[BL] Phoque Mis Dypê

***

Aoife Sartre died at eleven minutes past five in the morning, on the second Tuesday of April, with fog pressing gray against the windows and Kestrel Point invisible below the house — and Aemon Taira was kneeling at her bedside holding her hand, the only one awake to witness it, and the last thing she ever said to him was a job assignment.

“The men in this family hide when it hurts.” Her voice was paper-thin, her grip drowning-strong. “My Mathieu will go out to that boat and disappear into the work of being fine. Don’t let him disappear alone. You understand me, boy? Whatever it takes.”

“Whatever it takes,” Aemon whispered, because there was nothing else to say to a dying woman, and her smile flickered — Caleigh’s exact smile, worn first — and the pause in her breathing came that didn’t reverse, and downstairs a clock counted five-fifteen into an empty kitchen, and that was how the longest week of his life began: with a promise he had no way of knowing he’d keep with his clothes off.

Caleigh found them like that. She came up the stairs with a tea tray she’d been building since four, took in the stillness of the bed and the wetness on her boyfriend’s face, and set the tray down without a sound. She didn’t cry. That came later, catastrophically. What she did, that morning, was reach for him — and grief makes its own terrible gravity, and he went.

***

They had sex that evening. He’d have trouble explaining later why, except that death does something obscene to the living, some animal insistence on being felt, and Caleigh’s mother had died in the bed down the hall twelve hours ago and Caleigh pulled him into her childhood bedroom and kissed him with her eyes squeezed shut like she was trying to disappear into him, and what was he going to do, refuse her?

It was wrong from the first minute. Not forbidden-wrong — hollow-wrong, the worst kind. Her mouth tasted like salt and swallowed tears. His body responded the way it always dutifully did, three years of muscle memory, and he pushed up her sweater and put his mouth on her throat and she arched into him and made a sound that was supposed to be wanting and was actually just crying with her mouth closed. They fell onto the bed under the glow-in-the-dark stars she’d stuck to the ceiling at eleven years old. He worked her jeans down her hips; she shoved at his; he slid two fingers into her and she was barely wet and he kept going anyway, circling her clit with his thumb the way he knew, mechanically, she liked, and she gasped and rolled her hips and it was theater, all of it, both of them performing desire for an audience of one grieving person each.

“Fuck me,” she whispered into his neck. “Just— please. Make me feel something.”

He spat into his palm, coated himself, pushed into her — she was tight and dry and it dragged, and she made that closed-mouth crying sound again and wrapped her legs over his back, and he fucked her, steady and urgent, driving hard enough to knock the headboard against the wall, and she clawed at his shoulders and said yes, yes, harder in a voice like a hostage, and he hammered into her chasing something neither of them could name, sweat rolling down his spine, and she clenched around him and shuddered through something adjacent to an orgasm and sobbed once, sharply, into the pillow.

He didn’t come. He got close and then her sob broke something in the mechanics and he slipped out of her and sat back on his heels, cock hard and aching and suddenly irrelevant, and looked down at his girlfriend of three years, sprawled and wrecked under the plastic stars, and understood with terrible clarity that they had just used each other’s bodies as a place to scream.

“I’m sorry,” she said to the ceiling.

“It’s okay.”

“It’s not.” She pulled the blanket over herself. “Go check on Dad.”

Check on Dad. He washed up in the hall bathroom on autopilot, staring at his own reflection — flushed, bitten-lipped, half-hard still and hating himself for it — and downstairs the house ticked and settled around a silence where a voice used to be, and out on the dark water, far off, a buoy bell tolled like something keeping time for a race he didn’t know he’d entered.

***

The funeral was Friday. The days between were a fog of casseroles and casseroles‘ cousins, folding chairs, whiskey, old men telling stories in the sunroom, Declan Byrne arriving from Dingle with twelve bottles of proper whiskey (“they’re a message”), and through all of it — this was the part Aemon could not stop noticing, could not stop hating himself for noticing — through all of it moved Mathieu Sartre like a lit match through a paper town.

Six foot three. Black hair silvered at the temples. Hands like something carved, veins roping the backs of them, and he rolled his shirtsleeves to the elbow by ten every morning and Aemon knew — had always known, distantly, the way you know a stove is hot — that the man was built, but knowing it had never cost anything before. Now every detail arrived pre-loaded with voltage. The smell of him: cedar and clean sweat and some dark expensive base note that Aemon caught across rooms and hated catching. The way he stood at the sink washing dishes in his dead wife’s kitchen, sleeves dripping, forearm flexing around a plate, and said something low to nobody about the wrong soap, and Aemon’s traitor brain supplied the timbre of that voice against the back of his own neck and he had to leave the room.

