A Collar and Tie (Ganymede Quartet Book 4) (46 page)

The suits. Martin had worn his suits. He got up and threw
open the doors of the wardrobe. Martin had worn the grey and the brown. Henry
yanked the grey jacket from its hanger and breathed in the lining, the collar
and armpits, but it only smelled faintly as if a human body had worn it,
smelling neither of Martin nor himself specifically. The brown jacket was
disappointingly the same. He passed over the blue at first because Martin hadn’t
worn it, but then he remembered where
he
had worn it and thrust his hand
into the jacket pocket.

Martin’s long tail was curled in the pocket where it had
been since they’d left the barber shop. Henry pulled it out with a trembling
hand and brought it to his nose. It smelled of vetiver and of Martin, and it
was slippery against his lips. He rubbed it against his cheek and strands of it
caught in the hint of stubble that darkened his sloppily-shaven jaw. His entire
body shook and his cock began to stiffen. He suddenly feared that Martin would
emerge from his room and see Henry humiliating himself like this with a hank of
hair, and hurried to rid himself of the tail.

He opened the nightstand drawer. The cigar box containing
his talismans was there and it seemed quite fitting to hide the tail inside it,
coiled around the stone and the little straw man. With a pang, he noted that
the green glass bottle had found its way back into the drawer; there was no
reason to think he would need it again, and he considered that he could simply
throw it away, but he resisted the urge to do so for shamefully sentimental
reasons.

He would not get rid of the bottle because the weak part of
him hoped that he could be with Martin again, could hold him and smell him and
make love to him. If Martin were to apologize sincerely, Henry might be able to
see his way to forgiving him, and if he could forgive him, he could be intimate
with him, as well, and share his most tender self. He could keep loving him. It
was what Henry wanted more than anything.

He lay on his bed feeling disheartened and lovesick and
morose. He was very tired thanks to his sleepless night and dozed until
lunchtime, dreaming that he sent Martin away and it only made things worse.

“Sir, Sir.” Martin’s hand on his shoulder, just barely
touching him. “I’m going down for my lunch, Sir.”

Henry flinched from his touch and waved him off, turning his
face against the pillow. “Go, then.”

“I’ll be back for you soon, Sir.”

“Go,” Henry repeated. He suddenly felt as though he might
cry, and he didn’t want Martin to see it. He had been wondering if he would
cry—
when
he would cry. It felt as though his unshed tears were clogging
the back of his throat and the aching space around his heart; if he were to
cry, at last, it would be a relief. But even when he was alone in the room, his
tears wouldn’t come.

When Martin returned, he looked as though
he
had been
crying, but Henry pretended not to notice. Martin was lucky; he had the rest of
the slaves to comfort him, and Henry had nobody.

“Your lunch is waiting, Sir, whenever you’re ready.”

Sighing, Henry got to his feet and tugged his suit into
place.

“Your hair, Sir,” Martin said, making vague gestures in the
direction of Henry’s head. “From the pillow.”

He couldn’t possibly let Martin touch him. “I’ll fix it.” He
went into the bathroom and combed his hair back into place with his fingers,
then stalked out into the bedroom, sweeping past Martin and exiting into the
hall. Martin hurried to follow him, trailing him down the stairs and into the breakfast
room.

Henry told Martin what he wished to eat and Martin brought
it to him, then stepped back to stand silently behind his chair. Henry felt
very self-conscious, very aware of the noises he made as he ate. Just as at
breakfast, Henry found he wasn’t hungry for second helpings, though he could
not resist a piece of chocolate cake. Martin, he thought as he ate, would have
had this same cake for his lunch. Henry thought of all the times they had gone
down to the kitchen late at night in search of cake, sated with sex but seeking
to satisfy a sweet tooth, and suddenly lost his appetite, the chocolate turned
to chalk in his mouth.

As he was setting down his fork, Paul entered.

“Sir? Telephone for you. It’s Mr. Wilton, Sir, your cousin.”

Had Jesse somehow found out about Henry’s folly? He would be
full of questions regardless, and Henry was not in the mood.

“Tell him I’m unavailable,” Henry decided. “I’ll call him
back another day.”

“Very well, Sir.” Paul gave Henry a little bow and left the
room.

Henry made to get up from the table and Martin hurried to
pull out his chair.

Back in his room, Henry told Martin, “Do whatever you want,
just do it with the door closed,” and flopped bonelessly to the bed, his back
to the connecting door. He had not removed his boots, and he could sense how
Martin itched to untie them for him. But Martin kept his distance and closed
the door and was quiet for the rest of the afternoon.

