The mattress gave under him, and that was the part Cal could not get used to.
Two winters on a plank in the stall room had trained his hips to expect a floor. Every time the Master had him up here his back spent the first few minutes hunting for the hard place and not finding it, and he had to lie still through it, because the one thing he had worked out about this house was that you did not want to be seen being new. Not in your second winter. Not with the good sheets under you and the radiator ticking away under the window and rain coming down the glass in long crawling lines that the lamp turned orange.
Nell was between them. She had been put there without being told to go there, which was its own information.
The Master had not spoken since the door.
He was on his side, propped on one elbow, close enough that Cal could have counted the hairs on his forearm and had, more than once, in the dark, from the floor. The white line of an old scar across two knuckles. The heavy easy weight of him, forty-odd years of good food and never carrying anything, banked against Nell’s ribs and giving off heat like a stove left going. Under the blanket his cock lay half up his thigh, in no state to do anything about anybody yet, and Cal had already looked at it twice.
Nell lay on her back between them with her knees loose and one arm folded up over her head, and she smelled like the barn still, like straw and warm skin and what had happened out there an hour ago, and under that the tallow soap the house made her use before she came in.
In the barn there was work, there were orders, there was somewhere for the eyes to go. Up here there was nothing to do but look, and everything he wanted to look at belonged to the man on the other side of her.
The Master had one hand on her. Not moving much. Working her left tit slowly with the flat of his palm, pushing it up toward her collarbone and letting it fall. He was in no hurry about any of it. Her nipple came up tight under his thumb. He noticed it and did nothing about it for a long time.
Cal watched the hand.
“Closer,” the Master said.
Cal moved in. Their shoulders touched, his and Nell’s. He was still cold from the walk across the yard and it was showing on him, nipples drawn up hard, sack pulled in tight against himself, and he noted it the same as he would note a cold handle in the morning. It would go. Everything in this room went warm eventually. She turned her head and looked at him, and there was nothing shy in it. She had stopped being shy sometime in the autumn. She had one front tooth crossed slightly over the other, and when she smiled without meaning to, that tooth was the first thing you saw.
The Master’s hand left her chest and went down over her stomach, spread wide, fingers apart. He held it there. Then he moved it lower and Cal heard her breath change, one small hitch, and the Master’s wrist turned and two fingers went into her and came back out.
He held them up in the lamplight and looked at them.
They shone. There was more of it than Cal had expected there to be after an hour, thick along the first knuckle, and the Master turned his wrist slowly so the light caught it, patient about it, like a man reading a gauge.
“He put seed into you,” the Master said.
Nell said nothing. She knew when a thing was not for her to answer.
“Back in the autumn. Three days of it and it took, and there is nothing left in you now to spoil.” He wiped his fingers on her belly, low, in two flat strokes, and left the shine there. “Which is why it is safe for me to enter you. Say thank you to your breeder.”
She turned her head. “Thank you for breeding me.”
Then she turned back the other way, because the formula had a second half and she knew it. “Thank you, Master, for ordering me to be bred.”
Breeder.
Nobody had said it to his face before. It was on the house manifest somewhere, he assumed, in the column with the feed and the boot leather, and out in the barn what he did to her had no word attached to it at all. It was just the hour after the milking. Hearing it come out of her mouth on an order, in this bed, with the Master’s hand still resting on the mess he had spread across her, did something to Cal’s throat that made it hard to breathe evenly.
She had thanked him for the work and the Master for deciding on it, in that order.
The Master’s eyes came up and found him.
He did not look angry. That was worse. He looked at Cal the way he looked at the ledger.
“Come here,” he said. “Both hands.”
Cal went down onto her chest and got his mouth on her, and the orders came from the far side of her in a flat voice with long gaps in between.
“Not gentle.”
He was not being gentle. He went at her harder and she made a sound.
“She is not glass. Harder than that.”
Her skin was salt and soap. Her heart went hard and fast right under his cheekbone.
