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The Alabaster Jar

Chapter 9 — The Alabaster Jar

I wait beside the sarcophagus. I’m sore between my thighs, and I give myself several breaths to rest. Wrappings shift in the retainer corridor, then stop. Stone settles somewhere far beyond the wall, and my breathing slows. The bitter taste of the wine has left my tongue, and I can’t remember when it went.

A single footstep enters the burial chamber.

All night he’s crossed these rooms without letting me hear a thing. This step comes through the stone on purpose, and it stops right where I’m sitting. Air moves along my bare feet. A hand closes around the alabaster jar, lifts it out from under my palm, and puts it back in my grasp.

“Henuti did not follow.”

He says it from above me, without a title, and I can’t resist answering him in his own fashion.

“Henuti had no need.”

His breath changes. He came to me this time. There’s no dress being dragged ahead of me through the dark, nothing pulling me after him, and I’m so pleased about it that I have to press my lips together.

I stand and fold the linen once. I leave it on the sarcophagus where either of us can find it, and I take the jar.

For fifteen years, the oil in my hand got Ishenre ready for ceremonies and for sleep. It also got her ready for men she sent away before dawn. Tonight it isn’t getting anybody ready for anything.

I want Anubis slick under my hands. I want to find out which parts of him give up their stillness first. And while my oiled fingers are all over him, I want his mouth on me. My face goes hot in the dark, and I don’t take any of it back.

I head for the antechamber. The lion couch stands past the doorway on the left, and I reach its carved head without barking my shin, which is more consideration than the couch ever showed me while we were hauling it down here. My hip bumps gilded wood. I take the lid off the jar and set it on the floor beside one carved forepaw.

The air along my spine warms. His tongue touches the back of my neck, and I shiver all the way down.

Without turning around, I pour oil into my palm and tuck the open jar beside its lid between the lion’s forelegs. The oil pools thick between my fingers. Sesame reaches me first, then cedar, and under both the darker sweetness of kyphi. That smell belonged to Ishenre for so long that my hands expect to find her shoulder.

His tongue keeps going down my spine.

He catches my wrist before I can touch him. His hand covers half my forearm. His other hand takes my waist and turns me until my oiled palm lands flat on his chest, and he presses it there, hard, before he lets go.

The old words jump to my tongue at once. If it pleases you. He’s chosen where my hand begins, and every habit I have wants to thank him for the instruction.

I swallow the words and spread the oil.

His chest doesn’t give at all under my palm, and the oil warms between us and lets out more cedar. I follow the hard planes of him down toward his stomach, and his breath changes above me. The god who hears my heart has sounds of his own, and I like them, and I want more of them.

I crouch by the couch, find the open jar still upright between the lion’s legs, scoop more oil into both palms, and stand.

Anubis turns under my hands to give me one shoulder and then the long span of his back. He keeps a hand around my waist so I come with him, and when I stretch up for his shoulders, he bends until I can reach.

My thumb used to find the knot under Ishenre’s left shoulder before she’d admit it hurt. I use the same trained pressure under Anubis’s jaw now, and one tall ear swivels toward my hand. I follow it with my thumb, delighted.

A low sound gathers behind his ribs. He turns back toward me before my hands have even left his hips.

His cock is hard against my wrist. I close my oiled fingers around him, and they don’t meet, so I put one hand above the other, and I’m a little alarmed and much more excited.

He fills both my hands. The oil makes the first stroke almost too easy. My fingers find the ridge along his underside, and his breath breaks above me, so I trace it again on purpose, and his hips push into my grip.

My mouth waters. I want him there.

His hand slams down on the lion couch beside me, and the wood creaks. “Careful,” I tell him. “That took four men to carry.”

His teeth touch my shoulder. “It took Henuti and three men.”

That startles a laugh out of me. It bursts into the sealed chamber, loud and indecent among the offerings, and his whole body goes rigid under my hands.

I’ve never laughed for him before. I’ve barely heard myself laugh at all, in years.

His mouth closes on the place below my ear while the laugh is still leaving me. My fingers tighten around him, and his hips drive into my oiled hands. I keep the stroke slow, because for once I’m the one deciding how long something takes, and I intend to enjoy it.

He thrusts into my grip again, deeper, then grabs my waist with one hand and lifts.

My back lands on the lion couch, the gilded frame hard under my shoulders, and his mouth travels down my throat and over my chest. His tongue leaves a cool wet path across my damp skin and rasps over my nipple, and short fur brushes my stomach as he moves lower. The oil from his chest has rubbed off onto my breasts, and every breath I take smells of cedar.

His tongue finds me.

The first broad stroke makes my thighs fall open. The next one goes right through the soreness and turns it sweet, and when he pulls back, my hips follow his mouth, shameless. He follows them up.

My legs spread until the carved frame bites the backs of my thighs. He can smell exactly where I want him most. Knowing that pulls another sound out of me, and I’m too far gone to be embarrassed by it.

His tongue moves again, and I couldn’t name a single task I’ve ever performed.

I lift toward him, and he answers with a harder stroke. The lion’s carved flank knocks into the wall. My heel catches the edge of a low table, and the senet board goes over, and pieces scatter across the floor under us.

