Charles by Con Riley

9

Once inside, Charles gave himself a silent talking-to as he knelt to unlace his shoes.

They’d shared a kiss—that was all. Nothing to get het up over. But he had to admit, he’d felt less connection with people he’d had full sex with.

Connection?

It was a reaction, that was all, he told himself shrilly. Like dropping Mentos into a coke bottle. Yes, something had fizzed over, but now the bubbles would pop, like always.

At the approaching click of Hugo’s cane, Charles looked up. From his kneeling position by the front door, he saw legs that went on forever. And thick quads, he noticed, with an internal whimper. Quads that were impossible not to stare at now they were at his eye-level, only partially camouflaged by Hugo’s mud-spattered trousers.

That fizz bubbled back to life inside him.

“Is something the matter?” Hugo asked. “Oh, I see.” He brushed at mud left over from their adventure. “Actually, these are beyond brushing off, or a quick sponge-down.” He opened a door and headed through it. “Why don’t you bring your case through to your bedroom while I—” His voice faded as the door closed behind him.

Charles gave up on his laces and wrenched his shoes off. He followed, finding himself in a hallway where one doorway stood half open. He opened it farther to find the thighs he’d just ogled on show, muddy trousers puddled around Hugo’s ankles.

“Oh, sorry,” Charles said. “Didn’t mean to barge into your—” He didn’t finish his sentence, gaze snagged by what else Hugo’s trousers had hidden.

“It’s okay,” Hugo said, stepping out of his discarded trousers, and almost losing his balance. He sat on his bed before he could fall. “Let me just find some clean—” He broke off, noticing that Charles was silent. “It’s not as bad as it looks.”

The scars by his knee were much more noticeable than the one on his face, an angry red that somehow seemed both stretched and swollen.

“It’s fine, really.”

For the second time that day, Charles thought about kneeling in bedrooms, but this time, he knelt with no other thought than offering comfort. “That looks so sore.” He almost touched before yanking his hand back. “Can I help? Get you something?” He looked around, nothing but books piled on Hugo’s bedside table. “Like some painkillers?”

“I don’t need them.” Hugo moved his hand. “It’s fine.”

Charles was almost certain it wasn’t.

He studied Hugo’s knee before he raised his gaze and met eyes that had turned guarded, bruised again somehow, like they’d been earlier in the chapel. He’d listened to Charles confess pain there. Why wasn’t his worth hearing about or taking care of?

Surprised by the ferocity of that question, Charles heard himself sound exasperated. “Why act as if it doesn’t hurt you?” He laid a hand over scars that he guessed would be much smaller when not swollen. “Wow. You’re so hot.”

“Er. Thank you?”

Charles ignored an attempt at humour that felt like deflection. He moved his hand to Hugo’s other knee instead, comparing. Yes, there was a marked difference between them. “Should it feel this warm?”

“No,” Hugo admitted.

“I’m guessing it shouldn’t be all big and swollen like this either.” He peered closer. “Has it been like this for long?”

“No. I think I might have wrenched it while climbing out of that hollow earlier.” Hugo sounded sheepish. “It often aches, so I ignored it. A bit of pain is part of healing—how I know I’m making progress. But this ache…?” He shook his head.

Ache was such a small word. If his knee had been even halfway as swollen Charles would have cried like a baby. Perhaps demanded to be carried rather than walk any farther. That reminded him of carrying Tor with Hugo right beside him, and he flooded with heat of his own. “You mean you walked all the way back from the woods with it swollen like this? With it hurting?”

He thought back. Had Hugo leaned hard on his stick, or lagged behind on the way back from the chapel to the school?

No.

Charles recalled him matching him step for step, with no sign he needed Charles to slow down. “Then you walked me from Tor’s classroom to here, all the way around the school. And you showed me where the other paths led.” At least there, he’d rested, but not for long enough if the size of his knee was any measure. “It was hurting you the whole time.” He didn’t phrase it as a question, or wait for an answer. “Right.” He stood. “Wiggle yourself backwards.”

