Chapter 7 #2
It took everything. The shoulders fought.
The chin fought. The old habit of routing my face a few inches past his shoulder fought hardest of all.
But the contract was a band of heat at my arm and the bond was a hand at my chest and his eyes were on me, and I stayed.
I lifted my chin. I let the shoulders fall back.
I let him have the full height the lake had given me yesterday and the full nakedness the chamber demanded of me now.
He inhaled and crossed to me.
His hand went not to my face, but outward, palm up, a gesture so formal and measured it was as if the years of disappearing had to be uncoiled out of me one motion at a time. I put my hand in his, small against the broad lambent span of it, and the touch was not a hand at all but a summoning.
He drew me forward, to the very edge of the well.
The gold rose past our waists, warm and constant, lighting every scar, every pale seam, every place on my body I had mapped as a failing.
His gaze did not flick. His gaze did not eat or devour.
It built. It built me, as though he was reading a record of every year of me and signing each with a seal of approval.
He let go of my hand.
Then, gently, with the iron band grazing the inside of my wrist, he set his palm at the hollow of my throat. His thumb at my pulse.
“Present,” he said. “Stay.”
He moved his hand to my jaw. The heel of his palm cradled it, the fingers open, and he tilted my head with a pressure so exact it denied me every reflex I had built to hide.
His thumb ran once, deliberately, along the line of my jaw—up to the old white seam where the skate had taken a piece of me at twelve, then back.
Then down the side of my neck, then along the curve of my collarbone.
The touch was reverence. It was not a lover’s touch. It was not a coach’s touch. It was the touch of a lord with a city in his body, handling a thing more precious than anything in the city.
“Tell me where the shame is,” he said.
The gold in the well responded to his voice. It thickened. It curled around my thighs.
He waited.
“Here,” I said. My voice did not break. “The stomach.”
He placed his palm at the soft of my stomach. He pressed, lightly, and the warmth of his hand made the surface of my skin come alive.
“Here?”
I nodded.
He kept his hand there, allowing the heat to transfer. “All those years is a very long time to hold yourself in.” He pressed a little firmer. “You may let go, now. There is no judgment here. None at all.”
I tried to laugh, the high soft laugh I had used for years to dilute compliments. It caught in my throat and did not make it out.
His hand travelled gradually up the line of my ribs.
To the side of my breast. Not cupping. Not even holding.
Learning the contour. Then to my back, the line of my spine, the place where every fall on every rink had taught me to round and stay rounded.
He traced the old tension with his fingertips, the four precise points of touch.
Then down, to the outside of my thigh, the hip.
He stopped at the scar on my right knee.
He knelt. A single kiss, deliberate, held for a count of three.
A raw noise left me.
It was not a whimper, not quite, but the rawest sound I had let out in the presence of another human since the night in Tokyo when I had not yet known I was a ghost.
The gold at my wrist flared.
He watched it, from his kneeling, the prismatic band burning at my pulse.
He put his lips to it. Another kiss, longer.
Then his mouth to the inside of my elbow, where the contract had burned through the skin and left a faint old-rose mark over the blue vein.
Then his mouth to the inside of my wrist, a third time, and the sound that left me was not mortal.
He rose.
He circled me at a measured pace, the well between us, and when he reached my back he placed both hands at my shoulders.
“Now,” he said. “The clause.”
There was no need to specify. I knew.
The contract had written it into me in my own hand: I want to be touched without apology, without guilt.
I nodded.
He ran his palms down the line of my arms, down the muscles that had held children up for years and had not been touched by anything but effort. He took both my hands in his, from behind, and brought them carefully to my face.
“Touch yourself,” he said. “Here.”
He made me cradle my own jaw.
“Here,” he said. “This is not the jaw of a woman who is less than any being in this world. This is the jaw I want to see at the head of my table, at the high window of my citadel, in the gallery, at the edge of my ice, at the end of my long age.” He turned my face so that I could see the light from the well, reflected in the liquid at the basin.
“She is beautiful, baby. You are beautiful.”
I tried to say, “No, not really,” but the words would not move through the contract. The sigil at my wrist burned, then sealed the words off like a dam.
He brought my own hand to my own throat.
“You will not flinch,” he said. “You will not apologize.”
He stepped in front of me.
