happy.

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] It's Thursday night when Lukas calls Danicka again. The hour is late, but not that late, especially by his standards: a little after 10pm.

"I think I owe you dinner," he says. "If you're free, why don't you meet me at 2039 West North Avenue?"

--

2039 West North Avenue is about a mile or two up Milwaukee from the heart of the financial/shopping/tourist districts, but still well within the confines of what one might consider downtown. The area's old, all squat brownstone midrises dating back perhaps as much as a hundred years, some in better repair than others. Rent's still sky-high, but the seamier side of the city is beginning to show through. There's graffiti on some of the walls. Cheap nail salons jostle for room with expensive new-wave restaurants. Crumbling nondescript walls conceal polished, svelte lofts. More than a few of the buildings on both sides of the street, nameless and ugly and blocky and warehouse-like by weekday, will magically transform into the city's hottest nightspots on a weekend night.

It's an area for young urban professionals to let loose a little in: a juxtaposition of gritty history and sleek modernity, with just enough underground flavor to keep things a little edgy.

The address Lukas gave Danicka is across the street from a large four-story building whose signage announces, all-caps, MARVIN ENVELOPE AND PAPER COMPANY. It's impossible to tell if the company's still open, or if it's even a paper company at all. For all Danicka knows it could be another nightclub; it was suddenly in vogue to wear the masks of collapsed businesses of the previous century. The building that the restaurant itself is located in, after all, proclaims itself the NORTH AVENUE BATHS. The facade is whitewashed, faux-marble, with neoclassical flairs and arabesques.

There are banners hanging in front of the building, and these bear the name of the restaurant itself. Standing beneath them, waiting outside in dark jeans and an pale grey snap-front shirt, his coat under his arm, Lukas is playing with his cell phone. Some undefinable signal alerts him of Danicka's approach, and he looks up; he smiles, faintly and crookedly, snaps his phone shut, slips it into his pocket.

It's a half-moon tonight, and his rage has recovered itself. It brushes against her when she comes into armsreach, and he holds his hand out to her. His fingers close over hers and he takes a step forward. So far as kisses go, this one is soft, brief, and his eyelids droop but don't quite close. It feels like exactly what it is: a hello.

"It's not quite Jaro," he says as he turns toward the glass doors, "but I thought you'd forgive me the small discrepancy."

[Danicka Musil] The phone call goes as expected: for all her internal complexities and behavioral inconsistencies, for all her inscrutable motivations, Danicka can be remarkably simple at times. She wants to see him, and so she doesn't play word games about who owes who what or if anything, ever, is owed. She doesn't toy with the idea of being free. A hint of a smile in her voice underlines her words as much as the rest of the background noise: music, someone's voice that may or may not be the television.

"I'll see you in about thirty minutes."

=========

It rained lightly today, and all day; the pavement is wet, the windows still splattered. At the moment the nigh-unto-constant dripping the sky has been doing has tapered off into a cloudy mist that only occasionally builds up into a true, fat droplet of rain. It makes this area of town look somewhat messy, a little droller than usual, but after dark some of the dirt is hidden and the streetlights glint off of windows and signs and some of the splashes of graffiti.

When Danicka arrives she is coming from east, and she is on foot, and she is carrying an umbrella even though it is not spitting rain right now. The umbrella is black, the underside printed with an expansive image of a blue sky with white fluffy clouds. Danicka's hair is down, taken from its natural waves to a few loose, casual curls at the ends. She has on her gray trench coat, closed and belted, and a pair of calf-high leather boots with a slouched look to them.

She's smiling when she walks up to Lukas, lowering and closing her umbrella a couple of yards before she reaches him. When she does come within arm's reach and he holds out his hand she steps forward instead of taking it, lifting up on her toes, which she always has to do to meet his mouth when they're standing. That's what it is: a meeting, even if the kiss is not a struggle for self-control or an expression of barely-restrained longing, as it so often is.

Hello, says his mouth, silently.

Oh, hi there, hers says back.

"You're adorable," is all Danicka has to say to that, with an underlining of amusement. This is first thing she has said to him since hanging up the phone, since a half-hour of silence and two days of nothing, but it's not eleven. Which may explain the smile. She gives her umbrella one quick snap of a shake and then closes it completely, sliding it into an outside pocket on her purse as they step towards the doors.

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] The last time they saw each other, it was dark and cold, and the Brotherhood, as close to the lake as it is, was immersed in a sort of wet chill that lakeshores tend to get this time of year. She wasn't hurt, but she may have been rattled; it was hard for him to tell, except that she was smoking. He was hurt, but not badly, and anyway, he was pretending not to be. It wasn't hard for her to tell, except that she hadn't thought he was sick, only injured.

He's no longer sick. She can trust that if he was, he would've never asked her here. Even if she can't trust that, she can all but smell his health and vitality, his vigor and strength. She can feel it in his body, for the brief time their bodies had met through their layers of clothes.

"Don't worry." He's wry as he repeats this; he's aware that the gesture, the name of the restaurant, Spring, Jaro, was -- sweet. Uncharacteristically so. He downplays it; anything more and he'd be uncomfortable to be reminded of it. "I won't make a habit of it."

She steps toward the doors and he follows her, reaching past her to pull it open. Spring turns out to be asian fusion cuisine, and the air is rich with the smell of scallions and ginger; basil, soy, and parsley. The decor is entirely different from the understated old-world elegance of the Brasserie. It's modern and lively, all vivid oranges set off by crisp green, bright lighting, matte black metal. The restaurant is subdivided into walled sections. A steady hum of conversation rings off the walls.

The greeter can't seem to meet Lukas's eyes when he asks for a table for two, upstairs if possible. He leads them up the stairs, almost crabwalking; he can't seem to turn his back to Lukas for long. The menus are not quite dropped on the table, but they are pushed into Danicka's hands before she's even begun to remove her coat. Your-waiter-will-be-right-with-you, he assures them, and is gone.

Lukas reaches out, smirking a little, and takes the menus from Danicka. He sets one in front of her and one across the table, and then helps her with her coat. Of course he does.

After she's seated, and he's seated as well, and their coats are draped over the backs of their chairs, he flips the menu open and glances at it for a moment. Then he looks across the table at her instead.

"Just out of curiosity," he says; and instead of asking her what she did today, or what she wanted, or if she was interested in sharing a lobster spring roll appetizer, he asks, "what did you do with the 9mm?"

[Danicka Musil] A few nights ago Danicka had walked into the Brasserie Jo wearing jeans and a sweatervest and had fit right in without any trouble. Compared to how well she fits in this place, however, it may as well be compared to watching a dog walk on its hind legs into an art gallery. Something about her -- the way she looks, the way she carries herself, the apartment he knows she has, the attitude laying like an aura over her -- makes Danicka fit in this restaurant as though it was made for her pleasure.

If she has been worried about him over the past two days, nothing has stopped her from calling him or coming to see him, even without getting too close for contact. She has not called him or come to see him, and no courier has brought by a box of koláče for him with a handwritten letter expressing hope for his speedy recovery. If she has been concerned, it doesn't show in her now: she just smiles as they walk in, and smiles at the host, and laughs slightly even when menus are shoved into her hands.

Danicka catches Lukas's eyes when he takes the menus and rolls her own, so quickly it's like a blink. Then he's moving behind her, and though her spine is straight when he does so, she doesn't seem afraid of him. The trench is unbelted and unbuttoned and slid off her shoulders, revealing a soft yellow dress underneath. With her fair hair and her skin as of yet untanned the wrong yellow on her could wash her out, but Danicka knows better, and she just looks...bright.

She rarely wears stiff fabrics of any kind, is often seen in pastels or subdued hues of otherwise vivid colors. This is the sort of dress that is honestly just 'thrown on': it drapes nicely but is of some slightly stretchy textile that could just be pulled off rather than unzipped or unbuttoned or unhooked from around her. Her arms are bare but her shoulders covered, the neckline a loose cowl.

They don't order wine yet, or spring rolls. He asks about the gun, and she glances from menu to man, lifting her eyebrows slightly but not in displeasure. Not really in any readable emotion. "I filed it under 'pending'."

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] Perhaps there's some irony that when Danicka's clothing is described, it's described with an eye toward how to remove it. Irony, yes, but accuracy, too. Because when Lukas looks at Danicka --

and it doesn't matter that he's pretending at civility right now, that he's pretending to belong in this bright, sleek restaurant with its springlike colors and its expensive transpacific dishes, that he's pretending to be a man having dinner with a woman, a boyfriend taking his girlfriend out to dinner

-- when Lukas looks at Danicka, some part of his mind is caught on the smell of her, the song her bloodlines sing, and that part of him doesn't care about the color of the dress but cares that it makes her skin glow, and doesn't care that the fabric is soft and has some stretch to it, but cares very much that he could pull it off her with minimal effort.

They're talking about guns. They're talking about filed-under-pending. His eyes are a little more black than blue now, and he blinks once, a camera-click of his eyelids.

"Okay." Simply. His eyes flicker over her face, taking inventory. Then he looks down at the menu again. A beat.

"I feel like seafood. You?"

[Danicka Musil] What happened on Monday night had left Lukas bloody, even if his clothes were clean. She had seen the strain he was under just holding himself up, the way he forced himself not to sway, the set of his jaw refusing to give in to the waves of nausea, the gore on his visage just barely covering up the clammy cast to his skin. Lukas had done a truly admirable job of acting like he felt fine, felt strong, was maybe a little banged up but not as bad as he has been in the past. Danicka had done an equally admirable job of doing what she seems to do best: seeing right through him.

And instead of recoiling from his weakness, apparent or real, and without delving into the territory of maternal concern, she had gently asked if he wanted her to stay with him. Just stay. Did he want her there while he felt sick? He has no idea what she is like when spending time with someone wracked by illness or injury, has never seen her in that state, but ultimately it wasn't about what he or she might have liked: having Danicka with him while he recovered put her at risk, and she -- ever the self-serving -- had stayed the fuck away from him.

They're both rather practical. He would not have called her if he were not up to seeing her, if he were not whole and hale, and she made several decisions in that half-hour timeframe she gave him that were hardly sentimental. He doesn't know about that. He knows that she's wearing yellow and that he could pull it off her shoulders and yank it off her hips and that dress would be out of his way, and Danicka knows very clearly now that it doesn't matter if it's been eleven days or seven or two: she is thinking about his face planted between her thighs even before he has the unfortunate timing to mention seafood, and she is also thinking that this has to be a part of why they've never bothered going out before.

A flicker of amusement tugs at the corner of her mouth. "What, no lamb?"

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] One wonders if some part of Lukas -- perhaps as deepburied, deeper buried, as the part that looks at Danicka's soft yellow dress and thinks only of how to get it off -- resents that she left so quickly. That she refused to touch him after he told her, I'm fucking contagious.

One wonders if some part of Danicka resents that he gave her his keys and left her to fend for herself on the street. That, apart from asking her once if she was all right, he didn't even seem particularly concerned over her wellbeing. Assumed she was fine.

Their interaction is smooth, as though they were practiced at this sort of thing -- and they are. They're practiced, and they're practical -- pragmatic -- realistic. Not romantics by any sense of the word.

All of which is to say: Lukas does not resent it.

And his eyes flick up at that. He looks at her quizzically for a moment, a half-smile beginning to tug at his mouth. "They don't have lamb on the menu or I would," he points out. "How did you know I liked lamb?"

And he hands the wine list over to her, "Pick us out a sake. I'm getting oysters and sashimi for starters."

[Danicka Musil] To be fair, he refused to touch her first. And to be fair, she is thinking about not even bothering to get the dress off. And to be fair, she hasn't even given the way he left her to 'fend for herself' second though. Maybe she should have. Maybe she should see this as indifference, and note it. She just hasn't pondered it, though.

They sit in their chairs like civilized people who have never seen anything bad happen in the world. Both of them are practiced, experienced liars in this way. Lukas pretends to be human all the time; Danicka pretends that her life is like everyone else's. Neither is telling the truth to anyone but each other at the moment, and even then they're hiding something. They're sitting in chairs with their legs under a tableclothed table, not even touching. They're talking about lamb, and what to order, and --

She takes the wine list, flicks it open as though just checking to make sure they have what she wants. "You've always liked lamb," she says mildly, and shrugs off his starting, not to dismiss but agree: the same. Her palate has a wide and flexible range. The waiter comes, eventually, and she asks for Momokawa Pearl after Lukas orders his oysters, his sashimi, which apparently Danicka will be sharing.

"I have to admit, this is somewhat surreal," she says, when the waiter leaves.

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] You've always liked lamb, she tells him, and his smile changes a little; it at once deepens and becomes a little puzzled, as though he couldn't quite figure out this woman sitting across from him.

Which is, of course, exactly the truth.

"Have I?" It's an idle echo; he's studying her. He lounges in his chair and his legs are akimbo, relaxed, likely to either side of hers, and more than likely a little ways into her side of the under-table. They don't have wine yet, but they do have water, and his fingers trace the side of the glass idly, thoughtlessly. "When I was young, you mean?"

The waiter stops by; they order their appetizers and their sake, and the waiter departs. She says this is surreal and he laughs under his breath, a quiet sound. Perhaps it's agreement.

"I passed this place yesterday." Apparently his altruistic self-quarantine only extended to her; the rest of the city could catch the wyrmflu and die for all he cared. "The name caught my eye. I wanted to bring you here. I didn't really think past that."

There's a pause. "I like seeing you here, though." His eyes don't leave her face, but his hand gestures slightly -- he means the sophisticated surroundings, the bright, warm halogen lighting, the vibrant colors. "I like how you look here. I like how you wear your masks of social graces."

And there; he's said it, not someday, but today. He loves this pretense of hers; he loves that she has no pretenses elsewhere. It doesn't make sense. It doesn't have to.

[Danicka Musil] He is trying to figure her out and Danicka is smiling through ordering and talking about his favorite food, the strangeness of actually sitting down across from him to eat not because they ran into one another but because he actually asked her to come here, and all she really wants to say is

Stýskalo se mi po tobě.

But instead Danicka smiles and nods when he asks if he liked lamb when he was young. That's all she gives him: no story of how she knows this, no memory called up from his days in early elementary education. His family surely could not afford lamb when they could not afford more than one room at a boarding house. Danicka doesn't explain how she knows this, or what she's basing this on. Just a nod, because what she really wants to tell him is

Chci tě.

Her legs are crossed at the ankle in those expensive but casual boots, tucked back under her chair so that even Danicka does not take up as much space as she is warranted. In this way she is the exact opposite of Lukas, who sprawls, who dominates the space he inhabits, who thoughtlessly and automatically has his legs extended into space that might be called 'hers'. People who look at them think she must be a doormat, just by the way he sits and the way she sits and the fact that he feels so much like someone who must be abusive or controlling. Danicka just watches him as he speaks, his reasons for asking her hear simple and to the point, and though she does listen with an engagement and involvement that is almost tangible in her eyes, her body language is all but screaming

Můžeme jít na záchod, nebo jít do auta. I don't care. Můžeme jíst po.

Her lips curve into a soft smile, her brows quirking together thoughtfully. He thinks that he loves, but he says that he likes, and she just tips her head, unaware if it's anything more than that and possibly not caring much: "As opposed to masks of brutish inelegance?"

No thank you for the compliment, if it is one, that he likes how she looks here.

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] "As opposed to someone," he replies, "whose entire life and persona is nothing but a mosaic of social graces and codes of etiquette."

A fucking Fang, he means, perhaps. Or perhaps just one of those kin, and they've both seen the sort, one of those wellbred, wealthy kin whose entire life revolved around plastic smiles and charity balls, nothing beneath and nothing beyond, as though their wallets and their connections would save them from the horrors of the war.

Not that those kin weren't useful. Lukas understands their use; respects their use. He is, after all, pragmatic. But he is not iron, and somewhere beneath the cool, careful politeness lie his true preferences, and...

And he's not shielding them from her anymore; or at least, not completely.

The thought rattles him a little. She may not be able to tell. Then again; maybe she can. Maybe she can read him as clearly as he can read the look in her eyes right now, the way she sits; the way the air between them is thick and charged as the air before a storm.

His fingers drum on the table lightly. He draws a breath to speak, and then the waiter arrives: their sake, their appetizers. Lukas doesn't look at the man when he thanks him, and only gives their food the most cursory of glances. Then he flips his menu open and, while the waiter is still there, orders the seared sea scallops.

The sake is warmed. The fish and the shellfish are chilled; raw. He pours her a cupful of the latter, and pours for himself as well. This is while the waiter takes her order. He unwraps his chopsticks, though there are forks available, and samples the sashimi while the waiter is departing.

The oysters he eats with his hands, a shell raised to his mouth, the flesh slid down the hatch with a soundless slurp. An empty shell pings quietly down on his plate.

[Danicka Musil] This response gets a lifted eyebrow, not of query but amusement. She knows who he is talking about, and just lets out a soft, "Heh."

Maybe he can't imagine her as she has been so often in the past: kissing cheeks, wearing a plastic smile and a ball gown, or maybe he can and knows that at least that isn't it, that's not all, and this is what he means. Danicka knows, and has known for longer than she has even sat down and thought about, what is and needs to be underneath the surface. This is one way that they simply...mesh, without speaking of it, without misunderstanding. There is more going on than what anyone can see, and something in them both -- perhaps down to their blood -- likes it that way.

It seems -- at least on her end -- that sharing his food is a foregone conclusion. Danicka does not even ask, which would be traditionally polite, and one imagines that she knows this, but etiquette is less about specific rules of engagement and more about knowing how to make those around you the most comfortable, the most at ease. With Lukas it has nothing to do with whether or not she leans forward and takes oysters off his plate when they come, and more to do with simply being at ease with him. She knows instinctively that he'll pick up on it, that when she is relaxed with him it is Good and when she is withdrawn or cold or masked it is Not As Good.

There's more to it than that, though, and there's a familiarity and comfort that they have not earned in just a couple of months in the way she eats with him, the way she did at the restaurant when they ordered takeout and the way she offers him food or shares her kitchen with him when he is over. As though this has been going on for far, far longer than since early February.

Danicka orders Saki-Marinated Sea Bass. For what it's worth. She uses chopsticks, as she did at the W that one night, and while he is pouring the sake she starts in on the sashimi. After the third clink of shell to plate -- her own, and the assumption is several more have hit his plate -- Danicka's legs have slid out from under her chair, and though they remain crossed at the ankle, she sets them against the inside of his calf. It's nothing, really, just a point of contact, which is more than they've really had since they kissed outside.

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] If there was nothing beneath -- nothing beneath this dinner at this brightly lit, upscale, modern restaurant; nothing beneath the world-class blowjobs and earth-shaking fucks -- if there was nothing beneath, or below, or behind, or within it all, then this would not be what it is.

It is as simple (and as complicated) as that.

And -- she share his food, which he doesn't merely allow, but expects, because when she begins to reach for the oysters he puts the platter toward her, and there are six, and she's putting down shell number three when he's upending cup number two of sake, which is not, in fact, a socially graceful, code of etiquette-obeying way to drink, and when her legs touch his beneath the table she can see his eyes flicker down as though he could see through wood.

A beat. Then he eats another piece of sashimi, deftly, precisely, and chases it with another oyster. Four shells on the appetizer plates, and the bed of lettuce on which the sashimi rest is half-bare, and the two remaining oysters gleam pale and tender in their iridescent shells. Lukas pours himself a third cup, tops hers off, tosses his down like a shot, and draws his legs back.

She might read it as a rejection, though if she did, she'd be a fool, and not at all the woman who sees through him, clear to the bottom, almost every time she cares to look.

He takes the time to wipe his mouth and his hands. He sets his napkin off to the side, not atop his plate, and he sits up. And he leans across the table. His eyes do not grow bright when he drinks; or at least, not that she's seen. She's seen him something close to drunk only once, and it was dark in the Brotherhood's kitchen that night, and she was looking for him and he was showing her to Sam, and then he was walking upstairs.

Digression. Point is: his eyes do not glitter when he drinks, that she's seen. They glitter now, gas-flame blue, and it's not the three small cups of sake he's put down.

"Jděte na záchod." His eyes are steady and his voice his steady; his tone is utterly unrevealing, and it's times like this that a shared second language is very fucking helpful indeed. "Budu sledovat za pár minut."

[Danicka Musil] It does not take them very long to get through several small cups of the cloudy, unfiltered sake. Neither of them is eating slowly. They are not having a delicate conversation over candlelight. If anything, after the first few bites of appetizers and the first sips of the Pearl, both Lukas and Danicka seem to be eating and drinking with a sort of relentless dedication, the way one might go to war or compose a song: focused and intent. They are not rushing, exactly, but they are sure as hell not dawdling.

He wanted to see her in here, and she does indeed fit the setting to an a poetic degree. Danicka, in that yellow dress of hers and that bright smile and with her golden hair just looks...right, here. She is still thinking about what he said when she arrived, how it's not exactly Jaro, and it was sort of silly, and yet very sweet, and she thinks about that night when he asked her if she could have anything right then. Ironically, she reflects -- swallowing an oyster -- that he'd answered her same question by saying he wanted to see the ocean.

And look at what they're eating.

But these thoughts are fleeting, and she doesn't voice them. She just moves her legs slightly, and their food has not even come yet but she's matched him shot for shot of the sake. It hasn't hit her yet; her eyes will soon gleam, the gold flecks in them sparklingly bright, but it soon will. The way she's looking at him, when she looks at him, isn't related to the sake. She was looking at him like that before.

Their food hasn't even come yet, and they have not stroked one another's hands or reached across the table for one to touch the other's face, and she is definitely not running her foot up the inside of his leg. It's just a shift, a nearness, as casual as their legs might rest against one another if they were sitting side by side on a couch. She notices when he pulls his legs back, and looks up at him, her expression waiting, though her eyebrows don't so much as flicker upwards. She is not asking him a question with her eyes but waiting for him to tell her the answer anyway.

She's only seen him close to drunk once, and that night he had removed himself from the situation partly so he did not slam her down on that table in front of the fireplace and fuck her right there.

Danicka lifts her napkin from her lap after he speaks, looking down. She daubs lightly at her mouth, nodding once, and sets her own napkin beside her plate, lifting her eyes to his again. She looks calm. He knows better. He knows by the movement of her shoulders, can all but see through her breastbone to her heart, its pace steadily increasing. He knows because of the way she has looked at him, which is the way she looked at him when -- once upon a time -- he moved her hands and drew down the zippers of her boots before kissing her knee, before she slid onto his lap and before his hands went under her skirt and before she rolled her hips like that and sent his mind reeling into the stratosphere where it stayed because of her stocking-clad legs wrapped around him and her moaning god her moaning in his ear.

"Pánské nebo ženy?" she asks, scooting back her chair just enough to allow her to stand, as though inquiring as to what color they should paint the dining room.

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] They're both rather expert at pretending calm. She's rather expert at pretending a number of things; Lukas limits his repertoire, by and large, to calmness. To control.

