Henric and Alex Part XII (v1.2)

Tags: Villainous male knight / virtuous female squire, reverse trap, oral


It was the last time he would be removing the bandages from her shoulder, and Henric’s hand was quivering with excitement. Alex looked unnerved, sitting near the foot of Henric’s bed this morning. He’d been making her share his bed every night of her healing process and most of those nights he’d used her in one way or another. This morning, neither of them wore anything except for Alex’ bandages, and she wouldn’t be wearing them for long.

They sat face to face, crosslegged on the bed. Enough time had passed that Alex had better come to accept that she had to be pragmatic and couldn’t react to Henric based on her emotions. She saw him almost more as a force of nature than a human when they were alone together--he was a storm, a tidal wave. He could not be ignored, bartered with, nor turned away, only outlasted.

On his hands and knees he crawled forward to Alex, who leaned back slightly as he brought his face to hers and nuzzled her. “Are you excited?” he asked, running fingertips over the cloth bandages.

“I’m excited to get back to full-time training,” she said. Her eyes fled to the corners of the room, away from Henric.

He grabbed her jaw and kissed her lips, then down her neck to where the bandages began. He was almost shuddering, knowing that underneath the bandages would be the mark he was counting on seeing the most. His handprint.

Being the biggest injury, the handprint on her shoulder had taken the longest to heal and had stayed bandaged several weeks after the rest. Alex had taken the time to look over her other scars. The marks from the monster’s claws had left little star shapes on her thighs where she had been punctured. The places where she had been splattered with acid were pink and shiny and very slightly concave. From a distance, it was like she’d been splashed with pink paint.

Henric cherished these marks, from the line on her back where he had first cut her on her second night to the splatter mark between her breasts. He unwrapped her bandages, beaming like a child opening a gift until he got a look at the finished product--then he smiled like an artist admiring his finest work.

The handprint was much like her other scars. The pink skin was tender, perfectly smooth. Alex couldn’t see it except for a blotch of pink out of her left eye, but she had felt the pain for so long that she knew its exact, precise dimensions. Henric’s breath hitched in his throat.

“Gorgeous,” he murmured finally, and Alex shut her eyes when he lay his hand again on the mark he had left on her skin. They both felt it: the fit was perfect.

She hung her head to let her tears fall out. She knew that a scar was not a disability, it was barely a deformity. There were people who had lost legs and arms, she believed it wasn’t fair for her to be sad about her mark when there were people worse off than she was--but she couldn’t help it. He had branded her, treated her the way men treated cattle. And knowing that she would carry his mark for the rest of her life was a torture of its own. Her seventeenth birthday was coming up soon, and she would have to spend it with this mark on her shoulder. Fortunately she had birthday plans that she had been machinating over for the last few weeks.

“Gorgeous,” Henric repeated. He touched Alex’ cheek, but she ignored that.

“Can I go back to training full time?” she asked. She felt well enough. She’d been spending days outside for the last week or so while her body fixed itself up, but she hadn’t been able to participate with swords beyond some basic shadowboxing. The tenderness of her shoulder had meant she couldn’t carry the backpacks full of stones they used for strength training. With the other knights and squires out on assignment all over the place trying to chase down Henric’s wizard friend, she’d been horribly bored.

“Perhaps,” he said after a moment.

She knew what he wanted but she preferred to play dumb, he grabbed her and started to pull her in close to him.

Hammering on the door. Ellis. “Alex! We’re back! Can you come out?”

She saw a chance. “Yeah! I’ll be right out, just a second!”

She’d avoid the storm just this once.

Henric gave his squire a glare but didn’t want to hold her now. “I truly loathe that disgusting friend of yours,” he told her. “This is not Alex’ residence. This is my apartment. You happen to live here. Yet he hammers on the door and calls your name. He asks you to come out, he does not ask me if you may have permission to come out.”

Alex pulled from his bed and climbed down from the loft as fast as she could. Exposed to the air, her shoulder felt cold. She found her wrap where it had been discarded last night when Henric had disrobed her, and she started tying it, wiping her eyes with the end to get the last tears off of her face.

Henric’s head hung over the side of the loft, looking down with annoyance. “I don’t like it, Alex.”

She looked back up at him, pulling on underwear. “Ellis is my best friend. You don’t have to like it.”

