But, as had been the case every time I’d gone down this trail over the last couple of days, there was the glaringly obvious fact that I already had a bonded dimari.
“Sir?”
My head snapped around at Kade’s concerned voice. “Hm? What’s up?”
“You’ve been staring at the wall for ten minutes,” Kade said. “Are you all right?”
I sighed. “Yeah, I just… Can I ask you a question?” I said, knowing it would sound odd to Kade. Masters did not ask their dimari’s permission to ask them questions. “It’s a… I need information,” I stuttered, trying to explain. “But I don’t want to freak you out, because there are some very obvious, and potentially some very problematic implications to the question. So please don’t jump to any conclusions before we talk this through, okay?”
I waited a moment while Kade thought about that. “Okay,” he agreed eventually.
“So I was wondering… On other planets, where they routinely buy dimari, would one master ever own more than one dimari?”
Kade tilted his head, the way he sometimes did when he was thinking about something particularly complex. “Yes, they do,” he said, after a moment. “Sometimes one master might have three or four of them.” He paused again, then said, “I’m not quite following how this might have problematic implications.”
Really? I was surprised by that, because Kade was usually very quick to pick up on any ideas I had, with only minimal prompting.
“Is it not difficult for the master to make sure all of them get enough attention?”
“I don’t know,” Kade said honestly. “I’ve never had any experience with it. Our trainers told us it might be a possibility, to avoid problems if dimari expected to be the only one in a household. But I don’t know anything else about how it works.”
“Do you think dimari would ever get jealous of each other?”
Kade looked genuinely perplexed. “Why would we be jealous?”
“Because someone else was getting more attention. Or because the master liked them better.”
“We exist to serve our masters,” Kade reminded me – a refrain I’d heard dozens of times from him over the past year.“The master would have the absolute right to distribute praise or rewards as they saw fit.”
“But we’ve seen over the past year that sometimes masters make poor decisions,” I pressed. “Or they don’t understand what effect they’re having on their dimari.”
Kade frowned at me. “I don’t mean to be rude, sir, but I don’t understand what point you’re trying to make.”
Okay, so the subtle route clearly wasn’t getting me anywhere at the moment. “I was trying to think how things might work out if… Well, if I adopted Jai,” I explained, watching Kade carefully to see how he reacted. I’d been trying to get his opinion on the idea before coming straight out and saying it. “But that’s not just my decision. I don’t want to do anything that’s going to make you unhappy. And I don’t want to create conflict between you two.”
This was one of those questions that Kade would likely answer with a generic agreement – not because he actually agreed, but because he knew he was supposed to. But at the same time, I’d learned to pay attention to the nuances of his response, to see whether he was subtly trying to express his disapproval, at the same time as verbally agreeing to something.
I watched as Kade thought about it, and an expression settled on his face that I found myself entirely unable to read. His eyes narrowed a little, the corners of his mouth tightened, but it was impossible to tell whether he was annoyed or smiling… until he spoke. “I think we’d be well suited to each other,” he said, just a touch hesitantly. “We’re both combat specialists, so we’d be able to fit in with your work well. Particularly since you’re planning to go back into active service. I’m not sure how we’d accommodate his training as an erotic companion. But some masters enjoy watching two dimari pleasure each other. Perhaps Jai would find that appealing.” It was clear from his tone that Jai wasn’t the only one who would find it appealing.
“You really like this idea, don’t you?” I asked, rather stunned by the realisation.
Kade smiled coyly. “A dimari does not consider what he does or doesn’t like. I am here to serve your wishes.”
That was a clear yes. But even so, I wasn’t convinced he’d considered all the angles. “It would mean I’d be having sex with someone else. It would mean that you wouldn’t be able to sleep in my room with me every night. You’d have to alternate nights with him. And if we stayed at the base, we couldn’t fit three people into one room. And there would be more complexity on missions. If I just yell an instruction in the middle of a shit-show, you’d have to figure out between you which one was going to get the job done.”
Kade nodded eagerly. “That part would need to be prefaced with some clear orders to that effect – that so long as one of us completes the task, we can both consider ourselves to have obeyed you. And sleeping in another bed is…” His face fell a little. “…a necessary detail of the arrangement.” That was the only hint I’d gotten that he had any objections to the plan. But even so, it wasn’t astrongobjection.
“And what about me having sex with someone else?”
Kade grinned. “I do not own you, sir. You own me. I have no right to decide who you have sex with.” Translation: He thought the question was ridiculous.
But now that I had his approval, there was something else I wanted to know. Why the heck was he so damn keen on the idea? But if I asked that question too bluntly, he would just default to some platitude about wanting to please his master.
“Okay, there are a few more details to work out here,” I hedged, trying to work around the limitations of his communication. “What would you see as being the main advantages, specifically as they would affect you?”
Kade looked away, and for a moment, he seemed almost embarrassed. “When we’re in training, we’re always reminded not to form close friendships with any of the other dimari. It’s almost certain that we’re going to be sent to different planets, or at the very least, different cities on one planet. So it’s very unlikely that we’ll ever be able to see the dimari we trained with again.”
He didn’t say anything more, and it took me a moment to understand what he was implying. When I figured it out, my heart damn near broke. “You’re saying you’d like to have another dimari here as a… as a friend?”
