by Fiona Faris
She shook her head slowly.
“Well then...how about you enjoy this?”
She swallowed and then nodded, accepting that she wasn’t getting out of this and grateful that he was at least offering to make it good for her.
“Wh-what do I do?”
“Lift up my shirt. Touch me.”
Rebecca lifted trembling hands and lifted the linen hem, she placed her palm flat on his heated muscled belly, feeling his breath go in and out at an increased pace. She looked into his hazel eyes, staring hotly at her bosom and did not know what to say.
“Touch me,” he said again and she moved her finger up and down, feeling the heat of his skin, the contours of his flesh. She ran her fingers across his nipple and he gasped, throwing his head back. His hips jerked upward and she startled.
“Yes! Just like that,” he rasped and she flicked his nipple again. He groaned, his hand tightening against her thigh.
She was surprised at the power that surged through her knowing that she was able to cause that reaction in him. She lifted her other hand placing it flat against his other nipple, seeing his breathing become ragged.
“Wh-what do I do now?” she whispered.
He reached slowly for his breeches. “Put your hand in here,” he said his voice soft.
She looked down, seeing the aggressive jut tenting his breeches. She swallowed; her mouth dry. Slowly, tentatively, she dropped her hand fingers making patterns on his abdomen. Her hand traced the waistband on his breeches, gathering the courage to breach that last barrier.
He leaned back, his hands on the bed, supporting his weight. “Take your time.” he said and then grinned. “But remember we only have two hours.”
She huffed a laugh, digging one finger into his breeches, feeling the heat of him. He moaned, biting his lip and holding himself stiff so as not to arch into her hand. She closed her eyes, took a deep breath and then grabbed at him. He let out a strangled yelp, half surprise, half desire as she held on to him.
“It’s...it’s so...soft.” she murmured in surprise, rubbing her hand along his length. He couldn’t stop himself from jerking upward, chasing that touch. He reached for his breeches and pulled them down, exposing himself to her. “Please, more.”
She watched the color suffuse his face as she closed her hand more firmly around him, pumping a bit. He groaned aloud, closing his own hand over hers to stop her movement.
“E-enough,” he whispered, divesting himself of his shirt and toeing off his breeches.
“Wh-what? Why?”
“No, I mean, if you continue to do that, I am liable to explode before anything happens.”
“Explode?”
Chris laughed. “Never mind.” he reached for her shift, “May I take this off?”
Rebecca hesitated before nodding wordlessly.
“Thank you.” he whispered as he pulled at her shift until it was over her head and on the table with her other clothes. She hunched in on herself, trying to hide but he gently ushered her backward so she was lying atop her shawl. He spread her legs slowly and she whimpered with fear. “I’m going to do something, and I don’t want you to panic.”
“Al-alright.” Rebecca said shakily.
He lowered his head and before she knew it, he was between her legs. She screamed as she felt the wetness of his tongue, licking at her.
“Mmm, you taste good,” he murmured as his tongue dug into her heat. She welped jerking away but he kept her close by digging his fingers into her hips. He really went to work on her with his tongue and soon she was writhing and jerking her hips, holding a hand over her mouth to cover her moans.
“Please,” she said at last, her legs falling wide open on their own, hips stuttering as she reached for something, she could not name.
“At last,” he slithered up her body, hands coming up to cup her breasts. He reached down and kissed her, covering his body with hers, spreading her knees wider as he pressed into her slowly, nudging himself with gentle, careful, shallow, thrusts.
Rebecca could hear him babbling unintelligible things to himself. The immediacy of him between her legs, inside of her, was extremely distracting and that could be blamed for her inability to understand his words, but somehow, she did not think that was it. She crossed her ankles over his waist, arching her back and he groaned long and hard as he pressed deeply inside her.
“Rebecca,” he mumbled into her neck as he began to thrust slowly, gaining momentum with each movement of his hips. She closed her eyes, feeling each jab like a jolt to her system, reverberating through every nerve ending.
She closed her eyes. “Oh God,” she whispered, the strength leaving her limbs. She could feel something bearing down upon her, and she tensed in curiosity and fear. Then the world exploded into tiny colored lights, her ears ringing as her hips arched upward in extremity, tiny little convulsions tensing all her internal muscles and then releasing them in a flood of warm fluid.
Chris made a sound, as if he was hurt and then he was releasing into her, long and continuous as his face contorted into a rictus of effort. She stared in a mixture of shock and wonder as he rolled over beside her, and promptly fell asleep.
