The Companion Contract

by Solace Ames

  Miles stared into my eyes, left fist clenched around the handcuffs, the blue veins of his inner wrists as tangled and beautiful as a map of a river delta.

  “I can hurt you,” I said gently. “I’ve done it before. To other men and women. Hurt them until they screamed, until they forgot their own names. Are you afraid? You’re not afraid of me, are you?”

  “No.”

  Good. I was a little scared of myself right now, but I didn’t want Miles to be. “Then show me. Handcuff yourself.”

  I found the trigger of his pride and pulled it hard. His acceptance, the harsh sound of metal coming home into metal, was pure music.

  “Thread it through the railing and close it around your right wrist. I want you on your back. You can decide whether you want to be blindfolded. After that, you’re not going to have many choices, though.”

  He moved according to my instructions. He couldn’t even answer the question about the blindfold. We were going over another edge, where he’d lose language, except I wasn’t leading anymore—he was hurling himself down and I had to control his descent.

  I studied his outstretched body in the slanting light. He was made to move, to bend and twist and writhe, and catching him in a moment of still awareness was a rare and precious thing.

  “No blindfold then,” I said.

  I took out the scissors and rope from the same pocket in my suitcase the handcuffs came from. His clothes were thin and age-worn, giving way to the path of the blade as if they wanted to be off him. Snick. I hated to waste anything, even these tattered clothes, so I’d give the rags to the caretaker. Or maybe Gabriel could play with them. I didn’t hold any grudges. Snick. Miles closed his eyes and shivered as the cold, blunt edge of the blade grazed over the tensed muscle of his upper thigh. Snick.

  “Did he touch you like this?” I asked, just to see if he could still talk. I didn’t really expect an answer.

  “Yes.” His voice was low, but just as rich as when he sang. “A long time ago. It’s over.” I caught more resignation than regret in the answer.

  I decided not to mention Xiomara’s name. Not yet.

  I pulled the ruined clothes away from his body. The friction did nice things to his cock, got it half hard and twitching. The color was appealing, the shaft the same paleness as the rest of him and the head dark and flushed. I rubbed the blunt edge of the scissors up and down the base to see what would happen.

  He growled and got harder, fast.

  I raised up his legs. Faded marks like cat-scratch scars ran along the inside of his knees: needle tracks.

  I took strips of the T-shirt and wound them around his knees, to cushion the rope. Because the rope needed to be tight. It was always a delicate balance. I’d had this done to me, and I’d done it in return. Versatility was a valuable quality in the business.

  My goal was to stay impassive, egoless, but I couldn’t help the surge of pride. I let it rise, let it pool in the center of my body, and then let it pass through me. I couldn’t have what I really wanted, but this was good enough. I pressed the heel of my hand against my mound, right above my clit, and while Miles still had his eyes closed I ground against myself in a quick, hip-swiveling circle. Emanuel’s face flashed before my eyes, like lightning, and I bit my tongue to keep from making a sound.

  A little pain melted into a greater pleasure.

  I tied his raised knees to the railing. A spreader bar would have been useful, for ease of access, but I could improvise. If he struggled, he probably wouldn’t hurt himself.

  I didn’t think he’d struggle. Even in his absolute vulnerability, Miles had his own pride.

  “You look good,” I told him, keeping my voice soft and soothing. “I’m just going to clean you up a bit.” I’d wanted to shave him, but honestly, I was getting impatient to fuck a strong reaction out of him. So I used the scissors, clipped the curly, silky hair all around his sac and at the edges of his perineum. Snick snick snick. Deliciously clinical. As neat as I wanted him to be. Yes, I was a sick little bitch and I didn’t care—God knows I could have turned out a lot worse.

  He didn’t make another sound.

  He wouldn’t be silent for much longer.

