Boats in the night (11 page)

“Mmm, you’re spoiling me with the twigs.” Smutty’s lips twisted in a momentary half

smile as he opened the door, but he settled back into his seat and fixed Giles with an inscrutable expression. “You don’t need to seduce me, Giles. I’ll put out anyway.”

Giles groaned as memories from the last week painted themselves across his mind.

He’d had Smutty in every position he’d ever heard of—and a few he hadn’t thought possible

—and the man’s enthusiasm for Giles’s cock turned him on more than anything he’d ever dreamt of. He savoured the memory of Smutty sprawled on his bed last night. He’d looked so debauched, fingering himself while he begged for Giles to get on with it and fuck him stupid.

“Yes, I think we’ve already established that. Many times. But doesn’t it occur to you I might like to have a drink with you somewhere in public?”

He waited while Smutty appeared to mull it over, a small crease appearing between

his eyebrows as he thought.

“Are you out?” Smutty asked. “I don’t want to have to pretend we’re just friends. It bugs me, having to be that careful about what I do.”

“Yes, I’m out.” Giles sighed. He doubted he was as out as Smutty was. “You’re not

going to want to hold hands over the table, are you?”

Smutty made a sound somewhere between a chuckle and a bark. “You should see your

face! Nah, not my style, mate, but I might want to kiss you at some point. I just hate having to watch how I’m behaving all the time. Bath’s not the kind of place where you’re likely to get your head kicked in for snogging a bloke in public, anyway.”

“Probably not,” Giles conceded. The city centre was far too genteel, although he

couldn’t vouch for the surrounding suburbs.

“So that’s an okay to any possible public displays of affection, then?”

“Just how affectionate a display are we talking about?” Giles asked warily. “I think the staff at Bonghi Bo’s would draw the line at a full-on grope.”

“Not if I do it under the table.” Smutty waggled his eyebrows, the very image of some kind of mischievous fire sprite.

Giles knew every eye in the place would be on them anyway, what with the way

Smutty looked, but screw it. He wasn’t going to be ashamed of being with him, even if his table manners were atrocious. That was hardly Smutty’s fault—he hadn’t exactly had a normal upbringing. “What am I letting myself in for?” he asked with a sigh, but smiling right into Smutty’s laughing eyes.

“A chance to live a little? I’ll go grab my kit, then. I’ll only be a minute, if you want to wait here.”

Smutty’s “minute” turned out to be more like fifteen, but when he returned around the side of the house with a large rucksack thrown over one shoulder and a grin that outshone the sun, Giles’s frustration vanished. Christ, he was starting to lose it, wasn’t he?

It was getting harder and harder to imagine a life without Smutty in it.

***

spent the last week with turn into someone he barely recognised. Someone who spoke with an Australian accent and worked the crowd like a born raconteur, all the while quite literally playing with fire.

“But Kun Man Gur, the rainbow serpent, was so angry with the flying fox he blew out

a stream of fire that burnt the land.” Smutty punctuated his story by taking a quick swig from his flask, then holding one of the flaming torches to his lips.

Flames rolled out of Smutty’s mouth in a blast of heat and Giles recoiled, stepping on the foot of the woman behind him. She drew in a sharp, annoyed breath. “So sorry,” he mumbled, before turning back to the performance. Smutty was juggling the torches again, sending one leaping high above the others that whirled between his hands. And all the while he continued telling his strange little tale of Aussie talking animals to the audience that had gathered around the fragile barriers they’d constructed earlier. The crowd must have been about ten deep by now, and Giles calculated that if they all left Smutty as little as a pound, he’d have made at least a hundred from a mere twenty minutes of work.

Not that it was easy work. Giles watched the sweat rolling down Smutty’s bare chest, the flames licking at his fingers. His body was smeared with sooty marks and his voice sounded distinctly raw since the fire-breathing stunt. He wasn’t going to hurt himself, was he? Giles watched keenly for any sign of exhaustion or impending disaster, but all he saw was a man perfectly at ease with his movements, his body gliding almost effortlessly, muscles rippling in synch with the flickering of the flames.

