Tears welled up in his eyes. “You mean, if
Donato was still alive—” His voice broke. His lower lip trembled.
“Why can’t they let me be happy?”
“I don’t know.” I kissed his forehead. I wiped
helplessly at his tears.
“I can’t keep fighting it,” he said, his voice
thick with anguish. “I won’t win.”
“I know.”
He shuddered as a silent sob escaped him.
Whether it was relief that I wasn’t arguing with him, or fear of
what would happen to him, I didn’t know. “Will you go with
me?”
“Yes, if it comes to that. But there’s
something else I want to try first.”
“What?”
“Another surgeon. Jenko told me where to find
him.” I brushed his hair off his forehead. I kissed the tears on
his cheeks.
“You think he can undo it? Make it
stop?”
“That and more, I hope.”
He furrowed his brow, thinking. “What
else?”
“The trigger. The pain. I don’t know. Maybe he
can undo it all.”
He sighed softly and snuggled closer. “I don’t
care. As long as he can take the hook out of my brain. And as long
as I’m with you.” He pulled back to face me. “You promise, we’ll go
tomorrow?”
“I promise.”
“Good.” He slid his fingers up the base of my
neck, tangling them in my hair. He wrapped his legs around my hips,
pinning me to him, his oversized cock wedged between us — not
erect, but not totally soft either. “Now kiss me,” he whispered.
“Touch me. Do those things to me, Misha. Please. Make me feel good
again.”
How could I refuse him? How could I resist
sinking into the softness of his kiss, or caressing his silky
flesh? How could I deny him when he was arching into me, moaning in
desperation as his cock grew hard against me?
“Please,” he said again. “Please.”
I kissed him and stroked him and petted him.
The noises of the street and the neighboring apartments were loud
enough to mask whatever sounds we made. Soon he was panting my
name, so lost in desire he could barely kiss me. I moved down, past
the smooth plane of his stomach. The hairlessness of his groin
brought me up short. It was so alien. So foreign. I knew he was
older than his body appeared, but it was still hard to rectify that
knowledge with his youthful appearance. And yet the musky smell of
his groin, the feel of his thick shaft in my hands, the way he
thrust his hips toward me in anticipation, all helped alleviate my
unease. He wasn’t a child, despite his appearance.
“Please, Misha,” he whispered, raising his
hips toward my mouth. “Please.”
I slid his foreskin back, just far enough to
reveal the wet tip of his pale cock. I put my lips against it,
sucking gently, nibbling at his head. I slid my tongue into the
folds of his foreskin and circled him, tasting his saltiness,
aching with need at the way he cried and moaned. I was doing my
best to simply please him, to deny my own insatiable arousal, but I
wanted him. Goddess, I wanted him more than I could say. I hardly
dared move my hips, for fear that I’d come all over the bed. Or
worse, that I’d lose control and take him. Spread his legs and
claim him as mine.
But he wasn’t mine. He wasn’t anybody’s. He
was free.
He bucked frantically against me as I lapped
at the head of his cock, begging to be taken deeper, but he was too
big for me to swallow completely. I wrapped one hand around the
base of his shaft to keep him from gagging me. Then I parted my
lips and let him in.
He pushed in deep, holding my head with both
hands, writhing as I sank down his length until my lips were
against my fist. He stopped there, making shallow, frantic thrusts
into my mouth, whimpering, clearly in ecstasy, but frustrated as
well at his inability to see his pleasure to its fruition. I inched
my fingers underneath him, caressing between his cheeks, seeking
his entrance. He continued to thrust into my mouth, but his rhythm
became shaky. He spread his legs, arching his back, panting out,
“Yes, yes, yes.”
I finally found what I sought, and I moaned
when I did. He was greased, just as we’d both been back when we’d
served Donato. He was ready to be penetrated, and it occurred to me
that he probably had been since the moment we’d left Davlova. He’d
only brought a few things from Donato’s, but one of those things
had been for this. He’d probably prepared himself each and every
day, in case that was the day I decided to take him.
