Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

It was a Thursday when they came through Tombstone.

A Thursday--not that it mattered a-tall, because he would be leaning against this post and drinking his whiskey al fresco on the storied porch of this fine watering hole were it the day after, or the day before, or any given afternoon.

He heard them before he saw them; the bump and grind of the high cart wheels on the horse-packed hardpan of the optimistically-named Main Street, the sun-bright laughter and bawdy callings-out; the hoots of the bad men and the silence of the good women. That taciturnity, thought Doc, was less an audible clue than a visual one. They had paused on the boardwalks in prim, alarmed phalanxes, eyes up and feather-headed like quail, calico backs erect and taffeta bustles stiff like tailfeathers in a startle display.

The arrival of a novel conveyance of soiled doves was always cause for carousal, and consternation in some quarters. Every so often, a new troupe of girls would come through to spell the old and pique the collective palate. Piled on a phaeton like ripe produce, they would proceed to parade through town to much general fanfare; gunfire and ebullience. Sometimes the coach in question was a proper carriage and sometimes just a good old hay-wagon, repurposed for more precious cargo. Despite his upper-crust upbringing, or perhaps because of it, Doc bore no personal preference for surrey girls over haywagon ones.

Whatever way they came, they were welcome.

The ungracious truth of it was that a town like Tombstone had its appetites, and harbored its defects of character, and neither women nor whiskey could be in short supply for long without arousing carnal impulses far more concerning and chaotic than the usual vices.

Doc took his cue and another sip, and turned toward the calliphony, intending to greet the fair newcomers as he always did; with a tip of his hat and a raise of his glass. They would be stopping at the grand saloon in the center of town, as always, to begin their new tenure as artists-in-residence.

Doc supposed he would make his way there in good time, but for now his present straits were not so dire.

The carriage came into view, and these were surrey girls, all the way--even more so than usual hothouse flowers--with the fancy fringed canopy rendering their China-silk parasols obsolete. Doc let himself drink in the sight of jostling beauty as the cart-wheels jounced, bosoms in luscious motion below Paris lace and bared shoulders, curls bouncing over smooth decolletages and gartered legs dangling, lure-like, over the side of the coach.

Surrey girls, all, and pretty, apart from one. She was pretty, that was, but not a wool-dyed surrey girl. She was also familiar to him. She sat at the fore of the coach, beside the driver, looking more like a figure on a bowsprit than a lady of barterable charms. Her dress was a riotous but nearly respectable traveling costume in stripes and chinoiserie, bright yellow and black, that put Doc in mind of both a hornet and a honey bee.

In profile, he could not be wholly sure, but when the carriage drew up and she turned her head to look at him, he knew her to a certainty by the heart-shaped black satin patch that covered her missing eye. There might have been more than a handful of one-eyed whores in the West, but none who wore that damage with such brazen impunity, nor turned it to such alluring advantage.

Ignoring the others, he went at once to help her down from the carriage, offering the hand without the whiskey. “Why, Aspasia Talcott, as I live and breathe.”

“I’m glad to see you still do.”

“I do both,” said Doc, laconic. “Badly.”

“Surely you have other talents that come more easily.”

Aspasia’s eye walked over him, taking him in from tip to toe. It seemed to him at first an unnecessary flourish; he and Aspasia already knew each other intimately, after all. But he understood when she said, “How long has it been?”

Doc put on a game smile. “Seems like no time at all.” Aspasia didn’t reply right away, though, and finally he admitted, “Going on three years.”

“That’s what I thought.” Aspasia was eyeing the glass in Doc’s other hand. Without missing a beat, she reached over and plucked it out of his grip. She downed it in a gulp, not even moving her head enough to upset the broad-brimmed travelling hat she wore.

Handing the empty glass back she said, “I hope there’s more where that came from.”

“There’s more so long as my luck holds,” Doc replied. “Am I to take this to mean that I’m buying?”

“That’s a kind offer. I’d have to be a mighty unrefined lady not to take you up on it.”

With that, she leaned back into the window of the carriage to briefly confer with the driver, telling him to take her valises on ahead. When she returned, she fit a shapely, none-too-soft arm into Doc’s.

“I suppose you have all of one decent saloon in a little cowtown like this. One man to tend bar. One bottle of whiskey growing dusty on the shelf.”

“It’s not quite so bad. They have managed to replenish their larders somewhat, without you coming through to drink them dry.”

Aspasia laughed airily behind her hand. “You always say the most charming things.”

Doc took her back inside. Out of the sun, once more in the dim, cavelike gloom of the saloon, the air felt considerably cooler. Doc had, for the most part, acclimated to the heat. As for Aspasia, he had no idea where she had been spending her days, but if the sun got to her she was much too cool to show it.

“You do know such interesting places,” she said, sweeping her single-eyed gaze around the dusty saloon. “But rarely so rustic. Have you gone native?”

“It's not my usual watering hole,” Doc replied. “But sometimes a body does long for peace and quiet.”

Aspasia seemed to understand, though she didn't seem particularly pleased about the dive where Doc chose to do his thinking.

“I don't want you thinking we’re savages,” he hastened to add. “We do have better places, even in Tombstone. I suppose I could introduce you to society.”

He took a seat at a new table, away from the window, confident that nothing else was going to come up that dusty road today that was comparable to what he had seen. “Seeing as you’ve been so enterprising as to set up your own shop. I myself am not possessed of the Capitalist spirit, but I can appreciate it in others.”

Aspasia poured fresh shots for them. “I appreciate the offer, but I’m just hitching a ride. My business is of a different type these days, and it doesn’t require any introduction.”

“Just what line of work is that?”

Aspasia laughed again, a delicate high-society laugh that was not reflected in her dark eye. “Drink your whiskey, Doc.”

“I have been,” said Holliday, “and shall do. Never let it be said I spurn excellent advice, particularly when it aligns so favorably with my heart’s desires.”

She studied him for a long moment, over the rim of her glass and once again once she’d dispatched it. Her voice had sobered when she spoke, but still carried a hint of humor. “But what’s eating you, John Henry? You have that old morose quality about you, my darling, that I recall so fondly from our salad days in Philadelphia.”

“What’s eating me? Why, that is the consumption, my dear.” He cleared his throat like a thespian. “I hear it imparts a rather hectic glow. Dewy, if you will.”

“Not that,” she said. Her smile was wry, and perhaps a little taut, if he was honest. His gallows humor clearly panged her on some strata, but she was wise enough to his ways to let him have his levitous defenses. “You’re ruminating. I propose you looked this way whenever someone had you hogtied and hopelessly besotted, though even so, I think never quite to this degree.”

“Ah,” he said quietly, reflecting on the amber in his glass. “Yes. You are correct there, madam. Not tuberculosis at all, but a malady rather more pernicious.” He finished off the whiskey and slammed it on the table indelicately. “That of thwarted desire.”

“Your desires are never thwarted indefinitely, Doc. Your particular vigor and esprit cannot long be denied.” She declared it good-naturedly enough, and he knew that she considered it a self-evident truth.

“This one may well be,” he said, vaguely, eyes roaming the patterned walls. “It isn’t exactly like the others.”

“How so?”

“Well, foremost, I should accord it something slightly more than desire. Perhaps even verging upon that most pernicious of afflictions—”

Aspasia turned all at once, seemingly intrigued, training her single eye upon his face. “Do go on.”

“You know the one. And secondly, I do not think he cares for me in such an earthy manner, despite the absurdity of such a thing.” Even in the grip of his chronic, low-grade misery, Doc was pleased by his own words. It was like him; blunt and subtle all at once, the brutal truth made palatably blatant, all in the course of civil conversation. He reached for the bottle again and poured himself a fresh measure to anesthetize the revelation.

The painted woman was silent for several beats, considering it. “It is absurd,” she said, at last. She set a hand on his arm to show she meant the words. “Of course it is.”

“Thank you. I appreciate that.”

“What’s his name?”

A simple question, with a simple answer, and endless, uncounted complications and considerations. Well across the room, the saloonkeeper cleaned barware with a cloth. Doc eyed him, gauging his distance before uttering a reply. “Wyatt,” he said, almost into his shot glass. “His name’s Wyatt.” His drawl made the words come out more like ‘white’.

Aspasia regarded him curiously for a moment, and then she shook her head. “Shame on you, you old reprobate. However you survive at the card table with a poker face like that I'll never know. You’d be better off trying to tell me you'd fallen for some mysterious stranger named Barrymore than to try to hide that your new beau is the one and only Wyatt Earp.”

Doc downed his whiskey in a gulp, doing his best to look amused about the turn the conversation had taken when in fact his unflappable nature was more than a little flapped. “I declare, someone has been telling stories about me. My ears are fairly burning.”

