I could hardly breathe, myself. He was thick and hard, filling me, every inch of him plunging into me again and again, sending waves of pleasure over my entire body. I moaned as I arched against him, my breasts pressing into his chest as I bit at his throat, sucking the soft flesh into my mouth as he made a surprised sound, and then a deep groan of pleasure. I wanted to mark him, to leave something to remind him of me, to haunt him even, depending on the choice that he made.
There was nothing soft or tender about what we did on the floor of that hotel room. I remember thinking that there was the possibility of it, in the future—there were small moments sprinkled in, a second where he paused and looked down into my face, locking his eyes with mine as he surged within me. There would be a time when we could be gentle with each other, if that time was ever afforded to us.
It was not this time. He possessed me with every stroke, desperate for the fulfillment that waited at the end of this, and I returned it in kind, every writhe of my hips sending us both closer and closer. He kissed me again, hard, his forehead pressed to mine as he shuddered, breathing my name as he sped up, his thrusts more and more erratic as he hovered on the edge. “Come for me, Ravenna,” he whispered, never stopping or pausing for a second. One hand ran through my hair, over my breasts, his fingers brushing over my nipples and sending a shiver through my whole body.
“Make me,” I whispered back, a delicious sense of power flooding me, and he did just that. He slowed for a moment, holding back his own desire as he plunged into me with long, slow thrusts that seemed to touch every nerve I possessed, and the moment he saw that I hovered on the precipice, he sped up, fucking me with an intensity that sent me over in a sudden, blinding rush of pleasure that made me cry out and dig my fingers into his shoulders, scoring my nails down his back as I arched and pressed myself against him.
He groaned, his eyes fixed on my face as he thrust into me once more, hard, and I felt his whole body tremble with the force of it as he came, my name spilling from his lips, his every muscle rigid with pleasure.
For a moment neither of us moved. I looked up at him, my eyes wide, gasping for breath He shuddered once more as he sank backwards, kneeling on the carpet as I pulled myself to a sitting position, suddenly acutely aware that we were naked on a hotel room floor.
24
Toven
For a moment I sat motionless, unable to move or speak, my body still reverberating with the aftershocks of what we’d just done. I wanted to lie down, hold her in my arms and fall asleep; I wanted to grab her, shake her and ask her how she could possibly have made the choices that had brought her here. I wanted to fuck her all over again, and then make love to her, as slowly and thoroughly as I knew how. I wanted to do all of those things at once, and the riot of emotions threatened to consume me.
Her eyes were dark and impossibly wide in her face, and I knew there was no need for me to say what I said next, but I said it anyway. The words needed to be spoken aloud.
“I know, Ravenna.”
I saw a flicker of fear cross her face, quickly contained. Gods, how was she so beautiful? It was all I could do to keep my hands from her, and I couldn’t stop my eyes from roving over every inch of her naked form. I wanted to memorize it, to remember always what she looked like in this moment. Any other woman might have looked ridiculous, half-upright and nude on a hotel room floor, but Ravenna looked like a queen, or a reclining goddess.
That snapped me back to the present moment.
“What do you know?” she asked coolly. She stood with one fluid movement, and I watched her body unfold, lithe and long-legged, striding to the closet on the far side of the room. Her hips swayed as she walked, and I wondered if it was unintentional, or meant to distract me. At the moment, I couldn’t really bring myself to care.
She pulled a terrycloth robe from the closet, turning towards me once more and giving me a final view of her small, slightly upturned breasts, the nipples still flushed dark against her olive skin, and I remembered the feel of them in my hands, the hard points brushing against my palms. I had wanted to run my lips over them, too, to kiss the flat plane of her stomach, to find out what she tasted like…
My cock lurched, stiffening even as she closed the robe and tied it tightly, obscuring her body from view, and I remembered with embarrassing clarity that I was still naked.
Her dark eyes flicked down to my erection, and I thought I saw her skin flush, but I couldn’t be sure. I hoped that she was at least half as distracted by my nudity as I had been by hers.
The fingers of one hand went to the neck of her robe, closing it tightly as if shielding herself, and she turned away, grabbing another one from the closet and throwing it unceremoniously at me.
“What do you know?” she repeated, crossing her arms over her chest as I stood and wrapped the robe around myself.
“I know what Kavi is,” I said quietly, walking to the bed and sitting heavily on the edge, looking directly at her. “And I know what he did to you.”
“For me,” she whispered. “What he did for me.”
I stared at her, my mouth opening slightly? “For you? Ravenna, how can you say that? By your own admission, you have been running away from something for decades—and now I know what that is...the justice of the gods. And if you are caught…”
“It is not justice,” she snapped. “And…” she raised her hands and let them fall in a helpless gesture. “We are caught. Are we not?”
“I know the truth,” I said simply. “I cannot say what it is that I will do with it, yet.”
Her expression became guarded, and she sank into a nearby chair. “So…there’s a possibility you will let us go?”
“I don’t know what I should do!” The words tore from my mouth in a rush, strangled with emotion. “Ravenna, you have no idea what you have done to me!”
