He has a hand free to pet him. You could stop me, you know. 

:What, and not have you finish the very flattering artwork? I definitely want you to finish it so I can see the final result. ...You know, Quendi are very clever and very good at things and I expect you can still do a beautiful job while - a little distracted: He finds the end of Maitimo's braid. 

He makes a small surprised sound. I will confess my art tutors did not try that.

:Ha, I wonder why: Leareth undoes the ribbon, undoes a single twist of braid, leaves it for ten seconds before doing another. 

He is slightly twitching with anticipation and not doing precise pencilstrokes at all. Leareth's facehair is going look oddly fluffy.

That's pretty amusing, actually, this is very fun. Leareth does stop doing the pausing after a while and just unwinds it very, very slowly. 

Eventually he throws down his pencil and shivers and flops backwards onto the bed. "Love is cruel," he declares.

"If you are giving up now I still expect you to finish it later," Leareth says, pulling Maitimo into his arms and kissing him. 

"Sure, fine, whatever you'd like, right now you should touch me less slowly than that."

"Oh? If that is what you wanted you only needed to say so." Leareth undoes the rest of the braid at a more normal pace and runs his fingers through Maitimo's hair. 

Sigh. 

Leareth will keep doing that and kissing him and Mindspeaking random affectionate comments for a little bit. He stops long enough to let Maitimo string together a coherent train of thought. :Is there anything in particular you are wanting right now?: 

Mmmm. He turns around and considers Leareth, lazily. 

Surprise me.

Leareth (keeping his thoughts private because surprise) has to think about this for a while, because his top three ideas all involve some variant on restraining Maitimo with magic, which is not safe, this is very inconvenient but he hasn't figured out the spell he was going to research yet.

...Well, obviously he's going to go with something compulsion-related. Maybe a couple different layers of it.

He would like Maitimo to sing the song that enhances sensations again. He won't even try to make it subtle; he does it the action-way, not the wanting-way, and not sloppy but deliberately with a bit more force than it really needs. 

Then he is going to do a much subtler addition - Maitimo wants to touch Leareth, first just pet his hair, then Leareth can add more directions, and also just a general push toward 'touching', he's not going to stop Maitimo from getting creative with it–

–except that occasionally, at the most frustrating moments he can manage it, there are randomly going to be mage-barriers in the way. 

He sings to him and undoes his braid and kisses along his jawline and - 

- did you do that, he's about to ask seriously, but he can read the answer on Leareth's face - 

- and he can't stop trying, even when there's something there in his way and it obviously won't work -

- and then it does! He tries to puzzle out whether there was some trigger condition and can't figure it out; watching Leareth he'd guess not, but he is guessing with only a little bit of his attention because most of him is frustrated, and busy kissing Leareth.

He thinks to check after a bit if he can stop. He cannot. When he can't even reach Leareth he still cannot stop trying. If there is anything else in his head he can't tell but that's at least two things, maybe the third that sometimes makes him fail -

- is there a win condition -

- well, if there is, he will have to be more creative to discover it. 

(Honestly, the only win condition he has in mind is 'Leareth becomes distracted enough that he can't focus enough to do the mage-barriers', or no longer wants to, it's fun making Maitimo frustrated and a bit flustered like this but it's an amount frustrating for him too if he's preventing Maitimo from actually touching him. If Maitimo thinks to snuggle up close there won't be so many opportunities to sneak barriers in the way. Leareth will wait and see for a bit.) 

He comes up with that eventually. He comes up with distracting Leareth more thoroughly, too. 

Do compulsions take effort to maintain - or can you just stick them there forever -

Leareth is distracted and so answering is hard but he manages it. :They - wear off - not forever - long-term harder - but - not active effort: He can no longer focus enough to keep tossing up mage-barriers, the last couple of tries they only stayed up for a second or two, so he stops trying. :Can - stop the singing: It's not letting Maitimo take more than short pauses to kiss him. :If you'd - rather - other things–:

I would.

:Stop distracting me - one moment...: Leareth gets rid of it. And of all the specific bits of the other one, leaving just the general wanting-to-touch-him, which Maitimo hardly needs a compulsion to want but it's still somehow satisfying. 

He can't tell whether there's anything there or not. He would guess from Leareth's face that there still is, though. It adds some odd delightful distracting extra something to kissing Leareth more, to undressing him, having only the vaguest of guesses how much of this is him, how much of this is steered, how precisely -.

He will ask later.  "Just because otherwise I'll be curious for days."

Leareth can explain. Not very precisely steered at all, actually, he - really can’t multitask that well when Maitimo is keeping him busy.

"Huh." He grins at him, sleepily.

“Are you surprised?” Leareth is also very relaxed and sleepy.

"I too have a hard time accessing my core competencies when very distracted. I suspected there was not a very precise script but I didn't know - how much was my idea and how much was your idea - it's such an unusual thing to not know -"