Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Whey drips slowly and rhythmically into a bowl, the notes oddly musical in the quiet of the morning. Ruth scoops the curd carefully into the presses, biting her lip slightly as she concentrates, and Alex sits very still and watches Peter watch Ruth. Peter’s gaze remains focussed on her face, just looking, but with an underlying steady intensity as though he is attempting to fix every detail in his mind. Alex, for his part, is desperately remembering the way the rain sounds on the windows, the way escaped strands of hair rest against Ruth’s pale neck, the way Peter leans slightly forward in his chair to place himself that little bit nearer her.

Ruth shoots Alex an amused look under her lashes. “It’s like sitting with taxidermies, the pair of you,” she says, quiet in the peace of the morning but warmly enough that Peter and Alex are unrepentant about continuing to sit quietly, eyes tracking her as she moves about the kitchen to finish her cheeses. “Well,” she says at last, standing back with her hands on her hips to look assessingly at her produce. “Some of that ought to be alright for you to take with you, when you go.”

Despite having thought of little else all morning, Alex likes the reminder about as much as Peter seems to; Peter catches her hand and tugs gently, looking up imploringly at Ruth. She steps closer willingly, but with an air of slight reluctance. They all see where this conversation is going: it’s one they have had before, and no-one is keen on the position Ruth is forced to take up, least of all Ruth herself.

“Come with us,” Peter says anyway, his thumb rubbing over the back of her hand. With Ruth standing before him, her hand so small and delicate in his, and Peter’s face turned up in supplication, the scene before Alex could be Biblical or Classical or some chivalric ideal, if only Ruth ever needed rescuing.

“Peter,” Ruth sighs, and Alex almost wishes Peter wouldn’t ask. Much though he longs for Ruth to change her stance, she cannot; every reminder hurts them all. “You know I have to stay. Who will look after the farm?” she asks of his unchanging expression.

“Mr Mudge.” Alex frowns in some confusion. Ruth blinks, looks to Alex, sees that he, too, doesn’t know what Peter means, and turns back to him with one eyebrow raised. “And his grandchildren, and some of their schoolmates.”

“Why, dear heart, would Mr Mudge and a small herd of children run our farm for a month?” Ruth says with some hesitation.

“Why would we let them?” Alex adds. The idea of handing over every material thing he values in the world to an old man and a collection of eleven-year-olds fills him - not unreasonably - with some trepidation.

“Because Mr Mudge is very experienced, but will soon be retiring. He should like to train the youngsters before he is too old to do so, and requires space that his own farm cannot offer to do so. In exchange for a month looking after our animals and spraying the potatoes, his sons will help us shear our sheep.” Peter looks at Alex, who is trying very hard not to be immediately won over. “We trust Mr Mudge,” he reminds them softly. “And, this way, Ruth could come with us to Dartmoor.”

Alex is immediately won over.

Ruth is thinking it over from every angle, and Alex loves her for it - at present, he only wants all three of them together in his uncle’s old cottage on the moor, with nothing but sheep and heather for miles, but Ruth will not let them do something stupid for a month of peace. She wants to say yes, though. Alex can see it in the way she leans into Peter’s space, pressing their knees together and bowing her head to look him in the eyes.

“Come with us,” Peter says again, one hand shifting to her hip. Ruth lets her hand fall to his shoulder, swaying into the space between his knees and biting her lip thoughtfully. The air is suddenly somehow heavy with quiet and tension, and Alex can feel his heart beating too-loudly in his chest. “Where there is nobody around for miles,” Peter continues in a low voice. His hand slides down the outside of Ruth’s thigh and then back up, catching a little of her skirts and pushing them up slightly, and Alex forgets, for a moment, to breathe.

He would be lying if he said he hadn’t thought about - this; in truth, it has been far more difficult than he would like to admit not to think about it. Alex is quite content to blame Peter and Ruth for at least some of this: if they will insist on kissing him until his head spins, or standing near-glowing in the sunlight, or fitting so tremendously nicely in his arms, then. Well. But he’s not quite sure he’s ready for them to know how much the thinks about - all of that. Ruth is a lady, after all; he should hate to make unwanted advances. And whilst he’s trying desperately not to think about what the world at large and his Aunt Edwina specifically would think of his living arrangements, one thought too many about what Peter might look or feel or sound like, laid out bare under Alex’s palms, still tends to send him stumbling through a shaky prayer for forgiveness in the small hours of the morning. So, much though the isolation of Dartmoor does appeal to Alex for those reasons, he would not be quite so brave as to say it out loud.

“We can be quite alone together,” Peter says, eyes locked on Ruth’s and hand moving slowly up and down the outside of her thigh. Alex is rather impressed; he would have collapsed, jelly-legged into Peter’s lap by this point, were he Ruth, and were he Peter he would not have begun upon this line of persuasion. Every book he has ever read and every scrap of knowledge in this area he has managed to accumulate would have him believe that the fairer sex has limited interest in the matter, but even from this distance, Alex can see Ruth’s pupils are blown wide and dark. Her breathing seems more careful, as if she is thinking rather hard about how to breathe normally in the face of such persuasion; Alex has resorted to merely trying to keep his hitching breaths quiet. “No-one at all to disturb us,” Peter promises, pressing a kiss to Ruth’s hand.

Ruth looks at Alex and makes a decision based on the expression he can’t keep off his face. She moves her hand from Peter’s shoulder to his jaw and swoops quickly in to kiss him, deep and seeking and urgent, and then stands straight again. Alex’s brain stumbles to recover from the sight as Ruth steps neatly out of Peter’s reach and away from his chasing fingers. “Fine. I will go with you to Dartmoor. You have persuaded me by being highly inappropriate for the middle of the morning with the kitchen door entirely open, Peter, when you know people could come to the farm because it was most of your argument. You bastard,” she says, entirely too fast and without much real anger, fanning her very hot and flushed face with both hands as she turns away from them both.

Peter laughs in delighted triumph, eyes dancing with mischief in a way that does not, exactly, help Alex return to his usual state of equilibrium. He leans on the table, propping his head in his palm, and winks at Alex. “What do you think, Alex? I have allowed Ruth to come to Dartmoor with us, thus solving all our problems: am I a bastard, or a genius?”

In an effort to silence any response he might have made to the scene before him, Alex appears to have swallowed his own tongue and fused his jaw shut. It therefore takes a moment to persuade his mouth to work again. “You’re a bastard,” he manages through rather strangled vocal chords.

He can’t help but grin, though, when Peter and Ruth laugh. Ruth maintains a rather impressive blush about it all, but Peter just reaches over the table to take and kiss Alex’s hand - until Ruth flicks some cold water at him from the bucket by the sink and he flinches away. “Don’t you start again,” Ruth says sternly around a smile, and Peter looks duly and rather fraudulently apologetic. “Go and tell Mr Mudge what we’ve decided, will you?” she says, when it becomes apparent that Peter is quite willing to remain here just holding Alex’s hand, and that Alex is not much inclined to move him.

Alex’s hand is given one last squeeze, and then Peter is grinning off into the rain, whistling brightly as he trots through the puddles towards the Mudge farm. Ruth sends a fond look after him and then turns it on Alex. He can’t quite believe his luck for a moment - did the last conversation really happen to him? - and so when he opens his mouth to say something like I’ll go and find the potato sprayer what comes out is “Do you really want - that?”

Ruth tilts her head as she looks at him. “To go to Dartmoor, or to be very alone together and finish that which Peter was good enough to start?” Alex struggles to manage an answer for a moment, until Ruth tilts her head thoughtfully. “I suppose it doesn’t matter, actually,” she continues. “The answer is yes. Very much, if I am honest. Do you?”

Alex nods fervently, comforted by her confidence, and Ruth smiles - which comforts him yet further. “But not here, yet,” he adds rather quietly.

Ruth rounds the table to lean against it and run a hand over his hair and down his hot cheek. He pushes into the contact, brushing a light kiss to the heel of her palm but shooting a faintly nervous look at the still-open door as he does so. “Not here yet,” she agrees easily. “And we’ve plenty of time alone together; we can take all the time you need.”

“I was thinking of you, actually,” Alex mumbles into her hand before he can stop himself.

Ruth laughs softly and kisses him properly, until his blood thrums and he feels boneless in her hands. The caring confidence with which Ruth thumbs at the hinge of his jaw until his mouth falls open to her, the sweetness and ease with which she has him gasping against her tongue, the smug smile she treats him to when she pulls back, leaving him stunned and short of breath - she needn’t really say that she is ready whenever he is, but she does anyway.

Alex loves her for it.

