the corner at the back of the house too close and my shoulder hits the wall, a bright burst of pain, and then I’m heading for the bedroom.
It’s a dead end.
I know it is, but there’s a tiny piece of me that thinks if I beat him there I can claim sanctuary, I can find an escape hatch, I have options.
My options run out at the foot of the bed.
Zeus catches me around the waist and I shriek my surprise at how easy it is for him to swing me fully around so that he’s the one who lands on the bed first, me on top of him, his body taking all of the limited impact of the bed. As soon as I’m close he scrapes his teeth along my collarbone. He doesn’t seem to care if there’s a chance he might draw blood. Doesn’t seem to care if it hurts.
Good. Neither do I.
What I do care about is that he is always so clothed. I wrestle away from him and claw my way underneath his shirt, which is a different shirt from before, dark and expensive. He lets me tear open three buttons before he lifts me off of him and turns me onto the bed.
Zeus kneels over me and strips off his shirt and I am so transfixed by the reality of him that I don’t bother paying attention to what he does with his pants, only that they’re gone.
That he moves over me and thrusts in hard, and damn it, damn it, fighting with him, provoking him, makes me wet. So wet. It makes me live for him. He fucks me like a punishment and that only heightens the pleasure I get from being taken like this. Possessed. Like I belong to him so completely that he can do no wrong.
Which might be true.
“Come,” he commands, and I’m ready to laugh at him, ready to throw it back in his face that he can’t make me come just by telling me to.
Except.
My whole body has wrapped itself around that word, around his need, and my laughter gets choked off by a rolling tension in my muscles. Zeus slows his pace and whispers it into my ear again. I might as well be a puppet on strings. I’m on the edge. I’m so close.
I fight it off.
“Why are you doing this?” My words are broken up by deep thrusts. “You can’t do this.”
“Oh, I disagree.”
“Go after them, and I’ll come.”
A dark laugh. “That’s not a bargain you want to make, sweetheart.”
“I do,” I insist, but I’m struggling to focus on anything but him, but the pulse between my legs. “I want to—to—”
But he’s moved, somehow, repositioned himself so that my clit is under the direct assault of his body and in the end I’m too weak to stop it from happening. The winding tension breaks like a wave and Zeus catches my cry in his kiss and fucks me until I’ve come down, all the way to the pillow, all the way under the covers, with the heat of him on my thighs.
I’m midway to sleep, halfway into a dream, when the memory of how he moved me, how he caught me, floats delicately into my consciousness.
He was so careful.
11
Brigit
In my dream several nights later, Zeus’s office is changed. He’s left the theater largely intact and his desk sits at center stage, slightly angled so that if he sat down to write he would be in deliriously perfect profile to the audience. There are no chairs but I’m trapped in the main aisle anyway. A light comes up over the desk and he ambles in from stage left and sits down. Opens his journal. His hand moves over the page in steady strokes of the pen. Then he lifts his head. “I told you to stay on the second floor.”
I open my mouth to answer, but I’m already there—already in the scene. The woman who emerges from the shadows has my face. She comes to the front of the desk, and unlike me, she’s showing. Her hands rest on her belly as she considers the man at the desk. I’m on tenterhooks, I’m on tiptoe, waiting to see what I’ll say.
But something jolts me out of the dream and back into the bedroom.
To the sound of Zeus breathing evenly beside me in the bed.
I prop myself up on one elbow and watch him for several minutes. He’s really asleep. I put my hand out to shake him, hesitating