There Will Be Phlogiston Page 13

  “Is this sodomy?” she asked.

  “It’s about to be.” Arkady dug his fingers into Jones’s biceps, hard enough that his nails left pale crescents in Jones’s tan. “Darling, enough. I want to feel you.”

  “More oil.”

  Rosamond was glad to discover that all those tedious lessons in how to properly serve tea had finally come to something—it turned out, she was very good at pouring oil into her lover’s hand so he could make love to his lover. This time, however, his hand went nowhere more mysterious than himself, and her eyes followed because watching Anstruther Jones make his delightfully hard cock all slick and gleaming was quite stirring. Her interest in the proceedings had been temporarily diverted towards more intellectual considerations, but the sight of Jones kneeling between Arkady’s legs with that frowning, focused look on his face garnered a far more bodily reaction.

  Arkady reached down, caught hold of his own knees, and pulled them back, exposing himself in a manner so bold it was probably far beyond wanton. “Damn it, Jones, will you fuck me?”

  Jones grinned wolfishly, all teeth and a flash of gold, and stroked a possessive hand along the unprotected underside of Arkady’s thigh, making the other man shudder uncontrollably. His left hand was still on his cock, and as he pressed forward, Rosamond quite abruptly learned what sodomy was.

  Admittedly it was a little startling. She would never have imagined such a thing was possible, let alone pleasurable, but they both seemed to enjoy it immensely. There was even something a little bit remarkable about it, the way Arkady’s body was coaxed with gentle pressure and rocking thrusts to encompass Jones, and their gradual progress to a completeness of joining that made them groan in unison. After a moment or two, Jones came down onto his elbows, Arkady’s legs curled around him, and they lay like that, chest to chest, wrapped in each other, exchanging increasingly frantic kisses, almost as if neither quite believed that what they did was real.

  Rosamond was truly baffled. This was the terrible, unspeakable sin?

  She would probably not have wished to participate in it herself, but then she would probably not have appreciated it overmuch if Jones stuck his finger in her ear. But what was one appendage and one orifice over another? Why was this particular combination outlawed?

  Especially when it seemed to her a rather beautiful union.

  They were moving now, still entwined, the sweat-glossy muscles of Jones’s back undulating delightfully and his buttocks flexing as he claimed Arkady’s body in long, steady thrusts.

  Oh heavens. How very fine he looked. How strong and . . . Rosamond shifted, unable to help herself, all her most secret places alight with longing. Had she been in Arkady’s positions she would have— His hands curled over Jones’s hips, pulling him greedily against him, harder, deeper, the sound of skin against skin mingling with their rapid breaths, the moans of pleasure that seemed to ripple between them like an unending echo.

  Jones rose onto his knees again, his hips moving to a different rhythm, slow, shallow, and lingering. Rosamond was certainly no expert at the act they were committing, but she could recognise a tease when she saw one.

  Arkady, too, his mouth parting on a laughing gasp, as he wriggled frantically and arched after Jones’s cock. “You bastard.”

  “That any way to talk to a man inside you?”

  “Yes, if he’s not insi—” Jones drove forward, and whatever Arkady had been going to say was lost to a sharp cry of mingled pleasure and gratitude. “Oh God, yes. Like that.”

  Jones had that intent and ferocious look again, his eyes stormy as he gazed down at Arkady and at the place their bodies met. It made Rosamond shiver. She enjoyed being the subject of Jones’s attention herself, but at the same time she was a little envious. Not because she wanted Arkady the way Jones did, but because he yielded his body so completely, and revelled in it, unabashed. And because his surrender did not look like weakness. It looked like joy.

  Jones wrapped a hand about the other man’s cock, inspiring another spill of liquid, and a harsh, almost-pained groan from Arkady.

  His head tossed on the pillows, moisture caught on his hair and on the tips of his eye lashes. “No, don’t . . .”

  “No?”

  “Just you.” An unsteady breath, something close to a smile. “Is enough.”

