Chapter 22

twenty-two

“We shouldn’t, sir,” I whisper three mornings later as Mark pushes me to my knees in his shower. The large open space is lined with stone on two sides and glass on the other two, and the damp mineral scent and running water smells almost like Morois House. Almost like him.

I blink up at him, my eyelashes wet, my hand still clutching the washcloth I was using to clean him. “Dr. Sutcliff said no sex.”

“I don’t need my shoulder for this,” Mark says in a low voice, his hand already on my head, twisting in my wet hair. He pulls me to his waiting erection, and I groan in the back of my throat, unable to resist, even when it’s for his own good.

It looks too wonderful, standing straight up, his balls heavy underneath, and his hand in my hair is like the hand of God for all I can fight it. I let him guide my open mouth to the crown, plump and soft, and then down the shaft and back up.

He’s standing with the spray behind him, and water is running down his chest and stomach, dripping into his navel and along the line of hair leading down to his sex. It makes a soft tapping noise against the waterproof bandage sealed over his wound and hisses against the stone floor, and when he finally nudges me to take him all the way inside my mouth, I hear the rush of his breathing over it all.

A symphony of water, breath, and stone. And as he finishes down my throat, he murmurs my name like a coda, like it was the reason for the music to begin with.

His thumb finds my bottom lip and rubs it fondly as I finish swallowing, his gaze going from my mouth to my eyes to my whole face, like he’s trying to memorize exactly the way I look right now. I know he doesn’t love me; I know that I’m convenient, available, an animate doll that’s happy to be used and toyed with?.?.?.?but sometimes.

Sometimes when it’s like this, I can pretend.

Finally, he releases me and then looks down at the erection straining between my thighs. He nudges it with a wet, bare foot.

“You can take care of that if you want,” he says, with the air of someone being uncommonly magnanimous. And the shame of it is like a drug, humiliation twisting in my guts as I wrap my hand around my cock and start masturbating on my knees. And of course, the humiliation is everything—it’s like nothing else; it gets me even harder and it might as well be sweet nothings in my ear for how warm it makes me feel.

It’s someone saying no matter how mindless or messy or weak you might be, I’ll still want you. I’ll still want you at yourworst, your lowest, your ugliest.

I pant and spurt ropes of cum between his feet, making sure to stroke myself all the way through the climax because I’ve learned over the last month that I can never predict when Mark will decide that orgasm deprivation is his new favorite thing, and so I need to make every orgasm count.

After I’m done, Mark looks down at my semen like a king looking at his tribute, and prods my cock again with his foot. I hiss. It’s sensitive now.

He smiles.

“You can finish washing me,” he says, turning to give me his back, the tight lines of his ass and thighs, and I get to my feet to obey.

Mark refuses to discuss even the idea of a nurse, so it’s fallen to Sedge and me to take care of him while he recovers. Not that he needs much taking care of—he’s been patently ignoring Dr. Sutcliff ’s orders to rest and striding around the club with his IV catheter unhooked, taking meetings, answering questions for the police, and overseeing the necessary repairs of the club. It was driving us all wild how stubborn he was being. But halfway through the first day, he realized that he could make me play the part of a Victorian valet and concubine all at once, and after that, he became something much worse than a stubborn patient.

He became an infernally needy one.

Tristan, come dress me.

Tristan, bring me another glass of water.

Tristan, give me your hand, I need—yes, that’s right. Slower.Slower.

But I love it. I love it so much that I almost wish we could live like this forever, with me being even more than a bodyguard, being his valet and manservant and everything. I love it so much that every time Sedge helps in the slightest—even if it’s just to fetch his suit jacket from across the room or to get a pillow to put under Mark’s arm as he works in his office—jealousy bites at my stomach, gnaws in my chest.

I hate that Sedge has known him longer, that he can anticipate Mark’s needs, that he looks submissive, all quiet and unassuming, the kind of person who will take what he’s given and never ache for more. I hate that I can’t tell if there’s any fondness in Mark’s voice when he thanks him, and I hate that I care that there could be.

I shouldn’t care. I’m the one who gets to run soapy washcloths over Mark’s naked body; I’m the one who buttons his shirts and ties his oxfords for him (even though I know for a fact he can do it himself because he seems to have a superhuman ability to ignore pain).

But I do care. I’m still jealous. I want Mark like he was at Morois House—staring at me with naked, possessive ownership, refusing to let me leave even to get a new pair of pants. Sometimes I get moments of it here at Lyonesse: when we are together at night, alone; in the mornings, when I wake up to find him already watching me with eyes that shift like the underwater light that fills his room.

But for the most part, his attention is claimed by everyone and everything else that comes along with having a place like Lyonesse: members, employees, money, information.

And occasionally Sedge.

I have no idea what I’ll do if he brings back Isabella Beroul to play with. If I’m this jealous of an administrative assistant, I don’t know how I’ll cope with him having a woman tied to his desk again. Fuck.

After the shower, I make Mark go into the kitchen and sit at the table so I can change his bandage and check for signs of infection like Dr. Sutcliff showed me. He makes a noise in his throat when I clean the wound itself but otherwise stays silent.

“Do you want—”

He interrupts before I can finish. “No. It makes my thoughts slow.”

