The Pirate King Ch. 04

That did not bode well for me. I nodded my understanding and made the rest of my way down the hall.

The room was ominously silent when I reached the entranceway. I slowly pushed open the door and entered.

The Captain was sitting on the edge of the bed. His shirt was askew, and the sight of his body sent my heart careening wildly. I bid it stop, but when had my heart ever listened to my commands? It was his to control, I understood that by now. His head was in his hands, wild curls springing past his fingers and covering his face. Across from his body, the remains of his dinner were slowly sliding down his wall, adorned with the shards of a bowl or cup. It all pooled together at the junction of floor and paneling. In the scattered remains, I could recognize the soup I had made.

I moved into the room. As I did the hinges on the door made a noise, or maybe it was my footfalls that betrayed me. Either way, he knew I was there and stood suddenly, spinning to see me.

He took me in, eyes wild. I let him stare at me from the distance he kept. He looked beautiful, his chest heaving in surprise and perhaps the vestiges of the anger that had caused him to throw his dinner.

"You came back." He sounded so surprised, his voice light and breathless. My own breath hitched to hear it.

"Where else would I have gone?" I found that my voice was much more calm than I'd expected. I was safe with him; I was where I belonged. He was the sunset I had just left, and I was the sea. I found the answer to the questions I had asked there in his eyes.

"I thought..." He made a small gesture but seemed to not be able to finish the sentence. "Finn told me what you said at dinner."

I was silent. I had said a lot at dinner, for me. I made a note to be more careful what I said around Finn.

"Then he said you left with the other men."

"I was sparring."

"It made it seem like. Because you didn't want me anymore. You could have gone back with one of them, to their beds." His eyes were so intense, his face trying to hold in such anger. To hear him say that, to hear him think I didn't want him? It sent shock waves through my core. I wanted to kiss him so badly, then, to assure him that I would never go to another man's bed, that he had me forever. The sensation so extreme that my hand flew to my lips to try and keep it in.

We stood like that, me touching my lips wishing my hand was his mouth, wishing I didn't want him so badly, him staring so intently I thought I might turn directly to smoke. Good, I thought. If he breathes me in, it doesn't count as touching.

I broke from my thoughts with a sharp breath. "Your dinner." The path to the bathroom and the cloths that could clean the mess he had made was dangerously close to his body, but I set my eyes straight ahead and began to move my feet.

"Leave it." He put his hand out feebly towards me. "Finn will get it in the morning." I emerged from the wash room, damp cloth in hand. "Hey, I said -" He stopped as I dodged his touch, staring at the space that should have held us. Slowly, he sat back down on the bed to watch me clean up the mess he had made.

"If you didn't like it, I could have made you something else."

"No, it was." He watched me for a moment. "It was not the soup."

He sat there. I tried not to really look at him; I didn't know what I would do. We were too close, too close... "You made it?" he asked.

"Yes, with Cookie."

He returned his face to his palms. "It was not the soup." I thought I heard him mutter, "Can I do nothing right?" but his voice was quiet and muffled by the fleshy bits of hands that should be on my body, holding me tight and making me feel unimaginable pleasure and I chose to focus on the soup and shards of pottery.

When I finished, I made my retreat across the room to the chair that sat at the desk. I waited for him to speak.

"It's late," came his voice. It was low and graveling and drew me towards him. I gripped the arms of the chair to help me to remain still. "Best go to sleep."

"Yes," I agreed. I didn't move towards the bed.

He turned to me. He looked a little better than he had, comforted by my presence perhaps. He shouldn't have been. And yet here I was, comforted by him, made so uncomfortable by him. I didn't allow myself to look at him again.

"Hey." He spoke so softly. "Come to bed." I would have sworn that he was begging but for the firmness in his voice. My body began to respond; I wanted to submit to him, wanted to give him everything that he wanted. I pressed myself against the chair and shook my head.

"Sailor." Sailor still, I thought a little unkindly. That's a step up from prisoner at least. My frustration helped me to resist his insistent tone. "Come to bed."

Not the bed, I thought, panicked. The bed was his. If I went to bed, I would be lost to him. "I think I'll sleep here tonight." I heard him stand; he was coming over to me. My entire body tensed, I hadn't realized my body could tense further than it had, and yet...

