The Lord Won't Mind (The Peter & Charlie Trilogy) (45 page)

“You’re so lovely,” she said without stirring, staring up at him from the rock on which she was perched. “You two looked absolutely divine all naked together. It must be heaven to make love with you. Jeannot’s very lucky.”

Her open acceptance of their physical intimacy struck a quick, responsive chord in him; he did get weary of playing straight for all their straight friends. Charlie had always taken more naturally to the deviousness behind which he insisted they hide their life together. As if they were fooling anybody. “I’m not sure how lucky either of us is,” he said. It was the first opportunity he had had to speak openly to her. “Jeannot knows I tried not to let this happen.”

“Would your friend be very angry if he knew?”

“Yes, very. Worse than that. I don’t expect Jeannot to have any secrets from you, but you mustn’t let anybody else know.”

“Yes, of course. But you must be more careful, too. I’ve told Jeannot. If he loves you, he must put your feelings before his own and be grateful that he has had you even for a night.”

Peter looked down into the odd child’s face. His eyes wavered to the breasts nestled in the bikini top and then met her extraordinary gaze. A little spasm of tenderness for her passed through him. “You’re a funny one,” he said with a smile.

“No. I know about love and its pain. I told Jeannot to leave you to your friend but then he told me you wanted him, too. I was glad you could arrange it last week.”

He looked at Jeannot and met dark eyes full of longing. Anne was fanning the flame; the fire was not yet out. The inexplicable passion that had driven him from their first meeting came pounding up in him. His scanty trunks became a painful confinement. The presence of a witness was oddly liberating, giving a stamp of public recognition to their liaison, which in a more rational mood he would have preferred to avoid but which now added a unique thrill to the moment. On an uncontrollable impulse, he reached out and took Jeannot’s hand. The contact was like a blow, almost making him lose his balance. His chest heaved and his rigid sex slid up at an angle along the top of his trunks. “I want him, all right,” he said. “He knows that.”

Anne laughed softly. “It is quite obvious that you both want each other, but we should go back. Kiss as lovers should and then we must go.”

He looked into Jeannot’s mesmerizing eyes and felt a compulsion to do as Anne suggested. He knew that if they kissed, they wouldn’t stop there. Anne’s presence was no restraint. On the contrary, she was a spur. He must be getting depraved in his old age. His sex almost burst from its confinement at the thought of her watching him take her brother. He shook his head slowly.

“No,” he muttered to himself. He turned abruptly and stepped out onto a rock hanging over the sea. “You two go on,” he said. “I’m—”

He commanded his muscles to function and dove in. The shock of cold water immediately steadied him. He wasn’t very pleased with himself. What was this exhibitionistic bit? Letting Anne watch. Getting a hard-on in front of her. If he wanted to make a public spectacle of himself, why not do it with Charlie? That was who he belonged to, always had and always would; he would love to have it publicly recognized as a marriage, which was what it was.

He had figured out that he had been separated from Charlie, in the sense that he had thought they would never be together again, for exactly 146 days of his active sexual life—the duration of Charlie’s marriage to a girl (he didn’t count his year in the Army, during which he had been completely neuter, regardless of the way it had ended)—and in that time he had been had by about 200 guys. If he had had any great urge to experiment, he would have done so then. What was he trying to prove? That he could have somebody the way Charlie had him? Great. That was firmly established now, at the risk of destroying his whole life. He had to pull himself together. He would probably go to Jeannot tomorrow morning because he had more or less promised and, besides, there had to be a last time after today, but that would have to be it. So long as he was sure that his obsession with Jeannot no longer threatened his love for Charlie, he wanted that to be it.

He swam hard, determined to get back to the party before Jeannot and Anne.

Charlie immediately spotted the Courtins coming back along the promontory. They had probably been together all the time, Jean-Claude just out of sight on the other side of the rocky point. There was still no sign of Peter. He was doubtless off somewhere exploring on his own, the way he liked to do. Charlie took a long breath of relief. He had been a damn fool to be so upset by Guy’s silly, malicious remark. He would have been an even bigger fool to go rampaging after them, as he had been tempted to do. The fact that Jean-Claude was so obviously swooning over him wasn’t Peter’s fault; people were always falling in love with him. Who could blame them? He turned back to the group with a private smile on his lips and encountered Harry’s eyes. Harry responded as if the smile were intended for him; Charlie saw the truculence in his face lift slightly.

