Other Colors Ch. 21-22

"Oui. Ce soir? Mais bien sûr."

He kept on speaking. His hand sank lower. I could feel my skin begin to tingle, and like a slim, leather-bound book he had perused many times already, he opened my thighs, letting them spread to precisely the page he intended.

"Un moment s'il vous plait," his voice lowered as he laid his splayed fingers over my vulva, intercalating them with my lips. "I'm afraid my pen's run dry."

My skin turned scarlet. His Penny, his pen. I might have glared again—all daggers, bodkins, stilletos, and skeans—had not he stolen that moment to let his fingertips glide across my clitoris, and obliterate each discrete thought in my head. I groaned, my lips and lids still sealed, and melted backward over his lap.

"Oui, voilà, c'est mieux," he moved his hand slowly, sinistrally, in a tightly widening ellipse along my pudenda. "Et quelle est l'adresse?"

Pudendum. Pudere. To make ashamed. 'Venus bound by Two Putti'. I was putty in his hands, wet clay for him to slurry, and sculpt, and fire. Rodin's 'Hands', his 'Iris', and 'Danaïd'. My breath rasped as I rocked my hips against his hastening manipulations.

"Peut-être que oui. Merci, Madame," he leaned low, letting the last warm brash of his words play over my breastbone, and over the edge of my throat. "She'll come if she can."

He swept his hand still deeper, until I tensed, quivered, and started to moan. It was enough. I came quietly for him, torrentially, soused and drowning as I sank lower into the warm swell of his lap. 'I'd rather sink than call for help, sir.' Like the lumbering undertow of a riptide, most of what moved through me lay well beneath the surface. Still it was more than strong enough to sweep me out to sea. Bathos. Pathos. A pair of pennies for the boatman. He conned me calmly across my little tempest; his hand a sand-smoothed rudder, my body wracked, keeled, and sinking to its silken, water-spouted grave. Venus Anadyomene. Campaspe, Phyrne, the clam unclasped.

"En effet..." he cut off his interlocutor, smiling down at me deviously as his hand migrated up to my navel. My belly moved, breathless, like a bellows beneath his palm, "Merci encore, Madame. Adieu."

Adieu. Until God. I watched him hang up, throwing the phone over his shoulder, and heard it land dully on the divan behind us. I watched, violaceous, as he lifted his still-glistening fingertips to his tongue, and licked them clean. 'Je vais a l'amour.' I'd rather drown.

"May I," my voice was arid, and thin, "may I ask who was calling, Maître?"

"Marie," he smacked his lips, and I blushed a bit deeper, "seems they're starting their tech week tomorrow. She's invited us to a soirée somewhere in the city."

"Soirée?" I sat up, crossing my arms, and pulled his shirt closed across my chest. It sounded off to me. 'Rager', 'fête sauvage', and even 'seance' I could believe, but 'soiree' was a bit too stuffy for Marie. What's more, it seemed like lunacy to me that they'd risk commencing the final rehearsals with the entire cast and crew hungover. But then, Marie was not infrequently a lunatic. I narrowed my eyes at him, "she really said that?"

"Fine. A Saturnalia, if you like," he rolled his eyes, still grinning, and gathered his belt and shoes from the floor, "One night only. The world turned inside out. Hens will crow. Cocks will cluck. Masters will pour wine for their slaves. And slaves," he folded his belt once over into an ominous loop, and caught my eye, "may shirk their duties, sans rebuke."

"C'est le chaos," I bit my lip, recalling Biondi's orgiastic bronze. "Good thing we're not going, sir."

He cocked his head, "are we not?"

I bit harder. I knew he was teasing me. I knew better than to believe he had even the slightest intention of letting me leave the house that night—much less, to meet my friends, and let me off my leash in the spirit and pastiche of some obscure, pileated Roman holiday. Still, there was something in his tone that tempted me, that made me sniff a little closer to the apple underneath his looming deadfall.

"You're not—I mean, you're not really going to take me," I stammered softly, raising my knees to my chin, "are you?"

He sat down above me on the divan, and nodded. By ritualized repetition, I knew this was not to gesticulate affirmation, but rather a familiar signal that I should prostrate myself, and lace up his boots.

"Cela dépend. I did have grand plans for you, my sparrow," his eyes flashed as I began my degrading labor. He lifted the Bakst prints from where they'd fallen, and licked his thumb before skimming to the end. "Along these lines, peut-être? You make for such a lovely martyr."

