Page 3 of Coiled By the Naga

Then the loops under my knees tip me back and lower my hips toward him, and he follows me down, the man’s torso bending over the bulk of his own coils, and he puts his mouth between my legs, and the first touch of that split tongue on my clit takes the whole room out from under me.

I beg.

I told myself I wouldn’t and I do, inside a minute, because the tongue forks around me and works both sides at once and there is no staying quiet under it. There, there, don’t stop, please, the words running out of me in a string I can’t cut, my hips trying to move and the coils not allowing it, holding me open at the exact angle he wants. He pushes one finger into me, then a second, thick, curling up to a place that takes my sight, and his tongue does not let up. The coils squeeze once around my thighs like a fist closing, and the pressure tips me over.

The first one breaks slow and rolls all the way through me, no edge to it, just a long bright giving-way that leaves me boneless in the loops with my breath sawing. He doesn’t back off. His tongue stays on me through the whole of it and past it, into the oversensitive after, until the next one is climbing before I have come down from the first, sharper now, my thighs shaking against the coils that won’t let them close.

He brings me a third when I would have sworn there was nothing left, and this one he draws out cruelly, his fingers slowed to almost nothing, his tongue patient, pulling it out of me by the root one degree at a time until I am crying with how long it takes. At the end of it I hang slack in the loops, my face wet, my voice scraped to nothing, my body still working around his fingers like it can’t stand to let them go.

He eases the loops open and lowers me until I am settled along the curve of him, the scale cool under my spent weight, and he draws the scent back to the seep, and the difference is the tide going out and leaving me stranded on the sand.

He has touched himself nowhere. I notice it through the wreckage, that he undid me three times and asked for nothing back, and I lie in the proof of it and wait to learn what it was for.

“You did that to me,” I say. It is all I have left and it comes out in pieces.

“I did.” He doesn’t pretend otherwise. The pits have dimmed and the man’s face looks almost tired. “And you begged me. You’ll spend a while hating that both are true.”

He is right, and I have no answer, and having none is its own fresh humiliation.

By the dawn watch every soldier in this garrison will have read it off the air. What he did to me. How much I wanted it by the end. They will flatten to the walls when I pass and drop their eyes, and they will not be wrong about a single thing they tasted.

I lie in the loops of a creature that wrecked me on purpose and listen to the sea come through the arch, the one thing here he has not put his hands on. And there, quiet, where he cannot read it because it is not in my body yet, I start to plan.

AUDE

Iwake alone in my own bed with no memory of the loops setting me down in it, and for one breath my body is quiet and mine. Then I remember, and the fury comes up with no bottom under it.

Not at the taking. I could carry the taking. At the begging. He built the wanting in me and then made me ask for it, three times, in a voice I have never heard come out of my own throat, and the part of me that should be screaming about that is busy somewhere lower, still warm, still glad. That is the thing I can’t forgive. Not him. Me. The way my body thanked him while my head was still saying no.

So I get up and go looking for him, because lying here hating myself is the buyer’s idea of a good morning and I won’t give it to him.

He is in the lower hall where the arch opens on the water, the length of him stacked along a stone bench built to take his weight, a soldier in front of him mid-report. The report stops when I come through the arch. The soldier’s tongue flicks once, finds me, and he leaves without being told. They all know.

“You made me beg.” I don’t lead up to it.

“I did.” He doesn’t look away from me. The pits along his jaw stay low and dark. “Sit. You’ve had nothing since yesterday.”

“How does it work?” Not really a question, the way I say it. A demand. “The scent. You said it’s something you are, not something you do. Then tell me what it does, all of it, because I am finished being walked into things I don’t understand.”

He tells me, and he doesn’t dress it up. The scent comes off him always, a little, the way warmth comes off skin. In rut it pours, and the more of it I breathe the more my body answers, and no, I can’t out-stubborn it, any more than I could hold my breath against the tide. He can push it harder when he chooses. He chose, that night. He can’t make it stop.

“So it gets worse?”

“Until the rut peaks. Yes.”

I watch him while he says it, the way I watch a sky I don’t trust, and I catch it. Just before the word peaks, the pits down his jaw brighten, half a breath, and bank again. The word costs him something, and his body tells on him before his mouth does. I set it aside to keep. A current has a tell before it turns, if you know where to look. So, it turns out, does he.

“And the peak. What happens to me?”

The pits flare and dim. “When the rut crests, my body will want to breed you and hold you in the same motion, and the holding doesn’t know its own strength. The coils close. I have never been able to feel where the edge of it is.” He says it the way you report a reef to a pilot. “I could put them around you and not know I’d gone too far until you’d stopped breathing.”

A woman with sense would be on the next skiff. I haul nets in water that drowns men who don’t respect it and I have never yet stayed on the beach. You don’t beat a riptide by fearing it. You learn where it pulls and you work the edge.

“Then I’ll learn it,” I say. “Your edge. Where the lock starts. You can’t feel it, so I will, because I am very good at reading a thing that can kill me. I’m not staying off the water because you don’t know your own strength.”

His head comes up a fraction, and the wariness in him goes out of his shoulders all at once. The pits warm. And with them the air thickens, his scent climbing without either of us touching it, my own body lifting to it like a sail filling, the wet starting low in me again.

A loop of him has drifted off the bench and across the floor toward my feet while we talked, and I look down and watch it come, slow, like it has nothing to do with the conversation, and I understand he is not entirely choosing it either. I see in his face that he could let the scent climb and have me on the stone bench inside a minute, and that I would beg him for it, and that he knows both.