The Reward #3
“Mer,” I whined, gasping for breath, though Meryt barely paused to take a breath of his own before beginning to kiss and nip down my neck. “This isn’t… what the elder dancers taught us.” We were supposed to use finesse, technique, allure.
“I don’t care,” Meryt growled into the hollow of my throat, then licked into it and up over my bulb. “You looked so beautiful, so incredible moving like that, I couldn’t wait—I can’t wait!”
Meryt grabbed hold of only my cock this time and brought one of my hands down to take hold of his.
We stroked together, knuckles brushing with frantic friction.
We were panting so hard, warm breaths mingling as we pressed our foreheads together and zealously pumped each other’s pricks, hips rocking in tandem.
Our eyes kept falling closed, but every time, we would open them again, seeking the connection, the proof that the other was there.
Here. Because this was real. We were each other’s, and there would never come a time when we wouldn’t be. It wasn’t only about the madness for us. I loved Meryt.
Oh gods, how I loved him.
“Nakht…. Nakht…” Meryt whimpered, like a mantra to signal he was close. I was too, so close, but I wanted us to finish together.
I slowed my strokes, prompting Meryt to do the same. “Gods, you’re gorgeous,” I said, looking first into his beautiful black eyes and then down the length of him to his cock in my hand.
“You are,” he countered. “So gorgeous. You’re like… the sunrise, do you know that? Like… like…”
Then Meryt said the words that would hallmark our story forever after.
“The dawn to my dusk.”
We spilled, like the gods had decreed it, gifting us our twin completion. If not for Meryt’s weight against me, I might have sunk straight to the floor.
Dawn to my dusk.
“I thought I was the poet between us,” I teased him.
Meryt huffed a laugh into my neck, nuzzling against me.
I wrapped my arms up around him, and just let us rest there for as long as we could stand the mess between us. “I guess that means… you’re the dusk to my dawn.”
The scroll was on the floor.
Oh shit, the scroll was on the floor!
“Did we damage it?” I asked in alarm, looking to where it lay, upside down now, but seemingly unbent and unharmed.
It was in the reinforced covering Amy had planned for it, so really, nothing should be able to harm it, but it was still ancient.
Nothing was never a certainty. “It better be okay, it’s my… I-I mean… uh…”
What had I been about to say? My scroll? My poems?
My…
Meryt?
I looked into Merry’s eyes. So much for not having to deal with cleanup after hours. We both had our pants and underwear at our ankles and had jerked each other off to mutual completion, even sweatier now than before with me leaned back against the stack of items where the scroll had been resting.
But a moment ago, we’d been somewhere else, hadn’t we?
“Nakht…?” Merry whispered, like the name was some dangerous secret he wasn’t allowed to speak.
“What the actual fuck was that?” I blurted.
Merry laughed, staring just as hazily and contentedly into my eyes. “Seemed like more than déjà vu? Another lifetime? That’s crazy though, right? Insane.”
Madness. “I’m already starting to forget some of it, like… like a dream. Maybe there’s a gas leak—”
“Nero,” Merry chastised when I tried to get up and look around for the invisible gas.
I just felt sort of silly, not used to not understanding something.
Needing to understand, to learn, to know was why I loved history and immersed myself in it.
What did it mean if I didn’t know myself?
I glanced at Merry a little shyly, starting to feel uncomfortable from the cooling release on our skin, but I had to ask, “What do you remember?”
He tilted his head at me, not seeming nearly as disturbed by that…
whatever it was. “Just… you. And me. And a desperate need to have my hands on you.” He smirked, fingers teasing the skin of my naked thighs and moving to brush over the matching birthmarks I had between them that almost looked like burns.
“Mer.” I slapped his chest again.
Merry chuckled. “I don’t know what that was, Nero, or for sure all I remember about it, but I know I would follow you to the depths of whatever Hell exists if anyone or anything took you away from me.”
That brought out a smile—like Merry always could. “Right back at ya.”
I kissed him. We were already a mess, so it wasn’t as if we could become more of one. This time, our kiss was sweet and soft and slow, because, although nothing was certain in life, I truly believed we had a good many years ahead of us. There was no need to rush.
I hummed when we parted because any kiss with Merry was always perfect. “Well, I might be the one sending you to Hell if we don’t clean up, make sure that scroll isn’t damaged, and get it into its case in the next five minutes.”
Merry chortled. “Noted.”
Thankfully, these closets all had various cleaning supplies, including wet wipes and paper towels, so it didn’t take us long to become presentable again.
Afterward I shoved the evidence into the very bottom of the closet’s small trash bin and vowed to take it out first thing in the morning before Setterfield arrived.
I was a little hesitant to touch the scroll, since it seemed to have been the catalyst for what happened, but I had a job to do and snatched it up like ripping off a bandage.
