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The planks of the boat were rimed with salt, fraying into splinters at the corners. There hadn’t been any other options; they’d come down to the Côte d’Azur too late in the season, all the well-oiled ones had left harbor already.
It was pleasant, nonetheless, to lie on the prow and feel the dip and swell of it on the waves, beneath his belly - the closest thing to a cradle-roll he’d ever known. For years after he’d put down anchor and left his post at the Royal Navy, he’d woken up bereft, disoriented: expecting to find the hum and tumble of a deck underfoot, but meeting only dead, inert earth instead.
Francis was perched at the stern, a bucket of ice by his feet that had surely melted by now, the fishing rod dangling loosely from his fingers. There was no wind; the sun beat down relentlessly from an empty, cloudless sky, the blue of it so violent it hurt to look up. His back felt numbed with warmth, not entirely in a bad way.
“You’re going to blister, like that,” called Francis from the other side of the boat.
And you’re going to scare away the fish, like that, Arthur thought, but didn’t bother to say.
He continued to sprawl there, feeling the sun loosening every part of him slowly, opening subcutaneous knots and tangles that had formed over weeks, months, years. Trickles of sweat gathered at his temples, over his spine, in the small of his back. He felt the droplets gather, swell, and slide off his skin in quick, cool rivulets. The air smelled of salt upon salt.
After a minute or two, the boat rolled. It was Francis, getting up.
Great, he thought sardonically. No fish for dinner.
But he didn’t care about the fish. Not really. It wasn’t about the fish: they didn’t rent a boat and sail it all the way out here for trout, or sole. They could have gotten that at the markets, if they’d wanted.
The planks by his head creaked; Francis sat down beside him, bringing that faint lavender-scent that he always carried.
“I’m serious,” he murmured; Arthur felt his knuckles trail over his shoulder-blades, butterfly-light, slipping down his spine and dipping into the small pool of sweat at his lower back. “You won’t tan. You’re just going to peel, like ripe fruit.”
Francis himself was getting tanned: not a lot, just a light dusking that brought out the blue of his eyes even more than usual. Blue - the violent blue of the skies.
Arthur determinedly kept his eyes closed and mouth shut.
After a minute of this, Francis sighed, and went into the cabin. When he sat down again, Arthur heard the unscrewing of a bottle, then the cool, viscous sensation of oil: the verdant smell of olives spread on the air.
Francis may be right: he could feel patches of his back smarting, moreso when Francis started working his fingers into it. But still, for the most part, it was pleasant, even when Francis’s hands wandered downwards and lingered, just out of deniable distance of his buttocks.
Arthur couldn’t entirely help a smirk. He turned his head, glanced up past his own arms: there was Francis, long blond waves framing his shadowed face, a serious, pensive expression on his fine features as he contemplated Arthur’s naked back.
“Can’t keep off for ten minutes, can you,” said Arthur.
“Did you know,” said Francis philosophically, “that you freckle all the way down to your tailbone. Past that, too, I believe, if you’ll take off your trousers.”
Francis himself was completely, utterly naked: bloody typical. From this angle, Arthur could see the fine golden hair dusting his thigh, shivering from a barely perceptible breeze. Beneath that, a long, white, curving scar: some bayonet wound, from the not-so-distant past. A bullet whorl, just above the knee. More of the same on his torso, his arms, his back. They did not tan, unlike the rest of him.
Arthur closed his eyes again. The sound of wings, very faint, overhead: a shadow passed them, some gull or tern wheeling above. The air was close and still, like a shuttered room.
“No, thanks,” he said. “I haven’t yet absorbed the necessary amount of shamelessness, for that.”
“You haven’t quite gotten rid of the necessary amount of prudishness, you mean,” said Francis, in an approximation of his usual teasing purr that fell oddly flat. “We haven’t passed another ship for two hours, now.”
“Don’t care,” said Arthur.
The sun was a red shadow behind his eyes, searing-bright. Departing from Beaulieu, he’d steered them south-east; they were somewhere on the Ligurian now, drifting towards Corse.
“You stubborn, insufferable fool,” murmured Francis.
The wine glass was by Arthur’s ear, the condensation along its sides long dried; he picked it up now, a faint clink, and took a sip. Arthur imagined the taste: sour, flat, parching on the tongue. Lukewarm poison: the same that still simmered in his veins, and had threatened to turn them off-course, not two hours before. The faint lavender-scent kept sneaking into his nostrils, stirring, but not enough to make him do anything about it.
Out of the quiet, an odd twanging sound: the fishline snapping. Francis staggered up, putting down the glass. The boat listed and swayed as he stumbled along the side, footsteps wobbling and uneven.
The faint whizzing of the line being pulled back; a small pop of water, no telltale splash. An empty hit, then.
“Shame,” Arthur murmured. “Another one. Must be your incessant prattle that scared them all off.”
He expected to hear some riposte, some miffed reply. The sun continued to beat down; the boat rose and fell, slowly, borne along a great heaving sigh of a swell that rolled unhurried through the infinite waters beneath. When it fell away again, Francis still hadn’t answered.
A seabird shrilled somewhere, far off. Arthur opened his eyes.
