The Stars Over Bittergate Bay

Chapter 9

9

J onas had tried to make himself care about the garden. He’d looked at the overgrown weeds and the half-empty beds; the wind moved the leaves around plenty, but he still needed to rake. He’d gotten halfway to the shed before he admitted to himself that he wasn’t going to be able to do any of those things in his current condition, which was almost painfully aroused.

Kissing Sidney had awoken something in Jonas that had been suppressed for so long that Jonas had genuinely thought he’d killed it, and he was rather unhappy about its unexpected rebirth. The feeling started in arousal, which was frustrating enough. But if that had been all it was, it would have been quelled in the shower, where he jacked off so fervently that it made his injured shoulder hurt.

He thought about their bodies, certainly, too close beneath the blankets in the bed on the boat. How Sidney’s long, perfect fingers would feel around him. Stroking him. The problem was that Jonas came to the memory of that whimper of desire that he’d coaxed from Sidney when they kissed, the feeling of Sidney’s hair between his fingers. And those really weren’t the sorts of things he generally masturbated about.

Jonas scrubbed his body in a perfunctory and intentionally abrasive manner, washing his hair with the same quickness, trying to cleanse himself of the urge to kiss Sidney again, which clung to him like a bad smell. Irritatingly, when he stepped out of the shower, he was half-hard again. Jonas resolved to ignore it. He towel-dried his hair and shaved his beard, first taking it short, then fully off. It felt better. More himself. Then he pulled on his glamour, draped his towel around his shoulders and walked into his bedroom at the same moment that Sidney and Delilah stepped in from the hall.

Delilah vanished in the blink of an eye, before Jonas could even speak to reprimand her. She might still be in the room, or she might have incorporealized through the floor. Jonas sighed. Living with a ghost was tiresome at times.

Sidney stood, staring, mouth agape. Jonas told himself that he felt nothing at all, and certainly not the urge to preen which would have been particularly stupid. Still, every moment that the fully clothed Sidney spent staring at fully nude Jonas made Jonas’s arousal less avoidable or deniable. He tried desperately to remember that he was annoyed at the intrusion to his private room, and the rest of his life.

“Can I help you with something, Quince?” Jonas asked. Speaking seemed to remind Jonas that he could move, and he walked to his dresser to open the top drawer where his undershorts sat folded atop two marble phalluses, and why was he thinking about those now? Gods help him.

“Delilah had said you had a uh— a rather large, uh—” Sidney stammered, and Jonas glanced over his shoulder at him. “A telescope.”

“Right,” Jonas said, his hand resting on top of his underthings in the drawer. He should have taken them out and put them on. But the deep flush that colored Sidney all the way beneath his partially open collar was distracting for some reason. “And you wanted to see my rather large telescope?” he asked. Sidney coughed.

“Excuse me.” Sidney put his weight on his back foot, edging toward the door.

“It’s on the balcony there,” Jonas gestured behind him as he turned his attention to his clothes. All business. Easy enough. “If you’d be so kind as to wait a moment…” he let the sentence hang, glancing up in the mirror to check that Sidney was appropriately abashed. He was still flushed, but his gaze seemed to have stalled on Jonas’s backside. “I’ll dress and then be happy to show it to you.” Jonas cleared his throat, catching Sidney’s eye in the mirror before Sidney turned to face the empty fireplace that stood opposite Jonas’s bed.

“I’m sorry,” Sidney said. “Delilah said you were in the garden.”

“I’d caution you not to take her at her word. Ever. She may be having quite an extended afterlife,” Jonas pulled on his undershorts. “But she’s still nineteen at heart.”

“That’s good to know,” Sidney said. Jonas strolled past him toward the armoire, and Sidney turned to face the balcony doors, obscured as they were behind a curtain. “I spoke to Karolina,” he said. Neutral territory. And certainly de-escalating, as far as Jonas’s arousal went. Jonas pulled a pair of trousers out the armoire.

“And?”

“You lied to me.”

“About?” Jonas let his trousers hang open as he shouldered into his standard white button down.

“You said you didn’t know if the celestial skies of other realms affected things here, but they do. Because that’s how the Ascension works.”

“Celestial alignments creating powerful flows of magic isn’t precisely the same thing as gravity,” Jonas replied, doing up his buttons. “Portals opening and closing is practically a mundane experience. It doesn’t change the tides.”

“So it was the semantics of my question you objected to?” Jonas glanced at Sidney, but Sidney’s back was still to him. Jonas grabbed suspenders and clipped them onto the tops of his trousers.

“Get used to semantics if you’re going to be investigating magical realms, Sidney. It wasn’t a lie. You didn’t ask the right question.”

“Do you know if the celestial skies of other realms have any effects on earth aside from the Ascension?” Sidney demanded. Jonas laughed. He couldn’t help himself.

“You have a lot of gall to come into my room uninvited, call me a liar and then demand answers from me! I’m not sure I owe you anything at all.”

“You’ll forgive me if I don’t have a very clear sense of where our boundaries are,” Sidney snapped. The sharpness in Sidney’s voice shot a distinct prickle of arousal down Jonas’s spine, which was concerning to say the very least.

“I believe,” Jonas skirted around Sidney to pull back the curtain in front of the balcony doors, “you started it.”

“Why did you kiss me?” Sidney demanded.

“Why did you kiss me?” Jonas let the door swing outward as he turned to face Sidney. Sidney’s cheeks were red, his eyes bright. He swallowed, and Jonas watched the apple of Sidney’s throat with interest that he hoped wasn’t as plain on his face as he suspected it might be. The silence that fell between them was electric and strange and Jonas had to force himself to breathe through it. He shook his head, as if to dismiss his own question. As if he wasn’t desperate to know the answer. “Come on, Quince. I thought you wanted a look at my telescope.”