til morning.

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] "I'm sick of cafes and bars," is what Lukas said on Danicka's voicemail half an hour ago, "and it seemed rude to give you a hotel address.

"Why don't you meet me at the Shedd Aquarium in about half an hour. I'll be at the schooling fish display. It's down the hall from the sharks."

--

The Wild Reef wing of the Shedd, which is where the schooling fish and the sharks and the rays reside, is dimly lit. Apart from a few pathlamps, the only light comes from the eldritch glow cast from the curving glass walls of the enormous aquaria, each as deeply, luminously blue as the sky of the gloaming hour. There is at once a sense of movement and tranquility in each aquarium: the gently waving fronds of seagrass juxtaposed with darting, sinuous sealife, and all of it utterly silent through the glass, all of it cast in the shifting blue glow of the ocean, and the bouncing bars of light cast through the water's surface.

On a saturday afternoon, this wing sees a reasonable amount of foot traffic. Still, the sharks and rays are undoubtedly the main draw. Where Lukas sits -- on a comfortable, soft-padded bench set out for just this purpose -- there is a space around him where no one, consciously or otherwise, dares to linger long.

He pays the pedestrians no mind, his attention idly and comfortably disseminated amongst the silver whirl of the schooling fish in their endless circle. For the most part he cannot and does not follow the path of any individual fish long. They are a whole made of many, an endless counterclockwise whirlwind that seems to obey some invisible signal, some collective will he cannot understand.

Once or twice, a single fish falters in the rhythm, darts away and then back. His eye picks these out easily; they draw his attention.

It's just as easily that Danicka catches his awareness. He looks at her nearly the moment she's in this room, though he doesn't bother to stand up. He sits, comfortable, his ankle cocked over the opposite knee, arms spread along the back of the bench.

It's hard to tell in this light, but he does smile as she nears -- a faint shadow of expression, little more than a ghost.

[Danicka Musil] 'About half an hour' is a flexible span of time. Danicka is not there in exactly thirty minutes, but this has nothing to do with defiance, subtle or otherwise. She arrives thirty-six minutes after the end of the phone call because she had to dress, and then she had to deal with traffic, and then she had to wait in line at the aquarium's ticket counter. Of course she comes, though. There was no laughter over the phone about being sick of cafes and bars, and no snort to indicate her opinion on whether or not a hotel address would be rude.

She had just told him, in response to his Why don't you which really meant You're going to, that she would see him there. All she has to look for is an empty space amidst people milling about, a break in the crowd. Since it is going to be rather obvious, she keeps her eyes on the tanks as she passes them, looking through the glass as the rays and sharks slide effortlessly through the water. She is dressed much like she was the last time he saw her, though this time she is in knee-high boots instead of pumps, the skirt a lighter and looser fabric so that it moves as she walks. Over a camisole she wears a ballet sweater, wrapped around her trim waist, and her jacket is unbuttoned. In this light it's hard to tell distinct colors. Greens, blues, maybe purples. Nothing but the coat and boots are black. He's never seen her wearing black.

Maybe that's defiance. Or just style.

Her boot-heels click softly over the tiled floor as she passes the tanks and heads towards the empty space, to the cushioned bench where Lukas is sitting. A phantom smile, not a true expression of anything in particular, flits over his face. Danicka comes over, stands about a foot and a half in front of him, and lifts her eyebrows almost expectantly. But she doesn't stand there and wait for him to speak. She opens her mouth.

"The first time I went swimming," she informs him, "I was convinced that something was going to come up from the deep end of the pool, out of nowhere...possibly an invisible something...and swallow me whole." Beat. "For some reason, sharks don't bother me, but my pulse jumps when I see a moray eel. I hate those things."

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] His eyes follow her as she comes to stand in front of him. After she stops, he looks her over; perhaps she's flattered to find appreciation in his eyes when they return to her face.

She tells him she hates moray eels. He laughs suddenly, an expression he doesn't try to hold back.

"There are no moray eels here," he reassures her then, mock-grave. And he nods at the seat beside him, with a glance at the plaque on the wall indicating what, exactly, they're looking at. "Or invisible fish. Only groupers and triggerfish."

She sits, or she doesn't. His attention goes back to the fish, his regard level, steady without being focused. There's a long silence; perhaps it's companionable, or perhaps not.

"They're a little like our Totem, you know," when he speaks again, it's without warning, and quietly. "The Talons of Horus. A flock of birds-of-prey as far as the eye can see, in its purest and mightiest form.

"When I first joined this pack, I used to spend hours in the New York Aquarium watching the schooling fish. I used to think maybe I could learn something about packhood from them. That a wolfpack should be the same. That my pack, in particular, should be the same.

"One out of many."

Another pause. Then, "But now I know it's nothing like the same. These fish are prey-fish. And the birds that flock in life are prey-birds. The Talons of Horus are different. A wolfpack is different. We are many fighting to become one. We are predators forced to cooperate, and it is not easy for us. This sort of mindless unity is not possible for us. We need leaders and battles and dominance and strife. That's how it works. And if you could see the Talons of Horus circling in the umbral sky...

"They are nothing like this, either."

He looks at her then, frankly. He doesn't know why he told her this. Perhaps because she told him about the first time she went swimming; or perhaps not. Whatever the reason, it's something that has nothing to do with her, or even with what's between them. It's a piece of himself, plain and unvarnished, nothing more or less, laid out as simply as he's lain out any other truth. Given to her without any expectation of approbation, or response, or even comment in return.

"That's one thing I was thinking," he adds, "while I was waiting for you. Do you want to hear the other?"

[Danicka Musil] If it were not for the fact that he laughs, genuinely without apparent reservation, this would probably all go a completely different route. They're still guarded around one another, always will be, but especially now. Still. Her expression softens somewhat, even though she doesn't laugh with him. Danicka smiles a little when he assure her there are no moray eels here, and after a half-second of hesitation, she steps to the side, turns, and sits down next to him, close enough that their hips touch but do not lean companionably against each other.

Lukas looks at the fish, and Danicka remains in her coat, looking at them as well, rather than at the people who pass between the tanks and the two of them. And he begins talking. She listens, or at least does not interrupt, though without her eyes on his face and without her nodding or mm-hmming he can't really tell if she absorbs any of it, or if any of it matters. Why should it? She doesn't know about totems, about flocks of spiritual birds binding a pack together. She has only the more human-flavored bonds of kinship to rely on for closeness and companionship. Friends. Family. Lovers. It isn't the same.

Nothing like what he is talking about.

He turns to look at her when he's finished, and Danicka's eyes remain trained on the glass, on the glimmering fish switching directions. Her eyes look strange in this light, the same color as the glow coming off of the shifting water that casts bizarre and mutable shadows over her face, and her throat, and the part of her chest that is exposed. He can only observe her in profile for a moment, until she turns her own eyes back to meet his.

She gives a small smile, and without a word, just nods twice.

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] "I was thinking how harmonious and content the fish looked today. I was envying them their ability to exist like this, completely at peace with one another and with their environment, following instincts and signals written in a language I cannot understand, but are perfectly clear to them."

In the darkness, the edges of him are indistinct. He's a looming, breathing shadow beside her, his clothing dark and somber, his face lit fitfully by the reflected glow of fish and water. She can still feel the heat of him, not so feverish as it had been one or two days prior, but not quite abated either. There's a silence -- then he goes on.

"I was thinking that, until I realized a month and a half ago I came here when the moon was nearly ful, and they'd looked pitiful and trapped to me then. Their circling looked like a silent scream, some sort of wailing threnody to the open ocean they still remember with every drop of their cold blood."

This is the first time he's looked at her since he looked away three, even five minutes ago. Her eyes are strange in this light, dark and luminous and more blue than green; his, if anything, are more brilliantly blue than ever, catching and throwing back every mote of light.

"And the truth is, Danička, I have no idea what the fish are thinking or feeling, or if they even think or feel at all. They're simply a blank canvas I can project my own thoughts onto; an effigy I can burn or praise as I please. And it occurred to me that kinfolk, particularly the kin to Thunder, are much the same. It's what we train them to be, and it's what we want them to be. It's a role you can play very well, Danička.

"It occurred to me that's the last thing I want from you."

A breath's worth of pause.

"Did you come here because you wanted to see me, or because I told you to?"

[Danicka Musil] So he thinks. He observes and he contemplates and if she did not already know this about him one has to wonder if she ever really tries to understand who people are on any level other than what they might want from her. Danicka, for her part, sits up straight but without evident tension. She watches him as he goes on, until he reaches his truth. Never the truth. His.

They are different than they were not quite two weeks ago, with the moon full and his pack all but tearing itself apart. It may still be, for all she knows. She doesn't know about the conversation he and Sam had in their minds about her while she sat there a couple of nights ago, examining her cuticles before looking out the window. The moon's nearly new.

It takes him some time, talking about fish and cold blood and effigies, to get to his point, but she doesn't seem impatient for him to hurry up and get it over with, get it out. If nothing else is ever sincere, she always seems willing to wait and let people talk, get through whatever thoughts were in their heads until they are out in the open. She has her reasons, and on some level she is simply good at it.

Her smile is faded, but not because of displeasure. It just lived itself out. She cocks her head to the side as he tells her that he doesn't want her to be a blank canvas, and then asks if she is here because she wants to be. Then she simply holds out her right hand, palm up, asking for his.

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] Even in the dimness, or perhaps especially so, the flicker of moment, the pale palm of her hand held out, catches his eye. What light there is here is cool-hued, blues and greens, more blues than greens. She holds a palmful of blue light. When he puts his hand over hers, she holds a palmful of deep black shadow; and then his fingers close around the blade of her hand.

He turns his wrist slightly. Now their hands are side by side, and their forearms entwine. It's hard to say if this is meant to mean anything. He looks at the fish again, and the bars of light bouncing off their backs, their glittering silvery sides.

[Danicka Musil] Whatever reason she had for inviting his hand, it does not seem to be just to hold it there. She smiles patiently at the twist he does with his arm and shakes her head, reaching over with her left hand and unwrapping his hand from hers, drawing it to her left wrist. Knuckles shuck back the sleeves of her coat and the thin sweater underneath, until she arranges his first two fingers so they will be able to feel her radial pulse.

She does not know that one week and several hours ago, her roommate drew the hand of a werewolf to his chest, to the beat of it quickening under her palm. Danicka did not see that, and if she had then she likely would not be doing this right now. She might even have felt embarrassed for witnessing it. Or angry. Or any number of things. But no matter.

She puts Lukas's touch on her pulse, so he can feel it flickering faster, and not from walking in here from car to door. Not from striding through the halls. Not from fear. Her eyes go from his hand, to his face, and she lifts her eyebrows. "An extremely simple way to find that out would have been to ask me in the first place, not tell me."

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] It's not the first time he's misinterpreted her intentions, but for what it's worth, he lets her rearrange his hand without interfering or overruling.

She puts his fingers on her pulse. His eyes are downcast, the lashes dark, blue-black with reflected water-glow. Ask me in the first place, she says, and he looks at her.

There isn't any hesitation. He leans into her and kisses her mouth. The line of his jaw sharpens against his skin, bluelimned in this light.

[Danicka Musil] Today he isn't covered in sweat fueled by an utterly monstrous metabolism, and ironically they have more privacy here than in a single bedroom with a closed door at the Brotherhood of Thieves. They're surrounded by people, but they're people, not packmates and not enemies...no one, really. They aren't being stared at because no one wants to risk eye contact with Lukas. They're not the focus of attention; the sharks and the schooling fish and the manta rays are.

So Danicka, though she hesitates for a moment where he does not, kisses him back. Their shoulders and upper arms lean against one another, her hair falling in a curtain when her head tilts to align their mouths more perfectly. She doesn't move her hands, continuing to hold his fingers on her pulse as it jumps. She came here because she wanted to see him.

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] This cannot rightfully be called a gentle kiss, though it is, at the outset, at least a slow one. Then she tilts her head a little further; her hair falls over the dam of her ear, brushes cool over his cheek and jaw. He puts his free hand on the side of her face and he draws a breath and there's a second or two when all of a sudden the bottom has dropped away and this is something else entirely, not wholly appropriate for a public venue, an aquarium where parents led their children past manta rays and sharks.

