Ellsbeth #2
“Oh, no,” he said, “Don’t thank me yet. The binding is going to stay on. I just wanted to make sure you could get in the right position. Kneel on the bed. Facing away from me.”
She obeyed, and felt the belt cinch itself around her wrists again. And then a shove forward from which she couldn’t catch herself, and she landed with her cheek down on her duvet. Behind her, she sensed Rawlins pull off his T-shirt and unbutton his jeans. The foil of a condom ripping.
“Tell me what you want, Ellsbeth,” he said.
“I want you to fuck me.”
“I just spanked your ass raw and tied your hands behind your back. You want me to fuck you?”
“Yes. God. Please. More than anything.”
He teased her then, the tip of his cock barely touching her.
And then all at once he was inside of her and the rest of the world disappeared.
There was just the sensation of him filling her up completely, the lingering stinging of her ass, and the feeling of him being close to her.
She pressed in against him. She wanted more.
Deeper. She wanted it to hurt. Rawlins seemed to read her mind; he reached out with one hand and twisted it into her hair, pulling just enough to make Ellsbeth catch her breath.
She could feel the orgasm rising in her, but before she could come, he pulled his cock out and flipped her over, her back pressing into the bedspread.
She looked up at him, hallowed by the faint glow of a streetlight from outside the window.
“You’re so impossibly fucking beautiful,” he said, drinking her with his eyes.
And then he was inside her again, and now that he was close she could see his face, see his thick hair falling onto his forehead, the tendons in his forearms straining while his hands squeezed their way down her body. The crest was rising in her again.
“I’m going to come,” she said. “I’m going to—”
“Ask permission.”
“Please, sir, let me come.”
“Beg.”
“Please. Please. Please.”
He waited just a single, torturous breath before he replied. “Good girl. Come for me.”
She did, and at that same moment Rawlins shut his eyes and shuddered and came, too.
Ellsbeth could see the young man in his face then, the boy he must have been at twenty, an undergraduate, already tall but not yet filled out. Cocky and too sure of his own brilliance and inevitable success. Fucking a teacher, too.
Rawlins collapsed onto the bed beside her. “Here, let me.” He undid the belt, and rubbed at the red marks it had left in Ellsbeth’s wrists. “You have distinctly perfect wrists,” Rawlins said, kissing each one. “I didn’t know until this very moment that someone could have wrists that turn me on.”
Ellsbeth just lolled her head over and breathed in the smell of him. She wanted to bottle this moment, the perfect pain and pleasure of it, the way she had given Rawlins complete control and had only wanted him to go further.
She kissed him deeply, and he kissed her back, and she wasn’t sure if that was breaking the deal they had made to avoid feelings, but she couldn’t stop herself. She wanted to disappear into him.
It was another half an hour lying beside each other in bed before they were both stable enough on their feet to get dressed and return to the living room to finish their barely sipped glasses of wine.
It felt surreal and a little absurd to see Rawlins in her tiny apartment, in an expensive shirt half buttoned, perched on the couch she had picked up used for fifty dollars.
“I understand what people say about arcane mechanicals being a useless Ivory Tower discipline,” Ellsbeth said, tucking her legs beneath her on the couch. “Because you could have spent forty minutes preparing to bind me with writ magic, when a belt saved us both a lot of time and trouble.”
“Precious metals get expensive.”
“And it’s so hard to get the smell of burning out of upholstery. But alas. The pursuit of scholarship is about ideas, and not practicality.”
“Just don’t mention that to any fellowship committees,” Rawlins said.
“Try: A new study that will change the face of the world as we know it. Although—” He took a sip of his wine.
“—ironically, your obscuration ritual could actually change the world. It was brilliant. The most innovative ritual I’ve read in fifteen years, and it came from a graduate student.
And no one will ever be able to see it.”
“But I impressed you,” Ellsbeth said.
“You did impress me. But that shouldn’t be enough.”
Ellsbeth put her wineglass down. “Oh? A ritual for a form of arcane mechanicals that until this point had existed as an urban legend? In less than a semester? That’s not enough?”
Rawlins sipped deeply from his wine, and then held it up to the light, watching the blood-red legs of the liquid slide down the glass.
