CHAPTER SIX
I managed to get him all the way to the bed-shelf and sitting on it before his expression cleared. I would have continued anyway, but when I reached out to him, he warded off my hands. He said hesitantly, stating the obvious, "I've always thought it was wrong to use prisoners in this way."
I rolled my eyes. Ten years I'd been waiting for a guard who had an inkblot's worth of scruples. Now I was saddled with a guard who acted on his scruples at the wrong moment.
"Is that what it feels like to you?" I asked him. "As though you're using me? Forcing me? Manipulating me into being bedded?"
After a moment, I thought I saw the faintest trace of a smile on his face. "It feels more like the opposite, actually."
I leaned forward, close enough to smell his breath, which was as sweet as spring grass. I wondered why I'd never noticed that before.
"Look," I said, "you've played me the fool for the past seven weeks. You did it for my own sake," I added as he opened his mouth, "but even so, I've been the idiot all this while, walking blithely into your trap. The least you can do is soothe my pride by letting me give you something back that you weren't expecting."
He considered this for a minute while outside our cell a couple of on-duty guards exchanged murmurs. I wondered how late it was. Very late, or the guards wouldn't be bothering to lower their voices. Any minute now, the morning lamps might be lit. I felt the edge of panic touch me that I'd waited this long to do what I should have had sense enough to do during the first week. It might be too late.
Finally Thomas's smile deepened. He had a dimple; I'd never noticed that either. "Well," he said, "if you phrase it in that manner . . ." He leaned forward.
His mouth didn't taste like grass. It tasted a lot like my own mouth, which surprised me. I didn't really have anything to compare him to. All the times in the past I'd done this sort of thing, I'd been mildly drunk, that being the way I'd gotten my courage up to try again. Except that first time, which I didn't like to think about. I could still remember the girl's laughter when she realized that I couldn't live up to my half of the arrangement.
I'd had boys too – that is, I'd made an attempt to have them – and I tried to remember what they'd liked. It was so very long ago, and that hadn't been the type of memory I'd cherished. I forced myself to relax. Thomas wasn't like anyone else, I reminded myself. We'd have to write new rules here, no matter what my past experience was.
He made a startled sound when I pushed my tongue in, then relaxed. After a moment, he began exploring my mouth too, which surprised me more than it should have. It gave me the first clue I needed, though, to how this was going to go. It could go any of three ways, depending on how wedded to tradition he was. But apparently he wasn't interested in playing the role of the compliant youth. To my surprise, I found I wasn't particularly worried if he decided he wanted me to play that role.
He eliminated that possibility, though, in the next moment when he drew back and asked, "What do we do now?"
I eyed him, wondering whether he even knew that he'd just struck tradition a hard blow. Chances were he didn't, and I didn't want him to worry about such matters. A bedding between equals suited me just fine; it helped me leave aside all the messy memories of the past ten years.
Then I took in what he'd said. "Don't you have any idea how this is going to go?"
His skin turned pink. I could see that, even in the dim light. He directed his gaze toward the ground and swallowed.
I laughed. Not so loud that any passing guards could hear, but loud enough to make him turn even pinker. "Bloody blades," I said. "I should think that, after spending nearly half your life in Compassion Prison, you'd have seen this before."
He kept his gaze fixed on the ground. "It happens behind closed doors. I stumbled across it one day when I was thirteen, and after my father explained to me what he'd been doing . . . I never wanted to watch after that." He scuffed his right boot on the floor.
"Sweet blood," I swore softly. "Does your mother know?"
"Oh, yes. My father considers it a part of his duties, you see. He only does it twice a month, at scheduled times. We have special rituals for it at Compassion. My mother knew all about that before my father took his post; some of the rituals come from her homeland. She considers what he does . . . sacred."
"Does she indeed?" This was all offering a new and terrible perspective on Thomas's childhood. Matters were bad at Mercy, but we didn't mix rape with religion. I could guess what he meant, though. I swore daily to the god of hell as mere invective, but there were some guards at Mercy who swore to Hell in earnest. For all I knew, perhaps they thought their rapes were sacred too.
Suddenly I realized that I had good reason to be afraid of what we were doing. There is more than one way to stab with a blade, and if Thomas had been fed such imagery since he was young . . .
"It's different with my parents," he said quietly, his eyes still lowered.