The sun is low over the moor, setting the evening in amber and holding Alex in the moment like an insect in translucent golden resin. The air smells of hot dust and peat smoke when Alex tilts his head back to open up his chest and breathe deep and slow of the warm evening air, leaning back on palmfuls of spongy moss and prickling springy heather with his long legs sprawled out before him. There are midges on the breeze and grasshoppers scratching in the dirt around him, noisy in the quiet of the evening, but the air is warm and there is a fire crackling beside him and, most important of all, Ruth frowning as she prods the peat fire thoughtfully and Peter watching over them with a hand shading his eyes as he gazes over the valley.

Alex closes his eyes to feel the warmth on his eyelids, head dropping back to rest on Peter’s knee. He doesn’t, in truth, know how to be, in this moment. He hasn’t the experience others enjoy of courtship; he’d liked a chap in boarding school - and only realised many years after leaving - and had dealt with that by punching him in the arm a few times and running away from even the most normal of conversations. These are not strategies he thinks Peter and Ruth would much enjoy. But Alex can’t help overthinking every little thing; is he touching too much? Not enough? Is he going too slowly, or at the right speed? He hasn’t the point of reference he needs, no touchstone of knowledge upon which to rely, and any waymarkers society might offer seem not to apply, exactly. Being an unconventional romantic group, Alex is rather unsure of the milestones he ought to wait for, or even expect: it has been made rather clear, after all, that this excursion to Dartmoor could well be when they stop waiting until marriage - a concept that fills Alex with equal parts terror and excitement - but the topic of marriage itself has been rather ignored. Which Alex doesn’t mind so very much, but it is leaving him somewhat anchorless in a sea of feelings which he has only ever been told to expect with one female fiancée.

Peter runs a hand over his hair, thumb brushing away the slight frown that had been forming. “Alright?” he murmurs, and Alex hums.

“Thinking too much,” he says, eyes still closed, and it’s true. He is alone with the people he loves the most, who are exceptionally easy to just be around if Alex could just stop trying, and he is miles from anyone who might give the slightest damn about what they get up to. If his brain could just calm down, he might have a much better time of it all.

“About?” Ruth inquires. He opens his eyes to check, but as expected she’s deliberately keeping her eyes down, stirring their dinner and giving him space to respond as he will.

“Us,” he says, and that does make her eyes flick worriedly to his face for a second. “I’ve never loved anyone like I love you two,” and even just saying that out loud in a more-or-less public place sends a thrill of newness down his spine, “and I’m not sure I quite know how to do it.”

Peter tangles his fingers in Alex’s hair - it needs cutting, if Peter can get a whole handful of his half-hearted curls at the front - and strokes his brow. “Well, you’re doing rather splendidly so far,” he says, and Alex tips his head up to see him smiling down. The genuine warmth in the gaze makes Alex rather want to kiss him, only he’s too far away; Alex settles for winding his arm around Peter’s other leg and gently rubbing his thigh with his thumb.

“You mustn’t worry so, love,” Ruth says gently, serving their dinner. The smell makes his mouth water and he leans in, still half wrapped around Peter’s leg. “Do as you feel. Stop thinking about what other people might think or say or do; Peter and I aren’t in love with other people.”

“I know,” Alex says, offering Ruth a smile in payment for his plate and reluctantly letting Peter go so that he can drop down onto the heather between them.

“Then that’s all we’ll ask of you,” Peter says, reaching out to fondly shove Alex’s shoulder before tucking into his food. Alex hides a smile in his food; he and Peter apparently went to the same boarding school of showing male affection.

“Sheep all settled, then?” Ruth says after a pause filled by enthusiastic eating and the popping and crackling of the fire.

“More or less,” Peter says around a mouthful. Ruth raises an eyebrow, and he clarifies. “Yes, but we’ll definitely have to stay to the end of the month. Just in case.”

“Oh, I see,” Ruth says archly, trying not to laugh and not quite succeeding. “Well, it’s quite the sacrifice, but I’m sure we shall manage,” she says, waving her fork at the the sunset and the standing stones and the tranquil isolation.

“That’s very good of you,” Peter says, sending Alex an amused smile, and it’s exceedingly tempting to lean into Peter’s side and eat pressed against his broad warmth, so - he does.

Peter gives him a surprised little smile, looking more pleased than he could likely say, and Alex blushes lightly at Ruth’s knowing amusement. He would have spent more time leaning into Peter if he had known it would make him half so happy, especially since his heart seems to while away the hours these days just longing to be touching one or other or both of them and this is far more fun than the occasional punch to the arm.

It is, however, also far more difficult not to respond to the contact, and Ruth’s fairly wicked grin isn’t much helping.

Alex leaves his cleared plate on the grass and shifts to lie down with his head on Peter’s thigh. The world, all the same but turned askew, feels different from here. It’s Midsummer night, the sun low in the sky but still shining on, and there’s magic in the air. Their picnic lines up with the straight rows of stone running on and on across the moor, chasing after the sun, and the heat held in the heather beneath him seems to hold some kind of thrumming energy. These stones were placed here for this moment, and a thousand moments like it; for him, and a thousand people like him. It’s nice to think that he isn’t alone, that others have been here before him and had his worries and stood in his spot. Alex has been here before, because others have, and - actually, Alex has been here before.

He frowns, suddenly remembering: barely twice the height of the stones himself, he had run up and down the length of the road and stumbled on the uneven ground and compared the length of his shadow with an older, taller gentleman. The man had had a warm voice, as if always entertained by the lad’s antics, and Alex remembers that better than he does the man’s face. It had been a marked contrast upon his relocation to Sussex.

“My uncle took me here, once,” he realises. “When I was a boy. I had forgotten.”

“I thought you never really knew him,” Peter says, running his fingers through Alex’s hair.

Alex shrugs one shoulder. “I didn’t. But I was here, at Midsummer, when I was little more than five or six. He told me about the druids and celts and magic, and showed me the stones.” Alex remembers reaching out to trace chubby little fingers over something older than he could truly comprehend, listening to stories of people who lived longer ago even than the little boy’s grandfather - which is old indeed, when one is five or six. He had been fascinated, of course, and a voracious reader ever since; searching for traces of a hand older than his own in his books and buildings and even the earth around him.

“Do you remember why you came?” Ruth asks, and Alex winces. At least the memory of his stay isn’t painful; the boy hadn’t yet realised that this little holiday was only the beginning of a life lived with aunts and uncles. It does hurt now, however.

“Aunt Edwina hadn’t yet snatched me away to live with her,” Alex says. Peter’s hand moves to squeeze his shoulder quickly, and Ruth says “ah,” ever so quietly. “I think I should have liked it better here. He seemed to like children.”

And he had tried to keep Alex with him; Alex vaguely remembers a stand-off in the cottage’s little kitchen between Uncle John and his sister-in-law, chalk and cheese from the tip of Edwina’s fine hat to the soles of John’s scuffed boots. Uncle John had stood his ground as long as he could, but then there had been a comment made about “men like you” and Alex’s uncle had recoiled as if stung, and Edwina had smiled like a shark, and that had been that. Alex did not see John Leslie Lawrence again.

“I think I wish you had lived here,” Peter says. “I hate to think of your childhood, and I’m now just as upset about your bachelor uncle alone all that time, too.”

Something about the way Peter says bachelor makes Alex frown and shift to look up at him. “You don’t think - he was a confirmed bachelor, do you?”

“I don’t know,” Peter says quickly. “Only - he never married, and I really couldn’t say why your aunt didn’t like him or why he spent so much time up on the moor, but-”

“I think,” Alex begins, cutting off Peter’s rambling and then trailing off himself. “Perhaps. I should like to think that at least one of my relatives wouldn’t mind my actions.”

Another hand settles on his head - Ruth’s, by the slight chill and thin fingers. “We aren’t doing anything wrong,” she reminds him a little sharply.

“I know. And I’d like to think that Uncle John knows so too.” There is a pause after he speaks, and eventually he contorts his neck to look at Ruth. She smiles at him - with such softness that Alex cannot help but feel that his heart is literally melting in his chest - and leans over to kiss his forehead. His eyes flutter shut and he falls into a smile, the corner of which Peter traces with the very tip of his index finger, as if he’s trying to remember the shape.

The sun slips below the horizon in a last dying blaze of glorious red and orange and purple, taking with it the very last of the warmth. With the wind on the moor, the temperature drops rapidly even right beside the fire, and Alex knows he hasn’t long to wait before a sudden and terrible shiver ripples through Ruth’s slight frame.

Sure enough, there is a colossal shudder from their companion and Alex and Peter start to move, resigned to their return to the cottage. “No,” Ruth protests. “It’s fine. We don’t have to go back yet.”

Alex stays sat up, sure that they’ll have to go back after all, but Peter just opens his arms. “Come on, then. Can’t have anyone getting cold.”

