Read The Black Prince: Part II for Free Online

against the bookshelf, smoking his pipe.
    “A man,” he said, rather meditatively, “who smokes, smokes after he’s enjoyed himself with a woman.” He released a smoke ring into the air. “If he doesn’t, but he says he has, then he’s a liar.”
    Isla was still on the floor, using Tristan’s rolled up surcoat as a pillow. She’d rearranged herself, but she was content to rest. To watch him, and to listen to him. The mood had changed, becoming calmer and warmer. They were just enjoying each other’s company now, the tension of the night behind them. They were, Isla had to remind herself, still getting used to each other. There was so much that both of them didn’t know. Because the truth was, while she felt like she’d known him forever, their love was still new.
    “It’s funny, to me, that you still smoke.”
    His smile was a flash of teeth, there and gone. “Old habits die hard.”
    “Could a woman,” she asked, “ever be that bad?”
    “Indeed.” The bowl of his pipe glowed red. “Some just lie there, like dead frogs.”
    Isla giggled.
    “Or when she takes a man’s cock in her mouth, but it’s clear that she finds the act—and the cock—repulsive. She doesn’t see the act as the expression of power it is but, rather, as something degrading. Or, possibly worse, she gives one every reason to believe that she’s a consummate lover and then turns out to be both limp-lipped and dead-eyed.”
    “Oh, Gods.”
    “Arousal starts with the mind. A fact which most women seem not to realize.”
    “I find it difficult to believe,” Isla said seriously, “that any woman could suffer from lack of interest when it came to you.”
    “Which makes me a supremely lucky man.”
    Isla wanted to ask what Maeve had been like, but didn’t.
    Tristan answered her question, regardless. “Terrible.”
    She couldn’t help but smile. “Really?”
    “A man wants a woman to, if not tell him what she enjoys, then at least show him. But taking Maeve felt like forcing myself myself on a fellow corpse. Only one,” he added, a trace of humor to his tone, “a good deal less animated. For all her studies in seduction, she showed about as much interest in the act as I believe you’d show, dearheart, at the suggestion of taking up permanent residence with Rowena.”
    “I don’t know what to do about her,” Isla said.
    “Well.” Tristan showed a flicker of what could best be termed as—enthusiasm. The only type of enthusiasm he had for Rowena. “You know my proposed solution.”
    “You can’t eat her,” Isla replied.
    For awhile, they shared a companionable silence. Isla couldn’t have explained the whirlwind of conflicting emotions she’d felt that night, even to herself. She’d been furious at Tristan and terrified of losing him all at once. Terrified of not being enough for him; furious at him for not feeling what she felt. For not being able to give her children. When did one emotion begin and the other end? She thought, in the end, that she was just terrified. Of more war. Of more loss. Of a future she couldn’t even begin to envision.
    Tristan patted the floor next to him. “Sit with me.”
    She sat up, and crawled over. She laid her head on his chest, and felt the weight of his arm encircling her. Making her feel safe.
    “Next time,” Tristan said, his tone musing, “I should make you suck it from my cock.”
    “Next time?”
    He looked down at her. “Are you telling me you don’t want to do that again?”
    She did, of course. Although she was a little sickened at herself for admitting so. She was familiar with her own rhetoric: that what two consenting individuals did amongst themselves for pleasure was no one’s business but their own. And that, contrary to the church’s teachings, there was no list of acceptable practices. But believing a principle in the abstract, and applying it to one’s own life, were two different things. Isla worried sometimes that she was losing sight of herself.
    Not