“How have I done anything to you?” Her voice was cool now, her face shuttered of all feeling. “I hardly know you, Toven. Certainly, none of this was ever done with you in mind.”
“Why on earth would you ever have agreed to such a thing?” I shook my head. “Did Kavi not tell you what the punishment is for breaking that law? For a mortal to take immortality from a god, and for that god to give it?”
“He told me,” she said simply.
“Were you dying?” That would make sense, I reasoned. A mortal on the precipice of death would do nearly anything, in most cases, to escape it. Even the threat of some terrible punishment might seem far off and unlikely, if death were imminent.
“I was ill,” she said softly, “but not dying. I think he feared it. It reminded him that I would, in fact, one day die. It spurred him to offer it to me. But I was in no real danger then.”
“For gods’ sake Ravenna, then why?” I swallowed hard, trembling with the force of holding back the fear, anger and desperation that were churning deep in my gut. “You have to tell me why.”
I saw her flinch at the command, but she only looked away, her fingers curling into the thick material of her robe. “I thought that once I died, that I would go to the realm of the gods, that Kavi and I would be together for eternity. I did not know…”
“…that mortals go to a different realm.” I finished. “What of Isa?” I asked curiously. “He is mortal, or at least somewhat so. What about spending eternity with him?”
She looked at me. “Isa and I were not together, then,” she said sharply.
“Ah. So, his devotion to the two of you came later.”
“Yes. After Kavi had already made me immortal.” She sighed. “Kavi hesitated, at first. He told me what the punishment would be if we were found out. He told me we would have to flee, to always be in hiding, so that we would not be caught. We would give up the life we had dreamed of—a home, children perhaps, for a different kind of life altogether. A life that would never end.”
“How could you choose it?” I stared at her, wanting to understand. She looked like a statue carved from stone, her chin raised defiantly as she m
et my gaze. “How could you knowingly face such a terrible punishment, for both of you?”
“For love,” she said simply, her face softening as she said it. “I saw that I would have a full life with Kavi, the ordinary life of any mortal, one lasting perhaps another day, or perhaps another sixty years, and then an afterlife without him, a separation that would never end. I could think of no punishment so terrible that it could compare to an eternity of wanting him, and never seeing him again.” Her voice lowered, and she wrapped her arms around herself as if the room had gone cold. “I did it for love, Toven.”
I did it for love. I remembered that sentence said in another place, another voice, broken nails scraping against a marble floor as guards held the woman who had screamed it, her voice echoing in the hall. I did it for love.
She looked at me curiously. “Have you never loved anyone so much?”
I tensed, my jaw tightening. “Once, I wanted to,” I said quietly. “Once I longed for it above all else. It was the very height of humanity, the consummate experience we gave to the beings we created, the one thing they would both kill and die for without question. I longed to know what it was. I ached to feel it.”
“And did you?”
“Things changed,” I said grimly. “I swore I would avoid it at all costs. But then…” I looked at her, at her beautiful, unreadable face, and I remembered the smooth curves of her body under my hands, the way she had arched up into my touch just a few minutes before. I thought of what courage it took to do what she had done for decades for the ones she loved, and the courage it took even now, to face down a god that held the power of life and death in his hands, no matter what he might feel for her. I understood then what it was that would make Kavi risk all for the possibility of an eternity with her at his side.
“I know now,” I murmured softly. “For all my efforts, I have found out at last.”
I saw her face change, sorrow, hope, and something else altogether mixed, and she bit her lip. “So what changed?” she asked softly. “And what changed yet again?”
I gritted my teeth, jaw clenching as I tried to stem the tide of memory that rushed up at her question. I didn’t have to tell her. I owed her nothing, this beautiful woman who had somehow crashed through every barrier I had ever put up to ward against love. And yet, I wanted to tell her. I wanted her to understand—and I wanted to rid myself of the terrible burden of remembering alone.
“It happened a long time ago,” I murmured, as if beginning a fairy tale, “nearly two hundred years now, I suppose.” Had it really been so long? In some ways it felt like lifetimes—as it had been—and in others it felt as if it had only happened days ago. Certainly the memories were as vivid as if that were the case.
“There was a woman I knew,” I continued softly, not looking at Ravenna. “She was beautiful, and kind, and loved by all who met her. We were not as close, perhaps, as she was with others, but for all the time I knew her I admired and respected her, perhaps even loved her a little.”
“What happened to her?” Ravenna’s voice trembled as she spoke, and I glanced up at her. Her hands were knotted in her lap.
I looked away. “She fell in love with the wrong man. Someone who was forbidden to her, for reasons that seemed right and reasonable when the law was made. But she loved him nonetheless, and she could not bring herself to tell him goodbye. So they tried to hide their love from the gods, until one day she made a choice that would prevent their secret from being so any longer.”
The room was quiet and still as I hesitated. The silence went on for so long that Ravenna leaned forward, her eyes fixed nervously on my face. “Toven?”
“She became pregnant,” I said finally, the muscles of my jaw clenching and unclenching as I remembered. “She chose to keep the child. Even now, I think that she believed that would prevent the gods from meting out their punishment. She believed their love was fated, and that the child was proof of that.”
