Page 55 of The House of the Red Balconies

CHAPTER 17

The weather turned warm with the sunrise the next morning, and Zo was out in the garden, sitting in his chair, before Hylas arrived. Hylas had put him to bed the night before, kissing him good night with that tenderness that made Zo’s knees feel weak in a surprisingly good way.

Hylas came out with his tray of tea and buns as usual, but he stopped outside his door and stood looking at Zo with his wistful smile for a long moment.

“I wondered if you’d be out here,” he said, “since it’s so pleasant.”

Zo stretched luxuriantly in his chair. “The winters are so short here. I just start to brace myself for the real cold, and then it never comes, and the whole thing is over.”

Hylas came and took his usual spot by Zo’s chair, setting the tea tray on the ground. After a moment’s hesitation, he laid his hand on Zo’s knee, a tentative, light touch. He looked up into Zo’s face.

“It is good to see you in your garden again,” he said. “You make it more beautiful.”

Zo shifted the fabric of his robe, which was loosely belted and opened at the front. He tugged it out from under Hylas’s hand so that his palm lay on bare skin. He waited for the reaction, wondering if it would be shock—“Not out here!”—or solicitude—“You’re not wearing anything underneath? You will get cold!”

It was neither. Hylas looked up at him for a moment, frozen. Then he looked down, intent, as he ran his hand slowly up Zo’s thigh. He bent his head to put his lips to Zo’s skin, brushing them across in a kind of inchoate kiss. He touched the other side of Zo’s robe, lifting the fabric slightly, and looked up at Zo for permission. In answer, Zo unfastened the tie that held his robe closed. He let Hylas fold back the other half of the robe himself.

Zo leaned back in his chair, bared to the gentle sunlight in his garden, and twined one leg around Hylas’s shoulder to pull him closer.

“This is not uncomfortable for you, my love?” Hylas’s voice was rough, his long, calloused hands warm on Zo’s body but stilled as he waited for an answer.

“Not at all.”

Hylas bent to stroking and kissing Zo’s thighs and belly, his hands and mouth gentle and undemanding. Zo looked down the landscape of his own body, feeling like something precious under Hylas’s reverent touch. Hylas was breathing hard, almost panting, as if he were the one being touched.

He probably thought of himself as fumbling, but to Zo just then he looked powerful, a man with the self-control to wait decades with this fire of yearning banked inside him and still, when he finally allowed himself this, to put his lover’s needs before his own.

He nuzzled Zo’s still-soft cock with his lips and then hesitantly slipped out his tongue to lick. Zo made an encouraging noise. He let Hylas explore raptly for a while, longer than he thought he could bear this kind of slow build-up, but that morning it was just what he needed. When he was fully hard, he reached down and wrapped Hylas’s long fingers around the base of his cock.

“Just put the tip in your mouth and suck,” he instructed.

Hylas looked up, cheeks flushed, lips red. “Just the tip?”

“Well. To start.”

Hylas nodded obediently. Zo found himself lifted up, Hylas’s hand under his ass—holy angels, he really liked that manoeuvre, didn’t he—his legs draped over Hylas’s shoulders, his whole cock in Hylas’s mouth. He clutched the arms of the chair and moaned, levering his body up, pushing into the wet heat of Hylas’s mouth.

“Ah! Keep going—you don’t need any instructions, you beautiful man.”

He really didn’t. He’d only needed to be pointed in the right direction, and he sucked Zo with raw eagerness. In broad daylight, in Zo’s garden. Zo looked up at the white clouds in the sky. The wind rustled the olive leaves. He writhed in Hylas’s grasp, shouting aloud his need, totally abandoned to it, no longer even speaking Pseuchaian.

“God—angels—oh, Hylas, don’t stop! No! Stop, slow down⁠—”

And of course Hylas couldn’t understand any of that, and Zo came, arching his back and clinging to the arms of the chair and swallowing a cry that would have echoed off the mountainside if he had let it out.

He also came in Hylas’s mouth, and Hylas gulped it down. He released Zo’s wet cock and set him gently back down in the chair. Then he sat back on the grass and fumbled for the tea things, pouring himself a bowl and taking several quick sips.

“It’s not that … I don’t like the way you taste. I love it.” He wiped his mouth, chest heaving, and swallowed another mouthful of tea. “It’s just … different.”

“Mm,” said Zo intelligently. He lay back in his chair, his robe still spread open, climax humming in his blood.

“Are you all right?”

“Mm. Mmm.”

Hylas chuckled. “Oh. I see.” He sounded pleased with himself.

Hylas sat and ate buns and drank tea—or at least that was what Zo thought he was doing—while Zo stared at the sky a little longer.