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A perfect blue-green evening, with the last hint of sunset still tangled amongst the rooftops to the west, and Venus just beginning to show. They tumbled over the tower’s low parapet almost at the same moment, and lay panting on their backs on leads that were almost as warm as a range: deliciously breathless, deliriously giddy, the evening sky wheeling over their heads.
“Good - show,” Bertie wheezed between gasps for air. “Golly, I - I wasn’t sure - I could still do that.”
“Between you and me - nor was I,” Gimlet managed in reply.
“Well I think you - might have mentioned that - before you hauled me up here!” Bertie protested. “Was rather relying on you - to catch me if I fell off.”
“How on earth would I do that?”
“You’re the expert, you tell me!”
“You’d be the one falling off, I rather think it’d be your problem, not mine.”
“Rather assumed you’d have been shinning up here twice a week for the last two years,” said Bertie. “Know all the in and outs. Or rather the ups and downs, I suppose.”
He’d certainly looked it, on the way up. Not a hesitation, hardly even a pause, just the smooth, swinging movement of someone who knew precisely how gravity was supposed to work, and didn’t see why it should apply to them. In the moments when he’d had time to notice it, Bertie had looked up at King and felt a quick, warm flush of delight at seeing him so perfectly in his element: his sureness, his fluidity, the precision and economy and practical grace of his movement.
“Well - I suppose I’ve done it a fair number of times,” Gimlet conceded. “I don’t remember having done it after three pints before, that’s all.”
“And half a pint of champagne,” Bertie pointed out.
“And half a pint of champagne,” Gimlet amended. “And a few other odds and ends. Tends to add an element of uncertainty when you can’t quite feel your fingers.”
“On second thoughts - thanks for not mentioning it beforehand, old man,” said Bertie, hoisting himself up on his elbows. “Probably for the best I didn’t know.”
“I wouldn’t have gone up if I hadn’t been pretty sure I could do it,” King said, in what he probably fondly considered to be a reassuring tone. “The champagne was hours back, after all.”
Bertie sighed. “Oh, well. I suppose we’re not dead yet. And one only finishes Finals once.”
“With a bit of luck,” Gimlet added. “Touch wood.”
Bertie sat up; Gimlet didn’t, only lay gazing up at the distant blue of the sky. There was a tinge of colour in his pale cheeks, scuff marks on his polished shoes, a faint green smear of lichen on the left sleeve of his suit jacket, and his hair was all pushed awry by the climb and the breeze. He looked really quite human, Bertie thought, before wondering what sort of ragamuffin he looked himself.
“You should practice more,” said Gimlet, turning his head just enough to look at him.
“What on earth for?” Bertie protested, as he shuffled over to sit with his back to the parapet. “I suppose I could supplement my allowance with a little light burglary, but it seems a bit of a desperate expedient - the guv’nor doesn’t keep me that short, after all.”
“You never know when you might find it useful,” said King, vaguely. Then he sat up, as if remembering something, and freed from his jacket pocket that last bottle of champagne: the one that Bertie had informed him, with absolute certainty, wouldn’t fit in his jacket pocket, and even if it did certainly wouldn’t make it all the way to the top of Palmer’s Tower in one piece.
“I say, jolly well done,” said Bertie admiringly. “Not sure the cut of your coat will ever be quite the same again, but it stood up to the trip much better than I thought it would. I thought for sure it was done for when I heard it clunk against that downpipe.”
“Good thing it’s champagne,” says Gimlet, unpeeling the top and unwinding the fastening of the metal cage. “I didn’t think to bring a corkscrew. I might be able to hack a cork out with a pen-knife, but it does begin to smack of desperation. Look out now, it’ll probably be a bit lively after all that shaking about.”
The cork came free with a pop! that set all the surrounding rooftops ringing, and a rush of bubbles that cascaded up and over King’s hand where he was holding the neck of the bottle. He grimaced, swapped hands, shook the worst of the liquid off his fingers and licked away the rest, a dart of pink tongue that put Bertie in mind of a cat, and not for the first time that evening. Fastidious and sure-footed and sharp-clawed: he could think of worse comparators.