"I thought," he murmured as he drew closer, "you said you would do whatever I asked."

"I did." My eyes slowly raised to his. Dark curls blocked most of his gaze, and I thanked the gods of the sea and whatever other gods there might be for that, because I don't think I could have resisted the look of need that he was giving me otherwise. As it stood, his gaze blocked and my need only half killing me with each breath, I was able to tell him, "But I also told you that I would never let you hurt me."

When I said that, something flashed over his face. Surprise? Anger? Regret? It was over too quickly for me to see it in full, but it was strong enough within him to cause him to draw back. There was a long stretch of time where perhaps each of us was waiting on the other to act. Then, he slowly collapsed, his muscles releasing the taut construction that had always graced his physique. It was as if he was becoming undone, all the strings that pulled him together becoming unknotted one by one.

"Okay," he said, in a voice so reserved I wasn't even sure he'd said anything until he repeated it. "Okay." He moved back towards the bed.

"You'll need to tie me up." He froze, his entire body turning to ice. It wasn't like the tension had returned, he just froze as he was.

I don't know why I said it, except that my whole body was tense and I was still so angry, and this would bring him closer to me and would also hurt him like he had hurt me. I could have taken pity on him, I suppose, could have let him just go to bed, but I still remembered the way I had felt earlier that day, the way he had told me so casually that he would use me. I needed to protect myself, I lied. I needed to be firm, needed to prove I still had some control. My mind conveniently forgot how much control had hurt me. "I'm still a prisoner."

"I'll find rope," he voiced after a pause so long I thought he must have thawed. He hadn't. He moved through the room, popsicle limbs swinging on loose ropes, unhinged and uncomfortable to see, so I just stopped looking. Turning my gaze away didn't make the pit in my stomach any smaller. Making it so I couldn't see his body didn't make my soul ache any less. And when he reached my side and knotted me to my chair, I made sure I didn't look at his hands so close to mine.

He stood, inspecting his work. Or maybe inspecting me. I finally looked up to his face, and saw that he had his hands in his hair, drawing his brows smooth with the force of his frustration. "Are you comfortable?" he asked.

"More than I would be in your bed," I answered, unkindly. But not untruthfully.

His hands moved to cover his eyes. "Fuck," I saw him mouth. No sound emerged from his throat. Then, he retreated to his bed, where despite my attempts to not look at him I watched him curl into a small ball and pull the covers over his chin.

If he fell asleep that night, it wasn't before me.

***

We were awoken the next morning by a knock on the door. Finn had brought breakfast, and the day's briefings. I watched the Captain rise from his bed, his hair gloriously ruffled, his pants disheveled. Sometime in the night he had shed his shirt. His bare chest caught the morning light through the window of his room, golden and warm.

The sight proved too much for me. I untied myself and moved past the duo in the doorway as quickly as I could, taking pains not to touch my body to the Captain's smaller one.

"Sailor!" I heard him call after me as hurried off towards the kitchen. "SAILOR!"

But I was gone.

Cookie welcomed me into his kitchen and we prepared breakfast. The work settled my hands, anchored my soul to the convictions I had set. When the men came I sat with Natch and Finn, then went up to the deck and found work coiling ropes and cleaning the decks. Wicky wouldn't allow me to touch anything else, and I was fine with that. This place wasn't worth trying to get a foothold into, I figured. I would be gone before any of that mattered, in one way or another.

Lunch was more of the same. I moved down before the others, helped Cookie prepare, then served the rest of the men as they came down from the deck and up from below. The chatter was the same. I sat down next to Finn. He turned to me, face twisted and turned to worry.

"The Captain," he started to say, his voice low. Then all noise stopped.

I didn't need to turn around to know what happened; the drop of temperature told me enough. The feeling of eyes on my shoulder, icy and hot at the same time.

Silently, I stood and returned to the kitchen. It was my job to serve the men; he was one of the men. The room watched me make my way, then watched the Captain slowly follow me. I could track him by the pockets of silence he drew around him. When he reached the window, I turned.

