trust.

[Danicka] Having been here a considerably long time, Danicka has seen every exhibit, some of them more than once. She stood for a long time in front of the sharks, her coat folded over her arm, her eyes occasionally blinking. They don't bother her any more than thunderstorms do, nor do they particularly fascinate her. They are what they are, with their dead eyes and lethal-seeming movements through the water.

Eventually her footsteps brought her to the schooling fish, to the low and cushioned bench in a nook nearby. People don't avoid that corner because of Danicka's presence; they don't try to keep her from looking at them or hurry past. The Shedd will be closing in fifteen minutes, says a voice overhead. Danicka does not hear it; she has headphones in her ears, the cord slinking into her purse at her side, which sits on top of the silvery-grey trenchcoat that is just so very fetching when it's on her.

She is wearing a blue-gray V-necked dress over black stockings. The heels on her ankle boots are as high as most of the shoes she owns, taking her from 5'6" to 5'9" without any trouble or much fanfare. The sleeves on her dress are elbow-length and split, half-baring her arms through the simple ties over her biceps. She stands out only because most of the people at the aquarium are in jeans or the like; Danicka dresses like she works in an office and came straight here, or is going to a party -- on a Wednesday -- afterward, or a date.

She sits with her legs crossed at the ankle, but leans back on straight, bracing arms to watch the silver and blue flicker and flash of the fish in the enormous tank.

[Lukas] One wonders why Lukas bothers to buy a ticket into the Shedd 15 minutes from closing, but this is what he does. He doesn't bother to look at the deep ocean exhibit; nor the arctic ocean exhibit; nor the prehistoric ocean exhibit. He cuts a straight path for the Wild Reef, entering through the presumed exit, counter to the flow of normal traffic.

He passes the sharks first, and does not tarry. His pace is a good deal faster than most the visitors, save those hurrying along to see the last of the exhibits before the curators kicked them out. It's only when he's near the schooling fish that he slows.

Lukas has not bothered to remove his coat. He doesn't bother to sit, either. He stands in front of the display, his hands gently laced behind his back, and he watches the fish silently while a bubble of emptiness opens around him. The presence of an Ahroun is quite unmistakable, for those who recognize such things; the presence of a kin, purebred or not, is a little more subtle.

It's some three or five minutes before something niggles at his attention. Draws his eyes from the silent silvery whirl of fish. He turns, uncertain of what he's looking for at first -- first his profile dark against the blue, then his face, silhouetted, edged in reflected light. When he sees Danicka he knows immediately and absolutely what it is that had caught his attention, and it's too dark to see how he responds.

A beat or two. Then he comes toward her, his hands still laced behind his back. He stops an armsreach away.

There are no assumptions here. He does not assume she's here in an obtuse attempt to meet him; he does not assume she's here for him, or anyone else. Lukas regards the woman for a moment, impassive.

Then, "We should talk."

[Danicka] When Danicka sees Lukas suddenly stride up to the display, she knows its him. She just closes her eyes for a moment, and lifts her hands off the cushion behind her, sitting up straighter. When he does turn a few minutes later, she is listening to a different song, and she is leaned forward, one elbow planted on one knee and her chin in her hand. If there were anyone in this area other than Lukas by that point -- most people decided they were not going to spend their last ten minutes in the Shedd in his immediate vicinity -- she probably wouldn't sit like this, as the neckline of her dress leaves very little to the imagination when she leans forward that much.

Doesn't really matter. He's seen it all before.

She could get up and walk away in those three or five minutes, but she doesn't. She doesn't stare holes into the back of his coat, either. She looks past him, at the fish, and when he walks over her eyes lift but the rest of her doesn't, and she doesn't immediately reach up to take the headphones out of her ears. In fact, she only does this when he opens his mouth, so all she gets is

-- talk.

Danicka blinks up at him, sitting up to wrap her earbud cords around one splayed hand. When it's neatly coiled she tucks it, along with her phone, into her purse. "What?"

[Lukas] "We should talk," he repeats, patiently.

[Danicka] She looked tired the last time he saw her, both in the morning and the night before. She looked to him to be bored, disinterested, and apathetic. That is not how Danicka is feeling, but Lukas has no more ability to read her emotions than he has ability to fly.

Which only means: sometimes he can.

She looks tired now, too, though not with dark circles under her eyes or constant yawning. She just looks flat, her eyes dull and her expression unflinching. "Did you track me here?"

[Lukas] This makes him blink, but not out of startlement. His lashes are dark -- they sweep over his glittering pale eyes, slow, and it's something like amusement; something like dismissal.

"No," he says, softly.

He draws a breath then, and there's no reason for it, none at all. A moment later he holds his hand out, ostensibly to help her to her feet. She can read it how she likes.

"Let's take a walk. They're closing anyway."

[Danicka] The question amuses him, seems unimportant to him, but Danicka asked with a tone of defeat. This is what she expects: Garou that simply appear in her home, Garou that track their Kinfolk down like prey, Garou that lash out and hit her across the face. It could be argued that she has no reason to expect this from Lukas. It could also be argued -- and shown to be true -- that every time he is amused by these expectations or dismissive of her questions, Danicka moves a little farther back into that closed-up place he said he hates for her to go.

She does not take his hand when he offers it, but that may be because she's not looking. He doesn't say I want or Would you. He says Let's, and so she drops her head as she picks up her coat and her purse, getting her things together and standing up. If she noticed his hand and ignored it, she covers it well, and then nods towards the direction of the exit. After you.

[Lukas] The thing is -- when his hand is ignored, Lukas doesn't grind his teeth. He doesn't grow angry, or hurt, or any of the things one might expect. He drops his hand back to his side, then laces it again with the other -- one palm gripping the other wrist, loosely.

She gets her things together, stands. He tips his head toward the exit.

They walk in silence past the crowds and the tourists and the locals, almost all of them heading uniformly out now, only a few standing in the large rotunda, waiting for the rest of their party to assemble.

Lukas is a party of one, and so is Danicka. They are briefly associated, but it cannot be said that they are quite together tonight.

Having never removed his coat, there's nothing for him to put back on. He pushes open one of the glass doors that front the Shedd, holding it long enough for her to catch it on her way out.

Grant Park is dark by night, with only pathlamps to light their way. But then, one supposes an Ahroun of Thunder has less to fear from the dark than most.

Lukas is quiet for some time longer as they walk. The pace he sets is easy, a stroll; but his thoughts are his own, masked behind a carefully blank facade. Eventually, when they're a good hundred yards or so from the Aquarium, he speaks.

"I need you to do something for me, Danička." She's perhaps not altogether paranoid for assuming he'd tracked her here. He's so level and so careful with his words, laying them out with such great care, that they are almost certainly preconsidered.

Only -- they're not, really. They've been swimming in the murk of his subconscious, at the edges of his mind, for days. But it wasn't until he saw her behind him, near the schooling fish, that they surfaced -- began to string into sentences.

Anyhow:

"I need you to stop expecting me to read your mind when you're doing everything you possibly can to assure that I can't." This is the first time he looks at her since they've left the Shedd, and his regard is hard -- not angry, but unflinching. "If you expect me to react sympathetically, you need to show me some hint of what's going on below. And if you expect me to continue treating you with some level of consideration and regard, you need to afford me the same.

"Put plainly: I think I've compromised far too much of myself already for this, and for you. I can't and I won't tolerate your accusations of self-interest and self-motivation simply because I couldn't read what the hell was going on with you the last time we met. If you want this ... liaison to continue, you need to either expect less of me, or give me more to work with."

He pauses. They're a good hundred fifty, two hundred yards from the Shedd already, and the path lamps are a pale, fluorescent white. When he turns to face her, his face is a chiaroscuro of shadows and light; his eyes oddly gentle.

"If you want this to continue," he adds; it's not so much a question as an option, an escape route.

[Danicka] Which is all very nice.

Danicka shifts her bag to one hand as she slides her arm into her coat. It's switched to her other hand so she can slide her other arm in. All of this is done while walking, and done quite smoothly; she is nothing if not a capable multi-tasker. The coat is, however, left unbuttoned as they stride forward, and she doesn't look at him. He wants to talk, which she interprets -- apparently correctly -- as meaning that he has something to say. So he says it, and Danicka listens.

It's cold outside, but compared to the weather she's used to coming up off of lakes and weighing down on New York City, this is nothing. She has run along a sidewalk wearing nothing but a cocktail dress in weather like this and been absolutely fine. Danicka doesn't shiver, or shudder, at the chill. She is walking alongside him, guessing about halfway that they aren't going immediately to one car or another.

When he pauses, she looks once at him, and then reaches into her bag. All the time he's spoken she's been so withdrawn, so placid, so...distant. The last time he saw her was the same, except for nearly boiling-over emotions she quickly tamped down or sublimated. The last real surge of emotion he's seen from her was a sob as she bent over the kitchen counter in her apartment, and he's only ever seen her cry once before that. Even those tears didn't get very far, with this woman.

Without even eye contact, he has no way to know how she's feeling about anything he's said. She hasn't even tensed her shoulders. The most likely prospect is that she hasn't even been listening, but that's not really the case. He'll make his assumptions or he won't. Her words, when Danicka finally offers them, aren't very much to go on. She is pulling a cigarette and a lighter from her purse. She is speaking to him instead of lighting it, but they're there now, waiting in her bare hand.

"Do you?"

She sounds tired. She also sounds dubious.

[Lukas] There's -- a shift between them, a discrepancy between how they are now and how they were ten days ago at the Affinia. There's a distance between; a distinct and likely deliberate withdrawal on her side, and a -- certain apathy, perhaps, on his, which could be just as deliberate.

Both have their roots in their last, rather disastrous meeting.

Lukas gives her question serious thought. He gives it time and consideration, his brow furrowing faintly, his eyes lifting from her to scan the dark treeline, the winding paths dotted by lights.

"I don't know," he replies, finally.

There's a pause; he's clearly considering whether or not to say more. In the end he's honest as he ever is. "If you'd asked me Tuesday morning, or even before I saw you tonight, I would have said no." A quick flexion in his jaw; there and then gone. "Now I'm simply uncertain."

[Danicka] That isn't saying much for either of them, that a bad night and equally-bad-if-not-much-worse morning would be enough to splatter whatever it is that they both seem to have thought at one point or another is worth all the other bullshit. Danicka doesn't seem to have much of a reaction to his first answer, which is -- as always -- one of the most trustworthy, reliable things he could say to her.

She moves to light her cigarette after this, and perhaps because she doesn't tell him whether or not she wants this to continue, or how she feels about what could be construed as an ultimatum, he goes on. Her lighter flares to life, and the end of the Dunhill turns red, and she takes one very long first drag, exhaling to the side. Her eyes move back up to his face.

"Why didn't you come to bed with me on Monday night?"

[Lukas] There's a faint laugh, rather humorless.

"You closed the door." All that remains now is a sardonic curl at the corner of his mouth. "I didn't know how to read that."

[Danicka] "...to give you privacy," Danicka explains quietly, and about as gently as she is capable of right now. It's considerable, actually, and worth remarking upon that she has that much for him.

"I waited up for awhile," she goes on, and takes another pull from her cigarette, "but ended up figuring you were only there so you wouldn't be freaking out or something and went to sleep."

[Lukas] Lukas is quiet for a moment. His expression stills for a moment, blank, and then he frowns.

"I didn't know how to read that," he replies, quietly.

He starts walking again, stopping only if she doesn't follow. If she does, they pass from light into shadow, and her cigarette is briefly the only light -- a dull red glow that casts some faint light back on her face, on her fingers.

[Danicka] Danicka doesn't walk. She sighs in exhale. "You know what? Just...come over to my goddamn apartment; Marty's still in the fucking hospital." She starts walking again, this time towards the parking lot, this time at a far faster clip. "We can just...talk there."

[Lukas] This time it's Lukas that pauses for a moment; the space of a few seconds, a decision. Then he follows her, catching up in a few strides before matching his gait to hers.

"What's Martin doing in the hospital?"

[Danicka] There is really no need for her to slow down. So her hair is off her shoulders and her jacket is blown open and she is smoking that cigarette like a demon to get through more of it before she reaches the BMW; Lukas knows it didn't smell like smoke the one and only time he has been in it. Nor does her apartment smell like cigarettes, even fine, expensive, quality cigarettes.

"Recovering from a heart attack," she says, with a huff of semi-surprised, unhappy laughter.

[Lukas] There's a beat of pause. "Is that what was going on, Tuesday?"

[Danicka] "That," she says, glancing up to make sure she is not going to get run over as she crosses between lot aisles, "is what was going on on Monday." She strides quickly across, and picks up where she left off as she starts passing bumper after bumper towards her own.

"When you showed up I'd been home for maybe twenty minutes."

[Lukas] Lukas follows her easily, without hurry, without falter. His stride is long and smooth, picking up as she does, relaxing back to a distance-eating pace as she does.

That shouldn't surprise anyone. He is, after all, Garou and an Ahroun and a Shadow Lord. Strength and assurance is par for the course.

Another pause in his words, though. Then, "Why didn't you tell me, Danička?"

[Danicka] Her steps pull up short, not in reaction to anything he's said, or what he's asked. She drops her cigarette to the pavement, damp from earlier rains, and crushes the cherry of her cigarette quite thoroughly under the heel of one ankle boot. This may seem odd, especially coming from a city girl, but she pulls a tissue from her purse, bends, and picks up the cigarette rather than leaving it, shoving it in her pocket. It is in there with another tissue, but that one was used to wipe mud off her palm earlier.

What did you do today?
I asked a five year-old what a worm said to her. And you?

Danicka is at her car. She doesn't go on walking but turns her head over her shoulder, looking up at him. Her eyebrows are up. "So you could belittle my friend for being weak? Or laugh at me for caring? Or ignore it completely and go back to talking about those fucking Spirals?" She frowns, and though the words are harsh, she just looks drained. Her expression is almost a wince, in fact.

[Lukas] She pauses to look over her shoulder at him. He pauses as well, not going automatically to the passenger's side. He drove himself here; one imagines if they were to move this conversation to her apartment, he'd drive himself there as well.

There's a silence, and he's frowning.

"Danička," he says then, and evenly, "when I don't know something about you, I try to find out. When you don't know something about me, you assume. And you assume the worst. And you're often wrong."

A beat. His expression doesn't change; his eyes don't falter.

"I'm sorry to hear that about Martin," he adds; if he's lying here, he's a better liar than she ever gave him credit for. "I hope he's better soon. I won't pretend he means anything to me. But he means something to you, and that would have been enough for me, had you told me."

[Danicka] Her silence when he speaks can be interpreted as agreement, or lack of disagreement. Maybe by now he knows that's not true but he can't fucking tell. And that's the problem. That's what they're talking about, even though before he saw her sitting on that bench he would have said that he didn't want to be with her.

Danicka's eyes aren't blank, not like they were before. There's more life in them, more fervor, but not by much. It's a guttering lamp, briefly flaring and likely soon to go out again. "...Can you really blame me for not assuming that if I told you how I was feeling that day you would have suddenly turned into this super-supportive, understanding guy who wasn't about ready to break something because I didn't want to talk about what happened at the park a week before?"

[Lukas] His mouth twists at the words, super-supportive, understanding guy -- it's not quite humor, and not even close.

"No," he replies. "But it doesn't change the fact that you knew what I wanted to address and why -- and I had no idea at all. Can you blame me for failing to properly sympathize?"

It's only a rhetorical question; he goes on. Not in words, quite, but in a silence -- he looks over the parking lot, the Aquarium-goers returning to their cars and leaving. When his attention returns to her he speaks.

"You know, the bottom line isn't even what you tell me or you don't, Danička. The bottom line is I need some modicum of trust from you. You can't assume that I won't -- belittle your friend for being weak, or laugh at you for caring. But you can trust that I won't. You can trust that my interests are not completely self-centered."

[Danicka] [Willpower -1: You Are a Grown-Ass Woman.]

[Danicka] A couple of weeks ago, Danicka did -- it's been said once or twice -- come close to dying. Then there was that night at the Affinia. Then, a week later, that horrendous night-and-morning at her apartment. Not quite two days have passed since then. He knows now that on Monday her roommate had a heart attack, but does not know that Danicka spent ten hours in the hospital wearing her workout clothes, making phone calls and sitting in molded plastic chairs, smelling of her own sweat and watching Martin fade in and out of lucidity.

He knows now that the last thing she expected would be for Lukas to care about the heart attack and he can only assume that she doesn't believe he would care about its effect on her because she's not giving him anything to contradict that point...but he doesn't know that after she left the hospital she picked up Martin's daughter at O'Hare and dropped her off at a hotel by Northwestern. He knows that she was so exhausted that night that she cried tears that were completely different from the ones sliding over his shoulder as she held onto him at the Affinia, and he knows that she had only been home for twenty minutes, but he doesn't know that now she is not sure what is going to happen to her, living in that apartment and not knowing what is going to happen, exactly, with Martin.

Lukas doesn't know, because Danicka hasn't told him, that she's never lived alone in her life, and that on the occasions when her roommate has not been down the hall she has slept so fitfully that she wakes up almost as drained as she was when she laid down. Lukas doesn't know, because Danicka hasn't told him, that she doesn't care about what the Spirals may have wanted because knowing won't save her next time, and nothing really will if she doesn't run fast enough or someone stronger than she is isn't there. Lukas doesn't know, because Danicka hasn't told him, that it isn't that she doesn't fear death, it's that she's been far too well acquainted with her own powerlessness for so long that she's found it better to just...not think about it. And accept it.

It's really the words you can trust that start it.

She has her head bowed after he points out that she knew what he wanted to talk about, what was upsetting him, why he was so goddamned angry and at a loss, and she told him nothing but that she was 'tired'. He expected her to care that he didn't want her to die. She didn't think it would matter to him that ...well, anything. He's asking her for more, really, than she can quite bear to give up. He keeps saying that damned word and she can't quite handle it, so when he says that she can't blame him, or asks her if she can, Danicka looks at the asphalt instead of at Lukas.

Her eyes don't track back up to him afterward, and she just crosses her arms over her stomach, loose and low, when he says the T word the first time. Her lower lip, unseen, is quivering the second time. But she reigns it in. Danicka controls it, and doesn't sinff. Because god forbid someone hear her, right? The parking lot is emptying out. They've been here more than a couple of times now, watching that happen. She keeps herself disciplined long enough to lift her head up again, stronger than the average human yet weaker than many Kinfolk her age, yet weaker than any Kinfolk with two Garou in her family has excuse to be.

"I just...I'm sorry," she says, and it may strike him how rarely he hears these words out of her mouth when she is not trying to get out of something. They sound like they actually have meaning, for once. "I just..."

Which is where the first tear comes in, and the first sniff. Danicka looks away, and then down, but she keeps trying to talk through the tears that are obviously still coming. If he looks carefully he can see them falling, and groan inwardly as he realizes that this woman is weeping. She's wept the last three times he's been around her.

"...wanted you to be with me, and make me feel...the way you do." She can't say it, or else doesn't know how, because she doesn't explain from there how, exactly, he makes her feel. Danicka has started crying hard enough that speaking itself is difficult for her, so who knows if she could explain, even if she wanted to, even if she knew. Then again, Lukas is not an idiot. He knows from experience how many of his questions get answered before they are both naked, before they've fucked, or whatever they call it. He knows how she will try, sometimes, to tell him the truth afterward, and not seem as though it is like wrenching her own heart out of her chest to do so.

Maybe that's how he makes her feel.

Danicka leans back until her ass hits the trunk of her car, her legs stretched out in front of her, and lifts her hands to press their heels against her eyes. She has started crying, and not just a few tears as he's seen before but in earnest, sharp bouts of emotion that shake her shoulders. "I know...that I'm completely fucked, and this is so fucking pathetic...I just..."

Whatever she would have said then is lost in a gulp of air, another harsh sob.

[Lukas] Another man might be vaguely embarrassed now, to be caught in a parking lot with a woman who was not sniffling, not weeping prettily, but actually sobbing. Another Shadow Lord might suspect her tears are artifice, are a carefully constructed sham designed to put him off his guard, change his mind, quell his anger -- something.

Lukas is neither embarrassed nor suspicious. This doesn't mean he's unaffected. It's the third time in as many meetings that she's broken down in tears -- that he's made her cry. It has not yet inured him.

It does not make him groan inwardly. It makes him flinch, inwardly and outwardly, though in the latter case, it's controlled, it's reined back, it's compressed to the faintest flicker at the corner of mouth and eye.

And he does not reach for her. He stands where he is, an arm's reach away, then a little more as she sinks against her car and presses her hands to her eyes. He's glad when she does that; it spares him from having to be seen, gives him room to wince openly, to look away himself, to look at the asphalt and the neighboring car's bumper as though some answer, some response, some proper reaction might be written there.

All he sees is the distorted, vague reflection of himself and her -- made stumpy by the convex surface of the car, made indistinct by the imperfect reflective surface, made dark-tinted by the color of the paintjob.

So he looks back at her, and by then she's not even talking anymore, she's just crying, and he's just watching, and an onlooker would find this unbelievably cold, terribly callous and cruel, though he doesn't mean it that way. In some strange way, Lukas means this as a mercy.

He takes a step closer after a moment. He doesn't touch her, doesn't hush her, doesn't hold her or stroke her hair or any of the things another might have.

Instead -- he says, very gently, but with an emphasis on every single word:

"You are not pathetic."

[Danicka] Give her this much credit: she doesn't argue with him, or stand up and throw her arms around him seeking a strong, warm shoulder to bawl on. Danicka doesn't even want to be crying right now, that much is obvious. She's fighting it with just about everything in her and right now it isn't enough, and so for about two straight minutes she is sitting there at the edge of her car crying into her hands, while the man who has been intermittently fucking her brains out and telling her things he hasn't dared say aloud to anyone else stands there and looks...well. Awkward.

Luckily, Danicka no more sees his wincing or shifting gaze than he sees the tears running down her face, and then he tells her that she's not pathetic. Firmly, without touching her or softening his tone, and she sniffs. She drops her hands, taking a deep breath, and after another fifteen or twenty seconds -- and another few breaths -- she looks up.

It's not fair.

