August 2026 – Listen Here

A silk handkerchief is wrapped around my eyes and tied neatly at the back of my head. 

Some absurdly observant part of me is duly impressed by the Demigod’s craftsmanship. Not a single strand of sapphire hair has been caught or pinched beneath the knot. Such meticulousness seems almost indecently gentlemanly under the circumstances. 

My Inner Goddess is considerably less civilized.

She is somewhere beneath my ribs in a state of carnal hysteria, fluttering like a scandalized quail who has become belatedly aware that the wolf has been watching her for some time. The mere brush of his fingertips has reduced her to positively simpering anticipation. 

This is not how I expected the evening to begin.

I had arrived in the full blaze of an August afternoon with weekend traffic behind me, a ribbon of heartburn scorching down my esophagus, and the faintly flustered air of a woman who has spent far too long negotiating Texas highways. The Olympian, naturally, had opened his door looking as though neither traffic nor heartburn nor any other mortal indignity had ever troubled him. 

I had assumed my arrival would be followed by a quick turnabout and our immediate departure for dinner. The Olympian, however, appeared to be in no particular haste. 

This was not unusual. The Demigod has never possessed my mortal compulsion to treat time as an adversary requiring constant supervision. Still, there was a peculiar lack of movement toward the door. No reaching for keys. No indication that my arrival had commenced the next portion of our evening. 

I narrowed my eyes at him. He had plans. Plans? Now that was interesting. 

I made a valiant attempt to persuade my rumbling stomach that supper had been postponed and redirect my thoughts toward more salacious pursuits. 

His fingertips found mine, and he led me toward the adjoining bedroom. I had scarcely registered our deviation from dinner before he stopped me at the threshold. 

The bed was already prepared. Waterproof blanket and all. Oh.

Before my mind could assemble the implications into anything coherent, silk descended over my eyes.

Darkness.

And there, beneath the excitement and the delicious uncertainty, came the most unexpected part of all. 

My soul seemed to drop.

Not plummet.

Settle.

As though some unseen hand had reached inside me and quietly lowered a burden I had forgotten I was carrying.

I could no longer watch him.

I could not scan his expression. I could not study the infinitesimal movements around his eyes, calculate the meaning of a pause, anticipate discomfort, search for hurt, wonder what might happen next, or prepare myself to take care of it before it arrived. 

For once, there was nothing for me to read. Nothing for me to manage. I could not be in charge. 

Heavens, the luxury of it.

His hands settled upon my shoulders and turned me away from him. With an easy pressure, he guided me onto the edge of the mattress and then farther back until I was lying across the bed, my knees bent over its edge, my feet hovering above the floor.

And then began the strangest, loveliest sort of dance.

I have struggled to find language for it ever since.

Jazz, perhaps.

Silk and jazz and warm caramel – the sort poured in one unbroken ribbon from a silver spoon. Everything flowed into the next thing so seamlessly that uncertainty itself became part of the seduction. I never quite knew what was coming, only that another note would follow. 

His hands skimmed over my ankles and calves. The hem of my luminous skirt whispered upward beneath his fingers, no farther than midway along my thighs. Nothing particularly indecent had happened yet, which seemed almost indecent in itself.

Then kisses.

One at my ankle. Another higher.

They appeared across my skin without pattern or warning, each one blooming somewhere I had not expected it. 

A kiss. The faint graze of teeth. Another kiss. A tiny nip that startled my nerves without ever becoming enough to make me squeak.

Blind beneath the silk, I could not tell whether the next touch would be tenderness or teeth, and gradually I understood that I was not supposed to know. 

That was the dance.

I closed my eyes beneath the blindfold and let my body learn what my mind was still struggling to comprehend: I did not have to anticipate him.

I only had to feel.

So I let the darkness have me.

The tension I had carried through the door began loosening muscle by muscle. My breathing found the cadence of whatever strange, decadent music he was conducting across my skin, and I sank farther into the mattress while the evening gathered around me – silk and kisses, teeth and fingertips – one note folding languorously into another.

And somewhere inside that rising music, the woman who had battled traffic and heartburn and August and the thousand invisible calculations of an ordinary day began, at last, to disappear.

