[Danicka] A week after their last meeting -- after the red tie, after not seeing him for three and a half weeks and then calling him to the gates of Lincoln Park Zoo -- a note arrives at the Brotherhood by way of bicycle messenger. It's almost retro, when in this day and age an e-mail, text, or the like will usually suffice. This note, however, apparently needed to be hand-delivered.
Along with a package. Smaller than a breadbox. Smaller than a shoebox, even. The messenger is from an agency called Comet, and leaves the package and note for Lukas. It's possible he won't get it until Monday, but it arrives late on Sunday evening, perhaps even right as he's waking up.
The note is on pale, pale gray stationery, written in green ink.
Dnes jsem si uvědomil, že my vyrobený láska poprvé před šesti měsíci. Já vím, že je téměř úplně smysl. Ale myslel jsem, že o něm, a myslel na tebe.
Myslím, že jsem začal miluju ty tu noc, když ty políbil mé rameno. Možná, že to bylo poprvé, viděl jsem vás smích. Možná to bylo, když jsme se potkali, a slyšel jsem to říkal mé jméno.
Já nevím. Miluju tě teď.
- DaničkaInside the box are a thick paperback. He may or may not recognize it from that day he took her from a coffee shop and out onto the waterfront to confess that they were never really talking about Sam, ask her if she was capable of more than a casual fuck, and draw from her the answer to a single question: why the fucking Czech that night.
She had been reading The Collected Poems of Ted Huges. The copy she's sent is well-read, well-worn, the spine cracked and the corners of the pages fuzzy from attention. One page is dogeared. The poem is called
Lovesong. It is almost violent in its intensity. It is visceral. It is inexplicably tender, somehow.
But he may not get to that for some time. Atop the book, wrapped carefully in tissue paper, is a candied orange koláč.
[Lukas] The courier finds Lukas's door unresponsive. He leaves the package there, but as he turns to go the Ahroun is there in the hallway behind him, a towel 'round his neck and a towel 'round his waist, his eyes curious and keen. Though Lukas is nothing but polite when he signs for the package, the bicycle courier from Comet still vows to avoid any deliveries addressed to the Brotherhood henceforth.
Then he's gone, and Lukas picks up the small, dense package. He turns it over in his hands. He picks up the end of his towel and swipes water from his brow, his neck, then unlocks his door and goes in.
Behind closed doors he sits on his bed and unwraps the parcel, aware of a quiet, secret delight in himself that he thought had died around the time he stopped believing in Santa. The candied orange kolac and the handwriting on the note makes him smile, a quick, private expression that he would've dropped instantly if someone were to barge in his door right now.
No one barges in. His smile fades of its own accord into seriousness, into solemnity, as he, eating, reads the rest of the note.
When he sets it aside, the kolac is gone, and what lies beneath it makes Lukas's brow furrow quickly and sharply, as though a sudden pain had lanced through him. He recognizes the book. Of course he does. He flashes back to that day, the book she read, well-thumbed and well-worn; he flashes back to new york city, lying in her arms after the intensity, the rawness, the almost frightening viscerality of their lovemaking. He remembers her telling him why she owned so few books, her tears, the first time he let himself try to comfort her.
Lukas lays a hand atop the book. A moment later he brings that hand up, pinches the bridge of his nose for a second, and then opens the book to where the dogeared page lies. The poem is called Lovesong, and it's intense, and raw, and almost frightening in its viscerality.
All the tenderness is in the last three lines, but it's strange and haunting and almost inexplicable.
He thinks this makes perfect sense.
The book is set aside carefully. He gets up and goes to his landline phone; then he decides against it. He dresses instead, shaves and clothes himself swiftly, shuts the door to the Brotherhood and gets into his car scarcely five minutes later.
Not very long after that, he rings her intercom. If she's not at home, he'll call her.
[Danicka] Danicka does not sleep or doze with him but lays on her back, lazily running her fingers through his hair, feeling and listening to him breathe.
She eats cooled stew and cold bread without complaint, lying on her side in bed with bowls balanced between their chests, soaking up broth with bread.
When he gets up from bed for water she's at the window before he has even slid the closet doors open, stretching in the midafternoon sunlight. Anyone in the alley could look up and see her there, exposed and heedless it, as self-possessed in her nudity as she would be in a gown, in jeans, in satin lingerie. She does not catch the water bottle but takes it from him when he walks to the window, too, leans against her, the frame, looking over her shoulder at nothing, really.
They make love again, her thighs spread over his lap and their kisses their first and melting point of connection, as always, as ever.
(And ever and ever.)
They make love again.
Again.
She bites her cries into his shoulder, into his pillow. Her wrists are far less red by the time they can barely stand to move together again, evidence not only of her own health but of her blood, of her closeness to the purer and faster regeneration of werewolves. Danicka naps once between lovemakings, sleeping suddenly and simply in his arms the way he likely never thought she would, the way she certainly never thought she would. It is perhaps the first time he's seen her fall asleep before him. She rests with her hand near her face, her lips parted, her shoulders sloping and body curled.
When she wakes, she kisses him. And moves her hands past his hips, around his waist, between his legs. She loves him again, without moving from lying on her side, wrapping her leg around him and guiding him into her with her hand and a flex of her leg, so lazy and slow that one or both of them have to stop, have to remember, not to simply lose themselves in intimacy, in sensation. One or both of them stops kissing and gasps for a condom, one or both of them fights with the drawer to get the nightstand to relinquish it.
In the later hours she listens, silent, her hand still on his side. Her palm is open over his ribcage, feeling it press out against her palm as he breathes, feeling it tremble slightly when he chuckles, feeling his heart skip a little faster when she smiles back at him. She has an idea what classes she's taking but freshman registration isn't til September. Her advisor's assured her that the schedule she wants will be no trouble. She's tested out of some of the basics. She's amazed she remembered so much. It's been six years since she was in school.
Danicka fucking loved calculus.
He confesses he can't remember how to do an integral and she launches into a surprisingly energetic lesson, manipulating numbers in her head, in the air between them, going off on a tangent about trigonometry before she starts to get bored of the topic. Laughs. Apologizes, and he kisses her.
Here.
(I love your skin.)
"I love your mouth," she whispers back, pushing her fingers into his hair. It's undeniable what she wants, where he is headed, how she will react when he licks her again. "I love your shoulders." Random, arching her back, breathing words at the ceiling. "
Mám rád vaše ruce. Ach bože, Lukáš ..."
Later, she's wrapped in a towel on his bed, plaiting her wet, thick hair into a braid that rests on one shoulder. She deftly applies mere traces of makeup from the purse by his bed, curls the ends of the braid around her fingers until it is more than a sopping lock of hair. He gets to watch her go from the way she looked at the zoo to someone else entirely, pulling a rolled pair of jeans and a soft cream-colored camisole from her purse like fucking Mary Poppins discovering lamps and mirrors in her carpetbag. It doesn't even look like that big of a purse. And he knows she didn't expect to see him today. It's bizarre. It's Danicka, though.
When they leave for dinner her shoulders are bared and she does not look like she spent the afternoon fucking, talking, lolling in bed. The only similarity to the Danicka he met at the zoo gates and the one stealing his french fries with an arch mockery of impunity are her bright red shoes, scuffing slightly on the cement. There are no Garou or Kin, despite their proximity to the Brotherhood, to see how he lets her eat off his plate, to question how he is with his Kinfolk, to steal away that real smile of hers by their mere presence.
The smile that is awkward, and lopsided, and reminds him -- even before she slips and rambles for two minutes about World of Warcraft, though after her blather about calculus and trigonometry -- that he is dating a geek. A nerd, even.
Others see them when they get back. No one cares. His pack has long since given up on suggesting to him that she is worthless, not to be trusted, that he should not get caught up in her. They have stopped trying to push discussions regarding her. They ignore her. She does not notice; it is what she's always wanted from Garou, from the beginning, for as long as she can remember: for them to just not care, whether they see her or not.
And she is with him. She is leaning into his embrace, drawing his hand to her mouth and licking off the faint, barely there remainders of salt on his fingertips, undresses with him once more until she's in panties and camisole, until he's sharing his bed with her again but asking if she minds if he reads with her.
For a moment all Danicka can do is stare at him, and it's entirely likely that he might read hurt or bewilderment in her eyes where there is nothing of the sort. Her expression is impossible to decipher until she confesses, in a murmur, how she felt and what she wanted the night she came up here with Sam and saw him reading on the sectional. The book was
Lying Awake.
She has read
Crime and Punishment, too. Yes, in Russian.
Her answer is not that it's all right, but a quiet and hesitating request to read with him, as though he might mind her imposing on that solitary time before sleep, as though he might tell her to get her own book. She wants to do as she wanted to do in January and curl up next to him. For fifty pages, or a hundred, though near the end she's letting her fingernails stroke aimlessly over his abdominal muscles. And then his chest. And his hip.
Danicka is almost innocent about the way she runs her hand down and onto his thigh, though he knows better. He knows her better. Long before she works her hand under the sheet or into his pants and traces the seam of his hip joint, long before she caress his balls or wraps her hand around his cock he knows what she is doing, forsees the way she turns her head and wraps her lips around one nipple, her breathing quickening. Heating. Danicka is done reading before Lukas is. Danicka is blatant in her encouragement of setting Dostoyevsky aside and making love to her again.
She is much quieter in the morning, waking hours before he is set to. She does not leave his bed or his room the way she once left Sam, while Lukas is sleeping off the previous day, the sex, the thoroughly body-melting relaxation they find with each other that she could never have with another Ahroun. Another man. Anyone, maybe.
Instead she turns and eases him awake, as gently as she would a child. She whispers that she has to go, she has an appointment at ten. She kisses him more than she means to, less than she wants to, and only then slips away, pulling on the clothes she wore to dinner and heading out. No, she says, if he tries to get up and walk her down. She plays with his hair as he lies on the pillow, sitting beside him on the mattress until his eyelids dip closed again in simple animal comfort.
"I like you like this."
Danicka doesn't explain what she means. She kisses him one last time, on his temple. Then another one last time, on his lips, before slinging her bag over her shoulder and leaving the Brotherhood, going not home but to a salon-spa. Going home from there and then to the market. Staying up most of the night online. Sleeping til two the next day and wondering how it got to be Tuesday so soon. Reading, most of the day, about different majors. Different jobs. Different extracurricular groups and programs. On Wednesday she stays out of the way as a cleaning service whips through the kitchen and bathrooms and makes her roommate, Paul, laugh. On Thursday he brings her a goodie bag from the show. They end up dancing in the living room. On Friday she calls her father, she goes to a movie, she goes out dancing and drinking with Paul and a group of his friends. On Saturday she wakes up in Milwaukee at one of these friends' parents' house. They spend the morning on the lake, and her nose gets sunburnt. She is stoned most of the afternoon, out on their deck.
On Sunday she realizes it's been a week. On Sunday she realizes it's been six months. On Sunday she is home again, her nose no longer bright pink, packing a box with a book and a kolac and writing a note on the kitchen counter even while she's waiting for the courier to arrive. It will be midnight soon, and around midnight she was already in a motel room with Lukas, stripping out of her sweater, out of her jeans, as he stripped the bed as cruelly and coldly as he could, which never really struck her as either.
It is past midnight, and it is Monday, when her intercom buzzes. A single word from him, no father than
It's or
Let or anything else, and the comm buzzes and the doors click unlocked for him. She is waiting for him at the door to her apartment when he gets to the twenty-third floor, her hair up in a high ponytail, her feet bare, her body clad in pale pink lounge pants that cling to her hips and thighs and a chocolate-brown t-shirt with the molocule for theobromine in pink across her chest.
"
Jste zde," she says, with carefully suppressed and quieted delight as he gets nearer, though her eyes gleam with it. She looks up at him, smiling in the sconce-lit hallway, wrapping her arms around his neck if he lets her. "
Dostali jste balík?"
[Lukas] Of course he lets her.
Of course his arms loop around her waist as hers go around his neck. He tightens; he lifts her in a single, smooth pull, as though choreographed.
In flat soles, he's nearly eight inches taller than she is. When he pulls her up like this, she rides a good foot and a half above her usual height. He looks up at her and he smiles; tells her:
"
Polib mne a zjistit."
He tastes like oranges. His mouth, warm and gentle, opens to hers -- his tongue seeking hers, drawing her into his mouth.
And then he opens his eyes again, his smile settling into something quieter.
"You love that book," he says, quietly.
[Danicka] What he says makes her laugh. The door is closed, only because they're standing right beside it can he hear the music playing inside, some kind of ambient trance track. Danicka slides up the front of Lukas's body when he lifts her, squeezing against him with a grin as he moves her into the air like she's nothing. To him, it's not far from the truth. She wraps her arms closer around his neck and closes her eyes as she's leaning in to kiss him, as though to better experience it by closing off at least one other sense.
Danicka kisses him for a long time. Seven days' worth. Maybe more. There is no one in the hallway at this hour, not the night before a workweek. Even the music in her own apartment is hardly blaring. When he stops kissing her -- and it's Lukas, it has to be Lukas, because Danicka is wrapping her legs around his waist finally and sighing into his mouth without any apparent thought of stopping -- she blinks open her eyes and smiles at him.
There's an ache to it. Or maybe not an ache; tenderness. The fingers of her left hand toy with the hairs on the back of his neck. "Yeah," she murmurs, the corners of her mouth curled up almost sadly. "Did you like the poem?"
[Lukas] They touch each other, hands to faces: the two most unique, unmistakable aspects of their bodies. Her fingers stroke through his hair. His come up to touch, almost thoughtfully, the curl of her mouth.
"
Ano."
He kisses her again, lighter, briefer; sweet. Then he lets her down.
"I loved it," he adds, and kisses her brow. "Let's go in?"
[Danicka] All she has to do to answer is nod, several times in quick, happy succession. She kisses him again, quickly, first the pad of his thumb and then his mouth, her arms and legs squeezing him. "Paul has a few friends over," she says, as though in warning, "but one of them's just arguing with Paul about my speakers and the other two are playing MarioKart."
Danicka kisses him again. "They're also, for the most part, high as kites. I think they'll forgive you if you decide not to be social."
Her small smile grows into a grin as she hops to the floor, her feet silent on the thick carpet. She reaches for the doorknob of 23-C and twists it, pushes it open behind her, letting some of the music inside and the sounds of the video game on the enormous television spill out into the hallway. The scent of marijuana, however, does not, just as the cigarettes he knows Danicka smokes occasionally never come in past the balcony.
"We ordered about seventeen pounds of Greek food, too, so if you're hungry..." her brows waggle, "there's
lamb."
That grin still on her face, she moves into the apartment, holding the door open for him. Indeed, there are voices to the north of the living room as the track changes, and a thin but thick-haired young man is indeed arguing with a girl in a pixie cut about the quality of the stereo system that dominates part of that wall. The girl in the pixie cut wants to know why Danicka has a turntable if she doesn't have any records. There are two men in their late twenties sitting on the floor between couch and coffee table, legs outstretched and paper plates and napkins and bottles of beer adorning the surface of the table. They are not trash talking each other. They are very, very focused on MarioKart.
