That one little gasp led to difficulties afterward, though. When it was over, Keltryn lay back in a dazed haze of pleasure and astonishment, and only gradually did she realize that Dinitak was staring at her with a stunned look on his face that could almost have been one of horror.
“Is something wrong?” she whispered, close to tears. “Was I displeasing to you?”
“Oh, no, no, no! You were wonderful!” he said. “More than wonderful. But why didn’t you tell me it was your first time?” His forehead was knotted with anguish.
So that was it! His damned morals again!
“It never would have occurred to me. If you were wondering about it, I suppose you always could have asked.”
“One doesn’t ask about things like that,” he said sternly. It was as if she had done something dreadfully improper, she thought. How had this become her fault? “Anyway,” he went on, “I had no reason to suspect it. Not when you inveigled me down to this pool like this, and flung your clothes aside so shamelessly—and—” He struggled for words, did not seem to be able to find the right ones, and finally blurted, “You should have said something, Keltryn! You should have told me!”
This was bewildering. She began to feel anger rising. “Why? What possible difference could knowing it have made?”
“Because I feel so guilty for what’s happened, now. Unknowingly or not, I’ve done something that I can’t forgive myself for. To take a young woman’s virginity, Keltryn—it’s a kind of theft, in a way—”
This was getting farther and farther from anything that made sense to her. “You didn’t take anything. I gave.”
“Even so—one simply doesn’t do such things.”
“One doesn’t? You mean, you don’t. You sound positively prehistoric, Dinitak. Do you think the Castle is some sacred sanctuary of purity? I’ve spent months in the midst of a pack of silly boys who were absolutely slavering to do the very thing with me that you and I just did, and I said no to them all, and the first time I decide to say yes I get blamed for not having informed you in advance that I—that—”
Tears were surging up again, but this time they were tears of rage, not of fear. The idiot! How could he dare feel guilty in such a wonderful moment? What right did he have to expect her to give him details of her past sexual history?
But she knew that she had to put her anger aside and do something to repair this, and fast, or their friendship would never survive it.
In the gentlest tone she could find Keltryn said, “I don’t want you to think you did anything wrong, Dinitak. So far as I’m concerned what you did was one hundred percent right. Yes, I was a virgin—and I can’t tell you how tired I was of continuing to be one, and I think I would have gone right out of my mind if I had gone on being one an hour longer.”
But that only made things worse. Now he was the angry one. “I see. You wanted to get rid of that tiresome innocence of yours, and therefore you found a convenient implement to help you dispose of it. Well, I’m glad to have been of use.”
“Implement? No! No! What an awful thing to say. You don’t understand anything, do you?”
“Don’t I?”
“Please. You’re spoiling everything. All this pious outrage of yours. This blustering righteous indignation. I know that you can’t help it, that you take all these issues of morality tremendously seriously. But look at the mess you’re making between us! It’s all so terribly stupid and unnecessary.”
He started to reply, but she put her hand over his mouth.
“Don’t you realize I love you, Dinitak? That that’s the reason why you’re here with me tonight, and not Polliex, or Toraman Kanna, or some other boy from Septach Melayn’s fencing class? All these weeks we were together, and you never once made a move, and I sat there praying desperately that you would, but you were either too shy or too pure or too something else to do it, and so, finally—finally—tonight, the two of us at the swimming pool, I thought—I’ll put him in a position where he can’t resist me, and see what happens—”
At last he understood.
“I love you, Keltryn. That’s the only reason I was waiting. What I thought was that the time for that part of things hasn’t come yet. I didn’t want to cheapen our friendship by behaving like all those others. And I’m very sorry now that I miscalculated everything so badly.”
Keltryn grinned. “Don’t be. All that’s over and done with. And now—”
“Now—”
He reached for her. She eluded his grasp, rolled past him to the side of the pool, threw herself in with a resounding splash. He came splashing after her. She swam down the middle of the pool with all the speed at her command, a pink streak cutting a line through the pink water, and Dinitak came barreling after her. At the far end she pulled herself up to the tiles again, laughing, and held out her arms to him.
That was the beginning. It was all much less complicated for them after that. Keltryn began to comprehend that that odd puritanical side of him had its own set of boundaries, that the harsh code of values by which he lived was not something that could be delineated in simple tones of black and white. Dinitak was no ascetic. Far from it; passion and lust were certainly no strangers to his makeup. But things had to happen in accordance with his unique sense of what was proper, and Keltryn realized that she would not always be able to anticipate what that was.
In the weeks that followed, they spent night after night in each other’s arms, until it actually began to seem desirable to have some time off to get some sleep. Dinitak’s trip to Muldemar provided that. Provided rather too much of it, Keltryn thought, by the second day of his absence. She could not get enough of him—nor, it seemed, he of her.
She continued her twice-weekly fencing sessions with Audhari of Stoienzar. After Septach Melayn’s departure for the Labyrinth the fencing class had dissolved, but she and Audhari went on meeting, even so. Fulkari, for a while, had been convinced that a romance was budding there; but Fulkari had been wrong about that. Keltryn had never regarded big, good-natured Audhari as anything but a friend.
He guessed right away that something had changed in her life. Perhaps it was the dark semicircles under her eyes, or perhaps a certain slowing of her reflexes that had set in, now that she was getting so little sleep. Or, Keltryn thought, maybe there’s some kind of emanation given off by girls who have begun going to bed with men, a visible aura of un-chastity, that every man is easily able to detect.
And finally he mentioned it. “There’s something different about you these days,” Audhari observed, as they went at each other with their foils.
“Is there? And what would that be, then?”
He laughed. “I couldn’t really say.”
They dropped the subject there. He appeared to regret having brought it up, and she certainly was not eager to pursue the conversation.
She wondered, though, about his ambiguous words. Why couldn’t he say? Was it because he genuinely didn’t know what it was that had changed about her? Or did he feel uncomfortable about talking to her about it? Though he made no further references to it, it seemed to her, though, that a more personal tone had begun to steal into his remarks to her: a flirtatious one, even. He noted that she seemed not to be getting as much sleep as she needed. He observed that there was a new sexiness in the way she walked. He had never said things like that to her before.