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The gentle rumble of some bomb detonating far in the distance crept under the tarpaulin walls of the medical tent, but Harry barely noticed it anymore, the sound blending in with the coughs and groans of patients in the next tent over, and a jeep rolling through the camp, toting supplies or maybe politicians.
He’d been awake for twenty, no, twenty-one hours. Alexander MacDonald had paged him from bed in the very earliest morning, hours before his shift was supposed to begin. A woman was in labour, taking longer than any of them had expected.
In the end, it hadn’t been a difficult delivery, only long. Baby had arrived, and MacDonald went to bed, and Harry had decided it was to be a good omen, that no day could end badly if it had begun seeing a grateful mother hold her baby. That had been too much to hope for, though. There were no good days here, not really.
John Bridgens came into the tent after daybreak, as MacDonald was leaving, and as Harry was guiding the woman to the ward tent for a few hours of observation.
“Good morning,” Harry had whispered, as a concession to the still quiet camp and the baby sleeping in the woman’s arms.
“Good morning, Dr. Goodsir,” replied Bridgens, his eyes on the ground, the deep resonance of his voice contained to his chest.
When Harry returned, the mess from the night before was nearly gone. Bridgens stood over the sink, washing up to his forearms with the carbolic soap. The tent smelled less of human stuff and took on a more antiseptic air.
“Thank you,” said Harry, because there was no question who had cleaned.
Bridgens nodded in acknowledgement, his eyes never meeting Harry’s. Not once.
There was a weight about him, Harry thought. From the time he’d been introduced to John Bridgens, Harry had thought he’d seemed an Atlas, the whole of the world planted firmly on his shoulders. But in spite of the mysterious albatross around his neck, it could not be denied that Bridgens was an excellent nurse, and seemed unbreakable by the circumstances they both found themselves in.
It wasn’t just that he was tall and nearly twice as broad as Harry. It wasn’t only his strength, though Harry had witnessed Bridgens pick up full grown men with no effort in his features. It was the startling gentleness with which he treated every one of the patients who passed through. That those wide hands could be so delicate, the deep voice so soft, was a surprise every time, even months in. Bridgens smiled infrequently, and mostly for children, but he was never cross, or short. Harry thought he must just be the quiet type, contained and guarded. It wasn’t the wrong approach in a place like this. It helped to protect oneself against the indelicacies and crimes one witnessed. Harry wondered if he could learn something from that, like how to limit wearing his heart on his sleeve so thoroughly.
The only time he’d seen Bridgens come close to breaking was when a few soldiers carried one of their own in, and the comrade in their arms was only just a man, barely more than a boy. His chest was drenched in blood and Harry wasn’t sure where it was coming from, if it was from the soldier or from somewhere else.
Bridgens had taken the man from the soldiers to lay him on the table, but when his arms enfolded the man it was like something in him caught. There was a hiccup in his usual unbridaled efficiency as the man’s head slumped against his shoulder, a flicker of some dark and painful thing that made his already mournful brows knit even closer together.
“Bridgens,” Harry had said. “John?”
Bridgens shook his head once, breathed in deep, and came back to the room. He laid the man out, gently as always, and grabbed the scissors, handing them to Harry so the physician could cut away the man’s shirt. Bridgens ushered the other soldiers from the tent, and worked beside Harry as he tried, desperately, to save the man. Desperation, as was so often the case, was not enough. His heart stopped on the table, and he could not be resuscitated.
His was not the first life lost in the tent, and it would not be the last, but Harry never felt the impact any less. It was Bridgens he relied on more than he realized. Always Bridgens. His sure and steady movements, his gentle voice, his resilience. But on this day the nurse was as shaken as Harry was. The tasks took twice as long, and Bridgens moved as if he were in a fog, dark thoughts on his heels.
It occurred to Harry that Bridgens had been at this camp longer than Harry had been. He had a history here. Perhaps-
“Did you know him?”
Bridgens stopped and looked in Harry’s direction, if not quite at him. Like when they worked together, he didn’t need further clarification. “No.”
