Aude
The door opens with no knock and I am off the bed and on my feet before I decide to move, because my body knew he was on the stairs before my ears did. That is the first thing he has taken from me tonight. The warning my own skin used to give only me, it gives him now too.
“Get out,” I tell him.
He comes in. The coils pour through the door behind the man’s half of him and keep coming, more of him than the room should hold, and he shuts the door with the last of his length and leans the bulk of himself against it.
The small stone room fills with the wet violet weight of him.
He doesn’t say anything. He looks at me the way I look at water I am about to work, reading the set of it, and the pits down the side of his face burn up bright.
Then he opens the scent up, and I learn he was holding it closed.
What hit me on the dock was the seep of him. This is the flood. It fills the room and there is no arch wide enough to carry it out, and it goes into me through everything that breathes, and my body lights from the inside like a lamp someone else is turning up.
The wet that opened in me on the dock comes back tenfold and runs down the inside of my thigh.
My nipples draw up so hard it aches. The wanting climbs out of my belly into my chest and up my throat until I can taste it, and none of it, not one degree, did I light.
He is doing it. I can feel him doing it, and knowing the hand on the dial is his does not cool me by a breath.
It makes it worse. It makes me clench on nothing and want to weep.
“Stop,” I say, and my voice has gone wrecked already, low and thick, begging for the opposite of the word it’s saying. “Stop doing it. I can feel you doing it.”
“I know you can.” He comes off the door. “That’s the point of it.”
A coil takes my ankle, cool and slick, the wet of him sliding onto my skin, and where it touches the wanting doubles, because the scent is thickest on him and now it is on me.
The loop climbs my calf, my knee, and another comes around my waist and lifts, and the floor leaves my feet.
I get one hand flat on the scaled chest to push and the push moves nothing, and that does something to me I will be ashamed of for the rest of my life.
He has me off the ground in a cage of muscle that could close and end me, and my body reads being unable to run as the safest thing it has felt since before the debt. It goes soft for him. I hate that it does, and I tip my head back to give him my throat anyway.
“There she is,” he says, low, against my jaw. Not cruel. Worse than cruel. Pleased. “Fight me all you want. Your body already answered.”
“Because you’re making it.”
“Yes.” His tongue drags up the side of my throat, split, the two tips moving apart over my skin, and I make a sound I have never made. “And you’ll beg me anyway. Not because I made you. Because you can’t help it.”
He doesn’t fuck me. I brace for it, and some part of me wants it, the wanting has gone that far, and he doesn’t. He holds me spread in the coils, off the ground, my legs drawn open by two loops under my knees so I could not close them if my life hung on it, and he puts his mouth on me instead.
The man’s mouth at my breast first, the split tongue working one nipple while a scaled thumb rolls the other, the coils holding me dead still so every touch lands with nowhere to flinch to.
I am a held thing being learned. He takes his time.
The pits read what each touch does to me and he follows it back, mouth and hands returning to whatever made me jerk hardest in the loops, and I am giving him every secret I have without a word, because my body cannot keep one from a creature that reads heat.
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.