  Jones made one of his likerous, growly noises and shifted his hold from Arkady’s powerfully rigid member to his legs. He lifted them up to rest against his shoulders, and began to move afresh, thrusting deep into Arkady with quite remarkable vigour. Rosamond wasn’t sure if she wouldn’t have found such enthusiasm a little punishing, but Arkady seemed to relish it. And Jones looked wonderful that way, all feral passion and straining muscles, with the sweat streaking him like starlight. The sounds of them together had become profoundly and gloriously animalistic, colliding flesh, and ragged breath, and other more intimate noises, the slick and wicked kissing of secret places.

  Arkady stretched his arms above his head, hands clutching frantically at the carved rail, his whole body drawn into a trembling harp string of need and incipient ecstasy. There was nothing gentlemanly left in him. He was as wild as Jones, as heedless. His mouth opened and his eyes fluttered, and he babbled something that might have been Jones or I love you or God or Fuck or some combination of all of them. And for some impossible fraction of a second, he was the still point in a universe of skin and sex: utterly vulnerable, utterly exposed, taken and loved and free. Then he was all movement, full of shudders, his cock jerking as jets of pearly fluid spattered across his chest.

  “Oh Arkady, my Arkady.”

  He blinked up at Jones, his eyes slumberously soft, and murmured. “I want to feel you. Come for me.”

  Jones threw back his head, eyes closing, lips pulling back from his teeth in something close to a snarl. He made an equally unrestrained noise, which, for some reason, rippled across Rosamond’s most favourite particular place like a stone thrown into a pool. She watched him, as avidly as she had that day in the woods, as the pleasure took him, wondering what star-strewn skies he found in the savage darkness of his release. And she tried not to feel too disappointed the outcome was received by Arkady’s body, for she rather enjoyed being able to witness the sudden violence of his rapture.

  Arkady was as supple as a cat in sunlight as Jones came down over him again, purring with languid satisfaction as Jones licked the evidence of their activities from his skin. Then Jones mumbled something incoherent and collapsed completely, and Arkady’s arms flopped over him in a clumsy embrace. They lay entangled, spent in each other’s arms.

  “Oh my,” said Rosamond, “sodomy is magnificent.”

  Arkady wheezed out something she thought might have been a laugh, and beat his palms against Jones’s shoulder.

  Jones grunted and rolled off him with all the grace of a felled oak. Lay in a lax-limbed sprawl, breathing hard, and grinning. Rosamond gazed at him in some concern—men really did have substantial physical limitations.

  She had almost decided he had died of sodomy when he cranked open one eye, threw an arm about her waist, and pulled her down on top of him. “I love you,” he mumbled.

  It took her entirely by surprise. She had known he did, of course, otherwise his behaviour made no sense at all. Only a man who loved her would have treated her as he had. Or like her as much as he claimed to. She was under no illusions that she was a likeable person.

  It was probably not the context most young ladies would have dreamed of hearing such a declaration. But Rosamond was not most young ladies, and she found it was exactly what she needed to hear, when she needed to hear it.

  All the same. Her own delight embarrassed her.

  “How kind,” she managed, with admirably calm.

  And Jones laughed, and said it again—“I love you”—so she tucked the words into some pocket of her heart to take out and look at properly later.

  He eased her into the crook of his arm and Arkady curled into her side. It was very warm, a
nd a little sticky, and both men smelled very pungently of their previous activities. But she had never felt safer, or righter, or more loved in her entire life. Arkady slid a hand over her waist, and Jones reached over her, and they held hands, and held her.

  Arkady nuzzled his head into her shoulder. “I’m too extraordinarily well fucked to be worried, so I’m just going to assume you didn’t think less of me for that . . . and thank you.”

  “Thank you for trusting me.” She pressed a kiss against his brow. “Frankly, you may do that as often as you please.”

  Jones groaned. “Give me ten minutes, maybe twenty. I’m not as young as I used to be.”

  “Good God.” Arkady gave a shaky laugh. “You may have to wait a day or so before I can permit that again.”

  “Well,” Rosamond offered helpfully, “Jones will simply have to fuck me.”

  Arkady was pressed so close that she felt the scrape of his lashes as his eyes closed. “I think I might love you a little too.”

  They drifted in sated and companionable silence for a minute or two.

