Hammer & Air (12 page)

We were sitting side by side on the chesterfield, and he were peering over my shoulder at the book. Although he could read, he weren’t smooth at it, and he claimed to like the sound of my voice. I liked the feel of his breath in my ear and his chin on my shoulder, as he stared at the words and engravings with the big-eyed joy of the child I could not remember him ever being. I turned my head so I could see him smile, and his grin fell at the corners.

We kissed then, soft like, and without any urgency at all. It were just a kiss.

It went on and on. It followed us as I set down the book and we stumbled to the bedroom, and it enveloped us when our clothes fell, fumbled to the floor. It punctuated the satiny feeling of our skin, as we tangled our limbs, and the line between Hammer and Eirn faded, became thin, became lost in the simple need for us to touch.

Our breath came faster, not from sex but from want. I wanted him, not his mouth on my cock, not the terrible pleasure of orgasm, but just… just
him.
We panted in the darkness, huddled under the covers, our hands always moving, our mouths an endless mesh of tongue and lips and the hot taste of the other. I needed his arms around me so badly, I shivered with it.

We came—not because we tried—but because our hands, our bodies, were so twined that it weren’t possible not to, and our spend coating each other’s skin, simply changed the nature of the touch. Our mouths were never far from each other, and when they moved, it were to kiss a chin, a cheek, or the softness in the crook of Hammer’s neck, because I could lose myself there forever.

I were lost in there, we were lost in each other, naked and twined and panting, sated and needing and yearning, when we fell asleep, so deep in each other’s arms that I couldn’t tell, didn’t
want
to tell, which one of us were the other.

The bear probably watched all that, but neither of us cared.

I woke up again with the strange man at my back.

“No,” I grumbled, when he ground his cock insistently against my backside. I were sated, and besides that, I were with Hammer. We had meant something to each other this night. Or, better said, we had
acknowledged
that we meant something, something big, something so huge that it could stop the breath in our chest at the same time it kept our blood running in our veins. I didn’t want sex; not with a prince nor anyone else who cared to crawl in our bed.

There were a surprised grunt from behind me, and I snuggled deeper into Hammer’s arms. “You can stay,” I told him sleepily. “But tell that thing to stand down and go to sleep. We’ll play again later.” My own desire gave a sleepy twitch, but like I said, I weren’t in the mood.

There were another bear-like grunt, and then an arm came around my shoulders tentatively. I let it sit, and nestled closer to Hammer. I felt a clean, naked chest press up against my back, and a cleanly shaven cheek nuzzling my shoulder, and then I fell asleep.

When we woke in the morning, the bear were asleep on the floor by our bed. Hammer and I got up, bathed together, and ignored his baleful looks. Hammer went to go fix breakfast (he insisted it were his turn, which meant that he’d probably asked for something special from the cupboard) and I sighed and went to scratch the bear between the ears and have a talk.

“You have to understand,” I said quietly, “it’s always been him. You can play in our bed all you like, but Hammer will always be first.”

I still didn’t know the sly, crafty look that came into the bear’s eyes then. I’d know it eventually for what it were in its entirety, but that night, I discovered what it meant for me and Hammer.

The bear had taken my words as a challenge.

The day were clear, the blue light glinting off the snow and showing the black boles of the maple trees in stark relief. We spent the bulk of the day testing our limits. Together with Hammer, my fear of leaving the cottage behind weren’t so knife-edged. We ventured slowly, learned to find the moment when the falling feeling started, and using that as a guide (and not the full pain of vertigo that had flipped me flat on my back before) we mapped out the boundaries of our little space of enchanted land.

It weren’t huge—maybe twenty acres total, with the house as a center. Its shape were oblong—it seemed to make a special allowance to stretch over a cave in the forest on the west side of the border. It were a bear cave.

Hammer and I looked significantly at each other when we saw the mouth of the cave and then at the bear. The bear glared defiantly back.

Hammer went to go into the mouth of it, but, as he approached, he felt the magic grow stronger.

“The spell works at the cave mouth,” I muttered, almost to myself, “but probably stops in the middle.”

