Ingenious

by Barrie Farris

  Quiggs shrugged. “A grower.” He shielded himself when Stefan reached to inspect.

  “My dear, think of me as a doctor who has handled hundreds of pricks.”

  “Uh-uh. The last doctor inspecting my prick cut off my foreskin.”

  Stefan shuddered at the memory of his rite of passage. “Thought I would die. They never warned me. No one ever talked about it.”

  “Everyone’s supposed to face their rite of passage.” Quiggs voice darkened. “But Beau hasn’t. He’s sprung wood. Now it’s his turn to get cut. I hope they gouge out his ring and he bleeds out and it’s so putrid it—”

  Stefan silenced the rest by clapping a hand over Quiggs’s mouth. “When he finished his sexual transition, the ring changed. It’s not a spongy foreskin. Which you’d know if you’d had real sex with him as often as the First Family has the news heralds believing you did.”

  “We were saying hello!”

  “The heralds love quoting your explanation.” Stefan tittered, then continued assessing Quiggs. “Flawless skin. Hairless chest. Except for this sweet little treasure trail.” Fingers tiptoed from sternum to navel.

  Quiggs eeked like a baby bird.

  “Two weeks? Psssh. I need two months. Where are your abs? Gym is mandatory. I wouldn’t call what you have a gut, but all cadets graduate with bumpy abs and lovely v-shapes.”

  “And stretched holes,” Quiggs muttered.

  “I brought plugs for training.”

  Quiggs’s temper snapped. “The life of a concubine isn’t what I trained for. A stranger going up my ass my first time isn’t what I anticipated. I was married two years and exempt from the lottery and military. I have advanced studies and three extra degrees to devote to the Triangle. I was supposed to cut my braid today.” His arms swept the room as he shouted, “This was supposed to be my marriage retreat! How is this happening to me?”

  “Calm down. You’ll get the chance to cut your braid.”

  “I will?” Quiggs’s eyes rounded. “But the commander never—”

  “In a pleasure house.”

  “But my service—”

  “Max won’t file a complaint. He wants your cooperation.” Stefan’s hand caressed his hip. “Turn around.”

  “No.” Quiggs wanted to talk about cutting his braid. He covered his ass with his hands, then sat on them. “Tell me more about the pleasure house.”

  Stefan brushed a delicate red fingernail up and down the outside of each thigh. “What a light dusting of hair, and yet such furry balls. You need to trim. Bushy isn’t attractive on a concubine.”

  Oh, damn, oh, damn, oh damn, his contrary cock twitched at his first bare-fingered contact with another man. His thighs opened on their own.

  Stefan gave Quiggs’s balls a teasing squeeze. “Oh my, you really are a grower.”

  Quiggs had spent years coaxing his cock to life, never practicing restraint. The light impersonal squeeze tipped the scales. He doubled over, cupping himself, as he fell into his orgasm. His only warning to Stefan was a cough like a bit of crust had caught in his throat.

  Goddammit, not again. Quiggs was mortified.

  Stefan said, “Hmmm. Explains a lot.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  For two weeks Stefan instructed Quiggs on how to walk, act, and look like a concubine for the Claiming Ceremony. The First Family would watch Max and his concubine closely for a reason to challenge Max’s ownership, so they had to appear enthused at the ceremony. Cyrus was clever. He would argue for a new drawing at any hint the commander minimized the sex and maximized the financial profits of Quiggs’s service.

  Walking in platforms challenged Quiggs’s flat feet. Stefan taught him the trick was to sway with each step as if his hips were gelatin and his ribcage were in a vise. He practiced until Stefan conceded the trick for Quiggs was flapping his arms for balance before he broke his ankles.

  If he couldn’t walk the walk, Stefan insisted Quiggs would look like a proper concubine. Quiggs endured having his brows plucked, his skin creamed, his lips glossed, his toenails polished, his feet buffed. Then there were the endless exercises to shed weight. His belly flattened but remained soft. His arms and legs developed a hint of definition. His face remained boringly round.

  “Cosmetics can’t fix my face,” Quiggs complained when Stefan planted him on the vanity stool and told him to face the mirror.