Alex shrugs at Ruth’s look of bemusement, and this seems to be impetus enough; she shifts, clambering into Peter’s lap, and smiles as his arms settle about her. Alex flops back down, head now pillowed in her skirts, and grins up at them both. Peter’s smile is half-pressed into Ruth’s hair, but broad enough to be easily seen. From here, Alex has a rather excellent view; when Ruth turns her head to see and then kiss Peter’s grin, Alex can watch every movement that turns it from a chaste press of lips into something quite different. He can see the way that Peter chases every inch of contact, he can see when Ruth licks into Peter’s mouth, he can see Ruth’s hand come up to cup Peter’s jaw and Peter’s shift on her waist and both their spare hands drop as one to Alex’s own chest to catch up his hands in theirs.

Alex presses their knuckles to his lips. His skin is thrumming with nervous energy, all anticipation and fear, and he wants more and less and everything all at once. Peter’s thumb rubs across his wrist in time with a movement against Ruth’s lips and Alex shudders, head to toe. It’s terrifying and electrifying at the same time, and Alex can barely breathe for how much he wants it.

Peter and Ruth break apart, breathing heavily as they look down at him. “Cold?” Peter says.

“We can go back,” Ruth says, squeezing his hands.

Alex is fairly sure that, were it not for the night breeze, his face would be quite literally aflame. “It isn’t that,” he says quietly.

Peter hums, thoughtful and a little surprised. “Well, we can still go back,” Ruth says quite slowly, voice low and warm but perhaps slightly nervous, too.

“I wouldn’t mind that,” Peter says, as calmly as he can manage.

Ruth snorts, giving him an oh, really look. “Wouldn’t mind,” she scoffs quietly over Alex’s surprised giggling. Peter rubs the back of his neck, grinning rather sheepishly. “I’m sure.”

They are giving him the choice, and Alex quite possibly likes that the best of all, better than the kissing and the view and the wild, wonderful moor. That makes it easier to smile up at Peter and Ruth, and squash his nerves, and say, “I shouldn’t much mind it either.”

There’s a tension in the air as they pack up and walk home. Alex seems able to feel threads linking him to Peter and Ruth, aware at every turn of their exact location and drawn to them with every movement. But they’re practical people, so Peter and Ruth wash up their picnic and Alex sits at the table to trim the wicks of their lamps and he doesn’t kiss them hungrily the second that the door closes behind him. He can be a patient, practical person, and if they’re to have any light this evening the wicks will have to be trimmed - and he wants light this evening, enough to see the reality of the smooth skin and bared limbs that have haunted his dreams since the midwinter equinox.

Peter reaches around Ruth, making little to no effort to leave enough space and subsequently brushing his arm down the entire length of her back and a little beyond. In revenge, she presses the side of their hips together, in contact from her shoulder to her knee, and smiles sweetly up at Peter. With every reminder of what is to come, a little of Alex’s nerves melts away to be replaced with pure anticipation and he has to occupy himself entirely with the lamp in his hands lest he become entirely distracted and quite useless.

In consequence, he doesn’t realise Ruth and Peter have finished their task until Ruth taps his shoulder gently. “Sit back, my love,” she says and Alex, quite happy to do as instructed even without the slightest idea what for, pushes back from the table to look up at her. For this reason, he hasn’t the time to be nervous before Ruth is collecting up her skirts and swinging one leg over his knees. Instinctively his hands fall to her waist, supporting and holding her close as she settles astride his lap, her hands on his shoulders, and Alex can barely seem to breathe as she leans in to kiss him.

It’s all both familiar and new. Alex has lost count of the kisses he has given and received, but Ruth’s never been slightly above him before and she seems to like the new angle, judging by the way she leans into him, pressing up and forward and kissing him fervently. Ruth’s hips shift in his lap and that’s new, too, and of definite interest; with her hands and her hips pinning him to the chair Alex feels surrounded, almost lost in her, and it’s a great deal easier to get out of his own head and stop thinking when he is entirely reduced to the points at which he is in contact with Ruth.

There is a loud and shaky exhale from the direction of the sink and Ruth pulls back enough to shoot a wicked grin at Peter. His hands are all twisted up in the dishcloth, eyes fixed firmly on the pair of them, and apparently as unable to move as a tree rooted firmly to the flagstones. Alex himself cannot seem to manage much more response than breathless wonder, especially when Ruth begins to teasingly press her lips to his jawline, her eyes on Peter.

Alex sighs himself when her fingers slide over the skin of his neck, head tipping back to give her better access, and he can see Peter’s bright eyes tracking every single movement greedily. His breath hitches slightly whenever Alex responds to Ruth’s slow, steady progression along the line of his jaw and down his neck, and this is impetus enough to encourage Alex. The idea of perhaps inciting such a response from Ruth and this then pleasing Peter - performing, almost - holds a curious illicit appeal for Alex, and according to his new plan he moves, aiming for access to Ruth’s neck - and managing to bump their heads none too gently together.

“Oops,” Ruth says, drawing back a little. She appears fairly unbothered - fondly amused seems a more apt fit, to be honest - but Alex still shuts his eyes, flaring up in mortification. “No, Alex, come back,” she says softly, half a laugh hiding in her voice as her hands slide up his neck to cradle his jaw. “It’s alright. Come back.”

Alex cracks his eyes open, shooting a nervous glance at Peter who is still stationary by the sink. It had hardly been exactly what he had intended from his vague attempt at being alluring, but Peter remains just as frozen in focus as before. Only, now, there’s something else softening his gaze; a sort of helpless fondness that drags him forward onto the balls of his feet and gentles his focus without dimming its intensity.

And Ruth has obligingly moved enough for his lips to reach her neck without serious injury to either of them, and these things give Alex enough encouragement to hide his flushed face by pressing a chaste kiss to the underside of Ruth’s jaw.

Her head tips back with a pleased hum that Alex can feel against his lips and she shifts slightly in his lap. Emboldened by this, he moves a little further down the pale, smooth column of her neck, coaxing tiny huffs of air from her open mouth. She presses closer to him, her hands clinging to his shoulders and her hips bearing down against his thigh, and Alex gets so caught up in the addictive responses he can chase from deep within Ruth that he almost forgets his audience until Peter lets out a breathy sigh that sends trembles down Alex’s spine.

He tilts his head enough to see Peter. Having given up on the dishcloth, the man is now clinging with white knuckles to the sink; it appears to be all that stands between him and an unceremonious collapse to the floor. The knowledge that it was they who had so completely already rendered him incapable of normal function runs through Alex like hot, golden power, from his head down to his fingertips bracketing Ruth’s waist, and half a triumphant smile creeps onto his face before he presses an open-mouthed kiss to Ruth’s neck just above the line of her shirt collar, keeping eye contact under his lashes with Peter all the while.

Peter’s eyes are burning into him as Ruth lets out a breathy moan and her hips stutter, just once, seeking pressure against Alex’s thigh. It briefly punches the breath out of Alex, her grip tightening on his shoulders and hips rolling under his palms and then, on top of that, the almost whine that slides from between Peter’s teeth. Alex pants into Ruth’s neck, teeth pressing absently against the soft skin there, and her nails abruptly dig into his shoulders with an urgent moan at the gentle graze.

And that’s - interesting. Rather extremely arousing, actually, if Alex is being honest, and if he can’t be that now then he never will. So, holding his breath for the slightest hint of pain or fright, Alex nips ever so gently at Ruth’s neck. He is immediately rewarded with another stuttering roll of her hips and Peter’s grip tightening yet further on the basin, which suits Alex just fine - so he does it again, littering Ruth’s marble skin with little kisses and bites until she’s writhing and panting under his ministrations.

Suddenly she pushes his head gently back and he looks up curiously - to quickly find that Peter has somehow made it to his knees beside the chair, and is willing to reward his little performance with a driving, deep kiss and a hand sweeping down his chest and his side and oh, Alex is painfully hard. He almost hadn’t noticed. Now, though, with Peter’s broad palm settled on the flat of his stomach, just above his belt - now, Alex is no longer distracted by his lovers’ responses and entirely too aware of his own.

A reedy, breathy whine seems to echo in the small space between the three of them, and Alex realises with some embarrassment that he had made it. Peter prevents any attempt to stifle his sounds or hide his face by making a low, rumbling noise deep in his chest, almost a growl, that has Alex’s fingers impulsively tightening on Ruth’s waist. He’s quite powerless to do ought but meet Peter’s biting, desperate kisses with all the feeling his scattered brain can muster, and attempt rather half-heartedly to catch his breath in between.

“I love you,” Peter pants in between urgent kisses, and his voice is so wrecked, and there’s such desperation in it that Alex can’t help a brief high-pitched moan. “I love you both - so much - I-”

Ruth leans in and kisses him, sealing in the last of his agitated words. He seems to settle a little into something less frantic, as if he’d finally received confirmation with the gesture, and Alex moves one hand to settle over Peter’s sternum. He can feel Peter’s heartbeat running at half a hundred miles a minute under his thumb and there are suddenly far too many layers between them all and Alex cannot possibly bear it any longer.

