Scrap Metal (22 page)

We’d pushed it too hard. I wouldn’t have undone a second of it, but I knew, helping Cam struggle to his feet, that we’d driven our first time to its far extreme. I wasn’t sure I could walk, and he was shaking so deeply all I could do once I’d got him upright was hold him, bracing him against the tremor. He was bedraggled, soaked through. I was no better, but I felt my greater strength and solidity, my capacity to keep warm with his skinny frame—less strapping now than I’d thought, his wild flare of energy spent—pressed against me.

I kicked at the coat with one foot. No good. It had saved me from scouring my back raw on the rock, but it was waterlogged, useless for shielding him. “Come away,” I said. “Let’s find your clothes.”

“Give me a minute.”

I stroked his back, rocking him. I’d stay here all day if he liked, naked as I was. Longer—I’d known what it was to have him hit climax inside me, and just now I had no more ambitions. I’d stay until the waterfall turned our flesh to mineral, and there we’d be, a sign for future lovers who found their way here…

Voices echoed up from the track. I caught my breath and listened, and Cam raised his head from my shoulder. No, not lovers, not unless someone had brought a coachload of them here. It was May, the opening of the tourist season, though I’d thought we’d be safe for a week or so longer on this far-flung strand. Walkers. A lot of them from the sound of it, and I recognised one voice among the chatter—Craig from Whiting Bay, whose many summer jobs included guiding wildlife treks.
If you’ll just make your way up here, folks, and mind how you go… These are the
Cliaradh
waterfalls.
Cliaradh
means “singing” in Gaelic, and if you listen close you’ll hear…

“Shit!” I let Cam go. He scrambled with me to collect our sodden things. My jumper, his too. He was still in his jeans, just about, but mine were on flagrant display, hanging from the gorse bush where they’d landed when I’d chucked them aside. My boots, one wedged in the rocks, the other underwater. Stifling horrified laughter, we grabbed everything up, and I shepherded him urgently through a gap in the bushes. “Up there. Quick.”

A tiny sheep-track led into a tumble of boulders. Praying that only someone who had had to track sheep there would know of its existence, I bundled Cam ahead of me into the sheltering rocks. He tripped and went down on one knee, but we’d come far enough, I hoped—Craig and his walkers were ten yards away from us, well within earshot if we scrambled round anymore.

Catching Cam by the armpits, I drew him into a niche and sat him down. My T-shirt was quite dry. My jumper too, somehow. I shoved them at him, and when he hesitated, pushed them over his head by main force, tugging the sleeves the right way out. I clamped a hand across his mouth, and we stared at one another, frozen. He was decent—covered, anyway—but I was bollock naked.

“Well, I don’t know about singing,” a cut-glass English voice declared, “but I don’t hear those strange noises anymore. What do you think those were, Craig—badgers?”

“Don’t be ridiculous, Geoffrey.” That was Mrs. Geoffrey, I assumed, just as Sassenach and penetrating. “Everyone knows there aren’t any badgers on Arran.”

“Maybe it was foxes, then. The vixens make terrible sounds when they’re in heat.”

I crushed my palm harder to Cam’s mouth. Mercifully he shot out a hand to cover mine, and I squeezed my eyes shut, silently convulsing. Poor Craig—he’d told me maybe one in ten of the tourists he brought out here actually noticed the falls. The rest complained about the mud or all the wildlife they hadn’t seen.

“Maybe it was wildcats. Or seals,” he offered dubiously, and I lowered my face to Cam’s shoulder and kept it there until—finally,
finally
—the group finished its inspection and began to filter away down the track.

I jerked my head up. It was that or suffocate. My lungs filled, with a kind of sucking bark not at all unlike that of a seal, and I fell into Cam’s arms, howling with laughter.

Cam said, in a perfect Counties falsetto, “Poor Geoffrey,” then dissolved himself, clutching at me, sobbing for breath.

When finally we calmed—and it took a long time, far more than reaction to our close call pouring out of us—he was still shivering, his hands on my shoulders still cold.

“Here,” I managed, reaching for the other sweater. “Put this on too.”

“Nic, I’m wearing all your clothes already.”

“I’m okay. Warm again now.”

“How can you be?”

I pressed a hand to my own chest then reached out to his. “Tough island bastard. City boy.”

His tear-streaked face shadowed. “I’m not a city boy. Not anymore.”

