hold.

[Danicka] It's eleven at night, and Danicka is waking up in her own bed. The front door is locked and there is music playing in the living room still. It's been playing all afternoon. The bathroom does not smell like vomit, at least. Her hair is strawlike and disheveled because she went to sleep with it wet. She does not remember getting home. She does not remember drinking more in the kitchen, alone, after she did get home.

She doesn't remember turning on the stereo, or throwing up alcohol and miscellaneous fluids. She vaguely remembers Neil. She sort of remembers crying at some point, her face feels puffy. She's more hungover than she's been in...well. Maybe twenty-four, thirty-two hours or so.

Danicka picks up her phone to look at the clock. She hasn't done this in three days. She has six voicemails.

And three of them, she discovers, are from Lukas. She hears his voice saying her name over and over, and she is just glad that she doesn't have to hide her eyes from the light that doesn't exist in her room right now. She is just glad that she woke up alone.

It is eleven thirty at night, and Danicka is calling Lukas, who wanted to see her, who told her to call him, who asked what the fuck.

[Lukas] When Lukas sees the name on his cellphone:

DANICKA
312-555-2985

-- because his cellphone didn't have the accented C -- when he sees the name and the number, he's very close to simply putting it aside. Or turning it off. Fuck her, he thinks; fuck it all.

And then he picks up anyway. Because he's not petty like that, or simply because: it's Danička.

There's a click; the ringing stops, and there's silence for a beat, just airspace. Then, "Yeah?"

[Danicka] "I got your messages," she says, her voice raspy from hours of sleep, from dehydration, from abuse. A sigh leaves her, for no reason but that she's breathing irregularly right now, and tired. "Promiňte...I haven't...paid any attention to my phone for a few days."

[Lukas] Lukas is on the road somewhere; she can hear the low rumbling of engine noise, wind noise, road noise in the background. He doesn't say anything for a while.

"You don't remember a fucking thing that happened, do you."

[Danicka] Without facial features, they only have tone of voice. His seems flat. Irritated. Hers is just...drained. Rough around the edges. "I wouldn't know what day it is if I hadn't looked at my phone."

[Lukas] "Jesus Christ, Danička."

And another protracted silence, this one long enough that if she hadn't heard the sound of something whooshing -- was he passing an 18wheeler truck? -- she might've thought he'd hung up.

At last, "It's Saturday night." Which she already knows, but he's making a point, which is, "I called you Thursday morning. And then twice more. And then I found you at Mr. C's. It wasn't enjoyable." Beat. "What the fuck made you decide to go into a three-day tailspin?"

At least, he thinks it's three days. For all he knows she's been like this for a week. Nine days. Since the last time he saw her, on the morning of the 16th, leaving his room, angry and hurt.

[Danicka] The other end of the nonexistent line, the invisible connection between wireless phones, is silent for a few seconds. When she speaks it's a whisper, and it echoes back to fireplace, to waterfront, to --

"What do you think?"

[Lukas] "Don't you blame this one on me," he snaps, low. "I didn't hand you the bottle. I didn't drive you to a goddamn dive bar. I didn't put four jackasses around you to ogle your tits, and I sure as hell didn't make you tell me you were a slut, and if not for me, you'd be out getting fucked and sucking cock all night."

A long, angry pause. Windnoise -- then the blast of a horn, Lukas's from the way it refuses to taper off with distance -- an engine gunning.

If she hasn't just hung up by the end of it, he continues, "I don't see how the fuck I can trust you when you don't even remember what the hell you've done in the last 72 hours."

[Danicka] He can hear her breathe out. It's not exasperation. It's just air, and she just sounds tired. She is tired. He saw her before she drove off, drunk enough that the only reason he couldn't tell, the only reason he wasn't watching her fall down or vomit, was because she was flying. Lukas doesn't know enough about medicine to have seen any of the signs and realized that she was doing the same drug Katherine Bellamonte's pet had been addicted to. And that's for the best, that he doesn't know.

It may be for the best that Danicka doesn't remember most of what she said to him. She might throw up again. Mostly, for now, she lies there and listens to him rant because she's heard worse, and she doesn't know what she does and doesn't deserve, and she has something she's needed to say to him from the start of it.

"I don't ever blame other people for what I do," she says, calmly due at least in part to simple weariness. There's a pause, then, and this time when she sighs there's a weight of feeling behind it, feeling she's just too goddamn worn out to try and conceal. It makes her voice weaker than it is already. "Lukáš, I feel like my heart's broken and I still don't want anyone else, but...look, I got your message, and I didn't know all this shit had happened after. I'm sorry, I wouldn't have called if I knew."

[Lukas] Now it's his turn to sigh. "Hold on a minute."

And then rustling, and then silence -- the noise in the background slowly diminishing until it's just a faint idling in the background. He's pulled over somewhere: the side of a road, the shoulder of a freeway.

"You know," he's back, picking up the cell again because he hadn't bothered to get his headset out, "it's not even that I really believe you've fucked around on me. It's just -- I don't even know how to react, Danička, when you do something like this. I don't know if I should be angry, or just ignore it, or do something about it, or ..."

She can't see him. She can't see that he's leaned his head back against the headrest and brought up his free hand to pinch the bridge of his nose, as though the very act of talking to her made his head pound.

Another 18wheeler blasts by on the road, a fancy one with lots of chrome and running lights that glow like stars in the darkness. Its tailwind rocks the MKZ on its springs, gently. He's on the shoulder of a freeway after all, twenty miles out of the city and heading back.

"It's out of my experience. It's out of my scope. You're just -- you're nothing like me, or anything I understand."

[Danicka] And for motives he can't discern from where he is, Danicka holds on a minute.

They're actually very simple. Leaving him was an act of will, not feeling. Feeling told her to stay, to forgive everything, to sweep any hurt under the rug, apologize for whatever he might want to hear remorse for. Feeling told her to weep, to beg, to lie, to do anything if he would just tell her that it was all right and he wanted her anyway. And because she cannot bear whining, because she cannot fathom being that weak in front of someone so potentially dangerous, because deep down -- despite everything -- she has enough self-respect to have a limit, Danicka made herself go instead.

Now she holds on because in the absence of true coherence or her own memory she wants desperately for him to keep talking to her, she thinks of making love to him and sleeping beside him and she wants him there so badly it makes her wonder who the hell she has turned into. It makes her terrified of what's going to happen to her, if the things he says can hurt that much and she still loves him. It's mad. It's familiar. And that makes the floor drop out from under her.

That is what she is thinking of while he is pulling off to the side of the road.

When he comes back, she's surprised she's not crying. Danicka is breathing, that's how he knows she's still there. But she doesn't interrupt, and she waits til the very end to reply.

"...After that morning in your room? I've started...you said things, and then took them back, or apologized. It wasn't the only time. So now I have to ask: is that really what you think?"

That I'm nothing like you.

I'm nothing you understand.

[Lukas] Lukas closes his eyes. He thumps his head back against the headrest once, twice, as if to jar thoughts from his head, or jar them into something approaching order.

"I don't know what I think anymore, Danička." His hand opens over his brow; he kneads his temples with his thumb and his first two fingers, the arch of his hand fitting the curve of his forehead. "I used to be able to make up my mind and stick to it for as long as I needed to. Now I can barely keep my head on straight for thirty minutes at a time.

"I don't even know who the hell I am when I'm with you. I hate that it's so fucking easy for you to tear me down. Do you know how easy it is? You don't even have to leave me. All you have to do is look at me like I'm nothing to you, or talk like you don't care what damage you're doing. That's all it takes."

A hard silence; clamped jaw. Then he drops his hand to the steering wheel, faintly vibrating under his hand with the idling of the engine.

"And I hate that it's so fucking easy for you to make me happy, too. Sometimes you smile at me, or ... put your arms around me, or -- anything, really, and I'm just ... so in love with you I can barely breathe."

His thoughts scatter; then they reform. Quieter:

"I can't keep up," finally. "We go from one end of the spectrum to the other and I know it's me as much as you, but I can't keep up. I can barely handle how good it gets, and I can barely survive how bad it gets, and --

"Fuck; I can't even string a goddamn sentence together anymore."

Airspace; deadspace.

"Christ, Danička, chybíš mi."