It's not fair that when she cries she looks like this, still. Her face isn't distorted, and though her scleras are obviously irritated, the redness gives her eyes a strange ferocity and wildness that is compelling, rather than repellant...or even more attractive. Just different. It isn't fair that she's beautiful, or that her nose isn't running, or that even with her cheeks stained with saltwater she seems so much more alive than she does when serene. Her cheeks are flushed, but the skin around her eyes isn't mottled or blotchy. A few more tears escape when she looks up at him, but she doesn't suddenly burst into further tears.

"I didn't say I was pathetic," she argues, almost petulantly. "I said this was pathetic."

Danicka lifts her hand and wipes at her cheek with the back of her hand. She is either not wearing mascara or it is positively godlike in nature and requires a chisel to get off of her lashes, because there are no tell-tale black streaks down her face or smudges around her eyelids. She licks her lips; tastes salt. She opens her mouth; goes back to an earlier moment in the conversation, before her hundred and twenty second war with her own humanity and weakness.

"Do you...at least get why I wasn't just bursting to tell you all my problems on Monday?" she asks quietly, sighing.

[Lukas] Danicka makes the point that she said this, not I, was pathetic. Lukas lifts his eyebrows, looks down; it is not a gesture of disbelief. It's something closer to surrendering the point, but then his eyes flicker back to hers, and hold.

"This isn't pathetic, either."

They look at one another for a moment. She returns the conversation to where it was before she'd fallen apart, and perhaps it should bother him, or her, or both of them, that she's done exactly that so often lately, and in his presence.

Fallen apart.
Come undone.

And -- and he sighs then, suddenly, and some of the cool assurance leaves him; he raises a hand and rubs at his own eyes, though she's never even seen tears in his eyes before, and quite likely never will. Still: he rubs, he sighs, and then he looks at her, plainly.

"Of course I understand." It's not quite dismissal, but it is quiet, and absolute. "I understand completely."

Another silence, then. She looks where she will. Lukas looks at her, though not at her eyes; at her mouth now, the point of her chin. It's only a place to rest his eyes as he thinks, consults with himself. When he's ready he meets her eyes again.

"I never thought what I'm asking would be easy for you."

[Danicka] To an outsider, this entire exchange might be humorous. It would take a very special sort of outsider, one unaffected by Lukas's Rage and unconcerned about heart attacks, but her insistence that it is the crying that is pathetic and not her, that she would never say I am pathetic, joined by Lukas just standing there while she cried her eyes out...well. For the right audience, high humor.

Danicka is bothered by how much she has come undone lately, in his presence. It's the decision to let him see it rather than getting in her car and driving off, or going back inside since the Shedd will be open another three or four minutes and maybe they could have let her use the bathroom. Danicka doesn't run away when she cries, and does it bother her? Yes. But not for the most obvious reasons.

He speaks, after rubbing his eyes and sighing. He speaks again, after watching her face while she looks across the small distance of cold air at him. Danicka doesn't answer for awhile, and then just sighs herself.

"All right," she says, in a tone of voice not too far off from the one his own took on when he had her against a hotel room door and she was telling him now and it's okay.

She gets up, rising to stand straight in front of him. "Are you coming?"

[Lukas] Lukas pauses only for a second; then he just nods.

--

They part at her car then. He's not parked too far off, though he hadn't seen her car upon arrival. He hadn't bothered to look; who would? Besides, silver BMWs are everywhere in this part of town, economical downturn or not, and the parking lot had been more crowded then.

It's emptier now. He can see her taillights as she pulls away, while he's getting into his Lincoln. It's secondhand -- and now she knows why -- but it drives well, and has been well taken care of. He follows her, but only loosely. Eventually cars come between them and he gets left behind at a red light, and this is okay.

She arrives first. She doesn't have to look for parking either. A building like this has covered parking for its residents. A building like this, downtown, does not necessarily have parking for its guests. Lukas circles the block twice before he finds a spot, and this is okay too.

This is okay because he doesn't mind the extra minutes. It's time to think; time to take inventory of himself and his thoughts, time to figure out how he went from being rather certain that he'd be fine, just fine, if Danička Musil never entered his line of sight again, to sensing her at the Shedd long before he saw her, to seeing her and needing to take a breath before he could hold his hand out to her, whether or not he thought she was even going to take it at all.

From No. to I don't know to Yes, because it's worth it.
Because it's worth everything.
...but only if trust is in the picture.

Which, somehow, is worse -- more raw, more indefensible -- than anything that's ever come before.

There are mirrors in the MKZ, and he could look into them as he thinks; he could look at himself as if to ask himself how and why and what are you thinking, for the love of fuck? but he doesn't. He looks through the windshield for a moment or two, and then he gets out.

The door shuts behind him with a solid thump. The lights flash as the locks arm. She's probably already made it up to her apartment in the intervening minutes; he pushes the button for her intercom, and offers only a "Je to mě." if she asks.

[Danicka] He has no comprehension of how much she trusts him, how much he knows that he could betray her with, embarrass her with, hurt her with. In Danicka's eyes it's almost intolerable how much she's given over to this asshole. She thought about it, too, about how she'd feel if she never saw him or spoke to him again. If she sincerely needed something or if her brother were to ask she could give them Milo's name -- not knowing that he is not, actually, her guardian in this city -- and it wouldn't matter if she ever spoke another two words to Lukas.

Lukášek.

There is an underground parking garage for residents. He never even sees Danicka between the Shedd and her doorway. He doesn't even hear her voice when he presses the button on the intercom; she just waits for those three words, and then buzzes him up.

The fact that she has cried in front of him. Laid down and pulled him over her. The fact that she was more willing to have him sleep in her apartment than go back to the Brotherhood with him...the fact that she brought him here now when the goddamned W was closer and more neutral and not her home. She said at the start that she doesn't trust him, and doesn't point out to him all the ways that she has, that she does. He doesn't expect that what he's asking is going to come easily to her; she feels half-forced to give him more than she feels safe with, or else --

-- or else it's not worth it to him.

When he gets to the door of 23-C and knocks, Danicka's right there, and her eyes are clear now, her face clean. She's taken her boots off -- they're sitting near the door in the entryway -- and her coat is hung up. She has brushed her teeth as a mode of recovery from the cigarette, and he knows this because as soon as he is inside she reaches for him the way he reached for her the last time he was here, when she all but turned her face away from kissing him...but she doesn't press her lips against his. She lays one hand on the back of his neck and rises up on her toes but when she lifts her face to his she just exhales slightly, as though she was going to kiss him but for some reason has stopped.

"Prosím, Lukáš," she says, resting her brow against his.

[Lukas] Even in her heels, Danicka is a good half-a-head shorter than Lukas. Without, she must rise on her toes to kiss him -- to press her brow to his -- and truthfully, he must bow his neck to allow it.

There's a second where it seems he might not. There's a second when she rises on her toes and reaches up to him, and his hand lifts, and his fingers wrap around her forearm as though to stop her, or peel her off.

Then: something like a relenting, his hand opening again, smoothing down the length of her arm, down her back. Both his hands on her waist then, and his head bowing, his neck bending beneath her hand. His forehead touches hers and he closes his eyes for a moment, for the moment, inhales the moment.

A fragment of thought:
I wish I didn't...

It doesn't complete itself. His hands draw back to himself; without ceremony, he shuts the door behind himself. Peels his jacket from his shoulders and lets it fall. Leather has a certain weight, a certain softness and thickness -- it slaps lightly to the floor tiles and folds on itself, and by then he's put his hands back on her body, he lifts her by the waist against himself, slowly, not suddenly, turns his face up toward hers with something like a sigh.

[Danicka] It's very simple. She reaches for him not with the expectation that he will pull away or push her back but as though she recognizes that it is not her turn. This hesitance is not natural from her, is not how it was from the start, but it has evolved. Every time she has moved quickly it has been slightly dangerous thereafter. It is risky to push him, even on a moon that keeps getting more and more slender as it wanes away from half.

Danicka doesn't want to get eviscerated in her own home, but as he slides his fingers around her wrist he can sense a vibrant tension running all through her arm. As his palm relaxes and slides down her back, as his other hand joins its partner on her waist, Lukas can feel how much she is holding back. He can feel how hard it is to wait for him.

Or he may read it as fear.

She reaches past him as he's taking off his jacket and flicks the lock home with a muffled thud. Her dress is as soft as the one she wore that night, clings to her, swishes, slides off her arms where the fabric is split for the sake of fashion and not practicality. She's waiting for him -- always seems to be waiting for him, when he does finally move to touch her -- and sighs with a sound far more like contentment than resignation when he picks her up. It isn't difficult; the woman weighs less than she should for her height and far less than what he's simply physically capable of slinging around. Danicka presses her hands on his shoulders, her legs wrap slowly around him, and bends her head to his as he is lifting his face.

There it is. The back-and-forth is gone, the two of them are in contact, and whatever wishes he's making and not finishing don't really matter because Danicka is kissing him, warm and slow, like she hasn't so much as seen him since that morning in the downtown hotel. She hasn't seen him. Not like this. Hasn't felt him. Hasn't been close to him the only way she really knows how. Danicka kisses him, and doesn't stop after a few seconds to speak. Danicka doesn't stop, period.

[Lukas] It's not fair.

It's not fair that whatever else is going on, whatever else goes on, this should feel so ... natural. And right. As though he

(belongs here)

has been looking for this even before he realized this existed. As though -- ... the thought falls apart there; there's no need to go on, because she kisses him then, and he kisses her, and it's warm, and slow, and he thinks, illogically, Jste jaro.

His hand has opened over her back. She's slender for her height, and once upon a time she was simply small, not only slender but slight, short; the Kvasnička children were nearly of a height with her, though they were both younger -- one by a few months, the other by some two or three years. He does not remember this. Times like this he barely remembers what he did yesterday, or the week before; he barely remembers why he was angry with her at all.

Because he was. Angry, that is. He was angry enough to leave her alone in her apartment; angry enough to not speak to her for days, and not intend to again for ... however long that might last. But not so angry as to shirk his place and his responsibilities and his goddamn duties, and not go to Grant Park at all; not too angry to comb over the Park's penumbra, to assure himself that three Dancers were all there were, and --

-- and his hand has found the zipper to her dress, and he draws it down, and now there's skin under his palm, and the fabric of her bra or her slip or whatever she might wear beneath it, and their mouths part and he angles his head to kiss her throat.

"Pokud bychom měli jít?" he asks her, a low murmur, rough: some part of him, the monstrous part, always held in check, always held back, except, of course, when it isn't.

[Danicka] She cannot forget who she is, or where she is, or -- worst of all -- why she has missed this so badly. Sure, it may not be fair that this is when it works, without hitch or hesitation. It is certainly unfair that Lukas is with this woman and the only time she will talk even openly to him is after they've been fucking for a solid thirty minutes or so. It is not fair that even then, she gives him half-answers and timid truths that do not tell him the stories he actually needs to understand her.

It is not fair that when she kisses him it ceases to matter why she holds back so much, and not fair that with her body pressed up against his the memory of his own name starts to unravel, much less the memory of why he was upset with her or what he did yesterday or what it was like the last time he came to this apartment. She hasn't bothered to turn on any lights; all the illumination is coming from the city outside that massive wall of windows. It is dim, and flickering, and multicolored against his face.

No woman wears the sort of lingerie he's seen on Danicka every single day. Not to walk around town in. Surely not. This is, however, the first time they have met randomly in Chicago and ended up like this. Every other time, one has called to the other. Every other time, Danicka has known that she was going to see him, and the fact that she was wearing lace and satin underneath jeans and a t-shirt could be chalked up to fucking with his head, driving him out of his mind...something intentional.

She didn't know she was going to see him tonight, and yet what he feels under his hand when he gets the zipper down the back of her dress is at least accented with lace, at least partly made of satin. That isn't fair, either, but in an entirely different way.

Danicka, eyes closed, tilts her head back to give him access to her throat in a way that is so filled with lust that it seems she doesn't think twice about the fact that she is giving her neck to a goddamned predator. She doesn't think twice about what that inherently submissive gesture calls out to his instincts. She just does it, welcoming his mouth and sighing in pleasure as her dress slips away from her shoulderblades.

"Hloupá otázka. Chci tě v mé posteli," she answers, and shivers.

[Lukas] Had it not been a week, more, since he last had her, this, Lukas might've laughed then -- quiet and hushed, but a laugh. But it has been a week, more. It's been ten days, and what happened in between has made him doubt whether or not this would happen again at all; whether he even wants this after all, at all.

These doubts are falling away like scraps from a burning flag; stones from a ruin.

Laughing is not on his mind now. Her dress is falling open at the back, but her arms are still around him, and she's pressed against him; there's no room for it to pool off. He doesn't care. He undoes the clasp of her bra next, and he doesn't bother to set her down -- he doesn't lift her in his arms like a bridegroom, either, or throw her over his shoulder like a barbarian. They wind down the hall exactly as they are, entwined, kissing, half-blind, half-drunk with their own desire.

They pass the short hall to Martin's bedroom. His shoulder brushes the wall. The kitchen opens to their left, and the living room with its spectacular view yawns ahead of them. It occurs to him that he sees the city from this height most often in her company, or in the company of his celestial totem; he doesn't bother to analyze it. He takes a right turn instead -- if her bedroom door is closed he bumps her against it as he's groping for the doorknob, and then it's open, he catches her back against his body before they can overbalance, and now his hands are peeling her dress from her shoulders, and he has not stopped kissing her in all this time, her mouth or her jawline or her throat, and now her shoulder.

Windows in here too, windows that open to the south, a room that would be brilliant and airy by day, shadowed by night. He sets her down on the bed and this is the first time his arms, his hands have completely left her since he lifted her at the door, and it's only to reach back and pull his shirt off, which is a long-sleeved t-shirt, dark grey, given some flair by the opened, single-button collar, but these are details which don't matter anymore because he's pulling it over his head, tousling his hair, and dropping it on the ground.

Lukas finds her hands and draws them to him, not to guide them to his belt but to simply open her hands over his body, the cut lines of his chest and stomach, his wide shoulders. He helps her out of her clothes, and there seems to be no need for words now; he pulls her dress down as she shrugs out of it, strips her bra down as she pulls her arms out of the straps. Their arms cross between them as he covers her with his hands, his palms against her breasts, warm, with a roughness one might not expect from a man of his apparent means (though that is half a lie); and a roughness one absolutely expects from a garou of his moon phase.

He remembers her asking -- why do I want you so much? -- and he hadn't had an answer for her then, doesn't have one now; hadn't asked her the same question back then, and doesn't now. Whatever urge he may have had to do so is silenced when he kisses her again -- sudden as a storm -- and his hands are tugging at her dress now, his arm is coming around her to press her against him and lift her so he can push the dress down past her hips, down her legs.

[Danicka] It has been a damn sight more than a week, and Danicka would be quite willing to tell him this if she were not moving to kiss him again, tightening her thighs on either side of him. If she never wanted him again it would have been easy enough to ensure. She wouldn't need to manipulate him to get out of this or cheat on him; and he thinks she doesn't trust him, but for now she believes that if she were to tell him she doesn't want him anymore, that she's done with him and this, he would go. She may not believe that can last, that in a matter of months or years he wouldn't refuse to release her, but for now she believes it.

The thing is, she still wants this. She questioned it, and that is as troubling to her as the fact that she does in fact still want this, but it's the truth. Danicka says aloud what he thought, almost two months ago:

I want this man in my bed.

And he takes her there.

As Lukas tries to walk and undress her and kiss her and carry her all at once -- and there really is no avoiding a certain awkwardness here, a jumbling of hands and elbows and mouths -- Danicka helps him strip away whatever the hell sort of bra that is on her, the strap dropping down her bicep after the edge of her dress while his mouth falls onto her shoulder.

The door to the master suite of the apartment is open. It's unlikely that Lukas sees the kitchen as they pass by it, unlikely that he sees or smells anything that is not Danicka, at the moment, but there's an empty pizza box on the counter. The carafe of the coffeemaker was never cleaned out this morning. There are dishes in the sink. He'll see all this later. Danicka has said she can cook and clean and bake, she can knit and mend, but he has no real proof of any of these things beyond her word.

They pass her bathroom first and the fleeting impression he gets is bright colors and the scent of soap, of water, of Danicka. The door to her walk-in is ajar and he can smell fabric softener and because the hamper is in there, Danicka again. The scent of her saturates this space, fills his nostrils. This is her den. This is where she sleeps. The color of the carpeting and the paint on the walls is indistinct; pale. Two windows face the south, curving almost south-east. The hinting edge of sunrise will come through those windows in the morning; they have no curtains, and the white wood-slat blinds are pulled up. There is no light outside bright enough to strike the prism hanging in one window and cast rainbows on the floor.

The only major piece of furniture in the room is the queen-sized bed, made of blond wood and jutting out from the west wall. The bed is unmade, the sheets and thick down bedspread some light color that right now is just one more shade of gray. Her nightstand has a single drawer, a small lamp on the top, and a line of books on the lower shelf. She has no pictures on her walls, no plants, no desk, and while all of this is a blur right now he will see it in the morning...if he stays.

If he can stand to stay in this bed, with the obviously brand-new, pillow-topped mattress and the sinfully soft sheets and everything in here smells like her, like her hair, like her skin, like her sex. This seems like it could be anyone's room, except to what senses of his he can process right now, it is undeniably hers, undeniably her.

She kisses him once more, fiercely, before she allows him to put her down on that bed, but Danicka does not cling to him as he tries to pull away, but she never has and it's unlikely she would start now. She sinks down onto the mattress on her knees and when Lukas goes for her hands he finds them already all over him, sliding over the muscles in his stomach and covering his chest. Her mouth follows, the tip of her tongue flicking one nipple while her thumb and forefinger find and tease the other. Her arms are, at least, out of the sleeves of her dress, out of the straps of her bra, which has fallen unceremoniously to the carpet along with his shirt.

There's no art to the way his hands move on her, cup over her breasts, stroking the undersides and running his thumb over her nipples. There's no choreography to the way Danicka kisses his skin, licking him and then lightly biting his chest as though she would eat him alive given half a chance. There's just what has always come most naturally to them, when they aren't struggling with expectation or attempting some kind of dance. She gives herself over to this. Lukas gives himself over. And it works.

Lukas's hands find lace on her hips, find straps on the fronts and backs of her thighs, find the top edges of her stockings a few inches above her knees and a satiny thong not-at-all covering her cunt. His hands cannot help but run over both lace and clasps and bare flesh and silk as he holds her against him, kisses her like he's trying to overwhelm her. Resting her weight on her knees and not her heels, the dress -- once pushed off her hips -- can go no further than pooling around her knees and over her calves, but Danicka finds herself lifted around the waist and quite easily shifts her legs. She doesn't have to kick for the dress to fall to the floor, along with everything else. She presses her body against Lukas as much as he holds her there, breaking her mouth away from him only to wriggle out of his grasp, to get free so she can grab him by the belt and start unfastening it.

What happened at the hotel was not a fluke. His pants are, again, undone in what seems like less than five seconds, but at that point Danicka leaves him to finish what she's started, to get his shoes and everything else off. Her hands go to either side of his waist. Her mouth goes to his navel, and she draws a slow, hot line from there to his sternum. Her lips slide to one side and the other to lay kisses along his collarbone, and when -- if -- Lukas has the presence of mind to get his own damn clothes off the rest of the way, Danicka pulls one of his hands to the satiny scrap of fabric between her legs, guides his fingers to push the slip of it away and kisses him when his touch finds her, hot. Wet. Wanting. She moans against his mouth through the kiss, tugging at his lower lip with her teeth before asking him:

"Do you want me to leave it on?"

[Lukas] Their kisses began slow and warm at the door, but now they've evolved to something completely different. Something like hunger. Something like ravenous starvation, a need the way one needs to breathe, to drink, to eat. When her mouth roamed his chest, he'd barely been able to keep himself from dragging her up to kiss him again -- when she lays kisses up his midline she only gets as far as his diaphragm, as far at the topmost set of flexing, shuddering muscles in his stomach before he grabs her face between his hands and lifts her to crush her mouth, her kiss, into his.

His jeans and his boxer briefs come off as a single unit; they catch in his shoes and socks until he kicks it all off wholesale, and this is all done as an aside to what his hands are doing, because what his hands are doing is to hold her face against his, and then to run a rail down the center of her back, to open over her ass, and then his right hand is riding the crest of her hip to her lower belly, and then between her legs to discover

-- and in the morning, if he stays, he might wonder what sort of woman wears satin and lace, stockings and thong, even when she doesn't (...or shouldn't; and there's the rub.) expect to be fucked. He might wonder what sort of woman keeps half a dozen condoms in her handbag. He might wonder what the hell she does for a living, really, dressing like this, living like this, not apparently doing a shred of work in her entire existence thus far in Chicago.

He might wonder these things in the morning, or he might not wonder anything at all; but none of this matters right now because right now, nothing matter at all except --

the hotness, and the wetness, that his fingertips find beneath her panties.

It makes him suck a breath in. It makes some piece of his mind fall away from the rest, spiral off into some unknown darkness as their mouths open to one another again, devouringly,

and when she moans into his mouth his fingers flex against her flesh, and when her teeth close on his lower there's a sound low in his throat, a vibration more felt than heard, something like a growl.

His eyes snap open when she asks her question, so frankly, so artlessly that he's falling to pieces, and even in the dark there's some hint, some glitter of blue in his eyes, some burning clarity in his eyes, and he looks at her, his hand between her legs, his other hand at the small of her back, and he's motionless for a moment except for his breathing, audible in the silence.

And he doesn't answer. He doesn't answer because he doesn't need to, because his hand is moving again, and it's not just exploring now, he has a purpose, his fingers are pushing into her and his thumb is pressing against her and her lingerie is getting pressed out of the way against the back of his hand, but he's not bothering to pull it off, because that's her answer, and that's enough, and now he's cupping the back of her neck and kissing her hot mouth, and he is, quite frankly, trying to get her off just like this, face to face with him, kneeling on the bed in her stockings and lace, her thong underwear, her goddamn garter belt.

[Danicka] If he stays.