The turned the leaf for me, revealing poor Ida tied to a willow tree, her pale skin pierced by the graphite ghosts of a dozen arrows. I shuddered, and tied another knot, this one among the rippling magenstraße of my stomach.

"Do you want to go, Miss Foster?" he leaned forward, snapping the book shut, and lifted my chin. "I will take you, if you'll let me."

I squinted, still kneeling like Thetis at the Jovian throne. He's serious, is't he? He'd really do it. I knitted my brow, and pulled back. He'd let me make the choice tonight.

"Saturnalia?"

He smirked, "Pourquoi pas? I'll even let you pick out your dress."

"My dress..." I echoed, coquettishly batting my lashes, "and my perfume, too, Monsieur?"

"Hard limit," he lowered his head, pressing his nose to the poorly demarcated part in my hair, and breathed in deeply. "C'est Fracas, ma jeune fille rangée. Perhaps it's just the darkbloom in me," he breathed out, "but I would your scent was alscepius year-round."

I smirked, weighing whether to correct his floral faux pas—the serpent's staff bearing, after all, so little resemblance to San Jose's, and toxic to the heart to boot.

"Comme dirait l'autre, Monsieur, 'a tuberose by any other name'..." I needled him sub rosa, and took more than a sliver of pleasure in the perplexity that played across his face. It felt nice, frankly, being allowed a little license and levity, especially when I'd one-upped him fair and square.

"Is that a 'yes', then, Penny?"

My natural instinct was to nod. But I paused, unable to answer. I gnawed the inside of my cheek, and something inside me, more jagged and abstract than my teeth, gnawed deeper. By almost all accounts, I ought to have been elated. It ought to have thrilled me that Monsieur Caine—a man who always eschewed and at times renounced the niceties of dalliance, and courtship—had offered to take me out on his arm for the evening. It was as much a prison furlough as it was a date, and still I couldn't quite bring myself to say yes.

Somewhere outside the study, Rupestrian whined, and a distant door slammed shut. The truth was, I was afraid. I was afraid to let my two tidy worlds orbit too near one another; that the skew of their barycenter may upset the mercurial weather of one, and send the other spiraling off into oblivion. Granted, allowing him to meet Marie and vice versa, while weird and vaguely quixotic, did not especially worry me. She was sure to approve of his handsome strangeness, and of what she would probably term his 'Aquarian aura', while he had enough of his own far darker eccentricities that hers might actually come off as quaint.

But it was letting Marie see me with him that really concerned me. True as it may be, I dreaded the inevitable moment when she would tell me that I'd changed; that I was different around him, that she wasn't convinced it was for the best. And even that paled in comparison to another towering anxiety, the black, hypothetical windows of which I was unwilling to even peer though—I was genuinely terrified that we might run into Peter.

"Je ne sais pas, Maître," I sighed softly.

He leveled his gaze, "mull it over. We leave at nine if we leave at all," quickly, he kissed my forehead, stood, and stalked toward the door still shirtless, "come find me in the ballroom when you've made up your mind."

My mind... I winced, thoroughly annoyed with myself that upon his handing me the rare chance to make my own choices, I'd found myself utterly paralyzed. He drew the door closed, and I drew my knees tighter to my chest. I frowned.

It wasn't fair, him putting me in this position. Dmitri, as always, was breaking his own rules. And that was his right I suppose; his droit de cuissage as autocrat, and author of my grim, chimerical fairy tale. I'd always had my rigid part to play for him—the low-borne princess who pricked her finger; the doctor's daughter captured abroad, bought and sold to some barbarous white sheik of the Siberian snow. I hadn't the power to change the plot. Not from within, anyhow. If I did, I'm not even sure I would want to—and that, perhaps, was the ugliest worm in my apple. It was all written out ages ago, and he knew it; inscribed on vellum, and carved in caves. My part, merely, was to follow along—as bitter as it may be—unto the end.

There would be ball tonight, and a ballgown. A sleigh, a squash, a garden overgrown with night-blooming tuberose. There would be a glass slipper, a glass casket as well. Red flowers, red wine, red blood from blue veins. A wolf, or a woodsman, come to chew or chop the heart from my breast. Or was it her liver? Pandora's box, Prometheus' rocks. Es war einmal...

Enough. I closed my eyes tight to keep my mind from racing. I stewed for some time. I counted my breaths. Saint-Sebastienne was still lying on the divan where he'd left her, a vine-wound voodoo doll, stuck through with her sagittate stigmata. I glared, and Ida's white eyes glared back. The divisive device sat beside her, and though still indecisive, I snatched it up, and escaped the study. I felt overwhelmed. I needed him with me. And after the oath he'd coerced me to take, I couldn't quite trust myself to be alone any longer.