  “It’s your analytical expression,” Stefan said. “You must look as if you want to have fun. Leave the heavy thinking outside your bedroom.”

  Quiggs guffawed when Stefan instructed him on how to loosen his braid at night. “You want me to seduce Commander Bronn?”

  Stefan met his eyes in the mirror while his nimble fingers unraveled the braid’s three sections. “You have lovely hair. Your braid is a novelty Max has never experienced. Loosen your braid at night. Shake your hair. Whet his appetite.”

  “Why bother? I’m a bowl of greens and vinegar. He’s a man who has feasted on mouthwatering bodies for years.”

  Stefan laughed his breathless laugh. “A starving man will eventually accept a bowl of greens. You certainly did.”

  Quiggs had stubbornly fasted a half day before eating greens, then licking the bowl.

  Today was Claiming Day.

  Quiggs stood on the balcony cooling down after his early morning exercises. After all his hard work, his belly disappointed him. Flatter but still soft. And always hungry. The food cabinet held nothing for snacking except sprouts and veggie chips with slimy pastes. What he wouldn’t give to escape his prison for an hour. He leaned over the rail salivating at the wonderful aromas drifting in from bakeries and street vendors preparing for the Claiming Day festivities.

  Once a year on Claiming Day, the rules relaxed. Women remained indoors behind shuttered windows and loosened the leashes to allow their men a day to stroll the city for sex, drink, and gluttony. Claiming Day was the most wonderful day of the year to explore the city—if you weren’t a concubine in seclusion.

  This year, street vendors featured Quiggs’s grill and Rosamunde’s fuel paste to cook sausages on sticks with dipping sauces. Bakeries displayed trays of buns and desserts in windows for the flood of visitors. Pubs opened at noon and closed at dawn. Merchants advertised carved sex toys, feathers, leathers, and lubes on easels in front of their stores. Janitors swept and scrubbed the alleys for heavy trafficking.

  Today, the police winked at solicitations except when an active cadet wandering a side street alone caught a man’s interest. Then the man received a warning thwack across the back to ogle elsewhere.

  No one got thwacked from ogling Quiggs last year when he’d sat on public benches near alleys eating out of cartons and waiting for his ideal husband to pass by. Having Beau close beside him hissing when a soldier glanced his way didn’t help.

  Quiggs squeezed his fists at his sides. Beau had wrecked his life. Because of Beau, he’d spent the last two weeks hiding from heralds in a penthouse and starving to death to fit into a concubine costume. Because of Beau, he faced the humiliation of the Claiming Ceremony tonight before thousands of men squeezed on the balconies and around the roped-off plaza. The reactions when mismatched couples met were hilarious.

  Quiggs had watched the event the last two years from his apartment balcony with Witters and Meeks offering their bawdy commentary. Both men had enlisted rather than enter the lottery.

  Concubines followed tradition by wearing a red corset peeping through an open-throated white shirt. The costume supposedly gave the owner the illusion of a feminized young man to enjoy in lieu of a wife. It was a ridiculous tradition born of manic fear after the Rebellion to protect women from the rapacious desires of the mostly male population. Later, when the fear eased as men acclimated to the laws, the Ruling Mothers called the costume a travesty of womanhood and periodically attempted to ban the corsets. Ironically, the ones who pleaded the importance of the tradition were the men who’d dropped their names inside the lottery box.

  Men cherished t
he dream of winning a concubine. They fantasized untying the laces to reveal their helpless prize.

  Quiggs had indulged in the fantasy of owning a concubine, despite his preference for soldiers.

  Never had he fantasized his own soft underbelly straining against a red corset.

  The Claiming Ceremony began at dusk. After a formal greeting and acceptance in front of the steps of the Legislative Building, the owner and his concubine presented themselves to the governor. Speeches followed after everyone was seated at their assigned tables. Then the women attending the ceremony left with their husbands. The balcony rails would collapse from the weight of gawkers when he and the commander met the governor. What an entertaining mismatch.

  What irked Quiggs was Rosamunde conniving an invitation to attend with her family this evening. Would she fall off her chair laughing at Quiggs’s costume, or would she flirt with the commander, letting him compare his inept concubine to what a beautiful woman offered a man?