They're both thinking it, both wondering it, both refusing to expect that he's going to wake up tomorrow afternoon and see a stripe of multicolored light hitting Danicka's shoulder from the same sort of prism that was in more than one window at her father's house, a very long time ago.

That house had always seemed filled with light, with color...but not noise. Not unless the Kvasničkas were visiting. Rainbows on the floor because of the prisms. The thickness of oak leaves in summer shielding them from adult eyes when they hid in the branches. The smell of wood polish and koláče. These sort of sensory impressions would last longer than memories of individual words or stories, would be clearer. That's a world away, though, and too many years.

Danicka does not know if he is going to be staying because she does not think he will want to. Lukas does not know if he is staying, presumably because he does not know if she will want him to remain here. After their last meeting it's not terribly unfair if either of them are thinking that this may be it. This always might be the end, it seems, but what they are not talking about -- didn't she tell him to come over tonight so they could talk? -- is that what she said at the Affinia is still true, and stayed true when she was exhausted and hurt and angry and withdrawn: she's not ready for this to be over.

At least for now it's not. Lukas touches her, answers her question with a movement of his hand, and from the way he could not move for a second or two beforehand she knows that he's still somewhat stunned at times by her lack of shyness, by what would be called 'brazen' behavior in some circles. She is not shy. She is most certainly brazen, and her knees shift apart without fanfare or timidity when he slides his fingers inside of her. Danicka's eyes close, her mouth opening but not letting out a cry. She holds onto his shoulders, leans forward until her forehead touches his chest, and remains still for a few seconds, then a few seconds more, until it's too much for her.

Danicka pulls her head back and opens her eyes, her hands still on Lukas's body as though to hold herself steady. She looks down, watching the flex of his wrist and movement of his hand. She doesn't come when he kisses her, his tongue in her mouth and his hand in her hair. She doesn't come when he lets her move away enough to gasp. When Danicka comes, her hips squirming and her brow furrowed deeply as though something's confused her, her mouth open because she can't get enough air otherwise, she is looking up at him, making the quietest of noises in her throat, her hands so hot on his shoulders it seems as though she's going to leave burnt imprints on him.

For once she doesn't cry out. Not in Czech and not in English, not in Russian, not screaming into his flesh or biting into a pillow but so overcome, so caught up, that she can't even breathe. Even in the dark he can see the redness in her cheeks and a warm flush to the rest of her skin. Most of all, though, he can see that even though something in her eyes has just gone supernova, whatever has just died is already coming back.

Her orgasm hasn't even stopped before she's sliding those burning hands down his chest. Danicka gets words out, but she can't manage English and she speaks haltingly, groaning midway as another wave hits her and trailing off completely as her dominant right hand wraps around him:

"Potřebuji tě...uvnitř mě..."

[Lukas] There's a burning, unflinching intensity about this. It's the silence -- the nearness, and their hands on each other, hot, clutching; their eyes on each other, hot, unwavering.

When she comes, it's with barely a sound, and he doesn't say a word, he doesn't catch her up or bring her close or ... he touches her with his hand, deliberately, heavily, and her brow is furrowed with something like confusion, or consternation, as though what she feels is a mystery to her -- and his is furrowed with something like determination, or adversity, as though there's a barrier to surmount here, something to break down.

But then -- then, as her hands are moving down his body and his is relaxing, the flexed arch of the thumb and the forefingers relaxing to cup against her -- there's a change, subtle and unspoken; something like a gentling, and it's not his hand at the back of her neck anymore but his arm wrapping around her, and his eyes close when she wraps her hand around him and her hitching, unsteadily words are caught against his lips as he bends to her, doesn't quite kiss her, bends to her and breathes with her, draws her against him.

The breath he lets out is unsteady. At the end of it, words, the hard consonants and sibilants of his native tongue --

"Kde jsou vaše kondomy, Danička?"

-- and it's possible such prosaic, such unromantic words have never been spoken in so strangely tender a tone before.

[Danicka] Romance was, after all, never going to be in the picture. They have never taken one another out to dinner, gone to see a movie. They don't go anywhere together but hotel rooms. The only time they have eaten together was Chinese food ordered from a place down the street. The closest they have come to candlelight is the way the light from the schooling fish tanks at the Shedd plays over one or the other's face. The closest they come to flowers is the way he watches her sometimes as though he'll come to know her if he just looks long enough. The closest they come to kissing in the rain is when they can't keep away from each other in the shower.

That is worth noting: once they are together, they are almost relentlessly together. Even the first night, he kissed her shoulder before moving from the bed for so much as two minutes, and the way she'd kissed him before she walked out the next morning had been lingering. No, she would not have stayed if he'd asked. But she did not really want to leave, either. They shower together. They talk. They even play. When he has her and then sits or stands somewhere, separates himself from her as though he can't bear to stay that close to her, Danicka keeps off of her face the ache in her chest.

They haven't gotten that far, yet. They were supposed to be talking. They had been talking at the aquarium. Had she cried to get them off track? Was he angry at her? It seems like weeks ago that she pushed him away when everything else in her was screaming for him to come closer. It seems like a year ago that she welcomed him into her at a hotel because two nights before her heart had been pounding in terror, not with desire, and she'd thought when it was finally safe to stop running that she better not tell him she better not let him find out and could not back up that thought with reason, yet she had clung to it all the same.

Seems like a lifetime ago that scared of him or not, threatened by him or not, it turned out that she wanted him.

Wants him.

Danicka breathes rapidly as her body begins to let her go, as she comes back down, and yet the rushing pulls for air are nearly silent. She kisses him again and again, not for very long each time but with definite passion, as though she might be able to take literal sips of everything he is from his mouth. He is still touching her, gentler, even as her hand on him is finding a thought-melting rhythm.

"V šuplíku," she murmurs, lowering her mouth to flick her tongue over the nipple that several minutes ago did not get such attention. "Chci jezdit vás." she adds after a moment, the words almost a snarl, as though she can't help but voice what she wants right now, even if her eyes are sliding down his body to watch her hand moving on him.

Slowly, and in fact somewhat carefully, Danicka forces herself to move her lips and tongue away from him, gradually relaxes her hand on his cock. She lifts her hips and moans plaintively as his fingers slip out of her, more noise than she has made even while coming, and slides away from him. She does not go to the nightstand, tear open the drawer, and throw a strip of condoms at his chest. Eyes on Lukas's, she gets off the bed and stands up in front of him, the silk of her stockings against his legs, the softness and warmth of her skin on his thighs, his hip, his dick, his abdomen. This time Danicka reaches for his hands, taking one and placing it on her breast, taking the other and drawing it to the strap along the back of her leg.

Her eyes look like liquid, swimming with thoughts he can usually only guess at and does not need to, times like this: "Take it all off." She breathes out, roughly, and groans: "I really want to fuck you right now."

[Lukas] Danicka's hands, her mouth on him make Lukas exhale a slow breath, carefully steady. When she climbs off the bed it seems only natural, instinctive, to put his hands on her -- she takes them, replaces them, and now he can feel her heartbeat under his right hand, the button of her thigh-highs under his left.

Her eyes are liquid, depthless; a more romantic man might think it possible to drown in them, but Lukas isn't like that. He thinks only that all he can see are shadows and slivers, grey and green, and then he doesn't think anything at all because she says

(what she says)

and there's a sudden hot flare in his eyes, and his fingers curl under the strap of her stockings, and then he bends to her, but not to her mouth, he puts his mouth to her breast and nips at her, sucks at her hard, bends her back over his arm and trails kisses down the rungs of her ribs.

On his knees now, he undoes the button fastening strap to stocking, rolls it down to the floor. The other side next; the same, but faster now, less care, and then his hands are on her hips, he drags her against him and his mouth is on her through her panties; he kisses her with a sudden and fierce lust before his hands are pulling her garter belt down, and peeling her panties off, and when everything's off, when he's taken it all off, he gets up off the floor and scoops her up as he had in the entry hall, effortlessly, says

"Ty jsou tak krásné."

but it's rough, savage, and when he kisses her now it's like gravity, it's like magnetism, it's like a force of nature.

His balance is steady -- he takes her over to her nightstand, flicks the drawer open and feels around in the shadowy murk until he finds the condoms, shakes them out of the box, tears one open onehanded, sits on the edge of her bed and then pushes himself back until there's enough space in between to sheathe himself. As he's rolling the condom down by touch he leans up to catch her mouth again, and if he lives to be a hundred (which he won't.) he'll never understand how it is that this can feel so absolute, how it can unravel him and inflame him all at once.

Then he's ready for her, and he's dropping down on his back, and he's pulling her over him.

"Pojď, Danička."

[Danicka] If the moon were full, Danicka is almost certain that her lingerie would be in shreds right now, torn off her body with no grace and no gentleness, and he would be inside of her, condom or not, gasping for air and trying not to pass out with each thrust bringing them closer together. Even with the moon halved overhead she is somewhat surprised that Lukas has the presence of mind to unfasten it all in the dark and draw those silk sheathes off her legs as carefully as he does. She wriggles against him when he sucks so fiercely at her breast, though, making a small noise in the back of her throat and touching his hair.

This is what is most remarkable about this, perhaps what keeps both of them coming back even when -- especially when -- they struggle otherwise. Danicka does not need, tonight, to tell Lukas Softer, please because with an almost instinctive awareness he knows that sound, he knows the difference between the way she moves when he is making fireworks go off in her mind and when he is hurting her. If the moon were full...

...but it isn't.

Lukas knows the difference between Danicka squirming in discomfort and the way she arches her back and tightens her hand in his hair when he goes to his knees and kisses her. She bends at the waist, holding him there, letting out a moan that has absolutely no need of stifling because they're alone and the walls are thick enough that not a single one of her neighbors is going to hear her crying out tonight. The words are on her lips, about to burst out out, begging him not to stop but he stops before she remembers how to talk.

The lingerie on the floor is part black and part...some other color, some other shade of gray, it doesn't matter. They're not in tatters, they're not torn slips of delicate fabric on the carpet when Lukas gets her naked. Tonight he has some self control, even if it seems that Danicka doesn't, entirely. It takes effort for her to loosen her hands in his hair as he gets up, picking her up on his way, but no effort or thought at all for her legs to slide around him.

He tells her she's beautiful, almost snarling it, and Danicka's mouth is on his before the words are even finished, her tongue pushing his lips apart, exploring his mouth. Her body pressed to his is filled with energy that is not yet finding outlet, her pussy is wet against his skin, his hand is wet where he holds onto her, and though the room is cool she is starting to sweat. A hint of her is on his lips, and she shudders.

"Úst chutná tak sladké," she purrs in response, when their mouths finally release one another. The sound of the words is like a murmur of appreciation held in her throat or vibrating against closed lips, the noise she made over and over when he was on his knees and stayed there.

A few steps, a drawer opening, and the condoms rattling from their box. Danicka straddles his lap as he covers himself, her hands on his face, on his chest, leaning forward to kiss him. It's slower than before, if not really any more gentle. She cups his face in her hands like he does so often to her, kissing him as though never wanting to let go.

They haven't said anything about words like never, though.

So often when they're fucking, or about to fuck, or simply moving to each other like the hot and cold currents of air that slam together to create storms, Lukas grabs her. Pulls her. Lifts her up, guides her hands. And so, so often, it's utterly unncessary. Almost every time, with notable and pointed exceptions, he finds Danicka reaching for him, moving to him, lifting her feet from the ground and leveraging her weight against his strength. When he wants her touch she is already there, running her hands over his skin and bowing her head to lay her mouth on his neck, on his earlobe, without urging or spoken desire.

It would be very romantic and lovely to say that she knows him, or understands him, but that isn't it. It would be thoroughly sweet to say they were made for each other, but it takes precisely thirty seconds of conversation while clothed to blow that out of the water. When they're doing their best work they cannot say three words to each other before tensions are rising up. No, there's nothing particularly romantic about this, but even Danicka can't lie to herself anymore and say they don't have a strange compatibility, a vague understanding of one another, or something.

If nothing else: when he pulls her over him and encourages her to come to him, Danicka is already moving, already lifting her hips and laying her hands on his chest, already reaching between their bodies to take a hold of him and take him into herself. As almost every other time they've been together that first orgasm has taken her to a knife's edge of longing, has Danicka forcing herself to slow down and steady herself for his sake when otherwise she would ride him to her own pleasure without even looking at him. She would not do this for most men. She would not let most men into her bed, either.

Danicka watches him as she rocks her hips slowly, taking Lukas into her inch by inch, until their bodies connect. For a couple of seconds all she does then is hold him there, biting her lower lip. It's been nearly ten days and she's had no one else, she's almost had no time or energy for herself, and he can watch her taking a moment to adjust to him inside of her again, can assume it's because the physical sensation is too much, or he can look at the way her eyes watch his and see something else entirely.

Or he can listen.

"Ohh... jsem stýskalo, Lukáš," Danicka sighs, a heaviness to her breath and a warmth in her voice that is more tender than anything she's said to him since vám náležet zde. They go together:

You belong here.

...I missed you.

And this time it's not said as a response to what is wrong, or said while exhausted, or angry, or frustrated. Danicka exhales and rocks her hips. She moves slowly at first, if not softly, and then leans forward, kissing his jaw and murmuring Help me. It's not clear at first what she wants his help with, and Danicka gives him very little verbal instruction. So it takes a couple of minutes, with shifts of leg and alignment, careful twisting on the bed until Danicka is lying on her right side, her head on the pillow beside Lukas's. Her right leg is between his, her left over his right hip, their torsos almost perpendicular.

It is not the most common position to have sex in, not the easiest to get into, and not one they have used before. But now Danicka is pressed against him without strain on her back or her neck, her body is not pushing down against his. Neither of them are pinned. Neither of them is having to hold themselves up over the other. Both of them are free to move without fighting the other's weight. What seems the most different, however, is how close they are, her breasts to his body and their legs entwined, their faces nearly touching.

Danicka leans to Lukas, her left hand sliding into his hair, and pulls his mouth to hers. She rolls her hips to his, whimpers softly against his lips, and closes her eyes.

[Lukas] Didn't they come here to talk?

Didn't they come here to discuss the fucking issue at hand, to express themselves and their discontents, to -- as relationship counselors, those latter-day saints of the human heart, would call it -- communicate?

Well; what talking there is now is minimal at best. He watches her, as he always does, as she climbs atop him and mounts him; he watches his cock slide into her, inch by inch, and it's an effort, a fucking labor of hercules to remain still, to rest his hands gently on her thighs, to keep his eyes open and his head raised and not simply -- sink back into his pleasure, give over to it.

She missed him, she says. His eyes flicker to hers, and she can see that she's surprised him again, but not because she's goddamn brazen, not because she's asked him something that bypasses his frontal lobe entirely and strikes directly at his primitive mind, where everything is fight or flight or feed or fuck. Not because of that, but because --

He can't put his finger on it. Not now. Later, if he thinks about it, he'll understand that he is surprised because missing him implies an attachment, just as belonging here states that attachment; he'll understand that these things surprise him because she began this with a timeline, a deadline, as though this were a project to finish and clear-off-her-desk; and because even when she said she was not ready for this to end, she never promised anything beyond the moment, and the moment after, and the moment after that, and ...

... and this is not talking. This is not a discussion of the issues. He isn't even sure what the issues are anymore. Something about her lack of trust; something about his lack of sympathy; something about their selfishness in all this. It doesn't matter now.

It doesn't matter now.

She's taken all of him inside her, and he sets his head down at last, he closes his eyes at last, and in some unconscious mirror of her, Lukas too bites his lower lip, his hands firming on her thighs. When she begins to move -- achingly slow -- his lip escapes his teeth, his teeth close, he draws a hissing breath between them, and he thinks to himself, oh my fucking god.

This may not be talking, but in a way, this is their best and only form of communication. This may be the only time they stop thinking solely of themselves, their best interests, their survival, their boundaries, what they can tolerate and what they can sacrifice and what they're willing to lay on the line. This is something raw and unmitigated, unfabricated; oddly pure in the way the heart of an inferno is pure, where everything extraneous is burnt to white ash.

They can find a sort of concord in this. They can find a sort of understanding when words are no longer even remotely necessary.

It's a fact that he would have been glad to lie here and let her ride him as she pleased; it's a fact that he would have been just fine with it if she wanted to use him for her own pleasure, just as he was fine with bringing her to an orgasm with his hand tonight and previous nights, just as he was fine with kneeling at the foot of the bed and planting his mouth between her legs until even his consummately inexpert technique managed to get her off.

It's a fact that he's fine with all this, though he wouldn't be with another woman; though she doesn't do this with him; though she would with another man.

It's a fact that this is -- different.

Then she's leaning forward, and her lips are at his jawline, which is roughshaven tonight, or more precisely, not shaven yet, and his eyes are opening, and in the darkness they're not quite blue but merely clear, and when she says help me he doesn't quite understand her meaning before she moving on him, limbs rearranging, and he understands at least now that she means to change positions; he watches her to try to divine what she wants.

Once or twice their legs move the same way, half-collide; and once, he lets go a short huff that might signify humor, or a laugh, and his eyes flicker up from watching what he's doing to catch hers, and somehow there's such a connection in the moment that he leans up and kisses her, suddenly, before the crooked half-smile has quite left his mouth. As he's lying back the penny drops at last; he figures out what she's trying to do, and they move in complement now, and suddenly it all just ...works.

She's nearer, like this. Close enough to touch, which is exactly what he does. The arm caught half under her wraps around her waist, opens over her back; the other hand spreads over her hip, strokes up over her side, explores the curvature of her breast; the arch of the collarbone.

Lukas watches her moving against himself, his eyes lowered, lashes long and dark, and when her hand goes into his hair she hardly needs to pull before he's raising his mouth to hers, and opening his mouth to swallow her sounds, and laying his brow to hers simply because it's another point of connection, it's another point of contact, and now as they're moving together in earnest, slow at first, deep, she's closed her eyes but he keeps his eyes, looks down the seam of their bodies, looks at his hand against her skin, a shade or three darker

(and it occurs to him, suddenly and without warning, that this -- liaison, he'd called it, but it's not really that, is it; it's something more, and -- and that's not the point; the point is, this began in the dead of winter, and now it's the beginning of spring, and if it lasts until summer, if he sees her in summer like this, he'll be tanned and she'll be utterly golden, and he doesn't know why this matters at all);

looks at her body twined around his, the softer curves and contours of her to his bolder, harder lines; looks at the way the roll of her hips has its genesis beneath her skin, in the movement of the hidden muscles of her back and her belly against his two hands; looks at the way he matches her instinctively, beat for beat, without needing to think about it.

They're learning about each other without really meaning to. Not merely the facts; not merely the history, the troublesome inner workings that are revealed in puzzle-pieces and broad strokes on his side, and tiny chips and fragments on hers. Not merely those, but the implicit knowledge of the body. He knows the way her breath catches if he does this, or the way her body shivers if he does that, and she knows how he can't help but close his eyes if she rolls her hips a certain way, and how, if she bears down on him just so, his back arches and he presses his head back into the mattress.

There's a passion rising inside him, inevitable, unstoppable: stirring like a beast waking from slumber, but the moon is waning and the moon is small, and he can control it. He can restrain himself. He can shift his hand to her breast and run his thumb over her nipple, tug gently at it, play with it, and know that he won't be too rough; he can move against her harder, with longer strokes, faster, and trust himself not to lose all sense and control.

He picks up the pace. He turns his face to kiss her collarbone, and then her throat, and then the indent beneath her ear, and his breathing is harsher now, fast and deep, destabilizing, and his hand is tugging her leg higher over his thigh, and he's closing his eyes at last, he's letting sensation carry him. His teeth graze her throat, catch at her skin delicately. His hand has opened over her ribcage, thumb and forefinger bracketing the lowermost curve of her breast. He's pulling her closer still, pulling her against him while he moves against, and into her, and every cycle, every lift and fall of her hips, every thrust and withdrawal is gradually emptying his mind, reducing him to the basics.

[Danicka] This is not talking, but this is most certainly connecting. Somehow Lukas never doubts the things Danicka says to him when they're like this, and while she said that she missed him when he came over on Monday, it was nothing like the way she says it now. Then it was an explanation for her behavior, and an honest one, but it was not the same -- not the same at all -- as this. Danicka holds his eyes as she sinks down onto him, moans that she missed him as though...

...as though the times she sees him and they do not get past the hurdles of words and distance and clothes, she has not even seen him at all. As though the only time they are truly together or can find each other is when they're doing this.

This, which is fucking but not just fucking, sex but more. This, which she seems to need in order to see him clearly. This, which she needs to be even remotely close to him.

It isn't a promise when she rolls her hips against him, begins to ride him like she said she wanted to and makes him lay his head back and close his eyes because the visual stimulation on top of what she is doing to his body is too fucking much. It isn't a dedication of a double handful of moments like this, an offering of anything but right now, but whatever it is, she gives it freely. And yes: it is the only time that Danicka gives anything openly and warmly, without reservation or resentment. What she gives, she does not even need to ask for aloud, because she finds it already given, as unconsciously reciprocal as the way they kiss. What she gives now, he gives, without question:

Více. Všechno.

Danicka was stunned, the first time Lukas snaked his arm around her and put his hand in her underwear, slipped his fingers in her cunt, not just to feel her getting wet or to satisfy his own lust but just to get her off. She's wondered at least once or twice what he would have done if she had just turned over and curled against his side, if he would have told her to suck his cock or peeled her out of her clothes to fuck her, if he would have kept his arm around her and said not a word. At the time she hadn't even considered it. She wanted him wholly inside of her. And she wanted to see his face. She wanted to make him come.

That had surprised her, too. Wanting to ride him until he let out some noise of enjoyment, wanting to hear her name on his lips, wanting to see him so lost in pleasure that he could do nothing but hold on to her or the sheets or the headboard for dear life. Wanting to know if he wanted to keep her in her lingerie for awhile. Telling him what she wants, when she wants it, is as much an invitation for him to do the same as it is unfettered expression of yearning.

And all that is to say nothing of what it does to her when she thinks about his mouth between her thighs, fucking her with his mouth until she was screaming his name.

