Post by thia on Jan 23, 2012 13:14:48 GMT -1
Caress these lips with barbed wire, my muse
Smile in that beguiling way and feed me the proverbial apple
Make me your Snow White sleeping in a rose-covered casket
Embrace me, surround me in your body heat
Hold the blade to my back with your saccharine smile
Maim me, tame me, for you know not what you do
Make me Porphyria with her blueberry mouth…
This was my blood oath, all of my adoration made tangible in fine lines of ink. I declared my sin against my God and my society, drawing my transgression from my being as though it were a vile tapeworm. A hideous thing – I stared at the words, allowing the proper disgust and shame to settle in. His face drifted into my thoughts like the lost scent of a lover’s perfume. In my mind’s eye, he was the seraph that could only be from my own personal Perdition, blasphemous and glorious.
Such a bitter swill, isn’t it? Making love to your wife and imagining him in your arms, imagining his lips ghosting over yours…
With a flick of my wrist, I fed the parchment to the burning fireplace. The flames licked at the paper as the corners curled in on themselves – as I watched the fire dance in the grate, a small part of me wondered if it could be that easy to get rid of the desire burning in my chest. Just extract it and, with little more than the simplest gesture, let them burn to ashes and scatter. Nothing lost, nothing gained.
I couldn’t help but snort at my own naïveté. Since when had my life ever had such a clean resolution to anything, least of all when it came to matters of the heart? The foolish man deluded himself into thinking that he could just pursue his wishes with impunity or that his avarice could be satisfied. I was barely into my twentieth year, and I knew this better than anyone – no matter who I wanted, I would have to give one of them up.
My heart, however, had not had cleanly split in either’s favor. Instead it was a shredded mess that afforded no bias to make the decision easier, but instead simply grew more ragged as I delayed making a choice. I was a man being slowly ripped in two, ignoring the blood collecting on the ground as I wallowed in my own self-pity.
Pathetic.
I found myself wandering back into our bedroom, noting that my wife had already settled into bed. She’d obviously been there for hours. Every night, she burned a fresh candle as she read one of her novels, and this one had melted into a smooth puddle at the base. Even though it had cooled into a smooth disk of wax, the faint smell of rose still clung to the air. The maroon quilt was wrapped around her petite frame like a cocoon. Though the room was mostly dark, a few threads of moonlight managed to capture the contours of her face, rendering her both breathtaking and unreachable. Even as I tentatively rested a hand on the smooth skin of her forearm, it felt as though an emotional gulf separated us.
I knew she wasn’t sleeping. Her soft breathing ebbed and flowed in too perfect a rhythm, a measured attempted at feigning sleep like a stubborn child. I willed her to put her hand over mine, to give me that coy smile any man could grow to love – hell, to even spare me a glance. I felt my lips curve into a smile, but there was no real mirth in the gesture. It was a fragile thing, this hope of mine. Every night, I repeated the ritual.
Every night, she remained turned on her side, shrugging off my hand as though it were covered in poison ivy.
“Would you make me lie beneath you, Damien?”
Such a strange thing, the way her words were hardly louder than a breath but managed to slice through my skin like razorblades, the way her words positively dripped with disgust.
Sighing, I gave her arm an absent-minded caress as I answered, “Can a husband not touch his wife without it having to lead to something else? Isn’t this—” I gestured at the respective distance between us “—intimate enough? I would never force you into it.”
A derisive snort, softened just slightly by the tinge of sleepiness. But still a dull knife can do significant damage if wielded by a skilled hand.
“With men, it’s never just a touch. You use the nicest words imaginable to lure a woman to bed, taking and taking until she has nothing left. You’re all the same.”
Just like that.
I had shown her nothing but the patience of a saint – six months of marriage, and only once had we ever consummated it. Not once had I claimed my so-called right as a husband to lay claim to her body, nor demanded that she give me sons. Not once had I touched more than her bare arm, even as my hands longed to linger over softer skin. Yet for all my efforts to show her a husband’s adoration, she still categorized me with the same lechers who consorted with prostitutes or took without asking.
I dropped my hand from her arm, unable to restrain the grimace in my features. Every night, I longed to be affectionate, to properly charm her with gentle words and soft touches. Every night, she spat venom like a viper.
