The oil is mine to pour.
No handler prepares me. That privilege belongs to the boys, the young ones, the new purchases with their trembling limbs and their skin still carrying the dealer’s fingerprints. I pour my own oil. I heat it myself in the clay dish over the brazier in the corner of the master’s chamber, and the room fills with the green smell of it going warm, olive and faintly bitter, the smell this chamber has instead of incense. What I do not use I carry to the ledge beside the bed and leave there, still warm, where his hand will want it later. That is part of the preparation too.
When the surface shimmers I dip my hand and bring the warmth to my shoulder, my chest, the ridge of muscle that runs from my collarbone to the base of my neck, and the oil finds the scars and fills them: the long pale line where a sword caught me above the left pectoral, the knotted ridge across my ribs where a spear-shaft broke against my side, the small round puncture below my navel where an arrow went in and a field surgeon’s knife went in after it. The scars are a map of the man I was. The oil that fills them is the man I am.
I smooth the oil across my chest and the chest is enormous. The master’s word, not mine, but I have worn the word so long it fits better than any word I brought with me from the forests. Enormous: the pectorals broad and dense, the muscle so thick that when I flex the slabs of it rise like bread in an oven, the surface shifting under the oiled skin, and the master’s voice arrives in my head as it always arrives when my hands are on my own flesh: this chest, this impossible chest, no city boy could build this in a lifetime of training.
I see myself in the bronze mirror propped against the wall. The disc is larger than the ones they give the household slaves, a senator’s mirror, meant for a senator’s face, but the master put it here years ago so I could watch myself prepare. I watch. It belongs to the preparation and the preparation belongs to the offering. In the warped bronze I see the shape the master will touch tonight, and my eye goes where his goes. The cock first, heavy and already thickening against the thigh. Then up: the hips, and the narrow waist above them in the line that makes his hands spread and grip and pull, and the stomach ridged and hard, and the arms heavy with muscle that once swung iron and now holds other slaves in place, and last the shoulders, wider than the mirror’s edge, so that the disc cannot hold all of me at once. Below all of it, out of the bronze and out of the account, the calves carved by years of marching through forests that survive in my memory as nothing but weather: rain, cold, the crunch of frost, a world that happened to someone else.
The body in the mirror is not a warrior’s body. It is a warrior’s body repurposed. The sword-arm that serves wine. The shield-arm that pins a boy’s shoulders to the bed. The chest that blocked blows now blocks nothing. It opens, it receives, it offers the broad warm surface to the master’s palm as an altar offers itself to the priest’s hand.
I oil my back. The reaching is awkward. The arms are too thick to bend easily behind me, the shoulders too wide, the muscle limiting its own range, and I perform the awkwardness each evening as a small private comedy, the great barbarian wrestler contorting to reach the spot between his shoulder blades. The master has offered to send a handler. I refused, and he allowed the refusal, which is a different thing from my having a choice. The oiling is mine because he has decided it is. The ritual of preparing this flesh for the master’s hands is the closest thing I have to prayer, and prayer is not delegated.
My cock stirs. The oil has reached my hips, the warmth running down the creases of my groin, pooling in the hollows where the thigh meets the pelvis, and the heat reaches the root of my cock and turns there like a key in a lock that was never fully closed. I am hard before the oil reaches my thighs. Not aroused, not yet, not the sharp specific arousal of a hand or a mouth or a weight pressed against mine. The deeper thing. The permanent thing. The wanting that lives in me, a second heartbeat, so constant that I no longer notice it any more than I notice breathing. Until something makes me notice, until the oil or the mirror or the sound of footsteps in the corridor makes the wanting surface from the deep place where it lives and shoulder against the inside of my skin like an animal shouldering its cage.
I want to be fucked.
It is not shame. It was shame once, a burning corrosive shame that ate through the floor of everything I believed about the flesh I lived in. Months of it. Maybe a year. I could tell you when it started. I could not tell you the night it stopped. The wanting was always there. The warrior simply never found the door.
The master found the door. The master opened it. The master walks through it every night.
I hear his footsteps.
The marble carries the sound like water carrying a stone: the impact arriving before the weight, the sharp click of the senator’s sandals translating through the corridor into the chamber, through the chamber floor into the soles of my bare feet, through my feet into the bones that carry the vibration upward through my legs, my spine, my chest, arriving at my heart as a quickening that has nothing to do with fear and everything to do with the hunger of a body that knows its feeder’s step. My cock, already hard, thickens further. My hole clenches: the involuntary contraction of a muscle preparing itself, adjusting before the mind gives permission, tightening so that the opening, when it comes, will be felt more deeply. I am the dog that hears the bowl set down on the stone. The master’s footsteps are the bell. It has rung a thousand times and the same hunger has answered it every time.
The curtain moves. The air shifts and brings him in ahead of himself, wine and warm wool and the oiled bronze of his hair. He is here.
He does not greet me. We are years past greeting.
The master enters the chamber as he enters every room. His weight shapes the space around him, the air compressing slightly as his body displaces it, the lamplight adjusting to accommodate the new mass. He is not a small man. The senator’s body carries the decades as marble carries weather. The belly has thickened. The chest has softened. The arms lift nothing heavier than a wine cup and a stylus and have not lifted anything heavier in years. His toga is loosened to the waist, the senator at home, the public man giving way to the private appetite. His face is heavy and intelligent and was handsome once. It has been obeyed so long that it has stopped trying to persuade. The jaw is wide. The eyes are dark. The mouth, when it opens, will say things my flesh has memorised down to the muscle.
His eyes find me.
It takes no time at all. The gaze crosses the room with the speed and inevitability of a blade leaving the hand and lands on me before the door-curtain has finished swaying behind him. The eyes go to the chest first. They always go to the chest first, before the thighs he has spread and the waist he has held and the stomach he has owned, and having got there they slow, a step slowing at the threshold of a room entered a thousand times and still worth lingering in. The chest. The master’s country. The one part of me his hands spend more time on than anything else, learned with his palms and his mouth and his sleeping weight, and the eyes on it now are not appraising. They are arriving. The gaze of a man coming home.
I stand. Spine straight, shoulders back, the warrior’s posture that I carried through forests and battlefields now held for a different purpose: display. I am displaying for him. This is an offering and my body knows the difference. Shoulders squared so the width of them is the first thing he gets. Chin up off the throat. Every scar out where the lamplight can find it. I have said all of it before I open my mouth, and later I will say it again in cruder words because he likes them cruder.
His hand comes down on my chest.
The touch comes as his touches always come, without preamble, without the preliminary hovering that other men’s hands perform before they commit to a surface. The master’s hand does not hover. The master’s hand lands. Palm flat, fingers spread, the soft senator’s skin settling against the oiled muscle of my left pectoral with a pressure that is not force but possession. He does not ask. Asking would mean I could refuse, and I cannot refuse, and neither of us has ever needed that said. The hand presses. The pectoral is hard beneath it, dense, unyielding, built for war and maintained for this. The soft hand meets the hard chest and the soft hand wins. It always wins. A body that fought armies exists now to be touched by a man who never held a sword.
I lean into the hand. I do not decide to. A wall leans into the wind that has pushed at it for years. It holds its ground and it lets the wind know it is felt, and it would miss the wind if the wind stopped.
