Hale had been talking about money for twenty minutes and Osgood had not once looked at the corner of the room.
That was ordinary. Everyone did it. They came for dinner and drank his whisky and kept their eyes on a very interesting patch of carpet just left of where the boy was standing, and Hale had learned not to help them with it. Let a man arrive at it himself. He always did, in the end, and the arriving was most of the pleasure.
"The stock isn't the number," he was saying. "Everyone fixes on the stock. Stock is nothing. Stock is what you'd pay for a decent car."
"That can't be right."
"It's exactly right, and it's why half the men buying this year will be miserable by spring. The stock is cheap because the stock is raw. What costs is what happens to it afterward." He turned his glass on the arm of the chair. "The program is the number. Everything else is freight."
Osgood made a sound that was meant to be agreement and was mostly discomfort. He was sitting forward with his elbows on his knees, a big man made small by a chair he could easily have filled, turning his own glass in the same way and not drinking from it. He had been doing that since the plates were cleared.
Hale let the silence sit for a moment. Then, without raising his voice, without looking away from his friend:
"Here."
The boy came in from the hall with the tray. He had a collar on and four rings in him and nothing else.
He had been on his feet since seven, in and out all evening with the plates, and Hale had sent him off to the kitchen with the last of them and left him there long enough for the conversation to get where it was going.
The glasses on it were touching. A small dry tick, tick, tick in the quiet, all the way across the carpet, and then it stopped when he stopped and started again a second later when it went through his arms.
Hale liked that sound very much. Eight weeks, and the thing still could not bring four glasses across a room without announcing itself, and there was no correcting it and no point in trying. It was fear, obviously. He had worked that out in the first week and had never troubled to look at it any harder than that, because whatever it was, it was the most persuasive object in the house and he had learned to simply let it stand there and do its work.
And it was a good one. He watched it come across the carpet and was pleased all over again, quietly, without anything in particular happening. There was a fineness through the shoulders and down into the hips that you never got out of the yard boys. The firelight caught the two rings on its chest at every step and let them go again. All of it, the neck, the narrow back, the long unfinished legs, was still only a rough drawing of what he was going to be looking at in two years, and knowing that was most of the pleasure of it.
He had wanted one since he was younger than Osgood and had gone without, because there had been nowhere to go and nothing on paper anyone would sign. Now he said a word in his own study and it came in through the door.
He would take it upstairs after Osgood had gone. There was no heat in the thought at all and no hurry in it either. It sat in him the way it sits in a man to know there is a second bottle in the cabinet.
And it was halfway up. Nowhere near all the way, but far enough that no man in the room could have called it nothing, and it had been in that state since the doorway and probably since the hall before that. Hale had clocked it on the way in and had said not one word, because there is a correct moment to hand a man a fact like that, and it is never the moment you first have it. Better to let it sit there getting slowly worse in front of a guest who was pretending not to have seen it.
Osgood's whole body registered it. Less a flinch than a small adjustment, the kind a man makes when a photograph turns out to be of something other than what he expected.
He had managed all through dinner, because a body carrying plates is a body doing something, and a man can watch the plates. Standing still in the middle of a room with nothing in its hands but a tray, it was only itself.
He looked, because there was nowhere else to look now, and then he looked at the tray, and then at the carpet.
Hale watched him do it and felt the evening tip pleasantly into its real business.
This was the part he actually enjoyed. The boy hardly came into it. He had the boy every day and would have it again tonight. This: a decent man in a good chair, with his eyes going somewhere and coming back and going again a moment later, and the entire machinery of him working very hard at the coming back. Osgood had looked three times already and each time had cost him something, and each time it had cost him slightly less.
"He's young," Osgood said.
"He's eighteen."
"Yes. No, I only meant." Osgood stopped and started again. "He looks younger than that."
"They all do at the beginning. Give him a year." Hale reached over and took the fresh glass off the tray without looking at the boy, because looking at him now would have been a kind of instruction and it was too early for instructions. "Nothing is taken before majority, Osgood. Nothing is used before majority. We're not animals about it."
He said it easily, like telling a man his coat was safe on the hook, and he watched it do its work. Osgood's shoulders came down half an inch. He drank, finally.
It was the trick, and Hale had been on the other side of it once, in a house outside a city he still did not name in company, listening to a man explain that the thing he wanted did not make him what he was afraid it made him. There was a rule. There was a floor. There was a licence on somebody's wall. A man could stand on that.
