zamilovávám se do tebe.

[Danicka] I'll see you, she'd said, squeezing his fingers before going down to the parking garage. But Thursday, Friday, and Saturday had been busy, filled with packing books and crying on Gerry's shoulder so she wouldn't cry when she was at the hospital.

On Sunday, in the living room of the apartment that had been theirs and was now only hers, she'd stopped looking around the place for anything he might accidentally be leaving behind because he was standing there looking at her, the afternoon sun high on the windows hitting her hair and his face and he wasn't saying a word. Not, at least, until Martin put down the bag of essentials he was taking with him in the rental car and strode quickly over to her, wrapping his arms around her and laying his face alongside hers.

They'd stayed like that for a long while, holding each other tighter than she can bear to think about, until he'd whispered in her ear something that reminded her of Stay awhile, and her eyes had shut against heat and moisture she couldn't keep back. Okay? Marty had murmured at the end, and she'd taken a sharp gasp and nodded against his shoulder, saying Okay.

What happened after that has been filling her thoughts ever since, filling in the spaces when Gerry was not helping her clean the place up and start placing ads in newspapers and so forth calling for a new roommate. He didn't have to stay. He knew he didn't. He stayed anyway, sleeping on her couch until Tuesday, when she drove him to the airport. Her goodbye with Martin's best friend was less intense; she gave him a quick hug, a kiss on the cheek, and told him to keep in touch before he got on the plane and went back to his boyfriend in New York.

For roughly a week after saying goodbye to Lukas in the lobby of her building, she only had time to think about him when she was lying in bed unable to sleep, and even then a great many of her thoughts were occupied with her insomnia, with Martin's sudden absence, with Martin's voice in her ear and his lips gently parting hers, with worry over a new roommate. And for several more days she entertains phone calls that give her headaches, refuses to interview potential new roommates because from their messages it sounds like they didn't even read the ad, and on Friday she cries on the telephone to her father, about everything.

About Martin. Lukas. Katherine. The apartment. School. Everything.

In the end she is sniffing moisture out of her sinus cavities and rolling her eyes to the ceiling to make herself stop crying. She wipes tears off her cheeks and exhales a slow breath. She straightens her back as he responds to her, and nods even though he can't see it. Ano, she tells him, agreeing and obeying. Ano. Vím. And she hangs up, and does not call Lukas. Or Martin. Or anyone.

By Sunday, eleven days since she's seen or spoken to the guy she is fucking, Danicka still hasn't called. Or texted. Or shown up.

[Lukas] They don't think about each other much when they're apart. They're not like human couples, especially in the first blush of a romance: the infatuation, the obsessive thinking, the inability to go twenty minutes without thinking about the other. They're not a couple at all, arguably, and this is not a romance. They have never been on a date. They see each other once a week, on average, and it usually involves a fight, or a fuck.

Eleven days goes by. She doesn't call. Or text. Or show up. He doesn't call. He never texts. He's only shown up once, and it was not pleasant.

They don't think about each other much. She thinks about him at night when she can't sleep. He's never been an insomniac in all his life, and so his thoughts about her aren't so predictable as that.

He thinks about her, fleetingly, in brief and vivid flashes between doing this or that. He thought about her once going over a bridge crossing the Chicago river, because the sun had flashed off the water just so and reminded him, somehow, of the way she looked at him over her shoulder and down her side when he was behind her and ...

He thought about her once at a bookstore, because there was a red-and-black book called Sharp Teeth on the display, and it was blank verse, it was modern day epic poetry, it was about werewolves, and he thought to himself: she'd love this.

He thinks about her every time he eats a koláč, which is often, because he finishes them all off in the first three days.

After the night of the 25th, he thinks about her less often because he's got shit on his mind. When he does think about her it's with unease, and something like apprehension, and the next thought in his mind is usually three fucking spirals, and that's why he spends his recuperation making phone calls, looking things up on the internet, getting recommendations from kin and kind, making more phone calls.

On the 29th, in the evening, a package arrives via FedEx at the Brotherhood. The return address is in California. It's small but heavy, and he takes it directly to his room, where he opens it only long enough to see that what he wanted was inside. Then he closes the box up again, picks up his cellphone, dials Danicka's number.

"Hey," he says when she picks up, or her voicemail does. "It's Lukáš. Are you free?"

[Danicka] She picks up, not her voicemail. It's late, but not terribly; he hears metal contact with ceramic. She knew before she picked up who the call was from, so there is no Hello? or Who is this?

"I know," she says mildly, when he tells her it's him, then there's a pause. "Yeah," she says slowly. "I'm just...eating dinner. What's up?"

[Lukas] Lukas's room at the Brotherhood is small, but it's private. He shares it with no one. There's only one predominant scent in here, and it's his. All the clothes in the closet are his. All the things in the desk are his -- the pens, the pads, the laptop, the maps, the expensive liquor that he hoards to himself.

The furniture is not his. The sheets and the curtains are not his, but may as well be. He owns the space in here, and though he's always careful to keep things tidy and neat, he does not necessarily have to, and there are tiny traces of him all around the room.

There's his coffeepot on the table. There's his Ellis Island mug at the single nightstand. There's the fedex box on the desk, which he looks at while she asks him what's up.

A short silence. Then: "Could I come over? Or I'm at the Brotherhood, if you'd prefer."

[Danicka] There's another pause on her end, quiet now. There's no clink of silverware and dish, no swish of liquid in her mouth or half-breath after a swallow. There's no music playing in the background, no voices. He can assume she is alone there, knowing her roommate is gone, long gone by now. He may assume she hasn't found a new one yet. It's only been a week, after all.

She has 1,332 square feet of space, temporarily hers alone. Martin took nothing but his books and his personal effects and his clothes; the furniture is still in his bedroom. The chairs at the kitchen shelf and the stereo and the plasma screen television and the couch and coffee table are all, one can assume, Danicka's rightful property.

There are no traces of Lukas here. There's no traces of anyone, really, except her.

"Yeah," she says, after that brief span of silence. Then, because that's not really clear: "Come over."

[Lukas] "I'll see you." And he hangs up.

It's not a terribly long drive to 520 Kingsbury. Factor in another 10 minutes for him to change into street clothes, and he's ringing her intercom thirty minutes after they hang up; knocking on her door five minutes after that.

When she opens the door, he's in the usual distressed jeans, of which he must have dozens of pairs, all slightly different -- a blindingly white button-up shirt, well cut to his frame. His jacket is over his arm. In his other hand, the smallish box gripped securely in his long fingers, is his FedEx package.

They haven't spoken for eleven days. He looks at her for a moment, not merely to see that she's blonde, and green-eyed, and lovely, and fucking hot, but to actually look at her: to see as far beneath the skin as she will allow.

"Hey," he says again, as he had on the phone, but quieter. And he steps in.

[Danicka] I'll see you. There it is again. Danicka's smirk doesn't live long on her face as she ends the call and sets her phone back down. She finishes dinner in the time it takes him to change and to get over to her building. She cleans up her dishes; she has nothing else to do. She watches more of her movie. She doesn't spend a whole lot of time trying to tidy the place up. She brushes her teeth.

It takes her awhile to get to the button at the intercom by the door to press it and allow him into Kingsbury Plaza. At that point she just hangs out by the door, knowing that the elevator will be swift, especially this time of night.

When she opens the door, she's wearing a black t-shirt with some lovely scrollwork on it and careful lettering that informs him -- or the world -- that [Green] Is The New [Purple]. It's not a babydoll tee, but it is small, and while it doesn't show off her figure it also doesn't hang off of her like a tent. She has on a pair of loose jean cutoffs that hang precariously on her hips, the sort of thing that he might never imagine her wearing but has to be incredibly glad she is because with the way she leans one elbow on the wall and lets him in, she looks...

...blonde, and green-eyed, and lovely, and fucking hot.

Relaxed. Loose. She could pass for white trash if her nails were bitten-down. Her hair's in a messy braid but it works for her, it seems like everything works for her. She's not fair for life to have to deal with. Crying, she looks like something out of an old movie. Angry, she looks wild and untouchable. Like this, she makes you wish you'd spent more time checking out the girls at the trailer parks, makes you wonder if she owns a pair of cowgirl boots but...wait...no. That's getting off track.

"You ever seen The Fifth Element?" she asks him, kicking the door closed as he steps in, greeting her quietly. Barefooted, Danicka locks and latches the door, not asking about his package -- har, har -- but heading down the hallway towards the living room once more. The kitchen is cleaner than the last time he saw it, a couple of dishes on the stove. It smells like garlic, like starches, oregano. And wine.

"There's penne on the stove," she informs him a moment later, regardless of his answer. "I would offer you Pinot grigio, but," this word is elongated slightly, "it's all gone."

Danicka flops onto the couch again, kicking up her legs as she does.

[Lukas] Lukas looks at her quizzically as she mentions the Fifth Element. Then there's a faint smile, a little crooked.

"Yeah, sure. I think Milla Jovovich was the first true love of my life, even if she had absolutely no tits to speak of." A small shrug. "I guess that sort of thing mattered less at age 11."

He turns his head as they pass the kitchen, reflexively, as she offers penne and no-pinot-grigio. "Thanks," he says; the declination is already in his tone, "but I already ate."

And so Lukas follows her back to the couch, and since there are no other armchairs or footstools or benches to sit on, sits beside her. He's not awkward about this; he's not exactly a teenager, and this was definitely not a first date. He holds the box between his hands, frowning faintly at the TV. He would not be surprised to see Milla in all her orange-haired glory there.

A brief pause. Then he hands her the box. It's a little smaller than a shoebox, but heavy.

"I asked Anežka to recommend a gun for you," he says, simply. "This is a SIG SP-2022 9-millimeter semiautomatic. I don't have a Firearm Owner's ID, so it's registered in her name right now. As soon as you get your permit, you'll want to transfer it over to your possession legally. Illinois only permits concealed-carry for private citizens in their own homes or at their workplace, so you're going to want to practice loading it quickly or hiding it well."

He's lecturing again. He stops; his eyes flicker from the box to her face, from one eye to the other and back.

"Do you know how to fire a gun?"

[Danicka] This is not a first date. This is not a date, strictly speaking. So far they have not altered from what she murmured to him that first night at the W: not another two weeks. Eleven days is pushing it, but they have not gone two weeks without seeing one another or two weeks without fucking each other's brains out since the first time. Danicka is more than tipsy, more than 'mellow''; Danicka is drunk. She has put away a full bottle of white wine over the past two hours, with pasta and Milla Jovovich to keep her company while she drank.

"Milla Jovovich," Danicka informs him as she is slinging her legs over his lap -- the movie is indeed paused on the large screen, and Milla herself is frozen in time beating the shit out of some aliens -- when he sits down, "convinced me that I liked girls."

She still hasn't asked about the box, until he holds it out to her. Danicka blinks at it, tilts her head, then takes it from him, sitting up a little on the couch with her bare legs still half-bent over his thighs. Hearing what he has to say, however, she does not open it. She looks at the lid, then looks at him, her eyes flat despite the brilliance they carry whenever she is inebriated. And she is. Quite thoroughly.

"...are you fucking kidding me?"

[Lukas] Mildly: "Do I sound like I'm kidding?"

[Danicka] "I really couldn't guess, sweetheart," she says, choosing the English over the purring Czech endearment that essentially means the same thing. Danicka holds the box on top of her abdomen for a moment, then sets it on the coffee table without looking inside. Her eyes stay on his, so it takes her a few seconds to make sure the box is not going to fall off the edge before she lets it go.

"I've been a glorified nanny for the past nine years. Do you think I know how to fire a handgun? Or that I'm just chomping at the bit to learn how?"

[Lukas] Totally unfazed -- totally unsurprised, even -- Lukas leans to the side, pulls his wallet out, thumbs through it until he finds a small white business card.

This, too, he hands over.

"This is the number of a private gun range out in Hoffman. It's a little out of the way, but they're reputedly very good. They offer beginner's lessons and they don't ask a lot of questions. I'm told you should start on a .22 and move up to a 9mm." A beat. "I don't think you're chomping at the bit to learn, Danička, but I think you should. As a precaution."

[Danicka] As with the box containing the firearm, Danicka takes the card without rancor. She glances at it, does not quite manage to read all the words on it, and then sets it on top of the box. Her eyes go back to Lukas, because this time they had to follow her hand in order to make sure the card didn't end up on the floor.

"Do you know what happened to Martin? When he turned around and fired a fucking forty-five at a Spiral? He nearly got his arm torn off, Lukášek." Odd that she uses his nickname, the diminutive, the endearment, when she is frowning like this. "Why...what...why are you...hovno," she finally concludes, muttering the curse.

[Lukas] "Do you know what would have happened if he hadn't fired his .45 at a Spiral?" Lukas counters. Odd that she uses his nickname. Odd that he replies with utter and reasonable calm. "He would have gotten his head torn off."

[Danicka] "And I'd be dead," she fires back easily. "I asked you, when you came tearing in here in a...in...in snit because I didn't tell you about that, and I asked you if I should have stayed, and you said no, what the fuck do you want me to have a gun for?"

She sits up on her end of the couch, grabbing the back of the cushions and the one she is sitting on to pull herself up, but she doesn't draw her legs back from where they rest on top of him.

[Lukas] In case Lukas had not yet noticed Danicka was shitfaced drunk, her stumbling over her adjectives until her pickled brain manages to produce the ever-so-eloquent in snit would've surely tipped him off.

She doesn't draw her legs back. He doesn't get mad. He doesn't laugh in her face either, which is probably a good thing.

"I want you to have a gun for when Martin isn't there." Perhaps that's a cruel thing to say. Martin's side of the apartment smells -- empty. "For when running is no longer an option."

His eyes flicker from hers then. His hand closes gently over her shin, thoughtfully, as though he'd just now noticed her legs crossing his.

"I want you to have a gun so if you have to die you can die fighting. Rather than screaming."

And that is, as they say: fucked up.

[Danicka] What is fucked up is that this isn't flowers, or a bottle of wine, or a piece of jewelry, or a book he saw in a bookstore that made him think she'd love this. It's a goddamned handgun, and Danicka's reaction to it is neither squealing delight nor open revulsion, just...shock. She sets it aside and demands answers for what the hell she is supposed to think of this, do with this.

Then he mentions Martin, and she leans back until her spine is arched, til her braid is falling down the side of the couch, her eyes taking in an upside-down view of her apartment. She breathes, and the extension of her upper body makes every single twitch of that deep breath visible. She doesn't respond for awhile, doesn't move or jerk or come closer when his hand touches her leg.

Her head snaps up, and she glares at him. "I wasn't screaming," she insists, almost petulantly. "And I think if I'm going to die a fucking nine mil in my hand isn't going to keep me from screaming at the very end, so...thankyouverymuch, but Martin isn't here, and he hasn't been here for a week and you haven't even called me, you...vůl."

[Lukas] "Then you can die screaming and fighting, Danička," a hint of impatience now. "Look. It's yours if you want it. If you don't, the return address is right on the box. You can call it a belated name-day present. I'm sure my sister will be pleased. Either way, I don't give a fuck."

Pause. He draws a breath, resettles.

"And you didn't call me either. I was busy. I assumed you were busy. I didn't mind."

[Danicka] In response, Danicka grabs the edge of the blanket on the back of the couch and yanks it over her head.

[Lukas] There's a brief, flabbergasted silence.

Then there's a series of very quiet, short exhales -- as though Lukas were trying very hard to laugh quietly.

[Danicka] She kicks his hip. Gently, without much strength or even intent behind it, but she draws back one leg from his lap and kicks him in the hip with her bare foot, her voice muffled behind the blanket. "S'not funny. I'm drunk and depressed and you're bringing me lethal weapons and laughing at me. Tahni do prdele."

[Lukas] He catches her foot a second after impact, straightens her leg out beside its partner and clamps both down under his arm. By then he's controlled his untimely urge to laugh, quashed his hilarity down to a low buzz.

"I got you a book, too," he admits. "I was going to put it in the box, but then it seemed like a stupid thing to do. The gun isn't a present, anyway. So I left the book in the car. -- Danička, take that blanket off your head. You don't know how ridiculous you look."

[Danicka] "I know precisely how ridiculous I look," she argues from beneath the fuzzy red throw. "You should consider it a mark of --" whatever it is a mark of, whatever 'it' is, is lost. She pauses there, and drags the blanket down.

Loose hairs cling to her face from static and blur her eyesight. "What book? And let go of my legs."

[Lukas] "Are you going to kick me again?"

[Danicka] "I don't know," she replies levelly, giving a gaze that would chilling in its seriousness if she were not drunk, if she could remember why she thinks he's a jerk, if a thousand things, "are you going to continue being an ass?" Her legs wriggle fitfully, kicking without much use, and she scowls at him.

[Lukas] He regards her for a moment. It's vaguely amazing to him. A minute ago he was on the edge of annoyance; and then she'd done something so ridiculous, so childish, that anyone else attempting it would've met the sharp side of his tongue -- or the back side of his fist.

And he'd laughed.

And -- the corner of his mouth turns up, a little ruefully. "Probably," he replies. He lets go her legs, and as she begins to fold them up or draw them back or whatever it is she might do, he leans down and drops a kiss on her knee.

[Danicka] She gets a moment from him where he is not laughing, or speaking, and just looking. He's stunned slightly, or looks it. She doesn't look more than patient, unfettered by sobering emotions such as true anger or true frustration or anything. She's numb, and mild, and doesn't realize that what would irritate him or inspire discipline from him in others meets only with amusement in her case. Talk about special treatment.

When he lets go of her legs, with no real assurance that she's going to stop kicking him or that she's going to stop arguing with him, Danicka simply relaxes them on top of his lap once more. He kisses her knee, and she smirks at him, lazily and even happily. Her legs shift, one bending and lifting towards him so that he does not need to bend so much to lay his lips there.

"What book?" she asks again.

[Lukas] Lukas snorts at her. He shifts -- he kicks his shoes off and puts his back against the opposite arm of the couch, slides his left leg under her, past her, between her side and the back of the couch; tugs her by the ankles until they're antiparallel and her legs are sprawled half atop his body, her feet at the level of his chest.

His right foot is still flat on the floor, the leg bent at the knee. He covers her ankles with his hand, his thumb stroking the back of her foot, and when she asks him what book again, it's his turn to smirk.

"And why should I tell you? You acted patently ridiculous, and then you kicked me." His grin is irrepressible, but he tries. "Anyway, you won't even remember this in the morning."

[Danicka] Not surprisingly, Danicka is terrifically relaxed about the shifting and tugging and rearranging of limbs. She ends up scooting down on the cushions somewhat as he moves her legs, and she just lays back, mellow about what is being done, which is simultaneously meaningless and potentially disturbing. She looks at the ceiling, and then lifts her head to look at him.

He won't tell her what book. So she kicks him in the ribs with her heel, thumping him once soundly. "I will not. Wait." She blinks. "I mean I will." She squirms, assuming he has caught her foot as a reaction to that kick, trying to do so again. "Stop being mean. I'm miserable."

The blanket goes back over her head.

[Lukas] This time Lukas does laugh, but quietly -- she can feel it in his chest as easily, more easily than she can hear it. And while she kicks him again, solidly, he doesn't trap her foot again, instead exhaling a half-hearted ow. His hand moves higher on her leg, which means it actually moves down his body, and his palm is warm over her shin.

He's quiet, then. He settles in, comfortable, and he looks at the same ceiling he'd looked at the first night he was here, when he spent the night on the couch because she'd closed the door and he didn't know how to read that. That was two weeks ago. He's known her two months now. He's known her most of his life, only he hasn't.

"It's called Sharp Teeth," he says, some time later. "It's modern epic poetry, or at least meant to be. It's about werewolves in L.A."

[Danicka] She doesn't come back out from under the blanket, not when he laughs, not when he tells her -- finally -- the book that is in the car and not in his coat or in the box. Danicka at least stops kicking and swearing at him, doesn't call him an ox or a jerk, doesn't tell him to go to hell again. She lies quietly while Milla Jovovich looks savagely out at the room from the television screen, motionless for the forseeable future.

