Chapter 5 #2
Blood flowed southward. I was no stranger to fucking.
I’d shattered headboards from Egypt to Canaan.
I once spent seven infernal months rolling around with one of Shaushka’s daughters, until the highest-ranking members of Hittite pantheon turned her into an olive tree, if only to force her to take a break.
Forever was monotonous, and holy shit were gods drowning in the debilitating endlessness of time.
These human souls, on the other hand, had no seconds to spare.
I was the one made of the ghosts that moved in the night.
I shifted between realms in a step. I was not bound by the laws or physics of men.
So how was it that this woman of flesh moved around me before I could blink?
How was she in front of me with the bravery of the highest deity in any pantheon, touching the face of Eros like the Psyche to whom she likened herself?
Maybe it was hubris that had kept me from expecting the movement, or perhaps I’d underestimated her spirit.
But Eleni lifted onto her toes, bringing her lips as close to mine as she dared.
“Don’t.”
Her lips hovered unbearably close to mine. “Then stop me.”
This was no fantasy.
This wasn’t the impulse of an earthbound beast or the incubi beyond the veil.
This was where daydream met the moment upon waking.
She waited a hair’s breadth from my lips as if she needed my permission. The radiant pinks and blues and greens that streaked and swirled amidst the opal of her spirit danced close enough to taste. The moment became a throb, became a need.
And that was it.
My life, or whatever I had that passed as one, ended and began with a kiss.
If I had to define my existence, I would see it in three acts.
First, there was the time before humans.
I was Hell’s Prince, bound by duty, moved forward by the idle days of beings and realms, without the infringement of mortals and their ways.
The last page of that chapter was written the day Shala’s stoned and broken body peered through the veil in her final moments and asked me to stay.
In my second act, so brief as if it were a whisper, there was my lightning flash experiencing what it might be like to be a god with his human.
Had I a semblance of apathy, as I might have with anyone else, perhaps I would have risen to godhood.
I would have acolytes, worshippers, throngs of humans doing my bidding.
I might have sipped from the cup of their praise, had the faithful among them etch my story into stone, become a name among men.
But I didn’t make it past my first and only human.
Shala’s death uncoiled the tightly wound pieces within me that took me a mortal century in Hell to rebuild.
Hundreds of years later, I achieved the impossible.
I put her behind me. I went on.
Act three began, not just with Eleni, not just her courage, nor her openness and acceptance, but from this moment.
Her mouth crashed into mine, and I was unmade.
The sharp, diamond essence was wet on her tongue.
I drank her soul into mine as if I truly might drain her dry.
I was no longer in control. I wasn’t a god.
I wasn’t eternal. I was an animal, overcome with the desire to make her mine.
Primal need had to be experienced to be understood.
Until my fingers dug into her hips, until her breasts pressed into me until I dragged my teeth across her throat, tasting her, biting her, kissing her, the word went from a concept to my all-encompassing reality.
She tasted like the first thawed day after a long winter.
She was the flavor of hope, of a new spring when the world had been covered in snow. She was the energy of dawn’s first light.
She was the heat that baked the earth and broke the seed as it forced its way from the ground.
I tore myself from her with a wild sort of gasp, as if I’d resurfaced from somewhere deep underwater, and looked at her with panic.
A word escaped her lips. “Please.”
Her chest heaved. Her eyes were as wide as a startled doe’s.
She struggled to swallow, and I crumbled into myself thinking that I’d hurt her, that there were pieces of me that stole and sucked and drained, pieces I’d never explored.
I raked both hands into her hair with the intent to heal, to apologize, to undo, to fix, and learned how wrong I’d been.
Eleni possessed the sort of fearlessness and certainty I had yet to see on the faces of generals on the eve of battle. “Please, don’t let me go.”
My breath escaped. She had not been panting from injury.
“Don’t leave me.”
Animal. Human. Primal. Mortal.
She moved before I could think as she jumped into my arms. Her legs wrapped around my waist, and I caught her, cupping her ass, holding her close.
She’d never fall again. Not while I held her. And I knew then, I wouldn’t let her go.
“Never.”
We weren’t Eros and Psyche. The mortal woman, Psyche, had been punished for advancing things with Eros, but he—Cupid, by another name—had very particular ideas about being the final authority on love. He was the captain of their ship. The woman longing to be his beloved was its passenger.
But we weren’t them.
She gripped the back of my neck, mouth never leaving mine, legs tightening around my waist as I carried her to the bed.
It was hard to know who was at the helm as I tossed her onto the mattress, descending on her with a masculine body that no longer belonged to me.
We were at war to prove who craved the other more.
Before this moment, I hadn’t counted myself among carnal human lovers.
My love for my human was different. It had been curious, protective, pure.
Then her head hit the pillow. Night-dark hair pooled around her. Her back arched. Her toes pointed, knees moving like the plates that shifted the earthly world as her robe fell open.