"And you want them to have had a life first," Hale said. "That's the part people get wrong. They want them young because young is cheap to shape, and then they wonder why the thing in their kitchen is a piece of furniture. You want years on it. Real work, real debt, something it lost. That's what makes the reactions genuine." He tipped his glass toward the boy, a small warm gesture, the way you'd indicate a good bit of joinery. "You can't fake that. You can't build it either. You have to buy it already grown."
The boy stood with the tray held in both hands at the level of his waist, and his eyes were on the carpet, and he did not move.
It would stand there for an hour if nobody said anything to it. Eight weeks in, that still surprised him. Obedience was cheap and any fool could buy obedience. This was something else. It did not shift its weight, it did not fidget, it did not look up when a voice went near it. It stood exactly where it had been put with four glasses in its hands and its eyes on the floor and waited to be wanted, and Hale had never in his life owned anything else that did that.
Except that his chin came down. Half an inch, maybe, at the part about having lost something, and it had been most of the way down already, so there was not a great deal of room for it to go. And he took a breath, a full one, the kind a man takes before he says something, and then he did not use it, and it went out of him again through his nose.
Hale saw both and thought nothing much of either. New ones did all sorts of things with their faces in the first months. It passed, along with the rest of it.
The glasses ticked twice on the tray.
"Look at him," Hale said. "Look. He's shaking. Isn't that."
He let it go there.
He was very good at letting it go there. He turned his glass and waited, and the room waited, and Osgood sat with his mouth slightly open around a word he had not chosen yet.
"It's," Osgood said. And then, quietly, like a man setting something down he'd been carrying: "It's beautiful."
"Yes," said Hale. "It is."
He let that settle too. Then he leaned back and got comfortable, because now they could talk properly.
"So. You asked me why fresh. This is why fresh."
The cold started at his feet and worked up.
That was the thing nobody told you and nobody would have believed. It was not the nakedness. He had stopped minding the nakedness somewhere in the fourth week. You stop minding a smell too, given long enough. It was that the house was seventy degrees for men in shirts and it had not once, not for a single minute in eight weeks, been warm enough for him.
They had taken every hair off him below the neck. He had not understood at the time that this was the same as taking the coat off a man and putting him outside in it. There was nothing left on him to hold anything. The heat came off his skin and went out into the room and kept going, and the boards pulled it down out through the soles of his feet, and every time a door moved anywhere in the house the air came across all of him at once.
So it started in the thighs. It always started in the thighs, a fine fast shiver in the long muscle above the knee that he could not have stopped by wanting to, and then it climbed. Into the belly. Into the forearms. The skin came up all over him in hard little points, on his arms, down his sides, across the back of his neck under the collar. It got to his jaw last, and the jaw was the part he had to work at, holding his back teeth apart so they would not start, because teeth going in a quiet room is a sound, and sounds got noticed.
His hands were the real problem. Both of them were on the tray and the tray had four glasses on it, and every time it came up through his arms the glasses touched, small, twice, three times, a little run of clicks in the middle of a man's sentence. So he gripped harder. Gripping harder made his arms worse. He had found that out in the second week and had never found the way out of it.
And the cold did to his chest what cold does. The two rings sat in the middle of two risen points that had gone tight and dark an hour ago and would not go down until he was back in his room, and the metal in them was colder than the skin, so he could feel exactly where they were, and any man in this room who happened to look up would read that as one thing and one thing only.
That was it. That was the whole of it. He was a body losing heat in a warm house.
Except at the throat.
The collar ran warm. Not much and not kindly, a patch about the size of a coin sitting under the front of it, and it had been doing that every hour of every day since the first morning. It meant the thing was awake. That was all it meant. Somebody had built it to tell him it was awake, and it told him, and there was no way to stop listening to it.
It was the only part of him that had been warm in eight weeks. It was also the part he would have cut out of himself if they had ever left him alone near a knife.
And he could smell himself.
That one was newer and he had only started noticing it around the fifth week, which meant it had probably been there from the start. The room had a smell and it belonged to them. Wool and whisky and the polish on the table and the wet ash where the fire had gone down, all of it warm, all of it the smell of men who had put things on this morning. Underneath that, close, at the level of his own face, there was him. Skin with nothing on it at all. Whatever they washed him with was not soap and had no smell of its own and left him smelling of nothing except himself.
He had been a person who worked and came home and put on a clean shirt, and it turned out that a shirt is the thing that keeps a man at a distance from his own body, and nobody had told him that either. Now he stood in a warm room full of other men's fabric and could not get more than four inches away from the smell of his own chest.
