Work Text:
“You have got to be shitting me,” said Nix over Dick’s shoulder.
His breath was warm on Dick’s neck, his hand warm on the small of Dick’s back. They’d been dancing, and now they’d stopped. Right out in the middle of the floor, too, and until Nix froze in place and spoke Dick had been all swept up in it: the music, the lights. Dick wouldn’t have gone on record as an especially romantic person, but he supposed that, as with alcohol, intolerance made one more susceptible. As it happened, he had also had a glass of champagne. Or two. Nix had been persuasive.
“Dick,” Nix said.
From the bandstand the singer still crooned, her sequined dress clinging to narrow hips, glittering in the floodlights. She was beautiful.
“Dick,” Nix said again. He took Dick by the shoulder and wrenched him around.
“What?”
“Look over there,” Nix said. “Over by the bar.”
Dick peered through the crowd. All the swaying dancers, men with men and women with women. Dreamlike and still capable of thrilling him. Some who only had eyes for each other, some who seemed set on making eyes, for a night or just for a song. They milled through his field of vision, faces hard to discern in the twilit room.
“I can’t see who you mean,” Dick said. “Is it someone we know?”
Nix nodded. “I’ll say.”
He looked peaked all of a sudden. Perhaps Dick ought to be concerned. There was a part of him that ceded to Nix on nights like this to begin with; he was better at it, the way he was better at parties. Dick still felt clumsy beside him on the dancefloor, half certain he’d be tapped on the shoulder any moment and told he didn’t belong. He felt better with Nix’s arms around him, sweeping him along.
“Nix?”
Nix opened his mouth to speak, but then the crowd shifted again and Dick saw him, cutting as imposing a figure across the floor of this Manhattan nightclub as he had any ravaged battleground in Europe. Ron Speirs.
They’d seen him first, but only barely--Dick scarcely had time to consider whether or not Speirs was the last person he’d have imagined running across tonight or if he was just close to the bottom of the list when he looked up and stared Dick dead in the eye.
“Well, hell,” said Nix beside him. “That’s that.”
“You think we ought to go?”
“Not yet,” Nix said. “See what he does.” He slipped his arm free from around Dick’s waist. “Christ. Speirs. You know, the funny thing is, I’m not completely surprised.”
“Aren’t you?”
“No,” said Nix. He shrugged. “Guy like that’s got all kinds of things shoved down deep where no one sees.”
He had an odd look on his face, working his jaw as though he had something else to say. They were both too shaken up to go back to dancing, which Dick was a little sorry for. But the song changed then, to a bright swing beat they might’ve sat out anyway. Nix took Dick’s elbow and guided him off the floor.
Speirs met them halfway to a booth, carrying a trio of drinks in a manner that somehow managed to be neither awkward nor ungainly.
“Evening,” he said, although it was after midnight. “I figured I’d grease the wheels right up front,” he said, holding out two of the glasses to Nix, who passed one along. It was tonic water.
“Didn’t know what you were drinking these days,” Speirs said to Dick, looking between him and Nix as though the words carried another meaning. “But I hope that’s all right.”
“Fine,” said Dick, and Speirs grinned.
“Cheers, gentlemen. I hope you don’t mind my joining you awhile?”
Nix gestured at the booth. “By all means,” he said. “Sounds as if we’ve got a lot to talk about.”
Dick sat beside Nix, one hand in his lap and the other up on the table fiddling with the cut crystal of his glass of tonic. Nix prised it free gently and laced their fingers together, holding Dick’s hand against the rich dark wood. Dick looked from their joined hands to Speirs across from them and felt a frisson of nerves. Speirs was watching too, his expression inscrutable. There was a brashness to the gesture, as though Nix didn’t want to chance a misunderstanding.
“So,” said Nix, playing at a leer. “Come here often?”
Speirs shrugged. If he was thrown, by their hands or by Nix’s tone, he didn’t let on. “Reasonably. I’m down from Boston twice a month or so, when I get the itch. You’re in the area?”
He took a cigarette case from his jacket pocket and flipped it open. The lid bore a Reichsadler, beak frozen in mid-cry, talons splayed and sharp. Dick wondered what other souvenirs Speirs made use of.
“New Jersey,” said Dick. “It’s not far.” He looked at Nix.
“Depends on traffic,” Nix said tangentially. “He...works for me.”
“And you’re together?” Speirs asked, eyes on Dick.
Dick felt himself flush as though on command, as though Speirs had drawn the blood up into his cheeks by sheer force of magnetism. He shifted next to Nix, irritated by this quirk of physiology. Above all, he thought, he didn’t want to seem embarrassed, but the question was blunter than he’d been ready for, more forward.
He swallowed and nodded.
Speirs smiled. “That’s good,” he said quietly. The smile warmed his features in a way Dick had never seen. He’d seen Speirs smile before, of course, but never like this, so softly, in a way that reached his eyes.
“What about you, Sparky?” Nix asked. “You were married with a kid, last I checked.”
“I was. I could say the same about you not too long ago,” Speirs said, without venom.
Nix shrugged and took a sip of his drink. “Fair point.”
“We parted ways in the end,” Speirs said. “The boy’s staying with her.” He pressed his lips together, and Dick immediately got the impression there was more to the story. Nix slid his glass across the table and clinked it against Speirs’.
“Well, cheers to that,” said Nix. “On to better things, eh?”
There was a minute tightening around Speirs’ eyes then. His jaw clenched. Nix was looking at the table and didn’t see, and Dick wasn’t sure he’d have noticed if he had been looking. He had a bad habit of forgetting that people around him were capable of differing opinions.
