Or he can do that, sure. She bites her lip, lets her breathing hitch just slightly. (Note to self: have some kind of plan before explaining Golarion slavery to Keltham just in case instead of being appalled he is like 'that sounds great.') 

These pants don't look bad on her, but they have now become obstacles to Progress.  Obstacles to Progress must be removed.

He almost starts to tear them off her but remembers in time that this won't work, and undoes as many buttons as he sees before attempting further removal of the clothing.

The pants have two buttons. She contemplates making it slightly harder for Keltham to navigate them, by wiggling, but decides that while it is more fun for Carissa to be slightly difficult she has no real reason to think that's how Keltham prefers it - she can't read that much into his not having reacted more strongly to previous being-mildly-difficult, he's probably not calibrated on how much is appropriate -

- and so she ought to try cooperating like he's been serious about it, even though he hasn't. She doesn't wiggle; she does let her legs anticipate his movements, so it takes hardly any effort to move her to pull off the pants.

Her legs are as pretty as her chest.

Keltham yanks off his own pants, with the characteristic sound of micro-velcro coming apart which sounds like cloth tearing at first, and casts these apparently undamaged pants aside.  (Dath ilan has not evolved separate underwear per se; the bottom assembly just works off the shelf without added components being required.)

He is hard, of course, maybe harder than he's ever been.  If he knew that his contraception had followed him here, survived the healing he performed on himself last night, and not been surreptitiously removed by Chelish wizards in his sleep, he'd be fucking her so hard right now.  As it is, the two of them are not on childbearing terms.  "Be it clearly stated," Keltham says in a thick voice, "that if I'm not fucking you right now, that's not because I don't really, really want to."

Not quite pretty enough for him to pass up on licensing fees, huh. She's not even offended. Under normal circumstances she'd just offer to Polymorph it off, and she in fact could offer that, but then he'll get distracted trying to think through whether he trusts her that that works and that sounds like a not-at-all-sexy direction to push him in. If he were slightly less of an alien she'd say 'if you owned me, you'd also separately get to decide if we had children', but he's an alien and that seems to run a genuine chance of stamping on something he's been assuming all wrong.

"I admire your self control," she says, though she would actually really rather his self control not quite be adequate to the task.

He briefly smiles - that's a prideful thing for a woman to say, when she's tempting you, and Keltham likes pride.

Keltham then checks, also briefly, teasingly, whether Carissa tastes like chocolate.  He is careful to avoid the outward pleasure center with his tongue while he does that, both for teasing reasons, and because he doesn't know if she's a woman who requires warmup before direct clitoral stimulation.

She does! (She doesn't play that difficult.)

Prestidigation-based artificial flavor is very tastably artificial, as the cantrip description warned, but it's still better flavor than dath ilan can manage in the absence of magic.  Keltham makes a mental note to tell her about this scored point for Golarion later; he's not going to cheat on recordkeeping, but right now he has other things on his mind.

"If you want to lubricate yourself before my fingers go in, now's the time," he warns Carissa, some watching part of himself noting how much that also isn't being phrased as a request.

Most considerate baby dom. He is doing his absolute best to do whatever he wants and he's still sort of tracking whether he's going to hurt her, he doesn't know how not to.

She does not let this show on her face; she doesn't think Keltham would be flattered. "I'm feeling pretty ready," she says. 

(It frankly wouldn't occur to Keltham that going through the standard preflight checklist is being 'considerate'?  It's just standard.  If one suggested to Keltham that this entry on the checklist was particularly a female-serving one, he would stare blankly for a moment and then observe that things may not go in, if a woman isn't lubricated enough.  If you were having sex-with-finegrained-financial-transfers, the woman would not pay an additional fifty millims to add lube, that's just a symmetrical convenience.)

Keltham hesitates then, torn between an impulse to ask for directions for combining pleasure with pain correctly, and a deeper desire not to ask for directions.

- no.  He'll at least try it first on his own.

His desires seem to want Carissa in a different position.  One hand goes to her thigh, grabs, pulls.  A dath ilani woman would know by convention of nonverbal cuddling signals that Keltham intended to rotate her, turn her onto her stomach on the bed, facing down.

Carissa is not at all familiar with dath ilani cuddling conventions but she knows how to be very pliable. And giggly, just a tiny calculated bit of giggly. 

Some part of Keltham doesn't enjoy the giggly sound, maybe at any other time he would, but here and now it's not the sound he wants to hear.  When Carissa is flipped onto her stomach, he pulls her shirt from her, to expose her back; with the front of her shirt open, that should be possible to remove now, right?

Yes. She's not wearing underclothes; the shirt has chest support built in.

A fine enough backside as well.

With his dominant hand, Keltham puts two fingers into Carissa - yes, she's lubricated enough - and begins two-fingered thrusts directed at the frontal vaginal pleasure nexus.  He escalates the pressure quickly, over just the first dozen thrusts, faster than he would escalate without clear signals from anybody who was less wet or less supposedly-invulnerable.