His fingers eventually found the buckle of one white espadrille and worked it free with such absurd care that I became fascinated by the ceremony of it. He eased the shoe from my foot and let it fall with a muted thunk somewhere below me, but rather than immediately reaching for the other, he paused.

My bare foot disappeared into his hand.

There are moments when being five-foot-one is especially apparent, and having one’s entire foot cradled in the palm of a Demigod is among them. His hand seemed enormous around it. My foot felt positively doll-like by comparison, and when his thumb passed idly along my arch, I heard the most shameless sound escape me.

Over my foot!

Apparently this was where we were now.

It was not even the touch itself that undid me so much as the extravagance of the attention. Whatever destination he had planned, he seemed wholly uninterested in racing toward it. My ankle, my calf, the arch of my foot – each was afforded its own portion of the evening as though there were nowhere else he intended to be. Food, it seemed, was a concern for mortal stomachs; sex was its own form of ambrosia. The second espadrille followed the first, and I lay barefoot beneath the silk, increasingly persuaded that dinner could wait. 

His hands traveled upward and found the delicate straps of my dress. He drew them from my shoulders, easing the fabric lower, and his voice rumbled somewhere above me as one fingertip traced the curve of my breast. 

“These will have to come off.”

These?

My mind returned abruptly from whatever decadent little cloud it had occupied.

Oh, dear God.

The nipple covers.

In preparing my summer dress that afternoon, I had employed two discreet nude silicone circles in the noble service of public decency, ensuring that my nipples did not announce themselves to the unsuspecting citizenry through the thin fabric. Ordinarily, if I suspect play will precede dinner, I remove such practical contraptions in the car.

But I had expected food.

My hands flew to my breasts as my Inner Goddess suffered an immediate and catastrophic attack of mortification. Blindfolded and undoubtedly crimson to my ears, I scrabbled for the edges and peeled each offending circle from my skin with whatever dignity remained available to me.

There are limits to erotic mystique, and adhesive nipple covers are evidently among them. 

And yet, blessedly, nothing was spoiled. There was a flicker of amusement, a wonderfully human interruption, and then the Demigod simply gathered the thread again. Blindly, I offered them up, and he spirited them away. Within moments I was receptive once more, and the strange thrum resumed as though the music had merely paused between measures. 

A feather found me next.

At least, I believe it was a feather. Darkness had made certainty wonderfully irrelevant.

It whispered over my breasts, wandered across my abdomen, traced the tender interior of a thigh and then drifted inexplicably over my knee. His mouth appeared elsewhere – at my throat, along my neck – while the feather continued its capricious pilgrimage over my skin. Every time I thought I understood the pattern, he altered it. Feather became fingertips; fingertips became lips; lips vanished, and silk appeared in their place.

A scarf wound around my calf like some elegant serpent, circling once and then again before tightening just enough for me to recognize its embrace. It encircled the other leg before being drawn elsewhere, its smooth length gliding over my skin, across my breast, along my cheek. Every texture seemed magnified in the absence of sight, each one occupying my attention so completely that the rest of the room ceased to exist.

At some point my dress disappeared as well. I scarcely registered its departure, only the murmur of fabric being swept down my hips and then nothing at all.  Much later, I would discover it carefully draped across the back of a chair rather than abandoned in a heap upon the floor, another ridiculous detail that pleased me far more than it had any right to.

The dance changed after that.

What had been exploratory became decidedly more intimate, though it retained that same languorous fluency. His touch moved over my sex with almost infuriating patience, circling, retreating, returning, coaxing one response and then another. My chin tipped upward; my back arched from the mattress. Every alteration in pressure occupied me completely, and my hips began answering him before I had consciously decided to move them. 

He knew what I liked.

His fingers continued their game, gliding through my glistening eagerness, spreading my desire like honey over my folds before one slipped inside me. It withdrew, returned, and then crooked upward in that beckoning come hither motion that made my hips answer without permission. Again. Retreat. Return. Beckon. I shamelessly pleaded for more, and he obliged, adding a second finger while his other hand wandered upward to my breast. 

His thumb brushed almost playfully over the tip of my pearl before one finger slipped between my lips, followed by another. I welcomed them greedily, pussy closing around them as they withdrew and returned; that coaxing refrain continued without interruption.