Then it breaks. He turns his face to the side some few degrees, his brow to hers -- opens his eyes to the endless whirl of fish behind the curving glass, silver and blue, blue and silver and waving green seagrass.

He turns back. He presses his mouth to the corner of hers. Then he stands up, pulling her with him by the wrist, or the hand.

"Let's get out of here," he says.

[Danicka Musil] Slow. Very, very slow, at least at first, at least when there's the illusion that it's going to be rather brief before they break. Danicka does not kiss people like this, and she also does not kiss anyone in public, but things are changing. Faster than she would have expected, but there are at least two men in her past who would have just shaken their heads at her.

Lukas's hand slides to her cheek as he breathes in, which is when even this changes. A slow kiss, but not a light one, becomes something more heated and more invested. Danicka's lips are parting when he moves his own away, her eyes opening and seeing the corner of his eyes and his temple but not whatever else might be there.

Her mouth quirks in a smile, not only at how he looks away when the kiss breaks but his near-immediate move to get up and get out of here. She huffs out a breath that comes nowhere near a real laugh as she stands up with him. "You're ridiculous," is all she says.

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] A pause; a quizzical half-smile that could go any which way. "Why?"

[Danicka Musil] Her jacket settles around her hips and her skirt around her thighs as she stands, starting to walk without necessarily drawing her hand or arm back from his grasp. If he drops it, that's another matter. She starts to walk, back exactly the way she came. "If you want to fuck me," she says, keying her voice low; there are children about, "then we could have just gotten a room to begin with."

Danicka doesn't sound annoyed; if anything, she looks rather amused.

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] He doesn't. Drop it, that is. Her arm, or the half-smile; though perhaps the latter changes a little, wryer now.

"I wanted to meet you here." A flicker of his eyes down: their hands. Then back. "And now I want to leave." A beat. "I assumed I didn't need to ask what you wanted."

[Danicka Musil] "God help me if you ever invite me to a movie," she murmurs, shaking her head slightly with a mirror in her voice and features held up to his own wry attitude. "Won't make it through the trailers."

Her hand is warm; his hand is hot. She doesn't seem to be in too much of a rush at the moment, but nor is she keeping her steps slow and measured. "So you're better, then?" she asks, as they walk.

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] Won't make it through the trailers, she says, wry, perhaps teasing. It makes him look away, a flicker over his brow. They start walking and he doesn't respond. It occurs to him this is the first time they've gone anywhere together that didn't involve him dragging her, or all-but-dragging her, for one purpose or another.

They're coming out of the coral reef wing counter to the normal flow of traffic. There's a space around Lukas, though. They do not need to squeeze through the traffic, which isn't terribly dense anyway. It's not the holiday season; not the tourist season either.

A glance at her, "I told you, I was fine." A pause, perhaps realizing the futility of pretending he hadn't been injured. "If I wasn't, I would have found a healer."

Out of the darkened wing now, in the main hall, high-ceilinged, painted with images of the ocean, with a near-life-sized model of an underwater battle between a whale and a giant squid overhead. The hour is getting later; the sky is dark outside, and there are more people heading out than in. She has not checked her coat, but he has, and he heads for the coatcheck booth.

[Danicka Musil] It's below freezing outside, and the economy is so depressed that almost no one would be here even if it were tourist season, holiday season. Even were there a crowd, it would part. She's seen it before. So many times out in the city -- the city, New York City -- she was looked at not because of who she was but because of who she was with. People did not want to stop and stare as he dragged her down the sidewalk by the wrist, furious with her and probably thinking that as soon as he stopped he was going to lash his hand across her face.

Instead.

This time is utterly different. She actually seems like she wants to be here, is smiling at him, even seems amused. It doesn't falter as he looks away; it's all pretense. Aquariums or movie theaters, and it's that way for almost any encounter. Danicka flicks her eyebrows up at him, though, trying to remember when she asked if he was fine or not on the last occasion she saw him. They hadn't talked about him being injured; they'd just switched seats.

Danicka lets it go without comment, as they come back out into the lobby. She slips her hand out of his when he goes to get his coat, and waits by the doors leading out. When he joins her there, and when they go out into the falling night, her coat is buttoned up and she is looking over and up at him, sidelong. "Where?"

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] "I don't know." He does not take her hand again when he rejoins her at the door. Then again, his own are busy, knotting the scarf, which is pale grey, unfringed, woolen; then buttoning the coat over it. He turns up the collar, doesn't bother putting his gloves on, pushes the door open.

The second layer of doors, then, and they're out in the cold. It's frigid, but then, Lukas is Shadow Lord, he was born in a country that straddles a mountain range. He grew up in New York City, which is far from warm in winter, and he was fostered in a shadow lord sept upstate, in the shadow of a different mountain range. The cold is not a stranger to him, and he does not hunch his shoulders against it.

His breath frosts white when he speaks, though. "Why don't I follow you this time? Did you drive?" He asks this only as a courtesy.

[Danicka Musil] This should bother one of them. And it might. Either one of them might start thinking that there really is no point in talking about bullshit like trust or loyalty or even betrayal if all they are going to do is talk for a few minutes before they realize that they cannot keep their hands or mouths off of one another for any longer, before they realize that kissing is much too dangerous and they need to get out of public as soon as possible. Either one of them might begin to feel used. And that would be a possibility, if it weren't for the fact that it has been nearly two weeks since that night at the motel.

She doesn't know this, but part of the reason he stayed even as long as he did was because he realized it might never happen again. They haven't talked about this, but every time they kiss -- each other's mouths, or each other's skins -- they are saying something that doesn't make sense in words and might not fit the way their mouths do against one another. And apparently it is rather difficult to make Danicka feel worthless, or whorish, or used.

Danicka breathes in sharply at the cold, her hair shifting on her shoulders and around her face in the wind. She nods at him, to both, and a few moments of walking later a pair of headlights flash in the midst of all the other cars, a beeping sound relaying to her that her BMW's alarm is disengaged and her doors unlocked. She waits for him, til she sees his car -- wherever it is -- starting up, and pulls out of the lot on her own. He's following her, and she leads him north on Lake Shore Drive. It isn't far.

And it is not even remotely the sort of shithole that he took her to. It's the W Chicago, and she does not wait in the parking lot for him. When he gets out of the Ford, Danicka is already in the lobby, checking in and informing the clerk that no, she doesn't need any help with her bags.

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] This is nothing like the shithole he took her to, and of course, getting out of his car, walking into the lobby with its tastefully modern furniture and its wide open expanses of hardwood, its chandeliers, he can't help but remember her saying:

Being somewhere nicer wouldn't have made any difference.

And he could have asked them, any difference in what? Any difference how? But he hadn't. He'd reached for her instead, because he'd waited long enough, because he'd waited too damn long; and now the moment was past, and he's walking past the doorman that has trouble summoning a smile for this well-dressed young man with the eyes of a murderer, and coming up to Danicka as she finishes checking in.

The room keycards are slid over the counter. She picks them up and he takes no part in it, but he's there in time to hear the receptionist say, west elevator, 23rd floor, room 2311 or something like that.

She has no bags. Neither does he. He loosens his scarf as he follows her toward the elevator banks. If she doesn't speak in the elevator, neither does he. He grasps the rail with both hands, leaning some of his weight on the heels of his palms, and he seems engrossed in the carpet pattern until halfway up, upon which he gives up the act, or whatever train of thought he might've embarked on, and looks at her instead.

There's a question in his eyes; he doesn't ask it.

[Danicka Musil] Given the way both of them are dressed, the disinterested way they pass through the lobby without looking around much, as though they have both been here or places like it or places nicer before and are not impressed, it's possible that if anyone is giving them any thought they are assuming that they have personal assistants that will be bringing in luggage and what-not any moment now.

This place is expensive. Almost every room overlooks the lake. Every texture from floor to ceiling is sumptuous somehow, luxurious. Trendy. This is exactly the sort of place Lukas had to have been thinking of when he asked her why she 'let' him take her to a motel just a few blocks away from a bar no one in their right mind would let their daughter or sister go to, especially alone. Yet it's bizarrely the same, as they step into the elevator and hit the button to take them to their floor: Danicka seems as at ease here, as comfortable here, as she was two weeks ago.

It makes no difference. Not to her.

Danicka does not stand directly in front of the doors but beside him, straight rather than leaning. She has a purse with her, which she had not brought into the aquarium. It's a different one than he's seen her with before, just as the boots and the jacket are different and he's never seen her wearing those earrings. She is unbuttoning her coat as the elevator ascends, silent, and it turns out her camisole is purple and her sweater is off-white, her skirt a pattern of subdued gold and violet and cream.

And it just so happens that she is turning to look at him when he looks at her, questioning but quiet.

Her head tips to one side. "What?" she asks quietly, as though she has some intimation that there is a reason he is not just blurting it out. Her tone, like her gaze at the moment, is...

...well, it's kind.

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] If she hadn't prompted, he would have never asked. But for all that, he isn't waiting for a prompt. That is important; a distinction that must be made.

Still. She prompts, quietly, undemandingly. And he answers with a question of his own:

"Why are you okay with this?"

[Danicka Musil] The elevator is silent, and fast, and stops a moment after he asks his question. Lukas may or may not have seen a faint smirk flicker over Danicka's lips when she was told the floor number down at the desk in the lobby, but that depends entirely on angle. She has two keycards in hand as she exits the doors that are sliding open, the heels of her boots soundless on the thick, graphically patterned carpet. He still has Danicka's attention, and the nature and feel of it has not changed in the mere seconds between her prompting and his response, or his response and her movement.

Danicka waits for him outside the elevator to fall in line with him, her stride lengthening to keep better pace with his and her skirt consequently swishing above her knees with each step. She thinks, though, walking past two doors to other rooms before she says anything in response. It doesn't seem like she has to think particularly hard about what to say, but she gets to the door to 2311 before she does, in fact, say it:

"Define...'this'."

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] Define this, she says.

His mouth twists, wry. "Meeting me at an aquarium on thirty minutes' notice. Spending ten minutes there. Coming here." There's a pause. "To fuck."

[Danicka Musil] One of the key cards is taken, pushed down into the slot of the brushed-chrome lock and handle of the door. A tiny light goes from red to green, she pulls the card out, and twists the handle, pushing the door open even as he is speaking. The carpet is no less plush in here, the furniture soft and decadent. It's a suite. They give their suites and rooms names like Marvelous and Wonderful here; there's a good reason why.

Danicka holds the door for him as she steps in, but only for a moment, before leaving him to keep it from falling against his shoulder when he walks in behind her. She doesn't respond until she hears the door click closed, looking at the windows looking out at the lake with a somewhat discerning expression on her face. Her shoulders roll, to shift the jacket down her arms before tossing it on the couch in the front of the suite, purse set on the coffee table.

She isn't standing with her back to him, but doesn't look at him, either.

"Why wouldn't I be okay with it?" she asks, and lifts one leg to set her toe on the coffee table, bending slightly to unzip the boot.

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] This room is such a world away from the other that they barely deserve the same name. The carpeting is plush. The drapes and the bedspread and the furnishings match. The sheets are clean, already turned down at this late hour. The lights are bright without glaring.

Lukas lets the door shut, and it does so quietly -- latches. He throws the deadbolt; perhaps it's habit.

"Most women wouldn't be," he replies; which is of course a ridiculous response, because, as any fool would point out, Danicka is not most women. Neither of them would be here, if she were.

She has lifted her foot to the coffee table to undo her boot. He follows her there. He sits on the coffee table when there are perfectly good armchairs nearby; but then, it's not comfortable seating that interests him at the moment. His hands cover hers over the zipper, his palms warm even through the leather. Then he draws down the zipper himself, down the inside of her calf, past the ankle to the arch of the foot.

[Danicka Musil] Most women.

Would take issue with being all but ordered to come out on less than an hour's notice at an odd time of day -- not dinner, not lunch, not even coffee -- to spend time with anyone they are not terribly good friends with or completely enamored of.

Would have worried as they left the aquarium about seeming 'easy', or thinking uncertainly about how they really shouldn't have hooked up with this guy a couple of weeks ago, feeling guilt for doing that and shame for following him out past the coat check.

Would have invited him back to their place if they were just going to fuck, rather than spending quite a bit of money on a hotel room mean to be comfortable to the point of luxury.

