for this to end.

Danicka
It's hours later when Lukas comes back. Dawn is still some time off, the sky still slow to awaken though the days are getting longer and longer. The snow on the ground keeps melting into puddles and runoff, but it's freezing again now, as he makes his way back into the Brotherhood. Someone has been doing some cleaning up in the common room: maybe Danicka. Maybe one of the other Garou. Maybe Saint Jennifer. It still smells of blood, though, underneath whatever water and soap were applied to the flooring.

The door to Lukas's room is unlocked, and the lanyard-borne key bumps against the inside of the door when he opens it, hanging from the interior knob. The lights are off, except for the clip-on lamp attached to his headboard. Everything is as he left it, except for these changes: there is a large leather bag sitting on his desk. There is a woman's cream-colored wool coat hanging in his closed closet, though he cannot see it at the moment. No one has been sitting in his chair, because it's gone. No one has been eating his koláče...so far as he knows. But someone has been lying in his bed, and she's still there.

Despite the fact that the room is cool, Goldilocks is resting on top of the covers, the pillow arranged behind her head and shoulders to prop her up slightly. Her long legs are bare, her lower half clad only in the simplest undergarments he's seen on her yet: a pair of plain white bikini panties, low-cut and missing any detail of elastic or seam, a hint that even her 'plain' underwear isn't picked up at Wal-Mart. Danicka's hair is dried, down around her shoulders. Her t-shirt is a soft yellow, with a design on the lower right side of her body of blackwork coming out of the spout of an upended tea kettle. There are words; with the way she's sitting, they're indiscernable. They don't matter anyway.

There is a telltale line of wiring going from each ear down to the iPhone resting beside her hip on the bed; one of her legs is crossed over the other, her foot bobbing gentle to whatever song she's listening to. Her eyes are on the book she's reading, which has a Malamute-headed man in a red smoking jacket on the cover. When the door opens, however, her eyes flick towards Lukas.

She smiles. It's small, and momentary, but it's there. Checking the page number, rather than getting a bookmark, Danicka closes her book and reaches up to take her earbuds out.

Lukas
4:42am in the Brotherhood is a quiet time -- long after most the residents are asleep; before the kinfolk are awake. On a normal night Lukas likes to spend this hour before dawn reading in the open spaces of the common room, sometimes with the TV tuned to some public broadcast station or other if they have a concert on, more often with it off. The first time they met here, he was doing just that, reading, while she came up the stairs with Sam, both of them a little tipsy or more than a little tipsy.

He's not reading tonight. He's not even back until a quarter to five, and then the Ford pulls up sedately outside. He comes in the back, not hurrying, trusting the darkness of his clothing to hide the new mess he's made of himself. He unlocks the back door with blood-sticky hands and then goes up the stairs, showers again.

Carefully this time. Taking his time, getting himself clean.

It's a little past 5 when he comes back to his room. It's his own room, so he doesn't knock, only twists the knob and pushes the door open. His second change of clothes have followed his dedicated underclothes into the washer. He has a towel tucked around his waist, another draped over his neck.

She smiles at him. He doesn't smile back; his brow contracts instead, as though she puzzled him, or troubled him somehow. He shuts the door behind himself, quietly, and then goes over to his dresser, opens the top drawer. He leaves wet footprints on the wood floor.

"I thought you'd be asleep by now. Or gone." He gets a folding straight-razor out, a can of expensive shaving foam that he shakes with loose, rapid swings of his wrist as he turns to face her. Normally now he'd return to the bathroom, shave in front of the mirror. He doesn't. He leans against the desk, and when the shaving foam is adequately shaken, he applies it to himself by touch. "Aren't you tired?"

Danicka
The tips of her fingers slide gently across the screen of her phone, turning off the music before she starts winding up the cord of the earbuds. As he is walking to the dresser, Danicka is -- silently -- setting the book on the nightstand and then the phone on the book. As he is opening his mouth to speak, she is re-settling herself against his pillow, head turned to watch him.

"I told you I'd be here," she says quietly, mindful of the walls she knows are as thin as a dormitory's. The words are spoken lightly, without scolding or even amusement.

It's not unlike the tone of voice she used in the wee hours of the morning on the night she left the room right next door to his, slipping into her heels and fastening her earrings as her eyes watched him from across the common room. There's something almost like reverence in her tone, respect for the quiet, or maybe just an easy comfort in his presence that is not always easy, or comfortable, for either of them.

"A little," she confesses, her body rolling slightly to her side, but she doesn't prop herself up. "I dozed for a bit, though." The pause in her words only lasts about as long as her slow blink. "What about you?"

Lukas
There's an echo in his mind --

I suppose you don't sleep.
Don't be silly. Of course I sleep. I'm heading to bed in an hour.

-- and an echo in his mind, too, of her presence here, at this hour, in one of these small rooms, though it's not the empty one next to his this time. He looks at her for a moment, his jaw white with foam, his brow furrowed as though in confusion or pain, and then he looks down and unfolds the straight blade from the handle.

"I sleep late." He gives her a wry tilt of his mouth, not quite a smile. Then he gets up and goes to the cheap, woodframed, three-quarter-length mirror hanging on the door. Lukas has never been to college, but perhaps Danicka has, and this would be familiar to her.

His back to her, beadlets of water drying on the broad stretches of muscle networking shoulderblades to arm, ribs to spine, he shaves himself, tilting his head to get at the angle of his jaw. Every few strokes he pauses to wipe the blade clean on the towel folded around his neck, and when he's shaved half his face he steps aside a little, until he can meet her eyes in reflection.

"What are you doing here, really?"

Danicka
An echo is all it is, an allusion. Finding out that she wanted him, too, had not made him or the woman less inclined to satisfying that want. If anything, it had made it worse. Driving her home in the morning had not damned either of them, but it sure as hell didn't save them, either. Now, too, it isn't hints of flesh underneath clothes or the memory of the sound of her voice letting out pleasured noises that fill his head. Lukas knows every inch of Danicka's body know, has moved inside of her over and over, has tasted her and made her produce not stifled and truncated sounds but full-throated cries for more.

She's seen his face, his eyes, when he comes. She's touched every scar, buried her face in his neck and inhaled his scent as though she were not a human being but an animal capable of memorizing it. She has stroked his sweat-dampened hair while they've caught their breath, still feeling him inside of her rather than falling back against her own pillows in her own room in her otherwise cold bed, staring at the ceiling and cursing his name and his stubbornness and everything else about him.

Somehow the fact that there isn't any mystery left in that respect doesn't change anything.

He shaves, and she watches. Danicka doesn't pick up her book or her phone again. She lays on her side, curled on his pillow, arms relaxed, and doesn't say another word until he asks for one.

"I told you," comes the mild answer. Too mild. The fact that her voice never picks up any intensity as she speaks to him now and remains level and gentle instead is indication enough: the question annoys her. "And I wasn't lying. If you want me to go, say you want me to go. If you want me to call first, tell me to call first."

Lukas
If you want me to go--
"I don't want you to go."

He cuts her off quietly, absolutely, the way he'd explained to Erick, earlier, that Milo was a Bringer of Light; that Milo was effectively innocent until proven guilty. His eyes hold hers in reflection for a moment. It's a strange dichotomy, seeing a Garou, an Ahroun, in a mirror. The form is the same. The rage is somehow missing, dissociated; it's like seeing, if only for a second, and imperfectly, what he might have been if he had not been born with a shapechanger's spirit in his mutable skin.

