath hot against Richard’s pelvis. Richard’s stand throbbed in his grip; Richard’s voice moaned above him. Dominic hesitated for another heartbeat before leaning down to kiss the head.
Richard’s voice went from moan to a high pitch, almost a shriek, his cock leaking a bitter fluid against Dominic’s tongue. Dominic barely had time to register the taste before Richard’s fingers scrambled against his forehead, tugging hard on Dominic’s fringe, pushing Dominic backwards.
He bit down on a rush of bile as Richard met his gaze with his own wild eyes.
“Dominic, I—“
“I am most sorry—“
All his finest courtesies came to the forefront of Dominic’s darting mind, never mind their surroundings or the low throbbing beginning in Dominic’s own cock. Something on his face must have shown the collision of court and Catullus, the wild abyss opening up underneath him, for Richard’s nose crinkled and, as Dominic stared, he started to laugh.
“Oh, Dom, will you forgive me?”
Dominic’s fingers dug into the side of his own thigh. “Forgive you?” He swallowed down the inexplicable my lord his tongue nearly added, a title he had possibly never actually given to Richard in all their years of boyhood. He felt alone in some great ballroom, faced only with a towering presence, as if he were a knight of centuries past attempting to pledge fealty to his liege. Bewildering, and thrilling, and something that demanded to stay within the darkest corner of his heart, private even from Richard.
“My fingers—did I hurt you, at all? Only I was so—startled, and—“
“No hurt,” Dominic asserted, immediately, because it was true. There had been pain, of a kind, but it had been almost pleasant, like the biting of his tongue. The hurt, such as it was, was more the confusion broiling between his brain and his loins. “I only—it seemed like something you might like.”
Richard’s eyes were almost grey, liquid with whatever need curled there, blocked by some half-sense of a potential wrong done. His stand was rampant, and Dominic was blood-hot between his own legs. Richard cleared his throat.
“If you are certain it is no injury—“
“Never,” Dominic growled, surprising himself as well as Richard, though before he could feel any level of self-conscious there was Richard’s laugh, the soft one Dominic had heard a few times when they had finished spending and curled in toward one another in the most perfect peace he could imagine. More quietly he added, “I would—I would like to try.”
Richard’s fingers were warm and reassuring against Dominic’s scalp, only faintly trembling. He hesitated for a moment before kissing Dominic’s forehead with dry, tense lips.
“As you will.”
It was not the full-throated desire Dominic could feel roaring down to the tips of his own fingers, but then Richard did not seem to have Dominic’s more…wild…edges, his desire for something akin to trouble, even danger, in their play. Richard stood strong nonetheless, wrapping one arm around the trunk behind him for stability, and his eyes were kingly, sweeping across the sight of Dominic still on his knees in the damp grass before him. Dominic took in a long breath and set to it.
It was not a task, though perhaps Richard, marquess’s son, correct and dutiful even as a schoolboy, might have seen it as such. Dominic told himself, as he breathed for a moment along Richard’s thick length, that it was a duty of love, but in truth what he felt was the thrill of jumping blindly into an unknown lake. Dominic’s mouth filled with sweaty heat, the moist tang of Richard’s leaking cockhead, and he knew almost immediately that he was in far deeper than he had ever been before, wrong in posture and the timing of his breath and the position of one of his hands against Richard’s pelvis. It took most of his concentration simply to avoid choking, and there was a rush of something akin to fear that set Dominic’s nerves alight, not fading even when he pulled off after a few seconds to catch his breath.
Richard was stiff against the tree above him, eyes closed, whimpering as Dom ran the tips of his fingers around the base of Richard’s prick while he attempted to control himself. Whatever he had felt before this with Richard, whatever summer joy, awestruck yearning tenderness, was nothing compared to the pounding of his heart now, the ache pooling in his balls, a desperation without a visible bottom. He swallowed twice before leaning forward again.
It took four or five attempts to figure out how quite, exactly, to breathe, to catch a rhythm of his tongue around the incredible stretch of Richard inside him, drilling down his throat, enveloping almost all of Dominic’s sense of self in his beloved’s presence. Dominic felt himself to be little more than a flickering tongue, a gaping jaw, a wet and drooling thing doing exactly what he was meant to be doing, in a way no cock jousting or tentative thrusts of Richard’s stand between Dominic’s thighs had yet provided. He was overwhelmed, overcome, and his mind, having nothing to fight against, was humming, steady. Calm.