However, without the inanity of his statement being pointed out by either party, it's already known that she does not automatically have the freedom in their world -- their culture -- to just tell a Fullblood of her Tribe that if he wants to see her he can damn well give her more than thirty minutes' notice. It's already known that she does not care whatsoever if she is called a whore, if she is thought of as a slut, if she is disrespected to her face or behind her back or in the implications of a cheap room at a cheap motel. It's already known that she feels no more shame for fucking Lukas than she does for fucking Sam. It's already known that she has a roommate, who he can only guess is mortal, and so there will be no going back to her place and they've already silently agreed that going to 'his place' is probably not the best idea either.

Maybe she drove here to prove something, or send a message that entirely contradicts what she said to him two weeks ago, that it doesn't make any difference to her how 'nice' a place is. Then again, this hotel is one of the closest to the Shedd Aquarium, literally around the corner and down the street, so it could be that she noted it on her way...just in case. As he might have. It is quite likely that, given the conversations they've had and the strange and conflicting signals he's gotten about what kind of woman she is, Lukas probably already knows that her choice of hotel is as far from a passive-aggressive move as the two of them are from being star-crossed lovers.

Hell. They don't even seem to like each other, most of the time. In pop culture the opposite of the Meant To Be affair is the one where the principles initially loathe one another, circle each other like hissing cats, only to realize at the end that they really are perfect together. Yet the sniping and the malice is missing just as much as the protracted, yearning glances across the room: there was nothing hostile about Danicka bringing his hand to her wrist to show him that being near him was making her heart beat that much faster, and nothing evasive about his hand on her face when he kissed her, and nothing vicious or petty about the way he lets the topic go, sits down, and unzips her right boot.

So it's not that, either.

She lets him. There is no reason to stop him, to insist that she is going to be undressing herself, thank you very much, and he would do kindly to keep his hands off her shoes. Lukas's hand covers hers, Danicka pauses, and then slips her fingers away from the zipper to watch him draw it down. Underneath, perhaps not surprisingly, she's wearing knee-high stockings, white ones with a fleur-de-lis pattern on the nearly sheer fabric. It's one more thing about her that seems so knowing. She didn't leave her apartment to go to Mr. C's in her most comfortable cotton underwear but a set of lingerie just as sensual as bare flesh. She did not go to the aquarium today in tube socks or flesh-colored nylons but these: meant to be seen, meant to be uncovered.

It may occur to him, in the silent seconds when one boot is removed and her left leg replaces the right on top of the coffee table, that the last time they were in a position even remotely like this one no real promises had been made, no contract negotiated, no loyalty explicitly agreed upon by both parties. He'd fucked her like he might never even see her again, assuming from the start that she was going to leave him there, and it seemed for awhile that that was...it. More than likely he still doesn't trust her, but she's said that he will not be sharing her, so long as this (define 'this') lasts.

Thus, if it strikes his mind to think of it when he helps her out of her boots -- an act that could be seen as seductive, as servile, as something else entirely -- it seems that whatever he will uncover this time was donned knowingly, and exclusively, for him.

Without a word, Danicka lets her boots fall where they may on the ground. She takes a step forward, puts her hands on his shoulders, and moves to straddle him. The coffee table is made of sturdy wood and can support both his weight and hers without so much as groaning. Sinking down on his lap, skirt draping and pooling on his trousers, she does not kiss him, but lets his thighs support her. She tilts her head, reaches up, and begins removing her earrings.

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] Her stockings are the sort meant to be seen: the lilies of france imprinted over the sheer, over her skin. He pauses a moment when he sees the pattern. Lukas is not a fool; sometimes he's even astute. His eyes flicker up to hers. Then she removes one foot, replaces it with the other, and he turns his attention back to the boots.

When he tosses the second one on the floor, she starts to step forward and his hand tightens briefly on her leg. He pushes the hem of her skirt up; leans down, purely instinctual, to drop a kiss on the skin of her thigh, between the edge of the stockings and the drape of her skirt.

Then he straightens. She slides her knees past his hips. Sometimes his eyes are so alert, his silence so complete, that she could almost mistake him for the deaf and the mute. He watches her settle, and then he watches her start to remove her earrings -- the unconsciously elegant tilt of her head one way, then the other; the raising of her hands, the fingers deft, the elbows tucked.

His hands have opened over the outsides of her thighs, beneath her skirt. His body temperature rides a few degrees above a human's on a good day, and today, is perhaps another degree or two above the usual. At this range she can see that his jaw is cleanly shaven, with only the beginnings of stubble. She can see his breathing is already elevated, the centers of his eyes widening.

Still; he does not grope under her skirt for her panties, for her flesh. She does not kiss him whilst she removes her earrings. They strive for calm and control. At least one of them is pretending.

[Danicka Musil] This is not the first time that Danicka has never quite answered a question Lukas has posed to her. He never would have asked it, though, if she hadn't drawn the question out of his eyes herself. She has given him straight answers on multiple occasions, but rarely.

No, I'm not cold. I'm fine.
Stop asking me so many goddamned questions.
Be patient with me.
Chci tě.

Perhaps he wouldn't have asked without prompting this time because of the way she snapped at him when overwhelmed by how much he kept wanting to know, even if to him it all seemed innocuous, simple...easy. Maybe that's why now he isn't pushing it, but she never did tell him why she's okay with this. No, she isn't most women, but that's hardly an answer to the original inquiry. It doesn't give him any insight into what sort of woman she is.

And maybe he's just not asking any more questions because she is breathing in quietly but deeply when he kisses her knee the way he kissed her shoulder, because she is moving to his lap and sighing softly at the fabric of his slacks sliding over her inner thighs, because it doesn't matter, right now, at all.

The earrings, amethysts in gold filigree, are set with minute clicks against the tabletop when she gets them off, letting the tiny pieces of jewelry drop from her palm as she leans forward. Danicka presses against him, hands returning to his shoulders, feeling him breathe, feeling his heat bleed out of him and suffuse her own body. She doesn't make an effort to conceal or contain what being this close is doing to her, with as rarely as they touch and how long it's been.

One might think that she would try, that she would struggle, to not make herself any more open or vulnerable by letting him feel and see in her response that she wants him. But she never has, and that has to be bewildering, given how much else she tries to hide.

The longer she is there on top of him, the windows to the east bringing only dimmed starlight and almost no moonlight and a view of the lake reflecting only as much light as it absorbs, the less pretense there is. Danicka's hands tighten on his shoulders. Her thighs tense under his hands. She meets his eyes, and rolls her hips hard against his lap. It makes her tremble.

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] Lukas has not even taken his coat off. His scarf is undone, hanging from his neck; other than that, he's dressed as he was outside the aquarium, with the cold wind pulling at his hair and the trailing edges of his clothes. Under her hands, his shoulders are solid contours buried under layers of wool and cotton. He can barely feel her hands at all.

Still -- when she looks him in the eye, presses herself against him, there's no hiding the tension that spikes through him, tightening his hands on her thighs, flickering his eyes shut for a second. There's no hiding his arousal.

His breath catches on an exhale; it's nearly a sound.

Then his eyes open. He strips out of his coat, the weight of the wool carrying the garment down to pool over the coffee table, the lining sheening faintly in the lights. It's a silk-knit sweater beneath, thin but heavy, tugged off over his head. An ounce more force and he might've ruined the weave. That slides off the edge of the table, pools on the ground. The buttons of his shirt after that, his fingers deft and quick from collar to tail, then the cuffs, then peeling it off behind while he leans forward and, leaning forward, presses into her, his chest against hers, his shoulders.

He kisses her like he hadn't just kissed her not half an hour ago, in the blue-dark lights of an underwater world.

He kisses her like he's waited two weeks or two years to kiss her like this, half-undressed in front of floor-to-ceiling windows opening over the city and the lake. There's a break in the middle where he sucks air in like a drowning man, doesn't draw back, shakes his shirt loose from his arms, plunges his hands under her skirt to grab her by the hips and press her against him until he shudders from the anticipation of it.

[Danicka Musil] They part for a fraction of a minute when Lukas begins undressing himself, with a speed and force that betrays what his breathing and his voice refuse to. Danicka takes her hands off of his shoulders while he gets coat and sweater and shirt off, reaching behind her own torso to untie the wrap-around dancer's sweater with a simple tug on a string, a flick of her fingers. The light cotton unfurls from around her waist and chest, shrugged from her shoulders and drawn down her arms while his sweater is falling to the floor half-on top of her boots.

She does not pull her camisole up and over her head, though. Her breath coming faster, Danicka begins helping Lukas with the buttons of his shirt, sliding her hands underneath the fabric to touch his abdomen and sides while he is unfastening the garment at his wrists. She lays kisses on his jawline and throat as he frees his arms, rolling her hips again as her hands and her hair fall now on bare flesh rather than thick layers of clothing and outerwear.

Neither of them say a word, or release a dizzied moan into the air, or any sound at all even when their mouths meet again. Danicka parts her lips almost immediately, her tongue slipping out to meet his, inviting him in deeper. She gasps quietly when his touch rushes back up under her skirt, grasping her hips and finding almost no fabric there at all, just a mere slip of texture barely more substantial than string.

"Ah!" she lets out, pulled hard against him. The cry forces their mouths apart, but only for a moment: Danicka grabs him then, her palms soft on either side of his face, kissing him not so much with lust or even passion but sheer, unfettered hunger. When she groans, she rocks against him, her body moving to his as though they are not still separated by yet more layers of damnable clothing.

"Bed," she whimpers, riding him on the coffee table despite the fact they aren't even undressed fully yet. "Bed, now."

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] Bed, now, she means to say, but what she gets out is Bed, n-- before his mouth is on hers again, swallowing what words she might've said. A hard kiss, but a brief one, and then he lifts her bodily to her feet --

"Vstát."

-- being the wholly unnecessary demand that accompanies the act. He lets her go, stands himself, overshadows her by three-quarters of a foot. He deals with his own clothing first, and belt and slacks -- shoes and socks -- underclothes. There's a ruthless simplicity about his undressing: he isn't ashamed of his nakedness, and he doesn't make a production of it.

The lights are still blazing in the room. The lake is a black expanse edged in streetlamps outside the window, the sky nuclear orange over it, the clouds stained by the glow of the city. Her back is to the bed, and his to the window. Darkness over his shoulders; light over hers. He reminded suddenly and starkly of the night he saw her in the cafe, walking past -- the lights and the warmth and her inside, though the truth is, Danicka is born of the same dark and stormy blood as he.

Not that any of this matters. He comes to her, tugs her camisole off if she has not already. Then he's looking for the fastening of the skirt, zipper or button, hook and eye, whatever it might be, but he does it by touch. His eyes are on her face, on her, he watches her, intently, as if there was something to be gleaned there.

He's found the catch to her skirt; or she has. It comes undone and the skirt joins the rest of their clothes on the floor, and now he's naked and she's almost naked, her lingerie the very epitome of form over function, unless, of course, it were argued that form is their very function. She can see him suck a breath in to look at her, the expansion of his chest.

She's prepared for this eventuality, dressed herself in a modern day equivalent of the seven proverbial veils. He cannot be unaware of that. He has no reason, and no excuse to be taken aback by this, however. His hands linger on her skin another moment. Then he takes a step back and away, picks his coat up off the coffee table -- steady about this, matter-of-fact -- finds his wallet in one pocket or another, finds the condoms he's put in there, not half a dozen perhaps, but more than one. He tosses the packets onto the bedspread.

There are no blushing innocents in this room. They are both open-eyed about this. They knew exactly where this meeting would lead.

And yet; and yet. When he comes back to her, puts his hands on her waist, strokes his palms over her sides, he looks at her body for a moment, the subtle stretch and indentation of her skin beneath the sweep of his thumb. Then her face. A strange stillness in this now, a deliberate slowness that was not there before when he all but tore his outerwear off.

"Mám stýskalo." There is no tenderness in this, nothing but raw and brutal honesty. His hand on her face a moment, one, and then the other, taking her face between his palms. "Víte, že?"

[Danicka Musil] This did not begin in the aquarium, though that is where he kissed her and that is where her breathing first quickened. This began at the Brotherhood of Thieves, the room frigid yet his shirt sticking to his skin from sweat that wet her palm when she touched his neck and they crossed the distances between their heights to say the same thing they say every time they kiss, which seems to be 'Everything'.

