The Sacrifice

No feelings.

No love.

Just sex.

Pleasure.

Reproduction, when we decided we were ready.

We only had daughters, continuing the cycle.

And while I had come of age two years before, I had yet to decide I was ready for the touch of a man. Which was likely because my mother, a woman of experience, had sat me down, and informed me that in her history, many of the men she had known the touch of simply didn't know how to touch her body the correct way, to make the primal magic sing across the nerve endings, cause those deep undulations inside.

We had always been empowered about our own pleasure, were taught the ways of our bodies, how we could make them explode with pleasure. Orgasm magic could help difficult rituals, that deep release of energy.

And with her words, followed by the words of some of the girls my age who had ventured out, coming back talking of pain and embarrassment and completion for the man that didn't bring about pleasure for them, I decided to delay that experience for myself, maybe until I thought I was ready to bear my first daughter.

So I wasn't familiar with the connection between desire and the presence of a male figure.

I hadn't been prepared for the heady, intoxicating sensation of it.

I shouldn't have even felt it.

This male was not even a man in the strictest definition.

He was male and he had male parts, but he was not a man.

He was a demon.

He was a creature of hell.

He was evil.

He stood against everything my coven and I believed in.

As he stood there as I pulled my clothing off in front of him, I expected to feel humiliation and rage.

What I felt, instead, was a warming sensation, making a flush move across my chest, up my cheeks.

As his hungry gaze moved over my bare body, there was a tightening in my core, making me turn suddenly away, to hide in the tub, focusing a moment to figure out the plumbing that I had heard about, but had never personally experienced.

The coven was, as the regular humans said, off the grid.

We had composting toilets, but no running water. Instead, we had wash basins and pitchers. And when we bathed, we either did so in the river, or we filled up a tub we kept near the river, that we then built a fire under.

Running water was one of the few things I was sure, as I lay back and soaped up my body, that the normal people got right.

Just as I was starting to enjoy the sensation of getting clean after feeling unwashed for so many days, a movement in the mirror over the vanity drew my focus. And there at the corner of the mirror, just barely visible, was the demon. Ly, his demon brother had called him. If I recalled my lessons correctly, that made him Lycus. He was second-in-command only to the leader, Ace.

But there he was, looking at the mirror. Looking at me in the mirror.

His eyes were intense, his jaw tight, his body rigid. As my gaze moved down the length of his body, I saw the bulge at the fly of his jeans. Even as my focus stayed there, his hand lowered, undid his button and zipper, reached inside, and pulled out his erection.

I might not have had experience with men personally, but I knew just about everything there was to know. We had many anatomically correct male God statues, drawings, and paintings.

In the flesh, as it were, was very different from statues and pictures. Those always made it look hard, yes, but in real life, it looked somehow hard, yet somehow soft at the same time. Like if you ran a hand across it, it would be smooth and warm.

The statues and pictures hadn't prepared me, though, for this.

For this man.

No, this demon, I reminded myself.

But regardless of his origins in hell, this flesh he was wearing was all man.

And impressive, at that.

I pressed my thighs together at the length of him, the girth, realizing my hand would barely close around him.

That should have been intimidating, a little worrisome.

But all I felt was a heat, a thrill, a tightening of desire.

As his hand started to stroke his cock, the sensation only grew until it felt like it was overtaking me completely, until there was an oppressive weight on my lower stomach, a throbbing between my thighs that begged for release.

I didn't dare, though, knowing he could see me. It was bad enough I was allowing him to watch, had said nothing about him looking at me while I was nude.

I soaped my hands again, wrinkling my nose a bit at the plain scent of it, so used to the soaps my coven and I made each summer filled with flowers and herbs, earthy and familiar, then ran my hands down my body as Ly kept stroking himself, somehow making his cock get bigger, thicker, as he went.