Hammer & Air Read online

  “Hammer?” I questioned, lost. This… this person, behind me… we had not killed him. We had welcomed him into the heart of our magic home. We had let him see our sex, see our fucking, hear our intimate conversation.

  Now he wanted inside our bed, and had taken our confidences for permission.

  Hammer gripped my shoulders and let me burrow my face in his shoulder. “I’ll kill him if you say the word,” he said. “I’ll throw him out, bear or no. But….”

  “Bear” (for that were the only name we had for him) pulled his hips back to the point where his cockhead pulled at my stretched ring of muscle. I gasped, pleasured, and then he snapped his hips forward, and I moaned the same way.

  “But….” Gods of magic, gods of motion, I couldn’t form a sentence I were so aroused.

  “If you want it,” Hammer whispered, his voice seduction in itself, “if you want it, I’ll help give it to you. With me here, it will be us still. You won’t lose me, Eirn. Just have… have summat more.”

  Those hips thrust again, and again, and all I could do were whimper screaming pleasure into Hammer’s shoulder. Hammer pulled back and met my mouth in a desperate, hungry kiss, and his hand, the one that had gripped my shoulder, came down between us, taking my cock in palm and squeezing.

  I howled scorched desire into Hammer’s mouth.

  He stroked, and the bear thrust, and I howled it again and again, gasping without words, incoherent and mindless with my body’s traitorous launch into the heavens. Hammer broke off the kiss and moved down my body under the covers. He stopped to nip at my chest, lave my nipples, and when I would have clutched at his hair to keep him there, he pulled away again. Quickly, with hard kisses, he moved down to my cock, taking it into his mouth and his fist, and sucking and stroking madly to keep up with the frenzy of fucking that the bear man were pounding me with from behind.

  I were not sure which felt better, I were so overwhelmed. I think I might have sobbed, gibbered something, terrified by the fearful thing it were to have my arse and my cock and my senses invaded, because as my hand flailed on the sheets, I felt Hammer’s hand leave off my cock and come to lace fingers with mine.

  It grounded me, I think, gave me a way to gather my pleasure, and focus, and come, sobbing and confused, and dumping spend down Hammer’s throat as fast as he could swallow. I clenched madly at the strange cock in my arse, and the man behind me shuddered and moaned like an animal, low in his throat, and then climaxed, spending inside me and clasping me back against his chest.

  Hammer reappeared up near me, and I wriggled from that stranger’s embrace and into Hammer’s arms. He stroked my shoulders and murmured softly into my ears while the aftershocks rippled through the three of us. Hammer’s stomach pressed into mine, and I could feel the stickiness of where his cock had spat, having never been touched at all.

  There were no soft kisses or soft words from the man behind me. I couldn’t bear to look at him—a stranger, or an acquaintance in an enchanted skin, it didn’t matter. He’d come into our bed and taken me, and although in the end I’d given consent, I felt used.

  He must have looked at me some way, made a movement, shared an expression with Hammer over my shoulder, because Hammer spoke.

  “Well, what did you expect, coming into our bed like that? It were lucky he chose pleasure and not fear, or there’d be blood shed, much of it yours!”

  The grunt at my back were not friendly, and I found I didn’t have the strength—either of character or of body—to look the cock at my back in the eyes. I burrowed into Hammer some more and shivered, waiting to come down from the heights of a climax my body still couldn’t believe.

  Again, reluctantly, there were a soft touch of lips at the back of my neck, and something in me relaxed.

  I managed a full breath, and another, and another, and the muscles at my back and my arse unclenched. The stranger fell out of me, limp and replete, and I were left, used and confused, seeking the shelter of Hammer’s arms.

  There were another growl, and another reluctant pet on my skin, and then light broke through the high window over the bed.

  “Eirn, look!”

  He shook my shoulders out of their hunch, and I felt the body on the other side of me shift off the bed. I rolled over just in time to see the change.

  The man who had just fucked me were tall and broad—taller than Hammer, even taller than me—with a wide chest that narrowed to a slim, taut waist. The hair at his groin (impressive, but not as impressive as Hammer) were a deep brown, the color of chocolate, and the hair on his head were darker, like sable, and it were tipped with streaks of white.

