Year of the Inner Goddess

July 2025

Spin The Bottle – That bashful pastime of tingling adolescents and clandestine kisses, where hesitant smiles flash behind silver braces and shy giggles mask the fumbling bravado of youth. A parlor game stitched with longing glances and the tightening ache of anticipation.

Hardly the sort of trifling amusement one might expect amidst oak-hewn pillars and divinely sculpted forms. Surely, the celestials of Olympus would not deign to play something as juvenile as Spin the Bottle.

And yet, beneath the vaulted ceilings of the Great Hall, heavy with incense and stormlight, cloaked in the slate hush of an impending summer thunderstorm, it was there: the perilous clink of a verdant glass bottle as it skated across polished stone, its spinning path gleaming, an unlikely instrument in the hands of the Olympians. 

But of course, these were Olympians, ever inventive, ever delightfully depraved in the most exquisite of ways. Mortal rules had long since been discarded with an imperial flick of the wrist and the vaguest, disdainful shake of the head. There would be no meager pecks stolen in shadowed corners. No bashful brushes of lips behind velvet drapery.

No.

They had conjured a Decision Wheel, a device of mischief and hedonistic mayhem. Naturally. The gathered gods and goddesses, flushed with ambrosia and libidinous delight, shouted out random body parts with jubilant abandon.

“Collarbone!”
“Inner thigh!”
“Left buttock!”

Each suggestion was met with shrieks of laughter and scandalized applause as it was ceremoniously inscribed onto the gilded slivers of the wheel. Once the final entry was transcribed, the real game began.

A deity would step forward, striking a pose for the crowd, and with a flourish, twirl the bottle.

It spun.
And spun.
And spun.

Each revolution was a dare, a glittering promise wrapped in giddy tension. Around it, the radiant celestials gathered, their ruckus laughter ringing bright and just a touch unhinged. There was something older beneath the revelry, tinged now by heady excess and wicked delight.

The room fell still as the bottle began to slow, every breath held tight. Who would it choose? Who would be the Receiver?

Presiding over it all sat the Grand Master herself, a high priestess of pleasure, with the grin of an absolute libertine. Once the bottle stilled, its verdant neck pointing with unwavering finality, she spun the Decision Wheel with theatrical flourish.

The crowd leaned in. The wheel gave the faintest click, click, click…The moment it slowed, the Grand Master might call out…

“Face Lips.” or “Left buttock.” or “Elbow.” 

Each announcement rang out like the toll of a decadent bell, setting the Great Hall alight with gasps, whoops, teasing jeers, and gleaming anticipation. The Spinner, now the Giver, would rise like a newly crowned monarch set to fulfill the divine decree. 

And this is where the Olympians surpassed mortals entirely. This was not fumbling or fleeting. This was a rich experience, one that mortals could barely comprehend. This was art. No knuckle, no kneecap, no forgotten crease escaped the altar of seduction. The game, once innocent, had become a dance of teasing devotion, as sumptuous as a banquet and twice as dangerous.

The Giver would step toward the Receiver with a glint of promise in their eyes, and all the room would hush in giddy readiness. No one ever rushed. No gesture was wasted. Even if the Wheel had landed on “elbow,” perhaps especially if it had, the Giver would make it a mystagogic spectacle.

They might begin with a gaze, slow and searing, traveling the length of the Receiver’s arm as if mapping anointed ground. Then, fingers would graze the shoulder, light as breath, tracing the curve downward, dragging heated nails in their wake.

A kiss might land first on the wrist, delicate and deliberate. Then another, halfway to the joint. The elbow itself, so often overlooked, would be reverently cupped, adored, perhaps swirled and brushed with lips as though it were the very key to ecstasy. 

Then, straightening, a final kiss would be delivered upon the mouth. But not just a peck. No. It would be an invitation. Lingering. Exquisitely inappropriate. A hint of possibility barely concealed beneath the veil of play.

And oh, the way the Receiver would arch, or laugh, or gasp, the regal audience drinking it in with insatiable eyes, not a soul left unaffected. For the Givers, it was never just completing a task; they composed an experience, the way one might inscribe music or poetry or a sin.

