Page 9 of Coiled By the Naga

I drape his coils over me with my own hands so the heat of me reaches as much of him as it can. All season he has warmed and flooded and lit me up from the outside.

Tonight I am the heat, and he takes it from me the way I have taken everything from him, helpless, grateful, with no say in it, and slowly, slowly, the shaking eases and the pits come back up amber against the side of my throat and he is going to live.

It takes a long time. I am in no hurry. I lie in the cold-going-warm length of him and I make the decision I have been circling since I held the kelp and did not let go.

I know what he carries. I have watched it eat him since the dock, the question his pits can put to me a hundred times a night and never answer: whether I am here because of what he does to me, or because of me. He knows every thread that ties me to him is one he spun, and the not knowing whether a single strand of it is mine has been killing him by inches.

I am the only one who can end that. Not with words, because words are cheap and he knows it. Not with my body answering his scent, because his scent is the whole problem. There is no scent on the air tonight; he has nothing left in him to flood me with, and that is the only reason this will mean anything, because whatever passes between us in this room will be only what is actually there.

On the dock, the first day, his pits read me without my leave. Read me ready, read me wanting, priced me like a catch while I stood there hating it, and he has known ever since that his thumb was on the scale.

So I take the scale away. I give him the reading clean, on purpose, the first time in my life it has been mine to give.

I turn in his coils until I am facing him, and I take his face in both my hands, the scaled jaw, the pits gone low and uncertain, and I press my wrist flat against them where the blood runs closest to the skin, and I hold it there, and I let him read me. All of it. Not the wanting his scent makes, because there is none. Just me. My pulse, steady under his pits. The warmth of a body that climbed this stair by choice and is choosing, right now, to be read.

And under it, the thing I have not let myself feel anywhere he could catch it, the thing I have held behind my teeth since the kelp, because it is not fear and it is not heat and it is the truest thing in me.

“Read it,” I tell him. “All of it. I’m not in heat. You’ve got nothing left to flood me with. There is nothing in this room making me do this. Read what’s actually there.”

He reads it. I watch it land, the amber coming up slow along his jaw under my wrist, brightening, climbing, his whole body going still in the way it went still on the dock the first morning, the way a wave goes still at the top of itself before it falls. This is not a thing he has read off me before, because I have never before held still and given it to him with nothing in either of us pulling the weight one way. It goes down the length of him like a current turning over, slow, total, irreversible.

“Say it,” he says, and his voice has gone to almost nothing. “I can read it and I still need to hear you say it.”

“I chose you.” I hold his face and his pits read the truth of it off my pulse in the same breath that I say it, so there is no room anywhere for him to doubt the one against the other. “With the whole sea open behind me and nothing on this earth making me. I let go of the kelp and I came back. For you. That’s what’s there. Read it as many times as you need to.”

And something answers in me to meet the thing that set in him in the lock. I do not have his word for it. He claimed me with his body in a dark I barely lived through. I claim him back now in the warm I made, with my hands on his face and my own choosing driving every part of it, and I feel it close, the second half of a thing that was only ever half done, and it sets, low and certain, mine this time, given and not taken.

He puts his forehead down against mine, the great dangerous weight of him gone careful, warm again now, and for a long time he says nothing at all, because the pits have already told him truer than any word could carry it. He knows. He knows the one thing his body could never read off me, and I gave it to him on purpose, and it cost me nothing I was not glad to spend.

Outside the arch the tide is turning, the way it turns whether anyone reads it or not. I stay where I am, my hand on his face, the child he gave me settling into the body I gave back, and for the first time since my father reached for the salt I am exactly where I have chosen to be. No one sold me here. I came back and stayed, and the only creature alive who could ever have caught me in the lie of that read the truth instead, off a pulse I held still and gave him myself.

EPILOGUE / AUDE

Weeks on, the rot held back behind a north face they shored properly this time, and I have a boat.

He had it built. A small one, shallow, the kind one woman can work alone, and he set it on the dock with no word, the way he left the hand line. I take it out in the grey hours onto the east current and I fish my own water on my own terms and I come back when I choose to, and no one on this coast owns the woman in that boat.

My father has written twice. A courier brought the letters up from the settlement with my name on them in his hand, and both times I read the name on the outside and put the thing on the fire unopened. He sold the catch. He does not get to ask after it now. He will write until he understands that the silence is the whole of my answer, and then he will stop, and either way I am finished spending words on a man who counted me to the coin.

The child shows now, low and certain, and the garrison has stopped going flat to the walls when I pass and started getting out of my way instead, which is a different thing. Respect in the place of fear. I have not decided how I feel about being a thing this place guards, and I am getting used to it, the way I am getting used to a great many things I did not choose and have come to want anyway.

Tonight I go down to him, and I do not go to be taken.

He is coiled along the bench when I come through the arch, and he lifts his head and reads me, and whatever the pits hand him sends the amber up his jaw, but he does not reach for me. He has learned. Since the cold light and my hand on his face he waits to see what I want, and what I want tonight is the one thing this body has never had with him, which is the say.

“Don’t move,” I tell him, and I climb into the coils myself, and he goes still and lets me, the whole enormous length of him holding where it lies while I arrange myself over him the way he has arranged me a hundred times. Except the hands are mine tonight, and not one part of this is his doing, and he is the one waiting to find out what happens to him.

I straddle the place where the man gives way to the serpent, the warm seam of him under me, and I do not take my time the way he would make me. I know these cocks now. I have had them every shape he could give them to me, and tonight I want them as I have never been allowed to, both at once and on my terms.

The slick of him is already on me from the climb into the coils, the compound that taught my body a whole season ago how to open for both.

I reach down and fit the first head to me and sink, and the second, and I take both of them into me in one long stroke down to the root, the stretch enormous and known and mine, and the sound I make is not a sound of a woman being careful. It is the sound of a woman taking what she has decided to take.

He shudders under me, the whole length of him, and his jaw locks on the work of holding still. “Aude.” Just my name, rough, undone.

“I said don’t move.”

He doesn’t. The great dangerous thing that has pinned me and crushed me and bred me into the stone holds dead still under my hands and lets me ride him, and the power of that goes through me hotter than his scent ever did, because this heat is mine, I built it, no one put it in me.