Silk and caramel.

One hand at my breast. The other buried between my thighs.

And still that beckoning motion inside me – come, come to me – gathering speed and pressure until the languor of the dance became something far more consuming. At last he found that treacherous point within me which might as well have been the linchpin holding every floodgate closed and proceeded to dismantle it with alarming expertise. 

He knew.

My body yielded in torrents, spilling over his hand and arm and soaking into the blanket beneath me while my own hand flew over my mouth in a desperate attempt to preserve whatever innocence remained to his upstairs neighbors. There was only darkness and my body and soul gushing over the Demigod’s palm and arm.

When his hands finally withdrew, his mouth replaced them, and whatever tenuous grasp I retained upon the ordinary evening vanished altogether. I could feel the evidence of my own abandon upon my thighs and no longer possessed enough self-consciousness to care. He settled between my legs with the fluid appreciation of a man presented with a banquet prepared expressly for him, and there was something almost intoxicating in realizing that he did not regard his attention as labor bestowed upon me.

He wanted to be there, and the distinction touched some private place in me that had very little to do with sex. 

So I ceased trying to contain my responses. My legs began to shake; my voice deteriorated into something rawer and increasingly unreliable, and still he remained there. Beneath the blindfold, I surrendered another fraction of myself to oblivion while the music continued its ascent, carrying me toward the point where even pleasure became almost unbearable.

His tongue circled my throbbing pearl, clockwise and then counterclockwise, before his lips closed around it in a teasing pull. Then his tongue abandoned its circles and delved inside me while his hands closed around my hips, fingertips digging into flesh. 

My hands found him then, trying feebly to push his head away – not in refusal, but in that peculiar desperation that arrives when the body has been given more than it knows how to contain.

The Demigod was having none of it.

One enormous hand captured both my wrists and pinned them against my ribs, just beneath my breasts, while he shook his head. The gesture required no sight to understand: my overwhelmed attempt at escape had been noted and summarily rejected. 

My hands became supplicants instead, held uselessly against my own body while I appealed indiscriminately to Olympus – to the ancient gods whose names survived upon marble and parchment, and then beyond them, to older and forgotten divinities whose names had vanished with their worshippers and whose altars had long since crumbled back into the earth.

Surely among all those deities, one might have taken pity upon me.

None did.

The Demigod remained unmoved by my theological appeals, his mouth continuing its ministrations, short licks, lapping with broad strokes, tongue delving, while he moaned against my flesh, until my thighs shook around him and my voice cracked. The bedroom itself seemed to dissolve around me until there was no August evening, no traffic, no dinner waiting somewhere beyond those walls.

There was only him, and what he was drawing from me.

He did not relinquish his hold until he had coaxed the last shuddering surrender from my body.

When at last my wrists were free, I felt gloriously wrecked, every muscle alive with the aftershocks of what he had already wrung from me. 

Then, abruptly, he was gone.

Not merely his hands or the warmth of his body, but the whole immense presence of him – the weight, the scent, the breath, the almost menacing sense of an Olympian occupying the darkness around me. One moment he seemed to exist everywhere beyond the silk; the next, there was only the mattress beneath me and an unnerving vacancy where he had been.

“Don’t move,” he growled.

I heard his footsteps retreat across the room.

I confess, my Inner Goddess is a rather brash creature, ordinarily inclined to regard instructions of this sort less as commands than as provocations. She considered mutiny at once. Yet the Demigod had been exceedingly generous to her that evening, and even she seemed willing, for once, to behave herself.

So I remained exactly where he had left me, willing my thoroughly spent limbs to hold their position while his movements remained a mystery somewhere beyond the silk.

Then came that unmistakable sound.

Rrrrip.

Foil.

Oh, splendid. My toes curled. 

I knew what came next.

Perhaps obedience had been too ambitious a goal after all, because one hand slipped downward before I could reconsider the offense. My middle finger found the decadent evidence of everything he had already done to me and ventured farther, retracing territory his mouth and hands had so recently left in disarray. It was a minor act of mutiny, admittedly, but a satisfying one.

I heard him returning.

My hand did not retreat.

His palms settled over my upturned knees, and I waited. 

