I set my hand over his heart.
There was a pulse. Not fast, but hard. I pressed into it.
He took my hand, raised it to his mouth, kissed the heel of my palm, then set it at the back of his neck.
“You wanted this,” he said. “You wrote it in the contract. To touch, to be touched, without apology.”
I nodded.
He caught the contract at my wrist with his other hand.
He brought my hand up, to his face.
“Tell me what you want, baby. Here. In this chamber, at the root of me, you may have anything.”
There was no hesitation.
“I want to see all of you. I want—” I swallowed—“to touch you everywhere. I want to have you. Not just be had. Not just be watched. I want—” the word was there, under my tongue, as the triple lutz had been there the morning of the final—“to fuck you, Daddy.”
The crack at the back of his hand opened, wider than before.
He inhaled. His whole body stilled, as though he was holding back a tectonic shift in the earth under us.
“I will give you anything you want,” he said. “Anything.”
He stripped the tunic off.
It came free in a single movement, and then he was bare from the waist up. There were more cracks than I had seen. Down the right side of his chest, across the hip, a hairline at the bicep, another running around the ribs. Each glowed white, the light brighter as he let me look.
He guided my hand to each one. Made me touch them all.
At the last, the long one across his chest, he looked down at me. “This one,” he said, “is yours now. It opened the night you came up the parapet after Envy had gone.”
He set my palm to it, hard, as if to press it into memory.
Then, finally, he stood.
He unfastened the belt. It fell. The trousers, too, were gone in a movement so fluid it did not interrupt his looking at me.
He was sex itself. I gazed at his perfect cock again, thick and long and curved up, the head dark, the shaft the same lambentcolor as the rest of him. A drop of wet had gathered at the tip. The drop caught the white fire of the well and refracted it, so that a ring of gold ran along the underside.
He let me look.
“Is it frightening?” he asked, softly.
“Not at all,” I said. “It’s beautiful.”
The contract burned a line up my arm.
He knelt over me again.
He set his hands on my thighs, parted them. Bent his head, once, to the place he had already worshipped, and then up, planting kisses at my stomach, the rib, the sternum, the hollow at the base of my throat. Then my mouth.
He kissed me with his tongue in my mouth and his cock against my thigh, and I wanted him so badly I could not bear it.
I reached down, found him. The shaft was hot. He hissed at the contact.
I stroked, once, and the light in the chamber blazed brighter.