I looked at the bear. “Nice—you’ve got a home with a chesterfield and a rug in there?”

The bear gave a grunt and an indifferent shrug and ambled off in the direction of the house. I looked at Hammer, who quirked his lean mouth at me, and we watched the retreating snow-covered rug as it shook with every step through woods.

“What do you think?” he asked, sincerely wanting to know.

I looked at the dark fissure, dug into the side of a granite rise. “I think we shouldn’t go into that cave,” I replied thoughtfully, and he seemed to agree.

We went back then; it were getting dark, and the twilight purple of the woods seemed hushed and hallowed. We had no gloves so I’d tucked my hands in the folds of my sweater, and Hammer—who always seemed to run hot, even when we were children huddled under our one wool blanket in the orphanage—reached into my sweater and took my chilled hands in his. He warmed me, and we tramped back to the cottage like that, hand in hand.

That night we planned some more and read some more, and Hammer said we were running out of stories, so I wished for another book. I knew he liked card games, so I wished for a deck of cards—he’d won many games at the tavern, and I thought maybe he could teach me. We retired early, not much in the mood for fucking, but tired from our tramp through the woods, and I were not surprised, this time, to feel a naked man sliding down my front in the dark of the morning, as I nestled back into Hammer’s arms.

I groaned a little, but from pleasure, not resistance, and Hammer woke up enough to murmur in my ear. “You want him?”

“Mmmm…” The bear-prince were kissing a line down the front of my throat, laving each kiss with his tongue, and I arched backward into Hammer, my sleepy cock stretching and taking a look around.

It were greeted by the bear prince’s hard thigh, and a satisfied grunt from the man who had found my nipples and were suckling hard, and with insistence.

“Want…” I muttered, not sure what the words were. Hammer started to nibble on my ear then, and I felt his cock, hard and insistent against my backside. “Want you inside, Hammer,” I groaned, and the sound he made were happy, and not a little bit smug.

Hammer’s fingers popped into my mouth and I wet them—and teased them with my tongue and teeth. Hammer groaned in turn, his cock growing harder. He ground up against me, and my skin grew thickly wet with the dripping Hammer made before he spent. He slid his cock between my thighs and used that slickness to fuck the tender skin there. His cock rubbed my taint and my balls, and I gasped, because in a moment, it were all blood-swollen, tender, and throbbing with the touch, and the bear prince looked up sharply from my chest. Hammer’s face were clearly visible over my shoulder, and I knew well the half-hooded eyes and relaxed joy that could be read there.

I groaned again and thrust my cock against the bear prince’s stomach (he’d shifted by now) and there were a growl—possessiveness, challenge, it didn’t matter. There were sharp nips on the tender skin of my ribcage, of my stomach, on the jutting bone of my hip, and then…

“Auuuugghhhh…
gods
!” His mouth on my cock were heavenly and wet, his lips were hard around my shaft, his tongue were clever around my crown, and my whole body started to tremble.

Hammer’s fingers, wet from my mouth and from his dripping spend fumbled at my backside. I had been used, and used well, in past months—it took very little to stretch me, to take me past the burn and the pleasurable ache, and to thrust himself inside.

And it were that night all over again—a mouth at my cock and a cock in my arse—and I were half-blind and all crazy, my entire body tingling with desire. My hands flailed to the cover in front of me, and I remembered the way Hammer had come up to me the night before, soothed me with a kiss when I were done coming, and I yearned for it.

Then the bear prince turned his body—keeping his mouth busy with my tender flesh all the while—and I had a whole other worry.

There were his cock, long and thick and veiny, but not, thank the gods, as thick (
ahhh
….) or as long (
gods, Hammer, don’t stop
) as the one moving teasingly in my arse. He pushed it against my face, and I grasped it in my fist and started stroking. There were a growl from the throat swallowing my own prick, and I figured fair is fair, and began to lick the crown. I tasted it curiously; it were earthy, like Hammer, but not salty, and the crown were missing the soft flap of foreskin that I could use to stroke the crown.

The growl turned into a whimper, and I took it into my mouth, bold and tight, the way Hammer liked it.

