"Sealing the room, insofar as that seems to be a thing.  Don't suppose there's a switch I'm missing for whatever magical version of soundproofing you've got?  Or for that matter, something that tells the security people to get any five-year-olds out of the hidden wall tunnels, or switch the security cameras to only asexual observers?"

"I really hope there are no five year olds anywhere on the premises!! The walls are nearly a foot of solid stone, no one will hear us unless they're creeping on the balcony, and if we're being scried, then they can just hear us, and we can tell them," and she looks up at the ceiling, "hey, have a devil of the kinds that are too inhuman for sexual desire do the necessary observation of how Keltham hasn't been stealthily kidnapped or murdered."

Keltham did not think devils were that easy to consult on key national issues let alone employ as security observers but he will defer all infinite Additional Questions until later.  "I hadn't meant to ask for anything expensive, just checking if we were supposed to - nevermind."

Back to the bed.  It's not going to be easy having sex on a flat soft surface but it's possible.  Lots of things are possible if you're sufficiently determined about them, sexually speaking.

Carissa-Sevar didn't seem to think that escalating slowly and in order was particularly romantically important to her, which is good, because right now Keltham is feeling an alarmingly strong impulse to do exactly what his impulses tell him, and what his impulses tell him to do is throw off his shirt.

Keltham taking off his jacket-shirt is going to look strange, to an inhabitant of Golarion not accustomed to overengineered dath ilani clothing.

In principle, one spends a lot of time in clothes, and hence should be willing to spend some money on better clothes.

In practice there is a certain element, in Civilization's clothing choices, of that dath ilani personality trait which always puts a hidden passageway behind at least one bookcase in the house library.  Often one that just goes around a short corner and exits from a different bookcase in the same library.  The point is, the hidden passageway has to be there, and if you ask why, the people of dath ilan will smile and tell you to shut up.

Keltham's jacket-shirt assembly includes more technology than just zipper slides.  It has been painstakingly designed by a cultural accumulation-over-time of engineers with +4sd intelligence to, among other things: manifest a rainproof hood from no obvious receptable, convert between warmer and colder coverage... and be easy to remove from yourself while you're already cuddling somebody, without having to disentangle yourself.  This easy-removal feature makes good use of micro-velcro fine enough to not be obvious from a distance, and arrays of tiny rare-earth magnets which automatically pull bits of fabric back together again in a correct stepwise pattern.

From an outside perspective, one would see Keltham tear his jacket-shirt off of himself with an audible ripping sound, and end up holding a jacket with no visible damage.  If you were watching closely enough, you'd see the jacket split along the seams and then quickly come together again along those same seams.  The way this registers from outside is not an accident or any kind of side effect of other design purposes.  A mad engineer who would detect in Golarion as INT 26 spent several years figuring out exactly how to do that and make it look cool, subsequently collecting 0.1-unskilled-labor-hour royalties on over 200,000,000 pieces of clothing.

Keltham kneels over where he threw Carissa to the bed, one knee between her thighs, not bothering to avoid touching anything.  "How do I take off your shirt?" he says, after a brief moment of failing to see any affordances for doing that.

"My shirt does not do that." Does everyone's clothes do that? She doesn't see how, without magic - or why - stop getting distracted by textile manufacture questions. "It...buttons. With buttons." She demonstrates one. 

Huh, that's a surprisingly elegant solution to the problem of clothing that must be built with imprecise manufacturing technology.  The button-hole doesn't have to be exactly the same size as the button, it's okay if no two buttons are exactly the same size as each other, and the fastening method is robust to small departures of the shape from - if this line of thinking is not centrally necessary to sex with Carissa it can wait.

Keltham undoes all the buttons he can see, the motions unpracticed but not too slow; it's obvious enough how a button works, once you see one.

And her shirt lies open before him.

Carissa Sevar is older than any woman he's previously lain with, and prettier than them, in his sight, as far as he can tell from just her exposed chest.  Carissa being seven?? years older than him works for him on a physical level, it seems, so long as he's not at a social power disadvantage to her the way he would have been to an older woman of Civilization.

Keltham wonders if there's a non-button trick he's missing for how he could remove Carissa's shirt-sleeves from her arms, without her needing to rise up from her laid-down position; but also Keltham doesn't feel the need to do that right now.  The alien clothing on the sexy alien female isn't something he minds.

"I approve," he says a little breathlessly, eyes going between Carissa's face and her chest.