He placed his hand at my jaw again, then slid it down to the nape of my neck, and I felt the pressure of him draw me in.
His other hand found the flat of my back, then my waist, then, at last, the side of my breast. The heat of his palm moved through the skin, down into the deep muscle, the muscle that had been hiding for a long time.
I shivered.
He took the shiver as a question, and he answered:
“Is it uncomfortable, baby?”
I managed: “No. Not exactly. It’s—”
“New?”
“Yes.”
He smiled. It was the almost-smile, but fuller now, the corners of his mouth easing, the eyes gone molten.
“I will make it a pleasure. Not a test. Not a performance. There is no one in this room but you and me, and you are not being asked to land anything but yourself.”
He put both hands on my shoulders. He pushed, gentle, and the next thing I knew I was sitting on the warm rim of the well.
The gold pooled up under my thighs, the heat of it reaching the place between my legs, the place no being had seen since Tokyo and which was not sure, now, if it could survive being seen at all.
He knelt in front of me again.
He took my right foot in his hand and kissed the instep.
He said, “I am going to name every part of you. You will not interrupt. You will not deflect. You will not, sweetheart, call yourself anything but beautiful for the rest of the night, and if you forget I will start over from the beginning.”
The bond hummed. It hummed in both arms now, and the well’s light grew thicker, brighter, the gold reflecting off the pale skin of my thighs and casting up into the hollow of my stomach.
He kissed the inside of my knee. The thigh. The inner thigh.
He drew in a breath. He looked up at me.
He waited.
I felt, acutely, the wetness between my legs. I felt the color in the well catch it, light it, paint it as a feature and not a flaw.
“Daddy—” I said.
“Yes, baby?”
“Will you—” I could not finish.
He finished it for me.
“Yes. I will worship you.”
He opened my thighs with his hands.
Rather than go straight for the place, he mapped.
He set his hands at the curve of my hips, the outside first, then the inside, the thumbs at the crease where the thigh meets the body.
He kneaded, gentle but insistent, working the muscle as if it was a thing he had to teach to open before it could relax into the work.
He praised every inch.
“The strength in this leg. The muscle here. The power in this quad, baby, do you know what it did to me to watch you skate?”
He kissed the upper thigh. Once, then again, then higher, until the kisses found the place where the wetness had gathered. He paused, mouth so close I could feel the breath of him on the skin.
“This is the most beautiful pussy in the seven realms,” he said.
The word shocked me. I flinched.
He stopped.
He looked up.
He put one hand at my breastbone.
“Repeat it.”
The blood went hot in my face. I could not.
He said, “It’s a contract, sweetheart. You wrote it. Touched without apology. Praised without flinching. You will do it for me. You will say it for me, once, and after that I will put my mouth on it, and after that you may flinch if you need to, but not until then. Do you understand.”
The will to please him, the old coach’s instinct, rose in me. It broke over the top of the shame.
“It’s the most beautiful pussy in the seven realms,” I said.
He smiled. He pressed his lips softly to my clit, a priest kissing a relic.
“Good girl.”
The praise came with a surge up my arm, through my chest, into the apex of me.
He began with the same deliberate care as every other part of him—the kisses at the thigh, at the mound, at the soft cleft, then at the lips, then at the place where the lips met, then, finally, a long sweep of his tongue up the seam and over the clit. The tongue was hot. Inhumanly hot.
I bucked.
He held me down with his hands at my hips.
He licked again, more deliberately. Then circled with the tongue, then flicked, then returned to the long sweep, as if studying every stroke, learning every response, logging the feedback like a chemist.
It was too much.
I tried to deflect. “You don’t have to—”
He stopped.
He lifted his face. The lower half of it glistened. His golden irises were molten.
“Maria. What did the contract say.”
I could not catch my breath.
He waited.
“It said—” I stammered. “Praised without flinching. I want to be touched without apology. I want—”
“You want to be worshipped, baby.”
I nodded.
“You are going to let yourself be worshipped.”
I nodded again.
He buried his mouth in me.
Without the earlier sweep, the tongue was insistent, parting me, working into the heat, into the slick, into the wet that had gathered over two days and one night and all those years of wanting. He licked into the channel, then sucked on the clit, hard, and the sound I made echoed in the chamber.
He pressed a finger at the entrance.
He looked up. “May I enter you?”
“Yes,” I said. “Please, yes.”