"Žen." And they're casual, they're conversational, they could be discussing shades of paint, furniture arrangement. They could be, but they're not. They're discussing an assignation, a tryst -- a fuck in a public restroom, and the truth is the night in front of the fireplace wasn't the only time he's wanted to sweep everything off a table and slam her down on it. And fuck her. Right there.

There's a ghost of a smile on his mouth; he explains, "Obvykle čistší."

She's getting up and the angle of his gaze changes to follow, and now the light is hitting his eyes in a way that makes the blue almost colorlessly pale. These are eyes that should be cold and hard as diamonds, that are cold and hard as diamonds, but when he looks at her like this, there's nothing but heat in his regard.

"Handicapované příhrada," he adds as she's stepping past.

He doesn't turn his head to watch her go. He looks down at their appetizers, alone at the table-for-two now, a dark-haired man, broad through the shoulders, with the body of an athlete or a prizefighter under his well-fitted, expensive clothes and the aura of a sociopathic serial killer.

Their scallops and their sea bass are still on the way. There's a bottle of sake sitting on the table, and they've each put away three shots' worth. He pours himself another cup, fills her as well, but doesn't drink it. He dabs a piece of yellowtail sashimi in soy sauce and wasabi paste. He eats it. He counts the seconds. He thinks about Danicka in the women's bathroom, in the handicapped stall; he wonders if she'd stopped in front of the mirror and fixed her hair, reapplied her lip gloss. He wonders if she's taking off her panties while she waits for him. He wonders if she's touching herself.

He wonders if she looked at herself in the mirror and thought to herself, that is me, and I'm about get fucked. In the women's room. In a handicapped stall. By a monster.

Lukas drinks his sake after all. It goes down easily, smooth and fine. The small cup -- what were they called, ochoko? -- clicks back onto the tabletop. Then he gets up and, leaving their coats where they lay, follows Danicka to the restrooms.

[Danicka Musil] Whatever else she may be, Danicka is not an exhibitionist. She still carries a burning anger at Samuel Modine for what he did in that cafe, for humiliating her, for wrenching her will from her and worse than that, worst of all, exposing her. She is no stranger to unexpected urges, but they are usually kept reasonably private, between herself and some random person she chooses to share them with, someone she will usually never see again. But the fact that Sam drew her to him like that is trumped by and large by the fact that he did it in public.

Yes, she has -- while drunk -- wanted Lukas to take her in his car, but that is not the same at all. That was different, as this is, because there are escape routes, there are shields, there is some sembelance of privacy. That was different, as this is, because...it's him. Because in spite of herself she does not believe he is going to reveal who and what she is to his packmates, to other Kin, to anyone. She knows he isn't.

Which you can call trust, if you like. Danicka gets to a certain point in her thinking on it and then lets it go before that word in particular unfurls in her mind. She has too much trouble with the concept, even more than the idea of her own infatuation. Trust is such a dirty word, and a tangled one, like a filth-encrusted knot in a flagpole's rope, so long tied and re-tied that it may never be undone.

Lukas wears a ghost of smile when he states his preference and reasoning; the left side of Danicka's mouth curls slightly in a faint smirk, her lips parting for a moment as though she is about to speak. But all she does is breathe. As she told him, a few turns of the moon in the past, it wouldn't make any difference. Here or a dive bar. Men's or women's. Bathroom or car. Whatever it is that happens to them when they're caught up in each other will happen whether the restroom is clean or not, or whether they're at Spring or Billy Goat's or the pushed-back passenger seat of a Lincoln or a BMW.

She gets to her feet and steps past him, knowing he's watching her, and her only response to the directive is a touch: her hand goes to his chest, over his heart, and then slides up and across his shoulder. There's no hitch in her steps, and only the most enigmatic of glances. She leaves him alone. For a few minutes.

=======

Perhaps forty-five seconds later she is in the women's bathroom of the restaurant, in the prescribed stall -- which remains unlocked for now -- and her lips are parted again, but this time not to prepare for words she doesn't say. They are parted to let her breathe, faster than she was sitting down at their table, but silently. Lukas is sitting at their table wondering if she stopped at the mirror, and she didn't, and wondering if she touched her hair or worked on her makeup, but she didn't. He wonders if she is getting some scrap of cloth out of their way in anticipation of him, and she isn't.

Lukas wonders if she's touching herself.

The back of Danicka's head hits the wall she's leaning against quietly, the fall of her head backwards a slow and aching thing rather than a whiplash snap. She licks her lips, pulls her lower one between her teeth and bites down as her fingers work inside the thin cotton fitted snugly over her hips. As for what she thought, or is thinking, there's nothing about herself. This is most definitely her, but she has told him that she doesn't know who she is. There is nothing about what is about to happen to her, as though she is not an active and even instigating participant rather than a recipient of his lust alone, and that is almost always the way of it, from the beginning --

I didn't come here to get fucked. I came here to fuck you.

Danicka strokes her fingertip across her clit, spreading wetness around slowly, trying to stay quiet. She cannot entirely remember where she is, nor does she think about 'a monster'. The hem of her skirt rides her wrist where it's pulled up, the fabric slinky and heavy at once. She tips her head back and slips one, then two fingers inside of herself, and holds a gasp tight and silenced in her throat, and thinks only (plaintively [pleadingly] impatiently):

Lukáš...

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] Spring is not the sort of restaurant where you can see clear from one end to the other with nothing in the way. The bar's in one room, the dining room in another; the tables are arranged in zigzag, around half-booths and chairs separated by mid-height dividers. It's impossible to simply dash for the restrooms, and besides, Lukas wouldn't. He doesn't hurry. He doesn't look around to see if anyone notices their table is empty now. He's too confident for that, too steady, and even if he weren't, he would pretend it.

The door to the women's room is the first on the right. There's absolutely no hesitation: Lukas pushes it open and goes in.

--

The restrooms are down a short hall. No matter his quip about cleanliness, this is also not the sort of restaurant where the clientele will accept anything but hospital-grade sterility and hotel-grade furnishings in the bathrooms, regardless of gender.

The walls inside are the same vivid orange; the counters are a creamy marble. There are green prosperity bamboos in the corner. The stalls are large, the dividers high and solid.

Between the time Danicka entered and Lukas enters, one other customer was in here. It was a woman, and Danicka, with her sharp senses that verged on paranoia, would not have mistaken it for Lukas. The gait was too light, the clip too quick. She stopped by the mirror on the way in, she picked the stall second from the end, she flushed when she was finished, and then she spent so long in front of the mirror that Danicka may have begun to worry that Lukas would run into her on the way in.

The truth is, if he had, he wouldn't have been flustered. He wouldn't have done anything differently at all. He would've met her eyes on the way in, made her look away, and proceeded on his way.

He doesn't, though. The stranger leaves about twenty seconds before he enters.

Danicka recognizes him, perhaps, by the way he walks, a heavier, quieter tread than a woman's high heels. Perhaps she recognizes him by the sure way the door swings open. Perhaps she recognizes him by his rage, the undeniable presence that fills the bathroom, makes it suddenly seem small. Or it could be the fact that he doesn't hesitate as though uncertain, doesn't pause to look in the mirror, doesn't even stop to take in the unfamiliar sight of a women's room -- though, to be fair, it's not so very unfamiliar to him. He comes directly to the handicapped stall, which is not locked.

Lukas pushes this door open the same way: firmly, with his palm, but not violently. His eyes are on hers immediately, as though he'd known where she would be. A second later his eyes flicker down to her hand, her parted thighs, her rucked-up skirt. She can see his nostrils flare as he inhales, audibly.

He watches her touch herself, shamelessly. He doesn't say anything. He closes the door of the stall behind him the way he might close the front door of her apartment, the door of his room at the Brotherhood. The lock snicks into place. All this is done blind, and with a thoughtless assurance. Then he's crossing the gap between them, and his eyes are burning into hers, and before he does anything else, before he reaches to unsnap the snap-buttons of his pretty silver-grey shirt or undo his belt and button or lower his fly -- before he touches her face or her hair or even kisses her -- his hand covers hers between her legs.

His digits are longer, coarser, stronger; his palm is large enough to completely cover the back of her hand. His fingers tangle with hers and then the pads of the index and the middle find her clit. He's looking into her face, into her eyes, and she can see this first, electric contact sparking in his eyes as if it the pleasure were his.

This is not his first time fucking in a public restroom. It's probably not hers, either.
But it is different.

They can hear the dim buzz of conversation outside; the clatter of dishes now and then; the huff of the air conditioners; some neo-jazz chillout groove playing quietly on the stereo system. They can hear each other breathing, near-silently but not quite, their clothes shifting against skin, and that's the only sound that Lukas gives a damn about at the moment.

Lukas steps closer now, and closer still, until their legs interweave and their thighs press together and their bodies brush. There's a heat in him that she can feel straight through his clothes, like a blast furnace at close range. His hand is exploring her, his fingertips caressing, circling, pressing, moving on, and he's watching her through all this, watching her face change and her eyes change, until it's the heel of his hand that he presses against her, and his fingers are slipping inside her.

That's when he lowers his head to hers. The first kiss -- the first true kiss tonight, and for longer than just tonight -- is slow, pulling, inhaling; moving to the same rhythm that his fingers are fucking her to, and the same rhythm he's breathing to.

[Danicka Musil] They aren't going to stay in here long, but their meals will be waiting for them when they get back. Seared scallops. Sea bass. More sake. Maybe dessert. They haven't been shy about eating, and eating heartily, in front of one another.

There is, however, the niggling fact that when Danicka is down, when she is unhappy about one thing or another, she turns down food. She says she eats and claims it's not a lie but since the first night he saw her naked he's been able to see how thin she is. For her frame and height, the hundred and twenty-five or so pounds that he lifts against himself is healthy, but...barely. Then again, she's from New York City. The high glass, high gloss part of New York City, where one would think that the expectation is to be 5'10" and 110 pounds.

In any case, it would be fair to expect that when they get back to their table they may as well order dessert, whether it's crispy banana rolls again or something more artfully plated, or if by the time they've eaten dinner they will not be able to tolerate staying out in public for another second. It's late at night, at least for most of the 9-5 workaday world, but neither Danicka nor Lukas have jobs to go to in the morning. He just has a War to deal with, and it is not on a schedule...as they saw the last time they sat down together.

Tonight they could not even stand to completely finish their appetizers.

Lukas enters the bathroom and within a few seconds Danicka knows it's him, by the hot, rushing tingle that goes up her spine in response. She bites her lip harder -- she'll be lucky if she doesn't bruise herself -- so she doesn't whimper, and her hand quickens. Her lip is released, however, and her eyes open, when the door swings open, he steps in, and closes it again. She watches him watching her, both of them shameless, apparently incapable of insecurity...at least insofar as sex is concerned. And then he moves forward, pushes his hand into her panties on top of hers, and Danicka shudders.

Her eyes close and her lips open, as though she knows that he loves seeing her like this, even though he's never said it before and may never say it at all. Within a second or two she takes her own hand away, stifling a gasp as she withdraws her fingers and opening her eyes again to look at his. If they were not in public right now she might say his name there, but Danicka doesn't make a sound. She just breathes, as quietly as she can, and lifts her hand while his becomes bolder and warmer between her legs. She offers her fingers to him, to watch him lick them clean, a smile playing at the corner of her mouth.

This time she doesn't shove her hands into his hair and pull him down to her when they kiss. She doesn't grab a hold of his shirt or wrinkle the fabric. When her hand is returned to her and Lukas's fingers are in her and Lukas's tongue is in her mouth she closes her eyes, kisses him as hard as she would like to moan right now, and reaches for his belt. She goes slower than she has to, for the sake of silence, wrangling the tongue of the leather accessory out from the buckle and leaving it hanging while she goes for the other fasteners of his jeans.

Danicka doesn't waste time -- although she wouldn't call it a waste of her time -- reaching into his clothes and simply toying with him for awhile. Her eyes closed and her mouth busy and her dress held up only by Lukas's arm, she reaches under his shirt, works his jeans and boxer-briefs off his hips, pushing them just far enough down that they won't chafe against her inner thighs, and then pulls back from his mouth.

It seems she might say something, her eyes glittering with sake and lust both at this point, but she doesn't bother. Her hand goes to his wrist, wraps around it, and -- biting her lip again to keep from making noise -- Danicka firmly removes his hand from her body. Her skirt falls, and the next sensation of warmth Lukas's fingers know is her mouth. She moans for the first time as she sucks the taste of herself off of his skin: softly though, quietly. Carefully. Her eyes are closed as though this is as much pleasure for her as the first touch, the first kiss, but as soon as she has him against her lips and tongue she's peeling her panties down, stretching them around her boots, taking them completely off, and --

-- shoving them into Lukas's hand.

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] Sex replaces conversation in so many ways for them. It doesn't merely substitute; it doesn't merely interrupt and take the place of communication. It is communication. There's more said here than they could possibly say any other way, and more learned about one another as well.

Danicka knows when she lifts her hand and he's stepping into her that he'll turn his face toward her palm; that he won't look away from her. That he'll take her hand in his mouth and suck her fingers clean, one by one.

Lukas knows when he's done and his fingers are pushing into her that her pupils will dilate like camera shutters opening in the dark; that when he kisses her she won't turn away from the taste of herself on his tongue.

They know they'll meet each other in the middle, and the kiss will be just as it is, hard, openmouthed, tongues meeting in one another's mouths.

Their arms cross between them. Her hand is under his shirt and her hand is undoing his pants, and he thinks, dazedly, that she should get a fucking olympic medal for fastest unzipping in the world. His hand is between her legs and his hand is rucking her dress up from behind to open over her back, to press the small of her back against his body and his hand, to smooth over her ass. She pushes his pants down and they're both silent, not saying a word, trying to breathe their shuddering breaths quietly, and when the kiss breaks he follows her across the gap; he doesn't kiss her again, quite, but his tongue licks her lips and his lips close briefly, suckingly over her bottom lip.

Then they're apart and she's pulling his hand from the wetness of her cunt to replace it in the wetness of her mouth, and he's watching her lick herself off his fingers, and he can feel the vibration of her careful little moan against his fingertips. Arousal spikes through him hard enough to send a cold-hot prickle up his spine. While she's pulling her panties down he's pulling his shirt open, the discreet, colormatched snaps coming apart with a series of pops like so many miniature firecrackers.

He doesn't drop the shirt on the ground. He doesn't even pull it off his shoulders. He leaves it as it is, open, his skin bare from neck to thigh in a slice down the front, and her panties are off by now, and she's lifting her foot to take it off her boot and he's opening his hand over her thigh, and -- Danicka pushes her lingerie into Lukas's hand.

There's a brief flare in his eyes: bemusement, amusement, as if to ask what she expected him to do with it. The corners of his mouth turn up. The soft scrap of fabric rumples into his hand. He kisses her suddenly, kisses her until the smile has faded off his mouth, scorched off his mind, and he loops her panties over his forearm like the world's trashiest bracelet, and he knows he looks ridiculous and doesn't care.

Both his hands are on her dress now and he's not only rucking it up but pulling it up in fistfuls, the fabric thin but heavy in his hands, cool and soft. When he gets it past her thighs, past her hips, he kisses her -- he rubs himself against her belly, pushes her dress up to her waist, and now his mouth is at her jawline, and then her throat; then he's going to his knees, here, of all places, and he's thinking to himself that he hopes she's good at holding her tongue; he's thinking to himself that the floor better be goddamn clean enough to eat off of, and then he just thinking about the look on her face when she comes on his cock, on his hand, on his face.

His hands are open over her hips. Her dress is caught under his long fingers, pinned up against her body, out of the way. He tries to put his mouth on her -- the angle is too sharp, he'll break his neck if he keeps at it for any time -- so he drags her forward a half-step, her knees pressing against his shoulders, her shoulderblades to the wall. He tips her hips toward him and he turns his head to kiss her inner thigh to make her part her legs. When she does, he puts his mouth to her, and this time he doesn't have the free hands, the agile fingers to part her flesh, so he does it with his lips and his tongue, licks and kisses his way to her clit and her cunt, works his mouth on her with a silent, ferocious, singleminded devotion.

[Danicka Musil] In conversation the urge to lie is, for Danicka, too great. When Lukas is sitting in a car or on a couch or at a cafe with her she struggles with the profound, ingrained desire to divert from topics that are uncomfortable or from subjects that might make him angry, to keep things surface, to keep them safe. When Lukas is lying naked underneath her and running his hands over her with nothing but the city lights cutting through the otherwise impermeable darkness, Danicka gives him some of the most difficult truths he can hear. When he is coming to bed with her and she is stripping off her clothes, just the way she looks at him is painfully, deeply honest.

Considering the way they dress, the tidiness of their mannerisms, the reservation they have in public both with each other and everyone else, they can be incredibly filthy people. The taste of Danicka's arousal is on both their tongues by the time her underwear is off, and both of them are practical enough to know that despite how achingly erotic their kisses can be, they are not separating their mouths much this time because they have to keep Danicka quiet.

Not Lukas. Lukas never seems to have any trouble holding back his vocalizations when he's with her. This bothers her, though she's only admitted it when she's been drunk. They don't have to worry about keeping him quiet.

Clothes come off or are simply shoved out of the way, tugged away from as much flesh as they dare uncover. Danicka sucks on Lukas's finger with the same attention she gives his tongue, or his cock. The underwear in his hand, going around his wrist a moment later, is a bikini-cut scrap of pale blue lace that may as well not be there, for all the coverage it was giving her before it was given to him.

Danicka lets go of his fingers eventually and his hands go to pull at her dress, shoving it up while he moves closer and rubs against skin that's soft enough to be sinful. The muscles in her stomach ripple with a shiver, her hand going to hold him there briefly, stroking him against her while he kisses her throat and she bites her tongue. She is about to forget the condom she hopes is living in his wallet altogether and guide him inside of her when Lukas's mouth leaves her skin and the shadow of him falls lower. Danicka's eyes fly open and she looks down at him, her mouth opening with an

oh my fucking god

that she doesn't actually voice. She just shoves her fingers into his hair as she didn't do earlier when they kissed, her other hand taking her skirt from him to hold it up. This -- whether he is grinding against her body or going onto his knees -- is how she knows him best. Sitting down to dinner is, as she put it, 'surreal'. Lifting one of her legs over his shoulder to prop her foot against the metal handrail on the other side of the stall is natural, though, and she does this easily, her legs no longer constrained by that slip of lace. She presses her shoulderblades against the wall and pushes her foot against that handrail and hopes her left leg doesn't go out from under her.

She doesn't have a hand free to bite into, so she bites her lip -- again -- and watches him even though watching him for too long is going to make her scream. She doesn't scream, though. Maybe two full minutes pass before Danicka lets out a helpless little cry, and the bathroom door opens, a pair of heels steps in. Those steps pause; Danicka takes her fingers from Lukas's hair and bites down on the heel of her hand. She has been doing her best not to grind against his face but now she squirms, the effort of staying quiet taking resources away from being able to stay still.

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker]

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] Lukas's hands are free to roam her body after Danicka takes her dress and holds it herself -- and roam is what they do, pressing over long stretches of her skin, up her stomach and over her ribcage and around her sides and back down again to cup over her ass and grind her cunt into his face, because she's holding back but Lukas, frankly, doesn't give a shit.

And it's true: Danicka's skin is soft and fine, fucking luxurious, fucking perfektní, and he could spend all day just running his hands over her, feeling the deep muscles in her abdomen quiver and ripple when he licks her like this, feeling the shivers stealing up her spine when he sucks her like that. He could spend all night with his mouth pressed to her skin, her heartbeat beneath his lips, thinking that he belongs here; thinking that she was like spring to him, only of course -- he can't.

The War never stops. The War never waits. And Lukas is, if nothing else, honor-bound to do his duty.

And this is also true: she's on the edge of too thin. Because when she's relaxed and happy she has a healthy appetite, and between the two of them they managed to put away a table full of takeout chinese food. But when she's not she can barely eat at all, and he only has her word that she did eat that morning, and he does believe her, but what he doubts is: how much. Because when he runs his hands up her body and her back arches like that and the skin pulls taut over her torso -- when he runs his hands up her body to fondle her breasts, he can feel her ribs beneath her skin; he can feel how little spare there is to her. It's not the sort of war-honed hardness he has, where there's a solid sheet of muscle as hard as stone between bone and skin. It's not that at all, and he thinks to himself, perfektní, precious, protect, and he opens his mouth to fuck her with his tongue, and he opens his mouth to suck her clit against his tongue, and he opens his mouth as if he could devour her, and by doing so, keep her safe.

The single cry she lets out is barely anything compared to what she's loosed in the darkness of her own bedroom, or an anonymous hotel room, or even what she screamed into his shoulder that morning at the Brotherhood. It curls into the air like smoke, and is dissipated when the bathroom door swings open, lost in the wash of dining noise from without.

Heels click on the bathroom tile. Then they stop. Danicka's biting her hand to keep quiet and she's squirming against his mouth, and it's a second or two before he even registers that there's another presence in the room now, registers this and freezes, opens his eyes -- incandescent blue -- looks up at her with surprise flaring in his irises. His mouth leaves her flesh, but not far; she can feel him breathing, his breath warm against her wetness when he exhales, the surrounding air cool when he inhales. The silence is deafening.

Then, the woman, whose name is Therese, who's having a bad fucking date with a complete asshole whose jokes sucked and whose conversation, otherwise, was Always Only About Him, decides fuckit. She decides she doesn't care that there's more than one occupant in the big handicapped stall at the end, and they're definitely not up to any good. She decides she's not going out there yet, she was going to take a piss and then maybe, just maybe, she'll call her friend Caitlyn and tell her to call her back with an Emergency Bail-out Call(tm) because by god, the bitch got her into this mess, so she can get her back out.

Heels click on the bathroom tile. The woman walks the rest of the way into the bathroom, blithely, goes into the stall one or two doors down, she's laying down the tissue-paper toilet seat cover. Terribly-timed humor is chasing surprise through Lukas's clear eyes, and he's grinning down there between Danicka's legs, and he's turning his mouth against her inner thigh to muffle to soundless exhales of laughter, and his shoulders are quivering under her knee, and as Therese down the way sits down to do her business it's deviltry in his eyes instead, and he's turning his face back to her.

The first re-contact of his mouth to her is very gentle, almost hesitant. If this were a battle it would be called a feint, because in the next moment he dives back into the fray with all his might, focused as a laser, eating her out with such enthusiasm that Danicka might rightfully wonder if he's done this before, gone down on a girl in some public restroom before, only she knows -- if only by how bad he was that first time -- that she hasn't.

He hasn't done this before. He hasn't kissed the woman he fucked in bathroom stalls before, either, but the exceptions are getting too many to list, perhaps they don't matter anymore. The ghosts of the past don't matter, at least not for him, because none of them have ever mattered at all in the first place, and there's no one else in this room except him, and her.

And Therese -- but he seems to have forgotten that.

[Danicka Musil] They might want to spend all day, all night doing nothing but touching one another, lying in bathtubs or fucking in showers or falling asleep beside one another or sitting on the floor eating Chinese food until someone's hand travels warm and wicked up someone else's thigh. That isn't going to happen, and it's entirely possible that given as much time together as they may think they want, they'd just get bored. It's still up in the air whether either of them is even capable of true loyalty, true devotion.

