Chapter 28 Katharina #2
The angel touched me without hesitation, as if there was no part of me he had not already mapped and claimed. There was no softness in it, but there was no cruelty either. There was only the absolute and total certainty of someone who has never doubted their welcome.
He lifted my leg onto his shoulder, and his burning tongue snaked out, longer than it should have been. It laved my clit, powerful enough that my back arched against Heinrich.
“I have you.” Heinrich wrapped his arms around me, steadying me.
But his hunger could no longer be contained, either.
As the angel continued his worship, Heinrich’s hand traced down my side.
His flesh was just as hot as the angel’s, leaving a trail of fire on my skin.
Everywhere they touched glowed with that golden light, the paths of their touch marked.
Heinrich reached down, twisting the strands of our angel’s hair until he groaned against me, his forked tongue twisting my clit back and forth until my legs shook.
I bucked my hips against his mouth, and his hands came up to grip the flesh of my ass, guiding me against him.
Heinrich’s other hand descended, spreading me open from behind before plunging in deep.
They found a rhythm together quickly, Heinrich thrusting inside me, matching the angel’s pulses until my whole body burned.
“Our Katharina.” Heinrich’s voice was deep, steady. “Heaven’s light doesn’t compare to seeing you like this.” He thrust deeper, his long fingers achingly slow in their exploration.
“Heinrich, more…”
Below me, the angel chuckled. “Always such a lustful dove.”
He and Heinrich locked gazes, another wordless conversation. Then he shifted my weight, standing and lifting me, one of my arms draped over Heinrich’s shoulder, the other over his.
Heinrich withdrew his fingers, and my arousal glowed with that same golden light, as if my very soul had come with it. But he only shifted his hand back, fingers now pressing against the tighter ring of muscle behind my cunt.
I gasped, but the angel pressed against me, silencing me with a kiss.
“Do you trust us, Katharina?”
“I always have.”
He kissed me again and the light surged, burning away his vestments. I glanced down, but was greeted not by flesh, but a radiance beyond my comprehension. Yet what should have been pure light was solid against my stomach, a spear of Heaven.
Heinrich’s finger slipped into me, but where once there might have been pain, there was only satisfaction, as if the garden itself forbade harm. He tugged, stretching me slowly before adding another.
I convulsed, perfectly held between the both of them.
“‘Give, and it shall be given unto you’1,” Heinrich commanded, and the Light Bringer filled me to bursting, the pressure of him and Heinrich combined until I was filled to overflowing2. He groaned, his wings wrapping tighter, pulling us all closer.
“My dove, you are my window to Heaven,” our angel huffed, his hips thrusting slowly “ I shall pour you out a blessing, that there shall not be room enough to receive it.3”
But Heinrich stilled him with a look as he withdrew his fingers and pressed the head of his cock against me.
“Do you desire this, Katharina?”
I nodded, leaning back to kiss him. “Yes, I desire this. I desire everything.”
He grinned. “Then you shall receive everything.”
One hard, short thrust, and he had breached me, my nails digging into him and the angel’s flesh.
“We have you.”
They always had. Heinrich moved slowly, filling me inch by excruciating inch. My chest heaved, and all our breaths synchronized as we merged, our hearts beating as one. Holding me between them, they both started to move, flesh and starlight mixing within me like some primordial amalgamation.
I breathed both their names, over and over, a hymn in this ancient place, that rose into the air.
There was only the heat of them. I had stopped thinking. There was nothing left to think about. There was only this, only now, only the two of them and the place where they converged inside me.
“My dove.” The angel made a sound against my skin that reverberated deep in my chest.
“Katharina.” Heinrich said my name once, just once, and the way he said it undid me completely.
And then there was nothing but rapture.
Starting in my chest—that same warmth I had felt before—but this time it did not spread slowly. It tore through me, violent in a place of peace. It was the crumbling of towers and the parting of the sea. It was vast beyond comprehensions, yet contained within me all at once.
I arched into it and could not have said which of them I was reaching for because in that moment there was no distinction. We were not three separate things. We were one soul in three bodies, one light shattering into infinite colors.
