Dancing With Cupid

by Jennifer Stevenson

  In that moment, the hard spot in my chest turned to steam. The mountain was inside me, truly inside me now, and expanding. I seized the arms of my chair, hoping not to be propelled straight out my window into the sky, but it all happened inside, all mad-crazy explosions of sensation and images and rushes of emotion I could make no sense of, as the memories poured over me, avalanche after avalanche.

  “That’s enough!” I said sharply, hoping to scold all that history back out of sight.

  Fat chance.

  In desperation I took up the envelope of Kama’s ashes and shoved the coffee table aside with a kick that splintered its legs.

  I threw the envelope down on the carpet. The ashes spilled out. With a gesture I drew them up into the air—How? How was I doing that?

  *don’t ask yourself that, Rathi!*

  —And I made a little cloud of ashes, a cloud shaped like Kama.

  The ashes hung in the air. A ray of sunlight came through the window and lit them, sending them twinkling, then falling, sifting down onto the carpet again.

  I stood panting over the gray spot on the carpet, alone.

  Lakshmi wouldn’t have told me that I had the answer in my memories if she weren’t deadly serious. I thought it absurd to claim that a goddess of desire knew about raising people from the dead. A man’s erection, perhaps. But the whole man?

  *or a whole dog,* said my goddess self.

  Then a memory came to me. Oddly, it wasn’t of my life as a goddess, or of past lives since I left Kama, but of this very life, from the childhood of RathiRaani.

  When I was nine, I saw a puppy run over in the street. I heard its bones crunch, I heard it cry out, and I ran to help it, but the puppy died in my arms. I became inconsolably hysterical. Mummy put me to bed and gave me something to drink that sent me into deep sleep in the middle of the afternoon. I slept for hours, and when I woke I didn’t remember why I was in bed. The lingering effect of the drug made me woozy. I did what I hadn’t done in two years—I touched myself. It was while I was masturbating that I remembered the puppy. I heard its bones crunch and its yelp—so close and real, it seemed to be in the backyard.

  In the midst of my private moment, my parents burst into the room. They found me with my hand in my panties. My father ran out, shouting, and my mother spanked me and spanked me, oh, so hard. She was crying, too.

  It was shortly after this that I learned I was to go to live with my auntie in Los Angeles, six thousand miles away.

  It was shortly before I was taken to the airport that I learned how our houseman had been digging a grave for the puppy when the puppy woke up, shook itself, and began frisking about—completely whole and healthy.

  Never in all those years had I put these facts together in this order.

  Well, that explained a lot.

  My powers had come in. I was beyond my parents’ control. My Auntie Lakshmi, the foxy old goddess, had called from Los Angeles at just the right moment to offer herself humbly as a surrogate. No doubt she had lied through her teeth about how often she went to temple, how her deep mourning of Mummy’s brother forced her to live quietly. No doubt she gave my parents many promises that I would never, ever know desire.

  I would have spent more time putting these pieces of the past together, but I had a dead husband on my hands.

  And now I knew how to revive him.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  I took a deep breath.

  I reached into the deeps of my ocean, into four hundred and fifty years of unfed sexual neediness and, yes, love for my husband. Blushing, I closed my eyes and thrust both hands down into my skirt.

  I let my desire build.

  Kama, I need to kiss you again!

  Thinking of his kisses helped a lot. He was always so tender with me, whether I growled and pummeled and bit him, or kissed him timidly. I squeezed the fleshy parts of my pussy between my fingers and thought how tender and firm his lips were, how his mouth opened to mine, how he let me plunder him with my tongue but waited, held back. I thought of plundering myself with my own finger and hesitated.

  I became aware of smells of fresh greenery, of flowers blooming. My shoes pinched. I kicked them off. Bees buzzed past my ears. One-handed, I tore my clothes off and threw them behind me. My parrot shrieked and I opened my eyes, blinded by afternoon sunlight arrowing through the windows. Butterflies spiraled by. I shut my eyes to them and focused on the hunger in my body and the yearning in my heart.

  I felt much freer without pantyhose and heels.

  I cried aloud, “Kama, come back! Come back to your body! Come back to your wife!” How I wanted to welcome him between my legs!