I remember the night of the stabbing, when I woke him up from a morphine-laced sleep to talk to the FBI. How lucid and precise he’d been, quick and perceptive. The only sign he’d been injured had been the bandaged shoulder and the occasional tightness of his mouth. The only sign of the morphine had been his eyes, a pinprick of black in a sea of blue.

“It didn’t make you slow,” I say, although I know it’s pointless. He’ll keep refusing the medicine and pretending he’s not in agony whenever he moves or breathes. I press the new bandage over the neatly sutured wound—which is healing nicely, despite Mark being the most noncompliant patient ever—and seal the edges with my thumbs, being as gentle as I can.

“You’re good at this,” he says. “Nursing.”

“I like it,” I reply. In the field, there was only time for combat gauze and a call for help, and that was it. It’s nice to be able to do things neatly. Kindly.

I think of my hand against Sims’s neck, his last words, bloody and burbling. Family?.?.?.?ease.

“Not that you need it,” I say, trying to shake off the memory. “Sometimes I think you’d wrap a kitchen towel around it and call it a day.”

“I’ve done worse,” he says and gives a slow roll of his shoulder. I know he’s worried about keeping his range of motion there, although after seeing him fight in the hall, I hope his concerns are more kink-related than combat-related.

Because, uh, his range of combat motion wouldn’t be much to mourn.

Together, we go into his room, and I dress him for the day. I help him into his pants and undershirt, and then into the pale gray shirt he’s wearing today, easing it over his bad shoulder and then buttoning it for him. Then the cuff links, my fingers on his wrists, on his palms, brushing, grazing.

He watches me the entire time, his eyes hooded, his breathing steady, even as a muscle flickers in his jaw. I don’t need to look down to know that he’s hard.

I knot his tie as neatly as I can—and then have to untie it and start over when Mark tells me that it looks like it was tied by a cat batting a ball of yarn between chair legs—and then it’s my favorite part, kneeling to put on his socks and shoes. Normally, I dress him with a soldier’s efficiency and a submissive’s respect, only touching him when necessary and when allowed, no matter how tempting it would be to rub my palms up his back or trace the line where his pressed collar rests against his throat.

But his feet?.?.?.?I can’t resist the urge to stroke when he rests his bare foot against my thigh, and I don’t. I don’t resist. I run my fingertips over the intricate architecture of bone and tendon at the top; I press my thumbs to the sole and knead. I caress his ankle, feeling the crisp hair of his leg and the tight taper of muscle coming down from his calf, and I just stare, wondering how it can affect me so much. Wondering why it feels like a crime and a gift all at once to pull the fine wool sock over it and then the other, followed by his shoes, which I lace with tight, even loops.

“I think I’d like to wear my watch today,” Mark says once I’ve finished tying his shoe. He’s forgone the watch since the attack—watches aren’t much use if you can’t lift your wrist to look at them—but I also sense that he’s getting impatient with the pain in his shoulder and with himself for feeling it. And once Mark decides something, it’s done. Leaving the CIA, fucking me, wearing a watch even though his shoulder vibrates with agony whenever he moves his arm—once he’s chosen, the choice is chiseled in stone.

I know this is another thing I can’t fight him on and hope to win, so I get to my feet with a sigh. “I’ll get it for you,” I offer, just as his phone rings.

He nods at me as he answers it with his left hand, walking out toward the kitchen. I go into his large walk-in closet and stare at a section of built-in drawers for a moment, and then start opening them at random. I haven’t seen the watch in here while getting socks or ties or cuff links, but it seems like the most logical place to start.

Coming up empty, I walk back out of the closet and go to one of the bedside tables which brackets Mark’s oversized bed. The table on the right I’m very familiar with, since it’s where lube, condoms, and a handful of Mark’s favorite toys are kept. The one on the left I’ve never opened.

I do now, gratified when I see the watch right away. It rests on a wooden tray inside the drawer?.?.?.?and it’s not the only thing there.

Two rings sit in a shallow depression in the wood. Both are a dark metal—tungsten, maybe—each in a different size. The smaller one is polished, with a ring of black stones wrapped around the middle. The larger one is matte and unadorned.

When I nudge them with my finger, I see that both have the same thing etched inside: 1 Samuel 18:3.

Catholic Sunday School did a good enough job that I know 1 Samuel is in the Old Testament, but that’s about as far as I can get without a Google search, and I don’t want Mark to walk in and find me snooping. Because there can be no doubt that this is private. As private, maybe, as the dead rose in the drawer at Morois House.

I think they’re wedding rings.

I take the watch and close the drawer, thinking of the man in the picture next to Mark’s bed in Cornwall, thinking of Mark alone in the library, going there year after year to mourn.

Was he married to that man? And is it strange that I don’t know the answer to that already? For the last three months, I’ve been his shadow; for the last four weeks, I have given everything to him. It is odd not to know if someone’s been married after that kind of time together, right? Unusual? Especially when I feel so often like he knows everything there is to know about me, my foibles and nightmares and maybe even my stupid, hopeless obsession with him, and I can’t help feeling like it matters somehow, when it comes to him. Like if I can know this about him, then I can expose one of the intricate inner mechanisms that makes him tick.