(Did he mean comparators, he wondered? Comparisons? Comparanda? He watched Gimlet licking his hand clean, and reflected that it probably didn’t matter. There was a curious glow of warmth inside his skin, he found, though whether it was the drink or the exercise or the company that caused it he wasn't sure; but it was jolly pleasant, and he wasn’t going to risk chasing it away by worrying over grammatical niceties.)
“Shame we didn’t think to bring any glasses up,” he said. Gimlet gave him a look.
“And where would I have kept those on the climb?” he asked. “In the opposite pocket, I suppose, to keep the weight evenly distributed. I don’t think they’d have fared as well with the downpipe as the bottle did.”
“What about one of those special reinforced top-hats the peelers used to wear?” Bertie suggested. “Keep ‘em safe from accidental dings, and plenty of space for a couple of glasses if you stacked ‘em carefully and strapped ‘em in. For that matter,” he went on, warming to his theme, “I don’t see why you couldn’t have some sort of collapsible glass - make ‘em in three bits with a stem that unscrewed, then you could stack the base inside the glass and put the stems in sideways.”
“If you're going to make them out of something that unscrews, then you might as well have ‘em made out of metal in the first place and just stick ‘em in a pocket,” argued Gimlet, shuffling over himself so that he sat next to Bertie against the waist-high wall, both of them well hidden from the quad below. “None of this fussing about with top hats. In any case, I’m sure you couldn’t keep a top hat on for a climb like that.”
“Of course I couldn’t, old thing,” said Bertie, placidly. “I can’t even keep a top hat on for dinner and a show. Always some music-hall-comedian type simply longing to heave a shoe at it. Dashed unsporting. I say, are you going to keep the whole bottle to yourself?”
“I thought you didn’t want any,” said Gimlet. “All that wittering about glasses.”
“A man may witter about glasses without forfeiting his right to a drink, mayn’t he? Might as well say that a starving man who dreams of steak wouldn’t appreciate a good slice of bread and butter.”
Gimlet looked at the bottle. “I suppose we ought to have a toast, for luck.”
“With the amount of toasts you’ve drunk today, old bean, your luck’s either in already or there’s no help for you.”
“To champagne then?”
“To emancipation from the genius tutelary.”
“To the night-climbers of Oxford.”
Bertie cast him a sideways glance. “To freedom.”
He saw Gimlet’s smile, quick and brilliant and unguarded. “All right. To freedom.”
He took a swig of champagne straight from the bottle, then passed it over to Bertie, who swigged in his turn. It was a little warm, but still tasted bright as spring-time as it danced over his tongue. He passed the bottle back to Gimlet, who wiped the top, apparently unconsciously, with the trailing sleeve of his gown, and tipped his head back against the elderly stonework, and shut his eyes.
‘Relaxed’, Bertie thought, was not an adjective that one could easily or regularly apply to Gimlet King. He’d seen Gimlet King lying submerged to the ears in a bath with a clear six inches of soap sud, and even at the time he’d had the uncomfortable awareness that if a garrotter had crept in on silent feet, King would have been up and inflicting grievous wounds with the back brush before the fellow even had a chance to get to the first squeaky floorboard. There was a tension in him, as precisely controlled as a watch-spring, that drove him on relentlessly.
But, he reflected, if there was ever a time when that spring would have to run down a little or risk snapping under repeated over-windings, it would be the night after the end of one’s final exams. One wouldn’t easily have noticed, when he’d last seen him, that King was wound any tighter than usual; but now that extra tension had gone, you could see quite plainly where it had been. He’d seen it ease, over the course of the day: over the boisterous greeting from half a dozen of his friends at the back of Schools, over pints at the Chequers, the Blue Boar, the Turf, over genial chatter and Chambertin and lamb shanks at the Mitre, as the friends had eventually drifted off by ones and two, and left just the two of them together. Now, in the dimness of a perfect midsummer’s twilight, he looked as relaxed as Bertie thought he’d ever seen him: eyes closed, face to the heavens, his limbs a loose, heavy sprawl; and his shoulder resting against Bertie’s, close and companionable and uncommonly easy.
