[Danicka] The last two full moons Danicka and Lukas have seen one another on have been ...difficult. It's no coincidence that the first time was just after a moot, that the moon was still hanging heavily in the sky though beginning to wane again. That night was full of so many pitfalls, so many chances they might have fallen apart or simply walked away, and even included one near-death experience. A month later was so emotionally charged that it was physically dangerous at one point, and it left Danicka, at least, utterly exhausted.
It been just over twelve hours since the last time they saw one another at Grant Park when Lukas calls her. Danicka picks up her phone and looks at his name on the screen, her face expressionless and her eyes still bleary from sleep though she has a cup of coffee in her hand and is, in fact, standing in the living room in her pajama pants and a tank top. On the phone her voice is pitched low and rough around the edges but she doesn't mention that when she told him to call her, she didn't mean so soon. Through the fuzzy undertone of her voice -- she informs him, if he asks, that he did not wake her, I was up -- he cannot read whether or not she is surprised to hear from him not that long after dawn.
"I'll get us a room," she says, stifling a yawn, and in about ten minutes, his phone tells him he has a text message. 162 E. Ontario St., Rm. 335
This is not the Omni.
[Lukas] Lukas does not, in fact, ask if he woke her. What he asks instead is quite simple:
Can I see you?
To which she tells him she'll get them a room. And ten minutes later a text arrives. And nearly forty minutes after that the MKZ's navigation directs Lukas to a tidy little brick-and-mortar building on the corner of Ontario and St. Clair.
The sign out front says RED ROOF INN. He doesn't bother to check to see if the roof was indeed red, as it is in other branches of this particular franchise. This is only a block off Michigan and parking is tough. He circles the block a few times before he finds a spot.
The morning seems dazzlingly bright -- the surreal clarity that lack of sleep brings. It's Thursday, 7:42am, and the city is waking up and going to work.
There's no doorman at the door, and no one challenges him as he takes the elevator up to the third floor. The carpets are clean but faded; the wallpaper distinctly 1970s. There's a faint scent of age in the hall -- a combination of dust and cleaning powders, solutions, sprays. He finds room 335 a few doors from the end of the hall and knocks.
When the door opens Lukas is wearing the same clothes he wore at the park over twelve hours ago: the same dark-washed jeans with the carefully haphazard fading at the thighs and the knees; the same collared shirt under the same leather jacket. He has his messenger bag in hand, and it has a puffed look to it, as though he'd crammed something soft inside. Like a change of clothes, for example.
His rage is a faded echo of itself, blasted and emptied out. His spirit is charged -- though this is less evident than the former. He's unshaven, a little ashen-faced, a little rumpled, but he smiles when he sees her.
"Sorry about the wait. I had to drop my packmates off at the Brotherhood."
[Danicka] In terms of the quality of the bed, the pillows, and the linens...well, compared to the first hotel he ever took her to, they're at least clean, if not luxurious or particularly fantastic. The television is on top of a dresser and it's bolted down in the back. It's not a flat panel treasure nor discreetly hidden away in an armoire. Danicka has it on; he can hear it faintly when he is waiting at the door. Maybe she has a finely-tuned sense of irony or maybe it's just what was available, but she got a suite. The bed is king-sized, there's a desk, and a mini-fridge with a tiny microwave above it.
She can feel him before his hand touches the door. Danicka doesn't react overtly, even though she's alone, but the hairs on the back of her neck and her arms stand on end. She takes a deep breath and prepares to get off the bed, and when he knocks, her feet are touching the carpet and carrying her over to the door, pulling it open for him.
Danicka is not in a dress that heralds the coming of springtime just as much as the appearance of robins and bluebirds in the park. She is not waiting for him in jeans and a t-shirt, either. Her hair is down, blow-dried into straightness, and with his senses on hyperactive duty he can faintly smell her shampoo even before he steps inside. He can also smell hops, light on her breath. She's wearing pajama pants that hug her hips and drape around her lower legs, a paisley of mint green and faded gray and hints of a subudued, golden yellow. Over that is a ribbed gray tank top, despite the fact that the room is on the cool side.
She smiles when she sees him, steps back to let him in, and closes and locks all the locks on the door behind him. "It's fine. I had Tom Hanks to keep me company," she says, waving a hand at the now-muted television screen which does indeed bear the likeness of the actor when he was much younger. "You want a beer?"
[Lukas] The last time they met on a full moon, they kissed the moment he walked in, and it was almost desperate, as though they'd been starved for the taste of one another.
Today -- which is technically the morning after the full -- he wouldn't have been surprised if the same had happened. All the way here he thought it might. He thought about seeing her, as though he hadn't seen her twelve hours ago; he thought about her licking chocolate off his fingers, and he thought about what she said when they parted.
Then she opened the door. And they smiled at each other. And it's not quite lust that ignites in him but something stranger and a little more treacherous: a sense of homecoming, though this is not a home; a sense of belonging.
Lukas brushes by her and she locks the door, not merely the latch on the doorknob but the deadbolt and the security slider as well. While she's doing this and offering him a beer, he swings his messenger bag up onto the desk -- he hadn't bothered to pull the strap over his shoulder -- and then looks at the TV. Tom Hanks, just as she said: younger, with decidedly more hair and a somewhat leaner face. He doesn't recognize the movie and turns to look at the woman instead, who looks as though she may have come directly here without bothering to dress at all.
"No, thank you." That's for the beer. He sits down on the edge of the bed and starts unlacing his shoes. They're suede tennis shoes -- skater shoes to be precise -- tough and durable, good for walking, though this pair is far too new and well-kept to have actually seen much walking. The laces undone now, he pulls his shoes off one by one and tosses them haphazardly away from the bed. His socks follow, balled up together and aimed half-heartedly at the hollow of one shoe.
He misses. He doesn't care. He plants his hands on the mattress and scoots back until he can stretch out full-length, upon which he does -- with a groan of immense satisfaction -- his bare feet hanging off the end.
"Matky Boží, it's good to be horizontal." If she hasn't turned down the bed yet, he reaches up over his head and fumbles with the coverlets until he digs a pillow out, which he puts under his head. "I haven't slept since the day before yesterday."
And then, lifting his head to look at her, "Did you get back into PJs after you got here, or did you actually check in looking like that?"
[Danicka] The last time they met on a full moon both of them thought it was going to be the last time, and it's questionable whether Danicka knew, before that devouring kiss at the door, whether or not she wanted it to go on or if it was a decision she made only after she felt him against her again. This time it seems like there is no question that she wants him there, even if she hesitated when he asked if he could see her. Danicka did not question why he was asking as though she might deny him: they both seem to acknowledge that there is a distinct chance that she might. Except that when she lets him in and locks the door it seems unthinkable that he should be anywhere else right now.
No, not after what happened last time or It's not even seven o'clock yet. She could have asked him if he wanted to go get some breakfast, and she could have invited him to her place, but there's too many reasons not to do either of those things. Hotels are their friends, shitholes in Cabrini-Green or four-star establishments in this area of town or places like this, which fall somewhere in the middle.
There's an open bottle of Goose Island Nut Brown Ale on one of the nightstands and a telltale depression on the bed where Danicka was sitting. She is barefooted and over in one armchair there's a leather overnight bag that has seen some use over the years. She walks back to pick up her beer and take a long drink while he is taking off his shoes and socks, a brief half-grin lighting on her face, standing beside the bed until he has all but flopped onto his back, his head nowhere near the spot where the pillows are yet. If nothing else, the bed is big enough that Danicka alone on it would seem small.
"Wouldn't you like to know," she says dryly, setting her beer back down again and crawling onto the bed. Without seduction or hesitation she swings one leg over him and straddles his hips, looking at him almost thoughtfully. "Long day at the office, schnookums?" she intones, lifting an eyebrow.
[Lukas] He lays his head back down as she climbs over him. The pillow indents; he quirks a smile up at her as she studies him, his hands coming down from behind the pillow to rest on her hips.
Because that's what it is: resting. As though it were not only natural but right for his hands to be right where they are, curved to the curvature of her body, the palms warm, his touch gentle.
She mimics what both of them might imagine normal, boring, suburban housewives might say to their husbands -- not that either of them would really know -- and his smile abruptly becomes a crooked grin; he swats her ass.
"Co to blejes," he wants to know: there isn't a lilt on this question because it's not really a question at all.
[Danicka] At the swat, she neither jumps nor yelps. Danicka merely lifts her eyebrows, shaking her head at him. "I drag myself out of bed and across town, I pick up some beers, I get you a nice room -- with HBO, no less -- I miss valuable minutes of my movie, which I have never seen, by the way, to inquire as to how you're doing and you start smacking me around.
"Nice," she says, pursing her lips and nodding. "Real nice."
[Lukas] Lukas laughs under his breath. His hands open over the outsides of her thighs instead, his palms smoothing down her leg, then up again. This is as devoid of seductive intent as her straddling him had been -- it's half-absent, slow, for the simple sake of feeling her warmth through her pajama bottoms.
"Jsem velice líto, Danička. Mohl by mi odpustit?
[Danicka] He's still wearing his jacket, the clothes he had on earlier today. She looks like she just got out of bed, like she'll be rinsing out of her coffee mug, dressing quickly, and rushing off to work any second now. She'll do her makeup in the car stopped at red lights or on the subway train. She'll walk in looking like it took her hours to get ready because she is the sort of woman who has timecutting tricks and sure-fire hangover cures both up her sleeve.
In reality, Danicka got out of bed and showered. She dried her hair while her coffee was brewing. She booked a room online, packed a bag, wiggled her feet into shoes and slid her arms into her coat, and dropped by a brewery on her way over here. She hasn't had breakfast yet, but she doesn't mention this to Lukas, and she doesn't actually feel hungry right now. The beer -- at seven forty-five in the goddamn morning, no less -- helps there.
He may be touching her for the simple sake of touching her, of having her there smiling at him. She is lighthearted and playing with him, something that mere hours ago he'd snapped at her for, but that was because he was trying to be serious. Now he is laughing quietly, and she is grinning at him, and despite the fact that they are more companionable than anything else right now, what she said when she left Grant Park is still true.
Danicka shifts her weight slightly on top of him, getting more comfortable, and shakes her head slowly, with a mockery of sorrow in her eyes. "Nejsem si jist, zda to půjde." She pauses, then tips her head to one side and the other thoughtfully as though weighing options. Her eyes roll towards the ceiling for a second, then go back to him. Danicka screws up her features, feigning sincere disbelief that he can redeem himself. "Maaaybe if you make me come, I can forgive a little spanking."
She shrugs, hands lifted up in a helpless gesture before dropping them again. Her tone changes slightly, an undercurrent of actual seriousness beneath the more obvious, teasing humour: "Though I'm not sure if this morning is the best time to add that to our repertoire."
[Lukas] Twelve hours ago, they came to the edge of an argument. He was nowhere near playful; his humor was muted at best, nonexistent more often. There was an intensity beneath his skin, a restlessness that ran to the bone.
A lot happens in twelve hours. A car ride. A conversation. A moot. A revel.
Now he's exhausted, running on fumes: he hasn't slept since he woke up at 10:20pm on Tuesday night. It's Thursday morning. He can take it, because that's what a Garou is made to do -- sleep like rocks when they can, stay up for a week straight if they must. It doesn't change the fact that his rage is depleted and his spirit is charged; that he's relaxed simply because he's drained; he'd be able to go to sleep and sleep for twenty-four hours straight if he closed his eyes right now.
The hair-trigger is still there. There's still an intensity in his presence, in his vicinity. What's gone is the fuel for the fire, and perhaps that, more than anything else, is why they can be like this right now. Smiling. Playful.
It must gall him to some degree, he who placed so much stock in self-control, that so much of his control waxes and wanes with the goddamn moon. But the fact is: he's not thinking about that right now.
Lukas's eyes flicker down when she shifts on him. His eyelashes are dark, long enough to shade the color of his eyes when he looks down like that. Then he's looking at her again, smirking now instead of grinning, as she tells him the price of forgiveness.
"Is that so," he retorts, low. "Well, you better hurry up, before I fall asleep."
And then she goes on, and the slant of his smirk changes, becomes a smile, wry. It's on the tip of his tongue that perhaps she's been smacked around by a Garou enough that he wouldn't do it even in play -- but he's not so tired as to be incoherent, as to be a fucking idiot. He doesn't say it. There's only the shift in his smile, and then the shift in his body -- an arching of his back, a slow and self-contained stretch that settles again.
An inhale and an exhale: a pair, a quiet sigh: comfort. He wasn't kidding when he said it was good to be horizontal again. He reaches up then, strokes her hair back. Then his hand wraps behind her neck and he draws her down toward him.
"Come here," he says, and this isn't a joke anymore, quite.
[Danicka] She had a very relaxed Wednesday. She let herself sleep in a little, took her time getting ready for the day. She picked up her dry-cleaning, went home and leveled her alt, made an appointment at the salon, and called a cleaning service to come in over the weekend and do things like vacuum the carpets and wash the windows. She went shopping and got herself some chocolates, a couple of tops, and new moisturizer. She sat with the Garou she's fucking at the edge of Buckingham Fountain and did a pat-yourself-on-the-back-missy good job of not pricking herself with a sensory deprivation dart or drinking a vial of nightshade when she got home.
Last night Danicka slept for a solid nine hours. She is very well rested and the last thing she needs is a nap. The beer has her a bit drowsy, a bit warm, and a bit relaxed. He has no way of knowing, beyond looking in her eyes, if she's had more than one, though Danicka is not acting like she is drunk. Then again, considering how much it seems to take for her to get drunk...
He is drained, not only by so long without sleep but by the moot, the revel afterwards. She doesn't know why he didn't just sleep all day and then call her in the evening, but she doesn't ask him that. She just flicks an unimpressed eyebrow at his you better hurry up. She stays on him with practiced balance as he stretches out like he does, lifting her slightly on his hips. She just keeps her hands on top of his stomach, resting lightly there even after he settles back down.
Her eyes stay on his, as he touches her hair, pushing it off her cheek. The smile on her face is soft, and tender just for the moment. It flickers when he slides his hand to the back of her neck, like a still picture trying to move. Danicka moves towards him with an ease that smacks of agreement rather than either surrender or indifference. She kisses him, or he kisses her, or they kiss, and it's not like they were starving before this. Her mouth tastes like the ale she was drinking, she smells like her soap and her conditioner and that new moisturizer still lingering on her skin.
Danicka kisses him slowly, and almost gently, at least at first. Within a second or two it's starting to get harder, it's deepening. Her hands are running up his torso to his shoulders, explorative rather than purposeful. That's when she carefully pulls back and, taking a deep breath, asks him: "Would you like to just sleep?" She has the curtains pulled; the room is not as dark as it would be at night but it is as dark as it's going to get during the daytime. "I'll still be here when you wake up."
Which is one of the closest things to a promise he's ever heard out of her mouth.
[Lukas] Lukas catches the flicker in the smile; wonders if it's fear; then he doesn't wonder anything at all because she's leaning down to him and he's lifting his chin to meet her mouth and
this is the first time they've kissed in a week. Or been in the same room, alone, with no one to overhear and no one to see, in a week. Whatever fluke had brought on the back-to-back meetings last week had not lasted, just as none of these temporary crumblings of the walls between them ever last. But then they always crumble again, as they're crumbling now, and out of gentleness grows a rising fervor, and he's arching off the bed to kiss her mouth open now, his hands on her face, and she's drawing back.
He follows; he nuzzles her throat while she speaks, and then he realizes she's speaking. He sets his head back down, and as though to follow her line of logic, he looks around the darkened room.
His eyes return to hers, eventually. He laughs a little under his breath.
"And what will you do? Watch Tom Hanks?"
[Danicka] There isn't much in this room, dimly lit by the sunlight peeking in around the edges of the curtains. The mirror, the dresser, the little desk against the wall. Most of it is taken up by the bed they're lying on, with the ridiculously patterned bedspread.
They kissed on Saturday morning, not quite a week ago, but it wasn't the same. She pressed her lips to his arm and he kissed her before he left but that's not the same as these opening, beginning kisses that so often threaten to overwhelm them. This is the sort of kiss that makes them start to think they'll die if it doesn't go anywhere. When they're alone the line between not far enough and too far to go back is so thin that Danicka very nearly crosses it.
She sighs, her eyes falling closed, as he rubs his face against her neck, animalistic and thoughtless. Her hands knead his shoulders once, twice, and then go still again. She looks down at him and the corner of her mouth pulls out in a half-smile.
"I have my computer and headphones," she says with a shrug of dismissal, lifting one hand and reaching into his hair, massaging his scalp for a few seconds. "And a book." Her eyebrows pop up on her forehead. "Oh, and I can always take creepy camera-phone pictures of you while you sleep, too. That could keep me entertained for hours, especially if I get going with Photoshop."
[Lukas] Lukas exhales a laugh. "I think Kate actually has some creepy camera-phone pics of me sleeping," he notes. "So if you want, you could save yourself the effort and just get them from her."
The smile plays itself out and it fades; his hands stay on her face, his thumbs sweeping along the curve of her cheekbones. He looks at her for a moment, quiet and still, his eyes more black than blue in this light.
"If I sleep now," he says, "I won't wake up again until it's dark out." The pads of his fingers trace her eyebrow now, the hollow of her temple. He touches her face as if to learn it like braille, gentle and searching. "So I wouldn't blame you for leaving, though I'd like it if you came back."