Dick was suddenly eager for a change of subject. “Have you seen any of the men?” he asked.
Speirs shook his head. “I’ve been busy,” he said. “Lieutenant Lipton and I have written some. Though I suppose he’s just Carwood now.”
Nix hefted an eyebrow. “Carwood, huh.”
“Sure,” Speirs said. “Just like you’re Lewis, and he’s Dick, and Welsh is Harry, wherever he is. I’m the only one with a rank and serial number to hang onto.”
Nix shot a look in Dick’s direction. Under the table, Dick checked Nix’s knee lightly with his own.
“What’s Lip have to say?” Dick asked, because he thought Speirs had softened slightly when he said Carwood.
It was the right choice; Speirs immediately launched into a summary of the various comings and goings of Carwood Lipton, which seemed infinitely more agreeable than talking about himself. When they’d exhausted that subject they moved onto tales of the occupation, that grim period when Nix had left Europe and Dick was still hanging around in Rube Goldberg hell with no one but Speirs and Harry for company.
“And Dick saving Welsh’s ass night after night,” Speirs said. “For Christ’s sake, I can’t square the unrepentant brawler with the fellow who never looked sideways at another girl the whole war.”
“We’ve all got our vices,” said Nix. “Even Dick here, as it turns out.”
“Is that what this is?” Speirs had turned away from them, his gaze cast out over the dance floor.
“I was talking about his sweet tooth. Dunno about you.”
Speirs smiled, not the warm smile from before but something different, sharper.
They fell silent after that, and then Speirs got up to buy another round. Dick was half-worried Nix would launch into some overloud rehash of their conversation, but he didn’t, just asked Dick something pithy about the last time Dick had talked to his sister, so when Speirs came back they were hardly talking about anything at all.
Dick yawned, their stasis in the booth and his earlier champagne rendering his brain slow and sticky.
“You ready to go?” Nix asked.
Dick nodded. “I guess,” he said. They ought to go, anyway. It was very late, not long before last call. They’d have a heck of a time getting a cab. “It was good to see you, Ron,” he said.
“Unexpected,” said Speirs, cocking his head to one side. For the first time Dick wondered if the night hadn’t gone the way Speirs had wanted it to. When I get the itch, he’d said. Dick couldn’t imagine a stilted conversation with the two of them in a nightclub booth had come remotely close to scratching it.
“Say, Nix,” Speirs said suddenly. “I don’t suppose you’d let me steal your fellow a minute.” He was looking at Dick again, eyes bright.
For his part, Nix looked shocked. But he was fast on his feet, even this late, and he parried quickly. “Depends on what you mean, exactly. And if he’s agreeable to being stolen.”
“A dance,” said Speirs, and Dick very nearly laughed out loud.
“What?” he asked. Beside him, Nix looked equally incredulous.
“Let’s dance,” Speirs said. He was drunk, Dick realized. Very much so. His cheeks were florid with it in a way that reminded Dick a little of Nix. He wouldn’t be asking if he wasn’t drunk. In the morning he’d be mortified, if he was even capable of mortification.
“Sure,” Dick said, feeling a little drunk himself.
Nix kicked him under the table. Dick dropped his hand and squeezed his thigh. Buck up, he meant to say, would say out loud if he had the guts. It’s only a dance.
“You won’t jump me on the sidewalk?” Speirs asked Nix, tripping ever-so-slightly over his consonants.
“Hell, I’m not his keeper,” Nix groused. “He said yes, didn’t he?”
Speirs was a very good dancer, which on balance made a strange kind of sense to Dick. He took the lead as the band struck up, holding Dick at a prom date’s polite remove. Dick followed, and attempted to ignore the not-insignificant portion of his brain that was screeching, You are dancing with Ron Speirs.
“Tell me the truth,” Speirs said. “Did I shock you?”
“Nix said he wasn’t surprised,” Dick said.
“That wasn’t what I asked.”
Dick considered. “I never thought about it,” he said. “One way or another. So I suppose you didn’t shock me any more or less than anyone else.”
Speirs looked pleased. “I’d call bullshit on that from anybody but you.”
“Should I be flattered?”
“Of course.”
His hand was steady on Dick’s back. As they moved he splayed his fingers wider, five points of pressure Dick could feel through his jacket. “You shocked me, you know,” Speirs said, voice low.
Dick swallowed. “Oh?”
Speirs cast an eye to the shadowy periphery of the room, from which Nix was no doubt watching. “Mmm. Maybe less so given the company. But all the same, it’s--very interesting.”
He looked back at Dick and ran his tongue over his bottom lip. Dick shivered, the gesture painfully blatant. No way to hide it, close as they were. He recovered to stare evenly at Speirs, who said nothing. He just squeezed Dick’s hand and smiled that same sharp smile.
When the song ended they stood apart. Dick felt suddenly dizzy with questions, everything he should have asked Speirs here when he had him alone, for he and Nix seemed to incite some wolfishness in one another Dick couldn’t account for. But there was nothing for it now, and already here came Nix through the crowd like a missile.
“Send a wire if you like,” Speirs said to them. “Next time you’re thinking of coming.” He shook both their hands, and just like that he melted away as through Bois Jacques fog.
***
Dick wheeled on Nix the minute they got the hotel room door shut behind them, one hand in his hair and the other inside his jacket struggling with his buttons. He held Nix’s head still to kiss and made him shudder the same way Dick had in Speirs’ arms.
