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When Ulysses brings in the tray of glasses to signal the start of tonight’s proceedings, there’s very little on your mind, beyond the book you’ve hidden strategically behind a pillow, to occupy yourself when no one is paying attention to you.
Gideon left after dinner, and you hate him a little for that. In all other ways he is God’s perfect servant, but he draws the line at participation in Ulysses’ sordid little affairs. Which, of course, only increases the pressure on you. Teacher talks about how lovely it is, having his people all together, how much it means to him to have you there, how important it is to do things together as a family. Mercymorn, he says, my beloved. Won’t you stay? and you can refuse him nothing.
So, you have been here, yawning and clock-watching your way through almost every sexy party. Over the centuries they have progressed from banal to bacchanalian. A few decades past, Cyrus had found a blossom on a distant planet whose pollen was an aphrodisiac of unsurpassed potency, which had tipped these soirees over the edge into something beyond debauched, something more than orgiastic, something cunning and cruel.
Now, the game is this:
A glass for each of them; the deepest red wine, and one of them laced with as much pollen as could be made to dissolve in a single glass. A pinch of the stuff was all you’d ever tried, and that pinch had been enough to feel like a migraine deep in your cunt. I’d fucked you for hours to ease the pain of it, and you’d wept the whole time.
The amount in one of these glasses was enough to make a mortal heart thunder its way to failure. Frankly, you think that would be a kinder fate. At God’s side, we are no longer quite mortal, and so whoever drinks the spiked glass is doomed to suffer from unbearable, insatiable arousal until the drug works its way out of their system. Meanwhile the rest of them, like jackals around a carcass, will fall upon the unfortunate victim and feast.
You quickly identify the tainted glass; there’s the faintest sheen across the wine, like an oil-slick. Obedient you may be to your Lord, but there are limits. This is a game you would not participate in until you’d learned to stack the deck in your favour. You wonder who will be the one to drink it. Idly, you hope it isn’t Cassiopeia again. She’s a squirter, and the clean-up last time had been almost as distasteful as the event itself.
Then you see our Lord reaching for the laced wine and your heart lurches into your stomach. Your only thought, as you snatch it away before his fingers can touch the glass, is no.
This is the man who became God, the God who became man. This is your Resurrector, your Teacher, the Lord in whose name your every crime has been committed. You knew the first time you laid eyes upon him that you would spend eternity kneeling at his feet.
And so you cannot bear the thought of him kneeling before you, of your God, begging and debased and helpless in the face of his carnal desires.
Everyone is drinking. You are drinking, and the pollen hits you almost instantly, the drug working its way into your system through the membranes in your mouth and your throat. It is already intolerable and you know it will only get worse as you absorb more of it. You were thinking only not him, without grasping the necessary corollary, and so, me. When you realise what you've done, you fall to your knees before our God, ready to beg him to cleanse you with his power, and rid you of the drug.
He sees the flush that stains your cheeks, takes in your dilated pupils and heaving breaths, and before you can speak, he unbuttons his pants.
He tastes divine. He should. He is divine, after all, but usually he tastes of sweat, and salt, and the bitter tannin tang of a man who drinks too much tea. You're rolling his taste, and his cock, around on your tongue before you even realise that you've taken him into your mouth. You don't remember moving; a gap in your memory that you worry at like a loose tooth, until a jerk of his hips brings him to the back of your throat, and you have other things to think of.
And then I'm there, like something out of a dream, nudging you aside with a kiss to the cheek. You whisper my name, Cristabel, as sweet on your lips as honey, before I take the sacrament of our Lord upon my tongue in your place. As he takes his pleasure, you feel my hands on you, gentling and caressing, trying to ease your panicked resistance against the drug in your veins; we both know you can’t win the fight, and it will go easier for you if you can only surrender to it.
You might even enjoy yourself, but I don’t say this to you. Joy is something beyond your comprehension, an idea tangled up with so many snarled and hidden parts of yourself that it has become an oxymoron.
I wish I could take you away, that we could sequester ourselves behind closed doors and ride this thing out together, but I could not be enough for you, not alone, not steeped as you are with the pollen.
