Forth into Light (The Peter & Charlie Trilogy) (39 page)

“I’ll get him home and let George take over. I wish you could come too.”

“Me too, but it isn’t just Judy and the blasted pictures. I’ve got to find out who’s handling Costa’s case so there can’t be any slipup. I’ll try to bring him back with me. It’ll be easier with Jeff on the island.”

“You’ll come back tomorrow?”

“Don’t worry. Judy’s calling Tim now. That’ll take care of the pictures. I’ll get hold of the police this afternoon. Make sure George is doing everything at that end. Tim will probably want Judy to come right back. I’ll be on the afternoon boat.”

“No later. You promise?”

Peter looked into Charlie’s eyes and smiled, gratified by his insistence. “Promise? After this morning, do you think I’m apt to get delayed?”

They touched hands and Charlie picked up his bag and turned back to the bed. “Okay, kiddo. Let’s get going.”

Jeff opened his eyes and gazed at Charlie. He rose slowly and went to him and stood close to him, as if taking shelter against him. Peter was glad that the boy looked too knocked out to attempt a seduction. He could still feel Charlie enormous within him. After the years of being denied that sublime instrument, he was feeling acutely possessive of it. He hadn’t had time to wonder what the sudden reversal signified. As he moved to the door, he wished he was going with them.

“I’m sorry, honey,” he said to Jeff, “but when you get over the shock you’ll see what a shit he is. Not that that’s always a big help. Pay attention to anything Charlie tells you. We know something about these things.” He gave his mate a quick kiss and stood in the door and exchanged a wave of the hand with him as they started off down the corridor. Jeff stayed close to Charlie, but a step behind, and Peter noted that they didn’t touch.

He closed the door and remained beside it for a moment, preparing to return to Judy. Without Charlie to preoccupy his attention, he felt more confident of making her last day a happy one. If he could get his mind off Jeff. Maybe she would help. He called her name as he started for the other room.

Charlie led the way to Mike’s suite. He wondered if the boy was going to hold onto himself long enough for them to get to the boat. For the last fifteen minutes, Jeff had seemed to swing from deep plunges into his private torment, when Charlie could feel him moving closer to the edge of total collapse, back to a sort of vast yearning for him to control and protect him, for him to assume responsibility for the functions of his being. Sex was an almost palpable element in it. If the boy was going mad with unrequited love for Mike, what was the meaning of it? Did he react sexually to everybody? He thought of Peter’s afternoon with him and assured himself that there was no chance of his finding himself naked with the boy. He was far from attractive in this distraught state. Touching, yes. He appealed to all his tender protective instincts, but these could quickly give way to impatience if he didn’t pull himself together soon. The hysteria wasn’t completely convincing; in the midst of it, he was capable of curiously knowing moments. He had proposed going home. When Peter was out of the room, he had become very still and his passionate eyes had searched Charlie’s.

“Would you take me home?” he had asked in his husky voice. “I’d go if you’d come with me. Wouldn’t that be the best way?”

He had promised to be such a burden to all of them that Charlie had felt he was doing Peter a favor by agreeing. He was glad to go, anyway; he had accomplished his purpose, but couldn’t be accused of horning in on Judy.

They marched down the corridor toward Mike’s rooms. Jeff suddenly flung himself against the wall and buried his head in his folded arms. “I can’t,” he gasped.

Charlie wondered if tears were coming now. Once they started, he wouldn’t be able to do anything with the boy. He stepped close to him and put a hand on his back. Jeff was immediately in his arms.

“Not here, for God’s sake,” he snapped, disengaging himself.

Jeff stood in front of him, his head back, his eyes closed, his prominent Adam’s apple working. “I can’t go back in there,” he said dully.

“That’s all right. Give me the key. Are your things all together?”

“There’s just a bag. It’s packed. There’re two envelopes on the desk in the sitting room that Peter wanted.”

Charlie took the key and went to the number indicated. He found the envelopes and picked up the bag from the middle of the floor and returned to Jeff. The boy took the bag and they fell into step again. The danger of collapse would recede, Charlie hoped, once they were out among people.