“Jesus,” said Nix, sounding strangled. “Who knew Speirs would have you this lit up. I’d be offended if you weren’t so damn fetching when you get desperate.”
“Lew,” Dick said.
He didn’t know himself whether he meant to refute Nix or just to lodge a protest regarding their state of dress. So strange, how simply dancing with Speirs could make him want Nix all the more fiercely. All the way across town in the taxi he’d thought of nothing but getting Nix alone.
“All right, all right,” said Nix, trying and failing to sound put-upon as he shrugged out of his jacket and loosened his tie. “Get yourself out of those clothes, sweetheart, and we’ll get you taken care of.”
Nix was free with endearments when he drank and when he made love, and Dick’s response was always accordingly Pavlovian. He went dutifully to the bed and stripped, palming himself through his briefs before adding them to the pile of hasty discards. There was a damp patch on the y-front already, courtesy of the cab ride. He lay back against the headboard, one arm behind his head, and watched as Nix finished undressing himself. He shifted against the fine cotton sheets, like silk against his skin, and not for the first time felt his native pragmatism chafe against the pure pleasure Nix’s lifestyle indulged. They could be in a cheap boarding-house tonight, thwarted by paper thin walls. Instead they were here, and might as well be the only two people on the planet.
Nix came to sit beside him on the bed. He ran his fingers over Dick’s belly and laughed as his cock twitched in response. He leaned in and kissed Dick, one hand on his face, and when he was finished he licked his lips in a manner that took Dick straight back to Speirs on the dance floor earlier. He moaned, struck once again by the novelty of someone else mixed up in his thoughts this way. He felt instantly as though he ought to confess.
“About tonight--”
Nix laughed again, kindly, the same way he addressed everything to do with sex and its attendant indignities, everything Dick found potentially embarrassing that with Nix somehow never was.
“Did you want him?” Nix asked. “You can say. I won’t be mad.”
“I don’t know,” Dick said, thinking that Nix must know it for the almost-lie it was, that now as before his body betrayed him, too close to hide, his reaction too unmistakeable.
“Here,” said Nix, sounding sympathetic.
He gave Dick his middle- and forefingers as though offering some succor, and Dick sighed, shut his eyes and wet them in his mouth. “Good,” Nix said after a minute, and slid them free past the gentle scrape of Dick’s teeth. Dick kept his eyes closed, felt the mattress shift as Nix stretched out beside him on the bed and ran his hand along the inside of Dick’s thigh.
“He wanted you,” Nix said, more conversationally than should be possible given where his fingers were.
“He didn’t,” Dick said.
“He did,” said Nix softly, very close to Dick’s ear. “Don’t you think I know what it looks like?”
Warmth spilled along Dick’s neck and he shivered again. Nix pushed his fingers inside him and his hips came off the bed of their own volition.
“That’s ridiculous,” Dick said, gritting his teeth. If Nix could chat away as though nothing was happening, so could he.
“He asked you to dance. That’s ridiculous.” He had his free hand on Dick’s cock, movements too dry and uncoordinated to be of any real use. But Dick had been on edge too long not to crave the contact, and he watched Nix touch him with the concern of a starving man who watches a ration divided and wants to make certain he’ll get enough.
I don’t know, Dick wanted to say again. He didn’t know how any of it worked. He knew he wanted Nix, that he saw Nix sometimes and thought about this, thought about his hands or his cock, about what they might do in bed together. He told him sometimes, less often, both because it embarrassed Dick to say the words outright and because he wanted to preserve the element of surprise when he did. He might blush through the telling, but that was easy to forget when Nix shut his office door and backed Dick into a corner and kissed him with a knee-buckling thoroughness Dick could never have imagined from anyone, man or woman. He couldn’t imagine it from anyone but Nix, but Speirs had looked at him tonight with an intensity that Dick suspected might come close.
Dick shook his head. “I’ve never wanted anyone but you,” he said. He had no trouble with flattering Nix, but he meant the words at face value now. Nix seemed to understand. Another time he might have crowed about it, but now he just kissed Dick on the mouth.
“Think about it,” Nix said. “Think about him.” He twisted his wrist in a way that made Dick gasp, and thumbed the head of his cock where it had grown slick.
“Doesn’t it bother you?” Dick asked.
Nix laughed darkly. “Sure does,” he said. “But I like it.”
He withdrew, leaning across the bed to search for his shaving kit. Dick watched him, worrying his bottom lip between his teeth. Nix produced a tin of petroleum jelly and as Dick looked on he slicked himself handily, eyes falling shut, his mouth in a lax ‘o’.
Nix was pale, softer now that rationing and compulsory physical training were distant memories. In his suit tonight Speirs had seemed wiry, taut. Abruptly Dick imagined himself backed into that office corner, only now it was Speirs pressed against him, their bodies driving together, both hard, neither willing to yield.
Nix opened his eyes and crawled over to Dick, kissed him, pushed him lightly back against the pillows with a hand to his chest, gentle but firm. Nix had a commandeering streak in the bedroom Dick found captivating, though at first it had taken both of them by surprise. Nix liked to lead for a change, as it turned out, and Dick liked to be led. It wasn’t the only way they liked it, but somehow it stirred Dick more than anything else. Now Nix gripped both of Dick’s wrists in one hand and held them over his head. He kissed him again, thrusting clumsily against Dick’s body.
“What’s on your mind?” Nix asked.
“I was thinking about him,” Dick said quietly. “About how he looked tonight.”
“Mmm. Looked good, didn’t he. Ron always did clean up.”
“Did you want him?”
