já jsem zamilovaný s vámi.

[Danicka] On Wednesday afternoon, a cardboard mailing tube arrives at The Brotherhood of Thieves for Lukáš Kvasnička. It's lightweight but rattles slightly, and the return label gives away -- to anyone through whose hands the tube passes before it gets to its intended destination -- the name and address of the sender: Danička Musil, 520 N. Kingsbury, Apartment 23-C, Chicago, IL 60610.

Inside, there's candy. That falls out first, foil-wrapped chocolate eggs, rabbits, and chicks along with one particularly large piece, a Kinder Surprise egg. There's every chance this is not the first one he's seen in America. There's every likelihood that the hook-up the Musils know in Queens was known to other immigrant families fond of the FDA-banned confection.

The purpose of the tube, however, was to transmit the large rolled-up sheet of paper inside. It's white, except for the stylized silhouette of a human head and torso marked by white oblong rings: 7, 8, 9, X. There are just five holes in the target, two of them nowhere near the black figure. Two are barely inside the '7' ring, one by an arm and one around waist-height. But the most obvious one, perhaps the one he sees first, is the one that is straight through the X itself. It's the sort of shot that on a human body would send the victim into shock, the kind of wound that would rapidly bleed out.

She added a Post-It note under the X:

Dostal jsem unavený chybí.

[Lukas] On Wednesday afternoon, Lukas is not asleep as he often is at this hour. He's awake and at his desk, back to the door, which is slightly ajar. His forehead propped on the heel of his hand, his laptop open in front of him and a tumbler of clear liquid that was most definitely not water to the side, the Ahroun sits amidst a mire of 1040s, 1099-INT and 1099-DIV forms. There's also a DVD-style case labeled TurboTax 2009 and a paper copy of the 2009 1040 tax form instruction booklet near at hand.

Lukas is sorting through his list of deductions and thinking that if ever there was a valid argument for relying wholly on your kinfolk to provide you with your living funds, April 15th would be it. He's doing this and reaching for his vodka when there's a rap on his door, which snaps his head up and around.

Jennifer Coltrane, aka Saint Jen, leans the shipping tube against the doorframe and waves silently at Lukas through the crack in his door. He waves back, summoning up a smile, and turns back to his taxes.

Two hours later, with the sort of sense of accomplishment normally reserved for marathon runners and symphony composers, Lukas hits the Check for Completeness and File button on his screen. While Turbotax sorts through figures and numbers, he gets up from his desk, bring his tumbler of Wyborowa with him. Onehanded, he picks up the shipping tube, cocking his head at the name on the return label, its lightness and heft, the sound of small rigid things rattling around inside.

Curious, and perhaps faintly trepidatious, Lukas opens the tube over his bed. Candies tumble out first, which makes him smirk; the 'poster' takes some shaking before it'll slide out, though when it does, it unfurls itself over his sheets and makes him laugh aloud.

He tosses down the last of his drink and hunts his cellphone out from his nightstand. Half a city or more away, Danicka's phone begins to ring.

[Danicka] Lukas gets his mail before his pack's Ragabash has a chance at it, whether to steal his candy and share it amongst the other wolves or whatever it is Sampson might do with a bullethole-ridden poster. The note on the target does not say Thinking of you or Have a nice life, asshole. It very well might say Lookit what I did!

Whatever it says, whatever the potential -- if slight -- significance of the target and the note on it, it makes Lukas laugh.

Across town, the sender is not working on her taxes. She did hers in early February. She does not answer her phone for the first couple of rings and when she does pick up, she sounds distracted. Distracted enough that she doesn't even seem to have checked the screen before hitting a button blindly and accepting the call.

"Hello?"

[Lukas] "Nice shot." A pause. Then, wry, "Were you thinking of me?"

[Danicka] There's a pause, and faint, synthesized noises in the background emulating explosions, roars, and something like lasers...maybe. Danicka cannot be seen, but she blinks in bewilderment. Computer keys clack softly.

"Wait, what? When, just now?" Definitely distracted. "Are you in my apartment watching me pl-- ohhh." Dawning awareness. "You got the-- fuck!" she snaps, under her breath. "Listen, I have to call you back. Soon! Pinky promise."

Which is the last thing he hears before the call is cut off.

=========

[Danicka Musil] Pinky promise, she'd said, before promptly hanging up on him, assuring Lukas that she would call him back soon. That was about six hours ago, which makes it just past ten in the evening when his phone rings again.

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] Six hours is not soon.

Six hours later, Lukas is vegging out in front of the TV. Only he's not really watching TV, because the TV is off. He's reading. It's Absalom, Absalom!, which is perhaps not exactly considered light after-dinner fare.

When the phone rings -- no designer ringtone here; just a simple, classical trill -- he doesn't react for a moment. It's not until the second ring that he suddenly realizes -- hey, that's his phone going off. He comes up off the sectional in one movement, clapping the book shut with his finger inserted to mark the page. His room door is shut and locked, which means he has to unlock it, which he does, unfumblingly.

By the time he picks the phone up, it's on the fourth ring. "Six hours isn't considered soon," he says, but his tone is more amused than berating. He comes back out of his room, latching the door behind him with the pinky of his book hand. "Finished with your computer games? What were you playing, anyway?"

[Danicka Musil] Six hours isn't considered soon, she is informed. If it's bait, Danicka doesn't rise to it, choosing instead to talk. Quickly.

"World of Warcraft. And then I laid down to close my eyes and I swear to god I slept for like four hours and when I woke up I had a Red Bull. I am currently on my second Red Bull and I can't remember the last time I ate but you got the thing I sent you?" She sounds pleased. "Did you check out that last shot? POW! What now, motherfuckers?!"

[Nessa] When the phone stops ringing so horribly, loudly, Mrena's door opens.

Once upon a time, Nessa had color in her cheeks. That time would not be now, as she, a slim, athletic figure in a lightly ruffled black silk dress, gathered here, loose and flowing there, slips through the silently opened door from the theurge's private room into the commons area. Pale, porcelain on the wrong side of white. Her lips are rose from paint, not health. Considering the beating her brain just took, maybe the glassy eyes and shocky look are understandable.

She slips-- slowly-- across the room, behind Lukas at his selected seat du nuit. There's something to drink in the small fridge if there really is a Gaia. Something soothing, cooling.

"privet."

A tiny word, with tiny amount of volume, just a speck of a word, the way a woman with a hangover might speak. Shhhh...

[Vasily Zaitsev] *He had been watching the known building for sometime now. It was a known place, and nothing had moved to seem like it was either observing the place, or heading toward it. A few breaths more of his overwatch...and then the scarred man, although his scarring was currently being hidden by makeup...a little, began to head toward the known apartment. Perhaps some of the Minister's mate's Vodka would still be there*

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] Lukas is not in 'his' seat, largely because he's just returning to the common room. And now there's someone else there: one hungover-looking Agnessa Malikoff, greeting him in a tone that says if I speak any louder than this my head might shake apart.

The Ahroun raises his hand in a silent greeting back -- waving, sort of, with William Faulkner's rhetoric and prose. He's on the phone; a sleek, brushed-metal phone is pressed to his ear.

And there's a brief, slightly stunned pause. Then he says into the phone: "Are you on crack?"

[Danicka Musil] This makes Danicka laugh. Out loud, interrupted only by another swig. "Better! Weren't you listening?"

A hearty exhale, the crush of cushions being flopped upon. "Where are you? What're you doing? Did you eat the candy? What was the toy in the egg? You know people collect those?"

[Mrena Armstrong] Mrena Armstrong had come to the horrific realization that, yes, she was putting on weight. Her hips were larger than she remembered... either that, or the skirt had shrunk. Whatever it was, the younger theurge was going through something that could have been considered an age old ritual for twenty-somethings. She was trying on every article of clothing that she owned, promptly taking it off, and then letting out a quiet, keening wail of despair when she realized that, yes, none of these clothes were proper clubbing attire.

By the time she had narrowed it down, she had acquired company.

And that company was nice, and it was interesting, but it seemed that Mrena was not yet so easily worn down. She had refused to run, she wasn't intoxicated, and she wasn't even tired. Poor Nessa wasn't going to have much luck teaching the younger theurge much of anything today. So, instead, she went to her old fallback of going out and observing.

Which brought her back to the problem at hand: what the Hell was she going to wear?

She walked out of her room, holding a pair of particularly wicked looking high heels in one hand and an ominous-looking little wooden box in the other. She had settled on the ubiquitous black dress, there wasn't much to say about it. The theurge looked at Lukas briefly, tilting her head to the side and glancing at the phone, then back at him. "Who's on crack?"

More appropriately, who was on the phone, but that's not quite what came out.

[Sam Modine] [Gift Rollin', one moment please]
Dice Rolled:[ 7 d10 ] 1, 3, 4, 6, 9, 9, 10 (Success x 3 at target 6)

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] "I'm at home." He can't remember half the questions, so he just answers the ones he does. "And I don't know what the toy is; I haven't eaten it yet."

There was a time when you could cover the mouthpiece of a phone to have a private conversation. These days it's impossible to identify the minuscule mouthpiece of your average modern cellphone, much less plug it up. So Lukas just shifts the phone down an inch or so and replies to Mrena, blandly, "Danička. I think the Wyrm got to her."

[Sam Modine] A stranger with a shared room in the joint.

Between three weeks leave in New England and avoiding most of the pack in search of a decidedly hard-to-track-down clown, nobody's seen much of Sam of late.

But there he is....perched with two half-feet on the windowsill of the common room, tapping on the glass and smiling like an idiot. "Hey!" taptaptap "Luke let me in!" He's laughing, a thing entirely strange to behold when he's like this, which he seems to be more and more often as he learns to really reign it in. He shines like the namesake of his tribe, wrapped up in equal parts glory and legend, the better to barter with those few spirits who might give a full moon audience.

"Come on!" taptaptap

Why? One may ask, is he on the windowsill twenty or so feet off the sidewalk?
You'd have to ask Sam.

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] ...and then Sam's laughing like an unhinged man, perched on the windowsill. Outside. Locked out. Knocking to be let in. Lukas wonders why the fuck everyone seems to have gone off the deep end simultaneously -- and how he managed to miss the memo.

"Mrena, let Sam in." This is called delegation of tasks.

[Danicka Musil] "I think the Wyrm got to your face, Kvasnička!" she says back, louder than necessary and with great triumph in her voice. "Burn. Oh, burn. I am a genius." A pause interrupts her here, to drink again. It's fortunate -- for her, at least -- that no one in the Brotherhood's common room can hear her right now. They can go on assuming that she is as she ever is in their presence, and not...ridiculous.

"Sooo I think I'm going to head on over, then. I may stop for food. This...wow, I can't remember the last time I...did I already say that?" Beat. "Do you want anything?"

[Nessa] "That sucks."
Ahh, your team lost the game? Ahh, your stock portfolio got eaten to nothing? Ahh the Wyrm ate Danicka.
It's like that tone.

Sam POUNDS On the window and Nessa flinches hard as she pulls out a water bottle and tries to rip the lid off. Turn. Turns the lid, and it comes off. Eventually. If she were drunk, she'd be unlikely to guzzle the whole bottle to nothing the way she is, as she walks--shambles-- to the sitting area.
One of those seats is hers. Or will be. And if another garou wants it? Fuck em. No wait, bad things happen when she fucks garou. Very bad. Screw them then. NO wait, thats a bad word too. DON'T Screw them then. Yeah.

A few seconds later, Nessa is curled into a little black silk ball of woman on one of the sofas, her legs pulled up under her skirts. Bare feet; her shoes are still in Mrena's room, but her feet are strong and pretty and very feminine, with Ruby Red Glittery toenails.

Sam screams his laughter, outside. It's not nice.

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] She's coming over. A beat; surprised. "Okay." He listens. The rest of the common room can't hear the words, but they might catch the cadence, the rapid patter of syllables flying out of the earpiece. "No, I'm good." And Lukas listens again, if she cares to offer any further remarks/nuggets of wisdom. At the end: "See you."

And he hangs up, and puts the phone in his pocket. Reaches out to take the water bottle from Nessa and, with a faint long-suffering air, twists the cap open. Hands it back.

"What the hell did you drink?"

[Mrena Armstrong] Mrena, let Sam in.

This was called delegation of tasks. She put the box down, then started to make her way to the window. And, with a distinct degree of curiosity, she looked at him from the other side. She had her shoes in one hand; how the Hell Mrena intended on walking once she put them on was a mystery that one did not really intend on exploring.

She opened the window half the way.

"Sam, why are you on a windowsill?"

[Nessa] "Nothing. Is why I am thirsty."

The lump of Nessa unfolds enough to drink the bottle down in thirsty gulps, as if she'd just run a long while. She should eat that much instead, for she's a bit on the gaunt side of slender, her muscles too well defined, though not perhaps as bad as two weeks ago. Progress, of a sort.

One heals.

And then, one bashes one's brains against the rock wall of Mrena. And one wants a brain bandage after.

[Sam Modine] Sam ducks and slides his arm beneath the window and lifts with the outer surface of crooked arm as though he's doing a bench squat, except that his legs only flex and do not stand fully in this precarious position. As the wood creaks it's way to three quarters open he leans his shoulders through still giggling like a man-child in the full visage of Fenris.

"Wanted to see if I could pop out of the Umbra and land there." He tumbles back first the way a wrestler takes a fall in onto the hardwood floor. And grins toothily up at Mrena. "Turns out it's pretty darn easy."

He stands easily, almost kipping in a hard motion from his back to his feet with a supernatural agility. "Hey Luke, Nessa." He turns back to Mrena, quickly. "No leads yet, but he'll turn up." His tone doesn't go entirely grave, he's as the two packmates understand intuitively past the stages of greiving and onto the much easier part of a Fenrir Modi's life. The stages of ass kicking. Being stuck on search isn't so much an obstacle as half the fun.

A worthy adversary seems at least to have injected new life into him, and it's nothing if not refreshing.

=========

[Danicka] It takes over half an hour for Danicka to get to the Brotherhood of Thieves, and it takes a handful of minutes for her to get from her car to Lukas's door. She knocks, though it's possible he heard her voice out in the common room: the walls here are thin. Or else he wouldn't have had to hold her mouth against his shoulder to stifle her moaning that one time. Either way, she knocks, and when he opens the door or tells her to come in, she does so, and she's got a large purse slung over one shoulder.

Her cheeks are flushed, her hair is in a high ponytail with the ends neatly curled. She's wearing a knee-length gray pencil skirt complete with a two-inch slit up the back, black heels, and at the moment, a white peacoat. Her eyes are bright, but not from liquor. She puts her bag down by the door when it closes, goes to him whether he's a step away or across the room, and the next thing he knows, her arms around his neck and she's kissing him. While smiling.

[Lukas] In half an hour's time, Lukas has taken his book and retreated to his room, abandoning the increasingly crowded common room for quieter pastures. His room's not far from the stairs, and he has reasonably good hearing, and at any rate -- he'd recognize her voice, one suspects, from quite a distance.

So he does hear when she arrives, if she speaks. Or perhaps even if she doesn't. He doesn't emerge from his room, though, and it's not coyness or some game of who goes to whom. It perhaps has more to do with who else is out there, and a certain desire to avoid awkward situations.

Either that or he just wants to read his book a little longer.

Nevertheless: she knocks and he says, "It's open." She opens the door and he's putting his book aside, folding the dustcover into the pages to mark his place. She closes the door and he sits up on the bed, swinging his legs off, never taking his eyes off her. It's his first good look at her in ... well; days. She's putting down her bag and he's getting to his feet and then she's crossing the room in three or four strides of those long slim legs and he's taking one step toward her and catching her up in his arms -- not quite lifting her on his body but lifting her nonetheless, until even her toes leave the floor -- catching her up and spinning her around once, a whimsical, sudden, centrifugal spiral as he's turning his face up to hers.

She's smiling when she kisses him. He's sighing out into her mouth. They're standing still now, but the whirl or her presence has his senses reeling still: the world is spinning and she's the only still point he knows.

The kiss parts after some time. He squeezes her for a moment after, and then the corner of his mouth hooks up, a touch ruefully, as he lets her down.

"God, I've missed you." A beat. Then he admits, "I was half afraid you'd still be upset at me."

[Danicka] This has happened before. An argument of sorts, which Danicka has retreated from, only to reach out to him again somehow, whether by showing up with pastries or joining him in a blood-drenched shower or sending him a tube of candy and reassurance that she is making good use of the first gift he ever gave to her. She comes back, over and over, every time he thinks that she's still mad, or still upset, or that he'll never hear from or see her again. She comes back.

You become responsible, forever, for what you've tamed.

Danicka swallows a bit of laughter so that the common room's occupants don't hear her break into peals of obvious delight the second she gets into Lukas's arms. It's more than either of them might be able to stand, or perhaps it's just more than Danicka can handle, being that exposed. She can't let people see what makes her happy. She can't let them see that she's happy.

She can, apparently, let Lukas see it. So instead of laughing she smiles, her lips spreading into a grin as he picks her up and literally twirls her around, and the ridiculousness of it only seems to make her more joyful. She stops kissing him after...five seconds. Maybe ten.

"You're such a dork," she breathes out, not clear whether she's referencing the twirl, or how he's missed her, or his fear that she might still be upset. It seems to be the first, however, because she kisses his mouth again, firmly but not for as long this time. This time when she pulls back she nuzzles his temple, lays her face alongside his own. "I know you weren't trying to...hurt my feelings, or whatever," she finally sighs, as though it irritates her to even say such a thing.

Hurt feelings. What is she, eight years old again?

"I could have handled that better."

[Lukas] She calls him a dork. He begins to retort," ...this from the woman who was talking ninety--" and there her mouth seals his, and he shuts up for a while.

After, he doesn't bother finishing his sentence. They lay their faces together, slidingly, and she smells faintly of the night, the wind, the four different restaurants she stopped at. She smells of herself, beneath that; that new moisturizer of hers, and drawing her scent in, he lets his eyes fall nearly shut, the seam of their bodies a blur.

"By that token," his voice is low, partly because the walls are thin, and partly because this close, there's no need for volume, "I should learn to trust you before I start demanding the same in return."

Should've, could've, would'ves. He draws a breath and raises his head, and they come apart some small degree. His arms unwind from around her, and his hands cover the outsides of her elbows, her upper arms. For a moment he just looks at her, head to toe, and she has a chance to look at his room.

Which is much the same as it was the last time she was here. The tax pandemonium of the afternoon has been cleared away neatly -- filed or saved or discarded. The coffee maker still sits on the largely bare desk. His laptop is out on the desk as well. And of course, Faulkner's hardback sits on the nightstand.

The overhead light is off, but the desk lamp and the headboard clip-on lamp are both on. The angle of the lighting fills the room with long, lateral shadows.

"Do you want a drink?" he offers, his eyes having found their way back to hers. "I still have half a bottle of vodka."

[Danicka] The last time he offered her a drink she had run in here to get away from a Garou in glabro. It's possible that Lukas asked his packmates later why Danicka bolted, because she had not really told him. It's also possible that at the time, almost two months ago, it wouldn't have mattered enough to ask. Not when he ended up with her body pressed hard against his own, the two of them kissing silently but with sudden, aching heat that they somehow managed to pull back from. Even with all that passion it was two days before they saw one another again. When they did? It took them ten minutes at the aquarium to decide that was not where they wanted to be.

It's been six days. It makes a certain mathematic sense that they have roughly a minute and a half left before they can't play at conversation anymore. Outside in the common room a smattering of Garou and Kin are enjoying or ignoring the food Danicka brought that she decided she did not want. She'd realized in the car that she actually wanted the smoothie, and her breath tastes of pomegranates, strawberries, and mangos. When he kisses her. When her mouth opens to his even while she's smiling, and he's sighing a confession that he missed her.

The walls are thin. They can hear the blend of voices outside of this room, the flickering of guitar strings on the other side of the building, the people downstairs in the dining room. They stay quiet even though it doesn't seem like anyone is waiting at the door listening in, and exchange apologies that aren't. Neither of them say they're sorry, but both of them admit...room for improvement. Which in a way, is better than simple remorse.

Danicka's feet slowly touch the carpet again, her thin but tall heels pressing into the flat, mottled floor covering. She has not taken off her coat, but closer up he can see even in the dim and focused lighting the details: the sheen of her white coat's large round buttons, the hint of her pink shirt's collar, the glint of the white gold rings in her earlobes and the pearl drops dangling in their centers. She doesn't look around his room. She looks at him. Being observed from head to toe, looked over, either appreciated or taken in or examined somehow, does not seem to bother her. That, he noticed from the first time he saw her, the first time he wanted her. Danicka is beautiful, and she knows it. Danicka is used to being looked at, and the more it seems that this doesn't always have anything to do with being pretty.

But the reason she looks at him while he's looking at her is not that she is too busy preening, too busy wondering what he's thinking as he looks at her or waiting for some accolade. She looks at him because it has been six (goddamn) days. She has not seen him, not at her doorway or in her bed or in a picture on her phone because her threat was empty, in six days.

Do you want a drink?

Danicka is unbuttoning her coat like it is an unveiling, pulling it aside and shrugging it slowly off her shoulders and letting it slide down her arms. Her blouse is indeed pink, the collar bearing a subdued ruffle and the sleeves ending just above her elbows. Especially with the belt around her waist and the classic simplicity of her heels, this looks like something she would wear to work in an office somewhere. She does not drop her coat or drape it over his desk chair but lets it hang from her hands behind her back, the end just barely brushing the floor. With another woman this could be coy; she'd sway, swing her hips, give him a bat of her lashes and a little smile. Danicka just shifts her weight to one leg and stands there.

"Ano, prosím," she says, and her eyes follow him thoughtfully as he moves to get the bottle, the mugs they drank out of last time. "I was wondering...after running into Mrena at the fountain."

She pauses there, and moves over to lay her coat across his chair. She turns and hops up on the edge of his desk, her back straight and her legs crossed -- as always -- at the ankle. If it's offered, she takes the vodka from him, sipping before she goes on: "Would it be easier for you, if your packmates liked me?"

Another pause. A slightly different question. "Would you like that?"

[Lukas] The whiteness of Danicka's coat on her slender body, its well-cut lines and sweeps: it makes him thinks of ermines, not the fur but the animal itself, sleek and feral, crepuscular. That's what the coat makes him think of, but not the undoing of it, the way she lets it hang from her arms. That makes him think of something altogether different: how she bends her arms behind herself to unclasp her bra, and the way that, too, falls from her arms.

Lukas has to turn away. He sits down on his chair to get at the lowermost drawer. She can glimpse a few other bottles in there: one other that was almost assuredly vodka, judging by the clarity of the glass and the liquid both; the rest darker, scotch or cognac, perhaps a wine or two. It's the distinctively twisting bottle he takes out though, the Wyborowa, and this time he actually has tumblers stolen from downstairs.

While he pours she lays the coat over his chair, and he moves aside thoughtlessly to give her room to drape it, moves back when she's done. She levers herself up to the desk and he hands her the first glass, keeps the second for himself as he leans back. At this angle it's easier for him to tip the chair back on two legs to look up at her.

The first response she gets is almost assuredly reflex: he frowns instantly, though faintly. "What did they say to you this time?"

[Danicka] The shadow of the moon, or the lamplight, or him moves across her eyes. They're a darker green in that moment than usual, in this light. Even the pink of her shirt is too pale to be intense in here right now; it's a slightly more conflicted shade of gray. Her eyes, though, maintain their color. She just says quiet for a moment, then parts her lips and says quietly: "Let's try that again. Only this time, you can take what I say at face value: I was wondering, after seeing Mrena at the fountain, if it would be easier for you if your packmates liked me. I want to know if that would make you happy."

[Lukas] He lets the chair rock forward until the front legs touch down with a muted thump. Wood creaks as he shifts his weight. He considers her for a moment.

Then he replies, somewhat abruptly, "It would make things a little easier if they liked you, certainly. But not so much as you might think, and it certainly wouldn't make me any happier or unhappier."

A pause.

"What happens between us is between us. My pack has nothing to do with it. It's not for want of their approbation or fear of their rejection that I hide you in here. It's only for courtesy and privacy's sake. Even if they fucking adored you, Danička, I'd still spend more time with you in here than out there."

He looks down at his tumbler: clear liquor in clear glass. After a moment he lifts it, draining it, rolling it around his mouth once before swallowing it down. He doesn't grimace; doesn't even need a moment to catch his breath before he continues on.

"That said, my pack doesn't dislike you, Danička. Ed, Caleb and Dylan don't even know who the hell you are. Sampson and Mrena simply don't trust you because they think you played Sam to get at me. Sam's still off nursing his wounds because he feels played. Kate; well, Kate genuinely doesn't like you, but that has more to do with Martin than yourself.

"Now tell me what brought this on. What are you thinking? Why did you want to know?"

