[Danicka] Earlier this evening, Danicka got a text from her roommate informing her that Lee was staying at her studio again. The text was rather explicit on what Danicka should do with the empty apartment, and so sometime around midnight, Lukas gets a text, too. It's rather simple:
You want to come over?
[Lukas] It's about 20-some-odd minutes before Danicka gets a reply. It just reads:
Yes.
About seven minutes after that there's a ring on her intercom. He couldn't have been far away.
[Danicka] She is too careful, at this time of night and even in this area of the city, to simply press the button on the intercom to let Lukas into the building. Her exchange with him is simple, serving only to confirm his identity, and then there's a buzz and a click as the doors unlock briefly for him to enter. There is almost no one in the elevator. The ascent is quick, uninterrupted, and silent. There is no one in the hallway on the twenty-third floor, the gold-colored letters and numbers on the doors glinting in the dim sconce light.
When he knocks, however he knocks, the door opens and Danicka grabs his hand before she says anything else, tugging him inside. "I want to show you something. C'mon."
[Lukas] There's a light rain outside. It's a friday night. The city is alive. She's a few blocks from the heart of it, but Riverfront's high-priced property, and from her huge curving windows she can see the magnificent mile in all its glittering glory. Spreading away behind and to all sides, the rest of Chicago's urban sprawl: vast and flat, a city at the edge of a lake, in the middle of a great grasslands that had once seen the passage of mammoths and inland oceans.
Lukas is in a crisp shirt, dark-washed jeans. He pushes his shoes off his feet as Danicka tugs him in. His hand is faintly damp from the weather, but warm. "What do you want to show me?" he asks, curious, amused. He nudges the door closed behind him.
[Danicka] When Lee's text arrived, Danicka had not been at home. That is why it had taken her a few hours before she contacted Lukas, and when she did that? She was walking, quickly, from the train station to her apartment, quickly because of the wet outside, quickly because she wanted to get home soon, even if she just barely beat Lukas there.
She just barely beat Lukas here. Her hair is still slightly damp. At one point it was straightened but is getting some wave back to it because of the weather. She is wearing a short, flippant white skirt and a slinky green halter top, the ties around her neck like long, loose ribbons of fabric down her back. It glitters slightly as she moves, as the light hits her here and there. Her heels are still on; she just got here, perhaps five minutes ahead of him, and god knows what she's been doing in that time.
Her cheeks are flushed. "I got your books," she says, delightedly tugging on him backwards, pulling him into the hall and laughing.
[Lukas] Always, Danicka's hand feels fragile to Lukas. It doesn't stop him from firming his grasp on her when she tugs him. He follows her down the hall, quickening his gait, trotting a step or two to catch up to her at the bend in the hall where the short corridor to her room door opens up. There he wraps his right arm around her waist. Her heels give her a few inches of height, bring her closer to the ideal height, half-a-head shorter than the man, but when he lifts her against his side her feet still clear the floor by a good six inches. He presses a kiss to her smooth cheek. He hasn't shaven in a while; it's a bristly sort of kiss. Three steps later he sets her down, and they're at the door to her room.
"Did you?" Lukas breaks into a grin. "Good, I was getting worried. I had to write your address from memory. I was in a hurry."
[Danicka] Her hand is going to feel fragile to him til the last time he holds it, whether he is wasting away from some Weaver-born disease and she is still vital and strong or whether that time is tonight. Lukas will never look at her body and not know, on some level, just how goddamn breakable she is... at least in comparison to him. At least, that's what Danicka thinks. She turns around and he can see the curves of her shoulderblades, not so sharp that it says I haven't been eating.
She has. She's been doing rather well, all things considered. All things such as a trip home, all things such as the impetus for that trip if not the reason for it, all things such as the fact that not so very long ago she was shot. Breakable, breakable girl, she is. She knows. She knows better than most.
Her breath shoots into her lungs when he abruptly picks her up, not out of fear but possibly just simple excitement. She presses against him when he kisses her cheek, a small smile curving her lips, her hair curtaining her face. "Come on," she says, eager and impatient as a child, when he puts her down.
Her bedroom door is open and she pulls him in, her heels denting the carpet that usually never feels shoes, his or hers or anyone else's. Her bed is unmade, there are street clothes in a small pile by the nightstand, A Short History of Myth lying open on its pages on the nightstand's surface, a stack of college viewbooks and pamphlets about different majors shoved against one corner because Danicka still does not have a desk.
And in between her windows there is a five-shelf ladder-style bookcase of the same blond wood as her bed and nightstand. The books he sent to her are already on it, dusted, arranged alphabetically. They don't take up all the shelves. The lower ones are open, waiting for...god only knows what. More books.
They are not completely open. Stacked, rather than straight up, are the two books he's bought her, the spines cracked, obviously read.
Danicka bounces on the balls of her feet. Her skirt bounces with her, as do the ties of her shirt, as do the assets covered by the shirt. She doesn't care. She is beyond gleeful. "I get to put textbooks on it, too."
[Lukas] She's beyond gleeful. Lukas is quieter, always had been, except of course when he wasn't. When he was young -- of an age to begin collecting this small treasure trove of well-read paperbacks and hardbacks -- he was far noisier than she ever was. He ran shrieking through her house, yelled as he climbed her oak tree, got scolded, got spanked, went right back to it. It would have been hard, then, to predict the controlled, reined adult he was become.
Still, there's open, simple pleasure in his face as he sees she's already unboxed his books, dusted them, put them up. He goes to the bookshelf unhesitatingly and looks it over, putting out a hand to brush over the spines of the books briefly. They're not in perfect shape -- not even close. They're in the shape one might expect books to be in after having been read by a small, active child, though there's a clear progression across the years. His first books are battered, the pages threatening to fall out, his name on the inner flap scrawled large and inexpert. Toward the end, the books are longer and more complex; his name printed or signed with increasing skill.
Here's A Wrinkle in Time. Here's Black Beauty and The Black Stallion. Here's Where the Red Fern Grows, and The Magician's Nephew, and The Black Cauldron, and Ramona the Pest.
A Proud Taste for Scarlet and Miniver.
The Devil's Arithmetic.
Bambi.
The Call of the Wild.
Superfudge.
Greek Myths and Heroes.
Alice in Wonderland.
Fantastic Voyage.
Summer of the Swans.
The Giver.
And a second copy, somewhat tattered, of The Little Prince.
Lukas turns to her. It would be inaccurate to say his smile makes him look young, or that it lights up his face or ... except in a way it does. He smiles at Danicka, not bothering to hide it, not caring. "I love you," he says, just like that, when what he really meant to tell her was, "I didn't even get a chance to see them before I just boxed them up and sent them off. I forgot I even had half of these."
[Danicka] While Lukas crosses the room to examine the books on the shelves, Danicka goes to sit at the edge of her bed and watch him, crossing her legs at the knee as he will never see her in public and rarely in private. It allows her to look at his back as he scans the titles while still reaching down to unstrap her heels. She doesn't set them neatly aside. They end up somewhere near the brochures from the University of Chicago.
On the shelf they are all mixed up, arranged by the last name of the author and not the age of the reader. Here his name is printed, the accents careful. Here his name is scrawled; he was closer to adolescence then. Earlier she went through them all. She thought to herself, scanning his name over and over, that she could see the Rage growing even in the way his hand had to have held and moved the pencil, the pen.
Her books are still on the nightstand's shelf, at least for now.
When Lukas turns, she's barefoot, and smiling, and leaning back on her bed, resting her weight on her palms. Her legs are crossed now at the ankle, the faintest impressions of the straps lining her feet. His smile is youthful, and unfettered, and hers is sort of shy, almost quirky. They don't smile like this elsewhere. It isn't even conscious. It's just that nowhere else do either of them seem quite so...
...happy.
I love you, he says, and her smile broadens, the beginning of a laugh not quite making it even past the stage where it is simply breath. "I'm sure we can work something out so you can visit them," she says, grinning. "C'mere. I have been given instructions."
[Lukas] She speaks of visitation rights, as though his books were pets or children given over to her. He laughs himself -- the same exhale barely molded into sound.
"I'm happy for you to have them."
As she asks, he goes to her. Her heels are dropped now. She wasn't kidding about college. There are brochures everywhere. She can't seem to decide on a major. I don't know who I am, she said once. She doesn't know what she wants to be, what she wants to study -- where her life goes from here. It's understandable. All her life so far she's been one thing and one alone: owned. She belonged to someone else. She was told over and over, no, never, not possible, don't think about it.
Sometimes he knows why she changed the subject when he asked her if she wanted him to claim her. To save her from her brother, he said; it may even be what the thought, but the truth is, has always been:
I wanted her from the moment I saw her.
Her legs are crossed at the knee, which is as elegant and provocative as what she's wearing, and the shoes she just dropped. Golden, her hair slips between his fingers when he reaches out to run his fingers through it. She tells him she has instructions, and he's not so foolish as to not guess the direction this is headed.
"By whom?" he asks, smiling. He reaches up to start to undo the buttons of his shirt.
[Danicka] She was told: If you do not go now, we will not speak again.
And she was struck hard across the face. It was between Thanksgiving and Christmas, in that dizzied time of preparation for the various solstice-centered celebrations of various religions and cultures.
Her legs are crossed at the ankle, one calf slid down the opposite shin as soon as her heels were off. Someone told her, at some point, that it was just as inappropriate for a young lady -- or any lady -- to cross her legs at the knee as it was for a lady to sit with her knees apart in any fashion. Her toes are covered in a clear gloss, as they always are, because colors like red or orange or pink or blue or...any colors, really...are for harlots and whores.
Words that Danicka says have no meaning, none at all, at least not to her.
The smile on her lips softens as he moves to her, expectant and yet aching, as though she just realized that he's over there when that is the last place he should be other than in a grave somewhere. She doesn't nuzzle his palm as he touches her hair, remaining still, patiently allowing him to stroke her hair, run his fingers though and feel the remainders of raindrizzle on the strands. Danicka doesn't move to untie her top. She watches him unbutton his shirt.
"Lee told me she's sleeping at the studio tonight. I was given a rather compelling suggestion as to how to take advantage of this 'opportunity', as she called it."
[Lukas] Lukas laughs again, softer than the last. He unfastens the buttons quickly and deftly, but without hurry. No undershirt tonight. Contrasted against white, his skin beneath the shirt seems swarthy indeed, dusted in dark hair.
"I like your roommate," he says. He's on the last two buttons now, "but sometimes I don't know how to speak to her. I've never had a girlfriend's-roommate either, particularly not one who happens also to be kin."
The last button, and then nothing. He drops his shirt behind him, pale on the floor. It's nearly a half-moon outside. Its glow makes the shirt all but fluoresce in the darkness. No belt tonight either; he starts on the button and the zipper of his jeans.
"Turn around," quieter, "so I can undo your ties."
[Danicka] Danicka does not have the tan she has from walking around the city in sleeveless shirts. She has the tan she has from spending time on the sundeck at this building, wearing a bikini. She has the tan she has from lying on her stomach and untying the strings, keeping lines from appearing across her shoulders and back. Most of Danicka's skin is the same warm color, her hair only lightened further by the sunshine, her eyes that much more vivid. She was made to be seen in spring and summer, and he wanted her in winter, when she was nowhere near the zenith he sees her at now.
If the way she watches him undress is any indication, she likes to look at him. She likes the way the muscles move under the skin covering his shoulders. She likes the flex of his pectorals, the lines of his arms. Men are considered the visual ones, but Danicka's breath quickens as he takes off his clothes, as his hands fall to the waist of his jeans.
"She's my second roommate...ever," Danicka says, huffing a laugh, her eyes trailing down his torso, mentally caressing the thin line of hair from navel to the termination point where he's covered by his clothes. Still covered. Her teeth go on edge for a spare second; it passes. She relaxes, leaning back onto her elbows, her back arched slightly. "I just don't think she's ever had to cope with Rage before."
She'll get used to it, she thinks, but doesn't say it. There is no way to say it that wouldn't sound resigned. So Danicka keeps her voice silent but her lips parted after that. She disobeys. She doesn't turn around.
[Lukas] Danicka is very obedient.
That's what he thought the first night. Come here. Take off your clothes. Do this. Do that. Obedient, well-trained; fucking boring. He was disappointed, until he told her to ... what did he tell her? It doesn't matter. She didn't do it. She put her hands on his shoulders and climbed him instead, like a goddamn tree, and ...
She's been disobedient ever since. If obedience were ever a question between them, which it isn't. He isn't commanding her. She isn't really disobeying.
When his jeans are open he pauses a moment to take his wallet out and find a condom stashed within. This he clips between his teeth, holding it in his mouth as he hooks his thumbs underneath both sets of waistbands and pushes his lowerwear off wholesale. The thin trail of hair she imagined -- remembers -- is exposed now, running down from his navel to his groin, where he's half-hard already at the very thought of her.
Shamelessly, he touches himself, strokes himself as he looks at her. Her body now and not her face: watching her as she lays back on her elbows. His breathing changes as he hardens in his hand. He takes the condom packet from his mouth and drops it on the bed beside her.
Liadan is no longer a topic of conversation. He's not very polite about that. He doesn't reply to her last comment; he doesn't tell her we'll talk about it later. Lukas just forgets to reply, altogether.
Instead: quieter still, "Don't you want me to undress you?"
[Danicka] That night he didn't say a word. He pulled her hands to the waist of his jeans, and she'd paused, and then -- then she was on him, wrapping around him, kissing him like the world was ending. The way they'd kissed, or the way she was naked and hot and against him, made him nearly kill her, made him throw her from him to the bed and get to the other side of the room before the world ended, before he ended it.
