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God only knew why he’d thought to argue, anyway. If the master said he needed the time, not even Mr. Foster could fault him for it. Besides, he hurt to the point of distraction, would surely be useless at work. All he wanted to do was sleep.
Which apparently he did, because next he awoke, the sun was streaming bright through the blinds in the master’s bedroom, and the master and another man—no, a slave; he was black—were standing over him, talking softly.
He drew the blankets tighter around his shoulders and waited for someone to tell him how to react.
“This man’s a nurse practitioner,” the master said. “He’s going to look you over, okay?”
Daniel nodded, wondering why the master had even bothered to ask.
He had to strip again, even his underwear, so the NP could examine him. But the master held his hand, and Daniel clutched it without shame, those strong fingers squeezing out the worst of his fear.
The next minutes went by in a strangely dichotomous haze of pain and numbness, Daniel staring resolutely at the loose button on the NP’s shirt—he should fix that; the man’s owner would be upset if it fell off—doing as the NP asked and moving where the NP put him. The master kept a hold of his hand throughout, radiating concern, looking like he wanted to help but not knowing how. Daniel wished he had the words to explain just how much the man was helping already.
When the examination ended, the NP gave him a shot. “Antibiotics,” he said. “I’ll be back tomorrow,” he said. Whatever he said after that was lost to a metallic taste in the back of Daniel’s throat and the panicked realization, brief though it was in his last few conscious moments, that the NP had put him to sleep.
Not sleep, the master told him when Daniel woke again, half-surprised that he had at all. Just a painkiller. Daniel thought the drug might still be working, for he sat up with only minor complaints from his body. His trip to the bathroom, however, was torture, like shitting broken glass, or maybe a porcupine. His face was wet when it was over, his lip sore from where he’d bitten it. The master steered him back to bed with soft words and softer hands, laid him on his back, and brushed a kiss across his forehead.
“Do you trust me?” the master whispered.
“Yes,” Daniel said, surprising even himself. Words were cheap, after all, and the master had been so careless; maybe he was foolish to trust him now, but there was no changing how he felt.
“I want to make you forget your pain. Will you let me?”
“Yes,” he heard himself say again.
Another brush of the master’s lips against his forehead, his jaw, then his own lips, tentative and tender. Daniel opened his mouth just a little, felt the master’s mouth curl soft and sweet around his lower lip. There the master lingered, sharing skin and breath, and it was fine, okay, nothing like what those men had done to him the other day. Maybe too much, though, like what he’d shared with people he’d actually loved, or at least desired of his own accord, and his breathing sped up as his heart beat faster, nerves and nausea creeping in. But he held still as the master’s hands crept beneath the hem of Daniel’s shirt, shivered across his belly and flanks, then paused as if seeking—surely not?—Daniel’s permission.
Except, yes, that was exactly what the master wanted. “Tell me if you want me to stop,” he murmured against Daniel’s lips, and though his instinct was to lie here, to let the master do what he so clearly wanted, he decided to take the risk, to trust the man like he’d said he did.
He sucked in a breath and closed his eyes and prayed to whatever powers might give a shit about his life, and then said, “I’m sorry, Master. Please. Stop.”
The master’s lips and hands left his skin, and no retribution came, only a soft, “Okay.” A pause while the master settled beneath the covers, body close but not touching. While Daniel’s breathing returned to normal and his mind slowly wrapped around the idea that the master had not only asked for but actually respected his wishes. That what he’d wanted mattered. More, even, than what the master wanted.
He was still marveling at that when the master said, “So I’m starting to think Nathaniel Bishops is right.”
Daniel rolled his head to the side to meet the master’s steady gaze. “About what, Master?”
The master shrugged. “Everything, more or less.” He smiled gently, though his eyes looked troubled, and touched fingertips to Daniel’s forearm. “You’re a lousy slave, you know.”
Daniel’s pulse picked back up at that, but the master’s smile and touch both remained so gentle, he couldn’t have meant it in anger.
“I’m just saying, nobody’s found the gene yet. What if it’s like eye color instead of sex? Two brown-eyed parents can pop out a blue-eyed kid. One time out of four, in fact, if they’re both recessive carriers. Even if we assume only one out of every ten or twenty are recessive carriers, that’s still . . .” His face scrunched up, and Daniel waited in the silence, breath held and stomach twisting, to see where this would go. “Well, I’m bad at math, but it’s still some kids, sometimes, however rare, born without the slave gene, even if they come from two slave parents.”
Another silence. Except this time the master clearly wasn’t doing math in his head. He was staring right at Daniel, waiting for him to speak.
“I’m not doing a story on this, Daniel. I just . . .” The fingertips on Daniel’s arm brushed once, hesitantly, back and forth. “I don’t want to make any more mistakes, you feel me?”
Oh yes, he felt him, all right. He knew exactly how that fear felt—more, he was certain, than the master ever could. And yet . . . the man was opening up to him in a way that seemed unprecedented between master and slave. And he held so much power over Daniel’s life. If Daniel could convince him to use that power to make it better . . . “Are you saying you think I don’t have the gene, Master?”
The master shrugged, folded his arms behind his head and blinked up at the ceiling. “I guess I’m wondering if all those functional MRI results in support of the gene are because slaves really do inherently lack emotional response and empathy, or because the lives in which they were raised dampened those feelings by necessity, by nurture.”
“Or because we have no souls?” Daniel ventured. This was dangerous ground, all of it, but he’d spent his whole adult life facing down dangerous ground. Besides, he was pretty sure Carl Whitman wasn’t a church-on-Sunday kind of man, that he’d somehow climbed the ladder despite that.
But the master just shrugged. Said, finally, “I don’t know. Maybe there are no souls, not in anyone.” A pause, and then, “Maybe nobody’s been able to find the slave gene yet because it doesn’t actually exist.”
Daniel nearly left things there, but in this bubble of newfound trust, this sense—false though it might turn out to be—of real safety, he couldn’t help but risk one last step onto unsteady earth. “Yet you own slaves.”
The master nodded. “I do.” Another long pause, but still Daniel felt no fear of it. “Maybe I shouldn’t.” And again, a silence that invited Daniel to fill it.