Above his head the one who owned him told the guest to look at him, and said that he was shaking, and left the sentence sitting open. It took the guest a while to find anything to put in it. What he came up with, in the end, was that it was beautiful.
He kept his eyes on the carpet and held the tray and let all of it go past him.
He went to the number instead, because the number was still his. Three payments. There was a case. This got fixed. He ran it not for comfort exactly but for position, a hand along a wall in the dark. Eleven hundred and forty. He had eleven hundred and forty left when they came, and he had been putting away two hundred a month out of the yard work and the nights at the depot, which was six months, except that the interest ate forty of it, so it was seven, and he had been seven months from clear on a debt that was not his and they came on his birthday because that was the first legal morning.
He had worked out the seven months about four hundred times now. It always came out the same. It was the only thing left that behaved.
"Do they understand what's happening to them?" Osgood said. "At the start."
His mouth opened.
It opened before anything else, before the thought, and there was a shape already sitting in it, three words with their edges rounded off from use, and he shut his teeth on them so hard that his jaw made a sound.
Nobody noticed. Osgood had asked Hale.
"Perfectly," Hale said. "They understand it better than you do, most of them. Understanding was never the issue. Accepting is the issue, and that takes about a year, and it hurts the whole time, and that part is entirely up to them."
He carried the tray to Osgood's side. The glasses shifted. He steadied them.
"The rings come as standard?"
"God, no. Nothing about rings is standard." Hale sounded faintly offended on behalf of the entire trade. "The program does the head and the hole and the way it stands in a room. The rings are mine. That's the entire point of them, Osgood. You decorate your own."
"The one at the base went in three days after it arrived. First thing I had done. It brings the whole arrangement forward and sets the balls out where you can actually see them, which they are not, at that age, left alone. The nipples I had done in the sixth week and I'm not finished with those. Those are a small gauge and they're small on purpose, because there's nothing there yet to hang anything off. Give me a year on that chest and I'll take them out and put something heavier through, something you can see from the door, and it will sit properly because by then there'll be something for it to sit on."
"You'll want to think about all of it before you buy rather than after," Hale said comfortably. "It's a year of healing whatever you decide, so you'd rather decide once. Where you don't economise is the program. Ours are sixty a head and they are butchers with a licence. The Dutch are two hundred and forty, which is four times the price and a good deal more than the animal cost me, and you can see the difference from where you're sitting."
He could feel every one of them, all the time, and that was the real answer to the question nobody had asked him. The two in his chest went cold before the rest of him did and stayed cold longest, so that on any given evening there were two small precise points of colder in him that he could have found with his eyes shut. The one at the base held everything forward and away from him and never let it hang, which meant he was always slightly presented, standing still, doing nothing. The one through the head moved when he walked. A definite little weight that reported his own movement back to him, so that he could not cross a room without being informed about it several times over.
He had not known until tonight that the small ones in his chest were temporary.
A thing driven through you is permanent. He had assumed it was the last decision anyone was ever going to make about that particular part of him.
And what he was fighting was his own cock, and he had been fighting it since the hall, and he was going to lose.
Not all at once. Losing slowly was the ugly part. All the way up would at least have been over and done with, a thing that had happened, and instead it sat at half and stayed there and had to be pushed back down every few seconds with nothing to push with, in a lit room, in front of two men, with the ring at the base holding it out where none of it could hide.
It came up when the man talked. Not when he was touched. Not when he was looked at. When the man talked, about anything at all, the market, the weather, the price of a thing. Eight weeks and he had never worked out how that had been done to him, or where in him they had put it, or why it did not care in the slightest what the words were.
So he had methods. They were pitiful and he used them all evening. He ran the number. He counted the squares in the border of the carpet, twice across and back. He put his tongue hard up against the back of his teeth and went to the loading bay at the depot in February, four in the morning, the cold coming up through the boots, which at the time had been the worst thing that had ever happened to him and which he now went to on purpose, like reaching for a cold cloth.
They worked. They genuinely worked, for as long as the room stayed quiet. Then the voice would start up again in the chair behind him and take about four seconds to undo all of it, and he would come back a shade further up than he had been the time before, and start again from the beginning.
He was standing in a lit room holding a tray with both hands, and both hands were the problem, and neither of them had said one word about it.