The deck was empty.
For a second or two he was perfectly still, his heartbeat pounding a slow, emphatic rhythm in his ears, drunken time, blood-rush deafening. Then he scrambled upright, the boat listing beneath, sweat running off his forehead and stinging his eyes.
The cabin door was open; the lounge within was small, see-through from this angle. No one was inside.
“Francis?” said Arthur, uncertainly.
His voice echoed hollowly in the wide, open silence, with no answer to come. The waves lapped against the hull of the ship, reverberating dully in the empty chambers of the bilge, like the low rumbling of a bass drum. The deck creaked and groaned.
“Francis?” he said again. He shook the sweat out of his eyes, blinked hard, as if the disappearance of the other was a mere trick of the light. “Come on. This isn’t funny. Where are you?”
Dazed, as if in a dream, he stumbled along one side of the boat, and back the other side. The midday sun was blinding, bleaching everything within sight, glass-shard bright, stabbing at his inebriated brain; the air too stagnant to breathe. His heartbeat hammered madly behind his ribs, trembled in his fingertips like shell shock tremors, and the gentle rocking of the boat had turned nauseating instead of comforting.
Nothing stirred.
All around him, the vast expanse of the ocean was wide, blue, and merciless.
“Francis!” he yelled, truly panicked now. “Where have you - you - where the fuck - “
Crazily, he veered this way and that, unnecessarily going into the cabin to check - the seats were solid, there was nowhere to hide - then going to the stern again, where the fishline dangled forlornly over the gunwale and where the basket of melted ice sloshed noisily when his hip slammed up against it, tripping over a bulging plank.
Wild-eyed, Arthur leaned over the edge of the boat to peer down into the ocean: the wide, yawning maw of it, blue shading to black, light filtering down in horrible, infinite degrees. An unfathomable chasm, a bottomless abyss. The tiny boat floated over its glassy surface, saved only by its own sheer insignificance, while the truth lay just beneath, waiting to close its jaws over all.
Francis is there, he suddenly thought; the irrational certainty a gallows-knot in his stomach, twisting tighter with every impossible second that passed in this sun-bleached nightmare. He’s jumped down there. I have to go down to find him.
He started to undress then, limbs turned slow and uncoordinated with drink, shaking so much he had to try twice to undo the buttons of his trousers. He heeled off his loafers, ripped off his socks with impatience, and struggled out of his underwear with more than a little effort.
Before diving headlong into the dark waters, he turned reflexively to cast a last, desperate glance over the deserted boat.
A figure was leant sedately by the edge of the cockpit floor, water gathering in a dark stain beneath him, spreading like a shadow. Water dripped off his long, drenched hair, plinking over-loud on the wooden boards.
“Going for a swim?” said Francis, placidly.
Arthur flew at him.
They went rolling across the floor, elbows and knees slamming into the boards and planks, but he scarcely felt the pain: all he wanted was to hit, and bite, and scratch, getting at every slippery inch of the other that he could reach.
The boat buckled and lurched beneath them; Francis was laughing, a crowing, jangling laugh, delirious and insane-sounding, ringing out across the still waters. Arthur caught hold of his hair, and pulled; the laughter cut off as Francis hissed and coughed, turning to drive his elbow into Arthur’s side, but not before Arthur managed to pin him down with an expertly-placed knee, grabbed his wrists with his free hand, and levered himself up to loom over him.
The other was breathing hard, and smiling: something terrible about it, all jagged edges and cracked façade. Too-bright glint in his wine-sodden eyes. Saltwater had darkened his lashes and hair, plastering golden tresses to his forehead and neck, giving him the drowned look of a shipwreck victim, while Arthur felt his heart thrashing, staring down at him.
“Where the fuck were you,” said Arthur.
“In the water, of course,” said Francis, in a reasoning tone. “Thought you didn’t want to hear any more of my ‘incessant prattle’?”
Arthur was wet all-over now, seawater dripping down his chest and arms, crawling ant-like along the back of his neck. Francis’s body was cold beneath him, chilled by the sea; the sharp bones of his wrists ground together in Arthur’s grasp; he didn’t make a noise of pain, but only went on smiling steadily.
“One day,” said Arthur, quietly, “I’m going to kill you in your sleep.”
“Well, if so, you certainly wouldn’t be the first,” said Francis, his smile turned mocking and somehow obscure.
“Oh, I will be,” said Arthur. “I’ll find a way; be really inventive about it. I’ll pull you up by that twig-thin, abominable neck of yours, hang you from the rafters, skin you slowly from the wrists, just here - “
Francis started laughing again, at first quietly, just a faint wheezing noise, but quickly growing loud, his whole frame shaking uncontrollably beneath Arthur, golden hair tossing on the deck, leaving dark trails like ancient, abstruse symbols.
The sea was bitter on Arthur’s tongue. The sound of Francis’s laughter sawed at him likes knives, dull and serrated, rust along the edges. Salt stung in his eyes; the laughter echoed up to him through the places they touched, into the cavity of his chest, up through his trachea and throat, until he was fighting to choke it back down as he leaned in, blurry-eyed, to taste the devious curve of those smiling, chilled-blue lips.