Nevermind the fact that since that moment she sat down beside him at the Shedd Aquarium and he kissed her in front of the schooling fish, Danicka has not wanted to fuck anyone else she's seen, anyone who has bought her a drink or slipped her their phone number at a cafe or flirted with her in a shop. Nevermind the fact that this is strange to her, that when she looks out the window with a glass of wine in her hand she wants Lukas to be there and when she touches herself because he's too sick to even be around her she comes and yet she still aches afterward because he's not there and she does not know what to call this other than what she called it:

Zamilovávám se do tebe.

She isn't thinking about that right now though, not consciously. She is trying not to completely lose track of where she is and what could happen if they're caught, thought that is of course part of the fucking appeal of this, because Lukas is practicing again and she can't even use her words to encourage him this time. This time, Lukas gets not urging to go faster, or slower, or oh god yes lick me there again. He can only read her body language, which for them seems to be enough most of the time. Danicka can only squirm, and let him grind her against his face while he eats her, and struggle not to cry out.

Normally she doesn't have to try, and he's seen how she fights to stay quiet when they have to. Lukas, damn him, pushes her. In his narrow bed at the Brotherhood he'd not covered her mouth even though she said this was fine, had even told him to do so. He'd held her close instead as he fucked her, as she moaned, as though by keeping her near enough he could...do something. Silence her, or absorb her, or make the other Garou living nearby deaf to what was happening in that room. In her own bedroom Danicka had literally screamed when he knelt behind her and had her bent over the bed. She had grabbed the bedspread and shrieked with pleasure and called his name and now --

"Fuck," Danicka whisper-mumbles against her hand when Ms. Therese walks in and decides to go ahead and take her piss, fuck the happy couple in the handicapped stall. She immediately silences her breathing and her gasping and after a second can take her hand from her teeth to look down at him while he stifles his laughter on her inner thigh. Her fingers slide into his hair again, more gently than before, not to tear or grip but to touch. Her eyes are wide and bright, amusement tugging at the corners of her lips that is warring rather mightily with arousal.

You ass, she mouths at him when he looks up at her again, just before she recognizes the look in his eyes and quickly bites down on her hand again. She's lucky she doesn't break skin this time, because a second later her head tips back and knocks far too hard against the marble-tiled wall. Danicka cannot help but release a truncated, quickly swallowed grunt of both surprise and pleasure and pain, but she rolls her hips instead. If he's going to go back to eating ehr out then she is going to ride his goddamned face.

A couple of doors down the toilet flushes and a few seconds later the water at the sink is running. Therese is annoyed. She's not going to get laid tonight, and she can't even seem to go to a nice restaurant without having it slapped in her face that other people are, just watch her luck Caitlyn will be fucking that jackass Friend-With-Benefits that's always hanging around. She scowls at the knees she can see under the door to the handicapped stall and leaves again, to go text Caitlyn from the hallway before going back to the Blind Date From Hell.

Danicka waits until the door has swung closed and drops her hand from her mouth, gasping for air as though she was holding her breath that entire time, looking down at Lukas and whimpering:

"Jestliže jste přestal budu křičet."

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] Lukas doesn't reply. Replying would be stopping, and he is not going to stop. His eyes open for a moment -- he looks at her, and his eyes are the same startling blue they always are, pale as ice, hot as flame, a sharp and striking contrast to his dark hair, his swarthy skin that, given the summer season and time in a southern sun, would tan deep and rich and brown.

Likely Chicago's too far north for that, and its summer too short. Likely he's not the type to idle in the sun anyway, barechested and in shorts and flip-flops. Possible, anyway, that they won't even be together come summer, when her hair will be golden and her skin will be golden too; possible that he, or she, won't even be alive by then.

These are things they do not pause to consider in moments like this. In moments like this, she tells him not to stop, and he thinks he wouldn't dream of stopping, and his eyelids are falling shut, he's burying his face between her legs and his hands are coming up to cover her ass, to open over her flesh and flex against some of her weight as if he, too, worried that her leg might give way; that if and when she came she might lose her footing, kick down the stall, bring down the goddamn sky.

Sometimes it feels like that, to watch her come: like a force of nature, like astrophysical pyrotechnics behind her eyes. And then sometimes she comes so quietly, soundlessly, her palms burning into his skin, so hot that he's always surprised that he doesn't find marks there the next day, brands of her fingerprints whorled all over his skin as if to claim him.

And he's still eating her out, devouring her with a ravenous hunger that he's far, far too courteous to show at dinner, and he doesn't stop, and frankly even if Therese and Caitlyn and both their dates and all their friends showed up outside the stall now, annoyed and huffing and rustling their tissuepaper toilet shields and washing their hands he wouldn't stop now; even if the walls cave in and the ceiling crashes down he wouldn't dream of stopping; even if she came on his face, silently or loudly enough to get them kicked out of here, he wouldn't stop.

[Danicka Musil] It wasn't until that first summer in New Orleans that Danicka -- then eighteen, and barely, and running a household made up of people not her blood-kin -- found herself outside for any great lengths of time. She did not trim her hair as regularly and carefully as she had in the city. She lounged in the gardens with their broken-down walls without bothering with a bra, or shoes, and she caught bullfrogs in her hands. It was Rick, not Christian, who went and plucked magnolias and insisted that she and Yelizaveta and Helena wear them in their hair. Christian sat in the shade and watched them all as they ate apples, and it was almost autumn before his pale hands contrasted against Danicka's summer-warmed skin, another year before he tasted apples on her tongue.

Up in New York, and here in Chicago, there is really no chance that she will become as richly tanned as she did in Louisiana, and no chance whatsoever that she will walk around the grounds of any estate in cowboy boots and cutoff shorts and a Harley Davidson t-shirt. There are people here who know her family, who can call back to that unofficial capitol of the country and tell her brother what she's up to, what she's been doing. Danicka is less worried about Lukas than the Bellamontes: all Vladislav would be interested in if he were to hear from -- or about -- Wyrmbreaker is whether he's a suitable mate or not.

Whatever 'suitable' may mean to him.

This isn't mating, though. Lukas is not mounting Danicka in hopes that given a few months she'll swell and stir with a life other than her own, and they have not claimed one another. They've marked each other, though not physically -- he's never left a bruise on her and no matter how hard she's bitten him or scratched her nails into him there's no contusion or weal that is not gone within seconds the first time he shapeshifts. Her hands have not burnt her touch permanently into his flesh, even though when they lay down together he has to have noticed that Danicka is like a little furnace when she sleeps. Despite this she sleeps under great covers and holds his arm around her but she's ludicrously warm anyway.

She is spring. Early spring's rain and melting, zenith's blooming, early summer's warmth and relaxation. He is likely the only person in Chicago and one of perhaps three people with ties to New York City who would not be surprised to see her as she was in New Orleans: her hair occasionally tangled, her skin tanned, her nails unpolished and her demeanor so unguarded as it was. But that is only because he has not just had one night with her, one tryst in a bathroom stall. Night after night he comes to her, comes with her. And night after night she gives him the truth while she makes everyone else pay for their lies, whispering it in his ear or moaning it into the air or transferring it to his body's own memory by tightening her thighs around him, stroking his hair, branding him with a kiss.

They're not at the restaurant right now, or at least Danicka isn't. She's not in Chicago, or New York City, or New Orleans, or any place that she has a geographical name for. Minute after unmarked minute passes. She can feel the marble behind her shoulders and she feel the tension in her right leg helping hold her up over him and she can feel his hands and the scrap of lace on his wrist brushing the back of her thigh and she can feel him as deeply, as much a part of her as if he were inside of her, and as far as she knows the only answer to Where are you? would be Lukáš. Everything has become him, and what he does to her, and how she feels, and even that has no name right now but:

"Lukáš..." Danicka pleads, able to but not choosing to stifle her voice. Her hand is in his hair, her hand is gripping her dress, her eyes are on him. Her spine arches, her hips buck: "Lukáš!"

After that there's no outcry, no threatened scream, nothing but her whimpering against her own lips, gasps that tell him, in second after molten second, all the things she cannot risk saying aloud.

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] There are parts of their lives that are, in a very real way, missing from the other's. He has a war that he always thinks of capitalized, a proper noun: the War. He has the War and everything that goes along with it, not merely the battles but the strategy, the philosophy, the honor, the cunning, the strings that must be pulled and the wheels that must be greased, the fronts that must be put up, the sacrifices that must be made, the beauty and the ugliness of it all.

From the age he Changed to the time he met her, Lukas could very honestly say everything he did, every last thing he did, was done with one eye on the War.

Danicka does not have the War. The War has her in some ways: through her mother, through her brother, through her father, through Lukas and Sam and the Circle, through all the Garou and kin who have ever been in her life, through the fact that she sometimes cannot walk through a park without being chased by Wyrm creatures. But she was not raised to be a warrior, or to take part in the War. She was, by all appearances, raised as breeding stock, as a caretaker, as a good little kin. She cooks well; she claims she can clean as well. There is much about her that is welcoming, that is warm, that is gentle.

And, let's be honest: few women have ever learned to submit so prettily as Danicka.

But the catch is, her submission -- her pliancy, her placidity, her downcast eyes and her carefully worded acquiescence -- these things are as much an act as the way she had fucked on her couch the night he told her to shut up, please just shut up and fuck him; as much a facade of social graces as her ability to enter an upscale restaurant without gawking, to reserve a thousand-dollar room on ten minutes' notice without balking.

It's simply a facade tuned to a different society; one far more brutish (though one might argue, not more vicious) than that of the New York glitterati. And for better or worse, Lukas has clued into this. Has intuited the secret depths behind the glassy calm through a series of conversations, interactions, copulations; had intuited it, perhaps, from that very first car ride where she answered every question exactly as a good little kin should; had intuited it from the time he shook her hand and asked her if she was propositioning him -- as a joke, though perhaps a challenging and not entirely kindspirited one -- and saw her reading him before she gave her answer.

He intuited it because he looked at her and thought: she can't possibly be this empty. No one so intriguing could be so empty.

I wouldn't be drawn to her, if she were so empty.

...which is the crux of the equation, in the end.

But not the whole of it. Because the point of this is: Danicka is born and bred to be breedingstock, but she is more than that, and because she is more than that, she has managed to wedge in her own life around the edges. She plays internet games. She has formed deep and abiding friendships with those with no default bond to her. She has had her summer nights in Louisiana, in the vast old estates within and without New Orleans where time flows slow as the water through the wetlands, and the evening gloaming goes on and on and the air fills with the heavy scent of magnolias in bloom. She has formed her attachments that ran, perhaps, deeper than friendships. She has a history.

He has had the War. Its lessons, its experiences -- all that is necessary to the War, directly or indirectly, martial or social or intellectual. But in the end, it amounts to no more or less than the War.

She has the lessons and the experiences of everything else.

--

In a way, these are some of the truths they offer to each other when they're not speaking. When they're not talking of specifics, of 9mm handguns and theurges that once beat her bloody and healed all the damage after. When they're like this, in a restaurant's bathroom or in a hotel or on her living room floor, they offer themselves to one another, they open up, mute and wordless.

They lay it out in the open, not the details of their past, no, but the echoes nevertheless: the consequences, the repercussions of their respective histories, the ripples of their past experiences cascading down into the present.

He gives her the scars on his body and what stories she might sense behind them.

She gives him hints of the scars in her past, that are not drawn on her body but flicker, sometimes, through her eyes, glimmer through in her actions. She gives him what stories he might sense behind those.

Perhaps that's why he's so hungry for her; why he fucks her with such unswerving passion and ferocity. If she were nothing but a body, nothing but an empty shell of beauty and breeding, he would still want her, but not like this. Not over and over, night after night. Not on his knees with her leg over his shoulder and her cunt on his mouth; not watching her face to see ecstasy break over her like a drowning wave while he pleasures her, tirelessly, taking her over and through her climax as he always does.

Not kissing her mouth in this bathroom or holding her while she cried against his skin in the Affinia or melting with her in a pitch-black bathtub until the water and their bodies equilibrated in temperature and he began to lose track of where his skin ended and hers began.

If there was nothing beneath, there would be nothing to glimpse and reach when she opens like this, and shatters like this. There would be nothing to be drawn to; nothing to protect; nothing to hold precious.

--

After, long after, when her muted whimpers and her ragged gasps have diminished to a slowing, quieting breathing, he slows to a stop at last. He closes his eyes, his mouth still open to her body, her wetness on his tongue and on his lips, on his face. His own breath is shuddering in his chest.

He turns to the side, slowly, and kisses her thigh as he had muffled his laughter against it earlier. He raises his chin and kisses her lower belly too, and then he lays his face against her body as though his shirt weren't open and his pants weren't pulled halfway down his thighs, as though he weren't hard as rock and aching to fuck, and he would be okay with it if she wanted to straighten her clothes now and go back out to her sea bass dinner. As though the point of this, all of this, was not to slake himself in her body so he could go back to the War focused and undistracted -- was not that but to please her.

[Danicka Musil] The longer Lukas knows Danicka and the more he learns about her, the more he realizes that her life has not been as charmed as people who know her may think. The rest of the Unbroken Circle, the rest of the Shadow Lords, even the Kin who might call her their friend, see her car and her clothes and her apartment and simply know that she is of a certain class of lady. Sam saw very little about her and decided that the way to her heart was the nice restaurant, the wine, the decadent dessert. He even wore a tie. She's unscarred, she's untested in battle, she's like a doll...and a rather breakable one.

He knows that when she was three years old, she saw her mother in crinos. He knows that at some point in her life there was a Theurge who did Gaia knows what to her and would heal her afterward. He knows that she believes she's capable of cruelty. He knows that her life has been difficult and even brutal but he doesn't have a distinct time frame for anything, doesn't know When or Who or even What, in most cases.

There's more to her than most people see. There's more to her than the other Shadow Lords in Chicago see, more to her than the rest of the Unbroken Circle can see, more to her than almost anyone who knows her or has known her has ever seen.

And then there's Lukas, who saw underneath all of that beautiful submission and the high-maintenance lifestyle and in a matter of seconds, in a dark nightclub with his Alpha's younger sister sitting between them, he was drawn to her even without knowing just what all lay under the surface. He's learning. Bit by bit he's finding out that he wasn't wrong that first night, or during that car ride to her apartment building with his packmate's scent all over her still, or the first time he kissed her.

He detached from his life after he Changed. There was nothing more to be done about it, really. Danicka has no such adolescent cut-off point. She has changed but not so thoroughly: her life was set when she was born and it was decreed that she was Kin, not Garou. Nothing about that has changed over the years.

He has had the War. She has had a life.

And now they both have this.

He knows her. He does not know everything about her or where she has been or what all she's done or who she has loved or been cruel to but when she dissolves like this under his touch or his tongue he knows her intimately. He knows the flavor of her reactions and the responsiveness of specific places on her body. He knows that even when she loses the ability to put words to how she is feeling, even when she has to bite into her hand to remain even remotely 'mute', Danicka is giving herself over to him.

She doesn't kiss, but she kisses him. She doesn't lay on her back, but she wraps her legs and arms around his body and pulls him over her. She doesn't tell anyone that she is falling for them, but she says it even when he wishes she wouldn't, even when she knows that it's not what he wants to hear, and he knows this for an honesty no one else seems able to get from her.

After crying out his name twice, Danicka silences herself, struggles not to make another sound even while her orgasm is shuddering through her, even while Lukas's tongue is still moving and she wants to swear and curse him for going on when she can barely stand what he's already done. She squirms and bucks and if she were not trying so hard to keep herself from falling and crashing to the ground she would kick the wall of the stall. She shivers as the breaking waves start to subside, her gasping turning to panting, his mouth wet on her thigh, on her belly. Danicka has been watching him throughout her climax, aching for him, marvelling at him, and only at the end does she tip her head back, rest it against the wall, and close her eyes to try and catch her breath.

"God, you're amazing," she breathes out, the whisper not even loud enough to echo off the tile. Her hand in his hair ceases gripping and strokes gently over his scalp, once or twice, before she starts to draw her leg back from over his shoulder, shakily but slowly so that when both her legs are under her again her knees don't buckle.

"C'mere," Danicka murmurs, her skirt falling back around her thighs and one of her hands going to the back of his neck, to massage, to rub muscles that are surely sore. Her eyes on him are drowsy, almost dreamy. "Stand up. Dovolte mi vás drží."

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] There's some indefinable difference between this and a date.

Well; no. There's a very definable difference: generally, high-maintenance girls, girls that look and act the way Danička does, don't let guys fuck them in the bathroom after appetizers.

But beyond that; it's something in the air between them. The way they both played their parts so damn well, so smoothly, so thoughtlessly. The way they both knew they were playing their parts, and the way they both knew something lay beneath.

It was in her leg tipping against his: gently, not seductively, familiarly. It was in their familiarity, their ease with one another.

It was also in the attraction between them. And the way they set up this rendezvous in a few questions back and forth, simple, without art or embellishment, without shame or censure.

Sometimes it's like ... they know each other. Like they've known each other far longer than a few weeks, plus a few years a long, long time ago.

And now she's telling him he's amazing, and he's opening his eyes to look up at her with that sort of self-deprecating humor, and in lieu of denying it or qualifying it or even thanking her for the compliment he kisses her again, his lips against her stomach just under her navel.

She's drawing her leg back over his shoulder and he's sitting back on his heels, his hands on her thighs until he's sure she won't collapse in a heap. She massages the origins of his trapezius muscle and he twists his neck beneath her hand, not to shake her off but to move to and with her touch.

Then he's getting to his feet, grabbing the rail behind her to haul himself up, and though his joints are stiff from kneeling nothing pops, nothing cracks; his motion is as smooth and sure as it ever is. Her soft, bright dress is falling back down around her thighs and he pulls his boxer briefs up, tucking himself up and to the side, beneath the waistband of his underwear. As he's doing this -- as he's rising to his feet, actually -- he catches her mouth on his and knows, even as she'd known he would lick her fingers clean, that she won't shy from this, either.

His hands slip around her waist. He draws her up and against him, his arms wrapped around the dip of her spine, the clasp solid, the wall of his body solid as well. Her dress is soft against his chest, but her skin, where it lays against his, is softer still.

Lukas has said nothing at all this whole time in the restroom, but now, when his mouth parts from hers and his cheek slides past hers, he exhales against her skin and murmurs in her ear, "...tak horké, Danička." His mouth against her neck, pressing. "Miluji způsob, jakým jste chuť."

[Danicka Musil] It says something, though damned if she knows what right now, that what launched them from semi-comfortably playing their roles on opposite sides of a white-clothed table was not her foot sliding up his calf or a purposeful touch of their hands to the side of water glasses. What led to Lukas calmly, lightly telling her to go to the bathroom and wait for him was the thoughtless comfort they have with each other at times, which seems to come out of nowhere and yet has a common root in who and what they are and how they have lived.

Often when two people are -- or can be -- as relaxed around one another as they are, when they can laugh with each other or eat heartily or swear at growling stomachs, there is a correlative lessening of the intensity of attraction. Familiarity breeds contempt, is how it's put. In their case, somehow, that same familiarity instead seems to ratchet up their arousal so fast and so powerfully it's like a hurricane hitting land. There's definite warmth between them, not just the heat of sex or appealing traits --

(One might like to narrow it to things like: Danicka likes muscles. Lukas likes lingerie. Danicka likes his Rage. Lukas likes her breeding. These might be true. They might be patently false. One could try to simplify it down to these things, to the color of her hair or the length of his cock or the size of her tits or the cost of his clothes and car, and it's not that these things make absolutely no difference or that there are not long lists of things they enjoy about one another...it's that there's so much more to it than that.

There has to be, or they would never have kissed, and she would never have said that she didn't want this to end and he would never have murmured into her chest that she was precious to him.)

-- but a genuine tenderness. Sometimes it is almost familial. Other times it is incredibly friendly. Then there are the times when that warmth is expressed and shared by things like Lukas getting onto his knees instead of on top of her, or by Danicka...

If you asked her, she would say she does not really do anything for him. That she does not show him much kindness, that she gives him very little. Asked a month ago she might have spoken differently but now -- and not just because he has given her a thorough and intense round of cunnilingus -- she would say that he shows her he cares, and that she herself is not ever doing the same.

She does not go out of her way to show him that she is thinking about him when he's gone. She knows that anything she says is suspect, because just about anything she says has at least a fifty-fifty chance of being untrue even when she tries her best. She knows that she only had to tell him once to be patient, and he was. There's really only one thing she's asked him for that he's denied to her.

No one is asking Danicka what the hell she thinks Lukas is getting out of this. At the moment she is smiling down at him as he flexes his neck under her hand, a glimmer of adoration that may or may not be induced simply by orgasm making the flecks of amber and gold in her eyes seem to sparkle. Her hand stays on his neck as he rises. Her eyes stay on his eyes as he stands. She only lets her eyes close for a second as they kiss, and she indeed does not pull away but seems to search after the kiss even when his lips leave hers, chasing her taste, or chasing his mouth, it's hard to know for sure what it is she wants.

Unless, in some way, he just knows.

She's noticed -- of course she's noticed -- that he's covered himself again, his pants still undone. Danicka's hand slides away from his neck as he wraps his arms around her. She wanted to hold him, and so as he pulls her close her arms are going around his shoulders, her head to the side of his head. With their heights so vastly different and standing up she can not -- and does not try to -- hold him in that soothing, cradling way she has sometimes. She just kisses him, pressing herself against his chest and stomach and standing on the tips of her toes so she can stay there.

What he says makes her shiver against her. She can feel him against her through two layers of fabric, hard and aching and wanting, and in response to that as much as his words, Danicka nuzzles him just under his ear, whispering: "...Don't you want to fuck me?"

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] Another woman might ask that to be a tease, or to be reassured: in short, for the sake of their own self-worth. The question What's wrong? might be implied in their tone. Another woman might rub her belly against him until they hear what they want, or pout if they don't, or ...

Lukas is a cynic when it comes to sex, and the relations between a man and a woman. He's been a cynic since he can remember, which isn't surprising. He's not a hound, nor a player, but he's fucked a lot of women, and he knows how easy it is. He knows in the end it's nothing but pheromones, nothing but chemistry, a touch and a word and the meeting of eyes coming together to trigger the molecular cascade that leads to arousal, to want, to a pair of panties around a pair of ankles and a face pressed against the bathroom wall.

He knows the stories they tell themselves before and after: oh, I've had too much to drink; oh, I usually don't do this; oh, I think you're really special; he knows the ones that need to be told they're beautiful, and the ones that need to be told they're loved, and the ones that need to be told they're sluts, and the ones that need to be told this isn't their responsibility, and the ones that need to be told this doesn't mean anything, or this means something, or --

And Lukas is not cruel, is never cruel to them before or after the fact. He's gentle before and he's gentle after; he smiles; sometimes he even tells them what they need to hear. But the act itself is a cold and meaningless business of thrusting and grinding, a purely physical release, and when it's over he doesn't believe a thing they say in the course of, and he knows they doesn't believe him either.