Peter and Ruth break apart, foreheads leaning together but eyes sliding to Alex, when his hand fists tightly in Peter’s shirt and tugs. He can’t muster up anything but this: clinging to Peter’s shirt and staring in desperation at them both in the hopes that what he so urgently wants will somehow be conveyed through this alone.

It seems to work. “Upstairs?” Ruth inquires gently, and Alex nods fervently even as a bolt of fear runs through him, top to toe. He’d not really had time to think about it before, what with Ruth simply sitting in his lap and demanding his affection, but now Ruth and Peter are standing and turning to the steps and their bedroom and everything that entails - and Alex is rather suddenly frozen with fear, unhidden by Ruth’s skirts and oddly disconnected by the sudden lack of contact. He cannot quite make himself move, left staring after Peter and Ruth as they, hand in hand, turn away from him - but only for half a second that feels like a year, because then they move as one to reach out. Ruth is gazing over her shoulder, her eyes hot and heavy on him, and Peter’s hand is outstretched in unquestioning invitation, and they both look so bloody fond that Alex abruptly forgets to be nervous or fretful or disconnected.

All he wants - all he has ever wanted, he realises as he scrambles from his chair, tripping over his feet in his eagerness to slip his fingers into Peter’s hand and settle his palm on the small of Ruth’s back - is to be with them.

Alex wakes rather earlier than he had intended because of a curious inability to breathe properly. He shifts his head, attempting to free his nose from the mass of what turns out to be Ruth’s hair without opening his eyes, before settling back against her bare shoulder. A broad palm on his hip shifts slightly when he does, but Peter fails to stir when Alex doesn’t move far enough to disturb his grip and the soft breaths of his lovers continue unabated.

They’ve spent the night curled up like this, or in some permutation of this position, a fair few times before; usually with Peter in the middle and Ruth and Alex sprawled beside and half atop him. It occurs to Alex now that this could well be why he’s never woken up drowning in copper hair before - although, actually, now he thinks about it, it might also have something to do with Ruth not plaiting it last night so that it could fall about her shoulders and then around them both in a glittering fine curtain as she leaned in to kiss him, hips moving in a teasing rhythm - he stops that thought. Alex can’t help a slight frown, resisting the temptation to hide his embarrassed blush in the nearest available surface - this being Ruth’s bare skin, and therefore unlikely to help him much.

Peter shifts on Ruth’s other side, his hand sliding down Alex’s side to the small of his back and managing to press Alex’s hips into Ruth’s. An irritatingly familiar jolt of what feels uncomfortably like fear runs through him and Alex makes a deliberate effort to still himself slightly away from Ruth. Peter’s hand on him serves only as a reminder of Alex’s own touch: rather hesitant, and awkward from the familiar motions but unfamiliar angle, but still coaxing out moans and grunts and little breathless words of adoration-

Alex rather wishes it wasn’t common for his lovers to spend the early mornings attempting to iron the worries from his brow, but it appears not to be. He cracks one eye open and Ruth rewards him with a smile, trailing the thumb that had been pressing away his frown down the side of his face to cup his jaw. “Good morning, my love,” she says softly, in the slightly rasping tones of a voice not long roused from sleep, and she strokes the line of his cheekbone. “How are you, this fine day?”

Alex is -

Alex isn’t sure. There isn’t money in the world that could convince him to be anywhere but here, bathed in the grey light of early morning and wrapped up in the arms of those he loves the best. But he had also been about to make a daring escape from their bed without waking Ruth or Peter because the reminder of the night before had suddenly been far too much. Even now, he’s not quite sure where he wants to be.

“I’m not sure the day is that fine,” he says instead, smiling slightly and rather hoping she won’t press him on it.

It works a little; Ruth huffs and rolls her eyes and grins. “Pedant. Besides-” she raises one finger from his face to make a tiny circle at the room around them. “-seems pretty fine to me.”

Alex musters up an unconvincing smile. He wishes he could have her calm, could bottle it up and keep it for his own when he could best use it, but instead he is left with buckets of mingled joy and terror and guilt and love that overflow and spill onto Ruth and Peter too.

Ruth’s smile slides smoothly into a concerned sigh. “Oh, if I ever meet your aunt, Alex,” she says in a voice full of carefully controlled sadness and anger. “She and I shall have quite a few words.”

Alex closes his eyes against such emotion so close to his face. He’s not had anyone so ready and willing to fight for him since he was a small boy, and in truth he is not quite sure how to respond. “It isn’t just her fault, you know,” he says, because Aunt Edwina is, despite everything, his family, but his voice trembles slightly as he does and he tries very hard to focus on the slow and steady sweeps of the pad of Ruth’s thumb over his cheekbone.

“Even I might struggle to take up arms against the Church, darling,” Ruth points out, and Alex smiles in spite of himself. “But I would, if only I could work out how. If you asked.”

Alex opens his eyes again, searching her irises for insincerity and finding not a drop of it in her sharp gaze. Ruth has fought for everything she has ever wanted, from her independence to her right to live unmarried, even down to the bicycle that the salesman was rather unwilling to let her purchase. But it means an awful lot to be on that list of things Ruth has deemed worthy of her efforts, and it makes Alex feel tremendously cowardly for even thinking of running away from something he feels rather unable to live without, just because someone else might disapprove. Alex has had everything in his possession handed to him on a gilded platter; the only things he has ever had to make an effort to have and hold are Ruth and Peter, and they mean more to him than all else put together. He’d take up arms in their defence, too.

Something in him relaxes at this realisation and Ruth must notice, because a tense edge is smoothed from her bearing. “I might need - this,” Alex says hesitantly, gesturing between the pair of them at their words, floating in the bubble between their bodies. “Sometimes. But you needn’t fight the Church; the main battle is up here, in my head, but I am trying.”

Ruth beams at him, and helpless as he is he returns it. She leans in to kiss his forehead, her bare skin pressed against him shoulder to toe and against Peter in equal measure on her other side, and Alex’s heart sings with it. “That’s all we ask,” Ruth says, and Alex chases the warmth in her smile with his lips. His hand settles where her waist curves into her soft stomach, and he’ll never be quite satisfied with her corseted figure again - not when he could have smooth skin and rolling movement and little hisses of breath when he trails his fingers down her sensitive sides.

“Mmm, sleepin’,” Peter mumbles crossly into Ruth’s hair, clamping his arm tighter around Alex and Ruth to prevent their slight movements.

Alex muffles his giggles in Ruth’s shoulder as she grins wickedly. “So sorry, darling, did we wake you?” she inquires sweetly, freeing one hand to run it the length of Peter’s thigh, knee to hip and back again. “Were we disturbing you, when we were saying good morning? Enjoying the beautiful day?” Her voice lowers smoothly into something far more private, sending shivers down Alex’s spine as he gazes up at her in mindless adoration. “When Alex was kissing me, just inches from your face? Did that wake you up?”

There is a pause while Peter processes this, and Alex tries not to laugh again. “Yes. It did,” Peter says eventually, sounding much more awake and alert now.

Ruth bites her lip, grinning. “I am sorry. We shall be quiet, won’t we, Alex?”

Alex nods, even though Peter is yet to remove his face from the nape of Ruth’s neck and so cannot see that or the uncontrollable joy that accompanies it. “You’ll try,” Peter says, hand idly stroking Alex’s back.

“We can be quiet!” Ruth objects - quite loudly, Alex is half inclined to point out.

Peter finally sits up enough to see them both, head propped up in one hand. “Perhaps you can,” he tells her, “but I’m not sure about him.” Alex almost objects - there’s a slight frisson of fear that goes with it, that perhaps he’s doing it wrong or will somehow get them discovered - but then Peter winks at him and squeezes his hip gently. “I suppose I shall just have to stay awake and see what you get up to, then.”

Ruth presents her face to him for a kiss and needs not wait long to receive one. “You’re a saint, darling,” she tells him archly, eyes dancing with amusement. “Putting up with all this terrible noise.”

Peter grins, leaning over to kiss Alex - all stubble and sweetness. “I’m very open to rewards,” he says, semi-seriously, and Alex discovers that it’s rather lovely to be so caught up in skin and bodies and laughter that he doesn’t think of anything else at all.

July represents a return to normality. The myriad young Mudges and their classmates are kept on just long enough to pull pounds of potatoes from the thick, cloying mud and give the horses one last nose rub before, at long last, Alex has his farm and his lovers to himself again. The sun is shining, the sky is blue, and Alex is both processing cherries and preventing Peter from eating them - the latter with rather less success than the former, Peter having discovered his weakness for sweet-sticky fruit flavoured kisses and using it ruthlessly to his advantage.

Ruth steps out of the farmhouse, frowning at an open letter in one hand and using the other to swat Peter with a newspaper for being a nuisance. Alex tilts his head up at her. “All well?” he says, with only slightly forced calm.