Sightless, I had no warning of when he would finally enter me. No glimpse of his body moving into position, no visual cue from which to calculate the instant before contact. I could only remain there with my hips tilted toward him, aching with anticipation and acutely aware that he could see every response I could not conceal. 

Yet even then, he refused to simply take me.

He brought the swollen tip to my folds first, the crown of him gliding through the wetness he had already coaxed from me, coating himself in it as he traveled upward and down again. Once. Twice. Again. Each pass made my hips reach farther toward him in a shameless attempt to convert teasing into consummation, but he would not be persuaded into abandoning his chosen pace. I made a sound somewhere between a growl and a plea. 

Then, finally, he began to enter me.

Inch by maddening inch I stretched and molded around him. 

I nearly lost what remained of my mind.

Could he not tell?

Could he not feel my body pleading with him? Every straining muscle was offering the same increasingly indecorous petition: Now. All of you. Now!!

Had I been able to reach him properly, I might very well have seized hold of the Olympian and dragged him into me myself. But blindness had deprived me of both aim and advantage, and so I was forced to endure his measured advance until at last there was nowhere farther for him to go.

He filled me completely.

And stopped.

My body answered him.

The climax arrived with such sudden violence that a scream tore from my throat before I could smother it. I splintered around him while he remained buried to the hilt and motionless, granting me no movement to follow, nothing to chase, only the staggering fullness of him while darkness swallowed every other point of reference.

For several indescribable moments, I knew nothing beyond blindness and climax.

Then he moved.

What followed bore very little resemblance to the silken seduction that had brought me there. The jazz had found its drums.

His body drove against mine with a cadence that seemed to reverberate through flesh and into bone, and an image surfaced absurdly through the remnants of my thoughts: a sculptor before marble, hammer and chisel in hand, chipping away everything extraneous until the figure imprisoned within the stone was finally revealed. 

Chipping away the careful woman. The capable woman. The one who arranged and carried and guarded, until there was only the creature beneath. 

I writhed beneath him as the mattress shifted with our meter, gloriously disoriented, until his body lowered over mine. His mouth began at my navel and ascended over my stomach and breasts until his full lips found the vulnerable curve of my neck. 

Gods. He drew one nipple into his mouth, and the rasp of his breath against my sensitized skin pulled a keening sound from somewhere inside me. 

The contrast nearly undid me: the force of his hips against mine while his mouth lingered over my skin with absurd leisure, as though he had all evening to discover which kiss would finally make my Inner Goddess wave the white flag. 

Perhaps he did.

Dinner, after all, had become a decidedly secondary concern.

Then I am on all fours, and the evening has begun its descent.

The window is directly before me. Even through the silk I can perceive the last diluted August sunlight filtering into the room, a faint amber suggestion beyond the blindfold.  If I opened my eyes, perhaps I could make more of it – the position of the window, the dying afternoon, some pale assurance of the room around me.

I close them instead.

I choose the darkness now.

My knees sink into the mattress, my feet extending just beyond its edge, and I press my hips backward toward him in shameless invitation. Beneath my skin, everything he has already awakened smolders, waiting for the slightest provocation to blaze again.

But he does not immediately give me what I am asking for.

His hands begin at my shoulders.

They descend the length of my spine, palms passing over each vertebra before broadening across my hips, curving around my derrière and beginning the journey upward again. I moan at the sheer indulgence of being touched, and my forehead sinks another inch into the mattress while my hips remain unmistakably offered. His body is there behind mine; I can feel the warmth of him, the proximity of his cock, the lust, the promise of what he could do.

Yet he still does not give me what I am so blatantly asking for!

His hands make another circuit instead, sweeping down my back and over my hips before ascending once more, this time pausing at the nape of my neck. His thumbs work into the muscles beneath the spill of my sapphire curls while I push backward toward him, increasingly brazen in my petition. I could scream with exasperation. To the abyss with my neck and every knot residing in it; doesn’t he understand that I need him – the stretching fullness of him, enough to engulf my senses and leave room for nothing else? 

For pity’s sake, he is going to make me wait. Another massaging sweep.

And then he doesn’t.

The first thrust cleaves through every thought I possess.

Gods of Olympus.

