Why Anubis narrating his acts warmed me further, I couldn’t say. Although his voice was nice to listen to.
I peeked from my prone position to watch him pluck my comb from its pedestal and return to me. It was usually only Meryt who combed my hair now too, more so than I did, though all the dancers aided each other when we needed to be presentable.
I had unraveled all my plaits when I removed my baubles, leaving me fresh and plain for my mourning. After Anubis finished combing my hair, he re-plaited portions of it in the manner I usually wore it.
“Do all the dead, if they reach you, have the honor of you braiding their hair?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“Am I the only living?”
“Yes.”
I shivered from the low breathiness in how he answered the second time, for I also felt his breath on my neck, as he draped my finished hair to the side.
Next, after Anubis bent out of sight beneath the table, I heard the fall of water, presumably him retrieving cloth from a basin that he would use to wipe me down. He started with my neck and shoulders. Such tenderness was welcome, with the warm water smelling as much of frankincense and pleasant oils as Anubis himself.
His empty palm followed the path of his cleansing, like a separate wicking cloth in the fine ends of his fur. I sighed into his kneading, his massaging with steady motion into the grooves of my shoulders and down the center of my spine. Anubis’s hands were so strong, his fingers independently talented in their distribution of pressure. After he reached my waist, he returned to the top of one shoulder and started working down my arm.
My thought processes slowed, the breath pushing from my lungs when he finished with a spiral of his thumb along the inside my palm and then moved to my other shoulder to begin again.
“Are you feeling more relaxed now?” he asked.
I moaned before I could answer, as he finished that arm with the same motion of his thumb circling my palm.
“I will take that as a yes,” he said with a chuckle.
It shouldn’t feel so incredible, but I had never been bathed or attended to like this.
Fanning his fingers across my shoulders, he drew down, first the wet cloth again and then his hand along my spine. This time, he went left and right, trailing over the curves of each of my sides.
“Such lovely skin, supple and soft,” he said. “The dead are not so lucky at first.”
At first.
I wanted to ask if Anubis brought their suppleness back to them, but I was rendered mute as the cloth and his fingers trailed lower, worsening the growing problem between my legs. I desperately wanted to grind into the table.
Anubis paused, and rather than continuing down my thighs, he bent again beneath the table to gather more water. When he returned, he moved to my feet. That was no less exhilarating. As a dancer, often strained and sore, having my foot rubbed, my ankle, my calf, mythigheventually as he worked higher, made me moan deeper and louder than before.
“Your voice, too, is quite lovely. I enjoy the many differences between mortals, you know. The tones of voices. The varied hues in skin and hair and eyes. The unique curves and divots in your bodies.” Anubis circulated higher to the crease where my thigh met hip—and near to the heaviness of the sac between my legs. “All so beautiful in your distinctiveness, with none, not even twins, ever being truly identical.”
I couldn’t help imagining that he might keep going and let his long, elegant fingers slip more intimately between my thighs. What arousal could we bring to Meryt if he were witness to such a thing?
The smile that thought conjured dwindled quickly. Meryt could witness nothing, for he was not here.
Anubis moved to my other leg. Even though I longed for my beloved, I could no longer deny how hard I had become, erection trapped beneath me. I wanted to move, to rock against it to relieve the growing pressure, but then Anubis would know, and I had no idea what might happen after that.
“Relax,” he said. “You are tensing again.”
“S-sorry.” A whimper left me when he reached the tight muscles of my other thigh, sliding higher and higher again, butnot high enough to be indecent before he stopped. “I-I’m just… sore.”
“With the way you use your body, I am not surprised. I have borne witness to your talents many times.”
He had?
“I will turn you over again now.”
“What? But I, um… well…”