Then God pulls himself free of us and steps away. You survey the room in that unexpected moment of stillness and see Titania pressed up behind Ulysses, one hand around his cock, lips against his uncomprehending ear. Merely a kiss, or is it a whisper? You don’t know, but your mind fills with the things she could be saying about you. Aloof, untouchable Mercymorn, finally brought low, and—if she only knew—by your own hand.
Your eyes catch on Alfred—you always did hate him more than I could understand—jabbing at his brother with a conspiratorial elbow which Augustine ignores completely. Alfred’s expression is nakedly excited, but his brother takes their shared features and twists them into something mocking. You feel a rush of shame which quickly becomes anger, and you want to bury yourself inside Augustine like a blade.
But even that thought is wrong. It is not your usual hatred, but something warped; the purity of violence shot through with something lewd and awful. Blood diluted with other fluids; ones you can already feel soaking your panties and painting your thighs. The thought of his pale, slender fingers on your skin is like the crawling of insects, but you crave it…
Before you can think too much about Augustine I cup your chin, turn your head. You see Cytherea sprawled on a couch, propped up on pillows and already naked. Loveday, a looming presence beyond her. Cytherea sees you looking, and parts her legs.
You blink, and again, you lose time. You see your consciousness, your self, as a stone skipping across a pond, and you know it is only a matter of time before you plunge entirely into the howling, ravenous emptiness which roils beneath the surface; the animal self where you are nothing but sensation, and its absence, the boundless potential of an empty vessel, and the rapture as it overflows.
Perhaps you are drowning already. But no, it is only the wet heat of Cytherea’s cunt, close around your tongue as you worm your way inside her. It is only the scent of her which fills your nose and her cries in your ears pulling you down.
You feel someone come up behind you where you are kneeling, on all fours. Had you crawled to Cytherea? You still don’t know, but you hate the thought. The person behind you is a prickling of awareness down your spine, a whisper of heat and proximity against your skin. Your thighs are pressed together, whether from your last shreds of modesty, or the small friction it provides, but now your knees part of their own volition, and your spine arches in invitation.
Though your plea is writ loud in each line of your body, you remain untouched. You whimper into Cyth’s cunt, and catch the edges of whispered conversation behind you.
“... bet it’s as red as her hair by now...”
“... always was stubborn…”
“... must be uncomfortable, poor thing.”
They talk about you like you aren’t there, but you can’t protest. They’re only just wrong; you’re barely holding on to the mind within your meat.
They’re waiting for you. This is not your game, and so you never truly paid attention to its rules. You would consent, from time to time, to sit on the sidelines. You might permit that your fingertips be kissed, or a head be laid tenderly in your silk-sheathed lap—if that head were not overly sweaty—but you were never truly involved.
“You need to ask,” I remind you, a low murmur to cut through Cyth’s high keening. She is approaching an orgasm, and you think, dimly, that it may not be her first. “They won’t touch you unless you ask for it.”
We both know that ask is a tactful evasion, just this side of a lie. The real word is beg. This custom is not an attempt to pay lip service to the polite fiction that you retain some will, with such a dose of pollen nestled within you. It is something far crueler. We have lived too long, and we are far past being sated by decency.
“What do you need, sweetness?” Cassie prompts, and you want to laugh. You’ve tasted yourself upon my lips and you know that your body is not capable of sweetness.
“You,” you gasp, but you know she doesn’t hear you, with your face muffled by Cytherea’s cunt. You try again, louder now, voice cracking with the shame of it: “Your fingers,” and then, “I need you,” and, at last, “please.”
And finally she touches you, but not to fuck you. Cassiopeia has always been a scientist first, lover second; you don’t know how Nigella can stand it. You might have asked her, if you’d been willing to admit to such a prurient curiosity. Cassie lifts up your dress, settling it around your waist, and then slides your underwear down your thighs. You can feel how wet the fabric is, and you wish she would take them off completely; you feel more naked with them stretched between your knees than you would if you were bare. She runs a finger down the length of you; you’re so wet, so achingly swollen that it takes no effort for her to part your labia, and then she is pulling them aside so that you are splayed open like a cadaver on her autopsy table, exposed and defenceless.
