Archive of Our Own

He watched his cell being emptied with a sense of dread and finality he hadn’t even felt the day he’d been brought to this cursed place, a little more than five years ago.

There were a few baskets on the floor, containing all his items of clothing. Tunics, wraps, and the one single robe he had… They carried them out without even looking into them. The small table with the stool was emptied of his food bowl, cup and spoon, as well as of the numerous little pots and jars of clay, alabaster and brass –the single one of bubbly green glass the rarest of them all – holding his perfumed oils, powders, paints and soothing salves… All of it shoved into yet another basket together with brushes and combs and colorful hair ribbons. His pile of cheap brass trinkets were shoved on top with a rattling and clinking noise.

He nearly reached out a hand to try to stop them when they took his polished bronze mirror. It was broken, had a big crack in it, but it was still such a precious object, and he needed it to… Then he remembered, he wouldn’t need it again, and let his hand sink, swallowing the lump in his throat. The bronze mirror fell into the same basket with a noise that told him some of his makeup jars did not survive its weight.

Then they carried out the table and the stool, too.

He nearly started to cry when they emptied the wide built-in stone ledge, where he slept, and was fucked, of the entire big pile of blankets, pillows and mattresses, which, against all odds, made the hard, cold surface warm and comfortable. It was for the benefit of the customers that came to the brothel, of course, but it made his life at least somewhat bearable, as well. The last night he would spend in here, he would have to do without.

But he would not cry, not in front of them.

One of the keepers left, carrying his things away, the other, Bela, stayed and turned to him.

“Take it off!” he said, gesturing towards him with an impatient hand, the last basket of crushed makeup jars and trinkets at his feet.

“Wh… what?”

“Take that tunic off, and everything else! Come on, slave; do as you’re told, I don’t have all day!”

It was one of his oldest and most threadbare tunics. What possible difference could it make letting him keep this simple rag? He didn’t dare protest the petty cruelty, though, he slipped the tunic over his head and dropped it in the basket, reaching for the hairpins next, but, apparently, he wasn’t fast enough.

Bela, reached for him, clamped a big and strong hand around his skinny upper arm and turned him to the wall. He’d put up his hair with two brass hairpins and a red ribbon and Bela pulled it all out, none too gentle, his heavy dark locks falling over his shoulder and back. The harsh tugging hurt, but he wouldn’t cry.

No, he wouldn’t cry, even though he knew what was next. He couldn’t look up at Bela as he turned him back around. “Please…” he said; his voice barely more than a whisper.

The keeper sighed. “Come on, Boots, I can’t let you keep them, you know I can’t.”

Bela was a harsh and strict man. Working for a brothel owner, keeping the whores, he had to be, or they’d run circles around him every chance they got, using all their wiles to get away with things. So, the man was harsh and strict, but he wasn’t heartless, and he knew what the pair of boots meant to him. Knew they meant so much, him wearing them every day for the last three years had finally given him his ‘stage name’ around here.

The keepers and the other whores just called him ‘Boots’, and certain customers knew to ask for ‘Little White Boots’, when the girls didn’t have the bits between their legs those men were looking for, and the other, more masculine, male whore in the brothel was too much man for them. However, it wasn’t the fact the knee-high, lace-up boots, made of the finest and softest of white deerskin, probably was the prettiest and most expensive item of clothing he had ever worn, which made him utter this plea – but the promise they once came with.

He hugged himself where he stood, toes curling inside the soft leather, as if he thought it would make it harder for Bela to pull them off his feet. It wouldn’t, of course. ‘Little White Boots’ was no match for the broad-shouldered man before him.

Bela sighed, and, wonders of all wonders, did not reach for him again. “Well, if you wanna piss off Marus, I guess that’s your business,” he said. He bent to pick up the basket and left the cell, but stopped in the door opening. “I’m sorry, Boots. You suck cock so well; if I could afford it, I’d buy you myself, but my wife would fucking slice my cock off if I came home with you.”

The keeper closed the door and locked it, casting him in darkness. His lantern had been one of the first things they’d taken down from the beam in the low ceiling and carried out, and these cells didn’t have any windows. It didn’t much matter, he could barely see anymore anyway.

Feeling his way along the rough stonewalls, Boots soon found the ledge in the small cell that functioned as a bed and sat down on it. He only had a small piece of cloth tied around his narrow hips, which just barely covered his cock and nothing of his buttocks, and he winced as they touched the cold, rough, whitewashed stone. He dreaded lying down to try to sleep, but it was just for one night, Boots told himself, and he would not cry.

