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It is so blazing hot, Graham feels as though his skin is going to slough right off, peeling away from his bones and sinew. It is difficult to form words in it and even harder just to breathe. The humidity makes his lungs feel tarred. Even the night doesn’t extinguish the heat. The air remains flat and still. It encases them.
He watches the moonlit sky from his back on the double bed, its round, cratered face beaming down on him through the window. A full moon, large and looming. He wonders if the tides are high tonight.
The bed here is much larger than he’s used to. Normally he keeps snug at one end, but in this heat he lays spread like a sluggish starfish.
Sleep is a distant dream he can no longer reach. He is an insomniac again. A marooned traveller wandering in search of drink in this bleeding desert. He has nothing in his repertoire to compare it to. Perhaps the time he spent in Australia? How wretched for his damp and mild England to now be akin to that scorching land down under. It is simply not supposed to be this way.
“Can you see the moon?” he asks aloud suddenly. He wants to hear her voice. His female superior. The officer in charge.
“Yes. There’s a reflection on the tarmac. I think the tarmac’s melted.” His bridge’s voice sounds rather languid, floating in to him down the breezeless hallway.
“It’s a handsome moon tonight,” he muses. Given his lack of sleep of late, he wonders if he’s simply veering into sheer lunacy.
“We’ve gone there. To the moon.”
“Oh.”
Frightening, how much the world has advanced since he set sail to his doom.
“There are conspiracy theories. That the first moon landing in 1969 was faked.”
“Did they find little moon men there?”
“Tons.”
He chuckles. At least they can still find humour in an otherwise humourless situation.
“I hope they were friendly.”
“Some were.” She sighs. “I bet the moon isn’t hot like this. I’m starting to wonder if I’ll ever be able to put clothes on again.”
Silence follows this.
He is only just beginning to adjust to rooming with a woman. A woman that he thinks about shamefully and constantly, with her clothes on, and without them. Now she’s just told him that she isn’t wearing any. That she’s…naked in that bedroom, her door open wide to him. He feels his whole body flood with even more heat, the blood rushing down to his prick.
How wretched a thing it is to be so aroused at the same time as being so suffocatingly hot.
He hears her shift in the bed, the frame creaking beneath her weight. Tossing. Turning. She wouldn’t be wearing the bed coverings, no. Too sweltering. Her body soft and narrow, stretched sensuously across the sheets. The round curve of her buttocks—when she wears trousers he can really notice the shape. Her nipples—they would be coloured the same as her mouth. Perhaps a little darker. They would be soft and supple in this heat. Not pointed and hard as they might in a more biting temperature. He pictures his mouth folding over one nipple, lapping at it hungrily with his tongue.
She must be asleep now. The tossing and turning has stopped but his thoughts have not. He lets out an uneasy breath and skims a thumb along his waistband. At first he teases himself, contemplating.
No. He shouldn’t. He mustn’t. She would be so horrified if she knew. So revolted. She thinks he is a gentleman of his era. Not this lecherous degenerate whacking at his needful cock to the image that he’s painted of her in his head.
His history with self-abuse is both long and storied.
He was thirteen and back at their home in Barnstaple the first time he gave in. It hadn’t taken much. One of his classmates’ sisters, waiting at the perimeter of the school yard to walk her brother home after school; her pretty fitted empire waist and flowing yellow skirt. She was about the same age as him, but not allowed to attend school as her brother was.
She’d watched him in the schoolyard and he’d felt it; reaching up to tuck a strand of hair behind her ear, come loose from her coiffure. But then her hand had continued, making its way down the curve of her slender neck and tracing along her collarbones—the only skin women then were permitted to show. She’d bitten at her bottom lip and then that was it for him. His prick had risen and was attempting to needle its way through his trousers. The longer he’d ignored it, the more painful it got.
But that night at home, alone in the family privy…
It was at Sunday school where the vicar told them it was forbidden and sinful. For a boy to touch himself seeking pleasure, why, it was akin to stabbing Jesus in the heart: the back and forth motion of the hand the wielding and stabbing of the knife, and the viscous matter that followed the Saviour’s agonised tears. To self-abuse, was to hurt Jesus Christ Himself.
The vicar’s message followed him for years. Every time he felt that dreaded stirring, the stiffening in his loins knowing what his body would demand of him. It helped to be on busy ships surrounded by men, not always permitted privacy even within their berths.
Then, his little brother Edward: the youngest of the family, eight years Graham’s junior. The vicar was long dead by then, but those dreadful words had lingered. Graham was but twenty then, home with his family just a few short years before they relocated to New South Wales. He’d passed his oral lieutenant’s examination. He would be off to do great things. Soon, he’d be posted as Mate to HMS Pickle—his highest rank yet.
Nervous and bashful, young Edward had asked him uneasily about his own self-abuse. He was no older than Graham was at the time he’d discovered it: the nights draining in his sheets while he dreamt. The primal urges and tingling. How he learned that if he manually stimulated it, he’d feel indescribably good. The release and inevitable calm that followed. Sometimes even, sleep.