Gods reclined on plush ottomans, eyes glittering with strategy and scandal, no doubt calculating their next move should the bottle select them. Goddesses sprawled across cushions, biting their lips or pressing thighs together in delicious anticipation, planning their assault with almost military precision.

And the bottle? That treacherous little vessel spun without mercy and with the occasional, scandalous wink of favoritism. It chose as Fate might at a masquerade, mischievous, mercurial, and always in the mood for drama.

Who would be next?
What decadent feat of seduction awaited them?

And all beneath the twinkling fairy lights that swayed like raindrops against the tall glass windows, shimmering with suffused suspense.

Inevitably, the tension unraveled beyond the rim of play. The gleam in the goddesses’ eyes turned ravenous, mouths glistening with rapacious kisses, steeped in yearning. The gods, already undone by such unchaste sights, beckoned with the slow curl of their fingers, muscles coiled with intent.

And with the rustle of blankets cast aside in haste, and the soft slap of bare feet upon cool stone, the glorious and brazen rose from their cushions and ottomans. Awakened and flowing as one, they left the Great Hall, their bodies heavy with heat and long-teased anticipation.

They spilled into the adjacent boudoir, trailing essence and purpose, smoldering kisses and tremulous laughter. There, beneath brocade drapes and flickering candlelight, the true games, the ones whispered about behind fans and caught between moans, were just beginning.

And me?

I stood there…right on the edge, caught between the middle and the brink…struggling to steady my fluttering heart, to quell the chortles that threatened to bubble up like champagne, lest the Olympians mistake me for giddy, inept, or worse, tipped into lasting madness.

But truly, I feared I might burst, not from embarrassment, no, but from a scabrous delight at the spectacle before and around us, so profound it sang through my very marrow.

I followed the Olympians into the vast boudoir, and my mind fuzzed. 

I am beneath him. A god. A great, glistening monument of an immortal, his beard a bramble grazing the tender slope of my throat, his lips a contrast of silk and sin. His breath dances over my collarbones before his mouth drifts lower, slow and deliberate, so reverent it borders on worship, so ruinous it leaves my soul trembling, to the waiting altar of my bosom.

And somehow, without ceremony or mortification, I am entirely bare beneath him. What little modesty remained has been kissed into ash beneath the sacred weight of his embrace. My Inner Goddess radiates with sheer joy.

My thighs are parted, unfolded like the gates of some adytal temple. Is it the same god? A new one? I do not know. I do not care.

A pantheon-born buries his face between them with an appetite sharpened by play and lust, his mouth moving with aching precision. His pace begins leisurely, almost reverent, as if the world beyond my skin has ceased to exist. Each stroke of his tongue coils fire through my belly, and the last dregs of self-consciousness scatter like petals in the summer wind.

There is a storm in him, I can feel it. A tension barely caged beneath flesh, sinew straining with restrained ferocity. A tempest coiled tight, aching to be loosed. Or perhaps… it is simply the atmosphere itself: heavy as damask, cloying with redolence and the risque exhale of panting breath.

The very air thrums, ripe with musk, glazed with anticipation. All around me, invocation stirs: languid, luminous, an inflamed dream made flesh. Swaths of clothing lie puddled on the floor in unbridled testament to full surrender. Skin gleams beneath the dusky amber of afternoon light, flushed and glistening, freckled with sweat.

Gasps and guttural moans ripple through the chamber, not like hymns, no, but like declarations, raw and rising, the sound of bodies giving way. Lips pressed to throats. Fingers clutch breasts, rake through hair, and dig into the broad sinew of straining backs.

I cannot move. I am within it, subsumed by the haze, and yet somehow hovering just above, untethered, watching. Drinking it in.

My body hums in golden suspension, sheathed in the scent of warm skin and perfumed oil, in the salacious, audible sounds of mouths meeting mouths. All around me, divinity drenches itself in pleasure, slow, gleaming, inexhaustible.

