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It’s been thousands of years now but if I had to pick one single thing I saw first, it would be the way he blushed. It wasn’t quite splotchy; instead, it sat oddly on his nose — more on the left. He favored that side of his face, called it his most handsome, the vain bastard. It was true, his profile cut quite the shadow, but it wasn’t the whole truth; the whole truth itself was there, in the glowing flush of his cheeks when he looked at me.
Hades was a liar. Oh, he always told the truth, that much is real.
But the things he didn’t say? Those gaps could have swallowed mountains.
They certainly swallowed me.
G’raha’s grip on her thighs was steady, even if his voice wasn’t.
“Look at you. You’re incredible.”
A nudge of his knee had her legs pried apart, but she wouldn’t stop wiggling even while pinned. Had she been on her belly, he’d be treated to the sight of her backside shaking as she squirmed for him, but as things stood he had to be content with the privilege of spreading her labia with his fingers.
It was filthy, how slowly he went. A broad, fat stroke from her very bottom rim to the tip of her clit.
He didn’t care about building her pleasure, not right now; he cared only for the details on the map in his mind’s eye, and he planned to be thorough. He would require intricate cartography, a detailed legend. Repeatable, reliable coordinates.
He maintained eye contact until she understood there would be no mercy.
He started to wear her down.
“Hold still,” he would gently chide. Or, “Stay put for me, that’s my good girl.” Once, she got a “Fuck, fuck, you’re so wet—” and she answered him as best she could with a gush of slick into his eager palm.
He was experienced in pain, in patience. He knew the ache of being lost.
But here, teasing her by holding still, of all things, his deepest grief was his silence: he had never been honest with her, not really. The lies he had kept for the world, those were easy; hiding the depth of his desire was not.
It had always been fear — he knew, had always known, that he was not enough. That he was too much.
It was that very magnitude she was begging for now.
“More,” she keened. “More.”
I wish I knew what it was about his hands. There never was a specific thing — it was always a feeling in my gut when I stared at his knobby knuckles on the cello bow. Every part of him was articulate, and I would listen for hours. Each syllable was magic. Each sonorous thread strung me up to bake in the sun.
How do I describe a feeling that has rolled back into my body after eons? How do I describe eons at all?
For someone immortal, I am terrible at this. The true art lay within him, and it died there too. I have never had his gifts.
Please, forgive me.
Perhaps he could beg forgiveness later, but in that moment he was just another sinner: Raha could not, would not resist her.
“Yes,” he said, the truth pouring out like wine before he could stop his traitorous tongue, “yes, my love, everything. So good for me, please—”
“What is it?” she asked him, again and again and again, while he soaked himself in her. “Tell me what you want.”
“Only ever you,” he said each time, and discovered a new part of her in every one.
Just that question, just to be asked, had him bent in half and clumsily mouthing at her breasts. He rutted against the back of a thigh, kissed the ankle perched over his shoulder. He worshipped her skin with his mouth and her cunt with his fingers. To be asked, to be wanted—to be allowed to say—
“Never thought you’d be so wet. So responsive.” He bit her knee. “You’re doing so good.”
Her whimpers fell like rain.
“Can you take more? Are you certain you’re not too tight, little thing that you are?”
She squeezed him in protest, rocking to force him deeper. She was hardly little, and she was hardly accustomed to being so teased.
Then again—
he groaned, grinding his cock long and hard against her—
neither was he.
She nodded. “Please—”
What a word it was, please. What music. He pushed a third finger steadily in and felt her tissue fighting him; his instincts said to wait, to give her time, but how could he? Her begging had become a chant and his cock was leaking so much the back of her leg was wet. He should be ashamed, should be burning with it, but she was just so spread and her little pink lips were trying to swallow his hand whole.
If she let him, he would die here, and he would thank her for the honor.
“It isn’t that you’re beautiful,” he said, muffled by her skin. “You’re incandescent. Did you know that?” His thumb at her clit was slow, always slow. Her walls eased up just enough for him to sink a little deeper. “I can see your aether. I can taste you when you’re in the room.”
Fourth. Can he fit a fourth?
“Do you have any idea what you do to me?”
Not yet. He was sure the stretch must sting—her eyes were shining but she was fucking herself against him, undulating—
“I get hard just looking at you, sometimes.” There, there it is; his curled fingers tugged against the soft, spongy front of her, and she went silent, face strained and gasping at nothing but air. He kept up the pressure, deep and specific and relentless, determined to keep her voice captive.
