“You idiot,” he said genially, dropping his hands.
“You asshole!” Michael screamed. He released his right arm in a wild swing, and felt it neatly blocked, and once again, Chris was not where he should have been. Crowding in, he tried for a lower punch, a quick rabbit to the midsection, and the forward motion of the punch almost threw him right by where Chris had been standing. Chris was not only moving out of the way, he was almost dancing, bouncing on the balls of his feet, and still that damn smile was frozen on his face. Michael saw the blur of movement away from his fist again, and for one second something was triggered in his mind. But his anger was too hot, too overwhelming. He gave up trying to punch the smaller man, who infuriatingly wouldn’t hold still. Instead, he shifted back to give himself aiming room, and then lunged, ready to drop Chris with the classic schoolyard coup de grace, a knee to the groin. But he never made it.
The fluorescent lights of the office seemed like the blazing sun beating down on one of those ragged guys in a cartoon, the ones always shown crawling around in the desert looking for water. Michael heard the steady ringing of a clock he distantly knew wasn‘t there. There was also someone talking to him, but he couldn’t make out the words over the constant buzzing sounds. He tried to smile, tell them everything would be fine, and then he realized that he was going to be very sick.
Someone came closer to him as he gagged, and lifted his shoulders. He turned his head politely away and lost the contents of his stomach very carefully onto the carpet, and then finished his smile. His head was pounding, in about four or five places. He looked up and saw Lorens, looking very concerned.
“You’re cute,” Michael said.
“He is Opey,” Lorens seemed to be saying. Michael nodded, and felt a new site of pain, and closed his eyes.
“Oh, shit,” Michael said, stretching out parts of his body. He was in his bed, and although he wished he had been unconscious when they brought him here, he remembered every step of the journey. No one had ever explained just how much it hurt to be hit repeatedly on the head! I mean, he thought bitterly, you watch boxing, and they take it all the time. In the movies, the guys take turns swinging at each other’s jaws until one of them trips over something or falls out a window.
They never get hit in the jaw in a viciously planned knockout, fall backward and hit their heads against a table and a chair on the way down. No, check that. Sometimes they do, but then they get up and kick the other guy’s butt.
“That’s what you get for throwing a punch at a boxer,” Anderson said, as she industriously bandaged his forehead.
“A boxer?” Michael felt sick again, but there was nothing left to bring up. “Oh, man.”
“Well, not a professional one, of course. Too old; started training too late. But he’s not bad. On some days, he’s a regular killer. There, that’ll do it. You wanna go to the hospital now? You were dead set against it before. Do you remember?”
“Yeah,” he said. “I think I’m—okay.”
“Then just stay awake for the next twelve hours. We’ll keep an eye on you for the next two days; I’ve had minor concussions myself a few times.” She beckoned to Joan, who came forward with a glass of water and a straw.
“Concussions? I have a concussion?” Michael repeated, panicking. His head pounded, and he pushed the drink away.
“Well, of course, kiddo! What do you think boxers do? They hit each other over the head until one of ’em gets a concussion and passes out. Very civilized sport, huh?” She smiled and patted his shoulder. “We’ll have the serious chat after I’m sure you won’t take a left turn into coma-land. Sure you don’t want those X-rays?”
“Maybe I’d better,” Michael said weakly.
“Good boy. Let’s get to work on Parker’s guilt trip right away.” She stood up and left the room, and Michael carefully sipped the water. And cursed his stupidity until he ran out of creative words.
Chapter Twenty-three
Michael looked into the mirror in horror. There were bruises on his sides, right up against the curve of his rib cage. There was a really ugly one on his left upper arm—now turning a nauseating shade of greenish yellow. But his face! His lips were split—a doctor put in a stitch below his lower lip, just as a precaution. He had done a lot of damage because unlike a professional boxer, Michael hadn’t been wearing a mouth guard. His own teeth tore up the inside of his mouth, and one of them was loosened.
