FIC: All Tomorrow's Birthdays 3/4

[lobelia321]

Title: All Tomorrow's Birthdays
Part: 3/4
Author: Lobelia; lobelia321@aol.com
Other information: See Part 1/4.

-----

Maybe it was talking to his brother the day before, who knew, but the dream started out being set in the BBC's sports studio, with the dynamic duo of British soccer-commentating, Gary Lineker and Alan Hansen, beaming at each other across that amoeboid table. Alan looked lithe all in black, and Gary looked cheeky in his usual little-boy shirt'n'tie. There was a game going on in the background. Dom walked up to the screen -- or sort of got transported, dream-fashion, to just in front of the screen -- and tried to make out the colours of the kits.

When he turned round, Alan and Gary were locked in a passionate embrace across the blob-shaped table. Alan grabbed Gary's tie and moaned, "Phenomenal tackle." Gary straddled him, mussing Alan's knife-sharp parting with one hand and undoing Alan's belt buckle with the other.

The game hove back into Dom's vision, and he realised why he couldn't make out the sides' colours: the players were all, surprise surprise, stark naked. There was Becks's shlong swinging wildly as he came up in centre-field. There was Seaman, tugging at his ponytail and tugging at his tiger. There was little Michael Owen, not so little where it counted. And on the bench, glasses flashing in the late-afternoon sun, sat svelte Sven the Swede, with his receding hairline and elegant face.

Dom got a hard-on. To be more precise, he had that dream sensation of being very turned on but not sure where the eros started and where it ended. It didn't seem confined to his dick; it sort of oozed and merged into the dream scenario as a whole.

He turned round to see how Gary and Alan were getting on. They were still there but the room had changed. It had elongated and grown tall, ogival windows. Along the white walls stood rows of iron bedsteads. Gary and Alan were wearing pleated sports uniforms and baggy bloomers. They also suddenly each had shoulder-length hair, braided into two becoming plaits.

"Smack me on the bottom, Alan," Gary squealed. "I've been such a naughty girl."

Dom started running, past the beds, through a high oak portal at the far end of the room, down a wide stone staircase and out onto the playing fields. There they were, all those naked players, still kicking and sweating and fouling. Dom wove his way through the thronging athletes until he reached the opponents' goal. It didn't have Seaman in it, of course. It had someone else, someone with a white-streaked beard and penetrating eyes.

"Hello, young Dominic," said Bernard. He was wearing a floppy football top and shorts and spike-soled boots. A ball came sailing towards the crossbeam but Bernard jumped up easily and in one fell swoop snatched that ball out of the sky. He looked at Dom. He drew closer. Dom took the ball out of Bernard's arms and slid his hands underneath Bernard's top. He slipped them right in, right into Bernard's shorts and around Bernard's hard, quivering...

Then he woke up.

-----

What was the time? My god, my god, how could he have slept for so long? Dom fell over his own feet, trying to get to the alarm clock. He turned it over. Eight thirty-five. Shit, shit, pooh.

Dom fell on the floor, then fell into his clothes, then fell out of them again because no, he couldn't just wear his... surely not, but what else did he have? Scramble, scrabble. T-shirts, jeans, Kia Toa vests, thumb rings, washers used as pendants, socks, shoes, boxer shorts -- all flew through the room.

In the end, Dom wore just what he had put on to begin with, which was a pair of old jeans and a shirt and a zip-up sweatshirt thingy. It occurred to him that maybe he should be bringing a bottle of something, some wine, some booze. Quick, quick! He combed his hair with his fingers, grabbed his key and banged the door shut behind him.

The hotel's shop on the ground floor was still open. The selection was pretty meagre but Dom chose a semi-expensive bottle of local wine and then drifted, inexplicably, into the pharmacy section.

He stopped in front of the condom shelf. There went the pulmonaries. His pulse was so ferocious that it made the bottle vibrate in his hand. The display swam before his eyes. Quickly, without daring to think about it twice, Dom grabbed one of the packets at random and stumbled to the counter.

"Planning a quiet night in?" said a voice, and there was Viggo, of all people, leaning against the counter and smirking at Dom's handful of purchases. He himself was brandishing a jumbo-pack of hard-wearing, extra-durable, knobbed and ribbed Durexes.

"Uh," said Dom, threw down some notes and fled towards the lifts.

Bernard's room was on the top floor, at the very end of the corridor. Dom stood in front of it, cleared his throat, straightened his shoulders, brushed his hair back, moved the bottle from hand to hand, wiped his palms on his jeans, patted his back pocket, and knocked.

"Oh, hi, Dom," said Karl.

"Karl?" said Dom.

"Yeah, come in."

"Karl. Uh... I didn't know you were going to be here, too."

"Oh, I wouldn't miss one of Bern's dinners," said Karl. "He's a really good cook, you know."

"But," said Dom, trying to take in the dimensions of Bernard's room, or rather rooms, "but surely he's not cooking himself? This is a hotel."

"Oh, Bern's wangled some deal with the kitchens. He doesn't trust room service. He went down earlier and cooked."

