He might have anticipated it, some light swat of a comment, but that would imply he had put any amount of thought into the shape of a conversation when he'd fished his crystal out from his things and spoken the other man's name. What Marcus gets instead, that humouring oh?, sends a brief prickle over senses.
Reminiscent of matched eye contact or the rhetorical pivot that signals something, and pleasant for it, even if the logistics leave something to be desired. Pleasing, to feel like he's captured the other man's focus, even from here. Now, what he's meant to do with it—
"Mm," he says into that broad open space of Flint's question, voice rough-textured. "Maybe I can."
See, there's something appealing in the burr at the margins of Marcus' timbre. It stands out very clear to the ear when it comes by way of crystal and with little else to distract from it.
(Not that he's taking measurements.)
"You're not uncreative, Rowntree," has the sound of a slanting mouth behind whiskers, humor thickening. "Though far be it from me to keep you from your reading."
He can picture it, that specific slant of the mouth, the glint of teeth. The book is closed in his hand (no dog earring has occurred, good habits for the treatment of books long ago instilled, but nor has he really marked the page number, prone instead to just roughly locating where he last left off like some kind of animal) but still held, turning it over to consider its merits. Slouched low against the pillow as he considers the soft felt texture, the title embossed in the spine.
"You probably shouldn't call me that, you know. Not now that I've considered getting hard."
Some days' ride removed, Flint folds the letter in his hand a second time across his thigh, and then sets the page aside. There is other correspondence on the side table, albeit unopened. This page he'd deemed important enough to see to first.
But not so immediately actionable as to demand all his attention either— although he does this, and so renders himself empty handed outside of juggling the crystal. Given the givens, it leaves him a little
untethered, free hand finally moving to satisfy itself by picking at the carving motif bending across the curve of the chair arm.
"I might have taken you for that kind of man," has a conversational tint to it.
On Marcus' end of the crystal, there's a shift in breathing that's only audible when he speaks, "And what kind of man is that?" which indicates a slow, lazy twist of movement. Laying the book down on his pack half-tucked under the bed.
On his back again, he fidgets with the crystal between both hands.
Is he touching himself already? Or is he still just considering it? The uncertainty, guided only by these small shifting sounds and some changing tilt in Marcus' breathing, is a hot hand at the back of the neck.
"The kind that takes some pleasure out of the things that belong to him, I suppose." Yes, they're just having a conversation. For example, Flint's tenor seems to say, "I could call you Captain, but I think that might make some of the yard addresses to the company difficult."
(Technically speaking, this isn't ridiculous. It's just playing by the rules they've come up with where any familiarity requires the possibility of someone's hand on a cock. This is, in fact, a sign that the conversation they'd last hadn't been a wasted one.
That gets a breath of a laugh. Subconsciously more pronounced, given sound is all they have to go off of.
"I suppose you're right," Marcus says, "on both counts."
Maybe this was the point of this summoning. To listen to Flint's voice, clear enough over crystal that he could well be in the room, and Marcus can almost feel like the other man is conscious of it when he undoes his pants, and slides his hand beneath the fabric to grasp after himself to feel that initial thickening. Maybe that would be more suitable than simply wishing to share with him that he did start on that book.
The next breath out, at contact, is heavier. He's holding the crystal in his hand, hovered up where elbow is set against mattress. "And it's too late, anyway," he adds. No strain to his tone, certainly not yet, but the pretense of a conversational volume has diminished, quieter and more intimate for it. "It's already distracting to listen to you. So call me what you want."
"If my telling you how I care to be bent over is having a diminishing effect on your work in your position, we may have to address that," sounds a little like a joke and a little not at all like one.
(Not the week after Marcus returns from his escort work, but maybe in the ones which follow—there will be a point where Flint is speaking to the assembly of Forces division, and his eye will wander casually in Marcus' direction and play at lingering there as if the point of his attention were somehow benign and not explicitly looking to elicit a rise out of him.)
(It will be the sort of staring contest, as momentary in its lingering as it might be, that Marcus will lose, and see fit to make up for at some later point.)
Here, and now—
"As long as it isn't all talk," because he is electing to take it as a joke and responds in kind, even if his tone is as dry as normal, "I'm sure I'll manage."
In the space between Marcus' propped hand and ear, Flint's huffing laugh strikes a low note—a soft clenches tinge of something like approval in it. Or maybe it just sounds that way, and maybe that's all that counts at present. More, it has that warmer edge to it that suggests some unserious rejoinder is waiting in the wings; Flint only has to arrange it on the tongue.