How many times has she thought about him here, lying alone? The room is so spare it gives almost no hint to the woman that lives in it. There are no hints of her history, no insight into her personality, not in the dark. Lukas has not perused the books on that thin shelf or glanced at the contents of either closet. He hasn't seen anything under the bed or gone through her medicine cabinet. The only thing that exists in this room, as far as either of them is concerned, is the other.

She never thought she'd let him in here. She never thought she'd want him this close. And that is why she shifts, murmurs for his help, works quickly but carefully. Danicka laughs when their knees knock against one another, huffs out laughter when his leg lifts hers too high, but she kisses him through it, silent affirmations that this is all right, that they should keep going. She touches his face when she can, rests her forehead on his with that soft smile on her face, so tender it should ache but she's so lost with him then that it doesn't occur to her to be wary, or to hurt.

They're closer. That is, whether it's spoken or not, the whole goddamn point. She said she wanted to ride him and the only explanation for this shift is that she changed her mind. Danicka revels in his hand running over her, shivers when he passes his palm over her breast, and that is when she begins to move again on him...though now with him. The feeling of it is so keen that she whimpers yet again. Her eyes open after their kiss breaks, her hand gentling in his hair.

She watches him; he watches their hips. She is free to look at him any way she wants while he can't see it. She memorizes his eyelashes and the shape of his parted lips, while he is entertaining fleeting thoughts of what their skin will look like later in spring, all the way into summer, not knowing if he is going to have this then or if he will even be alive then. But Danicka just watches him until she can't anymore, arching her back and letting her head fall back, her throat utterly bared so that the next time he looks up he sees the flash of muscle moving in her neck as she gasps for air.

They move faster. Without a word, without a sudden or jarring swing of his hips or a twist of hers, the rhythm they've found quickens, and so does Danicka's heartbeat, and so does her breathing. She moans aloud when Lukas's thrusts come harder, come with more ardor. Her left hand has slipped from his hair and down the back of his neck, down over his right scapula, holding him closer to her.

Every other occasion they've found some handy bed and stripped each other's clothes off, the first time has been...almost furious. She has ridden him or he has fucked her or they have attacked one another as though ravenous, starving, enraged by any spare speck of air that might get cocky and try to come between the two of them. That is not to say they've never gone slow, or watched each other, or moved with a sweetness and care that they otherwise find a great deal of difficulty showing, but never the first time.

This is not just the first time tonight. This is the first time in a week and a half and the gentleness of the way they hold each other is, for once, mirrored by the flexing of their lower halves. If this were fucking there is no way to tell who is fucking who. Danicka thinks this, idly, thinks of the way he looked down at her and said something so simple and so thoroughly unromantic in a murmur that made her long to pull him into her arms, all the same.

I want to fuck you. I want you to fuck me.

She nuzzles him unconsciously as he kisses her throat and that hot spot underneath her earlobe that makes her entire body shudder. This is simple: she tightens her leg around him as he is lifting it. This is basic: she is shaking like a leaf, not from emotion or aftermath but from steadily, fiercely building arousal. This is unromantic: Danicka groans softly, sensing without warning or word what is happening to him and whispers in his ear

"Not yet...don't stop...please don't stop I'mgoingtocome justdon'tstopyet..."

but by the end it's not really a whisper anymore and it's not even in his ear anymore. She breathes in sharply as her back arches, her next cry truncated and meaningless, except that it means

Again: Více. Všechno.

And another cry, and another, as Danicka lowers her head again and pulls her throat from his mouth, nudges him with her face like an animal to look at his face, to find his eyes as though she can tell him without saying it again or some sort of supernatural telepathy as he has with his pack that

I'm going to come. I'm going to come I'm going to die don'tstopIneedyou.

He can see it like a spark lighting in the depths of her dilated pupils before he can hear her voice hit that pitch he has come to know so well. He can feel it deep in her body before that spark flares, before the room shatters, before the world melts. Danicka never stops moving as she goes over the edge, taking him deeper, taking him with her, bearing down on him and holding his eyes like keys to the gate of heaven or Pandora's box. She doesn't scream, even though he can feel that tension in her stomach muscles, in the way she writhes suddenly, almost violently.

Later -- in a few seconds -- he'll feel her left hand on his hip, realize that she pulled him harder into her at the very end. Lukas will feel his lips throbbing slightly because of the way she kisses him when he comes, passionate in a way simultaneously savage and compassionate. He will feel her warm and yielding all around him and fully against him, held in his arms as tightly as he ever holds her when his climax takes him. He will remember the sheer intensity of Danicka's orgasm, the way she clung to him and bucked against him, the way she lost control and then --

-- then the way that as she came back down and as she exhaled a shallow gasp for air her eyes flickered and the way her body went limp. Not relaxed-limp. Not spent-limp.

Unconscious.

[Lukas] If Lukas had the presence of mind for such things, the intensity of their couplings would frighten him. It's not really the fact that Danicka knows of obscure and exotic sexual positions, or that she carried half a dozen condoms in her handbag the first time they fucked, or that she lives with another man, or that she knows what she wants and has no compunction whatsoever against showing, and telling him.

It's not any of that. Lukas is not so petty and insecure as to be threatened by a woman's frank and uncompromising sexuality.

It's not that at all.

It's the -- unadulterated nakedness of the act. It's the sense that every piece of armor falls away from him, and from her, when they entwine like this and move like that and breathe like this and hold each other like that. It's the sense that every time they come together they go deeper into one another, become linked in some inexorable way.

It's the sense that every time they come together --

which is exactly what this is. Which is how it was the first time, and how it is this time, and how it is nearly every time in between: when something in one trips over, leaps like a spark from the searing nerves and shuddering flesh of one across what dissolving space between into the other, when she comes apart apart at the seams and the very sight of it, the sound and feel and taste of it, drives him over the edge; when she bears down on him and pulls him deeper into her he goes willingly, he moves deeper, he wraps his arms around her and they're looking at each other and seeing

(eternity)

the same dazzled implosion in one another's eyes, and there isn't room to breathe, or to speak, or even to make a sound; there's room only for her mouth to cover his and his hands to pull her down against the unmitigated flex of his hips. Even then he doesn't close his eyes, he looks at her because she's looking at him and kissing him and taking him into her, all he can do, all he can really do, is let go and give himself over to the pleasure, and to her.

(více. všechno.)

-- it's that, you see. It's the sense that even when he thinks he's in control of himself, and will not lose his mind and hurt her, or tear her to shreds, he's not, really. It's the sense that every time they come together, some part of him might be irretrievably and silently lost to her, replaced with a part she has lost to him.

He's still clasping her in his arms afterward, too far gone for a moment to do anything but hold on to her as his eyes fall closed and his body's need for oxygen finally catches up to him and he gasps, pants, strains for air.

It's seconds, perhaps as much as half a minute or more, before he can loosen his arms enough to smooth his palms over her back, and that's when he intuits something, some difference in the way she lays over him, some difference in the utter limpness in her limbs and her spine; remembers then, in dazed retrospect, the way some flame of consciousness had guttered out in her eyes as the last of his orgasm was tearing him to shreds.

Give him credit for this much: he doesn't panic immediately, doesn't sit up and shake her frantically and call the paramedics or a friendly theurge. She's still breathing, after all; her heart is still beating. He can feel these rhythms beneath his own. So Lukas remains as he is, and the pieces of his mind still trying to pull themselves together, are still trying to drift into a shape approximating sense so they can figure out what the fuck is going on, so they can form a logical plan of action, a logical response, and in the meantime he holds her against him in the circle of his caught arm, firmly, as his free hand strokes steadily and unwaveringly up and down her back.

"Danička," it's a low murmur, voice husky from disuse and from the harsh, soundless breaths taken between the last thing he'd said and this, "jsi v pořádku? Řekni něco. Mluv se mnou, láska."

[Danicka] What she said was that she lies to him because she does not trust him. What he's seen over and over is how those lies fall away when they're fucking. Even if Danicka does not completely trust Lukas, even now, it's true that she opens herself as much as she opens her legs and her arms and her mouth and takes him in. They breathe together, move together, and this time -- still stunning that it happens at all when they are still so new to each other -- they come together, too. She comes with her eyes open, and a scream caught inside of her, Lukas held inside of her as she tightens all around him.

That could very well be the reason why what happens, happens. Danicka writhes against the hardness of Lukas's hips and squirms so much against him that his arms lock around her when he comes, holding to her the way he almost always does at the end, and afterward. She gasps and goes limp, utterly spent, and their eyes close at nearly the same moment.

For a few seconds they are just holding each other, one unaware that his lover -- or 'the woman he is having sex with' -- has fainted and the other unaware of everything.

Even then she is still holding him slightly, her arm loose but still wrapped around his body, her leg slightly heavier on his leg where it is draped. Even now Danicka has him, but in an entirely different way than she did when he fucked her against that hotel room door. There is no doubt, though perhaps neither of them are coherent enough at the moment to realize it, that he has given something intangible but vital to her, and she has given him the same. It isn't very much, and it isn't truly lost. They know where it is, and it could not be taken from them by force.

So: given.

Danicka is not panting, though, and usually she is. Danicka is not gasping and holding onto him like a lifesaver tossed into a stormy sea. She is very still, and quiet, as though sleeping, for about fifteen seconds before Lukas realizes that Danicka isn't moving. He remembers her eyes flaring like stars going nova, destroying her world, lighting up her gaze in one last vivid flash before going dark with the abruptness of death. He comes back before she does, sweat on his skin that is his and hers, mingled. He pants, he gasps, and Danicka lays on top of him totally unconscious.

Later she may very well give him credit for not freaking out over this. Her eyelashes flicker though after a few seconds, a few cycles of respierations, and she is coming to again around the time he says her name, as though in some dreamlike state she prophesied to herself that he would whisper to her like this. Her lips are parted and slightly slack, and her eyes don't open all the way at first. She blinks several times as he speaks, barely comprehending, and then her nostrils flare as she takes in a deep breath and infers from their positioning and the feel of him still inside her and the darkness what just happened.

The tension that seemed to come when she breathed in that deep pull of hair relaxes, and she hears -- and actually understands -- the last few words she hears, the others half-lost in murky return from unconsciousness. Láska off his lips doesn't make her scramble for the door or look at him in shock; Danicka inhales again, not quite as deep, and shifts closer to him, moving her head from the pillow to tuck under his chin, against his neck.

"Je mi líto. Jsem v pořádku, miláčku," she murmurs back, content for now to remain lying curled up with him, entwined with him, still literally physically joined with him.

Her hand, alive again behind him, travels up his back as she says this. On the last word her fingertips reach his hair and begin playing gently with the ends of his hair, swirling in the curls tightened by sweat, tracing barely-palpable circles on the back of his neck. She sighs softly...happily, even.

[Lukas] She's sorry --

"Nedejte se," softly.

-- she's all right.

In response to that, and to her shifting closer, his arms tighten fractionally around her. His chest is still straining against hers; there's an unsteadiness at the edges of his voice. He closes his eyes as her hand drifts up his back to move through his hair, and he turns his head to press his mouth to her temple.

For a while that's all there is. He's fine with just lying here, saying nothing, thinking nothing. The simple, elemental connection of skin contact, of resting together: it's something a pack animal understands better than modern-day man, who has by and large forgotten his roots as a social creature; who speaks now of individualism and privacy, who locks himself in glass towers in ones and twos, shutters the windows and bars the doors.

Gradually, Lukas's breathing slows; his heart settles into a slow, heavy beating. Then he stirs: he reaches back over his head to tug the pillow free, toss it aside; lays back with a short sighing exhale.

It's his first time in her room. Other than that her scent is everywhere, absolutely everywhere, it's as unfamiliar to him as a hotel room. Flat on his back, has an altered view of it -- the walls and windows at the periphery of his vision, the ceiling front and center. Her mattress is considerably thicker and more comfortable and more expensive than the ones at the Brotherhood, but her ceiling is also much higher; there's more room in here, both in terms of square footage and in terms of volume.

His hand, returning from its pillow-moving expedition, drops to where her thigh crosses his hip. He strokes her skin thoughtfully, thoughtlessly, and his eyes have more or less adjusted to the dark now; he can see the vague details of the space they inhabit.

"Does that happen often?" This is no louder than the last thing he's said to her: the same murmured sound, more felt in his chest than hear from his lips. "You're not ill, are you?"

[Danicka] Walking out of the Shedd Aquarium, Lukas had spoken at length to Danicka about what he needs from her, what she needs to do if this liason of theirs --

(Liason. Affair. These are the words they use. Danicka has called him her boyfriend...while drunk. She has called what they do making love...once. What else can they say, when he admits that he doesn't know if he wants this to continue? What other words can they use, when she can't promise anything but this moment, and the next? Neither of them can be blamed for not placing much faith in the other. Neither of them can really be blamed for only speaking truthfully about taming, about what's happening between them, when they are lying in a post-coital heap together.)

-- is to continue. She did not and has not answered most of what he said then, because her question was not how dare he speak to her like that or what the hell he thought she was supposed to get from that. Her question had been about whether or not he wants it to continue, and he hadn't been certain. What happened after that miniature lecture was a revelation about why she was so reticent on Monday, and tears, and the strange comfort of hearing from someone else that her tears were not pathetic, that he understood her withdrawal, and that he never expected this to be easy.

And then they had come here, she had said Please, and moments later Lukas had pulled her into his arms. Moments later they were kissing as though gasping for air, and they were in her room, and he was watching her come for the first time in a week and a half, and then he was inside of her again, she gave herself over to him, and perhaps it means they've worked everything out just fine without talking any more about any of it.

Perhaps.

For awhile afterwards they both lie in warm silence, her fingers playing with his hair and his hand smoothing over her back. Lukas's vitals slowly return to baseline, and if it occurs to him that they are in an incredibly private room near the top of a glass tower, in a matched set of two without pack or family or roots to ground them, he doesn't say anything about it. They are, regardless of the location or the isolation, connected right now through touch.

Danicka seems perfectly content to lie there with him for as long as possible, playing with his hair, listening to his breathing. When he moves the pillow aside she just resettles herself against his body, resting her head on his shoulder instead. Her arm shifts and her hips, out of necessity, move against his briefly until she's still again, still and quiet.

There isn't much to see in her room, not on the walls or on the ceiling. The windowblinds are open, letting in some of the city's light pollution, dimming and diffusing the rainbow cast through the prism. There's a sense of ambient color from that prism, but no defined expression of it across her skin or his own. The ceiling is high, the square footage impressive, and the emptiness...telling.

Then again, his room at the Brotherhood seems spartan and empty at first glance, too.

At his question, Danicka stirs. She was not almost asleep, but she is so relaxed as to be quite close to it. She shakes her head gently against his left pectoral muscle, breathing him in deeply and exhaling slowly.

"Ne," she says, the word loose and casual on her lips. "I mean...it's happened before, but I'm not sick." There's a beat, filled with consideration, and then she relents, admitting: "I haven't been sleeping well...like, at all. I can't seem to stay asleep for more than a few hours at a time. I can't even remember the last time I ate."

It seems that once the words get going, they just...keep coming. There is not a note, a trace, or a whiff of complaint to them. The way she talks about not taking care of herself sounds almost musing, with a hint of consternation that she genuinely doesn't know when she last had something to eat. And as she goes on, she just sounds...worn out.

"It looks like Marty's going to move out to go live with his daughter in Florida, and...I can afford this place on my own, but not indefinitely or even a very long time. If I don't get a new roommate there's no way I can pull off the college thing, and Gerry said he'd help but I think I'm just going to end up with some freak who drinks whole milk or invites hordes of people over all the time or steals my cigarettes or fucks with my computers or...smells bad..."

Danicka trails off, turns her face, and buries it completely in the crook of his arm, as though this is the way to stop thinking about it. She lowers her hand from his neck, wraps her arm fully around his torso, and just holds him. And it would be fair to leave it that that: she's just tired, and she's just stressed, and there is nothing wrong with this. She is a grown woman capable of taking care of herself.

Who is falling apart because her roommate is in the hospital. And leaving her to fend for herself in this city. Which should not bother her, either; she's from New York City, for fuck's sake.

She rubs her face against his shoulder briefly and growls, very softly, in her throat. "...That was good, though," she says more quietly, more calmly than the rest of what she just told him. And then even closer to a whisper: "I needed that."

[Lukas] Perhaps if Lukas were a different man, he would offer some empty words of comfort or care. It'll be okay. You should take better care of yourself. I'll move in with you and split the rent.

Perhaps if Danicka were a different woman, she might even want one or more of these things to be said to her. But they are who they are, and while Lukas listens -- silent, attentive, and briefly frowning when she mentions that Marty is moving away, because he can't help but think but what about Katherine and poor Kate, but doesn't say any of this aloud.

He does not pretend to like Martin much, or care much about Martin. She does not pretend to like or care about Katherine. But there are certain things done here for one another's sake -- subtle little kindnesses that could hardly be called such.

And in the end, Lukas makes little response other than the slow tracery of his hands over her skin, and a faint sound, something like a laugh, when she fantasizes about all the ways her next roommate might suck.

Silence then. She's fallen quiet; she's turned her face against his skin, and then she rubs her face against him and he draws a breath and she says she needed that, and he thinks

potř;ebovala jsem tě.

and this, too, makes him frown, and then he stirs again, he tucks his hand behind his head and draws a deep breath.

"What's this 'college thing'?" he asks.

[Danicka] Were Lukas the type of man to assure Danicka that things will be all right and remind her to take better care of himself, her likely response would be that she knows this already, and he would see a glimmer of the alpha female that used to resent his sister and mother for coming into her house, the alpha female that still exists inside her -- caged, but not truly calmed. The night they met he'd seen a glimpse of this side of her in the way she was around Gabriella, and another hint of it that night at the Blue Chalk: fiercely protective, surprisingly nurturing, even somewhat territorial. Glimpses and hints are all he has, though. He doesn't tell her things she already knows, though, and so that moment passes without defenses going back up.

Were he to tell her that he would move in he wouldn't even get to the part about splitting rent. Like hell you are would be out of her mouth before she could stop it. There's a thousand reasons why, each one as obvious and not worth mentioning as the next.

It's funny, the things she imagines having to deal with if she gets a new roommate. Maybe she's being sarcastic, or silly, but she doesn't sound sarcastic or silly. Perhaps he doesn't realize that this is ignorance talking, and inexperience. It doesn't matter either way, though, because just a little while later Danicka nuzzles his body, murmurs what she does... and he thinks something thoroughly devastating and does them both the kindness of keeping it to himself.

You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed.

His question makes turn her head and look back up at him. She doesn't answer for a moment, then slides her right arm back towards her body until she can get her weight on her elbow and forearm. Her left hand gets out from around him and plants itself on the mattress. Holding her body up over him, Danicka lifts her hips away from his, allowing the cooler air of the room replace the familiar warmth of her body against his groin. She watches his eyes as she moves, sliding her legs over and off of his, coming to rest on her right side next to him, head propped up. Behind her is the second closet, this one with sliding doors instead of a folding one.

"I...am thinking about going to college," she says finally, once she's settled again. Her tone is light, and matter-of-fact. "And...by thinking about, I mean I've applied to a couple of places."

[Lukas] There are certain things Lukas cannot help.

He cannot help but laugh when someone's serious about something he finds ridiculous. He cannot help but look up on a clear night, in a dark space, where the stars overhead are so bright they burn. He cannot help but grow angry if his pride is attacked a certain way. He cannot help but want her when she reaches for him a certain way, and her eyes look a certain way, and her words fall from her lips a certain way.

He cannot help but draw a sip of a breath as she separates from him -- his eyes falling shut for a second, then reopening to watch her move over him, and then resettle.

There is a little distance between them now. He looks at her for a moment; perhaps his first instinct here is to laugh, incredulously, that a young woman of her obvious intelligence and worldliness and means had never spent four years at some vaunted ivy league, or some liberal arts college out west. Except, of course, he too has never been to college, and so this is less unbelievable to him than it might be to someone else.

He does not laugh. He merely looks at her, curiously, and when she props herself up on an elbow he reaches to thread a lock of hair behind her ear; traces the angle of her jaw down to the point of her chin.

"I always assumed you'd been to college," he says; there's no censure in or implied in his tone, only that same curiosity that lights his eyes. "Why didn't you go when you were younger?"

[Danicka] She's growing used to the way he reacts when she leaves him, which is a quieter, subtler version of the way he reacts when she first takes him. His head moves back, his eyes close, and she runs the palm of her hand over his chest as though in comfort. Danicka is getting used to these things, but she is not yet used to the unexpected tenderness that fills her when she watches him like this.

Danicka's body rests next to his left side, her weight on her arm still. It is not the same as having her head on his shoulder, which is so calming that if she does not soon fall asleep her heart begins racing and she has to move away. She can tolerate this: their legs and thighs and hips together, his side moving against her belly when he breathes, their skin beginning to cool as the air brushes over the sweaty expanses of skin where they were previously pressed completely together.

There is not a great deal of nervousness or shyness to her, not when it isn't feigned. Danicka is incredibly frank with him sometimes, usually during and after sex, and this is no different. There is, however, a certain guardedness, a wariness that he will laugh at her, or dismiss this as stupid. To Lukas, Danicka's intelligence and cleverness is obvious, but there's a vague and barely-revealed uncertainty in the way she talks about this. She is not hedging or retreating, though; she is not waving away the question or changing the subject or lying.

And if he's smart, as he was smart not to say poor Kate aloud earlier, he may very well realize that this is not easy for her, talking to someone she claims not to trust about something that fractures her apparent poise and confidence. It does not come naturally.

Instead of laughing, Lukas touches her hair, and her face, and she leans into it, tipping her head forward. It means that the lock of hair he just tucked back falls free again, slipping back down along her cheek, but no matter: she smiles gently. Appreciatively.

Remaining there, leaning closer to him, Danicka simply shrugs her left shoulder once. "After nine-eleven the Sokolovs were...freaking out," she says, with the faintest of eye rolls to indicate her opinion of this so-called 'freaking out'. "They waited until the next spring, when I graduated high school, and then sent us all down to their place in New Orleans."

[Lukas] The edge of his mouth quirks up. He teases her gently: "Tulane didn't live up to your standards?"

