Robin swallowed half of his own fear in the need to reduce Edwin’s. He could at least do something for Edwin’s obvious anger at his own futility.
“Do you have anything cool?” he asked, nodding at his arm. “It’s—still feeling hot.” Another new, alarming sign. For the first time it felt as though the cage of glowing wires had burned so hot and so long that it needed time to return to normal.
Edwin nodded and created the opening loops of a spell. He cradled a swirl of subtle mist and smeared it over Robin’s arm. It was like the relief of turning one’s pillow over on a hot night.
“Thank you.”
“I hate this,” Edwin said. “I hate that this is what magic is to you. What it’s done to you.” He was winding his string in absent, fretful motions around one thumb; he sounded irritable, almost wistful. “It’s not supposed to be bad. It really is—something marvellous.”
The mist was gone, but the cool swirl of it was still sinking into Robin’s arm. He could have tried to tell Edwin how lovely that spell had been, how soothing, but instead he reached out and took one of Edwin’s hands, gentling his thumb over the back of it as he drew it towards his mouth. Edwin didn’t resist; his breath caught, distinct in the silence, and it was enough to bring Robin’s arousal sweeping back over the horizon from where the pain had banished it. He found a holly-scratch over one of Edwin’s knuckles and traced it with his lips, then his tongue.
Edwin took his hand back. His eyes were hot, the furrow of his brow more thoughtful than fearful. He darted a look down Robin’s body and up again.
“I have an idea,” he said. “Will you trust me?”
“Of course,” said Robin.
“It’ll be easier if you take your clothes off.”
Robin could no more have resisted that suggestion than if he’d been magically compelled. He took his clothes off and lay down, and Edwin sat on the edge of the bed beside him.
“This is experimental. I’ve only ever done it on myself,” Edwin said, and Robin could hear him talking himself out of it, so he grabbed Edwin and pulled him down for another kiss to distract him.
It worked rather too well. Robin emerged gasping, nearly having lost his own concentration to Edwin’s skin sliding hotly against his, the taste of Edwin’s tongue, the way Edwin panted when Robin tightened his grip in the silky-fine fairness of Edwin’s hair.
“Whatever it is, I want you to do it.” He smiled and nipped at Edwin’s lower lip with his teeth. “I’ll try anything once.”
“How completely unsurprising,” Edwin murmured. “No, you need to understand this before you agree to it.”
“All right,” Robin said, flopping back defeated into the pillow. “Tell me.”
Edwin explained that his spell had been built to target the ends of nerves, and the signal of it would travel down those nerves just as normal sensation would. Except . . . magic. It all sounded like a lot of unnecessary bother to Robin, given Edwin could just have touched him and probably had the same effect, but Edwin looked animated and interested and like he’d forgotten about Robin’s stupid bloody curse, so Robin was happy to go along with it.
“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.
Edwin knelt between Robin’s legs, coated his hands with the oil, and began, with care, to build the spell without string. It took him a few tries, and when he succeeded the blue light was fainter than it had been before. It looked on the verge of blowing itself out.
In the moment before it did, Edwin pressed his middle finger deep into Robin in one quick slide.