  I knelt and smelled fresh grass. More birdcalls joined my parrot. My eyes opened. My fine Jaipuri carpet had sprouted. All its flowers and birds, its lawn and bamboo and vines were growing now, shoulder high, warm and fragrant with many scents.

  A vine popped up at my ankle and began coiling around my leg. I lay myself down on new grass. Were Kama’s ashes in there, among the blades? I rolled on the spot, daring to touch myself a little more—yes—inside—

  All those growing things seemed to thicken like a jungle in monsoon season. I heard their leaves rustle. I felt their branches leaning close to me. I smelled their blossoms as they caressed my cheek. The vines wrapped around me, promising to give me their lives, as I had given them life. My fingers thrust and pinched and stroked at my softest female flesh. I felt myself swelling. The scent of my sex infused the flowery air. My hand grew wet with my own juice.

  I could almost feel him. I could smell him, musky and manly and sweaty. I shut my eyes again. The vine thickened, pressing against my thigh, grasping my hips, sliding up my back like a strong yet gentle hand. I gasped and leaned into that strengthening vine, thinking only to draw more desire into it and give it life, feeling my own body respond.

  Kama, come back to me. I need you to make love to me.

  My heart thundered. I panted as if I had climbed a hundred stairs. I squeezed my eyes shut and clasped my thighs around that vine as thick and hard as a tree now, and felt a shock of pleasure that made me cry out. My back arched.

  The jungle swam around me as I reeled, faint with pleasure.

  I felt the vine branch and slide over my skin, as I rolled half-senseless on the grass-sprouted rug, crushing tiny fallen mango flowers under me.

  And then my arms were full of naked man.

  Joyfully I clasped his waist between my legs and pressed my belly and breasts to him and nuzzled the hollow of his neck. His hands rubbed me everywhere. He murmured to me as a man encourages a galloping horse, “Good, good, that’s it, baby, keep it coming.”

  The ocean pounded in my blood. With every wave I felt the power pulsing into me—then out into him—then back into me—then out into him and every living thing within reach. I was ocean-slippery in the crotch, and my husband slid his thigh higher between mine and drove his hipbone against the one spot of light in my ocean of roaring darkness. Bang! Stars exploded in my head.

  Then he did it again. And again.

  “Kama, come inside me, dammit!”

  “Not—while—this is—working—so well,” he panted.

  He kept it up, a heart-stopping, brain-befuddling, fingertip-tingling rat-tat-tat of pleasure, shocking me out of my mind and into my body.

  I bit him on the shoulder, then sucked at his sweat. I thought I might be losing my mind. But his fingernails dug into my back, my thighs, my bottom, sharp pricks like a little cell phone ringing, saying, Come back to me, love, I’m here, stay with me. Heaving sobs wrung out of me, but I didn’t pass out and I didn’t go mad.

  He kept bumping me in that spot, grinding his thigh against the center of my body, making me shatter again and again.

  As each wave receded, I had a chance to breathe. I sucked in huge breaths and held them as the next wave gathered, curled, and broke inside me. All my fear and shame and confusion washed out of me in pure, sharp waves of pleasure.

  I licked and b
it my way down his shoulder, down his back, biting his dimpled butt and thighs, digging my nails into him, marking him for my own. We revolved in the deep grass on my living room floor, back to belly, then belly to belly, growling and laughing. I was sucking sweat off his calf when he seized my ankle impatiently and pushed me onto my back. His strong hands rubbed the insides of my legs from my ankles up to my crotch, making me crazy to take his cock into me.

  “Oh, girl,” he said with wonder in his voice. His eyes were full of light.

  His thighs drove between mine. His cock was a brand of hot steel. I engulfed him with slippery heat. He was inside me at last!

  “Come to me,” I heard a voice saying. It was mine. “Come on. Come on! Come to me!” Far away beyond the surf in my ears I heard myself shrieking and sobbing as he buried his cock in me to the root.

  Now Kama seemed to lose control. He seized my breasts and squeezed. His breath came in tearing gasps. Our pubic bones met with a sledgehammer thump, thump, thump, thump. I waited for pain, but he never hurt me. His hands pulsed on my breasts and his cock inside me beat like another heart, or was that my pulse? I didn’t know.