You fancy that you can feel the gaze of your God, your assembled brothers and sisters, tunnelling into you, seeing just how hollow you truly are. Cassiopeia lets go, and circles an exploratory digit around the uncovered tip of your clit. You shudder with overstimulation, too sensitive, and she transfers her attention to the buried length of it, working her fingers along it, as though it were a cock, pressing deep and hard so that the flesh around it cannot shield you.
You are no longer attentive to Cytherea; you are hiding your face in her, no more, but now there is a hand on the back of your head, coaxing your attention away from the fingers picking you apart and analysing your every response. The hand feels firm, demanding; surely not Cyth’s. You picture her cavalier’s hands, picture Loveday’s crushing strength, and devote yourself, lips and tongue, to her adept.
But still, you cannot escape the probing of Cassiopeia’s insatiable curiosity. You are pinched, tugged, stretched and slapped, until each nerve is a clamour, because her attention is only to your vulva; she has not deigned fill the emptiness of your cunt.
When she finally slides a finger inside you, and then a second only a moment later, you hum your gratitude into Cyth’s body and she arches in response. But the fingers do not satisfy you, and Cassiopeia does not add a third. Instead, she works you slowly open, seeing how far she can stretch you before you break apart. It only highlights how empty you are, muscles closing around nothing, and even though she is careful, and there is no pain, you feel like you might shatter.
I hold you together as best I can; the solidity of an arm around your waist, a steadying hand between your breasts, my lips against your ear as I croon to you, promise that you’ll survive this, that you did the right thing, and that I’m proud of you. More than anyone else, I know the price you’ll pay for offering yourself as sacrifice to this pack of wolves.
Finally, Cassiopeia judges that you’ve reached your limit. One finger withdraws, and the other maps your inner spaces with a calculated thoroughness that leaves you gasping. When that finger curls within you, you cry out, and Cytherea pushes you away, impatient with your distractedness. You hang your head, feeling yourself smeared with her. It’s a mask, erasing your features, replacing you with someone other. Someone who belongs on her knees for reasons which are not holy.
And then Cassiopeia is gone, and you are empty. Somehow more so than you were before. More hollow than you have ever been. A finger presses against your ass, testing the ring of muscle there, and you retain enough of yourself to beg no. The questing finger retreats, leaving behind a smudge of wetness, so that you can no longer ignore that part of yourself.
“Fair enough,” Cassie says, with a shrug in her voice. “Let me know when you change your mind.”
The when is a threat and a promise, and it lodges in you like a fishhook. The more you try to rid yourself of it, the deeper it pierces you. She wipes her fingers off on your bare buttocks, a gesture which could be cursory, but this is Cassiopeia, and everything she does is calculated. It makes you simultaneously want to scream, and to turn so completely in on yourself that you become a black hole.
You don’t know how long passes in your agony. You are aware of only the cool touch of air on your wet cheeks, on your slick thighs, on your swollen cunt and the quiet but relentless awareness of your asshole.
Then there is a hand in your hair. It would be gentle, if you didn’t resist it so strenuously, but you can’t bear the thought of anyone seeing your face. In the end, your head is only raised far enough to see the obscene phallus jutting proudly from Cassie’s hips. She’s bound it to herself with strips of tendon, and you can see that they are digging into her hips; the cock she’s created wants to sag under its own weight.
“I made it for you,” she says, and you don’t want to believe her. To be weighed, and measured, and found wanting... this. It is a monster. Bulbous and ridged, the head larger around than your wrist. But you ache, thinking of it inside you, and you sigh a yes before you know what you’ve said.
“You want this?” Cassie says, and you bob your head. You don’t want to hear yourself say it.
“Prove it.” There’s something hard and cruel in her voice, and you know what she wants. You can’t fit the thing in your mouth, but you kiss it, run your tongue along it, acquainting yourself with the vile gift she has made for you.
It is unyielding; skin over bone, and you shudder. You’d expected the softness of flesh; muscle or cartilage, not bone, but you know deep down that you wouldn’t be satisfied by anything so gentle. Then the hand is in your hair again, dragging you away.
“You can do better than that. Beg for it.”
You can’t. You cannot bring yourself to do it. But what am I for, if not to be strong where you are weak, and weak where you are strong?
