Erin stopped talking; John had his finger to her lips. He brushed her hair aside and ran a hand down one cheek and a wingtip down the other. Then he said something that made her blush--no one had ever spoken this way to her before, either pre- or post- transformation.
"I'm sorry Erin, but I can't tell you how beautiful you are," he said, kissing her cheek briefly, then moving in close, to whisper right in her ear. "There aren't words for it." He bit her earlobe gently, and spoke again. "Language hasn't come far enough...hundreds of thousands of years of development--" he paused to kiss her jaw--"and the best I could do with the limitations of human expression is a crude attempt falling pathetically--" again he paused while he kissed her--"short of the mark. It would be a great disservice to you to craft some ineffectual simile. I've seen the old gods in visions, Erin, in the trances of magic--" he kissed her again, on the lips this time, with a strangely gentle passion, caressing her arachnid body and one of her legs--"And the mother goddess cloaks herself in the green of envy when she looks at you..."
In a fierce moment of animal passion, Erin wrapped a couple of her legs around him and returned his kiss, expelling years of pent-up deprivation and longing in a frenetic display of sensuality. "Do you really mean that?" she asked when she finished, breathing a little heavily.
John ran a wingtip down her face, tracing her jawline with the feathered appendage. "I do," he said softly. "After all, how do you think I knew what you looked like before a so-called 'blind date'? I thought the goddess was the pinnacle of beauty until she showed you to me, and even the daimonic vision pales next to the reality."