It doesn't even occur to Lukas that Danicka might want to be assured of her own desirability; of her own worth. It never once occurs to him.

Maybe that's why he replies without a second, without so much as a beat of pause or calculation:

"Až do nebe padá dolů."

And it's only after that he laughs -- wryly, at himself, and even when he bends to her she has to stand on her toes, except when he holds her like this, when his arms tighten like this he holds her up and against him, and her toes barely carry her weight at all.

"But," and there's a trace of gentle mockery in his tone now, "I'm not sure you can keep that mouth -- " and he interrupts himself to kiss her on that mouth " -- shut. And I've yet to be thrown out of a restaurant for indecent behavior."

[Danicka Musil] The tone of Danicka's voice was not one of concerned inquiry (What's wrong?), nor insecure wheedling for affirmation that yes, she's attractive and yes, he's kind of into her. If anything she sounded vaguely bewildered. Danicka knows that Lukas wants her. By now she sure as hell hopes that he knows she wants him, too. Badly. Often.

(Až do nebe padá dolů.)

She cannot think on her own of a reason why he has stopped, why he is shoving his erection into his underwear. Surely he can't think that since she's had an orgasm she's done with him. Danicka is...albeit mildly...confused when she asks him this question, nuzzling him in one of the softest spots she's found on his body.

The night they met she had not been drinking or taking anything, he had not been looking to do anything with her other than see what Gabriella was up to before going and finding himself a redhead, but it's entirely possible that had they met under other circumstances, if they were mortal versions of themselves or if they somehow just did not know what the other was, they would have ended up in SmartBar's women's restroom up against a wall, and Danicka would not have told him he was special or claimed that it was unusual behavior for her.

But given their respective pasts, though hers is still a barely-begun jigsaw puzzle to him and she seems able to infer quite a bit from very little from what she knows of his, it would not have been the strangest thing to see happen, if they'd fucked each other with the expectation of never seeing one another again.

Or he might have felt his control slipping out of his grasp, as he has before with her. Or she might have run her fingers into his hair and pressed her mouth to his, as she has with him. For all they know it might still have been earth-shakingly different from everyone else, all the same.

She smiles, softly, at the slightly poetic way he phrases his affirmative. It's amused and tender at once, and only grows when he laughs at himself. Her arms are still slung around him, her panties around his wrist still, his jeans pushed down still, her body throbbing in gently subsiding rolls of pleasure still. He teases her. She grins, that smile that is not a brilliant and societal flash but sort of...goofy, almost, the smile he's never seen on her face except when they're completely alone and she is more than a little relaxed.

"When I'm done talking, I'm going to count to five," she says slowly, and starts to lower her heels to the ground again, her arms loosening, "and if I'm not up against the wall, then we're going back to our table." Beat. "Though I won't blame you if you ask for the check as soon as we sit down."

She holds up her right hand, fingers splayed, and then folds in her thumb. One.

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] His eyes slide sideways to her hand counting one.[/] And then Lukas grins suddenly, a sudden flash of teeth, as white-hot as his eyes can be.

"You [i]are a bitch," he tells her, again, and still barely audible -- because it's bad enough if someone walks in right now and hears her talking about up against the wall, but it's worse if they hear the unmistakably lower, broader timbre of a man's voice as well. Two of her fingers have folded down now, and he turns his face without taking his eyes off her, and he kisses her fingertips, catches the tip of her pinky between his teeth as she counts to three.

Four and it's the end of his indecisions. He pushes his boxer briefs back down, and she never gets to count to five because he picks her up by the waist, and puts her back to the wall, and as she wraps her thighs around him his hands let go and she'll have to keep herself there while he fishes his wallet out of his pants, which are sagging down to his knees now, and he doesn't have enough hands to hold both his wallet and the condom and tear it open and roll it on by touch so he hands her the wallet, because if he had to wear her panties around his wrist then she could figure out what the fuck to do with his wallet.

He's so hot for her, so aroused, so fucking turned on that even rolling the condom on makes his eyes darken and his grin slip. And then he licks his lips, and then he's grabbing her skirt and tugging it up by the fistful, past her thighs, up her hips.

"I want you to know," he informs her, rather gravely, "that if we get caught, I'm going to blame it all on you." The thin dress with its stretch and its weight is slipping and sliding between them, a shifting fabric reality, but beneath it he can feel the heat of her pressed against him -- "I'm throwing you under the bus, Danička. No question... "

and then there's the hem, so suddenly, and after all, nothing, nothing at all, and his thoughts spiral away like blood in a whirlpool. His eyes unfocus; they darken and they flare, and he takes her by the hips and shifts her, or perhaps she shifts herself; one or the other takes his cock in hand and positions him, and she moves down, down, and as he's penetrating so slowly into her she can see how his brow flickers, and his teeth part; can hear the caught breath he draws in, and see the sparks that zing through his pupils; can almost read the thought skating singular and brilliant across his mind:

(oh, so good.)

-- before he's leaning across the gap to open his mouth to hers.

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] His eyes slide sideways to her hand counting one. And then Lukas grins suddenly, a sudden flash of teeth, as white-hot as his eyes can be.

"You are a bitch," he tells her, again, and still barely audible -- because it's bad enough if someone walks in right now and hears her talking about up against the wall, but it's worse if they hear the unmistakably lower, broader timbre of a man's voice as well. Two of her fingers have folded down now, and he turns his face without taking his eyes off her, and he kisses her fingertips, catches the tip of her pinky between his teeth as she counts to three.

Four and it's the end of his indecisions. He pushes his boxer briefs back down, and she never gets to count to five because he picks her up by the waist, and puts her back to the wall, and as she wraps her thighs around him his hands let go and she'll have to keep herself there while he fishes his wallet out of his pants, which are sagging down to his knees now, and he doesn't have enough hands to hold both his wallet and the condom and tear it open and roll it on by touch so he hands her the wallet, because if he had to wear her panties around his wrist then she could figure out what the fuck to do with his wallet.

He's so hot for her, so aroused, so fucking turned on that even rolling the condom on makes his eyes darken and his grin slip. And then he licks his lips, and then he's grabbing her skirt and tugging it up by the fistful, past her thighs, up her hips.

"I want you to know," he informs her, rather gravely, "that if we get caught, I'm going to blame it all on you." The thin dress with its stretch and its weight is slipping and sliding between them, a shifting fabric reality, but beneath it he can feel the heat of her pressed against him -- "I'm throwing you under the bus, Danička. No question... "

and then there's the hem, so suddenly, and after all, nothing, nothing at all, and his thoughts spiral away like blood in a whirlpool. His eyes unfocus; they darken and they flare, and he takes her by the hips and shifts her, or perhaps she shifts herself; one or the other takes his cock in hand and positions him, and she moves down, down, and as he's penetrating so slowly into her she can see how his brow flickers, and his teeth part; can hear the caught breath he draws in, and see the sparks that zing through his pupils; can almost read the thought skating singular and brilliant across his mind:

(oh, so good.)

-- before he's leaning across the gap to open his mouth to hers.

[Danicka Musil] At least one person out in the restaurant proper already knows that the occupants of table three are not outside taking emergency phone calls, or dodging the check for a meal that is sitting steaming on their plates uneaten, or for some reason decided to go piss at the same time leaving no one to watch their coats or Danicka's purse. The restaurant is not busy enough and not big enough that they will be able to get back to their table -- even within a few minutes of one another -- without at least a couple of eyebrows being raised.

Neither of them, apparently, give a fuck if eyebrows are lifted in their direction, or if strangers gossip about them. Danicka is freed from the city where everywhere she goes someone knows someone who knows someone that matters to her. She grins again when he calls her a bitch, darts forward to kiss the corner of his mouth when he bites her pinky, and a second later her feet are leaving the ground. Her legs wrap around his waist, knees pushing the flaps of his shirt back and her inner thighs sliding soft along his sides. Her hands are around him again, tightening to hold herself up, her thighs tensing as well.

He hands her his wallet. Danicka doesn't even pause for a second before putting the leather billfold in her mouth, biting down. So much for not trusting her to keep that mouth shut.

So when he informs her that he's going to blame her if they get caught, that he's going to throw her under the bus, she cannot answer verbally but just nods, her eyes twinkling with amusement. She rolls her hips to get closer to him, wriggling to aid him in getting her skirt up again, baring her lower half again, only this time it's not his fingers or his mouth but all of him. Her reaction is total: her arms sliding further around him as he moves into her and she moves onto him, her eyes flickering closed for a moment until she opens them and sees the way he's looking at her.

Danicka tilts her head to the side, to give his mouth somewhere to go, baring her throat to him and closing her eyes again. Oh, the things she would tell him right now, say to him, whisper in his ear. But she's keeping that mouth shut. Even if it means leaving teeth marks in his wallet.

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] And let's just be honest about it. This is not a long, slow, luxurious fuck. It was never going to be. This is not about enjoying one another's bodies in leisure

(though there was the oral, before this. there was him on his knees, getting a goddamn crick in his neck, holding her hips against him, outright encouraging her to grind her cunt into his face, tonguefucking her until she came, until she wanted to kick the stall dividers, until she wasn't sure she could stand steadily on both feet, let alone one. there was that.)

but about slaking a thirst, a hunger, a lust that began somehow over oysters and sashimi, over casual dinner conversation that was so deliberately and knowingly casual, because they both knew what the other is and isn't, and they both knew how to wear the mask and wear it so well, and they both knew it was just that.

A mask.

Because this is closer to who they are. This, the two of them in the handicapped stall of the tastefully appointed women's room, with his shirt open and his pants around his knees and her thighs around his hips and her arms around his shoulders; this, with his cock thrusting into her and her cunt slippery wet, tight and hot, gripping around him; this, with her teeth biting into his wallet to keep quiet and his mouth at her neck, at her cheek and her jawline and the side of her neck, with his hand pushing up until her hiked-up skirt to grab her hips and her waist, to pull at her lean back, her writhing thighs.

They fuck. If they were against the stall divider it would be shaking, all the stalls would be shaking under the force of this union, but they're not; they're against the wall, which is a bright and vivid orange, like spring, and he's not thinking she's like spring to him right now, and he's not even thinking he belongs here right now, because what he's thinking is

so good.
and
so hot.
and
so wet.

and she wants to hear him moan his pleasure into her ear, groan his sensation against her flesh, and it's questionable if he'll ever manage to let go enough for that, but in the meantime there's this: there's his hands grasping at her and his right hand coming up to stroke her hair back, to push her head back against the wall so he can put his mouth to her throat, so he can nip at the soft skin there, kiss along the axis of her collarbone, bite into her shoulder while he thinks gently and while he thinks oh my fucking god and

and then his hands are on her hips again and he tilts her against him, deepens his angle, and then he's murmuring in her ear, and his breath is catching in his throat on every thrust, and he tells her, tells her in a voice stripped to a husky shell of itself with want,

"Dotknout sami. Přál bych si, aby se dotknete sami."

[Danicka Musil] Well, they simply don't have time for a long, slow, luxurious fuck, do they? Danicka has sea bass waiting for her and it's going to get cold and Lukas's seared scallops are going to get cold and their sake is going to get warm and then where will they be? Reheating it at a hotel room's microwave, most likely, and that's just not the same. Danicka is not expecting -- maybe even not wanting -- anything but Lukas to fuck her up against the bathroom wall until he spends himself, until he comes, until he relieves the ache she could see in his eyes even when he was kissing her inner thigh.

Though she is most certainly enjoying his body, it doesn't need to be slow and decadent for that. It doesn't need to be gentle for that, or in public, or in her bed, or in a nice hotel or a seedy motel or in his car. What she hasn't said aloud is that she simply enjoys his body, even when it's just her legs slung over his lap on the couch or finding herself suddenly, unexpectedly comfortable with having him sleep at her back. The moon was thinner that night, though, and she was in her own home, her own bed, her own ...territory. Or when he's shaving while wearing a towel.

But that's listed under the category of things she would tell him if she didn't have a fucking wallet in her mouth to keep her quiet.

And then he tells her to touch herself, the wall bright and hot behind her and her eyes bright and her body hot and she moans against the leather between her teeth and shakes her head No. Her legs crossed behind his back pull him closer, pull him deeper, and her left hand reaches into his hair and holds on.

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] His eyes close for a blazing moment when her legs cross behind him, when her thighs squeeze his sides and pull him closer, and sometimes -- though he'd never tell her this, never be able to even find the words to tell her this -- sometimes he feels like she's pulling him into her, and he feels like if he just ... let go he would fall into her, and forget where their boundaries were, and forget how to draw apart from her, after.

His eyes close for a moment and she shakes her head and she puts her hand in his hair and her fingers close, and she holds on, and he loves this too, though he can't imagine why -- can't imagine why he'd like it when a woman grabbed him by the hair when anyone else, anyone else, would receive their retribution in cracked bones, rended flesh.

No; not a woman: Danička, and that makes all the difference.

And he's shifting against her, he's planting his feet apart and rocking into her, grinding into her; his hips are flexing against hers, sharply now, fast and hard, and his chest is pressing to hers through her dress, and when this is finished the bright yellow garment will be wrinkled, won't fall so easily, drape so well from her body. He's shifting against her and pulling her knees higher around his sides, around his ribs, and she has his goddamn wallet in her mouth and he can't even kiss her mouth so he licks her neck instead, sucks at her skin, and he says,

"Ano," and it's impossible to tell if this is a contradiction of the shake of her head or if he just means it as it is, yes, because it's good, it's so good, and he's been waiting four days or two months or allhisfuckinglife, and, "Udělej to pro mě, láska."

and the words are halfcoherent at best, really, because when he's like this he can barely think; when she does this to him he can barely think, and what thoughts he has in his head right now revolve around the way she looks with her hair loose or coming loose, her eyes almost black with want, and he can hear the muffled sound she makes in her throat, and suddenly, and incomprehensibly, he wishes they weren't in a goddamn public bathroom where she had to bite a wallet to keep her mouth shut; he wishes he'd never asked her to shut the fuck up and fuck him at all; he wishes she'd say all the things that rip him open, rend him apart, tear him down, burn him up.

"Přál bych si, aby jste došli," he bites the words into curve of her neck where it meets her shoulder; it's something between a demand and a plea. "Dotknout sami pro sebe."

[Danicka Musil] They both have always had -- until now -- very distinct internal boundaries. They'll fuck but they won't kiss. They'll fuck strangers but not their own kind. She has her home and he has his control and both keep getting compromised in some way. She lets him in further than she's let just about anyone in before, and even then there are walls that have not and might not ever come down. He lets go with her more than he could stand to do with anyone else, tolerates more from her than he ever thought he could stand, and yet with her he pushes for more.

In the way he angles her hips and thrusts into her faster, sliding out and then slamming back in, his chest pushed so hard against her that he can feel the lace of her bra through her dress and the weight of her flesh underneath that even though he can't see her and has not spared a hand to grab her dress and tug it down to bare her chest. Later.

As ever, Danicka is fucking him with an agility typically reserved for professionals, even while held up against the wall, crushed between his body and the shockingly orange surface behind her. One would think that after what happened at the Affinia she wouldn't want him like this, would equate fucking Lukas like this with pain or fear or shock, and yet: Danicka's hips roll and her hips thrust and she gasps around the leather wallet, her saliva and her teeth staining it as it stifles her cries for her. She bites down harder and he argues with her in incoherent gasps of his own.

Do it for him. Do it so he can watch her come -- again, she thinks in an unvoiced and dizzied groan, again, after he's already pleasured her to one orgasm -- do it for him.

Danicka moans against his wallet, muffled and restrained, and takes one arm from around his shoulders. She touches his chest and teases one of his nipples, rakes a slow line with her nails down his midline, grabs him at the waist to pull him into her before she reaches -- finally -- between her legs and starts playing with herself again, not slowly or tentatively but as fervently and eagerly as she had been when he first walked into the stall. A strangled cry dies in her throat at her first touch, because she's not throwing her head back but looking down between them, watching not only his cock stroking in and out of her but watching her fingertips rub her clit, and she bucks against him, hard.

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] The breath escaping him then is very nearly a groan. His brow furrows as though she'd denied him some pleasure, given him some pain, but they both know it's not that at all.

Sometimes the things she tells him hurts, he's said, because he knows it's the truth.

Sometimes the way she is with him, the way she fucks him, hurts. Not the way he's hurt her, physically, but in a deeper, subtler way -- an unwinding at the core, an undoing at the center, an unraveling he cannot stop. It's not just the tender moments but these, too, when her moans are muffled against her wallet but would otherwise be wild in the air; when she watches him fuck her and touches herself and she makes a sound like that, like that

(he thinks of her that night in her rooms: like that. just like that)

and he can't stop himself, he tears his wallet out of her mouth and throws it on the public bathroom floor, and she'll fucking think twice about putting it in her mouth again now, won't she, but it doesn't matter because he crushes his mouth to hers, he swallows her cries against his mouth like they were sustenance, like they were air, and he can feel her hand moving on herself, the residual echoes of it in her flesh against his flesh, and her knuckles rubbing against his lower abdomen as he fucks her, and then his hand opening over the juncture of her hip and her thigh, his thumb joining her fingertips over her clit.

He loves that she has no inhibitions when it comes to sex. That she has no shame, not because she has no self-worth and measures herself by how many men want her, but quite the opposite. She has no shame because she seems to see no reason for shame; she fucks men not because she needed them to want her but because she wants them, wants to, and while he resented her for fucking his packmate four times on a first date, while he lay on his couch and read his goddamn book and seethed on the inside and tried to tell himself he wasn't seething, tried to tell himself he was happy for Sam, tried to tell himself Sam deserved a little happiness, tried to tell himself he was okay and it didn't matter to him and he really, really didn't care --

while he did all this, and thought all this, and lied to himself through all that, the truth is

(mutable)

he loves her lack of inhibition, her unashamed comfort in her own body, her willingness to open herself to him, her courage and her willingness to just ...

let go. And fall.

And his mouth tears from hers now; he bows his head against her shoulder and he's fucking her so hard now that no one walking in the goddamn bathroom now would have any doubts whatsoever about the gasps coming from the stall at the end; no one would have any doubts about Danicka's half-stifled moans, and Lukas's harsh panting breath, and he watches the seam of their bodies, he watches his body slamming into hers with the sure smooth force of pistons in an engine, slides in a gun; with the sure smooth force of exactly what it is, his cock into her cunt, and then he closes his eyes and lifts his head a fraction of an angle, turns his mouth against her shoulder instead.

She can feel the muscles locking across his back, down his arms, across his chest. She can feel the rigidity lashing through him, unstoppable, a chain reaction that very nearly strips his control completely away for the space of a few instants.

When he comes into her he bites her, as he has before and likely will again -- doesn't break her skin but leaves an imprint of his teeth. His hands open over her ass and he grinds her against him, and this is rough, very nearly uncontrolled, and his breath rushes from him harsh and hot, so tattered at the edges it's nearly a groan.

He doesn't move for a few seconds. He keeps her close, keeps himself pressed into her, sucks one breath after another out of the air.

His mind is nothing but stars and galaxies again, constellations blow out into thin air. He can't even think; has no idea how it is he hasn't simply collapsed into a heap. He's leaning against her, heavily, panting, his hands are slowly loosening their grip on her flesh; slowly wrapping around her, around her, pulling her close.

[Danicka Musil] Normally, Danicka has a surreal level of self-control for someone who is so often so cowardly, so skittish. She can bite down on his wallet instead of screaming and she can -- with him inside of her, with her wanting him for nearly two goddamn weeks -- shift her hips and go through the motions of fucking him when she's a million miles away and he has to wonder how she can do that, how she can take herself so far out of his reach. Who taught her that, or where did she learn it?

That's the last thing on their minds. Danicka is all but choking on cries she can't let loose, arching her back and gritting her teeth into the leather, her body demanding that he fuck her harder, and now, and faster, not just because they have meals to get back to but because it's him and every single fucking time it's like one of them is about to die if they don't have each other. Lukas doesn't groan, though, and Danicka doesn't scream, even though she wants both of these things, and doesn't know what the fuck he wants other than to watch her fingers sliding slippery and deft between them.

When he rips the wallet from her teeth she goes for his mouth and eats at his lips and his tongue. Their mouths meet in the middle, in the air, clashing together like storms and opposing armies, both. She groans against his teeth and bites at his lips, her ass against the wall and in his hands, her shoulders scraping against the flat, brightly-painted surface. Her hand tightens so hard in his hair when he starts to play with her that it seems she might tear his hair right out of his scalp, and then

and then

he isn't quite thinking about that night where he listened to her whimper as his packmate's goddamned cock was inside her and she let out little cries in the language she knew he could understand, that Sam couldn't, as though she was calling to him even while fucking the Fenrir, thinking about him, and Gaia only knows what he was thinking about in the shower he took between seeing her walk into that bedroom and watching her walk out again. Danicka isn't thinking now about Sam but about how if he keeps this up she's going to come, she's going to come again and jezdí ní blázen.

So she lets out a barely-restrained shriek as he quickens his pace and increases the force of his thrusts. If she were screaming everyone within a half-mile radius, everyone in the restaurant would know that he's fucking her in here, he's fucking her like his life is about to end, and she's liking it. He's biting down on her shoulder when he comes and he's never done that before. He's kissed her hard and he's bitten her during sex but always gently, as though the word and concept itself is a mantra he sets to the rhythm of him fucking her or her riding him. Gently, gently, only...only not. At all.

Danicka squirms on Lukas's cock, swiveling her hips in a circle in welcome and in pleasure, hearing and feeling the intensity of his orgasm and losing herself so completely in the sound and sensation of it that she forgets what the hell her own hand is doing other than tangling with his where sweat and fluid and longing make them rub against one another. She is trying so hard to be quiet and not groan or gasp that as he goes still and begins pulling her closer to him he might not notice, not at first, but a few seconds in...

"Baby, I'm coming..." she whimpers in his hear, grinding against him even though he's gone rigid and still and spent. Her breath shudders out of her then shoots back in through her nostrils, her hips bucking. Danicka bites her lower lip and closes her eyes, writhing between his chest and the wall, and perhaps two...three seconds later she is letting her eyes roll back in her head, her back arched, her fingernails digging into him, her cunt clenching and tensing and spasming around him with her second orgasm in...what? Maybe five minutes? Ten?

Definitely a ten.

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] She doesn't ride him this time past his point of tolerance. She doesn't look at him with those eyes, that look in her eyes as if to warn him; she doesn't fuck him until he's literally writhing on his bed, literally gasping and panting and almost literally losing his mind. She doesn't do this -- she tells him what is happening to her, exactly what is happening, as if he wouldn't know from the way her breathing changes, the way her nails dig into his skin -- as if he wouldn't know from the sudden involuntary clenching of her body around his cock.

As if he wouldn't know the way he knows her, when they fuck like this.

