I did not want to say it.
He did not move his hands.
The not-touching was a mercy and a torture, both.
I felt the bond behind my ribs, the flare of the pilot light now white-hot.
“I want to want things,” I said, “without being ashamed. Success. Happiness. Anything.”
The parchment did something I had not seen before. The gold lines of the contract blazed up, a fire in the ink, and the sigil at the end of the line was the brightest yet. For a second the light of it ran up my left arm and into the hollow at the angle of my jaw, and I made a sound that was almost a sob.
I was shaking.
He was still not touching me below the waist.
He was watching, waiting for the last want.
“One more,” he said. “The bond is asking for one more, dove. The private one.”
I shook my head. I did not know what he meant.
The sigil at the bottom of the parchment—the one not yet lit, the largest of them—pulsed.
It named itself in my mind.
I tried to refuse it. The pulse on my wrist tightened, the bond pulling.
I understood, with a small administrative wrench, that the contract magic had chosen the word. Not him. Not even me. The word.
I lifted my face.
I met his eyes.
“I want to call you Daddy,” I said.
The sigil ignited.
Not gold.
Every color at once, the way the kiss in the gallery had ended. The color ran up my left arm and out into the room, refracted by every surface. I felt it in the roof of my mouth, at the base of my throat, at the inner hinge of my knees. My whole body went into the pulse of the word.
He closed his eyes.
The shimmer at his cheekbone went the deepest gold I had ever seen. When he opened them, the mercury of his eyes was molten.
“Yes,” he said, and the voice was not the voice it had been a minute before.
It was lower, raw. The Daddy register.
“Yes, baby.”
I could have died in that second and been happy.
He let the words hang a moment, then moved closer, and the gap between us disappeared.
His right hand, the one with the gloved fingers, came up to the side of my face. He did not brush my hair aside—he simply cupped the jaw, thumb on my cheek, fingers cradling the hinge. The contact was not tender, not at first. It was the contact of aperson verifying the truth of a thing, a jeweler testing the weight of a stone.
The left hand came to rest just above my knee, the palm broad and warm, the pressure light at first, and then—when I made a small involuntary sound in the back of my throat—firmer. The hand did not move up. It did not move down. It stayed at the place where the top of the kneecap faded into the long muscle of the thigh, pressing just hard enough to keep me in place.
