by L. J. Greene
I made to roll up my shirtsleeves, and in doing so had to remove my Fitzgerald cufflinks. I looked around for a place to set them down.
“Here,” Cresswickham said, and indicated the elegant side table next to his chair. On its shining inlaid-wood surface stood a dull silver dish, with a small key sitting in it. I deposited my cufflinks into the dish, and Cresswickham raised his eyebrows. “Where on earth did you find yourself such gaudy trinkets?” he asked softly, and then looked at Leo.
“They were my father’s,” I lied curtly, and rolled up my sleeves. The tub was deep, and I had to lean in quite a ways before I could plug it up. I turned on the taps and presently hot steam billowed up and over the sides of the bath.
The whole time, Leo stood immobile and placid on the sheepskin rug, as unconcerned as if he were waiting for a bus.
“You can see to Leo, now,” Cresswickham said. I came over to the rug. I had no idea what the Englishman meant, but Leo hinted clear enough by extending his arm, his sapphire and gold cufflink glinting at me in the warm yellow light cast by the chandelier. I removed it, and the other, and placed them with mine in the dish. Cresswickham watched me every step of the way, but I wouldn’t look into his face.
I returned to Leo and undressed him. Cresswickham gave me brief, snappish instructions on where to lay out Leo’s clothes whenever I showed hesitation. The worst was when I knelt down to unlace his shiny black shoes, my head bent low over them. I could see a shadowy reflection of my own face in his inky toes. At least I was spared a mirror image of my humiliation.
Cresswickham, I noticed, stared away, one knee bouncing in agitation. It was as though he couldn’t bear to watch the scene, couldn’t bear to see Leo’s nakedness, and it puzzled me. Wasn’t that his whole schtick, the watching?
Once I’d disrobed him, Leo sank into the bathtub with a moan of pleasure that made my prick shudder despite myself. He laid himself back and wrapped his hands lightly around the sides with a contented sigh.
“There are flannels there, at the end,” Cresswickham said, and stood up to pace around aimlessly. On the baroque bench running across the foot of the tub was a collection of neatly folded washcloths, just as he had said, but I still wasn’t sure what he expected from me.
“The soap is there, too,” Leo murmured, his eyes opening to slits.
“Oh,” I said grimly, and got the message. I wet a cloth, soaped it up, and started to wash Leo’s chest. Finally, the Englishman turned to watch us. Perhaps, I thought, it was just this that Cresswickham wanted: a show, a display of my servitude and an acceptance of his power over me. Well, I could give him a show.
“Make sure you get his back,” he said, circling the tub, and me kneeling there next to it.
“Oh, no need,” Leo said. “There’s no need. This is lovely. I don’t want—”
“But I want,” Cresswickham snapped.
Defeated, Leo pulled himself forward in the bath and sat with his head bowed. I heard Cresswickham’s intake of breath as he saw Leo’s skin. The marks were not so bad now; they’d faded, though they were still apparent. I didn’t glance in Cresswickham’s direction while I washed Leo’s back. Why give the man extra satisfaction? Once I was finished, though, and Leo reclined against the copper side of the tub, I did look up.
“Am I done?” I was tired of the game. Tired of waiting for the other shoe to drop. I was struck by Cresswickham’s face; he was so pale his lips were bloodless, and drops of perspiration shone on his brow.
“No,” he said, and his voice was taut and quivered like a violin string. “No, Mr. Fox, you are not done.”
“The water is getting cold,” Leo said quietly.
“Then for Christ’s sake, tell him to add more hot water,” the Englishman snapped. I turned the tap without Leo relaying the instruction. Cresswickham cleared his throat before he went on, his composure recovered. “Do you know what I believe to be Leo’s problem?” I made no reply, and focused instead on testing the heat of the water. “Coleridge?” He made my name sound dangerous, like a promise of pain.
“No, Reginald. What is his problem?”
“I am so glad you’ve asked, since it will pertain to you while you’re staying here—both his problem, and his solution. He takes a lubricious pleasure in his bathing, does he not?”