Having not come across the ballroom since my very first morning at Lacoste, its exact coordinates eluded me. From the foyer, though, I could hear a distant 'thump' punctuating Rupestrian's rhapsodic barking, and traced the commotion down a corniced corridor to its enormous, oaken doors. I frowned, and throwing my shoulder against the one on the left, thrust it open.

The room was as I remembered—a large, amber egg, with three oriels of blue stained glass at each of its eccentric ends. He stood off-center under an unlit chandelier, tossing a tennis ball for Rupestrian clear across the grand and desolate chamber. I watched the dog gallop after it, tongue flapping ecstatically, his toenails slicing across the trigonal inlays of the parquet. Ballroom. I rolled my eyes, my lips splitting into a reluctant, lopsided grin. He's awful. He spun to face me as the door latched shut.

"Bull's-Eye and Bill, I presume?" I crossed my arms.

He strode to meet me, chuckling, as Rupestrian waggled along behind.

"Is that meant to be clever, Miss Foster?"

"Is this?" I raised a brow at him.

The dog mewled, and dropped the ball at his feet. He snatched it up, and tossed it to me, "an animal needs exercise. It was too cold for him to come running with me this morning."

"Too cold for the one with fur?" I grimaced, and chucked it across the room, "but you went anyways."

He smirked, and stepped closer, "Ridiculous, isn't it? He gets soft, cooped up in here all winter." He clasped my hand, and slipped his arm around my waist, as if we were about to start waltzing. "We'll bring him with us to the mine this spring. He does much better up north. Fresh air. Fresh water. Room to run."

A chill glided down my spine as the invisible music commenced, and he led me firmly into the first figure.

"...We?"

"Mais oui. After Antwerp, Penny," he pulled me back into a vaguely Argentine castigada, "do you really believe I'd leave you alone again? I'd go mad."

My skin sizzled, and I struggled to keep up as he swept me into a swift cadena across the floor.

"What a noble mind is overthrown, Monsieur."

"Perhaps. But I don't care if I have to lock you in a crate this time," he let his lips feather over the edge of my ear, "you will come with me."

I shook my head, wrapping my leg around him in a timid and ill-timed piernazo, "you know, I can usually tell when you're bluffing, sir."

"Can you indeed?" he growled, and dipped me low, eyes flashing as my hair swept over the smooth parquet. "Tell me. Am I tonight, Miss Foster?"

He held me there, dangling from the bluff face, clinging onto his shoulders for dear life. My breath hitched, and I shook my head. Even when I knew, I never had the nerve to call him out on it. He grinned wryly, and raised me back to my feet.

"You'll like the Territories. You will," he led me once more, more gently than before, "you've never seen a lovelier wasteland. The Slave Lake, the taiga, the northern lights." He caught me, leering, and stopped us cold, "they're the color of your eyes, you know. And you still owe me a canvas in green."

Owe him. I knitted my brow. It was the first time since he handed me the key that he'd mentioned the precise provisos of our agreement. It was a gambit, that much I knew, but the game's rules were still impenetrable to me. I felt like Alice, trying to play chess in a convex mirror. Haigha, Hatta. The Red King's dream. He closed off our curious, quiet tango with a kiss, and I simpered, perennially impressed with the slyness of his boots.

I'm not sure why I kept resisting him. It had, after all, nearly done me in to be left behind on his abbreviated sojourn to Antwerp. Perhaps I was put out that he'd not done me the courtesy of asking this time. Perhaps I was just reacting to the first firm proof that he'd been here in his ovate ballroom hatching plans for us across the months to come; whereas I, stuck up in his study, still couldn't bring myself to gaze more than three hours into the future without recoiling in uncertainty, and horror. To date, I still hadn't even told him about my visa expiring on the first of the year—that regardless of what happened between us in the weeks and minutes and miles to come, sooner instead of later, I would have no choice but to return to the States.

I pressed my cheek against his chest, and clenched my jaw. The dog, who had been bounding around us during our impromptu danse sauvage, now dropped to the floor, exhausted, prostrate, and panting.

"Tu vois ce que je voulais dire?" Dmitri lifted an eyebrow, "Soft. And he's getting wide as well. Jules spoils him," he shook his head at the beast, "three square meals a day, une petite collation avant le coucher. It's a wonder he can walk at all."

