The Administration Series (81 page)

Considered in that light, Toreth really didn't deserve Keir — not that merit played much part in such matters. More frustratingly, he realised that choosing Toreth as his personal liaison had irretrievably ruined whatever small chance might have existed of engaging Keir's interest. Yet, without that choice, Keir would never have contacted him.

One of life's supremely annoying paradoxes.

Eventually, after they had gone through dessert, coffee and quite revolting authentic Eastern liqueurs, Carnac looked at his watch. "I should go. I have another scintillating day at I&I ahead of me tomorrow." Then he waited, making the silence an invitation. Just in case he was, for once, wrong.

He wasn't, of course. Keir smiled, shook his head. "Thanks for the offer, but no."

"Oh?"

"I'd hate to spoil old memories."

Carnac understood at once, but he made the comment for form's sake. "As I recall,
you
terminated the proceedings back then, in short order."

Keir rose, folding his damp napkin neatly before setting it down. "Precisely."

They shared a car as far as Carnac's hotel and he permitted himself to keep hoping for the length of the journey that Keir might change his mind. Which, naturally, he didn't.

As he prepared for bed, Carnac gave their conversation some serious consideration. Perhaps it would be worth investing some time in refreshing his understanding of indices of attractiveness and drawing up a profile for a partner. After all, if an individual as damaged as Toreth could find his regular fuck, there had to be a chance for himself. Not, of course, that they were so similar that the comparison meant a great deal.

In the end, he decided that it had been an interesting fantasy, for an evening, but he didn't think he'd pursue it. The likelihood of the search yielding a candidate who was both suitable and available was far too small to justify the expenditure of effort. Barring an event of miraculous improbability, he would have to continue to content himself with his personal liaisons.

Still, when the investigation was over, perhaps he would contact Warrick again and ask if it would be possible to try out the sim. No ulterior motives were required for that. Or perhaps he could see if Toreth could arrange it. That might make an informative test of his progress.

All in all, he'd had an enjoyable evening.

The next day, Warrick sat on the virtual beach, skipping virtual stones across the calm sea, and trying to enjoy the heat of the virtual sun. He wasn't, much. This was the first personal sim time he'd taken on his own for a while, and he knew what he was doing — hiding. Taking some time to think, in his safe, beautiful sim that had been a refuge from the real world for a long time.

He'd chosen the beach because he liked it, and because Toreth didn't. Or didn't now. At first he'd claimed to love it, but then Warrick had tried to demo underwater breathing to him. Toreth had tried it once, failed miserably, and then announced that it wasn't his sort of thing, and that he wasn't doing it again. End of discussion. After that, he'd always preferred one of the other rooms.

Warrick had wondered about it, but he hadn't asked. There was no point. There was a particular kind of conversational shutdown, signalling that any further probing would provoke trouble. Like the time when, quite without expecting any problems, he'd asked about Toreth's family. Missing the signs, he'd pressed too hard; he hadn't seen Toreth for a week after that. A week Toreth had no doubt spent working his way through enough strangers that he could eventually forget what had happened and come back.

Dilly had asked how he could tolerate it, and sometimes he wondered the same thing. Ultimately, the reason was that the strangers didn't matter; he'd grown used to ignoring them. Not that it wasn't . . . unpleasant, now and then, and he wasn't going to lie to himself about that. It was a balance between living with Toreth's infidelity and not trying to fool himself that he didn't care at all.

Inevitable dissatisfaction outweighed by the rewards of pleasure and affection.

The reason he was here, sulking in the sim as Dilly would say, was because of Carnac. He'd met Toreth's casual partners before — on occasion, they were hard to avoid. Sometimes Toreth lied about them, sometimes he didn't bother, and sometimes he went out of his way to make damn sure Warrick knew about them. That was usually another sign that Warrick had, by Toreth's standards, done something wrong. Then there would be an argument which would at some point transmute seamlessly into sex, and then everything would be all right once more. Or at least back to normal.

The casual partners, though, however deliberately flaunted, didn't usually want to sit down to dinner and
discuss
the situation. That was partly his own fault for not thinking things through. He'd felt curious to see Carnac again, to find out what he was doing and if he had changed. He should have known Carnac would expect him to demonstrate an interesting opinion on Toreth.

Also on I&I, which had led to the stupid slip-up of mentioning Marian. Dangerous, however oblique it had been. Thank God Carnac hadn't pursued that mistake.

Carnac was, annoyingly, right about I&I. It would make things intolerable to think too often about how Toreth knew what he did about pain and how to use it. Seeing the recording of Marian's interrogation had been bad enough. Watching her die had been worse, not only because of her death but also because of Toreth's reaction to it. While he himself had been appalled by what he'd helped to do, Toreth hadn't cared. It had meant nothing to him, except that he was out of trouble and safe from Psychoprogramming.

Another point to Carnac.

When Toreth had come back up to his office . . . well, it hadn't been Warrick's most shining performance of composure under stress. He didn't kill people every day, though, or even help arrange for them to die. Seeing it in the sim hadn't prepared him for it.

He'd wanted nothing more than to leave, to hear it was over and done with and to get away from I&I forever. Toreth had stopped him, physically stopped him, and kept him in the office long enough to complete the charade they had devised.

Toreth had been angry. Maybe, in retrospect, also frightened by the cost of it going wrong.

'Do you
want
to fuck everything up? Do you want to end up down on level C, where she was, spilling everything for one of the others? You'll stay in here long enough to make it look good, whatever it takes. I'm not going to risk ending up dead as well, just because you're too fucking gutless to stick it out. It was your fucking idea — live with it.'

