by Nia Farrell
Without the use of my hands, keeping my balance was a challenge. Managing to take him in my mouth and not impale myself on his length was accomplished only with his help. He fisted himself, finishing each upward stroke with a twist of his hand. He had me lap the pearly fluid from his slotted glans, fed me the first few inches of his substantial length, and started pumping, gradually increasing the depth and strength of his strokes. He was wide enough, his sides fairly scraped my back teeth, but there was no help for that. I could only relax, align, and fight not to vomit when he surged deep enough that I gagged.
He fisted my hair, short though it was, and held me there, eyes watering, saliva building, nose starting to clog and run. “Fuuuck,” he hissed, pulling back to let me breathe, then thrusting deep again, pulling my head down, bending me to his will. He used me for his pleasure, correcting me, directing me, offering praise when I managed something right and threatening punishment if he felt my teeth one more time. After long minutes, he began to ravage my mouth, hips churning, rocking on each upward thrust. There was a telling break in his rhythm, a scant warning given. He pulled me up by the hair, far enough that his manhood popped free. Two strokes with his hand, and he exploded, shooting ropes of creamy ejaculate across my face, my chin, my breasts.
I knew that if I had a mirror, I would see a red nose, tear-stained eyes, and swollen lips. Yet marked with his seed as I was, Edward was looking at me as if I were the most beautiful creature imaginable.
I licked what I could reach with my tongue, hungry to learn his taste as he had learned mine.
Blue flame lit his eyes. His nostrils flared, inhaling our essence. “Lane,” he groaned. “God.”
I said nothing, just tucked it away until I could decide what, if anything, to do with it. Clearly Edward was not gender-biased when it came to carnal knowledge. I longed to be his good girl, but what if he’d rather that I be his good boy? Could I be content in a relationship with a sodomite? Could I hope to make and keep him happy?
Edward untied my hands and checked the circulation. Fetching a dry towel and a wet washcloth, he cleaned me up, then rubbed my shoulders when he noticed that I was favoring them. Feeling very cared for in that moment, I told myself that perhaps learning to live with a sexual deviant would not be so very hard. True, it was a challenge that I’d certainly never envisioned. I knew what he would eventually want of me, knew something of what anal intercourse would entail. He’d already given me a taste of it, first with his tongue, then with his thumb, and it hadn’t been that bad. Not that good, either, but then it was the first time that part of me had been touched by a man. Given his size and experience, and my lack thereof, things were bound to be tender and a bit awkward the first few times.
The stonework of the hotel retained the day’s heat far more than white painted boards, and we spent the night as naked as Adam and Eve, resting atop the sheets, spent from our exertions. My nerves would not let me sleep when we must be up before dawn and at the train station in time for its six a.m. departure. We rose in the dark and dressed for the long day ahead. Arriving at the depot with time to spare, I was grateful for the fresh apples that the concierge had managed to scrounge up for us. We munched as we waited to leave. The crisp fruit would tide us over until we could breakfast aboard the train.
Thankfully, the New Moneys were nowhere to be seen.
Back in Chicago, when Edward had secured rail passage east for us, when he had planned to part ways in Canada and travel on alone, he knew that the train would arrive in Rochester too late to make connections to the City of New York. Traveling as stepbrother and stepsister allowed us to share a room at the Osburn and would again at the Fifth Avenue Hotel, which stood close to where the Democratic National Convention was convened.
We would get there by way of the Erie Railroad. Known for its scenic route and comfortable travel, it used substantially wider tracks than those laid in other parts of the country. I was exceedingly grateful for the kinder, gentler ride, considering that the shops were not yet open and no cushion had been acquired for the tender welts on my bottom.
Still, I was not about to complain. If we’d made the four p.m. train from Rochester to New York City, we’d have traveled all night and missed seeing the mountains and river valleys that I sketched a bit and studied at length, determine to capture what vistas I could.
