The Poet and Provocateur

Romcom short. A bodyguard is assigned to look after a very provocative poet.

4.5k, M/M, rated M. Bickering bastards going between American settler towns at the turn of the century. Adapted from a TweetFic.

Content warnings for casual period-typical homophobia and substance use throughout.

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Jared had expected to be met with a little homo in a suit.

He wasn’t sure if he’d be able to tell he was an queer just to look at him, maybe, that he’d be smoking a cigarette with his wrist limp, or watching men go by, or reading some fucking pocket book of Wilde.

Jared didn’t have any trouble with queers, and he saw them around, talked to them pretty comfortably and even liked a lot of them, thought that this was maybe why he’d been picked out for the job.

What he got was not a little homo in a suit.

What he got was a medium-sized homo in the tightest dress he’d ever seen, and wearing stockings and a wig besides, and blush on his cheeks, and his lips painted, and liner around his eyes, and all this other pigment and makeup Jared didn’t even know the name of.

When Jared stared down at him, the homo said, “It’s a disguise, you big lummox.”

“You don’t look like much of a woman,” said Jared, which was true, because he still had thin facial hair all around his jaw and chin, and he could see his Adam’s apple, and he was flat-chested, and there was a little hair on his chest, too.

“I’m not trying to look like a woman, darling,” said the homo sternly, waving a finger at him that was glad in a red silk glove. “I’m just trying not to look like myself.”

They moved along as Jared had been told to do, to just let him lead the way — at one point, the homo pulled Jared with him into an alleyway, up against a wall. They didn’t kiss, but their mouths were close together, Jared’s mouth over his.

Jared wasn’t gay. Guys had offered to suck his cock before — had asked, politely, with pretty pleases — to suck his cock before, and he’d never ended up bothering to go along with it, but he’d had homos kiss him on the cheeks or the jaw or the top of his head, and it wasn’t all that different to being kissed by women.

Lipstick wax was textured the same regardless of who was wearing it.

He almost imagined he could feel the sticky sheen of the other man’s lips under his own as the two of them stood there, breathing into one another’s mouths. He thought about closing the gap, feeling his lips under Jared’s.

He thought maybe it was the drag that got him going, that made his skin feel a little tighter and his cock harder in his pants, but the next morning, after he was done escorting him to meet the Boss as ordered, the homo was in a gold waistcoat and pinstriped trousers.

Somehow, actually looking like a man — or at least, looking like himself — he looked more attractive than last night.

The homo was not a homo by trade, but a hobbyist — this was according to his own testimony, given over breakfast, with a wink.

Immediately after, he asked to be reminded (for the third time), of his name: Jared.

“What is your trade, if not being a homo?”

“I’m a poet, darling.”

“Isn’t that the same career as being a homo?”

“Well, I suppose, but I don’t get paid for the inversion,” he said, spreading jam on a piece of bread. “I should, though, I’m marvellously good. But, ah, the things we do for love, hm?” With one hand, he held the buttered-and-jammed bread, and brought his other hand to his lips: the butter knife had become a cigarette, and when he took a drag, the colour on his lips left a mark on the butt. When he bit into the bread, Jared supposed there was too much jam to leave a mark there. “Don’t laugh much, do you, John?”

“Jared.”

“I’ll make you laugh,” he threatened. He was only in his shirt sleeves, and they were rolled up to his elbows, showing his fine, delicate wrists. The pale skin was decorated with tattoos.

He was not a sailor, he’d informed Jared earlier when he inquired, but he’d “spent more than my fair share of time on deck, dear.”

Jared still wasn’t sure what that meant.

“You piss people off much?”

“Constantly. I’m very enticing, you see. The man who aches for forbidden fruit will cut down the tree before he admits his mouth is watering.”

“That poetry?”

“Just fact. Is your cock very big?”

“Yeah,” said Jared, because it was true.

“Good chap, I expect all the young ladies climb you like a mighty oak, don’t they?”

“I’m saving myself for marriage,” deadpanned Jared.

The poet — his name was actually Benjamin Bristol, but it had been very firmly impressed upon Jared that he was under no circumstances to call him that, and ideally not think of him as that either; he called himself Echo — stared at him for some few moments before he began to laugh.

It was a tremendous thing to watch, the way he laughed, wrapped his arms around himself and squeezed his eyes shut, jam dripping down his wrist, ash falling from his cigarette, and he tapped his feet against the floor, and he wheezed.

“Joshua,” said Echo. “You do say the funniest things.”

He made the mistake of assuming at first that it was Echo’s poetry that got people riled up, but he was not sure the people that wanted to knock his teeth out the most could even read — they sure could count, though, and Jared was fairly sure he owed a lot of them money.

