Divine Torment

by Janine Ashbless

  Braced on the length of his arms, he stared down at her. There was no trace of a smile around his eyes now; she thought it was more like the look of an executioner. She looked up into his eyes and it was like staring into the darkness of the night sky. His sallow face was outlined by the black ink-strokes of beard and brows and lashes and by his cobweb-hued hair that was starting to come loose from its thong.

  Shifting his weight to one arm, he tugged loose the drawstring knot of her dress and pulled the neck wide. But he could not reveal her breasts; they were still swathed in the spiral of her sash. He slipped the end of that cloth free and jerked the first loop from under her supine weight. She arched her back to aid the unwinding, but it made little difference; the homespun sheath was incapable of resisting. She watched the play of muscles in his forearm as he stripped her of the outer garment twist by twist until her crumpled under-dress was fully exposed. Then he stretched the neckline wide and pulled that down over her shoulders and arms, down to her hips. Her nipples, dark as honeybees, tightened as they met the lamplight.

  Veraine was not in the mood to waste time; he cupped her breasts in his hands and bent over them like a tiger to the kill. For the attention she had offered him moments before he repaid her a thousand times over, lips and tongue and teeth combining in an impassioned assault on the most sensitive skin of her body. Where his mouth could not be, there his hands caressed, rolling each nipple in turn between his fingers until it was as hard as a pebble, and then he turned the ministrations of his mouth upon it, tugging and suckling at it until each breast felt as if it were incandescent.

  Then he withdrew and worked his way down the length of her body to belly and pubis, yanking her dress violently to her ankles when he found it was in the way. Thus he ended up kneeling between her parted thighs, his face hovering over the mahogany fleece of her sex, and with his thumbs he smoothed and parted that unruly nest to reveal the pearly egg within.

  His kiss was, to the Malia Shai’s utter confusion, as tender as the breast of a brooding bird, settling on her with a warmth that suffused her veins. And his tongue was slow, winding through the labyrinthine folds of her labia with none of the urgent teasing with which he had provoked her breasts. Here he lavished his kisses with the numinous awe of a mystic in communion with the divine. That softness, the liquid caress of his mouth, nearly drove the senses from her. She could tell she was wet, and getting wetter. She pressed her palms against the stone beneath her and arched her back, pressing her aching clit into his mouth. But he seemed unwilling to satisfy her straight away. With tiny kisses and little licks he pulled free, rising to his feet again and stretching full length over her body once more.

  She felt as if she must be pulsating beneath him.

  This time she could see the glisten of her own juices on his chin and lips, smell the sweet-sharp musk of her own eagerness as he stooped over her. His mouth covered hers. She could taste her own sex. His tongue slipped between her swollen lips, easing them gently apart. It caressed her lips and teeth and tangled with her own tongue, stroking the soft and sensitive tissues, the wetness of their mouths intermingling, the taste of her musk burning in her throat. Without deliberation or knowing how it was happening, she found she had opened herself to him, fully and without reservation. And though Veraine was not thrusting into or upon her sex, merely resting the weight of his body upon hers, his still-clothed erection was pressed hard against the mound of her yoni and she was so aroused that that was enough to send her. Orgasm blossomed like a flower, unfurling petal after petal of crimson sensation. She did not cry out, or writhe. She felt her flesh invert silently, secretly.

  But when Veraine lifted his lips from hers, somehow the light of recognition was in his eyes already.

  ‘What happened there?’ he asked in wonder. ‘You came?’

  She nodded. She could feel the flush starting to mount in her cheeks.

  ‘You’re very quiet.’

  She nodded again.

  He touched his lips to hers. ‘I would like to hear you.’ His voice was the huskiest of whispers.

  ‘I . . . I don’t cry out,’ she replied.

  ‘Oh,’ he murmured, his mouth to her ear this time, his voice buzzing down her spine, ‘you will.’

  She felt him reach down to his hip with one hand and fumble there, while his mouth concentrated on the slow and moth-soft teasing of her lips and cheeks and eyelids. In a few moments he managed to drag free the last remaining rag of cloth that separated them, and then she felt the rough linen give way to hot flesh. He rested his cock there, coiled at the gateway of her sex, and he stared into her eyes.