Bertie, for his part, felt as if every part of him was singing in harmony. There had been times on the climb up - the times when he hadn't been slipping and swearing and skinning his elbows - when he’d felt curiously weightless: as though if he’d let go he’d have fallen not down, but up, drifting off into the blue of the evening, light as thistledown, although fortunately he hadn’t been quite far enough gone to try the experiment. Now he let the warmth of the leads, of the old stone, of that solid weight against his side, sink into him and fill him up to the brim.
They lazily traded the bottle back and forth between them, Bertie tapping the base against Gimlet’s hand to prompt him to take it without his having to open his eyes. Each time Bertie handed it back, and before King took his next sip, King would carefully wipe the mouth of the bottle clean against his sleeve.
“Look, hang it all,” said Bertie, after a few minutes of this. “I realise it’s not exactly ideal, old thing, but I’m hardly pestilential. At any rate I’m sure I’m quite as hygienic as your bally sleeve. You’ve been trailing that thing around after you all day, I’m quite certain you’ll have dipped it into something unspeakable at some point.”
“What?” said King, eyes blinking open owlishly.
“All that business,” said Bertie, miming the action of wiping the bottle clean. “I mean to say, I'm fairly sure that what you and I have shared over the years amounts to rather more than a dab of saliva, even if it isn't normally done to bring it up in polite conversation. In any case, I’m not sure that wiping the lip will really do very much to sterilise it anyway - it just moves everything about a bit.”
“Oh,” said King, a little blankly. “I didn’t realise I was doing it. Habit, I suppose. The sort of thing one picks up at Prep school and never quite goes away.” He paused for a moment, as though gathering his thoughts together for a more thorough rebuttal. “I don’t really think you’re pestilential, you know.”
“Well - no, I didn’t think you did, really,” said Bertie, somewhat mollified. “In any case, I’m certain there’ll be more saliva washed into the champagne itself than there ever is on the rim, for all I’m doing my best to be tidy.”
Gimlet pulled a face. “Bertie - “
It was the way he wrinkled his nose that did it. That scrunched-up fastidious look he got when his attention was drawn to bodily functions. It was infuriating, and oddly charming, and more than a little funny, and Bertie thought quite distinctly to himself, oh, to hell with it, why not, and leaned across and kissed him, closed-lipped and badly-aimed and landing more than a little off target.
“There,” he said, after the necessary moment of surprised silence. “That was at least as much saliva as you'll get from the top of a bottle, and it wasn’t so awful, was it?”
“You’re the one who said it was unhygienic,” said Gimlet, automatically.
“Well, it is, isn’t it? Not nearly high enough proof to kill the bacteria, I’m sure of it. Just not sure it's more unhygienic than some of the other things we do together. Seems rather like shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted.”
“Not the bottle, you ass,” said Gimlet. “Kissing.”
“Oh,” said Bertie. “Well - I imagine that is too. Fairly sure that between chapel and natural history lessons they covered that in school pretty thoroughly.”
“And you don’t like it.”
There was, Bertie thought, the very faintest hint of a question mark hovering over that statement; and he took another mouthful of champagne or two as he thought through his answer.
“Well - no, I don’t,” he said, slowly. “Or at any rate I don’t normally. It’s just - I think I’ve told you before that I don’t usually know what trips it off, haven’t I? Fancying - you know.” He gestured, extremely vaguely, with the bottle. “That sort of thing. Doesn’t cross my mind from one month to the next, and then suddenly it’s just sort of there - like finding mole-hills in the lawn, you never know where they’ll turn up next.”
“And it’s turned up this evening?” asked King. “All of a sudden?”
“Well - the champagne might have had something to do with it,” Bertie conceded. “At least a bit. There’s an awful lot of things that seem like a better idea after a glass or two of champagne - perhaps this is one of them. Normally I'd ignore it, or go and - well, deal with it in private, if you see what I mean, but I thought - seeing as you're here, and assuming you're amenable, then perhaps - “
“You thought you might deal with it in public instead.”
“Hardly in public!” Bertie protested. Gimlet’s eyes narrowed, and looked around them in a way that pointedly took in the open sky, the distant stars, the glimpses of rooftops and towers. “Well - I mean, yes, I suppose it’s public under the meaning of the act,” Bertie amended. “I meant - you know. In company, if you see what I mean. But I'll quite understand if you're not keen on the idea, old thing, I know it's not precisely - “
“I'm amenable.”