She hums, not unhappily, and drops the newspaper in Peter’s lap as she settles between them on the bench in the yard, back against the sun-warmed stone. “Yes; Miss Bexleigh continues to be tremendously happy in her new position, although I’ve a mind to drop her a line or two about being careful. She is living in this man’s house, after all, and I do worry about how private she keeps her correspondence.”

Peter frowns, licking red juice from his fingertips. “She’s not having an affair with her chum’s husband, is she?”

“By the sounds of it, not the chum’s husband, no,” Ruth says with deliberate emphasis, still frowning at the neat lettering criss-crossing the page, and Alex can’t quite hide his smile at Peter’s startled amusement. “I will say something, I think,” Ruth goes on as she folds the letter back into its envelope. “I don’t suppose you know a Mr Frederick Fitzwater, do you, Alex?”

Alex furrows his brow, thinking. In truth, it’s harder every day to keep a hold on the intricate details of his life before the farm; knowledge of vague society acquaintances or the rules of bridge (neither of which had been his strongest suits even at the height of his socialite career) are now almost entirely lost to him, and he cannot quite help a general sentiment of good riddance. Being out and about in the world as he currently is, come rain or shine, makes everything feel so much more real than ever before, and in consequence there’s a dream-like quality shrouding his recollections of the interminable, monotonous days spent in his aunt’s shadow, greeting an endless parade of similar faces and people and trying desperately to be interested.

Having said all that, he thinks he does remember a Frederick Fitzwater - broad in the shoulders with a booming voice to match and a sort of boisterous energy Alex had found rather intimidating. “Yes, I believe so. A horse-and-hounds sort of chap, you know? He drank rather more than he ought, but that only made him rather noisy.” Ruth nods, satisfied, and it’s another tiny window into the things over which Ruth frets and that Alex hasn’t given a thought to - but then, however trapped Alex had felt in Sussex, he had escaped on his own two feet and with very little actual difficulty. Ruth and Elsie and Mrs Fitzwater and countless others like them could hardly dream of the ease with which Alex hopped on a train and became quite entirely independent.

The thought is a little saddening, so he chases it with the next brighter thing that comes into his head. “Rather handsome, I thought.”

It does the trick; Ruth sets the letter aside at last as she laughs, smiling up at him. “Oh, did you?” she says, eyes dancing, and Alex grins back.

“Broad shoulders, you know - always appealing.”

Ruth hums in amused agreement, knocking their boots together where they stretch out into the yard. Dartmoor was good for them all, but Alex feels a hundred times more comfortable in his skin after a little time away from the world to sort his head and his heart in sweet companionable isolation. He’s rather less paranoid now, too; he can sit outside, a little too close to them both, and enjoy the sunshine of the moment more than he frets about somehow being discovered. Once one has been talked into washing fleeces half-naked in a river, and then laying the wool out to dry on the sun-warmed grass, and then laying out themselves on cool, damp wool with nothing but the wind between their bare skin and the sunshine, with no-one for miles to see - after all that, bumping sleeved elbows on a bench and idly discussing the male physique cannot quite hold the same terror it once did.

Ruth nudges Peter. “You’re very quiet - do you disagree? Prefer a slimmer silhouette on a gent?”

“I like an Alex-shaped silhouette,” Peter says with studied calm and just a touch of reproach, popping a cherry in his mouth to excuse his further silence on the topic, and Ruth scoffs, rolling her eyes.

“You’re not jealous, are you? You daft sod - Alex, what adjective would you use to discuss Peter’s shoulders?”

“Well,” Alex says, raising one eyebrow as he looks back at Ruth - and Peter, though the man’s trying to be terribly subtle about watching them - and sharing in her exasperated amusement. “The word broad does come to mind; what do you think?”

“Very much the same, sir,” Ruth says, giving Peter a significant look. He offers them a sheepish grin and a shrug, and Ruth removes the bowl of cherries from his lap with an amused sigh. “Honestly, the pair of you.”

“Oi!” Alex objects without much heat. “I don’t see how that was my fault.”

“No, dear,” Ruth soothes dryly. “You’re doing a delightful job of coming to terms with who you are and what you want - only look what it did to Peter. Might be a nice change if you could both get your heads on straight at the same time.”

Peter catches Alex’s eye and sends them both into giggles. “Sorry, Ruth,” Peter says eventually, pressing his forehead briefly to her temple and making her smile a little harder for her to conceal. “How come you’re so much better at all this, then?”

It’s an idle question, more a product of Peter’s amusement than actual curiosity, but Ruth’s hands still on the cherries in her lap and Alex finds himself rather interested in the serious answer she seems inclined to give. “I suppose I’ve had rather less to - come to terms with,” she says, looking thoughtfully into the distance. “Falling in love with charming gentlemen is more or less par for the course, I’d say, although two at once and to quite this extent was something of a surprise.”

“When did you know?” Alex asks, busying himself with cherry-processing to avoid their gazes. It hardly matters, of course, but Alex equally longs to know how long, exactly, he has been theirs.

“That I loved you both?” Ruth clarifies, before tilting her head and humming thoughtfully at his nod. “Late November, December time, I think,” she says, nudging Alex’s foot. “Although I was rather smitten with you, Alex, by the time you left, and with Peter by the time you came back. He had a month’s head-start, but you made up for it admirably,” she explains to Peter, leaning into his side, and he rewards her with a sunshine smile and a kiss to her hair. “I had managed to persuade myself I was only in love one at a time, while we were in different counties; bit harder when we were all together again.”

“I never knew,” Alex says softly. He hadn’t had even the slightest idea, and he rather dislikes the image he now has of Ruth, alone and troubled and trying not to be in love.

She snorts. “I should hope not! I certainly didn’t want you to. Risky business, falling in love with one’s employer, or even one’s fellow employee.” Ruth soothes this little sadness by rubbing their ankles together and continuing to idly lean into Peter - the reminder of the Candlemas argument and how they had all begun still stings a little.

“That’s when I knew,” Peter says a little hesitantly. “I mean, I knew about - what and who I wanted - before then, but. You two. We had our fight, and I realised what I wanted just in time to lose it.”

Alex stands abruptly, Ruth barely managing to rescue the bowl of cherries from his lap before he has one arm wrapped around their shoulders and his hand cradling the back of Peter’s neck, the other propping him up on Ruth’s knee. Peter tastes like cherries and surprise, warmed by the bright summer sun, and Alex squeezes his eyes shut to press all of his apologies and affection and slight sweet sorrow into the kiss.

Peter, when Alex pulls back, is smiling in soft understanding. “I know,” he says, before Alex even has a chance to put his atonement into words. “I know.”

“If you had thrown all the cherries on the floor,” Ruth admonishes as he sits back down and accepts his bowl, “I’d have been very cross with you.”

“Extenuating circumstances?” Alex offers, and Ruth rolls her eyes fondly.

“Oh, alright,” she says, twisting against Peter to offer him her own apology.

They work quietly for a moment, Peter idly thumbing through the newspaper as the pile of cherry stones grows steadily. “It was Boxing Day for me,” Alex says. “I had some - confusing emotions about you kissing each other.”

“Confusing emotions could be the title of your autobiography, Alex,” Peter says dryly, and Alex laughs.

“Rather. But it feels as though I’ve never not loved you, these days - does that make sense?” Memories of Alex’s days at university, of meeting Ruth off the train, of listening to Peter sing a shanty on that bright Plymouth morning - all are now suffused with a great, all-encompassing fondness, as if he’d been head-over-heels since the very moment of shaking Peter’s hand their very first Michaelmas term, or raising his hat at Ruth’s grin just ten months ago.

She gives him that very same broad, bright grin now. “Yes, I dare say it does.”

They’ve enough cherries to keep them in pies and jam all winter, now, and Alex feels a warm glow of satisfaction spread through him. It isn’t only how much they’ve produced and how tremendously well they’ve done for their first year of farming - although both are rather impressive - but also the tangible reminder that such a supply presents. They have prepared for the winter; one they intend to spend together, working the farm they love and doing as they please, and this will, with time, be but one of many. The cherries here are a promise of time together to come, and Alex cannot wait.

“This Agadir thing isn’t resolved yet,” Peter sighs, frowning at the newspaper. “Keeps saying things about protection of liberties and warships in the Mediterranean.”

“Has no one considered giving Morocco back to the Moroccans?” Ruth yawns, settling her head on Peter’s shoulder and blinking sun-sleepy eyes.

Alex smiles, rubbing a thumb over her kneecap. “Ruth Goodman, diplomat extraordinaire,” he says fondly.

She offers him a sweet, closed-eyes smile. “That sounds about right. I do a good enough job of keeping the peace on this farm, don’t I?”

