Raised By Wolves 2 - Matelots (97 page)

He shrugged with his hands and sighed expansively. “I thought you had a bad affair and it ended poorly, and that in your youth he had been a bit forceful with you and you had found you liked it little.

Receiving is seldom pleasant and…”

“No,” I said quickly. “Receiving is very pleasant, if… one is properly prepared or well used to it.”

He appeared stricken and a trifle embarrassed. “I have not experienced it and… my lovers have…”

“Expressed otherwise, as you have not prepared them as you did not know you should,” I said. “So you thought I had been startled by… Well, that explains a great deal. I thought you just an insensitive arse.”

He winced.

I shook my head. “But I truly did not speak of it in a way to make you understand, and without knowledge imparted from me, how were you to know otherwise? Alonso, my cousin would beat me until I was too stupefied to fight him, pin me face down on my own bed, and take me by force with little lubrication save my own blood. In thinking back on it, I am not sure how he stood it. I know my member prefers to slide rather than grate.”

He was stricken. “Oh God, Uly,” he sighed. “Oh, God. I am so sorry. I used you poorly in many ways.”

His distress was genuine, and I felt pity for him.

“It was not your doing alone,” I said. “I could not tell you. While I was with you I… knew it should not hurt. But I thought it a thing that applied to others, and that I was merely tight and perhaps damaged by Shane, and therefore it could not feel for me as it should. So I said nothing. I would get drunk and let you and I said nothing. And I could not discuss the cause of it all, either. I knew not how; my shame was so great. The first time I told Gaston, I vomited profusely. I have since learned that it is a thing that occurred and I must face it. I cannot dissemble about it, especially to myself.”

“Still, I am sorry for being blind and stupid,” he said sincerely. He glanced to Gaston. “Does it still pain you?”

“No. Only if I am tense,” I sighed. “But you must understand. We put great effort into preparing me. We spent weeks lying about pleasuring one another with him atop me and his fingers up my arse. Now I feel it a natural thing, and I do not fear intrusion there or the weight of another.

Weeks, Alonso, and we spent months talking first. When I said Gaston and I possessed a commonality of spirit, I meant that we tend with equal fervor toward what you always considered sophism. We talk a great deal, such that I am sure we would bore any who listened.” I held his eyes with mine and smiled kindly. “You and I never talked, not like this.”

He smiled sadly in return. “No, we did not. I have never spoken of such things with anyone.” He looked to Gaston again and sighed. “I understand why you are with him now. I understand why you left.”

I shook my head but I smiled. “No, I do not think you do, yet. I am sorry I left as I did. It was cowardly. Truly cowardly. Yet I knew if I stayed until you woke, and told you of my decision, you would have persuaded me not to go, or wished to accompany me, and I did not feel that would have been best for either of us. Alonso, I left because your words of that night touched me and made me think. You said that it was time for us to mature and put aside boyish pastimes and accept being men. I realized I needed to banish the demon that haunted me, and face my father for whatever it was worth and… I returned to England to kill Shane.”

“Did you?” he asked sincerely.

“No,” I sighed. “My father kept him from me, and an old friend instructed me on the folly of it. I would have hanged or been running from the law in a manner I had not before. So I came here, thinking if I could gain my father’s good graces, perhaps I could supplant my cousin in his heart somehow. It was a foolish thing, and one I am embarrassed to admit. Yet, I feel there was perhaps a guiding hand in all of it, as Fate surely smiled upon me. I am far more content with life than I have ever been. I am not at peace with myself, but I am at least allied.”

“I am truly happy for you in that regard,” he said sadly. “I was a fool then, and I have been a fool since.”

“Alonso, as I said…”

“No, no.” He waved me off. “Not for that alone. There is the thing you did express displeasure to me about, and I did nothing to assuage that, either.”

“It is different here,” I said.

I grinned. Pete and Striker were kissing. I gestured to them.

“Very different here,” I continued. “And I asked much of you there.