  We crushed the fragrant, grassy rug under us. New grass grew.

  Suddenly he wrapped his arms around me and squeezed tight, hooking his chin over my shoulder. “Oh, Rathi,” he sobbed against my ear. “Here we go.”

  Then I realized that he hadn’t come yet. Not yet. In all that star-scattering, mind-shattering, blood-thumping lovemaking, he was still—I felt him swell inside me—still—

  “Here we go,” he said tightly, and I had a sudden horrid flashback to his last moment before he burned up—

  Then he bucked against me, shuddering like an exhausted horse. It lasted a long time. I came with him in little starbursts that echoed as he shuddered. I felt our cheeks slide, wet with his tears.

  In my head, I was young Rathi marveling that this man missed me so much that our sex made him cry. I was also the goddess, relieved to have him back, soothing him, petting his head, weeping against his hair. I felt a little crazy.

  “My poor baby. Oh, love. I missed you,” I said, realizing that I’d missed him so much, I had cut myself off from my own body.

  *it’s not just about you, lawyer-girl.*

  I ignored that. I couldn’t keep my own identity straight in my head. Was I the mountain or the mouse or both? It didn’t matter, because at last I could hold Kama and smell him and taste him and love him, at last, at last.

  He sighed like a baby in my arms.

  For a long moment we lay quietly like that, while shafts of sun poked between the flowering trees and vines crammed into my living room. Regret for all I had missed was filling me. I thought about my celibate life and wondered how many of my lives since I left Kama had been celibate. Soon I would know. The goddess part of me stood guard between me and the memories of those lives, but they were in me somewhere, like a big pile of old suitcases and leaky, dusty boxes I didn’t want to open right now. I jerked my head aside, shutting my eyes.

  We had more urgent work at hand.

  I said slowly, “Love, I don’t think it’s just about us.”

  “What isn’t?”

  I held him, feeling my heart thump against his chest. “The chastity thing. You and me not fucking. It’s as if I was staying celibate along with every woman in the world who never got to have an orgasm. Who was married against her will, or got raped by a relative. Every woman who just worried too much, until she withered inside. It’s as if I took a vow not to have this—” I squeezed his cock with my innermost muscles and we both sighed at the same moment. “I think I vowed to abstain from sex, and fight oppression, until all those women had their chance.”

  “That’s a major sacrifice,” he said seriously. “I see a hell of a lot of those women in my work.”

  For the first time I thought of his work as, well, work. Sex-demon work. Taking women to bed, mending them, making them feel good, sending them on their way, and reaching for the next one. Say what he might, my husband had changed.

  I relaxed my clutch on him and he slid down my shoulder. His long dark lashes were dewy with sweat.

  I smiled. “Here’s what I’m thinking. Has it occurred to you that what happened to us wasn’t unique? I mean, I went east, when I left you. Everywhere I went, in every village, every kingdom, on every island, I found changes. Women losing their rights to property, to marry or not at will, to work, to their own children. And you went west. My European history is weak, but wasn’t there—”

  “You’re right. It was the same in the west,” he said, his brow darkening. “Although I didn’t look at it the way you did.” He looked up at me. “I just saw the sex. How everybody started, well, hating sex. Even men were fucked in the head about sex. Men wanted sex all the time, but if a woman wanted it, she was evil, and there they were, in the midst of plenty, both of ’em starving for it.” He growled, “It’s still like that.”

  I told him about my weird idea—that some star had become misaligned, and suddenly sex didn’t work the same anymore.

  Kama shrugged. “Makes about as much sense as anything. How else do you explain all those new sex-hating religions cropping up all over the world at the same time?”

  I touched him on the lips. “How else do you explain the god of love letting himself burn to death—again—rather than make love to a willing woman?”

  “Because I’m a fucking coward?” He snorted.

  “Never.”

  He took my hand in his and kissed it. He wriggled up onto his elbow until he looked down at me. “I can’t heal every woman on the planet, Rathi, but I can heal you. I don’t know what happened to you—why it took you so long—but I’ll make it up to you.”

