Gaelic Goddess

"And just maybe, beautiful child, I thought to ease your dreams and to befriend you as you slept."

"So," Tom said slowly, trying to wrap his mind around this concept. "You see me as a friend? And you weren't mocking me by...by coming to bed with me, knowing that you couldn't be forced to do anything against your will?"

"A friend," she said, lips turning upward in a private smile. "Yes. And no, you idiot. I wasn't mocking you that way. I will never mock you that way. That sort of cruelty is too close to home."

She laid a hand on his chest. "Thomas Phelan, I swear by your name and mine. I would never do that to you."

"Swear by your name," Tom breathed. His eyes widened.

"Holy shit." Could it really be that simple?

He got out of bed and ran into the living room. Hands shaking, he leafed through the contract.

One. Two. Three.

"Rhiannon! Could you come out here, please?"

In an instant she was at his side.

"Thomas?" her voice was high and fearful. She followed his trembling finger as it showed her three separate clauses.

"I have it," he said simply. "I think.

"You led me to it. The triads. The power of a name. Swearing by your name. Oh, God, the old bastard was clever. He bound you by your own traditions, disguised so no one else could see them. Look here: 'The undersigned, who shall be called Rhiannon ni Brigit ni Dagda by the party of the second part'...

"That was his agreement. To call you by your name. Rhiannon daughter of Brigit daughter of the Dagda. Nothing else. Answer me truly. Did Mick ever call you by anything other than your true name?"

He watched, desperately hopeful, as her face went blank, obviously searching her memories.

"No. Never."

"No pet names? No nicknames? No endearments?" He snorted. "No, I can hardly imagine him calling you his little love muffin," She shook her head.

"Insults? Anything demeaning?"

"No. In fact," she said, hope lighting her face like a beacon, "when I tried to go against his will he oft-times would use my true name to compel me."

He nodded. "All right. I called you by a nickname yesterday. But the sun has set and risen since then. Any work of magic," he said, amazed he could say this with a straight face, "would have been dispersed by the power of sunrise. So we have to start over.

"Tell me. When you signed the contract. Was there anything special about the room? Any...drawings, patterns on the floor or walls? Candles? A ritual of some sort? Anything that would have told you he was trying to bind you to his will forever?"

She shook her head anxiously. "No. Nothing. If I had suspected him of such mischief I would never have signed the contract."

"OK then. Let's try to reproduce the scene as much as we can. Unless you would rather wait?"

"Like hell!" she retorted. "We're going to do this now."

"Yes. No. Wait," he said, rubbing his hands across his face in fearful frustration. "How will we know if we're successful? You hold my thanks as a way of insuring I do not harm you. We have to devise a way for you to harm me. To prove that the contract is broken."

Rhiannon gaped like a fish. "How?"

He looked around the small apartment. "Well, let's see. It has to be something non-lethal. I don't want to show up at the emergency room and have to explain why I have a knife sticking out of my leg," he said as Rhiannon giggled nervously. "But it has to be capable of real damage. Oh. Here we go."

He picked the cookie sheet he had used the previous evening to warm the taco shells off the stove. He handed it to her. She handled it nervously, like it was an exotic pet that might bite.

"Hit me."

"What?"

"Hit me. Now. With that. Hard."

She raised the sheet clumsily to one shoulder, then lowered it again.

"I can't hit you, Thomas!"

He opened his mouth, then closed it. Carefully he asked, "Won't? Or can't?"

"Can't." She dropped the sheet to the floor, where it hit with a muted clang. "As soon as I picked it up there was this need to put it down again. I could barely hold onto it."

He grinned. "Right, then. After we're done we'll see if the same thing happens." He walked back into the living room, Rhiannon trailing. He cast his mind over the problem, trying to think of any variable he could have missed.

To hell with it. Let's go.

"Three times is the key. I will call you by a false name three times. You will refuse. If we're right, the third refusal will break the contract. Then we'll test." He set a glass of water on his small table. He then sat at his office chair.

"Edith Bratt, bring me that class of water."

As the day before, her face grew cold. "My name," she said, "is Rhiannon." This time he was able to pick out the cadence of the words, the feeling of vast power behind them. Heart pounding, he drew a deep breath.

"Lúthien Tinúviel, bring me that glass of water."