When he's reached the pressure level and rhythm that's the optimal guess for that pleasure nexus if you otherwise know nothing about the woman, he rakes his fingernails, hard, down her exposed back.  He wants to see it annotated.

Carissa can, actually, enjoy sex in the straightforward way where it's nice and you like it, but she can't do that and also do anything else, so she usually doesn't. You can get yourself off if that's all you are aiming to accomplish in the evening. If she is trying to decide, deliberately, how to move and how to sound and what expressions to make and what her hands are doing, then she's doing that, and it's like casting a high-circle spell, exhilarating, compelling, but not at all something you'd straightforwardly describe as pleasant. She is using her sensory input for too many things for just enjoying it.  She can notice, while she takes cues from Keltham about how to move and how to twitch and how to breathlessly whimper, that he has had probably quantitatively less practice at this than most adventurers at the Worldwound but is better at it, presumably because girls in dath ilan have more bargaining power than girls in Golarion do, or at least have fewer non-sex priorities they're trying to arrange through sex and are therefore pointing more of the bargaining power they are possessed with at the sex itself being nice. But Keltham being better at it is not very related to how she moves and twitches and whimpers, and that's not even because she's trying to seduce him into Evil, it's just because you can't mindlessly enjoy things and react satisfyingly to them at the same time. 

Her back scratches up nicely.

(Keltham is better at this because he's had deliberate training, thank you very much.  What are your schools even teaching people, if they're not preparing them for such basic aspects of adult life?)

(This about dath ilan:  They never even considered not optimizing the shit out of sex.  There are regular Very Serious debates, some of them hidden behind fourth-tier pervertedness ciphers, about which parts of sex should have the shit optimized out of them, versus being let run wild and free.  But that no aspect of sex should be hyperoptimized at all would be a mad extremist position, which nobody could take Very Seriously.

There is, to be sure, the whole system of avoiding spoilers for young people, which means that their earliest sex is not much optimized.  You only get to discover sex once, after all; you wouldn't want to spoil those surprises, any more than you'd tell kids about conservation of momentum instead of putting them in a setting where they can discover classical mechanics for themselves.  Now and then, Civilization assembles together a group of recently-initiated young geniuses, who haven't been told yet about any standard sexual methods, and asks them to consider from scratch how sex should best be optimized - just in case Civilization's accustomed thought patterns are missing something.

It is not that dath ilan tries to destroy all naivety as fast as it can be destroyed by truth.  Some innocence is hedonically or scientifically useful to preserve for a time.

But once you are initiated into the first tier of spoilered discussion for sex, you get to learn about those standard optimizations that are simple common sense for repairing the defects of sex in a state of nature.

And then, of course, exactly how much sexual training a young man might invest his limited skill points into, depends upon that young man's hedonism, horniness, competitiveness, competing life priorities, and how much it bugs him to think he could be doing it better.)

(Keltham has competing life priorities, and would not call himself particularly hedonistic.  He is, however, very competitive, and sex does matter to his self-told life story at all.  The amount of pleasure he has to give in trade feels to Keltham like a key figure of merit for his own sexual self-worth; and for this reason he has invested more skill points than most other young men his age.  Maybe most women his age are not, in fact, evaluating him as if he were a sexual product in a marketplace; but Keltham feels on some level that they should be, they should be evaluating what he has to trade, and he doesn't like the thought of being unready if he meets a woman who is evaluating him.  The sexual standards he wants to live up to, first and foremost, are his own; and that never felt to him like a place where he was naturally very self-forgiving.

So Keltham has ever spent a dozen hours practicing with a very carefully built anatomical doll, hooked up to a room full of the best computers that are known publicly to exist, learning how to play standard-variation-over female anatomy as if it were a video game, and learning how to read standard-variation-over female sexual responses, especially the ones that don't require voluntary action.

Because among the defects of sex in a state of nature is, for example, that orgasms don't last nearly long enough in comparison to the rest of sex; and if you're trying to optimize the integral of pleasure over time - not that this is the figure of merit, for sex, but it's a figure of merit - then it's a bonus sexual skill to be able to read how close your member-of-desired-sex is to orgasm, and hang out in the region where she's close but not quite there.  To be sure, there's the very obvious version of this where she just tells you where she is, or gasps out figures between zero and twelve, or gives standard nonverbal signals; but if she doesn't have to focus on doing that, because you can just tell, then you are able to do a Difficult-Seeming Impressive Trick and she can have more fun without being distracted.

Dath ilan does enjoy its Difficult-Seeming Impressive Tricks, like being able to tear a jacket-shirt off of yourself and have it come out intact.  Or "fingersnaps", as they're now sometimes known more briefly, in a meme spread by the popcorn book series Science Maniac Verrez.  Keltham, in particular, likes Difficult-Seeming Impressive Tricks.  And what lots of people spend lots of minutes doing, Civilization spends big money on!  A lot of work went into designing the anatomical arcade system that trained Keltham to attempt this particular sexual fingersnap.)

