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“I should never have given you that loan. You truly have been corrupted.”
“I’d rather think of it less as corruption and more as enlightenment. But it’s as Violet says—I’d like to actually participate in one of these orgies I’m supposed to have been enjoying this whole time. I’d like,” Maud turned at the waist, transferring her gaze from Hawthorn to Violet, “to watch you fuck her.” Maud glowed, pleased with how easily the punchy thrill of the fricative had launched itself from her lips. Standing at Maud’s side, Violet squeezed her fingers, her storm-cloud eyes dancing.
Ross coughed from his seat across the table. Lord Hawthorn stood impassive and immaculate, his gaze slipping like a melting ice cube between Violet and Maud. His eyes remained cold, but Maud could detect a flicker in them, as though of firelight from another room. She drew in a breath like a swelling bellows, determined to bring that fire into the front room of his gaze.
“First, I’m going to make her come.” Hawthorn made a faint choking sound, and Maud’s cheeks heated with something close to glee. “And then—provided you agree, of course—you’re going to fuck her. With your prick—" another cough from Ross, this one protracted, practically tubercular. Maud cast a discerning eye about the room behind Hawthorn, “perhaps against the back of that chair.”
Hawthorn turned his head, unhurried, to gaze at the armchair in question.
“Splendid,” Violet’s amused delight floated up to the surface of her voice like sherbet in champagne, “my conditions still stand, Lord Hawthorn, but up to that point you’re welcome to do whatever it will take to—as Maud so desires to see—make me come apart on your prick.”
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” Ross whispered from the far side of the table. Hawthorn set his whisky glass down on its surface with a sound like a soldier’s heel coming to attention against hardwood.
“And what of Ross? Is he to play the nymph again?”
Maud could see the spear of ice that shot from Hawthorn’s gaze as he transferred his attention to Ross.
“You’d fucking like that, wouldn’t you, you overinflated Minotaur. Go fuck yourself, your lordship.”
“It doesn’t appear as though I’ll have to.”
Violet, clearly sensing that this could go on forever, interrupted.
“Ross can watch,” she said, her gleaming grey eyes on the writer, “you can touch me, if you like, but don't touch Maud. The conditions between you and Lord Hawthorn are up to the two of you.”
“I don’t think either of you will have to worry about Ross’s attentions,” Hawthorn said without looking away from the other man, his low voice like velvet trailing over rough ice.
“I see your arrogance extends to all areas of life,” Ross spat, his eyes sparking.
“You’d be disappointed if it didn’t,” drawled Hawthorn.
“Shall we,” Maud cut in brightly, clapping her hands together gamely, “get to the fucking?”
—
There certainly was a particular thrill in kneeling before a seated Violet, peeling back her skirts to reveal her hot center as Ross watched unbreathing from across the table and Hawthorn stood just behind Maud, increasingly taut with something ineffable that was working on all of them. It had the flavour of magic to it, as though someone had cradled an incongruous weather system into the room, thick with an electricity that could be seen only in the four of them—in the way Ross’s swallows sounded in the silence like thunderclaps; in the focused, storm-eye stillness of Hawthorn’s body; in the under-surface tremble of Violet’s splayed thighs; in the way Maud felt as though she were just barely holding in the sort of mad, giddy sound that normally only spilled from one’s lips in the midst of the kind of storm that brought heady relish to a boil in one’s chest and ate one’s laughter with its roar. But the storm in Hawthorn’s stateroom was silent—the silence of a heartbeat pulsing frantically in someone else’s chest, the silence of a held-in moan.
Maud stroked along the plush ridges of Violet’s cunt, then nudged her clit with the side of her thumb. Violet drew in a sharp breath. Maud could feel it against her tightened skin as Hawthorn and Ross’s breathing changed, inaudibly. Maud played with kisses up the inside of Violet’s thigh. She stilled with her lips an inch from their destination, then moved towards it an inch.
