Scrap Metal (21 page)

“Let me tell you about last night with Archie,” I said, not looking up. “It was meant to be drinks with a whole bunch of my friends. But when I got there it was just him, and—yeah, I got drunk, and I went home with him and I got into his bed. It was what we always did. Then I started thinking about you, and I got straight out again.” Cam’s mouth had fallen open slightly. I thought I’d better clarify. “I couldn’t let him touch me. I don’t think I could let anyone but you touch me now, and I don’t care how long I have to wait for that.”

What had I been expecting? For him to jump into my arms or make me a little speech in return? As it was, he walked straight past me and carried on towards the sea. The sun was in my eyes and I couldn’t make out his expression. I followed, stumbling over the long strands of kelp. “Cam? Are you all right?”

“I’m fine.”

His stride was powerful, elastic. He was moving like a man with huge weights lifted from his shoulders, and I didn’t dare imagine that what I’d told him had produced this effect—just jogged to keep up with him. He was wearing the jumper I’d given him on the night of his arrival. It almost fit him now, and a moment later I saw why. Without breaking stride he pulled it over his head, exposing a torso still pale but warm as new milk in the sun, skin smooth over compact muscle. Helplessly I thought of the seal bride again, how she’d cast off her human skins and returned to the ocean. Her people were there to greet her today, heads and tails held high as they basked, making the shapes of smiles or crescent moons.

“What are you doing?” I enquired.

“It’s a beautiful day.” His words came to me in tatters on the sharp sea wind.

“Not that beautiful. You’ll catch your death.”

“No, I won’t. Not now.” He tied the jumper round his hips and suddenly took off at a flat run.

The seals, safe here for centuries now, gazed placidly as he made for the water’s edge and pelted along the shore, sending spray flying. I wished I shared their insight. There was a child in me who wanted to strip off too and dash around on the sand, but I’d had to move so far away from boyhood pleasures that I couldn’t close the gap. Cam reached the deep inlet that bounded this stretch of the beach and circled back to me, still at top speed. I’d had no idea how strong and fit he’d become. He was beautiful in motion, his feet barely touching the sand.

Automatically I put out a hand to catch the one he was extending to me, and he grabbed me as he passed, pulling me after him. I gasped and burst into laughter, letting myself be hauled round in a huge half circle. “What are you
doing
, you bloody nutcase?”

“Running.” He reeled me in, and I went willingly, a fish jumping out of the water to be caught. “The sun’s so bright. I just want to run, or…” He threw his arms around my neck. “Or dance. Dancing would do. What’ll we dance to, Nichol?”

“Absolutely anything you like.” I was grinning helplessly. The beach was deserted, but no amount of spectators could have made me let go of him. He was already swaying to his own inner beat, drawing me with him. I hooked my thumbs into the belt holes of his jeans. “The Killers are nice in the open air.”

“Yes. Oh, yeah—‘Human’ would be good.” He held me tighter, his hips creating for both of us the song’s exuberant four-time. He began to sing me snatches of the lyric, laughter shaken, endearingly off-key, bloody thrilling in warm breath against my ear, the enigmatic query about whether we were human or…

“Dancer,” I responded, clasping him. At this moment most definitely dancer, an armful of sunlight and energy, ready to burn up and disappear. I kissed his cheek, wanting to make him human again, human enough to stay with me, and he turned his head hungrily. His mouth met mine.

Our movements slowed and stopped. He laced his fingers in the hair at the back of my head and kissed me with such solemn passion that my fears changed and I thought I’d be the one to burn or melt into sunlit seawater and vanish into the sand.

I shuddered, the world falling away from around me, and I cried out in protest as he ended the kiss, pushing me a little way back. “Cam…”

“I want you.”

“Oh, thank God.” I rested my brow against his. “Yes.”

“I know right here might not be practical…”

“Right here if you want.”

“I’m probably hallucinating, but…I can see rainbows over the top of that cliff. What’s there?”

Reluctantly I loosened my grasp enough to turn and look. “It’s spray from the Cliaradh waterfall.” I hadn’t been there for years. Not for the joy of it, anyway—it was a favourite place for Harry’s sheep to escape to when they broke through the fence, and I’d spent several hard winter nights with a torch between my teeth, extricating their sodden woolly bodies from the crevasse. As with most other beauties of the island, I’d lost the sense of its magic. And now, with Cam in my arms, I remembered.