He sat with his back against the wall and pulled his knees up to his chest, feeling at the boots he wore. They were the only thing left in this room, on his person, and they would be taken from him, too, if not now, if not by Bela, then by Marus in the morning, but until then, he would not cry.

No, Boots would sit here, caress the deerskin covering his lower legs, feeling the only soft thing left in his life, and remember…

Remember a young man with dark, messily cut, unruly hair that curled slightly around his ears and at his neck, with freckles over his broad, tanned nose and white teeth showing in a wide grin, a grin, which was only for him, and none of the other whores. A man with a strong back, strong arms and rough hands, which were still, somehow, always gentle.

For almost a year, Boots had learned everything about those hands, as the young man kept coming back to the brothel, always asking only for him.

At first, he hadn’t been so different from other customers, though better looking than most, for sure. He had been kind, yes, always gentle fucking him, joking with him, sometimes staying the night, only to talk and cuddle after sex, long into the wee hours, bringing him sweets as gifts. However, even if such good-natured customers were unusual, they were far from unheard of, and they were, of course, the type every whore preferred to deal with and would work hard to please. The young man had still only been a customer.

That had changed. This handsome young man, the regular customer who only ever asked for him, had finally kissed him one night, which was definitely something customers very rarely did.

Then he’d brought him a gift, which was much, much more expensive than sweets.

‘You have such pretty feet, for a boy’, he had said. ‘Narrow and pale like little Lady feet. They never use them, you know, those ladies, their feet I mean, always carried around in their litters, and all.’ He had laughed, and said such pretty feet shouldn’t touch the bare ground; they should be enticingly hidden in laced-up boots of the finest deerskin, to be unwrapped as a present. Then he’d kissed his instep, and his ankle and up along his slim calf.

Customers never did such things either.

Boots had just laughed, embarrassed at the attention, because he hadn’t been ‘Boots’ back then. He’d only been Umah, a slave without a family name, and had thought his young handsome customer was only joking with him, kissing his feet, as if he was one of the noble ladies he’d spoken of.

If so, his handsome customer had taken the joke awfully far because shortly after, he’d brought him these pair of fine, white, indoor, deerskin, lace-up Lady boots.

Things changed even more after that.

One night, his handsome customer confessed, with an unusually somber expression, he didn’t want to be his customer at all anymore, which had alarmed Boots before he had understood what the young man really meant.

He had plans, he’d explained. Plans that would make him enough money to buy a little townhouse in the city with a flat upstairs and a shop on the ground floor, where he could sell… something, he’d figure out later what kind of shopkeeper he wanted to be. Well, he’d be a shopkeeper, and then he’d buy Umah, rescue him from this wretched life, free him, and let him work in his shop. They’d be happy living together in the flat upstairs, for sure; didn’t Umah think so, too?

Boots had only laughed at that, too, knowing very well such things didn’t happen to whores, and especially not male, half-blind, ones, like him. He’d agreed, of course, both because he didn’t want to upset the best customer he’d ever had, and because he really did think nothing would have made him happier, if he’d been at all able to believe in it.

However, he wasn’t so naïve as to actually entertain such thoughts and wishes, not even for fun.

Only a few weeks after that, there had been a last visit, at which his young handsome customer hadn’t let on in the least that he never intended to come back, and then... he had never come back.

Boots had been pathetically unprepared for just how much that had hurt, just how betrayed he had felt; how heartbroken that it had all been a lie. He guessed he had been just that naïve, after all, fooling himself more than a customer with curling hair and white teeth had ever managed.

He hadn’t cried as he realized he’d been lied to and abandoned, but he’d started wearing the white deerskin boots every day, to remind himself not to be that stupid again.

It wouldn’t much matter now, whether he was stupid or not. Marus, the owner of the brothel, and therefore the owner of him, would take him to the city market tomorrow to sell him, and it was very unlikely he would end up anywhere good.

Yes, customers still occasionally told him he was rather good looking and he did have nice hair, but he wasn’t very young anymore, only a few years short of thirty, and that together with his other flaws meant his future was a bleak one. His eyesight had always been bad, that was the worst of it. Extremely nearsighted since a mere child, the world not directly surrounding him had always been a blur, but he’d still managed, until his eyesight had started to deteriorate even further.

It had started as a strange kind of cloudy haze in front his right eye, which had thickened enough the last year he barely saw anything at all anymore on that side. His left eye had only started to be slightly affected in the same manner just recently, and so he could still see enough, overall, to manage without help, but he feared the left eye would be as bad as the right one in a few more years.