He circles me. The hand lifts from my chest and the absence stings, a flash of cold where the warmth was, the skin reporting the loss as skin reports a blade coming out. Then the hand returns, on my shoulder now, and the shoulder runs wider than he can span, and the width delights him. It has delighted him on more nights than I can count. The pressure goes up a little when his fingers find again that the shoulder is too big for one grip. He squeezes. He spreads the fingers. He digs the thumb into the trapezius and squeezes again to be sure of it. No city boy carries this. The breadth, the mass, a frame built by war and kept up by appetite and set in front of him every evening like a sacrifice that never runs out of blood.
“Still the biggest in my house,” he murmurs. The voice is low and easy, carrying the faint amusement of having said this before and meaning it every time. His hand moves down my arm and closes on the bicep and does not go around it. The arm flexes under his grip, because the arm knows what the grip is after. He wants resistance. He wants the thing in his hand to have no give in it anywhere. The boys he keeps for variety give under a hand. I do not. “Flex,” he says, and I flex, and the bicep swells under his fingers and his breath catches, the small sharp intake that I know better than any noise in the world. It means yes, this, more of this. It is my master’s voice without the senator’s vocabulary, saying the simplest possible thing: I want what I’m touching.
His hands cross to my back. The scars. His fingers trace the long diagonal below my left shoulder blade. The ambush. The spear I turned from and not fast enough, and the blade cutting its furrow through the muscle. He reads it like a finger following a line of text in a scroll. The same text every night for years, and he is never quick with it and never bored, because the flesh is his and so is the story in it, and the story shifts when the light shifts and the oil shifts and his finger comes at it from a new angle. He never finishes reading.
“This one,” he says, tracking the scar with a fingertip. “The ambush at the river crossing.”
I nod. He knows the story. He asked for the story the first year, and I told it, in broken words, the language still new in my mouth, the Latin clumsy on a tongue that was built for different sounds, and he listened, and he asked again, and I told it better, and he asked again, and by the third telling the story was his as much as mine, the scar a chapter in the book of my body that he has authored as much as the blade that wrote it.
His hands move down. Past the small of my back, the fingers tracing the line of the spine, the vertebrae prominent under the oiled skin. The master calls them stepping stones, the ridge of bone that his fingers walk from my neck to my tailbone. Then the hands reach the curve and cup it, and no gesture the human hand can make is more possessive than this one. Both palms, full, taking the muscle with a firmness that pushes and lifts and spreads, and one thumb slides into the cleft, not deep, not probing, just announcing, settling against the crease and resting there with the weight of a hand that has decided where it will eventually go. My breath catches. The sound is loud in the chamber. The thumb presses, fractionally, and withdraws, and takes its time withdrawing, and I am left holding the promise of it with no say in when it is kept.
I am shaking. The oil on my skin trembles in the lamplight. I want the thumb to become a finger and the finger to become a cock and the cock to become the centre of the world, and I want it now, and he will not be rushed. He never is. The hunger is the thing he came for. He watches it and stokes it and says out loud that it is there, and it will be fed when he decides to feed it.
“Master.” My voice is rough. The barbarian’s accent has softened over the years, the vowels rounding, the consonants filing their edges against the Latin, but a throat thickened by wanting, the vocal cords swollen with the blood that swells my cock, every interior mechanism working toward one end and saying it in a different texture. “Master, your slave’s hole craves you. This body is yours. Fuck it. Use this hole. It belongs to your cock, it was made for your cock, every night it waits for your cock as the earth waits for rain.”
The house boys learn pretty sentences from the rhetoric master. I never learned any. My words are stones and he wants stones. He wants a man who killed other men saying fuck me in a thick accent, in the plainest words the accent can carry, and those are the only words I have. His hand comes back to my chest and bears down.
He laughs. The sound is low and breaks on my neck before I hear it in the air. The breath first, then the voice. He keeps a particular fondness for this moment, the nightly one, where the barbarian’s control cracks and the begging starts. “My hungry one,” he says. The hand on my chest presses harder. “I know how you burn. I feel it under my hand. The heat, the shaking. You would take me now, standing, without oil, without preparation, and the taking would wreck you and you wouldn’t care.” His mouth is close to my ear. The wine on his breath is warm and faintly sweet. It is the better wine, the evening one, not what he pours for guests. He drinks it alone or with me. I taste it when he kisses me, on the evenings that earn a kiss. “But the hole can wait. First let me enjoy what the hole is attached to.”
His hand leaves my chest. Descends. Crosses my stomach, the ridges of muscle contracting under his palm, the flesh answering the descent under his dragging palm, every surface reporting the contact, and arrives at my cock. He takes it. Not a lover’s grip. An owner’s. The hand closes around the shaft the way you pick up a tool that belongs to you, and the tool is hard, straining, the heat of it radiating through his palm, and he holds it and does not move. Just holds. The cock in his hand and his eyes on my face and the lamplight on both of us and the silence filled with the sound of my breathing, which has become the breathing of something held at the edge of a cliff by a hand that could push or pull and is doing neither.
“This belongs to me,” he says. The voice is quiet. The quiet is more commanding than volume. The senator’s trick, the soft voice that fills a room because every ear in it strains toward him. He strokes once. Slowly. Root to tip, the thumb crossing the head, the fingers tightening at the ridge. My jaw goes slack. His soft hand on my hard cock sends a shudder up through my belly and my chest and my throat and out of my mouth as a groan with the shape of please in it and none of the consonants. “This cock stands for me,” he murmurs, stroking again, watching my face the way a man watches a fire he built himself. “It would not stand like this for another senator. For a soldier. For any hand in the empire but mine. The craving belongs to me. Even the craving belongs to me.”
I shake. The hand on the cock and the voice in the ear and the years behind both, and I cannot hold myself together much longer, and he knows it. He lays this siege every night. He does it gently and he never lets up, and the fortress falls every time, because the fortress wants to fall.
“Please,” I say. The word is rough and naked and carries no rhetoric. “Master. Please. Fuck your barbarian.”
He smiles. I feel the smile against my shoulder, his mouth close, the lips not quite touching the skin, the expression transmitting through the warmth of the breath. “Soon,” he says. And the hand releases my cock and returns to my chest, and the tour resumes. The pecs. The nipples. The ridges of the stomach. The arms. He is not learning anything. He has known all of it for years and goes over it anyway, and going over it is the pleasure. Call that worship. His mouth will never form the word. His hands have been at it for years and they do not stop.
The master has moved to the bed. He sits on its edge and the frame creaks once under him. He does not recline. He sits upright with the toga loose across his thighs and turns his eyes off me and toward the doorway. The hand that was on my chest is gone. I cross the chamber after him without being called, the way I have crossed it every night for years, and take my place at his right shoulder, and wait there untouched.
The boy arrives as all the boys arrive, led by the handler’s hand round his upper arm, the bare feet stumbling on the marble threshold, the eyes too wide, the breathing too fast. The handler sets him down inside the doorway, bows to the bed, and is gone back through the curtain before the boy has found his balance. The master’s hand comes up and settles on my shoulder without his eyes leaving the doorway.
The boy stands in the lamplight. He is young. Eighteen, maybe. His heels keep lifting off the marble, the weight rocking forward onto the balls of the feet and settling back and rocking forward again, a body that has already decided to run and has nowhere to put the decision.
My eye goes where his goes. The chest is smooth and flat and has never carried anything. Under it the ribs flicker like a bird’s ribcage, and the stomach draws in and out too fast, and a faint trail of hair goes down to the loincloth, which is the only thing he wears. Below that the thighs carry no more meat than a boy’s thighs carry. The knees are too prominent for the calves they sit on. His skin is pale, a northern purchase, maybe, or a house-born boy kept from the sun, and the paleness makes the gooseflesh visible on his forearms and on the shoulders that the years have not yet widened.
