Revolutionary - part 2 (Patreon)

The candle won't sit still, because the window doesn't seat right in its frame, and every minute or so the draft leans the flame over toward the papers on his desk like it wants in on them too. They're nothing, those. Quartermaster's lists, a letter half-written. The thing I came up here for he keeps closer than that. I can see the cord of it now at the back of his neck where his shirt's fallen open.

I keep half an eye on it. The rest of me is on him, on the size of his hand at the back of my neck and how easily it rests there, how little it would take. The body's been doing this since the stairs, sizing up every man it passes by. What he could do to it, a low watchfulness in the belly that isn't all fear, and shames me for the part that isn't. His coat is over the back of the chair where he let it fall, brick red gone nearly black in this light, the lace at the cuffs gray, a brown stain on the hem. His boots are by the bed. His shirt's still on, half open, and he's got a hand in my hair, careful for a man his size, drawing the pins out one at a time and laying them in a straight little row on the nightstand.

He's been at the Madeira a while, long enough that his eyes have gone loose and slow, and he watched me cross the room earlier with the basin over the rim of his glass. I keep my eyes down like she said and feel them on me regardless. Somewhere between the door and the washstand I stop pretending I don't. I look up and hold it a beat past where a kitchen girl holds a look. He's not a stupid man and he's a lonely one and he's a long way from wherever he keeps a wife, and the three of those are doing most of my work for me.

"You've a strange way about you," he says now, against my temple. "For a kitchen girl."

"Do I, sir?" I've got the voice down, low in the throat, slow. I turn my face up under his hand and his thumb crosses my bottom lip and stops there, and I let it.

He loosens the laces at the front of the stays, slow, and the give of it undoes me on its own, everything I've been holding up since the washhouse letting down at once. He lifts the stays away and drops them and draws the shift up and off after, my arms going up like a child's to let him, and then there's nothing on me at all. Bare in the cold of the room, my own shadow thrown long across the boards by the one candle, and his eyes go down me slow, over the breasts, the belly, the dark hair below it, and his looking is its own touch, a heat that climbs my throat before his hands have even moved.

He lays me back onto the bed. The tick rustles, dry husks, the rope frame gives under us, and he sets his mouth on one breast and I learn what that is from inside. The pull of it runs a wire straight down through me, breast to belly to the heat between my legs, every draw of his mouth tightening the whole line, and my back comes up off the husks to put more of me in his mouth before I've decided to. His tongue crosses the nipple and the wire sings. There's a fist of mine in his hair and I don't remember putting it there.

His hand comes down my belly, unhurried, and finds the place between my legs, and my knees fall open for it without my say. His fingers part the folds, already slick, and find that hooded knot at the top, the one the washcloth caught on earlier, and settle into a slow circling pressure that empties my head of the room. I can hear myself, high, foreign, climbing. Two of his fingers slide down and into me and even that fullness is a shock, a stretch and a clutch around them, and his thumb keeps working the knot above while the fingers move, and the two together build something I can feel rushing up bright and fast. It crests. The whole center of me draws in hard and then breaks open in a long pulse I feel down to my heels, hips bucking up into his hand, and a sound tears out of me that I have to bite off at the end so it won't carry through the wall. The first one, and his hand did it, and I'm still shaking through the tail of it when he moves.

He comes up over me and settles his weight between my thighs and I feel him at the entrance, blunt and hot, and then he presses in, and the stretch of it whites out the room for a second, candle and cord and coat all gone, just the slow heavy fill of him into a body that opens and grips and opens again. He's all the way in, a fullness with nothing in my own memory to set against it, a pressure that aches and wants more of the same ache, and when he draws back and drives in again the drag relights everything his hand already lit, deeper now, and my hips lift to meet him before I've told them to.

I came up here to use him, and that isn't how it's going. He's got me pinned open under his weight, nothing left to do but take what he does, and the taking is where it turns, because under the heat of it I've gone willing in a place I didn't know would answer, and then past willing. Held down. Filled. Asked for nothing but to lie here and be wanted, and wanting that back so hard it scares me. It's doing more to me than it's doing to him. My hips keep coming up to meet him on their own. I can hear what I sound like and I can't bring it down. The shame of how much rises right alongside it and the one feeds the other, and I turn my face into the husks so he won't catch whatever's on it, and the turn gives him my throat and he takes that too, and the sound I make into the tick hasn't got anything proud left in it.

He finishes with a shudder and a groan he muffles in my hair, deep, and I feel that too, the pulse of it, and the body takes it, and for a long moment I lie there under his weight not thinking about cords or boats or doors at all, just breathing, ashamed and not sorry.

After is when I work. He's gone loose and heavy and pleased, an arm slung over me, his breath slowing against my neck, and I lie still under the weight of it and wait for him to drop into the long even breathing of a man who thinks the day is done. The room smells of tallow and sweat and the sweet wine on his breath, and under it the river. My heart's still going hard, and I can't say anymore how much of that is the work coming and how much is the rest, the part I'll have words with myself about later.

His arm gets heavy. His breathing changes. The pocketbook has slid round on its cord to rest against the husks between us, a flat little weight in worn leather, warm from his skin, and I work it loose with two fingers and ease it out to the end of its cord without lifting the cord from his neck, slow, slower, his face a foot from mine and never moving. I open it one-handed against my own bare stomach and tilt it to the candle. There it is. Dates in a clerk's clean hand, the boats counted out, the crossing to Gloucester laid plain as a recipe, the night of it ringed in ink. No way to take it, the cord would wake him, no paper to copy onto. So I read it over and over until it's burned in, the night and the boats and the hour, until I could set it down from memory on the back of nothing, and then I feed it back along its cord and settle it against his chest where it was, and his breath never breaks.

Then I have to get back into the clothes. The shift's easy enough, over the head, though it sticks to skin still damp from the bed. The stays are a riddle. I hold them to my front like she had them, the laces still threaded but slack, and tightening them on yourself is nothing like having it done for you, I can't get the pull even, one side gaping while the other bites, and I haven't the first idea how she finished the knot so it would hold. I get it close and tie it off clumsy and the whole thing sits crooked, one breast riding higher than the other, the boning digging in wrong under one arm. The petticoat I step into and then can't find where it fastens, turning it around at my waist in the dark, feeling for the tapes, and when I find them my fingers won't make the bow, too new to this body to make its hands do what I mean. I'm bent over the knot of it, half dressed, the stays crooked and biting, when the bed goes still behind me, and the stillness isn't sleep.

I turn around and he's watching me.

He hasn't moved. His eyes are open in the candlelight and there's no telling how long they've been open or how much they took in, the cord, my hands at his chest, my hands now at the ties of a petticoat I can't fasten. One of his hands has come up to rest flat over the pocketbook, over his own heart, without his looking at it. The major looks at me from the bed with something on his face I can't read fast enough. The next thing out of me has to come in that soft high voice that isn't mine, and I'm going to have to mean it.