A pause.
"Ale co bych raději udělat, je milovat se s tebou."
[Danicka] There is no denying that Danicka's expression darkens a bit when he mentions Kate, but it's only when he says that she has taken pictures of him while sleeping that Danicka actually grimaces slightly and gives a little convulsive shudder. "Ugh," she exhales, with a spoonful of humour but an undertaste of true discomfort.
It passes, but it's something that she doesn't even try to disguise it, or retreat wholly into joking with him. When Danicka lays things out on the table and does not hide any of it, she is actually quite expressive. From facial features to tone of voice to the light in her eyes she makes herself heard without saying anything, and what is being said is that this bothers her a bit, for multiple reasons. It doesn't bother her enough to get derailed.
Especially when his hands are touching her face like that, rough thumbs giving a soft touch. That is one thing she cannot accuse him of: not knowing his own strength, or never trying to control it. The sun outside is bright enough, even when blocked, that those errant rays make the edges of her hair as golden as daylight itself. Her eyes could be mistaken for hazel or even brown right now, except when she turns her head a little to encourage the caress on her cheek and a glint of green shows up like some mysterious object surfacing from the depths of water.
She is about to speak during that pause, her lips parting to tell him that I'd rather
be here with you.
stay close.
Or maybe Of course I'd come back.
But he murmurs what he does after that, and Danicka's eyes soften, her parted lips relaxing as the unspoken words melt off of them. She doesn't say anything, but she answers. She bends to him again, her eyes closing as she kisses his mouth, her body pressing more heavily against his own.
[Lukas] It's a kiss he meets halfway. Of course it is. The muscles of his torso clench as he arches up to her, even as she's pressing down against him, and then they're kissing, and there's a low sound in his throat that might've been words if he could've brought himself to tearing his mouth from hers for even a second to say, Stýskalo se mi po tobě tolik, as if he hadn't seen her just twelve hours ago.
But there isn't space for words, so his actions speak for him, and anyway, as the old proverb goes, they speak louder than words. There's no way to mistake the way he runs his hands through her hair, or the way his mouth opens to hers, or the way their tongues tangle before he's tilting his head the other way to get at her from a different angle --
and the moon is full; and it's hard not to think, if only for a second, of a wolf, of some monstrous beast angling its head to gnaw at a bone from a different approach, to strain toward some scrap of torn and bloody meat on the bone that it wants
-- and then he's turning her under him, a smooth fishlike flip of his body, all at once, that breaks the kiss for an instant. He goes at her again, fiercely, and then he's drawing back: to calm himself, she might think, except he gets up altogether and goes to the windows and opens the drapes, quickly, in a few swift gestures.
Morning light floods the room. "Chci tě vidět v slunečním světle," he says by way of explanation. He stops by the desk and opens his messenger bag, and he does have a change of clothes in there, which he pulls out and puts aside; a box of condoms under that, which he tosses onto the bed ahead of himself.
The jacket he tosses onto the armchair. Then he's standing at the side of the bed and undoing the buttons of his shirt, which is a pale blue thing that nearly matches his eyes, and would have been crisp and snappy when he put it on hours and hours and hours ago, but is rumpled now, wrinkled. He's not wearing an undershirt for once -- it's just the cut planes of his body, a dusting of dark hair across his chest, light down the midline of his body, darkening again past the navel to run down past his belt.
He gets the buttons on his cuffs open and he pulls his shirt off, drops it on the floor, and if she hasn't already straightened up to help him or to take care of her own clothing he tells her to pojď sem, láska, and while he's undoing his pants he leans forward and down to catch her mouth again; a drawing, rising sort of kiss that ends nearly on a gasp.
Lukas lets his jeans drop with their own weight when he gets the fly open, the zipper down. His hands are on Danicka then, and he goes directly for her pajama bottoms, grasping the soft material to tug the elastic waistband down past her hips, past her thighs; his free arm wraps around her waist and pulls her against him, raises her weight clear off her knees so he can push the pajama bottoms past, and off.
He says it after all, then: "Stýskalo se mi po tobě tolik," as if he hadn't seen her twelve hours ago; and he pushes his boxer briefs off as well and steps out of them, folding one knee and then the other onto the mattress; and he's taking her hand and wrapping it around his cock, just like that, because neither of them play at modesty or shyness or demureness in moments like these. When her fingers close around him his eyes fall shut, and he gasps against her throat, nips at her skin with his teeth.
[Danicka] The kiss starts slow, and soft, as the one before it. Faster than the other one began to turn, this kiss does not stay slow or soft for very long at all.
You'd think that just moments ago he hadn't been lying supine on the bed, exhaling as though releasing all the tension that had been keeping him upright and moving since sometime on Tuesday. From the way he responds when they kiss, you'd think he just walked in the door and attacked her like an animal, hungry and lost and desperate.
But from the way Danicka sucks his tongue into her mouth and pins him down harder with her comparatively negligible weight, one has to give her credit for not mounting him in his car as they sat outside of Grant Park. He makes a sound in his throat and she snarls in return, though whether to silence him or encourage him there's no way to tell. Her left hand pushes further into his hair, her right grabbing the collar of his shirt and crushing it in her fist.
And there's no way to look at them and imagine a wolf tearing at a shred of red-slick flesh. Even when he rolls atop of her, Danicka kisses him like they're not going off to or returning from war but fighting it, here in a motel room, only neither of them is really fighting the other. She wraps her legs around his waist as though she knew he would do this, squeezes him between her thighs and rolls her hips up to his in unabashed eagerness.
Nemohu se dočkat, she'd said at the Park, and she -- whose lies he'd discussed with his packmate just afterward -- was telling the truth.
"No," she snaps futilely at him, sounding almost petulant in her frustration, when he tears his mouth and himself away from her, slipping free from her legs to go to the windows. Danicka watches him from where she's sitting up now the bed, her skin and clothes and the room suddenly flooded with eastern light. If it weren't for the fact that he throws a box of condoms onto the bedspread she would be getting off the bed herself to get into her own bag.
But there they are.
All this time that he is unbuttoning his shirt and taking off his jacket and unwinding and unwrapping himself from his own clothes, it's a mistake to think that Danicka is curled up on the bed merely staring at him, her hands to herself and her head tilted in doll-like fascination. She moves to her knees and stretches to the nightstand, finishing off the second half of her beer in a surprisingly rapid series of chugging swallows. She has to gasp an Aah when she's done, setting the bottle back down on the table a little harder than necessary.
She drains half a beer by the time he gets his shirt off. She pulls her tank top off and drops it on the bed beside her, and her hair is still disheveled from the stretching gesture of it when he leans down to her, kissing her. They steal each other's breath, hers tasting like the chocolatey, nutty overtones of her ale and his tasting like...him, or his toothpaste, or his last meal, or like their last kiss.
Lukas's hands grab her pajama pants and all but yank them off of her. Danicka's hands push at the undone waist of his jeans, helping them fall as though pushing someone off a cliff with a singular, hateful shove. She bites lightly at his lips, urges his tongue into her mouth, shudders as soft cotton runs down her thighs under his grasping hands. When their lips part and they're both pulling for air she half-moans
"Měla jsem strach jsi chtěl jít spát,"
with dizzied relief. Her pants become a useless bundle of fabric as they fall to the carpet, leaving her in a pale blue version of the underwear she was wearing when he came into his room at the Brotherhood and found her waiting for him there: soft, seamless, and perfectly plain.
Lukas doesn't to guide Danicka's hand to his flesh. He never has to urge her to touch him, has in fact had to take her hands off of him on occasion. His fingertips glance over her wrist when he's moving to pull her hand to his erection, finding only that she's already there, and her other hand is going to the back of his neck to move his head, to bring his mouth to hers. Danicka kisses him as firmly as she strokes him, loosing a wispy moan.
She cannot tolerate the kiss for very long. She breaks away, still holding him by the neck and laying her forehead on his, her eyes glimmering and they're pale, pale blue, lighter than the sky. "Hrát se mnou, lásko," she purrs, nuzzling his face and slowing her hand on him eversoslightly. "Jsem mokrá. I want you to play with me."
[Lukas] It's hard to imagine that another woman's hand on him might make Lukas lose all sense of himself like this. It's hard to imagine that anyone else might make him lean into her quite like this, might make his eyes shut like this, might make his mind slip, might make his breath rush quick and shallow between his teeth like this.
She pulls his head down to hers, and he gives into the kiss blindly, and her mouth is firm and his is a sort of starving surrender, and it's only when the kiss breaks and her hand slows that he has the clarity to put his hands on her.
Gently: his hands on her hips. Because she's right, he does know his strength, controls it almost without thought, only that's not true, because the last time the moon was this full he hadn't thought about it, or couldn't think about it, and his control slipped, and his strength was ...
devastating. Could have been.
And all the same: it's okay, she'd said, accepting not the hurt but that he was hurting her; and all the same, here they are again.
"Roztáhni nohy o trochu víc, miláčka," he says, and when his arm tightens around her waist again he traps her hand between them, and he's pushing his free hand down the back of her panties, shoving the cotton down ahead of his wrist.
He opens his hand over her ass, and then he reaches between her legs, and the angle is a little more awkward this way and she has to arch her back to give him access, but he manages; they manage; his fingers are stroking past the mouth of her cunt now, and he's slowing down, he's forcing himself to take his time, slipping his fingers back and forth as if to test the integrity of what she's said.
When he finally finds his way to her clit, his fingertips are as hot and wet and slick as she is, and he's raising his head to catch her mouth again, and the kiss is slow, it's deep; his hand on her is slow and sweet; he rocks his hips against hers, pushes his cock against her hand and against her skin, slow and steady.
[Danicka] Control is such an important thing to him. Control of his strength, control of his Rage, control of his desire, control of his Kin. It touches -- it must touch -- every aspect of himself, every facet of his life. In very different ways, they both seem to have been raised to believe líná huba, holé neštěstí. What is said cannot be unsaid, and yet...
...and yet when they are around one another he finds that all his careful plans about what to say and how and when to say it go out the window, spiral down the drain, fly out of him like air leaving his lungs after being knocked flat. When they are around one another she found herself telling him the truth when he was the last person that should have been trusted with it, in her rubric. She finds herself telling him truths he does not even ask for, giving more than she has ever given.
The way Lukas moves to her when she touches and kisses him seems uncontrolled, unplanned as his challenge to Milo for guardianship of her. He had acted as though it would have been all right to tell her this little fact if it had been something he planned, but what Lukas left out was that after issuing the challenge he could have withdrawn it. He could have redacted his incensed words and there would really have been no dishonor in it. But he'd thought about it. He'd considered what he'd said, why he'd said it, and the next time he met Milo he followed through.
Because I wanted to protect you.
Because I wanted you.
That want was not like this want, and without discussing it overmuch (or at all), Danicka understood the difference between the longing that Lukas's body is displaying now and the sort of want that would make him literally fight to take her from someone who never really wanted her anyway.
At the moment he seems in control of his strength but not that want, and not this desire, which has him kissing her achingly, needfully, almost submissively. It would be one thing if Danicka were in control, or particularly concerned with self-control, but it was beaten into her head very early on how little she really has. She cannot be some kind of anchor to him, some protective, receptive lover that will keep him sane and keep him level when she cannot claim to be either of those things herself.
What is striking, though, what is significant, is that neither of them are really asking the other to keep them grounded. Danicka does not seem to place much reliance on his strength or his control. Lukas does not ask her to tether him to earth, or reality, or humanity. They just ...are. Mammalian, instinctive, and moving easily from vicious to tender, they just fall into one another as though what she said a lunar month ago is not only true but goes both ways:
They belong here.
So her legs spread slightly and her back arches to both guide and allow and accept his hand. Danicka holds him where he is to keep their brows touching, pushes closer to him, and she whimpers when his fingers find her. Her eyes fall closed, her neck rolling and her hair stroking his shoulder, his chest. Danicka's breath is quickening, her breasts brushing against his skin, her hips squirming as he takes his sweet time.
His touch his slow. His kiss is slow. The roll of his hips forward is slow. Controlled. At first Danicka simply writhes against him, aligns their bodies so that as much of his flesh is touching as much of hers as possible. She gasps and parts their mouths only after several seconds, licking his lips with a rapid flick of her tongue and meeting his eyes. His fingers aren't inside of her and her whole body is tense with the effort of not bucking against him in sheer yearning, but her eyes give her away, and completely.
"I don't care how you take me but I need to be able to hold you," she says, so breathless it's a whisper. Or maybe it would have been anyway. Her brow is furrowed with some faint, vague ache that she seems to be looking to him to relieve. "Lukáš, I want you so badly."
[Lukas] Lukas catches her mouth again only briefly after she's pulled away -- a hawkquick dip of his head, a brief and fierce press of his lips to hers. And then he lets space open up, and it's still early enough, not quite 8am, that the morning light slants in the windows and across her face; makes her eyes a sharp and unfamiliar blue; makes his eyes sharp and faceted as cut diamonds.
They're watching each other as they so often do, and there's a look of consternation or ache on both their faces. It's as though this lust, this hunger of the flesh has become a hunger in truth; as though they were eating themselves alive for want of the other. He holds her where she is and she holds him where he is, as if either of them would even think to draw away now -- they're taut with the tension of staying as they are, of going slow, slow, and when she says
(take me / hold you)
what she says he inhales sharply, and there's no room between them, so his chest expands against hers. His reply is not verbal. His fingers quicken on her flesh; his caress becomes suddenly fierce, until he makes her close her eyes, or gasp, or writhe or ...
something; anything. It doesn't matter which. He's always loved the sight of her, overcome -- since the first time they fucked and she came with her eyes on his, too far gone for words. I want to see you, he's said to her; show me, he's said, and when she does, when some flicker of reaction comes over her, he catches her mouth on his, her breath in his mouth, and he kisses her as though to eat her response right out of her body.
Then he's drawing his hand back -- lingeringly, sliding his fingers through her wetness anew. He's taking her by the waist and setting her back from him, not so very far, but enough that a gulf of air opens between them. Enough that his skin begins to miss her. Enough that her hand has room to move on him, and when it does, he's the one that has to draw a breath, that has to close his eyes for a second.
When he goes for the condoms it's the same as it always is: he doesn't fumble, and he isn't careful. He scatters the foil packets all over the bed and picks one, any one, and while he's getting it on he's sliding backwards off the bed again to stand beside it, and the morning sun limns the edges of his body, crests around shoulder and side, casts his shadow long and dark over the bed.
He takes her by the hips and moves her to the edge of the bed, rather unceremoniously, almost hasty now; nelze čekat. She's sitting up to him or lying back, it doesn't matter which; she's opening her thighs and slipping her legs around him and his fingers are still wet from her, and when he strokes his hand over his cock, he leaves streaks of slickness on himself. It's his left hand exploring her now, opening her, slipping one finger inside, then a second, and he's watching her with that laser-honed focus again: watching his hand between her thighs, watching his fingers spreading her cunt, watching his cock sliding into her, slowly, slowly.
He's watching the look on her face when he moves into her for the first time in too-fucking-long.
His thoughts are spinning apart, and as he fills her up he sets his hands down on the mattress, bracketing her hips between his fists, trying to breathe steadily, and it's only after a second or two that he even thinks to touch her body. It's only now that he smooths his hands over her waist and up her ribcage, that he covers her breasts with his hands, that he rubs his palms over her nipples, and he's watching her all along to see her skin and her flesh move under his hands, in the morning light; to see what he's doing to her refracted through her eyes. He's watching her as though he could read her as clearly as she can read him, as she's always been able to read him.
It's her shoulders that his palms curve over last, and from there, press against the mattress, brace there. She can see the way the joints and the muscles lock across his arms, his shoulders and upper chest.
"Pojď sem," he says, if she hasn't already. "Pojď nahoru ke mně," and when she does, he meets her in the middle, he kisses her when he starts to fuck her, and then he bends his head to the curve of her shoulder, as though he couldn't stand to watch her anymore; as though he couldn't stand not to press his face to her skin.
[Danicka] For awhile they are simply kneeling on the bed together, his head bowed as though in prayer and her face tilted upward as though in worship, and with the light coming in the way it does they could both very well be lit by auras, her hair and his eyes incandescent. But this isn't ritual. Lukas at least has had an abundance of ritual in the last twelve hours, perhaps one of the most necessary rituals for someone like him, who prides himself so much on his control and separates so much of who (what) he is into neat categorical boxes: pack. Tribe. Sept. Family. World.
And Danička, who does not fit into any of these boxes neatly at all, who has defied every categorization he has tried to make for her, like Alice growing too big for the White Rabbit's house, like a tree whose roots crack the clay pot they are buried in. She is not just Kin to his Tribe, and not just a snapshot of his life before he Changed, and not just the former governess who knew the Bellamontes as children, and not just a liar, and not just a cat in heat, and not just anything.
At least not with him. At least not to him.
She tries again and again to tell him, is telling him now, the very same thing: he is not just an Ahroun, or just the Beta of the Unbroken Circle, or just Wyrmbreaker. He is all these things, just as she is a liar and a cat in heat and his Kin and a snapshot, but so much
Více. Všechno.