  Despite Stefan’s meticulous training, Quiggs was to the commander what Rosamunde had been to Quiggs when they married—a contractual duty.

  Quiggs stood on the balcony, craving bread and jam to calm his nerves.

  Stefan walked outside to check on him. Whenever Quiggs went quiet, Stefan always checked on him. He inspected Quiggs for sweat, then sniffed his neck. Quiggs couldn’t fake the exercises by spraying himself with water.

  Satisfied his pupil had worked out, Stefan handed him a glass of milky liquid and a plug. One of the fat ones. “Drink up. Remember to use plenty of grease and three twists for the plug. Wear it two hours.”

  “I hate those damn things. You said the commander would wait until—”

  “Sorry, my dear. The governor announced an enforcement of the law requiring all concubines to undergo an exam for compliance after three days of service. So rude to dig up that old law, but the governor wants your combustion engine, and Max refuses a business partnership. The liquid is a calmative.”

  Quiggs took the plug to the bedroom and slammed the door.

  Minutes later, Stefan tapped on the door and checked on him. Quiggs had curled up on his side with a pillow pressed to his ass. Stefan gave a breathless laugh at the scowl given him, then inspected the empty glass on the nightstand. He sniffed Quiggs’s breath to check if he’d drunk the contents.

  “Where you going?” Quiggs asked around a yawn.

  Stefan had changed into a pink tunic and a pair of gray trousers with wide legs, giving the impression of a flowing skirt. “Cutty sent a message he and Max have arrived and are staying on the barge. Max has loaned his apartment to the Mayor of Port Paducah and her family. Oh, he’s added two kills to his count with Beau’s aid. He’s grateful you spared the breed’s life.”

  Quiggs bit back, Grateful enough to leave me alone tonight?

  “I’m meeting Cutty on the barge, where he will fill me full of gruesome details while he embroiders more skulls on the commander’s cuffs to show off tonight.”

  Quiggs bet it wasn’t details Cutty would fill him with. The pair were in their forties and still cavorted like cadets when Cutty had shore leave.

  Stefan had won Cutty in the lottery and had taught him elegance and a way with a needle and thread for three years. Celebrating his freedom after his service ended, Cutty woke up the next afternoon back in Stefan’s bed, legally wedded to a sober and triumphant Stefan, waiting with a pail to catch his husband’s reaction.

  Stefan checked his flawless lip paint in the mirror. “Rest up. Take a nap and dream about the yummy food served at the banquet.”

  Which he couldn’t enjoy because a fucking corset crammed his stomach up against his tonsils.

  Quiggs bided his time after Stefan closed the door. When the door flung open ten minutes later, he hid a smile. Stefan poised triumphantly in the doorway, ready to catch him removing the plug. Quiggs lifted his head, blinking sleepily, then burrowed under the blanket.

  Stefan left the apartment, convinced it was safe to leave if his charge was napping inside the locked penthouse with a guard in the hallway.

  Quiggs flung off the blanket and tossed the plug aside. He hadn’t inserted it, and he hadn’t drunk the calmative either. He had gargled, then spit it back in the glass and poured the contents down the tub’s drain. Wearing the brown military tee and pants of a private, on loan until his concubine uniforms were delivered, he pinned up his braid. He put on the boots and green hat which accompanied the uniform. Until they saw duty in the outland, enlistees wore their caps reversed. He turned the cap around, tugging it low so the visor hid the heavy braid looped at his nape, and inspected himself in the vanity mirror. He had the height to pass as an enlistee but lacked the pectorals and biceps if anyone examined him closely. No self-respecting soldier tweezed his eyebrows into sleek arches either. His eyes, however, gleamed with a true soldier’s determination to complete his mission whatever the cost.

  The commander had sent him a few credits for small items Quiggs might want Stefan to purchase. He stuffed them in his pocket. What he wanted was food.

  Stefan believed Quiggs had never figured out a way to escape, or he’d have tried before now.

  Heh. He’d figured a way out the first day. All penthouses had sunning benches on their balconies.

