“So you let me take too much, let me gauge myself against your standard instead of paying attention to how much I’d taken in.” Timothy felt his head begin to spin. “A stupid mistake. In the war it would have cost me my life.” He looked blearily at Charles. “Will it tonight too? Is this Smith’s cunning plan? Use you to drug me, then—what? Am I to ride his dildo next?”
Timothy wasn’t prepared for the intensity of Charles’s reaction; all he knew was Charles’s eyes went dark with hurt and anger, and his hands were bands around Timothy’s shoulders.
“I would never—” He shut his eyes, drew in a breath through his teeth, then let it out, loosening his grip as well. His eyes he kept closed. “I would never do that to anyone, but not you especially.”
“You barely know me,” Timothy said.
Charles smiled a half smile and opened his eyes again. “You tried to help me at the inn, and you knew me less than I know you now.” He shrugged. “I didn’t mean to hurt you. I just… Well, I thought with a bit of baetlbeth in you, maybe…” His smile fell away as he reached up and tentatively brushed Timothy’s cheek with the back of his hand. “I’ve been a social pariah since they knew my mother was pregnant. She never held me, not once, not even when I was a baby. But I was handsome, and I learned to be charming, and once I was older—well, it turned out noble bastards have a lovely free reign to fuck whomever they like, so long as they don’t cause the wrong kind of scandal. And even those can be bought off. So my life hasn’t been much, but sex has always been a pleasure I held dear. I didn’t know how dear until Smith—” He laughed, and it was a sad, hollow sound. “He’s all but killed it. He’s turned it into a nightmare, a torture. When I’m not sick from what he’s done to me, I think about how much worse it will be if he doesn’t kill me before he stops. If I have to find something else to live for, if I look at a woman or a man and see pain, not pleasure, I don’t know how I’ll bear it.”
He looked so bleak. Timothy couldn’t stop himself from reaching up and touching his cheek in return. But then Charles’s eyes lifted to his, and they were dark and full of heat.
“But you,” he whispered. “I saw you, and even at the inn—” He reached out and touched Timothy’s lips. “Goddess bless, but you’re so beautiful. And I wanted you. It felt so good just to want you, to look at your hands and imagine them touching me, to ache for that again instead of cringing. And then earlier, I caught you looking, just enough to make me think, to hope… I thought, if I don’t tell him about the drug, and he relaxes, maybe…maybe…”
His thumb tugged gently on Timothy’s bottom lip, parting it from his upper one briefly.
Timothy tried for reason, but simply breathing was trouble enough. “You didn’t need to drug me for this. Yes, I was interested, and if you’d kept me straight—”
“You would have focused on my brother, even though there’s nothing you can do until whatever Madeline is doing in there finishes.”
That was true, and it irritated Timothy to have it pointed out. He gestured awkwardly to his left forearm, to the tattoos there. “If you were after the ‘pleasure slave,’ you’ve just drugged him nearly insensible.”
Charles’s eyes danced. “I think insensible might be more fun, given everything that’s happened tonight. Bear in mind, I’ve never had anyone as fancy as the Cariff’s untouchable concubine. I’m sure I’ll be impressed no matter what happens.” He moved his hand to Timothy’s shoulder and made gentle but insistent circles with his thumb on Timothy’s collarbone.
Timothy swallowed and shut his eyes, but the room spun all the same. “Jonathan—I should be thinking of Jonathan.” It came out wrong, though, as if he meant he should be thinking about sex with Jonathan. It was dangerous territory, and Timothy tried to shut down those thoughts.
Charles leaned forward and whispered into Timothy’s ear. “Did you ever fuck my brother?”
It was a blunt question, and it occurred to Timothy that he should be offended by it. He couldn’t quite manage offense, though, and when he answered, he was a little shocked at the frustration in his voice as he said, “No.”
“Did you want to?”
Timothy tried to close his eyes, tried to find his anger. But baetlbeth wasn’t very forgiving, and he was too pleasured to be upset. “Yes,” he said and looked Charles in the eye.
Charles didn’t smile, just met his gaze and nodded. “He didn’t want to. He’s not that way. He didn’t resent you for it, and he probably noticed, but he just isn’t interested in you that way.”
