“So, Venus lost you to babies?” she asks with a good-natured, ribbing smile.
“My Venus will never lose me.”
“You talk about her like she’s a person,” she remarks, and I have to force my shoulders not to tense. She can’t know, because I didn’t give her that book, how close to home she’s hitting.
“She is, kind of,” I admit.
“Tell me more about her,” she murmurs. And as if her voice was her body or lips, the words wrap around my dick and wake it up. But I wasn’t kidding about sunrise sex and we’ve got time to kill before that. So, I force my mind back to the topic at hand and sift through my mental encyclopedia of knowledge.
“She’s named after the Roman goddess of love. Myth says Venus was born from seafoam. She’s the goddess of love, victory, fertility and beauty. And even though she was married to Vulcan – she was in love with Mars, the God of War.”
“What happened?” Her voice is rapt with curiosity. I glance at her from the corner of my eye and have to bite back a groan. She’s stretched herself out in a pose similar to mine, and her breasts spill out of the sides of her tank top tempting orbs of smooth brown skin that makes my mouth water.
“They were lovers, in secret of course. Until her husband became suspicious and set a trap for them.”
“A trap?”
“He built a net out of a bronze chain so fine it was nearly invisible and hung it over the bed where they met to make love. When they were naked and joined, the net fell and ensnared them. They were trapped. Caught in the act and he invited all of the other gods on Olympus to come and bear witness to the couples’ humiliation.”
An awkward silence descends, and I could kick myself. Of all the parts of Venus’s mythology I could have shared, why did I pick the part about her husband and lover?
“So, is that why Mars and Venus are synonymous with male and female? Because he was the fire and she was the foam?” she asks.
Grateful to her for keeping the conversation moving, I do my part, too, and it’s not hard. I love mythology as much as I love science.
“Mars and Venus really represent one whole person. In the myth, they had a daughter named Harmonia, Greek goddess of…”
“Harmony,” she offers when I trail off.
“Bingo.” I wink. “In particular, she oversees the harmony of marriage and partnership. She’s the soother of controversy in all things. In mythology she tells us that the union between War and Love is cosmic balance. But when you think about them… they’re, in essence, polar opposites that couldn’t exist without each other.”
The flash of her bright, effervescent smile is all it takes to make my heart skip a beat. “Is there anything you don’t know?”
“I don’t know anything with certainty, but the sight of the stars makes me dream,” I quote Vincent Van Gogh in response because what I want to say is that I watched her fall asleep and wished I could know what she was dreaming.
I laugh when I recall her friend’s joke about me fucking her feelings.
I’m the one she should have warned.
She has completely and utterly ruined me and being this close to her, when Venus is right there makes me desperate to sink into her body and claim her like I’m the pillaging god of war himself.
Like she can read my thoughts, she says, “These clothes are stupid. Let’s take them off.” She stands up and slips her shorts off and pulls her tiny tank top overhead. She pulls her hair free of it and a cascade of dark ringlets spill over her shoulders. With nothing between her and the view, she appears to be rising out of the foam of the waves crashing behind her. Just like Venus in Botticelli’s famous paint - but so much more beautiful than a mere mortal could capture on a canvas.
The underlying gold of her brown skin is set ablaze by the moon’s adoring light. I make quick work of shedding my shorts and grip my dick and stroke it. “Come here, my Venus.”
“I like that,” she murmurs and then sinks down, so her knees straddle my thighs. She cups the back of my neck and she plants a soft, wet kiss on me. The scent of citrus whipped with sea and sky fills my nostrils and shreds my equilibrium.