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The Warden had always said if Camilla hadn’t been his cavalier, he’d have lost her to the Alexandrites.
This was a joke that she valiantly tried not to ponder over for too long at any one time. So the Warden found her capable and attractive, as were the unstated requirements to be shipped off out-of-system with the Alexandrites—he would be a fool not to find her capable. Anyone would. The majority of people who recognized her abilities as a swordswoman didn’t even truly know the extent of what she was capable of, but he did.
And attractive—well, there entered the complications. They were both nearly twenty years old; it had been a couple years, at that point, of having frequent sex in the Master Warden’s quarters. He found her attractive enough to bed her, but she’d been propositioned enough times by others in the Spire to know that wasn’t a trait unique to him. He often needed it, anyway, as a way to relax himself. Calm his anxieties. She was merely doing her duty by assisting him.
This was the part of the joke she ignored, for what little peace of mind she could hold onto. But sometimes, unbeknownst to Palamedes, he managed to pluck that peace of mind from her fingertips and toss it out an airlock.
“I’m so grateful you’re my cavalier,” Palamedes said, tossing his pen onto the stack of papers piled onto his desk. The mess wasn’t clean, exactly, but the stack had been on his left side, and then he’d gone through each item until they were situated on his right, so his buzzing mind could relax. Somewhat. There would be more paperwork and Oversight Body meetings tomorrow. “I could never get through all of this without your help.”
Camilla leaned against the desk beside him and cracked her knuckles. Her hair was shiny from being freshly washed, and her shirt fit tightly across her torso, and she smelled like earthy-scented soap. Now that his work was taken care of, he could actually focus on her.
“You could get through it. You’d just get bogged down pulling your hair out over the details until you fell asleep on your desk a lot more often.”
“It’s a moot point, anyway, isn’t it,” Palamedes said, and grasped her hand in his own to press his mouth to her knuckles. “If you weren’t my cavalier, I wouldn’t be Master Warden. I’d never do this without you. And I hate to think of the Alexandrites stealing you away from me.”
“I’ve told you before—”
“You’d work in data instead, yes, but I wholeheartedly disagree, Scholar. I’m curious, though,” and he grazed his fingers up the length of her arm, “If you were an Alexandrite, I know how your swordsmanship would be utilized in the field, but you’ve got to have good looks as well—how would one put them to use?”
“In order to diversify the gene pool, you mean,” Camilla said matter-of-factly, her face betraying nothing.
“Exactly. It’s not something I’d ever need to know about, after all. All I’ve got to contribute to the Sixth is this.” He tapped his head with a finger.
“You say that like it’s insignificant.”
He raised an eyebrow. “It’s not a value judgment; I merely serve a separate purpose. Just as you do as my cavalier. But, hypothetically, if you weren’t—”
“To clarify, Warden, you want to know how the Alexandrites are prepared for deployment,” Camilla said.
“The various…strategies they might apply out-of-system, yes.” He swallowed, painfully obviously, and brushed his hand across Camilla’s waist from where he sat.
Camilla would know, anyway, she’d been trained in the Spire herself; she had plenty of friends and acquaintances who’d been put in the Alexandrites. She’d heard the stories.
She pushed off the edge of the desk, fisted a hand in the front of his shirt, and yanked him up out of his chair. “Fine,” Camilla said, lowly, mere centimeters from his lips, “you can have a demonstration. But you’ll do as I say.” As soon as he nodded, she crushed her mouth to his for one burning moment and then shoved him back.
“Stay there.” He stayed. Camilla went rummaging around the room behind him until she returned with a strip of leather, procured from one of her piles of odds and ends and weapons. She grabbed his wrists, positioning them in front of his body, and tied the leather around them in a tight knot. Being manhandled had him worked up already, and his cock was starting to pay attention.
She surveyed him when her work was finished, slow, deliberate steps taken in a circle around his body. He could feel the drops of sweat gathering on his spine, his neck, running in rivulets across his clammy skin. Camilla’s hands were clasped behind her back, the opposite of him, and she looked at him with feigned disinterest. Feigned, he knew, because he listened closely to the way her breathing came a little heavier—especially when she came to a stop in front of him and eyed the way his trousers were beginning to tent.