[Danicka] When the chair thumps back down to the carpet, Danicka uncrosses her ankles and puts the slightly pointed toe of her shoe on the edge of his chair as though to hold it down from tipping back again. She seems satisfied when he confirms that his pack's estimation of her makes no difference to his happiness or unhappiness, that the efffect on the ease of his life would be negligible, but the conversation doesn't end there.

They haven't toasted tonight. Danicka sits on the edge of his desk, one leg dangling, the other bent at a 120-degree angle. Her weight leans on one locked arm, head slightly tilted, the other hand loosely wrapped around the tumble of Wyborowa; she still hasn't taken a sip. She flicks an eyebrow up at his rundown of his packmates and their thoughts on her, existent or not. She very, very nearly rolls her eyes at the mention of Sam.

"I don't care what they think of me, or if they like me," she says, and finally does bring her glass to her mouth to knock back a mouthful. She doesn't spend much time tasting the vodka, but only -- this time -- because she's engaged in speaking. "As for what brought this on, I've told you twice: I was wondering about it. As for why I wanted to know, I've told you that, too: I wanted to know if it would be good for you. As for what I'm thinking..."

Danicka drains the rest of her vodka and sets the glass down on the desk, watching her hand place it and then looking back at him. "I know you like the fact that there's more to me than I let most people see, but sometimes things with me really are as simple as they seem." She wraps her hands around the edge of the surface she's perched upon, arms framing her body. "Or do you just want to keep hearing me say that I would go out of my way and put effort into doing something just for the sake of making you happy?"

[Lukas] That last bit gets Lukas's eyes flashing up to hers. He snorts -- an ironic sound.

"If anything, Danička, that's what I'm afraid of. That's why I kept asking you why you wanted to know. It's one thing if you want them to like you because it'll make you happy to be friends with my pack. It's quite another if you're doing it for me.

"Sometimes I do wish half my pack didn't think so poorly of you, but it's not because it shames me or embarrasses me. If I mind, it's because it's not fair to you, and because sometimes I think I should ... stand up for you, or something. I don't because I don't think it's their business one way or another, and I try not to deign to make it so. So the last thing I want is for you to stoop to ingratiating yourself to them for my sake."

His eyes move from hers then. He studies the length of her arms, her hand at the edge of the desk nearest him. After a second he puts his hand out and covers hers; wraps his fingers into her palm and draws her hand, takes it in his.

"I do appreciate that you'd even consider going out of your way for me," he says, quietly. "But all I want from you is you. Okay?"

[Danicka] Again, Lukas's words, Lukas's gestures, make Danicka quirk an eyebrow. This time it is not so dubious, not so wryly amused. It would be a touch cruel of her to tease him now, or to dimiss what he's saying. He had not been the only one smiling as he lifted her, literally spun her around, kissed her and told her how he'd missed her. There is a fairness to this, to whatever this is...to the two of them, each of whom could readily admit that the world, that life, is not fair.

She was the one who walked out, so she is the one who came back. It's possible she expects the same sort of thing from him, but neither of them have any real experience with the sort of relationship they have. Yet they're not naive, not innocent; each of them is, in a way, jaded. Yet he says all I want from you is you, and takes her hand as he says it, and Danicka quirks an eyebrow.

This time, though, it's thoughtful. Not jaded. Not cynical. She pauses, and then winks at him. A minute later she leans forward, slipping her hand from his to reach out and tuck a few loose hairs back from his brow. "As if I would have needed to use Sam to 'get at' you," she says, just shy of scoffing aloud.

[Lukas] Lukas does scoff aloud. "You talk as though I were a foregone conclusion."

Nevermind that he said outright to Mrena that Danicka would not have needed to go through Sam. Nevermind that if anything, going through Sam delayed the --

what? the inevitable?

-- far more than not going through Sam would have.

After her hand falls from his brow, he leans down to pick up the bottle again. He pours himself another shot or so, holds the bottle out to splash some more into her tumbler if she wants him to. Then he caps the bottle again, leans forward to set it on the desk.

It occurs to him, perhaps because she's more or less matching him drink for drink, "Did you eat yet?"

[Danicka] He scoffs, and she smirks, her polished but colorless fingernails still intermingled with locks of his hair. "No...you're an impenetrable wall of stone, your will breached only by your favorite koláče and me utterly throwing myself at you," she says quietly but with sarcasm as dry as a good martini.

Danicka pulls her hand back, shaking her head slightly as he pours himself another round and offers her more. "Yup," is her pared-down answer as to whether or not she's eaten yet. As he drinks, or leans back in his chair again, she shrugs. "If I'd met you the night before Sam asked me out and not the night after, I could at least understand him thinking he was played.

"But it's a little ridiculous. What do they think, I followed you here from New York to steal you from your pack and have, like, ten thousand of your babies?" Danicka pauses, lifting her eyebrows with exaggerated innocence. "We totally weren't betrothed in childhood, I asked!"

[Lukas] That makes his mouth twist in a smirk to mirror hers. When she draws her hand back, he turns his face to the side, drops a quick kiss on her wrist.

Then he's pouring vodka, and she's telling him she's eaten, and he's struck by the sudden and absurd urge to press his ear to her stomach and see if he can hear it growling. It passes. He's sitting back after he sets the bottle down.

"I do." Understand why Sam thought he was played, he means, though it may not be clear until he goes on. "Sam's a good guy, but he doesn't really understand subtleties. He can't see below the surface." His shoulders move, a shrug. Lukas is dressed down tonight, which is to say, he's not really dressed at all: pajama bottoms, white undershirt, soft cotton with a hint of stretch that molds over his chest, his shoulders. "Enough about Sam, anyway."

She goes on, and his eyes focus sharply on her, flickering again with amusement.

"You so did not ask." A pause. "You didn't, right?"

[Danicka] In terms of modes of dress, they're on very nearly opposite ends of the spectrum. The only way they could be farther apart would be if Lukas were naked and Danicka were wearing a gown and opera gloves. As it is, she looks ready for an office while he looks ready for bed. The ball of one foot is still resting between his legs, on the edge of his chair.

Sam's a good guy. Her eyes flicker, but she doesn't say anything. Enough about Sam.

Given the narrowness of her skirt, the height of the desk compared to Lukas's eyeline, and the lack of light in here, it is not as though he need simply flick his eyes downward to answer the question he asked once: lace or cotton? But the way she's sitting is still unladylike, completely unlike the style of her dress this evening. Hard to imagine her playing computer games all day, dressed like this, but one never knows.

It's Danicka. She wears satin underneath jeans and a t-shirt, seduces him with cotton panties and t-shirts, and apparently reads modern epic poetry alongside programming manuals. She may very well wear secretarial garb to play her rotting-fleshed warlock.

She lifts both of her eyebrows this time in a daring expression which gives him a pretty clear answer, but Danicka responds verbally all the same, the expression fading: "Oh, I so did."

[Lukas] Lukas notes the flicker -- he chooses to let it go, for the moment.

"Wait," he says, straightening up a little -- this gives her toes a little more territory on the edge of his seat. "Did you seriously?"

[Danicka] There's more territory for Danicka's foot to occupy, but it doesn't slide forward. The heel of her shoe remains hanging off the edge, the ball of her foot balanced, the angle of her leg unchanged. She nods simply, twice, to confirm.

"My father asked me every single week if I had met any Shadow Lords in the city. After you introduced yourself I had a name to throw at him, and he told me about how your family used to come over." A smile teases the corner of her mouth, then relents a second later. "I was at least half-joking when I asked."

Half.

[Lukas] The corners of Lukas's mouth move -- a quick flash of amusement that he schools.

"And if he'd said yes?" She was at least half joking. So too, now, is he. "Would you have at least told me we were children together then?"

[Danicka] "Děláš si srandu?" she returns, a different flavor of disbelief than Co to blejes? "I may have broken my lease and moved to Rio if that were the case, and hoped to high heaven you'd decide it wasn't worth the trouble to chase me down."

She glances at the door as someone laughs outside and across the hall, then at Lukas. She licks her lips, thoughtfully. "I am considering removing my clothes. I would like your thoughts on the subject before I make any rash decisions."

[Lukas] The pause is almost imperceptible, but then, this is Danicka. This is Lukas. When he pauses because he's caught a little off guard, because he's suddenly on fire, she can tell.

Even if nothing changes, superficially. Even if his eyes merely drop briefly to her skirt, or rather the shadow inside her skirt where he can't see anything for this light, and for the narrowness of the garment. Even if all he does for a while is lift his glass and drink his drink.

Doesn't gulp it, doesn't toss it back. Just drinks it, and then leans to the side to set the empty tumbler on the floor.

His balance is faultless. When he straightens up again, he reaches for her ankle, lifts her foot in his hands. He slides her shoe off, leans forward to set it on the desk instead of letting it drop noisily to the floor. Then he sets her foot down, this time against his thigh, and reaches for the other.

Which is all the answer she'll get because meanwhile, he carries on having a conversation, nonchalantly, as though she didn't mention taking off her clothes, and he isn't beginning the process of doing so, and as though he weren't distracted as all fuck.

"In that case, I'm duly grateful my ancestors stopped prearranging marriages a long time ago. Too many weak unsuitable mates or kin widowed before they were even mated, you see. They preferred a more active method of deciding mateship." Distraction or not, there's a hint of genuine wryness here in the quiet scoff he gives, the faint twist of a smirk. "Take what you can win, hold what you can keep. To the strongest go the spoils."

When this shoe comes off he sets it beside its partner, and then he runs his hands up her legs, past ankle and past the knee, past the hem of her skirt to find the waistband of her panties. He hooks his fingers beneath it and draws it down, and she'll have to lift her hips here to help him along.

And he asks her, offhandedly: "Do you know something, Danička?"

[Danicka] Whatever resolution Lukas had had to not flaunt Danicka within the walls of the Brotherhood did not last very long, if fucking her inside the confines of the building could be considered flaunting her. Somehow he'd had the presence of mind, the last time she was here, to shove a pillow between headboard and wall. Somehow he'd been able to tolerate stifling the sounds she makes. Maybe that made it so he wasn't showing her off, rubbing Sam's face in it, giving the finger to his packmates.

The strongest probability is that they simply don't care when or where or how Lukas uses his Kin. She's of his tribe. He's claimed her as his. It doesn't matter if they think she's a whore, whether it's fair to her or not, because as he said, it's really not their business. Danicka, at least as far as she says, doesn't care if every last one of them considers her his slam piece.

She leans back slightly, planting her palms on his desk just behind her hips. Agreeably, she lets him have his way when he takes hold of one ankle, then the other. She lets him slide her pumps off her feet, and lifts an eyebrow at his scoff, at his mention of winning, keeping, and spoils...as though a mate is a prize won in a war. Preternaturally warm palms slide up her calves and slip under the soft grey skirt. It's tailored to her, the sort of item that limits her stride to a degree. The fabric rucks up around his wrists as he pushes his hands further up her thighs, reaching for her underwear, finding -- eventually -- edges no wider than a narrow ribbon.

She'll have to lift her hips here to help him along. Danicka doesn't. She watches him.

"I know a lot of things," she counters. "Did you have something specific in mind?"

[Lukas] So his hands stay where they are. They open up again after a moment. The fabric of her skirt smooths some; his fingers spread over her hips, the line of her panties interrupting the smooth continuity of her skin.

She watches him, so he watches her. The edges of his mouth flick upward. It doesn't quite make it to a smile. He leans forward instead, pulls her by the hips, slides her to the edge of the table.

And leans into her. And buries his face against her crisp blouse; her abdomen.

When he exhales, his breath warms a patch of the fabric, and her skin beneath it. Then he raises his chin and kisses her through the blouse, a button caught under his lips.

"Do you know," he says, sitting back now, but only just enough to look at her, "all the time I was waiting for you to come in here, I was thinking about fucking you. Bent over this table. Against the window. In my bed. I couldn't wait for you to get in here so I could be in you.

" -- Lift up a little, láska." An aside: his hands urging her hips up from the tabletop.

"But do you know, now that you're here, I think I'd be perfectly happy even if all we did was lie in bed all night. And that's new to me, too."

[Danicka] The outlines of his hands are visible through her skirt, topographical but monochromatic maps of his longing to touch her. Danicka reaches down and runs her fingertips over the rolling hills of his spread fingers, lead-ups to the mountain range made by his knuckles. She would not lift her hips so he could remove her underwear, but she lets him pull her forward. Not far. Now she really is perched, her ass right on the edge of the desk, her right foot going to the top of his left thigh and her hands going back to the flat surface so she can keep her balance.

Her breath is coming faster when he leans in and presses his face to her, the muscles in her chest and abdomen moving against him with steady and controlled -- but more rapid -- rhythm. She would touch his hair now, rake her fingernails through the thick black of it and across his scalp, but she has to hold on so she doesn't slip.

Lukas wants her to lift up a little. If she does, her weight will be on her arms. She could do it, she's agile and he's seen and felt her display a surprising level of athleticism for the sake of sex. This close, he can smell her as she starts to grow more aroused, even with his hands doing nothing but laying on her hips and his mouth doing nothing but telling her the myriad ways he was fantasizing about her in between that phone call and her entrance into this room. Her knees are spread as far as the pencil-style skirt will allow, which is not far at all, and he can fucking smell her when she begins responding to him.

She does not lift her hips for him. Danicka does, however, lick her lips.

"...I know the feeling," she confesses, or agrees, her voice just barely above a whisper. Then she swallows, takes a breath, goes on to say: "But I was sort of hoping to fuck you first."

[Lukas] He can smell her. He can smell her moisturizers, her bodywash, her shampoo and conditioner. He can smell the traces of laundry detergent in her clothes. He can smell her skin and her hair, her health, her breeding echoed through every cell of her body. He can smell her getting wet under that demure secretary's skirt of hers, and not because he was touching her or kissing her or licking her but because she's talking about taking off her clothes and he's talking about lying in bed with her all night and really, in the end, they're both talking about fucking like wild creatures.

He can smell her. Her scent is in the air of this tiny, crappy little room of his, this thin-walled, bare-bones little dorm room which she knows is all he can afford because the rest of his money is going toward maintaining an image, living up to a legacy, keeping pace with the Bellamontes, or perhaps merely giving himself what self-respect he thinks comes from being filthy fucking rich.

She knows this, and he knows she knows this, and somehow it's okay. And he doesn't mind leaving her in this room alone when he's not here, for hours; he doesn't worry that she'll snoop and discover things about him that he wasn't ready to divulge, and if that's not trust then he doesn't know what is, and all the same, every time she asks him to let go, to give in, to give it all to her, he holds back.

Because he doesn't believe she'll give it back. He doesn't trust her to give it back.

Or that's the party line, anyway, the truth he'll give her and the truth he finds easiest to believe right now. Because Lukas thinks the truth is a single, incontrovertible thing, but Danicka knows it's not, and --

and he can smell her, and it makes his eyes gleam, it makes his nostrils flare and his pupils expand. A cat in heat, he called her once, unkindly, and not to her hearing, but if they're keeping score then he's by far the more feral in this room, and he's the one responding to the very scent of her arousal, drawn to her like a tomcat to a breeding queen.

"If you want to fuck me," he says, and then he loses the thread of the conversation for a while, because she won't lift her hips for him and the way she's licking her lips has lit a fuse down the reptile pathways of his mind, and he's leaning into her, her knees under his arms and the hem of her skirt taut between them, taut against his chest, and he won't pull his hands out to undo her blouse so he puts his mouth to the buttons instead.

When they fucked in that armchair at the Omni, she hadn't wanted to grind on his lap when he was getting her so wet. Lukas does not appear to have a similar concern about leaving her blouse wet. It's hard to say if he's trying to devour her alive through the fabric or undo the buttons with his teeth, or both. He gets a button open somehow; another; he nuzzles past the parting halves of her blouse to get at her skin, to rub his face against her belly and bite at her skin; sighing oh my fucking god against her skin.

And also:

"If you want to fuck me, Danička, you need to zkurvený výtah tvůj boky so I can get your goddamn panties off."

A beat.

"Unless you have a change of clothes in your bag and don't give a fuck about these, because I'll be glad to tear them off for you."

He's kidding.

Mostly.

Maybe half.

[Danicka] The last time she was here she left her scent on his pillow and sheets. He went to the airport and saw his sister, sat down and had coffee with her, came back exhausted, without having slept a wink in Gaia only knows how many hours. When he returned he was alone but Danicka's smell was rich around him, lingering in his room and in his bed, reminding him of what they'd done to each other there. It was the same at the motel in Cabrini-Green, it was the same that first time at the W when she stayed all night with him but left in the morning. It still seems rare, to have her beside him all night. It still is rare.

Every time he has gone to her bed on the other side of town he's been there all night with her. He's slept on her pillows, used her shower, had breakfast with her. Every time he wakes in her bed there's light in the room, flickers of rainbows, a serenity in what he could call her den that has nothing to do with a placid, amicable mask. He's never rifled through her closets or gone through the files on her computer. He's never searched any drawer but the one on her nighstand, and that one contains only condoms. He's been allowed into her bedroom, which only two other people can claim, and he has not betrayed her there.

What they are both denying right now is that just moments ago they were talking about mating. Not in personal terms, not question-and-answer, not Danicka-and-Lukas. In jest, really. Danicka never expected her father to answer that yes, she had been promised to a Shadow Lord Ahroun before they even knew he was a Shadow Lord Ahroun. They weren't talking about her being a widow, or Lukas taking and winning and holding and keeping her in particular.

What they deny every single time it comes to this is that a part of the reason his head spins when he can smell her and when he runs his hands over her is that something in her body, something in her blood, something even in her spirit, rakes slow fingernails across biological urges he is as much a slave to as anyone else. Something about her tells something deep in him that their children would be strong, that there's a good chance they would breed true, that she would be a good mate. It's not even conscious. It's beyond primal.

They both have to know it. Surely Danicka knows. They deny it, or ignore it, because it's ultimately not why they're here. It's underneath the surface, boiling, searing, wrenching on an instinctive level. But it would be the same with any Garou sniffing around her narrow grey skirt, sensing her breeding. Not every Garou wants her. And he knows that on a level beyond the sexual, he's the first werewolf she's wanted.

Danicka breathes in sharply as he starts to bite and tongue her buttons open, one by one, revealing bare flesh underneath. She gives up on tracing his hands goes for the buckle of the belt around her waist, and ironically this takes her longer to undo than it takes her to get his unfastened. It's still fast. It is tight around her but not looped and she just drops it to the desk behind her, pulling the ends of her blouse up from the waist of her skirt. Lukas got most of the buttons; she gets the rest and starts shrugging out of the pastel-colored garment. Her breasts are small and high and pale, her nipples pink and hard.

"Trust me, you want to see these on me," she says when he swears at her to lift her hips, dropping the shirt and cupping her palms on his cheeks, pulling his face up and lowering her head to kiss him. Danicka moans thinly against his mouth, pulling back just far enough to murmur: "Unzip my skirt, baby," before she's kissing him again, this time parting her lips. Her breath is coming rapidly, her tongue trying to taste his. Her hands on his face and moving into his hair now, she's very much on the verge of losing her balance.

[Lukas] Trust me, and his eyes snap up to hers, and then she goes on, and he laughs -- a ragged, unvoiced sound. Her shirt falls across the desk; it's almost soundless, just the tiniest taps of buttons striking the wood here and there. The wood is dark and the blouse is a pale pale pink. The colors make him think of plum blossoms in the early spring: fragile flowers against smoothbarked, rain-wet wood. It's only a flicker of a thought: he puts his mouth to her skin, bared now, nothing at all from the waist up, and he eats at the indentation between her ribs, just beneath her breastbone, blindly.

Then her mouth is coming down on his and he straightens his spine to kiss her, so quickly that they meet in the middle with a sort of violence, on a long inhale.

He reaches for her zipper when she tells him to, but he's forgotten to pull his hands out, so what he finds is the back of her panties instead, and her ass, and his hands open over her flesh, squeeze; he nearly bites her tongue. Then he's pulling his hands out and going around to find the discreet little zipper, undoes it as far down as it'll go.

Lukas stands up, suddenly enough that they're still kissing, and now it's she who's raising her face to his, and his hands are roaming up her back and around. He covers her breasts with his hands, which are small enough to fit perfectly the curvature of his palms, and he loves that too, he loves that so much of her seems to be made for him, and vice versa, as though they were two halves of a whole. His mouth is at her neck now; he kisses down the slender column of tendon anchoring the corner of the jaw to the collarbone, and his right hand slides off her breast, but only to cup it to his mouth, and he sucks on her pitilessly, as though starving for the taste of her.

Quite abruptly he pulls back, gasping.

He takes her by the waist. Picks her up off the table. Sets her down on the floor, three inches shorter now for lack of the heels still set neatly on the tabletop.

And pulls her skirt down to the floor.

And his hands are still on her, and he turns her in a slow circle between his hands, slowly, slowly, looking at the way the low, slanted light in the room dawns and dusks over her body, looking at this lingerie that he, trust her, wants to see on her.

[Danicka] From the room across the hall there's a slur of Russian, a male's low laugh. An unfamiliar voice, a rustle of a bag. Inside this room there's just breathing: they lower their voices automatically, he laughs without letting it vibrate more than a shuddering wave of air out of his lungs and his mouth. Inside this room there's just the tap of her belt buckle and her buttons against the desk, knocking a shoe over. Inside there's just Danicka gasping when he kisses her. Her skin flexes, the muscles beneath fluttering.

When they kiss she forgets what day it is. What she was doing before she came here. The taste of fruit is still in her mouth, tart and complicated, slowly being replaced by the sacred simplicity of...this. Of what she feels for him, which peels away layer after layer of meaning and intent, which leaves her more and more bare every time she sees him, which makes her wonder if she's losing some vital part of herself every time he moves into her, which makes her wonder if she even cares.

When they kiss she knows she is giving something to him. She doesn't know what it is but she wants to. Oh, she wants to.

Lukas's fingers find those thin lines across her hips, dipping down in a shallow V. He finds thin satin ribbons laced there, the tiniest of bows, and it's useless detail: his hands know her skin better than they know whatever he's touching, as though he was in fact made to lay his hands on her. Danicka squirms slightly as his fingers trace their way across her thong, as his hands cup and caress her before pulling away. She scoots back so she doesn't fall as he drags his hands out from under her skirt and goes for the zipper in the back.

"Don't stop," she gasps, softly and uselessly, because he's not stopping, he's not going to stop. Her right hand runs over his left, holds his touch against her bared breast as her gasp and her consciousness of the voices in the common room are being obliterated. When he stops kissing her to move his mouth to her neck, to slide his lips and tongue to her nipple, her eyes don't open and her head tips back and she's moaning "Lukáš," as quietly and with as much control as she can still manage.

"Don't stop," Danicka whispers again, when he pulls back. She runs her hands up past his hands, over his wrists, his forearms, up under the sleeves of his t-shirt, staring at his eyes. Her ass slides off the desk easily and her feet touch the floor without a sound, but her skirt doesn't fall of its own accord. It reacts only to that tug towards the ground, to Lukas's enforcing of the law of gravity.

He sees her from the front: the sheer white fabric with the scalloped pink lace creating an impression of roses, the thin white straps over her hips. He turns her, and he sees her from behind, what he felt with his hands bold and yet comfortable up under her skirt: the V-shaped detail of thin pink ribbons laced up just above her ass for no reason other than to draw the eye.

Danicka does not turn a complete three-sixty. She keeps her back to him. And bends over the desk.

[Lukas] She's right, of course. This is definitely something he wanted to see on her. In the moment before he turns her around, she can see how his lips part at the sight of her, all but naked now, her one last scrap of clothing serving to enhance the effect rather than to diminish it.

"Oh, yeah..."

It's a breath, words as meaningless as oh-my-fucking-god; it's raw appreciation put into some rough scaffold of words.

He's just starting to lick his lips when she turns around, and now neither of them can see the other's face. What communication there is is rooted in touch and sound, taste and smell -- posture -- position. His hands trace her waist as she stops turning, her back to him, shadows around the far curvatures of her body, in the dip of her spine. The coy little ribbons on the back of her thong catch the light; he realizes they fucking match her blouse.

She bends over the desk. She doesn't even have to look at him this time. He only has to look at her to know what she's telling him, and what she wants from him, and how.

His hands smooth lower over her hips. His thumbs trace the indents at the small of her back where the narrow muscles flanking her spine come to an apex, and then his hands cover her ass, spread her flesh. She can't see him bending his head, tilting it to look at the way the thong rides between her legs, to look at what's between her legs; she can't see that, but she can hear the way he draws a quick hissing inhale between his teeth.

