Page 51 of Salt Kiss
Afterward, as he’s pulling out, I tell him so, that we don’t have to use a condom, seeing as he’s tested so often and I was a virgin until very, very recently.
“You want to be bred, sweet thing?” he murmurs, biting my earlobe. “You want me to leave my cum inside you?”
I groan, fresh desire unfurling in my gut. “Please, sir.”
A kiss on the back of my neck. “I promise to think about it, my pretty Tristan.”
But he never does take me raw.
He cooks for me, he washes me, he takes me around the grounds and fucks me in his favorite spots. He pushes into my body on a magnolia-petal-strewn blanket in the graveyard, comes down my throat on a footpath near the topmost ridge of the valley. When we get caught in the rain on a walk, he shoves me against a tree and kisses my mouth like it’s the only good thing left in the entire world. My lips are swollen for a whole day after.
When he’s not cooking or fucking me, I’m still the entire locus of his attention. He makes me read to him while we sit under his favorite hazel tree with bottles of cold, crisp cider nearby. He annihilates me at chess and then grumbles about how my generation knows an embarrassingnothingof strategy, subtlety. He takes me to watch the lambs bleat and scamper in the field a mile to the north and listens while I talk about the animals back home. How we leased our farm when I was a kid but how the new farmer let me help with the calves and baby goats, how it was my job to feed them bottles of milk while they headbutted me with their tiny heads.
When the spring evenings get chilly, he lights a fire in the library and watches me with flames reflected in his stare.
I have no way of proving it to myself, of verifying it, but I can’t shake the feeling that this is really him, that this is the real Mark. Not the indolent devil of Lyonesse or the cold former killer, but the man who watches me eat with a possessive interest, who scolds me for bad chess moves, who can identify all the tiny, temporary wildflowers that crowd up around the gravestones.
It’s not that his eyes glitter less when he’s sprawled in a chair; it’s not that he’s any less ruthless. It’s just that it’s all theretogether, stirred up together, and it’s all completely fixated on me. Playful cruelty and utter possession, and I am at the center of it all.
Which is not to say that I don’t still see the ghost of whatever haunts him here at Morois House. There are moments after the welts, the orgasms, the glasses of water put to my lips, when I see something lost in his face, the same expression I saw when I came into the library for the first time. Burning and bleak.
Dead but still dying.
I fall asleep with him trapping me to his chest, and I wake in the morning with both of his arms around me and his legs tangled in mine, his face against the nape of my neck. But sometimes in the middle of the night, I come out of sleep to find that he’s sitting on the side of the bed, cradling a plastic-wrapped sweater in his hands, or that he’s gone to the library and shut the doors.
Sometimes when we’re in the graveyard I look over to see him rubbing a magnolia petal between his thumb and forefinger, his eyes on the fragile pink flesh of the flower, his chest moving fast.
I don’t disturb those moments and I never ask about them later. Whatever I am to him, I don’t think I have the right to. Even if little brambles of jealousy prick the insides of my ribs when I think about how devoted he is to a mere memory.
Mark isquiet on the drive to the airport and during the flights home. In the first-class lounge at Heathrow, he drags me into a single bathroom, shoves a wad of paper towels in my mouth, and proceeds to lash my ass with the end of his leather belt—not nearly as painful as it could be if he’d actually slid it from its loops and properly worked me over, but painful enough that I’m moaning around the makeshift gag as he fucks me after, his clothes rubbing against the newly welted skin.
He still doesn’t speak after, whatever demon not fully exorcised, but he does crouch behind me and check the welts, running his fingertips over them to test how puffy they are, if the skin is broken at all. He helps me clean up and then when we emerge back into the lounge, he goes to the bar for a glass of ice water and brings it back to me, watching to make sure I drink it all.
It’s a long flight home with my ass that sore, not just from the lounge but from days of punishment and sex. If I’d thought Mark needed the toys stocked in the rooms of Lyonesse to work his craft, I no longer think so at all. Anything from kitchen towels and wooden spoons to earmuffs and painter’s tape were put to work on me, and often enough, he just used his own body. His cock or fingers to gag me, his arms and legs to hold me down. His teeth to punish me until my tears brimmed over and then he licked them up like they were some kind of payment owed to him.
And always, always, I was hard and panting for it.
Always, always, I was falling deeper and deeper in love.
So healthy.
We get to DC bleary-eyed and vaguely disheveled in that hard-to-pinpoint way of long travel, and my stomach is gnawing on itself as Jago drives us home to Lyonesse.
What will happen when we get there? Will Mark want to pretend that we weren’t together in Cornwall? Will things continue as they were? But even if Mark wanted to continue, it couldn’t be the same, not with his schedule. It couldn’t be days of doing nothing but making sure I’m so thoroughly devirginized that I can hardly walk in a straight line.
When we step across the bridge to the club and go through the doors to the elevator bank, Mark turns to me and says, “Do whatever you need to clean up. Then come to my apartment.”
I nod, the gnawing feeling growing worse.
I don’t know whether he’s calling me up to fuck me again or to—well,break upis probably the wrong way to put it, since we’re not truly together, but whatever the Cornish Grief Fling equivalent of breaking up is.
I drop my things in my apartment as soon as I walk in, take a quick shower to wash the plane off, and then brush my teeth and get dressed. As I do, I catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror. Bite marks in various stages of healing dot my skin, front and back, a particularly defined one on the place where my neck and shoulder meet. My ass and thighs are welted and bruised, as are my shoulders and upper back, from the ruler and wooden spoon and kitchen towel. I have scrapes on my knees from the times he took me in the woods, and a grass burn on my forearm from a particularly vicious screw under the branches of the hazel tree. Mark had been right that first day together. He really couldn’t go more than twenty feet without needing to fuck me.
I didn’t mind.
I run my hands over the marks the way I used to run my hands over battered maps in Carpathia, like I’m committing important information to memory. I need to remember every single time he touched me. I need to remember how it feels to see my body as living proof of his desire.
Even if I’ll never have his love, I’ll know I had that. His hot stare under the hazel tree.
