Page 19 of Anchored

“Will he . . .?” Daniel swallowed hard, and Jane’s fingers tightened around his.

“Hurt you back?”

He nodded; Jane sighed.

“Come on, darling. Come make yourself useful.” She tugged him into the kitchen, and even though she hadn’t answered him, he went without resistance—with relief, even, eager for a distraction. When she sat him at the kitchen table and handed him a bag of apples and a peeler, his hands set to the monotonous work. He fought to untether his mind so that it might follow.

He was only halfway through the first apple when Jane, measuring and stirring at the counter behind him, asked, “You ever been in love, Daniel?”

“Yeah,” Daniel answered, voice carefully flat lest he unleash something he couldn’t contain. His hands finished with the first apple, picked up the next one. “Once.”

Jane handed him a paring knife and a plate and said, “Core them. What happened?”

Daniel shrugged. “We got caught.” He finished peeling the second apple, picked up the knife, and cored and sliced it in silence. But he could feel Jane’s eyes boring into the back of his head, seeking more, and couldn’t bring himself to ignore her. “NewWorld Media has a pretty strict policy about sexual relations. You can be ordered to breed, or apply for permission to breed, and if both parties are healthy, they’ll probably say yes. But anything else? Forget it.” He almost sliced open the tip of his finger, put down the knife, went back to peeling instead. “Spreads the four Ds, they say: distraction, dissension, disappointment, and disease.”

Behind him, Jane snorted.

“His name was Victor. We lived together in the dorm on the West Side, same bunkroom. It was seven years back; I was still a field reporter. He was a sound tech. We used to sneak off into the bathroom, fool around. You only get three, maybe four minutes before the supervisors start getting suspicious, and even if you’re quick, you’ve got to be careful; there are always people who will rat you out to get ahead, you know?”

Daniel paused, and Jane hummed an affirmation into the silence. There was something distant about the sound, something personal, and he felt certain that if he turned around and looked, he’d see bitterness, maybe even pain on her face. Instead he plucked another apple from the pile.

“We’d been going maybe eight, ten months, frantic handjobs in a toilet stall, that sort of thing. We knew some people were jealous of me. I don’t know if someone reported us or if we just got careless, but it’s not as if that mattered in the end.”

Beside him, the pile of peeled apples had grown. His fingers were still working, working of their own accord. Jane’s hand came to rest on his shoulder, squeezing gently. “What happened?”

Daniel grabbed another apple. He couldn’t believe he was telling her this, hadn’t told anyone but his mother. It wasn’t safe to talk about it at InfoGlobe, and it hurt just to think about, even still. Maybe it really was true that slaves didn’t feel like freemen did, but from where Daniel was sitting, that hardly seemed to matter now.

“Public beating. Whole dorm was there. Fifty strikes apiece, side by side. Next day they sent me off to cover some shit story, couple of hikers lost up in the Rockies. Twelve hours a day doing stand-ups in the snow, pretending like I wasn’t in too much pain to think straight. They found the bodies on day three. I flew home so cold I was still shaking when the plane landed. Victor was gone. Never saw him again.” He picked up the knife in a white-knuckled grip and mutilated the apple he’d just peeled. “Last memory I have of him is him screaming his throat raw as they beat him, begging them to stop hurting me. Me.”

Another mutilated apple. Jane stilled his wrist with one hand, divested him of the knife with the other. Her eyes were soft, damp with understanding. He didn’t have the stomach for her compassion, not with this, so he dropped his gaze back to his sticky hands. “Anyway, I heard a couple years back that he’s been working in the LA office for a while now.”

Jane squeezed his wrist again, and he could see in her face that none of this was surprising or new to her. He wondered who she’d left behind, if she had children, if she knew her parents.

“I’m sorry,” she said, and for a moment it looked as if she’d offer something more—some kindness or sympathy—so it came as a surprise when she said instead, “But at least you enjoy bedding men. Imagine how much harder this would be if you didn’t.”

Daniel blinked at her, realized his mouth was open and closed it. Opened it again when he couldn’t hold back the clarification: “But I don’t. Not like . . . What the master wants?” He shook his head, closed his eyes against sense memory over two decades old. “It’s terrible. Bled me worse than a strapping.”

Jane scowled—some strange mix of sympathy and reprobation. “Do you know what the master wants? Did you ask? Did he tell you? Maybe he’ll want something you like.”

Huh. Yeah, maybe. He doubted it, though, considering how much money had changed hands for him. Not to mention that being attracted to men was not at all the same thing as being attracted to one specific man. Still, cold comfort, he supposed, was better than no comfort at all. Besides, this couldn’t be easy for Jane or Dave; when the master was unhappy, so was everybody else, and that was nobody’s fault but his.

“Look, darling,” Jane said, her expression softening but still nowhere near soft. “The master may not be pushing you now, but if you keep giving him the cold shoulder, he’s gonna up and bust one day. And that man has a temper; you don’t want to see it pointed at you.”

And just what, exactly, did that mean? “But I thought . . . I mean, has he—?”

“No, course not. Master’s never laid a hand on either of us the whole five years we’ve been here. But then”—she gave Daniel another hard, appraising look—“he didn’t buy us for laying on hands, now did he.”

Daniel winced. He’d taken Jane for softer, not capable of such brutal honesty, yet she’d ambushed him twice in as many minutes. She was trying to help, he knew, but it didn’t make him feel any better. Nor did it solve his problem. He still couldn’t bring himself to offer up freely what the master wanted, and apparently the master couldn’t bring himself to take it. Or maybe he didn’t want to take it; maybe he wanted to be wanted in return. But that was never going to happen. Where, then, did that leave them?

“Anyway,” she said, full once again of the sunny cheer with which Daniel had come to associate her, “that’s just my advice. You can take it or leave it, of course.” She turned back to the counter, and silverware clinked against a plate. “You should, however, take this.”

Before he could ask what “this” was, she’d traded a fresh-baked brownie for his half-sliced apples, ruffled his hair, and began to core the apples herself.

They sat in silent companionship for some time, Jane cooking a variety of the master’s favorite foods for dinner (“He’s an easy one to placate; you just gotta know which buttons to push”), Daniel reading the paper and helping her when she asked.

Dave came home around 5:30, too sweaty and grimy for the hug he wanted. Jane sent him straight to the shower and, with a put-out sigh, cleaned up the muddy trail he’d left behind.

The master joined them at six, just as Jane was putting plates to the table. He smiled at everyone, said, “Smells great!” and waved Daniel to the chair beside him.