Then he's leaning into her, stepping into her and pulling her back against him. He still has his pajamas on, but the cotton is soft and loose, and she can clearly feel his arousal, the hard heavy curve of his cock against her ass. His hands are covetous on her belly, her ribcage, her breasts; his mouth is hungry on her back, and when he's like this, when they're like this, it's like he has to open his mouth to her, it's like he has to nip at her shoulderblades and lick the line of her spine, it's like he has to put his mouth on her as if he could take what she gives him and eat it up, swallow it up, make it a part of himself that he never, ever has to give back.

He was concerned about selfishness, when they fucked at the Omni. He didn't want to ignore that she acted as though she couldn't even whisper her happiness; he didn't want to ignore that she was

(damaged)

because it seemed so fucking selfish, he thought, to simply avail himself of her body, of her cunt, and ignore what was beneath her skin. Only he didn't understand, and doesn't understand, that fucking her, making love to her, giving himself to her, was one of the least selfish things he could possibly do in this transaction, in this tryst, in this relationship. Just like holding back, holding himself in check, holding something in reserve, was one of the most.

His hand has found its way to her clit while his mouth has found its way to her shoulder. He touches her through her panties, and then he pulls the scrap of fabric aside with his free hand and puts his hand on her directly, and he rubs her with his fingers, and he rubs himself against the cleft of her ass, and he bites at her neck and her ear, shudders silently against her back.

Then all at once he's straightening up; their hips are still pressed together, and she can feel the subtle shifts in his balance as he whips his shirt off. He pauses -- for no good reason at all, except that he wants to -- to run his hands through her hair, to comb it with his fingers, back and down her back, where it'll spread and stay for no more than a few moments before it's falling forward over her shoulders again. His hands rest on her back for a second, just a second, and then he undoes his own work and pushes her hair forward over her shoulder so he can kiss the topmost vertebra in her back, right where the neck joins the shoulders.

"Počkejte," he says. His footsteps are quiet, but the weight of them transfers through the floorboards -- he goes a scant few steps, two or three, to the nightstand; when he pulls it open he does it so fast the entirety of the little drawer comes out in his hand, and he has his ipod in there as well as a book or two, as well as his cell phone, as well as his condoms -- the packets loose now, since the last time they were here he'd dumped them all out of the box. He leaves the drawer atop the nightstand, grabs a square, drops his pants when he's behind her again, steps in close until the fronts of his thighs are against the backs of hers, and his feet are between hers, and his cock rests against the small of her back, atop the tiny satin bow on the back of her panties.

Lukas is hasty with anticipation. He tears the packet clear in half, has to catch the condom against his stomach when it tumbles out. Then he's rolling it on, his knuckles brushing her skin, and he's asking her -- his words shot through with his breathing, harsh already:

"Myslíte si chceš mi na pokrytí vašich úst?"

[Danicka] The night she'd stripped off her dress and shown him the stockings and the garter belt she was wearing beneath, the night she'd asked him if he wanted her to leave them on, the first night she took him to her bed and let him in, it had been made starkly clear that Danicka is keenly aware of the effect a simple slip of fabric can have. The night at the Omni when she didn't bother to remove her boots before fucking him in the armchair, the decision to wear a bra or not wear one, the colors she chooses, the fabrics... Danicka may or may not understand why it makes such a difference, but it makes a rather profound one.

She turns her head and looks at him over her shoulder as she bends to the desk. Lukas recited just moments ago a litany of ways he thought of having her, and this was the first. Not necessarily the most wanted, or the most erotic to him, but just the first one past his lips. Danicka's curled ponytail slips off her shoulder as she watches him breathe out that heady, wanting Oh, yeah..., her white-gold and pearl jewelry still dangling and glinting from her earlobes. Even in the dim, mutable light from the lamps and the moonlight from the window, he can see how wet she is when he moves his hands over her. Danicka can see him staring, see him pull in that hissing breath, and then she stops watching, dropping her head as he pushes his body against hers.

A faint moan finds itself stifled behind a bitten lip as the hot pressure of him touches her through cotton that shouldn't even be there anymore. Her back arches underneath his mouth, not because she wants to draw away from his lips and his teeth but because his hands are making her squirm. The urge to cry out being fought down is making her squirm.

If this were all there is for them, her lingerie and his cock, her pussy and his bedroom, then she might as well be a whore in truth. Instead he has the brightness in her eyes when they were riding up in the elevator that night, the joy of her smile even if she had to keep her happiness quiet. She has the way he pulled her close and spun her because he was so glad just to see her, just to hold her again. There's always been more communication in the act of lovemaking for them than words, clearer communication. He doesn't question what she says, disbelieve or try to look deeper, doesn't push her beyond what she can bear to reveal. She doesn't tell him what he wants to hear, or hide from him how she feels, gives him...everything.

Even when she doesn't get it all back.

Danicka gasps and bucks against him as he touches her, kissing her shoulder and biting her neck. The cotton of his shirt is against her back instead of his skin, but she still feels his warmth, feels his breaths pushing his chest against her ribcage, and his shirt should not be there. A moment later, it isn't. His hands run up her back, slip through her hair, disrupt the carefully tightened ponytail.

And Lukas doesn't tell her that he fucking loves all this. He doesn't tell Danicka that he loves the fact that she will wear lingerie underneath jeans and that he also loved seeing her on his bed reading her book and he doesn't tell her that he loves it when she calls him Baby but this can be forgiven and this can be considered fair. Danicka, after all, does not tell him that she loves the way he always touches her, slipping his fingers between her legs. She loves the way he will murmur Oh fuck, oh my fucking god, oh yeah when he feels her, when he looks at her body. She loves it when he bites her and she never thought she would be able to tolerate that, much less crave it.

She loves how sometimes even when his body is humming with desire and his hands cannot stop moving, the way he will bend and kiss her neck, or her breasts, or her hands, is soft. Tender. Like prayer.

Wait, he says. And she waits, bent over the desk, turning head over her shoulder to watch him again. A faint smirk tugs up the corner of her mouth at the way he yanks open the nightstand drawer. She remembers the last time, the stalking steps he took to the desk after calling her a bitch. She remembers the way he tore the box of condoms open and scattered them everywhere before coming back to her. And then he drops his pants to the floor, and then she remembers the way he fucked her, and then her breath catches in her throat.

"Lukáš..." she whispers, pleadingly this time.

Her head drops forward when he's against her again, her weight resting on her forearms, hands flat on top of his desk. The ends of her ponytail brush the dark wood. She spreads her legs unhesitatingly, unaware and oblivious to whomever might be in the common room. It's still early enough in the evening that no one would expect Lukas and Danicka to be going to bed. She didn't take any food in there with her. She was not running away from some fright, or helping him with some chore. If anyone out there is paying them any thought at all, they likely know exactly what the hell is going on in here.

Or they think they know: Lukas is fucking the shit out of Danicka. Danicka the liar, the whore, the untrustworthy. Lukas is finding his pleasure in a claimed Kinfolk, and she's spreading her legs and taking it. And that is not...what is going on here.

She closes her eyes and breathes in, feeling him against her. Her hands curl and flex, then flatten again. The muscles in her back tighten and release. He asks her what she does, and a shudder goes through her entire body. Danicka reaches back suddenly and finds one of his hands blindly, pulling his touch between her legs to feel the new warmth and wetness the mere question caused.

"Myslím, že bys měl," she whispers, while she still can. Her hand goes back to the desk, leaving his to find its own way.

[Lukas] "Fuck, ty jsi tak mokrá."

The words are chasing hers through the air; they're out of his mouth before he can think about them, torn from somewhere deep inside like ore from the mountain. It's her hand pulling his to her body; it's the slickness there, and the heat of her, and the shuddering that quakes through her body that makes him simply flatten his hand against her, simply push his palm against her clit and cover her cunt with his fingers, as though to meld her flesh to his.

He doesn't hesitate after that. He doesn't step back. He pushes her hips forward a little with his free hand. There's just enough light in the room to see even in the shadows between their bodies, and even if he couldn't find her by sight he'd know her by touch. He touches her, is touching her now, his right hand stroking her slowly as he guides himself to her. Slowly.

When he pushes into her it's not slow.

It's all the way, all at once, a single sliding plunge until his hips are flush against hers. It's exactly the sort of entry he'd tried so hard to slow, to ease, when she brought herself down on him in that armchair, and this is why he's a hypocrite, but perhaps it's the thought that counted that time; and perhaps it's his sheer want for her, his sheer inability to wait, that counts this time.

He fills her up and it makes him gasp: oh god. oh fuck.

Pleasure is bending through his mind; that, and a dark relief. It's been six days and it might as well have been a fucking lifetime; the last time they met they had one fuck when he was so goddamn tired he can barely remember, and then he slept like a stone, and then he woke up and he had to open his big mouth and say what he said and she was gone and he had to fight hard not to go after her like some sort of predator chasing down his prey; like some sort of puppy dog trailing after its master.

Never mind that now. Never mind that, because he's inside her now, and he holds himself still for a while, to give her a moment to adjust, he thinks, but really it's just so he can feel her body clenching and releasing around his cock. He's bending over her, his nose against the back of her ear, his mouth against her neck, his chest straining for breath against her back. His free hand pushes up across her torso to close over the opposite breast.

Which fits his palm like it had been shaped precisely for this purpose. Which fits him like she does.

And suddenly he's pulling her upright, pulling her back, clasping her against him as he bends to her. He can feel her heart beating in her thin body. It surprises him, vaguely, that it doesn't simply hammer its way through her breastbone, beat itself to pieces against her ribs. He holds her tighter, as if he were afraid she'd fly to pieces any moment -- as if he might hold her together if she did.

A second passes; two; ten.

His hand is still between her legs, and it moves purposefully now, and if the slow heavy caress of his fingers doesn't encourage her to bend back over the table, he pushes her gently down. He moves with her, his mouth to her shoulderblade, his mouth to her shoulder, and then his hands leave her body to come down on the edge of the desk on either side of hers, bracing himself. He's close enough that she can still feel his breath against her skin; the way it rushes when he draws out of her, draws himself almost all the way out, pushes back in.

And again.
And harder.

And he's reaching for her hand, clasps her hand under his, against the tabletop; he's reaching around to turn her face to his, and he kisses her when she does, fucking her now, slamming into her hard and fast as though he'd never heard of any other way to go at it.

When the kiss tears apart he's gasping for breath. "Oukej?" he asks her, never slowing, never missing a stroke, which makes even that single word a ragged thing, a flimsy final check, a last confirmation before he's covering her mouth gently, firmly, with his fingertips still wet with her fluids.

[Danicka] Another thing she has said she likes, but has not said she loves, is how Lukas tells the truth. Like now, half-gasping in English that dissolves into Czech. She loves the way he sounds, the way he forgets his second language, when he loses not himself but the outer layers of armor and control. She loves the relentless, helpless way he touches her as though he can't even consider stopping, and the way it strips him down, and the way he cannot wait any longer.

It's arguable that Danicka knew what she was getting into when she came over here. It's likely that she knew what she wanted when she drew that undergarment up her thighs and secured it around her hips, in the cleft of her ass. It's possible that all the way across down she felt the lace and the sheer silk against her skin and thought about him. It's possible that all the way up the stairs into the common room she felt her inner thighs stroking together with each step and was thinking about his hands, his mouth, the warmth of his tongue. When she turned around and bent over, it's damn near undeniable that she came here to get fucked.

The negligible existence of her thong is still pushed to one side. She's wet, and she's wanting, and yet she's not naked. She groans softly, impatiently...and then he fucks her.

Danicka moans aloud when he does so, giving the cry enough voice to make him wish he'd already clapped his hand across her mouth. It's his own goddamn fault, giving her the chance. It's his fault for staring at her, purring in her ear the words that he does. It's his fault for sliding into her in a single thrust, deep and firm and sudden. She bites back her moan at the end and turns to look over her shoulder at him again, but she doesn't get out the words Lukáš, what the fuck?

She just gasps, her now-red lips parted, unaware that they're thinking the same thing. Six days. Her arms tightening around him to pull him down and snarling at him not to go away, his cock buried inside of her as she leaned over him and rode him and held him as though it would kill her to let go. Only then, hours later, she got up and walked out, and here she is: alive and well. It didn't kill her to let go of him, to be away from him when all she said she wanted was to have him near.

"Baby, don't stop," she whispers as he's standing there with his fingers on her clit and his hand roaming up to her breast and her back arched, muscles tight everywhere with the twist of her body she's using so she can see him. Danicka pushes back against him, gasping at the forced thrust, the feel of him inside her. He leans over her and she closes her eyes again, her fingernails digging into the surface of his desk. Her head turns away from him but he can hear her snarl: "Don't stop."

What she wants, what her body is begging for and what she's verbally demanding, is that he brace his damn hands on the desk and thrust into her until he comes. What she seems to be asking for is that he cover her mouth so she can scream, and fuck her until she does. But he pulls her up and he makes her go on holding in her own longing, and Danicka tips her head back, rolls it to the side. She lays her head against his chest, she reaches back and slips her arms around him, her hands resting momentarily on the back of his neck.

"Fuck me," she whispers, rolling her hips back against him, as he folds his arms and himself around her. "Please? I want you to --ohgod."

One moment she's arched back against him like the maiden on a ship's prow, only uncovered and long since gone from maidenhood. The next her arms unwind from him and her hands hit the desk, followed a second later by his own. She's not on her elbows now but her arms are straight. His chest is against her back like the way it is when they sleep -- sometimes, only sometimes does he find himself falling asleep with her in front of him like this, bodies aligned -- and he gives her what she wants. She cries out softly, plaintively. Her fingers splay where his cover them, inviting his larger hand to interweave with hers.

Danicka grips the table and pushes back against him as he thrusts into her, demanding more. Her head turns and their mouths meet; she bites his lower lip, snarls into his kiss. "Harder," she growls when he lets go, when he gasps for air. "Fuck me."

Which is answer enough, because she doesn't say that yes, Lukas, don't worry, it's okay. She just bites back a shriek as he slams into her again, and accepts his hand over her mouth almost gratefully. Muscles in her back and shoulders relax. She lets her eyes fall closed for a moment, eyelashes fluttering, her head lolling forward as though now she can let go, now she can have him the way she wants him. She licks the taste of herself off his fingertips. He rolls his hips into her again, harder. She moans, and this time she doesn't hold it back. The edge of the desk, a bare quarter of an inch from the wall, slams back into the flat surface the next time he thrusts, shoved by her hands, by one of his.

It's a minute, or five, or an eternity later when Danicka's moaning has turned to sharper, higher-pitched cries. She lifts one leg and puts her foot on the desk chair, opening her legs wider, inviting him deeper.

[Lukas] Fuck me, she says, and the first time he manages to hold onto his sanity; he holds on to her and he wraps her tighter in his arms.

Fuck me, she says the second time, and this is after she's pushed back against him once, twice, every single time he fucks into her, and she's wet and getting wetter and hot and getting hotter, and she makes him so hot for her, so hard for her that he can barely think. When she says that it's like a flashbulb going off in his eyes -- a flare of incandescent heat in the pale blue.

He doesn't put his hand over her mouth after all. He kisses her again, a wrenching bite of a kiss. She's not the only one snarling into it, like an animal, and when he lets go her mouth he doesn't put his hand gently over it, either. He claps his hand over her mouth and she's licking his fingers, and his fingertips are slipping past her lips to curl between her teeth, and he knows damn well she might bite him, but really, who was he to complain about that?

He bites her. His teeth sink into her shoulder and he bites her, and biting her, fucks her. Harder. Just like she said. Danicka puts on a great show of obedience when they're out in public. Jesus, just look at her when they're in the common room of the Brotherhood, or at Grant Park in Mrena's presence. Look at the way she stays silent until spoken to, follows him like a good little kin, answers questions demurely and politely and with empty-headed humor -- like a fucking sheep, like a good little lamb, when really she was half wolf.

When really, she's a goddamn fox.

And the point is: she puts on a great fucking show of obedience, and then they're in the bedroom (...or the living room, or the bathroom, or on his fucking desk) and half the time she tells him to do this or that, and -- with one notable exception -- he doesn't even think about it. He just does it.

She tells him to fuck her, and he fucks her.
She tells him harder, and he fucks her harder.

This is not making love. This is a primal, primitive thing, a fucking, a mating, something older than romance and devotion and all the trappings of modern love; this is the sort of sexual exchange that takes place when your species is scrabbling for a foothold in the ecological web and the winter is long and the land is hard and the prey is scarce and the other predators are snapping at your throat, and the only way to survive is to hunt to feed your pack, to fight to lead your pack, to fuck your mate until she bore your offspring so that when you fell to sickness or injury or starvation, as you inevitably will, there are others of your blood to carry your genes on.

Survival of the fucking species. Survival of the fittest. In other words: to the strongest go the spoils.

Which is not what Lukas is thinking of, per se, when his hand closes over hers, his fingers curling against her palm, his knuckles pressed to the desk. Which is not what he's thinking of when he's transferring his weight to his braced hand and his planted feet, lifting his chest from her back to give himself the range of motion necessary to fuck Danicka, harder, to really pound her, because as much as he tries to be gentle with her, and as much as he tries to pretend he's not a mindless beast, not a slavering monster, there's a savage part of himself that -- well -- is.

It's a part he tries so often to bury when he's around her, and more often than not unsuccessfully. It's a part that doesn't give a shit that his packmates are outside, and half of them don't trust her or don't like her or think she's played them like fiddles. It's a part that doesn't care if they heard the desk slam against the wall, or sense the subaudible vibrations of impact transducted from him to her to the desk to the wall to the whole building; it's a part that wants to hear her crying out, not against his hand or his shoulder but into the open air, and fuck whoever might hear her. Or him. Them. The part of him that's not human, not civilized, not polite: that part of him wants the whole fucking building to know that whatever the hell was going on outside, whatever petty little dramas and feuds and inconsequentialities were going on outside, in here there's something going on that he can't explain, can't control, doesn't want to control. In here there's a goddamn hurricane, and he wants to drown in the storm surge.

He wants them to hear.

-- but he doesn't go that far: for her sake, if not for his own. He doesn't take his hand off her mouth. He muffles her cries on his palm and if she bites him he hisses a curse, but it's as much enjoyment as surprise, and hardly pain at all, and it doesn't stop him. He doesn't stop. His hair is plastered to his brow, damp; there's sweat running down his back, but he's just hitting his stride, picking up the pace another notch. She's lifting her foot onto the chair and his eyes are savage; he bares his teeth in a flickering snarl, silent. He doesn't stop. He's releasing her hand, lifting his hand from the tabletop to grip her hip instead. She's opening herself up to him and he's holding her steady so he can fuck her harder. He's straightening up until he has to stretch to keep his hand over her mouth -- so he can fuck her faster. So he can slam their bodies together over and over and over with all his momentum; so that he can, quite frankly, fuck the daylights out of her.

And he doesn't stop.

[Danicka] They haven't been together since he told her can't give her everything because he doesn't believe that she'll give it back. They haven't been together since she told him that he'd hurt her, and she's never said this before to him with that much blatant vulnerability. What it took for her to admit aloud that he could hurt her. What it takes for her to come to him again and again when every single time he gets closer to being able to break her heart.

And instead of tender, slow lovemaking done in whispers and kisses on his bed, she wants him like this: standing behind her even though the moon is still heavy, pounding into her with something almost like violence. Anyone passing by his bedroom door right now -- and situated where it is, Lukas's bedroom is passed often -- is going to hear the desk shaken on its thin legs, is going to hear Lukas growling and Danicka snarling, is going to hear her moans verging on shrieks, is going to hear him panting.

He's going to leave marks on her if he keeps biting her like that, and she just bucks against him, sucks his finger into her mouth to lick her taste off of his skin. She suckles, she kisses, she whimpers softly and almost plaintively around his finger, and Lukas fucks her hard enough to make her yelp in surprise. And then he wraps his hand fully around hers, holds it against his palm, when he pulls away from her back. There's sweat down the valley of her spine, glistening on her lower back, creating a sheen on her shoulders.

Neither of them are thinking, an iota, about being children together. Or having children together. They're not even human anymore.

Danicka doesn't scream so loudly that they can hear her out there past Lukas's hand over the lower half of her face, his finger in her mouth. She half-shrieks as he rides her up against the desk, and then her teeth lock down on his finger, biting him without mercy or even, apparently, though. Lukas hisses, swears, but he doesn't growl and his hand grabbing her by the hip is as silent as his throat.

He's fucking her harder, faster, while the desk trembles, and Danicka gasps. Her teeth, having left their impressions in his hand -- and he won't bruise, he won't bear teeth marks or hickeys from her mouth for more than minutes, and this will be the way of it forever -- suddenly leave, and she licks his hand as though to heal him. She arches her back and kisses his palm, because it's been six days, and her curls are falling out of her hair, and her earrings are swinging wildly every time he moves, every time she moves back against him, every time she cries out and it's subdued because for someone's sake, they try to at least pretend to respect the other people living here.

Who may not want to hear her when she twists her head around, takes her reddened mouth from his hand and gasps out: "Pojď ve mně. Pro lásku Boží, Lukáš, pojď ve mně."

[Lukas] Danicka twists her mouth free -- his eyes flash up to hers, gleaming in the low light. There's no sign of comprehension there at all. She might as well be speaking in tongues. He'd speak in tongues now if he tried, so he doesn't. He just looks at her, his brow furrowed with what could be concentration, or trouble, but is really just the moment, the wracking pleasure of what he's doing to her and what she's doing to him.

He doesn't clap his hand back over her mouth either. She's just going to have to hold it in herself while he grabs her hips, grabs her thigh where it lifts to raise her foot to the edge of the chair, and he pulls her back against his thrusts as if he couldn't get deep enough, but had to try. The desk is groaning at the joints, though at least it isn't slamming against the wall. He's fucking her hard enough to make her gasp and yelp, to make her moans range high and thin, half a shriek. The chair slips sideways suddenly with a creak of the legs over wood floorboards. Lukas doesn't even pause. He shifts rightward slightly, adjusts the tilt of her hips so his cock can slide into her, deep --


and he fucks her harder.

And he must have understood her after all; or his body understands what hers is saying to it; or it's simply inevitable. This sort of pace is not sustainable. Something has to give. Something has to overload, burn out, melt down. This sort of ... what, obsession? Infatuation? Devotion? might not be sustainable either, and not so very long ago he told himself this to reassure himself: that sooner or later he'll get sick of her, or she'll get sick of him, that they'll move on, because isn't that what they've always expected? I'll do this until we get sick of each other, she said, at the beginning, before it was even a beginning.

That's what they said, and expected, and agreed on. And then there's moments like this -- when he walks in to see her on his bed; when he watches her turn around and bend over; when she smiles at him in an elevator and mouths

i'm happy

that he realizes: no, no, no. He can't let go of this yet. Because if you take what's necessary, there's bound to be pieces left to pick up. He's bound to fall to pieces.

His eyes shut of their own accord when the first clenches of his climax spike up his spine, and then he forces them open after all, and the pupils are enormous, and his hands are pushing up over her body, sweeping up her stomach to close over her breasts -- his arms crossed, holding her against his chest. He leans over her, into her, his body heavy and hot over hers; turns his face to hers. He doesn't cover her mouth with his hand again but he does do this: he does kiss her with an all-consuming sort of fever, as though to not kiss her is an impossibility. As though to not kiss her would be lose something necessary, and fall to pieces.

It's like this, kissing her, that his orgasm breaks over him like a

(storm surge / hurricane / ocean.)

wave -- kissing her, that his brow furrows as though in pain, that his arms lock around her and crush her against him, that his entire body flexes and crunches and bunches against itself to drive him deeper into her hot cunt. His breath locks down when he comes in her, his chest straining against her back to pull in air or to expel it against a throat suddenly closed, closed because he won't shout his pleasure to the skies or even moan, or even groan, or even grunt; he holds back until that first blinding rush is over, and then he's pulling his mouth from hers to gasp and pant, and his body is moving against her of its own volition -- a series of short, sharp thrusts, but diminishing, slowing, until he simply holds himself inside her.

He can't bring himself to let go of her. He's leaning against her back so heavily that he knows this, too, is unsustainable -- that sooner or later her arms will buckle and he'll bear her down to the desk, or their legs will give way and they'll collapse on the floor. He knows that, and he knows he should let go, take his hands off her skin, unwind his arms from her body, put his hands down on the desk and carry his own weight. He knows this, but not for the first time he thinks just another minute, just another ten seconds; not for the first time he's holding onto her like he's the one that'll fall apart if he lets go.

Like it's his heart that'll hammer itself loose from its moorings --

and all along he's always thought she makes him feel as though his ribs might cave in and crush his heart, but it's not that; he sees that now, it's not that at all; it's that

-- his heart might hammer itself loose from its moorings if he lets go of her now, and beat his breastbone to pieces, and break his ribs, and consume him like a bonfire, and leave him in ashes; pieces.

"Ach můj bože, Danicka," he says -- a harsh, dragging whisper, half-coherent at best. "Neuvěřitelné."