[Danicka] Thankfully, she cannot see the effect that just talking to her is having: the fact that he pinches the bridge of his nose, he beats his head against the seat, he rubs his temples. All she knows is the sound of his voice. He cannot see the position of her body change, he only hears her breathing, and the rustling of her sheets. He cannot see her knees drawn up, her forehead resting on them as she holds her phone to her ear and staves off a throbbing headache of her own that has more to do with alcohol and drugs than stress.

But the stress doesn't help.

All the time he is speaking, she simply listens. She's rested, if nothing else. Her body aches and longs for water but she has slept enough, finally, for the first time in days. She slept for roughly sixteen hours once she fell into bed. She can stand to just listen for awhile, and not have to string any goddamn sentences of her own together. It isn't easy to listen to, though. Thankfully, he doesn't have to see the places where she flinches.

Even when she's alone, Danicka tries to hide it.

In the end, he is silent. And then he blasphemes Christ or maybe her name and tells her that --

Danicka sighs softly, and it's muffled. So is her voice, when she finds the words to speak. "I...don't know what to say to a lot of that." There's a pause. A long one. "When you told me that...you were in love with me...I just thought it meant that you trusted me. But things you said that morning and things you're saying now..."

Her eyes shut tighter. He can't see it.

"It just sounds like you wish you didn't want me, and I don't know if I can bear seeing that and hearing that every time I start to think I can trust...this."

[Lukas] "How can I trust you when I don't even know know where I'll find you next or what you'll be doing?"

There's a sort of misconception in fiction that anger, once kindled is permanent -- like a fire that burns until its fuel is utterly consumed. More often than not, really, it's nothing like that. Anger comes and goes; it sputters out to embers, and then, fanned, suddenly bursts into flame again.

He's angry again, abruptly.

"How can I trust you when you say such things -- "

If he had any objectivity left -- if he had any ability left to step back from the situation and analyze it, to go through the motions of anger without actually being burned by the flame, he'd see instantly that they were all but mirroring one another at each other.

The things you said that morning, she said. The things you're saying now. I don't know if I can bear that every time I start to think I can trust this.

How can I trust you, he says, when you say such things.

She wonders who the hell she has turned into, that she wants this -- and him -- so badly that she would stay on the line, keep talking to him, even begin to consider forgiveness.

He doesn't know who the fuck he is anymore.

It's a conversation rife with pauses -- not for effect, not to let the words or the hurt sink in, but simply because he doesn't know what to say. He cuts himself off when he can't string another word onto the end of a failing sentence; he's silent for seconds on end when he's trying to find the threads or something else to say, or hold himself the fuck together, or...

I just want to see her. The thought swims to the surface; it tears at him with shark teeth. He remembers her eyes flat and black as a shark's, the way she'd looked at him over her shoulder with such terrible indifference. I never want to see her like that again.

"Okay." This is the sound of him clearing shit off his table: tabula rasa. "You want the truth, Danička?"

"The truth is, I say things I don't believe when I'm angry, but I mean every last word when I say it. I mean it because you've made me angry, and worse, you've shaken my trust and hurt me, so by god I'm going to retaliate and hurt you back.

"The truth is, I've said things to you that I wouldn't dream of tolerating myself. And there's no reason you should have to tolerate it from me."

The truth, the truth. Lukas is always talking about the truth, when the truth he believes so firmly in shifts and slides from his grasp so easily now.

"The truth is I do want you. I do want to trust you. But right now, I don't know that I can."

[Danicka] This is why she can't believe that he really feels that they are nothing alike, that he cannot understand anything is, that she is wholly different from him and unfathomable. They are too similar. They mirror each other too much. Not always too well. She may as well echo him when he snaps that he can't trust her because the things she says hurt him, throw him off, make him wonder which is truer, her anger and indifference or her welcome and adoration.

And as he has seen time and time again, whether he pauses or he speaks at length, Danicka listens. She waits quietly while he says what he has to say, a far cry from the terse words of early this morning and a long way from her abusive, agonizing attacks. And when he is done telling her the truth about the things he says when he's angry, when he can't rely on the trust he's built in her, when she's hurt him. And in her mind she thinks

Yes, I know.

I know.

I understand exactly.

Because she does. With perfect, poignant clarity, she knows exactly how he feels. Danicka's hair slides along the sheets as she lifts her head, licks her lips, wishes she had some water to drink. And then she takes a breath, holds it for a second, and sighs. "That's fair."

Another pause in a conversation built on them. "Do you want to come over?"

[Lukas] There's a pause; just a second of silence cut with the sounds of the highway.

Then: "Yeah. I do."

--

Lukas is twenty minutes out of the city, which means he's thirty minutes from her place. He makes it there in twenty-five. The MKZ is a midsize sedan, not even quite a sports sedan, but he drives it like it's a goddamn supercoupe, gunning the engine to 95mph, riding down the tails of other drivers until they move out of his way, swerving around the ones that won't.

When he pulls to a stop in front of 520 Kingsbury, the car rocks to a hard halt on the yellow loading line. He kills the engine. He intends to park there. If he stays the night he'll assuredly have a ticket by morning, if his car isn't simply towed outright, but at the moment it seems all right; he doesn't care.

The doorman looks at him askance as he punches the button labeled 23/C on the intercom. If she says anything, he answers her, "Je to mě," but if she doesn't, if she just buzzes him in, he doesn't say a word either.

The elevator is silent. He's alone in it. The numbers streak by; he can feel the g-force tugging his blood to his shoes. Then it stops and the doors slide open soundlessly, and he thinks he could probably find her apartment by memory now, by smell.

Lukas knocks on the door with nothing in his hands: no flowers, no chocolates, no apologetic card. There's just Lukas, startlingly bright tonight in a bone-white leather jacket, a distant, expensive cousin of motorcycle racing gear with its short cut, its sleek, closefitting lines. No studs, no spikes, no frills, and only one zipper: the one he's pulling down now from the center of his chest to the bottom of the jacket, hidden behind its flap.

There were things on his mind all the way here: in the hall, in the elevator, in the car. Lists and lists or things he wanted to say and do. In the end it boils down, blows away, burns up into one thing: even before Danicka gets the door closed, he steps into her; even before he has his jacket open, he's pressing his face to hers, his cheek to hers, nuzzling against her neck as though to remember her scent.

[Danicka] After that there is no reason to stay on the phone with Lukas. Danicka doesn't. She ends the call and looks at the other voicemails she hasn't checked. Her father called on Friday. The receptionist at her salon called on Thursday to confirm her appointment tomorrow. Her father called earlier. Danicka doesn't call Miloslav back, though. She puts her phone down on the nightstand, gets out of bed, and goes to shower.

Having no idea where Lukas was, only that he was on the road, she moves quickly. She longs to just stand under the hot stream of water for a solid half-hour to recover from the conversation as much as the last few days, but she doesn't know when he's coming. She also did not ask.

When Lukas gets there, having driven quite like a bat out of hell, Danicka just buzzes him up. When Lukas gets to her door, Danicka just lets him him. She blinks at the sight of him, as though him wearing white is indeed startling. It's late on a Saturday and plenty of evenings like this she would be out on the town, but she's been out on the town for several nights in a row now.

Danicka is not dressed to go anywhere: her socks are oatmeal-colored, her jeans are boot-cut, and her sweater is a sherbert-pale orange with a white silhouette of a couple of swallows on the left shoulder, above her breast. Its sleeves end just past her elbows, and its hem barely touches the waist of her jeans. Her hair is dry but untouched otherwise, laying around her shoulders in the waves it falls into without effort.

She looks good. The apartment, however, is a wreck. He's going to pass the kitchen and potentially be horrified by the empty but untossed cans, the takeout boxes, the full sinks, the trash overflowing. There's clothes strewn all over the living room, as though night after night she came back here and just threw whatever she was wearing across the couch or the barstools or the floor. He likely trips on the shoes in front of the door, even though she's kicked most of them to the wall.

Danicka lets him in, stepping out of his way, and then closes -- and locks -- the front door behind him. The apartment seems like it must be empty, just the two of them, because it is silent except for the voice of Neko Case over a couple of guitars --

(just because you don't believe it, doesn't mean I didn't mean it)

-- but that doesn't mean anything. He thought they were alone the last time he was here, too, until he met Liadan. He moves to her, rubbing their faces together, rubbing his nose against her throat, sniffing softly and animalistically, and Danicka has to take a breath at the suddenness of his presence, the abruptness of his thoroughly inhuman, wholly natural greeting. But she steps over that gap, and her hands move to the sides of his waist. Her eyes close, and she turns her head to give him the same wordless, intimate hello.

