Chapter 11
The sensation of the sun on her body and the waves gently rocking her made Zoe sleepy. Only the overpowering presence of Laurene prevented her from drifting to sleep entirely. The Godling was near her constantly now, never leaving her side and her 8 meters tall frame was more than enough to stand on the ground, far below the surface of the sea, and yet tower like a massive slab of stone over it. In fact, opening her eyes, Zoe realized the sea level barely reached the bellybutton of the Godling.
“Why so tall here?” she finally managed to ask, turning in the water to really swim in front of the immense being. “Wouldn’t it be easier for you to either, uh… be way taller or normal sized, if you… if you don’t want to interact with Humans?”
“Hum… I kind of like it. I’m big enough to make it clear I’m more than a mortal. But at the same time, I can interact with people, and especially those that have devoted themselves to me. Sometimes I do require a little more oomph in my appearance, you Humans have quite a narrow vision of what a divine being must look like, Zoe… But when I’m with you, I just like to be mostly normal but taller, so I can protect you.”
The young woman drifted a little closer to the massive body, not looking up at the painfully beautiful face. She allowed herself to approach the womanly forms, almost dangerous in their perfection. Somehow, Laurene seemed to always know exactly how to stand to make the mortal she was crushing hard on slightly uncomfortable. Even now, even hearing the Godling, it felt as if it was an elaborate prank, a joke of celestial proportions that she was the butt off.
“You’re getting worried again, my Zoe,” Laurene gently chided her, a large hand coming and lifting her out of the water to bring her to the pouting face of the Godling. “I know what happened to you makes you doubt your self-worth. It shouldn’t. I understand why you may still have difficulties believing me. But I AM a Godling. What I say should means something to you, my Soulmate.”
“Because you’re all-powerful? It… it doesn’t necessarily makes you, uh… makes you right…”
The Godling’s eyebrows arched up, surprised seemingly by that rebuttal, as weak as it was. She smiled tenderly and shook her head, amused. She brought the tiny woman in her hands to her face and kissed her all over the wet body, one of her fingers twirling the hair of Zoe around it, bringing the head back. She smiled, teasingly, biting her lower lips playfully. Her breathing was quickening.
“I want you, Zoe…” she rasped. “I want to have you in front of my worshippers, so that they may witness the miracle of your existence. Please… Tell me I can…”
Zoe was left speechless. She had never even set foot inside a Church of the Godlings! She possibly never even had taken one of their leaflets about the greatness of their new Pantheon. And now she wanted to… to have sex with her in public, in front of her most devoted worshippers!? She tried to answer but only garbled sounds managed to escape her lips as she felt the blood rush to her face.
“Oh… Too much, too much. Silly Laurene,” the Godling giggled almost innocently. “Sorry my Zoe, you’re just so adorable, and I’ve waited so long to be with you. I’m not the best of my kind when it comes to handling her Soulmate, you know? Or even other Humans or other kinds of mortals… We may need to have me work on it, I guess. If you feel like it, of course.”
“Uuuh… Yeah… it’d… uh… Can’t we just Netflix and chill?”
“Sure!” beamed the Godling and they were back inside of Zoe’s apartment, with Murmurra rushing to push herself against the newcomers, purring loudly and insistently. “Yes, yes, here, your litter is clean and you have food and water little lady. I’ll play with you even” she added when a facet, far smaller, materialized to take care of the cat. “I swear, if you didn’t love her so much, I think I’d remove her, she’s trying to steal you from me.”
“Hey! Not doing anything to my cat!” yelped Zoe, struggling a little in the embrace of the Godling. “You added it to my life, now she’s been a part of it longer than you! No touching now, or else… Or else I… Uh… I…”
She stopped dead in her tracks when she realized that she had somehow flared, surprising herself and even the Godling whose eyes were bulging. Fearfully, Zoe shrank back into the enormous fingers. She felt as if she had made a mistake. That was why Ron had done what he had done to her. Because she had dared to stand her ground against him, even when she had stopped growing for so long, even when she had known she’d never grow larger because of a problem with her growth hormone production.