"Oh," said Dom. He looked around at the floor-length windows with delicate damask curtains, the wall-to-wall deep-pile carpet, the statuary, the exotic flower arrangement and the heart-shaped hearth with fake logs winking cheerfully. It looked nothing at all like Dom's generic one-person, standard-issue, bed-chair-telly cubicle. "Why does Bernard have such a huge room?" he asked.

"Oh, this is the honeymoon suite. He wangled that, too. Bern's always wangling things."

Karl sat down on one of the two overstuffed, pastel-coloured sofas that were arranged at an angle to each other in front of the electric fireplace. A chandelier tinkled softly. The wallpaper was pink, flecked with a pattern of white herons and striated with pale green bamboo rods. The shag of the carpet was about three inches thick. There was a mini-bar, a bus-sized television screen, a dining table and an imitation plaster statue of the Venus of Milo.

"Where's Bernard?" Dom asked.

"He's in the bedroom, on the phone to John."

"John?"

"Yes, you know. John Noble. Denethor." Karl said this as if everyone should know.

"I haven't met him yet," said Dom. The sofa was so plush that Dom sank into it as if into a cloud.

"Oh, you will," said Karl.

"Uh... I brought a bottle."

"Oh, right. Er, just put it on the coffee table for now. Bern will know what to do with it."

So there they sat. Dom felt a slight dizziness in his stomach. This could be because of hunger, or because of nervousness, or because he wished Karl would go away to the land of Nod. The purchase of prophylactics suddenly seemed sadly superfluous.

There was a bowl on the table, filled with olives. There were also two half-filled wine glasses. Karl leaned forward, took an olive and slowly started to chew on it. He looked different without his blond wig. His hair was quite pitch black, and so was his beard. His eyes were half-closed. He looked as if he was concentrating on the olive.

"So," said Dom, really just in order to make conversation, not because he was burning to get to know Karl better. "So, is this John a good friend of yours?"

"Yeah," said Karl. "You could say that. Well. He's Bern's friend mainly."

"Aha," said Dom.

Silence. Karl's teeth made chewing noises. He pursed his lips and spat the olive pip into his open palm. There was a saucer next to the bowl. A small pyramid of pips was already displayed thereon, and Karl carefully added this most recent one to the top of the pile, balancing it like a fiddlestick across two others. Then he popped another olive into his mouth.

More silence. Dom looked at the Venus of Milo and wondered what sort of bed a honeymoon suite had in its bedroom.

"So," said Dom again, delving into the depths of the etiquette part of his brain for some small-talkish matter. "What are we having for dinner, then?"

Karl's face lit up. "Well! We are having spaghetti alle vongole, with that nice sauce Bern makes; it has olive oil and capers and garlic and extract of sun-dried peppers and tomatoes in it. And I think he's also made some of that salad, with lettuce and curly endive and kale and rocket and, oh, with celery, of course. I *really* like celery. I could eat celery all day. It's just so wonderfully crunchy and has that great watery flavour! And then Bern makes this dressing, it has mayonnaise in it and balsamic vinegar and pepper and white wine. Oh, and for dessert..." Karl's eyes almost rolled up into their sockets at the mention. "...for dessert, there's going to be pears with *vanilla custard.*"

"Oh," said Dom. "Right." Well, the food question seemed to have elicited an exhaustive response, at any rate.

A hinge creaked. The white double-doors opened and, like a vision from a 1930s film, Bernard swept into the room.

Balrogs, trolls, werewolves and killer bees. Howling mines. Fangs snapping at Dom's ankles. Galaxies swirling over and around and through him. It was all he could manage simply to stagger to his feet.

"Hello, Dominic," said Bernard and strode across. "I'm so sorry to keep you waiting. I trust young Karl has been entertaining you?"

Bernard was wearing some sort of aubergine-coloured satinny-looking bathrobe sort of thing. It was knotted about the waist and embroidered with a Japanese floral motif. His legs were covered in a soft, pyjama-type trouser but the V of his neck was quite bare and sported short white curls.

Before Dom could say a word, Bernard was upon him. He leaned forward, placed his hands on Dom's shoulders, and smack, smack, planted a kiss on each of his cheeks. On that patch of skin immediately adjacent to the ear and contiguous with the jaw line. Just a friendly, just a polite, just an actorish *bohemian* sort of... Yes.

Dom fell over. Luckily, the sofa was there to catch him and make it look deliberate.

"Thank you for bringing wine, my lad," said Bernard, glancing briefly at Dom's bottle. "Very sweet of you. But I think we'd better drink my own Cloudy Bay first. It's been airing this last half hour. Karl, be a dear and fetch young Dominic here a glass."

Karl got up. Bernard sat down. Across from Dom. Dom stared at the dent left in the sofa by Karl.

"Well," said Bernard. "How are you?"

"Uh..." said Dom. He seemed to have regressed to adolescence. What had happened to his repertoire of apropos proprieties?

