I arch my back and whimper again. I don’t want to die, but I want her to keep touching me, so badly.
Her teeth scrape my skin, here and there. She releases my head so she can use both hands to touch me. Her fingernails dig into the skin as she grabs the muscles of my chest. She growls again, and rubs herself against my leg.
She has not killed me because she wants something else from me.
I am more than willing to give it to her. My body aches to touch her, but I am still bound and helpless.
‘Let me touch you,’ I say softly as I tug uselessly at the ropes.
She growls deep and angry, and I feel her teeth in my belly.
‘Unh,’ I try to curl up to protect myself, but the ropes keep me stretched out so she can do what she pleases.
My protective reflex sets her off again. She slaps my face hard, and then yanks my head back by my hair.
‘I am Nayana,’ she says, eyes blazing with anger at my audacity. ‘And you are food.’ Her teeth bare in a snarl, and she goes for my throat, and I know, this time, I will not survive.
‘Please,’ I say. ‘I’m sorry. Please!’
She growls low and angry, but her teeth only hold my throat, not tearing. She releases my throat for a moment. ‘Please, what? What is it you beg for, human?’
‘Please, don’t eat me,’ I say softly.
‘Why?’ she asks, looking at me, and there is little in her face that is human. ‘You taste good.’
‘Please, don’t eat me, and I will serve you.’
‘Serve me. How?’
‘Anything. I will kiss your feet. I will please you. I will do anything you wish.’
She puts her face down close to mine again, and licks my cheek lightly. ‘You taste very good.’ One of her hands continues to hold my head immobile. The fingers of her other hand trace across my lips. Then she moves the hand down and squeezes hard at the joint of my jaw, forcing my mouth open.
She covers my mouth with hers, and I feel her tongue filling my mouth as her lips mash against mine. It is more like rape than a kiss, but I cannot help but moan into her mouth. How can I be so frightened and so intensely excited by the same woman? Because she is not a woman. She is a goddess, the tiger goddess, the goddess I searched the world to find. And her lips sear mine and her tongue fills me, and I moan into her mouth with need and desire.
She comes up for air in a moment. Her eyes are half closed with pleasure. She rubs her face along my throat, and inhales deeply. ‘Now you smell like a mate.’ She growls with frustration. ‘I want to eat you, and I want to fuck you.’
‘Please,’ I say.
And she smiles slightly, an amused expression that seems more human than any other I’ve seen. ‘Please, eat you, or please fuck you?’
‘Please, fuck me,’ I say, and desire vastly overwhelms fear just at the thought that she might say yes.
She snuggles her body on top of mine again and her hips rock, rubbing her wetness along the length of me.
I shudder under her and my own hips rock in answer.
‘I could always fuck you and then eat you,’ she says, entirely too matter-of-factly.
I shudder again, a return of fear.
And she laughs, dark and deep. She’s enjoying scaring me silly.
My face must show my realisation.
She smiles down on me, a dark wicked smile, and nods. ‘I like the scent of fear. It adds spice.’ Then she yanks hard on my head arching my neck back, and licks my throat. ‘But don’t fool yourself. I like the taste of men, and sex with a tigress is never gentle. If I choose you for a mate, you will probably die.’
I look at her eyes, and see truth in them. If she gives me what I want, it will kill me. ‘What choice do I have?’ I ask. I am still bound and helpless, and even if I were not, she is stronger than me. If she wants to kill me, eat me, fuck me, or kill me by fucking me, I have no say in it.
Her eyes soften for a moment. Truly human. There is a woman there, not just a tiger in a human body. ‘There are few that I would choose for mate, but you are beautiful and brave.’ She reaches up to the ropes holding my hands and for a moment her hands grow shorter broader and furrier. She slashes through the ropes easily with a tiger’s claws. The ropes around my ankles are taken care of just as quickly.
‘You have a choice,’ she says, still crouched over me, as the fur disappears from her hands and arms as rapidly as it appeared, and a slim woman’s hands are once again on my chest in place of a tiger’s paws. ‘Stay and mate with me, and know that it means death. Or go, and follow the trail back to the village.’