Until Lukas enters. The argument by the stereo system falters, then pauses as both parties look over at the hallway. Both of the video game players manage to careen off the rainbow road they're trying to drive on, but instantly start blaming each other. The kitchen counter is covered in recycled-paper-and-foil-lid containers holding the promised Greek, and it smells like lamb and feta. There is a dedicated bowl for kalamata pits.
"You want your controller back?" asks one of the hipsters on the floor in front of plasma screen, as Danicka closes and locks the door behind Lukas and heads down the hall to the kitchen.
"No, keep it," she says, grabbing the plate she'd carried halfway to the door when Lukas first buzzed the intercom. "Paulchristammygene, this is --" a beat, a hitch brief enough that none of them will notice. He will. "Lukas." She mispronounces his name with deliberation.
They nod. Mutter hellos. They don't make eye contact. Paul does, actually giving a smile and a bright wave to the Shadow Lord. The monster in his new home. "I solemnly swear that I am not interested in your girlfriend's vagina," he says, holding up a three-fingered salute and giving the man a grin. He doesn't see Danicka cringe.
"I'm surprised you can even say the word, Pablo," says the girl he was arguing with. They are doing their best to cope with Lukas's presence.
By ignoring it.
Danicka looks at him as she goes to the fridge to grab a beer. "Want one?"
[Lukas] Sometimes Lukas pretends to be human so well that one might almost forget he's not. She's seen him out amongst the sheep, seen him dress and speak and act with an eye for detail. She's seen him in artfully rumpled clothes, lounging in clubs and bars; she's seen him wield fork and knife with impeccable table manners at old-world steakhouses, slurp oysters off the half-shell without balking at new-wave pacific fusion restaurants. She's seen him coming out of TD Waterhouse's downtown branch looking like he's accomplished something, and she's seen the confidence and ease in his dealings with the random humans that float in and out of his orbit day by day.
What Danicka may or may not realize is that so much of that is preconsidered and planned. The premeditation may be swift, may be reflexive, may be all but unconscious -- but it's there, and it's necessary. His ability to pass as a human is as meticulously structured as his ability to plan a battle.
It's different tonight. She tells him, offhand, that her roommate, whom he's never met, has friends over, which he does not expect. She kisses him. She tells him they'll forgive him for being antisocial, and then she opens the door.
Lukas follows her in. He doesn't have the luxury of forethought, of the swift but necessary mental preparation, the switches flipped and the dials turned in his mind, the mask chosen and donned. He tries to keep it in mind:
roommate, friends over, friends, but he pushes his rage ahead of him down the entryway, and when the party hitches and Danicka introduces him to Paul-Chris-Tammy-Gene, Lukas stands where the hallway opens into the living room and looks at the humans and thinks
strangers.
interlopers.
trespassers.They nod without looking at him, mutter hellos. Lukas doesn't even return that much. He looks at them, and while he's trying to remind himself that this isn't his territory, it's not even entirely Danicka's territory anymore, Paul waves and grins and tells him
well; what he tells him.
"
What?" The word is a little too sharp, his stare too direct.
Then Tammy speaks up; then Danicka; Lukas pulls his eyes to one, then the other. He fixes on Danicka. She's a familiar point, an anchor. He keeps his eyes on her for a second, and she can see the protective instinct, the possessive instinct in his eyes flare and flicker, fade by slow and forceful degrees.
He draws a short breath, lets it out. And then he gives Paul a brief, closelipped smile, leaving his quip unanswered. Lukas turns into the kitchen a moment later to help himself to lamb and greek salad. And beer.
[Danicka] They are going to believe forever afterwards that Paul's roommate's boyfriend is jackass. When they talk about Danicka -- and they will -- they will question why she's with him. They'll talk about how nice she is, as if that is all there is to her. They will take one word from his mouth, spoken like that, and determine him a humorless bastard who doesn't deserve her. They will know by instinct not to gossip about it in front of Danicka herself, just as they know by instinct not to engage with Lukas but remain hiding in the living room in their corners, waiting for him to go away to breathe again.
Paul, on the other hand, has to live here. He's considering the chances of running into this guy in the kitchen some morning while making coffee. He's thinking about the possibility of socializing with him in the living room if he and Danicka decide not to just hide in her suite all night. He's not wanting or hoping for it to happen. He's not fearing or dreading it. He's just... considering it. He gives Lukas more benefit of the doubt than Chris-Tammy-Gene. He lowers his hand and blinks.
"I'm just... I mean... " and points at himself. "Y'know. Gaa-aay!" he says, the last word in nervous singsong.
He stops because of the Look that Danicka is giving him. A 'cut' signal has never been more effectively, and he works in television.
She looks back at Lukas, meeting his eyes as he's enveloping her with his. The connection there is almost solid, almost tangible. She looks apologetic, but it fades as gradually as the ferocity in his does, albeit more naturally. Her plate has greek salad on it, lamb souvlaki, and pita, and everything's still warm; they only recently got the food, and she hadn't been eating for long when he showed up. She grabs a beer, then as an afterthough manages to grab a bottle of wine they opened last night as well.
"
Brýle?" she murmurs to Lukas, nodding her head at the cupboard. The music and video game are going again; Danicka's slippage into Czech goes unheard. She winds past the Ahroun and heads towards her room, the suite door lying open.
[Lukas] Lukas reaches up when Danicka indicates the shelf. He takes out a pair of glasses, manages to balance them, his beer, his plate, all while turning sideways thoughtlessly to let Danicka past.
When he follows her into her room, he casts the occupants of the living room an uninvestedly curious glance. There's no attempt to mend fences. Likely they're all focused on their respective conversations and games anyway -- coping by ignoring.
After Lukas is past the suite door, he taps it shut behind him. A moment's thought; then he shuts it altogether, turning the knob to keep the door from slamming.
"
Omlouvám se," he says, wry, but genuinely -- if faintly -- apologetic, "
já myslím já že může mít vyděšená váš spolubydlící a jeho přátel."
[Danicka] There are new dishes in the kitchen cupboards. Unlike Martin, unlike Lee, Paul seems to have brought quite a bit of his own Stuff to the apartment. Noticable but not terribly important is the dark blue armchair near the stereo system, the addition of a new shelf beside the sideboard that was already in place underneath the television. Paul has a lot of movies. There's another shelf like it by the armchair: Paul also has a lot of music. The new roommate has more shelves just like it in his own bedroom, but the chances of Lukas ever going down that hallway are next to none.
The lights are off in Danicka's room, but she moves through the dark space with ease, familiar not only with the room but with the darkness. When she gets to the end of the hall she turns on the light, sliding the bottle of wine and her bottle of beer onto the edge of her desk. It's been a month -- more than a month -- since he was here, since that night he took her to get Polish food and brought her back here to fuck her again
and again
and again.
Not much has changed. Her bed is made, whatever clothes she wore earlier today put away. She went for a run this afternoon, ran into a Theurge in the park, but that was hours and hours ago. There's a postcard from the Everglades on her desk, picture facing up. It is the only evidence of mail in the room. He's almost never seen such things: letters, bills, magazines, whatever. There are a few pictures on the bookshelf along with his childhood collection, but he's seen those before. Most of who Danicka is, the little hints at personality and life outside this room, remains hidden. Which is to be expected.
"
Budou přežít," she says, somewhat offhand and somewhat wry, herself. She turns to him, flipping open the lever on the airtight stopper she uses in the bottle in place of the cork it came with. "
Paul neznamenalo by to nic," she says gently. "
Nechce, abys byl jeho nepřítel, prostě proto že on je samec ve vašem území."
She speaks so easily like this, as if they are animals, as if this way of looking at it is natural. It's hard to tell if that's because she thinks it is, or because she's been conditioned to talk about it like that regardless for the sake of the Garou around her. She waits for the glasses, and then she pours the red Rioja with a thoughtless grace.
[Lukas] "
Vím," Lukas says; for a moment he sounds faintly tired, though not exasperated. And not by her. "
Chápu to. Bylo to ... reflexní. Nemyslel jsem to reagovat takhle."
He's briefly close to her, setting his plate down beside hers on the desk, and the wineglasses. Then he leans against the wall, watching her as she moves effortlessly about her space, about her activities. She pours the red, even though they each have a beer; he sets his beer down unopened.
"
Je mi to líto."
Either he's forgotten utensils, or never meant to use them. Either way, he reaches down by hand, picks up a strip of lamb and eats it. As she finishes pouring, he reaches out with his free hand, wraps his fingers gently around her wrist. Holds her a moment, and then finds her eyes with his.
"
Já nevadí, bez ohledu na jeho sexuální orientaci." There could so easily be a presumption here: that whether or not he minds would matter to her. That if he minded, she would change for him. It's not there, though. Lukas is careful, almost hesitant, in his tone; his phrasing. "
Nemyslím si, že vás mne zradí."
[Danicka] Her windows are open, the blinds pulled up and the glass raised, screens filtering the air in and the bugs out. The overhead light sparkles against the prism hanging in one window but there are no rainbows on the floor, on her bedspread. The sounds of the city are distant, the sound of the river, cars, voices, the occasional horn or blast of music. It's all muted, covered and carried at the same time by wind.
He apologizes again, and something flickers in her eyes as he does so. She pours, setting the bottle down and putting the stopper in. He reaches for her as she's picking up her beer instead. Her hand tenses slightly when he wraps his hand around her wrist, then relaxes. Her eyebrows pull together as she looks at him, a definite frown somewhere between displeasure and confusion.
"I didn't think you would," she says quietly.
[Lukas]
Dice Rolled:[ 4 d10 ] 1, 4, 5, 9 (Failure at target 6)
[Lukas] (SHADOW LORDS DON'T FAIL)
Dice Rolled:[ 4 d10 ] 3, 5, 9, 9 (Success x 2 at target 7)
[Lukas] For a moment Danicka can see Lukas's eyes searching her face, gleaning what they can. Then his hand shifts; he tucks his fingers into her palm instead, takes her hand and brings it up to his lips briefly, lightly.
"Okay," he says. Lets her hand, and the subject, drop.
Lukas lifts his wineglass with his hand clamped over the lip, drinking through the space between thumb and forefinger. The glass clicks down quietly. He picks up his plate and leans against her desk, wrapping lamb in pita bread, dipping in hummus. There's a careless sort of efficiency to the way he eats, which is not quite the same thing as neatness and very far indeed from politeness. They can hear the music from the living room, but it's dim, muffled by walls considerably thicker than those at the Brotherhood.
[Danicka] "Has anyone ever suggested to you," Danicka says, her lips curving in a smile both wry and gentle, "that you're kind of a worrywart?"
She picks up a kebab and a pita, folding one around the other and sliding the lamb off the skewer. She eats the first bite plain, bread and meat, taking a bite and looking past her hands at him as she chews.
[Lukas] Lukas exhales; it's something like a laugh, almost stripped of humor. "I don't want to make things difficult between you and your roommate," he replies. A shrug -- his shirt plain, striped in pale blue, the soft creases shifting with the roll of his shoulders. "And I'm usually better at controlling myself in front of humans."
He sets his half-eaten pita down for a moment, drinking from his glass again. When he sets it down this time, he shifts some objects aside on her desk, plants his hand on the edge and levers himself up.
[Danicka] There's an instant reaction from Danicka when Lukas hefts himself onto her desk. It's a solid desk, well-built, but like everything else in this room it's rather light, instead of the heavy sort of monster one would find in a richly appointed power office where everything is dark red, stained oak, and dust. Lukas is big. And Lukas is sitting on the edge of her desk, which is where her computers are, the iMac and the Macbook and the new black Vaio Z.
The reaction he sees is obvious, unlike some of her others: it's protectiveness of her technology more than concern for the desk going out from under him. He's not
that big.
Danicka takes a drink of her beer and dips her pita in hummus for another bite, chewing thoughtfully before she swallows and answers. "I don't think you will," she says. "Make things difficult, I mean. He seems to have... a lot of backbone. Especially for a human." Despite the fact that even someone pressing their ear to her suite's door would have difficulty hearing them, even with music off and the television muted, she keeps her voice low. "But I don't think he'll be like Lee or Martin. Lee never brought anyone over and the only 'friend' of Martin's that ever came here did so through the spirit world, and was never invited."
Katherine.
"Paul, on the other hand, has a
lot of friends." She chuckles, moving to take another bite.
[Lukas] "Like you?" Lukas says with a smile; it's a little rueful. The truth is Paul is probably nothing like Danicka. Lukas doesn't think Danicka brings any of her 'friends', any of those people she seems to attract to her and befriend within minutes and then leaves behind, home.
Come to think of it, Lukas isn't sure Danicka has many real friends at all.
He drains his wine with one long pull; backtracks, says, "Did Martin tell you Katherine came through the umbra?"
[Danicka] His smile is rueful; her answering
hmm of laughter is almost entirely mirthless. She has a lot of friends. She has a lot of people who know at least some version of her name, who know some portion of her routine, who know... what she chooses to tell them. She had a real friend in a Russian-speaking kinsman who once lived here with her, but Martin moved to Florida. She has a real friend in a young Silver Fang kinswoman, but Yelizaveta is in New York City. She has had real friends in men her age: Stephen, Christian, but she left them behind as well.
Lukas is the only one she's really invited into her room, into her bed, though he's not the only one that's been there. She has scores of people who adore her in restaurants, salons, shops she visits, places she goes through her empty days. She is not worried about making friends in college, already starkly aware that the eighteen-to-twenty-two year olds will attach to her because she is older, because she is rich, because she is beautiful, because she is charming. She doesn't fool herself that she will let a single one of them in, or invite them over, though by the end of her tenure at the University of Chicago she will likely know all their families and too many of their secrets.
It's been like that for a long time.
"Well, at the time," Danicka says mildly, "I was in my room. The front door didn't open and the next thing I knew she was in the hall talking to him. There was that... little noise, too, and the sort of... shudder in the air. The way it sounds when you --" she so rarely says it like this, the collective 'you', the 'you' that means
you Garou and not
you, mine, baby, "-- cross over."
She takes a pull from her beer, then sets it down, picking up her pita again. "And that's how she came in while I was Saran-Wrapping his shoulder after the Spirals attacked. Annnd that's how she showed up to tear his bedroom apart while I was taking him to the hospital." She takes a bite. Like it's a throat.
[Lukas] The empty glass hovers in Lukas's hand for a moment. Then he looks away briefly, downward, to set the glass down where it won't topple over or spill the dregs.
"It's not that I didn't believe you," he explains. "Or that I wanted proof, or convincing. It's just Katherine never mentioned seeing you there. You just stayed in your room the whole time?"
