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I found my peace / In the dark and blue
Waves, Teeks
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After two weeks of tense quarantine, of Edward alone in his cabin speaking to no one, the patently ridiculous attempts at avoidance on a ship the size of a modest two-bedroom house grow tiring, so Stede asks Edward to take tea with him.
The tea is an excuse. They have cups, of course, implements for drinking and boiling water, but the performance, the pageantry of tea-time, is gone. Stede has a passing feeling of regret for the fine China tossed overboard, relegated to becoming playthings for fish, but tea is still tea, whether it’s in a dainty cup and saucer or a tin mug that smells like someone else’s mouth.
He has another passing regret for his other lost luxuries, sugar and marmalade and the like, now also bound for the depths, but he finds the bitterness of plain tea somehow comforting. There’s a refinement in the purity of the leaf, and something to be said for its medicinal quality. Edward, however, smacks his tongue in disgust like a dog that’s licked something foul from the floor.
“What’s this?” he says, and tilts the mug towards his eyeline. He’s been doing a good job, so far, of looking everywhere except at Stede.
“Tea in its natural state,” Stede says.
“I don’t like it.” Ed puts his cup down. His face is pouchy, tired, and there’s still dirt in his creases, in the lines around his nose and the crow’s feet at his eyes making dark fissures in his skin. He hunches like a child, but his hair and stubble is grey as a silverfish.
“You don’t have to drink it. I didn’t really ask you here for tea.”
Ed sounds as bitter as the tea when he says, “What did you really ask me here for, then?”
“To see you.”
“And here I am.” Ed stretches out his arms. End to end, his leather creaks, and the black tattoos on his brown skin shift in the sunlight. Skulls, monsters, crosses that mark a spot or signal a warning. A mermaid. A snake. A bird in flight. Places and people that Ed has been, before Stede came along. “So, are we done, yet?”
Stede says, “No.”
It takes courage, to stand up, to walk around the table, sparse and marked with knife wounds, and to reach out a hand, expectantly. He has the sense that Edward will refuse, is even concerned that the threat of violence is real, now, in a way it wasn’t before, when Blackbeard was defanged and docile. Stede was more naïve, then. But Edward is hurt, now.
Still, Edward does take his hand. For whatever reason. His rough skin is puckered with knicks and scars, white-raised marks like starfish in the webs between his fingers. Stede slips his own fingers in there to join them. Without instruments for grooming, his nails are short and bitten. They make for a ragged pair, Edward and him.
Stede leads them to the bed under the window, unmade and uncovered, sheets tossed around by restless sleep. On the edge of the bed, Stede undresses. The shirt on his back is already loose and his breeches are simple, made for comfort and practicality instead of style. There’s no one left to impress. The one function he wants his clothes to fulfil now is the ability to come off.
Ed watches him, dark under the slash of his brows. He looks like he hasn’t eaten in weeks. He waits for Stede to get down to his undergarments, then he wrenches his own jacket off, shirt following close behind, leaving a loose arrangement of thin gold chains around his neck in the wake of the movement. The leather trousers, impractically tight, he peels off in a struggle of foul language and frustration.
They’re both naked, uncovered and lit by the slanted external windows, freed from the blackout curtains that had turned the room into an airless tomb, deliberately dark and deliberately hostile. The afternoon light comes in, and Stede can see everything.
Ed says, “Have you done this with a man before?” He doesn’t specify what this is, but Stede can catch the drift. Besides, he did start it.
“Only with Mary.” He can’t say he ever liked it much. “Have you?”
“A few times.”
Stede watches the ocean reflect on the wall behind Ed’s shoulders, a birdcage of broken light. “With Izzy?”
“No,” Ed says.
“Jack, then.”
“Yes.”
“And others?”
“Male prostitutes, sometimes.” Ed cuts a challenging glance at Stede. “You can get a good bargain when you’re not picky.”
