Jungle Swap - part 3 (Patreon)

The lilies had pushed in through the gap where the groundsheet didn't reach the tent wall. Tiger lilies, three of them, already half open in the heat, smelling faintly sweet over the deeper rot-and-green smell that was everywhere out here. He'd been staring at them for a while.

He'd taken his clothes off by degrees. The jeans first, the denim seam that had been chafing his thighs finally gone. The shirt. He'd hesitated at his underwear — small, cotton, a pattern he'd clocked briefly when he'd had to deal with the jeans in the jungle — and then the heat made the decision for him, the fabric damp from the day, from the humidity, from everything. He'd noticed early on he wasn't wearing a bra. Had been aware of that fact, in a distant managed way, since the first hour. Now it was just skin against the sleeping bag and the sensation of the nylon against his nipples was still startling, still immediate, still not something he had any prior experience to compare it to.

His hands moved eventually. Not a decision so much as the stopping of resistance. One hand at his chest, and the response was instantaneous and disproportionate, a warmth that spread out from the point of contact rather than gathering toward it the way he was used to — diffuse, no urgency at first, more like a door opening than a switch throwing. He went slowly because fast felt wrong, because the feedback loop was different, because nothing about this body's response resembled his own except in the most structural sense. The sensation built differently, layered rather than linear, and when it crested it crested in a way that moved through him in a wave that started somewhere deep and central and he made a sound he didn't recognize and lay still afterward with one hand on his stomach, breathing.

Outside the disc was cold and quiet. The jungle clicked and called. One of the lilies had dropped a petal onto the groundsheet, orange against the green. He was a man with no survival skills, alone in the jungle, in a body that wasn't his, and nobody was coming, and the lantern was burning low, and none of that had gone away. But for the length of that breath, it had been very far from the front of his mind.