She withdraws until she is crouched at my feet, watching me. Her face is cold and detached, once more the impersonal gaze of the tiger.
I sit up and rub my sore wrists and watch her as she watches me. The hemp ropes rubbed me raw in places where I fought them, especially on the hand that I nearly managed to free.
A legend is crouched in front of me, a ghostly white goddess of jungle and moonlight.
I have seen tigers in zoos. So beautiful. The desire to reach out and touch them is almost overwhelming. But then they look at you with those cold eyes, and you know that if you put your arm out to touch, it will be slashed to bloody ribbons.
She is the tigress. And I want her. I want to touch her so badly, my body trembles with the desire. But her embrace is death. There is a price for touching a legend.
I came so far, drawn just by the rumours of her existence. I cannot walk away now. I will die before dawn, but in the moonlight, I will know the touch of her sweet curves, know the power of her body’s strength swallowing mine.
I shift until I am kneeling in front of her.
She growls a warning.
I put my hands behind my back, vulnerable, no threat to her. And I bend, carefully down. The balance is difficult, but I dare not show her any sign of threat by moving my hands.
My lips touch her toes, and I kiss them reverently. ‘Please,’ I say softly, and nuzzle and lick the inner surface of the arch of her foot. ‘Please, do whatever you wish with me.’
She makes a soft sound, not anything like a sound a tiger would make. Very human.
I look up and see the sparkle of tears in her light eyes.
Her hands cradle my face gently, with human tenderness, and she kisses me, tender and soft, and then with increasing heat until she is all but swallowing me whole. I can barely breathe for the intensity of it.
She rubs her cheek against mine and pushes me back onto the table.
I lie under her and know that I made the right decision. This one night will be worth all my life.
She buries her face in my crotch again, and licks me and takes me into her mouth, savoring the taste and scent and texture.
The warm heat engulfs me and I feel like I’m on fire.
She moves up, her mouth, licking and nibbling across my belly and up my chest until she straddles me.
My hands lie above my head as if they were still tied. I am afraid to touch her without permission.
She grabs my wrists and pulls my hands to her breasts.
They are perfect. The firm round shapes fit my hands as if they were made for each other. I stroke and knead gently, glorying in the sweet soft skin.
She is kneeling above me, poised to impale herself on my erection.
She pulls me up into a half sitting position so that my mouth can reach her breasts.
I worship the beauty of the jungle goddess with soft kisses and the gentlest of licks and strokes and nibbles, that make her shudder in my arms.
She chooses that moment to take me into herself, and I am startled into a harder bite on her nipple than I intended.
She growls in rage and shoves me hard back onto the stone.
My head rings a little from the impact, but it doesn’t distract me from the fiery heat engulfing my erection.
She leans over me and growls in my face, her hands holding my arms helpless again, as she drives her body down, forcing me to pierce her deep and h
ard.
I cry out from the pleasure of it, as does she, in a voice part human and part jungle cat. The villagers no doubt are awakened from their beds by the violent echoing sounds of a tigress mating.
I force my body into her deeper, rocking my hips and twisting my body, fighting her, fighting to get closer, to go faster.
She screams a big cat’s ecstasy, and her body shudders and clenches on mine, and I explode inside her.
As her body bucks and shudders, it also shifts. Tiger fangs grow from her human mouth in a second, and her hands once more become paws on my arms.
I can feel the spasms of my own ecstasy as I watch her change, and I know I am a dead man. I have only seconds to live.
But the look on her human face just before it is swallowed by white striped fur is pure fiery pleasure.
I did that. I made the goddess scream with pleasure. I gave her my seed and my body and my life, and she was pleased.
And when I am dead, she will consume me, and I will be a part of her forever.
I smile into the tigress’s cold blue cat eyes, as her paw comes down hard and fast on my face and throat, and her claws shred my flesh as easily as they did the ropes.