Nix looked tender then, a little bashful. He pressed a hand to Dick’s cheek. “Wouldn’t kick him out of bed, I guess. It’d be better if you were there, though.”
Dick smiled. “Yeah,” he said. “Better that way.” He didn’t know what he was saying. He clutched at Nix’s hips, eager now to be closer. Nix obliged him, pushed inside and slid out again. Dick hated to be teased, to feel desperate, as though he might crawl out of his own skin.
“Lew,” he complained. “C’mon.”
“Think if I had to pick, though,” Nix interrupted, grinning to let Dick know he’d planned his line and had only paused for effect. “I think I’d rather watch the two of you.”
As if for emphasis, he fit a hand to the back of Dick’s knee and drove his leg up. In the same smooth movement he thrust forward, so that Dick took the whole length of him at once. Dick cried out, kicked, balled his hands into fists. His extremities felt beyond his control. Nix shushed him and settled Dick’s legs around his hips. He ran his hands up and down Dick’s calves soothingly, but it was all a means to an end, an arc of motion that terminated in Nix thrusting home again. The weight of his body left Dick pinned beneath him feeling flattened, full and breathless. His cock pulsed against Nix’s stomach.
“Lew,” he said.
“Hi,” Nix said, and how his voice could stay so even Dick would never know. Nix put his hands on Dick’s face again, traced Dick’s mouth with his thumb. He moved in Dick without bothering to be gentle about it. Once he’d have fretted and asked if it was all right, but he knew by now it was, knew Dick liked to be taken as much as he hated to ask. They kissed until Nix’s rhythm was too much, until they could do nothing but breathe alongside one another. Nix lifted himself on his hands and hung over Dick in one long, static pushup, looking down at himself where their bodies came together as though he still couldn’t quite believe it. Dick leaned up and kissed him, nipped at his mouth, reckless with pleasure. Nix bit him back hard; it hurt, and Dick imagined he tasted the tang of blood. He shut his eyes.
He wondered in specific how Speirs scratched his itch: in the washrooms of nightclubs, maybe, or in a seedy motel that rented by the hour, or in a five-star suite just like this one. If Speirs slummed it, Dick was certain, it was by choice, because he had a taste for it. The thought made Dick harder. He decided Speirs, unfettered by love, might take him harder than Nix did, if only to see what Dick could handle. He figured Speirs for the sort of man for whom everything was a competition, and that made Dick harder too.
He slung a knee against the small of Nix’s back and draped his arms across Nix’s shoulders for leverage. He arched up and met Nix thrust for thrust and Nix made a sound in the back of his throat. He slid home again and stilled, and Dick barely managed a protest before Nix had gotten onto his knees and hauled Dick onto his lap. Dick thought deliriously that Nix was still strong when he put his mind to it, could hold Dick fast without any trouble at all.
“Don’t stop,” Dick managed through clenched teeth.
“Is this how you’d have him?” Nix asked. “Inside you like this?”
“Nix--”
“Come on, tell me.”
Dick nodded.
Nix smiled at him as though he’d just been given an especially nice present. He crooked a finger under Dick’s chin and tilted his face up and kissed him. Gently, sweetly, so that all of it--his question, the way he gripped Dick tight around the waist and filled him up, the rough way he reached between their bodies to pull at Dick’s cock--was more overwhelming for the contrast.
Dick came with his face tucked against Nix’s neck, teeth on his collarbone. Nix gave a choked-off cry and fumbled for Dick’s hand, dragged both their fingers through the mess on Dick’s stomach as if to say, wonderingly, look at what I made you do.
Later they lay together, drifting. They’d sleep the morning away now, and Dick felt faintly irresponsible already. He could feel Nix wanting to ask about Speirs again in the fraught set of his body, in the way he wouldn’t quite relax. Dick had his own questions, but eventually sleep won the tug-of-war and and washed them away to be reconsidered in daylight.
***
They didn’t talk about it again until the following night, safely re-ensconced in the bedroom of the house in Nixon. They were underneath the covers, holding hands, Dick’s index finger traversing the peaks and valleys of Nix’s knuckles. Nix was warm with alcohol, Dick with the quilt and with Nix’s hand in his. He was tired, still sore from their interlude in the hotel room, and content to drift off to sleep just like this.
“So,” Nix said, his head on Dick’s shoulder. “I guess now’s the part where I ask if you meant any of it.”
“Any of what?” Dick asked.
Nix elbowed him in the ribs. “You know.”
“Oh,” Dick said. “That.”
“Hoped I’d forgotten?”
“No,” Dick said. “That isn’t it. I just...I hadn’t thought about it.”
Nix laughed. “You’re unbelievable. You--you let me say all those things to you, you come like a firehose--”
Dick made a face. “Jesus, Lew.”
“--all over me, and then you just tidy up and carry on with business as usual.”
“What else was I supposed to do, demand we run out immediately and--and, I don’t know, seduce Ron Speirs?”
“So you do want to seduce him,” Nix said, pouncing with a glee that made Dick roll his eyes. Beneath the covers Nix rolled onto his side and draped a leg over both of Dick’s. Dick could feel Nix against his hip, not quite hard but not far from it either.
Dick stared up at the ceiling. “I don’t know the first thing about seducing anyone,” he said.
“Well, that’s bullshit,” Nix said. “You’re plenty seductive. It’s also not a no.”
Dick sighed. He let go of Nix’s hand to scrub his own over his face. “If I meant no, I guess I’d have said no, wouldn’t I.” He felt abruptly nervy, as as though he’d had a whole pot of coffee without thinking about it. He crossed his arms over his chest.