As greatly as I enjoyed the ever-changing view, I loved watching Edward almost as much. He was interested in my work, and more than once I caught him surreptitiously watching me from behind a book or paper. At one point, my hand cramped and I set my pencil aside, stretching and working my muscles to get the kinks out. He reached across our table and began a massage that nearly brought me to my knees, right then and there. He knew it, too, and smirked in that way of his that was at once endearing and annoying. To reciprocate, I offered to let him look at my sketch book. The hitch in his breath told me the exact moment he stumbled across the picture I’d done of him, abed in Chicago, when he still thought that I was Lane.
He looked at me, inscrutable.
“I did it from memory,” I told him, so he wouldn’t think I’d pulled out a pad and drawn him unawares. “I still want to do a proper session. Sketch you from every angle.” The nude went unsaid. Ours were not the only ears, after all. “And I’d like to shave your chest. Not that there’s anything wrong with your manly thatch, but it hides the muscle definition.”
Good. Now he looked ready to drag me into the changing room, lock the door, and have his wicked way with me. Much better.
“Perhaps aboard ship,” I suggested, lowering my voice to an intimate whisper. “We’ll have days and days to play sailor.”
Fire sparked from his eyes. I sensed an epic ocean voyage ahead of us.
“Elena,” he growled.
I stretched my fingers and rotated my hand. “Edward, dear. Thank you for the massage. You must know that you have very gifted hands. Very. Gifted. Although I doubt that I’m the first person to observe it.”
He arched a brow, wondering at my game. “No,” he said slowly, “you are not.”
It was too soon to confess that I hoped to be the last. I had to be certain, and he had to be ready to hear it. I didn’t believe either one of us was there quite yet.
I tore my gaze away and looked out the window toward a horizon worthy of a wall-sized canvas. “Dear me. I’m afraid I must reclaim my sketchbook and get back to work. Do you mind?”
I thought that he did, a little. He seemed to enjoy seeing himself through my eyes, like a collector of prurient photographs suddenly finding himself the subject of one.
He closed the pad and slid it across to me.
“Just think about it, please.”
His turquoise eyes snapped to meet mine. I dropped my gaze to his chest.
“Shaving?”
“Bloody hell.”
Chapter Eleven
The City of New York was as bad as I feared that it might be. Even at ten o’clock at night, it was noisome, crowded, unbearably hot, and filled with the stench that comes from so many people crowded together.
Exactly the kinds of conditions that made for a hair trigger.
I clung as tightly to Edward as a barnacle to a ship. Clutched harder yet when we were required to take our hotel’s conveyance system, a vertical steam engine, to our room on the sixth floor. The too-close quarters, the unfamiliar sounds, the jarring movements…my white-knuckled grip on his arm was the only thing that kept me anchored to a semblance of sanity.
He managed to pry me off once we were ensconced in our room. I collapsed onto the bed, feeling as fragile as a dandelion. One puff, and I feared that I would fly away in pieces. “Look at me,” he commanded, the vibrato of his voice resonating in my core.
He cupped my face, refusing to let me hide from him. “Breathe,” he said, inhaling when I did, holding it longer before releasing. “Again. Together this time. In. Hold. Exhale. Now push out.”
I expelled the last bit of breath, surprised to feel m
y head clear ever so slightly with the fractional release of my tension.
“Again.” We repeated the exercise.
“And again.”
We did not stop until he was satisfied that I could function once more. “I am going to draw you a bath,” he said, taking off his coat and waistcoat. “Afterwards, we are going to sleep. And nothing more.” He gave me a stern look that brooked no argument. “Tomorrow after breakfast, I shall see about arranging our passage home.”
Home. I’d drifted since leaving Richmond, never quite connecting to Chicago, despite its being the place of my birth. I had chosen it because my father once had, long ago, before my British-born mother persuaded him to move to the Commonwealth of Virginia, founded by English settlers and populated by blue-blooded gentry who rode to hounds and adorned their palatial Tidewater homes with Brussels tapestries and original works of art.
