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Hunger at Sea

Erotic short. A sailor turns out to have met one of the ship’s passengers before.

This piece is part of this issue of the Shousetsu Bang Bang, Issue 109, The Devil and the Deep Blue Sea! Make sure to go and check out the entries by the other many talented authors and creators contributing! You can read this piece in SBB 109 here.

Rated E, 7.3k, cis M/M. Age of sail, a Jewish sailor and a vampire. Featuring some biting, some D/s and age dynamics, power dynamics, dirty talk, and anal!

Crossposted to my Medium / / Patreon / / SubscribeStar / / Ao3.

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Every part of his body aches as Goode makes his way up the stairs and up onto the deck. Every time he climbs them, these days, they seem steeper than he remembers, his thighs burning with the effort of ascending them, his shit hip all the shittier for it, but as soon as he shoves open the door and meets the brisk sea air, it’s a balm for all fucking wounds. Goode inhales deeply, tastes salt on the back of his tongue, and nudges the door closed behind him.

“Mr Goode, sir,” says Gillett, who’s on watch, and he stands to attention as Goode comes past him, giving him a nod.

They all know him by reputation if not by sight, all the young officers on this fucking ship, but it still makes the skin on the back of his neck prickle as he limps past the other man, leaning on his cane without the banister that had aided him up the stairs.

Even injured as he is, it feels good beyond measure to be at sea again. He’d scarcely believed the sense of relief that had cut through him, that had sizzled like so much hot oil in his veins, when the Mary Beth had cast off from port and he’d felt her move beneath them. Doctor Barnet had made some comment as to how he was unlikely to have his sea legs back, but he hadn’t had any difficulty whatsoever.

It’s funny, but with how he’s missed the rhythm of the sea beneath him, her swell one way and the other, it almost feels easier to limp along aboard the vessel than it had on land – how long has he been away from sea, a year? Fourteen months? Something like that, he thinks, when he adds it all up, puts it together.

He climbs the steps up onto the forecastle, and he stuns at the sight of another man up here despite the fact it’s the middle of the fucking night – he thinks at first it’s another man on watch, Gillett’s partner, but this cunt isn’t in uniform – he’s not even in a fucking jacket. He’s stripped down to his shirt sleeves and vest, which is made of some shiny gold brocade that catches the light, is worn open, his cravat untied so that Goode can see not just his Adam’s apple, the line of his pale throat, but the base of it, the hollow between his collarbones.

“What the fuck are you doing up here?” Goode demands, and the gentleman looks at him owlishly, his pupils seeming unnaturally wide in the darkness. He has black hair combed back from his head, thick and wavy, and he either lines his eyes or has some of the thickest eyelashes known to man or God, wears a pearl earring dangling from one earlobe. “The fo’c’sle is for officers only, lad – no passengers, not up here, not without personal invitation from the captain.”

“Oh, bless your heart for your concern, darling – I’ve that very invitation right here,” he says with a florid movement of one of his hands, and Goode snatches the piece of paper out of his hand and holds it toward one of the deck lamps to read the looping writing on it. He recognises Captain Esposito’s florid hand even without scanning the page further, taking in the writ of permission, that this man is permitted free reign of the vessel throughout the night: Christian Remigius Audubon Lampert.

Goode looks up from the page to Lampert’s face, to his dark eyes, wavy hair, high cheekbones. He’s handsome – he has a cleft in his chin, and cupid’s bow lips, which are darkly pink in contrast with his white skin. His name is more French than not, but his accent isn’t.

“Where are you from?” Goode demands. “Oxford?”

The man’s eyes light up, and he smiles. “Banbury,” he says, as though Goode’s paid him some manner of fucking compliment, guessing near to where he’s from. “You can do that just from what, ten words?”

“The fuck are you doing up here?”

“Same as you, Officer,” says Lampert, gesturing floridly to the black horizon behind them – it’s a cloudy night, fog on the water, and the thin crescent of moon does little to penetrate the thick mist. “Taking in the night air.” Lampert glances down at Goode’s middle, apparently noticing for the first moment that he walks with the aid of a cane. “Oh, forgive me – do you want for a chair?”

Goode curses under his breath as he turns on his heel and strides away, descending the painfully steep stairs and walking to the prow of the ship instead, far enough to be out of Lampert’s eyeshot – and out of his earshot, too. He leans back on a barrel for an hour or so, watches the movement of the water, the swirl of the mist, listens to the wash of each swell against the vessel’s side.

“Are you alright, Mr Goode?” asks Gillett when he feels soothed enough to go down to his bunk and finally fucking sleep. “Captain says we’re likely to see you at night. Miss being on watch, sir?”

