Not Quite a Husband

by Sherry Thomas

  Callista took to her suddenly enlarged family like a fish to water. But for Bryony it was too late. By that time she’d already turned resolutely inward. Humans, herself included, held no interest for her except as living machines, mind-bogglingly intricate, beautiful systems that somehow housed individuals not quite worthy of the miracle of their physical bodies. In due time, she left home without a backward glance, studied with the single-minded focus of those who cared for little else, and practiced with a cool, impersonal dedication.

  And forgot that she’d once wanted pageantry, companionship, and love.

  Leo asked for a bath the next day—he’d come to be in a rather medieval state of hygiene. The tub was set up for him in the bathing tent. He undressed, set himself down in the steaming water, and closed his eyes in the enjoyment of it. Several minutes later, someone entered the tent behind him. He first thought it was a coolie, bringing in more buckets of water. But he did not hear anything being set down.

  He turned halfway around. It was Bryony, standing just inside the tent flaps, holding a cloth bag in one hand and a stool in the other.

  “Why are you here?”

  “To help wash you,” she said.

  He looked at her with more than a little disbelief. Their ayah was Hindu, not Muslim, and could therefore, presumably, be persuaded to help him with the bath. Failing the ayah, they had no shortage of other lackeys, any one of whom could be prevailed upon to scrub a back, pour some water, and hand him a towel. There was no need for her to trouble herself.

  “I’m unclothed,” he said.

  Not that she hadn’t seen him plenty in the past few days, changing his clothes regularly so that they could be laundered.

  “I imagine you are since you are in a bathtub.”

  She unbuttoned one sleeve and rolled it up, in neat, creased folds, exposing her arm inch by inch and stopping only well past her elbow. Then she did the same with her other sleeve.

  He was not easily moved by the sight of a woman undressing. But with her, everything was different. The sight of her removing her gloves used to make his heart beat faster. And in the library of the Wyden town house, he, no stranger to the female anatomy, had been wholly seduced by what on any other woman would have been a most prim neckline—he’d never seen her shoulders, let alone the swell of her breasts, which she’d traced absentmindedly with one thumb as she flipped the pages of the encyclopedia, as if she were unfamiliar with the topography of her own body.

  “Lean your head back,” she said.

  He did. She poured warm water over his hair and washed it with a bar of Castile soap, her fingernails scraping his scalp gently. When she was done, she poured more water over his hair. The water collected in a bucket she’d set under the edge of the tub.

  She toweled his hair before sitting down on her stool by the side of the tub. From the cloth bag she’d brought she took out a piece of sea sponge, briefly submerged it underwater to moisten it, then soaped it with the meticulousness of a surgeon preparing for an operation.

  Her hands were wet. Her forearms too glistened. Lovely, smooth, wet skin. His breaths came in a little shallower. She started at his left shoulder and washed him down to his fingertips. Then she changed sides and did the same to his right arm, her gaze staying well away from the center of the tub, where the water, though turning slightly opaque with suds, hardly disguised his reaction.

  The tent was warm and dimly misty with the steam from the bath. Her face was dewy and flushed. He licked the back of his teeth. He wanted to lick her teeth: There was a slight chip to her front tooth that he’d wanted to lick since he sat down to dinner that first night at her father’s town house.

  He lifted his hand and undid the top button of her blouse. She rose immediately, knocking over the stool.

  “Please don’t do that.”

  She rounded behind him, sponged and rinsed his back. Then she returned to his side and tapped on his kneecap, which was above the water, to indicate that he should raise his foot to the rim of the tub.

  From where she now stood it was impossible for anyone not three-quarters blind to miss what had happened to him below his waist. And did she really think that she of all people could bathe him without provoking this very reaction?

  The sponge made its way up the length of his leg. It was soft and just slightly grainy against his skin. She was efficient about it—swift, firm strokes, no teasing, no dawdling.

  And yet his arousal only burgeoned. The sponge brushed his erection. He hissed. As if she hadn’t heard, she moved to the other side of him and tapped on his other knee. Again she washed him to almost the top of his thigh.