To my right, a goddess reclines on an undulating chaise, her knees high, thighs parted in flagrant invitation. A god is kneeling between them, his face lost to her flesh, his hands grasping, starved, her fingers twisted in his tawny hair as if anchoring herself to the earth. She arches, sharp, exquisite, lips parted in a soundless moan, her body shivering through wave after wave of trembling bliss.

Beyond her, another pair, limbs and muscle in exquisite tangle. One kneels, deliberate and stalwart, tracing the curve of a spine with his tongue like an incantation. The other clutches the bedding in frantic restraint, knuckles bloodless, back bowed, her sounds thin and more whimper than voice.

The air is thick, thick with breath and passion, and a heady, exultant want too complex to name. 

Everywhere I turn, there is motion and tension: a head thrown back in surrender, teeth grazing a lower lip, a cry muffled against someone’s throat.

And I? I am unstitched by it.

By the boldness. The beauty. The audacity of gods rendered flesh, and made ravenous.

No one watches me, and yet I feel seen. As though the very room knows the precise flow of my breath, the sharp little catches of it. It knows the damp throb building between my thighs. And still, I do not shrink from it.

I revel in it. I am a witness. And I am triumphant. And I? I want nothing more than for this moment to never end.

The god lies beneath me like a throne carved by Michelangelo’s deft touch. His fingers clamp hard on my hips, not to guide, but to hold steady as I ride him with a desperation that borders on violence. This isn’t worship. This is hunger. His eyes smolder with a heat that sings across my skin, the very embodiment of unrepentant masculinity, unbroken and beneath me.

My Inner Goddess purrs her delight: This is where gods belong, pinned beneath a woman risen in full bloom. A dirvish of moan and madness. I am astride him, sapphire hair wild and damp with exertion, tendrils clinging to my flushed face as I move.

I meant to move slowly. I meant to tease.

I meant to savor the spectacle of our union, to rise with solemn sensuality, hover with just the tip of him sheathed within my dripping folds, to glide down in aching increments, every slow centimeter intended to drive him into a frenzy. To stretch the moment into something unbearable. To take my time until he was buried to the hilt, and I was quavering with the searing of flesh on flesh.

To make it hurt with how good it felt.

But I’ve lost the thread.

My hips snap like I’m possessed. I ride him like I’m trying to tear pleasure from the air itself, brutal and gasping, skin slapping, sopping, and wild. My body is a blur, a carnal tempest. My mouth hangs open, too wrecked, too far gone to remember his name, let alone say it.

My eyes are wide, near-mad, as though corrupted by some untamable godlust. I can feel the climax knitting just beneath the surface, so close I could scream. I am screaming. The viscous sound of our bodies, the slap of flesh against flesh, the prurient magnificence of it, all build to an incipient inferno.

I chance a glance down at the god I am…quite literally…using, and find him grinning. Smug. Satisfied. Not with me, but with the wreckage he’s coaxed from my body. There is no tenderness. No intimacy. Only the calculated delight of an artist admiring the chaos he’s made, watching…unblinking…As I come undone.

The monolith impaling my sanctuary stretches me in a way that feels peremptory, almost punishing, and I want it. I want the burn. I want the bruises. I want to feel this later, when I’m clean and alone, so I can remember the way I defiled the gods of Olympus and how they offered themselves to me.

I brace against the faceless god’s chest, arms locked, fingers digging into corded pectorals as I ride harder, faster, sloppy now, past the edge of sense. The bed groans beneath us, awash with my need. My thighs sheened with hysteria. My breath shatters.

Just a little more.

“Gods,” I rasp, delirious, my walls convulsing around him like an unapologetic vice. Bearing down and clenching around him like a fist. “Just…just…just…A little harder.”

The god tilts his hips, jutting them upward, wielding his crown in an unforgiving rhythm against my inner jewel. I choke on the sound that tears out of me. My climax rips through like a seizure, unstoppable and brutal, oleaginous rivers gushing down my thighs as I convulse around him, gasping, half-sobbing, fractured. But I can’t stop. My Inner Goddess won’t give up, chasing the high as he once more thrusts his hips up in time with mine, cruelly perfect. My moan fractures into something animal. I throw my head back.

