Barkeep, For Keeps

"Let's go. I hope you like long drives, because I'm taking you home in my car. You're going to have to find out who I really am at our destination."

***

"When you said you'd take me home, I didn't think you meant my home." Mak said dryly as she alit Ridge's blue SUV, which they'd parked at the Philippine High School for the Arts parking lot that sat on the foothills of Mt. Makiling in Laguna province, an hour's drive out of Manila. "Is there a point to all this?"

Ridge threw a wicked grin Mak's way as he walked to the edge of the forest at the PHSA perimeter. "There is a cave here that I found ages before this archipelago was a Spanish colony. We can talk there."

"Talk, right." Mak rolled her eyes at Ridge, then lengthened her stride and quickened her pace to keep up with him through their ascent, one that took them deeper into thickening jungle of her mountain.

Once they reached the cave Ridge was talking about earlier, a rosy dawn was filtering through the trees' canopies, casting the leaves and branches in soft red-gold light and a slow drizzle was beginning to fall.

Ridge's curly hair grew longer and longer, down past his ripped shoulders, as they walked. He paused to gather them up into a man-bun two feet from the cave entrance. The maw of it was covered in lichens that couldn't quite hide the ash-gray granite they grew on. The faint sound of a stream burbled out of the cave opening.

"Is it true that this is your birthplace, Lady Makiling?" Ridge held out a hand to Mak, his eyes searching her face, hungry for the emotions she couldn't hold in. Nobody had ever found the place from which she'd sprung. Nobody had even bothered to do this before Ridge. His eyes held hers as those realizations dawned on Mak.

Mak's sister Banahaw was lucky. She'd had people who bothered to try finding her birthplace on Mt. Banahaw. They'd even consecrated it as holy, and told that story to their children, passing the knowledge and belief down across generations so her story survived to this age. Their continued faith made Banahaw strong and, in so doing, made the sacred site of her birth a place where healing came to those who sought it.

She was just Makiling, the passing fancy who was refashioned by the colonizers' tales into some Tinkerbell-looking thing with a "Maria" tacked on to her name like an insult. Nobody could recognize her because those blasted Spaniards had remade her form and face to look dainty and Caucasian. Feh. On her mountain, people got lost and blamed her for their own stupidity. It was enough to drive a diwata from her home.

The old hurts came up in a welling rush, like magma rising to a surface vent. And, no, she didn't have airy little wings or need an audience to clap and revive her. Mak was the living, breathing, immortal spirit of her mountain, wild, rosy brown and untamable.

She was a healer and provider for the people living on it. People who'd forgotten who she was—and maybe they didn't know who and what she was, to begin with. So she'd become the bitch spirit who got them turned around until they got naked and put their clothes back on inside-out so they could "backtrack" to the spots they knew. That was so not her circus, nor her monkeys.

Mak had been young then, barely out of her changeling shell, and still thinking like the humans among whom she'd been raised, as most diwata were raised. She hadn't had enough time to build her identity when the colonizers arrived and erased the culture of the natives on her mountain and replaced it with an amalgam of their own beliefs and the local culture they'd Hispanized and Christianized into the folk Catholicism that now dominated the Philippines.

But Ridge seemed to understand these things. Perhaps bringing him in to see her point of origin would show her the how of things. Perhaps she'd be able to tell him what even her sisters never heard from her lips. It would feel so good to share these things with him. It would also be good to get him inside her, at least once, she admitted to herself silently. But, first, the how of things, Mak.

There were many things to explore and, for once, Mak wanted to touch these ideas and guesses she'd been avoiding for centuries. Maybe the how of things would be easier to get after a good, hard fuck. She remembered that males tended to be more forthcoming after an orgasm or two, and fucking was something she could do. As for anything more intimate, well, that would be in the hands of the Old Gods. May they smile on her this day.

Sexy male who set her clothes on fire? Check. Man who understood things about her she never thought anyone would? Check. Time to bring him to beginning of her world, then, and see what happens from there.

***

Mak took Ridge's hand firmly in hers, determined to take the lead. This mountain belonged to her, and he would damn well learn that now.

Wordlessly, she stalked into the cave, not stopping until they reached a hot spring, and the stream it fed, where the only light came from the glow of bioluminescent lichens limning raw emeralds embedded in the igneous granite of the cave's walls and ceiling.

Stalactites hung over the warm stream like banners of stone. The raw, wild beauty of Mak's birthplace washed over her, a welcome relief from the city where she'd worked so hard to remain unseen.

"This is where I began." She pointed to the space where the spring met the far end of the cave wall. "My sisters found me there, and the hot spring flows in over an old lava vent."

Ridge's hands sat on Mak's shoulders and he pressed his full, sensual lips to her temple in a soft kiss that trailed heatedly down her cheek to the point where her neck met her shoulder. Mak closed her eyes on a slow, deep breath and turned around to meet his kisses with her lips. What began slowly and tentatively took a turn for the carnal and wild when lips opened and tongues met.

"There are so many things I want to do to you," Ridge's voice was rough as tree bark and deep with desire. "Let me. Say yes and put yourself in my hands. Be mine and make me yours." He needed this. Needed her. Here, where she began.

"Well, when you put it that way, how can I refuse?" Mak felt the flow of heat between them flare and shimmer, burning away cotton and denim in flashes of fire and light. Her hands trailed small flames across Ridge's shoulders, his pectorals, across the ridges of his hips and over his muscular ass. "I need you naked."

"I like the way you get me out of my clothes, lady." Ridge's growl was barely controlled. He took her face in his hands and tilted Mak's chin up for a deep kiss that mimicked the motions he wanted to set their loins in, eventually.

He backed Mak up against the cave wall by the stream, where a ledge sat at just the right height for him to seat her, and spread her body wide for his perusal and touch.