I was limp as a noodle and still fully dressed when Edward came back to collect me. He tsked and prepared to play the lady’s maid. He shed his cravat, undid the top button of his shirt, and rolled up his sleeves, exposing gilded forearms with ropy veins and muscle definition that made my fingers itch for pencil and paper.
I was transfixed, and happy to be so when he freed me of my shoes and clothes. Lifting me in his arms, he carried me into our private bath, lowered me into a tub that he’d filled with warm water rather than hot (due to the temperatures hovering near one hundred these past several days), and saw me safely settled.
He’d added fragrant oil to my bath. Embraced by the scent of gardenias, I closed my eyes and burst into tears.
It had been my mother’s favorite scent.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered, burying my face in a washcloth, more ashamed of the rawness of my emotions than the nakedness of my body, strange though that might seem.
He pulled the cloth from my fingers, refusing to let me hide. “Careful,” he warned, soaping up the washcloth and applying it to the length and breadth of my back in overlapping circles. “I am counting, in case you have forgotten. You already have a date with my knee for teasing me on the train. You do not want to make it worse.”
“Have you thought on it? Shaving?”
He harumphed and washed my neck.
“I don’t have to draw your face,” I told him, in case that was of concern. “But I truly want you to be my Achilles. I’ve a block of marble, just waiting to be given form. I’ll have to sit with it, of course. See if anyone else is in there with him. It will take another model for Patroclus. And a third male, if you insist that I use someone else’s visage rather than your own. Possibly a fourth subject, if Briseis demands inclusion.”
I sighed and rubbed my hands, already feeling the chisel and hammer, imagining the small study, done to scale, that I would carve first.
He paused in his ministrations. “Why?”
I knew what he meant. Not, why Achilles, or why the two male lovers, or why add a woman into the mix, but why him?
I ducked my chin and angled my earnest gaze at him. “Do you really not know how beautiful you are? All of you,” I said emphatically, when he looked as if he might argue. “Hair, hands, face, figure—God, even your feet are perfect.”
Why wouldn’t I want to capture him and make him forever mine?
He scowled and shook his head, blond curls shifting in the gaslight. “It won’t work, you know. We are sleeping tonight, nothing more.”
I coughed a laugh. “So I was told. So I am expecting. If you’re uncomfortable with compliments, Edward…please…feel free to go read your paper. It was kind of you to get me this far. I think I can manage the rest—so long as the convention delegates don’t start dueling in the streets over their respective candidates.”
He gave me a patently omniscient look. “If I had not wired them to place us as high as we could get, we would be on the second floor.”
Close to ground level and whatever sounds happened in cities that never quite seemed to sleep. He’d remembered my breakdown in Chicago. He had done everything in his power to keep it from happening here.
His consideration touched me deeply.
“Thank you,” I whispered, my voice quavering. “Now go read, please, or I shall start to cry and you know as well as I, it’s not one of my better looks.”
He wanted my tears, yes, but ones that he’d brought me to.
Thankfully, Edward did as I asked. I emerged a short time later, wrapped in a towel, scrub faced and yawning, to find him nose deep in a pile of local newspapers: the Daily Star, the Sun, the Times, the Herald, the Tribune, and God knew what else.
The man was an insatiable reader. So far he was managing to control his other, baser appetites.
Another line drawn, daring me to cross it.
Hmmm.
I dropped the towel and climbed into bed, naked as the day that I came mewling into the world, too small to survive, so the attending physician had told my parents. He’d issued my first dare—to cheat Death and live.
I’d been proving men wrong ever since.
“What are you doing?” His gruff tone seemed censorial.
Having noted Edward’s sleeping preferences, I stretched out on my stomach on the right side of the bed, keeping his space on the left hand (sinister, in Latin—appropriate enough, given his proclivities) sacrosanct for now. “I’m going to try to get some sleep in this abominable heat. Speaking of which, why are you still dressed, brother dear? A midnight assignation, perhaps?” I muffled my yawn in my feather pillow and rolled to my side, presenting him with a view of my back…which, to a sodomite, might just prove as tempting a display as my feminine charms. “I hope to be held myself tonight, if Morpheus will have me. He’s been damned elusive of late.”
