He left the office while there was still light in the day, though not much of it, and none that would last.
He’d cleared the early finish a week ago, in an email he’d made too casual and then sent before he could soften it any further. He’d had the flexibility for three years and never once used it. So he shut the laptop at half three, left three unread messages that could keep until morning, and took the bag off the hook by the door. It had sat there packed since the night before. The bag pulled at his shoulder all the way down the stairs and into the grey afternoon. The street was wet and the light was low over the rooftops, and he walked into it fast, faster than the cold asked for.
Cian’s jumper lay clean and folded in the bag, packed first, under everything he’d need for the night. He’d washed it and dried it and folded it small, the thing you can’t be trusted to remember. Bring it back Wednesday. He’d been told on Sunday, in that flat voice that left no room to bargain or refuse, and here it was going back Wednesday, clean and folded, on a train heading south. He’d thought about it more than a jumper warranted. He hadn’t been asked whether he wanted to bring it. He hadn’t missed being asked.
He was not going to walk onto a worksite and surprise a man in a tree.
On the platform at Pearse, the rule was plain. All week he’d been building the other version, the one where he came up a lane and there Cian was, forty feet up with a saw running, and looked down and found him at the fence. He’d built and rebuilt Cian’s surprise until the scene looked less like pleasure than an intrusion. That wasn’t the arrangement. The arrangement was a café and a text and a wait. He got on the southbound train with the bag between his feet and his phone face-up on his knee, and watched Dublin slide backward past the glass.
The DART let the sea in and then let it go. It ran the coast with the tide out and the water flat and pewter over the mud. At Booterstown and Blackrock, birds worked the flats in the last of the light. At Dún Laoghaire the two long piers went out grey into a greyer sea. The water went out of the windows below the line and came back between the walls and the backs of houses, and the platforms came and went, and he named the stations to himself as they passed. By Killiney the day had gone the colour of the end of something and the hills had come up dark on the right side of the carriage. He changed at Bray onto a bus, not the one the app had first put in front of him but the one he’d been told to take. From the window, with the bag on his knees, he watched the bus fill with a few kids off the last school run and a woman carrying two bags of shopping before it pulled away from the coast and turned inland.
The sea went out of the windows for good. The road climbed. It left the town all at once, the houses thinning to bungalows and then to gates, the verges rising, the hedges closing in wet and black on both sides of the bus. Each rise in the road brought colder air, darker hedges and fewer streets Evan could name. The hourly bus carried him out of every street he knew and into Cian’s country, and Evan let it. Nobody on the bus knew his order or his accent. Nobody was choosing the journey for him, correcting it, or asking twice whether he was sure of the stop. He’d chosen the seat himself, and it was taking him where he wanted to go. He wanted Cian. Wanting Cian stayed warm under his breastbone the whole way up the hill, fixed on the man at the end of the route.
The dark came up the hill to meet the bus. By the time it set him down in the village the streetlights were already on and the shops were yellow squares in it. It was one street and a church and a few shops, and the cold up there had a thinner, cleaner edge to it than the coast, with the wet of the hills in it.
The café window faced the road into the hills. Evan set a coffee he didn’t want between his hands and waited there for Cian to send for him.
Waiting asked nothing of him except that he stay where Cian had put him. December light failed over the rim of the paper cup. It went fast, the way December light goes, no drama in it at all, only there and then gone. The last of it drained off the wet slates, and the hills slid from green to grey to nothing behind the rooftops while the village lit itself yellow. One van went up the road towards the trees, then another followed more slowly with a trailer. Two men in high-vis crossed at the corner and were gone into a doorway. His phone lay dark on the table between his two hands. He’d silenced every other notification on the way down so only Cian could light the screen. It stayed dark while he drank coffee he didn’t taste. He’d been early since the train, as he always was when a thing mattered to him. His hands stayed around the cup for heat while the extra minutes passed.
He’d taken an hourly bus into the hills to stand behind tape and watch Cian work. The fact should have stung. It didn’t.
The hills disappeared behind the rooftops. The last colour left the wet slates while Cian kept working beyond the village. Evan’s office would stay lit for hours. Up here, the crew stopped when they could no longer see the ground under their boots.
Someone behind the counter stacked saucers. The front door opened, let in a line of cold across the floor, and shut again. Evan turned the paper cup between his hands. The coffee had gone cold. His phone stayed dark.
The phone lit.
Done. Fintan will bring you up. Stay where he puts you.
He was on his feet with the bag before he’d finished reading it.
