the part about the fox.

[Lukas] At some point within the last hour or so, Lukas called Danicka. She misses his call -- there could be any number of reasons for this. He leaves voicemail. The soft sound of ambient conversation is in the background, the occasional harrumph of someone clearing his throat or coughing.

"I'm at the Shedd," his voice is in the foreground, but even were it not perhaps she would pick it out now: its measured cadence, its educated enunciation, and the harmonics of it, the lowest registers of which a cell phone does not transduce properly. "I think I'll be here for a while longer. Why don't you -- " a pause. Then, "I'd like it if you joined me."

He doesn't bother to state where he'll be, perhaps because he imagines she can guess. And even if she couldn't, that's what cell phones are for.

--

Tuesday night, an hour before closing, and the Shedd is quiet. School field trips have long since ended; tourists and locals have gone off to dinner. In the Wild Reef wing, the schooling fish whirl on, silver amidst blue, an endless silent hurricane.

Lukas is not where he was last time, sitting on the padded bench in front of the display. He's moved to the back wall of the corridor, where the sonorous blue glow cast through the aquarium does not quite reach. He sits on the floor, nearly in a corner but not squeezed into it; he's comfortable, with one knee drawn up, the other leg extended on the floor. There are earbud headphones in his ears, the kind with the soft, flanged silicone tips that extend far into the ear canal, not white but black. His iPod is black also, fifth generation or so, with a glossy plastic front and a brilliant chrome back. He is not so OCD as to bury it in silicone skins and acrylic shells, but the device looks to be in reasonably good repair, despite that it's surely a year or two old by now.

He looks up when he senses her, and as before, he doesn't get up. He takes the earbuds out of his ears carefully -- yank these too hard and they'll rupture an eardrum -- and lets them fall around his neck. He's in expensive jeans, which is not surprising, and in a pullover sweater, which is also not surprising. But the sweater is wool, some indiscriminate dark color in this light, thick and soft, comfortable rather than stylish.

"Hey," he says, quietly, when she's within hearing range. He did not check his coat today. It's folded behind him, a makeshift cushion.

[Danicka] She misses his call not because she is online, not because she is out shopping, but because she is in the living room hanging out with two men who each have about a decade and a half on her, one of whom is in rehab and one of whom is completely gay. She misses his call because she is watching a movie and her phone is sitting beside her bed, charging silently. It vibrates on the nighstand when he calls, and she does not hear it because someone on the television screen is screaming.

About half an hour later she gets off the couch, stretches, and bids goodnight to the two Old Farts she has been rooming with this week, even though she won't be going to sleep for some time. Danicka is crawling onto her bed with her laptop when she sees that she's missed a call, and checks the voicemail, and checks the timestamp. She sends a text message, that terrifically loathsome way of communicating with someone who needs at least her voice if not her body language to really absorb anything she says, that just informs him:

See you there.

==========

It's not quite ten minutes later when she does arrive, but it's another ten before she finds Lukas, who did not tell her on his voicemail where in the Shedd he'd be. So she wanders, through mostly-empty wings and displays, until she comes to the same place she found him the last time. Truthfully, she saved it for last, guessing that this is where he'd be. She sees him easily, because there is so much emptiness around him.

Her leather jacket was checked when she got here. She has a rather simple canvas purse, about 10 by 7 inches with a strap crossing her torso. She is in jeans, and she is in black Converse All-Star sneakers. Not heels. Not skinny jeans or a skirt. Not silk stockings. Her long-sleeved t-shirt is dark purple, and she has her hands in her back pockets when she walks over to him. Danicka stops about four feet from Lukas, looking down at him and cocking her head to the side. Her 'hey' is just a silent nod of greeting in response.

"Are you fixated on fish?"

[Lukas] There's a flicker of a frown, and then it passes. "No. I just like it here. It's a quiet place to talk and people leave you alone."

He clicks his ipod off, puts it into his pocket, then loops the cord of his headphones behind his neck so the little buds didn't fall off his shoulders, roll around the floor, get gross and dirty. Then he looks up at her, levelly.

"I felt I owed you an apology," he says, "for last night."

[Danicka] She is nowhere near drunk tonight, nowhere near smashed and silly. Danicka does not have dark circles under her eyes. It's not yet twenty-four hours since he dropped her off, but it is also not early the next morning. She knows hangover cures that go back for generations, and at least one of them was taught to her by a Fianna Kinsman. Her hair is in soft waves, not wild, as though she didn't bother to do much with it this morning. Or this afternoon, whenever she got up.

Lukas remains seated, and Danicka remains four feet away from him, the fish swimming behind her. The tanks backlight her in soft blue with flickers of silver, magenta, and chartreuse swimming around. It leaves her front shadowed, particularly her face, her throat, the curves of her body. Slowly her hands come out of her back pockets, right arm crossing her stomach to wrap one hand around her left tricep.

"What about last night are you apologizing for?"

[Lukas] There's a slow movement in him: the corner of his mouth turning sardonically up, his eyelids lowering a fraction, his chin rising as he tips his head back against the wall.

"Are you checking to make sure I'm apologizing for the right thing?"

[Danicka] Her mouth doesn't move. For all that she smiled easily last night, laughed and spoke easily -- too easily -- and kissed him warmly, she doesn't seem to respond whatsoever to his near-smirk tonight. Danicka just looks at him, lips together, and lets her gaze sit motionlessly on his face for a moment.

Then, Danicka lowers her head, reaching up with her left hand and rubbing three fingertips between her eyebrows. Her hand drops a few seconds later and she shakes her head, looking at him again. Her arms slowly cross over her front, loose and relaxed. For now. "If you want, we can play with words and go back and forth like that all night. But just a heads up, I won't be on my game, because I'm really not feelin' it tonight, you know?"

[Lukas] He has a habit of cutting her off. It's not quite out of rudeness, though it is arguably rude. She gets to But just a heads up-- and he interrupts, quiet and measured:

"I'm apologizing for being an ass. Is that sufficient?"

[Danicka] He has a habit. She has a limit.

Lukas opens his mouth while hers is still moving and Danicka turns on her heel and begins walking away.

[Lukas] "Danička, wait." He doesn't spring to his feet, though she knows if he wanted to, he could be on his feet, across the room, on top of her and nine feet tall in an eyeblink.

It takes some level of courage to do what she does, this woman who's so nearly craven.

[Danicka] Her temper has not spiked uncontrollably. The one time she snapped at him, she had lost her reserve, had lost her ability to shut her mouth. This time her turning away is a decision, and it has nothing to do with courage, nothing to do even with manipulation. It's something else entirely, something he probably wouldn't understand and would perhaps be revolted by if he did.

Danicka stops in her tracks when he says her name, turns, and looks at him with an expression made all the more serene by the strange light and the movement of water...and simultaneously making her look dark, and cold, and as unreachable as a ghost. She doesn't answer.

[Lukas] What he asks her would be childishly simple if her motivations weren't so very vague: "Why are you leaving?"

[Danicka] As before: he is still sitting on the floor, and she is still standing, only now at a distance of about six feet, as opposed to four or less. Danicka blinks once at him, unruffled now, and stares back at him. Not a word leaves her mouth; she doesn't even look like she is considering what to say. She looks at him, motionless as a doll, except for that blink.

[Lukas] His eyebrows rise on his forehead. He prompts, gently insistent: "Why?"

[Danicka] Gently for now. Insistent and not demanding. Danicka does not even blink this time. She does not move. However, she does speak, but only after about five seconds have passed since the repetition of his question: "Oh, is it my turn to talk now?"

[Lukas] "That's why you're leaving?" A beat; a note of incredulity that he has to force to remain just so, and not swerve into mistimed mirth. "Because I interrupted you?"

And then it subsides. He's serious again, not even a hint of humor on his face, in his eyes, in his voice.

Again: "Why are you leaving?"

[Danicka] [Perception + Empathy: Wimmins Is CRAZY]

[Danicka] [Willpower]

[Danicka] Lukas does indeed do a fine job of keeping his incredulity from becoming a smile, a grin, a laugh at her expense. He looks surprised, seems almost aghast, and Danicka does not for a second seem amused. He gets serious again, repeats his question, and the blood drains out of her face from the sheer effort of not exploding. She doesn't explode. It's almost worse. She lowers her voice, speaking with a calm certainty and the patience that he finds, at times, to be so patronizing.

"If you are going to interrupt me when I speak, there is no reason for me to do so."

She is talking to him like he is an idiot. No...she's talking to him like he's a child.

[Lukas] Not only is there no amusement in him now, there isn't much that could be mistaken for neutrality, either. The dim bluish light casts a highlight down the side of his face, a line that traces the crest of his brow, temple, cheek, jaw. It changes subtly, flexes, when he clenches his jaw.

"If you're going to fly into a temper because I interrupted you, there's no reason for you to come here at all."

[Danicka] "Exactly," Danicka says, and this time she pauses: "Do I have your permission to go?"

[Lukas] "No, you do not." Maybe he was just spiting her now. "Why the hell did you come at all?"

[Danicka] Her sigh is small because she does not drag in a deep inhale of air to begin it. She just exhales quietly, sounding wearier than she looks, and it seems genuine rather than affected for the sake of punishing him, or making sure he knows just how displeased she is. Danicka and he remain nowhere near one another, talking across a room with only the walls and floors to echo their speech and only the fish to ignore -- rather than hear -- what they say. From a distance of six feet, her sigh is visible but not audible.

"You said you'd like it if I came. I felt like coming."

[Lukas] She doesn't even have to look deeply to read him. His face says it all: incomprehensible, capricious, hypersensitive woman. He glares at her for a moment. Then he looks away. Then, as though coming to a decision, he looks at her again.

"I'd also like it if you stayed."

[Danicka] "Good for you," she says, perhaps unwittingly quoting both of them from another conversation, on another night. Last night, in fact, when things went south not quite as quickly as they have tonight but fast enough. It's a far cry from the breathy affection laid on him before he went to see his sister at the airport. It's miles away from the easy companionability they'd shared for a few minutes on the way to his car last night. They can't seem to even get through a simple exchange, through an apology.

Danicka's arms are crossed over her chest again now, only this time her elbows are locked and her shoulders are tight. There's seething sarcasm in the three words she speaks to him, which isn't bravery. It also isn't stupidity.

[Lukas] Another spasm of anger, harder and faster than the last, flaring before he controls it, hides it behind expressionlessness. Lukas' face closes up; he glances in the direction of the exit, then back to her. "Goodnight, Danička."

[Danicka] That is one of the strange and sick things they have in common. With most people, Danicka is not passive-aggressive, is not sarcastic, is not patronizing. She knows better. With most people, even if she is being condescending it is so well-hidden that they think they're being complimented while half the people watching realize Danicka just backhanded them across the face...socially speaking. However, when Lukas has gotten her ire up, she does this strange turnabout.

Her aggression becomes couched in purring undertones and submission, rubbing his face in the image of Shadow Lord Kinswomen that he does not want her to be. It is not a reminder of what she is capable of, and it is not even an attempt to prove her power by pissing him off. Danicka knows he wants to know her, that he wants to understand, and that when they have sex over and over in some hotel bed or some twin-sized mattress at the Brotherhood he wants her to stay there, for reasons she doesn't quite know because they have only done this once and were asleep the entire time.

Maybe that's all he wants, is to fuck her and then sleep with her and nothing more. She doesn't know, she doesn't ask, and she has only stayed the one time.

Regardless, she knows. She knows why he asks his questions, if not why he wants her to stay. And so when she is unhappy with him, she retreats back into her own unknowability, and she makes sure he sees it as clear and plain as day. She's a liar, and she throws that at him like an arrow. It's disgusting behavior, it's ridiculous, and it works every single time as well as a straight arm and a locked elbow work at keeping someone at physical arm's length, rather than just metaphorical.

Danicka doesn't bother telling him goodnight. She turns around and walks back the way she came.

--

[Danicka] When he comes out, Danicka is sitting on the hood of his car. She is smoking a cigarette and talking on her iPhone, not knowing that his sister has the same thing and not knowing that he saw Anezka just the other day and had coffee because she has forgotten that part of the conversation. Her feet are up on his bumper, her leather jacket on, a knitted scarf around her throat, her green crocheted cap on her head. Her gloves are fingerless.

"You have to just be honest with him, Emílie," she is saying clearly, so her voice won't be caught away from the mic by the wind. "As soon as he gets home." Pause. "Because he'll smell it. The longer you go without telling him, the worse it'll be."

Danicka pinches her eyes shut. "He won't be mad. It's not like it's your fault."

[Lukas] Danicka can see when he sees her. Lukas' stride doesn't falter, doesn't speed up, but there's an awareness in his body language that wasn't there before.

He crosses the parking lot -- the spaces emptying out, but the corridors packed with cars as the last guests of the night depart. Behind him, the Shedd is closing down, the lights in its vaulted exhibition halls going dark.

It's very cold outside, as if spring will never come. He has put his coat back on. With his thick sweater underneath, he fills it out a bit more than he normally would; the cut of his body is less defined beneath. He comes up to her without speaking -- she's on the phone, after all -- and he clicks the locks open.

[Danicka] She can see him when he sees her, but only because her eyes only stay closed for a few seconds. For a moment she looks tired, but she looked tired inside the aquarium; seeing Lukas, the weariness seems sapped out of her the way that energy is sapped out of other people, and her spine straightens slightly. Green eyes move to blue ones and lock there for a couple of heartbeats while she listens to the other speaker on the phone call.

And Danicka takes a deep but silent breath, letting it out soundlessly. "Don't overdo it," she advises whomever she's speaking to, even though she's looking at Lukas. "He only gets angry when he thinks he's being manipulated." Beat. "Or when he knows you're scared. You shouldn't be."

The speaker responds. Danicka drops her eyes and closes them again, taking another drag of her cigarette. She exhales. "I'm sorry, Emílie, I know you were hoping. Go work on the roast. My ride's here."

Pleasantries are exchanged, goodbyes, and Danicka ends the phone call, lifting her eyes again. She leans forward, ashing her cigarette well off of the hood of his vehicle. "I'm going to try this again," she says, more worn-sounding than annoyed, than patronizing. "What happened last night that you were apologizing for?"

[Lukas] It has been some time since they parted in anger, and this is fortunate. If he had followed her out immediately, found her on his car, he might have ordered her off and left.

Instead, while she's speaking, he has gone around to open the door of his car -- not the driver's side but the passenger's. When she gets off the phone and faces him, he makes a small, abortive gesture.

"Let's talk out of the wind."

There's no expectation in this; whatever else, Danicka is perceptive enough to see that. He goes around to the driver's side, presuming she gets in. Otherwise, they speak out in the wind, facing each other across the car.

A beat or two; then he answers her, flatly. "I misread you, and then I proceeded to behave like an ass. I thought that deserved an apology." A beat. "But an apology is not a blank cheque for you to behave with utter abandon, Danička. And I have to confess, I'm getting sick of your condescension and your caprice."

[Danicka] It's been time enough for Danicka to be cold, to call or be called by this Emílie woman, to have and get to the end of a conversation with her. It's long enough that when he sees her on his car, he doesn't tell her to go. It's long enough that when he opens the passenger-side door, Danicka does not hesitate. Her ass slides against his paint job as she puts her phone in her pocket, sneakered feet hitting the pavement with as much ease as a teenager's. She gets into the car and gives a full-body shiver, a shudder, but does not take her gloves or hat off as he circles the car and gets into the driver's seat.

If he'd left it at the word apology, this would have gone smoother. But he doesn't, and he goes on, and Danicka just leans back in the chair she occupied last night as well, head turned to watch him. When he finishes, she takes a small breath and says: "Can I say two things that probably won't seem relevant at first, without getting cut off?"

[Lukas] When the driver's side door shuts, the cabin is quieter. He puts the key in the ignition, starts the engine, turns the heater up and waits for it to warm.

Cut off, she says; and he grimaces. "Go on."

[Danicka] "All right."

It means nothing. It's chatter, it's empty, and it's not as though this is unlike her; from the beginning most of what has come out of Danicka's mouth has been not worth attending to. They are lies, or pleasantries. They are things she says to escape, to subvert, to keep herself to herself so deeply that those around her can't get to whatever is real. It isn't always that what she says is deceptive, or even offensive. She is not always trying to get people to believe anything other than that there is nothing to see here.

And yet from the beginning, Lukas has looked at her and seen something. Not necessarily deep into her soul or anything like that; they met as children and played as children but that does not mean he knows her any better than Ilari Martin...or Gabriella Bellamonte, for that matter. He's just noticed her, which perhaps is exactly what she was hoping wouldn't happen. If so, any attempt on her part in that direction backfired. Horribly.

She turns her head and looks out the windshield, as more cars leave the lot. Employees are walking out and finding their vehicles while Lukas's idles.

"First: I don't remember how I got home last night. I vaguely remember seeing you, I know I had the equivalent of about a bottle of wine along with other assorted goodies with a couple of chefs and my waiter, and I was able to find my car this morning, but other than that things are pretty damn hazy. So when I asked what you were apologizing for, I wasn't playing some sort of pin-the-stink-on-the-bullshit game.

"Second: I have been drawn to you since I saw you upstairs at the Brotherhood reading your book, even though I didn't realize I wanted you until the door closed behind me. I don't know why I'm drawn to you, or why I'm attracted to you, or why the sex with you is so mind-alteringly good. It isn't that I think I can get away with anything I do, or that you're just such a nice guy I can't help myself."

The cigarette did not enter the car with her. It was crushed under the toe of her sneaker just outside the door. Danicka has nothing to take a drag of. She just looks far, far away, seeing not the glass or the lot or the buildings surrounding them but a whole other world entirely, if anything.

"The only thing I can come up with is that from the time you drove me home, I have been making an...effort...to be honest with you." Her brow furrows, and she gives a small shake of her head. "And I really don't know why I'm doing that, except that you're a lot more likely to lose your shit with me if I tell you what you want to hear instead of the other way around."

Danicka swallows, and as that day in his room, he can see the 'effort' she's talking about in the tension of her neck, the paleness of her cheeks, the deep lines in her forehead. "This thing where we can't handle a conversation and do better just fucking would be fine, if it weren't for the fact that you need it to be monogamous and the fact that I keep doing shit I don't usually do. If you were just..." she trails off, and looks out the window instead, removing even more of her face from his line of perception. She breathes out, and it fogs the glass. "And the moral of that story is: don't always assume I'm lying, or that I'm working some angle. Because with you, I'm not."

[Danicka] [1 WP spent.]

[Lukas] If nothing else, Lukas has the patience to listen. It's not impatience that makes him cut her off; it's assumption. Assumption that she's finished with the important bit. Assumption that he can pretend the rest. Assumption, and not impatience: because there's a difference.

In this, he can't predict the rest. And so he listens, and she looks out the windshield, or out the window, and so does he. There's a car directly across from them. One of the staff gets into it eventually: young, but a few years older than Lukas, a woman with a blonde ponytail. She catches sight of the two of them in his car, the blackhaired man with the pale blue eyes; the palehaired woman with her eyes turned away. For an instant Lukas sees himself through her eyes and is not surprised when she shudders, turns away, backs out and is gone as fast as she can.

By now Danicka has finished; gotten to the moral of her story. And he remembers one of his own, a memory that swims to the surface like the fish in the Aquarium:

The liar told a half-truth. And he said, see, I have told you half a truth. And the honest man said, no, you have told me half a lie.

Or maybe it's not even a story at all, but merely the misfiring of his memory centers, a conjured image where there is nothing.

He turns to her; quiet. Of all the things he could ask or say, this is what he chooses: "If I were just what?"

[Danicka] A heavy sigh, a hard breath, leaves her, clouding the glass again. "I don't know," she says flatly, wearily, "like everyone else or something."

Danicka turns her head and looks at him, faces him, but her body is still turned towards the dash, the vents, the heat, the light coming in through the glass. There have been times when they've opened up to each other like unfurling flowers, straining towards one another as though seeking the warmth and light and nourishment of the sun. And then there's times like this, when the other is more like a gale wind, icy and something they need to pull back from, to get behind walls and layers. She looks at him, but it's like watching the snow fall from within her own cozy fortress.

"I don't think I'm ever going to be able to explain myself as well as you keep wanting me to. I don't question everything I do."

[Lukas] She looks at him, but he does not look at her. He looks through the windshield at the still night; the lights of the cars that creep past, jamming their way out of the lot.

"I know," he says, quietly.

There's a silence after that.

Then he does look at her. They each lean their weight away from the other: he on his door, his elbow against the edge of the window, fist propped to his temple. When he looks at her he does so over the curvature of his shoulder -- the cut of his coat.

"I suppose -- " there's a halt; this is haltingly spoken, wholly unlike his usual considered, deliberate speech, " -- I question myself so closely, watch my every step so carefully, that I cannot imagine not doing so. So I interpret you through the lens of myself. When you follow your ... instinct, or spontaneity, I see it as caprice and instability. When you tell me a truth that seems to have no root or bearing on anything else I can understand, I see it as a lie.

"I can't help it. I don't -- understand you. So I can't trust you."

Another pause. And then he looks away, a sudden flicker over his face like a wince, like pain.

"But I'm trying. Do you know that?" He makes a sound like a laugh, humorless. "Because I don't understand that, either."

[Danicka] I know, Lukas says, and she knows he does, but does not repeat the words.

Unlike last night, she is sitting up reasonably straight, resting her spine against the leather seat. She does not move towards him, or away, and at some point it has to hit him that her anger and frustration is as mutable as everything else about her seems to be. It does not stay in one place for long, and in reality very little that she feels does stay. Maybe that's why the word is so hard for her to hear, whether a request or a command.

"It doesn't work," she says mildly, "to say that you can't help it, and then claim to be trying. If you really can't help it, then trying to is pointless. If you can't trust me, then I don't know why you're bothering."'

This mildness is, like so much else she has said tonight, almost exasperated. Resigned. For better or worse she's being open with him...right now at least.

[Lukas] There's another of the same sound, and this time it's closer to a scoff; another of the same expression, and this time it's even closer to a wince.

"And when has trust ever mattered to you, Danička?"

[Danicka] Her expression doesn't flicker as his does, and her eyes don't flash with annoyance or indignance. If anything, her features gentle towards him, and the tightening of her eyebrows together is compassionate. Danicka shakes her head. "I didn't say it does. But it matters to you. And whereas I can sometimes take something at face value even if it comes from someone I don't trust, I don't think you can."

[Lukas] This pause is longer than most, until she thinks he might simply refuse to speak again. And he doesn't know if her expression flickers or doesn't; if her eyes are annoyed or indignant or kind or compassionate or condescending. He isn't looking at her. He looks through the window. A silver SUV, and it's the last for a long time. The parking lot is nearly empty.

"That's what I always used to think," he says then. "That if I can't trust a person, then I don't want anything to do with them."

[Danicka] The silver SUV is not the only car in the lot other than this one; there is the convertible BMW a couple of aisles over, waiting for Danicka to come back to it. No one is walking towards the SUV, no one is walking around the field museum or the aquarium. They may as well be alone, in the lot and the area if not the world. All the blinking lights of the city could be vestiges, candles in windows for people who are not coming home. The buildings are monuments and the lake is going to swell soon enough and overtake it all, take everything back and call it even.

Unseen beside him, Danicka's eyes twitch upwards slightly. Her voice drops in volume but not pitch, the tone of it still light. "Okay, don't take this the wrong way, Lukáš," she says, in that tone where it sounds like they have known each other for years, that they didn't just meet a few times as children but grew up together, which is ironic because: "but it seems like you want to understand me and you want to trust me and you've only known me for...like a month, tops. You've haven't even been seeing me for two weeks yet. And you wouldn't even be interested in me in the first place if I was that easy to figure out."

Her brow furrows, her head tilting. "So...I mean it. I don't know why you're bothering with this if you've already determined that you can't have what you want, unless you're one of those guys, in which case I want nothing to do with the life of utter misery you're setting up for yourself."

[Lukas] "Why am I bothering with this?" He seems at once infuriated and baffled and on the verge of laughing. "Danička, you just told me you don't search yourself too deeply. You don't question everything you do, even when it's something as silly as -- drawing a smiley face on me. Then you want me to explain to you why I'm bothering with you?

"What makes you think I know the answer to that?"

He reaches out -- turns the heat down a little. It's gotten quite warm in the car, and he hasn't begun to loosen his outerwear.

"I'll tell you what I do know," he adds, quieter. "I know that when you're not driving me up the wall, sometimes you make me happy. I know that if it hadn't been my sister waiting for me at the airport that morning, I would have been glad to stay with you until you left. And I suppose that much is reason enough for me to want to see this through."

[Danicka] She could tell him that no, she asked why he's bothering with this, that asking why he's bothering with her indicates a lack of self-worth that she would like to believe she doesn't suffer from. She could tell him that it makes perfect sense to ask him his reasoning, when he's the one of them who actually asks these questions of himself while she seems to follow almost every impulse that comes to mind and only struggles when those impulses are contradictory or impossible to fulfill. She could also take off her hat, loosen her scarf, pull off her gloves.

But she doesn't, and she doesn't, and she doesn't.

Danicka's eyebrows go up. "You were going to see Anežka? What was she doing at the airport?"

[Lukas] "She was flying to New York City. It's my dad's birthday tomorrow. She had a 3-hour layover and we had coffee. I told you this last night, too. Most of it." A pause. "Why the hell were you drinking with the restaurant staff, anyway?"

[Danicka] Not a trace of embarrassment, surprise, or awkwardness flickers over Danicka's features when Lukas informs her that he told her most of this last night. She was drunk, she is not bothered by the fact that she was so drunk she doesn't remember how she got home -- other than the fact that he had something to do with that -- and if anything seems quietly pleased that he had coffee with his sister. Who she used to glower at, ignore, and boss around on occasion when she was too small to wash her hands without a stepstool but apparently old enough to cook meals and bake koláče.

Danicka had always been a very, very small girl. She's of average height now, but more than a little on the 'thin' side, and is just barely within the range of what's considered a healthy weight for someone of her height and frame.

She would ask how his parents are -- again -- if not for the fact that he gets to a question first. Danicka shrugs. "Just struck up conversation during and after dinner. It was a rough night...lots of asshole tables...and I guess they just offered to let me stay for a drink or two on a whim. From what I remember of it, we had a pretty entertaining conversation. They liked hearing about New Orleans and my crazy former bosses, and I liked hearing about the craziness going on in the kitchen."