Sometimes it's still like that: they kiss like it's the last thing they'll ever do. Sometimes it's the other way around, and they kiss as though they're creating something. Each other, maybe.
Lukas, coming to this apartment, needs never to worry about condoms. But he has one, and Danicka makes no comment about the stash in her nightstand, which takes up most of the drawer, as though she expects to get fucked there. He doesn't know that she just kept the boxes there to put a few (if half a dozen is a 'few') in her purse before going out. He doesn't know that after the first time he slept in her bed, fucked her in her bed, she started taking them out of the boxes. Anything to get him inside of her faster.
And yet when Lukas shoves the rest of his clothes to the floor, Danicka doesn't so much as start wiggling out of her skirt. She just lays back and watches him, reclining as languidly as she did in that armchair in New York. He's half-hard and she doesn't question it or raise an eyebrow; they've barely touched each other since that goddamn night, even when he slept over, slept behind her, held her against his chest the way he did. Her breathing isn't faster now just because of the way he looks, naked and wanting, with the windows and the city light and thin moonlight behind him.
Danicka lays back further, lifting her arms off the mattress and reaching for him. The sheets are white and rumpled, the comforter tossed over to the foot of the bed. She lies sideways on the wrinkled fitted sheet, her hair spread behind her, and grasps at his bicep, the hair on the back of his head, trying to pull him to her when she has nothing to hold onto, no clothes, just his body.
"You can if you want," she whispers, "but it's not a prerequisite."
[Lukas] So Lukas leans over her where she lays. Her mattress is mostly bare: just a fitted sheet, the comforter pushed aside. There are windows in her room. They have a fantastic view, an amazing view of the city that she pays for. His room has a view of a goddamn alley. Her windows looks out across the river. She can see the sunrise from her living room.
His room ... has a view of the goddamn alley.
It doesn't matter. It never did matter, where they were. He moves onto the bed over her, straddling her thighs. She pulls at him where she can, his biceps and his hair, his shoulder, his sides. Lukas is muscular and lean, wasteless, a body boned for war. He's utterly naked and she's utter clothed except for her shoes. She tells him undressing is not a prerequisite.
See the flare in his eyes, the flicker of fire behind the blue. He reaches under her skirt and whatever he finds there makes him groan, makes his eyes darken and his lips part. He grabs her by the hips and slides her roughly across the mattress, and now there's room for her to open her legs, swing them up and over his thighs, and open them.
Which is what he does. Swings her legs up and over his thighs, opens them to either side of him ... raises one calf over his bare shoulder. After, his hand goes under her skirt again, and he touches her through her panties, gently.
"Leave them on," he murmurs. His pupils open. It's the darkness. It's his want for her. His left hand goes to his cock again. He strokes himself as he strokes her, patiently, eventually shifting the fabric of her thong aside to slide the pads of his fingers against her cunt.
[Danicka] The view hardly matters. Times Square, the river, a goddamn alley, the courtyard parking lot of a dingy motel. They both seem to like being high up, though they never make much fuss about specifying at hotels that they would like to be on the higher floors. Danicka sometimes wedges herself onto her windowsill and rests her brow against the glass in her room, pressed against the window and staring downward until she bypasses her pale reflection and imagines she could fall forever. She never does that in the living room, or on the balcony.
Maybe it's because it's unnecessary. Maybe because it's a private thing, and the living room is too open, the balcony too dangerous. Danicka is not frightened of heights, or of falling, or of death. She is frightened of Garou. She is frightened because more than anything else in her life, Garou have hurt her. It does not mean she hates them. But she cannot ever work through that fear, will not ever be free of it. Lukas will only grow more enraged as the war goes on, as his life goes on. She will have to learn to bear it, or lose him.
When she knows she will lose him someday, anyway, she thinks on this as she stares out her window, and decides she will learn to bear it.
Lukas shadows her when he gets on the bed, his weight pressing down on the expensive, expansive pillow-topped surface. Danicka looks passive, looks patient, when he knows she's anything but. All he has to do is take one look in her eyes, turned dark by the lack of light, and feel the way her hands move on him, grasping as tightly as she is able, pulling at him for all she is worth to get his body closer to hers. Her legs are kept rather close together when he straddles her, her inner thighs warm against his hand as he --
"Lukáš," she whimpers, her eyes closing and her head tilting back when he finds her, when he groans.
It's a glancing touch, not long enough to get her panting, long enough to make her want flare like flames splashed with alcohol. And Lukas doesn't wait, after that. He moves her physically up on the bed, spreading her legs around him, feeling how luxuriously smooth they are under his palms. Her skirt is short enough, loose enough, that when he opens her legs the hem simply flips up, and he can see the orange cotton, the ribbons of lace that hold the thong on her hips. When he lifts her leg -- or when she lifts her leg, folding it over his shoulder before his hand can even push it that direction -- he can see all of her, covered by fabric or not.
And he can feel her. He can hear her gasp when he tells her to leave them on, as though this is his new and novel idea, as though she had any intention of telling him to take them off. Danicka's eyes are still closed, and her head tips back even farther as her back arches, as he pushes her thong aside to stroke her, as the first traces of moisture touch his fingertips. She moans again, struggling for breath and shifting her hips on top of the bed to meet his hand, as she becomes more and more slick. Blindly her hand reaches down, touches his hip, slides towards the center of his body, wraps around his cock.
Her eyes open. She looks right at him. "Rub it on me," she whispers, the color high in her cheeks.
[Lukas] Before Danicka, Lukas never spent hours in bed with a woman. It was a waste of time in his estimation. He got what he needed -- a bathroom in a nightclub, a shabby motel room -- and he got out. He was never so impolite as to be cruel or cold; he said what his women needed to hear, sometimes, and he treated them with as much respect as a Garou might treat a human he preyed on as surely as he might've preyed on deer, or elk, or antelope.
Before Danicka, he never bothered to wait, to draw it out, to reach beneath clothing and caress flesh; to put his mouth against flesh; to make her want him. He never bothered to even want her, whoever 'she' might've been.
It was a necessity, a need to fulfill, like breathing, like food and drink. It was an inconvenience, but a necessary one, and he did not care.
All that has changed. So much has changed he can hardly keep track of it. She whimpers his name and a clench of want goes up his back, unfurling across his lower abdomen. He can feel her; he can hear her gasp. He strokes her through her underclothes, and then despite them: his fingertips grow slick and she tells him what she wants; she gives him something like a command, and he's long since past asking her since when do Shadow Lords bow to the whims of their kin.
He's long past that. He told her to leave it on, the thong, which he can see now -- he thinks they might be orange -- he might laugh about this later. But he doesn't want her to leave it on after all. His fingers curl until the narrow ribbon of lace that fastens her thong to her body. He strips it off her, pulls it down her legs and over her feet. He drops it on the floor with the rest of his clothes.
Lukas is not obedient. As a Garou of Thunder's tribe, obedience was never even on the table for him. But he does as she asks -- as she demands. He shifts forward on the bed, his knees sliding alongside her hips; he raises her other leg over his shoulder as well, leans forward until her hips roll up off the bed and he's leaning over her, braced over her on one hand. He watches her face as he rucks her skirt up to her waist, takes himself in hand. Hot, heavy, he rubs the head of his cock over her, between the lips of her pussy, against the opening of her cunt. His eyelids flicker; he avoids shutting his eyes by a fraction of control, even as his breath hisses suddenly between his teeth.
Gently, he slaps his cock against her. He slides it against her cunt, rubs it against her clit. He holds himself by the base and rocks his hips against hers, fucks her without fucking her, while he turns his face to the side and nips at her shins, the smooth, impossibly soft skin over her legs.
Someday she'll lose him. It's a certainty. Someday this will cease to be. She thinks of this and decides she will learn to bear it. He doesn't think of it at all anymore. He takes the days as they come, one by one; he lets himself love her and doesn't think of anything else.
It works for him.
[Danicka] What he does to her is not fair, any more fair than the way she looks when she cries or the way she laughs when it rains. Danicka is not tied down to the bed but in a way she may as well be, when he decides to take his hands off of her long enough to work her thong down her thighs and off her body. She lets go of his arm, lets go of his cock, and wraps her hands around the loose folds of the sheet beneath her, clenching her fingers into fists.
He is the only man she has really invited into her bed here, the only person. A couple of drunk Silver Fang kinfolk, one passed out and one stupidly horny, do not count as being invited, being wanted. They were accepted, tolerated, even embraced because Danicka is not and has never been cold, but she did not take their hand and say Come with me, did not curl into their arms at night and sleep as deeply as she ever has in her life, feeling as though she finally belonged somewhere.
Lukas, though. She doesn't know that he used to do the same thing to meaningless women in meaningless clubs that Sam did to her, that --
Danicka quite possibly does not ever need to know. She does not, at least at this moment and in her ignorance at any moment, care. She does not care how he was with other women, what he did while they were broken up. She does not want to know. All that matters is that when he touches her and it makes him groan, she gets wet. All that matters is that when he whispers that he wants her to keep it on, or when he does what she asks and starts spreading her wetness around with the head of his cock, it makes her hips buck, it makes her breathing hitch, it makes her...
...wet. So fucking wet.
She writhes, clutching at the sheets, her breath shuddering in and out of her lungs. She rubs back against him, working her hips as he obeys because he wants her to want him, he wants her to moan like that again, gasp like that again, whimper his name in that way that sends fire up his spine to consume every last thought in his skull. Danicka just wants him. She knows he wants her, has known before Lukas himself allowed it to be real in his mind that he wanted to, at the very least, fuck her until he spent himself inside of her and could, was the vain hope, go on with his goddamn life.
This is going on with his goddamn life. Wanting her. Fucking her. Losing himself inside her.
Danicka does not know who she is, and she doesn't care. It doesn't matter.
She knows who she is, when she's with him, and it has nothing to do with finding her identity in the act of sex or in the reflection of herself as he sees her. It has nothing to do with creating herself in his imagined image. It is as though the rest of her life is a fog, and when they're together all the hazy incompleteness of her self and her life is cleared away and she knows, without needing a job or a major or another person, who she is. The longer they are together the more this bleeds out into the external hours, the days they spend apart, the times when he isn't --
"Fuck me," she whimpers, after he bites her. "God, please fuck me..."
[Lukas] That week, those two weeks they spent apart:
They found each other at a club, seven days from the night they decide that was it, they were over. They found each other and it was pure coincidence, sheer rotten luck, and she'd looked so ...
(perfektní)
and he'd looked so unaffected. They came together in the middle of the dance floor. She was the still point of the turning world; she always was. She led him to the bathroom and she wanted to know, do you want me? and though the answer was yes, yes, god, yes, he walked away from her. They found each other at a club and they left one another, and then it was over, it was really over, at least for the space of the twelve hours they could bear to have it really be over.
But before then: he found her at a club. And she thought to herself that when she looks at him she feels perfect fucking clarity.
Everything else is fog.
Everything else is fog right now. Nothing exists outside of this moment, but this moment is razorsharp, is pure and perfect, is ... perfect fucking clarity. He can feel every last nerve ending on his skin, interpret every last signal his senses cast to his brain. He can feel the way her back arches, and the vibration in her body when she speaks, when she begs him to
(fuck me. please fuck me.)
and he can feel the clenching of her hungry cunt, and the way she clutches at the sheets, and the way she bucks her hips when he does as she asks and rubs himself against her, patiently, patiently, patienceless, grasping her hips now, tipping her back to push into her, or begin to, when he remembers --
we should be more careful, she'd said. Oh, god, he thinks; it's sometimes torture to remember to stop. He remembers to stop, her legs over his shoulders, her body shuddering for him. He remembers and he tears the little packet apart, spills the condom out so fast he has to catch it against her thigh. By touch he rolls it on, watching her, looking at her, his eyes flickering and pale and glittering in the almost dark, and he kisses her leg again, bites her again, bites her and closes his eyes as he rolls the condom on and, almost in the same breath, rears over her and pushes into her.
All the way. Right in, straight to the hilt, the entire length of him, one single stroke.
"Oh, god," and this is a moan, unadulterated, against her skin. He leans over her, her legs hikes over his shoulders, all her goddamn clothing still on except for the thong. He plants his hands on either side of her shoulders and rocks deeper into her, as deep as he can, and his face is drawn with the strain of holding back, of holding still, of being inside her and filling her and holding inside her.
Until he moves, that is. Draws out; slides back in. Harder this time. His eyes close. A breath shudders through his parting lips, parting teeth. Again; a harsher pant. "God," again, as though he were praying, as though this were prayer.
Then he's shifting his weight to one hand. He's pulling her shirt up, drawing it up from her skin, and his hand is heavy on her body, sliding up her stomach to close over her breast. Her breast in his hand, he fucks into her again, a third time, harder still, but slow; heavy.
There isn't even space for a word, this time.
[Danicka] The night he decided. And he's a fool, or blind, if he thinks she's forgotten, if he thinks she has been able to blot from her mind the fact that Lukas was the one who walked away, who didn't want her anymore. They did not decide anything. She begged him. Pathetically, sobbing, she begged him. And threw herself at him a week later, unbuttoned her shirt in a bathroom stall and did everything but fall on her knees trying to get him to just fuck her, just please god be with her again. She hasn't forgotten the shame, or the loss she felt when he wouldn't do even that.
On some level it's impossible for her to forgive him for that, completely. He hasn't really asked her to. It was a mistake to leave her, and they agree on that. But Danicka hasn't told him that it's all alright, none of that matters anymore. And if she has, then no matter how full her love was, some dirty and wounded part of her heart was lying. That part of her is always lying. That part of her is always hurt. It clings to damage for its own survival. It takes all she has, most of the time, just to keep it from spreading, from eating all of her.