“Please,” he whispered, spreading his legs
wider, no longer thrusting into my mouth, but still holding me
there, as far down his thick shaft as I could go. “Misha,
please.”
I nudged my first two fingers past his rim,
and his response nearly made me come. He bucked off the mattress,
pushing toward my hand, crying out as I reached deeper into him.
And then he began to thrust again — both hands holding my head, his
cock driving into my mouth, his body hot and tight around my
fingers. I found the little nub of flesh inside of him that I knew
in other men could trigger an orgasm. I pushed it, and he
practically screamed, spasming off the bed.
“The word,” he panted. Not just pleasure now,
but something akin to pain. Something that was desperation at its
peak. “Misha, the word. Please!”
I let his cock escape my mouth long enough to
say it, stroking that exquisite bundle of nerves in his channel as
I did. “
Verezhny
.” I swallowed him again, before the first
wave hit. I let him thrust into my throat, swallowing again and
again, as he shuddered and moaned, and all I could think was how
perfect he was. How beautiful. How innocent, even as he found
pleasure.
The Dollhouse had created him. Now, would they
take him away?
When it was done, he collapsed onto the
mattress, panting hard. I stroked his hip. I kissed his stomach and
the arcs of his slender hipbones. I did my best to convince my
aching groin that it was fine. That going to sleep now was a
perfectly reasonable option.
“Misha?” he asked quietly.
I moved up to kiss him, loving the
now-familiar taste of him as he parted his lips for my tongue. He
wrapped his arms around my neck, and his legs around my
waist.
“You can finish,” he said, moving his hips
suggestively. “I want you to.”
“Ayo—”
“Anything you like, I can do. I’ll let you do.
I want it.”
“No.”
“Please.”
“Not yet.”
“You don’t want me?”
“I do.” And it was true. Feeling his soft,
supple body in my arms, the taste of his cum still strong in my
mouth, the sounds of his cries still ringing in my ears, it was all
I could do to hold back. I wanted more than anything to be inside
of him, to feel his fingers digging into my back as I thrust into
him. But how could I? How could I use him, after everything he’d
been through? “I do,” I said again. “More than I can
say.”
“Then why won’t you let me please
you?”
“Because I worry that it’s wrong.”
“Why would it be? It’s what I am. It’s what I
was made for.”
Yes. And that was exactly why I couldn’t go
through with it. Not yet, at any rate. “Don’t say that. You’re more
than your programming.”
“Misha, it’s the only thing that makes me feel
complete. Having someone inside me makes me whole. And now, for the
first time, I get to be everything I was made to be, but with a
person of my own choosing. And I choose you. The only thing I want
in the world is to be with you.”
His words raised a lump in my throat. They
might have been a declaration of love, but they also might have
been nothing more than the programming at work, forcing him to
attach to a new master. “You’re more than what you can do for me in
bed.”
“What if I don’t want to be more? What if I
only want to be yours?”
I didn’t know how to answer. Didn’t even know
how I was feeling, except that my heart ached for him.
“Do you love me?” he asked, his voice only a
whisper.
Did I? I barely knew him, and yet I’d
destroyed the only home I’d ever known, just to reach him. I’d
killed Donato, a man I might have loved, to save Ayo. “How can you
even ask, after everything I’ve done for you?”
“Because you’re afraid to touch me. And
because you still cry for him.” His lip quivered. His eyes filled
with tears. They spilled through his lashes to run down his temples
and disappear into his mess of curls.
“I cry for him,” I confessed. “But I wouldn’t
change what happened for anything. Even if I could go back and do
it all over again, I wouldn’t do it any different.”
“Really?”