But that wasn’t it. Harry knew when there was a story waiting to be told. “If you’d ever like to talk, Bridgens, I’m not far, you know.”
Bridgens’ eyes rose higher, and burned a hole through Harry's sternum. “Is there a problem, Dr. Goodsir?” It wasn’t outwardly defensive, but it was confirmation that the door was firmly shut.
“No, no. I just thought-” Harry wet his lips and shrugged. “It’s nothing, actually. Good night.”
Bridgens nodded, and left.
Late one evening after, when MacDonald had been kind enough to offer Harry some whiskey, he screwed up his courage to mention this exchange to the other doctor, given his experience, his time with the organization. He’d worked with Bridgens on other missions, and anything he had to say about him was complimentary. But when Harry had mentioned the soldier with his narrow shoulders and dark eyes, MacDonald took on an expression of understanding.
“You’re not to mention this to anyone,” MacDonald said, drinking from his flask and handing it over to Harry. He didn’t wait for Harry’s response, his discretion being a given. “Back about five years ago we were in Cambodia with another mission. There was a young man in, what was it now? Logistics, operations. That kind of thing. He and Bridgens were very close. Intimate. You understand what I’m saying, don’t you?”
Harry did.
“The long and short of it is that he died. Ran over a landmine that no one had plotted just outside of camp. John and I were the ones on duty.”
As MacDonald continued, Harry’s heart clenched at the scene his mind conjured. It was near identical to the one he’d witnessed not long ago - the body of a young man covered in blood, folding into Bridgens’ arms. Not yet dead, but closer to it than alive.
“Bridgens treated him?”
“It was just the two of us available. That mission was understaffed. At any rate, there wasn’t much treatment to be done. We could’ve been in a top hospital with the most well equipped teams in the world and, well, the lad wouldn’t have made it.”
Harry couldn’t imagine, and he did not try to. “That’s awful.”
MacDonald sighed. “Bridgens went home not long after that. He was… not himself after. I genuinely thought he’d left the organization. I was shocked to see him back, even after all this time. But he seems relatively restored, and he’s a good nurse. Happy to have him.”
MacDonald carried on, and Harry found his attention slipping. He thought about John Bridgens. His careful hands, his perpetually concerned expression, his competence, his kindness. It was hard work, this, to be out here, to witness the most dark and horrible things the world could muster and try to fix it, just a little. Bridgens perhaps had seen the very worst of it, and still he stood.
It was some time after that, but before the day that began with delivering the baby, that Harry realized that he admired Bridgens. Then shortly after that, but before the day that began with delivering the baby, Harry realized that his feelings towards Bridgens had moved well beyond admiration.
It grew in small moments, like a bottle of water being placed in his hand before he even realized he was thirsty, or a nod of encouragement towards a rickety folding chair in the tent, when he hadn’t sat down for eight hours. It was when he listened to Harry natter on much longer than he had any right to. It was when, after Harry complained of his mind failing to quiet at night, Bridgens began to bring him books.
In the margins of the Odyssey, and Brideshead Revisited, and a translation of Euripides, he’d sometimes find elegant handwriting in dull pencil, notes and thoughts befitting a scholar. The occasional section would be underlined. Very rarely he’d find the handwriting of someone else, a squared off print, also in pencil. An invisible hand would tighten around Harry’s throat as he filled in the blanks. It was all unspeakably intimate.
And still, amidst all of this, Bridgens rarely met Harry’s eyes.
After that brief lull, where Harry had settled the new mother onto the cot, the baby at her breast, the day transformed into chaos. He and Bridgens treated newcomers to the camp who were wracked with dehydration, flesh wounds that were a product of nearby skirmishes, a six-year-old with a garden variety broken arm that he got after a nasty fall in a football game. Harry and Bridgens didn’t stop moving.
Harry was applying salve to a horrific sunburn when MacDonald and Peddie came to relieve them. He took an hour to finish up, never willing to pass a patient off, then left the tent. Bridgens followed. He’d not left when relieved. He stayed while Harry stayed.
