I pumped again.
I learned, with the second pump, that I could feel his pleasure through the gold. Not as my pleasure. Something subtler. The bond carried the precise shape of what my hand was doing to him from his side of the contract—the drag of the friction, the catch at the head, the long return down the length—and I felt his pleasure in my own forearm, in my own throat, in the wet between my own legs that had not stopped.
He wrote on.
“She will not flinch from praise.”
I pumped harder. The bead at the head of him had become a steady running, and I caught it with my thumb, smoothing the wet of him down the length, and he groaned, no longer quietly.
“She will not lower her head in my court.”
He wrote it and inhaled again, hard this time.
“She will, when I command her to, lift her face to a mirror until she can hold her own gaze.”
I felt the mirror clause take as a small bright unease in the chest—the old habit of looking past my own reflection in shop windows, in the rink glass, in the tea-towelled mirror in my chamber—and the contract took the unease and set it as a thing I was going to be required to fix.
“She will, when the bond requires it, worship herself.”
He wrote it.
The seal took longer on this one. The light travelled the line of the characters as it had on his hardest clause, and the bond on my wrist took the cost of it in a single hard pulse that brought wet to my eyes.
He set the stylus down.
He waited before looking at me.
I lifted my face.
I lifted my face by degrees. I made my shoulders go back, answering the deep wine red of my second clause. I made my chin come up, as on the long opening glide of a program. I made my eyes find his and kept them from slipping into a small apologetic half-look at the air a few inches above his shoulder. I looked at his face. I looked at him.
His eyes gave that long pulse again.
“Good girl.”
“My Lord.”
“Tell me what else you want, baby.”
The hand around him kept moving. The bond carried his pleasure up my arm. The cold marble was under me and the deep wine-purple of his sky was in the window and the contract was glowing on the table beside us in two colors, and the thing I wanted came up out of me without going through the long careful chain of editing it would have, in any year before this one, gone through.
“I want to call you Daddy.”
The sigil on my wrist ignited prismatic and the colors played over his beautiful face.
He closed his eyes.
“Yes, baby. You should call me Daddy. It is right.”
I leaned across the small cold distance of the marble. I bent my head over the long lambent line of him. I put my mouth, very lightly, at the head of his cock, and I kissed the bead of precum that had pooled there, and I licked it, lingering, the salt-and-gold of him on my tongue, the bond at my wrist flaring at the same beat.
He said my name.
Once. Quiet. Wrecked.
“Maria.”
“Yes, Daddy.”