  I used a hand towel wet with warm soapy water to clean off any traces of clipped hair. Ran a soft, dry cloth up and down his crack. Rubbed lotion into his skin. Men hardly looked like men, bound back and presented like this—they looked like women. Or toys. Toys with one less hole to play with, but still pretty in their own way. I crawled onto the bed, positioned myself between his legs, parted his knees and ran my fingers down his crack, massaging the lotion in, going further and further each stroke until I was circling the tight, rhythmically clenching ring of his asshole.

  “He’s ready for you now,” I said into the air.

  Oh, that got a reaction. His eyes sprang open, and he raised his head, scanned the darkened room to see that we were alone, and glared at me. “God fucking damn you,” he spat.

  I put my hand across the dagger at his throat and pressed him back down into the mattress. “It’s just you and me tonight, baby. I don’t care if you hate me. You’re still going to take the pain.”

  “Bring it on, bitch,” he choked out.

  I slapped him across the cheek. And again, backhand. “First taste.” I felt love in my heart for the first time that night. Tainted love was still love, after all. “What did he do to you?”

  “He made me give her up. Xiomara...” He closed his eyes and clenched his teeth, overcome by a much greater pain than I would ever give him. I wasn’t that cruel. Maybe I wasn’t cruel at all, because just then, I wished I could cry the tears he couldn’t.

  I took up his own belt and whipped him. He convulsed against the ropes, his feet kicking out helplessly. I stole the words from his mouth, raised red welts across his bent-back thighs. I paced around the bed, marking him and marking him until he wasn’t pretty anymore, just a gasping, shivering, moaning animal. With every crack of the doubled leather across his lean flesh, so close to the bone, an electric jolt shot up my arm and down to my slit, centering me, a feeling that wasn’t quite pleasure...nothing that simple, goddamn it. Maybe I’d forgotten to feel on my own—I’d become a vampire living on borrowed emotions, even less human than Miles, sliding into any role that the men behind the cameras wanted me to play.

  But there weren’t any cameras in this house.

  I was on my own. By my own will, I’d stepped into the pale king’s court. I wanted to be part of this story, this fucking crazy, gothic, impossible story. Their story.

  I licked at the curve of his ear and whispered, “Stay.”

  He answered in a moan beyond any language.

  I didn’t take off my clothes, even though I was soaking wet with the weird pleasure-fear. I just strapped on right over my shorts and knelt between his legs again. The dildo was big and ridged and the color of pale skin. It didn’t feel like mine, it felt like another man’s cock. Perhaps that was how it would feel to Miles. I went to work with the lube, sliding in with slick, relentless fingers, exploring the lovely warmth of his secret flesh. An alien weight bobbed between my legs, changing my center of gravity and making me feel more powerful and dizzier all at the same time.

  “You’re a strong man,” I told him. “You can take this. Fucking open for me.”

  “Oh God...”

  “I’m going to make you feel like God. Do it. Now.”

  “Ah—”

  He relaxed enough for me to slip the head in, just the bulbous head, and I wrapped my fist around the shaft and waited for a while as his body found a new equilibrium.

  “Good boy. Good boy.”

  I pushed into him another few inches and ground my hips down, circling and circling until I knew I’d hit the right spot. I could tell by the noises he made. He was the one who sounded like a bird now.
Even though he clenched his jaw shut to keep in the shameful cries, they escaped into the air between us.

  He sounded so sweet. I wouldn’t chain him like Emanuel had—I’d let him float free after his fix tonight—but God, I understood the temptation.

  I fucked into him all the way, slow and hard, and jerked his straining cock until he came onto his heaving stomach. He was howling curses all the while. I dragged my fingers through his come, massaged it into his skin like lotion, leaned over him to slip my come-soaked fingers into his mouth. It seemed right. I didn’t really care if he liked it or I liked it. It was demanded. Ritual.

  Although I think he liked it a little.

  I didn’t just shove my fingers into his mouth as I fucked him. I pressed down his tongue with my knuckles, wriggled his teeth apart, shoved and forced and shoved until my whole fucking fist was in his mouth and he gagged desperately around it. My woman’s fist in his agonized, pretty mouth. I slammed my hips against his ass even harder, driving deep inside him.

