She looks at me across the room.
"No magic," she says. "I need to feel you check it's off."
I drop everything. The pervasive court working. The bond calibrations. Whatever small managements have been running as baseline. I let it go entirely and I stand in the room with nothing between us and I say: "Baseline bond. Nothing else. Nothing running."
She crosses the room.
She puts her hands on the front of my shirt and looks up at me. The bond runs between us raw and open—her state arriving in my chest at its actual size. Not simple. The wanting, which is real and has always been real. The anger underneath it, which has not gone anywhere. Something else beneath that, which she has been keeping somewhere for months, which I can feel the shape of and am not going to name for her.
I don't touch her yet.
"You can," she says.
I put my hands on her face.
Cold. She has known how cold I run since the first night. She knows my hands and she turns into them anyway, pressing her face into my palms. Both my cocks are hard and the wanting hits me at the volume it always hits me—the volume of something that has been building since a Thursday with a photograph and has not eased with anything that's happened since.
"I want to be on top," she says, against my hands. "I want to set the pace. Both cocks, when I'm ready. My timing."
"Yes," I say.
She reaches for my shirt.
I let her undress me. She works the buttons and pushes the shirt off my shoulders and her palms go flat on my chest—both hands, the specific warmth of them. I stand still. In six centuries I have not done this—let the omega set the terms and held to them. I follow now. I stand in the middle of my rooms and I lether hands move where they want to move and I hold everything at a distance.
She undresses herself. No ceremony—efficient, the way she does everything physical. She pulls the pins from her hair and lets it down.
I look at her.
The claiming marks at her throat are warm. They respond to my proximity even now, even with nothing running—the biology of the claiming working independent of any magic I put in the air. The bond between us: open, unmanaged, carrying everything she is tonight. The wanting. The anger. The beginning of something I am not going to rush.
She climbs onto the bed and looks at me.
I cross the room and lie back and she straddles me. She takes her time. Both my cocks are hard against my stomach, aching, and I put my palms flat on her thighs and I wait.
She takes the upper cock in her hand and guides it to her and presses down.
The heat of her.
I have been cold for six centuries. Her cunt around the head of my upper cock has no adequate reference point in six centuries. She takes me in slowly—thighs working, breath controlled, inch by inch—and I feel every fraction. The grip. The slick. The flutter of her walls adjusting.
My balls are already drawn tight. She has taken two inches.
The vibration starts involuntary. My body's base response. She feels it and her eyes come to mine.
"Higher," she says.
I raise the frequency. She inhales sharply and rolls her hips forward and takes another inch and the sound she makes goes straight to the base of my spine. I keep my hands flat.
"There," she says. "Hold it there."
"Yes."
She takes the rest of me.
I feel it when she seats fully—the upper cock curved against the front of her walls, her cunt around every inch of me. She goes still, adjusting, and I feel her clench deliberately and my jaw tightens with the wanting of it.
"Move," I say.