"I'm certainly glad those Hornburg scenes are in the can", Bernard said, clearly fully in command of *his* proprieties. "I don't know why that scene took so long to get right." He lifted one of the wineglasses to his lips and studied Dom over the rim with a look that suggested that, in fact, he knew *exactly* why the scene had taken so long. "I don't think I could have coped with yet another take of 'May I lay the sword of Meriadoc on your lap.'"

"Receive my service, if you will," replied Dom automatically, having stammered and fudged those lines close to twenty-five times earlier that day. He sucked in his lips. Why did he have to blurt that out? Why couldn't he be more suave about this? Why, when faced with Bernard's back-swept coiffure and strict forehead, did he find himself reduced to stuttering juvenilia?

"Oh, yes." Bernard took a sip and leaned forwards. "I will most certainly receive your service, if I may. But perhaps we should eat first? Ah, there's a knock. That'll be room service with our trolley. Karl? Could you get that?"

-----

The meal was finished. Bivalves, legumes, durum wheat, condiments and fermented grapes all jostled companionably for metabolisation in everybody's stomachs. Especially the fermented grapes, in Dom's case. He couldn't remember how many glasses of wine he'd downed but it had been quite a few, on account of the persistent puerility of his contribution to the conversation and on account of the insistent eyes of Bernard on him.

Karl, by the way, had been right. The food had tasted delicious. Dom had thank-you'ed and excuse-me'ed his way through a variety of absurd attempts at compliment, all through the pasta course and then the salad and, finally, the *poires flambées à sauce de vanille.* Of which Karl had consumed copious amounts. To the accompaniment of much slurping and quite a bit of hilarity and double entendre, all of which was unintelligible to Dom but nevertheless served to fuel his growing horniness.

They had repaired back to the sofas for after-dinner port, cheese and grapes.

The shift in location seemed to have brought with it a subtle shift in atmosphere as well. Dinnertime pleasantries retreated into the background. Pretence at prandial chit-chat was abandoned. Dom sat down on the left-hand sofa, and immediately Bernard sat down next to him. The sofas were vast, they were like boats on the ocean of carpet, but Bernard sat so close to Dom that their knees almost touched.

Karl sat somewhere over on the other sofa and busied himself with the cheeses.

Dom looked at the platter. He didn't think he could fit in another morsel. The wine sloshed around in his head. The room sloshed around behind his eyes. He looked sloshily over at Bernard. Bernard, for once, was not looking at Dom but at Karl, so there were a few moments in which Dom was able to study Bernard's profile at leisure. He studied the impressive nose and the imperious forehead. He scrutinised the lean cheeks and the way the hairs fell about Bernard's ear. He watched Bernard's Adam's apple bob up and down. Words flowed through space like slowed-down syllables on a faulty tape deck. Port gurgled down Dom's throat. Blood gurgled through Dom's aorta. Something gurgled in his ear.

"What?" he said. "Sorry?"

"Would you like a grape?" said Bernard.

No, Dom wouldn't like a grape. So he took the proffered berry and put it into his mouth.

"Crumb," said Bernard and touched his finger to Dom's lips.

Dom choked. The grape slithered whole down his throat, and because, from sheer nervous excitement, his larynx had contracted to a tiny three-millimetre bore, the grape got stuck there and wouldn't peristalsify its way further down. Dom coughed. Dom gagged.

"Heavens," said Bernard and gave Dom several good smacks between the shoulder blades.

The grape flew back into Dom's mouth. He wheezed.

"I think," said Bernard, "that grape has got to go. Don't you?"

Oh god. Bernard's fingers were in Dom's mouth. Bernard's fingers, vaguely tasting of garlic and olive oil, were moving about in the membranous insides of Dom's mouth, across his tongue, into his cheeks, looking, presumably, for the grape.

Dom moaned. He didn't mean to moan. The moan just rose straight up from his balls to his vocal cords. And it wasn't just a moan of pain or a moan of disaffection. It was definitely a very nakedly sexual moan.

"Let me just get that," muttered Bernard.

His fingers moved aside, something else joined them, some other implement. Dom had his eyes closed and couldn't see what it was but, oh, it was Bernard's tongue. He moaned again. And then a funny thing happened. His heartbeat slowed right down. His insides ceased their jittery shivering. Calm, calm. That's what Bernard's tongue was doing. It moved about in Dom's mouth and it calmed him right down. Calmed him straight into Bernard's arms and Bernard's mouth and oh, it was like the release of a tautly-held rubberband.

Finally, finally, Dom was where he wanted to be.

Bernard's bristles rasped against his chin. The grape swam around inside Dom's mouth and then glided down his throat with the loveliest ease. Bernard's assertive hand was on Dom's waist, not quite on his skin but almost. If he could just hoick up his sweatshirt a tiny bit, and his shirt... There. Skin contact. Dom moaned again. He moaned with abandon. He might have been a dinner dolt but he wasn't at all tongue-tied when it came to moaning and kissing Bernard. Bernard's other hand curved around Dom's nape, and that too, made Dom moan. Bernard's knee rubbed against Dom's thigh, and that made Dom hook up his knee over Bernard's thigh. And maybe, if he moved his leg just a bit further up... Yes. Crotch contact.

This time it was Bernard who moaned.

TBC