And she doesn't drive him past tolerance this time; but he does. She's coming and he responds to her; he moves in her not to reassure himself that there's a division between them after all, that when this is over he'll still be himself and she'll still be her. Not for that. He moves in her to fuck her, because she's coming, and because as her back arches and she shudders into her orgasm he wants to ...

he doesn't even know what he wants. To make it good for her. To make her come -- harder. To see her lose herself in her orgasm. To feel her body bucking and jerking under his hands, against his body, on his cock, and it doesn't matter that he's hypersensitive, that the short, hard thrusts he gives her makes him gasp with mingled pleasure and overstimulation; that it makes his hands clutch her and his mouth open against her shoulder; that it makes his head snap back.

He can't manage more than three or four. On the last he buries himself in her again, he turns his face to her neck and he just holds her, he just holds her, as her orgasm rolls through and through her.

He thinks of waves coming into shore. He thinks of the ocean; the spring.

When her climax starts to let her go he moves again, gentler now; gently. The last of his pleasure is still echoing in him, a shadow of intensity. His hands spread over her skin. He holds her against him, loathe to let go even though he knows he should, even though he knows their entrees have almost certainly arrived by now, are almost certainly cooling on their table; even though he knows any minute now Therese or some other woman who might as well be Therese might come in here to relieve her bladder and relieve herself from the boredom of ... whatever.

They've barely undressed -- her panties around his wrist, his pants around his calves now; his shirt open. They've barely undressed but they've found as much of one another's skin as they possibly can, and her arms are under his shirt, and his are under her dress, pushing it up until the fabric stretches over his elbows; they've pressed as much of their skin together as they possibly can. There's sweat on their bodies; his hair is curling; his cheeks are flushed and her mouth is red with his furious kisses. He's panting and his heart is hammering, and if he walked out now the whole damn restaurant will know what he's been up to.

The truth is by the time they walk out they'll be collected again; they'll fix themselves up the best they can and their sheer confidence, the very fact that they are the beautiful people, they are wolves and wolf-kin amongst men, will carry them through any scrutiny. The truth is they'll probably sit down to their meals and take their damn time, and study the dessert menu, and finish their sake; but for now, for now, he can't seem to bring himself to start putting himself back together. He can't seem to bring himself to draw away from her.

[Danicka Musil] [Stamina]

[Danicka Musil] What he said that night in the motel had carried enough consideration that Danicka had inferred a great deal from Lukas saying something as simple as I would have thought you'd prefer something...nicer. As though he cared even then what she might prefer, at least after that first mindbending, world-shredding orgasm that only truly ended when she ran her fingers through his hair and assured him he was there, that only truly ended when he clung to her as though he could by force of want make her a part of his own body to stay there for eternity...or everlasting or whatever there was.

If they had just met in a club and he had danced with her and looked into her eyes and drawn her to him this would be different. If she had just dragged him by his belt into a stall and gone to her knees and sucked him off at least until he was hard enough to fuck her, really fuck her, this would be different. Maybe. There isn't a lot of softness or tenderness to the way they throw down together, most of the time. Maybe at the end of the night, maybe when they have nearly exhausted one another and are yet still reaching out for something, some sort of connection, or closeness, or something, even if they can't name it.

Later on she might think that this entire evening was surreal, not just sitting down to dine with him as though he isn't a werewolf and as though their waiter isn't scared of him as the moon waxes to and past half-full. The fact that he went to his knees and pleasured her as though her little cries were what he wanted. The fact that she had to all but give him an ultimatum: fuck her now or wait til they were in the car or in a hotel or somewhere she could safely scream. Later on she might think that she believed him when he half-groaned that he loves the way she tastes, and that may very well strike her.

But for now she is so drunk on him, on the sake, on what has become a series of orgasms, that it is all she can do to keep from crying out his name -- again -- as he strokes in and out of her a few more times, just to see what's going to happen to her, just to see how far he can push her over the brink, just to see her brows pull together and her lips purse while parted, just to see how far he can take her pleasure.

As it turns out he can take it quite far. She has lost consciousness from sex before but it has been partly because of hunger and exhaustion and stress and this time he can imagine that if she is stressed she's hiding it rather well: out in the restaurant she was eating his oysters and sashimi as though he'd ordered them with her, for both of them and not himself. She does not look or feel tired. She does not seem any thinner than usual, though arguably she is always a bit thinner than should be expected for someone of her height and frame. And yet.

Danicka bites down on her lip to keep from screaming, her eyes losing the world even though they retain a suddenly vivid, flashing green color. She ripples around him, wriggles against the wall, as though she's going to fight him but in actuality she's trying to keep him close, pull him closer. And her breaths are short and shallow and not at all what she needs right now. She does not, at least, slam her head back hard against the wall and knock herself out. She does, however, let her hand leave her clit to throw her arms tight around him and cling to him as she comes, as her orgasm rips through her like a physical and pleasurable Judgment Day, as she presses her mouth to his sweating flesh so that she won't. Fucking. Scream.

He thinks of the ocean, and he thinks of spring, and as though carried by his body and her orgasm the thoughts themselves unfurl in her mind like fireworks, and oh how she wishes she could tell him this epiphany but she can't find the words: they are what they want. Already. Here, now, apart from the true wheel of seasons or location on earth. Whatever it is, they already have it, but the thought is there and then torn away again because she is letting out one last, sharp whimper --

"Oh my god, oh Lukáš, oh mine, oh fuck..."

-- and with a faint swoon her eyes roll back and her head tilts forward and she very simply passes out against his shoulder from the sheer intensity of whatever the fuck they want to call this.

He moves gently. Danicka goes limp on and around him when her orgasm is finished with her, when it releases her and when she is left to fall back to earth she simply plummets, crashing into him. She is not thinking about sea bass or scallops or sake. She is not thinking at all. She's unconscious, however briefly, going limp in his arms. Maybe it was the effort of keeping that mouth shut. Or the strength of him against her, inside of her.

Or maybe -- maybe -- there is something he does to her that takes her far, far past what she knows most of the time. And four days is too long to go without it. Eleven days is too long. Two weeks is an eternity. Danicka's last thought is that she's going to die one of these days just because of what he does to her -- it's a surreal thought but she is fainting, so forgive her. Her first thought when, a few seconds later, she starts to come to, is that oh, Jesus, not again.

But for a few seconds she is limply holding onto him, her head resting on his shoulder as though she's asleep, and Spring and Therese and their seafood are a million miles away. When she does regain consciousness the first thing she really knows, before her own mind or name, is his warmth. And that's something. That's enough.

Her eyes, closed as soon as her head hit his shoulder, open again slowly.

"I don't want to eat here anymore," she confesses in one solid exhale of breath. "I want you to take me somewhere. Please, Lukáš. Prosím, vezmi mě."

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] It's not the first time she's passed out, and even when it was, Lukas hadn't panicked. Hadn't lost his head. He's not the sort to lose his head --

though by god he's lost his head over her, even if he's pretending he hasn't, even if he pretends so well that maybe, just maybe, even she can't really tell. He's lost his head and he's lost his grip on the solid earth and he's drifting out to sea, into gravity, and ...

-- and she's unconscious, and he's just holding her, and he's steady inside her, and he's stroking his hand over her back gently. When she comes to it's his warmth she knows first; and sometime after that, somewhere between his palm drifting up and down her back under her dress, and this time it's him telling her, "Já jsem tady. Jsem tady, láska."

She confesses she's done with dinner. He exhales; only the curl at the very end marks this as a species of laughter, and like so many others, it's more affection, more tenderness than humor.

Lukas shifts his balance a little. He shifts inside her, and then he's unwinding himself, sucking a slow breath in as he withdraws. He holds her until he's sure of her footing, and even after.

"I'll go take care of the check," quiet. "Meet me outside in five minutes."

He kisses her again, a brief meeting of mouths, not quite gentle. Then he takes a step back; strips the condom off and tosses it in the toilet bowl; wipes himself off with a handful of toilet paper. A muscle jumps in his jaw, sensitive still. The tissues join the condom in the bowl. He flushes it down while he's doing up his pants, buckling his belt, snapping his shirt shut one button at a time, swiftly.

When he's finished he looks at her with a small, wry grin. "How do I look?" he asks; there's a hint of play to this, because he knows what he looks like: a mess. Hectic, with his hair tugged awry by her hands, curling against his temples and his brow with sweat; with her wetness drying on his face, his cheeks still faintly flushed.

[Danicka Musil] Sometimes she wishes she could be honest with him. She is honest with him: she tells him things she wouldn't dare tell another soul, things she hasn't told another soul, taking refuge in the fact that he does not know the weight of her revelations. But sometimes, sometimes she wishes she could tell him that she lets herself go only because she trusts him. And that's what's sick, really: she trusts him enough to let go, and not enough to tell him: I trust you.

Danicka knows that people always and only believe what they want to believe. When Lukas railed at Sam that from the beginning he has only had the cold, hard truth? She knew then that the truth of the matter -- that she wanted him, that she would give herself over to him if he would just reach out to her -- was what he wanted, that he longed for it almost as badly as she did, if not just as much. And when he finally laid down with her and held her on his lap, hands on her hips moving her, watching her as she rode him, she knew.

But she does not know if she wants to believe that he cares for her the same way she cares for him, that he is upside down and inside out for her, that he does not quite know what to do with himself. So Danicka doesn't know, not for sure, that Lukas has lost his head.

What she knows when she wakes up, perhaps ten seconds after fainting in the first place, is that he is saying to her what she once said to him, and his shoulder is strong and warm and they're in a brightly lit bathroom that is almost hospital-clean and he is still inside of her, stroking her back and holding her up with his hips, and his hands. And she feels good there. They should leave, because all she wants is to lose herself completely with him and she can't do that in a restaurant's bathroom. They have to leave, and that means he has to pull out of her, but that doesn't stop Danicka from making a little noise of protest when he does so.

The heels and toes of her slouched-leather boots slowly float back to earth and set against the marble tile. Danicka blinks her eyes a few times and holds onto him to steady herself, then nods. She's trembling slightly, but not quite so powerfully as she has in the past. She looks at his chest, and then at him, and drowsily kisses him back, only asking after their lips have left each other: "Don't...if you...wait, who's going first?"

Give her some slack. She just passed out.

When Lukas explains to her what, exactly, he wants her to do, Danicka nods. She's very good at being obedient but this isn't quite the same. She's still leaning on him even though he's no longer holding her up. Her eyes flick down to his wrist when he asks her how he looks, all cleaned off and dressed and she just quirks an eyebrow up, looking from pale blue lace to his pale blue eyes. "Put those in your pocket," is the only advice she has for him, before she goes to unlock the door, to leave the stall, to wash her hands and look at herself in the mirror and settle herself into the reality:

That's me. And as soon as we get to a bed I'm going to fuck the shit out of that monster.

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] Lukas exhales a short, surprised laugh as she points out his 'bracelet'. He takes her panties off his wrist, slips the scrap of fabric into his pocket.

He can't seem to keep his hands -- or his mouth -- off her whenever he's in her presence like this; before he leaves the stall or she does, he catches her hand and tugs her back around, presses a final kiss to her lips before letting go. Then he retrieves his wallet from wherever it had slid after he threw it on the floor, puts it in his back pocket.

Lukas exits the bathroom the same way he'd entered it: certainly, without hesitating or cringing. He takes a detour to the men's room where he dashes cold water on his face, rolling his sleeves up to keep them dry; washes his hands. Dries off.

He rolls his cuffs down as he's shouldering out of the men's room, buttoning the snaps as he reenters the dining room. When he returns to their table, the entrees are waiting -- vast gleaming plates with a dollop of artistically arranged food in the center or along the axis; glaze or reduction sauce drizzled over scallops and sea bass, fresh flowers adorning the food. Their waiter sees him across the room and tries not to stare, flushing red when he's caught looking and beckoned over.

Lukas asks for the check. The waiter isn't even trying not to stare now. He inquires, hesitantly, if they wanted their order to-go after all; Lukas snags up a menu from an adjoining table and glances at the dessert list, and they don't have fried bananas, but they do have banana-coconut tiramisu; so yes, he'll take the order boxed up, plus two portions of banana-coconut tiramisu on the side.

It's a little over five minutes before Lukas joins Danicka in the anteroom, coat thrown on, stiff white plastic bag in hand with four boxes inside. The rain has gone from a drizzle to a steady fall, and she has an umbrella but he doesn't, so he borrows it, opens it over them, laughs under his breath at the cheery blue sky he finds on the inside, and gives her the crook of his umbrella-bearing arm.

"Where's your car?" He asked her this the last time they left a restaurant together, too. That was wildly different from this; this is a casual, curious question, and there's no thought, no strategy, no calculation behind it.

[Danicka Musil] She walks to the sinks; Lukas walks out of the bathroom behind her. She watches him leave in the reflection and only smiles when the door swings closed behind him.

Danicka reaches up to gently arrange her hair so that it does not look like she just had a pair of orgasms against a bathroom wall. Her purse is still beside her chair at their table and she did not bring any lipgloss into the restroom with her; she runs the tip of her pinky along the edges of her lips to double-check for any smears. She washes her hands, thinking only there goes her taste, there goes the scent and sensation of what the fuck they just did to each other.

When she leaves, she goes towards the front of the restaurant, trusting Lukas to grab her coat for her. It's cold and it's wet outside but she steps onto the sidewalk, nothing more than a faint shiver going up her arms and back. Her arms are bare and slowly ripple with goosebumps, but she simultaneously revels in the rush of cool air that slips up her skirt and across her bared, still wet skin. She smiles to herself and steps out a bit further into the rain. By the time they have boxed up her and Lukas's food her hair is considerably wet. By the time Lukas gets outside most of the bodice of her dress is clinging to her shoulders and chest.

She looks over her shoulder at him when he steps out, bearing her coat, her purse, the bag of food. Her umbrella is coming out of the side pocket, and her expression flashes into a grin. She takes her purse and trench from him, stepping underneath the opening umbrella to wrap her arm around his offered elbow. She stands at his side and beams up at him, her coat folded over her arm and her purse held in her free hand.

"I took the subway," she answers, which does not answer the question he actually voiced. Her car is in the parking garage underneath Kingsbury Plaza.

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] There's something to be said for a woman who knows how to behave in a white-tablecloth restaurant; who knows how to behave in a new-american fusion restaurant; who lives in a tower of glass and concrete; who fucks in a bathroom; who'll stand in the rain, afterward, and get drenched even though she has an umbrella in her bag.

There's something to be said, and it boils down to: she's Danicka, and no other.

He doesn't bother with the umbrella after all. There doesn't seem to be any point; it was for her that he would've put it up, not for himself, and she's demonstrated she doesn't mind the rain. At all. She doesn't want to put her coat on either, so he just hands it to her with a quirk of a grin when she holds her hand out.

Lukas doesn't ask her why the hell she stood in the rain and got herself drenched. He doesn't ask why she took the El, either. He does offer his arm after all, not because it's the right thing to do in this sort of situation but because he wants to.

It doesn't matter that she's damp and her dress is clammy. He's getting damp and clammy too. Rain patters down on his plastic bag, and he nods southward.

"I'm parked about a block and a half over."

Once they're off North Ave, leaving the main corridor of Milwaukee behind, the area deteriorates quickly. The brownstones aren't artfully dilapidated anymore; they simply are dilapidated. There's a lot more graffiti on the walls, trash piled on the streets. Lukas doesn't rush on account of the surroundings or the rain; he doesn't dawdle either. It's the same pace he always has, purposeful, and there is this to be said for rage and the Curse: it sure as hell beats a can of mace in the handbag when it comes to keeping one safe in dangerous areas late at night.

When they get to the car his hair is wet enough that it no longer curls. The shoulders of his leather jacket are slick with rain; it's beaded on the front, on the sleeves, on his face, and his jeans are darkened.

The MKZ is unharassed, the tires unslashed and the windows unsmashed. In front of it is a BMW; behind it is a Lexus. A curiosity of hot nightspots in shady areas of town: expensive cars on cheap streets. The lights flash as he comes up on it, and he hands her into the passenger's seat, shuts the door before circling around the back to get in the driver's.

They can smell the food in the enclosed space once the doors are closed. Lukas realizes he's actually worked up an appetite. He's famished. He starts the engine, checks over his shoulder, pulls away from the curb. This is the third time she's been in his car with him, the fourth time she's been in his car, period. The radio is off, and he turns the windshield wipers on, the blades flashing in the streetlights as it sweeps rain from glass. He thumbs down his window, and the night wind eddies through the cabin as he picks up speed.

"Do you want me to take you home?" he asks; it seems whichever way she answers, they're heading in the same direction. "Or to a hotel?"

[Danicka Musil] So by the time they get down the street to Lukas's car, Danicka's hair is not just damp but very wet indeed, enough to drip. Her dress clings to her upper body and hips, the swishing skirt the last to fall, pressed against her thighs. The fabric is heavy enough that it does not turn transparent, but wherever they end up he will be literally peeling it off of her. She doesn't drape her coat over her body at any point during the walk, but walks very close to him. This necessitates a lengthening of her stride and a shortening of his, but they manage just fine, just as they manage kissing while standing up even though he is over half a foot taller than she is, even in the heels she has on tonight.

One of the reasons she walks close is simply that he is very warm, even through the layers of his clothes and coat, even in the rain. She turns her face towards his bicep as they are walking, as the buildings get more and more rundown and the already dark night gets darker and colder around them. She doesn't do this in fear or wariness or even because of the chill. Danicka just turns her face to him, inhales the scent of him that lingers on the fabric he wears, her eyes briefly closing for a few steps before she faces forward again.

Standing by the passenger side door of the MKZ, Danicka pauses to gather up the excess fabric of her skirt, wringing it out with a laugh. It means that for a moment her skirt is mini, for a moment her thighs flash into view but not all the way up. She does it as shamelessly as a child, but also with the knowledge that he has her underwear burning a hole in his pocket, that there is nothing else underneath that skirt. She lets it fall again after getting as much water as she can out of the fabric and climbs into the car, her hair pulled over her front, her bag at her feet and her coat over her lap.

She turns to look at him when he gets in, tipping her head curiously to the side as he cracks the window. But she doesn't ask why. There's a strange pause between his question and her answer:

"A hotel."

Beat. "Why do I smell bananas?"

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] They're in a car; it's nighttime; he looks straight ahead and his profile is a thing of angles and planes, dark, dominated by a sharply cut brow and a strong nose that both he and Anezka inherited from their father. For a moment he's concentrating on getting through a sweeping left turn and time could've slipped backwards. This could be the very first car ride. He could be taking her home, after all.

But he's not. And it's not. And when they're on a straightaway again he glances a smile her way.

"Tiramisu," he replies. "No crispy fried bananas. You don't need to change the subject, Danička. I don't mind."

This is Milwaukee, one of the major radial arteries fanning out from the center of the city. It'll lead them right back to the Loop, to the Mile; it might even pass by, or very close to, 520 Kingsbury.

[Danicka Musil] On their very first car ride it was colder. It was not raining. Danicka was warm and dry and her dress shimmered; silk. And he tried to hate her, or keep her at arm's length, and she saw right through him. She knew that when she went into the bedroom he had not been happy for Sam. Danicka did not know if he really wanted her then or if he was just the jealous sort, if there was something going on between the packmates that she didn't know about.

But she had a feeling. And as she unzipped her dress and showered Sam's scent off of her and her own sweat, she did not keep going back to how the Fenrir had kissed her navel or the way he cried her name -- mispronouncing it -- the first time he came.

Hot water running down her body, she'd thought about Lukas sitting on the sectional couch reading his book ('Lying Awake') and the way his eyes had flicked up and then down again. The way she had looked past Sam and wanted to go the other Ahroun, not to climb into his lap or shove her tongue in his mouth but to curl up at his side and read over his shoulder, and how she'd thought at the time that this made no sense, this was not usually what she wanted from men or women or anyone. She did not recognize it for attraction until several minutes later when the door closed behind her and it was beyond, beyond too late then. And it was not until weeks after that she understood what it was she'd felt then in the context of the strangely familiar comfort she has with Lukas.

In the shower before she went to bed, she'd thought about him, not to touch herself to but to muse over him.

Intrigued. Drawn to. Words he's used about her. Words she can apply to her thoughts on him in hindsight.

Tiramisu. She smiles at him, and then it fades as he tells her she doesn't have to change the subject. "I really wasn't," she says, a little lower than her usual speaking voice.

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] Driving, he doesn't have time to examine the fading smile; the expression which follows. He glances at her, once, and then again -- a slightly longer regard that he chances because the street ahead is empty and the lights are all green.

Chicago is very flat, very broad. They can look down the length of the street almost to the heart of the city itself -- though just before it would transect the river, Milwaukee hangs a right and cuts off their corridor of vision. Behind that turn, buildings rise higher and higher, and across the river the skyscrapers on the Loop glitters on a Thursday night.

"Okay," he says. It's quiet. After a moment's thought: "I misunderstood."

[Danicka Musil] The two of them have had truly epic misunderstandings in the past. Some of their best arguments have come from one just completely misreading the other. Usually this is Lukas not understanding Danicka, but even that can't be pinned solely on him: he cannot read her most of the time not just because of a lack of personal talent in doing so but because she is so very, very good at concealing whatever it is she feels. She does it unconsciously sometimes, even.

Such as now. Instead of frowning at him, or telling him that he's said something that hurt her -- albeit mildly -- Danicka gives Lukas only the barest of hints. But even that is a sign of progress: she does not try to completely hide it. And he, instead of getting angry with her for not giving him more to go on, just thinks for a moment before replying.

Danicka reaches across the middle of the car and lays her left hand on top of his right leg for a moment. It isn't much, and she doesn't rub his thigh or squeeze him, doesn't give him a condescending pat. She just lets her hand rest on top of his slacks for a moment, looking at him. One corner of her mouth pulls up in an expression that is not so much a smile as silent communication.

It's no big deal.

And it's okay.

She glances out the window, then back to him. Her hand stays where it is. After a moment, she says (sounding almost awkward, of all things): "I didn't mean to...rush you out of there. It was...nice. Being there with you."

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] Lukas drives with one hand on the wheel, most times. It's not negligence; it's simply yet another sort of confidence, a sort of understated certainty in his own skill and ability. It's his left hand on the wheel, gripping through the bottom rim, and his right elbow is propped on the center divide.

When she reaches across to lay her hand on his leg, his right hand turns over. He cups her elbow in his palm, gently, and it's nothing more than a reciprocal touch; an answer that's a little better than the brief glance he can give her back when she looks at him.

She tells him it was nice. He looks at her again, just as briefly. His eyebrows are straight and dark, and one quirks up. As though somehow connected, the same corner of his mouth turns up. He returns his attention to the street.

"It's still nice," he replies, simply. And then the smile returns, a little more private, as though he were savoring his own little amusement. After a moment he shares it with her: "Where we are doesn't make any difference."

[Danicka Musil] This is nothing at all like the first drive they took together, and not like the drive where he found her drunk outside a restaurant and took her home. It's not even like the time she got her bag from her own car and then got right back into his to go to the W with him. This is the first time they've ever been comfortable with one another on a drive, and yet it seems as though they have never been anything but.

Which is probably part of the reason why she smiles the way she does when he touches her elbow, just to touch her, because he cannot give her eye contact for more than the briefest of moments. This time, her hand squeezes gently, as though answering a question, and the answer is, of course

Ano, moje láska.