  He considered defining cock-teaser for her and decided he was being much too harsh. This was Bryony, who was probably doing her best to give him a proper bath while ignoring his rampant erection.

  She scrubbed his torso and his abdomen. He thought they were done, but she rolled her sleeves further up and knelt down. She reached underwater to his midsection. He sucked in air. The sponge lapped at his scrotum. And below and to the sides of it, light, smooth strokes on skin that was extraordinarily susceptible to touch. He swallowed. And swallowed again.

  The sponge climbed. It moved up the trunk of his erection, skimmed around the head, slid down, then up again. The sensations of it … as if she were an electrical source. Or a wildfire.

  Then it was no longer the sponge touching him, but her bare hand. A skimmer, almost like the brush of a fishtail. But it was still too much after nearly three and a half long, starved years. He came, his hips tilting, his facing contorting, his throat working sounds of hopeless pleasure.

  When he opened his eyes, she stood a few steps away by the foot of the tub, her arms held stiffly at her sides. The sea sponge floated just beneath the surface of the water.

  “I assume you lost the sponge and were feeling around for it,” he said. He could not imagine that it could have been anything but an accident.

  She made no response for a long moment. And then, “Shall I rinse you?”

  There was nothing else for it. He rose to his feet. Her gaze swept him. Then she looked away and hurried to the buckets of water that had been brought earlier just for this purpose.

  Warm water sluiced over him. When all the soap residue had been rinsed from him, she held out the towel for him.

  “I’ll let you dress now.”

  After having seen him in the altogether and brought him to orgasm, however accidental?

  “Are you sure you are the same person who refused to let me remove my nightshirt when we were married?”

  “If God wanted men to go to bed unclothed, he would not have made nightshirts,” she said, already outside the tent. “And besides, you removed your nightshirt anyway on certain occasions.”

  When their conjugal relations had become more awkward, not less, with time, he’d stopped coming to her at bedtime. Instead, he’d come in the witching hours of morning, when she was fast asleep, and made love to her then.

  For several days things seemed to thaw inexplicably between them. He smiled more often. Spoke more at dinner. And looked at her in ways that made her breath catch and her face burn.

  And for those several days she thought she’d had frightfully vivid erotic dreams. Until one night she woke up to find herself naked and impaled, her ankles on his shoulders.

  She couldn’t stop—not him, not herself. She could only whimper and pant and moan helplessly.

  The next day she’d asked him to desist. She could not live like that, so thoroughly in his power. But of course she did not say that to him. She only listed how important it was for her to get her night’s sleep and that he was welcome to exercise his conjugal rights at any other time, but not when she was asleep.

  He’d listened very quietly as she’d delivered her speech. Then he left without giving any response. That night she’d awakened screaming with a climax brought on by his lips and tongue. And of course she could only shudder futilely as he entered her, whispering in her e
ar that one day she would return the favor.

  The next day she spoke to him again, this time in sharper tones. For her trouble, she found herself bent over the edge of the bed, her feet on the floor, her legs pulled wide apart, trembling too close to the edge of pleasure to wield any mastery over the situation.

  Her requests to halt these nocturnal jaunts were met with stares more and more hostile—and pleasures more and more addictive. She feared the pleasures. She feared him, especially when he promised her that one day she would beg him to fuck her. Because she might.

  And on it went. Until she couldn’t go to sleep for fear of what he would do to her that night. What he would make her do. Until she almost killed a patient because she was so under-rested and distraught.

  That evening she went home, bolted all the doors to her chamber, and never let him into her bed again for as long as they lived under the same roof.

  He’d gone to her in her sleep because he was tired of playing the lion to her martyr. He wanted a chance to hold her and touch her without being made to feel that he somehow defiled her.