Which is bare now, great swathes of it, the white towels very bright against his swarthy slavic complexion. She's seen every inch of him naked, and he's not shy. The truth is, he'd only put the towel on at all because there was a distance between the bathroom and his room that was public.

"I want you to stay," he adds.

He resumes shaving, using the end of the towel to wipe a smear of shaving cream off his face, cleaning the razor on it as well before starting in on the other side of his face. Few men shave with traditional straight razors these days, but it suits Lukas, and he wields the tool with an ease that bespeaks long practice.

"I'm just at a loss with you sometimes," he says to his reflection then, watching the razor gleam across his skin, scraping whiskers and foam ahead of it, leaving bare smooth skin behind. "You've told me you need to set deadlines for yourself so you don't have to think about it until then. Even so, I don't understand how you can be here again, like this. Not after the way we parted, and not after you've told me you don't even want to come upstairs here. I just want you to explain how you can ... reconcile yourself with yourself."

Danicka
She looks like she belongs there. Lying on his bed in her t-shirt and underwear as though this is how and where she sleeps every night, book nearby and eyes softened by weariness as well as dim lighting, Danicka looks as comfortable against his pillow as though she's always been there. Chalk that up to what an excellent liar she is, to how easily she can fit in a variety of situations, and then start to ask yourself how it is that sometimes she doesn't fit, how sometimes she is so obviously out of her element that it bears wondering if even that is a calculated move, a decision.

And then, chillingly, her quietude and her relaxation here are questionable, too. The way she looks at him with the aid of the mirror, the reflections of their eyes meeting even if their gazes truly don't. Suddenly her softness and her willingness to be here become suspect, everything about her becomes a potential lie. A man could make himself go mad with paranoia if he liked.

Or he could look at her like this, listen to her, and decide that yes: she seems like she belongs here, and she wants to be here, and the way she looks at him is as genuine as the rest even if he could not describe on his best day just how she is looking at him.

There's an almost poetic parallelism to what he says to her. Not to go. To stay. It is the same message repeated, essentially, but both have their own necessity and meaning in her hearing. A ghost of a smile sweeps over Danicka's lips, there and gone as certainly but as quickly as a flicker of movement out of the periphery of one's vision.

"Consistency is for children and pets," Danicka says easily, an apparently old quip of hers. "I'm neither. You aren't." The shoulder that is not pressed against his mattress lifts and falls once, nudging towards her ear and then deciding not to bother. "Last time, I didn't want to come up here. After we talked, I didn't want to be around you. And now I do."

She pauses, and if he sees her in the mirror he can see her thinking, contemplating what to say next. She slides over again, onto her back, looking at the ceiling. Her legs are bent, one more acutely than the other, soles flat on his blanket. Danicka's hands rest loosely on top of her abdomen. "...I don't really feel a need to," is her answer, as far as reconciliation is concerned. Her tone is, as her expression, thoughtful.

As if this is the first time she's ever thought about it. Or thought about it quite like that.

Lukas
Lukas looks at her for a moment in the mirror, his eyes sliding over his shoulder. The light comes from behind him, and behind her, cresting over her on the bed, skimming over his shoulder, bouncing off the mirror. It gives his face an odd dark-bright quality, between the shadows cast by the light and the lights cast by the mirror. His eyes are visibly blue, but darker than they normally are -- full of shadows.

"Okay," he says, quietly. It's a conscious decision: to not ask more questions. To not ask her how long she intends to stay, nor what's in the bag, nor why her coat is hanging in his closet.

He accepts it the way he lays out his own truths: as it appears, as it is, as it's given, and without question or doubt. Perhaps this sort of acceptance is only possible in these hours just before dawn, when the night is not quite night, and the day has not yet broken.

Lukas finishes shaving, wipes the razor clean one more time, and then folds it into its handle. Crosses the room to drop it back in his top drawer. In absence of a sink, he gets a bottle of water out from the same drawer he'd kept the Wyborowa Exquisite in last time she was in his room. He pours a little onto the end of his towel, and uses that to wipe his face clean of the last residues of shaving cream.

Then, pulling the towel off his neck, he scuffs it over his hair -- raises the plastered-down wet strands into spikes and horns. Wipes his face down, his chest and arms, tosses it atop the table.

There isn't a lot of room in the room. It's a scant few steps from the table to the bed, and he looks down at her a moment before sitting on the edge, his body twisted to face her.

"I need to go at a quarter to seven," he tells her, quietly, as if this mattered. "I have to meet someone."

Danicka
Perhaps this sort of acceptance is only possible after brief but draining, vicious battle, where had a certain Silver Fang not interceded his entrails would now be adorning the neck of a Black Spiral. Perhaps this sort of acceptance is only possible after hours spent dismembering corpses of monsters and hiding them away from prying mortal eyes. Perhaps it's just a question, tonight, of what is worth it and what is not.

Or maybe it's because it's not quite sunrise yet, and they have only been together once before at a time like this, the reverse of twilight, and they had each seen each other so clearly then, even if only in flickers of eye contact and the ebb and flow of subtext.

Okay, he says.
And nothing, she says.

Finally, Lukas cleans his face and walks over to the bed where she's lying on her back, sitting on the edge of the narrow mattress still wrapped in the towel around his lower half. Her head turns, eyes leaving the ceiling and finding his. In answer to him, Danicka just nods, without asking who he has to meet or where he's going. She does not question, or doubt, insofar as loyalty is concerned. Were he to fuck someone else she would not fault him, but she would be freed from her own odd, unromantic monogamy. And she does not care where he is going, or who he is seeing, regardless: asking would be a politeness, a pretense of consideration that has no real place between them. She is not here to ask after his day.

She came here to see him. She has seen him, watched him in the shower and let him see her in a way he never has before, however brief it was. She has laid in his bed and amongst his space, smelling him faintly on the linens. She saw him as he shaved, and now as he comes within reach.

Danicka's hand lifts off of her belly, moving over to his bicep. The backs of her fingers rub lightly against the skin of his arm, blindly. "C'mere," she whispers, barely making a sound.

Lukas
There's something strangely --

(what? Familiar? Fitting? Right?)

-- about all this. The way she'd looked on his bed, not in lingerie designed to seduce or inflame but in simple cotton. The way she'd looked at him when he entered, and smiled. The way they'd spoken to one another as he shaved himself in the mirror, without his typical coldness, his mile-high defenses; without her faintly patronizing patience and gentleness.

The way her coat hangs in his closet, even. The way that she's here at all, when he was not. He had thought that would infuriate him, that she opened his closet while he was gone, that she could've been in his space, snooping around, digging through his drawers and his shelves and his secret. He had thought he would never tolerate someone else in his space, but when she'd said I'll be in your room when you come back?, a question, he'd handed her his key without a thought, an answer.

Maybe that's what brought this acceptance, in the end. The simple fact that the time for resistance, at least for tonight, was already long past. It had washed down the drain with the tainted blood of those he had slain.

She touches him now, lightly. He looks at her hand against his arm, and then at her face. It makes his brow draw tight again -- not out of anger but out of consternation, and something oddly akin to loss.

He realizes he could get used to this. Is getting used to this. He realizes he is not indifferent to whether or not she'll end this tomorrow, or a week from tomorrow, or a month.

He thinks, I don't want this to end.

Come here, she says. He turns away to roll onto the bed, planting his hand for leverage, drawing his feet up. He stretches out beside her, more or less on his stomach where she's on her back, his head propped on his fist. His hand finds the skin above the waistband of her panties, under her shirt, as easily as if it were made to rest there. There's a moment where he only looks at her, her face and then her body, the shape of his hand at her waist, under her shirt, and then her face again.