My fingers seize the bedding as my body pitches forward beneath the force of him. I struggle to maintain my position, and whatever cry tears from me is neither elegant nor restrained. He adjusts immediately, learning the limits of my smaller body even while testing them – shorter strokes followed by deeper ones, altering depth and cadence while I struggle to accommodate the formidable dimensions of the Olympian behind me.

And I am greedy.

Merciful divinity, I am a sightless, greedy, greedy thing.

I push backward to meet him, asking for what moments earlier I might have sworn I could not possibly take, my fingers clutching desperately at the sheets while our bodies find their rhythm. The sounds alone would embarrass any passerby – the indecent collision of flesh, the mattress answering beneath us, my increasingly ragged breathing – but embarrassment seems to belong to another woman now.

Then – 

Whoosh.

Suede tendrils skim across my back.

A low, involuntary grrrrr rolls from somewhere in my chest.

Oh.

The flogger.

I cannot see it rise. Cannot watch his wrist move. Cannot anticipate where those suede strands will land next. I know only the whisper of air an instant before they scatter across my shoulders, my back, the swell of my hips – more caress than punishment, an unexpected punctuation against the deeper tide already moving through me.

Swish.

Another pass.

The strands disperse over my skin and disappear. His hands return. Then suede again.

The Demigod has added another instrument to the arrangement.

The jazz has become wonderfully indecent now: the percussion of our bodies, the hush and flick of suede, my own fractured voice threading through it all while he changes the onslaught beneath me – shallower, deeper, measured and then more vigorous.

The next rasping inhale travels farther into my lungs. The next leaves without catching somewhere behind my ribs. My forehead rests against the mattress, my sapphire curls scattered around my face, while another sweep of suede murmurs seductively over my back and I yield backward into him.

Then the fury pauses. 

One massive arm encircles my hip, anchoring me against him while his other hand slips beneath me. His fingers find the swollen pearl between my thighs and begin their teasing ministrations, and I am already far too sensitized for such attention. My body jerks away before thought can intervene, the movement separating us as another release breaks through me in a warm, extravagant rush.

I gush.

And gush.

For one suspended moment, I am scarcely aware of anything except the strange sense of being emptied – not merely of what he has summoned from my body, but of a month I seem to have stored somewhere inside it. Tears I swallowed. Stress carried high between my shoulders. Pain tucked beneath my ribs because there had been nowhere useful to put it. None of it is being solved; none of it has magically ceased to exist. Yet for this one evening, my body seems determined to empty itself of the burden of carrying it. 

I cannot catch my breath. My thighs are drenched, my limbs barely dependable, and before I can decide whether I have reached the absolute limits of mortal endurance, the Demigod catches my hips and draws me back against him.

Surely not. Again.

The rhythm begins anew.

There is no sensible reason I should have anything left to give, yet my body answers as though we have only just begun. Another ascent. Another breaking wave. Another glorious obliteration of thought as our hips meet and the darkness refuses me any advance warning of what he will do next. I take what he gives me and push backward for more, increasingly ungoverned, until I no longer know where one climax ends, and its successor begins. 

Then a sharp flick crosses my skin.

My entire nervous system wakes at once.

It is not a slap and scarcely even a sting. A crop, perhaps – a square-tipped one, if my imagination has identified it correctly. Whatever he has chosen, he does not wield it to hurt me. It lands as a crisp punctuation, startling rather than punishing, a bright little electrical summons that makes every nerve beneath my skin turn its attention toward him.

Another flick.

My back arches.

And then his palm meets my backside.

The sound cracks through the room while my flesh ripples beneath the impact, followed by another broad strike that sends a vivid flush blooming across my skin. I can feel the color without seeing it: crimson spreading over the curves of my derrière and beginning its migration down my thighs like some rare, indecent flower opening beneath an August sun.

Good heavens, what a sight I must be.

Blindfolded. Sapphire hair strewn across my shoulders. Face buried deeply enough into the mattress to spare the upstairs neighbors whatever fragments remain of my voice. My skin flushed beneath his hands, every muscle taxed by exertion while my body continues answering him with a generosity bordering upon the absurd. 

The waves keep coming.