And it's this, really, as much as anything, that sets this, with her, apart from anything else he's ever had before. Sure -- the sex is mindbending, quite frankly amazing -- and the woman herself is beautiful, and beautifully proportioned, and ... and the truth is if it's nothing but a beautiful face and a good fuck, this would not be so devastating and irreplaceable as it is, and is becoming. If she, and this, were nothing but a beautiful face and a good fuck, then he could've easily made a whore of her, and left it at that.

But it's not just that. It's the sex. It's her loveliness. It's the connection. It's these moments afterward, when they're not so damn guarded; when they reveal things to one another that, perhaps, they did not think they would.

It's the strange comfort they have in one another's presence, their bodies touching incidentally, casually; acceptingly.

He's grown serious again. He does not tuck her hair back, but he covers her shoulder, the left one, the one that had shrugged, with his hand. It is thoughtless, a point of contact.

"Though, I suppose the Sokolovs didn't hire a governess just so she could run off and get a degree herself," he adds, quiet.

[Danicka] The smile she gives back when the corner of his lifts teasingly is tight, but not strictly unhappy, and not because of him. Her eyebrows tug together; the overall expression is almost a wince. "No," she replies quietly, "I was supposed to supervise Nanny Helena, and oversee Yelizaveta's education -- the tutors all had other clients in New York, but they continued to teach her through correspondence -- and direct the men-at-arms. Even if the Sokolovs had supported it and even if I'd been able to get scholarships for out-of-state, I wouldn't have had the time."

This isn't said with rancor, or defensiveness. Her guards are down, and she goes on running her left hand across his chest as smoothly and slowly as he stroked her back and then her thigh in the moments after the orgasm that was strong enough to literally knock her out. Now the color is fading from her cheeks and yet her eyes are just as bright as they were before she fainted, their color murky and shifting in the darkness. A poet might use their eyes as metaphor, how his are always so clear and hers rarely so, how he mercilessly tells the truth and she barely even seems to know what the truth is at times.

Maybe Danicka is a poet. It would be one more thing he has never been allowed to know about her, along with the fact that she did not attend college and -- as he learns now -- was essentially running a household and raising a preteen when she was barely out of high school. For all he knows she has pages and pages of poetry by her hand, or is an artist, or once shot a man in Reno, because this is one of the first times she has ever told him This was my life before you were in it.

[Lukas] One might expect more fanfare about this. Sometimes Danicka barely seems to know what the truth is -- sometimes Danicka barely seems able to tell Lukas two things about herself without nearly collapsing from the effort of it. One might expect more pomp, more circumstance, more ... effort involved in these divulgences.

Instead, this is how it comes: quietly, with their hands moving thoughtlessly over each other, their eyes resting on one another's faces.

"How did you get involved in the Sokolovs, anyway?" he asks then, and he shifts again: the other hand behind his head now. "It seems unusual for a Fang family of such clout to hire a Shadow Lord to raise their only child."

And then a faint tilt of his mouth -- "I suppose the pot is addressing the kettle."

[Danicka] When Lukas moves his right hand to join his left underneath his head, Danicka pauses for a moment, looking him over without grinning or leering but observing him thoughtfully, tracing the lines of his body with her eyes and -- apparently -- deciding she's pleased. She runs her left hand up his midline, over his chest, and past his right shoulder to slide over his bicep. Reaching his elbow, she curls her fingers and gently drags her nails back over his skin, breathing in deeply and sighing with quiet satisfaction. "I like your arms," she interjects idly, as the breath leaves her.

He asked a question, though, and for some reason she answers it. Her limit does not seem to have been reached, the point where she can no longer force herself to tell him anything. In fact, it doesn't even seem like these revelations are being forced. Danicka does not choose to distract him by mentioning that she is not a Shadow Lord, she's Kin to Shadow Lords, and she smiles wryly when he admits that he is one of the last people with good reason to ask this question. He is packed with Silver Fangs, Beta to them...as the Tribe used to be, a long time ago.

They are both from very old families.

No, Danicka just lies there, runs her fingertips through the hair on his chest thoughtfully, thinking about his question, and after a few moments she explains: "I wasn't exactly raising her. It's a hard job to explain because it's so...outmoded." Leaning over, Danicka presses her lips to his shoulder, not to arouse or to comfort him but because he's there, and because she wants to. Lifting her head again, she goes on as though she never paused: "My family was known, and loyal, and trustworthy. I had certain skills they were interested in, and I was Kinfolk. They knew that I spoke Russian and wanted Yelizaveta to learn naturally rather than through a tutor. I taught her the basics of piano and singing and was in charge of what I guess you could call her 'cultural education': art, poetry, theater, all that.

"What tutors she had for topics taught in mainstream schools answered to me, and I helped her with her lessons. The nanny was there to wake her and get her fed and dressed and to be available on my nights off, but I was supposed to teach her how to behave and prepare her for being mated one day."

She shrugs a second time, her eyes moving finally from his flesh to his face once more. There's no need to ask him why he didn't go to college. That would be a sublimely stupid question.

[Lukas] Her comment about his arms makes his eyes skate to her hand, her fingernails, his arm. Lukas makes some quiet sound, more amusement than pride, more self-deprecating than anything else. He doesn't thank her for the compliment; perhaps he is not very polite after all.

"Is that what happened?" This, after she's finished. "She got mated off, and you were relieved of your duties?"

[Danicka] She didn't thank him earlier when he told her she was beautiful; it's fair. There are things she could tell him she likes in words that she says instead with her mouth on his, or her tongue on his body, or the way she arches her back and groans something in another language. The things she will actually come right out and say she likes are odd, things that seem out of place. She likes that he doesn't lie and claim that she's safe. She likes his arms. She likes the way his mouth tastes, craved it before she knew what it was like and apparently was not disappointed because she kisses him the way she does.

Danicka's reaction to that quiet sound of amusement, nearly a scoff, is a flash of a wicked half-smile that Lukas misses because he is looking at her hand on his body and not at her face for a spare second.

She shakes her head. "Not yet. She was accepted to Columbia. The expectation is that she'll attend for a couple of years while they work through the short list of suitable mates. She has not had a nanny since we returned from New Orleans, no longer needs tutors or a governess, and she's spending this year in Paris with her mother to build relationships with French Silver Fangs. They let me go shortly before the holidays."

The way Danicka says 'let go' does not sound like the phrase used to mean 'fired'. It sounds like being held, and finally released. Like a breath. Like a captive.

[Lukas] Paris. Relationships with the French Silver Fangs. Suitable mates. Short lists.

Lukas closes his eyes for a moment, letting his breath go in a half-laugh that has more of an edge than the last. "Sometimes," he says, quietly, "I can get so tired of the fucking Fangs."

And then it's past; his eyes open again. He looks at the ceiling for a moment, studying it, before returning his eyes to her face. Thoughtful, now.

"Why did you agree to the job if you didn't enjoy it?"

[Danicka] Her mouth is on his before the s at the end of Fangs has completely left his mouth. That moment ends up lasting much later, the edge not just heard and felt but returned to him. All of these words had left Danicka in a rather flat tone, not obviously bored but not very invested in anything she was saying. It was all so much blah, blah, blah and then he confessed getting sick and tired of that whole goddamn Tribe and Danicka...kisses him.

It's sudden, and most likely unexpected, and there's nothing tender or sweet about it but as hard as the mountains their was born from, are made from. Every time he's around this woman her breeding sings out home and warmth and jaro to him but he has also seen how long it takes her to get cold, how little she shivers even when it's below freezing outside, how sometimes she holds her head up even when she's obviously terrified. And now, how she kisses him, it's simultaneously as sensual as their sex and as playful as they are strangely wont to be afterwards and yet it has that edge of ferocity and strength that encompasses so much of what they are, or what they're supposed to be.

And then it's past. She pulls back, takes a breath, and lifts her eyebrow at his question.

"I never said I didn't," she tells him, with the air of a reminder. "And besides...what makes you think I had a choice?"

[Lukas] The kiss is unexpected, but that doesn't mean he doesn't return it. It doesn't even mean he doesn't see it coming in that last split-instant before her mouth is on his -- and in that split instant he simply abandons the last consonant of his word and lifts his chin and meets her somewhere in the middle, with a sudden fierceness that has the hand on her shoulder tightening unconsciously.

And then it's past.

She pulls back. He sets his head back down. She reminds him it wasn't, or at least couldn't be assumed to have been her choice. He exhales, another laugh, and another breed of laugh -- wryer.

"I suppose," he says, "I do like to pretend we live in a world where it is."

[Danicka] What she could say now is something along the lines of I like kissing you but they've both already said that they don't do this. They don't kiss the people they're fucking and they don't go on and on fucking the same person with loyalty and affection and Lukas said he doesn't go at it four times in a night like a rutting animal and Danicka never does it without a condom and yet...

She smiles at him when their mouths part, a little amused, a little thoughtful, and says nothing about the kiss, or the damned Silver Fangs. They go back to their conversation as though nothing has happened, though something did happen and neither of them could or would deny it by this point: it's unlikely either of them could say with any certainty how long they actually kissed. Long enough for her to have trouble breathing? Long enough for his neck to feel the strain? Not long enough for the sun to have come up. It could have been a few seconds.

It could easily have been longer.

Danicka smirks faintly; there's no humor in it. "I can't."

Pretend, that is.

[Lukas] And now humor bleeds from him entirely. His hand returns to her face, but not to stroke back her hair this time. He simply puts his palm to her cheek for a moment, as though it meant something -- as though it accomplishes something.

A beat or two. "I know."

This time it's he that leans up to her. This kiss is not so ferocious as the last. It's gentler, lingering. When he lowers himself back to the mattress he licks his lips, drawing his lower lip in under his teeth for a second or three.

Then: "So, where are you applying?"

-- and it occurs to him, suddenly and rather wryly, that this is exactly the sort of conversation high school sweethearts might have. Exactly the sort of conversation they should've each had some five, seven years ago -- though not with one another, because they didn't know each other then, and anyway, they wouldn't have been in the same grade, wouldn't have applied at the same time. All that.

In a very real way -- in very real ways, because it is different for him and for her -- their bloodline, their birthrights steal their lives from them and replace them with another's. A human life for a holy warrior's. A human life for ... what? A nanny's, a governess's, a brood mare's? A caged bird's?

Lukas gets around it by divorcing himself, the best he can, from his life before the Change. There was Lukáš Kvasnička then; there is Lukáš Wyrmbreaker now. Simple as that. And yet in a way she's the bridge that spans the gap. He knew her then. He knows her now. He is not the same person, and she is not ... and yet they are.

And, and.

[Danicka] There's a moment in between that kiss and his next words where Danicka just looks at him, her cheek still against his palm and her face still incredibly close to his. She doesn't pull away as he lowers his head again, though she does wonder in a flicker of thought if he is even going to be able to sleep in this bed, so much softer than the one at the Brotherhood or even at the hotels, roughly three times as thick. The thought passes quickly, dismissed with the knowledge that he might not stay at all; she hasn't asked him to, and last time he slept on the couch and then they argued and the asshole threw her computer on the cushion beside her and then left --

Her heart, for some reason, beats a little faster when he bites his lip. She imagines his teeth in her shoulder, or dragging along her lip, or gently teasing her nipple with the heat of his breath behind them, and licks her lips.

When she was supposed to be applying to colleges he was still a cub. They never would have had this conversation.

"Loyola, the University of Chicago, and DePaul." Danicka turns on the bed, lying on her back now, shifting around until her head is pillowed on one of those arms she claims to like. She looks at the ceiling now, unable to look at him at this point and continue talking. Her brow furrows, though, and he might see this out of his peripheral vision. He might hear it in her voice, dubious and maybe even disconcerted: "Are you really interested in this?"

[Lukas] She has looked away, and so she misses the quick, half-pained quirk of his lips -- not quite humor at all.

"Isn't it obvious?" he asks her back. "I'm trying to figure out if you're leaving town."

[Danicka] Rolling onto her back, Danicka had laid her palms on her torso, one just under her breasts and the other over her navel. Now her right twists, lifts, and she turns her head so that she will not be blindly reaching when she moves to touch his face. "Kind of a weird thing to be thinking about when earlier tonight you didn't even know if you wanted to be with me."

[Lukas] He too has turned to face the ceiling. His brow furrows; then her hand touches his face, and abruptly the expression clears, and he smiles.

"Consistency," he quotes, "is for children and pets. I'm neither."

And quieter now, more serious: "I do want to be with you. I just don't think I can keep you for long. And I'm not even sure we can handle each other." A pause; and then the understatement of the century: "We're quite different, Danička."

[Danicka] She chuckles at the quote, moving against his side, and scritches the rough shadow on his jaw gently in retaliation. Given what they're talking about it strikes her, too late, how painful this is.

It hurts that it feels natural, that it feels right, and that despite this it still makes her tense when she realizes just how comfortable she can be with him. Times like these make it seem like they've been near one another their whole lives and just never stepped over some imaginary gap until a little over a month ago. Times like this make her feel...indescribable, and Danicka is rarely at a loss for words.

Her hand stills, and slides away, more because the angle is uncomforatble than because she has any wish to stop touching him, or to give him reason to drop the smile. His understatement doesn't get a laugh or a scoff; in some ways it's undeniable truth and in others it's the complete opposite of reality. In some ways they are inextricably alike, they just can't see it. She can't argue with him on that, though.

"Why do you think you can't 'keep me'?" she asks, sounding curious. Maybe even bewildered. "What does...keep me...even mean?"

[Lukas] The topic, the question -- it makes Lukas uncomfortable. It makes him close up a little. He exhales, and then, abruptly, he sits up, his knees drawing up, his elbows balanced over them as he raises a hand to his hair. Scuffs it through.

"It means I don't think this is forever," he replies, and there's a certain flatness to his tone now. "As to why -- there's any number of reasons, Danička, and I don't think I have to tell you that."

[Danicka] Isn't it obvious, he asked, that he was asking where she was applying to go to college because he wanted -- needed -- to know if she was going to stay or if she was going to be here for perhaps the summer and then gone again. Shouldn't it be obvious that he came in like a whirlwind the other night not because she is just Shadow Lord Kin but that he cares about her? Shouldn't she know, already, with the way this began and the way they are, that he is very likely right, and they can't handle each other? Danicka knows, better than most, can guess with more ease, and yet she asks.

Keeping her, it's half-explained, means forever. Lukas, sitting up before he speaks, shows her the expanse of his bare back and she runs her eyes so deliberately down the valley of his spine that he may very well feel it as surely as a physical touch.

She's lost the pillow they were sharing to...wherever he tossed it. She's lost his arm under her head and just sinks back down on the mattress, straining to watch him for a moment and then looking at the ceiling again, instead. Danicka blinks, her hands resting once more on her abdomen and her solar plexus. She breathes deeply.

"Nothing's forever," Danicka says, not quite as flatly as he but with a certain lessening of investment that signifies the beginnings of this -- whatever this is, what they have afterwards -- distintegrating, unless one of them does something to alter that course. Which she may be doing, when she takes a second deep breath and asks the ceiling: "Is that...is that what you want?" She pointedly does not say from me or with me. "Forever-until-you-die?"

[Lukas] Give him credit for this as well: the very mention of it, the very question, the very implied-assumption that perhaps this is what he wants, doesn't make him scream and run for the door any more than her sudden consciousness after the act had. He gives it serious consideration, though the naked muscles of his back contract unconsciously to some unspoken strain, or tension.

In the end he lifts his head, drops his hand from his hair, which is sticking up in spikes and horns now, the dampness of sweat lifting from the roots. He looks at her over his shoulder, and shakes his head.

"I don't know what I want."

[Danicka] "Ahh," Danicka exhales, a sigh as satisfied as she might after a long drink of cool water on a hot day, except that it is quiet enough to be reverent. This is not a holy temple, this is a bedroom, and a tidy but unrevealing one at that. She had dropped her eyes in the silence that followed her question, looked at his back again, and watched the stress move through him subtly.

It wasn't enough to make him bolt, and it isn't enough to make her hold her breath. She meets his eyes past the curve of his shoulder and offers him that sighed vowel sound and a faint smile tugging at one corner of her mouth. She pulls her right leg towards her until her foot is flat against the fitted sheet -- the topsheet and the comforter are tossed, kicked, and shoved to the bottom of the bed, ignored now -- and then pushes herself into a sitting position.

Danicka slides over, moves into the warm space where his body was laying just a moment go, and with one leg on either side of his lean hips, wraps her arms around him from behind. Her hands run over his abdominal muscles, pass each other, and she leans forward until her breasts touch his back and her head turns, ear pressed to his ribs, listening to his heartbeat below.

"Well, at least you're in good company, then."

[Lukas] He can feel her moving behind him -- can feel it in the shift in the mattress, in the air, and then in her limbs coming around him. He draws a breath as she straddles him in reverse, dropping a hand to her knee as it rises around the outside of his thigh. His other hand covers hers where they clasp over his stomach.

She leans into him and he bows his head, his back smooth and unscarred, the musculature there lean and hard, well-fitted to the bones and to one another.

She's well-fitted too: she fits him like this, and in a million other ways.

"Am I?" he asks her, quietly; this too is rhetorical, a simple echoing back and forth. A call and response, as uncomplicated and complicated as a shared breath. His left hand tightens briefly on hers, then slides up her right arm a stretch, to where the inside of her elbow presses against his side. He reinforces her embrace like this, holding her limbs around him, her knees, her elbows, her arms, her legs. It reminds him of the morning she'd fallen asleep with her brow to the center of his back, her hand over his heart.

She can feel his heartbeat now, too, through his back, his spine -- less distinct than when she hears it through his breastbone, but present nonetheless, like the great pistoning engines deep in the core of some vast battleship. The metaphor isn't that far off. In many ways, Lukas is exactly like that: a warmachine, born and bred for one purpose alone.

That purpose is decidedly not this.

[Danicka] It's arguable that Danicka was made for this, from the moment she was born and it was declared that she was merely Kin the way it had been declared when her brother was born that he was a Theurge. From birth, Vladislav and Daniela's roles were defined and their futures set, and by the time Lukas's family came to America Danicka was already well on her way. She learned to cook before she could read. She knew how to get blood out of clothes before she had her multiplication tables down...and she had them all memorized from her brother's books long before they tried to teach it to her in school.

When she was older, she learned the birds and the bees and the Garou and the Kin. A simplified understanding of genetics was passed along, family history shared, and when she was eight or so Danicka began accepting that one day she was going to be mated, preferably to a Garou, and then she was going to make babies, preferably as many or more than her father had helped make, and preferably one or more of them would be Garou as well, like her brother and one of her half-sisters. She was taught, she was trained, and she was subdued, and given that background, more than a few of the other Kinfolk at the sept in New York City would be wondering what Lukas's holdup is.

After all, they've already known one another for nearly two months. They used to play together as children. Isn't it obvious.

Danicka smiles against his back, and is not thinking about how she was made or for what purpose. She is, however, thinking about what he is, and smiles anyway, which is nothing more than a subtle tightening of her facial muscles against his back. It fades, her fingernails scritching gently on his abdomen as he holds her arms there around him. She has nothing to lean against behind her unless she somehow pulls him with her back to the headboard. This is the reverse of how they were that night in the bath, him held by her rather than the other way around. She does indeed fit him, in a million ways. The fact that he does not know what he wants, and that she understands this better than just about anything else, is what makes her smile.

"Já vím, co chci v tuto chvíli, ale to je vše," she murmurs.

[Lukas] A beat or two of pause. Then he turns in her embrace, twisting around to lift his arm over her head and set it down on the opposite side of her: right hand beside her left hip, indenting the mattress as his weight settles. He regards her a moment, his eyes flickering between hers. Even in the darkness there's a clarity, a sharpness to them; it's in the way what light there is slants through the pale irises, and in the way they move, alert, hawklike, between her eyes, over her face.

His body is torqued between her thighs, between her arms, a hundred sliding points of contact between. And then a thousand, as he leans in, tilts his head to kiss her mouth, his eyes closing only after their lips touch, and then their tongues.

It's a slow kiss, gentle; nearly sweet. It lasts for some unremarked time, until he begins to turn in earnest, his hips pivoting, his balance going to his knees, his hands drawing back to hook behind her knees and pull her closer against him.

Her thighs are still open to him like this. This is not something he overlooks, or can easily forget, when he's kissing her like this, and 'like this' has deepened now, and escalated.

"That's good enough for me," he says when their mouths part. And, his mouth curving, a smile: he quotes her back to herself again. "Více?"

[Danicka] Out of necessity -- and also in welcome -- Danicka's hands slide off of Lukas's stomach as he starts to turn, resting on the sides of his waist. She sees his eyes on her again, no longer sated and moderate in color but vivid. Her lips give a shadow of movement, the tension preceding a smile that never quite unfurls, as her breath catches in her throat. Lukas moves closer, and she retrieves her arms from around him, only to wrap them around his shoulders as she leans into kissing him.

Every single shift of his body is echoed somehow in her. He turns, and she pulls him into her arms. He kisses her, opens his mouth, and she slides her tongue into his mouth. He rests his weight on his knees and Danicka leverages hers against his upper body, pulling herself up. He runs his palm under the back of her thigh to her knee, brings her closer, and Danicka straddles his lap. If there were an obvious cause and effect it could be said that every one of his actions has a reactions, but they move so near the same time that it's almost impossible to tell who is responding to whom.

(Last time they were in this particular position he'd cursed, set her down to go get the condoms, and when he'd come back they'd both realized how close the moon was to full. Tonight it doesn't seem to matter what phase the moon is in, other than that it is not Lukas's birth moon.)

He pulls his mouth from hers and Danicka leans towards him, seeking the return of his lips on hers, his tongue in her mouth. He has done the exact same damn thing when she has pulled away first, following the kiss as though the lingering taste of it is not and never will be enough. There's no hesitance in Danicka's body to do this, no moment when she checks herself out of politeness or self-control, which is perhaps the most glaring and obvious difference between them outside of the physical. Male. Female. Black hair, blonde. Blue eyes, green.