Edward hardly remembered their eldest brother. He was still quite young when John passed away, and by then anyway John had mostly been away at sea. Graham was the only brother he’d ever really known, and he hung onto Graham’s every word like it was gospel. His wide brown eyes would look up adoringly every time Graham made it home from sea. “Graham! Graham is home!” He would shout with glee, running outside to greet Graham at the front gate. His accomplished older brother, following in the footsteps of greatness like their father and grandfather before them.
Edward had waited then until they had a moment alone, then embarrassedly, voice almost too quiet, he had asked Graham what it meant for him that he felt good when he touched the thing that hung between his legs.
He knew Edward would take his words and carry them forth with him, perhaps for the rest of his life. And so he’d passed along the vicar’s message. The stabbing of Jesus and His tears. When his little brother was silent, he’d hastily added, “But I’ve personally never seen any harm come of doing it. Not to one’s self at least.” And then his younger brother had looked relieved. His older brother hadn’t seen to shame him.
Any moment of his own self-abuse that followed, has invoked an internal battle in Graham. Now, to surrender to it—to this sinful urging between his legs—is even more awful, more daring, by reason of the young woman laying just a few feet away.
Tossing and turning in her bed, with only a wall between them…
He turns on his side. He tries to ignore it. But it’s too hard and too aching. His ballocks have become taut with the pressure that begs for his mercy. He is so stiff now that it’s causing him physical discomfort. He’s already said his prayers. Perhaps he shall say another.
“‘Almighty and most merciful Father, We have erred, and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep. We have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts…’”
But he’s still awake, and the tent in his drawers isn’t going away. He squeezes his eyes shut. Under his breath, he murmurs:
“‘All flag officers, and all persons in or belonging to Her Majesty’s ships or vessels of war, being guilty of profane oaths, cursings, execrations, drunkenness, uncleanness, or other scandalous actions, in derogation of God’s honour…’”
And what about that place between her legs? He wonders. Warm and wet and dampening her clean white sheets. What colour would that be?
Damn it all.
And as like anytime he has ever acquiesced to the demands that sound from between his legs, he sighs bitterly. He wiggles down his drawers so that it flops out, large and obscene. He hates it. Hates its neediness. Like the trunk of an elephant, long and obtrusive and somewhat absurd.
He begins to palm it. It’s already dripping, liquid beading at the top. This makes it easier for his hand to glide unencumbered. He starts with gentle, measured strokes, exploring his way up the hardened shaft. He thinks again about his bridge, tossing and turning in nothing but her skin, and his hand begins to glide faster.
The pressure is mounting, the pleasure building up to its release. He is a champagne bottle readying to discharge its cork.
“Graham? Are you still awake?”
His bridge’s voice, breathy and husky, trailing into the sticky night air of his room.
It is too intimate to hear her voice this close and this late between their bedrooms—all while he dares to pollute himself. Hearing her voice tips the balance, pushing him perilously close to his finish. He should stop, but he’s too close now. He could pretend that he’s sleeping. Let her lie there alone and awake at three in the morning thinking that he’s left her for the realm of Hypnos.
But he so hates to disappoint her.
“Y-yes, I am,” he allows. His hand is still frantic, pumping up and down, gripping himself a bit too tightly. He is nearly breathless with pleasure and exertion, but tries to make his voice sound even.
“I can’t sleep,” she says. “It’s just too hot even for that.”
Oh, God. Has she been awake the entire time?
“I’m sorry to—” he bites his lip as his cock jolts with pleasure, nearly taking his breath away. “—hear that.” He can hear his voice straining and he’s covered in sweat.
“I'd suggest we go out for a walk on the heath, but I think it might actually kill us.”
“Mm, yes.” Keep it together, Commander. Just. Act. Normal. “T-that sounds…nice.”
He pictures her hand there in place of his. Her mouth. The holes he would fill for her.
His body jerks and convulses as he spends. His head dips back on the pillow, his eyes closed, lip bitten. The pleasure so great it almost forces unseemly noises to escape him. He spills his seed over his stomach, pooling in his navel, tangling in the trail of dark hair there.
“Should we? Go out for a late night walk?”
He is soaked in his own essence. He doesn’t like to see it spurting, but must deal with the messy aftermath. In the blistering heat the scent of musk and bleaching powder assaults his nostrils. What he needs is a cold shower to rinse himself off: all they are now permitted under the mandated water rations. But not at this hour. His bridge will only wonder. Instead he reaches for the tissues atop his bedside table and begins to clean up his dirty spill.
“I’m starting to get a bit sleepy now, actually,” he answers, and it’s not exactly a lie. His eyelids are growing heavy now. The inevitable drowsiness and relief that follows.
“Ah, all right. Makes sense. It is after three in the morning now after all.”
“Mmm,” he murmurs, aware now only that his consciousness is finally dimming.
There is still a need to repent for what he’s just done, but that shall wait for the morning.
“Goodnight, Graham.”
”Goodnight, little…”