Even though the sun had set, the heat hadn’t cut, though the air was less stifling than it had been inside the tent. Harry was tired, and suddenly, very dizzy. He stopped mid stride and pressed the heels of his hands into his eye sockets. It hadn’t been the worst day of the mission, not by a long shot, but exhaustion had taken hold of his body. His head spun. His joints felt like they were filled with concrete. His breath started to come in short gasps.
“Dr. Goodsir?” Bridgens voice was low, gentle. He’d been right behind Harry, of course.
When Harry opened his mouth to speak, nothing came out, his breath stolen.
“Harry.” Then Bridgens’ hand was on his back.
“I’m fine,” Harry said, the words a complete mockery of themselves. He sounded wretched. He could barely pull his hands away from his face, the idea of having to see, of having to take in the world around him suddenly a task too large to handle.
The sounds of the dying day flooded his hearing. Whispers in a language he still struggled to speak, the rustle of blankets, people passing on the side, their shoes scuffling in the dirt. And he could hear Bridgens breathing.
“Let’s go. I’ll take you home.”
Bridgens urged Harry forward, the barest pressure on his back, steering him through the camp to the employee barracks. His hands adamantly refused to leave his eyes, and so in Bridgens he placed a blind trust, and slowly, whatever tightness that had overcome him, began to weaken.
“Here you are.”
They stopped, and Harry swallowed as he brought his hands away from his face. He stood at the entrance to his tent, his surname in block letters in the plastic pocket display. Bridgens had brought him here. Harry had no idea where Bridgens’ tent was.
“Let’s get you inside then.”
Harry realized he’d been staring. He hadn’t made a move to go in and so Bridgens had taken the lead. With one big hand he unzipped the tent. The other returned to Harry’s back, guiding him in. If Bridgens was curious about the space he didn’t show it, not that Harry was really noticing anything other than Bridgens’ hands on his arms guiding him to sit down on his cot.
Then, a warm palm on the back of his neck.
“I’ll get us something to eat, alright? I’ll be back soon. You’ll be alright?”
Harry hesitated. He was supposed to nod, he knew. The hand on the back of his neck was meant to steady and soothe. It was good nursing. But at that moment, he felt that if Bridgens took his hand away then Harry wouldn’t be alright at all. That Bridgens’ hand was the one thing holding him in place and if he took it away Harry would shake to pieces alone in his tent.
When Harry continued to say nothing, Bridgens crouched down in front of him, leaning heavy on one knee. He bent his head to look into Harry’s face and studied him. His dark eyes, so sharply focused, made Harry feel as if he were the subject of an autopsy, his rapidly beating little heart on full display.
“Have you had panic attacks before?” Bridgens asked, and suddenly it was obvious.
“It’s been years. A decade maybe.” When he’d been trying to get into medical school, like his father had, like his brothers had. “Not recently. I don’t think I realized…”
Bridgens’ hand stayed firm on him, but his thumb began to draw gentle lines back and forth through Harry’s hair. As Harry’s panic subsided, it was replaced by something else, a somersaulting desire that hadn’t ever been so strong as now. His defences were down, maybe that was why, but it wasn’t because of that. The feeling had been there before, growing into something, nurtured and sustained by Bridgens’ carefulness, his competence, his patience and kindness and-
“John?”
John smiled, just so slightly. Maybe Harry could only see because they were so, so close. “Harry. You need to eat something. When was the last time you ate?”
“This morning.”
“Before you started working.”
“Yes.” John’s thumb still moved through Harry’s hair and he leaned back into it, wished John would touch him with the other hand. He wished John would draw Harry to him, hold him tight, tell him that everything would be fine. And then, perhaps, kiss him.
“You need to eat,” he said again, and he stood, breaking contact with Harry. He moved towards the door. To leave. To come back, yes, but to leave right now which was not what Harry wanted.
“I have granola bars in my desk,” Harry said quickly, each word bleeding into the next.
The place on Harry’s neck where John had laid his hand still burned.
