Chapter 6 - Mouth and Monster

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I checked the vines when I arrived. Everything holding, and I can hardly believe it. My magic held through the night, through whatever dreams make a warchief twitch in his sleep. The vines are mine. They work.

I am going to put my mouth on him.

That's the plan. I made the plan on the trail here, stepping over roots in the dark, my heart slamming against my ribs the whole way. The other warriors talk about this. Cochitl bragged about her mate last moon, three cups of pulque deep, telling the whole fire circle how she put her mouth on him and he begged. The others laughed. I laughed too, late, the way you laugh when you don't understand the joke but you need them to think you do.

Open mouth. Use tongue. Don't use teeth. Cochitl was emphatic about the teeth.

Cochitl's mate is human. Five and a half feet. Regular.

Brath is something else entirely. I held him yesterday. Measured him against my hands, my wrist, the inside of my thigh on the walk home. That does not fit inside me, not dry, not without preparation. So I need to get him wet. I need to get myself wet.

That is what I tell myself on the walk here. That is what I am telling myself now, kneeling between his legs with my pulse in my throat.

His cock is hard before I touch it. I don't know if he was waiting or if the sound of my footsteps did it and I don't care because the sight of it makes my stomach drop and heat settle between my thighs. Dark green, darker than the rest of him, and the veins running the length of it are red and purple, thick, pulsing under the skin. The head is flushed almost black, the shaft curving slightly left. In the fungal light the colors are obscene. The other warriors joke about orc cocks the way they joke about bad weather. I am looking at one and it is not a joke. My fingers didn't close around it last time. They won't close around it now.

"Hold still." I point at his hips. "Don't move. I'm in charge."

He grunts. One low sound. It could mean anything. I decide it means obedience.

My voice is steady. My hands are not. My hands are shaking the way they shook the first time I summoned a vine, that sick trembling that means something is about to go wrong or right and I cannot tell which.

I kneel between his legs. The moss is damp and warm under my knees. His heat is different from the grotto's. The loincloth is pushed aside where I left it last time, bunched against his thigh. My bra strap slips off my shoulder and I don't fix it.

My mouth opens. My tongue touches the head and his whole body locks.

Every vine on his body goes taut at once. The chest wrap strains, the wrist bindings pull, the throat vine snaps tight enough that the thorns dig visible points into his neck. His legs cord with muscle and the vine around his left ankle creaks and I feel the vibration through my knees, pressed against his thigh.

He catches himself and holds. He is shaking with micro-tremors. I feel them in my lips.

"Good," I say, pulling back. My voice sounds like someone else's. "Stay."

I take more of him. The width stretches my jaw and I breathe through my nose and adjust the angle and take more and my eyes water and I pull back and try again. Cochitl made this sound easy. Cochitl is a liar. My jaw aches. He makes a sound. I take more.

The sound is low and guttural, a sound I have never heard from anything that size and he is making it because I have him like this. Me. The runt. The one they sent to clear trails because she couldn't catch anything alive, and now I have a monster in my mouth and the monster is shaking.

I learn in real time. My tongue flat against the underside, pressing the vein, and he shudders. My lips tight around the head, suction, my hand working what my mouth can't reach, and that is better. His fingers gouge the rock beside his hips and I hear stone crack. My tongue on the spot below the head where the skin pulls taut. His hips jerk, and I pull back and say "No."

I slap his hip. The crack echoes off the grotto walls and my own palm stings and I cannot believe I just did that. "I said no." His hips drop and he holds. He holds because my vines hold him. Because the thorns at his throat press their points into flesh and he obeys.

My hand and mouth find a rhythm, sloppy and imperfect. I edge him the way I did with my hands, building until the vines strain and his breathing goes ragged, then I stop. Pull away. The warm air hits his wet skin and his cock twitches and his body fights to stay still and the throat vine digs its thorns deeper.

I stop him three times. Three times the most dangerous orc on the border shakes because I say so. Every edging builds it higher. Every sound he makes pulls wet between my thighs. I keep going.

Something moves outside the grotto.

It is heavy. The ground shifts under my knees with impacts, weight landing. Something massive dragging itself through the undergrowth, close, close enough that I hear branches snap and the wet thud of weight settling against earth.

We freeze.

My mouth is on him. His cock is against my tongue, slick, throbbing. We both hold our breath. His amber eyes are fixed on the grotto entrance, the gap between root buttresses where the dark gets darker, and he heard it before I did. He is still. The way things go still before they kill something.

The insects have stopped. The tree frogs have stopped. The rain is hitting something out there, something new.

It passes. Whatever it is drags itself north, the impacts fading, the insects returning. A tree frog chirps. Then another.

I look down at him. He looks up at me.

I go back to him.