[Danicka] "Well, except for talking to her in Martin's room when I came back to get some of his things, and for a second when she came in to get all fluttery over his shoulder," Danicka says, her tone flattening slightly. She takes a much longer drink of her beer this time before setting it down.
It isn't imagined disbelief making her angry.
"Most of the time she was here tackling him to the fucking ground I was under my goddamn bed."
[Lukas] Reaction: a flicker of his eyebrows upward, surprise. Chasing that: a lowering of those eyebrows, a knitting of his brow. It's indistinct, what this means -- displeasure, ache, an unpleasant sort of realization and understanding.
Lukas says nothing for the moment.
[Danicka] This time, Danicka's not looking at Lukas, not gauging his response, not watching for his reaction. She's less afraid of him than she once was... though that's not it, really, at all. Sometimes it seemed she was never afraid of him. Wary, though. She watched him to see what he liked about what she said, how she behaved. She watched him closely to guess what he wanted to hear. She is less wary now. She is more honest.
She is also embarrassed, and angry, and once again biting into her food as though by tearing it apart with her teeth she can do some damage back to the world, feel stronger, be something more than she was. Not feel so
weak.
[Lukas] A moment passes in silence. Lukas watches Danicka, his pale eyes keen and unwavering; Danicka looks aside, tears into her food like an angry animal.
Then Lukas sets his plate aside. It's heavy, laden with lamb and olives and feta and pita bread, but he handles it firmly, carefully, sets it down with barely a sound. He comes off the desk the same way: a smooth flexion, a controlled descent. For a second he reaches for her, and then seems to think better of it. Or merely becomes unsure of it.
He moves past her instead. Goes to her window, beside the bookcase with the books that still smell faintly of his father's house. He looks out over the river, the city; thinks a moment.
And then he turns toward her. He doesn't tell her she wasn't weak when she hid under the bed. He doesn't tell her she was, either. He doesn't try to explain the fine and smudged lines between weakness and wisdom, between cowardice and survival. He doesn't tell Danicka what she already knows.
"Would it make you feel weak," he says instead, quietly, "if I held you right now?"
[Danicka] She knows that the right answer is
no. She knows that the right answer is
hold me. He wants to wrap his arms around her. He wants to protect her from all harm, real or imagined, present or long past. At the time all this happened -- when Katherine was throwing Martin on the floor and Danicka was huddled in her room, literally hiding like a child, covering her mouth to stifle the sound of her crying -- he didn't want her, or pretended not to, and even if she saw through the pretense, Danicka didn't want to tolerate it. They weren't together. They'd made love four times in a matter of hours, trying their damndest to just fuck each other and yet letting their bodies curl and tangle together between rounds, kissing every time they started to gravitate towards one another again.
Danicka's always known the right answer. It's an act of will, every time, not to give it. The right answer keeps her safe. It keeps other people happy. The right answer might have been to just let Lukas put his hand on her neck, pin her to the motel mattress and hammer at her until he came. The right answer, before then, might have been to run as soon as she felt that shockwave of fur erupting up his back just before he pushed her away and reined himself in once more. She's always known the right answer.
It took her a little longer to realize that with Lukas, he's never wanted the Right Answer. He has, consistently, wanted the truth. All she can do right now is think about what they said to each other before he left her, what they said about weakness, about being tired of feeling that way, being tired of being reminded, about how hard it was for either of them to allow themselves to be truly weak with each other. Not just feigning it. Not just pretending.
Needing.
"
Ano," she murmurs, looking into her bottle of beer. She takes another drink.
[-1 WP]
[Lukas] Lukas's eyelids flicker; it's barely a blink. She looks at her beer. He looks at her, and then away.
"Okay," he says quietly. And after a moment he leans against the windowsill, sliding down a little until he sits on its edge.
[Danicka] "
Omlouvám se," Danicka murmurs, no longer attacking her pita, no longer drinking her beer. She just looks at the floor, her forehead furrowed as though she's deep in thought. "
Nelíbí se mi o tom mluvit, že v noci, nebo Katherine. Víte já nerad..."
She pauses there, hesitating to say it, then closes her eyes, "
... tvůj bratry a sestry. To je různé. Není to prostě co ona udělal s Martínek, ale způsob, jak ona přišla sem. A že ona byl tak rozzlobený. A jak ona ho pronásledoval, a způsob, jakým ji připomněl mi --"
[Lukas] Almost instantly Lukas's eyes leap back to Danicka. There they fix, silent, watchful.
When she's finished, a few seconds tick by. Then, quietly: "
Kdo jste připomínala z? Váš bratr?"
[Danicka] She's told the truth once when she didn't really want to tonight, and it seems like she's just diving into the deep end now, unfurling bitter honesties like one would unleash the rapid roll and lash of a whip. Danicka's fingernail rakes down the label on her beer.
"
Můj bratr. A moje matka."
She hesitates there, sighs, puts her pita down on her plate and steps away from her desk, putting her beer on it's surface. "And Yelizaveta's father." She sits on the edge of her bed, falls back, leaving a half-eaten sandwich, a half-drunk beer, and a half-full glass of wine behind her.
Looking at the ceiling, she adds flatly, "
A čeká na Sam ukázat až sem a znásilnění mě."
[Lukas] There are two answers there that Lukas expected.
There's one he did not, and it glimmers in his eyes like a comet across the sky, passing, flickering, fading.
And there's one answer that makes him grimace; makes him flinch. Makes his rage beat briefly stronger, like an invisible tide. Outside, in the living room -- twenty, thirty feet away -- there's a brief but noticeable dip in the conversation.
"
Já bych neměl mít nechat ho." It's low, a murmur; hard.
[Danicka] Her reaction is liable to make his Rage spike, make the conversation outside dip again, make the stoned MarioKart players and the girl in the pixie cut suggest that it's time, past time, to go out to the clubs already. Let his pajama-wearing roommate fuck her boyfriend in peace, y'know? Right? Paul? Right?
Danicka makes a choked sound, then claps her hand over her mouth to stifle what would have been laughter. It's not a happy sound, nor even a bitter one. It's almost angry. It's almost hysterical.
She draws her hand away, takes a deep breath. "I'm sorry."
[Lukas] Lukas's chest rises on a swift, furious inhale. The last time she laughed at him -- and not like this, not half-hysterically, not
viciously -- he closed in on her and made her think he would smash her face.
He doesn't move this time, but beneath his tan he blanches with fury; save for two flushed spots high on his cheeks, just beneath the arch of bone.
Quieter still: "
Proč jste se smát?"
[Danicka] There's no more laughter now. There wasn't any after that initial choke, that sharp and yet near-silent bark of it so rapidly covered, sucked back, dissipated. Danicka is lying on her back on her bedspread, rumpling the comforter, her legs dangling from the knee down off the end. She turns her head to look at him across her right shoulder, to see him sideways.
Her right arm is thrown loosely across her abdomen. She looks at him with an ache in her eyes, more than fear, but there's still tension in her limbs. She's ready to run, or go limp, or curl up in a ball. Danicka has as much 'fight' as 'flight' in her, he knows it, but the times she's fought back rather than gone unresistant or gone fleeing are so rare he can count them on one hand.
"Because it's not true," she whispers. She speaks gently. It will remind him of the way she stroked his hair and pleaded softly with him to stop fucking her in that motel, almost exactly six months ago...to the hour. "Because you want to protect me so badly that you'll say something you know isn't true... the way you do when you feel that strongly. Because it's absurd, to care so much now, months after the fact, even though when I asked you for help you tried so hard not to."
Now he can see the ache for what it is. It isn't fear. It isn't wariness, even.
"
Bylo to kruté," she confesses quietly, to the man who once said he didn't believe she could be cruel, to the man who once said she never admitted fault. "
Já opravdu lito, Lukášek."
She pauses, and taking another deep breath, sits up on the edge of the bed without taking her eyes from him. "
Neřekl jsem jí to ublížit ty, moje lasko. Neočekávám byste se vrátit v čase a chrání mě ze všeho, co má někdy strach mne." Her hands fold in her lap. The corners of her mouth twist up in a smile that belies its smallness with sincere humor. "
Ty by byly příliš zaneprázdněn, aby někdy vrátit ke mně!"
The smile grows.
Carefully.
[Lukas]
Because it's not true, Danicka says -- gently -- and there's a flash of fresh fury in Lukas's eyes. He listens silently, his breathing shallow and quiet, but agitated; her careful smile does not change the directness or the fierceness of his regard. He waits until she's finished, a beat longer.
Then:
"I would have protected you even then.
I would have protected you from the very start. I would never have let him leave that cafe with you. I would not have let him hit you again. I..."
Lukas trails off. His back is to the window, the glass cool through his shirt. His hands grip the edge of the windowsill. His voice fades to nothing but his eyes are still ferocious, fixed, tumultuous.
"I know you have only my word for it. But I would not have let him
rape you if I could have stopped it."
[Danicka] She says nothing for a moment, sitting upright with her posture eerily perfect and her hands still folded in her laps. Put in heels and hose, skirt and blouse, her hair down and lip gloss shining on her mouth, she could fit wherever one might want to put her. Interview. Classroom. Receptionist's desk. There's no relaxed roundness to her shoulders, no calm in her eyes to counter the apology.
It takes her awhile to decide to speak, and to say what she does. When she does, Danicka speaks deliberately, so there's no mistake: this isn't, like that burst of laughter, accidental or vicious. She's careful. She wants to leave the question bereft of investment, leeching from it any indication of expectation or exasperation.
"Does it make you feel better, to say all that?"
[Lukas] He fires back: "You think I'm saying it for my own benefit?"
[Danicka] "No," she says slowly, her tone and body language unchanged... as well as nearly impossible to unravel. The only tell is the way her eyes look almost sad as she watches him. "But this isn't the first time we've had this same kind of misunderstanding. You say these things that
I don't need you to say, insisting on what you 'would have' done or not done, and it comes out of nowhere."
There's a beat. She blinks. "We were talking about how Katherine showing up here reminded of something that has never and
will never change: my home doesn't belong to me. There is no point in locking the doors to try and keep any of you out." Another pause, as though simply for the sake of absorption. "I don't like it, and it's scary, but I accepted it when I was about
six, Lukáš. Now we're talking about you protecting me, and it's
absurd."
Danicka repeats the word again, firmly this time, and for the first time in this conversation her own eyes flash back at this. "You are not omnipotent and you're not with me all the time, so I want to know why it's so important to you to make it sound like you are, or could be."
They
have had this conversation before.
"I don't think you're saying it for your own benefit. I think maybe you imagine I need to hear it, and I don't."
[Lukas] "Don't." Lukas doesn't stop to think; doesn't consider, doesn't plan. He snaps right back at her, "Don't make it out like you were talking about something totally different and I flew off the goddamn handle here. We were talking about Katherine.
You brought up Sam. You brought up waiting in your bed for him to
rape you, and don't tell me you weren't thinking of the night you asked me to get Sam off your back and I refused."
It's becoming an effort for him to keep his tone down. He stops for a second, lowers his head, his shoulders rounding, tensing as he grips the windowsill.
"I have to say it," he says with a sort of deliberate levelness of tone that only serves to betray his anger, his frustration, "because all I've ever shown you was that I would throw you under the bus for the sake of my pack, Danička. I know I can't be with you all the time. I know I can't protect you constantly even if I wanted to. But I need you to know I was putting on an elaborate show to convince myself I didn't give a damn. And I need you to know there were limits. There were lines I would never have crossed."
A beat.
"It doesn't excuse anything I did. But it makes a difference to me."
[Danicka] Her hands tighten in her lap, curl up enough for the skin to pull tight over her knuckles and make them look less graceful, less soft and elegant, and more like the crone's hands they'll one day be... if she lives that long. Danicka's deep breath is hard to see; she schools her body so that her chest doesn't rise and fall too much, so that her nostrils don't flare too visibly, but there's the faintest sound of air moving in, sliding out, as he speaks.
"You asked," she says levelly, "if it reminded me of my brother. So I told you what it reminded me of, and I was honest."
Everything she might respond to after
don't tell me you weren't thinking is gone. He may as well not have said it. In another form he could veritably
smell her anger. Even in this one it may as well be a visible corona. Yelizaveta had always said that Danicka's aura -- when she could see it, and when Danicka was upset -- was red, shot through with blue like lightning.
Yelizaveta said she knew Danicka was happy about something because she'd be lined in orange, going off in blossoming sparks all around her.
Yelizaveta said she only saw her covered in shades of sickly green and soured yellow once, but Danicka never explained why.
Yelizaveta, to see her now, would have something to say about the brilliant emerald so often surrounding her these days. But Yelizaveta is in New York, and she is biting her tongue as suitors come to see her. She knows eventually it won't matter what ghosts she sees hanging off the limbs of potential mates, or how violent or terrifying their auras are. She learned from a true master how to conceal what she knows to be true.
"I wasn't thinking about that, actually," Danicka says slowly, "until you assured me you wouldn't have 'let' him." Her tone is a flat murmur now, her eyes a venomous and unholy green. "But believe what you want."
[Lukas] "
Seru na to saké, Danička," Lukas explodes, "can we forget about why we're discussing this for one minute and focus on
what we're discussing? Are you listening to a single word of what I'm trying to say?"
[Danicka] There's a shockwave radiating out from the room when he swears at her. The foursome in the living room hear, but don't understand. And they decide to leave. They're getting their things together, turning off games and music, as Danicka stares at Lukas.
"Yes," she says simply. "You need me to know that not giving a damn was a show, and that there were limits to the pretense."
[Lukas] Instantly:
"Do you believe me at all? Or are you just parroting me back to myself?"
[Danicka] The television shuts off; the stereo, too. Tammy hollers something to Paul. Danicka doesn't glance towards the hallway as people troop past, getting shoes and bags and whatever else.
"I believe you," she says after a moment, softer than some of her previous words, less angry though no less firm. "But I haven't doubted that it was all show, or that ultimately you would have done everything you could to take care of me, for a very, very long time now."
A beat. When she speaks again, it's nearly a whisper" "Which is why I asked, before: does it make
you feel better, to say all that?"
Another pause, longer now. More words, and even quieter: "Or do you need something from me?"
The front door opens. Closes on her words.
[Lukas] "I just need you to believe me."
Lukas doesn't look toward her closed suite door, either. He doesn't look away from her, except when he shuts his eyes for a second; barely more than a blink.
When Paul and his friends are gone, what ambient noise there was is gone. It's very quiet.
"I suppose," Lukas adds, quietly, "I need forgiveness."
[Danicka] This is a conversation filled with long pauses, with stretches of quiet, none so profound as what they have now that the roommate and his friends have left. Danicka is so still she's like a small animal ready to bolt, waiting to see if the predator is going to come after her or keep on moving.
"You assumed I mentioned Sam to... prod an old wound. Or manipulate you. Or
something," she says, the words whisper-quiet at first, until the last frustrated, bereft pair of syllables stinging her lips on their way out. "It sounds like you also assumed that I don't trust you, or that I still think -- or maybe ever thought -- you're as cold as you pretended to be. That I think so little of you." Her brows tug together. "So right now I'm hurt, and I'm angry.
