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Thank God, their eyes did not meet across a crowded ballroom.
No, he was properly introduced to George Everett, at a dinner party. He was uncomfortably aware of his age the entire night, and although Everett was older than John, they were contemporaries – or the nearest thing, that night. Such a judgment would have been impossible outside of the collection of people that composed the dinner. John had paid little attention. Before the introduction to George Everett, he heeded nothing; after their introduction, he heeded only the signs of Everett’s attentions. What might have been translucent beauty in a boy was maturing into an equally compelling but more powerful grandeur. George Everett made promises without ever opening his mouth.
John would later realize that this did not place him under any obligation to keep those promises.
Not that Everett’s given word had much value either.
These were later discoveries. John was drawn in less by Everett’s character than by his frank interest and a familiar sweep of dark lashes.
Everett stopped him as he was leaving, with one hand on his shoulder. John wasn’t sure if it was the power in Everett’s gaze or grip that made his pulse race, but perhaps it was both. John caught a spicy, gold scent from Everett’s body, with a low, beckoning undercurrent, and John felt himself flush. There were intimate connotations to the base notes, and it was impossible to tell if it was a parfumeur’s trick or the man himself.
But Everett was speaking. John could not have flushed more, but he felt newly embarrassed. Awkward, off-balanced.
“Do you fence?”
“Yes,” John said. Everett’s hand still gripped his shoulder, making coherent speech a more difficult task than might otherwise be supposed. He didn’t add that he had to fence, which would have been graceless and stupid, but it was a close thing.
“Then you must come and see me,” Everett said. “Soon.” He named a salon unfamiliar to John, and withdrew his hand. “I am often there on Wednesdays.”
For all the banality of the sentence, the promise behind it caught John’s breath.
Culloden broke John open, and after it his wounds did not heal. He reached for Hector at every draught, woke in cold sweats, and found himself forgetting the rules. However present the danger – and, like God, it was omnipresent – he was too giddy with pain to care for it. Pain was the first constant. It flowed through John’s body with his blood, icy anguish wracking him with every beat of his heart and intake of breath. The pain made him careless.
Heaven help him, that George Everett was the first to warm him.
Not that appeals to divine mercy would do much good in the current situation. Certainly, not when one so eagerly entangled oneself with Everett, welcomed that long mouth and those hard hands. The knowledge Everett possessed was sublime, but it was far from holy.
What George Everett knew, he communicated through his hands, which molded other men into the shape of Everett’s desires. John did not mind this, in fact most of him could be described as grateful for the certainty of Everett’s knowledge. It was inescapable and overpowering, you followed after it like the dust and feathers following Thales’ bit of amber. To know George Everett was to become his intimate, at least physically. He made you so.
John was happy to comply.
Or, no: not truly happy. Certainly he was complicit, and terribly willing. He found a freedom in surrendering to Everett’s wishes, made explicit through subtleties like the hot brush of one finger pad against the inside of John’s wrist, or, later and once clothing and social mores had dropped in a soft pile by the bed, with the certain, forceful grip of his hands on John’s hips, buttocks, neck. But he was not, after all, happy to melt and twist so readily beneath George Everett’s hands. The pleasure was great, but it was terrible as well.
He would not describe Everett as an easy lover, but his demands created the pull between obedience and command, and that was a pattern John already knew. He fell into it readily, found a kind of ironic, paradoxical protection in being George Everett’s lover.
What John needed was healing, and though he welcomed the shelter of George Everett’s ambiguous emotions (and transparent desires), it was no cure for his illness. It was not even a balm for his wounds.
Everett looked ready to turn away, and John found himself unwilling to end the conversation on such a note. “Shall we wager supper on the events of the day?”
He was pleased with himself, he’d guessed correctly: Everett’s face shifted from satisfaction into a (mildly) surprised and (genuinely) engaged expression. “As a prize?” he murmured. John found himself far from indifferent to the lowered voice.
Which reaction was, all things considered, not a surprise. He’d been far from indifferent to George Everett’s physical manipulations all evening. But supper was not the prize for which John hoped. He shook his head. “As a consolation.”
It was like eating opium. He knew Everett before he had any familiarity with the drug, so the accuracy of his simile would only be proved much later, after a degree of time and trouble that was certainly not worth the linguistic enrichment, but it would nevertheless be proved. Everett was dark and hungry like the drug, beguiling in a manner thought unique to women, certain as a general of his right to command. It was strange, confusing, utterly intoxicating. The memories evoked by Everett’s dark eyelashes, his long mouth and limbs soon disproved, and his mouth and hands were the more decisive and powerful forces.
Although John would not have said it was impossible to manage without Everett – who could intoxicate one even through the briefest touch or glance – certainly Everett did nothing to help pull him back to polite society. He was careless of the rules, with or without George Everett. And George was secretive, but he was not discreet.
In hindsight, George Everett would be merely one among many mistakes that year, and the year after. John thought it a bit unfair that his mistakes had such a tendency to hang upon his personality traits.
Everett’s mouth moved in a leopard’s grin. “Succor to the defeated men on the field of battle?”
John looked down to pull his gloves taut, hiding his own milder smile. If he and Everett maintained eye contact for much longer, he wasn’t certain he’d ever be able to excuse what would follow. “Something of the sort, yes.” When he looked back up, Everett’s lowered lids and thick eyelashes hid most of his eyes. It did nothing to decrease their magnetism.
“We’d better not disclose our clubs ahead of time, then” Everett offered. “Too much temptation to throw the match.”
John laughed, unexpectedly. He couldn’t keep his surprise out of it, not altogether. But at least no one looked. “Not sportsmanlike,” he said. “I quite agree.”
Everett was still faultless, but the light seemed to fall on him differently now. John thought he seemed easier. Until you met his gaze. John shook hands with him, and realized the tranquility did not hold up under physical contact. The observation was not the deterrent it might have been. He found himself looking forward to Wednesday.
“Worrying after your immortal soul?”
John inhaled quickly: surprise, drying sweat, Everett’s musk and myrrh perfume, sex; he’d thought Everett was asleep. “Late for that,” he said.
“Early . . . I should say,” Everett murmured, lips shaping John’s ear out of the dark, and his hands curling around John’s arms.
“Would . . . you?”
“Oh, yes.” Everett’s mouth found the column of John’s neck, moved downward to trace his collarbones with wicked, mobile lips. John moaned when Everett scraped his teeth, hard, against the skin. “Will you do what I tell you?”
“Yes,” John sighed. “Yes, anything."