"You," she says after awhile, her voice muffled and hard to read, "are a fan of irony, aren't you?"

[Lukas] He reaches down further -- snags the end of the blanket and draws it down, down from her face; is reminded, absurdly and starkly and absolutely, of legends of desert beauties in seven veils.

He can see her now, down the length of his body and hers, overlapping. Downcast, watching her out of the bottom of his eyes, he seems lazy, very large when matched to her like this, a predator in repose. His hand returns to her shin, curving over the slender bone.

"I suppose," he agrees. The moon is small and he's agreeable, and that's part of the reason why, but not all of it. "I saw it at the bookstore last Tuesday. It seemed like something you'd read."

[Danicka] When Lukas grabs the blanket in his fist and begins to tug it down, Danicka fights him for it. She yanks back, holding to her end and refusing to show her face, though her hair is now not just 'messy' but 'wrecked' and they are becoming quite tangled, all legs and arms and fabric. She would be out of place in a desert, too fair and too too thin to survive a world like that, but if that's the criteria, it's a wonder she can survive any world at all. She's not frail, per say, and the fact that she is willing to wrestle on the couch with an Ahroun and kick him repeatedly shows a certain, unexpected amount of backbone, but her weakness and simultaneous strength is this:

he does not ask her why she is miserable, she does not tell him. Perhaps he doesn't see there's any reason to bother, and perhaps she does not want to anyway, it would not do her any good, it would not...change anything. She remains liquefied in the wine she drank with pasta earlier, though her breath now smells like mint instead of pinot grigio or herbs, and though she cannot entirely remember why she is under the blanket, it's warm and dark there, and she likes it.

"That's very thoughtful of you," she says, and lifts one leg blindly -- and therefore slowly -- to drape it over his shoulder. "You got me a book because you thought I'd like it and you got me a gun because...because you think I'm the type of person who is going to fight when something's trying to kill me."

Now she pulls the blanket down herself, or lets him have it, and reaches up one small hand to push face-framing hairs off her forehead and cheeks, smoothing them back. Her eyes glitter slightly, watching him finally. "I can't tell if you know me or not."

[Lukas] It's nearly a sigh, the in-out rush of his breath.

"I got you a book because I thought you'd like it," he confirms, "but I got you a gun because I hope you'll fight for survival. If it ever comes to that."

They look at each other now. She can't tell if he knows her or not. He makes a small sound, something like a scoff.

"I don't think I know you, Danička." Her leg has draped over his shoulder and he turns his face, he presses his lips to her ankle-bone, and then he lays his head back and looks at the ceiling. "But sometimes I feel like I do."

[Danicka] She reaches up idly and takes the hairband from the end of her braid, quickly wrapping it around her wrist, and starts gently combing the locks apart with her fingers while he lays there and kisses her ankle, looks at the ceiling. They haven't kissed, they haven't embraced, but they lie together on the couch as if they have not been away from each other for so long.

Danicka is quiet for a little while, unweaving her hair. Then she draws her legs away from him, scoots back on the couch cushions, and shifts her body weight forward, crawling over him, hair loose and wavy now as it falls over her right shoulder. She holds herself up over Lukas, her body carefully placed so that one knee is between his thighs, one on the cushion between the back of the couch and the outside of his leg, her hands pressed down on either side of his torso.

Neither of them, very likely, can forget how long it's been. If the flash of the sun off the water as he crossed a bridge made him think not of her hair or her eyes or her smile but the way he felt when he was losing himself inside of her. If the emptiness of her bed has made her ache and slide her hands down between her legs rather than call him and tell him she wants him. It occurred to her when he was still just a voice on the phone and she was not all the way through that bottle of wine that if he came over here she would try to get him to stay, if he stayed she would try to fuck him, and she told him to come over. And got drunk anyway.

"When?" she asks, her pelvis resting lightly against his, neither holding back nor grinding, just...existing.

[Lukas] She turns a slow half-somersault on the couch, drawing her legs back, crawling up his body. He closes his eyes as she's doing this, perhaps because the sight of it would arouse him; perhaps because he wants to, for no better reason than that he does.

Her hands bracket him; their legs are interwoven now. She asks him a single-worded question and his hands come to rest on her hips, through the denims of her cutoffs; trailer trash chic or something like it.

"Right now," he replies, quietly. "All the goddamn time."

[Danicka] If the shirt she's wearing was fitted to her torso, if it clung to her waist and so forth, it would gap away from the waistband of her shorts and leave a band of bare flesh open to his eyes, to his hands. He'd see the edges of her underwear, whatever it is she's wearing, but this isn't the case. Her shirt is loose, makes her look younger than she is even though the lines around her eyes and mouth suggest she's older than twenty-four, or is it twenty-five, she was always older than him but not by much...she's his sister's age, or close to it. But his sister looks older than she is, too.

This seems to be something most Kinfolk have in common, after a certain point. They have a wildness and savagery to them. They heal fast. In some ways they're stronger and faster and more vibrant than mortals, but then they get gray hairs earlier. They bear children younger. They grow old, they grow old because their lives demand so much of them, and Danicka is no exception. Danicka has never been an exception, not since childhood, not since infancy.

His hands feel loose denim; these could be jeans stolen from a guy in high school, for all he knows; they're old, they're loose, they're boxy and unfeminine in everything except the way they hang off her hips. "I have no idea who I am," she confesses loosely, after a moment, leaning her head down to kiss the side of his neck and whisper those words along his earlobe.

There's a pause, incredibly brief, and if she was thinking or considering her course of action during that pause it seems she did not need much time to decide her path. Danicka does not lift her mouth from his neck, or pull away after her admission; she keeps herself lowered close enough that her chest touches his through their shirts, however many layers there are between them. She rolls her hips once, hard, pressing between his legs, grinding against the juncture of his thigh to his torso, her tongue passing her lips to lick his throat.

[Lukas] There's something like surrender in the way he tilts his jaw just a little, just enough to accept her mouth at his

(throat.)

earlobe, and the side of his neck. He doesn't think twice about it; he doesn't worry about it, this man, this half-wolf that had savaged his own packmate in a heartbeat for daring to challenge him.

His eyes open a small ways when she says she doesn't know who she is; his eyelashes are dark, and they form a webwork of shadows across his field of vision, and he thinks to himself that he may have never heard truer words from her before, except of course he has.

Because she's said things like, you belong here.

And she's said things like, I am disgusted with you; I am angry at you.

And she's said things like, If I did proposition you, you wouldn't need to ask me that.

And the cuffs of her cut-offs are loose, as though stolen from someone with a larger frame than she; and the waistband of the cut-offs are loose too, because the pants are cut straight through the hips, men's jeans, and he has plenty of room to slide his fingers up under the cuffs, and plenty of room to reach his hand down the front of her jeans.

This is when she rolls her hips against him, and his eyes flicker shut again. When she lets up he pushes his hand under her panties and it's always like this, it always leads to this sooner or later, it always comes down to his hand or his mouth or his cock against her cunt, and his face turning to hers, his mouth pressing hard to her cheekbone and his raw whisper carrying past her ear.

"Oh, god."

The last consonant there is lost. He's found her mouth and he kisses her like he's drowning and she's air, or like he's mired in an ocean of desire and she's drowning him. There's a sound in his throat that, when he tears his mouth from hers, becomes words:

"Znáte jak moc jsem už chtěla vy?" It's his free hand on her face now, the thumb along her cheek and the palm against her jaw, pushing her back until she can see his eyes, stark blue, and read for herself his want; until he can see hers and read for himself whether or not what he was saying, any of what he was saying or doing, was registering past the screen of her drunkenness. "Znáte, Danička?"

[Danicka] Even when sober, Danicka is hardly a shy woman. As much of herself as she hides in general, from him and the world, she is incredibly open about her desire. So when Lukas slips his hands under her shorts and lets loose something like a helpless prayer at the feel of her, Danicka doesn't hesitate to squirm, doesn't hide the fact that she wants more. She's turning her head to his as he whispers to a god they both know isn't really there, seeks his lips and rocks slightly against his touch.

He has exposed her throat to her before, because of her hand gently petting the inside of his thigh or because her breath has moved like a humid island breeze across his earlobe, and time and again she has turned her back to him, or let him on top of her, or tilted her head back to get his mouth on the thin flesh covering her neck. There's submission in this, inherent and instinctive and unavoidable, but it seems that neither of them feel vulnerable in it, or naked, or afraid, or worst of all: weak.

Lukas has seen Danicka weep, knows that she runs from danger even when it is only perceived and not real, and he is aware that she is on her guard almost all of the time except like this, except when the walls fall down or when she is so drunk he doubts she'll remember this conversation, but somehow despite all that he knows she is not weak.

Not really.

Does she know, he asks. Danicka continues holding herself up, as though her weight would burden him. Her face is close to his, her eyes closed, her lips parted from kissing him, parted to breathe. He does not need to look in her eyes right now to see her longing; he can feel desire coating his fingers and feel the tension in her body as she presses their bodies together. His hand on her face makes her eyelids flicker but she doesn't open them. Maybe she's not able to.

"Ano," she gasps, and finally lets herself down to rest on his chest, but only so she can free one of her hands to start unfastening the belt and button and zipper of his jeans, slower than she has in the past, but in the past she has not downed a bottle of white wine before seeing him. Her eyes open briefly, find his, and words tumble out of her mouth, thoughtless, heedlesss, unembarrassed. "Ty by měly být více zpěv, když jsme kurva, Lukáš. Slyším vás snaží nesmí dělat hluk. Chci kurva, dokud si nemůže pomoct."

Her mouth is on his again, and her hand is slipping into his jeans, caressing him through his boxer-briefs, her tongue tasting of mint and her skin smelling of the soap he knows she uses, would know anywhere by now.

[Lukas] For all his unflinchingly honest eloquence elsewhere and elsewhen, Danicka is perfectly right to think he holds himself back deliberately and carefully when he's inside her. She's right that he doesn't say half of what's going through his mind in times like this, and he bites back all but the most soundless of exhales, all but the most unavoidable of gasps.

He doesn't tell her, for example, that he loves the look on her face when he first touches her, or when she's first bringing herself down on him. He loves how her eyes close and her lips open. He loves how her pleasure consumes her from the inside out: like fire licking through a house of cards.

What he doesn't know, of course, is that it's the same, the very same, when her hand finds him through his underclothes. His eyes shut and his brow smooths and it's something like rapture in his face, and then she's kissing him and he can only accept it, can only divide his attention between her hand on him and his hand on her, can only open his mouth to hers and let her tongue rove where it wants.

It's been nearly two fucking weeks, and they're alone in her apartment, and Milla Jovovich is still frozen onscreen, and Danicka is so wet, so wet, that his fingertips are slipping against one another and against her, and when he finds the entrance to her cunt and presses his fingers in she's hot and tight, and his thumb rediscovers its usual spot against her clit, and when he rubs her there he breaks the kiss and opens his eyes and watches her, fiercely, to watch the sensation spike through her.

As much as anything else, it's this he wants. The feel of her hands on his skin, certainly; the feel of her body taking him in, of course; but the converse of it, too: the way she looks when he pleasures her, and the way she feels when her flesh tightens involuntarily around him, and ...

"Stýskalo se mi po tobě," he tells her, tenderly and savagely at once, and this is not the same, not the same at all, as saying he has wanted her.

[Danicka] The closest Danicka has heard to a moan from this man is a groan he bit back the last time they were together, as he bowed his body over hers and took her from behind, the position and their union striking some primal chord in him that he could barely restrain. The closest she has heard to a snarl of pleasure is the way some of his words flirt with growling, undertones of viciousness that inflame rather than frighten her. She's telling him now, unequivocably and brazenly, that she wants to hear him. He'll take that as he will.

Lukas has no idea of how he looks when her hand slips warm and knowing under his jeans. The fact that she is not touching his skin is deliberate, a pointed choice to hold off for now, before it gets to be too much. Even drunk, Danicka has a surreal level of self-control. She has done horrible things before, dangerous and risky things, and she has always done them with full knowledge of what she's getting into. Drunk and high and god knows what else, she makes her bed and she lies in it without complaint.

Some time ago she got into bed with this man, decided to be loyal to him and decided that her want for him was worth self-denial. Just as Lukas has no idea what it does to her when an expression of bliss comes over his features in response to the way she touches him, he has no clue that to Danicka self-denial is a sort of death, and so she dies a little for his sake every time she is with him. She dies a little every time he leaves her, or she leaves him, and if not touching him when she's in the same room with him produces a very real physical ache, well...that makes sense, then.

She tastes him slowly, exploring his mouth with her tongue as though she has never kissed him before. His fingers are distracting as all fuck, but she goes on stroking him as well. The last time, when he was lying in her bed asking her where she was applying to go to college, he'd thought that it was the sort of question they'd be asking each other if they were teenagers finishing high school. Tonight, grinding and writhing on the couch together as though discovering one another's bodies for the first time, Danicka thinks the very same thing.

His fingers slip inside of her, his thumb teases her, and she moans into his mouth. The end of her outcry is voiced freely when he pulls back, and her eyes are glassy from want and from wine both, gazing drowsily down into his. She doesn't answer. Or else her hand, maneuvering to his waistband and underneath it and sliding finally over his skin, is answer enough.

Danicka is completely unaware by this point that there is a nine millimeter sitting on her coffee table and a book for her sitting in his car, completely unaware of everything but him: his tongue, his fingers, his cock, the way he breathes underneath her. "You are so hot," she pants, and kisses him again.

[Lukas] It is possible that no one has ever said that to Lukas before and meant it.

This is not something that one should pity him for. His self-worth is not measured by his physical attractiveness, and even if it were, there's a certain objective comfort with one's body that one gets from being able to move through more than one. He's looked in the mirror and seen that his bone structure is good, and his eyes are shocking, and if he bothers to wash his face and pull a comb through his hair and put on clothes other than those he bums around the Brotherhood in, he would pass any inspection.

He tries to take care of himself. He tries to make a good first impression. He tries to be tough and agile, a good thinker even under pressure. He tries to be a good Garou, a good Ahroun, a good son of Thunder.

However: hot. That is not a standard he strives to live up to. And the women that have told him this before, or something like it, have all been under the influence of one thing or another, some dread mingling of primal lust and primal fear, some moth's attraction for the flame, and the things they say to him are things they say to protect themselves, to try to make the sex something they can understand, to reduce it to a matter of hot and want and one night stand and too much to drink.

He did not believe them any more than he thought he might care for them.

But when Danicka says it -- and really, it's such a small thing, and not even an important thing -- when she says it, nonetheless, he finds he believes her. He finds it impossible to do anything but believe her when she puts her hand on him, when she puts her hand under that last layer of stretchy soft cotton and closes her fingers over him. He exhales all in a rush into her mouth, and then his free hand comes off her face and he's wresting her pants open, pulling at the button and the zipper with far less finesse than even her drunk-assed self can manage, and all the while his right hand stays right where it is, stroking her, and when her fly finally comes undone he looks down to push her cut-offs down as far as he can reach, which is about to mid-thigh, and no, he's not willing to stand her up so she can get them off properly; he's not willing to take his hands off her, or his fingers out of her.

"Turn around," he murmurs -- his lips move against her skin, the line of her jaw, and when she does his fingers slip out of her after all, but not very far, and now it's his fingertips pressed against her, and they're slick and hot and wet as she is, but their rhythm isn't so practiced or so insistent because his attention is divided. He's arching his hips beneath her, and it's not to press himself against her, it's actually to retrieve his wallet, but of course he does press himself against her and then he can't help but rub himself against her through his underpants and hers, even while he's flipping his wallet open onehanded (and his creditcards are falling out onto the couch) and getting a condom out, and there's only one in there because unlike someone whose name shall not be mentioned, Lukas isn't so eternally hopeful as to carry half a dozen.

He tears the packet open with his teeth. She's done a fine job with the fastening of his jeans, and he's freeing himself from his boxer briefs, and it's a feat of dexterity to do all this and to get the condom on besides, onehanded, and with his left hand at that. Then he's pushing her panties down and pulling her shirt up, reaching up under her shirt to cover her breasts with his hands before he reaches between them again to take ahold of himself. Their clothes aren't even off, aren't even totally undone, when he guides his cock into her the first time.

For the first time.
In eleven fucking days.

And -- it's mindbending. And he's just lost in the feel of her; it's off the fucking charts. He does not moan in her ear, though perhaps she's right, also, in that he wants to; he does not because he cannot, no more than she can easily tell the truth, because they are who they are. He closes his eyes, though, and he wraps his arms around her from behind, and he bends his head around hers and kisses her neck, her cheek, and somehow this reminds him of the night at the W, in the bathtub; the way they'd fit together then.

He begins to touch her again, then, and touching her, begins to fuck her. They know the meaning of slow, it seems, but not quite the meaning of gently; at least not the first time in the night, the first time in eleven(fucking)days, and the way he moves into her now is as slow and deliberate and hard as waves coming in to shore, and it makes him pant on every stroke, and it makes his free hand splay over her stomach, her chest and her belly, as though he couldn't get enough of the feel of her. Which is, in the end, the truth.

[Danicka] On full moons, or on nights like tonight when the semi-supernatural satellite is barely even visible, or on nights when she has been angry with him, or on nights when she has missed him so badly she can't make herself stop saying it, Danicka has never needed or wanted a hard drink to make fucking Lukas tolerable for her. The fact that she is, in fact, drunk this evening has nothing to do with the way she comes at him, climbing over him on the couch and moving her hands immediately to his waistband without caressing his arms or chest or thighs first. The fact that it has been eleven days since she's seen him or heard his voice, much less had him inside her...that most certainly has something to do with it.

Her hand is slender-fingered and soft on his cock, her left still holding her up over him while he kisses her, while he tears at her clothes to shove her cutoffs out of the way. Danicka does not instantly turn around when he says this. She bows her head to lick his neck again, a shift of her hips and a slide of her body on top of Lukas pushing her shorts down to her knees, at least.

Frankly, he's not making this easy on her. Telling her to turn around and then arching his body like that, playing with her under her still-on underwear, all while trying to get his condom on. There's a lot going on, and all at once, and he seems to expect her to turn around on top of his body and wait. Just turning over would take her a fraction of the time it takes him to do all this. So Danicka doesn't.

As his fingers slip out of her she grinds down against his thigh, biting his neck. Her hands are pulling at his jeans and at his underwear, yanking them down his thighs once they're past his hips. They are essentially savaging each other, a tangle of hands and legs and clothes, and when Danicka does turn around and he shoves her panties out of the way her bare ass slides against him, his hands slide over her breasts -- they're bare, and not surprisingly -- and then he slides into her.

It's fast. It's sort of rough. Danicka reaches back one hand and buries her fingers in his hair, grabs a hold of a fistful of it and groans deep her throat as she arches against him. "Zmrde zkurvenej," she snarls, while he is stubbornly silent, and she is fucking hating him for it now, not thinking about the bathtub at the W but ...

...well, she's not thinking at all. She's fucking him, her shirt half up and her shorts shoved down and her teeth bared, her eyes closed. "We're going to fall off the goddamn couch, you asshole," she mutters, but she doesn't stop.

