Chapter 9 - The Vines Were Nothing

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She is on top of me. Her hips rolling, her hands on my chest, her breath coming in short pulls that match the rhythm she set. The grotto is alive around us, vines I didn't see last night crawling the walls, thickening, pulsing with her magic. She doesn't know it.

I am healed, fully. The rib wound that should have killed me is a pink line. My arms are at full strength, my chest, my legs.

She rides me and her eyes are closed and her breasts move with every stroke, full and dark and slick with sweat, and her face does something open and unguarded. The bravado gone since the troll, since the laughter, since she put her hand on my face and my throat closed.

The mission is here. My shamans' words, carved into me since I was old enough to lead a raid: mount the conduit, take the power. The druidic magic is in her body, in the vines, in the grotto that grew around us.

I tear the vine at my left wrist. It comes apart like wet bark, like nothing. It was always nothing.

My right wrist is the same. The vine splits and falls away and my hand is free and the air hits skin that has been wrapped for days.

I reach up and pull the vine from my throat. The thorns scatter across the moss, tiny, harmless. The chest-bands I shrug through, one after another, snapping them with my shoulders. My ankles follow, and all of it is gone, every vine, every thorn, the cage she built.

She freezes.

Her eyes open. She looks at my free hands. At the broken vines on the ground. Her hips stop. Her whole body stops, still locked around my cock, still joined to me.

Her face changes, instant, all at once. The confidence collapses. The power drains out of her the way blood drains from a wound, and what's left is the girl I saw the first morning, small and shaking, the runt who dragged a monster through the jungle and tied vines around its wrists. The one who spent days pretending until pretending almost fit.

They never held me. She knows it now. Her shoulders draw in. Her hands lift off my chest. Her mouth opens and nothing comes out.

She retied them every morning, in the dark, on her knees, hands shaking, checking every loop, tightening every thorn-band, and the whole time she was tying paper around a monster and calling it enough.

"You were never-" Her voice cracks.

"No."

Her jaw works the way it did the first morning, that clenching thing, but this time it does not hold.

"The first night?"

"Yes."

Her hands are shaking on my chest. She looks at them. Looks at my free hands. The distance between her fingers and the edge of the moss where she could push off and run.

"Why didn't you-"

"Leave." I say the word she cannot finish.

"Yes." Her voice is barely there.

"Little jaguar." My voice comes out with the name I have been carrying since she swallowed me whole. She flinches at it. "Stay."

I should flip her now, pin her. The magic is right there. Her body trembling around me, the conduit wide open.

The warmth hums against my ribs, my arms, the flat of my stomach where her thighs press. My muscles tense toward it. The power is a current pulling me forward and my body wants it.

Her chin is shaking.

The air sits on my back, wet and close. Her skin is the only thing not sticking.

I put my hands on her hips.

My palms on her skin, fingers spread, holding her the way a man holds something he is afraid to break, careful. My hands are big enough to wrap her waist. I have cracked ribs with these hands. I have crushed skulls. I have broken a woman who loved me because my body does not know the difference between holding and hurting.

I hold her.

She flinches. A full-body jerk backward. Then she feels my hands and she stops. She looks down at where my fingers rest on her hips, light and steady and still.

I thrust up into her, slow, meeting the rhythm she stopped, carrying it, my hips lifting off the moss. She makes a sound, high and broken. Her hands come back to my chest but different now, open, feeling the muscle move under my skin as I roll into her.

She is still on top. I am still under her. The cage is gone.

I slide my hands up her back. Every notch of her spine under my palms, the small bones. My hands come around her ribs and find her breasts, full and warm. They fill my palms and my thumbs brush her nipples and she gasps and I hold them the way I have wanted to hold them since the first morning, since the wet leather and the string that was losing. My hands are gentle. I pull her down, shaking with it because my body has never done gentle while moving, never done it while wanting this much. She comes down with her breasts pressed against my chest, her face above mine, her hair curtaining us, her breath on my mouth.

My mouth comes down toward hers.

"What are you-"

I kiss her. Badly. My tusks press against her cheeks and my fangs catch her lower lip and I freeze because I have cut someone with these before. She doesn't pull back. She opens her mouth against mine and her teeth click against my fangs and neither of us knows what we are doing. Our noses collide. She tilts. I tilt. It gets worse before it gets better.

"We're bad at this," she says against my mouth.

"Yes." I kiss her again. Kissing is new. Orcs don't kiss. The mounting is public, fast, a performance. Kissing is private. Kissing is something I did not know I wanted until her mouth was on mine and I could taste the salt on her lips.

I thrust up into her and kiss her at the same time and my hands hold her against me and she comes undone. Her body tightens around my cock, her fingers dig into my chest, she cries out into my mouth. The sound vibrates through my skull and my grip tightens on her back and I follow her into release, spine first, and everything else empties after. My hips jerk, my arms shake, and I am spilling into her while my mouth is on her mouth and her body is pressed against mine and everything holds. Everything holds.

She lies on me after. I keep my arms around her, my hands on her back. She is shaking, or I am. The grotto drips. The fungi pulse.

I press my mouth against her hair and breathe in rain and rot and ceiba resin.

The vines on the walls keep growing.

I do not let go.