All they seem to have are beginnings. Of sentences, of disclosures that never quite make it out completely, of stories they aren't sharing: What it is with her and Ilari Martin. Why she wants him, since he's already told her why he wants her. Any discussion, whatsoever, of the fact that when they first met they were children, not a woman in lingerie or an Ahroun but just...children. The last conversation they could said to have finished, to have actually resolved, happened the last time they saw each other, and they had not seemed to know what to do with it besides saying All right.

And this: his mouth on hers even as she's asking for him, her legs tightening around his hips in momentary protest, in unwillingness to do as he says and get up, let go. He stands, though, and she slides her legs down his til her stockinged feet touch the carpet. She's smaller than him, simply average height for a woman and no more, though sometimes it's easy to forget, with the way she carries herself.

He's not wrong, to look at her and think not of the Carpathians or of a thunderstorm but of the warmth and light waiting when the wind outside is harsh or the lightning is the only break from the unending blackness of the sky. To smell her and think of everything else that is natural, that is familiar, that is already a part of him as far back as their bloodlines go. And to find himself struck by that, on the many occasions when a dim lamp behind her turns her hair almost gold, or almost white but casts a depth of color to her skin. She does not have the jet-black hair and blazing eyes of so many purely bred Lords, but there are moments...in her terror, in passion, in rare flashes of fury, when it is impossible to miss what she is. And where she belongs.

Danicka has not undressed herself as he has. She has stepped back through the arch to the bedroom past the sitting room in the suite, watching him disrobe with his stark efficiency rather than performance. She leaves her skirt where it is, her camisole, until he walks to her and peels clothing away from skin he has described as perfect. Untouched, even if he guesses that it wasn't. The camisole, tight and colorful, was not on her body long and left no red marks where the elastic held to her skin, but that is all there is beneath it: skin, warm to the touch as she leans forward and slides her arms around his waist. Her tongue teases one nipple, then the other, kisses trailing over his chest, as his hands find the zipper to her skirt which -- once undone -- falls without fanfare or urging to the floor beside the bed.

Which leaves her in white stockings and a mere scrap of lavender lace, lace and silk and string. Lukas has to touch her the way he does to move her back, to get a chance to look at her, because her hands are wandering, her eyes closed, her mouth teasing rather than devouring. Blunt, rounded fingernails drag from his lower back around to his abdomen then soften into fingertips, but frustratingly do not travel downward. Though one could say that's his own fault, for his hands on her waist and his steps going back to the coffee table and her eyes opening for her gaze to follow him even if she does not.

Danicka is on the bed when he comes back, kneeling on the turned-down bedspread, waiting for him, ignoring the condoms tossed to one side and slipping her arms around his neck when he reaches for her waist. Her spine elongates as she presses their hips together, their stomachs, her breasts to his chest, and she smiles softly even though he is not trying to be tender. He would have to try; it seems an unavoidable part of who she is, sometimes.

"Ano," she whispers, her voice quiet because they are close enough it needs not be otherwise. His hands move to her face, but her arms remain around him, in an embrace that would be innocent or girlish if she were remotely close to being either. "Ano, věděl jsem, že pravdu, když jsem tě viděla."

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] She knew that the moment she saw him, she says.
He's reminded: I wanted her from the moment I saw her.

It's something alike. It's nothing alike. It's a world away from alike.

Some part of him must find her softness, her gentleness, her knowingness infuriating. Lukas is a man who prides himself on his calm, his control and his courtesy, but around her, he seems to have none of these things. He hardly recognizes the thing he becomes: angry more often than not, hungry, cold to the point of rudeness. For all that, she can so often remain unperturbed, unruffled, obedient -- a submission that he might almost believe, if he has not seen brief flashes of way lay behind in, flashfires of fury and passion. And then he suspects it's not submission after all, this placid demeanor of hers that she assumes so well, but a strange species of triumph.

He is a distrusting creature, Lukas. Or at least, he is with her. He distrusts her precisely because she intrigues him; precisely because she is, as they've said, a sort of exception.

Digression.

The point is: she loops her arms around his neck. She speaks to him, softly, and in his native tongue, and what she says makes a shadow cross his brow, a touch short of a frown. It makes his hands tighten minutely on her face as though he might --

-- do something. It doesn't matter what. He doesn't. She presses herself against him, her breasts bare against his chest, her belly bare against his sex, and this makes his eyes darken; makes his eyelid flicker as though to close, though he will not allow himself to right now.

He looks right at her. It's a strange species of courage, this, or stubbornness: to show her what she is doing to him, without shame.

His hands find their way to the wisp of lace and silk that passes for her panties. His eyes are still open, clear blue, when he lean in to touch his mouth to hers, but they close at last when he angles his head a notch further, kisses her mouth open, pushes his hands over her hips, her ass, to shove the lingerie down until they catch where her knees press into the mattress. Then he's catching her around the waist with one arm, pulling her closer, pinning her close, holding her hips and her belly pressed against his while his free hand reaches to nudge her thighs apart and reach between.

The first time he did this, which was also the first time they fucked, he'd shuddered at the feel of her, as though the evidence of her arousal somehow intensified his. This is no different, though perhaps he controls himself marginally better -- a short sharp inhale before he tips his chin up a quarter of an inch, seals her mouth with his again.

He's not in such a furious hurry this time. It hasn't been an entire night of stops and starts yet; it isn't the very first time. He's gentler with her, though not quite gentle: exploring with his fingertips, first, and then caressing with the pads, his arm pressing her to him the whole time, his mouth open to hers as though to somehow swallow some portion of her sensation, until finally his fingers press into her, the slickness and the heat, and he tears his mouth from hers to say into her ear, strain tearing into his voice:

"Ó, můj bože."

And his teeth catch at her earlobe, and then:

"Potřebuji být uvnitř vás.

[Danicka Musil] The moment Lukas saw her was a week before he ever touched her, over two weeks before he found himself pulling her up into his arms and kissing her, being kissed by her. He's only seen her twice since she left him at the motel, and wrapping his hand around her coat-covered wrist to haul her out of the Blue Chalk Cafe and down the sidewalk is nothing and kissing her in a way liable to have made her moan if she were not so supremely conscious -- so knowing -- of her surroundings was not nearly enough. Not for either of them. Not when it's been nearly two weeks since the smattering of hours where they were bare...or open.

She knows what he is and who he is to his pack, has known since they 'met' at SmartBar near the end of January. And she could be said to understand, at least in the sense that she does not expect -- as some women, maybe even most women, would expect -- to be attended to more often or reached out to more frequently, why he goes so long without a call, without summoning her or seeking her out. It would be one thing if she understood simply based on what she might imagine are the duties of a Fullblood. It is quite another thing entirely that she understands that he will not let himself accept, or take, what he wants, even if he watns it badly.

Though she wouldn't claim to know why, or that it makes sense to her.

Danicka wants him. Without complexities or embarrassment, without understanding why or even how much or when it will end, aware only of when it began and her desire's current incarnation, current intensity. So she does not ask herself in dark or lonely hours what about him makes her heart race, or whether or not it has anything to do with some romantic notions over their shared childhood, or whether the way she feels when she is around him means anything. It is all extraordinarily, almost painfully simple, at least for her. At least for now.

Perhaps that is why, when he acts like a jackass, when he is rough or annoyed or even cold, all Danicka does is smile that frustratingly soft smile of hers. He may read victory in her earthy eyes, may verge on paranoia, wondering what contest she has won, unable to see that she smiles because she understands what he is doing...if, again, not why. She could guess. Instead, she slides her gaze down his face rather than meeting his eyes, and only seems nervous or uncertain when she finds herself opening her mouth and telling him anything other than what fits the situation best, what she could assume he wants to hear.

She is not nervous now, not uncertain. She knew when he called her where this would go, perhaps even guessed how quickly. It did not bother her; rather, she dressed for it, slipped into undergarments intended to speed his pulse and donned clothes meant for easy, rapid removal. She wants him. She knows she wants him...and knew as soon as she found him sitting on the bench in the aquarium that he had missed her. Looking up at him with his palms on her cheeks and the language they shared even as children dropping almost lyrically from both their mouths, Danicka catches a shadow and then lets it go, only then adding in a whisper:

"Stýskalo se mi po tobě, taky."

For a day. For a day and a half, between longing to press fully against him in the Brotherhood and pull him -- injured or not -- to the bed and now, alone away from roommates or packmates or thin walls. For perhaps a day and a half, she missed him as well. And though they don't say it, and despite the fact that he probably doesn't trust it: they were pleased to see each other. Maybe not 'happy'. But pleased...to talk about a lack of moray eels, about the Talons of Horus, about not being whatever he might want her to be, whatever it is she's 'supposed' to be.

Danicka makes no move to stand on the bed, to let her underwear drop further than her knees. She needs little urging whatsoever to part her legs, no more insistence on his part necessary to part her lips as well. Her eyes are closed when they kiss, her willingness to give herself over to this -- or to him, there's no way for him to discern which unless he starts dancing closer to that relentlessly troublesome concept of Trust -- evident in how easily she moves into his hands as they run over her flesh. How her mouth pulls away from his to let out a small cry of pleasure when he touches her. Her hands slide to his shoulders, grip his biceps, and though she gasps he is kissing her again a moment later, his tongue in her mouth and his fingers between her thighs and his throat swallowing the noise of a moan leaving her own.

She is panting, but soundlessly, when he leans forward to whisper in her ear. Drowsy, murky eyes flick towards a flash of movement in the dark to her right, and she sees the two of them in the reflection of the mirror over the sinks, both of them naked -- or near enough -- and pressed together. She feels him, against her stomach and against her breasts, inside of her and nipping at her earlobe. She can smell him, a scent masculine and oddly familiar and yet altogether his own. She can hear him breathing, hear his voice struggling with his own want -- need, he says -- and the addition of the sight of them together against the words in her ear all but makes her eyes roll back in her head.

"Nekončí," she says tightly, moving her hips gently even as one hand drops away to pick up one of the packets he threw almost carelessly on the bed. Her head turns, her mouth going to the thin, sensitive skin of his throat as foil tears and -- with little more than a quick glance down -- she somehow manages to make an almost tiresomely mundane act sensual, even if the implication is there that she is doing this primarily so that he won't take his hand away from her, even for a moment.

But then, her hand is sliding to his wrist, pulling his fingers not to her breast but to her mouth, taking one digit after the other past her lips, her tongue running over the calloused skin to factor taste of more than just his flesh and his mouth into the equation of all this. A moan leaves her, brief but potent, before she releases him. Not to lay back and kick her panties fully to the floor, not to climb up on him and wrap her legs around his waist, but to turn around on the incredibly thick mattress, still on her knees, still able to see the mirror and him in it, though she does not lean forward and press her hands against the bedcovers just yet. She reaches back behind her, ass against his upper thighs and shoulderblades to his chest, wrapping her arms around his neck yet again. Her fingers go into the hair on the back of his head, her head twisting around, pulling him down to kiss her.

"Chci více," she purrs, just before their lips meet.

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] Danicka casts only the briefest of glances down, but Lukas watches, chest heaving, breath sucking through his teeth, as she sheaths him. He loses focus. He has no idea what his hands are doing, and anyway, it doesn't matter: she takes him by the wrist and sucks herself off his fingers, one by one, until suddenly he kisses her through his splayed fingers, and then without his fingers in the way, and now he tastes of her too.

Oh, my god, he'd said; and oh, my god, he thinks now, which are not really words at all but the protoplasm that words might one day be made of, the space of a wheeling mind that's grasping for something, some form or structure to fit itself into.

What Danicka does not know:

That kissing is rare beyond rare for him. That kissing like this, unrestrainedly, uncontrollably, is unthinkable. That he does not speak, either; not like this, anyway -- that he might say come here or stand up or turn around or put your legs around me, but not oh my god or I need to be inside you or I missed you.

Commands. Demands. But not these things, which served no purpose other than --

What Lukas does not know:

What purpose it serves, telling her these things. Why he can't stop kissing her as though the only oxygen left in this room was in her mouth. What she's done to him, done to him, done to him.

What Danicka does know:

That when she turns around, Lukas kisses her skin instead, finds a path from her mouth to her jawline to the tendons of her neck, to the slope of her shoulder. That he has not noticed the fucking mirror because his attention is on her, completely, and his head is bent to her neck, and his hands are roving the stretch of her body as she arches against him, and his palms cup her breasts as she wraps her arms around his neck, and his fingers are gentle on her nipples, and then not so gentle as she presses back against him, rubs against his cock, and makes him pant.