"Different?"
"Yes. When they kiss. It's soft. My father is gentle with her. That's always been one thing I've admired about him – that he doesn't let his work spill over into how he treats my mother."
I let out my breath slowly. I hadn't known I was holding it. "Well," I said, "I can't claim to be an expert at this, but my impression is that it isn't soft or hard that matters. It's what lies between the two who are doing the kissing."
He raised his gaze, frowning in puzzlement. It was a joy to see him looking genuinely puzzled about something. I was feeling less and less useless by the moment. I said in a firm voice, "Let me show you." Then I pulled him into my arms and kissed him hard.
I could feel his back-muscles under the cloth of his uniform, his rib-cage pressed against my heart, his teeth scraping mine as we probed each other. As he shifted his body against mine, I could even feel his hardness against my hip, which was a delight. I hadn't been entirely sure that he'd enjoy himself with me. This might actually work.
Then he put his hand in my lap.
I pushed his hand away, but too late. Startled, he pulled back and looked down at me. I resisted the impulse to hide what was there – or rather, what wasn't there. My breath, which had been steady as a spring breeze a moment before, was now jagged.
He raised his eyes to mine. "I know I don't know much about this," he said, "but I've practiced what my father refers to as the solitary vice, and when I've done that . . . I thought it would be the same with other men."
Hell's balls, and Mercy's eyes, for that matter. I tried to think of a convincing lie. Then I saw the steadiness of his gaze on me, and I knew that, even in the unlikely event that I could slip a lie past him, I couldn't let a falsehood come between us now. Not with mere hours – perhaps minutes – left between us.
So I told him. Told him what I'd never told anyone, though a few of my past bed-partners might have guessed. When I was through, he was silent a while, absentmindedly trailing his fingers up and down the inside of my thigh. If I'd been a different sort of man, I'd have been driven mad with desire. But if I'd been a different sort of man, I wouldn't have had to tell my tale.
"Not even when you're alone?" he said finally.
I shook my head. "And don't tell me that I'll meet the right woman or man some day. I thought that too, till I began to seriously plan my murder. Then I knew . . . Well, I knew that I'd been made different from others, that's all. I get my pleasure in a different way from other men."
He was silent again. I could guess that he was trying to reconcile this with what I'd failed to do earlier that night. Truth was, I was still trying to reconcile it too. It wasn't going to be easy, deliberately giving that up, and I couldn't lie and tell myself that what Thomas and I were doing was a simple replacement. It wasn't the same; it couldn't be. And yet . . .
"Yes," he murmured. "Yes, I see."
"Do you?" I replied, surprised.
He nodded, raising his eyes to me again. "It isn't that I feel no temptation to take what the other guards take," he said. "I'm too much my father'
s son not to understand the lure. So I can understand the wanting. It's like that with you, isn't it?"
I nodded slowly. "But it's different for you," I pointed out. "It's acceptable for you to take, as long as it's given. You can allow yourself that pleasure. If Sharon had truly given herself over to my blade— No, I know that would have been wrong too," I said before he could speak. "So it's wrong for me either way. I can't take my pleasure, no matter what. And something like this . . ." I waved my hand in a vague fashion toward our laps. "It doesn't mean anything to me. It—"
I stopped, suddenly aware that I'd said too much. Gods, it was over now. He would leave me, and I wouldn't be able to explain the rest to him – the surge of happiness I'd felt when I realized I had something to give him. I was still having a hard time understanding it myself, much less trying to explain it to someone else.
He had been quiet, listening. Now, to my amazement, he smiled. "I think I understand," he said. "It's the giving, isn't it? It's the giving that gives you pleasure here. You don't need the taking."
I nodded, struck dumb, wondering how he could have known.
"All right," he said softly, "that's reason enough for us to do this. But if it turns out you like anything we're doing – you will tell me, won't you? So that we can do more of it?"
I shrugged, which he must have taken for some sort of answer, because he leaned into another kiss.
I did a bit of neck nibbling after that, which he seemed to like, judging from the way he clutched at my waist. He cleaned my ear with his tongue afterwards, which made me suddenly aware that I hadn't bathed in nearly a week. I wasn't the sort to wash myself between showers, and I had the feeling I was going to regret that before the night was through.