And, God help him, even then, even right
then
, he'd wanted Toreth. It hadn't hurt — or hadn't helped — that Toreth had been holding him against the wall while he delivered his little speech. The controlled anger in his voice, his hands on him . . . it had combined irresistibly with the adrenaline generated by their desperate plan. Being brutally honest — which he might as well be since he was here inside his own mind with no one else to hear him — it had gone straight to his cock, and Toreth had realised that straight away, too.

He'd managed to resist Toreth for all of twenty seconds. Maybe even thirty. Mm. Something to be proud of there. Then he'd let Toreth fuck him, against the desk, by the screen where he'd watched Marian die, and he'd enjoyed every moment of it. The best sex they'd had, up until then — close and hot and urgent. They'd come together, perfectly together, and he'd drawn blood biting his lip to keep quiet.

Afterwards, he'd managed to get himself back under control, and the sex had, strangely, helped that. Endorphins, probably. He'd still hesitated on his way out, before he'd opened the door. Toreth had put his hands on his shoulders from behind, and he'd braced himself for another blast of contempt.

Instead it had been calm instructions and a reassurance that everything was going to be fine. Then, finally, he'd said, 'I'll be in touch.'

Even while he was still sickened by what had happened, Warrick hadn't thought for a moment that it might be the end of things between them. They were bound together by what they'd done for each other.

Or was it really just the sex?

He smiled wryly. It might not be that entirely but, God, it would almost be enough on its own to stop him thinking about the other things. Incredible then, and even better since. He rubbed his wrists, thinking about last Saturday morning at his flat. Would it always be that good? Could it possibly be?

He lay back in the warm sand, tempted to stop trying to think about the difficult, unpleasant things and instead to concentrate on the rewards of pleasure. He tried to imagine them both in some vague number of years, still doing it, still playing the game. To his surprise, he could, easily. In fact, he couldn't imagine ever stopping wanting it. He would never, he knew, find anyone else who could do that to him.

Then there were the other encounters, rarer and so more individually memorable. Sunday morning sex, when they had plenty of time and Toreth might briefly let his defences down. Not often, or for long, but the fact that it happened at all showed that Carnac and Marian were wrong — Toreth was more than his job at I&I and his psych file. Warrick didn't need to read psychology textbooks to know that. Slow, passionate, after-breakfast sex provided all the evidence required.

There were additional things he wouldn't mind trying, too. Fucking Toreth, for one. He'd done it here in the sim, during SMS runs, which, in fairness, you could say didn't count since Toreth was in sensory deprivation at the time. Toreth hadn't complained about it afterwards, though.

In the real world it would probably be different, something else he'd learned from Toreth. Sometimes, when Warrick was pulling on the chains, desperately close to coming, he would get a sudden flash of their positions reversed: Toreth bound, while
he
fucked him. Just the thought of it, of being inside him, of how it would feel, was almost enough to make him resolve to go round to Toreth's flat tonight and ask him. I want you. Let me, please. A little give and take isn't an unreasonable request, is it?

He wouldn't go, though, even though normally he had no problem asking for what he wanted. It was just that he'd never been able to think of a way of wording it that didn't leave him with the fear that Toreth might refuse without thinking about it. Once he had said no, he wouldn't let himself change his mind.

In truth, Warrick had no concrete reason even to suspect that Toreth would turn him down. Toreth's hedonism was generally all-encompassing and enthusiastically experimental. However, this was something that required trust and a certain relinquishing of control and he hadn't needed Carnac to tell him that Toreth's trust was a far rarer commodity than his sexual attention. So he'd decided to wait until, eventually, Toreth might suggest it himself.

It was all the more irksome because he knew that Toreth sometimes took it from his one-night, no-consequence partners. Them and not him — perhaps because the limited surrender the act required was easier with someone Toreth would never see again.

Warrick smiled wryly. An evening with Carnac had made him excessively analytical.

What Toreth did with his casual partners wasn't something Warrick had ever wanted to know about in detail, but he'd caught comments, let slip accidentally or deliberately. Like this time, when it had been the fact that Carnac had sucked him off. In Toreth's office, possibly. Despite himself, Warrick played with the image. Easy to create the scene. He knew how Toreth would sound, how he would move, how he would respond. What he liked. Except, presumably, that he hadn't been saying Warrick's name when he came. Or had he? He should have asked Carnac.

No, he shouldn't have. What he should do was stop thinking about it, get out of the sim and get back to work. Why was he letting this get to him so much?

It was Carnac. Or, more accurately, what Carnac had told him.

'You, on the other hand, are in love with him.'

He'd also said Toreth loved him in return. Of course, he knew Carnac well enough not to believe every word he said, especially when he was fishing for a reaction. And they
were
just words. Putting a label on whatever feelings either of them might have didn't change them, or make them any more significant. There had been plenty of labels and 'I love you's with Lissa, and that hadn't turned out to be the lasting romance of the century.

It wasn't just sex between them any more (at least not on his part), and he'd known that for a while. He'd wanted it, in fact. That knowledge didn't tell him what it was, though. Dilly had asked him about it at New Year. A direct 'do you love him?' which he'd weaselled out of answering. She'd let him get away with it, too, which implied she didn't want to hear the answer. Maybe she thought she knew.

He wondered for a moment what Sara thought. Then he decided that if he was reduced to taking a poll on the question, then that in itself probably gave him the answer. If he wasn't sure, he couldn't be, could he? He stuck by his non-answer to Dilly: it would be an incredibly stupid thing to do.