There were also three stitches where his head had bounced off the side of the table. There were two huge lumps on the back of his head, and another smaller one below his mouth. He looked exactly like someone had held him for someone else to take shots at. He sighed and stretched. It would all heal, he had been reassured. There was no permanent damage; most of it was bruising. His concussion was very minor—his reactions were up to speed within six hours of the incident. He could only smile at the memory of the emergency room nurse who carefully asked him if his lover had done this.
“He’s not even my friend,” he had mumbled. “Besides, you should see him!”
She had given him a long suffering glance and gone away. But indeed, she should have seen Parker. Not a damn mark on him. Well, except for that little cut next to his eye, which was probably caused by the edge of the broken metal frames. He didn’t even have a black eye, for crying out loud!
Twice, twice Michael had felt the density of those biceps on Chris, but never had he suspected that they were anything, well, dangerous. There were a lot of musclemen in the gay community, for example, but that didn’t mean shit when it came to fighting. Chris probably could have taken shots to his arms all night long before he started to feel inconvenienced.
He pulled a robe over his marked body and sat down in the chair by his window. It had been two days; the concussion watch was officially over. It was time to hear the verdict, figure out what to pack, and where to go. When the knock sounded, he forced himself to look relaxed before calling out, “Come on in!”
It wasn’t Anderson.
Chris walked in and closed the door behind him. Michael tried to set his jaw, but the effort made his mouth hurt. He watched as the other man walked past the bed to stop about six feet in front of Michael’s chair. He was dressed today in a full suit, dark gray and single breasted. His tie was muted colors, dark and touched with an appropriate burgundy color that reminded Michael of old blood. The new glasses were shiny—the frames hadn’t acquired the patina of the old ones yet. He wasn’t even wearing a Band-Aid on his cut—apparently it had healed enough.
“I would like to offer my apology to you, Michael,” he said. It sounded a little stiff, but at the same time, sincere. “It was wrong of me to take advantage of you like that. You had no way of knowing I was trained to fight, and I could have defused the situation instead of inflaming it. I am prepared to make amends in any way appropriate, and I assure you that this will never happen again.”
Michael nodded, amazed at how completely sane it all sounded. How—right—it sounded. He blushed and lowered his head. “Yeah, it’s okay. Um—I accept. You know, I was going to hit you the first night I came here,” he remembered. “Jesus, we could have gotten this done way back then!”
“I don’t think so,” Chris said. “I never would have hit you that night. However, I would have certainly held a grudge had you managed to hit me.”
“Oh man, I should have been paying attention. You blocked me that night so easily—if I’d just thought about it, I would have known you were a fighter!” Michael shook his head. “I think sometimes that everything started to go wrong that night and it’s just never let up.”
“Perhaps. Thank you for accepting my apology—I will be at your service should you think of some way I can atone for my bad judgment.” He executed that neat little bow that Michael almost had nailed (or so it looked in the mirror), and turned to leave.
“Wait—there is something,” Michael said.
Chris wheeled back. “Yes?”
“Teach me.” Michael blu
shed again, and felt a renewed pounding in his head. “Really teach me. Make me understand this stuff—I’m not getting something, and I don’t know what I’m doing wrong!” He was close to tears, and ground his teeth, substituting physical pain for the much more threatening emotional one. “I can’t screw this up any more! But you know what’s wrong—you can make me understand, I know it!”
Chris folded his arms and nodded. “Of course,” he said, “this depends upon what Anderson chooses to do. If she releases you and sends you away, I will have to wait until I finish my project here in order to find you and do this. It might be a time-consuming occupation. Are you sure this is what you want? I assure you—it will not make you like me any better.”
“I don’t care,” Michael said stubbornly. “Maybe not liking you was a part of it. Always having you here meant that I couldn’t get everything I wanted. Hell, it was like having an older brother on the football team, you know? You got all the attention, and I was just a fu—screw-up. I don’t know. But if I leave this, I have nothing. I’ll be a bum, hanging out at my uncle’s—if he’ll still have me—and hoping that I win the lottery.”