"I didn't keep coming to you because I have no self-respect, or because it didn't matter to me how you treated me. And I'm still with you now. And I
don't hold it over your head every chance I get. I just don't pretend it didn't happen. I don't act like it never hurt. But I wouldn't be with you if I hadn't forgiven you. I wouldn't be with you if I didn't believe in you, or believe you love me."
She blinks, her frown deepens. "For fuck's sake, Lukáš."
Parroting him back to himself.
[Lukas] Such steadiness of the gaze can be hard to bear: Lukas's eyes blue as gas flames, blue as sunlight through ice. If Danicka were weaker, if Danicka were truly weak as she sometimes fears or thinks she is, she would not be able to withstand it at all.
He watches her and he listens. His attention is wholly bent upon her, and he's silent until she finishes.
"I don't assume ... any of that. I would never assume -- " no; that's not true. "I haven't assumed you were trying to manipulate me toward your own ends for a very long time now.
"I'm
afraid you think there was ever a time when you were absolutely nothing, less than nothing to me. I hate that I was so goddamn
kruté. I know you know I love you; I know you wouldn't lay yourself down to be abused. I need you to know you were always something to me. Different. More."
There's a pause. He remembers the note in her handwriting; it seems a hundred years ago that he read it.
"I don't even know when I began to fall in love with you."
[Danicka] A month ago, two months ago, and certainly at the start of all this, Danicka would have bowed her head. She never would have said what she's saying. She wouldn't sit so calmly in her pajamas, arguing with him over what seems more and more like fears over what the other thinks of them. They aren't wholly invalid fears: they each spent so much time pretending, holding back, saying hurtful things or withholding the right ones; no wonder they still try to cover a drought with a deluge long, long after the dry season has passed.
Danicka looks back at him with as much steadiness and surety as he stares at her. She is still vivid, her eyes poison or gemstone depending on how he looks at her, how he sees her.
Which is what the conversation is about.
His eyes are the centers of fire, or sunshine off glaciers, or tropical, depending on how she sees him.
Which is what the conversation is about.
Danicka takes a deep breath, and lets it out slowly. Her shoulders round slightly. "I know," she says, not in agreement but assurance, not in defeat or defense but an understanding that eclipses impotent words.
I know, she says, not because his words make sense but because this is a profound truth between them: it was never just fucking. They were never as disinterested or uninvested in one another as they acted. They were always falling love with each other.
"Come sit with me?" she asks, whispering the request after awhile. Whether he does or not, she goes on a few seconds later, no matter if he is standing at the windowsill or desk or lowering himself to sit on the foot of the bed beside her.
"I don't like talking about regrets," she says thoughtfully, looking at her hands. "But I wish I hadn't ever gone out with Sam." Or to bed with him, is the unspoken addition to that. "I wish I hadn't slept with Martin because you wouldn't take me, or because I wanted to despise you. I wish I'd never tried to put a limit on how long I was willing to be with you, just because I was scared." She turns her hand on her knee, palm up, looking now at the lines there in contemplation. "I wish I'd stayed with you that first night, whether you asked or not. I thought it was enough to kiss you."
I don't do that.
I don't kiss like that.They've both said it. Thought it. Meant it, whether it was spoken aloud or not.
"I wish I'd never hurt you, all the times that I've hurt you." Her eyes are moist, but not filled with tears. She speaks of regrets almost distantly, as though needing to hold them at arm's length not only to see them clearly but to speak of them at all. She cannot speak of hurting him, knowing she has, and remain detached. "Or pushed you away. I hate that I've given you so much reason to doubt how much I love you."
[Lukas] Lukas doesn't pause. He goes directly to Danicka, sits beside her. The mattress sinks under his weight. He's close enough that their thighs brush, and his shoulder rubs past hers when he leans down, puts his elbows on his knees and his face in his hands.
He's rubbing his face as she speaks, though halfway through -- when she says
I wish I'd stayed -- he turns, he drops his hands, he looks at her while his ribs cave in and his breastbone involutes.
Or that's how it feels, anyway: something inside him folding, crumpling, collapsing on itself. It's echoed on his face, if only slightly -- a line between his eyebrows, a wince at the corners of his eyes.
She doesn't quite finish. She gets to
to doubt how much I love-- and Lukas straightens suddenly, turns, takes her face between his hands and kisses that liar's mouth; kisses that truth-telling mouth; kisses her mouth and swallows her words.
Afterward, his brow rests against hers and his eyes are closed, and his hands are stroking gently, gently over her cheekbones.
"
Za to, co je to zásluha, nepochybuji o tom, co teď."
[Danicka] From the beginning, words have only confused matters. Lukas's carefully planned, calmly delivered speeches. Danicka's lies and omissions. The misunderstandings between them have not been based on a bewildering look, or a mistaken turn of body language. The words have provided the conflict, the confusion. There have been precious times when the physical and the verbal have matched, when the curl of her shoulder or the bow of her neck have cried out the same
please, please, come that she has spoken through tears. There are dear, rare times when the arch of her back has coincided with those
sounds, that
yes.
But touch has always been something else entirely. Lukas does not remember that Danicka hugged him often as a child, does not recall that though she was a bit older they were of comparable size and yet just as mismatched in coloration as they are now. Danicka barely remembers this. She remembers better how opening her arms to someone became something that was so often forced and frightening that it likewise became sacred, as awesome and unimpeachable as the holiest of holies.
When they met in Chicago as adults, they loosely shook hands, and the touch was so brief and casual and uninvested that neither one could stand it long. She thinks now -- knows almost for certain -- that had that simple handshake lingered, she would have felt in full, instant force the desire that did not crash over her completely until some time later.
When he made her say why she cried out in Czech instead of English or Russian while she fucked Sam, knowing that Lukas was near enough to hear every. Single. Moan, the touch was one-sided and terrifying. Danicka had not wanted his hands on her, or his mouth, or any part of him. It was so intense, his Rage so searingly hot in the midwinter cold, that though he did not bruise her, it hurt. She could still feel him, hours later.
Hours later was when she found herself still intense, still hot, still hurting from a deep and needful ache, touching herself to try and relieve it.
The next time they touched, they understood one another completely. There was absolutely no language necessary, and every word simply got in the way. He knew, even if he tried to deny, what she wanted from him. She knew, though he tried to hide it, what he wanted from her. Neither of them generous by nature, they capitulated. And they gave.
And now, Lukas takes her face in his hands the way he once wanted to, the way he often has, and kisses her, swallowing
youand her mouth tastes like beer and lamb, like Danicka, like the candied orange taste taken from his own tongue earlier. She breathes in suddenly, because the kiss is sudden, stealing the air from him to replace the word he took from her lips. Danicka's hand turns and falls to the top of his leg, fingers flexing to grab at the muscle of his thigh.
Her hand loosens when Lukas slows down. It's forced. She wills her hand to relax, her heart to beat differently, her eyes to open. Danicka listens, but only because she decides to. She sees him, dark lashes laid on his cheeks, his eyes blind though the rest of his senses are as alert as ever. Danicka's hand gentles on his leg, rubs as though trying to soothe him.
It takes only the folding of one leg and the swing of another to draw herself up, twist, and bring herself onto his lap, body settling to his, thighs parted to either side of his hips. Danicka kisses him, hard this time, her hands going to the back of his head, fingers into his hair, physically tilting his head back to serve up his mouth to her. She kisses him like she's trying to eat him, fulfilling first her hunger for his air, her senses' hunger for his taste.
She pauses though, lets their mouths separate, looks at him.
Her hands tighten in his hair, pull at his scalp, keep his head tilted back. Six months ago, impossible. Even now, risky at best. Danicka forces him into a position where his throat is bared, uncompromisingly dominant, yet there's something peculiar about her body language as she sits atop him. She is bowed towards him, bent over him, not like a predator but like a shield. Her eyes are not on his neck but his eyes, his reddened mouth, and
she could call him a
son of a bitch, call him
fucker, call him
moje, but what she does is whisper
"Lukáš,"
in something like recognition.
When she kisses him again, it's slower this time. Her hands release, relax. One slides down his neck. One plays with his hair. When she kisses him this time it's lazy, and patient, and an unsurprising precursor to the slow, hard roll of her hips.
[Lukas] There's no resistance -- not to her ravaging kiss, not to her hands twisting into his hair, not to the overt dominance of her grip on him, turning his face up to hers; not, finally, to her second kiss, lazier, languid, as though they had all the time in the world.
There's no resistance, but that doesn't preclude passion, and reciprocation. Lukas's brow furrows with the fury of that first kiss. They all but tear at one another. Her hands pull at the back of his head; his pull at her hips, her back, find some entrance to her clothes, her pajamas, slide beneath and up the flawless length of her back. There's a sound in his throat -- muffled, vibrating, something like a growl of intense ... what? Hunger? Satisfaction? Relief? -- and she swallows that too, swallows it whole.
When she lets him go he's breathing harder, his chest rising and falling against hers in short pants. His eyes open a moment after hers, find her looking at him already: narrow, fiercely blue, they're glazed with passion, or pleasure, or the moment, and recognition begins to burn through the haze even as she's saying,
Lukáš.They recognize one another. He recognizes her recognition; he puts his hand on her face, tenderly, but heavily. Lukas hasn't handled Danicka like she might break -- well; ever. He's been careful with her, and he's been sorry to see her bruised or scratched, terrified and furious to see her wounded, but he's also turned around and
pounded her against a shower wall;
pounded her against a glass window;
pounded her in her bed, in his, atop her car, on the sofa.
His hands are heavy on her face, his touch familiar, sure. She says his name and he releases a slow breath, as though his name were some sort of magic word, as though by speaking it, his true name, she gains some power over him, or releases him from some captivity, or...
The thought spins aside. She kisses him again and his mouth opens to hers, willingly and unhesitatingly. He cups her ass in his hands and drags her against him, moans into her mouth when she rubs on him through their clothes. A moment later he sinks back onto her bed, bringing her with him, and his hands are pushing up her shirt again; their mouths part just long enough for him to pull it off of her, seal again even before he's tossed it to the floor.
"My shirt," he says against her mouth, muffled. It's a buttondown, which is unsurprising; uniformly charcoal-grey, with crisp lines and short sleeves. His palms are hot on her skin, pushing down the back of her pants, rubbing over her flesh, squeezing, rucking her pants down over his wrists. "And my pants. All of it. Undress me, Danička, for god's sake, fuck me."
[Danicka] The muscles in her back flex in response to his hands, warmer than the room, warmer even than her. If she does not expect his fingers to curl and his nails to rake down her skin, she would still not be surprised if he did, given the voraciousness of that first kiss. They do indeed tear at one another, so much so that when Lukas lays back it is partly under his own power and partly Danicka's entire body pressing against him, trying to push him down, their food forgotten. They are hungrier for this. They nearly always are.
Her hair is askew after he tugs her shirt off, her arms sliding down out of the cotton. She is opening her mouth to speak when they kiss again, past the hems and edges of her now-discarded t-shirt, and Danicka is gasping against his lips, touching his face, his neck, wrapping her hands around the edges of his shirt.
My shirt, he says, and she literally yanks it open at the lapels, her kiss turning into more of a bite. A moan claws its way up out of her when he pushes his hands into her pants, under her panties, stroking and caressing her ass. She holds fistfuls of charcoal gray as they grind together like that for a moment, her mouth going to his neck when he starts telling her
all of it
for god's sakeand her groans vibrating against the thin skin of his throat. Her breasts are naked now, nipples rubbing against the fabric of his shirt, and then pressing against the warmth of his skin as Danicka more properly unfastens button after button of his shirt. She doesn't need to look. She gets the job done with the speed and violence of lightning, the precision of clockwork, but he knew she would if she did not simply rip it apart.
"I want you," she breathes in English, before her lips close on his neck again, before she lets her lips trail and drag up to his earlobe, sucking it into her mouth. Her body writhes atop his, lifting her hips to help him push her pajama pants out of the way even as she's spreading open the front of his shirt. One slim hand wriggles between their bodies to yank the tongue of his belt out from its buckle, which flops against the bones in the back of her hand as she flicks open button, draws down zipper.
Danicka's hair falls from its ponytail in strands and locks, brushing over him as harbingers and historians of where her mouth travels, cool and dry and distant compared to the hot, wet immediacy of her mouth around his nipple. She does not bother using her hands to hold herself up, uses both of them instead of start working jeans and boxer-briefs off his hips, pulling elastic out and around and off, returning her palm to his cock as soon as she can. Danicka is a live wire on top of him, in ceaseless and sinuous motion, her mouth opening wider over one pectoral, moistening and heating it with a hard, voiced gasp that sounds like relief more than pain.
His clothes are still mostly on. Even her pajama pants aren't past her knees. She parts her legs as much as she can anyway, guiding him between her thighs and closing them on his cock, the length of it pressed against her cunt. A shudder goes through her at the contact, the pressure, and her hands find the sides of his body, palms on his ribs for a moment before sliding down the lines of his torso. Her eyes are closed, her face pressed against his chest. "Christ, baby," she whimpers, "you make me so
wet."
[Lukas] Lukas had some vague notion of turning Danicka on her back, pinning her under him after she had his clothes undone, or pushed aside, or pushed down, or peeled off -- had some notion of laying her out on the edge of her bed and fucking her with the lights on and their food cooling again on the table, had some notion of making her come, making her scream, making her claw her bedsheets awry as he pounded her.
It's gone now. It shreds when she pulls his shirt apart, blows away like so much smoke when she puts her mouth to his throat. A flicker of animal instinct tells him to rise up and retaliate, and then that's gone too. She unbuttons his shirt like a surgeon opening an incision, like a hunter skinning a kill, and now it's her body sinuous and bare on his, it's her mouth devouring him.
His chest swells and falls with a ceaseless, tidal rhythm beneath her lips, every breath fast and deep. When her mouth finds his nipple he lets out a short, sharp gasp, the pectoral muscle flexing hard against the sensation. Lukas closes his eyes. He thinks of Danicka stretched on his bed, wrists bound; he thinks this is not so far from that; he thinks
surgeon and incision
hunter and kill
devouring meand it's her hand slipping down between them to push his pants down while he lifts his hips, almost unconscious of it, almost out of his mind, to help her. His hands have found her hair, pushes the elastic out of it, strokes through the strands. When her hand finds his erection unerringly he flexes his head back against the covers, bites back a hard groan that shears apart when she opens her mouth over his chest like she might tear through his skin and flesh with her blunt human teeth, rend through bone to lay waste, or claim, to the beating muscle of his heart.
"Oh god," Lukas says when she moves over him, when she guides his cock between her thighs and holds him there, holds him pressed against her cunt, moves and writhes and covers what seems like every last inch of his body with her roving hands, her roving mouth, her hot body, her hot cunt. "Oh ... fucking god."
