“So if I think you’re good enough…” He thrust once more inside me to make the point. “…then who the fuck do you think you are to disagree with me?”
“No one, sir,” I panted helplessly.
“Good. And just so we’re clear, I think…” He thrust hard. “…that you…” Another thrust. “…are absolutely…” A thrust, and a sharp tug on my hair. “…wonderful.”
He shoved me down again, to land on my elbows, as he thrust into me hard and fast. My fists gripped the blanket, and I buried my moans in the fabric as I took everything he gave me, eagerly, greedily.
“You can come now,” he said, even as he continued to thrust, and Iscreamed. Pulses of hot pleasure shot out of me, painting the blanket, my hips undulating wildly, even as I felt the warm spurts of his climax inside me. It took him a moment to finish, a few lazy moans and thrusts milking the last of his pleasure, while he steadied himself against my back.
As gently as ever, my master pulled out of me, leaving my thighs trembling and my mind struggling to catch up. He looked me over – my heaving chest, my dripping cock, the mess I’d made on the blanket – and looked thoroughly satisfied. “Go and put the blanket in the washing machine,” he said, sounding just a touch breathless. “Don’t run it tonight; we can do that in the morning. Then clean up a bit and come back to bed.”
“Yes, sir,” I said, forcing myself off the bed and onto my shaking legs. I tugged the blanket off and scrunched it into a ball, staggering to the bathroom. I shoved it in the machine, wiped myself off with some toilet paper, then flushed it. What the fuck had just happened? I felt safe. I felt complete. I feltowned. I finally felt the way I had always imagined I would feel, when I eventually bonded with my master.
And he was right. If he thought I was wonderful, then who the fuck was I to disagree?
I stumbled back to the bedroom, to find that my master had already found a new blanket to toss over the rumpled bed. He climbed in, then held up the edge of the sheets in clear invitation. I went to him like I’d been pulled by an invisible string. He tucked me in against his side, then reached over and switched off the lamp.
“You belong here, Kade,” he said, as he stroked my hair in the darkness. “I’m not going to let anyone take you from me.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Aiden
The morning after my – admittedly insane – idea about how to fix Kade’s mental state was surprisingly peaceful. We woke around eight and I asked Kade to go make some coffee. He kissed me – a rather unexpected move, given that I hadn’t initiated anything physically – then rolled out of bed, threw on some sweatpants, and headed for the kitchen.
“Eggs or pancakes for breakfast?” he asked, when I arrived a few minutes later. “Or something else?” he offered as an afterthought, likely as a concession to the need for obedience. Whatever I wanted, I would get.
“Pancakes sounds like a great idea,” I said. At the base, I usually went for something high protein and high energy – eggs and bacon, or oatmeal, usually. But at home, I could afford to indulge a little.
Unable to resist, I sidled up behind him and wrapped my arms around his waist, resting my head against his back. He gave my arms a squeeze before returning to the task of frothing milk for the coffee, and I caught the pleased little smile on his face as he worked. Did that mean that last night’s crisis was over? I hoped so. God, I’d felt like absolute shit after I’d dropped that bombshell on him, but the answer to the dilemma had come surprisingly easily, after asking myself a few pertinent questions. My dimari wanted to please his master – as he’d stated repeatedly in the past. The easiest way to let him know that he had pleased his master was to tell him I was pleased. And the best sort of reward for a dimari was sex. I’d been working on the rogue theory that the combination of sex and dominance might be most effective here… and what do you know, it seemed to have worked.
Was that really the secret to keeping a dimari happy? Give them work to do, tell them their master was pleased, and then fuck their brains out? If that was the case, then it made a curious sort of sense that so many dimari on Rendol 4 were so fucking miserable. Because, in our entirely misguidedattempts to treat them with respect, their owners here were going out of their way to avoid doing those exact things. Letting them do the work they’d been trained for was exploiting them. Praising them for being submissive was demeaning. And sexual contact of any sort was assault, rather than reward. It was at once so utterly simple, and so horrendously complicated. Knowing what to do was simple. Circumventing the multitudes of cultural taboos in our way was almost insurmountable.
I decided to approach the rest of the week in a thoroughly laid back way – while at the same time, keeping an eye on Kade’s moods for any sign of stress. Yes, he’d admitted to being worried about the Eumadians. And I was as well, no matter how many times I told myself that the Parliament would never bow to the Eumadians’ requests. But outside of that, I was hoping I’d genuinely managed to solve the issue of his fear of rejection, as a result of the news that I was not his intended master.
We ate the pancakes he’d made, smeared with jam and honey, then tackled the laundry and swept up two weeks’ worth of leaves in the courtyard out the back. We went for a walk to the local park and tossed bread to the givarids – small, furry creatures that made shallow burrows in beds of ferns. We looked up new recipes to try, and I allowed Kade to cook his first meal entirely without supervision. It was largely a success, though he added a little too much pepper, and I had to wrestle with my conscience before finally admitting the truth, rather than letting him bluster on with polite lies. He responded well to correction, resolving to fix the mistake next time around, rather than sulking about it, and I reminded myself that I needed to respect his intelligence, rather than patronising him by assuming he couldn’t deal with even mild criticism.
We watched a handful of movies that I thought exemplified Alliance culture – a love story, a legal drama and an adaptation of a true story about a Denzogal child who had been kidnapped, complete with overly dramatic chase scenes and a heartwarming rescue at the end.
We made love on the sofa… and fuck, yes, I was calling it that now. I loved him. And… well, I honestly wasn’t sure whether dimari could love their masters, but he seemed thoroughly enthused every time I looked sideways at him. He lay with his legs spread, his head thrown back, his hips rocking to meet my thrusts, and no matter how eager I was, he always seemed to climax before me. If that wasn’t a sign of his honest enjoyment of the act, then I didn’t know what was.
On a whim, I decided to teach him to bake. We started with cookies – nice and simple – and then moved on to almond friands, and then a fruit and nut slice. When Kade asked what we were going to do with it all – certainly too much for two people and just one week – I told him we would take it to the base on Monday to share with the troops. It might have been my imagination, but he seemed pleased with the idea.
On Thursday, I had the bright idea of looking through his operations manual again, to see what other skills he’d learned in preparation for impressing his eventual master. And one particular entry caught my attention.
“According to your manual,” I said, wandering into the kitchen where Kade was emptying the dishwasher, “you know how to dance.”
Kade smiled wryly. “Not any human dances. In some cultures, dancing is very important. I know some Anicrian and Polvron dances. They buy quite a few dimari, so it’s important for keeping the customers happy.”
I ignored the part about keeping slave owners happy and instead asked, “Could you show me?” I figured that if other people kept finding out interesting things about Kade, then maybe I should put in the effort to actually ask him about himself.
Kade looked up in surprise. “Now?”
“Finish with the dishwasher. But then yes.”
In the living room two minutes later, Kade pushed the coffee table back against the sofa to clear a bit of floor space. “Which one would you like to see?” He didn’t seem the slightest bit embarrassed about my request.
“I don’t know anything about either style of dance, so just… pick one.”