“Don’t try me, Alex,” he said at her dismissive tone. She glanced up at him again and caught him machinating, a dark look in his eyes before he continued. “We will be bringing you back to full time training today. Be ready.”

Training was the only thing Alex came close to enjoying with Henric. It was educational, even if he was a dick. He was an excellent swordsman and she had learned lots. She replied, “Yes sir,” through her tunic as she pulled it over her head and ran outside.

Ellis, Micah, and Glenn were down the stairs on the grass, looking tired and filthy as all boys after more than a week of camping do. Alex noticed their smells when she entered their circle but wasn’t too bothered by them. “What’s the word on that wizard?” she asked them.

“Sir Cuthbert thinks that he’s getting together his zombie army but that he’s planning on fleeing the country,” Micah said. “Good riddance.”

Alex wondered if Henric knew about that while they battered her with rumors that they’d heard and speculation from the knights. She absorbed it quietly until the other knights came by with towels and started to herd their squires off towards the springs. Alex excused herself and headed out to the field to grab her wooden sword and hold it again. She twirled it and stepped between stances, then paused to stretch sore muscles.

Henric found her a while later when she was alone on the field, still moving through drills. “Those delinquents ran off?”

“They wanted to bathe because they were on such a long trip,” Alex explained for them with a shrug. “Obviously I didn’t join them.”

Henric smirked as he reached for her to move her elbows and correct her form with the sword. “Afraid they’d all want a piece of you if you joined them?”

“Don’t be disgusting,” She said, looking at him with fury as she accepted his corrections. “Most knights aren’t like you.”

“Well that’s certainly true,” he said, puffing out his chest with a grin. He motioned for her to move to her next stance of the drill. Alex took a step and swung her sword in a carefully controlled arc, then paused to be evaluated when Henric stepped in to work again. He barely needed to adjust her form, and even then it was only because she was out of practice. “They would never be able to please you as well as I do.”

“I wouldn’t want them to!” she said. “I just want to be one of them, you idiot!”

Henric kicked the side of one of her knees hard enough to make her topple into the mud, and he didn’t help her back up. “Get back into your stance, Alex, I don’t have time for your games.”


Midnight found Alex and Henric bathing. Due to the bandages she’d been without a bath for a while and Henric was glad to be soaping her up and scrubbing her down again, holding the scowling girl with her back to his chest.

“You have been allowed to wallow in your own filth long enough,” he said, using soap-bar shaped piece of porous volcanic rock to scrape at her skin just hard enough to scrape away everything that wasn’t Alex. She didn’t enjoy it at all, but stopped whining a few minutes later when she saw him using the same vicious method on himself.

“Why do you use that thing?” she complained, submerging up to her neck to stay warm. With the pumice stone he seemed to remove everything on his surface.

“I have a sense of smell,” he said smugly. “Pumice works wonders clearing everything away. It’s like shaving for skin.”

“It hurts, though,” Alex said, watching Henric reach over his own shoulder to scrape and scrub at his back. Alex had to admit to herself that Henric was probably the most hygienic man she had ever met. Outside of his swordfighting, it was his one redeeming quality.

“Plenty of good things hurt, Alex,” he sighed. “I am not some animal like those other knights or peasants on the street. I am as clean as I am handsome because I refuse to waste these good looks on mud.”

The glaring squire had no comment on that. She glided past him in the water to the deeper side of the spring where the water came up almost to her shoulders, and she stood around there and floated a little. Down at the barracks, she saw a tiny distant yellow light in one of the windows that she knew led to Sir Isaac’s apartment. Ellis was probably still awake with Isaac. They were probably up late, talking like brothers despite the difference in age. Isaac probably had an important lesson or funny story to share with Ellis to help him become a better knight, a better man.

Alex glanced at Henric, who was lathering soap over his chest so the bubbles mixed in among the short dark hairs that were in abundance there. He saw the look of dissatisfaction on her face. “Tell me what’s on your mind, Alex.”

She glared at him. “The light in Sir Isaac’s apartment is on. I was wishing I was there with him and Ellis.”

“Naked?” Henric ventured.

“No,” Alex said angrily. “Just talking.”

Henric slipped through the water out to where she was, coming up behind her to put his hands on her shoulders, one over the scar in the opposite direction. “Just fantasizing about talking? I don’t believe it, Alex. Too boring. Too vague. You’re a girl with a wit to her, you don’t just fantasize about an action, you fantasize an entire scenario.”