[Lukas] "Shut up and fuck me," and this is nearly a snarl back, only misses being a snarl because it's so low, and quiet, and there's a catch in the middle of it where he can't quite keep ahold of his breath, and the end of it is muffled too because his mouth is against the nape of her neck, the side of her neck where her neck meets her shoulders and

when she rolls her hips just like that it's like a bullet in his brain, snapping his head back against her grip of her fingers, against the couch cushion, and no, he doesn't fucking care if they end up falling off the goddamn couch. There's a sharp panting gasp out, and then he redoubles his efforts, picks up the pace, fucks her harder now, plays with her with his hand between her legs, clutches at her with his hand on her torso, dragging heavy over her body, and he says it again, and it's not a snarl this time but a tattered whisper,

"Just shut up and fuck me, Danička, nelze vidíte, jak moc chci, aby jsi?"

and they can be tender, and they can be playful, and sometimes you might almost suspect them of genuinely liking one another, genuinely enjoying one another's company, but this fuck is like a war, and they fuck each other like they hate each other for wanting each other for not hating each other at all, and

all his thoughts are running together, and he grabs her shirt suddenly and he's tearing it up over her arms and over her head, whipping it off to toss it to the floor, and pushing at her shorts until she figures out what he wants and kicks them off herself, and then he's lifting her up to straddle him, to ride him like a motherfucking pony, and her back is beautiful, so slender and lean, and it's been so long, eleven days, and sometimes it feels like it's been longer than that; sometimes it feels like

(he's always known her)

and he's been waiting to fuck her for all his goddamn life. And he's holding her by the hips now as she rolls her hips and grinds against him, holding her by the hips while she fucks him with her golden hair spilling down her back and a wall of windows off to their left, the fifth element kicking alien ass to their right, and none of this matters at all.

[Danicka] The first time he tells her to shut up and fuck him, Danicka lets it go. She grips his hair harder, squirms on top of him in a way that makes him jerk his head back and gasp. Danicka doesn't moan when he touches her, when he thrusts faster, but she bites her lower lip so hard that a lance of pain goes through her as surely as the pleasure of everything else. Maybe if he had sounded like that the second time it would have been all right, if he had growled it, if he hadn't half-gasped it against the back of her neck and the curve of her ear, asking her --

Yes. It's like a war, and that would be okay. Because she does hate him when she wants him this badly, and she hates him for existing, for bringing her a goddamn firearm and for wanting her this much. She closes her eyes against the ceiling, which is spinning, closes them tightly, and then he yanks her shirt off. Which is okay, it is. She does figure out what he wants, and kicks off her shorts but she's shaking now, and not with pleasure, and her hand is not tightening savagely in his hair but loosening, letting go so he can get her clothes off.

He lifts her up, she parts her legs freely, and she grabs a hold of the back of the couch with one hand and reaches between her legs to touch herself with her other, and then she stops fucking him. Oh, Danicka is still moving, still rolling her hips and riding him, and by god she's good at this, she was made for this, may as well have been made for him, the way she looks and feels, and when she swivels her hips in a slow grinding circle he's going to see god. And then she's going to do it again, as though she's trying to kill him, utterly naked to his mostly-clothed. He can hear her breathing, heavy and fast, but she's making no other sounds, and she's not fucking him.

She's fucking, though.

[Lukas] The first time she swings her hips like that he gasps behind her, raggedly, as though someone had reached into him and torn something loose, something vital. Only, that can't be it because -- although she's never seen it -- he's had plenty of vital things torn loose before, visceral organs, muscle belts, and he doesn't gasp like this, in shock and something like pain; he just fights back, harder.

He got her a gun because he wants her to go down fighting. He's a fucking Ahroun; of course he wants her to go down fighting. He cannot understand anything but going down fighting, and it's true what they say, that what does not kill you makes you stronger, and there's been plenty of shit thrown at him that's tried to kill him.

So far they've failed.

So far he hasn't ever lost a fight, not a single one. That's not a boast. That's the truth for an Ahroun. The first fight they lose is inevitably the last.

And -- and she does it again, and his mind fractures like cheap glass, and the silence in the room is deafening, just the sussurant rush of their breathing, just the creak of something in the couch, the softer sound of cushions compressing, his clothes moving when she moves on him, and now he's sitting up, and she's not stopping, and he's shifting his balance to arch his hips against her and then swing his left leg under him, the knee to the couch cushions; to extend his right leg, foot to the floor, and now they're both upright and she's moving back against him and she'd be on all fours on the couch, her hands braced on the back or the far arm, except he wraps his arms around her and pulls her back against him, and when he kisses her neck he's nearly tearing at her.

"What the fuck, Danička," and he can't even find the presence of mind to put a lilt on the question. It's just a huff of a breath, breathless, his teeth scrape her shoulder, his hand smooths back over her brow and the crown of her head, pushes her hair back and he kisses her temple, and it's

incomprehensible, really, how swiftly this has changed, and she's distanced herself, but her body keeps moving, and he keeps fucking her and she keeps fucking, period, as though she's trying to kill him; as though she were made for him, but holding a part of herself back, and inviolate, and it's

maddening, that she can shut herself off like this when he can't close himself up now if he tried; that it only makes him want her more -- but no, that's not quite it. It makes him want more of her, because he's not a goddamn fool, and he's seen what it can be, and he can see what this is, and it's:

just a fuck.

[Danicka] What she doesn't know -- and he will probably never admit aloud -- is that one more reason (excuse) for his holding himself back from her for so long at the beginning was that he saw what one night with her did to Sam. And granted, they both know that what Sam went through was just as much if not more his own fault than hers, that she did not somehow steal his soul like a succubus or sap his will like a siren, but still. Still. It is not difficult to imagine her ruining a man, wrecking his spirit, tearing him down on the inside, shattering walls he didn't know he had built up to keep himself safe.

Because...because when they are together, at least, it feels like there are no walls between them, and she's completely with him. Even the first time, the first night, from the first kiss, there was nothing there until she got up from the bed to leave him. Even when he wasn't inside of her there was nothing there. He held her from behind and kept her warm, she whispered softly to him and it was as though they were old lovers, lifelong lovers, and it was...it was the first goddamned time.

It took her mother over forty years to lose a fight.

Her father is sixty-seven and nothing's killed him yet.

As far as Danicka is concerned it is impossible for her brother to die.

But she's so easily broken, so breakable, and fragile if not frail, and neither weak nor willfull but consistently unsteady. She does not know who she is, she does not know what she wants beyond the moment. When she does know what she wants, though, he's seen it and felt it: she goes after it like a demon. He's never had to doubt that she wants him, because the difference is so stark. He may not have ever realized it, may not even be able to see it now, but there is a world of difference between what Danicka wants and what Danicka allows.

When he moves and moves her, holding her from behind, her lack of resistance is more like the way she goes limp when he has grabbed her wrist. What he's doing isn't abusive, not at all, and in fact when he wraps his arms around her it's almost tender. She loses some of her leverage, neither riding him now nor able to hold into the arm of the couch in front of her. They're incredibly close in this position, the third in what seems as many minutes.

He touches her hair and her brow and cannot keep his mouth off of her. She tilts her head towards the kiss like a tree bending in the wind. It's never been like this before. He tried to make it just a fuck once and couldn't, and she couldn't then either. Now for some reason she can, and she does, and he may as well be fucking some girl in a club who looked into his eyes at the wrong moment. He may as well be fucking a dream. Or a doll.

[Lukas] It would be nice to say that Lukas is no longer attracted to Danicka when she's not being Danicka; when she's just being a dream, or a doll, or a nameless girl in a club whose features were blurred by makeup and lights. It would be nice to say that he loses all interest, loses his erection, gets bored. It would be nice to say everything between them is meaningful, that it's the connection that counts, that without that connection, he wouldn't want her at all.

It would be nice if that were the truth, but it's not. The truth is, he's just as hot for her cunt now as he was when this started, and even when she stops moaning, even when she stops

(making love to him)

fucking him, even when she becomes empty, a shell of herself, he still wants her. The swing of her hips still makes his head spin. The clench of her cunt still makes him open his mouth to her skin as though to groan against her flesh, but of course he doesn't, and it's only his teeth scraping her shoulder, and he can't stop fucking her, he can't help but fuck her like

(this might be the last time)

he's been waiting for this all week, or all year, or all his life. He can't stop wanting her any more than he can stop fucking her until, of course, he does.

And it's a slowing at first. And then it's a stop. And he's still inside her, and his chest is heaving against her back, and he's sweating like a racehorse, and his arms are wrapped around her like maybe somehow skin contact could make up for the rest of it, everything that was missing now, and he pants against her shoulder for endless moments until she might begin to think that he's actually found his pleasure, that he's actually managed to come without her noticing at all.

But it's not that. It's not anything close to that. He gasps when he draws out of her, and lets her go, and he's as hard as he ever was, his cock curving up and against his stomach when he drops heavily down on the couch and leans his head back and closes his eyes, and he takes himself in hand, squeezes as if to choke the arousal from his body.

"Co se tento?" The words are unsteady. He's fucking unsteady. He's amazed all over again that he's speaking in complete sentences when all that's in his head is what, what the fuck, what. "Co jsem udělal špatně? Co ode mne chcete, Danička?"

[Danicka] Lukas still wants her, wants more of her and even if that's all he knows for certain he wants, that's enough for right now. And what he wants is at least half there: the girl is pressed back against his body, he is as deep inside of her as he can be, and her breasts are as full and her smell is as rich. Then, even though the truth is that he wants to fuck her until he can't move anymore, Lukas slows down the flexing of his hips, then stops, holding her against him still but holding, essentially, nothing.

For her part, Danicka slows down when he slows down, stops when he stops, lets him hold her and does not think for a moment that he has had an orgasm. She'd know. She's know because she knows him...or it feels like she knows him. (Right now. All the goddamn time.) She listens to him panting, her own breathing quickened from exertion but no longer from arousal. She waits for him, turning her head slightly to look at him over her shoulder, out of the corner of her eyes, then breathes in sharply and turns her head away again when he pulls out.

Danicka feels cold in the places where his chest and thighs and his arms were. She leans forward, braces herself, then slowly turns around again, turns to look at him, hearing and seeing and just knowing how unstable he is right now. If it were a full moon she'd be terrified right now. Even when it's not a full moon she's not sure she isn't afraid. She catches her breath more easily than he does, and she wishes she had a fucking answer for what she wants from him.

"Promiňte," she says finally, and starts to slide off the couch, standing on unsteady legs, refusing to meet his eyes as she speaks: "Chci tě. But I can't drž hubu a kurva. I can't...just...fuck you..."

Her hands are up, their heels rubbing on her temples as she shakes her head, starting to walk away, and this would be insane if she were sober, it's barely any more understandable when she's drunk, walking not to the hall but to the middle of the living room like she doesn't quite know where she wants to go, just...that way.

"Odpusť mi," she mutters. "Já jsem to velmi líto."

[Lukas] I can't just fuck you, she says, and if his eyes were still open he would've closed them now, squeezed them shut as though to block out sight of the world would block out the sound of the truth.

I can't just fuck you, she says, and he thinks: I've never been able to just fuck you.

He raises his hands to his face too, presses the heels of his hands against his cheekbones, and then against his brow. And then she's walking away and he's dropping his hands to his lap, and his head is still back against the couch, and he looks tired, and weary, and he's wincing like he's injured, only his injuries are long healed.

"Danička..."

And it's just her name for a while, a verbal form of her walking away but not to her room, a verbal form of starting something without knowing how to end it.

"Danička, prosím, nejsou jít. Prosím."

And he's looking down now, tucking himself away, hissing a breath through his teeth as he's zipping himself up. When he's finished Lukas stands up. He hasn't had a drop to drink but he's only a little steadier than her, and whether she's coming back or not he's following her to the center of the room, or wherever she is now.

[Danicka] Most of the buildings around Kingsbury Plaza are not residential. Their windows are dark, for the most part, the offices empty, the workers gone home. Danicka and Martin never installed huge eight-foot curtains to shield their living room from view. She wanders in the vast space that is almost entirely bereft of furniture, what with the couch and coffee table sequestered off to one side, naked and pale and disheveled. There are no eyes in those empty offices to peer out and see her through the glass, her skin pristine where so very, very many Kin are scarred, her flesh and hair picking up whatever lights the city has to throw at her, like she's the blank canvas he once told her he did not want her to be.

She wouldn't care if there were eyes to watch her. She certainly doesn't care if he is watching her, she knows he's watching her, and it doesn't make her stop. She doesn't go anywhere, doesn't retreat to her bedroom or even the kitchen to hide from him. Given what he said about not knowing how to read a closed door she can't imagine how hard this is for him to read, her wandering aimlessly, turning a small circle, going nowhere. She does not know what she wants, she does not know who she is, she does not know --

-- oh, but she does.

Danicka stands with her left side towards the windows, her head bowed, rubbing her brow with the heels of her hands. She just shakes her head.

[Lukas] Lukas does not wander aimlessly. He has a very definite aim, and it's her, and he follows her to where she is, and then --

And then he's lost. His hand comes up once, twice, abortively; he can't seem to decide whether to touch her or no. In the end he doesn't. His hands returns to his side and he curls his fingers in, and it's a fist, but not a threatening one, though she might not be able to read the difference.

"I shouldn't have said that," he says, low. "I didn't -- mean it that way. I just -- "

He takes a breath; it's huge, deep, and it raises and drops his chest like a bellows at a forge. He's mining the thoughts out of his bones, beating them into words, and his blood is still racing, and he can hardly think.

"I just didn't want you to ask me to let go any more than I already have, again. I wouldn't be able to -- bear it, Danička."

The asking. The letting go. Both. He doesn't clarify; he turns his face toward the glass, and the lights of the city are dim on his face, and he looks out at the spectacular view behind her floor to ceiling windows and he realizes he misses the wind, the smell of the city, the life behind these glass walls.

He turns back to her.

"Danička," it's just her name again, a single word, a sort of supplication, and then he knows where he's going with it again, "láska, promiňte."

[Danicka] Lukas comes straight towards her, does not touch her, and in the end it doesn't matter that he doesn't. Once upon a time she might have taken a half-step back. They're out of balance, here. She's smaller and paler and upset and slipping in and out of her two closest languages because her heart is beating so fast in her chest it's making her sick. He's tall and half-clothed and aching, not only from restraint and frustrated desire but the longing for the reality that exists outside of the homes humans have built for themselves.

This is not natural. And she knows it, too. The windows at her house were open most of the time when she was a child. The windows in her bedroom cannot be left open because it's so cold, still. But soon. The light that her bedroom is filled with that he found so familiar will be joined with fresh air, or as fresh as it gets when they are in the middle of Chicago.

That is, however, beside the point. The point is that he does not come right out and apologize but he tells her that he shouldn't have, and her hands drop. He tries to explain, tries to breathe, and despite the fact that she is bare and he is covered and she is small and he is comparatively enormous and despite the fact that this is her territory but everything that is her and hers is in some way his because he claimed her, fought for her, earned the right to her which somehow makes a difference but not to her because she doesn't even know...

Despite all of it he's vulnerable when he says this, when he says her name, when he calls her --

Danicka lets out a ragged breath at that word again, closing her eyes and gasping: "Bože, chci ti moc," like it hurts, when she steps forward and wraps her arms around him and buries her face in his chest.

[Lukas] It's been said, time and again, that he can hardly think. That, interrupted mid-fuck like that, he can barely string two thoughts together when she's standing stark naked in her living room, wandering in her aimless, meaningless little circles; that his heart is hammering, that he's trying to catch back his breath, his thoughts, his reserve, his control.

It's been said, but she has no proof of it beyond that he winced to do up his pants again, and that he drew a huge breath in the middle of his sentence, and --

-- and that when she suddenly wraps her arms around him and presses her face to his chest, his heart is racing against her brow. There's a slick of sweat on his back. He draws a breath so sharp and sudden that his chest convexes upward with it. She can feel the shape and hardness of him through his jeans, against her belly.

For all that, there's something like hesitation in the way his arms come around her. Slowly, his hands slide over her shoulderblades; gently, he presses her against him, and then all at once it's not hesitant anymore, nor gentle, but fierce, and his back bows under her hands as he bends to her and crushes her into him.

He doesn't close his eyes this time. He looks at the far wall over the corona of her hair. He looks out the window. He stares without properly seeing, and if she could see his expression now, he would look confused, or bewildered, adrift and caught in some undertow he can barely understand, much less escape.

[Danicka] What is this? he'd wanted to know, and she'd had no way to answer him. What did he do wrong, what does she want from him?

Him.

She hates that she wants this, can't decide if she hates him or hates herself or just hates this feeling, overwhelming and far-reaching as it is, gut-wrenching as it is. Danicka feels him in her arms, against her cheek. Her lips seek out his pulse without meaning to or intending to do so, her face turning towards his skin as naturally as...well it's been mentioned. They don't seem to think about seeking each other out. They turn towards each other like plants seeking sunlight. She kisses his chest and he catches her up against him, pulls her closer as though one of these days he'll be able to make her a part of him.

He has to move inside of her when it's over, sometimes, just to remind himself that they are in fact not one being, one body, however much it may seem so in the moment.

It passes. The moment of truth passes and she escapes it without giving that truth, the one that has her stumbling through the living room, unable to explain to him what the hell was going on. And he'd known anyway. Which is worse. She holds him for a moment, gasps for a breath against his chest, and then tilts her pelvis forward and rubs against the front of him, shameless. And encouraging. And inviting. She unfastens his jeans before he has a chance to react, but this time moves slowly, turns her head down to watch her hands move.

His jeans are pushed off of his hips, then the boxer briefs, the half-used condom peeled off and tossed aside, it doesn't really matter to her, and it doesn't matter to her if it's disgusting or not. She kisses his chest again, and pushes downward on his hips. "Lay down."

There. On the floor.

[Lukas] And then he does close his eyes. She rubs against him, shamelessly, and he has to close his eyes, the same way he has to throw back his head when she first takes him inside her, the same way he has to hold her to him, and against him, and all around him, when he comes inside her.

It's a necessity, you see. As incontrovertible and unavoidable as breathing; as heartbeat.

He's watching her, she's watching her hands move, he's watching her hands move too and his hands are tracing her arms to her elbows, and he's not stopping her, or trying to help her, or doing anything at all except watching, and when she gets his jeans down and then his shorts he's exhaling a sharp breath through parted teeth, and when she peels the half-used condom off his stomach draws in so fast it goes concave.

She doesn't have to ask twice. He steps back just far enough to kick his pants off, his socks, and then he drops down on the ground and lies back, and even in this light his eyes are agleam, they're nearly incandescent with want, and he just watches her, just waits to see what the fuck she's going to do next.

[Danicka] They should have known when he snapped that if he didn't break someone's face or come inside of her in ten minutes he was going to lose his fucking mind. They should have known when she touched his hair and told him she was there. This was weeks before she told him that he belonged right where he was, buried inside of her body and holding himself over her, holding her to him, gasping for air, thinking but not voicing his agreement. This was weeks before tonight, with her telling him she can't just shut up and fuck him, she can't just fuck him anymore, at all, and yet it's never been 'just' anything.

Danicka watches him when he moves back, undressing completely, his clothes going into a small pile off to the side, gone. They have huge rectangles of light against the pale carpet, and despite the openness of the floorplan and the enormity of the windows they have an incomprehensible amount of privacy. At any moment his pack could call to him in his thoughts. At any moment one of them could track him down and simply pop into the room, into her home, without hesitation. She is his Kin, and so in a way she is Kin to the Circle, and so she could arguably be theirs --

-- but she isn't.

She slides her hand over his torso as soon as he's on the floor, going to her knees beside him. She touches his scar for the first time, not to pass it by but actually, if silently, acknowledging it. And accepting it. Danicka leans forward, and kissing him, swings her right leg over his waist and slips her right hand between them, taking hold of him. Slowly this time, inch by sliding inch, and not because they forgot, not because she insisted that it was okay, not because it's a full moon and she almost died.

Because...well she doesn't have to say why. He doesn't ask, and she's spared, and now he's inside of her again and it's unlikely he will ask. Danicka doesn't close her eyes or lean her head back. She watches him, slowly lowering herself onto his cock, her hands running over his chest, watching his eyes. And then his face, as he throws his head back, as his hands fall...wherever they belong.

[Lukas] Lukas is an intelligent creature, and reasonably sharp, reasonably perceptive; but for all this he cannot be called sensitive in any sense of the word. Not emotionally. Not physically. Yet right now, at this moment, his senses are wide open: honed to razor's edges the way they are on a full moon.

