The Devil's Favourite Obsession

She did not pull away from him.

In fact, the small private corner of her mouth, the small private corner that did not, by her own honest estimate, like to be caught performing emotion without her permission, performed a small involuntary smile.

She remembered, in the next slow, uncomfortable second, what she had been asking him.

”You are avoiding answering me,” she said. ”How are we in the bedroom? We were in the car. And I do not remember coming out of the car and walking to this room.”

Cassian looked at the ceiling instead of at her, with the small, patient, unhurried expression of a man listening to a question he had decided some considerable time ago that he was not going to answer in the form the question had been put.

”Do you have some superpower,” Cixi finally asked, and she closed her eyes, in the small private mortification of a woman who had just delivered the only question her brain had been able to assemble out of the small dark slit she had been seeing in the centre of his pupil all evening, expecting him, with the small honest preparation of a woman bracing for it, to laugh at her.

He did laugh.

It was a low, considered, surprised laugh.

He lifted her chin between his thumb and his forefinger with the small considered care of a man arranging a small object into the position he intended to look at it from, and he turned her face by a soft degree so that the lamplight could find both her eyes at once.

”You make me human,” he said.

He did not, in the small, considered economy of the sentence, answer her question.

”So you are not human,” she said.

The sentence left her mouth with the small slow honest clarity of a woman who had been turning a series of small private observations over in her mind for the better part of two months, and had decided, just now, in this room, to assemble them into a sentence and place the sentence in front of the man across from her on the pillow to see what he intended to do with it.

”You have survived deadly accidents, Cassian. Only a person with — with extraordinary power — could have survived the strong water you walked out of.”

She watched his face.

”I want an answer.”

She was, by her own honest private estimate, not going to leave this conversation without one.

Cassian saw the curiosity in her eyes. He saw the small, considered set of her mouth that meant the curiosity was not, by any careful estimate of the next ten minutes, going to be put aside.

He did not, however, answer the question.

He smiled instead — the slow, patient, considered smile of a man who had been waiting for this particular conversation to arrive in his bedroom for some considerable time, and was, now that it had arrived, finding the form it had taken pleasingly amusing — and he tilted his head against the pillow by a small, considered degree.

”How about,” he said, ”we take a bath together. And I answer you.”

Cixi truly contemplated the offer.

She contemplated it with the honesty of a woman whose private interest in the offer was, just now, at war with the small slow embarrassment of a woman who had been raised, by every aunt who had ever paused in a doorway to comment on her clothes, to understand that taking a bath with a man one had only known for four months was not, by the small careful standard of the doorways the aunts had paused in, the sort of thing one did.

She did not, however, want to lose the answer.

”If you can talk in complete sentences,” Cassian added, with the small considered patience of a man delivering the second half of a bargain he had decided was the only bargain available, ”while I do the things I want to do to you. Then I will answer.”

Cixi frowned at his words.

She frowned with the small private mortification of a woman who had been asked, in a single sentence, both to agree to take a bath with the man across from her and to attempt to hold a conversation while the same man performed some unspecified series of actions which were, by his careful framing, designed to interfere with her ability to hold the conversation in the first place.

”What do you want to do?” she asked carefully.

”Something,” Cassian said, leaning forward across the small warm space of the bedroom between his mouth and hers, ”you will love.”

He pressed his lips, slowly, to her own.

The kiss was warm. It was unhurried. It was the considered kiss of a man who had decided, in the slow private deliberation of his own mouth, that the woman in front of him had been doing too much talking for the last ten minutes, and required a small considered intervention.

Cixi gulped against his mouth.

The gulp was, in the honest estimate of the woman gulping, the gulp of a woman who had not yet, by any private accounting of her own body, recovered from the kindness of the last hour, and was now being offered, with the small unhurried patience of a man who was apparently not in any particular hurry, the prospect of a second one.

Her body throbbed.

Her body, the small private parts of it that had not, by any new careful measure of her own private vocabulary, been a virgin anything for some considerable time now, pained her.

”But I am in pain,” she said, very softly, against his mouth.

Cassian drew back with a considered breath.

He looked at her face.

He looked at her face for the slow, careful second a man looks at the face of a woman he had not, by his own honest estimate, expected to receive that particular sentence from at this particular moment of the night.

”Pain and pleasure,” he said, very softly, in the small, low, patient voice he had used earlier on the back of the moving car, ”go hand in hand.”

His thumb traced the line of her lower lip.

”I will be gentle,” he declared, pausing for a moment to admire the anticipation reflected in Cixi’s expressive eyes. ”I promise.”

She bit her lower lip.

She bit it with the small private deliberation of a woman who had not, by any small careful measure of the bargain she had been offered, been given an unreasonable offer, but who had also not, by the same small careful measure, been given an entirely fair one.

”You will answer me,” she said, finally.

”Yes,” Cassian said. ”I will. If you can complete your sentences. I will answer them.”

”You are challenging me.”

”I am merely keeping my point.”

Cassian, with the slow, careful patience of a man who had decided, in the considered second after the words I am merely keeping my point had left his mouth, that the bargain had been struck, drew the silk sheet back from her body in a single long, unhurried motion.

The sheet slid away.

Cixi, who had, by the small private accounting of her own body, agreed to the bath in principle without quite agreeing to the moment of bareness the bath would, by any honest accounting of the physics of bathing, require, made a small involuntary movement to gather the sheet back toward her chest.

Cassian’s hand closed gently around her wrist.

”Cixi,” he said. ”I have seen the body you are trying to cover. Why hide when I would prefer to look at it?”