Bertie stuttered over the end of his sentence. “What?”
And Gimlet rolled towards him, half kneeling up, and kissed him: closed-lipped, too, but rather more successfully central, and with his hand coming up to rest on Bertie’s shoulder in a pleasantly weighty way. “I said I'm amenable,” he said, at close range.
Bertie blinked at him; then slowly smiled. “Oh. Splendid. You know, I thought it seemed like rather a jolly idea.”
King was half twisted towards him, a position that ought to have been an awkward contortion, but there was something uncharacteristically pliant about him this evening. “To be quite honest, we probably ought to burn a little of the champagne out of the system before we try the climb back down anyway,” he went on pragmatically. “And we might as well do something as nothing while we wait.”
“Oh, absolutely,” agreed Bertie, fervently. “Couldn’t agree more. Fill the unforgiving minute and all that.” The hand had slid up from his shoulder and into his hair, carding absently through the thick fair strands, as though Bertie was a favoured dog that King didn't quite notice he was petting.
“Usual rules apply?” asked King.
Bertie gave him a rather old-fashioned look. “You planning to give me six of the best up here, old thing?”
“Sorry,” said Gimlet. “Force of habit.” He smiled, a little lop-sided. “Not sure I've got the energy this evening, in any case.”
Bertie thought for a moment, feeling those strong fingers still idly massaging his scalp. “I could try giving you six of the best, if that'd help get you duly motivated.”
The smile grew into a grin. “You could try.”
He felt another of those terrible, breath-taking clutches of affection; and reached out, a little diffidently, to slide his hand under King’s suit jacket and rest it over his hip, his thumb curving along the trim line of his waist. “Not sure I have the energy either.”
King leaned forward and kissed him again, a little longer, a little softer; and probably it would never be something either of them relished like the heroes and heroines of the cinema seemed to, but for this evening at least he found it was a surprisingly pleasant way to spend the time.
Gimlet pulled back a little, and tapped a fingernail against Bertie’s stiff collar. “Mind if I dispense with the formalities?”
“Be my guest old sport,” said Bertie. “Astonishing it’s lasted as long as it has. I was within an ace of shying it into the Isis hours ago.”
“I’m sure you’re about the only person I know who still bothers with a proper shirtfront for dinner,” murmured Gimlet, in a soft, distracted voice, as he pulled the bow tie loose, and ran his finger along the starched edge of the collar, just where it rubbed against the skin. “Even Freddie’s defected to integrated collars.”
“Well - they are a jolly sight more comfy,” Bertie admitted. “And rather a lot easier to get into and out of. But you can’t beat a proper collar for neatness.”
King nodded, fingers starting to work on the front stud. “Couldn’t agree more. Much prefer ‘em.”
“Yes,” said Bertie, with half a smile. “I know.”
The fingers paused in their movement for a moment, with King’s fingertip inserted delicately down the inside of his collar, the nail very slightly pressing into the skin. Then he pushed the stud through, and the long front tongue of the collar came free, and Bertie felt the bliss of night-cool air against the prickle of sweat and the heat of starch-chafed skin; and Lorry leaned forward to press one small, light kiss to the hollow of his throat.
“Honestly, old thing, I'm not sure you need to fuss about the back one,” said Bertie, a little breathlessly, as King’s fingers slid over the newly-revealed skin. “I'm really quite comfortable enough as I am.”
“I can't bear a flapping collar,” said King, firmly. “It looks slovenly, and even if it doesn't get you in the eye it'll certainly get me.”
A jolly good thing it was King’s fingers sliding around to the back instead of his own, Bertie reflected, because collar studs were quite enough of a trial when one was stone-cold sober, let alone when one was pleasingly in alt. He sat as patiently as could be managed, with one hand rubbing small, distracted passes over the small of Gimlet’s back under his gown and jacket, while Lorry knelt with his face inches from Bertie’s own and his arms resting on Bertie's shoulders, frowning absently as if trying to solve a quadratic equation, intent and focussed and very slightly muzzy. Then his face lightened, the collar came free, and Lorry’s hand was sliding down to drop the studs safely into Bertie’s jacket pocket.
