A Seditious Affair(6)

God knew quite how it had grown from there. How they had between them delineated the Tory’s needs, and the things Silas wouldn’t do, and the ways that Silas could know what the Tory wanted without making him say it. Because that was the Tory’s problem: Silas didn’t understand much of this, but he understood right off that it was no good for him to say out loud how he wanted it, if he even could. That would leave him master still, giving the orders, ruling from his knees. Not what the Tory needed; no good to him at all.

So Silas didn’t ask. Instead he’d learned. He’d read the Tory’s body and the pleas in his eyes, puzzled out his wants and needs, and while he was at it, he’d learned to enjoy the games that weren’t games at all. The ways he could make the Tory bend and break. And that had been a pleasure all on its own…but then they’d started talking.

He couldn’t remember which of them had started it, whose chance comment had begun an argument. Had no idea now when the first bottle had been laid out and waiting on his arrival, what day he had said, Have you read…and how long after that before the Tory had handed him a book and said, Tell me what you think. He didn’t know when the fucking had become just one part of the night’s pleasure, the thing they did before talking.

That was Wednesdays. That had been Wednesdays for a full year now, only a handful missed, so that Silas’s life ran from Wednesday to Wednesday, everything between marking time, and the very sound of Thursday was enough to make him snarl at his shop boy for the aching, empty week to come.

They still didn’t know each other’s names.

“If you ain’t read A Vindication of the Rights of Women—” Silas said.

“Rights, rights, rights.” The Tory drained his glass. Silas reached for the bottle. “You talk endlessly of rights, but I never hear you speak of duties or the proper maintenance of social order. Every Jack or Jill cannot be master.”

“Speaks a master,” Silas returned. “You’d feel different in my shoes.”

“In your shoes,” the Tory began, then stopped. “Well, in your shoes, I might feel differently about many things. Do you know what day it is?”

“Wednesday.”

“It’s a year.”

“What’s a year?”

“A year since you and I first…” The Tory waved a hand.

“Is it? A year, eh?” Silas had no idea what to do with that information.

The Tory sat up. “I mention it because…Ah, the devil. I suppose I’ve never told you about Richard.”

“Who’s that?” Lover? Son?

“My friend,” the Tory said. “My closest friend, all my life. Boys together. Lovers since we were fourteen. I thought it would be forever, he and I.”

“Aye? What happened?” Silas asked, since the Tory seemed to want to talk.

“I did. My damned…whatever is wrong with me that I want this.” The Tory swept a hand around the room.

“Oi. Nothing wrong with you.”

“Is there not? I am a gentleman of good family. I should not want men at all, and I should certainly not want men to…abuse me. But I do.”

Silas had no idea what to say to that. It was damned odd, and he’d often thought so. He’d assumed the Tory knew what he was about. “Well, but it does for you, don’t it?”

“It does very well for me, and you don’t need telling so, but why does it do? Why do I like these things?”

“Quot homines tot sententiae,” Silas observed, a little self-consciously, because he was probably saying it wrong.

The Tory’s brows shot up. “Where did you learn Latin?”

“Same school I learned the rest.” From the parson, then from his fellow radicals, then from his books. Self-taught, reading day and night. “It’s right, though, ain’t it? This many men, that many opinions. We all got different ways, and yours is different from most, that’s the long and short of it.” And why was the Tory fretting about this now, when they’d been fucking happily for a year? “Something happen? You all right?”

“Yes. Yes, very well. Just, a conversation earlier this week that made me feel somewhat…A conversation with Richard.”

Back to him again. Silas frowned. “So what about this fellow?”

The Tory tipped his head back and shut his eyes. “He is a very kind and caring man.”

“Ah.”

“Quite.”

“No good to you then.”

“Indeed not. I tried to explain, you see. We were, what, twenty-two? I thought he might understand. He didn’t. He was disgusted. It is…hard, to see disgust on the face of the man you love above all others. He was revolted by what I asked of him, and then…I had to tell him what we had, without that, wasn’t enough for me. That I didn’t love him enough to forget my own filthy wants.”