I was this boy. The lifting heels, the too-fast breathing, the jaw clenched against the sound that wants out. But I was a stupid animal then, a colt that had never felt the saddle, thrashing against the one thing that would make it useful. The boy thinks the fear is his friend. It hurt me for a year, and I would not give back an hour of it.
The master’s attention shifts. I feel it go as a surface feels the sun go when a cloud crosses. It does not go all the way. One hand stays on my shoulder, heavy with you are still here, you are still mine. The hand on my shoulder is the anchor. The eyes on the boy are the appetite. I have stood in this exact arrangement dozens of times and it burns the same way every time. The hand says I am yours. The eyes say but I want to taste something else.
He studies the young one. The gaze travels the narrow frame with the same slow possessiveness it travels mine, but the quality is different. He has had mine by heart for years. This one he has not read yet. My cock, still hard, strains harder and swings toward the only hand that has ever fed it, and that hand is busy with someone else.
The master speaks past me, to the boy. The voice is quiet, unhurried, the senator’s instrument tuned to the frequency that fills a room without rising above a murmur.
“Remove your loincloth.”
The boy’s hands move to the knot at his hip. The fingers find the fabric. From the master’s shoulder I watch them close on the linen, and then the fingers stop. The hands freeze. The loincloth is the last thing standing between what he is and what he is about to be, and the fingers cannot cross it. His jaw works. His eyes flick to the master’s face and the master’s face offers nothing back. The dark eyes stay level. He waits, and from him waiting is a command.
The boy’s fingers do not move.
I step forward. Nobody ordered it. The master has not nodded, has not gestured, has not spoken the shorthand. But I have stood in this room for enough offerings to know that hesitation is the cue. When they will not, my hands are what the room needs, and being necessary is its own permission. I reach around the boy from behind, one arm, the bicep brushing his shoulder, my hand finding the knot, and I pull. The linen parts. The cloth drops to the marble with a whisper that sounds louder than it is, and the boy flinches at the contact, at the heat of my arm against his bare skin, at the sheer mass that has materialised behind him without warning.
The animal can’t even obey a simple command. The thought comes down with the weight of certainty. My hand closes on the back of his neck. The neck is thin, my fingers close around it as they would around a stick, the tendons hard under the skin, the vertebrae small and sharp against my palm, and I walk him forward, toward the bed, toward the master. His bare feet stumble on the marble. He leans back against the walking, which is what they all do when they are being taken somewhere they will not go, and the leaning is nothing against my hand, and my hand delivers him to the edge of the bed like a dog delivering a bird. Held. Unharmed. Presented.
The boy stands naked before the seated senator, the cock drawn up tight with fear, the whole shape shivering in the warm room. He smells of the dealer’s wash and, under it, sharp and thin, of a body that has been frightened for days. The cold on him is not the room. It is the winter a boy carries when nobody has told him winters end. I release the neck. I do not step back. I stand behind the boy, close enough that the heat of my chest reaches his bare shoulders, close enough to intervene.
On the boy’s chest the master’s hand settles, the flat-palmed gesture he used on mine, the palm flat on the sternum, but on that smooth chest the hand covers everything, the pectoral and the nipple and half the ribcage in a single spread, and the coverage makes the young one smaller, makes him the opposite of me, and the making-opposite twists in my stomach. The master touches this chest as he touches mine. The same gesture. The same hand. The same slow going-over. He does not mean the sameness as a wound and it opens like one, small and bright, as a blade opens a nerve.
The hand moves down. Ribs, stomach, the faint trail of hair below the navel. The master’s fingers are clinical and slow, the touch of a man assessing what he has purchased.
“Turn,” the master says.
The boy turns. Stiff, reluctant, a body that knows what the turning shows, and when he comes round he is facing me, and for the first time we are eye to eye. His eyes come up and hit mine. He has understood, in the last thirty seconds, that understanding changes nothing, and it is all in his face. The mouth set. The jaw trembling. Somebody has told him what he is for. He is being used tonight. He knows it now and has not accepted it.
His eyes drop. Gravity, not intention, and what they land on is my cock. My cock is hard. It was hard before the master came through the curtain, hard from the oil and the mirror and the sound of his sandals in the corridor, and it is as big as everything else on me. He sees it, and his face changes. Something goes out of it and does not come back. He has been brought to a room with two men and one of them has a cock the size of his forearm and it is hard and it is not hard for him, though he cannot know that. He sees only the size, and the size promises something he cannot accommodate, and the promise sends his breathing up again, the ribs pumping shallow and fast, the lungs snatching at air they cannot hold.
The master’s hand drops to the curve of the boy’s buttock. The palm cups and weighs, the fingers testing the firmness. And then the hand lifts and falls, a sharp slap that echoes off the chamber walls, and the boy jolts forward and gasps without meaning to. The master’s hand returns. Cups again, and slaps again, harder, the sound flatter, the skin reddening under the palm. The boy’s shoulders tighten. He does not jolt this time. He does not turn around. He holds still and takes it, and the holding still is the first thing his body has done for the master.
“Face me,” the master says.
The boy turns back. His hands have moved. Both palms are over his cock, the last fortification, the instinct older than language: protect this, hide this, do not let them see this. The master’s hand reaches for his groin and finds the hands in the way. The mouth tightens. The brow lowers. He said turn and he said face me, and the facing was meant to include everything. He grips the wrists and pulls them away, not gently, and the boy’s cock is exposed again, drawn up small and tight against the sack, and the wrists strain to return, the hands trying to cover, the reflex pulling against the senator’s grip.
The master looks up at me. The look is shorthand: hold.
My hands replace the master’s on the boy’s wrists. I take both wrists in one hand, the fist this room always asks of me, the fingers overlapping, his whole resistance held in one hand. Then I pull his arms behind his back and pin the wrists against the small of the spine. It opens the chest and pushes the hips forward and leaves the cock out where nothing can cover it. The boy strains against my grip. The straining is nothing. His arms could strain for a year.
The master’s hand descends, past the stomach, past the trail of hair, and the fingers take hold of the boy’s cock. He lifts it, weighing rather than stroking, holding it up for inspection, the cock held between the senator’s thumb and two fingers, weighed and turned and considered. The boy’s face goes white. The most private part of him is being held and measured by a stranger’s hand while a stranger’s fist pins his arms behind his back, and nobody says a word while it happens. He is past naked. Naked is no longer the word. The word is inventory.
I watch the master’s fingers on the boy’s cock. Those fingers. The senator’s fingers, the trimmed nails, the soft pads that I know as I know my own pulse. Those fingers that have held my cock, stroked my cock, those fingers wrapped around another’s flesh, and the boy doesn’t even know what he’s being given. He strains while the most powerful hand in the city examines him, and he feels nothing but shame, and the waste of it sets my teeth on edge.
The master lifts his eyes to me. The full gaze this time, the dark eyes crossing the space between the bed and the place where I stand with the boy’s wrists pinned behind his back. The gaze carries a command I have never received before.
“Come. Teach this one how to serve.”
My hands open on the boy’s wrists before I decide to open them. Teach. The master has never said this word to me. The master has used me, displayed me, held me, fucked me. But he has never made me the instructor. The word rearranges the room. The boy has stopped being the offering and become the student. And I am not the enforcer now. I am the example. I want him to say it again. I want him to say it in front of the handlers, in front of the house, in the corridor where the cook can hear: this one knows my body well enough to teach it to another.