“I knew it. There still is fire in you, my Zoe,” the Godling cried, her lips forming a shaky but undeniable smile. “It has been dimmed but never died out. Now, we just need to rekindle it fully, right? So we can dispel all those dark thoughts that plague you.”
“I…I… Uh, I don’t think that’s possible, Laurene…” squeaked the little woman.
“We shall try, at the very least, my Zoe” the Godling replied. “And now, what do you want to see? We can have anything really.”
“Well, there was that series, Frieren, but I watched the whole first season already and, uh… The second one isn’t out for now, won’t be for a few months anyway, so… Perhaps something similar and… Uh… why are you looking at me like that?”
“Zoe, you’re adorable, but you keep thinking like I was a Human. Time is nothing to me, my beautiful Soulmate. I can pluck this series from your future and just have it here. It is trivial for me. And I think you’d like it, since you like this series, right?”
“You can’t do that, uh… It’s… it’s not fair…” Zoe fidgeted.
“Not fair? Why should I care about fairness when this world has hurt you so, my Soulmate? I know what you’ll tell if you speak, and it doesn’t convince me. So what if the people working on it haven’t finished yet from your point of view? They will. So what if no one else gets to see that series completed for years and years? They don’t matter to me the way you do, Zoe. You do so much. So much that it hurts me to not be able to only make you experience bliss, you know?”
“But perhaps it’s good to not experience perpetual bliss,” Zoe countered. “And… and I wasn’t thinking about me when I… when I wanted to tell you that. I… I’d like you to… to discover the series, a series, like you could when you were Human. So we could… we could, uh… could enjoy it together, you know? I… I thought it’d… be a good experience for you? So you’d… connect with us more?”
Zoe suddenly found herself sitting on her sofa, next to… a Laurene her size, who was looking away, as if she was ashamed. The small woman was too confused to react for a moment, unable to understand why the Godling would do that. It was only when Laurene nestled against her, her head on her small chest that she reacted and, almost without thinking, hugged her.
“You really are perfect,” the being in her arm mumbled softly, looking up a little at Zoe’s face, through teary eyes. “You care about me like a person still, in spite of everything, and so effortlessly… You’ve no idea how hard it has been for some of us. Loved ones, friends, terrified, awed, worshipping, or simply unable to reconnect with us. As for me…”
“You… uh… You don’t have to say anything if…” Zoe started, but the Godling silenced her with a soft kiss on the lips.
“I was always alone, Zoe. Married young, to a man that didn’t love me, to whom I gave children that never loved me either, always seeing me as too weak, to meek. They were big strong men, all. I was a feeble little thing… When my husband divorced me, because I had dared to exchange a kiss with the neighbour’s wife… My whole life may have been over. It was spite that kept me going… Until you came and saved me.”
“I… haha, I’ve never…” Zoe stuttered, who couldn’t recall anything she had done in the past to warrant such affection from the Godling.
“Yes you did. You came into my life, battling the little delinquents away, and never asking for anything in return. Even when I was odious to you, at first. You may not remember it, but the first time you approached me after chasing the kids away, I shooed you away with a broom! And yet, the following day, you were back to fend them off again, and you did it, again and again, until they had grown old enough to be tired of picking on an old lady.”
“I… I just did what… what felt right?”
“I know you did. And when you stopped coming, because you were getting older and preparing for your life, instead of being saddled with my old self, it’s your memories that kept me going. When I doubted, when I wondered for whatever reason I was even clinging to life, your face popped in my mind. I wanted to see you succeed. Even when I was dying in the hospital bed, with cancer eating at my bones, I held out because I wanted to see you again.”
“You… you were dying? But you’re a Godling!?”
