Taste of Passion (3 page)

His careful control was gone, his worries about what she would think forgotten in passion. He had turned off his mind and now he was fucking her just how he wanted to fuck her.

“Harder...harder.” She realized she was chanting under her breath. Truly, he couldn’t fuck her harder; he was pounding her with everything the angle allowed. His hand was on her shoulder, as if to keep her from moving, and the other on the small of her back. His body was smacking hers with enough force she had to fight the slide of her body across the table.

She was climbing fast to an unbelievable orgasm. Her body was tight, straining for a release it’d nearly forgotten how to find.

Then Rasmus closed his hands around her waist, lifting her body so her feet left the ground. At the new angle she had no control, no leverage to push back, but it let him pump her faster.

She came hard, her mind a mess of shooting stars and dancing lights, her cunt clamping tight. She lost track of her body for a moment, shuddering, losing her grip on the table. He held her tighter, and still he pumped, now shallower, faster. He was so close.

She struggled to find some balance before his coming orgasm. The taste in her mouth was like a burning fire, screaming out his intense, mindless rut.

He pushed his hand into her hair, forcing his fingers between pins and ruining her careful construction. He pressed her face closer into the table, more symbolic than painful. His taste was wild passion. And he finally seized his pleasure, the force of his orgasm overpowering all of her senses.

Just like that, she came to rapture a second time.

When she swam from beneath the haze of half consciousness, he was just lifting himself from her back, pulling himself from her body. Both of them were slow to recover. She became aware of the warmth of come dripping on her thighs, the damp of sweaty silk on her back and between her breasts.

In a warm after-sex lassitude, she wasn’t even alarmed. A professional cleaner could work miracles. The dinner party was still two weeks away.

He helped her stand, setting her on her feet, and carefully tugged her dress to cover her well-used body. He looked into her face with searching eyes, as if unsure what her reaction would be.

When she concentrated on his mood, she tasted shame and worry like milk slowly curdling.

She reached up, touching his lips in a gesture of thanks. “That was perfect. That was just what I wanted.”

He relaxed a shade.

She laughed softly, righting her dress. “You lost control a bit, didn’t you?”

His tension returned, redoubled. This was a man who didn’t understand passion, not truly. He believed sex and love were something to be controlled, always rational, always polite. She’d met that sort of man before, and taken great delight in fixing their misperceptions.

She laughed again, forcing herself to sound carefree. “That is the highest compliment, you know. That I am so beautiful, so alluring, you forget yourself and,
oops
, forget your dignity. A Xanian woman counts that more precious than diamonds.”

He seemed bemused by the idea, but at least partially convinced.

Then he looked at her cup of cold chai, abandoned on the counter. “I’ll send some sugar home with you? For more chai?”

She considered.

“I don’t need more, I think. I will go to the store today. And I’m woken up now.”

She would definitely be having more chai, at home, properly filled with sweetener.

Some barbarian customs just weren’t as delicious as the barbarians themselves.

* * *

She was regretting everything about the decision before she even got there. The occupation campus was huge, the directions horrible, and she felt grubby for continuing to take these classes just to keep receiving a stipend from the occupation office. But she went, she asked a stranger for help finding classroom 7-30-4 and she kept her head high while doing it.

She was late, of course, but it was okay. The room was huge, an amphitheater-style sea of rigid Federation-green seats, and the class was full. She slipped into a spot at the back and quietly laid out her data pad.

Normally, Fedni took her reeducation classes through the computer, but this time she’d decided getting out of her house and meeting other people would be good for her. In the wake of her lukewarm reception at the dinner party, it had seemed a good idea. Sometimes, when insecure, she made some very rash decisions.

The instructor was a tall woman with graying hair—an off-worlder. She had a microphone clipped to her tacky pointed collar and the measured cadence of a professional orator. She was also wearing a very nice purple skirt, in an unfamiliar cut. It must also be from off-world, and it flattered her legs. Fedni made a note on her data pad to look up the style

“The assistant professions have been selected as especially relevant to members of the Temple of Flesh. There are four genes and gene clusters shared between natural assistants and...”