Her hands move around to his lower back, under his jacket. They run up his spine, hold him, and she presses her face to his chest, lays her cheek there and keeps her eyes closed and the man close.

The song has changed before she says a word. It's a man singing, now. (And the world moves in slow-mo, straight to my head like the first cigarette of the day...) It's a song about being stuck in the past. It's playing loudly enough to be clear, not loudly enough to exacerbate her headache or interfere with his ability to hear what she murmurs against him, half-buried in his shirt:

"What you say and do in anger doesn't go away when you stop meaning it." There's a beat, a sinking of both the words and her own voice, because there is an echo of her answer to a question he asked while they laid in bed together, over a week ago: She was angry. Danicka takes a shaky breath. "Along the same lines...I don't remember what all I said to you last night or what hurt you. But I'm sorry for it."

[Lukas] The jacket drops off his shoulders and then down his arms. He lets it fall to the floor, exposing the sheening pale-gray lining. His shirt beneath is black as pitch, a thin pullover that transduces the heat of her hands and her breath immediately, makes the hairs on the back of his neck stand up, makes his skin tingle and his nipples tighten. He's so aware of her every inch of him longs to be against some part of her, and as soon as his arms are free of the jacket he wraps them around her, tight, tight. His back bows with the closeness of his embrace. He buries his face in her hair as she buries hers in his chest.

It's like they're lovers in the aftermath of a nuclear war, separated and found again. It's like they're lovers in a war.

It's literally minutes before either of them even awaken enough to speak, and even then they don't let go. And when she does he draws a breath that's full of the smell of her, and he thinks to himself:

I'm angry at this woman, aren't I? I don't trust her, and I hate that I love her. Don't I?
I was angry, wasn't I?
Wasn't I?

"Vím," he says, muffled against her hair. "Promiňte, láska. Nemůžu slíbit I'll never to udělat znovu. Ale slibuju, že se pokusí."

There's a shaky breath -- it comes from her, but it may as well come from him, the way his chest tightens at the sound of it. She goes on and his eyes open for a moment, close again.

"Ty se na mě podíval, jako bych byl nic do vás."

Another man, and one might be justified in thinking he says this to twist the knife, or to rub her face in it, or to make sure she knew exactly what she had done wrong. It's not that. There's no blame in his tone, no resentment, no anger. He says this the same way he told her he was in love with her, the very first time: quietly, with a sort of decimated calm; a final retaliation that was really a white flag.

"To vyrobeno všechno ostatní neúnosná. Kdybych věděl, že jste ještě záleželo na mě, nic jiného by mají záleželo."

[Danicka] Luckily, that pristine coat of Lukas's falls on a clean floor. Without the snow of winter leaving muck everywhere, the tiled entryway is clean even if the rest of the apartment is currently a wreck. Twenty-five minutes was not enough time for Danicka to wash and dress herself and eat and clean up everything, so everything was left where it was. Crude, filthy, and revelatory: what she can do, she does not always do.

What she wants to do, she will do with impunity. What she must do...she does, bowing her neck in silence.

Her only response to his apology is a nod, and one hand on his back curling, fingertips rubbing, before her palm flattens again.

She looked at him, early this morning, late last night, as though he was nothing to her. And Danicka's eyes are already closed or they would fall that way. Her brow, unseen, furrows gently. There is no accusation in his voice, and she doesn't imagine any. He says it like someone desolate, nearly empty, running on fumes and devotion. He says it like it hurt, not to hurt her. She takes a breath, and begins slowly stroking his back with his fingertips, drawing not some aimless pattern but a lazy eight, always moving up on the axis, which is felt in the dip of his spine.

"Jsem schovávat věci, které by mohly být použity pro mě bolelo."

[Lukas] And by the same token, another man would never have accepted such an answer. It's not an apology. There's no remorse implied in the words. It's an explanation -- almost a justification.

And yet -- it is enough. It's an explanation, which is better than an apology.

Lukas thinks about it for a moment. Then he wraps his arms around her higher, around her shoulders, each hand wrapped around the curve of the opposite shoulder, the cords in his forearms and the muscles in his upper arms standing out against his sleeves with the force of his embrace. He presses a kiss to her temple.

"Chápu."

And he does understand. If he were a better liar, he might do exactly the same thing.

"Ale prosím, není to znovu."

[Danicka] The remorse came earlier, in an apology that was bound to be filled with gaping holes and yawning emptiness because she does not remember what she is apologizing for. She doesn't know what she snapped at him, doesn't remember the cigarette, knows she said something about getting fucked and sucking cock all night if it weren't for him, and that sounds like she was blaming him for keeping her from her fun but she can't imagine why she would say that, because what keeps her from that now is not boredom or a need for security but the very thing that was missing from her eyes as soon as he saw her:

caring for him.

He is enfolding her right now, and there's something vulnerable about both the way he bows to her and the way that her hands rest on his back, the way his arms cross over hers. There is also something inexplicably, equally protective: he could suffer blows like this and she'd be untouched, she rubs his back like he's a child. So when they cling to each other, despite the difference in their heights, despite the fact that he is what he is and she is Less and despite the fact that she can't even break a coffee cup reliably, there is no sense of sheltered and shelter, guardian and protected.

Just Danicka and Lukas.

In the end she gives him what he gave her:

"Slibuju, že se pokusí."

[Lukas] Her hands are moving over his back. His hands are closed over her shoulders. This might be the first time, the only time he can remember holding her like this without going for her mouth, her neck, her breasts, her clothes. Lukas doesn't mind; he thinks he might be able to hold onto her like this forever.

But of course, he can't. The front door is still open, if nothing else. And gradually they draw apart. There's something like unwillingness in the way his hands slide down her arms to grip her elbows; to cradle her forearms. A tiny space opens between them, and then a little more, and then he turns to push her door shut and lock it, and instead of picking up his jacket he just kicks it aside, and then kicks his shoes off.

He's in his socks now, and he comes back to her; his arm comes around her waist like it belongs there, and he walks with her into the apartment. There's a glance at the kitchen, the piled-high dishes; a glance at the previously pristine living room, which is now heaped with abandoned clothing, a mute catalog of how many days, how many outfits, she went through while on her bender.

Or tailspin, as he'd called it. Perhaps the latter is more appropriate.

"Můj bože," he comments; but that's the extent of it. He doesn't rail at her to clean the place up. He doesn't shout at her for the mess, or beat her for not having a spotless apartment and fresh-cooked food and wine chilled for his arrival -- but then, perhaps she's past the point of expecting quite such a level of bullying from him. He just looks at the desolation, startled, half-admiring almost.

"Doesn't your roommate mind?"

[Danicka] The door, being already closed and locked behind Lukas, finds itself standing firmly as he reaches back to press his palm to it. A moment passes, and the man gradually realizes that he waited for her. When he first stepped in, before he unzipped his coat and pulled her close, he waited. And that had made a difference. Now that he is reminded of what transpired in the seconds before he had her in his arms Lukas turns back and Danicka steps out of the entryway to walk into the apartment proper. She's headed for the living room.

He slides his arm around her as he walks back up, making her breathe in deeply, and then -- after a moment -- she tips her head and lays it against his chest. They have a tendency to fight, to walk away, to endure painful conversations...and then they're like this again, as though it never happened. Until the next time they fight, or try to walk away, and then it all comes rushing back. It's not even that they're particularly forgiving. They could just be called lazy. They get tired of being apart, of being firm, of being angry, and so: here they are, her temple to his chest, as she walks with him towards the couch.

"My roommate," she says, "is in Paris. Or was. She's coming back soon, but she's been gone all this week."

Danicka gets to the couch, steps away from him, and sort of...flops...onto the cushions.

[Lukas] Lukas watches her flop. He looks at the plasma TV as if expecting to see Milla Jovovich still frozen there, but of course she's not. Then he picks a scrap of cloth off the couch -- it's another top, apparently woven of numerous braids of cloth that fall together to form something like a covering.

He balls it up in his hand and then tosses it aside. And drops down next to her, his greater weight making the whole of the couch jounce a little. He puts his feet up on the coffee table, between an empty can of red bull and a box of... something that might've been takeout.

"Convenient timing. Have you eaten anything tonight?"

[Danicka] The television screen is blank. There is no ashtray on the coffee table; Danicka doesn't smoke indoors. The only things missing from the general disarray of this apartent are evidences of hard drugs and rampant sexual escapades, but there's no torn-up boxes that once held condoms, no discarded syringes, no rolled-up dollar bills or cut-off straws. There's no lingering scent of marijuana out on the balcony, any more than the scent of nicotine lingers long at this height, when the wind washes everything away.

