Aude
Three days, and the scent is in everything now. The stone, the air on the stair, my own skin when I wake. He floods the whole garrison without trying and I live inside it, and there is no walking from a thing that is in the walls.
I last as long as I can. I tell myself I am going down to the lower hall to learn his edge, the way I said I would, and that is even half true.
The other half is that my body has been climbing toward him for three days and tonight it will not be talked down, and I am soaked through my trousers before I reach the bottom of the stair, the wet of me cooling on my thighs in the sea air and going hot again the instant his scent thickens.
The lower hall is his own ground, off the watch routes, where no soldier comes uncalled, and at this hour it is only him and the sea through the arch.
He is coiled along the bench when I come through, and he lifts his head and reads me, and whatever the pits hand him sends the amber up his jaw all at once.
“Say it,” he says. Low. He doesn’t move toward me. He makes me bring it. “You didn’t come down here for my edge.”
“I came for both.” Even now I won’t give him all of it.
“Then learn this one first.” The coils come for me across the floor, and I let them.
He has me off my feet before I’ve crossed the room.
A loop takes my ankles, another my waist, and the floor is gone and I am lifted into the middle of him, into a cage of muscle thick as my own body, and the first thing he does is close it.
Not all the way. He draws the coils in around me until they meet my skin everywhere at once, my legs, my hips, my belly, a loop banded across my chest under my arms, and then he draws them in further, and the give goes out of the air in my lungs.
My ribs take the pressure. My next breath comes shorter than the last, and the one after that shorter still, and I understand that he can do this, that he can take my breathing away from me by degrees and hand it back when he wants, and the understanding does not frighten me as it should.
It pours down through me and pools between my legs and I hear myself make a sound, thin, helpless, want.
He holds me there a moment without doing anything else, just holds me, the loops settled to my skin and the pressure even all over me, and lets me feel it.
Lets me feel that there is no part of me he is not touching and no direction I could go if I tried.
The sea comes through the arch, loud, the only other thing in the room, and I hang in the middle of him with my breath rationed and my whole weight given over to a creature who has not even begun, and the waiting is its own torment.
I do not want him to wait. I am furious that I do not want him to wait.
He feels it the instant it happens, the squeeze turning the fight in me to something else, and the pits read it off me, and his coils answer, drawing in another notch.
I gray at the edges for a breath and come back wetter than before.
“You go soft when you can’t breathe,” he says against my jaw.
“When you can’t get loose. I felt your cunt clench on nothing just now, Aude. ”
“Stop reading me,” I get out, what little air he leaves me shaping the words badly.
“No.” He strips my clothes with the loops, the wet fabric dragged off me and dropped, and then there is nothing between his scale and my skin and the compound that sheens him is on me everywhere, soaking in, lighting up nerve after nerve until the air itself is friction.
“I’m going to read everything you feel and give you more of it.
Hold still. Not that you can do anything else. ”
I can’t. That is the thing my body keeps coming back to and keeps coming around.
I cannot move. He has my legs drawn wide on two loops and my arms pinned and my whole weight held off the ground, and I have no work to do and nowhere to fall and no say in any of it, and somewhere under the heat the part of me that has never once set its own weight down does, and goes soft with a relief that is almost grief.
He works me open with his fingers first, the scaled hand spreading me, one thick finger pushing into me where I am already running wet, then a second, and the coils hold me so dead still that there is nowhere to flinch from it, no way to ride up or pull back, only the slow filthy stretch of him opening me on his hand.
He does it slowly. He has nowhere to be and nothing to prove and the slowness is deliberate, his fingers working into me and curling and dragging back and pushing in again, learning the give of me, while the loop across my chest keeps my breath shallow and my head swimming and the want winding higher with every unhurried pass.
My hips try to chase his hand and the coils do not let them move a finger’s width. I can only take what he gives at the speed he gives it. I beg before I have decided to. “Now. I need it now.” The words are out before I can stop them.
“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.