He's always the solemn type, the thoughtful, quiet type, this Ahroun with all his reserve, all his fallibilities, all his strange and convoluted codes of honor and conduct and behavior: always, but never so much as now, with his hand on her body, in his room, in his too-small bed. And solemn still, he moves his hand up her body, his wrist pushing her shirt ahead of it, baring a stretch of her skin that's golden-white in the light of the single reading lamp, pushes his hand up with a focus that's almost scholarly,almost severe, a focus that would be almost absurd if it weren't for the fact that he is so intensely absorbed, so utterly lost in the feel of her skin, and the beating of her heart against the palm of his hand when his hand finally opens over her breast.

She was wrong about one thing, this woman that so frequently reads him like an open book. Thoughts of her caught in the one act where they seem incapable of complete control, incapable of dissemblance, have been on his mind since the second he saw her. He just controls it better than most.

He's looking into her face again now, and if he's weary from battle, from cleanup, from the hour, she can't see it in his eyes. They're as clear and pale as ever, as sharp and fierce as ever. His thumb passes over the nipple, flicking it until it tightens on itself, and then he pushes her shirt up until he can see her. He raises himself on his elbow and bends over her, curving his body to hers, cups her flesh to his mouth, puts his mouth to her breast.

Danicka
There seems to be no expectation in the way Danicka lies there, or the way she touches his arm. Of course there is inherent intent in the slurred invitation she whispers to him: to lie down beside her, to kiss her, to move closer. Something. There is familiarity, though, and what's almost aching to realize is that this isn't the first instance. There have been brief flashes of it since that night in the club, most of them quickly suppressed, ignored, or explained away.

Even the morning after she fucked his packmate, there had been an odd comfortability in the way Danicka was with him, coming in flickers. Mere moments have gone by where they have been as casual as old friends together, like when they shared double shots of vodka in this room. Their conversation had not been any easier for it, but the way they'd poured for each other, the way they tapped their glasses without issuing toasts...it felt...right.

She has not snooped around, opening drawers and rifling through his closet. Danicka had opened the closet door, taken a hanger, put her coat on it, put it back inside, and closed the closet door again before getting this little pajama-like ensemble out of her bag. She'd changed, and gotten into his bed, and she hasn't even climbed under his covers. All of those things she could have done in his den while he was gone didn't happen, but he has no way of knowing that, and yet he had not so much as hesitated to hand her his key.

The look on his face as she touches him, her eyes matching his glance for glance, goes unremarked. Danicka waits, able to see that pang of...something...go through him and yet unable to tell exactly what goes through his mind. Maybe it would surprise her. Lukas cannot read her well enough, now or perhaps ever, to know on his own how she would react. He would have to tell her first. He would have to ask her.

That, for perhaps a thousand reasons, is not what he does.

She smiles softly in that way she has, neither placid nor closed, as he rolls onto the bed. She had smiled at him like this that night at the hotel, looking at him with aid of the mirror over the sinks as she sat on a cushioned stool wrapped in a bathrobe and drying her hair. Seeing him watching her, Danicka's otherwise wandering eyes had looked at him in the glass, and she'd smiled like this before letting her gaze travel once more, humming a song he could not hear over the noise of the dryer.

Danicka shifts slightly beside him, to make more room for him, to tilt her body towards his. Every single time they have had sex one of them has all but devoured the other. He has lifted her onto his body. She has climbed onto his lap. Their mouths have met with seemingly more hunger than any other part of them, and they have rushed headlong towards completion as though desperate to escape something, or find something, or as though they were going off to war...with each other.

Her eyelashes flicker when he touches her, yellow cotton rucked up a bit, but she doesn't blink. Danicka's stomach and chest move slightly with her breathing, steady as he goes, but he can feel her pulse and her respirations quicken, following the slow caress of his palm even before he touches her breast. When he does, she sighs quietly, restraining more of a sound, and lifts her arm over her head, reaching for the back of the lamp and wordlessly turning it off.

So now her eyes are grayish in the darkness, his still touched with color, and she is looking at him as though he has never done this to her before. In a way, he hasn't. She is looking at him as though no one has ever done this to her before. But that's another question entirely.

A moment of that look before he bends over her and engulfs her nipple in hot, humid sensation. Danicka breathes out heavily, but still quietly, her hands moving as though through water until they come to rest on his wet hair. It is unnecessary for her to tell him not to stop now. She does not reach down to grab her hem and wriggle out of her t-shirt. What she does is touch his hair, and stroke it back as he makes waves of heat emanate through her entire body, just under the skin. His hair is the only thing that feels cold.

Another hard breath is exhaled, this time with a shudder. Danicka says not a word, but tilts her body closer to his, slides one of her hands down the back of his neck, over his shoulderblade, and along his torso until her fingertips find the towel around his waist. With the gentlest tug of her fingers hooking under the fabric it comes loose, and begins to rub across his skin as she pulls it away, flicks it back off of his hip. The relatively cool air of the room brushes up against him once more, only to be followed by the warmth of Danicka's leg sliding around his waist.

Lukas
She looks at him like he has never done this to her before, and in a way, he hasn't. Not like this. When the lights go out the room is dark, but not black. His windowshades are open; they always are. He likes the moonlight, the starlight, the citylight. He likes the sense that he can see the sky outside, and were she not in the room, he might have opened the window as well.

He likes the bracing chill; the freshness of the air when the city's traffic stops and the day's rush ends and everything is still, and quiet, and waiting for the sunrise.

They're waiting for the sunrise, in this grey darkness, where her eyes have lost their color, but his still retain their clarity.

And he has never done this before, not quite like this. Not with this patience, this inexorable patience, and without saying a word: his mouth moving over her flesh, not just the nipple now but the underside of her breast, the skin over her breastbone, the midline of her body, the bottommost rung of her ribs. He kisses her skin, pressing his hand to the mattress on the far side of her now, bracing himself half over her, his torso bent at an angle, and when she flicks his towel off and wraps her leg around him, he's hard against her thigh, ready to fuck.

And yet.

And yet, he doesn't move over her, or move her over him. His mouth moves over her body, from the line of her diaphragm to the cusp of her hipbone, up again. He explores her, and his eyes are closed now, there's barely anything to see anyway -- he finds his way past her navel to the twisting serpentine muscles of her abdomen, somewhere beneath the skin; he finds his way back to her beating heart.

And he pauses there, his lips to her skin, his mouth open to her skin, the indent beneath her breastbone where the apex of the heart pushes close to the surface, where the great nerves of the torso bunch into a single ganglion, where a well-placed blow could stun, or kill outright.

She can hear him draw a shuddering breath, and he slides his arms under her waist, he clasps her to him tightly, as though he'd just finished, as though he were already deep inside her, riding the last fading echoes of his pleasure.

A moment passes. Then he moves on, drifts on to her right breast, his arms loosening now. His mouth closes there, he sucks at her flesh, sucks at her body until he hears her gasping, quietly, almost silently, because the walls are thin and he doesn't want to flaunt this, and perhaps neither does she.

Or maybe it's not so simple as that. Maybe it has less to do with his respect for his packmates, for the other residents, and more to do with his need for privacy. His respect for her, or for this. For the intimacy of this act, which is, in the end, between him and her exclusively, alone.

