The Wholly Other Pt. 02

(This is a sequel to a vignette I wrote nearly two years ago, if you want to understand more about the characters I recommend you check it out.)

The Goddess Aphrodite, who had blessed the island of Cyprus with her perfection after being slowly drifted on her shores by the sea, was staring right at him. It was a low-resolution. jpg of a statue (a Roman copy) on the PowerPoint presentation some poor undergrad had put together for this talk, but he tried really hard to focus on it and to avoid glancing at the audience, enthralled as he was by the sight of Her.

Things were getting boring. Most people only came for him, students who wanted to suck up, old friends and colleagues, people who only attended these events after scanning the posters in search of "household names", but he was made to speak first, and basically everyone in the audience had a face like they were holding out for politeness until all the other people were done speaking. All except for Her. Right in the front row, the eyes were full of life behind the glasses she usually never wore in class or in any other occasion, following every droning banality coming out of his colleagues' mouths, fully immersed on the topic, as if Aristotle was giving a lecture in the Peripatos.

If staring at her visage was enough to dry his mouth like the dunes of Arrakis, the high heels on the shiny boots en pendant with her leather skirt were a sight he wouldn't have dared to resist, which is why he made the decision to avoid even her general direction, a plan which almost worked, until, finally, the usual sign of relief when the moderator asked for questions from the public signaling that the mass was coming to an end gave way to dread when her perfect hand perked up in the sky.

"Yes? Can we get the young lady a microphone?"

"Thank you. I have a question for Professor Guyles about his speech from earlier."

Of course she did.

"How were goddesses worshipped?" she asked, permitting the entire world to hear for the first time every pin that ever dropped on the floor in the seconds of defeaning silence that followed.

"Excuse me, dear, could you repeat your question?" he said in his wise professor tone, trying to disguise that he nearly choked on his own tongue.

"Sorry, I meant, since you mentioned the importance that the cult of gods and goddesses had in Ancient Greece, could you expand on what this looked like in practice?"

He would have almost failed any other student for wasting his time with such a nothing burger of a pointless question. "Excellent question." is what came out of his mouth, after taking a second to clear his throat.

"You are essentially asking about the sacrifice of offerings to the gods, which was the core ritual of the Greeks and their main preoccupation and way to communicate with the Olympians and the other divinities they believed in. Let's not dwell too long on the actual rituals as it's not the right place for it, but you should remember the myth Hesiod tells us, where Prometheus tricked Zeus into accepting only the smoke as sacrifice and left the body of the animals to the humans."

Mark was in the zone now, and even stood up from his chair to address everyone:

"Sacrifice was one of the most important things in life to a Greek. To be a man, meant to work hard and sacrifice, just think of when Homer puts Odysseus with the Cyclops, inhuman savages, and one of the first things he has Polyphemus say is precisely that they do not sacrifice."

"You are so smart." was the first thing she said to him after waiting by his car, a huge grin on her face, a soft kiss on his cheek.

"I am going to make you drink my piss." was the second,

"Drive." was the third.

Sitting on the passenger seat with her boots firmly on his lap as her dark red lipstick moved to the tune of the gum she was chewing, he felt the blessing of Aphrodite and bent his neck to kiss the tip of her boot. Laughter ensued.

"You know, I could let you take them off, but I don't trust you to not crush the car."

"Wh-where do you want to go?"

he stammered, reeling from the idea she sent in his mind.

"Is she home?"

"She shouldn't be."

"OK, drive then."

"Mia..."

"Shut it! I don't wanna hear it." She ended any argument on the matter by punctuating her order with a kick on his right cheek, and before he realized what was happening, his car was backing up in his garage.

"This is very nice." came from her mouth as he chaperoned her in his and his wife's two-storied townhouse, greeted at the door by the Buddha in pewter they had bought in Sri Lanka, the one thing his wife had let him keep in the house besides his book in the study and a couple of boxes in the basement, but otherwise she did not care for a tour of the place and picked immediately the couch his wife loved, trampling with her soles the white leather.

"A black coffee sounds great, if you were wondering whether you could get me anything", a pleased smile on her face that made him scurry to work on the hellish contraption his editor had gifted him.

"Do you stand before me, dog?" she asked with god-given authority when seeing him with the black mug he usually had breakfast in, making his knees shake.

"What are you doing? Crawl to me and bring me my coffee!"

