Alex and Pete arguably had the least survivable jobs in World War II. They were American P-47 fighter-bomber aviators, based in England and flying dangerous bombing missions over the continent. Knowing the likelihood they wouldn’t survive, they led a hedonist bisexual sex life when on the ground, aided by men and women who wanted to make what life they had left pleasurable and who themselves wanted to sacrifice in the war effort. It helped that Alex and Pete were both hunks and studs. They had each survived over a hundred missions when the ceiling of expectance was ninety. They, like other pilots, ascribed this to the rituals they went through before flying. Alex and Pete’s rituals extended to sex, including with each other. Alex, the submissive, had grown to see their relationship in terms of love, not just ritual. When Pete fell in love with a young Viscount, though, pre-mission ritual went out the window. Would the two aviators survive this collapse in their rituals?
They told him they put him in the conservatory on sunny days, as the doctors had said he needed the sunshine. Autumn had arrived and it was too cold for him to sit, immobile, on the terrace. Immobile was Alex’s only option these days—at least for a while. A broken arm and leg and being blind—it was hoped only temporarily—meant he wasn’t going anywhere on his own. He’d been lucky, they said. Inexplicably, they said, he’d been thrown from the plane and landed on strong, leaf-cushioned tree branches. If he’d remained with Lucky Linda, he would have been burned to a crisp. They’d said it was inexplicable, but Alex knew it was because he’d been sloppy about strapping himself in the plane on takeoff. He’d said nothing about that.
He’d said nothing about the sloppiness and the lack of following ritual, because he knew that had a role in what had happened. They—his aviator compatriots at the aerodrome and even the Taylors here—had, in turn, not responded to his questions about what had happened to Pete. Their nonresponse was all the response he needed.
Angela Taylor was giving him a sponge bath on a wrought-iron chaise in the glassed-in conservatory. He was stripped down and embarrassed at all the areas she was touching in giving him the bath—this in spite of being in her bed every night. It just wasn’t the same—what happened in a glass room in the day and what happened in a bedroom in the dark of the night.
The bright flash when Pete’s plane exploded had blinded Alex. It had fried his retinas, they’d said. They also said that should be a temporary issue—that they’d rejuvenate themselves and when his arm and leg were mended, he’d be able to return to the air. They’d said it like Alex wanted to return to the war—to raining death down from the skies over Nazi-held territory on the continent. And he supposed he did. He couldn’t think of anything else he had to live for. Pete was dead. And he hadn’t fully realized what Pete meant to him until Pete wasn’t there anymore.
He’d had to convalesce somewhere, and the Taylors had stepped up to take over his care. The doctors and the squadron commander, Major Flint, had thought they were bricks for doing that—that they, as displaced Americans, not able to travel over dangerous waters back to the States, were doing what they could for the war effort here in taking a wounded American airman in to care for. Although he was, certainly, grateful for the care, Alex knew the Taylors had taken him in for the use of his cock.