What she does when he pulls for air the way he does and goes at her with his fingers like that is not a gasp or a writhe but a shudder, as though she is in fact overcome. As though this is, actually, too much. It makes her heart rate pick up, it makes her whisper
"Slow down,"
like it's a plea, and a command, because she has yet to really surrender to him. If that's the response he wants to kiss out of her very mouth, so be it, but that is all there is, that and the ache that remains untended, the want that isn't satisfied, the need she has stated.
It's unfair and maybe awful that she does not have to recover herself when he moves her away from him. She is looking at him as his eyes close and her teeth are on edge, her eyes viciously blue in their paleness, the light behind him and striking her fully. It's unfair that the way she's looking at him is not patient or tender, and it's definitely awful that she strokes him once and lets go, which is probably what allows him to reach for the condoms in the first place.
A single, sharp breath huffs out of her as he tears open the packaging and she wonders to herself how the hell he ever convinces himself that he's not a fucking animal.
Lukas rolls a condom onto his body, moving off the bed. Danicka sits back on her hips and all but rips her underwear past her knees and off her legs, staring at him as she does so. Her features are smooth; her eyes border on scathing. Most of the time he has seen her in the dark, or in artificially lit rooms. He so rarely sees her in pure sunlight, and the color change is so drastic that it's almost like looking at a different woman entirely. But she's not.
She's Danička, golden hair and warm skin and green eyes, and she is falling in love with him, she said it, he heard her clearly even if he didn't want to. Even if she was drunk at the time. She said it.
She meant it. And that's worse.
Lukas grabs a hold of her and moves her and her jaw clenches, but she doesn't lay on her back. She's lower than him, the angle is awkward, but she parts her legs and he...touches her again. A snarl rips free from Danicka's throat, her eyes closing in pleasure but her teeth flashing momentarily in frustration. She has her hands on the bedspread and curls them into fists around the fabric, refusing to buck or roll her hips towards him, even when he enters her. Then: her eyes stay closed and her lips part, but her hands don't relax on the covers.
They only unfurl when he begins touching her, passing his palms over her flesh until they reach her breasts, which are small, small enough that despite the lingerie collection she owns she could get away with rarely wearing a bra. They are sensitive, though, and she breathes out slowly as he touches them, her hands letting go of the bedspread and her toned arms lifting up as though moving through water to wrap around his neck. Her goddamned eyes are closed, though, and she's not reading him, and she's hiding now the something-seething that he may only have caught a flicker of in those delirious moments before he was inside her.
She's right there, she couldn't bear to lay down away from him. All he has to do is move into her, all he has to do is tuck his face into her shoulder, all he has to do is what he said he wanted to do.
Fuck her.
Only that's not what he said.
[Lukas]
Dice Rolled:[ 2 d10 ] 6, 9 (Success x 2 at target 6)
[Lukas] Let's be honest: when they get it right, they really get it right. Fucking her is second to nothing else he's ever had in this life. It's nearly a religious experience. Is that disrespectful? Does that reduce her to nothing more than a body, a warm hole? It shouldn't. What makes all the difference is --
-- well. What makes all the difference is that not-quite-tangible something that marks the difference between this and a half-dozen, a dozen, two dozen other go-arounds they've had. It's something about the way she won't look at him, and the way her hands clench in the covers rather than on his flesh, and; well, she's not looking at him, but he's looking at her, and he doesn't bend to her shoulder after all when he starts to move in her, he doesn't do that because he's watching her face, he's watching her as he fucks her, and as she wraps her arms around him, not the quick ivy-winding he's known before but something slower, deliberate.
Her eyes are still closed, and like that he realizes: she's angry at him.
There's a hitch in his rhythm. Then he's wrapping his arms around her and lifting her against him, as though by bringing her closer he might understand her better, and the rise is smooth and swift. At the end of it he holds her close; he holds her still; he seeks out her mouth as though this, too, might give him some hint, some inkling of what had gone wrong.
"Co je špatně, Danička?" he asks her -- just a touch out of breath, that. Ruefully, he thinks to himself that he's been asking this far too often recently. "Řekni mi, jak to, abys byla šťastná."
[Danicka] Self-disclosure does not come naturally to Danicka. It never has, possibly would not have come naturally to her even if her life had not unfolded the way it has. Some people are born slow to warm to others, and depending on their experiences they may only become more and more reserved until years go by and even they forget what it was like to feel some inner core of heat burning. Danicka is not quite that far gone; she knows what it is to feel for others, sometimes unexpectedly, sometimes intensely, and sometimes both.
In Lukas's case: both. She tells him things sometimes that she does not want to tell anyone about, trusts him with bits and pieces of herself that she has no real way of knowing if he is keeping as safe as she needs them to be. There are times when he walks away or drives off and, alone again, she almost crumples in on herself. It isn't that he's gone and her chest caves in; it's that every time, she gives him more, and every time, she doesn't know what he's going to do with it as soon as he's out of her sight. So far she has not told him an secrets so profound that when they part ways she has felt the need to faint, or vomit, but that does not mean she is not dizzy, or that her stomach doesn't wrench in on itself with terror.
Terror is what she should be feeling. The sun is up and bright, the moot is over and his Rage is spent but the damn moon will still be full when it rises and he is still an Ahroun and on the best of days, on the new moon, he is still just outside the border of what Danicka can truly be at ease with. That is a painful thought: that as comfortable as she is with him, as relaxed as she seems, it still took her half an hour to fall asleep when he was lying behind her. All she could feel was his heartbeat, his arm over her waist, and the insidiuous existence of all that Rage. What they can't get away from is that Danicka should be afraid of him. What they can only lie to themselves about for so long is that Danicka is.
If she were a different woman, born with a different temperament or coming from a different life, Lukas would probably not have to ask her what is wrong as often as he thinks he does. He would not have to intuit from whether she looks at him or looks away if she is happy, would not have to guess based on a glint in her eye what it is she's feeling. He would not have to carefully, gently ask her to please tell him what she wants from him.
(Všechno.)
Lukas holds her, and his lips brush over hers, and she tightens her arms around him as he speaks, her head going to his shoulder. "I just needed to hold you," she says tightly, too many sensations and urges warring with each other at once and yet this coming through, all the same, "and you made me wait."
Which may be when he understands that she never says need when she means want. She never says need when she means if you please. She shudders, her face still hidden away, partly because she is embarrassed. Of her anger, of her need, of...Gaia only knows.
[Lukas] "Baby," he sighs, and he could be parroting her back at herself, her terms of endearment reflected back onto her, only he's not -- only there's an honesty in the word, an ache, and as she tucks her face against his shoulder he turns his face to her neck, kisses the smooth arc of it.
A beat or two before he goes on, because she's talking in complete sentences again and he's still inside her, and he can barely think because the feel of it, of her, is so off the charts that...
that what? He can't even think of an appropriate simile. Metaphor. Explanation. It's what it is: mindblowing, worldshaking, tear down the skies, boil the seas. All that. His hands shift on her; he adjusts her balance on him, slightly, and sucks a breath at that, too.
"Sometimes I have to wait." He's trying to explain with what few coherent words are left to him. "So I can ... brace myself. And hold on to myself."
He kisses the tendon in her neck. His teeth catch on her ear, and when he shifts her this time it's purposeful, it's a slow rise and fall of her hips that makes a shudder run up the deep muscles of his back; makes a sigh exhale from somewhere deep inside him, rushing past her ear.
"Odpusť mi," and this is barely more than a whisper now, "Nikdy jsem to znamenalo ublížit ty."
[Danicka] He's never called her that before. Love, usually, and that's difficult enough to cope with, but when he sighs Baby like that into her ear, when he shifts inside of her because the movement of one muscle touches another and another and another and even his breathing seems to make her more aware of him filling her.
Danicka has no idea of how hard he has to fight sometimes not to lose himself in her, if he ever even wins that fight. She has no idea that in his mind he thinks that she is spring, or that he thought before she ever said that he didn't want this to end, or that sometimes he wishes even when he does not know what the hell he is wishing for. She doesn't know that fucking her is so intense for him that he achieves the sort of ecstasy talked about by poets and saints, both, the difference between the two being only if he ascribes the sensation to the body or the soul.
She doesn't know because he doesn't tell her. Usually it's the other way around.
But what he's saying now comes close. Maybe not close enough for her to understand. Nowhere near close enough. But she hears something in the way he says it, or what he's saying: being inside of her, being held by her, is something he has to brace himself for? Danicka pulls her head back slowly, after his mouth falls on her neck, after his teeth graze her skin, and opens her eyes. That is, strangely, the moment when he pulls her hips on him, when he moves inside of her and tries not to gasp. Danicka breathes in deeply and squeezes her legs around him.
Forgive me, he says, and she seems to...ignore it. I never meant, he says, and she just says, as she always says:
"I know,"
and kisses him again. Danicka slowly lays back, while her mouth is still on his. She pulls him with her, while her mouth is still on his.
[Lukas] Perhaps it would be wholly impossible for him to say half the things, a quarter of the things that race through his mind.
When she kisses him like that. When she tightens her legs around him like that. When she breathes like that, or gasps, or shudders, or trembles, or sighs, or moans, or cries out. When she lies back or moves over him; when her eyes glint green in the night, like an animal's; when there's a warmth in her, a welcoming, that reminds him of spring -- when there's a savagery in her, a wildness that reminds him she has the blood of Thunder in her, herself.
When she fits him like this, and a million other ways.
When she fits.
He can't say these things because it would make him seem weak -- to himself, if not to her. Because they don't even make sense, except in the dream-logic of his own mind, of the sexual act. Because they're so deep within him, so necessary and vital, that to rip them out and lay them out, another truth laid down like a playing card, like a chess piece, like a stone, would tear the foundations out of him. Would weaken him. Would collapse him on himself, like a building stripped of its buttressing.
So: what he says is what he says. What he says is he never meant to hurt her, and what she says is she knows, and it's enough, it's enough, because she's leaning back and he's bending to let her back onto the mattress, and then he's no longer standing at the edge of the bed but moving onto it again, and sometimes it seems they switch positions while they fuck because they're trying, physically, to adjust to one another; to navigate the sometimes-treacherous waters of what lay between them, to find their way into one another, deeper, until in the end he doesn't know where he ends and she begins.
He moves over her; they move onto the bed. She's lying back now, beneath him, and he's over her, and he braces his weight on his elbows, on his knees and his feet, on his hips which are against hers. He lays his weight onto her, some of it, what she can handle -- they're still kissing, and this is blind, and he flexes into her, and when her back arches he wraps his arms under her waist, seals her body against his.
I am falling in love with you, she's said, so brutally honest that he admired her and hated her for it at once; so brutally honest that it tore him open, tore what was necessary from him and laid it in the open.
I am falling, he thinks, and the rest of it, the rest of it is too hard to even think in his mind, so what he thinks instead is:
that this is like nothing before. Like nothing else.
There's a stillness when he's just -- there; wrapped in her limbs, deep in her body. He's just there, and the kiss has tapered off, and his face is against hers, his nose alongside hers and his brow to hers; he's just there and he's soaking it in, breathing it is, osmosing it in through his skin. Then he tips his chin up and his mouth finds hers again, and he exhales into her mouth when he shifts his weight over her, when he starts to move into her, and this is slow but not quite soft, not quite gentle; every rocking stroke of his hips against hers brings him deep enough to touch the mouth of her womb, and as the rhythm builds and the fervor builds he's unwrapping his arms from around her to press his palms to the mattress and rise over her.
And now he's watching her again. His eyes are open and there's sunlight breaking over his flexing back, around his obliques and over his shoulders; there's sunlight across her body where he does not shadow her, and this is not the first time he's
(made love to her)
fucked her in the day, but it's still something to behold; something out of the ordinary. He's watching her; the details are stark and clear; he can see every flicker of emotion or sensation on her face; she can see the same on his, the way his brow contracts when he pushes into her; the way he has to close his eyes sometimes, and the way his breath leaves him when he swivels his hips, grinds into her; the way his eyes are all pupil, all pupil with a ring of afterburner blue, and the way they hide nothing, can hide nothing -- the way they transduce every last shred of pleasure he feels, and finds in her, and
this is what he has to brace for. This is what he has to pause and prepare himself for, lest he lose himself completely.
[Danicka] I know is not forgiveness, and it's not absolution. Religious experience or not she rarely if ever gives him that. She almost never makes it okay that he hurts her, one way or another. What she does is give, even if she cannot undo. She can't undo what happened when she was three, or when she was sixteen, or when she was nineteen, or when she was wanting him and could not make herself stop.
Sometimes she hates him. Not because of what he is doing to her or because she doesn't see him often enough or because he will not moan against her neck when he's inside of her. She hates him because she knows better, and it's not really his fault, and she hates herself for being what he said: damaged.
It's hard to say what she said to him in her living room that night when the place where it's coming from sometimes feels so empty.
Danicka doesn't feel empty right now. She kisses him and pulls him over her, closing her eyes again and moaning into his mouth. She bends, she arches, she melts underneath him, and tries not to think. It's not terribly difficult with as much practice as she has, and it's not always something she can even choose not to do when he's with her. It's overwhelming, daylight or moonlight, full moon or new. She closes her eyes and her arms are now more like he remembers them being, enfolding him and holding him to her even as he is trying to live through the movement of their bodies together.
She doesn't ask him to say anything; that isn't what she needs. Her belly and his lay together like palms meeting, hers smooth and his bisected by a thin line of dark hair, hers flat but soft and his hard as a rock. He slows down, either to hold her or to be held or to feel her or to just be. Danicka kisses his face as he is lying there inside and on top and around her, her lips brushing his eyebrow, his nose, his cheekbone. Again, his head is bowed, and her face is lifted, prayer and worship and religious ecstasy ro whatever this is, all shattered like stained glass windows hit by a rock when he rolls his hips and thrusts.
The woman he is not falling in love with moans for him, not just out of pleasure but calling to him in some wordless, nameless way, across whatever distance is still between them simply because neither of them can open completely. Maybe even if they wanted to.
Her eyes are closed when she moans but they flash open when he unwraps his arm from her body to lift himself up. "No!" she snaps, one of her hands against his back tightening into a sudden fist, her eyes vivid on his and goddamned furious as they are needful, her arms flexing for whatever that's worth to hold him right the fuck where he is, where she wants him where he is supposed to be. Her teeth are on edge again, her expression and her eyes far, far from the fox, or the rose, or the very idea of whatever they say 'tamed' means.
"No," she says again, this time a whisper. "Let me have you."
[Lukas] Every time -- every time something like this happens, it's an uncertainty; it's a step into the unknown.
No! she snaps at him, outright snaps it like a demand, like a challenge, and he stops stock-still. It's as much surprise as obedience; it's more surprise than obedience, and for a moment his eyes are clear as ice, and there's a flaring in their depths that's unmistakeably rage. It's the beast roused: woken by the lash it's thoroughly unaccustomed to. A long time ago, not too long after he met her (again), he said to her, cruelly:
Since when do Shadow Lords bow to the whims of their kin?
And then he did. Over and over and over, only each time was not quite a bowing, not quite a submission, no more than her lying on her back for him was a submission; over and over and over until it seemed not to matter anymore who was bowing to whose whims.
A beat -- two.
And then she's whispering, and he's relenting. She can see it in his eyes, the hard fire going out of them. She can feel it in the way his weight is settling on her again, and he lowers himself over her on his elbows once more, and his torso seals against hers. "Okay," he murmurs. "Okay."
His mouth seals to hers. He kisses her before he starts to move again. He does this often -- the kiss, and then the fuck, as though the union of one somehow allowed the union of the other; only it's not that, it's not about permission or precedence or any of that.
It's that he wants to taste her mouth. It's that he wants to feel what sounds she might make, vibrating directly into his mouth. He loves this too, and this, too, is yet another thing that is impossible for him to say, or give voice to.
He's turning over then, and it's his back to the mattress instead, his knees hooked over the side of the bed. He brings her over him and the light is catching in her hair now, lighting the blonde to gold, and his hands are at her hips, holding her, guiding her, and after she has her balance steadied atop him he's urging her faster; he's letting her ride him as he watches her face -- half-rapt -- his eyes unwavering on hers, unfocusing with pleasure, flickering shut only to fly open again.
[Danicka] It would have been worse if she, like another Shadow Lord Kin in Chicago before her, had slapped him across the face for one 'reason' or another. Danicka does not seem like a violent creature, except in flickers, and except when they are like this. No one else he knows of has seen it, not even Sam, who couldn't possibly have been able to see Danicka the way Lukas does and come away thinking so very, very many wrong things about her. The image of her Lukas's packmate has is as much of a lie as the image that Gabriella Bellamonte was always fed, the image that everyone in New York knew.
He snapped once that from the beginning he has only ever had the cold hard truth from her, brutal and painful. That is not remotely accurate. Danicka has -- and still does, sometimes -- lie her ass off to his face, and what is brutal and painful is that he sees through her even then...most of the time. And yet he can't possibly get over the feeling that he sees her because she wants him to. She lets him in, deep enough that he even knows she questions doing so.
Which is cold. And hard. But at least it's the truth.
This is almost like the first night they spent together in terms of fits and starts, moments when it seems it's going to fall apart, only this time it isn't his Rage or him yanking his pants up that's making it seem so. It's Danicka, over and over: her needs, her demands, the fact that if this were just a whim she wouldn't snarl at him and she probably wouldn't be here. It matters enough to her that she doesn't want to just let it go, that she doesn't want to just shrug and lay back and let him do whatever is simplest, whatever is easiest, whatever he wants.
