Terms of Service - Twelfth Seat 07B

Companion to Chapter Seven. Mara.

* * *

Livia tells Julian in Chapter Seven that the evening was cleared before she wrote him the card. That is one line in his chapter, and I kept wondering what it looked like from the other side of the contract. So I wrote Mara's Sunday.

If it worked for you, or didn't, please tell me in the comments.

Thanks, Alix

* * *

The Sunday papers arrived at seven and were sorted by half past, because Mara sorted everything, and the sorting had an order. The two broadsheets went to the left of the Mistress's place at the table by the window, the financial weekly squared above them, and the thing with the glossy supplement to the right, where it could be reached or ignored, whichever the morning required. One of the broadsheets had come with a wet corner. She turned it to the wall side.

This particular Sunday the supplement had a list in it. Mara had already read the list downstairs, standing at the range in the interval between the coffee reaching temperature and the bread coming out, since she read everything that entered the house and counted that as part of her keeping of it, and she carried it up with the tray and set it down at the right-hand position with its cover straight and said nothing, and poured the coffee.

Livia read the Chamber pages first. Then, at the same speed, with the same face, she read the summer list of the Kingdom's eligible men, on which the Holder of this House stood seventh, between a footballer and a widowed brewery heir.

"Seventh," Livia said.

"I checked the method," Mara said, from the tray. "It weighs land."

"He has a courtyard."

"Hence seventh."

Livia laughed, the short one, the true one, and folded the supplement closed, and Mara refilled her cup and stood where she stood on Sunday mornings, at ease within reach, and knew from the fold of the paper and the set of the Mistress's shoulders that the morning had business in it, and waited for the business, because anticipating it aloud would have taken something from the Mistress that she preferred to give.

"Sit down, Mara."

That was the first unusual thing. Mara sat at the small table, opposite her, hands in her lap. The table had one short leg, and a folded card from a tailor in Ixelles had been correcting it since the winter.

"This week I intend to speak the Asking to the Holder," Livia said. She used the voice she kept for reading contracts aloud, in which every word had been chosen and could be relied upon, and Mara had never found it cold. "After the vote. He'll need his spine for the corridors until then and I want all of it afterward. I am telling you first, before Constance, before the Register. You know why."

Mara knew why. It stood in the second instrument, Article 4, in her own initials: material changes in the Mistress's attachments are disclosed to the household before they occur, not after. She had drafted the clause herself, eighteen months ago, and Livia had signed it and said, signing it, that it was the only clause anyone had ever imposed on her that she was grateful for.

"Then I'm asking for the disclosure terms," Mara said.

"Ask."

"All of it, after. The whole account." She held the Mistress's eyes, as she was entitled to at this table and nowhere else. "You tell me what he did and what it did to you. If I'm to keep a house with him in your evenings, I need the weights, not the totals."

"Granted. What else?"

"The band stays outside it." Her hand went, without her sending it, to the black velvet at her throat. "Whatever he becomes to you, he is nothing to this. He doesn't touch it, he doesn't ask about it, and if he ever learns to read it, he learns it by watching. Nobody tells him."

"Granted before you asked it." A pause, and the contract voice eased by a degree. "He steals from watching, you should know. Assume everything you show him is kept."

"I serve in front of him the same way I serve alone," Mara said. "If he keeps that, he keeps the truth. I don't lie in service."

Livia looked at her for a long moment, and something moved through her face that the contract voice had been holding off, and when she spoke again the voice had changed registers entirely, and Mara's body knew the new register before her mind had finished naming it, as it always did. It was a dropped half-tone that landed somewhere below hearing, at the base of her spine, and settled there, warm.

"Last term," Livia said. "Mine. Before I take something of my own on Friday, I confirm what is mine on Sunday. Stand up and clear the table, and then bring me the good chair from the window. You have until the chair to finish being my clerk."

* * *

Mara cleared the table completely before she let herself feel it.

That was her discipline and her pleasure, the same thing wearing two coats. The plates went onto the tray and the cloth was folded in thirds and the supplement with the seventh-place Holder was filed under household, miscellaneous, and the whole time the warmth from the base of her spine was spreading exactly as slowly as she made it wait, down the backs of her thighs, up under her ribs, her breath already deeper by the time she carried the chair from the window and set it in the Sunday light and stood beside it with her hands folded.