They made their way out of the hotel and he hailed a taxi and hustled Jeff into it. He got in beside him and ran his arm along the top of the seat and gave his back a pat. He felt all of Jeff’s body flow to him. Whatever he felt for Mike, he would doubtless soon find someone to console him. He dropped his head back on to Charlie’s arm and closed his eyes and was seized with another fit of trembling.

“Take it easy, kiddo,” Charlie said. “We’ll get a cabin on the boat. You’ll be able to rest.”

He let his eyes roam over the strong profile. The way his long dark hair fell over his forehead was an invitation to toy with it. The straight brows, the straight strong nose, the long hard line of the jaw, and the swelling curve of the neck were all elements that he would like to capture on paper. It was the mouth that his eyes kept returning to. The curve of the lips was exquisitely chiseled and there was a slight irregular fullness in the middle of the upper one that he found fascinating. It was a masculine face, but its vestiges of androgynous adolescence exerted the pull he had felt before. He suddenly saw Sarah clearly in it. He was holding Sarah’s son and being tempted by him.

He felt a welcome little twinge of distaste. Surely he could offer the boy comfort without allowing it to go further. He could understand how his yielding, not quite innocent defenselessness could have incited a Mike Cochran to sadistic excesses but it aroused only compassion in him. Thoughts of Peter long ago when he had thoughtlessly hurt him passed through his mind. The terrible sorrow of youth. He wanted to heal Jeff with blameless caresses. He hugged the boy closer. Jeff’s lips parted and he turned his face toward him without opening his eyes and closed his mouth on his arm in a simulacrum of a kiss. His trembling stopped.

Charlie’s eyes dropped to Jeff’s hands where they lay on his thighs. They weren’t wide, but had long strong-knuckled fingers and nicely shaped nails, good, sensually stimulating hands. He gathered this knowledge, along with every other detail about the boy, with an intense interest that people rarely stirred in him. He sat back, cradling him on his arm, glad that lustful thoughts remained in abeyance. His continued scrutiny of the face and body beside him satisfied the sensuous curiosity of his eyes.

When the taxi pulled up amid the bustle surrounding the departing boat in Piraeus, contact between them was broken as they unloaded bags and paid the driver and bought tickets and mounted the gangplank. Jeff became an automaton at his side. Charlie was greeted expansively by the personnel on board and he was obliged to exhibit his public personality for a few minutes while a cabin was assigned to them.

When he turned to look for Jeff, he saw him standing at the head of the companionway, clutching the rail, his head averted, his shoulders heaving. Charlie hurried to him and seized his arm and rushed him down the stairs. He found their cabin and thrust Jeff into it and locked them in as the flood he had been expecting burst over him. Jeff stood helplessly while his body was wracked with sobs and tears streamed down his face.

Charlie unbuttoned his jacket and removed it and supported him to one of the two bunks, safely narrow and uninviting and got him stretched out on it. Jeff flung himself about on it as the sobs were torn from him. Charlie sat beside him and untied his tie and unfastened the button of his collar. Handling the boy so intimately, feeling the smooth skin of his neck, uncovering the deep hollow at the juncture of his collar bones, witnessing this explosion of raw emotion, unsettled Charlie’s control. He couldn’t leave him in this state, but he knew that if he stayed he would be putting himself to a perilous test.

Jeff communicated a child’s wild longing to be held. He hesitated another moment and then stretched out beside him and gathered him into his arms. Jeff was so slight that there was plenty of room for both of them. Charlie choked with the sweetness of holding and comforting him, but in this position, body to body, there was no way of concealing any response that might be stirred in him. He doubted if Jeff would be aware of it, as all his hurt and grief and shame poured from him. He murmured comforting words to him and kissed his wet cheeks and stroked his hair. Perhaps he could get them both beyond sex.

Holding him, their bodies clothed and his own motionless, permitting his hands no greater intimacies than those of a man with a child, he found himself approaching somehing more inexplicably thrilling than the act of love; at moments, he felt himself being carried toward a strange sexless orgasm.

Slowly, Jeff grew quieter and at last was still. In the silence, Charlie heard the anchor being raised. After the passage of more minutes, while the silence was filled with the low throb of engines, Jeff finally opened his tear-cleansed eyes. Their heads were very close together on the pillow facing each other. Charlie felt as if he were looking into his soul and his heart began to pound at the passionate surrender he saw there.