[Danicka] At times like this she can't understand how they can go six days without so much as talking to one another. When he's kissing her like this she can't imagine going over a week and a half without him inside her. As she grabs a hold of her blouse still sitting in a pale puddle on top of the desk, her fist curling into it as though it is a sheet underneath her on a bed far more comfortable than the edge of this desk, she can't fathom how they can go two days. Six hours.

All she wishes right now was that she had taken him somewhere instead of coming in here. She wishes she had not taken off her coat but told him to put his on and taken him...dammit, anywhere. A motel on the bad side of town. One of the nicest resort hotels in the city. The backseat of her car. Anywhere she could scream his name. Anywhere she could let go the way she has before, the way she wants to when she's with him.

Well. Maybe not all she wishes right now. Danicka's hair is clinging to her neck and to her shoulder from sweat, her body is quivering against and around his, and she's the last person on earth who could tell him if it's obsession, or infatuation, or devotion. She knows what's happening to her. She doesn't know what's happening to him. She has no idea what is happening to them. And it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter right now, not when she's whimpering for him to give himself over to her, to let go.

She's not getting sick of him. When he hurts her. When he makes her angry. When he opens herself and bares herself and all he can do is pull away and tell her he's sorry, and she keeps. Fucking. Coming. Back.

Maybe it's because of this. Or because when he sees her the happiness in his eyes is genuine and she has been enamored of his smile since before they ever kissed, before they undressed themselves and stripped everything down to a torn-apart bed and each other. When she enters a room and his eyes light up, her heart skips, and when she's away from him she thinks maybe she could live if she never touched him again but she'd like...she'd liked to see him smile again. She'd like to hear him laugh. She'd like to be the reason for it.

And then Danicka feels his lips hit hers and she pulls him into the kiss further, moans against him, neither biting now nor snarling nor even demanding. And she thinks: I could live without it if he never smiled again, as long as he kisses me like this. As long as puts his hands on me. As long as this isn't the last time I feel this.

It breaks her heart, and she starts all over, starts back at the beginning when her legs wrapped around him for the first time and she tasted his mouth for the first time. She goes back to the start, to the moment when he told her to open to him and she wanted to whimper because it was already too late. She feels his heart beating through their two bodies, his pulse replacing hers, and his heat overtaking hers, and rather than overpowering or annihilating her, she finds herself burning that much brighter, she is that much more alive.

Lukas clings to her even before now, fighting so hard not to make a sound that he barely even breathes. Danicka reaches back her left hand, arches her arm, and buries her fingers in his hair. She gasps when he shudders, when his hips roll and jerk and then go still, flexed but unmoving. Her pleasure is still a sinuous, sensuous thing throughout her entire body, but she doesn't fall over the edge with him. She barely even moves as his orgasm takes hold of, wrenches, and then finally releases him.

When it's over, though, when she feels him coming back down, her fingertips massage gently into his scalp, comfortingtly. She is trembling, not from fear or cold but restraint, remembering the last time she fucked him in here in flickers and flashes. Danicka bites her lower lip and doesn't let herself make a sound. Her hand slowly slips, and falls away, and touches the desk again.

Neuvěřitelné.

Their eyes are closed, their faces turned the same direction so they cannot see one another. Danicka receives his weight, at least for awhile, dropping her head. She licks her lips, opens her eyes and looks at the belt, the blouse, the desk, as though these three things somehow have become the world. His hands are on her body, holding her as tightly as he ever does, and she just breathes out:

"Uvěřit."

[Lukas] Maybe he should feel selfish now.

Maybe he should apologize for not taking better care of her wants and needs; her body. Maybe he should apologize for not even touching her, really, except to hold her so he could fuck her -- for not putting his mouth on her, or his hand; for not even caressing her breasts, not even offering her a goddamn pillow, while he bent her over his desk.

Or maybe he should feel uncertain. Worried. Frightened of the response she rouses from him with -- what? A few words. A few commands, really, that he can't help but follow. A scrap of cloth that, jesus christ, was still on her; he'd just pulled it aside and fucked her, hadn't even thought about it. Had lost his mind over her because she wore a thong and no bra under her demure little office-girl outfit; because she bent herself over his desk and he could smell her arousal.

Maybe he should feel emasculated, because he came hard enough to blow all the fuses in his mental switchbox, and she hadn't even reached a climax at all. Maybe he should be scared of what she can do to him, or embarrassed at what he did to her, or...

He doesn't feel selfish. Or uncertain. Or worried, or frightened, or -- any of that, really. Because she wasn't commanding anything of him. And she's not using him, or driving him over the edge as some sort of power play, as some sort of object lesson, as some demonstration of her power or her control or --

Lukas feels -- well; good. He feels amazing, and amazed, and he feels comfortably adrift; at peace. Her hand comes up to his head and he turns ever so slightly toward her touch, like a plant toward the sun, a simple animal toward heat and light. That's been said before, but it's as true now as it ever was. She's like heat and light to himself, sometimes; no wonder he'd thought what he had that night at the Affinia, when they talked about what they wanted -- not of each other, not from this, but simply. Generally.

It was only later that she began to realize -- and perhaps he hasn't even begun to realize -- that what they wanted was wrapped up in the idea, the presence, the existence of the other. Somehow; somewhere.

He turns his head when her hand leaves his scalp. He catches her palm against his mouth, kisses it. Then her hand returns to the table and one of his unwinds at last. He presses it down to the table, taking some of his weight back onto himself, and his free hand explores her now, slowly, musingly, touching her so carefully and so patiently as though to learn her body the way a cartographer learns the lay of a foreign land.

When he straightens up, it's only briefly, and he wraps his arms around her again, brings her with him. He pulls the chair back and to the side, haphazardly, dream-slow, as though he were moving through water. He sits; it's a sort of controlled collapse, and now she's atop him, askew on his lap, and he lays his head back against the top of the chair and closes his eyes.

Just for a minute. Just for ten seconds.

[Danicka] If Danicka had been caught up with Lukas in his orgasm, she would be a languid, melting shape of a woman right now, easing back against his chest and purring softly in contented pleasure. She is not going over her own cliffside at the moment, though, not biting back helpless little screams like he's heard her do time and time again, and yet she is also not waiting (just ten seconds) for him to catch at least one of his breaths before rolling her hips and demanding more from him than he thinks he can survive giving to her. She's done that before, too, and yet right now she doesn't so much as move.

She trembles, trying to be silent and trying to breathe normally and trying not to reach back, grab his hip, and snarl that he'd better goddamn not stop now. It takes a great deal of effort for Danicka to be as still as she is, as quiet as she is, but she exerts it gracefully, biting her lower lip and shuddering softly as her body continues to pulse around his. She's hot, and she's wet, and when his fingers trace over her as though he is plotting an escape route, she arches her back and bites down harder on her lip.

Yet she falls back with him, eases onto his lap and fights a whimper, squeezing her eyes shut and leaning against him. This is not terribly unlike the way they were together in the armchair at the Omni, only she had one leg bent back and her spine was impossibly arched and she'd come, goddammit. This chair is also not as wide, not as comfortable, not an armchair at all but a desk chair, and Danicka ...

...she squirms on him, as though fighting to get his arms unwound from her body and to get her hips away from his, her breath catching in her throat. If she stays on him much longer she's going to lose her mind, so she reaches for the edge of the desk and pulls herself up, as though she needs to support of furniture just to stand.

He's not feeling selfish or uncertain or worried or scared, not thinking of what he just did to her or what she is able to do to him, not thinking that he can't allow this strange dominance of hers in the bedroom anymore or thinking that he can trust her not to hurt him with it. He needn't feel any of those things, or think that she is playing some game to earn a little power in the world she lives in where any power she might have is ultimately imaginary. As for Danicka, she's not thinking much at all right now.

There are times when she is satisfied, with surprising depth, by pleasuring someone else. There are times when she gets off on an emotional level that has little to do with her body's response. There are times when she has an orgasm spontaneously, without being touched or touching herself, though this has only happened a few memorable occasions. There are times when she can cradle her partner's head and kiss her lover's face and be content to see them melted completely in the aftermath of a hard fuck.

Now is not one of those times.

Danicka stands, and with a hook of her thumbs and a quick drag she drops the thong to her ankles. When she steps out of it and turns around she doesn't climb back onto his lap but back onto his desk, leaning back until her head and the backs of her shoulders hit the wall, slipping her hand between her legs. He needn't feel guilty, or selfish, or emasculated. But she needn't be patient.

[Lukas] Danicka stands --

or she begins to. She squirms and starts brace her hands on the edge of the seat, or on him; she reaches for the side of the desk. Up until now Lukas has been half conscious at best, slouched bonelessly in the chair, his head back, his chest still heaving to suck one breath after another out of the lamplit, silent air. He isn't moving his hands on her; he's just holding her, and it's a loose hold, gentle, absentminded.

Until she starts to get up. Then his arms instantly tighten. He drags her back against him, hard enough that when her back hits his chest it knocks a short whuffing breath out of him. And he laughs, wincing a little at the impact, half out of breath still.

"Where do you think you're going?" It's a velvet, laughing murmur in her ear. His teeth are sharp and careful on her earlobe; her earrings catch against the inside of his bottom teeth and he tugs ever so gently before letting it go. The metal has tranduced some of her heat; it's warm against his lip. "I don't think we're finished yet."

He holds her firm with an arm around her middle, and his other hand, his right hand, is pushing down her stomach to find her thong. He pushes it off onehanded, and unless she helps him it'll stay where it is, twisted around her thighs, and meanwhile he's opening her legs over his lap, spreading her thighs over his and hooking her feet around the outside of his calves, patient as he never would've been if he hadn't already come inside her once.

Which reminds him. He takes a moment to rid himself of the used condom, tossing it in the wastebin by his desk. Then his hand comes back to her, and with a quiet, satisfied sort of sigh, as though setting himself to a worthwhile and enjoyable task, searches out her clit with his fingers.

If she'd gotten up, if she'd gotten on his desk and begun to touch herself, it's possible she would've gone faster than this. It's possible, perhaps likely, that she would've gone at herself furiously, feverishly, to rub herself to an electric, arching orgasm. That would've made sense, given the fury of the fuck that had preceded this. That's not what this is, though. Lukas is slow. He's deliberate. He's methodical about this, steady, and his fingers are firm but unhurried, stroking her flesh in patient, pulsing circles while his mouth drifts along her neck, nips at her pulse. "I don't think we're finished yet," he repeats, a whisper now, like an incantation; a prayer.

And:

"Dejte prsty uvnitř sebe, Danička."

[Danicka] When Lukas tightens his arms around her, Danicka tenses. Instinctively, uncontrollably, a jolt of something not remotely like pleasure goes through her when she moves to get up and he stops her. It's easy to forget sometimes what he is...or perhaps it's easy for him to forget that there's never a time when she is not aware that he could and very well might break her in half. Danicka's not like many Kinfolk, who are perfectly comfortable staring down an Ahroun, who don't fear broken bones or torn skin at the hands of those Garou that are supposed to...

what? Protect them?

She doesn't want him to think about what Garou have done to her, when he's talking to her. She doesn't want Lukas holding back and guessing at her trauma (damage) when he's touching her. Every single time he does, a wall comes down between them, and she doesn't want it. She doesn't want whatever has happened to her -- and she won't fucking tell him the details, not even when, or who, or how often, or what it even was -- to weigh him down. What she wants, and what tears him apart, is that she wants to make him happy.

Right now, she's failing. She jerks slightly from sheer, instant fear because she wants to move and the monster behind her won't let go. Her heart isn't exactly going slow but it slams into her ribs all of a sudden, her breath catching. He wouldn't notice if, perhaps, they were facing one another and she were clothed and he had not just lost himself inside of her. With her in his arms and against his body, she can't disguise it. Not when the moon is gibbous, at least. Not tonight.

Danicka feels his lips and his breath more than she hears his whisper against her earlobe, and her eyes flicker open, her head half-turning as he nibbles her earlobe. The pearls in her earrings scrape quietly against his teeth, the lace and silk around her hips shoved down where before they were just shoved away, and she parts her legs unresistingly as his hand moves between her thighs. He's slow, and she whimpers, her lashes falling down again, rolling her hips to the touch, waiting for her heart rate to find a sane rhythm again.

"Ty první," she purrs across the curve of her shoulder.

If he thinks that she's insane to think for a moment she's hidden anything from him when they're this close, he underestimates, again, how different he is.

[Lukas] The jolt of reaction in her was nothing like desire, and if he weren't so damn drugged on pleasure, dazed on it, he would've caught it immediately.

Even now, Lukas is not entirely oblivious. He touches her slowly, and then slower still, and then not at all. It's passingly familiar, the way his tapers to a stop. It's familiar because it's something akin to -- a distant cousin of -- the way he'd stopped that night in her living room, on her couch, when he'd realized just how far she'd withdrawn; and just how capable she was of fucking him without being even remotely invested in the moment. It's familiar because the way she's reacting now is a little like the way she reacted that night: faking it, just a little.

So Lukas stops. His hand covers her inner thigh, but loosely; the other has all but slipped from around her. It would be easy enough for her to stand now, and this time, he won't stop her.

He turns his mouth from her neck and kisses her shoulder instead, softly. There's a question in it; a sort of reaching out. A moment later he voices it: "Myslíte si potřebujete nějaké místo, láska?"

[Danicka] The energy that Danicka puts into trying to calm down again is surprising, and the effort she exerts to disguise that she even tensed in the first place is given almost automatically, but the mask would usually be flawless. When she is with him, however, there are cracks where something brighter shines through, where light and heat draw him closer.

If she were honest she might say that she does want him to know her, but Danicka is a liar. She tells lies every single day without pausing, without hitching her step. If Lukas were to go through a day with her, visiting the market or the salon or going shopping with her, he'd see her flow from one persona to another without missing a step. There are places in this city were the entire staff believes her to be a recent Russian immigrant who makes all of her own clothes. She has made up a middle name where there is one, and she's been doing this since childhood. No one in the Czech Republic has a goddamn middle name, but Danicka has at least three dozen of them, and each one has a story.

Danicka lies. Sometimes she does it without thinking, and for no reason at all. Whether she's scared or not, whether she wants to or not even: she lies all the fucking time. When she writes letters to her half-sisters that she has never met in person, she lies. She lies to her father on a weekly basis. She lies to Helena, still living down south. She has told Sam Modine the truth a handful of times and everything else he's seen of her has been deception.

What's happening here isn't really even a lie, though. She rolls her hips and it's not because she wants Lukas to think she's aroused when she isn't, or because she wants something from him. She fears him and does not want him to know not because she thinks he'll hit her but because she does not want him to hold back, she doesn't want him to ache, she just wants...

...what they have to watch for, and what he is seeing, is that when Danicka lies to him -- flawlessly or not -- she is trying to give him what he might want, to keep him happy, to keep him content, to give him more than she could ever ask from him.

It means that the soft moan she releases may be fake. But it doesn't mean that she isn't invested in the moment. Quite the contrary.

She's invested in him. Just not, always, herself. Lukas, having only met her in late January, has an idea just how strange this is for her, how different he is from other men, from other Garou, from other people, but he can have no complete idea of the degree. He may as well be on another planet.

Her eyes open slowly again, her head turning again. Her skin is still visibly wet from sweat, her eyes a bright and almost surreal green when she looks at him. A few hairs have come loose from their bindings and lay across her face, a few strands stick to her cheek. She is breathless, still, from before and from now and from the remains of it all. She watches him silently as he kisses her shoulder.

And then she's off of him, the thong taken by gravity to the floor. There's every chance, in that split second, that the unspoken answer is Ano, that space and distance from him is exactly what she wants, exactly what she needs. Every chance that she's going to reach for her blouse, or her skirt, and get the hell out of here. Danicka does have as much a tendency to run as she does to lie.

A split second passes, but she doesn't walk away. She turns and steps out of her lingerie, slides onto his lap, and then her hands are on his face her mouth is on his lips her body is pressed to his. Without word. Without explanation. Without hesitation.

[Lukas] When she gets up Lukas seems to come fully awake again for the first time in minutes on end. His eyes are brilliant in their clarity; they follow her with the clicking precision of a hawk's, and like a hawk, they swoop down as the thong slips to the floor.

And then she's turning, and he's reaching out to welcome her back onto his lap, and as she straddles him his arms slip around her unhesitatingly, familiarly, his long-fingered hands covering her ass as he turns his face up to hers. She has given no explanation for this; for why she got up, for why she came back. For once she doesn't need to. For once, he thinks he understands perfectly.

He loves how she puts her hands on his face when they kiss, too: how she holds his face between her hands.

The kiss is not gentle to begin with, and it rapidly spirals into something akin to a wildfire. It reignites his desire almost too soon for him to fully comprehend it -- it reminds him, fleetingly, of the night of a full moon, when he could burn his rage away all he wants but the slightest provocation, the slightest insult or surprise or arousal or excitement could spark it back to life again.

His hands shift her abruptly forward. He grinds her against him -- tak za mokra, he thinks, dizzily -- and he's half-erect again, and getting up from the chair, and lifting her against him, and taking her across the three or four feet to the bed.

When he lowers Danicka to the mattress, she might expect him to crawl over her. He doesn't. He sets her down and then he pulls his pillows out from under the neatly made bedspread; tosses them against the wall, bends to take her by the waist and move her back a little. The sheets rumple ahead of her. So much for his neatly made bed. He doesn't care. She's perpendicular to the long axis of the bed, her legs hooked over the side, and he's dropping to his knees between them, lifting her knees over his shoulders.

"Lean back, baby," he tells her, gently, and gently, turns his face to kiss the inside of her thigh.

[Danicka] Kissing Danicka is like seeing the moon rise.

She would not understand this if he said it to her. A poet might appreciate the sentiment but not fathom it. Another Garou, certainly, would know what it means. The comparison between what this woman does to him and what the moon does to them all wouldn't be lost on another of his kind.

Danicka melts against him this time, his arms around her wanted rather than abruptly -- if not inexplicably -- feared. She can see him now, she can remind herself that this is Lukáš and he will not trap her. At least he has said that he will let her go. If she wants to leave him, if she needs to end this, he won't force her to stay. She doesn't say aloud that she just doesn't believe this yet, not when he also tells her that if she left him he's not sure how he would pick up the pieces. She doesn't say aloud what she repeats to herself as she wraps her legs around him and presses their bodies together: that this is Lukáš. This is Lukáš.

Which is significant not because it means he is not someone else. It's significant because of who he is.

She gasps when he pulls her closer, her hips rolling against him. There's no need for his fingers in her teeth or his hand across her mouth this time; she doesn't stop kissing him even when she moans, when he stands and takes her with him. This reminder of his strength doesn't startle her, or make her tense up; she doesn't care that she's in the air where before she was on him. Her legs just slide further around him, encompass him, as her hands push into his hair.

His retreat from her makes her eyes open as she loses his mouth, his arms around her upper body. Danicka's eyes follow him as he moves to grab those pillows and she sits up, puts her hands on his hips. Her tongue only has time to trace a portion of his midline before he's over her, shifting her backwards towards the wall, the pillows. Danicka is still holding to him, her eyes flicking up to his as she leans back, as though expecting that now he will come back to her, but that...isn't what happens. He drops to his knees, and she breathes in sharply.

"Nemusíte to --" she says plaintively, but as quietly as she can. Her fingertips trace his brow, explore his scalp and the curves of his ears but she cuts herself off before she finishes that obvious sentence. Her forehead is furrowed, expression troubled. "I'm sorry...about before. Chci jen vy. Promiňte, Lukáš. Jediná věc, co chci je být s tebou."

[Lukas] He looks at her quizzically. There's a faint, animal tilt to his head that matches the animal look to his eyes: the huge pupils, the thin rims of a blue so pale they don't quite seem human.

"Chci se," he tells her, the same gentle tone: but firm.

She goes on, and he's frowning; he's letting her knee down from his shoulder, and she's touching his face, and he's rising up to stand on his knees, bracing his hands on the mattress on either side of her thighs. The lamplight at the headboard casts obliquely over him, creating deep shadows on the far side of his biceps; over the shallow ridge of bone between his pectoral muscles.

"I don't think there's anything for you to apologize for, Danička. I should apologize. I wasn't thinking. I wanted to ... make you feel the way you made me feel. I forget sometimes that my rage makes me -- unnerving."

[Danicka] The book Lukas was reading when she called him, six hours after 'soon' and six days after she walked out on him, mentions on its very first page the belief of a certain character that the dark was always cooler, whether summer or otherwise. It's early spring now and on some nights still cold enough to freeze. It isn't yet the spring that Danicka said one night that she wishes for, it's not the spring that Lukas sees her as an elemental of, with her gold hair and green eyes and the moist warmth he finds in her.

But regardless of season or the weather outside this room's single window, it's the dark that seems to ignite something for them. Things always seem hotter when they're in the dark, in the shadows that his tribe is named for. As though anyone could lord over something as mutable, as changeable, as insubstantial as a shadow. As if anyone could understand from the name that the shadows are not what the rule but where they rule from.

Danicka understands that. She is not a Shadow Lord, she's a kinswoman. She could be changed if she were given away, if she were promised to someone else. If she were promised to anyone at all, because they covered this earlier: no one promised her to Lukas.

Those currently dark eyes of hers roam across his face and his body, not meeting his gaze as is falls on her. She licks her lips, tasting a curious blend of the two of them, of the air itself. As he speaks, she reaches back and works the tie out of her hair, thoughtlessly stretching it til it moves down from her hand to encircle her wrist. Her hair falls around her shoulders, the length of it wavy, the ends still in curls. She scoots down on the bed slightly, closer to the edge, and moves her hands to his biceps, gently pulling at him.

"And how do I make you feel?" she asks, in a whisper.

[Lukas] It's an expression she's seen on his face often, though perhaps not so often of late: that wince, very slight, as though it emerged without his permission and beyond his control; as though something pains him, or bewilders him somehow.

"You make me feel -- "

and he has to draw a breath here; he has to bow his head for a moment as if he couldn't stand to look at her a second longer, or as if, if he were to look at her a second longer, his retinas would sear and he would carry the afterimage of her forever in his vision.

"Like nothing else I've ever known." It's a sort of surrender, this admission. He's not a creature that fumbles often for words, but he's fumbling now; awkward, imperfect. "Like -- falling, or like I've no secrets left. Like I have nothing left except what you've given me."

His elbows bend. She pulls at him, and though he doesn't move over her, he lowers himself over her; presses his face to her smooth abdomen; closes his eyes for a moment.

A pause.

Then, quieter, "Like you've given me everything."

[Danicka] "Pojď sem."

It's no secret that she wants him near, that she wants him closer, but she says it anyway. It's the first time she's stopped him, even come close to stopping him, from planting his face between her legs and taking her past arousal and into orgasm. It's the first time she's even hesitated. She pulls at him again, insistent, but then he speaks and he bows his head. She relents.

Danicka's hands gentle on his arms and then smooth over his biceps, across his shoulders. She touches him aimlessly, thoughtlessly, and slowly. His skin under her palms feels soft enough to be strange, soft as her own or as a child's. It's because of how often that skin is stripped away, flayed off of him only to be regrown in a matter of hours, maybe a few days. She knows that, though he may not realize she does.

He thinks of her Theurge and doesn't know what all happened to her at his hands, but given what he himself has endured only to watch erased by the touch of a crescent moon, Lukas can likely imagine some horrific things done to this pristine woman. When Katerina or others have healed him, their power has to combat his Rage, which is considerable. Danicka has no Rage. Danicka would be even easier to restore, one could do so much and bring her back with just a touch, with so little effort.

She takes a small breath as he speaks, as though what he says is not what she expected to hear at all. As though she had some expectation to begin with. And then Danicka swallows, licking her lips again, and sighs out her exhalation, as silently as she is capable of. She stifles her laughter and she hides her screams and she can sigh without making a sound, and she does not blink as she watches him.

His face moves to her stomach, as though in surrender or worship or simple need, and Danicka just lies there for a moment. She pauses for a second, before touching his hair -- as though in acceptance, as though in blessing. "I..."

Her head falls back onto the pillows that he grabbed and threw against the wall. What a strange thing, a useless thing...a painfully considerate, thoughtful thing. So that she would be comfortable, so that she could luxuriate in what he wanted to do to her. She closes her eyes for a moment and then opens them to stare at the ceiling, taking another deep breath before she finds herself able to speak.

"I think, sometimes, that what would make me happy is being with you...every night. I just don't think that either of us could handle that, and I don't think it's possible, and it bothers me that I...want that."

Danicka doesn't explain why it bothers her. She doesn't explain why she doesn't think they could cope with being together without pause, though this, at least, she probably doesn't have to explain to him of all people. But she does look down at him again, and her fingers move gently in his hair, without agenda or forethought. A wince not far off from his own flashes across her features.

"...You do make me feel like I'm falling."

[Lukas] Like falling, he said.
Like I'm falling, she says.