His mouth lets go her breast. He lifts his head to her and kisses her now at last, with a devouring, slow hunger, the way fire engulfs that which does not burn easily.

She has lifted her leg over his hip, but when the kiss parts he slips out of her clasp. He turns her around instead, dropping a kiss on her shoulder, behind her now on the mattress, the way it had been that first night, that third time; like that and unlike that.

His arms are iron-hard, all muscle and strength. He wraps his arm around her waist and draws her back against him, her shirt ridden halfway up her body and rumpled between them, parts her legs with his free hand, slips his knee between hers and levers her thighs gently open, holds her thighs open for his hand, which presses down past the waistband of her plain white panties, and his sex is burning hot against the small of her back, and his mouth is burning hot on the back of her neck, and he touches her, touches her, with a gentle and ruthless insistence, the way her fingers had shown him the last time, at the hotel, when she knelt facing away from him on a two thousand dollar mattress and made his mind reel.

Danicka
This is easy because it is not meant to last. This is easy because there is a set ending point, at least for her, at least in her mind, at least for now. This is easy because the moon is still a crescent in the sky, not yet aching for fullness, and this is easy because it does not require her to hear things from his mouth that incense or disgust her, and this is easy because he does not have to hear anything from her lips that he might doubt. This is the easiest thing in the world for them, and like all things that are easy, it somehow makes everything around it more work.

The next time Danicka stands in her kitchen with the light streaming in through the eight-foot-tall windows that curve outward to view the city, flour on her hands and music vibrating in her throat and behind her lips, it will be harder for her to curl and wrap the dough around the filling of candied oranges whipped smooth and (easy) it will be more difficult for her when she licks a bit of sugar off the pad of her thumb and thinks about the way he looks when he smiles. She will not smile to herself but her brow will furrow slightly the way his did just moments ago, with confusion, with a twinge of unexpected pain.

The next time she sees him and he says something stupid, or cruel, or cold, it will not incense but inflame her, and Gaia only knows what she'll say to him then. Gaia only knows what he'll do to her then, thoughtless or tempered or not, and how hard it will be to feel herself hating him if he does, if he doesn't, if she sees him hating himself, or hating her. It will be horrible, the next time she lies to him after this, whatever this is, whenever it is meant to end or will end because the moon is large and bright enough to burn away the spiderweb-thin safety net currently stretched between them.

Whatever this is, he has never done it before, and never with her, and it goes unspoken if not unacknowledged between them. Danicka is nearly silent, a perhaps unexpected shift from her usually unfettered exultations. She does not lay on her back even with him braced over her like this, though her body is tilted, hips and shoulders towards his own. There is almost no Rage left in him, just the dim but vital burning deep within, like a spiritual pilot light. It is not out of fear that she told him she did not want to have him like that; he should know by now that it is not pride, or shame, not from this woman.

Lukas makes his way across her body, finding the muscles hidden under the softness and discovering with an attentiveness he's never bestowed on her body before that her lack of strength does not go hand in hand with a lack of health, or a smooth flexibility, which he has seen displayed. Her features are soft enough that she could easily bear more weight than she does without being weighed down; she is slight at the wrists and throat and other places in a way that reads of never having been as big as she perhaps should be.

He knows how to touch her when his hand slips between her legs and he knows that when she rides him she moans loudly when he touches her breasts but he finds now that a kiss on the right spot of her hip makes her shiver slightly. He discovers a flutter of a reaction when his lips and the tip of his nose trace their way over the skin below her abdomen, where she is ticklish. He learns that when his face comes to her chest and his mouth rests above her heart that she almost automatically, instinctively, reaches up and lays her hand on the back of his head, fingertips drawing minute spirals against his scalp.

He learns that Danicka, who begs in another language for the gods or the fates or someone to tell her why she wants him as much as she does, who trembles after she comes while he is clinging to her, who cannot help but squirm if his mouth is anywhere near her inner thigh, barely makes a sound tonight until he stops, until he wraps his arms fully around her and holds her to him. Then, she whimpers, and bites the exclamation off as soon as she hears herself making it. Her fingers are still in his hair. Her leg is still around him. Instead of whimpering when her lips open again, she sighs.

Lukas unfolds from around her, descends to her breast once more, and though the thought occurs to her to ask him if he didn't get enough before, Danicka doesn't voice it. A smile flickers over her lips, then scatters as he goes on...and on...if she makes noise she doesn't mean to. If all she does is gasp she does it thoughtlessly, like the way he pretends to promise that he will never strike her, like the way she dismisses this as unlikely and ultimately unimportant.

But she does gasp, and her voice shakes slightly behind the rush of air.

She opens her eyes and she's facing away from him, his mouth on her neck and her back half-bared, their skin in contact and his hand --

"Oh," she moans, a hard sound, not elongated or breathy at all, coming from her diaphragm and not her throat, so that she almost sings it (contralto).

The last thing she remembers is him kissing her, before this. She remembers her arms going around him, tightening around him as their tongues met and she tasted his toothpaste and smelled his shaving foam still lingering on his skin. As he tasted a hint of oranges in her mouth, the way she claimed once to want to taste his. The last thing Danicka was aware of before that moan was closing her eyes as they kissed for the first time since she left him lying in that two-thousand-dollar mattress, thinking

oh god

oh god

oh god, no.

She wants to tell him not to stop. And she wants to turn her head and kiss him again. She wants to buck against his body, or his hand, but she doesn't say a word and she doesn't go for his mouth. Danicka reaches down and hooks her thumbs in the sides of her underwear and pushes them down. Not far. Off of her hips, off of his wrist, not even halfway down her thighs before she lets them go and clutches at the blankets instead. She moves against the top of his leg, gasps, and when she cannot stand it any more she turns her face into the pillow that has been propping her up so much of the night and opening her mouth, burying a long, tremulous note of pleasure into the cushion where he lays his head almost every night.

Danicka does not reach for his hands, or kiss him. Her fingers hold a white-knuckled grip on the blanket she's lying on, the lower half of her body writhing slowly against his hand, his thigh, his cock. The first one is not the only cry she releases, but they keep getting louder, until she bites down, eyes shut tight and her voice descending to a hard groan as her orgasm, rolling through her all this time until it curls her toes, finally begins to let her go.

The pillowcase is slightly wet from her mouth when it, like Danicka, is let go. She is panting as quietly as she can, feeling him against her back with every ragged movement of her torso pulling at air. Perhaps it was the need -- or determination -- for silence that made her pleasure as intense as it seems to have been. Maybe it was his mouth all over her for minutes stretching out like skeins of fate and inevitabilities. Maybe it's just the fact that the last time they saw each other there was conversation about this exact thing, about not doing this here, about --

Fuck. She's forgotten.

Danicka opens her eyes and cannot lick her lips because her tongue feels as dry at the moment as her lips, as her entire mouth. Her eyes that he cannot see are a vicious, ravenous green, the color reserved for the sin of envy and the miracle of resurrection.

"Lukáš ," she breathes out after a moment, her hands still clenched around fistfuls of fabric covering his mattress, saying his name the only way she ever does -- before or after, never during. There is more for her to say, but she pauses there.

Danicka starts to twist around in his arms, her clothes barely clinging to her and sweat on her brow, on the small of her back, on her thighs and her breasts. She looks at him hungrily, almost angrily, and puts her hands on his chest, fingernails digging into his shoulders. She barely even seems human at the moment, a creature of desire and little else, a wild id without ego telling her what she can't have and superego telling her what she shouldn't want in the first place.

