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. “Youare 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 wasmade. We were the birth of the universe and its destruction all at once.