Chapter Six
The tentative knocking on the door alerted her to the fact that they were still occupying someone else’s space. She reached back and shook Chris, wanting to wake him from his snoring. He snorted, jerked and went on sleeping. She got tentatively to her feet, and grabbed for her clothes, dressing as fast as she could. She was walking toward the door when something flew past her, startling her.
“Tell her to take another two hours,” Chris’ raspy voice said from behind her, making her jump. She peered down at the thing and saw that it was another pouch.
“I dinna think that’s necessary,” she cleared her throat after, as her voice was raspy from disuse.
The rustling sound of his movement had her turning to face him to see him rest his head in his palm, arm bent so that his elbow was resting on the bed, holding him up. One leg had been raised in a pose that could be interpreted as seductive as he smiled at her. “Are you sure?”
“Yes I am.”
He sighed loudly, “That’s too bad. I think I could have gone for another round.”
“I think we have already consummated the marriage. Now it’s real. We don’t have to do that again.” Rebecca walked to the door and opened it while Chris gaped at her in stupefaction. The high chirping voices of children had him diving for his breeches. Luckily, it was the girls’ mother who stepped in the room first. As soon as her eyes fell on Chris, frantically pulling up his breeches, she stumbled out again, gathering her children and hurried toward her sheep.
Rebecca looked down and saw a sack filled with food by the door. She smiled, thinking that at least their use of the family’s house had resulted in something good for them. She picked up the second pouch and dropped it in the sack.
“You change your mind?” Chris asked hopefully.
“No.” Rebecca said not looking at him, and walked out of the house, going to untether the horse. Chris came out of the house, still fastening his breeches, glowering at her. “Well then why’d you drop the pouch in their things?”
“Because they deserved it after you turned them out of their own house.”
“It was only for a few hours!” he grabbed the reins from her in annoyance.
“Aye weel, she deserves it for seeing ye naked.”
Chris merely stared at her in disbelief. Rebecca put her foot on the stirrup and heaved herself onto the horse, eyes forward. Chris sighed and followed her up. “Gee up!” he cried and his horse took off. His teeth were grinding the entire time.
“Ye dinna even thank them,” Rebecca said after a while. She was sitting as straight as possible so as not to lean on him.
“I paid them, that means I don’t have to thank them.” Chris shot back.
The noise Rebecca made came from deep within her throat, reminiscent of a snorting pig. “You really were raised b
y wolves.”
“Nobody raised me,” Chris said, turning his head away as he sneered in remembrance.
Life with Killian and his goons only got worse. As Chris got older, the types of jobs he was sent to do got ever bloodier as he was left more and more, to fend for himself.
He was sitting in the foyer of the local washer woman’s abode, resolved that he had committed his last crime for Killian. His knuckles still hadn’t stopped bleeding from his last job.
The skin around the slices had turned brown and crusty, but a deep ruby still oozed from inside them. He would tug at the scabs every so often, squeezing the sides of each finger and peeling away clots to make the blood come out faster. He twitched his lips, snuffling his nose out of nothing but boredom, as he felt the dried trail of crimson there too.
The white of his shirt had become stained with that oh so familiar color, as his fingertips soon would be by tobacco stains.
His skeletal hands, cradled in his lap managed to stop the blood from pooling on the ground beneath him. That is, when he wasn’t holding the pipe up to his mouth or his thumb up to his nostril to stem the flow.
He could still taste the iron on his tongue from the punch to the side of his mouth, and the split in the side of his tongue from where he caught it between his teeth.
What he didn’t collect in the cup of his palms dripped down to stain the already filthy leather of his borrowed shoes.
Ruby droplets settled on the pewter buckle, which had been wiped clean with a dirty cloth only hours ago. His gaze settled on the floor.
He stared at the wood between strings of auburn hair hanging down over his forehead. The floor was scuffed and spattered with mysterious stains long since trodden into the surface. Although, as far as Chris knew it wasn’t as if anyone had ever bothered to clean it.
Upon reflecting further, he decided that his blood was not nearly the worst thing that floor had seen. Why, he was not even infected with anything, as far as he was aware.
He wasn’t sure how long he had been there.
Watches were a hazard in his role, though it wasn’t like he could afford one anyway. The washerwoman did not have any time keeping devices on hand, although she hardly attracted the sort of audience with any care for the minutes of life quickly passing by them.
When he arrived, the sun was not long past setting. Now he could see the sky getting lighter. Not by any considerable margin- it was still undeniably black. But it was the sort of black tinged with the yellows, purples, and blues of an impending sunrise. There was slightly warmer air blowing in through the door held ajar by a large stone wedged in between it and the frame.
He could feel the cold settling into his bare chest, his clothes currently drying against the warm hearth, but his back covered with his buckskin coat which had somehow, miraculously, escaped the bloodshed. He hadn’t brought a spare.