“You will call me ‘sir.’ Understood?” she asked.
Palamedes hesitated. “Yes, sir,” he said, unsure of himself, but desperate to please her. She’d assumed the air of a disapproving captain, chin tilted upwards, looking down her nose at him as though he’d just mouthed off to his commanding officer. Coldly, like they didn’t know each other as well as they did, like they were strangers.
“On your knees, Master Warden,” she ordered, and the formality of his full title from her mouth was a gut punch. He bent his legs, immediately ready to follow her instructions, and suddenly her hand shot out and gripped him hard on the jaw. “What do you say?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Good.” She released him. “Down.”
He obeyed, sinking to his knees on the ground. His tied hands bracketed his straining cock, and he stared up at Cam above him with burning cheeks and wide eyes.
“You’re going to eat me out,” she said, and he shuddered. There was no negotiation—though he knew he could get up and tell her to stop and she would, he had no desire to, and she knew that. He was putty in the palm of her hand, and she could mold him into doing anything she wanted.
Camilla removed her pants and undergarments, kicking them aside with a touch more force than usual. Her boots were still on, probably because unlacing and shoving them off would take more time than she felt like sparing. She stood up to his face and fisted a hand in the hair at the back of his skull. From here, from this close, he could smell her—her cunt mere inches from his mouth, a bead of slickness sliding down her inner thigh.
“Make me come,” Camilla said, and closed the gap.
He shifted up on his knees to meet her there; his tongue laved greedily between the folds of her pussy, the tip of it pushing, probing at her entrance. Her hand on the back of his head shoved him closer until his nose nestled into her hair, until his senses were full of her, her scent, her taste. He alternated between quick little circles around her clit—her fingernails dug into his scalp at that—sucking at it to make her groan, and long strokes up the length of her.
Camilla’s thighs shifted apart a few extra inches, and he was grateful for the extra room, taking the opportunity to push his face closer to her and to lick up inside her. Her breathing came even heavier, hot puffs of breath through her mouth, and her hips rolled against his face again and again with liquid purpose.
Palamedes’s cock ached. There was a cool sensation against the tip, the stickiness of cloth on skin, and he didn’t have to look to know precum had soaked through his trousers. His tongue fucked in and out of her and he needed—her, as he always did, he needed her or he was going to careen right off the cliff’s edge of the last of his sanity straight into the deep end. He shifted forward blindly, his eyes closed and mouth still working against her, bent his arms to his chest, and dragged his cock along her boot.
At some point, she stopped riding his face. He rutted against her and suckled at her clit, the friction barely enough to give him relief but satisfying all the same.
It took him an embarrassingly long time to realize her breathing had evened out. “Look at me, Master Warden,” she ordered, and he did, at which point he was actually concerned he might come in his pants. Camilla had pushed her shirt up to her neck, her soft stomach and tits on display above him, and she was idly toying with one nipple between her fingers.
She said, “I don’t think I told you to get yourself off.” Her foot raised into the air and he instinctively scooted himself backwards an inch. “And I didn’t tell you to stop eating me out.” Quickly, Palamedes quit his gaping and closed his lips over her clit once more.
“You’d never last out on deployment. Can’t follow orders to save your life,” Camilla said, her tone as blank and deadpan as ever, even as she pressed the heel of her boot between his legs. Applying pressure to his hard, clothed cock, she kept her eyes laser-focused on his.
He lapped up the slickness that eased out of her and moaned, somewhat pathetically, as she kept her boot firmly situated on top of his cock; the edges of her mouth tipped up in a smirk, and she gripped the hair beneath her hand hard enough to make him whine.
She never usually—she wasn’t always this rough with him, and his head was whirling with desire, with all the erotica he’d read and gotten off to and hoped desperately that Cam would be interested in, with visions of being folded in half and choked and spanked. He wanted to be ruined by her, for her to be his undoing and his resurrection.