His arms drop to his sides, the hands not covering this time, the fight gone out of the gesture. The lesson has taken. Covering is pointless in a room where the covering is always undone. I take the boy’s shoulder and steer him toward the bed. The boy moves. He has been handled enough now to understand that hands mean direction, not attack, and the direction ends at the bed, where the senator sits like a man who has ordered a meal and is waiting for it to be carried in.
I kneel beside the bed. The marble is cold under my knees, the same cold marble, different knees, different night, and I pull the boy down beside me. He kneels, and it is awkward. He has never knelt for service. The knees are uncertain and the spine is too straight and nobody has taught him yet where the head goes or how far the back comes down. Mine knows. I have knelt in this spot since the first night and the muscle folds into it without being asked.
My hands go to the toga. The boy watches them take the wool and draw it off where it has pooled at his waist. I nod at the other side. His hands rise, hesitant, the fingers trembling, and take the toga at the senator’s left hip, and together we pull it out from under him. The fabric falls. The chest, the belly, the heavy thighs, the senator undraped. The boy’s hands flinch off the bare skin. Mine do not. Mine go to the master’s chest and bear down, the flat-palmed thing I have done every night, the kneading, the thumbs crossing the nipples, the mouth coming after the hands.
I lean forward and lick the master’s chest. The tongue traces the line of the collarbone, the taste of skin and wool and the salt of a senator who has dined well, and I am not performing. The mouth goes where it worships, and the surface responds, the master’s breathing shifting, the chest expanding under my mouth. I glance at the boy. He is kneeling beside me with his hands in his lap and his mouth closed and his eyes wide, watching my mouth on the master’s skin with a child’s helpless attention, fixed on a thing it does not understand and cannot look away from.
I close my hand on the back of his neck. The thin neck again, the sharp vertebrae, and I guide his face toward the master’s chest. The boy resists. The mouth stays closed. My hand bears down and keeps bearing down, and his mouth comes onto the master’s skin and opens, with no willingness in it at all, because the hand on the neck leaves him nowhere else to go, and the boy’s tongue touches the master’s nipple.
The master growls. Low, from the belly. It is the sound my own tongue pulls out of him when it finds the right pressure on the right nerve, and the young one has found it by accident, as a mouth that knows nothing sometimes lands on the one thing that works. The growl goes through the master’s chest and into the boy’s mouth, and the boy flinches at the vibration of it. A man’s pleasure is being made by a mouth that never agreed to make it, and now the mouth can feel it happening.
Good. The thought surprises me. I braced for rage and rage does not come. What comes is the taste of this skin in my own mouth, the weight of this belly under my palms, the coarse hair against my lips. This body owns me. This body orders me. This body fucks me. And the licking and the kneeling and the mouth held open for a cock that will arrive when it decides to arrive is not what I pay. It is what I am paid. The boy’s tongue moves on the nipple with the mechanical obedience of a mouth put there by a hand, and the mouth carries no worship and no hunger. But the tongue moves.
Under my hand the neck stops fighting me. The tongue works harder without being told to. A neck that has quit and a tongue that has found pressure, and the master growls again, and the boy will spend the rest of his life chasing that sound without ever knowing which night he started.
I guide him lower. My hand on the back of his neck, steering him down, past the chest, past the belly, his face sliding along the senator’s skin, and I follow beside him with my own mouth on the same ground. Two tongues going down the master’s belly together. At the belly I put my face into the fat and the warmth and the depth of it, and beside me the young one’s face goes in too, reluctantly, the cheek against the senator’s stomach, and I can feel his disgust in the stiffness of his neck under my hand. That thins.
We reach the cock. The master’s cock is hard, the shaft thick and heavy, rising from the dark hair at the base, serviced by my mouth a thousand times and carrying itself accordingly. I look at the young one. He has never been this close to another man’s erection and his eyes say so.
I show him. Without words. The words are not mine to speak in this room, the words belong to the master. I extend my tongue. Deliberate, visible, the flat of it coming out wide and slow, and I lower my head and lick the base of the master’s sack. The skin there is loose and warm and heavy and my tongue drags wet across it. I hold the boy’s eyes the whole time. The look says: this. Do this. Here.
The boy’s mouth opens. The tongue extends, thin, pale, trembling, and the tip finds the other side of the master’s sack, and the boy licks. The lick is tentative, the tip barely landing, the stroke shallow, but the tongue is on the skin, and two mouths are working the master’s sack at once. I know that from his side. Two warmths at once. It spreads his thighs wider and shifts his hips on the linen and opens him to what both mouths are giving.
I take the master’s cock into my mouth. The lips part, the jaw opens wide, the shaft slides past my tongue and down into my throat, and below me the boy’s tongue keeps working the sack. Two mouths on the same flesh at different heights. He lies back and takes both of them, sprawled and heavy-limbed, worshipped by everything he owns.
“Perfect,” the master murmurs. The voice is thick, the pleasure thickening the vowels, the senator’s diction softening into something less than oratory. “This is how you serve. This is how you learn.”
I feel the boy’s breathing against the underside of the master’s sack, the fast shallow exhalations of a mouth doing something the mind has not authorised. But the mouth performs. The tongue moves.
The master’s hand settles over my head. The fingers thread through the oiled hair he had cut and shaped years ago, and the hand bears down, and I take the cock deeper. The throat opens. The gag went out of me years ago. His hips roll and the cock slides to the root and the boy’s tongue is still on the sack, inches from my lips. Three bodies playing one note, and the note belongs to him.
The master pulls my head up. The cock slides from my mouth, the withdrawal slow, the lips dragging along the shaft, the thread of saliva connecting my mouth to the head for one bright second before it breaks. He sits up and the sprawl goes out of him. The spine straightens. The eyes sharpen. He sets the pleasure aside. It has done its work.
“Enough,” he says. The voice is different now, the thickness gone, replaced by the senator’s clear, measured cadence. “It’s time for the deal.”
I know what the words mean before he has finished saying them. The deal. The boy. The hole. The body knows the steps. Years of offerings wrote them into the muscle the way years of war wrote the sword-arm into the shoulder, and my hands are on him before the last syllable fades. I take him by the shoulders and lift him off his knees and put him on the bed, fast, his back hitting the linen with a dull thud, the white shape sprawled on the dark fabric, the legs closing on instinct. My hands catch his knees. I push them apart against the lock of the thighs and fold his legs up toward his chest, and the hole is out in the lamplight, clenching and unclenching.
The master’s hand moves between the boy’s legs. Past the shrunken cock, past the tightened sack, the fingers arriving at the cleft, and the boy goes rigid all at once, as a thing goes rigid when the breath of what is hunting it lands on the skin. His finger circles the opening. The touch is slow and oiled, his other hand having reached the clay dish I left on the ledge for him. He takes his time. He is finding out where the resistance is before he goes through it.
“How tight,” the master murmurs, to the room rather than to the boy, to the connoisseur’s pleasure of discovery, and the words sink into my chest and keep sinking, cold, into deep water. “How new. The muscle has never been touched.” Then, without turning, in exactly the same tone, the tone he would use about a cup or a horse: “You have not been tight in years, my beast. I wore that out of you myself. Come and feel what you used to be.”
I come and feel it. He has put a name to the one thing I cannot get back, and he has done it kindly, and he is not wrong, and my hand goes where he tells it. The boy is hot and shut and unwilling around the senator’s finger. I was that once. I made that exact sound once. He wore it out of me himself and he says it as flatly as a man remarking that a road is long, and there is nothing in me that can argue, and my cock is so hard it aches.
