no riband wrought

Only after the fact, when he is tugging at his skin before the mirror and basin in his proud little alcove, does he realize the extent of the marks. The tryst that caused them is retreating into memory now, and its passing traces long since scrubbed away at the basin or carried off in his linen, but the ghosts of Hickey’s small sharp fingers stand out on his shoulders like inkstains, and the raw mark of a kiss has faded to a blue ring. Gibson tugs his shirt collar higher and grimaces.

The real ache is somewhere deep and private – he could probe it with guilty fingers and stir up the pain again, feeling inside his arsehole for some unmistakable privy mark of his misuse. Hickey likes to leave him feeling thoroughly used, and to give him the kind of poking it’s impossible to forget – leaving Billy sore and tender, with the sign of their complicity stamped on his insides. In the moment of their coupling the pain of being full beyond bearing is a pleasure – with a prick inside him, or Mr. Hickey’s fingers – but afterward it nettles him sorely, and there is no sitting or bending down or lying in his bed without thinking of what they have done. No doubt the little wretch knows, and it gives him pleasure to think of the nuisance he’s caused.

When Hickey touches him in all his dirty forgotten places it leaves Gibson buzzing with drunken energy – the seam between his balls, the ledge of his hip, the hairy crease of his armpit where Hickey sometimes hooks a thumb to maneuver him into place. The memory of it kindles a sort of heat again – how Hickey had taken him beyond the brink and past the point of bearing, how his fingers and prick and the weight of his body had pressed Gibson open. How the force of his thrusts had jostled him against the wooden railing, how it had made him cry out – had it left a red line across his belly, has the pressure of it left an undisclosed bruise?

He has no time to linger on that now, or to perform a more thorough examination; there are services required of him, he must don white gloves once more and prepare to do his duty among the officers. Even the quarters of a subordinate steward are forbidden to lesser men; Mr. Hickey cannot follow him. Here with his scissors and clothes-brush, his mirror and jug – in his own appointed quarters, where he can scarcely take two paces before arriving at the far wall, and where every inch of horizontal space is dedicated to good order. Hickey could never take him here with only a slip of curtain to separate them from the common view – it couldn’t happen tonight, with even the stifled sound of their gasps and grunts loud enough to wake the men in their hammocks, with Hickey’s hoarse broken voice panting vulgarities into his ear and his prick buried bruising-deep in Gibson’s arse. For such a beastly thing to happen here–

The wool cloth feels too-tight, his drawers are too constrictive, as if all the blood has run down into his loins the moment his uniform is buttoned and brushed to presentability. Gibson’s hand slips into the waistband of his trousers, as if a halfhearted frigging will relieve him before the officers take their supper. He wants to finger himself raw, to burn and ache, to spunk so hard that he sees spots and then be done with it, but that would put Mr. Hickey out of work.