The story ended with the creation of the desert, and the flying foxes temporarily

chastened. With his last words Smutty fell to his knees, arms outstretched, catching the remaining torches as they spun down towards him. He bowed his head for the burst of

applause then rose, grinning widely, as the tourists continued to cheer.

“Just put the torches out,” Giles muttered underneath his breath. Seeing this many

people so close to the flames made him twitchy—especially when some of them were

children, and the only thing holding them back was a lightweight barrier constructed of posts and rope that had all come out of Smutty’s backpack. He breathed a sigh of relief when Smutty extinguished the torches in the bucket. Coins were already starting to fly through the air towards the battered old top hat on the paving stones. Many were missing their target, but Giles noticed a couple of people bending over the barrier to place bank notes in there as well.

Smutty glowed with the exertion and attention, and Giles also flared into warmth as

he watched him crouch down to talk with the children, setting them all giggling with something he said. Smutty’s hands were constantly on the move, Giles realised, like birds flapping around him, but perfectly controlled and graceful.

When Smutty rose again Giles managed to catch his eye and mouthed “coffee break?”

hopefully. Smutty had said he’d need a good break after his first performance, and Giles was parched just from watching him. Giles dreaded to think what the state of Smutty’s mouth must be like after that little stunt. His overactive imagination conjured up a horrific vision of blistered gums and tongue, but the way Smutty smiled and shook his head at him didn’t suggest he was in any kind of pain.

Wait a minute—shook his head?

“Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, thank you for your generosity,” Smutty began, in a hoarse voice. “I’ve had a request for an encore, so I’d like to show you something from my ancestral homeland, New Zealand. The Maori people have a traditional weapon called poi, and while theirs aren’t usually on fire, I like to think a few flames improve just about anything.” Smutty winked and twirled, showing off his tattoo to a round of wolf-whistles from the women.

Giles groaned as Smutty pulled another contraption that looked like an instrument of torture out of his backpack. A tennis ball sized metal cage with the wick inside, strung onto a long chain that ended in a rubber coated grip. And a second one to match. Smutty drenched both the wicks with paraffin and touched a match to them as they lay on the ground, smiling like he was satisfied with the way they blossomed with sooty flames before settling down to a more controlled blaze. What the hell was he going to do with those? Giles had to fight the urge to stride through the barrier and throw Smutty over his shoulder then march him off to the coffee shop. The man needed to rest, damn it. It was dangerous, playing with fire.

But when Smutty began spinning the poi, Giles forgot to worry. This was completely

different to the torches leaping high into the air—this time the flames were attached to Smutty’s hands via the chains, but somehow that gave him even more opportunity to make them dance. Fire whirled around Smutty’s body in wheels and spirals. One moment he had his arms outstretched, his hands making tiny motions while the poi raced and darted in a mesmerising pattern each side of his body. A slight adjustment to his limbs, and the poi spun in front of him instead, weaving in and out of each other’s orbit in a way that just didn’t seem possible. Giles had to tear his eyes away from their blinding display to concentrate on Smutty. He hardly seemed to be moving at all, but Giles could see the strain in his body and the intensity in his expression.

Smutty’s eyes gleamed with reflected fire and a dark excitement that stirred up

something inside Giles. Something wild and painful. Something unlooked for.

As his heart squeezed tight, Giles’s stomach lurched.

He had the horrible feeling he’d just fallen in love.

***

Giles. The man hadn’t taken his eyes off Smutty since he’d started juggling, and it was both flattering and uncomfortable. Uncomfortable because Smutty had no idea how to interpret the piercing gaze.

“So? What do you think, now you’ve seen a proper performance?”

“I think you’re amazing.” Giles stepped forward and took Smutty’s hands. “Truly

amazing.”

That look in Giles’s eyes: it did uncanny things to Smutty and he wasn’t sure if he

liked that or not. Felt like the flying foxes he’d spoken of were now loose inside him, turning cartwheels and somersaults. He tried to laugh it off. “Thought you were going to shit a brick at one point, you looked so fucking worried, mate.”

Giles frowned. “What’s with the Australian accent?”

