Work Text:
Room for Improvement
It is clear by their second ‘dance lesson’ that Guy of Gisborne and Robin Hood are both interested in learning a lot more than the basic steps – a whole lot more.
After their first fumbled attempts some two nights ago, and a hasty retreat on Robin’s part – when the sheriff decided he couldn’t sleep and therefore needed to bend the ear of his long-suffering master-at-arms – Guy and Robin had arranged, by way of an unsuspecting Marian, to meet at the castle, again in Guy’s private chambers.
Now, as they sit, leaning against the overly ornate wooden headboard of Guy’s roomy bed, sated, and more than a little sweaty after their exertions, they realise there is no point in keeping up the dance lesson charade any longer. Guy of Gisborne and Robin of Locksley both want sex – and they both want it with each other.
“Well?” Guy asks, for the third time. “Am I getting any better?”
Robin lets go of his outlaw tag that he’s been absently playing with and turns to face the man who’s just gone to places no man, or indeed woman, has gone before. “Most definitely.” He gives Guy a dirty grin.
“Marks out of ten?” Guy asks, still feeling insecure despite Robin’s assurances.
“Er...six I’d say.”
“Only six!” “Why?”
“Because,” Robin patiently explains, with more than a hint of mischief, “your entrance was sloppy, your timing was off, your hands require attention and your finish leaves something to be desired.”
“I will be better next time,” Guy says miserably, completely missing the tongue Robin has firmly wedged in his cheek.
“You will be better now,” Robin says kindly, wrapping his bare arms around Guy’s muscled torso. “Let’s go for a ten, shall we?”
Legs entwined, the outlaw and the sheriff’s lieutenant slide down onto the silky black sheets, nuzzling and caressing, stroking and licking, each determined to outdo the other and win the glitter ball of sexual mastery.
~
Now, happily pleasured for a second time, the silky black sheets a little less silky and a little less black, the two men quietly dress. Robin needs to return to his gang before the night is over and they wake to find him gone, and Guy needs to grab a couple of hours sleep before the overbearing Sheriff Vaisey comes bashing on his door demanding Guy partake in yet another scheme to catch ‘Robin-bloody-Hood’.
“Same time tomorrow?” Robin asks, craning his head out the open window and checking the coast is clear.
“I can’t,” Guy says. “The sheriff wants me to—”
A quiet but insistent knocking on the heavy oak door interrupts whatever Guy is about to say.
“Guy. It’s Marian. May I come in?”
“Fuck!” Guy exclaims.
“Not now, surely,” Robin says with a wink, grinning and clearly unperturbed that the woman of his former affections is about to stumble upon a scene that could hardly look more suspect than if they’d hung a banner over the bed emblazoned with the words ‘just married’.
“Go. Now!” Guy hisses, throwing Robin his Saracen bow and shooing him towards the open window and a long piece of rope.
“But, Guy,” Marian says, clearly cross and more than a little bewildered by the remark, “I only just got here.”
“Not you!” Guy snaps, his face falling as he quickly realises his mistake.
The door handle turns and Guy’s face falls even more as he remembers that in their haste to trip the light fantastic, both Robin and he had forgotten to lock the door.
“Fuck!” Robin exclaims, diving under the bed.
“Marian, wait,” Guy shouts, fumbling with the last of his buckles and for the first time cursing his penchant for leather and its accompanying adornments.
Not content to hang about in a draughty corridor longer than necessary, Marian bursts into the room, her eyes darting hither and thither. “Who is in here? And what,” she asks, eyeing the bed, “have you been doing, if that’s not a stupid question?”
Guy follows her line of sight. “I’ve been...er...eating,” he says.
“Eating?”
“Yes. Eating a...cream puff...I think.”
Robin snorts.
“What was that?” Marian demands.
“Rats,” Guy says.
“Rats?”
“Very big rats.”
Guy hastily pulls the thick blanket over the smears of ‘cream puff’ and swings a boot under the bed, catching the snorting outlaw in the shin. To muffle Robin’s ensuing outcry, Guy coughs – loudly.
“Are you all right?” Marian asks, eyeing Guy suspiciously.
“Yes. I am fine. Very well in fact. Well, maybe not so well.” He coughs again, realises he starting to sound like Robin’s irksome little manservant. “I was practising a speech that the sheriff wants me to give at the Council of Nobles meeting tomorrow and I keep mucking up the lines. And I got hungry,” he adds, lamely.
Guy can tell Marian is unconvinced by his lie.
“A speech?”