  “I’m in good shape,” I said, gasping but still in control. I’d found the right rhythm. “I can do this for a long time. Tell me what you think, hmm? Tell me, baby.”

  His teeth ground against my pulse point but didn’t break the skin. His body sang around me.

  A little pain. A greater pleasure.

  I wasn’t going to fool myself—this was nothing but another fix for Miles. A rush of endorphins. But it meant something more for me. I felt like—

  I felt like Emanuel.

  In your name, I prayed. My love was sick and hopeless and tainted, but it was mine.

  * * *

  I’d forgotten to draw the curtains last night, and the first peek of sunlight woke me from uneasy dreams.

  I slipped out of bed and closed the curtains all the way, for the sake of Miles’s beauty sleep. I left him unbound and huddled under the covers, threw on a cotton shift dress and walked out of the house and down toward the Pacific Ocean.

  My arms were a little sore. Swinging a belt worked different muscles than usual, I guess.

  The wooden stairs were still in shadow, so I watched my bare feet carefully and held on to the railing. Once I got down to the beach and looked up, the sun’s rim was flame-orange, and a sword of the same color stretched across the ocean toward me. It really did look like a flaming sword, until the sun rose a little higher and it splintered into less apocalyptic rays of light.

  The vision was so dazzling I didn’t immediately notice the man swimming to shore.

  Emanuel.

  For once I didn’t censor my own mind. I didn’t force myself to think of him as human. I let myself appreciate his form in all its rareness, without feeling guilty.

  There was a lot to appreciate. Take an icon of Black Jesus carved out of mother-of-pearl and animate it with lightning, and you might come close. He cut through the low, lapping waves and I couldn’t look away, not even for a second. Not even when he rose to his feet and walked toward me, all massive shoulders and slim hips and gleaming with salt water. I curled my toes into the wet sand and held steady. Stop. Stop looking at him like that. I’d gone beyond fascination into straight-out worship, and I’d lost the way back.

  It helped to remember Miles. To remember what I’d done in the house above us. Emanuel was made of flesh and blood, and he had soft spots—the diagonal slash across his chest proved that, and so did the presence of Miles.

  Maybe I was even more lost than I realized, if I loved his weakness as much as his strength.

  “Good morning,” I said. “I think Miles is going to stay for a while.”

  “Thank you.”

  He took my hand and led me back to the stairs. We sat on the lowest rung, where we were shielded from the rising sunlight by the low cliff. His hand was ice-cold from the ocean but warmed quickly, and the smell of salt in my nostrils was better than any perfume.

  “It must be hard to stay away from the sun,” I said. I probably sounded like an idiot but I didn’t care, because I was desperate to build something between us that wasn’t centered around Miles.

  “Sometimes. It used to be harder. We come from an island off the Pacific Coast in Colombia, and we fished. The sun is very strong there. My father also had albinism, and skin cancer took him young. A tumor ate away his face. He swam into the ocean one night and never came back.”

  “How old were you?”

  “Six,” he said, matter-of-fact.

  I could see him in my mind’s eye: a small, pale boy, shielding his eyes from the sun and staring out into the ocean. “I’m sorry.”

  “I guard myself well. But the world is getting warmer and brighter as our factories pump carbon into the atmosphere. I worry about my daughter, the one like me.”

  “The oceans are going to rise too. I’m sorry.” I don’t know why I kept apologizing. He stroked the palm of my hand with his now-warm fingers, and a deep sense of peace washed over me. Everything would be all right, even if the world burned and drowned.

  “We lived on a small island, very close to the coast. Less than a mile wide. There was a cliff on the coast side and a steady spring of fresh water. My people came from escaped slaves. They went deep into the forest and built armed camps, dared the slave catchers to follow them and lived free for hundreds of years.”

  “That’s a really epic history. Wow. Do you know where they came from in Africa?”