“Sorry. Takes a few minutes to shake off again. I dunno, maybe because I learnt to

fire-dance over there, just feels natural to talk that way. The tourists love it too. It’s not really Aussie, though. More like a mish-mash of Aussie, Kiwi and a dash of Essex.”

“Essex?”

“‘S’where I grew up, innit?” Smutty could call up the Estuary English in a moment,

although it was impossible to say if that was his real accent, seeing as how he’d spent at least six months of every year of his life travelling the world.

“I thought you grew up in a commune.”

“Yeah, I did. A commune in Essex. What? It’s not all Footballer’s Wives over there,

y’know. There were a few of us without the Botox and fake tan.”

Giles stared for a long moment, until a smile slowly curved his lips. “I can’t believe I’m seeing an Essex boy.”

Seeing? Smutty had to wonder if Giles meant the same thing he might if he’d ever

used that word. Not that he’d ever stayed around anywhere long enough to consider himself as ‘seeing’ someone. Not unless you counted those strangely awkward few months as a

teenager when he and Finn had both confessed their attraction to other boys, and made their first fumbling experiments at intimacy. It had destroyed their friendship. Smutty had often wondered if it was that that made Finn run into the arms of mediocrity—he could picture him now, married with two point four kids and an office job, sneaking off to visit a rent boy whenever the lie became too much to bear.

But maybe Giles did mean he was seeing Smutty, because he was still holding his

hands tightly and giving Smutty that look that made his internal organs do a trapeze act. Then he leant forward and pressed the briefest of kisses to Smutty’s lips.

It was too weird. Too much like what Smutty secretly craved for him to trust it as real.

He was misinterpreting. Seeing what he wanted to see. People told him he was always doing that. He knew he had built-in rose-tinted contact lenses and he wasn’t about to make a fool of himself over a mirage.

“How’s about that cuppa you promised me, then? I’m dead thirsty.” It was the fire-

breathing that had done it—dried his mouth out and made his palms sweat. Funny it had never done that before. Normally the aftertaste of paraffin had him salivating reflexively just to spit it all out. “Need to wash the taste out of my mouth.”

“Right. Yes. Of course.” Giles dropped his hands like they were hot coals and started off. “It’s this way,” he threw over his shoulder.

“Yeah, thanks, I gathered that,” Smutty muttered, slinging his rucksack over his back and heading after Giles.

Chapter Fourteen

The café was one Smutty had never noticed in his previous trips to Bath, tucked away down a side street of designer boutiques. It figured—these were probably the kinds of places Giles thought it was normal to shop at. Smutty had rifled through Giles’s underwear drawer that morning, needing to borrow a pair of boxers as all his were overdue a date with the washing machine, and he’d come to the conclusion that not only was Giles in dire need of some more funky undies, but that the cost of Giles underpants alone must come to more than Smutty’s entire wardrobe. Hell, if you threw in his collection of pricey cashmere socks, it would probably cover all Smutty’s worldly goods, including the boat.

Which reminded him, after today he’d have enough money to fix
Freya
and get

moving again. He should probably be feeling excited about that.

“Hey, cheer up,” Giles said, turning to face Smutty as he reached the counter. “If you don’t like it we can go somewhere else, but they’ve got great carrot cake.”

“And what makes you think I’m a carrot cake muncher?” Smutty feigned indignation,

hands on hips.

Giles gave an impish grin. “I don’t know. The hair? The hippie upbringing?”

Smutty relented. “Okay, I admit it, I love carrot cake, but only if it has raisins and plenty of cinnamon.”

Once his tray was loaded with carrot cake and a pot of Sencha tea, Smutty gazed

around properly. It might be a tad on the pricey side, but the place wasn’t posh like he’d feared. With the Indonesian carvings covering the walls, ethnic fabrics and Buddha statue in the small courtyard garden, it felt comfortable. Smutty could imagine sitting in that courtyard with his mum and catching up on her latest travels. Starlight would probably joke about the place being run by trustafarians—hippies with a trust fund to fall back on—but she’d appreciate the decor and atmosphere.

“Can we sit outside?” Smutty asked.

“If you want to. It’s getting a bit nippy, though.” Giles led the way through the French windows and held the door for Smutty.