I said M didn't I?

Buccaneers

Part 3

Bells sounded at five hundred hours, as usual, and I wished I could ignore them, but of course that wasn't an option. Lashes awaited those who shirked. My new neighbor was still asleep however, and I took the opportunity to have a look at him. He was possibly younger than me, though it was hard to tell. His features were fine - brows, cheekbones and lips all hinting at a heritage of class other than the rough-hewn types aboard. I wondered what his story might be, and resolved to speak to him when I had the chance. For now though, I'd better be out, and seeing what Garrett had in store for me.

Throughout the day, I was avoided by all the crew, as it seemed my altercation with Demetri had tipped the scales somewhat. I espied the bully a couple of times and his head turned quickly away so that he didn't catch my eye. No-one deliberately tripped me, no-one threw a bucket of water on me, and no-one knocked into me in the mess below decks, spilling my gruel so I'd have to scrape it off the floor or go without a meal, all of which I had been subjected to before now. Had I actually earned some grudging respect, and won myself some freedom from torment? If I had, I was thankful. I didn't know how long a period of grace would last before Demitri, the boorish blackguard, and leader of a gang of scoundrels, would come for me, but maybe I'd have time to gather some allies. It seemed Jim might be sympathetic towards me, though certainly Garrett was not.

That night, the thin-faced boy was in his hammock as I was preparing to sleep, and he fixed large eyes on me.

"It's not over, with that fat one. He's a bad sort," he said softly.

"I suspected as much," I answered. "I'll sleep with one eye open."

"Make sure you do," the boy nodded. "He'll make a racket on the steps though. The boards are all loose. The captain keeps them that way, so he'll hear if anyone creeps up to knife him in his sleep."

And so it was I learned how unpopular Eleazar was, and got the feeling that I might be able to befriend the boy.

"My name is Edward. Who are you?" I asked him.

"Jasper," came the quiet reply, as he shrugged himself into his blanket. He must have been either unafraid of Demetri, or very confident of his early warning system. Or possibly too tired to care.

And in the morning I became a rigger. If I'd thought Garrett was doing me a favor I soon learned my mistake. It's the most dangerous job aboard. If you missed your footing or lost your handhold you either plunged yards to the deck and broke half your bones, or you fell over the sides and became sharkmeat.

Jasper was clearly still attending to his tasks when I crawled exhausted into my hammock that night. I knew he had to fetch and carry for the captain, and keep Eleazar's cabin clean and his clothes in good order. Eleazar was so demanding a master that Jasper had permanent dark circles under his eyes and seemed constantly fatigued. This night, beyond the captain's door I could hear noises I couldn't quite interpret, although they didn't sound like the polishing of boots. There was slapping and wheezing and then a few grunts. Minutes later, Jasper slipped through, and ignoring me, curled into his own hammock. A night later, he emerged from the captain's door stumbling, with his hand over his mouth. There was a red mark on his face. I watched as he spat into our night soil bucket, and wondered if Eleazar had hit him and made the inside of his cheek bleed.

"What went on in there?" I asked him with concern, when he'd finished wiping his face. "Did he hurt you?"

"A little. Nothing serious," he responded.

"He hit you?"

There was no need for Jasper to answer. He gestured at his face.

"He shouldn't have any cause to beat you. You work hard - I've seen how much he makes you do. You work like a dog. He shouldn't beat you regardless - but it's not as though you are lax in your duties," I persisted, though I'd learned by now that there was no point taking grievances on board to somebody senior. Nobody cared. And when the person your grievance was with was the captain, you didn't have any hope of redress. There was probably nothing at all Jasper could do about his situation.

"It's not to do with laxity or duties, Edward. It's to do with his appetite and his perversion."

This stopped me. Perversion? Eleazar somehow enjoyed hitting Jasper? I didn't understand.

Seeing my confusion, Jasper sighed.

"You really don't know, Edward?" he asked. "Eleazar uses me, for gratification. Now and then, as part of it, he slaps me. Usually on the backside, though. This is the first time he's hit my face. He couldn't reach my backside, with what he made me do."

