#naryamirie

Expensive scented oil (an extravagance you two can rarely afford) is perfuming the air from the corner of the room. It throws tiny diamonds of brightness on the walls and your bed, candlelight escaping the punched bronze vessel that holds the oil like an offering. It twines solemnity with the joy in the room. Everything wonderful here is toeing at the edges of sacred, waiting for the crescendo that signals it is time to jump and fall toward heaven.

And Asra is smiling that shining cat’s grin, looking at you with so much affection and deep knowing that you would look away if you were not spiritually yoked to their every blink and breath. There’s a slip of a different oil and just a little golden dust sitting warm and high on the middle of your forehead, tenderly applied with a kiss only a moment ago. Now you’re getting that look as Asra glances over all the careful work you did together to prepare you. You’ve been anointed, kissed in so many of the soft places of your face and throat.

So you are like an offering, too, sitting on your knees on your bed. Little diamonds make a cosmos on the skin of your limbs. That scented oil—strong stuff, you get what you pay for— is in the air in your nose and throat, an invisible smoke of night blooming flowers and peppercorns and something you only know must be velvety and purple, if you go by scent alone. In the wrong hands, a scent like that could choke you. But the rightest, surest hands you know have taken all charge tonight. So you are free from fear, and hope the spice of it lingers in your hair and reminds you tomorrow of the ways you’ll be touched and loved tonight.

As if you’d named that hope aloud, Asra lays a gentle hand on one of your knees. “Are you ready to open up for me?” he asks. When you nod quickly, there’s a silver laugh to match the gold on both your mouths.

“Good, so good for me. Let me take care of you.”

Your heart thumps painfully in your throat, gratitude and gladness threatening to spill out of some vulnerable part of your body. You spread your knees apart, trying to match the sacredness you have made together in the room you share.

“Do you think you can stay like this for awhile?”

You flex your thighs and nod. There’s nothing uncomfortable. And you might be willing to withstand it for a little while, as sumptuous as Asra’s smile is. You are not desperate for praise, and you will not lie about your comfort or happiness. The magnificent, unhidden truth, though, is that Asra’s satisfaction with you gives you comfort and happiness.

Lips somehow perfectly dusted with gold (not a smudge in sight) curve further and there’s a warm finger at the arc of your lowest ribs. “Sacred,” Asra says. “A special place.” A kiss replaces the touch, a press and then pulling, as though to bring something inside you to the surface. More than your blood. “Do you believe me?” Asra asks.

You whisper that you do. There’s a crackle of fire below your skin that lessens to become pleasantly warm. It feels imbued. Alive.

Asra touches the point midway between your ribs and your belly. “This, too, is sacred. A special place.” They lean down to lay another kiss, and you catch a quiet sound of enjoyment in the magician’s throat as they suck. You say you believe before the question is even asked, and Asra grins and taps your knee.

“Patience,” they remind you.

“...patience,” you repeat. There’s nothing sharp in Asra’s eyes, you don’t feel chastised or even warned. Only told, given something important. It makes your eyelids flutter and the wash of vulnerability you have been feeling draws tighter over your skin, an invisible shroud.

Asra watches you carefully, and then rather than continue the downward path you expected, he sits up and puts a finger in the space between your collarbones. It’s a place you have never considered at any length before, too low to be your throat, too high to be your chest. It makes your nipples yearn for touch, a triangle incomplete and wanting. But your only point of contact with Asra is that space between your collarbones. The magician is not close enough even to seal the touch with a kiss.

“Keep your eyes with mine,” he breathes, “As long as you can.” And you do. You must, as Asra comes slowly in for the next kiss. It’s an odd angle but when you lose sight of the violet and opal of eyes and lashes, you keep watching the beautiful white hair moving back and forth as you are kissed and drawn forth in this curious way. Brought out of your own dormancy.

Even when the muscles of your jaw and neck tell you to move, you stay. Asra stays, too, sucking at the skin. You can feel when it begins to bloom, and it’s then that a hand strokes between your legs.

Instead of asking if you believe, Asra murmurs “Patience” again, and there’s another suck, another stroke, and it feels like some new thread is being wound between the places where you are being touched. You know Asra loves you and would tell you your very hair would make a fine tapestry, but what they are making inside you with this ritual of awakenings... you want to know and see it.

Asra’s other hand slides behind your chest, and you feel cradled and comfortably possessed. The fingers of the hand between your legs curl like a harpist’s and when you sing out a sigh, you can feel the place between your throat and your chest, warm with magic. You can feel the way beautiful white hair crowds the sound as it escapes your mouth and sends it back to your skin as though a moan can be refined through careful exchange.

Asra sits back, arm still around you, hand still petting. Those full lips have only the faintest traces of gold on them now. You must gleam with it instead.

“That is a sacred, special place. Believe it?”

“Yes,” you say readily, nearly on a sob. Your being is lit up from the diamond shaped pinpoints of lights outside and the powerful glow Asra has awakened inside you. A new awareness of you skin makes you think you can feel every shimmering piece of the dust where it has been pressed onto your body.

“That’s good,” Asra says. “You’ll need to for the next part.”