“Why?” Hugo seemed about to stand up.

Charles braced both hands on the thighs he’d admired minutes earlier, but he didn’t pay attention to how good they felt under his palms, just as firm as they’d appeared, and coarsely hairy in a way he’d have appreciated if his attention wasn’t elsewhere. He pushed instead, encouraging Hugo to shift backwards. “Because this knee needs elevating. Sit yourself back against the headboard.”

“I… No. There’s no need. Really.” Hugo’s face shifted in a way Charles recognised, his jaw clenching, but he guessed that was against pain rather than Hugo’s version of Heppel obstinacy.

“There’s every need. That really looks nasty.”

“I didn’t mean to make you look at it.” Hugo tried to stand again, not meeting his eye. “I only meant to grab some clean trousers.”

He’s embarrassed.

“Wait.” Charles rephrased his statement, trying to lighten the moment. “All I meant was that it might not be the prettiest thing I’ve been faced with in a good-looking guy’s bedroom, but it’s definitely the biggest. Well done. You win this month’s size prize.”

Hugo let out a small laugh. But a quiet demurral followed. “Good-looking? Hardly.” His next attempt to stand had more power behind it.

“Hey, there’s no rule that says I have to look at the mantelpiece while poking the fire, is there?”

That stopped Hugo, who choked on the same laugh Charles remembered from when a curtain had hung between them, but at least he sank back to the mattress. “I wasn’t actually fishing for a compliment. I do know what I look like these days.”

Right now, with his defences dropped, all Hugo looked was dog tired.

That almost-smile was back though, which Charles did find attractive.

“Trust me.” He patted Hugo’s good knee, which was so much smaller and cooler than the other. “You look plenty good to me. Not sure why you need convincing, not after….” That goodbye kiss flashed back, and Charles swallowed. “Sit, will you?”

He stood before Hugo could answer, not making eye-contact in case that led to more of him insisting he was okay when his knee screamed the opposite. “Now stay there and don’t move. I’ll be right back.”

Charles found the kitchen, which was compact, but had what he needed. He grabbed his suitcase too on the way back to Hugo’s room. “Here.” He handed over a bag of peas he’d found in the freezer. He left the room again, searching, coming back with cushions from the sofa.

“Lift up.” He wedged them with care under Hugo’s knee. “Peas were the best I could find. I have no idea why you don’t have any ice. How do you make a decent gin and tonic?” Charles gently placed them on his knee. “Now, does it feel better with them or without them?”

Hugo acted as if Charles had clocked him on the side of the head with the peas rather than offered to cover his knee with them. “With them,” he said faintly. “Thank you,” he added, his voice strengthening. “You didn’t need to go to the trouble… but thank you,” he repeated. Then he let go of whatever strings had held him together this long, sinking back onto his pillows.

His face relaxed as well as his body. Like Charles had noticed with Luke earlier, he now saw that Hugo had to be a bit younger than he’d assumed—closer to his early thirties rather than late, maybe. Up until this moment, pain had aged him. Now that Charles thought about it, it must have been present from when they first met.

He watched a few years drop away, Hugo closing his eyes and finally letting the pillows take the weight of his head and shoulders. He let out a sigh that sounded long-held.

Relief, Charles imagined, lost for a few seconds in watching Hugo surrender. And that was what Charles saw—Hugo setting down armour he’d shouldered for too long. He jolted back to the moment when Hugo murmured, “I’m glad you came back.”

Pleasure bloomed inside Charles then, petals that had been closed tight choosing that moment, those words, this man’s praise, to unfurl.

How long had it been since someone acted as if he was useful?

Him.

And not simply as a willing body, although he liked that plenty. Or as a dogsbody, only useful to fetch and carry?

“I was sad to see you go,” Hugo said just as quietly, his eyes still closed, and Charles felt more of that strange unfurling. Pink, he imagined, like one of the roses that bloomed in Casterley’s gardens. His cheeks turned warm out of nowhere, maybe the same rose shade. He felt it deepen when Hugo added, “I’m happier now.”