“Use the teeth.”
Cal used the teeth, and her back came up off the mattress.
“She likes the teeth. Ask her.”
Nell laughed. Then she stopped laughing very suddenly, because he had done it again, and her fingers came down into his hair and closed.
It went on a long time. The salt came up through the soap and then took it over entirely, and a wet line ran in the channel between her tits and his mouth kept finding it and coming back to it. She got loud in a low broken way that had nothing performed in it, and every time she did the Master’s breathing changed a little on the far side of her. Cal found himself listening past her for that, for the man’s breath, the small dry catch in it.
He caught himself doing it and kept doing it.
Then it was his turn to be handled.
The Master’s hand came over and took him without any warning at all, just closed around him and held, not stroking, just holding, hot and dry and completely certain. The noise Cal made into her chest was not one he recognised. The hand stayed. The Master went on talking to Nell about something, about the barn roof, about whether the gutter was going to hold through February, about wanting the cart free in March to run her down to the pens before she got too big to sit up in it, and all the while that hand sat on Cal like a paperweight and did not move, and Cal’s whole spine went stupid with waiting.
Nell reached down and put her hand over the Master’s hand. She was allowed to do that. Cal was not, and he never had been, and he had never once seen her get corrected for it.
“He’s leaking on you, Master,” she said.
“He does that.”
“He does it in the stall too. When you walk past. I can hear it.”
The Master made a sound in his chest, not quite a laugh. He looked at his own hand where it sat on Cal, and at hers lying on top of it.
“She puts her hand on me,” he said. “Two winters you have been in this house and you have never once tried it.”
Cal’s throat worked. There was an answer and there was only one.
“No, Master.”
“Why not.”
“Because I’m not allowed, Master.”
“Mm.” Nothing came after it. The hand on Cal did not move and no permission arrived and none had been on offer. “Turn over,” he said. Not to Cal.
She went over onto her front with the ease of something that had been asked a hundred times, and got up onto her knees in the middle of the bed with her head down toward the pillows, and the Master came round behind her without hurrying about it and put a palm flat between her shoulder blades and pushed her down onto her forearms.
Cal was ordered under her.
That was the position. On his back, head at her chest, so that her tits hung into his face and he could keep her loud with his mouth while the Master worked. He had done it before. He knew where to put his arms so they did not get in the way. What he was not prepared for, ever, no matter how many times, was the first push, because it came through her.
He felt it in the mattress. He felt it in the bones of her ribcage against his forehead, in the way her breath got knocked flat, in the small helpless jerk that ran down her and into him. The Master went in slow and all the way and stopped there, and Nell made a sound directly into the top of Cal’s skull, and Cal lay under all of it with his mouth full of her and his cock lying up against his own stomach, hard and ignored and jumping.
Something wet came off her chin and landed on his throat. Then another one, on his jaw. She was running now and the soap had gone out of her entirely and left what was underneath it, and his own cock had been leaking onto his belly for a while, a cold little pool of it gathering in the dip under his ribs. He left it there. Nobody had said anything about it.
The Master leaned forward over her back to get more of his weight behind it, and his forearm came down on the sheet beside Cal’s head.
Cal turned his face and put his mouth on it. Just once. Just the inside of the wrist, quick, with the hair against his lips and the pulse right there under it, and then he went straight back to work on her like it had not happened.
The rhythm above him stopped.
For three or four seconds nobody in the room moved. Cal kept his eyes shut. He could hear Nell breathing in the pillow, ragged, waiting too.
Then the Master started again, harder, and said nothing at all about it. Nothing would ever be said about it. Cal’s eyes stung and he worked her tits until she was making a continuous low noise that had no words in it.
The Master pulled out well before anything.
He did it as he always did, one clean withdrawal, no last stroke, no chasing it. His cock came out shining and dark and he knelt back on his heels and let it stand there in the lamplight, wet with her, and he looked at it for a moment with an expression Cal had never once managed to read.
