There are things he knows with certainty. One day he will marry, and he will dutifully shuffle off some fraction of his pay to an unseen wife on some distant island who knits him comforters and complains that he is gone away too long. Women like him, but there are few women to be had -- a choice between a frosty officer's wife and some sloop-of-war with gin-pricked cheeks is no choice at all. He has never exhibited the slightest trace of venereal contamination, and to do so would be to expose himself to the kind of attention he despises -- some surgeon with cold hands twisting the skin on his member and tutting at it, inquiring about his habits and the company he keeps. To contract some ugly disease would stain his reputation too deeply to efface, and scotch his future plans for marriage, but more than anything it would sting his pride.

Frigging with men is an acceptable substitute, and at times its own pleasure -- he knows how to spot a likely fellow, just as he himself was once spotted, and how to make the overture, and how to fix his mind on the tight clench of pleasure until his frustration is eased and his disgust with the unlucky partner of the moment can slink back in. There are men with merry faces and soft hands who will keep him company until the blazing crisis passes, and the caulker's mate on Terror is one such.

There's not much room in the slops closet for two men to maneuver, so he must resort to propping a leg up with absurd swagger, so that Hickey drawing his braces down and shucking his drawers to his knees feels more like a visit to the tailor's shop than the knocking-shop. Hickey drops down to the boards easily, as if he is practiced in it, and the sight of his neat shaggy head bobbing down below his waist sends Gibson's brain swimming like a drunken man. His prick is fully standing now, and Hickey tugs on it as if to test it; he is spanning it with his hands, Gibson suddenly realizes, and the little swell of pride that gives him makes him turn his hip to better display himself.

"You've got a long one, haven't you? I knew you would." Hickey thumbs at his foreskin admiringly. "You can always tell by the span of a man's hands, what he has in his drawers."

Gibson scoffs, but his vanity swells, just the same. "You must say that to all your friends. Get down to it, then."

Hickey's answering laugh is barely audible, but it can be felt as his mouth draws its way up the side of his prick's shaft -- the little wet tip of his tongue catches at the tender skin, but more than anything there is the scratch of whiskers. Hickey kisses the head of his prick nicely and begins to work on it like a woman might. There is nothing especially mollyish about this man except perhaps the way he holds his head -- cocked at an angle, like a dog listening. The service he gives with his mouth is wet and close; Hickey plays with his balls in the palm of his hand while he sucks him, and it raises a keenness of sensation that sets all the hairs on Gibson's body creeping -- bare-arsed to the cold air with a standing cock, his whole body seems an organ of sense, capable of amplifying the least brush of skin into an agony. His scrotum tightens, and his wet prick-head throbs.

"You do that well," he says, gripping Hickey's shoulder in a way he hopes is encouraging. "Don't stop."

But this is the wrong thing to say -- Hickey snorts, rising up with a jerk to clinch him face to face, and Billy must roll back on his heels to keep his balance.

"It's too early in the day for a mouth-fuck, my Prussian blue," Hickey says, and without much further fanfare thrusts his hand between his legs; Gibson groans, and grips both hands in the back of Hickey's coat, feeling the bony flesh beneath. Between his legs but past his balls, the pads of Hickey's fingertips find some indeterminate place that makes a sudden knife of pleasure jolt into Gibson’s belly; Gibson makes some noise of affront at the suddenness of it, and Hickey goes on anyway, renewed in his saucy boldness.

"Have I offended you?" Gibson murmurs, but Hickey kisses him, straddling his leg with a lewd severity as they meet beard to beard and chin to chin. The teasing lightness of Hickey's tongue in his mouth is at a contrast with the constant pressure of his body, but the crush is queerly pleasant. Hickey could grab him by the stones and squeeze, just to make him yelp, or he could thrust his prick into the sweating crease of Gibson's upper thighs and frig himself dry. Anything seems dreadfully possible.

Gibson presses his face to the wall, groping at once for some support and finding none.

Hickey is bedeviling him with squeezes and caresses. One of his hands is grabbing at Gibson's backside, bruise-tight, and the other hand is making a significant inroads on his vital parts -- tracing Gibson's arsehole now and making the hair prickle, not fleetingly but with a purpose. Billy has the distinct thought, he thinks he'll bugger me now, the cheekish bastard. Stranger still, he can conceive of letting him. Hickey has a way of making him want strange things.

Hickey's voice is low and wicked, from somewhere below. "You like that, don't you? I'll do for you better than a girl can. Just say please."

Gibson's prick throbs. He never thinks of girls when he's with Hickey -- a woman Hickey would be fit for the devil's own wife, with whiskers and stinking ricepaper cigarillos. Gibson will marry a pure maid with no such ideas, and no such coarse flourishes. He can feel his face scarleting, and the blood mounting in his loins as if he will spend any moment now.

"Please," Gibson says, stupidly.