"I tell you a second time, mortal man. My name is Rhiannon." Inside the apartment, the light darkened. The air grew stuffy and tense, as if in the last few moments before a thunderstorm unleashed its wrath. A feeling of panic descended on him. Who was he, in his boxers and t-shirt, to try to break a contract and a curse nearly fifty years old?

He licked his lips and spoke for the last time, nearly stuttering in his hope and fear:

"Arwen Undómiel, bring me that glass of water."

"I tell you three times, my name is Rhiannon ni Brigit ni Dagda!"

The long, rolling cadences of Rhiannon's true name pealed through the apartment like the tolling of a great bell. At that moment, the sun emerged from the cloud under which it had been veiled and lit her in a ray of ravishing light. Overhead, light-bulbs blew out in their sockets and in his bedroom, his alarm clock gave a sad, high-pitched whine, then died in a pathetic puff of smoke..

The moment passed, and they looked at each other in silence.

"Well," he said slowly, "I would think that's a good sign. Let's test it."

He tossed her the cookie sheet, which she received in shaking hands. He stood in front of her, hands at his side.

"Hit me."

Slowly, she tapped him with the sheet. He glared at her.

"I said hit, not tickle. Come on, Rhiannon. I won't break. Hit me."

"I...I don't want to hurt you...I don't..."

Pushing her hard, desperate to know if his long-shot gamble had actually succeeded, he shouted, "For fuck's sake! Stop your pathetic whining and stand up for yourself!" His voice rose, mocking her, a sing-song taunt. "I can't. I don't. You're a waste of goddam fucking time and I don't know why I'm putting up with you." Her eyes narrowed dangerously, but he ignored her. "If I had any goddam sense I would have kicked you out Sunday morning when you first..."

WHAM!

The lights went out for Tom Phelan.

Rhiannon, goddess of fertility and the harvest, stood above his crumpled form.

"Well. I'll be fucked. It worked."

****

When he woke, he was on his bed. His face was a throbbing mass of pain.

"Nishe punshe," he said. Or tried to say. His lips seemed to be a mashed clump of hamburger. His hand explored his features gingerly, and found that his nose was squashed and seemed to be pointing in an odd direction. He probed his cheeks, and flinched sharply as his fingers encountered bruises and broken bones.

"Well now," a cheerful voice said. "Now we know better than to taunt goddesses after they have been freed from a spell of servitude that lasted longer than 'Saturday Night Live', don't we?" Rhiannon sailed into his vision, still dressed in the oversize t-shirt that she had worn to bed the previous night. It was, Tom noted, speckled with his blood.

"Yesh?" he said.

"You've got a broken right cheekbone, broken nose, three broken teeth, abrasions, lacerations, contusions, and bruises. Good thing I pulled the punch. Otherwise I would have killed you, you fecking idiot," she said her brogue deepening. "I'm a fecking goddess. Please try to remember."

His lips twitched. "Worth it," he said softly, tears running down his cheeks. They were not tears of pain. "Hel' me get uh? We should go to hoshpital. U'll 'ake uh a shtory on da way."

"No," she said. Her eyes were warm and loving. "This is my first task for you." She pulled her t-shirt off. She was fully nude beneath. She crawled on the bed, her legs straddling his. She stroked her fingertips over her nipples until they were firm and gleaming with her milk. She lowered one erect bud to his ravaged mouth.

"Drink, and be healed, my love."

Gingerly, he opened his lips. Questioning, he looked into her eyes, making sure this was what she wished. What he saw in return was concern for his pain and the desire to heal it.

Her milk was thin and sweet, unlike anything else he had ever tasted, and amazingly delicious. One swallow, two, and he was suddenly desperate for more. Under her touch, her felt his bones knitting together, the sudden shift as his nose straightened, the abrupt restoration of damaged lips and teeth that had been broken at the gumline. Laughing softly, he clasped his hands loosely around Rhiannon's waist, his fingers stroking the baby-soft down at the cleft of her buttocks as he nursed.

Abruptly the flow of milk ceased. He made a disappointed sound, and his lips pulled at her nipples, urging her to give him more. His tongue came out and flicked one taut bud, and she gasped, tensing in his hands. With a soft chuckle, she removed his mouth from her breast. She looked into his face, then bent to cup his cheeks in her hands, dropping a long, lingering, sensual kiss onto his mouth. He moaned under her hands, and with a shiver of pleasure she felt his cock stir, then rise, the head brushing her thigh as it grew, until it stood, high, hard, and proud, so tense it curved, the swollen glans whispering against the skin of his stomach.

