Jungle Swap - part 2 (Patreon)

He'd waited too long. He knew that. He'd spent the better part of an hour telling himself someone would fix this first, that it wouldn't come to this, that he could hold it — the same way the implant used to help him defer discomfort into a task queue, except the implant was gone and the queue was empty and his body had stopped asking and started insisting.

He found a spot where the ferns came up to his waist. He opened the shirt first — it seemed practical, and he was sweating through it anyway — and the air on her bare skin made him aware of it in a way that didn't help. Then the jeans, worked down to the boot tops, and he crouched, which took longer than it should have, his center of gravity not where he reached for it, his thighs shaking with the effort of holding the position. He grabbed a fern with one hand. The stem was wet.

When he finally let go the sensation was immediately, disorienting. Warmth spreading through soft folds rather than leaving him, trickling down toward the inside of his thighs, pooling briefly before finding its way to the ground. It was slower, more diffuse, intimate in a way that felt less like relief and more like his body conducting something private without his permission. He stayed crouched until it was done and then stayed a moment longer, not moving.

Then the practical problem. He looked around. Ferns, bark, more ferns. Nothing he could use. He ended up pressing the back of his hand against the inside of his thigh, which did almost nothing, and then pulling the jeans back up, the denim dragging against damp skin, the seam settling in exactly the wrong place. He buttoned the shirt back up. A wasp landed on his forearm and he flinched hard, stumbled, caught himself on the fern again. His heart was going too fast. He was a man who worked on the fourteenth floor of a building with climate control and a coffee machine and a security desk and right now he was barefoot-adjacent in a jungle, in a body that wasn't his, with wet thighs and no way to fix it.