Henry slept on and off, and then pretended to be asleep when
Martin went down for his dinner. He’d had painful dreams of sex with Martin,
closeness with Martin; dreams where they shared a heart and blood; dreams where
they were married, somehow, and no one could come between them, and all was
forgiven.

When Martin returned to help Henry dress, Henry felt bashful
and resentful, having bared his soul so completely to Dream Martin but getting
nothing in return from Martin awake. Martin worked with his head bowed,
touching Henry only as necessary. After a long, uncomfortable silence, Martin
cleared his throat and spoke in a low, hurried voice.

“I just wanted you to know, Sir, that I told your father
your uncle had nothing to do with it. I told him that Mr. Wilton wanted you to
wait until his return, Sir, and he didn’t want you running off on your own.”

“Why are you telling me this?” Henry asked irritably,
holding out his wrists for cufflinks.

“Because your father asked me if it was Mr. Wilton’s
influence that led you astray, Sir, and of course it was not. I don’t want you
separated from your uncle, Sir, not if I can help it.” He inserted Henry’s
cufflinks and turned to take his dinner jacket out of the wardrobe.

Henry had not even considered that Reggie might be blamed,
of course, and was deeply moved by Martin’s efforts to safeguard that
relationship for him, though he was loath to demonstrate this. It occurred to
him that if they had not returned, if Martin had not told Father about Reggie’s
lack of involvement, then Reggie might have been cast out again, and Mother
would have had nothing, neither birthday party nor brother, to pique her
interest and keep her engaged with the world.

“Do you expect me to thank you? Because I’m not going to,”
Henry snapped, embarrassed by how stupid he was, how little he’d considered the
consequences of his frantic actions. He jammed his arms into the sleeves of his
dinner jacket.

During dinner, Mother reiterated her intention to hire a
decorator to ready the house for Henry’s birthday, and Henry didn’t want a
party, but he hesitated to tell her as much, and he didn’t think Father would
thank him for discouraging her.

“I’ll be wanting some of your Martin’s time, darling,” she
told him.

“You can have him as often as you need,” Henry assured her.

“I expect he knows your taste better than anyone else,” she
remarked.

It was true. “Yes,” Henry said with a lump in his throat.
“Yes, I suppose he does.” Baroque. His tastes were baroque, Martin had said so.

It was another difficult night. Henry brushed past Martin on
his way out of the bathroom after brushing his teeth, and they were close
enough that he felt the warmth of Martin’s breath on his cheek. He rushed away
from him and threw himself into the bed, hiding his half-hard cock beneath the
blankets. He listened to Martin brushing his own teeth, rinsing and spitting,
and then Martin appeared in the doorway.

He leaned on the doorjamb with his pajama top half-buttoned,
the cant of his hips showing the shape of his prick through the thin cotton of
his pants. He licked his lips nervously and asked, “Is there anything I can do
for you, Sir?” in a quavering voice.

Henry flushed an angry crimson. How dare Martin even ask
such a thing!

“No! Of course not!” Henry was incensed, and now also
painfully aroused. “Go to bed,” he snapped irritably, turning his back to the
door.

Clearly, Martin was attempting to sneak back within Henry’s
good graces by seducing him without ever actually apologizing for all that he
had done wrong. Well, Henry wouldn’t be tricked, and he wouldn’t be governed by
his cock.

Had they never run away to begin with, they likely would
have had sex of some sort five or six times in the last two days, but Henry
hadn’t given himself a single orgasm during that time and presumably Martin
hadn’t either. Henry felt the lack of it, and he was furious with Martin for
making the oblique offer. Once he’d received it, he’d never imagined he might
have to do without Martin’s love for even a minute, and finding himself in the
position of potentially bargaining for it, begging for it, was miserable beyond
imagining. His own emotions were not ephemeral, not negotiable, but it seemed
that Martin’s feelings were situational. It seemed that he was perfectly
capable of using his body to get his way, to get Henry to do as he wanted.

As Henry lay in his lonely bed in the dark, he began to
reconsider his stance. If he had been willing to swallow his pride, if he had
been willing to not care about how he’d been wronged, he could have had Martin
in bed with him again, naked and pliant and so beloved, and it made holding
onto self-respect seem eminently stupid. If Martin had come back to the doorway
right then and given him another chance to choose, Henry would have thrown back
the covers and invited Martin to lie beside him, but Martin didn’t come back,
and Henry found himself crying at last, with his hands over his mouth to stop
the sobs. He cried for awhile, feeling hopelessly sorry for himself, and when
he finally stopped crying, he was able to fall asleep.