  A quick look over the rail showed the heralds had abandoned watching for him. They’d be staking out views for the Claiming Ceremony. Quiggs stretched the heavy sunning bench across the gap between the railing on his balcony and the railing next door. Thanks, new miniscule muscles, the real reason for adhering to his pushups. As he crawled across, he scoffed at the drop. He stepped down onto the next balcony, retrieved the bench, and stretched it over the next gap, then the next. At the end apartment, an emergency ladder attached to the building led down into an alley. He hid the bench behind shrubbery on the last balcony. If the owners found it… they found it. Quiggs had a destination in mind. The Canal Street Bakery!

  Canal Street saw as much sex vended in its alleys between storefronts as goods sold in its shops. Its row of two-story shops with striped awnings and multi-plated windows fronted the melted remains of what was believed to be the canal’s engineering room attached to the south rampart near the turnaround. The engineering room had regulated the canal’s current and its purification system but vanished after the Rebellion.

  Canal Street was a popular destination for soldiers on shore leave. They jammed their fists in their deep pockets and strolled the walkway for a civilian to entertain them. If a civilian passing by interested him, a soldier lowered his waistband shy of his pubes. If the civilian whistled interest, the soldier hiked a thumb toward the nearest alley.

  The youngest, handsomest soldiers leaned against the storefronts and bent back one foot to the wall. They waited for older civilians with credits to invite them to a screened cot in a bathhouse with scented oils and warm towels.

  It was mid-morning, yet the line in front of the bakery wound out the door and S-curved down the walkway. Quiggs watched the interactions between civilians and soldiers as he shuffled with the line. Did he have the bait to attract a civilian? He slid his hands inside his pockets, gathered his courage, and lowered his waistband exposing a pale inch below his bellybutton. He waited, then added a bit of pelvic twitch to get the message across. Not a single whistle. The civilians behind him muttered at him to move it forward or leave.

  Fuck all those nasty greens he’d eaten. He intended to gorge himself on sweets. Head down, he shuffled forward, hoping the honey custards hadn’t sold out.

  As he inched near the doorway, Quiggs noticed a soldier stretching a pair of tanned muscled legs on the stairs to the top of the crenellated rampart, preparing for a run. The fluid lines of his long legs spanned several steps, and the shorts hugged an ass as mouth-watering as anything he’d find in the bakery. As men turned and watched, the line stopped shuffling. Talking ceased. He heard indrawn breaths and the nervous jingle of credits.

  Printed in bold yellow letters across the b
ack of the soldier’s brown tee was Border Patrol. They were the badass soldiers. This patrolman wore a sergeant’s stripes on his shoulders His short sleeves boasted six skulls. Six skulls without losing a limb! He stretched as if unconcerned with the attention he’d drawn.

  Quiggs would love to lose his braid by pounding some badass like the sergeant. Oh, holy hell, yes! He’d found the right body for the job. The soldier sprinted up the winding stairs without giving a glimpse of his face. Quiggs didn’t have to know the face or name. If the commander lined up his border patrol for inspection, Quiggs would look for thighs that could crack a sputternut.

  A policeman rapped a baton across the tip-top of Quiggs’s butt cheek. “Pull ‘em up or take it to the alley, Private.”

  Quiggs hadn’t realized he’d jammed his fists in his pockets until the waistband rode his crack. He hiked his pants, blushing. Had he attracted attention? A rude shove urged him forward as the line moved inside the door. In the naughtiest section of the city, on the most liberated day of the year, his bait was rejected. He stood sighing, wondering if a personal favor for the commander would win the sergeant’s consent. He hoped the sergeant was ambitious.

  The long wait rewarded Quiggs when he reached the counter. Trays of bread puddings studded with currants. Sponge cakes soaked in brandy and topped with berries and whipped cream. Crisp triangular cookies piped with red, yellow, and green. Sticky buns swimming in syrup. Honey custards!

  A third-year concubine worked the counter. He appeared well-fed, contented. The owner walked by and squeezed his ass, earning a smirk. The perfect owner: a fat congenial baker who fed you custard you didn’t milk from his cock. The baker would have to lift his belly to find his concubine’s hole, but the service was worth it.

  Quiggs slapped down his credits and ordered quickly. He bought three items and left with a sense of triumph over defying Stefan.