The man waiting for him on the path was shorter than Cian and built close to the ground, a high-vis jacket zipped to the chin and a battered hard hat held under one arm. The offered hand came with a name before Evan had worked out how to explain who he was.
“Fintan,” he said. “You’ll be Evan. Right, it’s up this way. But you’ll stay the far side of the tape where I put you, and you’ll stay there the whole time, and that’s not me being awkward. There’s kit still coming down, and a man watching the wrong thing at the wrong second is exactly how somebody ends up hurt.” He said it flat and easy, with no edge in the warning and no apology for it. “You all right with that?”
“Yeah,” Evan said. “Wherever you want me.”
“Grand, so.” Fintan set off up the path, and Evan matched his pace with the bag knocking against his hip.
They came up off the village on a lane between two hedges, and the noise reached them before the site did, the flat industrial chew of a chipper working somewhere ahead of them in the dark. A gap in the hedge opened onto a field under lights on tall stands, with tape strung across the entrance. The lane was churned to mud down the middle where the vans had gone up and back all day. Fintan put him at the corner of it, where two lengths of tape met, with the whole worked mess of the field laid out beyond.
“There. Not one foot past that,” he said. “That’s Eoghan running the ground end, the big fella on the ropes. Dara’s the young one on the chipper. You stay where I put you and neither of them has to watch for you.” Fintan ducked under the tape and disappeared into the work lights, leaving Evan outside the line with the bag against his shin.
He had come up expecting a climb, and there was no climb.
The dangerous part was already over. The great tree that had stood in the field that morning lay down in sections. Under the lights, the crew worked through the long, unglamorous end of a hard day with more quiet competence than Evan had ever seen.
Nobody hurried, and nothing was wasted, and no one raised his voice. Eoghan brought the last of the rigging line down off the stump of the stem and gathered it in over his arm, coiling it against his elbow. Dara dragged an armful of brush across the churned grass to the machine and fed it into the throat of the chipper, and cleared what fell, and went back for more. The chipper took it and gave back its noise, and a fine pale drift of shredded wood, and the sweet raw smell of cut sap on the cold air. One worker levered a cut section towards the trailer with a hooked bar. Two others took a length of timber off between them and set it up on the trailer, squared it, and went back for the next. A fourth ran a rake over the ground where the brush had been, working the last of the chippings into a heap, in from the edges of the light toward the middle. Eoghan fed the rope through his gloved hands, checking every inch before he let it pass. The field cleared around them because each man took the next job before anyone had to name it. Evan hadn’t come to watch that quiet certainty pass from one pair of hands to the next, and he hadn’t been ready for how beautiful it was.
Then he found Cian in the middle of it, and stopped seeing the rest.
Cian stood near the base of the stem with his ear defenders pushed up and the harness wide around his hips. The harness set his feet farther apart and carried his weight low. His chainsaw trousers were dark to the knee. Mud had worked up the boots and onto the fabric above them. His breath showed under the lights.
Evan shifted his feet inside boots made for an office floor. His toes had gone numb.
Cian lifted one hand. Eoghan slowed the line. Two fingers went up and Dara changed direction without looking twice.
When the rope reached Cian, he drew it through his gloves before he coiled it. Cian’s hands travelled the full length. At a patch of mud worked into the fibres, his thumb pressed the rope against his palm before he carried on.
The bag strap bit into Evan’s palm.
It wasn’t the height. It wasn’t the saw.
Cian checked the rope again.
Dara dropped an armful of brush across the path to the chipper. Eoghan came up behind it with a rope over one shoulder and had to stop.
Cian crossed the ground, moved two branches clear with his own hands, and said something Evan couldn’t hear.
Dara shifted the pile. He pulled the thicker ends round first and opened the path from the field to the machine.
Cian waited until Eoghan had walked through. Once the path was clear, he faced Dara.
“Grand.”
Dara took the next load, and Cian put his hands back on the rope.
The strap had cut across Evan’s palm. He eased each finger away from it.
He waited for Cian to look across the tape.
He wanted Cian to lift a hand towards the tape and show him that the trip had mattered.
Cian didn’t look over.
He finished the rope, checked the path Dara had cleared, and crossed to help Eoghan with a timber section at the edge of the trailer. They lifted together. Cian’s shoulders tightened under the wet fabric, then lowered when the weight came off.
Evan stayed where Fintan had put him.
Cold had worked through his gloves. His cock was hard beneath the coat.
Cian wiped one forearm across his forehead and went back for the next piece.
Evan wanted him.