That much was true. Alex accepted his words and mulled them over.

“I was thinking about what it would be like if I were Isaac’s squire,” she said. “Not yours. So I could get a real education.”

“I didn’t realize you preferred that muscleman physique,” Henric continued to insult her.

“I don’t care what people look like,” she said. “And I hate sex. I hate it and want nothing to do with it. Stop acting like you think it’s something I would ever actually want.”

Alex wasn’t certain that she truly hated sex, but she had hated everything remotely sexual that had ever happened to her so much that it was hard for her to imagine that even if she could get away from Henric she would ever decide to seek it out. Part of her wanted Ellis, but any time her mind had drifted to that fantasy after she had been burned by the acid, she could not imagine a scenario where she could remove her tunic and he wouldn’t cringe at the sight of her.

She told herself that she could be content with hugs. It was her fate anyway, being someone who had to be a man without the right parts.

She didn’t flinch when Henric approached her to scratch shampoo into her short hair, she just kept her eyes shut so nothing would get in them. Henric commented, “If you didn’t enjoy it, you wouldn’t orgasm. Yet you very often do, young one. You need to stop lying to yourself and start accepting the way that you and I are.”

Alex thought, Haven’t I done that enough?

“Rinse,” Henric commanded, and she ducked underwater to rinse out her hair, rising from the depths unhappily and letting all the water run down her face where she fought hard to keep tears from showing.

Henric talked a bit longer in a tone that let Alex know she would be just fine if she tuned him out, so she ignored him while she rubbed her eyes and dunked underwater again briefly. Her ears refocused on him when she heard him say, “Tomorrow, you and I are going to leave to rendezvous with a few of my friends, and then I will introduce you to Kerran.”

“I don’t want that,” she said immediately. “He’s undead, it’s our duty--”

He had very quickly grabbed her head and thrust it underwater. He counted very slowly to three, aloud and in a deceptively bored tone--as if threatening Alex with drowning were a dull affair. Three seconds was a short enough time to ensure her safety and a long enough time to frighten her badly, and pulled his squire’s head up. Pink lips sputtered water and she convulsed when she coughed.

“Don’t talk to me about duty, Alex. It’s your duty to obey me. It’s your duty to report men who violate the knight’s code. It’s your duty to not violate the code yourself by being a woman. So just shut up about that. You will meet Kerran, you will do as he says, and you will be wonderfully well-behaved. He will meet you and judge your worth and he will judge me through you. Do you understand?”

She did when the water in her ears came unplugged. He was going to be showing her off like a trophy and he expected her to play along. “When will we get back here?”

“A few days,” Henric suggested with a shrug. “We won’t be far from here, but visiting with old friends is so important.”

Alex counted days and figured they would probably be back in time for her birthday. Good. She needed that night to happen in The Barracks for things to run smoothly. She needed to be able to catch Henric alone.

“Which of your friends are we meeting?” she asked.

“Aziz, Yorick. Ssazra will likely show up as well but I wasn’t able to contact him. He keeps ears to the ground though. Whatever he has that serve as ears.”

“Lizard people have ears,” Alex said. She knew this from her books. She was pleased to have the opportunity to see Yorick again, and believed that Ssazra was also on her side--where else had Yorick gotten the things he had given her? “But they’re more inside their heads. They hear pretty differently from us.”

Henric shrugged and began to wade to the shallower parts of the spring. “Sub-human anatomy doesn’t concern me, Alex.”

“I thought he was your friend,” she said, sounding almost hurt in Ssazra’s place at Henric’s racist remark against him. In reality, Ssazra was quite aware of and indifferent to Henric’s stance on non-humans.

“I’ve no patience for your bleeding heart, young one,” Henric said, and sat on the edge of the pool, looking at Alex’ lean back and the subtle ridges and valleys that made up her form in the moonlight. He stroked himself watching her lean out of the water to stare out at The Barracks, watching her use her arms on the edge to lift herself out of the water for a better view just enough so that he could see her entire glistening back and ass. Only for a moment though, and then she slipped back into the water, where the dark and reflective surface hid most of her from his eyes.

She seemed not to have noticed him.

“Alex,” he called to her and leaned back with one arm behind him to support his weight while the other stayed on his cock. “Come here.”