“You’re a gambler,” said Jared later that day.

“Gamble, me? Jack, you wound me. I don’t ever gamble.”

“That your way of saying you only bet on a sure thing?”

“In a way,” said Echo. “I’m a stupendous cheat.”

Jared didn’t laugh, but exhaled a huff of noise out of his nose: it made Echo sit up and clap his pretty hands together — he washed them vigorously to keep from getting stains from the cigarettes, and he kept the nails painted with a shining varnish and manicured them too — like a seal.

“I count cards,” admitted Echo very freely, without shame or compunction. “I pick pockets, too. I’d pick yours, only you don’t have anything worth taking.”

“My wallet don’t interest you?”

“It’s empty,” Echo complained, pouting out his lips. “I did check.”

“Got a knife. Got a gun.”

“Jerry,” said Echo, pouting his lips out even further and fluttering his long lashes as he looked up at him, head tilted coquettishly to one side. “Do I look as if I’d know what to do with anything like that?”

“Boss told me you’ve clawed a man’s eyes out before,” said Jared. “So I guess you don’t need ‘em.”

“Well, I had to do that,” said Echo. “He was a terrible bore.”

“That why you did it?”

“He made a dashed unpleasant comment about a waitress, if you must know. Said he couldn’t help but touch after looking — I made it easier on him. Really, what I did was a sort of good turn.”

Jared huffed out another sound. “Boss said I keep no one from touching you.”

“Cousin Leo is a darling, sweet man, you know,” said Echo.

Jared had never heard anyone call the Boss “Leo” before. Even calling him Leonardo, it was normally as part of his full name, or was a girl saying it softly as they leaned over his shoulder. There were some guys who just didn’t really dispose themselves to diminutives, he supposed the poet would call it, and the Boss didn’t even really dispose himself to names.

If anyone else tried to call him Leo, the girls included, Jared had a sneaking suspicion they’d have their innards made into catgut.

“My mother told him to look after me,” Echo informed him. “He takes familial duty terribly seriously. He’s really quite a sweetheart.”

“I once saw him kill three men with two bullets, then knock out the last guy’s temple with the pistol’s butt ’cause he was out of shot,” said Jared.

“Well, he and I are each experts in our fields, Jesse,” said Echo. “What would you have me tell you?”

Jared sighed. “No more cheating while I’m looking after you,” he said. “Or gambling — or betting on sure things.”

Echo smiled sweetly up at him. “Of course, darling, I promise.”

He didn’t believe it for a second, but he had to say it.

---

Echo read poetry like the words were burning under his skin, like they were crawling out of his throat and it was agony to let them out: he read from his chapbook in dark, smoky rooms crammed to the gills with people, and he stamped his feet and he sweated, and he turned pink and read until his voice was hoarse, and kept reading after.

Sometimes, people would shout the words that his voice broke on, and the chorus would carry over where his whisper went nowhere.

Jared didn’t understand a thing he said half the time, thought he might as well be one of those street preachers who spoke in tongues, but the people he read for, whether it was fancy dressed women in pearls and furs and their neat-suited husbands, or queers and fruits and freaks like Echo himself, they seemed to understand just fine – and like it very much.

A man came at him with a knife one night and Echo saw him before Jared did, slid back and insinuated himself against Jared’s side so that he couldn’t reach for Echo without reaching Jared first.

He had had a lot of bodyguards before having Jared — they normally quit or argued with him, apparently, which seemed unnecessary, but Jared was only three days in. He still had time to get angry, or lose patience, or whatever else.

Echo was the sort of guy who was comfortable and used to hiding behind bigger men, and Jared turned to face the guy with the knife, letting Echo peek around him like a fucking Punch doll peering around the theatre wall for Judy.

When the guy saw Jared, he jumped and sputtered and scrambled back.

“You got a problem with my boy here?” asked Jared, glowering down at him, and the knife went from glinting in his hand to being hastily stowed back into its sheath even as he blurted out, “He, he slept with my… wife.”

“His brother,” Echo corrected unhelpfully.

The man lunged bladeless, and after shoving him hard in the forehead so he went falling away, Jared said sternly over his shoulder, “Now, you know that ain’t helpful.”

“What help am I supposed to be?” asked Echo. “You’re paid to protect me, not the other way around.”

Jared scowled at him, and then advised the man clambering up off the wet brick, “I ain’t letting you touch him. So you can try that again, see if you can beat me off, but I can’t say I recommend it.”

“Yessir,” mumbled the man.