My mind, though, was drifting toward more important matters, namely how fast to take Thomas through this journey. Normally, my answer would have been, "Slow," what with him being a virgin and me having only this one time with him. But I was very conscious of the time passing. The last thing I wanted was for us to be interrupted before we were halfway through.
I was about to ask him what o'clock it had been when he arrived at my cell, when he breathed in my ear, "I'd like to see what you look like with your clothes off."
Virgin, my ass. Seducer, more like. I decided it was a good thing I was immune to such temptations, or the gods only knew how I'd end up. Probably licking the soles of his feet.
"You've already seen me without clothes," I pointed out.
"I know. That's why I'd like to see you that way again."
The boy wasn't shy with compliments, that was clear. I grinned, got up, and stripped myself in short order. This exercise, at least, I had well memorized.
He just sat there for a long while, looking at me. Not at my body, oddly enough, but at my face. I hoped he liked what he saw. "You'd be a handsome man," my sister had once said in one of her more acid moods, "if you didn't look as frigid as Hell." Staring at myself in the mirror over the years, I'd had to concede she was right. There was something cold and hard about my expression that made all other aspects of my face forgettable.
Thomas looked at me so long that I began to feel uncomfortable. "What is it you're staring at?" I asked finally in a harsh voice.
"Your eyes," he murmured. "You're so defenseless there."
It wasn't the answer I'd expected. I was still trying to take this in when he slipped down onto his knees in front of me. Very gently he touched my right nipple, then my left. They sprang up at his touch. Nothing lower down sprang up; that part of me was in its usual permanent hibernation. His fingers felt nice, though, as they trickled their way through the hair on my chest, then passed over my belly to the hair below.
He paused, looking down at what lay there. He asked in a shy voice, "Is it all right if I touch you there?"
I shrugged again. "Sure," I said, then sucked in my breath as he leaned over and kissed me.
In the old tales, when the dead are kissed they come back to life. In my case, all that happened was that I felt something warm and moist touch me. It felt good. I looked down at his head, thinking that we were beginning to be a bit traditional here, but I didn't feel like moving him away. He gently cupped my balls while running his finger along my crack with his other hand, then slid his hands down the inside of my thighs. He lowered his head further.
That's when I discovered that, if you don't teach a young man the established way of doing things, he'll come up with new ideas on his own.
He'd probably still have been licking my kneecaps at dawn if I hadn't hauled him back onto his feet and set him down on the bed-shelf. "Enough," I said firmly. "It's my turn now."
Easier stated than done. Five minutes later, I grumbled, "Why couldn't you have been a guard in the Eternal Dungeon? They wear the same clothes as their prisoners."
He smiled, saying nothing. Taking off my own clothes had been easy enough. Though a few prisoners at Mercy, such as Tyrrell, insisted on wearing year-round the full uniform we'd been issued upon arrival, most of us had sense enough to strip down rather than be encumbered with heavy clothes that got in the way of our work. Except in deep winter, all I usually wore was lower drawers, trousers, suspenders, and shirt, which had once led Sedgewick to say that half-naked prisoners got what they deserved.
Thomas, on the other hand, was wearing his full uniform. In order to get at his flesh, I had to unbutton and remove his jacket, unbutton and remove his vest, pull down his suspenders, untie and remove his scarf, take off his collar, remove his cufflinks and cuffs, unbutton and pull off his shirt – and after all that, it turned out that he was wearing full-body drawers, so after I'd unbuttoned the top half, I had to go down on my knees and remove his weapons belt, then unbutton his trousers. That left his boots, which, of course, had twenty-one buttons each . . .
By the time I finished pulling off his half-hose, he was laughing. "Shut your mouth, you overdressed aristocrat," I muttered, struggling to pull down the lower half of his drawers, "or I'll stuff something big and stiff into it."
After a while, it occurred to me that he was responding in an awfully quiet manner to this time-honored insult. It also occurred to me that his quietness might have something to do with the proximity of my mouth to his crotch. I looked up in time to catch him staring reflectively into space. He caught my eye on him, and suddenly his face was pink again. "Do folks really do that?" he asked softly.
So then I showed him what folks really do. I'd done this for plenty of guards in the past, and never much liked it, but this time I was barely conscious of the aching of my jaw and the protests of my throat. Instead, my concentration was on the feel of Thomas's fingers kneading my hair and the sound of him whispering my name over and over. He must have said my name a hundred times, and each time he made it seem as though he'd just discovered me.
