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“Come here,” Stede says, and in the quiet room his voice comes out too loud; too commanding; alien to his own ears. He swallows it down. Softens it. Tries again. “Come here, Ed.”
In the low light, Ed is little more than the high arc of a cheekbone, a flicker of dark brown eyes. Stede watches them flit restlessly between the window, the black sea beyond, and the garment hanging on the wardrobe between them, so white and clean that it glows. The gap between them yawns.
When Ed had first spotted the dress, he’d frozen in the doorway. A strange, hunted air coming over him as his eyes had darted from it to Stede and back again. Now coaxed into the room and into a glass of rum, he’s circling it. Something wolfish and hungry in the set of his jaw.
“Won’t suit me,” he mutters, a lilt to his words that betrays just how badly he wishes they weren’t true. His lip curls, caught there between a sneer and dog-like fear. “Won’t fit me. I’ll dirty it.”
He turns away, towards the sea. Behind his head the lantern makes a wild halo from his hair; loose and curling over his shoulders, long as a woman’s. Ever since he shaved his beard, Stede has found himself drawn towards the comparison more and more. Ed’s doe eyes, his penchant for Stede’s silk robes, the soft curve of his mouth. He hadn’t thought twice when he found the dress on a ship they raided some time ago; folded gently in a ladies trunk, pressed in tissue and dried flowers. Stede took it, and then hid it; held onto it for this very moment.
And Ed is looking at it like he wants to eat it. Like he’s afraid it might eat him. Men born from violence, Stede has noticed, rarely know what to do with their teeth.
He crosses the room, goes to where Ed is stuck fast to the floorboards, silhouetted by the lamplight, caught hard between want and fear. Catches hold of his wrist. His warm, tattooed skin. Leap of a pulse beneath.
“How will you know, if you don’t try?” he asks, in the same way he might’ve urged the children to eat their vegetables, a lifetime ago. And then, slyly, because this is Ed and he straddles the line between bravado and bravery like nobody else: “Don’t tell me a mean old pirate like yourself is afraid of a frock?”
It gets the intended result. Ed’s eyebrows draw down, his mouth flattens — Stede thinks briefly and wistfully about black smoke, hot red eyes, the creak of time-worn leather — and then he’s yanking at the ties of his nightshirt, muttering, “Fuck it.” Scowling out from beneath his brows. Fingers fighting a losing battle against the knot he’s made of his shirt ties. “Fuck it, I’m not scared.”
Stede touches his fingers to Ed’s knuckles; taking over the unknotting when he relents without pause. Outside, the waves lap at the side of the boat; a comforting, rhythmic sound. The moonlight bounces off the water to tangle with the silver in Ed’s hair as he shakes it away from his face, chest and stomach now bare and soft, broad hands hovering inches away from the fabric of the dress. Hovering like he’s warming his hands on a flame. Hovering like he’s about to touch something sacred, and has to think twice about it. The dress is a handsome thing; frilled ivory brocade, blooming with freshwater pearls at the cuffs and along its edges. An expensive thing, a precious thing. Its pearls and beads alight with the lamp’s yellow flame. Ed touches it. Lifts it. Holds it to him as he would a woman, hair falling across his face.
It feels like a natural cumulation of several months of what Stede can only call ‘yearning’. A kind of yearning so insubstantial and abstract that he still doesn’t quite understand it, and knows that Ed has neither the words nor the self-awareness to explain anything. Not its roots, nor its source, let alone its name. It began with Ed standing tall and dark and still so unknown in Stede’s closet, smelling like sea air and hot leather, running world-worn hands over clothes so fine they slipped through his fingers like water. Those deep brown eyes wide as saucers in his weather-beaten face, gentle against the hard lines of him; the leather, the tattoos, the beard that advanced into a room long before the rest of him followed. So unlike the burning coal eyes that all the stories had prepared Stede for. Or maybe it began before that. With youth, with childhood, with birth, or before it: when Ed was just a soul, waiting to be plucked.
Whenever it started, it now ends with this. Moonlight, candlelight, the creak and groan of the ship settling around their heads. Ed, his strange, gentle eyes and his big, rough hands. Holding the dress to his bare front as he stares at himself in the polished brass mirror; his reflection murky and golden in its surface. Pearls winking in the dim light as he shifts to and fro, eyes hungry, melting, yearning.
Perhaps it’s not an end, Stede thinks. Even old men like us can get second chances.
The thought turns Stede loose; has him going to the bottle of rum he’d used to lure Ed into the room; his dirty glass at its side, its bottom sticky with the dregs. Stede pulls himself out a glass, and fills it; sips from it. Lets the heat of the liquor flow down and through him before he turns and asks, “Drink?”
Ed’s eyes don’t even flicker from his reflection. His hand slides over the front of the dress. “Never met a drink I could say no to,” he murmurs.