I drifted to the couch in our living room, curling on the couch and crossing my arms over my stomach, as though it could hold me together. I was Pandora’s box seething with desperation for some form of catharsis, and it was all I could do to keep the proverbial stitches from coming loose. Despite the roaring fireplace crackling merrily, its warmth could never quite reach my numb fingertips or take root in my deadened heart. Every night, my wife poured poison on it with her acerbic words, and every night I found myself picking away another part of it that had withered away. Only twenty years old and already I felt like an old man, having experienced too much rejection ad nauseum to expect any reciprocation.
“My lord? Are you feeling well?”
There was so much kindness in his formal words – it was a soothing balm to the wounded ego. I met my servant Oliver’s cerulean eyes with a genuine smile; it was remarkable that we could be the same age, yet his eyes alone maintained the wide-eyed innocence of his youth. He was the cloudless summer day to my cumulonimbus, and even before he parted his lips, I could so easily find myself transfixed by something as simple as the ever-present slant of his mouth as he spoke.
“Another night of the same, Oliver,” I responded, too weary to hide the edge of despair from my voice. He knew of my situation, my increasing hopelessness; his eyes narrowed as he glanced to the side, teeth nibbling at his bottom lip as his thoughts began to churn. It was a contemplative expression I’d seen countless times over the years, and every time it evoked the same visceral response.
I wanted to kiss away the stern line in his lips. I wanted to smooth away the tension from his brow, to get him to smile that deliciously impish grin of his again. But ever since my wedding day and thereafter, my tension had siphoned onto him. My frustration had become his own, and without realizing it, he had truly become my confidante.
I was such a hypocrite. Even as I despaired over the frigidness of my wife, I lusted after the young man who had been both servant and brother from womb to marriage. We were Moses and Ramses, we were the brothers without bonds of blood – though as my parents had done their part to raise Oliver as a well-bred child, it had always been an unsettling reality for both of us that he was destined to be a servant until my dying day.
I had fought it vehemently at first, but our culture left no breathing room for such unconventional ideas. I had been fortunate enough to have been born into a wealthy family, and poor Oliver had been given the dubious fortune of being left on our doorstep as an infant, only days after my own birth. Fortunate in that he was raised alongside me until we were fourteen, and unfortunate in the fact that he was still destined to live at a lower status than me… and for what reason? Because his parents had decided to abandon him?
“Lord Damien, are you - ?”
Shaking my head, I interrupted his prattle.
“Please drop the formality and that ridiculous ‘lord’ title, Oliver. You know I hate it. You never called me anything but my first name until we were older. You’re the only person I can talk to without all the frilly diction.”
“Admittedly, you really are quite horrible at acting like an aristocrat” he quipped, dropping his politeness with tangible relief. “But really, we both knew it’d come to this point – we weren’t always going to be able to play together or act like we were brothers. We knew from day one that I’d have to call you ‘lord’, ‘master’, and that we’d both have to stomach it.”
I closed my eyes, putting my arm on my forehead as though I could block out what bothered me the most: that by existing in the first place, really, I condemned him to live a life of servitude. Even though I considered him my closest friend, I knew he would not remain at my side if given the choice to live a life of freedom.
Selfish bastard that I was, I couldn’t stand the thought of losing him. Already he had filled the role of brother, friend, confidante, caretaker, healer throughout the years. Now here I was, admiring how breathtaking firelight rendered him, glancing at the broad expanse of his shoulders, the graceful contours of his muscles. I could spend hours memorizing the way his lips always remained slightly parted with just the ghost of a smile, or that charming habit he had of covering his mouth with the back of his hand as he laughed – a surprisingly feminine and obsequious gesture that rendered his laughter even more infectious, as though we shared a private joke.
He was the man who’d greedily claimed my heart before I had a choice, my emotions caring little for his gender, status, or the fact that I was a married man. Oliver was the only living thing in a dead world, and in spite of myself, he had tied himself so neatly into my heartstrings. I loved every inch of him, from the casual disarray of his hair to the feet that he’d always abhorred confining in servant shoes. I loved his childish temper, his wild spirit, his quick tongue.
I loved him. My impulsive, compassionate, devil-may-care Oliver.
I felt slender fingers lace through mine, gentle hands prying my arm away from my face with barely a whisper of a touch. Blinking in surprise, I glanced up to see that Oliver’s smile had softened, glowing brighter than even the fireplace. He took in the rogue tear that had managed to escape, the way my face flushed when one of his fingers curved around the tear and wiped it away. The touch was feather-light, but somehow felt more intimate than any embrace.
