by Simon Archer
With each thrust, I stroked her arms and mirrored her rhythm. I shifted tactics and held onto her breasts, my thumbs elongating her tender nipples. The action spurred her on as she rode me.
I felt on the verge of an explosion. As if Hailey could sense it, she reached down to touch me, giving that extra prick of encouragement. I cried out and felt her tighten just as I gave her a final thrust. We fell into one another, into a shared pleasure that sucked all the air out of the room.
She sprawled across me, chest to chest. The sweat sucked our skin together, her body draped like a blanket over me, and she held on to me, both arms wrapped around my middle. I shifted one hand to the back of her head and stroked her hair. I guided her head up so we could see one another.
The giddiest smile broke out on her face. “Hi,” she whispered.
“Hi,” I chuckled back.
“Can we do it again?” she asked, her voice full of desire.
I didn’t even have to think about my answer. I kissed her quickly and she pulled herself off me. She hopped off the bed and headed for the bathroom door.
“So, is that no?” I wondered, confused about her actions.
“No,” She replied. “That’s a yes, just this time, in the shower.” She flipped the bathroom light on and let her naked body be back-lit by the fluorescent light. Then she walked into the bathroom, giving her hips an extra sway, knowing that I wasn’t far behind her.
28
The next morning, Aphrodite greeted me in the forge, holding two to-go coffee cups. She stood outside in the glow of the early sun, or it might have just been her own godliness that glowed. I slumped my way over to the front of the forge, not bothering to hide my dismay and tiredness.
“Good morning!” Aphrodite said cheerily, her clear twinkling voice ringing the air more annoying than the alarm clock that woke me up. “Coffee?”
“Please.” It wasn’t a please, so much as a demand. I held out my hands and waved my fingers, like a child asking for a bottle.
Aphrodite obliged, thank the gods, and handed me the cup. I sipped it gratefully. The heat ran down my throat and zipped through my veins. When I swallowed, I gasped with a distinctive ah.
“Rough night?” Aphrodite asked suggestively.
“It was a great night actually,” I snapped back, “just a rough morning.”
“Did you have to help clean up campus?” Aphrodite wondered. “After the dance?”
“The nymphs ended up doing that,” I said as I took another sip of my coffee.
“Lucky you,” Aphrodite chided. She pushed open the door and indicated with her hand that I should walk through first. I nodded my thanks and stepped into the forge.
To my surprise, the smithy was already up and running. The electricity from the lights buzzed while a single forge blazed near the center. Sarah sat on a stool at the workbench with her arms crossed, a grim and impatient expression on her face.
“Good morning, Sarah,” Aphrodite said with the same amount of enthusiasm as when she greeted me. She extended the other coffee cup towards her. Sarah eyed it suspiciously but accepted the drink with a grunt. “Thank you for coming to set everything up early.”
“Uh-huh,” Sarah said, cradling her cup in two hands.
“You summoned Sarah here too?” I asked, blinking in confusion. “I have keys to the forge. I could have opened it.”
“When a god demands your presence, you come.” Sarah shot Aphrodite a glare. “Even when it's at four in the morning.”
“I thought her expertise might be useful, being a daughter of Poseidon,” Aphrodite offered. She skipped over to the workbench, and instead of taking a stool next to my mentor, She hopped up onto the top of the workbench herself. She swung her legs like a kid sticking her feet in the pool.
The goddess of desire seemed more at ease this morning, as though she had a spring in her step that wasn’t there the night before. The harshness in her golden eyes had faded. It was as though the worry was gone, replaced by an obnoxious level of enthusiasm and excitement.
“I’m a ferrier,” Sarah grunted, “I graduated from Enka branch, out of all my father’s children, I am the least like him. How can being Poseidon’s daughter help with this?”
“Your father has a very important weapon,” Aphrodite said, like a teacher testing her students.
“The trident, I know,” Sarah said as she rolled her eyes. “So what?”
“What’s his trident made out of?” Aphrodite tapped the table expectantly.