Nothing of his went into anything in this house. That was the law. Cal had worked out the shape of it slowly, over months, the way you work out the shape of a room in the dark. The Master’s seed did not go in her. It did not go in Cal. It went in one place only, and you had to earn the whole night to get there.
“Boy,” the Master said. “Your turn.”
The problem with being told was that being told did not do it.
Cal got out from under her and got up on his knees behind her and he was not hard enough. It had gone soft in the shifting, as it did, and now there were two people watching him not be ready and the room was suddenly very bright. He got a hand on himself. It did not help. Heat came up the back of his neck and sat there.
“Master, I’m sorry, I can’t just, it takes me a minute sometimes, it isn’t…”
“Don’t explain. Fix it.”
He shut his mouth. He worked at himself and stared down at the sheet, at the two dark spots where she had bled the shine out of herself onto the linen, and nothing came of it, and the panic began to arrive properly.
Then the Master moved up the bed past her head and sat back against the headboard, and stretched his legs out along her, and settled, and Cal’s eyes went to him without asking permission from any part of Cal.
The man was just sitting there. Belly, thighs, the hair going grey along the chest, and that cock lying up over his hip, still wet from her, going slowly down and not caring who saw.
Cal was hard in about six seconds.
The Master watched it happen. He did not say anything for a moment, and then he said, quite mildly, “There it is.”
“Yes, Master.”
“Say what did it.”
Cal’s throat closed. He got it out anyway, low. “Looking at you, Master.”
“Louder. Let her hear what breeds her.”
“Looking at you.” His face was on fire. “Looking at you, Master.”
“Mm.” The Master nodded at Nell’s back. “Then go and be useful with it. She’s been waiting since the barn.”
He went in and it was easy and warm and it was nothing.
It was good. That never made sense to him. It was genuinely good, the give of her, the heat, the small sound she made when he got all the way in, and she pushed back at him and got a hand under herself and started working, and none of it landed anywhere. His hips did the work. His hands held her hips. He had started to sweat along his spine and down the backs of his thighs, and his balls had drawn up as they always did about here, and all of it was happening correctly and none of it was happening to him. And his eyes went up the bed and stayed there, on the man against the headboard with one knee up and one hand loose around himself, watching.
“Slower,” the Master said.
He went slower.
“All the way out. Then all the way in. She likes the whole length, she doesn’t like your fussing.”
He did it that way. Nell went up onto her elbows and swore into the pillow, and the Master’s fist kept up its slow easy travel and his eyes did not move off the join of them.
“There. That’s the animal. That’s what you’re for.”
“Yes, Master.”
“You are the only thing in this house that gets to be inside her.” The Master’s voice had not changed at all. He might have been reading a delivery note. “Do you know why that is.”
Cal knew. He had known since the first week and he had never once said it out loud, and his hips kept moving through it, steady, because they had been told to keep moving.
“Because mine doesn’t count,” he said.
“Because yours doesn’t count,” the Master agreed. “Keep going. Eyes down.”
Cal put them down. There was the back of her neck, and the two dark spots on the linen where she had bled the shine out of herself, and the wet dark seam where he went into her, and that was the whole world for a while.
He heard the nightstand drawer. He did not look up.
The bed dipped behind him.
He felt the weight arrive and then a hand on the small of his back, and then the cold shock of oil going down him, more of it than anybody needed, running.
He had time to get out one word. It was not a word. It was just breath.
The Master entered him without any of the ceremony he used on her, one long push, and Cal’s whole frame locked and he pitched forward and drove himself into Nell to the root, and she cried out, and the Master’s hands closed on his hipbones and held him there, buried in her, with the Master buried in him.
Nobody moved for a moment. There was rain on the window. There was the radiator.
Then the Master began, and Cal stopped being anything.
