by Renae Jones
The sweet did nothing to hide the true taste of Rasmus’s emotions. She could trace the lemony tang of surprise pain. She could drown in the sweet thickness of a body burning in slow arousal, like a thick whipped cream.
After a last little kiss on his ankle, she sat back and glanced at his face. His eyes were closed. He’d been shocked by the pain, but he was obediently trying to find the pleasure.
She leaned to his other ankle, and pressed her undulating tongue to the veil. She loosened it with her own spit until it slipped free.
Rasmus grunted a protest. “You couldn’t do that before?”
“No,” she murmured, letting him feel her lips moving against his skin. “The pain clears your nerves and magnifies pleasure.”
After that, she worked in silence. When she pulled the green, life-celebrating veil from his abdomen, she paused to run the flat rough of her tongue across his nipples. As she slowly freed the veils festooning his arms, she massaged his hands, loosening the tension she found there.
She found herself worried at his reaction, putting great value in his pleasure. She wanted him to enjoy this, and not in a detached, professional way. She wanted this strange man who tasted of kindness to be impressed by her, by the world she treasured.
The veils on his back were long, fastened in wide strips. She knelt behind him, pressing her peaked nipples into his back. Gently, she nibbled his neck, his earlobe.
“This isn’t sex?” Rasmus moaned.
“It’s about pain.”
She took the top veil in her hand, ripping it free with a hard clean jerk. Rasmus roared, hurt and defiance bleeding out through his voice.
A long welt of abraded skin was left behind, evidence of the pain he’d felt. If he was going to leave, it would be now.
Rasmus took a deep shaky breath, and waited for her next move.
She licked across his shoulder. His arousal was still sweet, though conflicted, his senses muddled by confusion. That was exactly where she wanted him—his pain extended by pleasure, his pleasure driven higher by pain.
When his back wore six long stripes, she returned to licking and nibbling, freeing the final veils with her mouth or hands. Either way made Rasmus moan.
Finally returning to his inner thighs, she carefully pressed his straining cock out of her way and ignored the drop of pre-come at the tip. He whimpered needily. While she lapped at the veil, he tangled his hands in her hair and whispered desperately in his native language.
She could guess what he was demanding. “Suck me,” or “Suck it.” Something harsh, by the bright taste of cayenne. Something desperate.
She let him find his mind again and waited while he carefully untangled his fingers from her hair. She moved higher, straddling him on the chaise to reach the last long red veil firmly fixed to the center of his chest.
“Do you want me to swallow your cock?” Fedni murmured.
He moaned.
She traced her fingers along the veil, letting him find words.
“Yes, please. I’ll do the same for you. I’ll...”
She ripped the veil free. Rasmus yelled, flailing and knocking a cushion free. The glue left a final red mark on his skin, mottled in outrage.
When he stilled she slid down and took his straining cock into her mouth, while the adrenaline of the shock was still overpowering the pain. She bobbed her head, each time taking him deeper, then swallowed, opening her throat.
Rasmus needed release far too desperately to bother with licking or nibbling. She sucked. She swallowed and sucked and pressed her face into his lap.
Above, he muttered a stream of obscenities, in Xanian and in the language of his home.
The words thudded in her ears like blood in her veins. She was drunk with his taste. It was searing with need, heady and bubbling with shocks of mindless pleasure. His taste drove her crazy, drove her faster.
In the wild rush for orgasm, she struggled to function well enough to give him what he needed, even while explosions of pleasure went off behind her eyes.
He came to a hard rapture, arched off the furniture, his cock buried deep in her mouth.
She came too, her entire body clamping and shuddering. Her hand dug deep into his thigh, gripping him desperately for support. Goaded by what little intelligence she had left, she pulled her mouth off him, finding air.
Her body continued to shudder, recovering slowly.
Rasmus’s hand tangled in her hair, dragging her close again. For a bare second she thought he would kiss her, then his fingers parted her hair behind her left ear.
He pulled her head to the side, ignoring her shock. Searching for her temple mark.
She jerked away, and he let her go. She stared at him. Asking was acceptable, but just digging in her hair like that was unspeakably rude. An assault. Her hand twitched to slap his face.
Now he knew she came from the Temple of Passion.
From her knees on the floor, she looked up into the hard glitter in his eyes. She couldn’t taste him, not now, so soon after overloading her mind with a shared orgasm. She didn’t need to. Unmasked anger sat on his face.
He pushed her hand off his knee, pulling away. “I’m not paying you for this.”
Her own anger swelled, swift and pure. She stood, suddenly feeling naked in her nudity.
“You can leave. Get out. Right now.”
He grabbed his clothes, every movement angry. He would have slammed something, if there’d been anything to open.
She watched him go with hard eyes. She refused to acknowledge how good he looked, how much a room that smelled of him affected her.
She listened to him put his clothes on in the entryway, then went to lock the door behind him.
* * *
When she went forth to sunder offensively fast-growing branches from her red, black and green topiary, Fedni found Rasmus waiting.
