“Show me you have pride in yourself.”
I looked at the parchment, thought to myself. What did I want?
He set his left hand at the line of my collarbone.
He laid it there—the long fingers open across the bone, the heel of his palm just under the hollow of my throat—and the heat of him moved down into my sternum and joined the bond, and I inhaled and lost it.
I bent over the parchment.
He let his hand stay where it was. He let the heat of it work in. As I thought, he ran one finger—the index of his left hand—upthe line of my collarbone and out along the curve of my shoulder, deftly.
I wrote.
“I want to be praised and not flinch.”
The stylus moved. My hand was not steady at first and the characters came out small, and then I made them larger, because the parchment was making them larger anyway, the dark page drawing the strokes wider and longer than I had drawn them, and the seal closed. The clause burned its line along the parchment and banked into the page and stayed.
His finger came down off my shoulder to my breast.
He cupped it, lifted it slightly. His thumb passed over my nipple—once, lingering—and a sound escaped my throat that I had not heard, perhaps, in any year I could count, and the wet between my legs spread down the inside of my thigh and onto the cold marble of the table.
“More,” he said.
I set the stylus to the parchment.
“I want to stand at my full height.”
I wrote it.
I wrote it and as I wrote it I felt my shoulders go back, the small old habitual rounding that had been my posture since Tokyo giving way under the seal of the clause, my chest opening, my collarbones lifting against the heat of his palm. His thumb passed over my nipple a second time and the body that had not been touched in years arched, very slightly, into the hand without my permission.
He groaned.
The bond carried the meaning of it up my wrist into me and the meaning of it was good girl, the meaning of it was again, the meaning of it was do not stop.
His hand left my breast.
It came down along the line of my ribs, the long fingers spreading wide across the soft place beneath. His palm settled at the curve of my stomach.
“More, baby.”
“I want to be touched without apology, without guilt.”
I wrote it.
The stylus moved more easily now. The characters came in the deeper steadier hand of a thing I had not used in years and was, in this room, remembering. The seal ran the line in deep wine red and banked and stayed and the bond made the tone and his hand at my stomach pressed, a small possessive press, the heel of his palm just below my navel, the long fingers fanning out down toward the soft cleft where my thighs met.
I felt myself contract.
The whole low body of me clenched, hard, against nothing, as a body clenches when a thing it has not had in years has been promised and not yet given, and the wet on the marble under me spread, and I bit the inside of my left cheek hard enough to taste iron, and his hand on my stomach stayed still.
“One more,” he said. Low. Steady. “Give me one more, precious one.”
I inhaled.
I wrote the hardest one last. I wrote it before I had let myself decide to. I wrote it because his finger had moved, a quarter-inch, down from my stomach, and the long edge of his index had just—just—grazed the upper line of where my thighs met, the edge of me, the place where the wet was, and the small bright contact lit the inside of my whole pelvis.
“I want to be looked at without going small.”
