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I take his hand and place it on Celeste's shoulder to feel her warmth beneath his shaking digits. “I’m showing you now. I'm giving you this gift—the gift of witnessing. Will you take it? Will you watch? Will you learn?"

He looks between us. "I don't know if I can share you."

"You're not sharing. You're being welcomed into the fullness of me." I kiss him, hard, my teeth catching his lower lip and drawing a bead of blood that I lick away. “You will witness her hunger for me and when I tell you—join."

I turn to Celeste as we come together like lightning finding ground. Her mouth tastes of salt and the particular copper-sweetness of female want. Her hands are at my wrap before mine are at her dress, and then we're both bare in the dying light. She's magnificent—long and lean, but muscular. I swipe my tongue across my lower lip as I admire her small perky breasts with pert nipples. My gaze moves down to her flat belly until I finally find her waxed pussy smooth and already glistening. Her arousal has bloomed so brazenly that my mouth waters. After five years of owning her body, I know exactly what I'm going to do to her.

I push her back onto the porch swing as the chains creak. I drop to my knees between her thighs, refusing to tease. Reluctant to wait, I feast.

My mouth latches onto her burgeoning clitoris, and I suck—my licks languid as my tongue moves to her dripping honey hole and curls inside her.

“Addie! Please! Mmmmm,” she begs and cries out as I hold the strings to her sexual euphoria. I relish finding the places no human tongue reaches, pressing against them until she bucks and swears and grabs fistfuls of my hair. Her taste is like her smell, uniquely feminine and divine. She drips a nectar only women make, and I take all of it, lapping at her fleshy pussy, sucking at the hard bud of her until she's shaking.

"Addie—" Her thighs clamp around my head. "Please. Please, Addie⁠—"

I look up with my mouth full of her and find Malik frozen three feet away. His hand is pressed flat against the ridge in his slacks. His dark gold-threaded orbs are glazed, and he's breathing like he's been running.

“I want you naked and stroking yourself," I demand, my face glistening with her juices. "Show me how much you want this."

He obeys. His hands go to his belt, then his zipper, as he finally frees himself. His thick rod is hard as steel with precum pooling at the mushroom-shaped tip. Celeste inhales as he wraps his fist around his shaft and starts to stroke himself slowly from base to tip at first. Then faster, as I lower my mouth back to Celeste and drive her higher, slipping one finger in her wet pussy, then two, and finally a third as her cries of bliss climb the register toward screaming. She's always been loud. Unashamed and female in her pleasure in a way that claims power. She doesn't muffle it nor apologize. Celeste has never been mild or meek about her submission. She screams my name to the marsh, to the sky, to the fireflies gathering thicker now around the porch lights. I feel her climax building in the tremor of her thighs and in the way her sex flutters around my tongue. I bite the inside of her thigh—not deep, just enough to mark and let her feel my teeth.

She comes with a cry that echoes across the water. Her body arches off the swing. Her hands tangle in my hair. Her essence floods my mouth, and I drink down every drop. The taste of her is woven into me the way it has been a hundred times before. I look at Malik; his fist is a blur. His face is twisted with need, and his jaw is clenched as his whole body shakes on the edge.

"Come here," I say. "Come finish inside me; we need you."

He stumbles forward, still stroking his dick with his trousers around his thighs, eyes wild with lust. I rise from between Celeste's legs with my mouth and chin glistening. I kiss him, letting him taste her on my tongue. Making sure he understands that in my bed and my body, there's no separation. Only weaving. I turn and bend over Celeste, where she lies spent on the swing, bracing my hands on either side of her hips, presenting myself to him. "Now, husband. Take me!”

Doing as he’s told, he enters me with a sound that's a mixture of a sob and snarl. I’m soaked, ready to receive him. He's hard as iron when he enters me, going balls deep on the first thrust. I relish the feel of him bottoming out as his hips slam against the heavy curve of my ass. He grips my hips and finds the rhythm I taught him. His body crashing into me like the tide. His strokes beat me like the drums, driving me forward into Celeste until my breasts drag across her stomach and my mouth is at her throat.

My teeth sink into the pulse below her jaw, and her blood fills my mouth. She’s sweeter than normal, as if the presence of Malik heightened her release and the taste of her blood on my tongue. I feed while Malik fucks me. His thrusts shove me against the wound and make me drink harder, while Celeste moans and arches under my mouth, cumming again from the feeding alone.

I climax around him with her blood in my throat—a long rolling wave of release that clenches me down on his length and drags a shout out of him. I finally feel him spill into me, pulse after pulse, his hands bruising my hips with his forehead pressed between my shoulder blades.

For one long moment the three of us are a single thing—bound by one hunger, one pleasure, one weaving. As we slowly come down from the high of our lovemaking, I lick Celeste's throat closed. Malik slides out of me, and we fold down onto the porch boards in a tangle—three bodies and souls with limbs everywhere. His hand finds Celeste's breast and rests there, learning the feel of her as his other hand is in my hair.

"Do you understand now?" I ask him.

"I understand." His voice is barely there. "You're infinite, and in your abundance, resides room for all of us."

Celeste reaches over and laces her fingers through his. "Welcome to the family, day husband."

"Ours," I say, and the fireflies descend around us in their thousands to celebrate, witness, and thread us together in light.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

DREAMS OF HOME

Idreamed, but it wasn't like other dreams. It was vivid and tactile. I felt more alive in this dream than I did when I was awake. I stood in a compound of red earth walls under a sky so blue it hurt my eyes. The air smelled of cooking fires and something sweet I couldn't name. Chickens scratched in the dust while somewhere a radio played highlife. Though I'd never been here, I knew this place the way I knew my own hands.

"Malik."

I turned and saw my grandmother standing in the doorway of the main house. She was not frail and gray in a hospital bed in Lewisham as I'd last seen her. She wasn’t surrounded by machines that beeped and dripped but couldn't save her. The woman before me was young, thirty, maybe. She was similar to the age in the photographs from London in 1963. Fiercely strong and breathtakingly beautiful. She wore the same kente cloth she'd been buried in, and she smiled at me with teeth that were whole and white.

"Nɔvi," she said. "You've found her."

"Grandma." My voice broke on it.

She came to me across the compound and took my hands. Her skin was warm and dry, exactly as I remembered. "I've been waiting for this. Praying for this since before you were born. I knew you'd find the Adze. I knew you'd find love."