Danicka looks inward and sees the black spot, the festering, damaged part that still hates him for hurting her, leaving her, not wanting her. She looks at him and sees clearly for once in her life.
Lukas looks at her and she's the still point of the turning world, the light in the dark, the star so bright it gleams even as the sun is rising. He doesn't see what she sees, looking at the same woman. She can't see what he sees. Because she is so very busy hiding that dark place, that wound, because she cannot forgive herself for not forgiving him completely
when she loves him
so deeply.
He's poised, his hands on her hips, his cock against her cunt, her hands clawing sheets so she won't claw him again, and at least one of them remembers this time that this is not okay, that he can't push into her and fuck her against the dirty sheets like this, her skirt up around her waist and her hair askew and her shirt knotted behind her neck and no condom, and she's on contraceptives but that did her a fat lot of good once upon a time and he doesn't know that story and never will if she has her way because then he'll leave her again. They can't do this, because if weeks down the line she's throwing up and taking another test then she doesn't know if she'll even tell him because if she tells him and she keeps it then she can't have him anymore.
It's torture to stop. Danicka breathes heavily, deeply in and out, her eyes open and looking at the ceiling as Lukas stops. She clenches and unclenches her hands while he's ripping open the condom and unrolling it, and she is doing her goddamndest to keep from just reaching down and pulling him into her. So she lets go of the sheets and reaches over her head and grips the opposite edge of the bed, arching her back to relieve tension and energy until she feels him biting her, biting her. Lukas is leaning over her again then and she lets go of the stupid mattress and wraps her arms around his neck as he moves closer, enters her, slams into her so sure and so deep that she lets out a soft, erotic gasp at the feel of him.
Finally.
"No," she whimpers, her arms loosening even as her body clenches around him, trying to keep him from withdrawing. Danicka shudders, bucks her hips against him, but that is the most protest she gives before he is back in her again, causing her to release a strangled cry of pleasure. This is not going to be soft. This is not going to be gentle. Danicka's hands slide to his biceps. She holds onto him, opening her eyes to find his, as he prays, as he worships. Her shirt's lining is silky against the back of his hand. Her nipple is hard against his palm.
"Miluji tě," she sighs, the tail end of the words turning into a thin whimper when he draws back and fucks into her again. "Fuck, Lukáš, to je to, co chci. Dej mi to. Tvrdý."
She cries out again, as he slides out again, as she begs for it again.
[Lukas] Finally.
Sometimes Lukas doesn't know what the fuck takes them so long. Why it's always a fucking week between every time they fuck. Why they can't seem to find time for each other sooner; why they can't just -- make time.
He knows why, of course. The war. His pack. Her life. She's going to college and he's... planning or scheming or trying to hold onto this, trying to win that, and in the end none of it matters, none of it matters because when he's here, with her, it all peels away from him, all falls away like ashes from a white-hot core, and that white-hot core is what he feels, what fills his mind, when he
fucks her like this.
Makes her moan like this, and whimper like this, and cry out like this. She begs for it and he closes his eyes, exhales in a rush, and his thumb brushes over her nipple; he holds her breast in his hand and holds his weight with the other. She can feel him shifting over her. He moves his weight onto his knees and onto his bracing hand; moves over her and leans over her, rolls her hips up with her legs over his shoulders.
Deep; every stroke is deep, and hard. She wants him to give it to her, hard, and in this, at least, he's never even bothered to ask her since when. His hand slides off her chest and braces beside her. His hands brace on either side of her ribcage and he holds himself over her on hands and knees, moves into her smoothly now, quickly, watching his face as he fucks her.
He hasn't gotten her shirt off yet. Or her skirt. He wants to -- the thought occurs to him, but he can't seem to summon the thought for it, or the will. He watches her face while he fucks her, thinking he'd love to watch her body rolling beneath his; would love to watch her bare and wild for him, baring her teeth, clawing his back; thinks this, but cannot put together the coherence of thought, of action, to tug her shirt off.
He pushes it up instead, up until her stomach is bared, and her breasts; up until it bunches at her collarbones, nearly as her neck. His hand pushes into her hair and the strokes it back from her face, leans over her, his hands on either side of her head now. This is not going to be gentle. This is not gentle. This is nothing close to gentle. This is his body slamming into hers, again and again; this is his eyes fast on her face, drinking in her every reaction, every last flicker of it. This is --
This is Lukas, dipping down suddenly to kiss her. This is the first kiss since ... god knows when. He's a fool if he thinks it was them that decided they were over, because it wasn't. It was him. He's a fool to think he could get over her so fucking easily. He was a fool to think it was as easy as that.
He's a fool for her sometimes. He's lost for her. He's nothing but instinct for her, nothing but his cock plunging into her cunt; nothing but his mouth on hers, kissing her, swallowing what sound she might make as he dips his head to her, sinks to his forearms for her, fucks her like this because he wants her, harder, tvrdý, and now her legs are folded almost against her chest and she's open to him, open, and he's kissing her over and over, fucking her over and over, his mouth sliding from hers to pant against her throat.
[Danicka] If Lukas wanted her every day, he could have her every day. Danicka does very little with her days. She plays her game, she visits the salon, she goes shopping. There is dry-cleaning to pick up. She goes out dancing and tries not to wish that he was there with her, because if she wishes too long she will just end up leaving and go home and he won't be there, either. And she likes to dance. Danicka does not have very much to fill her days with that is necessary, so she fills her days with luxury. She is used to this. She's been doing it since she was sixteen.
Later on she will not have so much time. She will have as little or less than he does to spare, overwhelmed by homework, bogged down by papers and reading and extra credit. Danicka does not do much of anything half-assed if it is even remotely important to her. What she hasn't hinted at is that going to school is very, very important to her. And she hasn't hinted at that because her assumption is that no one really cares. It isn't important to anyone else. It's not that she thinks that something isn't important simply because of its association with her; but there is the War to think of. There is the fact that other people have their own lives and interests.
Danicka assumes, when a week or more goes by that they don't contact each other, that this is because Lukas is busy. She forgets how long it has been because some days bleed into one another, the lines between them unimportant now. She drifts from sunsets and sunrises through afternoons and is surprised when it becomes dark and she's only been awake for a few hours, surprised when the sun comes up and she's been online all night.
And sometimes the need to see him is too great and she calls him. Running into him by chance is so thrilling her heart pounds when she sees him, and she forces herself to just walk away rather than drop everything to be with him. Even when she knows he's coming, it's a struggle not to gasp with happiness when she does see him at the door. It's girlish. Immature. It reveals too much.
But that's in the past. That's when she's at the door, her shoes on, her masks still on. Those are gone now, even though her clothes are still on. Danicka holds nothing back now, gripping Lukas's biceps tighter as he fucks her, moaning for him, gasping little yeahs and calling his name, or swearing to a god she doesn't believe in or just swearing, in general, fuck or oh, shit.
Both of her legs are over his shoulders now, his body pressed hard against hers, his hips flexing and pistoning to fuck her harder, to fuck her a little faster when she
"Faster...please, baby, give it to me..."
and this would be perfect up against a wall, her clothes askew but on, her panties forgotten. Leave them on, he'd said, only he hadn't. Danicka doesn't care one way or the other right now. He's inside of her, fucking her just like that, just the way she wants him to, the way she's begging him to, and she's fighting to keep her eyes open every time he slams his cock back into her cunt.
"More," she gasps, and squeezes him, watching his face, biting her lower lip after the word is out of her mouth. She lets it go so she can kiss him, though, lifting her head to eat at his face, moan into his mouth so he can taste every sound, swallow the pleasure she takes in him. She doesn't stop kissing him. She never wants to stop kissing him. "Let my legs down," she mutters against his mouth, biting at his lips, breaking the kiss only for these words. "I want to wrap around you. But fuck, baby...fuck...you should turn me over," she groans, changing halfway what she wants of him.
Danicka writhes, shuddering hard on the bed, looking at him long enough to look lost, to look gone, to look slightly wild, slightly mad. "Turn me over, baby," she confirms, squeezing him again.
[Lukas] He should --
let her legs down. Lukas is starting to do this when she changes her mind. He should turn her over. He halts for a second, mid-thrust, his mouth parting from hers, his eyes burning into hers across what little distance there is. Then he groans aloud, closes his eyes and groans and kisses her, kisses her hard. A hard shudder wracks up his spine when she squeezes him inside her.
Then he's pushing himself up. He draws out of her, hard and slick, gasping at the loss of her. Turning her over is a simple enough matter, especially with her willing, turning with his hands. Now she's on her stomach, and he's moving between her legs again, taking his cock by the base as his free hand kneads her ass, pushes her flesh apart to see her cunt.
"Bože," he breathes: his knees are nudging her thighs apart, and then the head of his cock is rubbing against her cunt again, and he's still slippery-slick from being inside, from fucking her, "tak za mokra."
Hot and solid, his chest presses against her back as he lowers himself over her. His hands adjust her hips, raise her ass up against his hips. He presses into her as surely as he had entered the first time, but faster still -- her cunt already slicked and wet for him, already fucked open, ready for him. His teeth catch on her ear; his weight is on his upper chest, against her upper back, pressing her down. He moves into her slowly and firmly to begin with, exhaling past her ear as he rediscovers her heat, the tightness of her pussy.
Slow, his hands push up from her hips. Slide over her sides, slipping beneath her to cup her breasts -- and up, curving under her shoulders to clasp her against him.
Harder now: her back clasped to his chest, his cock pushing into her. Lukas's eyes are closed; there's nothing to see anyhow. Her bedroom is dark. The moonlight casts pale squares onto the bed, the floor, but at this range she's indistinct anyway. He can feel her hair beneath his lips, cushioning his mouth against her neck, her shoulder, her cheek. His weight all but pins her to the bed as he moves inside her, relentlessly, buildingly, his hands clutching at her shoulders.
It can't continue like this for long. His weight is too much for her; her cunt is too fucking much for him. Soon enough Lukas presses his hands to the mattress again, lifts himself over her. He picks up the pace, fast now, fast and light, and then harder, solid, his body slamming into hers from behind, on her bed, in her room.
He does not know, really, how precious this is: how few individual have had this particular privilege, this honor. He does not know that she thinks of him as often as she does when they're apart; as often as he thinks of her. He doesn't know that when they see one another for the first time in days, he's not the only one who's so happy it's hard for him not to ...
... embarrass himself, somehow. Laugh, or lift her and spin her, or ...
They don't much about one another, when push comes to shove. What they've revealed has come slowly, in bursts and spates, half-unwillingly, often painfully. Except this. They've always revealed this without hesitation, without holding back: their want for one another. Their desire, and the fact that this is not, was never, just a fuck.
[Danicka] Fuck her. He should fuck her, push her legs up, turn her over, give it to her. Danicka does not stop to ask him if that's what he wants, or shyly request that maybe...if he'd like it...and he doesn't have to...
No. Danicka gasps, and tells him what she wants, and lowers her legs as he moves them of his shoulders. She kisses him, lifting her head off the mattress to meet his mouth and devour it, shuddering with him as their lips part, as their tongues touch. She rolls onto her stomach when he wtihdraws but before she gets purchase to move onto her hands and knees he's on her again, sliding his cock against her and any protest, any plea she might voice is lost in a pleasured whimper. Wanton, she arches her back and lifts her hips to meet him, rubbing back against him.
She says his name. For no reason: not in pleading, not in frustration, not in wraithlike sighing appreciation. She just says his name, as though in recognition. I know you. I know the way you feel. I know you.
Lukas moves down over her, moves back into her, presses her between body and mattress. His weight is not all but pinning her. He weighs approximately twice what she does, almost every ounce of it muscle, and in terms of sheer physical strength he outclasses her as though she were a child. It's a dangerous pairing in that sense, if he is not goddamned careful with her. He knows he can scare her when she can't see him, knows that if the moon is full enough or she is tired and stressed that being held onto when she wants to move makes her tense not with anticipation but terror, and he knows -- by god, she hopes he knows -- that these reactions are just as instinctive as the way he responds, without thinking or even wanting to, to her breeding.
Danicka exhales in a hard, rapid sigh when he fills her again, the heat of his body against her ass, her inner thighs, her back, his teeth on her earlobe. She is over the edge for a moment, dangling, not quite falling, and just as she starts to come back to herself he breathes against her ear in a sigh of his own, feeling her tight around him. Danicka shudders at that. He clasps her to him as he fucks her, and that's when she struggles, pushing against him -- as useless as that is except as a signal -- and groaning softly:
"Lásko, nech mě pohybovat."
It's not a request to get away from him. Let me move, she says. Let me fuck you. It can't continue like that for long, couldn't have even if she hadn't spoken, but she speaks and she moves and he lets go of her shoulders, that position that had her pinned against him as much as his body had her pinned to the bed, all but immobilizing her. Danicka bites her lip as he slides his hands away and down and presses them into the soft top of her bed, lifting himself up. She lifts, too, thrusts back against him, cries out sharply when he slams into her.
She moves onto her forearms, rolling her hips back against him, turns her head to look over her shoulder. "Untie my shirt," she whispers, her hair falling across one shoulder. "I want you to bite me when you come."
They give each other little things, little signals, little signs. The difference between the sound of one gasp and another that tells him god, yes or please, no. The shiver of pleasure against the shudder of fear. The tension in her that is her cunt squeezing his cock, holding him deep inside of her versus the tension of wariness, of old wounds. He knows her like this. He cannot read her eyes always and know that she is so delighted to see him that it wells up inside of her as powerfully as grief, as inescapable as mortality, does not realize just from her smiles that she doesn't know how to express this much happiness because she has never felt it before, does not understand some of the strange, strange little things she does.
