Chapter 5 #2
“There is one more,” he said.
“Yes, my Lord.”
“It is the hardest.”
“Tell me.”
He inhaled.
He took the stylus back up.
“When you break our contract,” he said—and the voice was quieter now, the lower register, the one he had used on the parapet when he had said you should not be here, precious one—“I will surrender my pride in equal measure to enforce your worth.”
He wrote.
The light ran longer on this one. The characters glowed for a count of seven, and then became law with a small audible hum.
I felt it. He would lower himself to lift me.
Every time I tried to make myself small, the same magic would make him smaller, until I had to choose between watching him diminish or learning to stand up.
He set the stylus down for the second time.
He turned, on the cold marble, and he looked at me.
The cracks stayed open. Not even the smallest reflex moved him to close them.
He let me look, and the bond between us hummed, and the heat that had been climbing under the solemnity climbed harder, because there was nothing more wanton, I was learning, than his gaze on me without armour after he had laid all of his down.
“Now you, baby.”
He turned the parchment toward me.
He took my right hand, lifted it. He set the stylus into my fingers as you put a thing into a child’s hand the first time—the careful curl of his fingers around mine, adjusting the grip, the gold-veined bone settling into the cradle of my palm—and the stylus, which had been quiet in his hand, hummed faintly in mine.
The veins of gold in the bone moved against my skin.
“Tell me what you want,” he said.
The voice was very low.
“Show me you have pride in yourself.”
I looked at the parchment, thought to myself. What did I want?
He set his left hand at the line of my collarbone.
He laid it there—the long fingers open across the bone, the heel of his palm just under the hollow of my throat—and the heat of him moved down into my sternum and joined the bond, and I inhaled and lost it.
I bent over the parchment.
He let his hand stay where it was. He let the heat of it work in. As I thought, he ran one finger—the index of his left hand—up the line of my collarbone and out along the curve of my shoulder, deftly.
I wrote.
“I want to be praised and not flinch.”
The stylus moved. My hand was not steady at first and the characters came out small, and then I made them larger, because the parchment was making them larger anyway, the dark page drawing the strokes wider and longer than I had drawn them, and the seal closed.
The clause burned its line along the parchment and banked into the page and stayed.
His finger came down off my shoulder to my breast.
He cupped it, lifted it slightly. His thumb passed over my nipple—once, lingering—and a sound escaped my throat that I had not heard, perhaps, in any year I could count, and the wet between my legs spread down the inside of my thigh and onto the cold marble of the table.
“More,” he said.
I set the stylus to the parchment.
“I want to stand at my full height.”
I wrote it.
I wrote it and as I wrote it I felt my shoulders go back, the small old habitual rounding that had been my posture since Tokyo giving way under the seal of the clause, my chest opening, my collarbones lifting against the heat of his palm.
His thumb passed over my nipple a second time and the body that had not been touched in years arched, very slightly, into the hand without my permission.
He groaned.
The bond carried the meaning of it up my wrist into me and the meaning of it was good girl, the meaning of it was again, the meaning of it was do not stop.
His hand left my breast.
It came down along the line of my ribs, the long fingers spreading wide across the soft place beneath. His palm settled at the curve of my stomach.
“More, baby.”
“I want to be touched without apology, without guilt.”
I wrote it.
The stylus moved more easily now. The characters came in the deeper steadier hand of a thing I had not used in years and was, in this room, remembering.
The seal ran the line in deep wine red and banked and stayed and the bond made the tone and his hand at my stomach pressed, a small possessive press, the heel of his palm just below my navel, the long fingers fanning out down toward the soft cleft where my thighs met.
I felt myself contract.
The whole low body of me clenched, hard, against nothing, as a body clenches when a thing it has not had in years has been promised and not yet given, and the wet on the marble under me spread, and I bit the inside of my left cheek hard enough to taste iron, and his hand on my stomach stayed still.
“One more,” he said. Low. Steady. “Give me one more, precious one.”
I inhaled.
I wrote the hardest one last. I wrote it before I had let myself decide to.
I wrote it because his finger had moved, a quarter-inch, down from my stomach, and the long edge of his index had just—just—grazed the upper line of where my thighs met, the edge of me, the place where the wet was, and the small bright contact lit the inside of my whole pelvis.