“You always had more options than that,” Anderson said, pushing the door open. Michael rose even before she crossed the threshold. She waved one hand, and he collapsed back. “You could have applied to any auction house, any other school, any large slave holding family—you could have gone to Europe, or to Asia, or any corner of the world. You could have stayed with New Age Negel, and become the Swami of Slavery in about ten or twenty years, or even started your own breakaway training program. But you’re impatient, Mike. You want everything now, or at least within the year. You want the best, but you have no idea what it costs to acquire it. And you feel personally slighted when you don’t get it.”
Michael nodded bitterly.
“And now—what? You want to stay, don’t you?”
“Yes, ma’am, I do.”
Anderson looked at Chris who shrugged. She looked back at Michael and pursed her lips. “This is officially your last chance, buckaroo. You listen up, because if you ‘fuck-up’ this one, I’m skipping your butt across every body of water between here and the Pacific, with three bounces on the Mississippi.”
Michael cringed a little at the obscenity, but nodded again. “I understand, Trainer.”
“Well, I sure hope you do.” She turned on Parker and jabbed a finger at his chest. “He’s all yours, Muhammed Ali. Start him the way I start my classics, and ride him hard. I want to see how you work, and I want daily reports. I’ll finish with Lorens in another two weeks, and Joan will be here for another two or three months. Before Joan is ready to leave, I want Mike to be where he should have been when he first got here. Got that?”
Two voices answered, “Yes, Trainer.”
When she left, Chris turned to Michael and shrugged. “That settles it, then. I will see you at five o’clock Friday morning in suitable jogging clothes. You’ll also start dressing more formally—you sometimes make the attempt, but often miss.”
Michael was about to say that Joan didn’t always coordinate his clothing the way he would have preferred, but he kept his mouth shut and nodded.
“I’ll rearrange your schedule today, and we’ll begin officially on Friday morning. And Mike—you will learn how to do everything we’ve been teaching the clients. I hope you are prepared to act—as you’ve put it—like a slave. Because in my school—those who teach must be able to do.”
“You got it, boss.”
“You’ve got it, Chris,” Chris corrected. “I will see you on Friday. If you feel you cannot run because of your physical condition, I suggest you bring a doctor’s note.”
Michael stared at the closed door after Chris left and realized that the pounding in his head had subsided a little. But that did nothing to relieve the butterflies doing sorties through his stomach. What had he thought after his first big gaffe here? That it was imperative that he not screw up any more? And how many times had he made that promise to himself since coming here? Twice more? Four times? A dozen?
He stood up and went back to the mirror. Carefully, he inclined his shoulders, bowing his head a fraction, cocking it to one side. It looked right but his back was too rounded. Again—should he briefly close his eyes? Yes, it added a touch of humility. Again, this time with the robe off, so he could see the angle of his shoulders better. Again...
No promises this time.
* * * *
Anderson pushed the back door open, allowing the light from the kitchen to spill out over the steps and the rich scent of the budding garden to come wafting toward her in exchange. It was mingled with a more acrid scent, and she sneezed.
“Gesundheit, Trainer,” Chris said. She looked down—he was seated on the top step, his legs kicked out in front of him. Smoke trailed out of his mouth as he spoke. He was in his jeans, thank goodness—the back steps had to be damp and a little grimy. She made a mental note to have Lorens clean them tomorrow. If he was going to insist on sneaking a smoke, there was no reason to get dirty doing so.
“I wondered where you were,” she said, stepping outside.
He took a drag on the cigarette and politely expelled the smoke away from her. “And here I am,” he said. “You know, Trainer—eavesdropping is not generally regarded as the height of good manners.”
She chuckled. “Are you lecturing me?”
“Oh, no, of course not.”
“The Trainer hears everything, my dear—as you well know. So do the slaves. The only one who deals in ignorance is the master. My, that’s an old one.” She looked down, and then sighed. Tucking her skirt under her, she took a seat beside him.