He looked ridiculous. He was waiting for her in his big weird garden, not even pretending to be doing anything other than waiting. For a brief outraged moment, she considered flinging her plant shears at his head.
A full night’s sleep later, and she was still that angry. How dare he imply she was going to ask for payment when no contract existed? How dare he deny her decision was her own? How dare he think he could even afford her if she were still an acolyte?
“Fedni.”
“What?” she snapped, proving yet again he wasn’t a client. That sort of tone used while under contract would have brought harsh sanctions when the client complained.
“I apologize.”
She wasn’t impressed. He apologized frequently, didn’t he? And truly, what he’d done was horrifying.
“I shouldn’t have said that. I didn’t think it, not really. I was just...I was alarmed that you are an empath. You know that only really happens here, on Xana, right?”
He just looked at her for a moment, while she stood stonily.
“I understand the empathy, with the sex. It makes it horrible. When you’re forced to have sex with a person, and you feel his personality, his perversions. I’m sorry I did that to you. I’m angry, I guess, that you didn’t warn me. You made me into a person I don’t want to be.”
If that made any sense, maybe she could have answered dismissively. But it didn’t. It didn’t make any sense at all.
And she almost felt bad for him, the crazy off-worlder, lost in a foreign land. If the memory of his hands grabbing at her hair wasn’t so vivid, she might even be willing to forgive.
She stepped right against the fence, pointedly making him uncomfortable with her nearness. “Do you know what you taste like when you climax? Like champagne. You taste like very expensive champagne, champagne I cannot afford anymore, with just a touch of a cayenne spice.”
He blinked.
Fedni stepp
ed back to yell at him properly.
“Who do you think I am?” she demanded. “You learn, oh, I have sold my body in temple service, and now I am someone else? I am this person you invented in your own mind.
“Who I am—” she thumped her own chest for emphasis, “—I am a grown woman. I do taste your personality, and your emotion, and I thought, I want to taste more of you, and you wanted that, so I did. I am not an idiot, I am not a child, I am not hurting you, and you wanted sex too. So we had sex! You are insane.
“You forced me to have sex with you? Is that your fantasy? Because that is how men think. Everything they don’t understand must be their secret fantasy, because the fantasy is all they think of.”
Rasmus cringed. She was taken aback, just for a moment, wondering. Perhaps that was more truth than she had expected it to be. Perhaps his fantasies were darker than you would ever guess, looking at his boy-next-door all-grown-up exterior. And if so, well, good.
Too much niceness was a sign of mental illness.
She continued her tirade. “Because there are no signs I was forced, not ever. I never told you no, I never said stop. I asked you if you wanted my mouth during the ceremony. And the first time? That was my idea too, and if you’re too naïve to see that, that’s not my problem. You think you forced me? I think you are insane!”
Their gardens fell silent, empty of sound like last hour’s bell toll, and she realized she’d been yelling. She’d never heard him yell, had she? He had remarkable self-restraint.
Except when he was fucking her. Then she could shred it like tissue paper.
She burst into tears and ran into her house, leaving her shears forgotten in the dark soil of her garden.
* * *
Fedni fumed. She seethed and cursed into the evening. She tried to distract herself with planning a small dinner gathering she would probably never throw, but she was distracted easily. How dare he think the best sex of her life was some accident of his own angst?
At one point, while she viciously applied a smoothing treatment to her hair, she wondered about the exact nature of his angst. How could a grown man, a sexy, passionate man, feel so guilty about something so natural? There was more foreignness to off-worlders than just bad accents and an odd preference for zippers.
But she didn’t think too long on that, finding her self-righteous anger far more soothing.
The next morning, she woke calm and resolved. Her memory of the fight was already softened by time, but she had the distinct impression she hadn’t made much sense. Only Rasmus made her that mad, that incoherent.
She was going to make him understand, and this time she wouldn’t be reduced to sputtering gibberish by her outrage.
Of course, by the time she’d pulled together a short list of talking points and arrayed herself in casual perfection, the day was already well begun. Rasmus did not answer his door.
With a little research she found an occupation medical center attached to the campus of the Temple of Flesh, with Rasmus listed as a senior physician. The coincidence gave her pause, as did the idea of visiting the campus for the first time, but she would not back down this time.
Fedni sent a terse message through his public mailbox. “We have things to discuss. Will you please give me the pleasure of your company for lunch? I will be there at 13:00.”
From the moment she arrived, she found her surroundings strange. The main Temple of Flesh campus for the city was huge, yet more compact than the Temple of Passion grounds she had grown up on. Instead of lawns, there were plain five-story buildings and the occasional concrete square. Even the seating was more efficient—instead of discrete conversation groupings, there were rows of concrete benches, like bumpy extensions of the ground itself.
The most off-putting part was the air of abandonment. She saw other people, of course, but far fewer than she’d expect on sidewalks so wide. Litter had blown into corners and entire buildings were shuttered.
