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He’s been wrapped in the sleeping bag and all his clothes for about fifteen minutes, ignoring his steaming breath and staring at the wall, when he hears the lamb’s sleepy bleating. Without turning, Johnny can see exactly what Gheorghe must be doing as he puts it down in the titchy pen, the gentling strokes of his hand along the runt’s back, in defiance of any sense. The season’s young and the farm’s running to shit, every lamb useful, so it’s all right for that extra attention, but Gheorghe’s patience with the daft thing is as grating as his patience with Johnny. (It was so much better when he broke, when he tackled Johnny into the mud and let Johnny best him, though Johnny couldn’t shake the seriousness from those deep eyes even with Gheorghe’s cock down his throat.)
Gheorghe’s silent as he crawls into his own roll, his breathing lost in the chill around them. With the fire banked there’s the dimmest glow and no crackling, only the wind outside to hear as the runt falls asleep well before Johnny can. Johnny wraps his arm around his chest, exhaling into the crook of his elbow so the heat will fan back onto his nose.
It’s not exactly cold, though it wouldn’t be necessary at all if Dad had half the sense to let them move the flock down, and Johnny scowls at nothing as he shoves his hands into his pits. His thoughts run dark, raw like the night outside, until something knocks into his back.
“Fuck off.”
He knows it’s Gheorghe, even before he fully processes what’s happening, because the tosser won’t leave his mind alone for more than a few minutes and it can’t well be the bloody runt, can it? His voice sounds painfully loud and pathetic, and he can’t move, too tired to jump away. He waits for Gheorghe’s broad hands and arms to envelop him, trap him in that heat he’d gotten only a touch of hours ago with the mud on them both.
Gheorghe’s breathing is slow and steady, inches from the back of Johnny’s neck. No other part of him moves, and Johnny gets to a count of thirty before losing patience and turning to face him.
Gheorghe’s eyes are half-closed, peaceful, meeting Johnny’s darting glances easily. His smile is thin, almost bitter, and the tension along Johnny’s spine loosens.
“It’s cold.”
No shit. The words, pointless like most, stick in the back of Johnny’s throat. A part of him wants to speak, for some reason, and he forces it back, bites his lip. Gheorghe’s smile deepens.
“Fuck off.”
Softer than before, leaping unbidden from Johnny’s mouth, and he turns away as his brain cringes, stupid stupid stupid echoing around his head as Gheorghe shuffles closer, his stomach against Johnny’s back, the heat of him steaming, somehow, through two bedrolls and Johnny’s sweats and Gheorghe’s stupid knit jumper.
“You want to freeze, it’s okay with me.”
Gheorghe has a way of making his soft, faintly awkward English sound reasonable, Johnny’s noticed, in the most annoyingly calming of ways. He has to talk formal, of course, probably understands only about half of any of their blather but makes it seem like he knows bloody everything. (He probably does, which makes it all the worse.)
“Nowt to do with freezing,” Johnny mumbles, because really, where was this rubbish last night, when the wind was even worse? He can’t lie around just waiting for the inevitable, now that he’s been dumb enough to open the gates, so. He twists, grabbing Gheorghe’s hip and watching as his face barely flickers. Something hot and ugly flares in his chest. “If you’re gonna, freak, do it.”
Gheorghe’s hands are rough as they fumble with Johnny’s long johns, one sliding to grab Johnny’s arse as the other settles at the base of his cock. Calluses dig into Johnny’s skin, hot and gritty, and he’s half hard as he pushes into Gheorghe’s tightening fingers.
They say nothing for the minutes Gheorghe works him, suffocating grip on cock and nails burning where they scratch Johnny’s arse. It’s mean, just as the mud was, and they’re both tense, Gheorghe’s breath hot and smelling of pot noodles along Johnny’s neck. Johnny, encased in heat and sweat, his head lolling against the edge of his bedroll, looks at the cracked stone and dirt underneath them as he comes, a short and unsatisfying burst against Gheorghe’s fingers and the cuff of his jumper.
Gheorghe clicks his tongue, lightly, as he wipes the come away, and Johnny makes the mistake of meeting his stare, where there’s little aside from half-shuttered amusement lurking. He pushes Gheorghe’s hands away, his fingers fumbling in the afterglow, and shoves his softening cock away before rolling back onto his other side and shoving his head under his makeshift pillow.
He falls asleep almost instantly and wakes, itching, to find Gheorghe sprawled with his back against Johnny’s, a mirror image in the morning air. Johnny lies still, his chest tight, until the lamb’s bleating rouses them both.
