Chapter Nine #3
No messages arrived for the remainder of their stay at Madog’s Throne.
To distract himself, Wes worked on whittling down the number of times he’d promised to make Delauney come.
He pushed Delauney into alleys and sucked him off in the shadowy corner of a public eating house, where Delauney made such a racket that a serving girl came over to check on him.
He even commandeered a private rowboat to the Manatee, where he took over the oars while rubbing his boot along the length of Delauney’s cock through his trousers.
“You know that sound travels over the water,” Wes said as Delauney whimpered and gasped, half trying to rut against his boot. Delauney responded by crawling across the boat to take Wes’ cock in his mouth, bringing him to a shuddering release in full view of the docks.
They were barely discreet when they returned to the ship.
Thankfully, Alain was too busy wrangling Ned and Peter’s children to notice Wes sneaking off with Delauney in the middle of the day, and Ned seemed to think that they were just engaging with experiments.
Which they were, even if some of those experiments involved ruining the bedsheets for the fourth time that week.
They went through three drafts of Delauney’s application before Wes felt satisfied enough to hand it off to Peter. They celebrated by sharing a pipe packed with a rare weed Delauney had bought off a man in Katoikos. They sat near the prow, watching moonlight glimmer off the dark sea.
“Is there anything you’ll miss about this?” Wes asked. “When you’re off being an astronomer in Gerakia, I mean.”
“I might miss the quiet,” Delauney said, taking the pipe.
“It’s always so loud at home. I can’t imagine a university full of people is much quieter.
My brother has a fund set aside solely for my parents’ balls, did you know that?
He had to give them an allowance to prevent them from spending everything on dancing bears. ”
“But you’re richer than the Imperator of Katoikos,” Wes said. He felt lighter, his head swimming as though he were slipping into subspace. “What are a few balls?”
Delauney gave Wes a dry look. “I wasn’t being facetious about the bears. Leo—that’s my older brother, you’d like him, very practical—he actually lost his temper when he saw them, which never happens. He was right to lose it, though. No one should trap a poor bear and force it to dance.”
Wes felt no small measure of empathy for those bears. He’d been treated the same by his parents as a boy, dressed up in expensive clothes and paraded around in the hopes of luring a noble suitor.
“What will you miss?” Delauney asked, passing Wes the pipe. “When you’re in Gerakia, studying the stars.”
“I won’t be in Gerakia,” Wes said. He nudged Delauney’s shoulder with his own and let out a breath of smoke into the night air. “I’ll be puttering around Staria, I suppose, avoiding my family.”
“Or you can avoid them in Gerakia,” Delauney said. “With me.” He took the pipe. “I can’t say that I did all those things in that letter, because I didn’t. We did. We’re going to the Aviary as a research team, Wes.”
Wes blinked at Delauney. “Nobles use assistants for their research all the time.”
“You aren’t an assistant,” Delauney said. “And I’m not using you. You’re brilliant, and lovely, and I’m not treating you like you’re invisible. You’re a part of this.”
“But...”
“Tell me you don’t want it,” Delauney said.
Wes felt adrift. He thought of studying with Delauney in Gerakia—properly studying, without pretending to be Delauney’s valet or slipping under the gaze of uninterested nobles.
He could learn everything his tutors never bothered to teach him before he’d been dragged to sea.
He could be with Delauney without his noble title looming between them. In Gerakia, they would be equals.
“I want it,” Wes said.
Delauney slid a hand up Wes’ thigh. “Tell me your qualifications, then.”
Wes’ lips parted in shock as Delauney’s smile went teasing and wicked. “You can’t use my own tactics against me.”
“That wasn’t an answer,” Delauney said, then laughed. “Oh, damn. I can’t. How do you do this?” He collapsed onto Wes’ lap, still giggling. “I thought about denying you and felt terrible about it immediately.”
“I may have called you a brat once or twice, but you aren’t one,” Wes said, petting Delauney’s hair. “You just don’t have it in you to be cruel.”
Delauney looked up at Wes plaintively. “So will you come with me? I don’t want to do it without you.”
Wes hesitated. If Delauney had said that he couldn’t do it without Wes, that would be different.
