Kim hadn’t been permitted to speak to his brother. Peacock had struck up an acquaintance with Quiller but had nothing to report as yet. Maisie and Phoebe were looking for Florrie Jacobs. And Will was doing absolutely nothing except sitting around selling books. It was getting on his wick.

At least they’d had that glorious night at the Savoy, the four of them in a private room talking and laughing as Maisie and Phoebe fell over one another to describe their Parisian adventures. Kim had booked a room in the hotel, so he and Will had retired upstairs at the end of the night and claimed themselves a brief bit of privacy before Will had had to slink off home.

That had been wonderful. The hours since then had not. It was getting on for the evening of a second completely uneventful day and he was twitching for the lack of action.

Lack of action, lack of Kim. He wanted to be right there, involved, knowing what was going on; he needed to be there if the news was bad and the hope forlorn. He wanted to be with Kim, full stop. Boredom made you horny, he supposed, but he hadn’t been able to stop thinking about their night at the Savoy. Kim had been flown on wine but drunk on happiness, glittering with hope and pleasure, and the way they’d made love afterwards... Kim had whispered, Make me burn, and Will had done his best, and the way Kim had responded was still tingling through him.

On that thought, he fished out the book of poems Kim had given him from his desk drawer. He’d made it a brown paper jacket earlier, since people in bookshops were blasted nosey about books, and he didn’t particularly want to be caught with an obscene publication, still less have someone try to buy it off him.

He went back to the first poem Kim had read him. He’d done that a few times now.

God! I shall faint with pain, I hide my face

For shame. I am disturbed, I cannot rise

I breathe hard with thy breath; thy quick embrace

Crushes; thy teeth are agony—pain dies

In deadly passion. Ah! You come—you kill me!

Christ! God! Bite! Bite! Ah Bite! Love’s fountains fill me.

He didn’t quite know how to think of it. It was obscene, he supposed, but it wasn’t dirty. Erotic, maybe. It was... Honestly, it was bloody like how Kim was when Will fucked him, taking a kind of deliberate pleasure in things he wasn’t meant to like. It gave him a disturbingly bare sensation, as if someone else had witnessed the intimacy between them in all its rawness.