If he’d been younger, this oncoming blindness might not have mattered much. He didn’t need to see his customers to find their cocks with his hands and mouth, after all, and certainly not to have them fuck him. Youthful looks might have done away with the need to see into a broken bronze mirror to paint away tired lines and dark shades under his eyes, too. Yes, if he’d still been rosy and fresh and afflicted with a blindness that didn’t show on the outside, he might have had a chance. However, he’d seen enough in his cracked mirror to not wonder why less and less men asked for ‘Little White Boots’ these days – his milky eye looked horrible.

In a bigger brothel, better managed, he might have been allowed to retire when the customers couldn’t stand the sight of him anymore, to help run things and train up new whores. However, as it were, Marus was in debt and needed to sell off a few of his whores. The nearly blind one that had a bit of age on him would be the first one to go.

Put up for sale on the market in the city, every other brothel owner who might come there to look for a new whore would see the same worth in him that Marus did – that is to say, none. What anyone else could ever want to use him for he couldn’t even imagine.

With dread in his heart, and an ache in his stomach, Boots lay down on the hard stone and tried to make a comfortable pillow of his own skinny arm, to be able to get at least a few hours of sleep. He shivered with cold, wishing the rest of him were as warm as his feet, but he would not cry.

No, he would think of a broad freckled nose, instead, and a strong tanned back, of strong arms holding him close, soft lips pressing kisses on his insteps, and whispering his real name in his ear.

Marus woke him up none too gently in the early morning, dragging him off the ledge by his hair, yelling at him, yanking at it until his eyes watered with the pain. He dared do nothing else than to pull off his white deerskin boots and put them in his owner’s hands.

“You worthless piece of shit!” Marus yelled again, giving him one upside the head with such force, he was brought to his knees.

“How you always manage to make Bela feel so fucking sorry for you is beyond me. I told him to take everything, everything, to the market yesterday, and he leaves the fucking most expensive things on you. Now, I have to go to the market this morning myself, only to sell these, and if I wasn’t selling you later today, I’d give you a real good flogging right now, you hear that?”

He heard, but didn’t beg for forgiveness for his disobedience the night before. Marus wouldn’t register any such attempts in his anger anyway. Boots remained silently on the floor until his owner tired of yelling at him and left.

Boots watched Marus walk out of the cell with his deerskin boots dangling from an angrily swinging arm before the door was slammed shut again. It was official then, he wasn’t ‘Little White Boots’ anymore.

He would not cry.

Marus had handed him over to the people at the slave market, not seeing a need to stay to watch him sell, or not. As much as Boots feared a new, yet unknown, owner, watching Marus leave the place, he hoped it was the last he would ever see of his master. The man had never had a kind word to spare for any of his whores, and even Bela would sometimes comfort the girls when they cried from hurting after hours of fucks, or had to give up yet another baby.

Boots was taken into a small tiled room to be ‘processed’. It had a hole for a drain in the middle, a large rough-hewn table placed right above it, and several buckets of water in a neat row along the wall. A sturdy middle-aged woman in a coarse brown dress with rolled up sleeves and a leather apron, her hair hidden under a scarf, stood at this table, fiddling with her tools laid out before her.

She looked as likely to work in a butcher’s shop, and he shuddered.

There was a guard in the room with her, too, but he apparently thought Boots so unlikely to cause trouble, he was reading a book, seated on an old chair in a corner, and didn’t even look up when he was brought inside.

Boots wasn’t used to free women handling him. It wasn’t as if they ever came to the brothel, and he hadn’t been in someone’s home since he’d been a small kid, but the woman was obviously used to handling male goods, so he proved the guard right and made no trouble while he was being washed, examined, prodded and scowled at.

“Fucking half-skeletal brothel whore,” she muttered under her breath. “Do you not eat what you are given, boy?”

He hung his head in shame at the implied accusation of ingratitude over the meager scraps Marus provided, and didn’t dare say it did happen quite frequently that he didn’t. He hadn’t had much of an appetite the last three years, or so.

“What the fuck! Did he drag you over here across the cobblestones by your feet?” She scowled, scrubbing the wounds on his left shoulder, elbow and hip that Marus had caused him earlier in the morning, pulling him off the stone ledge by his hair.

Boots winced and sucked in breath through his teeth at the pain, but kept his mouth shut. He was sure she would make it clear if she actually wanted him to answer.