“Gold,” Sarah said, not bothering to hide her irritation at the god. “But it’s not as though I made the thing. The Cyclops did that.”
“Yes, but I thought you being here could… I don’t know,” Aphrodite looked up to the high ceiling as if to find the right words. “Provide some inspiration for our young blacksmith here. Or should I say goldsmith?” Aphrodite winked at me, which was probably supposed to be encouraging, but it only managed to send a flush of desire rippling down towards my groin.
Sarah stuffed her hands into her apron pockets and shrugged. “You’re the goddess, Aphrodite. Whatever you say. It’s your girdle.”
“That’s right!” Aphrodite said brightly. She hopped off the counter and rubbed her hands together. “So I’m going to be here every step of the way. Where do we start?”
Sarah and I shared an apprehensive glance. My gut warned me about having a goddess looking over my shoulder the whole time I worked. Especially one with such long hair. I eyed the shiny strands of golden curls that swayed around Aphrodite’s ankles as she walked. It wasn’t the first time I had an audience when making weapons. I did demonstrations all the time when I worked at the museum. I also had to do presentations for students during Sarah’s blacksmithing classes. But this was like having a client who commissioned a piece in the room while I made it.
It didn’t help that Aphrodite seemed like a very opinionated god.
“It’s going to take a little while,” I stalled. “I mean, we’re obviously going to work as fast as we can, but you don’t have to stick around for every part of it.”
“Yeah,” Sarah said, picking up on where I was going with this. “I’m sure you have plenty of important things to do.”
“I have been without my golden girdle for weeks now,” Aphrodite explained. “Now, I have the chance to get it back. Nothing else is more important.”
I grimaced and tried to hide my dismay.
“Plus, I’m the only one who knows what it looks like, so I need to make sure you get it right, down to each and every detail,” Aphrodite said.
“I saw it,” I jumped in, hoping this was the excuse I needed. “In your vision of the past, remember? I think I can do it from that.”
Aphrodite’s eyes snapped to me with a fierce intensity, the same from last night when I clapped back at her on the dance floor.
“That armor is like another limb for me,” she said, her voice low. “I know its every curve as well as its precise weight. You will not make this armor without me, understood?”
I struggled to find words for a moment as I sifted through what I should do. The process stalled in my brain, and I suddenly forgot what the first step of forging was.
Sarah sensed my delay and jumped in to save me. “We need gold. Did you have some we could use, or were we expected to provide that for you too?”
“No,” Aphrodite said with the tone of a petulant child. “Chrysus was kind enough to provide me with some.”
The goddess of desire held out a closed fist. After a moment, she opened it, and two nuggets of gold sat pristine in the center of her palm. They were perfect spheres, shiny and smooth, and the size of a ping-pong ball. Aphrodite reached forward and grabbed my hand. She slapped the hand with the gold atop my open palm.
The weight of the gold surprised me. Upon seeing the gold ball, I wasn’t sure if it was enough to make a full girdle, no matter how small it might have been. However, as I held the gold, I thought I might actually have enough to mold something out of
these pieces.
Something else grasped my attention. I couldn’t sense the metal. While gold was similar to iron and steel in many ways, one of the biggest differences was that I couldn’t feel it. I didn’t realize until I began melting down the gold how much of an advantage I had. While I had trained and worked as a blacksmith for many years, I never realized the level at which I connected with the metal. The gold, on the other hand, never spoke to me. I didn’t have an innate sense of how it moved or how it was supposed to be manipulated. It was like playing with the clay all over again. I was going in blind.
That thought frightened me, but I did my best to soothe my fear. I pushed onward, determined to make this girdle for Aphrodite. As I set the gold balls into the forge, I thought of Beth, and of Karen. Even Hailey, Jade, and Daniella fluttered into my mind’s eye.
However, my lack of training with gold quickly showed. I burnt the first batch, making them completely unusable. Aphrodite was able to summon another set of gold balls for me to use. The second pair I thinned out too much to the point where it broke the minute I tried to curve it into the girdle’s unique heart shape.