Danicka is laying back on the couch, her head on the arm nearest the balcony doors. Her right leg is bent, its outer side resting against the back cushions. Her left leg dangles off the front of the piece of furniture where he had yanked her clothes down and proceeded to fuck her some time ago, not the last time he was here but one of the most memorable times he's ever seen her. Her socked toes brush the carpet, and the hem of her sweater rucks up, revealing an inch or two of her waist. She blinks at teh question, then reaches underneath herself to pull out not a piece of beribboned lace lingerie but a plain pair of underwear. She rolls her eyes and tosses it over the back of the couch.

"I woke up, checked my messages, called you, showered, dressed, and answered the door." Danicka takes a breath. "I also took some Excedrin. I slept for...like...sixteen hours."

[Danicka] [Correction: apartMent. Damn this M key.]

[Lukas] Her feet are closer to him. Danicka is five-six barefoot, which is not amazonian, but isn't quite a slouch either. A little above average. Blonde. Green-eyed. Small breasts. All things considered -- she's beautiful, but probably not the most beautiful woman he's ever see. Or fucked. There's nothing, nothing at all, that indicates at a glance why he should be so ...

... hung up on her.
Fucked up over her.
In love with her.

Crazy about her. That's the best way to put it. Because he is. Because he was mad. He was. He was angry all the way here; and even before. He was angry when they were on the phone, he was angry all fucking day because he'd found her in a goddamn dive bar with four guys buzzing around her like flies, and he was angry because when she saw him she didn't smile; she didn't look at him like she loved him; she didn't even look like she cared. She looked at him like he was the past, gone, written off, and all the while he could barely stand that she was there in her lowslung jeans and her $300 camisole and ...

... he lets it go. Fuck it; it's past. They've both apologized. Promised to do better. Didn't promise never, or not again, or anything like that. They've both confessed what it was that hurt so goddamn much, and --

And he lifts her foot from the ground, slings it over his lap. He sits sprawled, slouching, dominating his space; he puts her feet over his thighs like they belonged there, because they did.

His hand covers her shin. The thumb strokes over her skin, and he marvels that it's so soft, so perfect, so perfektní, and he never wants to think about why.

And he says, "Do you want to order pizza?"

[Danicka] If he just pretends that it didn't happen, that there should be scars criss-crossing her body and there aren't, then he can rest easy when he's running his hands over her. If he just acts as though it's normal for her to cover her mouth when she's laughing and choke on tears rather than sob, then he doesn't have to think about why that is, why she cannot admit that she's happy without fear that someone will take it away from her. And that's easier. That's perhaps easier on both of them, actually.

Lukas has to wonder sometimes as he looks at her what the fuck he sees in her. She's often the most beautiful woman in any club or bar -- there's a reason she was surrounded at Mr. C's -- unless some ethereal nymph made for catwalk or screen shows up. Her features are soft, her body agile and welcoming but not so striking that the sight of her makes people run into tables usually. But Danicka is beautiful. So beautiful that tears and anger only accentuate it, that whether she's drenched or dry or clothed or naked the eye wants to follow her.

And yet she is not so beautiful that that would excuse how he feels for her, how much he wants her...as though his feeling, and his desire, needed excuse. Needed justification, so that if asked he could simply point to her and say Duh, but that's not the case. He can't even excuse his state of mind with her breeding: the city is veritably crawling with well-bred kinswomen of his Tribe. He could go elsewhere, go back to New York or visit some other Lord-controlled sept, if he wanted a brood mare. Find one prettier and better bred than this one.

And yet.

She lets him put her feet on his thigh. Danicka doesn't usually resist. And there's a difference even there, between calmly allowing him to manipulate her limbs because she does not mind much one way or the other, and the way she goes limp and submissive when he might hurt her. She stretches out, but doesn't close her eyes. She slept for a full day; she's nowhere near tired. Just...ill. He rubs his thumb over her denim-clad shin, thinking of the smooth skin underneath, refusing to reflect too deeply on its perfection.

Danicka nods her head slowly. "Unless you feel like cooking me something greasy and delicious, that'd be great."

[Lukas] The edge of his mouth quirks up. "Omelets," he says, "are about the extent of my ability."

His cell phone is in his pants pocket. He twists his hips, arching them up to get at it. Her legs are briefly displaced, or at least raised. "Any preference?" he asks, while he's dialing -- apparently twenty-something werewolves were no different from twenty-something humans in having the local pizzeria on speeddial.

Whatever she wants, that's what he gets. Plus a meat lover's. Small surprise, that.

When the phone call ends, he clips the cell closed. Leans forward to put it on the edge of the coffee table. Puts his feet back up, sinks down; lays his head back. His hand covers her shins loosely; her denims are soft under his thumb, but not so soft as her skin. He looks at the ceiling, at the blank TV, and then, turning his head, at her.

Lukas hasn't lifted his head from the back of the couch. He looks relaxed, or perhaps exhausted. He looks like he's used to being here, even though he's not.

"I shouldn't have waited so long to call you," he says.

[Danicka] "Lies," Danicka scoffs quietly. "I have seen you cook sammiches."

Perhaps unexpectedly, perhaps unsurprisingly, Danicka does not want a veggie pizza or a chicken barbecue pizza. She wants something with sausage, pepperoni, ham, bacon, and ground beef. She wants cheese in the crust. She wants extra cheese, in fact. Considering the fact that she hasn't eaten in perhaps twenty, twenty-four hours, one can't fault her in the slightest for the sheer amount of fat she's asking to be fed.

She is just lying there, her limbs languid, as he looks around everywhere but her...until he is. Danicka stares back at him, quiet, until he speaks. She doesn't respond for a moment, and then she takes a shallow breath.

"After a couple of days, I figured it was over."

[Lukas] That makes him look at her: it's the same sort of quizzical look he gave her when she said you don't have to do that and he said i want to.

That's what it is: quizzical. As if what she says couldn't possibly make sense. And the regard goes on a minute, his blue eyes on her green ones; and his are clear, clear, so pale that they must be cold, except she's seen them anything but cold.

When he's over her. Or under her. When he's inside her, and she's taking him out of his mind.

Even in this light, those eyes of his are clear and pale; they're like ice in an arctic winter. He watches her a moment, and then he says, "Do you really think it would be that easy for me to just ... forget about you?"

[Danicka] As easily as she's lying there, it's still hard for her to forget that the last time they loved each other, whether with hands or mouths or their full bodies, was a week and a half ago. He'd asked her why she had gone on that bender, that tailspin, and her answer had made him hear blame where there was none. There was only the answer, which was painful, which was You broke my heart. And even then, it's not the truth, because it was not so much Lukas as the thought that he did not love her.

Danicka, looking at him, doesn't know that he knows he's the only one she's ever really fallen for. She doesn't know how much she unleashed.

"It doesn't matter if you forgot about me or not," she says, turning to look at the couch cushions and lifting one hand to scratch at a stray thread. "I walked out, we didn't call each other, and...I figured it was over."

[Lukas] And Lukas turns away. The back of his head to the back of the couch, he turns his face forward, and the way he's sitting -- slouched, leaning down, sprawled -- he faces the ceiling. He closes his eyes. He covers his eyes with his hand, pinches the bridge of his nose, and she can't know that he spent almost the entire conversation on the phone with her like this, holding his head as though he had a headache, hold his head as though if he didn't, it would simply rupture to pieces.

"Danička," he says, and he doesn't know what else to say.

That's it for a long time, then. Just her name hanging between them. He always pronounces it right. He's pronounced it right since the very start, when he looked at her across Gabriella and said, is that Danicka, or Danička? -- and she knew his heritage, and he knew hers, and neither of them knew, yet, that they went all the way back to childhood together.

There was an oak tree in her backyard that he climbed. His sister and he tore around her house in their socks, slipping on the waxed floors, falling, getting back up, yelling and shouting. They didn't grow up together -- had never quite seen each other enough for that -- but they did share a portion of their childhoods, long before it became clear that he would grow up to be Lukáš Wyrmbreaker, and long before it became clear that she would grow up to be Danička the liar, Danička the slut, Danička the untrustworthy; Danička, who he was in love with.

He touches that thought gingerly, like a man tongues a sore tooth. Danička, my love. Danička, moje láska.