Gheorghe’s pasta is so good it makes Johnny a bit sick, in a wholly different way from lager or Dad’s hospital bed. Gheorghe drinks slow, short and deep pulls from the can he makes last all the way into the tub, and he touches Johnny in equally short bursts, a hand across Johnny’s knuckles at the table, a knee sliding between Johnny’s thighs under the thin layer of soap bubbles. It’s terrifying, that Johnny can need that contact, that little bit of reminder that there’s something solid and good outside his mardy head. He doesn’t want to think about any of it, about what Gheorghe staying on might mean and how he’s probably only doing it because Dad isn’t right and how it probably can’t really mean forever (not, Johnny tells himself, that he wants it to mean anything like forever—Gheorghe’s making him foolish, and it’s all right for now, but it’s none of it going to matter in a few weeks).
They go straight from the tub to Johnny’s bed, and it hits him, as he throws himself across the duvet and watches Gheorghe slide easily alongside him, that they’re alone, Top Fell all over again, cleaner and warmer and with fewer noisy lambs. This must make him smile, as Gheorghe’s fingers trace soft marks along Johnny’s lips, and he smiles for true at the calluses against his mouth, the steady warmth of Gheorghe’s stare.
“You’re all right?”
My Dad’s in fucking hospital and it’s all falling down on me, Johnny thinks, rough, and he’s thankful for his silences when the words don’t come rushing out to ruin the gentle concern on Gheorghe’s face. Much better to distract them both, and he presses his mouth into Gheorghe’s, slides his tongue quick and hot past Gheorghe’s teeth until Gheorghe’s body loosens and he pulls Johnny in to slot their cocks together.
Johnny kisses his chin, gentle scraping beard, and each cheek, moving slow like syrup, trapped in some bright dream he doesn’t remember feeling before, a desperately determined grin while all his black thoughts stand on the outside of their bubble and let this bit of sunshine work. It’s so scarily easy to feel only the light with Gheorghe, and sometimes—like now, with Gheorghe’s mouth working easy and soft against Johnny’s shoulder, Gheorghe’s hands strong and sure across Johnny’s lower back—there’s something even better than light, a strange realization that Gheorghe is seeing all of the very worst of Johnny and his shit life and hasn’t yet bolted. (Gheorghe may just be touched in the head—he finds all of their bleak endless hillside beautiful, after all, and maybe he had too much shite back at home to learn any self-protection when it comes to gits like Johnny—but if he is, it’s the kind of touched that Johnny somehow understands.)
“I want to—”
Gheorghe’s no prince of words himself, at least not in English, but such a pregnant pause makes Johnny’s stomach tighten unpleasantly, lets in the black dog for half a second. Johnny clutches Gheorghe’s arse, digs his fingertips in like he’s hefting stone for the boundary wall as Gheorghe presses their foreheads together.
“Do you know—thighs?”
Johnny laughs in relief, because yes, when he’s with someone particularly skittish in some trailer somewhere, he’s substituted thighs for proper buggery. Gheorghe’s hands slide in between Johnny’s, warm and strangely tender, and Johnny’s heart beats faster, trapping air in his lungs as he realizes that he wants this, specifically, Gheorghe rutting between his legs and bearing him down, hard and secure, against the mattress.
“God,” he says, when he finally gets his breath under control, and his eyes are darting around the room near-crazily but he’s never bothered with much of anything aside from spit and somehow he wants more than that here, something poncy. All he can think of is his nan’s hand cream, frequently knocked off the windowsill in his drunker moments navigating the bog, and Gheorghe’s face when he suggests it is comical.
“I am sorry, Deirdre,” he whispers when he returns, bottle in hand, mock solemn face breaking into a stream of giggles as he throws himself back alongside Johnny, and Johnny chokes a bit on his own laughter. Johnny wants to complain about dragging his nan into bed with them, but Gheorghe’s getting into a commanding rhythm, slick hands prodding at Johnny’s thighs, and Johnny sighs and spreads himself open, breathing deep as Gheorghe’s massage works from his crack down to his knees and back again, slow swirling strokes.
“I will use a condom. Less mess,” Gheorghe murmurs, lips tickling Johnny’s ear, and Johnny shivers and croaks, “Top drawer,” and melts into the duvet until Gheorghe’s hands gently push his thighs back close together.
“Good?”
Johnny wants to say something halfway clever, for once. He settles for “Please,” a groan that dips into a sigh as Gheorghe’s cock slides into place.
He’s had a cock up his arse, once, in a particularly grim loo in Bradford, that time before Dad’s strokes started up when everything seemed a lot looser, and to be filled so thoroughly was far better than he thought it might be. There isn’t the same sense of fullness inside of him now—he’s pretty sure there isn’t much of a way to get off of just this, Gheorghe thick and slippery between his legs while he’s pinned to the bed by Gheorghe’s weight above him—but he’s strangely moved by Gheorghe’s noises, slick skin on skin and soft moans, one of Gheorghe’s hands on the small of his back while the other runs surprisingly steady fingers through Johnny’s hair. Johnny tightens his muscles around Gheorghe, smiles dazedly as Gheorghe whimpers, buries his face into the pillow and loses himself in Gheorghe’s single-minded attention.