“No.” There was a strange release in the confession.
Charles leaned forward and pressed his lips so close to Timothy’s ear that when he spoke, Timothy could feel his lips brush his skin.
“I want to fuck you.” The hand on Timothy’s shoulder tightened. “I want you desperately. I want you now. I want you here. I’ve been hoping I would have a chance to fuck you ever since you slammed me into the wall upstairs. Even when you scared me and I thought I should probably run, that you were too much for me, even then I still wanted to fuck you.”
Timothy had his eyes shut, and he was breathing too fast, swaying to the strange litany of Charles’s confession. “I want to fuck you.” It sounded so crass in Etsian, but he liked the sound of the words in Charles’s mouth. “I want to fuck you.” He swallowed and reached out to steady himself, which meant he grabbed the front of Charles’s shirt.
“Say it again,” he whispered.
“I want to fuck you.” Charles’s nose nuzzled Timothy’s ear, then his cheek, and then he kissed him, hot and open against his jaw. “I want to taste your skin. I want to pull your clothes off and push you onto the rug. I want you to push me back. I want to run my tongue down your chest. I want to see what other tattoos you have.”
“Scars,” Timothy whispered. “I have scars. Many scars.” But he was nuzzling back now, his fingers climbing up the shirt, seeking skin. He never could withstand words. He’d had nothing but clandestine affairs with guilty Etsian officers and the occasional refugees for so long; so few words, just gropes and nudges, and now here was this man, wooing him.
“I want to run my tongue over your scars. I want to trace them with my hands. I want to swirl my tongue in your navel, to make you arch, to make you beg me to go lower.” He caught Timothy’s lip roughly, briefly. “I want to taste your cock. I want it in my mouth, in my throat. I want my hands on your thighs, feeling you, curling against you as I lift you, spread you open and taste—”
“Stop.” Timothy reached up, fumbling for his head, ending up with two fistfuls of hair he used to tug Charles down to his mouth. He kissed him furiously, all his lust and anger and aching pushing so hard he was almost biting.
This is what I want, he said with the kiss. This hard. This angry. This raw. This. This. Please, please—give me this.
Charles groaned and met him, passion for passion, push for push.
I want you. I want you like this. I want to fuck you.
Yes, Timothy thought in surrender, and he swung his leg around and used his weight to shove them onto the floor.
Chapter Seven
a’stena
circle
There are many, many ways to travel around a circle, and each journey is sacred.
“Fucking is for animals.”
That was what Timothy’s ditma had told him on his first day in the garden, when he was young and uncertain and determined no one should ever know just how green he was. But his ditma had seen his fear and apprehension, and he had pulled Timothy aside and told him patiently the things he should know.
“Fucking is for animals,” he had said. “Pleasure is an art, and you are an artist.”
“I am not an artist yet,” Timothy had answered him. And his ditma had smiled a smile that made his eyes look like stars, so full of life and secrets, and he had kissed Timothy sweetly before he answered.
“You will be an artist whenever you decide you want to be one. An artist is born in the heart, not in t
raining. An artist believes and understands, then spends his life exploring what he has already come to believe, to make his garden greater and brighter for those who would appreciate his art. You do not enter the garden to become the sort of artist it wishes you to be. You enter to bring your art to the garden so that it may grow.”
The ditma’s words echoed in Timothy’s mind now as he rolled on a sooty floor with Charles Perry, high on the sort of dirty drug the pleasure garden would never touch, groping and grunting and groaning as mouth sought mouth and hands went everywhere and sexes burned with nothing more exotic than lust. In his affairs since the garden, Timothy had kept to his concubine principles and strictures as a sort of ritual, a way of keeping ghosts alive.
But this. This was not art. This was fucking.
Timothy liked it. He loved his art, and he would mourn the loss of the garden forever, but this, he was finding, was a sort of healing too. The garden had been full of beauty and artistry, but it was gone. Now he was in a dirty ruin full of cold and damp and strange things he did not understand, his partner dead or dying; everything was beyond his control. Nothing was right. All beauty was dead. Everything he loved was dead.