Instantly I was sorry. He’d invested a lot—everything he had—into this island life of mine. “No, you’re not,” I agreed, stroking his hair, which was starting to dry into pale flaxen spikes in the sun. “This is where you live now, here on this freezing rock with me. Just give yourself awhile to acclimatise. Tell you what…” I shook out the coat, which was still clammy wet but had a detachable lining. Undoing a few poppers, I extracted the lining and wrapped it round both of us. I pulled him close to me. “There. Now you need to eat.”

The cheese and fruitcake were squashed but still good. He pulled a face when he saw the combination, but I tore off a little of the cake and pushed it into his mouth before he could protest, following my advantage rapidly with a piece of the rich salty cheddar.

“
Nichol
,” he said in disgust, but that was at me, not the taste, and after a moment he grinned. “Yeah. Really lovely. More, please.”

We ate in companionable silence, huddled together on our rock. I knew I should make some moves towards getting dressed, but now I was warm again I loved the feel of my just-fucked skin tingling from the waterfall, sore enough in my deep core to remind me how thoroughly he’d had me.

As if he’d read the thought, he glanced up at me. “Are you okay, then?”

“Oh, you know. I can feel where you’ve been.”

“Ah, Nichol—if I’ve hurt you…”

“No, you daft git. You were so good with me.” I rubbed my brow against his, shivering into solemnity. “I’ve never felt anything like that. I never want to lose the feel of you inside me.”

“Well, next time—lubricant. A mattress. I’ll show you how good I can be with you then.”

I shuddered.
Next time.
And—oh, that husky, half-smiling promise…

“We don’t need lube for everything,” I whispered, unable to believe that my cock was twitching again. I kissed away salt crystals from the corner of his mouth, tasting allspice and cinnamon. “Are you still cold, love?”

“Yes. Make me warm. Lay me down.”

It was simpler this time. It wasn’t as slow as I’d have liked, not as much proof for him that I could take it gentle, make it last, because the moment I’d rolled with him down into the moss, stones and seagrass I was lost, but that didn’t matter. He was ready too, urgent and electric, pushing up his hips to seek mine. It was where we should have started—just a roll around, cock to straining cock—but God, it was sweet now, climax seizing both of us before a minute was up, together this time, wringing gasps and muffled cries from us, and then—after an exchange of weary kisses, barely formed endearments—bearing us both off resistless into sleep.

The sun was still high when I woke. At this turn of May—the astrological Beltane, Ma had told me, the sun reaching fifteen degrees of Taurus, the ancient cross-quarter—the bright afternoons would stretch out almost to infinity. Cam was sitting up, watching the glittering shore. He must have woken before me. He’d taken off both of the sweaters I’d forced on him and tucked one behind my head, spread the other over my belly.

“I’m not much better at wildlife than poor Geoffrey,” he said, “but I think I can see an otter.”

I could barely move. The marrow of my bones felt filled with honey. I pushed up, yawning. Yes, there he was—a big
beist-dubh
, a sea otter, tawny spine turning silver as he dived around in the kelp. “Oh, yeah. He’s a beauty, all right.” I slipped an arm around Cam’s shoulders. “I think… Yes, look. He’s got something.”

We watched in silence while he dragged a fish almost as long as himself out onto the rocks. The sounds of his crunching carried clearly up from the shore, and when he’d finished his meal he settled to wash, licking his spiked coat into order, either unaware of us or untroubled by our presence.

Cam folded his arms on his knees and rested his chin, his expression wistful. “I wish I really did belong here,” he said after a few moments. “I wish the place was…written into my name, the way it is in yours.”

“What—Seacliff? Don’t you like being a Beale, then?” I squeezed his shoulders. “It’s a good old clan name.”

“Yeah, but it’s not mine. I told your granda that because it’s really common around Larkhall. I…I do really come from there.”

I took this in. “Are you really Cameron?”

“Yes.” He turned to look at me. “Yes,” he said again, with a deep, soft emphasis. “Always your Cameron. But I never knew my dad any more than you did yours, and his last name’s meaningless to me. I feel like I don’t have one.”

“Well—you know, Seacliff’s not my dad’s name either. My ma took her maiden name back after he left.” I smiled, remembering. “She said she should never have been fool enough to give it away. And she called her sons Seacliff too, legally changed it on our birth certificates. Part of our matriarchal heritage, she told us.” I hesitated. I laid a hand gently to the side of Cam’s face. I didn’t think I’d ever see my mother’s ghost again after today, and I couldn’t have said why, except that I had a sense she had been waiting around to see me made happy.

