The Book of the Blue House

“It is different with us because you are not ordained, because you look at me like I’m just a person and we’re just two people who like each other, and I really, really wanted to be with you. I don’t know if I’m explaining this at all well.”

Derek stood up. He cleared his throat and his voice changed.

“Conn, do you want to spend the day with me? It’s not going to be fun. I have to do laundry. But… we could eat together and everything, If you’d like?”

When Conn was slow in answering, Derek said, “I hate laundry and completely understand—”

“No, No, I do,” Conn said.

And then he said, “I like you, Derek. A lot. You don’t have to be shy around me. I like you a great deal. I like how you take your clothes off in front of me and don’t think about it and aren’t trying to seduce me and you just look lovely. I like last night. I want it again. With you. I like the way we are, even if we don’t really know how we are. Okay?”

“Okay?” Derek nodded, smiling a little, feeling like he was the young one and Conn the elder.

“I’ll even do laundry with you.”

After their talk, Derek handled him in that rough, offhanded brotherly way which attracted Conn, as if they barely needed any introduction. He stripped the bed, tossing sheets to Conn and instructing him to place them in the basket.

“Go look for all the towels and get all the other robes that are in the discard.”

Conn did so and he said, “I’ll go clean up the bathroom.”

“No,” Derek said, almost scowling. “It’s part of our training. No matter how many dependents and servants there are, only Blues clean up bathrooms.”

Conn raised an eyebrow.

“I will explain it to you later. Or show you.”

Conn shrugged and nodded. They gathered their things, and Derek went back to his own room, the room where Nialla slept, though he did not see her and wondered where she was. He came back with bundled sheets and clothes. He opened the door and took up the first basket, holding the door open for Conn, and as Conn came out, Derek pressed him against the wall and kissed him roughly, then turned around, indicating for Conn to follow.

They did not go to the stairwell, but in the opposite direction, and even past the secret stairwell his sister had brought him up through yesterday. They stood at a gated door. Derek pressed a button, and the gates opened for them to go inside a lift. Derek pulling the door shut and they descended several floors, and then finally stopped. Conn pushed open the gate now, and they came into a hot room which opened onto a larger room full of steam and great hot cauldrons. Here there were Blues, stripped to the waist, stirring great pots.

“The laundry rooms. We always do our own laundry and our own bathrooms,” Derek said.

“Humility?”

“Not exactly,” Derek said. They filed past boiling pots and found one not in use, simply steaming. Derek instructed Conn on how to heat up the kettle, and what soap to toss in, and as he did, Derek wiped the sweat from his brow, pushing a hand through his black hair, and then began to toss in the bedsheets.

“The less warm pots are for the robes. The cooler for ordinary clothes. We will be here a while, or at least, you will be watching me. Oh, I’m such a nit. We should have had breakfast, but I wasn’t thinking.”

“I wasn’t hungry.”

But Conn felt hunger now. As if Derek heard his stomach grumbling, he said, “Don’t be foolish. Go upstairs. The hall you ate in yesterday is right above us, and say Derek Annakar wants his breakfast.”

“What about me?”

“You will eat the breakfast, dumdum,” Derek had stripped down to nothing and thrown his robe on the floor. “I just want the apple. Unless you want the apple.”

Conn realized he was not even looking at Derek with lust. In a day he’d becomc used to him, and they would be together again.

“No,” Conn said. “I’ll be back.”

Derek nodded and took a great paddle and began stirring the laundry..

It was three hours before they were done and the laundry was left hanging in the blowing rooms, rooms so hot and filled with turning fans, that by the time they’d hung their wash on the lifting hooks, Conn was stripped naked as well. At first he wouldn’t undress, but then he felt foolish being only half naked next to Derek who was dripping with sweat, flushed and nude, and continuously wiping his brow along with all the other men here who were not, Conn realized, all universally slender or the same in color or height and who were also not looking at each other.

“Enough of this. We’ll come back in the afternoon.”

“Are we going to miss lunch?”

“Miss lunch?” Derek looked at him as if he were mad, then said, “It’s only ten o clock!”

“What? What time did you wake me up?”

“About half past the sixth hour.”

“What?”

Derek shrugged. “We had a lot to do. Why sleep in?”

“I could actually hit you,” Conn discovered.

“Ah, Conn, don’t be like that,” Derek said as they came out of the boiling room into the ante room, and began to dress again. “And now we’ve got the rest of the morning.”

Unconsciously, Derek had decided to treat Conn more lor less like a younger brother, and to Derek Annakar, who had no actual younger brothers, this meant doing the same thing he would do with a young Blue in training. Since Conn was, it seemed, also his lover, and a few years younger, treating him this way seemed the only good sense. In their rooms, Derek stripped himself of the old robe and murmured that it was a shame he couldn’t have washed it along with the others.

“But there are others,” he said. “We need to clean. I’m going to my bathroom to use the commode. Come to me in about five minutes.”

Five minutes later, after Conn had relieved himself, he entered Derek’s little bathroom and Derek took a warm cloth and began to wipe Conn down.

“We’re filthy. We didn’t even shower after having sex in some old sweaty sheets all night,” he chuckled, and handed Conn the cloth as he took his own cloth and cleaned his body quickly, wiping between his thighs and swiping the cloth through his buttocks, murmuring, “That’ll do for this.”

He reached into the cabinet and pulled out a small bottle with a tip at the end, opened it, turned on the faucet and filled it with warm water, then closed it again. He squeezed a bit of the water out and put oil on the tip and then without warning, turning to half sit on the sink, and squeezed the water into himself all the time saying.

“If you’re going to have a man inside of you, you should do this. Or if you just want to be clean. Everyone should do this. It’s the first thing you should know. Well, one of the first things.”

Derek, in the confidence of a Blue priest, moved to the commode and chatting all the time, evacuated water and then repeated the process a couple of times saying, “You want the water to run clean out of you. If it does not run clean you are not done. Go to the other bathroom and try it yourself.”

Conn did not even think of questioning this, but was also surprised that he had become so used to Derek, and he understood now that the reason Blues cleaned their own bathrooms was because the bathroom was an intimate part of being a Blue, as were the clothes, the sheets where sex took place, stained with sex and the robes of the priesthood, perhaps sometimes equally stained. The bathrooms where bodies were cleaned and purified before and after sex, where the glamorous priest became the man voiding his bowels, was equally sacred, and Derek had decided that he would not be the glamorous priest, that he would show Conn everything, and as Conn grimaced and felt water pouring out of him, he felt himself oddly in love.

When he was done they showered slowly and with tenderness, and Conn could smell that Derek had already put coffee on. But they didn’t drink it. They made love until Derek lay on his back in the darkness of his little room in the bed smelling of clean new sheets, and he wrapped his legs about Conn and brought him inside. Conn nearly flew out of his body as Derek guided him and all too quickly, shuddering while Derek laughed in joy and held onto him, Conn came.