“Aw, don’t have kittens,” said Nix. “So you like the thought of it. So what?”
“That’s a stupid expression,” said Dick, because he couldn’t think of anything else to complain about. Nix was right; he did like the thought of it. Nix didn’t mind--encouraged him, even. There was no reason he should feel so out of sorts over the whole thing, especially given it was nothing but idle talk.
“I think I will wire him next time we go into the city,” Nix said. He took Dick’s hand again and pressed his lips to Dick’s palm. “Maybe I’ll invite him to dinner.”
“You go right ahead,” said Dick. “He’ll turn you down, and that’ll be that.”
“Hmm. We could bet on it. Make things interesting.”
Dick snorted. “Orchestrating a three-way isn’t interesting enough for you?”
Nix regarded him with mock horror. “A three-way? Christ, where do you pick this stuff up?”
Dick laughed, which made Nix laugh too, and when Nix climbed on top of him and kissed him soundly Dick decided sleep could wait.
In the weeks that followed, they mostly let the matter lie, though Nix took to bringing it up in bed, keeping a running list of things Dick might like Speirs to do to him that in the moment became a heated, whispered litany. Dick cornered Nix in the office after hours at a slightly higher rate than usual. On the whole, though, Dick thought it was mostly idle talk. Fun in the manner of a rollercoaster, a bicycle ride down a long steep hill.
In retrospect, he should have known better.
For all Nix claimed to dislike business, he was very good at wheeling and dealing, and even better at simply getting what he wanted. Or what someone else wanted--Nix was better still at that. He was the sort of person who filed away a glance into a shop window, a comment in passing about a set of leather-bound novels or the cut of a suit. He’d pretend he hadn’t, all the better to eat up the look on your face later when the same set of books, the same suit arrived gift-wrapped grandly as a wedding cake.
Ron Speirs, sitting in the hotel dining room in the same dark suit he’d worn at the nightclub, was another of Nix’s special deliveries. Dick wouldn’t have been surprised if Nix had somehow dictated the wardrobe.
“Hello, Dick,” Speirs said, getting up from the table in a single smooth motion. “Lewis.” He held out a hand to each of them in turn, seeming perfectly hospitable. Nix must be wrong. This was dinner, and that was all.
“Hi, Ron,” Dick replied, taking a seat to Speirs’ left.
The table was small, a three top. There was obviously no fourth party coming, and Dick wondered what they must look like from the outside. Three men on business, maybe. But it was a Saturday, and no doubt everyone here knew the sort of business one could get up to in the city on the weekend. But the staff was discreet, or at least Nix insisted they were. You get what you pay for, was what Nix always said. The waiter swanned up and took their drink orders--two neat whiskeys and a coffee, which predictably opened him up to Nix’s good-natured jeering.
Nix gulped his whiskey and clapped Speirs on the shoulder. “How’s tricks?” he asked. “The army?”
Speirs shrugged. “All right, I suppose. Far too much paperwork to be worth a damn, but that comes as no surprise. Right, Dick?”
Dick sipped his water. “Don’t remind me.”
“You don’t miss it?”
“Not for a minute. Sorry.”
“Don’t apologize,” Speirs said. “Not everyone wants to make a life of it.”
“He thought he might once, though,” said Nix. “Didn’t you.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” said Dick. “I thought a lot of things back in Austria. Should we order? Lew, don’t you like the porterhouse here?” It struck Dick impolite to talk like this about Speirs’ job, about a job he couldn’t leave even if he decided he wanted to.
“Sure,” said Nix, whose eyes were fixed on Dick. “Ron, get the steak. My treat.”
Speirs whistled. “Business booming, then?”
Nix waved a hand. “I wouldn’t know. I haven’t been chewed out by the old man in at least a couple of months, so I guess it must be. Anyway, we’ve got accountants for that. Dick looks at the books, passes along any relevant tidbits.”
“Do you like it?” Speirs asked, looking at Dick.
The question struck him. He wasn’t sure anyone had yet asked him if he liked it. Not even his mother, who’d asked him if he was settling in okay in New Jersey, not even Nix, who’d asked him more than once if he was sure he wouldn’t be too bored. Dick himself wasn’t even especially wedded to the idea of liking a job. He considered the early mornings alone at his desk with a cup of coffee, flicking through a handful of memoranda; afternoons in the canteen with men fresh in from the floor; times he came to Nix with a question about something or other and Nix paused, looked pensive and actually answered; the men he’d hired since coming on who were doing well for themselves and for the plant. All that, and Nix besides.
“Yeah,” he said. “I like it.”
He didn’t need to look at Nix to know he’d be gratified, to know Speirs had asked a question Nix had probably worried over the answer to. He reached for Nix’s hand under the table, and across it Speirs gave him the same warm look he had before, that small smile Dick hadn’t recognized. Dick remembered Speirs’ hand on his back as they danced. Leading.
They ordered Caesar salads made tableside with a flourish. Dick had his without the anchovies, “if it’s not too much trouble,” and Speirs watched him then unreadably, as though he wanted to say something. They ordered steaks, Nix just as lordly as his father had been every time Dick sat down with him, though of course Dick would never tell him. Speirs cleaned his plate with aplomb, every bite, and then he reached across the table and helped himself to half Nix’s potatoes.
“Hey,” Nix said, but Speirs just grinned and took a bite.
“Some things never change,” Nix grumbled, which led Speirs to a story of losing his identification at a border crossing and bribing a German clerk with what turned out to be the man’s own family silver.