His tongue slipped inside her again, easier this time, and his cock throbbed harder in tandem with Camilla growing wetter by the minute. Palamedes’s eyes were trained on hers, entranced by the way her hand left his scalp and joined the other to squeeze at her tits.
For as tough and in control as she was trying—and succeeding, of course—to be, Camilla’s eyelashes fluttered, and she let out a sweet, quiet moan that indicated she was close. Palamedes groaned against her, and she gasped at the vibration of it.
“Warden—” she choked out, the formality of addressing him by his full title forgotten, and ground her hips against his face as she came. Her thighs shuddered on either side of his head until she rested her weight on him and sighed. He’d never tire of this aspect of being intimate with her; bearing witness to her carefully-maintained stoicism melting away, her body taken over by pleasure and fully relaxed.
Camilla stepped back, removing her foot from its place on top of his cock, and he was utterly wrecked already. The lack of pressure or friction on his cock, his mouth off of her cunt, nothing to focus his tongue or his tied hands on—he could have wept. She stroked a hand through the hair at his temple, damp with sweat. The bottom half of his face was wet, too, and he could still taste her when he licked at the corners of his lips.
“Look at you,” she said, under her breath. Palamedes wasn’t sure she knew she’d said it aloud. “You’ve done what I asked. Good work. But we’re not finished with the demonstration.”
Palamedes preened at her praise, even as his heart rate spiked with anticipation. “Sir?”
She grasped a knife off a nearby table—one of many she had lying around, that one day he would probably impale himself on in a horrible accident—and knelt to cut the leather around his wrists. Instinctively, he rubbed at the sore, red skin, and tried not to think about leaning forward to kiss her. He could, but that wasn’t part of the game.
Camilla stood and gestured across the room with a nod of her head. “On the bed, Master Warden. And I want those clothes off.” He scrambled to his feet, hands working at the buttons of his shirt and pants, and he thought he heard a tinge of laughter in her voice when she said, “You look like a worm with problems,” behind him.
“I’m merely following your instructions, sir,” Palamedes huffed, finally peeling his precum-soaked underwear off of himself and setting his glasses on the bedside table before moving to lie down. He watched her putter around the room from where he rested on his back, legs bent and knees open; Camilla yanked her shirt over her head and dug around in the bottom drawer of their shared dresser, and his cock twitched knowing what she was searching for.
He would have wrapped a hand around it to give himself some relief, but she hadn’t told him to—and he could be good for her. Disciplined. He could follow orders, thank you very much.
Camilla pulled out her favorite dick (the longest one she had, naturally) and her harness, moving to kneel before him on the bed before strapping herself into it and getting situated. Palamedes closed his eyes. He was familiar with this part, the routine of it.
Until a bottle of lube smacked him in the face.
“Do it yourself,” Camilla said. “I want to watch.” She sat back on her heels as he grabbed for the lube that had fallen onto his chest, raising an eyebrow while he hesitated.
“Yes, sir,” Palamedes said shakily, and coated his fingers until they were slick; he pulled his legs up to his chest and pushed two fingers inside himself, biting his lip. Camilla stared while he did it with no immediately-apparent change in her expression, but her pupils had practically eclipsed her irises, wide and full and dark. He crooked his fingertips and groaned, not once breaking eye contact with her.
“Faster. Don’t make me wait.”
The muscles in his back tensed, rising up off the bed as he messily, desperately fucked himself for her, and her fingers dug into the skin of her soft thighs—he found he wanted to kiss them, to leave love bites there hidden by her clothing but that she’d see in the bath the next day. Overcome with a crashing wave of tenderness—blinding, debilitating affection that could cave his chest in if he let it—Palamedes feared he might get up and run out of the room, say something ridiculous and ruin the moment, or worse, come before she’d told him to.
