“What were you going to do to me, if you’d won?”

Her words jolt me out of an unaccustomed morning stupor, and I tilt my head up to look at her. If I’d won… yeah, I lost, didn’t I. That explains this… explains feeling like my brain’s been turned inside out. Belatedly, I look up further, to catch her eyes; she’s leaning forward, elbows on the bed, and her breasts are glorious in the morning light, and I was definitely staring.

That’s new. I frown a little, considering that feeling. I don’t feel unhappy or resentful about it; actually, I feel great about being sexually attracted to the stunningly attractive, brilliantly talented woman my life is now tied to. Watching her nipples start to crinkle up as I fail to keep my eyes away from them, seeing her react to my gaze with arousal, is hot as fuck.

“Ow!” I yelp in pain as she moves, almost fast enough that I can’t track her, and flicks me in the middle of the forehead. Only actually it doesn’t hurt nearly as much as I’d expected; it’s a tiny, distant sting, and then nothing. No oversensitivity, no lingering starbursts. I jolted, too, and there’s a profound sense of disbelief at the way my joints didn’t grind and flare and scream.

“I should think you’re supposed to answer my questions, Amelie darling.” Her voice is low and throaty, a purring that sends tremors down my spine. “Though your distraction is flattering.”

“You made me gay.” I try to make it sound like a question, because stating it so flatly seems disrespectful in a way, and then it occurs to me that I don’t actually have a reason to care about seeming disrespectful right now. Sure, a Fount, a Familiar, a Boundling, whatever you want to call what I am today, probably shouldn’t be back-talking her… owner, Mistress, Mage, whatever, in public, but this is hardly that.

Also, I am absolutely going to back-talk her in public every chance I get.

“Amelie…”

“Definitely gay.” I smirk at the exasperation in her tone, feeling the hunger to touch her, to be touched by her. Wait, let’s not use exclusionary thinking, I say to myself. Research requires testing hypotheses to failure, not to success. My thoughts flicker wildly through a series of images, ones that, frankly, I used to fantasize about, and I’m talking sexually here, and the heat and hunger gutter like a candle that’s been capped. Super gay.

“How is that a surprise, dearest?” Bailey smirks at me. The implications are obvious enough, and something unknots inside me that I hadn’t even realized was knotted. We’d be spending, best probable case, a few centuries together; a desire and need to perform and please her despite still being straight would have been a lot worse than genuine mutual attraction.

“I expected pan, honestly. You left me with anxieties about this? That seems, like, wildly unnecessary. Hey, did you do the thing, the performance-driven desire thing?” I cast around for a line of thought that can test that. Maybe with Bailey’s hands pulling my hair back? Okay. Yeah, that is hot. She followed through on the threat; I don’t know if that makes her even more of a bitch than I ever thought or less. Except didn’t she know that it wasn’t… whatever.

“Answer the question, Amelie.” There’s a hint of exasperation in her voice. “Unless you need me to get dressed so you won’t be so distracted.”

“No!” There’s a hint of panic in my voice, despite my best efforts. Can’t disappoint her runs through my thoughts, and I would frown except that frankly I was neurotic about not disappointing people before, so that’s not new at all. I guess letting it show is new. “Cuddle?”

Bailey’s face is thoughtful but pleased, and that pleasure lights a glow all the way up and down my body. She more or less rolls onto the bed, pressing her back up against my front, and I wrap her in my arms. It’s wildly distracting; even with her guiding my hand to rest on her hip instead of her breast, like I’d intended, she’s still thoroughly pressed up against most of my body, head tucked under my chin and ass pressed up against my hips and, well.

I want to say a million things, or at least seven or so. Self-indulgent things about how much I’m liking this and what I think we should do instead of asking questions. “Woulda made you a dude,” I say instead, grinning into her hair. “Fourteen percent body fat, five foot two inches, body like fuckin’ Zestes of glorious myth. Get you to bridal-carry me around every now and then. Finish Seventh Sage’s work on how to reverse-cycle physical empowerment spells, have you lift heavy objects for me, like fucking buildings and shit.”

She breaks from the cuddle at that, which I think is tremendously unfair, since I’d answered the question. Though, on second thought, the way she levers herself up onto her elbow and gives a half-baffled, half-glowering stare means I can trace the line of her with fingers and eyes alike, from her cheekbones down her neck all the way to her waist and hips and then back up.

