hyssop and scarlet

Cupping his hand to the back of Phil’s head, he can feel the ledge of his skull beneath his hair. The bones of his face are sharp beneath the skin, and his eyes are shut, his expression entirely opaque. Peter washes the last of the soap from his hair.

There were children in this house once; the tub is sized for a man, but still at Peter’s height it makes for an ungainly fit, and Phil must fold up like a crab to fit it, with his rough pitted hands gripping the edges. The white enamel is ringed with black dirt; once the water runs clear from that heavy dark hair his hand dips downward to the strange hollow of Phil’s throat, sun-dyed brown, and he feels the twitch as he swallows.

“What are you thinking about, Pete, I wonder? What’s in that funny head of yours?” Phil opens his eyes, first one and then the other, like a drowsing cat. No chance that he’d allow this without teasing him a little, but the sound of his voice is oddly strained, like something is paining him.

Undressed he looks stripped somehow, like someone’s taken the blade of a knife and gone over him closely, stripped him down down to pale and hairless hide in those places where the sun seldom reaches. His body is a landscape of terrible vulnerability, from his soft privates and the faint swell of his belly to the scrubbed creases of his neck, laid out under Peter’s hands like a diagram. Peter is naked too, kneeling on one of Rose’s good towels to spare his knees, but he has nothing to be afraid of.

Phil Burbank naked, and Palmolive soap and hot water, boiled and scrubbed and freed from under his customary lacquer of sweat and dirt — he’ll complain about it for a week after and be just as filthy soon enough but his men will see the change in him and know he’s been domesticated. Phil allows this because of what he thinks he’ll get out of it. He allows these bare-handed intimacies because he thinks Peter is his boy and no one else’s. He’ll let him erode away at what was once his own sovereign territory and he’ll do silly foolish things because Peter makes him feel good, because Peter will reach out and touch him. It’s one way of bringing him to heel.