“But that didn’t stop them, did it?” Ravenna’s voice was tight now, and I could hear the fear wavering in her tone. “The laws of the gods are inviolable,” she murmured. “Kavi told me that once. There can be no reasoning with them, no exceptions.”
“No,” I murmured. “No exceptions.” I heard it again then, in the deepest part of my mind where I desperately tried to keep the memories locked away. “We were all called to witness it, a council of all the gods and goddesses. And she was given no mercy, nor he.”
“What did they do?” Ravenna’s voice was so quiet that I hardly heard her speak.
“They executed her lover in front of her, before us all,” I said, tears rising up to choke me as I spoke. “They took her child from her, and gave her to another family, to be raised without knowledge of her birthright or the parents who loved her. And the woman herself was banished, locked away in near-solitude for all of time.” My hands were fists now, clenched in my lap, the nails biting into the skin. I looked up at Ravenna, my eyes wide and filled with tears. “Do you not see, Ravenna? I watched her pain. I watched her scream and beg, watched the light leave her eyes when her lover died and her child was taken away. They didn’t spare her life for mercy. They spared her life because they knew that to live an eternity with those memories was a fate worse than any death. And after that I swore never to love, because I never wanted to know what it was to hold someone so close to me that to lose them would be worse than death. And now I have come to just that!” The last words ripped from my mouth and I sank to my knees on the carpet. “I must disobey the laws of the gods, put my own life in peril, or else have you ripped away, to see you suffer a dreadful punishment. After all this time…” I shook my head, my throat closing so tightly that I could say nothing else.
“Oh, Toven.” Ravenna sank onto the carpet next to me, reaching for me as I pressed my forehead to her shoulder, my body shaking soundlessly. “I never meant…”
“I know,” I whispered. “I know you didn’t.”
She touched my cheek gently, turning my face so that I was looking at her. “Don’t you see, Toven? That woman you knew, you said her punishment was chosen because to live forever without her lover was worse than death. That’s why I made my own choice. Because I would rather suffer any punishment than die and spend eternity in a place where I could never again see Kavi.”
“And now I must make the same choice,” I said, reaching up for her hand. “To risk all that I am, or know what I have condemned you to, and to never see you again.”
“I would never have wanted that for you,” she whispered. “We always believed that it was only the three of us, that no one else would ever suffer for the choice we made. I see now how impossible it was to think that.”
There were many things I could have said. I could have said that I resented her for coming into my life, for causing such upheaval and destroying all the defenses I had so carefully built. I could have said that I hated her with equal measure, for putting me in such a terrible position. I could have said that I never wanted to see her again. But none of those things were true. “It’s not your fault,” I said, and that was the truth. “You didn’t ask for me to fall for you. But I have, Ravenna, and now I have a choice to make.”
“Why?” she whispered. “Why do you love me?”
I ran a finger over her palm, tracing the lines there. There are people who say you can tell a future in those lines; I have always wondered if it were true. If someone were to read her lines, would I be written there? “I have been with more women than I can count, Ravenna, and men too. I don’t say that to make you jealous—it is just the truth. I cannot remember the name of a single one, not even their faces, anymore. I have buried my memories and my sadness and the ache of wanting something I was too afraid to have in sex that meant nothing to me. And if I had tried to tell even one of them what I was, they would not for a second have even entertained the idea of believing me.” I threaded my fingers through hers, squeezing her hand. “From the moment I saw you, Ravenna, I knew you were different. I kn
ew there was something more to you—to us. With you I need hide nothing, not the truth of what I am, or anything else. I could spend forever with you and say anything on my mind or in my heart, and feel as if you would listen and understand. I have felt such crushing guilt, for centuries. That I didn’t save her, that I stood by and watched, that I was too much of a coward to speak up, to stop it. I have never been able to speak of it to anyone, then or since. But with you…” I swallowed, biting my lower lip. “It’s as if a great weight has been lifted. Which makes it all the more difficult that we can’t have that, no matter what happens next.”
She blinked. “No? Why not?”
I stared at her. “Ravenna, I will do all I can to save your life, and Kavi and Isa’s, too. But for us to be together at all, it would be like sending up a beacon. I am no minor deity, like Kavi. I am one of the major gods, and…it is not possible. Tonight may be all we have.”
She was quiet for a long moment. “And you would do that…take that risk, even without the promise of us being together? Even if we only get one night?”
There was no hesitation in my voice as I answered, only one word, and then she was on her feet, my fingers still entwined with hers, and leading me towards the bed.
“Yes.”
25
Ravenna
The house was dark and silent when I came home. I walked to the bathroom, my heart heavy, and turned on the taps for the bathtub, filling it with the hottest water I thought I could stand.
I shed my clothes slowly, letting my fingers drift over the places Toven had touched only an hour before. Our second time together had been everything the first was not—gentle instead of rough, slow and tender instead of furious and desperate. We had touched each other with the slow reverence of people who have both found each other at last and who know their goodbye is imminent, and we had made it last.
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