He abruptly gets up from his seat, looks down on me, then pulls a deep breath in. “Then I guess my presence is no longer needed here.”
I shrug as my eyes follow him. “I have enjoyed your company through the night, and will even allow you to share my bed and what lies between my thighs again. But, I have no other interest in you, Horus. Nephthys, with her rotted teeth and hollow womb, longs to spend every wakening moment with you, not I. She wants to bear your children and live happily-ever-after. Go chase dreams with her; come fulfill fantasies with me.”
“Nephthys is not whom my heart desires,” he says, lifting me up from my seat.
“Then Uadjet should suit your fancy,” I offer. “Her eyes burn with passion for you.”
He pulls me into him, pressing his body against mine. “I do not want Uadjet. My eyes burn only for you. I have longed for you from the very first moment I laid them upon you. It is you my heart craves.”
“No, Horus,” I snap. My lip begins to tremble, and I am unsure why. “You do not know what you speak. It is the warmth and wetness of my lips and vagina your heart craves. It is not love; it is lust.”
“Why do you reject me?” he asks.
“I am not rejecting you,” I answer. “I am rejecting that which you offer. There’s a difference.”
“Should we not endeavor to take a chance on love?”
I cannot believe him. He is relentless. And his frantic ramblings almost sound needy. Desperate. Clingy. I have no time or patience for either.
For some reason, hearing him say the word love makes me want to scream. Love, love, love…with all of its abstractions, with all of its uncertainty, there’s concreteness about its meaning, about its intent, that frightens me. It is a feeling that is foreign to me, and one I do not wish to explore. I do not wis
h to feel exposed, or vulnerable to emotions that involve the giving of my heart to someone else. To lose any part of myself in the process of loving someone does not excite me. I am not lonely, nor do I starve for love and affection in my life. Beyond the barriers of sex, I do not consume myself with thoughts of being held, or caressed, or cared for. There is no yearning for warmth, tenderness or intimacy. Just sex, sex, sex and more sex; that is the only thing I desire to share. So, no, I shall not entertain love’s possibilities. Nor shall I ever be plagued with lovesickness.
“To dance with love,” I say, almost apologetically, “would be like walking barefoot across a thousand wild bees. I am not eager to embrace the sting of heartache should it come.”
He looks at me with sorrow in his eyes. “Then you shall never know the joy it can bring.”
“Nor shall I ever regret what I shall never miss.”
He takes me into his arms. His touch begs me to reconsider his offering of love, but I am too detached and jaded for emotional connections. His hands, warm and gentle, embrace the sides of my face. “Who has cast a shadow upon your heart?” he asks, staring into my eyes. “Who has hardened your spirit against love? Tell me, dear Raghaba, who has trampled your heart? Will you not let me comfort you; help you mend?”
I do not answer. Do not breathe credence into anything he says. I stand, pressed against his chest. There is nothing to mend, nothing that has been trampled upon, and there is no need for comfort. I feel his heartbeat, his measured breathing. I feel him trying to melt himself into me, and me into him.
“Horus,” I say, prying myself from his embrace. “I will revel in the pleasures we have shared. And I thank you for keeping company with me, but I shall not open the windows of my heart to invite love in. Not today, tomorrow, and not in the calendar years to come. So, please do not badger me with such notions. If you wish to share my bed again, you may. But nothing more than explicit passion shall ever come of it.”
Solemnly, he keeps his gaze upon me as if he were attempting to burn me into his memory. Then he lightly presses his lips against mine one last time, before walking out the door, leaving me drawing in a long breath—wondering why things must become so complicated.