Monday morning, Father expected him to go back to school
despite the events of the prior week. Getting into the carriage, Father would
not put up with Henry’s nonsense about not wanting to sit next to Martin:
Timothy’s place was at Father’s side, and Henry would sit with his own slave,
with no discussion necessary or even allowed. Henry sulked and kept to the wall
of the carriage, his schoolbag on the seat between Martin and himself. Henry
had played far too many touching games with Martin during these carriage rides
to want to be reminded of that former intimacy by even the slightest accidental
contact.

Henry was afraid to return to classes, still worried that
Louis had exposed him, and that his mysterious absence from school would be
questioned closely, but no one seemed to know anything about his business at
all. His friends were mostly interested in the novelty of Martin’s haircut,
which Henry blamed on Father—most of the boys could relate, their own fathers
having insisted on haircuts for their companions. Of all the slaves, only Tom
and Allen retained their gorgeous long locks.

Louis seemed less hostile now, but Henry felt quite furious
with him. If Louis hadn’t made his ultimatums, none of this would have come to
pass. On the way to the refectory, Louis caught up to him in the hall and asked
him if he’d taken care of his problem, his questioning furtive. Henry lashed
out, pointing out that he hadn’t had a problem until Louis had made it one.

“Everything’s ruined,” Henry snarled. “Just leave me alone,
all right?”

Louis left him alone.

The other boys seemed unconcerned about their discord, all
confident that friends of such long standing would inevitably reconcile. To
Henry’s relief, none of the others seemed to notice that he was not getting
along with Martin, either. People really were less concerned with his business
than he’d imagined.

It was difficult to live so close to Martin yet not really
with him, but it wasn’t as impossible as Henry would have imagined. They fell
into a routine, albeit a far less pleasant one than what they’d been accustomed
to. Henry allowed Martin to dress him and undress him, to stand behind him at
meals, and to start the water for him in the shower, but he was back to shaving
himself and reading his own stories.

Henry was back to doing his own homework, as well, although
there was no reason to think Martin wouldn’t have done it for him if asked. He
didn’t want to ask, though. He didn’t want to admit anew, day after day, that
he was too stupid to understand anything but the most rudimentary Latin. He
spent no time on his translations, simply writing down the few words he
understood and ignoring the rest, and reconciled himself to failing and
disappointing Father, deciding not to care that Martin might be held
responsible.

Martin continued to practice his violin in his own room and
Henry had taken to asking him to shut the door between their rooms so as to
muffle the sound, not because he disliked it, but because it was so plangent,
so emotional, that he feared it would break him. After the first few days of
their estrangement, Martin had begun Thursday-afternoon lessons with a
prestigious teacher, a Mr. Jackson, which were a thank-you gift from Father for
Martin’s betrayal of Henry. Martin had only had the one lesson so far, but from
what Henry could hear through the door, it seemed the instruction might already
be helping with the partita.

Emotionally, their situation was quite nearly untenable.
Henry was tempted, time after time, to simply forgive Martin everything, but
then he would think about how much he had loved Martin, and the lengths to
which he would have gone to demonstrate that, and felt the betrayal anew.

It wounded Henry’s pride that Martin had not trusted him to
make a good life for them. Like Father, Martin clearly didn’t believe Henry
could manage on his own, and after some consideration, Henry could grudgingly
admit that they might be right. He hadn’t planned, hadn’t been practical. He’d
spent all his time downtown shopping and wallowing in decadence instead of
making sure he’d had a secure future lined up for the two of them. But while
Henry might be willing to admit that Martin had a point, he did not think the
solution should have been returning home. Martin should have spoken up, offered
his opinions, and helped Henry come up with a better plan, one that resulted in
them leaving the city on a southbound train as a pair of free men.

It was worse still that Martin had turned his back on what
they felt for each other, or at least what Henry had felt for Martin. When
Henry had told Martin he loved him, it had been with a tenderness and sincerity
unprecedented in his life. He’d never felt anything remotely like what he felt
for Martin for anyone else, and he’d treasured those feelings just as he’d
treasured Martin himself. He’d really believed that Martin had loved him in
return, but Martin had turned on Henry in an instant, looking for some means to
go against him from the earliest moments of their escape.

Henry had wanted freedom for them both, but he’d also wanted
to make certain Martin would never be punished, never sold. That it now seemed
obvious this never would have happened didn’t negate Henry’s conviction that he
had been right to try to protect what he loved. Perhaps Martin had been
confident Father wouldn’t return him to Ganymede because he’d been talking to
Father behind Henry’s back all along. Perhaps that was why Father had been
unsurprised by Henry’s reluctant confession—Martin might have told him
everything weeks or months before. Henry had wanted to be with Martin, just
Martin, but Father wanted him to marry and conform, and Martin favored Father’s
plans, Father’s goals. Through his actions, Martin had made it painfully clear
that he wouldn’t hesitate to hurt Henry if it would please Father.