“Oh, splendid,” Alex confirms, grinning out over the Devon landscape. All green and rolling hills, he couldn’t feel further from the sands of North Africa; and though Peter offers the paper one last frown before folding it away to smile in helpless fondness at Ruth, there’s also a large thumbprint of cherry juice staining the article deep purple and Alex finds it tremendously easy to ignore a foreign crisis in favour of a cherry-stained future on their farm.

One of Mr Mudge’s younger sons returns from his new, modern job in London in time for the harvest with a tripod under one arm and an enormous film camera beneath the other. It’s an event that causes consternation, gossip and delight in Morwellham; on the one hand, to be filmed is an honour! We, the people of Morwellham might be famous in the city! And on the other, we never ‘ad nothing like this in my day and it’s intruding on our privacy.

Alex can’t help but find the whole thing rather amusing - leave it to the village to render of a molehill an entire alpine resort - until he discovers that Nathan Mudge intends to film all the farms in his documentary of modern farming, and that this would include Alex’s own.

It isn’t the novelty that puts him off. It’s actually rather fascinating, and Nathan is quite happy to let Alex have a look at the contraption and ask interested questions and almost press buttons - which, admittedly, does make Nathan flutter anxiously about the extremely delicate and expensive kit under Alex’s untrained fingertips. Nor is it really the potential for judgement of his amateur farming, although Alex is slightly insulted that the young Mudge thinks it is.

“It wouldn’t even be for that long, honest,” Nathan implores as Alex frowns at the camera set up between them to photograph the churchyard. “Just to film you harvest one strip of oats, and take a few pictures of the three of you after. Nothing to it.” Alex tries and fails to not pull a face, and Nathan Mudge sighs. “Think it over, would you?” he says, collecting his contraption up in his arms and returning to his family.

Ruth announces her presence at his side by tucking her hand into his elbow and Peter ambles out of the Church behind them to stand at her shoulder. “What’s this, considering a career on the screen?” she says with a smile.

The frown which their presence had briefly chased away returns with full force. “Rather the opposite,” Alex says, starting their usual Sunday morning meander back to the farm. “I’m not sure it’s quite my thing.”

“All the other farms are doing it,” Peter points out. He’s quite neutral about it, not accusing at all, but Alex still chews his lip.

“Do you want to? Be filmed, I mean.”

Peter shrugs as he peels off his jacket, now far enough from the tutting old ladies to do so. Ruth lets her spare hand drop between them, brushing the thin linen of his shirtsleeves with her thin fingertips. “It matters very little to me either way, to be honest. I simply can’t help but notice that it really does seem to matter to you, darl-” Peter cuts himself off halfway through the endearment, flicking his gaze over his shoulder at the thankfully empty lane behind them.

Alex winces, looking at his feet, and Ruth rubs her thumb over his arm. “Is that why?” she asks quietly.

He shrugs, which is confirmation enough. “I’ll be more careful, Alex, promise,” Peter says apologetically, and Alex shoots him a tiny, but forgiving, smile.

“The camera can’t hear us, anyway,” Ruth points out. “We really would be quite safe.”

“I just hate-” Alex stops and huffs in frustration. It’s hard to say, exactly, why taking their behaviour down permanently on celluloid fills him with quite such unassailable dread. “I worry that this will condemn us anyway,” he says weakly. “If we are - pinned down, like this. Publicly.”

“It will just be as we are in front of the village,” Ruth says, frowning. He knows it isn’t so much the not-filming that bothers her; something is eating at Alex, and she will wrest it from him come hell or high water. “You know that, Alex, so what is it really?”

The hedgerows, high about their ears, hum with insects going about their business in the sunshine, untroubled by the slight clouds scudding across the heavens. There’s breeze enough to catch Peter’s wild-grown curls and brush the loose strands of copper collected behind Ruth’s ear, and Alex’s eyes are sunsore when he closes them on a sigh. “It will not just be the village, in the end,” he says, slow and measured. “We will be inviting the whole world onto our farm to peer at our life here and ask questions and poke and press and pry, and I will not have it.”

“Will you not,” Ruth says, sharp and arch.

Alex winces. “I do not want it,” he corrects, and she settles. Peter deems them safe from onlookers and catches Ruth’s hand in his own, swinging idly between them.

“People will not press the matter, Alex,” Peter says with soft confidence. “They will see three farmers, and assume that some of us are married and the other an employee, or family member. They will not be right, but that is none of our concern. I hardly think anyone is going to pay enough attention to us to think anything more of it at all.”

Alex sighs, turning to them. “Does it really bother you? That I don’t want to be photographed?” he pleads.

Ruth wraps her hand a little more snugly around his arm. “Only because it bothers you, dear heart. But if you don’t want it, we shan’t do it.”

Alex almost wants to object - he isn’t bothered that he doesn’t want to be filmed, he just doesn’t want it - but it’s a glorious day and Peter has moved on to whether this weather will stick, anyway, because there’ll be no filming if it doesn’t, and it isn’t an important distinction.

He’s grateful, later, that he hadn’t, because it turns out to be not quite true.

Mrs Westford, now rather grown children in tow, drops in for tea with her cousin, and Ruth looks rather too charming for Alex to form polite and coherent thought, with a nearly-toddling baby in her lap pulling at her soft hair. He tries - without much success - to avoid this vision of a perhaps-if-he’s-tremendously-lucky future by following Peter and the boys into the yard; he receives in its stead Peter listening intently as the children attempt to explain football to him with the least clarity possible, and then he and Alex are having rings run about them by two extremely determined lads. In the end, Peter grabs the ball and runs off towards the fields with it, pretending incomprehension of the rules as he is hunted down by two shrill children. Alex cannot help his smile as Peter returns, the eldest clinging to the football and hanging like a sack over one shoulder as the younger grips his shin, koala-like and laughing hysterically. Peter smiles beatifically back, adjusting his grip on a wriggling Will, and the perhaps-please-perhaps future is so sharply seared into Alex’s vision that, for a moment, all he can do is stop and stare and desperately want.

Mrs Westford collects up her children with an indulgent smile - very good of her, since by the time she and Ruth have finished their tea Alex has James on his shoulders in an attempt to keep the ball out of reach of his brother and Will looks liable to make an attempt at climbing Peter to get it back - and as soon as her skirts have vanished around the corner Ruth presses up on her tiptoes to kiss Alex and then Peter in quick succession. “It is tremendously difficult,” she informs them, “to be excessively happy and unable to tell those that love one about it.”

“Sorry,” Peter says. One hand settles on her shoulder, the other twines its fingers slightly with Alex’s.

Ruth raises an eyebrow. “Your fault, is it? Anyway, Maggie’s had Nathan Mudge take their picture and she’s brought me a copy for the family album, though quite why I’ve got it and she hasn’t I really don’t-”

“You have a family album?” Peter says.

Ruth looks momentarily surprised, and then she smiles. “I can get it out, if you’d like.”

Ruth’s family, it appears, were great proponents of semi-annual seaside photographs; it is therefore possible for Peter and Alex, poring over the small cards in the great leather tome, to track Ruth’s growing from a small, grumpy baby to a fidgeting, blurry child, and then on to a slight, sharp-grinning young lady. She can, around production of their dinner, name each and every family member and their relation to her on command, and it’s exceedingly obvious that Ruth is deeply familiar with the images.

“How many cousins have you got?” Peter asks incredulously. Births, deaths and marriages have been recorded in the back of the album in a neat hand, and Peter keeps flipping between the pages in an effort to keep track.

“Too many even to count,” Ruth laughs, and Alex watches her swirl about their little kitchen with grace and ease. “I ought really to go and see some of them soon, for something that isn’t a wedding, christening or funeral, but I’m fairly sure I don’t want to leave you two for a month.”

“Think what we might do to your kitchen,” Alex says, pushing away the promise of pain that comes with the idea of four whole weeks without Ruth.

“Ooh,” Peter says over Ruth’s chuckles. “We could have carpetbag steak and mussels and all the other stuff Ruth says we can’t afford.”

Alex looks in pretend horror at Peter, and then at Ruth. “You can’t leave me,” he says, catching her hand as she passes and gazing imploringly up at her confusion. “Peter will poison me with poorly-cooked seafood.”

“Hey!” Peter says, betrayed, as Ruth laughs. He prods Alex in the ribs, which doesn’t do much to stop his laughter, but then also gives him an amused smile and a kiss. “But, also, please don’t leave us. We adore you.”

“Oh, alright then,” Ruth says, pretending to think about it but smiling rather too hard to be even slightly convincing. “Haven’t the pair of you any photographs, anyway?”