It was like being aware of two fires, one against Maud’s lips and the other flaming low in her own core and building in intensity as Violet’s moans and needy shifts sent sparks scattering straight to the place where Maud blazed. She found herself pressing in a languid rhythm against her own heel as she tightened Violet into corset breathlessness with the press of her tongue and the slide of her fingers. The tautening of laces—knots and knots thwarting expansion, pressing in—glorious, aggravating constriction—and then the snap and the sudden release; the vast intake of breath; the bursting, cascading revelation of beyond that Maud was beginning to know in herself and in Violet—beyond restraints, beyond edges, beyond skin.
“Now,” Maud said in a voice like she’d just recovered from her first sip of whisky, Violet’s cunt still grasping at her fingers. She turned her eyes up to Hawthorn’s, “you.”
Maud snaked an arm around Violet’s waist and together they covered the few paces to the chosen armchair. Violet draped herself across its back, her hips in the air. Maud raised Violet’s skirts over her waist and ran her fingertips down the inside of her thigh, relishing the quiver she drew from her, the little oh of thrill. Then Maud returned to the chair at the table, sinking into it to watch. Violet gazed at her over the chair back, her lips curling. She looked as though she’d just come from the steamroom, tendrils of her blond hair clinging to her neck like humid sunlight. Hawthorn stood still for a moment, then stepped behind her and undid his trousers with deft fingers.
Maud found it was still true that she did not want to be touched by a man, but she burned at the low sound Hawthorn made as he slid into Violet, and even more at the way Violet’s lips parted around a rapidly tightening string of breath as Hawthorn’s fingers flexed against her hips, dragging her back against him as his own hips snapped forwards.
“Harder,” Maud said, her voice coming out strange, as though its usual brightness had smoldered down into ember light. She felt her blood heat at the low, burnt-caramel appreciation of Violet’s response as Hawthorn pulled back and thrust in again with a wicked drive. There was something deliciously obscene about watching the immaculate Hawthorn, still fully dressed, fucking Violet over the back of an armchair.
Maud found she was quite enjoying being truly scandalous.
Leaning back in the very chair Violet had come in the minute before, Maud hiked her own skirts and brought her touch to the heat beneath them, trailing her fingers through the syrupy wetness there as she watched. The last layers of performance began to disappear from Violet’s face as Hawthorn took her roughly, in exactly the way Maud had divined Violet liked. The sounds pouring from Violet’s lips were more delectable than anything served at the Café Marseille, more thrilling even than Miss Broadley’s velvet pulse of a song, and Maud felt the breath dart back and forth over her own lips as she searched for the hot, deep thing inside her that wanted to be let go.
“Not even going to touch me?” Violet said in a low, fraying voice, a teasing curl in her words. “And I’d heard so much about your prowess.”
“I don’t think I have to.” Hawthorn said with devastating coolness, his voice impossibly controlled even as he fucked Violet relentlessly. Maud gave a little shiver at the way his words made Violet pull in a gasp, which she let out in a laugh that was somehow rich and breathless at once.
"After I've come—" Violet panted, "I'm going to have to join Ross's—revolutionary efforts—it's got to be proof—of some fundamental unfairness—that such arrogance—should be so arousing."
Hawthorn gave a short, dark delight of a laugh, like a ray of sunlight through whisky. Ross made a sound that at its most charitable could be called sympathetic and which made it clear that Violet was not the only one finding it difficult, in that moment, to resist the unfortunate charm of Hawthorn's scalding pretension.
Even in the crawling, gloriously choking heat of the muted storm, it did not escape Maud’s notice that as Hawthorn pounded into Violet and Violet drew closer and closer to coming apart, Hawthorn was watching Ross, and Ross was watching Hawthorn.
Violet shivered exquisitely, a moan pouring, satisfaction-imbued, from her lips. Maud was almost too caught up in the glowing splendor of Violet’s release to notice that Ross had slipped off his chair and stepped slowly across the carpet until he was standing within arm’s reach of Hawthorn. Hawthorn’s gaze—all blaze now, the ice long since melted and heated to steam—followed him. Hawthorn thrust a few times more before stilling, not yet having reached his own release. He gave Violet’s spine a long, slow stroke towards her nape and back that struck Maud as discordantly tender and gentlemanly after minutes spent with his grasp on her hips and his prick deep inside her. Then he pulled out and turned all the way to Ross.