“Please,” we beg, and my voice sounds strange to me, cut through with the sound of your whimpering pleas. Cassiopeia cocks her head to the side, eyeing us with a distant, speculative curiosity. At last, she releases your hair, and you feel her move behind you to begin the work of filling you with her behemoth.
I wish it could be me. I wish that I had been made for you so perfectly, so beautifully, that I could fit inside you and leave no empty spaces to gnaw at you. Instead, I hold you as your body fights itself. You want to escape the invasion, and you want to force your cunt to accept it faster than the gentle, deliberate pace Cassie sets, and to hell with the consequences.
You feel each of the ridges along its length as they grind over the sensitive spot just inside you. With the third one, the pressure bursts within you, but your peak is not one of satiety; you have merely attained a higher plateau of unendurable wanting.
“And she complains about the mess I make,” Cassie tuts. You try to close your knees, awash with shame at the scorn in her voice, and feel yourself slipping on the unexpectedly wet floor. Strong hands on your hips keep you from falling, and your focus returns again to the delicious fullness in your cunt.
You fall to your elbows, and then your cheek is pressed against the cold floor. When Cassie’s monster is seated wholly inside yourself you want to scream with it, but there is no space inside you for air.
When she begins to fuck you truly you can tell, distantly, that her thrusting is measured, gentle, slow. But it feels savage. Your pleasure is not gifted to you, but wrung from you. It is an agony of ecstacy which has been perfectly crafted for you, a personalised torture, and you know this is only the beginning.
As the muscles of your cunt are beginning to clench too possessively around Cassie’s construct to allow her to continue her thrusting she gradually comes to a stop within you.
“I’m out,” she says. “I need a drink. Who’s next?”
As she tries to withdraw, you move back with her, unwilling to let go of the colossus within you.
“Please,” I ask her. We ask her. You ask her? “Please don’t take it.”
“Oh, so you do like your gift?” she says to you, mocking. “I don’t remember you thanking me for it…”
You hesitate, just a moment, but it’s enough. She yanks the phallus ruthlessly from you, ignoring the way you sob.
“Please,” you gasp, turning around on your knees so that you’re facing her, but she only smirks down at you.
“Too late… but maybe if you’re a good girl, you can have it back later.”
I want to tell her that you’re more than good, that you’re perfect, but I know it wouldn’t help.
“Don’t you think you’re rather overdressed for the occasion, little sister?” Augustine drawls at you. You launch yourself at him in a fury, and your clawed hands tangle in his shirt, and then you’re kissing the bare skin of his chest, drinking in the salt-sharp taste of his sweat.
“Not quite what I meant, but I can work with this,” he says, and you remember that you had intended violence; you had meant to carve into him with the points of your nails, draw blood, make him suffer for the crime of seeing you weak. Your hands are fists, gripping tight to the torn fabric of his shirt, and you think you might fall without that support, despite the sensation of my hands around you, my chest pressed warm and comforting against your back.
Augustine places a cool hand beneath your chin, tilting your face up to his, and he kisses you. You almost weep with gratitude as he pushes his tongue between your lips; even that much penetration is a balm to the hunger which consumes you. Then you remember yourself; you bite down, feral with hatred, and you taste blood.
He’s laughing as he pulls away from you, wiping the blood from his chin.
“There you are. My dear, it simply isn’t any fun for me if you lose yourself so soon. I want to see you fight it”—and now he leans in close, to whisper in your ear—“and you want it too, don’t you? You want to be the only one of us strong enough to overcome the compulsion. What happened to frigid Mercymorn, sneering at us all with such contempt, condemning our rutting?”
You grit your teeth and let go of his shirt, preparing to punch him, but I guide you away, and turn you to face me. I’m all too aware of how easily you could be overcome, just from the merest brush of skin against yours. You stare into the storm of my eyes, and a calm comes over you.
“Tell me what you need, baby.” I say. “Just tell me what you need.”
“Kiss me,” you say, and I’m there. You feel my lips, soft against yours, and my tongue is welcome and familiar inside you. My love, I can’t tell you what it did to me, to hear that in this moment of extremis, with each fibre of your being screaming with hunger, you can think of nothing more vital or precious than my kiss.