“Surprisingly tight for an older whore, I have to say…” she let him know next, bending him over the table and pushing her stocky fingers up his ass. He supposed he should thank her for the compliment.

She was unexpectedly gentle disentangling his hair, though, brushing it to a shine, before she finally stepped away and declared him done.

“Well, that’s the best I can do, I’m afraid. You have nice hair, boy, and not too bad teeth, so you had better learn how to smile real damn quick and try to be very nice and pleasing out there, because gods know you don’t have much else going for you. ‘Don’t sell him for less than three golden’ that bastard, says, ‘I need the money’, he says, and then he gives me a pale, bruised scarecrow with a Devil’s eye and expects me to perform some kind of magic.”

She shrugged and gave him a put upon sigh that made him shrink in shame before her. Shame, yes, but not hurt, he told himself; never that, no matter what they said.

A young handsome man had once spoken his real name in his ear as if whispering to a lover, given him a gift worthy of ladies who do not use their feet, and Boots had not been a piece of meat in that man’s arms, not merchandize, not a thing… That same man had ripped his heart into pieces and abandoned him, and being called a scarecrow with a Devil’s eye was quite frankly not so bad in comparison.

He wouldn’t cry.

The woman turned away from him to scold the guard instead, making him put his book away to bring the slave to the sales hall. The guard took him by the arm and marched him over without a word. His steps were hurried and impatient, and so wide he had to struggle to keep up. The guard wasn’t being brutal and his grip wasn’t hard, but it was clear yet another slave for sale in this house was of considerable less interest than that book.

The sales hall was long, narrow and dusty. Drafty and cold, it wasn’t much more than a barn roof over cracked flagstones, light streaming in between large gaps in the plank walls, the sounds of the market place a constant background buzz.

He was brought to an empty spot, the guard standing him onto a bigger, slightly raised, square flagstone. The raised stone had an iron ring set in it with a set of chains attached. These chains had a neck ring and two wrist shackles at the other end, all three of which the guard made short order of enclosing his neck and wrists within. He’d been restrained before, but these chains were so heavy it felt like the iron wanted to return to the earth and was prepared to drag him along with them.

The guard made him stand up straight from his slouch, patted his shoulder and lifted his chin. “Perk up, boy,” he said. “She told you to smile, didn’t she?”

“Yes, Sir”, he said, but he was afraid he wasn’t quite able to follow that order.

The guard left, but he wasn’t alone in the hall. Every spot like his was filled, every chain holding living breathing flesh – men, women, children, young and old, most of them probably with pasts as bleak as his own and all of them with futures as blurred as the world around him.

Boots was for once glad his eyesight was so bad. Except for the ones directly to the left and to the right of him, he couldn’t make out the face of a single slave in here, and it was just as well. It was easier then, not to take in their misery, too, with his own.

He could still hear them. One kept coughing; a dry, rattling cough from deep in the chest. His neighbor kept swearing at him and telling him to stop it. Chains rustled all around him, but one chain kept rattling with such consistency and regularity it was clear the trapped limb had some kind of nervous tick and wasn’t able to cease the repetitive movement. There was a lot of crying, too.

A child was crying loud and piercing, two women were crying low and keening, as if they’d been at it all night and this mewling sound was all they had the strength left for. A man tried to hide his sobs…

They cried, Boots wouldn’t.

No, he would stand here today and think of other things, block out the blurry apparitions around him, and only think of a smiling face that would always be clear as day in his mind, no matter how bad his eyes got. He wouldn’t cry, but he wouldn’t smile either, not at anyone coming here, and so, he wouldn’t be bought.

Bela would come get him back at the end of the day and there would be no money for Marus. Marus would be angry. He would shear all his hair off and sell it to the wig makers, to be able to squeeze at least some pennies out of him, and then Bela would strangle him. Bela was a harsh and strict man, but he wasn’t heartless, and he was strong, too, so he would be quick about it.

It would be all right.

Today didn’t seem to be a busy day at the slave market, but customers still kept dropping in with some regularity – Ghosts of different sizes and shapes strolling around, a few who cleared up somewhat if they happened to walk into the limited range of his still comparatively useful left eye.

Most passed him by without even looking at him, and he didn’t wonder at it.

Even from afar, his pale skin and long hair would mark him out as a sex worker, who didn’t need to have a closely shorn head for practical reasons, and who clearly was always locked inside and never worked hard in the sun. Most who came here would be looking for strong workers or reliable domestic help, not… him.

The few who did stop to look at him balked at his milky eye.