“Not at all,” Aspasia replied. “The only stories are about a tall, strapping sheriff in the town of Tombstone. An honest man, they say, whether he likes it or not.”

“When you put it that way,” Doc replied, not trailing off since he had no idea of what he might possibly say.

Aspasia was watching him closely, her single eye narrowed in feline contentment. “You do have a type, Doc.”

“Nonsense. I can appreciate all types.”

“No,” she replied. “Not so many as you think.”

“Then I am predictable and unrequited in love. Have you ever seen a more pitiful specimen than that?”

“More times than you can know,” Aspasia replied. “Where are my manners? I never did tell you just what kind of work I do.”

Doc laughed abruptly, feeling the subterranean tension inside him break and give way. “Oh, my dear Aspasia,” he said. “Your singular talents are many, myriad and no mystery to me. Have you so quickly forgotten the hours in my arms, the joys of our company? I should be quite vexed to be deemed so forgettable in the flesh.”

She rolled her eyes--rolled one, at any rate--and he chivalrously hid his canary-eating smile, satisfied to have teased a response out of her.

“You do know my halcyon complement of tricks better than most. But you would be woefully mistaken if you assumed I had somehow stagnated there, while you went on to become ever better at guns and gambling.” She leveled a look at him, mild but pointed. “And likewise, I would be remiss if I did not inform you that I chanced to develop something of a niche specialty in the years since we last kept company. One that I seem uniquely suited to, and one that you may find uniquely beneficial.”

“A specialty.” Doc dragged the word out, caressing it like he was loath to let it go. “Why now I am intrigued, Miss Talbot.”

She smiled slowly. “As I thought you’d be. In the simplest terms, my dearest John Henry, I am an ambassador; a diplomat, if you will, between the lost and isolated nations of mankind.”

“Sounds terribly noble, but I haven’t the faintest idea what you’re referring to.”

Aspasia tried again, conspicuously ladylike, inflecting her words with more weight and innuendo this time. “If each man is an island, why, then I am the bridge between them. A common ground, uniting them with my body.”

“You cater to men who like to share their women.” Doc’s eyes had a slight glint in them now, nothing like the feverish too-bright shine of illness.

“Not only that,” she said delicately, leaning in, like they were engaged in conspiracy, which he supposed they now were, “I have a history of great success in cases like yours. In initiating first contact. Brokering a very particular bond, an intimacy of ardor between two fellows previously unacquainted in such ways.”

The words sunk in, as Doc stared into the middle distance. “My, that is favorable.”

Her voice was low, solicitous. “Have you shared a woman before, you and Wyatt?”

Doc liked the sound of that name; liked it even more in close concert with his own. He sat back, bones turning to blackstrap. He closed his eyes for a moment. “Whores,” he said. “Once or twice.”

“And he never touched you, throughout? Or you him?”

“I touched him,” he said softly, on the underside of his breath. “Once, maybe twice, by happenstance. Glancing. Pulled away like he was a hot stove.” Doc rubbed his face for a moment, eyes defocused, remembering. “He touched me, and acted like he thought nothing of it, like it was a simple, incidental thing. He did not flinch, nor did he linger.” The memory pained him.

“That’s good,” she said, solemnly. “It’s a simple enough matter, with a few libations, to convince your oblivious swain to indulge in a little feminine recreation. And from there, why, it’s a mere matter of degrees, disinhibition, and expertly applied passion. I assure you, I’ve surmounted worse odds.”

“You mean to help me seduce Wyatt Earp?”

“If he can be won, my darling, I’ll do everything in my power.” She placed her gloved hand over his, gazing at him with territorial fondness and a ferocious devotion, draped defiantly over the inevitable bones of a future sorrow.

Doc held her piercing gaze for a long moment, as long as he could without laughing. But it was not too long before he broke into an incredulous grin. “You’re telling me that there is a market for this? There are enough sadsacks like myself around to keep you in your silks and jewels?”

“Paste jewels,” Aspasia soothed. “But, yes, you are a sad and pitiful lot. Back in Texas, they called me The Fixer. They’re so unimaginative out there. I’m sure you’ll think of something much more amusing.”

“I shall certainly put my mind to the task. Someone ought to. Wyatt, I’m afraid, does not have such a supple intellect.”

“I won’t say that makes it easier,” Aspasia said. “But it certainly doesn’t make it more difficult.”

“Dare I ask what else eases the process along?” Though he scarce believed that anything Aspasia was telling him was true, he felt himself buoyed along on a wild and preposterous hope. He wasn’t sure if he was humoring her, or allowing himself to be drawn into some kind of con game, the likes of which he would have disdained any other man for falling for.

“What do you think?” Aspasia said, nudging her glass towards him with one finger so he could refill it. Doc did not disappoint her. The shot he poured was less than a finger short of a hand.

“Now,” Aspasia continued. “I do take half my fee up front. It’s a security deposit of sorts. If things don’t pan out for you, I refund it. Usually.”

Chapter Text

“Now what is troubling you, Wyatt? I see that space between your eyes, more notched than a cathouse bedpost. Unburden yourself, to me and this bottle.”

It was the evening of the selfsame day. When Doc set his mind upon a course he generally preferred to stroll headlong into action. A saunter, but a directed saunter, nonetheless. He led with irreverence, as was his custom.

Wyatt’s brow eased a little, even as his frown deepened. His hooded eyes sought Holliday’s, artless and earnest in equal parts, and Doc felt his pulse bloom like a gardenia. “Ah, nothing much, Doc. Nothing new anyway.”

“There is truly nothing new under the sun. Just new ways of seeing and saying.”

Wyatt gazed at him, eventually nodding. “I reckon Virgil’s doing all right, but I worry about him. He’s not the man for the job. He’s not like us, Doc. He doesn’t like violence. Doesn’t have the stomach for it.”

“Or maybe that’s exactly why he’s the man for the job.” Doc raised his brows, swirling his whiskey in its glass. “Hates what he sees in the streets every day. Willing to do what it takes so he doesn’t have to see it anymore.” The whiskey went down wrong. A beat later, he coughed softly.

“Doc, are you all right? Is something wrong?” Wyatt’s voice dropped at once to the pitch of utmost discretion, which Holliday found both endearing and absurdly touching. He wondered who he’d become, to be so moved by such a simple gesture. Wyatt Earp’s creature, that was what.

Sitting beside him now, Doc knew full well that Wyatt Earp was his favorite being strolling this revolving ball, and under all these stars. There was no Rudyard Kipling story in it; it simply was and always had been.

“No, Wyatt, I’m favorable.” Doc took another sip of whiskey. He could see Aspasia across the room, all kitted out in lime-gold taffeta, corsetted within an inch of her life. Now that they were here, he felt oddly calm about this endeavor. Like the moments before he drew, it had that storm-eye sheen, where everything winnowed down to a singular focus. He knew what had to be done, and he knew that he was the one to do it.

They were in the grand saloon now, the proper one at the center of town, where Wyatt had a twenty-five percent interest in faro. There was no reason to drink elsewhere, no departure from the general routine. Nothing amiss or notable on this particular night.

Wyatt followed Doc’s gaze with a gambler’s perception, taking note of where it landed. Doc was sure that he had noticed Aspasia earlier, insofar as it was impossible to miss her. His contracted brow and forward-thrusting jaw did not shift much in reaction to her. “New girls always bring trouble.”

“I think in some cases reward is worth a little risk, don’t you? Besides, the fairer sex ought to bring out man’s better nature.”

Assuming it was as good a time as any, Doc motioned Aspasia over with his his glass. She played out her hand, collected her winnings, and glided over as if buoyed by a cloud that emitted from beneath the earth.

“Good evening, Mr. Holliday,” she murmured, offering her hand for his inspection. Doc kissed it, using the opportunity to shoot a sly glance in Wyatt’s direction. He looked less than thrilled by the company Doc kept, but there was nothing new there. It was a testament to their friendship that by the time Aspasia turned to face him, Wyatt had managed to school his unruly scowl into something more congenial.

Introductions were made all around. Wyatt pulled out the lady’s chair for her after only a few seconds of none-too-subtle hinting on her part.

“What’s your game tonight, gentlemen?” Aspasia asked.

“Whiskey, neat,” Doc replied. “My purse is simply too light for anything else.”

“I’m sure your luck will turn around,” Aspasia said. “For the moment, perhaps you’ll concede to tempt fate with a good old fashioned friendly conversation.”

“I see you two know each other,” Wyatt said. “Somehow I’m not surprised.”