“Really.” And as I said it, I felt the truth
of it. I hadn’t thought of it in those terms until now. Yes, I had
guilt about how things had ended with Donato, but it had brought me
here, to a place where I had Ayo, just the two of us, with no
jealous lover waiting to punish us or use one of us against the
other. Before the revolution, I’d harbored fantasies that the three
of us might escape Davlova together and find some new life where we
all three loved each other peacefully, without the intrusion of
Donato’s beast. But here, on what felt like the far side of the
world, faced with Ayo’s unwavering innocence, I could accept that
my fantasies of a happy relationship could never have been. It was
Donato’s nature to find pleasure in abuse. It was in Ayo’s
programming to take that abuse and beg for more. And I would have
been caught between them, loving them both, yet constantly fearing
one and striving to protect the other.
I kissed Ayo again, sinking into his eager
acceptance. His unquenchable desire to please me. His simple,
perfect love.
“This is better,” I said against his
lips.
He slid his hand again toward my groin, but
stopped short of touching me. “When will you let me,
Misha?”
I shook my head, kissing him again. Gently.
Sweetly, so as not to rekindle my own need for him. “I don’t know,”
I admitted. “I guess when it feels right.”
“What does that mean? It feels plenty right to
me.”
I smiled. His enthusiasm for sex, now that he
was allowed to orgasm, was somewhat endearing. “I guess when I can
touch you without feeling guilty.”
He looked into my eyes. “When will that
be?”
It was a fair question, and at that moment, I
realized I knew the answer. “After the surgeon,” I said. “After
you’re free.”
***
By the time Ayo and I rose the next morning,
Jenko and Ione were nearly ready to go. Jenko offered me a small
pouch full of money. “I withdrew as much as I could,” he told me.
“At least some of that should go to you and the boy.”
I didn’t count the money, and I didn’t bother
to ask what portion of it he’d given me and what portion he’d kept
for himself. The fact that he was helping at all was enough for
me.
Ione stayed with Ayo, making sure he didn't go
in search of the arch, while Jenko and I went back to the Miredhel
and stocked her for the journey home, which allowed me one final
lesson on how to operate the yacht’s engine. We filled her fuel
tank, and carried in buckets of coal, then stocked her cupboards
with fresh water, dried fish, salted beef, and hard biscuits. If
Ayo and I wanted anything fresh, we’d buy it just before we
left.
We returned to Jenko’s apartment after that,
although there was nothing left to do but say goodbye.
“You remember how to get to the surgeon’s
house?” Jenko asked. He’d been skeptical when I’d told him that he
didn’t need to write his directions down. I had them all in my
head.
“I remember,” I assured him.
He shook my hand, then clapped me on the
shoulder. “Good luck.”
“To you as well.”
And then he turned to Ayo. He held out his
hand, but Ayo lunged toward him, wrapping his arms around Jenko’s
waist, burying his face in Jenko’s shirt.
Jenko chuckled, hugging Ayo back. He kissed
the top of his head. “You’ll be all right. Misha will take care of
you.”
“I know,” came Ayo’s muffled reply. But still,
he clung to Jenko for several minutes, not bothering to hide his
tears. Ione and I turned away, granting them as much privacy as we
could in Jenko’s cramped apartment. I didn’t share Ayo’s anguish at
saying goodbye, but I understood how hard it was for him. Until I’d
come along, Jenko had been his only friend. He’d been the only
human contact he’d had at all, outside of being abused by Donato.
It was no wonder he was distraught.
Finally, he let Jenko go. “Thank you,” Ayo
whispered. “For everything.”
“You’re welcome.”
And then Jenko and Ione were gone, and Ayo and
I were left alone in their empty apartment. It felt like our last
small haven in the middle of a world gone mad. Outside, I sensed
the enormity of Deliphine, ready to swallow us whole. If I’d been
alone, I wouldn’t have worried. After all, I knew how to scratch
out a living in a city that had no use for me. But now, I had Ayo
to take care of, and he looked as lost and desperate as any urchin
living in Davlova’s gutters, his eyes red and swollen, his cheeks
still wet with tears.