One folds into another before I have recovered from the first, until counting them would be as futile as standing in the sea and attempting to number the breakers. I am coming and coming, receiving everything he gives me and answering with reserves I would have sworn were already exhausted. 

And beneath all of it – beneath the silk and the suede, the sharp little flick of the crop, his palms against my flushed skin, the indecent percussion of our bodies and the rasp of my own breath – I become aware of a single extraordinary fact.

I feel alive.

Not merely awake. Not distracted from grief. Not temporarily removed from the things awaiting me beyond this room.

Alive.

Ferociously, incandescently alive.

For weeks I have felt as though sorrow had occupied my body molecule by molecule, leaving less room for anything else. Now there is no room for sorrow because every inch of me is occupied by the present. My lungs labor. My heart hammers. My thighs are wet and shaking beneath me. My skin is singing where he has touched it, and my mind – my endlessly watchful, interpreting, anticipating mind – has finally been reduced to the simplest language a body has ever known.

Take.

Give.

Take.

Soar.

The silk serpent returns.

I recognize it before I understand what he intends to do with it, its sleek length flowing over my back, almost soothing after the brighter punctuation of palm and crop. It slips upward, disappearing beneath the fall of my sapphire hair before gliding around my neck in a loose loop. 

Then both ends are gathered into his hands.

Oh, Gods.

He draws them back.

The silk closes more firmly around my throat, and my breath becomes rationed, each inhale suddenly smaller and more precious than the one before it. Sight has already been surrendered; now even air has become partly his to govern, and the combination sends a primitive thrill coursing through me. 

Two senses diminished, and every other one seems to riot in compensation.

Touch becomes enormous.

I feel the Demigod everywhere: the force of his body driving mine into the mattress, his weight descending over my back, the silk at my throat, the damp strands of my own hair against my cheek. I cannot draw the great gulping breaths my body demands. I can only inhabit what remains. 

And what remains is feral.

His chest comes down against my back, and a growl reverberates through him, low enough that I feel it before I properly hear it. The vibration passes from his ribs into mine. His mouth finds the curve of my ear; I hear the faint grind of teeth clenched against the strain while his breath washes over my neck, and the cultured Olympian who had so carefully freed my feet from their espadrilles seems to have vanished somewhere during the evening. 

In his place is this creature.

His teeth sink into my neck.

Gods.

My breath escapes in tiny gasps through my nose while our bodies continue moving, collision giving way to flow, flow gathering again into collision. Silk holds me. His weight surrounds me. Teeth and mouth and breath occupy the vulnerable sweep from my ear to my shoulder.

There is a wonderfully contradictory part of me that wants his teeth to leave evidence.

Not injury. Evidence.

Some clandestine crimson crescent I might discover in the mirror the following morning, touch with two fingertips and remember that. Yet when morning comes, and there is no semi-permanent relic of his enthusiasm decorating my neck, I will find myself both disappointed and profoundly grateful. 

A woman can contain multitudes.

At present, however, this particular woman can barely contain the Demigod.

The silk remains taut enough that breathing comes in abbreviated measures, and our bodies alternate between collision and an almost liquid cadence, force dissolving briefly into flow before gathering again. I lose any meaningful understanding of time. There is only the narrow passage of air through my nose, the silk against my throat, his body surrounding mine and the rasp of his breathing growing progressively harsher behind me.

Then I notice a change in him.

Not with thought. Thought has become largely decorative by this point.

I feel it.

His body is changing against mine, his breathing descending into a deeper, huskier register. The surge that had seemed inexhaustible begins to acquire another urgency, and though some distant, educated portion of my mind possesses sufficient biological knowledge to interpret these signs, she has evidently abandoned her post.

I cannot process what they mean.

The Demigod can.

His voice reaches me through the darkness, lower and gruffer than it had been when this evening began.

“Turn around. Face up.”

A remarkably uncomplicated instruction.

My mind stares at it as though he has asked me to translate ancient Greek.

I am disoriented within my comforting darkness.

The instruction ought to be simple. Turn around. Face up. Four words requiring very little intellectual achievement, yet they reach a mind gone hazy and uncooperative, and for several bewildered seconds I cannot seem to translate language into movement. My limbs are equally unhelpful. They have been asked rather a great deal this evening and now respond with the faltering obedience of thoroughly overworked servants. 