I awaken some time later. The stars are fading, so it must be near dawn. I am still lying on the stone table.
A giant cat’s rough tongue strokes my face, and it hurts bad. That’s what woke me.
I reach up and push the tiger’s face away.
She allows it, and withdraws back to the foot of the stone bed.
I sit up, slowly, head reeling from the blow I took.
She shifts back to human form and watches me.
I reach up to my face and can feel bloody gashes along my cheek and jaw. The tiger’s tongue has cleaned most of the blood, but the open wounds burn like fire.
I look at the tiger goddess, still crouching there, naked and beautiful and pure in the pre-dawn light.
‘Again?’ she asks with obvious eagerness.
I blink at her in surprise. I feel like I’ve been run over by a truck.
‘Nayana,’ I say, savouring the sound of her name. ‘I can’t.’
She digests that for a moment, blinks once and tilts her head. ‘Why not?’
I laugh a little at the absurdity. ‘I’m only human.’
She nods as if that is a perfectly satisfactory explanation. ‘When will you be able to again?’
I start to laugh, but she’s dead serious. And the goddess of the jungle may not take kindly to being laughed at, and may decide to rip my head off.
‘I am not sure. A few hours? I need some rest, and food.’
She nods. ‘Eat, then, and rest.’ She jumps off the stone table. ‘And return again tonight.’
The white tigress slips away back into the jungle night, as if she were never there.
The next week is a dream and a nightmare. Every night, Nayana demands that I return. We make love every way it is possible to make love, as many times as my body can handle. Each time, she hits me hard at the end, although after the first night, she pulls her claws, and tries to pull the strikes so they will not knock me unconscious.
It makes her impatient, waiting for me to recover.
At the end of the week, I go to the stone table, and she tells me to leave.
She is done with me.
A part of me is relieved. I survived the first night largely by luck, and every night since, largely by her being more careful with my fragile human self. But even so, my body is covered with bruises and scratches, and the slashes on my face will leave scars for life.
Another part of me is horrified, rejected, devastated. She is my goddess, my love. I swore to her I would serve her, even if it meant my death.
She looks at my face, and reads all that I am thinking, and feeling.
‘Come back in two years,’ she says softly, ‘David.’ It is the only time she has spoken my name. Then she is gone. The forest swallows her again.
In two years.
In two years to the day, I return to the remote village, but the goddess Nayana is dead. Poachers shot her down for her skin a week before I arrived. The villagers skinned the poachers and left their skins on the stone table. But it did not bring her back.
I go to the stone table in the jungle, and I fall to my knees and weep beside it. My life has been little more than empty waiting for two years. I was touched by a goddess, and I wear her mark. I had thought to serve her until I died. Instead, I find that she is dead. If I had been here… If I had come back sooner…
I hear a soft low rumble from the jungle. I look up into a white tiger’s blue eyes. But they are not the eyes of a full grown tigress. They are the eyes of a less than half grown cub.
The cub is more than a hundred pounds, plenty big enough to make a meal of a mere human, and looks hungry, ribs showing from lack of proper nutrition, but I have no fear.
The cub changes shape as I half expected, and a small skinny child stands in her place. She looks like a child of four or five, but I know she cannot yet be even two.
‘Why are you crying?’ the naked little girl asks curiously.
‘Because Nayana is dead, and I loved her.’
‘I cried, too.’ The child walks up to me warily and slowly, like the wild thing that she is.
I hold very still, not wanting to startle her.
Her little hand traces the scars of a tiger’s claws on my cheek. ‘You are David,’ she says with certainty.
‘Yes, I am.’
‘My mother said you would come if I waited here. I am hungry. Find me food,’ she commands imperiously.
She shifts back to tiger form and rubs the side of her face against mine to mark me with her scent. Then my daughter, the little tiger goddess, curls up, purring, and places her head in my lap.
Black And White Photos
by Sommer Marsden
‘What the hell is that,’ I giggled into Charles’s shoulder.