“Do give your brother my rega — mmhff — ” Jared didn’t take his hand off of Echo’s mouth until he was out of sight, keeping him pulled in tight to Jared’s body with his hand over his mouth, like he was teaching a dog not to bite.

Echo allowed himself to be wrestled down the alley path and back toward the rest house.

“My gallant protector,” he purred when Jared let him free. “Do you enjoy being a guard, Jonah?”

Jared clapped him upside the head, and Echo let out a wounded sound before he giggled.

His lips left a waxy imprint on his palm, and Jared wondered if Echo kissed more like a girl did, some little slip of a thing who was nineteen, twenty, or if he kissed like a woman — like a woman Jared’s age, or like a woman older, a woman who was confident and kissed a hundred times before.

“He called you sir,” said Echo, with a sort of purring relish. He walked like a cat, too, treaded silent and graceful and feline next to Jared’s slower, steadier steps — right after a reading, he’d rotate around Jared or hop behind him from the left to the right, still feral from his performance, voice hoarse and crackling.

He talked a lot.

“Do you like that?” Echo asked. “When people call you that, call you sir? When young ladies do it? Does it make your prick stand to attention?”

“I don’t think so,” said Jared. “Why, does it make yours do that?”

“Oh, I’m sure I don’t know,” said Echo, gesturing vaguely. “No one calls me sir, not like they call you sir, big strapping fellow that you are. Not without a helping of irony on top, in any case.”

“Huh,” said Jared.

“You know, Joseph,” said Echo, buffing his varnished nails on his sleeve, “I’m beginning to think nothing makes your cock hard at all.”

“I’m sorry,” said Jared dryly. “Nobody told me you were conducting a study.”

“You don’t fuck anybody,” complained Echo, pouting out his lips and screwing up his button nose. “I was expecting to see a host of young ladies gathered about you, like sheep flocking to their shepherd and his big staff.”

Jared stopped, hands in his pockets, and looked at Echo.

Echo, after a few moments, wriggled in his place under Jared’s gaze, and then danced on, a few paces ahead of him. “Escort me to the graveyard!” he ordered. “I wish to say a toast to the dead, and recline on a bed of grass over a bed of one of theirs.”

Before he could walk too far ahead, Jared grasped him by the scruff of the neck and pulled him back. “We are going to the rest house.”

“I’ll go without you, Jensen,” Echo threatened. “I shall go it alone.”

“You want me to carry you over my shoulder like a heifer?” asked Jared. “I’ll hogtie you, if needs be.”

In the dim light, Echo went ruddy, and did his squirming laugh, not quite squirming enough to pull out from Jared’s grip.

“I’m sure that won’t be necessary,” he said breathlessly, and obediently took the turn toward the rest house.

He climbed out of the window into the night after Jared had gone to bed, and in the morning he had to go combing the streets to find him until he happened on the little bastard, drunk and giggling in a gutter.

He didn’t need to hogtie him, just hoisted him up and threw him over one shoulder, and Echo giggled the whole way home.

“You do that again,” said Jared as they ascended the stairs into the rest house. “I’ll beat you black and blue.”

Echo wiggled his ass. “Promise?”

Jared smacked him hard enough that he squeaked, but he stopped the flirty nonsense immediately, and let himself be tipped into bed. His eyes were wide as saucers as Jared unlaced his shoes — it was a chemical wideness, could not entirely be blamed on the drink.

“I’m gonna sit right here, and watch you,” said Jared, “until I can go get us some breakfast.”

It was just after six, and their train didn’t go ’til four, so at least he could force him to sleep off some of whatever he’d taken.

“Shan’t move a muscle, Jim,” Echo promised. His innocence faded to dismay as he watched Jared lock the window closed.

“You’re dreadful, you know,” said Echo. “No entertainment value.”

“I’m paid to protect you,” Jared reminded him. “Not to entertain you.”

Echo sighed loudly. “Not even a strip tease?”

“Don’t know,” said Jared. “You’d have to behave to find out.”

“Oh,” said the poet, and giggled again.

---

“My arse hurts,” Echo complained some hours later. Jared had shovelled some bread and bacon down his throat before letting him sleep, and now he was awake, his eyes half-lidded, still sleepy. “You’ve left a handprint, I bet. You’ve marred me for life.”

“Sorry,” said Jared, without feeling.

“Jurgen,” said Echo in a wheedling, wanting tone, “do you like my poetry?”

“Ain’t got an opinion one way or the other. Nothing to compare to.”

“No one compares,” Echo assured him. “I’m the greatest poet alive.”

“Alright,” said Jared.

“Jory, you don’t really sound like you believe me.”

