“Dislike you? Of course not,” Andrew said, “but—” and he stopped, literally speechless. “It hardly seems fair for you to tempt me like this.”
“Have you been fair to any of us?” she exclaimed. “Is it fair for you to insist on remaining in such a state when we all have to share it, like it or not? You are — you have been for a long time — in an appalling state of sexual need. Do you think I don’t know it? Do you think Callista doesn’t know it?”
He felt stung, invaded. “What business is that of yours?”
She flung her head back and said, “You know perfectly well why it is my affair. Yet Callista said you refused…”
Damn it, it had been an outrageous suggestion, but Callista at least, had had the decency to be a little diffident about it! And Ellemir was so like Callista that he could hardly help reacting to her very presence. He set his mouth and said tersely, “I can control it. I’m not an animal.”
“What are you? A cabbage plant? Control it? Maybe I wasn’t suggesting that otherwise you might go out and rape the first woman you see. But that doesn’t mean the need isn’t there. So in essence you are lying to us with everything you do, everything you are.”
“God almighty!” he exploded. “Is there no privacy here?”
“Of course. Have you noticed? My father hasn’t been asking any questions that would make any of us feel awkward. It really isn’t his business, you see. He won’t pry. None of us will ever know whether he knows anything about this at all. But the four of us — it’s different, Andrew. Can’t you be honest with us, at least?”
“What am I supposed to do then? Torment her for what she can’t give me?” He remembered the night when he had done just that. “I can’t do that again!”
“Of course not. But can’t you see that’s part of what’s hurting Callista? She was terribly aware of your need, so that at last she risked… what finally did happen, because she knew your need, and that you couldn’t accept anything else. Are you going to go on like that, adding to her guilt… and ours?”
Sleeplessness, worry and fatigue, and the strong cordial on an empty stomach, had hit Andrew hard, blurring his perceptions till the outrageous things Ellemir was saying almost made sense. If he had done what Callista asked, it would never have come to this…
It wasn’t fair. So like Callista and so terribly unlike… you could strike sparks off this one! “I am Damon’s friend. How could I do that to him?”
“Damon is your friend,” she retorted, real anger in her voice. “Do you think he enjoys your suffering? Or are you arrogant enough to think” — her voice shook — “that you could make me care less for Damon because I do for you what any decent woman would want to do, seeing a friend in such a state?”
Andrew met her eyes, matching her anger. “Since we’re being so overwhelmingly honest, did it occur to you that it isn’t you I want?” Even now it was only because she was there, so like Callista as she should have been.
Her anger was suddenly gone. “Dear brother” — bredu was the word she used — “I know it is Callista you love. But it was I in your dream.”
“A physical reflex,” he said brutally.
“Well, that’s real too. And it would mean, at least, that you need no longer torment Callista for what she cannot give you.” She reached to refill his glass. He stopped her.
“No more. I’m already half drunk. Damn it, does it matter whether I torment her that way, or by going off and falling into bed with someone else?”
“I don’t understand.” He felt that Ellemir’s confusion was genuine. “Do you mean that a woman of your people, if she could not for some reason share her husband’s bed, would be angry if he found… comfort elsewhere? How strange and how cruel!”
“I guess most women think that if they… if they have to asbtain for some reason, it’s only fair for the man to share the… the abstention.” He fumbled. “Look, if Callista’s unhappy too, and I go off to get myself laid — oh, hell, I don’t know the polite words — isn’t it pretty rotten of me to act as if her unhappiness doesn’t matter, as long as my own needs are met?”
Ellemir laid a gentle hand on his arm. “That does you credit, Andrew. But I find it hard to imagine that a woman who loved a man wouldn’t be glad to know he was satisfied somehow.”
“But wouldn’t she feel as if I didn’t love her enough to wait for her?”
“Do you think you would love Callista less if you were to lie with me?”
He returned her gaze steadily. “Nothing in this world could make me love Callista less. Nothing.”
She shrugged slightly. “So how could she be hurt? And think about this, Andrew. Suppose that someone other than yourself could help Callista break the bonds she did not seek and cannot break. Would you be angry with her, or love her less?”
Touched on the raw, Andrew remembered the moment when it seemed that Damon had come between them, his almost frantic jealousy. “Do you expect me to believe a man wouldn’t mind that, here?”
“You told me only now that nothing could make you love her less. Would you forbid her, then?”
“Forbid her? No,” Andrew said, “but I might wonder how deep her love went.”
Ellemir’s voice was suddenly shaking. “Are you Terrans like the Dry-Towners, then, who keep their women behind walls and in chains so that no other man will touch them? Is she a toy you want to lock in a box so that no one else can play with it? What is marriage to you, then?”
“I don’t know,” Andrew said drearily, his anger collapsing. “I’ve never been married before. I’m not trying to quarrel with you, Elli.” He fumbled with the pet name. “I… just… well, we were talking, before, about things being strange to me, and this is one of them. To believe Callista wouldn’t be hurt…”
“If you had abandoned her, or if you had forced her to consent, unwilling — as with Dom Ruyven of Castamir, who forced Lady Crystal to harbor his barragana wife and to foster all the bastards the woman bore — then, yes, she might have cause to grieve. But can you believe it is cruelty, that you do her will?” She met his eyes, reached out, gently, and took his hand between her own. She said, “If you are suffering, Andrew, it hurts all of us. Callista too. And… and me, Andrew.”
His barriers were down. The touch, the meeting of their eyes, made him feel wholly exposed to her. No wonder she had no hesitation in simply walking around without her shift, he realized. This was the real nakedness.
He had reached that particular stage of drunkenness where preconceptions blur and people do outrageous things and believe them commonplace. He could see Ellemir, now as herself, now as Callista, now as a visible sign of a contact he was only beginning to understand, the fourway link between them. She bent and laid her mouth against his. It went through his body like a jolt of electricity. All his aching frustration was behind the strength with which he pulled her into his arms.
Is this happening, or am I drunk, and dreaming about it again? Thought blurred. He was aware of Ellemir’s body in his arms, slender, naked, confident, with that curious matter-of-fact acceptance. In a moment’s completely sober insight, he knew that this was her way of cutting off awareness of Damon too. It was not only his need, but hers. He was glad of that.
He was naked, with no memory of shedding his clothes. She was warm, pliant in his arms. Yes, she has been here before, for a moment, the four of us, blended, just before catastrophe struck,… At the back of her mind he sensed a warm, welcoming amusement: No, you are not strange to me.
Through growing excitement came a sad strange thought: It should have been Callista, Ellemir felt so different in his arms, so solid somehow, without any of the shy fragility which so excited him in Callista. Then he felt her touch, rousing him, blotting out thought. He felt memory blurring and wondered for a moment if this were her doing, so that for now the kindly haze obscured everything. He was only a feeling, reacting body, driven by long need and deprivation, aware only of an accepting, responding body in his arms, of excitement and tenderness matching his own, seeking the deliverance so long denied. When it came it was so intense that he thought he would lose consciousness.