Danička, who thought it could be so easy as that, for him. Who thought if she walked out, and he didn't call her, it meant they were over. Because that's how shallow his affections ran.

"I was just ... busy. Things have been rough with the pack." A pause. And then, though he doesn't understand why he confides in her, he does: "Kate's gone. So's Ed and Dylan. It's just the four of us now, plus Caleb. And Sam was acting up, and ...

"It was rough. I just didn't have time. I'm sorry."

[Danicka] When he's angry, he says things he doesn't believe, but he means them at the time. Danicka watches him tip his head back, as though exasperated. She hears him say her name, as though drained. And she thinks: when he's alone with me, he says things he doesn't believe, but he means them at the time. Things about how he feels for me. She wonders if she can trust anything he says when his emotions are running high, and wonders if she can trust anything anyone says, and all she knows is that she looks at him and the idea that he's exasperated with her or frustrated with her makes her stomach tie into a knot, and this disgusts her.

She felt that way when she walked out of his bedroom after breaking a mug and a bowl, after he yelled at her. She felt weak, and she felt hurt, and could not fathom him contacting her again out of anything but responsibility. She could not imagine him continuing to want to be with her. Not when, at the time she left, the last thing she felt was loved.

A far cry from the way she felt when she woke up that morning.

He's been busy, he says. It makes her take a deep breath. But he says he's sorry, so after she exhales, she just...closes her mouth.a=

[Danicka] [Damon was watching porn while doing this scene. Just. You know. FYI. So maybe he shouldn't tease me about my typos. Should he? No he shouldn't.]

[Lukas] (:O)

[Lukas] She closes her mouth.

Which is surely what she's been taught all her life to do. Close your mouth. Speak when spoken to. Don't backtalk. Don't act up. Be submissive. Be docile. Be breeding stock.

And he knows she can put on a damn good act when she wants. He's seen the way she acts when they're in the common room of the Brotherhood. Hell, he saw the way she answered him the first time they met in their adult lives, when he asked her if she was propositioning him, and she answered --

-- what she answered. Which was neither yes nor no; which was, in essence: a submission.

Only she's not really like that. There are kin whose spirits have been utterly broken, utterly crushed, and though Danicka is quite possibly damaged, she is not quite broken.

And what was it he said, at the aquarium, looking at the schooling fish?

That's the last thing I want of you.

So it's little surprise, really, when her exhale makes him turn his head toward her without lifting it. Now his temple is to the back of the couch; his cheek. The light strikes his eyes at an oblique angle; gives a faceted, crystalline depth to the blue. His eyes flicker over her face.

"What were you going to say?"

[Danicka] The moon is just barely past new, or she wouldn't answer at all. She looks at him, her chest lifts as she breathes, and she just says it: "Probably something cruel. And angry."

[Lukas] There's a change in his eyes -- the faintest dawning of a frown that never touches his brow.

"Why?"

[Danicka] The easiest, most flippant answer would be the one that has a shared past between them, thirty minutes ago and several weeks ago. Why do you think? Danicka looks at him almost warily. She wants him here, that's true, or she wouldn't have asked. She wants that peace and quietude she has with him. She wants him to take he to bed later and lean against her headboard and rock his hips upward as she rides him, as he caresses her breasts and licks her throat.

The bite mark he left on her shoulder is gone now. Has been gone for days.

Wanting him or not, though, Danicka's eyebrows pull together slightly as she tries to phrase an answer that isn't flippant, isn't easy. She is reminded in a flash of the feeling that he will never trust her, that every time he gets angry whatever love he has for her will go out the window, just as pack matters and the War will drive her out of his head for days at a time. She breathes in, nostrils flaring, and her lips barely part to release it.

"My heart broke," she says flatly, her eyes bright but no moisture in them yet. "Enough that I didn't want to feel anything for days, and I didn't want to remember it if I did. Because I thought you didn't love me. Or if you did, that you thought so low of me I was less than human." Her exhale wants to tremble; she refuses to let it. "I don't care if it makes me high-maintenance, I thought it was over when I walked out and spent the last week falling apart because of it, and the fact that you didn't have the time just..."

She stops herself again, because she has to.

[Lukas] Now Lukas is frowning. In the distant light shed by the lamp in the foyer, the furrows in his brow seem marked and deep, dark as tattoos. He listens to her without speaking, all of it, and in the end her feet are still across his lap, and his hand is still on her shin.

He turns toward the ceiling again. And she'd read him wrong, earlier: it wasn't exasperation at all. It was this: a certain helplessness, an inability to find anything appropriate to say, or do.

"I think maybe not having time was just my excuse to myself," Lukas says suddenly. "Maybe I was afraid to call, or just didn't want to, or ..."

A quiet. Twenty-five minutes, the pizzeria said. He doesn't know how many of those minutes have gone by.

"I don't have an excuse," he finishes. "I should have called. You deserved that much."

[Danicka] All she has to do is sit up, put her hands on his face or his chest, and kiss him. All she has to do is get on his lap and help him peel that sweater off her body and draw his mouth to her nipple. All she has to do is spread her legs for him, only him, the way he wants her to, and tell him that she doesn't care if he called or not as long as he doesn't. Stop. Fucking her.

"...Is this going to work?" is what she asks instead, when ten seconds have gone by and neither of them have said anything past his assertation that she deserved anything at all.

[Lukas] This draws his eyes to her face again. He looks at her, this woman who was not so exceptionally beautiful as to stop traffic; this woman who was assuredly, and decidedly, beautiful.

Shadow Lords shouldn't look like her. They shouldn't have such golden hair; such verdant eyes. They shouldn't have such soft skin and such frail wrists. They shouldn't be so soft, so welcoming, so familiar that sometimes when he wakes with her in his arms --

(which is still, and perhaps always will be, a rare thing)

-- it feels like he's never known anything different. It feels like he belongs.

"I don't know," he replies. It's the truth. "Probably not forever." That's the truth too. And another pause. Then, "But I want it to."

[Danicka] "Okay..." she breathes out, not at all like the Okay she had murmured as he run his tongue over her breasts and wrapped his lips around her nipples. Not at all like the way she sounded when she was underneath him, naked and sweaty in his bed, taking off her earrings slowly because she could not focus well enough to not stab herself while he was trying to pleasure her.

Danicka reaches up and grabs the back of the couch, drawing herself upright slowly becauser her head is still reeling and she is hungy and yet nauseated, because right now it seems that all the water in the world is not going to help her. She pulls herself to sitting and leans forward over her thighs, curls her arms up between her chest and her legs, looks at him closer.

"Tell me why you laugh at me when I'm angry."

[Lukas] Lukas grimaces. It's possible that it's on his tongue to tell her to stop, just stop. Leave it alone. Move on.

And then he turns back to her.

"That morning," he says, quietly, "I laughed because you were telling me to put up or shut up. Only not in so many words. And you were right." His shoulders move, a slow lift and fall that stirs the stretch lines on his shirt; resettles them. "That was all.

"When else have I laughed when you were angry?"

[Danicka] "I can't remember," she says, shrugging one shoulder.

It does not bother her to not have a list of offenses against him, exhibits A through F of times he has performed a certain behavior. Her mind does not work like that, not so ordered, not so pristine. More than once, she thinks. Less than a hundred. Time is just as mutable to her: she does not tell him she is falling in love with him because they have been together a prescribed length of time, she does not tell him her heart broke when she left him because she believes that will change anything.

She's quiet for a moment, and then winces. "I really am sorry that I broke your mug."

[Lukas] A stitch in his brow, there and gone. Lukas shakes his head.

"I overreacted."

[Danicka] The woman beside him, so reserved, so standoffish and perfect in submission when they are around anyone else, so poised when she is out shopping or running errands...screws up her face in the grimace that the wince wanted to be.

"Yeah..." Which she means. Yes. He overreacted. He very nearly frenzied over a cup, "but that wasn't okay for me to do. And instead of apologizing I freaked out because you were yelling at me."

[Lukas] Now he's frowning in truth. He shifts, putting his back against the arm of the couch instead; bending one knee up onto the cushions, leaving the other foot on the floor. They face each other, more or less. The city glitters off to his left, silent and brilliant through the double-layer glass.

"Not just because I was yelling at you," he says, quietly. "Because of what I said. Isn't that right?"