Zamilovávám se do tebe, she'd said; and he hasn't had the courage to even approach the words again. Even the thought of them now makes him press his brow to her skin, to that smooth perfect expanse of skin between her ribcage and her hip girdle -- the soft underbelly that an animal would be so very, very careful to protect from the tooth and claw of another.

Perhaps some primal part of him responds to the way she puts her hand to his head, as though in blessing, or in acceptance. As though, whatever happened at the desk, in the chair, she is not afraid of him after all.

Which is not quite the truth, but perhaps not wholly a lie, either.

He turns his ear to her stomach, then. Wraps his arms around her. "The first time you were in my bed," he says quietly, "when I walked in and saw you there, I thought to myself that I could get used to seeing you there. I wanted to get used to seeing you there, every night."

And his mouth to her skin again, slow, a press of his lips to her flesh: as though in blessing. As though in acceptance.

"I don't think it's possible. But it's unexpected and unnerving for me, too, to want that."

[Danicka] Without thought, she not only exposes herself to him but pulls him closer. He could tear her throat out, could gnash his teeth and sprout fur and in seconds that soft underbelly he is all but nuzzling would be shredded. He could bite deeply enough to not kiss her inner thigh but absolutely destroy her femoral artery, and she would bleed out in minutes. And Danicka, yet, spreads her legs and strokes his hair as though she is not afraid of him even though when her back was to him and he wouldn't let her go she found herself on the edge of a panic attack.

His arms come around her and she arches her back slightly, lifts her hips a little, to make room for him. They're at odd angles to one another, him laying his head on her stomach and her legs bent over the side of his bed, toes barely brushing the carpet. She can look down and see him because of the pillow underneath her shoulders and neck, he can look up at her if he turns his head just so and see the flat of her belly, the swell of her breasts, the shadows around her throat and the way her hair falls around her face. And they're comfortable like this, as comfortable as they were when he had her against his desk and his teeth were locked into her and she was not, at all, scared that he would devour her.

Through her stomach he can hear the impression, the echo, of her heartbeat. It has steadied considerably but is still faster than her resting rate, because he is still naked and between her legs and they're alone in near-darkness. She smiles gently, though he doesn't see it, and so he can't tell that it's gentle because it's almost...sad.

"I've told you before, this bed is way too small for two people."

[Lukas] He looks at her as she speaks, and when she smiles. The edges of his mouth flick up. The smile is as poignant as hers -- it's not really humor at all.

"You and I both know that's the least of our reasons."

Our, he says: because that's what it is. It would be easier, perhaps, to blame this on her alone: Danicka the untrustworthy, Danicka the whore, Danicka who plays with hearts. Easier; but no more true than any of the above.

He presses his mouth to her body again, his arms tightening to bring her against him. His brow furrows with the intensity of this kiss, as though he could kiss her body the same way he kisses her mouth -- a sort of mutual devouring; a sort of mutual giving.

When it ends his arms unwind. He straightens up and moves onto the bed, the thin inexpensive mattress dipping and squeaking beneath his weight. His hands urge her to turn ninety degrees, to stretch out lengthwise instead, and when she does, he lays himself down beside her, on his side, facing her.

She's right. The bed is too small for two. Even like this, his back is inches from the edge; she's not very far from the wall. The pillows are still where he tossed them, so he pillows his head on his backbent arm. His free hand finds it familiar spot at the dip of her waist, his fingers spreading over her skin.

[Danicka] The size of his bed is the least of the reasons that they cannot be together every night. His room is roughly the size of one of Danicka's closets, not much larger than the balcony off which she smokes when she's stressed. He has a window. She has a wall made of glass that overlooks the eastern half of Chicago from twenty-three stories up. He's the Shadow Lord, and he lives in a hole in the wall. She's the spoils of war, and she lives at the summit of the city. She has a broad, soft bed and a bathroom obviously meant to be shared between two people, she has the room and the funds to house and support not just one but maybe an entire pack of Garou.

If it were a matter of space, it wouldn't be a reason at all. There's the war itself, and the fact that she is indeed a distraction from it. Every hour he spends with her, he is not planning, not patrolling, not hunting. He is not with his pack, maintaining those bonds and communing with that familial spirit. Lukas even tends to fall asleep with Danicka at her hours, even if they are offset from the ones he tends to keep when he has any routine at all.

There are so many reasons why she can't be lying here waiting for him every time he walks through the door intent on falling asleep for the night, or the day. There's what her life was for nine years, the limitations, the walls, the responsibilities she is free from for the first time since before he was even Changed. There's what her life was before that. There's the fact that this place is somewhat inherently dangerous for her, inherently uncomfortable, inherently...wrong for her. There's the fact that where she lives would not be the place for him, either. They each have lists of reasons as long as their arm for CON, and only the one reason in the PRO column:

I want...every night.

Her stomach muscles move as he kisses her belly and as she breathes. Her fingers tighten in his hair, then relax, and finally he comes to her, gets off of his knees and onto the bed. Danicka sighs, but this time it's in relief, as though this was what she wanted all along, from the moment she turned around and climbed onto his lap...from the time she walked into the room...from the time she crossed town to get to him...from the time she rolled up that target and slipped it into the mailing tube.

She is moving before his hands encourage it, grabbing the pillow behind her and putting it back in its place. Danicka lies on her left side and curls towards his chest, tucking her feet under his, the way she did the first night. They're the only part of her that really seems to get cold, but right now they're not icy, which is small comfort. She burrows her face into his pectoral muscles, undeterred by the dark hairs splashed across his skin. Sometimes when she lays down next to him she seems wholly separate from him, untouchable and unassailable as he saw her once in a nightclub, in a coffee shop, at the waterfront. Sometimes she's still so far away, her body open and her mouth crying out his name but so much of her hidden from him.

It's changing. And this is part of it, the way that sometimes she is also like this. She is not seeking his protection, or his guardianship, or some bizarre security to be found in his physical strength. When Danicka curls up in the hollow created by his body and his covering arm, she does not want anything from him. The only thing she wants, as she said, is to be with him.

[Lukas] Sometimes it's hard for Lukas to remember that he's only really known her for three months. Not even. Sometimes it's hard for him to remember that they haven't really known each other all their lives; did not grow up together; were not high school sweethearts; were not betrothed to one another.

Sometimes, when he stretches out beside her like this and she curls against his chest and he encircles her in his arm, she feels so ... natural, so right, that it's hard for him to remember that even now, he doesn't really know her.

There are entire stretches of her history that are blank to him. There are crucial details that are missing, but he's thinking of her less and less as a puzzle, an enigma that if he could only figure her out he could get over it and move on, and more and more as --

what?

Danička.

And that's enough.

Some time goes by. His arm is heavy across her side, his hand warm where it covers what seems like half her narrow back. His shin is warm, too, where it crosses over her tucked feet -- all tough sinewy muscle and heavy bone tapering to the complex and precise interarticulations of the ankle joint. His breathing has long since slowed to a steady tidal rhythm, too quiet for sleep. Now and then, his thumb sweeps a half-circle over her shoulderblades.

Eventually he lifts his head, propping the heel of his hand over his ear. With the fingers of the free hand he combs back the waves and sheets of her hair, loose now, golden in the lamplight. He's careful at first, gentle and delicate, surprisingly deft; as the curve of her cheek and temple is revealed his touch becomes surer, pushing her hair back with the palm of his hand, his fingertips delving into the strands to follow the curvature of her head.

There's a certain solemnity to the way he watches her: not to study her or to pry beneath the surface, but simply to watch her. To observe, and consider, and take in.

"Why was your mother in the warform when you were three years old?" he asks her, so unheralded that it had to be a passing thought.

[Danicka] It the silence had gone on for much longer, she would have kissed him. Not to preclude a coming question but to be there, lying naked with him while they're both still (and again) half-aroused. Danicka would have, soon enough, turned her face up and sought his mouth. But that isn't what happens.

What happens is this: Lukas curls his arm around her as she curls her body to his chest, and reflects briefly on the fact that she is not his girlfriend from adolescence, not even someone he was always a few steps behind in terms of maturity growing up only to turn around one day and discover that the skittish, startled little girl had slowly become something else entirely. Thoughts pass through his mind about how when he looks at her he cannot even see the scaffolding, just the tattered ribbons that thrash in the wind, not even the joints where those ribbons are tied to the core of her.

And he touches her: side, spine, and shoulders. His fingers lift her hair and let it fall like one might let water or sand pass over their skin. Then he plunges his hand into the surprisingly thick strands, touching her scalp. Danicka just smiles at him when he is playing idly with her hair, but her eyes close when he gets bolder, a sigh of relaxation passing her lips. She hides nothing.

Lukas's question catches her off guard, and when her eyes open there's a rapid-fire flick of betrayal in their depths, faster than the beat of a hummingbird's wings, faster than her own following blink. Danicka pauses, and licks her lips, and breathes out. She tips her head forward until her brow touches his chest, and she sighs softly, shifting her entire body closer to his as though to...hide. Or distract. God only knows which he assumes, if he assumes anything this time.

"She was angry," is Danicka's answer, muffled in volume, flat in tone.

[Lukas] Lukas considers this for a moment, even after she's leaned forward until her face is hidden against his skin.

His fingers comb from her hair, roots to tips; he flirts with the ends, absently, twining them between his fingers and then letting them slip free.

"In the house?"

[Danicka] He's close enough that he can feel the shifts, the increases, the changes in her. Without his hand encircling her wrist or his fingertips against her carotid artery, he can likely sense her pulse fluttering faster. He can feel in the strange, warm nest created by their bodies that her breathing is steady only because she is forcing it to be. Danicka is not on the verge of panic, not yet, but she is having to exert effort to stay calm.

She just nods.

[Lukas] It's hard to piece this picture together. She's not a puzzle; she's a woman, a kinfolk; she's the woman in his bed and in his arms, naked and warm and smelling of sex, of herself, and it would be so easy to just --

fall into her.

She's not a puzzle, but she can feel like one. It's as though he has a limited number of questions he can ask, or a limited kind of questions he can ask, before she simply closes up, shuts down: game over. He's quiet for a long time, taking the pieces she's given him, turning them over in his hands, in his mind.

Three years old.
Angry in the house.

Not -- she was in battle or she was fighting or she was at war.

She was angry. In the house.

His arm settles around her again, folding her close. His heartbeat has not changed at all. Steady as a metronome, it beats on in his chest. He would like to ask one more question -- what happened next? -- but he's almost certain, almost dead sure, that this will be the one to snap her shut like a trap; that this will be the one to topple her down like a house of cards.

So Lukas doesn't ask anything else. He backs off, and he keeps his own counsel, silent and thoughtful.

[Danicka] Maybe one of the reasons she didn't understand when he talked of pieces and putting things together is that for her there's no clear memory of a time when pieces, shattered and strewn about, were not her own reality. She doesn't want him to see her as damaged, she doesn't like knowing that he does see her as damaged, but sometimes it's hard to miss the fact that it isn't just Lukas's perception of the woman that's fractured.

Tonight, she would have answered. Had he gone on to ask what happened after her mother got angry, after her mother shifted into crinos inside her house when she was three years old, Danicka would have told him the truth. And it would have cost her, and after that she would have nothing left, nothing but what he gives her, and then she would know exactly how she makes him feel.

Or something like that.

Lukas does not ask, sensing the tremors under the surface that indicate to him that her ability to be open with him is running out, draining dry. Danicka responds much as she did when he felt her terror and let her go, to move or to get away from him as she wanted: she takes a deep breath as he holds her, and then she does as she might have done earlier, had he not asked anything at all:

She turns her face up to his, and she seeks his mouth, and she kisses him.

[Lukas] Lukas's heartbeat is steady as a metronome, a relentless rhythm deep in the cage of his ribs, beneath the sheath of his skin and flesh. Fifty beats a minute, less -- surreally slow, unchanging, a pulse that an olympic athlete would envy.

And then she raises her face to his. And she kisses him. And that's all it takes.

His heartbeat jumps so hard she can feel the spike of it right through his body. He returns her kiss, not softly or sweetly as though they were just now easing back into intimacy -- but devouringly, slowly but consumingly, and though he'd just been waiting for her to kiss him again.

Which, in a way, he has.

He pulls her thigh over his hip. He hadn't let her pleasure herself atop his desk; she hadn't let him pleasure her at the edge of his bed. He's rekindled; she was simply never put out in the first place. His hand finds its way unerringly between her legs, and when he finds the wetness there -- residual; growing, whatever -- he murmurs oh my fuck against her mouth, and it doesn't seem to matter that this makes no sense.

Lukas turns; rolls over her, settles between her thighs, braced on his free elbow. She's still wearing her earrings. They glint in the lamplight. He's kissing the underside of her chin, the fluttering pulse in her neck. He's kissing the hollow at the base of her throat when he whispers, "Dovolte mi dát mých úst na vás."

He's touching her with his hand, stroking her with his fingers, gently, searchingly. He's touching her where he's asking to put his mouth, and his mouth has found her breast now, and as much as he's trying to go slow, there's a limit to these things; his breathing is tattered at the edges already, and the kisses he lays along the undersides of her small breasts are savage and sucking.

"Nech mě starat se o vás."

[Danicka] She means to be gentle, and slow, and...yes...she means it to be sweet. But that doesn't last, and the next thing she knows she's not being eased back into intimacy but rather eaten alive, and --

Lukas doesn't get any farther than the first moan against her mouth, the traces of wetness on his fingertips. Danicka jerks her head back, letting out a frustrated breath. Her hands go to his shoulders but she doesn't shove him back or try to push him away. She just turns her head and moves her hips apart from his hand, her teeth on edge for a flashing second before she forces her mouth to relax, her lips to soften again.

"I know...you want me...and if I didn't want to be here with you I'd go, but please...just...slow down once in awhile."

An echo of another night, fully clothed and angry: Be a little fucking patient with me!

[Lukas] It's ironic; the one time she asked him to stop, really stop, she didn't push at him. She didn't put her hands on his shoulders. She didn't even exhale like that, frustrated with his impatience.

She touched his hair, stroked it back; she murmured to him in a tone so gentle that if he hadn't spoken Czech, he would've thought she wanted him there.

She's not asking him to stop now; not quite. But her hands are on his shoulders, and when she draws herself away he stops, a little breathless. His mouth leaves her skin and he raises his head. There's something like startlement in his eyes.

It takes him a moment to catch his breath; his wits.

Then he laughs -- not at her but at himself, wryly, self-deprecatingly, soundlessly. He drops his brow to the center of her chest for a second, and it's hard to say if he's laughing now or simply panting for breath. A moment passes. Then he tips his chin up and kisses her skin, softer than he has previously. Slower.

"Promiňte," he murmurs. "Promiňte, láska."

[Danicka] Most of the time when they are stripped bare like this and giving themselves over to their lusts and each other, stopping is so far from their minds as to be on another planet. Slowing down, waiting...these are anathema. They couldn't even wait to get out of a restaurant once, couldn't wait to finish eating. They got through a matter of minutes of conversation tonight before he was biting at her blouse's buttons and trying to insist that she lift her hips and let him get her goddamn panties off.

Danicka wants him not to wait, not to stop. She wants him to slow down. She does not stroke his hair and purr to him in their shared language, hiding their words from everyone outside this room. She lets him see that she's frustrated, that this is too much when literally seconds ago she was on the verge of curling up into a ball to escape trauma her mind had aboslutely no defense against when she was that young, no way to repair the damage done.

The reason it hurts when he looks at her like that is that she believes, wholeheartedly, that something in her got broken a very long time ago. Something vital.

At her breasts, Lukas slows. He tries to breathe normally and looks at her, seeming surprised. Danicka isn't looking at him at first, not until he truly stops, and then she bites her lip and turns her eyes to his again. There's a wince begging for expression at the edges of her features, as though she is waiting for the explosion, the shove against the wall, the snarl before she's flipped onto her stomach. Something. Something...that doesn't come. His brow falls to her chest again, and she exhales slowly.

A moment later, Danicka unhooks her thigh from his hip and lays her foot on the mattress, her leg bent along the outside of his body. She's relaxed underneath him, or seems so at least. She takes a breath and lifts her hands up towards one ear. "Chci, abyste lízat moje prsa ... pomalu ... jak jsem brát tyto volno."

[Lukas] It's a second pulse of surprise that chases the first through his eyes. Surprise, and something a little darker than that -- an instinctive flaring, a glitter in his eyes that says

since when do Shadow Lords bow...

-- he closes his eyes for a moment; scarcely more than a long blink. It's gone when he opens them. He shifts over her: his chest pressed to her belly, her legs down the outside of his waist, his narrow hips, his thighs. The hand that had stroked her too hard, too impatiently, joins its partner now: one on either side of her, thumbs along the outside of her breasts, palms and fingers wrapped around to her shoulderblades.

He holds her like this, between his hands, the way she holds his face sometimes when she kisses him: like she were something precious, a treasure; like she were clear water and he were dying of thirst.

And he bows his head to her body. He picks up where he left off: kisses her along the undersides of her breast, but slowly now, very softly, a slow spiral across her flawless soft skin --

(and even now he can't bear to think about why she is so utterly perfect)

-- a spiral that closes on itself, that brings his mouth to her nipple. Which he licks; slowly, with the tip of his tongue, and then the flat of it. Which he closes his mouth over and sucks between his teeth; gently.

Slowly.

[Danicka] Since when, he almost asks. Lukas hasn't asked her this question in months, because they both know the answer: since now. Since her. Since she lifted her body onto his even as he was trying to pull her into his arms. Since their mouths met because neither of them could think of surviving without a kiss, at least one kiss, at least...something beyond the casual fuck he'd once thought was all she was capable of. Since he laid his body down behind hers and held her loosely, not for the night but while they caught their breath, before he was moving into her again, like -- what was it he'd said? -- a rutting beast.

Her fingers slip to her earlobes to remove, slowly, the earrings he was teasing with his lips and teeth over by the desk. Danicka closes her eyes and pauses when his mouth finds her again, when his tongue traces its way to her nipple. She arches her back. Slowly, she told him. She did not tell him that it's going to just distract her, that it's going to make it difficult for her to get her earrings off, that this is going to take time now.

Lukas's fingers are slick against her. They smell like her. God, they both smell like sex, they both taste like sweat. Her eyelids flicker as he slowly licks her breast, her nipple, and she gets one earring out. The tip of her tongue slides across her lips, and her hand reaches out blinding, dropping her earring on top of his nightstand. But the drawer is on top of his nightstand, and her earring falls into it amidst the condoms, the book, the iPod, whatever else.

She rolls her hips against him as he sucks on her nipple, her breath coming faster, and moves her hand to her other ear.

[Lukas] The tiny clatter of metal and pearl amidst books, condoms, ipods, cell phones, and plywood is barely noticeable. They wouldn't have heard it at all except that they're both being quiet, still; as if it really matters now. As if his pack and whoever else was out there watching her walk into his room didn't know (or think they knew) exactly what was going on in here.

She moves to the other ear. As if cued, he moves to the other breast -- shifting his weight on his elbows, the muscles in his shoulders rolling, his chest moving against her belly, the muscle tensing and relaxing, settling.

They aren't saying anything now. They're wordless, as though struck dumb, but they're not silent. The air is filling with the sound of their breathing -- the swift inhales he sucks through his nostrils, and the slow exhales, forced-steady.

He watches her now, and this time he doesn't wander about her breast, doesn't kiss his way to her nipple. He's there at once; but he's patient, and gentle; considerate; a little playful. He watches her reaction when he touches the tip of his tongue to her, and when he presses his tongue to her, harder. He watches what she does when he turns his face to the side and catches her nipple lightly, so very lightly between his premolars -- and whatever the response, it must have pleased him, because the other corner of his mouth turns up. He kisses her breast then, wraps his lips around her as if to soothe her, sucks her nipple between his teeth and licks her the way he might've licked an ice cream cone when he was little, except he never licked ice cream cones when he was little -- even then, he always bit at it, little impatient nibbles that eventually built up to give him an ice cream headache, which made him laugh.

Lukas is not laughing now. He's not thinking about his childhood now, or ice cream. He's thinking about her, and the taste of her sweat; the texture of her skin, and how her nipple has tightened in his mouth, and how he should careful with her -- gently, gently -- and how he should be patient.

He's patient because she told him to be, because this Shadow Lord, apparently, does bow to the whims of his kin; but more precisely, because he understands they aren't whims at all. They aren't games she plays to establish her power or her dominance.

Power and dominance has somehow ceased to matter here, between them. It had seared away to nothingness that very first night, in their fits and starts and their falterings, while all the while the attraction between them grew out of their control and became something more than lust.

Lukas is watching Danicka now while he works at her breast, and she works the earrings out of her earlobes, and she did not tell him this would distract her, but she did not have to. He has a humble estimation of his own abilities, but he has a realistic estimation of her sensuality. He knows she doesn't hold back, and he knows she isn't ashamed. He knows that if he watches her, this will not deter her, or make her self-conscious; he knows that if he watches her, the sight of her will light him up like a bonfire.

[Danicka] When he picks up the earrings, if he does, if she forgets them or if he hands them to her later tonight (tomorrow?) then they won't burn his flesh or drain his spirit. Danicka does not wear silver jewelry, does not own a single piece. There are stories even there, memories. Horrors. But she doesn't often leave her jewelry places where she takes if off. She scooped them off the desk in the unused room beside Lukas's when she left Sam, was putting them into her lobes as he offered her a ride.

She's taking them out now, an action he's seen her do a handful of times. It's as oddly domestic and thoughtless as him shaving, the way she cants her head to one side to slip metal posts through holes in her ears or slip them back out again. He is not someone she's going to fuck once and then walk out on, or fuck all night and then leave in an exhausted slumber. He's the one she wishes she could be with every night.

Danicka may very well leave her earrings in his drawer just as she left that pale blue lace thong in his hand when they left Spring. Lukas has had those for almost two weeks now, and even if busy, he can't have completely forgotten them in his coat pocket. Even washed, smelling only of whatever Jenny uses for the laundry and not like Danicka, they're exactly the sort of thing she would wear. If he's the tactile sort he can hold them in his hand and think of how they fit on her body, peeled down her thighs so he can get at her, they're a strange reminder of the sort of woman she is, even if he can't put into words what sort of woman she is. They belong to her.

Just as he belongs...not to her. But with her. Here. Even though 'here' is never the same place twice, never just the hotel or the bed but inside this woman, against her body, in her arms, between her legs.

Danicka is used to being watched, and does not shy away or blush or suddenly go cold and uneasy in his bed. She also does not perform, gasping louder or affecting certain expressions meant to entice him. Yet there's no sense, as he is suckling her breast and watching her face, that she's unaware of the fact that he's watching. She knows he is. It makes her reach down as soon as her other earring is free and dropped with its partner into the drawer, makes her slide her fingers into his scalp to hold him where he is, to keep his mouth on her flesh.

"Okay..." she breathes, her eyes closed and her head tipped back on the pillow. She shudders once, caressing his scalp with a fondness that does not get paired, this time, with the soft look her gaze takes on sometimes when she looks at him. Danicka's back arches and her hips writhe under him, both of her hands in his hair now, her thighs tightening on either side of him. "God, I love fucking you..."

[Lukas] I love fucking you, she says; but it's the first two words that catch his attention the way a hook catches a fish -- instantly; brutally.

He doesn't struggle. He doesn't thrash. He stills for a moment, his tongue pressed to her, his teeth scraping her skin. His eyes are astonishing in this light, startlingly blue in a lamplit world of softer tones, warmer hues.

A moment passes; then he closes his eyes and turns his face against her breast with some exhaled sound, something like a groan. There are words that are clawing to get out of him, that he will not allow himself to say --

(Řekni mi, že mě miluješ.)

-- words that would start a chain reaction whose ultimate outcome he could not foresee. He doesn't know what he'll do if she does as he asks. He doesn't think he can handle it, hearing it like that, not merely I am falling but I am.

And if she refused --

He doesn't even want to consider it. What that would do to him; that it would do anything at all. That, somewhere along the way, she became precious to him. That, somewhere along the way, it became painful, deadly, to think of her ending this; not wanting this; not wanting him.

So there's a moment, a stillness, a moment where he presses his brow to her body and tries to steady himself. Still as stone, one might say, only he's not stone. He's flesh and blood, unmistakeably alive, made vivid by his changing blood, a creature of raw power and rage and instinct and passion who pretends to be a creature of finesse and will and forethought and logic.

His chest moves against her abdomen as he breathes. His heartbeat rolls right through the walls of his torso, through her, into the mattress and the floor; the city. He moves again, slowly; thinks to himself, Okay, okay, and doesn't understand why. His eyelashes flick her skin when they open. He puts his mouth to her again, gently; covers the other breast with his hand, as though to keep her warm, and then, unashamedly, undisguisedly, to caress her.