He had too much to say for her to speak yet.
“I’ve taken myself in hand more than once, thinking of the smell of you. Do you truly think I can survive knowing how you taste?”
The very tip of a fourth finger now, and she was so wide he could see inside her.
“Do you think I’m ever going to let you leave this room?”
She dug her nails into his arms, flesh giving way until his forearms were marked with red half moons and the pain was unfamiliar, electric fire. She couldn’t quite fit all four of his fingers yet, but she was trying, sweet thing, whimpering, grunting—even so sloppy, so thoroughly impaled on him, her mouth tilted up confidently to one side.
“You’ll have to force me to stay. Fuck me until I can’t walk, perhaps.”
Perhaps, indeed.
“Open your legs,” he said, pulling out of her with a loud, wet sound and pushing to demonstrate what he wanted. “Wider.”
She obeyed, deliberately stretching her legs out.
“Now stay.”
“Make me,” she teased, though she made no move to escape.
“I don’t have to. You’re going to be good and listen to me. Do you know why?”
He leaned over her, presence huge and everywhere and yet meticulously touching no part of her. He hovered oppressively: his fingers danced above her nipples, his cock teased her center with a weightless press through his trousers, his shining wet hand left sticky trails along her skin. His breath scorched the shell of her ear as his heady voice coaxed her higher.
“I want to be used, darling. I want to taste you as deeply as I can reach, and I can’t do that if you don’t keep your legs open for me, now can I?”
He lowered his hand to pinch her clit, and she jumped, struck dumb by lightning.
The look he gave her could be innocent, if his pupils weren’t blown entirely wide and bottomless. “Don’t you want to come in my mouth?”
She did. She really, really did.
“Please,” she asked sweetly. “Please let me come in your mouth.”
The last thing he said for a very long time was a muffled good girl before he fell, starved, upon her.
This body… here, with her, he was—
His heart ached with need. He was going to destroy her, absolutely ruin her until he was lapping his come from her cunt and she was begging him to stop.
He’d do it all again if he could. Every single thing.
He started slowly but viciously. Of course, of course he did. Her toes curled against the onslaught of his seemingly endless need to take his time. He was slow, yes, but he was not meek — his mouth was fully open and lapping at as much of her as he could. The sound of it—the reach of him.
She was soaked enough to drown them both.
In lieu of his voice, hers rose to fill the room. Every time he licked or sucked, pearls of thank you and yes and please, please! fell from her mouth and scattered across the floor. He was a mantra and she could not stop the chant.
Sometimes, throughout all their time together, he would look at her and a jolt of recognition would go through them both: a home given up, an ancient weight of loss. So many secrets. The understanding she found reflected in G’raha Tia was a gift: he always met her exactly where she was, because he was the same.
He pushed her, just that little bit, to be better.
She pushed him, very gently, to slow down.
On most days, she would have told you that he made her kinder.
Today, as he held her gaze over her pubic bone and fucked three fingers into her so fast her tits bounced, they shared an understanding of a different sort—a different sort of care.
He was going to spoil her rotten, and she was going to let him.
He worked his jaw to ease it as he drowned in her taste. Her eyes were devilish, sparkling: she was having fun.
He felt like bubbles in champagne.
He nipped her clit, chest suffused with giddy light. Nothing could stop them, now. His nerves had been relentlessly overstimulated since she had woken him in the Tower, big and raw and frenetic. It was the same now: his inability to lick her everywhere at once curled in his gut until he was pressed, nose shoved against her clit and ears flicking with agitation as he discovered exactly how deep inside her his tongue could reach.
They were alive, and he was far too big for this new old body of his.
She was going to come until she hurt.
He was done being contained.
I saw the nasturtiums first. A baby’s cheek or a whore’s knees, it didn’t matter, the color was the same: the blush when Hades looked at me.
They grew to fill my balcony. Amaurot was a hard place for foreign greens to thrive, but my fingers will always know the secrets of the forest, and for me they ran as wild as horses. They spread, and stretched, and curled like content and lazy things. They bloomed for me, just like he did.
I’m not sure why I’m telling you this. The flowers I surround myself with aren’t exactly interesting; they just keep me company while I have my coffee.
