“P-please…” I beseeched him. “Can Meryt see us?”
He paused in his leisurely stroking of me. “Do you wish for him to?”
“Always,” I said. “I wish for Meryt to be part of my every fulfilled desire. Not since we first confessed our feelings have we enjoyed such delights outside each other’s company.”
I did not know how to read the expressions of a jackal, but I thought Anubis smiled. “Then look.”
Before I could attempt to look in any direction, the bindings Anubis had unwrapped from me sprang up like snakes from either side of the table and bound around my limbs. I yelped as they spun me around and pulled me down the table so my hips were angled up its elevation, displaying me for Anubis with legs spread.
He was clearly in command of the linen and moved to the head of the table to admire me. He seemed impossibly taller, like he stood on some platform there, ready to unwrap his loincloth and take me. The linen straps tightened where they bound me,parting my legs further and stretching my arms straight back along the table’s base.
I held my breath, both eager and hesitant about what came next, when another of the bindings wrapped around my neck to tilt my head back.
Distant, like down a previously unseen corridor, and upside down due to the angle, was my Meryt. He was there—here—and he looked exactly as he had when I last saw him alive, in his azure-sleeved dancer attire with similarly blue-toned lotus flowers adorning his hair.
He was beautiful, and he looked just as surprised to see me, as well as darkly flushed.
“You wish for him to bear witness?” Anubis asked.
“Yes. I would never deny him such a sight, just as I would enjoy watching him. But is it really my Meryt?”
“It is. But he can venture no closer. Not yet.” Anubis’s hands slid up my thighs, and I glanced back at where he stood at the ready to make me his.
But no, not fully, for I belonged to Meryt and Meryt alone. Not Pharaoh nor any god could lay more claim to me than my beloved.Ever.
And I would prove it.
I nodded my consent and dropped my head back again to meet my beloved’s stare.
Anubis’s tongue was the next thing that touched me, laving long and unfamiliar in its texture as it licked up the crease between my cheeks.
“Ah!”
Distant though Meryt was, I saw him grin, and his expressions I knew too well to doubt.
I looked at Anubis, for I needed to see his animal tongue in action, which was as black as the rest of him and wonderfully wet.
Its thick end began to prod and push inside me, wetting me as it entered.
I moaned without trying to stifle it, for this was a performance for my Meryt now, like all others before it.
After the retraction of Anubis’s tongue forced a guttural grunt from me, I sought once more to keep my eyes on my beloved.
“Your sounds of pleasure make quite the chorus,” Anubis said.
“All the better for my love to hear me.”
“Is that so?” He ran his hands up my thighs again, only this time, he lifted them and bent them backward, and some of my linen bindings shifted to move with me. Only the faint prick of Anubis’s claws interrupted the memory I clung to of Meryt having done this only just last night.
If Anubis noticed the scars between my thighs, he made no mention of them, though he had cleaned them earlier, wiping away the paint that usually covered them. Meryt had told me to claim they were the thumbprints of the gods. How true that was now, like I had never imagined could be real.
“The way you writhe and display yourself is also inviting,” Anubis said.
Iwaswrithing, thoroughly enjoying myself now, for my body could be anyone’s so long as Meryt had my heart, especially when he could watch. “I have been bound before while being taken, but under Meryt’s gaze, I am free.”
“Free from what?”
“Everything.”