Pause. "I don't usually have trouble making friends."

[Lukas] "No," wry, "I suppose you wouldn't."

The windows have begun to steam up from their sitting here. He redirects the heaters at the windshield, and his side vent at his window. He thumbs the back defroster on.

"Can I ask you something?"

[Danicka] She wouldn't. Danicka is pretty, can be at turns soft-spoken and witty, a good listener with good stories, and an ability to read people and give them (tell them [be]) what they want that is damn near unparalleled outside of political campaign teams. Of course she doesn't have trouble making friends. With barflies. With waitstaff and chefs. With young Silver Fang Kinfolk musical prodigies, with old Silver Fang Kinfolk coke addicts. With the gay Jewish friends of old Silver Fang Kinfolk coke addicts. One can imagine Danicka being utterly comfortable at a slam poetry reading and equally at ease at a debutante ball. Or a crack house. Or a whore house.

"Mmm," she hums, an affirmative sound.

[Lukas] He hesitates only a moment. And he could ask her any number of things now, which she may or may not reply to, may or may not lie to: he could ask her why she was smoking on his car, or what she was doing in New Orleans, or why her bosses were crazy or what she did for a living, for that matter, that gave her enough money to afford an undoubtedly nice flat in a very obviously nice building. He could ask her any number of things, and instead, out of left field, what he asks her is:

"Why aren't you mated yet, Danička?" And he looks at her, and his eyes are a strange color in the parking lot lights -- not blue but colorless, a sort of grey. "God knows there must be plenty of Garou who would be more than happy with a kin that could pretend submission and compliance so well."

And fuck so well. He doesn't say that; it would be, to him at least, rude.

[Danicka] This woman is too good for the temperature in the car to suddenly drop ten degrees, or for her easy smile and calm silence -- a triumph, considering their last two meetings, including the one earlier tonight -- to evaporate. She looks at her fingernails, bared because her gloves only extend over one knuckle, and knows that he is looking at her. It isn't as though no one has ever asked her this question before. It isn't as though she hasn't been waiting for it.

She is twenty-four years old. She is well-bred, enough that every single beat of her heart seems to quicken the pulse of the Garou around her, especially Garou of her tribe, meaning only that when they are angry they are angrier, when they are aroused they want more, when they are happy they want to laugh. Her presence is more intense, and more poised. The expectations are higher because of that breeding, and one of those expectations is the same one laid on (and fulfilled by) her father: the well-bred are for breeding.

Beyond that, Danicka has domestic skills. Cooking, cleaning, mending, childrearing. She has, one way or another, procured funds to support herself quite nicely without seeming to have a day job to attend to...or an evening job busying her nights. She can hold her liquor and take a beating. She is an expert liar and when she really puts her mind to it, her talent for pretending submission is not just well-done, it is goddamn flawless. Lukas doesn't say it, but...there is that, too.

"Well, for one thing, I was otherwise engaged," she says easily, glancing up from her fingernails at him. "The Sokolovs had a lot of clout." He knows this. "They wanted to keep me, and so I was kept."

[Lukas] He's watching her again now, curious, perhaps not quite openly distrustful yet. She tells him about the Sokolovs and their clout; he gets a wry look in his eye, but says nothing.

When she's finished he prompts: "And for another thing?"

[Danicka] One corner of her mouth turns up slightly at his prompt. That wry look of his own could mean anything to her: the Sokolovs, Royalist Fangs in the most classic sense, with more than one home in New York City alone, with their beautiful daughter and their bloodlines dangling by threads, with their clout thinned by the sheer number of ways that daughter could be used, with the rumors, with the dirty secrets...oh yes.

They're not that different from the Bellamontes. Just richer.

"For another thing...you're wrong. There were not plenty of Garou who were so eager to get their paws on me that they were willing to go after the Sokolovs, and certainly not eager enough to challenge my brother's claim and his arrangement with them."

[Lukas]

[Lukas]

[Lukas] There's a faint frown etching his brow -- a few lines between his eyebrows. He shifts his weight, and now his elbow comes off the edge of the window. He faces her a little more fully.

"Tell me the rest of it, Danička."

[Danicka] If the moon were full, or fuller than it is, this would be harder. The fear he thinks he's reading in between her words, in the silences before and during and after each syllable, would be real. And it would be of him. The first time they kissed, the first time they had sex, the moon was full and waning, seething in the sky, and if he had been more tired, if his arguments and conflict with his pack had drained the core of inner strength that allows him to keep himself so damnably controlled, she would be a splatter on a wall now.

She knows it, and so it's not unthinkable that she's afraid of him, that telling him the truth is hard not because of something in her, something separate and disconnected from who he is or what he is, but because he's a Big Bad Wolf who was taught how to be what he is in part by listening to stories about Ahrouns like her mother. In those stories that woman was made of iron and her eyes burned like silver. In those stories a single word from her throat could rally the spirits of her pack and four other packs, besides.

And so on, and so forth, etcetera.

Danicka quirks an eyebrow at him. She is about to come up with a lie, with something, with deflection, and then her eyebrow lowers and her forehead furrows and she shakes her head. "I really don't want to," she says quietly.

[Lukas] It's impossible to really face one another in the front seat of a car. The seats are designed to hold the driver in place, and the passenger. There's a steering wheel to bump the left arm, a center console to bump the knee. He does his best anyway, turning at the waist, setting his shoulderblade to the door, and he can see her eyebrow rise; perhaps he can even see the wheels start to turn --

-- and then stop.

They frown at each other for a moment. Then, unexpectedly, he puts his hand out -- he touches her cheek with his fingertips, the pad of his thumb, very softly. A moment later he draws his fingers back into his palm, lowers his hand.

He's no louder than she is, "Will you someday?"

[Danicka] They don't completely suck at this. It helps that Danicka doesn't seem to know how to hold onto her own anger for more than a span of hours, maybe a day at best, though that may be as much a conscious decision on her part as telling him the truth...when she does, in fact, tell him the truth. It helps that in fits and starts they can admit to one another that there is something going on other than mind-blowing orgasms, and it simply wouldn't be worth the trouble if outside of sex they completely failed to grasp the other.

It helps that even though she is resigned to the fact that he is eventually going to hurt her, physically and badly, Danicka does not run and hide every time she sees him. He may not like this resignation, despite the fact that it is the motivation for her flippancy in a roundabout, almost backwards way. It isn't that she thinks she can get away with it. There is just a certain comfort in having accepted that there is no way around it, a strange calm that comes from refusing to fight the inevitable anymore.

It's sick, and it's horrendously sad and he doesn't understand it at all, but that is why she does not flinch when he touches her cheek, and that is why she turned on her heel and walked away in front of the schooling fish. It isn't trust; it isn't courage, either.

All she can do is shrug, a single lift and fall of her shoulders. Then, both eyebrows popping up this time: "I don't have any sexually transmitted diseases or a criminal record, if that's what you're worried about."

[Lukas] His lips quirk, and it's not quite a smile, nor even properly amusement.

"I'm not even remotely worried about something like that," he tells her. If he had been properly amused, he would have done this with a studied gravity. As is, he merely says it: plainly, uncomplicatedly.

This is a little more complicated: "But I'd like to know."

[Danicka] "I kind of figured, given that protection isn't high on your list of priorities," Danicka tosses back, rather good-naturedly. Whether he takes it good-naturedly or not, that seems to be how it's meant. Teasing, but lightly. Affectionately, almost. If he hadn't noticed, if the words 'mind-alteringly good' didn't register, he might begin to suspect at some point in the immediate or near future that this woman actually enjoys having sex with him.

"Why?"

[Lukas] Her teasing draws only the faintest lift of his mouth, one corner, there and gone.

Why, she asks him again, and while these questions seem different to her, for him they're all linked, the way every volcano on the face of the earth is a link to the same roiling ocean of magma beneath the crust. And he turns his face away, grimacing; turns back a second later.

"I don't know, Danička. I don't know why I ask you questions, I don't know why I care about the answers, I don't know why I kiss you and I don't know why I make exceptions. I just do it. I don't -- " irony of ironies, and the flicker on his face, a microexpression there and gone too fast to catch, says he knows it, " -- question it."

[Danicka] Her jaw drops comically, her eyebrows going up higher and higher on her brow. Danicka bats her pretty eyelashes and feigns overwhelming shock, but it's positively gleeful, at that. Her expression is macro, exaggerated and conspiratorially teasing. They're alone in the car, in the parking lot, and there is no question that she would never do this with other eyes upon them, though he can't guess at what the reasons for that might be.

"I think it's because you liiike me," she says, her face relaxing again, but a smile still broad on her face. "I mean...come on. You're sitting there asking me why I've not been paired off and I know you're thinking on some level about the fact that we haven't had sex in like...a week."

Five days.

But who's counting.

[Lukas] Her feigned shock irritates him on some level -- he was being serious. When she goes on with the teasing he gives her a sharp, dark glance, unamused, shifting his weight in his seat as though his clothes, or the bantering, suddenly sat ill at ease on his skin. She's a sharp woman. She's no fool. She can see he's not playing along with the joke.

Then she steers it back to sex and he snorts audibly, but at least this earns her a glance that has some measure of amusement in its depths. "If I'm thinking about sex," he says, and he's only half-joking, "it's because that seems to be the only time any of this just ... works without a goddamn hitch."

[Danicka] Her head tips to the side, and she reaches up to take off her hat. It's warm in here, even with the heat turned down a bit, and when she takes the crocheted garment off and sets it in her lap there is just enough static electricity in her hair to make several strands rise for a moment.

"Is there something wrong with that?"

[Lukas] "You wouldn't think so," he replies, more wry than amused. "I haven't made up my mind yet."

[Danicka] Danicka regards Lukas quietly for a moment, not teasing him, nor making light of his words or his wryness or the meaning underlying what he's said tonight. She just watches him, thoughtfully, and then says in all seriousness:

"There are people out there whose sex lives...just don't work. Their appetites don't match up. One person's fantasies freak the other one out. Sometimes they just don't connect, which, let's be honest, is one of the reasons people go through as much trouble as they do to have sex. Or it could be any number of thousands of things that fuck up your fucking."

She looks at the windshield, taking off her gloves and tucking them into her hat. "And sometimes everything else works, and clicks, and makes sense, even if their sex life is nothing but hitches and frustration." There's a beat, and she looks over at him. "So I don't think there's anything wrong with feeling the way I do when we have sex, even if everything else is difficult. I'm grateful for it."

[Lukas] Very earnestly, with all seriousness, she gives him on the nature of sex in a relationship. Of all things, it's this that makes Lukas laugh, suddenly and without warning. It doesn't last long, but he's still grinning at her afterward, and grinning at her, he rubs one eye with the heel of his hand.

"Danička," he says, and here's the grave assurance that was missing earlier, "I'm not undergoing a bout of catholic guilt for enjoying the fucks." The humor's fading now, becoming something more thoughtful, quiet. "It's that the rest of it is difficult that I'm undecided on."

[Danicka] She rolls her eyes when he laughs, up at the ceiling, and presses her tongue into her incisor. It isn't anger, at least not outright. She looks back at him after a moment. "You have an Olympic-class talent for being wrong about what I mean, Kvasnička."

[Lukas] He could ask her what she means -- perhaps would've, only she calls him by his last name again. She might not realize it's an 'again', but it is, and he does.

He looks at her for a moment, half-quizzical. Then -- and this is not angry, but it is serious -- "I liked Lukáš, or Lukášek better."

[Danicka] "Well, Lukášek," she says quietly, reaching up and running now-bare fingers through her hair, lifting it off her shoulders for a moment, "you have an Olympic-class talent for being wrong about what I mean."

As her hand falls, Danicka winces slightly and loosens her scarf, letting some fresh air in to hit her neck.

[Lukas] And now he does ask, gently: "Then what did you mean?"

[Danicka] Gently, he asks her a question he could have asked without getting hung up on which name she calls him. If it weren't for the fact that she goes by her own lifelong nickname, it might be odd to her that he doesn't want to be called by his last name, while the diminutive they called him in childhood is all right. She has called him Lukášek rather than Lukáš time and time again, without permission or preference, before he knew that once upon a time they climbed trees together.

Oh, and that was most certainly Danicka. Not her birthday, not her choice to have lacy dresses, but it was indeed hosted at her family's home and they did have an oak tree and she did follow Lukášek up into its boughs. He hadn't pushed her, but she was roughly the same size as a boy nearly years her junior and thin-armed. She'd been eight, and she'd fallen, but luckily had not broken anything. She hadn't seen Lukas get thrashed for it by his father; she'd been in the bathroom getting her knees and her elbows cleaned up, not a tear on her face until later, when she heard that he'd been punished.

She didn't cry when Sam hit her.

She lost her temper when Martin got swirlied.

She's an odd duck. She knows it. And most of the time, she doesn't care. Almost all of the time, actually. Maybe even now, while she's not meeting his eyes and slow to respond to his question.

"I meant," she says, and then pauses, taking a deep breath and looking at her knees, "that the way I feel when we're making love is what makes all the rest of it worth the bother." Beat. "But, you know, that's just me," she adds, with self-depreciation that is somehow not self-depreciating at all. She turns to look at him, finally, and even goes so far as to meet his eyes.

[Page from Ken] HADOUKEN!

[Lukas] At some point, tired of looking at her or aware that he was staring rather steadily at her while she looked away and didn't speak, he looks away as well. He shifts again, twisting his torso back a little bit, alleviating the strain on his lower back that his unorthodox position induced.

If she wanted to face him, it would be easier for her. She's smaller than he is; three quarters of a foot shorter, and also far slighter. She could probably draw her knee up into the domestic's big seat. She might even be able to curl onto it entirely, and sideways, and face him with her knees drawn up like a little girl's.

He does not remember what Danicka was like as a little girl. She remembers him though, and he was a happy child, rather rambunctious, not at all restrained or controlled, almost perpetually in motion. She might remember him tearing around her father's house with his slightly older, rather bossier sister until their father told them, in that stern tone of voice that always got results, to sedni si, Lukášek, Anežka! because their mother was trying to have a conversation with Miloslav, and no one could hear anything. She might remember them sitting side by side on a sofa then, legs dangling, identical grins, jostling and shoving in an increasingly threadbare silence until one or the other let out a shriek, and got in trouble. Or got put outside, like puppies. Or got assigned to Danicka, to go and color or something blessedly quiet like that.

Danicka (one hopes) doesn't color anymore. Lukas doesn't tear around the house anymore. Times change. Now they're adults, consenting adults at that, sitting in the front seat of his car, the engine on, the vents huffing warm air at them while she begins to speak, and calls what they do making love, and this makes him look at her again, not quite sharply, but quickly.

That's just me, she finishes. He regards her for a moment. And they're not really talking about the sex anymore, or not just about the sex. Not just about the physical logistics of what goes where, and what goes where but something different from that, within it and around it, inextricably linked to it, but different. They're talking about the way they look at each other, and the way she shakes afterward, and the way he holds on to her, and the way they kiss, and kiss, and kiss.

He's quiet for a moment; then:

"Doesn't the way you feel frighten you?"

[Danicka] Last night she slouched, and tonight she simply relaxes. So much of the time that she has not looked at him it has been to keep herself from straining her neck. When turned to look at Lukas, her head has rested against the back of the seat, making her look as comfortable here as she had lying on his pillow. And it had been strange, how comfortable she looked there.

With only Miloslav and Danicka in the house, it was indeed all right for the two Kvasnička children to run around, to kick their legs, to make noise. Her mother was not there, her brother usually was out with other Shadow Lords, Kin and Garou both, closer to his own age. Miloslav was calm about it. He was nearly fifty then. He talked to Lukas's mother about the two little blonde girls in the picture over the fireplace, and about where it was taken, because she knew of the place.

Danicka was quiet, and she was simultaneously thrilled and terrified at the noise and the activity that the two dark-haired children brought into her home. She had to be reassured by her father that it was all right, and she had to be coaxed out of hiding when their father's voice rang stern out at them. They didn't seem scared of him but she would jump, even though the words weren't directed at her.

They went outside a lot.

And she most certainly still colors sometimes.

Danicka thankfully is not looking at him when he looks at her so suddenly. Those damnable words she used were not said with any particular meaning, any added weight, but they have their own, at least in his vocabulary. Just as neither of them knew at the time that the other was not given to kissing the way they did the first time, he has no way of knowing if 'making love' means more to her than 'fucking', or 'having sex', or whatever other euphemisms they might employ. All he has is her calm profile, hair askew and scarf loose.

It's a complicated question that he asks her, and she lifts her head, looks at the windshield, and frowns slightly in thoughtful consternation. And then in the end it's not all that complicated, not if she just follows the track she's been on since getting into the car and simply says:

"Yeah, of course it does," Danicka murmurs, "but that's probably part of why I like it."

[Lukas] He frowns at her then, and there's two possible reasons why.

The first is simple. He frowns because he doesn't understand her one bit. He doesn't understand how she can like something that frightens her. He doesn't understand how she can be nearly livid at him one moment and forget about it a day, an hour, ten minutes later. He doesn't understand how she doesn't question this; not why she's all right with the fact that if they aren't fucking, they're probably interrogating one another, or fighting, or simply in recovery from one or all. He doesn't understand how she can think a good romp in bed can make up for the rest of that; how of all possible reasons for her to be okay with all this, she can pick the sex, which is surely the worst reason of all.

That's one possibility. The other is far more treacherous.

Because the other possibility is: for once, Lukas understands entirely too well. He understands how he can like something that frightens him. He understands how he can be livid with her one moment and forget about it a day, an hour, ten minutes later. How he can be furious at her, growing angry at him for interrupting her when he was trying to apologize, when he never fucking apologizes; and then see her on the hood of his car and think, simultaneously, how he doesn't want to see her there and he's glad to see her there. How he can go about not really questioning this either -- or, he questions it, and finds no answer, no reason for why he's interested, why he wants to know this or that, why all this is somehow worth the effort when he doesn't even trust her -- so he simply sets it all aside, and ignores it, and decides consciously to stop questioning it for the night, or the hour, or the next ten minutes.

The other possibility is: Lukas understands, completely, how the fucking can make up for everything else, because she's right, and it's not just fucking. Because of all the reasons to put up with the shit they throw at each other, what happens between them when there's nothing left between them but skin, and their mouths pulling at one another's like they wanted to eat the air out of the other's lungs, might just be the best reason there is.

Anyway --

He frowns at her. And then he looks away. And then he looks back, and he draws half a breath.

"Let's go somewhere," he says.

[Danicka] What Danicka remembers of last night is, as she said, hazy. She remembers drinking with the staff of Zealous. She remembers seeing Lukas and she may even remember how she felt when she did. Danicka knows that she woke up in her own bed, undressed, with her teeth brushed -- strangely enough -- and no one with her, which was not strange or unexpected at all. She remembers, if vaguely, laughing, and holding onto his arm, and given what she knows about Lukas she can put most of the other pieces together from there.

Her car was not in the parking garage, which means that she left it at the restaurant. She woke up in her own bed, alone, and if it were not Lukas this would mean nothing but because it was Lukas it means they didn't have sex, and it bothered her this morning that she knew she would have stayed if they had, and if he'd asked. They didn't have sex, and so she can figure that they probably had an awkward conversation, and if not an awkward one, then they argued about something.

Or maybe they walked down the sidewalk arm in arm for awhile and she made him so pleased about some idle comment that he had to turn away so she wouldn't see him grinning, and he was enjoying himself and she was laughing and...it was good, for a few minutes at least. But Danicka doesn't remember that, one of the longest stretches of pleasant, non-sexual time spent with him. It's a loss that she is lucky enough not to be aware of.

Anyway.

He frowns and she doesn't question it. Danicka doesn't wonder if he's going to try and pare down sex to the mechanical act, the biological reaction, the spontaneous muscle spasm and the chemical reaction and so forth. If that were all they were talking about then, yes, sex would be a stupid reason to put up with any other shit. But it isn't, and it hasn't been since the first time, and it hasn't been a single time they've been together.

He frowns, and she doesn't ask why, and so there is no way to get around to her explaining to him that you take what you can, when you can, and if all you are given by fate or the universe or your own insane choices is a few minutes where something makes sense, you take it and you are grateful because it, like everything else, can't last.

Let's go somewhere.

'Somewhere' does not mean the Brotherhood, or her place, in their lingo. It means they will go to a hotel room. It means they will likely be there all night. It doesn't mean they should go get coffee, or hang out at a bookstore, or take a walk, even though they're both from New York City and just-under-thirty degrees isn't that bad, when you get right down to it.

Last night he said they could go somewhere, if she wanted. It wasn't that she hadn't wanted to go somewhere with him, or that she was testing him, or that she just wanted to use him and go back home afterward, as she'd presumably done the first time. It was that she didn't understand what the problem was with doing it there, then, and some of that lack of understanding was the bottle of wine and the Scotch and the shots she'd had. Some of that lack of understanding is that his privacy is his treasure, and privacy in general is still something of a novelty to her that she doesn't quite know what to do with.

In the end he'd taken her to her apartment and left her at the curb. She doesn't remember how that happened.

"Why didn't you take me somewhere last night?" Danicka asks, half-sighing the words, as though she's been waiting for him to finally say this. She hasn't. But that's what it sounds like.

[Lukas] Her question makes him frown; makes him turn away. At least he has an excuse this time. He puts the sedan in gear -- the parking lot is almost empty, and there's no reason to back out. Lukas is a careful driver, though not a particularly slow and plodding one. He picked this car because it was practical, in good repair, not very flashy, but with a big trunk and a surprisingly decent engine. When he puts the gas pedal down, they can feel the gentle g-force of acceleration pushing them back.

He crosses the parking lot in a haphazard straight line, ignoring the grids and the corridors marked on the asphalt.

"Because I was angry by the end," he answers at last, which could be a reason in and of itself: I was angry and I didn't want to see you anymore. I was angry and I wanted to punish you by leaving you at the curb. I was angry -- but then he goes on, and it's not that at all; it wasn't petulance or vindictiveness, but this:

"And I didn't want to fuck you out of anger."

He casts her a glance after he says this, not to gauge her reaction but simply to look at her. Then he comes to a gentle rolling stop at the exit, looks over his shoulder to see if there's any oncoming traffic; looks at her.

A little belatedly: "Did you want to drive yourself?"

[Danicka] For Lukas to not understand Danicka right now, he has to have never found meaning and worth and benefit in something terrifying...such, perhaps, as himself. He has to believe that anger is permanent, that every flash of Rage is righteous. For that frown of his a few moments ago to have been because he doesn't understand this woman at all, the sex they have has to be just sex, a so-called 'meaningless fuck'. Which it might have been, which is what they both might have been hoping for the first night.

To get it over with. To get it out of their systems. To stop wanting so badly, rather than wanting more.

But the treacherous and traitorous reality is the complete opposite of all of that. In fact, it isn't even that what happens to them in private, a locked door between them and the rest of the world and absolutely nothing between them but desire, that comprises all that might be worth the trouble. There is also his confession that he doesn't want her to be like every other Shadow Lord Kinfolk, and her laughing yet drunkenly, uninhibitedly honest declaration that he is not just the worst or the best but the only Garou she has ever bothered to be faithful to, anyway.

His pleasure in that, readable even though he turned his head away, had warmed her. She doesn't remember. But she does remember that it was endearing, when he asked her if she was cold, when he kissed her shoulder. It isn't just the sex that makes it worth the bother, the work, at very least the attempt. Danicka would not wait for him on the hood of his car or come back when he's been an ass or call him after she's snapped at him if this were not more than it might seem to be. Or has the potential to be more.

Suddenly, the car starts moving. Danicka blinks as he begins to drive, glancing out the window at her car, and when he pauses at the exit of the parking lot to speak to her her brows are pulled together in rather mild bewilderment, but not outright confusion. It doesn't bother her that he was angry at the end of last night; she doesn't remember why, and she doesn't ask. Someone else might ask 'why', but she doesn't. Not after the conversation they've just had.

Anger has no real place between them, not in that, and she understands.

"Yeah," she says, one corner of her mouth quirking a little, "I usually do." A beat. "If you really want to take the same car, though, I'd still like to grab my bag out of the backseat."

Another pause. "I've gotten into the habit of being prepared, if I know I'm going to see you."

[Lukas] Yeah -- she usually does. His mouth quirks. It's not quite humor, but at least it's not bitterness, and it's not anger.

"It does make the logistics of departure a little less troublesome."

And then: "Okay. Hold on." He goes out onto the street, takes a right at the next inlet to the lot, and then drives back. He can see her car; it's one of only a scant handful still there -- two, three, maybe four. Employees, curators, the sort.

He parks next to her car, doesn't bother to pull up the handbrake or put the transmission in Park. "The W again, then?" he confirms.

[Danicka] Taking her own car means she does not have to rely on anyone else for a ride. Taking her own car means that she can leave whenever she wants, that when she leaves as he knows she almost always will, she will not have to call or wait or pay for a cab. Taking her own car means that she can change her mind at the last minute and just go home. Granted, he could find her at home. He knows where she lives and all it would take is scanning the intercom labels, intimidating the doorman, and going up to the twenty-third floor.

He would not even need to do all of that. There are Rites. There is stepping sideways, precluding even the need for knocking on her door, but perhaps Lukas's own discipline of privacy might...

No. She's Kinfolk. Her right to privacy is negligible.

Danicka smiles when Lukas turns back into the lot, pleased. When he stops his car near hers, asks her about the W, Danicka turns to look at him and doesn't say anything. She gets out of the Lincoln, goes to the BMW, and gets a bag out of the bag. It's the same one she brought to the Brotherhood less than a week ago. Slinging it over her shoulder, Danicka re-locks and re-alarms her car, and gets back into his. He may have noticed when she got out that her hat and gloves were sitting on his dash.

Closing the door and closing out the heat once more, Danicka answers: "Up to you." The subtext is: I obviously don't care much.

[Lukas] It's a good thing she left the door open when she stepped out of his car. Otherwise Lukas might've driven right off.

That's a lie. What is true is: his eyebrows go up as she leaves her hat and gloves. She gets the bag out of her car, rearms the alarm, comes back to his. It only takes a few seconds, too short for him to formulate any sort of response, any sort of reaction beyond surprise. She gets back in and he's still looking at her, his frown faintly drawn in puzzlement, but not in irritation. When she answers him, he doesn't look away and start driving.

