Typically Daniel stands outside all this talk of blood and sex, keeping himself dispassionate. It's harder with a hand on him, light over skin that hasn't been touched by anyone except medical professionals in a long, long time. Armand's touch is cool, and inhuman, and his fingers are delicate enough that they evoke other touches from his past. Daniel's mind whirls, panic waxing, lost memories trying to bubble to the surface through thick tar. It's worse because he doesn't understand what's happening, how he can have whole fragments of experience he'd so wholly forgotten.

He reaches up and catches that marble wrist in his own grip. Knows he doesn't really want to stop Armand, and probably couldn't if he did. But he still breaks their eye contact, and it's not some kind of fluster. Daniel's not exactly a blushing flower. But he's touch-starved and deeply shaken. "If you don't want to expose yourself, I don't see why I should," he says sharply. There's a hint of the hurt he felt when the play of Rashid was revealed. He doesn't trust Armand, and no amount of tawny-eyed seduction is gonna change that. "Maybe fifty years ago a beautiful mystery would have been enough."