I was beginning to wonder whether I should pause and discuss with him other possibilities for this night when, without warning, he pushed me back, shoved me stomach-first onto the floor, and slammed down onto me.
I had just time enough to think that it was a good thing he'd remembered what my favorite position was; then I gasped as he entered me like a piston shoving its well-oiled way into a cylinder. A very fast piston, entering very hard, in a relentless manner.
It was the leaded whip all over again. He was quick, he was ruthless, and within three strokes he'd figured out the right angle. Within five I knew that I was being plowed by the most skilled bed-partner I'd ever had.
I don't think I breathed before the end. All my benighted soul was focussed on the feel of each solid, pitiless stroke and the rasp of his heavy breath as he drove himself into an unexplored region of his life.
And then he gasped. I felt him shudder upon me, then collapse.
My heart pounded. The water on my cell wall trickled faintly. Fire whispered outside the cell. A guard's boots rapped their way past my cell without pausing. I recognized the tuneless whistle as Sedgewick's.
After a minute, Thomas rasped in my ear
, "I'm sorry. . . . Merrick, I'm sorry."
I tried to twist my face round to look at him, and he immediately raised his weight from my back, shifting over to the side of me. "I'm sorry," he repeated, and this time his words were nearly a sob. "Merrick, please forgive me."
I propped myself up on one elbow to stare at him. His face was stricken. For a moment I thought he had just realized the danger of entering my much-plundered body without a sheath, and I was going to reassure him that I wasn't carrying anything deadly. Then he whispered, "Did I hurt you much?"
I laughed then. I realized later that this was the best thing I could have done. If I'd merely protested, it might have taken hours to convince him. As it was, by the time I managed to contain my laughter, his expression had changed to puzzlement. He said, "I didn't ask whether you wanted . . . I simply forced you . . ."
"Bloody virgin." I addressed the ceiling. If there were any gods up there, presumably they would have a better chance of understanding my guard's mind than I could. I turned my head toward Thomas and grinned. "What sort of request were you contemplating making to me? 'Please, Merrick, I've just fucked your mouth. Would you mind terribly if I fucked your ass as well?'"
He gave a lopsided smile then, but said, "You gasped with pain when I entered you. I heard you. And I didn't stop—"
I waved the matter away with my hand. "I'm not hurt. You surprised me." He'd also scared me, just for a second at the beginning, but there was no reason to tell him that. "I'd forgotten how fast you are. And how skilled. Is your father that skilled?"
"My father?" he said in a distracted manner.
And that was the moment of climax for me. I felt as though my soul had burst open and poured out something sweet. He'd forgotten his father. I figured there'd probably never been a minute in his life when his father wasn't preying on his mind. But now he'd found something more important to think about.
He was quick, much too quick. I saw his expression change, and then his eyes met mine, and I knew that he knew what I'd set out to give him. After a moment more, he dipped his eyes and smiled. "Perhaps," he said, tracing a pattern across my chest. "I don't know. It doesn't really matter, does it?" He leaned over and used his tongue to trace the pattern he had made.
He worked his way down my body slowly, missing nothing. It was like having a warm, moist chick fluttering against my skin. I hadn't even needed to tell him that I'd liked him touching my body before; he had known. His fingers and lips and tongue paid their tribute to my body, as a subject does to his king. I could still feel the faint ache where he had exacted his own tribute. The sensations blent into a warmth that seemed to permeate my bones.
By the time he reached my kneecaps again, I had started to worry about Sedgewick.
There weren't many good times for me to remember at Mercy Prison, and most of them were accompanied by a memory of how Sedgewick had maliciously destroyed whatever pleasure I had received. The man seemed to have an instinct for knowing when prisoners were enjoying themselves; he always turned up when that was happening. I had to finish this before Sedgewick interrupted what we were doing.
I cleared my throat. "Thank you," I said, "but this really isn't necessary. The best part for me came before."
"Mm?" He confined himself to an interrogatory sound, probably because he was busy sucking my big toe.
I tried to explain then, about the enjoyment I'd received, knowing that I was taking him into a place where he had never been before. Then, when he paid no attention and began licking the sole of my left foot, I desperately explained the burst of joy I'd felt in knowing that I'd helped him break free of his imprisonment.