His vague focus on the slanted ceiling goes vaguer, closing his eyes as he simmers in that specific feeling Flint's question induces, like a lit ember landing somewhere low in him. Focus sharpening in immediately to the way he is, yes, touching himself, the loose press of his palm and curled fingers.
"Aye," only after half a beat of delay, and then he shifts. Pushing waistband down a little lower, even as his hand stays light, fingers finding sensitive spots to gently work, coaxing along that rush of blood, its trapping.
Quicker off the mark than if he were truly alone. Speaking of— "Will you stay?"
It's an intimate and warm thing, and in sharp contrast to the cavernously dark room of the division office as the rain sheets down beyond the bolted windows, sluicing off the face of the tower stones without ever managing to slip past the cut of the window box to beat against the glass. He is aware of a low thrill solidifying in his belly—a stitching not-quite-ache that is some mix of arousal and curiosity both.
(There is a real fascination in seeing what impulses can be coaxed out of Marcus, or uncovered; how relatively quiet he'd been in that tent.)
The tone carried by an exhale is just loud enough to be heard, that specific kind of pushed out vocalising—from a squeezing hand, maybe.
"I was thinking," he says (and isn't it strange to report what he is thinking, to be asked for it so directly, instead of murmured in scraps, impulsively, against hot skin, and how that makes his own skin prickle), "about your voice. And how it's like your hands."
There've been times he's anticipated some mocking turn to something he's said or done, weighed the risk of it, but there's assurance in how—when they are like this, at least—it never does. Whatever dwindled twinge of defense he might feel for the possibility now is outweighed by knowing that there is little point to any of this if he can only think of how to guard against it, rather than answering the question.
"Guiding," he almost doesn't say, but as noted, it seems unhelpful to not say things in this moment. "Rough, hard sometimes, but good for that. Thinking," a drawn in breath, released, "what we'd do if you were here."
The push of pull of Marcus' breathing is tender against at the ear, tugging at the knot wound low in his belly—crisp edged and so specific in its isolation that it will.be difficult not to turn over in the head later. It occurs to Flint, a fleeting thought, that they've never fucked in the full dark before. And isn't that strange? And that maybe they should so he might better appreciate these narrow breathed out sounds or the simple dimensions of Marcus under his hands.
A low considered hum becomes, "I might insist on just watching if I were," while the thumb of his spare hand idly shifts across the scrollwork of the carved wood chair arm. Searching out small gaps in the design with his fingernail.
It's possible that just about any feasible suggestion might have triggered this warm pooling feeling low in his gut, the responsive pulse he feels through his cock and the hand holding it, but there's something to be said for novelty. The mm he gives is an acknowledging sound (yes, the bed is small, entirely reasonable) but not just that.
It's an easy possibility to access. The crystal does its part in conveying the rich timbre of Flint's voice through it, with only a little uncanniness that gets lost in under the thick rhythm of his own heartbeat and the blood it pushes through him.
"Would you touch yourself too?" he asks, letting the crystal down on the mattress beside him so he can put both hands to work in shucking off clothing, having already been reduced to only comfortable layers upon settling in to read. It could be interpretable to the ear, the rustle of cloth, the bend of breathing along with this next part, "Or would you wait?"
"I would wait," Flint says. And though they're pretending and he might indulge in touching himself now without anyone being the wiser, his spare hand remains curved across the chair's arm.
The angle of his knee and hip shifts, sympathetic to the rasp of clothing sounds from a considerable distance off, but he neglects to shift his palm into the widened space and grope himself through his trousers. It will be better (isn't really a thought so much as an instinct) if he's patient. And the shape of sound across the crystal is thin enough that he doesn't care for the distraction of his own palm shifting across fabric.
(How far is Marcus bothering to undress? How is he laid out in that allegedly narrow bed? Where are his hands now?)
There is probably a practical reason for complete undress. No sense sweating into what few clothes he has out here. No sense making a mess of things he can't leave in this room. But by the time the last of it has slid off the edge of the mattress, the indulgence of it prickles over his skin after these past few days of close quarters, of hasty dressing, half-hearted cleaning.
Flint would wait, which means he will wait. The certainty of this prickles through him. Good, he doesn't say. His hands are on either side. He lays back, as Flint asks that.