Then he smiles. And repeats back to her a paraphrase of something she said what seems like ages ago. Danicka grins, quirkly and brightly, her hair twisted into damp dreadlocks, her nipples most definitely pressing through wet lace and wet cotton because it is nowhere near warm enough in the car to offset walking through cold rain for as long as she did. She doesn't quite laugh, but that grin is very close.

=========

When they get to...wherever it is they're going...that is when Danicka decides to put on her coat, as soon as she gets out of the car. It is relatively dry, and once she wraps it around herself and ties the belt off it is not obvious that she is completely drenched. Just her hair, slightly finger-combed but still a thorough mess, but she doesn't seem to care. Her bag goes over her forearm.

That smile is still on her face.

She can't seem to do anything about it. Or doesn't care to.

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] For a while it seems very much like he's heading to her apartment building after all, but a few blocks before Grand Ave and the bridge that will take them over the river to the foot of her highrise he takes a left on Chicago.

They end up in on the Mile instead, pulling up in front of the Omni Chicago. Yet another four-star establishment; yet another bill he could afford ... but certainly not too often, and not indefinitely. He might have any number of reasons for bringing her here rather than some quiet little inn somewhere, clean but shabby. To impress her is not one of them, and because they were still pretending to be human versions of themselves is not one of them either.

Perhaps because she is, in fact, soaked through and not wearing any underwear besides, Lukas doesn't pull up to the front door. He drives directly to the parking lot. Parks himself. She's out of the car before he can open her door. He's not disappointed by this, and nor did he rush to beat her to it, but if she had waited for him to do so she can be quite certain that he wouldn't have let her down. She puts her trenchcoat on and he gets the food out of the back seat, and then they're shutting doors and locking the car and her heels are clicking a cadence across the lot as they circle around to the front of the hotel and the doormen are sweeping the glass panes open.

She's still smiling and he looks at her as they step out of the damp cold into the dry warmth, and the light catches in her rain-twisted hair and in her eyes, and then he's smiling back, a sudden widening grin, and he reaches out to catch her hand.

Lukas realizes, somewhat surprised, that he's happy -- not merely content or pleased but happy, and this is a rare thing for him. Which is not to say he's a pitiful, cringing, sniveling creature normally, nor even particularly dour. But he is serious, and he tends to measure things by their long-term importance and necessity, not their short-term appeal. Happiness is rarely even on his map as something worth striving for. It is not a necessity, and therefore not important.

He lets go her hand as they're coming up to the check-in desk. The credit card he hands over is the same American Express he left at the Brasserie Jo the other night -- he must've gotten it back after all. A signature, a pair of keycards handed over, a well-wishing for a goodnight, and then he's rejoining Danicka on the way to the elevators, his hand touching briefly at her back as they cross the lobby with its lights and chandeliers, its gleaming floors.

[Danicka Musil] At no point on the drive to the Omni does Danicka think that Lukas has just ignored her and is going to her place anyway. Not that she would put this past him, but he asked. She did not come right out and say that she would prefer it, did not offer a reason to go to a hotel instead of her apartment: he asked. And so she believes that they're going somewhere along the Mile, somewhere of the class they have been seeking since that first night at the motel.

Near 'Spring' there were a couple of bed and breakfast establishments, warm and cozy but not quite so impersonal as the hotels, not quite so private somehow. Privacy matters to them both. It shows in how he parks away from the front door, even though this means they need to walk in the rain a bit, because her dress is leaving almost nothing to the imagination at this point.

Her bag is, he may or may not have noticed, the same one she brought to the Brotherhood that one night, the night he quipped a question at her about if she was moving in.

Danicka gets a handle on her smile as they go through the lobby. She would rather not be grinning like an idiot, like a virgin, like a high schooler sneaking out to a hotel with an older boyfriend. Except she's the older of the two of them. She looks at him with that smile on her face as they walk through the doors and as he takes her hand with that smile on his face and her heart suddenly thuds so hard that she wonders if he can feel it through her palm, through her fingertips.

She takes a breath and calms her smile and lets go of his hand when they check in. She walks towards the elevators with him without complaint, without giving any signal that walking around in a soaking wet dress under a semi-dry trenchcoat has started to become rather uncomfortable. Normally when they walk into a hotel like this they look the part. At least she can blame her state on the rain outside.

The bright doors of the elevator slide closed after them. It's getting very near midnight, and on a Thursday evening the hotel is quiet and still. When the doors close and the elevator starts to lift, Danicka shifts her purse, turns to face Lukas, and wraps her arms around his waist. She does not bury her face in his chest, or grin at him, or hug him as tightly as she can. She just holds him, as she said she wanted to in the women's restroom at the restaurant they just left.

She isn't trying to kiss him, or press her body to his, or squeal in a girlish display of glee. She just holds him, and looks at him, smiling but with a quieter version of the delight she showed at the doors. Her lips part, though, and even though no sound comes out, he'll have no trouble understanding what she mouths to him:

I'm happy.

As though she doesn't even dare say it aloud.

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] They have the elevator to themselves. It's one of six, and the guests are sparse at this hour, this time of day, and once the doors are shut and they're on their way up to the 20-somethingth floor, because Lukas had asked for a high floor, because Lukas likes the heights.

No surprise. Look at his totem. Look at his tribe. Look at his blood and his breeding and his bearing: he was made for the sky.

Danicka comes across the elevator to him, then, and he's leaning against the wall, one foot tipped back on its toe, but as she wraps her arms around him he shifts his balance, extends his feet to either side of hers -- gives her room against him. His hands come to her face, large and warm, and though he's nearly as damp as she is, his innate heat is unabated.

He's smiling at her, crookedly, affectionately, and then she mouths to him that she's happy. His smile changes; there's something a little like a wince at the edges of it. His eyes change too, and he looks at her as though he were seeing her anew, and then thinks of the night at the Brotherhood, long before he ever touched her and she ever kissed him, when she came out of the spare room with Sam and found them all wrestling on the floor.

He thinks of her clapping her hands over her mouth to stifle her laughter.

One and then the other, his hands stroke back her hair. Lukas kisses the center of her brow, tenderly, and then he wraps his free arm around her shoulders; he tightens their embrace by a few notches, until she feels his voice in his chest as much as she hears it.

"No one's going to ...hurt you for being happy, Danička."

[Danicka Musil] She would have added:

Look at his eyes.

It's almost as though Danicka expects the room to be made for her, that she will have a space to rest against the front of him, as though...

Well, he's never told her that she belongs there when she is riding him, or when she is kissing him. Or when he held her from behind as they slept, the first time she drifted off with him at her back rather than somewhere she could see him.

But that does not mean she does not have a space that seems made for her, created for her, when she leans against him. Danicka smiles, and where another woman might drop her eyes shyly when he cups her face in his hands, she just...glows. Her eyes soften, her smile gentles. And if she hadn't silently whispered to him how she feels right now, that the dinner and the sex and walking in the rain and just being with him have made her happy --

if she hadn't mouthed it as though being happy is some sort of crime to atone for, something to hide or be sorry for --

then they would have kissed, and gone on kissing until the elevator stopped the the doors opened again. They would have kissed until he obviated the traces of chill on her skin, kissed until hands were pulling at coats and until her breath caught in her throat. But instead, she tells him she's happy, and it seems to lessen his own by a degree.

As he pushes her hair back and kisses her forehead, Danicka's smile falters with a flash of wariness, as fast across her eyes as a silvery fish darting under the surface of night waters, barely reflecting the shattered moonlight. It's a mask, that her smile still stays in place at all when she sees the edges of his smile seem more like a wince than anything else. He doesn't see even that; he wraps her up closer to him, and she eases into letting him hold her with a slowness that no one else would ever notice, because no one else would ever have felt the way she flows so easily into his arms sometimes.

She can't explain to him why she is on her guard now, or how hard it is for her to fight those walls coming up when they, suddenly, are making her feel safer than anything he could have a hope of offering her right now. She closes her eyes and lays her head on his chest; the elevator doors open at their floor, and she starts to step backwards, slipping away to go out into the hall.

"I know," she says simply, as though this assurance of his is a foregone conclusion. If she is defensive, it isn't showing in her eyes, in the way she smiles at him, in the way she backs out of the elevator as though to draw him after her, take him with her.

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] And that's how shortlived that happiness was. It's flawed now, chipped and chinked, though she's still smiling. She's still smiling, but he's not, or he barely is -- he's watching her, and she's backing away from him, and he straightens up and follows.

The elevator doors sweep shut behind them. Their clothes are still wet, though at least he had the protection of his coat. He shifts the bag of food to his left hand, his off hand, holds the door keycard in his right.

When he catches up to her he has no hand free to touch her. So he watches her a beat longer instead, watches her instead of where he's going, but of course Lukas is far too sure in his own skin to ever do anything so graceless as run into a wall.

Their room is at the end of the hall. The Omni is a suites-only hotel, and if the Affinia had much in common with Spring in its simplicity and its modernity, the Omni has much in common with the Brasserie: more opulent, more classical.

When the door shuts the silence is quite absolute. He sets the food on the dinner table and the keycards beside it; doffs his damp coat over one of the dining chairs.

Suddenly: "I wish ... "

-- and just as suddenly it simply fizzles; trails off. He doesn't know how to complete that sentence. The things he wishes, and wants, are impossible to put into words. Are impossible. He's looking down at what his hands are doing, and what they're doing, almost of their own accord, is unpacking the food.

He stops. His hands pause on the clean white boxes, and then he looks at her, his brow faintly, faintly furrowed.

"I would protect you." This is far, far from the first time he's thought this; it's the first time he's said it aloud, and the only reason he's said it at all is because of all the things he could possibly say now, this is perhaps closest to what spurred him to begin a wish he couldn't finish, "I wish I could."

[Danicka Musil] They have had their moments, though there is at least one night when they were happy together that Danicka has almost no memory of. She knows that she got drunk. She knows she saw Lukas sometime between getting drunk and waking up the next morning. She knows that the next time she saw him it was...tense. And he had been angry with her and did not want to fuck her out of anger.

That's all she remembers. Not calling him her boyfriend, not gently rearranging his arm to twine with hers, not the way he had to look off to the side to hide just how pleased he was that while not the first Garou she's taken to bed, the first that she's...

...been with more than one night? Been loyal to?

Fallen for?

But she doesn't remember saying any of that to him, or what he said back. All she remembers is that upon waking the next day she had a vague recollection of seeing him, and she was home safely, and she figured that he had something to do with that.

They walk down the hall, not touching and not speaking. Lukas unlocks the door and leads them in, and Danicka is working her trenchcoat off of her shoulders and arms before the door has closed behind them once again. She is reaching for the hem of her dress when he says

I wish

which makes her pause, and look over at him, half-bent at the waist. Danicka remains still for a moment, and in that moment he does not finish the sentence, the wish. So his hands begin going through the motions of unpacking the bag to get out the food that they ordered before, that they wanted, that they were hungry for.

While he is doing that, in a span of seconds where she figures he has given up finishing that thought, Danicka bends again, takes hold of the hem of her dress, and unceremoniously pulls it up. It peels away from her thighs and hips, pulling away from her belly like a second skin being removed. She arches her back as she tugs the dress up over her chest and head and then off completely, leaving her in a bra of pale blue lace that matches the pair of underwear in his pocket. And her boots.

The dress in her hands drips a few times onto the carpet. She would take it to the bathroom to hang it up but then Lukas tells her what he's only ever thought before. Danicka takes this in, and then licks her lips in thought, and answers:

"I think everybody feels that way...when they care about someone." She leaves that there, blinks her eyes once, and then shrugs one slim, pale, now bare shoulder. "At least to some degree."

The way she says it is almost academic, even if gentle. She turns to walk to the bathroom of the suite. There's a wet slap of fabric against itself as she hangs the dress over the shower bar, but she comes right back, naked but for boots and bra, pushing her fingers into her hair and looking over at him.

"Svléknout pro mě."

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] Or -- well. Lukas is looking at her until she strips the dress off her body. It's sodden through; it was wet enough that when she wrung it out by his car and her legs were bare underneath, and everything else was bare too, and he knew that because her panties were in his pocket, and --

it's sodden through, and it sticks to her, peels off of her, leaves a cold dampness to her skin that he knows would be there without having to touch her. And he looks away, looks down at the food that he's unboxing now.

Perhaps he should be wounded that the truth that took him so damn long to spit out has been explained away as everybody feels that way. Perhaps he would be, except --

"I can't think when you do that," he says, when she comes back, and she hasn't bothered to throw even one of the hotel's waffled cotton robes on. And she's not intending to either, because she tells him what she tells him, and he lays his hands down on the table, tented, fingertips against the wood.

And looks at her.
And looks at her.

And closes his eyes, doesn't lower his head or turn away, just closes his eyes. She can see him swallowing, can see his brow furrowing with concentration.

He says, "What I meant was, I wish I could show you I am -- this is -- different from whatever happened before."

[Danicka Musil] If she were being coy, or trying to derail this conversation for the sake of not having to speak to him, Danicka would have not paused just outside the bathroom to tell him -- ask him -- to undress. She would have crossed the room and touched him. Or gone to the enormous, decadent bed they have essentially rented for the night and bent over the edge of it without so much as a word, and they both know what happened the last time she did that.

Danicka is not trying to be coy. She is trying to avoid getting a full-body rash by wearing that wet dress around the hotel room. Her bag is sitting on a chair and surely there are clothes in it, it's big enough, but she didn't grab a robe and she isn't going to get changed and she has not even taken off her boots because she knows what the fuck seeing her like this is going to do to him.

Her motivation, however, isn't really about trying to get him to drop it.

And she didn't tell him that to dismiss him, or explain how he feels away. If anything it was...well, he doesn't look or seem wounded, and she assumes he understood her perfectly, so Danicka doesn't try to give him a sense of what she meant by that. He looks at her, looks deeply and silently and for several protracted seconds, until he closes his eyes.

While they're closed, the heels of her boots thud muffled and almost soundless against the carpet, more like tremors of motion coming towards him. She doesn't touch him, except to reach over and push a lock of wet hair off his forehead and tuck it behind his ear, but she's right there, nearly naked and yet not, yet right on the verge, just as he is, even after having her in the bathroom.

"What do you think happened before, Lukášek?" she asks quietly. And then checks herself, her fingers stilling and then pulling away. If he opens his eyes now he'll see a vaguely pained expression on her face, one of clear apology and less clear consideration. Danicka's brow furrows. "You are different to me," she says, no less quiet but somehow far more honest and therefore more painful to say, more painful to hear. "I thought...you understood that."

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] It's instinct, how he turns toward her touch. The turn of his head is slight but unmistakable. He doesn't open his eyes until she tells him he is different, but when she does his eyes open immediately, and they meet hers as unerringly as if he'd been able to see her even with his eye shut.

And in a way, he can. He can infer her position from the touch of her; from the sound and the smell of her. He can almost imagine the expression on her face before he sees it.

"I know that," he says, quietly but absolutely. "That wasn't what I meant."

[Danicka Musil] Her hand, drawn back towards herself, goes to his collar instead of behind her back or the strap over her shoulder. She meets his eyes, and they're close enough -- so close -- that she can feel his breath, and feel his heat, and she focuses on that as she starts to push his jacket off his shoulders.

Every single time it happens that he moves towards her like that, seeks her like she's sunlight, or air, or something so vital to him that he cannot help be pulled physically towards it, it makes her ache a little. She doesn't even know whether to call it lust or fear or something else, but she knows it is a part of why this is so compelling, why she can't bring herself to end it even when she continues to remember or think of reasons why she should.

"Tell me what you meant, then," she says kindly.

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] Lukas has to take a breath then, so deep that his shoulder rises against the side of her hand.

"I don't know what I mean, Danička."

And he catches her hand, he takes it from his shoulder, from beneath his coat, and he presses it furiously to his mouth as though this were a dam breaking, and he's been holding this back for longer than he can remember.

He shrugs out of his jacket, lets it fall to the floor. It's heavy, makes a muffled noise when it collapses on itself, and he presses her hand to his chest now, he presses the heel of her hand to his heartbeat.

It's racing, that pulse. And he holds her hand against it, because if he doesn't hold her hand still she'll drive him mad, and if he doesn't touch her at all, he'll drive himself mad.

"I don't know what happened before, either. I don't even know what I think happened, but whatever it was ... damaged you, and I think you assume things will always be the same, and whatever hard lessons you learned then will always apply. And -- "

He cuts himself off, because he's rambling, and it's not like him to ramble. He lectures her sometimes; he gives goddamn soliloquys, but he does not ramble.

And,

"I wish I could show you that's not true. Not always."

[Danicka Musil] And then he's kissing her hand, because he doesn't know what else to say or what else to do or how to explain himself. And his jacket is hitting the floor as he pulls that kissed, caressed hand to his chest as though to ask her if she has a fucking clue what she's doing to him, to his heart.

Given her way he would have set that bag of food down and undressed when she told him to, when she wanted him to, and they would not be talking right now. Instead she's standing there, wanting him, knowing he wants her, and then he says she's damaged.

Danicka flinches, and not from fear. She stops breathing for a second, then frowns at him, unable to tell even inside herself if she's more hurt, or more angry. Either way, she snaps, before she can stop herself: "You have, you stupid son of a bitch, or I wouldn't be here."

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] Perhaps unexpectedly, it's not her words that stings him but her tone. He can count the times she's snapped at him on one hand, and all her years taking care of the Sokolovs' little girl would have taught her this: occasional snapping is far more effective than constant.

Not that he thinks she snaps at him as a form of control. She isn't so foolish as to try; worse, she's far too ...

(what? damaged? she's angry and she's hurt by the word; he's regretting it already, but at the time it was the only one that came to mind. even now, it's the only one that comes to mind)

to try such a thing. He knows she snaps at him because she, quite literally, snaps. Put another way, put in his language: because she's lost control at some level.

None of which addresses the main point, which is:

When she snaps at him, he flinches as well -- not from fear, not the way abused children flinch from raised voices, but from the unexpectedness of it, from his own urge to drop her hand and grow angry, to turn away and get his things and get the fuck out of here before they started fighting. Again.

Instead, he holds on to her hand. A few moments pass, and under her hand, she can feel how his heartbeat had thudded, had jumped once, hard, when she snapped at him. It's subsiding again now. He forces himself back to calm, closes his eyes to do it. Reopens them.

Quietly: "Já vím, že taky.

And this time it's him that tells himself: be a little patient with her, Lukáš.

He lets go her hand then. Doesn't rip it off his chest and push it back at her, doesn't turn away in anger. Simply releases it, to see where it'll go, if she'll draw it back. A beat later he drops his head to take another long breath, slow and deep.

When he raises his head again he says, "Jen pojďte sem, Danička."

[Danicka Musil] Truthfully, she almost never snaps at anyone. The fact that she has lashed out verbally at Lukas twice, even as mildly as she has -- and this, her swearing at him and insulting him, is far worse than her demanding that he be a little patient but still not the worst one can imagine -- says something about that dangerous comfort level she has with him.

Still. As soon as the words are out of her mouth she flinches, before he so much as takes a breath, before she can read even a flicker of reaction in his eyes. Danicka does not feign bravery when it is not there. She is not the type to square her shoulders and lift her chin and stare down someone who is about to hurt her, or someone who might hurt her.

She loses her temper with him, and they both flinch. Lukas from sheer surprise as well as his own frustration, or annoyance, or even Rage. Danicka flinches the way she would if she is trying to move with a slap across the face, her shoulders jerking once and a grimace flying across her features. And yet:

He doesn't let go of her hand, and she doesn't try to pull it away.

And he doesn't leave. And she doesn't get hit.

Danicka watches him with open wariness when his eyes are closed. When they slide open again for him to speak, her expression is terribly still, but there's a definite tension to it. There's some struggle going on inside of her, but there's no way to tell just by looking at her what the opposing forces are. He speaks, and releases her hand. For a few moments at least, it remains right where it is, sensing his heartbeat through his shirt and his flesh and his ribs to that terribly precious muscle beneath it all.

Slowly, maybe even tentatively, her other hand lifts up and she begins gently pulling apart the snaps of his shirt, one by one, watching her fingers even though they both know she could get this article off of his body in a matter of seconds if she wanted to.

"I wish you would have just let me be happy with you...in my way," she says quietly, with a surprising lack of rancor, "without assuming I was scared of being hurt."

When his shirt is unbuttoned, she reaches for the fastenings at his wrists, flicking them undone and then letting them go. "I know you want to protect me, but bad things are going to happen to both of us and there's really nothing we can do about it, most of the time. It does...mean something to me, though, that you...feel that way."

She licks her lips in thought, and pauses a moment before she decides not to undo his belt, or push his shirt off his arms, or undress him any further. She steps back instead, takes his hand, and starts to lead him over to an armchair near the windows, grabbing her bag on the way and carrying it at her side, only to drop it on the floor by the chair when they get there.

"I don't want you to think about what's happened to me before," she says after some thought, and -- if he isn't arguing, if he isn't fighting her, if he will let her, she guides him to sit in the chair, following him even as she's speaking to straddling his still-clothed lap. Finally her eyes meet his, her hands resting on his chest for balance. "Just let me be happy with you."

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] Lukas is trying to pay attention to what Danicka says, because it's important, because it's ... true; because it's something she may not say again.

Lukas is trying to pay attention, and Lukas is trying to keep his breathing steady and slow, and he's watching as she's undoing the buttons of his shirt one by one, pulling the small squareish snaps, silver-grey as the shirt itself, apart. He's watching her fingers on the fabric and he's listening to her say she wishes he'd just let her be happy in her way, without assuming she was scared or hurt, and he closes his eyes again to pull the words into focus.

And then he's holding his wrists up one by one for her to undo those snaps as well; and bad things are going to happen to both of them, and it still means something, and --

and he can't tell her what he really meant was he wishes he could protect her from the past; that that's what he really means under all the rest of the imperfect explanations he's given her, but of course he won't say this because it's stupid; it's pointless; it's impossible to protect someone from the past, and because

when she leads him to the armchair by the windows, the city glittering away in avenues radial and parallel behind him, when she sits him down and straddling him with her bra and her boots and nothing else,

he can't think anymore.

Lukas doesn't close his eyes this time. He looks down as her hands come against his chest for balance, and then he follows her arms to her torso, her torso to the parting of her thighs and what's between. He puts his hands on her thighs, spreads his fingers, pushes his palms up to her hips. When he slides his hips forward and his shoulderblades down, slouches in the armchair; when he tugs her forward and over him until she's pressed against him, she can feel his arousal through his thick denim jeans, his soft cotton-blend boxer briefs. She can see the way he draws a sip of air, and the way his eyes flare and darken at once.

Happy with you, she says again. And, just let me be. And his mind rearranges the words, and they seem to make a little more sense like this, backwards. He follows the curvature of her body up, over her waist and past her diaphragm, up her ribs. One by one, he tugs the cups of her bra down, frees her breasts, and he cradles them in his hands, squeezes them ever so lightly; tugs and rolls the nipples between his fingers. Gently. Gently.

