by P D Singer
Bobby slid one leg out from under the duvet, sitting up as stealthily as possible. The covers puddled in his lap, draping over his cock.
“You’re still awake too?”
No, he sleep-sat all the time, just like he sleep-snuggled. Bobby just barely managed to keep his irritation inside—it was for himself, not Lee. “Yeah.”
“Guess you had the same idea I had.” Lee did roll over, to rise on one elbow. “You don’t have to get up. If you don’t want to.”
“I don’t, but it seems kind of weird to just….” They’d had frenzied nights and leisurely mornings—to jack off in the same bed without touching, or helping, or watching, or…. Just weird. Like they were furtive teenagers instead of grown men who’d screwed each other silly more times than he could count.
Just not lately. A distinction that grew hazy while Bobby gazed at the highlighted silhouette of a man who had the same erection issue going, and for the same reasons. He hoped.
“Yeah, but….” Bobby could practically hear the gears turning in Lee’s head, because they churned in his own.
All the thousand reasons why this was a terrible idea and the best idea ever rolled into the stupidest suggestion he could have made. “If we help each other, we might sleep again tonight.”
“Uh, okay. Sleep… right.” Lee sounded less than thrilled, but that didn’t keep him from reaching out with a yes that pulled Bobby down to the mattress. “M’kay.”
And oh, it had been too long since he’d rolled through the sheets with Lee. Too long since he’d crushed the man’s strong body to his own, felt his skin as a river of fire against his matching heat. Too long since he’d met Lee’s mouth in a tangle of tongues, nothing but the ghost of mint flavoring their kiss. Too long since Lee had wrapped him in arms that had been Bobby’s refuge.
Locked together from knees to nose, Bobby twisted until he lay atop Lee, devouring his mouth until they gasped. The hard column of Lee’s cock lay beside his own, trapped between their bellies. He could frot against Lee until they exhausted their animal need and then roll over, and they’d sleep.
But if he made one excuse, he could make more. Should Lee question, Bobby’d say “so we don’t make a mess,” but Lee shouldn’t have believed him about the sleep thing either. It was enough in his own mind to let him leave the magnet that was his captain’s lips, to lick and nip a trail down Lee’s body. He’d have lingered if he weren’t so frantic, to play with a nipple or dip his tongue a second time into Lee’s navel, but the need that had tormented him for the past hour was too much.
With one hand full of muscular buttock and the other for aim, Bobby dove after Lee’s stiff cock. Familiar and yet new again, it filled his mouth with the same rightness he’d felt holding Lee in his sleep.
Velvet skin and musky scent, heady enough to make Bobby dizzy, and all for him. With his fingers threaded through Bobby’s hair, Lee thrust into his mouth, his soft moans driving Bobby completely crazy. He’d come in a minute—he wouldn’t last a second beyond the first taste of Lee’s seed. He put a hand to his groin to chase back his rising orgasm, and just in time. Lee bucked and froze, loosing deep groans and jets of come. Bobby swallowed him down, the bitter-salt tang painting his throat. It had been so long….
When Lee fell back on the mattress, panting, Bobby released him, slowly. Lee always got hypersensitive after he came, so no tongue, no extralippy kisses to the head or swipes along the shaft. Just… let go. But letting go was so hard.
Bobby followed Lee’s tug to rest again in the circle of his arms. Rasping their cheeks together in his search for an ear to nuzzle proved Lee hadn’t shaved either, just washed the travel away. More kisses, once Lee caught his breath again.
Bobby let himself be guided by pats and pushes until he lay on his back. The duvet ended up around his shins, giving Lee what he wanted. With those saltwater hands, Lee cradled Bobby’s cock for long slurps and lazy swipes. Gulping back a sob, Bobby let Lee engulf him as he’d done so many times before. The way it used to be. When this was their favorite way to tease each other, or to bring each other to the heights. His hands found their own way to Lee’s shoulders, because they knew where they should be. Right here. Like this. Now. Always.
It could be always. He’d said never again, but that couldn’t be right, not with this Lee, who drank mineral water with dinner and spoke gently when Bobby panicked. With this Lee, Bobby couldn’t let go.