“You liking it here OK?” Harry asked, the attempt at cordiality coming out guarded and surly.

“Yes, sure. It’s wonderful,” Charlie said coolly. He never pretended to like people when he didn’t. Life was full enough of pretenses just winning some measure of acceptance.

“Course, you’re not here for long. Couple of months?” Harry launched into a snarling attack on living conditions in France, the strikes, the shortages, the vicious shopkeepers. “One thing,” he concluded, “you don’t have trouble here with staff. Not like at home.”

Charlie contained his mirth. Staff, yet. He wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that Harry’s parents were servants. “Servants aren’t really one of my big problems,” he commented politely.

“Guy lets them walk all over him, but I don’t go for that. I expect service and no crap.”

“Well, naturally,” Charlie agreed, with a tremor of spent laughter in his voice. He looked back down the beach and saw Jean-Claude and Anne still ambling along toward them. He felt a slight stirring of anxiety for Peter. His gaze shifted and then he saw him, the golden head moving along the water at an angle that would bring him to shore ahead of the Courtins. He was swimming flat-out, making speed. Charlie kept his eyes on him, the sight of him more than usually welcome because of the moment of anxiety he had felt for him. He watched as he ran up out of the sea, the beautiful symmetry of his body glistening in the sun. He stopped and called something back to the brother and sister and then turned and came jogging down the beach, all swift and lithe and bursting with youth. A great wave of love rose in Charlie as he watched his approach.

Peter circled around the others and dropped to his knees beside him. Charlie looked up over the swell of the crotch to the lightly heaving, flatly muscled abdomen, lingered over the broad full definition of the chest muscles, completely hairless, before he met the smiling blue of his eyes. Peter’s regard was eager and devoted; it touched Charlie with special poignancy because of having doubted him.

“I’ve been swimming and swimming,” Peter said. “It’s gorgeous.”

“You’re pretty gorgeous yourself.” He maintained his social guard, making it something he could have said to any of them, but he exerted a slight pressure with his arm against Peter’s.

A small frown creased Peter’s brow. After what he had been through, he would have liked Charlie to tumble him over, hold him in his arms, kiss him on the mouth. He giggled as he imagined this unlikely occurrence and put his hand on Charlie’s shoulder as he lowered his head to his ear. “You’re beautiful. Has anybody said anything about lunch? I’m starving.”

“I think it’s in the offing. I could use a drink.”

“So could I. Let’s try to get them moving soon.”

Peter chuckled. “You have only to say the word to Guy.”

Charlie sensed a keyed-up excitement in him. The exhilaration of a morning of physical activity? Sexy. He felt the same way himself. Perhaps there would be time before lunch to do something about it. He studied Peter’s hand where it rested on his thigh, long-fingered, big-knuckled, powerful. He inhaled the clean salty tang of his skin, underlaid by the faint musky animal smell that had always intoxicated him. He wished they were alone. It required a real effort of control not to touch him, caress him, lay his hands all over him. He looked at his large smooth nipples and smiled to himself, knowing what he could do to Peter when he touched them. His eyes lifted and swam into the extraordinary sweetness of his face, alive, responsive, incapable of any meanness. It was absurd for him to go on looking so like the boy of under twenty whom Charlie had seduced and whose first lover he had been. Charlie had only himself to blame that he hadn’t been his only lover. People generally took Charlie, quite accurately, for only a year or two older than Peter, so he supposed he was holding up pretty well, too.

They were leaning against each other, heads close, murmuring together when Jean-Claude and Anne rejoined the party. Jean-Claude stopped and brooded down at them; neither looked up. Anne took his arm and led him over to Guy and Madeleine.