  ‘Tell me what you want,’ he demanded.

  She quailed before that question. The goddess in her acted according to her nature, without contemplation or introspection, while as a mortal woman she had never listened to the voice of desire. She had no vocabulary for it. ‘I don’t know,’ she said weakly.

  Veraine raised his eyebrows. ‘Ah.’ He took one of her nipples between thumb and forefinger and pinched it softly. ‘Do you feel this?’ he asked, the slightest nudge of his hips sending the hard neck of his cock pressing into the wet furrow of her sex.

  She felt as if she were melting. She managed to nod.

  ‘Do you want it?’

  She tried to smile but her lips were trembling. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Tell me–’ he planted soft kisses on her chin, her throat ‘–what you want.’

  ‘I want you,’ she gasped.

  ‘Yes. How?’ His tenderness was torture.

  ‘I want – oh! – you to do those things. That you said, here, when I came into your room. All of them.’

  ‘Ah. You remember.’

  ‘Yes.’

  His voice was as gentle and cruel and deadly as the stirring of a cobra against her cheek. ‘Do you want me to fill you with my prick? Do you want it inside you, splitting you wide? Do you want my cream in your cunt, and your mouth, and your arse?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So you want me to fuck you,’ he concluded, his murmur thick with unspilled desire.

  ‘I want you to fuck me,’ she groaned in surrender.

  He bit her earlobe softly. ‘I’m glad you said that,’ he whispered. ‘Because I have to warn you: your tight little quim is so hot. And wet. And sweet. That when I get my length inside it, I won’t be able to hold back. I will not be able to wait for you. I’m going to come inside you. It may be . . . rough.’

  Her reply was to reach up and lick his throat, a response that made him groan and judder against her. ‘Fuck me,’ she ordered desperately.

  It took only a rock of his hips to align himself. She felt the hard fist of his cock slide down the slippery, swollen folds of her sex and press into its hidden mouth. And she felt herself open up around him as more and more of his thick member entered her, stretching her wider than she could imagine, feeding into her without pause or mercy until he was rooted full length in her soil. Her body yielded – not just the shocked muscles of her yoni but the whole aching length of her, bone and flesh and skin, enfolding him in her arms and her thighs.

  ‘Sweet gods!’ Veraine said with feeling, his eyes fluttering shut. Then, despite all his threats, he lay still, buried to the hilt in her, savouring the moment. The Malia Shai fought to get her breath back. When he did move, it was to raise himself on his arms and then pull her up against him, arm round her waist and then under her arse, keeping her straddling his hips, his member rigid inside her, as he carried her over to his bed. He kneeled on it, lowering her down upon the cover, their hips still locked. Once his hands were free he ran them over her, caressing breasts and belly and flanks, his palm as heavy upon her flat stomach as if he could feel his own cock beneath it.

  She writhed beneath his touch, afire with sensations that had never before been aroused in her by mortal flesh. She reached up to him, caught his face in both hands, held him tenderly for a moment and then knotted her fist in his loose hair and pulled him down prone upon her. He came
down hard, with a low cry, and the thrust that accompanied it repaid her impatient cruelty tenfold. She arched under him. He grabbed her wrists, pinned them wide and continued to thrust into her slender body. Their skins, slick with the perspiration of the warm night, seemed to melt into one another, their heaving torsos fused. His hips pushed her thighs wide, his face was buried in her tumbled hair. And every blow of his pelvis against her stoked the flames higher, like a man pumping a furnace bellows who does not dare stop until the metal turns to liquid fire.

  Pinned beneath him, wrapped around him, the breath trapped in her chest, she felt the flame begin to run through every channel of her body from the white-hot crucible of her molten cunt, up her belly, filling her spine and lungs until she whiplashed under him in the inferno of orgasm and the fire ran up into her throat and came spilling out as a wailing sob of helpless abandon. She had never uttered a sound like that in her life. And Veraine caught it, smothering her mouth with his, swallowing her cry. Then the fire boiled through him, igniting his flesh, and he came in her with a violent shuddering thrust of his muscular arse that sent new flames washing through her twisting frame.

