Page 11 of Salt Kiss
It means nothing, and even if it did, it’s not like... It doesn’t change anything.
“Maybe Mark’s brought that little blond back to him,” Andrea says. There’s something pointed in her voice, and Mark doesn’t miss it.
“Yes, maybe,” he says. There’s something equally sharp in his voice now, sharper even, and Andrea looks away. Something about the blond is a point of contention between them. I wonder if the blond is a woman and then shake off the twinge the thought brings. Even if the blondisa woman, that doesn’t mean Mark only likes women. And anyway, it has nothing to do with me.
“What Mark does with his submissives is his business,” Dinah says, and Andrea gives a tight smile.
“I never said otherwise.”
“Good night, all,” Mark says before this exchange can go any further, and then he looks at me. “Tristan?”
I follow him as he turns and leaves the hall—a hall which has gotten more raucous and indecent as the hours crept by—and survey the people dancing, crawling, writhing in each other’s laps as we walk to the doors leading out. It will take some getting used to, assessing a place like Lyonesse for threats rather than a city street or a mountain village, but the challenge is a little thrilling. Very different kinds of dangers await here.
I think of Arjun’s long fingers sifting idly through Evander’s hair.
When we get to the elevators, Mark stops. “I can see myself up,” he says.
“Yes, sir.”
“What did you think of tonight?”
I hesitate. I think Mark is the kind of man who appreciates an honest answer, but I still want to be diplomatic. “It was different,” I finally reply.
“Of course,” he says with something like a smile. And then, with his eyes a brilliant blue in the light of the glass hallway, he says, “There will be worse than Evander kneeling on the floor, you know.”
I don’t ask how he knows watching Evander made me uncomfortable. Either he looked at me without me noticingorhe’s guessing and seeing what his words draw out. At any rate, the safest answer seems to be “Yes, sir.”
He watches me, and I see an infinitesimal flex in his jaw, like there’s something he wants to say but is deciding against it. “I only ask that you keep an open mind,” he says. “You strike me as a romantic person. There’s romance here too, in letting go. In surrender.”
He turns to face the elevators, his profile suntanned and hewn against the blue and black glass of the hallway beyond. “I was in the army too,” he adds. “I can guess what you might think about Evander. I can even guess how you might feel if you saw a woman kneeling next to Arjun tonight, looking delicate and helpless.”
I haven’t thought of that, but the minute he speaks, I feel a wave of protectiveness, of worry for this imaginary woman. It’s one thing to read about dominance and submission online, but when it’s happening in front of you, when the reality of the coercion isright there...
“I promise that no one at Lyonesse, aside from me, needs a knight in shining armor,” Mark goes on. “Everyone else is winning a game they’ve chosen to play, no matter how it might look. Everyone here—whether they’re being caned or electrocuted or simply fucked into next week—is here because they want to be.” He presses the elevator button and then looks at me. “An open mind, that’s all I ask.”
“Yes, sir.”
The elevator chimes and the doors open. “And Tristan?”
“Yes?”
“Good work today.” Mark smiles and steps into the elevator.
The unexpected praise lights me up.
I’m glowing the entire way back to the farmhouse.
Five
I’m givena half day to move my things to my new apartment at Lyonesse—not that I need it. After years of bouncing between deployments and bachelors’ quarters, all I’ve got are a few boxes of clothes, a handful of books, and a service cross I’ve only taken out of the case once, to wear to my father’s wedding. For a moment, I finger a picture from my graduation from West Point: a clump of eight of us, grinning in our grays and whites, slender cadet swords dangling from our waists.
We couldn’t wait to graduate, to join our compatriots in Carpathia, to gomake a difference, whatever that meant. In Carpathia, a new country that had been carved out of the mountains a decade before, no one actually knew what adifferencelooked like or how anyone could tell if they’d made it. Because while peace had been won there once, it had only lasted until a man little better than a dictator came into power. And then after he’d been deposed, the American military had flooded back in to help the Carpathian government hold on to their own country.
We were there to keep the peace, to build infrastructure, to train their new soldiers and airmen—but the enemy wasn’t some outside force wearing brightly colored uniforms. Theywerethe Carpathians, or rather a minority of them: zealous Carpathians wanting to see their country as the most violent and hostile version of itself. And they were willing to kill their neighbors and friends to see it happen.
All of us, in our West Point grays, had been walking into the last place on earth it was possible to make a difference.
My touch lingers over McKenzie Reed, all flyaway red hair and freckles, who I was too late to save on our first deployment. I’d dragged her and three others to the end of an alley while exchanging fire with unseen enemies at the other end of it. She’d died anyway, and if I’d managed to kill any of the fuckers, I never found out because there were no bodies there when we finally had enough soldiers to secure the alley for good.
