“I’ll bet you can’t bugger me better than I’ve done you,” Hickey says, slyly goading.

Gibson gives a dry little laugh. “Who will be the judge of that?”

“It’ll be evident in itself. Come on, Billy, be a friend.”

The caulker’s mate has been obliging him all winter, taking him every way he can every time he gets a spare moment — how much of his duty owing owes to shirking his duties in the hopes of catching Gibson’s eye, only the fellow himself knows. Gibson feels a sense of responsibility for the poor devil, but it extends no further than their meetings together in the ship’s storerooms or in empty corridors by stolen lamplight. They’ve made use of the engine room before, in a pinch, but the spot where the men’s slops and coveralls are stored makes for a more congenial trysting place. For all Mr. Hickey's sinewy strength, Gibson can lift him up against the bales and shelves like a man lifts a kitten -- and Hickey is twisting all the while, arching into the rub of his erection with shameless joy.

Gibson too is beyond shame. He no longer has to seek out his companions with coy gestures and forced coincidences, with cow-eyed glances over pitted wooden tables, with gifts and bribes. Hickey comes to him willingly, and sometimes it is like this, too, sometimes it is Hickey who plays the wanton woman's part. Hickey’s blue woolen trousers are dropped off around one leg, pooling over Gibson's shoes, and his one bare calf hooks at him, absurd in its black-and-white striped stocking -- this is the most undressed he has ever seen him, even as he is groping sightless at the meeting-place of his bare arse-cheeks in the near-dark. There is something scandalous in it.

"Pop it in quickly now,” Hickey says, with a brisk urgency in his voice -- he doesn't want to be seen like this any more than Gibson wants to be seen with a flushed erection sticking out in front of him stiff as a fist and leaking urgency all over his crewmate's shirttails. 

"All right, keep your shirt on--"

"I want your prick inside me," Hickey says with a biting decisiveness. He kisses him after, hard and rummaging, as if he wants to shut him up. 

The little man maintains his position against the shelves by grabbing great fistfuls of his jacket; Gibson will have to press out the creases later with brush and iron. The thought of Hickey wanting him like this is maddening -- not a furtive rough hand in the dark but pressed tight and close and soft, past the twinging muscles of his lean thighs to the straitest hottest most punishing place. Here in the dark his tight little hole is blood-hot and eager for Gibson’s prick. Gibson is eager to be held as much as to be had, to enjoy the forbidden proximity of another body and the scuffling familiarity of love at close quarters.

Billy presses into him spit-wet; Cornelius makes a stifled pained sound against his shoulder but he lifts his hips, parts his legs, drives himself down deeper. It's hard to keep balance, with hardly a place to put your feet, and the peril of it all is almost exhilarating -- the fear of tumbling to the ground, overturning something breakable, snapping something painful.

“Like this?” Gibson asks. “Face to face?”

Hickey nods, tight-lipped, face burning. Gibson kisses those lips apart, feeling the rasp of his whiskers. He cannot feel contempt for him now, not like this, and all sense of responsibility vanishes too — he is already lost to desire and to the love of being wanted, to the very heat that burns in the roses of those cheeks. Having another man grinding like this on his prick, feeling the passage of Hickey’s arse yield to the first hard blunt thrusts as Hickey's body arches up against his own -- Hickey rides against him furiously, with both hands groping and roving at Gibson's back, raking with the hard little points of his fingernails.

It's pure joy to be inside him, to slip his prick into something spit-wet and tight and to be taken so eagerly -- is this how Hickey feels, when he’s bending him over in the dark? No man touches his steward in the course of his duties, not a clap on the shoulder to say he’s done well or a brotherly clasp of the hand. Only Hickey touches him now, all below decks, and he hurries to it like a glutton loves his supper.

“That’s it — fuck me quickly now, Billy, you do it so well. Show me what I've taught you.”

Hickey’s voice is tight and urgent in the dark, small from where he is crushed against Gibson’s front. Gibson says nothing; he is focusing on the work at hand. Hickey cleaves to him like a drowning man, and Gibson moves in him, holding in his mind the conjunction-points where skin meets against skin. The thrust of his prick must meet some private place, because Hickey jumps and bucks against him -- he makes a sound of pleasure that is more candid than Gibson has ever heard from his grudging lips, but grips onto him tighter rather than jerking back. 

Hickey’s neat little body is crushed against him, and his ribcage heaves like a bellows — he makes another moan that might be Gibson’s own name, and Gibson paws at him, fumbling a hand over his mouth from pure habit. What have they become to one another that Mr. Hickey so freely employs his Christian name? It can only be an excess of familiarity.

Hickey’s mouth fixes on the palm of Gibson’s hand, raunchily wet and over-familiar. He can only laugh, in the absurd tangle of their limbs, and shift back on his heels.

“Now then, enough of that, you devil. You’ll break the skin next.”

“You’d like that, wouldn’t you? Sweet William.”

Hickey breathes the words against his mouth in a heated and not entirely pleasant fashion, breaking off only to Gibson's bottom lip between his teeth. After that there is no other sound but ragged breathing and the curt sharp slap of their flesh coming together -- his own grunts of exertion as he quickens his strokes, shifting Hickey's body for a less clumsy pitch of entry. At last Gibson comes entirely undone in him, with his prick slipping loose to anoint the hole he has just left -- Hickey presses his mouth to Billy's throat with a sacramental assurance and leaves a bruising mark there, the mark of love.