He looked magnificent, as always. I didn't let myself get distracted by his bare chest, or by his soft lips. What were those things to me? I stared instead into his eyes, daring him to see him this time, to actually see me. I loved him, and he would not use that for his pleasure. I wrote that on my face and dared him to read it.

When he met my eyes back with eyes so broken, so torn, filled with things held just at the cusp of spilling into mine, it was I who dropped my gaze.

I moved through the kitchen, finding what was needed. Was he here to torture me, to try and wear me down? He had never come to the mess before, had never asked me to serve him like this. I would, of course. I would serve him however he wanted, my body told me, even as my brain screamed that this was another of his cruelties, that he had come to try and get me to crawl back to him.

He held out a bowl.

My hands took it from him, gently, carefully. My ladle filled it with soup. I could feel his eyes on me the whole time, watching me, waiting for something. I wouldn't give it to him. I had borne greater torture than this and come out the other side intact. Whatever he held in his eyes, I didn't fucking need it.

He put his hands out to receive the bowl...

Which I put down on the counter inches from his hand. "Your soup," I told him. Then I raised my eyes to his and finished my gesture with a very soft and very hard, "sir."

If I had been watching his hands, I would have seen them turn white as he clenched them into fists. If I had been watching his face, I would have seen it fall, just a moment, before he was able to catch it. But I wasn't. I was studiously watching the air just over his shoulder, ignoring his presence before me. I was busy lying to both of us and pretending that he had become nothing to me.

It was not a very convincing lie.

He reached out and took the bowl. He waited just a moment more, then he turned and made his way from the silent room.

It was a small miracle in and of itself that I was able to wait until he was out of the door before collapsing behind the counter, the weight of everything he created inside of me sucking me down and pulling me in.

"Oh, all the stars in the sky." Cookie was beside me in an instant. "My boy, what have you done."

What hadI done? I buried my face in my hands and listened to the gossip erupting in the vacuum the captain had left in his wake.

"I saw the marks on your neck," Cookie was continuing, "but I didn't really think." I could hear him shifting before me. "Have you fallen for him?"

I didn't respond.

"For all the -" He took my hands from my face. "Boy, you listen to me. This can't continue."

"I know," I told him.

"It's dangerous."

"I know," I told him again.

"No, boy." Cookie was practically vibrating. "You don't. All due respect to you, but you truly don't."

I looked up into his little pinched face as he took a deep breath. "The captain is nameless."

I think I scared him when I set my head back against the counter and laughed, the irony of fate driving itself through my gut like a knife.

***

Cookie got me calmed down eventually. He sent me out into the mess, a fresh bowl of soup in my own hands, and told me to "go find yourself a nice named boy who isn't destined to kill you."

It hadn't seemed worth it to explain to Cookie that I wasn't that person anymore. That I was now nameless too. He seemed invested in me being the person he wanted and besides, I hadn't had much luck lately of convincing others that I was not the person they had created in their heads.

"Holy shit," Natch greeted me with. I put my bowl on the table and ignored him.

"I'm sorry," Finn said, leaning over to me. "I was going to warn you."

"I thought you said it was over," Natch continued.

"It is." I tried to take a bite of my soup but found that it tasted like dust in my mouth. I couldn't let him get to me like this, not when we were stuck on the same ship. I rolled the soup about in my mouth, feelings mounting.

"That," he said, pointing to the direction that the Captain had gone, "is not over."

I slammed my spoon on the table and stared him down. He stared back, unconcerned with the hard lines my body was suddenly making. Natch, I remembered too late, was not afraid of ghosts. Well, I thought dangerously, he had seemed worried about the king.

We stayed that way, anger stewing through me like a storm.

I could deal with storms. I could pick them apart, learn which bits of them were real and which of them were bluster. Where it was safe to sail. And this, this was bluster. I wasn't mad at Natch. I was mad at the Captain, mad at the way I felt him pulling at me still even after he'd left. I was furious at the pain I felt, swirling around inside my gut.

I moved my soup out of the way and put my head down on the table. Natch carefully reached out and put his hand on top of mine.

"It is nothing," I told them.

"That isn't true," Natch told me quietly. "What happened?"