Chci více, she says. Whatever he might've said doesn't matter, if he would have said anything at all -- she twists her fingers into his hair and pulls him down to kiss her, but she needn't have, he would've kissed her anyway, kisses her now like he'd meant to kiss her anyway, like a war, mouth open, tongues tangling.

He has wrapped his left arm around her now, his bicep flexed against her left side, his hand open over the right. She is a slender creature, and he knows this because he's seen the narrowness of her back as she lay curled on a bare mattress, afraid for her life; he knows this because he can feel the entire span of her enveloped in the circle of his arm, but she's different now, nothing like the rigid fearful thing on the bed, a living, vivid thing now, half-ferocious, moving and twisting as if she couldn't get enough, as if she trusted him to be at her back like this, when she barely trusts him to escort her out a door.

He has wrapped his left arm around her, which frees his right hand to run down the axis of her body, past the twisting slender muscles of her stomach to cup firmly between her legs (and he exhales again, sharply, and if she won't release his mouth he simply pulls his next inhale out of her lungs), and, by this point of contact, he lifts her a little higher on her knees, tilts her hips just so. She can feel him bend his knees, his erection sliding down the cleft of her ass -- the glance he casts down, half-shadowed by her hair, is as brief as the one she'd given him before; he finds her sex largely by memory and instinct and touch -- and then his mouth is back on hers, or on the line of her jaw if she's turned her face away, and she can feel the flexion in him, thigh and abdomen, chest, arms, every muscle in him flexing in effort, or for control, or for simple unadulterated pleasure, as he straightens his knees and pushes into her.

What Lukas does know:

He's been waiting for this for two weeks.
He's been waiting for this.

And he might've promised himself at the end of their last encounter, their last tryst, that if he ever (had the opportunity/made the mistake) ended up in this situation again, he would be gentler with her, he would be more ... courteous; but the truth is, this is not possible, even from the start. He moves slowly within her, but every stroke is deep, and solid, and at first he clasps her back against him, holds her firmly with one arm around her ribcage, one hand cupped over her sex; to press his palm against her, but also to feel with the tips of his fingers the way her flesh parts for him, as her flesh parts for him; to feel himself sliding into her, as her flesh parts for him.

(Ó, můj bože.)

Which he does not say now, of course; but which she can guess anyway from the way his breath rushes from his lungs, and the way he moves against her, and the way sweat breaks out over his back, dampens the side of his face, the roots of his hair. He's moving faster now, and his hands are on the crests of her hip, and she's no longer pinioned against him, he's moving her against him, and any moment now he'll bend her down to all fours and fuck her, feet planted, back straight, body away from hers, impersonal, as though she were a whore, and --

-- and he withdraws himself, suddenly, gasping at the loss of her, or perhaps merely gasping from it all, but his hands are still on her, he takes her by the waist and turns her around on the bed.

"Chci vidět tvou tvář." It could be a command. It could be something else entirely; supplication. "Chci vidět tvou tvář, když přijde."

[Danicka Musil] If only the moon weren't nearly new in the sky. If it were broader than a sickle, if it were even half, things would be different. It's already different, and not because he held her hand or because she confessed that she used to be scared of swimming. And not, though one or both of them may blame it on this later, because the moon is not the same heavy, blazing thing it was the first time. But then again, the first time it was different, too. Nothing to do with the where, or the what, and everything to do with the whom, the how. Nothing to do with the when.

Even though neither of them can pretend that the moon's phase has no effect on him whatsoever. She listened to him talk about it at the aquarium, watching the schools dart one way, turn the other, hating them under a full moon and considering them more thoughtfully with the sky darker overhead. Danicka had not said then that the moon changes her, though less dramatically, less obviously. She cannot fathom whether this has more to do with being what she is by blood or what she has become over the years spent with wolves all around her. Either way:

If only the moon were not so thin, and if only his skin was not so hot against her own, and if only it had not been two weeks, and if only he were not half-moaning to god at the feel of her.

Then this might be different, and god only knows if she would feel safe turning her back to him. God only knows if it's even about trust at all, this willingness to have him take her from behind, her stated unwillingness to lie on her back for him. In any case, when Lukas's hands tighten on her breasts and his fingers lose their gentleness she cries out...and not from pain. He has her trembling as his hands seem to try and take all of her in at once, as his arm enfolds her and his mouth devours hers.

The truth is that she can't get enough, at least not right now, not when she is still wondering why they did not just meet here, why he did not pull her onto him the second she was within reach, how the hell they even got to the bed, how on earth they managed to get all their clothes off. She chalks it up to his near-obsession with self-control, without wondering if it has anything to do with wanting to see her, all of her, when he fucks her.

That's why they're here, right? To fuck.

Her abdominal muscles tense as his hand runs down the front of her torso, a fluttering tightness that she cannot control and which passes as her lower half begins to completely, utterly relax. Lukas can feel her melting against him, shoulders rounding as anticipation becomes certainty, as she reads through touch alone the movement of his body behind her own. Her eyes close, her mouth leaving his as her head falls back against his shoulder, leaving them both pulling at fresh air rather than sucking in the taste of one another from joined mouths, searching tongues. The angle of her throat makes the cry Danicka releases sound almost strangled, makes it sound helpless, makes her sound lost when he is -- finally -- inside of her.

Danicka pants, her arms around him having long since loosened, long since dropped back down. She is covering his hands with her own, her fingers intertwined with his between her legs, her palm over the back of his left hand. There is no comparison to the way it was the first time, when he issued commands at her and when the first thrust of him into her body was done just seconds after his hand had nearly closed on her neck. There is no similarity between that and this, with Danicka panting, each exhalation half-voiced with pleading alto notes that mean nothing except, perhaps, the implied: Ano. Více. Ano.

When his hands slide away from her, holding her hips to move her against him, Danicka goes on touching herself, leaning forward to push her left hand down whether he intends to bend her over or not. She is not -- was not two weeks ago, is not now -- anything remotely resembling passive with him. The placidity she wears so well, the calm, the unassailable composure seen almost everywhere else, is shattered just as surely as it was the night after the moot when she started rattling off god-knows-what in Russian, just as certainly as it was when she snapped at him, or unfurled secrets that made her shake. Danicka thrusts back against him with a groan, biting back a scream that he can't see because he can't see her teeth dig momentarily into her lower lip.

Her lip is released only moments later, as he withdraws from her and she gasps, only getting out a frustrated "What the fu--" before she is grabbed and turned around. Her eyes are the color of seagrass, almost translucent, and when Lukas first sees them they are flashing with something too close to be lust to be called anger. His words, or the sight of him, stop her dead, but she doesn't answer immediately.

Danicka grabs his face, her own wetness on her fingers touching his cheek, pulling his mouth to hers and kissing him. Hard. Furious. As in another motel, at the foot of another bed, it is with a shifting of muscle in her thighs and upper arms and a sudden dragging on his shoulders that she half-leaps, half pulls herself up onto him, legs going around his waist with a slide of flesh and silk and no way to tell which sensation is more decadent to him.

"Zdi," she gets out, drawing his lower lip between her teeth for a moment. The word is followed by a low, hungry sound not quite a chuckle, not quite a purr, before she kisses him again, moaning into his mouth. It is not oh my god or I need you. It is, however, what she wants.

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] Lukas catches Danicka up as she half-leaps, half-climbs onto him. His hands open under her thighs, the muscles of his arms and shoulders pulling taut even as his spine backbends to balance. She grabs his face and crushes a kiss to him, and he accepts it, he gives it back, lifting his mouth to hers with a ferocity that furrows his brow, that scrapes his teeth over her mouth, her tongue.

The wall, she said. And Lukas, who does not listen to kinfolk, who does not accept summons and commands from kin, doesn't even think about it. He turns and takes three steps and slams her into the wall, they slam together into the wall. The shudder of impact runs down to the roots of the wall; the downstairs neighbor is looking up in consternation. A framed print, some tasteful nonintrusive modern artwork or other hanging about half a foot from her head, jumps an inch off the wall and thuds back. The wallpaper is expensive, neutral tones, with a subtle, raised texture that would probably rub her back red by the end of this.

He raises her with his hands, biceps clenching, sliding her back up the wall. He kisses her collarbone, sucks at her breasts and watches her face, tugs at her nipples with his lips, and then his teeth, until her hands twist into his hair and pull with the same merciless strength. Then he lets go her breasts with a gasp, raises his mouth to her, lowers her mouth straight onto his, lowers her straight onto his cock, is back inside her in the same fell stroke. He groans words against her mouth, not a command, not a request, nothing that makes any sort of logical sense outside of this context; not even oh my god or any variation thereof but simply --

"Fuck, Danička."

-- before he catches her mouth on a kiss, like he couldn't bear not to. And fuck is exactly what he does, they do: his hands grasping at her waist and her hips, his body moving between her thighs, moving inside her with a reckless, ruthless rhythm that jars the framed print by her head awry, that has him panting for breath, that has him twisting his mouth from hers to bite her shoulder and stop his mouth and keep his silence.

He cannot, in this moment, imagine how it is he is capable of pretending coldness or indifference toward her. The words exchanged at the Blue Chalk cafe; the words in his room; the words at the Shedd -- he cannot imagine how he managed to say them at all, so calmly. He cannot imagine how he could be that person saying them. He cannot imagine how he could go back to being that person.

Near the end, Lukas raises his face back to hers, but not to kiss her. He raises one hand to her face and he presses her back until he can see her face; he'll press her back again if she tries to close the distance, hide her face, something. He watches her face as he said he wanted to, and would, and his expression is sheer intensity, is sheer focus, the muscles of his face taut and drawn too tight for expression. Whether she'll meet his eyes or not, he watches her, shaking sweat out of his eyes with a snap of his head, watches every flicker and shadow of expression on her face echoing every clench of her thighs, every flex of his hip, every electric arc of sensation that seems as much hers as his own.

When his climax overtakes him his eyes shut, if only for an instant -- then they're open again, he forces his eyes open to look at her, and the blue is absolutely incandescent, absolutely shattered. His pleasure is writ in a subtle language of clenched jaw, furrowing brow, twisting lip that could almost be mistaken for anger or pain; it is writ also in the much bolder language of his hands clenching her body, grinding her hips hard against his; in the iron rigidity of his back, his arms, his locked joints; in the last half-involuntary thrusts that set shudders quaking down his spine, and leave him buried so deep inside that he forgets what it was like to not be here.

Then he can't keep his eyes open any longer. He leans into her, heavily, wraps his arms around her, between her back and the wall, he crushes her into him and his mouth catches her for a second -- he doesn't have the presence of mind to hold a kiss -- he simply opens his mouth to hers as he closes his eyes, panting now.

[Danicka Musil] There is, and has been, nothing like this. They are attacking each other as though this is the first time, despite their joining again and again that first night. They kiss like each of them has waited not two weeks, not twenty minutes, not since that night in the club but like they have waited for years, for all their --

Let's not get carried away.

But the way that he pulls her into his arms and the way his body feels wrapped in her legs seems like something new, the sweat on his skin seems startling, and the need she feels urging her onto him and against him seems overpowering. There is a sense of inevitability to all this that has been there from the beginning, that once fueled her impatience with him, that now does not even occur to her. Not now. Not right now.

Danicka lets out a light yelp when her back hits the wall, her body instinctively curling away from the impact and into the softer, warmer solidity in front of her, which happens to be Lukas. The second time her shoulderblades meet the wallpaper it is not with almost bruising force, and she finds herself lifted up and wet, unbelievable heat engulfing her breast. Yes, her hands go into his hair, fingers tightening as she feels his teeth on her. A low groan resonates in her throat, stifled for some reason but coming out in a rough, ragged purr from clenched teeth.

Which is nothing compared to the sound she makes when he pulls her back down again, when his hips flex and he pushes into her. The moan Danicka releases then is let go into the air past his shoulder, loud and unrestrained, and it does not sound pained or helpless or enraged or anything but almost relieved, as though he has just alleviated some nameless but unbearable pain. Her hands loosen in his hair even as her thighs tighten around his waist, their mouths meeting as he groans her name.