  His eyes were large and dark brown, and expressive. As he stood there and stretched and surveyed me, used and undone, he looked both arrogant and puzzled. He’d done something wrong, but he felt so good, he couldn’t figure out what it were he’d bollixed up.

  Even if he could have spoken in this form, we didn’t have time for a breakfast conversation, because abruptly, as though shaking water off his skin, he shook the human off him, and were a bear again.

  He turned his head, as though in embarrassment, and lumbered off into the kitchen, to sit and wait for one of us to let him out.

  Part VII

  At the Winter Hearth

  Hammer let the beastie out and then came back to bed. I found I couldn’t look at him, either.

  He wouldn’t let that stand, though. Grasping my chin in both hands, he frowned into my eyes. “You… you wanted it, aye?”

  I could only shiver. “It felt… it felt wonderful,” I confessed, because once I’d relaxed and allowed it to happen, my body had been possessed not just with consent, but with glory.

  “Then—”

  “But he weren’t you.” The statement hung between us, and Hammer grunted, getting my attention again.

  “That’s not such a bad thing,” he said decisively. “I’m nobbut a smith, Eirn. I kept you safe when we were snot-noses in a sandbox, but there’s no reason to hitch your wagon to me forever.”

  My hurt must have hit him like a wave. “You don’t want me?” The betrayal of this thought made my bowels shrivel like a salted snail.

  “Now listen to me!” he snarled, gruff as he seemed to get when his heart were talking fierce. “I wanted you. I wanted you when I first took my fist to my prick. You want to know how I got through that other?” His time with the smith. “I got over it thinking of you, sweet under me, like you were that night by the tree. I spent my youth wanting you, and not once knowing you’d want me back.”

  I gaped at him. “How could you not know that?” I asked numbly.

  He shrugged. “You think real hard. I’m naught to think about.”

  I took his hands and held them to my chest and cursed the words we did not have. “If you wanted me so badly, why… why the girl, Hammer? Why let me see you with the girl?”

  The memory… even now it made my cock stiffen. Even now it filled me with bile.

  Hammer shrugged. “I didn’t know which you’d want. You wanted a girl, I’d get her for you.” The look on his face then… oh, gods. Simple longing, pure and undecorated. “You wanted me, instead. That were nice.” More than nice. So much more than nice. “Now, you’ve got a chance, you see? Like your garden. Which one grows more, me, or your prince.”

  I frowned at him. “How do you know he’s a prince?”

  Hammer’s shrug were as peasant a thing as he had about his person, even lying naked in the bed next to me. “He took what he wanted, and didna… didn’t worry about the rest.” More old words—peasant words. It were the first time it hit me that Hammer used less of them to try and impress me.

  “You think I’m going to choose a man who will take me, regardless, over a man who threw himself in front of a mountain cat to save my life?” I asked in amazement, and Hammer shrugged again.

  “I’m thinking it’s going to be a long winter,” he said at last. “And I’m thinking we may get mighty bored, only the two of us in this bed. Maybe,
it being three of us, you get your choice, and we get something to do until the ice breaks from the stream.”

  For a minute, I weren’t sure whether to laugh or to throttle him, and I’m sure my face showed it too. Something dropped from his expression then, something raw and bare and terrified.

  He were sure I’d choose the bear prince, whoever he were.

  “Hammer…” I choked, unable to finish the sentence. I kissed his hands instead, kissed his cheek, his lean, vulnerable mouth. I resolved to try this thing—to let this man in our bed—so that Hammer would know, when I chose him, that I knew exactly the worth of the man I wanted in my arms.

  “Hammer,” I finished lamely, as he waited patiently for my thoughts to find their voice, “we have got to find better words for the things we have in our hearts.”

  “Words seem to be weak things,” he murmured into my hair, and I could only hope our hearts would prove stronger.

  We slept late that day, but we made up for it by working to get the rest of the snow off the cottage roof in the early afternoon. Hammer did the roof climbing this time, and I kept the porch swept, and there were no more mishaps. The bear watched Hammer with unfriendly eyes, but I didn’t have much of a heart to look at him anyway.

