“There’s room for you here.”
He hesitated. Did this make any sense, tantalizing himself this way? Then he laughed, climbing in beside them. The bed was an enormous one that would have held half a dozen without crowding. Callista said softly, “I wanted to prove something to you, my love,” and gently pushed Ellemir into his arms.
He felt furious embarrassment that seemed to burn through his whole body, dousing his passion like ice water. He had never felt so naked, so exposed, in his life.
Oh hell, he felt. He was behaving like a fool. Wasn’t this the next logical step anyway? But logic had no part in his feelings.
Ellemir felt warm, familiar, comforting in his arms.
What’s the matter, Andrew?
The matter, and damn it, she had to know it, was Callista’s presence. He supposed that to some people this would be especially exciting. Ellemir followed his thoughts, which associated this kind of thing with erotic exhibitions, attempts to rouse jaded tastes, decadence. She said in a whisper, “But it isn’t at all like that, Andrew. We are all telepaths. Whatever we do, the others will know it, be part of it, so why pretend that any of us can ever completely shut out any of the others?”
He felt Callista’s fingertips touching his face. Strange that in the dark, though their small hands were almost identical, he could be so sure it was Callista’s hand and not Ellemir’s on his cheek.
Among telepaths the concept of that kind of privacy could not exist, he knew, so shutting doors and going away in isolation was only a pretense. There came a time when you stopped pretending…
He tried to bring back his previous amorous state, but drunkenness and embarrassment conspired to defeat him. Ellemir laughed, but it was perfectly clear that the laugh did not intend ridicule. “I think we’ve all had too much to drink. Let’s sleep, then.”
They were all almost asleep when the door of the room opened and Damon came in, moving unsteadily. He looked down at them, smiling. “Knew I’d find you all here.” He flung his clothes this way and that. He was still blundering drunk. “Come on, make room, where do I—”
“Damon, you want to sleep it off,” Callista said. “Won’t you be more comfortable—”
“Comfortable be damned,” Damon said drowsily. “Nobody ought to have to sleep alone at festival time!”
Laughing, Callista made room at her side and Damon crawled in, was instantly asleep. Andrew felt a mad laughter blowing away his embarrassment. As he fell asleep he became aware of a dim thread of rapport, weaving among them, as if Damon, even in sleep, reached out for the comfort of their presence, drawing them all close together, intertwined, close-folded, their hearts beating in rhythm, a slow pulse, an infinite comfort. He thought, not knowing whether it was his own thought or another’s, that Damon was there, it was all right now. That was the way it ought to be. He felt Damon’s awareness: All my loved ones… I will never be alone again…
It was late when they woke, but the drawn curtains made it dark in the room. Ellemir was still folded in his arms. She stirred, turned sleepily toward him, enfolded him with her woman’s warmth. The sense of closeness, of unique sharing, was still there, and he let himself be swept into it, accepting the welcoming of her body. It was not only himself and Ellemir, somehow, but the very awareness, somewhere below conscious level, that they were all part of it, they fitted together, uniquely and without analysis. He felt like shouting to the world, to everyone, “I love you, I love all of you.” In his exultation he did not distinguish his sexual awareness of Ellemir, the tenderness for Callista, the strong, protective warmth he felt for Damon, They were all one emotion, and it was love. He floated in it, he drowned in it, he lay spent, luxuriating in it. He knew they had wakened the others. It didn’t seem to matter.
Ellemir moved first, stretching, sighing, laughing, yawning. She raised herself a little, kissed him quickly. “I would like to stay here all day,” she said ruefully, “but I am thinking of the chaos downstairs in the hall. If any of our guests are to have breakfast, I must go down and make sure something is done!” She leaned over and kissed Damon and, after a moment, kissed Callista too, then slid from the bed and went to dress.
Damon, less physically involved, sensed the effort Callista was making to keep herself barriered. So it was not complete, after all. She was still outside. He touched a light fingertip to her closed eyes. Andrew had gone into the bath. They were alone, and he felt the gallant pretense dissolve.
“Crying, Callie?”
“No, of course not. Why should I?” But she was.
He held her, knowing at this moment they shared something from which the others were excluded, that shared experience, that painful discipline, the sense of apartness.
Andrew had gone to dress. Damon caught a fragment of his thought, contentment mingled with chagrin, and thought how for a little while Andrew was one of them. Now he was apart from them too. He sensed Callista’s emotions too, not begrudging Ellemir anything, but desperately needing to know before she could share it. He sensed her desperate grief, the sudden mad impulse to tear at herself with her nails, beat herself with her fists, turn against this useless mutilated body which was so far from what it should have been. He held her against him, trying to calm and soothe her with his touch.
Ellemir came back from her bath, the ends of her hair dripping, and sat at Callista’s dressing table. “I will wear one of your housedresses, Callie, there is so much clearing away to be done,” she said. “That is the only bad thing about a party!” She saw Callista, hiding her face against Damon, and for a moment she was wrung by Callista’s grief. Ellemir had been brought up thinking of herself as having a little of the laran of her clan, but now, taking the full impact of her twin’s sorrow, she knew it was more of a curse than a blessing. And when Andrew came back she sensed his sudden apartness.
Andrew was thinking that you just had to be brought up to that kind of thing. He interpreted Ellemir’s tense silence as shame or regret for what had happened and wondered if he ought somehow to apologize. For what? To whom? Ellemir? Damon? He saw Callista lying in Damon’s arms. Where would he get any right to complain? Turn about was fair play, but he still felt an almost physical queasiness and disgust, or was it only that he had drunk too much the night before?
Damon saw his eyes on them and smiled.
“I suppose Dom Esteban has a head worse than mine this morning. I’ll go douse some cold water on mine, and go down and see if I can do something for our father. I haven’t the heart to leave him to his body-servant today.” He added, disentangling himself slowly and without haste from Callista, “Have your Terrans any suitable expression for the morning after the night before?”
“Dozens,” Andrew said glumly, “and every one as revolting as the thing itself.” Hangovers, he thought.
Damon went into the bath and Andrew stood jerking a comb through his hair, glowering at Callista. He did not even see that her eyes were red. Slowly she got out of bed and into her flowered chamber robe. “I must go help Ellemir. The maids will hardly know where to start. Why are you staring at me, my husband?”
The phrase made him angry, quarrelsome. “You will not even let me touch your fingertips, and if I kiss you, you draw away as if I meant rape, yet you were lying in Damon’s arms—”
She lowered her eyes. “You know why I dare… with him.”
Andrew remembered the intense awareness, sexuality, he had sensed, shared with Damon. It was disquieting, flooding him with vague unease. “You cannot say that Damon is not a man!”
“Of course he is,” said Callista, “but he has learned — and in the same hard school as I — when and how not to seem so.”