Peter pulls a face. “One or two. My family barely had the money to send my brothers and me to school when I was small, and then we all went off to university. I’ve a graduation photo, but nothing like this.” He runs his fingers reverently down the edges of the pages before him, and Alex suddenly understands why Peter had been so fascinated by a whole book of history and holidays and family. Peter does not often talk of his family, but Alex knows they had had less than auspicious beginnings and that Peter’s not seen them in a while. To have and hold the evidence of a vast family, comfortably well-off and frequently collected before a lens - of course Peter had wanted to see the album.

“I’ve a photo of the pair of us at the graduation ball,” Alex offers, and - as intended - Peter’s brief longing is brushed aside in favour of a grin.

“Have you really?” he says, leaning back in his chair and turning his whole chest towards Alex to capture him with the full force of his pleasure. “I didn’t realise there were any of you and I.”

“Do you look tremendously dashing?” Ruth teases.

“Oh, undoubtedly,” Peter says. “Camera couldn’t resist us. Have you got the photo here?”

Alex gestures absently at the stairs. “It’s in the black box in my room.”

“Right,” Peter says, using Alex’s shoulder to push himself to his feet. “And that’s...under the bed?”

“Didn’t you stay in his room while Elsie was here? Shouldn’t you know?” Ruth queries, half-smiling already.

Alex ignores her. “It’s in the wardrobe, I believe.”

“You definitely ought to know,” Ruth points out as Peter heads upstairs, and Alex rolls his eyes.

“Well, I’ve not had much opportunity to spend time there of late; not since someone declared her bed far superior to all others and required Peter and I to abandon our own rooms.” In truth, he minds it not one bit - as Ruth, laughing triumphantly, is quite aware. There’s something rather special, Alex finds, about shutting the animals away for the night with Peter and then creeping together into the quiet, dark house and up the stairs; into the room where Ruth is stretched out on the bed they share, bathed in soft golden light as she plaits her long, fine hair; where she pretends she isn’t waiting for them and receives them like a queen. To be allowed into her bed, her space, her arms, is a pleasure of which Alex will never tire.

Peter trots back down with his eyes on the envelope in his hands, sliding his fingertips absently over the small of Ruth’s back as he passes and settling back in his chair with one arm now wrapped around Alex’s shoulders. “We aren’t dancing in this photo, are we?” he says, flicking through the small stack.

“No. Not with each other, and exceedingly poorly,” Alex says in response to Ruth’s turn away from the stove, face lit up with delight and a question balanced on her tongue. She pouts and returns to the pot.

“Here we are,” Peter says happily - much more happily than some might say that the image deserves. The photo is of the pair of them, dolled up in their finest glad rags, sitting on a couch at the edge of the ballroom. They are almost unrecognisable to Alex: the young men here have had their curls combed and pomaded and swept straight back from faces far less tanned and weatherbeaten than they are now. Peter’s muscles have filled out since, thanks to a few years of hard work, and even Alex’s younger self is rather skinnier than he is presently. What is immediately recognisable is the pose: Peter, elbows on his knees, and Alex, leaning into his space with an arm propped up on the chair arm between them. Escaping from the dance and the dreary elite conversation to talk quietly together with barely twelve inches between their bowed heads. Alex remembers spending much of that evening this way, but it is more than that. They sit like that even now - are presently, in fact: heads together, close enough to brush hands with every gesture, leaning into each other.

Only now- “Oh, my beautiful boys,” Ruth says, soft and smiling, over their shoulders. Alex opens his arms and she settles sideways on his lap, arm overlapping Peter’s where it rests over his shoulders. “Gosh, don’t you look young. Lovely buttonholes - what are they, roses?”

Peter nods. “I went out in the early morning and bought two matching white roses from Covent Garden, and when I presented them to my beau he said oh, thanks Peter; I hadn’t sorted that out yet.”

Alex closes his eyes and lets his forehead thump into Ruth’s shoulder as she laughs. He does, now, remember Peter presenting him a little nervously with a flower for his buttonhole, but he genuinely hadn’t thought anything of it or seen anything more in the gesture. “You didn’t really - already - did you?” he manages over Ruth’s giggling.

Peter squeezes his shoulder, and is smiling fondly at him when Alex opens his eyes again. “Not really - or, not that I was aware of. I knew I liked you a great deal, and that I wanted us to have matching flowers, but I hadn’t quite managed to put it all together yet.” Peter looks back at the photo in his hand, turning his affection on their past selves. “But you wore something I’d given you, and it was like a little part of you was mine. And you tied my bowtie for me, and every stuffed shirt in the hall reminded me of you.”

Ruth strokes Alex’s hair back from his temples and Alex leans into her hand with a self-deprecating smile. He remembers fussing with the tie, knuckles brushing the soft skin of Peter’s neck and feeling his pulse thrumming beneath, but truly hadn’t thought anything of the curious curling satisfaction from having done so. “My dear, dear boys,” Ruth says, smiling. “Enacting high romance without even noticing.”

Alex ducks his head, grinning, and Peter leans in to press a laughing kiss to his temple. They had been young and exceptionally blind, but the idea of time wasted doesn’t sting so terribly now that Alex has the happy ending within his grasp.

“Anything else good in your photograph collection, Alex?” Peter says, setting the photo of the pair of them aside and picking up the rest.

Alex shrugs. “I really don’t remember. I haven’t looked at them in some time.”

Peter shuffles through them idly, past an awkward and gangly Alex, aged about thirteen, with his Aunt Edwina and three sulky cousins; past gown, mortarboard and degree; past-

Ruth leans over and plucks the oldest photograph from the top of the pile, settling back into Alex’s chest. She flips it over to read the looping scrawl on the back that Alex knows so well, although he rather suspects she knows who sits within the frame of this image already. “Your father looks like you,” she says softly, looking at the picture and not him - for which he is rather grateful.

Alex tightens his grip on her waist, pulling her more snugly against him, instead of answering that. She’s quite right; the man in the photograph standing behind mother and child has hair perhaps a little less inclined to curl wildly and an angle to his smile that a ten-year-old Alex could never quite copy in the mirror, but barring those details it could be him a few years from now. His mother looks proud and faintly austere, but she has given up her hand for baby Alex to cling to while he looks adoringly up at her face. His main memory of her is the softness of skirts and touch and voice as it formed lullabies he now cannot recall.

Peter rubs his shoulder gently and Alex swallows past the lump in his throat. “Yes. My aunt said so. I think, sometimes, it upset her; my father’s brother, her husband, died in the Boer War when my cousins and I were very small, and I grew up looking rather like them both.”

“That must have been difficult for you all,” Ruth says gently, and Alex nods sharply and rests his head against her shoulder. “May I keep your photographs in my album?” she asks after a moment. “Any of yours, Peter, too.”

Alex leans back to look at her, but she appears quite serious. “In your family’s album?” he queries.

Ruth smiles, soft and gentle and a little nervous. “Your family too, if you’d like them.”

He blinks, stunned. Alex has given up on his own family, now, but it hadn’t quite occurred to him that he could have a different one instead - or that he would be invited into one.

“Ruth,” Peter says, a touch of amusement sneaking into his tone. “Are you proposing to us?”

She laughs and pats his thigh. “One knee, darling; you deserve nothing less. Nothing quite so public, I’m afraid, but. If you’d like.”

Alex manages to break through his surprise and collects up Peter’s hand and Ruth’s in one of his own. “Yes,” he says softly. “Please. I should like that very much.”

Alex is almost glad, in the end, that Nathan Mudge films the oat harvest. He’s so ridiculously proud of what the three of them have achieved together, this past year, that he’s half minded to sing their success from the rooftops and send an ear to his cousin as a wedding present.

Peter sends him a bright grin as he passes, collecting up neat sheaves, and Alex’s heart stutters in his chest. He’s so ridiculously in love that it’s almost tempting to sing about that, too.

Ruth had kissed them both and then set about securing their photographs in the album immediately, forcing Peter to get up and serve their dinner so that his and Alex’s place in her family could be finalised as soon as possible. Alex and his parents smile out beside him and Peter, immortalised in a private conversation; opposite, two young men with degrees and proud eyes. But there had been a gap beneath the recent photograph of the Westfords, and no photos of Ruth or Alex or Peter beyond the age of about twenty-one.

And Alex has a family album now, and Ruth’s mam has written several times now to say that she likes the sound of the young men Ruth lives with but would quite like to like the look of them, too, and Alex gets over his terror of discovery long enough to stand before the camera with the people he loves.

It hardly hurts, either, that Nathan Mudge is absolutely delighted.

“That’s the last row,” Ruth tells him, quite redundantly as Alex can certainly see that for himself, but it matters not a bit; Alex gives in to temptation and hops off the reaper binder and strides over to catch her up in his arms. She giggles in startled delight into his neck as he spins her around in triumph, stumbling slightly as he sets her down. It’s tremendously tempting to lean in and kiss her upturned and smiling face, but - the camera.

