Page 46 of Captured By the Pakhan

"Take your shirt off."

I take my shirt off.

"Lie back."

"Ilya—"

"You may tell me to stop at any point, and I will stop, and neither of us is going to discuss that again, because we settled it and I do not insult you by relitigating it." He kneels one leg on the bed. "Lie back. Hands above your head. And do not move."

"That's a lot of instructions for a feather."

"The instruction is the point of the feather."

He starts at my collarbone.

And the first thing — the actual first thing — is that it isn't sexual at all. It's just strange. A line of contact so light it's barely contact, tracking the ridge of bone from the base of my throat out to the point of my shoulder, and my whole body goes stupid trying to work out what it's being told.

Then he does it again, the same path, the same speed.

Then again.

By the fourth pass I'm no longer thinking about the feather.

"Don't move," he says.

"I'm not moving."

"You moved."

"That was breathing."

"Then breathe less."

Down the inside of my arm. The crook of the elbow, which turns out to be somewhere I did not know I had. The underside of my wrist, and I make a noise, and the feather stops.

I open my eyes. He's watching my face with an attention that is close to clinical.

"Why did you stop?"

"Because you moved."

"I made a noise⁠—"

"You moved." He is completely unhurried. "We go back to the start."

And he goes back to the collarbone.

Twenty minutes into this, I understand what he's doing, and it doesn't help at all.

Because the arrangement is not that he's teasing me; teasing has a destination. This has no destination. This is a man with unlimited time who has decided the only thing that matters in the world tonight is whether I can hold still, and every time I fail we go back to the beginning, and there is nothing to push against, nothing to fight, nothing to win —

— and I have spent thirty-one years winning things.

Ribs. The line under my breast, which he does four times and I count all four. The dip of my waist. The crease of my hip where my jeans still are, which he traces along the top of the denim for what feels like a year without going anywhere near underneath it. Every slow pass leaves a trail of heat behind it, goosebumps rising as my skin tightens in the wake of his touch, my body memorizing exactly where he’s been.

"Ilya."

"Mm."