“They'll fall out of there faster than you can say Jack Ketch,” Bertie said.
“That's your look-out. What do you want done with this?”
“Oh, chuck it off the roof for I care - no, not really you ass, someone will see!”
He snatched the abandoned collar from Gimlet's hand, and frowned quellingly as he shoved that in his pocket too.
“I don't imagine stiff collars fluttering from the sky would be the most implausible thing to happen during exam season,” King said, mildly. “Shirt, do you think?”
“Oh - just a stud or two, ad libitum you know,” said Bertie with a careful lack of interest, quite as though his blood wasn’t beginning to hum delightfully in his veins. “Just try to make sure I'm still respectable enough to get back to your rooms later without scaring the horses.”
He could still see the hint of a frown in the dimness as Lorry bent over him, Lorry's fingers seeking out the shirt-studs by touch as much as anything else: just one or two, just enough to free his neck, the top inch or two of his shoulders, the hollows at his collarbones, the places he had learned by now that Lorry was especially keen on. Jolly good thing it was King, again, because if it was him he'd certainly have lost at least one of the shirt studs already -
A faint but distinctive plink.
“Oh bother.”
Bertie didn’t quite manage to suppress the perilously undignified gurgle of laughter, though he tried. “It's all right, old thing,” he soothed hastily as he saw King’s rather put-out expression. “I've got boxes and boxes of spares. Lose the damn things almost as soon as I buy ‘em. If you're ever at a loss for a present for me, buy me two dozen studs, assorted.”
“It rolled towards the gutter, I’m sure I can get -”
“Don't you dare go guddling around in gutters at this stage in proceedings, you've got better things to do.”
King’s lips curved, and he ducked his head to nuzzle into the crook of Bertie’s shoulder. “Do I, by Jove? What sort of things?”
Bertie smiled. “Use your imagination, old boy.”
The feeling of King's mouth against his throat sent a champagne fizz down his spine: a brush of lips, a flick of his tongue, a nip that made him gasp.
“Have I ever told you,” Gimlet murmured against the skin, “how excessively fond I am of your neck?”
“Not in so many words,” Bertie answered, a trifle distractedly. “Do you always chew on the things you’re excessively fond of, like a hound pup?”
“Not all of them. But this one - “ Another press of teeth, and then a slight, sucking pressure, soothed by another stroke of his tongue that made Bertie’s skin tingle. “Yes. Quite definitely. I say, you don’t mind if I leave a few marks here today, do you?”
“You don’t - don’t normally bother to ask.”
“I’ve normally got a few more discreet parts of you available to work with,” Gimlet pointed out. “But I thought you probably wouldn’t want to strip off many more layers up here - I expect it’d get jolly chilly jolly fast - so I’ll probably be a little more prodigal with your neck than usual, if that suits.”
“Jolly considerate,” Bertie murmured. “You could always consider not marking me up, Special occasion, and all that.”
“Then how would you know where I’ve been?”
“There’s the hound pup again,” Bertie murmured. “Marking your bally territory.”
Gimlet’s teeth pressed a little harder, making him catch his breath. “Vulgar.”
“Oh, I think you like a little vulgarity here and there,” said Bertie, vaguely. “Gives you an excuse to chastise me for it.”
“I have half a suspicion that you quite like being chastised.”
“What on earth gave you that impression?”
And King reached down, palmed his half-hard cock through the wool of his dress trousers, and smirked, with quite devastating smugness.
Probably, Bertie reflected hazily, as Gimlet lavished attention on first the soft parts of his ear, and then his throat, and then the place where neck and shoulder met; as Bertie’s eyes dipped closed for a moment in a shiver of pleasure, and his hand came up to thread through Gimlet’s hair and clutch him to him; as the first faint stars began to appear, and to spin, lazily, overhead - probably, if King’s post-Finals trajectory was anything like his own had been, he’d have something like a week of this blissful lassitude. He remembered that sensation of drifting on a wonderful cloud of irresponsibility, his brain revolting when faced even with a light novel or a musical comedy, because thinking of any kind was frankly unthinkable. It had felt like the most glorious, perfect freedom: freedom not only from exams, and revision, and university, but from all expectations, from all weight of either past or future: like he was surrounded only by one glorious, shining present.
