Page 91 of Rears & Vices

Vitaliy’s gaze turned dark and intent, dusk-blue sea sparkle.

“Do not you dare,” Everard warned.

“Vermin jumps, anyway. You are already contaminated.”

“You shan’t—you won’t—no te creas⁠—”

They grappled half-heartedly, laughing; Vitaliy unwilling to press the advantage of his weight, Everard unwilling to give up his own superior position of limbs-on-limbs—at the same time earnestly trying not to touch any part of the quilt beneath them.

Three loud bangs of a fist upon the door came, rattling the window glass. Everard swiveled round to see wavering stacks of brown curls, a feathered hat. Romilly René.

He was immediately sobered, alert, as he raised up on elbows; Vitaliy ceded the fight, suppressing giggles.

“Lovebird layabouts!” came, singsong. “I am sorry to interrupt your victory fuck, but I have been here waiting for the distribution going on one-half hour.”

“Milly,” Vitaliy huffed, exasperated but relaxed.

Everard levered off, handed Vitya his shirt, and went to remove the chair from the doorknob⁠—

Vitya held him back by the wrist. “Thank you,” he said, low. “For your care.”

Everard could only smile over his shoulder as he unbolted the door.

Romilly René tsked in disapproval. In her hands she held a massive ledger, pen and ink.

“That cot, over that beautiful grand thing? Disgraceful.” She nodded to the desk—which was rather large, come to think—and looked them both over: their hastily undressed state, obviously having been intimate.

“Milly,” Vitaliy said again.

She said nothing, but her glance lingered briefly on Vitaliy, a flash of appraising concern so fast, Everard almost missed it.

He did not miss Vitaliy’s reassuring nod, the twitch of his smile.

René worried for Vitaliy? For the aftershock, which surely she must know about already? Or merely that he had disappeared alone with Everard into the depths of an enemy ship? Everard, who knew precisely what she was?

René said, “We had best hurry. Matelot, your Fitzwilliam is half the way to three sheets flying already.”

“My… who?” Everard said, bewildered and caught off-guard by the address.

Vitaliy cleared his throat. “The lieutenant.”

“Oh, Preston. Yes, that would be his usual.” Everard slept like the dead the night and the whole morning after conflict; Vitaliy apparently was sick, and shook; D’Arcy… drank. “Though I will say his name is not Fitzwilliam.” He paused, as Romilly René smirked.

“But it is… D’Arcy?” she said, in the English way, drawing the a long.

“Oh!” Everard laughed despite himself. “The fashionable novel, you are referring to. I… had been meaning to pick up the second edition, when next in London.”

Which, now he thought of it, might well be never.

“Is he so drunk as to be incapable?” Vitaliy asked René, ignoring all this.

“Half of the way, I said,” René responded. “The matelot reads the English novels? Hmm.”

“The thing sold its entire first printing,” Everard said. “Of course I’ve read it.”

René nodded to herself, darkened eyebrows pushed high. “Very black eyes and now this, et alors.”

Twenty-Two