“Shut the fuck up, Gillett,” Goode says exhaustedly, and goes downstairs to find his fucking bunk.

* * *

Seventeen years before the mast before some Spanish cunt saw fit to set off a cannon shot beneath him and send him sprawling to the floor a few decks below – seventeen years of loyal service, naught more than a few cuts and bruises here and there before he gets all his injuries at sea all at once, dislocates his hip, tears the flesh about his thigh.

What sort of man survives cannon fire with not so much as a burn or a splinter, gets torn about on the inside instead?

It feels like shit, to go from real fucking sailor’s work, from hauling rope all day and barking orders, to being a fucking ship’s accountant, sitting in a fucking office all day and keeping track of the money being spent by the posh cunts they’re ferrying across the Atlantic. It’s somehow exhausting, doing nothing all day, sitting at a desk and keeping track of numbers, counting coin.

The fuck did he ever leave his father for, if this is how his life ends up all the same?

“Goode,” says Esposito in the doorway, and Goode looks up from his desk, pushing down his eyeglasses so that he can meet Esposito’s gaze instead, and he rubs exhaustedly at one of his temples. “Gillett’s watch report said you were up on deck last night.”

“Aye, sir.”

“You said you might be.”

“I said I fucking would be, sir.”

Esposito’s lips twitch. “Did it help?”

The question is asked not without a certain extension of sympathy, Esposito’s eyebrows raising, his head tilting to one side. They’ve known each other the best part of a decade, and Goode knows he’s not faking it, that genuine interest in how he’s feeling, the hope that he would be feeling better.

Esposito always was a soft touch. Goode’s known him for years – he’s a decade younger than Goode, but he’s always conducted himself in the way of an old man, has always seemed older and wiser than he ought be.

“Yes,” Goode answers. “As much as anything helps.”

“Barnet says you have a hard time sleeping – used to sleep on your side.”

“Used to be a fucking sailor and all, sir.”

“All things must change, Mr Goode,” Esposito tells him gently, and Goode sits back in his seat and crosses his arms over his chest, leaning the flat of his boot – his good leg, obviously – against the desk to hold himself steady as the ship sways.

“I met your special boy last night,” says Goode. “One of the toffs’ catamites, is he?”

“Remy? He’s no one’s catamite.”

It’s Goode’s turn to raise his eyebrows, and Esposito falters, huffing out a breath as he tugs at the back of his tied back hair and curls it anxiously about his fingers.

“Alright, well, he’s obviously some manner of… But he’s not aboard at any noble’s particular behest. He pays his own way – he’s an artist. Likes to paint at night, up on deck. Nocturnal, you know. A man after your own heart.”

“What, and painting pictures by moonlight earns him the right to go anywhere he chooses?”

“The investors like that sort of thing,” Esposito says. “You know how it is, Goode, I’m sure – or you’ve heard of it, at least. This is no navy vessel – it’s not the king’s money that makes us go, it’s investors, shareholders, after passengers, of course. Making a man like Remy happy, and by extension, his kindly patrons, makes our coffers happy.”

“You fuck him?” Goode asks.

Esposito huffs out a quiet laugh. “You navy men are always so preoccupied with buggery.”

“Not answering the question, sir?”

“Have a good day, Mr Goode,” Esposito tells him cheerfully, and disappears down the hall.

Sighing and pushing his spectacles back up his nose, Goode goes reluctantly back to work. The things he must bear to play at being a fucking accountant – wearing these eyeglasses so that he can make sense of the letters and numbers, exhaustedly forcing himself through the day when he’s always been a night owl by nature. Esposito had told him he could sleep in the days, if it suited him, and do his work at night, but it made trading off with the purser and the rest of the money-men aboard too awkward, would force them to wait until he was out of bed to address one dispute or other, and there was no sense in that.

Come the early afternoon he’s flagging considerably, had only managed a few hours’ worth of sleep last night – it’s bad enough being in this strange little room as he is, the only man in it with his desk beneath it and the cabinets and safes for keeping cash and valuables locked up.

He had calmed himself with the night air up on deck, had soothed himself enough to disappear below decks and into the dark, but it’s unnaturally quiet aboard in day time, and all those little noises had kept him awake, kept startling him into shifting in his singular bed. There were no breathing men or swimming hammocks in rows around him, no sounds of snores or grunts or any of the other noises a hall of men sleeping made. At least when he was occasionally on a day shift there’d still be men asleep around him.

Here he is alone like a man condemned to a cell alone – this is no fucking way for a man at sea to sleep.