Stede doesn’t comment on that. Instead, he asks, “When you do it. Are you usually doing the entering, or the other way round?”
“Entering, generally. Though Jack did me, once or twice.” If the past tense stings, Ed doesn’t show it.
“Do you have a preference, this time?”
Ed shrugs. “You can do me.” It’s neutral. And not quite enthusiastic. Stede can’t tell if it’s a test. Maybe Ed likes it this way, but is being deliberately cautious with him. Or maybe he’s punishing himself, like there’s some kind of martyrdom involved in being the receptor.
Stede has imagined, on more than one occasion, taking something inside of himself, and it’s filled his cock with blood just from thinking about it. He supposes not everyone feels the same way. “Alright,” he says.
He leans in, but Ed stops him with a hand to his chest. He says, uncertainly, “I haven’t washed.” Charcoal fingerprints like the aftermath of a fire blacken his neck and torso. The heat of the past few days has flared as they float into southern oceans, and they’ve all sweated buckets under a rough sun.
Stede leans back. “There’s a basin and some water in the corner. It’ll be cold, though.” The lavender soap is gone, too. Only the plain tallow stuff remains.
Still, Ed goes to the corner of the room, behind the curtains. There’s the sound of water splashing, the sound of scrubbing, and quick, hitching breaths. Stede takes his own calming ones. He touches himself, trying to settle the anticipation and the excitement blooming like a flower from inside a strange and muddy fear. His cock rises. Sweat pricks him like an insect under his skin.
When Ed comes back, he shuffles up the bed, making some distance between them. Unsure, Stede says, “Will you kiss me?”
They’ve only kissed once. Months ago, now. He’s turned the moment over in his mind constantly since, a warm and precious thing, like a coin heated in his palm. His memory of Ed, soft and also viciously real, the late stain of the day on the seashore burnishing the sand to gold around them.
Ed’s face goes through a complicated series of expressions, too quick for Stede to read, but his mouth is there, so Stede makes the move and kisses Ed at the parting of his lips. Ed startles, then breathes into him, and Stede thinks about sails unfolding.
“Now what?” Stede leans back, mouth tacky where Ed had put his tongue.
Ed’s face is dark with something, raw and bruised-looking. He pulls away and turns over, belly-down on the bed in the nest of sheets. “Oil,” he says. “You’ll want to put it on your prick. And – in me. Makes it all easier.”
“Won’t it stain?”
Ed looks over his shoulder. He’s lovely – absolutely fucking lovely, Stede thinks, with a quaking feeling, like sand crumbling away under his feet. The line of his spine, the shape of his shoulders. With his tattoos and scars, the distention of his ribs, the swell of his arse into sinewy legs. He’s like a topographic map, weather-beaten and fascinating. “Yeah, it will. Hope you’ve got someone on hand to do your washing, after.”
Stede doesn’t think he would have asked anyone on the crew to scrub the effluents from his linens at the best of times, but especially not now, when their looks have become guarded and mutinous once more. “It’s fine. They’re not very nice sheets, anyway,” he says. The Ceylon tree oil for his hair is in an unlabelled glass jar, forgotten on a shelf in favour of the fruitier stuff with prettier packaging, overlooked in the purge. He pours a handful onto his fingers and it drips through his knuckles, down the line of his wrist.
He touches himself with it, oiling up his prick as if it were a piece of meat for cooking. He feels himself go red. The forced intimacy of ship-life has given him more than a passing awareness of nudity. Not to mention the raw, physical experience of being surrounded by bodily bleeding, gangrene, fever, bowel infections, lacerated flesh and shit everywhere. He wonders if it’ll get messy, here in his bed. He thinks he doesn’t mind if it does.
Ed’s voice comes thickly from a pillow, “Use your fingers to push some of it into me.”
“I see.” Stede lays a hand hesitantly on Ed’s lower back. He feels a shiver like the lightness of an animal cutting through the water under his palm. “So, it’s. Wet on both ends, as it were.” Ed snorts. “What happens if I don’t do that?”