Violet swayed back towards the table with bone-deep ease, draping her arm over Maud’s shoulder. She began to tease the skin of Maud's thigh, accepting Maud’s breathless, half-lidded kiss with sated languor. Then they both turned their gazes on the scene unfolding before them. Maud observed, fascinated at the way Hawthorn’s arousal stood, slick and flushed, against the starchy white of his shirt. The electricity in the room was crackling fiercely in the space between his gaze and Ross’s. Ross dipped his eyes to Hawthorn’s prick, then looked back at his face. A moment, and then Ross stepped forward and closed his hand around Hawthorn’s arousal.
Hawthorn gave a lit fuse of a hiss, his hands fisting at his sides, his eyes fixed on Ross’s face as the other man began to stroke. Violet, her chin propped on Maud’s shoulder, her eyes on the show, trailed her fingers up Maud’s thigh and slipped them beneath Maud’s own hand, leaving Maud free to grasp at her skirts as Violet slid two fingers into the pooling center of her and ground the heel of her palm to Maud’s swollen clit. Maud could feel Violet’s breath against the bare curve of her shoulder. She could hear Hawthorn’s breath, hard and fast, as Ross’s strokes built in intensity, could practically see the sparking flare between their locked gazes.
And then Hawthorn’s head was falling back with a shuddering groan, his eyes slipping shut, and Maud watched, fascinated, as cream spilled from his tip, pouring over Ross’s hand. A couple more strokes, and then Ross, panting, released Hawthorn and took a step back.
A long drag of a breath that pulled deeply on the storm air around them, and then Hawthorn was lowering his head, his eyes flashing open. Never looking away from Ross, he closed himself back into his trousers with a few easy motions, then stepped forward, sliding one arm up around Ross’s back and bringing his hand to Ross’s trousers, undoing them with a one-handed reverse of the same deft motions he’d used to put himself away. Maud thought of one-handed cradles and of reversals and let loose a light-headed giggle, sinking her hips forward into Violet’s touch.
Ross and Hawthorn were pressed chest to chest now, and still they did not look away from each other, and Maud could not have said which of them had more fire in his eyes.
“You arrogant—Jesus—presumptuous—ahh—devil of a bastard.”
Maud, somewhat to her disappointment, could not observe Ross’s prick with Hawthorn’s body angled the way it was, but she knew by the way Ross’s voice was riddled with sounds of undoing, like a cloth seared through with burn marks, that Hawthorn had taken him in hand and begun to stroke as Ross had done to him. She could see the pistoning of Hawthorn’s arm, and the rise and fall of their chests, and the diamond hardness of Hawthorn’s eyes, even from side-on.
And then Hawthorn broke their gaze to lower his head to Ross’s far side, and he began to speak into Ross’s ear. Only the barest edge of Hawthorn’s ceaseless murmuring carried, so that Maud could not discern his words, but she could hear them in the look on Ross’s face, in the way his eyes fell shut and his brow furrowed desperately and his breath came in quick, short draughts over full, parted lips. She had not yet seen any naughty paintings, but she had the feeling that Ross’s face like that—as Hawthorn held him against his body and stroked his prick and poured hot, unrelenting murmurs into his ear as easy as decanting whisky—would feature exquisitely in the sort of oeuvre that depicted in color the kind of scene that her collection of pornography captured in words. Ross was pressing his hips into Hawthorn’s touch now, his pretty lips gushing filthy-sounding Italian, the sharp Zs visibly stabbing heat into Hawthorn and making Violet gasp soft, delighted ohs against Maud’s skin.
And then Ross made a sound that would have conjured into Maud’s core all the illicit heat and pulsing need she would have required to pursue an education in scandal without any other impetus. A firework of brilliant shivers burst in her center, and she made a harmony of Ross's undone sound as she clutched at Violet’s forearm, her toes curling. Ross’s forehead sank to Hawthorn’s shoulder, his body shaking. Still working at his prick with slowing strokes, Hawthorn slid his other hand up Ross’s back and over his nape, his fingers splaying up into those angelic curls. Hawthorn held the back of Ross’s head as he continued to murmur into his ear, his voice lowering into a growl for a moment and then going soft as silk.
