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trying, without having to use words, to tell him so. Michael Emery loved him back—it was clear from his tenderness with the young man as well as the passion with which he cried out his name as he came. But Clarke—Emery—it was muddling in Pete’s mind—would not act on his feelings. Some of it was because he was a teacher.
     
    Most of it, Pete knew, was because of the father.
     
    Mr. Underwood was hardly present in the house, but when he was, it wasn’t good. Pete followed him for a while and soon learned all he needed to know. Carl Underwood was a sick man. He was vicious to the kitchen staff, and one visit to what he’d done to the field slaves had been enough for Pete. Carl beat his son, but carefully, leaving no marks and only the most discreet of bruises. Pete didn’t get to see this part. Carl would take his son into his room at night or during the day into the tutor’s room if the tutor was gone, but Pete could not follow there. But when Peter Underwood came out, he looked miserable and spent, and when he undressed in his room, he was bruised and sore. Pete got the sense that the abuse had been less since the tutor had come, but the beatings still happened. It hurt Pete to watch, even though he couldn’t see the act, but it seemed to hurt him more than it hurt Peter Underwood to bear both the blows and the words. The young man simply endured it all.
     
    There was no mother, and no one ever spoke of her. Pete had the sense that she had run away. He couldn’t blame her.
     
    The tutor, Pete learned, had been hired to “make a man” of the boy, but from the gossip of the servants it was clear this was some outside pressure, and Pete suspected it was the dictate of an aunt who sometimes visited and gave Carl strict scoldings. After she left, the beatings he gave his son were usually the worst.
     
    Then one day the tutor found out about the beatings.
     
    The scenes from the past usually flew by, churning like strange colors across water, but when the eddies slowed, Pete paid close attention. In this image, tutor and student were working in the library. Emery put his hand on young Peter’s back to soothe him as he struggled with some problem laid before him, and Peter cried out. The dialog was hushed from where Pete watched, and time started shifting again, rushing and slowing in waves, but the end result was that Emery suspected the truth, Peter tried to hide it, and somehow this ended with Emery ordering Peter to undo his shirt and his braces and show him his back. Emery had cried out at the sight of the bruises there.
     
    Peter had taken hold of his tutor’s hand and placed it squarely in the center of his own naked chest. There was a brief pause, the weight of the moment hanging in the air. And then time advanced, and soon Pete watched the pair of them writhing on the rug, mouths locked.
     
    Young Peter was the aggressor. It began in that library, but took days to play out: Emery still clung to his nobility, but Peter wore him down. It wasn’t long before Emery was locking the door and backing against it, shuddering in forbidden pleasure as Peter claimed a suckle at his tutor’s cock as a reward for lessons well-completed. The walks down to the lake turned into trysts in the grass. And Pete liked to watch. As a ghost, he appreciated the sex, but his real pleasure came in watching their play with one another. Yes, it ended with Peter naked and kneeling on all fours as Emery thrust into him from behind, but it began with the young siren leading him there, kissing him and whispering how he wanted his teacher to touch him, how much he liked the taste of his cock, of how good it felt when he filled him.
     
    Pete watched it all. He could not leave with Emery on the days he left Haven, but he knew enough from watching the man in his bedroom, from the letters he wrote and the diary he kept, that Peter Underwood had become his world. He was arranging college for the young man, or at least an escape from