"I want to ride you. I want you inside me...but you may need to cover my mouth."

Lukas
It's different every time he goes to bed with her. It's changing, and evolving, and faster than he could have anticipated. No, that's a lie: he had not anticipated it at all. Not this. Not any of this.

Not the way he felt when he walked in to find her listening to music on his bed, which is a way that he can't even begin to articulate, not even to himself. Not the sense of something inside him crumpling on itself, as though his ribs had suddenly curved in on themselves; as though something deeper than the bones, deeper than the blood, had suddenly lost its strength and its hardness, become brittle and breakable, utterly fragile.

Not the way he wanted her this time, wants her this time: not for the quick simple satisfaction of her hot wet sex, and not for the sharp pleasure of her legs wrapping around him, her arms wrapping around him, her mouth opening to his as she rides him to a white-hot orgasm. Not like that, but otherwise: slower, and all-consuming, as though every inch of her breathing body mattered in at some basic, elemental level.

It matters, suddenly, the way her thighs strain to clench together, and the way she twists and writhes, turns her face to the pillow to muffle her cries; the way she strains her body and grasps at the blankets with her hands. It matters, the way the muscles in her abdomen snake and flutter against his clasping, steadying left hand, and how, at the end, they seem to crystallize and run molten at once, and he feels the shuddering begin deep inside her.

He does not stop when she begins to come. He takes her over and through the peak of her orgasm, and his teeth scrape over the back of her neck, and he bites her, lightly but thoughtlessly, as she turns electric in his arms.

When she is only just beginning to return his hand moves, sliding down, grinding the heel of his hand suddenly and firmly against her in the sharp wake of her climax. He presses his fingers into her to feel the way her cunt has suddenly become a living thing with its own vital rhythms, clenching and releasing against his fingertips in pulses.

He had not expected this: that it does not matter that her skin is not even wholly his, that her shirt is rumpled between them, and her panties are tangled around her thighs, that he is not inside her. That none of this matters at all in these moments directly after, when he lies with her in the aftermath of her orgasm, his hand caught between her thighs, his hand pressing her back against him, her heart hammering so hard he could feel it through her back, her ragged breathing tearing through the predawn silence in the eight-by-ten space of his room.

He had not expected that it was not his own pleasure he wants here, this time, but hers.

Moments pass; and he's silent, utterly silent, his breathing deep and fast; he's iron-hard against her back, but he doesn't move. He keeps his arm clasped tight around her, and he keeps his hand pressed tight against her, until at last she lets go the pillowcase with her teeth, lets go his hand with her thighs, lets go some undefinable, elusive tension, starts to turn. He loosens his arm then, and she twists about, and her eyes are wild, and his fingers are wet when they come to a rest on her hip.

His eyes darken when she speaks, the pupils so large in this light, in his arousal, that the blue is only a rim around the black. She gets to I want you inside me and it's like flint striking steel. The words ricochet down the dark recesses of his mind and whatever restraint he had before, whatever superhuman restraint had kept him from devouring her with his mouth, fucking her with his cock while she came on his hand, is gone, gone, gone. His chest expands on a half-convulsive inhale, his nostrils flaring. Her nails dig in and the muscles beneath her fingers flex of their own accord, in reflex and reaction, and then in deliberate action as he grabs her by the hips and rolls her roughly atop. He says nothing. He flexes up to her, every bit of leverage internalized in the axis of his body, musculature clenching from throat to groin to bring him up to her. His mouth collides with hers; his hands stay where they are, at the crests of her hips, he tears at her mouth with his, and when they come apart and he falls back against the rumpled bedspread he's not even trying to hide that he's panting.

It's nearly 6am now, there's light in the east, the sky is turning blue and grey. There's enough light to see her by, though she's ghostly, her pale skin and pale hair blued by the light. Her eyes would be shocking green, but the light is not the right color; it does not reflect correctly from her irises, though it does from his. His eyes are blue as they ever are, glassy with pleasure, only he's had almost no fucking pleasure, so it's not that: glassy with a sort of intoxication, then, a sort of addiction all his own, not crack or cocaine or heroin but this, sex, her. There's a beat where he might've tried to speak, but no -- he kisses her again, hard, brief, and this time when they part he has words for her:

"Come on."

-- which are not words, really, no more than oh my god were words, but simply a noise imbued with some vague meaning, some vague encouragement, so he tries again,

"Fuck me."

Danicka
It's interesting that they've never talked to each other much about the sex they've had, despite how blunt Lukas can be when he mentions it or how uninhibited Danicka is in this regard. Their conversations have glanced over the fact that they're even sleeping with each other, that they want each other, that even when she was coming off of fucking his packmate (the bratr jeho duše) there was thick attraction if not immediate desire in the air between them. Lukas has not said to her what it did to him when she turned around on the hotel mattress and bent forward, touching herself as he moved inside her. Danicka has not described for him the way she felt when they kissed for the first time.

Danicka has not told him that she stopped being able to always tell the difference between fear and desire a long, long time ago. That may be important. But in the future, which may not exist.

He knows so little about this woman, remembers less, but times like this it doesn't seem to matter. He cannot open her mind the way he parts her legs and read the light in her eyes the way he reads pleasure on her face when she comes. Lukas has wanted her from the beginning, finding himself drawn in and intrigued and caught up in understanding what seems made by nature and experience to not be understood; he would not be so if there were hints that she is like this as a lure, as a mystique calculated to attract members of the opposite sex. He has wanted to figure her out, claims not to know why, and his wanting does not seem to be the key to it. She gives him what she can, when she can --

She gives when our attention is distracted
And what she gives, gives with such supple confusions
That the giving famishes the craving. Gives too late
What's not believed in...

-- and because it cannot possibly be enough for him, it is no wonder that he wants to have her just like this, alive and unhindered and unhinged, her eyes so open to him that for one he can read everything in him, even if 'everything' is just desire.

It isn't just desire, but that is not the point. The point is that he cannot be blamed for reaching for her when he wants to understand her, when some part of him wants to keep her. Right now, touched and held not until neither of them can stand to be separate any longer but until orgasm wracks her body, Danicka is as she said she was earlier: she is his, open to him, brutally and searingly honest, informing him without embarrassment that she may not be able to stop herself from crying out this morning, even though she knows they are not completely alone here.

The Danicka in his arms right now, pulled on top of him, seems almost animalistic in her arousal, in her satisfaction if not satiation. Yet that's not all there is, not by a long shot. She does not know what to do with his teeth on the back of her neck and the sharp jolt of lust going through her at that point, or with the way he is looking at her now, letting her see every single nuance in his own eyes. Right now she looks like she could eat him alive. Right now he looks like he is going to lose his mind if they aren't together, now.

She lies on top of him, unable to straddle him as both of them would like. So she captures his mouth with her own as two pairs of hands force her underwear further down her thighs, until she wriggles successfully and quickly out of the scrap of fabric, kicking into the netherworld where his towel was dropped. As soon as it's gone, her ankles and knees freed, Danicka presses her hands on his chest, runs her tongue from his collarbone up the side of his neck, and whispers seethingly: "Get a condom," from between clenched teeth. Her hands press down on him and she sits up, thighs spread over his, hands leaving him to tear her shirt off of her upper body and throw it aside.