Carissa knows that she is pretty. There are things it's smart to lie to yourself about, in Cheliax; that isn't one of them. It matters for a lot of things; you get lots of data on it; it is not suspicious to be competent at it, and it's vaguely pathetic not to be, to be living in a fantasy where you are prettier than you really are, or one where you're average and the way people respond to you is mostly about your charming personality when you are not average and it's not about your personality at all. In a room of girls her age she'll be the prettiest, if it wasn't selected on that, and if it was, she'll be average, unless it was selected hard on that, reaching the point where people deploy magic potions; she can't be mistaken for the kind of woman who's done that, not once you've met them. The worry about attracting the notice of the pharaoh of Osirion is realistic given certain bounds of uncertainty about how much he likes exoticness.

For a statement that contains approximately no new information Keltham's approval is oddly satisfying. 

"If you are characteristic of men with your taste," she says, "you'll like it even better when it's marked up a little."

"I expect I'll be very excited by whatever that actually means, but that idiom in Baseline means something implausible, unless you actually did want me to annotate you."

"Your poor language." She pinches her breast, hard enough to leave a bright red mark when she pulls her hand away. "Your poor civilization. You may have coordination but towards what end, if the only thing to do with unblemished skin is to annotate it?"

Keltham notes, somewhat to his own surprise, that his hands are slightly trembling.  The impulse to pinch her, harder than that, to get sounds out of her again, is powerful enough that - well, that it's now absolutely obvious why dath ilan doesn't want sexual-pain-dealers to know what they are, if there's no improbable invulnerable sexual-pain-receivers around to complement them.  He is struggling between two mutually inhibitory instilled reflexes, the training out of dath ilan which says that in the cuddleroom of all places you're supposed to just follow your impulses, and his acculturation out of dath ilan to be careful about hurting people no stop that's stupid he couldn't even produce blood when he bit down hard on her lip -

Keltham allows his hand to do what it wants, seizing her other breast and grabbing as hard as he can, digging in with fingernails.

Carissa thinks it is far too early in the evening to not-react to something he does, look at him challengingly and ask if he can do it more than that. That is a good move to have in reserve. Right now she has thrown enough complications onto the table and should just let Keltham explore them. She should shudder and wiggle and reach for his hand, but not to pull it away, and smile at him. 

(Good is wrong. Carissa believes this mostly because the possible Carissas who don't have been neatly pruned from existence, or hypothetical existence, but it feels like there's another angle on believing it, here - dath ilan layering all their propaganda to hide from people what they are, because their beautiful Good abundant empire didn't have space for the hunger of humans to hurt each other and be rewarded for it, to have something that is theirs and that they needn't treat with caution -

- the desires in yourself that have no place in Axis -

- maybe, though she shouldn't even dream of it, it's true of Keltham too -)

If he did this to a normal dath ilani woman she'd be at least saying 'ow' and the fact that Carissa isn't - yelling, isn't having her face tighten up in pain, that she can still choose to just smile at him in response - he feels like he needs to hurt her more than this, take that control away from her, and he almost stops to ask if he's thinking it right, except that he, he can see himself as others see him, he can see his own story as a reader would see it, he can guess where this trend is going and if not Carissa can tell him in words to stop -

His other hand seizes her nipple, traps it between thumbnail and forefinger-nail, and bites down on that nipple with those two fingernails as much as his grip strength allows.

You have to think about these things very quickly; a delay will betray you. Most men will keep going until they get the reaction they want; some for a while after that, so you want to start grimacing and whimpering and flinching substantially shy of your actual limit, so it's not too bad later either. She bets that in dath ilan that's not even Complicated Romance it's probably, like, a major social faux pas or something. 

It does hurt, a lot, more than would be sexy in isolation, which it so so profoundly isn't, and a lot more is sexy when it's part of a game played with your body for the sake of getting things you desperately want. She flinches, and whimpers. But only a little, and then she goes back to smiling at him.

"You're cute."

He's satisfied, a little, by that flinch and whimper.  Part of him is reassured about still being addressed in favorable terms afterwards, that he didn't make a misstep.  Part of him seems to feel an overpowering need to be otherwise to her than -

"Maybe you'll tell me that the first date is too early for it," he says, his voice coming out lower, huskier, than he expected from himself, "or that nobody gets it their first day, but I hope there's a path to eventually escalate a relationship like this one to where I'm something other than cute."

"You can get a girl to call you all kinds of things, including on the first date. Hurting people is very effective for that. ...it does, typically, take a little longer, to make her mean it."

For her to call him - what?  Keltham doesn't know.  There is something, but he doesn't know what.

Implied in Carissa's words is that there's a version that's a game, and a version that isn't just a game.  He can already feel from where he is, that this must be so.  But he doesn't know what lies beyond this, beyond just the sexual infliction of pain.  And maybe he shouldn't ask, shouldn't delve too greedily and too deep upon a first date.  He doesn't want to slow down for explanations either; he can ask afterwards.