The chipper wound down and stopped. The saws had been quiet a good while by then, and the lights stayed up over a field that had held a tree this morning and held none now. The men moved through it gathering the last of the kit into the vans, and Cian crossed the cleared ground toward the tape, toward him.
Up close, the day clung to him in sweat, sawdust and mud. His hair had gone dark under the hat, sawdust clung to the red beard, and the harness still spread his stance. He brought the cold smell of two-stroke and cut wood and his own worked sweat with him to the line and stopped on the other side of it, close.
“You’re perished,” he said. “How long were you stood there?”
“A while. I’m fine.”
“You’re not fine, you’re blue.” He took one of Evan’s hands and turned it over between his gloves, and looked at the throat and the state of the coat while he had it. Then, drier, “Did you get a look at any of it, or only the clear-up?”
“I got a look.” The moment Cian made him the subject, Evan’s mouth went looking for a joke to stand in front of the truth. He let the truth out anyway. “It wasn’t what I pictured. It was better than what I pictured.”
Cian looked at him a beat longer, then turned when Fintan called his name.
Fintan came over pulling his gloves off finger by finger. A folder sat under his arm, dry and clean against the mud on the jacket.
“I’ll want that back signed,” he said. “The buy-in. I can’t hold it open the far side of Christmas.”
Cian’s hand stopped on the buckle of his harness.
Fintan waited.
“We’ll talk tomorrow.”
“Grand. Tomorrow so.”
Cian released the buckle and pulled the strap through. Fintan tucked the folder back under his arm and walked towards the vans.
The dry folder stayed under Fintan’s arm while Cian’s hand rested on the wet buckle.
Cian reached for the next buckle.
Evan didn’t ask.
The tailgate light laid a white strip across the mud behind Cian’s boots. The harness came off heavy—waist, then thighs—and dropped several inches before he caught it, and his feet came back together under him without the weight of it. He hung it beside the ropes and pushed the buckles flat so they wouldn’t strike the side of the van, and put a dry layer on over the cold one. The tailgate shut the ropes and harness out of sight.
The dark had come down the whole way by the time they dropped back out of the hills toward the coast. Warmth came up off the heater. The wet road unspooled in the headlights, and the hedges gave over to houses, and the houses to the lights of the town coming up in the windscreen. For the first time in the whole of the day it was only the two of them in the warm, with the night shut out of it.
At a red light on the edge of Bray, Evan put his hand flat on Cian’s thigh, over the dry trousers, the muscle solid under his palm and warm through it.
“I want you,” he said. “After the shower. I want you tonight.”
Cian looked down at the hand, and then out at the empty junction and the light holding red over the both of them.
“You’ll ask me properly,” he said, “when we’re home.”
The light went green. He put the van in gear and pulled away, and Evan took his hand back into his own lap, and neither of them said one more word about it, and the town came up around them in the dark.
The flat was up two flights of stairs and warm from a radiator that had been on a timer through the empty day. Inside his own door, Cian sat on the arm of the chair and stripped off the boots before their mud could cross the room. He set them side by side and returned every piece of gear to its place as he took it off.
Evan laid the clean jumper over the kitchen chair where Cian couldn’t miss it.
The clean jumper stopped Cian halfway across the room.
“Clean?”
“I considered returning it with the original mud.”
Cian’s mouth stayed flat.
“I washed it.”
“Thought you might have.”
He sat on the arm of the chair and worked at one cuff, where the fabric had dried stiff around his wrist.
“Here.”
Cian held the stiff cuff towards Evan, his hand open for help.
The hand was warm and rough in Evan’s, pale scars crossing the back and a hard callus at the base of every finger. Evan worked the cuff over the heel of the hand without pulling against the skin. Cian turned his wrist when Evan needed him to and held still when he didn’t.
The cuff came free. Evan pushed the sleeve up once and found the warmth underneath it.
“The other one,” Cian said.
Cian’s other hand settled into Evan’s.
The bathroom was too small for both of them. Cian turned sideways to pull the curtain shut, and Evan had to put one hand against his chest to keep from stepping on his foot.
“Palatial.”
“You can wait outside.”
“I withdraw the criticism.”
The water came up hot. Evan worked the sawdust from Cian’s beard with his fingers, then washed the mud from the broad slope of his back and the place above the boot where it had worked beneath the trousers.
Red lines crossed the tops of Cian’s hips and ran down the fronts of his thighs. The skin stood in ridges where the harness had sat.
Evan followed one line with his thumb.
Cian’s head lowered. Water ran from the back of his neck and over Evan’s hand.