  He hadn’t meant to go further than that, but as he’d lain next to her, she’d turned and fitted herself to him. Her body, always so rigid, had been as pliant as a belly dancer’s. He had not been able to help himself. He’d disrobed them both and made love to her. And she’d put her arms about him and clutched him tight to her for the very first time—asleep, but whispering his name.

  Leo, she’d said. Leo. Leo. Leo. And he’d emptied into her like a dam breaking.

  It frightened him, the hold she had over him, that in one moment of crushing pleasure he would forget all his resentment and hopelessness. But the sweetness of it, he could not get enough of it—he could not get enough of her, his wife of the witching hours.

  Perhaps this could be a new beginning for them. He could woo her with lovemaking, something as sweet and artful as spun sugar, a meringue of sensations, a froth of kisses and caresses to float her to the clouds.

  He wanted it, how he’d wanted it, that newlywed idyll they never had, that halcyon of mad corporeal infatuation. If he had it, a year, a month, or even a solid week of it, he could change her, repair the misalignment of their temperaments, and remold their marriage into something lovely and worthwhile.

  Instead she banished him altogether. They grew further and further apart. And their marriage dissolved like a pearl in vinegar.

  The summer night sky over the Hindu Kush, domed by the Milky Way’s mage light, was infinitely splendid. Strewn against this craggy luminosity, millions of tiny stars shone, a diamond heist gone awry.

  Bryony left the flaps of her tent open, the next best thing to sleeping under the stars. If only she could sleep, that was. But the otherwise inoffensive camp bed felt like a heap of rocks against her back. And she was hot in the frustratingly still air—Chitral Valley was a good two thousand five hundred feet lower than the village of Balanguru in Rumbur Valley, and noticeably warmer in climate. The collar of her nightgown chafed her throat. Within the long flannel sleeves, her arms sweltered.

  She wanted what she should not want, what she could not have.

  She wanted him.

  The bath had been her way of scratching her itch, to touch him under a semi-legitimate guise. The weight he’d lost and the illness had not been enough to diminish what months of strenuous daily exertion had done for him. His body was efficient and compact, his shoulders strong, his abdomen ridged, his legs long-thewed and shapely.

  And his skin, so very wonderful to the touch. When she’d brought the sponge down to his forearm and her wrist had slid over the hair on his skin, she’d almost jerked her hand away in surprise. She’d forgotten how different a man felt.

  Or perhaps she never truly knew.

  I assume you lost the sponge and were feeling around for it.

  No, she’d let go of the sponge to touch him. But she’d been too timid to grab him along his length—it seemed an awfully rude thing to do. She’d only barely brushed him, in the end. And his response had been truly out of all proportion to her hardly-at-all caress.

  But it had shaken her and aroused her. And the memories of it had continued to arouse her for the remainder of the day, though she’d taken pains to avoid him around the camp. And now the lack of him was a physical torment. Her skin was oversensitive for the want of his touch. Her head, already aching from her inadequate rest during his illness, throbbed with frustration. Certain other parts of her throbbed too, biological imperative exerting itself at the worst possible moment.

  She raised herself to a sitting position and shoved her fingers into her hair, digging her nails at her scalp. After a few minutes she got up and ducked out of the tent.

  Overhead the sky was so saturated that it was a wonder it did not rain stars, the way an over-festooned ball gown shed seed pearls and crystal drops deep into a waltz. The mountains were massive shadows. The silence was unearthly, the eerie quiet of the deepest night, when birds dozed and nocturnal creatures slunk soundlessly on their unseen hunt.

  She walked the thirty feet or so that separated their tents and slipped into his tent to check on him. He slept, his breaths quiet and steady. She knelt down, took his pulse—normal—and his temperature —also normal. He was young and hard-wearing; by morning he would be back to his old self.

  She tucked in the sheet more snugly about him. There, all done. Now she would go back to her tent and try again to sleep.

  Except she didn’t move. She remained as she was and listened to his hypnotically easy breaths. Then she touched him again.

