The Companion Contract

by Solace Ames

  “Is that when you started being Mister No Labels?” I asked.

  “There’s a perfectly good English word for it,” Emanuel said. “Bisexual. I use it myself.”

  “This old argument again.” Miles sighed fondly. I wondered if he’d stuck with that phrase out of sheer contrariness, from some long-ago debate that had turned from anger into passion.

  “It might be an argument if you could learn to speak more than one language, Miles. Until then, it’s just an unqualified opinion.”

  “He’s got you there,” I said. “Labels are just words, and he knows five times more of them.”

  Miles rolled onto his side, the angle of his jawline pointing right at me, and the dagger’s hilt. “What about you then?”

  I didn’t want to stop the easy flow of conversation. I didn’t want to talk about myself either, but every game had its stakes. So I kept my voice even and calm. “I don’t know. Being in the business made me learn a lot about myself real quick, but it also confused me. What I want, what I like, wasn’t that relevant sometimes. I’ve been with women. I’ve been with a lot of women. Sometimes I felt something, most of the time it was just a paycheck. There was one woman I could have had something with, but she was so messed up. Messed up like my friend Chiho, but with her, I can draw boundaries. And this woman was...well, she was kind of the porn ideal. Very blonde and white. And she’d say cruel things to me sometimes, comparing us...” I couldn’t go on. This was insider stuff. They wouldn’t understand it.

  “Then I’m glad you stayed away from her,” Emanuel said. He always said the right thing, and God, I loved him for it.

  “So I don’t know. Maybe I’m bisexual. Or something else. I’ll wait a few years post-retirement to decide.”

  “Good idea,” Miles said. “Amy, I’m sorry if I—”

  “Don’t be sorry. It’s okay. Every job has its occupational hazards. STDs and sexual confusion were mine.”

  “Your man had me sexually confused, stoned and dethroned,” Miles said, grinning. He wasn’t being malicious, I recognized—he was changing the topic so that I was the voyeur instead of the subject under study. I appreciated that. He wasn’t nearly as terrible as he liked to believe he was.

  “How?” I asked. Such a little word. Hardly even there. But they both listened to me so very carefully...

  I could have anything I wanted.

  Anything at all.

  “It was a fight turned something else. We were up against a bed in a hotel room. A bed like this one, actually.” He smoothed over the quilt. Shh. And back, after a languid pause. Shh. He knew how to make the smallest movements count.

  Emanuel’s fingers traced the inside straps of my halter now, outlining tantalizing shapes against my skin. “You can go on,” he said. “Only as long as you don’t speak of regret again.”

  Miles blinked and shivered. “That’s hard.” His voice sounded pleading all of a sudden, calculation abandoned.

  “You can do it,” I said softly.

  I meant that in more ways than one. The power of giving permission swept through me, starting from the top of my body where Emanuel drew his magic shapes, down through my breastbone, my ribs, into the tightness of my stomach, the welcoming triangle of my pelvic bone, curving into the arches of my feet. I kicked my heels off and stretched luxuriously, stiffening and then relaxing.

  Miles watched me with a familiar hungry smile. “Fuck if I know how to feel anymore, without regret. But I’ll try, for you. For both of you.”

  “You were up against the bed,” Emanuel reminded helpfully. He knew exactly what he was doing.

  “Yeah. I was up against the bed. He didn’t have his hand around my throat. It was at my collar.” Miles touched himself as if he’d forgotten he wasn’t wearing a shirt, plucking at an absent collar. That one small movement was the detail that tipped me over. The grace of it, the longing...

  I gathered myself into a crouch, rose from Emanuel’s lap and crawled across the few feet that separated us from Miles.

  “Amy gets whatever she wants tonight,” Emanuel said behind me, his rough low voice as good as his caress. Even though I’d just been given full permission, I followed the pace he’d set. Slow. Deliberate. Until I hovered over Miles, my hands on either side of his chest, looking into his dark, dazed eyes.

  “I kind of figured,” he whispered. He was starting to slip away. But this time, there was no desperation between us. No need to drive the pain away with more pain.