He was not fucking her. He was being used to fuck her. Every stroke went in at the top and came out the bottom, through him, and his own hips had nothing to do with it, and his hands on her waist were just where they had been left. The Master set a pace and the pace travelled through Cal’s body and into Nell’s, and she took it with her face turned sideways on the linen and one eye open, looking back down the bed at the two of them, at Cal, at what was happening to Cal, and she reached back blind until she found his wrist and held it.
He came like that, without warning, without being anywhere near ready, driven into her by somebody else’s hips, and it went on and on and he made a noise he would think about for weeks.
The Master did not stop.
He kept going through it, and past it. Cal hung there in the middle, oversensitive and shaking and useless, still hard because there was nothing else he could be, still being put into her over and over. Sweat came off his chin and off the end of his nose onto her back and ran down the channel of her spine, and there was nothing to be done about that either. Somewhere in it Nell arrived too, with her mouth open against the linen and her fist closed white around his wrist.
Then the Master pulled out of him and it was over.
Cal pulled out of her and dropped sideways onto the sheet, and the ceiling did a slow revolve, and the room smelled like all three of them at once.
“Up,” the Master said. “Both.”
He was on his back now, head and shoulders up on the pillows, one arm behind his head. Loose. Comfortable. His cock stood up off his belly, dark and thick and glazed, and he did not touch it.
They came up the bed on either side of him. Nell got there first. She was always faster about this and Cal had stopped resenting it. She was on her front with her elbows braced, her hair stuck to her forehead, and she got her mouth down onto him without being told twice.
Cal got there and there was a moment of arranging, of finding room, her cheek against his cheek, both of them low on the man’s belly with the smell of him filling everything. The hair. The salt. The sour good stink of a man who had been at work half the night.
“Hands,” the Master said. “Both of you. Together.”
So they wrapped him together, her hand under his, Cal’s fingers over her knuckles, and they worked him that way while their mouths went where they could. There was not room for both mouths on the head. They traded. She would take him and Cal would go down the side, and then she would slide off and let Cal have it and go and put her tongue in the crease of the man’s thigh, and their hands never stopped, moving as one thing, and the Master’s belly began to rise and fall harder under Cal’s forearm.
Then he reached down and took Nell’s wrist and held it still.
“No.”
Everything stopped. Cal came off him with his mouth still open.
“You have had since the autumn to learn the grip and you are still doing it like you are wringing out a cloth. Slower. Lower down. Let the boy carry the top.”
“Yes, Master,” Nell said into his hip.
Let the boy carry the top. Cal took the head and did not look at her, because in two winters nothing in this house had ever been moved in his direction over hers, and she was six inches away with her mouth on the man’s hip, and she had heard it too.
“Again.”
It took them a while to find it the second time, and the whole way back Cal was doing sums he had no business doing. The Master had decided that an evening was enough of an evening before. Twice, in two winters. Both times they had gone back down to the stall room with their mouths clean and the tether short and nothing at all to think about until the bell.
Cal had his eyes open the whole time.
He had known since the pull-out that it would come, and now that it was here he could not make himself be greedy about it, could only work, could only be exactly as good as he knew how. The Master finished when the Master decided to. Nobody made him. The rest of the night had been given to them. This had to be earned all over again.
“Don’t waste it,” the Master said. His voice had gone rough at last. That was the only sign. “Whatever lands, you keep. Show me before you swallow.”
“Yes, Master,” they said, more or less together, and Cal heard how his own voice had gone and did not care.
It came fast at the end.
The Master’s stomach went hard, and the arm came out from behind his head and took a fistful of Nell’s hair, not to guide her, just to hold. Cal saw the first pulse travel and got his mouth there and got most of it, hot and thick across his tongue, more than seemed reasonable, and the second one went across his lower lip and onto Nell’s cheek and she made a sound of pure outrage at the loss of it and got in under him and caught the third.
Then it was just the two of them working him down with their hands and their mouths, gently, easing him down off the last of it, and the Master’s breathing came apart and put itself back together.
“You like my seed,” he said. Not a question. It never was.
Cal could not speak. His mouth was full and he had been told to keep it.
