Chapter 38
Thirty-Eight
Everard had tried everything.
Significant glances, meaningful brows. Early-morning advances, post-dinner suggestions. Even once—skirting danger, given he couldn’t guarantee Vitya would be the first to walk into the printing parlour—his printing apron and nothing else.
But no.
Surely, Vitya’s eyes went wide, huge in his face, darkened not just with kohl; his hands shook as he approached, every time.
He’d sink to his knees and use those lips and sweetly, carefully take the edge off, or push pricks together and slowly drive them to it, any other number of blissful intimacies—so long as Everard was seated or lying or in no way moving or otherwise exerting himself. And it was all wonderful.
But Vitya would not fuck him.
Everard recognised that some men’s preferences didn’t align with putting their pricks into arses—D’Arcy, a notable example, liked only the reverse—but Vitaliy was absolutely not one of those.
He shared preferences with Everard, which was that sometimes he wanted to fuck and sometimes he wanted to be fucked, and they were usually fantastically well aligned—usually.
And he wanted to fuck him. There was no doubt.
But Vitya also had an iron will. Consequently, also an iron prick.
Everard woke to it pressing against him, hot and pulsing and growing, and Vitya’s hands pulling, pushing, clasping him close, his lips open and soft against Everard’s skin.
Every time, Everard gritted his teeth—for he would nonetheless keep his promise—and woke him, knowing it would mean the man would divert to hands and mouths and thighs or worse, retreat, would slide out of the cot with a soft final brush of a kiss and regretful murmur over his skin.
After weeks and weeks and weeks of convalescence and being fed and watered and being too weak to sit up without pillows and his joints aching from lack of movement, Everard merely wanted to feel alive.
And so thus he wanted, in particular, to be held down and fucked. He couldn’t explain it, knew logically it meant nothing, but he wanted it, wanted Vitya heavy upon him, merciless, taking him apart, ruthless, gasping in his ear.
He tried being direct as he could bear, short of straight-out asking. When even finally asking, begging, pleading in the moment, failed just as well as anything else—a gentle, careful, trembling denial was his reward—he felt he had no choice but to enlist help.
Of course, then Romilly René, Vitaliy’s close friend, crew advocate, enforcer, intelligence-extractor extraordinaire, was no help at all.
“Matelot,” she said patiently, scratch-scratching into her ledger the take from the surrender of a Portuguese corsair, “I head an all-women company. So, I do not see why or from where you have gotten the expectation that I know the smallest thing about what makes a man’s prick point up.”
René, in addition to speaking loudly, liked to use her hands in emphatic gestures to underscore what she meant. Everard was grateful in this particular instance that she currently had both hands occupied, and that they were behind closed doors.
“Er—that’s not quite the… issue. I only meant… perhaps that…”
He was sweating, suddenly acutely aware he was probably making a mistake but figuring any potential result would be worth it.
Not quite how that works, a voice told him. He ignored it.
“Since,” he went on, “since you are yourself the fairer sex, I wondered if you might have encountered a point in your previous relations where—er, perhaps you found a man…” Unwilling didn’t work. Nor unobliging. “… holding himself back?”
René looked up, expression blank, rouged lips parted. “Pardon? Relations? Fairer sex?” She wrinkled her nose. “What… do I do with this?” she murmured. “Vee and myself, you ask.”
“Yes’m,” he said quickly.
The eyebrows stayed high, but her expression had turned into slanted mockery. Vicious.
Yes, Everard had made a mistake.
She leaned forward. “Holding himself back… you mean in the sex.”
Everard, scarlet, was nonetheless relieved that she’d understood. If she understood, maybe she knew—
René shook her head and muttered, “Cannot he piss himself in fear, like all the rest?” She signed the ledger page with a flourish, replaced the pen, and leaned back in her chair. “Why have you come with this, to me? You should not. One, you have no right to know what you ask about me. Or anyone.”
“No. No, of course not. I see your point. You can of course turn me away—”
“Two, I don’t think Vee would like you to say these things to me. Or anyone.” She hummed. “Possibly your Fitzwilliam,” she added thoughtfully. “Of course, he is not here…”
“Perhaps… perhaps not,” Everard said hastily. “But I am fairly desperate—”
“Three, I do not want to shoulder this. Why must I?”
“Vitya said I ought do. Consult you, that is. More often. He trusts you. And I thought since you’ve had… er… relations… previously…”
She gave a brittle-sounding laugh. “Not like this, I don’t think. For my profession—at which I excel—yes. Not this. But let me on one thing correct you. How to say again? Matelot,” she said slowly, “I head an all-women crew.”