"It doesn't matter." I didn't bother to lift my head, speaking to the table. "It's over now."

"Yeah." He patted my hand with his. "Of course it is."

Finn joined him, patting me on the back. "My boy, it's best just to tell him. He might even be able to help."

These men had no right to question me. I stood and gathered my still-full dishes, feeling my bulk pull together harshly. I wasn't hungry anyway. "There is nothing that can help this."

As I made my way into the kitchen, I heard Finn mutter, "Oh all bless, this is bad."

***

After lunch, it was back to the decks and more of the same work.

It used to be that this was all I needed to be happy. It used to be that I could exist on nothing but salt spray and hard tack, with the occasional battle thrown in for variety.

Yet here I was. Empty. Aching. Thinking of him.

Back down for dinner I went. We prepared a different soup this time, Cookie and I. He joked with me and we chopped and prepped but I wasn't in the mood. The food was served. The Captain came in, stopping conversation, and I served him. I had never stopped serving him. I wondered if he knew that in the moments I spent filling his bowl. We did not touch or exchange words. I placed the bowl just before him, as before, and he picked it up and left.

"He's tormenting me," I told Cookie. He frowned and shook his head as I watched the Captain's perfect body leave.

I sat with Natch and Finn to eat. Some of the other men had begun to show hostility towards me, their eyes dark and piercing, or perhaps not landing anywhere near me at all. That was fine. The sooner I left this place, the better. In the evening I made my way back up to the deck and trained with Natch and the others; I fought as if I were asleep. These men could not claim my interest. At night the man who could tied me up and I pretended it wasn't killing me.

The days passed like that. I cooked, I trained, I tried to ignore how the Captain pulled at the parts of me that should have never been allowed to move. Natch and I become very close, often retreating in the evenings to the upper levels of the riggings. He seemed to sense that I needed space from the rest of the ship, a place to get away from it all. We'd push ourselves up against the sky and, when it didn't break, let ourselves rest, wrapped in rough cords as makeshift hammocks.

He climbed almost as quickly as I did, much faster than any of these other land boys. I told him that the second night we went up, my sign of thanks. He laughed and thanked me back by trying to shove me from the air.

The third day I went up to the docks, the Captain came up too.

I thought, for some stupid reason, that we'd made some unspoken agreement to not be in the same place at the same time. I certainly avoided places where he might be like the plague; he seemed to do the same to me, skirting the training club after hours and keeping off the deck, or at least the portions I was working, when he knew I was working. But that day I looked up to find him ducking from the doorway, blinking, his black cloak thrown carelessly over his shoulders doing nothing to cover the skin of his chest.

I froze, my body arrested by the sight of him. I hadn't seen him like this, caught by the sun and the wind and the sea, dressed as a Captain should be, since the first day my eyes had frozen on him, since the first day my body had demanded him with such intensity I had been propelled onto this ship. He was stunning, his hair spinning around his face and refracting the sun, absorbing the sun. He was a prism and a black hole all at once, and I felt myself unable to escape his influence.

A hand landed on my elbow and I jumped. I looked down into the eyes of Hams, the old tar in charge of my work. "Lad," he told me sincerely. "You're staring."

I scowled and turned away, suddenly conscious of the way the rope hung limp in my hands. Through the day I redoubled my efforts, taking care to make every knot perfect and every coil precise, but between my jobs I stole glances and kept watch across the ship. The Captain moved through the ranks, patting a man here and laughing with another there, never coming anywhere close to me. I was glad for that, I supposed. He wandered through my thoughts all day, inescapable in my mind even when he was not not present in my field of view.

Every time he touched another man, even in camaraderie, I flinched. Every time I heard his laughter and it was not for me, my soul curled up a little tighter.

At one point, I turned a corner and there he was. I was holding four lengthy ropes, weighed down by the immensity of them. Their weight had finally managed to press him from my mind. To see him then was all the worse; it was a slap in the face, a cold blast I was no longer steeled for. At some point his shirt had become further askew, revealing part of his shoulder and collarbone to the relentless sparkle of the sun. Under its influence he was a brilliant force, and I reeled, breath catching in my throat, sweat freezing over my skin as goosebumps crawled with the memory of his touch.