“Oh, we’re thick as thieves,” Doc put in. “Bosom companions since time immemorial. Why, I even remember when Miss Talcott had twice as many baby blues to get lost in.”

“It sounds like quite the story,” Wyatt said. “Is it presumptuous of me to ask how you lost…” He trailed off, tapping the bone above his own eye.

“Presumptuous?” Aspasia echoed. “It is, a whit, but if you’re a friend of Doc’s I don’t mind. I was in New Orleans when it happened. In fact, it seems to me the kind of story that could only happen there. I was working at a salon on Bourbon Street, and I was quite besotted with one of the new girls. A timid little thing, but very determined to become a veritable Venus before the year was out.”

She tipped her whiskey glass and took a drink, leaving the story unfinished in the air. Doc had heard it a dozen times before, and he knew first-hand how mutable and shifting the details could be. It was Wyatt’s first rodeo, though, and he was clearly enraptured.

“As it turns out,” Aspasia went on, “I wasn’t the only head turned by this nubile nymph. The house bouncer was also onto her scent. She was six feet tall if she was an inch. Flaming yellow hair. A French patois so thick you only caught about one in three words she said. Those sledgehammer fists were eloquent enough, though, when our guests got a little too full of piss and vinegar.”

She sighed wistfully before continuing. “I’d like to say I handled the situation with aplomb, but in good conscience I cannot. However, gentlemen, I did learn two things that day. The first, is that you should never bring a broken whiskey bottle to a knife fight. The second is that I clearly have no business fighting for love; no, I ought to be bringing folks together instead.”

On the last word, she reached out her hands as if in benediction. Setting one over Doc’s and the other over Wyatt’s.

Wyatt stared down at her hand over his, a ramrod stiffness in his shoulders for a moment.

Doc smiled, almost languid, and swept his gaze toward Wyatt; an oblique glance from beneath dusky lashes. “Why, Aspasia, you brute; you’ll make my poor friend blush.”

She already had. Whether by the story, the touch, or the implication, one or the other had stirred some color up. Wyatt’s strong, spread cheekbones wore a rough sort of flush, like they did when he’d been riding all day. Holliday found it unconscionably fetching. It reminded him of nights by the campfire, of bedding down in nature, Wyatt only an arm’s length away, well within his reach if he should extend his fingertips. He ached with the memory.

Wyatt looked up, eyes still, and spoke quietly. “If I didn’t know better, Miss Talbott, I’d think you were aiming to get yourself a brace of pistols tonight.”

Doc felt his heart jackknife a little, in the good way. It jumped sidewise like that at times, just to remind him of its presence and vitality, say, when circling and sizing up an adversary.

“Why, whatever makes you think you know better?” Aspasia said blithely.

“The part about your Venus. Makes me think you’re no great fan of mankind in that manner, and if so, why court two customers, when one will do?”

Many of the saloon girls did indulge that way, left to their own devices, and many eventually came to prefer it. Doc could hardly blame them, given the sort of un-scrubbed, volatile, couthless fellow that comprised the bulk of a frontier town’s male inventory. Himself and the Earps excepted, of course. Doc prided himself on always being the exception.

Wyatt freed his hand without ceremony and threw back his whiskey. “Believe me, I know all about doing a job you don’t want and didn’t ask for.”

Aspasia was looking at him, amused, Doc thought, and maybe a little charmed, perhaps beginning to see the appeal Holiday himself saw. “Why, my dear Mr. Earp; it’s well worth noting that not all of our characters are so fixed and intractable. Some of us find we relish the charms of both Adam and Eve equally—or if not equally, nearly enough so.” Her gaze slid toward Doc.

Wyatt’s eyes followed hers, but his expression stayed slate. If he gleaned anything from it, he kept it to himself.

Aspasia sighed. “As for my Venus of Bourbon Street, well, she really was a lovely little minx, but nothing worth losing an eye over.”

Doc raised his glass, leaving his other hand captive. “As Wyatt said to me mere moments ago, ‘new girls are trouble’.”

“Did he.” Aspasia smiled sidelong at Wyatt, who shrugged.

His handsome face told no tales. He wore what he habitually did: a certain stoic ambiguity. “I said they bring trouble,” he said, after a moment.

“So do old girls,” Doc said wryly, feigning negligence. He paused, looking down at his glass, lips parted. “Or maybe they bring out the trouble that’s already in us.”

Wyatt was looking at him when he raised his gaze at last. He offered a broad and charming smile.

“That’s neither here nor there,” Aspasia put in, lightly. “The only question that truly matters—Mr. Earp, Mr. Holliday—is whether trouble is something you look for.”

“Habitually,” Doc declared.

“You do,” said Wyatt, hesitant. His gaze seemed a little darker now; even wounded somehow. “I’d just as soon you didn’t.”

“Bah,” said Doc. “He means gunfights.” He leveled a finger at Earp, avoiding his gaze. “Let’s not wander off-topic here, my friend.”

Wyatt was silent for a moment. “And what exactly is the topic?”

“Pistols,” declared Doc, airily. “Of course.”

“Forget your weapons for a moment, boys.” Aspasia rubbed her fingers slowly over the back of Doc’s hand as she spoke, seductively reassuring. “Perhaps I should put it in gambling terms. What empty-headed fool would turn down a pair of kings, much less a pair of aces?”

Doc laughed, feeling the hectic thrill of creeping impropriety. “Oh, but we play fa-ro here, Miss Talbott. This is no poker town. Make no mistake: this is a tiger town, and we twist his tail unrepentantly.”

“What if I want to grab two tigers by the tail?” Aspasia leaned in, as her voice dipped low, dispensing with coyness and plunging into sheer insinuation.

“Auribus teneo lupum,” Doc murmured to the rim of his glass. “But it’s not the first time.”

Wyatt was watching him. “Doc’s an educated man, madam. I do quite often defer to his acumen.”

“Then let us do so now,” Aspasia said. She turned deliberately towards Doc. “What’s your poison, Mr. Holliday?”

“Oh, any poison at all suits me. Just so long as it is administered in the guise of something sweet.”

Aspasia glanced back at Wyatt. “This is why I used to call him my Georgia peach,” she purred.

She held his eyes after she spoke, as if waiting for an answer. Wyatt tried to glance away, but she just watched him with heavy eyes until at last he grumbled, “Makes sense.”

Though he was sure it was the least appropriate response, Doc laughed. Wyatt looked at him, startled, hackles raised, as if the sudden flurry of noise had been the prelude to a fit of coughing. Doc knew that Wyatt had never been particularly demonstrative in his concern, but for a moment it had almost seemed as if he was ready to leap across the table at the first sign of trouble.

It was probably just the nerves getting to him, Doc told himself. All the same, even if Aspasia’s cock-eyed scheme fell through, he would at least have that sudden display of protective worry to keep him warm.

Maybe it hadn’t just been his imagination, though. Aspasia, it seemed, had noticed something as well. Like tripping the first switch on some intricate contraption, she set her trap in motion.

“Oh, dear, I’m afraid the whiskey has gone to my head. Mr. Earp, would you be so kind as to escort me up to my room so I can loosen the stays of this corset?”

The reversion to such an amateurish and obvious ploy seemed to set Wyatt’s mind at ease. He stood, and offered Aspasia his arm. She took it, glancing back at Doc as she did and throwing out a smile like a lure.

Doc followed them to the narrow stairs that led to the rooms on the upper floor. It wasn’t the first time he’d made this particular walk of shame, if it could even be called such a thing anymore, but tonight he felt that he was being watched much more keenly than usual.

At the foot of the staircase, Wyatt released Aspasia and let her go ahead. He still trailed after her, but he hung back so he could talk to Doc. “Want me to wait down here a spell?”

“Do you mean to tell me you want to deny a lady her most fervent wish?” Doc said. “Besides, after she’s through with me, I think she’d as soon steal my sundries and leap out the window than wait patiently for you.”

Wyatt frowned. “Then maybe you ought to wait down here and I’ll go up.”

“That’s even worse. She’ll put a saddle on you and ride you to the Mexican border before any posse could catch her.”

Wyatt looked at him flatly for a moment, and then, abruptly, he laughed. “You’re a hell of a man, Doc. And you know some singular folks.”

“Like attracts like,” Doc replied, and resolutely he followed Aspasia up the stairs. A moment later, he heard Wyatt following close behind him.

Chapter Text

Aspasia had staked out one of the larger suites as her own. She habitually travelled light, but she had still taken pains to add a feminine touch to the surroundings. There was a Japanese screen stretched across one corner, and tangles of colored scarves were stretched over the windows and knotted around the bedposts. There was a ghost story by Elizabeth Gaskell sitting on the vanity near the bed, along with a dime novel about Jesse James.