The occupation medical offices were easy to find; they alone were doing bustling trade. The building itself was squat, more poured gray concrete with green-tinted windows. A crowd of people rode the lift with her, lower-caste members who allowed her an appropriate amount of space.
In a wide reception area, a line formed for check-in kiosks and automated medipods. Fedni bypassed that entirely, heading straight for a waifish off-worlder with riotous curly hair at a reception desk.
She narrowed her eyes as Fedni approached.
“I’m here for Rasmus Misseen.”
“You need to check in, and a doctor will be assigned.”
“I am not a patient. This is a social visit.”
“Is he expecting you?”
“Yes, he is.”
Well, he was, if he’d checked his mail.
The woman looked unconvinced. They stared at each other a moment, judging the situation. Fedni began to get angry, a bit fed up with off-worlders who thought they knew better than you on everything—but then the woman waved a hand in surrender. “Please take a seat. I’ll let him know you are here.”
Fedni sat in a molded plastic chair, her back straight and her legs crossed just so.
She was oddly uncomfortable in a room of people so far below her station—perhaps because that station was now in question. Five years ago, she wouldn’t have been acutely aware of stolen glances and people who avoided walking down her row. She wouldn’t have wondered if hushed murmurs were to respect the noise levels in the room, or to talk about her, so obviously luxury caste in a waiting room meant for the service caste.
When Fedni looked back at the desk, the woman had been replaced by two men leaning over a former Flesh acolyte’s data pad.
The receptionist was gone, and Rasmus was nowhere in sight. Fedni stood, but she didn’t bother with the desk a second time. She walked through a set of wide double doors, walking too confidently for anyone to dare stop her.
The office became a maze after that. Dozens of staff had offices, or desks in halls. Automated pods were taking and disgorging people at a high rate, each manned by a medical professional in a pale lavender vest with a low Nehru collar. There were data crystals heaped in piles and a janitor was mopping right in the middle of the hubbub.
It was nothing like the medical office she attended, a discreet place with decent tea and personal attention. This was more like a factory, a manufacturing line to take in people, do their yearly exam and spit them out on the other side. How could Rasmus stand this?
Fedni followed the purple back of a doctor into a long room of curtained sitting areas. The nearest area, curtain open, had a desk, a data console and an exam table smashed into a space too small for comfortable movement.
Her unknowing guide closed a curtain behind her, and another one opened to disgorge a patient. Fedni was turning to go when she heard Rasmus’s voice.
Fedni walked closer, identifying the right curtain by the hum of Rasmus’s soft voice—but she paused outside, not certain what she might be interrupting. For the first time it occurred to her Rasmus might not be able to arrange his schedule to eat with her on such little notice.
“What do I do for now?”
A lick of clingy desperation burned Fedni’s taste centers, not passion at all but too strong for her to miss.
“I know it’s hard to imagine, now, but you will be fine. Go to your counselor, use the new health systems. Come here for your appointments on time. Take the pills, eat well, use lotion to ease the regenerating scars. Six months sounds like forever now, but you’ve had the scars for four years already. Life will pass quickly enough.”
Fedni froze, horrible images pelting her imagination.
Scar regeneration was an expensive procedure, and lengthy, but not that lengthy. This woman’s scars must be very bad to plan for six months of regrowth before surgery.
And four
years? That was after the conquering, but before the Temple of Flesh had been disbanded. Why hadn’t the procedure begun immediately? But Fedni already knew the answer to that. The value of beauty in the Temple of Passion was such that even minor scars from childhood spills and acne were tended, but in the Temple of Flesh, acolytes had a far lower value. Disfigured workers were retired, or moved to more exotic venues.
She couldn’t interrupt this. This wasn’t someone here for a yearly weighing. Guiltily, the courtesan moved, letting the curtains of an empty exam room shield her from view.
“And you promise?”
Rasmus seemed to know exactly what she meant. “I can’t promise you will look exactly as you did, but I promise the scars will be gone. No one will know unless you tell them, after the surgeons are done.”
“But will I be beautiful? Will I look weird?”
And now Fedni could taste Rasmus’s sorrow and pity. It tasted familiar, like turnips or bitter kale, and like Rasmus.
“The surgeons, with your input, will pay attention to aesthetics and do their best to make you pretty. They can do amazing things.”
“You don’t know?”
“It will depend on the depth of the scarring and the growth of the stimulated tissue. That affects what they have to work with.”
A moment of silence left Fedni confused, then a soft sob reached her ears. There as a rustle, and she imagined Rasmus pulling the woman close to hold her—a physical comfort Xanian doctors would never lower themselves to, not even with another of the professional caste.
“What do I do?” the woman repeated, her voice cracking. “Who will I be if no one can stand to look at me ever again?”
The words rang harshly in Fedni’s ears. It was a question she had asked herself—“Who will I be?”—as news of her temple’s disbandment had filtered down. What did you do when everything about yourself was taken, when you lost your place in society and became helpless and invisible? The idea that this woman had faced that at Xanian hands, before the Federation took a care in prostitution, rocked her on her heels.