“If she’d lived, she’d have seen you as one of her sons. I’m certain of that. So…” A piece of golden seagrass was swaying in the sunlight, softly back and forth as if it wanted to catch my attention. I reached to pick it, and I twisted it round in a circlet and knotted it, and I took his hand. The little loop I’d made fitted closely round his third finger, not at all a bad guess. I twisted the long ends around and around, and made another knot, and kissed his palm to comfort him as one hot tear and then another rolled down his face. “So there you are,
ionmhainn bhan
.”
My fair-haired beloved.
“Cameron Seacliff.”

Chapter Twelve

His heart was still full of secrets. I knew that. Even after we’d redistributed enough of our clothes to make a civilised journey home and were slowly walking back up the beach, shoulder touching shoulder, he ducked his head and evaded my questions about Bren McGarva. I was happy to let them go. I was full of a dazed joy that seemed to renew itself every few seconds, like surf on the incoming tide, obliterating everything that had gone before, and no matter what his past, Cam was here with me now. I’d make him forget, now he’d let me close enough to try. I’d start the world again for both of us from scratch.

It felt as if the universe approved my plans and was trying to wave me on through. From the moment we got back to the farmhouse and found Harry by some miracle still out on his day trip, I concluded fate was on our side—we could walk in unmolested in our sandy, dripping clothes. We could have a hot bath and stay in it until it went cold, discovering that it would accommodate a bruised, loving, near-exhausted fuck, and after that we’d stumbled out to catch up on our afternoon’s work. I’d been rehearsing in my head some kind of story about rescuing a sheep from the waterfall, but knew I couldn’t have got through it. The smile hovering over my heart would have turned into a grin, and I’d have told the whole helpless truth.

Which I wanted to, but not yet. I knew all the things Harry would say, and I wanted for a little while to keep this new happiness, this bright sacred flame, just between Cam and me. If Cam had asked me to acknowledge him, I’d have stood up to the old man straightaway, but predictably he shuddered at the suggestion, so I buttoned my lip and left all of us in peace.

Harry inadvertently cleared our path by coming down with some kind of cold and taking to his bed for a few days. It was nothing serious, he testily insisted, and he wouldn’t have taken a blind bit of notice of my suggestions that he rest and go easy, but Cam could influence him where I failed. I stayed out of that exchange, drying dishes, letting the two of them get on with it.
There’s never been a day when I haven’t worked this farm with my own hands,
gugairneach comhachag
!
A barn-owl chick, that was, presumably a reference to the spiking blond hair.

I pressed the tea towel to my mouth to stop a laugh.

Aye, but if you don’t rest now, you might end up more poorly still, and then who will hound the life out of Nichol all day? You know how he is. He’ll be up till all hours, playing his records too loud.
And the laugh I’d heard, rumbling and reluctant, had been Harry’s, not my own.

He wouldn’t have a doctor, so between us we took such care of him as he would allow, and his absence from around the barns and paddocks gave us a sweet wild freedom for our first days as lovers. If we finished our rounds early, I could climb with him into the truck and drive out to places I’d loved since childhood and hadn’t dared go near in my bitter adult grief. You mostly travelled Arran on the road that followed the shore, but there was one route called the String which led directly across the island’s belly, through rolling hills now turning green and gold in the May sun.

I parked the Toyota in a layby—no tourists this time, and the landscape around so spectacularly open we’d have plenty of time to see any coming—and we followed an ancient drover’s track over the crest of Beinn Ordha and into the sheltered valley beyond. I’d meant us to stop in the copse of birches I’d always thought would do for mac Mhaighstir’s Summer poem, but we never got that far—were stumbling to a halt, tugging at one another’s clothes, as soon as we were well out of sight of the road.

Still, I could see them. “The fragrant birch tree is branching over the cairn,” I whispered, and Cam laughed and told me to say it in Gaelic, and I got as far as the
bidh am beith
before we crashed down onto the blanket I’d tossed onto the heather.
“Brùchdadh barraich,”
I managed, rolling him onto his belly—
the fresh young buds
—and then was silent, concentrating everything I had into fucking him with such gentle ardour that he would never look back, never think again of Bren McGarva, the last person to plough and possess the shuddery inner recesses of his flesh. I could keep him safe, keep him my Cameron Seacliff forever.