Lilith (#flashfiction #erotica #stories #spirituality)

He’s searching for God. She’s just looking for a fuck. But that’s not quite right. She knows, somehow, that you don’t have to seek God. God’s already there, inside. You just need to figure out how to open yourself and let divinity out.

For her, sex is the way, the consummate opening. When she’s writhing in a lover’s arms, the barriers crumble. For a few glorious moments, she can experience first hand the communion she normally has to take on faith. The bliss and the certainty are as brief and fragile as they are transcendent, She’s left with mere memories that fade the more she tries to clutch at them—scraps of joy, glimmers of magic. She’s learned over the years to let them go, the same way she releases her lovers when it’s time for them to move on. There are always new bodies, new hearts—new truths.

He doesn’t understand, thinks she’s been put there to tempt him him from his path of purity and righteousness. He’s not pure, though. He knows very well he’s not. If he were, he wouldn’t want her so badly.

She loves his youth, his shyness, his awkward innocence, his cleverness with words and with his hands. His intuition astounds her; the depth of his feelings humble her. When they meet for coffee and intricate conversations, she aches to touch him, but he’s armored in self-denial. The most casual brush of her hand makes him flinch away.

A veteran of many couplings, she can read his desire like the books he cherishes. It’s in his darting eyes, his flushed cheeks, the sweat she can smell, even across the cafe table. It’s more than lust. It’s like a prayer.

He stares into his coffee cup to escape her bold stare, even as he speaks of Japanese folk tales or dissects King Lear. In the fragrant and bitter dregs he reads his fate—an instant of forbidden indulgence then a long, hard fall. He vows to be strong, but her magnetism draws his traitor body. His stubborn cock is a pillar of iron between his tensed thighs.

Iron, and salt, the destiny of sinners.

Every Monday they come together to pace out the same steps in this dance of frustration. What can she do? Perfume and decolletage don’t dent his desperate resolve. If only she dared make a first move—but she knows terror and need will send him skittering away. She cares too much to cause him that distress.

She dreams of him, imagines the magic they’d create in connecting. He might be the one to finally set her free. No virgin, still she succumbs to the seductive promise of a soul mate. And if that promise fails, the mystery of opening remains, illusion vanishing like fog in the white-hot flare of pleasure, incandescent truth shining forth for a few seconds before the curtain falls. That’s what he craves, too, or so she believes.

But how to reach him? She ponders the conundrum as she twists and tosses on ocean-scented sheets, her fingers an unsatisfactory substitute for his maleness. His aspirations to holiness make her feel like a whore, but that doesn’t matter. Nothing matters except her need to wrap her legs around his waist and pull him inside her.

Finally, she writes him a story.