The stylus moved. So did his finger.
He let the long edge of his index slide a single inch into the wet at the seam of my thighs.
He stopped short of entering me, short even of the small ridge at the top that would have undone me in a second. He let the edge of his finger sit in the slick at the entrance of me, the slightest pressure. My hips moved, helplessly, the small forward grind of a body that was desperate, and I almost came.
I almost came on the edge of a single finger that was not even moving, on the cold marble of his study table, with the contract still wet between us and the deep wine-purple of his evening sky in the narrow window behind him.
He drew the finger back.
He lifted it. He looked at the wet on the long edge of his index, the shine of me on the lambent gold of his skin, and his eyes stopped moving in their concentric rings entirely.
He put the finger in his mouth.
He held it there for a count.
I watched his throat move on the small swallow. His eyes did a thing they had not done yet—a long pulse, in and out, like the dilation of a pupil in a dim room finding a light it had not been ready for—and the bond on my wrist carried, up my forearm into my chest, the precise sensory record of what I tasted like to him. Salt. Heat. The faint metallic undernote of a thing he had wanted for an eternity, and now he almost possessed.
He drew the finger out.
He reached, with the same hand, for the stylus.
I set it back in his palm.
“Now mine again,” he said. The voice was rougher than it had been ten minutes ago. “My answers to yours. The enforcing clauses. The shape that holds yours up.”
“Yes, my Lord.”
He bent over the parchment.
And I looked properly, at the rest of him.
He was harder than he had been when he had disrobed.
The lambent gold of him at the base. The long thick weight of him standing up against the line of his stomach. A bead of clear precum gathered at the head of him, with the same living quality as the gold in the marble.
I reached.
I did it before I had decided to. The hand that had been steady on the stylus a moment ago was, suddenly, not steady at all, and I reached across the cold marble between his thigh and mine and I put my fingers around the thick base of him.
He inhaled.
I felt the breath through the bond before I heard it. I felt the small involuntary lock-and-release in the muscles of his stomach, the long fingers around the stylus tightening by a measurable fraction, his eyes blowing wide.
He kept writing.
“She will accept my touch,” he wrote, and read the words as he wrote them, the voice lower by another register. The sigils tightened, a band of heat up the bare skin of my arm, and the deep wine red of my clauses on the right side of the page glowed in answer to his white-gold on the left.
I closed my hand around him.
The width of him did not let my fingers meet. I had to curve my hand around him, as around a stair rail of the wrong width, and the heat of him in my palm came from blood that ran with the gold of the realm.
I pumped, once.
Down the length of him to the base. Back up to the glistening head. The small involuntary sound came from somewhere very low and very old.
“She will not call herself worthless,” he wrote.
The bond pulsed at my wrist. The band of heat tightened by another measure up my arm, and I felt the magic of the contractsettle a fraction deeper into me, as a key settles into an oiled lock.
