where he had all his beauty and all of his money and none of his pain. It’s reverent and deep and romantic and I fall into it headfirst.
Zeus breaks the kiss in time for me to take a deep breath that’s filled with him, absolutely filled with him. We’re inside but the air is new and fresh and sparkling, like the first snow. He kisses me again below my jawline, kisses the side of my neck, the curve of my shoulder at the edge of the robe, and then he sinks to his knees in front of me and pulls me close.
I’m glad for the air now because I can’t get a full breath with how astonishingly intimate this is. He’s never done this before. The last time I saw him kneeling was to fuck me on the floor of the lounge, and even then, I was under him. He lets his forehead rest against my still-flat belly and I run my fingers through his hair.
My skin tingles. Time travel isn’t real. Past lives aren’t real. God, maybe. But this god is kneeling at my feet, his breath warming my skin, and he presses a kiss below my belly button like he’s bestowing a blessing. Or receiving one.
Then he kisses lower. The holy moment breaks apart. Only a devil would kiss me this way, teasing, taunting. He’s a god and devil both.
Zeus, it turns out, is in charge even when he kneels. Maybe especially when he kneels.
He keeps kissing me while he shifts us in subtle but powerful moments, his hands on my hips, on the swell of my ass, everywhere. He’s been waiting to do this since I provoked him in his office, I can tell, but he’s agonizingly measured about his kisses. I drop my head back and close my eyes. No reason to be afraid of falling. He wouldn’t let me. He’d just as soon take me over the kitchen counter and—
A breath edged in ice gives me a heartbeat of warning, and then a deep freeze wrapped in heat meets my clit.
It’s too late to squirm away but I try it anyway, my hips going nowhere in his hands. He laughs around the grape and I feel his tongue dance underneath it while he sucks my flesh in. My embarrassing moans are punctuated with cries.
“Cold,” I manage, though the rest of my sentences are nothing but heated babbles. I have no idea what I’m saying. “So cold.”
He doesn’t answer except to use his tongue to roll the grape around in tiny circles against that supersensitive bundle of nerves. Pleasure runs up my spine in an electric melody that makes my hips circle with it, anything, anything to relieve the pressure. But it’s a pressure that only he can take from me. I’ve been waiting so long to come that I could scream and finally I do. My hands find the edge of the counter and I hold on. My limbs won’t work together. My hands are trying to pull me away but my hips are trying to push into his mouth.
I thought grapes were innocent.
I thought they were just fruit.
He rolls it down between my folds and holy shit, oh my fuck, how is he doing this? “I’ll tell you whatever you want to know,” I cry. “Just let me come.”
The grape is starting to melt but he pushes into my clit again with the flat of his tongue. It’s too much. The cold. The heat. Pain. Pleasure. Stars explode behind my eyes. New universes form. Flowers push up through new earth and two people dance in the middle of a crowded room, whirling, whirling, whirling. My toes are the only parts of my feet touching the floor but there’s no escaping him, thank god, there’s no escaping him. All the scenarios I pictured scatter to the ends of the void. He didn’t leave. He didn’t leave. He didn’t leave.
He keeps his lips on my skin, sucks the grape into his mouth, swallows it.
And then his breath skims over my clit again.
“Why did you think it was cancer?”
I’m too busy trying to get contact with his mouth to care that he’s asked this question. “What?” One of my hands finds his hair but he won’t give me what I want.
“You made an offer, sweetheart.” Fingers brush up the inside of my thigh and tease at my opening but he won’t put them in, the bastard, the bastard. “Now tell me. When the doctor called, you thought