We stood together, arms linked, staring at the monstrosity in charcoal. Maybe that was the title, ‘Monstrosity in Charcoal’.
‘It’s clearly… um. It most definitely is a,’ he paused, stroked his chin and set his face in a scholarly mask. ‘A flaming baby with three heads and a tail.’
I hid my face against his shoulder and gave into the laughter for real until he nudged me. Someone was coming. I could only guess it was someone who shouldn’t see me laughing my ass off at the art.
‘Ah, I see you found Caroline’s charcoal of her father.’ Hank slapped Charles on the shoulder and guffawed. ‘Isn’t it wonderful? So stark and yet inspiring such hope.’
I glanced back at the flaming, three-headed baby and smiled politely. ‘Absolutely. Is Caroline here tonight?’ I asked, praying the answer would be no. I most certainly hoped she hadn’t witnessed our juvenile display of humour over her work.
‘Sadly, no. She had to work. Even us artists have to eat. God knows, being an artist rarely pays off,’ Hank said and took a healthy swig of his martini. Already his face was florid and he had that dazed, fish-eyed stare of someone well on their way to be full-on shit-faced.
‘A shame,’ I said and took Charles’s arm. Hank was his friend and I had never kept my distaste for the man a secret. He had promised me the moon just to come tonight. ‘We don’t want to dominate your time. I know how much these art evenings mean to you. Not to mention, I saw some beautiful black and white photos over there I want to get a better look at.’
He nodded and smiled his big I-am-the-host smile. ‘Ah, those were done by a new fellow. I’ve never invited him to art night before. Met him at a gallery opening down town. Jude Belmont. Nice boy. He’s over by the shrimp puffs.’ With that Hank disappeared back into crowd.
‘I love how he slid in his ‘art night’ plug right along with calling attention to the fact that there are shrimp puffs,’ I snorted as we wandered over toward the wall that displayed the black and whites.
‘Be nice. He thinks he’s helping his fellow artists by hosting these
evenings. Who knows, he might be.’ Charles patted my lower back and then surreptitiously slid his hand down for just a moment and gave my ass a squeeze. ‘If you behave, I’ll do something nice for you later.’
I caught his wink and grinned. It wasn’t as if I had to convince my husband to have sex with me. I didn’t even have to remind him to give me my due pleasure. It was him plying me with promises of sex that got me worked up.
‘Well, I don’t see how showing artists the work of other artists furthers anyone’s career, but I will behave. Plus, I really do want to see these. I only got a quick glimpse on the way to the flaming baby, but they look like they might be rather good. Worth standing and staring at,’ I said.
‘Worth stroking our chins knowingly and tilting our heads?’ he teased.
‘Maybe so, my dear. Let’s go see.’
There must have been a mad rush for the shrimp puffs then, because a wide space cleared in front of the three framed black and whites.
‘I don’t know,’ Charles whispered close to my ear, ‘if they’re all dispersing that quickly, maybe it’s black and whites of road kill.’
I started to laugh but then we were standing right in front of them and my breath caught in my throat. My pulse felt like a living thing trying to break free of my skin.
‘I don’t think so,’ I heard myself almost sigh. ‘They are gorgeous. My God, Charles, he has real talent on this wall.’
And they were gorgeous. Most certainly unexpected. In a room full of flaming babies, and still lifes of oddly shaped fruit and a few Dali-inspired melting objects, they were bright like a flame. Simple, stark, beautiful. Each was an eight-by-ten print set with a plain white mat and then framed in a brushed black frame.
The first was titled, ‘Elle’. In it a tall blonde woman straddled a plain ladder-back chair. Her legs from the knees down were encased in patent leather boots. Kick-ass boots. Her wrists were encompassed in handcuffs but the chain had been broken. Her thin hands gripped the back of the chair. Her head was down, blonde hair hiding her face. With all the hair, the viewer could barely make out the studded dog collar around her neck. She looked both broken and free. I heard myself sigh again.
Tie Me Up Page 3
