Free Force Majeure by Daniel O'Mahoney

I don’t remember. It was a long time ago.’
    ‘What did he look like?’
    ‘I don’t remember. I don’t remember his face or anything about him.’
    ‘He’s a big blank.’
    ‘But he was real. He held my hand. You remember someone’s touch even if you forget the rest.’ Pause – she thought he’d dropped off – then: ‘He was recruiting me. That was it.’
    ‘Go to sleep.’
    ‘Do you want to know why I keep coming to the old free house?’
    ‘Not tonight. Go to sleep.’
    Sleep.
    In Candida, Kay dreamed, in Candida (where dreams are true).
    For the past week she had dreamt of Xan, every night. She knew him more intimately in her imagination than she did from their few minutes together in the cell. In dreams, he came to her like an old friend or a childhood memory. He took her to the high point of the city and paralysed her tenderly and stripped her tenderly and mounted her tenderly. There was no join between their bodies. Their skins, reflecting one another, met seamlessly, and her consciousness flickered from her to him and back again, until it was no longer possible to tell who was who.
    She had never been in love before. That poison.
    Xan lay gasping and red on the brickwork, steam rising from his body. ‘When I was at school,’ he said, ‘there was a girl who claimed she used to be a boy until a wizard kidnapped her, locked her in a tower and cut off her dick. As you do.’
    Her mouth filled with laughter and phlegm; she had to cover her face.
    ‘We must have gone to the same school.’
    And Esteban was watching them – no, watching her – and his face was haunted.
    It stops being a dream about Xan and becomes a dream about Esteban, as he is now. This is, after all, her first night away from the old free house since she arrived in Candida, and her body adjusts to new surroundings. Kay has her head in his pillow, where his dreams and fantasies have soaked. She flits from the bed into his skin and watches herself through drowsy but unsleeping eyes. He has an unshiftable erection. She feels it as a hungry alien graft, a parasite in control of his entire body.
    There is something of the hero in Captain Milo Esteban. He’s morbid and romantic. There is an attractive woman lying under his bedclothes and those sheets are an invisible country to be conquered. He fondly imagines the folds on the blankets, faint lines in the gloom, as a labyrinth that all champions must pass through to reach the centre, where the captive maiden is staked out as dragon-feed, where the treasure lies buried, where the minotaur lurks.
    No.
    No, she’s the real deal. She’s not a prize or a riddle to be solved, no, she’s not a virgin or a monster, no, she’s not territory to be seized and tamed. She’s complicated in flesh and spirit. She’s a human animal. His head is full of her, of the pheromone signature of her pores, of the memory of the curve of her breasts below her clothes, of the tiny movements of her hands and her head as she talks. He wants to know the taste of her mouth and her sweat and her inner thigh.
    There’s water-pressure at the base of his stomach and alcohol fizzling away in his system. His bedroom, though cool, is stuffy, because they’ve used all the air in arguing. He goes to the bathroom to relieve himself, then returns to stand over her sleeping body while one hand rubs the back of his neck and the other cups his genitals through the line of his trousers. Embarrassment. That’s what he’s feeling. Embarrassment and self-loathing.
    ‘You found her then?’
    He looks to his side, only mildly surprised. ‘Is this her?’
    ‘This is her,’ says his guest. Esteban paces to his desk and takes out challanco ’s envelope, torn to expose padding. Grey wood pulp sheds like confetti on his floorboards. He hasn’t looked through it since he received it – two days after his defeat at the hand and the broomstick of Ernesto (spit!) de Broca, one day after his meeting with the dreadful