“Did you give it back?” Dick asked, mopping up his gravy with a dinner roll.
“Some,” Speirs said.
When the waiter came to ask about dessert Dick ordered ice cream. Nix and Speirs deferred in favor of another round of drinks, and from the way they looked at him as they drew out their respective cigarette cases and lit up it was clear they knew what he was about, that he’d succeeded in forestalling the end of the meal like a child at bedtime, whether he’d done it strictly consciously or not.
Speirs leaned back in his chair. “So, what’s your pleasure, gentlemen?” he asked smoothly.
Dick had a spoonful of vanilla halfway to his lips, and he very nearly dropped the spoon.
Beside him, Nix hiccupped a laugh. “Meaning?”
Dick hazarded a look around the dining room. It was sparsely populated, but not quite empty.
“Meaning, are you planning to go out, or are we saying goodnight?” His answer was bland enough, but the look on Speirs’ face showed exactly what he was getting at.
“I was thinking of a nightcap upstairs,” Nix said. “See where that takes us. Dick, you in?”
Under the veil of the tablecloth, Nix’s hand came to rest on Dick’s knee. Just a nightcap, it seemed to say. Unless--
“Sounds fine,” Dick said. Nix’s hand moved halfway up his thigh and squeezed once before retreating.
They were quiet in the elevator. The operator seemed half asleep, though it wasn’t especially late, and Dick was glad for it. The elevator walls were mirrored, and Dick watched their reflections in the inside of the door. Nix, flushed with drink, his lips red and kissable, dark stubble evident on his cheeks already. Speirs kept his eyes downcast, as though guarding against precisely this sort of stealthy observation. Out of uniform he seemed like a stranger. Perhaps this was why the sight of Speirs in the nightclub had failed to shock him; perhaps he simply hadn’t fully registered as the man Dick knew.
In their room Nix made immediately for the bar, pouring two glasses with a haste Dick might have taken for nerves. Speirs stood at ease in the middle of the room, looking around the well-appointed suite.
“Nice place,” he said. “I usually find a cheap room somewhere.”
“Yeah, well, Red over there’s got expensive taste,” Nix said over his shoulder. “Take it up with him.”
“Oh, shut up,” Dick said.
“Red,” said Speirs quietly. His diction was tentative, as though he was tasting the word. He looked at Dick. “I wasn’t complaining.”
Before Dick could come up with a reply, Nix delivered Speirs’ drink and clapped his hands together. “How about some music?” He seemed to have found himself the maestro of the evening, for better or worse.
He put on the radio and found a station playing jazz. Speirs sat on the edge of the bed and sipped at his drink, looking thoughtful. Nix drank quickly, as was his wont, and when he was done he set his glass down on the table and stood, holding out his hand to Dick.
“Dance with me,” Nix said.
So they were to make no bones about it, then. Dick looked at Speirs, who was staring at the carpet. “All right,” Dick said, for the alternative was--what, to insist on polite conversation?
He guessed that was what dinner had been for. Nix had it all wrong; Dick really didn’t know the first thing about seduction. The dance seemed a gamble. If he was Speirs he might see them dancing and want to leave them alone, decide they wanted their privacy. Dick wasn’t sure whether that would be a relief or a letdown.
Nix took Dick in his arms and they moved around the carpet. They were dancing the way they did at home sometimes when Nix was drunk and--Dick suspected--sore he couldn’t paint the town red more easily. Dick used to say he couldn’t dance, but Nix loved it and in the right mood he wouldn’t take no for an answer. So Dick had come to like it too, mainly for the look Nix got when they did. At first they occupied the room the way the music did, loose and brassy, but as the song spun on they came closer and closer together until they were pressed cheek to cheek. Dick watched Speirs watch them over Nix’s shoulder, and as they moved around in their lazy circle and Dick was forced to drop his eyes he wondered what Nix was seeing, what he and Speirs might be saying to one another without the benefit of words.
Presently the song ended and the announcer came on, reading out an advertisement. Speirs got up from the bed and came over to them, sidling up close without pretense. He’d loosened his tie, and Dick kept his eye on the undone button at his throat, the dark shadow of stubble on his neck. He resembled Nix only broadly, but it was enough that some rudimentary part of his brain lit up just to see him.
Maybe you’ve got a type. The possibility tickled him, and he bit the inside of his cheek to keep from smiling.
Nix gave Speirs an appraising look. “Come to cut in?” he asked.
“Not really,” said Speirs.
“What, then?”
Speirs reached out and put a hand on Dick’s elbow. Dick flinched at the touch, though he’d seen it coming. Somehow the fact of Speirs’s hand on him made things real. There was no mistaking this, just like there was no mistaking the dancing.
“I’d like to kiss you,” Speirs said evenly. “Can I?”
Nix sniffed, and Speirs’ head whirled. “Don’t get coy now. This is why we’re all here, isn’t it?”
“Who’s coy?” asked Nix. “I’m not. He’s sure not. You’ll figure that out.” He jerked his head at Dick. He was a tomcat to Speirs’ baying dog, all puffed up and stalking.
“Hmm,” said Speirs. He looked at Dick again. “Have you got anything to say?”
Into the breach.
“No,” Dick said. He leaned forward, took Speirs by the lapels, and kissed him.