The pressure on my own cock increased to the point of pain, and the sound that I made around the prick in my mouth defied description, but it were a wanting, needing,
begging
sound, and Hammer, who had always given me what I needed deepened his thrusts until my head fell back to his shoulder and the cock in my mouth fell out, becoming the cock in my fist once more.

I didn’t stop stroking, though, and the bear prince’s thigh moved, and his foot planted squarely on the other side of Hammer’s head, opening up his body and inviting me. It were awkward, especially with Hammer fucking me like a steam-driven piston, but I moved my other hand, the one not squeezing, stroking, tormenting, and fluttered my fingers through the spit-slick mess at the base of his prick and then behind the prince’s balls.

I found his arsehole all on my own, and used two fingers to thrust roughly inside, and the throat around my cock rumbled in surprise. The suction became brutal and painful, and the prick in my hand spat white come on my face and my chest, coating my eyes and my hair. It probably spattered Hammer, even as he grasped my hips and thrust inside me again and again and again.

Hammer bit my shoulder, heedless of the spume on my skin, and his heat, coursing through my body, crude and sticky and wet, were enough to set me off.

I came, flooding spend into the bear prince’s mouth, and he swallowed until he gagged on it, and then pulled back and let it coat his face.

Well then, we were even.

For many minutes there were only the sound of our breathing, roughly sanding the smooth darkness of the morning. There were a change in the light, a fractional brightening of the black sky in the window above the bed, and the bear prince sighed and rolled off the edge of the bed and onto his knees. He stood and looked lazily from a face glistening with spend and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. He moved to me with purpose, arrogance and satisfaction written in every line of his powerful body, and bent toward me with intent. Just when his knees hit the ground and his face neared mine, the light changed again, and so did he.

There were no mistaking the unhappiness and sheer frustration in his human expression as his skin shook out with the thick rug of fur, and his features lengthened into the bear’s.

He stared balefully for a moment, and if a creature could feel regret, then that is what he were feeling. The bear’s sigh were almost sad as he shook his great head and turned, plodding out of the bedroom and into the kitchen, where he flopped on his stomach with his muzzle on his paws. He didn’t show any urgency to get out, just a resigned sort of thoughtfulness as his long tongue licked fitfully to clean the short fur around his mouth and nose.

Once he were gone, Hammer’s arms wrapped around me tighter, and I shuddered in his arms, shaken, once again, by the terrifying arousal and freefall that were climax between the two great men in my bed.

“Should we…?” I panted at last, and Hammer took a deep breath before answering.

“No,” he gasped. “No. He don’t want out in the snow. He just don’t want to be in here to watch us.” He pulled his free hand from my chest and wiped it on the sheet in front of him, then pulled the shaggy hair back from my face. I closed my eyes and leaned into his touch, a tender reprieve from the violent passions that had torn orgasm from my body.

I didn’t even need to ask him what it were the bear didn’t want to see.

Winter progressed slowly. Long nights, short days, a desperate scramble to find things to do that wouldn’t make us crazy with the stillness of our bodies.

We were used to living in town, to working physically demanding jobs, even when snow covered the ground. With enough people to tramp through it and shovel it out, it never stopped the world the way it did in our frozen little mesa of time and season.

Hammer and I took the bear outside for the days. We tossed a ball around, skirmished, wrestled, climbed trees like boys. In desperation, we wished up a hatchet and started cutting up dead trees for firewood. Before two fortnights were over, we had stacked it up against the back wall of the cottage—the side with the least amount of snow.

That brought us to the mill. Hammer knew iron works; I knew machinery. We spent a fortnight at the very least making sure that the small stream nearby could grind grain or mash grapes and apples, or power the pump that kept the water flowing. We primed and repaired the boiler that kept that water hot.

After the first fortnight of finding these things, I started wondering why they had all seemed to work just peachy before we’d come about, and I asked Hammer if he’d been wishing for things to break so we’d have something to do. He raised his eyebrows in question, while using a wrench on the plumbing to the boiler, to make sure it wouldn’t leak.