Especially when she knows that what he wants, even on mornings like this, is to
make love to her
please her.
So: Okay. Okay. is what he murmurs, curling over her again like a shield. Danicka sighs, the first sound of contentment he's heard out of her since he walked in the door. The television is still on, still muted, the movie playing through itself because neither of them botehred to turn the machine off. The faint, almost imperceptible buzz of electronics in use fills the motel room as much as the sounds of Chicago outside, nowhere near silent as the day begins. People pass by their bedroom door. People speak, people go to work, cars honk, wind blows, and Danicka gasps.
"Lukáš," she is saying, blissfully, just before they kiss. It's not plea or call: it's recognition, and welcome. Her head lifts from the bedspread slightly to meet his mouth, her hands going up between his shoulderblades to the back of his neck to his hair to his face, cupping her hands on his cheeks and kissing him for as long as she can, which may not be for long. Her body clenches around him, not because she is near orgasm, not because she will get there before him unless he is extraordinarily careful, but because...because he's inside of her, and she wants him there, and she wants more.
Only after what she just whispered, maybe it's clearer that more has almost never been referring to the sex.
They roll together, but Danicka doesn't let go of him. Their bellies don't separate more than a whisper, quickly silenced. She lies on him the ways she did on his bed at the Brotherhood, as close as then, her mouth trailing off his lips to his neck. Her breasts lie on his chest, her hair cast over one of his shoulders as well as her own. Without the leverage of sitting up on him she moves a bit slower, which is torturous, but she will not let go of him. She does not want to be apart from him. It means he can't watch her face. He can feel her mouth, though, feel her gasping and pulling for air against his throat, hear her moaning just under his earlobe, under the line of his jaw.
[Lukas] All right, then:
They turn together, and she doesn't let go, and he expects her to rise over him now but she doesn't; she lies atop him, rests against him, and there's still no space between, and they don't have the leverage, really, to fuck each other like
(it's a war)
they couldn't go fast enough, hard enough, deep enough. And that makes this a little torturous, a little like torture, but she will not let go of him and after a moment his hands move from her hips. His palms smooth up her back, and every time he does this, every single goddamn time, he remembers how her back looked when she was riding him with her back to him, the slender lines and the lean muscles; he remembers how her back looked when she was curled on that motel bed that very first time, frightened for her life.
I never meant to hurt you, he thinks. The thought spins out of nowhere and back into nowhere. His hands open over her back as if he might be able to shield her with his flesh and bones; as if he might shield her from something, anything.
And so his arms fold over her. He pulls her into him as if maybe he could draw her closer yet; return her to his side. He pulls her so close there's barely even enough room for them to move against each other -- nothing but what flexibility, what leverage there was in their lumbar spines, their hips. Her mouth is against his neck and his turns to her shoulder; then her neck as well. They curl to each other, clasp each other, hold each other as though to disappear wholly into one another, and it's never quite been like this before -- and he doesn't know why or what or how; doesn't know why she doesn't want even a breath of air between them, but --
all right, he thinks. All right.
It's okay.
It's okay, and his arms are loosening a little now. There's enough room that she can move again, and her body slides against his, and his hands find her hips again, and she rolls her body against his or he swings her hips on his or -- it doesn't matter, it doesn't matter, it's okay; it's more than okay. It makes his head fall back as it always does, and he exhales something against her ear, a word, maybe more than one; something like her name, Danička, or perhaps Don't stop, or --
he turns his mouth to her skin again. He kisses whatever he can, shoulder or cheek or jaw or neck. His hands are gripping the crests of her hips, but not to direct her; merely to feel her move; and he's moving against her too, arching against her in counterpoint. They're pressed so close she can feel his heartbeat accelerating -- the heavy metronome of his pulse starting to race.
[Danicka] They are reduced now to a sort of rolling, grinding pressure against one another rather than the withdraw and return of one another's hips. Sweat is building between them despite the cool air in the room. Danicka remains curled against him, gasping just under his ear and squeezing him inside of her. It's possible that he could ask her now what the hell is going on with her, what the fuck, Danička, but it seems that neither of them are capable of complete sentences anymore.
She shudders as his hands run up her back and his arms come around her, and their skin sticks as though their bodies, too, want to eliminate whatever distance nature and time have imposed upon them. Danicka doesn't stop moving but she kisses his neck and his shoulder and whispers his name -- again -- into his ear, bites the lobe as though that tiny flap of flesh can stifle the low moan that leaves her.
They hide in each other, in a way, folding towards each other like they are falling apart, or simply falling, or simply crumbling. It's a far cry from the comfort that was welcoming him when he walked in, a far cry from the playfulness of her straddling his lap. Her hair sticks slightly between her shoulderblades. They have been making each other sweat in a matter of moments every time they've come together, as though this is a level of heat they have never encountered before, as though they are about to die and they know it and their hearts are
crumbling
slamming into their ribs faster than their hips can move. That energy has to go somewhere. Their bodies have to survive whatever this is one way, and so they sweat, and if they keep this up and neither of them die summer is going to be ridiculous. They could make love on ice and come away with flushed skin and wet scalps and smelling richly of one another. Air conditioning has no chance.
Seconds slide into each other in chaotic pirouettes, exploding in Danicka's mind when she realizes with each heartbeat, each second, each collision that it will never be again. It's lost forever now. If it were another man underneath her, another Garou inside of her, another lifetime, she would perhaps be horrified right now to see how she is wasting her time, how she is holding and being held instead of riding him to get off. All she can think as time disintegrates around her, though, is that
yes. ano. yes.
this is where she wants to be, this is where she wants to live, this is where she wants to die, this is enough for her.
So she lifts her head and kisses him, her skin peeling from his where she allows it to separate, her mouth hungry but slow on his, her hips swinging down onto him as her tongue slips between his lips. She remains close, weight on her hands and on him. She doesn't lift up to ride him but she does begin to gradually allow them to get an inch or two of air between them, to get the leverage necessary to go faster, to get him deeper. Danicka's not a particularly strong person but when she pulls her mouth from his he can see the tension in her arms, and it seems that she has more than enough strength to hold up her own weight, at least.
Her face is a mask of pleasure, softening as her eyes open after kissing him. She's moving faster, but god not fast enough, not yet. She looks as though she is caught somewhere in the middle of pain and release, finding a rhythm with him as though there's never been any pause, never been any hesitation, never been any waiting, never anything but this.
"Jste úžasný," she whispers, but does not manage to keep her eyes open long enough to see the same reaction he always gives to this, the doubtful laugh, the dubious look. She closes her eyes again and lets her head fall back, arching over him like an animal. "Oh můj bože ano," she slurs in one breath, and fucks him faster.
It builds with the tension of a rope-climber, as though every rocking thrust of their hips together is another knot, another set of muscles tightening to pull them higher, and though she's still folded over him there's no mistaking that Danicka is riding him now, gasping wordlessly now, until those moments and seconds start to spin out into minutes. There's no way she could keep this up, hold herself up, for fifteen or thirty minutes or an hour if they could even fuck each other that long without dissolving, without coming, without losing themselves no matter how much they might want to go on it'll kill them if they do.
Danicka lowers her brow to his, the cries leaving her meaning nothing, nothing at all except maybe Lukáš or baby or ohmygodyes. Her hands on either side of him tighten in the bedspread, curl like talons and hold on as though if she just digs in this will keep her on and in the earth, but that isn't what happens. When she comes, her weight moves onto his chest, her arms wrapping around him to hold on, not to earth or to life but to him. The last thing she does before she loses her mind is kiss him, opening her mouth and giving him the singing moan waiting on her breath, waiting for this, waiting for him.
[Lukas] It's true that Lukas wants to ask Danička what the fuck; it's true, perhaps, that he'd barely be able to string together the words if he wanted to. It's true that when she's pressed to him like this every inch of her seems to have a match with some part of him; and when she moves on him, when she moves on him and he can feel the genesis of that motion throughout her body, he has trouble existing in any moment but this one.
All that is true; but what is also true is that he doesn't ask because ... well, because he doesn't. Because he knows better, or because he knows a necessity is a necessity is a need is a need, that such things may or may not have explanations, that what explanation she might have may or may not be something she could even tell him right now.
Because he has to come at her sideways, sometimes. Because he has to give her time, and space, and remain very still, and let her inch closer on her own terms.
Just like he's giving her time now, though he's neither still nor giving her any space. Closeness is what she wants, and he gives her that; he lets her stay close enough though it's driving him crazy, it's driving them both crazy, even though every time she moves, enough and nowhere close to enough, he has to tell himself not to simply roll her on her back and rise over her and fuck her senseless; even though every time she squeezes him inside her, clenches down around him as though to hold him tighter or pull him deeper he has to tell himself not to...
...to end this for her, somehow. To ruin it for her, somehow. He has to tell himself to be patient, to give her time, to be patient with her.
And then she's
(inching closer on her own terms)
letting some small space open between them; and she's lifting her head and she's kissing him, and her mouth is hungry but slow and his is simply -- starving, because that tension has to go somewhere, that energy has to go somewhere, and he channels it all here, into this kiss, into his mouth opening to draw her tongue in; into the way he eats at her mouth, eats her very breath from her.
It parts. He's panting; not even trying to hide it, and she's rising over him now, bracing her own weight, and there's more room now, room enough that she can look down across it and see him, the light on one side of his face, glinting off the sweat beaded at his hairline, glinting in his eyes.
She tells him he's amazing, and this time it's not the same reaction; it's not disbelief and wryness; she doesn't see it but it's simply: not a reaction at all, to be honest. It's simply the same dazed, open look, the flickering of his face when she moves on him, the savage adoration in his eyes as he watches her, watches her close her eyes, watches her bare her throat and he has to arch up at that, he has to close the distance again, if only for a moment, to put his mouth to her neck and nip at her skin, suck at her flesh.
Faster. He falls back. He pushes his head back against the counterpane. She's riding him now and his hands are holding her by the hips, and there's no way she can keep this up for an hour or thirty minutes or fifteen or ten so his hands move, they press up past the smooth plane of her stomach to her ribcage; he holds her like that, his hands open across the lower curvature of her breasts; he holds her up and takes her weight on his arms, frees her hips to move like that, just like that, he's watching her ride his cock just like that until he can't watch anymore, and his head is falling back again.
"Oh, god," and it's a sigh, a rush of an exhale, "oh, fuck."
At the end he's watching her face as her orgasm comes over her: watching her to see her orgasm come over her, and when it starts to take hold she's twisting her hands into the bedspread, she's coming down over him and his hands are slipping around her sides to open over her back, and he has to remind himself not to clutch her the way she clutches the sheets, has to remind himself she's breakable, she's not like him, he can't mark her flesh and bruise her bones and expect her to be all right because
(he's no theurge)
she's only human; only, times like this, when she's so ferocious, so fierce, she's nothing close to human.
That tension has to go somewhere. He doesn't clutch her back; he folds his arms around her and she folds hers around him and that tension explodes into the kiss, and when she moans into his mouth it unhinges him somehow, it lights something on fire, starts a blaze he can't control. She's moaning into his mouth and she's coming, and her cunt is wet and hot, alive, clenching and spasming on him and even as she's pulling him closer he's grabbing her by the hips and slamming her down on him, slamming up into her, again, and again, fucking her with a savagery that lifts his hips off the mattress, arches his weight back into his shoulderblades, drives him into her as though to simply --
fuse into her.
The pleasure is blinding when it crashes over him, like a wave, like a tsunami. He's lost in it, rigid with it; arches so tautly that he lifts her clear on his body. A motionless instant, and then he's panting into her mouth, bucking against her, instinctive, reflexive, and when their mouths come apart he's gasping for air, sucking great heaves of oxygen out of the room as though there were a firestorm in him that needed to be fed. He relaxes by degrees: his hips lowering, his muscles unclenching. His hands are prying loose from her hips to wrap around her, to bring her close, keep her close; to press her chest against his, her hips against his.
Which is what he always does, after he comes in her. Which is what he always does, but it's different somehow, this time. Because she'd needed to hold him. Because she was angry when he wouldn't let her; because she'd held onto him like he were a life preserver in a stormy ocean. Because it was her skin on his, her body on his, and she was so close, so close, and somehow --
somehow, it's different. He always holds her like this, after, but this time: this time, he thinks if someone were to pry her from him now, just now, he might literally come apart at the seams; as though she were an anchor for him, or his sanity, or what humanity he had.
[Danicka] Afterwards they float, eyes closed and bodies composed of nothing but countless particles, shifting and mixing together, fragile enough and disparate enough that a sturdy gust of wind or well-timed sigh would be enough to blow them apart, scatter them across the bedspread and the carpet and out the window and through the city.
Or that is how it seems. It's the rise and fall of civilizations before Danicka knows where her arms are enough to realize she has them locked around Lukas's upper body as tightly as she is capable, and it's that long, again, before she realizes that she needs to relax because she's trembling from the strain. Conversely it's just a blink of time before she feels enough of herself to start telling the difference again between his body and her own.
She slowly returns enough to realize that she is breathing, and that the swell and fall underneath her is also breathing. Though it is several long minutes before she knows where all the various limits of her body are, she knew even when she was a cloud that he was there with her. God help him if he needs her to remember that he is even part human; she can't be an anchor.
She's the ocean.
Nothing close to human.
Danicka realizes a some point that all this time she has been lying here holding onto him, he has been holding onto her, and thinks that's very nice, that two dustclouds can embrace. She cannot see him because after he came and the world was destroyed she laid her head on his chest to wait for the next world to explode into existence. She closed her eyes and waited for life to get around to re-creating itself, becoming gradually and infinitely more complex. She stares across the room when her eyes are open, a small smile on her face at the thought that she has been lying here with him since the dawn of time, life, and existence.
Which is when she sighs softly and closes her eyes again, because it would all right with her if, right now, the world decided to end again. All the same she comes back to herself, inevitably rediscovering a certain separateness in the aftermath. Things like the taste in her mouth and the smell of the hotel room beneath the smell of Lukas and things like an ache in her knees all slowly, slowly become a part of her map of reality again.
Without looking at the bedside clock she has no idea how long it's really been. The universe did not, actually, collapse. She and Lukas did not become particles connected by nothing more than consciousness of one another even more than themselves. It could have just been a minute. Maybe fifteen. Danicka doesn't want to know, so she doesn't look at the clock. She realizes -- without surprise -- that she's not tired. No matter.
She lifts her head, hair in her face, and looks up at him with slowly blinking, almost bleary eyes.
Before she moves her head she thinks she'll say something, or think of something to say. Something witty, perhaps, or tender. Maybe just something to move them from one place to another. When she looks at him, though, that's enough. So that's all she does.
[Lukas] She thinks she'll say something, or think of something to say.
He thinks he'll ask her why or what or ... something. He thinks he'll say something.
Then she raises her head and he opens his eyes, and like that the world falls back into place and he thinks, yes, that's right.
This is me, and this is Danička.
All right.
All right, then. And his eyes drop from the ceiling; she's looking at him. So he looks at her, and it's this again, his head bowed, or his eyes at least downcast; her face raised to his. Like religious icons, prayer and praise. Like old movies.
He can't bring himself to let go of her yet. He leans up to her and he kisses her, gently, oh so very gently.
And exhales. And sets his head down. And looks at the ceiling again, and then closes his eyes.
"Nenechávejte mě jen zatím," he murmurs.
[Danicka] Maybe he'd ask her more questions if she seemed like she ever actually wanted to answer any. He used to ask her so many questions, all the time. About Sam (but not Sam), about Kate, about Martin, and while Danicka has tapered off on actually lying to him, she still withdraws and shuts down and avoids topics where, if she's honest, she will only tell him things he doesn't want to hear. It's not just self-preservation, or avoidance, or trying to make him happy. It's all three, and more than that, even. She keeps shutting doors in his face and he has no real promise that they're ever going to be opened.
Danicka doesn't say anything because there is nothing she has to say when she looks at him. Lukas does not ask her what he might have asked her, why she was so furious when she was not holding him that it seemed the difference between life and death. He doesn't ask her why on this morning of all mornings, all their times together, it was so vital to her that she be close enough to hold him the whole time. It never has been important before.
After. Yes, after he knows: he clings to her because he has no other choice. She curls against him because she welcomes him there, right where he is, for as long as he can stay.
They kiss this time not like they have no other choice, but like they are waking up though neither of them have been asleep. It's a whole other language unto itself, these hellos and I want yous transmitted not in words or even sounds but the flavour and tone of how they kiss. This one is not 'as soft and gentle as it would be if it were not a full moon, or if he were not an Ahroun', because it is, and he is, and there's no reason that should stop them. Apparently.
Lukas lays back, closes his eyes, and Danicka watches him as their lips pull away from each other and he lowers his head. "Já nepůjdu nikam," she says quietly, reassuringly. "Nechci být kdekoliv, ale tady."
[Lukas] Some moments go by. It's exhaustion crashing over him like a wave now, the soft colorless wings of unconsciousness brushing over him like a curtain of moths. His arms shift around her. His hand smooths up her back, and down again. Settles.
He staves off sleep. He opens his eyes. The lines of the room are remarkably stark. It's the morning light, which is not so golden as it was, which does not slant in quite so easily now. Her hair is still brilliant though where it lays over him -- waves and sheets, flaxen, golden.
