Page 10 of Coiled By the Naga

I find my rhythm, not his. Slower than he wants. Deeper. I roll my hips at the bottom of every stroke and grind both of him across the places I learned by heart in a whole season of being taken there, the left one forward against the front wall of me, the right one back, the two pressures meeting in the center of me where every grind throws a jolt straight up through my clit until my thighs shake. I take him apart by inches and I make him watch me do it.

I have learned the two of him do not feel the same. The left answers to pressure; when I clench around it deliberate and slow he hisses through his teeth and the coils twitch under me and go still again because I told them to. The right answers to heat; I warm my palm against the scale of his chest and lay it where I am joined to him and he makes a sound that has no language in it at all.

I play them. I make them take turns. I make the creature who read my body like an open chart for a season lie still while I read his right back, and find every place he cannot keep quiet about, and use them.

“Please,” he says, which is a word I have never once heard him spend, and the pits are wild and bright along his jaw and his hands are flat on the stone where I can see them, digging in, not touching me, because I have not told him he can. “Aude. Please.”

“No.” I do not speed up. “You made me beg through three of these and you never once hurried for me. I am in no hurry at all.” And I am not. I ride him slow and filthy and complete, and I drag my nails down the seam where his torso becomes the serpent, the ridge I learned makes him lose the last of himself, and he breaks under me, the sound tearing out of him with no shape to it, his hips straining up against the order to be still and only just obeying, and I have never felt anything like being the one who breaks him.

When I take myself over it is on my own terms, grinding down to the root at the angle I picked, my own hand where I want it, both of him buried so deep I feel them in my teeth. And as it breaks through me, long and hard and entirely mine, I do the thing my hand learned in the dark, except this time I send it, on purpose. I press my wrist to the pits along his jaw and I let him read me come.

Let him read that all of this, the having and the taking and the riding and the choosing, is mine and real and nothing he made. That is what finishes him. Not the heat of me. The reading of it.

His whole length goes taut under me and he spills into me with my pulse in his pits and my name broken open in his mouth and his hands fisted on the stone where I left them, and I hold him exactly where I want him held until the last of it wrings out of us both.

After, when I let him, he wraps me in the coils, the keeping hold and never again the killing one, warm now, all the way through, the heat I gave him on the cold floor of this room come back to him for good. I lie in the cradle of a thing that would die before it harmed me, and that nearly died for being unable to reach me, and I listen to the sea come through the arch.

In the morning I will take the boat out on the grey current and fish the water I have read my whole life, and I will come back because I choose to. To a creature who waits to be told what I want. To a garrison that knows my name and not my designation. To a child I chose, settling under my hands. No one sold me here. No one can carry me off it, either, because I tried the open sea with the whole way out in front of me, and I turned back, and I would turn back again.

I was handed onto this dock like a thing with a price. I stand on it now because it is mine. That is the whole of the difference, and it is everything, and the sea, which never once lied to me, comes in at the turn of the tide and agrees.

Not ready to be released from the Naga’s coils?

The thing that holds this coast has never once been the one who needed saving.

Then the sea takes him, cold-blooded and sinking, and the woman he was sold is the only soul on the water who can pull him out, and she has to decide whether she will.

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