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“Have you got a magnifier?” Holden pulled one from the box and handed it over. Tyler put it to his eye. “Well, it’s not a plate 77.”
Holden didn’t know much at all about Victorian stamps and wished he did. “That’s the big bucks?”
“Yeah. Thousands. This looks like a plate 88. It’s mint with a nice clear watermark.”
Holden had never looked at plate numbers in his life and hadn’t really cared when he had been collecting his birds, butterflies and flowers. This stamp had four perfect regular borders with the initials M and K in the bottom corners and swapped around in the top corners. “Worth anything?”
Tyler pulled his phone from his pocket and thumbed the buttons, opening a browser. “Couple of hundred bucks,” he said.
Holden smiled. “Not bad at all. Maybe we’ll find more.”
They looked at each other. Tyler’s eyes were shining and Holden wanted to be the one to put that expression there for the rest of his life. He dipped his gaze back down to the pile of stamps and froze as something jumped out at him as though painted in neon.
“What the fuck?” he said softly.
“What?”
Holden reached into the pile with his tongs, his hand starting to shake with adrenaline because he recognized the stamp. He wasn’t sure what it was or from where, but he knew he had seen it before, and recently.
As the tips of his tweezers found it and lifted it free, Tyler let out a cry like someone might make when they won the lottery.
“No!” he yelled, “no!” And he grasped Holden’s wrist, making him hold the stamp between them, bending his head to look while with the other hand, he fumbled the magnifier to his eye.
Holden knew then where he had seen the stamp before. In Tyler’s kitchen on his phone that week when Tyler had said he would never own it. The red two penny with the flowers and the coats of arms. 1857. No postal cancellation. Thirteen thousand bucks.
He jerked his gaze to Tyler’s and saw his grey eyes were wide and round and filled with tears. “Is it?” Holden asked, the stupidest question in the history of questions because he could see the name, for fuck’s sake, Newfoundland, and the design and he knew it was.
He knew just like he knew their future was now way rosier than he had first thought. He cupped Tyler’s face and kissed him before he dug his tweezers back into the pile of stamps. “Maybe there’s more,” he said.
Tyler laughed. “Greedy much?”
“Hey, we found a Penny Red and a rare Newfoundland so far. What are the chances of something else?”
Tyler shifted a few stamps with his tweezers. “Did you really get these from eBay?”
Holden searched his memory. “Maybe not. Maybe it was at a garage sale in my old neighborhood.”
“They obviously didn’t know what they had.”
“No. That’s why we might find something else.”
Tyler gave a sharp intake of breath. His whole body started to quiver. “Like this?”
Holden saw the stamp he was holding up. An Inverted Jenny.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Tyler
First of all, Tyler made Holden put the two stamps carefully into a black mount covered with plastic. That then went into another packet. Then he made him put the packet in the top drawer of the bureau in the gap beside his socks, where no liquid would get spilt on it and nothing could actually damage it. Then he searched for the Inverted Jenny online with trembling fingers. He knew nothing about this stamp other than it was worth a fortune. Wikipedia told him there were only a hundred copies of the 1918 stamp with the rare fault in existence and they were worth around one and a half million dollars, although some had sold for two million in the past.
Holden closed the drawer. He looked at Tyler’s screen, before he took the phone from him and laid it down. Then he pulled Tyler into his arms and kissed him. They kissed like they were millionaires. Which Holden was. They fell onto the bed amongst the pile of stamps—even the hundreds of bucks Penny Red—and rolled about with abandon, ripping at clothes. Money had never made Tyler hard before but it did now, even though it was Holden’s. Because Holden’s excitement was his excitement and there was no doubting the writer was hard enough to drill diamonds. Tyler kind of hoped Holden wouldn’t sell his stamp and move away to Malibu or some such place, leaving Tyler alone and maybe homeless after he’d sold the house, but if he did, he did. Tyler would accept Holden’s good fortune—and he was due some—and wish him well.
But Holden, on top of him and breathing hard with tears in his eyes, said, “We’re rich. We’re rich. Our troubles are over.” And Tyler stared up at him, hearing the word we and his tears started to roll down his cheeks.
“Don’t cry,” Holden said in a whisper. “The best leg money can buy, I swear. The best fucking leg. A fucking robotic leg that takes you for a walk down the street when you’re too tired.” And they both started laughing, clinging together half naked and kissing.
Holden eased between his thighs and Tyler caught his breath as they rocked together, hard cock to hard cock before Holden started to strip Tyler of his shorts and underwear. Tyler watched his gaze and didn’t see Holden so much as glance at his stump. Instead, he was focused on his balls, and stroking the area behind them. They kissed again and Holden’s fingers moved into Tyler’s ass crack, over his hole, and he got what Holden wanted. Tyler wouldn’t have called himself versatile, because he mainly did the fucking and actually, couldn’t remember when he last got fucked.