There was a heat that came up under his face when it happened, nothing to do with being warm, and it was coming up now, and he had nowhere to put his hands. A man with his hands loose can at least fold his arms. He had a tray, held at the level of his waist because that was where they had taught him to hold it, which put nothing whatsoever between the room and the front of him.
He had worked out in the first month that the tray height was not an accident.
That was what he could not get used to. Not the being seen. The being seen and it not being worth mentioning.
He had spent that first month trying to work out whether he was disgusting. The answer came back in two pieces that would not sit together, every time, and after a while he stopped asking and went back to the number, which at least behaved.
"Half of them are still writing to lawyers at this stage," Hale said, to Osgood, about nothing. "It passes."
Something went through him at that, underneath thought, a fast hot rise in the back of him like a hand closing, and he took the figures out and held onto them like a rail. Seven months. Seven months and eleven days. There was a case, and the law was four years old and nobody had finished arguing about what it meant, and there was a man in an office in town who had the whole thing in a folder with his name typed at the top of it and, four lines down, in the box where the form asked what he was, the word slave.
Half of them. Not him. He had never written to a lawyer in his life. Somebody had written about him, which was a different thing entirely, and the man in the chair did not know that and would not have cared.
He went through it twice more while they talked over his head, and by the second time he had stopped noticing that he was arguing, and had not noticed at all who he was arguing with.
"Now the reason you buy one this age," Hale was saying, "is that you're not buying what it is. You're buying what it's going to be. Look at the frame on him. There's nothing there yet. In eighteen months I can have that chest wherever I want it, I can have the nipples out to here, and the balls, well." He laughed, comfortable, delighted. "The balls are the fun part. You tell them the size at the start and they grow it to order. It's like ordering a hedge."
Something sweet came into the room.
There was nothing sweet in the room. It was whisky and a fire that had gone down and the polish on the table, and underneath all of it, out of nowhere, clean and sweet and slightly medical, the smell of the drift.
His palms went warm on the tray.
"Whatever taste you like," Hale said. "Buy one finished and you're living with another man's taste for fifteen years."
No.
It got most of the way out. All the way to the front of him, with a breath under it and a shape, and the muscle in his throat had already started to do the work. He was going to say it out loud, in a room, in front of two men, for the first time in eight weeks.
And a needle came out of the collar into the side of his neck.
It was very small. He could not get over how small it was. He had braced for months against the other thing, the current, because that was what a collar was for and he had been shown what it did in the second week and had thought about it every day since, and he had been braced for it just now, he had been braced and willing, and instead there was a sting the size of a splinter on the left side of his throat and it lasted less than a second.
The breath went out of him. Just went, unspent, like a door easing shut somewhere else in the house.
His shoulders came down. He watched them do it. His jaw let go and his mouth closed and the word was still there, entirely intact, sitting in him with all its meaning on, and there was no longer any road from it to his mouth. He had not changed his mind. Nothing had been taken out. He was standing exactly where he had been standing, holding a tray, full of a word.
He had been ready to be hurt.
The guest had stopped talking.
He did not look up. He never looked up. But attention has a quality that arrives on the skin whether you want it or not, and this was not the kind that goes over you and moves on. Somebody was looking at his face. Nobody had looked at his face all evening.
The other one had not stopped talking at all. He was still going, somewhere above, about the balls.
Osgood opened his mouth. Closed it. Then he said, to Hale, in a voice that came out slightly wrong:
"Does he get fed?"
It was a stupid question and Osgood heard how stupid it was on the way out.
He had wanted to ask something else and there was no version of the something else that could be said in this room, and so what had come out instead was a question about feeding, like a man asking after a dog on a long car journey.
"He's fed on a schedule," Hale said. "He's fine."
Osgood nodded and looked at his hands.
Here was the thing he had come here to find out, and it had nothing to do with prices. He had known for two years what he wanted, and had been careful never to look straight at it. He was not frightened of the boy. He was not frightened of the money or the paperwork or what anyone would say, because nobody said anything anymore, because there was a licence and a floor and everybody's brother-in-law had one now. What he was frightened of was that on the day he signed for one he would find out something about himself that could not be unfound, and that the something would be that he was cruel, and that he had always been cruel, and that this was simply where it had been going all along.
Hale was not cruel. It was the reason Osgood had come to Hale's house instead of anyone else's. Hale was the kindest man he knew, an easy fond man who kept his gardener on through a bad year and cried at his mother's funeral, and Hale had one of these and discussed it with the same easy fondness he brought to his roses.
So there was a way to do this that did not make you a monster. There had to be. And there had to be a way to find out.