Speirs drew in a breath and let it out. Dick could feel the minute gust of his exhale against his upper lip. It struck him, that little breath; it occurred to him that he’d never before imagined Speirs doing something as quotidian as breathing. They kissed chastely for a moment, until Dick felt a twinge of something like pride and was moved to open his mouth against Speirs’. That was the watershed: Speirs moaned and drew Dick to him. He moved his fingers up to grip Dick’s bicep, put his other hand on the back of Dick’s neck. Dick’s own hands found the small of Speirs’ back, slipping underneath his dinner jacket. As they did he couldn’t help but run them along the lines of Speirs’ body, and his mind drifted back to his private thoughts the night he and Nix had conceived this plan. He’d imagined someone lean and hard, and he wasn’t left wanting now.
“Well, damn,” said Nix. “Doesn’t that make a picture.”
They parted at the sound of his voice. Dick didn’t quite feel guilty, but he had a sense of uneven footing, unsure how or where to tread. Speirs looked between them, his dark eyes shining. He looked as though he’d thrive on whatever their kiss shook out, antipathy or warmth or something in between.
“Nix?”
“Oh, come here,” Nix said.
His kisses were slow, deeper than usual, and Dick wondered if there was some taste Speirs had left, and if there was how long it might linger. Dick felt rather than saw Speirs come closer. The hairs on the back of his neck stood up and with some prodding he was persuaded to remove his arms from Nix’s waist long enough to be divested of his jacket.
They shed their clothes piecemeal on the way to the bed, gravitating towards it as to a base from which to launch their exploits. Dick reclined against the headboard, still wearing his briefs. He didn’t miss the way Speirs looked at them, taking in the way the fabric tented. Nix looked too, and smirked, which was typical. Speirs made no expression at all, but whether that was natural or politeness Dick didn’t know.
Speirs lolled on the bed far too casually. His body was economical, muscles ropy. Should Speirs hold him, he’d have to fight to get away. The idea set his heart thumping.
Nix sat alongside Dick, and Dick was grateful for his closeness.
“What now?” Dick asked.
“Up to you,” said Speirs, as though Dick had asked about a choice of restaurant.
Dick looked at Nix, who looked back. He raised his eyebrows, and Dick knew precisely what he was thinking, that Dick should be made to ask for what he wanted. Dick nudged him anyway, as if he needed to see Nix shake his head and be entirely unforthcoming. Dick swallowed.
“I like it both ways,” Speirs said, leering.
“Um,” said Dick.
Beside him, Nix sighed equivocally. “So do we,” he said. “But--” He put his hand on Dick’s knee.
Fine, Dick thought. “I--I want you,” he said quickly. “That’s what I want.” Speirs’ smile widened, making it clear he took Dick’s meaning. Nix got a thunderous look on his face Dick couldn’t interpret.
“Both of you,” Dick added, laying his hand over the top of Nix’s, who laughed uneasily.
“What, together?”
Dick wasn’t sure that was strictly possible, but it sounded good. He kissed Nix by way of reply, pulling him down onto the bed, running his hands down his back and pulling at the waistband of his underwear. He felt the mattress dip behind him as Speirs came alongside, and then there were hands on him as well, pulling his own briefs down his legs. Dick could feel Speirs’ cock against his back, and when Speirs reached out gently and touched Dick’s cheek he felt aflame from the two points of contact, from Nix’s body all along his, from what he knew so well by now and what was entirely new.
Speirs turned Dick’s face from Nix’s and kissed him again, openmouthed and wet. Nix hummed appreciatively, and Dick remembered what he’d said before, that the notion of Dick and Speirs together bothered him but that he liked it. A satisfying sort of pain, maybe, one you could prod at until it throbbed, until it was wholly indistinguishable from pleasure.
“Lie down,” Speirs said, shoving lightly at Dick’s shoulder. Dick lay back against the pillows, and above him he saw Speirs reach out and touch Nix on the arm as though to get his attention. No words passed between them, only a look, but Dick guessed this must be some sort of compact. Nix nodded, and got up from the bed.
Speirs brushed Dick’s hair back from his forehead with a tenderness Dick found surprising. He leaned in and kissed Dick’s neck, his chest, all the way down his stomach until Dick gasped and shifted under the weight of Speirs’ hot breath between his legs. He kissed Dick’s thighs, nipped at his skin, and at last he took him into his mouth. Dick propped himself up on an elbow to watch as though he needed the sight of Speirs’ dark head to assure himself this was really happening. This was dangerous. If he looked too long he wouldn’t last.
Nix padded back over. Dick reached for him and Nix brushed their hands together before taking up a position beside Speirs at the foot of the bed. He laid his cheek against Dick’s bent knee, looked him in the eyes. His hand was out of view, but soon enough Dick felt slick fingers pressing into him. The combination was nearly too much, sensation and thought both, the idea of both of them touching him like this. Speirs’ mouth was impossibly hot, and though Dick had little grounds for comparison he seemed practiced, the way he hollowed his cheeks and took Dick down far enough into his throat that his nose brushed Dick’s belly. Dick slid his fingers into Speirs’ hair unthinking, pulled a little the way he liked to do with Nix sometimes. Nix liked it, and Speirs did too by the way he moaned.
“Careful,” Nix said, nudging Speirs. “He’ll go off.”
Speirs sat up and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “He can if he likes,” he said.
Nix shook his head. “He doesn’t want it that way,” he said. He kissed Dick on the knee.
Speirs was looking down, ostensibly at Nix’s fingers. As Dick watched he put his own hand between Dick’s legs to join Nix there, where Dick’s skin was wet with spit and slick with Vaseline.
“Ron--” Nix started, but Speirs didn’t let him finish.
“Did you mean what you said about the two of us together?” Speirs asked.
