CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

Aiden

T he morning after my – admittedly insane – idea about how to fix Kade’s mental state was surprisingly peaceful. We woke around eight and I asked Kade to go make some coffee. He kissed me – a rather unexpected move, given that I hadn’t initiated anything physically – then rolled out of bed, threw on some sweatpants, and headed for the kitchen.

“Eggs or pancakes for breakfast?” he asked, when I arrived a few minutes later. “Or something else?” he offered as an afterthought, likely as a concession to the need for obedience. Whatever I wanted, I would get.

“Pancakes sounds like a great idea,” I said. At the base, I usually went for something high protein and high energy – eggs and bacon, or oatmeal, usually. But at home, I could afford to indulge a little.

Unable to resist, I sidled up behind him and wrapped my arms around his waist, resting my head against his back. He gave my arms a squeeze before returning to the task of frothing milk for the coffee, and I caught the pleased little smile on his face as he worked. Did that mean that last night’s crisis was over? I hoped so. God, I’d felt like absolute shit after I’d dropped that bombshell on him, but the answer to the dilemma had come surprisingly easily, after asking myself a few pertinent questions. My dimari wanted to please his master – as he’d stated repeatedly in the past. The easiest way to let him know that he had pleased his master was to tell him I was pleased. And the best sort of reward for a dimari was sex. I’d been working on the rogue theory that the combination of sex and dominance might be most effective here… and what do you know, it seemed to have worked.

Was that really the secret to keeping a dimari happy? Give them work to do, tell them their master was pleased, and then fuck their brains out? If that was the case, then it made a curious sort of sense that so many dimari on Rendol 4 were so fucking miserable. Because, in our entirely misguided attempts to treat them with respect, their owners here were going out of their way to avoid doing those exact things. Letting them do the work they’d been trained for was exploiting them. Praising them for being submissive was demeaning. And sexual contact of any sort was assault, rather than reward. It was at once so utterly simple, and so horrendously complicated. Knowing what to do was simple. Circumventing the multitudes of cultural taboos in our way was almost insurmountable.

I decided to approach the rest of the week in a thoroughly laid back way – while at the same time, keeping an eye on Kade’s moods for any sign of stress. Yes, he’d admitted to being worried about the Eumadians. And I was as well, no matter how many times I told myself that the Parliament would never bow to the Eumadians’ requests. But outside of that, I was hoping I’d genuinely managed to solve the issue of his fear of rejection, as a result of the news that I was not his intended master.

We ate the pancakes he’d made, smeared with jam and honey, then tackled the laundry and swept up two weeks’ worth of leaves in the courtyard out the back. We went for a walk to the local park and tossed bread to the givarids – small, furry creatures that made shallow burrows in beds of ferns. We looked up new recipes to try, and I allowed Kade to cook his first meal entirely without supervision. It was largely a success, though he added a little too much pepper, and I had to wrestle with my conscience before finally admitting the truth, rather than letting him bluster on with polite lies. He responded well to correction, resolving to fix the mistake next time around, rather than sulking about it, and I reminded myself that I needed to respect his intelligence, rather than patronising him by assuming he couldn’t deal with even mild criticism.

We watched a handful of movies that I thought exemplified Alliance culture – a love story, a legal drama and an adaptation of a true story about a Denzogal child who had been kidnapped, complete with overly dramatic chase scenes and a heartwarming rescue at the end.

We made love on the sofa… and fuck, yes, I was calling it that now. I loved him. And… well, I honestly wasn’t sure whether dimari could love their masters, but he seemed thoroughly enthused every time I looked sideways at him. He lay with his legs spread, his head thrown back, his hips rocking to meet my thrusts, and no matter how eager I was, he always seemed to climax before me. If that wasn’t a sign of his honest enjoyment of the act, then I didn’t know what was.

On a whim, I decided to teach him to bake. We started with cookies – nice and simple – and then moved on to almond friands, and then a fruit and nut slice. When Kade asked what we were going to do with it all – certainly too much for two people and just one week – I told him we would take it to the base on Monday to share with the troops. It might have been my imagination, but he seemed pleased with the idea .

On Thursday, I had the bright idea of looking through his operations manual again, to see what other skills he’d learned in preparation for impressing his eventual master. And one particular entry caught my attention.

“According to your manual,” I said, wandering into the kitchen where Kade was emptying the dishwasher, “you know how to dance.”

Kade smiled wryly. “Not any human dances. In some cultures, dancing is very important. I know some Anicrian and Polvron dances. They buy quite a few dimari, so it’s important for keeping the customers happy.”

I ignored the part about keeping slave owners happy and instead asked, “Could you show me?” I figured that if other people kept finding out interesting things about Kade, then maybe I should put in the effort to actually ask him about himself.

Kade looked up in surprise. “Now?”

“Finish with the dishwasher. But then yes.”

In the living room two minutes later, Kade pushed the coffee table back against the sofa to clear a bit of floor space. “Which one would you like to see?” He didn’t seem the slightest bit embarrassed about my request.

“I don’t know anything about either style of dance, so just… pick one.”

