transgressings | inbox for duplicity;

"The precious few who manage." There's an undercurrent of emphasis to precious that isn't verbal at all. He has few friends in this city he deeply values, fewer yet he considers to be his in a proprietary way that far transcends any implications of objectification. He can count them on one hand with a digit left over. Fewer still he loves with a romanticism that surprises him anew every time he's brought face to face with it, such as now.

She questions, and he strokes her cheek, watches the play of light in the depths of her eyes so close to him. His smile is subtle but lifts into his own instantly, softening sharp watchfulness to abiding regard. "I didn't notice at first."

He shakes his head. Even in hindsight it's impossible for him to pick out the difference between unnatural command and anything he'd give her freely at any time for nothing more than the asking. "I'm not enamored of the idea of my will not my own, but nothing you asked of me was a burden. Nothing subverted my own desires. When I sired you, I determined that everything I am or have would also be yours. That designation had no power with us because there was nothing to transform, and you would never turn my devotion to a leash or a lash."

No more than he would hers. In this moment, he can acknowledge that he fears himself less than he sometimes believes. That history is not repeating itself. That it will not. He won't allow it.

“Oh, believe me, I know it’s not a task easily achieved by any means,” she’s quick to declare, expression schooling into something as teasing as it bears notes of unflinching honesty. He hadn’t proven himself a man who was conveniently known, and even now she’s not certain whose resolve had crumbled first out of the two of them with regard to this partnership, or perhaps it had happened simultaneously, twin revelations taking place so close to one another that they couldn’t distinguish them as ever being apart.

She presses her lips together in a soft line; the truth of the matter is that she hadn’t noticed anything was amiss either, at least not right away, which speaks to the tenor of what they’d established but also the type of authority she would wield if given the chance — nothing beyond his own capabilities, but still pleasurable for them both.

“Good.” It’s all she can say, at first, at the confirmation that he hadn’t felt unsafe or even mildly uncomfortable beneath her hand, save at the notion that he didn’t possess full control of himself. “There is nothing I would do unless I were absolutely sure it was what you wanted too. Which is not to say I haven’t been thinking about the intricate ways in which we might make use of the club’s various offerings, of course.”

A chuckle briefly punctuates her words, but her face sobers as she looks to him again. “Even as you take the necessary steps to renew our contract on a more permanent basis, you have me beyond their designations and rules. More than submissive, more than lover. All I am is simply… yours, without need of definition.”

"You know that, do you?" There's a teasing lilt at the end. "You, who sussed my most closely guarded secret almost from the moment paint touched flesh? You, who grew vexed with my dire warnings the very first time I appeared on your doorstep like an omen blown in on the first chill breeze of autumn?" Deliberately overwrought descriptions, each one accompanied by a curve of lips he's powerless to suppress despite his efforts. "I'd have posited there was nothing I could keep from you even before the bond, whether I wished it or no. The risk of courting a witch's affections." The wider smile has stopped threatening, revealing itself in full.

It lingers as she speaks of the club's offerings. "They'll bear testing. If they can withstand our strength..." He lifts his brows.

Ultimately, the only answer he has for her is a kiss. His holding back in quiet recovery from his ordeal is over. There's a sense of multiple knots in him untying. Each movement of mouth, the distant sensation of pressure of lips on lips, the intimate slip of tongue, furthers the impression that he's fully with her again. He'd know the truth in her words without her being such an integral part of him. With that fact, it's everything.

He draws her down with him to settle in the bed so that when torpor comes, they're not oddly akimbo. "You remind me why 'always' is such a siren's song. I didn't think I'd ever hear it again. I thought it would forevermore be a word that tasted of ash and regrets." Even knowing it can't last, he's able to indulge the hope it might. It's the gift of beginnings.

She gives voice to a quiet hum as if recollecting those precise moments herself — and to an extent she is, revisiting them in her mind's eye as his words paint the illustration even more vividly, though with the type of flowery language that indicates a total lack of solemnity by extension. She hasn't made any attempt to suppress her smile now, something broad and overtly fond, as her eyes search his face. "At the time, it did seem as though you were being rather overdramatic," she murmurs, feeling no need to speak any louder than that hush while they're in close proximity. "Or I was simply too stubborn to let you successfully drive me away. I do have a tendency to embrace that from time to time."