“Yes!” Guy snaps, tiring of the ridiculous knots he is tying himself into, thinking instead about what he will do to Robin once he has got rid of Marian – a thought that quickly turns to a pleasant, but presently unwelcome, mushy feeling in his loins.
“Now, Marian,” Guy says, determined to be business like. “Please tell me why you have chosen to disturb me in my private chambers at such an ungodly hour. Surely there is nothing so important that it could not wait until morning, or do you wish to cast an aspersion on your good name by being here, un-chaperoned?” He leaves the last word hanging in the air and Marian shifts uncomfortably.
“I am sorry, and you are right. It’s about the upcoming ball.”
“Ball? Oh, yes, the Nottingham Ball. What about it?”
“Well, as you know, it is in two days time and it has occurred to me that I will be expected to dance with all the leading nobles and I have never learned to dance.”
“Your father did not teach you?” Guy asks, incredulous.
“He tried to, but I was more interested in learning how to wield a sword and fire a longbow than how to move gracefully around a dance floor.”
“And what exactly do you want me to do about it?”
“I was hoping you could teach me a few moves.”
Guy waits for the snort, boot at the ready. Thankfully, it doesn’t come.
“I’m afraid I am really not that good at dancing myself,” Guy confesses. “However,” he adds, voice raised for the infuriating but oh-so-kissable outlaw’s benefit, “this will be remedied one day soon. Alas,” he continues, meeting Marian’s increasingly suspicious blue eyes, “not in time for the ball, I fear.”
“Well, could you at least show me what you do know?” Marian asks, determined that her nocturnal visit should not be a wasted one – slipping past those guards hadn’t been easy, despite her cartwheeling prowess.
“Does it have to be now?” Guy asks, feigning a yawn and then yawning for real.
“Please.”
Marian is wearing her stubborn face and Guy suddenly realises why Robin might find him an attractive alternative to Marian’s charms.
“Very well,” he says, a sigh in his voice. “But not for long. I am tired.”
Marian slips off her cloak and stands in front of Guy. Guy closes his eyes for a moment, trying to remember the steps Robin had first taught him, before their eyes had fallen on the bed in the knowledge that dancing was the last thing on their minds.
“Put your hands on my waist,” Guy instructs.
“What, here?”
“No, higher up. Yes, like that. And now put your feet on top of mine.”
“Shall I take off my boots first?” Marian asks.
“No, they are fine,” Guy says, wanting nothing more than to get this over with, drag Robin out from under the bed, and either clump him one, or soundly ravish him – probably the latter.
After a few less than enthusiastic moves around the floor, Guy declares that they have done enough for tonight and suggests that Marian meets him again tomorrow at a more civilised hour.
“Thank you,” Marian says, giving Guy a light peck on the cheek and frowning when he wipes his face with the back of his hand.
“You are welcome,” Guy says with a small bow.
Marian bends down to pick up her discarded cloak and notices a boot – a boot with a foot inside it.
“Guy?” she hisses.
“What?”
“There is someone under the bed.”
“Rubbish. There is—”
Ignoring his protest, Marian pushes past Guy and gives the booted foot a swift kick.
“Ouch!”
Guy leaps across to the far side of the room, swipes up his sword and advances on the bed. “Who is there? Show yourself,” he demands in a strangled voice.
Sneezing from the disturbed dust, Robin wriggles out from under the bed. Standing up and stretching, he grins at Marian and winks at Guy.
“Hood!” Guy exclaims, only just remembering to point his sword in Robin’s direction.
Robin raises his arms, trying but failing to look like a man caught in a trap.
“What are you doing in my room?” Guy demands. “And how in heaven’s name did you get in?”
“The usual way,” Robin says, pointing at the window.
“Why did I not see you?” Guy asks, fervently hoping that Robin can come up with an answer that doesn’t cause his leathers to become any more uncomfortable than they already are.
“You were...er...in the privy,” Robin says, pointing at Guy’s curtained garderobe.
“Oh, yes, so I was,” Guy says, relief flooding through him so quickly he thinks perhaps he might be heading that way any moment now.
“By the way,” Robin says. “You have rats under your bed. Very big rats.”
Alarmed, both Guy and Marian step back a pace and, as they do so, Robin whips up his bow and swiftly nocks an arrow. He points it at Guy’s chest.
“Ah,” Guys says, lowering his sword. “It seems you have me.”
“Had you,” Robin dares to mouth back, Marian’s eyes still roaming the floor for the fictitious rats.
“So what now then, outlaw?” Guy sneers, regaining some of his composure and trying to remind himself that – sex apart – Robin Hood is still the man he most wants to see hanging from a gibbet.
“This!” Robin declares, flinging his bow aside and raising his fists.
