air while I was forced to kneel by your side. Might there have been an element of vengeance in deflowering his daughter, so lonely and vulnerable and unprotected?
No might be about it. Your birth and your beauty and perhaps your fecklessness: I thought that was the whole of your appeal, at first.
Well. I certainly learned otherwise in due time. Perhaps I am a little foolish, after all.
Make no mistake, you are precious to me. You matter more to me than any other human being I have ever met or can remember. You matter enough that I compromised years of planning in order to storm your father’s station in a ludicrous gesture and snatch you into my den, simply because I hadn’t slept well without your warm, slight weight at my side. I honestly don’t know what I was thinking, except that your absence was an unendurable lack that had to be remedied posthaste.
And if I should ever know that lack again, if your joy in me doesn’t last forever…after all, what joy does? What then?
Would you call these musings love? They seem incredibly selfish to me, and you would tell me that love isn’t meant to be selfish. Love, to you, is some transcendent feeling, pure and perfect. Although I have my own perfections, I certainly can’t call myself pure.
Case in point.
Here I am, lingering alone in a lounge on Ceti Station Three and hungrily watching the limbs and curves of one of the most beautiful women I have ever seen. Not a slave—she’s what they call a paramour around here. A pretty euphemism for one who spreads her legs for coin. I can see why this one would be rather successful in her trade.
In two years, I have taken no lover but you. This is unprecedented for me. Not that I’m a rampaging monster of carnality; I didn’t exactly have harems lying around before you arrived, and I’m not some oversexed young buccaneer. But I’ve never been monogamous, either. The slave girls—never a free woman, never, until you—pleased me for a few nights and were then sent on their way. If they pleased me well, I freed them. There was no attachment. They were beautiful, fuckable, and that was all. If I felt the need, I called someone to fulfill it and then sent her away. I never stuck with the same woman for a month, let alone two years.
I think it’s starting to wear on me.
Don’t misunderstand me, my dear. I have never known anyone like you, and I know that no one can do for me what you do. I’ve known slave girls and paramours, yes: like sweet clouds of incense or potent glasses of wine, pleasing but only a distraction. I have never allowed myself to be distracted for long. I’ve never kept anything around that dulled my judgment.
But then I met you.
The other girls, lissome and perfumed and well-trained, were incense and wine. You were fresh air and cool water. A distraction, to be sure, but life-giving and sustaining in a way I’d never known before. Something essential, something I needed to have and still need to have. Something that has me in return.
But I’m only human, and as a human, after a while I start missing the taste of wine, no matter how pure the water is. I get tired of all this bracing fresh air and just want to sink back on a cushion and breathe in the incense for a while. So you might say I’m going a bit stir-crazy.
All right. I’ll be honest. It’s even more than that. If I possess you, then you possess me as well. Our power over one another is disturbingly…equal.
I’m not used to equal. I don’t like equal. My success is largely thanks to the way I’ve never tolerated an equal in my general vicinity. And now, watching this beautiful woman who will indulge my every whim, who will follow all my commands without question, I find myself wishing for someone who is not my equal.
She sees me watching. She’s a bold one; she tilts her head to the side and lets her green eyes—yours are huge and dark—blink at me. Golden skin, green eyes, tawny hair. Magnificent. She’s one of those girls who has trained as a dancer. I can tell by the way she moves. I can imagine her dancing around me, clad only in a few silk scarves, teasing me until I tire of being teased.
Then she saunters forward, keeping her emerald eyes