But we both know you need more. Together we slip the straps of your dress from your shoulders, let it pool around your feet. You step free of of it, and feel my arms holding you close. You shiver to feel my skin against yours, the simple, animal pleasure of it. I slip a hand between your slick thighs, rubbing your clit in the way I know you love, the way that even Cassie, with her scientific precision, could not replicate.
“You’re allowed to want this,” I croon to you. “There is no shame in need.”
But you’re shaking your head, and I know you’ll let your body tear itself to pieces with the force of your desire before you’ll beg for that desire to be satisfied. Whatever hope I had that you might be able to surrender to this without losing an essential piece of your soul is gone, gone with Augustine’s kiss and his vile words in your ear.
I take a deep breath, feeling your chest expand in time with mine. One flesh, I think. One end. You feel the question in my heart, and I feel your assent. I feel you make way for me, parting like the sea, like flesh around a keen blade, like your own, beautiful thighs. I prepare myself, and then I turn to face our brothers and sisters, our Lord.
“I’ll do it.” I say, voice steady in spite of the tight grip of fear and shame around your throat. “Whatever you want. Whatever it takes to satisfy your petty cruelties. I’ll take it all.”
“That isn’t how it works,” Ulysses says, petulant.
“That’s how it works tonight. You get me—you get this—or you get nothing.”
I feel you pressed up against me, my touch the only thing keeping you whole, and I’m soothed by the knowledge that you will be there with me, bound up with me, as unable to let go of me as I am unable to leave you.
“Well then,” Cyrus says, with a smirk, “let’s get the party started.”
~
I am standing. I feel you pressed against me, behind the shield of my self, skin slick with sweat, and so, so hot. I feel your hands in mine and together we cup my breasts, holding them up as an offering. A sacrifice. You can’t look, won’t look, and so I close my eyes, not wanting to see the faces of my tormenters. These are my brothers, my sisters, many of them my lovers. All of them are my friends. We don’t want to know which of them touch me with cruelty in their hands and their hearts. And there are so many hands. So many hearts.
The sensations are overwhelming; even the gentlest touches are burying me. I crumble under the weight of kisses, shatter at the slaps, am crushed by pinches and devoured by bites. The caresses erode at me, but still I stand strong. I feel your trembling; you flinch with each blow that you feel ripple through my body into yours, and it makes me feel insubstantial. I am weak, permeable, insufficient, but I am yours. Whatever feeble protection I can grant you I will.
I feel you huddled behind me, wracked with fever and longing and loss. I cannot cleanse the drug from your veins, cannot change how you need these hands I shield you from, but I can keep them away from you until the moment you want them too. I can slake their thirst and sate their cruelty, leech the poison from their souls, leaving only tender affection for you, whenever you are ready to let yourself be held.
The hands are everywhere now, but I’m doing this for you, and so when I close my eyes, the hands are yours. All I’ve ever wanted is to cover myself in you, smother myself in you, drown in you, and so I lean into those hands. I part my lips for fingers thicker and more calloused than yours, but yours all the same. I offer my breasts up to palms that are too large, large enough to cover them entirely, broad and square and strange and you. My legs are coaxed apart, and I don’t just permit it, I want it. I thirst for it. I want flesh and skin and sweat and sex and sensation, I want a hundred cocks inside me, my face and fingers pressed into a thousand cunts. I want everything, filtered through you; my body and my service and my self laid at your feet. I want you to use them to fuck me.
You feel it as I move from endurance, through acceptance, to ecstasy. With my example, your body finds a way to take pleasure in a dozen lovers, or more, and together we remember how you once learned to love just one, just me.
“I’m ready,” you whisper.
You were careless, love, careless in taking that glass, and, far longer ago, in taking me, but I was careless too; I picked the locks on your heart and wedged you open. I created a space for myself within you, and when I climbed inside I left you ajar, just the tiniest bit. I left you assailable, and now—hand in hand—we throw open those doors and invite the world into you.
I am at your side through it all. You feel me there as you brush the hair from your face, breathe deep and trigger an old alteration you’d made your glossopharyngeal nerves, taking Cyrus so deep into your mouth that he shudders. When at last you remember to breathe, you smell my perfume on the air and smile. When Ulysses steps in, coaxing your hand around his cock, I feel how your fingers shrink from the too-soft skin of it, the too-hard flesh, and I take that from you. I take him. Your hair is more sanguine than gold, and our lives are no fairy tale, but I devote myself to ensuring that tonight, everything is just right for you.