“Feel this.” The finger presses, enters, the boy’s body arching off the bed, the cry going up out of him with no sound attached to it. “Like a fist closing. Like the tightest thing in the world.”
That finger knows the inside of me.
It knows where the nerve is. It goes into me slow on the nights he wants me slow. It is in him now and he is trying to get away from it. I would have opened for it before he reached me. He squirms and tries to shut his legs on the hand and cannot, because my hands are the reason they are open.
The boy protests. A sound, not words, a whimper that curls at its edges into something closer to a plea, and his hands push at the master’s wrist, the thin fingers wrapping around the senator’s forearm in a hold that is pathetic against the arm’s thickness, the boy trying to pull the finger out, to undo the entry, to put himself back the way he was.
Stop fighting. You don’t know what you’re being given.
I fought for a year and the year bought me nothing. Let go, boy. The finger is a gift.
The master withdraws the finger. The boy sags against the bed, the tension going out of him in a shudder, the legs still held apart by my hands on his knees. He looks at me. It is the old shorthand and I have had years of it. Hold him wider.
I shift my grip. My hands move from his knees to his ankles, and as I fold the legs back toward his chest I catch a wrist against each ankle and close my fist around the pair, so that each arm is bent up alongside its own leg and he is folded shut around himself, held open only where the master wants him open. The hole is exposed and glistening.
To keep him folded I have to come up over him. I plant my knees on the linen above his head and lean out along the length of him, my forearms driving the two bundles down into the bed on either side of his ribs. That lays me over him the wrong way round. My cock is where his eyes are. My face is down where the master is going to be.
So he looks straight up into it. Not my face, which is too far along the bed for him to reach. My cock, hanging above him with the weight of something he cannot accommodate, and past it the ridged stomach, and past that the chest blocking the lamplight. He goes completely still, which is what the young ones do instead of flinching. He sees only the size and the hardness and how near it hangs, and his body reads all three as a threat in the oldest language it knows.
Then his eyes travel the length of me, past the stomach, past the chest, and stop on my face. It is a plea. The eyes say help me, and they say it in a language I understand in my bones because my eyes said the same thing years ago, on a different floor, to a different chest, and no help came. And no help comes now. The eyes that look down at the boy are not the eyes that looked up from the bench. These are the eyes of the man the bench made.
Lucky boy. A senator’s cock and a warrior’s arms, and you are spending it on being afraid.
The master positions himself between the boy’s legs. The weight settles on the bed, the frame groaning, the linen pulling taut, and I feel the bed shift as the senator arranges himself for entry. His belly presses against the backs of the boy’s thighs. His cock takes the opening. From where my face hangs I should be able to watch it happen and I cannot, the senator’s bulk is in the way, and so I get it the way I get everything tonight, through somebody else: the sudden increase in tension transmitted up the ankles I hold.
The master enters the boy.
It reaches me as a change in what I am holding. The boy’s spine stiffens against the bed, the back arching, the wrists going rigid in my grip, and that is how I am told he has been breached. It comes up through his arms into my hands and through my hands into my chest, and my heart reads it: I remember. I remember the stiffening. I remember the spine going rigid.
The boy makes a sound. High, thin, the sound of air being forced through a throat that has clenched against it, not a scream, not a word, a whimper that carries more than any scream would. It is high because it hurts. It goes on because the hurting goes on. It runs out of air at the end because some part of him is still refusing to believe his body is where this is happening.
The master’s gaze comes up off the boy and holds mine. The narrow torso bridges the space between the senator’s belly and my chest, and his look crosses it and lands on my face, and the body under it cannot interrupt anything. Two men looking at each other over the flesh they are using together. His hand reaches past his hip and takes the forearm holding the legs open, the soft grip closing on the hard arm, and he leaves it there. The boy is the instrument. The performance is ours.
“Hold him wider,” the master murmurs, and the murmur is for me, and I take the two words and hold on to them, a coin too small to buy anything. I spread the boy’s legs further. The boy whimpers. The master thrusts deeper. His hand stays on my forearm, the fingers tightening with each stroke, the senator’s pleasure transmitted through his grip into my skin as his pleasure transmits through the boy into my hands, and I am holding both, the boy’s resistance and the master’s rhythm. It is the closest to being fucked that the geometry allows. It is enough. It is not enough.
“He is still fighting me,” the master says. The voice is conversational. The hips do not break. “You stopped fighting me in the first year. I have not had this from you since.”
I hold the boy wider.
The master’s face. I watch it above the boy’s splayed legs, the furrowed brow, the parted lips, the concentration I have spent years earning. It is the face from a thousand nights above me. It is not above me.
The master’s cock is inside the boy. The master’s cock belongs inside me. Three bodies, one cock, and the cock is in the wrong one.
My fists tighten on the pairs I hold. Nothing professional in it, nothing of the enforcer holding a position. I close down until the small wrist bones shift against the ankle bones inside my grip, because if I cannot be the one fucked then I will be the one holding the one being fucked. The boy gasps. The gasp is a sound I should be making. The gasp is mine. The boy is making it with my mouth. And instead his mouth makes its thin, terrified sounds and the master’s hips drive forward and the master’s eyes are closing now, the lids dropping, the face going slack, and I cannot stanch that and cannot show it.
The boy thrashes. The second protest, the back arching off the linen, the legs straining, the wrists twisting in my hand. My grip locks. It is the old reflex and it does not break. He folds no further and he comes no looser.
And the master goes over.
I feel it arrive before he makes a sound, because I am holding the body it is happening inside. The rhythm shortens. Three strokes, then two, then he stops moving forward at all and simply presses, grinding himself in as deep as the boy will take, and the boy’s eyes go wide and stay wide, and I watch the senator’s face come apart above the splayed legs. The mouth opens on nothing. The brow smooths. He makes the sound I spent years learning how to pull out of him, low and torn and helpless, the one sound in the world that belongs to me, and he makes it into somebody else.
I feel him finish through the boy’s ankles. The pulse of it, transmitted through a body that is not mine, reaching my hands secondhand, at one remove, like heat through a wall. My own cock stands untouched against my belly and drips onto the linen and nobody in the room looks at it.
The boy’s thrashing has stopped. It transmits through him into mine anyway, the last of the shaking passing through wrist and ankle together into my hands, through my hands into my arms, through my arms into my ribcage, through my ribcage into the place where the memories live, and the shaking works something loose in there, and the door opens.
I remember the first time. Fresh from the market. Captured, shipped, sold. The transit oil still on my skin, the auction brand still raw on my hip. They bent me over the bench. Four hands pinning me, one to each wrist, one to each shoulder, and I was stronger than all four and it changed nothing, because behind the four hands stood the senator, and behind the senator stood the house.
The finger first. Cold oil, then the press of it, and I clenched the way I had clenched against everything my whole life, the gate slamming, furious. The senator did not force it. He waited. He pressed, and went on pressing, and found the place inside me that no one had ever reached because no one had ever been allowed to, and he pressed that, and the gate I was holding shut with all the strength that had killed men began to open on its own.
It was not the cock that shamed me. It was my own hole easing around a stranger’s finger while my mouth still snarled, my own spine curving toward the thing I cursed, my own cock filling and darkening against the bench where every eye in the house could watch it fill. The cook saw. The handlers saw. The body slaves along the colonnade saw the barbarian held down and opened and wanting it, the traitor flesh stiff and wet while I was still shaping the word for no.