There was a small dish on the table between them with the last of the olives in it.
Osgood took one.
He thought about it for perhaps two seconds and every one of those seconds was a piece of arithmetic he would rather not have done. Hale would see. Hale would say something. It was not his to give. It was not, when you put it plainly, food that a person was owed, it was a thing off a table, and to hold it out was to make a certain kind of claim about what was standing in front of him.
But if he was kind to it and it took the kindness, then he was not cruel. Then this was a thing a decent man could have.
He leaned forward and held it out on his fingers.
The hand came into the bottom of his vision, which was all the vision he had, and it was holding an olive.
The guest was sitting down, so the hand was at the height of his hip. Nobody had told him to put the tray anywhere. He had two hands on it and no third.
So he went down. Knees onto the carpet first. Then his arms straight out to push the tray clear of his chest, the glasses going in it, and then he folded down over the top of his own hands until his mouth reached the fingers, which put his face a foot below a seated man's and made the whole business take a good deal longer than it needed to.
He did not decide any of that.
His head went down and his mouth opened and closed around the olive and around the ends of two fingers, and his lips shut, and they moved. They kissed. There was no other word for what they did and he was there for all of it, watching it happen from about six inches behind his own face, and then his tongue came out along the underside of the fingers and licked, twice, slow, thorough, like cleaning the last of something off a spoon.
And the heat came up.
It came from the middle of his chest and it went up through his throat into his face and it was not shame, shame was cold and he knew the taste of it by now. This was the other thing. It was wide and slow and it opened him out, and it went everywhere the cold had been, into his hands, down the front of his thighs, and for the first time since a hallway on his eighteenth birthday he was warm all the way through.
For an olive. From a man he had never seen before tonight, who had not spoken to him, who had not touched him except to have his fingers licked, and his whole body had come up out of the cold like a dog going to a door.
He would have knelt for him. It was right there. If the man had put his hand flat and moved it two inches he would have gone straight down onto the carpet in front of both of them and it would have felt like a kindness he had been given.
"There," Hale said, from the chair, warm, hugely pleased. "See? Nothing to it. Perfectly safe, and grateful. Look at it. It's grateful."
The heat kept going up. It did not care what had been said.
The fingers went away. Somebody swallowed.
"Yeah," Osgood said. He was looking at his own hand. His voice had gone flat and quick, a man closing a drawer. "Yeah. Feeding it."
The word went in and stayed there.
He stood there with an olive he had not asked for and a mouth that had done that on its own, and he heard the word.
Which was the strange part, because it was not the first time. The one who owned him had been saying it all evening and had been saying it since the first morning, and somewhere around the third week it had stopped arriving as anything at all. You stop hearing the clock in your own house.
It took a stranger to turn it back into a word.
And the stranger said it differently. The one who owned him said it about a dog he was fond of. This one said it about a thing he had not decided to buy yet.
He got himself back up off the carpet without anybody telling him to, and levelled the tray, and stood where he had been standing before. It was only afterward, standing there, that he noticed he had known exactly when the kneeling was over.
"Now," Hale said, "the mistake people make."
He was enjoying himself. He had done the difficult part of the evening without appearing to do anything at all, and Osgood was sitting all the way back in his chair now with his glass empty, and the rest was just the pleasure of a thing explained properly to a man ready to hear it.
"You'll be told to go soft on a new one. Everybody's cousin will tell you that. Ease it in, let it come round in its own time, be a friend to it." He shook his head slowly. "That is the cruellest thing you can do to an animal and I want you to understand why, because you look like a man who's going to want to be soft."
Osgood did not deny it.
"It suffers because it hasn't accepted where it is, and never because of anything you do. You could keep it in silk. It would still be lying awake doing sums about the appeal it isn't going to get." Hale turned his glass. "Every day you're gentle with it, you leave the door open one more day, and it stands there looking at the door instead of settling. I've seen men keep one miserable for two years out of pure kindness. Two years. And then they wonder why it's thin."
"So you."
"So you shut the door. Hard, once, early, and you never open it again, and in six weeks it stops looking. That's not cruelty, Osgood, that's speed. Being soft with a new one isn't kindness. It's a man wanting to feel comfortable about himself, at the animal's expense, for as long as he can stand it."
He put his glass down.
"Down."
He put the tray down on the side table, squarely, without a sound, because that was the one part of the evening he could still do properly. Then he crossed the carpet to the other chair, which took four steps and felt like more, and went down beside it. And while he was going down, he reached for the number.