“Well, promising as your ritual is, its effect is very limited in practice. It would work only as long as the compounding clay is actually touching the target. After that…”
Ellsbeth answered fast. “You could put the ritual on a delay. Thirty seconds. Adding cadmium. Although—” She shifted her weight and moved her legs under her.
“Then there’s another problem. The ritual itself lasts so long.
If you suggest something to someone under obscuration, they’ll do it, but only until the ritual wears off.
How do you change someone’s mind over a longer period of time?
So that you can tell someone to do something, and they’ll still feel the impulse to do it over the next few days or weeks?
” Her mind felt as fizzy as a shaken can of sparkling seltzer.
She tried to visualize the ritual in her head, hoping the final piece would appear behind her closed eyes.
“Hmmm,” Rawlins said. “It’s an interesting problem. Lingering mental effects. Not that it even matters, of course. Because this is all academic.”
And then the answer came to her. Simple as if she had been squinting through a dirty window, and she finally realized she could open it.
“Time dilation,” she said.
Rawlins didn’t respond. He kept his eyes closed for so long that Ellsbeth worried for a moment that he had fallen asleep. “How would slowing down time—”
“Not for the person, for the ritual itself,” Ellsbeth said quickly. “Give the magic a…slow release. Like a cold medicine pill.”
Rawlins blinked. “It’s compounding a ritual onto another ritual, using magic on magic.”
“Very meta,” Ellsbeth said. “I don’t know how you’d actually go about doing it, but—”
Rawlins sat forward, getting excited. “Do you have a pencil?” he asked.
Ellsbeth brought back a pen and a pad of paper, and Rawlins began writing quickly. “It could work,” he said. “And in theory, the effects could linger for…weeks, at least, if you set the metrics slow enough. Obviously, the mathematics would be incredibly complicated—”
Ellsbeth was reading over his shoulder while he wrote.
“—but it would definitely be possible.”
Rawlins scribbled for ten minutes straight, Ellsbeth watching him in silence, and when he finished, he collapsed back onto the couch. Ellsbeth continued staring at what he had written.
“I feel like I need a cigarette,” Rawlins said. “I haven’t thought about mechanicals this way since I was a grad student.”
“You need a cigarette after that?”
“You’re right. I deserve two cigarettes.” He pulled her in by the waist and kissed her. “You’re very, very pretty. Did you know that?”
“I think you’re biased because this robe hanging open gives you a very good view of my tits.”
“I’m an arcane mechanist. Very empirical. Absolutely no bias. And I say, with all of the authority of my numerous academic accomplishments: You’re stunning.”
Ellsbeth ran her hand through his hair and pressed her face into his neck.
“I like you,” she said, hoping that his skin would swallow her words before he could hear them.
He wrapped an arm around her, and she got a fresh smell of his cologne.
She burrowed deeper inside the crook of his elbow.
She still wasn’t sure if he had heard her or not.
He finally got dressed to leave at one in the morning. “I would invite you to stay the night,” Ellsbeth said, “But I’m afraid that would cross the line when it came to the this-is-just-sex thing.”
Rawlins straightened the sleeve of his T-shirt where the hem had folded up.
“You have a seminar at nine in the morning. I consider it a good deed to leave now and let you get all of the sleep you can manage. Because if I stayed, you would be getting very, very little sleep.” He kissed her again, on the lips, and then his eyes caught the paper he’d written his new formula on.
“I should take that. Don’t want to leave any evidence lying around that could get you hauled in front of an academic tribunal.
Or the police.” He stuffed the paper into his pocket.
“God knows the legal system would love another juicy case of arcane mechanicals gone bad—corruption and disgrace among the God-hating liberal academic elite who twist nature to their will. It’s been, what, ten years since the tabloids got to sink their teeth into the Maxwell Keene case?”
“Seven years,” Rawlins said stiffly. “Since the trial.”
“Oh,” Ellsbeth said. “Sure, yeah.”
His demeanor changed; his posture straightened, and he pulled open the door to let himself out. “Thank you for a lovely and inspiring evening.”
“Good night,” Ellsbeth said.
As soon as the door shut, Ellsbeth returned to the pad of paper on the table and replicated what Rawlins had written. It didn’t matter that he had taken his work with him—she had memorized it in an instant.