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Physicality does not come naturally to the Night Incarnate, although she has learned. She has learned to have a body; to hold herself precisely in space so that those she is addressing receive the impression she wishes them to receive. She has learned to savor the touch of warm hands, the taste of ambrosia.
Persephone never had to learn any of this, Nyx thinks; her bright movements come as naturally to her as breathing (another foreign process to the Night). She gestures, she grins, she laughs. She buries her hands in the soil and leaves streaks of mud across her skin when she wipes sweat away. The first time—long ago—that she came into the House after hours working in her garden, Nyx didn’t know what to do with the mess of her. Nyx hardly recognized the intrusive, insistent smell of a hard-working body. She’d thought, at the time, that she was slightly repelled by the experience.
Over time, she has rethought that assumption.
*
“Nyx—ah—oh, please—”
This is Persephone: warmth and sweat beneath Nyx’s palms, sticky sweet arousal that Nyx presses her tongue to in something a bit like worship but far closer in nature to investigation. She is always seeking: what can she make this body do? What can she make it feel? When Persephone’s muscles seize, trembling, it is a gift and a revelation.
“Darkness… oh, please don’t stop, Nyx…”
Nyx hungers for the presence of it all. The ringing cries of Persephone’s pleasure in her ears and the throb of her pulse. The heat. And, sometimes more than anything else—
*
“You smell nice,” Persephone had said once, spontaneously, so unexpectedly that Nyx had turned her attention around her to discern who else the foreign goddess might be talking to. But Persephone had leaned in and inhaled deeply before breaking into a dazzling smile. “Like the air on a summer evening, all full of sound and life. Like I could just spread my arms and feel all the potential of night welcoming me.”
Nyx looked down at her, confused. “Is that a scent?” she asked. It seemed nothing like what she has come to recognize on Persephone, the earthy realness of it all: rich, dark soil; floral scents over that, sometimes light and sometimes pungent and attention-seizing. And something more innately her than the trappings of her domain: the sour, bitter sweat born of her labors in the garden, the inherent scent of her body.
Persephone laughed at her confusion, a warm sound. “Well, maybe not a scent exactly. More like a feeling. I like it, though.”
“I see.” It was (and still is) a rare thing for Nyx’s domain to be embraced so openly, and for a moment she stumbled over a response. Persephone always seemed to expect a sense of interaction that Nyx had never before been called upon to produce. Sometimes it was the best Nyx could to do imitate. “I find that your scent is welcoming as well, Persephone.”
She did not understand the way Persephone’s cheeks colored red in response to that. Not for a long, long time.
*
When Persephone has spent, they lie in bed together, the golden-skinned goddess settling into Nyx’s pale arms. Persephone breathes. Nyx does not need to breathe, but she does, now, inviting into herself the air that has touched Persephone’s skin. Persephone’s scent is as it always has been: the soil and flowers and sweat, even when she is clean; at just this moment, she smells of sex as well, that heady aroma that will be woven into Nyx’s hair until she bathes. And she will bathe, because she cannot wander around the House of Hades smelling of the Queen’s passion. But for now she simply breathes. It makes something within her body quicken. She pulls Persephone close, buries her face in the queen’s wild, wheat-colored hair, and with the clarity of bright-glaring day she realizes all at once that the space between her own legs is damp and humming like the stars.
The breaths that she is taking by choice stutter.
“Persephone,” she says, with an unfamiliar tremor in her voice, “would you mind if I attend to myself?”
For a moment, neither of them is breathing. Nyx has not often needed the same things Persephone’s body does; she has not often craved it. Not often at all, but now she does.
“Nyx,” Persephone breathes, careful and reverent and gentle all at once, “of course I wouldn’t mind, not at all.” Her lips brush Nyx’s throat, sending a new frisson of need across Nyx’s skin. “Touch yourself for me, beloved?”
And Nyx traces slender fingers down her own side, over her hips, between her legs, and she shivers.
*
The House felt emptier when Persephone left—a far more drastic change than could be accounted for by physical matter alone. It was the lack of her laughter, too, and her movement and light. Her smell was all that remained, and that barely. It caught Nyx unawares, always: perhaps a seat where she had once sat in the lounge, perhaps one of the pomegranate trees shifting in the dead air and spilling their aroma into the hall, perhaps the thought of a garden on the surface under the cover of night. Each time, the whiff of it stopped Nyx statue-still in the midst of whatever she was doing, something searing in the core of her chest, something breaking.
When she returned—
When she returned.
That first moment when she finished her business with her family and threw herself into Nyx’s arms, impact and warmth and her heartbeat and that smell that had broken Nyx’s heart so many times, earthy and strong and everything Persephone was—
That seared Nyx from the inside out, too.
*
It is searing her again now, delicate careful touches earning disproportionate response. She is still breathing, each inhale drawing in Persephone’s scent, pulling it from the Queen’s hair and into Nyx’s body. Pleasure puts down creeping roots in her gut and they threaten to overtake her.
“Nyx,” Persephone is murmuring in gentle, adoring encouragement. Her body is pressed close, her callused fingers soft along Nyx’s spine. “That’s it, Nyx, keep going.”
“I,” Nyx begins to say. And then another wave of desire rolls through her and her jaw clenches so hard that it aches. “I am not certain I can,” she confesses. She thinks of the moment when billions upon billions of stars burst across infinity, kept in their whirling associations by a dance whose name even she does not know. She is going to spin apart, just like that.
Persephone’s fingers still on Nyx’s back, and she speaks. “May I, then?” she proposes quietly.
Nyx hesitates for only a moment before answering, “Yes.”
And then Persephone’s fingers search her. Nyx feels their slide, their circling, even their calluses made pleasant and amplified by her own sensitivity, and she makes a quiet sound in her throat. Persephone’s lips brush her chest in indistinct murmurs as she strokes her. With one arm, Nyx cups Persephone’s head close and inhales the scent of soil and sweat and sex and the bright defiant existence of the body —
And then she is spinning, spinning, buried soul-deep in embodiment, in the solid weight of bone and ichor and flesh, in nebula-lightning bursts of pleasure that pulse through her as muscles contract and release. Nestled in her arms, Persephone is still murmuring, talking her through her climax, her fingers still stroking deftly as Nyx shakes in a way she never has before.
Then, for a little while, the two of them lie together. There is sweat beaded on Nyx’s skin, and it is unpleasant, but in a way she is willing to tolerate. Persephone is next to her, a serene weight on the bedspread, and both of them simply breathe.