Nineteen years. Three of them dating the man’s daughter. And in none of those years had Aemon ever once let himself notice that Mathieu Sartre was the single most physically overwhelming human being he had ever stood next to. He noticed now. He noticed constantly. It was like discovering a new color painted across everything he owned.

Grief does this, he told himself. Grief scrambles the wires.

The wires, meanwhile, had other ideas.

***

Friday night, after the wake had done what Irish wakes do — refused to behave, filled the house with laughter that people apologized for, emptied again by one in the morning — Aemon came downstairs for water and found the kitchen lit and Mathieu standing at the counter making tea with funereal precision, sleeves rolled, forearms on display like a threat.

“You couldn’t sleep either,” Mathieu said, not turning around.

“No, sir.”

“Don’t sir me. Sit.”

There was tea, in Aoife’s blue chipped cup, and there was silence, and there was Mathieu talking in a low wrecked voice about February, about hospice beds and final promises, and Aemon sat across the counter drinking it in — the tea and the voice and the smell of him filling the small warm kitchen, cedar and dark cologne and underneath it something male and alive that the whole house’s death made unbearably vivid — and at some point Aemon reached across the zinc to move the tin and Mathieu reached to steady it and their hands crossed, knuckle against knuckle, and neither withdrew, and the second stretched.

Mathieu looked at him. Really looked — gray-green eyes moving over Aemon’s face with a slow, deliberate attention that no father had ever spent on anyone — and Aemon’s heart slammed once, hard, like something turning over in its sleep, and upstairs a floorboard creaked, and the moment snapped like a line under load, and Mathieu withdrew his hand and said something ordinary about sleep, and Aemon climbed the stairs on legs that didn’t feel borrowed only because he refused to check.

He lay beside Caleigh’s sleeping shape in the dark and stared at the ceiling and conducted the audit he’d run nightly since sixteen. Loved Caleigh: yes. Attracted to men: yes, filed, locked, unacted-upon forever. Tonight’s anomaly: explained entirely by grief, proximity, and fog.

The audit balanced. It would go on balancing for exactly one more hour.

Because at two in the morning he gave up on sleep and went down for water again, and the kitchen was dark this time, empty, and he was filling his glass at the sink when the door to the deck opened behind him and the cold came in with the man attached to it.

Mathieu had been out on the boat. He carried the flask and the smell of Islay smoke and sea air, and he stopped inside the doorway when he saw Aemon, and for a moment neither of them moved, and the kitchen light was off and the fog outside was pressed white against the windows and the house around them was a held breath.

“She loved you like a son,” Mathieu said quietly. “Elle t’aimait comme un fils.”

“I know.”

“And yet here you are,” Mathieu said, crossing the kitchen slowly, each step putting him closer, larger, until Aemon had to tilt his head back to keep the eye contact, “at two in the morning, standing in my kitchen with your pulse in your throat.”

“I don’t—”

“Don’t.” One word, low, and it wasn’t anger. It was permission wearing anger’s clothes. He set the flask on the counter beside Aemon’s hip, caging him without touching, close enough now that Aemon could feel the heat coming off him, could smell the whiskey and the sea and underneath that the raw male scent of him, skin and musk, and Aemon’s body reacted before his mind could file an objection — breath shortening, blood leaving his head for points south, cock thickening against his thigh in a pair of thin sleep pants with nothing underneath.

“Mathieu—” His voice cracked on the second syllable and the man’s eyes darkened at the sound like coals breathed on.

“There he is,” Mathieu murmured. “Three years you’ve been in my house, mon garçon, looking at everything except me. Looking so hard at nothing.” A hand came up — slow, giving Aemon every chance in the world to duck it — and cupped the side of his jaw, thumb dragging rough along his cheekbone, calloused and hot. “And now you look at me with your mouth open and your heart trying to break your ribs. Tell me I’m wrong. Go on.”

Aemon’s tongue wouldn’t produce words. Every audit he’d ever run lay in pieces around his feet.

“That’s what I thought.” And Mathieu kissed him.

Not gently. There was nothing gentle available in either of them tonight — it was teeth and tongue and five o’clock shadows scraping, Mathieu’s mouth hot and tasting of whiskey and smoke, taking Aemon’s mouth the way a storm takes a coastline, one big hand sliding into his hair to grip and angle him deeper while Aemon grabbed two fists of gray-black sweater and hung on, moaning into it, loud, too loud—

—and Mathieu’s palm came up and covered his mouth. Sealed over it, warm and huge, swallowing the sound whole, and his lips went to Aemon’s ear, beard scraping, and he whispered:

“Caleigh is asleep twenty feet above us. So you’re going to shut up and take it. Do you understand?”