Jared looked up from the duck he was whittling, sitting back in the chair, and squinted at him. It wasn’t easy to make much of Echo’s always-innocent expressions, because he didn’t think Echo had ever been innocent of anything.

“S’that even a name?”

“I suppose it has to be,” said Echo. “It’s yours, isn’t it?”

Jared grumbled wordlessly, and gestured to Echo’s empty plate. “You want something else to eat?”

“I’d like some cough syrup.”

“You drinking that recreationally?”

“Well, I don’t know, Jackson,” Echo said, looking at him sourly, his hair all messy from sleeping — in the bed and in the street. His voice was a tiny bit hoarse, but not more than normal. “Do you hear me cough?”

“No cough syrup,” Jared decided. “You can eat something or not — we’re getting the train at four.”

Echo sank down in the bed, looking at Jared from under his lashes. “Yessir,” he said, and then, sultrily, “Leave me alone for ten minutes, won’t you?”

“Don’t you touch that window latch,” growled Jared as he stood.

“My hands will be far too busy,” Echo assured him. “Would you like to watch?”

Jared took the plate, and shut the door behind him.

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Echo slept on the train, but only after he complained and griped and whined until Jared handed him his coat. He wrapped himself up in it like it was his blanket, and made Jared’s shoulder his pillow.

Unfortunately, this meant he was very well-rested, and thus energised, when they reached the station.

And he ran.

Jared was no tracker, but it was not hard to ask people if they saw a little fruit in a coat too big for him come this way, and when he finally found Echo he was bent over a barrel behind a bar.

Jared was charitable, and waited until they were both done — or at least, until it seemed like Echo was done, he didn’t give a fuck about the other guy — to take his coat back.

The guy bent over him mumbled something incomprehensible when Jared appeared at his shoulder.

The second guy tried to say, “I’m next!” and actually stepped up to Jared, but he leaned back when Jared stared him down.

“Nah,” said Jared, very low and dark as Echo pulled his trousers up, Jared holding his coat up like a curtain for his non-existent privacy. “You fucking aren’t.”

“Jackson,” Echo said pleadingly.

“Fuck off,” Jared told the second guy, and told Echo, “Don’t do that again.”

“A man has needs,” said Echo.

“If a man wants to sit down this week without feeling the ghost of my belt underneath him, he’ll ask first, and tell me where he’s going.”

“Why?” Echo demanded. “Want to watch, do you?”

“Didn’t watch,” said Jared.

Echo’s indignation faltered in its tracks, and he paused a moment before he rushed after Jared, who was leading the way out of the alleyway and into the street. “Didn’t you?” he demanded. “Why not?”

“Schoolhouse’s this way,” said Jared, although it wasn’t much of a schoolhouse, and more of a saloon with a few bookstacks in it.

Echo, scowling, adjusted his tie, and tried to keep pace with him.

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“Jock,” said Echo after the gig, if it could really be called that, “did you think I was very good?”

“People seemed to like it. Some of ’em asked your signature after.”

“Yes, yes, of course they all adored me, I command a worship of sorts,” said Echo impatiently. “Did you?”

Jared shrugged. “I like your voice,” he said. “Goes all throaty when you read, and you squeeze real tight on your little notebook, makes the ink on your arms pop.”

“Oh,” said Echo softly. “That’s not really the point.”

He didn’t sound quite like he meant it.

Jared’s attention was commanded by a horse and cart as it rumbled past: Echo took the opportunity to sprint off, but Jared managed to catch him by the jacket collar before he could get all the way down the alleyway.

“Judd,” he wailed.

“Lead the way if you want to go,” said Jared, keeping his grip on Echo’s jacket. He kept hold of it like it was a goddamn leash until Echo picked a door and they went down the stairs behind it, where there were roulette and craps tables crammed into a little dusty room.

Jared dragged Echo up to him, pulled him close enough that his beard dragged on Echo’s pretty, powdered cheek. “You cheat anybody here,” said Jared, “and get caught, I’ll put you over my knee with everyone here watching.”

Echo’s gulp was audible. “I shan’t get caught, Jopson, on my honour,” he said.

Jared squeezed tighter on the collar and lifted higher, such that Echo let out a reedy little noise. “You want me to start right now?” he asked in a growl, and Echo shivered.

“No, Jakob, no need, no. I’ll behave. I promise.”

Jared let him free.

He did not, in any sense of the word, behave, but he didn’t cheat, and after Jared slapped the back of his hand twice, catching him at it, he stopped trying to pick anybody’s pocket but Jared’s own.

He got messier the drunker he got, and he offended a dealer when he sat across him at the blackjack table and tried to kiss his hand, so Jared herded him out into the street.