And he cups her face suddenly in his hands, raises her face to his blindly, tears into her mouth so ferociously that he groans into the kiss, shuddering, kisses her until the flexion in his chest and shoulders and neck gives way and his head falls back, he falls back to the mattress.
His hands are inexpert, impatient, as they push her hair back so he can see her eyes. His eyes are all pupil, dilated to take in every ounce of light, every scrap of detail.
"Okay," it's ragged, breathless, "come on. Give me that pussy. Take that cock inside you, baby.
Nedovolte, aby mě čekat."
[Danicka] If the new roommate and company were still in the living room, they would probably uncomfortable with the presence lurking in the south of the apartment but simply drowning it in beer and music and video games. Maybe if the new roommate and company were still in the living room, Danicka would not be attacking Lukas like this, all but singing the moans that leave her throat every time she rolls her hips and rubs against his cock. Maybe it would be more like the first time in his bed, burying cries in one another's skin and mouths and doing their best not to make the bedsprings shriek underneath them.
Or maybe it would be just like this. The walls are thick, and Danicka's room lies at the end of a short, insulating hallway. There's a chance Lukas will still flip her over and fuck her with his jeans around his ankles and her legs hooked around his waist, and there is always the chance that no matter how she takes him, Danicka may scream loudly enough that no amount of space or presence of a wall or blaring music or television speakers would muffle or drown her out.
He has yet to follow through on ever clapping a hand over her mouth to stifle the noises she makes when his cock is buried inside her.
They are alone, though, with no excuse for silence or even wish for it. Lukas has long since given up on directing so much of his will towards holding back, towards hiding from her what it does to him when they fuck. Danicka can't bear to hide from him in Russian, cannot help but cry out whenever he bends her over or covers her with his body. She gasps against his chest because she's incapable of lifting her head for a moment. She closes her eyes because seeing him stretched out under her right now would, at the moment, be too much.
So her eyes are closed when he kisses her like that. Danicka answers the noise he feeds her with one of her own, her hands moving up to his biceps to hold onto him. Her grip tightens when he shudders, her hips swiveling once in a hard, tight circle. She feels her own slick on his cock as it slides against her inner thighs and lets out a half-restrained shriek, a sharp whimper. Danicka pants as his head falls back, her eyes still closed. Lukas cups her face, pushes a thousand strands of pale hair off her cheeks, and she does it again. This time her cry is drawn out, trembling against her lips as much as her cunt quivers against his erection.
Okay, he says, and her eyes open. Danicka's hands are hot and tight on his arms still, holding herself up or holding him near or holding on for dear life. Her lips are parted, wet from kissing him, drying from the rapid and shuddering breaths she's taking. He gets to
Nedovolte ab-- before she kisses him again, hard enough to push his head back against the mattress. Most of her weight goes onto her hands as she fucks his cock without taking it inside her, covering him with the hot moisture now mingling with his own.
It takes will just to make herself slide her hips off of him, will and several seconds of convincing her body to relinquish the sensation he's giving her. The sensation she's taking from him. Danicka does, though, and kicks off her lounge pants and her underwear completely. Her lips lose their lock on his a few times, slide to his jawline or his throat, but she comes back to kissing him, comes back to his body, touches him like it's been more than a week, which would only be strange if it weren't for the fact that she wants to touch him like this -- something like this -- every night.
Pulling back, Danicka looks down at him, breathing heavily. Her eyes flicker, making it look like she wants to say something, but in the end she decides to act first instead. Her hands slide off his arms onto the bedspread, palms flattening on the comforter. "
Zatím ne, oukej?" she murmurs, then swings her left leg off of him. In a second, maybe three, she turns completely on top of him, thighs parted to either side of his head now instead of either side of his hips. Whether Lukas takes advantage of this or not, the smell of her surrounding him, Danicka bends over his midsection and wraps her lips around the head of his cock, rolling her tongue over the silky flesh..
Time unfurls unrealistically, losing all meaning and coherence. Some amount of time, either the rise and fall of nations or the beating of a dragonfly's wings, passes with Danicka simply sucking the very tip softly in her mouth, tongue flicking against his slit. With no warning but a sigh, she takes him deeper, her lips vibrating around him with a gentler, longer moan as she finds her rhythm.
[Lukas] When Danicka murmurs
zatím ne, Lukas nearly snarls in frustration. His hands tighten in her hair for an instant as she starts to dismount -- and then he lets go, brings them to his face, slams his head back against the mattress in physical protest.
"Fuck," he mutters, "fuck, Danička, what the fuck are you--"
And then she swings around. She kneels over his face and he doesn't pause for so much as a second; he grabs her hips and drags her firmly, even violently down to straddle his mouth. Lukas goes at her with a feral, furious hunger, pushing, pulling, pawing her flesh open to plunge his tongue into her cunt, moaning into her flesh as though the taste of her, the taste and smell and feel of her, satisfies some deep and untenable hunger in him.
And then she takes him into her mouth. And he lets his head fall back, eyes shutting, with a gasp. "
Bože," he says, "
to je to. Sát to, mimino. Ach můj bože--"
The rest of it is lost, muffled into her body. He pulls her down over his face again, spreads her thighs wide and wraps his arms over her waist, drags her down, grinds her onto his mouth. He doesn't have her patience. He doesn't have any patience at all.
They were angry at each other five minutes ago; hurt. It was nearly a catastrophe. This is something like the lust of survival, a need to be close, to grasp and claim and fucking eat her alive.
His eyes are shut and his mouth is moving, roving, hungering; he fucks her with his tongue, and then moves down to lick at, lap at, suck on her clit for a sharply escalating, merciless moment, flexing up to follow her if she arches away -- it passes -- his mouth gentles, but only for a second, his tongue pressed to her clit while her pussy quivers and pulses against the tip of his nose. Then he's moving up again, lazier now, nuzzling, licking up along the wet lips until he finds the opening of her body again. He holds her hips still as he slips his tongue inside, exploring the tightness, the heat of her cunt with his mouth.
And drops his head for a moment, looking between the fork of her thighs, down the length of his body to where her mouth is wrapped around his cock.
"
Tak kurva dobrý," he says. He might mean her cunt; he might mean her mouth. Lukas watches for a moment, his brow furrowing, ghosts of expressions skimming over his face, and then he can't watch anymore and he sinks down and he turns his face to bury a moan against Danicka's inner thigh.
A moment later he reasserts his grip on her hips, wraps his forearm over her waist, pulls her down again. "
Přines jenž kundo sem," he tells her; gives her a long, slow lick, abruptly stopping. "
Roztáhni nohy širší. Dejte mi jenž kundo, Danička. Dovolte mi, být dobré do vás."
[Danicka] Once upon a time if she would pull away he would grow angry, as wary of her as prey animals are of predators, demanding to know what the fuck she was playing at, making him wait. Making him stop. Asking him to undress like this, telling him to lay on his back. She was never playing. She was never tormenting him because she could, knowing better than to stupidly disobey or disappoint him for the sake of proving that she was able to. She was never holding his desire for her over his head, never holding a hoop by the edge and telling him to jump just to see if she had power over him. He knows her, now. He doesn't get angry.
Once upon a time if she would pull away he would stop her, unwilling to let her go, unwilling to be separated from her for an instant, a minute, however long it might be. And Danicka would tense. It's inconsistent enough to make the most levelheaded man -- and he is not really either, not truly, neither levelheaded nor a man -- nervous and agitated. It's enough to make anyone wonder why she tolerates and even craves being pinned down, tied down, bitten on the shoulder or throat and yet tenses to feel something drawn tight across her neck, locks up when he holds her in place as she tries to move. But he knows her, now. He doesn't force her to stay in place.
He knows her, now, but Lukas still seems wrecked when Danicka pulls away, so frustrated that his hands grasp first at her scalp and then at his face, so frustrated that his head thumps against her bedspread to try and release some of the physiological tension wracking him. Danicka doesn't make him wait, or move away from him. She doesn't resist, when he grabs her hips and pulls her to his mouth with an almost deranged hunger. She moans, though, instantly responding with a grind of her pussy against his face.
For a second or two, she whimpers and he licks, she moans around his cock and he groans as moisture covers his lips, his chin, and then his head falls back again. The hot air from his mouth as he gasps and mutters both blasphemy and encouragement moves over her, eliciting another rush of wetness. Some women would find him crude, or demeaning, or selfish. Danicka groans, and rolls her hips so she can rub against his mouth, wordlessly begging him not to stop. Danicka runs her hands over his thighs and hips. Danicka finds him crude, finds him selfish, but he could not demean her if he tried. And he has.
She does, indeed, arch up helplessly when his lips wrap around her clit, when his tongue flicks against it and rubs it as he sucks on her. Danicka's whimpers are sharp and gasping, but she only sucks harder, her mouth briefly but mind-alteringly tight on him. She's loosing cries because he follows her, holds onto her, and trembling because as torturous as it is she doesn't exactly want him to stop. He can't see it but she closes her eyes, her hair spreading and pooling over his lower half, her breasts brushing and rubbing against his abdomen.
Danicka licks him inside her mouth, slowly working from base to tip. Her head swivels and moves as she goes down on him, devouring him the way she or an animal might eat a meal with lazy but total focus. And then he stops. His hair brushes her legs as he looks down, as he purrs, as he moans, and Danicka slides her head upwards, letting him slip from her mouth. She lets his cock -- wet, hard -- rest against her cheek as she gasps.
"Baby," she says, her teeth nearly clenched with tension, her body shivering atop his as she tries to speak as clearly and as firmly as she can at the moment, which isn't very, "stop. Fucking.
Stopping." The last word is nearly a squeal, accentuated by a hard roll of her hips.
She turns her head, her mouth opening over the top of his thigh. Danicka bites into the meat of his leg with a growl that turns suddenly into a high whimper when he licks her again. She licks the place where she's bitten him, kisses it as she starts eagerly and unabashedly fucking his face, then takes his cock in her mouth again. The noise she makes then is one of deep, profound pleasure, even satisfaction. This time her mouth moves faster. Her head bobs slightly over his lap, her entire body starting to move with the the rhythm they're creating with each other.
[Lukas] Lukas lets out a breath of a laugh that transmutes into a short, sharp snarl as her teeth sink into his thigh. It's almost unthinkable that a woman like Danicka -- or rather, the woman Danicka pretends to be, vacuous, beautiful, submissive,
docile -- would dare something like that. Would dare to use her teeth on a werewolf's throat; would dare to sink her teeth into his thigh, where major arteries run close to the surface. Would dare to tell him
no and
later and
not yet. Would dare to put him under her, straddle his face, fuck his face like this.
Would dare to let him tie her down and fuck her like that, recklessly, as though he couldn't possibly hurt her.
It's almost unthinkable. So Lukas doesn't think about it. His mind is a burning emptiness; a desert; the corona of a star. She's going faster now, and every stroke of her mouth, every rise and fall makes the muscles in his flank and abdomen clench, makes him grasp at her hips and drag her cunt against his face as though by burying himself in her he might be able to keep himself from
simply thrusting upward into her mouth; simply fucking her face right back.
She told him to stop fucking stopping, so he stops fucking stopping. He doesn't stop. No room for words now; whatever he might've said is lost in the wordless sounds he's loosing against her body, muffled, indistinct. He raises his chin, arches his neck to get at her cunt, plunging his tongue into her, kneading her ass with his palms, prying her legs wider, opening her flesh to him to trace the tip of his tongue around and across, over, inside. Low and ragged, he moans into her -- the taste of her, or what she's doing to him; some trick of the tongue, the lips, that makes him flex unstoppably against her mouth only to grind to a halt, shuddering, and lower his hips back to the bed again.
For a second, ten, he turns his face sideways, pants against her thigh. It can't be helped; it's a necessity if he wants to stay alive, and reasonably sane. Wet and hot, his mouth; his face; his breath against her skin. His fingers explore her in that time -- aimlessly, fondling over her, slipping between her legs to nudge apart the slick folds. When he pushes his fingers into her Lukas turns his face back, returns to her clit, licks at her, sucks at that volatile focus, insistently now.
[Danicka] In days to come, Lukas will lose another packmate, another brother, another whom he's been bound to in spirit for longer than he has known this city or this woman. Danicka will be settling financial aid and working and reworking her proposed schedule for the fall. She'll be buying new clothes. She'll smoke more, nervous about school.
When he tells her about Sampson -- if he tells her about Sampson -- she will hold her tongue and only silently regret telling him tonight that she hates his packmates, despising the truth as she has since she was a child because of the pain it causes. She will not regret Sampson's death, and this is another reason she will bite her tongue. It will remind her that she is not really a very kind person, not really very warm-hearted at all. It will remind her that she knows too well how suddenly they die.
As though she forgets.
Though truthfully, death and loss are the last things on her mind. If she could speak now she'd moan for him to
lick it, groan
just like that, tell him to do that harder, do this softer, fuck her with that hot mouth, make her come. She snarled at him several moments ago, told him not to stop anymore, but after a little while she slows her mouth on his cock, gently and easily slides her lips off of him and just licks it. Her hand runs from his hip to his thigh and then between his legs, softly palming his balls while she gives slow, sucking kisses to the head.
"
To je to, miláčku," she purrs, lips feathering across his flesh with the murmur of the words leaving them, as though she cannot help but lose him from her mouth so she can say them. "
Lízat to pro mě. Do prdele mě s aby horké, špinavé úst."
A hard shudder goes through her at the way he sucks on her clit, or the words she's saying, hips rolling. Maybe she sensed how hard he was fighting not to thrust into her, fuck her mouth. Maybe she doesn't want him to come yet. Maybe she's selfish, and crude, and maybe he's just giving her more than she can handle. So she strokes him instead now, licking him intermittently, moaning every time his tongue flicks across her or his fingers move inside her.
"
Udělej mi přijde, lásko," she all but growls, the words coming low and fast now, as steady and warm as the rolling of her hips, the rubbing of her cunt back against his lips, his tongue, his fingers. "
Udělej mi kurva přišel na tvůj tváři."
Danicka pushes herself up now, hands splayed on top of his thighs, body arched above him like a sphinx, like a cat, little whimpers issuing rapidly from her throat. "Oh god," she says, the tone of her voice almost a whine and the words coming haltingly, matching the unerring and helpless thrusts of her cunt back against him, "you are so...
good..."
Whatever else she would have said (
at this or
to me or
with that tongue) is lost in the hard, sudden gasp that leaves her. Danicka's head, flung back as she essentially rode his face, drops forward again, hair falling all around her cheeks, sliding off her shoulders, tossing as her fingernails dig suddenly into his thighs. She lets go, grinding down on him hard enough that he can feel and taste the beginning of her orgasm, the quiver and clench of her cunt on his fingers, the way she squirms to get away after that initial grind as though she can't possibly bear any more yet can't consider letting herself, or him, stop.