Hickey holds back his thigh, hooking his thumb under the sweating crease of his knee, and lowers his head to kiss the base of Gibson's throat -- pressing sucking kisses to the gibbety hollow of his chest as his free hand goes roving. There is something unsavory about the way Mr. Hickey's fox-colored hair lies brushed back behind his ears, like one of the pinks of fashion temporarily at a disadvantage without his hat. It doesn't suit a sailor. It must be a point of vanity. Gibson makes a fist in the back of his coat instead, and breathes hard breaths.

Mr. Hickey's fingers press inside him, making his breath catch and his prick jump; more than anything, it is a shock that his body admits Mr. Hickey inside. The crooking teasing motion is queer at first -- he has quick fingers to go with a quick tongue and the minute sleeking motions of his fingertip are enough to make Gibson groan and tremble. Then there is another finger, tickling and teasing at him and pressing for admittance -- Hickey's fingers hook and twist until something within yields, like he is determined to map some uncertain zone of pleasure.

It all becomes too much to bear. Gibson's prick is leaking against his shirt, and he can feel Hickey's own erection jutting against his hip merrily when he stoops to kiss him; the crush of their bodies is nearly enough to make him spend his brains out all by itself. He's frigged and sucked with the best of them, and he won't turn down the chance for a run at a nice tight hole if it presents itself, but Hickey has made a fool of him by positioning him this way. All his parts seem to tighten and convulse, drawing up together like a beating heart -- his arsehole tightens around Hickey's two fingers, and Hickey stretches the taut band of him around his two bent knuckles, twisting and crooking with cruel vulgarity.

"Billy," Hickey calls out in a low voice, as if it is for some purpose -- to wake him from a drowse, or to catch his attention in a narrow hall -- and Gibson spends with such force that it leaves him for a moment bewildered. It's as if something has permanently broken, as if a cord has snapped.

His breathing slows from emphatic gasps, and he returns to himself and to the sensations of his body -- the brutal tenderness of his prick after he's come, and Mr. Hickey's coarse little hand kneading it like a little cat. Hickey rises up and disentangles himself from their clinch with an unsteady arrogance, as if his own cheeks are not flushed pink, and as if his lips are not raw from kissing. There is spit shining in his whiskers.

"I'm finished," Gibson says hoarsely. His voice is no more than a whisper now, and it shames him to think of the prior sounds of pleasure. Hickey laughs at him, grabbing a fistful of his wet shirtfront to clean his hands -- Gibson means to jerk back from the vulgar touch but he merely sways, like a drunken man.

"Do mine, and we're even."

Gibson grips him in a kiss and pulls him off as ruthlessly as he can, gripping his prick without finesse and tugging the spend out of him -- Hickey cries out when he finishes, and then they are even in truth.

"That's a new trick," Gibson says afterward, "what you did with your fingers."

He lies still breathless against the slatted wall; Hickey swabs at himself circumspectly with a handkerchief. His cheeks are luminous.

"New to you, I'll reckon, spunking like a rabbit in the time it takes to say two Hail Marys. It can be good that way, if you let it. I'll show you what two men can do."

Gibson turns his head away; the pulse of scorn is rising up again as desire ebbs from him, and he is left cool and dispassionate once more. "Do you think so?"

He's no innocent. He simply hasn't done such a thing before, and no amount of furtive frigging has ever persuaded him to allow the breach of his body. There will be other opportunities for that later.

Hickey tucks in his chin, frowning as Gibson yanks up his drawers. "You mean to say your sweetheart doesn't stick her pretty little fingers--"

Gibson makes a sharp sound between his teeth to cut the remark short; he grips him around the middle, as if for a squeeze, but now Hickey turns his sharp face up at him, looking like the man in the moon.

"Cornelius, is it? Well, Cornelius, don't go thinking that the two of us are friends, you and I."

"Are we to be enemies, then?"

"We're shipmates, that's all."

"I was only chaffing you, Mr. Gibson. I don't think you've got a sweetheart at all." He squeezes the back of Gibson's forearm, grinning up again rosily among the crates and bundles. "Back home you must have the girls beating down your door, for dances and such. Do you shake a foot from time to time, or do you refrain?"

"You might be a whipster wherever you come from, Mr. Hickey, but there'll be none of that here." He is not rebuking him, only helping him into line -- the fellow must be a latecomer to the sea, or he would know better. "Don't talk that way so early in a voyage, or you'll court bad luck."

Gibson does up his buttons and braces, feeling despairingly sticky beneath his clothes and yet pleasantly sore. Hickey goes through the motions of straightening his collar and sleeking back his hair behind his ears -- every time Gibson sees him slouching about his business on the upper decks, his collar is spread and askew, so it strikes him as a vain gesture yet still somehow commendable. If they carry on like this, he might pass inspections after all.

"When will I see you again?" Hickey asks, in a low voice.

"I'll find you," Gibson says, with uneasy visions of Hickey dawdling in the corridors. "I'll give you a signal. You'll know."