And yet he was not dead. He was alive, and he was fucking.
He dug his face into the carpet—carpet so dirty he had to tuck his chin in toward his chest or he would choke—and he gasped as Charles Perry opened his mouth over his naked skin. Charles was kissing Timothy’s back, laving it, inspecting his scars, just as he had said he would. There were many: lacerations from war, whip marks from the Cloister, burns from firing canon, grazings from bullets. He had cuts on his hip, nasty poker marks on his rump and beneath the curve of his thigh where the monks had tried to convince him of his sins of the flesh with fire. Charles found them all, touching them, sucking them. He was not tender. There was no pity. Just touching, endless touching, with hands and mouth and tongue.
Timothy held still through it, just breathing, steeping in the strangeness of it all. Why did it feel so good? Why was he so passive? He had no answer. He had been an artist in paradise, but now paradise was gone. He could go there no longer. His ditma had died before his eyes, his kind and beautiful face twisted in horror and dull disbelief at what had happened to him. And it had happened to all the others. Dead. All dead.
Charles’s thumbs ran down the sides of Timothy’s cheeks, parting him to make way for Charles’s tongue, which was finding deeper, darker scars. Timothy shut his eyes and relaxed the muscles there, his breathing coming faster.
The others were dead. But he was not.
Charles’s tongue flicked over Timothy’s entrance; Timothy gasped, sucking in dirt, digging his fingers into the carpet.
Ca’dimdirah. Fuck me. Fuck me with your mouth and hands. Fuck me without art, because this is not the place or time for beauty. Ca’dimdirah. Ca’dimdirah. Ca’dimdirah.
He did. Timothy could not tell what, exactly, Charles did, but he knew he felt wet and hot and dirty, and he knew he was being fucked. He was on his knees with a strange man between them, he had his face buried in moldy carpet in a room that ached with cold, and he opened himself and let himself be taken with mouth and tongue and hands and breath. He held himself still, finding a strange peace in being the object, of being so removed from his art that he was in that moment just what Smith had called him: a slave to pleasure. It soothed parts of him he had not known were aching. There were so many dangers. So many shadows. And yet in this odd, unexpected dance, there was also a strange light.
He came abruptly. The orgasm was so hard, such a push and void that for a moment he thought he had only pissed, but when he opened his eyes and looked back at himself from beneath the tent of his body, he saw the pool of white he had made. He saw too Charles Perry’s knees between his own. The sight gave him a quiet sort of comfort, and he smiled as he shut his eyes again.
When Charles eased him down to the side, resting on his hip, Timothy did not fight him. He tucked his arm beneath his face and watched Charles settle back against the couch, wearing nothing but a necklace much like Jonathan’s medallion. Charles reached for the bottle and took another drink, but his hand was shaking. His naked body glistened with sweat, caking his hair to the sides of his face.
Sated, his body still humming from release, Timothy smiled. “Thank you, charisa.”
“You’re welcome.” Charles put down the bottle, smiling back, but he still had an edge on him. “Wish I had a cigarette or a dram. I wasn’t joking about being an addict.”
“Bad for your body,” Timothy said.
“So is Smith.” Charles spread his feet and let his arms rest over his knees, giving Timothy a good view of his sex, which was hard and pointing upward.
It was also, Timothy noticed, covered with the same profane marks that covered his arms.
Charles caught him looking and took himself in his hand a little self-consciously. “More henna.”
Timothy’s eyes were tracing the rest of him. “You have scars too. Though they are…strange.”
“Some are from the mundane sort of accidents,” Charles said. “Knives in an alley, falls when too drunk to navigate stairs, angry lovers with blunt instruments. But the ones you’re noticing are Smith’s.” He grimaced and pointed to the inside of his thigh. “It’s a sort of vise thing.” He tried to smile, but the gesture was pained. “Sometimes I can’t help fighting back, so he’s taken to bolting me in place, as it were.” He rubbed gently at the raw, red flesh. “The torture doesn’t bother me like I thought it would. It used to seem the scariest sort of thing, being hurt on purpose, over and over again. I heard about the Cloister monks in the stories from the Continental War. And I saw the evidence of what Father had done to Andrea and to others, and when I heard of both of these things, I felt sick. I never thought I could bear it. But it’s oddly easier than I thought. It sounds insane, but you…get used to the pain. Or at least I did.” His hand stopped stroking his thigh and fell back to the floor. “It’s what it does to my mind and my insides. That I keep thinking will kill me.”