  In the afternoon, we went inside, and I made us the warm chocolate and cream (we’d started putting the things that the magic cupboard gave us into the other cupboards so we didn’t have to work it so hard) and we sat down to plan our dream cottage again.

  I watched Hammer, intent on the plans, talking of a garden and rose bushes, of a printing press that I would own and a forge that he would run, and I thought with an ache in my chest that he must have had some hope, then, that I would choose him. Something, at least. It were like the night we ran from our town, when he told me to leave him while shouldering a knapsack full of our things. He wouldn’t make all these plans for the two of us if he knew bone deep there would only be the one.

  Another layer, another level, of the breadth and depth of Hammer’s heart came clear to me.

  Without me, he would have no plans.

  Oh, Hammer… what would it take? How could I make you know?

  That evening, I read some more from the book. This one had a princess with a bloody-arsed-bugger for a brother, who kept trying to hide her birthright from her. Hammer looked at me slyly with that one. “It’s good to know all the bits and pieces before going and making up your mind, isn’t it?”

  I grimaced back. “Hammer, she were taking advice from a potted plant. I’m thinking information were the least of her difficulties.”

  He snickered then, and I had a moment to realize that I’d not had much opportunity to see Hammer laugh. He hadn’t often laughed when we were at the orphanage. In fact, most of his expression had consisted of a grave sort of glower, and another piece of Hammer fell into place.

  He’d not felt free until we went on the run. He may have killed the printing master to protect me, but it seemed he’d turned the tumblers of his own jail cell as well.

  We were sitting side by side on the chesterfield, and he were peering over my shoulder at the book. Although he could read, he weren’t smooth at it, and he claimed to like the sound of my voice. I liked the feel of his breath in my ear and his chin on my shoulder, as he stared at the words and engravings with the big-eyed joy of the child I could not remember him ever being. I turned my head so I could see him smile, and his grin fell at the corners.

  We kissed then, soft like, and without any urgency at all. It were just a kiss.

  It went on and on. It followed us as I set down the book and we stumbled to the bedroom, and it enveloped us when our clothes fell, fumbled to the floor. It punctuated the satiny feeling of our skin, as we tangled our limbs, and the line between Hammer and Eirn faded, became thin, became lost in the simple need for us to touch.

  Our breath came faster, not from sex but from want. I wanted him, not his mouth on my cock, not the terrible pleasure of orgasm, but just… just him. We panted in the darkness, huddled under the covers, our hands always moving, our mouths an endless mesh of tongue and lips and the hot taste of the other. I needed his arms around me so badly, I shivered with it.

  We came—not because we tried—but because our hands, our bodies, were so twined that it weren’t possible not to, and our spend coating each other’s skin, simply changed the nature of the touch. Our mouths were never far from each other, and when they moved, it were to kiss a chin, a cheek, or the softness in the crook of Hammer’s neck, because I could lose myself there forever.

  I were lost in there, we were lost in each other, naked and twined and panting, sated and needing and yearning, when we fell asleep, so deep in each other’s arms that I couldn’t tell, didn’t want to tell, which one of us were the other.

  The bear probably watched all that, but neither of us cared.

  I woke up again with the strange man at my back.

  “No,” I grumbled, when he ground his cock insistently against my backside. I were sated, and besides that, I were with Hammer. We had meant something to each other this night. Or, better said, we had acknowledged that we meant something, something big, something so huge that it could stop the breath in our chest at the same time it kept our blood running in our veins. I didn’t want sex; not with a prince nor anyone else who cared to crawl in our bed.

  There were a surprised grunt from behind me, and I snuggled deeper into Hammer’s arms. “You can stay,” I told him sleepily. “But tell that thing to stand down and go to sleep. We’ll play again later.” My own desire gave a sleepy twitch, but like I said, I weren’t in the mood.

  There were another bear-like grunt, and then an arm came around my shoulders tentatively. I let it sit, and nestled closer to Hammer. I felt a clean, naked chest press up against my back, and a cleanly shaven cheek nuzzling my shoulder, and then I fell asleep.