It was not there.
Not gone. He could feel where it was, an area of himself with a shape and no sensation in it. He went for the seven months and the eleven hundred and forty and got a smooth place, and something else came instead, unasked, fully formed, in the tone of voice they had used in the room with the ceiling tiles.
You're where you're supposed to be.
He shut his teeth on that too.
The carpet was cold under his knees. The chair leg was by his shoulder, and the man's shoe, and the hem of the man's trousers, and he put his eyes on the shoe and waited.
The hand came down into his hair.
They had left him his hair. It was the one thing they had not taken and he had understood in the first week that this was not mercy, that it had been written on a form somewhere by a man who liked hair, and he had still been stupidly glad about it, and now the fingers went into it and back through it, unhurried, all the way to the base of his skull, and the thumb settled in the hollow behind his ear.
And he opened.
That was what it felt like from inside. Not a decision reversed. A latch lifting. His spine went long and loose in one slow movement he had no part in, his knees drifted apart on the carpet, his breathing dropped down into the bottom of him and slowed, and the whole braced front of him, the part that had been standing up straight in there for eight weeks doing arithmetic, lay down.
And he went the rest of the way up.
There was no fight in it. None at all. For four hours he had held it at half by counting carpet squares and standing in a February loading bay in his head, four hours of small grim work, and a hand arrived on the back of his skull and every bit of that was simply gone, and he came all the way up hard against nothing, against the air of a warm room, in front of two men in chairs.
The methods were still there. He went for them and they had nothing in them. It was like putting your weight on a step that turns out to be painted on.
"Good animal," Hale said, above him, not to him particularly. "Be a good animal."
Everything in him did what it was told and then hung there, open, waiting for the rest of it.
Because there was a rest of it. There were two more words and they had not come yet.
And the room went out.
The ceiling had a grid of tiles and the third one from the left had a water stain on it in the shape of nothing.
He was not asleep. He could never explain that part to himself afterward. He was not asleep and he was not unconscious and he could have told you the day of the week. He was floating about a foot above the place where he usually kept himself, agreeable, enormously agreeable, and the straps at his wrists and his ankles and across his hips were only a fact about the room, like the tiles.
The voice was a recording. He worked that out on the fourth day, from the little click before it started, and it did not help. Nobody was in there. They ran him in the mornings and there was nobody in the room.
There was a hand. It came in from the left. It went into his hair and back to the base of his skull and the thumb went behind his ear, and everything in him opened out flat. Then the voice said the thing about being good, and he came up hard with nothing touching him there at all.
Then the machine on the other end of him, for as long as it took, which was never hurried and never long.
And then the two words. The same two, in the same flat order, every single time. And he came.
They did not stop it. He came, and it was cleaned off him, and eleven minutes later the hand came back in from the left and the voice said the thing about being good and the two words came after it and so did he, and the second one was better.
Forty minutes in he started pushing his head up into the hand.
He remembered that. It was the piece he could not get out of himself. Not the straps and not the drug. The way he had lifted his head, in the fourth session or the fifth, without being asked, wanting the hand to still be there, the way you go up on your toes for something on a shelf.
By the time anyone bought him he had come more times in that room than he had in his life. Nobody had been present for any of them. The best minutes he had ever had were in a locked room with a recording and a machine and a stain in the shape of nothing, and there had not been one other person in the building who knew his name.
The thumb moved behind his ear.
He was on a carpet in a warm room with two men above him and he was pushing up into the hand.
"There," Hale said. "Now look at that and tell me what you're looking at."
And Osgood looked. Finally, properly, both eyes, which was the evening's real work done and had taken four hours and a hand.
There was plenty to look at. It had come up off its heels, knees wide on the carpet where the hand had put them, and it was hard enough now to have pulled away from its own belly and stand clear of it, so that the ring at the base sat proud and the one through the head took the firelight every time it moved. Which was often. Every few seconds it went up half an inch toward the hand and came back down, the way a cat does.
There was already a thread of wet coming off it onto the carpet. He did not mind about the carpet.
He took his own time looking. He did most evenings.
"See, this is what I couldn't explain to you over the phone." He had not stopped moving his hand. He did it absently, the way he'd have done it to a dog by the fire, his attention entirely on his friend. "It's been half at that all evening and fighting it the whole time. You saw it. You've been not looking at it since the soup."
"I did notice," Osgood said. "I didn't like to."