I’d continued in my half-hearted washing of Leo, and at Cresswickham’s words I couldn’t help looking down into the water. He was right. Leo had been partly aroused through the whole ritual, and he squirmed now as though my gaze was a touch. His lips, never truly closed at rest anyway, opened a little wider and his nipples tightened despite the warmth of the bath. My washcloth dipped lower, and I swiped it across his belly and looked Leo straight in the eye.
“Yes,” I said. “Yes, he does.”
Cresswickham paced at the end of the bath, his arms crossed, watching us and monologuing fit to beat Hamlet. “In fact, he is a libertine through and through. He is a sybarite, a perfect satyr; a hedonist and a voluptuary; lecherous above all things; seeking only and ever his own gratification. He is, in a word—” Here he stopped, and touched his fingertips to the foot of the bath. “Oversexed.”
As Cresswickham spoke the word, Leo’s hands clutched at the tub. They stared straight at each other, the two of them, and Leo’s lips curled at the corners. His cock was thick, swaying in the eddies of the water.
“Aren’t you, Leo?”
“Oh, yes. Yes, Reggie.”
Without thought, as though I were catching a fish, I darted my hand into the water to grasp his prick. Leo arched, and the water slapped up the sides of the tub.
“You see?” Cresswickham breathed.
“Yes,” I said. “I see.” I was hard myself, and I wondered if Cresswickham was as well. I gave a squeeze, just to see Leo wriggle again. My shirtsleeve was soaked through.
“There is only one solution,” Cresswickham continued, leaning in closer. “He simply must have relief. It’s an agony for him to go even a single day without emptying his bollocks. He’d go out of his mind, I suppose; start rutting up against the furniture. We can’t have that. So he needs to relieve himself regularly. He’ll toss off if he has to, but he prefers to have someone else do it. Rather like a stud bull, you know, being milked of its semen.”
“Like a goat,” I said, and the note of disgust in my tone surprised me. Leo whined in the back of his throat, and Cresswickham gave a short burst of laughter.
“He knows you, Leo,” he said. “He knows you.”
I had my hand firm but unmoving around Leo’s cock. I watched his face closely, wondering if the desperation there was only for show. Somehow, I thought not.
“Come on,” he said to me. “Please.”
He could have rubbed at it himself, of course, or clenched his fingers around mine and made me do it, but that wasn’t how this particular game was played. For once I was being granted an element of control. I wasn’t being choked or suffocated; for the first time, I was clothed and he was naked. He was vulnerable. The Marquess of Holford was laying his prized possession out before me on a silver platter—or in a copper bathtub, anyway.
So: “No,” I said, spitefully. “You can wait a little longer.”
Cresswickham laughed again, delighted.
“Please,” Leo repeated. “Oh, please.” He was trying to move, trying to get some measure of stimulation, but my hand moved with him and all he ended up with was the chokehold I had on his cock and waves in the water. He stilled, and I rewarded him by fondling his balls, massaging them the way he liked to do to mine, until he started moving again, and I stopped.
Cresswickham pointed out, “You’ll have to behave, Leo, if you want to be set loose.”
Leo’s head lolled back, his throat a golden arc speckled with pinpricks of hairs, a shadow threatening to bloom. I could see the muscles of his throat undulating as he swallowed. I stroked him with a firm, unyielding grip, and the water rocked and splashed with my movement. I brought him to the edge, until he whimpered
and his knuckles turned white as he seized at the edge of the bath, and then I stopped.
He groaned, gritting his teeth.
“Now this is interesting,” Cresswickham murmured. “Will he relent, Leo, do you think? Will he let you have your release, or will he be cruel? You have been cruel to him, after all. He might leave you in your torment, on that terrible brink between anguish and rapture.”
“Reggie,” Leo gasped, and reached out towards him. “Please.”
Cresswickham remained unmoved. “It’s in his hands alone. Literally.”
“Look at me,” I said roughly. Damned if I would let him shoot a load while begging Cresswickham for permission. Leo turned his head and ran an unsteady hand over my shoulder. I said, “Ask me, you hear? Ask me.”
“Please.”
“No.”