Something about that makes her shudder on him, makes her close her eyes and lean so that more of her weight rests on him, more of her body presses to his, whimpering, "More. God...more..." as though she may very well suffer some fate unimaginable if he dares stop again, even for a minute.

This is not gentle, or soft. He's not fucking her slowly now, even if at some point he assured himself that he would even be able to. He may very well be capable. But again: not now. Not right now. Danicka does not beg him to stop this time, or say please in any language. She gasps almost musically when his teeth find her shoulder, but unlike him she does not make a single ounce of effort to keep herself quiet. Every time she cries out, every time she moans, every time her hands -- sliding to his shoulders -- tighten involuntarily, he knows what her reaction is to what he's doing to her, even as he could see on her face how she felt about his mouth devouring her breasts.

And those cries get sharper, and closer together, the further he takes her. Danicka is leaning onto him, almost -- but not quite -- laying her head on his shoulder, gasping against his throat, sweat slick on her back and on her flank, between her chest and his, making loose hairs along her scalp stick to her brow and her ears and her neck. She calls to neither god nor goddess nor lover, just Oh, again and again, as though any more complicated words have left her. Yet she doesn't erupt into Russian this time, either. She can't. She can't remember anything, right now, anything but this.

His eyes seem to startle her when the meet hers, as though the intensity of their color is more than she expected to find. It's a moment before she even realizes his hand is on her face. Oh, and she fights. Danicka tries to lean forward, tries to kiss him, wanting him in her fully, completely, but he resists and she closes her eyes, back arching, head tipped back against the wall. She lets him see her, watch her, as they ride each other into her orgasm.

This time no sound leaves her. Danicka goes electric in his arms, shoulderblades pulling together, her body tightening all around him from legs to hips to arms. Her mouth is open though she does not make more than the smallest sound deep in her throat, brows tugged towards one another in a look that seems to mimic consternation as much as it conveys pleasure. When it's over, when she begins to relax and finds that she is still with him, that she did not just die and he is still moving and very much alive as well, Danicka opens her eyes and gasps, shuddering. She is pliant, and warm, and her arms slide wholly around him when he grabs her hips and pulls her down hard on his cock.

A cry does leave her then, a small yelp that is very nearly pained, but she doesn't so much as blink. His eyes are open; hers stay there as well, holding his gaze with her own just as her embrace holds him right where he is. No thought of being angry with him, or distant, comes to mind. No understanding of closing her eyes or holding back his name or speaking some other language makes sense to her now. She is with him, and only with him, and that is all that may very well exist.

Her eyes stay open when his close, when he pulls her close and leans into her at the same time so that they are touching, pressed together so close that it is imposisble to tell where one of them begins and the other ends. She looks at the wall over the headboard of the bed that they didn't end up using...or, more accurately, have not used yet...and she holds him very, very close to her shoulder with one hand on the back of his head while he starts to come back down.

Lukas kisses her, or touches his lips to hers as he begins to breathe normally, and Danicka finally closes her eyes again, wrapping her lips gently -- tenderly? -- around his lower one, kissing with more control and more thought. She is trembling, though, and her shaking only grows more pronounced as she goes on kissing him, kissing him, over and over as though somehow that will undo something that is already a foregone conclusion.

"Nechoď pryč," she whispers against his mouth, like a secret. "Prosím, Lukáš. Ještě ne."

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] He responds, at first, to her kisses in the most rudimentary and reflexive of ways, as though all higher brain functions have ceased to exist for the moment. He moves toward her, and in reaction to her, the way plants and simple animals yearn toward light. He tilts his chin up to give her access; his hands tighten a little on her back when she kisses his lower lip. Other than that, he merely breathes, merely catches his breath from wherever it may have escaped to.

Then a little more awareness, unfolding like a rose. The warmth and wetness of her mouth. The warmth and wetness of her, where he's still buried inside her. His mouth moves to hers, parting when hers parts, his tongue tracing the seam of her lips delicately, gently, and his weight shifts slightly between her thighs, pressing gently closer.

He grows aware, soon thereafter, that she is still in his arms; he grows aware of how close he is crushing her, how he has tried his best to meld her completely into and around him. He knows he should loosen his grip, but it is not a possibility right now, not even remotely so. He is aware of her shaking as she kisses him, as though completely undone, as though some vital part of her has come utterly apart and cannot yet to be put back together again.

Her mouth moves on his: words. It's several seconds before they trawl through his mind and come up with a haul of meaning, glistening and alive.

He kisses her then, the first kiss he has managed to truly give back to her since ... however long it has been, since the last. It doesn't matter; what matters is he kisses her now, gently but deeply, sealing her mouth to his.

"Nemám v úmyslu opustit." Afterward he presses his mouth to the corner of hers; then to her cheek, beneath her ear. He turns his face to the side of her neck, the musculature of his shoulders rearranging under her hands as he shifts his grip on her slightly, adjusts her weight on him, leans into her. His temple, and the corner of his brow rests against the textured wallpaper. It feels cool and solid, and now, gradually, his awareness extends to the edges of the room -- the curtains still opened, the nightscape lights amongst darkness outside; the low hum of the central heating system.

Moments go by. Eventually he opens his eyes. Eventually he lifts his head, and then her, from the wall. His balance is not quite so perfect this time. They sway; then he takes a few steps back and sits on the edge of the bed, lets her weight settle to his thighs. He has every excuse to unwind his arms now, but he does not.

He watches her instead, his arms loosely looping her waist, her hips: his regard a keen thing, but not piercing; thoughtful, but not suspicious. He looks at her like he likes to look at her, and like he does not quite know what to make of her.

[Danicka Musil] That...was not exactly fucking.

Danicka doesn't know what that was.

What this is, now, as she finds herself kissed slowly, with less hunger, with less insistence. The wall is no longer being abused by their bodies, and though her back is indeed slightly reddened it is not bad enough to bruise, not bad enough to leave tears or scrapes on her flesh. It'll pass, like the almost intolerable heat that somehow does not make either of them pull away.

She tells him not to go. Then asks. Then uses his name, and if her tone were not barely even a ghost of her usual voice, she would sound like she was pleading. Not yet. And he says -- well. He knows what he says, and so does she, and that is enough for her. Neither of them pull away, or seem to want to, or even so much as move beyond the subtlest shift.

It is awhile before anything else happens, a stretch of time and timelessness spent just breathing, mouths together but not for any apparent purpose they could name. Danicka's chest and shoulders move with every breath she takes, slowing down, becoming shallower but remaining steady. Then her body begins to relax, not just in the wake of completion but as she begins to rely -- at least for now, at least in this -- on his strength holding her up. It's a very slow melting, gradual enough that she succumbs even to curling forward and laying her head on his shoulder, eyes closed and each breath hitting her with the scent of him.

All this time, she touches his hair. Not raking her fingers through it scalp-deep and demanding, as before, but simply playing with the ends over the back of his neck, idly and thoughtlessly. It is what she wants to do...and so. There it is.

Movement, however, that seems to wake Danicka up. She blinks her eyes open rapidly, unseen, as she's carried back a few feet and Lukas sits down. This, for some reason, makes her laugh. Not the way she did when she walked in on a pillow fight, but light, and quiet, and only for a moment. The smile on her face is not smooth or small or placid but almost...quirky, like she just walked into a surprise party and she's not entirely sure she believes it's really for her (or what she's going to do to the people who planned it).

This was something he sacrificed, sitting down: her hands leave his neck, his hair, and go to his shoulders. This is the other thing he has sacrificed, without meaning to: Danicka pushes gently on his shoulders and lifts her hips, breathing in deeply as she rises off of him, but she does then settle on his lap again a bit further back. Her eyes meet his, eyebrows lifting slightly, as though he's got a question in his eyes and she's prompting him to say it aloud.

But for once, she may just be misreading him.

Or asking him something.

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] Lukas can be terribly sensitive to laughter -- cannot stand being made a fool of. Which is not to say he cannot stand being insulted, or cursed at, or shouted at, because that's quite another thing. It is possible to come away from an argument looking better than you did going in. It is possible to come away from an insult with your honor wholly intact, and that's the crux of it.

But not the point. The point is: Lukas can be terribly sensitive to laughter, but when she laughs, his mouth only moves in unrestrained response, a silent flash of a smile, lopsided, that comes and goes as quickly as a shadow.

Then he's solemn again, and then sucking a small breath in as she shifts, puts a little more space between. Her eyebrows lift -- he doesn't know what question to ask, or what she might be asking him, and so he says nothing.

A moment later he puts his hand to her face though, pushing her hair gently back, then tracing a line from the tip of her nose to her lips, to her chin. He speaks after all, quietly, gently:

"What?"

[Danicka Musil] Every time one of them has laughed -- a huff of air, a chuckle, or the knocked-to-the-floor giggling that she released the night she brought koláče to the Brotherhood and ended up with her face turning different colors -- it does not seem to make the other frown, or roll their eyes, or sneer. She'd noticed then, and noticed again just a couple of days ago, how her pulse jumped when he smiled at Mrena. There was no thought in Danicka's head, and still there has not been any thought in her head, of petulance that he did not smile that way at her. It really isn't comparable, and her focus was on the fact that such a simple expression had caused such a sharp and sudden reaction.

So this time she kisses his smile even as it's passing from him, catching it with her mouth like one might try and capture a firefly with a jar or a ladybug with cupped palms. Her fingertips even come to his jawline, her back bent slightly from leaning towards his mouth. And, as they tend to do, the smallest brush of her lips on his becomes more, lasts longer, leads to her sinking against his chest and sighing quietly when they part.

There is no one here who gives a good goddamn how long they stay, or what they do to each other, or whether or not she is trustworthy, or whether or not he is a jackass. At the moment, it is entirely possible that even Lukas does not care if she is trustworthy and that Danicka does not care if he is a jackass. The sad likelihood is that they will be like the man who looks in the mirror and as soon as he turns away forgets what he looks like: as soon as they've gone -- her to her life and her apartment and whatever fills both of those and Lukas to his life, to his pack, to the War -- they will each lose whatever it is exists right now, unnamed and unnameable.

What?

He touches her face, oddly, but she doesn't furrow her brow or cock a questioning glance at him. Garou are creatures, without adjective or disclaimer. They are only partly human, and it is not just an animal side but a powerful spiritual side that they carrying around with them in their changeable skins. That they are odd, in the way they kiss or speak or touch someone's face, goes without saying, and Danicka simply revels in the touch without a hitch in her demeanor.

Which is, right now: quiet. Still.

It takes her a moment to decide not to pretend that she had nothing to say. It takes an internal struggle that is getting briefer and less difficult the more times she fights it. She breathes out slowly, leans forward, and rests her brow against his. "Not another two weeks, all right?"

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] Perhaps she had not meant that as a joke, but it makes him laugh anyway: short and nearly soundless, but genuine, an exhale of humor before he reaches up to cup his hands over her cheeks, to press her brow against his.

"No." The humor has run its course; it's gone now, and his voice is simply quiet, soft. "Not another two weeks."

His hands are gentle on her face. Kissing her seems the most natural thing to do, the most inevitable; the only option. He's losing count of the times they have kissed now. Hard; hungry; gentle; soft. Slow. That's what this one is: slow, and gentle, tapering.

After, his hands stay on her face, carefully pushing her hair back, stroking the line of her cheekbone. His eyes have reopened, but they are too close for focus. He looks down the space between their bodies instead, her knees folded to either side of his hips; he looks in that direction, but does really, he sees pays little attention to any of it.

Drawing back, he looks at her instead. Studies her a moment, then takes his hands from her at last, propping them to the mattress behind him, leaning back.

"I don't know what to do with you," he confesses. What he might really mean instead, or in addition:

I don't know what this is.
I don't know what you've done to me.
I don't know what to do with myself.

[Danicka Musil] Joke or not, his laughter doesn't make her stiffen and pull away, or frown. She smirks to herself, not maliciously, and does not jerk back from his hands on her face. They together are still a sweaty, spent mess, hair tousled and her back red and his legs likely still recovering. And this is okay. At the same time they are stuck, momentarily, in a quiet where there seems to be no safe distance from one another. She has not climbed off of him and rolled onto her side; he has not asked her a question and reached for her again, cutting off any chance for further conversation.