A few recognized him, having been customers at the brothel, no doubt, even if he didn’t remember them. He could see it in their faces, though, if they came close enough, how their eyes widened, and a faint embarrassed blush tinted their cheeks. They would definitely never buy him, and their steps away from him were quicker than any others were.

Only one man during the day was not so inhibited. Half intoxicated already in the early afternoon, judging by the smell of him and the ruddy cheeks, he laughed when he saw him.

“Well, if it ain’t Little White Boots. So, finally ended up here, did you? Ain’t that the way it goes? Thought you’d have at least a few more years of cock sucking in you, but Marus gotta pay off his gambling debts, eh?” The man smiled at him as if they were both in on a funny joke and tapped him on his bare ankle with his booted toes. “Sold your boots, did he? Right bastard, that one. Weeell, I only came to look for a maid for the missus, so… Good luck, lad!”

The man ruffled his hair and left, and Boots nearly cried then, looking down at his bare feet and his lost dreams. Bela really could not put a string around his neck soon enough, not in his opinion.

The day turned into evening, there were less and less customers and closing time couldn’t be far off now. The chance someone would buy him in these last minutes was non-existent and that meant he would probably be dead before the night shift started at the brothel.

In spite of it all this was not an easy realization to come to terms with, now that it seemed like it would actually happen, not a terror he really knew how to handle. He wanted to cry now, but he was as if frozen up inside, and as much as he tried, he couldn’t.

The guard with the book had started to unchain the slaves still left in the hall and take them out, one by one, while a young boy went around the hall, blowing out lanterns… when there was an angry voice outside the entrance farther down the hall.

“I don’t fucking care if you’re closed. I wanna buy a slave, and I’m gonna fucking see for myself if he’s in there or not.”

Boots turned at the voice, trying to peer through the dusk with his not quite so bad eye, there was something vaguely familiar about it, though the voice it reminded him of had never sounded so desperate and angry…

“Sir, please, come back tomorrow, and…”

“It’ll be too late tomorrow, I told you. Let me in! You want my damn money, or not?”

“Well, yes, of course, but… Oh, all right then, I suppose, it would be all right, to… Sir, please, wait up!”

A blurry dark shape stalked through the hall, and to his utter surprise went right for his spot. As the shape stopped before him, the image finally cleared up into an actual person, a breathless person, a man, who was a few years older than when Boots had last seen him. He gave him a wide white smile in the dusk, and he had a broad freckled nose and hair curling around his ears…

“Umah! It’s me; I’m back… I… I- I know I never said goodbye, but I had to leave in a hurry, you see, and… I’m so sorry, but… I’m back now, and I’ve been making money, just as we planned, and… Didn’t anyone read you my letters? Oh… oh no, my goodness, what happened to your eye?”

He couldn’t snap out of his shock. Surely, his mind was playing a trick on him. Was he already back at the brothel, and was this what you saw when a tightening string closed around your throat and cut off your air. Were these the visions, right before the end?

Boots reached out a hand and felt the arm on the man before him. It was not the wisps of a vision; it was a solid arm. He gasped. “Kilian?”

Kilian smiled in a relief so big it nearly lit up the room around them. “Oh, thank goodness, for a moment I thought you weren’t recognizing me.” He put his strong, rough and gentle hands in his hair, on his cheeks, on his shoulders... “Can you still see me then? Did Marus hurt your eye? I’m gonna kill him, just you wait and see… Oh, wait…”

He let go of him and stepped back, leaving Boots in the biggest dread so far, but only to pull something from his belt and holding them up before his face with yet another wide grin.

His boots, his white deerskin boots.

“I just came back to the city this morning, meant to freshen up and go see you, first thing tomorrow morning, surprise you. I went to the market, to get me something to eat, I found these for sale and I couldn’t believe my eyes. That bastard! As soon as I saw them, I knew something had happened. I ran to the brothel so fast, Umah, and Bela told me you were here. I’m gonna kill Marus, Umah, I’m gonna fucking kill him. I sent you letters, asked him to read them to you; I sent him money, for you, I asked him to keep you, not work you too hard… Didn’t you know, all this time?”

Boots shook his head, his mind as blurred as his eyesight. Kilian had not forgotten him, hadn’t abandoned him. All this time, he had worked to make money, so he could come back and get him out of the brothel, and Marus had known, all along, and never said a word…

Still in a daze, he felt Kilian kneel before him and help put his boots back on, before getting up again to pull him into his arms.

