AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Hugo glanced at Lancelot and then back at her.
“Which one of us?” Lancelot asked.
Sylvia smiled, but didn’t answer his question directly. “After I graduated from college, Mrs. Rutherford invited me to spend a weekend with her and her husband in Columbia. He was stationed there for a short time. Mrs. Rutherford believed I had the capacity to understand love and passion in their full complexity, rather than the narrow view defined by contemporary society.”
The men shared a glance. Lancelot frowned. Hugo arched one brow as he leaned toward her. “What did you do on this weekend, to understand the full complexity?” He repeated her phrase carefully.
Sylvia let her smile widen. “My writing then was good, but more romantic than real. It was the poetry of a girl who didn’t know how deep and wide the human soul could be.” Sylvia took a moment, reminding herself not to get caught up in the imagery the words provoked. “She suggested that I learn about relationships in reverse, like Merlin.”
Lancelot blinked, though his shoulders were still tense. “Like…Merlin?”
“In some of the tales, Merlin lives backwards. Born at the wrong end of time.” Hugo glanced at Lancelot and smiled. “You should know that, chevalier mal fait.”
Sylvia smiled. “He is far from ill-made.”
“This is true,” Hugo murmured.
“Get back to the story,” Lancelot grumped.
Sylvia shook out her hair. “I’d always been younger than most of my classmates. As such, I didn’t really date much in school. In fact, I was a virgin when Mrs. Rutherford suggested the weekend.”
Lancelot tensed, his big shoulders seeming to swell under his shirt. A muscle in his jaw clenched and he leaned forward. “What did they do to you?”
There was a darkness in his tone that felt out of character with what she’d learned of him over the course of the past few hours. His demeanor didn’t feel dangerous—at least not to her—but there was a look in his eyes that told her he would be her champion if she needed one.
It was a romantic notion, one her brother Oscar would have rolled his eyes at. However, she preferred her expansive and encompassing rose-colored view of the world and love over his stark black-and-white vision that saw nonfamilial relationships as too subjective, too open to interpretation. Sylvia sometimes missed the bighearted, easy-to-love, and slow-to-anger man Oscar had been before Faith. But the past was the past, and she hoped he’d heal.
Oscar lived in a narrow world of absolutes, preferring the tap tap tap sound of his keyboard to any real conversation.
While Sylvia fell in love too fast—and too frequently for her brother’s liking—Oscar never fell at all. He’d sworn off love, which would have seemed overly dramatic and even silly if she hadn’t seen exactly how broken he’d been.
She’d actually placed a bet once that Oscar would end up with Harmony, the first AI sex robot. She hadn’t won…yet. But she figured it was only a matter of time.
“The Rutherfords didn’t do anything to me,” Sylvia said.
Hugo cleared his throat, drawing Lancelot and Sylvia’s attention to him. The sound was clearly meant as a warning for Lancelot—another clue to the puzzle of these two men.
“How did Mrs. Rutherford suggest you learn about relationships?” Hugo was more circumspect, able to ask questions without emotion coloring his tone, even though his eyes said something different.
“She and her husband took me to their sex club.”
“Bloody hell.” Lancelot half rose from his chair, reaching for his hip like there was some imaginary weapon there.
Hugo lunged across the table and placed his hand on Lancelot’s shoulder, pushing the man back down into his chair.
“You were a virgin,” Lancelot said, his voice quieter, though still deadly. “They had no business taking you to a place like that.”
Sylvia reached out to rest her hand on top of Lancelot’s. “I only attended as a spectator, Lancelot. No one touched me. And it was quite fascinating, eye-opening. When you’re young, even if you have parents who are open-minded, you think of love as a string—it goes from one point to the next. A date to a relationship, a relationship to sex, sex to marriage. What Alicia did was let me see things I’d never considered, not only in terms of sex, but the direct connection between people regardless of gender. Power and submission, trust and fear, and even the fine line between love and hate. I saw the binary, the contrast, and then I saw all the shadows that occupy the space between. I saw people change, flowing in and out of constructs I had assumed were fixed in our DNA.
“That night, I learned sexuality is fluid, that a person can crave control in one relationship, but submit in another. I saw things that could objectively be called cruel done with care and attention that made them acts of love. I left the club that night and wrote for the next twenty-four hours straight. Half the poems in my first novel were written right after that experience.”
“Were Ali—Mrs. Rutherford and her husband participants?” Hugo asked.
Sylvia nodded, as she recalled watching the couple that night. “Mrs. Rutherford had bound her husband’s hands together above his head. At first, I tried to look away. It had felt wrong to stare at my teacher’s naked husband.”
Lancelot’s shoulders were stiff and his mouth a flat line.
“What happened then?” Hugo asked.