The room fills with the sound of the pouring rum. When Stede turns back, it’s to find the dress puddled on the bed, and Ed pushing his hair back from his face; half-lit, beautiful, wild about the eyes.
“I don’t know where to start,” he mutters, a note of want strung hard through his voice. The whites of his eyes flash. “How does anyone know where to fucking start?”
Stede sets the glasses down, unable to keep his mouth from curving into a smile as he lets the roll of the ship bring him close to Ed’s side. “Lets get all this out of the way first,” he says, softly, easing Ed’s fingers from his hair and replacing them with his own. “The buttons are a devil if one catch one’s hair in them.”
Ed glowers at him through the mirror, something petulant in the shape of his mouth even as he lets Stede gather his hair off his neck. “S’pose you know something ‘bout that,” he mutters, voice gruff. Stede feels himself colour, just slightly, as he wrestles a pin into Ed’s mass of thick hair.
“Some,” he says, eyes on the nape of Ed’s neck. “Not as much as you may think.” With his hair drawn up and away his neck looks pale, soft and vulnerable. A kiss there seems to settle him; has him flashing his eyes at the dress rather than Stede. That hunger; a hunger no food in the world could sate.
Like a handmaid, Stede dresses him. Settles the shift on over his piled-up hair, the light sliding through the delicate satin ribbon at the cuffs and at the hem. The gold necklaces around Ed’s throat swing forward over the frilled neckline when he braces a hand to Stede’s shoulder as he steps first one foot and then the other into the petticoat Stede fastens at his waist a moment later. The room is thick with their silence, the room a golden bubble against the blueblack night.
The petticoat nips Ed’s waist in; the stays that follow bring it in further. Have him standing differently, as though more aware of the way the lines of his body bend the night air. They give him a considering shine in his eye too, watching his figure change as Stede draws the laces closed.
“Too tight?”
“No.” He sounds breathless. Chin tipped up to bare his throat, eyes huge and dark in his face. “No, it’s perfect.”
His chest swells against the stays as he draws a deep breath in. The necklaces that rest in his chest hair wink dully in the low light. Covertly, Stede images pressing his face to it. The soft surge of flesh.
“You still think it doesn’t suit you?” Stede asks, as they both pause to take in the figure in the mirror. It seems to swim out of the murky surface, a white-garbed apparition neither man nor woman.
The reflection shifts. Touches its hand to its sternum. Says, “I think I might be coming round to it, y’know.”
His voice is low and husky; skin hot under Stede’s hands when he skates his palms down Ed’s sides, just to feel the dip of his waist. He’s never dressed anyone like this before. He hadn’t expected it to feel so intimate. Ed has shared his bed for close to a month now. Stede has held him through the wall-eyed aftermath of nightmares; surveyed his sleeping face by violet dawn light; tasted the hollow of his throat deep in the throes of midnight pleasure. The undressing was the intimate act; the ability to follow that serpent on his right arm through to its end on Ed’s left ankle. To press his fingertips to the constellation of scars on his hip, to count the swallows on his body, Ed murmuring in his ear, one for every five-thousand miles I sail.
The act of dressing Ed is reorienting Stede’s idea of intimacy, now. Just one of many things the man has shifted and made new.
They take a drink together; Ed dashing back his rum in one neat movement, as if to steady himself for what’s still to come. Stede drinks his slower, watching Ed turn about the room with his bare calves flashing between the thin folds of his petticoat. He can see the dark tattoo that winds serpentine from wrist to chest to hip to shin; scaled and undulating against his brown skin. The tattoos are pleasing against the ribbon-trimmed shift, just as pleasing as the body hair is too.
“Do you like it?” Stede asks, the rum warming his face. That, and the way Ed smooths a hand over his front, spearing Stede through with that heavy, dark-eyed stare. Even half-dressed, clad only in underwear, Stede can see a change in Ed. As if the feeling of silk and linen against his bare skin has gentled him; a wild animal after the thorn has finally been pulled from its hurting paw.
“I like it,” he says, simply. A piece of hair has escaped its pin, and now curls gently into his face; fluttering with his breath as he admits, “I don’t know if I’ll be able to take it off, once it’s on.”
It’s a familiar all-or-nothing sentiment, one that Stede has heard in a dozen different iterations since he and Ed first crossed paths. Won’t be able to get out this bed once I’m in it. Won’t be able to come back if I go. Won’t be able to stop kissing you once I start. For a man who lives life so close to the edge that he’s in danger of falling over it, it doesn’t seem like Ed has ever done much of what he’s really wanted.
He’s still watching Stede. The lamplight making a tiny double of itself in his black eyes. Stede kisses him, gently, runs a hand down Ed’s arm and feels all the tiny raised lines of tattoos needled with too much force into tender skin. Murmurs, “Let’s cross that bridge when we come to it,” and, “Now, more petticoats, my love.”
