CHAPTER FOUR #2
Mina’s cheeks burned, and his neck grew red and splotchy. He crossed his arms across his chest, hooking his hands on his shoulders.
“Give me back my clothes,” he said, barely more than a whisper.
The god struck again with the flail, the narrow exposed strip of his belly. The room echoed with a crack like thunder.
Mina tensed his stomach at the pain and cried out, the lean muscles of his abs rippling.
“Why are you doing this?” he cried, even as a black, unbidden thought from the needful thing inside him came to him:
Do it again.
A deep throb and pressure against the soft fabric of the shendyt around his waist. He closed his eyes and soaked in the burning.
His skin ached, raw with want. He felt like a flint waiting for the strike.
Despite himself, Mina continued to throb and grow, his hips almost involuntarily rolling against the soft friction of the fabric.
Anubis pulled back and looked into Mina’s eyes.
Mina remembered the first time he’d tried touching himself.
The whole time, all he could picture was every dead relative and Jesus himself sitting on a cloud right above his room and watching from heaven, shaking their heads in embarrassment and shame.
Every time since then, when he’d tried to masturbate as a teen, it had been halfhearted, and he’d only done it when he couldn’t stand the ache any longer.
Like letting out a sneeze you couldn’t hold in.
Mina always assumed people could read the scarlet guilt on his face like a burning bush because of the images he had to conjure to get himself there. The dark places his mind had to go.
Mina could feel the heavy gaze of the god and broke out into a cold sweat.
Looking again at himself in the mirror, Mina’s arms traveled back up to his chest, covering the parts of himself he hated.
His concave breastbone, his hips that jutted sharply.
Mina squeezed his eyes, wondering if this god had the power to remake him into something more suited to the life everyone expected of him.
A guttural growl rumbled through the darkness. Mina looked up, and the god’s eyes flashed red.
“I will say it again.” Anubis came in close to Mina’s ear so that he could feel the prickle of the god’s canine teeth along the nape of his neck, “Touch yourself, boy.”
No. He was trying to do better.
He was trying to be better.
But, Mina wondered, what if?
What would happen, Mina wondered, if he let his mind go to the dark places he always avoided because he thought God was watching? What about this god? And after all, wasn’t that what he was here for? To test the boundaries of his religion? To find its edges—
Here?
Or here?
To put himself right under the nose of the God of his youth and see if He even noticed him? If He ever even knew Mina?
Mina felt his body, like an entity all its own, aching for the sting. For this god’s eyes on him. For the deep quake of that voice. The spice and smoke of his breath. A wild thought came into Mina’s mind, escaping before he could catch it.
“Make me. Jackal.”
The god’s eyes blazed; one ear twitched; the corner of his mouth on one side quirked up. Anubis raised his flail again and brought it down even harder, this time across Mina’s exposed upper thighs.
“Aaaah god…” Mina threw one hand over his mouth and the other over the sting across his thighs. This time, he had been ready for the pain. This time, he had welcomed it. Mina looked down and saw that he was fully erect now and pushing the fabric of his shendyt into an absurd bulge in the front.
Anubis looked down with a wide, wolfish grin. “Son of man likes pain. Craves power over his body.”
With the long claw of his index finger, Anubis flicked the edge of Mina’s garment, and it fell away around him.
Mina was now completely naked and exposed.
His cock throbbing painfully, the head bulging and veins thickening.
Mina blanched at the vulgar image. Anubis ran the smooth top side of his claw along the underside of Mina’s cock from base to tip. Mina’s eyes rolled back.
“Look at yourself in the silver,” the god gestured to the mirror in front of him.
Mina looked, shifting his weight uncomfortably from one foot to the other. He looked away. A thunderous crack through the room and a deep growl.
Mina looked back.
A softer voice, like a secret whispered in his ear. “Look. See. Believe.”
Mina didn’t know what Anubis meant, but he lowered his hands and looked. The red stripes across Mina’s stomach and thighs prickled and burned. He pressed a hand to the tender flesh of his abs and felt the muscles firm beneath his fingers. Hard. Strong.
His stomach pulsed. His cock twitched. Mina never liked being naked.
To him, it was a transitional state between undressing, bathing, and dressing.
What else was there? When life was about the avoidance of temptation, it was best to move quickly through the valleys of shadow.
But now, in the safety of this darkness, where he felt he could let himself stretch into new shapes, explore unfamiliar depths, Mina allowed himself to look at his body in a new light.
In the mirror, golden light shone across his pale skin.
He ran his hands down his stomach to the V line of his hips, tracing down to either side of his cock and balls and underneath to the smooth taint.
Mina had always been rather naturally hairless, which he never fully appreciated until now, as his hands ran easily across his skin, his long fingers reaching back and just feeling the beginnings of the opening of his ass.
He brought his hands back and, with warmth spreading through every inch of him, wrapped around his throbbing cock.
The oil was warm and slick, and he ran his hand back and forth.
“Yes, boy. Trust your desires. Let your body bask in itself. Give and take of itself. This is how you supplicate. This is how you worship.”
Mina closed his eyes and let the hungry thing grow as a deep shudder washed over him. The perpetual guilt of his desires had always robbed him of most of the pleasure of masturbation in the past, and all he’d ever been left with was a weak tremble and a small burp of sticky mess.
But this was different.
In the safety of this darkness, Mina could feel years of repression bubbling up.
He opened his eyes and saw the jackal god, head tilted, looking down.
Watching him, the red flame of his eyes softened again to an ember.
Mina stroked harder, his breath coming and going in short, erratic bursts.
He rolled his bottom lip between his teeth as a soft purr escaped him, answered quickly by a deep growl from the god that vibrated between his toes.
Mina’s knees grew weak as the waves of an orgasm took over his body.
His balls tightened up as the first thick ropes of come shot the nearly three-foot distance between him and Anubis, landing on the giant god’s feet.
The sight of it fanned the flame now burning through him, and the next shot was even thicker, harder.
Over and over he came, more than ever in his life.
More even than when he’d pleasured himself in the tunnels earlier.
As he finished, he fell to his hands and knees, spent and breathless.
Amen, Mina thought.
A growl, low and contented, rumbled from the god’s throat. “Clean it,” he said.
This time, Mina didn’t hesitate. He knelt before Anubis, hands splayed on the ground, and licked every drop of come from his feet until they glistened like polished stone.