Then the cock. It split me and I bucked and the bench shrieked and the pain was enormous, a tearing, real. But the pain came braided to something rising underneath it, and the whole colonnade watched me find that out in the same instant I did. The senator finished inside me. The slaves let go of my arms. I slid to the floor and could not stand, and it was not the ache that held me down. It was the thing they had all just seen me do.
Hundreds of times after that. Morning, evening, the middle of the night when his appetite woke him. Borrowed to soldiers at the banquets, the senator’s barbarian mounted for the audience while the guests drank and watched the warrior mounted like a mare. I felt the shame every time. And the hole changed anyway. The hole opened, and what came up through the opening had been under the warrior the whole time, guarded by him, waiting.
Now I heat the oil myself and pour it over the scars and stand in the lamplight and wait for his footsteps and say fuck me, Master, this hole is yours. The bench became the bed.
I open my fists and get off him.
Ankles and wrists come loose together and none of them do anything with the freedom. I take my knees off the linen above his head and back down the bed, and the space I leave is filled before I have finished leaving it. The senator collapses onto the boy. The full weight of him settles like earth settling onto a grave. The legs drop to either side of the senator’s hips, the thin thighs bracketing the wide belly, the arms falling where they fall. He does not move. He has stopped moving. What is under that weight is limp and spent, held open and entered and filled until there was no fight left in it. The young ones are always like this afterward. The ones that fought hardest go stillest, something in them putting down its load and handing the rest over to the mass on top.
I ease myself beside them on the bed. The air over the linen has gone thick and close, wine breath and spent seed and the sweat of three men working, and the lamp adds its thread of smoke to it. The frame protests, three bodies now, the barbarian’s weight added to the senator’s weight added to the boy’s nothing, and the mattress dips under my hip, and my shoulder comes up against the senator’s shoulder, and the boy is sandwiched between us, the senator’s belly on top of him, my chest against his side, two bodies enclosing him like a shell around a thing that is not yet formed.
When the master lifts his head the face is flushed and younger for it, the blood close to the surface, the eyes glazed. The politician is gone out of it. What is left just fucked something. His mouth is close to my ear.
“Play with his body,” the master murmurs. “Don’t let him cool down.”
The hands begin. Four of them on him, two soft and heavy, two scarred, and he takes all four without resisting any of them. His skin is too worked over by now to tell an assault from a kindness. The senator’s fingers trace the boy’s chest, the nipples, the ribs, the hollow of the navel. My hands work his thighs and his calves, the small hard muscles that fought me minutes ago and lie slack now under my palms. His hand leaves the boy and settles on my chest. The flat palm on my pectoral, the familiar weight, and I lean into it before I have decided to, the lean older than thought. Three heartbeats. Four. “The same as last night,” he says, not looking at me, and takes the hand back to the boy, and I am still leaning into the place where it was.
The boy’s body begins to answer. Nothing so willing as consent. The mechanics run without the mind’s permission, the skin warming, the breathing dropping out of its panicked flutter, the muscles letting go one at a time as a fist lets go when the hand is held long enough. His cock has been soft through all of it, through the inspection and the penetration and the thrashing. It stirs. He does not do it on purpose. His eyes widen when he feels it happening, and what is in them is the horror of being betrayed by the thing you live in.
The master sees. He misses nothing. He counts the boy’s cock the way he counts everything, the senate’s votes, the price of grain, the bodies of his slaves. His hand closes around him. The boy flinches. The hand strokes, once, twice, practised, and the cock responds, thickening, lengthening, his horror deepening as it fills, because the filling proves that the body has a will the mind does not control. His old self is falling down the gap between the two.
He is not requesting yet. He is still falling. But the cock is hard.
The boy lies on the linen like something the tide left behind, exposed and bare and glistening with the senator’s sweat and the oil from my skin and the boy’s own fluids. The master’s hand rises to the boy’s chin. The fingers close, the thumb on one side of the jaw, the fingers on the other, the potter’s hold that turns a face on the wheel, and the master tilts the boy’s face toward his own.
The boy’s eyes meet the senator’s, and for the first time he looks at the master without the screen of terror. The terror is still there. Something else has joined it, something he cannot name yet, the confusion of a body that has been hurt and held and touched and is now being looked at by the man who did all three. There is no cruelty in the look. It is warm. It is how an owner looks at a thing he likes and intends to keep.
“Will you entertain me more, my little creature?” The voice drops into the senator’s bedroom register, the voice that I have heard say the same words to me in different language, my hungry one, my beast, will you give me more. The master leans forward and kisses the boy.
The kiss lands under my ribs and lodges there. The senator kisses the boy, the lips parting, the tongue going in, and the kiss is what I earn. The whole evening earns it. The oiling, the kneeling, the worship, the years it took to wear this mouth down into something his mouth will come to meet. The boy gets it for nothing. He gets it on the first night. He gets the mouth I worked years to deserve, and no crueller gift has ever been handed out in front of me.
The boy does not kiss back. The mouth is open and the jaw is slack and nothing in it moves, and the senator’s tongue goes through it the way his finger went through the hole, slowly, finding out what is there. The master pulls back. Wipes his mouth with the back of his hand.
“Mount my barbarian.”
I lie on my back. The linen under my shoulders still holds their heat, the boy and the senator and the struggling they did in it. My cock stands. It rises off my hips thick and hard and absurd against the flat of my oiled stomach, and it was hard before he ever came through the curtain and has not softened through the boy or the memory or the burning. It is the one the boy looked up at and stopped breathing. Now it points at the ceiling and waits.
The boy kneels beside me on the bed. He does not know what to do. He has received one command, mount my barbarian, and it is clear enough and he does not move. He stares at the cock like a man staring at a mountain he has been told to climb, the understanding of the instruction and the impossibility of carrying it out sitting in one face at once, the eyes wide, the mouth open and producing nothing.
I slap his butt, lightly, nothing like the senator’s testing slap from the inspection, the one that echoed. This one is direction. The flat of my hand on the curve of his buttock, and he moves, because he has learned in the last hour that slaps are instructions and instructions are followed. My hand closes on his hip. I guide him, pulling the thigh across my body, positioning him above me, his knees on either side of my hips, the colt straddling the barbarian’s torso, perched on a frame too large for him.
Looking down, the boy finds the cock between his legs, the shaft laid along his inner thigh, the head near the cleft, the heat of it radiating into his skin. His face is calculating the distance between what is being asked and what he can accommodate. The answer coming back is no, and it shows in the set of his mouth and the whitening of the knuckles where the boy’s hands brace on my chest.
“Don’t worry, my little creature.” The senator’s voice, from behind the boy, from the edge of the bed where the master has positioned himself to watch. The voice is amused and tender. He has broken this one once already tonight and knows he can do it again. “Your hole is elastic enough. I’ve checked it.” The dark eyes come up over the boy’s shoulder and find me. “Enjoy him, my beast. He will not be like this long. Neither were you.”
My hands clamp the boy’s hips. I lift him, he weighs nothing, the white shape rising in my hands, a thing made of paper and fear, and I position the hole above the head of my cock. The boy’s hole is warm, and the warmth is the senator’s, left in a passage recently filled and recently stretched, the muscle loose and oiled and carrying the memory of the senator’s cock in its dimensions. I lower the boy.