  I let my head fall back onto the smashed, fragrant new grass. “You bet you will.” I swallowed a lump. “What I’m trying to say, love, is that maybe we can heal them all.”

  He blinked. “Is this my lawyer talking?”

  “No,” I smiled. “This is your goddess. We’ve been kept apart. And while we’ve been apart, the world has gone sour in our—our corner, our division, our department—”

  “Please.” He raised a hand, wincing. “Not the corporate speak.”

  “Well, our season, if you will. Sex used to have a place in the world. But sex got shoved into such a tight, unloved corner, it has become mangled and twisted and broken and forgotten. Maybe it’s our job to…return to our job.”

  “Definitely not my lawyer talking.” He snuggled closer to me, and I sighed happily. “C’mon, Rathi. Never mind your crusades for a minute. Tell me about you. What’s been happening to you?”

  I sighed again. “I don’t want to remember.”

  “Tell me just about this life.” He was reaching under me with busy hands. I squirmed, lifting my knees to give him more room to work. “Why hasn’t a thirty-four-year-old woman had sex?”

  “If you keep doing that—” I felt his fingers entering, stroking, pinching, entering, with some complicated rhythm that messed with my thoughts.

  “Whatever they did to you, I’ll fix it. I’m going to brainwash you with pleasure.” Then he flicked me with a thumbnail and I gasped.

  “Look, you!” I wrapped him in the Noose of Rathi—my legs locked around his waist—and drew his cock home into me, giving it a sharp squeeze until it hardened like a stone. “Do I talk, or do we fuck?”

  He pulled in a long, happy sigh. “Talk. Then fuck.”

  I looked up past his shoulder at the mangos ripening on a tree over our heads. “I’ll tell you a story.”

  “If it’s a short one. About sex.”

  “It’s about sex. About me masturbating.”

  His cock swelled inside me. “You have my full attention.”

  I took a deep breath. “I was seven years old. I had one of those children’s plastic playhouses—a pink Victorian, very prim, very pink and pretty. I was in my pink plastic playhouse, touching myself, smelling the flowers and thinking about mangos, becau
se the tree over my playhouse was a mango tree and just beginning to bloom. I wanted mangos. I knew those blooms would become fruit someday, but I wanted them now. I thought about mangos and touched myself. And the next thing I knew, my mother came screeching out of the house and dragging me out of my playhouse by my legs, and then she really screeched, because she found me with my hand inside my panties.”

  Now I could smell mango flowers and the mangos ripening. His cock throbbed inside me. The past and the present swirled together, not unpleasantly. Yes. He was brainwashing me with pleasure. I might survive prati-prasav after all.

  “So what about the mango tree? It fruited?” Kama said.

  “Yes, how did you know? Its branches were bent nearly to the ground with ripe mangos. We ate a lot of mangos that week. I associated them with my sore bottom—my mother spanked me very hard. To this day I have mixed feelings about mangos.”

  Oddly, my feelings were less mixed now. I shook my head. “My poor mummy. Stuck with a little baby love goddess.”

  He laughed, but kindly. “My poor Rathi. Little baby love goddess trapped with all those uptight people.” He busied himself with unsticking lengths of my hair from my skin. He looked so unnaturally innocent that I said, “What are you thinking?”

  He leaned forward and whispered, “I have an idea.”

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  “Yes?” I said warily.

  To my disappointment, he pulled his cock out of me. He got up on his knees so he could look behind me, at my back, still busily plucking at the thick, sweaty locks of hair and fluffing them between his fingers. “You’re going to love it.”

  “Ooo-kay.”

  He pulled my hair around in front of me in two big fluffy black wings and arranged them over my breasts. “God, I love your hair. Lie back, beautiful.” He smiled dazzlingly.

  I felt beautiful. I lay back.

  “Wait, pick me a mango. A ripe one.”

  I looked past him. In dappled sunshine, dozens of fat yellow mangos hung, their bottoms knocking together, from the tree above us. I began to see where this might be going. My heart thumped. As I remembered that long-ago day under the mango tree in my parents’ backyard, the thump got slower and harder. I reached up and fingered the mangos. Their skins released perfume onto our faces as I selected the ripest one.