He came in a burst of incandescence, the spangles behind his eyelids matching the pulsing below. Lee stayed with him, long enough that the world stopped heaving and he began to soften.
“Think you’ll sleep now?” His captain stretched out beside him.
“Shh. Stop talking.” Bobby gathered Lee right back where he should be, their thighs lined up and his ass in the cup of Bobby’s groin. With Lee’s back to Bobby’s chest and his neck in the right place for gentle kisses. “Go to sleep.”
Chapter 15
THE FAINT astringency on his tongue when he woke was enough to convince Lee he hadn’t imagined last night. That kind of fantasy had soothed him often enough this past year, but then he’d wakened to the taste of stale bourbon and without Bobby hugging him. He’d lie here ’til he popped rather than disturb the miracle of being pinned in place.
Please don’t let this be a onetime thing. He needed to get to sleep every night.
Bobby stayed silent when they did get out of bed, a process that required no kisses or other fanfare, and disappeared into the shower. They finished dressing silently, packing because they wouldn’t be here again tonight. Too bad—this bed was nearly a sacred spot.
On the way out the door, Bobby paused with his pack half-hoisted. “About last night—”
Whatever Bobby was about to say, Lee couldn’t bear to hear it. He wanted his fantasy that things were good between them, back to the way they used to be, for another few hours, until something happened where reality intruded. He pointed a finger upward to interrupt. “We’re still working on it, right?”
Bobby nodded, his face brightening. For the let-Lee-down-gently he didn’t have to say aloud? “Right.”
That covered enough territory for Lee to relax. A little. He didn’t mind waiting until tonight to find out he was back to sleeping alone.
BACK TO the submarine they went, in search of facts their jet-lagged brains hadn’t registered the day before. “What kinds of equipment would have the boat’s call sign?” Bobby pondered on their way up the beach.
“Anything that might be taken out for servicing and have to get back to the right vessel.” Lee contemplated where he’d painted “Bottom Hunter” on his own equipment. “Navigation, tool boxes, parts boxes. Probably a lot of things in the lower level. The gyroscope. The Enigma machine.”
Bobby choked and nearly walked into the path of a Mercedes sedan. Lee yanked him back before a horn blasted. He’d better pay attention to details on dry land. “Do you really think there’d be an Enigma?”
“It’s possible. I have no idea what it looks like, but it would be in the radio room, I think.” As booty, that would completely outclass the Andrea Doria’s ship’s bell, but wasn’t really fair game. “We can find out.” Lee stopped talking once they hit the boardwalk to the submarine. Who knew how much English the man in the ticket booth spoke? He hadn’t said much yesterday, aside from the few words for the transaction.
Bobby fished a red ten-euro note out of his pocket to pay their entry, and got back a handful of euro coins. The beach was deserted aside from the two of them, the ticket taker offering pamphlets written in three languages, and a small boy playing ball with a dog in the sand outside the enclosure.
“You are the first this morning,” the ticket taker said when Lee glanced behind him for anyone who needed to be let past. “So early, not many people come. Take your time looking.”
“Thank you. Bitte.” Based on the crowd yesterday afternoon, they might well have had to make six trips through at the pace of the tourists.
“Wo
nder where the captain left the logbook?” Lee eyed the dark gray form of the U-995 looming over them. The control room was directly below the conning tower and the periscope, so the radio room would be….
“Yeah, probably a lot of paper stuff was marked. Charts, signal books. But how long would it survive in water?” Bobby led the way into the sub.
“No way to know except to look.”
Except looking would mean figuring out where everything not tied down had slid to when the boat heeled over on its right side. Bobby had that in mind too, making notes as to what lay on the port side in relation to everything interesting on the starboard.
“I haven’t seen anything with U-995 on it,” Lee fretted when they reached the Dieselmotorenraum. “You’d think the electric motors would have something marked.”