He’ll talk to someone about changing his shift over – he’ll offer to start his work at four or five bells and finish at three, and failing that, try to sleep until noon before going about his work, because this exhaustion, it just isn’t tenable. He’s making too many mistakes.

Late at night, he’s above decks again, and once more on the forecastle he sees the painter at work, sees he’s got a lamp hanging with him – pinned with the bolts on the deck they occasionally use to mount a scope, his easel is firmly anchored, and while he’s on his feet to work, he’s got a chair beside him.

Goode hadn’t paid much heed to what the man was actually painting the night previous, but he’s surprised to note now that he’s not painting the sea or the sky or the moon, nor any still life of the quiet ship around them, but working from sketches and notes. He’s painting a portrait of a woman poised with her shoulders back, one hand on her hip, the other wielding a parasol over her middle with a grip on it like it’s a sword.

“Good evening, Mr Goode, isn’t it?” asks Lampert. “The captain said you’re not much one for chat last night – if you’d like to take a seat, I won’t bother you any.”

Goode doesn’t trust this at all, but as he stands there, saying nothing, leaning on his cane, Lampert turns back to his easel and continues to work. The night air is cool on his cheeks, the breeze not as brisk here as it is at the prow, and very slowly, cautiously, Goode takes the seat as offered.

It’s a damn sight more a relief, sitting back in the armed dining chair Lampert’s evidently stolen from the first class dining hall, than it had been hoisting himself up on a barrel the night previous, and Goode lets himself relax marginally in the seat, closing his eyes.

It’s not right, isn’t the same, sitting like this rather than being able to stand on his own two feet and feel the sea through his heels and his toes, coming up through the sole of his boot from the ship as she cuts through the water, but the relaxation of his muscles does allow him to better appreciate her sway, even if it is through his arse cheeks on the chair.

He’s too awake to properly doze, but he does let himself relax, sets one of his elbows on the chair’s arm and watches the painter at work as he layers colours onto the canvas, adding dimension and movement to the subject of his portrait’s dress, her hair, the hat she wears.

“You’re good,” he says after perhaps an hour or so of settling in the comfortable silence, the seas shifting beneath them, the ship rocking comfortingly. It doesn’t feel quite right, to be up on deck like this and not be working, to be sitting at ease instead of standing on watch, to not have real work any longer.

All he has now is numbers on paper, columns of the fucking things, an abacus on his desk instead of his boatswain’s call.

“Kind of you to say,” says Lampert, shooting him a warm smile. He’s just finishing up now – he’s not painting with oils. Goode’s no expert in art or painting, but he’s smelt oil paints being mixed in the streets, and has heard people talk about it – there’s no space here on the ship to cure oils, too many fumes. “I usually mix my own paints, something of a traditionalist that way, but to sail I bought a few cases of pre-mixed pigments – I obviously don’t work directly from the tray, but…”

“You mix your own?” Goode asks, and Lampert nods his head, beginning to go about washing his brushes with water, blotting them dry with cloths. He appreciates observing this process, likes to see a man care for and put away his tools once he’s through, likes the discipline of it.

Lampert doesn’t look to be the sort of man who carries discipline within him – what artist does, let alone some Ganymede sort?

“My master taught me long ago,” Lampert says. “I’ve never been much of an innovator, myself – I rather like to do as I know how, to do as I’m habituated. You’ve been at sea for a long time, hm? I would wager you’ve no great affection for changing your ways either.”

“No,” Goode says, not without a wry smile, and he leans back on the chair, gripping loosely at the back of it as he looks up to Lampert.

He’s pretty, this gentleman. Must be twenty-five or thirty, Goode would guess, still a young buck, his skin with a clear glow to it that is made the warmer by the lantern light illuminating him. His lips, which are rather pink, shine, and the twin pinpricks of pink at the very tops of his cheeks catch the light too.

He must do good trade for himself – aboard ships, a boy who’s too pretty is more liable to be punished for it than not, either with too much attention, rapes or otherwise, or by officers who know he’ll distract the faggots on the crew. It’s better to be a little bit plainer, to be alright to look at, but nothing too remarkable – better still, in Goode’s experience, to be sour from the front but very handsome from the back, so that every encounter boils down to its bare essentials.

For a landman though? Being pretty lets a man be womanish in a way he might not get away with, otherwise – and artists might be richer, might find it easier to make their money and their names off the rich, but they seem to follow the same rules as go for whores.

“We’ve met before, you know,” says Lampert, and Goode stares at him, then huffs out a quiet laugh.

“No, we fucking haven’t, lad,” says Goode. “No offence, but I’d remember.”