He was moving too fast to actually catch, so Jared just picked up his clothes as he threw them behind him.

There was more ink on the rest of his body, an octopus’ tentacles curving around his arse cheeks like it was holding them, its eyes peering out from the base of his back. Its upper tentacles were coiled around a great sinking sail ship, which dominated the canvas of Echo’s back.

There were other things too, of course — stormclouds and fish and more bots and coils of rope, on his shoulders, around his arms, down his thighs.

“Johnty,” Echo complained when the rest house came in sight and, lacking a collar to grab him by, Jared caught grip of him by the hair. Jared shrugged off his coat and hung it around Echo’s shoulders, keeping Echo’s own clothes bundled under his arm.

“Ooh,” said Echo, bundling himself in it. “It’s warm.”

“Yeah,” said Jared. “It’s fucking cold out here, that’s why it’s best to keep your clothes on.”

The woman inside luckily didn’t realise that Echo was a disturbance of the peace in himself, and Jared didn’t think she realised he was naked under the coat until they were almost at the top of the stairs, and Echo turned around to flash him.

“Very nice,” said Jared, with forced politeness.

“At least sound like you mean it,” Echo moaned before he ambled into the room they were sharing — Jared knew better than to trust him to a room alone again — and fell inside.

Jared locked the door twice, and the window, before he stripped for bed.

“I’m cold,” Echo complained once the lamps were out, and Jared rolled over to look at him in the other bed, the untattooed patches on him all but glowing in the moonlight.

“You’ve no clothes on,” Jared pointed out, “and you’re on top of the blankets.”

“Let me sleep with you, Jun,” Echo said plaintively.

“Am I fucking stopping you?” asked Jared tiredly.

Echo whipped across the room like Jared had tugged him on a string, and crawled under the covers, plastering himself against Jared’s body.

“Fuck me,” he said. “It’ll be lovely, I promise you, and the space between my thighs is just as nice as any woman you’ve had, and I can kiss like — ”

Jared took Echo by the hair and crushed his face against Jared’s chest. He could feel the smear of wax and power on the hair of his chest, which wasn’t nice, but Echo sighed in contact with the warm heat of his body, and went quiet. “Sleep,” Jared growled.

He waited until the morning, when Echo was mostly sober, and then he rolled him over and fucked him until they broke one of the posts in the headboard.

He had to call the Boss anyway, said he would, and when he went downstairs they’d already put the phone ready for him, so he leaned n the bar to ask the operator to connect him through.

“How is he?” asked the Boss.

“Fine,” said Jared. “Not that drunk anymore — went back to sleep, now.”

The Boss didn’t say anything for thirty seconds, maybe a minute, and then he sighed. “You fucked him, didn’t you?”

“Seemed the path of least resistance,” said Jared, knowing better than to try to lie or get out of the question. He was pretty sure none of his predecessors had fucked him. “Keeping him out of trouble, though. No cheating, and I’m not letting him gamble too much, or pick pockets. And I haven’t let anyone kill him.”

“Keep it up,” said the Boss, and Jared exhaled in relief. “He’s a hard case.”

“Y’ain’t angry?”

“Nah,” said the Boss. “Picked you ’cause I knew you’d be able to handle him, and if that’s how you handle him, he’s handled. You keep him on a line, you’re doing good.”

Echo was sitting up, half-asleep, when Jared went back into the room, and groaned when he saw the plate in Jared’s hand.

“What’s your obsession with feeding me?” he demanded.

“Something to soak up all that rum and morphine,” said Jared.

Echo ate mulishly.

As Jared went back to whittling, Echo wrote in his chapbook. It wasn’t a very warm morning, but he sprawled naked under the patch of sun that shone in directly through the window, lazing underneath it.

“Jared?” he asked after a few hours of this companionable silence, and Jared glanced up, surprised to hear his actual name out of Echo’s mouth.

“Mm?”

“Will you come back to bed?”

“Call me by the right name,” said Jared, dropping his knife aside, “I’ll do anything you like.”

Echo looked up at him, lips parted. He’d cleaned off last night’s face — the remnants he hadn’t left smeared over Jared’s chest — and his eyelashes were still very long, his lips still plump, his cheeks still flushed slightly pink, but his features weren’t quite as exaggerated as usual. “Anything?” he asked.

“Uh huh.”

He held up the book. “Listen to me read?” he asked hopefully.

“Can I tug myself off while you do that?” asked Jared, and Echo’s cheeks were a dark colour when he blushed this time, like fresh plums.

“Oh, yes,” he said. “Yes, Jared, please do. I’d like that very much.”

He undid his belt as Echo found his page.

FIN.

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