  “It’s okay, Miles. I don’t want anything bad. I just want to know.” I imitated his plucking motion, then returned my hand to pet the hollow above his collarbone, that tender, untattooed triangle of flesh. “And then what happened?”

  “I pushed him away.” Miles raised his hands to me, palms up. He took a deep breath and struck at my shoulders in a mimicry of violence, his hands hot against my skin, Emanuel’s satisfied sigh almost drowning out the faint thudding noise of the push. “And then I pulled him in.”

  Yes. Of course. It couldn’t have happened any other way.

  He grabbed my arms and pulled me down on top of him.

  He dragged me down through time, making the past burst alive in all five senses. Everything we’d ever done together led into this moment—I didn’t have to use Miles to get closer to Emanuel anymore because I was Emanuel, tasting Miles’s darting tongue for the first time, the rich rush of love, and maybe they were doomed from the start but that made the love all the richer.

  “I couldn’t resist,” Emanuel said.

  I was him and I was myself. Both. Doubled. My heart beat twice too loud for my body, and oh God, I burned. I kissed him, covered him, fought to rip my clothes off.

  Emanuel’s cooler hands ran up my sides and plucked at the strings of my halter. The bed shifted as he moved behind me. He was improvising, playing the two of us like fine instruments. The need pulsing between my legs was fucking unbelievable, metaphysical, impossibly sweet and pure and painless.

  Miles didn’t move an inch as I broke the kiss and rose up. He spread his arms out to the side, offering himself. His lips were wet and shining and so were his eyes. I knew he was busy traveling deep inside himself, and wished him all the pleasure on that journey.

  It was time to take my own.

  “Good girl,” Emanuel whispered in my ear. “Steady now.”

  I laughed and spread my knees wider, mounting the man below me. Emanuel helped loosen my leggings and peel them off, then cupped my hips in his palms and rocked me back. He made everything so gloriously easy. When I shivered down onto Miles’s good stiff cock I felt the parting of my flesh like a healing, a sense of satisfied ease, strange like everything about us together.

  Emanuel made the strangeness all right.

  Miles moaned softly, closed his eyes and arched his back, his taut stomach swirling with stars and thorns. I’d seen him look like this in photographs onstage, crucified and overcome. Now I had the front-row seat.

  I licked my lips. “You couldn’t resist.”

  “Perhaps I could have. But I chose not to.” Emanuel’s voice thrummed in my ear. His arms folded around me. He’d taken off his shirt at some point, and the slide of his skin against mine drove me mad with the need to feel and feel and keep feeling. I wanted to be a hundred women and a hundred men and a hundred magic creatures and make love with him in all those bodies, forever.

  His fingers slid down to my labia, petting me where my cunt stretched tight and wet around Miles. Pleasure spiraled at the touch. I spasmed around the heat pushing up inside me, moaned, and fell back against his arms. He held me up and circled my clit, nudging, playing me, giving me almost everything I needed, drawing it out until I cried out wordlessly, too fucking close to even beg. All I could do was quiver against his hand.

  “Soon,” he said, his breath at my throat. He licked there
, right beneath my jawline, a quick taste that triggered something wonderful but scary inside me, way more intense than it had a right to be, lightning in place of a gentle dawn.

  “Fuck, yes,” Miles moaned beneath me.

  “Not you. Not yet.”

  Miles made a fist and beat at the pillow inside him, his teeth glinting through twisted lips. But I knew he’d obey. He wouldn’t come yet.

  Emanuel kept me hovering at the edge. My pleasure was a chord full of promise that echoed without fading.

  He pressed harder, spiraled faster.

  Joy.

  I came, wet and dripping and fucking full of power. Charged with it. Screaming with it. I let myself go, tight and rippling around the shaft inside me—gone, gone, but not too far gone to also love the pleasure I was giving my lovers.

  “Beautiful.”

  All of me came alive. I rocked with the spasms, rode the wave. When the orgasm finally faded it left me strung taut and breathless but still holding on to that amazing feeling of power and life, the swell of it...