His hand comes to her hair now. He threads his fingers through; gentle, slow. Thoughtful.
"Řekni mi něco o tom, kdy jsme byli dětmi," he murmurs. "Něco jiného."
[Danicka] When Lukas asked Danicka not to leave him just yet, she thought he could mean one, or two, or all of three things. She has not left in any sense that she can contemplate right now, and will not, but she is quietly stunned that he is still awake. Yes, she knows that he could keep going if he had to for longer than this but he does not have to.
The room is theirs til tomorrow afternoon. They are downtown. If they need booze or food or coffee they're in the thick of things down here. Danicka has a television and her computer if she needs entertainment while he sleeps. She has told him she'll stay. And yet he stays awake, pushing aside his exhaustion for reasons she can't fathom, because the only thing he says is to, essentially --
Danicka lifts her head from his chest and peers at him with a faint smile, his fingers falling through the strands of her hair, which is twisting again into waves where it is damp from sweat.
"You want a bedtime story?" she asks, amusement curling the corners of her mouth.
[Lukas] A breath of a laugh -- as though he were too tired for anything else. Which isn't the truth, really. He often laughs like this, quietly, as though to keep his amusement under wraps.
"Something like that," he replies. Perhaps it's an admission. A moment after he adds, "I like to hear the stories you remember."
His hands smooth down her back again, spread over her ass. He moves her hips on his slightly, enough that he can feel where they're still joined; not enough that he slips out. He could stay here forever, he thinks to himself, but of course that's ridiculous; worse than ridiculous, and so he doesn't say it.
"It's not something I think of often nowadays," he adds, quietly.
[Danicka] There is only so much to draw from, in these memories Lukas asks for. This is only the second time he has ever asked but Danicka thinks on it and wonders if one day the well will run dry and she's not going to be able to give him whatever else it is he's cut off from that time of his life. She wonders if he can only remember anything of being human when he is with his family, or perhaps only his sister.
She also loosens her arms and folds them in closer to her own body, so her hands are laid on top of his chest. Laying her head back down, she takes a deep breath. The fingernails of her right hand scritch softly amidst the fine, dark hairs there while she ponders what story to tell him. He moves her and her eyes close; she shifts her hips on him to adjust, to get comfortable again, and doesn't say --
but she does.
"I like feeling you inside me for awhile," she confesses, as quietly as he laughed, "after."
Which has nothing to do with stories of the time when they were children, but she says it anyway, without any more prompting than his hands on her hips like that. She settles back against him and thinks for a little bit longer before she decides what she wants to tell him.
"The spring I turned nine, I was allowed to participate in a female-only ritual for the first time. Before then I was too young to go to any circles without my father. Later that week your family came over for dinner and Anežka was doing her homework at the kitchen table. We were sitting on the back porch and I started telling you about it, and Anežka went and told your mother, and they made us go inside and play a board game."
She turns her head and nuzzles his chest briefly, as though to use his skin to scratch an itch on her nose before lying back down. "I think it freaked your parents out, which I remember thinking was ridiculous even then."
[Lukas] They stir against one another; they resettle. He exhales when she relaxes again, nearly a sigh.
"I understand," he says. He doesn't elaborate.
Quiet, then, he listens to her. When she pauses to nuzzle his chest, he doesn't think she's scratching her nose against his skin. He's not reminded of that at all. He's reminded of some forest animal nosing through layers of fallen leaves for something, some buried treasure. He thinks to himself, senselessly:
She's searching for my heart.
and his hands come up to cradle her head, as gently, as carefully as they'd cradled it when she pleasured him with her mouth. He doesn't pull her face from his skin, nor hold her still, nor anything at all. When she lays her cheek to his chest again, he folds her in his arms.
"What was the ritual?" he asks, quietly.
[Danicka] He understands. She smiles to herself. His hands are in her hair and her face is pillowed on his chest, and it's ridiculous to want to stay here forever, or even all night. Her body will rebel, demand to be unfolded and allowed to stretch out, and she'll relent because Danicka -- perhaps unlike Lukas -- almost unswervingly listens to her body.
Such as when her nose itches and this conflicts with her hands' desire to stay on his skin, she finds a way to scratch it. Against his chest, and the chair on his chest, and that way both her face and her hands are pleased, and get what they want.
"It was a night of purification and preparation for the full moon between the spring equinox and the summer solstice. The actual cross-quarter day is communal, so it was men and women together," she explains.
Danicka shrugs her shoulders, squeezing them up by her ears and then relaxing them. She slips her hands off his chest and onto the mattress on either side of him, arching her back and stretching up over him, catlike. Her head rolls back on her neck, first one way then the other, swinging back around to look down at him again, arms straight. "I don't remember what I told you, exactly," she muses, "but I do remember sitting out on the porch talking about it."
[Lukas] And she stretches, Lukas's hands leave her back to reach over his head -- almost as though he, too, were going to stretch. It's not that, though. He reaches for the pillow he'd flipped out from under the cover. He stuffs it under his head, then laces his hands atop his head, and atop the pillow.
"Why were my parents 'freaked out'? Because it was supposed to be for kinwomen only?"
Not that his parents, or anyone, had had any inkling that he would not grow up kin at that point. She was nine; he would've been seven, if that. The very first glimmerings of rage in him wouldn't have shown up for another year, and he wouldn't Change for several more after that.
[Danicka] They are as gradual about this as they were about opening their mouths to speak in the first place, about allowing their arms to relax around one another or anything else. They go in steps: Danicka pushes herself upward but her stomach still matches his. Lukas grabs a pillow and takes his hands off of her. Danicka shifts her weight back and straddles him, breathes in slightly at the movement of him inside her.
And then she gives an exaggerated shrug, her facial expression comically bewildered. She lifts her hands, palm-up, in a whaddya-gonna-do gesture. "I have no idea."
She drops the act and, while she thinks of a more useful answer, lifts her hips and slides off of his body, breathing in more deeply this time. As she rolls to her side next to him, laying her head half on his bicep, half on the pillow so she can see his face, she adds: "Probably not that." A beat; a thought comes to her. "Did your family ever pray?"
[Lukas] He looks down as she moves off of him, doesn't raise his head. His reaction is so subtle, such a careful slow inhale that if she didn't see the flaring of his nostrils, if she didn't know him better than that, she'd think there was none at all.
She lies down again. He makes room for her, the slightest adjustment of his weight one way and then the other. He slips his foot between hers, his shin between her calves; tugs her leg closer to his other one.
Her question makes him laugh, a short-lived huff of mirth, if only because when she says pray he imagines evangelical christians holding hands around the dinner table.
"My father accepts the existence of Thunder and Gaia and all the rest. My mother might even believe in them. But no, they didn't pray. I think they're far too pragmatic to ever expect the deities of the Garou pantheon to go out of their way and help kin such as themselves. for that, particularly when these deities were having a hard enough time saving their own asses in the end times. If they needed something, my parents always believed in working towards it themselves."
[Danicka] At some point or another they moved. When they were fucking, maybe, when all that need for something harder, deeper, faster had to be satisfied some other way, by tangling legs and the bedspread nearly getting torn off the fucking mattress. Doesn't matter all that much. Danicka curls against his side thoughtlessly, her limbs arranging themselves in comfort and then easing around his own as he shifts his leg.
They follow a certain pattern of activities, each one as careless and easily done as the last: physical withdrawal, getting rid of the condom, ignoring these mundanities in the midst of conversation.
Which is, for the first time, turning towards religion, of all things.
Danicka frowns slightly. "Isn't that part of the problem with the 'end times', though?" she asks, and somewhat rhetorically, because she goes on with: "These aren't imaginary beings on mountaintops, they're real, and...they affect and are affected by this world. Isn't part of the reason these are the end times is because humans don't know that, or believe it? Because they're relegated to being just 'the Garou pantheon'?"
[Lukas] A frown mars Lukas's brow, but it's not anger, or even that he's particularly troubled. He thinks a moment. Then his right hand unlaces from his left, and he rubs his thumb across his forehead -- as if to erase the traces of his own frown.
"I don't know," he says. "Sometimes I think these are the end times precisely because we're all too ready to give up all responsibility to some higher power. Not just humans, but all of us. What can I do? I'm only human. What can I do? I'm only a Cliath. What can I do? I'm only one Garou. And so on and so forth, until everyone's doing whatever they damn well please instead of what's ... necessary."
He shifts -- his arm moving under her cheek, but not quite drawing away. He resettles then, relaces his hand with the other.
"It'd be one thing if it were understood that the Incarnae and the Celestines are not just imaginary myths but entities that turn with and are turned by the turning of the world, as you say. But more often than not, if you present a man with a god and convince him the god is real, he'll just revert to a child and become all the more irresponsible and careless. It's the whole judeo-christian father-deity thing."
A pause.
"Why? Did your family pray?"
[Danicka] He talks. At length. And in the end the woman next to him is just propped up on one elbow rather than laying comfortably on his arm. She started to move to this position as he started talking about presenting man with a god. She is giving him a look that is only bewildered in an ironic way, bordering on sarcasm.
"I'm not talking about giving up responsibility, Lukáš, I'm talking about rendering honor. What the hell do you think praying is?"
[Lukas] A flicker of a frown. Then it passes.
"I suppose I've always thought of praying as asking for something. Entreaty rather than respect."
[Danicka] This could be seen as an argument, or a chance for one. She is taking certain things he's saying as dismissive or demeaning; he is likely seeing her movement and her tone, her expression, as defensive. It's entirely possible that with or without intent that's actually the case. It could be that Lukas is being condescending and Danicka is going on her guard...or it could be that they're having a discussion, and neither of them is really thinking all that hard about it. Lukas's family is from one of the most atheistic countries in the world; Danicka was brought up in what is regarded as the most diverse melting pot in this one.
She says 'pray' and he thinks of evangelicals holding hands, or Catholics on their knees and palms pressed together, or Jews before candles with their fingers interweaving. Heads bowed, as Lukas's was to her before, or faces lifted, as Danicka's was to him. She says 'pray' and the idea of supplication enters into his mind, pleas for intercession, forgiveness... help. People relying on something bigger and stronger than themselves rather than themselves.
And Danicka, apparently, sees something different, but that may be because she was raised with something different. Then she does what always seems to need doing between them to bridge any gap, communicative or otherwise: she touches him, running her warm hand across his middle, below the ugly scar across his torso.
"It's just communicating with Gaia or the spirits," she says mildly, giving a half-shrug. Her eyes go to his nipple for a moment, linger there meditatively. "Everyone has a soul connected to her and to the spirit realm, even if they can't go there."
[Lukas] His eyes drop again when she touches him, a flicker down, a shading of the lashes without a lifting of the head. After a moment he covers her hand with his, her finer, slighter knuckles beneath his palm.
"I misunderstood what you were asking me," he says, quietly. "But if my parents ... communed like that, I didn't see it either. I imagine they would've found it too private an affair for them to display openly, or perhaps too frivolous."
A moment's thought.
"My father had his books, and sometimes, if he had the time, he sketched things from life. And after relations with the tribe thawed a little and we could begin to move some of our assets over, my parents bought their first house stateside. My mother planted some fruit trees in the backyard, flowers in the side. She wasn't much of a green thumb, but she enjoyed it. I think what communion my parents had with the pulse of the world were more in these pursuits than in what might be more strictly termed prayer."
Then, again: "Why do you ask?"
[Danicka] When his hand covers her own she might have stilled it, maintained that contact and remained under his palm, but Danicka doesn't. She accepts the touch and continues sliding her touch along and around to his other side. Her arm drapes over him then, her weight still on her left elbow but her body closer to his than it was even a few moments ago.
"It's only a strict term if you make it so," she says quietly. "Sometimes baking koláče is prayer." Her head bows and her lips touch the center of his chest, the bony ridge between his pectorals. "I've heard that battle can be prayer." She says this as though she doesn't know firsthand; it's not hard to let that slide, to believe her, because there's no hitch and no evidence and nothing in what she's shown him that says she will even do as he wants and die fighting if she must die. "I'm sure whatever it is you did to make those talens was a sort of prayer."
Danicka's murmuring lips travel back over to the nipple she gazed at thoughtfully a few seconds ago, wrap around it, tease it, part further to allow the tip of her tongue to flick it a few times. "Making love to you is like praying," she whispers when she lets him go, and now her body is half over his, one of her legs long and lean between his own, breasts against his abdominal muscles, her hair sliding over his midsection like a scarf being drawn across his skin.
"I asked," she answers, "because I wanted to know."
[Lukas] There's a sort of formality that settles over his words when he speaks of his parents like this that's not there when he talks about Anezka -- a sort of structure and rhythm to the words that makes them sound preconceived, half-recited, though she knows they're not. It's a sort of distance that inserts itself not because he wants it there, but because he's put it there so often and so long that it's become instinct. It's questionable if he hears it at all.
When her mouth closes over his nipple Lukas draws a sudden breath. His chest expands against her mouth, her body. His left hand moves now, settling over the back of her head, his fingers sliding between the smooth locks of her hair, paler and more golden than anyone in his family could recently boast.
His is a clan of traditional Lords -- stereotypical ones, one might say, mountain Lords -- black-haired, strong-nosed, with broad, sharp slavic cheekbones and implacable eyes. She looks nothing like him, but he recognizes her blood anyway. His body recognizes her, and she's right: it's like a sort of prayer when they join.
When she answers him he opens his eyes. His skin feels abruptly cool where her mouth had been, not merely the nipple but the center of his chest as well, his breastbone where her lips had briefly stamped.
There's a quiet, then -- a natural lapse in the conversation where touch replaces words. His fingers comb gently through her hair, with utmost care and very little finesse. It is possible this is wholly new to him as well: lying abed with a woman after sex, unwilling to move away or get dressed again or even roll over and go to sleep. Combing his fingers through her hair. Talking, as though they had all the time in the world.
After a while: "What was so special about the cross-quarter moon?"
[Danicka] Rumpled, he'd looked, when he walked in. Tired. Drained and yet somehow simultaneously filled, one thing replaced with another, or one thing allowed to shine through because another was emptied out. Good to be horizontal, he'd said, and from the look of him she'd thought that he would simply fall asleep there on top of the covers, still in his clothes. And ironically, being with her had apparently given him a second wind.
Not enough that he is now rolling over and onto her as he had that first night after a minute or two of conversation, wanting again and not sure when or if he would have have a second chance. But enough that they're doing as they so often do and talking in a way they can't ever seem to get to unless they've had sex first, as though the act of lovemaking crashes through some locked and barred gate in both of them, tears down a wall, and
so it's really no wonder that sometimes it feels like prayer and yet it just as often feels like a war.
Danicka, however, knowing he would fall asleep in seconds if they stopped talking and he closed his eyes, is touching him and moving her mouth on him. She may or may not want more, it's difficult to tell with the lazy, idle way she kisses his skin and drapes her body over his. She may just want to be close to him, may be licking his flesh because it occurs to her in the moment to lick his flesh and she does not like to deny herself any urge and he's picking up on that oh by god he knows that even when the threat of his frenzy is very real and immediate she does not like to tell herself no for any reason.
Her entire family is fair-haired and light-eyed, with skin that easily turns ...well, in her father and her brother's cases, a sort of ruddy, pinkish tan. She takes after her paternal grandmother's side of the family and her mother's side, turns golden. She looks like the half-sisters Lukas doesn't even know she has, looks like her mother, with the same wide, intense eyes and sharp chin. She and her brother have waves in their hair, curls even, taking after their father. She is the only one with green eyes, but they match her family's in the sunlight.
It's difficult for those who have set stereotypes in their mind to look at her and think Shadow Lord. Doesn't the very name imply a greater size than she has, a statuesque carriage that she lacks in favor of a grace that evokes prey animals rather than mountains? Doesn't the name imply darkness of coloring as well as bearing, a swarthiness and genetic predisposition towards anything black? He knows she owns a pair of black slacks, he saw them on her at the Brotherhood once, and she has a couple of black coats and sets of shoes, but she's of a completely different sort of stock.
Very, very old blood runs in her veins. Quiet blood, but for a few standout heroes like her own mother. Patient blood. Warm, earthy, feral blood that is just as likely to use the shadows to hide in than stand on the mountain and look out at everything the mountain's shadow touches and claim it for their own. She looks and smells and tastes so different than the lineage Lukas comes from, but she comes from his homeland. She is his homeland.
"The start of traditional seasons," she says, as this is an easy answer. "Astronomically, the middle of the seasons." Danicka pauses, looking up at him as his fingers stroke through her hair like he's never touched it before, like he's afraid he'll break it or break her if he really buries his touch in. She pushes her head into his hand, turns her face to his palm, and kisses it. "The Garou had major rituals on the solstices and equinoxes, of course. Because so many of us served as guards and served where they could during those times, the rest of us were busy watching the children for any major gathering or ritual to honor those days. So we saved our energy for the quatcruses."
She says all this against the thin skin of his palm. Then she blows a raspberry against it.
[Lukas] "And this is what freaked my parents out so much?" He seems amused at the notion, as much as he's amused when she suddenly -- and randomly -- blows a raspberry against his palm. He shifts his head, puts his free hand behind it entirely, pillows himself up a little higher so he can look down into her face.