Aemon nodded against the hand, dizzy, terrified, harder than he had ever been in his life.

“Good boy.” The words went through him like current. Mathieu walked him backward two steps until his hips hit the counter’s edge, and the kiss resumed around the edges of the silencing hand — mouth working at his jaw, his throat, teeth finding the tendon where neck meets shoulder and biting down, slow, marking, while Aemon shook and panted against the palm and soaked up every word poured directly into his ear. “You have any idea how long I have wanted to ruin you. Standing in my garden in those little shorts all summer. Hugging my daughter. Smelling like youth and salt and—” a groan, low, filthy, against his ear, “—I could smell how badly you wanted this tonight. In the kitchen. Your pulse in your throat, your skin going up in flames. You smelled ready, mon garçon, and I have been starving.”

The hand left his mouth — replaced instantly by fingers, two of them, pushing between his lips. “Suck.”

Aemon sucked. Obediently, dazedly, tongue working between the man’s fingers while Mathieu watched with burning eyes, and above them the house slept on, oblivious, and somewhere in Aemon’s chest the audit finally, permanently, collapsed.

Mathieu spun him around. Bent him over the counter — one broad hand flat between his shoulder blades, pressing his chest to the cool zinc — and stripped the sleep pants down his thighs in one rough motion, baring him to the cold air and the fogged window and the man behind him, and Aemon heard himself make a noise into his arm and heard Mathieu answer it:

“Quiet. I mean it.” A pause, and then, unbearably: “Unless you want me to make you loud. Is that it? You want the whole house to hear who owns you now?”

“No,” Aemon gasped. “No— yes— I don’t—”

“Yes, sir,” Mathieu corrected, and the submission went through Aemon like a blade of heat.

What followed was the slowest cruelty Aemon had ever survived. Mathieu sank to his knees behind him — he heard it, the drop of knees onto hardwood, and nearly lost his mind — and gripped him open with two thumbs and buried his face between his cheeks and ate. No hesitation, no ceremony: tongue flat and broad and relentless, licking into him with a hunger that was nothing like technique and everything like appetite, wet sounds obscene in the silent kitchen, stubble rasping, and Aemon bit down on his own wrist to strangle the noises and failed, whimpering into his arm with every thrust of that tongue, hips bucking back shamelessly onto the man’s face. Mathieu spat against him — once, twice, deliberately crude, working the spit in with his thumb, then returning with his tongue, deeper, until Aemon was loose and dripping and shaking apart at the seams, whining behind gritted teeth.

“Look at you,” Mathieu breathed against his slick hole, and the vibration of it made Aemon see white. “Open for me already. Greedy little thing. You’ve needed this for years, haven’t you. Needed someone to stretch you open and fill you up and make you take it.”

“Yes— God— yes—”

“Since when.” Another lick, another slow press of tongue. “Answer me.”

“Since—” His mind was static. “Since I was seventeen. Since I figured out what I— please—”

“Trois ans.” A sound came out of Mathieu then that was half laugh and wholly feral. “Three years you’ve been walking around my family with this inside you. Waiting.” He rose — Aemon heard the zipper, heard fabric hit the floor, heard pure anticipation dismantle his nervous system — and then the blunt heat of him pressed against Aemon’s entrance, huge, bare, the foreskin slick with precome smearing wet against him, and Mathieu leaned over his back, chest to spine, mouth at his ear, and did not push in.

“Do you feel what you do to me.” He dragged the heavy length through the mess of spit, slow, coating himself, the crown catching and sliding, and Aemon mewled and pushed back and was pinned in place by a hand clamping his hip. “Uh-uh. You take what I give you, when I give it. This cock has wanted your ass for three years, mon garçon, and when it finally gets there, it will be slow.”

“Please—”

“Beg properly.”

“Please fuck me.” It tore out of him, raw, ruined, past all shame. “Please, I need it, I need you inside me, I’ve wanted— I think about your hands, your mouth, I think about your cock, I’ve thought about it since I was seventeen, please—”

The growl that came out of Mathieu Sartre was not human language. He spat into his palm, coated himself in two strokes, notched the fat head against Aemon’s loosened entrance, and pushed.

Aemon’s vision whited. There was no easing, no mercy of adjustment — Mathieu fed himself in on one long continuous drive, splitting him open inch by thick inch, the stretch burning and blooming into fullness so complete Aemon couldn’t tell where his own body stopped, and his mouth opened on a scream that never got volume because Mathieu’s hand was already there, clamping over his mouth from behind, his whole torso draped over Aemon’s back, pinning him to the counter.