But he knows her like this, though she's not naked to him right now, though he hasn't seen her in days and hasn't fucked her since New York. Danicka watches him fucking her, whimpers when his cock slides into her like that, oh god just like that, doesn't realize she says this aloud just before her head turns again, before it falls forward, before her hair tumbles around her face.
"God, Lukáš, you're going to make me come...!"
[Lukas] When Lukas lifts up, so does Danicka. Her weight is on her knees now, her forearms and her knees, and it gives her the leverage and the freedom of motion to swing back against him when he thrusts. It makes him groan aloud, softly, his head dipping between the wide rack of his shoulders to press his mouth blindly against her temple, her cheek.
There's a space between them; his broad chest and her sleek back. He moves into her with his hands and knees braced, fucking her with his hips, and he thinks -- he's sure he can feel the echoes of his movement, of their movement together, beneath his lips; can hear it in the shudder of her breath, the unsteadiness when she tells him to
untie her shirt. He shifts his weight to one hand and the other presses up this space between. Thin, crisscrossed, the ties of her shirt bump beneath his fingers. He finds the trailing ends and undoes them swiftly, blindly; flicking them apart first, then simply pulling until it all comes undone, all comes apart, and her shirt falls from her body to pool like a flag on the bed.
Then it's her bare back under his hand, and her bare breasts against his palm when he follows the curvature of her ribs around. He cups her breasts into his hand, one and then the other, squeezes gently, lets them bounce against his palm as he fucks her, and now she's turning to watch him, and he's pushing off the bed altogether to hold her breasts in his hands, and then to smooth down the coiling muscles of her belly to press his hand between her legs, to feel where they're joined, where he's fucking her; to grasp her hip in his free hand and pull her back against him, harder.
This is not going to be gentle. But it's swung into something deliberate, heavy -- not recklessly fast, but purposeful, hard. He fucks her hard, somewhere between slow and fast, and when she tells him like that, just like that the want, the need that flickers across his face is almost ferocious. He says nothing; there are no words; but he snarls at her, his fingertips find her clit and press, rotate, firm; he grinds sharply into her. He fucks her harder.
He fucks her harder -- when she starts to come. He fondles her, and fucks her, and he knows her like this even if something he feels like he barely knows her at all. He can see her like this, perfect fucking clarity, perfektní, even if sometimes he feels like he can barely see beneath her surface, her masks of social graces, at all.
Lukas knows her like this, and knowing her, watches her; feels her, groans when she starts to orgasm, gasps when she comes on his cock, gasps to feel her writhing and clenching, losing it, she's losing it and so is he, whatever shreds of control kept him fucking her slow and hard like that -- his hand is slipping off her hip and he comes down over her again, and all of a sudden he's fucking her so much faster, reckless now, slamming into her as she's starting to come down, his hand leaving her clit at last as she comes to the end of her orgasm. He plants both hands on the mattress now, covers her, leans over her and
(i want you to -- )
bites her, suddenly and sharply, tells her -- ragged, "Jedu na -- " which isn't much of a warning at all because a second later his teeth clamp against her shoulder again, clench and hold, hard, and he thrusts so hard against her he threatens to stagger her forward; becomes absolutely, electrically still for an instant, tense as piano string, caught nearly out of time, before he's coming into her, before his cock is twitching and jumping inside her, and his hips are bucking against hers with no forethought, no intention, and his chest is heaving against her back as he gasps, fights for unsteady breath against her skin.
There's a quivering at the edges of his triceps. He wants to let go, just fucking collapse atop her, bear her down to the bed and cover her and ... he doesn't. He holds himself over her, shuddering through his orgasm, the sharp thrusts of his hips subsiding, gentling, until he holds himself inside her, releasing his teeth on her to kiss her, panting, where he'd bitten her; to lick her skin as though to heal it.
[Danicka] She's close, when she cries out his name like that and tells him that he's going to make her come as though this is somehow unexpected, as though she wasn't touching herself just the other night, biting her pillow as she came, wishing he was with her. Danicka's halter top hangs around her waist, the ends all trailing now from her front, her breasts bared and open to him. Her back is a clean expanse of skin, muscle and bone working underneath the skin as their hips roll and slam together again, and again, and again.
Lukas's hand passes a ring of green fabric, the hem of her sinfully short white skirt, his fingers seeking and finding her cunt. Danicka screams outright when he touches her, squirming now back against him even though she doesn't need to, not with the way he's grabbing her hip and pulling her harder onto him, pushing himself deeper. She squirms, and her pussy clenches, and when he snarls at her she groans aloud, just as vicious.
There's no warning on her part after that, nothing but the way she suddenly starts moving faster, bucking back against Lukas's hips and cock, fucking his body and his hand when her orgasm catches her like a struck match, sparks and flares and burns, burns, burns. Her head tosses once with a gasp, hair thrown over to one side, mouth open to cry out but almost no sounds making it out of her throat after that initial shriek.
At first she's too tight, too hot, to say anything. But as it starts to loosen, let her go, leave her awash in pulsing waves that go on and on as though it's never going to fucking end, Danicka gasps a breath and tells him
"Chci být tvoje," she whimpers, she groans, she almost wails in her pleasure.
There's no time after that. His orgasm is upon him, words that go nowhere stumbling past his lips, his body grinding into hers as though to make them wholly one. Danicka is trying to survive what he's doing to her now, faster and harder and while her cunt is still throbbing with the tail ends of her own climax. She cries out again, cutting off his words and her own, feeling him hit some wall and break through it, go over some cliffside, the fall killing him, killing him, but at the end he'll only feel more alive than before.
Her hands clench in the sheets.
Her hand moves to find his own, cover it, hold onto him while he thrusts, while he comes hard inside her, shaking with pleasure if not simple exertion.
Danicka is still holding his hand when he starts to slow again, when the pounding of his hips and cock becomes a gentler rocking motion. She held his hand while he came. He bit her when he came, licks it now softly, and Danicka looks at the sheets, looks at their hands, and exhales all the air in her lungs slowly. "Roll over," she whispers, the sort of command you give a dog, but this is nothing like that at all. "Move on your side. Hold me."
Her eyes close. She inhales again. "Lukáš, moje láska, drží mě."
[Lukas] Beneath her hand, his is a fist, might as well be stonecarved, the bones and knuckles unbreakable arches under the skin, the sinew and muscle nearly as hard.
But it relents. His hand unclenches under her palm. His fingers spread open to allow hers between, and then close again. He digs his fingers more into her sheets than he allows himself to close his hand around her fingers. He holds onto the sheets so he doesn't crush her fingers between his.
Afterward her sheets are rumpled and wrinkled under his palm. Her hand seems so much slenderer than his, so much more delicate. She's looking at their hands together and he's moving slowly: he's pressing soft kisses along her neck to her ear, to her mouth if she turns her head his way; he's rocking gently into her now and then, as though to remind himself they were still joined, or that they were not, after all, the same creature.
Hold me, she says. His left hand, the one she does not cover with her own, lifts from the mattress. It wraps around her waist, and he clasps her against him again as he had at the beginning of this. Rolling onto his side is a sort of half-controlled collapse, his weight coming down against her back, her right shoulder, bearing her down with him as he turns onto his right side and pulls her back against him.
They fit together like this. They always have. He's always belonged here like this, in this bed or another; with her. He isn't sure where this is for a moment; he isn't sure which way is up or down, north or south; which way the headboard lies, even. Then he remembers. It's her room. They're lying crosswise on her bed. He can look down the lengths of their bodies and see the sky; see his books.
His arm tightens minutely. He kisses her neck again, and closes his eyes.
And answers something she said minutes ago, "Vy jsou moje. A já jsem tvůj."
[Lukas] Beneath her hand, his is a fist, might as well be stonecarved, the bones and knuckles unbreakable arches under the skin, the sinew and muscle nearly as hard.
But it relents. His hand unclenches under her palm. His fingers spread open to allow hers between, and then close again. He digs his fingers more into her sheets than he allows himself to close his hand around her fingers. He holds onto the sheets so he doesn't crush her fingers between his.
Afterward her sheets are rumpled and wrinkled under his palm. Her hand seems so much slenderer than his, so much more delicate. She's looking at their hands together and he's moving slowly: he's pressing soft kisses along her neck to her ear, to her mouth if she turns her head his way; he's rocking gently into her now and then, as though to remind himself they were still joined, or that they were not, after all, the same creature.
Hold me, she says. His left hand, the one she does not cover with her own, lifts from the mattress. It wraps around her waist, and he clasps her against him again as he had at the beginning of this. Rolling onto his side is a sort of half-controlled collapse, his weight coming down against her back, her right shoulder, bearing her down with him as he turns onto his right side and pulls her back against him.
They fit together like this. They always have. He's always belonged here like this, in this bed or another; with her. He isn't sure where this is for a moment; he isn't sure which way is up or down, north or south; which way the headboard lies, even. Then he remembers. It's her room. They're lying crosswise on her bed. He can look down the lengths of their bodies and see the sky; see his books.
Her books.
His arm tightens minutely. He kisses her neck again, and closes his eyes.
And answers something she said minutes ago, "Vy jsou moje. A já jsem tvůj."
[Danicka] The woman underneath him, rolling to her side with him and curling against his chest now, is -- as a wolf-born Uktena said to her recently -- soft. She's slender but not so much that when he touches her he feels little more than protrusions of bone. Her skin is smooth, her hands almost completely free from callouses, her lips tender when she turns her head and they kiss, they kiss again, because they cannot stand to be separated.
Danicka lays down on the mattress and holds Lukas inside of her still, smelling of sweat from dancing, sweat from fucking. She tips her head back so that her neck is bared and so she feels his shoulder and chest against the back of her head and neck, trying to catch her breath. They are no longer rocking as they were, Lukas's cock sliding gently in and out of her as a reminder, as memory itself, as reassurance.
He holds her now, and she wraps her arm over his, pulls his left hand to her right breast. He feels her heartbeat not on his palm but slamming against the inside of his forearm somewhere, echoing through her body. Danicka knows where she is because this is where, in her mind, he always is with her. On some level he's with her here at night, even when he's across town or they're in a hotel room fucking up against a wall. He belongs here. With her.
"I want you to tell that to Vládík," she whispers back, bowing her head as he kisses her neck, closing her eyes.
[Lukas] Stillness.
Different from the electrified stillness when he came inside her, when he was so caught up, so overcome that he couldn't move. This is different: a pause, a sort of sudden wariness, an uncertainty.
Then his mouth softens on her neck. He completes the kiss, sighs quietly. He moves behind her as he shifts onto one elbow, his knuckles to the side of his head.
Her heart beats against the inside of his forearm. Her breast fits his palm perfectly; or was it the other way around? He looks at her, tries to catch some hint of what she's thinking when he says:
"I can't, Danička."
Lukas has no more idea what she'll do now than he did when he drew her to him, weeping, five hundred feet above Times Square. But he holds her if she'll let him; doesn't let go or move away.
"Not yet," he adds. "Even if he would be, as you say, happy to give you to me, it's a challenge by the laws of the Nation. Vladislav is an Adren, two ranks above me. I haven't the right."
[Danicka] Happiness has nothing to do with it. Danicka had told him...her brother would give her to Lukas in a heartbeat, whether it pleased him to do so in some way or not, whether it pleased Danicka or not. There is so much Lukas is not told about what it was like for her to see Vladislav, what he asked her, what she told him, what became clear. Nothing's free. There is nothing he cannot use to hurt her, somehow.
Lukas pauses behind her and Danicka, knowing exactly what she meant when she gasped those words while he was still fucking her, while she was in the throes of her own orgasm, exhales slowly and steadily, her eyes closed. The only thing to see is her headboard, anyway. She refuses to see it, feeling his mouth on her skin kissing her where she's hypersensitive.
She's sensitive everywhere, right now.
When he looks at her, her face is serene as it is when she's sleeping. There is a faint flush to her cheeks still, pink mingled with the golden tan. He can't. There is no wince, no tears, no flash of pain...nothing. She lets him hold her. She wants to be his. He can't. Even if Vladislav would give her to him, there are laws, and won or lost it would...look bad? Danicka doesn't ask, and she doesn't attempt to argue the way the Nation works with someone who is actually a member of it and not an accessory to its perpetuation.
"Alright," she murmurs, and that is all.
[Lukas] (we're not flailing here, nope.)
Dice Rolled:[ 4 d10 ] 1, 2, 7, 10 (Success x 2 at target 6) [WP]
[Lukas] That is all.
It's a non-answer. It's a sort of withdrawal, a way for her to draw away from him without moving at all. She's still right where she was, warm, golden, soft, in his arms.
Not quite his.
All Lukas can do is shift against her back, try to move closer; hold her closer. He has a sense of grasping at shadows -- he's trying to read her face through the shadows; trying for some idea, some sense, some intuition of what's on her mind. In her heart. Beneath the surface.
"Není to, že nechci do," he tells her, softly as he can. "Já chci. Velmi mnoho."
Some part of him must know how unfairly he has behaved toward her, when the last time they were at the Lakeshore W he seemed -- he was -- ready to fly to New York City and ask Vladik for her, on the spot, right then, regardless of rank or what is right or proper in his mind.
And now he's not. Because ...
... the reasons spin out into uncertainty. Because he's thinking straight now, and not angry. Because it's not right or proper. Because he's a Cliath, or because there's a difference between asking and claiming, or -- Lukas grimaces in the dark, unseen, because her eyes are closed. He has no excuse.
"Danička," something like a plea, "mluvit se mnou."