She's saying something that sounds like nothing more than gasping vowels, only occasionally becoming
ano, low growls that become
jo. Her entire body turns molten on him, or at least her pussy, until she's sure that everything between her legs and below her navel has become nothing more than liquid heat, flowing over his tongue. She whimpers when she looks down between their bodies, past his cock and the thin line of hair up to his navel and the broad expanse of his chest, the hints of his neck and jawline. She twists to look over her shoulder, seeing little more than his hair, moaning because of the way he's still fucking her, eating at her, drinking in what he's done to her, doing to her, relentlessly
(
mercilessly).
When she's finally let down, when she can do little more than survive the clutching and spasming of her cunt and try to remember how to breathe without gasping, Danicka lowers herself over him again and takes him in her mouth without warning or preamble, moaning hard around his cock. And yet despite the way she sucks on him now with nothing short of ravenous fervor, she
stopsand kisses it, kisses him, whimpering
"Lukáš... baby, I need your cock in me."
and gasping
"Flip me over and
fuck me. Let me feel that cock in my pussy."
[Lukas] There's indeed something merciless about this, the way his hands and his arms hold her inescapably there, right there, splayed out and spread open and straddling his face, his hot tongue, his hungry, hungry mouth. Chalk it up to his tribe, his upbringing: goddamn Shadow Lords, taking no prisoners. Chalk it up to the fact that it's him, and her, and from the start, from the very start, Lukas has had trouble taking Danicka in moderation.
Four times that first night. All the comforters and pillows on the floor. The sheet rumpled beyond repair. The two of them, naked, burning, fucking over and over and over and over in that cheap motel room with its ice-cold air conditioning and its sallow lamps and
her, golden with lamplight though not yet with summer, sinking into his skin and into his blood, crossing every barrier until she became inextricable as a bone, as a rib.
And now look at him: holding her on his face like that, pleasuring her with his mouth and his fingers like that, eating her up and drinking her down like that. Latching onto her with his lips and driving her out of her mind with his tongue, licking her, flicking her, fucking her until she arches over him, gasps, pants, tries to get away.
Which, of course, Lukas doesn't quite allow. The muscles in his arms are bunched; the joints locked. He has her hips held fast; the tendons in his neck stand out as he strains after her, follows her, keeps going until she's lost, until she's shattered, until she's limp and collapsing over him, her body pressed to his, her hips still rubbing, grinding, writhing against his face. Slowing now, slowing. His tongue slows too, his fingers in the clenching shuddering grip of her cunt; everything; until of course she opens her mouth and devours him alive, takes his cock in warninglessly, mercilessly.
And Lukas falls away from her, throws head and shoulders back against the bed on a panting exhale. His eyes are shut. His face is wet; her slick and his saliva mingled, smeared over his mouth, his cheeks, his nose, his jaw. His fingers slip out of her. He reaches both hands down her body, which is really up her body, follows the tense long lines of her up, up. He can't help the lift and flex of his hips; the single sharp thrust against her mouth that has him gasping something like a tattered apology before he settles into a gentler, slighter rhythm, matching and subliming her ferocity into something far subtler.
"Yeah," he has to fight to get the words out between the involuntary quiver and catch of his body, "that's it.
Oh my god, baby.
Nekončí nyní. Udržujte sání můj --"
-- she stops. This time Lukas slams his head against the mattress hard enough to shudder the bed in its frame. "
Fuck!" He almost shouts it. "Baby,
co to --"
Lukas doesn't finish the sentence. Danicka explains what the fuck. Lukas pushes his palms against the mattress and slides back, sits up, grabs her by the hips and topples her over, flips her down beside him like a goddamn pancake. It's all the same motion. Then he's moving, climbing, flowing over her, stretching out atop her and grabbing her wrists and pinning them over her head and catching her mouth on his and there's no shame, no disgust, nothing of the sort as he kisses her mouth, kisses her until he's groaning into her mouth and wrestling between her thighs and
and stops, dropping his brow against hers and exhaling the second curse in about as many moments.
Explanation: "
Kondomy."
Her wrists are loosed. He pushes up, drawing his knees under himself. They've inverted on the bed, heads at the foot of the bed, feet at the head. When he sits up and back she can see the breadth of his shoulders, the thickness of muscle at thigh and chest, back. She can see the sheen of sweat on his body, the droplets where it beads at his hairline, the rivulets where it runs down the center of his torso. He swipes the heel of his hand across his brow, wiping his eyes clear, and then, suddenly, he grins at her -- a little sheepish, a lot savage. In one swift grab he raises her leg over his shoulder, kisses the inside of her knee. A moment later he lets it down and turns, twists, pulls open her nightstand and gets what he needs.
A third time Lukas curses as he's rolling the condom on -- a stripped, gasping
fuck that accompanies the sharp contraction of his abdominal muscles as latex stretches tight over his hard cock. He doesn't wait; doesn't want to give her time to catch her breath and recover. He comes right back and hikes her legs around his ribs and plants his hands on either side of her shoulders and, looking down, pistons his cock over her cunt once before shifting his angle, slamming into her with one solid thrust.
This time he doesn't curse. The sound he makes is not a word; closer to a snarl. When his eyes open again he finds her face unerringly. He holds her eyes and he starts
fucking her, unapologetically, energetically, pounding into her as fast and hard as if they'd been going at each other all night already.
[Danicka] His shoes and socks are somewhere, kicked off and peeled away by toes in hallway or bedroom. His pants and boxer briefs are somewhere, shoved down and dismissed at the end of the bed that descended cliff-like under his knees, past her line of sight. His shirt is tossed the way of hers when he rises up, torn finally all the way off his tensed, sweat-slick arms, leaving the two of them
naked
burning, fucking or trying to fuck on top of the thick pale bedspread they've slept together under only a handful of times, the comforter she crawls under almost every night by herself.
Danicka's own slick spreads over her skin as Lukas touches her, runs his hands up her body, down it, as though they have any sense of direction left beyond the simple, cardinal:
towards each other. His fingertips find her nipples, caress loosely and then lose all coherence of contact when she puts her mouth on him, groaning hard at that first thrust in either surprise or protest or even simple acknowledgement.
Words unfurl, hot and tinted by lust, across her cunt. Danicka quivers, rubs against his chest, whimpers around his cock before she lets him go, makes him swear, all but drives him out of his goddamn mind. A moment later, not even that long, she hits the bedspread with her shoulderblades, hair fanning, and wrists held down against the edge of the bed as that shirt of his gets ripped away, tossed aside. She looks up at him, cheeks faintly pink under her tan and mouth slightly open, panting. Her legs part for him even as he's working his body between them, and
her mouth is opening for him when he kisses her. She lifts her head and crushes their mouths together, swallows his sound, her taste, licks it off his lips, the underside of his jaw, sucks a bruise onto his neck even as his brow is touching her temple and she's rolling her hips to try and get him inside her. Danicka bites down on his flesh with a groan of frustration and impatience that is not yet quite as vicious as the cursing growl he loosed when she took her mouth from his cock
again.
She whimpers again when he pushes himself up, her freed hands touching the mattress to push herself up after him, running her hands up his abdomen and his chest while he's wiping his face and she's grinning lopsidedly back at him, licking sweat off his left pectoral to combine with the taste of her own cum in her mouth. Her legs are still spread to either side of him, and she's utterly thrown off balance when he grabs her leg and sweeps it up. Danicka falls back to the mattress again with a single huff of laughter.
This time she lets herself lay back, watching him twist, watching the lines of his body in the room lit by nothing but moonlight and citylight coming in through the windows, turning him gray and then turning him colors, turning him silver and velvet, turning him into a heated, glinting shadow. She touches herself while she waits for him, while he unrolls the condom and while well-defined muscles twitch in response to the torturously contact of necessity. Her fingers splay over her pussy, beautifully but simply manicured nails catching hints of light on their gloss while the pads of her fingertips rub over her clit, almost too sensitive for the touch.
Danicka's hips buck, head falling back and spine arching. She doesn't wait for him, not really, not even the few seconds it takes him to get the fucking condom on. It's the warmth of him as he moves over her and his hands spreading her legs, wrapping them high around his body, that have her taking her hand away. She opens her eyes again, looking up at him. "That's it, baby," she breathes again, palming his ribs, laying a flat hand on either side of his chest while his cock is grinding over her cunt. "Oh, god... oh--
"
-- god!" she says, all but squealing it as she takes him in. Her head lifts from the bedcovers again, her mouth seeking his, her eyes finding his. She puts her hands on his face, fighting to kiss his sex-drenched mouth even as she's accepting his thrusts, loosing groans past his lips, moans that might be his name, might be the sort of non-survival pleading she once thought she'd never perform for him, might be the forgiveness he wanted earlier, might be nothing more complex or convoluted than recognition, and desire, and relief.
Her hands fall away, hold onto his shoulders. Her head drops back, hair off the edge of the bed, legs wrapping around his waist and ankles locking over the small of his back. It would be merciful if she arched her back and tipped her head away and closed her eyes, groaning her words to the ceiling. Danicka looks at him, though, runs her hands over him and half-whimpers the words, clenching around him in intermittent emphasis.
"
To je ono. To je co chci. Udržujte kurva mě. Ach, bože, Lukáš, dej to mi to těžké."
[Lukas] Like tattered flags of defeated armies, their clothes are strewn all over her floor. The lights are still on. They can see them if they only turn their heads: his jeans kicked off, collapsed and telescoped into a pile. Her loungewear, sleepwear, whatever the fuck wear peeled off and scattered, listing off the edge of the bed. His shirt whipped off, clawed off, peeled off and stretched out like a corpse, one sleeve outflung, rumpled.
The detritus of a mortal life. The shed skins of their human masks.
And then there's them, born out of the ashes: burning, alive, vivid and vicious as animals, as stars. Bare and shameless, beyond shame; so caught up in one another that there's no thought of anything else. Coming together with a singularity ferocity. They keep kissing. They keep touching each other, looking at each other, drinking each other in with their eyes and their palms and their mouths, and through it all is this beating thread, this pounding pulse of recognition, recognition, want, recognition.
Mine. That's what the spread of her hand over his ribs, the heaving sides of his chest, say.
Mine. That's what his groaning sink between her thighs says.
Mine, mine, mine, the way she arches up to kiss him, the lock of her legs around him, the unmitigated pound of his cock into her body.
They taste like each other. His mouth is wet, his face. She was so fucking wet. She's so fucking wet now, so hot and tight, that the thrust of his cock into her drives her slick out of her, leaves it smeared between their bodies and on her inner thighs, on his groin, down the cleft of her ass. He leaves her taste on her face when he kisses her mouth, her cheek, her neck. He tastes himself on her tongue and she
keeps kissing him, keeps coming up and back to him while her hands grasp at his jaw or his neck, his shoulders.
Oh my god, he thinks, might say it aloud, can't tell anymore,
oh my god, oh my god, oh my fucking god. And then he grabs her by the shoulder and bears her down, pushes her down and pins her down, comes down over her and opens his mouth and kisses, or bites, something in between, at her neck, her shoulders, crouches and bends over her like an animal to suck at her nipples
while he fucks her. Just like that. Gives it to her hard, and fast, slams into her faster and harder than he can breathe, almost faster and harder than his heart can pound. He has to let go her breast. He has to lean over her on his elbows, gasping and cursing, looking down the space between their bodies to watch her taking him in, taking his cock, taking the force and ferocity of it
until he has to close his eyes for a moment. Find hers again. Lock onto hers, thinking of her looking at him as she touched herself, thinking of her crying out when he pushed his cock into her.
Tumbled over the edge of the bed, rippling with every slam of his body into hers, her hair spills like spun gold, like a waterfall, like the bolt of silk brocade he thought of once when he saw it spread like this over her pillow. He slows. His hand pushes into the spill of her hair. It's cool and soft, slippery between his fingers, and he follows it back to her brow and he cradles the curve of her head in his hand as he kisses her, eats the sounds she's making right out of her mouth.
Steady now, slower, solid, every thrust carrying him as deep as he can reach. His chest pressing to hers, he sets his brow against the mattress beside hers for a moment, gives himself the mercy of darkness, pants for breath, catches his breath, turns his head, kisses her neck.
"
Chci přijít dovnitř vás." His breathing is unsteady, the words carved and shredded between his slicing inhales, shuddering exhales. He sounds -- tattered, destroyed; oddly tender, as if he weren't so much telling her what he'll do as asking her if he can. "
Jdu do prdele, že těsný, mokré malý möse tvrdý a přijít dovnitř vás."
And he raises his head. Meets her eyes. He grasps the edge of the bed for leverage; the cords in his forearms, the muscles in his shoulders stand out.
"
V pořádku?"
[Danicka] This is what she wants. What she always wanted, from the second the thin door closed behind her in January and she realized with a sinking devastation that the lingering image of the dark-haired, pale-eyed man sprawling in a nightclub, on a sectional couch, was lighting her up from the inside, sparking off drunkenness and fear and a certain lack of concern over her own safety. This is what she was craving even when she was hungover and exhausted, rippling green silk clinging to her legs and her senses picking up on an unexpected -- and intriguing -- yet fierce joy from him when she told him that she did not want Sam Modine. The way he sublimated it into anger. The way it was buried beneath layers of distrust. The way she knew, even then, he was not so much angry with her for fucking his packmate as he was angry at himself for wanting her.
This is what she wanted so badly she considered coming to his bed some night and wordlessly offering some relief from the raking, rankling tension they found in each other's presence. Back then it wouldn't have worked. He would have demanded words, because it was before they'd clarified -- lying in an expansive, soft-sheeted hotel bed and murmuring to each other about a French children's book -- that words were where so much of the confusion was coming from.
This is what she wanted so badly she refused to let him fuck her like this the first time, because it wouldn't have been like this. There was a time when he must have wondered if her refusal to let him crawl on top of her and push himself between her legs was about power, about dominance, about fear. There was a time, long gone now, when Lukas did not understand what comes off of her in waves of clarity now: like this, she can wrap her arms and legs around him. She can receive him, accept him, hold him while he falls apart, kiss him when he's shipwrecked, tattered, destroyed.
And he would not let himself shatter like that on her shore for the longest time. At least not without a fight, not without the risk of resentment, the risk of feeling weak, the uncertainty of being with her -- liar, slut -- in the first place.
Which is all in the past, which no longer exists. Danicka does not urge him any longer to let go, does not need to, and has never tried to explain to him why it's so vital to her to have him like this, completely wild. She cannot explain it to herself. It is, and words would only create misunderstanding. So instead they fuck like escaping armageddon, or preparing for it. They fuck like it's been forever, like it's the first time, like it's going to be the last, like everything depends on this willful decimation.