He throbbed, and shoved his fingers deeper, his mind a hazy, contradicting mess of potential actions. It settled on saying something ridiculous. “Oh God, Cam, I lo–”
She fastened a hand around his bony wrist before he could send every unnamed wall between them crashing to the ground and yanked his fingers out of his ass. “That’s enough.” She held his hips with an iron grip, definitely knowing he’d be bruised from it, and pushed her silicone dick inside him without fanfare. “I told you to call me ‘sir,’ Master Warden.”
The pace she set was brutal from the start, hips snapping against him with a vengeance, and Palamedes’s head fell to the side onto the mattress as he let himself be used. “Sorry, sir,” he breathed. She shifted just slightly to the right and a ragged gasp tore itself from his throat—Camilla hummed, like she’d just found an error in one of his drafted letters to some other House delegate that she’d need to correct, and rolled her hips to hit that spot over and over.
Palamedes’s eyes began to glaze over. Little starbursts of pleasure rocketed through him every time Camilla thrusted against him, and he thought he might be moaning, or whining. Some sound was leaving him, bumpy and interrupted with each thrust, but he hadn’t the clarity of mind to place it. A tear trickled down the side of his temple onto the sheets.
Camilla noticed, of course. Camilla noticed every move he made. “Tell me how it feels,” she said.
“Good,” he said, not entirely certain if he’d followed up with sir, but too fucked-out to care. “I’m—I’m so—”
“I know. You can come without touching yourself, can’t you?” Camilla didn’t even appear remotely winded, though her pace hadn’t slowed.
He said something that sounded half like, “Yeah,” and half some sort of whorish ahh sound. He blinked tears away to stare up at her, though he had to squint without his glasses. Camilla’s face was flushed, and she splayed her hands over the sides of his abdomen, thrusting into him as though her title as his cavalier depended on it.
“Then come, Master Warden,” she said. His breath hitched—the tip of her cock brushed along his prostate again—and he rolled his hips up to meet her, groaning and fisting his hands into the bedsheets as orgasm rushed through him like a solar flare. He came in a thick, hot mess across his stomach and chest; Cam bent to lick some of it off, and he was nearly lightheaded watching her tongue lave over his skin.
“Oh, God,” he said, all intelligent thoughts and brain functions obliterated, leaning up to kiss her deeply like he’d been wanting to. She tasted like him, and he was sure he still tasted like her too.
“Not bad,” Camilla whispered against his lips. And: “I hope that was a sufficient demonstration of an Alexandrite’s duties, Warden.”
Camilla pulled her shirt back over her head, adjusting her collar and the part of her hair in the wall mirror. The Warden was snoring a few feet away. He’d fallen asleep just as she’d left him on his back, with his hands still gently curled into the sheets and his knees wide. Good, she thought. He needed it.
She stepped over to his desk and gathered a portion of his paperwork in her hands to tap it on the surface, and straightened up his scattered pens and barely-intelligible notes to himself all written in shorthand.
They still disagreed, and would continue to disagree on what path she might have taken had she not been his cavalier. But the Warden had been right about one thing—to conceive of any world in which he wasn’t Master Warden of the Sixth and she wasn’t his right hand was unthinkable. Her purpose, truly, wasn’t to serve her House. She would never be fulfilled as just another soldier, or working in data, or as a junior fellow of Oversight Body like Kiki was. She had one duty, and that was to the Warden.
It was—mind-bending, in a way, pretending to be someone else with him for a while. She’d enjoyed stepping outside of her body and into the boots of someone who didn’t know him, someone who wasn’t secretly afraid of his tenderness, or of the hurricane of desire and fierce loyalty raging inside of her when she looked at him. Palamedes needed distraction from his work, and Camilla needed distraction from him, lest she falter in her role, as that would be his undoing as well as her own.
She sat on the edge of the bed, watching the cavity of his chest rise and fall. The distraction had worked for a short time, but now, after it was over…she was reminded of who they were, who they would always be—who she could only ever be to him. She remembered that he had taken her hand in his while sitting at his desk and brought it gently to his lips, and the memory of it played and rewound and played in her head until he woke.