They spoke as little as possible. Henry remained wary of
what Martin might say to him, what sorts of ugly truths might be revealed, and
each time Martin seemed prepared to offer an explanation for his actions, Henry
panicked and demanded silence, thinking to put off the inevitable final
rejection for another day.

On that first Saturday after their return, they went cycling
in the park with a large group of Henry’s friends, Louis included. Louis kept
his distance. Still, none of the others seemed to have noticed that Henry was
estranged from Martin, and Henry hoped it would stay that way. Halfway round
the reservoir, they all stopped to share the snacks they’d brought along. Henry
was annoyed by the sight of Martin sitting in the grass with Tom, having some
sort of discussion that necessitated gazing into each other’s eyes while
holding hands. He knew it was just how slaves acted, but it made him jealous
all the same. Tom put his arm around Martin’s back and hugged him, and Martin
put his head on Tom’s shoulder, and Henry had to turn away, gritting his teeth.

Victor said, “Henry, you like to ride, don’t you?”

“What?” Henry asked, shaking off thoughts of Martin’s
inconstant heart.

“Horses. You like to ride.”

“Yes, I do. What of it?”

“We’ve finally gotten Will a horse of his own,” Victor said.
“Do you want to come riding with us tomorrow?”

“Sure,” Henry said, relieved that Victor and Will would
provide a few hours’ buffer between Martin and himself. He and Victor made
arrangements to meet the following afternoon.

Tom continued to fawn over Martin until everyone got back on
their bicycles, and Henry then began to wonder what story Martin had been
telling him with such a sorrowful expression on his face. No doubt, he had told
Tom all about their escapade, and now Henry would have to hope that Tom would
keep his damned mouth shut. Tom should want to keep quiet, considering how kind
and understanding Henry had been about Tom’s own troubles, but Tom might easily
be as faithless as Martin. All slaves might be that way—Henry would have no way
of knowing. He wondered if he were from an old family whether he might have
known better than to ever trust a slave.

They went home and Henry showered and jerked off under the
spray, trying to think of nothing. His dressing gown was not on the hook behind
the door where he expected it to be, and so he left the bathroom in just a
towel, which slipped from his hips, and he froze, naked, in the middle of the
room, and Martin froze, too, wide-eyed and with parted lips, his expression one
of pure longing.

Henry bent and snatched up his towel. “Stop staring!”

Martin ducked his head, his cheeks very pink. “S-sorry, Sir.
My apologies, Sir.” He hurried to get Henry a fresh pair of drawers and kept
his eyes on the floor as Henry stepped into them.

With this fresh evidence that Martin still found him
attractive, and then with Martin kneeling at his feet, Henry felt a sudden
sharp, sweet stab of arousal, and his cock stirred, and if Martin looked up, he
would see it, and he would know that he still meant something to Henry. Once
again, Henry froze.

Martin didn’t look up. He kept his eyes averted as he helped
Henry put on the rest of his clothes. When he was done, he asked, “Will that be
all, Sir?”

Henry nodded.

“I’ll just be in my room, then, Sir, until you need me.”
Martin looked so unhappy that Henry could not bring himself to tell him to close
the connecting door. However, that meant that he could hear Martin moving
about, shifting position, clearing his throat, and letting out little sighs,
and it was maddening. He was about to tell Martin to close the door after all
when Martin came out of his room and did it of his own volition.

“I’m going to practice my violin, Sir, if you have no
objections.”

“No, no objections,” Henry assured him, feeling his face
grow hot and becoming angry because of it. He frowned at Martin until he went
away.

Martin closed the door and soon began to play. Henry got up
from the bed and went to press his ear to the door. He missed the violin. He
missed being close enough to feel the music resonating in his chest. He missed
being able to look at Martin playing with his eyes closed, dipping and swaying.
He wanted to ask Martin about the new violin teacher and about what he’d been
taught. He wanted to tell Martin that he thought the
chaconne
already
sounded much improved. He wanted to open the door, but would not let himself do
so.

By the time Martin emerged from his room to go down for his
dinner, Henry was back on the bed reading his book.

“Oh, by the way,” Henry said, stopping him in his tracks.
“We’re going riding tomorrow with Victor and Will. Please make sure all of our
gear is in order and let the stables know to expect us.”

“Yes, Sir, of course. What time should they be ready for us,
Sir?”

“One o’clock.”

“All right, Sir. I’ll let Jerry know.” He paused for a
moment, then added, “It will be nice to ride, Sir. Thank you.”

“We’re doing it because
I
enjoy it,” Henry informed
him, irritable and haughty. “You’re just lucky you like it, too.”