Keeping his hand laced in mine, his other traced baroque patterns on my forehead, the bridge of my nose, the contours of my cheeks, my jaw line, lips. I closed my eyes and sighed with pleasure as I let him trail the two fingers along idly, his fingertips never quite lifting from my skin. It was a gesture of comfort, the same thing my own mother would do when I felt sick or when I had awoken from a nightmare.
“I don’t mind staying here, Damien. You know as well as I do that if I hated it that badly, running away wouldn’t be much of a challenge.” His fingertips rested on my lips, silencing the words that were already formed on my tongue. “And I know that if I were to leave, it would tear you apart to see the person you love gone for good.”
I couldn’t have answered even if I wanted to. His words rendered me speechless, my mind reeling as my feelings, ones I had punished myself over for months, were immediately laid out on the open. It would be a disservice to dismiss his truthful observation: though my faced burned with embarrassment, it was all I could do to nod and wait for the blow to come, to watch my fragile, neatly assembled world crumble as I finally lost –
“I would have never stuck around if I didn’t feel the same way.”
His lips silenced my protests gently, the touch light as air, asking permission that was eagerly given. It was chaste, hesitant, but somehow with such a delicate touch he could chase away the carefully formed explanations I had created for why my feelings for him were taboo. His hands touched me so gingerly, as though I were made of glass – even as he gave himself away, it was driven out of a need to comfort rather than out of lust.
I could only stare at him like some wondrous marvel as we broke apart; indeed, a part of me wondered foolishly if I had daydreamed the entire thing. But slight redness of his lips confirmed it, as well as the beginning of a smug smile forming on them.
Shaking my head, all I could do was reciprocate his smile and marvel as his ability to remain so casual, as though being in love with your male servant was as acceptable as reading the morning paper. Absentmindedly, my fingertips brushed against my lips, as if the truth could be felt or that it had left a tangible mark.
Carefree as always, Oliver swatted my hand away and gave me another peck on the lips, the kiss of a courtier. He gave a mock bow and said, “As many years as we have ahead of us, m’lord, I do think that you’ll need to rest well for tomorrow.” His diction defaulted into its traditional formality, but not without an accompanying wink, a glint of mischief in his eyes.
My Oliver was as practical a servant as always.
He was mine, and… I relished the phrase, savored it like a fine delicacy, I was his.
Smile in that beguiling way and feed me the proverbial apple
Make me your Snow White sleeping in a rose-covered casket
Embrace me, surround me in your body heat
Hold the blade to my back with your saccharine smile
Maim me, tame me, for you know not what you do
Make me Porphyria with her blueberry mouth…
This was my blood oath, all of my adoration made tangible in fine lines of ink. I declared my sin against my God and my society, drawing my transgression from my being as though it were a vile tapeworm. A hideous thing – I stared at the words, allowing the proper disgust and shame to settle in. His face drifted into my thoughts like the lost scent of a lover’s perfume. In my mind’s eye, he was the seraph that could only be from my own personal Perdition, blasphemous and glorious.
Such a bitter swill, isn’t it? Making love to your wife and imagining him in your arms, imagining his lips ghosting over yours…
With a flick of my wrist, I fed the parchment to the burning fireplace. The flames licked at the paper as the corners curled in on themselves – as I watched the fire dance in the grate, a small part of me wondered if it could be that easy to get rid of the desire burning in my chest. Just extract it and, with little more than the simplest gesture, let them burn to ashes and scatter. Nothing lost, nothing gained.
I couldn’t help but snort at my own naïveté. Since when had my life ever had such a clean resolution to anything, least of all when it came to matters of the heart? The foolish man deluded himself into thinking that he could just pursue his wishes with impunity or that his avarice could be satisfied. I was barely into my twentieth year, and I knew this better than anyone – no matter who I wanted, I would have to give one of them up.
My heart, however, had not had cleanly split in either’s favor. Instead it was a shredded mess that afforded no bias to make the decision easier, but instead simply grew more ragged as I delayed making a choice. I was a man being slowly ripped in two, ignoring the blood collecting on the ground as I wallowed in my own self-pity.
Pathetic.
I found myself wandering back into our bedroom, noting that my wife had already settled into bed. She’d obviously been there for hours. Every night, she burned a fresh candle as she read one of her novels, and this one had melted into a smooth puddle at the base. Even though it had cooled into a smooth disk of wax, the faint smell of rose still clung to the air. The maroon quilt was wrapped around her petite frame like a cocoon. Though the room was mostly dark, a few threads of moonlight managed to capture the contours of her face, rendering her both breathtaking and unreachable. Even as I tentatively rested a hand on the smooth skin of her forearm, it felt as though an emotional gulf separated us.