She turned back to look at him and he saw her face change from curious to disappointed in a moment. Because she was naked he saw so much of the tenseness in her body when she became fearful. He smirked.

“I said come here,” he said, and let go of his member long enough to beckon her. His voice hadn’t become threatening yet, but it was enough to coax Alex into hanging her head in shame and coming over to where he dangled his feet in the water. Her footsteps were cautious and became more so as she entered the radius where he would be able to grab her. “Because you claim to hate sex and because I am a generous man, I’ll let you get away with just using your mouth tonight.”

Her brow creased furiously and there was a slight bulge at the sides of her face where she had locked her jaw, but this was followed by a slackening of her body as she gave up. Henric grinned as she got to her knees and scooted closer on the perfectly smooth stones to bring himself towards her pink lips.

He’d made her practice on him when she had been healing. They’d spent a significant amount of time in evenings where Henric had become determined to teach her exactly how to please him. More time had been devoted to teaching his squire how to please him with her mouth than had been spent talking about literature, languages, mathematics, history, or any other academic pursuit.

Alex felt hollow, as if she were a suit of armor without the knight inside. She was eye level with Henric’s navel, taking a few deep breaths while she looked at his erection. Her eyes traced veins that she had regrettably come to know well down to the base.

“Go on,” he encouraged her by wrapping a guiding hand around the back of her head that promised retribution if she wasn’t up to his standards. He pushed her face forward until her lips brushed against the head and he felt her shudder. “I’m waiting, Alex.”

She started with a lick along the underside of his shaft from the base to the tip. Her tongue was flexed and wide to touch as much of him as she could. This was his preferred first step, and it made an electric, adrenal shiver rocket up and down his spine. Her tongue felt oddly warmer than the hot spring water, and when it reached his tip he pushed a drop of precum onto it.

Next, the head of his cock disappeared between her lips, into the tight confines of her mouth to be probed and massaged further by her tongue. He breathed heavily and held the back of Alex’ head to keep her hard at work on him. Her blue eyes were open, but they were empty.

“Such a good girl,” he purred to her, following up his words with a heavy grunt. “But don’t forget your hands.”

At the reminder, her eyes briefly looked up to make eye contact with him again as she reached forward to grab and massage his balls with one hand while the other hand came up to grip the part of his shaft that her lips couldn’t reach comfortably. Henric’s hips bucked gently, pushing his member far enough into Alex’ mouth that she made a sound of discomfort. He didn’t care.

“You can do it, squire,” he said. They were words of reassurance he should have been sharing with her in her training on the field or in the library, and Alex shut her eyes as she felt that pain sharply in her heart. It only made her suck harder, fondle him more roughly, and drag her tongue over every inch of him.

He let his head tilt back finally and a guttural moan came from his lips. The knight came in Alex’ mouth and held her hair tightly.

“Swallow,” he demanded, and she did, with a sickened look on her face. The moment he let go of her hair she dove under water to rinse out her mouth and wash away her shame. Henric stayed at the edge of the pool, just smiling and breathing, finally watching Alex climb out and put on her clothes to head back to the barracks.

Alex’ short, wet hair made her ears freezing cold on the walk back, and her heart felt just as cold when Henric caught up to her and clapped her on the shoulder.

“What?” she asked flatly.

“I’m looking forward to tomorrow,” he told her, and pulled her close for a sideways hug.

“You just want me to be something you can show off,” she said.

“Well aren’t you though?” he asked her. Soon they walked up the stairs to Henric’s apartment and he opened the door. “You’re the child of a lord. If no one were to interfere you would be king someday. And you of all squires were dealt to me.”

Alex didn’t like the way he used the caveat, ‘if no one were to interfere.’ She thought about The Princess and would have been worried for her safety if she wasn’t so confident in the abilities of her bodyguard. She said, “Those are all the things you hate about me though.”

She tried to go to her furs but Henric stopped her and pointed up to order her to his bed. She was too tired to fight, and stripped down again. The squire was still wet and dripping.

“It’s true,” Henric admitted. “Your heritage and wealth are your worst features. Fortunately they haven’t destroyed you.”

“I don’t even know what you mean,” Alex complained, climbing up to the bed while Henric removed his heavy clothes and followed.

“I don’t really expect a rich girl like you to understand,” he dismissed. “You wouldn’t get it. Now come, get in the bed.”