And Danicka looks at him. She watches him when his head is lifted, runs her hands up his throat and face and buries her fingers in his hair when he kisses her neck, sucks at her breasts, goes at her with bruising force and searing intensity that leaves her skin reddened where he's been, a map of lust and recovery, marks of ownership and belonging, icons of worship, their gasps as pale and threadbare as flags of surrender. She can't tell the difference anymore between sweat and the wetness on their faces, their hands, between their bodies. She can't tell the difference anymore between the end of her own skin and the start of his, as though her body is giving in completely just to survive, becoming liquid and heat and light because remaining solid only invites destruction. So she melts. She kisses him and demands a subtler deconstruction, her arms and hands softening on him even as her cunt clenches down hard and tight on his cock as he drives into her.
She's gentle, and
"
Tolik tě miluji," Danicka whispers, as he's pushing her hair back, letting it wrap around his fingers, the lengths cool and her scalp dark and wet, every strand smelling faintly of water and witch hazel, of her sweat, of the breeding and natural familiarity that tells him
she's his.
The first rush is over, the first wave of a battle, the initial onslaught of need. He slows and she thinks,
Jsem tady. Jsem tady, má lásko. She says nothing, though, her eyes closing while she kisses him, lingering now in his mouth, pushing sweat-curled hair off his scalp and gasping when he fucks into her deeply, roughly. She follows him as he lets his brow fall to the bedspread, her fingers floating across his cheeks and temple, her kisses trailing after her touch, her hips rolling back against him as though to discourage any potentiality of him stopping, however slim, however fucking nonexistent.
"
Ano."
That's what she has to say, as though he ended anything he said on a question, as though he made it sound, in the slightest, like a plea. She looks back at him as he raises his head, her lips parted, her breath panting, her cunt bearing down on him in unerring, unintentional emphasis. "
Ano, Lukášek. Ano. Ano, prosím. Miluju tě tak kurva hodně. Pojď ve mně."
She whimpers, raising up her head and kissing him hard, forcing his head back, one hand leaving his body to grab the bedspread and push against the mattress, holding herself up so that her stomach and her chest press to his, seal against his skin. "
Dej mi to. Dovolte mi, abych to cítím."
Her eyes find his, an almost gleaming green now, one hand cupped around his jawline, gasps leaving her every time he thrusts. "It's all right," she whispers, kissing him again, fighting to speak past his lips, as though to fill him with the words like water, like food, like air. "I want it. I want you to take it off. I want to feel you. Baby, please..."
[Lukas] Unhesitatingly, Lukas meets Danicka's mouth as she arches up, cleaves to him. His elbows straighten. He holds himself up, pushes himself up, wraps his arm around her and clasps her against him as she gasps, as she whimpers, as she murmurs against his mouth as though to transduce her meaning directly into his flesh.
The first time she says it --
let me feel it -- he doesn't understand. He groans because she's so damn close to him, groans because she's so damn tight and so fucking
good, but his eyes are falling closed and he's moving into her and
then she puts her hand on his face, and she kisses the words into him:
take it off.
feel you.and Lukas's eyes fly open. He stops midstroke, buried deep. Harsh, his breathing. Quivering, the muscles in his one supporting arm. He stares at her; his eyes are shockingly blue.
"
Co?"
It's not even properly a word; just a caught consonant, a pant of an exhale.
"Baby, are you -- "
he doesn't finish the question. It's an insult to her intelligence and to his to ask her
are you sure, are you certain, are you asking me to... when he knows the answer. He lunges across the divide and he kisses her suddenly, like he can't resist. Pulls back, draws back, draws out of her and unwinds his arm around her to reach down and yank the condom off in one swipe of his hand. It's tossed aside. He grabs her by the hip and drags her forward, under and around him; they're close enough that his chest brushes hers when he inhales, and when he slides into her again it's so raw, so sudden, she's so hot and immediate and
there that he drops his brow against hers and lets go a single, rushing groan.
Which cuts off -- muffled -- not against her neck or her shoulder but against her mouth. He kisses her again, suddenly and completely, like magnets snapping together; an electric circuit closing.
[Danicka] Even if he were to refuse, even if Lukas were to groan that he can't stop, he can't take five seconds, he can't bear to move out of her, Danicka would look at him the way she looks at him when he holds himself up over her and holds her and
stops like that. She keeps her hand on his cheek, panting quietly, her legs entwined, keeping him close. She looks at him as though frozen in the moment, in the waiting, her face still though her eyes are verdant and her cunt is squeezing him, hips rolling, lips parted to release both breaths and tiny little whimpers hinting at the lightning bolts of reaction every stroke of his cock sends through her.
"
Chci --" she starts to answer, when he barely gaps the beginning of a question, a confusion. She runs her hands over his trembling arms, covering over the constant vibrations underneath his skin. Danicka kisses him before he cuts himself off, before he kisses her like the inevitability of hunger, pulling his mouth down while he pulls his hips back.
She moans into his mouth, hand tightening like a wild, living thing all its own in his hair as though to make up for the loss of him inside her. Her legs loosen for him, though, make room for him to move away and then return. She is moving back to him as soon as he all but rips the condom off, rubbing herself against him, the back of his wrist as his hand is reaching for her hip. "Baby," she whimpers, and
harder
"
Baby!" when he rams into her again.
Danicka falls back to the bedspread and presses her hands against his shoulders even though their chests are together, their foreheads, her eyes finally closing and her gasps mating with his groans in the thin band of air between them. When he kisses her now her arms wrap around his neck and hold him to stay, to tattoo him into her skin, press him into her bones, merge flesh and spirit at once by carnal ritual.
"Don't stop," she gasps, her lips still touching and twined with his even as she parts them enough to breathe, to let go of words filling up her mind. "Fuck me til you come, baby.
Udržujte kurva mě." She arches her back, tipping her head as a groan tremors through her throat. Danicka's hips swing sharply against him, fuck him back with as much desperation as the steady slam of his cock. Every word she says is more of a moan, more of a plea to go in time and intensity with her counterthrusts. "
Pojď ve mně. Ukaž mi, jak moc milujete, že mokrá kunda. Ach bože," she says, the blasphemy a shriek towards the ceiling, "
že horké kohout! Ach bože, lásko, nekončí, you're going to make me come again...!"
[Lukas] Lukas used to hold back. Because he was afraid of hurting Danicka, yes, but also because he was afraid she would hurt him somehow. Take it all and give nothing back. Strip him bare, flay him to the bone, take everything; fling it back in his teeth. Reject it. Reject him. Humiliate him. Leave him twisting in the wind the way he thought he saw Sam twisting in the wind, in love and destroyed, decimated, razed to the ground.
(I am
sick of hearing about what Danička did to Sam, he shouted once.
Ever the hero or the victim, never the villain, he said once.)
Lukas used to hold back. He doesn't anymore. That's been said before. It's too obvious not to be noted. He used to fuck her without a sound, preferring to stop breathing rather than utter a single syllable, a single noise. He used to grind his teeth together rather than bite into her. He used to
he used to do a lot of things. He doesn't anymore.
What's less obvious, but no less true, is how Danicka has changed as well. She used to hold back, too. Her reasons were different, but ultimately the same: fear. Fear of this, fear of that. Fear of being hurt. Fear of vulnerability; or fear of simply being damaged, being wounded, being destroyed.
There was a time when she wouldn't dig her nails into him. Wouldn't sink her teeth into him. Wouldn't speak to him in languages he knew, wouldn't
show him just what he was doing to her ... except, of course, when she did. Except when she looked at him that first night, held his eyes that first time. Except when she kissed him like that and wouldn't let him fuck her like that, fucked him instead like
that. Except when she clung to him in the aftermath, shaking.
Danicka was always more unpredictable, less consistent. Danicka is changing, too. But this is still the same:
When she kisses him, he falls into her. They fall into one another's gravity. The bottom drops out of the world. They collapse into one another, and it wouldn't matter to him now if everything else ceased to exist.
And then it's parting. And his eyes are opening. She's beneath him, holding him. He's moving into her. There's nothing between them now. It's all stripped bare, flayed to the bone, but it doesn't hurt; it never did. It's
good. It's so fucking good that he has to take his hands off her; he has to turn his palms to the bedspread and his fingers are clutching at the fabric, are pulling it into wrinkles and folds, are crushing it into his palms as he moves over her, fucks her, slams into her in a sort of wild delirium of want, as fast and hard as he was before she told him to
take it offand give it to her. Harder. He's found the edge of the mattress again. Grips that; holds onto that while his lower body hammers at hers, while his mouth catches at hers, while he shares her breath and drives into her body. Holds on as though the strength of his hands, the tenacity of his grip might keep him together while his mind comes apart at the seams. Tells her "
Bože!" and "
fuck!" and "
ach bože, lásko, držet v do mě. Držet mě. Kurva mě, ach můj kurva bože ... fuck!" like it means something, like it could convey what was happening to him, and what she was doing to him, and how the boundaries of his body and his existence were ceasing to make sense to him, and how through all of this from beginning to end there's only ever one constant, one unbroken line, one tenuous thread of perfect fucking clarity that ran purely, simply, directly, from him to her.
Everything else is fog.
Lukas does not have the words to tell her this anymore. He does not have the ability to tell her anything at all anymore, except her name,
Danička, one last covenant of recognition bitten out in the instant before he bears down over her, crushes her body to the bed, seals every inch of himself that he can against her, and into her.
His orgasm hits like a tidal wave, a force of nature. It obliterates his thinking mind, reduces him to reflexes and impulses, instincts. He bites into her shoulder and spends furiously inside her, snarling; floods her, fills her, fucks her afterward in short, rough, mindless thrusts, on and on and over and over, as though to drive his cum into her; as though to make it indelible.
It doesn't matter that he can't handle it anymore. It doesn't matter that he should be thinking of not fucking her like this, not coming inside her, not impregnating her, for god's sake, because she'll have to go away. His body is following some directive older than him, older than her, older than the war and the tribe and the nation, as old as sex, that doesn't care if the sensation overloads him, blows every last fuse in his head; doesn't care if this can or can't last, if she will or won't have to go away; cares only that she's his, and healthy, and fertile, and
and he's collapsing against her now, slowing and sinking down, quivering, and the joints of his hands ache from gripping the mattress so hard, and every last synapse in his body is still incandescent with the unbearable pleasure that had so recently lit them all up at once.
Straining for breath leaves him wordless for nearly a minute more. When he finally speaks, he sounds tattered and unsteady; wrecked.
"
Láska, my nelze to udělat který." The muscles in his upper back tighten, bunch. He raises himself, presses his mouth to her cheek with a sudden, desperate heaviness. "
Nemohu nést ztratit ty."
He's yet to leave her body. He's still buried as deeply as he was when his orgasm dragged him under and drowned him. An errant pulse of pleasure wracks through him, sets him shuddering. Eyes closed, he presses his brow to her temple, nuzzles her face, the side of her neck.
"
Tolik tě miluji, Danička."
[Danicka] They both held back. She wouldn't say his name, even when it was trying to jump off the tip of her tongue, even when she thought she might die from what he was doing to her if she couldn't at least call out to him. As though she might be lost forever without that tenuous connection of recognition, of knowing one another the way they have even before they realized it, even when they were trying to despise each other. Yet she'd bite her lip, or her tongue, or scream in Russian as she writhed against him, before giving him the gift of being able to recall at will rather than imagine the sound of her moaning his name in the dark.
She hates that she gave him so many reasons to doubt how much she loves him. That was one of them.
There were things inaccessible, not allowed between them: she would not lay on her back willingly for him, would not take him in her arms and legs like this. She would not permit him to effectively pin her between his chest and the mattress, whether that mattress was in a luxury hotel or his bedroom at the Brotherhood. He never laid in this bed with her before things changed, before that first time she laid back, murmured invitation to him, made him wonder with a pang if he deserved this.
It is no coincidence that the first time she cried out his name as he pleasured her was also the first time she laid back underneath him. Welcomed him in, called him to her.
And now look at her. (
Which he does.) Look at her writhing underneath him, against him, whimpering his name as he fucks her. Look at her arms wrapped around him as though she can't bear to loosen her grip, look at her fingernails digging into his shoulders as though there's no chance he'll get furious if she hurts him, as though there's no chance he won't get so reckless that he injures her in a fit of Rage, as though she isn't scared anymore. Look at her taking him in her bed and giving him every reason under sun and moon alike to stay there.
If she wanted to, she could raze him to the ground, and they both know it. She could take everything and not fling it back but hold onto it, keep it from him, hold it over him. She could strip him bare, take him by the throat, humiliate him, leave him twisting at her side
in love and destroyed,
belonging to her and with her and in her, inextricably. She could whisper in his ear, take him by the cock and lead him wherever she wants, manipulate him with an ease and effectiveness that should chill any Shadow Lord into watching their Kin more closely, treating them more carefully.
Danicka does not want to. She is not interested in his power, except as how it affects his view of himself. She is not concerned with whether his pack succeeds or fails, except as how that impacts him. She wants nothing from the Nation. She needs nothing from him, neither money nor freedom nor approbation. She wants
...this. Him in her bed, entwined in her arms, swearing and gasping against her as he fucks her, as he makes love to her so ferociously it's comparable to a war, to the end of all wars, to cannonfire breaking down every last wall in the kingdom. Him in her home, in her body, in her ears, in her mouth, giving everything over to her
so that she can give it back.
"
To je ono," she gasps as he grabs the mattress instead of her, groans, kisses her like bites, like sips of hard liquor burning down her tongue and throat. "
To je ono, lásko, nezůstávejte kurva přestan, nezůstávejte --"
Her cunt clenches on him as her arms lock around him, as her head tosses back, as she looses a strangled cry of pleasure and bucks her hips back against his pistoning thrusts. She isn't coming but she's close, so close that she squirms, rubbing against his cock, against his entire sinuous, sweating body. Her first orgasm was melting, molten, so hot and wet that she couldn't feel anything but those two sensations for some time afterward.
This time it's like a star dying.
She gasps when he bites her shoulder, but she screams when he twitches inside her, jerks, fills her the way he has only when they've been unable to tolerate even a moment of separation to get a condom or when they've been so far from civilization and its trappings to remember or care. She comes when she does in part because she knows what is happening to him, knows how far this takes him because she loses herself, too. And she was never as frightened of that as he was, never as resistant to it, in fact sought it for most of her life, but she knows that freefall.
That glorious death. That sudden sinking back into the dark, into the earth, into the primordial beginning and ending of life, back to the root of what they are and what they all inevitably become.
Danicka holds onto him with only one arm at the end, hooked around his shoulders while her left hand flies to the bedspread, then reaches back to grab his forearm, his wrist, clutch at his hand. She shrieks as her body arcs upward, presses into him, breasts and belly and thighs searing his skin. They crush against each other, lose track of physical boundaries they way they long since lost track of all others when it comes to this. But she slides her fingers in between his, past his knuckles, and it's almost gentle.