“I won’t be but a moment,” Aspasia said, slipping behind the screen. “I’m sure you two can find something to amuse yourselves.”

“Oh, I’m sure,” Doc said obscurely. Left alone with Wyatt, he cast about for a moment, finally sighting a rickety side table with a decanter of claret and several glasses, invitingly arrayed. He raised his voice slightly, deliberately, angling it toward the scrim where her shadow shifted. “Are these libations here for guests to avail themselves of, my darling flower?”

“Why, of course, John Henry. What manner of hostess would I be if I didn’t provide refreshments for my guests? Help yourself and Mr. Earp, if you will? I’ve still got some underpinnings to clamber out of.”

“Gladly,” said Doc. “And I thank you kindly.” He poured for them both, and held out a glass. Claret was not wholly out of Wyatt’s wheelhouse, though it was normally whisky they drank together, outside the company of the gentler sex.

Wyatt took the wine and raised it to his lips at once. “I appreciate it,” he said.

Doc didn’t trust himself to meet Wyatt’s eyes, not fully, so he skirted the edges of the room instead, never quite letting their gazes cross. “Well, she’s taken these rooms and made them quite charming, hasn’t she? Downright cozy, I daresay.” He took a drink of claret; a larger one than he’d intended.

“They certainly have a woman’s touch,” said Wyatt. It wasn’t clear if he approved of that or not.

“John Henry,” intoned their enigmatic demoiselle, brushing her hair behind the partition, “dim the lights, won’t you?”

“Certainly, my dove.” His heart beat a little harder, if it did not quicken. In the corner, there was a fancy hanging lamp with dangling crystals and a hobnail cranberry-glass shade, and a table lamp beside the brass bed. He moved toward the first and lowered the wick, then the other, as the room slowly descended into sultry twilight, cast in a subtle rosy warmth.

“Not too low,” she disemobodiedly admonished, and he corrected it, raising the wick a touch once more.

“Better, my angel?”

“Why, I don’t know,” she murmured. “What do you think, Mr. Earp?”

“Seems about right,” said Wyatt, from not so far behind, surprising him. “Enough to see by.”

Under threat: hens set, thought Doc. And roosters spook. It came to his head unbidden, intrusive and unasked for, but no less true for all that. It was that way for grouse, and chukar and China and ring-necked pheasant alike. It was, contrary to Grecian declension, the men of the prairie-bird persuasion who were prone to hysteria, flying straight up in the air at the sound of a gun, while the ladies laid low and strategized. They played the long game, hunkered in the sage, running ahead of the hunter, and oft escaped unscathed. That was but one way the fairer sex endured in ways that the brash and brawny one did not.

Aspasia and her ilk would doubtless outlive him, even without the consumption’s slow-galloping onslaught to even the odds. Even so, Doc knew that he did not spook, and to this one fact he owed the greater part of his success. He had a cool head, and a dead-cold hand. Wyatt, for all that might be said about him, was no ordinary rooster, either. Wyatt was ever steady under the gun. Perhaps not cool, but level-headed. Even now, in these strange apartments, at the precipice of this portentous appointment. He stood abreast of Doc even now, never very far, content in watchful waiting, ready to weather whatever the dice might prescribe.

“Doc,” he began, quietly, to Holliday’s surprise.

“Hmm?” Doc turned his head, as if drawn from distraction.

“Everything all right with you?”

Doc’s lips spread wide, into what he’d been told was a lush and staggering smile. “Never better, Wyatt.”

Wyatt didn’t look away. Instead, he just plain stared.

“How do I let you talk me into this?” he said, sitting down on the bed as if he owned the damn thing. He started to loosen his collar and his cuffs, and quickly rid himself of his jacket, tossing it over a chair.

Doc tracked his undressings with a gunslinger’s eye. He seemed completely comfortable disrobing in Doc’s presence, as if he were little more than a piece of furniture or a family pet. In an uncharacteristic moment of uncertainty, he wondered if this was not all a terrible idea. If he was not about to place some tender and unarmored part of himself up as a target for Wyatt to take pot shots at.

There was no sense following that train of thought to its end; no good to come from going down that road. He’d stared down his death more times than he could count without flinching or faltering, but in the face of Wyatt’s naked wrists poking out from his undone shirtsleeves, Doc felt that he would lose his resolve entirely.

Fortunately, it was at that moment that Aspasia stepped out from behind the screen. She was dressed in a short silk kimono, belted loosely around the waist. Her dark hair was unbound, falling ramrod straight, without a single ripple, to the center of her back. Though she had undeniably aged in the intervening years, her body was still taut and youthful, a fact which she seemed to already be well aware of as she swayed across the floor.

“Are you gentlemen enjoying your drinks? I brought that claret special from back east. It’s as good a time to get some use out of it as any.”

She swept her eyes over Wyatt first, then over to Doc. There, she paused, and frowned slightly as if she had detected something in the decor that displeased her.

With an exaggerated sigh and a toss of her head, she planted herself in front of Doc. “Shame on you, darling. We’re all waiting on you.”

She reached up, undoing his collar with a flourish. Though she was not a short woman, in her bare feet, she stood half a head shorter than Doc. He could see over her shoulder quite clearly, to where Wyatt was seated on the bed, just watching them.

He wished that he could not.

Doc closed his eyes and gave himself up to Aspasia’s expertise; lithe fingers pulling the stickpin and unfastening his flashy ascot, easing the lounge coat off his shoulders, slipping the fine horn buttons of his costly linen shirt until it fell open--exposing the top half of a snug silk union suit that he knew did little to hide the contours of the masculine chest beneath.

She did it all at a torturous and glacial pace; slow as molasses. A strip-tease, by any other name. Doc shuddered and took a sip of claret.

“Why, you’re shaking, John Henry.” She paused, uncertain, and touched his jaw with her fingers. “I’ve never seen you this way.”

“It’s the White Plague,” he heard Earp murmur. “He has spells now and then.”

“It’s not the goddamn phthisis, Wyatt.” Doc opened his eyes, and immediately knew his mistake.

Wyatt was now wholly stripped to the waist, and that was a happening. He was well-built, brawny as he should have been, and seemingly unaware of that fact. His skin was lightly sun-bronzed and supple. Fine, straight, downy light-brown hair curved over his jutting pectorals. It had always looked impossibly soft to Doc. Impossible, because he would never truly know.

It was nothing Doc hadn’t seen before, a hundred times over. A literal hundred times. In fact, he’d seen plenty more. Wyatt washing his face at the pump outside a lean-to. Wyatt taking a hasty whore’s bath over a platter. Wyatt changing his clothing, any given day. Wyatt waking, stumbling half-aware to the camp coffeepot with his union suit half-on. Wyatt, naked as they made him, knee-deep in a crick and scrubbing his chestnut-brown hair.

And yes, that included even the most treasured, profligate memories he could conjure--Wyatt and he, drunk and debaucherous, fraternally sharing the charms and carnal attentions of one obliging lady, as had occurred more than once, as Wyatt had easily conceded. But that had been hedonic happenstance, driven by drugstore nerve; liquor and lust in equal measures. The dynamic, though all too backslapping and brotherly for the way Doc’s true tastes ran, had nonetheless been stirring. Such diversions were hardly unheard of in towns where obliging ladies were in short supply. It was only thrifty.

None of that was Doc hiring a ringer to expand the conditions of the tryst. None of that was Wyatt half-naked on a whore’s brass bed, solemn-eyed in the semidarkness, waiting for them. For him.

He felt like he was cheating at faro.

This time Doc didn’t close his eyes. He laughed, unsure if he was half-mad, or merely half-hard. “Well? Are you done? Shall I do the rest myself, hapless consumptive that I am?”

“Let her do it,” said Wyatt.

“Don’t get all apoplectic, darling,” said Aspasia. She continued her sensual deconstruction of his legend, peeling the union suit from his upper half, over his broad shoulders and down his arms, exposing him to the warm, still air of the room, and Wyatt’s constant but unfathomable gaze.

“My word, what a situation we have gotten ourselves into,” Doc said to no one in particular, tilting his head back so he didn’t have to look at Wyatt, while Aspasia knelt down, lifting each of his feet off the floor in turn so that she could manhandle his boots off. She straightened up again, and then made for the belt. Doc was assiduous in his determination not to look, but he could hear the soft clinking of the metal hardware, chiming together as she slowly lowered his trousers.

Flinging the last of Doc’s clothing into the growing heap on the chair, she stood once more. “How does that strike you, Mr. Earp?” she said, looking Doc over like an artist scrutinizing a canvas. Then, as if placing the last dab of paint, she stroked the tip of one finger up the underside of his waxing cock.