Turns a knee out, as if bodily thinking it over. A hand, slipping down further between the crook of thigh and abdomen, not yet doing this thing suggested. Collects the crystal in his other hand. "I could," he says, and if there's any trace of amusement in his tone, it's overshadowed by that husky texture that's gripped it, murmuring in intimate spaces despite the actual distance at play.
Curling his fingers. "Do you want me to?" feels a little like negotiating.
The low hum that slides from the crystal in answer is considering, and tinged with the affirmation that yes, Flint does want him to. Or, at the very least, that the image is compelling. But what is actually said, rumbling hum clarifying into lower instruction, is, "Not when I'm not there."
Planting an idea and then shortening the leash on it being something of a habitual practice.
It's familiar, enough that the sound of acknowledgment for it that Marcus makes conveys some amusement—prick—and also agreement. No, not when Flint is not really here. Familiar, too, is that sense of something in the future, of an unfulfilled want. A tug of restriction.
"Alright," he says. Hand shifting, a looser hold that has him draw in a breath. "Then I won't."
Then, after a hesitation, the closing of which has the sense of biting down on something, he adds, "Tell me what to do."
Flint's breath out through the nose is heavy, warm. It has the illusion of closeness in it by merit of how closely he has his own crystal propped near to his cheek; it sounds a little like he's weighing a short list of possibilities, the back of his neck prickling from the satisfaction of being obeyed. From the winking ember of challenge in Marcus' timbre.
"Slowly to start," he instructs him. "I want you to tell me something you want while you do it."
After a breath of time passes, Marcus shifts. Reaches for the sidetable with the lamp and its guttering flame inside. There, the small copper-lipped clay pot with a scant amount of oil left in it, but enough. No need to be particularly graceful, alone in a room, with the short run of oil onto himself.
That second thing, turned over in his mind as he does so. As he curls his hand around himself and signals this, a semi-conscious action, with the heavier breath out of him. Slowly, to start.
"Something I want," he repeats. "Now?" Slowly, a stroke of his hand. 'Gently' is different, and so the squeeze around at the base is firm. It alters his voice, just slightly, when he says, "Or when I get back, and I can get you in a room?"
"Either," he says, and realizes that his interest in which it will be is so sharp that it stings high in the chest. Or maybe that's just the expected kind of restlessness from Marcus' breath in the ear, contrasted with all the empty space about him and his spare hand wrapped gently around the carved wood of the chair arm.
First and foremost, though, he wants Marcus to talk. It's easier to discern the shape of his hand in the slant of his breathing when he does. To picture how he must be arranged on the bed, and the flexing line of sinew and muscle up through the forearm. Fragmented ideas of Marcus' shoulder and the muscle that joins it to neck. The stubble speckled underside of his jaw.
(They shouldn't concern themselves overmuch with this being untenable; they're too eager for one another. It hasn't been a week since Marcus left his bed, and already he wants more of him enough to play this stupid game.)
The breath out of him next is shaped more by the quick spread of a smile than what his hand is doing. Sharp, brief. "I want your hands on me," Marcus says. It's distinct, the awareness of the lack of this, which is (conversely) somehow good in this moment.
He speaks, a slow process of liberating the trappings that tend to prevent him from rambling in the way that would be of benefit here. The slow slide of his own hand is a good encouragement. His other, holding the crystal idly, thoughtlessly working the chain attached to it between his fingers. "Hard, because of what I'm doing to you. Because you want more of it, or something else that I'm refusing you.
"Or," a small, vocal push of a breath, "you just want to touch me as much as I want to touch you, in that moment."
Either is a lot like both, as far as he is concerned, and he adds, "And I want you to tell me what you're thinking too."
The point of this—asking him to put these things into concrete form—is meant to stand in place of his hands. Something in the suggestive quality of Don't think about what isn't happening should serve to render the fantasy especially appealing, and sharpens the edges of what is. That the effect should travel both ways—
A small turn of the hand, ring band scraping a gentle rythmn across the hard wood of the chair arm makes for a sufficiently tactile distraction from the twinge at home low in his belly. The tightening sense of arousal. The impulse to loosen his belt.
"Now?" Flint asks, some thick curl of wolfish humor nipping at fingertips. "Or am I meant to tell you when you get back, and get me into a room?"
"Now," has a likewise nipping quality, playing at chastising. It would be just like Flint to delay that answer. Evade it entirely. Has the effect, here, of a sharpening of focus, but not so much that Marcus stops touching himself, the slow and deliberate strokes across oil-slick skin, thickening out under fingers, warming.