Several days and nights have come and gone, and Horus has been silent. A part of me is relieved that there’s been no word from him. However, there’s another part—that part of me that has not grown tired of him, yet—that would keep company with him again through the night, and perhaps into the sunrise. I can not deny the truth: Horus felt so very good inside of me. And my vagina walls wish to wrap themselves around his manhood again. However, I will not call upon him. And though he keeps his distance, I know I am still in his dreams. He still allows images of my nakedness to consume him. And I linger in his thoughts, against his morning erections, against the stroke of his hardness, against the flooding and release of his loins. I am fully aware that he will find comfort between the thighs of many others, but his thirst for me shall not be quenched. The well of his desires for me shall overflow and no matter how hard he tries to ignore these urgings, he shall give into them. He will seek to feel the heat of my skin against his. He shall find his way back to me to rest himself in between my bosom, and in the center of my thighs where I will allow him to taste the fruit of my clitoris, then release himself into the basin of my womb.
It is early evening and I have just finished washing my body and oiling it with jasmine oil. I have been as lazy as a cat, napping and nibbling today. And now I am sitting at the table in the central room, eating a bowl of boiled cabbage and a side plate of mullet roe—fish eggs—when my mind slowly begins to drift, along the edges of the desert.
I am running over and around the shifting sand-dunes of the Sahara; something is chasing me, but I am not exactly sure what it is. There are no faces. Just sweaty and musky bodies chasing behind me with long arms, big hands and long spidery fingers, stretching out to grab me. They are naked and salivating. And their grotesquely large penises have the heads of hissing asps. The scorching sand beneath the bottom of my feet makes running unbearable, but if I stop, these two-legged creatures will devour me. The heat and the want of water make it most difficult to keep my stride. My lips crack and my throat burns from gulping in the treacherous heat. I am screaming, but no one hears my cries for help. I am stumbling and falling. The sun is beating down on me, brutal and relentless, just like the creatures that are slowly closing in on me, determined to have their way with me. To do whatever they will. There is nothing but miles and miles of desert ahead of me and I do not understand what this means. But somehow, after all of my running, and all of my screaming, an oasis lies ahead of me. I crane my neck to look behind me, and there is nothing behind me. The creatures have gone. And I am now wallowing in the Nile, soaking in all of its wetness. This vision frightens and confuses me. I take a deep breath and wonder if the gods are trying to reveal my fate to me.
The sound of a man’s voice saves me from finding out what becomes of me. A film of sweat lines my forehead.
“Is it I who fills your thoughts?” he asks, grinning. I stare up into his face. For the first time, I notice his straight, neatly spaced teeth. They have not been worn down over the years from the sand that gets into the food or the bits of stone that end up in the stone-ground flour. I don’t know when he got here, or how long he had been standing here, but…
“Toth,” I say, feigning surprise to see him standing in my doorway. But I knew he would come. The throbbing heat between his legs has led him to me. His dreams have become too much for him to bear. And now he stands before me, eager to fulfill all that has consumed him. Though I know what will fall from his lips, I still ask, “Why have you come unannounced?”
“I could no longer wait to be summoned by you,” he says, his tone filled with a lust that matches his gaze as he steps into my space. “You seem to have time for everyone else, except me. You leave my loins neglected. You deny me your touch. Teasing me with promises you do not plan to keep. No, Raghaba, I have waited far too long. Tonight, I am here to take what I’ve been longing for.”
For some reason, his jealousy entices me; the knowing that he is feeling slighted, that he has been wanting, longing for, this causes my nipples to harden. I smell his need. His pores leak with the scent of lust. I will not give in so easily.
“But I have not invited you,” I say, backing up, “nor have I offered you any reason to make claims upon me.” He is making his way closer to me, and I keep moving away until my back is up against the wall, and I have no more room to go anywhere else.
Though I am not frightened by his presence, I pretend that I am. I toy with him, giving him the illusion that he is in control; that he is taking what he wants. I allow him to think he is orchestrating this journey. He raises his arms on either side of me, then presses his palms flat against the wall, blocking any chance for escape. The element of danger, though imagined, ignites a flame inside of me which causes my juices to slowly simmer.
He leans in, presses his body against mine, and whispers, “Raghaba, sweet goddess of desire, give me what my loins so desperately need. Let me slip myself into your wet valley and lose all that I am in your pleasures. Allow me to melt against the scent of your womanhood.”