They aren't going to be able to stop the springs under this thin mattress from protesting their abuse. They aren't going to manage to stop their gasping, panting pulls for oxygen. Even if they share each other's air instead of opening their mouths to the room, even if Lukas claps a hand over Danicka's mouth, it's a very distinct possibility that the two female Garou next door are going to know that he is fucking his Kinfolk in there, the one his entire pack seems to despise, the one they're convinced is not going to become any sort of fixture in his life or theirs.

Naked now, hair askew and eyes wild, Danicka looks down at him and runs her hands up his torso again, fingertips teasing his nipples, hips writhing as though in anticipation of more.

Lukas
If his life depended on it, he would not be able to explain how it came to this. How it went from a shortcut through an alley to a bitter fight to a sprint across the umbral nightscape to a bloody shower stall to her on his bed, in a tshirt and plain white panties, smiling at him, to this.

How it went from a casual, half-random meeting at a nightclub, a handshake across their mutual acquaintance, is that Danicka or Danička, to a car ride home in the morning where he talked about Sam, and tried to think about Sam, and tried to watch out for Sam, when all he could think about was

the way she cried out in pleasure, muffled through the walls. And how it went from then to now; when all he can think about now is

the way she cried out in pleasure, muffled into his pillow.

He could not explain how the points connected to make the whole if his life depended on it. It's a sort of madness; a sort of total and catastrophic loss of control; an inability to even predict your own movements and thoughts and actions, much less those of another.

Because when she's atop him, they're both fighting with her underwear as if he didn't get it off her, if she didn't wriggle out of it in another half a second he'd simply grab it and tear it. And what you have to understand, what Danicka may or may not understand, is that Lukas is not like this. He is not like this. He is not mindless with need. He does not tear at a woman's clothes. He does not touch her like her pleasure was important somehow; he does not look in her face when she comes, and he does not kiss her when he comes; he does not do any of this.

Did not.

And for all that: in the predawn gloom of his room, he's fighting with her, they're fighting with her underwear, and then she kicks it off, and she draws her knees up and she straddles him, and he thinks, Oh my god, he thinks, Ó, můj bože, he thinks none of this at all, only a wheeling sense of -- hunger, when he opens his hands over her skin and she tells him to

get a fucking condom, of all things, and his need is so savage it almost spikes into anger, and then she sits up and she whips her shirt off, and he allows himself a second, just a second, to look at her in the ghostly light.

"You're a fucking bitch," he tells her, but his anger has melted suddenly into a sort of savage amusement. He flashes her a grin, all teeth.

Then he grabs her by the waist and topples her off him, roughly, her shoulder thumps the wall, which is not the polite thing to do, but then again it's this or fuck her, right now, condom or not, and he chooses this. He climbs out of bed and she can bet her ass if this happens again in this room, ever, he'll have moved his condoms to the nightstand, but for now they're across the room, in the second drawer of his desk, and he doesn't bother trying to open the little box -- he just grabs it and tears it in a single, swift gesture. His hands don't shake; this is a sort of deliberate chaos. He scatters the little packets all over the desktop, grabs and tears the first one open.

He pulls it over himself with his back to her, and she can see the way the columns of muscle at the base of his back tighten on themselves at even this; he's rolling it down as he comes back to bed, both hands, then just one, and he doesn't so much lay down as he throws himself down, the mattress creaking protest, the headboard slamming against the wall, and that's not okay, that's not okay at all, so he grabs his pillows and stuffs it between the headboard and the wall.

He puts his hand on her hip and draws her over him, his other hand gripping the base of his cock, and he tells her to

"Get on."

as if he were some sort of horse, or amusement park ride (what was the joke, you must be this long to ride?), and then she's climbing on top of him, and taking him inside, and his head falls back as it had in that expensive suite, on that expensive bed, the tendons in his neck taut as he strains back, his back strains into an arc, baring his teeth in a silent wince of pleasure that borders on anger, or pain.

A moment later he's with her again, his eyes fiercely clear; touches her body as she begins to ride him, caresses her breasts and her sides, the span of her abdomen, open his hand over the juncture of her thigh to her hip, presses his thumb to her clitoris, rubs, and when the first sounds start to escape her he reaches up and grabs her by the back of the neck, bends her down to him and muffles her mouth against the lee of his shoulder, turns to drop a single hard kiss on the tender spot beneath her ear, behind her jaw.

He doesn't merely lie still for her this time, straining toward control while she rides him to a peak. His knees bend, his feet planting flat on the mattress. His weight goes to his shoulderblades, the soles of his feet, and his body flexes into a tensile arc beneath her. He fucks her like this, and it does not matter that sweat is running up his back, that his muscles are burning with the strain of it. Right now, it probably wouldn't matter too much to Lukas if he died like this: fucking her like this, fucking her hard and ferociously fast, holding her by the hips to steady her against his penetration.

When she begins to cry out he turns her mouth against his shoulder again, his arms wrapping around her shoulders, his hand cradling the back of her head. His skin is searing hot and sweat-salty beneath her lips. There's a curious duality in this between the way he fucks her with all the force of his lower body, ruthless, and the way he holds her with her face turned to the juncture of his shoulder and his neck, her upper body pressed so closely to his she can feel his heartbeat hammering through her ribcage as though it were her own: as though to let go of her would be to let go of something irreplaceable that, once lost, could never be found again.

He does not look at her when he comes this time. He does not even try, and cannot. When his climax is upon him his hands go back to her hips, he grinds her down as he arches up, he becomes a single seamless arc of tension beneath her and he doesn't press her mouth to his shoulder now; he presses his mouth to her shoulder, teeth bared, teeth open, trying not to bite down too hard, trying to hold onto his silence.

Danicka can hear him gasping in the humid space between their bodies, snatching one harsh breath after another out of the air.

Afterward, slowly, his hips lower back to the mattress, and his legs straighten, he relaxes, but he brings her with him, he keeps her pressed to him, her body open to his cock, her body pressed to his. His hands move over her back and he tightens his arm, pulls her close, close. His breath is shuddering in his lungs. His exhaustion -- the night, the fuck, the battle, all of it -- is finally beginning to affect him: not creeping mildly up to tug at him but rising up like a tsunami out of a calm ocean, a great roaring grey wave breaking over his head.

It doesn't matter; Lukas doesn't let go of her.

Danicka
It's easier to be an animal, and not have to explain why, or how, or even ask these questions. To not have to, as Lukas put it, reconcile yourself to yourself. To accept that everybody lies, to themselves most of all, and embrace that with wholehearted affection for the concept. It is easier to an animal and for the only reasoning behind anything to be impulse.

When he sees her like this, base and wholly driven by wants that she does not ever pause to doubt or analyze, he is seeing her as elemental. She burns because that is what fire does. She flows, she freezes, she melts, and evaporates. She is as warm and moist as welcoming as the earth, as alive as it longs to be. When he kisses her, he kisses her as though she is what fills his lungs, exists and vitalizes even when he can't see her there.

A dozen chances go by for her to tell him that seeing him reading in the common room she had not wanted to walk drunkenly to him and climb onto him instead of the Fenrir; she had wanted to let go of Sam's hand, and cross the room, and curl beside him on the couch, smelling him, absorbing his warmth as his eyes scanned the page. It was not until she felt lips pressing against her hip that her head tilted back and the hair under her hands was momentarily black in her mind's eye instead of blond, soft to the point of silky instead of almost strawlike. She has had a dozen chances to tell him that yes, she was trying to hide behind an unknown language, but yes, she thought about him, and yes, she wanted him.

On some level she still believes that denying herself that first brief flash of longing, to go and simply be near to him, is what led to all of this. On some level Danicka still believes that they would all be better off now if she had not told herself No.