I had to process this, and when I did the images that came to me made me want to be sick. Jasper hadn't been spitting out blood. He'd been spitting out -

The realization made me want to retch myself. It seemed forced sexual receptivity was endemic aboard this blighted, floating hellhole.

"Have you refused him?" I asked, knowing the pointlessness of the question.

"I did at first. He found it amusing."

"So he forces you despite your non-consent? That is criminal, both morally and legally."

My hands curled into fists at my side and I looked towards where my knife lay on a ledge next to my hammock.

"I will kill him Jasper. He can't do this to you, and I'll make it stop," I said in a choked voice.

Jasper shrugged. "Leave it. It could be worse. He's the captain, and if he lays claim to me, I am his alone. If someone else was to take a fancy to me I'd be shared around. Dire as things are for the moment, we'll make the Windward Isles in another couple of weeks and I'll be off this stinking ship. I'll find work ashore and never set to sea again."

After Jasper's revelation about the time he spent in the Captain's cabin, I did everything I could to make life easier for him. Not that there was much I could do. When he wasn't around I poured some of my daily water rations into the flask he kept near our hammocks, and I slipped him most of my rum, too, saving myself only occasional mouthfuls. I declared myself to be overheating of a night, and gave him my blanket. And I talked to him. He and I both were starved of conversation - me because the swine above decks had little to say besides cursing and squabbling, and he because surly Eleazar's idea of dialogue proved to be himself mumbling unintelligibly, and cuffing Jasper if he responded.

I discovered, as I had conjectured, that Jasper was well educated, from a family of the merchant class. He alluded to some sort of falling out with his parents, and having run away to sea. Aspects of his story mirrored mine - including his revulsion at conditions on board, and at the behavior and manners of his crewmates. He was of a philosophical bent though, altogether more thoughtful than I. He was erudite and insightful, and I found myself wishing I had met him earlier. His observations were shrewd, his considerations sensitive, and if I had had such a clever companion during my time at university I might not have been such a wastrel. As it was, the brief moments we managed to share of one another's company rapidly became the highlight of my otherwise miserable, exhausting day.

"Did you have a sweetheart at home?" I asked him one night idly, when we both happened to be awake at the same time.

"No," he answered. "Did you?"

"If I had, I should hardly be here," I replied. "I'd be back in England, lying in a soft bed enjoying kisses, and playing with a girl's pretty breasts."

We were both quiet for a while, reminiscing. Well, I was. A few girls stood out from the rest - Charlotte of course, generous and accommodating. Victoria, flame-haired and with a quick, ascerbic tongue. Orphaned Jane who was whoring to support herself and her younger brother. I remembered them well enough, but none had come anywhere near to capturing my heart.

"Do you miss women?" I said.

"My mother, yes," he answered slowly. "More than that, I haven't really spent much time in their company."

I pondered this, and extrapolated. "You've never lain with one?"

"No," came the quiet answer.

I had been bedding women and girls since I was fourteen years old, and his admission was surprising to me.

"But what do you do to relieve your needs?"

"Same as most men, I imagine. I make good use of my right hand."

I rolled onto my side to look at him, and he was gazing at the bulkhead where our hammocks were attached beyond our feet.

"Or I lie with a man," he continued, in a voice so low I barely heard it.

"But - " I began, and couldn't think of how to respond. His statement shocked me, completely.

Jasper seemed to wait for me to catch up.

"The captain - what he does to you - are you saying that you have taken part in such acts of your own free will?" I finally managed.

"Edward, between partners who are willing it's nothing like what happens to me here, and what you've experienced. It's not brutal or humiliating. What the captain does to me is a sinful travesty. When partners care, and neither seeks to hurt the other it can be tender and beautiful and exciting, and you can fall in love."

"Love? Surely, what transpires between men when there are no women available cannot be deemed love, even if neither of them are reluctant to take part..." I almost stammered.

"It's nothing to do with whether there are women available, Edward. I'm simply not drawn to them. I have a preference for a male touch, and a male voice, and male skin. Consensual acts involving male partners are not shameful or degrading, and participants may even feel that such pleasure is God-given. It's certainly heavenly."

I thought back to Demitri, and his accomplices, and I felt doubtful. "Surely not," I frowned.