[Danicka] Not quite there, but certainly his. Just not graspable, not able to be held any longer than the breath in his lungs, the water rolling down his body, the blood in his veins that is, always, inevitably spilt. But his. Danicka pulls into herself rather than away. Away isn't safe from him, or anyone else, but there are places where she cannot be reached, and she knows all the locks by touch, can turn them in the dark and remain hidden and untouched. She simply goes quiet, because there is no point in arguing what she doesn't understand and -- she has learned this -- no reason to beg, or plead, or tell him a second time.
What he cannot see, because it's taken with her into locked houses, shuttered rooms, is the seething anger that's underneath the hurt, rather than covering it like a protective lion. How dare he do this, over and over: offer and withdraw, give only to take, put a thought into her head only to brush it aside when it's not a fucking impulsive decision anymore. It clenches in her stomach, cold and sharp, and she looks...like a portrait. Even the curl of hair stuck to her cheek by sweat looks like it was meant to be there, painted against her skin with a steady hand and oil paints mixed with gold dust.
He sees that she is hurt, and scared, because those are her first thoughts, before the fury starts to unfurl inside of her, the resentment that comes so easily out of those old gashes in her heart, seeping like an infected wound, staining even her breath.
But he feels her withdrawing, and he knows it, isn't fooled by how pretty she seems, how pliant, how accepting. She holds him still inside of her, holds his arm around her waist like she wants him never to let go, but he isn't fooled.
"Why did you ask me if that's what I wanted...if it doesn't matter that I want you to?" she asks quietly, her breath hitching in the center because she is still so fucking close to what they just did to one another, because her heart has not quite slowed down yet. Her eyes flicker open. She turns to look at him over her shoulder.
[Lukas] This time it's his turn to shut his eyes. He can't face her regard, the accusation he thinks he hears in her voice, which may only in the end be his own self-accusation reflected back at him.
"Láska, it does matter to me."
Quiet, that -- strained. A beat goes by. Lukas opens his eyes again and meets her gaze steadily.
"It matters to me," he repeats, as though to secure it. "But I want to do it right, absolutely correctly, so that it's irrevocable. So that no one can ever point to some ... stupid technicality and say you're not really mine."
He watches her as he lowers his mouth to her shoulder, briefly; watches her because if he can catch the slightest hint of withdrawal, or unwillingness, or recoil he'll stop instantly.
"I suppose," quieter now, "last time I was just ... too upset to care."
[Danicka] "I didn't..."
She doesn't bother to finish, when he says it does matter to him. Danicka looks at him a moment longer, half her gaze hidden simply by virtue of the fact that her head only twists so far, and as he repeats himself, she turns back around, unwilling to correct him, to say I never thought it didn't matter to you, or whatever hair-splitting thing she had it in mind to say. She lowers her head to the mattress again, staring at the headboard rather than straining her neck to try and watch her lover behind her.
A sigh leaves her as he explains, and she sounds tired. By the reality of it, not the night. It's around one o'clock, something like that. When he claims her, challenges for her, whatever, he wants it to be impossible to undo. As though someone could not come along and challenge him for her. As though he would not have to consider his honor and what is proper, if that should happen, and he should lose, and she should be taken away. As though once he has her, he will have her forever. As though there is any such thing.
He kisses her shoulder, sees her profile, the way she lifts her hand from the back of his arm to move aside that artful strand of hair. There's impressions on her skin from the way he bit her earlier, savage and intense, too wanting to hold back.
"Should I not...bother listening to anything you say when you're upset, then? Because much as you mean it then, you won't mean it later?" Her eyes close. She's softer; she's relented a bit, but her frustration is evident in the way she speaks. She doesn't attempt to conceal it, quiet as it is. "I've been thinking about this for three weeks and...it doesn't make any difference."
[Lukas] Danicka's relenting, softening, but Lukas tenses now. He tenses when she says: as much as you mean it then, you won't mean it later. He raises his lips from her shoulder and looks at her, but she's looking at the headboard. Their eyes don't meet.
They've had this discussion before, only a little differently. They were discussing the things he says to hurt her when he's angry, the tone he uses with her and how that stays with her even after he ceases to mean it. There's an irony there, a reversal of roles almost, that he doesn't bother to consider. He has other things on his mind.
"Please don't make it out like I'm some kind of oathbreaker, Danička." Lukas's tone is low; he's trying hard not to be angry. "I'm just asking you to give me a little more time."
And, after a short pause: "What doesn't make any difference?"
[Danicka] [WP]
Dice Rolled:[ 5 d10 ] 1, 1, 1, 2, 9 (Failure at target 5)
[Danicka] "I'm not calling you an oathbreaker," she snaps, "and I'm not telling you I won't wait."
Danicka's voice lashes out like that, sharp and irritated, despite the fact that his arm is around her and despite the fact that his cock is inside her and she can feel his chest against her bared back, his palm cupped around her bared breast. She takes a deep breath to try and calm herself down, not because she thinks
how easy it would be for him to break my neck
but because he's angry, and she knows how this goes. One gets angry, the other gets angry. She takes a deep breath, but she's not calm when she exhales. She's twisting towards him, staying in his arms and against his body, but she's nowhere near calm.
"I'm pissed off because you... hold this thing out to me, and ask me what I want, when there's no way you're going to. If you can't, that's fine, I'm not going to hate you for it. But do you have any idea how much it hurts to hold that in mind for nearly a month, to start to believe in it, and then..."
She turns again. And shuts her eyes tight, like a child, breathing out in a rush through her teeth.
[Lukas] She hasn't even begun to turn again when Lukas snaps right back, gut reaction, defensive reflexology: "Do you know how much it hurts to ask you something like that only to have you turn around and call room service, Danička?"
[Danicka] She turns anyway, setting her jaw, exhaling through her teeth, closing her eyes. There's no leg to stand on for her if she claims that she would have known, had he told her. Not when just moments ago she was trying to pretend that she didn't hurt at all, that she wasn't angry, that it was alright and that was it, that was all that mattered, that she felt nothing when he told her I can't.
Danicka doesn't answer. She breathes. And then she starts to push herself up, drawing away from him if he will let her. Slowly.
[Lukas] "Danička," this is on the cusp between anger and exasperation and frustration and need, "stay. Please."
But he doesn't hold her back.
[Danicka] "I just want to be able to see you," she says softly, and does not stop moving. Her arms beneath her, her body curving like a sculpture, her breath quivering slightly when she pulls herself off of him.
Danicka exhales and kneels on her bed beside him, taking off what's left of her clothes. The halter and the skirt come off easily, pushed aside and dropping to the floor, but she doesn't move more than a few inches away from him. When she does come back, moving to her left side to lay facing him now, she's naked, and comfortingly warm against his more searing heat.
She puts her hand on his chest, over his heart. Like she does when she sleeps behind him, like he does when he holds her left breast in his palm.
"When you asked me that it scared the hell out of me, and I didn't know what to do, or how to answer. But I took it seriously. I kept thinking about it. I feel like you just yanked a rug out from under me."
[Lukas] Willingly, he lets her go then. She strips off her clothes -- rumpled, rucked up, untied, let down as it was. They drop to the floor and she returns to the bed, and to him.
They're still crosswise on the mattress. He hasn't moved. He watched her moving, the curvature of her spine, the twist of her torso, the way her arms unfurled over her head when she pulled her shirt off. Her hand comes to his chest and his drapes over her waist, as natural as breathing.
Facing him now, she can see him wince, subtle though it is. His hand moves slightly on her skin, a small gesture, the meaning indistinct. "Vím." A pause. "It wasn't fair of me."
Another, longer.
"Danička, if you ask me again, I'll go to your brother tonight." His brow furrows, "I just worry that he could deny my challenge on the grounds that it's dishonorable. And I'm ... frightened of what he might do to you afterward, which I would have no right to contest."
[Danicka] The way they flow back together is as natural as though they have been doing this far longer than a matter of months. Danicka loosely wraps one of her legs over his as he wraps his arm around her, his hand on her back. She's too close now for him to hide the wince, for her to misread it. She cannot just turn her head around and look somewhere other than at him, not unless she wants to fully physically reject him. They can see each other clearly.
Danicka moves her hand off his chest and pushes a few damp tendrils of dark hair off his forehead. She strokes his hair back, smoothes it, gently rearranges it, the sort of animalistic grooming that comes so thoughtlessly. She's never been accused of treating a lover like a child, doing this, because she does not do it so thoughtlessly as she does with Lukas. She does it because it comes to her mind, moves down her arm, guides her fingers. She doesn't do this because it will soothe him, make him back off, calm him down, get her what she wants.
It wasn't fair. He doesn't apologize. She doesn't tell him he is forgiven. Not out loud.
But then her hand stills, and she blinks. "What do you think he'd do to me?"
[Lukas] Briefly, his eyes close when she moves her fingers through his hair. There's a thoughtless comfort in this, too: elemental, animalistic.
Then she pauses. He opens his eyes. Even in this darkness they're clear and pale.
"If he denies my claim," Lukas replies, "I can only assume it's because he's found me somehow unworthy. At my rank I can't force a challenge. You'll remain under his claim, and if he finds me lacking -- "
It's all so very scholarly, lawyerly, the way he speaks of claims and challenges, rights, worth. And at the end it falls apart, spins to pieces; he can't say the simple truth of what he's afraid of, what he's afraid Vladik would do.
What he says instead, "If I were an Adren, and I found a Cliath somehow unsuitable for my sister, I would remove her from him. I would take her away and deny him the right to see her."
[Danicka] "Lukáš," she whispers, and there is nothing after this. So many times she says his name, it is a world in itself, a communication, a prayer. She watches him fall apart near the end, shying away from what he truly thinks the Theurge in New York would do to his sister as punishment for Lukas's disgrace, or dishonor, or impudence. What he would do to her. What Lukas cannot think about, much less speak aloud, as though to speak it is to invite it, like the Devil.
"He reminds me, when we talk," she says quietly, her fingertips trailing down the side of his face to his bristled jaw, her eyes following the touch, "of how weak I am. How I would not have gone to the Sokolovs or come to Chicago if I were not as weak as I am, because it makes me less useful."
This is what she says, instead of an answer that might sound like argument, like a plea. What she says instead of forcing him to tell her what he thinks of when he thinks of Vladik's anger, since he has only his imagination, which could be worse than the truth, which could be gentler than reality in order to protect himself from it. "I think at this point he believes that --" she stops, and curls closer to his chest, resting her head against his shoulder. "I am selfish for not taking care of our father. And when he dies, I will be a burden until someone breeds me."
[Lukas] As Danicka curls closer, Lukas turns on his back, unpinning his right arm from beneath himself to wrap around her shoulders, around her back. His left hand lifts from her back, her waist. He gets the used condom off, tilting his head back and outstretching his arm to toss it into the wastebasket by the bed. Then he stares up at the ceiling; the lights of the city faint and glimmering there.
When summer comes and the city heats up, when it gets so hot and humid that the lake shimmers haze-silver and rubber soles stick to the pavement, Lukas would be able to hear the air conditioning huffing through the vents. In the wintertime, he might've heard the heating. Now, however, at the turn of the seasons -- the end of spring, the beginning of summer -- there's no need for artificial heating or cool. The windows are all closed. Her roommate is gone.
It's very quiet in Danicka's room. He can hear her breathing.
"Did you want me to claim you because you wanted to be mine, or because you wanted to not be Vládík's?" Perhaps this isn't fair of him to ask, either. "It doesn't change what I'd do, either way."
[Danicka] Again they roll, the sheet below them wrinkled and mussed to hell, the comforter still tossed aside, their clothes scattered on either side of the bed like flotsam floating to the surface, as though her carpet is the sea and this is their lifeboat. Danicka moves easily with Lukas, neither needing to resist out of discomfort nor needing to resist to prove that she has a backbone. She moves with him because she wants to, because she does not want to be parted from him, because this way he can wrap both of his arms around her.
He hasn't been here in several days, and before that the last time he was here was the tail end of April. They have not made love in this bed since the end of March, before Liadan moved in, after Martin moved out. This is a luxury. This is precious. They see each other perhaps once a week, most of the time, do not always get to fall into bed with one another, and being here with her in her room almost never happens.
He doesn't know that most days, she opens the windows. He does know that the room smells primarily of two things: fresh air and Danicka. Now books.
"You don't need to claim me for me to be yours," Danicka says softly to this, resting against his chest. She almost never does this, but tonight she plays with his chest, only she is not drawing ticklish shapes with her fingertips. She rakes her fingernails up and down his skin, carefully avoiding his nipple, watching the sparse hairs move against her fingers. "I want you to claim me so that I am no one else's."
[Lukas] Lukas breathes in when she begins to drag her fingernails over his skin. Though she assiduously avoids his nipples, they tighten anyway in response to the stimulation, and the finer hairs on his body stand on end.
He doesn't tell her to stop, or that it tickles. It doesn't tickle. He doesn't want her to stop. He does, however, shift her minutely closer, turning his head to press his mouth to her brow. Abruptly he's reminded of the night Mrena died, arguing with Hatchet on the stairs: We need time to prepare. / What time do you think you have?
Still: "I'll do it now if you ask me to," he replies. "But I'm asking you to wait a little longer. Please."
[Danicka] He reacts, and Danicka notes it. She follows the way he reacts, moreover, the cadence of his breathing and the involuntary response of his nipple anticipating a scrape of a touch that never comes. Danicka keeps going, dragging her nails gently down past his chest and over the chiseled lines of his abdomen. Oddly, her fingers soften when she passes a scar here, a scar there, moving from nail to pad and back again as soon as she is over whatever expanse of healed flesh she's just passed.
