He wrote on.
I watched him write.
I watched the long line of his back as he bent over the parchment, the cut of his shoulder, the easy working of the muscles down his right arm as he formed the characters, the bare line of his hip against the marble. The light from the deep wine-purple sky outside the narrow window caught the lambentskin at his cheekbone and at the inside of his wrist and at the long flat plane of his stomach, and the cracks on him caught their own light from inside.
He was so beautiful. Achingly, perfectly beautiful.
He was also lonely. Deeply lonely.
The cost of every clause came up the gold at my wrist and sat under my sternum next to the small old tenant who had lived there since Tokyo—the memory of my pride—and the two of them met, and they embraced.
“I will kneel to you when you require it.”
He wrote.
The light ran. The seal took. The bond gave a low warm pulse that I felt in the soft place behind my breastbone, and the cracks on him widened by the smallest measure.
He set the stylus down.
His eyes stayed on the parchment and his head remained bowed. He held very still on the marble beside me, his bare shoulder against my bare shoulder, his gaze lowered.
“There is one more,” he said.
“Yes, my Lord.”
“It is the hardest.”
“Tell me.”
He inhaled.
He took the stylus back up.
“When you break our contract,” he said—and the voice was quieter now, the lower register, the one he had used on the parapet when he had said you should not be here, precious one—“I will surrender my pride in equal measure to enforce your worth.”
He wrote.
The light ran longer on this one. The characters glowed for a count of seven, and then became law with a small audible hum.
I felt it. He would lower himself to lift me.
Every time I tried to make myself small, the same magic would make him smaller, until I had to choose between watching him diminish or learning to stand up.
He set the stylus down for the second time.
He turned, on the cold marble, and he looked at me.
The cracks stayed open. Not even the smallest reflex moved him to close them. He let me look, and the bond between us hummed, and the heat that had been climbing under the solemnity climbed harder, because there was nothing more wanton, I was learning, than his gaze on me without armour after he had laid all of his down.
“Now you, baby.”
He turned the parchment toward me.
He took my right hand, lifted it. He set the stylus into my fingers as you put a thing into a child’s hand the first time—the careful curl of his fingers around mine, adjusting the grip, the gold-veined bone settling into the cradle of my palm—and the stylus, which had been quiet in his hand, hummed faintly in mine. The veins of gold in the bone moved against my skin.
“Tell me what you want,” he said.
The voice was very low.