His continued thrusts make her groan, one after the other, noises as hard as his orgasm, as rolling as her own. It explodes in a single shockwave followed by ripples, throb after throb of pleasure going from the epicenter of her cunt, his cock, her clit, flowing through her arms and legs and over him, around him, unfurling from her mouth with every moan. She's lit up, all flushed skin and sweat and gold and green, her mouth and her eyes open at once. Her right hand is open over his right shoulderblade, holding him close even as her snaking moans start to become gasps, which become panting, which become whimpers as he descends over her, wraps around her.
She closes her eyes because the ceiling is spinning.
"
Ne," she whispers, but it isn't so clear at first. She's just murmuring meaninglessly, mumbling as he speaks to her in Czech, kisses her cheek. She is just whimpering when he kisses her cheek, shivering when his cock moves inside her again or when he shifts his hips. "Lukáš, baby, don't..."
They're nothing more than susurrations, minute vibrations in the air from her lips to his ears, as tremulous as her thighs shuddering on either side of him, as her cunt quivering on him: "
Nemohu myslet. Nemůžu se pohnout." Her hand flexes on top of his, the pads of her fingers rubbing softly between his knuckles and then relaxing again. She tries to catch her breath.
"
Ještě ne, lásko. Prosím. Prosím, jen ... Ještě ne."
And she exhales. Sighs.
[Lukas] So he quiets.
He quiets, and he stills, and he lays his head down beside hers; his body atop hers. A moment passes and then he turns his face -- faces her instead, nuzzles against the side of her neck, her cheek, and closes his eyes.
Steady now, his breathing. Fast and deep still, but without the raggedness and the harshness that marked it a moment ago. His heartrate is slowing too. She can feel it clearly through the walls of his chest, pressed against hers.
Gradually he realizes their fingers are still entwined. He lets go the edge of the mattress. His forearm aches. The fingers spread; he lets her fingers between his, closes. Holds. His free hand slips under her back, between her spine and the mattress. Holds. He holds her against him, close to him, stays right where he is, and right where he belongs.
Moments pass before he stirs again. Gently, slowly, he rolls onto his side. Their lower bodies are still entwined, tangled. The conditioned air feels abruptly cool on his chest and stomach when they part. He draws her with him, but there's some small distance now, enough to see one another.
His eyes are a pale and crystalline blue, the pupils constricting now. He looks at her across the space between, raising his hand to her face. The pads of his fingers are careful on her cheek, her temple.
Lukas doesn't tell her again that she can't
do this. That it's dangerous, that it's addictive, that it makes him think and want things that are dangerous and fatal to them; not to him or to her, but to
them. He doesn't say this again. What he says with his hand on her face, his eyes on hers, is very soft, very gentle:
"
Můj lodní důstojník."
[Danicka] Though the air conditioning washes cool air over Lukas's skin and begins stripping away some of the nigh-unbearable heat in the aftermath of lovemaking that was a little like a supernova, Danicka remains wrapped for some time in his arms, held between blankets and heartbeat, cradled in warmth. She lets herself melt into it, her legs the only part of her exposed as she unwinds her arms and lets go of his hand and tucks herself in underneath him. The posture of her arms is almost prayerlike. Her hands tangled over her breastbone, her shoulders rounded forward, her head ducking down til her forehead touches his left clavicle.
And there they remain for awhile: man and woman together, naked, and not ashamed. His sweat begins to dry. Her feet, elevated and uncovered, begin to feel cold. She wiggles her toes, and her heels rub against his back. Her ankles unlock, and her thighs part, calves sliding over his ass, off to either side. She readjusts, gradually unkinking her legs, and works her feet under his legs -- lower thighs, knees, shins, somewhere -- dark hair tickling her toes slightly.
So she can move. After awhile, she can breathe normally again. They're shallow, because of the way her arms and his body press into her ribcage, but her breaths are steady, finally. Slow.
Danicka makes no noise of protest when Lukas rolls to the side, simply sighing and rolling with him. Their legs wind around each other further, Danicka seeking warmth for her feet and her knees while simultaneously relishing the sudden swirl of cool air across her back as she hooks one leg around his hip and tries to move her head back to its spot on his chest. There's the sense that if allowed, she would simply fall asleep like this, as lazy as a sated animal, as content as a protected child.
Her wandering, tattered ends of thoughts remember that the first time he was inside her there was nothing between them. The first time he was inside her, he pinned her down and took her in a single stroke, moved his hand from the front to the back of her neck as a need for control -- over her, over himself -- shifted suddenly to a need to draw her mouth to his again. She remembers that the first time she took him in her mouth, he tipped his head back and bared his throat not out of willfull submission but momentary helplessness. It all seems meaningful, if fleetingly, that he said then
I came here to fuck and you came here to get fucked. I can't offer you anything more than that. ...Not right now. Because right now, if I don't come inside you or break someone's face within ten minutes, I'll fucking lose my mind.and it was longer than ten minutes before he came inside her, her eyes meeting his though he had to look away, he couldn't bear it and still maintain his grip on sanity. And he couldn't offer her more than that but he gave her more, all the same. And he didn't know then how much the book he'd seen her reading days before that night meant to her, did not know that
The Minotaur makes her think of her childhood, that
Lovesong made her think of night after night spent in hotel rooms at the W, the Omni, the Affinia, and how they so quickly deconstructed each other, found the primal core behind every civilized trapping.
It all seems meaningful.
And it passes.
Danicka opens her eyes when he touches her face. Some of their murkiness has returned, as though in the wake of coming with him she is losing clarity, losing honesty, but that really is the truth of it. For a long time he's felt as though when she comes he can see straight through her, see everything, right to the fucking bottom. Her eyes are clearer then, vivid green or pale emerald, thin rings of color around sharklike and expanding pupils. Now they're softening, darkening, gaining the amber cast and golden flecks that makes them so indistinguishable from hazel sometimes, catches the light and turns them blue in the sunlight.
The corners of her lips curve into the softest smile, one that fills her eyes but does not lift her heavy eyelids higher than necessary to see him. She lets them fall again, drowsy, and does not try to read his mind, the wishes he can't tolerate entertaining, the desires that go beyond sex, beyond thought, right to biology, evolution, creation, the most ancient measures of personal power and firmest proofs of survival. Her eyelashes lift again after this, the slowest blink in his history with this woman, because she hears him breathe and knows he's going to speak
though she doesn't know he's going to say
what he says.
"
Udělala jsem ti můj lodní důstojník na slunovratu," she murmurs in response, fighting a yawn and tucking her head back down once more, burrowing between his bicep and his pectoral muscle. Her voice is low, warm with the worth of the words if too relaxed to give them proper gravitas. "
Je mi líto jsem vám neřekl," she adds more softly, the sort of thing one would say after borrowing a sweater without asking, though this is not that sort of thing at all.
Danicka sighs softly, closing her eyes again, making his body her pillow. A familiar-seeming whisper brushes across his skin.
"
Je mi zima."
[Lukas] So much of what's between them is unorthodox; even disallowed by the harsher interpretations of shadow lord creed. She's kin; as she was told by her mother, standing before the boys that had mistreated her --
You're better than them.-- so too would he have been taught by his mentor, though perhaps not so plainly, not so explicitly. He was taught -- it was there in the undertext, insidious -- that he was better than kin and humans; better than other Garou. A cut above. Superior. Capable of making the hard decisions, the ruthless, calculated, weighted choices, that a lesser creature would quail before. He was taught to be a pillar of cold righteousness, a mailed right fist for the justice of ice and rock. He was taught to cleave to What Is Right and What Is True, even if it is not what is kind and good.
He was taught that an Ahroun's strength is given to him so that he can ward those weaker than him; to protect them, to keep them safe ... even from themselves.
He was taught that sometimes protection and control are inseparable.
He was taught to dominate.
And then, there's Danicka. Who performed her own spontaneous rite of claiming by the dark of moon, the length of day. Who hunted him, trapped him, put him under her and rode him, conquered him, let him conquer her. Who tells him now,
I made you my mate.As if such things were ever the choice of the kin, and not the Garou.
And it's there, recognition of that; rebellion against that. The wild beast straining against the collar. It's a flicker in his eyes, hot, violent, burning itself out like magnesium. It fades; the way he looks at her is something else now, a different sort of recognition, something touched with the same ache that filled him when she gave him the collected poems of Ted Hughes; when she looked at the waxing gibbous moon and told him to lie atop her.
Lukas has yet to think of anything to say when Danicka curls close again, burrows against his chest. His arm encircles her automatically, but never thoughtlessly. He holds her close, smoothing his hand over her shoulder, down her arm and then her hip, down to cover her thigh where it crosses his hip.
Budu vás v teple ty, he thinks; doesn't say it because it seems so juvenile, so silly, so guilelessly idealistic. He lets his body speak for him, covers as much as her skin with his as he can, draws her into the warm center of his torso, where the ceaseless motion and turmoil of his heart and viscerae shed a perpetual, radiating heat.
"
Spánek, lásko," he murmurs, and kisses her temple.
[Danicka] That ripple of rebellion pass from him, to her, and then dissipates entirely without being remarked upon. It was the same in the woods on the night in question, when she informed him that he'd never really been entirely the hunter in that spontaneous -- but not strange -- ritual on the night after the longest day of the year. He'd flashed, strained, and finding the bonds utterly complete yet somehow not restrictive, had relaxed again. Neither of them accepts the yoke of the other, however gentle, without testing it. Neither of them capitulates without a fight, without war, without pushing so hard they are left decimated by the struggle.
In fact, decimated now, wrecked by one another, spent physically for the time being -- however long that time is to be -- she informs him that she's taken him, took him months ago, claimed him the way that Garou in their world claim Kin, and he pushes back. Subtly, emotionally, and only for a moment, like the resentful stirring of an itinerant sleeper, but there.
Lukas was taught that he is better than others. Danicka was told. The difference is in the proofs offered to each as they were trained up from childhood and adolescence into early adulthood: Lukas learning to make an example when necessary, being shown how to use his natural strength for protection and dominance. Danicka was told one thing explicitly, though reality showed her completely different truth. Her mother had not even meant that she was better than those; merely that they were unworthy of her because they were mortal, human, weak, fragile. Just as any Garou of another Tribe would be unworthy of diluting her bloodline. Just as any Kin, regardless of pedigree, would be punished for even considering her.
Night Warder, like Heals by Pain, would approve of an Ahroun from an old and storied lineage, an Ahroun who is Alpha of his pack, born in the Czech Republic, and so on, and so on, and so on. The dead Lord of the Summit and the dangerous Child of Crow would consider Lukas -- who looks at Danicka sometimes and wonders if he deserves her, deserves
this -- more than worthy. They would only wonder what he could want from a woman who will run in panic even from the near-forms, not to mention her sobbing, pleading, pathetic breakdowns when faced with a crinos-bodied Garou.
They have never known her as he knows her, darting through darkness and clinging branches, earning scratches on her unscarred skin -- luminous under moonlight, enigmatic in starlight, golden under the sun -- and drawing him in deeper, and deeper, until his heart beat underneath her palm and her breath was given simultaneously to him and to the night itself, the spirits of heavens, earth, and epiphany. No one has ever known her as he knows her, as he knew her that night, as he knows her this moment.
Tonight, Danicka does not bother to ask him if he is staying with her. Though her bedcovers are rumpled and their clothes are scattered and there's a half-used condom lying forlornly on the carpet and they're lying with their heads at the foot instead of up by the headboard and wall, she simply sighs, curling closer. She uses his arm as a pillow, his chest, breathing in his warmth and his scent deeply before exhaling it across his solar plexus.
She withdraws from him in the meandering, unwinding moments between that sigh and the first steady, rhythmic breath of actual sleep, pulling off of him with a lift of her hips. She turns around sometime between that sigh and completely going under, her skin -- his skin -- sweaty, sticky, saturated with mingled scent. She drowses on his bicep as her shoulders relax further, as her body becomes heavier than life, as his warmth suffuses her skin, touches and ignites her core. In sleep, Danicka produces more heat, turning their tangled bodies into unintentionally lit furnaces.
Wine mellows. Beers sweat. Food goes ignored, uneaten, turns room temperature on her desk. The roommate and his friends don't come back. The apartment becomes silent except for the intermittent, barely audible whir of air conditioning.
At some point she wakes, stirring underneath his arm and silently squirming away to go to the bathroom. It's the middle of the night, and she stays in there for some time. When she returns, her breath smells of mint and her skin's scent is less potently sexed, and she lays soft hands on him and urges him to move, come lie on her pillow, come under the sheet with her at least. Her brief and halfhearted cleanliness doesn't last long, because whether Lukas turns on the bed at her behest or remains where he is and pulls her back down to him, it is only moments before the press of their bodies together inspires memory and yearning both, before she is turning her face up to his and kissing him with parted lips, drawing his hand to her breast before he even has a chance to get there on his own, sliding her leg up the outside of his before either of them has the presence of mind to murmur
I want youor remember
I've wanted you since the first time I saw you.And it's true, what he didn't say: that it's addictive, that it's dangerous. Danicka does not reach into the nightstand for a condom when she slithers a hand between their bellies and guides him into her with a needless kiss of "
Uvnitř mě," against his mouth. She does not say anything after that but his name, but
ah... ah!, but other wordless if not meaningless cries. Her eyes are open when she comes this time, her hands open on his shoulders as they writhe on their sides, or in some esoteric position found in this bed before.
This time, too, she doesn't try to speak to him afterward. She holds him when he comes, wraps her arms around him and tips her head back, bares her throat, groans as his mouth falls on her neck, her mouth, as his hands travel her body or push into her hair or simply hold her where she is, firm and hot against him. This time, she kisses him over and over, her lips touching his chest, his jawline, his brow, his cheekbones, his shoulders. She sleeps half atop him when she sleeps again, arm and leg draped possessively, protectively, yet imploringly across him.
They are woken around seven in the morning by something dropping in the kitchen and a slightly hungover young sound technician swearing, shushing someone else -- also male -- who is laughing at him. Danicka starts at the initial noise and then, feeling Lukas under her arm, gives a quiet groan and calms again, rolling over and rather insistently pulling his arm around her, though some part of her feels the instinct under his skin that foresaw her insistence, or did not need it. It does not matter.
He holds her. She holds him around her. And when he has to go -- because he has to go -- she does not get up to make breakfast. She watches him from bed, from underneath the covers, the light from the windows hitting his back and shoulders. She watches him dress, when he dresses, hauling pants up his legs and fingers manipulating fasteners. She blinks slowly, lazily, staring at him with the sheet over her waist and her breasts heedlessly bared, her skin marked here and there in pink where his mouth sucked at her, where his teeth bit.
It takes her hours to get out of bed, after Lukas has gone. She stays surrounded by the lingering scent of him as long as she can, stretching out in the middle of her bed and letting her body rub against the sheets. It is not until a few hours after he leaves Kingsbury Plaza that his phone vibrates or chimes with a text message, as though they have just started dating, as though it was the first time, as though he is somehow out there thinking about her, wondering if she's thinking about him:
Kdy si tě zase uvidím?