“That doesn’t sound offensive at all,” Lampert murmurs, and there’s a warmth to his voice that makes Goode’s skin prickle with heat, hair standing up on the back of his neck. As Lampert turns to look at him, Goode leans back in his seat and carefully spreads his thighs just a little wider – he’s not at all surprised at the way Lampert’s gaze drops downward, the way it lingers at Goode’s crotch, between his legs, before it comes up again. “I seem memorable, do I?”

“I’d remember you,” Goode repeats.

Lampert turns his head, looking down the length of the vessel, probably for whoever’s on watch, and then he turns back to Goode and takes a step closer, standing between the spread of his knees but not getting closer, between his thighs.

Goode can smell the powdery pigment of the scents from his paints – some of the colours are staining the heels of his hands and his wrists. His sleeves are rolled up to the elbow to keep them clean. He can smell Lampert, too – he doesn’t smell like a sailor or one of the working men aboard, smells of rosewater and faint perfume.

Goode expects it’s much stronger below decks, without the sea breeze blowing it away.

“Cast your mind back,” Lampert says, and Goode furrows his brow as he looks up at him, tilting his head to one side. The young man’s voice is soft, has a seductive tone to it – artists and whores really aren’t so different, Goode doesn’t think. “Long ago, Mr Goode – before your injury, but before that. Before your promotions, before you were a sailor at all, I believe. You were sixteen or seventeen: your father was an accountant, yes?”

Goode stares up at him, uncomprehending, feeling his body stiffen. “How the fuck do you know that?”

“It was a Friday evening,” Lampert says. “Your body was restless – you were restless. You ached to put your hands to work, and you quarrelled with your father. After services at the temple, you parted ways instead of walking home with your family, you walked into town. You watched the ships at port, looked at the smaller boats tied in the harbour, watched fishermen unpacking their hauls as the sky began to darken, smelt that fish, smelt the whale oil, smelt wood and seawater. A few of the whores called out to you – they knew you by sight, several of them. One of them sighed over you, and said, “Oh, this boy’s not out here to pop his cherry – he’s not here for us, girls, he couldn’t care less about a pair of bosoms filling out our shirts, what he wants is a set of sails with a strong wind filling them.”

He remembers that, remembers her – she’d been a good woman, Rosalie, French by birth and come to Britain as a sailor’s wife, caught in the trap between divorcee and widower. She’d make him laugh, when she started flirting, teasing, and ask him to give hints toward young men that might be better client, young men he might know. Referrals.

“I haven’t told that story in years,” Goode says, “since—”

“You laughed, kept walking, and you stopped when you saw mollies – two pretty boy-girls in pretty dresses, made up in corsets and skirts, and a fatter man between them, eyes lined, lips painted. He winked at you – it made you feel hot and flush, made your clothes feel too tight. You walked a little faster, and you knocked into an older man, sent his things flying.”

Goode closes his eyes, having to turn his head away from the other man to remember – the memory washes over him like a real-life wave and he’s sodden with it. For just a moment he’s drenched in recollection, he’s sixteen again and standing at the dockside, slouching with his hands in his pockets in the way that always makes his father snap at him when he witnesses it, his keppel gripped in one of his hands.

He manages to stay on his feet as the other man goes flying, and he hears himself go, “Fuck, fuck, sorry—” and go to his knees to help pick up his case, the wooden frame he’s carrying.

The man who looks at him, pink-lipped and wide-eyed, is so handsome that he stops being able to breathe for a moment, and somehow is less frightening, less intimidating, than the burlier sailors he sees, the bigger mollies, who promise to show him a good time, who promise to teach him, to ease him into pleasures untold.

Goode opens his eyes and stares up at Lampert, his eyes going to the pearl dangling from one of his ears. He remembers it then, too, remembers stammering out a compliment about it, a comment—

“A gift from my old painting master,” he’d told Goode at the time and tells him again now.

Goode reaches up and touches the side of his own neck as though he’s going to feel a scar there, as if he’s going to feel the scabbing, the throbbing injury, that he felt after that night. Lampert is smiling down at him, and it’s a kind smile, warm, entirely at odds with the sudden pulsing fear that rushes through him, the dreadful certainty of danger in this moment.

“You remember now,” Lampert says. “You walked with me a little while, stumbling over your words – you asked if I’d been sailing, and when I said yes, you were ensorcelled. Listened so sweetly as I told you where I’d sailed to before, where I was going next.”

“You bit me,” Goode hisses.

“Yes,” Lampert says, and he laughs faintly. “Oh, I’m sorry, Mr Goode, but I simply had to – you were so strong and handsome, even at that age. Never yet kissed, never yet a sailor. Your blood was sweet and as yet so untested, so untried.”