I was babbling; I knew I was babbling. It had something to do with the way he was following the arch of my foot with one of his fingernails. I decided that the part of me which was asleep was an utter fool, because the rest of my body had never had so much fun in its life.
I tried again. "It was the giving. I told you before. The giving was enough – it was a kind of taking in its way. . . ."
He raised his head. I could see his smile, half-screened by the foot he had lifted. "I know," he said. "It was the same for me, earlier tonight."
I can be slow, but not that slow. Shortly thereafter, I began cursing him in a methodical manner, and when I ran out of curses, I started over again.
He was laughing by that time; then suddenly he wasn't laughing. He flung himself down at my side like a soldier dropping into a trench, and he placed his hand over my mouth.
I heard it also then: the tap of Sedgewick's boots. The tap slowed and paused outside our cell. I couldn't breathe. All that Sedgewick had to do was open the little window, and he'd see everything. And by the morning, the entire prison would know – gods, the entire system of life prisons would know. The story would follow Thomas back to Compassion, and his father would hear. I could imagine the scene between them, Thomas's father quizzing him to see whether he'd properly raped his prisoner.
I took Thomas's free hand. It was rigid. He was leaning on one elbow, staring beyond us to the door. I didn't dare move my head to look back at the door.
Then the boots slowly tapped their way past. A moment later I heard the sound of a cell door opening, and then closing again, followed by the closing of a second door. Sedgewick had decided to pay a visit on his own prisoner.
Thomas's hand was still over my mouth. I bit it, too gently to draw blood, and he removed his hand. Relief was written upon his face.
"That was a distraction," I growled at him. "You bribed Sedgewick to appear at that exact moment so that I'd forget what you'd done."
He smiled then, not bothering to respond.
"Did you plan this all?" I persisted. "Even the first kiss?"
He shook his head. "Honestly, no, Merrick, I had no idea you were going to do this. I didn't even know I wanted it to happen. But when I realized that you were giving this to me without need for taking, and that you had begun to recognize that the giving was a pleasure in itself . . ." He hesitated.
"Go on," I said grimly, pulling myself up into a sitting position and folding my arms. "Explain your devious purpose for doing this."
He stared down at my thigh, tracing a pattern on it with his finger. I refused to allow myself to be distracted. After a while he said softly, "Everyone thinks it's easy, what I do: the transforming of prisoners, guiding them into unexplored territory. . . . It's easier now, because I've done it so many times. But in the beginning, there were times when I would come close to weeping because what I was doing was so hard. It was like trying to run from the bottom of this prison to the top level. I wasn't used to the work, and my soul ached. It would have been so much easier for me if somebody had showed me at the start what sort of pleasure could eventually come from the giving. I could have held that in mind during the hard moments."
I saw then what he was suggesting, and my heart began pounding, the way it had when he had taken me with such swiftness and perfection. His eyes flicked up toward my face, and then down. He looked more uncertain now than he had at any time since we met.
And well he might. Asking a prisoner to turn from his old life of vice was one thing. Thomas was asking a great deal more than that from me. I doubted he'd had the gall to make this proposal to any other prisoner.
It was a compliment, in a way. I sighed and pulled him into my arms. "Bloody idiot," I said, ruffling his hair. "It's like asking a crippled man to run to the top of Mercy. Whatever you may say about the importance of hard work, you have the gift for this sort of thing. I don't."
He didn't say anything, just smiled and rested his head against my shoulder. I spent a minute smoothing down the hair I'd ruffled before I said quietly, "I'll try. That's all I can promise, that I'll try. But what about you?"
"Me?" He seemed genuinely startled.
"We've determined where my future lies. Where is yours? What do you plan to do when you've taken Compassion into your hands?"
His expression drifted into a faraway look. Several minutes p
assed before he spoke again.
So we talked, and we talked for a long time, because he'd arrived at the cell much earlier than I'd thought. And in the midst of our talking, we fell asleep, which was remarkable in its own way, because Mercy bed-shelves aren't made to be slept in by more than one person. But it can be done if one of the persons is lying half-over the other, murmuring words of fidelity into the hollow of his love-mate's shoulder.
That was me. I figured that, if I was going to learn to do new things, I might as well spend the last of our time together in that learning.