Ridge pulled down some of the strong and flexible rattan vines hanging from the cave's ceiling and wall. He bound Mak's wrists with them so her hands were clasped over her head and her body curved toward his. "Stay this way. Let me see your body in its molten glory."

His words were whispered over her lips, and their command flowed in a trail down her neck to her navel. He ran his hands along the insides of her thighs, raised her feet to the ledge on either side of his hips, then wrapped and knotted the vines around them.

Mak set her elemental nature free, trusting that Ridge could take the burn, trusting in the thought that he could not, would not, harm her body. She laid kisses where she could: His shoulders, the muscles of his neck, on his big, well-formed hands when they rose to cup her face.

Bound as she was, with the vines in patterns of knots that raised her breasts to Ridge's mouth and hands, she felt free. He kept binding her with the vines: Around her torso to support most of her weight, between her legs to bracket her sex and the clitoris crowning it, around her thighs and ankles to hold her open to him—and she willed her innate heat to not burn the vines or the rock ledge holding her up.

She liked being wrapped in bindings like this, feeling the supple roughness of the rattan vines against her skin. She liked feel of the smooth but unyielding granite that supported her for his pleasure, and hers.

His hands drew cool patterns against her molten skin. His fingers set to pinching and rolling her nipples so he could lick the hardened, rose-gold tips, and apply oral suction that pulled simultaneously at her sex and her soul.

Ridge stepped back, his breathing coming in harsh pants as he held his pulsing member, showing his body off for her. He was as wet as she was, with sweat and arousal, and he wanted so much more. Possibly as much as she did.

He faced Mak squarely, slowly pumping his fist up and down the thickness of his hard shaft. "Call me by my true name, Makiling. Command my pleasure, and yours."

A row of Baybayin characters glowed gold against the deep bronze of the skin on his left pectoral muscle, just below the copper-brown disk of his nipple. Through the haze of her arousal, Mak read it and called it out with in her multi-layered voice. "I want you, Dumakulem, patron of the hunt, guardian god of the mountains. I do. But I want more than just this fucking. Do you?"

"Why do you think I brought you home, Makiling? I want you, body and soul, for as long as you will have me," Ridge replied, his hair falling in waves down his back as his man-bun unraveled and he met her intent stare. He approached her and got down on his knees. His breath skimmed over her sex along with his husky words. "Tell me you want this: My mouth on you, my tongue, fingers and cock in you. Tell me you will be mine."

"You had me at 'guardian god of the mountains' Big Guy."

"Tell me." His lips grazed her hipbones and laid hot licks around her sweet spot. The demand in those two words was implacable, and his eyes bade her to obey, promising her ecstasy as a reward for her compliance.

"I want your mouth right there, eating my pussy, worshipping me, Ridge," Mak was impatient for him, her physical need ripping through her the way magma raced out of an open caldera to kiss the sky. "I will be yours."

Ridge licked a long line up and down her slit, alternating his fingers with his tongue to the soundtrack of Mak's multi-layered voice making wordless pleas for sweet release. He increased his rhythm, pushing slick fingers into her as he licked and sucked, until her sheath gripped his fingers in spasms of rapture and her whole body shook in its cradle of vines once, twice, thrice.

He rose to his feet and cupped her thighs, guiding his shaft into her, hard and to the hilt. She raised her head to him, her lips searching for his kisses as he thrust into her in a rhythm that brought her to climax twice more before he reached his own peak of pleasure on a low groan, his knuckles white in their grip on the vines at her hips.

Mak took steadying breaths and smiled up at her very own deity, who was still joined to her: "So, does this mean you're my personal god now?"

"Diwata, you say the damnedest things."

"Get used to it." Her voice was pert, but Ridge could feel the beginnings of affection in its tartness as he withdrew his body from hers in a sensual slide that conveyed his reluctance to pull out.

"Already there, lady." Ridge stepped back and looked Makiling over, feeling a strong sense of satisfaction over the marks left by the knotted vines she'd somehow willed away from her body. She'd let him tie her up and stood naked and proud of it—even if she could have untangled herself at any time. She gave him her trust, and that was more than he'd hoped for when he began his pursuit of her.

"I think we've got the start of a good thing going here, Mr. Huntsman and Guardian of Me." Mak's heart had never felt this light before. It felt a lot like hope.

"We've got a good beginning, yes," Ridge concurred with that grin that made Mak's head spin with the brightness of it. "I always like to begin as I mean to proceed."

"But we've known each other for what, half a day? Are you sure, Dumakulem?" She knew she wanted this to keep going on, forever—she'd been ready and waiting for this for ages. Did he want the same thing? And were they going to keep playing this delicious game of sweet bondage? Please, Old Gods, let it be so.

"We have forever to get to know each other better, my diwata, and I hate my true name, if you must know. I prefer Ridge, thank you very much. My parents have absolutely no understanding of how stinky their choice of proper nouns for sentient beings is." Mak raised a brow at that, pulling another laugh from Ridge. "Only you know just how much hate that disgusting name generates, my diwata. It sounds like a foul-tasting medicine, or an ugly animal. Use it only if I displease you, so I'll know to make things straight with you."

Mak and Ridge laughed together this time, over the first shared joke of their relationship and Mak couldn't help teasing him. "So, our story should open with 'in the beginning was the word, and the word stank'?"

"So long as you call me yours, you'll have a happy god." Ridge pulled Mak against his body and leaned against the stone ledge. "We'll take forever a day at a time, sweet diwata of mine."

"Oh, my god." Mak whispered, squirming in his hold. Ridge's hands were getting busy again—and he was whispering the filthiest things in the ear he was nipping and licking softly, too.

"Yes. Your god. All fucking yours."