On and on it went like that. Failure after failure while I tried to learn on the fly how to manipulate and sculpt the gold. Sarah was encouraging, putting in her two cents every so often, but she refused to jump in and help.
“There’s a reason we don’t put gold on horse’s hooves,” she said, with a soft frown and a shake of her head. “I’m not touching the stuff.”
The sun reached its peak and shone violently through the windows at the top of the smithy. Their harsh beams added to the already sweltering heat of the forge. While it didn’t bother me any, I could see the sweat trickle down Sarah’s temple. Even Aphrodite looked irritated, but that probably was because I kept messing up the goldsmithing rather than from the heat.
Finally, a little after noon, Sarah got to her feet and slapped her thighs. “I can’t sit around here anymore.”
“Where do you think you’re going?” Aphrodite demanded, offended that Sarah would appear to have something better to do than be here with us.
“I need something to eat,” Sarah clapped back. “Unlike you, us mere mortals have to have something to sustain our energy.” The older woman turned to me and rested her hands in the front of her overalls. “Cameron? You want to come with me to the mess hall?”
I shook my head, my eyes focused on the color of the gold as it heated up in the forge. “I think I’ve finally figured out the best temperature for this stuff.”
“Can I at least bring something back for you?” Sarah offered. “You can’t go forging this long without something in your stomach.”
“Bring me back whatever Jade makes,” I said, dismissively waving my hand towards Sarah. “She knows what I like and won’t give you any apples.”
“Right,” Sarah said with a stiff nod. “Now, if you two will excuse me.”
The daughter of Poseidon slipped out of the smithy without a second glance at Aphrodite and me. The goddess of desire now sat atop the workbench, but with both legs stretched out beside her. She looked like she was recreating the iconic scene from titanic.
“What do you have against apples?” the goddess wondered, her head cocked to the side, clearly interested. It made sense, because one of her symbols was the golden apple.
“I’m allergic,” I answered as I pulled the heated gold out of the forge and settled it on the anvil.
“That’s unfortunate,” Aphrodite commented. “Apples are delicious.”
“So I’ve been told,” I replied noncommittally. I swung down on the gold, making the first dent of many as I thinned out the material to a foldable thickness.
“How did you find out that you’re allergic?” Aphrodite asked, her voice rising slightly out of pure curiosity. It was as if she couldn’t fathom the idea of being allergic to anything.
“I don’t really remember it, apparently the first time was when my mother discovered there were apples in the baby food and ended up rushing me to the hospital,” I said as I dug back into my memory. “The first time I remember finding out myself, I think I was at school, preschool, maybe? I was really little, and one of the kids gave apples and caramel to the class. I instantly went into anaphylactic shock, and luckily, the teacher had an EpiPen, so I was okay, but I haven’t had an apple since.”
“You said a lot of words just then,” Aphrodite said as she waved a nonchalant finger around at me. “Most of them, I didn’t understand.”
I looked up at the goddess and raised an eyebrow. “What? Like the medical terms?”
“Is that what they are?” Aphrodite stuck out her bottom lip, a contemplative expression coming over her face. “I had no idea.”
“Are all gods so stuck in the past?” I wondered as I continued to pound on the gold. “Like, do you know what computers are? Cars? Electricity?”
“I’m not so daft like some of my brethren,” Aphrodite defended, offended by my generalization. She held a proud hand to her chest. “Me and my children had an influence over all of those dating apps mortals use nowadays, obviously.”
“I didn’t need to know that,” I said. As if warding off the goddess, I hunched my body over the anvil, lowering my face closer to the gold.
“Well, is there anything you would like to know?” Aphrodite spread her arms out wide. “I’m an open book. Well, kind of. I can’t give away all of my godly secrets, you understand.”
A scoff escaped my lips. “I think I’m good.”
“Oh, come on,” Aphrodite said. She almost sounded truly disappointed. “You have the unique opportunity to ask a god anything. Anything at all, and you can’t think of a single question? I find that very hard to believe.”