There's a sense he might've wanted to say something about it, if he'd known what to say. He doesn't. So he glances at her bag instead, and now a slow and subtle smile crooks up the corner of his mouth.

He describes a large circle in the parking lot, and heads out yet again. "So," low, amused now, "what's in the bag tonight, lace or cotton?"

[Danicka] If he'd driven off, she might have laughed, and most likely met him at the W only to inform him that he had absconded with some of the smaller pieces of her outerwear.

The brown leather bag with the gold rings in the strap, with the closed zipper along the top, is set down very gently on the floorboards between Danicka's sneakered feet. It isn't light as a feather; there is weight and mass inside that bag, more than just clothes. She pulls her hat and gloves off the dash and puts them back in her lap, and this time she reaches for her seatbelt, buckling herself in without making comment or giving nonverbal response to his evident surprise.

She does, however, keep looking at him. And he smiles, amused. Danicka loosens her scarf further and then unwinds it from her neck, letting the hand-knitted item pool in her lap along with the rest. "Oh, Lukášek," she sighs, shaking her head, "there's so many more options than that."

Were the drive longer, she might reach for the radio, or suggest he do so, but if he is indeed going to the W it is just around the corner and up the street. So, for the duration of the drive, Danicka does not seek to break the silence unless he does.

[Lukas] His mouth flickers up at the corners. Then he turns his attention on the road.

Lake Shore drive is long and gently winding, following the contour of the lake. The W isn't even three minutes away in this traffic. The ice at the edge of the lake cannot seem to decide whether it wants to melt or remain. It's frost-white under the half moon, riven with jagged black cracks.

"Can I ask you something else?" They're about a minute away when he says this. "When we were at the motel, you told me being somewhere nicer wouldn't have made any difference. What did you mean?"

[Danicka] In sneakers and enough warm clothing, with the sun up, Danicka could easily walk back to her car from this hotel. Something tells her that she won't have to, that if she stays with him and if she does not just put her clothes on and leave tomorrow and if they do not piss one another off terribly between now and then...again...then she will not necessarily have to walk.

Lukas used to live in New York City, but what he doesn't know is that for years, Danicka walked almost everywhere, or took public transportation, or was driven where she needed to be by servants. She has only had her car for about six months, maybe even less. When he sat in it, the vehicle had no signs of being 'lived in', no hints at her personality or livelihood or history. Just the lingering scent of the pastries she'd brought him that night.

For two minutes she looks out the window at the lake. And then he speaks, and Danicka turns her head to look at him, lifting her eyebrows in question. This is all the permission she gives, but there was no real pause or glance looking for that permission to go ahead and ask. Lukas may very well assume that whether he waits to be told Yes of course or not, she may refuse to answer or tell a lie, regardless.

The woman beside him blinks, but not in surprise. "Oh..." She turns and looks out the window again, but raises her voice by a notch to make sure he can still make out her words clearly: "I just meant that if you wanted to treat me like a whore, the setting wouldn't have stopped you."

[Lukas] They're already there: across the intersection from the Lakeshore W's sleekly modern driveway. It's a red, though, and Lukas stops for it, turning to Danicka to study her a moment.

"I think there was more to it than that," he says, quietly.

[Danicka] All she does is nod slowly, turning to look out the windshield at the hotel across the way. She is aware that he's studying her, his attention weighing like a physical presence on her face, on her shoulder. It may be impossible for him to watch her without her knowing, unless she is asleep, and this has never been a possibility. If he had turned around as she slept behind him the last time they were at this hotel, Danicka would have woken, stirred easily by motion, by noise, by the mere existence of another person so close.

He has no way of knowing and she cannot bear to tell him that it means anything that she was able to sleep so quickly, and so deeply, with him there beside her. It isn't about feeling safe, or protected, or unafraid. Truthfully, she had been exhausted, quite literally sapped of whatever bodily energy she'd started the night off with. The shower had not woken her up, it had only served to lull her further, and so that is probably a big part of why she could tolerate it. The moon being so thin at the time had certainly been a part of it. But weariness and Luna had nothing to do with her goddamn hand on his chest.

So: Danicka nods. And perhaps surprises him again, by simply answering the question.

"I think you could have fucked me in the bathroom at Mr. C's and it still would have...been the way it was."

[Lukas] He's wearing that look again, the one he wore when he stepped into his room and found her listening to music in what looked like pajamas, on his bed. The faintly furrowed brow; the faintly puzzled, faintly wincing regard that says:

I don't know what to do with you.
and
I don't know what you've done to me.
and
I don't want this to end.

And then, suddenly aware or afraid that she could read him like a book sometimes -- or perhaps only aware that the light has turned green, he turns away. As the Lincoln sedan is pulling up in front of the W and the doormen are coming out to open doors and the bellhops are coming out to see to bags, Lukas draws a breath so deep his chest convexes upward with it.

"I wish you weren't right," he says, and then pushes the door on his side outward as the doorman sweeps Danicka's open.

He gives the keys to the valet this time, informing him that they'll be checked in under Kvasnička, and no, they didn't have any bags -- not beyond the one Danicka carries. On their way past the smiling uniformed doormen who lose their smiles as Lukas passes, Lukas reaches out and takes the bag from her if she'll let him. Otherwise, she can hang on to it herself.

He checks in this time, paying with a credit card, signing his name. Perhaps in another five, ten years, if he lives that long, he will have become a wholly different sort of Lord, cunning instead of honorable, paranoid instead of careful, and he will have stopped leaving paper trails.

They get a suite on the 25th floor this time. The keycards are passed over in their stiff little paper holder, and he pockets them. Then, picking up Danicka's bag again unless Danicka has taken care of it herself, he follows her to the elevators.

[Danicka] The conversation they were having, with the long pauses in between fragments of it, is dropped when Lukas said that he wishes Danicka weren't right, that he could have taken her into some grimy bathroom or the backseat of a car or against the wall of an alley and they still might have kissed the way they did. They still might have argued, he still might have almost frenzied, she still might have stayed. He has to take a deep breath to say that he wishes this weren't the case, and Danicka says nothing as she gets out of the car, putting her scarf and hat and gloves in her bag while they walk to the doors.

One of the downfalls of being what they are is that they are eminently noticable. On the occasions that Danicka has gone out with Gabriella Bellamonte -- to a nightclub, to a detox facility, to Dunkin Donuts -- no one seems able to ignore the two women. It doesn't necessarily have anything to do with physical beauty, carriage, or modes of dress and manners of speech. Mortals do not see them as the daughters of heroes, they just know that there is something there, something remarkable. 'It'. The reason why mortals cannot seem to skillfully and easily ignore Lukas is an entirely different story, however; they remember him because he scares them, because they will remember upon going home that chills ran up and down their back when they saw him.

Just their luck, the clerk behind the counter is the same one who handed over a sleeve of two room keys last time, as well. Just their luck, the clerk remembers the both of them, though Danicka was taller by a few inches then and they did not walk in at exactly the same time. No bags again, except for a purse slung over Danicka's shoulder -- which she retains only because when Lukas reached out, there was a moment when it was clear she had no idea what he was doing, and then she figured it out, and by then he'd already taken his hand back, and, so: she's carrying her bag still.

The clerk watches them as they head towards the elevators, looks down, and doesn't pay it any mind after that. None of her business if people choose to conduct their affairs in expensive hotels along the lake. Not her problem. She types a few keys on the computer in front of her, and the elevator doors close after Danicka and Lukas step on, beginning to ascend. The hotel does not have as many guests on a weekday evening as it does on the weekends, not as many as in summer or spring, not as many as it would if the economy were not afflicted as it is. They pick up no extraneous human beings as they rise to the twenty-fifth.

At the twentieth, Danicka shifts her weight to one leg and scratches her calf with the toe of her sneaker. Setting her foot back down, she looks at their warped reflections in the brass-colored interior doors of the elevator. "I'm hungry," she says, with a slight frown of consternation.

[Lukas] That exchange had put a distance between them again, and the intervening silence -- from the time they exited the car to the time they stand side by side in an empty elevator and she declares herself hungry -- has only increased it.

Yet now, suddenly and unexpectedly, she makes him laugh. The inside of the elevator is all brass and rich wood. Their reflections are distorted, the features barely discernible, but she can still see the way his chest moves when he laughs, and the way his mouth smiles.

"You know," he says, "I was going to ask if you wanted to get room service, or delivery from something nearby."

The elevator slides to a smooth stop, but it's fast, and the deceleration is swift enough to make them feel a little lightheaded for a second. Then it passes and the doors open. He looks at the sign on the wall and heads toward their assigned room: 2584 tonight. It's about halfway down a hall, on the right.

[Danicka] Awkward silences are not their usual demon. Vicious tension, argumentative questioning, misunderstandings aplenty...these they are on nodding terms with, could well become good enough acquaintances with to later be invited to the christening of full-blown arguments or silent treatments. Maybe one day they'll even know passive-aggression well enough to be introduced to heart-wrenching tragedy. Up until now, however, they have avoided awkward silences. Luckily for Lukas, Danicka knows how to exorcise it. And she does.

I'm hungry.

She realized around the fourteenth floor that she hasn't had a full meal since around two o'clock this afternoon, when she had a late lunch with Gerry and Martin. They had popcorn later on while watching a movie, but even that was an hour and a half ago. Danicka is familiar with realizing far too late that she has not eaten in a regular amount of time. Her life is no longer as structured as it once was, her time is almost constantly her own, and as such, she doesn't look at the clock at eleven and start planning when she needs to get herself and her charge fed. There is no one knocking on her door in the morning informing her that her breakfast has arrived, and no dinners to attend with hair swept up and jewelry on.

Lukas laughs at her, not maliciously, and Danicka turns to look at him with a vaguely amused expression that spreads into a full smile when he explains himself. The elevator stills and they exit, the smaller but elder of the two saying: "There's this place over on North Clark Street called Yen's." Beat. She frowns slightly, adjusting her bag on her shoulder. "You like Chinese food, right?"

[Lukas] "Only if we're getting lamb, beef or scallops." He slides the card in and out. A small green LED goes on atop the lock. There's a click. Then he pushes the door open, holding it. One or the other walks in first, depending on how comfortable Danicka felt, or wanted to act, about Lukas being behind her at the moment. "Or all three," he adds, with a half-smile.

It's a pleasant 68 degrees inside. He lets the door shut behind him, and it doesn't slam. This room is just like the other, only the view is a few degrees higher, and faces a slightly different part of the lake. It's one of the marvels of hotels, particularly chains: after a while they all blend together, one room to another, one hotel to another, one city to another, with only the view outside the window changing like a screensaver on a computer.

Lukas sheds his coat at the door, hanging it up in the closet. They're both, by some coincidence, rather casually dressed today. He pulls his sweater off as well. Static sparks and jumps in the thickwoven wool. He hangs it up beside his coat, and underneath he's in cotton shirt, fitted, longsleeved, pullover, a deep burgundy red that's nearly black: a thermal undershirt, really, but enough to do as a shirt in a pinch.

[Danicka] By virtue of the fact that she is already pulling her phone out of her coat pocket when the light flashes green, Danicka walks in after Lukas. She slides her thumb gently over the screen, finds what she's looking for, and puts it to her ear a second later. The door is caught by her hand before it swings closed, eyes flicking over the number before she lets the door go. Inside the room, the extra locks ignored -- at least by Danicka Musil -- he goes about taking off his coat and hanging it up, another difference other than the view and the height of the room.

Last time they left clothes lying in piles from coffee table to bed. Last time they didn't, technically, even get all of Danicka's clothes off before he was inside her. They've never eaten together, either, but one of them is absolutely ravenous now that she realizes it and the other spent most of his evening at the aquarium listening to music rather than getting lamb chops and red wine.

Danicka glances at him taking off his sweater as she walks across the room and sets her bag on the coffee table, lying on its side, the strap hanging down. She sits on the couch and leans over to start untying her black high-top sneakers, which are really so casual it's almost jarring to see them on her. All the while, she is ordering, from memory. Crab and cheese wontons. Mongolian beef. Jumbo scallops with vegetables. General Tao's chicken. No, nothing with lamb? Okay, then. She glances at Lukas throughout this, eyebrows lifting a couple of times, double-checking with him in the manner one might make sure that their roommate still pretty much wants what he always gets.

"Ohh, and crispy banana rolls," Danicka throws in at the end. "Yeaaah." She grins, and gives her credit card number, and the room number, and when the call is ended her sneakers are off and her jacket is undone and she sets the phone on top of her bag. "We have twenty to thirty minutes," she informs him, flopping back on the couch.

[Lukas] While she calls, he goes to the window. He doesn't close the heavy, light-blotting curtains. He opens the inner ones, the sheer ones, pushes them all the way to the ends of their tracks.

By day, the view would be spectacular. By night, the lake is by and large an expanse of darkness rimmed in lights, with the blinking lights of cargo ships far out on the horizon. The Great Lakes are large enough to look much like oceans at their shores, complete with wavelets that lap at the beach, but the water is fresh, and the color subtly different. He stands there looking for a moment, feeling the coldness seep in through the glass, and when she begins to order he can see her reflection in the glass, dim, looking at him.

He turns to face her. Drops down in the other couch, drags the coffee table over and nudges her bag aside to put his feet up. At least he kicks his shoes off first, and his socks are reasonably clean.

She orders crispy banana rolls and Lukas holds up his fingers: two. There's a glint of interest in his eyes, a small grin that, for a second, echoes the sort of grin he might've worn nearly twenty years ago when he heard Mr. Musil had made koláče.

There's a strange ease in this. She said it herself: they've really only known each other a little over a month. Been together, if three tempestuous nights strung out like beads on a string could be called 'together', for about half that time. Circled at each other, questions and parries taking the place of snaps and snarls, for most of that time. Moments like this are far rarer, but he can remember each one with a crystalline clarity.

Danicka hangs up. She tells him they have twenty to thirty minutes and his mouth tilts on a smile, somewhat ironic. It's not enough time to fuck; not the way they do it.

Still, after a moment, he holds his hand out to her, palm up. "Come here," he says, a quiet invitation; not a demand.

[Danicka] The bag on the coffee table is heavy when he nudges it aside, probably close to ten pounds. Danicka jerks slightly when he moves it, as though concerned for its contents, but settles. He's not knocking it to the floor or anything; she goes back to ordering. Wontons and beef and scallops and chicken and not one but two orders of crispy banana rolls with the sugar on the top and the yeaaah. His grin finds a match in hers for a brief moment just then. It isn't the wild, almost manic grin they'd given each other in his bedroom at the Brotherhood when he called her a bitch; it is, oddly enough, shared delight.

Oh, don't think for a moment, Mr. Kvasnička, that every time she makes you koláče that there isn't more sitting in her own kitchen, with strawberry or blueberry filling, with a chocolate mousse version she made up that is completely non-traditional but painfully good. The tone of her legs and belly and arms comes with effort, not from pure deprivation. Given what he's seen of this woman, deprivation isn't her strong suit.

Then again, on the same track, one has to wonder what sort of loss, or emptiness, or pain, that she could not find a reason to tolerate.

He holds out his hand, and Danicka lifts her eyebrows. Her deep violet shirt is visible through the now-parted sides of her coat, her black socks thick and actually rather cozy-looking. She smiles at him, half-cocked and thoughtful even in her amusement. Now would be the point where a coy woman, perhaps one whose insecurities warp her every thought, for whom control and power are inextricably linked to sexuality, would say no. You come here. Danicka observes him for a moment, thinks of something, and then gets to her feet in a single motion, shedding her coat and stepping around the corner of the coffee table to him.

When she sits, she sits down on the couch cushion to his left, immediately sideways, and drapes her legs over his lap. If his arm does not go around her, she leans instead on the back of the couch, tipping her head onto her cocked arm, and smiles. It's there, and then it fades, but not out of displeasure: out of a desire, instead, to make sure this is read as sincere as she means it to be:

"Thank you for taking me home last night."

[Lukas] Lukas has a certain way of sitting: solid, with his feet planted, at repose. It gives every impression of confidence and relaxation, even when he's tense, but when he's relaxed in truth, there are tells. His balance is not so evenly distributed. Some coiled, restless energy is subsumed. His eyes don't glitter, and they don't follow her every move.

Only; they do. She stands up, and he watches her, tipping his head back as she approaches and their angles change. He does not seem to care that this exposes his throat. She sits and he's still watching her, and his arm does, indeed, brace across her back.

There was a night when he was recovering from the invisible damage of some ravaging wyrm-toxin. There were no superficial wounds, but his skin was flushed, and sweat poured off him, and his temperature was off the charts. The whole room smelled like furious regeneration: a hot, musky, animal scent, like the smell of a predator that has dumped all his adrenaline in a fight.

Lukas doesn't burn nearly so hot tonight, but there's a preternatural warmth in him nonetheless. She can feel it where his arm crosses her back; and again, where her thighs intersect his.

His free hand curves over her shin. There's almost a hesitance in this, as though touching her were new to him, only he never hesitated to touch her even when it was new to him. It's not that, then, that makes him watch the absent sweep of his thumb over her denim jeans.

Then he shifts slightly beneath her, slouches a little lower, and all of a sudden becomes more relaxed. Some stiffness leaves him, recognizable only in retrospect when it's gone. His hands mould to her body; there's a sense that he would be content to sit like this, in an unassuming silence, until the food arrived.

Danicka speaks, then. She means to be sincere, but this only makes Lukas glances at her with a twist of a smile, truly ironic now. "You wanted to walk," he tells her. "I wasn't sure you even remembered which way was home."

[Danicka] [Perception + Empathy]

[Danicka] This is why so many people trust her, and why he does not. This is why Ilari Martin, film critic for one of the oldest newspapers in the country, claims to a Philodox of his Tribe that she is one of the finest actresses he has ever met. This is why he can almost never read her, and when he does he seems to have a sort of Danicka-specific dyslexia: if she is hesitant, or uncomfortable, or wary of this companionable ease they suddenly have together, it does not show even in a flicker. Maybe that means she really is unbothered by this.

Whatever 'this' is. Warmth. Closeness. Or worse: intimacy. Almost every time they have touched each other there has been a furious intensity to it, if not at first then very quickly. Casual physical contact is unusual, perhaps even disturbing. Walking arm in arm last night, well...there had been a function to that, a purpose, because the sidewalk was icy and both of them were well aware that Danicka was three sheets to the wind and wearing heels. She'd navigated fine without leaning on him, true, but better safe than sorry, right? And her hand touching his arm and his hand laying on her belly that night in his room had led very, very quickly to more, and those minutes in the motel room the first time don't count because they were both naked and had already fucked twice, it's not even remotely the same.

Lukas's left arm does indeed come around Danicka's back, and so she leans on his bicep more than the back of the couch, as his right hand moves to rest on her leg. She sees something in his eyes, or his expression, in the split-second before his body relaxes against and underneath her own. The corners of her mouth curve slightly, briefly, in the softest of smiles. She does not look as though she is questioning this, but he has some insight into that now: she almost never does, and should not be expected to explain clearly why it is that she's immediately and wholly at ease...just like this.

Her sincerity does not whatsoever preclude her sharing in his ironic amusement. She smiles, eyes twinkling slightly. In this light, though dim, they are their most natural color: a quiet, earthy green, flecked with bits of amber and gray with hints of blue, more like sky than lapis, just as her eyes are more like seagrass than jade. "Some of the most interesting nights of my life would never have happened if I'd been terribly concerned with making it home quickly," she informs him, possibly teasing, and then settles, adding quietly: "Say 'you're welcome'. It's polite."

Now...quite probably teasing. But gently.

[Lukas] Lukas snorts: "Some of the more interesting nights of my life have revolved around some poor bastard who probably should've gone home a little quicker. So forgive me if your argument fails to stick with me."

Then she instructs him to say you're welcome. And the corner of his mouth turns up, a smirk.

"I'm not your little Fang brat. I'll be unwelcoming if I like. Anyway," his hand shifts on her leg, as though to emphasize his point, "the politeness is just an act."

[Danicka] At his snort, and his response, Danicka's lips split into a slow grin. "I wasn't arguing," she murmurs, her voice dropping to a lower register, to a meek and submissive purr that with anyone else would surely be intended to seduce, to subdue, or even to enrage. With Lukas, it seems -- in a convoluted way that may still be and could very well remain completely mysterious to him -- tongue-in-cheek. She knows very well what she is, how she seems, and she knows that he knows, too. He may not like the conspiratorial manner of her humor, or he might; but considering who he is speaking to, it may be that this is one way she can...let him in.

Her hands have, since she sat down, been simply sitting in her own lap, folded together. Her left shifts now, important moments after she speaks, and comes to rest on top of his shirt, on his abdomen. When he touched her like this a few nights ago his hand covered several of her ribs, the heel of his hand at her navel and fingertips along her side. When Danicka does it to him, the warmth of her hand bleeding through his shirt is just a small patch of contact in what is otherwise empty.

"Yelizaveta was never 'my' anything," she corrects him mildly, "and she was never a brat." Beat. She is looking at her hand, not at him, and then she tips her head back again to do so. "Yours or mine?" is the question, then.

[Lukas] They are intrinsically different. There's too many reasons to name. She's kin; he's Garou. She's a liar; he's honest to a fault, to the point of brutality. She's slender; he's broad. When he put his hands on her, she was soft. What muscle there was was slim and supple, under the skin.

When she puts her hand on him, he's carved out of rock. There's a sense that he might be invulnerable -- that you could throw a truck at him and he wouldn't blink.

This isn't true, of course. She knows that better than anyone. Her mother was an Athro, and she became an Elder, but in the becoming she also proved herself anything but invulnerable.

The tenor of the conversation has shifted again. After a moment he covers her hand with his, his palm warm across her knuckles. She can feel him inhale deeply -- filling his chest, pushing his diaphragm down, raising his body against her palm.

"I was talking about mine," he replies. "It's mostly an act, anyway. Courtesy isn't the same as respect."

[Danicka] His skin is the same sort of skin that she wears, and just as easy to pierce. His bones are made of the same stuff hers are, though they're very likely stronger. Danicka is hardly frail, and has a constitution surprising for her size, but in some ways she seems as breakable as she is: her wrists are slender enough to come close to being knobby, her eyes prone to sinking in and wearing dark bruises underneath them when she's tired or extremely stressed, and nothing about the fear shooting through her when his hand landed on her throat once was an act.

The difference in invulnerability, or lack thereof, is that Danicka will not regenerate if a knife slices across her stomach. She will need stitches, she will scar. If he were to receive an injury like the Bone Gnawer who had a run-in with a Skull Pig, he would heal just as fast. Slice open Danicka's femoral artery and she will be dead in minutes...if that. He's not so superhuman that he won't die. She's not so fragile that she swoons at the slightest exertion.

And apparently she is unafraid of walking half a mile home at two in the morning, drunk off her ass and in a city she's quickly becoming familiar with but has no intimate knowledge of yet. Which is interesting, considering how cowardly he has seen her as.

His hand comes to cover hers, and she just curls her head downward, temple to the front of his shoulder, the side of her cheek, her nose, her mouth resting against his left pectoral. He breathes, and she breathes, and when he intones that courtesy and respect are not the same thing, she doesn't smirk, or snort slightly. She thinks it over, her eyes closed, and then: her stomach growls. Danicka groans, bashing her head lightly against his hest. "Mamrd," she all but snarls, "I want my goddamn wontons."

[Lukas] She lays her head on his shoulder. He lets her. No, that's not true: he responds to her, his embracing arm curling minutely tighter, his chin lifting to give her room before bending again to press his lips to her hair.

Then her stomach growls. And against the top of her head, Lukas' mouth widens into a grin that he tries to stifle; and then she snarls mamrd, and that she wanted her goddamn wontons, and he suddenly bursts into the sort of laughter that, not so very long ago, made Katherine hurl a chair against a wall hard enough to break it.

[Danicka] For a few moments, wordless and contemplative, he holds her without holding her in place, and she touches him without it seeming or needing to go anywhere. Last night when things between them soured and turned argumentative, when -- in his words -- he was an ass and she got passive-aggressive, it suddenly seemed as though the pleasure of one another's company and the shared laughter had never happened.

Tonight, with one arm around her and one hand on her legs, with her body curled towards his side as though the space was created and then left empty for her to do exactly this, the harsh frustration between them at the aquarium and even in the car seems like it happened ages ago. Years. Never. And that's not necessarily 'healthy', or appropriate, or setting either of them up for stability or happiness of any kind, because arguing and then dismissing it is not the same as resolving it. Courtesy is not the same as respect, but respect without courtesy is treacherous ground to tread and courtesy without respect is arguably not courteous at all, but this is the sort of talk that two Shadow Lords should not get into, period.

So they don't. Healthy or not, stable or not, at least one of them holds in mind the constant perspective that a few moments like this, or laughing on the sidewalk, or screaming into a sweating shoulder, are worth it. Whatever 'it' happens to be. For now, this is worth hunger and sleeping in a bed not her own and putting aside misunderstandings and arguments that are hardly pointless but that she doubts are going to go anywhere anyway. This being him pressing a kiss to her scalp and laughing, stomach muscles trembling under her palm.

"Oh, go ahead, mock my pain," Danicka mutters, disgruntled. She curls her hand under his and pokes him lightly in the belly with her index finger. "See if I ever buy you dinner again."

[Lukas] Poked, Lukas catches her hand in his again, still laughing. It's under control now, muffled behind his closed lips, and he raises her hand in his, nips her offending index finger with his teeth, kisses the palm.

He could tell her that her pain would be the last thing he would mock. He could tell her that he would protect her, that he would never hurt her (...without reason), or any of the thousands of white lies Garou tell the kin they are fond of. Lies that, in the moment, they believe. Lies that, in the end, they prove, when their temper gets the better of them, or the situation calls for sacrifice, or...

The point is: Lukas does none of these things, and he never has. He kisses her hand, and he's serious now, his eyes frank on hers, perhaps a little troubled. None of this is easy, even when it's like this. Particularly when it's like this.

He lets go her hand, then. Wraps his arms around her, presses his mouth to her temple instead. A moment passes; it might've gone on, except that there's a rap at the door, and Lukas' head turns that way so quick and precise that he's briefly the echo of his totem, avian, raptorlike.

A beat or two. Then he stirs, his hands going to the arms of the couch. He looks back at her. "You better go get that," he says.

