Page 139 of At Her Will

“Yes ma’am. Got some interesting female deities in there.”

When he removed his pocketknife from his slacks to cut a lush red azalea bloom out of the bouquet, she wasn’t prepared for the sudden memory that wrenched her away, making her lose time. When she came back, he was leaning over her, his hand on her shoulder.

“Veracity.”

She shook her head, and a tear rolled down her face. “This is beautiful. I don’t want to ruin it.”

“You can’t ruin anything.” He folded the blade back into the knife, put it in her hand and closed her fingers over it. “This helped me free you.”

“Yes.” She felt the heat of his hand lingering in the metal and held onto that, closing her eyes. It was as he’d said on her porch. Good and bad. This had been a weapon of good. It had helped save her.

She offered it back to him, and he continued, easy and calm. He laid the bloom on her mound, the petals brushing her clitoris. “The Goddess Kali. Folks think she scary, bloodthirsty, and she can be, but you made me think of her a different way, and what I read said she also is passionate. She know creation comes from destruction, from pushing ourselves, facing our fears to free us from them.”

He met Vera’s gaze. “Things end so other things can begin.”

“Yes,” she whispered.

He selected an amber colored rose next, laying it on her abdomen. “Freya,” he said. “A goddess of fertility, among other things. Her name translates to Mistress. I liked reading about her.”

When he put a yellow peony on her sternum, over her heart, her breath hitched in a near sob. “Kuan-Yin,” he said. He stroked the side of her breast, her upper arm. “Her name means ‘she who hears the weeping world.’ She a goddess of compassion and healing, who stayed human instead of becoming pure light. She wanted to stay near humanity and help them.” He nodded thoughtfully. “She reminded me of Jesus that way.”

He put a white azalea bloom on her throat, the petals a light caress against her pulse. “Hecate. Goddess of witches, a moon goddess, sometimes an earth goddess. Connected to earth and God power, and she understand the balance between the two. She bring that understanding back to you, to bring you peace and balance.”

He stroked her cheek, traced her ear, caressed her hair and took away another tear with his thumb. His face showed anguish, love, care. Resolve and determination.

“All of them are within you. Theyareyou. You stand apart from whatever earthly harms are done to you, because whatever happens, you come out on the other side, just as Christ did, showing death, pain and torment had no lasting hold upon Him.”

She knew reading wasn’t easy for him. She imagined him holding the books in his hands, bent over them, his mind taking those words into him, absorbing them into who he was, to remember what he’d read and repeat it like this, in his own way.

He unscrewed the dropper top of a small brown bottle, tucked next to one of the flower bowls. “I anoint your crown chakra, to reinforce and bring my Mistress that balance.”

Rev leaned over her. While he left a drop of lavender on her forehead, she rested her hand on his abdomen and closed her eyes again. Inhaling its calming properties and the almond oil base, she kept his image inside her mind, every detail of him over her like this. His body, his words, what he'd created here, all of it was a forcefield, keeping out anything unwelcome.

When she opened her eyes, he was replacing the top of the bottle. He set it aside and sat back, his hands on his knees as he bowed his head.

“And now I await my Mistress’s desires.”

She felt the flowers resting upon her, and all they meant. She welcomed the familiar touch of that power into her and didn’t shrink from it. It closed around her, helping and healing. Giving her back the power she’d been too fragile to embrace this fully, up until this moment.

She’d come back from church wanting to immerse herself in pleasure with him. This took that need to a far more transcendent level.

She slid her hand over his knee and touched his fingers. “You remember that first fantasy I described, leaving your handprints on a chalkboard as I did what I wanted to you?”

“I remember it.” He kept his head down, his fingers tightening on his knees under her touch.

“All the things I’ve done to you and with you. They go through my mind a hundred times every day. They make me aroused, make me content. Make me miss you, need to be with you.” Joy surged through her as the words came to her the way she wanted them to come, unfettered by anything else. “Even as I’m also able to wait, to do what the day demands of me, knowing you’re there, at the end of it, but also throughout it, and at the beginning of it.”

He swallowed. “It sound a lot like my day, Mistress.”

“Take off everything but your cross, then sit back down, legs Indian style.”

A little smile crossed his face as he rose. “Teena Joy, when she taught me history, the part about Native Americans, she had me sit that way and we made feathered headdresses out of construction paper. She told me stories about the Choctaw, Natchez and Chitimacha, the tribes around New Orleans.”

“I’d like to hear those stories. But right now, I want to see your beautiful body, every inch that belongs to me.”

Heat flourished in his eyes, in the energy shimmering over his flesh and the muscle beneath as he complied, stripping off his shoes and clothes and setting them aside. The cross gleamed against his bare chest.

“Your eyes are the color of gingerbread,” she told him. “We’ll make gingerbread men later and frost them. I’d like to do some creative things with that frosting.”

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