In his experience, the washerwoman was competent yet discreet enough to bring his clothes back to a state in which he could wear them to walk home in, without attracting the wrong kind of attention.
However, in his experiences, he usually wore black. When the washerwoman had removed the soaked cotton from its wash, it had still been spotted all over with blood as if he were some kind of morbid Dalmatian, but he knew a second time through would do nothing to save it. Besides, he had never had any intention of waiting there longer than necessary.
When it was dry and warm, he would drop his coat onto the chair beside him, and take his shirt off. He would tug the coat back on, and dig through the pockets to find his last remaining bit of tobacco.
Then he would stagger to the nearest privy, his feet sluggish and unsure on broken ground, and his head swimming. If he was lucky- and he often wasn’t- he would have found a stray coin in his coat pocket looking for the tobacco. With that, he would head for the nearest public inn where he might beg some water from the well and use of the privy. If not, he would have to put up with the nearest bush where he could relieve himself and use wet leaves to wipe himself down and rinse the cracked blood off his knuckles.
That would have been the plan, if he hadn’t heard the dim chime of the bell over the door behind him. He would have given anything not to know immediately who was pushing open the boarded up wood, but he had stopped believing in miracles long ago.
The sound repelled him, lacquered leather squeaking as if to break the nonexistent silence, the confident footsteps unfazed by the unfamiliar territory. He hummed a gentle, lulling unfamiliar French ditty, the sound filling the room; he would certainly do nothing as commonplace as whistling.
Chris could hear the whinny of horses, outside the washerwoman’s, but his tired heart couldn’t bear the thought of jumping at the idea that he might not have to walk all the way back to his hovel. The man sat beside him. A flash of blond hair lingered in the corner of his eye.
“I was sure that I’d find you here,” the newcomer purred. Chris’s skin bristled, goosebumps joining freckles to climb up his arms despite being covered in worn-out leather.
“You knew I was on a job,” he bit back, “And you know that jobs get messy. Where else would I be?”
“In your abode? I’m sure there are washing facilities there.”
“There aren’t.”
“Then what am I paying for?”
Chris shrugged. Cerulean eyes scanned him from head to toe and back again, but he kept his gaze trained steady and forward on the wall, even as his eyelids began to droop slightly.
“You took longer than usual,” Killian hummed.
“He knew I was coming- he was prepared. He had two men to flank him,” Chris explained in response.
“But did I get my money back?”
“My right pocket.”
He felt brush of fingers behind his back, tracing a meandering line before digging through the buckskin. He didn’t allow it- nor did he do anything to stop it. That hand could shoot up to the back of his neck in seconds. It found his pocket in far more time than it should have taken, gently circling Chris’s hip bone from the other side of the fabric, before pulling free a pouch filled with gold sovereigns.
“He had this ready?” his voice was tinged with undisguised surprise as he flicked through the coins.
“I told you, he was expecting me.”
“And he sought to have it on hand in the event that you trounced him and his pathetic excuse for a posse, I suppose? What foolish men. Why did he even hire them? Didn’t they have wives they’d much rather be spending the evening with? Or mistresses for that matter.”
Chris shrugged again, still not daring to glance over at his unwelcome companion.
“Or perhaps not. I know who I’d rather spend the night with- I’m very proud of you, my little monkey.”
The same hand deposited the pouch in a delicate silk pocket, before once again slithering towards Chris.
“Killian?”
“Yes little monkey?”
“Are you about to ask me to do another job?”
Killian hummed.
“Perhaps.”
“Did you come here to ask me because you thought I’d be more likely to say yes since I’m in a state of exhausted inebriation?”
“Of course not. If I needed you in an altered state, I’d get you drunk myself- but I don’t.”
Chris sighed. It was a deep, melancholy sigh, the type that came straight from the soul Chris had bared in front of Killian on more than one occasion.
“We’ve talked about this, Killian. No more jobs.”
“One more,” Killian whined. “One last hurrah.”
His neck ached, and he was loath to do it, but Chris turned to look at Killian, finding his sultry gaze far too close to his own. The first hand stayed in its place, the second rising to cup the soft, pale line of Chris’s jaw.
“Am I not convincing you?”
Chris cocked his eyebrow. Killian smirked.
“Allow me to buy you dinner or even breakfast; whichever you desire. We’ll go now; there are so
me people I’d like for you to meet.”
“Not now, Killian.”
The grip under his chin tightened.
“There are some clean clothes for you in the carriage and wet cloths so you can wash your face. I’ll take you home once you’ve eaten, and you can sleep then.”