“Nah, it’s totally legit.” I answer her question on autopilot, not really listening to it. I knew what she was going to ask, knew in a way that transcends what I remember of our friendship. That’s new too, I think to myself idly. Yesterday, I’d have said our rivalry, or maybe gone on a rant about how she was a bitch that tormented me constantly. Never friendship. “The Compact says that you can’t leave your Familiar with dysphoria, but that’s just a matter of, like, taking the dysphoria away after changing your body. Dysphoria has a conceptual hook because we have language for it, so the Ritual woulda let me target it narrowly with an abstraction. Easy peasy!”

“You’re…”

I grin at her, grin at her expression and grin at the way the late morning sun streams through the window and brings out the lighter tones of her mahogany hair, the way the waves of it shift and the curls of it bounce as she breathes. “I’m?”

“I undertook a great deal of effort, Amelie, in order to not change your personality during the Ritual. I had not one but two independent verifications of my Vision of Perfection to ensure that this would be so. Admittedly, correcting any neurotransmitter dysfunctions might have resulted in that regardless, but not in this manner. How is it that you are…”

“Even mouthier?” I grin at her, all teeth and spark-flame. I’d do something magical, give myself a literal glint or torch irises just for more emphasis, but that’s out of the cards now, out of the cards for a good long while until our relationship settles properly. Relationship, fuck, now there’s a thought that grabs me in the lower spine and doesn’t want to let go, and that’s absolutely new; I want her to claim me and keep me, I want her to own me, when I’d done the next best thing to kill… whatever. “I was always worried I’d cross a line and you’d straight-up murder me, you know? You could have gotten away with it. Scion of House Adanna mercs some dumb cunty bitch who can’t keep her mouth shut? Nobody would have cared I get—got, fuck, got higher scores than you in theory and math.” I can hear my voice darken, but I can’t stop the obvious followup from coming out. “Fuck lot of good that did me, though. Chumped by the artist.

“But like, whatever. Forget that. Lemme ask you a question, Bails. Do you want me to be one of the simpering toe-kissers who can’t speak anything but bottom?”

“Interesting question.” She grins back at me, and before I can process the savage hunger in her face, she’s straddling me, lips a millimeter away from mine and hands on my shoulders.

I go absolutely still, as her hands trail slowly down, and she shifts her body back onto her heels. Her fingers trail down my stomach and waist, lingering around my hips, and then with nothing but her pinkies she presses up under my knees. My legs move, eyes locked on her eyes, drowning in her, and her fingers trace parallel lines from the root of my cock down my perineum, circling slowly on the inside curves of my ass.

“Would I want you to only speak bottom, as you so inelegantly put it, Amelie? I think not.” Her voice is a low murmur, and I strain with every bit of me to hear her. “Besides, you’re a brilliant mathematician and theorist, and every bit of that remains. But those pleading eyes show a promising start to your eventual fluency in the dialect. Don’t you think so?”

“Maybe,” I hear myself gasp in response.

She stops, she moves her hands away, raising an eyebrow at me, and I can see the way her smile is twisting her eyes and the skin on her forehead, but I can’t look away from her gaze. I want to buck my hips to follow her touch, I want to… I want to do all sorts of things, but what I do is nothing, what I do is stay there in stillness and desire.

She doesn’t bother saying anything.

Technically, this is a choice. Technically, formally, in the most literal of senses, there’s no coercion, nothing and no-one is forcing me to say anything here I don’t want to. There isn’t even an a-priori need to make her happy, to demonstrate a loyalty and passion and love that borders on obsession or worship. Technically. And I know exactly what I would have done a week ago, in the wildly unlikely event I was in this situation, and sure as hell wouldn’t have been—

“Yes, ma’am,” I breathe, shakily.

Her smile changes and, gloriously, she’s touching me again, feather-light touches in my mind and soul as she touches my body. Not changing anything, not forcing anything, just present, just driving my utter vulnerability home. Just demonstrating what the consequences are of having lost to her, of being the Familiar instead of the Magus. “You’ll need some practice to master it, I suppose. There’s no sense in letting you be bad at something.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Good girl.” My eyes flutter shut at those words, rolling up and back into my head, and for a while, I’ve no more need—or use—for words.