"You know," he's grinning, "my sister used to do that. She was very good at it. Had a huge repertoire of horrible, vulgar noises, like the worst sort of flatulence. I remember one day -- this was back when we lived at the rooming house, when I was about eight or nine -- my parents put us outside to play, and my sister started blowing farts whenever someone walked in or out of the house. Timing them to their footsteps, you know, and matching the noise to the person? So if it was a particularly fat guy she'd make these -- " he breaks off here, laughing at the memory of it, " -- big, loose, fluttery, sloppy noises against the crook of her elbow, and if it was a skinny guy she'd make these pinched little squeaks against the back of her hand.
"With about thirty households living under one roof, there were a lot of victims. I thought it was the most hilarious thing ever but well, not everyone appreciated her efforts. Mrs. Liebschutz from two doors down walked in and Anežka let her have it. My god, you should've seen the look she gave us. And then apparently the old battleaxe went straight to my parents and gave them an earful, because my dad -- my father came charging down two minutes later and hauled Anežka inside. I remember thinking she was so brave because even when she was getting spanked she was still laughing about it, which of course earned her a sound scolding after my father was done tanning her hide. She told me later it was worth every wallop and every minute of the lecture she got."
There's a laugh residing in his chest, not quite loosed. It colors his words, vibrates under his voice, and when he finishes, leaves a smile to linger for seconds longer.
"I suppose you never did anything like that," he adds -- the corner of his mouth hooks up again. He tilts his head to ease the angle of his regard, flicking her hair lightly back from her eyes. "You couldn't even climb trees reliably."
[Danicka] When he all but scoffs at how this may have freaked out his parents, Danicka just shrugs, at a loss. As if she really knows. As if it couldn't just as easily been an argument or disagreement between the adults that had them insisting that Lukášek and Danička come back inside and stop talking about whatever it was she was telling him.
It wasn't as though their childhood conversations were all that memorable, or long-lasting: usually within a matter of minutes one (Lukas) would lose his ability to sit still and go tearing off like the hounds of hell were after him. She shrugs it off, her mouth still pressed to his palm, and her lips crack in a careless grin.
As he speaks, Danicka turns her head so that his hand is against her cheek rather than her face. She looks down at him from where she has herself propped up, that half-smile still on her lips until he gets to the part where his father came charging. He's seen this look on her before, notably the night she brought koláče to the Brotherhood: hilarity and ease crumbling from the inside into ruin.
The faltering starts at the edges of her eyes and the corners of her mouth, as though she is pulling in on herself. Her brow never furrows but he can almost see her heart inside of her chest speeding up. Danicka, lying naked beside him, doesn't even seem to notice her own reaction because she sweeps it off of her expression and off the table without thinking.
But he's close enough -- in more ways than one -- to catch it before it's hidden again behind another smile, which curves into a faint smirk as he tucks her hair back and teases her about treeclimbing. Danicka's eyebrows lift.
"Of course I never did anything like that," she retorts archly, as though that sort of behavior were far, far beneath her. The mockery of those fucking Fangs is evident only in the way her eyes twinkle as she imitates a certain Philodox's cadence of speech and vocal pitch. Ilari Martin -- judge of actors -- once called her a phenomenal one. She has Katherine Bellamonte down, but this time, only for eight words. It drops, and her smirk is less adorable because there is a canny edge to it, a sharpness and savagery that no one else he knows has seemed to see.
Has been allowed to see.
[Lukas] There's a faltering in her smile -- it's there and then it's gone. That's how quick, how thoughtlessly she catches it, but she's not the only one to have caught it. This time it's her brow that his thumb rubs over, as though to smooth a frown from her face.
She'd never frowned at all. She hadn't needed to.
"My father never once raised an unjust hand to us, Danička," he says, not defensively but gently, as if to reassure her. "Even when he was angry, it was discipline, not violence."
The conversation goes on. She imitates Katherine -- not kindly, but accurately -- and Lukas slants her a smirk. "Put your claws away, koťátko," he says, lazily, not really meaning it.
[Danicka] Gently, Lukas strokes his thumb across her brow and reassures her that his father may have spanked him and his sister but that he wasn't abusive. He wasn't a violent man, even though he was strict. He was not unjust, even when he was angry. And she pulls her face away from him, her brow furrowing now in the frown that -- no -- she had not needed to express a moment before. It only deepends, moving from exasperation to a flicker of annoyance, when he smirks at her and calls her 'kitten'.
"I wish you wouldn't act as though you know what I'm thinking," she says, sighed more than snapped. Danicka slides her arm back as she rolls from his side, moving to sit up.
[Lukas] Lukas catches her -- his right hand coming down from behind his head to encircle her wrist. It's the loosest of grasp, easily breakable, but his intent is clear: stay.
"It was a joke, Danička," he says, gently. A pause. "What are you thinking?"
[Danicka] One thing both of them can claim is that few of their reactions, in most cases, are involuntary. The only time that Danicka or Lukas seem to lose all control over what they are displaying, or doing, is when they crash into one another. And that works. It works because it's real, and sincere, and open. This: when they misunderstand each other or disagree, is still calculated and thought-out. It's not necessarily false, or insincere, or closed, but it's just so much more...considered.
So when Danicka works her wrist out of his hand it is only after a brief pause for thought, a halfsecond of hesitation before she decides to pull away from the one thing that really has a chance of helping them connect. She sits up, but she doesn't immediately leave the bed. She looks at him, twisted to look over her shoulder where he still lies.
"I know the koťátko bullshit was a joke," she says quietly, though there's nothing gentle about it. Just...relenting a bit. "And I'm thinking that I should shower, and you should sleep. You're hallucinating victimhood," she adds, bordering on a sardonic humor of her own. "I think you're getting delirious."
[Lukas] Lukas's eyebrows go up; he doesn't share the humor, sardonic or otherwise. A second later he sits up as well, grabbing the pillow from behind him and tossing it against the headboard. He moves up the bed then, back to the pillow, knees drawn loosely up.
"Then why are you so bent out of shape about it? And 'hallucinating victimhood'; what does that even mean?"
[Danicka] Lukas moves up and away, so Danicka scoots to the edge of the bed and pushes her fists into the bedspread as she gets to her feet. "I'm not. That's not even..." she says, a bit tightly, and loses the sentence as though to follow it might just get her off track.
She walks to her bag, digging around inside until she comes up with a clean pair of underwear and her toothbrush. She isn't looking at him. "It means..."
Danicka trails there, sighs, shifts: "...Jsem nemocná mého nápadník pohledu na mě, jako já poškozen."
[Lukas] And he's silent for a while, looking at her back while she digs in her bag. She isn't looking at him, so she can't see the look on his face; they aren't touching, so she can't intuit what's going on below.
The converse is, of course, also true.
Eventually Lukas speaks up again, quiet as ever. The hum of the central heating almost drowns him out across the room.
"I shouldn't have called you that. I didn't mean it the way ... " he trails off here, and it's still glaringly bright in the room, and he squints out the window at the day outside, which seems inordinately brilliant for lack of sleep.
"I didn't mean to label you, or suggest you were somehow -- beyond help, or pitiful, or dirtied."
[Danicka] "Yeah, well, we aren't talking about what you called me a week ago," Danicka sighs, zipping her bag up again and taking a step to move around the armchair where it lies to go to the bathroom. She pauses then, glancing over her shoulder at him, and then the curtains, and then him again.
"...You want me to pull the shades so you can sleep?" she asks, and is said with such sudden care that it seems this other conversation, where she is pulling away from him, isn't even happening.
[Lukas] "No," now he's exasperated, "we're talking about how you think I looked at you just now, which apparently reminded you of what I called you a week ago. And I'm telling you: I don't think you're damaged."
She's been zipping up her bag and heading for the bathroom while he speaks. She pauses now and her eyes flick between him and the window. She asks him if he wanted her to pull the shades and he's briefly unbalanced. He looks at the window too, and then back at her.
"I think you've been hurt before, and it hurts me to think of it." He doesn't answer her question just yet. "That's why I look at you like that. It's not the same thing as pity."
A beat.
"I'm not sleeping yet." There's no romance in this: "Come back soon."
[Danicka] This time Danicka doesn't answer. She doesn't argue. She's naked, his sweat drying on her skin, every inch of her hit by the light coming in through the windows. To one side of her, facing the foot of the bed, Tom Hanks is having a conversation with Corey Feldman. Neither of them, still, has turned off the damn television set. The underwear she's holding is pink.
It's not the same thing as pity, he says, and she puts her lips together and doesn't give him so much as a facial reaction to it. She doesn't tell him she's going to come back when she comes back, either. Danicka just walks to the bathroom and shuts the door. In a few seconds, the water is running.
=========
Thirty-seven minutes pass before Danicka comes out. For about thirty-five of those, the shower is running. The sink turns on and off again in intervals, and then nearly two-thirds of an hour after she first went in there, the bathroom door opens and Danicka comes out. She's just wearing the pair of panties she took with her. Her hair is towel-dried but still damp, and the first thing she does is pick up her tank top from wherever it landed and pull it on.
If he's still awake, and she's surprised to see it, it doesn't register on her face.
[Lukas] When Danicka emerges, the shades have been drawn and Lukas has gotten under the covers. The TV is still muted and it's a different movie now, and Lukas is not, in fact, still awake.
He reawakens, though, around when she pulls her tank-top back on, as though cued by the spreading humidity in the room, or the scent of shampoo and soap, or the sound of her picking her shirt off the ground, or simply her. There's a beat where he almost asks what time it is, but he turns his head instead, looks at the clock.
It's still early. That's what time it is.
"Fell asleep," he says, perhaps a touch sheepish. He pushes himself upright and puts his back against the headboard again, rubs one eye on the heel of his hand. A pause. "Are you coming back to bed?"
[Danicka] The room is darker and her skin -- still fair, because it is still cool enough outside that she is not exactly laying out on the sundeck at Kingsbury Plaza in a bikini -- is no longer lit up by the sunshine. She shakes her head slightly at the closed curtains; it would have taken her just a flick of her wrists to do that for him, but no, he wasn't sleeping yet, and just look at him.
She just looks at him. Standing across the room in her underwear in the middle of the morning, doing what she never expected to do to anyone: she looks at him while he's asleep. It's not a dreamy, protracted gaze. She doesn't muse over how angelic he looks (he doesn't) or how tender she's feeling (she isn't). Her forehead is furrowed, eyebrows pulled together, the corners of her mouth tugged inward. She looks like someone reading test results that are informing her that she has some sort of terminal illness. Someone who is, however, too strong to break down.
It clears from her face as she steps forward and finds her wifebeater, and as she is turning it right-side-out and pulling it on over her head, Lukas's eyes slide open. He turns in bed; she is looking down at her feet as she adjusts the fall of the shirt's hem around her hips.
Are you coming back to bed? makes her look up and over at him, eyes first before she ever raises her head. It makes her look a little savage, til she lifts her chin. "I'm not tired," she says after a few seconds, "but I'll lay down with you for awhile if you want."
[Lukas] He doesn't answer that immediately. He looks at her while she looks at him, and after; at the end his eyes flicker briefly away: the desk, the drawn shades, back.
It's hard to say what he's looking for. If he's looking for anything. If he's simply looking around to regain his bearings.
Eventually, his eyes complete their survey of the room, and come back to her. With the shades drawn the irises aren't the sharp, focal blue they were, but the color is still visible, still noticeable and noteworthy.
"Come back to bed," he says, somewhere between a request, an invitation and a decision. Lukas throws the covers back on the empty side of the bed, braces his hands on the mattress, slides down on his back.
[Danicka] It isn't quite the same as him saying Yes, I want you to. It's not quite the same as him saying even I'd like that. It would be nice to think that Danicka reads him well enough to braid together the request, the invitation, and the decision and hear whatever it she wants to hear, but that is both assuming she has something specific in mind she wants to hear and assuming that she knows him.
Sometimes she does. And sometimes she doesn't want to. But it doesn't really matter. Come back to bed, he says, words that aside from tone imply an order, not a plea. That isn't what in his voice, but it's as though it is so trained into him to speak a certain way that the lordly patterns don't quite get extinguished all the way.
Danicka walks over to the bed as he is sliding downward and crawls onto it, slipping her long and bare legs under the covers. She lays down on her side, facing him, her eyes open.
[Lukas] He turns his head to watch her slide between the sheets. The angle of his regard changes as she moves; his eyes follow her unerringly.
When she turns to face him, he turns to face her. Horizontal like this, they're eye to eye, and their size difference is evidenced in other ways: how far down the bed his body extends versus hers; how much higher his shoulder rises than hers.
He studies her for a moment, and her eyes are green again in this light, an opaque, depthless color that invariably reminds him of old forests, still ponds. When his eyes fall from hers, it's to watch his hand move -- he draws the blankets up to her shoulder, and then curves his hand over her arm through the fabric. Even so, his heat is a palpable thing, insinuating itself into her flesh.
"What was different about today?"
He asks her this after all, and quietly. Their shoulders and their sides pressed to the same mattress, the lowest frequencies of his voice are transduced as much through the coils and the springs as it is through air.
A pause, then: "I mean when we were making love. You didn't want to let go."
[Danicka] They've had over half an hour. Him to sleep, her to think, to relax, to let the hot water hit her back and shoulders and leave nothing but words like damaged and hurt and pity and dirtied going around and around in her skull until she honestly can't remember who said them or when, or if it matters.
The better part of an hour is not enough for her to get it out of her head that it hurts him to think of the fact that she's been hurt before. The better part of an hour is not long enough for her to stop feeling like the way he looked at her is who she is.
She doesn't immediately slide under the sheets over to him and lay her head on his arm, but she's done this before. He pulls the covers up to her shoulder and she gently shrugs them back down again, pushes them to her waist. "I'm hot," she explains quietly.
The shower. He knows how hot she likes her showers, and her baths. This will change in a matter of minutes: the heat from her shower will dissipate and the cool air from the window unit will make her slither right back down under the covers, but for now she's slightly flushed. She doesn't shrug off his hand on her arm, though. She just looks at him, lying there beside him far more alert and far more awake than he has a chance at being right now.
"I just wanted you near," she says dismissively ('just'), shrugging her free shoulder.
[Lukas] Her shoulder moves under his hand -- his fingers lift momentarily, arching off her skin. When the shrug ends and her shoulder settles, so too do his fingers, like birds returning to their perch.
There's a certain distance between them again, a guardedness in the way she answers him, in where and how she lays her body.
In and of itself, that's nothing unusual. What's unusual is that's it's somehow onesided this time. It's as though she's washed him from her skin, but she still lingers on his. It's a little like that. It's exactly like that, and he's not ready for this distance yet. He's not ready for it at all, but if there's a trick to it, a way to unlock her or thaw her, he doesn't know it.
His hand remains where it is for another moment. His thumb traces her skin, which is soft as it ever is, and warm, but it's not jaro he thinks of now.
Lukas's hand slips from her shoulder, then. It comes to a rest between them, on the sheets.
"Okay," he says, quietly.
[Danicka] The smallest things can have profound consquences. It means something that he shifts his fingers when she's shrugging and re-settles them again when she is done. Danicka blinks her eyes slowly, not sleepily but calmly. It means something that this makes her shoulders round slightly, that perhaps some of that edged guard comes down, because he gives her room to move and then returns when she stills.
And unfortunately, it means something that he pulls his hand away again. She watches him, and much of what he's feeling is laid out for her, quiet and under the surface but still present, still readable. Danicka takes a small breath and waits a second, then:
"Go to sleep." Nothing's changed. "I'll still be here when you wake up."
[Lukas] The television is still on, and it's flickering, and its flickering light is the only left in this room.
He's turned all the lights out. Drawn the curtain. He meant to sleep all along, sooner rather than later, and it's as much a mystery to him as to her why he didn't simply say goodnight (good morning?) when she left to shower.
But he didn't. He closed his eyes and he dozed, this is true, yet when she returned he opened his eyes.
And asked her -- or told her -- to come back to bed.
And reached his hand out to her.
And drew it back.
Each of which carries its own weight and consequences, affects the tangled webwork of interactions that spin between them, fine as gossamer; and sometimes, as treacherous as razorwire.
And when she tells him to go to sleep --
he's briefly and suddenly wants her near, her back to his chest or his to hers; or her legs tangled with his; or her arms around his neck. Which is plainly ridiculous, because it's daytime and she's not tired, not going to sleep, and anyway, when he's asleep he won't even know the difference.
Maybe.
It doesn't change what he wants, though, and for a moment the want is so fierce it's very nearly a need, and he understands what she meant when she said:
i need to be able to hold you.
-- when she tells him to go to sleep, and that she'll be here when he wakes, nothing's changed, and everything's changed.
It's only after a second or two that the ache subsides, and the need subsides to a want, because a want is controllable, a want is something he has a lot of experience controlling, and so, wordlessly, he complies in the simplest way possible.
Lukas closes his eyes and, like a stone dropped into an ocean, falls straight into sleep.
--
[Danicka]
It is nearly nine in the morning when Lukas closes his eyes and drowns himself in sleep without so much as a thrash. Danicka stays right where she is, unheld and untouched, for several minutes thereafter. Gradually the aura of heat around her fades and is replaced with the chill of airconditioning. For a moment, she thinks about rolling over and curling into his body, finding that spot that seems made for her and resting her back against his chest. For a moment, she thinks about the way his heartbeat would transfer between the two of them, beating through bones and skin to lull her to sleep she doesn't need.