It's really not that he has any particular fondness for breasts over and above what might be expected of a heterosexual man confronted with a particularly lovely pair, except that these are Danicka's breasts, this is Danicka's body, this is Danicka straddling his lap and talking in complete sentences while his mind dissolves, until he's sure that if he opened his mouth now all that would come out is gibberish and nonsense.

Except when he does open his mouth, it's not that at all. It's a complete sentence, though only one, and very quiet:

"It seems that would be so selfish of me."

[Danicka Musil] She does not and has never played cute with her sexuality. Danicka isn't prancing around in boots and a lace bra -- that would cling to her breasts even if she had not been soaking wet -- because she thinks it's funny to reduce Lukas to a barely-coherent body of primordial yearning. It's never about power plays with her, or mind games, as much as he may have once thought it was. She didn't use Sam to get to him. She would not have needed to.

That said, she is comfortable with her body in a way few women in their early twenties are. He's seen the way she dances, the way she fucks, the way she walks. She knows the effect she has on men -- and women -- in general, and more importantly, she knows the effect she has on him. It isn't as though he tries to hide the fact that watching her peel that dress away made him struggle to keep a hold of his thoughts. They don't have to play any sort of game with it.

What's interesting is that even while she's undressing him, it seems to ground her rather than distract her. It makes the conversation tolerable. It gives her a focus for completing these sentences even while she is stripping his ability to focus away from him along with his clothes. When they sit down together in the chair he is in a similar state to the one he was in before they fucked in the handicapped stall, his shirt open but not off. Only this time there's almost nothing covering Danicka herself and she hasn't taken the goddamn boots off, either.

Lukas slouches; Danicka leans forward to press not just her hips to his lap but to lay her stomach against his, the lace of her bra brushing the hair on his chest. Her breath catches in her throat at the feel of him but that's all: no moan, no helpless and hopeful whimper. Not yet, at least. She is looking into his eyes, though, and her own are sharp as an animal's, a deep and enigmatic green versus the cool clarity of his blues.

Her skin is very cool, and the room is cool as well. Her nipples are hard when he pulls the lace away from them. Danicka's core temperature is rising gradually but right now her skin is drawing heat directly from his hands and body, hungry for his warmth and merciless about it. Her hair is damp but drying, a little frizzy. The lace has to be peeled away as well, and her nipples are red and hypersensitive when he starts playing with them. This time her breath doesn't just catch; she gasps quietly, her back arching.

Selfish, he says, with his hands on her breasts. Danicka's hips are tense under his hands, on top of his body, trying not to grind against him while he's still half-dressed. Her breathing is quickened, her palms flat on his pectoral muscles.

"I just don't want to make you unhappy," she murmurs, and in any other situation, on any other day, in any other tone of voice...it would be so easy to decide that she's fucking lying to him again, that she's telling him what he wants to hear. Danicka's voice is breathy, her hand sliding up the back of his neck to his hair to draw his mouth to her breast, biting her lower lip as her arousal grows more intense, and there's an ache in her words and in everything else she's said that

she's telling him the truth.

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] It's all backwards.

She wants him to ignore the past and let her be happy ... because she doesn't want him to be unhappy. He wants to protect her from the past ... because he doesn't want her to be afraid. The things they want of, and from one another are ultimately not for themselves, but for the other.

Lukas is not used to thinking for another in this way. He is accustomed to thinking for the alpha; for the pack; for the war; for the nation; for the tribe. In that order. He is accustomed, to some degree, to thinking for himself. But outside the Circle, outside these circles, his attachments are few and far between. He does not have mortal friends, or kin friends, or even true Garou friends. They seem extraneous to him. Unnecessary.

And then there's Danicka. Who does not want to make him unhappy. Who has her legs open over his lap, and her skin so bare; chilled and still faintly damp, which is unusual, because when she sleeps she's like a little furnace, she's warm as spring.

He held her the night she slept with her back to him, as though she did not fear his presence behind her and out of her sight. His last thought before sleep wasn't a thought at all but merely an amorphous, wordless sense of primordial comfort; of belonging.

Warm as spring.

"I'm not unhappy," he says, softly. "I'm not unhappy, Danička."

And then there's Danicka: who has most definitely become something like a necessity. Something like necessary. Look at the way he turns toward her when she touches him. Look at the way he seeks out her mouth and her kiss, and the way his eyes are glazing over with desire when she gasps, and she arches, and she lays herself against him.

Look at the way his back rises off the armchair when her hand pushes into his hair, and the way he moves to her and bends to her breast: willingly, without hesitation or resistance.

Words have fallen away now. Her skin is cold but his mouth is warm. The contrast is shocking. This could so easy ratchet out of control in a quick, furious fuck. He could so easily devour her breasts, eat at her body, tear open his pants and be inside her in seconds, but --

but he puts her mouth to her and takes her flesh into his mouth. He takes his time with this, and with her. He opens his mouth over her breast and circles her nipple with his tongue; he scrapes it with his teeth. He tugs at it with his lips, and he lays a series of soft, sucking kisses to the bottommost curve of her breast, where it joins with her ribcage. When he returns to her breast he sucks her nipple into his mouth fully, with a slow, pulsing ferocity that builds and builds, breaking only when he takes his mouth from her, suddenly.

And he's panting into the space between, and his eyes are nearly black, his pupils enormous, the blue rings around them aglow, afire, luminous. He has such eyes, Lukas Wyrmbreaker -- like the sky; like ice and flame -- and they're dazed now with want, glassy with how badly he wants her, and he says her name, and he always gets it right, even when he can barely remember his own,

"Danička,"

and he kisses her because he wants her, and he kisses her to show her he wants her.

When that kiss breaks he returns to her breasts. The other one now. The first is wet from his mouth, and her skin was cold and his mouth was warm, and the contrast was shocking, but now her skin is warm too, warm from his mouth and from her own rushing blood, and the air is cool, and he covers her with his hand, tenderly, opens his hand over her right breast as he brings his attentions to bear on the left.

He's patient with her. He's patient with this because he's learning the language of her body again, and because sometimes this is the only language they have in common. This is oftentimes the only way he can show her what she is to him; what her happiness and her pleasure is to him. What she does to him, and what he wants to do to her. What he feels when he sees and hears and feels what she's feeling, echoed through her body and her reactions.

He's patient with her, and this is slow, and his free arm has wrapped around her to hold her stomach tight against his chest, and he bends her back, and he licks and sucks and eats at her breasts with such endless devotion, such attention, that she might believe he could do this all night. She might believe he would love to do this all right. She might be right, to believe that.

[Danicka Musil] Specifically she wants him to not think about her past, to not wonder or ask after what has happened to her. She's seen the way he reacts to know that Something Bad happened. His reaction when she murmured that Theurges don't have to be careful when they can heal with a touch. The way he all but flew to her when he found out about the Spirals in the park. Danicka has seen how angry he gets, how very close to a beast he becomes, not because he wants her more than he can bear or because the moon is full but because his want to protect her -- to have somehow protected her when he was not there and could not have been there -- is enough to drive him as mad as his want for her, pure and simple.

Not that anyone would call a Shadow Lord, or a Shadow Lord's Kin, either of those things.

There are stories of a generation or two ago, of Garou who were able to enact a Homecoming and go back to their families, better able to control their Rage and subdue it in order to be tolerable to both Kin and mortals. It's been a long, long time since that was true, though. Nowadays the War takes them all, old and young and weathered and fresh, and uses them up until there is nothing left. Kin are drawn into the War more often than they used to be.

Danicka has no illusions that one of these days Lukas -- who is terribly young still, even by mortal standards -- is going to just calm down and step back from the War. The truth is that Danicka is always going to be a little afraid of Lukas, a little too aware of what he is. Even should she grow to trust him completely, even if she adores him, even if she is devoted to him, her life was stripped of any and all illusions a long, long time ago. Long before anyone should stop believing in things that can't be, long before anyone should be such a curmudgeon, Danicka was a jaded cynic.

There's a chance that til the day one of them dies, she will flinch when she thinks she's made him angry.

It's a sorrow to contemplate, but there is also this: the way she melted against him as his arm wrapped around her from behind, the way she became heavy and heated and at ease even though there was a literal monster not just in her room but in her bed. There is the fact that she does not sleep with the people she fucks, the fact that she never thought she'd want him in her bed, the fact that inviting someone to sleep with her or come over to her place is a new and strange animal to her. Everything is new to Danicka in some way, despite her skepticism on life and everything composing it.

And Lukas is a part of it. This comfort, that belonging. This laughter, that argument. This warmth, that desire. It's all new though he can't imagine, he can't possibly believe that he's as new to her in some ways as this city is, as having her own place is. He doesn't know. There's so many gaps, so many pieces of information that add up to assumptions that are patently false, and Danicka doesn't fill in the empty spaces for him to show him No, actually, this is what it's been, and this is where you fit.

Maybe it's enough that she's told him he belongs.

She purrs when he tells her that he's not unhappy, when he repeats it, murmuring her name against her skin. She softens her hand in his hair when he lowers his lips to her breast and begins to worship her flesh the way he does, taking his time until he has left warmth and wetness where his mouth has been. It is a completely different sensation from the chill dampness left over from the rain and her wet dress. This could fall apart so quickly --

(truer words were never spoken)

-- but Lukas doesn't let it, and Danicka begins to let go. She closes her eyes, her head falling back and her mouth opening to release a thin moan just before he takes his lips from her. Her fingers suddenly curl in his hair, in that demanding way she didn't dare show him the first time, or even the second. Danicka's hips buck in the air because though she is resting against him she won't grind, she's even trying to lift her body off his. If he could read her mind he'd know that she doesn't want to rub against his goddamned jeans when she's getting so fucking wet, as much as that might make him laugh. All he knows is that her hips buck and her thighs are tense on either side of his lap as though she's struggling.

She's not struggling, though. Danicka is tipping her head forward again, wet hair sliding over her shoulders and hanging in her face, looking into his eyes as he says her name, closing her own as they kiss. It's hotter than he perhaps expects, harder than he might be asking for, but she kisses him with enough passion to explain the tension in her lower body, the urge to ride, to fuck, that keeps growing stronger.

When he pulls his mouth away to return to her breasts, Danicka tries to follow. She leans further against him, tries to recapture his lips and there's no timidity or pride in this, she doesn't hesitate out of embarrassment. The last thing Danicka could feel shame for at this point is wanting him. But she relents, because his hand and his mouth are both on her, and this makes it all right that he's not kissing her anymore.

The lace is still tickling Lukas's chin as he licks and sucks at her. It takes awhile for Danicka to regain her senses enough to reach back, spine curving and shoulderblades pulling together, to flick the clasps of her bra to that it can slide down her shoulders and off her arms, fall to lie between their bodies. She doesn't bother tossing it aside, and that is not what she is doing when she reaches down, parting her stomach from his enough for her hand to slip between her thighs. Danicka gasps when she touches herself, her other hand still buried in his hair, but she doesn't go on pleasuring herself.

She withdraws her hand, lifts it up, nudges his hand from her right breast, and runs her wet fingertips across her nipple.

Nothing pure. Nothing simple.

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] If it was purity that Lukas wanted, he would've never come to Danicka. If it was simplicity he was drawn to, he would've never come to Danicka.

He asked Sam once, not so very long ago, what he saw in her. All Lukas saw in her then was a goddamn slut, a goddamn homewrecker (packwrecker?), a faithless bitch that would use a man up and then kick him to the curb and move on to his brother. All Lukas saw in her then

(only that's not true, is it; because he wanted her from the moment he saw her, and what he saw in her then was a flash of depth, a flicker of something beneath the surface; what he saw in her then was something deeper and truer than the placidity, the empty kindness)

was something he would never, ever want, except that he did.

And what Sam said was: she's beautiful. As if that were the first and most important thing. And then, she's smart too. As if this were a surprise. And kind of funny, and she's been good to him. And makes him happy.

And all Lukas could think was:

You poor, stupid bastard.
and
You don't fucking deserve her.

Then Sam added, into his mind as though it were too true, too fragile to even be spoken aloud:

I can't get my mind off her.

And this, at least; this, Lukas could understand.

Because there's nothing pure or simple about Danicka. What purity, what simplicity she had was stripped away long, long before Lukas even began to show the first glimmers of what would one day be a Full Moon's rage. Even when he first knew her, there was very little simple or pure about her. She clapped her hands over her mouth when she laughed. She danced from foot to foot instead of shrieking. She didn't slip and slide on her waxed floors with the Kvasnicka children. She ran and hid at the very first sign of trouble.

There's nothing pure or simple about Danicka; a woman who'd fuck one packmate while thinking about another; a woman who'd bend herself over her own bed and just look at him, just look at him, as if to say: you know what to do. A woman who'd strip her panties off in a public restroom and fuck; who'd bite down on a wallet to stifle her cries.

A woman who'd --

do what she does now, and when she nudges his hand away he turns his face, his mouth doesn't leave her but he turns to look to see why, and what, and when she smooths her own fluids over her nipple he exhales so harsh and fast against her skin that it's audible, it's palpable, and he releases the one breast for the other again, closes his mouth over her newly wetted breast with such ferocity and fervor that his teeth scrape her fingers, and then her nipple. His eyes are shut now. He sucks at her as though she were air; he licks and sucks at her flesh recklessly, ruthlessly, until she gasps aloud; until every trace of her wetness is gone, replaced by his saliva.

And then he's straightening, and his mouth is hard and hungry on hers, and he's reaching between them to grab her discarded bra and fling it out of the way, he's reaching between them to undo his pants with one hand while he touches her with the other, and what patience he had is thoroughly at an end now.

His hand is firm, his fingertips searching and coveting -- he finds her clit and he rubs her, mercilessly, and this is hard, a little bit rough, and when his fingers move on to push into her he frees himself from his jeans and his underclothes, starts to stroke himself while he strokes her, and the kiss is -- opening, if not quite parting, and he says against her lips, against her tongue, "Máte kondomy v pytli?"

[Danicka Musil] It really didn't take much convincing on Danicka's part to get Lukas to take her from that shithole bar to that shithole motel. It wasn't as though she chased him from venue to venue, wheedling after him, grinding against his thigh and offering herself to him as a toy, as someone(thing) to enjoy, or use at his leisure. He was not the packmate she was dancing with that night at the club, but the Fang who was not then and is now his Alpha. She came to talk to him repeatedly, that's true, but her spoken motive was -- surprisingly -- the truth: she wanted him to keep Sam away from her. Sam scared her. Sam still scares her.

When she first admitted that she wanted him it was almost a week after that ride in his car from the Brotherhood to Kingsbury Plaza, and she had not even said it in English. Even now, she almost never says it in English. After that it was only a couple of days before she brought him his favorite treat from childhood, and then...even when he would not stop Sam from striking her, when a box of candied-orange pastries was not enough to 'win him over', it was another week before she called him to her and very simply, very clearly, made what would have been her last offer.

Had he not taken it.

Even now Danicka has no idea the sort of contradictory thinking that Lukas engaged in when he was harrying Sam with questions as to what he saw in her, why he wanted her, as though this would clarify for him his own desire, or as though if Sam could tell him something true, something deeper than beautiful, smart, kind of funny then he could give her up to his packmate and pay her no more thought. This of course would be denying the fact that Danicka did not want Sam, would not have taken him and could not have been kept by him. But god only knows what was going on in his head two months ago.

There are Kinfolk like Agnessa Malikoff: troublemakers to the hilt, bearers of loud children, eavesdropping sisters of unreliable Fosterns. And Kinfolk like Gabriella Bellamonte: born to be pawns, to be princesses, to be portraits, and still naive enough to complain about it. Then there's Danicka. Not a queen or a pawn (maybe a rook), pretty as a picture and with blood that on some level must call to some evolutionary, uncontrollable longing in him no matter what he thinks he wants or can ever have. She is beyond savvy, to the point that it's hard to imagine her ever being truly naive.

Somewhere along the line she lost naivete, and lost (almost) all her shame, and lost her belief that if just some wonderful guy would love her enough then everything would be fine and she'd be happy. God only knows what else she's lost along the way from her terror-ridden childhood to now, to this, to telling him to please let go of the past and just let her be happy because she cannot stand the idea of what she has been through dampening his happiness.

Which is sort of pure. And sort of simple. And she does not want to damage it.

Or him.

Danicka looks down at him as she draws her fingers to her mouth and sucks them clean, as he breathes out roughly before attacking her right nipple to taste her, to lick her and eat at her as eagerly and as devotedly as he has gone down on her, as he did earlier tonight, even. And she does gasp, loudly this time, pressing harder against his chest, against his mouth, her hips moving as though he's already inside of her.

Her heart is slamming against her ribs when Lukas decides it's high time to do what she asked him to do earlier and undress himself, though there's nothing slow or seductive about it. They fight through their kiss, both of her hands in his hair now, keeping him there so she can taste her own flesh and desire on his tongue. His fingers find her and she squirms, bucking atop him again and making some wordless, needful noise into his mouth.

Lukas isn't gentle, and Danicka rips her mouth away from his to let out a little shriek at the intensity of what he's doing. It's right on the knife's edge between pleasure and something completely different, but then at least some part of him is inside her and she settles somewhat. Her reactions are, as they have been from the beginning, almost completely instinctive. She doesn't think about what it looks like to him that when he slips his fingers into her she relaxes immediately, as though he has quite suddenly relieved her of some nameless but lifelong ache. Danicka's face is still resting by his while she tries to breathe, her eyes closed and her brow touching Lukas's.

"Ano," she exhales, kissing him again. It's slower this time, more sensuous, but her answer seems to have nothing to do with his question. Danicka is reaching between them to wrap her hand around his cock, and at the feel of him she suddenly, forcefully groans. "God," she moans against his mouth, "you're so hard."

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] One of these days

(he'll tell her everything he loves about her)

they'll manage something like patience when it isn't the end of a long, long night; they'll manage to fuck at a reasonable hour in a reasonable way that doesn't suggest they might eat each other alive, or combust if they don't. One of these days --

-- one of these days he'll get over her, goddammit, and the sight of her rubbing herself onto herself won't drive him over the edge; and the taste of her on her tongue when he kisses her won't shoot sparks down his spine. One of these days she'll stop calling him baby in that tone and one of these days she'll stop kissing him like she needs him. One of these days they'll use each other up, finally, and be done with it. Move on. Clear it of their fucking desks.

Maybe.
Maybe not.

Maybe he doesn't even want to.

Because so far as this as gone, he's only found himself turning deeper and deeper. He's Theseus in the Labyrinth, only she's not Ariadne, she's not so simple and pure, and he has no ball of golden string to guide his way, and anyway in the end he's not Theseus after all -- he's the half-human monster in the dark. He barely feels human at all. He barely feels in control at all, though he forces himself to slow down, slow down, and when she kisses him a second time it's slow, and it's sensuous, and somehow his fingers inside her have given them both some grounding, as though what was necessary was not even the sex, not even the fucking, but the contact.

The connection.

And then her hand is wrapping around him -- her fingers tangle with his -- she moans against his mouth and he exhales a sharp silent rush of air, turns his face and turns his brow against hers. He wraps his hand around hers, closes her fingers around him to show her how to caress him; he takes her through one stroke and then lets go, gives himself over to her touch.

He does this because he means to reach for her bag and look for the condoms he damn well hopes are in there, because he only keeps one in his wallet and that one was currently flushing down through Chicago's sewage system, but the truth is if the sight of her nearly naked in boots and her bra made him lose track of his thoughts, the feel of her hand on his cock makes him incapable of anything but letting his head fall back against the back of the armchair, and trying to remember how to breathe.

So that's what he does: he puts his head back while she's stroking his cock, and he's trying to remember how to breathe, and he's trying to remember how to touch her, and every time her hand moves he's trying not to lose his shit and throw her on the ground and mount her like a beast, and

somehow through all that he manages to breath a few words out: "Získejte kondom a mě, Danička. Potřebuji být uvnitř vás."

[Danicka Musil] If someone were to suggest to Danicka that one of these days she will be reasonable when it comes to Lukas, she would laugh so hard that tears would swell at the corners of her eyes. But he can think of it if he likes, if that makes this tolerable, if it makes this fit into the rest of his life somehow, if it helps him cope with whatever it is she's doing to him: all right, then. One day Danicka won't make that noise when he touches her, and she won't shudder like that when he licks her, and one of these days she won't mean anything by it when she kisses him.

All right. If that makes this something he can deal with, he can think of one of these days. But not right now. Not with her on top of him and not when he's finding her so wet that there's no wonder her eyes roll back a little and she makes that noise. Not when they want each other enough that after just four days they can't even get through dinner without having each other. Not when she melts against him and sighs softly in pleasure and relief and comfort because two of his fingers are moving with her to a rhythm that may as well be musical. Not when still, every time she's with him, she stops feeling so fucking alone.

"Nekončí," she purrs against his mouth as she's leaving his kiss, her eyes closed and her breath sighing out across his cheek, humid and wanting. Wanting his fingers in her and his body aligned with hers and his dick in her hand, wanting to go on kissing him, wanting nothing more than she wants to be with him right now, and it doesn't really matter at the moment who is on top or who is making a whisper of noise so long as it's him.

Lukas guides her hand on him and for some reason this makes Danicka laugh a little, breathy and soundless, against his jaw. She kisses the corner of his mouth and gives him a deft, purposeful, practiced stroke of her hand as though to assure him that no, that's quite all right, she knows what he likes. When she pulls back again, she flicks her tongue across his lips, watching him as his head falls back. This does not amuse her, the way he struggles to breathe steadily, the way she can sense tension in every single muscle in his body as he fights not to lose all control of himself. She slows slightly, sweetens her touch, and kisses the side of his throat, murmuring:

"Dýchat, láska."

She lifts her hips slightly, out of necessity, and unless he is in better control of himself than she thinks, his fingers slide and she bites back a whimper. Her hand leaves him only carefully and she leans to the side of the chair, bending over the arm and digging into her bag, but when she is upright again and looking into his eyes she keeps the condom held in her hand, fingers wrapped around the packet. Danicka watches him, taking a deep breath herself, but her eyes wander over his face, observing him while he's like this, as though to memorize the way his eyes flash and the way he all but pants for air.

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] Of course she laughs. He's guiding her hand like he thought maybe she didn't know what to do with him. He's guiding her touch like she didn't know just how to touch him, just how to make it good for him; like she hasn't spent the last two months driving him out of his head. And maybe that's just because he can't think right now, can't even think enough to think:

This girl knows exactly how to work a cock.

Which is, excusing the french, exactly the truth. Because when she takes over, the first stroke has his head thumping back, and the little kiss she gives him has him turning toward her mouth blindly, and when she draws back he exhales raggedly and says, "Ježíše Krista, Danička," and really, it's not his fault, it's not his goddamn fault that when she kisses his neck and tells him to breath and lifts her hips he doesn't have the presence of mind to keep his fingers in her.

Lukas touches her though, while she's leaning over the side to fetch her bag and her condoms. He wraps his free arm around her, as though to support her as she bends; his other hand opens over her ass. It strokes over the curve of her flank, up the narrow lean lines of her back. He leaves streaks and smears of wetness on her skin and abruptly, while she's still leaned over, leans up, bends his mouth to her skin and sucks her taste off her skin, kisses a meandering trail from her hipbone to her shoulder blade, where he nips at the ridge of bone pressing through her thin muscle sheath, her delicate skin.