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Reminiscent of matched eye contact or the rhetorical pivot that signals something, and pleasant for it, even if the logistics leave something to be desired. Pleasing, to feel like he's captured the other man's focus, even from here. Now, what he's meant to do with it—
"Mm," he says into that broad open space of Flint's question, voice rough-textured. "Maybe I can."
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(Not that he's taking measurements.)
"You're not uncreative, Rowntree," has the sound of a slanting mouth behind whiskers, humor thickening. "Though far be it from me to keep you from your reading."
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He can picture it, that specific slant of the mouth, the glint of teeth. The book is closed in his hand (no dog earring has occurred, good habits for the treatment of books long ago instilled, but nor has he really marked the page number, prone instead to just roughly locating where he last left off like some kind of animal) but still held, turning it over to consider its merits. Slouched low against the pillow as he considers the soft felt texture, the title embossed in the spine.
"You probably shouldn't call me that, you know. Not now that I've considered getting hard."
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Some days' ride removed, Flint folds the letter in his hand a second time across his thigh, and then sets the page aside. There is other correspondence on the side table, albeit unopened. This page he'd deemed important enough to see to first.
But not so immediately actionable as to demand all his attention either— although he does this, and so renders himself empty handed outside of juggling the crystal. Given the givens, it leaves him a little
untethered, free hand finally moving to satisfy itself by picking at the carving motif bending across the curve of the chair arm.
"I might have taken you for that kind of man," has a conversational tint to it.
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On Marcus' end of the crystal, there's a shift in breathing that's only audible when he speaks, "And what kind of man is that?" which indicates a slow, lazy twist of movement. Laying the book down on his pack half-tucked under the bed.
On his back again, he fidgets with the crystal between both hands.
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"The kind that takes some pleasure out of the things that belong to him, I suppose." Yes, they're just having a conversation. For example, Flint's tenor seems to say, "I could call you Captain, but I think that might make some of the yard addresses to the company difficult."
(Technically speaking, this isn't ridiculous. It's just playing by the rules they've come up with where any familiarity requires the possibility of someone's hand on a cock. This is, in fact, a sign that the conversation they'd last hadn't been a wasted one.
Or something.)
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"I suppose you're right," Marcus says, "on both counts."
Maybe this was the point of this summoning. To listen to Flint's voice, clear enough over crystal that he could well be in the room, and Marcus can almost feel like the other man is conscious of it when he undoes his pants, and slides his hand beneath the fabric to grasp after himself to feel that initial thickening. Maybe that would be more suitable than simply wishing to share with him that he did start on that book.
The next breath out, at contact, is heavier. He's holding the crystal in his hand, hovered up where elbow is set against mattress. "And it's too late, anyway," he adds. No strain to his tone, certainly not yet, but the pretense of a conversational volume has diminished, quieter and more intimate for it. "It's already distracting to listen to you. So call me what you want."
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(Not the week after Marcus returns from his escort work, but maybe in the ones which follow—there will be a point where Flint is speaking to the assembly of Forces division, and his eye will wander casually in Marcus' direction and play at lingering there as if the point of his attention were somehow benign and not explicitly looking to elicit a rise out of him.)
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Here, and now—
"As long as it isn't all talk," because he is electing to take it as a joke and responds in kind, even if his tone is as dry as normal, "I'm sure I'll manage."
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"Are you touching yourself yet?" he asks instead.
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"Aye," only after half a beat of delay, and then he shifts. Pushing waistband down a little lower, even as his hand stays light, fingers finding sensitive spots to gently work, coaxing along that rush of blood, its trapping.
Quicker off the mark than if he were truly alone. Speaking of— "Will you stay?"
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(There is a real fascination in seeing what impulses can be coaxed out of Marcus, or uncovered; how relatively quiet he'd been in that tent.)
"If you tell me what you're thinking of."
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"I was thinking," he says (and isn't it strange to report what he is thinking, to be asked for it so directly, instead of murmured in scraps, impulsively, against hot skin, and how that makes his own skin prickle), "about your voice. And how it's like your hands."
There've been times he's anticipated some mocking turn to something he's said or done, weighed the risk of it, but there's assurance in how—when they are like this, at least—it never does. Whatever dwindled twinge of defense he might feel for the possibility now is outweighed by knowing that there is little point to any of this if he can only think of how to guard against it, rather than answering the question.
"Guiding," he almost doesn't say, but as noted, it seems unhelpful to not say things in this moment. "Rough, hard sometimes, but good for that. Thinking," a drawn in breath, released, "what we'd do if you were here."