“I need you,” she said between breaths.
I nearly laughed that she believed she was the one who needed me.
I’d never experienced this sort of ache, the desperation for two to become one.
All thought drained from me, pulsing in a demanding rhythm to be inside her.
I tasted her sweat, the scented oils of her realm, the sharp lungful of ozone, and above all, the shimmering opaline aura that belonged to her and her alone.
She tore the scrap of tunic from my corporeal form, flinging it to the ground with the sort of haste that told me she’d wanted it gone for a long, long time.
My mouth moved from her navel upwards, between the bronze of her breasts, suckling her russet nipples, teeth and lips and tongue skimming across her throat, exploring every inch.
Her hands balled into fists in my hair. She moaned, “Let me worship you.”
The words were poetry despite their absurdity.
She hitched her calves against the back of my thighs and held me in place—as much as she could for a human, anyway.
Clothes in shreds on the marble, bare in the secrecy of the world we’d created, we paused on the precipice.
Her hips rolled, soaked lips brushing against the tip of my cock.
A low growl escaped my throat, but I held back for as long as I could.
She’d known carnal pleasure. I was no stranger to the concept.
But the consummation between mortal and immortal?
Tales were written of such things for a reason.
She dug the heels of her feet into my ass, bringing herself closer, wordlessly begging.
“Eleni…”
She pulled her face away from mine and peered into my eyes. “I will never want anything like I want this. Don’t forsake me now.”
While in my human body, I relinquished myself fully to earthly rules. I wouldn’t have broken away from her hold if my life depended on it.
“This is it for me,” I swore, terrified of the oath as it echoed through me. “You are it for me.” I didn’t know what I meant at the time, but the words wrapped their spell around me.
“Then let this be it,” she replied.
And it was so.
If her soul tasted of pearl and sky on her lips, I needed to know its flavor in the deepest, warm parts of her. I wasn’t ready to bury myself within her. Not with my final memory of her and another man being one where she’d been brought halfway to pleasure then ripped from reprieve.
I grabbed her legs and yanked her to the edge of the bed, kneeling as if I were worshipping at my own goddess’s temple. She remained tense, eyes wide for three uncertain seconds.
One as she watched me, breath caught in her throat.
Two as she sucked in a sharp gasp the moment my tongue hit her sex.
Three as her head hit the bed behind her, hips lifting off the bed as she gave herself over.
I’d been right. There was no purer drink of soul in the world than the one between her legs.
I wasn’t sure that I’d ever come up for air.
I would have drowned in her one thousand times over before choosing to breathe.
The way the flavor changed while her muscles tightened elicited new, curiously primordial, responses from us both.
These were sounds I’d never made, and ones I’d never heard from her.
This was a rush of water, a scream, a spasm, then another, then another that each came with a taste of its own.
But I was left with something else.
In the glow of her glorious, holy orgasm, there was a choice.
I could drink her soul, and protect my human, and know what it was to be a god with a worshipper. I could carry on in this messy, interesting, piece of immortality.
Or.
I kissed my way slowly from her inner thigh upward.
My throb had not ebbed. The thunderous pulse of need continued to claw through me.
I could stop. I was no slave to urges. One thumb traced its way from her cheek into her hair as if it had a mind of its own.
She looked up at me with a question as we were trapped in the moment before oblivion.
I was poised so close to her entrance I could feel her heartbeat, as well as mine, along with the slick, ready tilt of her hips as her legs moved once more, urging me closer.
“If we do this,” I said, “nothing will be the same.”
“When has sameness served us?” she asked, pulling me closer.
I’d felt fear before. But the sheer lightning bolt of terror? Did it belong here?
I braced, arm flexing to keep myself in place.
She clutched me. “What?”
There was no route for me in the maze of confusion aside from abject honesty.
“I don’t know what it will mean for either of us,” I said. “For me, Eleni. Who I am. What I am. If we see this through…I don’t think I’ll be able to let you go. And maybe that sounds okay in this life, but is it fair to make that choice for you in your next life? Or the one after that?”
She touched me with tenderness as if I was the fragile mortal as she said, “There would be no me if it wasn’t for you.”
“El—”
“In the next life, too, right? And after that, and that, and that?”
“You’ll always be mine.”
“Let not a god speak my mortal name given by earthly parents. Don’t call me Eleni, as I’m more than this name.
” She was quiet, solemn, and fierce as she dug her fingernails into my skin.
“I’m her, too. The one you saved on those shores.
I’m whoever comes after me. I don’t want to exist in a world without you, in this life or the next. ”
Act three.
I slid inside her like a meteorite burning through the galaxy. Her iridescent aura became the thing from which stardust was made. We were the birth of the universe and its destruction all at once.
I was merely a star.
She was the universe.