  “Oh...”

  Emanuel gripped my inner thighs and bodily lifted me off Miles. I reveled in his strength, drew my own strength from him. He laid me down next to Miles. Our hands touched, then our fingers twined together as if we were plants following some unconscious chemical surge. We were both passive. Both waiting. Through the haze of that tidal orgasm my thoughts started to gather, and the first one to mind was don’t ask him what he wants and then I wonder if Miles is thinking the same.

  When Emanuel lay down against us, his arm stretched across me, just under my breasts, and rose much higher. He stroked a gentle arc across Miles’s trembling chest.

  “I was so mad at you for leaving,” Miles said, his voice faint and breathless, but for all of that, sounding so naked and honest, like he was presenting a fact, channeling a memory too pure for recriminations or regrets.

  “I know,” Emanuel said. “It was family business. I didn’t have a choice.” He spoke in my ear, drawing me into the memory.

  “And you barely made it out alive.” Miles turned his head slightly so that our foreheads touched. “You know I tried to go after him? Made it as far as Bogotá. I remember the air was very thin. I tried to hire someone to take me where Emanuel was going, and they laughed in my face. Do you think you would have followed?”

  “No,” I said. “But I’m a lot more patient than you are.”

  “You’ll be good with him.”

  “Yes,” Emanuel said. “She will be.”

  “Do you want me to go now?”

  “No. Of course not.”

  “Don’t go,” I echoed. My heart felt raw, no distance, closer to sadness as well as joy.

  Emanuel made love to both of us then, with a searing tenderness, kisses deep and slow and demanding. He showed us what we wanted, and we followed happily.

  He had me on my back, driving into my clenching, fully mastered cunt with long, even strokes, his fingers stroking Miles’s face in perfect rhythm.

  Miles, the cat he was, rubbed his face against those fingers and made a primal noise of pure satisfaction.

  “It’s so good,” I moaned. “Thank you. Thank you.” I wanted to beg for his come...then a tiny doubt needled me a second later. Was I only echoing a scene script I’d read so many times before?

  He doesn’t care. It doesn’t matter.

  Nothing existed beyond this bed. Beyond these men and how they made me thrill with every touch, every stroke, every sigh.

  “More,” I begged. “I need your come. Sir. Please.”

  “Cariño.”

  Of course I couldn’t tell the very moment when he filled me, when the first spurt flooded deep inside me, but what I did feel was how his shaft muscles pulsed with the motion of it, how he became almost impossibly thicker inside me, stretching my vagina to the sensual limit. I couldn’t feel his seed, not yet, not until he gave one last shuddering stroke as he growled, and yes, now I could feel it, the hot trickle at my pussy lips already tender from his pounding.

  “Thank you. Yes, oh God, thank you.”

  “Can I have some?” Miles asked, his sly tongue sipping at my ear.

  “All you want.”

  Emanuel rose from me slightly and cupped the back of Miles’s head. “His mouth?” Asking me, asking my permission, because he knew about my issues, my strangeness. He remembered. He cared.

  I nodded agreeably.

  Emanuel guided Miles downward. Pressed his head between my thighs.

  “I like it this way,” I whispered as I stared into his pale eyes that seemed to store light, an ocean of light. “It feels right.”

  Miles’s tongue lapped up and down my slit, diving in where the come welled thickest. I’d never loved a mouth on me so much. I’d never understood. Another man’s wicked tongue worked in me but Emanuel was the one guiding me to this wholeness.

  I forgave myself for everything I’d ever done to my body, every hurt I’d allowed the world to pierce me with.

  I turned it all into pleasure.

  Miles drank me down as I drowned in Emanuel’s eyes.

  Chapter Seventeen

  I dreamed that the ocean rose in the night and took us back to the climate of a dinosaur age. The house adjusted to our new existence, and we swam back and forth to breakfast through the warm, shallow water.

  Gabriel found a gap in his net and wriggled through it, fleeing to deeper ocean.