[Danicka] Not since that night -- and she was drunk, wasn't she? -- in her living room has she so much as hinted at what she said to him there. It's as though the shifting light and the mutable darkness against the pristine white wine had created a sort of confessional for her, for them. She had used the secrecy and purity of it to admit to him that she is falling in love with him, without explanation of when or how or even why. He had used the peace after fucking her -- as endless-seeming as death after war -- to admit to her that he is an asshole, and worse than that, a coward.

This is the sort of weakness no one in their Tribe is allowed to have, not even the Kin. Weakness. Fear. Cowardice. Maybe if she hadn't been drunk, maybe if they hadn't just made love, maybe if she weren't lonely and miserable and wondering what the fuck was going to happen, she might have soothed him after that. She might have given him absolution, instead of quietly and slowly running away.

He had not, as she feared, meant to leave her. He'd stayed, ended up in bed with her again, fucking her again, but she has not murmured anything like that again since. Even this now, this moment where she moans that she loves 'fucking' him, as though what they are doing is or has ever been as simple or as casual as a 'fuck', she is not telling him how she feels about him.

That he makes her inexplicably happy. That she forgives him when he frightens her because at least he is honest. That she has never felt quite this way about anyone before, and he is the last person on earth she thought she would or could, and she will keep up the lies and the pretense and the masks as long as she can, hold him at arm's length as long as she can, because as soon as he sees just how fucked up she is he's going to apologize for being a coward and then...then he'll stand up, gather his clothes, and leave.

Or worse, he'll stay. And he'll lock her up in her room to protect her. He'll watch over her every step. He'll be there, every moment, breathing down her neck and looking over her shoulder. She'll be fragile for the rest of her life, til he or someone else breaks her completely. So much worse than him leaving. Infinitely worse.

Danicka is not unaware of the pause, of the way that he hitches on her words. His mouth goes still, his body tensing for a second, and her eyes flutter open like she's waking up and leaving a cocoon. She looks down at him, shivers at his breath moving across her saliva-wet breast, and one of her hands softens as it slides to his cheek. She doesn't know what he's thinking, what he is longing to hear from her, what he is breaking himself apart to not ask her. She just knows that he is thinking, that he is longing, that he is breaking himself apart.

So she touches his cheek, the polished backs of her fingernails stroking tenderly over his skin for a bare moment.

"Nepřestávejte, moje láska," she whispers, half-breathless and trying to stay silent in the darkness. "Přišel jsem sem proto, že chci tohle."

Danicka takes her hand from him and reaches over her head. Her fingertips touch the shade on the lamp, she hisses in pain, finds the switch or the knob, and turns it off. He presses his brow to her body and she strokes his hair for a moment, breathing in deep. Danicka's palms slide down the back of his neck and hold him there as he opens his mouth and moves to her again, taking one of her breasts in his mouth and the other in his hand, gently squeezing and slowly caressing. Slowly. Just like she asked.

"Lukáš..."

She's moaning his name, which is not the same as telling him what he can't bear to want to hear as badly as he does. She's not holding back. She's forgotten where she is, who is outside, or else...or else she just doesn't care anymore.

"Oh...Lukáš, já chci, abys mě zase dovnitř. Nechci vás k zastavení."

[Lukas] And now they're in the half-dark. And now there's only one light left in the room, and it's the desk lamp -- it illuminates not the dark wood surface of his desk, which is never cluttered with papers or pens or books or magazines or computers; which is almost always completely clear, except for a coffee maker, perhaps a mug.

It's not clear tonight. Her blouse is there, a pale and fragile pink that makes him think of plum blossoms. Her coat is over his chair. These things catch what lamplight there is left, and the pale colors seem to glow in the dimness. The rest of the room is shadow.

He thinks about turning that light off too, after she's told him why she came here; after she's turned off the light.

He thinks of turning the desk lamp off as well and leaving them in nothing but shadow, and it's not that he's ashamed to couple in the light. It's certainly not that he couldn't stand the sight of her, because Danicka is beautiful, and the sight of Danicka with her legs wrapped around him and her eyes closed, her lips parted, is a sight worth beholding.

And yet it is that, in some sense. Sometimes the darkness is easier. Sometimes the sight of her drives knives through him. Sometimes the things she says

(moje láska)

and the way she says them, and the way her skin feels, and the way her hands touch him, the way she kisses him, tears him to shreds. To see her; to watch her, while she does these things: that can be almost unbearably intense, and the darkness is easier, and more comfortable, and not so raw.

It's all right. It's okay. It's dark enough, even with the desk lamp on, that he thinks he might be able to bear it. He thinks he might be able to bear wanting her, making love to her; wanting to love her. Because that's what this is, isn't it: when all the rest is stripped away; all the intricacies and details and quicksand pits of who's damaged, and how, and who's hurt whom, and how, and who wants to protect whom, and who will do what for whom, and --

and in the end, in some way, they're all ways in which he makes up for holding back in the simplest and most crucial way. They're all ways in which he tries to make up for his inherent selfishness; ways to skirt the edges without ever seeking the heart of the issue; to address the effects and the consequences without ever looking at the cause.

All right -- enough.
Okay.

Lukas doesn't get up to turn off the light. He doesn't want to leave; he wants to be where he is. He wants to make her feel good, and to feel the way he does with her; he wants to make her happy. He wants to make her happy because he's frightened her, and then dredged up memories she can barely speak of even now, and it hurts him to hurt her, and he doesn't want to think of why this may be.

He doesn't turn off the light. He stays where he is. His eyes have closed again; he turns his attention to other, more primitive senses. He caresses her with his mouth and his hand, and she's moving beneath him, arching and rolling, a woman turned to warm and viscous liquid. It's strange; he never would have thought, before this, that there was any real pleasure to be derived from pleasuring another. He never would have thought the taste of a woman, the feel of her body under his palm or against his tongue, would have grown so intoxicating to him. He never would have thought it possible to grow drunk on the sound of her sighs.

Seconds unspool; perhaps minutes, until she moans his name and he doesn't think, not even for an instant, to shush her; to put his hand over her mouth. She tells him what she wants of him, then, and he opens his eyes. His mouth leaves her breast, but only to seek hers -- he slides up her body like a seal onto ice, in a single concerted motion, aligns himself to her. He kisses her mouth and this time he can't help the hunger of it; the way his mouth opens to hers, and the way his tongue seeks her, and the way his hips roll against hers to rub himself against her belly.

It's like this, kissing her, that he shifts his weight to one elbow; that he reaches blindly into the drawer sitting atop the nightstand. His searching fingers bat past the ipod, the book; skim over an earring; find one of the small square packets. The kiss parts and suddenly he's the one that needs to be able to hold her; he's the one that doesn't want to allow a single extra millimeter of space between that doesn't need to be there. He doesn't want to sit up to sheath himself, so he hands the condom to her, and then raises himself on his forearms, lifts his torso from hers to give her hands room.

She's shadowed by his body like this, and he's shadowed by himself. There's a faint rim of light over his shoulder, sheening against the texture of his skin, the thin film of sweat there, but the light that once refracted through his eyes is gone now, and when he looks at her his eyes are nearly black; the centers of them are open so wide there's scarcely any blue left. There's a world of shadows between their bodies and he bends his head, looks down to watch her roll the condom on. When she touches him he draws a shuddering breath, his stomach contracting sharply on itself. When she has it on he lets himself sink back between her thighs; lets himself relax until their bodies are pressed together and entwined.

Pomalu, he thinks to himself. And that's how it is: slow, when he finds the wetness and the heat of her; slow, achingly slow, when he pushes into her.

[Danicka] She has never been scared of the dark. The dark hides her, has wrapped her up as though in a loving embrace so many times she lost count before she was finished with grade school. When Danicka turns off the lamp clipped to his headboard, though, it isn't to conceal anything. It's because the moonlight coming through the window and the city's glow leaking through the glass changes the way Lukas's skin looks as her hands run over his shoulders. It's because the dim lamplight over on the desk somehow creates the sense that this room is an island of warmth and closeness surrounded by the cold emptiness of walking alone through crowds.

She turns off the light not because she does not want to see him but because she wants to feel him in her, and around her, and know that it's him by touch, by scent, by the pattern of his breathing as it gets faster, by the taste of his throat under her tongue, the taste of his tongue in her mouth. She turns off the lamp because when her eyes open and she looks at him, she wants to see his skin turned all but silver, his eyes liquid black, his gaze telling her things he does not say to her, or anyone else, when the lights are on.

Whether the lights are on or not, Danicka is the same as she has been since the first time. When Lukas returns his mouth to her and watches her as his hand tries to find the magical combination of warmth and pressure and movement to make her shudder, she looks almost serene. The only furrow of her expression is a ghost of tension between her eyebrows. Her breathing is kept steady and silent, flowing in and out between parted lips, her eyes closed not because she does not want to see him but because she's lost, or because she's trying to understand something profoundly mysterious.

Which this is.

The last time they met (fought. fucked.) each of them confessed that they really have no idea what they're doing with one another. Relationships with packmates, friends, family, and even fuckbuddies has not prepared either of them in the slightest for the intricacies of anything more concrete. It would be difficult enough if they were...normal. But neither of them is even strictly human. What Sam did to Danicka's face should have taken the better part of a week to heal completely, for a mortal. In roughly two days her skin was flawless again. Shortly before they met, Lukas was torn apart by gorehounds and came back from it. If he were just a man, just a boy she liked, he'd be buried now, and she never would have known him.

Not at all, and not how she knows him right now, how she is knowing him: with her mouth turning to find him, any part of him, as he moves up to cover her. Danicka kisses him achingly, lifting her head from his pillow to send the sound of her wanting into his throat like possessing ghosts. She doesn't stop, her legs wrapping around him more fully until her ankles touch, until every time she tries to breathe while kissing him it makes her gasp. Lukas rubs himself against her, as unselfconscious as an animal, and when he releases her mouth she turns her head, nuzzling his throat, the side of his face, with a low noise of impatience and appreciation.

There's no sense of power-exchange or game-playing when he puts the condom in her hand, no assumption that this is part of her duty or her job with him, no intimation of degredation. Danicka has never washed him in a shower they've taken together, or undressed him for any reason but to get at him when she wants his body against her own. She does not clean up after him. She has cooked for him but he has yet to ask for it, or demand it, or expect it. As far as their usage of hotels and takeout has been, the financial responsibility seems to have fallen according to convenience more than traditional gender roles or even who has more money.

Danicka, hands down, has more. Her severance package alone could get her through college, without ever touching the savings and investments from nine years of highly lucrative work for the goddamn Fangs. But she doesn't seem to feel remotely guilty if Lukas picks up the check, or sets down his credit card for a suite at the Omni. She did take pause when he used his blood to make those talens. His blood, which regenerates far easier than his income, was something she considered more costly.

Precious.

The way she touches him, sometimes, communicates a strange protectiveness, as though he is breakable, as though he is...yes, precious. She doesn't say it. Instead, she makes an art out of the way she performs such a mundane, even frustrating task of applying a prophylactic. Instead of telling him that the sight of him trying to conceal sickness and injury makes her stomach twist and her heart pound, she lays kisses along his jawline as she unrolls the condom onto him, licks his earlobe, breathes out a coil of warm, humid air into the inner curvatures of cartillage.

She loosened her legs around him when he moved onto his forearms, the shift in attitude between them a natural, wordless flow. Danicka's breath is coming in subdued gasps, some leftover attempt at silence. She runs her hand up his abdomen, barely tracing the scar across his midsection with her fingertips before her palms are on either side of his waist, pulling him to her again. She lays her head back down and smooths her hands up his back as he comes closer, her thighs enfolding him, all of her welcoming him.

Slowly, he thinks to himself.

"Ano," she moans in his ear, pomalu. Měkce. Danicka releases a stifled, almost strangled gasp that tries its best to be an outcry. It's unmistakable for anything but what it is, sharing the intensity of pain and the plaintiveness of need but ultimately, for his ears, becoming something else. A song. A call. Something like that, which evolves from primordial wordlessness to become his name, blossoming in his ear as he moves into the woman who is, at least for this goddamn moment when they have nothing else to hold them back, his lover.

[Lukas] At one point, she traces the scar that marks Lukas's most recent death. It's a seam of imperfection in his body, a furrow of numb and immobile flesh where the muscle beneath has been knit to the skin by damage. The skin immediately around it is comparatively hypersensitive, though, and jumps at her light touch. His balance shifts over her. He covers her hand with his. For a moment it seems he might draw her hand away, replace it elsewhere: his chest, his shoulders.

He doesn't. He weaves his fingers between hers and holds her palms against his body, against the incontrovertible evidence that Shadow Lords are not all-powerful, are not infallible, are not immortal.

This is how he kisses her as he lowers himself back to her. This is how he moves over her: her hand held against his body, the muscles of his abdomen bunching and clenching against her palm.

Her head sinks back to the pillow, and he lets go her hand to brace his forearms on either side of her shoulders. She takes him in her arms; wraps him in her legs. She welcomes him.

If he's slow, it's not for lack of want, or lack of strength. He moves into her with a sort of fluid, dragging ease; with an inexorable momentum like gravity, but there's nothing sudden about this; nothing swift.

The first stroke is shallow -- he's barely within her before he's stopping; he's withdrawing.

He lowers his head as though to hide against her skin. His mouth follows the bones of her face back to where jaw joins neck and ear; when she lets loose that heady moan, a single word that means yes, a raw sound that means yes a shudder goes up his back.

His breath is shuddering in his chest. This is such an easy fuck, such a slow, easy act of love, that his response to her seems almost out of proportion. He shouldn't have to breathe so unsteadily. His heart shouldn't have to beat like that. He shouldn't have to want her this badly: but he does.

He does.

The second stroke runs deeper. The one after that; deeper again, and again, until he's giving her every inch; until he's exhaling against her throat and trying not to moan her name; until the movement of his body into hers opens her to him; until rocking of his hips tilts hers up and back, shifts her to take him down to the mouth of her womb.

And it is slow. It's gentle. There's tension all through his body, a ubiquitous war of will against instinct, every muscle in constant and locked flexion, his strength pitted against itself. His hips flex against hers; his abdomen; his flank and his loins. For every muscle that clenches to bring him deeper into her, there's one working in opposition to hold himself back. His motion is slow and easy, deceptively smooth, but he's nearly humming with power and strain, like a high-voltage wire carrying at capacity.

It's slow and it's gentle, and it's slowly killing him to be so slow and so gentle. But it's all right; he doesn't mind. He doesn't mind it at all, because it's slow and gentle and torturous and ...

... perfektní. Just like this.

Minutes drip by. It's surreally slow, a sort of trance. His mouth trailing along her neck -- his mouth wandering over her cheekbone. He kisses her eyelids, and then he finds his way to her mouth, and all the while, the same rhythm, endlessly patient, cyclical as a tide.

His eyes open when he kisses her. He kisses her open-eyed, which is not something he does often -- ever. He watches her in the half-dark, her body moving below his, and in response to his. He watches her hair spread and flow over his pillow, and for a moment he forgets where he is. He forgets that he breathes air and walks on dry land. Just for a moment he's not sure they aren't really underwater, that the pale blue of moonlight isn't the dim blue of light in the ocean a hundred feet from the surface; that her hair isn't afloat; that she isn't something inhuman, a legend or a fantasy or a dream.

He blinks -- the illusion's gone. She's not a dream, because he can feel her, and when he brings himself into her again pleasure pours through him like honey.

He's shifting over her, resettling his weight, the muscles of his back rearranging beneath her hands. He's bowing his spine and opening a breath of space between them; not much; just enough room to move a little faster. A little harder. The change is subtle; it's gradual. It ramps up over the space of ten or twenty breaths. He takes her a little higher -- carefully, gently -- and when he kisses her again, he murmurs against her mouth, "Dobře?"

[Danicka] Never has she ever marveled at a scar, on a mortal body or a Garou's. Danicka's touch grazes Lukas's seeming imperfections only because she does not avoid it. She may not stare, or let herself think about what sort of wound could do that to someone who can literally re-grow parts of his body when necessary. It's a part of him now, regardless of how it came to be there, and when he catches her hand she doesn't struggle to take it away. Rather, she smooths her hand over him and feels the tension and longing in him, feels the flesh-marring ribbon across her palm, and kisses him with a soft whimper.

They enter into a controlled fall. She pulls at him like she's gravity, he moves to her like he's a heavenly body pulled out of its natural, placid orbit. By the grace of the way time seems to slow down as he moves into her, he doesn't crash. She doesn't shatter.

Danicka does arch her back, though, her hips tilting towards his, but he's pulling away again, and she lets out a trembling sigh, her hands flexing on his back. As he kisses her face, brushing his lips across breezy pathways on her skin, her fingers curl and her nails dig into him briefly. His heart is slamming into his ribs, and her body is squirming slightly, trying to get more of him. But slowly, only slowly, does he give it to her.

She moaned yes, moaned his name, but he bites back the shape of hers fighting to get out of his throat. Danicka shudders every time so much as the first sound of it makes it to his lips, every time a struggling breath loses the war for steadiness and becomes a quiet gasp in her ear. Every time he shivers against her as he thrusts inside of her, Danicka reacts as though he's giving her an electric shock. She's alive and moving underneath him, her legs unhooking and her hands raking down his back as gently as such a thing can be done, as slowly as she can stand it.

This is what she came here for

...but that's a lie.

Danicka meant what she said: she understood the feeling. She would be perfectly happy to just lie here with him all night. She would be happy beyond description to lay on her side with him and listen to him talk, or let him play with her hair, or simply rest her head on his arm and stare at him. She meant what she said: she is falling in love with him. She came here for him.

Lukas is caught up in a war against himself not to unleash his desire, not to bury his face in her shoulder, bite her neck, and ride her until he's spent himself again, and Danicka is not making it any easier on him than his own body is. She is not reclining passively, waiting for each flex of his hips. She lifts her own to meet him. Her hands explore him not with bewildered wonder but dextrous purpose, whether caressing his lower back, hip, and ass or reaching between them to gently tease his nipples. The only restraint in her is how she tries to stay quiet, even if she cannot stay silent: Danicka cries out softly but the sound doesn't carry far past his own ears.

And the things she says to him, whispering in complete sentences. He can't understand them all. Some (Cítíš se tak úžasný. Ach bože ... Ah! Bože, Lukáš, udělat to znovu.) he needs no translation for, or for the moan that follows. Others are in a language he has no comprehension of, no map to guide him to her meaning. Russian purrs from her throat with damnable incomprehensibility as her teeth graze his earlobe, as her tongue runs over his throat, as his mouth blesses her eyelids, her cheekbones, as his hips roll again. He silences her and her mouth opens, her eyes closing, long gone in this kiss, lost in the darkness they've created around themselves.

Her eyes don't open when he moves his mouth away. Danicka writhes against the top of his blanket, the rucked-up and disturbed and wrinkled bedding he sleeps in alone, most days, most nights, whatever hours that he finds himself there. She arches her back, her hands dragging down his flesh again, this time not so gentle, not so slow. Her mouth opens for a deeper kiss than he gives her, and she whimpers in protest when she doesn't get it.

Danicka's eyes open, black in the half-light, their color too thin to be be discernable in the dimness. Her lips are spread to breathe, to pant, and wet from kissing him, from licking him.

"Yeah," she whispers, one hand moving to the back of his neck as though to pull him back to her again. "Ano, nemluvně. Rychleji," she all but purrs, lifting her head to press her mouth to his even as she's pulling him down. Just before their lips touch she half-snarls: "Dej mi to."

[Lukas] The second time her nails rake down his back, Lukas twists his head up and back and to the side at once, instinctively, like an animal straining toward some point on its back it couldn't quite reach with its teeth. His teeth are briefly bared, and this is also instinct, and feral; it couldn't possibly be that she's actually hurt him. It's not pain that makes him twist like that. It's certainly not pain that makes him swing his head back and down, that makes him catch her mouth on a kiss more sudden than any in the last ...

he's lost track how long this has been going on. The stuff piled on his nightstand obscures the clock radio. When did she come in here? It could be 10pm; it could be 5am. It's night time; that's all he knows, and all he needs to know.

Yeah, she says, and then, Yes, and, Give it to me.

It makes him shudder like a beast, like an animal with no sense of what physical expressions are socially acceptable, and which will get you tossed in a goddamn looney bin. He's shuddering, and she's pulling him down, and he's shifting some of his weight onto his knees, and when their mouths touch this time his is open, he's breathing, sharing her air, just breathing with her for some seconds before his tongue crosses the gap to lick her lips. To slip between her teeth. His mouth opens over hers; the kiss is a living, writhing thing, interrupted and punctuated by sharp-edged exhales that escape him every time he moves into her.

Faster now; harder, the collision of their bodies a solid, tangible echo.

Lukas shifts over her. He curls his arm beneath her shoulder, his hand at the crest of it; he shifts his weight to that side, which frees his other hand, which splays over her side, and then cradles her breast. He bends over her and he kisses the fragile arches of her collarbones, cups her breast to his mouth. He knows the taste of her as he knows the smell of her, but it still makes him sigh against her flesh; it still makes him move into her with a fresh fervor.

"Řekni mi, jak chceš ono." Tell me, tell me: if there's one thing Lukas says more often than anything else to Danicka, perhaps it's this. And why not? He can't read her the way she can read him; he has to guess half the time, and the other half the time, he simply asks her, as if this would make her open up to him. As if this would make her, Danicka, the liar, open up and tell him what he wants to know. As if it's as easy as that.

And the amazing thing is -- sometimes, it is as easy as that.

Tell me where you're hurt, he's asked her. Tell me what's wrong. Tell me why you're angry. And now this: which coming from another man, spoken to another woman, could be a sort of arrogance; a sort of brinksmanship. That's not what this is, and she only has to look at him to know that. She only has to look at him --

his mouth raw from kissing her mouth, raw from kissing her breast; his hair damp and his pupils enormous with want; his eyes flickering with what he feels every time he moves into her; every time.

-- to know it's only a question, a genuine question, because sometimes he doesn't know what she wants. Sometimes he doesn't know how to -- please her, or make it good for her, or --

"Řekni mi jak milovat ty." It's only a breath, a whisper. He dips his head, ducks his mouth to her breast and sucks at her, fiercely, as though he could draw the answer from her very flesh. "Řekni mi, Danička.

[Danicka] The last time she came here -- the last time she was right where she is now, fucking him in his bed, her bare skin aligned to every inch of his own -- she had meant to stay all night with him. She didn't say it, he can't know for sure, but she'd hung up her coat and she'd brought a change of clothes and she looked...comfortable there. She looked like she belonged there. But he'd gone to see his sister and she had not waited for him, only whispering that it wasn't him. It wasn't his fault. Her reasons for leaving when she did had nothing to do with him.

That was a lie, but not the worst one she could have told. There was reason to wait for him before, reason to shower and change into her pajamas and curl up on his bed with a book: he was coming back. When he told her he had to get up to go meet someone, the sole purpose for her presence in this goddamn dorm floor was gone. On two occasions, and only two, Danicka has come up to the second floor for any reason other than Lukas. And one of those was at least half for his sake.

Tonight she may very well stay with him for the rest of the night, whether it is now just ten o'clock or closer to dawn. She wants to be here with him. That is all she wants...

...and that is the truth. She wants this, the way he moves in her and the way his mouth travels over her, because it is the only time when he is given over to her even in part. It is the only time when she has him, as she said she did that night at the Affinia. He'd been hurting her, going over the edge into his orgasm, and she had whispered in his ear that she had him. It had nothing to do with possession, though she would be hard pressed to explain what the hell she meant by that.

In their language, in their fathers' language, it means something else entirely.

What he needs to know right now, she gives him. Yes. What she wants from him is vague, is indeterminate from the words she's used, but the way she holds onto him and the way she flows back up to him every time he moves into her communicates more than a few gasped words ever could. Danicka is losing track of herself, of her body. Her joints are becoming liquid, her body is turning to fluid flame, and for a few sureal moments she thinks that she is nothing but skin, that everything inside of her is pleasure, that if this goes on much longer she's going to lose touch with solidity and reality altogether.

So she moans, louder than she has all night, as he gives 'it' to her -- whatever 'it' is -- faster. A little harder. Danicka doesn't have his mouth on hers to silence her, but her hands tighten on his shoulders to transfer a vicious tension as he licks her breast, as he caresses her as he was before he was inside her. He made her wet, doing this. He made her want him, doing this. She moans, and lifts one hand to push her fingers into her hair, the other going to his scalp, as he sighs over her flesh.

"Harder," she groans, when he asks to be told how she wants 'it'...how she wants this.

How she wants him.

"Oh god," Danicka whimpers, her hand falling from her scalp, back arching to push herself towards him more. "Harder...prosím, I need it...Lukáš, prosím, potřebuju víc...! Jste jízdy mě z mé mysli."