First, it came from our angel, from the place at his center the fall had never touched, that nothing had ever been able to extinguish, no matter how long the dark had lasted.
It poured out of him and into us, flowing through Heinrich beside me, his whole body tightening as his fingers sank into the soft flesh of my thighs.
And then it came from me too.
I could see it through my closed eyelids as my mind went white-hot with pleasure, pulsing and cresting around them, as their adoration dripped down my legs.
Above us the tree blazed and we collapsed beneath it.
Heinrich’s arms surrounded me, his head against my chest while my fingers danced over the sharp lines of his nose.
Our angel lay on his back beside us, his hand tracing the curve of my stomach and the lines of Heinrich’s shoulders.
His wings were folded beneath him, and he gazed up through the canopy with an expression I didn’t understand.
But it was peaceful, like he had not rested in a very long time, and was resting now.
Surrounded by them both, I understood something.
My angel loved me the way a predator loves its chosen prey.
With a desperation, a need that is fundamental to his being.
He loved the parts of me that were difficult and sharp and dangerous, the parts that other people had asked me to hide.
He’d never once asked me to be smaller. He wanted all of it—the hunger and the fury and the raw unfinished edges—and his wanting had no ceiling and no apology.
Heinrich’s love was different. It was the thing that stands between you and the cold, steady and warm and entirely without condition.
He’d believed in my goodness when I had not believed in it myself, had seen the shape of what I was becoming and guarded it quietly, asking nothing, simply remaining.
His devotion was the oldest kind, the kind that does not require reciprocation.
Between them, I was all the things I had always been and never been allowed to be at once, wanted for my wildness, cherished for my softness. Held so completely that for the first time in my life, I did not feel the need to choose which one was right.
I basked in their very different kinds of devotion, of love. I could have stayed in it forever.
My angel knew that. Perhaps that was why he asked.
“Stay.” His voice was quieter now, stripped of its thunder. “Both of you. Stay here with me. The garden is yours. It has always been yours. There is nothing out there that this place cannot give you.”
I looked away from him, and met Heinrich’s gaze. I saw it in his face before either of us said a word, the same thing I felt sitting in my own chest, certain and a little sad.
It was desire. Desire for the exquisite discomfort of the unknown. That whatever we were, whatever we had been built for, it required the friction of the real world—its difficulties and its ugliness and its magnificent uncertainty.
That you cannot become what you are meant to be in a place where nothing can hurt you.
Heinrich understood this as well as I. Our love had blossomed in darkness, so we did not need the garden’s light. We only needed each other.
“What do you think?” I asked.
He smiled. “I think you were never meant for a cage, no matter how beautiful.”
I reached out and grabbed my angel’s hand, lacing it with Heinrich’s and mine. He looked at me, his red eyes unreadable, but he did not pull away.
“You know we can’t,” I murmured
He was quiet for a long moment. The tree breathed above us.
“Yes,” he said finally. “I know.”
“You always knew.”
His face twitched, not quite a smile and not quite grief. “I had hoped, perhaps, that this time would be different.” He turned his head to look at me fully, the weight of lifetimes in his gaze. “It never is.”
He reached out, his hand trailing down my arm and then Heinrich’s.
“You were both meant for more than this, more than this place. You were meant to shape the world to your desires, not to live as a flower in a glass case, perfect and preserved for eternity. You were meant to blossom with an unrelenting ferocity, to rip and tear into this life with your roots. You are both beautiful and raw and imperfect. You deserve everything.”
Heinrich sat up beside me and looked at him steadily. “You could come with us.”
The silence stretched long enough that I thought he wouldn’t answer.
Then he laughed. It was a real laugh, surprised out of him—warm and nothing like thunder. It made him look like something that had once been young.
“No, I think we have seen how that will end,” he replied. “But I will find you. I always do.”
He looked at us one last time, and in his eyes I saw the garden and the snake and every version of this moment that had ever happened, stretching back to the very first one.
