Page 18 of As Many Stars
“About—”
“About a lot.” Ash leaned in, shyly; Blake knew what he was about to do, understood it, and yet felt the touch of Ash’s lips at the corner of his mouth with pure surprise, as if he’d been kissed by a butterfly, a star, an angel. So right, so natural—part of the world—and yet magic.
“We talked,” Ash said, “and—and the thing is…” He coughed, briefly; waved away concern. “Much better. The thing is…I want you, I love you, I always have, you know that, I told you. And I think…you want me too? I heard you, just now. You love us both. We know you do. And, well…” He even blushed. “Cam’s so…er, that is, I see what you see, why you would…I don’t know him as well but I saw him trying so hard to save you—and me—and he’s the sort of person who tries to rescue people,and he sees people—he saw you, maybe even better than I did, and I think—I think I could love someone like that. That sort of person.”
“And,” Cam rumbled quietly, “I like you, too, lad—Ash. Liked you from the start, when you wouldn’t give up, being so sick and fighting…and when you looked at our Blake and you saw how much he was worth, and I saw that too, you fighting for him…ah, well, kinda ended up in love with you myself, if you want to call it that, this soon. Thinking it might be, though. You and that hair and that stubborn heart.”
“Starlight hair,” Blake said weakly. “I’ve always thought so.”
Ash’s smile was magnificent. “God—I love you so much.”
“And I love you.” Cam bent to kiss Blake as well, a quick but dominant claiming, easy and unhurried. “So we’ll figure this out, the three of us. All together.”
Around them the sun came out more, sidling up onto the bed; it draped light across all three of them, present and recovering and alive.
Chapter 11
Of course the story was not so easy. Blake, a writer—even one of sensationalist memoirs—knew that stories weren’t. And he knew himself, and how little he had to offer a pair of geniuses.
He loved them with everything he was, and he lay in bed being weak and depleted, and he watched Ashley and Cam grow closer. Touching. Smiling. Ash’s bashful pleasure when Cam pulled him close and petted him. Cam’s grin while hearing Ash ramble about the metrical devices in classical poetry.
Blake knew that expression. He’d worn it himself.
The first days were a fantasy. A daydream. Ashley recovered rapidly—the fever’d been bad, but singular, not recurring—and, though his lungs might be weakened, he had Cam for care and attendance. He was up and around faster than Blake, who evidently had been hit harder, and who did not like it.
Cam said it’d been something picked up during travel, most likely; exacerbated by strain and stress and not resting when he’d first felt ill. Some sort of fever, tropical. One of the drugs had worked; Cam admitted that he wasn’t sure which, that the field of medicine still did not know enough about rare diseases, that he’d been desperate, near the end.
Blake took his hand. Kissed it. Told him that it had worked, that Cam had saved him. He hadn’t forgotten the darker edges of Cam’s words, during the hazy dangerous hours. A loss, he thought. The bad day, when they’d met. Someone Cam hadn’t been able to save.
He wasn’t sure Cam wanted him to ask, so he didn’t. But he told Cam that he was here and alive; he said it with a smile, with innuendo, flirting. Being bright and weightless as he could, a reminder of light, if Cam needed that.
Ash read to him sometimes, both of them convalescing,in sunshine. Cam took ready charge of them both, with a dominance that felt natural, an easy assertion. Ash answered orders with a laugh and teasing; Blake ended up surprised, because that tended not to occur to him; he generally found himself responding naturally to command, because that meant someone wanted him to do something—whether that was getting up for a short walk across the room or eating a few bites of soup—and he did not want to let anyone down.
But perhaps he wasn’t surprised. Ashley was a stronger person than he was. More fearless. More clever. More Cam’s equal. Blake understood.
Some of those moments were perfect. Diamond-etched, clear as a breath of clean air atop a Swiss peak. The first night they went to bed together was one of those perfect moments: cautious, not for sex, not yet, but finding ways to fit and tumble and tuck their bodies into Ash’s large bed.
That first night, they’d moved Blake into Ash’s bed, in part so that the housemaids could clean the spare room. Blake, not above clinging to company—he did not want to vanish into the heavy oceans again—reached out, when Ashley hesitated, plainly thinking of giving him space. Cam said, “Would you like us to stay, lad?” and Blake nodded.
Ashley’s eyes lit up. He’d been wrapped up in his cozy robe, only a shirt and trousers under; he said, “Cam?”
“Hmm?” Cam had pulled off his own shirt, and both Blake and Ash ended up equally speechless, for a moment. Solid muscle. Red hair, tempting. Glorious. “Question? Both of you.”
“I have a question,” Blake said. “You wouldn’t happen to sleep naked, would you?”
Ashley blushed. But added, “Same question?”
Cam laughed. “You two. Such flattery.”
“If all doctors looked like you, I’d pretend to be ill more often,” Blake said. His body was in an odd confused halfwaystate: hungry, wanting, but still very wrung out. His cock stirred, but he suspected he’d not be very impressive at the moment.
It felt strangely…nice, in an inexplicable way. Wanting, not able to have; aroused, but denied release. He tucked that thought away for later.
Cam’s mouth did something between a laugh and a shadow of old pain. “Weren’t pretending, were you? But yes, I sleep bare. Unless you’d rather I not.”
“Oh no!” Ash blurted out, and then blushed even more but kept talking. “I mean yes, please! I mean—you know what I mean.”
“I would feel much better,” Blake suggested, “with you naked. Touching me. You know. In case you need to feel…anything.”
