Agreeing to go into service is easy. No harder than signing up for the Marines. He's spent so long serving his country, it's a comfort to know he'll be acting in service again.
"Mm." Kiss. "Mine should too."
He settles in and closes his eyes and holds Chris closer than he strictly needs to.
He still doesn't remember more than flashes of what he'd dreamed about, but when he wakes up he's warm and comfortable and in Chris's arms.
It's 5:53. He watches Chris's face for seven minutes, and then gets out of bed as carefully as he can and gets started making breakfast and coffee.
"Very good." Chris kisses his forehead. "I release you from training. I am absolutely incapable of training you in an unbiased way. I assume you don't want me to call Grendel."
Breakfast!
"If Anderson approves," he says, "I think the best thing would be for me to buy you. 'Something' is not a recognized kind of person in the Marketplace, and you'd be an atrocious trainer and a worse spotter. It'd add to my debt but that can't be helped and I'm not going to pay it off for decades anyway."
"I don't know how well you'd do at Alex and Grendel's, you'd have to play a role in the training of the novices but you might do fine with teaching them self-defense and helping Rachel teach them to clean and so on and letting me handle the punishments. --You can speak freely and ask questions, you are for now a free person."
"I mostly just don't have much to say — I can help with teaching self-defense but I have very little experience with teaching."
"As much as I'd like to spend the next year honing you into the pinnacle of slave perfection, I don't much fancy adding another year's worth of rent and food to my debt with Anderson, and so I am going to have to train. So we talk Grendel and Alex into hiring you on, or I train independently, and either way you'll end up having to help. --Quite selfishly, I'd like you as my assistant, if Anderson lets me be a slave and you're my assistant we can arrange to be sold together."
"I usually recommend six months or a year. Two years in exceptional circumstances, such as a slave from a Marketplace family."
"If Anderson approves," he doesn't say.
"If you don't get tired of having a master who is, himself, a slave," he doesn't say.
"You could have had a year with me anyway," he says, "if you were a bit less naturally talented. If not for the sex issue you would have been a fine novice slave in a week."
"Last slave I trained for a year was a linguist. Good cocksucker, cried very prettily when I hit him. I had to spend six months beating the judgmentalness out of him."
He takes Chris's hand and squeezes it. "Well. Now I get multiple years with you anyway."
If Anderson approves goes without saying, so he doesn't say it.
"I think I should spend a few weeks with you before we bring it up to Anderson, so I have a better sense of how the relationship will work," he says.
"And so that I'll have the memories if she says no," he doesn't say.