Sometimes though, when I couldn’t sleep, I’d take my lightest robe and drink in the sunrise like it was water. And those nasturtiums—they would glow. My heart still wrenches at that color, at the heat of him, but it wrenches too to simply have known him.
To have loved, and lost, and all that shit.
Aches like this do not heal. They accompany.
Truly, I am blessed: for in this way, I am never alone.
“Please,” he was saying, over and over and over, stunned that it was he who had resorted to truly begging.
However hard he looked now, however deep, he no longer found an ounce of shame within himself.
No guilt.
Nothing but the lightness of air, the negative weight of wonder.
This new old body, this self he had left behind to the mercies of the unknown, was a raw nerve awash in everything, sore from it. The soft kiss of hair on her legs, her bruised lips, the marks of his teeth across her breasts and belly.
He was overstimulated, overwhelmed.
But he was staring, enraptured as his cock slowly disappeared into her body for the first time. She was so wet his own thighs were slick with her, and her kisses when their bodies came together were elated, joyful. Laughter bubbled from her, a sound so infectious that even when he bottomed out and rubbed furiously at her clit for the selfish gift of feeling her come around him, he was laughing too.
He’d never laughed during sex before. Never had fun quite like this.
What on earth had he wasted his youth doing, to have only now experienced this?
He was never going to be such an idiot again.
“I could have been fucking you this whole time,” he snarled, a desperate, soft plea that took the threads of her heart and twisted. “Would you have let me shove you to the floor and tear your skirts, I wonder? Would you have been this wet?”
And it was true, she was — he was in awe of the slick sounds as he pulled out of her, the rising chorus of her keens at the loss of his cock.
She did some… swizzle, or something, with her hips—not that he could say for sure because his vision whited out as she fucked herself on him—and leaned in to bite his nipple.
Her wicked hand (curious, he used to think of her as curious, naive young cat that he was) reached around his ass for his entrance. But her tongue was distracting him—she was still flicking his hypersensitive nipple, startling him with stinging bites—hot, relentless, cruel—
He whimpered as her finger made gentle contact, pistoning forward hard enough she grunted low in her throat.
“When have I ever worn a fucking skirt, Raha,” and then she was pressing.
He’d always known she made him stupid. At the best of times, at his very most lucid, he was a fool for her. At his worst, well.
Here at his worst, with her finger gently pushing into him (this, this is why it was horrible that she was taller, he always told her You and your blasted reach but now the reach was inside him and he can’t stop—)
Her velvet heat squeezed him like he belonged with her, and you could call him sentimental (for it was well deserved) but he was absolutely never leaving.
They had no lubricant so it wasn’t a proper fucking, but it didn’t matter. It had been so long, and the world was so brave and new and it was her.
“Next time,” she promised into his hair, pressing the lines of their bodies together and feeding on the intimacy of skin to skin. He was helpless, out of control, grinding back against her finger until he hit the brink and then forward into her welcoming body. Back and forth, the ebb of one tide into the flow of another.
The enormity of G’raha’s situation was already crushing him, and then she promised him next time.
A future. A real, physical future.
It was all too much.
With a hoarse and broken shout, he came. It was torrential, an amount that would have embarrassed him had her face not been so open, so ecstatic, so flushed red with pleasure. She ground her clit against his abdomen with a ridiculous wet squelch and breathlessly, wildly came.
His softening cock rocked her through her aftershocks. He threatened to touch her swollen, tender clit one more time, and she laughed and swatted him. He kissed her hair. They slept. In the morning, filthier than any two people had a right to be, they would bathe.
What a horizon, looming before them.
What a remarkable horizon.
I know you believe that sadness needs to be fixed.
But it just needs to exist, Hades.
It needs to walk with us.
Without it, I wouldn’t remember you.
And listen to me, you insufferable ass, and listen very carefully. Unclog your smug ears and listen .
I would die before giving you up.
One day, I will remember everything. I know it. I hear it in the nasturtiums’ song, even here in this fragile future. I could make that beautiful, tawdry blush of yours out of any pigments Tataru will ever give me. Your feet will always be too cold at night, and you will always make tea that tastes better than mine.
I’m telling G’raha about you, when you come up. It’s quite often; he has as many questions as I do.
Don’t preen, your ego is big enough. You’re not the only thing we talk about. I have a life, you know.
I should have started today’s letter with “to whom it may concern.” It’s no less than what you deserve.
All my love,
Henvethel