He smiles, his lips still close to hers, and a gentle smirk flickers like a candle guttering across her features. Of course he wants more. Many minutes ago, maybe more, she could tell just by looking at his eyes that the sated warmth and relaxation that fills him after an orgasm was giving way to renewed energy, restored attention. Even if Danicka could not read him, especially at times like this, as though she's known him all her life, the way they were kissing strikes a clear enough chord. She can feel it in the muscles of his shoulders, see it in that smile.

And he can feel it in her, in the slide of her thighs around him when she moved into his lap, in the arch of her back to press herself closer. She does not pause to ask him if he's staying, or insist that they talk some more, that they address again the question of where this is or is not going or what they want or blah blah blah. Then, this is Danicka: he probably wouldn't expect that of her.

She gives that smile back to him, her eyes half-lidded and drowsy, her hand reaching down to her side. Danicka covers his hand with her own and slides it back up her thigh to her ass, watching him as her voice lowers to a purr: "Silněji této doby. V pořádku?"

She darts forward after this, flicking the tip of her tongue over his lips, her smile spreading into a grin.

[Lukas] This surprises a huff of a laugh out of him, though really, he shouldn't be surprised by such things anymore. Danicka and restraint does not belong in the same sentence -- at least not when bedsport is concerned.

Other things: that's a different story. When they were young, she was the very picture of restraint. The Kvasnicka children tore around the house; they shouted and they jumped and they ran and they skidded and sometimes they slipped on the waxed floors and faceplanted. Danicka watched, silent, perhaps shocked or awed, and the slightest hint of trouble tended to send her scampering to safety.

It's not quite the same thing anymore. She doesn't run at the first sign of trouble anymore, at least unless you counted how she'd run from the Spirals when Martin told her to run; at least until you counted how she ran into Lukas's room when Sam showed up in near-man shape. It's not quite the same thing, and they're not quite the same people, but they are, and they aren't, and ...

... and his mind has gone down this path before, and really, right now: who the fuck gives a fuck?

He tilts his chin up. He catches her lower lip between his teeth, gently, and then his eyes close and he kisses her grin, he grins as he kisses her, and there's such a sense of co-conspiracy in this that he's reminded of when they were children, and climbing trees together, only that's a false memory, because he barely remembers these things, and ...

(and who the fuck gives a fuck, now.)

"Dobře," he agrees when the kiss parts, and by then they've kissed the grins off each other's faces, only his is coming back, and his hands close over her ass where she's moved them and he pulls her up along his body, and his breath catches when she slides against and over his erection but his grin stays where it is, slight and a little crooked, a little self-deprecating. "Ale ruka mě ti kondomy zatímco jsem ještě může myslet."

[Danicka] What passes for restraint when Danicka is in bed with him is not biting him when she wants to stifle a scream...or simply when she wants to feel his skin against her teeth, or add some savage and intense layer of sensation to the act for him. Her version of self control involves not digging her fingernails into him or leaving long red tracks down his back or over his chest. It is waiting until the door is closed and locked before she is on him. It's not tearing anything when she takes his clothes off. But since he never would have expected any of this from her the first night, he perhaps didn't realize that she was careful, that she held back.

She does that less and less, as time goes on. He sees more of the truth of her: that strangeness in the shower as she let blood splatter her skin and unbuttoned her dress as water coursed down over her, the protective look in her eyes when she welcomed him on top of her the first time and pushed his hair back from his face, the uncertainty she has when talking about never going to college and considering going now, when she's going to be seven years older than most freshmen. Lukas does not always get the answers to his questions the way he wants them or when he wants them, but he is learning more about her even outside of this, outside of bedrooms and hotel rooms and outside of the warmth of her legs and arms enfolding him.

Danicka squirms when he bites her lower lip, even for just a second, her grin leaving her face when she kisses him to be replaced by an expression of steadily increasing lust. Her hips roll against him, make him catch his breath in his throat. She watches him, her eyes darker suddenly, and then she slides off of the tops of his thighs, onto her knees on the mattress. Danicka doesn't just twist around and lean over to grab what he's asked for from the still-open drawer of the nighstand. She moves to the edge of the bed, swings her feet down, and stands up.

The light from the windows just barely hits her, half her body palely lit and the other cast in shadow, her hair askew and wild and tossed around her shoulders. She grabs the strip of packets, tears one off, and tosses it onto the sheets in front of him, and closes the drawer with her thigh. Danicka does not get back onto the bed. She stands beside it, her upper thighs at level with the top of the mattress, and watching Lukas -- who is watching her, or watching his own hands, or whatever he is watching -- she slowly leans over, sliding her hands across the sheets, almost as though stretching. But when the stretch is over, she doesn't stand up straight again. She just looks at him.

It's as though they've never even heard of restraint, times like this.

[Lukas] The packet doesn't quite hit the sheets -- he catches it, snags it out of midair and tears it open, and all along he's watching her, of course, rolling the condom on by touch; he's watching her and the way the artificial lights from without hit her body, sheen off her skin. However fucked up she might think herself, she's got this going for her at least: her youth, her health, her beauty, the fact that her skin is absolutely flawless and her breeding is like a scent in the air.

Lukas does not know why she's gotten off the bed, and doesn't particularly care; assumes it's because this is easier for her, or because she wants to stretch her legs; frankly doesn't overthink it because he's got better things to think about

but then she puts her hands on the bed, she leans over, and the lean muscles of her back are stretching out, her arms are stretching out, and she's looking at him without saying a word or needing to say a word, because her body speaks for her, and he understands suddenly and perfectly why she got up off the bed.

A glint in his eye. A sort of hard, hungry gleam, all of a sudden. He draws a breath in and then he's off the mattress, sliding off after her, and his hands are on her even before he's behind her. His palms are roving up the slender length of her back, up and down again and then around. He touches her breasts as though to weigh them in his palms; traces the curvature of her ribcage and the lean ribbons of muscle over her belly, touches her as though to memorize her with his palms, and when his right hand goes between her legs his left hand holds her by the hip. He steps in behind her and rubs himself against her, his hips moving to the same deliberate and heavy rhythm as his hand, sliding the length of himself against her until her wetness is smeared all over him and all over her, and his cock is slick, his fingers are slick, the cleft of her cunt is slick and wet as waterweed.

She can hear him breathing now, quietly but audibly, a little unsteadily. He draws his hand from between her legs, draws back a little to look down through the darkness while he spreads her open with his thumbs, the fore and middle fingers of his right hand leaving a tracery of moisture across her ass. There's a starkness to this, a rawness, silněji této doby even before they begin to fuck in earnest. He parts her ass-cheeks, and then the outer lips of her cunt, and then the inner, and if there were more light he'd see her glistening wet, but as is he can only feel it, and feel her heat swallowing him in.

She can't see his face: she can't see the way his brow furrows, the flickers of tension drawing the tendons in his neck taut, shadowing his upper lip. He is not brutal; he doesn't force himself, ram himself in; but it is fast, this penetration, and absolute, a single sure slide in to the hilt.

A second to collect himself, then. Two --

-- and then he draws himself out, not merely a few inches but all the way, pulls out entirely, sucks a breath in with the speed and completeness of it, and she might think he's about to tell her to turn around again, tell her he wants to see her face, but no, it's not that, because he says, low,

"Zůstaňte kde jste,"

and then he's dropping to his knees behind her, and his hands are still holding her open, and he more or less plants his face into her sex, pushes his nose and his mouth and his chin against her wet, wet cunt, pauses only to say,

"Sehni se trochu více, láska,"

and there it is again, that troublesome word that could mean absolutely nothing or could mean absolutely everything or something in between, but it's likely neither of them is worrying about that right now, because right now Danicka is getting her pussy eaten out and Lukas is -- well. Eating her out.

[Danicka] What he did not know on Monday night, what she could not tell him, was that Danicka needed him. She needed him to stop yelling, come into her room, and get into this bed with her. She waited for him. She'd wanted him. Closed off as she'd been, fucked up as it was, she had wanted Lukas then. Not as an escape, not to offset the spark of attraction she'd felt when she picked up Ekaterina Martin from the airport, but because he makes her feel the way he does, even if she can't put words to what that feeling is.

What he knows now is that this has been an incredibly difficult week for Danicka, and that is not even counting what happened in Grant Park. She is not sleeping well or deeply, she is not eating enough, and she is stressed about not only money but the path her life is going to take, and later on if he thinks about that it could cast a whole new light on why she worked her body into a position where they could be closer to each other the first time. Whatever this is, it is something Danicka says she needs, and something that is good for her.

Harder this time, all right? is what she'd said when she climbed onto him, rubbing against his thigh and then his erection, purring the words, telling him what she wanted. Then this...standing at the edge of the bed and bending over, making it explicitly clear without a word exactly how she wanted to take him tonight, this time. One might think they spend all their time fucking, until one considers the fact that they only see each other every few days, or every week, or every goddamn-ten-days. Danicka would be the last person to deny that she has a healthy sexual appetite. Words like 'ravenous' and 'voracious' have been applied to her. Making her go a week and a half without fucking is like asking her to go without eating.

Danicka wants him to stay. She wants to keep on fucking him, and she wants that hungry glint in his eyes, that sudden explosion of psychological arousal that augments what is already happening to his body. She arches her back underneath the roaming slide of his palms over her flesh, presses back against him when he starts rubbing against her, makes a small noise in the back of her throat that is not entirely unlike a whimper. Danicka's breaths come heavier and faster as he matches the swing of his hips with the attentions of his fingers, and she bites her lower lip, but all he sees are the muscles in her back flexing, the fingers of her left hand curling into a fist around a handful of bedspread.

"Baby..." she moans, when he takes his hand from her, protesting and pleading at once.

Another moan, harder and louder and less plaintive, escapes her throat as he enters her, ending in a wordless cry of pleasure. Her hands tighten on the tangled comforter and sheets, her body relaxed but humming with aroused energy, quite simply waiting to get fucked to hell and back if he'll only --

-- not do what it is he does, which makes her gasp with the loss. "Lukáš, what the fuck," she whimpers again, feeling her body trying to clench and squeeze around something that is no longer there. She is fully against the mattress, her cheek to the sheets, her tongue slipping out to lick suddenly dry lips, her mouth open to pull for air that doesn't seem to do any good, because she goes on panting. If she were capable of coherent thought at the moment she might be trying to turn over, expecting that this is like before, that in this way he is nothing like the animal she damn well knows he is and he will always want to see her face when she comes.

But she's not capable of thinking right now. Danicka just squirms, barely processing the hints of movement behind her, her eyes shut and her mind lost to pleasure. This is going to help get her through the week to come. The packing. Placing an ad in the newspaper. Saying goodbye to Martin. Living by herself in this expansive apartment with its expansive view and feeling the way she does almost all the time: alone.

She does not feel alone right now, though.

Hearing an instruction, she obeys almost thoughtlessly, a frightening prospect if he did not know that on a full moon with an Ahroun on top of her she is still willing to tell him clearly what she does and does not want. Her obedience is not thoughtless, the way her muscles flex and the way she leans forward, bends more is not meaningless or a mere reaction to his words. Danicka is absorbing what he wants to do to her and gasping in reaction, clutching the luxuriously soft linens of her bed and thinking that this can't last, that if it lasts they'll only end up killing each other, and she doesn't fucking care right now because his tongue is on her, his lips, the heat of his mouth.

Maybe it's the fact that she's come twice already, maybe it's the fact that she is so stressed she cannot do anything but give herself over to what's between them when everything else is cast aside, left at the the door, dissolved. She calls his name, as though she's shouting for him to find her, and she swears, she curses like a sailor in three languages, she demands that he not stop, and her hands twist her sheets in hard grips. Harder this time, she'd said. It's harder. It's not his cock inside of her, his hips flexing behind her -- not yet oh please let it be not yet, she thinks -- but it's harder, more savage, and as her gasps and her heart rate skyrocket it's lucky that they're both so lost in each other that no one seems to remember what happened the last time she came.

In less than ten minutes this time, Danicka is nearly tearing her sheets. She is trying her damndest not to grind against his face, but in the position he has her in her movement is limited anyway, and she can do little more than stifle her cries in the mattress as he pleasures her. If this is what he wanted, if this is what makes it worth the time and energy he pours into it, if reducing Danicka to incoherent expressions of ecstasy is his goal, then Lukas gets what he wants. She screams when he makes her come for the third time in less than two hours, her head turned so the sound fills the air, raw and open, starting with a syllable that could be the beginning of his name and becoming nothing, becoming everything.

She is not surprised when he keeps going. She is slightly surprised, in a dazed way, that she does not pass out this time, vaguely shocked that she survived. Her hands don't loosen on the sheets, though, not for the nearly half a minute that her orgasm goes on...and on...while Lukas's lips and tongue keep working on her. Her outcry fades to gasps and whimpers, and it's only after she has taken in a deep drag of air that she manages to speak again, and it's nothing like English, she's never even heard of the goddamn language:

"Potřebuji tě uvnitř mě. Nyní." Danicka's eyes flicker open, look at the headboard, slowly close again as she tries to catch her breath, knowing it's only going to escape her again. "Bože, Lukáš, prosím. Nyní!"

[Lukas] Danicka is right to no longer be surprised when Lukas keeps going -- and going -- because it's what he did last time, and it's what he does this time, eating her out with such ferocity and focus that she might be forgiven for suspecting he's not just doing this because he thinks she expects it of him, or because it was the polite or courteous thing to do to the woman you've caused to cry three out of the last three times you've seen her, and the woman you've fucked against a hotel door until it hurt, and the woman you've left alone in her room the last time you were over because you couldn't figure out wtf a closed door meant, and ... all the other sins he's committed against her, they've committed against each other, that were all worth it nonetheless, because:

of this, really. Simple and complicated as that.

And the bottom line is: he's not doing it out of duty. She might be forgiven for suspecting, and she's probably right for thinking that he does it because he likes the way she responds. Because he likes getting her off, and not because it flatters his ego in some way, or proves his prowess, but because he likes the way she writhes on her bed and tries so hard not to grind on his fucking face, and the way her hands are tightening in her sheets and her blankets, and the way she presses her body to the mattress and arches her back and turns her face to the side like a swimmer exchanging old air for new, only she's exchanging muffled cries for the raw, openthroated scream she lets loose, and

he's still going at her with his mouth, sucking her with his lips and fucking her with his tongue, because he loves her disinhibition, and, let's be frank, he loves the glimpse of her that he can see in moments like this, clear to the bottom, with no shred and no hope of deceit.

His mouth gentles on her when she begins to come down at last. When her cries die down to whimpers and gasps he's licking and nuzzling her more gently than he ever has tonight, and it's not until she draws that deep, deep breath as though to re-ground herself that he kisses her very softly on her quivering cunt and draws back, gets to his feet.

"...so fucking hot," he exhales, he tells her: he means all of it.

And he licks his lips and he wipes his mouth on the back of his hand, but slowly, without disgust, and really, she doesn't have to ask him to fuck her because he's already moving in behind her. She certainly doesn't have to beg, and she doesn't have to do it twice. Lukas is, as they say, quite happy to oblige.

When she's saying now the first time he's touching her where he'd licked her, and he's thinking oh-my-fucking-god, and when she's saying Lukáš in that voice, that tone he's angling her hips just so, and she never gets around to saying now! that second time because halfway through the please he gives her what she wants, and what he wants; he pushes into her in a single sure stroke and

she's so hot and so wet that it's a smooth fucking slide, until every inch of his cock is in her, until the backs of her thighs are against the front of his and her ass is against his hips, and then her cunt clenches around him, and his head falls back and he says "Oh, fuck--!" at the ceiling, at the sky, eyes closing, as though fuck were a god and this is a prayer being ripped out of him.

Whatever answering words or cry or moan or simply -- breathless silence -- he gets is also incomplete. Is cut off because he draws out some small distance, not even halfway, and then slams it home again, and she doesn't have time to recover from this and neither does he, because he does it again, watching this time, silněji této doby, and then again, and then it's a rhythm, a steady pounding rhythm that he builds against her, fucking her fast and hard with all the momentum of his lower body while his hands spread over her skin and roam over her body, her hips and her thighs and her waist and her lower back, everything he can reach while she bends over the edge of her bed and gives it to him, gives it all up to him, všechno,

until even that isn't enough and he's reaching around to cup her between the legs, and by that point of contact, urges her up onto the bed, saying nothing now, letting his body speak for him as hers had spoken for her. He's right behind her as she climbs up, shifts her knees up one at a time; he follows her up onto the mattress and if his cock slips out of her he's back inside the first moment he can be, but even that's too long a time apart because it makes him gasp for the loss of her, and gasp again for the gain of her; it makes him bend over her and plant his fists down on the mattress on either side of hers. His mouth is at her shoulder now, the nape of her neck, on her skin and on her hair, and she's on all fours and so is he, covering her like the animal he thinks he is not and she knows he is, and that's okay, because

(it's her. it's Danička. it's okay.)

he doesn't think about it now; he's fucking her again, the same fast ungentle rhythm, the same mindlessly fluid pistoning of his hips against hers, him into her, hard enough that he can feel the aftershocks of the impact echoing through her slender body, beneath the arch of his.

That arouses him too. Everything about this, about her, arouses him, and the strength in his body moving into hers is a lie because he's on fire and burning to ash, crumbling to pieces, blowing away on the wind.

"Chci se na vás přijdou," he whispers in her ear near the end, only it's not really a whisper; it's more like a murmur, only it's not really a murmur; it's more like a growl, and he's nuzzling her ear, her cheek, he's searching for her mouth and if she turns her head he kisses her like a bite, and his hand finds her between her legs, and she's taught him well in all their encounters, and his fingers are unerring and merciless. "Chci se cítit vy. Danička..."

[Danicka] In the position she's in, Danicka cannot see anything Lukas is doing or about to do. She can hear him, telling her so fucking hot without saying if he means her, or this, or how he feels. She can sense movement behind her, can hear his breathing, and his presence tonight is sending chills up the back of her spine. He knows she's exhausted, he knows she's drained, and not just from the week she's had or the fact that she cried earlier, but the simple fact of the matter is that he is an Ahroun, he is as strong as he ever is, and even on her best day Danicka can barely handle being around him.

Right now he is not only behind her in the dark but she is naked, bent over, and yet those shivers racing up and down her body have nothing to do with fear. He wants trust, some modicum of it, some sliver of faith, and he has it. Danicka is not just trusting him at her back but coming down from a screaming orgasm only to plead with him to fuck her. Hard. Now.

And as it's been said: she doesn't really have to ask him twice.

A harsh cry leaves her throat when he slams into her, undercutting his Oh, fuck with her own voice, her own incoherent but no less worshipful exultation. After that there isn't much in the way of words from either of them, not when Lukas starts thrusting, rough and fast, like they've been going at this all night (and in a way, they have) and are just now hitting their stride, reaching their peak. For the first time, Danicka is not rocking against him with her own counterthrusts, because for the first time, this really is about just wanting Lukas to fuck her. This is what she wants, what she literally begged for, and that is what he gives her.

"Oh, fuck..." she echoes in a whimper, when one of the hands that has been smoothing all over her goddamn body slips between her legs again. Danicka doesn't so much as hesitate to pull herself up and put her knees on the mattress, rising up on her arms. Like this she has more leverage, and as soon as he's back inside of her she damn well uses it.

Danicka turns her head over her shoulder, looking down the side of her body and part of her back to watch his hips pounding her from behind, watch the expanse of his body bent over hers. It doesn't last; when he covers her, his fists on either side of her and his restrained grunting breathy in her ears as he kisses her shoulder and neck, she does not yelp in fear but moans. This is animalistic, this is primal, and she tilts her head back as best she can to rub against his, her back arching as she does so, her hips pushing back to meet his. This can't last, either: Danicka drops her head, eyes closing, and gasps when his hips flex particularly hard.

"Lukáš," she moans, because that's all she has left, sweat beading on her spine, the muscles in her arms and her shoulders tight, the ones in her hips and thighs and back tensing and relaxing at turns, in rhythm with him.

For a little while at the edge of the bed she was still but not passive, clutching at the sheets when he first began fucking her, crying out to let him know that by god what he was doing felt good, was wanted, was needed. Once back on the bed she was moving again, encouraging him with the rolls of her hips, the arch of her back coming with a concurrent gasp of pleasure. When he whispers in her ear she turns her head to him, breathing in his exhale, letting her own breath curl over his cheek, nipping at his lips and the skin covering his jaw before kissing him like she's as much of an animal as he is --

-- which is the truth, when you get right down to it. She's just stuck in one body, this body that arouses him so deeply and so furiously, even though she has to know that if it were just the body then he wouldn't be here, he'd be at some club in some bathroom or something and she sure as hell wouldn't be fucking some other Garou like this. She growls against his mouth, into his mouth, around his tongue, her entire body clutching around him when his fingers find her.

Danicka tears her mouth from his and gasps again, groans and thrusts back against him as though somehow, with all that strength he's still not fucking her hard enough, not when she's this close and --

"Jesus fucking Christ, Lukáš, you're going to make me pass out again," she half-groans, half-whimpers, starting to squirm rather than thrust in response to what he's decided to do to her with his hand along with his cock, with his arms framing her, his chest against her back, his body wrapped around her.

It may occur to him that she never falls asleep like this with him, with him enfolding her so completely, but it won't occur to him now, if at all, because Danicka is moving away from him, crawling forward. The sound that leaves her when he slips out of her body is nearly a shriek, of frustration or hypersensitivity or both, but she rolls over and wraps her legs around his lower half, her arms around his shoulders, pulling him to her which is unnecessary because he's already moving, entering her for the fourth time this round. It's no different this time than any other, causes them both to gasp sharply, causes Danicka to moan loudly again, her hips lifting to meet his thrusts again.

She puts one hand on his chest and one hand on his face to keep him from lowering himself to wrap around her, breathing out: "Chci se dívat na vás," before her eyes slide down to the juncture of their bodies, barely lit by city light and starlight both. "Nekončí... like that...just like that..."

But their pace picks back up again, faster. Harder. And Danicka can't go on watching him fuck her for very long. She slides her other hand to the other side of his face and watches his eyes instead of his body, asking silently with her own if he knows where he is, if he knows that she does trust him at least some, if he knows that if he doesn't stop she's going to come again, and it's because she's going to come again that she can't ask him any of these things, or say anything when it hits her other than

"LUKÁŠ!"