Ed is still. Then, from the pillow, he says, “It’ll hurt.”
Stede remembers running Ed through with his blade, into his stomach and all the way out to the other side. The intimacy was intense, penetrating, sickening. The heat of blood on his fingers, the dull tug of pressure on his sword from Ed’s belly still clinging to him. It had made him dizzy, frightened and delirious, and Ed’s eyes had stayed feverishly bright as he slid the blade from his guts.
Stede says, “We’ll do it properly.”
His hand goes to the back of Edward’s thigh, smooth skin and coarse hair, and his fingers trail up the seam of him. He presses a thumb, gently, into the crack, just to see, and Ed’s breath goes sharp. He presses harder, then rubs, slick oil smoothing the way.
When he enters with a finger, deep into the heat of his flesh, Ed makes a shocked sound. It’s strange, to feel without seeing, so Stede withdraws, and uses both hands to pull Ed apart, to get a better look. Ed’s voice comes louder then, gravel at the edge of his breathing.
It’s a transfixing and primal thing, the way Ed’s hole gives under pressure, opens with his coaxing, sucks in the tip of his finger. It’s visceral, like pinning a wild animal under his hands, like parting mango flesh, like bloodletting a tumour. He pushes at the ring of muscle, and the heat feels intimate and dangerous as the quiet immolation inside a sleeping volcano.
Stede pulls back. Ed is silent, save for a tremor of wet breathing as he turns his head to the side, mouth pressed up against his own shoulder. He lies there, unmoving, but Stede notices, subtly, the clench of his muscles, a rolling, rhythmic flex into the bed.
“Can you get on your knees?” Stede asks. “Don’t do it if it hurts. I just – I’d like to see.”
“See what?”
“You. What’s happening under there.” He’s never yet been able to bring another person this kind of pleasure. He wants to know what it looks like. He asks, “Is your prick hard?”
“God al-fucking-mighty,” Ed chokes, but he goes to his hands and knees. His cock is flushed, standing, and a thin trail of slick goes from the bedsheets to its tip.
Stede takes him in hand. It’s hard, thick, the skin like velvet. The head is wet, reddened, protruding like a living thing. Stede thinks about the illustrations from the botanical compendiums back in his old home, of lush, exposed plants, intricate and vibrant, perfectly adapted for their purpose. He’s never been particularly fascinated by his own, but Ed’s prick is captivating. He slides his hand down, slick with oil. “Is it alright, like that?”
Ed shakes. He says, “Yeah, sure.”
“What happens now?”
“Now you stop fussing about and fuck me.”
“How—?”
“You want a book on it? Just stick it in and move.”
“Alright.” Stede takes more oil. He rubs it on himself, then tips the glass jar slightly at the parting of Ed’s arse, trickling it directly into him. Ed groans, and his legs spread, and Stede feels the hot clutch of a sudden thought; of covering them both in oil, slicking them head to toe until they become stained and slippery, like primeval creatures, strange beasts made of heat and instinct, twisted and slithering into each other.
It’s better for everyone if he doesn’t indulge every fanciful whim that comes into his mind, so instead, he simply presses his cock to Ed’s arse, and slowly pushes in.
“Fuck,” Ed says, and a balled-up fist thumps against a pillow. “Fuck, yes,” he says. And then, “Do it, come on, Stede, do it, get in, get all the fucking way in and fucking fuck me.”
Stede pauses, half-in, half-out. The sensation is astonishing, but: “It’s not meant to be a fight.”
Ed’s forehead leans against the back of his own wrists. The slope of his spine is incredible. He’s quiet for a moment. Then he says, “It’s just what you say during a fuck. It doesn’t have to mean anything.”
“Well. I wouldn’t know.” He and Mary always did it in silence. Overhearing her enthusiastic cries in the painting studio with Doug was incomprehensible to the point where he thought maybe she was being attacked, until he understood what was happening.