Help me, gods. Just a little more…

He offers no comfort. No words.

Only that gaze so silent and unblinking, as my soul incinerates, then drifts, ember by ember, back to the realm of flesh.

And beneath me, still grinning, still ironclad, as though he delights in every shiver, every tremble, I can no longer hide. He waits for me to do it again. 

“I’m sorry,” I wheeze, broken-open. My voice sounds weak, like a thread drawn taut between us.

 And his smile deepens, glowing with heat and satisfaction.

“There’s nothing to be sorry for,” he murmurs, voice low and rich as poured molasses. “I like it when you drench me.”

Time morphs. The bed is a wreck beneath us, saturated in the evidence of my unraveling. But this god does not flinch. He holds me there, lets me ride the storm, the muscles of his thighs tensing beneath mine, holding me steady as I rise and fall, again and again, until my vision fractures.

And then…

I’m on all fours. Shifted. Split. My limbs ache from being held like this, like a prize, like a beast.

One god behind me, hips snapping with vicious precision, as he drives in…again, again…with an intent that doesn’t ask, that doesn’t slow. His grip is cruel, fingers sinking into the meat of my thighs, yanking me back onto him. My knees slide on the rumpled sheets with every brutal stroke. I can hear him snarling, right at the edge of losing it. And my Inner Goddess dares him to drive deeper.

Another groan before me, veined granite buried past my lips. His fingers locked tight in my hair like reins. He rocks into my mouth with the same dark cadence as the god behind me, their pace matched, like they’ve done this to me before. Like I was meant for this. I choke. Sputter. Recover. I drag my mouth down farther until I feel my throat stretch, gliding and spasming around him. 

I wrap my arms around his thighs, desperate for something to hold, gliding my tongue around the crown, swallowing him deeper as my chest heaves. I can barely stay upright. My body shakes, suspended in this brutal rhythm, kept in place by his grip, like I’m nothing more than a plaything to be used.

And gods, I want it.

They bookend me between them, a conduit for Olympians. My body isn’t mine, not anymore. I think it hasn’t been for a long, long time. My Inner Goddess fragments, scattering under the weight of them. My sanctuary spasms, tight, desperate, exploiting the one inside me like I’m trying to own him or milk him dry. Perhaps, both. My throat tightens around the other, willing him deeper, starving for the obliteration of him. I feel his thighs flex under my palms. The growl that breaks from his chest is vicious.

My jaw throbs. My thighs quake, muscles spasming with every punishing thrust. My raw throat works around a moan that never quite escapes.

And still, they do not stop. They use me, in turns, in tandem, like a vice they’ve no intention of releasing.

I endure.
I hold.
Not from strength, not for grace, not for air, but clinging to the animal burn, to the brutal rhythm,
to the sacred, beastal promise that I will be left eviscerated, gasping, drenched in their aftermath.

One hand forces its way between my legs, I don’t know – don’t care whose, and swirls around my hooded pearl, lethal. Fingers dripping with the liquidity of me, they find my pearl, swollen and straining, and circle it…once, twice…lethal. Precise. Cruel.

I cry out around the god in my mouth, a mangled sound that vibrates down his length. He twitches against my vocal cords. The one behind me stutters, thrust going ragged for a heartbeat as I seize around him like a trap snapping shut.

They’re losing it.

And my Inner Goddess is feral and smug with blasphemous triumph. This is her high rite…me, split and silenced, writhing between divinity, dragging them toward collapse with nothing but the curves of my body and the desperate worship of my mouth.

I rock, arching back into the hand tormenting me while shoving forward into the god who impales my throat. I am all sensation…no thought, no name, just flesh, pressure, and the sear of too much all at once.

I am chaos incarnate.
Pinned and pulsing, dripping and delirious, and still hungry for more.

But the world spins.