"Je sais par quoi il passe," I frowned, and glanced down at the dog. "You know I haven't worked out once since I got here." I wriggled out of Dmitri's arms, and knelt to pat Rupestrian's belly, "I've wanted to—it's hard to hit the gym while you're under house arrest."

He cocked his head, circling behind me, "are we feeling a tad stir crazy, mon piaf?" He touched my shoulder, and I shied away, "A little trapped, perhaps?"

"I'm not crazy," I hissed, "it's not crazy to need a little space once in a while—to need some fucking time to take care of myself."

He took his hand away, "come again?"

I kept my eyes down, unwilling to show him the tears welling up at their edges.

"I don't understand what I'm doing here, Dmitri. I don't know what you're doing to me. And I don't know why I'm so fucking scared to leave the house tonight, and see my fucking friends for once," I clenched my fists, and felt my shoulders begin to tremble. "I swear, I don't know anything anymore, and I'm just so fucking sick of it I could scream." I sniffed hard, and wiped my eyes, "And I know I know I know I'm not supposed to say so. I know I'm supposed to just grin and bear it. I'm supposed to suffer, and be your perfect little esclave dévoué, but I can't. I can't do it anymore, Dmitri. And I just want to murder myself right now because I know I'm ruining everything and you're going to hate me and think I'm not worth the trouble because I'm falling apart right in front of you for no fucking reason at all, and its just the cruelest fucking joke in the world because you mean so much to me it scares me out of my fucking skin, and I—"

He dropped beside me, clasping my throat to cut off my fulmination mid-flash, and twisted me into a deep and compulsory kiss. I fought him at first, but he held me fast. He didn't allow me to speak, and he didn't allow me to stop. Very gradually, I gave in. I felt myself melt his arms. Like a bolus of botulinum toxin, his lips were lethal, and could put me into flaccid paralysis with little more than a tincture, and taste. He took his time, satisfying himself in the totality of my surrender, and tore away to gaze into my eyes.

"I didn't know," he stroked my cheek softly, "I didn't know how much I was hurting you."

My brow furrowed, and I laid my head against his shoulder. I felt guilty, and already a little regretful of my tirade. The frustrations had swept over me like a flash flood, and once he stoppered me, they seemed to recede almost as swiftly.

"You're not..." I murmured, "Not really. I just—I have no idea what to tell people, and it's stressing me out." I nestled a little deeper into his chest, "I don't know to what to tell Marie when she asks me point blank why I'm not wearing my own clothing. Why I went out with you just once, and never came home. Why I look and act so different than I did before." My tone was timid, and meek, "Tell me. Tell me what I'm supposed to say, sir. I want to be with you. But I don't want to lose her either."

He folded his arms around me, and laid a chaste kiss on my cheek, "You can tell her the truth, if you like."

My eyes widened. I was shocked.

"You're not serious."

He nodded, "You have my permission. Obviously, I'd prefer that you not broadcast my proclivities. But I'd also never force you to lie to your friends for me. It's a stormy petrel for abuse. I'll none of it."

"You'd," I bit my lip, "you'd really let me tell her?"

He shifted a little, and leveled his gaze, "I would. And you can tell Mulgrave, too. Or keep it our secret. Either way, I imagine he's been on your mind tonight."

I blushed Hester-red, and hid my face against his shoulder, trying hard again not to picture how Peter would react. Honestly, it was embarrassing. I could put on a chastity belt, chainmail, and a helmet made of solid lead. To Dmitri, I would still be naked, still vulnerable; my thoughts as obvious as Babylonian graffiti. Clotho, Lachesis, Atropos. Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin.

"No," I looked up, "No. I think I waited too long with Marie. She'd strangle me for not telling her sooner. And Peter," and I saw his face before me, the moment after he'd made his confounding confession; sweat-smeared behind the welding mask, and half-rapt to the top of his ladder, "we're not that close, really. And besides," my blush deepened, remembering his harsh invective, "I think... he already knows."

His eyes flashed, but he stayed silent. I wondered what he was thinking. I wished I could read him as well as he read me. I wondered what he would say if he knew that Peter had kissed me; if he knew that Peter, unprompted, had already proclaimed his 'love'.

"Regardless, sir," I scratched Rupestrian's haunches, hastening to change the subject, "I'm not going stir crazy. But I really would like to get a little exercise. It helps when I'm stressed," I frowned, and felt my shoulder tingle beneath his hand. "It always has."