“Well, what do you want to say?” Ed says. It bites. People like you, it sounds like he’s saying, and Stede hates the reminder of the oceans between them.
“I want to say that it feels nice,” he says mulishly. He pushes in a little deeper, and he fights to keep himself from keening under the thrill of heat and feeling. He needs to keep a level head. “It’s – hot, inside. And smooth. Like silk.” He closes his eyes briefly, breathes out through his nose. “I can feel you all around me.”
Ed is tense for a moment, then he makes a low sound, animalistic, almost wounded. He asks, voice shaking, “Around your – around your cock?”
Stede feels strangely tender when he agrees: “Around my cock. It’s so deep inside – I feel like I need to be careful.”
“You don’t have to be.”
“I’m going to.” Stede presses on Ed’s back as he pulls out and pushes in again, and Ed sinks down, arches, stutters a noise, the timbre of his voice gone from salt and smoke to something soft and high like a bird.
“Oh shit,” Ed says. “There. Do that again.”
Stede does. “What is it?” He’s nothing if not curious. About everything. The living vibrancy of the world around him. The vastness of the unknown. The complexity of Ed’s soul and body.
“Just— Christ. Fucking Christ. There. Just do it again.”
Stede tries to find the right angle. He pulls back, swollen cockhead tugging just at the rim of Ed’s hole. He rubs a thumb at the place where they’re connected, hot and slick and a fascinating conjunction of flesh, veins and blood, meat and muscle, tenderly sucked into one another, capable of creating such feeling, such possibility.
“Stede,” Ed says. He sounds broken. “Please. What the fuck are you doing back there.”
He's getting distracted. Thinking too much. “Looking at you.”
“God. Okay. How’s the view?”
Stede touches the join of him again. “There’s not a sunset I’ve seen that I’ve liked better.”
Ed shudders. “Better than your cock in my arse?”
“Well, I’ve seen a lot of sunsets. This is new.”
“And you can’t – ah – fuck a sunset.”
Stede’s hips start working harder now, into Ed’s body. There’s sweat on Stede’s brow, at the join of his thighs. He’s flushed hot. He feels stretched. Taut. Burning. The arousal is consumptive. He feels the flex of his own muscles, the curl of his toes, the weight of his lungs. He feels febrile, otherworldly, but even in the throes of fever he’s never been good at shutting up. “Mr. Buttons might disagree.”
“What the fuck are you talking about,” Ed growls. “Fucking – God.”
“He has – a unique sense of ritual – that often involves – nudity.”
“Stop,” Ed says, and he grinds back against Stede, arse into hips, making them both groan together. “Stop fucking talking about fucking Buttons and fucking sunsets, fuck.”
Stede feels the sweat pearl and drip from his forehead, down the side of his neck. “What do you want me to talk about instead?”
“I don’t know – I don’t know,” Ed’s voice is a smeared, babbled sound, and Stede can see the damp gathering of spit on a pillow under his open mouth. He looks loose, strings cut, so Stede gathers Ed up in his arms, bringing the breadth of his back into Stede’s chest. The shift of the angle makes Ed gasp, clenching down, and Stede grits his teeth at the kick of heat that pricks like a thorn at the core of him.
Ed drops his head back onto Stede’s shoulder. Stede can’t quite kiss his mouth, but he bites the join of his jaw, teeth at the juncture of Ed’s neck, and relishes in the fluttering jump of his pulse. He spreads his hands on Ed’s belly, pulling him close. Fingernails scratch ribs, nipples, neck, a scarred landscape of skin and tattoos. It’ll be over soon. He doesn’t want it to end. He wants to keep holding Ed in his arms. He wants to make him happy. He wants Ed leaning on him like he’s found a soft place to rest.
“You’re wonderful,” Stede says, and he means it, with all the meaning of the word wonder. He reaches down with a still-greasy palm and takes Ed’s cock, swollen and dripping, into his hand.