“Better ask him how he likes it,” Wyatt said. Unlike Doc, he hadn’t looked away even once. By some illusion or trick of the light, it was as if he had not even blinked.

Aspasia’s eyes lingered on Doc’s face a moment longer. Then she turned back to Wyatt. “I think he likes it fine. But did you need some help with your fastenings as well?”

She took one step towards him. Wyatt sat perfectly still and composed, until Aspasia reached for him. Then his hands snapped out, seizing on her waist and lifting her bodily onto the bed. She murmured in protest for her lost dignity, but quieted quickly when Wyatt buried his face in her bosom.

Aspasia’s hand rose like a spectre, grasping briefly at the air, and then falling on the back of Wyatt’s neck. All at once, he lifted himself, looking out from behind the screen of Aspasia’s loose hair.

His dark, unreadable gaze augured deep into Doc’s chest.

“Well?” Wyatt said. “It was your idea. Are you going to just stand there all night?”

The words hit him broadside, like a sledge. A sharp, sudden pulse went through his cock and left it taut. Doc eyed him back for a beat. “No sir, I am not,” he said coolly, like a man pulling his back-up gun, tapping into a deep, rich motherlode of bedrock insouciance he had come to rely on in the direst of straits, for which this surely qualified in spades.

He sauntered, hasteless, toward the brass bed where Wyatt and Aspasia reclined, arrested in the act, half in dishabille, like a classical painting. Wyatt had lit upon her like a barbarian; a tiger on a tenderloin. Her lips were parted; his hair was wild. At the sight of them lying there entwined, all his mettle was molten. He wanted to let it consume him.
Still, it would do him no favors to let such treacherous passions hold sway. They might detract from his ultimate purpose, or worse yet, betray his intentions long before the time was right. Doc ran his hand slowly along the heavy brass crossbar of the footboard as he strolled around to the bed’s other side.

Now Wyatt was not watching him; not directly, anyway. He knew well that look of peripheral intensity, from gunfights and shoot-outs with the man.

“He is full of vigor, isn’t he, darling?” Doc drawled, letting his eyes traverse them. “A real specimen. I do enjoy his manner in these moments.”

Aspasia’s single, pale eye watched him from between the lush tumble of her locks. “I’m enjoying him thoroughly. I’m also enjoying the view. My dearest John Henry, you are a sight for sore eyes. Every bit as strapping and fetching as the day I last saw you in such a state. Those lips alone—"

“Flattery will get you most places,” he intoned, and fell in behind her on the bed with languid grace, letting his palm drift slowly down her silk-clad back as he did, from tip to tail, the motion a soothing sort of stroking, like reassuring a horse when you walk behind it.

Aspasia closed her eyes and sighed, and he did not know if it was fact or fiction, and he did not care, so long as she was a competent thespian. Wyatt had no such dramatic gifts; men like him were not minted for life upon the stage. Staying slate and poker-faced was his only hope of obfuscation, and he knew it, so he traded on inscrutability. But when unguarded, Wyatt more than made up for his lack of guile with earnest and unvarnished artlessness, to Doc’s perpetual delight. However this hand played out, at least he would know beyond a doubt when and if Wyatt enjoyed himself.

Now they flanked her like telamons, bookends on either side. Wyatt’s broad hands roamed roughly, inches from his own body. He’d been closer to Wyatt on many occasions, in many ways, but farther away in all the ones that mattered. Doc reached to draw her hair back from her neck and fell to kissing it, his slow-burn sensuality an oddly harmonious counterpoint to Wyatt’s forthright lust.

Aspasia gasped and hummed between then, a series of noises against which a man could claim little defense. However, Doc knew even without being able to see the expression on her face that she was no mindless slave to pleasure. No, she was still hard at work, the gears in her head grinding away towards some specific end, even as their earthly flesh ground away towards some other goal.

Doc’s hand was on her waist, she took it and guided it up, to her breasts. Wyatt had already tugged her robe off her shoulders and was fondling her, one soft globe in each hand, the nipples pinched lightly between thumb and forefinger.

When Aspasia corrected his course, it was to guide Doc directly into a collision. His exploring fingers met Wyatt’s, briefly entwined with them. His palms were rough, almost chapped from good labor and hard living, and Doc felt himself trapped between the perfumed sweetness of Aspasia’s bosom and the punishing roughness of Wyatt’s touch.

He almost pulled away, but he rallied himself and held a steady course. To his surprise, Wyatt didn’t cede any ground to him, either.

At some point, Wyatt had gotten his belt undone and freed his cock. It rubbed up against Aspasia’s belly, under the loose belt of her robe, stirring the ruffles on her silk bloomers. She moved all at once, catching Wyatt’s face between her hands and arresting its frantic movements against the side of her throat.

“Before you ruin my nice silks,” she purred, her voice velvety and hoarse, “there’s something I simply have to try.”

“And what might that be?” Wyatt ground out.

“You have only to ask, my darling, and Wyatt and I shall do our level best to oblige.” Doc murmured this, lips near to the shell of her ear, looking across at Wyatt with his light, piercing gaze. “That is, if it’s a wish within our power to grant.” Wyatt looked back, and the sight of him made Doc’s pulse thunder.

His collar-length hair was no longer coiffed for town. Once swept-back and tamed, it had fallen forward around his neck and jaw, lusciously uncivilized. Oh, he’d seen Wyatt like this, and savored every savage moment. But never with those hooded hawk’s eyes so bold and unrelenting, trained upon him like he was Polaris above the endless chaparral, the sole compass point in the sky.

Aspasia turned her face toward Doc’s, eyes closed, lips parted and smiling. Her expression was serene and beatific now, her movements almost hypnotic, as she wantonly offered her mouth to his. Doc bent his dark blond head and savored what he’d been given.

He felt Wyatt’s hand clench; an indirect sensation, but apparent nonetheless.

“Gracious,” she murmured, shivering, as he broke the kiss. “That mouth of yours is still made for sin, John Henry.” She shifted, then, grasping Wyatt’s face, still shuddering as she did. His mouth was on hers in an instant, a ruthless and hungry crush. Watching them at such close range, Doc felt a bolt of arousal shoot straight to his loins, wholly bypassing all his faculties. It was a fascinating thing.

When she broke from him, she was even more breathless. “And you, Mr. Earp, are quite the passionate one. Not to be outdone.”

Serpentine, she turned once more, only to find Doc waiting his turn, which he took with great and demonstrative ardor. This time she made only a low and appreciative sound before turning back to Wyatt, who kissed her openmouthed, mid-moan, stifling her cry with his lips and tongue in the Florentine way. When she turned her face to Doc again, he felt the deliberate manner in which she parted her lips; an invitation, with a sly hint of unspoken triumph. The first bite of caviar, on the tip of a silver spoon. He closed his eyes and let his tongue slide beyond them, to go where Wyatt had gone.

The very thought inflamed his senses; sent everything up in flames.

Wyatt grasped her face, drawing her mouth from Doc’s to his own, stealing the kiss he was no longer content to wait for. A beat later, Doc stole it back. They had drawn closer with each iteration, and now their faces were mere inches away as they kissed her, first one, then the other.

“If you intended this game to be harmless—” began Doc, before Wyatt guided her face back to Doc's, urging her to kiss him again.

“Oh my darling,” she gasped, against his lips. “It was never meant to be.”

Doc felt something steal over his side—an arm, muscular and warm; a hand, a grasp, unmistakably broad, rough-palmed and strong. And then Wyatt was kissing Aspasia again, closer still, his lips now more adjacent to Doc’s than merely very near; their faces close enough that he could feel Wyatt’s breath and steep in the mingled bouquet of their aftershaves. In such proximity it was nigh unbearable, how much he felt—like staring at the sun. Doc felt a wild impulse take hold of him. He reached out, mindlessly, stroking Wyatt’s chestnut hair, his stubbled jaw; cupping the back of his head.

Wyatt tore his lips from hers and turned his face toward Doc’s. In the space between seconds, their eyes met. Wyatt’s gaze was a hot, hazed blue, raw and stripped in a way he’d never witnessed. And he knew in that moment that Wyatt meant to kiss him.

Wyatt surged forward. Doc felt his eyes close, felt a rush of hedonist elation—then nothing. Wyatt had arrested himself within a hair’s breadth of his lips.

“Go on then,” said Aspasia. “It’s what that mouth was made for.”

At that, Wyatt seemed to recover himself. He drew back slowly. Doc stared, lips cloven, disbelieving. “My God, I’m sorry, Doc,” said Wyatt, quietly, after several moments. “Claret must have crossed some wires.” The contrition in his eyes was genuine. Nobody did heartfelt contrition quite like Wyatt.