She goes to her knees beside him and he swears he can feel every molecule of air tumbling out of her way, sliding over his skin. She traces his scar and his flesh jumps under her hand. She kisses him and he lifts his head to meet it, his mouth opening to hers, and the texture and feel of her mouth, her tongue, is as stark and clear as a brand in his mind.

When her hair tumbles down over his face he swears he can feel every strand. When she takes him in her hand and lowers herself on him he swears the top of his head is caving in, and it's just her and him, and there's nothing between, and it's not because they've forgotten, and it's not because she says it's all right or the moon is full or ...

Lukas doesn't stop her this time. He doesn't stop himself. He doesn't tell her he's forgotten, or ask if it's what she wants, because he knows the answer and because he can't think enough to speak, though if he could he would tell her

i know
i know
i understand

without ever being able to frame what exactly it is he knows, or understands, or perceives.

His skin shudders and tightens under her touch, his nipples drawing taut, and there's a sensitive spot on his left side, on his ribs, that might make him laugh if tickled there, but she's not tickling him, she's sweeping her palms over his body as though she were blind and he were braille, and when she brushes that spot it makes his obliques jerk under her fingers; it makes his breath shudder.

He watches her all through this. They watch each other through the breathing darkness. He watches her lowering herself, the spread of her thighs and the shifting belts of slender muscle there as she controls her descent, takes him inside so slowly, so very slowly, until he can't watch that anymore and then he watches her face, he watches her eyes and knows that she can see the want in his, the pleasure in him, the way he's burning up from the inside out like a fire in a house of cards, and then when her body comes down on his and she's finally taken all of him into her his head falls back, and his bared neck is tight with strain.

He can't even touch her right now. His hand pulls at the short pile of the carpeting; his other hand opens over his brow, grips his temples and shades his eyes for a moment as though to physically block the sight of her out, and he's breathing silently and swiftly, and he's struggling for control when he can barely find the reins, the chains, the locks and the keys.

But her hands are still moving over him, and one is tracing the midline of his body down toward his navel, and of its own accord his hand lets go the carpet and takes hers instead, grips the way drowning men grip ropes, and his other hand joins the first and he's opening his eyes again; he's found whatever anchor it is he needs and he pulls her hand to his mouth, he kisses her palm and her fingers, and his hands are sweeping down her sides to her thighs and up again, are coming to a rest at her hipbones.

"Prosím," he says, the way he'd said please don't leave, but this is different, it's completely different, "Danička, prosím."

[Danicka] When her hand passes over his torso, touches his ribs, traces a scar that's been there since before the first time she saw him with his shirt off and so may as well have been there since the dawn of time, there's decisive and definitive acceptance in the way Danicka's fingers move on him, the way her eyes lock on his. It's very simple, and yet overpowering in its enormity: he is going to die. Eleven years ago the War was not as brutal as it is now, has only been getting worse year by year, moon by moon, and the chances that he will live to be as long as Night Warder are...incredibly slim.

Truthfully, the imminence of his mortality has never been much of an obstacle for Danicka when it comes to getting attached to him, and she has been attached to him since the first time -- the true first time -- she met him. Always gave you whatever you wanted, isn't that how his sister had put it? It was reasonably true. Maybe at one time it was just an older child to a younger child, the host family to the guests, but there was and is and has always been a protective element to Danicka. If there is an Alpha Female lurking in those earthy eyes of hers, she is expressed in this way: her hand through his hair, her lips on his brow, her voice in his ear assuring him that it's okay, it's okay, she's there, he belongs here.

What has stood, and continues to stand, in her way is not the fact that he might die and she'll be sad. Everything dies. Nothing is forever. She's said this, flatly and bluntly and simply. She could die even easier than he could, and no one hears her waxing poetic about that. Why should she mourn the inevitable, when the inevitable is not specific to one person, or one attachment, or one part of her life? Everything fucking dies. Everything ends. Nothing lasts.

But her hand over his body, caressing his scar as a visible part of him and a sign of what he is, is still significant. If he had harbored any thought of this being between them, unspoken and unspeakable, it should be gone now. It's okay. It's Danicka. It's okay. They are what they are, which is mortal, though in their own ways they are each closer to it than the average man or woman working out some communicative kink in an unwieldy and uncertain 'relationship', they are closer to their own deaths than the average male or female incapable or unwilling to wait to get to a real bed in order to have each other.

Danicka might be able to wait. She chooses not to. This may not be worth thinking about.

She touches him gently as she moves down onto him, watches him, feeling the tremors of tension and longing in his thighs and his abdomen and his arms. She feels him inside of her then and opens her mouth but no sound comes out, not this time because she has shut herself down and shut him out but because there is simply nothing she could say or cry out that would tell him how this feels.

It's stupid. She could tell him: I haven't used one form of birth control since I was nineteen, you ass, or she could have told him that until that night at the Affinia. She could tell him that she doesn't fucking know him, he has no assurance that she isn't sick, that this is not a good habit to get into, that there are literally dozens of reasons for them to halt where they are, go to her room, and open up that nice drawer on her nightstand full of condoms instead of simply laying down in the middle of the living room the way they doo.

Instead, Danicka gasps out a breath and simply rests on him for a few seconds, as his hands struggle at the carpeting, cover his eyes, as he fights for the discipline that in so many areas of his life comes so very, very easily to him. He does not have to get angry to lash out, he does not have to raise his voice to be heard, he doesn't have to be tickled to laugh but when he is with her -- oh when he is with her -- he cannot close up and he cannot hide from her what this is doing to him. And it isn't fair at all that she can, if she wants, that she can withdraw so far into herself that it seems he can't get to her unless she chooses to let him in.

Still, she lets him in. Over and over and over, after sex and before, meeting his eyes or looking away, she lets him in, and now with striking and vivid clarity he knows the goddamned difference. He knows that he can tell when she has gone away from him, and how very far she can go, and how deeply different it is from the way she is when she allows him close. Close as this.

Danicka leans forward slowly after her hips start to rise on him, lets his hand wrap around hers. Her palm feels his breath against it, her skin feels his hands stroking her slowly, carefully, with restraint.

"Let go," she breathes out, and slides back down on him, watches him as he pleads with her, not saying what it is he wants. Maybe just for her to move. She moves, her hips rolling, her body rocking in rhythm to his, finding his heartbeat and building up to match it. Everything about her searches out something in him, and upon finding it, twines with it. She lays down on him, rests her cheek alongside his, whispers in his ear.

"Let go, moje láska."

[Lukas] There are certain things Danicka does not have to explain to Lukas for him to realize their significance.

There was the way she'd kissed him that first night, the way her brow had furrowed as if it hurt her somewhere deep inside to be kissing him like that, and even when he didn't know she didn't kiss either, even then, he could not have mistaken those kisses for the mindless, automatic liplocks of a girl going through the motions so the guy she's fucking won't be put off by her non-investment in it all.

There was the way she'd looked at him in the Affinia when she was kneeling on the bed taking off her bra, and they'd looked at the moon, and then they'd looked at each other. There was the way she lay back on the bed and opened her legs.

And then there's tonight. There's the way she shut down, showed him just how mindless and automatic and uninvested she could be, showed him how she could fuck without fucking him and, perversely, still be so fucking good at it; showed him that if she had never shown him how she could open up in the first place, he would've never even guessed that she was closed down at all.

And then there's this.

And even if she hadn't said a thing, had simply pushed him down and climbed on top and took him inside her without anything, any barrier between, he would've known it meant something, it wasn't just whim or caprice, it meant something, even if he couldn't express what.

He would have known. And knowing hurts too -- it fractures something in him -- and when she does speak, when she says let go that first time just like he was afraid she would if he didn't tell her to just please, please, shut up and fuck him and don't say anything --

When she says let go that first time he gasps a breath out because she's riding down on him again and he can't stop himself from flexing up against her and even so, even then, he tells her,

"I can't," in a tone that says exactly that: I can't. "I'm afraid of what -- " and there are ragged breaks here, " -- I'll do to you. I'm afraid I'll hurt you. God. -- " because she's building the rhythm, because she's rolling her hips and bearing down on him, and all the same he's trying to talk, he's trying to tell her why he can't just let go the way she keeps asking him to, and it's not just that he's afraid for her, just like it was never totally about Sam, because there's a core of cowardice and selfishness in him after all, and the truth is:

"I'm afraid of what you'll do to me."

And even if she hasn't stopped by then -- if she still leans down to him (and his hands spread over her body as she comes down, then wraps around, then opens over her shoulderblades and holds her against him, and all this is thoughtless, nearly involuntary), if she still says what she says,

moje láska,

even if she hasn't stopped by then, he stops. Not the way he had at the couch, slowing and then gradually ceasing. Not like that. Altogether, at once, as though thunderstruck: as though someone had lanced through the life-preserving nerve bundles at the base of the skull and simply ended him.

If it weren't for his chest rising and falling, his breath rushing past her ear, his heart hammering from chest to groin to neck, she might've thought him turned to stone. He holds himself motionless, and holds her motionless, and his thoughts are running swift as cheetahs, but they're running in circles, and not a single one manages any coherence at all.

Seconds of stillness. They roll out, like waves to the horizon.

In the end this is all he manages:

"Co to říkáš?"

[Danicka] Tonight, just a few feet away on the couch, Danicka had indeed shown Lukas how far into herself she could retreat without having to get up and leave, without saying so much as a word, but it wasn't intentional. It wasn't done so that he would feel regret, or so that he would see just how untouchable she can become even when he's inside her. That wasn't it, at all.

In a way, at that moment, that's what she thought he wanted.

And that's why she got up when he separated their bodies, that's why she could not stay on the cushions touching him or even stay on the couch where he could reach her, that's why she had to get up and walk away. It was bewildering, would have been confusing even while sober, to compare the sting of thinking he wanted her like that, empty and ...blank... to the hurt of realizing that no. No, he doesn't.

They can have so much trouble talking to one another when it's just words. It was difficult even the morning after he stayed here before. It isn't that they don't understand one another, ultimately. As challenging as a simple conversation can be, what seems to be the problem is how far each one of them recoils when they realize that they are being seen through, that after only two months they know anything about one another, that they often understand even without context or intent.

It's terrifying.

Lukas knows without a word from her lips that it means something that Danicka is fucking him again now with nothing but flesh against flesh, with nothing inside of her but his cock and nothing on him but her cunt, just as it meant something up against the door of the Affinia. She knows what this is going to do to him, what all of this is doing to him, and though it may be cruel of her to go on there's only mercy in her eyes...mercy and lust, and something even more potent.

She lifts her hips off of him and slowly slides back down again, letting out a heady sigh as he meets her, feeling that thrust throughout her entire body. She doesn't stop, even as he struggles to get words out of his mouth, somehow managing sensible sentences, somehow managing English, as though he can think more clearly when he's joined with her than when he's denied her, and all the while she's looking at his eyes, which is just as relentless and yet tender as the way she's riding him.

Her hand smooths to his cheek. This, too, is something like a blessing and a wound at once.

Danicka gasps, not because of the way he speaks or something he says but because of the way he feels in her, the way his hands move over her as she lowers herself to him, aching for the closeness as much as the eroticism inherent in the way they come together. It's always like this, savage and sweet at once, hungry and gentle, ruthless and reaching...even if neither of them could say with any honesty if they know what the hell it is they're reaching for.

Yet at the moment, touching his face and moving into his arms just as easily and as naturally as she moves on his body, Danicka seems to know. Even before her words stop him in his tracks, even before the sudden jarring stillness of him makes her shudder, she seems to know, even if she denied it when they were talking about the prince and the fox and the meaning of taming another person, whether they be Kin or Garou or mortal or simply someone you used to play with.

Lukas can stop her from rising and falling, he can grab her hips and keep her from squirming against his hips but he can't stop either the voluntary or the deliberate flexing of deep muscles inside of her that clench around him. Danicka bites back a sound too helpless and too lost for her to tolerate, and because both of his hands are holding onto her body to keep him still he can't spare a grip for her head. She turns and licks his neck, kisses his cheek, still fighting to move, to writhe, to fuck him, until finally he asks her what it is she's saying.

And that, in the end, makes her pull her mouth from his flesh, makes her cease the struggling tension in her body. She offers him no reassurances that he will not hurt her, or that she will not really do anything to him. She fucking knows better. She does, however, lift her head and meet his eyes. Lying down on him as she is, their faces are so close she can barely focus on his searing blues, and her breath moves in small tide-like rushes over his lips and his chin and Adam's apple.

Maybe because the moon is thin, or because she is drunk, or because she is simply Danicka, she is braver than him, and simply says:

"Zamilovávám se do tebe,"

very, very softy. Danicka shivers against him, the way she used to when she would have an orgasm with him, and kisses his mouth once, almost timidly.

"Odpusť mi," she whispers, her brow furrowing with concern, her hips fighting his grip again to move on him. "Odpusť mi, já to tak líto. Ale nekončí. Prosím, Lukáš, nekončí, už zase."

[Lukas] It's surreal, the difference on little word makes. There's a world between calling someone love and my love, just as there's a world between merely fucking and fucking him.

This is why it's easier when there are no words. These are the subtleties that snare the unwary; the nuances that the Lupus werewolves try so hard and fail so hard to grasp. These are the shades of meaning between one and the next that mire even those born and bred to the human tongue, and in a way it's worse for him, it's so much worse, because he understands the difference between one and the other, but even so he has to ask, he has to ask not because he didn't understand but because he did, and wishes he didn't.

Sometimes Danicka seems almost craven. She runs when threatened. She hides -- behind her father or in Lukas's room or under a goddamn blanket. She goes limp instead of fighting back. She's sorry when it's not even her fault, and every time she's been sorry he's been sorrier, because it's not her fault.

Sometimes Danicka is such a coward -- and then she turns around and she just says it, so simply, so softly, that he thinks she doesn't understand at all how she's tearing him apart, except that he knows she does understand.

Because she doesn't apologize this time; she asks for forgiveness. There's a difference. And for the first time he doesn't tell her there's nothing to apologize for, nothing to forgive. He doesn't say anything at all; he closes his eyes and now she's finally still too, her hips are caught in his hands and her body isn't constricting and shuddering on his like a living thing

(which is patently ridiculous because of course it's like a living thing, she is a living thing, she's alive like this as few women ever are; alive, here, with him, as few women he's ever had.

she is not a city behind glass, distant and beautiful and closed-off. he can feel the life in her when she's like this, which reminds him of spring, and it's this as much as anything that undoes him.)

and she's still, still, and then she's kissing him, once, and it's almost timid, like she's trying to read him, which is in a way exactly what she's doing, because they have exactly three ways to read each other, to really understand what was going on below.

They have eye contact. They have kissing. And they have fucking.

Making love.

His lips move against hers. It is not a kiss, just as he is not looking at her, just as they are not moving. This would be a groan, a wounded noise, if he'd voiced it; if it weren't just a rush of a breath:

"Vy jste mi trhání na kusy, Danička -- "

and the last vowel of her name is lost because he lunges up across whatever tiny distance might divide them and he's kissing her now, ravenously, and his hands on her hips aren't holding her still but urging her to move, urging her to move faster, and he's moving against her momentum, driving her faster and harder and harder and faster, and just like that,

just like that they're fucking again, he's fucking her and kissing her with a sort of ferocious, grasping desperation as though he might burn up with desire if he didn't fuck her just like this, and kiss her just like this; as though he might be able to burn away what she's said, and what he knows, and what's already in his bones.

[Danicka] Words are the source of misunderstandings.

So Danicka meets his eyes when she speaks, so that when he hears her tell him this devastating secret he knows it for what it is: the truth.

So Danicka kisses his lips softly after she speaks, so that as he absorbs the words out of her mouth he will know them for what they are: the truth.

So Danicka tells him that she is falling in love with him while he is as inextricably joined with her as one person can be with another, while he is lost as deep inside of her as he has ever been, so that there is no doubt in his mind: she's telling him the truth. With her voice and body and everything in her, she is telling him the goddamned truth and it's so painful that maybe now he understands why it is so much easier sometimes to lie.

Except that she says falling, she uses the present tense, describes something that is in process, and yet...and yet the words my love fall from her lips so easily it is as though this has always been the case, as though she has never called him anything else. As though he is, in fact, hers.

Lukas does not groan, or lift his voice, or moan for her. He does not let his voice ache with whatever it is he feels in response to this plea for forgiveness, as though falling in love with him were a crime, were a sin that she needs to atone for. And he gives her no absolution: she is tearing him apart.

Forgive her, forgive her, but she knows.

"Vím," Danicka half-moans, as though helpless, just before he kisses her. Her mouth receives his as her body receives him, her hand sliding from his cheek to his hair, holding him there while her knees and his flank and shoulders move against the carpet. She gasps away from his lips when he begins moving her, a new surge of arousal rushing through her lower half. "Oh, Lukáš," Danicka says, while she still can.

Because then she's riding him as fiercely and as hungrily as they had begun on the couch. It's been eleven days and nothing has satisfied her. No food, no drink, no conversation has filled whatever gap is left when he is not there and yes, this still makes her angry, this still hurts, this still terrifies her, wanting him this much and this often and this badly. They are not grinding slowly or rocking sweetly now but he's fucking her the way he did at the Brotherhood, lifting his hips and pulling her down on him. And Danicka is riding him with no thought to her knees or the open windows, her hand tightening in his hair and her teeth dragging along his lower lip.

Don't stop, she'd told him, and he doesn't stop. Not again.

Shut up, he'd said earlier, and she shuts up.

Not this time because he wants her to stop, not because he has snarled at her to shut her mouth, but because one single truth (I'm falling in love with you) and its aftershocks (You're tearing me to pieces [I know]) has seared her throat and her tongue and her mind so completely that there is nothing left, nothing she can find other than moans that build quickly in pitch and volume and speed.

For the sake of leverage she pushes herself up and rests her hands but not her weight on his chest, quite simply bouncing on his cock as though she's been waiting for this for far longer than a week and a half. Whatever they are reaching for, they are both denying that they even want it. Whatever they need right now, they are both striving for it with an intensity that borders on Rage, borders on madness. He is not the only one trying annihilate the truth here...and yet they both fail.

Because when she suddenly goes rigid, throwing her head back, the lights from the city hitting her breasts and her hair and the look on her face...

When she casts her last tremulous, gasping outcry at the ceiling and all he can see is the expanse of her flat belly and the peaks of her breasts and hear her voice as lost and as released as he refuses to become...

When Danicka comes, she fails utterly in her attempt to pretend that she never asked him about the part with the fox, about taming, to pretend that she never called him her love, to pretend that he has never whispered that word to her more tenderly than her own name. She fails at this lie that they are just fucking each other until they get tired of one another.

Neither of them have ever believed it anyway.

[Lukas] It's a kind of madness, every time.

It's a kind of madness when they start moving, when they move together like this, and it can't be slow, and it can't be gentle, because it's madness, and there's nothing slow or gentle about madness.

It's -- on the very knife's edge of control when she moves atop him and his hands are holding her, are opening over her back as she rolling her hips and he's kissing her mouth, and then he's simply breathing into and around her mouth, and her lips, and her chin, and then she's sitting up, and he's leaning up, flexing up with her as if loathe to let her move away, his mouth is following the arch of her neck and her collarbones.

Then she moves, she bears down on him hard and he throws his head back hard enough to thump on the carpet -- some half-choked exhale of a word escapes him, and it might've been a curse, fuck, and his hands are on her hips now, roaming her skin, and he lets her ride him.

He watches her, riding him.

He watches her and her body, moving, the paleness of her skin in the dim city lights, the shape of her, the shadows between her breasts and in her navel, on the far side of her torso. He watches her body beneath his hands, the way her soft skin and firm body indents beneath his grip on her hips; the way her breasts move to his palms. He watches her face, and her eyes, and he loves the way she looks like this, with her eyes shadowed with want and her forehead wrinkled with effort or smooth with release; with her mouth open to breathe, open to cry out, or open simply because she can't even cry out anymore.