“Alukah,” Goode says, getting to his feet, and Lampert doesn’t grab him or attempt to wrestle with him, as Goode is prepared for, hand going for the blade that no longer hangs from his belt – Lampert stands back from him, his palms in line with his head. “You’re… You’ve not aged a day.”

“No,” Lampert agrees modestly, shrugging his shoulders. “Alukah, as you say – a vampire, I might say. We don’t age, not as you do.”

“You’re a demon,” Goode says.

“How can you say that with any authority? You’ve never yet had me in bed.”

Goode is so stunned for a moment he can’t breathe, is stunned the way he was the first time, faced with this man, this thing, on that fucking dockside. He hadn’t remembered until now, hadn’t thought about it for fucking years, never thinks about it unless talk turns to the dark and twisted things that haunt the night, and in any case, it’s not like he’d bring a fucking thing up on land or at sea – sailors are too superstitious no matter where they are.

He remembers the pain, the pinpricks at the side of his neck, the heat of Lampert’s tongue and the sensation of his teeth sinking so easily into the meat of Goode’s throat, and at the same time, at the same time, he recalls the ecstasy that came after.

Unconsciously, almost, he thinks of it at times when he touches himself, when he’s restless with want in sleep or just as he wakes, sometimes even thinks about it when he’s with the sort of man who wants to bite or nibble at his flesh as he fucks him, thinks of it in brothels, when the mollies kiss his neck.

He’d been floating in a sea of perfect pleasure, perfect satisfaction, every part of him throbbing and singing with want and need and delicious, impossible craving. He’d scarcely even been touched at that age beyond getting a bit hot and bothered tousling with other lads, occasionally getting a bit too close, breathing too heavy, enjoying it too much when pinning one another in the dirt – or letting themselves get pinned.

But that? That fucking vampire biting him?

Tossing himself off had only come so close – fucking another man, that was closer; pinned down and roughly fucked himself, pain tied into the pleasure, that was the closest.

How the fuck had he forgotten it, that feeling? How the fuck had it faded into the ether, into darkness, lost to all the fucking decades behind him? How could he have forgotten that?

“You’re an old man now, Mr Goode,” Lampert says in soft, warm tones, and there’s something soothing to his voice, something that doesn’t just settle on the air between them, doesn’t just meet his ears, but creeps inside him, slithers under his skin and makes itself at home there, coils about his heart, his lungs. “There are a great many things you don’t remember any longer, I wouldn’t doubt – your mother’s face, your father’s voice when he laughed, when he sang, but what sort of wood was your childhood bed made of? What did you eat, on the nights you didn’t eat your favourite, the fish your mother would cook in garlic and lemon? Which door was yours on the street?”

“Don’t fucking do that to me, lad,” Goode growls, and he watches Lampert’s face change, watches his lips part – it’s like the coil inside him, the coil of Lampert’s mind toward his, whatever cursed magic he’s working… It’s like breathing in smoke, and it’s fucking hard not to breathe it in, if it’s on the air, but at the very least, he can try to hold his breath.

“Don’t do what?” Lampert asks, and it’s like a physical shift under his skin, a movement in his fucking veins, burrowing into his body.

Goode squares his shoulders and snaps out with one hand – he forgets his cane for a second as he lunges and punches the lad square on the fucking nose, and suddenly the magic fizzling its way under his skin is gone entirely: Lampert falls back on the ground with a yelp, clutching at his face.

Goode manages to catch himself before he stumbles all the way over, although it jars his bad hip, and Lampert stares up at him aghast, his mouth open, blood dripping down his nose and chin, gathered behind his pretty hand.

“You bunched me!” he says, indignant, and Goode feels his lips curl back in a half-laughing snarl at the impact on his speech, the way he can’t pronounce his Ps, his Ms, with his throbbing lip and bleeding nose.

“You tried to fucking hypnotise me, or whatever the fuck snake charming shite that was. Who the fuck do you think you are, treating me like that?”

“Who am I?” the vampire repeats, and laughs wetly, then coughs, pulling a cloth out of his back pocket and wiping his nose and the front of his face. “Thad’s your issue here? Who I am?”

“Tilt your head forward, not back,” Goode orders automatically when he sees the lad start tipping his head backward, and Lampert leans forward again, his brows furrowing.

“But shouldn’t I…?”

“Tilt your head back, all that blood’s gonna leak down your throat. You want a taste of drowning in it, is it? That a treat for a little cunt like you?”

Lampert coughs out a laugh, wiping blood from his face, and Goode limps forward, gripping his cane by the shaft instead of the handle as he drops to one knee and reaches out. Lampert doesn’t struggle as Goode grips him by the hair like a kitten and pulls his head back so he can see, tugging down Lampert’s bloody-clothed hand at the same time.