"Nobody likes to at first." Hale laughed, and his hand went on moving. "But look at it now. That took about four seconds and I did not do one thing to it except put my hand where my hand is. You've had all evening to sit there wondering whether the poor creature is only frightened of me and doing as it's told, and there's your answer, on its knees, dripping on my carpet, in front of a man it had never seen before tonight."
He let Osgood have a moment with that.
"It can't lie about it. It isn't capable of it. There's no performance in a cock, Osgood, that's the entire point, that is the argument and there isn't a second one. Everything else about them you could doubt. That, never."
Osgood was looking now, properly, both eyes, at all of it.
"It's not agreeing with me because it's afraid," Hale said. "A frightened animal doesn't do that. It's not agreeing with me because it's clever, either, and it isn't grateful in the way you or I would mean it. It's just true. That's what you're looking at. That's a pure animal reaction and it's the only honest thing in this room."
He watched it land. The tone was the one thing he had never had to work at. Men heard it and went easy, every time, and heard what he had actually said about ten seconds later, and by then they had already agreed with it.
"They can't lie to you. Do you know what that's worth? Everyone you have ever met has lied to you about how they feel about you, every day of your life, and this thing cannot."
He was somewhere near the top of it and he had stopped being able to sort out which part was which.
They were talking about his cock in the third person a foot from his own ear and the heat went up through him at the sound of it. That was the joke. That was the actual joke and there was nobody to tell it to. Every time the man said something humiliating, the man said it in the man's voice, and the voice did what the voice did, and so the humiliation arrived pre-mixed with the other thing and there was no way to take them apart. He had tried for eight weeks. There was no seam.
The hand kept going in his hair.
He was leaking onto the carpet. He could feel it going, the slow thread of it off the ring at the head, and some far-off part of him was appalled and that part was very small now and getting smaller.
Thank you master.
He shut his teeth.
Thank you master thank you master.
Not out loud. He had not said it out loud in eight weeks. It was the one thing he had, it was the last door in the house he was still holding shut with his shoulder, and it was three words, and they came up his throat like water finding a crack every single time the hand moved.
The room was going soft at the edges. He was warm. He was so warm. He had been cold since a hallway on his eighteenth birthday and now there was heat all the way through him, up under his jaw, out to his fingers, and it was not his.
He knew that much. Something had gone into his neck earlier this evening and this was what it did. That was the explanation, and he held onto it with both hands.
It changed nothing whatever about how good it was. He was pushing his head up into a hand to keep it coming.
Somewhere with no name on it, something told him that this was not so bad.
He heard it arrive. He did not argue with it. It came back a moment later and added that it was warm.
"Up."
He stood. He did not remember choosing to stand.
The hand left his hair and came round in front of him and closed on him, and the man did not look at him while he did it. He reached across with his other hand and took an empty tumbler off the side table. One of his own good glasses, off the tray that had come in from the hall an hour ago in two aching hands.
He held it there.
"Cum. Now."
Nothing came out of the collar.
He would have known. He had been listening to that collar since the first morning. He knew the coin of it going hot, he knew the click, he knew what the needle felt like because he had felt it once tonight, and there was none of it. It sat at his throat on the same idle heat it had been at all evening and did not do one thing.
And he came anyway.
It went through him like the floor dropping. It rose out of his legs and folded him at the middle and he made a sound he had never made, and it kept going, it went on past where it should have stopped, longer than the room, and his hands went out and found the arm of the man's chair and held on. It was not like the room with the tiles. It was better than the room with the tiles, because someone was there. There was a hand on him and a person breathing above him and a voice that had said the thing about being good, and his whole body opened up around that fact and emptied itself into a glass.
"Thank you master."
It came out on the second wave. All three words, clear, in a wrecked voice, out loud, in front of both of them, in a lit room.
Nobody remarked on it.
He stood there shaking with both hands on the arm of the chair and his eyes shut, and there was warmth right through the middle of him where the cold lived, and something surfaced on top of it and told him that had been good. That it had been better than anything. That maybe this was not.
He did not let it finish. It finished anyway.
Hale set the tumbler down on the table and slapped him on the backside, twice, friendly, the sort of slap you give a horse.
"Out."
The boy went. Osgood listened to his feet in the hall and then on the stairs, slow, one at a time, and then not.
The glass stayed where Hale had put it, on the low table between the two chairs, in the light.
"So," Hale said. He was wiping his hand on a napkin without any ceremony at all. "That's a bad one, by the way. That was a very bad one. Eight weeks, and it fought me all the way to the end of that and you saw how much good it did. It'll fight me for another month. Six weeks, maybe."