And my need hinged upon… the tragedy that had befallen me, as you so aptly named it. I could not have conveyed it well to another, but… in addition to the idea that sodomy was painful for me, I labored under the conceit that if a man did not feel he should be with me, in that I was a man, and yet he chose to bugger me anyway, then that was love. And I have since learned that is not love. So, in a manner of thought, I truly did not leave you because you could not love me without discretion, but because I would not have recognized you loving me at all. Was that intelligible?”

He smiled. “I did not understand love, either.”

“It is not an easy thing to understand,” I said. “It has destroyed nations and brought all manner of fools to ruin.”

“So you truly have found love here?” he asked.

“Si, though in all honesty, if I had known what true love entailed, I would have run screaming in fear from it as well. But I am a fool.” I smiled.

He chuckled and frowned, not at me but at the others. I followed his gaze. Pete had mounted Striker and they were storming the gates quite happily. I chuckled at Alonso’s discomfiture.

“You see this all the time?” he asked.

I laughed. “We live upon very crowded ships for months at a time.

You become inured to it, both the seeing of it and the being seen.”

I looked to Gaston and found him watching us. I remembered what he wished to do that night, and my gut churned. After the discussion Alonso and I had held I no longer wished to wave anything under Alonso’s nose. Yet, with Gaston’s current mercurial disposition, I was not sure how I could avoid it without an argument I wished for Alonso to witness even less.

“I have never seen… They are quite…,” Alonso was muttering while still watching the lovers.

“Si, they are quite.” I grinned anew. “Made even more amazing in that none of us have slept in more than a day, we rowed and marched through all of last night, took a town today, including rowing about the harbor, and still they go at it with enthusiasm.”

Alonso chuckled. “So are all of you pirates sodomites?”

“No. We have just long been plagued with a shortage of suitable women and we live like sailors. And we do not perceive ourselves as pirates as you so freely use the word,” I teased. “We are buccaneers, the Brethren of the Coast of the Haiti and we sail under a marque granted by the Governor of Jamaica to make tacit war against Spain. As you must know, there is no peace beyond the Line.”

He nodded soberly, though to my amusement, his eyes did not leave Pete and Striker.

“No, there is not,” he said at last. “There are many here who would drive you English out, and the Dutch and French as well.”

“We intend to stay,” I said. “And as the King will not spare troops or ships, we are the English military force in the West Indies, horrifying though that may be.”

He nodded. “You are correct; I have been naming you wrongly. You are mercenaries.”

“Just so,” I said.

Pete and Striker finished with mutual grunts and barks; and Alonso shook himself as if waking, and turned away from them to look out over the water again. I chuckled.

He was thoughtful when he looked to me. “None here thought you would be so bold or be able to amass so many, though this is a small number to take a town such as this.”

I shrugged. “Si, we have a very ambitious commander, and an even craftier governor.”

“Are you the same force which attacked a town in Cuba in March?”

he asked.

I nodded.

“What next?” he grinned.

I gave a disparaging snort and grinned. “As if I would tell you if I knew. I truly do not know. As it is mid-summer, I imagine we will return to Port Royal. Many of us have plantations to attend to, and there are wives and businesses and the like, and none of us like to be sailing about during the storm season.”

I studied his profile and thought about the future. I supposed I had much to look forward to. “Are you truly miserable?”

Alonso shook his head. “It is… tedious. I miss the way we lived. I missed the ever-changing string of lovers, the parties, the intrigues, the money…. My family is not so very wealthy. There is wealth enough; but Uly, we lived very well indeed in Florence.”

I chuckled appreciatively. “Si, that we did.”

“What with the marriage, and coming here, and establishing a household, and investments needed in the plantation and… taxes.” He swore softly. “I spent much of what Teresina gave me. I am not poor, and yet even if I felt wealthy, there is little to do with it here. Gambling and whores to be sure, but it all lacks allure for me now. Not much to do but hunt on occasion, and check on the doings of our overseers. My brother did not need me here to help with the plantation’s management as he claimed; no, he needed additional capital, and his shrewish wife was bored and wished for the company of another. She drives poor Maria to distraction, and there is nothing I can do for her, or me. I find myself snapping at her because she is not… She is simply not what I would wish. She is a simple and virtuous girl, raised in a convent.