John found the bars in the first drawer he opened, and brought Harry one. He opened the wrapper, as if Harry was a child with poor dexterity, and handed it to him.
Harry’s eyes followed John as he moved to sit beside Harry on the bed, the simple cot creaking under both of their weights. John looked pointedly at the granola bar and Harry took a bite. As John sat, their arms touched, their thighs brushed. John was thicker than Harry was in every way. In his waist and thighs. His fingers. Harry felt slightly short of breath again and he ate the rest of the granola bar slowly, staring at his own knees.
“This is hard work, Harry. And you’re a good doctor.” John’s hands were on his own knees, and Harry shifted his focus to them. “You need to remember to eat, to take what you need. Otherwise you’ll hurt yourself.”
Slowly, very slowly, John moved one of his hands from his knee, shifting to the side a little as he did it, and put an arm around Harry’s back. His heavy hand came to rest on Harry’s shoulder, and his thumb did that thing again, back and forth. Back and forth.
Maybe somewhere along the way, John had come to admire Harry as well. Along the way, maybe it had grown into something more for him too.
Harry turned to look at him and John’s face was so close the tips of their noses could’ve touched. He could hear John’s breathing.
He’d never been with a man. Mostly from lack of opportunity, truthfulness with himself, and no small amount of fear that he wouldn’t know what he was doing.
He didn’t know what he was doing.
“You should sleep,” said John.
Harry felt the air rush out of him all at once. He’d been holding his breath. His every feature must have telegraphed disappointment. He wasn’t good at hiding his feelings, and now that he was so exhausted John could probably read each and every one of his desperate thoughts.
John’s dark eyes studied Harry, and his hand on Harry’s shoulder stilled. “You’ll feel better, with a little sleep.”
“Stay.” The request tumbled out past Harry’s lips before he even thought the word. But there it was, in four letters a betrayal of things he’d not quite admitted to himself, and had never had a plan to share with John. His colleague. There were rules about this kind of thing, maybe. He should know. He read the Mission Handbook, but all best practices seemed out the window now.
John nodded his now familiar nod. Then without speaking, he encouraged Harry to put his head on the pillow, and reached down to pull the camp blanket up over them.
The cot was narrow. There was an awkward series of movements as John tried to find the best way to lie down and also not fall off the bed. At one point, he laughed, and Harry realized he’d maybe never heard John laugh before, a rare and sweet thing. Finally, John lay back, his grey streaked hair spread out on the pillow, and Harry curled into his side, his head on John’s chest. He didn’t think he had ever slept this way with someone, not since he was a child. He wondered if he’d even be able to fall asleep. Except then he did.
He dreamed of sunshine. Not the searing kind he’d come to know at the camp that kept him in the shade, or in the tent, but the kind from home that warmed his shoulders in the late spring. The kind that made you want to take your coat off after a long, wet winter. He stood in a breathing field, the edges fuzzy, and felt held for the first time in ages.
Then the dreams became more familiar. Unsettling. No longer in the warm field but somewhere else entirely. In these dreams he was never quite where he needed to be to do what had to be done. Voices that he was sure he knew but he couldn’t place called out for a doctor, but Harry couldn’t find the room they were coming from. The layout of this uncertain space kept changing. He was in every hospital and clinic he’d ever worked in but also none of them, every familiar corner leading him into unknown territory.
He pushed through a set of swinging doors and he was in the camp, an invisible sun beating down in a dusty orange haze. He was surrounded by a cacophony of wails and moans of the very worst kind. He walked, then ran down the narrow strip of land between tents, but the corridor was endless, circular, devoid of any of the small joys that balanced out the most difficult days here. No children playing a chaotic game of football or neighbours breaking bread.
Harry woke up abruptly. For a moment, he didn’t remember where he was, because it did not feel like his bed, nor like waking up any of the other mornings he’d woken up here. He was curled into John, almost exactly as he’d fallen asleep, but his leg had drifted over the other man’s. It was different, to wake up from a dream like that pressed into a warm body. It was easier to tell what was real, and what wasn’t.