Instead, Danicka waits a little while, then slides out from under the covers and off the side of the king-sized bed. She reflects on the fact that two months ago he would not even close his eyes as she got up, got dressed, and left the motel he'd taken her to. Now he sleeps, not with her in bed next to him but moving around the room, and somehow that seems important. She puts it out of her mind and goes to get her computer -- the MacBook, this time -- out of her bag, pulling it out of its protective, cushioning sleeve and setting it up on the desk.
She also turns off the damned television, finally.
Hours pass. Danicka plugs in her earbuds and plays her game. She gets her pajama pants back on at some point. Her hair dries without being attacked by a focused assault of heated air and as a result is so wavy it borders on curls. She stays online for far longer than necessary, even when her stomach starts growling, and finally orders something from a restaurant's website around two o'clock. It's not Chinese or pizza but Greek, and she wonders briefly if the smell of the lamb and lemon and chicken is going to wake him up. Decides to risk it.
When the delivery girl shows up, Danicka has brushed her hair and changed into a pair of jeans, yellow socks, and a green sweater. She eats, rice and vegetables and all, while watching an old movie on her laptop. Strange game. The only winning move is...not to play. The curtains stay closed. Danicka doesn't go anywhere. The leftovers go into the miniature refrigerator with the ale she brought with her this morning. She brushes her teeth again.
Around five o'clock, Danicka walks around the bed, crawls on top of the covers, and lays down behind Lukas. She slides her arm around his torso, her brow resting against his back, and closes her eyes. She doesn't sleep. But she holds him.
[Lukas]
After this, it'll be very clear why sometimes one might find Lukas freshly showered and shaven at 11pm, bumming around the Brotherhood in pajamas while he eats a quick 'breakfast' and then heads out for the night. The Ahroun barely stirs for the first two or three hours, after which he turns on his back.
The sun slides past its zenith; it starts down into the west. Danicka's lunch, or breakfast, or dinner, or whatever the hell it was, arrives. The smell of lamb and chicken and lemon doesn't quite wake him, but it does make him turn on his other side, half on his stomach, his one arm tucked under the pillow and under his head, the other stretched across the bed as though making a break for the border.
Four o'clock, five o'clock. The dipping of the mattress makes him shift his head, tucking his face against the pillow. When Danicka lies down behind him, her brow to his spine, her arm around his torso, he half-wakes, mumbles something that makes no real sense (Vraťte se do spánku. Je to ještě brzy.), and puts his hand over hers.
Five thirty, six thirty. Seven o'clock and he opens his eyes in the last light of day, ten hours after he'd closed them. He's facing the window now, and the light leaking in around the sides is ruddy red with sunset.
If she's still there, he's mildly surprised to find her hand in his. Either way he closes his eyes again, as though he meant to go back to sleep -- but then he turns on his back, rubs his hand where it fell asleep under his head, and then stretches in place: back arching, muscles clenching, ten or twelve seconds of quivering strain that abruptly and silently releases, leaving him liquid.
Lukas opens his eyes to the ceiling. "Do I smell lamb?" is the first thing he asks.
[Danicka]
Time was, Danicka's schedule was absolutely draconian. She woke long before dawn and prepared herself for greeting Yelizaveta after Nanny Helena woke her and got her dressed. They would share breakfast and discuss the day's agenda. Plans had to be made to fill any free time. Even on her day off each week, Danicka had to somehow manage to see her father, often her sister-in-law, and her brother if he demanded it, and do any shopping or personal errands she might have.
She had precious little time herself, so it's something of a miracle that she had even casual friends, a sex life, or time to go out dancing in New York City. It was months after being let go before she could stop waking up at five in the morning. One of the reasons she's as financially solvent as she is is that she never really had any time to spend the money she was making.
So now, it's really no wonder at all that she's perfectly content to throw a schedule out the window. Doesn't matter if the Greek food is lunch or dinner. Doesn't matter that she woke around sunrise and that she's been stuck inside all day doing nothing but sedentary activities...other than fucking. Doesn't matter that adults are not supposed to nap. Danicka lays down after her dinner, curls up behind her alleged boyfriend, and murmurs
"V pořádku."
For two hours or so, Danicka just lays on the bed with him. She doesn't fall asleep quickly, but after about fifteen minutes she dozes off and drifts deeper into sleep. Her arm is warm and heavy on top of and around Lukas when he opens his eyes. His hand moves and hers twitches in between his chest and his palm, reflexive. She is quite displaced when he rolls onto his back, though, and wakes rapidly. She's not too groggy, but she pushes herself up and props her elbow under her, rubbing her eyes with her knuckle and watches him stretch.
Danicka yawns and nods. "Řecké potraviny v lednici," she informs him.
[Lukas]
Her hand is still in his. It says something about his control that, just awake, stretching with nearly every last fiber of his body, he managed to hold on without crushing her fingers in his.
Her hand is still in his, though they hadn't fallen asleep this way; though she hasn't been in bed long at all. It makes a difference, this contact.
"Zní to dobře," he says. "Jsem vyhladovělý."
And he sits up, releasing her hand now. Rubs his face with his hands, yawns. He hasn't showered, hasn't shaven, hasn't put any item of clothing back on. In the dimness, his naked back is a tapestry of shadows and grey highlights, complex layered muscles that bunch into existence ex nihilo when he moves one way, fade again when he moves a different way.
When Lukas lowers his hands, he looks at Danicka over his shoulder. His eyes are glimmers of clarity.
"Jedu k mytí," he says. He could easily slide off the bed on the open side, but he chooses to climb over her, pausing with his hands on either side of her hips, lowering his head like an animal to a still pool. He kisses her stomach through her sweater and her tanktop, and from this angle, foreshortened, he's all dark hair and ridge of brow, slash of nose; all massive shoulders and braced arms.
He gets up then, and off the bed. He's tall; just out of bed, refreshed, he has a sort of rangy, athletic ease of movement, taut with reined energy. The bathroom light comes on, throws a rectangle of light onto the carpet, which diminishes as he taps the door shut, but doesn't latch it.
[Danicka]
Like children, they yawn and stretch and rub their eyes. Like adults they trade almost meaningless idle chatter about hunger, about intent, about what food there is to eat. Like animals they roll on the bedspread, Danicka moving to her back as Lukas extricates himself from the covers and climbs over her. She stares at him, her eyes hooded, as he drops his head and kisses her belly. She reaches down and gently scritches his scalp, her lips and her eyes inscrutable in their mammalian ease.
The truth is, he could have torn her jeans down from her lower half, pressed her to the mattress and fucked the living daylights out of her in that moment and she would have thrown her arms around his neck, bit his shoulder, and fucked him back. Her expression as he passes across her body, however, tells him nothing.
She nods as he goes to leave, doesn't follow him to the bathroom.
Lukas is hungry, and Danicka is fed. Lukas is naked and smells like sweat and sex and sleep, and she is washed and fully dressed. Lukas is waking up from a ten-hour crash and Danicka is rested, and will momentarily be filled with energy ramped up by having been stuck inside all day. Which one might think she wouldn't mind, considering that she's a relentless geek. Except Lukas doesn't know she's a relentless geek. It doesn't matter either way; Danicka is used to spending time out of doors each day. That's how it's been since her childhood.
That energy hasn't hit her yet. She listens to the bathroom door close and reaches up, lacing her hands behind her head. She breathes out, cocking one knee while leaving her other leg stretched out. She stares at the ceiling.
That is where she stays.
[Lukas]
The shower starts up seconds after he's in there, and while the water warms, Lukas takes a piss. The inn is sufficiently inexpensive that flushing the toilet causes the shower pressure to momentarily drop, but blasting again by the time he gets in.
He stays there for a long time; not thirty-five minutes, but at least a good fifteen or twenty. When he comes out he's squeaky clean, flushed with hot water, and he leans across the bathroom counter to scrub a hole in the steam so he can brush his teeth.
Lukas comes out wearing one of the hotel's bath towels around his waist, another around his neck, and this is ironically more than he's worn at any point in the last ten hours. He looks at her as he passes the bed, mildly curious, says nothing. The door to the living room is open, and he goes out. She can hear him opening up his bag, unzipping zippers, getting stuff out.
He comes back with his shaving paraphernalia in hand. The sensible thing to do would be to perform the ritual in the bathroom (he wonders, briefly and irreverently, if this counted as prayer too). However, he shakes up the can of foam in the bedroom, as he goes to the window and pulls back the drapes to let in the last light of day. He has a weak reflection in the glass, and it's by this that he applies the foam, setting the can down on the windowsill thereafter to unfold his straight razor.
There's a sort of patient, thoughtless ease to this. He shaves while he watches the sun go down, so familiar with the process that he hardly has to think about it anymore. One has to wonder if it's his father that taught him to shave the old-fashioned way, because it is that: almost ridiculously old-fashioned, a handcrafted folding blade gliding expertly over skin. It's a fair bet that he has the whole nine yards at home: a badger-fur brush and jars of real shaving cream.
He wouldn't pack that sort of thing for an overnight trip. It's something of a surprise, even to himself, that he's packed for an overnight stay -- as if before this, he always managed to convince himself he'd only be there for a few hours, only be there for a few minutes.
"Is that how you think of me?" The question emerges suddenly, unheralded. "Váš nápadník?"
[Danicka]
She is indeed still on the bed fifteen or twenty minutes later, staring at the ceiling like a daydreaming teenager. When Lukas emerges she turns her head and gives him a small smile, mostly meaningless. Her head turns back on the pillow to observe the pebbly white expanse above her again as he goes to the sitting room in the front of the suite, and she does indeed expect him to go back to the bathroom to shave. So when he stops at the window and chooses to shave there instead, Danicka peers over at him and blinks.
Her father shaved with a straight razor as well, but with a puck of glycerine soap instead of foam. She remembers imitating him, standing on a stool in front of his sink, sharing the mirror and using the back of a comb to 'shave' her own permanently hairless jaw. She smiles softly, less tight than before, at both one fond memory and another: lying in another bed, watching Lukas shave. It's nothing. It's not terribly significant, either one of these. But she remembers.
And it makes her smile.
This is indeed the first time he's packed anything. The first time she did was, actually, the first time she laid in bed watching him shave. Danicka had brought a change of clothes to the Brotherhood that night, which is strange considering he'd seemed so against the idea of having sex with her there. There's every chance -- even a likelihood, given the fact that her attire was not lingerie but the sort of thing he's seen her wear to bed at her own apartment -- that her intention had been to simply sleep with him.
Which is neither here nor there. They didn't end up sleeping that night, Danicka with him nor Lukas at all.
Out of nowhere, the man she seemed so unlikely to actually stay with for a full night that he'd turned his back on her even to ask, even to suggest the idea...asks her if that's how she thinks of him. Danicka's answer is not automatic. Behind him on the bed, she takes her eyes off the small of his back and looks at the ceiling once more.
"I think of you as Lukáš," she says, her voice quiet. "But...yeah, I think..."
She stops, closes her mouth, pauses before asking: "It's better than describing you as 'this guy I'm fucking'." There's another pause, but briefer. "Because that's not really what's going on."
[Lukas]
This is, indeed, the first time he's packed, the second time he's shaved in the same room as her. And the first time he shaved in the same room as her was the first time she'd packed for the night as well.
It's not terribly significant. But he remembers.
His smiles never did come as easily as hers; by the time he smiles, she's usually progressed to a quirky, half-giddy grin. At any rate, he's working on his upper lip right now, and when she answers him he turns, setting his lower back against the windowsill.
There's a quiet while he finishes with his lip, during which he watches her steadily -- not to study her or to see beneath the surface, but simply to watch her. Even with the light at his back his eyes are distinctly blue.
When his upper lip is bare of both foam and stubble, he wipes the blade off on the trailing end of his neck-towel. "No," he agrees, "it's not."
His lower lip then, and his chin, and then on to the angle of jaw, the plane of the still-unshaven cheek. He shaves with his head tilted to tauten the skin, his back slightly slouched, as though instinctively leaning toward a mirror he neither needed nor had.
"I don't mind," he adds, though she probably knows that. If he minded terribly, he would've spoken up long ago. "It's just a little surprising, every time." A short pause; then a confession, carefully offhand, "You're the first ... girlfriend I've had."
[Danicka]
Out in the world, as he's seen her reading in coffee shops or sitting down to dinner in a restaurant, she exhibits a great many markers that read feminine. The way she looks, the way she carries herself, even what she reads or what she orders fit certain molds that many people don't even realize they have. Everything is part of the image, though. Alone with Lukas, neither of them seem defined by their sex, or the sex they have, or the masks they wear that to others look...like whatever it is all those others want to see.
The way Danicka moves when she is alone with him is different. The cadence of her voice, even, is different. She is not necessarily feminine, but she is unmistakably female, with an animalistic simplicity to the fact. This isn't something she thinks of consciously. Consciously, she thinks that when Lukas is alone with her he is unmistakably male, with an animalistic simplicity to the fact. She doesn't think we have this in common. She thinks I belong here.
'Here' is with him, but she doesn't let herself think that far.
Her eyes flicker with amber in this light, held by a gentle green. She blinks when he says 'every time', though, her eyebrows pulling gently together. The expression smooths as he goes on, as she notes just how meticulously constructed his casual way of putting it is. Her lips stay together but twitch slightly, not with amusement but the tension of restraint, of automatically refusing to let her pleasure show on her face. Her eyes shine, though, smiling brightly where she does not.
"...what do you mean 'every time'?" she asks after she gets a hold of herself, which takes approximately three seconds. "I don't think I've ever called you that before." To your face.
[Lukas]
If she had simply smiled at him, amused -- laughed at his painstakingly casual confession -- there isn't a doubt that he would've taken offense. She's not the type, though, or perhaps she simply knows him well enough. In any case, she doesn't laugh at him. She doesn't even smile.
She's pleased, and for some reason he couldn't explain, her unvarnished pleasure makes him feel a little less exposed by what he's just told her.
"You have."
He finishes with his cheek and jawline; lifts his head to carefully shave his neck and his throat. Another pause in the conversation here, if only because he doesn't want to nick an artery.
When he's done, he wipes the blade clean again, sets it aside, picks up the can of foam and reapplies: a thinner, quicker coat this time. Then he goes over the terrain a second time, against the grain now, in quick, bright-flashing sweeps.
"That night on the street, when you were quite inebriated and I took you home. You'd forgotten most of it by the next day, but you told me I was the worst werewolf boyfriend you've ever had." A beat. There's the faintest, faintest glimmer of a smile at the corner of his mouth, which he controls. "Then you told me I was also the only. Then you congratulated me for being, by default, the best werewolf boyfriend you've ever had."
[Danicka]
To that -- his confession that she is his first 'girlfriend' -- Danicka would not have laughed. Not in a million years. It wasn't disdain pursing her lips or amusement shining in her eyes but a strong effort to not break into a grin, to not let herself go so far in her own delight that she did something as awful as blush. It made her happy, inexplicably and for no reason she can name.
She controls it. She does something very similar to what he did that night on the street and flashes away, hiding otherwise obvious pleasure at something as simple and as intense as meaning something to another person.
Her eyebrows pop up when he informs her that she has, in fact, called him her boyfriend before. Danicka waits patiently but with faux doubt in her eyes as he finishes shaving. It takes her a couple of seconds to place 'that night on the street' but it comes to her fast enough when he tells her that she forgot most of it. She doesn't break in to tell him that she still gets free wine when she goes to that restaurant, but listens.
When Lukas tells her what she said to him, worst to only to best, including the fact that she'd congratulated him, Danicka flops her head back on the pillow behind her head and bursts into laughter.
"Well, you are," she says gently when she calms down a little, though the afterglow is still on her face in the shape of a warm grin. She rolls onto her side in the middle of the bed, propping herself up on her elbow. Her smile softens on him somewhat. "You're not just the only...werewolf boyfriend I've had," she confesses, almost wincing in the middle of it, as though revealing this is difficult. She doesn't even try to make it seem casual, or offhand.
On the other hand, she adds: "I mean, I've had people I cared about, or...got attached to...but...it's not the same as this."
She's told him, while he's been inside her: zamilovávám se do tebe.
She's told him, while he's been inside her: I've never said that to anyone before.
It's not the same as what she's telling him now, while he's across the room.
[Lukas]
Lukas's hand doesn't quite falter, or shake, or anything so overt as that on the razor. He does pause for a split-instant though, unmistakeably. Then he finishes what he's doing, and this time the silence is not simply because he doesn't want to slice himself open.
It's not the same, what she says now and what she's said before. Not simply because 'werewolf' was a modifier, or because they were as close as they could possibly be, or because the words were different. The connotations were different too. The implications were different. And perhaps most importantly, when he's across the room like this, he somehow feels more naked, as though his pleasure in that --
and he is pleased to hear it, inexplicably, for no more reason he can name than he could've named why hearing he was her worst, best and only garou boyfriend made him happy
-- were exposed for all to see.
Except no; that's not it at all. When he's across the room from her, he feels a little more alone. Isolated. Cut off, like a wolf without a pack, only that's not what he is at all. If anything, he's the wolf that's had nothing but the pack for so long that he's forgotten what else there is.
Lukas finishes: wipes his razor on his towel again, leaving a last streak of evaporating foam and tiny dark stubble on the white. He flips the end of the towel over and uses the clean side to wipe his jaw off, sets the blade aside -- he'll wash it later when he goes to splash water on his face. And then he has no excuse left for silence, for a moment taken to think.