“Please, sweetheart.”
It was the pet name that persuaded me; it made me think of all the other pretty things he’d called me and how they’d made me feel, and how his body had made my body feel. It must have been that lust coming over me, because I said, “You’re so desperate for it. Come on then, you goddamn degenerate.”
I’d never talked like that in his ear before and I thought I never would again, but it did the trick, alright. I felt a flood of new warmth in the water around my wrist, and with my other hand I grabbed a handful of his hair and forced him under the water, willing him to feel the same panic I’d endured in the pool the other day.
The water sloshed with the tempest of his convulsions, and I found myself just about drenched. I let him up quick enough, but he coughed and choked as though he were drowning still. I ignored him, slicked my hair back off my face and reached for a towel from the bench. Cresswickham pulled them away.
“Just a moment. Are you cold?”
“Yes, and it’s damned uncomfortable,” I told him baldly, and put my hand on the edge of the bath to help myself up from my knees. Leo was still gasping for breath in the cooling, polluted water, but he clutched at my hand like he was trying to tell me he forgave me.
I didn’t want his forgiveness.
Cresswickham said, “Dry Leo first. Then you can worry about yourself.” He returned to his chair, and watched me help Leo out of the bath and rub him down with a towel soft as mink.
“Get me a cigarette, would you?” he asked me idly, while I was on my knees drying off his feet. I gave him an incredulous look. “Never mind,” he said hurriedly, but something landed next to me on the rug, right next to my hand: Leo’s cigarette case. Cresswickham had thrown it to me. At me.
I turned in time to catch in one hand the lighter he pelted at me.
“Quick hands,” he said. “You’d make a fine fieldsman. Do you play cricket?”
“Baseball,” I said. “Shortstop.” We stared at each other until Leo shivered.
“My robe,” he said. “Please.” I brought it to him and helped him into it. I lit his cigarette for him. He said, “You should go and change, or you’ll catch your death. Won’t he, Reggie?”
“Yes. You’ll catch your death.”
I shivered then. I got out of that bathroom as fast as I could without running, but at the door of Cresswickham’s bedroom I remembered: my cufflinks were still in the silver dish. I didn’t like to leave them behind. I was certain I’d never see them again if I did, and—despite everything that had passed between us, despite the hot shame welling in me—I wanted them, a talisman showing Leo’s regard for me, or at least the ghost of it. A reminder of the good things we’d shared.
Cresswickham hadn’t liked them, either; another compelling reason.
I strode back towards the connecting door before I could change my mind, but paused when I realized I could hear them speaking.
“Why must you always choose the most wretched lowlifes? To try me further?”
Leo replied, “I told you, my best beloved, he means nothing to me. It’s you, only you. Always you.”
There was a pause, and then Cresswickham said slowly, “He does have potential, this chaud lapin of yours. That way he looks at Alice, sometimes. And he has a callous streak in him; he showed that today.”
“You promised you’d leave Alice out of it, Reggie.”
Leo’s voice was so close I backed away, and bumped blindly into a dresser. The talk stopped. Footsteps came close. There was nothing for it. I stood my ground.
Leo flung open the door and froze, but only for a moment. “Gabriel. We’ll take tea downstairs in half an hour,” he said, using the tone of voice he reserved for the servants, raised a little because he wanted Cresswickham to hear him. “In the rose garden, I think, since it’s such a sunny afternoon. We’ll send for you if we need anything else.”
Go, he mouthed at me, but there was no need. I was going, alright. I shook my head at him in disgust.
“Stay the hell away from me,” I hissed over my shoulder, and banged the door shut on my way out.
Part V
In a Lonely Place
Chapter 21
I took a long, steaming shower in my en suite, trying to sort things out in my mind. I knew exactly what Leo would maintain if I asked him: that he was just telling Cresswickham what he wanted to hear. That of course I was the one he truly loved. I could hear him, just about, his fake accent whispering in my ear just like he’d murmured sweet things at the Englishman.
You, only you. Always you.