The waterfall cascaded from the cliff top in three huge drops, each of them broken by a horizontal outcrop of black rock. Towards its base, about twenty feet from ground level, the curtain broke up into countless smaller down-rushing fans, each of them throwing off a rainbow halo of spray. To see it in full glory you had to get close. It was tucked back into its own ravine, the notch it was still carving into the lip of the cliff. The first intimation of its presence was its voice, a growing subsonic roar from behind dark walls of gorse and thorn.

Cam pulled ahead of me—we’d walked up from the salt-marsh plain hand in hand—and I let him go, the better to enjoy the sight of his first sight of it. He was still naked to the waist. As I watched, he began to run again, unsteadily this time, blindly grasping at the branches of ash saplings. The track became a muddy ribbon here, treacherous underfoot. Around the foot of the falls was a tumble of ferns and fallen rocks.

He drew closer and closer, reaching out to catch the spray, and then when he came to the edge of the night-black pool where the cataract plunged to meet the stream, he did as I had once done—came to a swaying halt, steadied himself, and lifted his hands high in an instinct of greeting, worship, exultation, something I’d never been able to define for myself but saw clearly in his face as he turned back towards me. His smile was wide and dazzling, his eyes their most knee-melting indigo.

“Come here,” he called to me across the mud and the vast music of the falls. “Nichol, love, come here.”

I didn’t know which of us knocked the other to his backside in the mud. We collided hard. I grabbed him in time to stop him cracking his head on a rock, but then we were down, fighting, oblivious to hurt. He pulled my coat off my shoulders and aided my scramble out of it, dragged me with him onto the stones. My jumper went next, and the T-shirt underneath, both of us moaning in frustration at the time it took.

“God, Nichol. Any more layers?”

“That’s what you get when you undress a farmer.”

“It’s like peeling an onion. What am I gonna find in here?”

His hands were on my belt buckle. I lay back to let him find out, gasping at the chill of spray-soaked rocks on my spine. He undid my belt and my zip then gave a sob of laughter at the thermal long johns underneath. “Oh, these should be passion killers.”

“Are they?”

For answer he dragged them down, the jeans on top of them and my boxer shorts beneath. My naked backside scraped on stone, but I could hardly feel it, or somehow the cold shot answering fires into the root of my cock, and he gasped as he exposed me. “Oh, Nic.”

“All right for you?”

“Bloody lovely. So big.”

“I’ve been waiting for you. Let me see you too.” Together we got his trousers and briefs down round his thighs. His shaft sprang up hard and ready as soon as it was released. “You can’t have had any complaints,” I whispered, painful shudders of excitement running through me.

He was a beautiful dark Gael under all his disguises, his cock arching out of a rich black pelt, deep rose red and striated with veins. We reached for one another on the same half-starved impulse. I grabbed his backside and pulled him tight against me. The hot press of him was almost too much and I cried out, a prayer to the sundrenched sky that I not come right now, that I hold on at least for…

What? I didn’t know. We thrust and struggled in the mud, grazing knuckles and buttocks, mouths locking together then tearing apart when the need to breathe or yell became too great. It was enough—more than. I would give it all up any second, catapult my soul to join the ravens wheeling over the cliff. He was there too, bruising me with his grip.

“Cam…”

“Yeah, sweetheart?”

“Want you to fuck me.”

“Ah, no. Till the cows come home—when we’ve got the equipment, but not…”

I jolted up to kiss him. “Now. I trust you.”

“Then
don’t
, stupid. Why? Why would you trust me?”

“Because you wouldn’t do it to me if you weren’t clean. And you
are
gonna do it.”

“Nichol, I am damn well…” he stiffened in my arms, and I thought I was going to lose him, but he caught his breath and rode the crest out, “…not. Oh, Jesus. I had one lover in Glasgow. Not that I loved him. I hated him.”

“Bren McGarva.”

“I never let him near me without a condom.”

“I lost count of my boyfriends in Edinburgh. I was wild, though, not stupid. I’m clean too.”

“This is still bloody madness.”

But he reached behind me and dragged my coat across a flat slab of rock almost under a wing of the falls. I choked on laughter as we struggled up onto it. We were going to get soaked. Already stray droplets were bouncing off his back and shoulders. I should have been freezing my arse off, but he was making me burn.