I knew she wasn’t sleeping. Her soft breathing ebbed and flowed in too perfect a rhythm, a measured attempted at feigning sleep like a stubborn child. I willed her to put her hand over mine, to give me that coy smile any man could grow to love – hell, to even spare me a glance. I felt my lips curve into a smile, but there was no real mirth in the gesture. It was a fragile thing, this hope of mine. Every night, I repeated the ritual.
Every night, she remained turned on her side, shrugging off my hand as though it were covered in poison ivy.
“Would you make me lie beneath you, Damien?”
Such a strange thing, the way her words were hardly louder than a breath but managed to slice through my skin like razorblades, the way her words positively dripped with disgust.
Sighing, I gave her arm an absent-minded caress as I answered, “Can a husband not touch his wife without it having to lead to something else? Isn’t this—” I gestured at the respective distance between us “—intimate enough? I would never force you into it.”
A derisive snort, softened just slightly by the tinge of sleepiness. But still a dull knife can do significant damage if wielded by a skilled hand.
“With men, it’s never just a touch. You use the nicest words imaginable to lure a woman to bed, taking and taking until she has nothing left. You’re all the same.”
Just like that.
I had shown her nothing but the patience of a saint – six months of marriage, and only once had we ever consummated it. Not once had I claimed my so-called right as a husband to lay claim to her body, nor demanded that she give me sons. Not once had I touched more than her bare arm, even as my hands longed to linger over softer skin. Yet for all my efforts to show her a husband’s adoration, she still categorized me with the same lechers who consorted with prostitutes or took without asking.
I dropped my hand from her arm, unable to restrain the grimace in my features. Every night, I longed to be affectionate, to properly charm her with gentle words and soft touches. Every night, she spat venom like a viper.
I drifted to the couch in our living room, curling on the couch and crossing my arms over my stomach, as though it could hold me together. I was Pandora’s box seething with desperation for some form of catharsis, and it was all I could do to keep the proverbial stitches from coming loose. Despite the roaring fireplace crackling merrily, its warmth could never quite reach my numb fingertips or take root in my deadened heart. Every night, my wife poured poison on it with her acerbic words, and every night I found myself picking away another part of it that had withered away. Only twenty years old and already I felt like an old man, having experienced too much rejection ad nauseum to expect any reciprocation.
“My lord? Are you feeling well?”
There was so much kindness in his formal words – it was a soothing balm to the wounded ego. I met my servant Oliver’s cerulean eyes with a genuine smile; it was remarkable that we could be the same age, yet his eyes alone maintained the wide-eyed innocence of his youth. He was the cloudless summer day to my cumulonimbus, and even before he parted his lips, I could so easily find myself transfixed by something as simple as the ever-present slant of his mouth as he spoke.
“Another night of the same, Oliver,” I responded, too weary to hide the edge of despair from my voice. He knew of my situation, my increasing hopelessness; his eyes narrowed as he glanced to the side, teeth nibbling at his bottom lip as his thoughts began to churn. It was a contemplative expression I’d seen countless times over the years, and every time it evoked the same visceral response.
I wanted to kiss away the stern line in his lips. I wanted to smooth away the tension from his brow, to get him to smile that deliciously impish grin of his again. But ever since my wedding day and thereafter, my tension had siphoned onto him. My frustration had become his own, and without realizing it, he had truly become my confidante.
I was such a hypocrite. Even as I despaired over the frigidness of my wife, I lusted after the young man who had been both servant and brother from womb to marriage. We were Moses and Ramses, we were the brothers without bonds of blood – though as my parents had done their part to raise Oliver as a well-bred child, it had always been an unsettling reality for both of us that he was destined to be a servant until my dying day.
I had fought it vehemently at first, but our culture left no breathing room for such unconventional ideas. I had been fortunate enough to have been born into a wealthy family, and poor Oliver had been given the dubious fortune of being left on our doorstep as an infant, only days after my own birth. Fortunate in that he was raised alongside me until we were fourteen, and unfortunate in the fact that he was still destined to live at a lower status than me… and for what reason? Because his parents had decided to abandon him?
“Lord Damien, are you - ?”
Shaking my head, I interrupted his prattle.