Harry gingerly pushed himself up on his elbow, not wanting to disturb John’s sleeping, to look over at the digital, battery powered alarm clock he kept on his desk. The red numbers shone bright in the darkness. 3:44am.
He’d woken up around this hour before. But it was different. It was all different.
“Alright?”
Harry startled, just a little, at the low rumble of John’s voice, breaking the silence between them. He looked down and John’s dark eyes were open, waiting. Watching. Those inches of space between them became impossibly thick. The space between 3:44 and 3:45 became leaden with possibility, heavy with the knowledge that Harry could , if he wanted.
He wanted.
He hesitated, so close to John he could feel warm breath brush his lips, and then Harry kissed him, tentative and slow, and not quite sure. He stopped when John didn’t kiss him back.
“Harry,” he murmured, and Harry couldn’t read it, but it didn’t sound like desire.
Harry felt his face flush in the dark and pulled away. Fear gripped his chest as he wondered if in his receding panic he’d misinterpreted what was happening between them. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what-”
His retreat was halted and his apology stalled by John’s hand on his face, stroking back in one warm line to the nape of Harry’s neck, and his fingers wove in the short curls there. He could feel John’s concern, rather than see it in his face. “You had a hard day.”
The words could have been a dismissal, but they didn’t feel that way. And John didn’t ease his hold.
“That’s not what this is about,” said Harry, with a conviction he’d only just realized. He brought his hand to John’s wrist, up by the side of his face and laid his hand there.
“No?”
“No, I-” Harry touched his forehead to John’s, and allowed himself to feel anchored by that firm, warm grip on the back of his neck. “I do want you. Very much.”
John inhaled sharply, and closed the distance between them.
Harry hadn’t kissed another man before and the sensation was wholly different from kissing a woman. Or perhaps just kissing John was the difference. Feeling the scratch of his beard, the gentle bass of his moan, his easy strength.
John rolled Harry over onto his back, and Harry opened his mouth to him with what sounded like a whimper. One of John’s strong thighs found its place between Harry’s, and Harry arched into it, aware now that his prick was straining against the trousers he’d worn for work and never changed out of.
His arms slid around John’s broad back, feeling the muscles shift. The trapezius and deltoid stretching and retracting under his fingertips. Even in this liminal hour, everything about John felt real and weighted to the earth.
Sometimes Harry felt as if he were outside of living, merely an observer. An anthropologist of human behaviour that when he tried to perform he somehow was not to be believed. The world had so often not been gentle with him, and so he drew out of himself the greatest kindness he could muster to combat it. So often, this approach had been met with hostility and suspicion, but never by John. To be here now, under his weight, Harry felt the closest to earth he had in years. Of it, and not apart.
John’s broad hand ran down Harry’s thigh and hitched it up over his hip, and then Harry could feel it, the rigid line of John’s cock pressing beside his own, albeit through layers of clothing. They both moaned, quietly, with the restraint that came naturally now after living several months with only canvas separating one from their neighbours. Harry let his fingers ghost over John’s throat, his Adam’s apple, to feel the stubble and the reverberation of the fact that John wanted him too. At least for now.
As he stroked the line of John’s neck, John withdrew from their kiss and instead touched his lips to the tip of Harry’s nose, his cheeks, his brow bone, his ear.
“What do you want?” John asked, his warm breath tickling the hollow place where Harry’s jaw met his neck.
Harry turned his face to look at him, those dark eyes, the patrician nose. The streaks of grey running through his hair, visible even in the dark, served as only one of the indications that John had been doing this so much longer than Harry, and knew so much more.
“Will you fuck me?” His throat closed as soon as the question was out, but before he could feel properly sheepish John’s hips bucked into his, inspiring another cut-off moan.
“Harry,” John growled.
“I need to warn you-” Harry said, his voice gone breathless and reedy. John stilled, but did not pull away. “I’ve not done this before. Not with a man, I mean.”
John let out a breath, but in the dark Harry couldn’t read the meaning.
“I’m- I’m sorry. I should’ve said earlier.”