An expansive, downwards-floating moment of after-storm settling, and then Ross pulled away, boneless, and sank onto the sofa, breathing hard, his eyes on Hawthorn’s middle. Hawthorn stood still for a deep breath, gazing down at him, then lowered himself into the armchair opposite, his gaze on Ross’s face.
“Well,” said Violet, sucking a fingertip as though she’d dipped it in cream, regarding the men with a languid gleam, “if I’d paid for a front row seat to that I’d have gotten my money’s worth. Shame it’s our last night on board, I would have quite liked to attend a repeat performance.”
“Thank fuck we’re getting off this ship tomorrow,” muttered Ross, having finally returned his eyes to Hawthorn’s, his features not the exquisite bliss of a minute before but scowling once more, the sparks flashing back into his gaze.
“Yes,” drawled Hawthorn, gazing back with polar levels of distain, “we wouldn’t want the labyrinth to give us any further opportunities to let slide the thread of our convictions.”
“We’ll all be living in London, won’t we?” Maud ventured, Violet’s suggestion of a repeat performance having glinted around inside her like prism-scattered shards of rainbow in a heating sunroom.
“Hawthorn’s townhouse is rather suited to orgies, wouldn’t you say, your lordship?” Violet sparkled at him with something that might have looked like innocence to someone with no eyes.
“I wouldn’t come to him if I were on fire,” Ross spat.
Hawthorn merely arched a brow. “You have come to me, Ross, and I believe I did a rather breathtaking job of putting out your fire. One of them, at least—shame the fire of raging contrarian reignited so quickly. I’ll have to smother it more thoroughly next time, perhaps with my—”
“Ooh,” Maud clapped like a child on Christmas morning, “I do believe I’d like to see that.”
“Fucking hell,” Ross moaned, “there will be no such show.”
“Of course not,” Hawthorn’s voice was a frosty blade, “you’re the most strait-laced of pornography-purveying jewel thieves.” He put special emphasis on the word strait.
“I sell the pornography, I don’t write it—I’m not the one with the fantasies of being bent over by insufferable aristocrats.”
Hawthorn scoffed and looked him up and down with a slow drag of his eyes, a silent, sarcasm-drenched of course not dripping from every inch of him. “If you’re hoping to have it the other way around—“
“Gentlemen,” Violet said as one might throw a bucket of ice water on an inferno, “as amusing as it would be to spend our final night on this ship watching you fuck each other without even touching, I’m afraid I’ve more enticing prospects to pursue,” she slinked her arm through Maud’s, “namely, fucking this scandalous little minx a few more times before we all slide into port tomorrow.” Violet’s fingers curled around the soft skin at the inside of Maud’s elbow, drawing out a delicious shiver.
“Yes,” Maud said a little breathlessly, glowing all the way through, “I’m afraid I’ve become a very busy strumpet, and my schedule of actual fucking is rather too tight to waste a moment longer in this den of merely verbal iniquity.”
She and Violet swept arm in arm across the carpet between Ross’s spot on the sofa and Hawthorn’s armchair. Maud felt a helium-light giggle rising from her, not unlike the storm-wrenched sound that had been hovering, electric, in her chest earlier, wanting to break free. She didn’t look at either of the men’s faces, but she could feel Ross and Hawthorn watching their exit with the dumbstruck quality of those who have been freshly walloped in the face.
In the corridor, Maud and Violet pressed their backs to the door, collapsing into a stifled fit of laughter.
“I bet they won’t last a minute before they start fucking,” Maud made a poor attempt at a whisper.
“Don’t tell me you’re taking up gambling now, too,” Violet teased, her touch tingling on Maud’s arm, “I really am a dreadful influence, aren’t I?” Her eyes sparkled. “…Thirty seconds.”
“And the wager? I can’t very well go back in there and ask Hawthorn for another loan.” Although the prospect of what she might see if she did hummed in the flesh around her ribcage.
“Oh,” said Violet slyly, bringing her lips to Maud’s ear, the warm music of her voice reawakening every last one of Maud’s shivering impulses, “I’m sure we can think of something.”