[Danicka] Ultimately there is some comfort in the lack of pretense, though no appreciation or tenderness for reality. She likes that he doesn't promise not to hurt her and is disgusted when he comes close to it. It's been laid out on the table: she likes that he doesn't feed her that bullshit -- though she didn't come right out and call it that -- about protection, about safety. He does not like that even what he has said, she doesn't believe. Sure, he won't hurt her 'without reason'. Until the time he does.

The hand that he was before simply covering is caught up, kept from poking him again or scratching, or tickling, or anything else she might do. Danicka doesn't fight it, but she also does not go immediately limp as he has felt her do before. He cannot tell that her hypervigilance, that her awareness of other people's eyes on her is something left over from childhood, from the very beginning of her memories, but he can tell that she has taken a beating more than once. Her response is to give up, go limp, and wait for the blow to fall.

But she doesn't go listless when he catches her hand. Nor does she lift her head from where it is tucked against his chest, as he pulls her hand up and bites at her fingertip. She doesn't shudder, but a subdued and therefore unseen charge goes through her at that. Danicka does, however, breathe in when he kisses her palm, and slowly tips her head back until she can look at him. His eyes are troubled; hers are almost drowsy.

As Lukas lets go of her hand, it comes to rest on his cheek, passing his own kiss back to his skin. Her fingertips split around his earlobe, her thumb resting on his cheekbone, and she huffs out a soft, voiceless laugh when he hugs her like that and kisses her temple, but the sound goes unexplained and the hug doesn't last and their mouths don't go anywhere else because someone knocks on the door.

"Nah," Danicka says, even as she is swinging her legs off of his lap and slipping away from his side, "I think I'll just let him keep knocking, 'cause I'm not hungry or anything." She rises to her feet, stepping over his, and going to the door. A slim wallet is taken out of her back pocket, a few bills pulled out to hand to the young man at the door, who trades her brown paper bags for his tip. "Mother of God," Danicka says in relief, when the door closes behind her and she turns, taking the bags to the coffee table.

==========

And less than an hour later, it can make absolutely no sense to Lukas how Danicka is as thin as she is. Maybe she has a bit of the Garou's metabolism, or maybe she works out a lot, or maybe this is her one meal for the day, or maybe this is not her usual behavior. The woman eats, deftly and almost expertly, with chopsticks. She eats easily and neatly with her fingers, as well. And she eats wontons. And General Tao's chicken. And while she doesn't eat it as soon as its in his hands, she takes some of the scallops and Mongolian beef, as well. Danicka eats as if she has not had anything all day, straight from the carton, sitting cross-legged on the floor with her back to the couch and --

-- at one point her phone vibrates. She picks it up, looks at the glowing screen, and just hollers good-naturedly: "Shut up, Helena!" and puts it back down without texting back or calling back whoever was trying to reach her somehow.

Danicka eats quite a bit, she eats rapidly, and yet she does not eat until her stomach is swollen from food and she has the urge to groan about overdoing it. She eats until she is satisfied, there is no trace of sauce or bit of rice on her face or fingers or lap or even the table around where she ate. She does lean back, however, when she's finished, most likely well before Lukas is, and quietly enjoys one of the crispy banana rolls while laying her head on the couch cushions and looking at the ceiling.

[Lukas] They ordered some three or four dishes, plus dessert. They have white rice on the side. Danicka eats like she's starved, and Lukas -- well, he doesn't eat like he's starved, but he eats with a steady, methodical deliberation. Slow and sure as a hurricane coming off a warm ocean, he lays waste to the meal.

When they're finished there isn't much left. A few pieces of chicken, because Lukas doesn't like chicken much. A few limp shreds of green onions in the sauce that had accompanied the scallops. Some white rice. A wonton, which Lukas is eyeing with passing interest, the way a fullbellied lion might eye a particularly young, lost, helpless, weak gazelle.

Gazelle-ling.

Whatever you call their babies.

Lukas leans back too when he's done. She ate on the couch; he on the floor, his legs crossed indian style, back to the big HDTV. She can just see a shadow of him faintly reflected in its matte black surface -- an impression of his tapering back. He decides not to demolish the last wonton after all and sets his chopsticks, along with his little white carton that seems ubiquitous to all chinese takeout places, back onto the coffee table. Then he picks up one of the sweet, deepfried banana treats and eats that instead.

He hadn't bothered to ask who shut-up-Helena was, but a thought occurs to him now: "Who's Emilie?"

[Danicka] [Correction: DAMON'S POST IS TOTALLY WRONG. SHE ATE ON THE FLOOR. HE JUST CAN'T READ.]

[Danicka] What is unusual about this is that they have been here for nearly an hour now and they are both still dressed. His coat and sweater are hung up, his shoes set aside. Danicka's sneakers are off to one side, her coat resting on the couch seat where she left it when she went over and sat very nearly on his lap. They still have their shirts and jeans and even their socks on. They are both sitting cross-legged on the carpeting, and while Lukas eyes the wonton and the desserts with what seems like equal interest, Danicka observes the ceiling as though it bears an invisible mandala.

She feels relaxed, and she feels satiated, and she feels strangely comfortable considering how the night began and how last night ended and considering her company and the fact that normally by now they would be coming down off of at least their first orgasms. The bed in the other room hasn't even been glanced at, though, and so yet another night together is going not only just 'not as planned' but is new, and different, and therefore somewhat disconcerting. Or could be.

She doesn't feel disconcerted until he asks that question. Danicka is chewing, though, and only blinks at the ceiling, the arch of her back keeping the way her spine stiffens for a second from being obvious. She swallows her bite and licks her lips, drawing the crispy roll down. "My sister in law."

[Lukas] "I thought it might've been," he says quietly.

Lukas doesn't have a couch at his back, and even if he did, it's somehow hard to imagine the Ahroun sitting in quite the same position. There's a control even in his sprawls. Whenever she's seen him stretched full-length -- on the couch, reading; in his bed, naked -- his eyes have been straight ahead or lower; his chin level, or lowered. He does not bare his throat like that.

Or; not often, and never for long.

"It was the way you spoke of the Garou. You seemed to know too much for him to be a stranger." Pause. "And I know you've had no Garou" boyfriend, she called it, drunk, happy; he uses a different word, "affairs before this."

Well. There was Sam. But perhaps that didn't count.

He's thirsty now. They hadn't ordered any drinks. He gets up without warning, but without haste, and he goes to the minibar, crouches down, looks through it. When he comes back he has a bottle of water; two glasses. Two tiny bottles of wine too, one of which he holds out to her, bottom first.

He doesn't retake his seat across the coffee table from her. He sits beside her instead, close enough that their shoulders brush. She can feel the tension in his arm as he lowers himself, one palm braced to the floor. She can feel when his weight comes off his arm too, the tricep and shoulder relaxing.

"What was she hoping for?" A pause; then a guess. "Conception?"

[Danicka] On the occasions when he has bared his throat to her, it has not been a deliberate act of submission, not a show of weakness. He has thrown his head back in an almost literal fit of passion, or loss of control. He has lifted his head to watch her move across the room, not all that long ago. If she notes it, if it means anything to her, she doesn't bring it up. She doesn't nuzzle his neck to let him know she's seen it. Danicka, however, exposes her throat to him as easily as the rest of her body, as though no one ever taught her that this could be searingly dangerous to do. Then again, with him inside her, it hardly bears talking about whether one action is or is not more dangerous than any other.

"Mmm," is all she says in response to the first part, the soft-spoken assertation that he had guessed at this. She had spoken to the woman on the phone with familiarity, had spoken of the Garou in question with a sort of deep and yet indirect understanding. But when he goes on, saying that he knows she's not had an 'affair' with a Garou before this, Danicka slowly lifts her head and then lifts her eyebrow at him, her expression suspiciously Oh, really?, but a moment later she just goes back to her original position.

She is no fool; she can guess how he knows this. If nothing else, they talked earlier about the fact that she has no mate, has never had a mate. Even without remembering last night's conversation in anything but dim hints, Danicka can see the line of logic and the leaps of assumption. She doesn't question him on this, and finishes her treat as he goes to get drinks.

"Thanks," she says, if a bit idly, but then she sees the wine and half-smirks. "I'm liable to just fall asleep on you if I add alcohol to the food coma I'm about to go into," she tells him with a wry half-smile. But she'll take the water; she's thirsty, too.

Lukas sits down, and she lifts her head from the cushions behind her, turning her head to look at him. The coffee table is strewn with napkins, chopsticks, wrappers, cartons, unopened and ignored fortune cookies. She waits for his guess, and then just nods, but offers no more information on the subject. There's a pause, and then she just tips her head and rests it on his shoulder. At the same time, her hand lifts from her own lap and moves to his, moving to the middle of this thigh.

[Lukas] Briefly, a smile flickers and fades. He opens his wine, twisting the cap loose with a tiny crackle of breaking metal filaments. The cap is tossed onto the coffee table. He drinks directly from the bottle, not caring if this was impolite or vaguely barbaric.

He'd said it earlier, anyway. His politeness is an act. Courtesy has nothing to do with respect.

They had not debated the point. And this, too: he takes a guess, but not a wild one; she gives an answer, but only the simplest one possible. And then her hand moves to him, and he looks at it. He shifts his wine bottle to the other hand, lays his hand over hers.

Lukas doesn't ask anything else about her brother; his mate. The questions are certainly there -- but perhaps he's learned something of patience after all.

[Danicka] Lukas's family is up for discussion. How his parents are doing. Whether or not he did anything for his sister's name day -- and how the hell, exactly, did she remember when it was? Did she look it up just in case? Does she have every name for every day of the year memorized on some internal calendar? It had at least been a hint that she was oriented to time and (for the most part) place, but still, it had come from out of nowhere. She has no issue asking about his family, but maybe that is because they are all Kinfolk.

They have not talked about Laura, or about Vladislav, and she has only mentioned her father in passing. Asking about her sister in law was not terribly informative, as only the barest of answers were given. Danicka's family is, at least for now, not something it seems she's keen on talking about. And this may be because only one member of her immediate family is Kin. Miloslav and Emílie have no names and no deeds to be dishonored by a careless tongue, loosened by food or comfort or anything else. And even then, Danicka is nearly silent.

When Lukas touches her hand, which is sitting quite pleasantly on top of his leg, her fingers draped towards the seam of his jeans, Danicka lifts her splayed fingers and laces them through his. She looks at her fingers through the weave of his, and then relaxes the muscle in her forearm, in her wrist. Her fingers tighten as they curl downward again, though, pulling his fingertips towards her palm, but loosely. Danicka's hand slides further between his legs, and then higher, and the only oddity in this is that she takes his hand with her own.

Her iPhone's screen flashes again, on top of her purse. Danicka ignores it.

[Lukas] If he were asked, the fact that his immediate family is entirely kin and hers is not would be the last reason he'd give for their unspoken agreement of near-silence on any and all topics relating to her family. But then, he isn't being asked. They aren't asking anything now, and he's quiet, quietly breathing, watching as her fingers part and stretch and lace through his.

His hand tightens as hers does. There's control in this, too, because if he's not careful he could clinch her hand until it hurt, until something snapped. He folds his fingers through hers, and into her palm, and when she starts to run her hand up the inside seam of his jeans -- his knees loosely updrawn, feet apart and relaxed -- she can feel a frisson of reaction, the muscles of his loins tightening to shift the cant of his hips slightly; his knees moving minutely apart, and straightening a little.

Lukas downs the rest of the little bottle of wine in two long swigs with a half-beat of pause between. He doesn't even lower the bottle from his mouth until it's empty. Then he sets it carefully aside -- on the coffee table if he can reach, on the carpet if he can't.

It's on his mind to ask her if this is deliberate: distracting him from the difficult topics of her family, her brother, her indistinct and quite possibly unpleasant past. But some part of him must know that's not the whole of it. If all the sex was was an excuse not to talk, they would've stopped after the first night. After the first time.

They wouldn't have come this far -- whatever 'this far' might be.

She's found a sensitive spot on his inner thigh, around where the complex bunched muscles of the quadriceps give way to the deeper stretches of the adductors. It makes a frisson of awareness and tension tighten through his leg and up his spine, and she can hear him draw a single, short sip of air. His hand tightens on hers as though to stop her. Then it reopens, the pads of his fingers pressing between the splay of hers, to the denim of his jeans.

[Danicka] If she were a nervous, inexperienced young woman, someone like Gabriella or -- hell -- even Katherine, there might be uncertainty at this point, as soon as muscles begin to tense and Lukas takes that almost sharp, but still carefully controlled, mouthful of air. If Danicka were hesitant about her own desires, or her body, or not sure quite what to do with a man once she's got him alone, this might be the moment when she would pause, rethink things, and move back to a more passive, receptive stance. She might wait for him to reach for her, to push her, to take her by the hand and show her: Here.

And if she were in that stage where the ability to make someone, anyone, quiver where they sit from the effect of her touch, she might even smile. Danicka does not. She is not touching Lukas now, like this, because she mistakes attraction for power or yearning for control. The part of him that stops him from asking her if she's doing this to avoid talking is wise, and he does well to listen to it. So instead of a question, instead of the spur to another argument, there's silence between them and Danicka goes on sliding her hand up his leg, her head turned to watch her own progress.

With a small intake of breath of her own, Danicka slips her hand past the casement of his palm, caressing him through his jeans with a purposeful dexterity that speaks of certainty, of want, and -- though he knew this along with everything else -- practice. Her body turns towards his, head tilting and neck straining, til the tip of her tongue finds the lobe of his ear. She licks him once, then twice, pulling the small bit of tender flesh into her mouth and biting down gently.

Lower, her hand trails up to his fly, and she smiles against his jawbone, her breath humid and warm on the side of his neck.

[Lukas] It was said earlier that Lukas would never sit the way Danicka does, her back to the couch and her head back to look at the ceiling. It was said that if he exposes his throat, it's rare, and it's brief.

That is a lie.

Lukas watches Danicka's hand, his half-lidded with his downward gaze, deliberately calm, deliberately controlled. When her hand comes free of his, his palm rests over her wrist, her forearm, half-forgotten. His breath pauses for the second before she finds him through his clothes. She finds him already hard, and even a garou, even a goddamn ahroun can't manage to get it up in the 0.2 seconds her hand has been on him, so it's not that; it must've been nothing more than her nearness, her hand on his leg.

Then she shapes her hand around him, the denim reducing sensation to a mere hint, a mere tease -- he exhales in a short, audible huff, and then draws his next breath in between his teeth, his head falling back against the couch cushions. He closes his eyes. He doesn't care if this bares his throat.

She presses into him to find his ear with her mouth. His shoulder stirs against hers, and then he opens his arm along the seat of the couch behind them, opens the stretch of his side to her. There's an exception being made here, too, in his quiescence and his acquiescence, his allowing her to kiss and lick and nibble at him, his allowing her to caress him slowly through his jeans when really, he probably wouldn't mind tearing off both their clothes and taking her on the floor, right now, or bent over the coffee table with the remains of their dinner scattering to the floor around them.

[Danicka] Every single time they end up here -- not in the W, but like this, together -- it's different. Her sliding onto his lap in another suite in this same hotel was not the same as the way they undressed themselves in that road motel before they were tearing at one another, and nothing at all was like the way they moved together on the narrow bed, him losing his towel and her clothes not even off when he made her come the first time. And this is entirely different, again, the movement from awkward silence to hunger to...what was that? Cuddling?

And now this. Danicka moves slowly, because her hunger has been sated and because sitting with him earlier and sitting with him now have her skin heating by degrees, have her hands longing to move and her mouth opening against his skin. She can sense the tension in him, not just with her hand between his legs but all over him, in the curve of his neck and the way he's breathing, the way his arm opens does not come back to enfold again. They don't say anything, so perhaps this all is just an excuse not to have to talk to each other and risk one of them shutting down or the other getting angry.

She is using her off hand to get his belt undone, and yet that takes less than a couple of seconds. Danicka doesn't rush, but she doesn't tease, either; her mouth descends to his throat, eyes closing and a warm kiss becoming something far more passionate as the button and then the zipper of his jeans are carefully, quickly unfastened, drawn down, unraveling his clothes bit by bit. The first night, when he pulled her hands to his waist, she'd wordlessly refused. Instead she'd jumped on top of him, and --

-- well. They both know what happened when they kissed.

Her mouth leaves his neck with a flick of her tongue, that impossibly, dangerously warm hand of hers slipping not only under denim but under cotton as well as her whisper hits his ear: "Měli byste si sundej si košili."

[Lukas] Danicka is developing a bad habit.

She's developing a bad habit of telling Lukas what he should or ought to do while making it halfway impossible for him to think. First it was get a condom. Now it's take off your shirt. There's a pulse in his neck and it's bumping under her tongue, a hard steady fast rhythm while she unfastens his pants without looking, with absolute expertise, and then she tells him what she does, and his eyes open to the ceiling, and that's when she touches him under his clothes and his stomach sucks in, the ridges of the abdominals all pulling taut at once.

He makes a sound that's half scoff, half laugh. Then his knees drawn up in counterbalance as he straightens up from the couch, reaches behind his back and grabs fistfuls of his shirt, whisks it off in a smooth pull. He bundles the soft, thick cotton into a loose ball in his hands, which he tosses over his head to unravel against the back of the couch, not bothering to check if it's fallen to the floor.

Lukas wreathes his right hand into her hair, then, but it's only to touch her, to cup the back of her head in his fingers. He doesn't grab her by the hair. He lifts her face to his with his other hand instead, his left hand opening over her cheek, the thumb along the line of her jaw. He kisses her; there's a sudden fervor in this, a slow kiss but a hard one, and she can taste the wine on his tongue, and she can feel the way he flexes his hips, pushes himself against her hand.

When it ends she can feel his mouth curving against hers, an unlikely and unexplained grin, slow, a little lopsided, with his breath coming faster and heavier, but his hand curiously gentle now on her face.

You should take your shirt off, she said. What he says is: "Měli měl by sundej vykuř mi."

[Danicka] She is not just unfastening his pants without looking, but with her off hand. One can only imagine how quickly she would get this done if she were using her right to touch him and not to balance herself as she moves onto her knees at his side, shoulders and hips turned towards him, their bodies rather awkwardly wedged between the front of one couch and the edge of the coffee table. One can only imagine...though in Lukas's present state, it can't be held against him if he can't imagine much at all other than what to do with her next, if even that.

Danicka pulls back slightly from kissing his throat as he nearly tears his shirt off his back, and he no more acts in obedience to her wishes than she takes it as such. Her instruction was a statement of the obvious, an indication of her own desire, rather than some misguided attempt at an order. She doesn't think about it as the thin garment is tossed aside, doesn't follow it with her eyes. She is on him again, the fingers of her right hand sliding up the back of his neck and into his hair, her mouth more fervent now as lips trail down his jawline, as her tongue moves to his adam's apple.

It doesn't last, and she does not get a chance to pull a fold of Lukas's flesh into her mouth to suck softly on it. He is kissing her a moment later, almost gently, but not because any of this hunger has been satisfied. She shivers slightly at his fingertips against her scalp, the touch almost hypnotic at the moment, even though there is no alcohol in her system and she is not the one who has been sitting there with affection after affection laid on her skin. The kiss hardens, and Lukas moves, and Danicka breathes in sharply enough to take the air right out of his mouth.

He is smiling, touching her face in a fashion almost tender -- but it's hard to apply that word to it, with them, even without one or the other attempting to say it aloud -- and then he speaks, and her lips spread into a lopsided smile of her own. Danicka pulls her face away from his, not enough to break away from his touch, and her own doesn't cease. Or falter. Her eyebrows twitch upward, in a mingling of extremely mild amusement as well as something like intrigue...but not displeasure. Her breath is still close enough to touch his face.

It's a pause. It's a pause long enough for him to wonder what her real reaction to that is, enough for him to consider it, as her hand slows and then begins to draw away. She kisses his mouth, once and softly, and begins to stand up. Danicka does not grab her coat or reach for her shoes. She skirts around the edge of the coffee table, reaching down to the hem of her dark purple shirt. The small of her back, the valley of her spine, and then the back strap of her bra all come into view as she walks towards the bedroom, towards the bed, hair lifting as she tugs the shirt up and then falling again over her shoulderblades.

The shirt drops to the floor. His earlier question is answered, though it is on her body and not in the bag:

Lace.

[Administrator] Lukas, welcome to Grant Park (Northside) (Night)

[Lukas] Lukas' hands seem loathe to leave her after the kiss, singular, soft. She stands and they run down her body as her body rises; they trail off her ankles only when she steps away.

He is still where he is, shirt off, fly undone, head back against the couch cushions. He turns his head to watch her without lifting it, a sort of lazy appreciation, and a clench of desire so strong it spreads electric up his spine when she pulls her shirt off.

He doesn't bother to consider why she would wear tennis shoes and casual jeans over lingerie like that. Lukas has learned that for some things, perhaps most things regarding Danicka, it's best not to think too much. She's through the bedroom door when he plants a hand on the couch cushions behind him and levers himself up. He takes a moment to peel his socks off, and his pants. His wallet is in the back pocket, and it thuds lightly to the carpet.

He loses his shorts at the bedroom door. Though he'd told her to turn the lights out before the second time they'd (fucked/made love) at the hotel, and though she'd turned the lamp on his headboard off the last time at the Brotherhood, he turns the lights on. Even the lighting here is expensive, tasteful, subtle, careful. Nothing glares. No pallor of fluorescence, no dimness of low-wattage incandescence. The bedroom is instantly awash in a comfortable amount of light. It gives her skin a sort of golden cast. It picks out the details in the lace of her bra, and the textures on the bedspread.

Lukas shuts the bedroom door before stepping away from it.

[Danicka] There are certain colors of lingerie that are automatically thought of: black. Red. White, for brides most of the time. Purple is considered adventurous somehow, pink is feminine. Black is a safe bet. Try to guess the color of a woman's undergarments when she expects to get laid, go with black, and most of the time you'll be right. Lukas has almost never seen black on Danicka, period. A set of slacks once, and a few of her coats. The lace under her shirt now isn't black, either. Nor is it red, or white, or pink, or matching her shirt. It isn't green satin.

Brown. Dark, rich brown, somehow making that golden-pale cast to her skin warmer when Lukas flicks on the lights around the room. Were there another building close enough to this one for the windows to face each other, the uncurtained windows and this much light inside would make their every action visible to onlookers. He can't blame her for not having picked up on his rather intense need for privacy in most things, with the way he stands naked at the windows here and the ease with which he reclines nude, on top of the sheets, when she is getting dressed afterward.

Danicka is not naked by the time he is. She has turned however, to sit neatly on the very edge of the foot of the bed, watching him with an expression that would be 'thoughtful' if her eyes weren't a slightly darker shade of green, if her lips weren't parted, if she weren't also leaning back on top of the covers to rest her weight on her elbows. Danicka does not reach for him, or the fastenings of her own, unbelted jeans. Her toes are at work, idly easing the socks off her feet. The door closes, and she smiles at Lukas.

[Lukas] The master bathroom of this suite is probably nearly as large as his entire room at the Brotherhood. Put another way, unless one counts the inside of his car as well, the bathroom of this hotel suite is larger than all the space, all the territory, he could rightfully call his own in human terms.

In Garou terms, of course, it's a different story. In Garou terms, as far as this city is concerned -- though Danicka does not know this, and perhaps Lukas will never tell her -- he owns far more than that. He lays claim to everything his pack lays claim to, though always secondarily to his (new) Alpha. He lays claim to Danicka as well, every inch, and there is no conditional clause in this.

Of course, then there's the trouble of her family. Her brother, who would be her closest living Garou relative, and all the permissions and arrangements involved there. But then, that's a different thing altogether. That's a step that goes beyond guardianship and claim, and skirts treacherously close to --

No; it doesn't merely skirt. It is, it would be, a claim of matehood.

We digress.

The point is: whatever claims he may or may not have already lain, it doesn't change that Lukas pauses half a yard away when Danicka leans back on her elbows, looking at her as though gauging whether or not he had permission to touch. Her lace bra is not black, and the contrast between it and her skin is not so sharp as black would be. It's somehow warmer than black, but breathtaking nonetheless, and it makes him take a slow sip of air that, if he were not naked, she would not even register as any different from his usual rhythm.

But he is naked. And so she sees it, how it's slower and deeper, and very controlled.

He looks at her skin, what he can see of it. Her shoulders and her chest, her stomach; lower down, her toes pushing her socks off. A moment's consideration. Then he drops to his knees, unhurriedly, and tugs her socks off. Drops them on the floor. Straightens up, standing on his knees now, reaches up to undo the button on her jeans, to draw down the fly. His hands curl into the opened halves of her jeans, but before he tugs them off, too, he looks up the expanse of her body.

Her eyes are quite green in this light, somewhat darkened -- he'll never quite be able to say if it's only a trick of the light, a trick of her dilating pupils and the way the light refracts through the contracted irises, or if by some magic her eyes really did shift color and change.

His eyes rarely change much. Blue they are, and blue they will be, in this light or another. What does change is the temperature of the blue: it freezes, it chills, it burns, it sears. There's a heat in his regard now that has nothing to do with anger, and only a little to do with rage. He doesn't look away from her as he puts his mouth to her skin, laying a trail of kisses from the center of her stomach to the waist of her panties, whatever they might be, wherever they might be exposed, while his fingers curl into her denims and pull them off inch by inch.

[Danicka] She'd never seemed terribly interested in how she was claimed or by whom. He and Mrena were -- and remain -- the only Shadow Lords she knows of in the city. He outranks her by virtue of his place in his pack. Quite some time ago, before they ever laid hands on each other to do anything but shake them, he told her about a man named Milo, and she has not bothered to seek this man out and introduce herself. It does not matter to her, from all evidence. She has not asked Lukas to make exceptions for her. She has not asked him to protect her. She has no idea that he quite literally fought for her, even if it was a formality.

They are here not because this hotel is the nicest in the city or the cheapest. They are here -- and this is what makes it sound desperate, almost needed, and most certainly surprising that they are just now getting around to touching one another -- because it is very close to the aquarium, easy to drive to, and because they know from experience that the showers are hot and the bed is comfortable and the walls are thick enough that they may as well be separated from the rest of the world when they're here. Which may very well be the goddamn point.