If there was any question about stopping, about going back, it ended at that moment.

With a sharp cry of triumph, she dropped down, her weight landing firm against his phallus. She sat up, rocking her dew-damp lips against him, reveling at the feel of a hard prick against her cleft.

Desired. For the first time in decades. Someone who is desired. Her eyes stung with tears, and she closed them for a moment. When she opened them again, she looked at the beloved man under her, scion of her bitter enemy, her savior, her friend.

Her lover.

Oh yes, my lover.

She bent her face to his, and gave him her mouth again, kissing him deep, savoring the feel of his lips on hers, the delicate touch of his tentative tongue as it explored her mouth, unlike any other lover she had ever taken.

Not a gentleman, maybe. But a gentle man.

His hands roamed her back as they kissed, his mouth both firm and kind, fingertips caressing her skin, making her shiver with want. Lower, his hips rocked upward, pressing the steely length of his cock into her sheath, the head of his phallus firm on her clitoris. Instinctively, her hips danced, matching his movement, as he cupped her breasts, thumbs firm on her nipples. He bent his head to suckle at them once again, and she mewled happily as his lips and tongue woke delightful feelings inside her womanly core.

"Don't expect to drink from me all the time, my love," she gasped, somehow able to speak rationally.

He grinned up at her. "I never expected to ever drink a woman's milk at all, so that isn't much of a change." He opened his mouth wide, shifting his jaw back and forth. "Did you do something to me when you hit me with that cookie sheet? My mouth feels weird."

She smiled lovingly. "I just fixed a couple of those crooked molars in the back of your mouth."

He blinked. "Oh. Well, thank you. I guess."

Deciding to concentrate on the task at hand, he shifted under her, then rolled out from underneath, smiling as she pouted her disappointment. He caught her ankles and spread her legs wide. She caught her breath as she watched him, his eyes hot with desire, as he kissed his way up the length of her legs, his mouth warm on the soft white skin of her thighs. As he approached her hidden treasure, she settled back on the pillows of his bed, propped up as she reached down and spread her nether lips for his questing mouth.

The first touch of his tongue made her keen her desire into the air, a high-pitched wail that spoke of her longing. He lapped at the folds of her sex, the tart tang of her dew thick on his tongue. His hands roamed the shallow curves of her hips, his hands dipping under her buttocks, lifting her mound to his eager mouth. She set her feel flat on the bed and pushed up, driving her pubis into him. With a delicate hook of his tongue he teased her clitoris out from under its hood, then pursed his lips to draw it into his mouth. The tip of his tongue drew patterns of love on her bud, and as he looked up he could see her breasts and face blush pink with desire.

The rocking of her hips took on a more urgent rhythm. Her scent surrounded him, and as his tongue drove ever more deeply into her folds, her hands delved deep into his hair, clutching it in her fists, pulling him into her cleft.

Rhiannon drove towards her climax, needing to come, to prove at last her freedom. Her entire world shrank to the sensation of Tom's mouth on her sex, the feel of rumpled cloth on her tingling skin, the heat of her nipples as her fingers danced across her areolae. In her belly, the slow, gathering warmth had grown into a blazing fire, one that was only matched by the heat of her groin as Tom's tongue left her depths and moved to her aching clit yet again.

With a final rush her orgasm barreled towards her, overwhelming her senses. The muscles of her stomach and womb gathered, tensed, released. With a piercing scream that threatened to shatter Tom's eardrums, Rhiannon ni Brigit, Irish goddess of fertility and the harvest, reached the first climax she had achieved with a man in over fifty years.

She lay panting and still in the aftermath of her release. Eyes blurry with tears of joy, she looked up to see Tom gazing at her in something that closely resembled awe.

"What's the matter, young one?" she purred. "Have you never seen a woman come before?"

He shook his head. "Not like that. Your entire body...lit up. It was as if you had swallowed the moon, and its light was shining through you."

"Ptthhht." She made a rude noise. "But aren't we forgetting something? Where is your pleasure?" She crooked her hand around his hot length. "If you think that you are going to escape this bed without using that on me, or in me, you are sadly mistaken." With a firm grip, she pulled him unresisting until he was aimed at her entrance.

Sighing happily, she spread her legs, a welcoming cradle for his love. She looped her hands loosely around his neck and smiled into his eyes.