If she told him any of this, somewhere between frustrating talks in cars and hands clutching at naked skin, then he might understand why now she will not stop, why she never stops, why she does things like stepping into a shower pink and red with Spiral blood and his blood. He might understand a lot of things she has done, a lot of things he has become, if Danicka would tell him the answers to questions he does not even know to ask.

Instead she rubs herself against his thigh and touches his chest as though she needs the haptic reassurance to anchor her in reality right now. You're a fucking bitch, he all but snarls at her, even if a bit happily, and the same sort of fierce, violent smile breaks across her own face, mischief bright in her eyes for the...first time he's ever seen. For one startling, terrifying second they are not just in the same room, in the same state of lust, they are smiling like animals, like old friends, like co-conspirators.

Danicka doesn't have a chance to reply, though, before she's all but thrown off of Lukas's body. Her shoulder knocks and she flinches, but doesn't cry out. They're supposed to try and be quiet. Her eyes glitter on his back, his ass, his waist, as he goes for the too-far-away prophylactics, tearing into thin cardboard and foil. A vision hits her then, hard and fast enough for her to reel from it, for her breathing to turn again into panting, but she would not know what to say to him even if she could say anything at all.

Her leg goes over him when he comes back, before he has even laid down fully, before he has grabbed a hold of himself and even as the words are leaving his mouth, as though by taking him inside of her she can exorcise whatever thoughts, whatever impulses, are hitting her when she knows she is not brave enough to follow them to their conclusion.

There is no slow entry this time, no gentle gasp from her mouth. Danicka's pelvis meets Lukas's seconds after he tells her to get on, to fuck him, and though her left hand is almost tender against his pectoral muscles, she is biting savagely into the knuckle of her right index finger so she does not moan aloud. Her eyes are closed; she doesn't see the look on his face so much as feels him beneath her, arching, twisting, and one might think: trying not to die.

She is all right, she is fine, when his hands are roaming her body. She is not so fine when he returns to the scene of his earlier crime, and that is when a singing groan begins in her throat. That is when he pulls her down to him, but she's already folding her upper body over his, knowing by now that her weight isn't going to make a bit of difference to him. Drawn to his skin, she almost gratefully looses cries into him, her hands sliding along the sides of his ribs, to his waist, back up again. This is unnecessary; this does not serve to do anything but keep her touching him, keep him under his hands, memorized inch by inch and scar by scar through her palms instead of her eyes.

Even when his hand is no longer on the back of her neck, when he holds onto her hips to grind her body down on his, Danicka does not sit up. She holds her mouth to the slope and muscle where his shoulder flows up to his throat, the headboard slamming against the pillow with bounces against the wall which makes no noise even if the bedsprings are yelling What the hell, man?

He holds her.

Not after, not by default because they are against a wall, not with a single arm wrapped around her from behind but almost cradled to his chest, to his shoulder. And Danicka does not so much as try to move away, chose before and would choose again to remain curled against him like this while his hips flex with each thrust, while she rolls her own and meets him, every damn time. They are not looking at each other when he comes, but her lips leave his skin for the barest second to loose a single small cry when his teeth find her flesh, small enough to reach his ear, perhaps small enough not to echo. It isn't pain. It isn't even surprise. It's...relief. Or something like it.

She is still riding him, stilling her hips for the protracted seconds of his orgasm, her hands no longer moving and her arms wrapped as far around him as she could get them. When it's done, though, when it's over, when she feels him begin to breathe again, Danicka swivels her hips. She lifts her head long enough to look at him, finally satisfied, as though to warn him. Her eyes roll back, and no warning leaves her mouth. She starts to moan, moving on him again. And then moving faster. And then, with the noises in her throat barely stifled and trending upwards in both pitch and volume, she finds his shoulder again, as though she belongs there.

When Danicka comes, using whatever strength is left in his body for herself, she starts to scream. Starts to. Her mouth opens against his skin, a sharp cry escapes, and to stop it from becoming more, Danicka sinks her teeth into the meat of his shoulder. She does not use as much care with him as he used with her. She bites, a shudder running down her spine. This orgasm is not as intense as the last, but with his body engaged still he feels every contraction of muscle, every ounce of tension in her arms and her thighs around him. He can hear every note of her shriek, bitten into his flesh as though tattooing him with the sound.

And by god if she has trembled before after coming on him, in his arms, she is shaking like a leaf now, as though cold. Her mouth has let him go and her lips are quivering against the bite mark she's left, and she will not lift her head from his chest to look at him.

Lukas
It's just a moment -- just a moment where she's still, and he's still, and they're breathing together, motionless.

And then she moves.

She rolls her hips against him, gives her hips a slow swing while he's still inside her, not yet softened, still entirely too fucking hypersensitive in the fleeting moments after orgasm, too sensitive to even move, too sensitive to even withdraw, much less --

The effect is electric. A bullet of tension wracks down his back. Just like that, his exhaustion splits in two, cloven in twain by the jagged bolt of sensation that relays up his spine, and his head doesn't so much fall back as he slams it back, hard enough to rumple the sheets, and he sucks a sharp breath in between his teeth.

She looks at him, as though to warn him, and he wants to tell her that she's going to kill him, that she can't do this to him, that she can't start again like this, so soon, ten fucking seconds after he came; that she can't do any of this to him, she can't be here fucking him with his packmates who may despise her next door (only he was the one who started this), and she can't be here at all (only he was the one who told her to stay), and she can't be with him at all (only he was the one who started that, too).

He wants to tell her that, but he's afraid if he opens his mouth he'll just groan, he'll just say her name like it was an incantation, and anyway she's moaning now, she's lost in herself, and anyway he has no words left in him -- her hips move against his, her cunt is moving on him, so fucking hot, and the pleasure of it is so sharp it's unbearable, it scatters his thoughts in all directions like fish from the harpoon.

There's a second when his hands grab her hips and hold her still, when his fingers dig into her hard enough to leave white marks that slowly flush red. A second where it seems inevitable that he'll stop her, push her off, get up off the bed, put his clothes on.

Then it passes. He lets go her hips, lets her move as she will. His hands go to her waist, slide up her back, he opens his hands on her sides and lets her ride him, lets her move faster and harder even though it's blowing his fucking mind, even though it's making his thighs twitch and his hips buck and the muscles of his lower abdomen spasm and contract involuntarily.

"Oh -- fuck -- " he says at one point; and a little later, "Oh my fucking God -- "

It doesn't mean anything. His mind is a whirling void -- she's at the edge and he's losing his mind, his fingers clutch at her skin, and she turns her face to his shoulder and bites down, she screams into his flesh, she bears down on him and what's left of his mind is in fragments, and he can't take it, and

it was only a few seconds, a minute on the outside between the first mindblowing rotation of her hips and now, and then she's liquefied in his arms, as though her very bones had melted, and she's beginning to shake, and her sex is still squeezing him inside her in fading contractions, each a little fainter than the last.

They're just lying there. He can't even tell how hard he's holding onto her anymore because all his nerves are scalded, stripped bare, incapable of conduction.

She doesn't look at him, and this is fine. He's not sure there's anything there to look at. He's half-afraid that the top of his head has supernovaed and whatever dark detritus and glistening thoughts that might fill his mind have blown out across the sheets, might be spread out now like a star map for her to read. He's afraid that if she looks at him now, she'll read every last thought he's ever had, and she'll see

(he does not want this to end.)

to the very core of him, as though he were glass.