In a way that’s imperceptible to the untrained eye, Ed melts. The lines around his eyes ease. A smile lifts the corner of his mouth, body swaying close to Stede’s side. Times like these, Stede thinks that Ed’s been searching his whole life just for somebody to take the reins.
Stede knots the second petticoat around Ed’s newfound waist, thoughts straying fondly to undersized tees and the few inches of soft belly they display. Then comes the stomacher, scattered with little pearls and catching at the light as Stede pins it carefully to Ed’s stays. He dutifully holds the pins and holds still, offering a little conversation that grows more and more meandering as the level of rum in the bottle goes down. “The way I see it, nobody should live on land,” he mumbles, watching Stede press pins through thick brocade. “Make the sea the new land, eh? Fuck it.” Until finally Stede plucks the dress from the bedsheets, and Ed falls quiet. A gleam comes to his eyes, one that Stede has come to associate with trouble.
“Ready?” Stede asks him.
Ed doesn’t falter. “Ready.”
Even with the devil in his eyes; half-dressed and half-drunk, Ed is lovely. The curl of his hair, steadily escaping the captivity of the hairpin as the night wears on. The slip of firelight over tattooed skin. When he holds his arms out wordlessly for the dress, Stede comes to him as if summoned. I’d follow you until we drop off the end of the world, he thinks, as he guides Ed’s arms through the sleeves. Or until something awful swallows us whole.
Six pins bring the whole thing together. Six pins, flashing silver like tiny fish in the warm light, driven straight into the stomacher; Ed’s chest swelling above it with every slow breath in. And then it’s done. Stede steps back, and then back again. Ed touches his fingertips to the bird below his collarbone, its delicate outspread wings. A hush falls over the room, punctured only by the whisper of the sea.
Ed breaks the silence, as he so often does. A gruff, “Well, shit,” that Stede silently agrees with. The dress suits him well; muddle of a man that he is. Blue sailor tattoos and silver stubble on his jaw, wispy strands of his hair just flirting with his shoulders. As Stede watches, he shifts slightly, just enough to let the full skirts ripple. Gathers his steadily-escaping hair away from his face, and holds it up, turning this way and that with eyes clung hard to his reflection. Gone is the flinty coolness that Stede always associates with the man he’d first met, of the thick beard and worn-soft leather. Ed’s eyes are dark and melting, lids at half-mast as he takes himself in.
Stede blurts the first thing that comes to him. “If only I had makeup —” he starts, and then flushes, mind full of the image of smearing his thumb across a lax, lipsticked mouth. “I mean, it’s beautiful, you’re beautiful —”
Ed’s eyes dart to his own. “You think I’m beautiful.”
It’s not a question. Still hot around the ears, Stede nods.
“You’d be beautiful in anything, but this,” he gestures towards the gown; its pearls, Ed’s figure in it, the pleasing contrast of warm, brown skin and cool, white silk. “Well,” he adds, and shrugs, speechless. Ed is watching him, warily. All bare skin and lace and fiery pearls. Sweetly vulnerable. Fiercely beautiful. Helplessly, Stede settles on, “Didn’t I say you wear fine things well?”
Ed stares at him for one long, dragging moment; eyes searching, flicking over Stede’s face. He lets himself be searched, stepping closer to Ed, who still looks like he’s waiting for the other shoe to drop. But whatever he’s looking for in Stede’s face, he mustn’t find it. When Stede touches his knuckles to Ed’s cheekbone, he leans into the touch. A smile tugs at the corner of his mouth. Rueful. The devil in his eyes again.
“I love it,” he admits, gaze straying back to the mirror as he touches again at the tattoo under his collarbone. “It feels right,” he murmurs, eyes bright. “I thought it’d feel like a lot of things, but I never knew it’d feel right.” His smile widens and then blooms; turns wicked as he presses his nose to Stede’s temple. “Thank you,” he sighs into his ear.
Stede smiles, catching at Ed around the waist and drawing him close to his front. “For you, anything,” he says, settling his hand at the point where the stays draw Ed in the smallest. “And for what it’s worth, I think that’s the best way to feel in one’s clothes.”
The skirts whisper against the floor as he pulls Ed away from his reflection and into the light proper. Candle flame, the cool, indifferent light of the moon. Ed’s hair smells like pipe smoke and night air when Stede turns his face into it, heart pressing close to the back of his mouth as they sway together. More embrace than dance. In Ed’s ear, Stede whispers, rouge for your cheeks, gold earrings to match your necklaces. We’ll comb perfume through your hair, anything you want…
The dark sea stretches out endless around them. For one moonlit moment, they’re the only people in the world.