My fingertips find his hard chest, radiant as sun-warmed marble, and I urge him back, insistent, toward the throne left empty in the storm of Olympian revelry. He obeys, his dark eyes never leaving mine, lowers himself, his body bending with the poised tension of a beast granting a plaything the cruel grace of fleeting control.

I am no longer a woman…I am a storm crowned in flesh.

With a flex of control, he shifts, and I am lifted, seated atop him, astride him, catching my bottom lip in my teeth to keep from laughing with joy. My legs coil around his flanks, helplessly drawn, my petite toes dangling in the air, nowhere near the floor as I am lost against the breadth of him.  His grip tightens, one hand on my hip, the other threading into my hair, and suddenly I am nothing but motion. Torrid, clutching, insistent sway. I slide down onto him, until there is no space left between us, only friction and the desperate pulse of my Inner Goddess.

My spine bows unnaturally, lips parted in a cry I don’t remember giving shape to. I can feel him everywhere…cinched in the tendons of my thighs, my breasts crushed against the unforgiving wall of his chest. His fingers bite into my flesh, holding me upright as if I might splinter from the force of it. The world shatters…there is no light, no sound, no audience. I am full. So full. Stretched, shaking, breath snagging on every thrust. My Inner Goddess doesn’t roar…she screams. She exults. We burn.

Each thrust is a thunderclap in the cathedral of my body.

His hips strike me with unmeasured brutality, and yet…there is discipline in it. Worship. The sound of us is obscene: lubricious, animalistic, uninhibited…glazed flesh against glazed flesh, a sparing that drowns logic. My throat tears on a scream as his crown drags over that bladed nerve inside me, again and again, like he knows exactly where my Inner Goddess resides. 

My hands scrabble..shoulders? Drapes? The carved back of the throne? Nothing holds. I am unmoored. Ungodly. The moment owns me. My hips rise to meet each thrust, not to retreat, but to beg. The pressure. The punishment. It isn’t cruel. It is truth. I am not being broken…I am being forged.

His mouth sears the slope of my shoulder, and that single graze…right there, on that hyper-laced, sinful curve of flesh, detonates me. I cry out. Not for mercy. For more. And he answers with an intuitive growl, a feral kind of triumph.

My orgasms tear through me, violent and ecstatic. My thighs seize. My walls clench with mindless authority, milking him, gushing down over him. It is not delicate. It is devastation. I think he curses, his hips stuttering as the flood of me coats his lap and the chair groans beneath the violence of our joining.

But he does not stop.

Not yet.

Not until I am boneless, dewy-cheeked, lightheaded, nearly ruined, and utterly raw, that I no longer remember the shape of my name, only the shape of his inside me.

Eventually, I peel myself from him, dazed but grinning as wide as a Cheshire cat, tipsy on cream and despoiling. I find a gown: rose-pink gossamer, scandalously sheer, clinging like breath and barely-there sin. And yet I feel swathed, somehow. Each ruffle licking at my ankles like frolicking petals, as if the garment itself were delighted to dress me.

The Great Hall hums with golden decadence. Gods slip back into their languid sprawl, goddesses recline once more upon velvet lounges, and libation flows in generous rivers, pooling in crystal goblets. The long table groans under fruits bursting open with ripeness, glistening cheeses, and roasted meats fragrant with spice. No immortal shall go hungry, not while I draw breath.

I slip back into the revel like a secret, as if I might go unnoticed, though my cheeks are still pink with aftershock, and my fingers keep lifting, absently, to smooth through my wild, damp curls. The gossamer gown standing out more than I intended against the gray canvas of the cloudy sky, and I walked slowly, syrupy, caught somewhere between floating and bashful.

They are laughing now, drinking, draped over divans and one another, as if nothing scandalous has happened at all. As if we have not just reached the highest stars in the heavens, catching them with our bare hands.

I feel shy. Silly, really. As though I’ve slipped back in from some hidden corner, hoping no one noticed I had been thoroughly, shamelessly used. As if they hadn’t all heard me. As if they hadn’t all done the same.