He wondered aloud how to f

do so, but she cut him off: "Don't you have two degrees? Figure it out, genius!"

The Reverend Magister, honorable professor of Religious studies in one of the most important colleges of the country, got on his hands and knees and carefully attempted to balance out the mug in his mouth by holding his head sideways, taking a deluded sense of pride in how little of it spilled on the floor or burned his hands, and presented it to her, still on his hands and knees like a dog before Venus resting on her back.

"I didn't say with sugar. I am sweet enough." she harshly commented after taking the first sip, digging her purple-polished nails in his arm, in the laughter when he winced one could see the cruelty that moved all the conquerors in history, then finally brought her boots at the height of his shoulders, another smile, another pandemonium: "Take these off, slave."

"Yes, Miss." he replied mechanically, grasping at the animal leather, only to be interrupted again by the light of his life:

"Actually, sacrifice to me first. You have to sacrifice."

"Money?" he asked, emptied of any coherent thought, inducing another contemptful comment.

"No, I want you to cut off the beard of a goat and burn it on a brazier, dumb dumb."

That was his cue to tremblingly reach for his wallet and empty every bill he found on there, not even attempting to count. "But not just money, everyone knows you have too much of it, pig. I want you to give up something you might actually miss."

"May I stand up then?"

"You may."

He knew exactly what to do, and went in his study to grab an extract of an article Georges Dumezil had written about rituals in India, "Per aspera ad astra" hand-written on it by his brilliant mentor, kept always on his desk as a memoir of the time studying in Europe, mullets, psychedelics and revolutionary theory, the young life that went by too quickly.

He instinctively kow-towed after giving it to her, like the Mandarins of old before the Heavenly Emperor of the Middle Kingdom. A smile came on her lips, she was far too intelligent not to appreciate the worth of his offering: "Say I deserve this just for being me."

"You deserve this and everything you want, Goddess."

Finally her left boot returned in his hands, the zipper slowly pulled down, followed by the right one, then he helped himself with his mouth and hands to peel off the hosiery, until it was just bare skin. "Kiss" and then "Keep kissing" he had heard from somewhere, but there was no need for such instructions: reverence gave way to hunger and lust until his tongue was on the entire surface of her feet, the coordinates of time and space melted away in his mind, and only when he instinctively reached down to unbutton his trousers her heel hit harshly against his lips, denying permission, his grunts attempted to sound apologetic.

"Heel, puppy." she rose, slipping away from him, he bowed his head and crawled behind her in the bathroom, the heart beating faster at the sight of her on the toilet seat with her skirt spread on the floor.

"Strip, before I piss on your floor." clapping her hands to give him rhytm, which made him scurry to obey.

A waggling finger invited his naked self forwards towards her, the knees scrubbing on the cold tiles of the bathroom, blinded by the sight of her legs spread wide-open.

He bit on the lace of her black panties and slowly pulled them down, not quite off but it was good enough for her yo grabb his greying hair towards her sex. He did his best to welcome the river filling his mouth, she roughly made contact with her foot on his own erect member, while her nails digging sharply on his cheek, "You better get every last drop."

To this overwhelming assaults of sensations, smells and tastes he posed no resistance.

Finally, the stream ended, but her foot hadn't stopped its consistent motion and his instinct brought his tongue forward in the clitoris, inducing her reaction in a clenching of her thighs around his head and her nails in his skin, but he did not relent, savoring sweet and salt like manna from heaven.

She moaned, deeply, like a mountain shaken by an earthquake, and eventually shrieked in pleasure, but he came first, as there was no virtue his spirit could muster under her feet.

As she put her clothes back on, he went to the sink, rinsing his face and mouth of the many fluids that invaded it, thankful for the beard to cover up the scratch marks.

Her phone rang, or beeped, or whatever the hell they even did these days, and she raised it up to her face, showing the pin with the Palestinian flag on it: "Oh shit, it's so late, I need to take the next bus."

"I can drive you home, if you want." he offered, but she shaked her head dismissively.

"Thank you but don't worry about me and focus on cleaning this place up."

"Yes, you are probably right." he admitted, chaperoning her at the door, when she turned around to face him.

"You were such a good boy." she said, caressing his martyred face, kissing his old lips, closing the door on his face.

Bacchus is wise, and to the wicked he adds wickedness.