If anyone in the Brotherhood is being quiet enough to listen, they can hear her now, but Danicka is being as careful with her literal begging as she has been before. It's nothing due to shame or embarrassment: he's heard the way she has screamed in her own bed, the way she cried out when she was riding him in her living room, the noises she makes in hotels. Here, though, she holds back...or at least she tries. He's gasping, and she's throttling every peading note that tries to escape her, every moan of his name, every time he lifts his body and pushes harder and deeper into her, every time he pants in her ear.

She looks up at him as her hand falls away, as her spine uncurls again. She looks at the moisture on his lips, the vivid redness of them that is, apart from his eyes, the only color she can see right now. She sees the way his hair is tousled and his shoulders slick with sweat, the way he shakes, and she opens her mouth to tell him something just as he is breathing a whisper, pleading to be told --

Lukas drops his head before the echo of the last word has left him. Danicka gasps as his teeth and his tongue find her again. Her eyes close, her mind unraveling as he says her name against her skin. She shudders, and reaches for him, cupping his face in her hands and drawing him to her mouth, letting out a small cry as the shift of his body sends him slamming into her again. Danicka kisses his mouth, his jaw, his cheeks, gasping helplessly, and whispers in his ear in between hitches of her breathing, curls of her hips.

"Řekni to," she breathes. "Nenechte se bojí."

[Lukas] There's an inherent inequality in this. If Lukas does not want to be moved, Danicka would never in a million years be able to move him. Yet she puts her hands on his face and draws him up her body and he goes along with her; he moves into her embrace and meets her mouth so ferociously that it's impossible to say if he kisses her because she wants him to, or because he wants to, or if there's any difference at all.

Their bodies are moving as though of their own accord -- coming together again and again, matched for speed and magnitude, aligned. He's giving it to her hard and fast, whatever 'it' is: his cock, surely; his body; his want for her; his need.

For this.
(But that's a lie.)

For her.
(And that's the truth.)

And -- she's raining kisses on his face, and his eyes are closed; his mouth moves against her skin when he can find it, and it's hard to say if he means to kiss her or mouth words against her skin, and then she says; she says:

Say it.

And it's hard to say for certain what Danicka means. For all Lukas knows, she could mean anything at all, but in his mind there's only one thing she could possibly mean, and that one thing makes his eyes fly open; it makes his head snap back from hers.

He looks at her with such raw shock; such reeling dismay.

"Nemůžu." It's like his body hasn't even caught up yet; it's still mired in its own essential rhythms, and he thrusts into her three, four more times before he can stop himself, grind that to a halt. And then he's pushing himself up on his hands, raising himself up over her as though to unwind himself from her embrace. "Nemůžu, Danička. Je mi to líto. Prosím, neptejte se mě do."

[Danicka] He only comes to her because he wants to be there. He only moves away when she pushes him because he doesn't want to hurt her, because he wants this to be good for her, because he does not want to be a monster. It's not about honor, or even about necessarily caring for her in particular: not forcing her to the mattress when she does not want to lie down, not fucking her like a fiend when she tells him to go slow, or even stop, is a simple matter of having a soul.

The fact is that she wouldn't ever let him undress her, or wrap herself around him, or kiss him over and over on the mouth, if she didn't have some basic trust in him that if she moans for him to touch her that he will, if she gasps for his mouth on her breasts he will lick her, if she asks him to slow down or wait, he will slow down. He'll stop.

Which is what he does now, and which makes her gasp sharply. Even after he spoke -- and what he said was enough, she wouldn't have pushed any harder, she wouldn't have said anything else after that first I can't -- and kept moving, Danicka only groaned, the heat and arch of her body growing more and more intense with every thrust. But then he stops, grinding into her and then...and then trying to leave her body, and her eyes flicker towards his.

"Don't...please...Lukáš, don't stop..."

Her hands flow up his chest, up the sides of his neck, into his hair, her legs wrapping tighter around his waist. "I thought...just..."

A ragged breath leaves her as she finds his hair, her eyes closing and her head falling back. She rolls her hips up to him, gasps at the feel of him. "Just please don't stop, baby."

[Lukas] If they were keeping score, this is the first time Lukas has ever tried to stop of his own accord. Not because she's asked him to, and not because she hasn't actually asked him to, but something in her body, or her demeanor, or the way she was fucking him, all but cried out for him to stop. Slow down. Stop.

But it's not that, this time. This time it's all him. He's the one that can't handle it, can't deal. He's the one drawing back, and he's the one trying to put an end to it. If they were keeping score --

but they're not.

They're not playing a game. He's pushing himself up on his hands not because he's kept score but because he can't take it. The heavy muscles of his chest and shoulders are standing out in stark relief, hard beneath her coaxing hands, tense with rejection: of her, of this, of what he cannot say. He's almost backlit like this; the desk lamp is to his left, low, oblique, casting a dim glow over his shoulder, the back of his head, around his side. His face is shadowed, and it's hard to read his expression exactly, but he's wincing, as though in pain or torment.

When her hand breaches the horizons of his body, it comes into the light: slighter and paler against his skin, smooth-skinned and delicate. Where her leg wraps around his body it's the same, the same contrast of her body to his, the differences stark and unmistakeable between them.

They're not playing. They're not keeping score; this isn't a game. He's not drawing back as some sort of retaliation. He's drawing back because he can't handle it, and because he's overwhelmed; he's drawing back because ...

He's drawing back; and she's drawing him back. Her hands are buried in his hair, against the curve of his skull; she's drawing him back down to her and when she rolls her hips just like that the expression flickering across his face is so intense it's very nearly pain.

"Oh my god," he gasps; and he can't remember why he's drawing back. His hands are still firmly braced, but he's neither moving away nor towards; he's caught in the middle, quivering with strain and indecision, and when her legs tighten around him, wrap higher and tighter around his waist and pull him deeper, the sound he makes isn't even a word at all. It's an open-throated groan, an unadulterated vowel:

"Aah--!"

before he gives up the fight, because while this is not a game, this is sometimes a war, and when his elbows unlock and he gives himself over, sinks back into her embrace, it's with a sense of surrender. He doesn't pause, not to catch his bearings; not to catch his breath. He puts his hands to her face, takes her face between his hands, plunges his hands into her hair as hers are in his, and like this, brow to brow, his eyes closed, he starts moving into her again -- a reckless, pounding rhythm that has the headboard threatening to bang on the wall and the mattress springs crying for mercy, and this time Lukas doesn't have the presence of mind to shove a pillow behind the wood.

[Danicka] Harder.

That had been her answer when he asked her to tell him how she wants it. Danicka had growled against his mouth before kissing him, earlier, had given and then demanded ferocity. The question of what she wants can't ever be answered definitively because it changes.

When he held her and rocked in and out of her with aching slowness because that is what she asked for, that is what she wanted, she was pleased with him, purring and writhing on his bed and murmuring filthy, decadent phrases into his ear in a language he has no comprehension of. When he started going faster, lifting up on her just enough to give his hips room to move, she had not just assured him that it was okay but begged for more. This time he doesn't ask, doesn't hesitate beyond his struggle to pull away from her --

-- which she halts.

And that isn't right of her, or fair, or gentle. Please don't stop, she argues, when it could be said that he does not just want but needs to stop this, to stop whatever the fuck it is they're doing here. And baby, she called him, the endearment she half-moans whenever they are like this, when she's hot and sweating and her cunt is so wet around him that it damn near makes his eyes roll back, baby don't stop.

When the sun comes out from behind the clouds and she begins spending more of her time out of doors, Danicka will, indeed, turn golden. He'll be swarthier, though, darker even then now, but the contrast won't be as sharp. They will be shades of one another, muted colors of flesh far more vibrant than anyone gives the Shadow Lords credit for. She wears yellow and blue and even pink when the weather outside is still dank and overcast, rather than the black and navy and maroon that so many people adopt in the colder months. Gaia knows how bright she will look when the sun comes out, when summer comes.

If they last that long.

Lukas relents and comes back to her, gasping out blasphemy or praying to a god they don't believe in, a god they both know doesn't exist. He all but falls into her, against her, crying out like he never has before, no matter how far gone they've been. Danicka kisses him, hard, as though to burn away any sudden thoughts that he might have of people listening, as though to burn away what their mouths just said to each other by devouring them straight from his lips, sucking the residue of their meaning off of his tongue.

It can't last. And it doesn't. She gasps, her eyes closing as well, as though the contact they have as their heads rest together is enough sight, or because with that sudden thrust of his hips she can't open her eyes. They hold one another's faces, one another's heads, fingers buried in hair, and Danicka shuddering from pleasure that has been too rapidly brought forth and too many times abandoned tonight. She kisses him again to stifle a groan, holding onto him with her legs because she will not take her hands from his head, untangle her fingers from his hair.

Nothing gets said now, nothing but whatever noises the bed makes beneath them and against the wall, nothing but whatever they cannot hold back. Faster, she said, and harder, too. She needs 'it', whatever 'it' is.

And because he cannot give that, she will take this. Which is not lesser, not worse, but not the same. Not what she finds herself wanting every goddamn night with an ache that threatens to suffocate her. Not what she hates in herself, hates needing, hates longing for, hates him for making her feel. This is a reflection, this was the beginning, this is what they've always had. Danicka kisses him like the world is ending...as they love each other like it's a war, like it's the last time, like it's the only time they've ever had.

Which may explain why, when she comes, she comes with such intensity that the adrenaline-fueled arch of her body actually pushes Lukas up slightly. The fact that they're making love while her heart feels like it's about to snap in half like the branches of an ice-covered tree somehow makes this orgasm a mind-altering, life-destroying thing. She takes her hands off of him because in the last second before her body clenches around him and her hips squirm under him, she does not want to tear out his hair or scratch his back hard enough to bleed, and if she touched him right now she would and she doesn't want to hurt him by god even now she doesn't want to hurt him.

Instead, she grabs the blanket underneath them, the fabric clutched in her hands as she would have clutched at his body, and sweat rolls off her brow and dampens her hair and those curls of hers are long gone, at least the artificial ones. Danicka keeps her eyes closed, her head turned to the side, and if Lukas does not hold himself still while she comes then as he goes on thrusting another orgasm hits her just as the first is starting to let her move back down to earth. She managed not to scream the first time but when she realizes what's happening to her she thrashes, she grabs his shoulders, and she buries her mouth against his neck, moaning his name like -- yes -- it's a prayer, like it's a mantra.

Danicka is shaking the third time, on the verge of tears almost, clinging to him as her body begins to relax and then gets slammed into pleasure again, this time by the longed-for feel of him against and inside her, or because he is going over the edge too, or because she simply cannot stand it anymore, she can't stop. So she whimpers, lost and surrendering, as she comes again, and again, and again, and is left trembling like she never has before. It's a miracle that she's conscious after that, that when she opens her eyes she can see him clearly.

Her eyes do meet his, finally, but only when it's over, only when their desire has let them go a little, only when she returns to her own body. Danicka does not know her name, or even his. She does not know where they are, or what time it is, or what the world is like. He's the first man on earth, and she's the first woman, and she looks at him like he is entirely new to her, and as though they just now invented the act of lovemaking.

She doesn't know who she is. She does know what she feels when she looks at him, when she comes with him, when he smiles, and she knows more than that, besides.

Danicka looks up at him, his sweat on her skin and her warmth still holding him in, and shakes her head, whispering before she loses the courage to, and before she loses the control she just barely clings to in the words themselves:

"I can't do this."

[Lukas] She's shaking when it's over.

(She's shaking?)

He's shaking. Which is something he has no experience with -- this sort of total loss of control, this sort of inability to command his body to do even something so simple as be still, be silent, be motionless.

He can't manage it. His nerves are shot; he's in pieces, fragmented, devastated.

To call that intense would be like calling the surface of the sun mildly warm. Her first orgasm had him raising his head to watch her, to watch it take hold of her and detonate all through her body; the first one had him wanting her so badly, wanting her hands on him so badly, that he'd rolled his weight to one elbow and grabbed her hand with the other, brought his hand down on top of hers where she gripped his blankets hard enough to turn her knuckles white, to press the slender ridges of bone out against her skin so hard that he was afraid she'd split herself open.

Which is ironic, because the way he fucks her then --

There's nothing held back there. He can't. Not too much later she'll say that to him: I can't, and not too long ago he'd said that to her. I can't. But in the throes of her first climax he can't; he can't even speak, he can't hold back, and as the first rolls into the second he can't even watch her anymore; her hands are coming to his body and she's grabbing him, digging her nails in; she's moaning against his neck and when he realizes it's his name, it's his name she moans when there's nothing else left to her,

the world may as well implode. She may as well kill him.

His orgasm hits him not like a tidal wave but like a goddamn freight train, like a meteor dropping from the sky to incinerate everything he is, everything he knows, in a single searing flash of white light. Ironic, that in his last instant of awareness he thinks exactly what she'd thought, that he doesn't want to hurt her, that if he doesn't get his hands off her right now he'll dig his fingers in, he'll bruise her, he'll mark her for days.

So he turns his palms to the blankets. When his climax slams into him and he slams into her and he's coming into her, and she's coming around him again, for fuck's sake, again, and he's twisting his hands into the sheets and popping them free from the corners of the mattress, and she's nearly sobbing with pleasure, and he's pushing into her so hard he slides her up the mattress, he slides them both up the mattress a good three inches and

for all that he hadn't wanted to hurt her, he can't help it. He can't help biting her again, though for the first month and a half of this, longer, he'd gone without sinking his teeth into her like this once. It's like some sort of chain reaction; once the walls are breached, it's all over, and he can't help but do it over and over and --

Lukas has never cried out like that before, either. He's never not been able to help it before; never been in such a state that he couldn't hold his own tongue. He's never done that before, and now he does it again, biting a harsh, rough-edged groan into her shoulder; as if the walls were irreparably breached, and something in him, some fragment or shard of his control, has been irretrievably lost.

He doesn't even realize he does it. He's that far gone.

No wonder he's shuddering like this afterward, quivering with exertion and something very much like shock, as though someone had torn him open and his entire blood supply had dropped out of him; he's holding onto her as though he could lend her his strength, stop her from trembling like that, like a leaf, only of course it wasn't quite like that, because they're both trembling, so perhaps he only hopes that somewhere, somehow, between them, they can manage -- they can find the ability to put one another back together again.

Time goes by. His teeth relent. It's his mouth against her shoulder now, his breath washing her skin. When she opens her eyes he hasn't even begun to move yet, but his panting is subsiding, his shuddering has settled into a quiver in the triceps, in the shoulders, the muscles that had carried most of his weight this whole time. He senses her watching him, though, or perhaps intuits it somehow. Lifts his head, his cheek sliding past hers -- rests his brow on hers a moment before drawing back enough, just enough, that he can open his eyes and look at her.

There's nothing left in his eyes but a dazed and blasted echo of pleasure; a smouldering remnant of what she's done to him. There's nothing left in his eyes but what she's given him, and when she shakes her head he doesn't understand it; when she says

(I can't do this.)

he doesn't understand it, either.

But he does comprehend the words. And they spark in his eyes, and she can see the way that spark takes, the way it begins to spread -- the way her meaning burns into his awareness, and the way his eyes sharpen, fix, grow alert; grow fierce; grow desolate.

Lukas closes his eyes before she can read any more from him. He couldn't stand it right now, if she can read more than what he's already given up. He can't stand any of this right now: what their lovemaking was like, this last time; the last time?; what it's like to be like this, rent apart by what happened between them, bared down to the bones, with nearly every last shred of his defenses in shambles; what it's like to hear these words that he's always expected to hear, and hoped, fervently, never to hear; what's it's like to hear them right here. Right now.

The corners of his jaw flex when he swallows. When he opens his eyes he's under control --

that's a lie. This is nothing close to control, but it's the best she'll get out of him right now: a sort of decimated calm. He draws a short, abortive breath.

"Are you ending this?"

[Danicka] This is where they've been heading from the beginning, and when she thinks of the beginning, right now all she can think of how hard he tried to fight against this. Right now, all Danicka can remember is that this is what he's always expected of her, this is all he saw her capable of giving him in the end, because she's the whore, the cat in heat, the liar, the --

zamilovávám se do tebe.

Right now all she can think of is how he could not even look at her after that, and the way he looked at her when he tried to pull away just a couple of minutes ago, and the way he is looking at her now.

If things were different she would simply be holding him now, nuzzling his face, kissing him, telling him not to move, to stay where he is. If she did not immediately pass out from exhaustion she would go on touching him as long as she could tonight, running her fingertips through his hair, asking him about what his life was like when he was still a child but not a part of her childhood. She feels wrung out from pleasure and would not be surprised if her skin was a web of visible cracks, she's so close to shattering, but she would like nothing more than to lie here with him for as many hours as they're given, talking in whispers, sleep coming over them in gradual waves.

But she said zamilovávám se do tebe. And he asked her to tell him how to love her. And she thought...

...right now she doesn't know what she thought. It was wrong.

There's no disguising what the hell has been going on in here from anyone else now. Not with the way she was whimpering out his name, barely muffled against his flesh. Not with the way he yelled as he moved back into her, the way he groaned when he he bit her, or the cry she let out as that -- the bite, or the sound of him -- sent her over the edge a third and final time. The headboard was knocking against the wall at the end, when Lukas realized that after her first orgasm she wasn't done yet, when he covered her hand and fucked her because that was the only way to convey how much he wanted her. The springs underneath the thin mattress were threatening to give way near the end, protesting this as much as the last time he had her here.

Because he had her. Looking into his eyes when she could, screaming into his shoulder when she could not bear it. He had her then, completely, as he only ever has her when he's inside of her. Lukas is inside of her now, still, both of them trembling, both of them drenched in sweat. There's a glow to Danicka's skin, her cheeks pink as though she's blushing, her lips livid red, and she looks whole and alive and powerful unless he looks into her eyes, and sees that whatever it is she's feeling as she looks up at him, it's almost too much for her.

Danicka's legs are still wrapped around him, her hands still on him, all of her entangled with him and welcoming him. (Vám náležet zde.) She is still open to him, enough that even as he closes his eyes off to her, all he has to do is look at her and see that she was never reserved, never cold, but overflows with an intensity of emotion that could drown him. Is drowning her. She holds him against her even as he asks what he does, her fingertips moving with an agonizing ease to his head, stroking the soft hairs on the back of his neck with debilitating tenderness.

If things were different, she would have waited to tell him until morning. If she thought she could bear it, after falling asleep in his arms again.

All Danicka can do, in the end, is nod.

[Lukas] There's a ripple in him when she nods; a tiny, simultaneous clenching of every last muscle, as though he'd wanted to flinch and caught himself at the last instant.

Lukas is not surprised; not at all. How could he be? He's always known this was coming; they've always known this, or something bloodier than this, was how it would end. There was a time he thought blood would be the worst option of all; but then, he'd never once thought of, or prepared for, something like this.

Any of this.

So: he's not surprised. But he is stunned, reeling from it, an archipelago of fragmentary thoughts and emotions that drift and bump one into another and refuse to fuse into something tangible, something hard and solid that he could hold on to, and stay afloat with. There's nothing like that out here. He reaches out, and the best he can come up with is,

"How can you ... "

He doesn't finish because he told himself, swore to himself that for god's sake when she told him it was over he'd just accept it, just accept it and move on and not debase himself, not degrade himself by trailing after her and whimpering and whining and begging to know why and how and what he could do keep her, keep her, keep her.

He doesn't finish because he doesn't know where it's leading, himself. How can you:

do this to me.
do this to us.
bear to do this right now.
bear to do this at all.

It could be any or all of the above. It could be something wholly different -- words that he can't even begin to string together, not even in his mind. It could be something so simple and helpless and pathetic as How could you?

He doesn't finish the sentence. The point is moot. Instead:

"Je to v pořádku, Danička," he murmurs. "Je to v pořádku. Můžete jít."

It occurs to him, dimly, that he should be angry. He shouldn't let her hold him; she's lost the fucking privilege. She's thrown it away. He should pull himself out of her arms, out of her, throw her off his bed and out of his room and tell her ha!, she was full of shit, she was always full of shit and he always knew it. He should congratulate her on a game well played, on successfully ensnaring and crushing yet another of the Circle, and then he should draw her a goddamn map to Sampson's room, or Caleb's, or Mrena's and Dylan's if he thought she might be craving a little variety. He should do something like that, cold and hard, something to protect himself with his anger because he's a Shadow Lord and she's a liar and a whore and

and it's not like that at all. It's nothing like that at all.

Lukas is not angry. He's stunned, and when he's finished being stunned he imagines he'll fall to pieces, and possibly then he'll be angry, and he'll hate her, and he'll think of her as a liar and a whore and be angry at himself for having fallen for it; but not now. Instead of all that, any of that, what Lukas does is stay where he is. What he does is lay his hands against her face, take her face between his hands, gently, like something precious, and lay his brow to hers. He closes his eyes.

"Já jsem zamilovaný s vámi."

They're so near that he can barely focus on her eyes; it's so dark that there's hardly anything to see. It doesn't matter. He wants her to know that his eyes are open, that he isn't speaking in a delirium or in some desperate, despicable, transparent attempt at manipulation. He wants her to look at him and read in his eyes what she must already know, which he knows he won't have another chance to say, which he would very much like the chance to say at least once, which is the truth.

A beat. Then his eyes open and he looks at her, steadily.

And again:

"Já jsem zamilovaný s vámi."

[Danicka] In a position very like this one, the two of them wrapped up in each other and the sweat of lovemaking drying on their skin, Lukas had told Danicka that he kept waiting to get sick of this, to be tired of their liason. He'd told her he couldn't put into words how much he liked just...being there with her. In an enormous bed, in a lavish hotel, but she'd known what he meant was 'here' in the same sense she meant when she told him he belonged.

With her.

She kept waiting to be tired of him. Tired of fucking him, tired of his questions, tired of the violence inherent to his kind that lives under his skin even now. From the very start she did not tell him that her first flicker of desire had nothing to do with sex, that all she wanted was to be near him. What she told him was that she would fuck him, and only him, until they were done with one another. And she kept waiting...not to finally get bored, not to finally get fed up. She kept waiting to stop feeling something while with him. She kept waiting for her heart to stop fluttering if he so much as chuckled.

Maybe from the start, Lukas thought that eventually she would crave variety again. She'd end up in the showers with Mrena or in the back of a car with Dylan. She'd fuck Sampson and all of his wives and laugh while doing it. She'd corrupt Katherine, distract Edward, make Katerina want to come back to the States. Hell, maybe she'd even fuck Sam again. Or she'd end up banging her roommate, or random men and women in bars, or...

...something. Maybe from the start, Lukas thought that at some point or another, Danicka would get bored with this loyalty of hers and his demand for it, and she would not want him anymore, and she would leave. That is not what's happening, though. Is she ending it? She says she is. She also said that she was falling. She also laughed and kissed him when she came in the room tonight and he pulled her into his arms, she called his name as he made love to her as though she was pleading and summoning and worshipping, all at once.

He starts, and stops himself from finishing, a demand to know How...

And if he didn't bite back what might come after that, she would answer

I've done it before.
There is no 'us'.
I can't.
I can't.

I can't do this.

She is so much better at deception than he is, at holding things in and holding things back. Yet she has always chosen to cry out while fucking him instead of stifling herself. She has said things to him, reaching out from whatever she was feeling at the time to attempt to show him, to see if he could cope, or if he would recoil.

What has hurt is that he can hear her tell him some of the worst parts of her life, the painful hints at what she's endured, and yet he all but pulled out and pulled away and ran from her when she tried to tell him that it was okay. That he could tell her...whatever it is that he might be holding in. He has always been able to absorb and accept the horrors, and yet not this.

So it's okay. She can go.

From another man, to another woman, it would be dismissal. To Danicka, it's the alleviation of a genuine concern. She's never believed that if she wanted to go that he would let her. She's never trusted that if he wanted to keep her that he simply...would. As far as Chicago is concerned, she belongs to him. As far as her brother is concerned...if Lukas wanted to take her, he could have her. One can assume. She doesn't talk much about her brother.

He does not flinch, or climb off of her and tell her in a fit of pique that she can go fuck the rest of his pack now, hiding the word crushed with that ha!, stringing together the pieces he's been left in by the one thing that keeps him going when everything, literally everything else, has left him: Rage. He does not become cold. He bows his head to hers, and Danicka's lips part to let out and then drag back in a shaky, forcefully silent breath that conceals a quiet cry of despair.

Danicka feels the words as much as she hears them, washing over her lips, her cheeks, her eyelashes. She cannot close her eyes for fear that she'll never be able to open them again, or that something horrible will happen to her while they're closed. She holds her eyes open as his close, and her heart sinks.

Disintegrates.

She recovers in time for his eyes to open, but then...

...then he says it again, and breaks her again, and she takes a breath that makes her entire body shudder.

"Don't..." she begs, as tears spring to her eyes, "...don't say that just to get me to stay. I wasn't trying to make you. I swear to Her, I wasn't."