But even if they had (impossibly) missed the sound of my pleasure, the sight of it, the crimson on my cheeks, the way my lips still part as if expecting another kiss, it all gives me away completely. There is no hiding this kind of glow.

I pause in the center of the hall. One breath, settling my pulse.

And then…A shadow peels from the edge of my vision.

A god moves behind me, just off my right shoulder. Quick as a flash, and in one sin-soaked heartbeat, I am seized.

Snatched into his arms as if I might run. As if I’d want to.

My breath hitches. My eyes go wide, not in fear, but in the crackling thrill of it. One thick, muscled arm coils around my throat, hooking into the niche of his elbow with the precision of a hunter and the promise of possession. Not cruel. Not careless. But complete.

He anchors me there against the furnace of his chest, my pulse a thunderclap where his skin meets mine. I cannot move. I do not want to.

I am caught.
Pinned.
Butter in his grasp.

He holds me there…a heartbeat, a suspended eternity. A cord in the arm about my throat loosens a fraction as he bends his head forward. His voice drips into my ear, a growl streaked with gentlemanly restraint, low enough for only my ears to catch. 

 “Is this okay?”

The contrast shatters me. That brutal grip, softened by the hum of required sanction. The pause. The invitation nestled inside the threat.

I nod. Barely, and his grip tightens, threatening to cut off my airway.

My knees are no longer mine. My pulse is a beast unleashed. My Inner Goddess bares her teeth and dares him to tighten. And yet, some quiet, lucid thread in me blooms with gratitude.

For the check-in. The choice.

He is not taking me.

He is offering an out.

A respectful thread of consent looped through a moment strung with vice.

But gods…gods…it’s the last thing I want!

I want to tumble headlong into whatever decadent machinations the Olympians have conjured behind those sly, uncowed smiles.

I want to be unraveled by divine perversity and worshipped in ways mortal tongues have no names for.

I want all of it: the surrender, the spectacle, the brazen nectarous sheen of my thighs.
I want to be the story whispered about tomorrow.

Let them take me. Let them write me into their games.
I will not be spared. I do not wish to be.

Fingers…whose, I could not say…slip beneath the gauzy hem of my gown, gliding up the trembling expanse of my inner thigh. They find me easily, obscenely, parting flesh with a familiarity that steals my breath. My knees abandon me. Boneless. Mindless.

But I do not fall.

The arm cinched at my throat, the second corseting my waist, holding me aloft, immovable. My head is still trapped in the crook of his elbow, angled and offered, unable to turn, to see. But I don’t want to see.

I want only to feel.

And heavens, I do. That ache, that yawning hollow inside me, keening for intrusion, for fullness, for some act of ruthless generosity that will end this yawning torment and usher in something darker. I want the profane, the unholiness of it all. 

As if summoned by thought, the fingers deepen, curling just so, finding the exact coordinates of my undoing.

I shout something. Barely a word. A cry. A fractured intercession torn from parted lips. I don’t want to, gods, I try not to, desecrate the thick rug beneath our feet with the deluge threatening to pour from me. But the pressure is maddening. Wanton. Monstrous. It coils with exasperating purpose, tighter and tighter, until I am nothing but a mortal creature fraying at the seams. 

But…the rug! 

The god is merciless. His fingers a blur, brimming with command, coaxing, demanding, insisting my body yield. The climax rips through me like a scream swallowed by thunder…but it is not enough. He will have the river of me, too.

I clench. I gasp.

I cannot.

A flicker of motion: the Gypsy Queen spreads a fleece blanket beneath me with an elegant flourish. Waterproof. Merciful.

It is the final kindness. The last push. I shatter.

With a scream torn from somewhere primordial…I break. I gush, unstoppable, a flood down my thighs, over the god’s unrelenting arm, pooling in an unholy lake at my feet. The slick sound of it, the scent, the sheer indecency of it…it announces me.

Every eye finds me.

I feel them, those gleaming, celestial stares drinking in my collapse.

And I welcome it.

I am beyond reproach, beyond modesty, beyond anything resembling control. I need this. This cataclysm. This coronation of flesh.

And gods help me…I do not want it to end.

