“Do you consent?” Edwin finished formally.
Magic was contract. Robin thought about the difference between Edwin’s impeccable care and the way Belinda had laughed when the Cupid arrow turned Robin giddy. He thought about Edwin spitting his full name into the earth along with his blood.
“I, Robert Harold Blyth, consent to you using your completely experimental but—knowing you—completely safe and well-researched spell. Will that do?”
“Thank you,” said Edwin. He was already cradling a glow of pale blue light. It matched his eyes, Robin thought ridiculously, and then Edwin touched one glowing finger to Robin’s wrist and he wasn’t thinking of anything at all. A sensation that was something like the snap that followed rubbing your feet on carpet, and something like the perfect fire of swallowing good brandy, was moving all the way up his arm and through his shoulder and—“Fuck,” Robin gasped—burrowing itself to a triumphant end exactly between his shoulder blades, where it faded.
Edwin looked anxious. “Was that—”
“Do it again.”
This time Edwin touched one of Robin’s toes, and the sensation slid all the way up Robin’s leg—he hissed as it seemed to pass within a few inches of his cock—and into his lower back. It glowed there longer, this time.
They both grew bolder after that. Robin sucked two of Edwin’s glowing fingers into his mouth, then gasped hard around them and forgot not to bite, because he could feel the sparks burying themselves somewhere in the nape of his neck.
“Sorry!” he said, once Edwin had snatched his hand away.
“No damage done,” said Edwin. He sounded rather hoarse.
Another handful of light. Edwin shifted back down the bed and reached between Robin’s legs, and Robin cried out as Edwin cupped his balls with agonising gentleness. The path of the blue-light sensation was short but very, very targeted.
“You said you—did this to yourself?” Robin panted. He could see it: Edwin’s hands shaking on the strings, Edwin’s long legs splayed open, feet slipping on the sheets. “What, with a Roman tract propped open on the bed in front of you?”
“Actually . . . yes, once,” Edwin said. “I believe it was the story about the plucky young reporter who was caught spying, tied to the evil lord’s bed, and tortured with the fascinating collection of glass phalluses.”
Robin’s lip flashed with pain as he bit down on it. He knew that story; it hadn’t exactly been torture, by the end. He couldn’t help imagining how much better, or worse, this would have been if Edwin had tied him up first.
“Keep going,” he said.
Edwin did. The blue light carved lines of ticklish pleasure that softened and burned from every point on Robin’s body, always heading inwards, each one a breath of air on the fire of need building inside him. Sometimes Edwin paused and used the cooling spell again. Sometimes he followed it with a similar spell of soft heat, calling up contrasts that made Robin groan and want to roll away and roll towards them, both at once.
Always Edwin returned to the blue light, letting Robin feel the full length of each nerve as distinctly as if he were drawing them there with ink. As though Edwin were mapmaking and using Robin’s flesh to do it. The spells he cradled were always small, controlled; Edwin seemed determined to eke out as much effect as possible from his modest supply of power.
Robin drank up the motions of Edwin’s fingers and the intent delight on Edwin’s face, until it reached a point where even that was too much effort and Robin could only lie there, hot and wrecked, taking fast gulps of breath, incandescently aware of every mapped inch of his body. This had already gone on twice as long as any sexual encounter with another human being in Robin’s life. His cock was hard, and fluid beaded at its tip. If he took himself in hand it would be over in three good strokes.
He didn’t.
“I wonder,” Edwin murmured.
“Yes,” Robin agreed instantly. “What? Yes.”
Edwin left the bed, but he was only going over to the dresser, and he returned with a small bottle of hair oil. Robin’s heart kicked hard in delight. Edwin was still wearing his trousers, though Robin could see where he was straining against the front of them. Now he stripped with efficient movements, and when he was naked he laid his string hesitantly to one side with the clothes.
“Legs apart?” he suggested.
Robin planted his feet on the bed, thighs in a V, and told himself sternly to hold still and not embarrass himself. Whatever this was, it was going to be amazing.