“Please drop the formality and that ridiculous ‘lord’ title, Oliver. You know I hate it. You never called me anything but my first name until we were older. You’re the only person I can talk to without all the frilly diction.”
“Admittedly, you really are quite horrible at acting like an aristocrat” he quipped, dropping his politeness with tangible relief. “But really, we both knew it’d come to this point – we weren’t always going to be able to play together or act like we were brothers. We knew from day one that I’d have to call you ‘lord’, ‘master’, and that we’d both have to stomach it.”
I closed my eyes, putting my arm on my forehead as though I could block out what bothered me the most: that by existing in the first place, really, I condemned him to live a life of servitude. Even though I considered him my closest friend, I knew he would not remain at my side if given the choice to live a life of freedom.
Selfish bastard that I was, I couldn’t stand the thought of losing him. Already he had filled the role of brother, friend, confidante, caretaker, healer throughout the years. Now here I was, admiring how breathtaking firelight rendered him, glancing at the broad expanse of his shoulders, the graceful contours of his muscles. I could spend hours memorizing the way his lips always remained slightly parted with just the ghost of a smile, or that charming habit he had of covering his mouth with the back of his hand as he laughed – a surprisingly feminine and obsequious gesture that rendered his laughter even more infectious, as though we shared a private joke.
He was the man who’d greedily claimed my heart before I had a choice, my emotions caring little for his gender, status, or the fact that I was a married man. Oliver was the only living thing in a dead world, and in spite of myself, he had tied himself so neatly into my heartstrings. I loved every inch of him, from the casual disarray of his hair to the feet that he’d always abhorred confining in servant shoes. I loved his childish temper, his wild spirit, his quick tongue.
I loved him. My impulsive, compassionate, devil-may-care Oliver.
I felt slender fingers lace through mine, gentle hands prying my arm away from my face with barely a whisper of a touch. Blinking in surprise, I glanced up to see that Oliver’s smile had softened, glowing brighter than even the fireplace. He took in the rogue tear that had managed to escape, the way my face flushed when one of his fingers curved around the tear and wiped it away. The touch was feather-light, but somehow felt more intimate than any embrace.
Keeping his hand laced in mine, his other traced baroque patterns on my forehead, the bridge of my nose, the contours of my cheeks, my jaw line, lips. I closed my eyes and sighed with pleasure as I let him trail the two fingers along idly, his fingertips never quite lifting from my skin. It was a gesture of comfort, the same thing my own mother would do when I felt sick or when I had awoken from a nightmare.
“I don’t mind staying here, Damien. You know as well as I do that if I hated it that badly, running away wouldn’t be much of a challenge.” His fingertips rested on my lips, silencing the words that were already formed on my tongue. “And I know that if I were to leave, it would tear you apart to see the person you love gone for good.”
I couldn’t have answered even if I wanted to. His words rendered me speechless, my mind reeling as my feelings, ones I had punished myself over for months, were immediately laid out on the open. It would be a disservice to dismiss his truthful observation: though my faced burned with embarrassment, it was all I could do to nod and wait for the blow to come, to watch my fragile, neatly assembled world crumble as I finally lost –
“I would have never stuck around if I didn’t feel the same way.”
His lips silenced my protests gently, the touch light as air, asking permission that was eagerly given. It was chaste, hesitant, but somehow with such a delicate touch he could chase away the carefully formed explanations I had created for why my feelings for him were taboo. His hands touched me so gingerly, as though I were made of glass – even as he gave himself away, it was driven out of a need to comfort rather than out of lust.
I could only stare at him like some wondrous marvel as we broke apart; indeed, a part of me wondered foolishly if I had daydreamed the entire thing. But slight redness of his lips confirmed it, as well as the beginning of a smug smile forming on them.
Shaking my head, all I could do was reciprocate his smile and marvel as his ability to remain so casual, as though being in love with your male servant was as acceptable as reading the morning paper. Absentmindedly, my fingertips brushed against my lips, as if the truth could be felt or that it had left a tangible mark.
Carefree as always, Oliver swatted my hand away and gave me another peck on the lips, the kiss of a courtier. He gave a mock bow and said, “As many years as we have ahead of us, m’lord, I do think that you’ll need to rest well for tomorrow.” His diction defaulted into its traditional formality, but not without an accompanying wink, a glint of mischief in his eyes.
My Oliver was as practical a servant as always.
He was mine, and… I relished the phrase, savored it like a fine delicacy, I was his.