Danicka does not know he's claimed her. She knows the difference between one sort of claim and another, and maybe she doesn't care. Maybe she'd have something to say about it if he told her, oh, just a heads up, that 'Milo' guy isn't responsible for her anymore. Ultimately her brother still holds the claim over her, though it is necessary for their to be a member of their Tribe in Chicago acting as her guardian, and it obviously has nothing to do with matehood. It has a little to do with ownership.

Maybe she's just on lease, then, or something, but it's a question that's not on his mind and certainly not on hers. She watches him, not only the movement of his body, of muscle shifting under skin, but the way he pulls at air and the way he pauses before coming to her. There is nothing subjugated about the way he moves to his knees, but it still surprises her somewhat, and she breathes in deeply when his hands go from her feet to her waist. Danicka lays back, lowering her shoulderblades to the bedspread, and lifts her hips to aid him in pulling her jeans off of her body.

Lace again. Lace and satin boy-shorts fit snugly to her hips, a soft pink that makes the skin of her belly and thighs seem somehow paler the same way that the deep brown above makes her shoulders and ribs look darker. A small sound escapes her as his mouth touches her skin, her eyes opening to the ceiling and the rough fabric of her jeans drags down her legs, past her knees, off, and to the floor. Another sound, breathier, catches in her throat; she swallows it, and her fingers reach down, moving into his hair.

"Pojď sem," she says, and cannot keep at least an undercurrent of pleading out of her voice, though for the most part she sounds aware, and in control, of her own yearning.

That is, achingly, what it's becoming.

[Administrator] cricket, welcome to Grant Park (Northside) (Night)

[Lukas] Her jeans come off in his hands, and he pushes it aside. The boyshorts then, and by now her fingers are in his hair, and his eyes are no longer on her because his mouth is pressed to the skin of her belly, his face turned to it, and he can feel the same snaking muscles under his mouth that he'd felt under his hand the last time, in his room, in his narrow bed, in the pre-dawn darkness.

It is not darkness in here. The room is well-lit, just a hair shy of blazing with lights. When he's hooked his fingers under the waistband of her boyshorts she tells him to come here, and he opens his eyes and looks at her for a moment, just a moment, his lips parted with his breathing, his eyes vivid and glittering.

And then he ignores her. He turns his face to her skin again instead, and her inner thighs are bare now, and when he kisses her there, she squirms just as he'd remembered.

Perhaps it should disturb him, or frighten him, that he remembers these things. Has discovered these things at all. That he knows there's a sensitive spot on her hip, in the shallow valley just inside the iliac crest. That he knows there's a ticklish patch of skin just over the line of her panties, where her belly contracts reflexively if he kisses her there. That he is beginning to know her body, the measure of it, the curvature, the slenderness and the subtle tone, so well that he could trace it in his mind's eye without even looking at her.

Perhaps all this should disturb him. Perhaps it frightens him that the sex is not just sex, but some sort of strange, nameless learning; a connection on a nonverbal, implicit level that has nothing and everything to do with whether or not he knows her and understands her.

When his mouth finds it way down her thigh, he kisses her through the scrap of lace and satin that, in this day and age, passes for lingerie. It's not an accident; it's not curiosity or some twisted sense of obligation, or even properly whimsy. It's firm, quite deliberate; he means to do this, even if the decision was made somewhere in the last ten seconds, between the shivering muscle deep in the middle of her thigh and the soft skin at the juncture of thigh and torso. He puts his mouth to her through her panties until the satin is wet, and her spine is winding taut.

Then he straightens to strip her boyshorts off. Doesn't fling them over his shoulder to catch comically on a framed picture; doesn't snap them like a rubber band to the far side of the room. He simply drops them on the floor. He shrugs her legs over his shoulders then, her knees over the crest, her calves down his back, and even in this her body seems to fit his. If she's taken her hands from his head he takes one and replaces it, takes the other and grips it, her smaller fingers folded in his larger ones. With his free hand he opens her sex, spreads it open, and he puts his mouth to her.

And the truth is, Lukas is not an expert at this. He's not even particularly good at. He is not good because he doesn't practice; he doesn't practice because -- well; there's any number of reasons, but they amount to the same reasons he didn't do any of the other things he didn't do before, that he does not.

This, too, could be questioned. Examined. Combed over; pored over; studied, queried, debated, flayed open. This could bother him, disturb him, if he lets it.

But he doesn't. Not now, anyway. Perhaps this is why this just works. It works because somehow, at some point, they shed their misgivings and their doubts. They leave it at the door. They pick it up again on the way out, and then they'll meet in the street and argue and distrust, but in here -- though the location does not make a goddamn difference -- in these moments, the air between them is clear, and charged with a wholly different sort of tension, and simplistic.

So. He watches her as he pleasures her, or tries, but not to determine if she lies to him, or puts on a show, or disguises her true feelings beneath a placid facade. He watches her now to watch her. He puts his free hand over her belly to feel her. He takes in her reaction as though hungry for it, as though it fed his own; but also to study it: to learn this, too, as he'd learned the other subtle details of her body.

[Administrator] cricket has left Grant Park (Northside)

[Danicka] Come here, he'd said to her in the sitting room just outside, while they waited to be fed. And she'd gone over to him, sat not beside him or on top of him but with him, encircled by him, albeit loosely. It had been casual, and they both know it would not have stayed that way for very long if the delivery man had not knocked on their door. She still remembers his lips on her palm; if she thinks about it, she can feel where his lips landed, sense a tingle in her nerve endings where he nipped at her fingertips.

Drunkenly she had called him her boyfriend, best and worst and only when it comes to members of his species. She does not remember giving him this title, and he didn't recite it back to her, for whatever reason. Danicka has also told him that -- at least for a time -- she's his, as though one person can possess another, as though there is such a thing as belonging to someone. As closed off as she is, as hard as it is to reach her, she is the one who called this something other than fucking, other than sex, other than boning, screwing, or any number of other, inherently distant euphemisms.

Pojď sem, she says to him as he's undressing her, kissing her with the same deliberation and attention that he had in his bedroom, and he ignores her. Only he doesn't. He comes to her again and again, mouth on flesh that has become hypersensitive, slowly returning to spots that will make her react in ways he knows, seeking out new places to see what she'll do then. Danicka does not make any attempt to hide what he is doing to her. Yes, she squirms, and when he kisses her through her underwear her thighs tremble for a moment, out of her control.

The noise she makes then is quiet not because she tries to hold it back but because she cannot breathe deeply enough to give it voice.

With him on his knees, with her laying back, the only part of him she can reach is his hair. She cannot meet his eyes because every time she tries to look down at him another shock goes through her and her eyelids fall, or her head tilts back. And this is while she is still covered, while he is still kissing her with at least one incredibly frustrating layer between his mouth and her body. Danicka's hands leave his hair briefly, clenching into fists, and are forced to relax again. The only thing she is fighting to control is the shaking of anticipation, of want, that is trying to overwhelm her.

She moans protestingly when he straightens his back, even though she knows why, even though on some level she is aware. Still. It escapes her throat and she lets it go, lifts her head while she can to look at him, because she likes to look at him, because as much effort as it takes for her to lift up on her elbows right now it's worth it to see him. This, like so many other moments of stillness or control, doesn't last. As soon as his mouth is on her again, hot and wet as she is, Danicka lowers herself back to the bedspread, her back arching uncontrollably, her hands grabbing not at his hair but at the covers to her sides.

This was not what she expected, either when she started to touch him in the other half of the suite or when she stood up and drifted in here. This is not what she expected when he went to his knees, even. The number of men who have done this without prompting, without encouragement, without being asked, is so small as to be almost negligible. The simple fact that he has utterly surprised Danicka -- for once -- is enough to make that first electric shock of pleasure nearly impossible for her to come back from. It takes several moments for her to lower her back to the mattress again.

And what's more, what's even more surprising than the fact that he is doing this at all, is that he keeps going. Danicka forces her eyes open to look at the ceiling, gasping for air, her relaxing hands slowly moving back to his hair, as she realizes that...well. He doesn't entirely know what he's doing. She takes a few harsh, begging breaths of air and then she begins to speak. Her tone of voice is soft, if not particularly gentle because she can't quite manage 'gentle' right now, and the first thing she tells him is:

"Dobrý ... ach bože...velmi dobrý..."

Danicka is not an idiot, and she has never been a passive lover. She doesn't hold back for fear of seeming wanton, and the words 'slut' and 'whore' mean absolutely nothing to her. She is vocal, she is encouraging, and Lukas knows without a shadow of a doubt when he has done something to her that she likes: her muscles go rigid, her voice catches in her throat with some instinctive urge not to scream, and when he strays, she whimpers for him to do what he was doing before.

"Jet rychleji," she says after perhaps seven or eight minutes, but by then...

...well, by then. His hand is holding hers and she is squeezing his at turns, tightly, one more point of contact to tell him yes, or more. Her free hand is not over his on her abdomen. It goes into her own hair, or to the covers, the longer he tortures her like this. Danicka's body is responding to his attention, her voice is rising from it, and when he listens to her and he goes faster...or slower...or harder...she suddenly cries out "Nekončí! Lukáš, prosím nekončí!"

And then, her back arching again, her hand tightening hard on his and her free hand going with surprising care to the back of his head, all she does is scream his name.

"LUKÁŠ!"

[Lukas] Lukas is not expert, but if nothing else, he is intelligent; he's capable of learning, and quickly. Perhaps more important than anything else, he has the humility to listen to what she tells him: with her words, with her hand, with the writhe and twist of her body.

And patience. There's that, too. Some, anyway. Enough to persist, though by the end he's breathing hard, there's sweat on his brow, and his free hand has left her stomach to stroke himself, only returning when she cries out, only then wrapping hard around her hips and holding her against her uncontrollable flexion, holding her against his mouth while he works his tongue and his lips on her, carrying her over and through her climax with a silent intensity that borders on fury.

Afterward, for the span of some endless seconds, moments, a minute or more, he's with her still -- he doesn't move. He doesn't release her hand. He doesn't pry her thighs apart and turn his face away. He doesn't crawl up her body and over her.

He stays. Still, and where he is, his shoulders moving under her legs with the speed and force of his breath, while her body starts to shake as he knows it would, trembling like a leaf, as though she were cold.

Weeks ago:
Není ti zima?
Ne.

-- and she'd tucked her feet under his, as though she trusted him.

He closes his eyes at the memory, or perhaps because her hand is beginning to loosen now, or her thighs are beginning to turn liquid.

In her pleasure, her hand has clenched his in a way his could never clench hers, not unless he wanted to hurt her, break her: she's able to put all her strength into her grip at the moment of orgasm in a way he would never be able to. He hasn't let go yet. He grips her fingers in return, gentler, but firm; he gives her a touchstone, a point of contact, a still point in a turning world.

It's only now that he gently flexes his fingers to loosen them. His thumb traces the outside of hers. He presses a kiss to her sex, gently now, and then he shifts a few inches upward to lay his cheek against her lower abdomen, turn his ear to the stretch of smooth, unmarked skin between her lowermost rib and her hip girdle, as though by listening hard enough he might hear the fragments of her come back together. His free hand opens over her body as well, a little higher than his head, her thigh still hoisted over his shoulder. He draws a breath and lets it out, and it's nearly a sigh.

Moments more go by -- minutes on end, unspooling. "Danička," he says, as though this meant something.

[Danicka] This is the second time Lukas has sought Danicka's pleasure before his own, as though listening to and feeling her come apart from him is the goddamn point as much as just being with her is. This is the first time she has used his name during sex, not just murmuring it in his ear before the act or saying it conversationally afterwards. This is the only time she has called out to him while caught up in her own orgasm. What he doesn't know is that it is not the only time she has wanted to. It's just the first time she has been unable to stop herself, unwilling to attempt to stop herself. It's the first time she has reached out to him like that.

And what's disturbing, what is the basic reason for stopping herself on any other occasion, is that it is a reaching-out, a connection, pulling him into her and with her even though the only thing pleasuring him for several minutes is his own hand. Considering that this was the first time he has lowered his mouth to her like this, considering that he does not practice this any more than he kisses the women he sleeps with:

"That was amazing," Danicka is breathing out, batting her eyes at the ceiling in a completely nonflirtatious fashion. She is trying to refocus her eyes.

One hand still held in his, both of their grips loosening, she gives a single shudder -- because for once she actually is not trembling all over, is not shaking or seeming as though caught by a sudden chill -- and begins stroking his hair softly with her free hand. She is utterly relaxed, her breathing slowing as he rests his head on the expanse of her midsection, her fingertips strangely soothing in the way they touch his scalp through hair that curls when long, when wet, when dampened with sweat as it is now.

"Lukáš," she murmurs, not after minutes, but mere moments. "Lukáš, pojď ke mně."

The woman's tone of voice is imploring, but not pleading. Inviting, but not demanding. She has not attempted to unwind her leg from where it rests over his shoulder, has not stopped touching his hair, but she looks down the stretch of her body at him lying there, and if he looks at her now her eyes are as open, as clear to see through as they were when she stepped into the shower back at the Brotherhood and was her strange, untamed-but-not-wild self.

"Prosím," she adds, in a whisper.

[Lukas] Amazing, she calls it, and this makes him open his eyes and laugh aloud. It's equal parts self-deprecation and disbelief and a strange, uncomplicated joy. Lukas is a proud creature, but not vain, and he knows what he's good at and what he's not. What he did to her falls under the latter category. Then again, he knows when she comes, and he thinks -- perhaps knows -- that she hasn't lied to him there.

In the end he only turns his mouth to her skin, laying a soft kiss on her body.

Moments later, she speaks again, and he lifts his head. He looks at her for a beat, seriously, searchingly perhaps. Then he draws a sharp breath in, and it's like some switch has flipped; some circuit once closed is now open, some gate once barred is now open, and the light in his eyes is suddenly no longer a slow burn but a wildfire; a storm.

His shoulders bunch under her knees. He draws his arms from under her thighs, presses his hands to the bed, the muscles across his chest tightening as he gets up, shifts his weight onto his palms. The carpet here is thick and soft, but even so, after nearly twenty minutes of kneeling there, the bedspread feels astoundingly soft and smooth in comparison. He moves over her, and his mouth finds her stomach, her breast, her collarbone on its way up to her mouth, where he kisses her with a sudden, devouring hunger, like this were the first time, or the first kiss.

But she'd said once, the first time, that she would not lie willingly beneath him, and whatever else he is, Lukas is not forgetful, or careless. A second later he catches Danicka up with an arm under her waist, draws her swiftly up against his body as he's bulldozing his way onto the bed, and all this time he has not stopped kissing her unless the jostling of their bodies jars their mouths apart, and even then he seeks hers out again, kisses her again, harder.

When he's away from the edge he sits back on his heels, the muscles of his back tightening under her hands -- he draws her upright onto his lap, her thighs straddling his, and --

all of a sudden he turns his face away on a curse, something like sonuvabitch under his breath, a breath hissing out between his teeth, and then Lukas gives something that sounds like a single, solitary exhale of a laugh, or what would've liked to be a laugh if there was any room left between his hunger and his desire and his need for something so paltry as humor.

"I fucking forgot the condoms again."

He looks at her again. Another man, upon remembering, might pretend he hadn't. Another man might've waited to see if she would forgive him this once and let him fuck her anyway. Another man might've simply crawled on top of her and fucked her, period, nevermind the condom, nevermind what she'd said once.

But this is Lukas. And he looks at her, and a beat goes by, and then he arches suddenly across the gap and he kisses her, and it's like high voltage wires tangling in rain, it's a jolt of connection as sharp as a train wreck. A second later he lifts her by the waist, off his lap, he sets her back and gets up off the bed, or starts to, then stops and closes the distance, crushes another kiss to her mouth, and murmurs "Hned jsem zpátky." against her lips.

Then he gets up off the bed in truth. He yanks the bedroom door open too fast, and the tongue of the lock jars against the frame, making the whole wall shudder.

[Danicka] One would think that mere seconds after her orgasm he would be on her again, not laying his head on her stomach like a pillow, like a lover and not...whatever the hell she is to him. That may even be what she was expecting, to have him crawling up onto the mattress and on top of her body, whether to roll her onto his own or simply push her legs apart and push himself into her, but to say that Danicka might have been expecting anything would be ignoring the fact that right now, she is only marginally aware of where she is, or what day it is.

She does not know what to call these moments when he looks at her, not entirely inscrutable but still unreadable because he is not so much projecting as searching. Lukas looks at her when she murmurs for him to come to her, and if she weren't convinced that this is highly unlikely, she might see the way he looks at her as hesitance. Does he still, even now, wonder if she really wants him, if it's honest, the way she quite literally screamed his name when he took her over the edge? Or is it just his control...his nearly unabating, relentless struggle for control?

Danicka doesn't know, and it is just a moment before he is getting off his knees. Her leg slides off his shoulder and down his arm, remaining bent, one foot flat on the bed and one dangling off the edge as he gets closer. Traces of moisture touch her skin here and there, and when he reaches her mouth she is already leaning up towards him for this kiss, obliterating any suspicion he may or may not have had that she would not want to kiss him after he spent roughly a quarter of an hour fucking her with his mouth. Then again, Lukas may not know how many women would turn their faces away in disgust, or discomfort. Danicka licks his lips, and invites his tongue into her mouth, kissing him until her own satisfaction begins to roll over into new arousal, until she tastes herself on her own tongue even when their lips part.

When they kiss her hand is on the back of his neck, as though to hold him there. When he bends over her body, her legs slide up and down on the outsides of his hips. When he moves her, moves them, Danicka just purrs and wraps an arm around his shoulders, holding tightly to him so they can go on kissing like this. Muscles tense and bunch up in her back and shoulders, tighten in her flank, as he sits up and drags her onto his lap. The presence of him up on the bed with her, the heat of his bared flesh, their kiss becoming less and less focused and more and more ravenous all contribute to the way that she is flowing up against him as soon as her thighs are spread over his.

Gasping briefly for breath, Danicka rubs herself against him, making a low sound of pleasure a split-second before he swears. Her closing eyes open to ask him why in god's name he's stopping, why he's not inside her yet, why he's-- but he tells her before she asks and she just stops for a second, blinking at him. "Oh," she says, not in disappointment or sudden loss of desire, but realizing she hadn't thought of it. For once. Danicka, instead, buries her fingers in his hair and kisses him suddenly, hard, her mouth meeting his in midair as it has so very, very many times before, as though the urge is born simultaneously in both of them more often than not.

The dangerous thing is that she rocks against him again as she does so, fingers tangled in silky black hair, hips writhing from want, even while they are both attempting to not be idiots. The fact that she does not stop moving on his lap, that she so obviously and almost painfully wants him even now, even after what he did to her, likely contributes to just how quickly he has to make himself move to get off the bed and away from her, from her body. And even then he comes back and she bites his lower lip when he kisses her, which stands in for anything she might say.

Such as Hurry.

When he comes back from the sitting room, Danicka is on her knees on the bed, her back arched, the moonlight far fuller than the last time they were here hitting her skin. Her arms are folded back, unfastening her bra. She is looking out the windows, looking in fact at the moon, and then she turns her head to him. Looking at him in the doorway, her eyes wide open (and wearing some vague expression that looks like pain), she slides the lace number off her shoulders and arms, her breasts rising and falling with breath quickened, but not panting. The lingerie is tossed aside, and the woman unfolds on the bed, lying back until her head touches the pillows.

She doesn't tell him to come here, come to her. No please. No poetry. Danicka parts her legs, cups her left breast in her left hand, and slides her right down her stomach and abdomen to touch herself. Which says for her: Come here. Come to me. Please.

But not: "Lukáš...". Because that, she moans aloud.

[Lukas] It's a monumental effort to draw away from her when she's pressing herself to him, rubbing herself against him, and there's absolutely nothing between them but the frail and shredding remnants of his will. They kiss like a collision and his hips buck against her, and his hands move to her waist and he begins to lift her, and for a split-second, an instant, it's impossible to tell whether he means to bring her down on his cock or set her back from her, away.

Of course, we know now which he chose. And even then he couldn't leave without a last press of his mouth to hers, and even when he's gone, he's gone for a matter of seconds, less than a minute. When he comes back she's kneeling on the bed taking her bra off, and she's looking out the window, and the moon is out there, gibbous and growing.

It's as much that as the bra falling from her shoulders that makes him stop for a second. He follows her eyes out the window; he looks at the moon as she looks at him, and then he looks at her, and they stare at each other for a second, and they're both suddenly and starkly aware of something neither of them voice.

A beat. Then he comes to the bed, drops a handful of easy-rip packets on the sheets. His voice is steady and quiet when he speaks. If she wasn't already beginning to know him well, to be able to read the faintest nuances of his tone and decipher the tumultuous emotions riding just beneath his veneer of immovable calm, she'd think him uninvolved, uninvested in this all, when nothing could be farther from the truth.

"It's okay," is what he says. Perhaps even he doesn't know what he means to reassure her of. He shakes his head as though to negate the moon phase, the inexorable rising of his rage like a tide; the approach of the full. "Don't worry about that."

And then she's lying back again, only it's not again, because she's never lain back like this before, not for him, not once, not ever, and he looks at her with such a look, so subtle and complex that it's simply not possible to put a name to it or the exact emotions that underlie it -- something like a dawning and a consternation at once, something oddly like amazement; something like recognition of her, of what she has done; of himself, of the fact that he is, perhaps, not quite worthy of this; something very like the same half-pain that was in her face a moment ago.

He doesn't say her name, though perhaps he wants to. He doesn't even stand there staring for long. He rips the first packet open and smooths the condom on by touch because his eyes are fast on her as she opens her legs, and when she touches herself and moans his name he has to draw a breath, he has to lick his lips as if he wanted to plant his mouth between her legs again.

Then the mattress is dipping under his weight, but the headboard doesn't bump the wall and the springs don't creak, and he moves over her with as much gentleness and patience as he can manage, which is not much at all. His fingers tangle with hers between her legs when he kisses her, and he can feel the way she responds to this, the rise of her body up and toward him in counterpoint to the way he bends to her. His breath catches when he finds her as hot and wet as he remembers, he gasps into her mouth, he draws her hand up in his, their fingers twisting slickly together, leaving a tracery of wetness along his body as he brings her up to his mouth and sucks the tips one by one, or that is what he means to do, except after the second or third finger his thoughts have unraveled and he kisses her mouth instead.

It's like this, kissing her, that he draws her legs up over his hips if she has not already wrapped them around him; and like this, kissing her, that he first enters her tonight.

It makes him suck an involuntary breath in, so sharp and fast and strained that his stomach flexes in and his chest rises sharply. He loses the thread of the kiss -- his mouth opens to her mouth, merely breathing now -- there's an electric instant when his hips meets hers, and he's all the way inside her, touching the mouth of her womb, quiveringly still, before his hands come to her and he cradles her face between his hands, his weight on his elbows and not on her body, and his mouth closes very gently over her upper lip.

He means to ask her something -- if she was okay, as if she were a virgin; if she was okay with this, as if she were exactly who and what she is; but it's not that that comes out of his mouth, not that at all but simply this:

"Danička."

Nothing more. Nothing less. As though this, too, meant something.

Then he kisses her, again and again, with a passion that rises so precipitiously it shakes him to the core, as though he could not get enough of this, as though he could not get enough of her, as he begins to move in her.

[Danicka] After tonight, there is not going to be any question of whether this makes dealing with the rest -- the misunderstandings, the miscommunication, the misread intents and the mistaken assumptions -- worth it. 'This' is not meaningless, and it is not just sex, and something else entirely is going on even if does not have a name.

The way they look at each other after Lukas observes where the moon is in its cycle and then looks at her again doesn't quite have a name, either. It keeps happening, though, and not just in the way they sometimes move at the same instant to kiss each other. There are just times when with a look, or a touch, or a few words --

Why do you think?

-- they know without being explicit what the other is thinking, or what the other wants, and maybe even why it's impossible to come right out and say it. Abruptly and unexpectedly they will have this unquestionable awareness, and it is obvious sometimes how difficult it is for either of them to cope with.

Like right now, when Lukas shakes his head as he comes towards her, and quietly offers: It's okay. Don't worry about that. Danicka just shakes her head in return, smaller movements but faster, and whispers: "I'm not." Afraid. "I'm not." Worrying. She repeats it only once, a sigh more than a pair of words, and her eyes leave his for a moment as she lays back as though to escape the way he looks at her then. That flicker of her attention away only lasts a second; her eyes come back to him and sees the vestiges of his expression before it changes.

Then she feels herself, and she feels the bed move, and he knows she did not expect to feel his fingers slipping in between hers because of the way Danicka gasps when he does so. It takes the breath out of his mouth, the taste of her still on his lips, the moisture of his tongue flicking over the incredibly thin skin. Yes, she moves towards him, arching her back as their lips inevitably part so they don't drawn, suffocate, fall away from light and air completely.

Danicka's eyes on him, watching as he licks her fingers and sucks each tip, look somewhat drowsy, look drunk. Only he's seen her when she's drunk and her eyes glitter then, turn bright and yet indistinct. Somehow at the moment, though half-lidded, her eyes are both sharp and lazy, satisfied and hungry at once. They close when he kisses her, and stay closed as her legs slide up his thighs and around his waist, and stay closed when he eliminates the last of the distance between the two of them.

He loses the kiss in favor of breathing, which she can't fault him for, but when their mouths part even for a second Danicka opens her eyes as though she is going to ask him if he is okay. Nevermind the fact that when his hips flexed and brought them together she arched on the bed again and let out a small, sharp gasp of definite but maybe even surprising pleasure. It's his hands on her face that bring her back down, that have her looking back at him with a thin line of concern between her eyebrows, a concern that does not in the slightest change the tension of longing occurring elsewhere in her.

It smooths away, eases off her of her face, and Danicka kisses him softly in response to her name. Then not so softly, and in response to nothing other than him, the weight of him against her, the heat of his skin augmenting and increasing her own unabating warmth. When he moves, she rolls her hips, the two of them aligned suddenly more than physically. She wraps her arms around his neck to hold him to her: her fingers in his hair, his cock in her body, her tongue moving with his.

It's less than a minute before she moves her hand in his hair, the muscles in her arm around his shoulders flexing to hold him closer, her breath curling around the upper curve of his ear: "Více," she purrs, almost snarling the word. Her legs tense around him, tighten, and pull him deeper.

