Elin Gregory

I won’t go into detail but it’s a day when I need the comfort of writing about sun sea and shenanigans. also I miss Kit and Griffin quite a lot, so here’s a bit of story that may or may not end up in Lee Shore 2.

The eerie moan carried well on the still air. Even at this distance – a good hundred paces away over rocks and a strip of still azure sea – Griffin winced at the sound.
“I’m sorry.” Kit didn’t look as though he knew whether to laugh or be apprehensive. “I didn’t realise how single minded he would be.”
“You could have asked.” Griffin stretched out on the sand, his arm under his head, his hat pulled down to shade his eyes. The Cycladean sun warmed him even through his clothing. If there were better places than this little island to anchor while waiting for their passenger, Griffin couldn’t think of one. But in retrospect it had been a mistake to allow Kit and Denny to go and buy supplies alone. Kit could be relied upon to be sensible and efficient with anything nautical or tactical but Denny, surely the oldest and oddest cabin boy ever to sail the seven seas, could talk Kit into almost anything.
“You could have bought Denny a drum. A small one. It would have taken him a day to master the intricacies and he would have lost interest but Kit – dear God, Kit. Bagpipes!”
“When he asked me for a groat to buy a tsampouna I thought he was hungry.”
“I thought you knew Greek.”
“I thought I did. Maybe Homer and his bunch didn’t have them.”
“Oh I bet they did, they just kept quiet about it.”
The moaning from the ketch rose to a sharp squeal and ceased.
“Benedigaidd Duw.” The other three crew members were also ashore, as far away from the awful noise as they could get. Lewis raised his head from Protheroe’s belly and glowered across the water.
“Don’t get your hopes up.” Saunders turned another page in his book. “I would put money on that last squeak having startled our intrepid musician. In a moment he’ll see if he can do it again. There – I told you so. I’m afraid, dear gentlemen – and Kit, because sometimes, dear boy, your stupidity astounds – we will have to wait until Denny gets hungry before we can ask him to put the instrument away. Has anyone got any wine left?”
Kit leaned to pass him a bottle and Griffin’s glance rested with affection on his lover’s back, shirtless and brown as a nut. Unable to resist, he lay his hand on Kit’s waist, enjoying the play of muscle under his palm, and slipped his smallest finger below the waist band of his breeches, where Kit’s skin, he knew, was just as smooth and muscular but of a far paler hue. Kit turned his head and fixed him with an amused and tolerant stare that warmed Griffin’s heart. Once Kit would have checked to see if any of the others had noticed first.
“I think I’ll swim.” Griffin patted the sun warmed flesh. “If you took those off you could join me.”
“I could.” Kit grinned and got up, extending a hand to help Griffin to his feet. “There’s a spot at the end of the headland where we could dive.”
And a spot, just beyond, out of sight of the rest of the crew, Griffin reflected as he tugged his shirt over his head. But he wasn’t sure whether Kit had remembered that.