He loves this -- and if he could he would tell her that now, but of course he can never find the ability, not now when he's inside her, not now when all he can think of, ironically, is her.

And her.
And her.

Watching, he can see it when her orgasm ignites in her, can see the way she arches like a bow pulled taut, can see her chest expand with that last breath sucked in until the shadows of her ribs are visible beneath her breasts; can see the pulse fluttering in her throat.

He watches this, he can see all this, but he cannot, at the end, watch her. He cannot because her climax sparks onto his like a wildfire leaping a river, and the very sight of her, the sound of her crying out, the feel of her drives him over the edge, and even as she's beginning to come down from her orgasm he's grabbing her by the hips and grinding her down against his upwards flex, driving up into her hard, and his spine arches so fiercely that he's briefly a single tensile arc slung from shoulderblades to heels.

Absolute silence when he comes in her -- absolute, breathless silence.

Even if he'd wanted to he wouldn't be able to speak now, wouldn't be capable of sound now because his very breath has caught hard in his throat; his orgasm is tearing through him and it rips his very breath away.

It's not until the initial onslaught is past that he can even release a single harsh breath, draw another; and then again. It's not until the first rush of it is past that he can even move into her again, and again, and yet again, half-involuntarily, ruthlessly, even though every stroke of his cock now makes him shudder, makes his breath tear in half, sends a quake of pleasure through him.

He holds himself inside her after the last, and now the tension is running out of his body like water from the thaw, and his hips return to the floor; his lumbar spine, the backs of his thighs, his calves. He's panting for breath now, fast but regular, and he's opening his eyes and thinking oh my god and what the fuck and trying to remember if it's always like this, trying to remember how he survived this last time, trying to remember how to survive and how to breathe normally and what his own goddamn name is, but he can't remember this; he can't remember any of it, because all he can remember is that

(já tady patří.)

she's not the only one spinning out into nothing here; she's not the only one who's lost her gravity, lost her grip on the lifeline; she's not the only one falling.

She's merely the only one with the courage to admit it.

His hands are sliding up her body and he's bringing her down to him, and as she bends to him he's pushing back her hair and holding her face between his hands and he's kissing her, softly and swiftly but endlessly, fervently, again and again, and he's moving against her and into her again -- slowly now, lazily, very gently for her sake and for his own, to remind himself of their boundaries; to remind himself that their boundaries are not yet redrawn.

[Danicka] If she were honest (she's not), Danicka would not deny that she understands why Lukas is so loathe to let himself go when he's with her. She believes every word he said earlier, not because it was anything she wanted to hear but because it was obviously something he wished he was not saying. That is, she knows, one of the best ways to lie: to act as though the falsehood is a truth being dragged kicking and screaming out of you. She also knows that Lukas would not affect pain like that as a manipulative tactic, even if she would. She knows that the near-helplessness with which he said I can't was not feigned, and she understands.

How she can know this, and how she can understand, does not quite make sense to her. Yes, she knew him when they were children but they weren't close, they weren't as dear to each other as brother and sister, they weren't best friends, they weren't even the same age at a period of life when two years makes a vast difference. Yes, she has been seeing him on occasion since the end of January and been fucking him since early February, but how often have they sat down and had a nice, long discussion about hopes and dreams and histories? All she can come up with is that she knows him because of this, because of how when she fucks this man it's not fucking at all and the only way she can make it just fucking is by shutting down.

No wonder that weeks ago she called it making love. It reaches too far inside of her, tears her apart, and she was the first one to say that just as she was the first to admit aloud that she wanted him and just as she is telling him now that she's sorry, she can't help it, but she's falling in love with him.

It's most certainly madness.

While they're in it, they're lost. Danicka isn't thinking about tomorrow, or what is going to happen when they get off her living room floor. She isn't thinking much at all, not what would be recognized as thought. She feels him inside of her and that's true, feels his hands on her and that's the truth, too. She watches him arch and writhe underneath her and against the pale carpet and for every sound he holds back, every word he can't say, she fucks him that much harder. It's the only torture she can devise, is pushing this closeness to the very last boundary of tolerance, and then kicking it over.

Which is when they come, when Danicka throws her head back and Lukas responds by holdering her tighter, thrusting so hard into her that she cries out and at this point there's no way for him to tell if it's pleasure or pain or just a noise out there on the horizon of consciousness.

She is coming back down to earth, to him, when he continues to stroke into her. Danicka looks back at him now, rocks her hips like answering a question, and then flows down towards him before he can finish more than the initial tug of his hands on her body. She slides her arms around his neck and shoulders and folds over him almost protectively, almost as though her thin and rather easily damaged body is going to shield him from something, somehow. She buries her head on his shoulder, into the softness of his neck, her hair falling over his throat and onto the carpet and her breasts pushing against his chest every time either one of them takes a breath.

Lukas pushes her hair back, puts his hands on her face, and Danicka's hold on him loosens. She kisses him back and sighs into his mouth because he's still moving. Her thighs tighten on either side of him, she clenches around him as though to hold him still, and then pulls her face away from his. She goes back to the spot she originally occupied, her face buried, her head resting, his upper body cradled.

He cannot speak. And she cannot go on kissing him now.

[Lukas] Cradled.

Which is an interesting word for this, and utterly accurate. Because it's what she does for him, and he for her, in these shattered moments afterward: they cradle each other.

She holds him still and she buries her face against his skin as if to hide her face from the harsh world, but it's her arms that go around him, and it's her body that folds over his, and there's something undeniably protective about this, the same way that her telling him it's okay or i'm here or you belong here is somehow -- in some strange, nameless way -- protective.

And it's the same, the way his hands slowly open over her thin back. It's the same, when he covers her back with his arms and his hands -- and he can cover a lot, because his hands are large and his arms are powerful, and she's slender, always has been; on the verge of skinny; and her bones are slight, her shoulders are narrow, and in his mind's eye, stark and merciless, he can see the way she looked that first night when she thought he might kill her, folded on the cheap motel bed with her soft underbelly protected the best she can.

He thinks of that, and he thinks of how she'd cried in the parking lot, her hands to her face, and how she had not reached for him; he thinks of her withdrawn and closed off on the couch, her body shivering, but not from desire, and --

And she's never asked for his sympathy, or wanted his protection, but when he asked her if she expected him to protect her and she said no all he could think was I would and here, and now, in the blasted moments after sex when he's putting himself back together and trying not to think about what's been said, what's not been said, what she's let him see and what he's, in some obscene twist of irony, has not dared to let her see, all he can think is:

I would protect her.
At all cost.
...but not from myself.

And that's the end of it, isn't it; the bottom line. Not from himself. Not from his own wants and needs, urges, furies. Not from his own priorities, that would let him stand by and allow his packmate to nearly break her face, because better her face than his pack. Because he can't, and perhaps also because he won't.

And meanwhile she's telling him she's falling in love with him, and she's letting him inside her without a condom; she's letting him inside, period. He's suddenly filled with a sort of self-loathing. His hands shift to her waist and he lifts her from him, he rolls her gently but unequivocally aside to her back beside him, and as they're coming apart and their legs are disentangling he sits up on her living room carpet, his back a complexity of shadows and highlights, gleaming with sweat. He scuffs a hand through his hair, draws his knees up and lays his forearms over them.

"Je mi to líto," he says -- low. "Jsem zasranej kretén a zbabělec."

[Danicka] Though lying on top of him now and holding him -- and holding herself against him -- Danicka is undeniably sheltering towards Lukas, it's nothing compared to the way she has held him when she's laid on her back, slid her legs around him, and tilted her face up to kiss him more softly than he could have imagined after that very, very first one in the motel. When Lukas is on top of her, in the more obviously dominant position, Danicka has treated him with such gentle nurturing that no one who has not experienced it would recognize her. The first time she reclined on the bed and welcomed him like that, she had been... yes. Protective. That's the only real word for it.

Lying like this it's more equal, somehow. She bows over him and is enfolded by him, simultaneously offering and seeking shelter, giving and receiving comfort. For a few seconds, at least, they can both bear it.

What no one likes to acknowledge is how Kin guard the Garou that are their parents, their siblings, their lovers, their children. The lies they tell, the beatings they take, the embarrassment and failures they face, everything they do in a support role. There are those that, like Martin, act as snipers while trying not to think that their mate is the one down there being torn into with claws and teeth. There are those that, like Rick and Christian, safeguard ones like Danicka and Yelizaveta from the things that slink through the night because one simply can't expect the Garou to act as bodyguards for their own families all the damn time.

Unquestionably, Lukas is physically stronger and if some beast or inhumane man were to break into the apartment right now Danicka wouldn't need to do much of anything in order to stay safe. She has no fucking clue what to do with that nine millimeter on her coffee table and would be damned lucky to manage swinging a baseball bat and actually hitting someone, much less doing any damage. He could kill her in a heartbeat, has hurt her, has let her be hurt, and yet:

she lifts a hand and strokes his hair and it does not feel playful or simpering or attention-seeking. Danicka's fingers moving over his scalp do, and have always, felt as though she is reaching out to soothe something in him.

This is worth mentioning only because it is not what the rest of her behaviors in or out of the bedroom convey. She doesn't ask him to comfort her when she cries, doesn't want him to. She doesn't want a glass of water when she's upset, she wants four shots of imported vodka. She doesn't ever ask him to hold her, doesn't hide behind him or even call him when her life is threatened -- doesn't even tell him -- or when something happens in her life that upsets her.

He wouldn't protect her from himself. It makes her seethingly angry when he uses her as some kind of shield, when he lets her take a fall that she doesn't deserve, when he is so fucking callous...and yet she takes it in stride. She expects, though this is brutal and gutwrenching in its way, nothing better.

Except.

Sometimes from him, she does expect better.

Sometimes with him, she does wish he would...not be such a fucking coward.

Danicka does not cling to him as he starts to lift her. She breathes in sharply, not expecting this, not so soon, but she doesn't fight it or open her mouth to say No. Lukas lays her down and does not come with her, does not angle his body between her legs again and lower himself on top of her but lets their bodies slide apart. He unwinds from her, sits up instead of lying down beside her, and something in the air between them hardens, crystallizes, and then quietly, slowly crumbles.

For a few seconds after he speaks, Danicka is so quiet it seems as though she's not even breathing. There is no sudden intake of air to prelude her speech, just a shift of limbs against carpeting. She slowly sits up, arms locked to brace her progress, drawing her legs in closer to her body in an unconscious but halfhearted self-protective gesture.

This is one of those instances that contrasts so sharply with how she is in the moments immediately after fucking him, sometimes the moments while fucking him. Up against a hotel door being fucked so hard it made her yelp, Danicka had still stroked his hair and held him against her chest and told him it was all right, reassuring him that this was okay. Just now she had been wrapped around him, all warmth and softness, and existed with him in a state that felt so primordial it stood before birth, after death, in between incarnations.

But now she does not tell him that his apology is unnecessary, or even that it is accepted. She does not assure him that no, he's not an asshole, he's not a coward. Danicka doesn't coo in his ear that it's okay, it's okay. She slowly sits up, and doesn't say anything at all for a moment, and she does not reach out to protect him, or take care of him, or even touch him.

Not right now. Not when she knows what's coming next.

"...All right," Danicka whispers, her head spinning, her body confused at the loss of him. She pauses, as though about to say more, then slowly and carefully gets to her feet. She is still drunk. Danicka waits a moment for the room to stop swirling, and then starts to walk towards the hallway.

[Lukas] Whatever he'd wanted from her, it was not absolution.

It was not this either, though. It was not for her to withdraw into herself, to get up, to walk away.

He doesn't stop her. He does watch, though -- turning to see her go over his shoulder.

If she hadn't been so inebriated, if he had not been looking so carefully, if they had not just been on and with and within one another, as close as two people could be, as open as two people like them could be -- if not for all that, he might've mistaken this for anger, for some sort of punishment, some sort of sick game.

But it's not that. And by some fucking miracle he can see her now, clearly. He knows why she stood up and left. He knows what it is she expects him to do, and the great irony is that if he were not what he is, a coward and an asshole, he might've done exactly that. It may or may not, in the long run, be the right thing to do -- but he would end it if he could, and done it for the right reasons.

To spare him and her inevitable pain. To spare them the shattering weakness of the attachment, and the brutality of its ending, one way or another.

This is what he would do, he thinks, if he were a better man. But he's not.

So -- some thirty, sixty, ninety seconds or so after she's left him alone in the living room, he gets to his feet. His hand braces briefly against the carpet. There's a warm hollow where he lay. He leaves his clothing where it is; she has little discomfort with her body, and he has less. He follows her down the hall to her bedroom or her bathroom, her closets, wherever the hell he might find her.

[Danicka] In the minute and a half or so it takes Lukas to get up off the living room floor and move to do anything, whether leave or go after her or even just head to the bathroom that used to be Martin's to wash up, Danicka has gotten down the hall and gone towards her own suite. She isn't thinking about whether or not he could see right through her or not out there. She's trying to remember how to live past the deep ache in her chest that doesn't even have a name yet. And she is waiting to hear the door close behind him, thinking that perhaps when that happens she'll be able to breathe again.

The door to her hall is only partially open, not because she thought about how he didn't know how to read it being shut last time but because she is too drunk and was in too much of a hurry to get away from him to bother closing it behind her. She goes to her bathroom and steps into her tub and sits down but doesn't turn on the water. She draws up her knees and curls forward, arms between her torso and her thighs, hands covering her face, hair hiding her on either side, and waits for the door to close.

There's no punishment here, for him or for her. There's just misunderstanding, or understanding so perfect and clear that it turns into piercing, crystalline agony. That's how it feels to her, at least. She cannot even drum up anger at him, not right now, because in a way she can still feel him inside of her. Which makes it even worse, when the silence keeps stretching out and all she can think is

Why don't you go why don't you go if you're going to leave just go already

because she can't breathe until he's gone.

Her eyes are closed and her face is hidden when he does drift quietly down the hall and finds her where the hell he finds her, and she knows he's there. His Rage and his presence leave a taste in the air that she recognizes as easily and with as much familiarity as she seems to know his body when her eyes are shut and her hands are moving over him in the dark. She knows he's there, and the first reply Danicka has for him is the drawing of a ragged breath.

"Budu v pořádku," she mutters, her words muffled. She doesn't sound helpless or wistful or desperate; she sounds firm, and she is sure as hell not talking to herself.

[Lukas] Lukas does not have rage to guide him, but he finds Danicka easily enough nonetheless. There are only so many places she can be, even in a darkened apartment, and besides that, her blood calls to him, it sings to him in a language he can't quite understand, but recognizes in his bones.

He lingers in the bathroom doorway a moment. Danicka has the master suite, and the bathroom is within the door to the south half of the apartment. There are two sinks under the enormous mirror, and a row of lights over them, all off.

The bathtub is sizable too. Not quite a wading pool, but more than large enough for him to fit into with her, which is what he does when he straightens up off the frame of the door. He doesn't say anything, not to her ragged breath and not to her telling him that she'll be okay. He just steps in past the door, shuts it softly. Then it's very dark in the bathroom, but his eyes have long since adjusted, and his eyes are half-wolf anyway, and he can see well enough to climb in behind her with minimal awkwardness.

This time he doesn't hesitate to touch her. His hands fold over her shoulders when he crouches behind her, and she's bent forward, and his knees nudge her sides just under the shoulderblades, and the backs of her arms. He kisses her shoulder, gently, warmly, and then he reaches past her to twist the faucet on, seal the drain.

When he unfolds back against the sloped side of the tub he draws her with him. He draws her back against him, between his knees and against his chest, and as the water starts to rise past their ankles, their hipbones, he folds his arms around her and he's thankful for the dark, for the fact that she cannot see his face, because it hurts him to know that it would have hurt her if he had left, and that makes no sense at all.

"Byl jsem nikdy v úmyslu opustit," he tells her, not for the first time, though it had not meant this, quite, the last time. "Je mi líto, že jsem ublížit ty, Danička."

[Danicka] Essentially they are damned if they do, damned if they don't. It would have hurt if he'd left. It hurts that he stays. Either way, really, neither one of them is willing to believe that this is going to end well. This lack of faith may have something to do with the fact that it has to end, period. Everything does, that's what Danicka keeps saying. She could take a mortal lover and that mortal lover, by definition, would eventually die. And that's just the inevitability. People fall out of love. People learn to hate. People give up, people change, people become monsters and monsters become the parents of your children.

She knows this, and knew this from the start, which is why even at the start she scoffed at the very concept of falling for Lukas. Wanting him was not the same as wanting to be with him. She was curious. She was drawn. Put crudely -- and in fact put this way out of her own mouth -- she wanted to fuck his brains out. She wanted to fuck him until neither of them could walk. She wanted to come on his cock, or against his tongue, wanted to feel him gone rigid and gasping with his own orgasm, and there have been precious, precious few people in her life with whom she has had all this and then...wanted...more.

Every time she's with Lukas, she wants more. She cannot get enough of him, and it's driving her out of her mind, and it's hurting her because she knows what that life is like.

Já si to hned, tatinek. Chápu.

With no windows in this room and no lights on outside in the hall or her bedroom, there is absolutely no light to draw from once Lukas closes the bathroom door behind him. Danicka to him is a spectre, a charcoal-skinned ghost. Even her hair is little more than gray, but he could close his eyes and find her. The hairs on her arms and on the back of her neck lift up as he approaches, and she breathes in more deeply because he's still there. She doesn't even know that he's still naked until he gets in behind her, curls around her, and turns on the water.

The first rush of it is ice cold when it starts to creep up to her toes. Danicka curls up tighter, drawing them back, but the water gets to her anyway, quickly warming. This is a nice building, with new pipes, and it does not take long before the crash of water is turning very, very hot. The tub is big enough that were it just her it would take quite awhile to fill up, but with Lukas's bulk behind her it's going to happen in a third of the time, if that.

She isn't crying, at least.

Danicka's legs are the first thing to move when Lukas pulls her back against him, her feet sliding forward until her toes are underneath the fall of water. Her hands gradually slide off of her face, but only so she can half-turn, twisting into his arms and burying her face against his chest. He still smells like sweat, like sex, like himself, and the sharp, earthy scent of it all strangely seems to calm her down. Not that she was hysterical. But she relaxes somewhat to his touch, not quite ready to melt...but ready to unfurl a little.

She doesn't say anything in response. She just lays against him, her arms loosely folded in front of her, until the tub is so full that they are mostly covered in steaming water. This time it's Danicka who leans, water rushing in between them behind her, and turns off the faucet. It's still dark but her eyes are adjusting slowly, slower than his. She can make out his face, just barely, and looks into the ethereal abysses that his eyes have become to her now. Danicka pauses for a moment there, then turns again and lays back against him, reaching down to his wrists and replacing his arms around her from behind.

"If you're not ending this," she says quietly, reverent of the dark -- except for each other, they may as well be in a sensory deprivation tank -- and slow because the world has turned inside out too many times tonight, "then why...did you say you were a coward?"

[Lukas] It's somehow easier to enfold her in his arms like this, in the darkness and in the warm water. A romantic or a poet might draw the connection between this and life before birth, floating in the womb, but Lukas is neither a romantic nor a poet. This is simply what it is: him and her in her bathtub, in the near-absolute darkness, in water so warm that it skirts the edge of scalding.

He can handle it. And she's always liked her showers hot.

After she turns the water off it's very quiet in here. A last few drops drip-drop from the faucet to the bath, and he can imagine the ripples spreading, breaking against her wet skin. She does not need to take his wrists to make him replace his arms around her. They come around her of their own accord, tightening, his biceps hard and warm against her sides, the broad muscles of his chest bunching against her back as he bends to her, kisses her neck with a sudden adoration that was, as ever, curiously close to pain.

Then he's relaxing against the tub, and she's laying against him, and they're nearly drowned in the hot water, and the steam, and the darkness.

"Because," he answers her, the same slowness, the same quietness, "I haven't the courage to let go, or call things by their name."