[Lukas] It's slow for the first few moments, a minute, less -- but intense, their bodies joined, their eyes shut, their mouths open to one another's, with a profound, escalating fervor that builds beneath the skin. It's by necessity that they tear their lips from one another's, eventually: merely to breathe, merely to move even closer, and now her arms are wrapped around his neck and his head is bent to her, his mouth to the side of her neck, and her legs are shifting to wrap higher around his ribs, tightening.

Více, she says, lifting her chin to drop the singular word in his ear. There's nothing soft about the way she says it. There's nothing soft about hunger: it's a physical need, a requirement, unapologetic and raw.

It's wholly possible that even without encouragement, he would've done this anyway. Increased the tempo. Upped the ante. It's wholly possible, but it hadn't happened before she spoke; she speaks first; he responds. He nips at the side of her neck, and then he starts to shift. She can feel the spreading delta of his trapezius muscle bunch under her hands as he presses his palms to the mattress as though he meant to straighten up, to lift his body away from hers to give himself the leverage to fuck her. There's a second where his triceps are beginning to flex, his back beginning to bow away from her.

Then, just like that, he changes his mind.

Lukas slides his arms under her body instead. He wraps his arms around her, as he has before -- as he would again, if given the chance; though, given the moon, the date, the fact that they don't see each other for days at a time, and don't always fuck every time they meet, that this would happen again at all is never a certainty.

(don't worry about that, he'd said.)

He wraps his arms around her, tight, enfolds her and lifts her against him with an exhale like a sigh, only harsher; then he reaches down to tilt her hips, angling them to align her to him so he can drive deeper, so she can wind him tighter in her arms and her legs. His weight changes, and he puts his balance on his forearms beneath her, his knees and the balls of his feet, arched against the bed. Now they're so close together that when he moves, he moves against and into her with the whole of his body. She can feel the flexion there, the deep contractile power that surges pulselike from chest to abdomen to flank to thigh; a force that sieves through every muscle, a summation of strength across the body to center on the grind of their hips.

He has never quite been gentle with her, and she has never asked it of him. They have coupled slowly, achingly, in the dark with her riding above, but even then, even then, even there, there was something of this in it: something of this hard, deliberate rhythm, something of the ferocious way he drives himself into her.

When he moves in her, he moves the way he could never squeeze her hand: with the full strength of his body.

He doesn't do this because he's cruel, or because in some subconscious part of his mind he wants to hurt her; but because in this, at least, control is not possible.

Restraint is not quite possible.

But then; there's this, too. There's the way he turns his mouth to the tender spot beneath her ear, and the way he kisses her skin as though he were kissing her mouth, or her cunt. There's the way he holds her as though to let go were not even remotely a possibility, and might cost him all too dearly. There's the way his arms encircle her, and his hand smooths back her hair, and cups the back of her neck, opens over her cheek. There's the way the muscles in his back shiver and clench involuntarily now and again, again and again, when he moves in her in such a way that pleasure jolts up his spine like a slider up a zipper, unraveling all his nerves and thoughts in its wake.

And then there's the way that he seeks her pleasure in this, which is perhaps new, or at least different from before: an awareness, a care in the way he fucks her, fast or slow, rolling his hips or grinding or bucking, deep or deeper. There's an attentiveness in how he responds, adjusts, adapts to the signs and subtleties of her reaction. More than a few times, he lifts his head to look at her face, to watch the flickers and flashes of her expression, the echo of what she feels writ on her face. More than once or twice, he kisses her with a focused, fierce intensity as she's opening to her mouth to gasp, or moan -- as though to swallow the sound and internalize it, as though to take it into himself as she takes him into her.

Toward the end, when her cries become wilder, breathless, incoherent -- when her body moves unrestrainedly, opening utterly to his -- it's only then that his arms unwind from around her, and he braces himself on his hands; only then that he looks down the seam of their bodies to watch their flesh join again and again, watch the way his cock pounds into her, and the way her thighs are open to him, her legs around his waist, her knees riding the straining line where his back musculature inserts into his ribs. He watches this until he can't watch anymore, must close his eyes, squeeze them shut for a second to maintain control, control himself -- and then he opens his eyes again, looks at her now, and his eyes are burningly blue, and he doesn't look away.

"Come on," he says; these are barely words, merely rushing exhales shaped by lip and tongue. "Show me, Danička." He lowers his head; he kisses her, hard, tapering. "Come for me."

And Lukas watches her, fiercely, and if Danicka looks at him she can see how drawn his expression is, the way he clenches his jaw against the near-involuntary urge to wince, or grimace; can see the flickers of microexpressions batting at his brow, his eyelashes, and how he has to try so hard to control himself, to hold his own climax back while he chases hers with a furious and singleminded devotion, fucking her, and when she begins to come, when suddenly her body arches taut and tense as a violin string, he sweeps her up against him onehanded, the other planted on the bed for leverage; he embraces her roughly to him and this kiss is almost a bite, is ravenous, tooth and tongue, hot as summer, hot enough to sear away the last vestiges of conscious, coherent thought.

He carries her through her orgasm, figuratively and literally, holds her against him, the muscles of his back and his arm hard against her body, the drive of his body hard against the cradle of her hips, and he doesn't stop, he never stops, even after the last echoes of her climax are rolling back out like the tide, because his is upon him by then.

The kiss breaks -- it's necessity again. He doesn't have the presence of mind to maintain it. His brow pressed to hers, he pulls a single ragged gasp out of the air, an inhale. He cannot hold this grimace back, his lips peeling back from his teeth, a silent snarl of pleasure so absolute it's indistinguishable from pain, or anger, and this would frighten another woman, perhaps frightens her.

His breath stops for an instant. His arm crushes her into him. The last thrust is mindless, nearly brutal.

Then a rush of an exhale; tremors in his bracing arm, low in his spine. His bracing arm is losing all strength. He lowers her, and himself to the bed, and it's a controlled collapse, a barely controlled collapse, and he's not only breathing now but panting, like he'd run a marathon, run a hundred miles, and his arm is still around her, he wraps the other around her as well, shudders are running uncontrollably down his spine and the deep muscles of his abdomen are twitching and contracting of their own volition. He presses his brow to the bedspread and his eyes are closed, he's wondering if she'd see all his thoughts again if she looks at him; he finds he doesn't give a fuck, doesn't care at all. His hand finds her face, and then he turns his head, he kisses her neck, which is the first thing he can reach, and then he turns his head further, turns her face to his gently, his hand at her jaw; he kisses the corner of her mouth, and then her mouth.

[Danicka] This is different. Were Danicka on top of him now it would be different. Had he never gone to his knees before her, it would still be different. And it isn't just the way they came up to this room together, ate together, curled together on the smaller of two couches and talked about...what, she forgets, and may not remember until later, if ever. What will not leave her, even now, even with so much of her attention distracted by the movements of their bodies against one another, is that look that passed between them when they both realized --

It's okay. Don't worry about that.

I'm not. I'm not...

Because it isn't as much the fact that the moon is so much closer to full than it was last time -- five days is forever when you're not sure how much time you have -- but that when he looked at her he knew. And worse than that, somehow, is not just the fact that the moon keeps waxing or that when Lukas saw her eyes he knew why they were pained but that as soon as she turned to look at him she knew that he would.

But don't worry about that. Call this an affair, call it fucking, and swallow one another's moans and outcries in kiss after kiss, pretending even when you know better that these are more than just kisses, too. Even when it's different, because like this they can't lie to themselves or each other and say that no, no it's not, it's the same, neither of them seems inclined to move too slowly, too calmly. Not with each other. Not now. Not, especially, after looking out the windows and the white path the half-moon makes on the half-frosted waves of the lake.

Více, she calls for, and pulls at him with all of her strength, which is almost nonexistent in comparison to his own. She should be scared of him like this, would never be able to get his body off of her own if she had to, would be helpless if he lost control. Danicka does not seem scared, though, not in the slightest. No, she pulls at his lower body with her legs, arches her back and rocks her hips harder against him, and the look on her face when she breaks a kiss to demand more is not frightened or wary in the slightest.

So that wasn't it. Not the first night, not on any other occasion, not now, it was never about fear, or distrust, or the fact that he is Garou, an Ahroun, and should frighten her.

In fact, when Lukas starts to move and she thinks he's going to take his chest from hers, rise up and move so much as an inch away, her hands curl and her fingernails dig, eyes locked onto his while she breathes heavily and hungrily underneath him. No, she doesn't say, and doesn't ultimately need to. He comes back down, wraps himself around her as though their lower halves are not writhing almost desperately, and Danicka kisses him with a low growl in her throat echoing appreciation, approval, and acceptance.

It turns into a whimper. In seconds, their mouths breaking and her head falling back onto the pillows. Her hands have long since relaxed on his skin, no longer digging or raking but resting, sometimes massaging, always caressing. There's more than a slightly odd juxtaposition in the way they hold each other like this despite what they are doing, despite how they are doing it, Lukas fucking Danicka almost roughly against the bedspread and her responding with active, attentive counter-thrusts of her own.

Yet the way he's kissing her is seeking the soft spots along her neck and her face. The way she keeps his head close to her shoulder and neck, cheek against his temple, one hand cradling him there as though any moment she might whisper some secret in his ear, but all he hears is her gasping, is the sounds she makes when he pleases her (a moan, a whimper, a snarl) or when it is too much, or too hard, or too deep (a yelp, a sharp intake of air, a low sound that does not become a word). All he can hear is the way she murmurs his name again, a quiet groan of it past her lips and into his hearing, just before he touches her face and looks at her again.

Just before they kiss again, and her eyes close even as they roll back, her hips rolling in a slow circle against him.

"Lukáš," Danicka moans near the end, writhing under him, her hands sliding to his shoulders, down his biceps, holding to him there when he lifts himself up to watch the intersection of their bodies. There is sweat on her breasts, on her brow, on the flat, soft expanse of her stomach, and some of it is her own and some of it has come from him and she grinds upward with her hips, pulling her pleasure from his body as she has again, and again, the only time she seems truly, unabashedly demanding.

What he says to her would not, normally, do anything for her. She's heard it before. She's faked it before just to shut a guy up, saying that. And what she can't understand now, even as it's happening, is whether it's the way he says her name, what that mouth of his did to her earlier or what the hell this is between them that makes her hands clench, makes her almost choke on a sudden cry that has no translation in either language they share.

"Oh, fuck," she finally gets out when her orgasm hits her, her back arching hard. "Fuck, Lukáš...!"

After that it's just gasping -- but not 'just', not ever 'just': Danicka relaxes her spine again as her climax rolls through her, forces her eyes open to find his, looks at him with something almost like fury, as though she's never going to forgive him. One of her hands is on the back of his neck, and god damn him if he closes his eyes now, if he looks away, if he kisses her or lets her go. Her fingers tangle in his hair. This is harder than the first one, than what happened to her when she had to fight not to buck her hips against his mouth.

She doesn't swear at him when he comes after her, seconds or moments or minutes, doesn't rake her nails down his back or bite him. She doesn't scream in her own orgasm this time, but holds onto him as he falls over like Jack after Jill, turning everything backwards, all of it unexpected and new though they've done this over, and over. And yet not.

This time, when Lukas all but collapses on top of her, barely keeping his weight off her thin ribs and smaller lungs, Danicka does not tremble. She doesn't do anything but breathe as they both start to come down. Her legs loosen around his waist but do not unfurl or unwrap; she keeps them around him, warm and close. She keeps her arms around his upper body, holds his head close to her neck. Her eyes close, and her chest expands and contracts with air, and she...strokes his hair.

She kisses the top of his head, kisses his brow.

She kisses his mouth when he finds it, softly, her own hand smoothing to his jaw in a mirror image of how he touches hers, and she murmurs to him words that sound tender, but have no mapping in his mind, not now or ever. But in the midst of them is his name again, over and over, in the gentle diminutive from his childhood, welcoming and sincere.

[Lukas] So --

He doesn't close his eyes, after all. He doesn't lean down to catch her mouth with his. He doesn't kiss her as though to taste her orgasm, only it's not that; only in this, and perhaps this alone, there is something closer than their kissing, and it's this.

It's this:

The ferocity grip of her hand on her neck, in this hair. The sudden nearness when he sweeps her against him, but does not kiss her. The last bit of distance that would have let them close their eyes, that would have let him look away from her, that would have let him hide that last, fragile shred of himself away from her, but doesn't now, cannot, because

they do not close it.

It's the look in her eyes when she forces them open. It's the look in her eyes, which is nearly fury, of the same intensity as any fury, any rage, but is not. It's the look in her eyes that runs him through, pierces him through and through like a arrow cast into water, flays the flesh of his veneers from the bones of his thoughts, lays him open and roots him to the spot, caught motionless in the moment, even as he finds that he cannot stop moving, cannot stop, cannot --

The look in his eyes, the second before he comes: something like fury, that she would do this to him. Something like savagery, that he would do this to her. Something like wild, brutal elation, that they have this, that anyone can have this at all. Something like utter terror, when he realizes he will not look away this time, and nor will she, and

this time she will see every last thought he's ever had, and
(that's completely fine.)

The look in his eyes: something like freedom.

--

Afterward he doesn't all-but-collapse. He does collapse, and his eyes have been open so long and so hard that the darkness seems very absolute when he closes them at last, and this time it's Lukas that quivers, his triceps shivering from strain, shudders running up his back.

For a while, he doesn't have the strength to take his weight off of her. Danicka will simply have to try not to perish. Fuck knows Lukas was trying to do the same, so it's only fair. His chest is heaving against hers as her legs loosen, sliding a little ways down his sides. She strokes his hair and he finds the will, at last, to push himself up on his forearms, and she kisses his brow, and he kisses her throat, and then, somehow, they find their ways blindly to one another's mouths.

He does not understand a word she says now, and perhaps that's unfair. Perhaps he doesn't give a damn, at all, about what's fair, and what's not, and what she shows him, or tells him, or doesn't.

He shifts. He puts his hand on her face as though to read the shape of her expressions there, as though he was never going to open his eyes again.

There's one thing he does understand, in all that she says. It's his name, over and over, and while he does not give hers back to her so many times, he does say it once, murmured, low and blurred at the edges, as he lowers his brow to hers.

[Danicka] This is one thing they have not done often, and only ever in these moments just afterward, when something inexplicably and inescapably tender exists between them, finding its place here and now when it cannot survive any of their other interactions. Her fingers touch his hair like this, playing idly with it in a way that speaks of familiarity that does not really exist, has not had time to grow. He holds onto her as though the mere thought of letting go takes his breath away with a crushing blow to the center of his chest, breaks through his breastbone, shatters something in him. Danicka kisses him softly, without hunger or demand, seeking closeness even though, truthfully, they are as physically close and joined as any two people can be.

Whereas before her eyes were open, kept his open somehow, and she saw everything in him and he saw everything in her and neither of them shied away from it this time, even at the last second, now her eyes are closed as though to recover from it. Her mouth caresses his upper lip, moves to his lower, the tip of her tongue tracing the line of his mouth before retreating, before they meet fully. She cannot pull in breaths deep enough to satisfy her, though her chest expands and pushes against Lukas's, begging. He can't stay on her like that for long without something like panic setting in, that is how badly she needs air, but she doesn't tell him to move.

She doesn't want him to. At least for now.

This 'one thing' that they do not do, that comes as naturally as the fucking, as naturally as this heavy panting for air in the aftermath, is the way their faces touch. Noses drag gently over skin, cheeks rub softly, foreheads touch, and Danicka nuzzles against him with an animalistic intimacy and abandonment. Abandonment not of self, or of inhibition, but of all that was just smashed to pieces. They can hardly be blamed for seeking each other out like shelter from a storm in this way, when every single time, it seems as though the whole world has been struck by a hurricane and they only barely survived the chaos of it.

With the hotel room quiet and the night dark and the walls thick enough to hide them, the pleasant fiction can exist for a little while that they are alone. No packmates intruding on his thoughts, no one knocking on the door, nothing. It's an illusion, and a highly dangerous one, especially for them, but for once in her life Danicka allows herself to sink in and indulge in it. She rubs her face to Lukas's, slowly, and softly, and sighs.

The sound of it is satisfied. The Russian has left her lips, abandoned itself to his ears. Her name has come back to her, which is good, because for a few moments she thinks she may have lost it. But she still can't move.

[Lukas] There's a curious blasted peace in this -- the survivor's calm after the cataclysm. They kiss. They linger. Their faces move together, not entirely like people; rather like animals, as though to take in one another's scent, touch, presence.

That was not just a fuck. That is what she realized the second time they were in, or perhaps even before. He's a little slower, or if he's realized, it's been murkily at the back of his mind, uneasily noted, shuffled away. Cleared off that proverbial desk, but not into the trash bin; onto the floor where it germinated, and grew, and became something he could no longer ignore.

These are not just fucks.

She sighs. A moment later he echoes her, and by then his breathing has slowed almost to baseline, and his heartbeat is a slow heavy thunder in his chest, pressed to hers.

Then he stirs. He rolls over on his back, bringing her with him, and now his eyes open, and he pushes her hair tenderly back where it falls past her ears, over his face. He looks at her for a moment, his eyes brilliantly pale blue, the pupils drawing smaller again as the light hits them. He has nothing to say to her; nothing that would make a difference, right now.

Outside, the moon has risen high over the lake. It's no longer visible from the bed, but its reflection is still glistening on the dark waters. It's very large now, very nearly full. How many more days -- three? Four?

He wonders if this will be it; the last time. He tries to remember if there was any hint of that in her response, in her body, in her mouth, in her eyes. He tries to recall if, when she kissed him, it had felt like she was kissing him goodbye. The details are gone already -- they were gone the second they passed, the sensations sifting through his wheeling mind like fish through a tattered net.

Lukas decides it's unimportant. He wonders if he'll be all right with it, if this was the last time. He decides he will be, and then he decides that's a lie, and then he decides that, too, is unimportant.

His hand firms on her face. He arches up to her and his mouth meets hers again, softly.

[Danicka] They are not entirely like people. He most certainly is not human, never was and could not, now, pretend very well to be so. There are some -- Children of Gaia, mostly -- who would like to claim that those Kinfolk like Danicka, like Gabriella, will be reborn as full-bloods in their next lives. No one has ever asked Danicka what she thinks of this theory. No one has ever offered this theory to her. Her brother is a Theurge, and they have not talked about the different realms of the Umbra or the connection werewolves have to their ancestors. Her brother is a Theurge, whose very name is both warlike and restorative, and one has to wonder what growing up with him was like.

Maybe he could ask his own sister what growing up with him was like, especially as the years went by and it became more and more clear that he was not like other children and could not remain like other children, that there was something vicious and primal inside of him, as deep and as intrinsic as his skeletal structure. Maybe he has asked his sister this. But she is nothing like Danicka, neither in appearance nor temperament, and it does not take much genius or a degree in psychology to recognize that his childhood is worlds away from her own.

Except for little things they still share, bits of culture from a different country that he only remembers in vague patches and that she absorbed solely from her father's instruction and lifestyle.

Ultimately they are neither of them human, not entirely, though he can pretend if he must to survive and protect his people and she can make a mockery of humanity by her very existence, by her purpose. Whereas she wears her heels and her lingerie and has her technological gear surrounding her, when he strips her of everything and she is left like this, warm and pliant and open to him still, the fact that Danicka is more animal than anything else is undeniable. Everything else is pretense, everything else is a facade: this, right now, is truth.

And the truth is, they have not been just fucking each other since the first time she lowered herself onto his lap, since the moment they first kissed.

Maybe the weight of this truth, and the weight of the moon outside, is why neither of them speak. Danicka's eyes don't even open until he starts to move, her lashes flickering upward not in startlement but quickly all the same. She sees what he is doing and closes her eyes again, curls against him, eases the movement from lying supine underneath him to lying prone on top of him. Her legs shift, her arms as well, and she lays her head quite easily on his left shoulder, her face turned towards his midline and her hair falling across his arm.

There is no way for him to tell, none at all, if she is wondering the same thing as he is, or how she feels about it if she does. Except that she holds onto him, even now, even though the undercurrent of it has changed. Moments ago there was something almost protective about the way she held him as he laid on top of her, and that flickers and then begins to fade after he stirs and rolls over. But he doesn't just flop onto his back and close his eyes; he takes her with him, she re-settles onto his chest, and her eyes don't open or so much as flutter as his hand passes over her face, pushes her hair back, smooths the golden cobwebs away.

She does smile, though, gently and for half a moment. It fades too, tiredly, but the feeling behind it does not.

Through touch alone he communicates what he wants. And she responds, tips her head back, kisses him without needing to search for his mouth, without sighing again. Danicka does not, as she has before, climb off of his body and lie alongside him. She merely kisses him, and if there was a goodbye in it earlier -- which he can't remember and she couldn't say even if he asked -- there is not one now.

[Lukas] This time, minutes do go by. Neither speaks. Neither moves, much.

His heartrate, his breathing -- they've both returned to baseline now. Steady and slow, the envy of olympic athletes. His arms encircle her, but loosely now, gentled. His hands rest at her waist, and if he opened them they would span most of her back. She's slender to the point of thinness; always was.

Danicka's eyes are still closed, but his are open now, and he looks at the ceiling of this unfamiliar room. One might think it has become more familiar -- being nearly identical to the other, being furnished with the same materials, the same items, the same taste and style. It doesn't work that way, though. Familiarity runs deeper than that. Familiarity is rooted in all five senses, and the sights, the sounds, the scents, the textures -- perhaps even the taste of the air -- is subtly different here.

Familiar is what Danicka is becoming to Lukas: sights and sounds, scents and tastes, and the touch of her skin.

His chest rises and falls beneath her. She hears his voice refracted through his ribcage almost before she hears it in the air, quiet, as his arm folds across her shoulders.

"Nejste protřepáním."

[Danicka] While they breathe, while minutes pass by, several things begin to happen. Danicka's heartrate slows, more mellowed and relaxed and steady than it was even when they were sitting in the other room of the suite. Her breathing calms, until it seems as easy as it would be in sleep, until he has only one thing to tell him that she has not, in fact, drifted off on top of him. The fingers of her left hand stroke over his chest idly, but slowly enough not to tickle. She watches the displacement of the dark hairs there, but this time she is not drawing patterns or faces on his skin. She is just touching him, and her dominant ear pressed to his skin listens to the lub-lub-lub of his pulse without analysis or comment.

Danicka is incredibly healthy. Most Kinfolk heal quickly; Danicka recovers from hangovers like a champ when she gets them, can run a mile without her heart exploding, prefers to walk even when it's cold, so long as the distance is reasonable. She's more than a little active in bed, verging on dominant, bordering on aggressive. Her bones don't seem brittle, she bounced back fast from the smack Sam gave her, and she clearly does not have too much trouble when it comes to eating regular, full meals. But she's just got a certain constant thinness to her that isn't magical metabolism or deprivation. If Lukas knew anything about development --

-- but he doesn't.

She smells him in those protracted minutes of silence, breathes him in unavoidably. She listens to the way his heart beats, to the way he breathes, to the way he swallows his own saliva or shifts against the bedpread. And though the room is a comfortable sixty-eight degrees fahrenheit, there is sweat cooling on her skin and she is getting cold on top of him. Not shivering, though. And then he says it.

Danicka's eyes open; he can feel it, eyelashes against skin. She smiles; he can feel it, the corner of her mouth tugging outward and up. "Nejste protřepáním," she recites back, her voice lower, reassuring almost. Her hand goes still. Then, in a gentle tone that could be teasing if there were not a distinct undercurrent of sincerity: "Nehovoříme."

[Lukas] She cannot see him smile, of course. Her ear is pressed to his chest, and her eyes are cast either toward the window, or toward the doorway to the master bath. She would have to crane her neck, tip her head back, to see his face. And even then it would be mostly an impression of his chin, the topography of the underside of his jaw; his nose a peak above that, the rest of his face receding away in angles and planes.

Lukas has a distinctly eastern european face, with stark bones, wide cheeks, a broad brow and an angled jaw. There's a dusting of dark stubble on that jaw now which is not there immediately after he shaves, and was not there the last time they slept together, the morning he went off to meet Anezka at the airport.

These moments wheel lazily through his mind, the fragments, the pieces of their short acquaintance, which is in the end of a long acquaintance, only their childhoods were so long ago, so distant now, as to nearly not matter.

His hand covers her shoulder now, his palm over her deltoid. A pause; then, "Nehovoříme." He repeats this back to her, too. "Jen jsem chtěl... být tady na chvíli."

[Danicka] Normally when they begin to come down from their separate (yet not separate) orgasms, when they stop panting and begin breathing, when their hearts no longer feel like they are going to explode, soon enough Lukas will make some question. He does not badger her in bed, but yes, usually, he speaks. Danicka has come to expect it, and not once has she seemed terribly annoyed or put off by it. If anything, some of her most honest answers have come then, while he is still inside of her, while her skin is still flushed and the sweat on their flesh has not yet cooled nor dried.

This time, though, he stays quiet, and so does she. This time she does not swing her leg off of him and stretch, or lay down next to him to get more comfortable or to insert some distance between them when it seems impossible they can ever be distant again. This time she stays where she is, even when she could move away, and this time Lukas does not say a word for several, several minutes.

They look nothing alike. The bloodlines Danicka comes from have rather angled jaws and broad brows as well, but their features are otherwise rather soft, and their coloring light. Even the half-sisters she has seen but never met look something like her, and were they not so disparate in age she and her brother could have been mistaken for twins...well, when they were young. Set a picture of Danicka at five beside a picture of Vladislav at five and it's there, the similarity. They both look more like their mother than their father, though.

His eyes are blue, brilliant and cerulean, the eyes of a mystic. Or an old, old man who has seen too much, understood too little. Lost too much, given too much, had too much taken. Danicka's eyes are shadows of his sometimes, but only when she stands in the sunlight; then, her eyes echo her father's, and they echo the sky. Right now, however, her eyes look like leaves at the end of summer, slowly going from deep, vivid green to yellow.

But she can't see his smile, which has quickened her pulse on more than one occasion for reasons she has yet to voice. And he cannot look into her eyes.

"Chápu," she murmurs, after a moment.

And then, though she does not shiver, or tremble against him: "Jsem studený."

[Lukas] She understands, she says. He isn't even sure he understands, but he doesn't scoff. This wouldn't be the first time she understood him before he understood himself.

