There will always be a Hammer and an Air...

Graeme and Eirn have no words for what they are to each other. Children, clinging together in a crowded orphanage; friends, battling back to back in a school yard; and bedmates, finally bridging the gap between sleeping next to a body and allowing it to touch you in the night—all of these roles are summed up by just their names: Hammer and Air.

The innocent exploration of their newest roles is brutally marred when a violent, ill-tempered master threatens Eirn, and Eirn's "Hammer" kills the man in a fair fight. The two run off into the wide world with only each other for safety. It's difficult to forge a good life with only a blacksmith's hammer and a printer's cleverness, but together, Hammer and Eirn will learn to negotiate the dangers of magic and motion, of sex, obsession, and tenderness, and of the word that can make sense of it all—one word they must earn for themselves.

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.

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