Page 5 of Coiled By the Naga

“Look at you.” His tongue drags up my throat, the fork of it moving over me in two wet lines. “Begging for fingers. You’re going to scream for the rest of it.”

He draws his hand free, and the loss of it pulls a sound out of me I am not proud of. Then he lifts me and turns me in the coils like I weigh nothing, because to him I do, the whole of me rearranged in the air with no effort I can feel, and the ease of it works on me the same way, the handling of me like something light and his.

He rolls me face down over a thick loop of himself with my hips canted up and my arms still bound and my cheek against cool scale, and I feel the blunt head of him for the first time, one of the two, pressing up against me from behind.

The size of it stops the breath I have left. There is no taking that. There is. My body knows it before I do, opening, the compound and the wet and his slow pressure making room where there is no room, and he feeds it into me an inch at a time and talks the whole way.

“That’s it. Open up. Take it.” Not sorry. Not careful past what my body needs. He is not asking my pardon for what he is, the way his eyes did the first morning. He is working his cock into me by degrees and he is pleased, and the pleased is what wrecks me. “Good. There. All the way now.”

“All of it,” I beg, because the want has eaten my shame whole. “Give me all of it, please, please.”

“You’ll take what I give you.” And he gives it, the rest, until I am full past sense and the loop bears down across my back to hold me to it, and then he moves me.

The coils do the moving. He lifts me off himself and turns me again, onto my back this time, folded nearly in half with my knees up by my own shoulders and held there, wide open, and he slides back into me at a new angle that punches a cry out of me, and he does it again, and again, moving me into a different way in, a different depth, my body a thing he turns and seats and turns again on his cock while I hang in the loops and take it.

On my side, one knee hauled up and held. Curled into him with my back to his chest and his hand splayed over my belly where he is moving inside me, so he can feel himself through me. Bent backward over a loop with my throat bared to the ceiling and the blood gone to my head.

He moves me and uses me and moves me again, taking his time between, never rushing, settling me into each new shape and seating himself deep before he begins again, and I lose track of how many ways he has had me. He has me every way one cock can have me and I never lift a finger to help, because I can’t, because he won’t let me, because being moved is the whole of it now and I am sobbing from how good it is to have no say.

And through all of it the flat of his tail tip has found my clit and stayed there, wet, working me in slow circles that never break rhythm no matter how he turns me, and I learn what it means that his nerves run his whole length, that he feels my pulse through the end of his own tail and uses it, pressing harder the instant I clench, always there, always exactly where I can’t stand it.

And he times the squeeze to it. Every drive up into me, the coils close, the air goes out of me, my vision dims at the corners, and on every withdrawal they ease and the breath rushes back in on a wave that breaks straight through my cunt. Crushed and fucked on the same beat. Breathing only when he allows it.

The first one doesn’t build the way it should, with warning, with a climb; it just arrives, slammed up out of me on the same stroke that takes my air, so that I come in the dark behind my own eyes with no breath to make a sound of it, and he reads it off me before I have it and bears down harder and drives me up into the next before my lungs are even full again.

Somewhere past counting I stop making words. The squeeze takes them before they form, each one knocked out of me half-shaped, and what is left is lower than speech, dragged up from under my ribs on the breath he keeps rationing, please and yours and more run together into one sound, and his voice is in my ear the whole time, low and filthy and certain, telling me he can feel his own seed climbing in him, that he is going to put it so deep in me it never comes back out, that I am going to carry it whether I beg him to or not, how he feels my cunt clamp every time he says it, whose, say it, whose.

At some point my free hand finds his jaw. I don’t decide to do it. My fingers settle over the pits along his face the way they settle on a rope without my looking, and the amber pulses hot against my palm, and I read the change in him the half-second before it reaches the rest of me. I don’t notice I’m doing it. My hand knows him now, the way it knows water, under thought, and it has stopped asking me first.

“Yours.” It tears out of me. No hesitation left anywhere in me. “Yours, yours, I’m yours.”

He finishes deep with a sound that is nothing a man could make, the heat of him flooding up into me where none of it can leave, and the coils close around me through it, not the killing close, the keeping one, every loop of him pressed to every inch of me, and I hang in the cage of him wrecked and full and breathing in the little he allows and, God help me, happier than I have been since the day my name was on a debt.

He brings me down slowly. The loops loosen by degrees, the breath comes easier, and he sets me into a cradle of himself with my back against the cool of his lower length, and the compound hums under my skin where every coil has been.

Later, in my own bed, the scent fading out of me and my mind coming back, the shame arrives as it always does. But it has changed shape. The first night I was ashamed my body wanted him. Tonight I am ashamed of something worse and truer. It wasn’t only my body.

Some part of me that is all the way me, that no scent of his put there, has started to want the cage. Has started to feel safe held in the one set of arms in the world that could crush me to nothing.

AUDE

Istart going down to the water before the garrison wakes, in the grey hour when the watch turns and the stair is empty, because it is the one piece of the day that belongs to me.

He leaves the dock to me. He told me without telling me, the first morning I went down and found a hand line coiled on the planks and a bait pail beside it. No note, no word, just the tools left where a fisherwoman would find them. He gives me the water and stays off it. It is the nearest thing to courtship he has in him, and he has no idea how well it lands.

So I fish. Badly at first, with garrison tackle and no boat, casting off the end of the dock into the east current I marked the day they brought me here. Then less badly. The fish are the same fish. The current runs the way it ran under the skiff, the kelp holds what kelp always holds, and my hands remember the work even when the rest of me has forgotten how to want anything that isn’t him. For an hour before the garrison wakes I am only a woman reading water, and the reading is clean, and none of it is his.

I don’t think about how far the sound of me carries. A woman in heat, alone, at the waterline, where the scent of her runs out over open water with nothing to stop it. I am thinking about the set of the current. I am not thinking past it.

The garrison wakes around me when I climb back up, and I have begun to see it for what it is. Not a household. A wound the cliff has clamped shut and refuses to let bleed out. Every body on the walls faces the land, where the rot comes from, and the talk in the halls is all of the north face, where the corruption has eaten three spans of cliff this season and the soldiers shore it up by night and lose ground by day. They are holding a line that is moving toward them.

I came here thinking I’d been sold into a man’s house. I was sold onto a battlefield, and the man whose house it isn’t carries more weight and less time than I understood.

And he is getting slower. I see it in him now as plain as a change in the weather. The rut is climbing toward its peak and taking pieces of him with it, his attention, his speed, the edge a commander needs. I watch him miss a beat on the north wall he would not have missed a week ago, and a younger soldier catch it for him, and I see his jaw set at the cost of being caught. His body is bending all its strength one way, toward me, and the line is paying for it.

I should feel safer, knowing what I cost him. I feel the opposite. The more of his strength bends toward me, the more I understand I have become a hole in the wall of a place that buries its dead, and something in me that has no business caring has started to care.

That is the part that frightens me, climbing the stair from the water one grey morning with salt on my hands and a thing turning over in my body I have not had before. Not the wanting he builds. Something my own, deeper down. My blood has changed. I have read enough cycles in enough women, and in myself, to know the shape of it coming. The heat that is mine, not his. The fertile one. It is days off, and it will be different, and for the first time I am not sure I want to be talked down from it.