  She thought it would never end, that they would burn like that for ever, that she would die there wrapped in fire.

  She only knew that the conflagration was over when Veraine raised himself up onto his elbows and wiped the tears from her cheeks. She opened her eyes onto his gaze, still as intent as the glare of stars in the midnight sky, but softened now by a smile.

  ‘You outran me, then,’ he said.

  She did not reply. The breath was heaving in her throat. He eased himself from within her and rolled off onto his back, but he caught her up as he went and tumbled her up against him, half-sprawled across his chest. They lay and let their panting slow. His left hand was tight on her back and she could hear his heartbeat thumping up from under his ribs. He ran his spare hand through his hair and over his scalp.

  The Malia Shai twisted herself against him slightly so that she could look down the length of his torso, burning to see for the first time his cock, the pestle that had ground within her mortar. It lay against his belly, flushed dark with blood but quiescent now. It was glazed with her juices and to her eyes it looked improbably large; she could not believe she had managed to engulf such a thickness within her. She reached down to stroke it and felt it throb against her palm. It was not as smooth as she had expected, gnarled instead with thick veins.

  ‘Ah,’ said Veraine with satisfaction.

  She pushed herself up on one elbow in order to reach further, down to his bollocks. She cupped them in her hand, feeling the weight of the velvety purse, the softness of the hairless skin.

  ‘Gently,’ he cautioned as she found the firm stones within, and then whimpered helplessly, his lip caught between his teeth, as she rolled them slowly together. His penis jumped. She was pleased and intrigued and she sat up so as to better examine these new toys. But as she kneeled on the bed there was an unfamiliar rush of moisture between her legs.

  ‘What’s that?’ she asked, frowning at the wet that had leaked out upon her inner thigh.

  ‘Me, mostly,’ Veraine said. He reached in and cupped her fur, his fingers delving in the sopping folds of flesh and teasing the hot embers of her pleasure into new flames. ‘Us.’ He withdrew his hand again and showed her the pearlescent slipperiness painted upon it. She sniffed cautiously at it, scenting an entirely unfamiliar musk.

  ‘Taste it,’ he suggested as her parted lips hovered an inch from his palm. His voice was husky again.

  She lapped at the slippery dew, kissing the moisture eagerly from his splayed fingers. And under her own palm she felt a wave of tumescence surge up his member, stiffening its turgid length to utter rigidity.

  ‘Oh sweet Shuga,’ blasphemed Veraine, bundling her over onto the sheets and covering her with his weight.

  ‘I thought we’d finished,’ she gasped, and then gasped again as the thick length of his cock penetrated her swollen sex.

  ‘Oh no,’ he told her. ‘We’ve hardly started.’

  9 Desecration

  He has fallen asleep at last He lies against me, the weight of his head pinning my right arm to the bed, his lips pressed softly to the side of my breast. I can feel the warmth of his slow breathing. His arm is wrapped around me, long fingers framing my bruised and tender left nipple. His skin looks pale against my own.

  My arm has gone numb, but I wouldn’t dream of shaking him off.

  What do I see, looking down the length of my body as I lie beside him? I see the muscular peak of his shoulder, the thickness of his upper arm and the long hard wedge of his forearm draped across my ribs. I see the smooth curves of his back receding to an arse as solid as the clay mound of a potter’s kiln. I see the hopeless tangle of his strange, strange hair that escaped from its tie during our sweaty rutting and has fallen everywhere like a pool of wood-ash, black and grey.

  When we fucked . . .

  Under his hair I can make out part of his face. The angular black arch of a single brow, the sharp curve of nose and cheekbone. The dark lashes sweeping from eyelids blue with exhaustion. The stubble creeping up from his jawline where he has neglected to shave for a day. I could never get tired of looking at that face.

  The sweat has dried upon my skin now and the pulse has stopped rippling across my belly like an earthquake. My thighs have relaxed and ceased to shake. The strain of our coupling took me to the edge of my strength, but I survived.