Slowly, the party started to reorganize itself. They had their final plunges and gathered up their things and straggled back through the trees to the inn, a band of immaculate gypsies. Guy had taken all of the half-dozen rooms at the establishment for the day and they all went up to shower and change.

As soon as they were alone in the room where they had left a little traveling bag earlier, Charlie peeled off his damp trunks. Peter was immediately self-conscious and uneasily postponed stripping as if the morning had left some telltale mark on his body. His response to Jean-Claude was so intense and immediate. He hated it to be any less with Charlie, as it had been recently. He bustled about, keeping clear of Charlie, avoiding looking at him. He picked up the trunks Charlie had left on the floor and spread them out on the windowsill. He opened the bag he had packed for them.

“God, I’m thirsty,” Charlie said behind him.

“Yeah, me too. Let’s just wash the salt off and go find the bar.” Once it was established that they weren’t going to linger in the room, Peter was able to relax. He pulled off his trunks and placed them beside Charlie’s. He tossed fresh shirts and shorts out onto the bed. “Which do you want?” he asked. They wore each other’s clothes, or rather owned a joint wardrobe.

“I don’t care. I’ll take that blue shirt if you don’t want it. How goes the flirtation with Jean-Claude?”

Peter’s ears were instantly alert for undertones in the question but found none. It was light and playful. He laughed, “How goes yours with Guy?”

“I really had to lay into him this morning. He tried to make some insinuation about your trip to Paris last week.”

Peter’s heart skipped a beat. “How do you mean?”

“Oh, something about Jean-Claude having gone somewhere Wednesday night and whether you were really on the train. I don’t know what it was all about.”

Blood rushed to Peter’s cheeks. His hands trembled as he leaned over the bag pretending to look for something in it. “Silly fucker,” he said, hoping that his voice would work. “How did he think I got back?”

“I don’t know. I suppose you could’ve taken a plane to Nice. It sounds complicated even for an experienced old roué like you. Getting from Nice to St. Raphael to pick up the car. What if I’d come to meet the train? I almost did, as a matter of fact. Let alone the danger of running into somebody we know.”

Peter’s scalp crawled as he was presented with the risks he had run. He continued to rummage in the bag, but Charlie’s accurate account of his movements on Wednesday afternoon and Thursday morning had given him time to compose himself. He felt sure that his blush wouldn’t show through his tan. “Guy must be getting desperate for you,” he said dismissively. “Where’s the damn—? Oh, here it is.” He pulled out the comb he had been clutching all along and threw down the bag and turned as Charlie laughed.

“Oh, he’s mad for me. I got a gilt-edged proposition. I’m supposed to take Harry’s place.” Charlie was standing idly at the foot of the other bed, naked, a hip thrust out rather in the attitude of Michaelangelo’s David, his cloudy purple eyes smiling at Peter. His regard deepened as Peter’s met his. “I guess we’re irresistible,” he said. “You certainly are.”

Peter felt a twinge of apprehensive withdrawal. He picked up a shirt to cover himself. “I just happen to be in love with you, in case that comes as a surprise to you. How about that drink?” Even as he parried Charlie’s look, he felt everything happening the way he wanted it to. There was a welcome stirring in his loins. Had Charlie’s coming so near the truth frightened him into his senses at last? He looked at Charlie’s superbly tanned body, so like it had been almost eleven years ago except for a little more hair on the chest, still his first and only love. His sex jutted forward and nudged the shirt. There was nothing equivocal about that. His eyes dropped to Charlie’s imposing sex, extended, as he knew it so well, in prelude to erection, curving out slightly toward one thigh, heavy with promise and power. He threw his head back and laughed with the sheer joy of knowing that everything was working right and tossed the shirt from him.

Charlie looked at him approvingly. “That’s my baby. I’d recognize him anywhere. Are you planning to get a drink like that?”

“Drink?” Peter asked through laughter. “I just happen to’ve brought the stuff. The eternal optimist.” He snatched a tube from the bag and advanced to Charlie. As he did so, he watched the massive sex swing out straight from his thighs, lengthen thrillingly, swell, lift its darkly shining head.