Her look grows more conspiratorial, though, a single arch of her eyebrow countering the rise of his. "All the more reason to be... more thorough with them. We wouldn't want to install something that isn't worth the investment in the long run."

She doesn't need the breath, but she draws one in anyway, almost out of habit, though it releases in a sound, an audible sigh, first as his mouth slants over hers and then at the deepening of that kiss, the slow inquiry and response of tongues, each of them refamiliarizing themselves with the other, until he brings her down against the mattress and she stretches out alongside him, fingertips resting lightly against his chest where his robe drapes over his frame.

"It may still be foolish to use it, with the knowledge that nothing is indefinite, even us." Even if she longs to continue in some form of perpetuity, her face turning serious for a brief moment. "But it's an 'always' that is in as much of my power to give as anything else can be, for all that my words are worth. Hopefully more than regrets."

"Overly dramatic? I?" He doesn't try to hold an affronted expression more than a few seconds. "Stubbornness on your part sounds far more likely." He offers it sagely. It's rare he finds himself outright fighting laughter, yet here he is.

"We'll be the most thorough." Likely more than once and likely long after the opening takes away the newness.

He decides the rest of what he wished to broach can wait for another time. They're getting close enough to torpor to feel as though they might not get through the conversation before it hits. He doesn't want that kind of interruption for this. "If I lost you tomorrow, in the end I'd still be left with more than regrets if I could make it through the loss." He feels no certainty in that.

"I'll let you maintain some of your dignity from that time, I suppose, if it makes you feel better. Besides, everything transpired the way that it was meant to, in the end." She settles in against him, her head notching atop his shoulder, her fingers drawing invisible shapes and sigils across the unmoving plane of his chest — and a faint smile lingers behind, even as she starts to feel the pull toward torpor, like a train approaching from a distance while she stands in wait on the platform.

"I don't have much power afforded to me, and likely even less as a submissive, but if this is what I can offer — the security of something permanent, and lasting, where so much can change instantly and without warning — then you have it. You had it even before you asked for it."

The rest she can't necessarily ensure won't occur, but at least in this he has the certainty of her presence where the city's rules are concerned — and even beyond that, where they are. "I've never stopped to dwell on what I would do without you," she says, barely louder than a faint whisper.

"Very generous of you," he says dryly. She's right about the rest of it. It happened as it was meant to. He settles her in his arms. The position is now second nature and difficult to imagine any other way. Funny how that happens when one least expects it.

"I think there's value in creating security for ourselves where we can. This is one thing we at least know the city respects absolutely." It's also unlikely to be altered in any way after the fact.

"One thing about which it's futile to dwell. A true exercise in borrowing tomorrow's trouble for today." He's morbid at times and prone to bouts of brooding, so he doesn't always take his own advice. He tries.

"My gratitude for this, for you, knows no bounds. It makes the vagaries of this place worth it." Since this is the only way they can have one another, the only place it would ever have been possible.

"I have never been accused of anything less," she replies, briefly lifting her head so that her chin docks against his chest, surveying him from that close proximity. There are so many things she barely has to dwell overlong on where they are concerned anymore — the way in which he takes her in his arms being just one of them, not to mention the way she settles there, as though she was always made to be held by him.

"Fair enough. Unless the city spontaneously decides to alter one of our designations and pretend it was always the case, we have given them little reason to find fault with us otherwise." Save for the experience on the pyre, though she suspects it was not something relegated strictly to certain pairs but a more indiscriminate cleansing.

She finally lowers her head again, her cheek turned to his chest, her eyes falling shut as her body establishes an expression of purer repose. If they were ever intruded upon like this, the first impression would be that they are simply deep in slumber, curled together, save for the obvious sign that no breaths are being taken, features slackened and limbs holding no lingering tension. "I'll wait for you to awaken and join me again, my darling," she whispers.

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