Gheorghe eventually comes, a low shout, and falls to the duvet to Johnny’s left, stroking Johnny’s back with shaking fingers. One hand reaches underneath Johnny, brushes his semisoft cock with a feather-light touch.
“‘Salright,” Johnny slurs, his voice loose and distant, running easily out of his mouth. “Just this. You. Here.”
Gheorghe hums, presses the tips of his fingers to Johnny’s cheek. Johnny, eyes closed, swallows around the lump working its way from his chest into the back of his throat, the heat trapped behind his eyelids, and jams his jaws closed before any noise can leak out. Gheorghe’s voice murmurs, something low and repetitive and not at all English, the intonation like a song, and Johnny tries not to think of anything at all.
It takes a few days to get someone down to help with the camper, and as long as it sits there, reproachful, Johnny’s sense of shame is too strong for any sort of deeper pleasure. When it’s finally towed away, allowing Johnny to stumble back into the house with Gheorghe close behind, relief blossoms in his heart like early spring sunlight.
He waits until after the beasts have been done and Dad and Nan have bedded down themselves, until it’s him and Gheorghe side by side under the covers. Gheorghe is warm, his head lolling against Johnny’s, his eyes open and glittering in the faint moonlight coming through the uncurtained windows.
“Thank you,” Johnny says, tightening his grip around Gheorghe’s middle. Gheorghe’s nose wrinkles, and Johnny bites down on a sudden laugh. “Thanks.”
“You’ve said this every night, now,” Gheorghe murmurs, a hand brushing Johnny’s hip. “Soon I will wonder if it is true.”
He’s joking, Johnny knows he must be, and yet whatever they are is still too fragile for Johnny to bear thinking of Gheorghe having anything like a doubt. There are probably words out there—ways to say You've meant more than I ever wanted; I want you; I need you; please have patience without running his gob for an hour straight—but their first language was touch, and Johnny ducks his head under the covers instead.
He last did this in the mud, furious and raw, a battle he didn’t understand then and understands possibly even less now, an attempt to get control over himself and this enraging stranger. The memory drifts in and alongside him as he works his mouth over Gheorghe’s cock, feels it fill against his tongue, salty precome and tensed skin, and he wants to blot the past out, replace his rage with something gentler. Gheorghe keeps himself quiet, bitten off little moans that raise the hair on the back of Johnny’s neck, nothing like the sharp and commanding yelp he’d released up on Top Fell and somehow almost unbearably intimate. He sighs, his delight evident, when he comes, and Johnny scrubs water from his eyes with the back of his hand before emerging.
He’s—leaky, cracked slightly open, like every day since Kircaldy, and it makes him uneasy, vulnerable, after such a long time of keeping himself walled away. But Gheorghe saw that crack, kissed him when he was a bolshy arse and when he’d started to be less of a fuck-up, and Johnny’s spoken a few achingly soft things in the past days that haven’t sent Gheorghe screaming back to Scotland. He leans his head against Gheorghe’s fluttering heart, listens while his breathing slows.
“I mean it.” He sighs as Gheorghe kisses the top of his head, slow and lingering, and then wills himself to lift his head, to meet what he can see of Gheorghe’s face in the moonlight. “It’s not—don’t mean it like ‘Thanks for the job, see you next week’ or nothing. It’s like ‘Thanks for waiting.’”
“Waiting?” Gheorghe cups Johnny’s face in both his palms, and Johnny fights the instinct to lean into his touch for a moment before deciding it’s all right, it’s okay to want this. Gheorghe’s face is so soft and open, and Johnny curses inwardly, a tiny bit, as his eyes water all over again, but he doesn’t move, doesn’t look down. “For you to...follow?”
“For me to pull my head out my arse,” Johnny says, fast and bitter, and Gheorghe’s eyes crinkle with delight that makes Johnny’s heart thud and all the bitterness drift away, as quickly as it came. “You were...patient. Didn’t need to be. Can’t believe you did wait, really. Feels like I owe you—in a good way, the best way,” he adds in a rush as Gheorghe frowns. “Not pissed about it, honest, just want to make it up to you.”
Gheorghe kisses him, and Johnny closes his eyes as Gheorghe pulls slowly away and strokes the line of Johnny’s jaw with a warm, blunt finger. “The English don’t know that love means owing nothing.”
The warmth that runs from the top of Johnny’s head down toward his guts is startling, forcing his eyes open, because how is it that Gheorghe knows Johnny’s language better than Johnny himself does? He can feel himself gawping, knows by the light in Gheorghe’s eyes how stupid he must look, and takes Gheorghe’s knuckles in hand, rubs them slowly as he repeats, like a simpleton, only half a question, “Love.”
“Love,” Gheorghe agrees, three words collapsed into one, and smiles as Johnny leans in for a kiss.