Page 44 of Rears & Vices

Everard had already been in a bit of a precarious situation, prick-wise; the pleased noise certainly didn’t help. Then gravity resembled its normal self, and brought Everard’s weight down. Vitaliy was as hard and hot beneath his drawers as Everard; he couldn’t help but gasp.

Vitaliy splayed his legs accommodatingly, slotting Everard between broad firm thighs; he rutted up, a roll of hips. He mumbled, “Mmm?”

Holy Good God, Everard thought. Vitaliy wanted him after all.

He really hadn’t had expectations, but…

“Wait,” he groaned, “wait, Vitya. We can’t—that is, we shouldn’t, not now.”

Vitaliy’s arm held fast around his waist; his other hand gripped onto Everard’s arse and clutched him insistently closer.

Everard resisted, held his hips as still as he could bear—they seemed to want to press and grind of their own accord—and tried to prop up more of his weight on his knees. What he wanted was to do precisely the opposite, to put hands to either side of Vitaliy’s waist, let his weight fully down, kiss him, everywhere. But Vitaliy’s strangeness held him back.

He remembered a lazy, sleepy midnight conjugation, once upon a time; Vitya had been quiet, but intensely responsive all the same.

A man can’t change so much in three years.

“Vee?” Everard rested his forehead on the other man’s. “Are you awake?” he whispered. “You don’t seem quite yourself.”

Vitaliy grunted, “Mhm.”

It sounded affirmative enough. And the rutting continued against him, slow and molten. Everard kissed the soft mouth carefully with closed lips—as perhaps he could coax the man to his normal responsiveness that way—and received a dark, needy whimper that sank straight into his gut. Hadn’t he heard that sound in his dreams ever since?

Still he held back.

“Vitya,” he said regretfully; every bit of him trembled with restraint. “It’s still raining—there’s a storm.”

“Evra’d,” Vitaliy mumbled, and then was silent. Everard, really alarmed now, raised higher to look at him properly.

What seaman didn’t react to the word storm?

Vitaliy’s eyes were closed, and a tiny furrow creased between his eyebrows; his lips were red and parted, unsmiling, his breath increasing. His hips moved up, up, up, and his hands roamed, all over, up Everard’s back and down again, clutching.

Everard bit his lower lip, hard. The exquisite drag of linen between their pricks seemed suddenly very, very wrong.

For Vitaliy wasn’t awake. Not at all.

“Vitaliy,” he said urgently now, one hand pushing down on the man’s warm hip to put more space between them, the other pushing himself up, not wanting to break his grip too harshly. “Wake up. Vitya.”

Nothing, except increasingly aggressive rutting, murmurs of what sounded like encouragement in slippery, lilting Russian. Vitaliy’s legs wrapped round Everard’s own, pulling them closer, closer.

Everard said, “Vee,” loudly. “Vitya,” he said, directly into an ear.

Sant Jesús, the man was completely insensible.

“For God’s sake,” he said, even louder. “Vee, wake up!”

Vitaliy inhaled like someone surfacing. The rutting stopped abruptly, and Everard felt the man’s awakening jar into his bones. Muscle and limbs stiffened, and hands jerked away from Everard’s arse. Blue eyes opened in bleary horror.

Thus freed, Everard quickly pushed himself up, backing onto his knees. Vitaliy sat up, too, shoving back into the corner of the cot, breathing hard. Prick still hard, too, Everard noted dimly, though he knew that meant nothing at all. Not compared to the thin-lipped look of disgust on Vitaliy’s face.

Everard’s stomach dropped. Dear God, he’d assaulted an unconscious man. One who, in the daylight, hadn’t encouraged him at all.

“Oh, God. I’m sorry.” He scrambled out of the cot so fast, he sent it swinging anew and almost fell. He caught himself luckily with his left hand against the rug, and picked himself up, so ashamed he felt his skin would dry to a crisp around his bones. “I’m so⁠—”

“Don’t,” Vitaliy said thickly, harshly. A wakening voice, truly this time. His fist gripped the cot’s corner rope tight, his arm wrapped round, like an unsure child did on a swing. “Wait. Please.”

Everard waited, not that he knew what for, or where he would go in drawers and nothing else.