  “Is it always thus?” she asked. “Does Jones always . . . and do you always . . .”

  She had not realised it was a troublesome question, but the quality of the silence shifted, and she felt Arkady tense.

  “I . . . have never . . . that is, I presume. I do not think Jones—”

  “As it happens,” said Jones, “I’m very fond of taking a cock.”

  This made perfect sense of Rosamond—clearly having an appendage up the fundament was a delightful pastime for men. But Arkady seemed oddly flustered. “Truly? But . . . are you not . . . I would not have . . .”

  “Love, I’ve lived too long in this world to believe my masculinity lives in my arse.”

  Arkady laughed, but his body was still restlessly anxious against Rosamond. “I have never met anyone who would permit me that. I might not . . . I might disappoint you.”

  “Don’t be daft. I’d love it if you wanted to fuck me, and I don’t care if you don’t.”

  That answer seemed to satisfy Arkady. In more ways than one. Rosamond was a little disconcerted as his member stirred and stiffened somewhat against her hip. But then she recalled that she had recently seen him dispense ejaculatory fluid all over himself. So they were probably far beyond the usual social awkwardnesses.

  “How does it feel?” She had not intended to utter the thought aloud—but there it was.

  “What?” Arkady’s voice was slurred, as though he was pleasure-drunk, already half-asleep.

  “To have a man inside you.”

  “Well, I rather enjoy it.” She thought that was going to be all the answer he would grant her, but then he continued. “Like you’re holding his heart in your hand.”

  And then, nestled against her, he slept in earnest.

  He probably had the right idea. But even though she had been up all night and—from the hazy light behind the curtains—some chunk of the day, there was a pulsing energy at the core of her tiredness that made sleep seem distant and unlikely.

  A nervous feeling crept over her like a shadow, something that seemed perilously like the queerest loneliness she had ever experienced, but then she turned her head, and found Jones still awake as well, his eyes very blue just then in their secret morning. He smiled fuzzily at her, and gently untangled his hand from Arkady’s.

  His fingers explored her idly, tiny, sweeping touches that sent shivers chasing themselves across her skin. It was an odd sensation, the warmth of him travelling through the shifting linen of her chemise, but strangely pleasurable, two softnesses moving against each other and upon her. She closed her eyes, letting herself be touched, floating in it, while everything else faded away. At last, his hand eased between her legs, and she was a little shocked at how wet for him she was, how hot and swollen and ready.

  She shifted, opening to him, and he circled the place she liked best, this thumb gliding over her, effortless as an ice-skater. She allowed herself a breathy, unseemly moan, and basked, lazy pleasure spiralling outwards from her unmentionable regions—she really would have to ask Jones how they could be mentioned but . . . oh . . . not now—to fill every part of her. Her peak came upon her swiftly, though it was not really a peak, more a kind of gathering of everything that had happened that night, everything she had learned and felt and done, transmuted into a kind of pure physical joy. She muffled her cries in Jones’s shoulder and stayed there a little afterwards, pressed against him, soaking up his heat, his solid strength, the realness of his body, all breath and blood and skin and scars.

  Hers.

  Fuck.

  “I love you,” she told him crisply. “And there’s no need to make a fuss about it.”

  His grin was quite ridiculous.

  She gave him a stern look. “I don’t want it to give you ideas above your station.”

  “Unlikely.” He yawned and settled her against him. “I’m exactly where I want to be.”

  She was quiet awhile, watching him as he drifted close to slumber. “I have been thinking.”

  He started. “Huh. Whassumatter?”

  “I have been thinking of configurations.”

  “Con—what?”

  “Configurations for the three of us. That we may try. In the future.”

  “Oh.” His eyes opened. “Oh.”

  “I was thinking perhaps it would be entertaining if Arkady were to fuck you and you were to fuck me. Or perhaps Arkady could fuck you and you could pleasure me with your fingers or . . . I understand sometimes at finishing school mouths were used, so you could possibly oblige me in that fashion. Or Arkady and I could both use our mouths on you. Or I have noticed that Arkady enjoys to hold the bedrail when you enter him with particular vigour so it occurred to me—although this could be a little too depraved—that you could secure his hands to it while you laboured upon him. Do you not think he would look beautiful that way?”

