*Sorry for the delay, I recently had to do a lot of studying and had very little time for Lit, but I hope I can churn out a few more stories now.
All characters are 18+*
*
Brekken was the name of the Scots-Irish cook. He was a mostly strait man, but he had found out that he had a fondness for boys later in life. He liked to watch the younger sailors with their shirts off, and he often had visions of their sweet white buttocks in his sleep. The fragile boy that he kept in the anchor-chamber was the first boy he had ever fucked.
Matteo lived in the tiny chamber. He never spoke to Brekken, not even to tell the cook his name. If Roderick had known how well his 'conditioning' had worked he would have been overjoyed.
Brekken was not demonstrative, and the sex was frank and unappealing, but the cook went extra lengths to try and make his little prisoner happy. Every time he came down he tried to give Matteo a little gift. Matteo was grateful to Brekken, he stored the little gifts in a corner, and sometimes playing with them was the only thing that kept him from going insane.
Brekken gave him little lumps of charcoal to draw on the walls with, and the walls were covered with clumsy drawings that steadily got better and better, and Matteo's hands were constantly blackened with it. He brought a little lump of the soft clay that was stored for caulking the hull. Brekken brought interesting fish bones, and feathers from sea birds, and twice he brought sharks teeth from sharks that bored sailors had gaffed. At least once a week he tried to bring an interesting morsel of food other then the stale water and hard biscuits that Matteo subsided on. A pickle, a scrap of bacon, a sip of wine, one precious time, an egg.
Matteo learned to sleep. During his captivity with Roderick he had spent much of his time in a blank-eyed coma, occasionally moving to feebly scratch his healing wounds, or to relieve himself, feeling his body and mind atrophy.
With Brekken he did a sort of exercise. He now had the strength to do simple exercises similar to squats and pushups. He didn't have the room to stand, but he found workouts that would exhaust every muscle in his body. He didn't know where the ship was going, and he didn't have the language or the courage to ask, but he wanted to be able to run when he got there.
As a bonus, the exercise made it easier to sleep. He loved sleep, it could eat up the hours like no amount of doodling with charcoal or playing with clay could. He could sleep for up to sixteen hours at a time.
It was established that Matteo did not enjoy their sex. Brekken knew that, and sometimes he felt vaguely bad about it. He knew that women loved sex when they felt good, but he just didn't have the know-how or the courage to try and make the little redhead enjoy it.
One thing that Matteo loved, one thing that the frail beast needed, was the time after sex. After finishing his clumsy self-servicing little hump, Matteo on his hands and knees, the big Scots-Irish cook would gasp and collapse a little. Matteo would stay under him, loving and craving the feel of the big man's skin and warmth. Matteo desperately needed the man's touch.
About two hundred years in the future, a man called Harlow would do experiments with baby rhesus monkeys. He was the pioneer of the scientific study of love, and he found that given the choice between a cloth-covered doll with no food and a wire-covered doll with a milk-giving nipple, the baby monkeys would always cling to the soft doll for comfort, sometimes for up to twenty-two hours a day.
The big man gave Matteo nourishment, and gave him things to occupy himself with for the long hours of the day. He gave Matteo water to clean himself, and he daily cleaned out the pot he had left for Matteo's waste. In most ways he was the perfect caregiver of his rare little beast in a cage.
But at times, Matteo would have traded it all for those few moments of intimacy.
---
A month had passes. The little chamber was freezing cold despite the extra blankets Brekken had smuggled down, and Matteo spent much of his time in a warm little nest. It was loathe to leave the little pocket of body heat to eat or bathe or use the pot. Matteo had been in a blank state for the last hour, the kind of waking dreams that some call daydreaming, but absolutely nothing had been going through his head. He had been watching the faint mist of his breath waft up to the ceiling.
He had taken to doing this recently, the boards of the ceiling had first become shiny with frost, and now small icicles were growing ever-so-slowly. He had perfected the act of perfect, mindless meditation, not thinking, or sleeping, but something between the two.
The soft three-note knock woke him from his meditation, and a delighted smile split his face when Brekken came in. The chamber was too short for him to stand, or even to sit up comfortably. He crawled in on his knees and one hand, his bald head shining in the dim warm light from his candle. Normally the only light came from the hole in the wall where the anchor rope chafed slowly against the metal rim. At night, Matteo always stuffed this hole closed with rags to prevent the slightest ray of moonlight from reaching him.
Brekken smiled at the huddled figure of the boy in all his blankets. He got in and sat down on the floor after throwing down a blanket.
"Got a treat and some trinkets for you to play with, boy."
He unwrapped the cloth bundle that he had been holding to his chest. Matteo sniffed the air and he could smell cinnamon and honey. Brekken gave him a cloth, which had a sticky doughy ball in it. The ball was of soft bread-like dough with the consistency of pudding. It was a treat that the sailors liked to call skilly and duff. It was bread dough mixed with honey and cinnamon and raisons. Matteo's mouth watered but he just took a little bite of the warm sticky dough before wrapping it and putting it aside.
Brekken gave him his daily rations of hard bread and topped off his leather water bottle with a bit of water from his own. Today's little gifts included a massive white feather from a seabird, a blue marble, and a small wooden carving of a fish. Matteo thanked him in his customary speechless way, by taking Brekken's hand and kissing it softly.
They had developed their rhythm; gifts, sex, snuggle, leave. Brekken couldn't have been more surprised when he took hold of Matteo's frail white shoulder and the boy pushed his hand away.
Matteo was painfully bored, and he wanted something more fulfilling. He sometimes ached with desire and need after the clumsy bouts of sex. He wanted to make it good. He saw the beginnings of anger in the big cook's face, but he hastily reassured him in his strange speechless way. He cooed softly and gently put his own hands on the man's shoulders.
He leaned forward and for the first time in the month of knowing the cook, Matteo kissed him. Brekken suddenly understood, with the boy's soft full mouth on his and his little nest opening up like a flower; he understood that the boy wanted good sex. He tried to be an attentive student.
Moving clumsily in the small space, and shivering in the frigid air, Matteo maneuvered them so that the cook was leaning against the wall and the small beast-boy was straddling his hips with those slender thighs. The blankets covered Matteo's shoulders like a many-layered cape and his pale soft nipples had hardened into points as hard and small as birdshot.
Matteo kissed him, their mouths clumsy and wet and slowly learning. With his small hands he clasped the older man's wrists and put Brekken's hands on his shivering body. Brekken groaned softly, feeling shivering warm skin that was pocked with large goosebumps.
