I press my thighs together and look at the sphere.
I've had two lovers in three years of field work, both human, both brief. I've had my own hand more times than I'm counting. None of it comes close to what my body is currently trying to tell me it needs—the cold of his hands working into me, the vibration from inside, a frequency he'd choose and hold until I stopped being a person who could string a sentence together.This is my professional assessment. I have assessed it very thoroughly. Several times. At two in the morning.
I look at the sphere.
I wonder, involuntarily, what his precum tastes like. The briefing said silver. Ran cool. My mouth actually waters and I hate myself completely and look at the sphere.
"You're thinking about the outcome again," he says.
"How can you tell?"
"Your jaw."
I unclench my jaw. Three weeks of pre-heat and his court magic running through every room like a low warm current, and I am in his study for the fifth time in nine days close enough to feel the cold radiating off him, and the slick between my thighs has been a constant problem since I walked through his door. I breathe. I keep my eyes forward. Troop movements near the eastern border. The Stone Court captain's red face. The intelligence gap I still can't account for—the piece that should be there and isn't?—
"Better," he says.
The sphere shimmers. A ripple across the brass, warm, there and gone.
I didn't do that.
I keep my face neutral and wait for him to say something about it.
He doesn't. He leans forward slightly to look at the sphere, close enough that the cold of his face is near my cheek, and my breath catches before I can stop it. One audible inhale. I feel him register it—not react, just register, the way he registers everything—and then he straightens without comment, and my heart rate is doing something I am absolutely not going to write in the notebook.
His hand is a centimetre from mine on the sphere. Not touching. I can feel the cold of it from here—the specific coldthat is nothing like winter, nothing like a room without a fire, something that my body has apparently decided to interpret as its opposite despite all available evidence to the contrary.
My eyes go to his hands. His hands are?—
I look at the sphere.
"When you stop trying to do it," he says quietly, "it happens on its own."
"That's not very useful as instruction."
"No." A pause that goes on slightly too long. "It's more of an observation."
I look up at him. A mistake. He's watching me now, not the sphere, and the expression on his face is not the cool patience from the Gathering halls—it's something quieter and focused, and it goes all the way through me before I manage to look back down at the brass and compose myself back into a person conducting fieldwork.
The sphere shimmers again.
Still not me.
He doesn't push.Three weeks now, every lever available—the magic, the proximity, an omega in pre-heat in his own court—and he hasn't pulled any of them. Any other alpha would be pressing. Every instinct I have says he should be pressing; it is the logical play, the obvious move, and I have been waiting for it every lesson with my guard up and my professional face on and some part of me that I refuse to look at directly also waiting for it in a completely different way.
Instead he stands at my left shoulder and lets the sphere do whatever it's doing and watches me with that expression and says nothing.
I hate it. I hate it in the specific way of something that's working.
And underneath that—here is the thing I can't write anywhere—I want him to. I want him to stop being patient and just take the choice away from me. Push me against the wall of his study and not give me the option of saying no and make it something that'shappeningto me rather than something I'm choosing, because then at least I'd know who I am. Operationally compromised, yes, but not this: not a professional intelligence operative standing in an enemy lord's study soaking through her underthings and quietly disappointed that he's being civil.
That's what I can't stand. The disappointment. Every time I leave and he hasn't done anything, some part of me registers it as a loss. I find this completely unbearable. I have found it unbearable every single time and gone back on Thursday anyway.
I don't know who that person is. I've been in the field for three years and I know exactly who I am in every room I walk into. I do not know who she is—the one who wants a Mist Court lord to take the decision away from her. I don't recognise her. She frightens me a little, if I'm honest, and I am trying very hard not to be honest.
What are you running.I want to ask him. He'd say:something that was already true.Twenty-three days and I still don't know what to do with that answer, or whether the thing that was already true was always in him or whether some of it was already in me.
"Same time Thursday?" he says.