“I want to be looked at without going small.”
The stylus moved. So did his finger.
He let the long edge of his index slide a single inch into the wet at the seam of my thighs.
He stopped short of entering me, short even of the small ridge at the top that would have undone me in a second.
He let the edge of his finger sit in the slick at the entrance of me, the slightest pressure.
My hips moved, helplessly, the small forward grind of a body that was desperate, and I almost came.
I almost came on the edge of a single finger that was not even moving, on the cold marble of his study table, with the contract still wet between us and the deep wine-purple of his evening sky in the narrow window behind him.
He drew the finger back.
He lifted it. He looked at the wet on the long edge of his index, the shine of me on the lambent gold of his skin, and his eyes stopped moving in their concentric rings entirely.
He put the finger in his mouth.
He held it there for a count.
I watched his throat move on the small swallow.
His eyes did a thing they had not done yet—a long pulse, in and out, like the dilation of a pupil in a dim room finding a light it had not been ready for—and the bond on my wrist carried, up my forearm into my chest, the precise sensory record of what I tasted like to him.
Salt. Heat. The faint metallic undernote of a thing he had wanted for an eternity, and now he almost possessed.
He drew the finger out.
He reached, with the same hand, for the stylus.
I set it back in his palm.
“Now mine again,” he said. The voice was rougher than it had been ten minutes ago. “My answers to yours. The enforcing clauses. The shape that holds yours up.”
“Yes, my Lord.”
He bent over the parchment.
And I looked properly, at the rest of him.
He was harder than he had been when he had disrobed.
The lambent gold of him at the base. The long thick weight of him standing up against the line of his stomach. A bead of clear precum gathered at the head of him, with the same living quality as the gold in the marble.
I reached.
I did it before I had decided to. The hand that had been steady on the stylus a moment ago was, suddenly, not steady at all, and I reached across the cold marble between his thigh and mine and I put my fingers around the thick base of him.
He inhaled.
I felt the breath through the bond before I heard it. I felt the small involuntary lock-and-release in the muscles of his stomach, the long fingers around the stylus tightening by a measurable fraction, his eyes blowing wide.
He kept writing.
“She will accept my touch,” he wrote, and read the words as he wrote them, the voice lower by another register. The sigils tightened, a band of heat up the bare skin of my arm, and the deep wine red of my clauses on the right side of the page glowed in answer to his white-gold on the left.
I closed my hand around him.
The width of him did not let my fingers meet. I had to curve my hand around him, as around a stair rail of the wrong width, and the heat of him in my palm came from blood that ran with the gold of the realm.
I pumped, once.
Down the length of him to the base. Back up to the glistening head. The small involuntary sound came from somewhere very low and very old.
“She will not call herself worthless,” he wrote.
The bond pulsed at my wrist. The band of heat tightened by another measure up my arm, and I felt the magic of the contract settle a fraction deeper into me, as a key settles into an oiled lock.
I pumped again.
I learned, with the second pump, that I could feel his pleasure through the gold.
Not as my pleasure. Something subtler. The bond carried the precise shape of what my hand was doing to him from his side of the contract—the drag of the friction, the catch at the head, the long return down the length—and I felt his pleasure in my own forearm, in my own throat, in the wet between my own legs that had not stopped.
He wrote on.
“She will not flinch from praise.”
I pumped harder. The bead at the head of him had become a steady running, and I caught it with my thumb, smoothing the wet of him down the length, and he groaned, no longer quietly.
“She will not lower her head in my court.”
He wrote it and inhaled again, hard this time.
“She will, when I command her to, lift her face to a mirror until she can hold her own gaze.”
I felt the mirror clause take as a small bright unease in the chest—the old habit of looking past my own reflection in shop windows, in the rink glass, in the tea-towelled mirror in my chamber—and the contract took the unease and set it as a thing I was going to be required to fix.
“She will, when the bond requires it, worship herself.”
He wrote it.
The seal took longer on this one. The light travelled the line of the characters as it had on his hardest clause, and the bond on my wrist took the cost of it in a single hard pulse that brought wet to my eyes.