Everard nodded, bewildered.
René rolled her eyes. “Mon dieu. All right. I have never with Vee. Ever. We have never. I am uninterested in the sex with men. Totalement. Especially with Vee.” She shuddered delicately.
It hit him then. All-women crew.
“Oh,” Everard said. “Ohhh.”
René laughed, and Everard let the embarrassment douse him like spattering rain. No wonder Vitaliy had been so angry at his accusation. It had been mere jealousy; and, as it turned out, completely baseless, too.
Everard grimaced. “My apologies for the presumption. And the rest of it. You disliked me so that I thought—I assumed—”
She smirked. “You need not say le prétérit.”
“Oh.” Everard snapped his mouth shut. “Indeed,” he made himself say. “I… All right. You make yourself quite understood.” He bowed. “I’m sorry to have taken up your time, fleet master.” He about-faced.
“Et alors! Wait a moment, matelot. We have come this far in spite of you.”
Everard reluctantly turned back.
“I can assume you have never been with a woman?” she asked.
“Yes,” Everard confirmed warily.
“Then you wouldn’t know: we are generally not fragile.”
“Indeed… no?”
“Pas non. Absolument pas.” She shrugged. “But I have heard some men do forget it, time to time, and they get in their arses about it.” She eyed him. “You think Vee finds you fragile, all the sudden? Because you had nearly died?”
Everard ducked his head. Was he not supposed to have been abandoning his cursed pride?
“Yes, I… I fear he must. But I am perfectly hale. Stephan says my heart beats as well as can be expected. I haven’t felt the vertigo these two fortnights past. My weight is…” Not ideal. “… returning to its usual.”
She looked him up and down. “You look well enough. Better than before. You are lucky to be alive.”
“Thank you,” Everard said. “I am.”
René smiled. “Vee still wants you, matelot. I can say this without a doubt.”
“I know,” Everard said vehemently. “I know he does.”
“Yes, otherwise, he would not keep you to your matelotage. You know him; he would set you free.”
Everard agreed.
René said, “But you remember I said he and I are opposite? As is meant to be?”
“In authority. I understand that now.”
“But also self,” René emphasised. “Violence is my first option in most cases. I don’t mind it, and often my crew and I do not anyway have the luxury of choice.” She paused. “But Vee makes himself do violence only when he must.”
“Though it sickens him.”
René nodded. “For the sake of many, he will hurt another. But… hurt you, even accidentally, for the sake of himself? For his pleasure?”
“It wouldn’t—”
“Even the chance.”
“It’s my pleasure, too,” Everard muttered. “For God’s sake, he’s a bloody hedonist. My side of it ought count just as much. Surely he’s realised.”
René shrugged. She picked up the pen once more. “I think this is maybe what he forgot. Guilt is a powerful thing.”
Everard thought this unlikely. Vitya had never been more focused on pleasing Everard, in every other way but the one. Probably, Vitya had just got it in his head to become a temporary martyr.
But this gave him an idea.
If his demands weren’t enough, maybe he could tip the scales of rational hedonism. Put forth an empirical argument.
He just needed… help.
The Enemistad was due into Chetumal Bay two days hence. D’Arcy was due with her.
Everard felt those days as though they were weeks.
Vitya—absorbing into himself the guilt he felt about Everard’s having to wake him in extremis nearly every morning—had most recently decided to abdicate the big cot and sleep in the trundle once more.
Fine, Everard thought. The man wanted his sleep uninterrupted, fine. Never you mind it was of entirely his own doing, and that he still woke rutting his mattress regardless of Everard’s lack of presence.
If his plan to enlist D’Arcy’s help proved unsuccessful, Everard thought he would go quite insane.
Two days.
D’Arcy hadn’t gone strictly by choice. By choice, his letter said, he would rather be beside him in his convalescence—leaving quite a lot unsaid between the lines—but needs must.
Everard’s rescue in Galveztown had been flown under Vitya’s own American stars and stripes. The American brigs outside the bay had been perturbed by the San Telmo coming in flying their own—to say nothing of the Sévère—but left her alone at a message from Vitaliy.
Everard, not for the first time, began to see why three Crowns wanted Vitaliy—and not just the pirate Varfolomey—dead. A word from him, and two American brigs-of-war held their fire on a pirate fleet?
He also suspected D’Arcy and Vitya both had been understating their title of simple spy.
But that was a matter for another time.