His hole meets the head of my cock and the boy gasps, and it comes from further down than the thin one at the inspection. This one is deep, pulled from the bottom of the lungs. He is being opened wider than he has been opened before. The senator was the rehearsal. The boy sinks, slowly, my hands controlling the descent, and the passage the senator opened takes a width the senator did not prepare it for. His mouth opens. His eyes close. His hands brace on my chest, the fingers digging into the pectorals, the nails scoring the oiled skin, and he is not resisting. He is holding onto something while he is being split.
The boy moans, and that is the sound I have been waiting for. Past the whimper. Past the gasp. Past the thin cry of a thing in pain. This one comes from a body that has gone through the pain and out the other side, to where the nerve the senator’s finger found is being pressed by something bigger, something that fills the passage so completely the nerve has nowhere left to hide. The nerve fires and the sound comes out of him. It is the first honest thing his body has said all evening.
The boy’s hands go flat on my chest. The palms spread on the muscle he flinched from at the inspection, and he bears down for leverage, and the leverage lifts his hips, and the hips come down, and the boy is rocking on me. Clumsy. The untrained hips catch the angle by accident, lose it, catch it again. But it is there, and it is happening on top of me, where I get it through the cock and through the chest and through the hands resting on his thighs.
He’s learning. The thought comes without the contempt in it. Not the stupid animal. Not the ungrateful one. He is finding it by accident, with the hips, in the body and nowhere near the mind.
The senator watches. I can see him past the boy’s shoulder, seated at the edge of the bed, the toga open, his hand on his own cock, stroking with the lazy rhythm of an owner watching his property perform and pleased with the performance. His eyes move between us, from his face to mine, from his hips to my cock, from the place where the cock enters him to the place where his hands press against my chest. Watching is his pleasure, the voyeur’s delight in an arrangement of two bodies that is working.
“Slower,” the master says. The boy’s hips slow. The descent becomes deeper, the cock sinking further into the passage, the boy’s weight settling onto my hips with a fullness that makes my spine arch. “Deeper.” The boy’s hips sink. The cock finds the end of the passage and the boy cries out, and what comes out of him lives between pain and pleasure, the noise a nerve makes when it is worked to its limit. “Now his cock. Touch it.”
I take his cock in my hand. It is fully hard now, standing up between his thighs, an erection he did not authorize and cannot undo. I close my fist on it. His hips jerk. The cock inside him and the hand on his cock, two pressures meeting somewhere in the middle of him, and out of the meeting comes a sound he has never made before. Low and broken. Not the whimper. Not the gasp. His voice is learning a new word and nobody asked him.
The frenzy builds. The boy’s hips find a rhythm, faster now, the clumsy novice discovering the rhythm’s logic, rocking on my cock with a motion that is no longer mechanical but urgent, the hips demanding depth and the depth producing the sound and the sound producing the urgency and the urgency producing the hips and the cycle feeds itself, and I thrust upward to meet the descent, and he moans with each thrust, and my hand works the boy’s cock, and the senator’s hand works the senator’s cock, and the room narrows to three bodies and three rhythms converging on a single point.
The boy spills. It takes him by surprise, the back arching, the cock pulsing in my hand, the seed coming across my stomach in thin white ropes that land on the oiled skin and slide toward my navel. His eyes fix on the ropes coming out of him and landing on me, and stay there, and he cannot make them go anywhere else. And his hole goes off around my cock. It grips and lets go and grips again in waves along the whole length of me, milking without being told to, tighter than anything he did on purpose all evening, and my hips come off the linen chasing the tightness. He is still spilling on my stomach while his hole works me. He cannot stop either one. He is doing both at once and his eyes are open and he is looking down at me while he does it.
“Stop.” The senator’s voice cuts through the frenzy. Sharp. Clean. The politician’s voice, not the bedroom voice: the voice that commands legions and silences senators and ends debates. “Stop, you whores. Come here. Your Master needs your mouths.”
I lift the boy off my cock, fast, his hole releasing the shaft with a wet sound that fills the quiet room. He is hollow now, hollow and warm. Not empty. The passage still holds the shape of what was in it, as wet sand holds a foot.
I take him off the bed with me. The marble is cold under my knees, the second time tonight, and this time he goes down onto it beside me without my hand on his neck. Two mouths at the same altar. The senator’s cock stands before us, thick, heavy, the shaft glistening. I lower my mouth. Beside me the young one lowers his, and his mouth is open before it gets there.
Our mouths work the senator’s cock together, my lips on the shaft, the boy’s tongue on the sack. The same arrangement as before, with a different boy in it. This one has been fucked and has spilled and has found out what his own body wanted, and the finding out took the last of the resistance with it. It always does. It took mine the same way and it took longer.
“Oh yes,” the master murmurs. The voice is thick again, the pleasure reclaiming the diction. “My slaves.”
My slaves. My throat is full and I hear the plural anyway, the small hiss at the end of the word. The hiss is the boy. His shoulder is wet against mine and his breathing comes fast through his nose and his tongue is somewhere below my lips on the same flesh, and I take the cock deeper, and the master makes the sound, and he does not make it for me. He makes it for the pair of us. There is no way to take that word apart and keep only my half of it. Two mouths. One master. My jaw aches and I hold it open.
“On all fours.”
The command is for me. The vowels have gone flat again. He knows what he wants next and what he wants next is my hole. My spine has already started to curve. I have been waiting for those three words since the boy came through the door, and the waiting turned into burning and the burning turned into holding, and now the three words take all of it and boil it down to the one thing I am for.
I turn. The bed shifts under my weight, the frame groaning, the linen pulling, and I go down on all fours, the spine curving, the hips rising, into the position this body knows better than any battle stance. Then the elbows go down, because he likes the back deeper than a man on all fours can make it, and the pectorals press against the warm fabric and the hips stay up. The back I put in front of him is wide and scarred and was built for war. It is better used now than it was then. The retraining was the kindest violence ever done to me.
“Boy.” The master’s voice, addressing the boy behind me. I cannot see. My face is pressed to the linen, my eyes forward, the position denying me the vision of what is happening behind it. “Prepare him. Use your tongue.”
He is behind me and I cannot get past it. I stood over him tonight and watched his heels lift off the marble and thought stupid animal, and now he kneels at the back of me with his face at my hole, and my hips are up, and my hole has become the thing in the room. I could turn my head. I do not turn my head. Keeping my face in the linen is the last decision I am permitted to make and I make it, and it buys me nothing, because I know exactly where his eyes are.
And past him, the curtain. It does not reach the floor. It never has. The corridor runs from this door to the kitchen and the house does not stop being awake because the master’s evening has, and a man carrying water past that gap will hear what I am about to start making. I have wanted them to hear. I said so with my mouth full of the word teach, wanting it carried down the corridor where the cook could get it. The house can have this instead. It always gets this part of me.
The boy’s tongue touches me, tentative, the wet tip catching the cleft and tracing downward, its path uncertain. A minute ago that mouth was on the senator’s cock. It has no idea where it is now. The tongue reaches the hole. The muscle clenches once, the old reflex, and then lets go, and the letting go is all the welcome there is, and the tip goes in as easily as a finger sinks into warm oil. What meets him in there is heat, and give, and no argument at all.
The boy licks. The tongue works the hole, circling, digging, the strokes growing bolder as the boy discovers that the muscle opens for the mouth as his own opened for the cock. I groan into the linen. It comes out as the same low belly-deep noise the master’s chest makes when my tongue works his nipple.