Danicka speaks again, though she doesn't so much as stir. He lifts his head from the counterpane a few inches, looks down at the top of her head, what he can see of her face. A moment, and then he moves beneath her, the broad planes and stretches of his body rolling into slow motion. He turns on his side, rolls her to her back, and there's a flicker of memory here too, a shot fired back through time to trigger on the last time they were in this hotel, when he'd rolled her off his body and gone to the window in a dark room, with the dark night and the dark lake outside, and asked her to stay.

Lukas does not leave the bed this time. His hand opens over her stomach, then wraps around her:

"Otoč se."

He draws her back against him, and back into the warm hollow on the bedspread that his body has created. He fits his body to hers, his warm chest against her cool back, and his arm tightens infinitesimally around her.

She's facing away from him now, and she cannot see his expression, and therefore cannot see the furrowing of his brow, as though this, too, confused him; or hurt somehow.

It does not stop him from kissing her shoulder, gently.

[Danicka] Something has changed, and while it would be one thing if they each realized this, it is quite another that they are equally aware of the fact that they're not alone in their new insight. He has to sense that the safe distance is gone now, and does not seem in any hurry to come back. It is not without reason that his first instinct upon entering her tonight was to ask her if she was okay, and not strange that this is the sort of question one might ask a virgin. Danicka has certainly had other men on top of her, so it's not as though Lukas is the first, in any sense.

Still, from the moment he held himself up over her and she wanted him there, pulled him closer and told him achingly that she wanted more, any chance of pretending reservation was annihilated. This was not her first time, or his, but it was the first time that he could -- and reasonably -- move back from her body and feel as though she had given him something...or let him in.

Danicka has never held him like that before. And she has never stayed with him this long. Not in the sense of physical proximity; they have slept together before. She is staying with him, being with him, and her eyes are not closed off and she is not pulling away the way she seems able to do even when their bodies are still intertwined. Whether she is like this deliberately or because she cannot help herself is...a mystery. Maybe even to her.

He lifts his head and she tilts hers to look at him, their eyes barely able to meet but doing so anyway, at least for a few seconds. And then they're sliding apart but not completely; she sighs soundlessly as their bodies separate, and before he even speaks she is turning to her left side, facing the windows, and within moments they are lying the same way they ended up lying the first night they had together. Only not the same way, not the same way at all. His arm tightens; she curls up against his front and then rests her right arm on top of his, her smaller hand on top of his. And he kisses her shoulder, just as he did before, but this time it is not to tell her that he is coming back...because he is not going anywhere.

Danicka is quiet and still for a moment, then takes her hand off of his and reaches back, sliding her fingers over his jaw and into the hair behind his ears. She draws his head towards her own, or at least encourages him to bow his head until his nose is behind her ear or his mouth against her temple, something. And without a smile, she breathes out in contentment and says: "See?

"Worth it."

[Lukas] Even in this there's something of a connection: when her hand covers his, when it reaches back to draw his head down, and when he lets her. When he bends to her willingly; more than willingly. Presses his mouth to the back of her ear, draws a breath.

There's a pause, a second of stillness in him when she says See? like it was already inevitable, already accepted truth, that he did see that it's worth it, it's all worth it.

And of course, she's right. It is inevitable, accepted truth. And Lukas' silence is not doubt, but simply -- a stillness, the deep breath before the plunge.

"Stojí za to," he says, very quiet. She can feel the vibration of his chest against her spine more than she can hear the words. She can feel him kissing her again, too, his beard-bristle coarse against the nape of her neck, his mouth softer and gentler both. She cannot see him wince, though, when he lays his head back down and says, "Stojí to za všechno."

[Danicka] Closing his eyes the first time had done nothing for him, in the end; afterwards he had still held her and he had not slept until she was gone and the next time they kissed he still leaned into her when their mouths parted, as though --

-- no. Not 'as though'. Because he could not quite bear the separation, knowing that she was going to turn and walk from his room and he was going to return to letting his body heal itself, go back to writing letters or his grocery list or some plan of action, some blueprint for coming days, or coming weeks, plans having nothing to do with her, plans it was difficult to go back to.

In the end, Lukas had held his tongue only from asking her to stay when dawn came, had stopped himself from telling her that if she expected him to protect her that he would, by god he would, and Danicka reserved the right to reject his exceptions and his protection, his guardianship, which would exist without her permission and without her appreciation because...well Gaia only knows why it matters to her, to not expect anything of him, to not rely on him.

Maybe because her mother was Ahroun and had been dead for years by the time Lukas's body caught up to his Rage (or vice versa). Maybe because it is a near-miracle that Vladislav is still alive. She has not lost some great love of her life to the War or the Cause, because she has never had a Garou lover before, never a boyfriend of his race, he knows this and yet that does not mean she has not lost anything, does not mean that for whatever reasons -- whether they be from childhood or adolescence or her brief and not-quite-steady adulthood -- she cannot let herself believe that he is any different, or worth her trust, or her time, or --

Danicka takes a deep breath, the expansion in her middle pressing back against his chest, moving his arm where it rests on her. Her eyes watch the lake, what she can see of the city through the enormous windows, and her hand doesn't falter on him but for a moment. Just a moment, and then her palm is curling, holding him there, keeping him.

Some part of her wants to ask him And is there anything wrong with that?, repeat the question in the car, as though winning some argument or teaching some lesson, as though bringing it full circle will prove something, even if all it proves is that it is never what they are talking about but how and where and when that causes the goddamn problems. It's not the topic; it's always them getting in their own way.

But she doesn't ask him that. She does not see his wince but somehow she does know not to ask him that, and truthfully does not really want to very badly, or very much, at all. Her hand slowly slides out of his hair, and off his jaw, and she tucks her feet under his as she did once before, and shifts slightly until his arm is covering her arm, their limbs weaving together to cover her, and to give him something to do with his strength, or his weakness, depending on how he sees it.

What Danicka asks is this: "Have you ever read The Little Prince?"

[Lukas] To Lukas, this sounds a little like a change of subject; like avoidance. It's impossible for him to tell, himself, whether he's relieved or irritated, or simply accepting of it. There's a pause. Then he shifts again, tucks his forearm under his head.

"Of course," he says, as though everyone must have read it at some point.

Lukas is a remarkably well-read Ahroun. A well-read Garou, period, many of whom do not care for the petty tales of men. If Danicka had ever been to Lukas' childhood home, she might have seen that this is the influence of his father, with his shelves and cupboards and desks and boxes full of books; books in Czech, books in Russian, books in English, books translated from one language to another.

Even though Danicka has never been to Lukas' childhood home, she can still guess at this if she paid any attention at all to the adults' conversation. Jaroslav Kvasnicka was a solemn, dark-haired man in his early 30s then, tall and broad, often stern with his children, with intelligent dark eyes and a head full of arts and literature and books and poetry. Unless the topic had something to do with the printed word, Marjeta was the main conversant on the Kvasnicka side of things apart from a sentence here and there from Jaroslav.

Come to think of it, Marjeta's eyes were dark as well. But there were blue eyes farther up the family tree, scattered amongst the boughs of the ancient and proud house of Žerotínové. The same blood that gave the Kvasnicka children such ice-pale eyes, identically blue, gives them their purity of breeding that any Garou could read, and even humans intuited on some basic level.

It is a very different sort of breeding from Danicka's, golden-haired and golden-skinned, with eyes like the silent green life of deep forests, deep oceans.

A moment or so has passed. Lukas adds: "Why do you ask?"

[Danicka] It is everything but avoidance, though she can't -- and doesn't -- blame him for the pause. He doesn't pull away, though, and they lie there as before, her curled against him, but if there is the smallest of changes in the way they lie there Danicka doesn't fret it. There is a reason she asks, and it is not to push him away, in some small and half-invisible way.

His answer makes her smile, because for one thing, it is the right answer. For another thing, it is true.

He remembers almost nothing of her father's home. If he were to go there he would perhaps recall patches, sense memory overtaking the years and telling him that this was a place that smelled often of good food, with a yard and a tree fit for climbing, with a cupboard under the stairs and a soft-spoken old man. He might remember the sounds of adults speaking, the creak of the stairs when someone went up or down, the way the light looked coming in through the front windows, casting rainbows on the rug and the bare floor both because of the prisms hanging against the glass. He might, if he were to go there today, remember things that as an adult would have told him about the woman now lying in his arms, as if she was always there, or supposed to be.

Looking at them now, or any other day, it wouldn't be difficult to make a summer and winter comparison. Danicka turns absolutely gold in the later months of the year, a blush to her cheeks and a tan on her arms and legs. Most of her breeding comes from her father's side of the family, and their history is long and winding and mysterious, leaving quiet and homey folk that are not typically associated with Shadow Lords. In truth they are a rare bloodline, one protected from vampires, from poverty, for generations upon generations solely because of their fertility, their service, and what passes for sentiment in their Tribe.

The name means, the one who must.

She smiles, but not because she has to, just as she stays here even though she knows he would not force her to -- which is dangerous, for her to believe that he would not, because one day he will, and that will break something that for now is alive and vital and yet still and quiet. "Do you remember the part about the fox?"

[Danicka] [Correction: For another thing, it is the way he says it. It's true. Everyone must have. Or should have.]

[Lukas] Lukas says nothing for a while, and if she could see him, she would see that he has closed his eyes, though not to sleep. His breathing is too quiet for that, and not deep enough. Anyway, after a moment his arm shifts around her, and over hers. His leg shifts to tuck hers gently between his, and then relaxes again, his thighs warm behind hers, his shin heavy where it crosses hers.

" 'Words are the source of misunderstandings'," he quotes at her, quietly, which is an answer in and of itself.

There's another pause. He turns his head some little ways behind her, turns his nose into her hair, his cheek into her hair. This is a sort of slow, animal affection too -- all tactile communication, a connection of the senses. After, he lays quiet again for a little longer.

And again, quieter now, "Why?"

[Page from Ken] HADOUKEN

[Danicka] Right now they smell inextricably like each other, from their hair to their fingertips to their legs now, because every inch of them touched and the sweat rolled and mingled together. It's been some time since Danicka has been able to tell the difference between what is him, and what is her, and she stopped caring about this inability before she formed a word in her mind that joined the two. He is no longer inside of her but he is still in her hair and in her mouth, and because she knows that there is no way around some inevitabilities, she does not struggle with it and simply thinks: Okay.

Okay.

Danicka's head turns slightly as he does, his nuzzle on the back of her skull now and her cheeks starting to tighten faintly with a smile. Soon she is twisting all over, not to pull away but to move towards, holding his arm over her as long as she can if only to indicate that it should stay where it is. In a moment, Danicka's hair slides away from his face as she wriggles around to lie on her back, still under his leg and under his arm. She smiles at him, a small expression that is incalculably fond. But not all of a sudden. It's him seeing it that is sudden.

Anything essential is invisible to the eyes.

"Why do you think?" she asks gently, and where before this phrase was -- for both of them -- an avoidance of saying something, it was also a pointed remark: You already know. Danicka does not use it to straight-arm him away from her, this time, nor to keep from having to say something they both know. She asks him this now because there is no way, really, to say what they both know. Or at least, no way they can tolerate just yet.

[Lukas] She turns in his arms.

They have not known each other very long when one speaks practically. From the 25th of January to now; a span of a little over a month. But already he has memories of her, things that link back, one to the other.

She turns in his arms and he thinks of the night in the brotherhood, in his room, in his cramped bed, after the first time, when she'd turned in his arms to say --

Lukas turns his elbow to the mattress, props his head up. She looks at him and he looks at her, and when she smiles his eyebrow move; they don't quite furrow so much as the inner edges quirk faintly up, as though this, too, sent arrows into his flesh. A beat later the corner of his mouth turns up too, crookedly. In this new position his arm lies across her diaphragm, and then it moves. His hand draws over her skin until it covers her left breast, and she might think he would stop this conversation now, before it got too difficult; that he means to bend his mouth to her body as he has before.

But it's not that. He holds her flesh cupped in his hand; he presses the heel of his hand gently to her breastbone, to feel the beat of her heart beneath. It's not so pronounced as his, nor so slow, nor so strong, but it's there nonetheless, unmistakable, hers.

Lukas lays his head back down, looking at her as she looks at him, her heart beating against his palm.

"I think I know," he replies.

[Danicka] This may be the longest they have gone between one round and the next. It's crude, but it's the truth, and neither of them would likely be able to find reason to be ashamed or embarrassed by this. In the past they've hit a limit of words they could say to each other, as though there was a quota. Perhaps there is: Danicka can only handle so many questions before she snaps, can only tolerate so much pressure to unfold herself before she retreats behind walls that there really is no way for him to get past by force. Unless he were to torture her.

And this: being silent, whether he holds her or not, and asking her no questions, does not break down but builds. He sits very still, and does not say a word, and in that way he can come a little closer, and a little closer. Even his words earlier were a statement, a volley that she caught, considered, and threw back. (Nejste protřepáním. [Nehovoříme.]) So there are no words to have to escape somehow.

Words aren't, really, the enemy, or even a weapon. If the sex that is Not Just is a sort of unfurling learning, a connection made of careful attention and response, then so is the argument at the aquarium, so is the tension in the car, so is waiting for food together, and eating together, and a hundred thousand other moments when it seems that a single misstep is going to be unforgivable. In the beginning they could communicate about this, they could work this out. And they did, and then it simply worked.

Bit by bit, it has started to bleed over, even into conversations, despite misunderstandings, but this is the comfort zone, the safe place, where it is just not quite so hard to understand. And this is the place from where they speak now.

Danicka's breath hitches slightly when he moves his hand, but not in fear. She just breathes more deeply in one cycle, her smile fading to a far quieter expresion, thinking not of that night at the Brotherhood or that night at the motel but something entirely different. Her hand floats up from the bedspread, covers his, and keeps it there. Her heart answers by speeding up slightly, beating stronger.

She nods, and then pauses. A flash of an expression similar to the one she wore when she looked out at the moon comes over her face, and passes quickly. She has los the rest of the world, and the phase of the moon, but not the memories that this moment calls up, forces her to relive, drags to the surface and splashes in her face like ice cold water. Danicka lets him see it. And that's something.

In fact, that's quite a lot.

[Lukas] It's quite a lot -- to her. But the truth is, to Lukas, largely on the outside looking in, it's only something. It's only a flicker of something that he couldn't quite name, or even put his finger on.

He watches her nonetheless. He looks at her, his eyes moving over her face, quietly taking in whatever there is to be seen.

Which isn't much. But something, nonetheless. And that's what he takes away from it in the end: that there was something. That she let him see it. And that was never in question, that she let him, and if she had not let him, he would've never suspected.

Lukas doesn't ask any questions. He doesn't demand to know what she's thinking; or who she's thinking of; or why, or when, or how. He doesn't demand anything. His hand smooths over her side a moment later, and he watches this instead, the passage of his hand, the shadow it casts over her skin, the way her flesh indents faintly beneath the weight of his palm, his fingers. His hand crests over the curvature of her ribcage and curves against her side.

Now it's just his arm draped over her body, holding her against him. It's not possible to stay here forever. They'll shower, or get hungry; his pack will call for him, or some goddamn emergency or other will come up; or she'll simply leave, or, failing all that, the housekeeping will kick them out at noon.

Forever's not possible at all. Three more days may not even be possible. For all that, he's in no rush now. There's no urge to couple with her again and again, as if to get it all out of his system, as if to get it all out, lay it all out, and then leave it all behind.

He's in no rush. He's content to lie here, just like this, for the now.

[Danicka] Three things, in their brief and yet rather tempestuous past, seem to be capable of pulling them away from each other once their clothes have come off. The first is sheer exhaustion, usually a result of what happens when said clothes make their hasty retreat from flesh. The second is duty, or some place to be on her part or his, but at the moment there are no bodies needing to be dismembered and no sisters to be met and no...well, whatever it is Danicka does. The third thing that makes them stop, and is an unreliable means of separating them, is some need on his part or hers for distance that cannot be held onto if they stay in the same room. Or the same building.

Not a single one of those things is present now. And yet. They watch one another, not so much uncomprehending as seeing no need to ask, or speak. Whatever has changed, it's something that Danicka, at least, seems unpracticed at dealing with. She has no easy exorcism for this, and moreover...if it's a demon, it's a pleasant one to have possessing her. So in the absence of utter weariness, of other engagements to face, of any desire to pull away...and in the rather surprising absence of longing to draw him near again, to fuck him again...she doesn't know quite what to do with herself.

Danicka refuses to look outside again. She looks at Lukas, takes a breath, and instead of suggesting they climb under the covers, or saying that they should shower, she does something that may slap him across the face, may seem to come out of nowhere, and yet, if he can't understand why she's telling him this, and why she's telling him this now --

The only things you learn are the things you tame.

-- then he doesn't understand, really, or know why she brought up the goddamn children's book.

"The first time I saw my mother in crinos I was...maybe three years old, if that," she tells him, watching his eyes, as though steeling herself for something, but it's unclear whether watching his eyes will prove a warning or an anchor. "Part of the reason I've never had a mate is because I can't..." She takes a breath, holds onto it even though it somehow fuels her words: "I can't deal with it." She licks her lips: "That's why I ran when I saw Sam at the Brotherhood. I honestly don't know why I went to your room, I barely even remember getting myself there. And he wasn't even in his warform."

Meaning: Imagine how it would have been if he had been.

[Danicka] [1 WP spent.]

[Lukas] What Danicka does not know is that in the moments before he said, very simply, I think I know, he'd wanted to say something else entirely. He'd wanted to ask if he was supposed to be the prince or the fox in this tale; he hadn't because it was too stupid, too silly, and anyway, they were talking about a children's book that has nothing to do with reality at all.

He hadn't because he suspected he knew the answer to that one, too, and it was: both.

When her eyes come to him his rise back to hers. They look at each other in silence, and it's not late, really; it's only perhaps midnight, if that. He is not tired. He's merely -- quiet. Quiescent. He takes in her face, looking at her, and his thumb traces an arc over her side, and then she speaks and she can see how his regard focuses, sharpens without actually sharpening, or growing hard.

He is listening to her now, and his breath is shallow and quiet, as though he were afraid to speak; afraid to breathe, lest she closed up again and withdrew.

She gives this to him, one piece and then another, and he listens, his face still until the very end, where his eyebrows contract a fraction of a millimeter, and he raises his hand to her face. He touches her face, and it means nothing; it means anything. He moves into her and his mouth finds the curve of her shoulder, her skin dry now, cooled in the cool hotel room, because neither of them had bothered to get under the covers.

Or shower.
Or get up.
Or leave.

When he lays his head down again, he tucks his arm beneath again as well. There's a pause; then, in some sort of reciprocality, he says:

"Part of the reason I've never had a mate is because I find it grossly unfair to ask a woman to devote her entire self to me when I'll most likely be dead in a matter of years. Months."

There's no pathos in this; it's blank truth, self-evident. He pauses; then he adds, slower:

"Another part of the reason is that I've never wanted to. It seemed ... dangerous. Like it could open an uncontrollable rift in me. A weakness I would have no defense against."

[Danicka] There is so much more than what she told him. So much beyond seeing something traumatic and horrifying at an age when the human mind simply has no structures whatsoever, no defenses, nothing to protect it. It's a piece, and not even the whole piece. Danicka exhales the breath she took before she told him that, but there's no way to tell if it's relief or something else, because she doesn't do this until he has opened his mouth in response.

Or, rather, not response. He is not drawing something out of what she said and returning it to her with some way of saying I understand or All right. This is what most people do when hearing a secret: they tell their own, and Danicka recognizes it for what it is. She relaxes slightly with that exhalation and blinks her eyes once, but the shadow thrown by what she told him retreats back into the rest of the darkness, no longer hinting at reality but simply melding with the rest of the shapeless emptiness that composes so much of her life...as far as his awareness of it is concerned.

Had he asked, she would have said he was the prince.

Then she would remember the wheat fields, and the silence at the waterfront while he spoke, and little things, and then she would agree: Oh yes. The fox, too.

...And the rose.

That's neither here nor there, because it is just a children's story, and this is real life. They are talking about horror witnessed at an unthinkable age -- or mentioning it, at least -- and now they are talking about the fact that he is probably not going to survive to see twenty-five, probably not thirty, because the war keeps getting worse every year. This isn't a book. And it's not a fairy tale.

Her eyebrows lift slightly when he states that he thinks it would be unfair. There's mild disbelief in her expression, but not mockery. Her eyebrows lower again and then pull together when he goes on, precluding a question of what else there is, because that can't be it. Danicka rolls onto her side to face him completely, her arms folded loosely in front of her, between them.

When she speaks, it's very quietly, almost a whisper, because there is no need for any louder tone of voice: "...That's why it would be unfair the other way around, too." Beat. "Not because you'll die; everything dies."

That pained expression, becoming so familiar between them now, winces across her features, passes again. But her brow stays furrowed slightly. She could tell him that the idea of devoting one's entire self to another person is more than a little disturbing to her. Something holds her tongue. She knows what holds her tongue; she doesn't know how she feels about it. It keeps her frown gently in place.

"...You're not the only one who would end up weak and defenseless in that."

[Lukas] Were this a story -- not a children's story, but merely a story -- they might have divulged all their secrets tonight. And their secrets would have been easy to divulge; a series of facts that string logically, smoothly together, point a to b to c, a roadmap clearly mapping their development from children to adults, from who they were to who they are.

But this is not a story. And she gives him two ragged pieces, two fragments in a whole, cracked pieces of a fragile eggshell within which, hidden somewhere, was her self.

He gives her something in return; two pieces of his own; and in truth what he gives her is more than what she gives him.

But that's all right. That's ... expected, now. He has tried to push her, to cow her into the truth the way he does others, to shame them or bully them or force them into it, and it failed utterly. He's learning, albeit slowly, how to approach her from the side, and very, very slowly, without saying a word.

So he waits. And she gives him a piece, unexpectedly, and he takes it; tucks it away; doesn't ask questions.

He touches her face instead, as though this were a reply -- far more than his own divulgence was.

Danicka turns to face him then, and his hand moves to cover her shoulder instead, his palm warm over her flesh, then drawing back. He closes his hand over hers, somewhere in the space between them.

"No. I wouldn't be. But mutual weakness is still weakness. It still -- " his words have filled up with pauses now, silences as he looks for the right word, " -- frightens me."

[Danicka] Doesn't the way you feel frighten you?

Stojí to za všechno.

Of the two of them, he is more likely to speak first, to lay out on the table what he feels and what he is thinking and why he does what he does. And yet, conversely, Danicka knows so much she doesn't say. She knew that he wanted her, but didn't call him out on it until that evening by the fireplace, which was not even twenty-four hours before he dragged out of her the truth, spoken plainly: that she wanted him. He, however, didn't really know until then, not for sure, not the way she seemed to know.

One thing she does not know, cannot intuit from the way he looks at her or the things he says, is what keeps rolling through his mind at intervals that make him grimace half the time: that he does not want this to end. That he's growing used to seeing her, not just having her around but having her in his bed, or a hotel bed, or against the wallpaper, or...it doesn't really matter so much where. What matters is the way she is when she's alone with him, when there's nothing there between them but air and any invisible defenses they choose to put up. He's getting used to it, and it hasn't been all that long. He's getting used to it, and they barely even see each other.

Danicka doesn't see that it isn't just attraction, or even attachment, but something more insidious, more dangerous, which has any number of names. Lukas does not want this to end, and she has no idea.

She doesn't move into his hand when he touches her face, but she does relax under his hand as it briefly cups her shoulder. She smiles gently, cannot even work all that hard to conceal how forced it is, how uneasily it comes to her lips. Her hands are under his, their bodies are aligned, and while either of them might honestly say -- at least in this moment -- that they would like nothing more than to stay here like this without having to leave or move, Danicka attempts not so much humor as...freedom. For one of them, at least, even if she couldn't say who at the moment.

"Well...then it's a good thing we're not taming each other, then."

(You're a liar.

...I can't help it.)

[Lukas] After she's spoken, a silence hangs in the air.

Lukas does not smile back; he can't even fake it, though perhaps he would like to be able to. Some part of him must wish he could pull on a new affect, a new face, a new emotion like a man pulls on a new coat; some part of him must wonder if, after lying enough, he could learn to forget what the truth was.

A distance could be growing; he could be growing cold, or angry. Because Danicka lies, and she lies, and she lies to protect herself, or because she has to, but so far as lies go this one isn't even very good, and neither of them buy it.

But his hand is still over hers, and it tightens subtly, drawing a little closer.

"Aren't we," he says; uninflected, very quiet.

[Danicka] He could have just slapped her. He could have grabbed her by the throat, rolled her onto her back, pinned her there and snarled in her face if he wanted to make the blood drain out of her face the way it does now. He could have called her a whore or a liar and she wouldn't have reacted like this, and just as she could not put enough effort or energy into the lie itself, she can't hide right now what his answer does to her.

Not when their faces are mere inches apart, their bodies still naked, his hand covering both of hers and his leg lying loosely over her lower half. Not when she admitted that she felt cold and knew that asking him to hold her was completely unnecessary. Not when he understood, without the words actually passing back and forth, what the hell she was talking about the fox for.

Danicka's attempt at a cooler, more amused expression -- and a flawed, failing attempt it was -- completely crumples. She feels a knife, or a claw, shatter her breastbone and reach into her chest, wrenching something so hard she's not entirely sure she's going to survive it. She licks her lips, her expression pained and for once it doesn't blow away as though hit by a gale.

Still wincing: "...Ano."

[Lukas] For a moment there's a mercilessness in the way he watches her, his eyes blue as an iridium fire: studies the expression that she does not, or perhaps cannot, hide. Because he has to, you see -- for the same reason he had to ask her question upon question in the cafe, on the waterfront, when really all he was asking was:

Do you want me like I want you?

Because whatever it is he'd felt when he walked into his room and found her on his bed, not arrayed to seduce but simply ... there, as though she belonged; whatever it is he'd felt when she said It's worth it in the car, and when he'd walked back into the bedroom to find her looking at the moon, and then at him, and then sinking back on her elbows, and --

Whatever it is he'd felt then, it's something like what he sees on her face now. And he has to know that. He has to see that.

A beat goes by. It's negligible. It's endless.

Then all of a sudden he reaches out to her, he takes her face between his hands and this kiss is hard as any, as sudden and fierce as a storm, it detonates and it passes, and then he's drawing her to him with a sudden, unavoidable strength, clasping her, crushing to him and turning her face to his shoulder as though she might need to scream again, only it wasn't that, it wasn't that at all.