They are naked together, as unashamed of it as myths, as ancients, and Danicka traces her way down to the first curls of sweat-dampened, air-dried hair at the base of his cock. Her touch becomes even gentler, sliding between his thighs to caress his balls almost thoughtfully. Fondly. Her eyes are on his face.
"Moje láska, jsem nebudu nikdy požádat znovu," she whispers, tenderly. Again and again it comes up, but this was never about her trying to get him to do this for her. She thought she was answering a question, accepting an offer, giving him some sort of reverse permission to do what he wanted to, what she knew he wanted to do if only she gave him some sign it was what she wanted, too.
Doesn't matter anymore.
Danicka kisses the corner of his mouth. Argument or no, they both know now what they want. He knows why. She knows why not now. Her tongue flicks his lower lip. "Lee told me to bang the shit out of my hot boyfriend tonight," she murmurs. "It occured to me," she goes on, moving her hand to his cock, heedless of the fact that they're both something of a mess still, "how rarely I tell you how fucking hot you are."
Her mouth lowers to his nipple, lips wrapping around it, tongue flicking it once before she lifts her head, looking up at him. "In another life I would have fucked you the first time I saw you."
[Lukas] I'll never ask again, she says, and perhaps she means this as reassurance. Lukas doesn't hear it like that. It makes him frown when she says this though a second ago, when she reached between his legs to cradle his balls in her hand, he could barely think.
He doesn't, would never draw away from her, but when she kisses the corner of his mouth he's still frowning, and when she draws back and licks his lower lip he's still frowning. "Danička," he begins, putting his hand to her face, to her hair, but whatever he might've said dies in his throat because she takes his cock in hand.
Just like that, just that easily, he can feel himself starting to harden again, his body stirring to hers.
Lukas closes his eyes. He draws a shallow breath when her mouth finds his nipple. His hand has not moved from her hair, his fingertips following the curve of her head. He cradles her head gently in his hand, following her movements with his touch. She tells him what she would have done in another life. His eyes open again.
"In another life," he muses, "we would've grown up together."
[Danicka] Lukas frowns and she notices, but a part of her thinks oh, you worrywart in a mixture of fondness and exasperation. Danicka kisses him anyway, licks his nipple anyway, touches his body with no apparent aim in mind other than to touch him again. Arousal starts to course through him and she gently kisses the tongue-moistened nipple she held in her mouth a moment ago, wondering if this is another misunderstanding to sort out, if they will have to talk back and forth:
I just meant that...
Yes, but...
Well, I...
Which would be all right, but his cock is hardening in her hand and she breathes in deeply the scent of his skin and sweat, drinks in the sight of him laid out on her bed like a feast, washes herself in the sound of his voice, in the way his hand in her hair finds the same rhythm as her hand on his skin. His eyes open just after hers close, as she is leaning over him to lick his other nipple.
In another life, she said, meaning: if you were not Garou, if you could not tell that I belonged to your tribe the first time you saw me. If Gabriella hadn't been there. If she hadn't told me about you before you sat down. If we were just dancing and your hands touched my hips, if I ran my hands up your arms. In another life, she said, meaning: if we were mortal, or if we were kin.
In another life, he echoes, going back farther. If he had not been about to Change their families would have likely kept on spending time together, especially since it was obvious that the two younger children of each family got along even if Anezka was constantly left out. If her brother were not a Garou, if her family had not been just as much to 'blame' for the Musils and Kvasnickas parting ways. If, if... even if he were Garou and her brother was Vladislav, if she had been some small part of his life even after he approached and underwent his Change.
Even if the only difference was his fostering at the sept in New York City, and not the one farther upstate. He would have known of her. He would have known, all that time, that the steadily growing young blonde seen in the company of Silver Fangs and known to be demure, chaste, and submissive, once followed him up into a goddamn oak tree because that was her tree and she would get in less trouble than she did if she threw her shoe at him for teasing her.
Danicka lifts her head, her hand stilling on his skin. She looks at him, the amber flecks in her eyes gleaming in the green. "...Yeah, and then gotten our heads knocked in for playing doctor at some point."
[Lukas] "Nepřestávejte."
That's the first thing sighing past his lips when her hand stills. His eyes close for a second; open again. He laughs suddenly -- a little breathlessly because of what she's doing to him.
"I would have liked that," he says. "Growing up with you, I mean."
He doesn't know that she thought the same, earlier. She didn't tell him. He doesn't tell her half the things he thinks either, whether because they're silly, or sentimental, or simply because they course through his mind like trains through the night, a glimmer of light and speed flashing by, passing, gone.
Muscles bunch in his abdomen when he leans up to her. He kisses her mouth suddenly, unsparingly, and when it ends he turns on her bed, moves her with him, moves up until his is near the headboard.
Here he lies back, taking her by the hips, swinging her astride to straddle him where he lay. He looks up at her now, his chest opening up, stretching as he tucks his hands behind his head. The frown's gone. He's smiling now, the corners of his mouth turning wryly up.
"Zajímalo by mě, jestli člověk čas bude někdy být dost pro nás."
[Danicka] So she does not stop. Stills, yes. Slows, yes. But only for a moment, only when she compares what they are doing now with what he just said, when she thinks about the vivid curiosity she had about boy-bodies in that hazy period of childhoood that, interestingly enough, coincided with the end of his family's tenure on her family's social calendar. He escaped, just barely, the questions and the interest of a little girl whose desire for knowledge was never extinguished, not even when her brother destroyed all of her books, not even when she left high school only to pack up her things and go to New Orleans instead of college.
Danicka's hand slides down his cock again, tip to base, and then back up again, fingers wrapping around him more firmly now. She at least waits until he's spoken, until he tells her that he would have liked growing up with her. Not necessarily playing doctor and getting his head knocked in, of course. She half-smiles, strokes him with deft purpose and evident practice, and sucks his lower lip into her mouth when he kisses her. Heat rushes through her, responding to the kiss, to his growing erection in her hand, to the anticipation of more.
She yelps, amused and delighted, when he moves them both up, but -- as before -- there is no reason to resist, so she doesn't. She lets go of him to straddle him, though she doesn't have to, and plants her hands on the pillows behind his head, in the triangles of space created by his arms. Leaning over him, Danicka shifts her hips and rubs her cunt against the shaft of his cock, as though with a swing of her hips she'll erase that wry little smile of his just to see if she can. Just to watch the way his expression changes, to see if his eyes close, to see if he moans or if he has to stop to remember how to breathe...anything. Whatever his response.
"Možná," she says thoughtfully, though her breathing shudders slightly under the word. "Pokud vidíme navzájem více než jednou za dva týdny."
[Lukas] Response:
His eyes fall shut. It's like a reflex, a reaction he can control no more than he can control the hardening of his cock in her hand, and the quick-drawn sip of air when she rubs herself over him like that. His wry little smile doesn't quite fade, but it changes. He pulls his lower lip between his teeth, and when she stops, when she stops his eyes open again and he looks at her lazily. His grin is lazy too, spreading.
"You should call me more often," he says quietly. "You should just drop by unannounced."
Lukas flexes his head back against his hands for a moment, his spine arching, his body tensing against hers. He grinds his cock between her legs, against her pussy. Then he relaxes. His hair moves against his palms when he cranes his neck to look in the direction of her nightstand, back at her.
"Chystáš se kurva mě znovu?"
[Danicka] [WP]
Dice Rolled:[ 5 d10 ] 1, 1, 2, 4, 10 (Failure at target 6)
[Danicka] Her answer is a slow nod, hair hanging down either side of her face, the ends just barely grazing his jaw when she moves on top of him. Danicka never stops that slow, rhythmic swing of her hips, rubbing herself against him until he's as hard as he was when she felt him before, until her cunt is slick and starting to slide easier against his shaft. He smiles lazily, pleasured and pleased, and she leans forward to run her tongue up along the side of his neck.
They are like animals, simultaneously satisfied and seeking more, or awaiting more when they know it is coming. She closes the distance between their bodies once to brush her breasts over his chest, breathing in deeply as she grows hotter against him. "Baby," she murmurs, "I will. I will if you want me to. Fuck you in that tiny bed, ride you until you're trying not to moan..."
Despite the fact that he flicks his eyes at the nightstand, a strong hint to someone as perceptive as she is, Danicka doesn't lean across the short distance, open the drawer, and grab a condom for him. She just grinds on him, that endearment becoming a whimper, and her eyes close. She moves her hands from the pillow and puts them on his chest, resting her weight on his body, trusting his body.
"Bože, máte pocit, že tak dobře," she moans softly, raising her body up and reaching between them to guide his cock into her. Danicka is wet, she's ready for him, but she takes her time working her pussy onto him, opening her eyes as soon as the head of his cock is against her and finding his. She licks her lips, breathes: "Tak kurva dobrý."
[Lukas] There's a languor to Lukas right now. He's already fucked her once tonight, and though it's not enough, the edge of his hunger is dulled, the first vanguard of his strength spent. He has a little more patience.
He has what they talked about, too: his, hers, mine, Vladik -- and though he doesn't know how to deal with it, it casts a faint shadow over his mind. It's not enough to blacken his mood. It is enough that she seems all the more precious, and what they have between them, all the more priceless. All the more frail.
So he lies where he is, relaxed, at repose. She bends down over him and her breasts brush his chest, and this makes him inhale; this makes him arch his back to close the distance. His chest presses to hers, and she seems so soft against his body, her skin so smooth. They breathe each other in. They seal their bodies together, and when she tells him what she's willing to do, what she'll do to him in that tiny bed of his, he turns his mouth to hers.
What she says is: until you're trying not to m-- because that's when his mouth catches hers. The kiss is searing hot, electric, and when it finishes he tips his head back and gasps cool air, and she's ignoring his glance at the nightstand, and she's taking him in hand and his hands unclasp from behind his head to grip, briefly, at her headboard.
"Oh God." It's almost a whisper, a thin veneer of sound on a breath. Their eyes are closed. Their eyes open. They find one another's eyes in the dark, look at one another, watch to see their pleasure reflected on the other's face. "Baby, wait -- "
-- and she doesn't wait. She's sinking down on him, working herself onto his cock, and his head falls back again when she licks her lips. His hands grip at the headboard, let go -- he fumbles for her nightstand, the drawer clattering open at a strange angle, catching when it's half in half out. His fingers bat for a condom; spasm closed when the head of his cock slips past the first tightness of her pussy.
Eyes closed, he exhales the words at her walls, her ceiling, "Jste jízdy jsem blázen, miláčku. Bohu, že teplé kundo."
[Danicka] [WP: Let's try that again, Ms. Musil. WHAT do we want to avoid?]
Dice Rolled:[ 5 d10 ] 2, 3, 4, 7, 9 (Success x 2 at target 7)
[Danicka] It isn't enough and it's not going to be enough for either of them until they see each other more than once every week, once every ten days, once every two weeks. It isn't going to be enough until they can trust that they are going to have each other again...and that will never happen. Whatever they say about her calling him more often, or vice versa, or her showing up unannounced or fucking him in his bed at the Brotherhood, they both are too aware of how close they each are to death at any given point. Once isn't going to be enough, most nights, because they know better.
Danicka squirms onto him even as he's reaching for a condom, his hand in the drawer and her hands on his chest and her cunt clenching around him, hungry and hot and demanding. She starts to lift her hips and bounce on him as he's telling her how she's driving him crazy, saying hot like that, his words slipping into another languge and slipping away from him, unraveling at the edges.
She gasps, then, whimpering, and her hands clench into loose fists for a moment on top of his chest. "Bože, lásko, ty jsou nebezpečné," she breathes out, tilting her hips to rub her clit against the shaft of his cock. It makes her not want to stop, not care to stop, even though she knows why he was telling her to wait, even though she knows what he's reaching for.
Danicka is ungentle about it. She swivels her hips in a circle as she withdraws from him, letting out hard little moans until he's slipping out of her again. She gasps, then, looking down at him with something carnal and barely even human in her eyes.
[Lukas] Dangerous, she calls him, and he lets out a tattered laugh because on one hand it's true, it's so fucking true, because the first night they were together he almost fucking killed her; and at the same time she's the one that's rubbing herself against him even as she's squeezing him inside her. She's the one that's swinging her hips like that and making his head fall back and making him gasp for air, pant out a breath when she dismounts.
"Bože--!"
It's a curse more than a prayer. He opens his eyes to find her looking at him, and he can imagine if there was more light in the room her eyes would be poisonous green, envious green, green as jewels. His hand comes to life again, fumbles in the drawer until he pulls out a condom -- a strip of condoms, which makes him huff a stripped-down laugh out, makes him tear one loose, tear the packet apart, spill the condom out onto his chest. He tosses the wrapper aside and grabs the rubber up, sits up in the same thoughtless motion to suddenly meet her mouth across the distance. Anticipation makes him impatient, almost hasty: he rolls the condom on and smooths it down as far as it'll go, and all the while he eats at her mouth like he can't get enough.
Then Lukas is sinking back down. His hands touch her hips, grasp at her, encourage her to rise up and take him inside her again. "Průvodce mi palce, Danička," he murmurs -- the last syllable of her name shears into a panting exhale. He closes his eyes and waits for her to take all of him inside her, barely breathing, waiting.
[Danicka] Feral, this is. Unholy. Inhuman. Animal.
Danicka's eyes are indeed a darker green than they are normally, not the pale they are when she's angry, not the gentle blue they are when she's out in the sunlight. They are deep as forests, saturated with color like leaves going from spring to summer. She waits for him, laughing breathily when he rips the condom out of the packet and tosses the strip of them aside, rolls it on.