Like a certain professor of history.
Edward harumphed but did not rise to my bait. Had he taught rhetoric and composition, I might have dangled some participles, but I realized that I was, in fact, too tired to tease him even the least little bit. I had been speaking the truth, as far as sleep was concerned. I’d gotten far too little these past few nights. I was exhausted, almost to the point of feeling weary to the bone in a way that I had not been since the war.
Tonight, he could sleep soundly, free from any advances on my part.
Of course, tomorrow was another day.
*****
I awoke the next morning, feeling like clothes that had been put through a wringer and hung out to dry, cleaner than I’d been but much in need of starch. Edward was in the bathroom, humming as he prepared himself for the day. I was inordinately pleased to hear that he could carry a tune. Music had bolstered my poor spirit on more than one occasion.
The room was still warm, but felt cool in comparison, and although I was still naked, I was at least under a sheet. Whether I had pulled it up in my sleep, or he had covered me, I knew not, but if he had done it, he would expect me to remain covered. If I did not, I was certain that he would cheerfully add to my pending punishment for that bit on the train.
I finger-combed my hair. From the feel of the locks going this way and that, I quickly decided that it was a hopeless mess. A wet comb would help some. Dunking my head in a bowl would be better. Once Edward was gone, I could laze the day away in the bathtub if I wished, moderating the temperature to offset the rise that was sure to come, despite the rumor that the weather was supposed to improve. Ninety-five degrees from ninety-nine was still damnably hot.
Edward strode into the room, fresh shaved and buck naked. His uncircumcised phallus hung like a fat sausage even in its flaccid state. I was reminded of something I’d seen, a competition of sorts, back in my army days, among men with too much time on their hands, desperately missing home and drowning their sorrows in contraband drink.
Daniel had bet on himself, and won. I suppose, if there was luck involved, it was better than he usually had, playing the horses.
Tears sprang into my eyes and I swiped at them. Edward stopped and stared. “It’s not you,” I said. “It’s just…”
“Nothing,” I murmured, watching him watch me as he dressed. “I’m fine. Really. Just a little heartsore, I think. Surely nothing that breakfast and a bath won’t ease. Bacon works magic, you know. The cure for most ills, where I am concerned.”
He paused from buttoning his shirt. “I was going to arrange to have your lunch sent up. Would you like to breakfast here as well? You’re welcome to eat with me, but it will mean riding the iron beast down and back.”
I remembered the cramped space, the unnatural lift, the unholy noises. My churning stomach clenched painfully at the thought of repeating the experience. “Here, I think. If you don’t mind.” I preferred to keep my breakfast down, if possible. “Bacon and something mild, if you please. Oatmeal and fruit. Fresh or canned, it does not matter.”
Edward nodded, then turned his attention to finding his cravat and diamond stick pin. I watched him tie it, using the mirror that hung near the door, making swift work of it with those magic fingers of his. I’d knotted enough cravats to be suitably impressed.
He lifted his chin and checked his handiwork. “Are you absolutely certain that you will be fine?” he asked smoothly, judging its perfect symmetry with a critical eye. His gaze met mine in the mirror. If there was a hint of mild annoyance at the problems I continued to create for him, his concern for me tempered his tone.
“Brother Edward,” I said, “I survived Gettysburg. I think I can manage here. Heaven knows, there is plenty to read, and I can work on fleshing out some of the sketches that I did on the train while the scenery is still fresh in my mind.” I didn’t tell him that it would forever be exactly as I’d viewed it. The perfection of my visual memory was a blessing and a curse. For better or worse, once something was seen, I could never erase it. “Go forth and conquer. When you return, you can show me your spoils of war—souvenirs of the convention and what not.”
“I hope the ‘what not’ will be two first class tickets to London on the next available steamship. Securing those is my priority this morning. All else will follow, yes?”