[Danicka] She nods, twice, but that's all. It doesn't need to be emphatic. Leaning up like this her face is perhaps ten inches from his own. He's been able to tell from entering the apartment everything about her, from the smell of her shampoo and soap to the cleanliness of her sweater, the softness of her socks. Kissing her forehead he could tell she was colder than usual; the apartment is not hot but it's warm enough that if he were to get up and walk around that pullover would start to make him sweat in moments, but she seems cozy in that sweater. Her stomach isn't growling, her pupils are broad and dark but not blown out.

She doesn't remember curling against him as they left Mr. C's for the second time in their acquaintance. All she recalls is how he reacted to her when he put his arms around her at the door.

Danicka is still for a moment. Then she nods again, the edges of her eyes tight with a mixture of embarassment and fear.

And hurt.

[Lukas] What is there to say to that?

He could tell her he hadn't meant it. Said it because he was angry -- not even to hurt her, but simply because he was angry, and he needed to lash out somehow. He could tell her he didn't think she was weak, or broken beyond repair, or crazy. He could say these things that he's said before, but like she said -- it's not that she never believes him. It's that she believes him every time.

Lukas puts his hand out instead. He puts his hand on her face, the right, and then the left. Holding her face between his hands, he draws her toward him.

"Pojď sem." These words have history between them, too. "Dovolte, abych vám držet."

[Danicka] If she could just believe he's lying, that would actually make things easier. Then it wouldn't be so back and forth, so up and down. She could choose one truth to trust in: that he loves her, that he wants to be with her, that he likes this thing or that thing about her, or that she is a slut, a distraction, a damaged piece of goods that is only worthwhile to him when she's accepting his cock inside of her.

But she believes both. Every time. She cannot, for some reason, always lie to him. She cannot, for some reason, always dismiss whatever he says as a lie itself. Danicka wants to believe him. She wants to love him. She wants him to trust her, and that is perhaps even newer and stranger to her than the rest.

"You have to keep talking to me," she murmurs, as she unfolds her legs, moves onto her knees on the cushions, and then straddles his lap. Danicka wants to be held, and specifically by Lukas. She lays her head on his shoulder.

[Lukas] Let me hold you, he'd said. Not, let me fuck you, or even let me make love to you.

Because that's not what he wants right now. There's pizza on the way. Besides that -- not twenty-four hours ago she looked at him like it was over. Not an hour ago, she thought it was over.

It's not over. It's nothing close to over. If anything, it's moving too fast. Up and down. Good and bad. I can't keep up, he'd said: that much was still true.

He can't keep up. Not with her; not with what happens between the two of them when they bare themselves to one another and tell the truth, the truth, the truth. Not with what happens between the two of them when whatever exists between them hardens and turns cold, shatters into distrust, and then they're tearing at each other, and she's pretending she doesn't care and he's pretending he doesn't care that she doesn't care, and --

She comes into his arms. She straddles his lap and he extends his leg down the length of the couch, the other still hooked over the edge, foot on the floor. Danicka lays her head on his shoulder and his arms come around her, easily. Her body fits his. There's a curve of muscle between his neck and his acromion that seems made to pillow her cheek. There's a dip at her waist that seems made to accommodate the drape of his arms.

"Danička," he replies, quiet, and faintly amused, "I would gladly talk to you as long as you'd like."

[Danicka] "I'm serious," she whispers close to him, and she is. She sounds it. It's not ungentle, or angry; she hasn't sounded angry with him since last night. This morning. Whenever it was, outside the bar.

Lukas cannot tell if her eyes are opened or closed right now. All he knows is the feel of her breath as she curls up there. One could see her positioning and hear her insistence that he keep talking to her and think fondly of it, sweetly. Adorable, a grown woman a year and a half older than her lover snuggling up to him for comfort like a little girl, childishly making her demands.

Except that is not what is happening.

"I'm not even sure this is real."

[Lukas] She can't see his face. She can't see him frown again, though perhaps she can hear it in his voice.

"Why not?"

And his right hand, the dominant hand, moves from her back. He strokes her hair back, and then he lifts her face from his shoulder to look at her.

Gentler: "Why not, Danička?"

[Danicka] "Because..."

I thought you loved me, and then I thought you hated me, and then I wanted to die.

Danicka's shoulders tighten. He is doing what he did from the beginning, saying her name almost relentlessly, like a mantra, like it is some kind of password that will ensure his words reach her ears and her mind and maybe even her heart. She despises that he can be as ruthless as he is, as terrifying and even as cold as he has been, and when he holds her like this she stops caring.

Maybe, she thinks, all Kin are inherently insane, all fucked up. We want to be abused. We want to be blamed for things that are not our fault. We want to be terrified by those we love. We want to be controlled, dominated, broken down. Maybe that's what we all want, or else why would Martin have wanted Katherine? Why would Miloslav have wanted Laura? Why would her sister-in-law --

She turns her head as she's drawing back, nuzzling his jawline, as though despite all these fears she just cannot help herself. She kisses his cheek, shifts her weight on his lap so she can look at him.

"This whole time...I just thought that you were done with me. Even if you did feel something for me or want me, I thought that was it. I'd blown it. And I was angry, and I was hurt, but despite all that I still..." her throat moves as she swallows, and she curls up again, bowing her head and hiding her face.

"Pořád tě miloval," she whispers. "It wouldn't go away even with all that. Every time I woke up I thought I was going to die, it hurt so badly."

This time he feels her eyes close. "And now we're going to have pizza. And it's my birthday. So it just doesn't feel real."

[Lukas] Maybe it would be better if Lukas had shown up here unkempt, unshaven, unshowered -- as much a mess physically as Danicka was emotionally for the last week. That's not how it is, though. The cheek she kisses is smooth-shaved, as though he'd scraped it clean with his straight razor just hours ago. He smells like his soap and his shaving cream, like his car, faintly, and like himself. His clothes are clean; he dressed with the same keen attention to detail that he always does.

He went through the motions. Thinking he was nothing to her, thinking that look in her eyes, flat and indifferent, was all there would ever be from here on out -- he went through the motions.

I hide things that could be used to hurt me, she said.
I understand, he said.

Only there's nowhere to hide right now. She starts to bow her head but he puts his hands on her face. He holds her where she is -- not because he wants to look at her, but because he wants her to see him; every last detail.

Every wince. Every flinch.

When her eyes close at the end he touches her face gently with his palms, the pads of his fingers. He sweeps his thumbs over the arch of her cheekbones, as though to wipe away tears that were not there.

"It never occurred to me to end it," he tells her, quietly. "Not once, Danička."

There it is again: her name, like an invocation.

"When I saw the way you looked at me last night, I thought you'd already ended it. But I would've never ended it myself." A pause. "Nemůžu."

[Danicka] At first, Danicka resists his hands on her face, his refusal to let her curl up the way she wants to. She closes her eyes, brow furrowing, and half-turns her head even while caught in his palms. It's thoughtless, and that's saying something, that she allows herself to be thoughtless. Later today she will have a phone call from a man she has utterly conflicted, confusing feelings for and she will put thought into everything she says, even when what she says is a mistake. It means something when she doesn't do that, when she isn't careful.

It means more that she resists, that she struggles, even for a second before she opens her eyes and looks at him. Her frown does not completely ease away from her features. Sometimes it is difficult to be held precious, and not feel forced to be fragile. Sometimes it is difficult to be vital and necessary and not feel trapped. There are times when what is between them is perfect in its equality; other times when they cannot strike even the simplest balance.

"...That's not very fair," she says quietly, her voice falling. "If I'm the only one who can make that decision. If you're with me because you can't survive not being with me."

[Lukas] This does make him exasperated. It makes him sigh shortly, and his hands come off her face to drop to the couch -- one draping over the back, the other relaxed at his side.

"Danička, please, stop reading so much into every word I say. Stop analyzing everything and jumping to conclusions."

This is the pot, speaking to the kettle.

"You don't always know the reasons I do anything I do. I didn't not call because it was over; I didn't not end it because I simply can't bear living without you. I'm not that -- weak. I can survive without you. I might fall the fuck apart but I'll put myself back together again. I -- "

he cuts himself off there. His head drops back against the arm of the couch and he exhales at the ceiling. Then he slouches down another few inches, moving behind her, carrying her with him thoughtlessly. After a pause his hand comes back to her, rests over her waist, her spine beneath his palm.

"I'm with you because I want to be," he says, quieter now. "And because I'm happy with you, most times. And because I'm in love with you and I love so many things about you I can't even begin to list them all. And because I don't want to have to survive being without you." His eyes shift, and they come back to her face. "It's because of all that that I don't want to leave you. It's nothing so simple as pure survival."

