That was all.
The bond carried the rest. It carried what he wanted to do to me, raw and unedited, as it had carried his shame on the parapet—the want to put his mouth at the hollow of my throat, the want to put his hands at my hips and lift me onto the marble table, the want to part my legs with his and find with his fingers and his mouth and his cock the wet that he could see, that he could smell, that he was holding himself, by the small thin line of an unbroken rule, from taking.
Neither of us pretended.
I felt my own want answer his through the gold at my wrist. I let him feel it. No editing. No deflection. For once since Tokyo,I refused to route the feeling into a joke or a denial or the small apologetic laugh that had no humour in it. I let him have it.
His mouth did the thing at the corner that was almost a smile and was not.
“Shall we begin?”
“Yes, my Lord.”
He crossed to me.
He put his hands at my waist—the long fingers wide, the heels of his palms warm at the curve of my hips—and he lifted me, without effort, then set me on the edge of the marble table. It was cold under me.
I felt it everywhere, sharp and clean, the cold of the deep stone meeting the heat of me, and I made a small sound that was not entirely embarrassment. He let his hands stay at my hips for a count of two. Then he drew them back.
He sat beside me on the same edge.
The marble took his weight without a sound. His thigh was at my thigh. His shoulder was at my shoulder. His bare hip was an inch from my bare hip.
He took up the stylus, looked at the empty page for a count, then looked at me, his eyes turning as he thought.
“I write mine first,” he said.
“Yes, my Lord.”
“The sovereign binds himself before the kept. It is the order of things, for me at least.”
He set the stylus to the parchment.
“My kept. I swear I will not perform magnificence in your presence.”
He said the words as he wrote them. The stylus moved in long measured characters, the same hand from the folded square of paper on my pillow this morning. The dark parchment drank the strokes, then the stylus lifted.
The clause sealed.
A line of white-gold light travelled along the new characters from left to right. When it reached the end, it banked into the parchment and stayed, faint.
I felt it on my wrist.
The bond sounded and the gold at my forearm warmed by a measurable degree, and I felt, through it, the cost of what he had written—the cost of performing magnificence for a long age, then agreeing not to perform it in front of the only person he most wanted to be magnificent for. The cost was high. The bond did not soften it.
He drew the stylus back to the parchment.
“I will show you my cracks when they form.”
He wrote it.
The light ran. The light banked. And on the back of his right hand, two inches from where the stylus held, a fissure opened. This time, he never paused. He kept writing. He let the crack stay. He let me see it without lifting his eyes from the page.
“I will ask you, aloud, for one thing I want, every day.”
He wrote.
The light ran. A second fissure opened at the line of his jaw, the smallest of seams. The bond carried the cost. He had not asked aloud for a thing in a long age. The small old terror under the bone of it, the terror of a child who had learned, very early, that to ask was to admit a need, and to admit a need was to admit a lack, and anything with a lack was not what he had been built to be.