He laid me down, pushed an arm under my head, cradling me. “Ah, Nichol, you daft sod, it’s not just condoms we’re lacking.”

“Can manage without if you go easy. Have done before.”

“Me too. It hurt like fuck.”

“You won’t hurt.” Reluctantly I pulled out of his embrace. I needed to lose the restriction of my clothes, the jeans and underwear tangled round my thighs. I knelt up for long enough to deal with those, and then I was naked under the waterfall, lungs shallow and tight with the wild joy of it. “Anyway, I can improvise.”

“You look like a sea god. What are you on about?”

“Make you slippy. A bit more than water and sweat, anyway…”

I pushed his knees apart and leaned over his cock. His shout bounced off the cliff face as I sucked him into my mouth. Partway there anyway—I’d need a bit of practice before I could tackle such a lovely length as that in its entirety, and I briefly wondered how I thought it was going to fit in my backside. That would be up to him, though. I almost lost track of my intentions in the pleasures of tonguing him, learning his shape, starting to taste pre-ejaculate…

“Stop.” His hips lurched, and he clenched a hand in my hair, stilling us both. “If you want me to do this. Stop now.”

He was hauling deep breaths, his face flushed and starred with spray. So beautiful. I sat up and moved to straddle him, but he uncoiled with a wildcat’s grace and seized me by the shoulders. Bore me back until I was flat out on the rock, staring at him and the rainbow zenith. “You want this?”

“Yes. Yes.”

He knelt between my thighs. He slipped his hands beneath my buttocks and I lifted for him, moaning when he shifted his grip behind my knees. And I was wrong—it hurt like hell, when at last the head of his cock found my entrance and pushed in, so bad at first that I couldn’t cope, and grief and frustration rushed in on me like thunderclouds. “God! I can’t…”

“Hang on a second.” He leaned right over me, letting go of my legs and embracing me. The only hope for me seemed to be clutching him back, clinging for dear bloody life. Arms weren’t enough—I raised my thighs to clasp his hips, and the angle changed, and he slipped inside all the way.

I lay sobbing. He held me tight, keeping my shoulders off the rock. I let my head arch back, and his first thrust tore from me the howl I’d been trying to contain, a cry for all the lonely pain of the year just gone, all the hunger, the cold endless nights. Again, his shaft jolting hard into the core of me, and I howled for my ma, for the brother who had been flesh of my flesh. Again, and his stroke found my prostate and I came roaring back into the moment, ghosts flashing off in the sun. Just me and Cam. Me and this perfect lover, fucking me hard beneath the waterfall. I writhed and bucked to meet him, matching his pace. He was rigid, muscles bunching under my hands.

“Come on,” I grated out for him, tight against his ear. “Come on. Harder. Yes!”

Liquid fire burst inside my spine. I took fire like an oil spill, all over myself—felt my coming blaze up in my balls, my elbows, the arches of my feet where they were flailing in the air. My toes curled and convulsed with it. My arsehole clamped and gaped, and my muscles locked, squeezing frantically up and down the length of his cock. My scream shot skyward once and then I couldn’t make a sound, my mouth contorted in silent wailing as I spurted against his belly, a fierce endless spending that turned the sun blood red in my vision and almost stopped my heart.

“You,” I choked out, when I next got a breath, when he was still riding me down the far edge of the explosion, thrusting at me carefully, his shaft still massive in my arse. “You. Let go.”

He buried his face against my neck. I wrapped a hand around his nape, squeezing his wet hair. He thrust twice more and went desperately still. “Nichol!”

“What is it?”

“I can’t…”

“Oh, you can.” I organised such muscles as I had at my command down there, the ones not numbed out in cold fire, to give him a great hard squeeze. My balls were still straining, aftershocks of climax still surging through me. “Come on,
ionmhainn
. I love you. Give it up.”

He groaned as if the pain of death was on him. I clung to him, seeing him through it, and yelled out as one of the aftershocks burst up into something else, a joyful wrench of my whole being. His wet heat shot into me. He burst into racking tears.

“I’m sorry,” he rasped, powering up one more time into my body, holding us both briefly high in the zenith, up with the clouds and the ravens, safe in the hands of God. “I’m sorry. I love you. I love you too.”