[Lukas] Twice now he's withdrawn unexpectedly and she's said, in that tone not merely aching or needful or bereft but pissed off: Lukas, what the fuck.

And let's be honest. If he weren't just as wracked as she was each and every time -- if he weren't missing the feel of her just as much -- he would have laughed at that. Even missing her, each and every time, some small part of him wants to laugh.

Well. After tonight, that might change. Because when she's just starting to squirm against his hand and his body and he's starting to get there, to get close, to feel the first unstoppable vanguards of his climax clawing their way up his viscerae -- when all this is happening, and then she just moves away from him, just ups and pulls herself off his cock and moves away, and all he can think is

Danička, what the fuck.

and the next time she says it to him, the next time she says it because he's drawn away, he might remember this; he might remember the sort of blank what-the-fuck-ness in his mind, the bafflement and frustration and wordlessly yammering want inside him, and not want to laugh quite so much.

Maybe.

Doesn't matter.

Doesn't matter because now she's turning on her back under him and her arms are wrapping around his neck and his shoulders and her legs are opening to him and he gets it now, he understands what she wants even before she says it, and he has to bite his lip when he slides, pushes, pounds right back into her, has to bite his lip to hold back a groan, which manifests itself anyway in a sort of caught breath, a sort of unvoiced murmur at the back of his throat, and she's right to hold him back because if she didn't he'd come down over her, he'd half-collapse on her and pull her up into him and hold her against him as he always does, as if to draw her into his very skin.

But she does. Hold him back, that is. Her hand is on his face, and her hand is on his chest, and his heart is pounding against her palm and his chest is straining against it, and she can feel his muscles bunching and churning there as he breathes, as he fucks, as he tries to lower himself over her, and it's not her strength, really, that holds him back; it's the look in her eyes, and her intention clear as day, clearer than words could ever be.

And he's never simply fucked her quite like this before, and she's never quite asked him to; has in fact asked him quite specifically not to, told him quite specifically she was not here to 'get fucked', and he could analyzed why she has changed her mind, or why this is not really quite changing her mind at all, or why this is still, somehow, different from how he would fuck some nameless woman in some men's room in some club, or how this is, in the end, still about what she wants for him, and what he wants for her, still about trust, and still about him and her and no one else in this room, and ...

like that, she says. Just like that. And his thoughts are scattering.

And he could analyze this, except of course he can't; he can't even think. His thoughts are spinning away from him and he's watching the joining of their bodies too -- no; let's be specific about it: he's watching his cock sliding into her, all the glistening length of it disappearing into her, and he's watching her cunt stretching around him, he's watching her thighs move and her stomach squirm and she's breathing the words out and he's just breathing, he's just trying to keep breathing, and he knows that she's watching too, saying just like that, and it's really that, more than anything else, that makes it impossible for him to maintain this pace.

So. Faster again. And his hair is damp with sweat, the strands sticking together; there's sweat running down his back in rivulets, driven down his skin with the flexing of his muscles, the impact of every thrust; there's a droplet of sweat running down his nose to hang off the end and he dashes it aside impatiently, his hand closes over her wrist, her forearm, and now she's watching his face, and he's twisting to the side to kiss her hands, to press her hand against his mouth with his, to nip at her palms and suck at her fingers before he plants his hand on the mattress again; he holds himself up over her and he fucks her, and

he's just watching her watching him, he's looking at her and there's an echo of every lance of pleasure running up his spine flickering in his eyes, and he can't quite read all the questions in her eyes, can't quite decipher them, but it doesn't matter because he's wracked with pleasure, blank with arousal, he's so lost in this, and in her, that the answer to anything and everything right now is simply yes, yes, fuck yes.

When she comes, he's only a second behind her, but it's a second that spins into an eternity, and as the instants drift apart like slices of paper flung into the wind he can feel the sudden arch of her body, flexible and tensile as steel, the unequivocal clenching of her cunt, the look in her eyes as her pleasure hits some threshold point and lights all her nerves afire, crystallizes, collapses her into herself and

and he can't hold it anymore. His eyes shut for a searing instant and then he's utterly lost; he looks at her not to watch her but to let her watch him; he slams himself home, deep as he possibly can, and he holds himself there, holds himself deep inside her as he comes, spends himself furiously inside her, electrically, quiveringly motionless, for a span of gasping seconds that roll on and on.

When his pleasure begins to let him go at last it's nearly a physical thing: a sudden relaxation in the spine, in the shoulders. His eyes close and he lets his head hang as his breathing settles into a ragged, harsh panting, as he flexes himself against her for another two or three short strokes, as though to remember the feel of her, or to remember that he can, in fact, move apart from her; that they are, in fact, two creatures.

He doesn't draw out just yet, though. His hips rock against hers; he returns himself to where he was, pressed inside her. His arms bend, elbows unlocking. Lukas lowers himself at last, and he can hunt and fight and kill and run for miles without tiring, but his exhaustion is deep now, absolute, and he's kissing her over and over, not a single thought, not even a shred of a thought left in his mind.

[Danicka] Their attunement to one another when they're -- fucking, let's say fucking, it's shorter and more businesslike -- fucking is uncanny. There are times when they are literally laughing together, not with mockery or derision but a conspiratorial playfulness that some can never achieve out of insecurity or ever-present tension. There are times when wordlessly and yet effortlessly they communicate what they want, what is happening inside of them, with little more than exclamations, gasps, and their hands on one another's faces to speak for them. And yet despite this seemingly inherent knowledge of one another, there are times like this, when Lukas says he wants to see her and he doesn't mean literally but that is how she takes it. That is why she turns around, leaving him -- momentarily, at least -- with a feeling of emptiness even though she is the one no longer filled.

This, like so much else between them, passes because it cannot survive very long the heat of the moment. That's what they have: heat. Moments. It's only a moment, but a heated moment, when they reconnect after so much as a few seconds of confusion, her trying to give him what he wants and him trying to cope with her body leaving his. They're back, though, a gasp on her part and a near-groan on his expressing whatever it is they feel when he moves into her again, and again, and again. They're sideways on the bed and so the headboard isn't being slammed into the wall as Lukas's hips pick up the pace. What Danicka says to him when he tries to lean in over her sets off the same cranial fireworks that burned behind his eyes when she asked if he wanted her to leave her stockings and thong on. Even this moment, with both of them watching the way their bodies join and separate again and again, cannot last for long.

It is, like the proverbial flame, too hot. Too bright.

It doesn't bear thinking about for very long, and certainly doesn't bear thinking about right this second. Danicka certainly is not thinking now about how long they can go on like this, not just this relentless ardor when they have sex but all of it, everything they seem to be to one another. She is not thinking about the times when she is afraid of him or hates him or hates herself for wanting him anyway, or about the unnameable ache that fills her in response to a certain endearment he has murmured to her twice tonight when she was barely conscious or coherent enough to appreciate it.

Right now, Danicka is thinking about how she's not sure she's going to be able to let him go with this is over, not because he is going to make her come again -- again, for Christ's sake -- rather than just fucking the daylights out of her til he reaches his own climax, but because right now she does not feel alone and she cannot remember the last time anyone she was with, sexually or otherwise, made her feel like she wasn't alone.

Or else she can remember, and that hurts even more.

So. Faster. Danicka touches his face with her free hand while her other one is taken by him, kissed and nipped and sucked at like he does, odd and tender and ferocious all at once and she adores it. She runs those fingers into his hair and arches her back to press towards him, to pull him to her, to meet his eyes and let him see that for a handful of moments they are each utterly emptied, filled with nothing but the other, and this is incredible, and this is what makes it worth it, and that is what pushes her over the edge. No wonder it's his name she cries out; she's forgotten her own, forgotten what she is called or what she looks like but she knows who she is, and who he is, and pulls him closer to her by screaming the only name she knows to give to him.

Her head is thrown back at the last second, when she can't hold onto his gaze any longer, when the last five, ten seconds of her orgasm -- his orgasm, their orgasm, there's no line anymore -- are rolling through her. Danicka begins to relax again, her spine losing its hard arch, her hands loosening in his hair and touching his neck and his shoulders and his arms, smoothing her palms over him as though to make sure he is still real, as if anything can be real and solid and tangible after that. Her breasts rise and fall as she pants for air, groans dying in her throat with those last pulses of his hips, pleasured beyond thought, beyond outcry.

They settle into a slow rocking against the mattress, unable to quite let go. Lukas's arms flex before he lowers himself and so when he does, Danicka knows he's coming, her eyes slowly opening to look at him once, her arms deepening the embrace...welcoming him. She kisses his forehead, his temple, and his mouth -- oh, of course his mouth, and she adores this, too. She is conscious, wholly with him now, knowing he is wholly with her, and that is enough.

It's some time before her lips leave his skin and before she can get enough air in her lungs to whisper: "I swear to Gaia if you don't stay in this bed tonight I'll never forgive you."

This might make him laugh.

Danicka sounds dead serious. The words leave her, and she shudders slightly, an echo of the tremors that used to take her over whenever they...

...fucked. Let's say fucked.

[Lukas] It does make him laugh, but not the sort of laugh he gives when he thinks she's kidding about something, or when he thinks she's being absurd about something.

It's a quieter laugh than that -- and still ragged at the edges, he's still trying to catch back his breath -- a wry sound, more appreciation than humor, and then he kisses her again, blindly, his eyes still closed; he kisses not her mouth, because he's not even sure where her mouth is, but whatever he can reach.

It turns out to be the soft indent of her throat, in the shallow valley between her larynx and the tendon connecting skull to collarbone, where a branch of the carotid flutters close to the surface. He kisses her here, with a deep and lasting fervor, and by that landmark, finds his place on her body; finds his way to her mouth.

When that kiss parts he opens his eyes. He shifts his weight over her, lifting one hand to stroke back her hair. Citylight and starlight: that's what gives clarity to his eyes, and the faintest hint of blue.

"Nikdy jsem nebyl plánujete dovolenou," he says, and he's not laughing now; he can only murmur it, and his brow contracts faintly at the end of it, as though of all truths that he can tell flatly, nigh-unflinchingly, it's these that he says plainly, in her bed, in her, that were the most devastating.

[Danicka] Some people find it difficult to lie when they are physically connected to another person, or when that person just shared an orgasm with them. Some people find it difficult to lie when they're naked, or when their eyes are being looked into, or when they are in a vulnerable position. Lukas finds it difficult to lie in general, and Danicka.... well, Danicka finds that nothing comes quite so naturally to her as lying.

She has lied when flat on her back, with her wrists tied to a headboard, with someone looking deeply into her eyes. While naked, while coming down from an orgasm, while holding someone inside of her or while she has had her fingers deep in someone else, she has lied so convincingly and so sweetly that if there were such a place as Hell she could probably get Lucifer to let her back out again.

And yet.

This isn't Lucifer, it's Lukášek, and she can no more lie to him right now than she can suddenly make the world turn back three days, three months, or fifteen years. When it is him inside of her it does not matter if she can lie, she does not want to, and that drives her mad. She sighs as he kisses his way up her throat and to her mouth, sighs into his mouth. Her hands slide up the back of his neck and into his hair, into luxurious and silky and sweat-soaked tangles.

Her eyes are shadowed, the light hitting him and not her, making the edges of her irises -- the only parts that are visible -- colorless. She turns her head towards the hand stroking her hair, smiling faintly, but looks at him out the corners of her eyes as he speaks. It's one word in particular, the one that indicates not just not planning but never planning, that gives her pause. She opens her mouth to reply, stops, and takes a breath instead.

Danicka lifts her head, kisses him softly, and nuzzles his cheek, whispering: "Děkuji."

[Lukas] Lukas can't tolerate a lie. Danicka can barely tolerate telling the truth. It's a recipe to utter disaster -- and not only because she lies to him, and he catches her sometimes, and then he doesn't berate her or discipline her or abuse her or make her sorry as he'd threatened to. Not only because of that, but because here -- and now -- she doesn't want to lie. And he does not doubt anything about her. Not even for a second. Not even for an instant.

There's a deep vulnerability in that. That's what this is, that makes this frightening and irreplaceable at once: vulnerability. Truth. Trust.

To a Shadow Lord, there isn't a lot of difference between the three. And he's said it before: we're Shadow Lords. And she's thought it before: yes we are.

And yet; and still: she kisses him softly. She nuzzles his cheek, and he reciprocates, thoughtlessly. They linger together in the aftermath of a fuck, which is what he thinks of it as because it's shorter, and more businesslike, and less devastating, and these are the ways that Lukas is, after all, a liar --

They linger together in the aftermath of a fuck that was quite frankly world-shaking, and he's comfortable here, and he thinks to himself that he could go take a shower, or at least pull the goddamn condom off and throw it in the trash, or at least pull out of her and get off of her, and then he thinks just another minute, just another second.

And it's more than a second, and more than a minute.

This breathing silence goes on a long time, more time than he can account for, and at the end of it he rolls to the side carefully, gently. He does draw out of her -- a sip of air, as always -- and he does get rid of the goddamn condom, but he doesn't actually go take a shower, or even go very far. He's on his side beside her then, their legs still tangled, their bodies still perpendicular to the long axis of the bed, and he's tall enough that if he stretched out straight one end or the other of his body would hang off the edges.

So he doesn't stretch out. He stays loosely, languidly curled like this -- he tucks one forearm back and under his head, and opens his other hand over her stomach, the expanse of skin over her navel and under her breastbone, and his thumb sweeps an arc through the dampness there, the mingled sweat on her body.

He thinks it again; doesn't say it this time:
Krásný.

-- because what he means, really, is not exactly what he said. What he means is not you're so beautiful but you're so beautiful to me, and they're not exactly the same thing, not quite, not at all, even if he couldn't for the life of him put his finger on the difference.

[Danicka] Only one of them has had the courage to call this what the hell it really is, and ironically, it was not the Ahroun who is oh so very strong and oh so very unafraid. It's better, for someone who can lie about anything but this and someone who can only lie to himself about it, if they just don't try and use too many words to describe this. No one comes out and says that he does not need to pretend to not be an animal with her, because instead Danicka nuzzles his face and breathes across his cheek and his ear, affectionate and tender and so far gone in the pleasure she's already had that right now she can't even think about ever having sex again.

There's an almost familial, and most certainly familiar, warmth between them in these fleeting seconds and minutes afterward, a closeness that he simultaneously knows only with his pack and yet also cannot have with any of them. Danicka does not tell him that his weight on her is uncomfortable, or indicate that it is. Rather, she touches her hands lightly on his biceps, looks at his eyes as he is thinking just another minute and her brows pull together in unspoken concern. As strong as he may be they've fucked repeatedly in a very short amount of time and she imagines that holding himself up over her has to be tiring.

A few minutes later, after the expression has left her eyes, he rolls, and at first she moves with him. Danicka shifts her hips as he withdraws, kisses him on his lower lip as he does as though this will offset whatever it is they feel when they're parted -- but it's a silent protest, a No of longing, her own just another minute. But still the air comes between them and he throws the prophylactic away, which is all the time given before she curls up against him again.

Their legs and arms intertwine like vines growing over castle walls, natural and yet guided by something like magic. Danicka breathes underneath his hand, thoroughly alive, nothing at all like a stone wall, as hot as she was under him just seconds ago. Not knowing what he's thinking, she nuzzles her face against his chest and breathes in the scent of him, of them, running her fingertips up and down his back.

Neither one of them says a word. Not when Lukas shifts and Danicka stirs. Not when she stretches out against him, lifting her arms over her head and creating a perfect bowlike arc with her body before relaxing again. Not when they find they have no need for words in order to turn together in the bed so he can stretch out and she can lay alongside him. Not when she yanks the sheet up over them but not the duvet, which would only make the heat he gives off unbearable rather than wanted and comforting. Danicka doesn't roll to her left slide to sleep in the position she's most comfortable in but drapes her left leg over his left leg, her left arm over his chest. The sheet covers her up to her shoulders, veils her arms and the shape of her body.

There's a second pillow up there, which was not tossed away by the Ahroun at some point. Danicka ignores it. She lays her head on his shoulder, saying nothing, not even Goodnight. Usually with them, that's a goodbye. And he's not going anywhere.

In the morning he'll wake alone, but not because she's left the hotel or slipped out to leave him. He'll smell coffee and oranges and meat and cheese and bread, smell her in the sheets and all over him. The light in the room will come only from the prism in the window casting a rainbow on the ceiling due to the angle of the sun. When he rolls over he'll see the books on her shelf: The Little Prince, an SAT study guide, Lives of the Monster Dogs, the complete poems of Ted Hughes, an O'Reilly guide to Mastering Perl, something called Neverwhere. He'll hear singing

"Spi mladyenets, moi prekrasný, bayushki bayu. Tikho smotrit myesyats yasný, f kolýbyel tvayu..."

and though the tune of the song sounds almost painfully sad, the voice is not. The woman who he was surprised to hear knew how to knit and bake is singing a lullaby in a language he doesn't know as she makes breakfast.

And he is in her bed... like he belongs there, on a morning like this.

--

Lukas
Morning after: Danicka is up first; she cooks, she bakes. Lukas sleeps on.

His sleep patterns are bimodal. Which is to say, either he doesn't sleep much at all, and doesn't seem to need it -- or he sleeps ten, twelve hours a night like a teenager cutting saturday school, utterly dead to the world for the duration.

It was the latter, last night. From the time he falls asleep to the time he awakens he barely even moves, except to roll over onto his stomach after she leaves the bed, and to tuck a pillow under his side as some unconscious replacement for her. It's still there when he wakes up an hour or more later, vaguely confused, not quite sure where he is or what he's doing with a pillow pinned under his arm, the left side of his chest. He tugs it out from under him and looks at it for a moment before tossing it aside, getting up, and then he sees her bookshelf and its odd assortment of books, realizes and remembers where he is.

Her room is full of light, as he thought it would be. The prism on the glass casts rainbows over the carpet. He sits on the edge of the bed and scrubs his face, becomes aware of the smell of candied orange koláče; becomes aware of the sound of the shower running. He tracks down the source of the former first, and is still chewing a mouthful of koláč when he joins her in the latter.

They're there for longer than strictly necessary. This time he tastes like oranges.

Afterward, she's out first too. Lukas, having entered later, stays longer -- borrows her shampoo and her soap, washes up, grins faintly at himself when he realizes he smells like her, thanks his lucky stars she didn't indulge in ridiculously girly toiletries like strawberry-vanilla meringue shampoo and cantaloupe-cucumber bodywash.

She probably doesn't have a spare razor for him, and he certainly didn't bring his own, so that department is left untended. He didn't bring a change of clothes, either; he hadn't even expected to see her, much less go home with her, much less spend the night. He gets back into last night's clothes; or rather, he steps into his underwear and then throws the rest over his shoulder to put on later.

She's out in the kitchen, putting the finishing touches on breakfast or packing half a dozen koláče into a box for Martin or getting ready to go or ...whatever it is she might be doing. Perhaps the kitchen has been tidied up since last night, or perhaps the pizza boxes and dirty dishes are still there. Lukas doesn't care either way; she's not his maid, and anyway, it's not like she's piling pizza boxes and dirty dishes into his territory.

He snags another koláč off the baking tray, and his hair is still damp, but his skin is warm and dry when he wraps his arm around Danicka's shoulders from behind and kisses her solidly, a little playfully, behind the ear.

"Dobré ráno," he murmurs; his teeth catch at the cartilage of her ear, gently, and then he kisses her again, this time on the arch of her cheekbone. She can feel his smile against her skin and hear it in his voice. "A ano, vím, že je to minulost poledne."

He lets her go to bite into koláč number two, and to hover over the stove and peer through the glass lids on the pots and pans to see what the fuck, exactly, smelled so good. Or at least, one hopes, smelled nontoxic.


Danicka
When Danicka wakes up it is after ten o'clock. She does not groan because she slept longer than she meant to; she does not sigh heavily or gasp to discover that there is a very large, very warm man lying in her bed and half-under her body. Danicka wakes up with the sun streaming in, rainbows on her face, and smiles. She doesn't move her arm or her leg, not ready to disturb herself or willing to disturb him. She looks at the window, at the city, at the skyline, past the field of his chest rising and falling with the steadiness and regularity of deep slumber.

She says something to him before she moves, a murmur he won't remember, before gently sliding arm and leg away from him, slipping naked out of the bed and padding to her closet. If he were awake he would be stunned at its contents, but as it is, she pulls on a pair of orange boyshorts and then goes to her other closet to grab a black Fraggle Rock t-shirt. A hair tie is grabbed blindly from a ring in the bathroom and her messy hair goes straight into a ponytail.

There isn't much cooking to do. Breakfast is just bread and cheese and meat. Coffee is brewed and kept warm while she begins baking, and she does not clean up the pizza boxes or do the dishes; she shoves things out of her way instead as she begins throwing together a pastry she's been cooking since she was six years old. She does not get out a recipe card or strictly measure most ingredients; she just begins, and by the time Lukas wakes up and discovers that he has been holding a pillow against his chest and not Danicka, the apartment smells like...

...a home. The bed, however, smells like Danicka, smells like the two of them together, smells like sex.

The koláče are out of the oven when he finally gets up, and water is running in the bathroom just down the hall. The door is open, but the curtain is closed, and Danicka doesn't hear or see him out there as he passes by to go get himself a pastry for breakfast. Her bathroom is all yellows and oranges and reds, bits of green here and there, a bright spot of color adjacent to a mellowly-colored room with muted green on the duvet cover. She does not yelp when he comes in, because she sees a shadow, and her soaking wet hand wraps around his wrist to pull him in as soon as she realizes he's there.

If one were to ask Danicka, she would say there were in there for exactly as long as they needed to be, as long as they wanted to be, but she doesn't check the clock to see how long, exactly, it took them to get each other off. Again. Long enough for her to look up at him and watch the muscles in his face pull with pleasure, long enough for him to kiss her as though he would like to devour her, long enough for his hand between her legs to make her clutch at his shoulders, crying out underneath the crash of falling water.

