Hammer & Air

Part I
First Steps into the Woods

When all were said and done, Hammer probably knew what forces brought me to hide in that tree to watch him fuck the innkeeper’s daughter before I knew, but it were an imperfect picture.

Between the two of us, that’s what we had, an imperfect picture. I had the blues of it, he had the reds, and we were both still blind to the yellows. Sometimes you need that third color to see the world is beautiful.

But I didn’t need to see the whole picture to know what kept me in the tree, even if I didn’t realize what brought me there in the first place.

I were there for Hammer.

Hammer were gentle at fucking, I realized with something of a shock. You wouldn’t think it; he weren’t a talker, and he tended to move in gruff, blunt ways that made you think he’d be rough with a person while holding them.

But then he and the girl met, and he kissed her, made her comfortable, stroked her breasts and pinched her nipples through her clothes until she groaned. He unlaced her vest, let her flesh spill out over his hands and praised her for being beautiful (she were not) and smiled at her when she shrieked and giggled. She were a big-boned, hearty girl, with thick lips, a square jaw, and a gap between her teeth, but when Hammer flipped her skirts over her head and knelt behind her, licking her quim as she leaned forward and clutched the bole of the tree, her face flushed and her eyes fluttered closed, and I could see something of beauty in her.

She started to beg him, then, coarse words, breathless, incoherent words, and abruptly I hated her, although she’d been nothing but kind to me in all my days.

Hammer unlaced his trousers, and his cock sprang free, and there weren’t room for even that anymore.

It were huge. We lived in an orphanage, in a room with ten other boys; seeing another boy’s pricker were not something you talked about, but not something you could avoid either. I’d caught glimpses of it, hanging monstrous and flaccid between his thighs and heard the meaty sound of his fist on it as we lay in the bed we shared like all orphanage boys shared once they were out of their slatted cribs. I had not, however, seen it erect, or even felt it rutting on my thigh, as I knew the other boys in our room would do at night when they could pretend they were alone in the privacy of the dark.

There it sported, huge and purple, and even from my perch in the tree I could see the head glistening before he even thrust it between the girl’s thighs.

I licked my lips, suddenly cold and hot, wishing I could cradle the aching flesh between my own thighs instead of clinging to the limbs of the damned tree, and I must have made a sound.

Hammer’s fingers moved to the girl’s quim and she moaned, and then his blunt, broad fingers moved some more.

“There?” she asked, surprised.

“No baby,” he muttered. Yes, that would figure. Hammer had been dumped off at the orphanage at two, because his mother, apparently, decided he were too much of a bother to keep. He would not want a baby, not with a tumble in the woods.

“Right,” she hissed, and he wrapped his arm around her chest and pulled her up. He moved his hands and kept his fingers busy on her mound then, even as his other hand disappeared to her backside. She cried out—in a good way—and then he grunted and thrust and sighed, buried to his root in the girl’s backside, his fingers thrusting urgently into her quim.

My whole body shuddered, and a faint, damp spot soaked through my trousers, but I didn’t pay attention to that. Hammer’s straight, dark hair were cut shorter in front than in back, but it still hung in his eyes. His dark eyelashes fluttered closed on the flushed skin of his fair cheeks, and the brilliant blue of his eyes were hooded. The flesh at the corners of his mouth were drawn tight in concentration.

I knew that look; it were the look he wore at the smithy, the time I’d asked him prettily to make a protractor and a compass for me from scraps. Hammer were not a “small, delicate things” craftsman. He had doughty swathes of muscle across his chest and his back, in his thick, heaving thighs and his flanks, and even (though I couldn’t see them from this angle) in his jewel-hard buttocks. He could hold a horse in check with his shoulder while hammering on a shoe the size of an ale barrel. He could make wrought iron fences with the loveliest arabesques, or ploughshares that could carve through hardpan for seasons on end, but the tiny scientific instruments had near to flummoxed him, that were for sure.

I looked at the girl, her face slack with passion, and looked to Hammer, his face tight with the not wanting to hurt the girl, and the part of me that had been building for nigh on twelve of my seventeen years began to scream.

You don’t want her, Hammer! You want me!

I must have made another sound then, forlorn, like a whimper, because his eyes sought mine unerringly in the trees. He’d known I were there—hell, he’d told me to be there, and twelve years of doing what he said weren’t easily shaken off. And now, he met my eyes and pumped into the girl as she screamed loud enough to be heard back in town. As she convulsed and shivered around him in what I could only assume were her climax, Hammer did the unexpected thing.

He pulled out of the girl and pulled her skirts up even higher, so her soft, pale arse were gleaming under the sun, and then he wrapped his fist around his cock and stroked.

His strokes were hard, and his grip were brutal enough to turn the head of the monster a deep, painful purple. One hand crept up to his shell-colored nipple, and he gave it a vicious pinch, while the other hand….

Ah, gods… stroke, pump, stroke, pump… some clear liquid spurted from the tip, and he grunted, and now on the upstroke, the flesh of his foreskin slid up over the head and swished over it, probably feeling good enough to make him scream, if that hadn’t meant opening his mouth to do more than eat.

His eyes threatened to close, and I gasped again, not wanting the brilliant blue of them hidden from me, not now. Not when his face were naked, and, regardless of the flesh quivering in front of him, he were all mine.

His eyes opened again, and he mouthed a single word at me. “Taste.”

Then he closed his eyes and stroked, and I envisioned having that thing in my mouth, tasting it. When it suddenly exploded in spend, spewing from the tip like a white banner and spattering the girl’s backside in thick ribbons, I swallowed convulsively, hungry for the knowledge of what it would be or feel like on my tongue.

