Hal gets stabbed; Hickey gets invasive.

“You missed the discussion conference,” Jiang Cheng snaps back at him, whipping his head up stiffly from his perfunctory bow.

Nie Huaisang’s smile doesn’t waver, his entire expression perfectly, painstakingly polite. He looks pale, but anyone of his mettle would, clad in the violent contrast of silver and black. It all relinquishes nothing to Jiang Cheng but the means to inflame his irritation for the situation and for himself. He had left the conference too quickly to contemplate his …

January 15: Lucca and Matteo observe the hours of night.

A scene of traditional seamen's handicrafts, for traditionally handsy (and crafty) seamen.

Caleb tries to put himself in a favorable position for the inevitable. It doesn't work out.

“They'll have to make a few surgical incisions, of course.” With a single finger of each hand, Tsurumi traced two lines, one across each side of Ogata's face, from the corner of his warped jaw to the centre of his cheek. “You'll still look fetching as ever, I'm sure.”

(What urge will save him now that sex won't?)

A great deal of history is written on the body. Bond reads attentively.

They were nearly at the end of this bout of fucking, when Sergei gave that damned scarf still looping over his shoulders a playful jerk and whispered in his ear if he would mind if he choked him a little?

A treatise on the use of the riding-whip, or, Fitzjames and Crozier celebrate their safe return with a bit of recreational discipline.