"I assure you, Edward, there is joy to be had between men when there is trust."

I was certain that I could not experience any joy or pleasure at a man's touch, and my expression of disbelief must have communicated this certainty to Jasper. He seemed to reflect for a while, then took a deep breath, regarding me with those girlish, dark-lashed eyes of his.

"Edward, do you trust me?" he asked.

"Of course I do."

"Then let me try something. Tell me to stop any time you're uncomfortable," he murmured, and he reached over with one hand, across the narrow space between us with to touch me between the legs. The feel of his hand on my member was initially confronting, and I gasped at him. He didn't move, he just had his fingers cupped lightly over my penis, which lay limp and slack, curving towards the top of my right thigh. I was frozen. That part of me had never had a hand on it that wasn't my own or female.

"I don't want to upset you, and I'll do you no harm," he whispered. "You can stop me with a word."

Then he stroked the underside of my shaft very gently with his thumb. Base to tip and back, slowly, backwards and forwards. My manhood was soft and unresponsive, but he was in no hurry. Truth to tell, I was stunned. I had the urge to pick him up and throw him overboard for doing such a thing to me, and he was of so slight a build I could have done it, but I lay transfixed as my cock responded. It had been a while since I'd known the sensation of friction there and a familiar, yet at the same time new, feeling of sensual excitement overtook me. If I shut my eyes tight, I could imagine a girl had her elegant hand on me, though if I looked down I could see that the palm was too square, the fingers too long, and the wrist too broad. A man was touching me there, and I fought against the simultaneous notions that it was wicked, but that my cock was swelling and almost leaping into that hand, and that it stroked me with more surety and firmness than a woman had ever shown.

"I'll stop whenever you say so," his voice promised me again, and I could have shouted at him to do exactly that. I could have punched him. I could have shoved him off me and called him all the filthy names under the sun that people call the men who take their enjoyment from other men, but I didn't. I looked into his jade eyes with their inky lashes, and my fevered gaze drifted over his smooth, though now flushed skin, and down to his full lips, and then beyond, to where he was working me expertly. This was surely wrong - but I had been so long without being touched intimately and now that he'd started I felt desperate for completion. Was this voyage, and the backbreaking work, and the company of oafs, and the hardship making me into something I was not?

I didn't know myself. I grunted and found I was pushing my hips up, wanting him to be rougher and harder. Normally I would look into a girl's eyes when she was doing this to me, but I couldn't look into Jasper's. Instead my gaze fell, and there in his trousers was a bulge pushing out the fabric. It seemed to point straight at me. Startled, my gaze flashed to his face.

"Ignore it. I don't expect anything from you," he said, his breath irregular. "Close your eyes."

I did as he instructed, unwilling to have him stop now, though I was wracked with hesitancy and guilt over what I was permitting. At one stage his hand paused, and I growled like a wolf to express my displeasure, but then nearly leapt out of my skin to feel that he was undoing my belt and reaching inside my clothes. He stood next to me as I lay, and recommenced his actions, while his other hand cupped me lower down. I lost all dignity and whimpered like an animal when he squeezed there with a rhythmic but soft insistence. It wasn't much longer before I attained my release, gritting my teeth so not to cry out as my ejaculate spurted into his fingers.

While I recovered my breath I lay back quietly in my hammock, listening to the sound of his breathing slowing as well. I didn't know what to say, and didn't dare glance sideways to meet his eye. Remembering that he had clearly been in a state of high arousal I even started to feel angry. How dare he - a queer - force his attentions on me in such a manner? He couldn't possibility have garnered any impression at any stage that what he done to me would be welcome. I felt besmirched at his affrontery, and offended that he had, upon receiving confirmation that I trusted him, abused that trust. A small part of my brain niggled at me that Jasper had surely derived no satisfaction from the incident, because I had not touched him as he had touched me, and he had done nothing himself to address the situation of his own obvious excitement. Another thought niggled at me that he had assured me several times that he would desist as soon as I asked him to do so. I had been so long without a woman that I hadn't asked him to desist.

When a moment later he whispered my name in a questioning tone, I rolled over to lie facing away from him, determined to seek the refuge of sleep. But sleep did not come.

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