  Jones was laughing, although Rosamond had no notion why. Configurations struck her as being quite a serious matter. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, and yes, and yes.”

  Well, that was good news. She settled down to sleep.

  She thought she was going to enjoy being ruined very much indeed.

  SNEAK PEEK: PROSPERITY

  A breathtaking tale of passion and adventure in the untamed skies!

  Prosperity, 1863: a lawless skytown where varlets, chancers, and ne’er-do-wells risk everything to chase a fortune in the clouds, and where a Gaslight guttersnipe named Piccadilly is about to cheat the wrong man. This mistake will endanger his life . . . and his heart.

  Thrill! As our hero battles dreadful krakens above Prosperity. Gasp! As the miracles of clockwork engineering allow a dead man to wreak his vengeance upon the living. Marvel! At the aerial escapades of the aethership, Shadowless.

  Beware! The licentious and unchristian example set by the opium-addled navigatress, Miss Grey. Disapprove Strongly! Of the utter moral iniquity of the dastardly crime prince, Milord. Swoon! At the dashing skycaptain, Byron Kae. Swoon Again! At the tormented clergyman, Ruben Crowe.

  This volume (available in print, and for the first time on mechanical book-reading devices) contains the complete original text of Piccadilly’s memoirs as first serialised in All the Year Round. Some passages may prove unsettling to unmarried gentlemen of a sensitive disposition.

  Ebook: ISBN: 978-1-62649-176-2

  Paperback: ISBN: 978-1-62649-177-9

  riptidepublishing.com/titles/prosperity

  In which the reader is introduced to our hero, Piccadilly—Concerning his birth, parentage (or lack thereof), history, education (or lack thereof), charms, endowments, and virtues (or lack thereof)—Of the skymining town of Prosperity and our hero’s arrival therein—Descriptions of a game of cards and sundry persons of variable character and importance—The lamentable actions of an ungentlemanly gentleman—Some notes on the workings of skyhooks

  I ain’t never been one for truth-telling, and all that shite about what yo
ur father was called, and where you was squeezed yowling out your mother—but this ’ere tale ain’t your everyday moonshine.

  See, it begins with a town called Prosperity.

  It don’t really matter how I came to be there, cos back in them days, everybody was going. Way I heard it, the rush started cos of this one cull who got himself an airship and took to the skies over Gaslight. He went up there with pockets full of sweet fuck-all, and came down again with enough phlogiston to light up England for a year. Made him flusher than that Greek bugger what I read about.

  And that’s when folks started buying up the sky, turning nowhere places like Prosperity into somewhere places. Leastways for the sorta folk who didn’t have nowt to stay put for, or had sommat to run from. And them as rather’d go clutching at dreams than turn their forepaws to honest graft.

  When I first rolled into town, there weren’t much in the ol’ brain box except turning the usual tricks and running the usual rigs. Cos me being Gaslight gutterborn, I ain’t precisely grained for the straight and narrow. ’Twasn’t long afore I got settled in. Few days after making slip, I had five fat culls—meaning them as possessing more money than sense—chasing their own tails in hopeless pursuit of Judith in the game of three-card monte I was running from the street corner.

  It didn’t make me no new friends, but I did get together enough chink for grub, and somewhere to kip that weren’t the ground or some stranger’s bed. Though I ain’t never stood in opposition to snuggling up with strangers.

  Course, I’d also heard tattle of deep play at Albright’s Saloon, and I had the buy-in right there. I was hot for it, having always had sommat of an itch in my palms for the dealing of cards and, most particularly, for the winning at ’em by means both fair and foul.

  Truth is, I like stealing more than I like having, and I like cheating more than I like playing. I know it ain’t honourable, but way I smoke it, any nick-ninny flat can get what he deserves, so the real trick is getting what you don't. And since by rights I should’ve probably been croaked in a gutter down in Gaslight or mouldering at the bottom of the Spire—which is where they put pilferers, bobtails, and tradesmen of fortune when they can catch ’em—I reckon whatever I can sharply lay paws on is as close to mine as makes no difference.