He knelt. A single kiss, deliberate, held for a count of three.
A raw noise left me.
It was not a whimper, not quite, but the rawest sound I had let out in the presence of another human since the night in Tokyo when I had not yet known I was a ghost.
The gold at my wrist flared.
He watched it, from his kneeling, the prismatic band burning at my pulse. He put his lips to it. Another kiss, longer. Then his mouth to the inside of my elbow, where the contract had burned through the skin and left a faint old-rose mark over the blue vein. Then his mouth to the inside of my wrist, a third time, and the sound that left me was not mortal.
He rose.
He circled me at a measured pace, the well between us, and when he reached my back he placed both hands at my shoulders.
“Now,” he said. “The clause.”
There was no need to specify. I knew.
The contract had written it into me in my own hand: I want to be touched without apology, without guilt.
I nodded.
He ran his palms down the line of my arms, down the muscles that had held children up for years and had not been touched by anything but effort. He took both my hands in his, from behind, and brought them carefully to my face.
“Touch yourself,” he said. “Here.”
He made me cradle my own jaw.
“Here,” he said. “This is not the jaw of a woman who is less than any being in this world. This is the jaw I want to see at the head of my table, at the high window of my citadel, in the gallery, at the edge of my ice, at the end of my long age.” He turned my face so that I could see the light from the well, reflected in the liquid at the basin. “She is beautiful, baby. You are beautiful.”
I tried to say, “No, not really,” but the words would not move through the contract. The sigil at my wrist burned, then sealed the words off like a dam.
He brought my own hand to my own throat.
“You will not flinch,” he said. “You will not apologize.”
He stepped in front of me.
He placed his hand at my jaw again, then slid it down to the nape of my neck, and I felt the pressure of him draw me in. His other hand found the flat of my back, then my waist, then, at last, the side of my breast. The heat of his palm moved through the skin, down into the deep muscle, the muscle that had been hiding for a long time.
I shivered.
He took the shiver as a question, and he answered:
“Is it uncomfortable, baby?”
I managed: “No. Not exactly. It’s—”
“New?”
“Yes.”
He smiled. It was the almost-smile, but fuller now, the corners of his mouth easing, the eyes gone molten.
“I will make it a pleasure. Not a test. Not a performance. There is no one in this room but you and me, and you are not being asked to land anything but yourself.”
He put both hands on my shoulders. He pushed, gentle, and the next thing I knew I was sitting on the warm rim of the well. The gold pooled up under my thighs, the heat of it reaching the place between my legs, the place no being had seen since Tokyo and which was not sure, now, if it could survive being seen at all.
He knelt in front of me again.