I scream again, my body bucking against the vice of their inescapable grip. The god behind me does not falter, a necessary pillar against my thrashing, anchoring me to the earth as the climax rips through me in an annihilating sweep. And when it passes, I sag against him, limp, flushed, trembling. A woman steeped in debauchery, radiant in the afterglow, her body humming with the sacred ache of indulgence.

Still breathless, I thank each of them in a voice barely above a whisper, a blush blooming so violently across my cheeks it borders on fever. I hardly dare meet their eyes. My hands are unsteady, buzzing in the aftershocks, but I manage to gather a damp cloth in the ensuite and gingerly press its cool kiss to the places that burn with life.

My thighs quake. My knees threaten mutiny.

Nevertheless, my Inner Goddess, still greedy with mischievous possibility, notes how easily I might slip into a shadowed alcove with my personal device and summon one more eruption at my own hand.

The temptation is real…ripe, pulsing, near indecent.

But the duties of a gracious hostess rise up to silence her sulking protests. For now.

Somehow, the soft, sheer sigh of my gown survived the onslaught. I smile, fingers caressing the hem in reverent delight. The gossamer fabric clings to my curves like spun moonlight, whisper-thin and wholly unrepentant. It hides nothing. It makes me feel… holy in my desecration.

I twirl once, slowly. My flesh still hums. The diaphanous train fans out behind me, licking the cool stone floor in gentle apology for what just transpired.

I pin my hair back, striving for elegance, but conjuring only a kind of disheveled poetry, strands falling loose, lips swollen from giving and receiving, skin still flushed. Surveying myself in the mirror, I find my eyes red-rimmed and heavy-lidded, carnelian with exertion, the remnants of godly touch still echoing along my flesh as though ecstasy itself had etched its sigil there. I look every inch the coruscant heroine of some forbidden myth, slightly unstitched at the seams, yet incandescent with aftershock.

And still, I return to the revel.

Transfigured.
A tad tender.
Marvelously victorious.

The rest of the evening unfolds in laughter and voluptuous abandon. Though the table still groans under platters of fruits, savory delights, and golden breads, it is pizza, cheesy and mortal, that I serve and blink as it vanishes with startling speed. Candlelight flickers as dusk slips beyond the high windows, and everything feels hushed and mellow, like the night itself has been fed and sated into contentment.

My Inner Goddess chews on her thumb, sulky and bright-eyed. She wants another round.

But I hush her. “Not now.”

The gods sprawl all around the Great Hall. Their limbs long and languid across cushions and divans, lazy smiles of satisfaction resting on their countenance. Candlelight paints their skin in soft gold; the dulcet drip, drip of rain threads through the silence like a lullaby. The hush is not absence…it is aftermath.

There’s comfort in it, I know.

Still, I press a hand to the hollow of my breastbone, as though I might soothe the restless stirring of my Inner Goddess, who grumbles like distant thunder, unsated, and pacing.

 “Let them be,” I urge inwardly. “If they wish to begin again… they will.”

 A half-truth, at best.

Because I cannot admit it, not even to her, that I no longer hold the emerald alchemy that first stirred Olympus into fevered motion. The bottle was the spark, the flick of naughtiness that shattered restraint and set our hunger alight. But now, the bottle lies forgotten, tucked into the shadows, glass dulled, its magic spent. 

Nor can I confess the deeper truth, the one simmering hot in the hollows of my marrow:

That I fear… I may be the only one still burning.

And so I sit, legs tucked beneath me, sipping Tennessee amber as though it might cool the flicker beneath my skin. I blink through long lashes, pulse still thudding, reluctant to forgo pleasure. I ignore the sulking annoyance, the slow drag of my Inner Goddess’ teeth against her lip.

Eventually, the night folds inward. Conversation curls into the corners like forgotten perfume. Candlelight gutters in slow rivulets, casting long shadows as if the Hall itself has been spent.

But I?

I nurse the last of my amber, already plotting the next game.

Something darker. Deeper.

A sin with no name.

Until next time. XO. Elsie