“You are talking of reasons I should try something else. I think it may be time for us to drop the titles anyway, Vasily. I think it is time to recognize that the future is not for our class anymore.”
“Haven’t you learned anything in the academy, Pyotr? History is with us. The Bolsheviks are rabble. We are the ones trained to fight and to rule. The peasants love us, and the Bosheviks are treating them as brutally as they do us. The serfs will rise to reinstate us. This is just a blip in history.”
“And yet we are the ones who retreated here two years ago, and now are preparing to retreat even further.” Pyotr had meant the statement to be ironic, but irony was wasted on one as thickheaded and medievally entrenched as the Baron Vasily Bestuzhev-Ryumin was.
“We are merely regrouping so that we can go on the counteroffensive. This is just strategic maneuvering. But enough of that. We are alone, and you know what I have intended. It could be days or weeks before we have another chance.”
“Vasily, no. I came here to think. No, oh, please, no.”
Pyotr’s torso was encased in one of Vasily’s arms, and the bigger man’s other hand was stroking Pyotr’s chest and belly.
“You have let me give you relief and you have given me relief, Pyotr. It was a promise that I could have you—fully.”
“It was just a barracks thing. The tensions of our life here. Just something we do in the . . . Ohhh.”
Vasily’s mouth had gone to Pyotr’s nipples and his hand had descended below the waistband of Pyotr’s sweat pants and taken possession of Pyotr’s cock.
“You do want me. You’re hard for me,” Vasily said with a low chuckle.
The two young men froze as the sound of a voice calling up from the riverfront reached their ears.
“He’s calling me,” Pyotr said, as he used the break in the tension of the moment to permit him to struggle out of Vasily’s grasp and rise up on his knees.
“Your minder calls, yes, and you must go.”
The voice was calling Pyotr’s name—insistently.
“We are at the beck and call of any of the faculty, Vasily. You know that.”
“Yes, but Grigory Orlov is especially attentive to you.”
“My father requested that he be.”
“But I’ll bet your father doesn’t know what Orlov has in mind for you. He wants to take you, Pyotr. Everyone knows that. And everyone knows what Orlov wants from the cadets who attract him.”
“Why is that different from what you want?” Pyotr had stood up and waved at Grigory Orlov, who was standing at the entrance of the academy’s boathouse. Orlov spied Pyotr and beckoned to him. Vasily, who was still sitting on the ground, was outside of Orlov’s range of vision.
“I am young and virile. And titled, as you are,” Vasily answered, his voice edged with bitterness and scorn. “What is Orlov? He is old and is no better than one of our servants. He trained here, but he is not a general. He is only good enough to teach—and to debauch as many of the cadets as he can. He isn’t worthy of you.”
“He’s a faculty member, and he’s seen me. I must answer his call and go down to him.”
“Of course you must. But beware of him. He wants only one thing from you. And you are too good to be deflowered by the likes of him.”
Pyotr could find no answer to that, so he turned and worked his way down the slope to the harbor walk and then to the door to the boathouse. Orlov had already entered the boathouse. He turned in the dim light of the interior, with the reflection of the waves lapping at the side of the academy yacht sending a dancing pattern on the ceiling of the chamber.
“We leave by truck in the morning,” Orlov declared.
“Do you know where we go now?” Pyotr asked.
“Yes, to the Black Sea, to Novorossiysk, to join the army of Admiral Kothak. But do not tell the other cadets. Kothak intends to impress them into service. We need every solider now, no matter how young or ill trained, to enlist in keeping the Bolsheviks from taking our Black Sea ports.”
“It sounds rather hopeless,” Pyotr said.
“It’s never hopeless. We are the ruling class. The communists cannot sustain this for very long. The people will come to the aid of Mother Russia.”
“Soon, I hope.”
“That is not why I sought you out,” Orlov said. He had pulled Pyotr toward him, and turned the young man so that his back was pressed into the side of the yacht that was pulled into the boathouse and that was slowly bobbing in the water next to the boathouse walkway. “We will be traveling for days, and I don’t know how soon we will be able to couple again. I must help supervise the pack out and you will be busy too. Lay on your back on the decking of the vessel. I want to have you again now, while I can.”
Pyotr obediently laid on the deck of the boat and lifted his legs, while Orlov took hold of the waistband of the young man’s sweat pants on either side and pulled them off his legs. The heel of one of Pyotr’s feet pressed into the wet decking of the boathouse walkway and his other leg raised up Orlov’s torso, the young Russian count moaned softly as Orlov’s mouth went to the cock that was still half hard from the recent attentions of Vasily’s fist.
In short order Orlov was holding both of Pyotr’s legs spread and raised, as he pressed his thighs between them and expertly fucked Pyotr’s channel—as he had been doing for two months.
Late in the night, exhausted from packing up his gear, Pyotr lay awake on his barracks cot, still conflicted on whether he would be there to mount the transports in the morning. There was nothing holding him to Kazan. It was a dreary backwater city. But he castigated himself—as he had done repeatedly for months—on having let Grigory Orlov make a woman out of him. The change in his life had been just too much for him, and Orlov was too dominant. And now Vasily was after him too. Vasily was stronger and younger and better built than Orlov was—but that wasn’t necessarily a good thing. Pyotr was ambivalent about what his preferences were. If only he’d been raised with some purpose in life—not to just bend with the wind.
Perhaps it would be best to take his chances away from the academy—to make a total break and to strike out on his own, no matter where it would lead him.
He heard the sounds of stifled sobbing, just a few cots down from him. He lifted his head and looked down the row of beds. Most of the young men were asleep, but not all. Vasily, almost on the opposite end of the chamber was fucking one of the cadets. Pyotr couldn’t tell who it was in the dimness of the moonlight coming through the unglazed windows of the old barracks building. But it could be almost any of the cadets. Vasily took whomever he wanted—even though he hadn’t completed his conquest of Pyotr yet. And Vasily was someone who needed release every night, sometimes twice a day. Pyotr assumed Vasily hadn’t come for him only because he was tired and didn’t want to bother with the struggle. Most of the cadets had come to accept his advances, some even to seek him out for his prowess and the size of him.
A blanket was stirring on one of the other cots and was raised enough to accommodate two of the cadets under it. There was the sound of sex, but the cadets had learned to ignore those sounds in the night. They almost always went to their cots exhausted, but they were particularly so tonight.