"Mistress."

"Undress. The band stays."

She undressed as she served, nothing hurried, nothing displayed, each garment folded because she folded everything, and the cool of the room arrived on her skin in an inventory she felt item by item, her shoulders, the small of her back, the backs of her knees. When she was down to the band she stood straight and let herself be looked at, and being looked at by the Mistress was a physical thing and always had been. It had temperature. It moved over her like a hand deciding where to begin.

"Lie back across my lap. Face up."

Not the usual grammar. Mara laid herself back across the Mistress's thighs, her spine along that firm warm shelf, her head supported in the crook of an arm, the whole length of her open to the ceiling and the Sunday light, held, entirely, the way a thing is held that is being read, and Livia looked down into her face and did not begin.

"I see you," Livia said.

The formula went through her as it always did, and no length of service had blunted it. It went straight down the center, a key in a lock she could not reach herself.

Then the Mistress began, and she was not quick about it.

One hand first, opened flat at Mara's collarbone and drawn down her. It went over the sternum, slow, with the full weight of the palm, and over her left breast, taking its weight, the nipple rising into the palm's heat and being held there, pressed and kept, and down the soft of her stomach, which trembled and was allowed to, and Mara felt every station of the hand as a sentence being reread, this is mine, this is mine, this, and her breath went ragged and she made no effort to correct it, because at this table, in this chair, corrected breathing was the lie, and she did not lie in service.

The hand arrived between her thighs and cupped her, all of her at once, the whole heat of her mound held in a still palm, and Mara heard herself make a sound she made nowhere else, low and cracked open, and felt how wet she already was against the Mistress's fingers, embarrassingly, gloriously wet, wet since stand up and clear the table, and Livia felt it too and said, "Good. Entered as accurate," and Mara laughed once, helplessly, and the laugh broke in the middle as two fingers parted her folds and found her clit, swollen and waiting, and began to circle it with the slow exact pressure she had taught one woman and no one else, and taught her patiently.

She felt everything from underneath. That was the gift of the position. The fingers' slow orbit tightened by degrees. The heat was building in two places at once, under the circling and deeper in, behind her pubic bone, where an ache was assembling itself with a patience that matched the hand, and her own hips had begun to lift into the rhythm in small stationed pushes she could not have stopped and was not asked to. When the two fingers slid down and into her, a stretch, sweet and specific, her walls closing greedily on them, the ache behind the bone and the heat under the hood joined into a single circuit, and the Mistress's thumb took over her clit without breaking count, and Mara's hand rose off the floor and gripped the chair leg, and the Sunday room went away.

"Eyes," Livia said.

She dragged them open. The Mistress was watching her face as she read contracts, everything, in order, missing nothing, and holding her gaze while the fingers worked her was more intimate than the fingers, it always was, and the climb went steep. Her thighs began to shake against the arm that held them. The circuit tightened, and tightened again, her breath in pieces, the whole coil of it drawn up to a point directly beneath the Mistress's thumb.

"Ask."

"Please, Mistress."

"Come."

It broke downward and outward at once. Her cunt clenched hard around the fingers in long pulling waves, the heat flashing out through her hips and down to her heels, her spine arching over the lap that held her, and through all of it the thumb kept its exact pressure and the eyes kept hers, and she came the way she folded linen, completely, every corner of it, and was watched doing it, which doubled it, and the sound she made had the Mistress's name in it somewhere, broken across three breaths.

Livia gentled her down with the flat of her hand, long slow strokes over her stomach and thighs, the aftershocks flickering under them like a current being smoothed, and then bent and kissed her, unhurried, upside down, her mouth soft in a way the household rarely required of it.

"I always see you," Livia said. "That doesn't change on Friday. That is the term I am giving you without being asked."

* * *

They put the room back together, both of them, in the easy divided grammar of long practice. The chair returned to the window. The band lay straight at Mara's throat.

At the door, the Mistress paused with the vote folder under her arm.

"Sunday next," she said, "you'll want the account."

"All of it," Mara said. "Try him once, and tell me whether he's worth the disruption. And mind you sit somewhere I've cushioned. If he's what I think he is, you'll want the good chair."

-- End of the bonus scene --