(And in that present, King’s hands were against his chest, his shoulder; King’s legs, one to either side of him, bracketing his hips with heat and the strength of lean muscle; King’s lips, tongue, teeth against his skin, and the heat of his breath against Bertie’s neck, and the scent of his hair in Bertie’s nose, rosemary and bergamot and somehow, always, woodsmoke, and the feeling of him was a wonderful, astonishing, implausible certainty.)
After that week or so, of course, the future had come crashing in again with a vengeance, an infinitude of possibilities somehow transfigured almost overnight into a terrifying lack of guidance: he hadn't known then what should come next, and frankly he didn't really know now. But perhaps things would be different for Lorry. Lorry, after all, always seemed to know exactly what he was doing.
Goodness only knew how long it took him to fumble the buttons open, his and King’s, with his fingers still tingling with the afternoon’s drinking and with frequent pauses for the most delightful distractions; but it really didn’t matter. There was no rush and no hurry, nowhere else they were supposed to be and nothing else they were supposed to be doing, and who knew how many more times in their lives they’d be able to say that? The evening was a gorgeous, shining soap bubble that somehow didn’t burst, and from minute to minute he felt the miracle of that more and more, and perhaps it was only the champagne talking, but perhaps it wasn’t. He felt an astonishing benevolence for the whole world, for the world in general and for King in particular, King pressing against him, warm and lithe and tipsy and joyous; and Bertie fumbled and fidgetted and worked them both free of trousers and underwear in the end, and wrapped his fingers around the two of them together, and stroked.
And perhaps it was the champagne, and perhaps it was the thrill of the climb, of the height, of the knowledge that they were rocking together like this under the lavish brilliance of the evening sky, without so much as a ceiling between them and the eyes of God or, more pertinently, the university constabulary - but there was something in it that was rather more than the sum of its mechanical parts, more than King’s lips and tongue and teeth against his throat, more than the the little throaty gasps he gave when Bertie squeezed a little at just the right moment, more than the pleasing curve of King’s waist under Bertie’s hand as he fitted them closer together, more than the shift of his fingers along and around both their cocks in unison -
They’d done far more than this before, and no doubt would do again: but this was the present, without any weight of past or future, and it felt gloriously exciting and new.
“Bertie - I - oh - can I - please - “
“Anything - anything, old thing, it’s all right - “
And King had bitten down, hard, hard enough almost to draw blood on the skin of his throat, just high enough that no collar would quite cover it, and Bertie had let out a sound that rather shocked him, something between a cry and a groan; and King had stiffened and spilled over his hand, and Bertie, to his lasting astonishment, had found that was more than enough to send him tumbling after.
“Not a hound pup,” he said, a minute or so later, when he finally stirred himself enough to hunt up his handkerchief from his pocket and make a desultory attempt at cleaning them up, with King’s face still buried in his shoulder and King’s arms still around him. “Something vampiric, perhaps.”
King didn’t say anything particularly intelligible in response to that, and Bertie didn’t really expect him to; and in any case it was much more pleasant to sit here for at least a few more minutes, with his hand warm against King’s back, and King’s weight draped across him.
Eventually, though, he sighed, and murmured against King’s ear, “Probably time to call it a night, old thing. You’ve had rather a day of it.”
King made a disgruntled noise, and rolled off him to end up where he had begun, beside Bertie with his back to the stone parapet. Bertie could feel his presence as a line of warmth pressed against his side. He heard a clink in the darkness, and felt the bottle bump gently against his leg.
“The moon’ll be up in half an hour,” said King. “It'll be easier to get down if we can see what we're doing. Let's stay until then, anyway.”
He took the bottle, his fingers brushing against King’s for a moment as it changed hands, and smiled a smile into the gloom that he knew would have looked perfectly fatuous if King had only been able to see it. “Splendid notion.”
It would have to end soon, of course, this lovely, ephemeral, once-in-lifetime day: but it didn't have to end quite yet.