[Lukas] "You think I said it to make you stay?"

It's a harsh sentence, but barely more than a whisper. In the depths of his eyes there's a turning coil of blue flame; a fierce, unquenchable spark of anger rising out of the nuclear ashes he's been reduced to. He reaches for it, grasps for it with a drowning man's deathgrip: it's familiar, it'll keep him warm, it'll string him back together.

"You think I would do that?"

Abruptly the muscles of his back and his flank flex; he all but tears himself from her, pushes himself from the bed. He turns his back to her to cross the room. The condom hits the bottom of his wastebasket with a vicious splat. He snaps his undershirt off the ground and uses it to wipe himself off, as if to rid himself of all trace of her as soon as possible so he can just ...

clear this off the table. Put himself back together. Move on.

Move on.

He wads the shirt up in a fit of sudden fury. He whips it at the ground, and then he drops heavily into his desk chair and bends double on himself, drops his face into his hands. His fingers plunge into his hair, splay out across his skull, grip so hard the last knuckle backbends. The lines of his back are carved with rage and something very close to grief.

"Just go. Christ, Danička, if you're going, then go."

[Danicka] You can go.

I'm in love with you.

And she doesn't know which implication to believe. She knows where things got tangled, and it wasn't tonight. This, the one thing that has always just ...worked between them has been growing increasingly more challenging ever since she performed the spectacularly stupid feat of telling him that she was falling in love with him. Ever since then, in her mind, it's been fits and starts. Hurdles. Obstacles. Moments when they can't reach each other, when they can't get it right.

His ability to control himself is unspooling, falling apart tonight because he has been looking so deeply into her, trying to understand her, trying to find out what it is she is feeling, thinking, what she wants, what he can do, why she is doing this. It cannot wrap around his Rage like it normally does and keep him in check, keep him in line. Tonight his control is slipping, is half-gone and scattered, and that leaves...his spirit. And his fury.

The latter is stronger, and Danicka flinches visibly as he pushes up off of her, her eyes squeezing shut for a moment. You think I would do that? echoes between them as she opens her eyes again, as she forces her body to relax past the kneejerk reaction, the expectation that with Rage comes violence, and usually directed at her. She watches him, the muscles in his back, the movement of his body through the shadow, as he wipes himself off, and she starts to slowly push herself onto her elbows, and then to her hands, lifting herself from laying supine on his bed.

Her shoes and belt and blouse are in front of him on the desk. Her skirt is at his feet, the pale and delicate thong atop it. The fabric of her coat touches his back, picks up his sweat, smells faintly of her. Just go, he says, but she either has to go past him and pick up her clothes to obey, or she has to just get her bag, yank on the clothes she has in there as quickly as she can, and leave the rest for him to burn in effigy, if he likes.

Or if he's really cruel, send back to her.

It comes down to -- it comes back to -- the fact that she has always been able to read him. It's as pure and as raw as instinct, sometimes, and it was there from the morning he drove her home. She saw farther than he could admit to himself. And time and time again he's bared his throat to her, often physically...more often in a sense that doesn't stand up under description. Sometimes Danicka looks at him and understands the blue in his eyes as though it's a language, comprehends the muscles in his back or the clench of his hands as though reading a book.

When he all but lunges across the room to get away from her, to wipe any trace of her or their sex or her scent off his body only to collapse in the chair where he held her not so long ago, Danicka's stomach lurches because it's almost impossible for her not to see it as yet another rejection. He tells her to go and her chest feels crushed, because the veil of expectation is so heavy: expecting that she's really messed it up this time, so she should go, because the last thing he needs here and now is her presence. Expecting that if she tries to stay now, he'll beat her.

And underneath that, she watches him fall apart.

Which she can't bear. So she looks at the ceiling, tipping her head back, as a tear rolls down her left cheek. It's striking: the angle of her body, the way the light does and does not hit her, the way her own confusion and sorrow seems not to detract from her -- simply put -- beauty, but sends it into almost surreal levels. But she's behind his back, and no one like Mrena is there to appreciate the way her eyes look a soft a green as seagrass in this light, how artful the lines of her back and arm are, how her sweat and Lukas's makes her skin seem to glisten.

A minute passes. Maybe two. And then Danicka finally sits all the way up, and slowly draws her legs to the edge of the bed. Her feet touch the carpet soundlessly, but the mattress creaks on its springs when her weight leaves it. He can feel her, he doesn't even need to look, as she crosses the room. Now would be the time for her to slide her arms around him from behind, or lean over to whisper in his ear, but she's afraid.

She's never been afraid to touch him. She is now.

"Nechci být bez tebe," Danicka whispers, coming from the darkness surrounding that lonely island of light coming from his desk lamp. "Myslel jsem, že ... pokud by bylo pro vás tak těžké říct..."

A wraith of laughter huffs from her lips.

"...it couldn't be the truth."

Her eyes are closed, though unless he's turned he can't see it, and yet tears have left her lashes again. She sniffs once, shakes her head, breathes out to steady herself, and turns to go towards her bag by the door. "Nacházíte se nikdy strach říct pravdu," she says as she crouches, with a self-deprecating tremor of mirthless laughter underneath the words.

[Lukas] Danicka might be right to fear touching him right now. Her coming closer makes him tense -- makes the great sweeps of muscle on his back pull taut and stand out. At her closest approach he's almost vibrating with tension, and if she touched him, he would've surely snapped.

And shaken her off.
Or taken her head off.
Or taken her in his arms and never let go.

But she doesn't touch him. She says things that veer into absurdity for him, and his brow was pressed hard to the heels of his hands, but now he stirs; he half-turns, enough that she can see his profile and he can see a hint of what she's doing, gathering her things at the door.

Lukas lowers his hands slowly. He's still hunkered over in his desk chair -- like a gargoyle, or like a man with a slow and fatal wound. His elbows are on his knees and his hands are loosened now, the fingers pointed at the floor, faintly curled.

The lamplight doesn't quite reach the door. Whatever she's doing, she's a ghost, a pale shadow of herself.

"Is that why you're leaving me? Because you don't believe me?"

[Danicka] If the dark were water it would be suitable to call back to Lukas's earlier image, when the edges of the light were blue and gray and green and her hair floated around her where it did not cling to her scalp in tight, wet curls. Something out of myth, born of and dwelling among rock and water...which is odd, considering how when the light is on her Danicka seems far more attuned to earth and sky, considering how when she is snarling and biting his lower lip demanding he give her more, her eyes all but burn.

It doesn't matter right now what she is, though, elemental or animalistic. It doesn't even really matter that she worships Gaia and the spirits she knows of more whole-heartedly than most Kinfolk, as much as even some Garou who are able to actually interact with them. It doesn't matter that she has compared making love to him to communing with god.

Because she's taking a pair of cotton underwear out of her bag and standing, stepping into them and drawing them up her legs, her eyes flickering closed as though this act makes her somehow uncomfortable.

Leaving me, he says. Not just leaving.

Danicka just looks down. She's still crying, and every so often out of nowhere he can hear the quiet sniff to get moisture out of her sinuses, to keep herself from falling completely apart. As long as she can. Which isn't very long, sometimes. "Because...

"I couldn't handle being with you, and feeling this way, and knowing that you...didn't. I've seen what that can do to someone and I can't..."

She exhales raggedly, and bends her knees to drag a rolled-up pair of jeans out of her bag, whipping them out and starting to pull them on. "And now I just think I should go before I fuck this up any more."

[Lukas] They watch each other, but not at the same time. When she was looking at him, he gave her his back, his anger and his distance, his face hidden from her.

Now he's looking at her, and she's pulling her clothes on, getting ready to go. She's left the clothes she wore on his desk and on the floor, at his feet, and that's a cruelty because those are the ones that smell of her, just like his sheets smell like her now, just like he smells like her.

His fury has come and gone. He's overwhelmed, off his guard; he can't even hold to a single emotion for very long. There's a slow quake inside him while he watches her dress herself to leave -- a gradual, terrible upheaval that finally splits something vital open. Released from the bloodied viscerae within is a kind of silent, piteous animal moan; it reverberates and resonates throughout his very blood and bones, grows until he has to close his eyes for a moment. He can't watch.

When Lukas opens his eyes again the feeling has subsided. It's a sort of stripped and blasted calm in his mind now, like the silence after some catastrophe. Thoughts float in and out of it: dust motes through shafts of light.

"Potřebuji ty abys zůstal," he tells her, and he barely recognizes his own voice. "Pokud si přesto chcete, abych vůbec, potřebuji vás, aby zůstali se mnou dnes večer."

A pause.

"Ale pokud tento je přes, pak jsem třeba ty abyste šli." Another. "Zatímco nemůžu nepohnutě vydržet to."

[Danicka] Danicka has one leg in her jeans when he speaks, is lifting her right leg to slide it into the rough denim. She doesn't get that far, because his voice does something to her. She can ignore it if she tries, lump it in with all the others, but she won't be able to do that for much longer. Not if she stays tonight. Not if she stays with him.

She pauses and looks over him after the first four words out of his mouth, standing on one leg almost like a crane. But she slowly lowers her foot to the ground again, her jeans falling around her ankles, as he goes on. If she still wants him at all, he needs her tonight.

If asked right this second how they got to this point, she'd be at a loss. If asked why she is hesitating to make what could be called a very simple decision, she wouldn't be able to answer. Yes or no. Stay or leave. Does she want him, at all. But Danicka hesitates, because there is a voice screaming in her head that he has to be lying...but it's not his voice. It doesn't have his eyes.

With a deep breath, she steps out of her jeans and walks over to him. It's not a large room, she crosses it in a few steps and the space he inhabits is less haunted now, filled not just with the remnants and the scent of her but her body sliding onto his thighs, her stomach aligning with his, her breasts pressing to his chest and her hands going to his face. She kisses him, not his mouth but his brow, the salt of his sweat clinging to her lips.

"Ty jsi můj princ." She kisses him underneath his right eye, the salt of her tears brushing his cheek. "A můj liška." She kisses the corner of his mouth, whispering against his lips: "A moje láska."

Danicka tips her brow to touch his, her eyes falling closed. "Samozřejmě chci vás," she murmurs, shuddering once with the words, or maybe with the words the follow, almost as quiet as she had once told him that she was happy...almost soundless. "Já jsem zamilovaný s vámi."

[Lukas] In the space of the last few moments, Lukas made himself a series of promises.

He promised himself, holding himself over her in his bed still, that when she left, he would never take her back. Not if she begged; not if it killed him to stay away. He promised himself that if she left, he would never lay himself open to such devastation again, and in some strange way, the shattered peace of knowing that it would over soon, finished, allowed him to say what he'd never dared to before.

But then she was still there, and he couldn't deal with that, and he left the bed to sit in his chair with his back to her, and he promised himself then that even if she didn't leave, he would angry with her for what she put him through tonight. He promised himself that he'd get to the bottom of whatever game it was she was playing now and give her hell for it.

And then she told him why she was leaving, and what she'd thought, and it was so different from what he'd thought that he had to promise himself that if she stayed, if she'd only stay with him, he would explain everything at his first opportunity. He would explain why he's always held back, and why he's afraid to tell the truth, and --

And he breaks this promise too, and sometimes he thinks it's ironic that she likes his honesty when all he ever does around her is break rules, break promises, break down everything he did and was and replace it with whatever he becomes when he's with her.

He doesn't think that right now. He's not thinking anything right now; she leaves her jeans where they are and she comes to him, and there's still so much of her bare, and he's reaching for her as she's coming down against him, and his arms wrap around her like he was starving and she was sustenance; like she was water; like she was air and light and everything else necessary.

"Oh, Danička."

His words are muffled against her skin. She's kissing his face and his hands are splaying over her back, pulling at her skin, closing on themselves as if to hold some part of her before they open again, open wide, crush her close. He turns his face up to hers and her tears are on his cheek, and a shiver is stealing up her spine, but it's his breath that shudders out of him when she says

(i am in love with you.)

and he says it back to her, a third time, like an incantation or a spell, irrevocable now:

"Já jsem zamilovaný s vámi."

[Danicka] Very likely they will never tell the other, concerning this night, the truth.

You broke my heart.

For the breathless and cataclysmic span of a matter of minutes, that's what they did do each other. It was a tidal wave, an earthquake, a forest fire, bombs going off until all their walls and guardtowers were in crumbled ruins. Their armies deserted them, their crowns rolled away, they were -- for perhaps the first time -- alone together, with nothing else left but a single confession, hurled from both sides like a last, desperate weapon.

I am in love with you.

And instead of dealing the final blow, it turned out not to be a weapon at all, but a white flag.

I give up. I give in. I fall, I fold, I bend.

You broke me.

Another shiver goes through her, cooling air running across sweat and tear-dampened skin as the heat of sex subsides from her. It's as though whatever she had in those last moments with him, when she was moaning his name in pleading outcries and orgasm after orgasm wracked her, it gave her just enough strength to try and save herself from something even more torturous. And when that was gone, when he tore himself off of her and when she saw the look in his eyes, there was nothing left in her, nothing warm, nothing alive, nothing...nothing she could call her own anymore.

So she leans into him as though to join their bodies together, melt together, take shelter together (like children in a storm) after a devastating onslaught.

"Oh, my love, why couldn't you tell me?"

[Lukas] Danicka leans into him, and he pulls her closer still, as if he could seal her to his body. His cheek slides past hers. He bends to her shoulder and her neck, her hair. They hold each other like that, without reservation, and when she asks him what she asks him he can only shake his head for a moment.

She might think this is another refusal, another thing he can't; can't do, can't say, can't explain. But it's not that -- it's only a delaying, a moment when he can't even begin to put the words together.

And then he can.

"Because it seemed like such a weakness," he can't seem to pull his mouth from her skin; the words are muffled, but slow, deliberate. There's nothing uncertain about them, "to need somebody like this. And saying it would make it real. Then you'd see what a weak creature I am, and you would leave."

His hands move on her back. He strokes her back in long sweeping strokes, his arms wrapped around her, his hands spread over her shoulderblade; her waist.

"But then you were leaving anyway," he adds, very quiet. "There was nothing left to lose. And I just needed you to know how deep this ran for me. I could've survived losing you, Danička, but I couldn't survive it if you didn't at least ... know."

[Danicka] If Danicka does think that the brief shake of Lukas's head is another denial, him keeping himself from her when all she has wanted from the start of this has been him, as much of him as he can give, all of him if he can bear it, it does not make her stop holding him.

When she slid onto his lap she didn't hesitate to rest her weight completely against him, didn't try to hold herself up when there is no need and no reason to. She is well aware of her own body, of its dimensions and the strength and concurrent weakness in it, of how much she weighs and how much she can lift. She knows her physical limitations as few people do, not because she is an athlete or a yogi but because she has tested so very, very many of those limitations. For all that she is a doll of a kinswoman, fragile and all but useless for anything but adornment and domesticity, Danicka knows her pain thresholds and how much she can drink or partake in before she goes over a dangerous edge.

All that is to say: she knows her body, has compared it night after night to the one belonging to Lukas, and she does not apologize for curling up on his lap with impunity when the man is twice her damn size. She leans on him comfortably, her weight distributed across his thighs and his torso. Their heads slide past one another, heads bowed to shoulders and turned inward, like nesting birds.

So his words, when they come, vibrate against her throat softly. She hears them as though they are translated through her flesh, moving upward through her pulse to become a part of her brain. There's no time for her to question them as a lie, to see that shake of his head and that pause to hold her as a chance for him to come up with some nice-sounding reasoning. Danicka has forgotten how to tell time by counting heartbeats or breaths; time began when he started to speak, or he has always been speaking, or it is the end of the world and these are his last words. She relaxes, and she listens, as one listens to chimes in meditation. She listens as he rubs her back, as a child listens to a lullaby before sleep.

Her heart never stopped slamming in her chest after she came with him, only ratcheted up higher and higher as it seemed that she was going to leave him, and he was going to let her, because...ironically, at least partly because neither of them could quite tolerate what loving the other was doing to them. Now that her body is relaxing and her pulse is slowing, Danicka's exhaustion is insinuating itself into her limbs, into her eyelids growing heavier, into the muscles in her back all but melting under his touch.

For awhile after that know passes through his lips, she doesn't say anything. Her hands are cupped on his biceps, her cheek resting on his shoulder, her eyes open but her breathing slow.

To say that she understands would be the understatement of the year. To say how weak and pathetic she felt when she told him she was falling, to say how lost she felt when she thought he was going to leave her because of that weakness, to say that finding herself wanting him to the point of desperation even though she knows she could survive just fine without him, that this terrified her because there seemed no escape from agony either way...

...Danicka has to hope that he simply knows, because she cannot put it into words right now. She breathes out across his sweat-stained skin and lets her eyes slowly close. She says the next best thing, an echo of defensiveness for his sake coming all the way from her childhood:

"Nejste slabá."

She takes a breath, sighs it out softly.

"To není slabost."

[Lukas] Someday he'll tell her --

(or perhaps not. Or perhaps this, like all the rest of the somedays, is something so deep in him, so absolute, that he doesn't even know how to begin to put it into words.)

-- someday, maybe, he'll tell her what comfort he finds in just biding with her. He gave her a book a few weeks ago; a relatively short volume that reads quicker than even its pagecount suggests, because everything inside was blank verse, page after page of broad margins and quick sentences sketching out some human's imagination of lycanthropes in L.A. Lukas never actually read the book, and if he had he would've scoffed aloud at most of the delusions within -- most of them, but not the two words found just pages in:

elemental comfort.

That, he would've understood. That, he would've agreed with wholeheartedly.

There's something primitive and wordless about this embrace, which is not even so much an embrace as it is a ... belonging. A belonging together. Their bodies fit together like this and a thousand other ways; he fits to her even when he isn't inside her, and when she sighs a breath across his skin and relaxes just a little bit more, he opens his hand over her lower back and wonders if this time, he'll open his eyes and find there really isn't any line between them anymore.

You are not weak, she tells him. He may not believe her after they've parted; he may wish he never opened his mouth and said i'm in love with you, may wish he never opened his mouth and groaned out his want for her, his pleasure in her. He may do these things come morning -- or noontide -- or evening, or maybe never, because maybe they can just stay here forever, and hide from the world, and hide from the war, and hide in each other, and...

The point is: she tells him this, that he is not weak, and right now, unequivocally, he believes her. She tells him this is not a weakness. And Lukas thinks to himself:

No. It's not.
This is not a weakness.

He turns his face to her skin, nuzzles her neck with the tip of his nose; his mouth. "Dovolte, abych vzít vás zpátky do postele," he murmurs. "Dovolte, abych vám držet."

[Danicka] The words have made it out, in fits and starts, just like the first time they fused together and found something completely unexpected that, all the same, almost anyone but the two of them could have foreseen. He has told her how happy it makes him just to be with her. He has shown her in smiles and in his embrace how much he likes seeing her. The fact that he could not moan to her during sex some wordless appreciation of what they have then, what he feels then, held her at a distance. The fact that he could not, because it was weak, tell her during lovemaking or apart from it how he feels about her, held her at arm's length.

No longer. Whether he lies to himself later about it or not, right now they are closer than they have ever been, and neither of them seems willing to move away. Danicka certainly is not. She stays where she is, all but naked with him, and the smell of her fills his nostrils as the smell of him fills hers. She sinks down under the surface, where she finds him, and decides to stay.

Given her behavior in the past it would not be out of line to believe that she sees no farther than this, that once given over there is no taking back, that everything has to break before she will alter. She may not tell him that there is a character in children's literature that she understands wholeheartedly, because that character was turned into a whoreish caricature in leaf-green dress and puffball-shoes by a Disney movie, but the way that Tinkerbell is described in 'Peter Pan' always made sense to her. She cannot hold more than one emotion inside of her at a time. She's just too small to contain more than that.

So when she hates, it possesses her. When she loves, it is all she knows.

Which is oversimplification, to be sure. But Danicka understands that strange, animalistic wholeness of feeling. There are times when a single emotion is so pure, so complete, that it seems to encompass her entire existence. Now is one of those times.

Lukas nuzzles her, whispers Let me; Danicka does nothing but nod, drowsy as a child.

[Lukas] So Lukas leans back to twist off the desk lamp, which is the last light in this room. After that it's true darkness, broken only by what light filters in from the alley that his window faces. The color is wan; the intensity, negligible.

He can barely see her when he stands, and standing, lifts her: not as a bridegroom lifts a bride, crosswise, but as he might lift her onto his body in the act of love -- torsos aligned, limbs wrapped around one another. There's always such effortless strength in the way he carries her weight, as though it meant nothing at all to him.

Danicka has slept with many, many people, and surely amongst them there were weightlifters and bodybuilders, athletes who took care of their bodies. His build is both like and unlike theirs.

There's something raw about his musculature: something unpolished, untamed, war-honed. Danicka could see from the first time he undressed in front of her -- could see, long before that, from the height and build of his father -- that he's destined for a sort of husky, rock-solid brawn. His bones are large and heavy, shoulders vast, knuckles pronounced. At twenty-three, he still has something of a youth's leanness, a certain suppleness to his strength, but even now he has more height of frame and breadth of chest than the vast majority of the human population. Even now, stripped bare, divested of his masks of civility and civilization, there's a savagery to him: his isn't a body fashioned by weight machines and ellipticals, nor by running after balls on well-tended lawns.

Lukas is an Ahroun of the Nation, a warrior class out of a warrior race. He was never intended for anything but violence.

And yet for all that: such care, when he crosses the room with her riding on his body. Such meticulous balance when he leans sideways to flick back the blankets; such tenderness when he sits on the side of the bed, slowly so as to give her legs time and room to move. Perhaps Danicka was surprised at what a considerate lover Lukas can be; how gentle he tries to be with her when he had tried -- so hard -- to just fuck her like a whore the first time. Then again, perhaps after that first soulrending kiss, she's not surprised at all.

She's right: this bed is too small for two. When he stretches out she's half atop him, his leg between hers. He doesn't mind. They're covered in one another's sweat; they smell like each other; the whole room smells like sex, like tension, like uncertainty, like familiarity. He doesn't mind any of that, either. He does what he said he wanted to: takes her to bed; holds her. Keeps her close.

He's not quite tired yet. His fingertips trace meaningless patterns on her hip until her breathing evens out, and after. His eyes are open and his mind is alert, but he's strangely untroubled. Naively, he would have thought that such a night, such a situation, would leave his mind reeling, running in circles, treadmilling all night long. It's nothing like that. There's nothing in his mind but a sense of ...

Já tady patří.
(Vždy jsem patřil zde.)

--

Lukas wakes three times in the night, and he doesn't look at the clock any of those times. The first time, some late-returning tenant slams the back door on their way in loudly enough to wake half the second story. Lukas lifts his head, looking window-ward, instantly but passingly alert. Nothing else happens. He lays his head back down and yawns, thinks no more of it.

The second time is brief, and he doesn't remember it by morning. He opens his eyes and it's pitch black in his room. Even the alley light has gone out. He can't see her, but he can feel her, and he can smell her, and he thinks to himself as he closes his eyes: okay.

The third time, the light has changed. It's dim grey in the room now, the murky half-light of a distant dawn, and he can see her again, and the sheets have slipped off their bodies or been thrown off in the night when their shared heat became too much. It's chilly now, though, the lingering warmth of the previous day thoroughly gone now, and instead of covering her with the blankets he covers her with his hands, he strokes her with his hands, he wakes her with his hands and touches her until she turns her face to him, and then he kisses her mouth and turns her, aligns her body to his.

It's achingly slow this time, as if they were underwater. The room fills with the blue predawn little by little. They're side by side; their bodies flex and clench against one another. His hands explore her skin, and he never stops caressing her, but that's slow, too. Even at the end it's still slow, only heavier: sure, deep grinds of his body against and into hers.

When he comes in her, there's just one word on his tongue, and it's just her name, whispered and gasped to her like a mantra.

It's just past daybreak, after. His room does not have a view of the east, or of anything except an alley, really; sunrise is inferred through changing colors and quality of light. The light sifting in has taken on a golden cast, that fabled magic hour of photography and film. It gives her skin a golden glow, turns her hair to molten gold: a preview of summertime. He kisses her over and over, her shoulder and her neck, her mouth when he can reach it.

When the sun clears the horizon and the light in the room fades to the plainer white of day, his eyelids are growing heavy again. He gives himself over to sleep thoughtlessly. His chest presses to her back, his shin crossed over her feet. He falls asleep with his arm heavy over her side, his palm loosely cupping her breast, his fingertips still wet with the touch of her -- her heartbeat light against his hand. His back is to the room; she's sleeping in the hollow that his body makes, and amongst his last thoughts of the night is the vague and half-incoherent notion that she's sheltered now, she's safe now, she's ...

The last of the thought spirals out into ephemerality; he's asleep, and this time he sleeps in a solid block until noon.