“You are?” More than his cheeks heated. It spread through his chest too.

“Yes,” Hugo said. “I am, because I need to apologise.”

“For what?”

“For what happened outside. I know you said you were okay with it, but I shouldn’t have done it.”

That was a slap of cold water.

A needed one, Charles decided, as he got off the bed to dig in his suitcase. Reality, not a reason to feel hollow.

He turned back from his suitcase to find Hugo watching, his eyes clear, not clouded by anything like pain or tiredness.

They snagged with his, and held fast.

“I shouldn’t have,” Hugo insisted. “Not without asking,” he said in that same low but sure tone. “I should have checked in with you first. Will you accept my apology for that?”

“There’s no need.”

“There is to me.”

“Why?”

Hugo let out a long sigh. “Because I didn’t think. I just reacted,” he said as if someone had dropped Mentos into his coke bottle too. “I don’t know what came over me. I just knew that I wouldn’t see you again, so I….” He scrubbed a hand over his face. “Now here you are, and I don’t want you to feel awkward around me.”

“I don’t.” Had anyone checked on Charles like this before? He couldn’t remember. “I kissed you back. It wasn’t a hardship.”

“And now you’re here,” Hugo said, a touch pensive.

“You must have done something terrible in a past life,” Charles said, aiming for breezy, which was tough when he didn’t know what that pensive look meant. “Yes. Something so bad in a past life that I’m your penance. You might as well lie back and take it.” He got back onto the bed and sat beside him, careful not to jostle his knee. “We can forget it,” he offered, then changed the subject. He offered the tablet he’d retrieved from his case. “Why don’t you choose something for us to watch?”

“Watch?”

“Yes, on Netflix?” He put the tablet in Hugo’s hands. “Lying around on a Friday night watching something mindless isn’t a sin, you know? Pretty sure if Moses was around now, he’d make it a commandment.” Charles rummaged in the wash bag he’d grabbed too. “I promise you, at least half the population does it. Besides, if it is a sin, hell surely can’t be big enough to fit us all in, can it? It’s probably safe for us to chill out together.”

Charles dug through his bag, and in a replay of first thing that morning, lube fell out along with condoms. “Here we go,” he said, triumphant, brandishing a pill packet. “Ibuprofen. Can you take it? It might help with the swelling?”

Hugo watched him again.

Charles couldn’t translate what flickered across his face next.

“What?” he asked, more than a little concerned that the same pink warmth as a few minutes before had returned, climbing his throat like a ladder. He hunched his shoulders as if that might hide his flush, and scanned the pill packet rather than meet a gaze that seemed to see through his evasion. “It’s definitely ibuprofen, not Viagra. No fear of rogue erections.”

Hugo let out a laugh that made up for the awkwardness of the last few minutes—for the flush Charles couldn’t control, and for the pang of hollowness that had followed. He couldn’t do anything but join in, the sound filling Hugo’s bedroom.

Their laughter must have masked Luke knocking at the front door. Charles only heard him after he knocked on the bedroom door frame.

Luke stood in the open doorway. “I was going to ask if you wanted to come to the pub for supper later, Hugo, so I could tell you something, but it looks like that cat is already out of the bag.”

“Come on in,” Hugo said, attempting to sit up straighter, coming to an abrupt stop, pain perhaps making his voice gruffer. “And yes, Charles beat you to it.”

“So I see. And heard.” Luke’s gaze landed on what had spilled across the bedcovers, turning surprised, and somehow wary. “What exactly are you two doing?”

“What it looks like,” Hugo offered. He turned the tablet to face Luke. “Netflix.”

“And chill,” Charles added, reaching for the bag of frozen peas that had slipped from Hugo’s knee. He replaced it carefully, then sat back beside Hugo to see that Luke’s expression had shifted.

That wariness was gone.

Now he just looked hopeful.