John kissed him again and Harry’s chest flooded with relief. When he pulled back he chuckled warmly. “I don’t think there was any opportunity to bring it up earlier, love. I think this was exactly the right time.” John cupped Harry’s chin, and studied him a long moment. “That said-”
Harry felt his heart drop again. His desire was ricocheting around his body, completely uncertain of John, worried that this would be the moment he would leave, not knowing if he himself could handle that abandonment.
“I think we should start a bit more slowly, if this is your first time.”
Harry dropped his head back onto the pillow. John was right, of course. But it didn’t mean that Harry wanted to be filled by him any less.
John hummed in a way that indicated he had interpreted Harry’s reaction as abject disappointment. “There are other things we could do, that I could do for you.” Before Harry could react to that particular arrangement of words that made his cock throb, John looked off to the side, surveying the tent, and added in an offhand way, “I’m willing to wager that you don’t have everything we need for your first suggestion anyway, hm?”
“Everything we need?”
“A condom, Harry. And something to, well, ease the way.”
Harry was certain that he’d flushed bright red. “Ah, no. No. You’re right. I don’t.” He’d never anticipated needing those kinds of things close at hand here at the camp. Not for himself, at any rate. “Anything like that would be at the hospital.”
“Right. And I don’t know about you, but I can’t say I’m particularly eager to walk halfway across the camp in the state I’m in and ask Alexander if he can provide me with these particular supplies.”
Harry laughed, trying to lean into the absurdity of the situation and further away from his own embarrassment. “No, of course.”
“But there are other things,” John continued, and punctuated his statement with a soft kiss to Harry’s cheekbone. “Let me take care of you, Harry.”
As quickly as they had been drawn into conversation about logistics, Harry fell back into his own want. Had anyone, in his whole life, offered to take care of him so plainly? The simplicity of the offer made him feel like he could overflow with gratitude, but the heat that came with it, underpinning each of John’s words, let Harry know that this wasn’t only for him.
John began to move off of Harry, up onto his knees, and Harry had to resist pulling him back down. He was just starting to mourn the loss of John’s heady weight covering him, when John took his hand and drew Harry up to sitting, then he turned on the small, dim bedside lamp, that cast them both in a low golden glow. John was disheveled, his clothes twisted around him, his hair in his face. Harry thought him impossibly handsome in that moment, and, as if John could read his mind, he leaned in to kiss Harry again, tilting his head back, his teeth gently pulling on Harry’s lower lip.
“I want to use my mouth on you. Would you like that?”
Harry’s mouth dropped open, and any eloquence he’d ever had left him, as his mind was filled with the image of John Bridgen’s mouth around his prick. “Um, yes. Please.”
John smiled and on any other man it would be wicked, but not him. It was warmth and welcome and pleasure. He moved off the bed, coming to his knees in front of Harry. There was a sharp click from somewhere below and Harry realized it must have come from John. A stiff joint. John let out a small self-deprecating laugh. “Getting old,” he murmured.
Before Harry could respond, before he could insist that John wasn’t old at all, John began to arrange him, bringing Harry’s feet down to the ground, reaching for the waistband of his trousers.
“Oh,” Harry whispered, and John’s hand stopped their actions, though Harry could still feel warm knuckles brushing against the skin of his belly.
“This is alright?”
“Yes, yes.” Harry curved his spine down to capture John’s mouth with his own, licking into it, feeling the sharp edge of his teeth.
John’s hands continued their efforts. He undid Harry’s buttons, the fly, then tugged his trousers down, underwear too, past his rear and his knees and his ankles, until they were entirely discarded on the floor beside the two men. Harry was nude from the waist down, his nervous desire plain between the both of them. He curbed his impulse to cover himself and apologize, because from the look on John’s face, he wouldn’t have appreciated either. And Harry wanted John to do what he had offered to - to use his mouth, to take care of him.
“Harry,” John said, and his hand slid up the inside of the bare thigh before him. He wrapped his hand around Harry’s cock and gave the barest tug.
That alone was enough for Harry to moan, at first open mouthed then stifled by his hand.