Kade thought for a moment. “I’ll show you a Polvron dance called ‘Rise of Summer.’ The changing seasons are very important to their culture.” He tapped on his comm for a few moments, then a soft melody began to drift through the room. He stood on one leg, the other tucked up on his thigh, placed one hand over his chest and bowed his head. Then he began to move. The movements were slow and sweeping, reminding me of Tai Chi. There was an old man who taught it down at the local park on weekends, and I’d sometimes seen him there with a handful of people, all moving in unison. Kade’s movements were somewhat more exuberant and less precise, but the overall feel was similar.

“What do they use this for?” I asked, when he came to a stop some minutes later. “Is it for entertainment, or some kind of ritual? Does just one person dance, or a group of people?”

“Usually a group, for rituals at various times of year. This one would be performed at the spring solstice, to welcome the summer season. The Polvron would hold a feast, play music, and have their dimari and other servants perform the dance.”

“It was beautiful,” I told him. “Did it take you a long time to learn?”

He smiled and shook his head. “The Polvron dances were easy. The Anicrian ones were a lot harder. They’re quite long, and I…” He ducked his head and looked away. “I didn’t always have the patience to practice them all the way through. ”

“You seem to have immense patience now,” I said, a little surprised by that announcement. “You sat on a rock in the cold and stared at the desert for two hours straight.”

He shrugged. “Watching for danger that I need to kill is more interesting to me than dancing for a bunch of annoyed aristocrats. On Anicrios, the dances are performed for the entertainment of royalty.” The unspoken opinion that he didn’t much care for the whims of royalty was loud and clear.

“Do you ever miss it?” I asked, the stray thought popping out before I could think better of it. “Being on Eumad, I mean. The training? Being with other dimari?”

It would have been vastly different from being here, on Rendol 4. But even so, I was honestly expecting him to say no. His desires and focus were so wrapped up in me now that I didn’t think he’d give the idea much thought. But a wistful expression settled on his face. “Sometimes. Being a teenager, mostly. It was a lot of fun. We were always learning new things and playing games to test our abilities. We got a lot of rewards. It was nice.”

“What kind of rewards did you get?” Not sex, I assumed… and then immediately wished I hadn’t asked. How old were the dimari when they started being trained for sex?

But Kade’s answer quelled my fears. “Nice food. Some really soft blankets. Sometimes we got to listen to music or watch videos. Or sometimes they’d take us for walks through the hills when the flowers were out. Most of the landscape was very dull, but for a few weeks in summer, it was beautiful.”

“I never actually asked you before, but… do you want to go back? I assumed you’d want to stay here, but maybe I was wrong.” Kade had seemed so distressed when I’d told him I wasn’t his intended master. But being distressed at my supposed rejection of him was not the same thing as not liking his childhood home.

Kade looked at me quizzically. “Do I want to go back? I don’t understand. You are my master. Why would I leave?”

“Because you enjoyed your life there. Maybe it was simpler, or more peaceful? It would be totally reasonable to want more of that.”

Kade frowned. “Dimari are not taught to think in terms of what we want . We obey. That is all.”

Now it was my turn to frown. “But you enjoy things. You said you find our missions satisfying. Did you like the baking?” That was the impression I’d got from him.

“Yes, I did,” he confirmed.

“So doesn’t it make sense that if you enjoy something, you want to do more of it? ”

I was treading on rocky ground here, effectively trying to goad my dimari into arguing with me. But as usual, he took a neat sidestep around the issue. “If I offered to cook chicken for dinner, I would enjoy eating it. But if you told me to cook fish instead, I would be equally happy to eat that. I enjoyed dancing for you. But if you were not here, I would not be dancing.”

Was it pure stubbornness that had me not believing him? Was I shooting myself in the foot by trying to force an opinion out of him, when he really didn’t have one? I considered my next move carefully. Then, slowly and deliberately, I stalked towards Kade, backing him up until his shoulders hit the wall. I leaned in close, but stopped short of kissing him. “What if I told you I want to suck your dick right now? Would you enjoy that?”

The scales over Kade’s face fluttered to a faint purple, then faded back to blue. I was learning his tells now, having caught a few stray changes of colour at various times over the past week; when he was pleased, when he was frustrated, when he was aroused.

“Yes, sir,” he said, his voice a touch breathless. “I would enjoy that.”

What I was about to do next was cruel, to a certain extent. But if Kade and I were going to have a healthy, long-term relationship, I needed to get a better handle on what really made him tick. “And if I just wanted to watch you wash the dishes instead? Would you enjoy that just as much?”

He opened his mouth to answer… but no words came out.

“If both things please your master, then it shouldn’t make a difference.”

“Y...yes, sir,” he said, though he sounded far from convinced.

“I think that you do actually want things. But you’re so accustomed to not being allowed to say so that you’re not even aware of them. Take some time to think about that.”

With that, I walked away, aware that I was leaving him hard and frustrated, but hoping that with enough time, and the right amount of pressure, he might learn to realise his own thoughts and desires, rather than solely waiting for cues about mine.