Irving’s back is broad and white, with sweet dimples just above the split of his arse — bent down like a beast over the carpenter’s bench, his round hairy thighs disclose the secret of his hairy little hole. Hickey scoops up more grease, four fingers’ worth, twisting it against his palm to make a great shining glove of himself — every coarse hair on Irving’s body is erect and aquiver. The wet sound of oil on skin makes his knees part wider, and the sweet bones of his shoulders draw up.

“Greedy little thing. You can’t have enough, can you?” Hickey thrusts into him with three fingers, until Irving is begging him for more and more — the pleading that falls from his lips is clumsy enough but the sucking tug of his insides is eloquent with greed, the puffy ring of his hole lapping at Hickey’s fingertips. Hickey gives him all he has and all the same, the lieutenant stays just this side of satisfaction — his great heavy prick is stiff and dripping beneath him, all untouched, and his plump balls are dark with blood.

John has contrived somehow that he will not lay a hand on himself — it is some strange compunction of his, that he will soil this furtive meeting-place of theirs beyond all imagining but he won’t be found guilt of simple onanism. When they’d first taken up this pastime the lieutenant had come off like a shot with just the press of a cupped hand through his drawers. Now he has risen through the ranks of sin. Hickey folds his thumb against his palm and presses, presses inside. At the passage beyond the brink of pain, there’s a stronger tug of suction that pulls his hand in deeper like a greedy current.

The whole thing is inside now, up to the greased wrist. The difference must be palpable, because Irving gives a raw moan of absolute despair — sharp as a moan of pain, but his prick unspools another long spill of come and his arsehole flutters around Hickey’s hand. The stretched band of muscle is flushed and plump with blood, like a little mouth.

It seems wholly impossible, and yet here they are. Hickey cannot believe his luck. He wiggles his balled fingers, rolling the bones of his knuckles as slowly as can be, and feels Irving’s insides shift and shudder around him — he is truly sunk inside him now, wholly enveloped in that shining flesh in a way that makes a prick thrust to the root seem a pale imitation.

The heat of a man’s insides is like a glove, and the constriction around the bones of Hickey’s hand is quietly frightening. Irving himself can only be terrified, but he is docile as a lamb. It would be easy to hurt him, but what man would be able to do it — with the majesty of a man’s insides spread out before him, all the things that are secret as a woman’s cunt. Contempt for the man, certainly, but nothing but reverence for the body — this piece of flesh that has never done anything but follow its own law.

Here on this sorry bench, the truths of nature are laid out for any man to read. Once as a boy Hickey had seen two women quarreling over the headless trunk of a dead man, all wrapped in an old apron. The guts had been scooped out at the lower end, and that hollow cavity had shone a dull red. The inside of Lieutenant Irving is just the same, all secret folds both private and dark.

“You’re a marvel, lieutenant,” Hickey murmurs, and licks the sweat from his lips. “You’ve opened up beautifully for me.”

The sublime has broken through. There is a sort of holiness in it, where he is the officiating priest and Irving is his bread and wine, his golden cup and embroidered handkerchief. What would our good lieutenant say if he knew he had a Papist’s fingers inside him?

Beneath him Irving blubs and whimpers, a prisoner to his own pleasure. Hickey sweats and labors over him while he receives, and his soft interior yields slickly to the press of Hickey’s knuckles. The tight muscularity of the interior has ceased to resist him and now draws him in with a pliable enthusiasm. Gently, gently, terribly gently — it’s harder to draw back than to enter; Hickey caresses Irving’s hip like a spooked horse, then goes down between his buttocks to rub at the seam of his balls.

“Oh, God,” Irving says, prayerfully. “Oh, God.”

“Do you fancy you can take more, then? Just say the word, lieutenant.”

John whimpers his assent, and Hickey scrapes out the last of the tin of grease, easing it into Irving’s hole and slickening up his wrist. Only then, once the pull and catch of friction is lessened enough for an easy passage does he begin to thrust in earnest, to see how far the lieutenant can take his fist. Each grunt and whimper shaken loose from Irving’s lips is sweet to him, pathetic broken breathing sounds not of pain but of loose hungry need. The inside of him is close as a garment, tight as a glove, and every small increment of resistance

Hickey’s own prick is wet with welling spunk, all but untouched between his legs -- he grubs his hips against Irving’s shivering leg and braces his other hand against the sweating small of his back to push in deeper. He wants to reach inside him, to press his way past all bounds and intrude upon the core of him — whatever clean and decent place Lieutenant Irving reserves for himself only, some place that the sin and sweat of this wooden-walled world cannot penetrate, Hickey will broach those bounds and ruin entirely. He wants to make a path through Irving’s tender guts, and make a fist to grip his beating heart.

Hickey moves in him with his fist, pressing steadily back and forth past that place that makes men’s pricks go soft and their whimpers turn to moans, and as he does he’d swear he heard the lieutenant saying his prayers.

At the last he can feel his subject shuddering against the raw wood — the lieutenant’s sweet fat stones have drawn up tight to his body in preparatory need, and Hickey cannot help but press him from the inside, fucking into him faster past that spot that makes men come when they’re fucked. Irving grips at the edges of the bench with white-knuckled urgency, but he does not touch himself, not at all. The lieutenant is a gentleman of his word.

When he has chafed that inward place past bearing, Irving climaxes with a vehemence — his body shuddering, his throat torn with a hard groan of pleasure and his shot coming off like a fountain. Hickey could lick him clean from head to foot, he thinks, to taste the grease and salt of him without any going to waste — but there are more immediate concerns. He must slip himself loose.

When Hickey works free his folded fingers, Irving’s hole strains open for a long moment, empty and taut — in the light the rim of that hairy portal is fat with usage and blushing like a flower. The shadowed interior is softer than anything else, anything in the world. Hickey tugs the prick out of the flap of his drawers, and it takes only a few sleek wet strokes before he is spilling his tallow down the cleft of Irving’s arse to paint him in salt-spunk and hot grease, white against reddened rim and dark hair.