Chapter 7 - The Little Jaguar

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She turns around on top of me. Her thighs are shaking, slick, and I can taste her on my lips and my chin and the vine at my throat. She swings her leg over and settles on my hips and my cock is between us, wet with her spit, pressed against the heat of her. She is soaked.

The rib wound is gone. A pink scar where a killing wound was. The vines are warm against my skin, and they pulse when she's close. My body is at full strength and the cocoon is absurd, a patchwork of green thread across a body that fought a rock troll and lived.

Her hand closes around my cock and lines me up. The head presses against her and the heat is different from everything, wetter, more alive. This is her body opening and the heat of it against the head of my cock takes my vision.

"Don't move."

Her voice is the steadiest it has been. Her thighs are still shaking.

"It will not fit," I say.

Her eyes snap to mine. "What."

"You are small. I am not. I have broken women larger than you." The words taste wrong in my mouth. I am not supposed to warn prey. "Do you have any idea what you are doing?"

Her jaw sets so hard I hear her teeth click. "You're going to take all of me," she says. Not a question. Not a negotiation.

"Little one-"

"I am not little." She presses down. The head pushes against her and I watch her face change and I watch her refuse to stop. "I am an Amazon. I have mounted jaguars bigger than you."

She has not mounted anything bigger than me. We both know it.

She presses down. The head pushes in and the pressure is so tight my vision goes white at the edges. She is too small for this. My cock is thicker than her wrist and she is forcing it into her body one inch at a time, teeth gritted, face twisted, shaking, and she will not stop. I feel her stretch around me, wet and impossibly tight, her body gripping me so hard every nerve in my shaft fires at once. She drops another inch and I feel something in my spine unlock and my hips want to snap up into her the way I took Durga, one thrust, all the way, and something breaks.

The thought arrives from somewhere I didn't know I had: little jaguar. She is small and vicious and shaking. I have killed jaguars. This one has me in a cage.

My hands find the wrist wraps. Fresh growth layered over older breaks, warm and damp against my skin. I grip them. Thorns bite my palms. If I hold the vines, I cannot hold her.

She sinks lower and takes more. Her face twists with pain, then past pain, her hands pressing flat against my chest, palms against the vine-wrap, thorns poking her skin too. She doesn't pull away. She takes me to the root and holds there, breathing, adjusting, and I feel her body grip me in a way that makes the rock crack under my nails.

"Good," she breathes, talking to herself. "Good. I have you. I have all of you."

She has all of me. The little jaguar swallowed the whole kill.

Do not move. Do not thrust. Do not grab her. I grip the wrist wraps so hard the thorns break against my palms.

"Good," she says. "Stay."

She rolls her hips once, testing. My cock shifts inside her and the angle changes and her eyes close and her mouth opens and the sound she makes is not the pain sound. The vine at my left wrist creaks. I press my wrist flat against the root and hold. She doesn't notice. She doesn't care. Her eyes close. She is finding what works, adjusting, her hips rolling in a rhythm that builds.

She rides me.

If I let go of the vines, I will grab her, and if I grab her she breaks.

"Harder," she says, and then catches herself. "No. Stay. Stay still. I'll do it."

She drops her weight and takes me full and my hips buck, one inch, and the vine at my throat bites and I clamp down, hold still, hold the vines, hold the vines. She grinds forward and the friction drags a groan out of my chest that echoes off the root-walls.

"Yes," she says. "That. Make that sound again."

I make the sound again. I don't have a choice. She grinds and it comes out of me and her hands press harder against my chest. She rides that angle until her thighs shake.

My fists are white around the wrist wraps. Thorns press into the meat of my palms and draw nothing because orc skin is thick but I feel them, every point, a map of tiny pressures that keeps me here, in the vines, in the fiction that I am held. If I thrust, once, with the force my body knows, I would split her open. My cock is inside her and I am the stillest I have ever been.

The vine at my right wrist snaps. Wet crack, a green branch breaking. The outer wrap parts and slaps the moss. Under it, a thin new tendril is already crawling across my skin from the root-wall. I pin it under my palm before she sees. My other hand tightens on the left wrap. If my hands open they will close on her hips and her hips will not survive my hands.

She doesn't notice. She is riding me with her eyes half-closed and her hands on my chest and her breath in short pulls and her breasts are bouncing with every roll of her hips, full and dark, slick with sweat. They catch the blue-green light on every upstroke and I cannot look away. I have been staring at them through wet leather for days and now they are bare and moving and her nipples are hard and dark and I want to put my mouth on them so badly my jaw aches. I hold the vines. I hold the vines instead of her breasts. The thorns bite my palms.

"Slower," she says. I cannot go slower. I am not moving. She means herself. She slows. Rolls her hips in long strokes that take me deep and hold me there and the walls of her body grip and release and grip and I dig into the rock. The stone splits under my nails.

"There," she says. "Right there. Don't you dare move."

I don't know how she expects me to answer. I grind my spine against the stone and keep my palms planted over tearing vines and creeping new growth and let the little jaguar fuck herself on my cock while she commands me to stay still. Every muscle in my body is locked against the one thing it wants to do.

I stay still.

She speeds up. Her rhythm breaks into something desperate and her nails dig into my chest through the vine-wrap and her thighs clamp against my hips and I feel her body tighten around me, every muscle, and her back arches and she comes wet, gushing wet, the way she was on my tongue last night, soaking my stomach, my thighs. The vine at my left wrist tears through the new growth and the old. I clamp my hand down over bare skin and do not move.

The sound she makes is low and broken and her body clenching around me is the end of my control. Four days of edging, her hands, her mouth, her body, and it all breaks at once. My hips snap up, one thrust, and I feel myself let go inside her in a surge that locks my spine and whites my vision. My hands crush what is left at my wrists. Something cracks, stone or vine or both. She gasps and grips my chest and rides it out, her body milking me, and I am shaking harder than she is.

She collapses forward. Her face presses into the crook of my neck, above the throat-vine, and her body is still twitching with aftershocks and I can feel myself softening inside her and the heat between us is unbearable and neither of us moves.

Her breathing steadies. Her heartbeat slows against my chest. I listen for the things I always listen for after. The hitch in the breath that means a cracked rib. The whimper that means something tore. The silence that means something worse.

Her breathing is even. Her weight is loose and warm. She is mumbling something into my neck that I cannot hear.

Water runs down my face. The grotto drips. The humidity.

She lies on me. Both wrist wraps are gone where they matter. Thin shoots are already nosing over my skin again, warm and damp and useless. I cup my hands over them and breathe. The girl on my chest trusts every one of them.

I was inside her and she came and she is breathing against my neck and she is whole. She is still alive.

The vines pulse warm where her skin presses against mine. The warmth surged when she came. My wound is gone. My body is full. Whatever her magic is doing, it is doing it faster now.

She is spent, draped across me, trusting the vines, trusting me.

The magic is wide open. I can feel it pouring through her skin where it presses against mine, through the vines, into my chest. If I rolled her over now, if I pinned her, I could try to take it.

My hand moves. My right hand, the one cupping the slack at my wrist. It lets go. My fingers open. My palm lifts toward her hip.

She shifts against my chest. Her lips move against the throat-vine and the thorns catch her lower lip. She murmurs something, my name, slurred and half-asleep. She settles closer.

My hand stops. Hovers. The air between my palm and her hip is the width of a finger.

I close my fist over the new growth creeping across my wrist and hold still.

The humidity is running down my face. I don't wipe it. My face is in her hair and it smells like wet bark and sweat and the little jaguar said my name in her sleep and my hand went back to the vine.