A silence; then he kisses her again, gentler this time, his mouth to her temple. Water sloshes when he raises his hand and smooths it, wet, over her hair; when he sets her head against his shoulder and lays his own back against the tile.

"Why were you miserable?" he asks then -- long after she said she was.

[Danicka] There has been, from the beginning, no expectation of romance between them. He does not expect her to make him lavish dinners by candlelight, she does not expect flowers on her birthday -- he doesn't even know when her birthday is -- or when he does something that upsets her. In fact, truth be told, they don't expect a whole hell of a lot from one another. It's become clear that Danicka is not a fan of waiting for a week or more to so much as hear from him, but there's not always much they can do about that.

Even when she was convinced that he was going to get up, get his clothes, and leave -- because she did something as horrendous as confess to something they both already know anyway -- Danicka did not so much as ask him to stay, or explain himself, or tell her flat-out

I'm not. Falling in love with you, that is. I think we should stop seeing each other.

She didn't ask him to follow her in here and hold her, but now that he is, now that they're curled up together in water that's just barely tolerable and yet comfortable to both of them, Danicka does not hesitate to mold her body against his. She lets herself be pleased and soothed by his wet hand stroking her hair back and getting it damp. She allows herself to enjoy his mouth pressing against her neck, even if it only lasts for a few seconds. She gives herself over to it, as she has given herself over to a multitude of sensations that Lukas probably does not want to imagine her ever experiencing, but he has no reason to suspect she's ever felt before.

Her eyes are closed; there is not much to see, and she is drowsy. The wine, the sex, the hot water, and the immediate calm brought on by a drunken acceptance of his continued presence in her home. (Oh, he's still there.)

She has no answer for the first part; it's too convoluted for her to wrap her thoughts around right now. She thinks she knows what he means, but she doesn't inquire. Danicka quietly reaches for his arms, puts her hands on top of his hands, and then puts them on her breasts. They are half out of the water, and given how matter-of-factly she performs this repositioning she may as well be using his palms to keep her warm. Strangely enough, she crossed his arms, putting his right hand on her left breast and his left hand on her right breast, and then she relaxed again.

Why was she miserable.

Danicka doesn't answer for awhile. When she does, her voice sounds sort of lost. "...I'm alone."

[Lukas] It's not strange to him that she crosses his arms over her chest. It brings them closer. It keeps them close. His arms shift around her, adjusting to the changing positions. His hands open, his palms fitting to the underside of her breasts, and then they close. His fingers curve over her flesh, and his hands are as warm as the water.

Her heart is beating against the heel of his right hand. It's beating against his chest, through her back.

And this is relaxed, still; comfortable. There's a sense of being adrift and anchored at once. It's the darkness and the hot water. It's the confines of the tub, the hard curving ceramic, the hard curving lines of his body around hers. His hands are not motionless. He weighs her breasts lazily in his hands, smooths his palms over the skin. He rolls her nipples between his thumbs and the base of his forefinger; tugs very gently until they harden, and then he covers her with his palms until the heat of his hands softens them again.

When she answers him, it's his turn to be silent a while. Then his arms tighten a little. He turns his face against her hair, nuzzles her; it's not quite a kiss, but it's not far.

"Proč se ty tak bojí být sám?"

[Danicka] There's very few secrets between them at this moment in time. They are connected to one another's heartbeats, a dull thumping carried through skin and through water and into the other's body. Even when Lukas pulled Danicka off of him and moved her -- with gentleness she thought was one last kindness, one final exception -- onto the floor beside him, they somehow did not quite break this implicit connection, when usually...usually...that is the beginning of the end.

But this time they parted, and she walked away, and seconds turned into minutes, and even sitting in the dark alone it was as though he was still there, and he could still sense her near him. Now they are aligned physically again, laying together as naturally as though their lives have been completely different than they are in reality, as though a thousand things have not happened that have.

Danicka's fingers stroke his right knee as he plays with -- yes, plays with -- her breasts, feeling and watching them respond, hearing her breathing change. He's never once touched her and had her not react, somehow. Sometimes her reaction is so violent she can barely control herself; the night he pleasured her in the Brotherhood she had squirmed and bitten his pillow and almost kicked, fighting not to make any noise the closer she got to that solo orgasm.

It never bothers her. It never makes her feel guilty or burden her with a sense of obligation to reciprocate when Lukas gets her off without joining her. Nor does it bother her, or make her feel ashamed, to arch her back now and sigh as he just...enjoys a particularly sensitive part of her anatomy. Danicka relaxes again as he simply rests his palms against her once more, but momentarily lost the train of conversation.

There it is.

"Já jsem neměla strach," she answers, half-petulantly, half-thoughtfully. "Já prostě nevědí, jak žít takhle."

[Lukas] It's true: he plays with her breasts, because he was not really caressing her; he was not trying to arouse her. It was not foreplay. There was something idle in it, a little lazy; a little thoughtful, almost. He drew a response from her and then quelled it, holds her now, listens.

Water laps at the edges of the tub as he shifts slightly behind her, sliding a little lower, slouching a little more. He could tell her everyone's alone in the end, or something trite and shadow-lord-like; he could tell her she's not alone right here, right now, with him.

He could say this, but he doesn't. There's merely a silence for a while. Then his chest expands against her back, and she can hear him drawing a slow breath in through his nose.

"Budete se učit, Danička." It's oddly tender, the way he says this. He kisses her again, then: the curve of her cheek. His mouth lingers against her skin even afterward.

It's some time before he lays his head back again, and though he's breathed in and out several times in the interim, this exhale seems the spiritual successor to the inhale he'd drawn moments ago.

"Tell me something about our childhood," he invites, quietly.

[Danicka] Trying or not, Lukas has a remarkable ability to arouse Danicka. He has come right out and said it: he wanted her from the moment he saw her. She has not even admitted that she was attracted to him then, but that is not the same as wanting, anyway. Whether she is angry at him or tender towards him, miserable or happy, she would not still be with him now if she could resign herself to never feeling his body against her own again. She would not still be with him now if she could accept the thought of never kissing him again.

He does not understand, or at least she believes he does not understand, that her desire for him was strong enough to compose a great deal of her reason for staying in that motel room even when he told her she should probably go, even if he didn't want her to. He must be learning by now, though, that if he so much as breathes across her ear she will begin to melt. If he touches her in certain places she will shiver, or gasp, and sometimes she will clutch at his shoulders with her hands as though her knees will go out from under her otherwise.

It means something that she does not hide her reaction from him, or even attempt to, just as it means something that she fights to tell him the truth even when it's the most painful thing for both of him, the last thing that he wants to hear, the last thing she wants to say.

Such as what came out of her mouth in the living room.

Ultimately the truth in this case is that he can undo her just by looking at her the right way, or hitting a certain register with his voice. The truth is that with a very simple touch he can either calm her down or make her writhe, and sometimes she may hate him for it a little but she surrenders to it anyway. And the truth is that when they are naked, and surrounded by heat, and his mouth keeps grazing her neck and face, and his hands cup and toy with her breasts, Danicka is just as aroused by the idleness of his attention as she is by the resulting sensation.

When he realizes that what he's doing to her has consequences as natural as gravity, Lukas stills his hands on her. The damage is already done -- was done as soon as he put his hands on her waist back in February and realized that he had only touched her three times in his adult life -- but Danicka quiets a bit, leans on him, and tells him that her misery has nothing to do with fear. What she doesn't tell him is that the irony of all this is that she always feels alone, is used to it, but still cannot sleep when she is the only person in a residence, when there's no one down the hall or lying on the other half of the bed.

And what he does not tell her is the obvious or the poetic or the romantic. He tells her the truth. And he tells it to her more gently than he tells her most truths, kisses her cheek, and if he could see her expression clearly in the dark he'd know she is mulling this over, appreciating it even as she remains...sad...and he would also know that she would choose to let him see all this. If, of course, she were more than a shadow with the impressions of eyes, a nose, lips.

When he leans back and makes his request -- invitation -- a series of images flash through Danicka's mind. There are hundreds of memories spanning almost four years of her life, and his, and while many of them are innocuous and some of them are even happy, all the dark ones surface now. They are summoned by loneliness and fear and wine and for a long time Danicka doesn't answer. She is trying to sift through the first time Lukas met her elder brother and the time she lost her temper at Lukas's elder sister and so forth, searching for something that could be called at least...pleasant.

Whether she looks for something pleasant for his sake or hers, she couldn't say right now.

Finally, though, Danicka takes a deep breath and lets it out slowly. "When you learned to read. In English. You brought 'Frog and Toad Are Friends' over to my house one of the times your family visited, because you wanted to...show it to me, or show it off, or something.

"So we sat down on the rug in front of the piano while our parents had coffee, and you started reading. Anežka kept looking over your shoulder if you hesitated, she would say it for you. After about two pages of this, you..."

If he can't see her smile, he can hear it.

"I believe a nice way of putting it would be: 'you lost your goddamn shit'."

[Lukas] Strange how memory works. Strange how a detail that seems wholly lost is really only dormant in the mind -- stored in some deep memory bank whose entrances and exits, pipelines, conduits, have long since rusted and crumbled to dust. Then, months, years later, a word, a phrase, a sound, a smell -- something -- can spark suddenly down the murky corridors of the mind, reignite all those long-abandoned circuits, and like magic the memory flares to life again, vivid but disconnected, like a shard of a dream.

Frog and Toad are Friends, she says, and suddenly he can remember the little volume, the cover with its lush greenery around the borders, its toadstools in the corner, the titular characters in the center under a blank white sky that serves as a backdrop for the letters of the title. He can remember the smell of the book, which was old, possibly secondhand; he can remember its yellowing pages and how the corner was puffy and discolored because it had been dropped in water once, and swelled and crinkled as it dried.

He can remember this clearly, though not the day she speaks of. He thinks he might have some murky recollection of it, but he doesn't trust it: it could as easily be a phantasm raised by her words.

Danicka gets to the end of her story and Lukas laughs aloud, suddenly, openly. In the dark confines of the bathroom the sound resonates off the tile, the mirrors; it vibrates through his chest.

"That sounds exactly like something Anežka would do." She can hear the smile in his voice. "She was such a bossy little pitomec. Still is." A moment's pause. "The truth is I don't mind. It'd be strange if she suddenly treated me with ... I don't know. Deference."

Another pause. The smile is back. It changes the timbre of his voice, the way the sounds form in his chest and shape from his mouth.

"She claims you refused to share your crayons once. And consequently, she had to color in shades of grey."

[Danicka] Two things a liar must be good at: listening and remembering. People will not believe what they do not want to believe, and so you have to listen to them to learn what it is they want to believe. People trust those who listen to them when they talk and speak up just enough, neither too much nor too little, and 'too much' is less than you might think. You have to know who you said what to, remember it years later. And if you grow up like she did, live the life she has, you cannot ever forget certain facts because you are expected to simply know, no matter how insignificant the detail may be.

Danicka is an attentive, thoughtful woman whose memory is and will remain sharp as a knife for decades to come. It's as much a survival mechanism as curling up in a ball when threatened. She is also older than the man sitting behind her by almost a couple of years, and when the difference is 6 years old and 8 years old rather than twenty-two and twenty-four it means that she can remember this better than he can. She can remember the circular rug and the piano and the picture that lived on the back of the old upright. This was her house.

She remembers Lukas pitching a fit at his older sister, she remembers how he was scolded for it and remembers that the book wasn't even his, it had the stamp from the elementary school library on the inside cover. She also remembers that when he calmed down and Anežka was sulking, she went upstairs and brought down Naměsíc a Ještě Dál, a fantastical children's book which ached with its own age, which had belonged to her father, which he had read to his first daughters, which he had brought from the Republic and given to Danička, which Danička handed to Lukášek and asked him to read to her.

She remembers that the adults eventually got into the vodka that same night, and played cards late into the night, until the three children were all sleeping on the couch together, Lukas leaning on his sister and Danicka curled up at one end by herself and a stack of English and Czech books sitting on the floor. She remembers all these things, but does not tell him.

Because he laughs, and she smiles silently in the pitch darkness, just listening to him. Her smile does fall, though, as he describes his then-and-current relationship with his sister. At least he can't see it, or hear it in her voice. She is facing away, it is dark, and she does not speak up then. She does laugh, lightly, when he mentions the crayons.

"Once?" Danicka shakes her head slightly, her hair rubbing against his chest. "I was a beast to that girl."

[Lukas] This time when he laughs it's quiet, more felt than heard. His hands move, the right to her left shoulder, the left to her right ribs. His arms wrap a little tighter around her and he rubs his temple against her hair.

"Danička," he says, wry, "I don't think you're capable of true cruelty to anyone."

... which is a strange thing to say, really, to someone you claim not to trust. And he realizes this, and he's quiet afterward, and the silence has a different tone this time -- caught, stilled.

A few moments go by. Then his arms relax from around her. One comes to a stop over her stomach, under the surface of the water. The other rests along the outer rim of the tub, leaving a tracery of water on the ceramic. The water is no longer scalding hot, but it's still warm -- he debates, briefly, opening the drain and the tap, exchanging warm water for hot.

"Tell me something about yourself," he says, quieter.

[Danicka] After he tells her that he doesn't think she's capable of cruelty to anyone, there is indeed a protracted, painful expanse of silence between them. Lukas is caught because he does not trust her but he believes this, and Danicka closes her eyes tightly, something in her twisting hard and sharp and agonizing. The water laps on the ceramic, the faucet drips twice, and Danicka gradually allows herself to let go of the knife in her chest and instead marvel at how it feels to be here like this. With him.

Her nipples are wet and resting above the surface of the water with the way she's leaning back on Lukas. When he takes his hands from them and holds her they harden almost immediately, and she breathes in deeply, exhales slowly. His arms loosen after awhile, and she slides some of the way down his chest, til the ends of her hair are in the water and her breasts are covered as well.

Lukas speaks just as she is thinking that she'd better get out of here.

"I am," is her quiet answer, without specifying what she is. It's not necessary for her to.

Danicka pauses after that, then moves her hands from his knees to either side of the tub, pulling herself up. She moves slowly, her departure from his chest and from between his legs gradual instead of abrupt, but she stands up. He cannot see clearly, but he can certainly hear, the water running down her body, the slosh of it around her calves. Danicka is careful as she steps out of the tub and onto the plush orange rug that sits on the floor outside of it. She swipes water off of her arms and legs with her palms and rather than reaching for a towel, grabs a silk robe he has seen her wear before off a hook on the wall.

All these actions are shadows upon shadows to his eyes, even his eyes. The robe falls around her thighs, and she ties it only loosely, her back to him.

[Lukas] Lukas sits up in the tub behind her. Laws of physics: a greater volume will displace more water. The sloshing is louder -- wavelets lapping at the edges of the tub. It's too dark for details, but if she could see him clearly, she'd see that he grips the edges of the tub, that the muscles in his forearms tighten because he's about to push himself up.

About to. Doesn't, just yet. Paused there, he watches her step out carefully, watches her pull a robe on. The bathroom is still very warm; there's steam in the air. The mirrors are fogged up. She's tying her robe and he can only infer this from approximate positions, the way the fabric of the robe moves.

Instead of following her out, he leans forward, scrubs his face and his hair with his hands, scrubs all over, briskly. By the time he's done she's finished with her robe; she's sat down; she's lit candles.

He doesn't comment. He finishes washing.

Then he pulls the plug and the bathroom's filled with the sound of draining water, and when he gets up it's a waterfall coming off his body, sluicing cleanly over his shoulders and his back, catching in the dusting of hair on his forearms, his chest, his groin. He doesn't reach for a towel either, since they're not his, and he doesn't reach for a robe, since he doesn't have one. When the lion's share of the water has dripped off he splashes out of the tub, leaving wet footprints on her bathmat.

There's a pause during which he looks at the candles, looks at the fogged mirror, looks at her. The dim, warm glow of the tiny flames gives her skin a golden cast; makes his swarthier complexion ruddy. It glints in his dark hair, plastered to his skull with water; it resonates in his pale eyes. He sits on the edge of the tub then, skimming droplets of water off his thighs idly, absently, until he braces his hands on his knees instead and levels his eyes on her.

It's on his mind to tell her something: some great truth, some painful absoluteness. He feels like he should, oddly, as if this might fill the space that was left after she told him: I am, and stepped from the tub.

It's strange, how that broke some connection between them, as though she had stepped from a world of water into a world of air, and he could not longer communicate with her until he had joined her there. It's strange how after she spoke, and left, he washed in silence, let the tub drain, stepped out again before he even looked at her with more than a passing glance.

He looks at her now. He studies her quietly in the light, which is steady but dim, too dim to read by without straining. She's not a book, though, and he can barely read her if he tries.

So -- he doesn't try. He asks her, instead: "Co tím myslíte?"

[Danicka] Outside of the tub, Danicka -- realizing that Lukas is not getting up behind her and following her to bed -- feels her way to the counter. A drawer opens, a box found, and a moment later the scrape of a matchhead against a rough surface preludes the sudden creation of light where before there was only darkness, and the spirit moving across the surface of the water. His hands pass over his ribs and the scar on his midsection, scrubbing his flesh, feeling the loss of her, as a tongue of fire goes from wick to wick.

It is not quite the beginning of the world, and certainly not the ending, and Danicka does not seem the type to seek wisdom from talking snakes or magic fruit, anyway. She seems older than that, formed of the earth (just as he was), rather than from some part of him taken away as he slept.

They no longer exist together as they did with thin moonglow and city lights turning her fair skin a multitude of colors and mottling them both with shifting shadows, no longer curled up in a primordial union broken by his cowardice. They no longer exist together in the water, warm and languid and deprived of all senses that might inform them of a reality beyond one another. She leaves him for the air, and though the water took away some of her perspiration she still smells dimly of him and of sex and of their sweat mingling together. When he gets out he does not smell like her soap but he's cleaner than he was when he got in; he's cleaner than she is.

She is sitting on the counter between the sinks, the candles on the other side of the sink to her left. She perches there as easily as she did the counter of the kitchen the last time he was here, only this time she's not preparing to go to the hospital. The tips of her hair are dark and wet, water drips off her toes for a few moments. Her robe barely covers her, her ankles cross demurely, and she watches him bathe in silence. As he stands she wills him to take two steps, or one long one, and touch her again.

He sits down instead; she thinks: All right, an echo of what she murmured when she thought he was done with her.

Danicka is ready for this question, has been waiting for it, and she just shakes her head, slowly. When she speaks it's as quiet as before; the addition of candlelight, which is warm but not enough to beat back the darkness, still requires a certain stillness. Though no longer joined bodily or even by touch they do have this bridge: they are two people sitting in the dark, and that is its own strange intimacy.

"Everyone is capable of cruelty, Lukáš." Beat. "Nechte to být," she adds, in an even softer murmur, her voice like a plea.

[Lukas] Everyone is capable, she says, and she can see the wheels turning behind his eyes, the way he takes this and examines it, turns it over in his hands like a fragment of a jewel, studies it from all angles --

-- and then she says Let it be.
Let it be.

And the way he looks at her changes; it's at once a relenting and an opening. There's a shadow on his brow, too slight to be a frown. Then it passes. He reaches up to knead the back of his neck for a second. He scuffs his hair until the dark strands unplaster themselves from his skull; stand up in spikes and curls.

"Pokud chcete, aby mi to," he says, quietly, "já to udělám."

It's as easy as that.

Another half a minute or so. The last of the water is running down the drain, and then suddenly the silence seems very absolute. He imagines he can hear the candles burning, the faint hissing as the wicks flame in densely humid air.

Lukas gets up, then. It's not one step that separates them, or two; it's one and a half, and the half is to close the last bit of distance, until her demurely crossed ankles are between his bare legs, and the silk of her robe brushes the front of his thighs.

His hands are as warm as the water had been at the beginning, warmer than the water was at the end, when they come to her waist. Just like that -- just the feel of her body beneath her robe, the smell of her, the smell of their last bout still on her -- just like that the want is back. He looks at his hands on her, the robe between, and then he looks at her face and, looking at her face, undoes the sash of her robe by touch.