Evan traced the second line.
Cian didn’t move.
Evan soaped the broad chest and the belly under it and lower, and took him in a slick hand, and stroked him once and twice, slow, and felt him fill and go hard and heavy against his palm. Then he let him go again without finishing it. Cian’s breath changed over the top of his head. He didn’t reach for anything. He kept his own hands away and let Evan decide whether to touch him again. Evan got his arms up around the wet back and held on, and he could feel the man’s heart going under his hand, slower than his own, and the heat of him, and they stood like that a while before either of them moved.
Evan’s cock had been half-hard since the red light, and it filled the rest of the way under the hot water with his two hands full of the man. Cian turned and put a hand around the back of his neck, the same hold he’d used on the towpath a week ago, and kissed him under the spray, slow, the beard wet and rough against his mouth, and it was a long time and a good deal of hot water before either of them said anything at all.
Cian asked while both of them could still answer straight.
“When were you tested last?”
“Three months ago. Clean. You?”
“Six weeks. Clean.” His voice didn’t change around the answer. “What do you want to use?”
“A condom,” Evan said. “I want a condom.”
“Grand.” A low cupboard by the sink held the condom and lube. “You’ll know where they are now.” Cian set both on the bedside table within reach, then came back to the kiss while hot water ran over them and steam filled the room.
The towel went rough and fast over Evan’s hair, shoulders and back. Cian left him half damp when he put him on his back on the bed and came over him on hands and knees.
“Tell me what you sent.”
Evan kept his eyes on the ceiling instead of Cian.
Cian waited above him, one hand beside Evan’s shoulder and the other resting against his hip.
“Say it to me now.”
Cold climbed into Evan’s chest. His fingers tightened once in the sheet.
Cian stayed above him, close enough that Evan had to choose between the ceiling and his eyes.
“I want you to fuck me.”
“How?”
Evan met Cian’s eyes.
“Slow. Until I ask for more.”
“Good.”
Cian’s hand moved from Evan’s hip to the inside of his thigh.
Cian’s mouth travelled down Evan’s body. He put his mouth on Evan’s cock first, warm and slow and in no hurry about any of it. He took the whole of him and held him a moment, and let him go, and Evan’s hands came off the sheet and went into his hair. Then Cian moved lower. His beard scraped the insides of Evan’s thighs, his hands pushed them wide and held them open, and his tongue worked him while Evan gripped the sheet. Evan was already making sound by then, up out of his chest, and Cian stayed at it, unhurried, until Evan had gone loose and open under his mouth and his hips were lifting from the bed after it. Then his mouth came off him.
“I’m going to use my fingers now.” Lube shone across his fingers.
Cian pressed one finger into him slowly. He watched Evan’s face and worked it deeper before drawing it back.
The sheet twisted in Evan’s fist.
The finger slid in again, the slick drag longer this time, the heel of his hand settling against Evan when the finger was fully inside. Evan’s breath caught. Cian stopped there until it released.
A second finger pressed beside the first.
A sound rose out of Evan’s chest, and he caught it behind his teeth.
Cian’s eyes rose to Evan’s face and stayed there.
Both fingers worked deeper without hurry, his other hand spread across the inside of Evan’s thigh.
Evan let the sound out.
Cian’s eyes stayed on him.
“There.”
Cian resumed the same slow stroke.
Evan’s hips lifted from the mattress. The next sound came without catching behind his teeth first.
Cian turned his wrist and found a place that pulled another one from him.
“There you are.”
Evan held the sheet but didn’t hold himself quiet. Cian added the third finger only after Evan had started moving down to meet the first two. The stretch burned, then eased. Cian held still through the burn and moved only when it eased.
Evan’s next moan carried through the warm room.
Cian kept the same slow rhythm.
Cian rolled on the condom and used more lube on himself and on Evan. Then he put Evan’s hand around him.
“Guide me.”
Evan’s hand guided Cian against him.
Cian pressed the head inside him slowly. He stopped when Evan’s fingers tightened and waited until they loosened again.
“A bit more,” Evan said.
Cian eased farther inside.
Cian’s cock stretched him wider as it moved in. Evan breathed against it, one hand still holding Cian and the other flat on the mattress beside his head. Cian watched his face. Each time Evan’s breath caught, he stopped. Each time Evan moved his hand, Cian followed it.
By the time Cian was fully inside, sweat had started again at his temples.
He stayed still, arms braced beside Evan’s head.
Evan drew one breath, then another. Cian filled him deep and heavy, but the burn had eased.
“Still with me?”