My mouth finds him again. My hands find him. The danger is out there and I am in here and I would rather die in this grotto with this monster in my mouth than go back to Tlaxoan and be the runt who never caught anything. I have caught him. My vines hold him. My mouth holds him. He is mine and the jungle can send whatever it wants.

I edge him one more time. He makes the sound again, the low one, the one that vibrates through my teeth, and I want to hear it again. A muffled grunt comes from under me. One syllable. It might be a word. It might be my name. I don't know and I don't care.

I pull away. Wipe my mouth with the back of my hand. My thong is soaked. Has been since I knelt down. Every sound he made, every time the vines strained and held, every time his body fought against my vines. I am dripping and he hasn't touched me once and that is going to change.

He is my prisoner. I can use him.

I climb. My knees on either side of his head, my thighs shaking, and I pull the thong aside and lower myself onto his mouth. His tusks press against my inner thighs, hard, warm, the curve of them fitting into the crease where my legs meet my hips. His mouth is hot. His tongue is wider than my hand.

"Lick."

My voice cracks. I don't care. I am sitting on the face of a warchief and giving him a one-word order and this is either the bravest or the stupidest thing I have ever done. Cochitl would die. The whole tribe would die.

He does.

His tongue is rough and textured, like wet hide, and wide enough to cover me in a single stroke. The first sweep runs the full length of me, base to clit, and my legs nearly give out. One pass and I am buckled forward, hands slamming the root wall, because that tongue is huge and rough and it drags across everything at once. He doesn't know what he's doing any more than I did ten minutes ago. He doesn't need to. The width of it, the texture, the sheer wet heat of his mouth against me. One stroke does what fingers would take ten.

"Again," I say. "Slower."

He tries again. Slower. That rough tongue pressing flat, dragging, and when it catches the spot where everything gathers I buck against his face and hear my own voice, high, strangled, a sound I did not plan. The throat vine shifts. Thorns prick the back of my thighs where they rest against his neck. He learns me the way I learned him, by the sounds I make. His tongue sweeps again, rough and wide and soaking, and I am shaking so hard my vision blurs.

"Right there. Don't stop. Don't you dare stop." The commands are coming out messy now, falling apart in my mouth. I can hear myself and I sound wrecked.

I grind against his mouth. Tusks against my thighs, thorns at his throat, that massive rough tongue working in long wet strokes.

I lean forward. His cock is right there, hard, slick, twitching against his stomach. I take him in my mouth again. Both of us at once, my mouth on him, his mouth on me.

His tongue drags rough and wide and I moan around his cock and the vibration makes his hips jerk and the vine at his ankle creaks and neither of us stops. I suck him deeper, my jaw aching, and his tongue presses flat against me and sweeps and my thighs clamp against his head. I edge him with my mouth while he licks me in long soaking passes that make my spine liquid.

His tongue drags rough across me and my stomach clenches and my thighs lock against his tusks and it HITS. My muscles seize. Everything below my navel contracts so hard my vision whites out and I gush, hot, wet, soaking his chin, his throat, the vine at his neck. A noise tears out of me, muffled by his cock, an animal sound I have never made. I grip the root wall so hard my knuckles pop. My hips buck. I can't stop them. I am squirting on his face and I didn't know I could do this.

I shake. I am shaking so hard I bite down and he grunts and I open my jaw and gasp around his shaft and my abs are still contracting, still pushing it out of me in pulses, and his tongue keeps going, wet and wide, lapping through it, and my arms are giving out and I hold on. I hold on because if I let go I will collapse and his cock will fall out of my mouth and I have more to take from him. I want more.

I don't stop sucking. I am shaking so hard I can barely hold him but I don't stop. He is close. I can feel it in the way his thighs cord, the way the vines scream, the way his tongue falters on me. I edge him one more time. Pull my mouth off. He makes the sound, the low one, broken, and his hips strain up and I press my hand flat against his stomach and hold him there on the edge. His tongue is still on me, sloppy now, desperate, licking me through the aftershocks while his cock throbs against my cheek.

I stay where I am on top of him, his face wet with me, my face wet with him. Both of us breathing hard, the grotto thick with the smell of us, and I am still shaking. His tongue makes one more slow rough pass and I shudder from my scalp to my toes.

His cock twitches against my lips, hard and thick and slick with my spit, throbbing. He hasn't finished. I didn't let him.

I swing my leg over and turn. My thighs are shaking so badly I nearly fall, but I get myself upright, straddling his hips instead of his face, and his cock is between us, wet, huge, pressing against me. His amber eyes find mine. His face is soaked. I must look the same.

I reach between us, take him in my hand, and line him up.

"You're going to take all of me," I say, telling him, telling myself. The Amazons drag their mates home. I dragged mine. I am an Amazon.

My voice comes out steady. The steadiest it's been all night.

"Don't move."