She was clean before he got in. She has to get clean again after he gets in. Which is all right. He can hear her drying her hair while he showers with the Olay Shea Butter soap, the unbelievably-expensive-salon-exclusive shampoo and conditioner. She has the luxury of having clean clothes to change into, jeans and boots and a button-down shirt. The bed is not made, nor stripped, when he gets out. The underwear and t-shirt she was wearing to cook are still sitting on the bathroom floor. The lingerie and dress she had on last night are still on the carpet by her bed.

His girlfriend, he'll realize as he steps back into the kitchen to find her standing there boxing up some pastries for Martin and Gerry and Katie, is something of a slob, or else she just doesn't care right now. Visiting time at the hospital started hours ago, while she was sleeping or cooking or fucking in the shower. She looks well put-together, as she always seems to when she's not lying in a bed with him, but she's moving quickly. Until, of course, he comes up behind her.

Danicka's lips flicker, then smile. She lets herself move back against him, her back to his chest, thoughtlessly turning her head to accept his mouth on her earlobe and then her cheek. They've never done this before; this slow and easy togetherness in the morning after one of their trysts. He's never been in her home before, either. She was singing when she baked, when he first awoke, but she's not singing now. The stereo is going, but not loudly.

Take it slow, take it easy on me...

"Dobré ráno," she echoes back, sensing his smile and turning her head just enough to nuzzle his cheek. Her hands deftly, blindly, close the box with a half-dozen of the pastries in it. Lukas's arms leave her and she brushes her hands off on a tea-towel hanging from the bar of the stove door. He goes peering around, and her eyebrows flick up once. She smirks faintly behind his back, but gently.

"There's coffee," she tells him. "And I made a garlic spread if you wanted it for your bread; the meat and cheese are in the fridge by the cream."


Lukas
Danicka is well put together, as she usually is. Lukas is -- not put together at all, which is not as he usually is, except that's not necessarily her impression of him, because it seems every time they're together he spends the majority of his time with her in some state or other of undress.

She finishes boxing up the pastries; tells him where the find the meat and cheese. He glances at her over his bare shoulder, the other shoulder not being bare because his jeans are thrown over it; his shirt. His socks are tucked into the waistband of his boxer briefs, hanging over his ass, and if Danicka's a slob, Lukas, at the moment, has no right to complain.

He pulls the fridge open, then, finds the cream, the ham, the cheese. Apparently whatever she'd snacked on while baking is enough for her; apparently Lukas intended to eat more to make up for the exertions of the night before.

"Mind if I make grilled ham'n'cheeses?" he checks, lifting the lid on the closest frying pan now to give it a discreet sniff. If it smells rank, he swings it under the tap to rinse out. And, "You want one?"


Danicka
There have been few occasions that Danicka has seen Lukas and not seen him undone somehow, either when playing with his packmates or grabbing her out of a mingling of anger and lust. Even before the first night -- the first kiss, the first fuck -- she saw him lashing out at the seams around his being, and she knew what he was made of long before he realized that she was not the type of woman to care a whit what sort of hotel she had sex in or what sort of bar she drank in. His picture of her keeps changing. She knew him, though, for what he was...from the start.

She has no liquor in the fridge, no sealed bottles of wine. There's some Red Bulls, the cream, yogurt, the usuals, but it looks like the fridge of a healthy person -- except for the caffeine, of course. Fruits and vegetables and meats and cheeses instead of Cheese Whiz, whipped cream, mountains of soda and some rotting leftovers. Fillings for koláče that went unused are stored in Saran Wrap-covered bowls.

As far as he can see, Danicka has not eaten and is not eating. She's got a half-finished mug of coffee turned pale from cream that she's sipping at again, but she doesn't ask him to grab her anything. "Knock yourself out," is her first answer, given with a slender shrug. She just shakes her head, though, to the second question. "I should get going soon. Gerry and Katie convinced Martin this morning to go to Florida -- Katie texted me while you were still asleep." She takes another sip, leaning against a counter while he goes about getting a breakfast-come-lunch together. "We're going to talk a bit about...logistics, the lease, all that shit."


Lukas
So: he knocks himself out. He butters the pan swiftly, sets it over the flame, lays down slices of bread. Then, as the bread browns, he turns to face her, tugging his socks out of his waistband and bending to pull them on one at a time.

"He's still in the hospital, isn't he?" Lukas's easy -- what was it, comfort in her presence? Happiness? -- is shifting now into something a little more suited to him: a seriousness, a thoughtfulness. "What's their hurry?"


Danicka
There's no 'flame', per say, on the ceramic-topped electric stove. It's very nice. Brand new. Sleek. Danicka drinks her coffee and watches him cook in his underwear, wondering why he bothered to throw his clothes over his shoulder -- until, of course, he starts putting them on. They at least do not smell of sex and sweat, as they came off rapidly once they got to her bedroom. They're not clean, but it's tolerable.

Danicka shrugs one shoulder again, lets it fall. "I haven't asked. If that's what's best for him, he should do it. His kids are in Florida...I think he's going to live w--" she stops, frowns slightly in bewilderment. "Are you seriously interested in this?"

It's the second time in twenty-four hours she's asked him that question. This time, the answer that he just wants to figure out if she's staying in town can't apply.


Lukas
He has his jeans on by the time she asks him, for the second time, if he's genuinely interested in this. And he gives her this look, half-puzzled, half ... something else. Pained, almost, though not for the most obvious reason. Not because of her doubt -- or at least, not directly.

"Danička," he says, "I wouldn't ask if I didn't want to hear the answer. I don't ever ask, unless I want to hear the answer."

He pulls his shirt on, then: the collar first, then the sleeves, and then the cuffs tugged up his forearms, nearly to the elbows. And he brushes past her to pour himself a mug of coffee, adds cream onehanded while he flips his toast over on the pan. Lukas cooks with a certain careless adeptness: bachelor survival skills.

"It's not that I have any particular stake in Martin," he adds -- and he's terribly blunt about things like this, "but you clearly care enough to lose sleep over him. And I care that you care. So."

The way he says So. is the way mathematicians say Q.E.D. From behind, his shrug lifts his shoulders, makes his scapulae briefly more prominent against the fall of his pullover shirt.

When the other side of the bread is lightly toasted, he assembles two slices of ham, two slices of cheese on one piece; stacks the other on top. Now he has a grilled ham'n'cheese sandwich and, after a moment's thought, puts down the bread to start making a second.

"Do you want me to go with you?"


Danicka
There's a definite imbalance, here. Danicka has flat-out said she does not care about things Lukas has worried about. She did not ask him questions about the harsh scar on his abdomen the first time she saw him naked. She did not ask him about the Black Spirals he killed with Caleb or whether or not he was okay. She dismissed every word he said about the ones that chased her through the park, informed him that the only thing that could make her more indifferent would be strong sedatives and alcohol. Maybe he forgives her for that, though; now that he knows what else was going on that day.

Maybe.

She's watching him in the kitchen with mild amusement, cooking and pouring coffee and getting dressed. They've talked about his finances, not hers, but unless she's been living off of Martin somehow if she can afford even half of this apartment she can also afford to feed an Ahroun without it hurting her. The stereo is still playing Feist, filling the living room but mostly leaving the kitchen alone. She crosses one arm over her belly and holds her coffee at level with her breasts, listening.

That, at least, has never been something she's faked with him. She's never come out and said that she likes listening to his voice, that while sometimes it seems like he'll never shut up and he would rather hear himself than hear anything she has to say, there are other times when she wishes he would let himself go, open his mouth and his throat and --

She sips her coffee as he shrugs, and considers what he's said.

Danicka raises her eyebrows, though, when he asks her that. She bites her tongue before she says something to the effect of Co to blejes? and instead thinks it over. She does not suggest that he only wants to go so he can have more koláče. She watches him, licks creamed coffee off her lips. She knows what the answer is, she just has to make herself not phrase it in a way that dismisses him, that undoes what he just told her.

I care that you care. So.

So.

"It's all right," she says, even though this is not what comes naturally to her. What does come naturally is setting her mug down, stepping over, and sliding one arm around his waist. Děkuji.


Lukas
He's facing the stove, not her, but he doesn't startle when she comes up beside him and slides her arm around his waist. He doesn't wheel about and snarl, an animal at bay.

He simply lifts his arm around her shoulders -- the coffee mug tipping at a not-yet-dangerous angle -- and kisses her hair, which is dried now, brushed, soft, golden, faintly fragrant.

There's such familiarity in this that it warms him and spears him through at once. There's such thoughtless fondness in this that it seems impossible that twenty-four hours ago he was fairly certain he never wanted to see this woman again and fifteen hours ago he was lecturing her about trust as though she had never given him any at all.

It's another strange quirk of their relationship, if this could be called a relationship. They don't apologize for the past. They don't talk about the future. They don't -- though this drives him mad sometimes -- even bother to reconcile themselves with themselves, from one day to the next.

What was it she'd said? She knows what she wants right now, and that's all.

And that's good enough for him.

"You know," he replies -- this too is wry, "I thought you'd say that."

He turns his head to take a sip of his coffee over her head, then transfers the mug to his other hand, sets it down. When he lowers his arm it's in front of her shoulders this time; if she's still holding on to him, she's embracing him from behind, and she can feel the warmth of him through his shirt, the solid and faultless way he moves even in something so mundane as making grilled ham'n'cheeses. He turns the first sandwich over, begins to assemble the second.

A pause; then he adds, quieter, "Are you going to be all right?"


Danicka
To look at them, though they're both clothed now, one might think they're still naked, still entwined together in a dark and locked room, rather than standing in a brilliantly sunlit apartment working on breakfast several hours into the day and preparing -- in one case -- to go visit a friend at the hospital. To look at them there would be no guessing that they have not known each other for years, are inherently at ease with one another.

It warms and pains Lukas at once, and Danicka is simultaneously comforted and unnerved. This is just another rug to be yanked out from under her feet, and so she cannot trust it forever. Without having gotten into a long, late-night conversation about it there really is no way for him to tell how hard she is struggling, right this second, to not be extremely on her guard, waiting for the tables to turn.

Yes, he's wrapping his arm around her now and kissing her hair and that makes her smile, but...

Yes, he's telling her he cares about what's going on in her life and that makes her both unsettled and pleased, but...

Yes, he's here, he stayed all night and she was glad of it rather than disturbed, but...

...but he's Garou. He's an Ahroun. He's a Shadow Lord. He doesn't care about anyone but himself. He will turn. The moon is going to turn, and he will only grow older and more filled with Rage as time goes by. And that is if he lives even to the age she is now, that is if this is not the last time she will see him. Of course she doesn't talk about the past, which hurts, or the future, which is worse.

Instead she tightens her arm slightly around his waist, keeps still while he sips his coffee over her head, and then slips away from him to go pick up her own mug again, the brief and -- between the two of them, at least -- somewhat unexpected hug ending.

But his question makes her let out a huff of laughter, not entirely mirthless but not truly amused. "Of course I am," she says, her tone a mixture of I've had worse and I don't really have a choice. She finishes her coffee and doesn't bother rinsing out the mug, just shoving it towards the back of the counter with another bunch of dirty dishes. Her eyes go back to him, softening slightly, aware of the harshness of her response.

"You..." She pauses, licks her lips, unsure of how to phrase this. "I thought I said this last night, but I may have just imagined it, but I really did need that." She huffs out a small laugh and shakes her head. "If nothing else, I haven't slept that much in days, and it... it means a lot to me that you stayed."

There's more to it than that. But she can't say it. And it doesn't show in her face, because she doesn't know how to say it. There's nothing she knows she's holding back. By now, after everything, even with him, holding back is reflexive.


Lukas
If her response was harsh, it doesn't seem to faze him. It's the rest, actually, that makes him frown down at his grilling sandwiches; that makes him twist his head on his shoulders as though to dissipate some soreness, some strain.

"I wasn't doing you a favor," he says, low. "I did everything I did because I wanted to."

He flips the second sandwich over. Then he takes a plate off the drying rack and scoops the first sandwich out onto it. The toast is buttered and browned, the ham warmed, the cheese melted. He holds the plate out at her wordlessly; maybe he'd forgotten that she said she didn't want one.


Danicka
"I know," Danicka says softly, seeing his frown, seeing the tension in his body not because she is carefully examining his shoulders and back but because she can almost feel it. The kitchen isn't large; two people could work comfortably in here without bumping into each other but no more than that.

She checks the counter behind her and then pulls herself up in one smooth motion to perch on the edge, legs crossed at the ankle, looking at the plate extended and shaking her head. Her eyes go back up to his. "It wouldn't have meant anything otherwise."


Lukas
She slides up on the counter -- there's a fluid, quick grace in her that reminds him, and not for the first time, that she's half-wild herself. His eyes meet hers for a second or two, three; then some relenting behind the pale blue.

"Yeah," he agrees, without knowing quite what he's agreeing to.

His eyes drop to the sandwich; it's an anchor for the conversation. "You told me last night you couldn't remember the last time you ate," he says. "Take it."


Danicka
Between them:

- approximately 18-20 inches
- one round white ceramic plate, 7 inches in diameter
- one grilled ham'n'cheese sandwich, unwanted

Inside of them:

- numerous unnameable emotions
- a total of approximately 4 cups of coffee plus sweet cream
- the 'blood', a.k.a. genetic material, of kings, wolves, murderers, mountains, meadows

Danicka looks at him, into his eyes, which she has never said and likely will never point out remind her of both her father's and a young Silver Fang Kinfolk. She looks at the sandwich he's holding out and telling her to take because he knows she isn't eating enough lately. She looks at his eyes again. He's seen the woman eat before, heartily and well, noshing on wontons and quite happily chopsticking rice into her mouth. He knows that when she has an appetite it is a healthy one. He also knows that despite that she's always been a little too slender.

"That was last night. I ate a little before you got up." There's a pause, then quieter: "I know you probably have an iron stomach, but if I eat that right now it's just going to make me feel sick."


Lukas
What does Danicka, who seems utterly convinced -- and perhaps rightly so -- that whatever this is now will not last, that one of these days, he'll lose his temper, and lose it badly, and hurt her badly, maim her, possibly kill her; what, exactly, does Danicka expect him to do now?

Get angry, maybe. Shout at her. Tell her that he made it so she better eat it, and if she dared to throw it up he'd make her regret it. Shove the plate at her, throw it at her. Force the sandwich down her throat -- literally.

Or maybe she expects exactly what it is he does.

Or maybe she doesn't have any expectations of him at all.

Any which way: if Lukas is angry, it's hard to tell. There's no tension in his body, no twisting sear of rage. His eyes have dropped again to the sandwich between them, sitting on its plate, and she cannot see them enough to read them.

A beat or two go by; then he looks at her, something like irony in his eyes, something like a half-smile tugging at his mouth, and something like a half-frown knitting his brow. He studies her a moment, and then he raises his chin a half-inch. It's something like a nod.

He's not angry.

"All right." He sets the plate down and picks the sandwich up; flips the other sandwich over on the pan.


Danicka
The saddest thing is that Danicka expects him to hurt her. She expects him to regret it, one way or another. She does not think Lukas will get angry at her for refusing a sandwich she told him without fear that she did not want. She does not expect him to be so much as ruffled by her refusal. What cannot last is not their relationship -- whatever that means -- but the affection in it, the warmth, the easy comfort that lets her fall asleep on his chest and get out of bed without thinking that he is going to be irritated that she did so. What cannot last is the trust, on either side. What cannot last is it being good.

Because it is. This right now is good, talking calmly, eating. What happened earlier in the shower was good. Last night was...very good, enough to make Danicka simply come out and tell him so as though her moaning and the way she screamed his name and clutched at her sheets had not communicated quite soundly that she was enjoying it. Enjoying him. When she told him for the second time that she needed that it was not just his mouth on her or his cock inside her or their lips meeting again and again but all of it, every moment, every word, and the fact that he stayed and she wasn't alone, which is how she always feels but not when...

...not when...



...This can't last. It's impossible that in a few days or a few months or however long they have that she will be with him and continue to feel as though she is not separated from the rest of the world by an invisible but impenetrable wall. She cannot even risk telling him now that this is what he gives her, this is what makes it worth it, that for moments at a time she feels a little less lonely, and this is worth it even if she believes that the worst that can happen will. The worst that can happen is not his hand on her throat. The worst that can happen is not a broken bone or several of them, or any physical damage he could do.

But that's all beside the point and lives outside of this morning even while it permeates it. It's not even technically morning anymore. It's lunchtime. She should have been gone hours ago. At least Martin is not alone.

Her brows pull together as she looks over the expression on his face, tries to read it, and can't: "I'm not starving myself, Lukáš, I'm just stressed. And I'm not lying, I ate."


Lukas
She's trying to read him -- he's tucking into his ham and cheese sandwich, and when she insists that she's not starving herself, that she's stressed and not lying, that she ate already, he gives her a look, half-quizzical for a moment. Then his brow evens out.

"I believe you," he says, simply. A pause; and a gulp of coffee, the last of it, and then he's crossing the kitchen the rinse his mug out.


Danicka
The song on the stereo changes finally, away from the dulcet, Starbucksian tones of Feist to something with a steady beat and an utterly bizarre-sounding male voice that claims to have been gettin' tired of his motor running. One of Danicka's feet starts to bob slightly a few moments into the song, but idly; her attention is on the man in her kitchen who she has never seen there and never would have imagined seeing there.

She doesn't say anything for a few moments, while the water is running. When it turns off again she holds out her hand, a small smile on her face. "C'mere for a second."


Lukas
Lukas takes the time to return the mug to the dishrack, where it begins to drip dry. His hand is still wet when he takes hers. The water's cool but his skin is warm.

He comes here for a second.


Danicka
Wet or not, her hand laces easily with his, which is something she never does. Danicka does not hold his hand when they walk. Even drunk, she took his arm but doesn't even remember doing so. Lying in bed together she does not reach for his hand and play gently with it, measure her own agains his, any of that. But she takes his hand now, presses her palm to Lukas's, and gently slides her fingers in between his digits. Her ankles uncross and her knees move apart to give him space to come closer.

He knows. And she doesn't doubt that he knows, probably knew before she even spoke, knew when she held out the hand he took. The other one slides around the back of his neck, and if there was any doubt left that annihilates it, washes it from the face of the earth.

Danicka kisses him. Not the way she did in the shower while his hand was between her thighs, moaning into his mouth and squirming helplessly, and not the way she did this morning, a soft press of her lips to his shoulder before she slipped out of bed while he was still unconscious. Not the way they kissed at the door when they first came in, or the way they kissed when he was moving behind her, on top of her, struggling not to groan aloud (like an animal).

This one is sweet, and slow, and firmly -- but with regret evident in a half-buried sigh -- she does not allow it to get any deeper before she pulls back and opens her eyes again to look at his, her hand still warm on the back of his neck. "I know none of it was a favor, but you coming here last night and being with me helped more than you know." She tilts her head forward, brushes the tip of her nose against the tip of his. "So when we get out of here, take the rest of the koláče, okay?"


Lukas
Lukas knows.

Even if he didn't know when she took his hand -- when she asked him to c'mere for a second -- he knows when she draws him closer. He knows when her knees part and their legs interleave. He can read her intent when she turns her face up to his and her hand encircles his neck.

And he meets her halfway. Of course he does. His hand tightens on hers, and his free arm comes around her waist, and he bends to her, and this kiss is sweet, and slow, and firm, and when she pulls back --

When she pulls back, even though he knows damn well she needs to go, and this can't escalate, and he should draw back as well, he follows her; he leans across the gap and kisses her again, brief but hard.

Then he's letting her pull back, and she's saying what she does, and he's drawing a slow breath, and she's tilting her head forward and he's trying not to kiss her again when she tells him to take the rest of the koláče, and he laughs under his breath.

He tips his chin up. Kisses her in the center of her forehead, and then drops his arm from around her. His hand holds hers another second -- their linked arms stretch between them until they let go, and he goes to pack up the rest of the koláče.

It doesn't take him long. And he's not polite about leaving her a half-dozen or so, either. She offered; he'll take 'em. Every single one that's candied-orange gets snapped up, and then he eats the last of his sandwich.

"Come on," he says, mouth full. "I'll ride down with you."


Danicka
It does take effort, on both their parts, not to let it escalate further. Considering that they have had a combined eight orgasms in less than twenty-four hours it's somewhat surreal that there could be even a drop of want left in either of them, but when Lukas pushes forward and kisses her again the way he does, it takes effort for Danicka to keep her legs right where they are, her knees on either side of his waist, her hips resting motionlessly on the counter. It takes effort for him to leave it at that, to keep his hands from pulling her forward and lifting her up against his body.

They manage, and it's a damn good thing: Lukas may not need or want to know that Danicka still has a stash of condoms chilling out in her purse, which is sitting on the counter that faces the living room just waiting to be snatched up and taken with her. They would need those, though, given the likelihood they wouldn't make it to the bedroom again.

But it doesn't matter, because they stop. Danicka smiles when he kisses her forehead, amused but affectionate, and she sits on the counter watching him pack up the koláče -- she directs him to a box for this purpose -- without saying he should leave her some. They're all the same flavor, she didn't pull out the strawberry or blueberry or anything else this morning, which just would have been more work, and when she told him to take the pastries she indeed meant every last one that is not going with her to the hospital.

While he's eating, she turns off the stereo, plucks her iPhone from its charger, and gets her coat on. Come on, he says, meaninglessly, because she's in the hallway while he's shrugging into his jacket again, keys in hand, ready to go.

Danicka smiles as they walk out, and as she's locking the door behind her. It fades on the way to the elevator, and silently thanks her stars that it doesn't remain empty for all twenty-three floors to the ground level. Everyone who gets on or off stays on the opposite corner from Lukas, and at the lobby they're the first ones allowed off. But Danicka doesn't walk him to his car, or head out the front doors with him. She has an underground parking garage to go to.

Their 'goodbye', such as it is, is brief and succinct, and partly so because it is public. Danicka does not leap into his arms or maul his face but takes his hand momentarily and rubs her thumb over his knuckles, giving him the oddest, quirkiest little half-smile he's seen on her face. It's almost shy, and almost hesitant, and...happy, even. It's nothing like the brilliant flash she gives when she is wearing a mask at a social gathering, or the small, pleased smile she gives when she approves of something.

I'll see you, is the best she can do. It's what she does, before she lets him go.