The Sugared Game - K.J. Charles Page 0,36
duelling, until first one then the other groaned and jerked and came.
They lay together, a tangle of arms and legs, body heat and wet spunk. Kim let his head drop to the crook of Will’s neck, leaving him with a faceful of fine hair.
“Not sophisticated,” he said at last, muffled. “But good.”
“Did you want sophisticated?” Will asked, with a stab of self-consciousness.
“Not tonight. I think I wanted honesty. Thank you.”
Will dropped an arm over his shoulder. They lay together in silence for a moment until Kim shifted, which made it apparent that the sticky mess on Will’s belly had started gluing them together. “Ugh. This must be what they call a mess of frottage.”
“Jesus Christ. Had you been planning that long?”
Kim grinned and rolled off. “I’ll get a cloth.”
Chapter Eight
Sleeping with Kim was always good. Waking with him had, to date, been a more mixed experience.
On this occasion he was still in bed when Will woke with a mild headache, a sense he hadn’t had enough sleep, and a tight patch on the hairs of his stomach where he’d missed a bit of spunk. He dropped an arm over his eyes. Kim said, “Hello.”
“Morning.”
“Sleep well?”
“Not bad. Is your chap likely to wander in with a cup of tea for sir?”
“That’s ‘my lord’ to you, and no. Peacock does clothes, cooking, and occasional espionage. I make tea myself.”
“Is that an offer?”
“I walked into that,” Kim said with mild disgust, and rolled out of bed. Will took the opportunity to admire his back view until he covered it with his purple gown and went in the direction of the kettle, and then took himself off to the bathroom to borrow Kim’s toothbrush and make himself rather more presentable.
By the time Kim returned with a tray, Will was sitting up in bed flicking through a book and feeling civilised.
“Tea,” Kim said, handing him a cup. Will took a sip. It was horrifyingly weak. “Are you reading The Waste Land?”
“No, you are.” It had been the only thing on Kim’s bedside table. Will didn’t consider Modernist poetry much of a bedtime story. “I’ve read it already. I had a copy in the shop a couple of months ago.”
“Thoughts?”
“It doesn’t rhyme.”
He closed the slim volume and put it on the table as Kim got into bed, a feat he managed without spilling his tea, and sat with his knees up, so their shoulders didn’t quite touch.
“Are we talking now?” Will asked. “Or is the door still locked?”
“It is locked, but—as you wish.”
“Tea first.” The tea was undrinkable, but he didn’t really want to know what Kim had been hiding about the job either. It would doubtless be infuriating, but he was less concerned by that than by whatever pain had driven a boy, a privileged marquess’s son at that, to let it out with a blade. Kim had no fresh scars, nothing within the last decade or more. Will had a crawling sort of worry that was because he’d found less visible ways to hurt himself.
There were a lot of things he wanted to know, and he wasn’t sure he could ask most of them. They were private, secret things, and physical intimacy didn’t automatically open the door for those. You could ask a lover for them, but he couldn’t call Kim his lover in any conventional sense. Or even a conventionally unconventional one.
“I don’t know what the rules are,” he said aloud.
“Sorry?”
“The rules for us. What we are, what we’re doing. I don’t know how we’re expected to behave in this situation.”
“We’re expected not to do it at all,” Kim said. “That being the case, behave as you like.”
“Rubbish. There’s still rights and wrongs and expectations. Things you ought to do, lines not to cross. The things you won’t change, the things I won’t put up with, the things we both want. I’d like to know where I stand.”
“Wouldn’t we all. I’m not sure where I stand either, Will. I had an equilibrium before you turned up.”
“I didn’t turn up. You turned up. You hired a thug to wreck my shop.”
“Moan, moan, moan. He didn’t break anything expensive.”
Will made an offensive gesture. Kim gave him a rueful half-smile. “How do we set rules for the game when neither of us is sure what we’re playing at? You have no idea what you want, and I don’t know how I’d give it to you.”
“Start with this: I want to know what you do.”
“You already know that.”
“No, I don’t. You were a Bolshevik once, unless you