“Even if I ask a question,” I said as I paused and put my fist on my hip, the hammer hanging out to the side. “Who says your answer is going to be true?”
“Valid point,” Aphrodite said. She swung her legs back around and leaned forward, her fingers curling around the edge of the workbench. “I’ll be honest when I can, does that satisfy you?”
“Still sounds like an uneven bargain,” I said, getting right back to work.
“I’m curious,” Aphrodite prompted. “What would you ask me if I could swear to tell the truth? It would tell me a lot about you as a mortal.”
I resisted the urge to roll my eyes. I got the distinct impression that Aphrodite would not stop talking to me unless I talked back. Without Sarah there for her to talk to, I was the only person left. Unless I wanted her bugging me nonsensically, I should probably respond. Plus, this way, I could navigate the conversation as best I could.
I stood up with a stretch, and saw Aphrodite lick her lips when she caught sight of the hint of skin that showed when my shirt rode up.
I smirked, “Any question? And the truth?”
Aphrodite seemed dazed, she shook her head and smirked back at me, “Anything.”
I sauntered over to her, and placed my hands down on the workbench, caging her in between my arms.
Her golden eyes held a warning in them, but predominantly I saw desire. “You’re playing a dangerous game, boy.” she muttered.
I leaned over and inhaled deeply, then whispered in her ear, “All the best games are.”
And before I could second guess my actions, I pulled back just far enough to capture her lips with mine. Kissing a goddess was unlike anything I had ever felt before.
She tasted of berries and exotic fruit, and electricity ran from my lips to my fingertips.
Images of meadows and dazzling ballrooms flashed behind my eyelids, and the sound of mystical lyre music hummed in my ears. We were no longer in the forge. We were somewhere else, everywhere else, everywhere and nowhere all at once.
Aphrodite gently placed her hand on my chest, pushing me back away from her slightly as she slid off her perch, taking careful steps forward as she forced me to stumble backward. Her eyes were full of both desire and warning, and I suddenly realized that I no l
onger had any control in this situation.
My lower back hit the edge of a nearby pillar, and she kept me pinned up against it as she used her other hand to free me of my sashes and my shirt. Her movements were slow and methodical, and the anticipation built to intolerable levels. The lyre music danced in the back of my head, and I yearned to kiss her again, but she held me at bay as she worked. I pressed the back of my head against the pillar and took deep, slow, bracing breaths as I waited her out, my pants growing tighter as desire coursed through my body. Her hand was splayed firmly on my chest, and though my arms were free, I somehow knew the rules forbade me from using them. She released my zipper and let my pants fall to the ground, and when my boxers followed, I sprung free, and she looked down with a satisfied glint before looking back up at me.
“Last chance to back out,” she whispered, sending somersaults through my stomach. The feeling made me slightly nauseous, but there was no way I was backing down now.
“No,” I ordered simply, staring her down with a firmness and a fierceness that I was no longer sure I had. The corner of her lips twitched and her eyes sparkled with anticipation.
“If you insist,” she muttered mysteriously before lowering herself down to her knees.
The second her tongue hit the base of my shaft, the lyre music returned and the images reappeared, and when she took me, wholly, into her mouth, the images began flashing by faster as the music grew louder. I heard my own pulse, smelled my own sweat, and my skin tingled as if I had been electrocuted. I no longer felt the pillar pressed against my spine, although I knew that it had to be there, as I wasn’t standing with my full weight over my feet. I felt weightless, outside of my own body, the only sensations those of Aphrodite’s tongue, lips, and fingertips as she caressed me as I’d never experienced before. Her hands cupped me gently as her fingers danced behind her palm, sending bolts of electricity up through my gut. The nausea returned but I tamped it down. I wouldn’t let it interfere, not with this. Just as I began to wonder just how far back her fingertips would travel, she pulled her hand back forward, sliding my length out of her mouth and leaving me cold and shaken, suddenly back in the room, the pillar hard and uncomfortable against my back.