"Now, Thomas. Make love with me."

Braced on his elbows above her, shaking with yearning, he slowly lowered his body. Unerring, guided by fate, his cock slowly pierced her flesh.

As they joined, they both gasped in wonder. Their merging seemed to them to be more than a physical union, but rather something fated, preordained.

"By the High One!" she gasped as he stopped, the skin of their groins fused together. "How do you fit so well inside me?"

He shook his head, unable to answer. He had thought he had been happy before, when he had woken and realized that they had truly broken the contract and set her free. It was nothing compared to the joy he now felt as he slipped deep into Rhiannon's silky-smooth depths.

Kissing every spot on her body he could reach, he slowly withdrew, then plunged into her again, wanting nothing more than to feel the exquisite sensation of her sex wrapped around his phallus. He shifted his weight to one arm, gathering the globe of her breast in the other hand, lipping the turgid nipple until she was writhing underneath him, the heat of her passage growing more and more intense, the muscles clenching, clutching his rod.

Deep within him, he felt it gathering, an oncoming storm, ready to hurl down the long-held barriers he had crafted against it. He pumped his aching cock into Rhiannon, the incredible woman who had shown up without warning and who had won his heart with her improbable courage. His testes drew up into his groin, boiling with seed, his thighs slapping lewdly into the firm flesh of her buttocks.

The feeling came upon him like lightning from a clear sky. He was barely able to gasp out a word of warning.

"Rhiannon..."

"Yes!" she said. Or thought. Or willed.

"Yes!"

With a mighty shout he emptied himself within her, spurting streams of his seed into her waiting womanhood.

****

Afterward, they lay together, Tom's hands clasped around her middle, his mouth close by her ear. His hot breath tickled her, and she gave a deep sigh of contentment, almost a purr.

"When will you leave?" Tom asked. His voice was sad.

She twisted in his arms, turning to face him.

"Leave?" she asked, incredulous. "Why should I leave? Are you so easily satisfied that one morning in my arms is enough, foolish boy?"

"What? No! It was wonderful! But I thought, after all that has happened to you, that you would want to go back to Tyr-Na-Nog. To your own people."

"The people who could not free my from a contract that you managed to unravel in only a few days?" Her voice was scornful. "The ones who abandoned me, who did not seek me out to see whether or not I was well and whole?

"No, I am in no hurry to leave. Besides, beautiful man," she said, arching into his body, her silken skin a flame to his senses, "I seem to have grown rather fond of you. Do you think you would agree to have a fertility goddess in your life for the foreseeable future?"

Tom gaped. Of all the possibilities which he had thought of, this was the last. His best hope was that he would be able to free Rhiannon, and that she might visit him from time to time. If he failed in breaking the contract, he thought that they might be able to reach some sort of balance, with Rhiannon free to come and go as she pleased.

He swallowed. "So, what are you proposing? What kind of relationship? Would I be your boyfriend? Your lover?" He took a deep breath. "Your husband?"

She laughed, high, free and clear, with no hint of mockery. "Poor man. You don't know whether to be terrified or not.

"Husband? No. At least not yet. I have been bound too long to tie myself to another so soon. And are you prepared, Tom, to choose a life at my side? Knowing how long that may last?"

He blinked. "Humans do it all the time. I'm not sure I'm ready to marry, either, but I'm not scared of it."

"Really?" her mouth curved. "Forever?"

"For..." his voice trailed off.

"Oh."

"Oh indeed," she said, voice warm. "I am an immortal. You are not. Humans are not...not prepared for a life as long as we have. There have been exceptions. You may be one. But I am not going to do this on the spur of the moment. You may find that a diet of my milk may sour."

"What? Oh. So it does more than heal?"

"Yes. For instance," she said, "You may discover that your pants no longer fit."

Startled, he groped his waist. Hard muscle met his fingers, rather than the slight bulge of fat which had settled around his middle in recent months.

"Aw, goddammit," he said in mock-disgust. "Now I am going to have to buy new slacks and suits. Shit." He pondered for a moment, then giggled, followed by a bellow of full-throated laughter, loud and mocking.

"The bastard never knew, did he?"

"Knew what?" asked Rhiannon, but a cruel gleam in her eye told him she was following his thought.

"Mick. The sonovabitch took away your...took away your pussy and your clitoris and your nipples. And he never knew that he could have forced you to nurse him and increase his life span, did he?"