“What exactly do you have to be sorry for, Wyatt Earp?” drawled Doc, discomfited, and struggling to conceal that fact. “Trying, or not following through?”

“I don’t--” Wyatt started to say, but then his brow creased and he trailed off, any words of embarrassment or protestation evaporating like so much condensation from a chilled pitcher of mint julips.

“I do,” said Doc, holding Wyatt’s eyes with his own. He knew that unsettling stillness was in them, same as when he drew. He reached out very slowly, letting his fingers brush the hairs at the back of Wyatt’s neck before he cupped it, and leaned in. The first touch of his mouth against Wyatt’s was a soft caress that held the impact of a punch.

Earp’s hands found him a half-beat later, seizing him, pulling him close. Wyatt kissed back without hesitation, escalating matters at once, forcing Doc’s lips open with his tongue. Before long they were violently entwined, open-mouthed and stealing each other’s breath.

Doc reeled, grappling with the weight of Wyatt’s passion, and what it did to his own. It was like one of his spells—the chills and heat and headiness and lack of breath; the fever he could feel in his glossy eyes and listless skin—but this was all over, and lower besides. He’d thought of it so many times, but none of his idle reveries had ever approached the reality.
His pulse pounded in his palms, and throughout his body, like Apache drums. Doc would never have considered his brazen nature a virtue, but from time to time it paid off handsomely. For his part, Wyatt seemed content to ignore the frantic thumping of his heart, the cold sweat that had collected on his palms, as he granted Doc all he’d ever wanted and then some.

He was aware, peripherally so, of Aspasia fading away, withdrawing, drifting back out of reach by nigh-imperceptible degrees. She kept a close eye on the proceedings, but was presumably more than ready to transition to a hand-off approach. Having dispersed a goodly amount of fairy dust, she was now content to sit back and let the magic happen.
Doc held the kiss as long as he could. In truth, he didn’t want to lean back and see the expression that was now inevitably imprinted on Wyatt’s face. Eventually, though, he found himself short on air, his head swimming from the breathlessness of passion, and, panting, he withdrew.

Wyatt’s face was flushed from ear to ear, but his expression was still set and unreadable.

“Doc…” he said. Then he shook his head, clearing the slate so he could try again. “Well, hell. You ain’t catching, are you?”

“These are not the kisses of death,” Doc said, making an attempt at a rakish twitch of the eyebrow, and feeling that he must be failing spectacularly.

“Good enough for me,” Wyatt replied.

He raised himself on one elbow. Doc tried to follow him up, but Wyatt was too swift for him. He had already slung his free arm over Doc’s shoulder, pushing him back onto the bed so that he could half-cover him with his body.

Doc sank back obediently, his body moving seemingly without conscious signaling from his brain. Reacting on muscle memory, like it might in a gunfight.

“I feel like you’ve done that before,” said Wyatt, searching his face with a piercing gaze.

“Well, you would be correct,” Doc managed, coolly. “I am no neophyte when it comes to Venusian pursuits, nor Martian ones.”

He heard an indulgent, feminine laugh from the sidelines. Perhaps from the ether. “What Doc is trying to say, in plain English, Mr. Earp, is that his formative years were half-spent indulging in that grand collegiate back-East tradition of brotherly love.”

“That wasn’t much plainer,” said Wyatt. His gaze was heavy with some sort of promise, unvoiced and enigmatic. It made Doc shudder.

In lieu of words, he grasped Wyatt’s hand and slid it down, guiding it over his cock, which made itself clear in no uncertain terms, like the hard bulge of a holstered gun. “Is that plain enough for you, Marshal?”

Earp’s brow furrowed. He took his time about it, but he didn’t pull his hand away.

Doc stroked it with his own, like he had when their hands had crossed over Aspasia’s breasts. “Lovely as she is, I fear our dear Miss Talcott has undersold me. This mouth was made for more than one thing.”

“Just so you know,” Wyatt said, at last, “I’ve never done this with a fella before. I don’t want to hear any lip from you if it’s not up to your standards.”

It was a gruff disclaimer that Doc found both amusing and endearing. “Are you telling me that you don’t have any desire for men?” he replied. “Not even for that which they share with women?”

Wyatt’s face didn’t change in any perceptible way, but it was still clear that his expression had become a few degrees less impressed. His mouth was hard set, a line drawn straight across his face, neither tilting up nor pulling down.

Doc sighed. “I’m sure you’ll do splendidly,” he said quietly, in an uncharacteristic display of vulnerability. It embarrassed him to do so, and so he quickly added, “After all, a lady is present.”

“Don’t mind me, boys,” Aspasia caroled. She had, at some point, slipped off the bed without disturbing them in the slightest and withdrawn to the padded divan where she lounged with a glass of claret. “Just think of me as very tasteful wallpaper.”

“Why’s she still here?” Wyatt said, to the space between them. “Seems like this is between you and me now.”

“Why, I suppose to lend her feminine inspiration to you, Wyatt, as you nobly embark on this novel endeavor.” Doc averted his eyes.

“Do you need inspiration?”

“No, Wyatt, I’m afraid I have all I need right here.”

“You’re afraid.”

“I am.” It was a frank admission, and Doc’s voice was quiet as he made it. He reached up to touch Wyatt’s chest. “It is soft,” he murmured. “I always wondered.”

“Always?” The word was husked; with incredulity, and maybe something else.

“Is it really so hard to believe?” He wondered how Wyatt could have remained oblivious to the nature of his devotion, after all this time.

“It’s getting easier,” said Wyatt.

“What can I do to allay you?” Doc said. He had meant it to sound like tossed-off innuendo, like wit to lubricate the joints, but it didn’t come out that way. He could hear it in the way the words rolled off the edge of his voice, a bare whisper, too vulnerable to be anything but the sonic equivalent of a white flag of surrender.

Wyatt had never, to Doc’s knowledge, scorned weakness in anyone, but he didn’t like to see it. A display of fragility was more like to make him freeze up in embarrassment than mock the afflicted. Somehow that was worse, though. To have Wyatt think of him like that when all he had wanted for them was to carve out a space where they might forget their troubles together; well, it was like something hard and heavy in his chest that he just couldn’t seem to cough out.

Imagine his surprise, then, when Wyatt didn’t shut down. Didn’t shy away from him at that first glimpse of the turbulent depth beneath his placid surface. Instead, the corners of his mouth creased into some cold cousin to a smile.

“You don’t gotta worry about me, Doc. I find I learn best when I can take a hands-on approach.”

Before Doc could formulate a response, Wyatt had descended once more and claimed his mouth in a kiss. Good to his word, he set both burning hands around Doc’s waist and set to work moving him around like he was farriering a bit of iron around a blacksmith’s anvil, trying to find the right angle to knock a kink out of it.

He ended up on top, his hips slightly askew, one leg thrust up between both of Doc’s so that the bulge of his thigh bumped against his sensitive bits. He was still wearing his trousers, having just undone them a bit at the belt.

Doc sucked in a hissing breath between his teeth. “I know you’re the type to leave your boots on, but do be so kind as to shuck off those vestments. You’re giving me a most disagreeable saddle sore.”

“You sure you want to see what you’re getting?” Wyatt ground out, already straightening up onto his knees so he could ease down his trousers.

Doc half-raised himself on his elbows, watching the much-awaited unveiling, trying not even to blink. “I want that very badly,” he said, his voice hoarse.

Wyatt disrobed without much ceremony, whipping off his trousers and the bottom half of his union suit, tossing them in the general direction of the growing tangle of their clothes.

Doc caught a strangled breath. Seeing Wyatt en flagrante was nothing new, but this time it was different. This time, it was all for him. Slowly, as if mesmerized, he reached for Wyatt’s cock, angling to wrap around it, to at last get a real sense of its heft. He stopped before he got there, though, hesitating.

“Well?” Wyatt said. “What are you waiting for? It ain’t a snake and it can’t bite you.”

When Doc was still slow on the draw, Wyatt leaned forward, pressing the shaft of his weapon into the hollow of Doc’s hand. His skin felt hot against Doc’s fingers, and he was gripped by a brief spell of flustered alarm, wondering if his hands were equally chill against Wyatt’s sensitive bits.

If they were, Wyatt didn’t pay it much mind. He settled himself half in half-repose, bent on his elbow over Doc’s prone body. He gripped Doc’s jaw in one hand, turning it first one way, then the other.

Doc’s hand was moving in slow half-circles around the shaft of Wyatt’s cock, more of a nervous tick than an earnest attempt at seduction. Wyatt idly slipped an index finger between Doc’s lips, and his grip tightened convulsively, grasping at the column as if it were the only anchor fixing him in place.