When Cassiopeia returns, you feel my plea. I want her, and you do not refuse me. I arch my back, joyful, grateful, as she works her construct into a cunt which is wholly and only mine, and it is a pleasure unlike anything I have ever experienced, to feel it fit me, as perfectly as it fits you. I cry, and I laugh, and I scream with the pleasure of it, and then you feel the fullness of it too, the sensation of my fist cradled into your cunt, rocking into you with the same rhythm Cassie uses on me, and our gasps come as one.
You surrender to the pollen, open yourself up, to lips and hands and cocks and cunts and all the pleasures your body can be made to experience, but the deeper you go, the more it’s me you feel, more vivid and more present than any other touch, more real than real.
Some wordless time later—an interval marked in your memory only by gasps and groans and the slide of skin on skin—your head is pillowed in Cassiopeia’s lap, her construct abandoned inside you, nestled securely against your pelvic bone. She ducks her head, kisses you, passes a mouthful of wine between your lips, and it is warm from her body, and sweet, and you realise how parched you are. She manages to slip you a few sips of wine this way, before a greater thirst overcomes you.
You reach out, as if to tangle fingers into my hair, and pull me down between your thighs, and, love, you might not be able to find the sweetness in your body, but I do. I drink deep from the fountain of your body, and we are both sated by it.
When you glance down, though, it is our Lord licking sweetness from your overflowing cunt, like drops of dew from a leaf. You think it should feel different, divine cunnilingus, but the being between your thighs is more the God become man, than the man become God, and you can barely pick his touch out from the others. It is fine, and no more. The word adequate crosses your mind like heresy, and you push it away.
I caress your breasts, cupping them as gently as overripe fruit, as though they might bruise at the slightest unkindness. You feel the urge overtake me, to seize one nipple between my lips, then the other, and it is my mouth, only my mouth, that you feel on your skin. The kisses on your breasts, and your stomach, are my kisses. It is my tongue you feel running lightly along the sensitive skin inside your arms. Your fingers are slipped one by one between soft lips and adored.
I worship your body, and you’re aware of me moving over and around those other bodies, those other lovers, until each nerve is awake and alive and singing, until a kiss on the pad of your thumb is as piquant a delight as the phallus still hard and heavy in your cunt. It occurs to you then to question why you deny yourself the pleasures of any part of your flesh. If your liver had the nerves to appreciate such a thing, you would carve yourself open to feel the joy of my tongue upon its quivering surface. You would filet yourself and beg me to caress each bone, turn yourself inside out and let me coax climax after climax from muscle and tendon, gland and duct. But your body is not built for those pleasures.
Still, there is another horizon to reach for, another thrill within your grasp. You look up to Cassiopeia, see the banked coals of anticipation in her eyes, and you say yes.
Arrangements are made around you, and you are arranged around her. She is gentle, but she is insistent, and the petty protests of your body are quickly overcome in service to this new union. She works one finger inside your ass, and then another, and you expect a third—you brace for it—but she withdraws. She has a new toy for you now, graceful where the other was vulgar, formed of slender, delicate-seeming ovoids, each broader than the one above.
Some part of me is obscurely wounded, that Cassiopeia is the first to cross this threshold, but I do not permit such ungenerous thoughts to find root inside my heart, and I brush the envy aside. Every choice I made was made with open eyes, and an open heart, and I can’t begrudge you this. I study your face as she buries the thing in you, inch by painstaking inch. I perceive how you shutter yourself—eyes closed, mouth pressed tight—with each widening of its form, and throw yourself open again as each bulb of it finds a space inside you; you look up to the heavens, lips parted in something like awe. And I know that Cassie might be fucking you in a way I never have, but no one else will ever know the naked play of expressions across your face in the way I do. This is only for me.