“It’s going to happen, isn’t it?” Jeff said.

He spoke with such a matter-of-fact assumption of an understanding between them that Charlie couldn’t immediately believe Jeff knew what he was suggesting. Charlie had been so caught up in the strange delight of holding and comforting the boy that at first he had been scarcely aware of the growing rigidity of his sex. At troubling moments, he had been able to believe that Jeff was past caring about it. Jeff’s question made it impossible to ignore it; it suddenly stood up hard against them both.

“Do you think it’s a good idea?”

“I know gods sometimes play with mortals. It’s nice for the mortals, but it can’t really mean anything. I know that.”

“I wish I did. You’re such a funny one. I’ve watched you grow up and all of a sudden you’re somebody I’ve never seen.”

A pale smile hovered on Jeff’s lips. “I know. You’ve always seemed so aloof and unapproachable but now you’re all alive and beautiful. You seem even younger than Peter.”

“Did you make love with him?” Charlie asked to clear away any possibility of doubt. Peter never lied, but he almost wished he had so that he would be relieved of all scruples.

Charlie stroked his hair and felt for a moment that that was sufficient joy. “I feel very shy with you,” he said gently. “You’re all knocked out. I don’t want to do anything that’ll make it tougher for you.”

“The only thing that would make it tougher is if you don’t take me. I’ve dreamed of both of you taking me. Now you’re holding me and you have an erection. I want so to hold it, but I won’t do anything unless you tell me I can. I can feel it growing and growing. It’s making it right for Mike to have left me.”

“Are you sure of that?”

“Oh, Charlie. If you’d just let us be naked together, like Peter, it would be almost enough. Does it make any sense to be dressed when we both have erections?”

Charlie raised himself on an elbow and looked at the beautiful mouth and his lips parted. Was it possible
not
to kiss it? If he kissed it, he would never be able to stop there. He could still feel Peter’s ecstatically leaping body in every fiber of him. This morning, he had broken through the fixed cold guidelines he had set for himself and awakened in both of them a fresh passion. Peter would probably think it an unforgivable denial of life to reject this young plea for comfort now. He had held Jeff and learned all of him with his eyes, an act of possession very nearly as complete as the meeting of bodies. Anything he did with Jeff had nothing to do with Peter.

He lowered his head slowly and kissed him. To his surprise, Jeff didn’t stir. He simply parted his lips and let Charlie do what he liked with his mouth. Charlie had never encountered such an utterly passive body; he found it deeply provocative. Jeff was challenging him to release him from sorrow. He unbuttoned Jeff’s shirt while he kissed him, and drew back to look at the chest he had laid bare, the chest he had seen a thousand times, transformed now by being uncovered by him. He loved the uncompleted look of his body. It was like a work of art at the point of being brought to fruition, rich with potentialities. He stroked the fine dark down on the chest and ran his hand over his abdomen to the concavity that began above the top of his trousers.

“Go on. Undress me,” Jeff whispered without moving.

He opened the fly and pushed the trousers aside, uncovering undershorts with buttons. He unfastened them and eased them down so that the body was naked to the first outcropping of pubic hair. Still, Jeff lay inert. It was like unwrapping a package. He could see where his sex was confined, a significantly straight hard line.

He lifted him enough to work an arm out of a sleeve and then removed the shirt. He stood and went to the foot of the bunk and removed his shoes and socks. He took a grip on the trousers and shorts and drew them down and stripped him. Jeff’s sex lay out rigidly on his belly, looking astonishingly adult for the boyish body. He straightened and surveyed all of him, his heart racing, wondering if he could find the source of his potent appeal.

His eyes moved from big feet up long coltish legs to slim hips. They lingered on the concave belly and the bony pelvic formation and moved up over the still-underdeveloped chest to the wide shoulders, and looked into Jeff’s eyes. They yearned up into his so unabashedly that his stillness became a miracle of submission and Charlie’s heart accelerated breathlessly. So far, he probably had done little more than his mate had. Simple lack of desire would have made it easy for Peter to check himself.

“Now you. Please,” Jeff murmured.

“I’m not going to be as restrained as Peter.”

“I have some——” Jeff began in his deep voice.