“I wasn’t then, my Zoe,” Laurene gently explained, caressing the side of Zoe’s face. “I was just a very old woman whose time on this Earth was coming to an end. And then, in a split second, I was something so fundamentally different. And yet, you were burning in me, the anchor to this place. Not just your tiny planet, but this whole Universe. Not all of us had those, you know it. Some moved away. And I was lucky to remain here, and to try and make the world a better place. It took a lot of tries, to be honest.”
“What… what didn’t work?” Zoe asked, genuinely curious but also awed by what she was hearing, she had never been able to picture Laurene Beckworth ill, let alone on the verge of death, so hearing that she had almost not become a Godling was shocking.
“We tried brute force. It seemed easy enough, back then. We had all the power in the Universe, we could do whatever we wanted, surely. We took bodies the size of mountains, and we told Mankind what would happen. Then they launched atomic weapons at us, we grew a little angry that they wouldn’t listen and we… lashed out. Each of us protected their Soulmate, of course, but in a split second, we had wiped out most of the Humans. It wasn’t… ideal.”
“Not ideal!? It… billions of…” Zoe gasped, unable to form coherent words.
“I know. I still was one of those who wished to make due with what we had done. At that time, we weren’t as cognizant with our abilities as we are now. We didn’t know we could rewind time, for instance. So, we… decided to preserve our Soulmates, freezing you lots in a sort of ageless sleep, and we tried to make it work. But Humans… the poor things were terrorized by us, you know? They couldn’t even look at us! Understandable but you can’t build a good society on that.”
“For… for how long… the ageless sleep? And… and that attempt?”
“Hum… give or take, a few centuries. Not that very much then, all things considered. But then Ibrahim discovered we could rewind time. It was a very joyous discovery and we agreed to return to the moment after we had gained our powers. It was at that moment that we came to see Time as we do now. Back then, we devised another plan. We divided the Earth into 30 dominions and we tried to create perfect societies.”
“It didn’t work?” Zoe asked, seeing some semblance of sorrow on the tiny Godling’s face.
“No, it did not. Even with gentleness, even with a betterment of everyone’s lives, Humans chaffed - not just you, mind. We had divided the Universe in the same way and it was almost always the same problem with sapient species… It turns out that your mortals are stubborn little things, who would rather suffer and die rather than accept salvation. So… after… more time than the first, when it became clear it wouldn’t work, we went to the drawing board. Again, and again, and again. So many times… And I… I never managed to connect to you.”
“No… not even once?”
“No. You were always afraid of me, terrified, even. No matter my approach, your mind seemed to break under the weight of my very existence. I kept you safe, of course, sleeping and secure, but I saw the others connecting with their Soulmates, again and again, ever more effortlessly. And I couldn’t. I was… dispirited. I even thought about… going Further… Leaving this Universe entirely…”
“I… Uh… I’m glad you didn’t,” Zoe said truthfully. “I… I mean…” she added, blushing, “I’m not sure I know why you’d want to be with me but… uh… My life wasn’t great before but the last few days have been… really good, so, uh.. I… uh…”
She stopped talking and kissed the Godling. It was an impulse, an unthought action, like she used to have before Ron had defiled her. No, not defiled her, she realized. Used her, abused her, but he was the one dirty, not her. She kissed Laurene with a mounting passion, almost purring as she felt the body of the Godling expanding, growing, until she was towering over her, a colossus of curves and power, larger than any Human could be, and yet strangely soothing.
“You still want to do a Netflix and chill, my Zoe?”
“I… I’ve never seen Cowboy Bebop… And it’s a one season only show…”
“Well then… let’s binge watch it. It’s not as if you had any need to wake up early tomorrow, or any other day of your life now” the Godling smiled tenderly, as she nestled the tiny body of Zoe between her large breasts, close enough that she could kiss the top of her head with ease.
As for the small woman, if she was surprised at first, she had to admit that it felt right to be there…