“I’m so, so, sorry, Umah, don’t hate me too much. I should have made sure you knew, but things happened, ran into some trouble, had to get out of town, faster than fast, and... Well, if- if you still want to stay with me, I’ll explain everything later, but first… Let’s gets things in order with this wretched slave trader and get you out of these chains.”

Kilian guided him through the dark streets with a firm hand around his, took him through a labyrinth of blurry alleys and buildings, until he halted the both of them before a small townhouse at the outskirts of the inner city.

There was a lit lantern over the scuffed door, and Boots could make out large storefront windows on either side of it, dark and shut down.

“I bought it already weeks ago, before I got back,” Kilian explained. “Only saw the plans before, seeing it in person for the very first time myself now. There’s a lot to do, I’ve been told. Lots of cleaning and repairs, but the bones are good, they tell me. I’d start a General Store, I thought; sell a little bit of this and a little bit of that…”

Kilian put a hand under his chin and guided his eyes farther up. “Look! Can you see it with your good eye? There’s a flat upstairs… for two.”

He did see it. Umah did see the windows of a flat upstairs, and then…

He cried.

His left eye slowly fogged up, just as the right one, and blindness set in about three years later. He could still tell night from day, and make out large shapes vaguely, he wouldn’t walk into a wall, but all the smaller details were lost to him.

Umah told himself it didn’t much matter. By now, their store was so familiar to him, the order of their wares so perfect, he always knew where every little thing was, and had no problems finding the customers what they needed. He tied a cloth around his milky eyes, too, when he worked, so he wouldn’t make anyone uncomfortable or scare little children. Their regulars were used to it. They knew his history overall, but seemed to respect that he was now a free man, and never mentioned it. The ones who would hold his past against him shopped elsewhere, he supposed.

As long as their little store made enough to keep their humble life going, he respectfully didn’t give a shit.

He’d never known how to read, and there was no use trying to learn now, when he couldn’t see the letters, but he had always known the numbers and had no problems counting the coins to give the correct change back. Umah had learnt to feel the coins with his fingertips to separate them, and there were a few little rascals in the neighborhood that had quickly learned there was no fooling him with this.

There’d been a problem, in the beginning, of non-regular customers trying to steal from the blind shopkeeper, but that had stopped after Kilian had brought him another precious gift – a dog.

The huge scraggly dog reached him to his hips and was fiercely protective of him, always lying at his feet in the store. He would growl in warning at anyone having fishy business in the store, and had even learned to steer Umah around obstacles in the street when he was outside on his own, doing errands, Umah holding on to the big dog’s long neck hairs. The dog had become a dear friend and gave him some independence from the likewise fiercely protective, Kilian.

Umah called the dog ‘Also Kilian’, which always made his mate laugh.

In time, Kilian had turned over most of the storekeeping to Umah, while he himself traded in other things, always looking to strike it rich. He hadn’t succeeded so far, but Umah didn’t mind his mate’s limited career successes. As long as Kilian came home every evening and cooked him a meal, waiting on the table in the flat upstairs as Umah closed up the store, he would be forever happy and satisfied.

Kilian was quite good at cooking and Umah had filled out a little, from his former starved appearance. They sat down at either side of their table every evening, and talked of their respective days over dinner. Kilian would laugh at something and Umah would fill in the appropriate image connected with that sound in his head, remembering a wide white grin, and a crinkled freckled nose.

It was all right, he told himself, that he could no longer see the handsome man he shared his life with. He had a very good memory, and had made sure to ‘see his fill’ while his left eye still worked. Besides, they’d both grow old and change, but Kilian would always look the same – inside Umah’s head.

Nevertheless, it was the only thing he sometimes still cried about.

Kilian got up from the table after they’d finished their meal and cleared it off, but returned to put something under Umah’s nose. The distinct smell of candied nuts wafted over him and made his mouth water, as full as he was.

“I brought you a gift,” Kilian whispered in his ear. “So… I thought, tonight… maybe you’d let your hair down and put on your white boots and let me unwrap a gift of my own?”

Umah grinned, took the bag of candied nuts out of Kilian’s hand and put his own hand up to caress his lover’s cheek. He did also have his fingers, not only his memory. His fingers could read coins, but they could read Kilian’s face, as well.

“Perhaps,” he teased. “Just maybe, I will…”

He was not ‘Little White Boots’ anymore, and Kilian never made him feel as if he should be.

However, if he had a handsome man kneeling before him now and then, to unlace those soft knee-high boots, so he could kiss his way up from his insteps to his slim calves, while worshipping those narrow pale feet – then that was only between him and his mate, wasn’t it.