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A low considered hum becomes, "I might insist on just watching if I were," while the thumb of his spare hand idly shifts across the scrollwork of the carved wood chair arm. Searching out small gaps in the design with his fingernail.
"Those let beds are usually small."
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It's an easy possibility to access. The crystal does its part in conveying the rich timbre of Flint's voice through it, with only a little uncanniness that gets lost in under the thick rhythm of his own heartbeat and the blood it pushes through him.
"Would you touch yourself too?" he asks, letting the crystal down on the mattress beside him so he can put both hands to work in shucking off clothing, having already been reduced to only comfortable layers upon settling in to read. It could be interpretable to the ear, the rustle of cloth, the bend of breathing along with this next part, "Or would you wait?"
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The angle of his knee and hip shifts, sympathetic to the rasp of clothing sounds from a considerable distance off, but he neglects to shift his palm into the widened space and grope himself through his trousers. It will be better (isn't really a thought so much as an instinct) if he's patient. And the shape of sound across the crystal is thin enough that he doesn't care for the distraction of his own palm shifting across fabric.
(How far is Marcus bothering to undress? How is he laid out in that allegedly narrow bed? Where are his hands now?)
"Are you going to use your fingers on yourself?"
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Flint would wait, which means he will wait. The certainty of this prickles through him. Good, he doesn't say. His hands are on either side. He lays back, as Flint asks that.
Turns a knee out, as if bodily thinking it over. A hand, slipping down further between the crook of thigh and abdomen, not yet doing this thing suggested. Collects the crystal in his other hand. "I could," he says, and if there's any trace of amusement in his tone, it's overshadowed by that husky texture that's gripped it, murmuring in intimate spaces despite the actual distance at play.
Curling his fingers. "Do you want me to?" feels a little like negotiating.
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The low hum that slides from the crystal in answer is considering, and tinged with the affirmation that yes, Flint does want him to. Or, at the very least, that the image is compelling. But what is actually said, rumbling hum clarifying into lower instruction, is, "Not when I'm not there."
Planting an idea and then shortening the leash on it being something of a habitual practice.
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"Alright," he says. Hand shifting, a looser hold that has him draw in a breath. "Then I won't."
Then, after a hesitation, the closing of which has the sense of biting down on something, he adds, "Tell me what to do."
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"Slowly to start," he instructs him. "I want you to tell me something you want while you do it."
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That second thing, turned over in his mind as he does so. As he curls his hand around himself and signals this, a semi-conscious action, with the heavier breath out of him. Slowly, to start.
"Something I want," he repeats. "Now?" Slowly, a stroke of his hand. 'Gently' is different, and so the squeeze around at the base is firm. It alters his voice, just slightly, when he says, "Or when I get back, and I can get you in a room?"
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First and foremost, though, he wants Marcus to talk. It's easier to discern the shape of his hand in the slant of his breathing when he does. To picture how he must be arranged on the bed, and the flexing line of sinew and muscle up through the forearm. Fragmented ideas of Marcus' shoulder and the muscle that joins it to neck. The stubble speckled underside of his jaw.
(They shouldn't concern themselves overmuch with this being untenable; they're too eager for one another. It hasn't been a week since Marcus left his bed, and already he wants more of him enough to play this stupid game.)
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He speaks, a slow process of liberating the trappings that tend to prevent him from rambling in the way that would be of benefit here. The slow slide of his own hand is a good encouragement. His other, holding the crystal idly, thoughtlessly working the chain attached to it between his fingers. "Hard, because of what I'm doing to you. Because you want more of it, or something else that I'm refusing you.
"Or," a small, vocal push of a breath, "you just want to touch me as much as I want to touch you, in that moment."
Either is a lot like both, as far as he is concerned, and he adds, "And I want you to tell me what you're thinking too."
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A small turn of the hand, ring band scraping a gentle rythmn across the hard wood of the chair arm makes for a sufficiently tactile distraction from the twinge at home low in his belly. The tightening sense of arousal. The impulse to loosen his belt.
"Now?" Flint asks, some thick curl of wolfish humor nipping at fingertips. "Or am I meant to tell you when you get back, and get me into a room?"
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"Now," has a likewise nipping quality, playing at chastising. It would be just like Flint to delay that answer. Evade it entirely. Has the effect, here, of a sharpening of focus, but not so much that Marcus stops touching himself, the slow and deliberate strokes across oil-slick skin, thickening out under fingers, warming.
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