But she's shaking, trembling as though she has lost all control over her muscles. And as his thoughts begin to spin together again, like particles coalescing to elements, he tightens his arms around her, staring at the ceiling without properly seeing it, and then closing his eyes altogether.

Danicka
Were they lying together in a queen- or king-sized bed in some hotel room, or in her as-of-yet unseen bedroom in that sparkling high-rise, there might have been words between them during this. There might have been a real warning, and he might have told her that she can't, she can't, she can't. Even if either of them could speak, or allowed themselves to, there is no telling if Danicka would have stopped, and no telling if Lukas would have made her.

She has never asked him to make an exception for her, even if he wishes she would. She does not expect him to protect her, even if he knows that he would. He does not want this to end and she seems to want nothing at all from him, nothing but this, nothing but to be near him sometimes. He has called her a liar and he could very easily call her cruel, but...

But the way she touched his hair the first time he came inside of her, murmuring I'm here, I'm here. But her feet tucking under his for warmth. But, strangely, her almost hurt-seeming fury with him for laying a hand on her friend (she cares about that man). But a rush of words from her telling him that she feels something when she's around him, though he still doesn't know what that is. But laughing in the shower at the W, something about never getting back in bed if they didn't turn off the water. But her hand over his heart while she slept. But knuckles softly stroking his cheek in her car, before they argued. But her smile, when he entered the room...how long ago? An hour? More?

Dawn is coming, and he will have to go soon, and despite what she just did to him and what she has been doing to him from the beginning, he cannot honestly call her cruel.

She kisses the spot where she bit him, long after the fact, when she has caught her breath and he has caught his and their bodies are still joined at the hip. Even minutes later she is molten from the waist down, laying almost limply on top of him. Her hand is over his heart. Her left ear is on the right side of his chest, her hair everywhere, stuck to him and to her with sweat. Danicka's eyelashes flicker over his skin when she blinks. He looks up; she looks at her fingertips on his chest, thoughtful.

Her quaking stilled after awhile. Her shaking died down, because she's not really cold, not actually. Not until long, long after his eyes close. Her fingertips move slightly on his chest, and then she draws a smiley face on his left pectoral, his nipple standing in for a nose. Her cheek moves on him as her lips stretch into a smile of her own.

"Jste přežít?"

Lukas
His eyes have not opened since they closed, and there's really nothing he'd like more than to sleep, sleep, sleep for a thousand years. His exhaustion is back, a great grey curtain of it sweeping his mind like a warm summer rain. His nerves are still flayed, but they're recovering -- the distant parts of his body are sending in all-clears and casualty reports, and when he feels her fingertips move on his chest his arms loosen a little, give her room to move and breathe.

Jste přežít? she wants to know, and his eyes flicker open; his chest moves beneath her, a huff that takes the place of a laugh.

"Ty mě skoro zabil," he says, quietly, but it's not a whisper -- she can hear and feel the rumble of the lower harmonics of his voice in his chest, rough-edged with humor, with tiredness. "Ale já ne zemřít tak snadno."

He turns his head -- there's a clock radio on the nightstand, the sort of cheap plastic thing that any college kid would have, complete with a big snooze bar that even the most uncoordinated half-asleep victim could reliably smack.

The numbers are red against dark: 6:37. The sun is just barely up outside and the sky is a deep, vivid blue.

He draws a deep breath. Then one hand leaves her back. He reaches up and pulls the pillows loose from where he'd wedged them earlier -- it makes him laugh suddenly, and quietly; he's surprised at his makeshift silencer, surprised he even had the presence of mind to think of it. The headboard thumps back into place, the pillows tumble down. He pushes them to the side and tucks a hand behind his head, pillowing his head on his hand instead.

He should get up. He should shower again -- three times in six hours; that must be some sort of record. He should get dressed and go to the airport, and he can imagine the trip: the white glare of the dawning day, the surreal clarity of a night without sleep.

He should leave. He should ask her how long she intended to stay here. He should ask her if she'll be back; but he doesn't do any of this. It's the same decision he'd already made, reprised. He won't ask, he thinks to himself. He'll watch and see, and he'll take what she'll give.

Danicka
Moments just lying together are precious few between them. They fuck, they recover, and sometimes while they catch their breath and regain their strength...well, yes, they might touch. They might have arms loosely slung around each other, or she might stroke his hair, or he might keep her body close to his chest. When it's over, though, when they both feel the finality of the last orgasms their bodies can stand to have in a matter of hours, they do not lie there cuddling.

Even sleeping together at the hotel the day they met at the aquarium could not qualify. Danicka had been unconscious seconds after draping her arm over his side, had not nuzzled or squeezed him in silent, purely physical affection. And they are not going to do that tonight; the bed is just wide enough for Lukas to sleep on comfortably; if she stayed here they would end up tangled, pressed together, waking with kinks in their necks and sore spots in their backs.

For now it doesn't quite matter; she is not a terribly short woman, even if she is slender, but she can lie on top of him for awhile and not regret it. She regrets nothing. She does not apologize for nearly killing him. She just smiles, and thinks: My mother was an Ahroun.

Emphasis on the 'was'.

As Lukas reaches back for the pillows that kept the headboard from announcing to everyone on the floor what was going on -- as if her stifled screaming wouldn't be heard by those close enough, as if his oh my fucking God had not left his throat at all but only been thought in his head -- Danicka takes a deep breath and sighs with a sound very much like contentment. She begins to stretch, sliding her arms upward, and as the unfurling of her body reaches her hips they begin to lift slowly, with more care than she has ever used with him when pulling away. The look on her face is one of pleased satisfaction, cheeks still flushed and hair askew, a youthful smile stretching her lips.

Her hands go to either side of his head to brace her weight on something other than his body, as she rolls off of him and onto her side, laying on the bicep of the arm tucked behind his head. At some point before this she glanced at the clock. It's very near a quarter til seven. As she looks at him, she isn't thinking about asking him why they did this here when he did not want to 'flaunt' it. She's thinking about how different his jaw and his throat can look: covered in blood, covered in shaving foam, glistening slightly with sweat. It's a strange thought to be having, fleeting, and not one worth voicing.

So after awhile -- the clock reads 6:39 now -- she slides her hand over his jaw, cupping his cheek, and gently draws his mouth to hers, kissing him slowly, softly, until she forgets what it was like to not be. That makes it more difficult to pull away, and behind her the clock now says that it's 6:42. Danicka looks at his eyes, thumb rubbing over his cheek, and try as he might he cannot read sadness or disappointment there, he cannot read anything but her regard, her awareness of him.

"I'll be gone when you get back," she whispers, like a secret, and not an unkind one, "but it isn't you."

As if to preclude an answer, Danicka kisses him again, firmly and quickly, parting only to say: "You need to go." Her lips land on his cheek, in no rush to do this, or to move him, but yet her words still urge him in that direction: "Ranní ptáče dál doskáče." Which she recites with a smile, almost teasing. Her hand leaves his cheek, slowly. Maybe even reluctantly.

When he does leave, when he hauls his body out of bed to shower if he will and drive through the morning to go see his sister, Danicka is still naked in his bed. When he returns she will have locked the door behind her. Her coat and her bag will be gone, her book and her iPhone, everything just as it was before she showed up in the wee hours after midnight. The bed is mad, pillow smoothed and...it's like she was never there.

Except that later, when he climbs under the covers again, the smell of her is everywhere, deep in the fibers of his pillow, his sheets, his blanket, his being.