“Yeah.”
Cian didn’t move until Evan asked him to.
“Move. Please.”
The first stroke was slow enough that Evan felt the full length leave him and return. The second was the same.
Cian’s weight came down over him, close and heavy. Evan could still move beneath it. He lifted his hips and met the next stroke.
The bed touched the wall once.
Cian changed the angle and moved again. Evan’s fingers slid over the damp skin at his shoulder. Cian kept each stroke slow and full, drawing almost all the way out before he returned.
The slow pace stopped being enough.
“Harder.”
Cian slowed.
His hand came under Evan’s jaw and held there until Evan looked at him.
“Again.”
“Harder.”
Cian didn’t move until Evan said the whole thing.
Evan kept his eyes up.
“I want it harder.”
Cian thrust harder.
The next stroke drove the breath from Evan’s chest. Cian’s hand moved from his jaw to his hip and held him where he wanted him. The bed struck the wall again, louder, and the sound disappeared under Evan’s own.
He pushed back to meet the next stroke.
Cian’s pace built. Evan kept his eyes open for as long as he could, lost them, found them again when Cian’s hand tightened at his hip.
“Like that,” Evan said.
Cian drove into him again.
“Exactly like that.”
“You asked me for this,” Cian said, low and even above him. “Don’t you go hiding from it now.”
“I’m not.” He got a hand up into the wet beard and pulled him down by it. “More. Like that. Don’t stop.”
And Cian didn’t. He kept the pace and weight, his eyes returning to Evan’s face between strokes, and did exactly what Evan had asked.
Cian closed a hand around Evan and worked it with the pace of his hips.
Evan came hard enough to lift from the bed. The sound tore out of him before he could catch it. His body clenched around Cian, and his face turned into the pillow.
His hand pushed once at Cian’s shoulder.
Cian stopped.
His open hand settled on Evan’s chest without bearing down.
“Don’t apologise.”
Evan opened his mouth to apologise and swallowed the word instead.
Cian stayed still.
“Keep going.”
And Cian kept going. He held Evan’s eyes and worked into him through the last of it until his rhythm went ragged, his weight came down, and a low broken sound left his chest as he came deep inside Evan, shaking, his forehead dropping onto Evan’s shoulder and staying there.
For a while there were only the two of them, and the sound of the two of them breathing in the dark.
He pulled out slowly, removed the condom, and came back to the bed with a warm cloth. The same hands that had checked rope all day cleaned them both without hesitation. Then Cian pressed one hand low on Evan’s belly and ran it down the inside of his thigh. His fingers stopped once where the muscle tightened.
“You sore?”
“A bit. Nothing wrong.”
“You’ll be more sore in the morning.” He said it flat, without apology or boast. “There’s paracetamol in the press if you want it.”
“I’m all right.”
“Water, then.” He was up and gone and back with a glass of it before Evan had managed to move himself. He got an arm in under Evan’s shoulders and brought him up enough to drink, and waited while he drank the whole of it, and took the glass back and set it on the floor by the bed within reach. Then he lay down along the length of Evan on the narrow bed and pulled the covers up over the both of them and put one big hand flat on the middle of Evan’s chest, over the heart, and left it lying there.
The heat of him ran the whole length of Evan’s side. The radiator ticked over in the corner. Somewhere down below a door went and a car started up and pulled away into the night, and the room held the two of them and the dark and nothing else. Evan lay there under the weight of a warm hand over his heart and waited, out of a whole lifetime of the habit of it, for the cold to come—for the turn, for the part where Cian, once he’d got what he wanted, put the distance back between them and rolled away and left Evan on his own to come down from it.
It didn’t come.
Cian’s hand stayed over his heart. His thumb moved once and went still.
Cian’s breaths lengthened against the side of Evan’s neck. The weight of him remained along Evan’s side, warm from shoulder to ankle.
A minute passed, then another.
Cian didn’t turn away.
He lay and waited for it a while longer, out of the plain habit of waiting for it, and it still didn’t come. Evan’s breath slowed to Cian’s without permission. His muscles loosened one by one until his whole weight rested in the narrow bed for the first time since he’d left Dublin. The radiator ticked as its timer clicked off. The glass of water sat on the floor within reach of his hand, and neither of them moved for any of it.
Rain came lightly against the window.
Evan turned his head on the pillow. Cian’s eyes were nearly shut, one hand still spread over Evan’s heart. The red lines from the harness crossed his hips beneath the edge of the cover.
Evan’s breaths came slower.
The hand stayed.
He wanted him out of the harness.