  Her hand landed on his shoulder. She followed its outline to his throat, then his chin. He’d shaved before the bath, but already the beginning of stubble scraped her palm. Her hand shook—the rest of her shook too—but whatever it was that drew her toward him was more powerful than her much-justified, tremor-inducing fear.

  She leaned down and kissed him, his neck, his cheek, his ear. He smelled still of her Castile soap, of oil of olive from faraway Iberia. It made her lightheaded, the feel of him, the scent of him, the madness of what she was about to do.

  She unbuttoned her nightgown at the throat and pulled it over her head. It had affected her strangely to know that he’d been in the same countries she had, as if they’d been fellow refugees, fleeing from the same wreckage. That did not diminish the stupidity of what she was about to do. But stupid things had a gravity and a momentum of their own; they crushed good thinking and resistance as colonists with guns and cannons overcame spear-throwing natives.

  Her heart hurt. But her skin felt delicious, freedom after an eon of oppression. “Leo,” she said softly, more to herself than to him. Why must it always be you, Leo?

  She pulled off the sheet she’d just carefully tucked in around him. He wore nothing to cover his torso. His chest was smooth and taut. She drew a finger down the center of it, from the base of his throat to his navel, then she pressed her lips to his skin and kissed the trail she’d drawn.

  Her hand traveled further down the center of him. She was not surprised to find him hot and hard. It seemed almost … inevitable.

  He slumbered on, even as she climbed onto the camp bed, straddling him, careful to keep her weight on her own hands and knees. Even as she grazed her nipples against his torso. Even as she took him inside her.

  The slip and slide of her hair on her own skin was an unfamiliar, decadent feeling. Where his sheets had shifted, her knees sank into the raw canvas of the camp bed. The smallest movements on her part brought her floods of sensation. She heard herself murmur, little prayers at the altar of Eros. What did she want? Surely not this terrible loneliness, this complete isolation in the midst of the most physically intimate act possible?

  Then her prayers were answered and a long chain of climaxes began. She shuddered and cried out in desperate gratitude. “Leo. Leo,” she breathed. “Leo.”

  Suddenly he joined her in it. His hands clamped over her thighs, his pelvis raised, his breaths tumbled out
in gasps. He was rough and massive against her. She couldn’t help coming again, her entire body seizing with the violence of her pleasure.

  And then her mind seized in dismay. For he touched her, tracing a line down the center of her torso as she had done with him.

  “Bryony,” he murmured. “Bryony.”

  On the day Bryony asked for an annulment, Leo had bought her a present: a W. Watson & Sons microscope. An imposing piece of equipment, with a rotating slide holder, two substage condensers, a camera lucida attachment, and a magnificent finish of polished brass that gleamed like Cupid’s golden arrow.

  Why the present? He had not a single reason. He didn’t even know whether she needed a new microscope. But sometimes the males of the species brought home shiny, beautiful things, with hope burning in their hearts.

  The microscope and its numerous accessories had come in a handsome mahogany case. He laid the case on the desk of the study, then crossed the room to pour himself a drop of brandy.

  “Do you have a moment? I need to speak to you.”

  He turned around in astonishment. She stood at the door of the study, dressed in a jacket-and-skirt set of blue silk, her usual uniform for heading to the hospital. Except it was the middle of the afternoon—he hadn’t seen her home during the day in God knew how long.

  “Certainly,” he said. “Could I get you something to drink?”

  She declined and took a chair in front of the desk. “Would you like to have a seat also?”

  He sat down behind the desk, across from her. She sat stiffly, her face wan, her lips pinched, her eyes deeply shadowed. And she smelled of some strange chemical substance, not carbolic acid, but the offensive pungency of ammonium. Yet he’d never been so glad to be near her, to be on speaking terms again.

  She placed her hands on the desk, her fingers interlaced, and began to address him.

  Beyond the first sentence, her words washed through his hearing like a random sampling of the Oxford English Dictionary. He stared at the movement of her mouth, the shaping and reshaping of her lips, and felt the vibration of her speech against his eardrums, but understood nothing beyond that she meant to push him off a cliff.