Nothing strange happened, which filled me with a sort of disappointment maybe, as I stared with fascination and fondness at the displayed poem’s pictographs.
It had been unrolled just enough to show the one translated on its signpost outside the display.
“Is it just me… or can you almost read that?” Merry whispered from behind me.
I knew some from my studies, but he was definitely right. “Let’s get out of here and make that dinner reservation. I’m thinking I really need that margarita right now.”
We slipped out of the closet, I hooked the scroll into place in its display, then we made a hasty beeline for the Ennead.
“If Setterfield catches us, you just got here,” I said. “Geez, how do I always let you talk me into things like that?”
“Me?” Merry scoffed.
“Yes, you. You talked me into our apartment.”
“It looks over the botanical gardens!”
“You talked me into getting Spot.”
“You love that cat as much as I do.”
“You talked me into naming her Spot.”
“She has spots! She’s an Egyptian Mau!”
“But…” I whirled to face him just before we reached the curtains closing off the exhibit, “…you didn’t talk me into marrying you. That I wanted all on my own.” I kissed him again, bringing my left hand to join his in a crisscross between us so our engagement bands touched too.
When we found the matching bands in twisted gold and black titanium, there had been no doubt that we had to have them.
Merry chuckled when we parted and touched his forehead to mine.
“I might be the talker,” he admitted, “but you’re still plenty charming.”
“Yeah?”
“Oh yeah. You could charm the gods right out of the sky.”
“Only if I was doing it for you.”
Even as I said that, the exchange made me frown, and I thought, for a split second, that there were… blue lotus flowers in Merry’s hair, but he didn’t even wear something like that in Aida.
I shook my head, looking back at the installation’s entrance.
“Everything okay?” Merry asked.
The feeling of déjà vu was odd but not worth frowning over. If anything, it meant I would choose to be with my Merry in every life, every time. I kissed him one more time to assure him all was well. “Yep. Everything is perfect. Now let’s go get that dinner.”
MERRY
Admittedly, I was still a little hard after our encounter in the closet, but I could wait for round two. I could always wait for Nero. He was worth waiting for.
I glanced at him as we continued toward the main entrance where security guards were seeing out the last of the patrons.
I was the luckiest man alive to have snagged someone so stunning.
Everything about Nero was like polished bronze, from the color of his skin, to his hair that was only a few shades darker, to the amber radiance of his eyes.
He wore his hair long, and usually, it was wavy and free down to mid-chest, but on late nights like this, he tied it up into a messy bun like a sexy librarian.
For a history nerd, he kept himself in impeccable shape too, hiding quite the jacked physique beneath his dark jeans, checkered shirt, and crimson sweater vest complete with matching tie. In short, he was the sexiest history nerd in, well, history, and all mine.
He always looked so good in red.
With our hands clasped, I swept Nero into another dance step, just a quick tug, a spin for both of us, a twirl of him in place, and back against me for a swift kiss, then he was at my side again, as we continued forward.
“You dork,” he teased me, but he fell into perfect step with me every time I did something like that, a naturally graceful dancer himself, though he rarely admitted it.
“And you are the nerd to my dork, and the dawn to my dusk.”
Nero laughed. “Dawn to your dusk? I thought I was the poet between… us…” He trailed off because this was definitely déjà vu.
“Must be true,” I said, “because it came to me like a vision from those gods you could so easily seduce.”
We were right at the final corner leading toward the entrance, and I paused to glance back at the curtain blocking the Egyptian exhibit. Our exit had left it just open enough for me to see a sliver of the underworld arch and Amun-Ra’s night boat.
Had Nero told me that’s what it was?
“Maybe I could seduce them,” he said, “but I wouldn't want to unless you were there too.”
It was odd. I didn’t think I could name too many of the Egyptian gods. A few obvious ones, like Anubis, Ra, that cat goddess maybe. Bastet? Bast?
Pasht?
But as I looked at the night boat, I knew I could name every god displayed.
When I turned back to Nero, for the briefest of moments, I thought his hair was down with braids in it woven with strange baubles, a feather, a bead like a snake scale…
We suddenly latched onto each other, desperate, more so than in the closet or possibly any time before. I wanted to devour every part of him, tongue first, to consume him, all of him, so we could never be parted again—and I knew Nero wanted the same thing.
The distant clearing of a throat snapped us apart.
It wasn’t Setterfield, thankfully, but we were in clear view of the security guards ushering people out.
“Closing time, gentlemen!” one of them called to us.
We were back to our senses, and eager to escape the museum’s confines to enjoy our night out, we took off faster until we burst out the doors into the cool evening air.
I didn’t know exactly what came next for us, other than that I was marrying this man and nothing would stand between us and that fateful day, but wherever our feet carried us, we were headed down that path together.
From dawn to dusk and everywhere in between.
The End