"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."

He nods again. "I'd like that, yes." 

"A one-year contract to start, I think?"

A year with Chris. "Whatever the standard length is." 

"I usually recommend six months or a year. Two years in exceptional circumstances, such as a slave from a Marketplace family."

He nods.

"Sorry, I know I'm not offering much, I'm just — a year with you." 

"You can renew a contract at the end of the term!"

"Multiple years with you!" 

"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."

He glows at praise exactly as much as he did before. Maybe a little bit more, even. 

"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.

Someday he's going to be good enough at this to be able to tell what Chris is deliberately not saying. 

"Makes sense." 

"Mm. I should introduce you at Alex and Grendel's. --You'd either love Jack or hate him, not sure which."

A soft curious sound. He laces their fingers together — this might be soft-world, he's not sure, but he never wants to not be touching Chris. 

Chris doesn't act like he notices but his fingers curl around Marlo's. 

"He runs the stable. He's very... aggressive. He'll humiliate you and beat the shit out of you and shove his giant cock up your ass till you squeal. --Not, of course, without my permission, which I am not inclined to give unless you'd rather like to be beaten and raped."

"I would prefer not to be, not that I expect that to be a surprise." 

"I like it."

Chris has seen Marlo blushing before; it isn't a surprise how he looks when he was not expecting something to be that hot. 

(He was. Maybe not being perfectly truthful with himself, a moment ago. He puts that thought aside for later, not for forever, because he's not doing that anymore but he doesn't actually have to deal with it right this moment.) 

"If you want to you can watch sometime."

"Thank you, Chris." 

"Would you like to?"

"Please, Chris."