Carnal activities are to take place with the lamps out and the covers tucked all about.”

I laughed, and he regarded me sharply. I waved my hands in supplication.

“She sounds quite unlike, yet like, my wife, though that is a long story,” I said.

He smiled. “Not like the women we were accustomed to, si?”

“Si.” I chuckled.

He sighed and shook his head sadly. “If I attempt to please her, she becomes quite distraught and thinks it is improper and we must confess to the priest.”

“And so,” I teased. “Mistresses?”

“It is not so easy. All know one another’s business, and there is little I could do in that regard unless I had the tacit consent of my brother or some of his friends. My going off by myself would be tantamount to having an affair, no matter the destination. And my brother frowns upon such things.”

“Men?” I asked.

He chuckled ruefully before sighing and considering the water thoughtfully. “There is an officer who may have desires such as ours. I have been leery of pursuing the matter.”

I raised an eyebrow. “Why? I would think a friendship with a man might be easier to explain.”

He snorted. “It would; but I am afraid, in the absence of all other excitements, that… I will become easily and sincerely enamored with any I may dally with. And I fear I will lose them as I did you, because here, I surely cannot love them as they may wish, or allow them to love me as I may wish. So you see, losing you has stripped me of much of my callous disregard for anything but my own pleasure.”

“Oh, Alonso,” I sighed. “Truly, I do not know whether to applaud or pity you in that.”

He grinned. “For the good of my soul, applaud me. For all else, I will take whatever pity you feel you may bestow.”

The entendre was strong in his voice, and I shook my head sadly.

“I can offer you ought but words,” I said. “Gaston would kill you if I were to but touch you.”

He took a sharp breath, and nodded his bemused acquiescence. “I see.”

“See that you do,” I smiled reassuringly. “Though he is behaving such that he has earned my undying admiration this night, be aware that he takes his jealousy very seriously, as do I. We do not toy with one another.”

“God, I envy you,” he sighed. “And you can tell your Frenchman I am jealous, too.”

“Let us not,” I said.

I looked to Gaston again. He had stood, and was now watching us with arms crossed and hard eyes. I wondered at the change, especially on the heels of my praising him for his forbearance, and then my gut churned. How was I ever going to make him understand that I could not do as he wished?

“And speaking of that, I need to see to him now,” I said quickly.

I looked back to Alonso. “I feel we should bind you again, in some fashion.”

“I give you my word I will not attempt to escape,” he said solemnly.

“And I accept that; your word, however…” I shrugged.

He looked about at the others, who were paying no attention to us, and raised an eloquent eyebrow.

“They care not now because I have taken responsibility for you,” I said.He cocked his head. “Uly, what is amiss?”

I could not tell him – after all of my protestations of love – that I needed to go and argue with my matelot and, perhaps… do other things… and I did not want him about where he could witness such.

I glanced to Gaston again, and found he had moved closer.

“I will not explain,” I told Alonso. “If you are still my friend, you will do as I ask. If not, then you are my prisoner and you will do as I ask.”

“Is it him you must appease in this?” Alonso whispered.

I did not like his choice of words. “It is the way of a partnership, is it not?” I said harshly. “I appeased you often enough.”

He sucked his breath in and studied me with both speculation and pain. It hurt, but if I had to anger one of them, it was far better it was Alonso.

“As you wish,” he sighed.

“I am sorry,” I sighed in return. “We will speak again on the morrow.”

I cast about and spied a cannon. “Sit there,” I said, pointing at the end of the carriage.

He did as I bade, and I bound his wrists before him, to an iron ring for the ropes used to run the weapon in and out.

“You should be able to lie after a fashion,” I said with a tired sigh.

I knew I would not be comfortable if bound so, but at least he could scratch his nose.

“I will come around and see to you later,” I added.

He snorted. “I doubt you will see to the needs I wish seen to,” he teased.

“Alonso…” I chided in warning.

I could feel Gaston near us, and as I stood and turned, I found myself face to face with him.