The Devil's Favourite Obsession

She opened her eyes a small considered moment later, when Cassian had pulled himself back by only a single careful breath, the single careful breath being, by his own small private estimate, the exact distance he had been willing to grant her between the warmth of his mouth at her forehead and the rest of the room he had spent the last hour rearranging around her.

”How can I change your eyes’ colour?” she asked.

She waited for him to answer. When he said nothing. Her eyes fell over the place, this time with the new clarity of a woman who had been told, by the man she was lying next to, that the room she was lying in was the only room in the city he had ever brought a woman into.

”And now,” she said slowly, with the small, slow realisation, ”I realise — we are in your room.”

”Our room,” Cassian corrected her.

The word — our — arrived in the room with the small slow steady weight of a man who had decided, some hours ago, that he was going to begin using the word at the small careful pace of a man building a house brick by brick, and who was now, in the warm lamplit middle of his pillow, laying down the first brick.

Cixi, who had nothing on her body but the long silk sheet that had been pulled up to her collarbone half a conversation ago, tried to move away from him by a small, considered inch.

Cassian did not let her.

His arm, which had been resting at the small of her back, tightened by the smallest fraction, by any honest measure of force, constrain her, but that did, by the equally honest measure of intention, signal to her that she was not, by his preference, going anywhere in the immediate next minute.

She tried again.

He did not let her go.

”I want to wear clothes,” she said. ”Let me go.”

”I removed them,” Cassian said, with the small, dry amusement of a man delivering a fact that was, by his estimate, the only honest answer to her objection. ”And I will be the one to put them back on you.” His mouth pulled by a small, considered fraction at one corner. ”But before that. Do you want to take a bath —Together?”

”No!” The denial arrived in the room before her brain had had the chance to consult any of the other parts of her body it had spent the last hour discovering.

The denial was also by the equally honest estimate of the part of her stomach that had been refusing for four months to give up the flutter.

”Why,” Cassian said, ”are you feeling shy?” He was watching her face. ”After I have seen and tasted almost everything.”

Cixi wanted, in the small private corner of her chest that handled the registering of embarrassment, to close her ears.

She wanted to close her ears; in fact, with a small, careful enthusiasm she had not previously imagined herself capable of feeling about her own ears. How was it possible, she wondered, that a man could, in the warm lamplit aftermath of the kindest hour of her life, deliver a sentence that contained the words seen and tasted and everything in the same considered economical breath, and could deliver it, furthermore, with the slow patient amusement of a man who had been told, by the small private rulebook of his upbringing, that conversations of this kind were perfectly ordinary subjects for two adults to discuss in a bed they happened to be sharing.

”Do you feel no shame,” she asked him, ”to talk like this?”

She remained, while she asked, in his arms.

”You didn’t feel shame when you asked me not to stop!”

Cixi wanted to run and hide somewhere where he can not find her, but he wasn’t letting her go anywhere.

The contradiction — between the question and the position she was asking it — was not lost on her. The contradiction was, by her own small private estimate, the most honest sentence she had said since she had opened her eyes that evening.

”You are shameless.”

He looked at her instead, with the careful, considered, faintly amused look of a man who had spent the last hour being asked questions by the woman in his bed, and was finding, in the small slow comfortable settling of the surrounding night, that he did not, by any honest measure, want to be anywhere except the precise place he was, answering them.

He looked at her with the dark patient eyes she had spent half the night trying to read and had failed to read, and the lamplight, in the small bright corner of one of those eyes, picked out something — a small slow flicker that was not, by any reasonable accounting of the optics of human irises, supposed to be there.

She did not this time look away from it.

”When I want you,” he said, in the slow patient register he had used, earlier in the evening, on the back seat of a moving car, ”and you try to resist me, it encourages me, somehow, to turn you on more.”

Cixi shut her mouth.

She shut it carefully, with the small private quiet of a woman who had just been given a piece of information about the man she was lying against that she had not, by any of the small careful measures she had been using up to this point, been prepared to receive.

How was she, by any honest private estimate, supposed to deal with him.

The heat that had been climbing up the back of her neck for the last ten minutes climbed by one more slow inch. Her cheeks burned hotter than they had been burning ten seconds ago, and Cassian, who was watching all of it happen across her face with the unhurried patience of a man reading a book he had been waiting for the publication of for some considerable time, drew the back of one finger, very slowly, down the long line of her spine.

The goosebumps rose along her bare skin in a small, uneven wave.

”Stop it,” she said, looking away from him.

”I want to stay like this with you.”

He pulled her closer to him by a small considered inch — the small considered inch being, by the small honest private estimate of her own body, the exact distance her body had been waiting for him to close since the moment she had tried, twice, to put it between them. Her breast, with the bare skin of it still slightly flushed from the last hour, pressed against the firm, considered plane of his chest, and the warmth of him under her settled into the warmth of her against him, and the long quiet pillow they were lying on agreed, by the unspoken contract of bedrooms, that this was, in fact, the arrangement.