That look, combined with those words, left Ephraim almost too breathless to say what he must. “Then, Mr Hull, you had better lock the door.”
A gleam lit those dark eyes. Mr Hull leapt up and dashed for the door. His hooves tapped against the floorboards as he went, as rapid as raindrops on the roof. Belatedly, Ephraim recognized the sound which had greeted him every morning since Mr Hull’s arrival.
The deadbolt fell into place with a click and a thud. Mr Hull turned from the door and regarded Ephraim with a look of one who beheld something precious beyond words and could scarce believe his fortune.
Ephraim, for his part, had not yet quite determined this wasn’t all a dream.
Mr Hull’s return proceeded more slowly and with more caution than his mad dash for the door. As if he were a medieval maiden approaching a unicorn in the wood and feared to frighten it away.
Nothing could frighten Ephraim away now.
Mr Hull reached him at last. He knelt before him again and brought his hands up to cradle Ephraim’s jaw in his fingertips. He closed his eyes, tilted his head, and, finally, lowered his lips to meet Ephraim’s once more.
The second kiss proved still more potent than the first. Again astonishment opened Ephraim’s lips; again Mr Hull slipped his tongue within, inspiring sensations Ephraim couldn’t have begun to imagine but for which he knew he would hunger forever after. Yet despite his ravenous state, starved as he’d been these past forty years and more, he still required breath, and this forced him to break off the kiss long before he felt sated.
A low moan escaped Mr Hull’s lips. “Mr Grigsby…”
“Ephraim.” His own name fell from his mouth without thought.
Mr Hull cocked his head to one side, a velvet ear trailing down to his shoulder.
“Call me Ephraim.” Words which Ephraim had wished to say so many times before but only now found the courage to pronounce.
A wondrous smile revealed Mr Hull’s eye-teeth as rather more numerous and pointed than most fellows.
“Ephraim,” he echoed in a low murmur. It reverberated with a reverence that thrummed through Ephraim’s own rheumatic ribcage and sparked a flame in his heart.
“And… may I call you Sven?” Ephraim ventured, though he hardly dared to ask.
“If you like,” said his clerk, easy enough. “Though Hull is nearer to my true name.”
“Hull, then,” said Ephraim, the name feeling both familiar and strange without its title.
Hull bent to grant him another kiss.
“If I may be so bold as to suggest, sir,” he murmured against Ephraim’s lips when they broke apart to breathe, “shall we retire to your chamber?”
Ephraim hadn’t expected matters to progress so quickly. Then again, he’d never expected them to occur at all. And far be it from him to deny Hull now, when everything he’d spoken and shown had so far outstripped all Ephraim’s hopes. He managed a brisk nod.
Hull, grinning, took Ephraim’s hands in his own to draw him up out of his chair. He kept his hold on one hand and laced their fingers together—to Ephraim’s delight—and led him away upstairs.
Ephraim had never given a great deal of thought to his bedchamber beyond practical necessity. Certainly he’d never imagined inviting anyone else into it. He gave thanks he kept it tidy and had nothing within to shame him; though, as he glanced over the desk, chair, wash-stand, trunk, and clothes-horse, he wished for a touch more in the way of decoration. The walls, at least, had a few of Lofthouse’s early watercolour landscapes, before he’d hidden his art away altogether from Ephraim’s eye.
Hull, by contrast, had eyes for Ephraim alone.
No sooner had Ephraim bolted the door and shut the curtains than he found himself entangled in Hull’s embrace once again. On instinct he seized Hull by his lapels, their crisp edges crumpling in his fists. Before he could even think to apologize, however, Hull had shrugged his frock coat off altogether and let it fall in a heap to the floor. A gentle blue hand took Ephraim’s wrist and guided his fingertips to waistcoat buttons. Ephraim hadn’t undone another man’s waistcoat since university. His fingers trembled with more than age as he fumbled his waythrough the button-holes until the waistcoat joined the frock coat at their feet. He felt more conscious than ever before of how the heat of his own blood failed to reach his fingertips as he stripped away the warm wool to reveal the shirt beneath. Hull seemed like a bonfire under his touch, his inner blaze burning through the thin linen to warm Ephraim’s hands, the diaphanous fabric doing nothing to disguise the muscular dappled-blue flesh behind it.
Hull slipped out of Ephraim’s grasp to untuck the hem of his shirt from the high waist of his trousers and strip it off over his head with all the carefree ease of a youth about to dive into a mountain stream. Ephraim steadied himself with one hand on the bed-post and gazed in awe at a figure few clerks could claim. The rippling brawn of an honest tradesman unveiled before him—arms and shoulders accustomed to hauling far more than ledgers, their broad expanse narrowing to a taut waist, the navel just visible above the fall-front of the trousers, with a trail of dark blue hair over it leading down beyond.
Then the fall-front tore open beneath clever blue hands, and the trousers likewise fell away. What they revealed appeared rather like other gentlemen’s, save the colour, and more than Ephraim had ever hoped to see again in all his days. A sapling grew from amidst the dark blue moss, standing at half-mast with a delicate upward curve to the tapered tip just peeking out from beneath its foreskin. Perfect, to Ephraim’s eyes.
And yet, despite all his evident beauty, Hull hesitated.
“There is one more thing I must show you,” he said.
Ephraim, hardly able to speak for all his want, nodded.
Under Ephraim’s enraptured gaze, Hull turned—every movement slow and measured—until he faced away from Ephraim altogether, so that nothing should obscure the truth.