"Je to v pořádku," Lukas says, as he had before; and as before, doesn't quite know what he's trying to reassure her of, or if it was even Danicka he means to reassure.

[Danicka] The answer had been the same then: in the cafe, on the waterfront, when all he was asking was a difficult and dangerous question. Ano. Yes.

God, yes.

Even before she knew how he wanted her, how much or from when or why, even before she could rightly classify what 'like I want you' meant, Danicka would have and tried to tell him that the answer was yes, if he would only reach out and take it. Take her. Still, and not surprisingly at all, he had been far more honest with himself and with her then.

The way Lukas wanted Danicka was not for a meaningless fuck in a one-night motel, whorish and inconsequential, even if he tried to make it so, even if she wouldn't have hated him for it. And the way she wanted him was more than that, too, only she lied to herself better than him then, and didn't let herself see it. Thank god he hurt her friend; thank god he gave her a reason to get angry, to insert some distance between them where for the course of a night there had been none, none at all.

He kisses her, suddenly but not out of nowhere, and though it's almost abrupt she responds as though she was waiting for it, as though they had one of those protracted moments of eye contact and silence before someone got the courage to do something about it. They've never done that; when they kiss they do it as though they're trying to fight each other, or fight a fire, or destroy the world. Danicka moves towards him and into the kiss...into him...and yes, this is what she needs, this is what she needs so that this feeling will go away--

Inexplicably, when he pulls her to his shoulder and wraps his arms around her, when he comforts her, that is when she freezes up. That is when her eyes open and though she doesn't jerk away from him, she tenses, rampantly and obviously uncomfortable, her spine an iron rod all the way up her back underneath his hands. He tells her what he told her when they looked at the moon, only not in English this time, and she draws her shoulders up against him.

Her arms don't wrap around him in return. She lays her hands on his shoulders, resting them there, and lets him hold her like that, but the tension doesn't leave her.

[Lukas] That she responds to his kiss as though she was waiting for it: she could not know that shakes him to his foundations, to feel his sudden ... want, or need, echoed so starkly and absolutely in her.

That she does not respond at all to his embrace: that does not faze him. That does not bother him much, if at all, because the truth is he's not comforting her; he's doesn't want her to respond. He doesn't need it, and doesn't want it, and can't take it: not another level of connection, not another inescapable connection, not now.

Nothing is constant in this. Everything's shifting and treacherous. She does not always tell a lie. He can't always tell the truth. Sometimes a kiss is a refuge; sometimes, so is an embrace, when he doesn't have to look at her, because he can't.

Some span of seconds goes by. Gradually his arms loosen. His jawline slides past her cheekbone; he does not press a kiss to her temple. He draws back instead, rolls on his back, puts a hand over his eyes for a moment, as though suddenly very weary, or struck by vertigo. Except for some incidental contact here or there, they are more completely separated now than they have been for ...

He doesn't even remember a time when she wasn't bare, and open to him, her skin to his. His chest rises and falls, a breath. He drops his hand from his eyes, to his stomach.

Lukas can't think of anything to say at all now. He stares at the ceiling.

[Danicka] What isn't obvious to him, and wouldn't be, is how drained Danicka is by this entire evening. She didn't expect, when she waited for him on the hood of his car, that she would fight so hard to tell him the truth while sitting inside of it. She didn't think she was going to look outside and realize that if she really can't stand this, if she can't bear to be with him for some reason that she only has a little while longer to satisfy her desire for him.

Then again, what Danicka expected was that after she left him at the motel she wouldn't want him anymore, and that would be that, and he wouldn't want her, either. But here they are. Wherever 'here' is.

Oh, she knows where 'here' is. Talking about things they have no business talking about, bring up truths they could have avoided if she'd just gotten into her car and gone home instead of waiting for him, confessing that she has been seen as near-worthless as a mate because she cannot even cope with what the Garou are and him admitting fear which is not something any Ahroun should be feeling, much less saying. 'Here' is a bad, stupid place, because she knows better. She knows what he is, and what he'll become, and it's not about being morose about the inevitability of death and loss but something else entirely, something worse than death.

Sometimes the way they kiss hurts more than a hand across her face.

Lukas rolls away, and Danicka relaxes, taking a deep and somewhat shaky breath. She remains lying on her side, but only until he covers his eyes with a loose hand. And then she, too, starts to turn, not just onto her back to lie beside him but moving onto her elbows, then sitting up as his hand is falling away from his face and his eyes are watching the ceiling, which is not exactly serving as the oracle everyone wishes it would. Her hair falls across her shoulderblades, and she starts to slide towards the edge of the bed.

[Lukas] Lukas is already looking at her back when Danicka begins to slide toward the edge of the bed. He'd looked at her when she sat up, the mattress shifting slightly under her changing weight distribution.

He doesn't say a word, though. He simply watches her as she gets up. Her jeans, her boyshorts are still at the foot of the bed, on the floor. Her bra is on the bed. It's rumpled under his left calf, actually, forgotten.

When she circles around the bed he stops watching her because the angle is too oblique. He watches the ceiling instead, and listens to her footsteps receding.

It's the bathroom she heads to. Listening to her run the bath, he asks himself if he would've stopped her if she'd picked up her clothes instead, got dressed, left. He asks himself if he could've remained silent then, and waited for it.

He can't come up with an answer to that. What he knows is that it would have been an effort. He would have wanted, very badly, to ask her to stay.

But she doesn't go. She retreats, but only to the bathroom, and as the tub begins to fill and the sound of water cascading into it begins to change, become more sonorous and muffled at once, Lukas also sits up. He draws his knees up and scuffs his hands through his hair, the roots still faintly damp. Then he plants a hand on the mattress and pushes off the bed.

She can hear him opening the bedroom door. He comes back a moment later, though, and when he joins her in the bathroom he has another little bottle from the minibar. This time it's vodka.

Not Wyborowa. Something far less exotic, something you don't have to import special or ask your father's european friends to bring back the next time they visit the motherland, or the UK, or the continent. Just a bottle of Stolichnaya, very small, a shot or two at most.

He stands in the doorframe for a moment, watching her, inscrutable if only because he doesn't know how to feel, while he cracks the bottle open and tosses the cap casually into the trash. He takes a swig, passes her the other half, and then nods her over in the bathtub.

"Room for another?"

[Danicka] There was no pause at the edge of the bed when Danicka got up, no moment when she rested silently before standing, no chance for him to have stopped her before her weight left the mattress, and no indication that she wanted him to tell her to wait, to stay, or...something. She didn't move onto her elbows until she knew what she wanted to do, and what she wanted to do was get out of that bed.

Walking around the bed to go into the bathroom she pushes her fingers into her hair, taking it all off her face, lifting it from her shoulders, off the back of her neck where several strands became stuck by sweat. It falls to one side when her hands fall again, and she cross out of his line of sight completely. The water begins to run into the tub, which is enormous, and so she does not hear Lukas get out of the bed and go into the anteroom to get more alcohol.

Whatever effect the wine had on him, if any, it's gone now.

When he comes into the bathroom, Danicka is sitting on the edge of the bathtub, one shoulderblade to the tiled wall at one end, her feet in the swirling water beginning to fill it. She didn't say that she was going to take a bath, and she didn't invite him, but she doesn't seem surprised to see him. Her arm drifts out, takes the vodka, and she downs the rest of it before tossing the tiny bottle into the trash after the cap.

There is no nod given in answer to his question, just her leaning back against the tile once more, her voice raised only enough to be audible over the crashing water. She seems to be waiting, for him to get in the tub before her, as his body will displace the water more than hers will. What is not even half-full yet will likely surround them both once both of them are in. It's hot enough to steam; not hot enough to be turning her feet red.

"What I want to know," she says mildly, "is who pays for your existence."

Surely she means: the clothes, the car, the hotel, the minibar. And not: the cost of knowing him, of being a part of his life.

[Lukas] Lukas climbs into the tub while Danicka downs the vodka in a single toss. This does not surprise him. Curiously -- though a woman like Danicka is hardly the sort you'd think of as hard-drinking -- it never had.

His hands are braced on the edges of the vast tub and he's beginning to lower himself in when she speaks. He pauses for a second, simply stops: the muscles of his arms and shoulders and upper chest all tensed against his weight, locking absolutely and quiverlessly.

He looks at her for a moment, and she's not mistaken if she thinks she sees a sudden guardedness to his regard, perhaps more than the question warrants.

It is an unusual question, though. Most people would assume Lukas, with his excellent bloodlines, his genteel parents and his clever, corporate-law-leaning sister, was being kept by any number of relatives near and far with vested interests. They'd assume he has access to funds that, if not unlimited, were at least vast, free-flowing, and bestowed upon him through the charity or duty of his kin.

But then, Danicka is not 'most' people. She knew him when he was young; she knew his parents, and she knows they must have come from good money, old money, the way he talks so casually of cooks and estates, orange groves when he was young. She knows, too, that in New York City their clothes were always formal, always quality, but always a little worn, a little outmoded. She knows that her family was never invited to their house.

She knows him now, and she knows how highly he values his honor, his honesty, his pride. She probably knows the Bellamontes have a loft full of empty rooms; she may suspect his pride would never allow him to partake of their charity. She knows he lives in a cramped single room at the Brotherhood with most of his pack, but seems to think nothing of dropping a hundred dollars at dinner, four hundred dollars for a night in the W with her.

For a moment, she's almost certain he'll dodge the question, or fire it back at her: Why do you care?

Then, instead, he sinks into the tub. The water rises. He leans back against the gently sloped edge, extending his legs underwater. He plunges his arms in for a moment, ducks his head forward and under, scrubs his face underwater, then straightens up. Wipes water off his face, pushes his hair back, wet now.

"I do," he replies, simply. A brief pause. He sinks back again, regarding her frankly. "When it was clear that I would Change, my father set aside ten thousand dollars in an investment account for me. This was '96, '97. It was ... a lot of money for my parents, then.

"For the first few years my father managed the account for me alongside his own. He reads a lot, invests almost every spare penny he has. Talks to people. He bought up stock in Qualcomm, Oracle, Yahoo, the like. Dot-com companies. Of course everyone knows the bubble burst in 2000, but my father was careful enough not to sink all his eggs in that basket, and smart enough to bail when the market started crashing.

"He got out with enough to send my sister to a good Ivy League college, among other things. When I First Changed he handed my account over to me, minus the original ten thousand. I manage it now, live off the dividends. I add to the principal when I can. I never withdraw."

There's a pause. This is another hard truth that he lays out, though perhaps it means less to her than the rest.

"I'm not ... as wealthy as I pretend, especially with the market today. I have enough, but not so much as the Bellamontes. It is mine, though."

[Danicka] As Lukas gets into the tub and starts to slide downward, Danicka shifts her legs slightly out of the way of his upper body, her left foot sliding past his hip and to his inner thigh. Her right foot goes to the side of the tub, out of the water completely, droplets trickling down the sides of the tub while his mass makes the level rise upward. Her position is precarious, in more ways than one.

He does not remember anything about her childhood, to know if her home was in a state of good or waning repair, if her clothes were oft-mended or easily replaced, if they owned a television or not. What dim recollection he has of her father is overwhelmed by how quiet the man was, the fact that he listened more than he spoke, and his voice was low when he did. He might remember cards flipping over rapidly and numbers being called out before the deck would be gathered back together and dealt for another game between the adults.

She has wondered about him, about the way he dresses, the car he drives, the disdain for Mr. C's (which is really not that bad a place; the drinks are cheap and the crowd is mellow and the darts tournament on Thursdays is always entertaining) and the ease with which he goes through the minibar at a hotel that is several hundred dollars a night. She cannot imagine him holding a job; the idea is ridiculous. Her brother could never, and he's not an Ahroun.

Maybe Lukas wonders the same about the woman he seems to be sleeping with, talking of taming and being tamed by; she is available at all hours. The bra he crumpled under his calf likely cost nearly a hundred dollars alone. The last time they came here she didn't blink at the cost of the room. And yet she, who could easily hold down any number of jobs -- he can imagine -- does not appear to have any sort of set schedule. What is she, a consultant?

Kurva.

Lukas dips under the water and when he comes up Danicka stands up, putting her weight on her left foot, which is planted on the bottom of the tub between his thighs. She uses the tiled wall, not his head or shoulder, for balance, sets her right foot down as well, and lowers herself into the water in front of him while he's talking. Her back is to him, hair swept over her shoulder, fingertips sliding down the wall. He cannot see her reaction as he describes for her how he came to the money he has, what his father did for him, what his father did for Anezka.

Danicka sighs quietly as she sinks into the water, and without prelude or hesitation, leans back until she's resting against his chest. The water is not quite high enough to turn off yet; she lets it run.

It means something that he says he pretends to have more than he does, and that he mentions the Bellamontes. This is what stops her from saying what comes to her mind immediately in response to It is mine, though. She lays her head back, unable to look at him, but if he looks down and turns just so, he can see the thoughtful look on her face. "...Why do you pretend to have more than you do?"

[Lukas] Somehow, despite their abrupt parting on the bed. Lukas isn't the faintest bit surprised when she gets in the tub with him and turns her back, when she sinks down between his knees and leans back against him. Somehow, despite their parting, he finds himself moving to subtly welcome her back against his body, as though that's where she's always belonged.

His knees draw up slightly while she's getting settled, and then extend again until his feet touch the far end of the tub, and his kneecaps are drowned beneath the surface. He doesn't wrap his arms around her, quite, but the wallward arm does come loosely around her waist after she's leaned back. He tilts his head around hers to the right, giving her his left shoulder to lean against.

The other arm comes up out of the water to rest along the edge of the tub. Water trickles down his skin in rivulets, pools against the ceramic. It's cool enough in the bathroom, the water and his skin warm enough, that steam rises in near-invisible twists and whorls from the surface of his body.

There's a silence after she speaks, but she can't detect any tension, any unease in his body behind hers.

He can't imagine why it's -- easy, somehow, to confess to her. Perhaps it's her way of listening. Perhaps it's her placid, submissive facade: the one that he's always found faintly condescending, faintly patronizing; the one he hasn't seen except in brief flickers and flashes for ... some time now, really. So it's not that.

Perhaps it's this: the simple fact that after the things he's already confessed, after he's flayed himself open and dredged words like I've wanted her since the moment I saw her from the pit of his stomach, things like this -- deeper, older secrets, but not so raw -- seem easier.

Maybe this is why he didn't care if she was in his room while he was gone. Maybe this is why he didn't even ask if she'd looked through his things.

The silence isn't tension, then. It's simply what it is: silence, a quiet. She leans on him; he leans on the tub. The water is still flowing, getting close to the emergency drain now.

"My parents are descended from some of the oldest and noblest blood there is, human or Garou." When he speaks at last, it's without prelude, but not abrupt; it's deliberate, quiet. "Our line has extended unbroken since the dark ages.

"It's not that I care so much about my ancestry. It doesn't define me. But my ancestors stood proud through centuries of wars and revolutions, vampires and wyrm uprisings. They withstood the collapse of the monarchy and the rise of communism with their pride and holdings mostly intact. What they couldn't withstand was one little peaceful revolution after the Soviet bloc collapsed, and all the Tribal politics that ran alongside it.

"I don't know the details. I was too young, and my parents don't talk about it. One day we just had to leave, just like that. I still remember my father coming home and shouting at my mother to start packing. We were gone by morning. We had to leave almost everything behind; our possessions, the money, the land."

He pauses here. He turns the tap off with his foot, if she hasn't already. Now the bathroom is very quiet, and he's very quiet, until he finds the thread of the story again.

"Some old friends of my father got us out of Prague. When we got to New York, we were pretty much on our own. The family back home was too busy pulling their own fat out of the fire, and I guess my father didn't want to divulge too much to the Tribe in New York in case someone had connections to whomever it was he had to run from. Besides, we're Shadow Lords, and the Tribe has no patience for those who can't pull their own weight.

"So we kept our heads down. Kept to ourselves. We lived in one room in a rooming house -- about the size of my room at the Brotherhood. To tell you the truth, I was too young to care about that. I was happy. It was only when I was older that I understood I was happy because my parents worked very hard to make sure Anežka and I had nothing to be ashamed of. Two or three jobs apiece so we could keep up an appearance. New York was full of ex-Soviets around then, Slavs and Russians all washing dishes, waiting tables, cleaning bathrooms. As long as my parents were careful, no one would know how weak we had become.

"Anyway. Eventually the politics settled down, and my parents could liquidate some of their assets in Europe and move it over. Not too long after, it turned out I was Trueborn, and ... well. Suddenly we were golden again."

There's a curious detachment in all that. He tells it like he tells it every day, like it wasn't his life story he was relating but another's. Except, of course, he can't remember the last time he's told anyone; if he's even told anyone. The pack must know some of it, if not all, but if there was another, he couldn't think of it right now.

It doesn't matter.

Another pause. Then: "I know that doesn't really answer the question. The truth is I don't know why. But that has something to do with it. Watching my parents, who have the blood of kings in them, scrub toilets; watching them do that so they could keep up an appearance; knowing how important that appearance was to our happiness and our survival ..."

A silence, for a while. Water laps softly at their skin, the edges of the tub. He draws a breath, exhales.

"I suppose you don't really appreciate wealth unless you've had it, and lost it. You don't really realize the doors the very appearance of wealth opens until they slam shut in your face."

[Danicka] It is surreal, how much they have learned about one another tonight. Some of it has been subtle, in a way, flaring up briefly in conversation only to be filed away for future perusal, contemplation, use. Some of what they now know is truly innocuous, though not entirely meaningless or unimportant: the name of her sister in law, the way he sat on the floor listening to music when she first arrived at the aquarium. There are puzzle pieces to fit together later, from what Lukas overheard Danicka saying on the phone to the way she struggles so hard to be honest with him.

He only gets angry when he thinks he's being manipulated.

But she hadn't been talking about Lukas, then. He'd learned later: she was talking about her brother.

Or when he knows you're scared.

And had the advice after that, the assurance that Emílie need not be frightened of Vladislav for not conceiving, been a lie? Maybe Lukas will remember this later, think it over, think of the way she told him that the first time she saw her mother in warform she was so young as to be genuinely fragile, and what was her mother doing in crinos around a toddler anyway, and does she realize (how can she not, a well-trained Lord Kinfolk like herself?) that his attempts to apologize to her were yet another exception? He doesn't apologize. Surely Laura never would. Surely Vladislav would not.

Danicka doesn't apologize, either. Not often. She did when she bolted into his room in terror over seeing Sam, who was only in glabro. Murmuring apologies for entering without knocking, for running to him at all, for being weak. For being afraid.

Then again, given what all has happened tonight, what all they have talked about, it may be that Lukas doesn't think about any of that at all. Danicka will not be thinking much about what she told him, bits and pieces like crumbs in the forest compared to the whole, nourishing loaves of information he gives to her in response. She will not feel guilty for giving so little to him in words, because she looked at the moon. Because she laid back and wrapped herself around him, murmured things to him in Russian she honestly could not bring herself to say in any language he would understand. Danicka has given him more tonight than she can almost bear to have done, and will not feel bad later for not exposing her secrets and her history the way that he has.

She will think about what went unsaid, alluded to in talk of foxes:

You are taming me, and I never told you how.

I am taming you, and I did not mean to.

In some ways they are incalculably different from one another. To him, trust is everything. To her, it's like following a false prophet. He opens up like he is now, telling her about his childhood, his life, how his family came to be as it was when she met him and how he came to be as he is now. She gives him breadcrumbs of her history and tries to tell him to be satisfied with that, with candied-orange pastries, with her moans in his mouth and the uncanny reality that when she comes with him she is momentarily yet wholly his. But he agrees that it is worth it. It is, as he said, worth everything.

Tonight they have run the gamut in conversation. There are few topics they have not covered, few things they have not approached briefly only to retreat from again. What is sad, or ironic, or even pathetic, is that at the end of the night they still do not entirely understand one another, and cannot. As Danicka pointed out in his car, they have only known one another for a matter of weeks, they have only been 'together' for a portion of that time, and it's ridiculous to try and 'understand' each other, but on some level it has to be tiring to have spoken so much, and come away with nothing solid, with nothing more than tastes. It is utterly exhausting, to Danicka, to have said as much as she has.

No wonder she lays her head back on his shoulder and closes her eyes. She doesn't even bother watching the water level rise up, doesn't reach to turn it off as it gets higher and higher, as Lukas speaks to her. From the steadiness of her breathing, one might think she's falling asleep, but there's an energy and vitality in her that has nothing to do with how tired she is or is not at any given time. This is how her breeding feels to him, when she's in his arms or walking across the room: there is something incredibly vivid about her, as though she contains Life itself inside her skin and if he could get close enough to her then he might find immortality, or another reason to go on with his own life, or maybe even just the reverent warmth of companionship.

Her arm rests over his arm on her waist, her back moves slightly against his abdomen and chest as she breathes, and yes: she feels as though she belongs there, as though she always have. She felt that way on the couch while they waited for food, too; this is how she fits against his body, this is how she was supposed to fit from the beginning. Whether the beginning was in childhood, or birth, or ancestry, or January twenty-fifth.

As ever, she listens in silence and waits for him to finish every word. She conceals her reactions, if she has them, and this has to be a part of why so many people tend to open up to her: she does not judge. She does not impose her own opinions on his reality, and yet she is anything but indifferent. Her fingers stroke his under the water, and her other arm rests along his thigh, her hand just above his knee. Her eyes do open briefly when he says One day we just had to leave, but then they close again, slowly. He turns the tap off, and the only sounds in the room are their inhales and exhales echoing off the tile, the movement of the water against the ceramic.

And his voice.

The question she might ask -- why his family did not ask for more help from her father -- is answered before it even is completely formed in her mind. It's understandable. Her first assumption is the last explanation: we're Shadow Lords. In her mind, an unspoken reply: yes...we are. The more sensible reasoning, however, is the first that Lukas gives: you never know who knows who, who knows what. She does not even know all of her father's connections. Her eyes do open again, however, as he reveals why she and her father were never invited over. They lived at a boarding house. They did not see them often, and that probably had at least something to do with the fact that both parents were working several jobs.

Her fingers lace with his on her stomach, more strong than comforting: no one would know how weak we had become. It loosens only a moment later. It is not the hand-holding of someone at a funeral, or someone hearing a confession of misery. It is the way some people reach out and touch another not to transfer some of their own strength but to remind the person of their own.

Or maybe Danicka is just touching his hand. She is, eyes closed and body languid with his in the water, inscrutable as ever.

At no point does she stop him and ask, impatiently, when he is going to get to the goddamn point, and really answer her question. At no point does she sigh, or feign annoyance, or seem to have to restrain herself from an expression of sincere irritation. Danicka, as always, seems to enjoy listening to him. She relaxes. She is content. A couple of weeks ago she could not imagine lying naked in a bathtub with this man, but a couple of weeks ago she never would have expected to have gone to sleep with him, or have told him as painful a secret as she tried to reveal and yet shied away from at the last second.

In the end he voices his thoughts on the appearance of wealth as well as the appreciation of it. Danicka doesn't argue. It's horrible that she can't respond by telling him about her own family's financial history, or the line of their conjoined clans, or any doors that have been slammed in her face. It's awful that even if she wanted to she could not, tonight, force herself to share more with him than she has. She does not know what to say to him other than disclosure of her own, which she cannot bear tonight. Thinking about it makes her tired. And feeling tired makes her open her eyes.

Because she doesn't just feel tired, which would be the easy way out of all of this. Not saying a word. Not doing anything but lying there in the hot, steaming water and stroking the back of his hand until one of them decides that it's time to get out, dry off, and go back to bed. She knows that she's going to stay here with him again, that she will sleep facing him with her arms curled between his chest and hers, their legs loosely woven together under the covers. She knows that the first thing she's going to see in the morning is going to be his face. Her eyes open because as drained as she feels, as weary, she is glad he followed her in here and she is glad he's sitting behind her now and she is looking forward to waking up and finding him there.

Danicka takes a breath and sighs quietly, moments after he's finished speaking.

Many times tonight silence has fallen between them, or a conversation has exhausted itself, and one or the other of them has changed to a new topic, asked a new question, as ravenous (or escapist) as they are when they kiss. This time Danicka listens to everything he has to say and does not offer anything in return, nor does she ask him some question about his past, his present, or some trailing thought they never finished exploring earlier. She keeps silent...and she keeps silent for a very long time.

Until the warmth of the bath starts to dissipate and they leave it. Until she turns her head and nuzzles his neck, wordlessly urging him to turn his face towards her, kiss her, move his other arm around her as well. Until they are dry and slipping finally under the covers of the expansive bed, her bra brushed to the floor and unused, unwrapped condoms tossed onto the nightstand, the curtains left open just as they were the last time. There is nothing to say, really, nothing more to be said, nothing they can likely stand to speak of any more tonight. It is enough.

Danicka does not even speak again -- not at length, not more than a couple of words in answer to some question or indication of intent -- until the closeness of him, the warmth of him, the softness of uncalloused and unscarred parts of his body against her own smooth skin call on her the way they have from the very first night. In the complete darkness left over after fingers hit switches and heads hit pillows, she finds herself sliding closer to Lukas between sheets that are almost but not quite as luxurious as satin, and she cups his face in her hands and slides her fingers into his hair. When she kisses him again she tastes like mint from brushing her teeth after their bath, she smells like the orange and ginger soap unwrapped at the tub's edge, she feels so soft it's almost agony to touch her.

What she says, finally, when their lips are parting and her leg is sliding around his hip, is this: "Chci být s tebou," she murmurs against his skin, capturing his lower lip again briefly, not thinking about how close the moon is to full, not knowing that tomorrow a simple walk is going to turn into absolute madness and a dear one -- last seen bloodied -- not seen again for hours. "Chci tě uvnitř mě," is all Danicka can say, half-moaning the words as she rolls her back to the sheets, pulling him onto her.

What they need is within arm's reach, this time. He does not have to leave the bed and go to the other room. He can stay with her, feel her kisses falling on his skin like prayers, until with a flex of his hips and an arch of her back there is no more illusion of separation. Just Danicka gasping Chci tě... chci ti moc... as they move together, and Lukas's name curling into his own ear, softly this time instead of screamed, when she comes.

She sleeps as she knew she would, turned towards him as she did before, when she whispered a confession that yes, they were talking about taming each other.

In the morning she opens her eyes and sees his face.