The closest thing to this was that incredibly unmasked moment after he came back from splashing cold water on his face. The frigid air of the motel room had in fact finally cooled her skin and that was why she could let herself get away with curling back against him when he asked, but there had been no attempts then by either party to shut the other up or shut themselves down. Moments later his mouth had been on her shoulder again, on her arm, on her earlobe, the back of her neck, hands traipsing over her flesh before they had each other...yet again, but not for the last time even that night.

Eventually they'll escape from this moment, too, and remember what to do with themselves. Which is stop kissing. Which is leave. Which is don't think about it. Or, in Lukas's case, think himself into circles about it. But everyone has their own way.

Her eyes, while his travel, fall closed. They don't open until he slips away, until his palms leave her face and she lifts her head slightly, watching where he's going as though she has to be more aware than she was to see if she's about to be lifted up and deposited on the mattress so he can go get his pants back on...or something. He does not do this, though. He just lies there, openly quizzical -- rather than guardedly curious -- as he only seems able to be after he's already been with her and his (their) illusions of separateness have been annihilated so completely.

And Danicka perches on his thighs just the same, tips her head to the side, and hears his confession with the seeming lack of personal investment as any priestess. That is to say, with patience, and a stillness that transcends yet simultaneously does not quite touch acceptance. And then she gives him a lopsided grin, a half of a laugh, and leans forward, putting one hand on either side of his chest. Her hair falls forward but is not long enough to touch his chest the way she gets on all fours on top of him, smirking slightly with her eyebrows high on her forehead.

"Oh, I beg to differ," she informs him.

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] He sinks back on his elbows as she moves over him. Her smirk makes the corners of his mouth turn unavoidably up. Then his weight shifts to one side, one elbow, that shoulder rising a bit higher, the muscle and tendon slinging the joint to the collarbone tensing.

He tucks her hair back behind her ear. Then he catches her by the chin, his calloused fingers light on her skin.

"Tell me your name." He's no longer laughing, or about to laugh, but the corners of his mouth remain faintly upturned -- relaxed. "Danička must be short for something."

[Danicka Musil] Though the gesture -- the way he grabs her chin after tucking her hair back as she has done for him on more than one occasion -- does not startle or frighten her, Danicka pauses a moment and then pulls her chin away from his fingers. The touch was light, and not demanding, but still she moves her face away from it. Her head remains where it is, eyes on Lukas's. There's no flash of annoyance in her expression or her eyes, so no immediate explanation for it.

What she does give him is a nod, slow and sage, a mockery of deep and ancient wisdom. Her eyes are drowsy, still; pleased, still. The corners of her own mouth hint at a smile that doesn't come, at least not yet, until she gets tired of nodding.

"I am named," she says slowly, and somewhat thoughtfully, "for my father's first mate's father."

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] She pulls away from his touch, and doesn't quite answer the question. So far as avoidances go, this is one of her less expert ones. There had been another earlier -- when he'd asked her why she was all right with all this, and she'd slid sideways out of the question so neatly he'd forgotten to ask again.

His hand falls slowly back to the counterpane. He considers her and her non-answer, the corners of his mouth no longer upturned; serious now.

"Is this another question you don't want to answer?"

[Danicka Musil] Earlier, her evasion of his question -- planned or not -- had been so stunningly well-executed partly because Lukas was, let's just admit it, quickly losing his interest in the whys and the hows and gaining greater and faster investment in what would happen when the deadbolt was thrown and there were four walls and locks between them and the rest of the world. He can't be blamed. What has happened with the two of them whenever they have been alone -- in a car, or beside the waterfront, or in a bedroom or rented room -- seems to be like air sometimes, like oxygen to the deprived, like the relief of a great weight that's been pressing on one or both chests.

Knowing he was not going to have to share her, whether with another man -- or a woman -- or the schools of people watching schools of fish, or with Sam, or with his diapproving packmates, or with anyone at all, even for a few hours...it has to be compelling. Distracting.

Something like that.

This is not an avoidance, at least not an intentional one, but he can't be blamed for thinking that, either. The reason she does not want him holding her chin is not dislike, or defiance, and he was close enough to see the pause, the hesitance, before she pulled away. In her own mind it is in the same realm as asking him to stop in the motel two weeks ago, it is in the same category as jumping into his arms and kissing him instead of just taking his pants off like a good girl, it is similar to drinking her vodka without a wince or a grimace or a gasp.

He asks her if that's just another question with an answer she wants to keep to herself, and she searches his eyes for anger, for temper, for Rage or even displeasure. It comes as naturally to her as his seriousness and his calm, watching him like she does, gauging what he might be wanting from her from moment to moment. That may change. That may not have time to change. Still:

Her brows are drawn lightly together, a look entirely vulnerable rather than upset, with him or with the question itself. Wary. And:

Her voice is quiet, when she does reply. "No one ever calls me Daniela."

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] For what it's worth, there had been no anger in his eyes.

Were this a movie, this would be a turning point: the first time he lets her answer him at her own pace, and of her own will! -- and from here on out things would be different, he would trust her, she would open up to him, all that.

But this is not a movie. And more likely than not, when the moon is rounder, and when she isn't naked over him, and --let's be honest -- when he isn't still reeling from (what was it she said?) coming so hard he saw eternity, she'll evade some question of his and he'll respond the exact same way he always has before. With anger, and coldness, and brutal insistence.

But not right now. And anyway: there's no point. She answers him after all, and if she's looking at him now, she'll see the surprise in his eyes, so unguarded it was something like wonder.

"All right," he says; as though this were some sort of contract too, some unspoken agreement. And after a pause, "What do you want me to call you?"

[Danicka Musil] For what it's worth. They've talked about that, briefly: her analysis of something he'd said, figuring that what he meant was that she was worth his time, his attention, his energy, his thought -- what have you -- if she were even capable of something more than a one-night-stand, a meaningless fuck. Without the capability, she was not worth it, and that would be that. She'd understood this cold, calculating way of looking at things and had not seemed personally offended by it, but then...Danicka seemed like she wanted to be with Sam that night. Danicka seemed happy to be abused by the Garou, to be dismissed, to be told where to be and what to do.

Danicka can, as Lukas knows, seem to be just about anything.

So, for what it's worth: the was no anger in his eyes when she told him something that for her, is deeper than the name because it is what gives the name meaning. For what it's worth, she is old enough and she has seen enough to have precious few illusions about anything, especially men she goes to bed with, and she does not expect that there is even such a thing as a turning point. She may be wrong. She's been wrong before, and has survived. From the beginning, she has known what he is. He's a Shadow Lord, which may mean nothing more than that she can play him better than most other Garou simply because she understands his Tribe better than she understands any other.

For what it's worth, though, right now the moon is a crescent and they could not even pull away from the wall or each other for the span of a few full minutes simply because of what they had done to each other, even if they aren't talking about it and neither one necessarily knows what to call it. They aren't trying to call it anything. They're talking about her name.

Danicka has so many good answers for this. What do you want to call me?, but she knows better. I don't care, which is a lie he has a solid chance of seeing through, especially right now with both of them bared in more ways than one. There are others, more evasive, more distracting, and some of them don't have words, but Danicka chooses one that is clear, and which does: "What you've always called me," she says.

Always meaning the name he heard underneath Gabbie's Americanization of it. Always meaning how she was introduced to him years ago, back before his memories coalesce into anything significant. What he's always called her is not Danny or Daniela or Miss Musil.

She takes a breath, letting it out silently through her nostrils, and leans forward to kiss his cheek, and his jawline, as though certain parts of him exist solely for that purpose, for moments like this. Danicka slides against his chest, lowering her body to his without putting all of her weight on him, and lets her lips drift towards his earlobe, suckling softly there for a moment before she whispers: "More?"

Which is not a question.

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] Lukas sinks down on his back as she moves over him, his eyes flickering shut as her mouth finds his earlobe. His hands touch at her waist, lightly, fingertips only, as though he thought a harder touch might send her, or himself dissipating to nothingness.

She asks him a question which is not a question, and his eyes open again. The ceiling is the same color as the walls, a neutral off-white with undertones of cream: an expensive color, somehow. He tilts his head back. A room like this has all the room lights on a single control panel on the nightstand, for convenience, and the corner of his mouth turns up as he returns his gaze to her face.

"Turn out the lights."

She has to crawl over him to do that, and his hands trail down to her thighs; he arches up to her, presses his mouth to the stretch of her stomach, the soft skin just below her navel. One by one the lights click off, until the light cast through the open door to the living room is all that remains.

It's dim in here, then, but not quite dark. His mouth trails up her body as she crawls back down. His eyes are closed and he takes his time; he lingers if she does, and where she wants.

At some point he finds his way back to her mouth. There's less of patience in him by then, and his kiss is hard, raw, he swaps the used condom for a fresh one and pulls her down to him, slowly, slowly, arching his head back against the bedspread for an involuntary moment when she sinks fully onto him.

He lets her set the pace this time, his hands free to caress her, touching her in long strokes, pushing back her hair, holding her face between his palms when they kiss, and when they gasp into one another's mouths.

Toward the end he closes his eyes and gives himself over completely, holding her by the hips only to feel her move, and not to guide her movement. At the last his spine arches, his head pressing back as it had at the beginning, his hips flexing upward hard enough to lift her on his body. His breath catches; then a rush of an exhale, and then his chest is heaving, his ribcage straining to exchange enough air, fast enough.

If she kisses him then, he returns it thoughtlessly, with an unfettered ferocity, freely giving up the breath he did not have.

--

Afterward, it's quieter this time. He seems drained of anything to say. His hands move gently over her back, tracing a short span of skin with a slow, steady sweep of his wrist. This is how it is for some time, minutes on end, perhaps longer. Long after his breathing and heartrate has returned to normal he stays as he is, listening to her breathe.

Eventually he draws a deeper breath than before, turns her onto her back. His leg tangles between hers when he rolls with her. He kisses her collarbone, gently, and then presses his hands to the mattress and gets up, goes to the window. She might think he means to close the drapes, but he doesn't; he merely stands there, sweat drying off his skin, looking down at the city below.

It was perhaps nine pm when they left the aquarium; nine thirty, thereabouts, when they came here. Some time has passed since then. It's a little short of midnight, and Lakeshore Drive below is relatively empty. At this height, the cars passing below are indistinct, little more than the white sweeps of headlights stringing between the ochre pools cast by the sodium street lights. It is below freezing outside, and even through the double-pane glass he can feel the chill seeping slowly through.

When he puts his hand on the glass, a rim of steam quickly forms around his hand. It lingers, a ghostly outline, after he lowers it.

His back is to her, and this creates a distance between them. For a garou, body language is as important as any other, but his is deliberately blank right now: his balance settled midway between his feet, his hands at his sides, fingers loose, not quite brushing his thighs. His back is a work of art, wide shoulders to narrow hips; his limbs are long and straight.

One hand closes slowly on itself, opens again. His back is still to her when he asks, quiet, "Why don't you stay 'til morning?"

[Danicka Musil] The look of him, tilting his head back like that and rolling his eyes upward to peer at the switches by the nightstand, makes a weird light brighten Danicka's expression. Her eyebrows are up, her smile loose but pleased, her features moves into a configuration most often seen on the faces of women who have had a small, immature animal with a bow around its neck thrust towards them, mewling helplessly or licking the tip of their noses. This expression, on Danicka's face, would warrant questioning of why she suddenly looked damn near gleeful, and that is probably why it passes so quickly, returning to a more acceptable and less out-of-place mask of half-sated warmth when he looks back and cocks that near-smile up at her.

There is, however, some bit of amusement or pleasure of delight left over in her eyes, and all he has to go on is what he just said. It was no more an order than her More? had been a question, and having no reason whatsoever to deny him now, or tease him, or defy him, Danicka simply crawls over him and stretches for the switches, flicking them one by one. Her stomach muscles react, most definitely, to the passage of his lips across them, and she shivers when they touch the flesh below her belly button. For a moment she remains there, hand on the last switch, very near squirming, fighting some urge in herself, and then dousing the last light.

She comes back, sighing at his tongue, pausing again when his mouth lands on her breasts. Danicka rests her weight on one hand, the other lifting from the mattress and the bedclothes to run fingers into his hair. Everything has slowed down, this time, as though there is no rush to join together, no rush to treat her like a whore or fuck his brains out like she said she would. It's only been like this once before, the sun aching to come up outside but not quite making it yet, Danicka looking down through the dark with his hands on her body, on her hair, on her face, as though to memorize her through every sense available to him.