“Good?” John asked, though he must know it was. Harry nodded, keeping his hand firmly in place.
Then John crouched low, and took Harry’s prick in his mouth. It was not the first time Harry had experienced this particular act but it had been some time, and never, never with anyone like John. John took him all until the tip of his nose was touching the dark thatch of hair between Harry’s legs.
Harry whimpered and mewled into his palm, urged on by John’s ministrations. The flick of his tongue, the way one of his hands had come up to cup and gently squeeze Harry’s bollocks. Harry’s free hand gripped John’s shoulder. His fingers twisted in the dark blue fabric of his scrubs, which he’d never taken off, in spite of the long sleeved t-shirt underneath. He hadn’t changed, or eaten, or sought to get rest in his own bed. John had done nothing but care for Harry since the moment they’d left the tent. That thought, that John had surrendered his precious and rare non-working hours to ensure Harry was well cared for in every way was almost too much to stand. It felt too good, too rare. Too fleeting. He squeezed his eyes shut.
John pulled back, for just a moment, just long enough to say, “You’ve got a beautiful cock, love. You’re a gorgeous thing.” Then he was on him again.
The sound that escaped Harry was a foreign one, some primal, carnal thing he didn’t think he was capable of making up until now. And all because this man had called him gorgeous .
He was close. Closer than he thought he should have been but it was night, and he was still exhausted, and it had been awhile and this, this particular arrangement was new. Most of all, it was John.
“I’m almost-” Harry started, panting, then he had to stop to wet his lips with his tongue. “I’m so close.”
He thought John would move back, replace the wet furnace of his mouth with his hand, bring Harry off that way. But instead he hooked one of Harry’s legs over his strong shoulder and squeezed it, bringing all of Harry into his mouth. He moaned, and Harry could feel the vibrations from John’s throat, as they shot from the apex of thighs to the base of his skull.
Harry’s hand came to twist in John’s hair. “John-” he panted out. “John, please. Please.” He wasn’t sure what he was begging for.
The hand that had gently held Harry’s bollocks slipped back now, careful, but not gentle. One warm finger teased at Harry’s entrance, not even breaching it, and Harry broke. With a strangled cry Harry came. His hips thrust involuntarily into John’s mouth, but John anticipated it, holding his hips firm to the cot.
He whimpered when John finally withdrew, having swallowed all that Harry had given him. John rose up to kiss him, softly this time, the salty, musky taste of Harry still on his tongue.
“Mhm,” he murmured, his hands rubbing Harry’s bare thighs. “You’re shaking, love.”
“Am I?” asked Harry, immediately laughing. Even his voice shook. With one of his trembling hands, Harry stroked down John’s chest to his waistband, but the still kneeling man caught it, and brought Harry’s hand to his lips.
“One thing at a time,” he murmured in response to the question in Harry’s eyes. “We can take care of that later.”
All Harry could think of was later as John looked for Harry’s pyjama pants and got him settled back on the cot. They kissed until Harry’s nervous system had calmed and the shaking stopped. Only then did John let Harry touch him, guiding the younger man’s hand with his own in strong and certain strokes.
John liked to talk in disjointed and sometimes filthy sentences, hot whispers against Harry’s skin waxing poetic on the taste of Harry’s cock and how he wanted to be buried inside of him, how he wanted to see Harry’s face when he came, hear him beg for it again. It was near enough to bring Harry hard again. John came all over both their hands, curiously silent for someone who could talk so well. Harry was just happy he could do something to take care of John.
By the time they were finished, they could hear sounds of the camp waking up. John looked towards the door of the tent, then back to Harry. He wasn’t smiling but his eyes were soft, and Harry thought he looked like he had gone somewhere else.
Harry wondered if he was thinking back to another camp. Another young man. Another fumble in a tent. Maybe he was, but Harry couldn’t fault him. We don’t get to leave our memories behind.
Harry traced the line of John’s form with his eyes, and felt the places on his own body where John’s mouth and hands had just been. He thought he might be in love.
“Stay,” he asked, and John smiled.