Something in him must tense, because Ruth runs her hand down his arm in a settling gesture and pulls back a little. She looks a little - disappointed, almost - so he turns his head away from the camera and quite quietly says, “I’m trying very hard not to kiss you.”

She laughs and steps away. “Thank you, that’s very considerate,” she teases as Peter wanders over to sling an arm about Alex’s shoulders.

“That’s about it for our farming year,” Peter says. There’s a glow of satisfaction about the man that Alex can’t help but lean into, pressing into Peter’s side.

“Barring the last snippets of photographic evidence, yes,” Ruth says, beaming. “I’m tremendously proud of you boys.”

“And of you, Ruth,” Alex adds. “You - both of you - you’re simply invaluable.”

Peter squeezes his shoulders, and Ruth blushes prettily, and it’s probably for the best that Nathan Mudge interrupts to arrange his photograph. Alex is altogether too inclined to gather them in his arms and kiss them senseless.

Nathan brings round a copy of their photograph a week later. Alex is the only one in the house when he calls, and so it falls to him to accept the framed image.

They look so austere in the photograph. Nathan had instructed them to assume serious expressions, but the three people behind the glass look so much less joyous than Alex knows they had been that he almost doesn’t recognise them. But it is a good picture: well-arranged, with Ruth sitting upon the cartbed between Alex and Peter, and all three of them proud and tall. They look-

They look like real farmers, and that, more than anything, makes Alex set his shoulders and smile. “Thank you, Nathan.”

He nods, and then shuffles his feet awkwardly. “There was one more. If you wanted it. It’s the only copy, promise, so if you don’t- Anyway. Here.”

Alex looks nervously from Nathan’s resolute expression to the overturned photograph held quivering in the space between them. Tentatively, he takes it; turns it over; stops.

His mind can’t quite take in, all at once, the image he has been given. He picks out details only: the way Ruth’s legs have swung beneath the cart a little as she laughs; Peter’s left hand jammed in his pockets in self-satisfaction; the straw clinging to Alex’s hair above his amused mock-scowl; and running through the middle of the photograph, the chain of their joined hands.

Alex remembers the moment. Nathan had arranged them and then gone to fuss with his camera, and to pass the time Peter had removed the handful of straw he had been keeping in his pocket for this very purpose and scattered it artfully over Alex’s head. Nathan must have taken a picture to test the framing, or something, because this perfectly candid photograph is of the moment a few seconds later, when Alex had feigned crossness with Peter’s smug delight and Ruth had captured their hands and laughed.

This is how Alex remembers the oat harvest, not the taxidermied farmers of the first photo. He remembers the curve of Peter’s smile and the way the light shone on Ruth’s hair and how wonderful it had felt to stand there in sunshine and success and love. He remembers the triumph and the joy and the brief irritation with the temperamental reaper-binder contraption. He remembers holding hands and laughing.

Alex looks up at Nathan, wringing his hands. Nathan looks even more nervous than Alex, but this does little to assuage the leaden pit of terror that has taken up residency in his stomach. “You - you don’t...mind?” Alex manages at last, unwilling to give name to the nebulous secret contained in the photograph.

Nathan blinks. “Don’t you?” he says. “I didn’t mean to take it then, honest, and you’ve got the only copy. I promise. I’m not here to put you in danger, I just thought you might like it.”

Alex stares at the photograph in his hands. “I do,” he says softly. “I like it very much, thank you. Only - we had been keeping rather quiet.”

“Oh,” Nathan says. “I know. And you had probably better. But-” he sighs. “Dad ain’t never said anything, but he was right cross with Tilda when she made a comment about Ruth’s not being married. And he was dead keen on it being your farm, so’s you could all go to Dartmoor.” Alex stands in stunned silence, entirely frozen, whilst Nathan jitters with nervous energy. His fingers tap against his arms, his legs; he draws in the dust with the toe of his boot; and Alex stands, perfectly still. “He had a sister,” Nathan adds quietly. “Aunt Dot never married, but she lived for a bit with a Miss Hall. There was some funny business when I was a lad and she had to go away. Dad didn’t like that at all.”

Alex unsticks his tongue from the roof of his mouth. “Do many people know?” he whispers.

Nathan shakes his head. “Just me and dad, I think. But you’ve a Mr Mudge on your side, now, and that name means things round here.” He offers Alex a smile and nudges the brim of his hat as he turns away. “You’ll be alright.”

He leaves the photographs, side by side, upon the table for Peter and Ruth to return to. Ruth traces the line of their arms with one careful finger, and mirrors Alex’s look of concern as Peter abruptly trots upstairs.

She crosses the room to where he fidgets by the stove and insinuates herself into the space between his front and the stove until he has no choice but to wrap his arms about her. “It’s beautiful,” she whispers, face resting on his shoulder. “It’s the most precious photograph in the world.”

Alex presses his nose into her hair and breathes deeply. “I’m glad you like it as much as I do,” he mumbles, and feels her smile through his shirt.

Peter has a book in his hands on his return and he presents it to them both at a distance, arm extended as if the book - or perhaps Alex and Ruth - will bite him if he holds it closer. “Here,” he says gruffly. “I wasn’t sure when I would show you, but. Here.”

Alex unwinds one arm to take the small, leather-bound tome and Ruth opens it between them. It’s not a book, exactly, but a sketchbook; inside, in careful pencil, are sheep and wildflowers and the pony. There’s Tom and Prince, pulling the cart; and there’s Boo with his head upright and proud; and Alex and Ruth, always Alex and Ruth. Alex frowning at a ditch, and Ruth pegging out laundry on her tiptoes, and the pair of them giggling together over the stove. They appear on almost every page, in some form or another. There’s even a few messy sketches of them kissing, or of hands wandering, but Ruth skims through them all in silence until she reaches the last used page. Peter must have drawn this in the past few days. It’s of Alex and Ruth attempting to rescue an unfortunately tangled ball of wool, and they’re grinning at each other, sitting in opposite chairs, with Ruth neatly rolling a ball from the cat’s cradle mass wrapped around Alex’s fingers. Peter has drawn them with such tenderness that Alex can feel his love from here, dripping from the pages.

“Peter…” Alex manages softly.

“I’ll stop if you’re worried it’ll be found, or if you don’t like it-” Peter says quickly, defensively.

“Don’t you dare,” Ruth says, mild but firm, as her eyes flit over the drawing. “Peter, it’s wonderful.”

He steps closer hesitantly. “Really?”

“Yes,” Alex says, carefully juggling the book with Ruth so that he can pull Peter into their huddle. “I love it, and so does Ruth.”

“Good,” Peter says, slumping into them. “I know it worries you, sometimes, but I’ve always wanted us - written down. Or drawn out, I suppose, but on paper. So that it’s real and we existed, the three of us together; so that maybe, someday, someone will find it when we’re long gone and know that we had a place in history, and it was ours, and we loved it. And maybe there’ll be some future graduating gent, like you and I were, who might see us and think perhaps I should be a little more obvious with my gift of flowers.” Alex huffs a laugh and Peter smiles, running his hand down Ruth’s arm. “We can’t tell people now,” he continues softly. “But I can put us on paper and give us to people like us, a hundred years from now, and I can tell everyone just how much I love you just as much as I want to - but not yet. This, and that photo, and the fact that we put our photographs in Ruth’s album - it’s the evidence that we existed, and I want that. Because I love you, and this is the little bit of Devon and of history and of everything that is and was and will be that is ours.”

In a valley, in Devon, it is raining. The mist has coiled up off the river in clouds that look too tangible to enter and the grey and angry heavens are well and truly open. A young man steps out of his cottage, one hand jamming his hat onto his head as he winces against the onslaught of weather and the other holding a bucket of kitchen waste. He begins to make his lonely, weary way, when a hand stretches out into the rain and spins him, pulling him back. The young man goes willingly, grinning as he leans down to kiss his lady good morning before she starts work, too.

Another man joins them in the doorway for his own kisses, and then they’re outside, ducking their heads against the rain. They push each other into puddles and laugh, watched all the while from the doorway.

“Don’t get too wet, will you boys,” Ruth calls from the cottage.

“We won’t be long, not in this weather,” Peter replies, turning as he goes to offer her a smile. His hair is already quite soaked under the deluge, but they’re both grinning brightly at her.

“Half an hour, that’s all,” Alex adds.

Ruth pretends to look stern around a smile. “See that it is.”

Peter stomps through the wet farmyard and Alex heads out to the fields. Physically, he’s an awfully long way away from his blood relations, out here in Devon, and emotionally yet further estranged. He hasn’t anyone to question his decisions or correct his behaviour; he never even considers upholding his family name.

He looks over his shoulder at Peter, talking intently to the geese, and the door to the cottage - still open, allowing Ruth’s bright singing to sound over the rain. Alex is a long way from his relations, but not at all far from his family, and he turns to the rain-damp cows with a grin that he cannot, at present, seem to shake.