“He had already put me in a difficult position—now, you’ve committed me. And I wonder who put that idea into his head to begin with?” More smoke shot out, followed by a short, harsh cough.
“Not I,” Anderson insisted. “And that’s the truth, Parker. You know he’s been dancing around the solution for weeks now. All he needed was a push.”
“Or a concussion.”
“You seem to be prone to handing those out this year. Is the strap out of order?”
“Not a lecture from you too, please. Dr. Quigley has already scolded me quite harshly. I have promised to go to the gym more often and consider adjusting my meds again.” He flicked some ash off his knee. “Yes, the strap still works—but I think my own warranty may be running out.”
“Since you’ve already gotten the lecture, perhaps I should do something more... direct.”
He blinked slowly, and then one eyebrow raised in a come-hither look that Anderson couldn’t help but laugh at. Chris snorted in amusement himself and sighed.
“This further limits your options, you know.”
“Of course I know.” He ground out the cigarette and pulled another from the pack. He used a kitchen match to light it, and flipped the match into the garden still lit. They followed the descent, and the sputtering death of the light.
“I detest that habit,” Anderson said.
“Tell me to stop!”
They stared at each other as he took another drag. The end of the cigarette glowed, and he turned his head away, breaking the intensity of their contact to add more white smoke to the air.
“Give it to me.”
He immediately plucked it out of his mouth and passed it to her. She examined it for a moment, and turned it around in her fingers. “It’s a disgusting thing to do,” she said, tapping ashes off. “Unhealthy. And it’s inconsiderate to do it in front of non-smokers. Give me your hand.”
Chris extended his right hand, his arm crossing in front of his body. Deliberately, he turned it palm up.
Anderson raised the cigarette to her own lips and drew smoke into her mouth. The tip glowed, and she let the smoke billow out, as she tapped ashes away one more time. She turned the glow downward, and aimed it at the center of Chris’s palm. He remained still, his eyes on hers, and there was only the slightest stiffening of his body as the
heat from the tip came closer to his skin.
Anderson lifted the cigarette away and ground it out on the step. “You didn’t make your obeisance,” she said softly.
“No, I suppose I didn’t.” Chris brought his hand away slowly, curling his fingers into his palm. “Was that a decision?”
“There is no drive more compelling than the drive to serve, my friend. My dear friend. If you are everything you’ve struggled for, there was never any decision to make.” She stood up, stretched, and brushed her skirt off. “I’ll see you in the morning.”
“Good night,” he said as she walked back in the house. He stayed where he was, gazing out onto the garden, for a long time. The night grew a little more chilly, but he didn’t move; somewhere in the matted grass, a match lay, a twist of burnt ash.
He lit another one, and pulled a cigarette out of the pack. The tip glowed amber and copper, and smoke billowed up again. The second match joined the first, and he pushed his back up against the house, drawing his knees up to his body. He stayed there until the pack was finished.
Chapter Twenty-four
It took another week to get the nuances of that one acknowledgment bow down exactly. Michael worked alongside Joan now, and she acted as a teacher more often than not. It was humiliating at first. Michael burned with fantasies about what she thought of him now—the cocky trainer apprentice now reduced to following her around and doing the very same exercises she did, only clumsily. And while Chris wasn’t quite as snippy as he had been before, there was a strong, underlying feeling to it all, as though this was what should have been.
It wasn’t exactly starting from the beginning. Knowing the feel of the house came in handy, and so did knowing what tasks were routinely assigned to the clients and which ones Chris and Vicente took care of. And oddly, after all the reading and note-taking he had done, only now did some of it begin to sink in. How training and skill led to confidence, which led to pride, for example. It was all very good on paper. But it was also contradictory—slaves weren’t supposed to show pride, except in the smallest of ways, and too much confidence was often interpreted as arrogance. How was a client supposed to strike a proper balance? It was impossible to describe before, and didn’t get much easier as he learned. But each time he repeated a task or movement, or figured out the correct way to say something, another gram of understanding seemed to click into place.
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