Hammer’s eyes flew open, and he patted the girl’s flank as though he’d been coming for her and not me, and then righted her skirts and held her for a moment and gave her a soft word. She laughed then, and kissed his cheek, and said if ever he wanted a tumble in the woods proper, she’d lay on her back and spread her legs for him, as were right, and he said he’d take her up on that perhaps.

But the whole time, he were casting surreptitious looks into the tree before them, and nothing he said to the girl could erase the thing he’d mouthed to me, while our eyes were locked and his come were still dripping in a clot from the end of his cock.

“Mine,” he’d whispered, bringing his hand up to taste the white spend clinging to the webbing between his thumb and forefinger. “Mine.”

Good, I thought fiercely. Good. He’d claimed me twelve years ago on the playground, and now that we were near to grown, it were time he made good.

My parents had died in a sickness epidemic. I’d had the sickness but skipped the dying, and had been taken to the orphanage by a solicitous neighbor. I’d had with me only some hurriedly packed clothes and the things I clung to: a child’s stuffed bear, a simple book of how things worked, and a small glass through which to look at things.

The women who ran the orphanage were kind, but weary. There were too few of them and too many of us, and the pecking order of the wild took care of many of their problems before any of the adults needed to be bothered.

I must have had some inkling of this, because the bear and the book were shoved immediately under the mattress I’d been given to share with Graeme. That were Hammer’s name—his real name—but I were possibly the only human being on earth who remembered it, and that included Hammer.

“Eirn?” he’d said that first day, looking me over. “You’re thin as air. Be careful. You’ll get yourself beat.”

He’d been right. The first day, playing in the yard, some of the older boys saw me, fretting in a corner disconsolately with my little glass, and set about to take it from me.

I weren’t going to let them. I kicked one of them in the shin, and that set his mates on me, and that might have well been the end, but Graeme stepped in. At six (he were nearly a year older than me) he were not tall, but he were already powerful and wide, and fierce. I bit and I kicked, but Graeme—Graeme hit like a hammer, and that’s where his name came from.

At the end there were the two of us, bloody but unbroken, in a circle of jeering older boys, not a one of them weren’t bleeding himself.

You do that long enough, and one of the grown-ups were going to take notice. Sure enough, there were Miss Delaina, graying hair falling from its habitual knot, coming to see what the fuss were about. We scowled up at her and told her not a blessed thing.

Desperate, but it worked. From that moment on, Graeme were considered too lethal to harass in the play yard. The older boys dispersed, but since we hadn’t ratted them out, they were honor bound to leave us alone. (The intricate code of honor found in the anarchy of a boy’s play yard never ceases to amaze me.)

When Hammer and I found ourselves alone again, I felt I had to pay him back in some way—after all, he’d evened the odds considerably and kept me from being a victim. Even I could see that my life had just been made easier by the intervention of this big, sturdy boy with the brilliant eyes and surly curl to an already lean lip.

“Ya wanna look through my glass?” I asked diffidently. “Makes bugs look big and scary.”

He’d blinked. “Alright.”

We’d played the rest of the day in what were practically silence. I’d look at a bug and show him, he’d look, and hand the glass back to me to find another one. It seemed a good system at the time, and we continued everything like that, from lessons with books to new foods and even to our apprenticeships. I may have ended up at the printer’s shop, but not before Hammer had given me a go at the smithy, and the other way about.

And as for claiming me in the play yard?

Someone tried it again, once, and Hammer had broken his jaw. When questioned by the horrified attending woman, he’d growled, “Eirn’s mine.”

And so I had stayed. We graduated up a dorm at twelve, and we could hear the cacophony of muffled groans around us as the boys grabbed their pricks and emptied them into their own hands, or rutted them up against their companion’s thighs. I feared for a bit then. I were still smaller than the other boys, and thinner, although were it not for that, Hammer and I could have been brothers, or cousins at the least. We both had black hair and blue eyes, but my jaw were narrower, and so were my shoulders. I grew a few inches taller than he were, but he would always outweigh me by at least three stones, all of it muscle, until we were so old that we lost flesh instead of gained it.

But my fears were ungrounded. I were Hammer’s. The other boys probably assumed that he rutted with me, or even fucked me, but nothing could be further from the truth. I would hear him at night, pretend to sleep as he stroked himself to completion. His sounds made me hard, but I waited until he were asleep to take care of my own business.

One such night, after feeling my spend coat my hand and spatter inside my small clothes, I opened my eyes to see his gleaming at me in the darkness.

I turned red then and rolled over on my side, but his hand on my shoulder stopped me.

“You wait then?” he whispered, and I shrugged.

“It’s private.” And it were. It were between me and my fist—and my starving vision of Hammer, as I feasted my eyes on his face and smelled his semen under our sheets.

“You done it with a girl yet?” he asked insistently, and I cast a hunted look over my shoulder. Girls left me alone for the most part, and I were grateful. I did not hunger for them the way I hungered for the boy who shared my bed every night.

“No,” I said shortly, and he grunted.

“You still draw sketches in the old maple tree?” he asked, considering.

I drew in a deep breath. “You know I do.” We both had two half-days a week off—but on different days. I knew I could come off my shift at the printers and find him in the tavern, where he weren’t supposed to be, but the midwives had long since given up keeping him from it. He knew, any given half-day, he could find me out in that section of the woods around our little town (it were bigger than a village) classifying my flora and my fauna, and writing my notes on the poetry of the way the natural world worked beneath my fingers.

“You be up in the tree, your next half-day. Don’t skitter. You can see a woman, see if you want her.”

“And if I don’t?” I asked coldly, and he shrugged, before turning his own way. There were scant inches between us in the small orphanage beds, but we had perfected giving each other the dignity of those inches in the twelve years of sharing a mattress.