She laughs breathily, that is, until he mauls her face like that. Danicka's hands come up to either side of his face, clutching at his hair while they kiss. It's hard, and heated, and he can smell the sheen of sweat on her back and shoulders from sheer arousal, from sheer control. It took everything she had to pull herself off of him like she did, and the way he threw his head back and cried out a curse at the loss of her almost made her grind her hips back down.
Anticipation. Impatience. Haste. Danicka gasps, leans forward after his kiss parts, trying to find more, only to realize that he's ready for her now, she won't be told to Wait, she won't have to make herself stop. So she whimpers, leaning over him, reaching between their bodies again. This time she doesn't work him inside of her slowly. She guides him to her cunt and then in one aching swing of her hips takes him as far as they can go. The cry she lets out then tapers off into another whimper, a series of small sounds, quivering breaths, trembles of her lips.
She waits. One second, two, three, not to give herself time to adjust to having him inside again but to get control of herself, to give him a chance to do the same. And then Danicka, hands splayed over his chest, lifts her hips slowly until he's almost out of her again. This time, like the first...she returns slowly, hips following a tight circular track, her eyes on his face.
"Řekni mi, co se vám líbí," she purrs, grinding against him when he's inside of her all the way once more.
[Lukas] Uncompromisingly, all at once, she takes him inside her. The sound he makes is harsh, a snarl that bares his teeth, squeezes his eyes shut. When they open again his eyes are all black pupil, all arousal on the most basic level: fight or flight or feed or fuck.
She's waiting. She's waiting. He's holding his breath, and when he realizes this he lets it out in a slow shudder, and his hands loosen on her hips, and she lifts up and his brow furrows with it, unconsciously, irresistibly, as though his very expressions were somehow tied to her, and to what she was doing.
Tell me, she says, turning the tables on him, and his breath catches hard. She's winding her hips down on him and he's bringing a hand up to sink his teeth into this heel of his own hand, then pushing it over his face, over his skull to grasp at the hair at the back of his own head.
"Oh my fuck, baby."
That's all he can manage. Tatters; that's all she's left him. Tatters of consciousness, of words. He remembers the first night in his room, in his tiny bed: the way she'd fucked him after his orgasm until he couldn't take it anymore, until he thought the top of his head must've lifted right off and spilled his thoughts across the sheets like a tapestry, like music notes on the score for her to sift through and read.
"Oh my fucking -- bože, miluju, když se ty kurva mě takhle." He's found an island of coherence. He clings to it; it's sand slipping through his fingers, passing unfiltered from mind to lips, spilt out, gone. "Rozkývat ty boky, mimino, jízda mě. Jdi pomalu."
Lukas's eyes flicker shut. Open again. He finds her eyes; absolute fucking clarity.
"Jdi pomalu, Danička. Být dobré pro mě, lásko."
[Danicka] She still does not understand completely why he almost frenzied that first night, when her arms and legs wrapped around him and she kissed him like that. He's felt lust for her since then. He's felt a desperate, needful sort of desire with her since then, but has not nearly killed her again. They have argued on full moons, insanely and dangerously, and walked away from it with her fragile body still intact and the love -- oddly -- only growing between them. She does not understand that on that night it was also frustration with his pack, anger at others, and that they have not since come across the same combination of factors.
There was also this: wanting her, for weeks, wondering what she would feel like, wanting her in his bed, wanting her body pressed to his, wanting to be inside of her. What he wanted, he couldn't have even known completely until it happened...
...and happened over and over again, losing himself inside of her, feeling his mind unspool into nothingness, away from control, away from restraint, away from the reservation that keeps him so cold to so many others. Danicka rides him now like she did that night in the Brotherhood, only he is not so sensitive that it seems he might die from the pleasure and intensity of it. She grinds her hips and he bites himself, pushes his fingers into his hair, prays to fuck, a more earthly and familiar god than any that he could call to right now.
She licks her lips and leans over, kisses him once softly, rolls her hips on him again. He starts to curse, starts to speak, and then Czech begins tumbling past his lips, words he can't find in the language he learned when he was a child, the language she grew up with alongside two others. She gasps at what he says, lifts her hips, slides back down slowly, gently, as though to wordlessly encourage him to go on.
He does.
And Danicka, this time, obeys him. She rides him, slowly. She swings her hips again, slowly. She fucks him like that, the way he loves it, the way he wants it this time, the slow lift and fall, the gentler grind. Her right hand leaves his chest. She touches her breasts, touches her neck and shoulder the way he might, licks sweat off her fingertips, runs her fingers down her belly. The muscles in her abdomen flutter, and then she bites her lower lip. Her head tips backward when she parts her lips and starts to stroke her clit, while Lukas murmurs to her.
Be good to me. Danicka shudders. Her eyes open, her head falling forward again, her lips parted as she touches herself, as she rides him. "Takhle?" she purrs, as though she doesn't know. As though she isn't very, very good.
[Lukas] So intense are his eyes on her when her hand smooths over herself that it might be his body she were caressing instead of her own. It might be his sex she were reaching for instead of her own, and when she shudders -- because of what he said, or because of her fingers on her own clitoris -- he leans up to kiss her, suddenly, pullingly, furiously, putting into this kiss all the fire and fervor that's subsumed in the way they're fucking.
Because they're fucking slowly, the way he asked. Because she's riding him slowly, so slowly that his mind is fragmenting in slow-motion, coming apart at the seams. He's reaching back with his free hand again to grip her headboard as though this would anchor him to the earth -- his bicep flexes, his tricep; the shoulder and the pectoral muscle. His other hand is roving her body now, pushing up her side and pressing against her breast, following the butterflying muscles in her stomach down, down to turn at the wrist and tangle with her fingers between her legs.
Takhle, she wants to know, as if she didn't already. He pants against her mouth; his eyes fly open, and they're so close together that he can barely focus on her face, her eyes.
"Takhle," he breathes. She's said this to him before, only not in this language. He echoes her back to herself and the rise and fall of her hips is driving him out of his mind; it's making his eyes fall shut and his breath shudder and the muscles in his flank, in his loins clench and quiver. "Jen takhle. Jen takhle, milačka."
When his eyes open again he lets go the headboard. His arm aches faintly; the edges of wood leaves impressions in his palm. He puts his hand to her face and he brings her down to him this time, his brow knitting with the fervor of this renewed kiss. His tongue finds hers; he licks her lips even as the kiss is parting, and this time he speaks against her mouth, unsteadily:
"Teď trochu těžší. Ne rychleji. Oh... fuck... jízda mě těžší, lásko."
[Danicka] Riding Lukas slowly, like he says, is taking effort. Danicka's fingertips are slick between her legs, her left hand now cupped around her breast, fingers occasionally stroking her nipple as she rolls her hips on him. They are not often gentle with one another, not when it has been weeks since the last time they were able to be together, but sometimes they go slow. Sometimes, when they have spent each other once or more already, they are able to be gentle.
They always, somehow, even when he is locking his teeth in her shoulder and she is holding his head between her legs as her heel slices open his back, share a strange sort of tenderness, even then. Somehow, true affection shines through in the way they destroy each other in bed, or in armchairs, or up against walls. Because in the end, when all that's left are the tattered remains of sanity and self-control, they hold onto one another.
Even when they argue, when they are snapping their jaws at each other, they are in a way struggling for an elusive, precious intimacy, a vital understanding.
Elemental comfort.
Lukas watches Danicka as she moves on her, kisses her as though she's stroking his cock and not her clit, devouring her with passion that doesn't translate into the rocking of his hips into hers, the controlled clench of her cunt, the shifting rise and fall of her body. He holds onto the headboard, touches her, mumbles and sighs and pants for air as he answers her nearly-coy question. Danicka bites her lower lip as he speaks, whimpering, the urge to go faster and simply start bouncing on him almost as overwhelming as the need to mount him was just minutes ago.
She leans over him, kisses him slower than before, softer. It's wet and primordial, as though they have all the time in the world, as though they are in the midst of creating it...messily, fondly, aggressively, as though the way they fuck may have some sort of impact on the reality to come. And when they part, and Danicka sits back up over him, she stops touching herself and reaches over, tracing his lips with the tip of her middle finger.
Her hips lift until he slips from her, not almost but completely. Her left hand, not quite as deft as her right but good enough, takes hold of him, guides him back in after one breathless second of separation. Danicka watches his eyes. She swivels herself down on him slowly.
She fucks him harder.
[Lukas] Lukas loses himself in that second, softer kiss: like sinking into the organic soup of an earlier earth; like returning to the origins.
He closes his eyes and he loses himself. And she's moving on him, slowly, slow but hard, and he's losing himself in the kiss, in the flex of her thighs, in the hotness of her cunt and her mouth and the darkness behind his eyelids.
When she rises over him again his eyes open. They've adjusted to the dark. She's half-luminous in the reflected glow of the city. He's reminded of the lights in New York City, the way they sheened and glittered when her skin grew damp with sweat. He reaches for her, his hands dark on her body, tangling with hers between her legs and over her breasts, rubbing slow and heavy over the coiling muscles of her midriff.
There's no hesitation when he takes her wet finger into his mouth. He sucks on her fingers hungrily, silently, saying nothing now -- no words between them now -- nothing between them but the sex, the fucking, the lovemaking; the gasps and low moans that escape him when she lifts up.
Lifts up.
Lifts away.
"Danička," in that breathless second -- timeless, stillness. "Prosím. Prosím kurva mě. Nedovolte, aby mě čekat."
And she's coming back. And something flares behind his eyes, a light like a flame, like a solar flare. An instant later he throws his head back; her fingers slip from his mouth; his hands grasp at her hips and her thighs; he doesn't stop her, though, or force her down faster. He lets her spiral onto him, and when she's mounted him again, taken his cock all the way into her, he lets out a caught breath in a single ragged expulsion, a gasping groan.
She fucks him harder. He watches her face. They watch each other as she rides him slow and hard, and her thighs strain under his hands, and the muscles of his torso clench and shudder with the things she's doing to him. He twists his head to the side, catches the skin of her inner wrist gently, gently between his teeth; turns further, kisses her palm, finds her fingers, takes them into his mouth again. He licks and laps at her fingertips, nips at the knuckles, and when he lets her loose her fingers are as wet as they were, but it's saliva now, and he's licking his lips like a wild thing, like a wolf after the feast, rolling his hips up against hers now, flexing into her hard and sharp and slow.
"Těžší, lásko. Vyrobit mě přijít."
[Danicka] Of the two of them, Danicka is usually the one more likely to cry out, gasp, moan, murmur dirty little things into Lukas's ear. Yet even the first night they were together, he snarled things to her that sent currents of lust up her spine and obliterated her higher functions. Don't stop. She remembers, still, the way he touched her hips and told her to take him. She remembers, and always will, the way he clutched her close to him when he came, the way she knew for the protracted, crystallized seconds of her own orgasm that once was not going to be enough.
Making love to him has been, always, like breaking down everything in life to not the simplest, not the most base elements, but to the most sensual, the most animal. Hunger. Fear. Lust. Rage. It's always been a sort of war, a death, a reawakening, with the moment of climax annihilating them both. Every time she wakes from sleeping and he is there with her, for a few drowsy moments she can pretend that this is the beginning of life. Nothing before. Nothing after. Only breath, heartbeat, and touch.
She loses herself. She finds herself. She contradicts herself, which is the beginning of wisdom.
It's alright.
She nods to him, gently, as he touches her, as she grinds on him, as she lifts her hips and leaves him. "Jo...jo, lásko..." she whimpers, while he's begging her to fuck him, while he's begging her not to make him wait. Which she doesn't. When he releases her fingers she keeps her hand on his cheek, fingers wet from her cunt, from his mouth, even as her back and her breasts become faintly slick with sweat.
"Ano," Danicka says, sharper, when she starts to ride him harder, listening to him groan and keening the word as though it's an answer. He doesn't say faster, he says harder, but she balances herself with her left hand on his chest and quickens her pace, while her wet hand is trailing down his jaw and his neck to rest over his heart.
"Me first," she snarls, digging her nails into him. "Dotkni se mě."
[Lukas] Lukas doesn't dispute that, any of it. He's not in the state of mind to dispute anything. "Fuck," it's a gasp. Teeth flash in the dimness when her hand flexes. There was a time she might've been terrified. There was definitely a time when she would've never done this at all, never risked his fury with her teeth and her nails, never told him to just
let go.
Give it to me.
Všechno.
His left hand comes over hers, grips for an instant, releases. He lets her dig her fingernails in. His right hand follows the curve of her thigh, the juncture of thigh to hip, follows it around and his knuckles brush against the hair between her legs. His hand forks over the base of his cock for a moment, and every time she comes down over him she's hot and wet against the back of his hand, hot enough and wet enough to make him hiss a breath between his teeth.
Turning at the wrist, he flips his hand palm-up now. The pads of his fingers brush against the lips of her cunt, and then his hand is following her body as she rides him; he caresses the taut flesh where her cunt opens over him; the slick wet folds of her pussy. He follows them to where they meet, presses his fingers to her clit, finds it, thinks to himself -- absurdly, with a strange exultation:
There you are.
There she is.
Here she is. In her bed; on his cock. Here she is, and he touches her, caresses her firmly and unhesitatingly as she rides him, his eyes glazing with pleasure, his hand tightening over hers where hers digs into his flesh. He holds her hand against his breastbone, against his chest, his heart, while she rides him harder, as he asked; faster, though he hadn't even gotten around to asking it. He's panting now, his chest heaving against her hand, his hand following her body, his body moving against hers, thrusting upward against every downswing of her hips. The sheets are damp under his back. He's tense and hot, caught up in a tide he can't fight but he fights it anyway, because she said me first and since now do Shadow Lords bow to the whims of their kin, and --
his eyes shut suddenly, a flicker like a wince; she did something, turned her hips a certain way or squeezed him or rode him somehow, or it's just a matter of critical mass, a steady building toward an inevitability. Lukas is gasping when he says, when he opens his eyes and they're gas-flame blue and he says,
"Baby, I can't -- nemůžu čekat mnohem déle."
