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Ah, yes, I was all too ready for this.

Chapter 3

3

OH, HOW LONG the days could be without him. By nightfall, I clenched my fists as the candles were lighted. There came nights when he didn't appear at all. The boys said he had gone on most important errands. The house must run as if he were there.

I slept in his empty bed, and no one questioned me. I searched the house for any personal trace of him. Questions plagued me. I feared he would never come back.

But he always came back.

When he came up the stairs, I flew into his embrace. He caught me, held me, kissed me and only then let me fall gently against his hard chest. My weight was nothing to him, though I seemed to grow taller and heavier every day.

I would never be anything but the seventeen-year-old boy you see now, but how could a man so slight as he heft me with such ease? I am not a waif and never have been. I am a strong child.

I liked it best-if I had to share with the others-when he read to us aloud.

Surrounding himself with candelabra, he spoke in a hushed and sympathetic voice. He read The Divine Comedy by Dante, the Decameron by Boccaccio, or in French The Romance of the Rose or the poems of Francois Villon. He spoke of the new languages we must understand as well as we understood Greek and Latin. He warned us that literature would no longer be confined to the classic works.

We sat in silence around him, on pillows, or on the naked tile. Some of us stood near him. Others rested back on their heels.

Sometimes Riccardo played the lute for us and sang those melodies he'd learned from his teacher, or even the wilder ribald tunes he'd picked up in the streets. He sang mournfully of love and made us weep over it. The Master watched him with loving eyes.

I had no jealousy. I alone shared the Master's bed.

Sometimes, he even had Riccardo sit outside the bedroom door and play for us. Obedient Riccardo never asked to come inside.

My heart raced as the curtains closed around us. The Master pulled open my tunic, sometimes even ripping it playfully, as if it were no more than a castoff thing.

I sank into the satin quilted down beneath him; I opened my legs and let my knees caress him, numbed and vibrating from the graze of his knuckles against my lips.

Once I lay half asleep. The air was rosy and golden. The place was warm. I felt his lips on mine, and his cold tongue move serpentlike into my mouth. A liquid filled my mouth, a rich and burning nectar, a potion so exquisite that I felt it roll through my body to the very tips of my outstretched fingers. I felt it descend through my torso and into the most private part of me. I burned. I burned.

"Master," I whispered. "What is this trick now which is sweeter than kissing?"

He laid his head down on the pillow. He turned away.

"Give it to me again, Master," I said.

He did, but only when he chose, in droplets, and with red tears he now and then let me lick from his eyes.

I think a whole year passed before I came home one evening, flushed from the winter air, dressed in my very finest dark blue for him, with sky blue stockings and the most expensive gold enameled slippers that I could find in all the world, a year before I came in that night and threw my book into the corner of the bedroom with a great world-weary gesture, putting my hands on my hips and glaring at him as he sat in his high thick arch-back chair looking at the coals in the brazier, putting his hands over them, watching the flames.

"Well, now," I said cockily and with my head back, a very man of the world, a sophisticated Venetian, a prince in the Marketplace with an entire court of merchants to wait on him, a scholar who had read too much.

"Well, now," I said. "There's a great mystery here and you know it. It's time you told me. "

"What?" he asked obligingly enough.

"Why do you never . . . Why do you never feel anything! Why do you handle me as if I were a poppet? Why do you never. . . ?"

For the first time ever I saw his face redden; I saw his eyes gloss and narrow and then widen with reddish tears.

"Master, you frighten me," I whispered.

"What is it you want me to feel, Amadeo?" he said.

"You're like an angel, a statue," I said, only now I was chastened and trembling. "Master, you play with me and I'm the toy that feels all things. " I drew nearer. I touched his shirt, sought to unlace it. "Let me-. "