left leg, and the blood, and his tongue. The pleasure moved all through me, and helpless, I let the air escape my lips in a rosary of sighs.
"Master, Master, Master, I love you."
"Yes, well, that's not so unusual," he whispered. He didn't stop his kissing. He lapped at the blood. I writhed under the weight of his hand on my backside. "But the question is, Amadeo, why do I love you? Why? Why did I have to go into that stinking brothel and look upon you? I am strong by nature ... whatever my nature ..."
He greedily kissed a large bruise on my thigh. I could feel his sucking at it, and then the tongue lapping it, eating the blood, and then his blood coming down into it. The pleasure sent shock after shock through me. I saw nothing, though I thought that my eyes were now open. I struggled to make certain that my eyes were open, but nothing came visible, only a golden haze.
"I love you, I do love you," he said. "And why? Quick-witted, yes, beautiful, yes, and inside you, the burnt-up relics of a saint!"
"Master, I don't know what you're saying to me. I was never a saint, never, I don't claim to be a saint. I'm a wretched disrespectful and ungrateful being. Oh, I adore you. It's so delicious to be helpless and at your mercy."
"Stop mocking me."
"But I don't," I said. "I want to speak, the truth, I want to be a fool for the truth, a fool for-. I want to be a fool for you."
"No, I don't guess you do mean to mock me. You mean it. You don't realize the absurdity of it."
He had finished his progress. My legs had lost any shape they possessed in my mist-filled mind. I could only lie there, my whole body vibrating from his kisses. He laid his head on my hips, against the warm place that he had smacked with his hand, and I felt his fingers come up under me and touch the most private part of me.
My organ hardened in his fingers, hardened with the infusion of his searing blood, but all the more with the young male in me who had so often mingled pleasure with pain at his will.
Harder and harder I grew, and bucked and pumped beneath his head and shoulders as he lay on my backside, as he held tight to the organ, and then into his slippery fingers I gave forth in violent unsurpassed spasms a great gush.
I rose on my elbow and looked back at him. He was sitting up, staring at the pearly white semen that clung to his fingers.
"Good God, is that what you wanted?" I asked. "To see the viscous whiteness in your hand?
He looked at me with anguish. Oh, such anguish.
"Doesn't it mean?" I asked, "that the time has come?"
The misery in his eyes was too much for me to question him anymore.
Drowsy and blind, I felt him turn me over and rip off my tunic and jacket. I felt him lift me and then came the sting of his assault into my neck. A fierce pain gathered itself around my heart, slackening just when I feared it, and then I sank down beside him into the perfumed cleft of the bed; and against his chest, warm under covers that he pulled up over us, I slept.
It was still thick and heavy night when I opened my eyes. I had learnt with him to feel the coming of morning. And morning was not yet really near.
I looked around for him. I saw him at the foot of the bed. He was dressed in his finest red velvet. He wore a jacket with slashed sleeves and a heavy tunic with a high collar. This cloak of red velvet was trimmed in ermine.
His hair was thoroughly brushed and very slightly oiled so that it gave off its most civilized and artful shimmer, swept back from his clean straight hairline and turning in mannered curls on his shoulders. He looked sad.
"Master, what is it?"
"I have to go for a few nights. No, it's not out of anger at you, Amadeo. It's one of those journeys I have to make. I'm long overdue for it."
"No, Master, not now, please. I'm sorry, I beg you, not now! What I-."
"Child. I go to see Those Who Must Be Kept. I have no choice in this."
For a moment I said nothing. I tried to understand the denotation of the