Hands find me in the darkness.

His hands.

They guide rather than command, catching an arm, repositioning a shoulder, steering my thoroughly uncooperative limbs while I make what I suspect is an embarrassingly poor contribution to the endeavor. I surrender even this problem to him. If the Demigod wishes me arranged differently, the Demigod is evidently going to have to arrange me himself.

At last I am on my back, my head extending beyond the edge of the mattress, sapphire curls spilling toward the floor while he stands above me. 

Ah.

This I understand.

At last, my thoroughly addled mind believes it has solved the riddle. I expect the broad, mushroomed crown of his cock to find my mouth, and my lips part instinctively in preparation. I wet them with my tongue and wait.

Nothing.

Instead I hear it.

A slick, wet rhythm somewhere above me.

My brow furrows beneath the blindfold before comprehension finally arrives: his fist is working his cock. 

Oh.

One of his hands closes around my breast, fingers tightening and twisting my nipple while the other works himself above me. I can hear the obscene, slick cadence of his fist, the changing quality of his breathing, the guttural sounds escaping him as his body begins to vibrate with the force of what he is doing.

And I grin.

Because while I may be sightless, disoriented, thoroughly used and barely capable of following a four-word instruction, I am not without resources.

I lift my head.

And take his balls into my mouth.

They are drawn taut against his body, already betraying how near he is, but I have no intention of making this easy for him. If he intends to stand over me and bring himself to climax while I lie beneath him, then I shall contribute to the proceedings – and, if fortune favors me, prolong them.

My mouth closes around one.

I suck it gently downward, coaxing it away from his body before releasing it and turning my attention to the other. My tongue attends to each in turn with almost devotional thoroughness, nuzzling and coaxing one carefully into my mouth and then the other while the onslaught of his hand accelerates above me. 

His thighs frame my head, muting some of the sound, but I no longer require hearing to understand him.

I can feel it moving through his body.

The tension in his legs. The vibration pulsating through muscle. The increasingly ragged breath. The hand at my breast tightening as his other moves faster and faster, each stroke drawing him nearer to whatever precipice he has been approaching.

He is close.

Very close.

And then, somewhere amid the wet cadence of his hand, the tightening of his thighs around my head and the devotion of my mouth, my tongue, and my lips, I become aware of another gathering inevitability.

Oh, Gods.

So am I.

My left hand is wrapped around his thigh, holding fast to him while my other has slipped between my own legs.

My fingers glide through the extravagant aftermath of the evening, and I nearly groan at myself. Sweet divinity, I am so wet. Slick beyond decency, drenched from everything that has already passed between us and yet responding as though my body has discovered some secret reservoir I never knew it possessed.

I part my fingers and tilt my hips upward, opening myself beneath him with absolutely no pretense of modesty, offering the Demigod standing above me a positively vulgar vantage of my swollen sex. I cannot see his reaction, but I hear it – a low moan torn from somewhere in his chest – and the sound sinks straight through me. One finger slips inside, almost as though his response has summoned it there, and then my hand begins to move.

But my mouth has not forgotten him.

I am surrounded by his scent now, nearly suffocated by it: the barest trace of masculine musk mingled with clean soap and sandalwood, all of it concentrated by the strange alchemy of blindness until breathing him seems almost another form of touch. My mouth returns to him, and his knees nearly buckle.

That pleases me enormously.

I nuzzle and coax, taking one and then the other into my mouth, swirling my tongue around each with lavish adoration while my hand continues its own ministrations between my thighs.

Above me, his fist moves faster.

Beneath him, so do my fingers.

The two rhythms begin separately and then seem to find one another, gathering into the same breathless measure. His thighs tighten on either side of my head, while my right hand works furiously between my parted legs, my hips lifting shamelessly into every stroke.

I am still tending to him when the first wave catches me.

My mouth falters but does not abandon its task. My thighs draw taut; my back bows from the mattress, and my fingers keep moving as my body begins spilling around them. At nearly the same instant, the Demigod shudders above me.

And then we are coming together.

There is no elegance left in either of us.