  Toward the end of the dream, as the morning sunlight crept through the curtains and dragged me into wakefulness, I started to get worried about the fact that I couldn’t breathe underwater. I gasped for air, kicked at the sheets.

  “Amy. Amy.”

  The sound of Emanuel’s voice brought me back home. I hugged his arm like it was a life raft. “I had the strangest dream,” I croaked, my throat painfully dry.

  He brought me water. I told him as much as I could remember.

  “We’re in a time for decisions,” he said, stroking my shoulder. I sat up and leaned against him. I knew he was right. We weren’t just in-between anymore—this was the terminal point.

  Miles stepped from the bathroom, naked except for a towel wrapped around his head. He made me smile. I wished I had a flower to throw at him right now. “Last night was amazing,” he said. “I’m just not sure if it changed anything. Maybe it changed something between you two, but I still see myself on a plane out of California.”

  “I just want you to be happy,” I said. Maybe I should have gotten on my knees and begged him to keep the band together, to abandon his hopeless quest and just let us take care of him. But it wouldn’t be right.

  “I think you should try,” Emanuel said. “Go. Do your best. I’ll miss you, but I’ll always love you more alive than dying.”

  “Thanks.” Miles looked oddly stagestruck, at a loss for further words. He shook his head, the towel fell off into his hands, and he stared at the towel for a while in an almost accusatory way.

  I should have been jealous of Miles. Instead, I felt like I’d just dodged a bullet. I wanted Emanuel to tell me he loved me, but not at the cost of saying goodbye.

  I love you. Now leave.

  No thanks.

  I’d rather live in bittersweet silence.

  We helped him finish packing and called him a taxi for the airport. The house was eerily quiet with only the three of us. The silence wasn’t as awkward as it could have been, because Miles and Emanuel seemed equally at peace with the decision they’d made together.

  We drank coffee in the outdoor kitchen, the three of us. Dressed casually, so the sea breeze ruffled the edges of loose cotton T-shirts. We were close without touching.

  “You look good,” I told Miles. “Healthy.” It was true. He’d filled out a little, gotten some color on h
is cheeks. He looked his age in the best possible way. I hoped that was a good sign he wouldn’t disintegrate on reentry to normal life, like an astronaut leaping back to Earth without a spacesuit.

  “So do you, Amy. Then again, you always do.” He sipped his coffee and darted a glance at Emanuel. “You still look like you should be leading an undead army to pillage Valhalla.”

  Emanuel laughed and shook his head. “You’re the only man who can get away with that.”

  “Don’t I know it.”

  The taxi called from the gate. Emanuel put in the code to let the driver through.

  Everything we’d built was falling quietly apart. Once Miles took that last step away from us, the dream would be dead.

  But we could make a new one.

  Miles took out his book of lyrics from the duffel bag and put it on the table next to his empty coffee cup. I remembered how small it was, but I’d forgotten how perfectly square, and how even the cover had writing on it, jagged, fractured sentences punctuated with spirals and stars. “Give this to Xiomara,” he said. “I’m sure you’ll see her before I will. I wrote her a message in the back. You can read it or not.” He took a deep breath and smiled, his shoulders lifting now that he’d handed over this crushingly heavy little block of paper and ink. “I’d write you something, but I think we said it all last night. Goodbye.”

  “Goodbye, Miles,” Emanuel said. “Que te vaya bien. Take care of yourself.”

  I echoed him.

  Miles slung the duffel bag over his shoulders and walked away.

  By silent agreement, I moved from my chair and sat across Emanuel’s lap. We watched Miles walk away, into the house, waited as he passed through the house, and heard the rumbling of the car engine that took him away.

  “Are you sad?” I asked Emanuel. He put his arms around me. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath, soaking in the sensations: the warm wall of his body, the rich toasted smell of good coffee, the faint sounds of the sea.

  “Yes. But this sadness feels clean.”

  “I know what you mean.”

  “I’ve made other decisions as well, cariño. Many of them. One, I need your word on.”