“She’s right about your mouth,” Wyatt said, studying it, warm blue gaze fixed on his face. “You always were easy on the eyes, Doc.”

Doc felt a flush creep up, enlivening his pallor, spreading over his broad cheekbones. “I could say the same,” he breathed, as Wyatt drew back his hand and traced the finger down his chest. The faint tracing of moisture on his heated skin heightened his senses nearly unbearably.

Wyatt watched his response, seemingly fascinated. “How does this go, Doc? What’s on the table?” He leaned in, close enough to intone. “I have half a notion to get inside you.”

Doc closed his eyes, unable to believe the words, and unable to meet Wyatt’s gaze while he savored them. “I do believe that can be arranged.”

Wyatt’s hand found his cock a beat later, found it already and unapologetically hard. Doc blenched at the touch, and Wyatt let out a soft, low whistle. “Always ready, as usual.”

“Tell you what, Wyatt,” Doc heard his own drawl, low and persuasive as chamois, quite in contrast to the hummingbird thrum of his pulse. “Let me up, lie back, and I’ll show you a thing or two.”

The corners of Wyatt’s eyes crinkled; he was amused. “Now this I have got to see.” He eased off Doc, slowly, with no great haste, and lay back brazenly against the brass headboard with the impunity of an outlaw, arms outstretched and grasping the metal bars.

“My word, Wyatt,” said Doc, with a faint smile. “You are a wanton.” But in that moment something shifted, and his nerves fell away. He saw his old friend, and realized that nothing about him had changed. It was only Wyatt before him in this overdressed brothel bed, game as ever. He felt his seductive wiles returning in force, his desire renewed and heightened as he gazed at the lawman, at his thewy arms fully extended, gripping brass in taut expectation.

Doc eased over Wyatt’s body, slow as honey, and pushed himself downward on his arms, sinuous, settling himself in the cradle of Wyatt’s legs. Earp watched him, disbelieving, piercing blue gaze hazed and attuned, like a man rapt at a magic show.

He felt the urge to say “abracadabra” before he made it disappear, but while Doc generally felt a bit of humor carried most moments, Wyatt was a touch more decorous in solemn occasions, and the joke might not be as well received as his carnal affections.

Instead he gave an indolent smile, and took it in hand, grasping low on the shaft with the surety of grip he gave his guns. “My, this is a fine weapon, Wyatt. And you know how I love a good piece of iron. Why, I can spend hours polishing a gun. You want them primed when you finally go to pull the trigger, after all.”

He bent his head and swirled his tongue over the glans. Wyatt groaned. The sound hit him lower than he could have imagined, panging his loins unmercifully. He surged forward with the showmanship and flourish of a cart-traveling sword swallower, taking Wyatt’s cock to the hilt.

He heard Wyatt’s breathless, ripped-out curse. He increased his attentions, moved by the desire to hear it again.

His shoulders were wide, and grazed Wyatt’s inner thighs as he moved. Like the head of his cock, the skin there was soft as kid, and Doc reveled in it. These were the pastures of Wyatt’s territory he’d never had access to, the ones he could only admire from a distance with pokerfaced indifference and quiet longing. He had always wanted to trespass, to graze on the tender lands he saw beyond the sagebrush. But now Wyatt had lifted the gate, and he intended to roam every inch.

Doc gave himself over to it, letting the full length slip past his teeth and over the muscled press of his tongue, dragging the weight of it over his full lower lip, feeling the heft of the piece, learning its particular contours. After a spell, he looked up, laudanum-eyed, searching intently for how he was being received.

Wyatt’s head was thrown back. His arms were flexed against sensation, which pleased Doc’s ravenous gaze. “Christ, Doc. You touch a man like that, with a mouth like that…” He broke off, swallowing the words. Doc could feel his loins move in counterpoint, rolling like the endless hills; Wyatt’s broad thighs taut around him like a cage he had no wish to escape. It did not surprise him. Wyatt was not passive, but passionate, even in receiving.

He indulged every impulse, chased every indecency, spurred on by Wyatt’s responses. He could hear Wyatt’s breath, hitching as it climbed; his body tensing. Doc drew back, letting his lips reluctantly release his long-sought trophy to the warm stillness of the air.

Denied his peak, Wyatt reached for him, wild and aroused, fingers mindlessly grasping his hair to urge him back.

“Easy, Wyatt,” he murmured. “Plenty more where that came from.”

Wyatt’s eyes didn’t stray from him, which admittedly surprised Doc. As inevitable as this had all seemed to him, he still hadn’t expected Wyatt to go along so easily. Had thought that he might look away, turn his eyes to the ceiling, imagine himself somewhere else in order to preserve the perception he had of himself, as one never to let the reasonable and orderly lines between friend and brother and lover blur.

But Wyatt had proven himself up for the challenge as usual. He was fully present, not letting his mind drift for a moment. He held Doc’s eyes, his rough hands locked around his waist as Doc leaned forward on his knees, positioning himself over Wyatt’s cock.

He felt it swell against him, pushing its eager tip against the inside of his thigh, leaving a kiss of dampness there.

A spit and a prayer, that was all Doc had ever needed to get by, and that wasn’t about to change now. Gripping Wyatt’s cock by the base, he shifted forward and lowered himself down on it.

He heard Wyatt suck in a sharp breath, as if he were in pain. But there was nothing pained about his expression. His eyes were half-hooded, almost casual, as if he were squinting into the glare of a sunny day. He shifted his grip, finding the bony ridges of Doc’s hips and caressing them as if they were the luscious curves of a woman.

Doc moaned at the first thrust. Not with pleasure - though he surely was enjoying himself. No, the sound that escaped his raw throat then surprised even him. It was a sound that suggested only relief, as if he had been exposed to a cold draught of water on a hot day.

Wyatt’s eyebrows quirked in surprise, but when Doc bit his tongue so that no more murmurs were forthcoming, he let the curious display go by the wayside.

When he urged Doc forward it was not with the clumsy ministrations of an inexperienced lover, but rather with forward momentum and purpose. Eyes on the prize, that was Wyatt. As it is and ever shall be.

Doc couldn’t help but smile at the thought.

“Something funny?” Wyatt growled. His tone was casual, conversational even, but there was a raw and rough edge to it that had not been there before.

“Just a private joke,” Doc replied. He felt very mindful of his body, from the tip of his coiffure to the hard fiery knot in the center of his chest. And then down to his nethers, where Wyatt’s cock was buried inside him and Wyatt’s hands were fastened fast around his waist, urging him to keep moving.

“Not boring you, am I, Doc?” Wyatt’s gritty, breathless voice reached his ears, gently sardonic, and wholly lustful. “Maybe you’re used to a certain sort. A sort with more finesse in these things than me.” Something else had crept into Earp’s voice at the end of the phrase. Something all too familiar to him on this particular day, but almost foreign from such unexpected quarters. Uncertainty.

“Hush, Wyatt.” Doc leaned forward, leaned deep--groaning, even as Wyatt echoed him, at the sudden shift in posture that tightened their indecent junction--and covered Earp’s mouth with his own, muffling any further discouraging discourse. “You are just the sort for me.”

Surely Wyatt could not even know how true those words were. Could not conceive of the place he’d carved for himself without even knowing. Or what soft thoughts Doc harbored of his being in parts unspoken.

Doc pulled back, closing his eyes, hands flat on Wyatt’s torso as he rode him, harder than a mustang he meant to break. Harder than he rode the convulsions of the graveyard cough when they wracked him.

Perhaps he could die like this, and it would be a mercy. To expire, here and happy, impaled on Wyatt’s cock. What wry quatrain would then emblazon his tombstone?

Something Romantic, most likely, in the most aesthetic and European sense of the word. That sort of thing had never really caught on in this dusty little corner of the world, and so Doc supposed he had better stick around a while. Long enough to set the record straight.

Besides, Wyatt probably wouldn’t like it if he died with his boots on. Or with his hammer in his hand. Or in the saddle, as it were. No, Wyatt would not appreciate the poetry in that at all.

With a sudden fondness that threatened to overwhelm him, Doc sank his fingers deep into Wyatt’s hair, pressing the heels of his hands against his temples, pinning him in place and descending on him for a kiss.

He swept his tongue around the inside of Wyatt’s mouth, tasting tobacco and whiskey like a fine powder coating every surface. He worked his hips down and felt Wyatt working back up against him, gathering a ball of liquid heat in the pit of his stomach, so unlike the fire that blazed endlessly in his breast. So long now, so long that he had almost stopped feeling it burn.