The Federation was getting smarter about Xanian culture; Xanians loved their genotyping. Idly, she wondered what the conclusion on her own gene makeup would look like after run through an off-world service. The genes didn’t change, but what personality traits and career suggestions would be on the results?

The woman explained personal assistants, professional assistants, executive assistants, secretaries, receptionists. It was excruciatingly basic, as every reeducation class was, so Fedni people-watched.

There were at least two hundred people in the room, male and female, young and old. All seemed to be service class, with close-cropped hair and flashy ear jewelry, and most of them she could pin as from the disbanded Temple of Flesh.

You could judge caste by dress, hair style and jewelry, usually, but temple was harder—except for the Temple of Flesh. An acolyte of the Temple of Passion advertised through their contacts and wit. An acolyte of the Temple of Flesh advertised with his or her body—with piercings, scanty clothing and heavily lined eyes. Looking around, she could see both people who fit the stereotype right to the details, and those with just a telltale tongue piercing or tattooed eye makeup.

The room might contain some people from other temples, but very few. It made sense why the lecturer would tie back to the Temple of Flesh, then.

Reeducation was free and available to everyone. A lecture or a few weeks’ classes, and the participant was assigned help to find a new position—basic temple services, being offered as a means to leave your temple behind in the Federation way.

In reality, no one attended them for that purpose. Why would a woman in a still-legal temple, a gardener or a financier, break from years of experience, their family and friends, to invite society’s shock and become a templeless outcast? They would struggle in an industry convinced they didn’t have the genes or connections to keep up. And so far the Federation promised much, but the help of the occupation career counselors hurt more than helped their candidates.

No one would be here at all, except that former members of disbanded temples were required to attend. The continued collection of their Federation stipend depended on the farcical notion that they were searching for a new career. You showed up for the occasional class, or your money dried up. And while there were rumors of the templeless happily employed by the occupation council and elsewhere, the Xanian economy had been limping even before the conquering. There just weren’t enough entry-level jobs on the planet for every prostitute, gladiator, duelist, test subject, tissue carrier and altered-world tech.

Fedni noticed all the people pecking notes in data pads, and glanced down at her own.

“Communication is the core of these careers. Behind me, I have a standard communication template. This is used to address communication to someone you know in business, to a group, or to a stranger you are addressing for the first time. We start with the memo line.”

Fedni drew a flower to look busy. The memo line? She’d learned this when she was eight.

“And if you’re a bit slow typing, a training program was included in the course materials. To open it on a standard data pad for the first time, open your scheduler and press the icon for one full second...”

A stir of excitement rustled through the crowd. Had no one added new functions to their computers before?

She’d known the education in her temple was rigorous, a necessity for someone being trained to fully satisfy the luxury and professional caste on a physical, emotional and intellectual level. She was getting the feeling few others in the room could say the same.

This disconnect was why mixing castes in education or career would never work. She could not understand the Federation way of thinking, or why they made the crazy proclamations they did.

Three hours later, by the time the lecture ended, Fedni was oddly disturbed. Sitting at home, annoyed and laughing at the silly stuff in a reeducation class, was a different experience from sitting here, watching grown adults learn how to use their data pad for the first time. The gratitude some of the lower-caste members had casually called out to the teacher was especially disturbing.

She just sat, letting the room empty past her.

She held her head high to approach the instructor, though. “Excuse me, my apologies. I came in a bit late, but I was here by the part where you explained the different assistant jobs. May I still have credit?”

The woman let her thumbprint herself as present, and Fedni went on her way. By the time she got off the lev rail at the stop near her home, her earlier misgivings were completely forgotten, buried by her musings on the subject of skirt length.