It would keep Wes in a tidy little box as a useful assistant, someone indispensable but nevertheless bound to Delauney by duty.
But Delauney wanted him there. He wanted Wes, not a valet.
Not an assistant. Not a servant. Wes looked out over the sea and felt the lifting of a weight he hadn’t realized was there.
“I’ll come with you,” he said. “We’ll do this together.”
The next day, Delauney brought the revised letter to Peter alone. As the minutes ticked by, Wes busied himself with the laundry, pinning up damp clothes as he tried not to think about Peter de Burre reading Wes’ name at the top of the paper.
He was just pinning one of Delauney’s ridiculous gold vests when a shadow passed over his right shoulder.
“Leave it.” Ned de Burre’s voice was so heavy with dominance that Wes dropped the vest on the deck. He turned, looking up into dark, unreadable eyes.
“Sir?” Wes asked, saluting warily.
“None of that,” Ned said. He jerked his head toward the stairs leading up to the wheel. “Follow me. We need to have words.”
Peter must have told him, then. Wes hunched after Ned, trying to resist the swell of resentment building ahead of what had to be a thorough dressing-down. When they’d reached a quiet corner of the ship, Ned turned around, a hand on his belt.
“So,” he said. “Delauney has been involved with you.”
Wes kept his mouth shut. It was better to say nothing than to confirm or deny Ned’s suspicions.
“Don’t pull the silent sailor trick on me.” Ned’s brows lowered dangerously. “I’ve seen it before. You and Delauney, you’re involved? You haven’t just been assisting him with your research?”
Your research, Wes thought. Not just Delauney’s. “Both, sir. He told me about his work with the stars, and things... progressed.”
“And you understood it?” Ned asked. “All that nonsense about light having a speed and eclipses doing something about curves or lines coming out of the sun?”
“You didn’t?” Wes asked, before he could stop himself. The corner of Ned’s mouth twitched slightly, but it was hard to tell if it was disapproval. “Yes, sir, I did. It’s pretty straightforward when you lay it all out, actually.”
Ned raised a hand. “Please don’t lay it out for me,” he said.
“So there are two of you, then. Two... star people.” He gestured widely toward the sky.
“You do understand that Delauney’s family is here on this ship, yes?
His parents will never accept this, what you two are, but they aren’t the ones you need to concern yourself with.
I’m the one who will be displeased if you break Delauney’s heart. ”
Wes felt a small tug of pain in his chest as he realized that there was no one to do the same for him. He and his family were strangers, now. “I wouldn’t,” he said.
“Because he’s like a brother to me,” Ned said.
He scratched the back of his neck. “A brother who was too nervous to tell me that he loved something. Or someone. I have you to thank for opening him up to all this. He’s been drifting away for a while.
I’ve been taking on more of the work on the ship to make up for it, but there wasn’t much I could do when he wouldn’t tell me anything.
Now I know. That’s a sign, then, that you might be good for him. ”
Wes didn’t know what to say. Ned was the quintessential noble; not too cruel, not too kind, but distant enough from the lower classes that Wes didn’t think he’d have the wherewithal to look closer at Wes’ influence on Delauney.
Ned must have caught something of Wes’ confusion in his expression, because he smiled thinly.
“I may not know the stars the way you do, but I’m no fool.
It comes from being a father, perhaps. If one of my girls falls in love with a commoner one day, well, I’d be a monster to deny them.
The world is shifting. Nobles run off to study stars.
Courtesans take on noble titles. Commoners can and will burn Staria to the ground if they’re mistreated.
If we don’t move with the tides, we’ll drown in them.
” He looked Wes up and down. “I never thought Delauney would settle down with a submissive, but then again, I didn’t picture him settling down at all. ”
“He’s full of surprises,” Wes said with a shrug.
“You both are.” Ned sighed heavily. “You can really turn light into a math equation? And you two do that for fun?” Wes shrugged again. “We do need to get you to Gerakia.”
He walked off at that, muttering softly to himself about mathematics and light. Wes waited for a full minute before he shook out the tension in his limbs, glanced at Ned one last time to make sure that he wasn’t coming back, and ran off to inform Delauney.