Nell nodded against the man’s hip. There was a stripe of it on her cheekbone, catching the lamp, and she was not going to touch that until she was told she could.
“Show me.”
Cal got his tongue out and took the stripe off his own lower lip first, carefully, because it had been said out loud that whatever landed he kept. Then they came up onto their knees and opened their mouths. His jaw had been aching for a while and there was drool at the corner of it he was not allowed to deal with yet.
Cal had his tongue out flat with it pooled there and he looked at the Master over it, and the Master looked back with an expression of perfectly mild interest, checking the work, and Cal held that look and felt the whole night stack up behind his eyes.
It sat on his tongue and went slowly cool.
“Swallow.”
They swallowed.
Nell reached up then and took the stripe off her cheek with two fingers and put them in her mouth and cleaned them, unhurried, and the Master watched her do it and said nothing.
The lamp went out.
The Master did it himself, reaching over without getting up, and the room dropped into the orange dark of the radiator and the grey dark of the window.
Then he took Cal by the arm and moved him, and Nell went the other way without being told, and the three of them came down into the arrangement like stock settling in a stall. Nell at the wall. Cal against her back. The Master behind Cal.
The middle was where she had been at the start of the evening. Nobody said anything about that either.
The Master pulled the blanket up over the three of them and put a hand on Cal, low, one cheek and part of the other, and left it there. It was the hand off the barn-roof conversation. It sat where it had been put, and it did not move, and it was not going to, and inside a minute his breathing went long and slow and unbothered behind Cal’s shoulder.
Cal put his arm over Nell. They fitted together the way they had learned to in the stall room, on the plank, with the tether short.
He was glad to be where he was. He put that away with the rest of it.
His hole would not close.
It always took longer than the ache, longer than the shake in the thighs. It stayed open and cooling in the dark and went on reporting itself, a wet ring of nothing where something enormous had been for a long time. The hand lay across the outside of it, heavy and warm and asleep, four inches from the part that was asking. Every time Cal shifted his weight the sheet moved against him and told him again. The oil had run down the backs of both thighs while he was being used and had gone tacky there, so his legs stuck to themselves and came unstuck when he moved. He lay still to make it stop. It did not stop.
She was working through her own on the other side of it. He could feel it in how carefully she was settling, in the small adjustments, in the little wet sounds she made and did not seem to know she was making. Two cocks and nothing else all night. Nobody had asked her a question. Nobody had made her say one word she had not already been taught. She let out a breath with a hum in the back of it, low, pleased, not aimed at anybody and not put on for anybody, and then she did it again a minute later.
Cal was not humming.
There was a thing sitting in him, and it was not the noise he had made and it was not the six seconds. Those belonged to his body. His body did as it was told and had never once been asked first.
It was the things he had said out loud.
Looking at you, Master.
Because I’m not allowed, Master.
And the last one, the one he had carried since his first week and had not in two winters let out of his mouth, handed over between one stroke and the next because a question had been put to him and his hips had been told to keep moving. Because mine doesn’t count.
The Master had all three now. He would still have them at the bell. He would have them next winter.
But her tits had been in his face for the better part of an hour and he had been ordered to be rough with them, told to use the teeth, told she was not glass. That had been good. There was no honest way around how good that had been. His mouth still tasted of her, the salt gone flat and a little sour with the hours on it, and he kept finding it and going back to it, like a chipped tooth he could not leave alone.
She found his hand under the blanket and moved it, and put it low on her belly, flat, and held it there with her own hand on top of it.
There was something there now. Low and firm and not much, no bigger than a fist, and it had not been there at harvest.
March, he thought.
He got the thought out of his head like a stone out of a hoof, carefully, and put it down somewhere, and went back to the small hard swell under his palm, because she was holding his hand on it and nobody had told him he could move.
Outside, the rain kept coming down the window in long crawling lines, and the radiator ticked, and Cal lay in the good bed with his hand where the Master’s hand had been, and did not sleep for a while.