[Danicka] This is most definitely unfair. She should stop reading so much into every word he says? She jumps to conclusions? Danicka bristles underneath his hands, and she's not remotely soothed when he quiets down, when he recovers from his exasperation and touchs her lower back. She sits up straighter, frowning at him, as though that terse sigh was an electric shock that made it impossible to remain snuggled against his chest.

She listens. She lets him finish, and her frown eases away, but not necessarily due to anything in particular that he's said. She sits back on his lap, closer to his knees than his pelvis, and gives him a somewhat flat look.

"You know...sometimes when you've said something that's made me feel hurt, or just...uncertain, I've kept my mouth shut and let it go because I didn't want to overanalyze every little thing you said. And then," she goes on, eyebrows lifting, "you pester me about what I'm not saying. I tell you when something you say makes me feel hurt or uncertain, and you jump on my case."

Her head tips to the side, a look of impatience that is only half-facetious in her eyes. The buzzer goes off in a series of light chimes, and she leans forward, touching her forehead to his, brushing her lips over his cheek. "I can't win," she says gently, before sliding off his lap to go accept their dinner.

From the tone of those last three words, she doesn't sound all that angry.

[Lukas] His hand slips behind her neck when she kisses his cheek. He holds her where she is for a moment, as gently as he can, even when the intercom rings.

"That," he says, without vindictiveness, "is exactly how I feel sometimes."

A pause. He leans up; his mouth is soft on hers -- barely parting for this kiss, which is gentle and slow.

"Neither of us have ever done this before," he says, "and I never thought it'd be easy for either of us. Ale my moci zkusit udělat lépe. Já bude snažit udělat lépe. Oukej?"

[Danicka] The door buzzes again when the delivery person doesn't get an immediate answer, because Danicka is held in place. She gives Lukas a patient look when he informs her that this is exactly how he feels, that he can't win, or even break even, when he talks to her. She kisses him, her eyes flickering closed but for the most part remaining open.

It's soft. It's slow. And the intercom buzzes again. Danicka is trying to slide away from him again with a sigh, til her socked feet hit the carpet. There's a part of her that wants to call him on bullshit, remind him that near the beginning he seemed to struggle with the fact that this wasn't easy for them, that he sure as hell seemed to think it should work without a hitch even outside the bedroom, and her eyes are a bit narrow with that -- and with hunger, and the fact that she knows her pizza may very well get spat on if she doesn't go let the poor guy in -- but ultimately she just

sighs, and nuzzles his cheek, and nods. "Okay," she kisses to his cheek, and goes to the intercom panel to buzz the pizza guy upstairs. While she's waiting for said pizza guy to come up she goes to the kitchen to fill up a glass of water, pausing in there to rub her temples as she sips. She doesn't come back to the couch.

But she does look over at Lukas, after scanning her apartment, and say: "Sorry it's such a wreck."

[Lukas]

[Lukas] His eyes flicker over her face as she starts to sigh. Then she comes back, and he closes his eyes, and she nuzzles his cheek, and -- he lets her go when she moves to get up again.

While she crosses the room to buzz the pizza guy up, Lukas gets up off the couch with a quiet sigh of his own and goes to the entryway, where he picks up his jacket and gets his wallet out.

He's very monochromatic today. The jacket is unadorned and ivory-white; the shirt is black as night, collarless and buttonless, a pullover with some drape, some stretch. The jeans are not even blue, but grey -- a medium color like an overcast sky, deliberately scuffed lighter at the thighs, the knees.

He leans against the hallway wall while he waits for the pizza guy to get up the elevators. She apologizes for the wreck; he looks around, and then he shrugs, though she can't see it from where she is.

"I don't mind."

And, after a pause, "I meant being in love." A few beats of silence. "I never thought that would be easy."

[Danicka] To say that Danička Musil is a defensive young woman is almost beside the point. All she has are defenses: walls, reservations, lies, guard towers ornately decorated to look like observatories. One could argue that behind the walls there's not just empty ground but ravaged earth, that there is not even any reason to try and get into such a carefully guarded person.

Prison.

She stands at the entrance to the kitchen drinking her water and watching him get out his wallet. He's had to have noticed since he got in that there's still puffiness under her eyes, slightly alleviated by the Excedrin earlier, but at least her eyes aren't bloodshot and sunken. She's slept, deeply and well, for two days' worth. She just hasn't eaten, and she has had so many substances in her body in the last few days that she's going to be feeling this for another couple of days of recovery. She has a bit of a headache.

It doesn't matter. She kisses him instead of snapping at him, nuzzles him instead of arguing this time. She's not tired, physically or mentally. She is, however, more than a little worn out. It's different.

He meant being in love. She leans her head against the freezer door, one arm held across her midsection, the other holding her water glass. Danicka's eyes close slowly, open again in the same fashion. "I didn't either."

[Lukas] He could, if he slid a few inches to the right, see her. The back of her, anyway. He could, but he doesn't -- because he imagines if she'd wanted to see him, or be seen by him, she would've come out of the kitchen already.

Which is a disaster area. The whole apartment is a disaster area. He doesn't mind, he says; this might be a surprise, or just plain unbelievable. She's seen his room. Immaculate is the word that comes to mind. She's seen his car, and the way he dresses, and the way he shaves himself. She doesn't know that he gets his hair cut every three weeks like clockwork, but surely this wouldn't surprise her.

"Okay," he replies. It's just a verbal nod -- an acknowledgment. Before he can say more there's a rap on the door. He straightens up.

She can hear him interacting with the pizza guy. He hands cash over and takes the pizzas; gets his change; gives tip back. Bids the guy a good night. Shuts the door again and locks it.

"Come on." He finds her, wherever she might be. The pizza are balanced on his shoulder, and he wraps his free arm around her, kissing her temple before unwinding from her. "Come eat something."

[Danicka] She can hear him, and standing where she is, she can see him. Not well; she has to angle her head, twist her neck, shift her feet, but she can see the shadow of him, flashes of his face and his shoulder. Danicka remains where she is, drinking her water as he accepts the pizza, and watches him as he passes by. When he moves to wrap his arm around her, it's awkward because of the placement of her arms, the way she's leaning, the fact that he's so much taller than she is, but that's all right.

Her eyebrows lift when he tells her to come eat something; she stays where she is for a moment, whether he stands there with her or goes on to the living room. Danicka closes her eyes and rubs her head again, taking a deep breath before she follows.

[Lukas]

[Lukas] She stops. So does he. His arm slips off her shoulder. He doesn't turn to face her for a moment; he bows his head, and he too takes a breath.

Then he turns; looks at her.

"For god's sake, Danička, can we just ... not fight tonight? Can you just pretend for once that I have nothing but good intentions toward you?"

[Danicka] "Nejsem bojují s vámi," Danicka says wearily. She puts her glass down on the counter as she passes it, sighs. "Možná bych měl jít zpátky do postele."

[Lukas] That's it. Lukas's temper abruptly tears in two.

He sets the pizza down on the counter, wherever he can find room, hard enough to jar the pies inside. His hands come down on the edge of the tile. His back is turned to her, and his arms lock: his triceps stand out, the complex musculature affixing arm to shoulderblade. The Ahroun bows his head and just ... strains for a while, silently, trying to hold onto his temper.

It's seconds before he speaks -- over his shoulder, giving her a hint of his profile over the tense rounded curve of his shoulder.

"I can't do anything right, can I?" This is so low as to almost be hushed. "I've spent all night trying to explain, and every time I open my mouth you take it to mean the worst possible interpretation possible. I've spent all night trying to apologize and trying to promise you I'll do better, I'll do my goddamn best, but all you're doing is moping around and sighing and acting like you're just sick of it all and -- Jesus Christ, Danička, co chcete? Co mám dělat? You tell me. You tell me how to make you happy, because I'm all out of ideas."

[Danicka] While Lukas goes all but off, he does not turn around and face her. She can see his shoulder, his back, the strain in his neck. She can hear it in his voice, which he does not raise. He doesn't yell, which would rip this apart in a second. Her head is still throbbing, yet she doesn't complain. She rubs her temples and her forehead to alleviate some of the tension there, not to earn his sympathy or play for his pity. She does what she can to fix it, drinking water, taking wonderful little headache-killing drugs, but she doesn't whine about what is her own goddamn fault.