Ed’s breath expels and he grabs Stede’s wrist, hard, fingers around the bone. “Stop,” he says. “I’m going to fucking come.”
Stede pauses. “Don’t you want to?”
“You first.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m going to black the fuck out the moment it happens. And I want to feel it when you do.”
Stede clutches a hand into Ed’s hip, fingernails biting into skin. The approaching edge of his own release makes him feel light-headed as a cloud, floating in airy bliss, but Ed’s words are dark and heated like a storm in the night. Stede thinks about lust, and hellfire, and damnation. He reckons his old priest would have a thing or two to say to him, now.
“Alright,” he says. He lets go of Ed’s cock, stiff and leaking wet stains onto the sheets. He wraps his arms around Ed’s torso instead, presses his face into the back of Ed’s neck, tasting the sweat off his skin, nosing the coarse silver of his hair. He bucks his hips with a hard slap of skin to skin and feels it gathering inside him.
And then it hits him like a pistol-shot to the spine. “Ed,” he says, gasping and needy himself. “Ed, I think I – oh, God – I’m going to—”
“Please, fucking, do it, let me feel you—”
And Stede releases, spilling deep into Ed’s body, like a breaking wave, like the extrusion of venom, like a cure. Shattered, he comes back together. He breathes Ed’s skin. Tastes salt. A flush of blood from his own bitten tongue.
He starts to pull out, but Ed reaches back to grab his thigh. “No.”
Stede stills. “No?”
“No.” Ed doesn’t let go. “Stay.”
Stede’s cock is softening but the clench of Ed’s body keeps him halfway on edge, stirred up. “How—”
“Please stay. Just, please.” Ed’s voice is high, thin like it gets when he’s emotional, strung taught, fighting tears, fighting rage, fighting. “I’m so – I’m so—”
“Okay,” Stede says. “Easy. Come on.”
Ed twists back hard in Stede’s arms, and Stede kisses him as much as he wants it, mouths him wetly on the neck, his own face abraded by greying stubble and the immutable roughness of his jaw. Ed is bow-tight, his stomach clenched and hard as a plank where his muscles strain. And then Stede reaches down, brushes Ed’s cock with his palm, and Ed comes with a tremor and a shout into his hand.
Stede doesn’t know what it is that makes the calm before and the calm after the storm so different, but it’s something. Ed’s breath is shivery with tears, and the clench of his body loosens, and Stede lowers him gently into the bed. Pulling out is messy, oil and seed spilling from where their bodies unjoin, and Stede awkwardly wipes himself and Edward down with a sheet before bundling it up and discarding it.
As Stede comes to lie down on the bed, Ed rolls over onto his side and looks at him. His eyes are dark and bright as a woodfire reduced to embers. As black waters lit by stars. Stede reaches out, wipes a thumb over the thin-soft skin under those eyes where dirt and shadows remain. He thinks he might cry, himself.
“I am sorry,” he says.
“Yeah,” Ed says. “Me too.”
“I never meant – I had to set things right. With Mary. And the children.”
Ed's face is set. “Your family.”
“Yes,” Stede says. “And no. It was my duty to go back and make reparations, but - there are some things you do for duty, others for love. If I hadn’t gone back, I might never have understood the difference.” He puts a hand on Ed’s chest, the casing for his heart. “This is where I want to be, now. With this family.”
Ed’s expression flickers, quick as a passing cloud. “Me?”
“You.”
And Ed surges forward and kisses him, mouth wet and his eyes too. He breaks away and presses his forehead to Stede’s and says, low and fierce, “Ko koe anō hoki toku whānau.”
Stede passes a tongue over his own lips, tasting warmth, tasting joy, tasting – he thinks – love.
Ed closes his eyes. “Can we rest?”
“Alright,” Stede says. “We can rest.”
They sleep, drifting. The waves of ocean water keep them afloat in the changing of the tides.
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