I grab his ears without asking anyone’s permission. The metal-leafed edges are warm under my thumbs. I pull him closer, and he growls against me and presses harder, and the growl goes right through his mouth into my belly. I pull his ears again because I like what it does to both of us.

My hips come up off the couch. He spreads one hand across my belly and pins me down, heavy enough that I push up against it, and his other hand slides between my thighs.

Two long fingers push into me while his mouth keeps working. The first stretch is almost too much. I bear down and take them deeper, and he turns his wrist, and my body clamps around his hand.

Until tonight, this part of me belonged to overheard explanations. Teti used to describe fingers through the partition while Satiah corrected her technique, and I’d lie there wondering why either of them sounded so pleased about losing their composure. Now his fingers are inside me, and my body pulls them deeper before my mind can offer a single opinion.

Teti was right. The only bad part is that I can’t tell her.

My breath goes, and my words go after it, and I don’t miss either. I can hear his fingers moving in me, wet enough that the sound comes back off the stone. I’ve heard other women through linen partitions for half my life. I’ve never heard myself this clearly, with no cloth and no duty between me and the noise I’m making, and I like it. I like it so much.

I say his name. I say it again. The third time it breaks in the middle, and then everything does. My back arches, and my thighs lock around his head, and I clench around his fingers while his tongue holds me right there, and a second wave comes before the first one has let go. He stays with me through the last of it, slowing when I slow, and stays a while after that.

I unclench my hands from his ears. “Up,” I manage.

He rises over me, his breath leaving my thighs and coming down again from somewhere far above my face, and he kisses me with no gentleness at all. I taste myself and cedar on his tongue. One long tooth catches my lip when he turns his muzzle, and the little sting makes everything below it sharper.

I reach down for him. He gets his arms around my waist and under my thighs first and lifts me off the couch before my fingers find him, and I make an indignant noise.

The limestone hits my shoulders, cold on my oiled back, gritty with fine gypsum. He comes down over me, pins my reaching wrist above my head with one hand, and opens my thigh with the other.

The floor smells of dust and old offerings, and over that, cedar and his mineral smell, and under it all the musk of what we’ve already done. I breathe him in and pull him closer with my free arm, then strain against his grip on my wrist. It doesn’t move. “Anubis.”

My name comes back to me, rough and low. “Henuti.”

“Inside me.”

Two words, and Ishenre moved whole mornings with fewer.

He lifts my leg along his side. The head of his cock presses at my opening, and he drives forward in one long, controlled push, and my free palm smacks against his chest.

He holds still and lets me breathe around him. The burn reaches up into my belly and down the backs of my thighs, and then my body remembers the sarcophagus and how patient he was, and pleasure catches underneath the burn before it can take over.

I slide my free hand up to his shoulder and pull. He gives me more of him, slowly, and a laugh catches in my throat right alongside a moan, because he’s so warm inside me and the floor is so cold under my back.

He hitches my knee higher. He draws halfway out, shifts his hips, and thrusts, and the first stroke knocks the breath out of me. The next one finds the spot that makes me tighten around him, and he finds it again without a word, and again. I’ve spent years kneeling on floors exactly like this one, and I’ve never been glad of a floor until now. My hips rise to meet him. He kisses me while he does it, harder now, and his teeth catch my lower lip.

Stone scrapes under my oiled back. His breath hits my face with every thrust, cedar and the taste of me, and the sound in his chest gets rougher every time I squeeze around him. So I do it on purpose, over and over, thrilled with myself.

I strain against his grip on my wrist. He lets go while I’m still pulling and plants that hand by my head instead, and I grab his shoulders with both hands and drag him down. My nails slide off his smooth skin without marking it. His chest crushes my breasts, and his tongue runs along my neck.

His fingers dig into my hip, and he goes rougher. I wrap both legs around him and meet every thrust and pull his head back down whenever his mouth leaves my skin. “Good,” I tell him.

I bite the place where his neck meets his shoulder. He jerks inside me, and his hand slaps the limestone by my head.

“Again,” he says.

I bite him again.

He drives into me hard enough to lift my hips off the floor. It builds faster than I can think. His hand pins my hip and the stone holds my shoulders, and every list I’ve ever kept, every pin and jar and sandal strap, falls out of my head until there’s nothing left in it but his name.

“Henuti.”

My name in his mouth sends me over. I come around him with my nails in his shoulders and my voice worn down to one word, “Anubis.” He holds me right there through every clench, then drives in once more and stays as deep as he can go. A shudder runs through all that weight on top of me, and he spills into me in a long rush, and his hands shake against the stone and against my skin.

One of the scattered senet pieces rolls under the lion couch and stops. I’m still fluttering around him in little aftershocks, and each one makes him move a little in answer. The air near the floor smells of sex now instead of the embalming house, and I’m smug about that in a way I’ll never admit to anyone.

He slides out of me. Before I can miss him, he takes my waist and rolls me onto my side.

His chest covers my back from my shoulders to my hips. One long arm settles under my neck, and his other hand spreads over my heart, right over the place he called empty.