  “No, the knowledge was lost a long time ago. Somewhere in West Africa, that is all we know. And there were indigenous peoples who intermarried with the people of the palenques, the free camps. We have their blood. Not so much in my close family, but I had distant cousins with straighter hair and high noses.” He turned to look directly into my face, studying me with those intense eyes.

  “I have a teeny little nose,” I said stupidly.

  He touched the bridge of my little nose with the side of his finger, tracing the curve, and smiled. “You’re entirely beautiful. I want to hear your family’s story. All of it. As much as you know, back through the generations.”

  I couldn’t absorb the compliment. I’d dissolve and lose the power to speak. So I pretended I hadn’t even heard it. “Usually, I don’t want to talk about my family. But for you, I will. I trust you.”

  “I’m glad I’ve earned that.”

  Goddamn, I’d forgotten to breathe. I took a deep lungful of fresh air, and my head cleared enough to ask the question I really needed to ask. “Who’s Xiomara?”

  “Another relative,” he said without hesitation. “Younger. Isabel’s generation. I moved her from Bogotá to Los Angeles and sponsored her. She’s a gifted musician.”

  “Miles said you took her away from him.”

  He sighed. “Xiomara was at a vulnerable time in her life when she met Miles. That was five years ago, at the first failed reunion. It’s true, I made him end things. Xiomara did well afterward. She graduated from college, and only holds a small grudge against me for what I did. But Miles...”

  “Miles freaked out.” That was a pretty safe guess.

  “Oh, yes. He went back to New York and married Sarah. They met in a rehab stay and dragged each other back down.”

  So many women crowding around Miles. Xiomara, Sarah, heroin, me. “The junkie nurse,” I said. Then I felt bad for calling her that. She must have had it harder than Miles, after all.

  “I look at Xiomara as a goddaughter. There was never anything romantic between us. I can’t say the same for Miles.” He smiled again, crooked and rueful.

  “I was wondering about that.”

  “He can be very...” He made an impatient noise with his tongue against his teeth.

  “Provocative?”

  “A good word.”

  He’ll take a strong hand, Emanuel had told me.

  “Are you seeing anyone now?”

>   “I was with Jacinth for the last few months. I rarely enjoyed her company out of the bedroom. It’s over, in any case.”

  “So who’s the bigger drama queen, her or Miles?”

  He laughed. “Miles, by far. But he wouldn’t treat a woman like you the way Jacinth did.”

  “A woman like me? I don’t know what that means anymore.”

  “People are unkind to you.”

  “Oh yeah. They jerk off with one hand and point with the other. But I’m used to it.” God, that sounded pathetic. I wrenched myself to my feet and took a step up toward the house, my back to the rising sun.

  “Never with me,” I heard him say.

  I muttered a goodbye and ran the rest of the way to the house. I was panting and feverish by the time I got back to my room. Emanuel kept terrifying me, making me act like a fool, this time with tenderness. He had feelings for me, but they were the wrong kind of feelings. Too protective. I didn’t need another father. The thought twisted my stomach, and I bypassed the bed and went straight to the bathroom and knelt in front of the toilet like it was a fucking altar until my stomach quieted.

  At the sink, I ran some cold water into my palm and drank it down. I could taste a little of the sea in the back of my throat, but maybe that was just salt from my skin. My face wouldn’t come into focus in the mirror. What if I’d never gone down to the ocean? What if I’d only just now jolted awake from sleep paralysis, and the possibility that Emanuel could have set Jacinth aside for me was a sick, sad wish fulfillment, an idea almost too bizarre for a dream?

  But there were traces of sand between my toes. No, I was still sane.

  If I lived in this house much longer, I wasn’t sure I’d stay that way.

  * * *

  Miles stayed. I stayed. Juan Carlos didn’t heal well. He probably had cat scratch fever. He could barely make it downstairs for lunch, much less play bass. Emanuel sent him off to a relative in Long Beach who was a nurse. Maybe she was even a nurse Miles hadn’t slept with yet.