His hands worked against the sides of Wyatt’s scalp, and he could feel a sheen of sweat gathering around his fingers as he tufted his hair, making it rise in waves.

Wyatt made a little urgent noise against Doc’s lips, spilling it into his waiting mouth. He jerked his chin so that his teeth scraped along Doc’s skin, leaving a trail that felt like wildfire.

He came with a twist of his hips, a mindless straining upward that almost unseated Doc from his dignified perch. Wyatt was panting; he, who had never so much as been winded in Doc’s recollection was fully and ungracefully out of breath now.

Doc moved off him, gave him some space, well aware of what it felt like to have the air crushed out of you. But Wyatt grabbed him before he could get too far away, seizing him by the wrist and jerking him back.

Wyatt rolled over him, bringing his full weight to bear as brass protested, pinning him down against the storied mattress that held the memory of countless trysts less intimate, and kissed his mouth, remorseless and ravenous, until Doc felt a sweet and heady breathlessness, not unlike the rush from a dose of top-notch opium. Wyatt’s hands clutched his wrists, and Doc let himself be manacled, giving a lazy smile when Earp finally broke from his lips to stare down at his face.

“Why Marshal,” he drawled, “whatever have I done to earn such rough treatment? Do remember that I am an invalid.”

“You’re no invalid, Doc, and I’m no marshal. Not anymore.” Wyatt searched his expression for a beat, as if less unsure what he wanted to say than how he wanted to say it. Not finding an answer there, he finally held forth. “You didn’t finish. At least, you didn’t shoot. Does it not work that way, when you…”

Doc laughed. “Oh, it works that way, to be sure, Wyatt. Given time and inspiration. But I don’t mind sitting this one out, to be honest. I got what I wanted.”

“And what’s that?” Wyatt’s deep blue eyes were endearingly unwitting in their inquiry, or so Doc thought.

“Oh,” he said breezily, eyes aimlessly roaming the wallpaper, “this and that.” He paused, sobering. “You, mostly.”

“Me.” One of Wyatt’s hands tightened on his wrist, as the other slipped free. “All this time, and you never said a single word about it.”

“To be fair, it’s not really saddle conversation,” murmured Doc, avoiding Wyatt’s steady stare with a faint, bemused smile. “Nor dinner conversation. Nor casual conversation, either.”

“Seems to me it might be campfire conversation,” Earp observed, with igneous calm. “A thing like that. If you held a man in any sort of esteem.”

“Perhaps you’re right.” Doc nodded slightly; contrite, conceding. “And I do, Wyatt. I hold you in the highest esteem. You are my greatest friend. I’m awfully sorry for this duplicitous little act of perfidy.”

“I don’t know’s you should be sorry,” said Wyatt, and Doc felt the lawman’s broad, callused hand come to rest on his half-hard cock, gripping him with prejudice. “Seems all’s well that ends well.” He gave a slow, firm stroke of his fist, from shaft to tip, that made Doc twitch, with a sharp intake of breath. “So long as it ends well.”

“What are you doing?” whispered Doc, finding his breath in abruptly short supply.

“What’s it feel like?”

“Heaven,” managed Doc, dry-mouthed, closing his eyes against the sensations that assaulted him with every move of Wyatt’s rein-roughened hand.

“That’s right,” intoned Wyatt, near his ear. “You like to talk, Doc. Loose that silver tongue for me.”

“I have no words, Wyatt.” He swallowed, feverish, and let his head fall back. “Not a one.”

Wyatt’s lips found the bulge of his Adam’s apple, and the hollow of his throat. Wyatt’s stubble raked over his own. And all the while his hand kept stroking below.

Doc shook, silently, and it was Wyatt who filled the quiet, in the end, with gentle goading; crude encouragements and low-throated amusement, intoned at an intimate proximity.

It was the litany of coarse, fond obscenities that undid him eventually, when they crossed with thoughts of Wyatt’s seed, shot somewhere deep inside him, lost forever within him, and he shot his own a half-beat later, a blast of white heat that welled up volcanic and spilled in a veritable flood, coursing over Wyatt’s ruthlessly pumping fist and soaking the bedspread beneath.

Wyatt stared at his hand, transfixed, as his motions slowed, and he let out a soft, low whistle. “You have been holding back a few things, haven’t you, Doc.”

Doc gave a wan smile. “I just anointed you with the last of my earthly vigor, I fear. I’m a ghost now.”

“I must say I don’t mind seeing you in those sorts of convulsions.” Wyatt ran his palm over Doc’s chest and stomach, idly smearing his issue over the muscles with a curious and debauched sort of hedonism Doc wouldn’t have credited him with harboring. “But I don’t like those sorts of jokes. Jokes about your condition.”

“I have to joke about it, Wyatt.” Doc’s voice was low, a solemn drone that bore the weight of confession. “Otherwise it will eat me alive. I’m perfectly horrified by it.”

Wyatt looked down, falling quiet. “I suppose I understand that.”

“I appreciate it.” Doc remembered Aspasia abruptly, like a bolt from the blue, and it occurred to him to turn his head covertly, seeking her where she’d arranged herself on the chaise, chagrined that he had forgotten himself, and she was privy to such intimate exchanges.

But the room was empty. She had slipped the noose at some point, and let herself out like Kipling’s cat, and they had been neither of them the wiser. Preoccupied, by any other measure.

“Doc,” said Wyatt, quietly, drawing his attention back. Wyatt neither seemed to look for Aspasia, nor even remember her. “What is all this? What does it mean?”

“Do you need a grand declaration, Wyatt? A soliloquy, perhaps? A sonnet of my inclinations and intentions?” Doc coughed in his dramatic vigor, and Earp was there at once to stay him, hands pressed to him, throat and chest, and holding him against his own.

“Why yes. That would be instructive in the moment.”

Doc smiled sadly, and felt water gather at the corners of his eyes that he did not try to hide or disavow. “I cannot offer you forever, Wyatt. Alas.”

“I already know that.” Wyatt’s voice was no-nonsense, once more. Brusque and almost clipped, though Doc knew it for what it was: a brutal stemming of emotion, rather than a blithe dismissal. “What are you offering?”

“You already have my gun, and my loyalty. I won’t say my undying loyalty--”

Wyatt grimaced at his gallows levity, but otherwise ignored it. “I’ve always had those. And you’ve always had mine.”

“Alas I cannot offer you forever, Wyatt.” Doc slowly reiterated his earlier words, like an elocutionist reprising a stanza in a poem; a stage actor making one final grand monologue before the curtain. “But I’m offering you everything I have right now. For as long as I have it to give. I offer you everything. Whatever I have left, it’s yours.”

“I’ll take it.”

His declaration accepted, Doc closed his eyes, feeling lightheaded and drained in the wake, as all the adrenaline of venturing it receded and left him stranded on the high ground of his primal shores.

“Then we’ll live in the moment, as long as the moment lasts,” he murmured, a little delirious. “We can dwell in the land of nod. Beachfront property on the lake of fire.”

“And you’ll try your hardest not to die?”

Doc almost laughed, pleased that Wyatt was finally joining him in his deathbed irreverence, but when he sought Earp’s gaze he found it sober, earnest. There was no glint in his eye, no telltale cant to his mouth or his brow. Confronted by his unbudging sincerity, Doc sobered as well. “I shall try my hardest not to die, Wyatt. You needn’t worry about that.”

I’ll try my hardest not to die, because if I have you, I don’t want to.

The thought came through loud and clear, as if another voice had suddenly spoken it against his ear. But in fact no one had said it aloud, and as the silence stretched out long enough to be noticeable, it seemed that no one would. Doc had decided to keep his morbid, Byronic thoughts to himself. They weren’t for everyone.

“So, what do you suppose we do now?” Wyatt said at last, perhaps just to have something to break the awkward lull. “I mean, what are we doing?”

At a loss for what else Wyatt might want to hear, Doc finally ventured, “It seems to me that we have come to a crossroads. Shall we plunge ahead blindly, do you suppose? Or go forth with an excess of caution?”

Wyatt looked perplexed for a moment. Then he laughed. “Shit, Doc, I was suggesting you buy us dinner. That is how this works, isn’t it? Even if we got the order wrong.”

Doc laughed as well, but he could feel that he was blushing. It was just as well; he could certainly stand to have to have some color in his cheeks. “Dinner it is, then. Though you might have to lend me the cash. I am in dire straits at the moment.”

“Gambling?” Wyatt said with a frown.

“Something like that. Though I do think my luck is primed to turn around.”

“Dinner is on me, in that case,” Wyatt said. His hand came to rest on Doc’s hip. “And this is on both of us.”

“All upon us and within and through,” Doc said. “I do declare, I like the sound of that.”