Take Me With You
Chapter 10 — Take Me With You
I hear linen settle somewhere beyond the antechamber, and for once I leave it for someone else to see to.
Anubis lies along my back, so big that all of me fits between his chest and his thighs. Oil has matted the short fur under his jaw where it rests above my head. His chest rises and falls against my spine. His arm stays under my neck, and the other crosses my ribs, with his hand over my heart.
His cock rests heavy against the wet seam of my thighs. I draw my top knee forward and press back against him, and he slides into me from behind in one slow stroke. I’m tender, and I take him anyway, and his hand tightens over my heartbeat when he’s all the way in. My back arches, and he stays there.
This serves no task at all, and eight days ago that would have bothered me. The game is over. My dress is folded on Ishenre’s sarcophagus, and nobody has taken anything to make me follow. He came back anyway. Or I heard a footstep and wanted him so badly that I made up the rest.
His thumb moves once against my skin. Something warm and careful follows the line under my jaw.
Every request I’ve ever made was on someone else’s behalf. These words are right there anyway, and they’re mine, and I’m terrified of them, and I say his name first so I don’t lose my nerve. “Anubis.”
His breath crosses the back of my neck.
“Take me with you.”
Then it’s said, and I can’t unsay it, and I lie there with my heart slamming against his palm and wait.
My breathing slows by itself. For fifteen years I slept at the foot of Ishenre’s bed and listened to her breathe until I knew her rhythm better than my own. The beat I’m listening to now is mine, under his hand, and it feels heavy, as full as a jar.
If the scale were here, I’d set my heart on it myself.
Somewhere in the corridor, stone settles against stone, the same sound I heard when I first woke. Water drips from the ceiling. Under those two sounds, the tomb is as silent as it was the day the priests sealed it, and it’ll stay that way long after anyone remembers my name. Just now I’m too happy to care.
The shabti figurines stand in rows along the west wall where I straightened the last of them, each with its tiny hoe, ready to work forever for a princess who’s already gone ahead without them. They can keep their hoes. I’m lying on the floor beside the overturned senet board, with my dress on Ishenre’s sarcophagus and a god along my back, warm and sweaty and happier than I have any right to be.
His mouth finds the place where my pulse beats under my jaw. He’s still inside me, and he moves again, one slow thrust that starts in his hips and seems to end somewhere behind my ribs, and I push back into it and hold him there.
I am alive.
Or this is what alive becomes in the house of silence.
I do not know. I do not need to know.
The house of silence keeps its secrets, and I am one of them.