* * *

Fedni slipped into her back garden in the grace of sunset, hoping to escape the heat as she made her first fussy attempt at yard sculpting. She wasn’t going to do anything too ambitious―just trim back the little branches starting to break the neat shapes of her topiary―but she approached with trepidation, anyway.

She was not bred for this. She wasn’t a purist; she even agreed, somewhat, with the Federation idea that a person should be able to pick their own profession. But yard work? Cutting shrubs? Her genes had two hundred years of sex and passion in them. That wasn’t going to help much when grubbing around with plants.

But if she wanted to keep to a budget, and also keep her wardrobe current, some sacrifices must be made. Weekly visits from her gardener had to be cut back.

She was greeted with the pleasant smell of a wood fire. Rasmus was outside as well, lounging beside a small grill and watching the portable vid player he’d clipped to the waist-high fence. His foot was working a pedal, storing energy to power the slow turn of the grill’s rotisseries. Huge kebabs of half-cooked meat, small cabbages and onions were on the skewers, occasionally dripping into the hot fire beneath.

To her mortification, she was going to have an audience for her foray into the lower castes. At least he was an off-worlder, and might not realize the full extent of her degradation.

He smiled at her, an expression somewhere between neighborly and surprised thrill. She smiled back.

They hadn’t interacted much since that morning in his kitchen. She’d seen him a couple times, he’d waved at her, she’d nodded back. They’d had a few conversations over this same fence, comparing kebab recipes and weather comments.

Rasmus had asked politely if she’d like to go to a show, again, but it had tasted like an obligation he felt he had to keep. Maybe it was a lesson taught in off-worlder schools: never have sex with a woman before she’s decided she’s seen enough of the theater with you. She’d declined that invitation, and both had been too busy to make another.

So they were casual friends, despite the blistering memories of the orgasms he’d given her. It’d been more than two weeks, but the orgasms she remembered well.

She started at the back of her garden, carrying her newly bought pruners in thick gloves. Fedni hadn’t waited long to attempt this, preferring to tackle the job while it was still small and hard to mess up. She carefully clipped the occasional flyaway leaf or jutting branch, and marveled how much a bush could grow in just a week.

The firebushes were the worst, already scraggly. An amazing gene-spliced hybrid of native Xanian foliage and hedges brought from distant planets, the leaves were a soft ash color at the base, sloping into a fiery red. The deep white elder leaves smelled like cinnamon, outdoing any cut flower.

The Federation had lifted the embargo on export of the bush early after they took power. The firebush was no longer a luxury exclusive to Xana, and just looking at it made her sad.

The conquering had been inevitable, but had seemed so sudden. There had been a letter—a missive informing her government there were too many human rights violations on Xana, and they owed the Federation too many debts for that to be ignored. Everyone had tried to ignore it anyway. Then there had been a warning, a date, addressed to both the government and every news feed.

When the date came, the bombs were still a shock to everyone. Dozens of ships in orbit, thousands of bombs destroying transit lines and government depots. More than two hundred were killed, four of them civilians.

Off-worlders, their own worlds conquered by the Federation in much bloodier wars, were confused by how quickly Xana had capitulated—but Xanians weren’t. The shock of blood on soil that had never seen war was devastating. And on review, the Xanian defenses were pathetic.

Eight hours later, in the morning sun, the Xanian surrender had been formally broadcast.

After the transfer of power, three laws had taken effect immediately: no parent could accept payment for their child (including from the temples); no temple could enforce imprisonment or torture outside the structure of central government law; and no caste requirement could bar access to government services, police intervention, health care, nutrition or shelter.

Other laws, like widening exports and outlawing prostitution, had followed in a trickle, like sand falling on her people’s faces.

Everything had been a blow, everything had meaning, and yet it was odd that she cared so much about the fate of a plant. But firebushes were exclusive, Xanian only, and that made them rare and wonderful. She’d been rare and wonderful too, once, and that gave her an odd feeling of connection—to a bush.