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These 21st Century young men....
When Jack leans into them and breathes them in, as much he tries, all he can smell is hints of sweat and where they've been and what store-bought scent they put on today. Backwards 21st Century pheromones have no smell, they just work. The attraction is more subtle, more insidious than what he knew back in his own time. It's a mysterious and exotic novelty--and that makes these young men very hard to resist.
Ianto wears a high-priced designer fragrance, made for well-paid young men who dress in sharp modern suits and wear titanium watches. When combined with his hand-tailored three-piece suits and his father's old watch with its leather strap, it's incongruous, but sexy. When the spice of the cologne hits, it reminds Jack what a puzzle Ianto is.
Layers. When he gets Ianto undressed, peeling off those layers of fine wool and silk waistcoats, all the textures go to Jack's head. The soft fuzz of the wool when he rests his face against the shoulder of his jacket, cool smoothness of silk satin when he slides his hands over the back of the waistcoat. Affects him better than alcohol has the power to any more. He wants to slip off the layers of persona that he knows Ianto has put together for him, to trick him, keep him guessing, and find the real Ianto Jones underneath.
Jack suspects, just a bit, that Ianto is a completely average man in this time period--same tastes, same ideals, and isn't that thrilling in itself. The mystery is there's no mystery at all.
Still, this young man is from an age that was gone thousands of years before Jack was born, from a civilization that only dreams of spaceships and the stars, yearning for new worlds and fearing them all at once. What could be more inspiring, more exotic than that? He'll be making love to history, to the unborn future of humanity--and all its potential.
Jack once loved a 20th Century man.
Captain Jack Harkness, that man had given as his name...
...and Jack's past and future had collided with a discordant buzz and crunch, like clockwork seizing.
He hadn't been able to shake the hand offered to him. He'd only been able to clench his teeth in a poor attempt at smiling, as he stood there with his mind reflexively blank and his heart shuddering in his chest. He'd looked at the young man, bright and young and handsome--so handsome--in that uniform, and even his face, his different face hadn't really registered.
For that single moment, until reality had started up again, all Jack had been able to think was:
It's me.
Jack once... dabbled... with a 51st Century man.
John loved to strut around a public square in Athens, 5 AD, or go for a saunter on the cobblestones in Manchester, 1800, and look down his nose at all the people he could see. He'd wave around a sonic blaster or an Ancient West sixgun, and laugh at the incomprehension of a man, or a woman, or a child who didn't know they were being threatened.
It was Jack who would inevitably grab John by the collar and haul him back out of sight and beat his head against a wall for it, while John would laugh and laugh, grinning while the blood ran down his face. "They're just stupid apes, man. They don't even know what they see!"
"Look who's talking," Jack would say to him, and John would laugh and then Jack would laugh, and then they'd go and find themselves a brawl in a New New Orleans tavern or consort with charming, orange-skinned women in a bordello in the Lotus Nebula.