“It’s not broken,” Goode tells him, nudging Lampert’s hand back toward his face.

Lampert looks at him wonderingly for a moment, and then he leans forward, keeping the cloth in front of his face – he’s not squeezing his nose tightly, but a lot of this, Goode wouldn’t wager based on how he’s holding the cloth, is just to keep the blood from dripping onto his clothes.

“You wanted to kill me,” he says lowly, enunciating more clearly now that he’s blown most of the blood and snot out of his nostrils. “Thought about going for your weapon.”

“Well, lucky for you, I don’t carry a fucking weapon any longer. That watchman’s not worth his fucking salt,” Goode adds, looking up the ship, and Lampert smiles at him faintly, exhaling.

“Mr Fredericks has his wits yet, Mr Goode,” Lampert murmurs. “He thinks that yelp was you bending me over, I wouldn’t wager.”

“You wouldn’t wager, or you can hear his fucking thoughts, same as you can mine?”

“A little of both,” Lampert says, and then lets out another noise, quieter, a grunt, at the grip of Goode’s hand on his face, the press of his thumb and his forefingers on both of his pretty marble cheeks, making him open his mouth, lower his jaw. After a second of Goode peering into his mouth, he retracts his teeth, and Goode has to concentrate to keep himself from flinching, staring at the two sharp canines that slot forward, lengthening, widening.

Goode stares at them, leaning his head forward a little more and pushing Goode’s head back so that his mouth is tilted better toward the light, so that Goode can really look at them. They’re not serrated on their edges like a shark’s teeth – they’re like the teeth of an ape, Goode thinks, longer than a man’s, sharp at their tips, but only the on the top half of his mouth, not the bottom.

“When did you come across an ape?”

“Bombay.”

“You’ve been all around the world, you have, hm?” asks Lampert, and the flirtation strikes him as hollow, somehow, lacking in sincerity – or perhaps just in commitment. His expression changes, presumably in response to Goode’s own thoughts, and Goode watches Lampert’s expression slacken.

He closes his mouth, leaning back from Goode’s hand, and as his lips purse together, he looks…

“How old are you?” Goode asks.

“How old do I look?” Lampert asks, damn near fucking simpers, and Goode raises his hand as if to slap him – Lampert doesn’t flinch, but his gaze flits to Goode’s hand, and Goode doesn’t need the man’s fucking mindreading powers to see that he’s a little excited at the prospect, that part of him craves another blow. “You’re familiar with Shakespeare, I take it?”

“Heard of him.”

“He and I shared a birthday, once upon a time.”

“That’d make you centuries old.”

“You are a capable mathematician, aren’t you? No wonder you came back to sea to tend numbers instead of other men.”

Goode feels his lips curl up into a snarl, and Lampert keeps his gaze for a moment, but then turns his face away.

“I’m sorry,” he murmurs. “That was unkind of me.”

Goode braces himself on his cane, easing himself up onto his feet, and he watches as Lambert rights himself, rising up to his full height again. His nose isn’t bleeding anymore, and there’s no bruising on his lip, no bruising that Goode can see at all – but for the last dregs of drying blood, which the vampire adeptly wipes away, one might never know he’d taken a blow at all.

“How often do you need to drink?” Goode asks.

“Every week or so, on land.”

“On a ship?”

“Oh, darling, I might have been so brazen as to reintroduce myself to you, but I’m not about to go biting sailors about the place. Have you any idea how superstitious you people are?”

“I’ve an inkling,” Goode says. “Pack up your things, come with me.”

“… Beg your pardon?”

“You’ve not tasted blood since we set sail? Two weeks ago, we’re still another week or two from making port?”

“… You’re offering?”

“I’m ordering,” Goode says. “You’re going to come down into my cabin, you’re going to drink from me.”

Lampert is frozen for a second, and Goode recognises in him the wanting hunger of his own youth, the hesitation, not quite able to believe what he’s seeing, what he’s being invited to, is real and true – not believing that someone would offer him a satisfaction to that terrible hunger so easily.

“And I’ll fuck you, shall I?” Goode adds, and he measures it right – Lampert’s pretty throat jumps as he swallows hard, the lump of his Adam’s apple bobbing prettily. If Goode were a vampire himself, maybe he might understand the hunger there, wanting to bite at that forbidden fruit, or at least fucking nibble beside it.

Perhaps Lampert’s pretty white skin would blush, if it could do – that blush at the tops of his cheeks, that’s absolutely painted on, or powdered. It sure as fuck isn’t real.