It makes him think of her too upset to eat again. It makes him think of her mouthing I'm happy at him, and then she's sitting upright and he's leaning back to wait for her to unroll the condom over him because he's way beyond small manipulative tasks now, but she's just watching him, she's just watching him while he watches her, eyes black and fiery blue with want, chest rising and falling, breathing hard for her already.

He's dying of want, and she's just watching him, and finally he grabs her by the hips and shifts her a sudden inch or two closer.

"Co čekáte, Danička?" -- it's the same tone as what the fuck, Danička; impatient, quietly frustrated, climbing up the fucking walls. "Jedu sem blázen."

[Danicka Musil] When they drink together or eat together or curl up together on a couch it seems like they know exactly what to do with one another, what to think, what the jokes mean and what's going on behind either set of light-colored eyes. When they are in bed together they seem to know exactly how to treat each other, with the only notable exception being the first time.

And then, it was not so much that Lukas did not know how to treat Danicka so much as he could not bring himself to, not until she essentially made him, and as soon as he flexed his hips and she rolled hers down to meet him they knew. They both damn well knew what the other wanted. After that there was almost no need to talk, and barely any pause to talk. He'd asked how many more times he could fuck her until she left him, assuming she would leave him, and then her thigh had been around his hip and his arms had been around her waist and she'd kissed him almost the entire time he was inside her, then.

They know.

Danicka knows that if she leans in towards his chest as she touches him he with not writhe because his body goes into a sort of lockdown, a protection against losing his head and tearing something apart. She knows that at a time like this her breath moving slowly against his earlobe will drive him mad because her mouth makes no contact with his flesh, he'll turn towards her face trying to kiss her and, simply, she knows that every damn time she'll meet his mouth and kiss him because nothing else feels so natural.

What Lukas knows is that while she is bent over the side of the armchair ripping one packet off a line of them, it's going to take her longer if he does what he does and caresses her ass. What he knows is that until she showers she's going to smell and taste like her own arousal, that if he can keep her in bed she'll bear the scent of his sweat all night and smell like she's his, which she is...in a way...

What he knows is that with his hands all over her and then his mouth, she's going to take longer to get the condom out because she will writhe, and squirm, and gasp, and almost drop the damn thing.

Straightened out again, looking at him with that longing to memorize him burning in her irises, Danicka is pulled closer and listening to the sound of his voice on the edge of...well, just what he says: going crazy. She paces out the distance between that sound, that edge, and the line she's seen him go over before. She counts her own heartbeats like people count seconds between lightning and thunder, thunder and lightning, gauging how far they are from the storm, how far the storm is from them.

She rips open the packet and reaches between them to roll it onto him, quickly but carefully, and while he is still clinging, grasping to the threads of his own control after that, she rises up on her knees and -- again, quick because she is practiced and careful because she doesn't dare take risks she doesn't have to -- turns her body around on his lap. Her hand is between her thighs, on him, and then she's guiding him into he

oh, unbelievable

and as Danicka is sinking down onto him, deeper, she lets out the first full-throated moan he's heard from her all night, the first he's heard from her in four days.

Feels like longer. And she doesn't tell him what the hell she was waiting for.

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] Lukas's brow is furrowing when she's rolling the condom on, as though this, somehow, is more arousing than even her hand jacking him off earlier; which is ironic, really, because it's putting something between him and her, it's putting a barrier between --

-- but it's also preparing him to fuck her. To be fucked by her. And this is conditioning at work, ladies and gentlemen; he knows exactly where this leads, and it makes him gasp out a soundless exhale when she gets it on, when she turns her back to him, and then she's taking him in her hand again and he's just watching her, his hands are on the arms of the armchair and he's just watching her, just watching her come down on him, just throwing his head back and knocking the back of his skull against the armchair, twice, as if to beat the pleasure out of himself before it consumed him completely.

She sinks down, down, and his hands come under her thighs, under her ass; he holds her, slows her descent as though he's afraid she might hurt herself, as if he hasn't thrust himself into her in one fell swoop before, as if he hasn't fucked her over the edge of her bed with almost nothing held in reserve, with nothing held in reserve at all.

Still: he holds her, and he lowers her slowly, and she moans and suddenly he's wrapping his arms around her to pull her back against him as he's rising to meet her and he's kissing her neck, his teeth are clipping at her earlobe; he's kissing her racing pulse and his hands are reaching around to play with her breasts, to push down over the writhing length of her abdomen to cup between her legs. He can feel where they're joined, his flesh in hers, and the touch of it makes him gasp out against her neck, harshly, before he finds her clit.

He begins to stroke her, gently at first, and he's leaning back again, his arm loosening from around her to give her the room to move, to ride his cock, to really fuck him, and then he's stroking faster, pressing his first two fingers against her as his free hand holds her by the hip, not to slow her or guide her but just to feel her. He's thought Danicka's back beautiful before, and he thinks it again -- the lean length of it, the narrow strips of muscle, the grace of it, the elegance of it.

Lukas can imagine her rubbing elbows with the Fangs of New York City. He can imagine her at their charity galas and their gallery openings, their fucking social functions, the chandeliers and the hors d'oeuvres, the evening gowns with their plunging necklines and the plunging backs, the white ties, the false smiles, and

there's nothing false about this; there's nothing false about this at all. And it's the same back that'll look so fucking good in a three thousand dollar gown, only she's not wearing one; she's wearing her goddamn boots and that's so hot that the very thought of it makes him close his eyes, makes him think of the night she asked him if he wanted her to leave it on, and it makes him think of her unambiguous appetite, her unashamed sexuality, and he's opening his hand and smoothing it up her back to close over her shoulder, and down again, and when it returns to her hip he bucks up against her, begins to match her building rhythm.

"Do you know how hot you are?" he asks her; there's strain in his voice, and it's the strain of not sounding strained, because if he let himself he'd gasp the words, he'd pant and grunt them; but instead he's speaking them, he's almost whispering and the roughness is only at the very edges of his voice. "Do you know what the fuck"

and his hands move her on that word -- his fingers press against her clit mercilessly and his hand shifts her hips in a slow grinding circle and he fucks up into her, and if she had any doubt that there are two people fucking here, two people whose minds are getting blown here, the jagged pause that interrupts his words while he sucks a breath out of the air would fix that;

it's seconds before he can finish, "you do to me, Danička?"

[Danicka Musil] The most Lukas ever gives her is a gasp, needful and restrained. He would rather choke off his own airways than grunt when she lowers herself onto his body, it seems. He would rather bite through his tongue than let out the growl that threatens to escape him but remains hidden in his throat. He would rather gasp if he has to, rather than groan slowly and achingly when she rolls her hips

just

like

that.

Danicka can't see him literally beating his head against the thickly upholstered back of the armchair but she can feel the reverbations of the movement, the echoes of his effort at keeping himself in the here and now. She is secretly amazed at the way he tries to make sure she's careful, secretly amazed and suddenly touched even though it's so unnecessary it might make her laugh if she were not leaning back against him, moaning because as far as she knows right in this moment she's never had him inside of her at all, much less half an hour ago.

She shudders, and turns her head over her shoulder while his mouth is attacking her earlobe and shoulder and throat. One of her hands is still between her legs, playing with herself when his fingers get there. She chooses to let him take over, touches the breast that his hand abandons, and then he presses his fingertips against her and --

"Jesus fuck," she all but shrieks, bucking her hips. That is when he loosens his arm around her and that is when she starts to do what she seems made to do and rides him, her back against his front, his hands on her cunt and her hip and her hands on her breast and in her hair. She arches her spine, stretching out and one thing she wouldn't lie about is that she knows he's watching her, which may answer the question he gasps out while he's stroking her back and watching his hand move against the skin, watching her muscles moving under the skin.

Danicka is, as she said to her reflection she would, fucking the ever-loving shit out of him at the moment, and gasps instead of trying to tell him Of course I do or whatever else a woman like her might say. It turns out that a woman like her has nothing to say to that, nothing but a sinuous, slippery moan. The lights of the city are coming through the half-curtained windows and discoloring her hair, playing across her skin, but this is because when they walked in the other source of light was the city and they did not add to it by turning on any of the lamps. Danicka swivels her hips in a circle on top of him, and then she reaches up, taking his hand from her shoulder.

She draws it to her left breast, then just under her left breast, holding it against her skin so he can feel her heartbeat, which is slamming so fast in her chest surely it's going to break those thin ribs of hers but all she does is hold him there.

While she moves with his hands, on his lap, with his cock. While sparks fly through the dark of her mind. While she loses track of time because all she knows is the meeting of his body and hers, the heat despite the cool air in the room, the luxurious torture this has become.

If she were capable of coherent speech right now she would, she'd tell him...something. She'd tell him that she wants him all night, that they can stop to eat or rest but she doesn't want to stop. And maybe when she comes she'll tell him exactly what she thinks of when she sees him leaning back in a chair with That Look in his eyes, or what she wants to do to him when he wakes up in the morning but right now, her riding gradually falling apart and turning into grinding, demanding thrusts of her hips down onto him, all Danicka can manage is a few shaky words, a plea that devolves into a sound that's almost mewling with need:

"Kousni mě. Kousni mě, Lukáš, I'm going to come."

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] By the time she replaces his hand beneath her breast, that her ribs are thin and breakable is no longer on his mind.

Not that that isn't true. There's a frailty to Danicka. There always has been, and on some level it's as simple as the fact that she is essentially human and he is not; that if he (lost control and) slipped his skin and took on another, his claws could pierce right through her. It's not just that, though. It's the thinness of her body, the narrowness of her frame -- this girl that once fell out of a tree that she had climbed just to prove to the Kvasnicka children, or perhaps to herself, that she could climb it; that fell out because despite being two years older than the boy and half a year older than the girl, she was neither as sturdy as the former nor as wiry as the latter.

He doesn't think about that either. He doesn't think that if he squeezed hard enough, even in this shape, he could crack those ribs under his hand. He doesn't think that if he isn't careful he might bruise her, break her, shatter her like a butterfly on the wheel.

What he's thinking are not thoughts at all -- they're fragments, they're meteorites of pleasure burning up in brilliant streaks, red and green and pale. They're shards of words, oh fuck and oh my god and her name, of course; her name.

He's rolling his hips against hers, matching her stroke for stroke, and it begins gentle but it amplifies. It spins out of his control and by the time she's reduced to grinding against him, slamming herself down on his cock, he's reduced to laying his head back against the armchair and letting her do with him whatever the fuck she pleased. His free hand has wrapped around to the right side of her body, and his arm is tight about her, and he's holding her tight against him.

There's something almost brutal about this. Certainly, there's something pitiless about the way they demand more of each other, and more; something reckless about the way they give more to each other, and more. There's something dangerous about it -- pushing the envelope, pushing one another's limits, until he loses track of where his limits are.

She tells him she's going to come and he doesn't reply, doesn't relent, doesn't let her ride it out slow and gentle. His arm tightens around her, locks her back against his chest, and he plants his feet wider apart, nudges her knees apart where they hook over his thighs, gives himself the leverage he needs to shift his weight, to sling his body between his shoulderblades and his feet. It opens up his hip joint, the lumbar spine, gives him the degrees of freedom he hadn't had before.

Suddenly he's fucking up against her as hard as she rides him, and his hand is still between her legs, and -- let's be honest -- Lukas is a quick study, and he's been studying this particular subject particularly hard, and he knows where to touch her now and how fast, how hard, and as she starts to go over the edge he kisses the side of her neck and the curve of her shoulder, and he thinks to himself gently, gently,

and then he's not thinking at all because he can feel the hidden muscles inside her beginning to clench and spasm about him, and some sort of involuntary response, some sort of reflex arc that ran from her into him, makes him bite into her shoulder, high up where it joins her neck, with a thoughtless savagery.

This time Lukas keeps fucking her even after Danicka begins to come down not because he's carrying her through her orgasm but because he's hitting his own. This time he slams himself into her time and again not to see how far he could take her but because he has to, needs to, it's not an option, it's mandatory, it's necessary if he wants to live through this. This time when he comes into her she's just beginning to turn liquid after her own climax, and his mouth is open to her skin, and his rush of an exhale is nearly a groan that he bites back at the last instant, literally, sinking his teeth into her shoulder a second time, a third time tonight, hard enough to leave a white imprint that'll quickly redden when he lets go.

When he lets go.

Which is not yet, though he's gone taut and still now, gasping against her skin, and his mind has blanked out, become a whitehot expanse of molten primordium, and shudders are starting to quake up his spine, and his hips are bucking and jerking against her, wholly out of his consent or control.

It's endless seconds before the hard arc of his body is relaxing, endless seconds before his harsh ragged gasping is settling into anything even approximating a rhythm. He's panting as he's sinking down again, and things are beginning to make sense again. It's only then that he realizes the armchair is sinking down too. The locking of his joints had raised the damn thing up on its hind legs. It's a fucking miracle it hadn't tipped over and spilled them over in a tangle of arms and legs.

It's a fucking miracle he can even think right now. It's a fucking miracle he hasn't come apart at the joints. It's a fucking miracle he's alive, and his arm shifts on her; he moves her on him, gently, gently, and this makes him turns his mouth against her neck and exhale his pleasure.

His hand is loosening on her ribcage. It moves; it slides up to her breast, and then across the midline of her body to the other. Its partner is still between her legs and he begins to stroke her again, very gently now, idly, and as his mind reassembles itself he begins to kiss the line of her neck and the back of her ear; the line of her jaw. His arm returns to its own haunts, wrapped around her torso, but this is different -- something a little more tender, an embrace rather than a clutching -- as his knees straighten out and his spine sinks into a boneless curve, and he simply ... sprawls in the armchair with her.

Amazing, she's called him, or what he did to her, twice now. Amazing, he thinks to himself, and he presses his mouth to her shoulder where he'd bitten her.

[Danicka Musil] This started out gently, with her sliding her nearly-nude body onto his lap and her breasts brushing his chest, her breath warm on his face. It started out gently with his fingers and his mouth warming her nipples, his hands running up and down her back and caressing her ass until she was hot for him, ready for him. And then quite suddenly, with a stroke of her moist fingertips over her breast it had gone completely over the edge. They were driving each other mad with want, Danicka making him wait a moment and then Lukas making her go slow at first and now this.

His head falls back as she rides him, while he tries to remember his own goddamn name along with hers, and then she moans that she's going to come soon. He slides down and shifts his position in the armchair, and that first tenacious thrust of his hips, of his whole body, makes her yelp and grab a hold of one of the arms of the chair, holding on for dear life. She leans forward slightly for leverage and lets out increasingly desirous cries that even with the thick walls between them and any other suite are unquestionably audible to other guests tonight, but she doesn't care. She doesn't even know where she is when his hips swing like that. She remembers, when he pulls her against him again and kisses her shoulder and neck.

She's with Lukas.

Up against the bright orange wall in Spring, Danicka had bitten into Lukas's wallet and Lukas had bitten into Danicka's shoulder, and only one of them needed to bite into anything for the sake of keeping quiet. He has heard her scream during sex before, not in pain or terror but in praise, and he has heard her groan and whimper and purr and begun to memorize which sort of touch will elicit which sort of noise from her. The first time she bit him it was to keep herself quiet, burying her groans in his shoulder as she laid on top of him at the Brotherhood, and it was only after that night that this woman started letting herself tighten her hand in his hair or rake her nails down his back.

'This woman'. That's what he'd called her to Sam, avoiding her name on his lips like it would burn him to say it aloud to his packmate, or as though that would expose him somehow. He knows that what everyone calls her, what she has told him to call her, is not her name. It's a darling little nickname, mispronounced by just about everyone who meets her so she gave up a long time ago even saying it correctly herself during introductions. 'This woman', or 'that woman'. He's called her that before, but no longer.

On her left shoulder there's still an imprint of his teeth, a red mark, from the bite he gave her in the restaurant bathroom when he was coming so hard that he couldn't move for several seconds afterward. Even then he had found himself curling his arms around her body and holding her closer in the immediate aftermath, something she somehow can't imagine him doing with the random strangers she knows he used to use to get off. Something she knows for certain she would tolerate from the random strangers she used to use to get off, but not seek. Not want. Not find herself needing.

At least not the way she needs this.

Now there is -- or is going to be -- a mark on her right shoulder, not a perfect match because its placement is slightly different and it's actually going to darken to a hickey. The way Lukas bit her in the bathroom stall was not quite so rough, not quite so animalistic, as this. And this time she asked for it, as though his teeth sinking into her was what she needed to hit her own climax. In a way, it was. She cries out for him to bite her because that's simple, because that's something she can say when she can't think clearly enough to tell him that what she really wants, what she really needs --

-- fuck it.

"Lukáš," she whimpers, and then: "Aah!" and sharper: "Lukáš!"

She doesn't remember when this was gentle anymore. Her head is thrown back against his shoulder as he grinds up into her, pulls her by the hips harder onto him. All Danicka knows is his teeth in her, and her consciousness spinning out from her in a white-hot swirl scattered to the very edges of the known universe. The length of her body moves in a pulse, her back arched and her stomach flat, breasts thrust forward. She thinks for a moment that she's going to pass out again and sets her teeth against one another in a silent, defiant snarl.

Just as her orgasm is beginning to let her down, she gasps because one is flowing into the other and it might as well be her body coming again when she feels Lukas gasping against her shoulder, frustrating a groan before it can be given voice. Danicka's body is relaxing as his is going rigid, and she closes her eyes. Instead of going limp, she rolls her hips like that again, as though dancing on him, against him, dragging him down after her. She purrs as he is lost in it, in her, shaking and thrusting by instinct rather than intent underneath her.

Danicka is anything but passive when she's with him. Even when she is receiving him, even when he has lost himself, even when all she seems to be doing is welcoming him and bearing him, there is never any doubt that it's her, that she's caught up in and with him completely. Actively. She's right there with him, every moment, every time. And he knows this because he has seen the difference. He knows what it was like with other women, and he knows how it can be with Danicka if she's not with him.

She feels the two of them lower slightly to the floor as Lukas starts to come back down and come back into his own body again, and realizes that they very well could have fallen over. A breathless, nearly soundless laugh leaves her, but it's gone in a second because she is falling back against him, the line of her body revealing again just how flexible she is. She keeps her eyes closed, leaning back on his chest and resting her head on his shoulder while she catches her breath. Danicka lets out a low, moaning plea when he moves her on him again and all but gasps into her flesh at the sensation. She shudders as he strokes his hand down between her legs and plays with her, as he kisses her:

"Baby, what the fuck..." she sighs, not in displeasure or frustration but as though to ask him how he can possibly stand it right now, or how much more he thinks she can take.

In a minute or so, she's going to need to move. Not to ride him again, not to turn around and kiss him again until both their bodies are waking and ready once more. Just because if she stays like this too much longer her back will be sore and her hips will, she's convinced, stop working completely. For awhile, though, Danicka is perfectly content to lay against him, putting the pieces back together until she remembers who she is, and where, and what day this is.

Eventually, she reaches back one hand and gently scritches his scalp, plays with his hair, sighing and opening her eyes to find that the world didn't disintegrate, after all. "...You okay?"

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] Now they're languid, satiated. Now he's sprawled in the armchair, his shoulders and the back of his head against the back of the armchair; his waist and mid-back against the seat, his ass at the very edge. His body is slung so low he might've unhinged all his joints, turned his bones to rubber. She's atop him, balanced somehow between her hand on the arm of the chair, her foot on the ground, her body on his, and she's so damn flexible, so limber and loose right now that he can't help running his hands all over her.

Baby, what the fuck, she wants to know, and his touch lightens still more, slows and lightens, doesn't quite stop. He touches her in long, light strokes, aimlessly, and his teeth catch her earlobe, but this is nothing like the crush of his teeth to her shoulder.

"Jen jsem se chtěla dotknout tebe, miláčku," he murmurs. "Nech mě dotknout tebe."

She's reaching back then, and his free hand smooths up her body, follows the arch of it from her navel to her shoulder, and up her bicep. Some part of him is vaguely amazed -- that she's here, that he's here, that she lets him touch her like this; that all her skin is his to touch, to caress, to taste and adore.

Her question makes him laugh. It's not the first time she's asked such a thing, and if he didn't understand so very well why she might feel the need to ask him if he's okay, if he's survived, he would find it funnier still.

But he does understand, and the laugh is only a short huff. His hands still against her at last, and he holds her a moment, silent.

Then, "Jsem v pohodě. Jsem lepší, než v pohodě."

[Danicka Musil] Right now Danicka's body is in a surreal state of tension and relaxation at once. Her left foot on the floor by the chair gave her the leverage and balance to fuck him the way she did, digging her fingernails into the upholstery and crying out as their hips slammed against one another again and again. But with her right leg still bent back, the heel of her boot by his hip and her knee against the outside of his thigh, leaning back like this as Lukas sinks lower and lower in the armchair makes her back arch further and further.

On an aesthetic level, the line of her body right now is fucking beautiful. As his hands run over her he can feel -- and see, as he looks past her shoulder and her breasts -- the lines of muscle underneath her skin, the curves of her rib-bones. It's a little unfair, though, as he melts into the cushions, that even though she is laying her head back on him and nuzzling the side of his neck she cannot completely melt the way he is, the way he has felt her do before.

Not that Danicka seems to care very much, at least for a minute or two, while Lukas caresses her and kisses her and nips at her as though even now he can't get enough, as though all he has to do is wait for his body to catch up so he can take her again. And again.

She purrs softly in response to his words, and acquiesces: she lets him touch her.

What eventually gets her moving isn't his laughter or his hand riding along the side of her body as she pets his head like she would give affection to a child, to a cat, or a lover. Which seems to be what he is, though she has called him boyfriend instead. Danicka stretches on top of him only after the second time he speaks, the assurance that he is better than fine, and makes a contented, pleasured noise as she does so. Her eyes flicker closed and then open again as she lifts herself up off of his chest, her weight shifting to his lap. She carefully unfolds her right leg and then gently lifts her body off of Lukas's completely.

"Mmm," she says, or hums, when so, so slowly he is drawn out of her by her movement.

Maybe at this point she would go to the table and suggest that they eat, she's ravenous. Or she might go to the shower to wash off. Or flop onto the bed and sprawl across the fluffy covers in post-coital bliss. Danicka does not do any of those things, at least not yet. Maybe in a little while. For now, while he is discarding the condom in the wastebasket by the chair or nudging his shoes off his feet or whatever it is he does, she stands, and lays her hand against the windowsill for balance as she strips off her boots, and then the thin stockings underneath them. They're damp, but not wet, and now -- finally -- she's utterly, completely naked.

And turning back to him, to curl up on the double-wide armchair beside him, against his ribs. Her legs go over his lap, her head to his shoulder. There's no doubt in her that he will know, simply by the way she moves to him like this, that his arm should go around her, and he should hold her, and that they should simply not move for a little while. They should, while they can, just be happy with each other.