He could crack a joke: I guess that makes me the best and the worst boyfriend. Good for me, madam! He could deflect it somehow, deflate it, make it seem casual, or offhand.
In the end Lukas doesn't say anything at all. After the straight razor has clicked down on the windowsill, and after he's watched her a moment, he straightens up and crosses the room. The mattress dips as he joins her on it, not covering her or curling up behind her or turning her atop him -- he simply stretches out at right angles to her, his lower legs hanging off the edge of the bed, laying his ear to the dip of her waist, between the swell of ribcage and hip girdle. His hair is still damp enough that if he remains there long he'll leave an imprint on her sweater, and then on her tanktop, and then on her skin.
He turns his face against her body; he kisses her again as he had before his shower, slowly but firmly. Afterward he covers her free hand with his, drawing it to his mouth where he kisses her fingertips one by one, thoughtfully.
"It makes me happy to hear that," he says; a small confession spoken plain in return for her larger one spoken the same way. "I don't know why."
[Danicka]
The difference between their confessions is obvious, and takes little to no thought: Danicka has fucked a lot of people. She is worldly and social, and it's not difficult to imagine her as she might have been in high school. Maybe she was a cheerleader, or the class tease, or homecoming queen; she seems the type. She is closer to the mortal world than Lukas has been for years now, pretends to be a part of it, or so he might imagine. She's had people she's cared for, grown attached to, and yet has never said to anyone that she was falling for them, never claimed anyone as her nápadník.
Lukas...has his pack. The War. When he was of the age when most children were at the start of high school, he was being trained, fostered by others of his kind. No football or hockey team, no less-supervised class trips to the same museums and monuments that they went on class trips to all through elementary and middle school. No prom. No girlfriends. Women, certainly, but...not women he would spend the night with or lay in bed with for hours, or want to lay in bed with for hours.
She's more of a first for him than he is for her, but that doesn't change the weight of what she's telling him. It doesn't change the fact that this obviously means enough to her that it's taken her this long to say it...sober and outside of lovemaking.
She sighs, but gratefully, when he sets down his razor and comes over to her, laying across the bed and making contact. She turns just enough so that his head has more softness to rest on. Her hand comes to him immediately, into his wet hair, like it doesn't matter if he's soaking wet still or not. It's an awkward angle to look at him from, but she smiles. Her fingertips are wet when he pulls them to his mouth, and that makes her nose wrinkle up and her smile broaden.
"It's 'cause it means you're special," she says, almost mockingly. But there's truth to it, which she can't avoid on her end, either. It makes her smile fade, not in faltering death but quiet rest. "You are."
Danicka takes a breath there. "It's why it sucks so much when it seems like...not like you see me as broken somehow, but like...you can't see me except through this veil of 'she's been hurt', and everything between us gets tangled up in that."
[Lukas]
Lukas grins, a small quick flirt of his lips, when she makes her quip. Then she says it again, and this time she means it, and his grin fades as well. It fades entirely, leaving him solemn, a faint stitch in his brow.
He has a sense of gravity sometimes, with her. When she says something like that. When she says zamilovávám se do tebe. When she takes him into her body and strokes her fingers through his hair. When she grins at him, quirky, almost goofy; when she curls against his back as though she trusted him.
It's a sense of falling. A sense of being pulled in inexorably, and not to something so benign as a planet, a star; being pulled in inescapably past the event horizon of some vast singularity that's growing like a cancer at the core of him, threatening to crush his ribs, buckle his bones on themselves, crumple his vital organs, his heart, like so much tissue paper.
He takes a breath, not to steady himself but to speak, but then he sees that she does as well -- and then she speaks and he is quiet, quiet until the end.
Then, barely more than a whisper: "Not everything."
[Danicka]
Not knowing what he might be opening his mouth to say and having waited over ten hours to tell him this, Danicka doesn't wait when Lukas takes his breath to respond to her telling him once in jest and once seriously that he is special. Not just in general but to her.
The way he's looking at her, solemn and serious in a way that on another night or in another conversation might read to her as displeasure, as the foothills of anger, makes Danicka feel a surge of urgency. She has to say this, she's thought about this all goddamn day and she hasn't been outside, she's gotten killed because she looked at him while he was sleeping and one second turned into thirty and then she had to release and run back and her body seemed like it was a thousand miles away, and she has to say this because it's far, far too easy for her to let it slide and let it not matter and let it sink down to the bottom again rather than surface.
She has no idea that he is feeling pulled, and crushed, at the same time that she's feeling caught at the exact moment of shattering, and that is when she tells him what she does: everything gets tangled up.
Not everything.
Her face falls, her brow furrowing in a wince more sympathetic than pained. Her hand drifts back to his hair. "Yeah...Lukáš. Everything," she says, as softly as she can, as though being gentle with her tone will somehow gentle the words, make them hurt less.
Danicka sighs. "You hold back so much with me that you don't even let yourself moan. And...sometimes all I can think is how weak you must think I am, even when you're inside me."
She says this quietly, too. As though sighing it will make it better...make it less obvious that it hurts.
[Lukas]
"Wait."
It hadn't been displeasure, or the foothills of anger, when he looked at her so seriously. That wasn't the prologue of anger, but perhaps this is -- or at least, it's confusion, and consternation.
"You think I hold back because I think you're weak?"
[Danicka]
Wait. She was waiting, but he says it anyway, and a flicker of a frown crosses her features, as quickly there and gone again as a leaf blowing by on the wind.
"I think..." comes her answer in the wake of his consternation...if that's what it actually is, "...you gave me a gun...and talens...and reassure me that your father wasn't abusive, and wince when you look at me because you think I'm weak. I think you hold back because you're afraid you're going to scare me, or break me, like I'm some hothouse flower that can't be so much as breathed on wrong."
[Lukas]
Lukas raises his head. He props himself up on his elbow as she's so fond of doing, and he frowns at her.
"I gave you a gun and talens," he says, calmly and levelly, calm and level to such a degree that she knows immediately it comes from control, not lack, "because I don't want you to die. I'd arm you even if you were ten feet tall and made of stone and steel.
"I reassure you that my father wasn't abusive because when I tell you he spanked my sister or I, you look at me as though my father were an ogre. And I admit it, when you do that, I wonder if you're tarring my father with whatever brush painted whoever your mystery Theurge was. But more than that, I just want you to know my father is a good man."
That's the easy stuff. The rest is harder, and he takes a breath before he goes on. A muscle works in his jaw.
"I hold back because I'm afraid it'll make me weak to ... give in so entirely. I'm afraid if I give everything I have, I'll have no way to call it back again; I'll have nothing left inside me. You may be able to open up and shut down at the flip of a switch, Danička, but I can't."
A beat.
"And I wince when I look at you because I want to give everything, and I don't know what hurts more: knowing that, or denying that."
[Danicka]
He lifts his head from her side, and Danicka takes in a breath, her eyes flicking away briefly. She turns and scoots back on the bed until she's leaning on the headboard, a pillow shoved thoughtlessly behind her. In a way she's like a teenager preparing to be lectured, or a soldier stepping onto the battlefield...or like one half of a couple for whom the phase of the moon affects their interactions more than any cycle of hers does.
The moon is full. It's visible in the sky now that the sun is going down, that the world outside is shifting from natural light to artificial. Sometimes that means that he cannot make himself leave a goddamn motel when he thinks he should, and then he ends up fucking her, again and again when he knows he should stop. Sometimes the full moon means that he almost loses himself because she's on her knees oh god and she's not wearing anything under that dress and so he slams her against the door and takes her like it's a war.
And this time it means they make love and call it that, he sleeps and she thinks, they argue because they are so close right now and confessing what feels like so much that they can't even breathe.
Danicka just stares at him as he speaks. She doesn't falter (her eyes glint when he mentions 'her' Theurge). And when he's done, she keeps staring, and doesn't say anything for about ten seconds. When she does speak, her voice is very small.
"...I'd give it back, ma láska."
[Lukas]
There is this:
He lifts his head. She draws back. He reaches out and his hand rings her ankle, loosely: a point of contact he maintains.
And then there's the ten second silence, which doesn't sound like a long time but is. It's two whole respiratory cycles. It's a dozen heartbeats. It's long enough that, in any other conversation, someone would've spoken up by now to fill the gap.
But no one speaks. He's finished; she hasn't begun. Even when she does, it's only six words, four english, two czech, one truth she hands over without making him fight for it.
One of many.
More than he's given her, perhaps.
"I know that," he says, and it's like a sigh. His arm extends; he props his head on the heel of his hand instead, his side opening against the mattress from elbow to hip. "I suppose I don't believe it yet, is all."
[Danicka]
An asshole and a coward, he'd called himself. After moving her off of him as though he needed her away so he could think. After sitting up while she laid on her back on the carpet, apologizing to her even though she could not, at the moment, think of anything he should be sorry for. She thought of that a few moments ago, when he spoke of being made weak by giving in...to her, in particular. To whatever this is.
She doesn't think 'asshole' or 'coward' when she sighs that he knows, but doesn't believe. All she can think, in words at least, is
...Ow.
Because they're not talking about a lie, or a promise. They're talking about him giving her...everything. Everything she wants, everything she's outright asked for (all of you), everything he has in him. They're talking about wanting to give that over, and denying himself, because he doesn't believe that she would give it back to him again.
If that's even what she meant. If she didn't mean I want to give you everything, herself.
Danicka tries. She rolls her eyes to the ceiling and takes a breath and then swings her legs to the side, off the bed, moving quickly because all the fighting in the world doesn't seem to be stopping the tears. This time it's not because she is up against a wall realizing that she really is willing to be with him, even if he messes up, even if he loses control for awhile, even if he is an asshole, and a coward, and a monster. This time it's not because she's so overstressed about the rest of her life that he sets her off just by showing up and giving a damn about her.
This time it's because something he's said...just...hurts. On a level that's not as simple as thinking he doesn't trust her, or thinking that she's a liar, so she's broken, so he can't believe in what she wants to give him, which is harder for her to admit than even what she wants from him.
At least she gets off the bed fast enough to keep him from seeing this time, to keep him from seeing more than the hard blink that got the first drop rolling.
"I should have just..." she begins, and stops herself, shaking her head. "I'm going home." And she starts to gather her things.
[Lukas]
At least she gets off the bed before he sees -- except she doesn't, because she's swinging her legs off the bed and she's quick about it, she's fast, but he's faster, and he catches her by the wrist and holds her fast.
[Danicka]
He grabs her, and she does as she does every time he grabs her to stop her movement...every time so far, at least. Danicka goes limp, like a rag doll dropped to the playroom floor. She even bows her head.
[Lukas]
-- and as quick as that he lets her go again.
And she'll do whatever it is she does. Get her computer and her toiletries, her spare clothes, continue to pack her bags. Leave everything where it is, and simply walk out. Stay where she is, waiting to be hit.
He pushes himself upright, gets off the bed. The movement is not quite hasty, but it's not careful either. The towel around his neck slides off onto the sheets. The one around his waist doesn't slip, but it's a close thing, and even if it had he wouldn't have caught it. What's the point? If she walked out now he wouldn't chase her down the hall bare-assed, in a towel, or otherwise.
He hadn't gotten up to chase her down the hall. Or to bar her escape -- again. He got up because it was the only thing he could think to do just then, and now that he's on his feet he's lost again, and her head is bowed, and likely turned away, and somehow her emptiness, her limpness, her stillness, is a better shield than any struggle would have been.
Lukas had thought to pull her back to him when he grabbed her wrist like that. He had thought to pull her back into his arms, somehow, and that urge is still there: to touch, to hold, to keep; it makes him stoop to her unconsciously, his shoulders rounding and his neck curving, making out of instinct the hollow in his body where hers would fit. His hands come up of their own accord, but they stop short of her, and then they press to one noather instead, the fingertips and then the palms sealing together in a gesture of thoughtless supplication that, if he could see himself now, he would recognize immediately as his stereotypes of prayer.
"Danička," it's not a prayer to god after all, "prosím, zůstal. Prosím, zůstaň tady se mnou."
[Danicka]
There are times when she seems like an animal. When she snarls and pulls him back to her, or when she bites his shoulder to scream into his skin, or when her eyes flash with anger or even annoyance, there's something about Danicka that comes off as feral. Lukas sees it, is exposed to it in a way no one else is, and so he may very well expect that this submissive little kin with the secret, savage backbone is going to whip around one day and not give him an open-palmed slap or even a straightforward punch to the face but curl her fingers and claw out an eye.
That is never, ever what happens. The second it seems things might become violent, the second they already are, she relents. When he threw her down the first time and pushed into her, his hand just barely pulling back from her throat, Danicka did not scream or smack his head but lowered her voice to a purr and tucked his hair back. She whispered in his ear, she called him by his name. When something hot and furious became painful, she held him closer and held him tighter and closed her eyes. When he grabs her wrist like this, as he has done before, she doesn't so much as jerk away.
She collapses in on herself, and if she is waiting to be struck, at least she'll be limp enough to absorb the force of it. There is. No point. In fighting.
There's more to it than that, but this is the most obvious, the most serious, the most flat-out disturbing. Danicka hides her crying and stifles her laughter and never bothers to fight even when she does bother to try and argue with him.
She starts to get her clothes together, dirty and clean, just a few articles that weren't already stashed away, and she decides she can get a new toothbrush so that one can stay in the bathroom and the rest is in the little toiletry bag inside her purse. She'll miss the beer but she can buy more. She's thinking this, head down and tears on her cheeks, and she's thinking all this because it keeps her from thinking
ow. Ow.
He prays for her to stay, entreats her, not to render honor and respect but there is still something worshipful about the attitude of his body. It's a plea. She recognizes it as such, and pauses. The only thing she's taking time with rather than just shoving into her bag is her laptop, carefully winding the cord and making sure to put it in its sleeve rather than just dumping it.
Danicka sighs, a single burst of air, and then sniffs moisture out of her sinus cavities. Lifting one hand to wipe her face quickly with the blade of her hand, she mutters: "To jsem udělala."
And zips up the laptop's sleeve.
It has polka dots on it.
[Lukas]
She pauses; he's not quite holding his breath but it's close. He's breathing very quietly, very slowly, as if she were a wild thing that the slightest disturbance would send crashing away through the undergrowth.
She speaks, eventually. And then she goes on packing. Lukas watches her for another second, while she watches what she's doing, and if he missed that she was crying up until now, the quick swipe of her hand over her cheek disabuses him of that.
He turns and walks into the bathroom. He's in there for only a few seconds. When he comes out he has her toothbrush in hand, as well as the little spool of floss she'd forgotten. He hands them back to her silently, and then a pair of tissues.
[Danicka]
There's only one person in the world that Danicka has talked to about something so very, very many Kinfolk with Garou siblings think of: what if. If she had been born differently. If she were not like her father but if she were like her mother. They say women all become their mothers eventually, but Danicka is never going to be what Laura Dvorak was. There's no chance. She's not a werewolf.
She is not really one of those Kinfolk that seems to have a wolf living under their skin, either. Sometimes she is oddly dominant, viciously protective, even territorial. Other times she's more like a deer who has heard a hunter's foot snapping a twig: she goes motionless, muscles quivering, on the brink of bolting. This is somewhere in between. This is not a wolf, or a deer. Something feral but cowardly, potentially violent but just as likely to run and hide.
A fox.
Lukas walks away and she puts her laptop into her overnight bag, sniffing. Her hair falls aorund her face, wild but somehow not unruly. He brings back her toothbrush, and her floss, and she looks at them in his hand for a second before taking them and stowing them in an outer pocket. "Thanks," she says quietly, as she's taking the tissue and wiping her eyes, delicately wiping her nose even though it's not running.
Danicka doesn't hide her face when she cries because it turns her blotchy and pink. The woman has cried in front of him before and has looked just as beautiful, her eyes turning a more vivid green and drops clinging to her lashes. It's not that she doesn't like how she looks, nothing quite that vain or surface. She just doesn't like to show that much...weakness.
She balls up the tissue in her hand and looks at him, her brow furrowed with annoyance turned inward: pathetic pathetic pathetic. And she bites the inside of her lip, gnaws on it like she's working out some complex problem.
"That really hurt."
Her bag is packed. Her shoes and coat are by the door. That's all she needs.
[Lukas]
There's a flicker of an expression, too complex, too shortlived to accurately read. He looks at the tissue balled in her hand, then at her bag, and last at her.
"I'm sorry," he offers at last, having nothing better to say. "I didn't say it to hurt you."
-- which, arguably, only makes it worse, because it makes it true.
[Danicka]
It's fair, what he says. And it's the truth, just as brutally as what hurt in the first place was the truth. Danicka either cannot or chooses not to argue, and she doesn't seem to have anything left to say, herself. She slings the wide strap of the bag over her shoulder and hefts it without bothering to hide the fact that it is heavy and she has to compensate.
Danicka picks up her coat from the chair it's draped over, wiggles her feet into her boots, and wordlessly undoes the locks before grasping the handle. She pauses, but not to speak: to reach into her pocket and take out the key card. Leaning over, she lays it flat on the table, then goes back to the door.
"Checkout's at eleven," she says as she opens it, and steps out, and lets it close behind her.
celebration.
9 years ago