“You’re very differ—”

“Of course I’m fucking different, lad, it’s been damn near forty fucking years since you bit me at that dockside. You just called me old and senile – is it any wonder I’ve changed in other ways?”

“I didn’t say you were senile,” Lampert says in a smaller voice, and as he turns to pack away his paints, Goode can see that he’s smiling, that his pretty lips are being tugged into the crescent curve. “I didn’t suspect that you might like to give as much as you enjoy to receive.”

“Disappointed you didn’t fuck me then, are you?”

“You were a little young for my tastes then,” Lampert says, wrinkling his nose. “Wine should be allowed to age before one tastes it – the same might be said of men.”

“And yet you tapped my barrel and fucking drank from me, eh?”

Lampert blinks, caught off guard, and then giggles. It’s a curiously coquettish thing – breathless, flustered, full of want and at the same time, spotlit. “Alright,” he says. “You’ve got me.”

“I’ll have you yet,” says Goode. “Chop chop, lad. Night’s a-wasting.”

“Yes, sir,” says Lampert, and Goode hears the way he savours the words as they fall out of his mouth.

* * *

It’s the work of a few minutes, climbing down ladders and leading Lampert quietly through the corridors, giving crisp but polite greetings (“Ah, good evening, Mr Goode,” says Gillett, and looks past him to Lampert, his eyes widening marginally. “And, um, Mr Lampert, of course.” “Of course, Mr Gillett?” Lampert asks in a purr. Lampert might not be able to blush, but Gillett certainly fucking can.) as they make their way to Goode’s cabin.

A few minutes further find him on his elbows with his arms wrapped tightly around Lampert’s thighs and his mouth buried against the vampire’s arse, tonguing as deep into the hole as he can get as Lampert bites down on his own stained handkerchief to muffle his yelps and whimpers.

They’re gorgeous, the noises this lad is fucking making, even muffled as they are – he’s writhing on his back, his thighs spreading as widely as he can get them as Goode keeps a firm grip around his legs, his fingertips pressing into the soft, meat of the flesh he’s got a hold on. He arches his back up, trying to press up for more as Goode sweeps his tongue around his insides as dexterously as he can, one of his hands gripped tightly around Lampert’s cock and squeezing at it.

It’s been a long fucking time since he’s been able to really enjoy himself like this, since he’s been able to sink himself into a young man’s hole and pillage him for all he’s worth, act the pirate instead of a navy man turned mercantile accountant, and Lampert is all too happy to be pillaged.

There’s a sweetness to his sweat, a sort of fruity tang that’s just not present in human men, and Goode wonders if it’s the sweetness of decay that he’s tasting, if it’s the closeness of this pretty little bastard to death that makes him taste like this, or maybe just his particular diet.

Maybe it’s the fact that he’s such a fucking fruit himself that makes him taste this way – either way, it’s good.

“Please,” Lampert whines out breathlessly, the word coming out in a soft and aching whisper, “please, Mr Goode—”

“Not trying to call me by my forename, lad?”

Lampert’s skin shimmers with sweat, on his face, down his pretty throat and soft-breasted chest, across the folds of his belly with how he’s damn near bent double with the curve of his back – Goode picks the wetness on his thigh to drag his tongue over, to taste the moisture there and feel the sweetness on his tongue, and Lampert shudders.

“Gavrel—”

Goode almost laughs, because of fucking course he’d call him that, skimming the name off the top of Goode’s own head – why should he know that on his papers, on this ship, he’s Gabriel, not Gavrel? Why shouldn’t Lampert call him by the name his parents called him, his own people, before he went to sea? He supposes it’s funny the bastard calls him Goode at all, and not Gutman.

Lampert blinks down at him, owlish. “Oh,” he says. “It never occurred to me that— do you prefer…?”

Goode bites down on Lampert’s thigh and he shoves his handkerchief so hard into his mouth it almost hits the back of his throat, a stuttered keen eking out of his throat, and Goode laughs softly at him as he crawls forward, his hands either side of the body beneath him, shadowing Lampert with his own, eclipsing him.

Lampert’s lips quiver as Goode tugs the handkerchief from his mouth, and Goode laughs softly at his expression, at the sweat still shining on his flesh – there’s still no proper blush, no obvious colour beyond what’s painted on him, but his lips seem a little more flushed, plumper for being bitten and pressed on by his very own teeth.

“That light a fire in your belly, does it? A sailor’s absent thoughts of the eclipse as he readies himself to fuck you?”

“A man isn’t permitted his petty sentiments, Mr Goode?”

“You like to call me that, do you?” Goode asks him. “Sure you wouldn’t rather sir?”