“Shhhh,” he breathed, wild and gentle at once, bottoming out with his balls flush against Aemon, throbbing inside him, impossibly deep, impossibly thick, filling him to the brim with bare, veined, pulsing heat. “There. There it is. Look at you. Taking all of me like you were built for it.” His hips rolled — one slow, grinding circle that dragged the head of his cock across something inside Aemon that made stars detonate — “You’re gripping me so tight, putain, like you’ll die without it. Have you ever been this full? Has anyone ever been inside you bare, feeling every vein of you squeeze me—”

Aemon shook his head against the hand. Nobody. Nobody ever.

“Then this is mine,” Mathieu said, with finality, possession laid down like a keel. “This ass has been waiting three years for me, and now it’s getting me. All of it. Whenever I want. Wherever I want. On this boat, in this kitchen, in my bed with her photographs on the walls—” a brutal snap of his hips that punched a muffled cry into the palm, “—you’ll spread your legs for me and thank me for it. Say yes.”

He lifted the hand off Aemon’s mouth — needing to hear it bare.

“Yes,” Aemon gasped into the dark kitchen, wrecked and ringing. “Yes, whenever you want, please, please move—”

He moved.

The rhythm he set was nothing like tender and everything like fate: long drives pulled almost all the way out, the thick crown stretching the rim on every withdrawal, then slammed home to the root with a slap of hips and a grind that made Aemon’s toes curl off the floor. The counter shook. Dishes rattled softly in the drainer. Fog pressed against the window inches from Aemon’s open mouth, and he was panting against it like an animal, being mounted and filled and used in his girlfriend’s parents’ kitchen while the whole household slept, and it was the hottest thing that had ever happened to him or would ever happen to anyone. Mathieu’s hand fisted in his hair, turning his head for kisses that were mostly teeth; his other hand reached around and wrapped Aemon’s weeping cock — rock-hard, swaying, leaking a rope of precome onto the cabinet below — and stroked him in rough counterpoint.

“You’re going to come on my cock,” Mathieu informed him, low and absolute, jerking him faster, driving deeper, his control fraying audibly at the edges now, accent thickening the filth into music. “Without me touching— no. With me touching. Both. You’re going to milk me dry with this hungry hole and then I’m going to fill you up, mon garçon, deep, raw, every drop, the way you were made to take it—”

“Inside,” Aemon begged, past thought, past everything. “Come inside me, please, I want to feel it—”

“Dieu—” The rhythm shattered. Mathieu drove in hard, ground deep, and the first pulse of it hit the deepest part of Aemon like a brand — hot spurts flooding him, cock kicking and swelling inside, the man groaning low and endless into the back of his neck — and the feel of being filled, claimed, bred, shoved Aemon over his own edge untouched by anything but the fist around him. He came across the cabinet doors in long stripes, clenching down around the cock pumping cum into him, milking it, sobbing silently, and Mathieu rode him through every spasm, feeding him the last of it in shallow grinding strokes, until they stood welded together over the counter, heaving, dripping, done.

Silence. Fog. Their heartbeats arguing.

Neither moved for a long time. Then Mathieu withdrew — slow, careful, both of them hissing at the loss — and turned Aemon around and looked at him, really looked, at the tear-tracks and bite marks and wrecked expression, and something crossed the man’s face too complicated for the hour.

“This never leaves this kitchen,” he said quietly. It wasn’t tenderness. It was terms.

“It doesn’t leave,” Aemon agreed.

“And it happens again.”

Aemon, boneless, marked, leaking slowly into his sleep pants, stared up at the most beautiful catastrophe of his life and gave him the truest thing he had.

“It happens again,” he said, “the second you want it.”

Mathieu laughed — low, dark, delighted, a sound Aemon had never heard from him and would spend the rest of the summer hunting. He tucked himself away, straightened his sweater, picked up the cold tea and poured it out with the unhurried calm of a man reassembling civilization around himself, and paused at the door with his hand on the frame.

“Sleep, mon garçon,” he said, without turning. “Funerals are exhausting.” A beat. “For amateurs.”

And he was gone up the stairs, and Aemon stood alone in the dark kitchen with the taste of whiskey and the smell of sex hanging in the fogged air, his own release cooling on the cabinets he would wipe down in a minute, cum beginning to drip down the inside of his thigh, and outside on the black water the buoy bell tolled once — patient, unhurried, keeping time for a season that had just, finally, begun.

***

End of Chapter One.