Something changes in his rhythm. The tongue stutters, breaks its pattern, and a small wet gasp comes from behind me, and I know without seeing what has happened: the master’s fingers have found the boy’s hole. He has reached between the boy’s legs while the boy kneels behind me with his tongue in my passage. The hole is willing now. The muscle that clenched against his first finger opens for the rest of them. The boy’s tongue resumes, deeper, more urgent, his own arousal feeding his mouth, the fingers in his hole producing a tongue in mine. He designed this chain. It starts at his fingers and ends in my throat.
I relax into it. Not the warrior’s collapse. The other softening, the one that comes when the flesh knows what order things happen in. The tongue is the prelude. I feel the rest coming in the bed’s shifting and in the senator’s weight moving and in the boy’s tongue withdrawing as the master’s hand pulls him aside. I am going to be fucked. The jealousy earned it and the burning paid for it and now it arrives.
Behind me, the master positions himself. The belly presses against the small of my back: the soft mass against the hard mass, the axiom of everything we are. His hands close on my hips, firm, settled, hands that have had these hips each night for years and know the exact pressure.
He enters me.
He does not so much enter as arrive. The cock takes the passage and the passage opens, not because it was beaten but because it has been waiting, the muscles going soft before the head touches them. It is less like being entered than like being finished. I groan, deep and guttural. The boy could not make this sound. The boy’s body was fighting. Mine is receiving, and there are no words in the receiving, only the one long unclenching I am kept for.
The master grabs my hair. The fingers twist into the oiled strands and the pull is sharp, the head yanked back, the spine arching, the frame adjusted by the hand in the hair the way a rider adjusts a horse with the reins. The pull turns my face up off the linen and takes the decision away from me, and there he is.
The boy sits where the master put him aside, close, his knees drawn up, watching. Not with horror. Not with anything. He watches the way he watched my mouth on the master’s chest an hour ago, that fixed helpless attention, a thing he does not understand and cannot look away from, and his face hands me nothing to read. So I read it myself. I put my own words in it. Stupid animal. A wild thing that does not know what it is being given. Everything I stood over him with, coming back at me out of a face that is not even thinking it, and it lands harder than if he had said it, because I am the one who supplied it, and I cannot stop supplying it, and the master fucks me the whole time I do.
I am ridden. The hips drive forward, the belly slaps against my back, the cock goes deep on every stroke. I am the horse. I have always been the horse. The saddle is the senator’s belly and the reins are his fist in my hair, and this is what the body is kept for.
He has been walking toward this all evening and he takes it at the pace he wants. The boy he opened in minutes. Me he opens slowly, every night, and tonight slower than that, drawing almost the whole way out and holding there, my hole shut and grasping at nothing, before he puts it back into me an inch at a time. He does this three times. The third time a sound comes out of my throat that I have never heard it make, and the boy comes up off his heels onto his knees to see it better, and I watch him do it.
“Deeper,” I say. The word is wrecked. “Master. Deeper. Fuck this slave’s hole. No boy can take you like this body does.”
“No boy,” the master agrees, the diction in ruins, the orator gone. “No boy could. You were made for this. My whore. My hole. My best beast.” The fist twists in my hair and shoves my face down. “Take your Master’s cock. Take it like the animal I bought.”
His mouth comes down close to my ear, the wine-breath warm, the hips never slowing. “You think I did not see,” he says. “I saw your jaw set every time my hand was on him. I saw your cock stand while you held his wrists open for me. You wanted to be where he was. Under me. You always want to be where the boy is.” The fist tightens in my hair. “Why do you think I keep them. I keep them so that you will burn. So that I can watch you burn.”
There is nothing I can do with that.
He has told me the shape of my own life while he is inside me and there is no part of my body free to answer him. My mouth is in the linen. My hands are holding my own weight up. He has not asked me a question and would not want one answered. So it goes in and it stays in, sitting behind my ribs next to the burning, and the two of them are the same thing and always were. Every boy since the first one. Every night I have oiled myself and waited. He was not taking them past me. He was taking them for me to see.
And my hips are still pushing back to meet him while I think it. The keeping of them I can hold. What I cannot hold is that my body does not pause for a single stroke while the reason for all of it is put into my ear.
The master’s rhythm breaks. Faster, the control fraying, the measure going out of it. I push back against each thrust. I am not being fucked now so much as used to finish something, and that difference is what I wanted, and I take it.
Out in the corridor, someone goes past with water.
I hear the slap of bare feet on marble and the small slop of a full jar being carried level, and the sound does not hurry and does not slow. Whoever it is has heard the noise coming out of me. Whoever it is knows which of the two of us is making it. The feet go on toward the kitchen at the pace they came, and I am still making the noise when they are gone, and in the morning I will pass that man in the corridor and neither of us will say anything. The master does not stop. The master does not lower his voice.
My cock leaks against the linen without being touched, the fluid pooling under my stomach and going cold where the air reaches it. My arms have started to shake, and it is not the weight. They held the boy for an hour and did not shake once. They shake now because everything in me has gone to one place and there is nothing left over to keep a man upright, and the shaking travels up into my chest and the master feels it and grunts and drives harder into the thing that is shaking.
The master comes inside me. The cock pulses, the liquid heat spreading through the passage, filling the space, the master taking what is his the way he takes everything, totally, without negotiation. The groan is torn from the senator’s chest, low, involuntary, the sound of a man losing something into a body he cannot stop losing things into.
I come. Untouched. I always come untouched when he is deep enough, the cock dragging across the nerve on every stroke until the nerve gives out. It starts in the hole and not in the cock. My hole shuts on him and will not open and he grunts and shoves through the clenching anyway, and my cock jumps against my belly and the seed comes out of me in long slow pulls and soaks into the linen underneath. I am still tightening on him when the last of it goes. My arms fold. My face goes down into the wet fabric and I do not care that it is wet.
The master stays inside me. The cock softens, slowly. It is in no hurry to leave me.
The master does not move away.
Years of nights have taught me the rhythm. Completion, withdrawal, wine, distance. That is the architecture.
Tonight the architecture breaks.
The master stays. His weight remains on my back, the belly’s warmth, the chest’s softness. His cock slips free, but he does not follow it. The weight stays. His hand settles on my hip. The fingers do not grip. The palm rests.
I feel the boy. On the other side of the bed, the small shape curled at the edge of the linen, the knees drawn up, the breathing slow. The boy is asleep. He fell asleep as the young ones fall asleep, suddenly, totally, dropped where he stood, clubbed from behind by his own body. His face in sleep is a face I know. It is the face of something taken apart and not yet put back together, and it trusts the dark, because the dark is the only place where the putting back happens.
The master’s hand pats my hip. Once. Small and gentle, the pat you would give an animal that has carried you well. Nothing sexual in it. Nothing that claims.
The master’s breathing deepens. He is going under, the senator falling asleep pressed against the slave’s back with his hand on the slave’s hip.
I do not close my eyes. The chamber smells of oil gone cold in the dish, of him, of what we have all been doing in it. The boy breathes at the edge of the bed. The master breathes against my back. Three bodies on a bed that was built for one.
His hand tightens in sleep. The involuntary clench, the fingers digging into my hip, holding on to something in a dream. It is not for me. It is what his hand does.
I keep them so that you will burn.
Tomorrow the handler comes for the boy and the boy is brought back and I am the one who holds him. I will burn then too. He has arranged it so, and he has told me he arranged it so, and in the morning I will oil myself and heat the dish and carry it to the ledge where his hand will want it.
I lie still under the hand and do not move for a long time.