  When we fucked it was like we were trying to kill each other. Or kill ourselves. Like a man running into the heart of desert. Like a woman throwing herself under a landslide. A blur of grasping hands and thrusting limbs and choking breath. Teeth biting into tender flesh, nails raking vivid lines across tortured skin.

  I am swollen and bruised in places I never imagined could be battered. And to the multiple cuts and bruises of battle I have added my own marks, across the length and breadth of his wonderful body.

  He’s got long legs; his feet seem to be miles away at the bottom of the bed. The legs are flecked with dark hair, like his chest. But his arse and back are as smooth as a Yamani’s. He’s strange. His body is a foreign land. I can’t understand it, though I try and try to find out what makes him gasp, what makes him flinch, what makes him laugh, and I’ve learned so many of these things in just hours. What makes him harden like a tent-stake, instantaneously.

  He is beautiful.

  When we fucked it was like the monsoon rains, it was like heaven and earth colliding and mingling, it was like the elements fusing in chaos at the end of the world. It was like the apotheosis I shall achieve when three hundred and thirty-three lifetimes on earth have been completed, and I am able to return to the godhead.

  This is not desire. I was taught to reject desire. This is not lust. Lust is an itch, an appetite, a selfish yearning for something that will satisfy the flesh. Scratch an itch and it will fade, feed a hunger and it will be sated. But what I feel now is not of the order of things that are satisfied by the material world.

  It took me a long time to recognise that. At first I thought only, he is a man and my female flesh desires him. It is of no importance. But there were other men he brought with him, and for them I didn’t feel the same. Veraine only has to look at me and I know that I am being tom apart. He smiles that crooked smile of his and I feel the skies peel back and the stars shake in their spheres. If this is lust, then it is a lust that consumes the soul.

  Every time I thought of him – his glance, his hands, the way he moved and turned and walked – then something would knot in my belly beneath my navel, something as sharp as the stab of a knife. Even now, with my flesh so wracked by pleasure that I would hardly have the strength to stand, there is a white-hot fire in me that is not quenched.

  I could fuck Veraine from now until the end of time and it would not take away this need.

  They never told me about this. I have no memory of it happening before, not in all my lives. What am I to
do? I don’t even have a name for this thing. In the arch of his eyebrow I see the vault of heaven, in the curve of his fingers I recognise the swell of the ocean, in the shadow of his throat I apprehend the depths of the underworld. He has become the universe itself to me.

  I am earth, and he is water. I am darkness and he is light. I am the goddess – I am all goddesses – and he is the god. We consume each other. We make each other whole, and in doing so we become nothing. Sunyata. For the briefest moment when we meet in that holy place outside of time which is orgasm, then there is nothing, perfect and indivisible. The world is annihilated. We are not individuals, not matter, not existent. That indescribable union of all creation which thus becomes the Uncreated – that is the godhead. That is the state to which Malia has striven across the vain lifetimes.

  I do not understand why we come back. Why does the universe return to existence?

  He is beautiful. I want to bite his arse-cheeks and kiss the small of his back where the satin skin meets the cleft between them. I want to lick his nipples. He likes that. It makes him squirm.

  My own nipples are tightening at the thought, firming like dried peas. If he stirred in his sleep and closed finger and thumb, he would have hold of the left one now. He would have hold of my soul by a golden chain. Oh. When his lips close over my erect nipples I feel as if I’m melting with pleasure. When he buries his face between my legs it is as if I’m a flower opening to the morning sun. He fills me with light. He puts his hand on my yoni and I’m wet for him. But a hand on my waist would do as well

  My right arm has gone to sleep. Otherwise I would reach up and brush the tangled locks back from his face as gently as he does for me. Oh, the tenderness in his fingertips when he strokes my mouth and my hair and my cheeks. It makes my eyes fill with tears that I don’t understand but he seems to, kissing them away with lips as soft as feathers. He is most possessive when he is being most gentle. When he pins me down and we fuck hard, then I feel like a tigress, but when he touches me with the tiniest, most delicate of caresses, then I shake in his arms helplessly, like a fawn in a tiger’s jaws, like a sacrifice on the altar.