My own release gushes over my hand and floods beneath my hips while the warm splash of his strikes my breast and abdomen, droplets reaching my legs as we surrender to the same frantic crescendo. Warmth strikes my ankle and, absurdly, some surviving scrap of my mind wonders whose it is.

Mine?

His?

I know the virile force of his releases well enough to wonder, but the mystery survives for approximately half a heartbeat before my own body renders investigation irrelevant. Another rush spills beneath me, warmth spreading under my hips while my Inner Goddess positively preens at the realization of what we have done.

Not what he has done to me.

Not what I have done to him.

This.

The Demigod and I have found the precipice together, each of us bringing the other there while I remain wrapped in darkness – his body shuddering above mine, my own still yielding beneath him, neither of us spectator to the other.

For once I have not watched his face as he came. I have not read the moment approaching in his expression or searched his eyes for confirmation of what I already knew. I have known him through the tightening of his thighs beneath my hand, through the falter in his knees, through sandalwood and musk, through the vibration rocketing down his body as he lost himself above me.

And he has known me in return – not through my eyes, but through the gush beneath my hips, the arch of my body and the hand that kept moving until there was simply nowhere higher for either of us to climb. 

We arrive there together.

Eventually, the Demigod takes an unsteady step backward, liberating my head from between his legs, and for several seconds I simply lie there, blinking uselessly beneath the silk while my lungs reacquaint themselves with the ordinary business of breathing.

My hands reach behind my head and find the knot he tied so carefully several lifetimes ago – or so it seems now. 

The silk slips away.

Evening returns by degrees.

The bedroom comes back into focus around me – the rumpled bed, the fading remnants of August light, the evidence of our astonishing lack of restraint – and then, finally, him. I look at the Demigod and discover that I cannot curb the ridiculous grin spreading across my face.

Nor do I particularly wish to.

There is the decidedly unromantic matter of the waterproof blanket, now thoroughly vindicated in its inclusion. We gather its sodden folds together with the weary cooperation of two people surveying the aftermath of a small and highly successful natural disaster, and once it has been sufficiently dealt with, he collapses onto the bed.

I follow.

There is no ceremony to it. I simply curl into his arms, throwing one leg over his thigh and nestling closer until I find the place where my body fits against his. His fingers begin wandering idly over my skin, no longer seeking a response from it, merely caressing because I am there beneath his hand. Mine answer in kind.

And together, we breathe.

For the first time all evening, neither of us is trying to take the other anywhere.

There is no next crescendo waiting to be summoned, no silk descending over my eyes, no clever instrument waiting beyond the reach of my sight. The music has spent itself. What remains is the hush after the final note, when no one moves because movement would break the spell before it is ready to release us.

So we stay there.

His chest rises beneath my cheek and falls again. My breathing gradually finds his, and time – which abandoned its responsibilities somewhere around the first espadrille – shows no particular inclination to resume them. His fingertips trace absent patterns over my skin. My leg remains tangled with his.

And there is peace.

Not love.

Not promises.

Not the beginning of a future requiring examination or definition. There is no expectation waiting for me at the end of his arms, no question I must answer about what this means tomorrow or next week or next year.

Just peace.

And perhaps that is why, of all the things I remember about that evening – the silk, the feather, the sandalwood, the suede, the dying August sunlight, the Demigod and all the indecent ways he made me forget my own name – it is this that remains the strangest luxury.

I can breathe.

Later, of course, mortality reasserts itself.

Eventually we retrieve our clothes. I find my dress waiting neatly over the back of the chair, because naturally the same man who spent the evening reducing me to incoherence had taken the time to hang it properly. We make ourselves presentable enough to venture into civilization and finally go in search of the dinner I had expected several hours earlier.

We walk beneath an evening sky and talk.

We eat.

We linger.

And somewhere while we are still talking, the last of the daylight disappears, and the stars come out above us.

Nothing monumental happens beneath them. There is friendship and conversation.

For a handful of hours, I had surrendered my sight and, with it, that ceaseless compulsion to watch, interpret, anticipate and prepare. I had been allowed simply to inhabit my own skin – to receive, respond, breathe, and be astonishingly, incandescently alive.

Then I opened my eyes.

The stars were still there.

And so was I.

Breathing.

Until next time, XO. Elsie