Bobby knelt to examine one of the piston housings. “We’ve probably passed a dozen of them, but this boat’s been through two navies and gussied up for a museum piece, so they’re under three layers of paint.” He grinned up at Lee, like that hardly mattered. “We’ll find something.”
“Most of the portable stuff they’d mark isn’t in here anymore.” Lee noticed that the big stock pot on the three-burner stove in what passed for the galley had been chained to the railing.
“We’ll just have to figure out where it goes, then.” They reached the control room after an hour of only needing to let a pair of tourists try to get by in the narrow companionway. That had been entirely impossible for people who didn’t want to get close enough to bump uglies. Lee and Bobby had had to go forward to the control room to let them by and then return to examine the labels on the gauges.
The command center would be a treasure trove if Bobby could get to it, which Lee fervently hoped he’d never do. He said nothing about it—Bobby’d know as well as he where the escape routes were. The radio room—now that was less likely to be guarded by the dead, and oh my, full of cabinets, which were bristling with drawers. If the museum ship’s drawers were empty, their unknown boat’s would be full.
“That’s a primo target,” Bobby exulted, and Lee with him.
Except—“See that pressure bulkhead? What if the hatch is shut?” Going through the meter-wide round opening horizontally could be as tricky as when Bobby tried it yesterday.
Bobby shrugged. “That’s big enough to get through. We’ll see. Besides—” He poked at the hinge. “—that door opens to down.”
“Okay, then.” One more hazard that might not be as bad as Lee suspected. Though it could be worse. If he went for worst-case scenario, all the surprises were good.
Unless it got worse than he could imagine.
Lee put that thought aside when Bobby paced the length of the seamen’s berths. “The gash in the hull goes right… about… there.” He drew a curve in the air. “The razor fell out on the stern side of the gash. It belonged to someone sleeping on the port side, probably.”
Lee shivered. Bobby made the wreck all too real. He said nothing but took notes through the bunk rooms and all the way up to the bow torpedo tubes.
Bobby read aloud from his pamphlet. “The seamen applied a thick coating of grease to insert the torpedo in the tube for launching.” He blinked like an owl. “Now why didn’t we ever think of that?”
Lee snorted in spite of himself. Sweet, crazy Bobby. No wonder he loved the guy.
THE TAXI left them at the entrance to the memorial in Möltenort, guarded by a tall stone pillar topped with a bronze eagle. They stopped to read every plaque, puzzling out meanings from a few recognizable words but not needing translations to know a nation mourned its lost.
Gedenkstätte für die gefallenen U-Boot-Fahrer der Deutschen Marine on weathered bronze told enough of the story, with 30,003 fallen in one war alone.
Wreaths and banners lined the entrance to the gallery. Some of the flowers were fresh.
Silently they passed into the curved gallery, open to the sky. Masonry walls higher than their heads, lined with bronze plaques, with a cobblestone path between the inner and outer curves, held the information they sought. Close to noon, the sun couldn’t cast much shadow, less for being muted behind broad swaths of cloud. The wind smelled of the sea.
Lee stopped at the leading edge of the gallery. So much death here. Yet some life as well—a man and woman strolled down the cobbles, speaking words he couldn’t understand. A gray-haired woman gazed at one of the plaques on the World War I side, a spray of chrysanthemums and lilies in her hand. A granddaughter? Someone who remembered one of the Gefallen from a war one hundred years in the past.
“Are you okay?” Bobby had marched a few steps in and realized he was alone.
Words wouldn’t come past the lump in Lee’s throat. He shook his head. The thousands of names crushed him with the weight of their deaths. The battle had taken some; the waters had taken more when their vessels failed them. The sea had taken them all, one way or another. That same merciless sea would take his Bobby if it could. Bobby’s equipment and skill were all that stood between him standing in the sun and being a name on a plaque in a divers’ memorial. And Lee, with whatever skill he still had, and the Bottom Hunter. Such a narrow margin. Would it be enough? Would he be enough?
“Let’s go around once, just walking, not searching, okay?” He had to get it together—he’d come all this way on the quest for something intangible, and now his quarry was all too real. Bobby depended on him. And whether or not they ever knew, so did the families of the men on the sub.