Lampert’s lips quiver, and Goode looks at the colour in his dark eyelashes as his eyelids flutter too, the very tips of them seeming silvery, catching the light.

“What should I call you? Boy? Lad? Want me to call you by name – Remy’s what you prefer, isn’t it?”

Lampert shivers like a wave is running through him, and Goode wonders how much he gets this, exactly, how much he gets treated the way he likes.

“Not so often,” Lampert answers the question – his legs are wrapping around Goode’s, tightening around the other man’s thighs, and Lampert moans quietly as their cocks rub against one another, as Goode slides forward and thrusts against the other man’s smooth belly. “It used to be easier – when I was… Before I became what I am now, before I was turned. I’m stronger now – there aren’t many men who can outmuscle me.”

“I can’t really outmuscle you though, can I?” Goode presses, raising his eyebrows. “That punch healed quick as anything, and I remember how fast you were, back then, how quick, how immediate—”

“But you… know,” Lampert says. “Know what I am – have an idea as to who I am, you’re… You’ve experience. You know where the pressure points are on a man.”

“I know a slut who wants it, you mean, alukah or no.”

Lampert grabs him by the cheeks and kisses him, kisses him fiercely – fiercely enough that Goode has to be careful of his too-sharp canine teeth, but that hint of danger adds to the wonder of this, the pleasure of it, of this beautiful beast beneath him. He reaches between them to line himself up, and he doesn’t let the slight resistance of Lampert’s hole hold him back – he slams forward and sheaths himself entirely, and swallows the whine it makes Lampert release, muffles it with his own tongue. They keep kissing as Goode fucks him hard, makes the narrow bunk creak beneath them and doesn’t give a fuck about it.

Lampert trembles like he’s something a hundred times more fragile than he is, as though he’s not used to this treatment, and Goode allows his hands to roam his body, to grip tightly at his waist and dig his thumbs in, to tickle over his sides and his belly, to tweak the pretty pink nipples prominent on the soft meat of his chest and laugh at the little squeal Lampert releases against Goode’s own lips.

“You are a slut, aren’t you?” he asks softly, gripping Lampert’s hair and tugging his head back so he taste his sweat again, licks a stripe up the side of his neck and tastes him again before he nips and bites under his ear and behind it, down the length of his throat. “I asked our good captain if he’d sampled you – he avoided the question quite fucking deftly.”

Lampert’s response is a whining sound, and his hands are grabbing at Goode’s body – it’s not the groping Goode’s enjoying, isn’t touching him for touching’s sake, but is desperate, trying to pull him closer, trying to get their bodies tighter together, to get Goode deeper inside him. He certainly is fucking strong, even whilst fucking distracted.

“How many other men aboard have fucked you, eh? Been down in the hold letting the lads have a go on you?”

“Mr Goode—”

Goode grips Lampert’s cock and twists it hard in his hand as he strokes it, and to muffle Lampert’s responding wail, he drags Lampert by the hair to Goode’s own neck – Lampert needs no further invitation to extend his teeth and bite.

Oh, fuck, but it’s everything.

The pinprick of pain is a sharp pleasure, but after that comes the sudden radiation outward of complete pleasure – his whole body is alight and it’s as if the world goes sublimely dark as he keeps burying his cock in the warm, wet heat surrounding it, kisses rough and hard, feels the tonguing at his throat, the drag of his tongue—

He devours the ever-young man beneath him at the same time as he feeds on Goode, and the pleasure is so overwhelming that lost in the mess of it all, Goode almost doesn’t notice when he reaches his peak.

* * *

Goode has the hangover of a fucking lifetime when he finally goes into his office to work, having taken first thrown a few extra blankets over the bastard in his bed, because once Goode had crawled out of bed Lampert had whined pitifully, pathetically (surprisingly endearingly) about the cold.

At first, the vampire’s venom soothed the ache in his hip, and he’s sure that it’s had a good effect on him in the aftermath even still, but all the exercise of last night has him fucking aching, and he’s asked one of the boys to keep bringing him hot compresses from the kitchen throughout the day.

“Mr Gillett gave me his report once he came off watch,” says Captain Esposito, appearing in the doorway and smirking down at him. “You navy men and your buggery.”

“Men at sea are liable to sate each others’ hunger,” Goode says. “Navy men or otherwise.” Human men or otherwise, he doesn’t say.

Esposito glances down the corridor, then leans forward and says, in a low, rich voice, his lips smirking, “Mazal bueno, Gavrel.”

“A dank, Amado,” Goode replies, and smirks to himself as he forces his aching eyes back to the rows of numbers before him.

FIN

#musings #shousetsu bang bang #erotica #writers on tumblr #original fiction

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