He brought his mouth to my left ear, so close I could feel the warmth of his breath on the soft rim and the angle of my jaw.
“The magic distinguishes,” he said, soft and close. “My promises seal in my color. My authority over you seals in yours.”
He did not move his mouth. He did not touch any other part of me. The only contact was the air between us, and the gold sigils burning along the left side of the contract.
I looked at the page.
I saw, at once, how many lines there were.
I saw how many clauses had gone down in one minute, how many ways the world had been changed forever.
I did not know, before that second, that the weight of being cared for could be heavier than the weight of being ignored.
He let the hush sit.
He let the moment grow between us, dense and luminous, until I felt it was about to break.
Then he spoke, at my ear.
“Now you, dove,” he said. “What do you want? What have you always coveted? What can I give you?”
I was not ready for the question.
What do you want? It came at me with the force of a verdict, the soft execution of a voice at my ear, and my own heart, ill-equipped, stumbled.
I waited for him to move his hands. He did not.
He kept his palms bracketing my hips, fingers outspread, the heat of his body filling the air between my knees and his chest but never closing the distance, not by a millimeter. The not-touching was a physics problem. The longer he kept his hands on the table, the more acutely I felt every part of myself that wanted to be touched. The parts I had spent a decade ignoring. The parts I had, for all intents and purposes, handed off to other women in other rooms and let their names do the touching.
He did not rescue me from the question. He waited.
The first attempt came out in a half-breath.
“I don’t know,” I said, and heard the sentence collapse on its own ambiguity.
The contract did not react. The silver and gold lines on the parchment were so luminous in their clarity that my small, unfinished sentence looked gray beside them. The words did not take. The stylus did not move. The surface of the parchment rejected the line; it beaded on the surface and dried invisible.
He was close enough that when he spoke I could feel the shape of the words in the small airless space between my jaw and my neck.
“The bond only takes what is true,” he said. “Lie to it and it will not hold.”
A shiver ran down the hollow of my spine. Not fear—a recognition.
He waited for me to try again.
I summoned another sentence.
“Whatever you want,” I tried. “Whatever makes you happy.”
The parchment refused it. I watched it refuse: the ink ran, the gold went dull, the letters dissolved, leaving nothing behind but a stain of hope that did not belong there.
He turned his head, just a fraction, and his mouth was at the base of my ear.
“Rachel,” he said, and the name landed like a hand at the center of my chest. “Try again. Tell it. Tell me. Tell yourself.”
The air in the room went thin. I could feel my heart racing under the button of the shirt. I could feel the pilot light, which had been burning steady blue behind my ribs, flicker and brighten.
I closed my eyes.