No, there was no question about what he’d say. The real question was whether I could believe him or not, and the man was an inveterate liar. What the hell Cresswickham’s crack meant, about the way I looked at Alice, I could only guess. I didn’t doubt Leo would find a way to explain that away, too; yet when I thought about it, I came over gooseflesh, even under the hot stream of water. Cresswickham hinting that Leo was some kind of sex maniac—maybe it was just his idea of a gag, but I couldn’t shake the dread. It settled at the base of my skull like a dull ache.
The Incubus floated into my mind. A killer who liked choking pretty blondes to death.
Leo enjoyed closing his hands over my throat.
But it was unthinkable, I insisted to myself. Leo, while courteous and gallant to the female of the species, had shown no interest in them sexually, and the papers had been clear—insofar as they could make themselves clear about it—that the murder of Lynette Rochelle had been not only violent, but sexual.
I felt a frisson of dread. Alice.
My gut cramped, sudden and excruciating, and I grabbed at my belly. My God, but I needed a drink.
The water ran cold, so I hopped out. I couldn’t bring myself to wear the robe hanging on the back of the door, with its richly curled RC insignia on the breast pocket. I wrapped myself in a towel instead and went to get dressed, trying to find something in the selection of clothes that suited my own tastes.
There was a short, loud knock at the door, and I called an abrupt and impolite “Yeah,” as I continued rummaging in the cupboard. My first mistake was assuming it was Leo.
“I did ask Leo to provide proper attire for you.”
I spun around, clutching the towel at my waist. Cresswickham, of course. That was my second mistake. The knock had been an irony, a way to catch me off guard.
“I asked Leo to leave you a robe in your bathroom. Or do you not approve of his choices?” he continued, his rich voice thin. He held up his hand to show me my cufflinks, and tossed them without care on the dresser, where they rolled across the top and came to rest against the mirror. He came up close to me, and I felt like I was being backed into the wardrobe.
I drew myself up to my full height, which gave me a few inches on him. “Since you ask, no. I don’t like the choices he’s made.”
He raised a hand, fingers stretching out towards my chest, as though he wanted to touch me, but he stopped a half-inch away. I wasn’t backing down, and refused to move away.
“I think we’d better come to an agreement,” he said softly. “I’d suggest a gentleman’s agreement, but…” I pushed past him
rudely. Not being a gentleman in his eyes, it didn’t seem necessary to behave like one. I sat on the bed to unroll my socks and ignored him.
“Enough of this bluster,” he said, following me. “Leo likes to have his little dalliances, and for some reason he always chooses the most gutter-dwelling individuals he can find in each city. So enjoy yourself, by all means. Partake often and habitually. You have been bought and paid for, after all, and a pretty penny you cost, too.”
His shot struck home, and I sprang up off the bed.
“No one asked you to—”
“Au contraire,” he said. “Someone did ask me. I agreed because I am a kind and generous benefactor and I want Leo to have whatever he desires. And for the moment, he desires you.”
So I had Leo to thank twice over now for snaring me in this sticky web—if Cresswickham were to be believed. I sat down again, and smoothed out my socks against my thigh while I thought. “Seems to me you’d mind more,” I said carefully. I wanted to draw him out some if I could, understand the man more than I did. “You can’t watch all the time, after all.”
He laughed at that, a genuine guffaw that made my skin crawl. “I don’t mind where Leo does his business. Because he’s my dog, see? I don’t care if he’s sniffing your tail, because he knows who his master is.” His voice dropped, and he took a step forward. “But listen to me, Mr. Fox: do not presume to whip my cur.”
He was enraged. His finger, pointing at me like a shotgun right between my eyes, was shaking.
I stared back, mute and confused.
“If any further harm comes to him—even if he tells me he demanded it—even if he gets down on his knees and begs me to spare you—I will extend an invitation to the Walker Boys, and happily watch them dash your brains out. Do you understand? I will have you killed, quite brutally, and I will make sure Leo watches every moment of it.” He breathed it all out like a sigh, like something he’d wanted to say for a long time and had kept bottled up inside. He waited for my reply, but I had nothing to say to him. “You presume too much,” he finished, and drew his fury back in again, a tide going out on the beach.