“I’ve had better,” said Stanley, smiling behind his closed eyes. “With my own hand, because you missed a spot.”
“I did not,” said Devon, insisting, whispering as he kissed Stanley’s cheek and the corner of his mouth, tickling Stanley into a smile. “I didn’t miss anything, not even how your breath quickened when I curled my fingers like this.”
Devon reached down to cup Stanley’s cock quite gently, now that Stanley’s cock was soft against his belly. His fingers combed along the trail of hair that led down below Stanley’s belly button. He pressed at the base of Stanley’s cock, in the back where the flesh curved to become Stanley’s balls. The touch was quite tender, and Devon stroked for a moment, then drew away.
“You like me touching you there, don’t you. Just right there.”
“Yes,” said Stanley, a little breathless as his heart slowed. “I guess I do. Never had the patience to find out. Not when I had to be quick, so the other fellows didn’t find out what I was doing.”
“They were probably doing the same,” said Devon gravely, in a way that told Stanley that this was not something from a book or Devon’s notes, but something Devon knew himself. “Or spending their money going to a red lamp district.”
“We didn’t have one,” said Stanley. He opened his eyes and looked at Devon, who was concentrating on the path his hand was making on Stanley’s belly. “The village was too small, and the fighting—well, there just wasn’t any time.”
“And you and Isaac never—”
“I never even told him.” Stanley shook his head and reached to brush the dark hair back from Devon’s forehead, in the hopes that Devon would look up at him. Which Devon did, his eyes green and dark. “I couldn’t be sure of what he would say. I think he had a girl back home anyway, and besides, we both would have been shot. No court martial, just shot at dawn.”
“Right,” said Devon. “I keep forgetting that part. I’m only thinking that you might have been a little less lonely if you could have told him.”
Stanley was coming to realize that Devon was like that, concernedabout such things like having a friendship to offset the loneliness, the sensation of being adrift in the world without anyone to connect with, to be with. And that was because Devon himself was alone, alone with his books and his papers and his notes. His metal laptop. His goal of getting a master’s degree in a field that nobody else thought was interesting in the least.
That made Stanley a little worked up about it. If anybody had ever paid attention to Devon while he was talking about his interests, his paper, they would have seen the light in his eyes and heard the passion in his voice and been instantly drawn into how alive Devon was, how smart he was and how fine and good.
Stanley turned on his side so that he was inside of the curve of Devon’s chest so that the only thing Devon could do was wrap his arms around Stanley to keep Stanley from falling off the couch. Devon obliged him with a deep-throated sigh, pulling Stanley close, his legs weaving with Stanley’s in a way that bound them together in a steady, warm embrace.
Stanley felt a little sleepy now, which always happened after he came, but he wanted to let Devon know that he was interested in Devon, in Devon’s work.
“Tell me about the war,” Stanley said with half a yawn.
“You don’t want to hear about that,” said Devon. “Besides, you were already there, and know all about it.”
“I do,” said Stanley. “I want to hear whatyouknow about it, and your theory about the weather.”
“It’s just isobars and isotherms,” said Devon, his voice a little faint, as though he was prepared to defend himself if Stanley was teasing him. “Temperature anomalies and climate patterns. A cold front that stayed and stayed and stayed.”
“Why did it stay?” asked Stanley.
“Because it didn’t have anywhere else to go, not with the low pressure coming from the North Atlantic,” said Devon. “That part’s a fact, you understand, because the data proves it. My theory is about how that cold front affected what was happening at ground level on the battlefield.”
Stanley was quite sure that Devon’s theory was absolutely spot on. As Devon talked, he had a great many facts at hand, and described, in some detail, a chart he was developing that showed the various forces at work. And how the chart, though it might not be accepted as part of his thesis, was definitely helping him work through the patterns in motion at the time.
Stanley wanted to ask what the weather had been like at the end of the war, whether the sky had been sunny and blue, or whether it had been raining and, indeed, when the war had ended, which it had. Devon had said it had ended. Stanley opened his mouth to ask, but the breath turned into a yawn, and the rumble of Devon’s voice in Stanley’s ear where it was pressed against Devon’s chest was too powerful a lullaby to resist.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Devon woke up and got up from the couch carefully. Needing a distraction from waking Stanley, he puttered around the cottage, rinsing the dishes in the sink, straightening his papers and books so they weren’t all over the place. Mostly, he kept his eye on Stanley, who was asleep on the couch, looking a tad more rested, his eyes closed, his lashes dark on his cheeks. The point of all this, of every bit of it, was to make it easy for Stanley to stay with him.
He hadn’t quite told Stanley how scary it had been to watch Stanley vanish in front of his eyes. When he’d thought about mentioning it, the more important thing had been about how Stanley had felt about getting dragged back into the war, into the trenches, on the verge of watching his friends die all over again. Which they would have, except for Stanley’s quick thinking.
That had taken guts and a steel nerve, none of which were visible now, or even when Stanley was awake. He seemed, then, as always, an innocent youngster from a small farming community. He’d had no idea of the scope of the war, except that some foreign duke had been killed, and the idea of it had seemed glorious. Enlist, get a free trip overseas, kill some Germans, and come home again.
Devon wondered how quickly it had taken Stanley to figure out that this was not so. Probably only a handful of days, which had been driven home when the weather had turned sour in the middle of September. In Stanley’s world, it was November 10th, the day the entire battalion had been wiped out. It had been raining, and Stanley had had no coat. This thought above all others was driving Devon crazy; why the hell had there been no thought to bringing in much needed coats for the men?
Against his better judgment, but with the thought of keeping himself occupied while Stanley slept, he opened his laptop and looked it up. He brought up a brand new webpage that he’d not seen before, and he read it, half sick at what the details revealed. The rain had flooded the nearby River Ornes, wiping out the bridge, thus preventing supplies from coming in. For weeks before that, the supply corps had been battered by German attacks, and unable to get their trucks across broad expanses. Even if the river hadn’t been out, there wouldn’t have been any supplies.
Part of him wanted to tell Stanley about this, as if it would make any difference to him. What did Stanley need to know about the war? Now that he was with Devon, he could forget about all of that. Except that Stanley deserved a medal for not complaining more, about the lack of coat, about the weather, about any of it. He seemed stoic in nature, and might have determined it wouldn’t have made any difference anyway, so why waste the energy. Maybe the war had ground him down at that point to where his only defense was in pretending not to mind, until this had become ingrained within him.
All of this was too much. Devon needed to do what was best for Stanley. Not telling him what had happened to the 44thBattalion because Stanley didn’t need to worry seemed kind, but it was also a lie. Devon snapped the laptop shut and buried his head in his hands. Why had he ever thought that writing a thesis about the war, even from the distant vantage point of the weather, would be a good idea? He was an idiot, that’s why. He’d had high ideals that none of it would truly affect him, that he would be immune to the ethos of it all—untilStanley. Stanley, who was like a dream come true and who deserved better than what he’d gotten.