(And also this of dath ilan: faking your sexual responses is... well, mostly it's not imagined, but if imagined, it would immediately be judged as serious-business awfulness.  You don't want to live in an equilibrium where people having sex are constantly distracted by the question of whether their partner's signals are real or fake.  Hiding your sexual responses during sex, sure, there are Complicated Romances like that, but if you see something it ought to be real.  Learning that somebody you'd trusted had done that to you would be the sort of betrayal where a dath ilani might be wondering for the rest of their life if it was going to happen to them again.  Telling a man that she deceptively faked her enjoyment with him is the sort of thing that a not-redeemable fictional villain would do to her ex-boyfriend, just before she stabbed him in the neck and left him to rot someplace his brain wouldn't be found in time.

If somehow an adult were caught faking an orgasm, and this was somehow socially proven... it wouldn't get them kicked out of as many cities as if they deliberately raped somebody.  But it would get them excluded from around the same number of orgies and startups.

Obvious exceptions obviously apply, of course, like in movie acting or scripted sex work; there is a great difference between depiction and deception.)

Keltham isn't thinking that Carissa is deceptively faking her sexual responses; it's not someplace his thoughts would readily jump.  He is distracted, among other things, by the pattern of red trails he's managed to leave on Carissa's back, though his hardest-raked fingernails haven't made her bleed.  She is, again, right about him; he likes seeing her annotated.

Keltham is noticing that Chelish women's sexual responses don't make sense in terms of the patterns he's been trained for; or at least, Carissa's finer patterns of breathing and muscle-tensions aren't matching up well with Carissa's overt sounds, and he's not sure which one he ought to believe.  Maybe there's some kind of Permanent Cheerfulness thing going on, like with the research harem in his lessons?  If Carissa had spent a lot of time doing something like that during overcomplicated romances with no off switch, she wouldn't necessarily be able to stop, especially if she was otherwise distracted by fingernails.  Keltham does not wish to stop and talk about this either, and it's not like he can ask her to switch to a standard precoded nonverbal signal scale.

Keltham decides he will mostly believe in Carissa's less overt responses for now, and starts experimenting with standard-variations-over optimal stimulation patterns, to see if he can hill-climb to anything that produces a readably different less-overt sexual response, or if he just can't read her at all.

Carissa has no information about any of this and couldn't actually stop pretending if she tried, the link between stimuli and responses is too interrupted for her to identify any particular response as natural. She's not even trying to guess what Keltham is going for, specifically, that's difficult even without a cultural divide in the way. Probably he'll do this until he gets bored and then want to enjoy himself, which is much less complicated. 

Okay, Carissa's subtle tells are reading at the same low level for any pattern he tries, including a set of tactics such that you'd expect at least one set element to have a noticeable effect over a supermajority of dath ilani women.

Which suggests that either (Hypothesis 1) Keltham isn't able to read Carissa correctly, at all; or alternatively (Hypothesis 2) that he just isn't using her correct sexual entry codes at all, and she's got Permanent Cheerfulness going on.

Subhypotheses of 1:  Does dath ilani training do something that makes women more readable?  Does his own training assume the woman is a dath ilani who's had whatever goes into baseline female sexuality optimization?

Subhypotheses of 2:  Maybe Carissa has been messed up by this world somehow, or is just untrained to operate optimally in the cuddleroom, such that it would take a lot more work to raise her arousal to anywhere near an orgasmic level.  Even when Keltham and his agemates were reinventing sex without spoilers, the cuddlerooms had vibrators and lubricants and ergonomic furniture lying around to figure out.  Can most women not trained to optimize their sexual responses even figure out how to have orgasms, if not supplied with lubricants, vibrators, and ergonomic cuddling furniture?

How sex works in a complete state of nature is not a topic that comes up much in Civilization!  Not being in a state of nature is what being civilized is!

Keltham doesn't want to think about this right now!  He wants to preserve the heady momentum of discovering sadism, not figure out further experiments to distinguish these multiple hypotheses and subhypotheses!

And Carissa does not currently seem distressed?  She may not realize that there is any reachable level of sexual enjoyment beyond what she's experiencing now.  He can go further into exploring his own sadism and enjoyment; and later go back to giving her pleasure in return trade trying harder to inflict pleasure on her, even if he has to pause and ask for directions.

Without saying anything in words, Keltham stops stimulating Carissa and pulls her up from her facedown position on the bed, maneuvering himself to be beside her and below her.  He has his own ideas about what he could tell Carissa to do, but is curious to see what she'll do on her own if initiative gets nonverbally passed to her.

- oh, good, this is wildly less complicated, Carissa knows how to give a blowjob and it seems really improbable that in dath ilan that either 1) works super differently or 2) is supposed to be accompanied by a performance of some kind more elaborate than 'I am sweet and cooperative and having a nice time because of how sexy you are', which she is assuming that men want the world over. More than the world over. The shared genetic heritage over.