"Sundej tento náruční," he says, though he's already doing just that. Firelight has few wavelengths in the blue; his eyes lose their color in this light, but not their glittering clarity. The three or four candles cast three or four reflections into his irises, but the true flame is in the blackness of the pupils, a twisting flare deep inside, rage or desire or both. "Chci vzít ty do postele."

[Danicka] One would think they would tire of each other. If not the sex then at least the difficult questions or the silences they cannot seem to endure for very long. One would think they would tire of the sex, too, that they would be able to get their fill of each other after two, three rounds at a time...but one might also think they have something like forever, or even a chance at it.

Every single time Danicka touches him it may as well be the last time. He's heard stories about how her mother died and so on and so forth but doesn't know the last thing she said to her daughter, or what it was like the last time her mate saw her. He doesn't know how long it took for word to get back to the Musils that Laura was dead, doesn't know what it's like to wait for weeks without knowing.

One might think she would let herself be content and happy and leave it at that. One might think that if she's falling in love then she's going to want him to marry her and move in and be with her Every Single Night and it's going to be swell, just swell, but that would be idiocy. And Danicka's not an idiot.

She is, however, surprised when he agrees. There is only a rapid flick of her eyelashes to indicate this surprise, but it's possible he sees it. Even with his assurances, even though one of the things she likes (likes?) about him is his honesty or his honor, Danicka does not expect him to hold to his word on this. But he does, and her shoulders round slightly. She doesn't even think to feel shame for doubting him; it doesn't occur to her to be outwardly grateful.

They stare at each other, while he drips water and she sits very still on the counter.

And then Lukas steps. In one step her ankles uncross and in half a step her knees pull apart slightly so that by the time his hands go to the belt of her robe there is no doubt that she wants him there, right where he is. Her legs don't wrap immediately around him, just parting enough to give him a space to stand between her knees, against the cabinetry.

Danicka licks her lips, feeling the heat of his palms through the wistfully thin fabric that does not quite cover her. The simple act of giving her belt a tug to loosen it causes one fold of the robe to slide away from one breast, and when she moves towards him, her left hand going to the back of his neck, the robe falls down her right shoulder as it drops.

As soon as her hand is on his neck and her spine is elongating to bring her face to his she knows that he's going to meet her, so her eyes close split seconds before they kiss. It's long and it's slow and it makes her slide forward until Lukas is between her thighs, not her knees. Her right hand is pulling her robe off, at least until the only part of it remaining on her is the left sleeve, and this is easily remedied even if it takes her a moment or two to convince herself to drop her hand from the back of his head.

Take this off, he'd said, and it is off, draped over the counter, the ends in the sinks on either side. She wraps both bare arms around him now and does not stop kissing him, not for a second, not for a breath, not for a heartbeat. Danicka deepens the kiss instead, tasting his mouth with her tongue, more drunk on this, on him, than she ever was on wine.

There's pressure from her hands on him, a tension in her arms, a faint warning of her intent. At least this time Danicka is already halfway up when she pulls herself into his arms and against his chest, her legs going completely around him, her cunt pressing to his abdomen, her breath moving sharply when she finally releases his mouth.

"Pak mě vzít," she says quickly, her voice somewhere between a gasp and a purr, before she is kissing him again.

[Lukas] Look at them, and you'd think they have nothing in common at all. He's tall and strong and warlike; she's anything but. He's dark, with astounding clear eyes; she's golden, and her eyes are the green of dim forest floors. He's honest. She's a liar. He's a coward when it comes to this, to her, to what's between them. She is -- if not brave altogether, then at least braver.

Look at them, and you'd think all they have to share is a heritage, an ancestry, a tribe, a few dimly recollected years of childhood. Old books. Treeclimbing. Crayons. Noise and laughter in a house so often marked by silence. Space to run and climb and tumble and play for children so often crammed in a single room in a boarding house in a crummy area of town.

But look at them now, and there's no denying that in some way, in some primal, basic way, they get each other. They're attuned somehow, even if that somehow is only ever clearly expressed when they're naked, and lusting, and about to fuck one another's brains out.

Perhaps he should be ashamed, that for all his control and all his discipline he can't even bring himself to just fuck this woman once a night. Perhaps she should be ashamed, that she's falling in love when their relationship, if it can even be called that, revolves around sex and the befores and afters of sex. Perhaps they should be ashamed that they've never had a date, have never even successfully spent more than an hour or so in one another's presence without the clothes flying off.

Perhaps they should be -- but they're not.

Because there is a connection in this. It's more elemental than words, but it is a connection, and she's right to think he'll meet her kiss because he does, because even as she's turning her face to his he's leaning down to her and the kiss is sudden and complete, long and slow, and when she's pulling her robe off he's putting his hands on her body, pushing the fabric off the opposite shoulder.

The second her hands begin to pull on his shoulders, the second she begins to lift herself onto his body he's already drawing her up, picking her up and bringing her close, and they don't stop kissing even now -- his chin tilts up and she bends her head and the kiss goes on, and on, and his hands are pressing her against him, grinding her against him where her thighs open against his stomach, and it's no wonder that by the end, when their mouths finally come apart, they're both breathing harder.

They're both breathing hard, and really, it's not that fucking far to the bed; it's one door, a right turn, and less distance that it takes for him to cross his small room at the Brotherhood. It's not that fucking far, but it might as well be a lightyear, because when she says

pak mě vzít

she leaves off the all-important qualifier, the goddamn destination, and suddenly it means something altogether different and as he lifts her away from the counter, and her robe is slipping to the floor, and he's putting her back to the bathroom door instead he's thinking

pokud chcete, aby mi to, já to udělám.

and it's really not that funny at all, but somehow the thought makes him want to laugh, it makes his mouth quirk against hers even as he's kissing her, and kissing her, and kissing the humor right out of his mind and replacing it with something more like a wildfire.

Her candles are still burning. It's a fucking miracle she didn't drop her robe on one of them, because then they'd really have something to get excited about, then they'd really have a fire to put out.

She didn't, though, and the robe is safely on the floor, and her candles are still burning their steady orange flame, and he can see her by that light, can see how her skin glows in this light, how her pupils are huge and her hair is damp, and then he puts his hands under her ass and lifts her up, slides her back up along the steam-damp door, puts his mouth to the breasts he had touched and caressed and toyed with for so long in the bath, and this time he's not playing; no one's playing now.

It's not a game when he draws her nipple into his mouth, holds it gently between his teeth, flicks her with his tongue. It's not a game when he drags her hips against him, grinds her cunt against the taut muscles of his abdomen. It's not a game when he watches her, watches her face to see exactly what it is he's doing to her, and it's sure as hell not a game when the sight of her makes him so hot he has to let go her breath and stifle a curse on her mouth, and

suddenly he doesn't want to fuck her against the bathroom door after all. He wraps his arms around her and lifts her off the door, fumbles the knob open, and he's kissing her again now, they're kissing and he's blindly feeling his way down the short hall, and he misjudges the distance because he bumps into the bed, nearly trips and falls, catches himself at the last second and drops her on the bed instead, drops her at the foot of the bed and then takes her by the hips and moves her roughly, impatiently up to the center, and now he's moving over her and he's putting his mouth to her again as if he couldn't get enough of the taste of her skin, he's licking and nipping and kissing a trail from her navel to her throat, and when he gets there he takes her face between his hands, holds her face between his hands the way a man might hold some infinitely precious treasure, but instead of some lover's vow, he says:

"Děláš mě šílené."

The words are soft. Tender. The kiss is not; the kiss is a ravaging, another battle in the war, and his hand is leaving her face to drag heavy down her body, and when he finds the wetness between her legs he pants into her mouth the way a man dying of thirst might at the sight of water, and he tears himself from the kiss to add -- the softness and the tenderness coming apart at the seams now, the raw hunger beneath showing through the cracks as he strokes her, touches her, pushes his fingers into her,

"Nemůžu přestat nedostačující ty."

[Danicka] They don't share very much at all, when it comes right down to it. Danicka's childhood was spent in a two-story house with an attic up top, an oak tree in the back, lace curtains on the windows and a piano in the parlor and the smell of vanilla and sugar and fruit lingering in the kitchen. There were books everywhere, the banister gleaming with wood polish, and rainbows on the floor from the prisms in the windows. Her childhood was spent connected to one of the more powerful Shadow Lords in the sept at the time, and they were well-protected from any harm that could have befallen them. Laura had enough clout to safeguard them in so many ways. They protected each other.

She would never compare her childhood to Lukas's, just as she does not compare whatever misery or loneliness she has to what he experiences in his life. It really doesn't matter, in the end, if he talks to her about what is going on with his pack, or with the sept, or what the Wyrm has gotten up to this week. Danicka doesn't ask, doesn't seem to want to know, doesn't appear to suffer the lack of this knowledge whatsoever, but she does -- on occasion -- ask Lukas about himself. Usually she phrases the questions idly, frames them casually, as though expecting him to lie.

And then he tells her the truth, and it breaks her down a little. For all his pride and self-control there is, once in awhile, a bit of humility to him that she trusts. Once in awhile, there's a vulnerability to Lukas that she understands. In her way, she tries to give it back.

At times like this it's easiest for her, with his mouth so open and his hands so hot and his body -- the simple truth of the matter is that she veritably aches for his body, cannot name a part of him that she does not take some sort of delight in, however strange or unexpected that delight may be. The thought of shame does not so much as flit through her mind. She wants him. So she seeks him, moves towards him, opens her legs and her mouth and her entire self to this man to give him...she doesn't even know what, but she knows that's the point.

Because in the end she wants to ask very little of him in return, if anything.

At some point before he gets her to the bed she moans his name, or whispers it, or whimpers it, before her lips fall to his once again and stay there a little longer. Danicka begins devouring him like this, kissing him harder, sucking on his tongue and gasping in breath after breath of his air. She doesn't notice the way his lips curve, doesn't feel that smile that is so quickly burnt away. She opens her eyes briefly while they're kissing, and the way he looks, all shadow with the candlelight behind him, makes her eyes roll back in her head again. Held like this all she can do is writhe in his arms and kiss him until he steals his mouth from hers to give his lips and tongue and teeth to her breasts, instead.

That bite and the flick of his tongue over her nipple? Danicka cries out, her head thumping gently against the wood of the door, her fingers going into his wet hair and curling, stroking, encouraging. She rolls her hips as he moves her against his torso, as though this is going to satisfy her somehow. Danicka is lost, pressed between door and man, her back arching and her mouth open to let out ragged, demanding cries of

"Don't stop...Lukáš, baby, don't stop..."

which only makes him stop kissing and nibbling her breast so that when he swears it's only her tongue that takes it, that licks it from his very mouth and swallows the harshness of it, the savagery of it.

When he had her at the door Lukas almost laughed, and Danicka almost laughs when he bumps into her bed and drops her there. She didn't laugh the whole way down the hall, the negligible steps from bathroom to bedroom, just rode him upright while he felt his away along to a room lit only by whatever light comes in through the windows. When he drops her, though, Danicka lets out a huff of surprised laughter that turns into a plaintive gasp a moment later. He crawls over her, all hands and tongue and wild-sweet drags of his teeth. A full-body shudder goes through her while he is laying this adoration on her belly, dipping his tongue into her navel before moving upwards.

Her eyes open when he stops and, touching her face, informs her that she turns him into a lunatic. Danicka's pupils are blown, her eyes mostly black, and wraps her long, slim legs around his waist. With a tense of her thighs and a lock of her ankles she pulls him down onto her almost roughly, her arms still laid lazily across the pillows above her head. The words are soft, and tender, but the way she does this to him is not and the way he kisses her when he moves closer is not. She groans harder than before, sucks his lower lip into her mouth, and clutches her headboard with her hands, as though she needs to hold onto something that is not currently making fireworks go off in her skull.

A honeyed, mewling noise leaves her when his hand finds her wet for him, making this discovery anew as though she was not growing wet even before her robe slipped off the counter and onto the tiled floor. "Baby," she whimpers, breaking away from those rough panting breaths he's loosing to call him that again, to look up at him.

As he starts to fall apart.

As he starts fucking her with his hand.

As she squirms on top of the comforter on the made bed, clutching the headboard and rolling her hips in rhythm with the slide of his fingers that grows more and more practiced, more familiar, every goddamn time.

"You have me," Danicka gasps, looking up into his eyes. Her hands uncurl from the wood behind her head, her fingers spreading as they push into his hair. "Získat kondom, Lukáš," she pleads, a stroke of his fingers and a rub of his thumb on her clit making her arch her back and moan again. "Potřebuji tě uvnitř mě. Oh, má lásko, potřebuju cítit vy."

[Lukas]
Someday Lukas will tell Danicka that he loves it when she calls him baby, and it's not because of any particular significance attached to the term of endearment. It's because he's only ever heard her call him baby when she's naked, when she's hot and wet and wants to fuck. Someday he'll tell her just what it does to him when she calls him baby in that tone, that voice, just like someday he'll tell her how he loves the way she looks when her eyes are closed and her mouth is open, just like someday he'll tell her how he loves her shameless sexual appetite.

Someday.

Not today. Because this is only ever on his mind in the heat of the moment when words are nearly beyond his grasp; and when he's calm, when his head is level on his shoulders, it would never even occur to him to say such things. He's not a poet. He's not a romantic. He's a Shadow Lord and an Ahroun, a young man with an old soul, a werewolf with old, old blood and it's surreal, almost, how she can light him up so easily.

His breath rushes out as her legs wrap around him and pull him down to her, and he loves this, even: he loves her goddamn dexterity, the practiced clasp of her thighs; he loves that there's no shyness about her, no pretense of modesty. He goes with it. He goes with her, and it's a barely controlled topple, his weight barely caught on his knees and his hands before he's atop her, and her legs are wrapped around his waist, and her bed is heavenly soft and thick compared to his dingy single mattress at the Brotherhood, but the quality of her bed is the very last thing on his mind right now.

"Danič--" he begins, but then her mouth is on his.

And she's lifting her arms over her head to grasp at the headboard and he's kissing her because there's nothing else he can do when her mouth is on his like that. He's running his hand all over her body, the one that isn't between her legs. He's following the roll of her body from her hips to her breasts to her elbows to her wrists and back, and when she's like this she's all open to him, all lean grace and long limbs, all flawless expanses of pale skin that'll turn golden in the summer, if she's around that long, if he's alive that long.

They're not perfectly aligned; her legs are around his waist and he'd have to move up her body to be inside her, but that's all right; he's all right with fucking her with his hand. His fingers are inside her and she's slippery wet, and her hot flesh is clutching at his fingers, and his head is caving in and she's calling him baby again, in that tone, in that voice stripped raw with desire and he thinks what he always does:

(Oh my fucking god.)

He thinks that and she's squirming, she's rolling her hips against the rhythm of his hand and he has to bend his head back to her breasts, he has to silence himself, press his mouth to her skin, and all the effort of holding back, holding himself back finds its focus on her. He sucks at her breasts ferociously, one and then the other; he rubs her with his thumb and fucks her with his fingers and --

-- and she's looking at him with those wild eyes, all black pupil with a rim of color, like an animal's. And she's telling him something while her hands go into his hair

(and he loves this, too, and he'll tell her that someday, he will)

and the words don't make sense, they're just sounds, they're just her voice and he can feel the vibrations of them in her chest under his hand, under his mouth, and he closes his eyes because it's too much, it's too much, and he rubs his face against her breasts, sucks her nipple into his mouth, bites at it with his teeth while he thinks to himself, gently, gently, but her back is arching and she's moaning and he can't tell if it's his mouth or his hand, if it's pleasure or pain, and he lifts his head, and he's panting for breath.

That's when he finally realizes she told him to go get a condom so he can fuck her. She's saying this while she's pushing her hands into his hair and her legs are wrapped around him, and he doesn't know how she expects him to follow directions as given. So he surges up the distance to kiss her again, like he wanted to eat her alive, and then he's reaching to disentangle her legs from him, and his fingers are wet on her left knee, and he's still kissing her, and then saying against her mouth, "Nech mě jít, láska. Hned jsem zpátky."

He's sitting up on his knees then, reaching off the side of the bed and snagging open the drawer on her nightstand. It's too dark for him to see the writing on the boxes, so if there's more than one brand in there, one size, one flavor or pattern or whatever-the-fuck, it'll be a random choice tonight.

He grabs whatever's closest; and it's the same sort of controlled chaos as ever. Lukas empties packets all over the bedspread and picks one up and tears it open. He's moving back between her legs even before he has it on; he's still rolling the condom down when he's bending to her again and she's meeting him halfway and they're kissing, kissing like they couldn't breathe without the other, and he's touching her with his hand and then he's guiding himself to her, and he's lost track of how many times he's entered her tonight, but it doesn't matter because what does matter is that before tonight, the last time he was inside her was eleven days ago, was an eternity again.

"Ach -- bože," he gasps -- and it's not slow this time, it's not gradual, maddening; it's a single mindrending thrust and then he's buried in her, his hips tight against hers, and he's shifting his weight on his knees and bracing it on his hands, and he's looking down at her beneath him, and it's overwhelming; he has to close his eyes for a moment, to gather himself.

Then he starts moving, and you'd think after the fuck in the living room, the intensity of that; after the interlude in the bathroom and the warmth and the calm of that -- you'd think this could be slower, could be gentler, except it's not. It's the same madness it was in the living room, because it's been so long, or perhaps because of what she said, and because of what she thought he was going to do, and because he knows damn well he was never going to leave, and worse, could not have possibly brought himself to leave.

It is not slow, and it is not gentle. The pace builds precipitously, exponentially -- it's almost getting away from him and his hands are grasping at the coverlet, he's twisting his fingers into the blankets beneath her as though this might help him hold on. When he's above her like this what dim light comes from the city outside is on his face, and she can see his brow furrowed with effort, his eyes ablaze with want, can see him panting as he fucks her, the flickers of restrained expression that, on another man, might've long since dissolved into groans of pleasure.


[Danicka]
Someday, he might say, and No such thing, she would retort.

I love it, he might say: the endearment, the way she sounds, the way she looks, the feel of her, her hunger for him, her hands in his hair, everything, and I love you, she might say. (Someday.)

Láska, Lukas calls her, and Má láska, Danicka calls him, and they aren't the same thing.

(But they are.)

Nothing about Danicka is encouraging Lukas in this attempt of his to try and be gentle when it's thoroughly, utterly impossible. He was gentle with her when he grasped her hips and slid her off of his body in the living room. He was gentle with her when he fondled her in the bathtub. She is gentle with him when her hands slide into his hair, but that's the extent of their ability to go slowly or carefully with one another at this point. All he knows is that she's moaning and arching her back, and all she knows is that if he is not inside of her in the next sixty seconds she's going to lose her damned mind.

At least her legs move easily when he unlaces the knot they form around his waist. Danicka looks up at him and strokes his hair, kisses his face, licks his lips, giving no other response to his words. She continues to run her hands over him as he's digging through her nightstand drawer, which is surprisingly simplistic: he finds the same Trojans that she threw at him the first time he fucked her, incredibly thin but otherwise pretty basic, a good standby for a woman who apparently needs to keep a half-dozen in her purse.

For whatever reason.

Danicka makes a sound nothing short of gleeful when he gets back between her legs, a grin lighting up her face, not shy and not timid. Her legs go back around him even while he's trying to get the fucking condom on his body, the smile fading only when it has to be cast aside to make way for the whimpers vibrating her lips underneath his. Maybe it wouldn't be like this if they saw each other every day, or even every few days, but a week and a half or more in between encounters leaves them both starved for this. For each other. Danicka wraps her arms around him just as firmly as her legs and pulls him towards her, a hard groan rocketing out of her throat when he enters her. As though it was a lifetime ago that he was last inside her, not a half hour or less.

There's only a moment or two that they stay like that, Lukas buried deep inside of her with his eyes closed and Danicka's head thrown back, gasping once, twice...