Danicka doesn't interrupt him, or walk over to rub his back. His anger is, like her headache, his own damn problem. "Lukáš...I want you to be here," she says in a sigh, shading her eyes as though the hall light is bothering her. "That's why I asked you to come.

"I feel sick, my head is pounding, I'm still reeling from a pretty rough week, and I know I'm irritable as all fuck." She drops her hand, but her eyes are closed. "I'm trying not to be argumentative because I really just want to spend the night with you. I don't want to argue with you. So if you can tell me how I started this fight other than by not doing a better job of pretending I don't feel shitty? I don't know. That could help."

[Lukas] "In case you haven't noticed," Lukas replies, low, "I'm still reeling from a pretty bad day, myself."

He turns his head forward again. Hangs it for a moment, low enough that for a moment, from behind, his upper back becomes a surrealist mountain chain: the matching sweeps of the shoulders tapering to the arms on either side, the valley of the spine between, the first cervical vertebra a knob of bone that, after a moment, he raises a hand to knead at.

"I just need some sign that ..."

He trails off; it's too weak to put into words, to say aloud. After a moment his hand drops back to the counter, and his back is a portrait of tension and strain once more.

[Danicka] [Perception + Empathy: A Yield Sign? // +1 (Oogy)]

[Danicka] "I've noticed."

Another tone of voice, it would have been snapped. Another day, or another woman, or...if he weren't him, if she didn't care. Danicka's not one to go out of her way to coddle or nurture most people, whatever their age or gender or relationship to her. The fact that she gives a damn that he feels whatever he feels is meaningful, considering she has seen him refuse to give a damn about others when it doesn't suit him. He doesn't inspire her kindly impulses by his very nature, but still: when she says this it's quiet.

She understands. Because he's told her about the way she looked at him, the way he thought could only mean that she didn't want him anymore. And that's what he's been thinking, for the sixteen hours she was asleep. For longer than that, even. She's been thinking that for days now, believing that it was over. That doesn't mean that she deserves more patience, more sympathy.

It means she understands what he's been going through today.

Danicka is hungry enough to eat both of those meat-lover's pizzas herself. She glances at them as she steps forward, and steps behind him, which she could never to do an Ahroun normally, never do to Lukas if the moon were fuller than pure black. Danicka moves slowly, and wraps her arms around his torso. There's hesitance there, as though she expects to be growled at, but if he lets her, she holds him. If he lets her, she rests her brow against his back. If he doesn't move away, she simply stands there for about half a minute, and then she speaks.

"I love," are the first two words, murmured to his pullover, "holding you like this when you're asleep."

Her hand drifts, easily, to rest over his heart. "I love seeing you smile. It made my heart beat faster even before you'd ever touched me.

"I love how ridiculous you can be. I love hearing you fight not make any noise when you're inside me because it makes me giddy to think of you actually losing that control. And I love it when you ask me to tell you about what it was like when we were children."

She takes a deep breath, her chest touching his back, and sighs it out, turning her head so that her cheek is against his sweater. "I love you. I went completely off the rails because I thought you wouldn't ever trust me or see me...as good. I really don't want to fight with you, I'm just still...on edge."

[Lukas] He never finished his sentence at all. He couldn't.
She understood anyway.

When she slips her arms around him there's a singular twitch that runs through the whole of his body -- a muscle spasm as though he hadn't expected her to touch him, or hadn't wanted to be touched, or had needed to resist jerking away from her, or had needed to resist bowing his back against her.

Whatever it had been, he controls it.

Her arms wrap around him then. His body is hard, the wrap of his latissimus dorsi a tapering sweep against the inside of her biceps; his obliques, the muscles of his abdomen ridged and solid against her palms. If her hand is over his heart, she can feel where the muscles of the chest and the abdomen, the bones of the ribcage all come together -- the soft hollow beneath that where the apex of his heart beats close to the surface, just beneath a vast bundle of nerve ganglia whose processes web out to nearly every portion of his body. A firm blow there can stun; a wound there could kill.

When she presses her brow to the center of his back, the heat beneath his shirt is a palpable force, and his heartbeats radiate through the spine, through his flesh.

He doesn't draw away from her. He doesn't bow his back to press himself closer to her. He stays as he is, and she stays as she is, and he stares out across pizza boxes and the wreck of her apartment, over the breakfast bar, at the darkness of the living room. He doesn't think anything, or of anything.

When she speaks, his ribs expand against her encircling arms. He draws a long slow breath. She can feel him lowering his head in the way the muscles in his back shift and stretch. She goes on, and his hands curl in on themselves; he presses his knuckles to the counter. It's only at the end that he lifts a hand -- the same that had kneaded the back of his neck -- and folds it over her hands.

"I didn't need you to say any of that," he says; and maybe he's lying to himself. "I just needed you to hold me like this."

A pause. Then, quieter still:

"But thank you for telling me."

[Danicka] [Perception + Empathy: Because I'm a Dick // +1 (Oogy)]

[Danicka] "I didn't say it because you needed it."

Danicka says this softly, her cheek still resting against his back. And she may be lying. She has never said any of that before to him, the little things she loves, the things that make her happy, the moments that draw her in. It isn't even a complete list, not even close. There is no guarantee she would tell him any of this unless he needed it, unless he was about to snap from the strain of wondering whether anything he does can please her, put her at ease, get her guard down and her ire soothed. All he has is her word, which is suspect.

It takes him a long time to stop resisting the initial urge he has to press back against her, turn and hold her in return, cling to her the way he sometimes does when they make love as though he can barely stand the fact that she is separate from him and will therefore eventually have to move away. And in the end, all he does is lay his hand over hers. Danicka twitches her fingers, laces hers with his.

"You're welcome."

[Lukas] When their fingers lace, his curl into her palm hard enough that he has to remind himself to let go, let up, to not crush her hand in his. It's transference: all the force he would've liked to put into his embrace concentrated in his hand, his grip, their hands.

Some time goes by. Then he raises her hand to his mouth, kisses her palm. There's something worshipful about this; fervent.

When he lets her hand go, Lukas draws a second, slow breath.

After, he straightens up, his hand coming off the edge of the counter. He flips the top pizza box open, and all at once the rich smell of meat and cheese and dough and grease fills the kitchen.

"Come on," he says again, but it's different this time, a little wryer, and not so -- overprotective, "let's eat so I can take you to bed."

[Danicka] It takes effort sometimes to stop herself from asking him Why. Why does he kiss her palm like that, why does he hold onto her like that, why does he have to control himself so carefully as though he will lose himself in her if he doesn't? She doesn't ask this because she is not actually as unhealthy mentally as those questions would imply. She wonders, though, because it is still so...very...difficult...to trust that this has even a snowball's chance of lasting.

Perhaps it should help her -- and him -- to know that they're not alone, that they're both insecure in this, that they both revert to jaw-snapping defensiveness at the slightest hint that they're about to be left, rejected, pushed aside. It doesn't seem to help, though, doesn't do anything but make them both more open to what could very well be inevitable heartbreak. They prepare themselves for it as best they can, even to the point of seeing it when...it isn't there.

No matter.

They stand together, Danicka behind him as she was the first night she slept beside him, arms wrapped around him as though to shield him somehow when he is twice her goddamn size. She doesn't try to move. Until he opens the pizza box and the smell unfurls. Her stomach snarls in response and Danicka's knees go weak.

"Ohsweetjesus I'm so hungry," she groans against his back

=========

Danicka Musil is five feet and six inches tall. Her weight fluctuates but she generally stays around one hundred and twenty-five pounds. She is not a plump woman, though at least she is not underweight. She is actually quite thin, thinner than Lukas is comfortable with sometimes, though that could be because he knows how flippant she is about eating regularly.

Danicka Musil has not eaten for, at very least, nearly eighteen hours.

Danicka Musil eats three-quarters of a meat-lover's pizza with cheese in the crust and extra cheese.

She gets up several times to refill her water glass. This does not require them to pause Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, the DVD agreed upon after brief discussion, because Danicka has seen it several times. She does not, at any point, compare herself to Clementine, or suggest similarities between Lukas and Jim Carrey, who has another name in the movie but that name doesn't matter much. Near the end of the movie Danicka has given up on eating anything further other than the occasional nibble of cheese tugged from the box, or a stray bit of pepperoni or sausage.

Near the end, she lays on her left side with her head on his lap and breathes so steadily that he may think she's asleep. She isn't. She's not tired. She's just quiet, and her right hand is resting on his thigh, under her cheek.