It would be slow going, even if her other toy were not still deep inside you. You feel yourself filled to breaking point… but you do not break. Again and again she tests you, but you do not fail. You were not made to contain such glory, but you are my Mercy, you are my love, and this is not the first time you have remade yourself to endure beyond enduring. There is a grace in reinvention. You make yourself again as something worthy, something holy, something transcendent.
And then you are beyond thought. Augustine stands before you and you are purged of viciousness; you take him into your mouth and tend him, and your toes do not curl with revulsion, your fingers do not tighten into fists with rage, you do not close your eyes with shame, or feel a petty surge of glee as he is rendered inarticulate by your attentions. Your body wants his, and it costs you—this new, transformed you—nothing to allow that wanting. Your peace is not my peace, not the peace of service. It is the peace of exhaustion, of a heavy burden momentarily set aside. The pollen is scourging hot inside your veins, scouring you clean, setting you free.
Augustine is spent, now, and as he withdraws from your mouth, leaving only the animal taste of salt and sweat and something as sour as sorrow, he seems as troubled as you are serene. You put him from your mind, and part your lips for Cytherea’s fingers. They are slender, and fragile, and cool on your tongue, barely skin over bone, but they warm within the furnace of your body.
You don’t know how many hours pass, each minute as full as your asshole, each second made as broad and accommodating as your cunt. You live a lifetime through those moments, some fleeting and gone, some which will last forever, a brand upon your soul.
Licking blood from Cytherea’s lips, her nose bleeding from the exertion of your fucking. A moment of compassion, of second-hand longing, as Cyrus and Ulysses kneel side by side, and suck your nipples to exquisite, oversensitive peaks, then turn as one to press their lips together in a kiss. The poised, breathless feeling as Cassie withdraws first one, and then the other toy from your body, leaving you momentarily hollow; there is a second, as weightless as the moment before a fall, and then your body closes in upon itself, reclaiming the territory she had stolen.
There are a hundred moments like this. A thousand. At last, you lie back upon the couch, and then squirm to one side, feeling the fabric damp beneath you where Cytherea had been sitting earlier. The drug is nearly gone from you now. You are lazy, languorous. Not sated, but beginning to remember what satiety is; repletion is no longer a foreign and unattainable concept. I have Cyrus’ cock in hand, barely half-hard. We are all starting to tire.
Perhaps it is only weariness which distorts your vision. You see a figure behind him. Valancy? But no, you blink, and he is alone. Are you seeing double? Of course it can’t be Valancy—Valancy is… She is...
I try to stroke your hair, try to distract you from the looming dread which has appeared from nowhere and settled into your bones, but my touch is feather-light. Barely perceptible. I kiss you, and it is the memory of a kiss, or the dream of one. I am fragile, insubstantial, and I burst, like a soap bubble in the sun.
You remember.
The pollen expanded you, and I rose to fill the gaps. It cracked you open so I could spill out, and so, as it fades, I do too. There’s a cock in your hand. You flinch away from it as your body contracts on itself. It’s a convulsion reminiscent of orgasm, but born of its opposite; it is not completion, but the sudden and staggering knowledge that you will never, can never, be complete.
I try to hold you through it, but you can’t feel me. I call out to you and you do not hear. A dozen decades have passed since you swallowed a single drop of my blood, and with it, my spirit.
Sometimes I feel guilt for that. You lost me. I didn’t think you would. We none of us knew what it truly meant, not then. But I was gone to you, and it didn’t matter that you never said the words aloud; I heard it, when you screamed in the silence of your heart that losing me was losing everything.
Sometimes I feel guilt, but I cannot feel regret. What you lost, I gained a hundred times over. I am within you now, forever. I am a part of you, incandescent, and I shall burn and burn and burn inside you and never be alone. Do not stand at my grave and weep, love; graves are for dead things, and I am so full of life.
I am full of life, and you are full of me, so how can you be so desolate? Why is your heart a barren and empty plain? I am more now than I ever was, safe within your heart. How are you less than you were, without me at your side? I wish I had hope that you might take the pollen again, and conjure me forth into your body, but already I can feel you doubting. I can feel your growing conviction that your sense of my presence was a mere figment. After all, if I am not gone, not destroyed, not wholly dead, that complicates your desire to punish yourself eternally for my murder, doesn’t it, love?
When did hating yourself become so much more important than loving me?