Felix #2
She did that sitting still in a hard chair while a man drank Ren dry three feet away.
She got that wet because I told her not to look at me.
I am going to be so insufferable about this later that she'll want to deck me.
Worth it. Worth every second. "Cold front.
Atlas is thrilled. He gets very chatty about isobars when there's a front. "
I find her clit and stroke it once, slow, the flat of two fingers, and feel her breath snag—not loud, nothing loud, just a hitch she covers by setting a card down on the table like she meant to.
Christ, she's good at this. Better than she has any right to be.
I want to haul her up into my lap right here, in front of God and Wheeler and everybody, and ruin the whole goddamn hour.
"Keep talking," she breathes, barely.
"I'm an excellent conversationalist."
I work her slow. That's the whole art of it. Not fast, not toward anything, just steady—circles, light then less light, learning the answer in her slick little clit and the answer in the bond at the same time, two readings of the same woman that agree with each other and pull tight in my chest.
I want my mouth on her so bad it's an actual ache.
That's the honest thought running under the patter, plain as a card turned face-up: I want to be on my knees under this table with her thighs hooked over my shoulders and her cunt on my tongue and Wheeler none the fucking wiser, want to feel her come apart against my mouth while she keeps that polite little face aimed politely across the room.
And I want her hand on me. That's the other half of it, the half I keep my face shut over: I'm hard as hell and aching behind the edge of the felt, my own want hauling at a leash I'm holding with both hands while I work hers loose, and Christ, what I'd give for her palm to find me under this table and even the score.
I don't reach for it. I don't move her hand an inch toward me.
I'm barely holding the line as it is—one touch from her and I forget there's a man four feet away drinking Ren dry, forget the cards, forget the whole careful game.
Wheeler drones. Ren bleeds magic up into the man's greedy hands and shows nothing, the saint, the deep well, while three feet away the only thing in the room I actually care about is coming apart in increments on my fingers and refusing, gorgeously, to make a sound.
The power of it is its own thing. I won't lie and pretend it isn't. To do this here, in this room, under these eyes, with Catalina's leash carved into the back of my own hand and burning low the whole time—to make her drip on the very hand they marked to keep me off her—there is a meanness in how good it feels and I am not above the meanness.
I like winning. I like winning here especially.
I like that she's the prize and the dealer both and that nobody else at this table knows the game is even running.
Keep it a game. Keep it filthy and funny and a little cruel, because the second it stops being a game I have to look at the cards instead, and lately the cards are all the same goddamn picture.
She's close. I can feel it stacking, the way the odds stack when a hand is about to land. Her thigh trembles against my forearm. Her slick wets my fingers to the knuckle. Her cards lie forgotten in a loose fan she's pretending to read.
The bond's gone bright and tight, singing her pleasure into me until it's hard to keep my own face arranged, harder still to ignore that I'm so hard behind the fly of my own pants it's bordering on a medical event.
And the sight picks now to deal me the staircase—her at the bottom of it, the gray of the stone, the angle of her neck all wrong.
Face-up. Unasked. I keep my fingers moving.
I don't flinch and I don't stop. I take the card the way I take all of them, and I choose, the way I choose every hour I'm near her: the future where my hand on her means she's still alive to feel it.
One more pass. Two. Her hips tilt the smallest fraction toward my hand, asking.
Greedy. Her clit's gone tight and slippery under my fingers, and every cell in me is screaming to give it to her—to shove two fingers up into her and feel her clench and let her fall apart on my hand right here in front of all of them.
I lift my hand away.
The sound she doesn't make is the best thing that happens to me all day.
I bring my fingers up where only I can see them, wet to the second knuckle, and I sit back and deal a card off the top of the deck onto the felt, faceup, like the last three minutes were about cartomancy. "Bad hand," I tell her, sympathetic. "House always wins."
And I smile at her—warm, real, awful—while she sits there strung out and abandoned and empty, soaked through and aching and not allowed to do one thing about it, her knees still apart under the table and a flush climbing her throat that she will spend the next ten minutes pretending is the cold room.
I'll think about leaving her like this all day. So will she. That's the point.
"I hate you," she mouths, and means none of it, and the thread between us means none of it either: it's gone molten, furious, wanting, the most honest she's been all morning.
And of course Atlas feels it. He has to.
Whatever just went molten in her runs straight down the thread to all of them, and Atlas is the one who can't keep it off his skin.
The air over the table tightens, goes dry and electric, the hair on my arms lifting like the whole room took a breath and held it.
There's a static crackle living in his knuckles that wasn't there a minute ago.
He's staring very hard at the felt and not at either of us, because if he looks up he'll know, and knowing is going to cost the ceiling another scorch mark.
God, I love it. I shouldn't—it's petty and reckless and exactly the kind of thing that gets a man expelled—but there's a filthy joy in being the only one at this table allowed to touch her and making the man who can call down lightning sit there and feel it secondhand.
He wants to be where my hand is. They all do. I'm the one who's there.
Callum's worse. Quieter, and worse.
He's at the far end of the table, where the Mors discipline likes him, where the shadow he can't quite keep leashed pools a little too dark at the legs of his chair.
He isn't looking at her. He isn't looking at me.
He's looking at the air over the middle of the table the way you look at a room you've just walked into where something happened a second before you got there, the residue of it, the wrongness of the temperature.
His jaw is tight. The shadow at his feet has gone still in the way that means the rest of him is working hard not to.
He doesn't have the sight. He can't read what I read.
But the bond runs through all of us, and somewhere under his cold he's feeling the edge of what just moved through her and can't put a name to it, can't trace it to its cause, can't do a single thing but sit at the other end of his mother's table and burn quietly about a thing he can't prove.
I meet his eyes and hold the grin exactly where it's always lived, easy, nothing underneath it he's allowed to see. The photographs. The swallowed stone. The woman beside me I keep choosing into the futures where she lives. All of it stays behind my face, where I keep it.
"Felix," Wheeler says, surfacing from Ren at last, blinking like a man coming up from underwater. "You're next. Try to take it seriously."
"I take everything seriously," I tell him, and lay my marked hand out for the well.
I don't hide the rest of it. I sit back in my chair and let my knees fall open under the table and leave them that way, my own arousal still up and obvious behind the fly of my pants, going down on no schedule but its own.
I'm not in a hurry about it. When the hour breaks and the others scrape their chairs back, I'll be the last one up, because I'm not going to stand and rearrange myself like a man with something to be ashamed of.
Let Atlas clock it. Let Callum, already simmering at the far end about a thing he can't name, get a good clean look at exactly what I am after the hand I just played.
I dealt it. I'm allowed to look like I won.
***-
After, when the room's emptied and Wheeler's gone to write down how much of us he stole, I stay at the table alone with the deck.
I shouldn't. The cards want to be dealt when the room is quiet—no faces to read, no cover to keep, just the sight and the felt and me.
I tell them to behave and they don't, the way the chaos in them never quite does, and I let the futures press up into my chest without the buffer of an audience and look, the way you press a bruise to check it's still there.
I turn cards. Not for a question. For the company of the motion.
And one comes up that I know before it lands, the way I knew the mark would take my bare hand the day they tried to leash me, a card whose whole meaning is an outcome that makes itself happen. The warning that becomes the cause.
I dealt that card to myself once before, and I have spent every day since learning that some odds are only long until you look at them.
I look at it now. It looks back.
The deck has gone still in my hand, all the way still, for the first time today.
I put it down on the felt, faceup, and I leave it there.
I don't shuffle it back in.