"And then?"
"And then it'll start coming to find me." He said it without any triumph, which was somehow worse. "They all do. It'll be waiting in the hall in the mornings, and it'll put itself where my hand is, and it will be the happiest it has ever been in its life. That's not me being sentimental, Osgood, I've watched it happen in four houses. What we do to them is not the cruelty. The cruelty was the eighteen years."
The fire had gone right down. His eyes kept going to the glass and coming back, and he made himself stop, and then did it again.
He was not thinking about the boy, and he noticed that he was not, which is a thing a man only notices by having been careful about it. What he was thinking about was the back bedroom in his own house, the one nobody used, which got the morning light and had a good window, and whether the door on it locked from the outside or only from the in.
"Nobody's happy out there," Hale said. "You aren't. I wasn't. They certainly aren't, working nights to pay off a dead man's paper. All we do is take the part that's making them miserable and we take it out, and then we keep them warm and used and busy for the rest of their lives, and they are grateful, and they are grateful in a way you have never once been grateful about anything in your life." He folded the napkin. "We're good for them. That's the whole of it. We bring a bit of peace into these animals' lives and everyone's too embarrassed to say so."
Nobody moved the glass.
He put his own down beside it, which made two on the table, close together, and got up and went to find his coat.
At the door, with the coat half on, he found the question already in his mouth, and understood that it had been sitting there a while, waiting for him to be finished pretending.
"The Dutch place."
"Mm?"
"The one you used. Who do I call?"
Hale smiled and went to find a pen.
The hall was cold and the stairs were colder and he went up them one at a time, holding the rail, because his legs were not right yet.
Two words, in the voice he used for the price of things.
He kept coming back to it on every stair.
And the collar had done nothing.
For eight weeks that had been the answer to everything. It was chemical. It was done to him from outside. It was not him. He had leaned on that without ever once noticing he was leaning, and tonight it had sat there at its idle heat and never once stirred, and he came harder than he ever had in the room with the tiles, because a man put a hand in his hair and talked to somebody else.
Halfway up he did the sum.
Eleven hundred and forty. A hundred and sixty a month against it once the interest had eaten its share. Seven months, seven months and eleven days if you counted the way the office counted.
He could have done it in five.
There was the coat in November. There were the two weeks he had not taken nights at the depot because his back was bad, and his back had not been that bad. Sixty here, forty there, one soft winter, and they came to the door on his birthday.
So it was not the law and it was not the men.
Then the front door went, and the car, and the quiet came back into the house.
He knew what the rest of the night was before he had finished hearing it.
The man had been showing him off for four hours and he had been down on the floor for the best of it, close enough to hear what it was doing to him. The voice getting slower. The hand staying in his hair long after there was any reason for it. The man was full of it now, and there was nobody left in the house to be civil in front of.
He would be used within the hour.
His body got there before he did. The second week, on the boards of the room he slept in. What came back was never the pain, though there had been more of it than he had known a person could hold. The noise. The smell of another man that close to his face. Lying in the wet afterward with his cheek on the boards, working out that something had been put inside him that could not be taken back out, too disgusted to stand up.
He had cried about it once, in the third week. Not since.
He ought to go and get himself ready.
It arrived flat. An item on a list. The douche at the end of the corridor, the oil under the basin, twenty minutes if it was done properly, and the man did not like to be kept waiting.
And then the heat started.
Lower this time. It came up out of his hole and spread, exactly the way the other one had spread out of his chest, slow and wide and warm, into his belly, down the backs of his thighs, out to his hands. It was the same heat, exactly, the one out of his chest, arriving somewhere new.
He stood in the dark on the landing and felt himself start to want it.
Not take it. Not bear it. Want it, low down, everything back there going soft and loose and open on its own in an empty corridor, warm and patient and aching, for a man downstairs who was locking his own front door.
He went along the corridor to the bathroom.
He caught himself hurrying.
If this story hit right, leave a rating. It helps others find it.
If this one worked for you:
The Meridian Grand (Dystopian, Inspection, CMNM). A members' club with a hotel built around it, where the stock arrives already conditioned and each new intake is graded, milked and priced in front of the room.
The Expert (Master & Slave, Conditioning, Slave Training). He priced and collared other men at intake for years. Then his own numbers came up short, and he walked in knowing exactly what every step was for.
If you enjoyed this story, consider supporting the author on Patreon.
To get in touch with the author, send them an email.
