Page 13 of American Squire (New Camelot Trilogy 3.60)
“Can I touch you?”
He turns to me, his hair ruffled and his cheeks still splotched with exertion, and his expression the loose and satisfied look of a man who’s had his needs tended to. “I’d like that,” he says, and indeed, he does seem to like it. He likes when I stroke my fingers along the corrugations of his belly and when I explore the wide planes of his chest. He watches me with glittering, approving eyes when I press my lips to his nipples and explore the damp well of his navel with a darting tongue. And I get a very male purr when I tuck my mouth against the curves of his testicles and suck and lick until I’ve memorized their topography.
In fact, he likes me touching him so much that I end up getting fucked again, and neither of us can last much longer than it takes for him to get inside me and for me to grip my cock. We com
e, we clean up, and we fall asleep the way I’ve wanted to fall asleep for years—tucked safely into a master’s arms, sleepy and welted and adored.
I find the book two days after Christmas. It’s a slim volume tucked between two different amateur histories of Thornchapel, and it crackles ominously when I take it into my hands.
Sidney—who I’ve learned over the past few days is uncannily attuned to my movements—is up and peering over my shoulder at the book in seconds.
“Is that it?” he asks, and then takes it into his sure, expert hands once I’ve nodded. He examines it thoughtfully for a few moments.
“I’ve never heard of this publisher,” he says, pointing to the title page. “And these endsheets are beyond luxurious. This must have been a very expensive book to own.”
I search in vain for a date on the front. “How old do you think it is?”
“Books aren’t my area of expertise,” he says, frowning down as though it’s the book’s fault he spent years studying paintings instead. “But it looks mid-eighteenth century to me. Maybe a decade or two older.”
He hands to book back to me with a “hmm.”
“‘Hmm,’ what, Mr. Blount?”
“Tristram and Iseult of Lyonesse? Wasn’t your kink club called Lyonesse?”
I look down at the book, surprised. “It was. I mean, it is. What an interesting coincidence.” Although even as I say the word coincidence, I somehow know it’s got to be more than that. With Merlin, it always is.
Sidney puts me in touch with a company who can courier such a valuable item to Merlin, who is not in America, as I thought, but in Wales on some kind of romantic getaway with Nimue. And although we’ve spent the last four days in a heady fog of punishment, sex, and faking polite, disinterested conversation whenever Auden Guest is around, I do feel a bolt of trepidation as I sign the book over to the delivery service. I really no longer have a reason to intrude on Auden’s hospitality, and what I have with Sidney feels too delicate to force into real life. I’m suspended in an awful limbo as I walk back from the front door to the library, and that limbo becomes hellish when I get to the library and see that Sidney is packing up boxes of provenance papers.
“Oh,” I say. Stupidly. “Are you finished?”
“I’ve done all I can do here on site,” he explains, settling a lid over one box and reaching for another. “I’ve examined the paintings themselves and examined the documentation. I’ll do the rest of the work at my office.”
For four years, I’ve held my ground in front of generals and kings, and yet, right now, I want twist my hands in my sweater and plead.
Of course Sidney notices this, because those cold, perceptive eyes miss nothing, and he lets go of the box to walk over to me and take my face in his hands.
“You didn’t know earlier, but I’m asking if you know now. Will you come to London with me? Will you allow me to try to win you?”
“Mr. Blount,” I say, trying to duck my face. He doesn’t let me. “I think you’ve already done that. Won me, I mean.”
Sidney Blount, ice god and art expert, lets out a long, relieved sigh. “Thank fucking God.”
I decide right then and there, when he’s at his most vulnerable and his most human. Had I felt like I was drifting before I came to Thornchapel? That nothing would ever matter again?
How could I have been so wrong? When all this time I’d been drifting right towards him?
And then I have to wonder, really wonder, why Merlin had to send me to get this book. Why not come himself, if he’s already in Wales? Why not have Cremer arrange for someone?
Could Merlin have known that I needed to meet Sidney Blount? Could he have constructed this entire scenario just to see me happy?
Maybe I am lucky to know a real wizard. Maybe I’m the luckiest man alive.
“I’m going to come with you,” I declare.
Sidney’s forehead drops to mine and his eyes sweep closed. “Oh, Ryan,” is all he says.
“But what next?” I ask. “When I come with you, what will we do?”