Without even seeing each other, with nothing more than the guidance of muscular tension and whatever bizarre and unexpected intimacy they have, they move at the same time. Lukas slides out of her, not very far, mind, and rocks back into her. Danicka rolls her hips in a firm, slow circle, and though these two things happen at the same time they find their rhythm and if the sound that leaves the woman underneath Lukas is any indication, she's decided that it's good, it's very good.

That is about all the gentleness or slowness they have left in them, though. The next thrust is faster, is made with all his strength, and Danicka holds onto the hair on the back of his head with her right hand and holds onto his right shoulderblade with her left hand and watches him as though the look on his face is driving her pleasure further just as much as his cock, as the pulsing of his hips between her thighs, as the flex of his arms, the brush of his chest on her breasts. She watches his eyes and not just to connect, not just to be there with him but to know where he is, to know how hard it is for him to hold on.

Shut up, he'd said to her, and Danicka had later murmured I'm falling in love with you.

She lifts her head up from the pillow to kiss his mouth as he fights not to grunt like an animal, not to groan like a man overwhelmed, not moan with the same shameless, helpless desire that Danicka does. She kisses him ravenously, and tenderly, and with a brutal sweetness that is wild and tamed at once and when her mouth parts from his she does not simply toss her head back, arch her spine, and moan again.

Her hand is still in his hair, her eyes still on his, his cock still slamming into her, their joining and their tangling disrupting the once-made bed. Danicka is interrupted when she speaks by gasping, by crying out whenever he leaves her only to come back, as though over and over she is dying and being resurrected.

"I've never -- ah! -- I've never said that -- ohgod -- to anyone before," she tells him, and strangely the words are quiet and the outcries loud, one part of her secret and one part of her open and both of them given over to him tonight. He knows what she means. He has to know, as her legs tighten and pull him in deeper again, hold him closer. "Lukáš, slibuju...ohmyfucking god!" she breaks in, and bucks against him, her voice losing coherence, gasping out only: "It's okay...all of you...all of you, Lukášek...Ach, máte pocit, že dobrá..."


[Lukas]
The things she says.

The things she says to him: he wishes he could tell her to let it go; he wishes he could tell her please just shut up and fuck me; he wishes he could tell her she was tearing him to pieces, or any of the things they've told each other before, but he can't.

The words simply aren't in him anymore.

She's saying these things and they light up all his dials; and it's arousal but it's also something like shock; something like inability to cope. He's overwhelmed. He's overloading. There's too much, too fast, and when she tells him he feels so good, says it like that, he leans down to her and shuts her up the only way he knows how:

kisses her, ravenously, tenderly, with a brutal sweetness that's more brutality than sweetness.

Time pulls apart -- he couldn't say how long this goes on if he tried. Time separates into quanta measured not in seconds or minutes but in breaths, in heartbeats, in the sounds she makes into his mouth; in pulses of his body into hers.

When it ends he leans into her. His elbows unlock and he sinks down atop her, his brow to the counterpane beside her ear, his temple to her cheek, and his arms are sliding under her; he's bringing her up against him and his hand is opening over her ass to lift her hips against him, to tilt her hips and drive deeper into her. His breath is hot on her shoulder; his eyes are closed and he's thinking

oh god. oh my god.

and he's thinking

why the fuck do i want you so much

and he's thinking

(potřebuju tento žena.)

and then he's not thinking at all because despite the closeness of their bodies, the unrelenting tenderness of this embrace, their bodies are still coming together with the same fevered speed, the same unflinching force. Circuits are fusing in his head; fuses are blowing, and when his orgasm hits everything lights up like a phone switchboard on christmas eve, brilliant as a supernova.

Every last one of his nerves are afire, flaming to ash. He's holding her the way he always does, like he'll never let go. He's holding onto her and slamming into her and holding himself deep inside her and his breath is shuddering in her ear, and once or twice it's almost a word, a stripped-bare whisper -- it's almost her name, or láska, or a curse.

Sometimes there's no difference between the three, to Lukas.

When he starts to return to himself, the rigid flex of his body begins to let go. He sinks onto her, heavy, his weight pressing her into the mattress, pressing her thighs apart around his body. His arms tighten, though, rather than releasing -- almost-imperceptibly but unmistakably. He raises his head and his mouth finds hers and it's the very first thing he does, the very first thing he can think to do: he kisses her, little more than a touching of his mouth to hers, a breathing, almost-motionless point of contact, very tender, very gentle, even as his heart is still hammering against her, and his breathing heaves his ribcage as though he'd just run a marathon; as though he'd just run a thousand miles.


[Danicka]
Lukas has told her to shut up, and she stopped fucking him. He has told her that she's tearing him to pieces and all she did was throw her head back and scream. He's said it all, he's begged her not to make him say it, he's bitten back not only words but even incoherent expressions of what it is she does to him when they're like this, as though so much as moaning in her ear would only drag him further down this rapidly spiraling, sliding, dangerous slope.

It's getting to the point where he cannot handle hearing even that she wants him, that what he's doing feels good -- feels amazing, if the way she drops her hand to the bedspread and grabs a hold of it is any indication -- or that she will now say (and gasp) his name when they're in bed together, or up against a wall, or on the floor. She didn't used to, not until that night at the W when he dropped to his knees and slung her legs over his shoulders and ate her out until she screamed his name.

Moaning for him now, rolling her hips over and over to meet and move with his thrusts, Danicka gasps the air out of his mouth when he kisses her, licks his tongue, nips his lower lip with his teeth. It's brutal, and that is okay because there is that strange sweetness behind it.

As happens so often with them, when Danicka lays on her back and looks up at Lukas as though she wants to be nowhere more than she wants to be right where is, as though there is nothing more that she wants than for him to lay on top of her, Lukas folds over her and...with a somewhat surprising bid for greater nearness...holds her as close to his body as he can get her. Her hand leaves the bedspread and touches his back, holding him return as she is brought up.

She doesn't tell him now that she likes the way his hand covers her ass or that if he were to touch her there outside of the bedroom she would shiver, clothed or not. She doesn't tell him now that one of the only times she feels comforted by his presence is when he wraps around her like this, so utterly, folds her in as though to be one with her. She is thinking these things and not saying them aloud, just making small, soft noises in his ear as he ...fucks her.

"More," Danicka whimpers, one of the only times she's ever said this to him in English. Her fingernails dig into him, and for once when he drives inside her and then goes rigid, his face buried against her and his breath tremulous and wordless, it sets off some internal chain reaction in her body that makes her groan aloud, that makes her rake her fingernails down his shoulderblades, that makes her come.

She can't remember the last time she came because the man she was fucking came, can't remember the last time that this sent her over the edge. Her orgasm is not as intense as he has seen before, but she clings to him and arches her back, writhing almost violently as it goes on...and on...rolling over her in waves that seem like they're never going to crash. Danicka doesn't make a sound. Her eyes are closed. Her mouth is open. Tiny aftershocks of pleasure ripple through her even after she begins to come down and relax, breathing heavily, or as heavily as she can when so much of his weight is on her.

His lips find hers, softer than any sex they've had yet, and she responds by tipping her head and nuzzling him, rubbing her nose against his cheek, stopping only when she presses her brow against the side of his neck. And then she's still, doing nothing more than catching her breath with him.


[Lukas] Lukas doesn't have a dancer's grace or anything so studied as that, but he does have a certain animal ease of motion. Perhaps it's the assurance of strength; perhaps it's his half-feral blood showing through. Either way, his movements always carry a sense of confidence about them, as though he never does anything he doesn't intend to --

but we've been here before, and we've seen what a lie that is.

And here it's a lie again: because there's no grace in him now. His hands on her face are gentle but heavy, incapable of fine manipulations. He lays his weight on her thoughtlessly until, of course, he thinks of it -- braces himself on his elbows instead.

Now there's a tiny sliver of space between them, enough room for her to breathe. She's just catching her breath and he's just breathing with her, and it's impossible to tell how much of the dampness of his hair is from the bath, and how much from his sweat.

He moves, very slightly, very slowly. His mouth trails down her neck, past the fluttering of her pulse. He kisses her shoulder, her collarbone. He presses his lips to the center of her breastbone, and then his arms tighten around her, bend her up against him; he lays his head against her chest, between her breasts, and listens to her heart. He listens to her breathing.

He doesn't want this to end.
He closes his eyes.

[Danicka] "Who is that?"
"Lukášek."
"What's he doing in my clothes?"
"He threw up."
"...What?"
"I made koláce and he ate too many and then he threw up and tatínek put him in your clothes."
"That's so pathetic."
"No, he's not."
"Excuse me?"
"..."
"Say that again."
"He's not...pathetic."
"Go upstairs."
"But...but they're still here."
"Then you'll have to be quiet, won't you?"

Often in the aftermath, one or the other of them will speak, given enough time. The words come in Czech, his first language and the one close to her heart and history. This was the language they spoke in when they were bathing together, at least until -- oddly enough -- they delved into the intersection of their early lives, before Vladislav's Change, before they knew what Lukas was going to become. As far as anyone knew then, the three children climbing trees and sliding in their socks down the upstairs hallway were all Kinfolk, were all going to grow up to be mates and supporters.

The timing was surreal. Flickers of what would become Rage began to show in those crystalline eyes of his, and his family drew away, pulled back into themselves. Around the very same time, Danicka's elder brother Changed, and the Musils essentially went into a social lockdown. No one came to that house anymore. Even when Laura and Vladik were not present their combined Rage seemed to saturate the air, live in the walls, weigh the very boughs of the oak tree down.

Danicka, for her part, was about ten years old. She was in fifth grade and she liked art. She was finally tall enough to reach the pedals on the piano. She no longer asked any questions about her half-sisters. She worked harder. She got quieter. Her eyes became more canny. The time that Lukas knew her was over, and something vital had gone out of her life at the same time. The events were unrelated. The correlation was chilling.

She could be a dancer or a musician or a teacher. She could be an artist, a poet, a hundred things that she is not. Her identity and passion is not the job she held with Sokolovs for so long. Her identity is an enigma and her passion seems to be in this, in accepting Lukas right where he is even before he lifts his weight from her. She lifts one hand and wipes away a drop of water, or sweat, from his forehead with the backs of her knuckles.

"It's okay," she whispers, "you can rest on me."

They both know this is a lie; he would crush her if he allowed her body to accept all of his weight. But she murmurs this with wholehearted affection, even though if he does lay on her that her entire body is going to gradually go numb and she is not going to be able to breathe. However, when he kisses his way softly down her neck, strokes his lips along her skin like a caress, and then lays down his head beside her breasts, her hands follow him tenderly.

Danicka's hands, warm as sun-heated stones or warm as a girl in summer and not in late March, fall to the top of his head and begin to slowly stroke his hair. There is nothing short of tenderness in this, nothing short of total acceptance. He closes her eyes but hers stay open, watching him from where she lays against the pillows, as though it would be fine, perfectly fine, for him to fall asleep right now.

She stays quiet.

[Lukas] The reality is Lukas barely remembers their childhood together.

He barely remembers his childhood then, period, and this is as much a factor of his young age as it is a deliberate choice -- a way for him to separate the then from the now, the time when it seemed he might have a semi-normal life with high school football and prom and grad nights and college and graduate school and, eventually, a Productive Job in some big city somewhere; a wife, possibly Garou, most likely kin; children. Another generation of Kvasničkas, that old old bloodline growing up in a new crop of descendants.

That is what his future seemed to be for a while. He did not have an Athro for a mother; worse, his parents had fallen out of favor with the tribe. They did not have connections, money, favors to call in. They did not have a way to tell that Lukas would become what Lukas became, and he did not have the benefit of a lifetime's worth of indoctrination.

When it happened, when it became obvious and inevitable that he would Change, one life ended for Lukas and a second began. There was almost nothing in common from one to the other, and it didn't seem ... worth it to hold onto the memories of the first.

So Lukas forgot about the stories his father would tell Anežka and him in their old rattling car on the way to school. He forgot about his first bicycle, which was secondhand but in good repair, which had noisy solid-centered wheels, which his mother painstakingly cleaned up until the hard plastic seat was snow white and the red paint gleamed, except where it had chipped off, which his father attached clattering training wheels to, and, six months later, took off. He forgot about the afternoons at the Musil household, has only the dimmest memories of the oak tree in the back. He forgot about eating so many koláče that he threw up, and had to borrow Vladislav's clothes; he forgot how quietly pleased he was to be wearing Vladik's clothes, because it was a great honor, because Vladik was a big boy, and far too important to play with Lukášek and Anežka (because bossy big-sister Anežka was always Anežka, never Ani or Anežek even when she was young) and the frail little blonde girl that was his sister.

Lukas forgot, utterly, about how that afternoon Vladislav came home after all, and how Danicka was nowhere to be seen for some time thereafter. He may not even have noticed at the time. He may have been plotting to eat just one more koláč, no matter what the fate of the other three he crammed down.

--

The reality is, even if Lukas did remember, he might still never make the connection. His early life was entirely too different from Danicka's, and no matter how thoroughly he might have forgotten it, they were still his formative years, his formative experiences, and he carries them always beneath his skin.

He told her how his family's abrupt fall from grace must have shaped, in some way, his attitude toward wealth and privilege. What he has not told her, and perhaps doesn't realize himself, is how the rest of it matters, too. How his stern, scholarly father -- and his love and his respect for his father -- must have influenced his personal ideals of masculinity, of honor, of what it is to be a good man. How his mother's loyalty and patience must have shaped his own. How his sister, who was always Anežka and always, even now -- even after his parents have lost their authority and begun to defer to him as the Ahroun, the Garou, the Shadow Lord head of the family -- his bossy, too-eager-to-help big sister must have shaped his understanding of sibling relationships, and sibling love, and what those of one blood and one root would do for one another.

All of which is to say: he could not imagine a family where an elder sibling would not use his age and authority to protect the younger. He could not imagine a family where the Garou sibling did not protect the kin.

--

Curious, though, how for all their differences, all the ways their childhoods and upbringings and formative years were wildly divergent, they have this in common. They have a certain instinct towards family; toward those that mattered, that were worth it. They have a protectiveness toward that which is theirs.

Tamed.

And there's nothing but acceptance and tenderness in her, in the way she cradles him afterward; and there's nothing but genuine attachment and protection in him, in the way he lies over her and holds her. And for a long time, she's quiet, and he's quiet, and his breathing is settling down into silence, and he could almost be sleeping.

But he's not. He moves, at length. He turns, and he presses his mouth to the center of her chest, as though he would kiss her beating heart if he could. He breathes her in. He breathes her out. He lifts his head a little and looks at her, his arms loosening at last -- some slight degree, at least.

"Sometimes the things you say hurt me," he tells her quietly, and without censure or blame, "because I know they're the truth. And you have the courage to say it, but I don't even have the courage to hear it."

Lukas bows his head again. He kisses her skin, presses his brow and the high bridge of his nose to her breastbone. Silence for a little while. When he speaks again it's a raw whisper, as though he could only manage to say what he says if he barely says it at all.

"Kristus, Danička, jste natolik drahé, aby mě."

[Danicka] He can not, and if Danicka has her way he never will, imagine the sort of life she had in that house with its rainbows, and wood polish, and music, and the oak tree. His life changed so completely along with the rest of him that he may has well have died and come back as a new person, another son, a separate brother. The life she was given when she was born --

"She will not Change."
"Give her here."
"She needs to --"
"I will feed her. Hand her here."

-- is the life she still has, and she has no desire to tell Lukas about the things he missed. The person she was in school, the parties, the prom. She does not want to tell him about the things he has forgotten because they do not fit into his life now, not whatsoever. She does not want him to know about Laura, or Miloslav, or Vladik, or what it was like having an Athro for a mother, what it was or is like to watch the effects of time and tribe ravage her father and know: that is me. In twenty years, maybe less, that is me. Til I die. She remembers how he was with his sister on those afternoons and evenings and knows from who he is now and things he has said that he should never find out what her life was really like.

This is not self-protective, at all. She will hide from him, and lie to him, and she will do it every moment to spare him from facing that. Underneath that perhaps she will do it all to keep him from seeing the weakness and fractures that exist in her, but at least as far as intent goes: Danicka will never tell him about her life, her family, her reality, because it will hurt him. Because it is the truth.

There was once a time when Vladik played with her, and protected her, and hid with her in the closet to hold her because of what was happening in the other room. There was a time when he kissed her hair and told her it would be all right, he was going to be like Mother, he was going to be so strong, all she had to do was wait and he would show her. And Danicka, at age three, choked on tears and snot and terror and nodded when Vladislav demanded that she answer him, that she believe him, his eight-year-old hands tightening on her upper arms, digging in his fingernails. Did she believe him? Yes, Vladik, I trust you.

And they left the closet and washed her face, and they hid under the bed but pretended that it was a game. Somewhere in the house, something made of wood snapped, and the floor shook, and Vladik told Danicka to laugh. So she laughed.

Lukas has forgotten. And Danicka can't.

He lays over her now, protective -- because someone taught him how to be a man. He is patient with her and her withdrawn way of coping with things that are impossible otherwise -- because someone taught him how to do this. He is Garou; she is his Kin if not his family, and he knows the way to be with her because somewhere along the line he learned, he was taught, and he is and forever will be shaped by these lessons that go as deep as muscle, as deep as bone.

Danicka has no thought of claiming him, calls him hers only in the most transient of English terms or in murmurs that only leave her when he is inside of her. He is Garou; she is Kin, and he is not 'hers'. She cannot say that she strokes his hair and safeguards him as he lies there because she learned this at a young age or watched it growing up. She looks down at his dark hair and believes with utter certainty that one day he will break things in her home and make the floor tremble and yet...and yet so would any other, and there is no escape from that part of her existence, anyway.

At least with him she has some affection, at least she feels something, at least for now she does not feel so very alone when she is with him, and that is something. He may be a monster, or will become one, but at least he is the devil she knows.

...Which is all very nice, and helps her maintain the brick and mortal walls around herself that this fatalistic faith has built. But when she gets right down to it, in times like this she cannot think very long on the life her father lived, or on the home she came from, or on the brutal and terrifying existence she has always expected awaits her til the end of her life.

She thinks that his hair is so soft, and she likes watching it flick across the paleness of her fingers. She thinks that he is so very warm, and she would not mind it very much at all if he stayed there, if he came to her bed every night and fucked her into senselessness and slept beside her, holding her or not. She thinks that despite everything it makes her feel like a fourteen year old with her heart pattering when he smiles, and she can't quite breathe normally when he laughs. She thinks that it's hard to tell what aches more: not seeing him for days on end or seeing him again when he calls, or shows up, or she runs into him someplace.

Danicka closes her eyes and strokes his hair, and does not notice when he looks at her after kissing her chest. She is beyond drowsy at this point. Her drunkenness is fading, but the warmth from the bath and the exertion of their sex has her sleepy and content. She does not think about tomorrow. She so rarely does.

But he speaks. Her eyes stay closed, but her hand is still moving through his hair, slow and regular, the backs of her fingernails making tracks through his wet hair. Danicka only stops when he bows his head, bringing both of her palms gently to the back of his crown. She does not hold him there but simply rests her hands on him, cradling him to her.

"Shh," she murmurs, elongating the slow sound, breathing it past her lips. "Chápu, Lukášek. Vím."

Her fingers begin stroking again. She has nothing more to say, not tonight at least. Tomorrow perhaps they will regain their footing, their distance, the space between them that allows them both to survive this but can only be maintained if they do not spend too much time in one another's presence. Tomorrow. It is some time, though, before Danicka kisses him -- infinitely soft -- as he withdraws from her. It is no time at all before he rolls back over and into her arms again, this time beneath sheets and thick comforter.

It could mean nothing at all that for the first time since all this began she sleeps with her back against his chest, curled up on her left side, his arm over and around her, the backs of her thighs on the tops of his, his breath against the back of her neck.

Mohlo by to znamenat všechno.