"Don't call me anything you don't mean," he says, and there's an undertone in his voice that isn't often heard in dath ilan; what he said should have been a request, it's not clear what multiagent equilibrium could sensibly exist here where that could be something other than a request, but it wasn't one.  And because it felt right, his hand pressed fingernails into her breast again as he said it.

She shivers; that part's easy. 

Carissa possesses a convenient degree of sexual enjoyment of pain; she doesn't have a particular tendency to use what's hot as an input into who she obeys or to find it hot rather than convenient when people obey her. But she can recognize the thing he wants - better than he can, at least, and -

- four pillars of Asmodeanism, one of them tyranny, enjoyment of power and its exercise, one she doesn't have particular aptitude for but a path to Asmodeus just as valid as her own -

"Yes, Keltham," she says, quietly, meeting his eyes. "And if you were a ruler to whom I had sworn my loyalty, then it would be, 'yes, my lord,' like so."

Keltham clamps down on an impulse to pull back his hand like it was burned; something is escalating too far and too fast.

Naturally Keltham has been, at one point in his life, told Very Seriously that men are also allowed to decide that something sexual is escalating too quickly for their comfort, even if that's not the typical gendertrope depicted for the male sex in books and movies.  And to this, Keltham had replied that he was in fact a quite archetypal male who would never have need of that advice.  But because Keltham had also been possessed of at least average intelligence, imagination, and reflection, Keltham had added, after another moment's thought, that this might not be true if there were secret levels of sexual escalation he was having difficulty imagining.  And this, of course, the Watcher had neither confirmed nor denied.

Courage, Keltham thinks to himself, and keeps his hand where it is.  He is typical-male enough that typical-male gendertropes are useful to him, and he wordlessly autoexpects for it to do well by him if he draws on that to not look hesitant in front of a sex partner.

"There's something there I want," he says, "but it's deep and it's complicated and even though you obviously already know what it is, I'm not going to understand it right away and I don't want to stop while you explain it to me.  I do know I want to - be to you as I would be to a sex worker whose time I'd bought - only, not like that, but as if she'd just given it to me - the ability to do what I want with you - I don't want to trade pleasures with you.  I want to force pleasure out of you and hurt you while I do that, and then hurt you again while you pleasure me in turn."

"Yes," she says, because she's getting the sense that they both individually and together have a failure mode of talking too much when only a little would do.

Keltham has read the description of standard wizard cantrips, and he expects he's guessed at least part of magical sexual practice in Golarion; especially since he doubts their tech level suffices for ingestable latent flavorants.  "You can use Prestidigitation now to flavor my -"  (Taldane doesn't have very detailed words for the components of semen or their anatomical storage places.)  "- stored sexual fluids however you prefer," he says, looking down on her darkly.  "And for myself, I want you tasting like chocolate."

This is, in fact, a thing Carissa has ever done, but she is intensely curious about under what algorithm it comes to mind as one of the first - she should think less. Entirely too much thinking. 

She takes his wrist, and moves his hand with hers while she casts a cantrip. "Probably I did what you said," she says. "You've hardly got the spellcraft to know for sure. I guess you could check."

(In a world of a billion people, around a hundred million minutes per day are going to be spent tasting male sexual fluids, or around 50,000 years per year, and at least an order of magnitude more for that portion of women who desire oral sex where the fluid-tasting phase lasts much longer.  And that's just the momentary hedonics; if a suboptimal taste were permitted to act as a negative reinforcer for sex itself, that would destroy an order of magnitude more happiness still.  It would be silly to not have hundreds of top engineers working on the problem of making people taste 10% better.  Though you don't especially need good social coordination for that, they'd say, because Markets; they would be surprised if you told them a world could have Markets but somehow not those top engineers.)

There's always been a strange impulse, any time Keltham is asked to do anything during sex, for him to want to do something else instead; like he wants to not do anything that could be remotely seen as doing what somebody else says.  Keltham has always chalked this up to an excessive level of individualism, even for himself; and gone on trading pleasures and fairly providing that which he trades, since he can't afford yet to routinely trade money instead.  Now he's starting to suspect it's something else entirely.

"I guess I could," Keltham says, and as his fingers go down Carissa's pants, his fingernails move aside and dig hard into her thighs instead.

(The thought that Carissa was inviting him to monitor and enforce her obedience, or to punish her if she hadn't done as requested, does not occur to Keltham yet, not at all; those are still ideas that require much longer codes in his native language of thought, for he has not seen all their pieces.)