“Really?” Guy asks.
“Yes, really,” Robin replies.
“I hate to interrupt,” Marian says, “but what exactly were you doing under Guy’s bed in the middle of the night?”
“Isn’t it obvious?”
“Not to me it isn’t.”
“Nor me,” Guy adds, smirking.
“I had it on good authority that Gisborne has some interesting sexual aids from the Orient hidden under his bed. I was looking for them.”
Guy can tell that Marian is not convinced, although at the same time clearly brimming with curiosity.
“Here, take this,” Guy says to Marian, thrusting his sword into her hands. “And leave us.” He raises his fists, mirroring Robin’s stance.
“No,” Marian says, scowling at Guy and Robin in turn. “I will not allow it.”
“And what are you going to do?” Robin asks. “Call the guards and risk my being captured?”
“I forbid it,” Marian says, jutting out her chin. “You will be hurt, or he will. You might kill one another.”
“It’s just skin, Marian,” Robin says, valiantly trying to keep a straight face.
“Just skin,” Guy echoes, gazing into the outlaw’s twinkling blue eyes.
“In that case,” she sighs, “give me your knife, the one you keep in your boot.”
Guy bends down, withdrawing the small blade. He hands it to Marian.
“And yours,” she says to Robin.
“Happy now?” Robin asks, passing Marian a similar looking blade to Guy’s.
“No, I’m not. But I can see that nothing I say will change things, so do what you have to do. Just don’t come running to me when you’re all beaten up and bloody.”
“I won’t,” Robin assures her.
“Nor I,” Guy says, again locking eyes with the outlaw, envisaging the two of them all beaten up and bloody, but with considerably less clothing than at present.
Clutching Guy’s sword and the two smaller knives, Marian opens the door, checks the guards are still out cold, and slips into the gloomy corridor, kicking the door shut behind her.
Robin blows out a long breath, lowers his fists.
“That was close,” he says, approaching Guy and then stopping when he hears the clatter of Marian dropping one or more of their weapons.
The men wait, straining to hear, finally smiling when it is clear that Marian has gone.
“Much too close,” Guy agrees, pulling back an arm and punching Robin in the face, sending the outlaw sprawling onto the hard stone floor.
“Fuck. What was that for?” Robin asks, pushing up onto his elbows and fingering his jaw.
“For making ridiculous noises under the bed,” Guy grumbles, “and for the sex toys thing.”
“I had to think fast,” Robin says, spitting blood. “What else did you want me to say?”
“Well, money might have been a more obvious suggestion.”
Guy hauls Robin to his feet, tenderly licks the blood from Robin’s chin.
“Don’t weird out on me, Guy,” Robin says. “We still need to go for that ten, remember?”
“I remember,” Guy says, pushing Robin towards the bed.
“And don’t forget,” Robin says, watching as Guy deftly unlaces the outlaw’s breeches, “it’s all about intention.”
“What is?” Guy asks thickly, plunging his head between Robin’s open thighs.
“Dancing. It’s all about drive and thrust.”
“I’ll give you more drive and thrust than you’ll know what to do with, outlaw,” Guy retorts, roughly flipping Robin over.
~
Now, happily pleasured for a third time, the outlawed Lord of Locksley and the power hungry, but sadly deluded, Guy of Gisborne, are lying side by side on Guy’s bed.
“You really must change the colour of your sheets,” Robin muses, running a hand up and down Guy’s spine.
Guy turns lazily towards the naked outlaw.
“I like black.”
Robin looks towards the open window, notices the first pale blush of dawn. “I have to go.”
“Yes, you must,” Guy says sleepily.
“Gisborne! Wakey, wakey,” Sheriff Vaisey roars from some distant part of the castle.
“No peace for the wicked,” Guy bemoans.
“Same time tomorrow?” Robin asks.
“Same time,” Guy tells him.
“And no punching this time?”
Robin fingers his aching jaw.
“No punching,” Guy agrees, sitting up and watching as Robin dresses. “By the way,” he asks, “how did I do?”
“Do?” Robin queries, checking the rope he is about to shinny down is securely tied.
“Marks out of ten?”
“Oh, that,” Robin says. He starts to climb out the window. “Let’s just say,” he says, grinning at Guy, “that there’s room for improvement.”
“I guess we’ll have to have some more lessons then,” Guy says, a little more eagerly than he intended.
“I guess so,” Robin agrees, blowing Guy a kiss and disappearing over the window ledge.
Sighing, Guy slumps back onto his bed, dreamily contemplating his next clandestine meeting with Robin-bloody-Hood and wondering where he can purchase cream-coloured sheets.
to be continued...