[Danicka] She wanted him so badly that making herself stop was not, initially, an option. Watching him respond to her hand on his cock and her mouth on his nipples set off a spark in her that turned into flares of lust. She wanted him, demanded him, and could barely make herself stop so that he could roll that condom onto his body, something she -- not he -- has always insisted on. Riding him slowly, touching herself and watching him suck her fingers has her shuddering every few seconds as she gets closer.
Me first, she all but growls, and Touch me, she demands, fucking him as though she's using his body but thinking, thinking of how blasted he was that night in his bed at the Brotherhood, how his pleasure mingled with pain and how he could barely move after she did use him once he had come. Danicka watches Lukas, her mouth open to moan, the swing of her hips now hard and needful, her cunt squeezing him faster now, tighter.
Oh...oh...oh... she's whispering.
When he turns his hand and touches her, finds her, she lets out a ragged cry that is part scream, part gasp for air that only dissolves into harsh, rapid panting. Danicka takes her hands off his chest and reaches over him to grasp the headboard, looking down at him now, tilting her hips against his cock and grinding harder. "Fuck," she echoes. "Fuck, yes, baby...yeah...yeah..."
And he closes his eyes, thrusting up to meet her, fucking her as hard and fast as she's fucking him now, working her clit and trying to stave off a breaking wave, but when he opens her eyes and he says Baby like that, I can't like that, she is--
There she is.
"Fuck!" Danicka is crying out, either indifferent to his plea or merely oblivious to it, caught up in the sudden and rolling pleasure going through her. Her hands clutch the headboard, her cunt clenches on him, her mouth open in a soundless scream after that blasphemous shriek that sent her hips slamming down onto him to get him as deep as possible inside of her. She watches his eyes, as though unable to look away right now, her expression going from aching to serene like moonlight chasing a shadow.
[Lukas] Fuck!
For a second he's not sure who said that; if anyone said that. If it wasn't just a razor across his mind, unzipping his surface thoughts to spill forth whatever red-hot, white-hot magma lay beneath; the incandescent contents of his sub-mind, the subterranean makeup of his psyche and his self, the animal part of him, the primordial and primitive.
For a second he's not sure it was even a word. If it wasn't simply a -- thought, a concept. A blasphemous shrike. She bears down on him. He groans aloud. She clenches down, bears down, squeezes him so tight inside her, so deep, that he can barely stand it. He watches her though, wouldn't close his eyes or look away for all the world: he watches emotion, or sensation, or both, some amalgamation of both, wash over her like a storm; like warm summer rain.
He makes himself wait. He waits as long as he can, which is not very long at all, a handful of seconds while she shatters on him, and as soon as the ache begins to taper from her face he rises against her sudden as a tidal wave coming to shore, catches her up with a wordless growl and turns her roughly under him, flips her on her back on the mattress without ever leaving her body, covers her like an animal and
just like that, like that, drives himself furiously home in two, three strokes, hard and heavy and fast, nearly brutal. His hands are in her hair and clutching at her back. Lukas doesn't bite her this time. He's afraid he'll hurt her if he did. He bites her pillow instead, or her blankets, the mattress, something.
On the last thrust he comes in her, and his entire body shudders once, all over, like an earthquake at the very foundation of him; shudders and catches into motionlessness.
He muffles a groan that might've been her name.
A stillness. And then a slow relaxation drizzling through his limbs; aftershocks rippling through his loins to thrust his hips against hers. He pries his hands from her to grasp thoughtlessly, almost helplessly at the sheets instead. Panting now, gasping for breath, he presses his brow to the mattress and presses himself between her thighs, the powerful convex arch of his spine relenting, sinking his weight upon her. When he can trust himself not to hurt her, he wraps his arms around her, bends her up against him, holds her with something akin to desperation.
Moje, he thinks. Nikdo jiný to. Moje.
And he thinks:
Já tady patří.
[Danicka] She never invited Lukas to her place when Martin lived with her. It was not that she was worried about Martin being frightened, or Lukas posturing. She did not want to deal with either, to be perfectly honest. More than that, she did not want some passing glance or trace of a scent to reveal somehow to Lukas that she had fucked Martin in his bed, in her bed, on the floor of her closet. More than that, she did not want a man whose opinion mattered to her for some reason to look at her with contempt or pity for loving someone like Lukas.
Not a man like Lukas. He is male, but not a man. He is intensely, powerfully male, but he is not human.
Either way it could have translated to shame, been seen as weakness, as embarrassment one way or another. Either way she might have lost something important to her. Now she doesn't keep Lukas away from her home because of another male, she keeps him away because Liadan is frightened of him. She keeps him away because she knows that too long in his presence and she will be wanting to feel him inside her, under her, on top of her, behind her. She will want to make him come and she doesn't want to hold back, doesn't want to ask him to hold back.
Danicka likes it when he's vocal. She likes it when he growls and gasps and when he groans against her flesh. She likes the way he sounds when he comes, ragged and almost violent, sonorous and masculine and hers. She will not share his voice any more than she shares his body.
Moje. Nikdo jiný to. Moje.
Všechno.
She is still coming when the world turns on its end, the way it did when she stood in the doorway between common room and hallway and realized that she wanted him, wanted to be with him with aching desperation, wanted to curl up alongside him and inhale his scent, wanted to go to bed that night and wrap her legs around his waist, touch his face, arch her back and feel him come inside her. Lukas rolls her onto her back while she is still riding out the ends of her orgasm on his cock, and suddenly it's not his face or pillows for a moment but the ceiling, only she's not alone with her hand between her legs hating herself for wanting a goddamned Ahroun this much but smelling his scent, wrapping her legs around his waist, touching his face, feeling him come inside her.
Danicka arches her back, her body like a drawn bow, her breasts pressed against him and her legs tightening around him and the smell of her sweat and his sweat filling his nostrils along with lingering traces of fabric softener, creating a whole reality of sensation that tells him he is in her, in her bed, in her den, fucking her like she's his mate when they have no right to that word. But he belongs here, with her hair tangled between his fingers and her voice rasping
"LUKÁŠ!" in his ear.
Hers. Nobody else's. Hers.
She is panting when he starts to come down, her spine relaxing and their bodies sinking to the mattress, sinking into one another. They are melted and molten and indistinguishable from one another for now, Danicka curling against his chest and wrapping her arms around him to cradle him as much as he clings to her. She rests her head on his shoulder. Everything around them is, for a little while, stillness.
And it's perhaps an hour before she speaks. Maybe thirty seconds. She still sounds breathless; her heart is still pounding. They have been here forever; they will never leave. It should be words that come out of her mouth, some great secret or some expression of adoration. But her breath hitches. Her mind unravels. She is fine with that. He will stay with her, and she knows, and she doesn't ask. When they make love again perhaps they will be more patient, or more playful, and when she leans up to kiss him she'll bite at his lips in a way she never would with another Garou, would not dare even with some human lovers.
But that is then.
For now:
"Lukášek," she sighs, her fingertips trailing down his spine. "Oh, moje láska. Oh... moje."
[Lukas] For a long time there's nothing but this. Nothing before; nothing after. Just this.
Gradually his mind comes back together, quarks to quanta, quanta to fragments, to thoughts. She touches him lightly, gently, and his arms tighten on her. When her hand passes down his spine, her forearm traces the line her heel had gouged into his back a little over a week ago. A human would bear a scab there still; perhaps even scar. He is not human. He is not a man.
He is something else altogether, a creature from a world where others like himself think of mates and dens, of claim, of belonging, of challenges and snarls and snaps and bloody victory. He is not a man, and she, in truth, is not wholly a woman.
She bites at his lips sometimes. She digs her nails into him. She thinks of him as hers, calls him her boyfriend or her lover sometimes, but thinks of him as hers.
A sensitive spot: his skin tightens and shivers beneath her fingers. He makes a sound, muffled, and then he turns his face to her neck and kisses her skin suddenly, uncompromisingly. They cling to one another. She cradles him. He cradles her. She holds him as though he were precious to her. He holds her as though to ward her somehow; as though to disappear into her; as though to keep her.
"Nenáviděl jsem ho, když jsi odešel poslední doby, v restaurace."
It sounds like a confession. He shifts, moves his weight to his elbows and raises himself enough, just enough, to trail his lips over her ear, the line of her cheek. They move. He speaks against the corner of her mouth, against her lips.
"Nenáviděl jsem odcházím minule jsem byl tady."
A silence here. A kiss, slow and soft, his mouth moving on hers, catching her lips between his, opening, drifting. He bows his head, his brow to her lips, his lips to her throat.
"Nemohl jsem se medvěd pro vám jít v New York City."
And tightening again, his arms around her; his hands opening over her back. He draws a long breath, releases it.
"Jsem neodejdeme večer."
[Danicka] A litany drops from his lips, not laws or statutes that bind him in a world she is held separate from by virtue or vice of birth, but a sort of falling-apart poetry, each statement simpler than the last, each one murmuring a memory. This time, when she walked away from him because her pride would not allow her to scurry off after her boyfriend as though he was all that mattered. That time, when they were beginning to move closer to each other in bed and opening their mouths as they kissed only to pull apart like pieces of dough so that he could get up, get dressed, and walk out. This time, when she had to put on her heels and earrings again and leave his room at the W in Times Square so she could be at home in time to greet her brother and his mate.
It aches to hear it from him as they kiss, softly and slowly, spent for now and lazily, languidly drinking in the nearness of their bodies, the warmth between them. There is a distinct sense of possession to all this, or at the very least a lack of awareness of anything else. The vagaries of their lives, mundane or otherwise, do not interfere. Danicka licks her lips after his mouth parts from hers; her eyes open and look up into his. She exhales softly, thinking that any moment now they will simply fall asleep, fall into each other, fall to dust. It is a drowsy, half-formed thought, and it means nothing. It blows away like dust, itself.
They do not. The wind cannot take her from him, not when he holds her like that. Her legs loosen around his waist, slide down. Her toes tuck under the tossed-back covers. She smiles gently up at him. She has no idea how long it has been since they came together, since she went from riding him with her finger in his mouth to lying on her back and holding him to her like something beloved.
Which is what he is.
The way they kiss and move their faces together is as slow as if they were moving through water. It is animalistic, primal and thoughtless. Her cheek touches his, scrapes against the hairs there. She kisses his forehead and her eyelashes brush his hairline. She smells his sweat and feels such a surge of protectiveness that she holds him tighter for a moment, holds onto him, refuses to let time or the War or anything so much as consider taking him away. She kisses him, closing her eyes and opening her mouth, her hands sliding up the back of his neck into his hair. She kisses him, touching his face, cupping his cheeks in her hands, loathe to let him go, loathe to retreat even when she knows she has to breathe.
"Vím," she whispers, holding him close, opening her eyes even though they keep trying to fall closed so she can lose herself in a dark, warm, sensation-drenched existence before sleep. Danicka yawns, but doesn't remove her hands from him to cover her mouth. She smiles, soft and almost shy in its slowness, closing her eyes finally and pulling him down to rest against her chest. "Vím."
He doesn't leave. He parts from her, eventually, as he has to. He lays with her; neither of them suggest a shower, a break, a separation that has them trying to walk. She lies on her side and tells him about the first time she read A Wrinkle In Time. She tells him that she's not even sure she could do anything with it but she's thinking of going for a degree in Physics, and because they are mere inches apart lying on her pillows he can see the way her eyes light up when she goes from that to talking about poetry of all things, about someone named Rumi, about the book he got for her about werewolves in Los Angeles.
She's never been to Los Angeles.
She tells him: The Devil's Arithmetic is so much better than Number the Stars.
She tells him: I've never read Summer of the Swans. and Sometimes I think I would be a good teacher.
As she talks, quietly and without any direction in mind, she touches his face here and there. Her thumb smoothes and eyebrow. Her fingers rake back his hair. She laughingly, softly, tells him that she likes the hair on his chest, likes the way it tickles, likes the way it holds his scent. They talk, for some time, about books, and about college, and even about the fact that he needs to get a new car and she's wondering why she ever bothered with one in the first place when she did perfectly fine in New York without one and is doing perfectly fine here without one now.
They laugh. As intense and insane as things keep getting, as aware of they both are of how fragile life is, they laugh about the fact she picked a goddamned convertible in the middle of winter to live in a city like Chicago. And their feet rub together, their legs tangle together, and as their conversation begins to slow, and soften, because his hand runs up her waist a certain way or her fingertips trace his nipple or because she moves closer and he looks down and breathes out against her breasts at the very sight of her body aligned to his, she kisses the corner of his mouth, the line of his jaw. She moves her knee gently between his thighs, passes her hand down between his legs again.
Danicka is the one who chooses to move to her back, when their breath is quickened again and his eyes are vivid with renewed but still half-sated desire. She is the one who eases him between her legs, guides him on top of her, tells him in the attitude of her body that she wants him again, that she's ready for him, that she is hers. Before he's inside her, before they lose their minds, while their lips are still brushing skin and sipping air, she murmurs something she hasn't before, at least not freely, at least not without some sort of ache to it. This time when the words curl in his ear they are nothing more than a contented, pleasured sigh, the likes of which he hears so very, very rarely from her because she so very, very rarely is so at peace:
"Děláš mi tak radost, Lukáš."
Her voice is a purr.
Her body is welcoming.
She is telling him the truth.
celebration.
9 years ago