  When we woke in the morning, the bear were asleep on the floor by our bed. Hammer and I got up, bathed together, and ignored his baleful looks. Hammer went to go fix breakfast (he insisted it were his turn, which meant that he’d probably asked for something special from the cupboard) and I sighed and went to scratch the bear between the ears and have a talk.

  “You have to understand,” I said quietly, “it’s always been him. You can play in our bed all you like, but Hammer will always be first.”

  I still didn’t know the sly, crafty look that came into the bear’s eyes then. I’d know it eventually for what it were in its entirety, but that night, I discovered what it meant for me and Hammer.

  The bear had taken my words as a challenge.

  The day were clear, the blue light glinting off the snow and showing the black boles of the maple trees in stark relief. We spent the bulk of the day testing our limits. Together with Hammer, my fear of leaving the cottage behind weren’t so knife-edged. We ventured slowly, learned to find the moment when the falling feeling started, and using that as a guide (and not the full pain of vertigo that had flipped me flat on my back before) we mapped out the boundaries of our little space of enchanted land.

  It weren’t huge—maybe twenty acres total, with the house as a center. Its shape were oblong—it seemed to make a special allowance to stretch over a cave in the forest on the west side of the border. It were a bear cave.

  Hammer and I looked significantly at each other when we saw the mouth of the cave and then at the bear. The bear glared defiantly back.

  Hammer went to go into the mouth of it, but, as he approached, he felt the magic grow stronger.

  “The spell works at the cave mouth,” I muttered, almost to myself, “but probably stops in the middle.”

  I looked at the bear. “Nice—you’ve got a home with a chesterfield and a rug in there?”

  The bear gave a grunt and an indifferent shrug and ambled off in the direction of the house. I looked at Hammer, who quirked his lean mouth at me, and we watched the retreating snow-covered rug as it shook with every step through woods.

  “What d
o you think?” he asked, sincerely wanting to know.

  I looked at the dark fissure, dug into the side of a granite rise. “I think we shouldn’t go into that cave,” I replied thoughtfully, and he seemed to agree.

  We went back then; it were getting dark, and the twilight purple of the woods seemed hushed and hallowed. We had no gloves so I’d tucked my hands in the folds of my sweater, and Hammer—who always seemed to run hot, even when we were children huddled under our one wool blanket in the orphanage—reached into my sweater and took my chilled hands in his. He warmed me, and we tramped back to the cottage like that, hand in hand.

  That night we planned some more and read some more, and Hammer said we were running out of stories, so I wished for another book. I knew he liked card games, so I wished for a deck of cards—he’d won many games at the tavern, and I thought maybe he could teach me. We retired early, not much in the mood for fucking, but tired from our tramp through the woods, and I were not surprised, this time, to feel a naked man sliding down my front in the dark of the morning, as I nestled back into Hammer’s arms.

  I groaned a little, but from pleasure, not resistance, and Hammer woke up enough to murmur in my ear. “You want him?”

  “Mmmm…” The bear-prince were kissing a line down the front of my throat, laving each kiss with his tongue, and I arched backward into Hammer, my sleepy cock stretching and taking a look around.

  It were greeted by the bear prince’s hard thigh, and a satisfied grunt from the man who had found my nipples and were suckling hard, and with insistence.

  “Want…” I muttered, not sure what the words were. Hammer started to nibble on my ear then, and I felt his cock, hard and insistent against my backside. “Want you inside, Hammer,” I groaned, and the sound he made were happy, and not a little bit smug.

  Hammer’s fingers popped into my mouth and I wet them—and teased them with my tongue and teeth. Hammer groaned in turn, his cock growing harder. He ground up against me, and my skin grew thickly wet with the dripping Hammer made before he spent. He slid his cock between my thighs and used that slickness to fuck the tender skin there. His cock rubbed my taint and my balls, and I gasped, because in a moment, it were all blood-swollen, tender, and throbbing with the touch, and the bear prince looked up sharply from my chest. Hammer’s face were clearly visible over my shoulder, and I knew well the half-hooded eyes and relaxed joy that could be read there.