“Mr. Farrell,” she said. “Could you tell our listeners, please, just what it has cost you to play like that? What you have chosen to give up?”
“Caramel baked beans,” he said, and went on up the stairs, turning at the top, though he had planned not to do that. They were not looking after him, but at each other, and Sia was raising her brown fortuneteller’s face to Ben’s scarred one, as her quicksilver hair came down. From where Farrell stood, her belly’s camber appeared as elegant and powerful as the arc of his lute. What can it be like for them? He caught himself trying for the first time to imagine the shifting weight of breasts as softly wrinkled as sand dunes, wondering what sort of teasing obscenities that contrary voice could possibly permit itself. These deeds must not be thought after these ways—so, it will make us mad. He grinned, shivered, and went to bed.
That night he felt them making love. Their bedroom was at the other end of the house; the only suggestive sound he ever heard from there was Briseis whining vainly to be let in. This was an understanding intensely beyond cries or creaking springs, an awareness so strong that he sat up, sweating in the dark, smelling her pleasure, feeling Ben’s laughter on his skin as if he were caught up in bed with the two of them. He tried to sleep again, but the wicked sharing invaded him from all quarters, tumbling him in his own bed like a pebble in a flash flood. Shamed and terrified, he bit his mouth and clenched around himself, but the cry clawed free of him at the last, as his body shook loose from his will, resonating helplessly to the alien joy that used him in order to savor itself that much more and had already forgotten him as it let him go.