Dominic could have settled there for a small eternity, lost in the ebb and flow of matching his tongue to Richard’s cock, but it was not so long before he felt a sudden contraction, a groan echoing from Richard’s mouth down through his cock, and then pulses of salty warmth, choking him in truth. He had to pull off, swallowing frantically, feeling Richard’s spend leaking from the corner of his mouth, and the calmness was gone, to be replaced with nerves of fire, licking around the base of his cock.
Richard, dazed, slid to the ground and reached out for him, and Dominic—he did not lean away, did not turn aside, but there was little Richard could offer him on the high windswept plateau Dominic had reached, his own hands stripping his cock ferociously until he too reached a crisis and burst, over his own belly and one of Richard’s outstretched arms.
They sat in the grass and dirt for some moments, Dominic’s chest heaving, his heart pounding in his ears long after his prick stopped twitching. Richard looked sated in body, limbs loose, but with a question banked in his eyes, one he was vainly attempting to veil.
Dominic leaned forward, gasping still, and kissed Richard’s slack mouth with all the fire in his veins, the rush of pleasure as if at a steady gallop, hair whipping behind him and Richard laughing at his side. He could feel himself smiling even as his tongue pressed its way passed Richard’s teeth, feel himself shiver one final time and settle into perhaps the most complete calm of his life thus far.
He was half in Richard’s lap, softening pricks sticky between them, spend tacky against their sweaty skin. The sun was dazzling now even through the curtains of willow around them, overwarm against Dominic’s bare back, and one of his legs was bent at an awkward angle, his knee twisting. He panted once more into Richard’s mouth before disentangling himself, distantly and unpleasantly aware of the utter indignity of his position.
Richard brushed Dominic’s cheek with a blunt and trembling finger, pausing at the edge of his hairline.
“My Dom.”
It was impossible to tell if he had felt even one half of the utter destruction Dominic had taken himself on, the edge of obliteration he’d leaned up against, wallowed in with nothing but delight as Richard half-choked him with his cock. Certainly Richard appeared at ease, only a very faint wariness that could well be the remnants of the marquess swirling around the back of his mind. His touch was gentle as he stroked back and forth across Dominic’s face.
“I have never—“ Richard swallowed, shook his head rapidly as though he were a dog clearing water from its fur, and smiled, so easy, so open. “Thank you, Dom. My Dom.”
“My Rich,” Dom replied, painfully sweet, closing his mouth against the hot lump burning in his throat. He did not know what it was doing there, why he should be brought to such emotion from a mere bit of play, not when he had been so contented not a minute before. They were together, as they had been all month. Blessed. Set apart from the rest of the world. Friends in ways only David and Jonathan, Achilles and Patroclus, could be friends. Preordained.
Perhaps these wanted to be tears of joy, of the purest emotion like that a man might feel upon the birth of his heir. They could not be anything less, anything other than an offering of—of communion, of a sort. Of an awe that startled Dominic, and perhaps, somewhere in his enchanted, Edenic life, where all he had to concern himself with was Richard, scared the edges of his soul.
It was good, to have a new source of awe. A new uncertainty amidst all the certainty, something to keep his regard for Richard at its highest possible levels.
(It could not be anything else, he knew that. No matter what sort of things the marquess might say, no matter how dangerously Dominic’s veins might sing, might push him toward the edges of cliffs, where a marquess’s son could not go, Richard was not merely second. Richard would not ever be second to anything else in Dominic’s mind.)
“Shall we swim ourselves clean?”
Richard’s voice was close against the back of Dominic’s neck, tickling. His eyes were large, and merry now, and so very calm, as Dominic, still leaning halfway out over the bottomless deeps of his soul’s (his body’s?) desires, could not quite be. Richard’s hands were broad and strong and warm against Dominic’s cheeks, every inch solid and protecting, guiding Dominic back into himself.
He had to know, of course.
“It was—it was good?”
Richard blinked first, smiled second. A confused smile, almost, if Dominic were any judge (and oh, how he had studied Richard’s face, long before either of them was in breeches), but a smile. An offering.
“Of course it was.” Richard kissed him, and Dominic closed his eyes before any of the damp in them could spring forth. “Was it—for you? I did not hurt you? Next time I will pull away first.”
Next time. Next time he could convince Richard that there was no hurt at all involved, that such oblivion was a gift to be welcomed. With enough practice he could surely even make Richard feel it himself, nobility though he was, dutiful as they both were.
Dominic leaned against that implicit promise, counted to five before opening his eyes, and let all the remnants of his dangerous joy flood into his face.
“It was the best yet.”
Richard nodded, slow. Perhaps surprised, somehow. But smiling, gently smiling, and Dominic could do anything, solve any problem as long as he had Richard’s smile.