He bit his lip and pressed forward as if Dick’s wherewithal could be assessed this way, by the sheer forgiveness of his body. Tightness, and a little pain. Dick moaned and spread his legs wider, and wrapped his hand around his own cock by way of a distraction.
“Jesus,” said Nix. “That’s something.”
“I--I don’t know,” Dick bit out. “Will it work?”
Speirs laughed. “One way to find out,” he said. Carefully, he withdrew his fingers. “Lew?”
“Fuck,” said Nix. He ran his free hand up Dick’s flank. “You sure about this?”
Dick nodded. “Heck, we--we can give it a go,” he said, and Nix shook his head.
“‘Heck,’ he says. Butter wouldn’t fucking melt, huh, Ron? And to think, all the goddamn time I wasted sure I was nuts to even think of him--” He looked away. Speirs laid a hand on his shoulder.
“Come on,” Speirs said. “You’re here now, aren’t you? You’ve been here.”
He ducked his head and looked for Nix’s eyes, kept at it until he found them. In a temper, Nix tended to retreat into himself, and Speirs evidently knew it, knew enough to try and call him back. Speirs knew them, Dick realized, knew how to talk to them, how to draw Dick out and how to cajole Nix. Already Nix was smiling again, and as Dick watched Speirs leaned up and kissed Nix on the mouth.
They lay Dick back down, the two of them working in tandem. They made a tableau for Dick to watch from between the V of his legs, kissing as they slicked each other up. Now that they’d started touching one another they seemed unable to stop, and they fit themselves between Dick’s thighs in a tangle of flesh. They meant to take him together, to get themselves both inside at once, but it didn’t work; one or the other of them kept slipping free, and when they did manage it for a moment it hurt and made Dick curse, which in turn nearly made Nix shut the whole operation down.
“I’m all right,” Dick gasped. “Lew, really.”
They resorted instead to playing with him, teasing in the way that drove him crazy, one of them and then the other but never enough, never as deep or as hard as he wanted it. And he did want it; now as ever he shocked himself with just how much. He seemed to shock Speirs too, and Dick recalled what he’d said dancing that first night. He’d called Dick interesting then, and Dick wondered now if this was what he’d meant.
“Please,” Dick said, and just like that Speirs was on him. He might have looked to Nix for some tacit permission to end their game, but if he did Dick didn’t notice, for Speirs fell forward with a groan, grabbing at Dick’s hips and driving into him as if he’d been just as undone by waiting.
“Please,” Dick said again, and Speirs shook his head as if in disbelief. Nix lay on his side next to Dick, their faces close, the better for Nix to kiss him at intervals, to touch himself and to watch Speirs at work.
“He’s wild for it,” Nix said. “See? Look at his face.”
Speirs laughed. He held Dick’s hand to his mouth and kissed his palm messily. “I see.”
That laugh might have made Dick squirm if Speirs hadn’t sounded so frankly pleased, as though being here with them and seeing the way Dick wanted brought him an understated sort of delight. He had the same expression now he had all along when he looked at Dick. That warm look, only now Speirs seemed hectic on top of it, sweaty, and when Dick cried out and arched against him he made a frantic noise and set his hand against Dick’s shoulder, held him down and kept him there.
Nix muttered to Dick, lips against his ear, telling him all sorts of things: how he looked, how Speirs looked. Speirs finished with the sort of brutality Dick expected, teeth bared. Nix put his hand on Dick so it was all three of them together, and when Dick came at last he had Speirs’ tongue in his mouth.
Speirs slumped sideways, and through a stupor Dick heard Nix talking.
“Mmm,” said Dick.
“Let me,” Nix muttered, and Dick thought, anything.
Nix rolled on top of him and set a palm to his cheek. Dick smiled to have him so close, and kissed him. Nix was still hard, and when he slid inside of Dick he sighed with what sounded like relief. Speirs had his head on Dick’s pillow, looking somnolent, but when Nix moved he watched with interest and laid a heavy hand on Nix’s head.
***
Dick woke towards morning from a blessedly dreamless sleep. Nix was beside him, belly-down, face plastered to his pillow. Speirs sat at the open window. He was dressed and smoking a cigarette. He smiled when he saw Dick looking and Dick went to sit beside him, dragging a spare blanket with him against the chill.
“You’re going?” Dick asked.
Speirs nodded.
“Stay,” Dick said. “Have breakfast with us.”
“I’m due back,” Speirs said. “And it may be easier just the two of you.” He looked rueful.
Dick didn’t like to think it would be. “Have you done this before?” he asked.
“Once. With a man and a woman. None of us were anything to each other. It was just fun. We were very drunk.”
“Ron--”
Speirs gave him a long look. He ran the back of his hand along the line of Dick’s jaw, and then he leaned in and kissed him. He tasted of tobacco and mint; Dick was struck at once by the image of Speirs borrowing his toothbrush.
They parted and Dick felt belatedly bashful, as though he’d just been seen home on a date. Speirs ran a hand back through his hair, looking as close as Dick had ever seen him to ill at ease.
“I wish I’d known about you,” Dick said. “Before.”
Speirs shrugged. “You know now.” He sucked on his cigarette, mouth a bloom of orange in the low light. Then he tossed the butt out the window and looked at his watch. “There’s a train at seven,” he said.
Dick nodded, feeling lower than he had a right to.
Speirs looked over at the long lump of Nix in the bed. “Tell him goodbye, will you?”
“He’ll be sore,” Dick said.
“He’ll get over it. Tell him I’ll buy him a drink next time.”
“Next time, huh,” Dick said.
Speirs grinned. “Send a wire,” he said.