When they kiss, though. When they kiss she is rubbing herself against his hip, her nipples wet from his tongue and her hands doing nothing more than holding herself up over him for the length of time it takes him to prepare for her, which is not very much time at all. Danicka is still leaning forward above him, close to him, when their hips align and with a roll of her lower half and a thrust of his they eliminate the last of the empty distance between them, little as it was by then. And she gasps, eyes falling closed and mouth left open for a second or two, hands splayed on his chest as she ignores what his palms guide her to do and grinds down on him, slowly, so slowly. His head falls back. She opens her eyes and watches him arching, waits for him to return and look at her before she moves.

And when she moves, she reaches for his hands and draws them to her breasts again, moaning -- softer now. There is nowhere to be, no one waiting anywhere for either of them as far as either of them know, and the pace that Danicka sets is in fact slower, more sensual, than anything she's ever done to him before. It is a long while before she quickens, before she rests more of her weight on him and leans forward to kiss him, drawing his breath out of his mouth and murmuring nothings in Czech, near-meaningless exaltations and encouragements, welcoming his hands on her hips, her ass, and digging her fingernails into his chest when she comes.

She's never done that before. Never let herself. She does now, riding him with her back arching, her thighs tightening, telling him in purrs of the language they both learned before all others -- though he can only guess that this is the case, with her -- a half a dozen things that he may not even be able to hear when he pushes his head back against the mattress and falls over the edge with her, a fall that happens far too fast and yet seems to take forever. She does not kiss him. Not then. She kisses him minutes later, uncounted a unticked by any noisy clock in this silent hotel room.

Danicka is panting when she kisses him, then, her body quivering slightly as though it cannot quite let go of her pleasure. Ještě ne

She is lying on him for a long time when it's over, when she has finally been let go and her body is returning to her, flesh and spirit and thought rejoining slowly as though they could not remain cohesive with Lukas inside of her and moving. Her head is resting on his chest, without pretense, hair spread over the other side of his torso and her eyelashes flicking his skin occasionally when she blinks. She does not want to be moved, when he moves her, and makes a protesting noise like a child being told it has to wake up for the day. The noise is short-lived, truncated, cut off willfully, and Danicka simply rolls onto her side, then relaxes onto her back after a moment of hesitation.

But Lukas is not crawling between her thighs and parting them, teeth at her shoulder or hand on her neck. He is just laying near her, with her, without resting his weight on her. Danicka never tenses, but the split-second of wariness passes faster than it might have, were the moon more full. She almost reaches up and touches his hair, but stops herself, and just runs her fingernails lightly, gently, up his back as he kisses his way across her chest. Danicka breathes in, but does not sigh, when he gets up and walks away.

This time she doesn't prop herself up on one elbow and watch him. She lays on her back, head turned, and drowsily blinks a couple of times, his form distinct only because there is some light outside to turn it into a silhouette. A smile tugs at one corner of her mouth when he touches the glass, but it fades when it is done. Danicka closes her eyes, thinking she may as well, not knowing how long he is going to be over there, staring at the city. One hand rests idly, loosely, on top of her stomach; the other is cast back, fingers curled towards the ceiling, hand by her head. Were he to turn around he might think her sleeping, from the steadiness of her breathing and the stillness of her form.

So she could, if she wanted, just pretend not to hear him.

Danicka does hear him, though, and her eyes slowly open. Not to look at Lukas, at the canvas of his back or at the dim, floating reflection in the windowpane. She looks at another corner, at the stars and the other buildings through the glass, and does not say anything for awhile. Her eyes track upward, to the ceiling with the patterns in it shifting because the night is long and the dark is incomplete. He cannot hear her breathing; she's an expert at breathing without making much noise at all, when she must.

Turn the windows to open French doors. Make late February into late June. Make this the ground floor rather than the twenty-third. Give him a different color hair, a slimmer build, and then have them switch places; she at the doors left open to let in a little cool night air coming off of the water, circulating in a stifled and stifling house. Take out the silence and central air, insert the sounds of bullfrogs and birds she couldn't identify then and wouldn't be able to now, the buzzing of bugs hidding in the trees and grass outside. Fill every square inch of the emptiness with the almost overpowering scent of magnolias. Give her a cigarette, a silk robe open and hanging off her shoulders. Him not above the covers but under a single sheet. And limit everything in his question to a single word, an imperative, but not a demand:

Stay.

What is she going to tell him? That it's her hotel room, she paid for this, if anyone is going to be asked to stay or go it's going to be him. That she doesn't stay til morning, just like she doesn't kiss her meaningless fucks the way she kisses him, has kissed the tiniest handful of anyones in her life the way she kisses him, and it's still different in ways she can't tell him yet. That she has to get up early (she doesn't), that someone is waiting for her (no one is), that she would simply rather not (...).

Or she could tell him that she can understand, better than he might like to know, why he is only asking her this with half a room between them and his face towards the glass rather than looking at her. She wouldn't have to say that, though. She could just do what she did at the aquarium, when he thought she was asking to hold his hand but in truth trying to show him something, tell him something without saying a single word that could be mistaken for a lie. She could do that again now, and that might be answer enough.

Danicka exhales; it catches, and she has to try again. She keeps her eyes on the ceiling.

"Are you?"

[Danicka Musil] When she kissed him, her hips rolling faster and grinding harder against his own, she purred against his lips, words in their language falling like caresses over his mouth, over his cheeks, against his throat. Don't stop, as if he would or as if he were the one riding her and not the other way around, the last syllable of the Czech a susurration of air against his skin. Good, her voice tighter even than the rest of her, straining towards something, but giving him no more than that's good as her hair falls around her shoulders. Cries to god, louder than his own from earlier, repeating the name of a deity she doesn't believe in interspersed with a

look at me -- ah! watch me fuck you

and a plaintive

why do I want you this much?

and finally

I'm coming Ó, můj bože, I'm coming...!

Til the end, breathed even while she was near screaming, gasped against his mouth: Come in me, she said in a moan so lost it was impossible to tell if she was demanding or begging or giving him permission or some strange combination of everything. Perhaps, like everything else, meaningless on its own and ultimately nothing more important than desire, given voice, and forced into language.
to Lukas Wyrmbreaker

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] Before she answers, in that silence while she considers, or thinks, or goes into her memories: in that silence, Lukas is tense without realizing it himself. It's in the way he holds himself, spine straight, shoulders back. It's in the tightness of his loins, the taut columns of weightbearing muscle at the base of his back.

She answers -- it's not an answer at all, really, but it still saps some tension from him. He half-turns to look at her over his shoulder. A moment, and then he turns fully.

His feet are silent on the deep carpet, but his weight gives his gait a certain solidity, a subaural presence that she can feel when he shifts his stance, shifts his balance, faces her.

The open window is at his back now. There are two sources of light: what ambient glow there is from without, and what indirect light there is from the living room. Caught between the two, he's a map of shadow and highlights, more the former than the latter.

"I wouldn't ask if I weren't," he replies, quiet now. Lukas has many breeds of honesty: confessional truths, unwilling truths, aggressive truths, angry truths, truths that are weapons, truths that are shields, truths that, once spoken, lose their power; truths that, once spoken, become indelible.

Or perhaps that last is true of every truth. And this one, though guarded, is as irretrievable as the rest. He draws half a breath to realize this; and then, perhaps because what he said was oblique, imperfect, he adds:

"Yes."

[Danicka Musil] When Lukas looks over his shoulder, Danicka is a pale shape against the dark covers and light-hued sheets, visible in the dark even without much moonlight streaming in or any lights on inside. She is looking at the ceiling, her chest rising when her breath hitches, but for once she does not seem to notice him looking at her. Not until he turns around, and then her eyes flick, her head turns, and she looks over at him.

Her hands have not moved from their loosely curled, gentled positions beside her head and atop her abdomen; on another night, she might be curling into her body, self-protective. She might not be this comfortable remaining uncovered with him standing there, not with her but...apart, distanced, and therefore -- again -- unsafe.

I don't trust you.

They've both said it; it doesn't bear repeating anymore.

Danicka watches him from where she reclines, not bothering to prop herself up or sit up or break the quiet and the stillness that remains even though they are no longer wrapped up in each other physically, even though they are talking. Then she takes a breath, after his Yes, and her sighed answer is almost voiceless:

"All right."

The only hint that it is a yes, that it is an I'll stay or I'm staying -- which are completely different messages, when given a closer look -- is that she nods, twice and slowly, as the words leave her mouth. Danicka swallows, then, licks her lips, and slides her hands to the bedspread, slowly sitting up. One of her legs is drawn towards her chest, not nervously, but because she is slipping fingers into the tops of her stockings and starting to slide them down, one leg at a time. She looks over at him again.

"I'm going to shower," she says, nodding her head loosely towards the bathroom of the suite. And then, daringly, or thoughtlessly, or both: "You should come with me."

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] There's a certain grace to him like this -- stripped bare, stripped of all the extraneous, all the unnecessities, until all that remains is muscle and bone, tendon and blood.

All right, she says. His chest expands with a brief and swift breath. Other than that, there's little enough, there's nothing in the way of reaction.

He watches her, though, when she sits up and starts to shed the last piece of her clothing. When she looks at him he's still looking at her, and the angle of his gaze shifts -- his eyes skate to hers and hold, unashamed to have been caught staring.

After a moment he comes toward her, crossing the space between. He reaches out. His hand covers hers for a moment, over the inside of her calf, and he's reminded all over again of how this began, at the coffee table, in the living room, back to the window. This time he doesn't peel her stockings off for her. His hand grips a moment, then releases. She finishes, laying them aside or tossing them to the floor.

He holds his hand out for hers, tilting his head in the direction of the bathroom. "Come on, then."

[Danicka Musil] Later, skin cleaned and no longer smelling or tasting of their own and each other's sweat, they are going to eventually pull the sheets and the blankets over themselves, the air turning colder and colder because their body heat no longer fills it and the drapes are open and the room is set at sixty-two. The most obvious thing for Danicka to do will be to curl up on her left side the way she always does when she sleeps, with Lukas at her back and wrapped around her. Another easily imagined positioning would be for her to slip into the crook of his arm, head on his shoulder or chest, arm and leg draped over him.

The most obvious, or even the easily imagined, never seem to be quite the way things go with Danicka, though. It isn't that she delights in being difficult, that she throws him curveballs just to see if he can hit them back. The sparring doesn't attract her, the 'witty' back and forth as though probing for weakness. Everything is a test for weakness, and there are subtler methods. But no: she does not do the unexpected, or refuse the obvious, with any thought given to how clever she is, how challenging she must be.

She is just...different.

With his hand on her calf, all she does is pause, looking up at him without expectation or words of her own. She just takes off her stockings, leaving them where the skirt and everything else fell at the foot of the bed, kicked aside at some point. And then she does take his hand, this time without hesitation, but her fingertips slide to his radial pulse for a fraction of a moment, enough to feel just a few beats on the inside of his wrist. Her hand does not lace, but wraps around his, as she gets to her feet.

In the shower she lets him touch her, or he lets her touch him, or they simply touch each other without there being any necessity for permission or request. Danicka kisses him under the stream of hot water, caresses his body, but does not wash him. She pulls his hand between her legs, she slides her own down his abdomen still slick with soap bubbles, and because this is an incredibly nice hotel with top of the line water heaters, they stay in there for a very, very long time. The feeling briefly comes back that despite any assurances otherwise it may be another two weeks. Or never.

Could always be 'never'.

It is not until fingertips are wrinkled, til skin smells like soap, til Danicka is laughing that it's going to be morning by the time they get out of there...not until she has dried her hair with a noisy machine found under the sink...not until the bed has cooled completely to make the sheets almost a shock to their skins... It is not until they lie down that Danicka crawls not into Lukas's arms, not turned away from him and pulling away from his touch, but behind him. She lays with her breasts barely touching his back, her forehead resting between his shoulderblades, her body curled slightly.

And she sleeps, the sex and the shower and all of it overtaking her in a wave moments after her head hits the pillow and their bodies settle. While she sleeps, she holds him, her right arm around his much larger torso, her right hand a half-fist against the pillow, her knuckles barely touching the flesh over his heart.

As though she were about to knock.