He’d yelled at Eddy that war wasn’t a game, but neither was it what Lee’d believed it to be. Thirty-five thousand names from two wars mocked his self-righteousness.
“We’ll go together.” Bobby slipped his hand around Lee’s arm. “Your pace.”
Not fast, when he could barely step between the walls of the memorial. He could go much faster if he went the other direction, in search of schnapps or whatever local favorite came as 80 or 100 proof served in shot glasses. Then the inner voice that whispered how Lee wouldn’t be enough should he ever be tested might go silent for a few hours.
But no—he’d go in. Because he could do it if Bobby stood with him.
Step by measured step they marched the curve of the bronze cenotaph, until they’d completed the horseshoe path. Lee had remembered to breathe when Bobby mentioned it somewhere around U-498. He’d made it. And Bobby stood at his side.
At the far end of the corridor, Lee slipped his pack off and dropped it at their feet. Bobby would understand—Lee didn’t quite lunge, but he wrapped himself around the warm, living, breathing body of the man he loved with all his heart and had still failed. He’d dulled himself, and Bobby had been right to leave. Lee’d made himself certain to fail should Bobby need him to come between death and the sea. He might never get back the edge he’d washed away in the tequila and the bourbon. With every drink he’d made himself less than he needed to be, but no more. Never again. No matter how the siren liquor sang to him, he couldn’t answer.
Bobby held him while he shook in delirium tremens born of resolve, and let him lean against the great wall of his chest. His muscled arms were a haven as well as a responsibility.
Footsteps grew louder and receded; shadows passed by. At last Lee could lift his head to see the concern in his lover’s eyes. “Promise me something, Bobby,” he croaked around the knot in his throat.
“Promise what?” Bobby murmured.
“Promise me you’ll do your best to die of old age in a bed.” Next to me wanted to come out too, but Bobby hadn’t so much as promised to wake up next to him tomorrow.
“I’ll do my best, Lee,” Bobby rumbled.
But Bobby knew as well as Lee did that skill and equipment couldn’t vanquish every chance, and that the sea liked the taste of divers as well as it liked the taste of submariners.
“It eats at you, doesn’t it?” Bobby asked. He didn’t have to say death or mortality to know what gnawed at Lee’s soul.
“It does.” Lee bowed his head, not disturbing B
obby’s embrace. “Makes it tempting to take the next drink.”
“But you’re the one who ultimately decides.”
“I know.” Lee rested his head on Bobby’s shoulder. He owed Bobby the dignity of meeting his eyes, but the words were hard and too heavy to say without the support. “I’m sorry for everything I fucked up between us.”
That had been one of the steps he’d learned in his brief church basement forays: apologies due, amends if possible, not to expect or demand forgiveness. He could only hope.
“I’m trying not to fuck up anything else between us. I’m sorry I drove you away.” Another boulder needed swallowing down—Lee gulped hard because the damned thing was lodged in. He lifted his head to force the lump away, but gazing into Bobby’s eyes made it grow.
Bobby turned aside long enough to glare away a couple of curious passersby. He returned to meet Lee’s eyes and say the words Lee hadn’t let himself hope for. “I never stopped loving you.”
The sun grew too bright—all Lee could see was Bobby’s face, his deep-set dark eyes beneath thick brows, high cheekbones, the little bump on his nose where he’d broken it years ago. Lee forced his voice around the lump in his throat. “I never stopped loving you either.”
“It’s never been a question of love, has it?” Bobby asked quietly. “It’s always been a matter of trust and reliability. I’m a loose cannon underwater, you drink. We feed into each other’s worst parts.”
“Except you’ve been diving with discipline. Lately.” Lee tightened his grip on Bobby’s strong body. “In spite of the temptations.”
“And you’ve stayed sober. Which I know is hard.” Bobby lifted a finger to stroke a strand of hair away from Lee’s face.
“It’s a little less hard when you’re around.” Bobby’s face went all swimmy. Lee blinked and salt water ran down his face. Bobby came back into sharp focus. “I’ll probably be fighting forever.”