“Go on then,” he breathed. “Go and be magnificent. You know what you must do.”
We all rose and he pulled me into a deep kiss.
He started gently, his lips meeting mine and caressing me softly.
I opened to him, and his tongue captured every part of me, a claiming of more than just my body and soul.
His fingers wrapped around the back of my head, sliding between the strands of my hair and pulling me to him even tighter, knowing this was goodbye.
I opened my eyes to him glowing with a heavenly light that no mortal was meant to see.
I squeezed my eyes shut again, and deep in my stomach, that fear returned. I wasn’t meant for this.
Then he released me, and before I could even catch my breath, he turned.
Heinrich had not moved from where he stood, watching.
His face was open in a way I had rarely seen, stripped of its careful composure, something wondering and unguarded in his expression.
Our angel gazed at him for a long moment with those ancient, burning eyes, and Heinrich looked back and did not flinch.
Then he crossed to Heinrich and took his face in both hands and kissed him with that same terrible gentleness.
Heinrich’s eyes closed. One of his hands came up slowly and gripped the angel by the wrist—not pulling away, just holding on, as if he needed something to anchor him to the earth.
I watched the light move beneath our angel’s skin, and I watched Heinrich absorb it without breaking.
When they separated, Heinrich exhaled slowly. He opened his eyes and found mine across the small distance between us, and what was in his face made my chest ache.
Our angel placed his hand on my shoulder, his light dimming as shadows surrounded him once more, and in the next moment his skin shifted and he coiled up my arm. His scales were cool and smooth against my heated skin, his weight familiar and grounding.
“It’s time.”
I reached up toward the weighted branches above, and they bent down until one perfect fruit lay in my palm. I grasped it firmly, ripping it from the branch. The skin was velvety soft, and I did not hesitate as I sank my teeth into its firm flesh.
The fruit was cloyingly sweet, like everything else here.
Thick juice ran down my throat as I bit into it, coating every surface of my mouth in its sugary essence.
But as I took bite after bite, something new emerged.
Something sharp. At first it was sour, like fresh citrus, and it bled into bitterness like the rind of the same fruit.
It cut through the deep unending softness of the sweetness like a jagged knife.
The sweetness of the fruit—of my life here—was forever tainted, notes of ash and tannin clinging to my tongue. But I couldn’t get enough.
I ripped into the fruit, tearing it in half with my bare hands.
As it split, more juices spilled over my hands and arms, and I was drawn to it like a bee to nectar.
I ran my tongue over my arms, tracing the paths the juice had taken.
I traced those irresistible lines back up to the fruit.
A deep gash ran down its core, overflowing with that undeniable nectar that tasted like honey and ash and sin.
My tongue laved around the edges of the soft flesh before diving into the warm center, guiding more and more of the juice down my throat.
“That’s it,” the snake hissed. “Take it all.”
As I consumed, visions raced before my mind.
Everything, everywhere, and everyone who had been or would be passed through me, even as I couldn’t hold on.
I was taken by the current of knowledge, but I couldn’t stop as I ate more and more of the fruit, until I could not eat any more, and the river of all that was deposited me on its sandy shore, and I lay on the ground panting.
The world slowly reassembled itself around me.
Heinrich was kneeling beside me. His hand was on my face, warm and steady, and his eyes moved over me, worry set in the down-turned corners.
I pushed myself upright. My hands were still sticky with juice, the smell rich and irresistible, and I glanced at him—this man who had stood in the light without breaking, who had been my foundation to grow strong.
I held what remained of the fruit out to him.
He looked at it. Then at me.
He was quiet for a moment. The garden breathed around us, patient.
Then he took it from my hands, and bit into it, and I watched his eyes close as the taste hit him, the moment the sweetness turned, the slight crease between his brows as the bitterness came through, and then the moment after that, when something in his face went very still and very open, as the current took him.
I held his hand while the river carried him, and I did not let go as it pulled us both away.
1 KJV, Luke 6:38
2 KJV, Proverbs 3:10
3 KJV, Malachi 3:10