“It’s because you’re strong.” Timothy’s accent was thicker; he was too tired to try and flatten it out. He wished he could speak in Catalian, because the words were hard to find in Etsian. “To rape the body is nothing if the mind does not come along. You have a strong understanding of your body, more than most. You understand it as an extension of your mind. But Smith has found the way into your mind, your secret door. And he does not come in love.”
Charles shrugged. “I’ve lived a long time without love. And even with Andrea, when I thought it was love, it was still just good sex. I don’t understand why it’s so different with Smith, why I can’t separate myself.”
“Ma’to it qu’er a liera,” Timothy said. “All of us yearn for love, and there, charisha, is both beauty and pain. Love is our sun. We cannot live without it.”
A cloud passed over Charles’s face, and he ducked his head to try to hide the pain. His laugh was hollow. He said nothing.
Timothy held out his hand. “Come. Come here.”
He came cautiously, like a boy crawling across the carpet fishing for a smile, trying to make light by brushing a kiss against Timothy’s hip. Timothy motioned him forward, and soon they lay side by side, faces inches apart and lit by the orange glow of the fire.
Charles stroked Timothy’s face and ran his hands over his neck and shoulders. “You are so soft,” he whispered. He slid a hand over Timothy’s chest, his stomach, then up again, back to his breast, which he began to knead lightly. “You are soft but hard.” Charles nuzzled Timothy’s nose, his cheek, and closed his fingers over the hard peak of Timothy’s nipple. “You are perfect.”
Timothy nuzzled back, seeking his mouth, taking his lips with gentle fierceness, coaxing them open, suckling each before dipping inside, claiming and soothing at once. The baetlbeth was still buzzing in his head, but there was so much more than that humming in him now. There was magic here, magic he believed in. Charles slid one hand be
tween their bodies to stroke Timothy’s hard, ready sex while his other continued sweet torment of his nipple. Timothy shuddered, then sagged, then broke the kiss and tipped his head back, arching his neck in offering as pleasure rose inside him again.
“You make me feel good and whole,” Charles whispered, his lips hot against Timothy’s neck. “How do you do that?”
“I do nothing. You do it to yourself.” Timothy opened his thigh, then drew it up high to rest against Charles’s hip, opening himself to his lover’s eager hand. “I am only lying here, submitting to you.”
“It’s more than that. It’s—I don’t know.” Charles’s hands stilled, and he buried his mouth against Timothy’s chest. “Smith asked me once what it was that I wanted. Not from him, he said, but in general. I told him nothing. That there wasn’t anything. I couldn’t see it. And then he showed me. I had a dream that was a nightmare—it was why I came to him, to get rid of it—but he took me through it, past the wraiths that tried to drag me down, and when he did, at the end, I saw the Goddess. She was golden and beautiful and strong, and she looked at me, and she loved me. And I wanted her. I finally wanted something. And Smith raped it. I’ve never seen her since, and I’ve lived nothing but the nightmare. But I can’t forget that wanting.”
“Charisha.” Timothy shut his eyes and buried his lips in Charles’s damp hair.
Charles’s hands found Timothy’s hips and kneaded gently. “What I don’t understand is how it’s better,” he whispered. “I don’t understand how I feel more alive being tortured and raped every day, used against my own family for someone else’s selfish quest—why am I happier than I was before? What is wrong with me? I want a phantom! She isn’t real. She was just a dream, despite how it felt during his spell. Am I such a fool that I keep hoping I am wrong, that she will appear? That I would give up everything, anything, even my life, to feel the way I felt in that dream for the span of just one heartbeat? That I hope Smith is right, that she is coming to find me? That even if I’m leading her to him, I can’t care, because at least, before we are both destroyed, I might see her again? Does that make me terrible, as much a monster as he?”
The Etsey Series 1: The Seventh Veil Page 19