všechno.

[Lukas] Sunrise is in a few hours, which perhaps makes this not the ideal time for anyone to call anyone -- and particularly not for Lukas to call Danicka.

They were finished, after all. Done with one another. The last they met, they didn't even have anything to say to one another other than business: take this information, go to this person. Do you need these talens back. What are your chances -- but not out of sentimentality.

They barely had anything to say to one another at all.

Except: the way he'd embraced her the moment she came up out of the subway, from the underground and the noise and the trains and the heat to the chill of a Chicago spring which, even now, is barely warm enough to go about in single layers.

Except: I love you, at the end, as though even now, that's the last thing she wants him to take away with him if they were to never meet again.

If; if.

None of this really matters. The point is: it's Friday night, or Saturday morning. It's 4am, which is an ungodly hour even for someone like Danicka, and her iPhone rings. The number is recognized this time: it's Lukas's cell phone. When she picks up, it's Lukas's voice. The last time they spoke was nearly a week ago; the last time she heard from him was a little after that, when he called to say -- terse, businesslike -- that there was no need to call Milo Maevsky, because they'd taken care of it.

This is different. This is a brief silence after she picks up, and then: "Do you want me to meet me somewhere?"

[Danicka] Tonight she is not leaving someone else's bed and lying to them, saying she gave them her phone number earlier. She's not straightening her skirt and re-buttoning her shirt after a tryst in a bathroom. She's not sitting in a room full of people playing games and trading music. Danicka is not standing out on her balcony smoking a cigarette, or sitting on the couch playing World of Warcraft. She is doing what most people in Chicago are doing at four in the morning even on a Friday night...Saturday morning.

She is sleeping. Curled on her left side in her soft bed, she dreams about creeping vines and lions, and in the distance she can hear a helicopter. It means very little. It means nothing at all.

Her phone rings three times before she picks up, and in that time she is stirring, rising out of sleep drowsily and reaching for the iPhone on her nightstand. She picks it up and looks at his name on the screen, because she has no photo of him to go along with the entry. Something moves in her chest as though it, too, is waking up now. She accepts the call and puts the phone to her ear, and it is silent for a second while she wets her throat, before she says:

"What do you want?"

Danicka's voice is raspy from disuse, quiet from the hour, tired-sounding. It is all but a whisper, and she does not sound annoyed so much as worn out. But she picked up. And she obviously knows it's him. He asks her if she wants to meet him somewhere and she doesn't give him anything for a moment. Her voice is less rough but more drained when she speaks again:

"Is this going to be a weekly occurrence?"

[Lukas] "No."

She has no way of knowing where he is, just as he has no way of knowing where she is. He can hear the sleep in her voice, though, the huskiness of vocal cords long out of use. She can hear the clarity in his; but then, she's always known that he doesn't sleep until dawn.

Don't you sleep? she asked him, early on.
Of course I do, he replied -- dismissively, as though the question were stupid.

He had been trying to push her away, even then.

After a pause, "Chybíš mi. Jsem nemocný z předstírat jinak. Ale jestli chcete, abych přestal volání budu."

She can't see him. She has no way of knowing how he holds his breath after that, involuntarily, strung up on tenterhooks waiting for the answer.

[Danicka] Blankets rustle; the mic on her phone is quite good and he can hear her legs sliding underneath the covers or he can imagine her flipping them off her lap or whatever it is might enter his mind then. In reality she is turning over, leaning against her headboard and her pillows and covering her brow and eyes with one hand.

You broke my heart, she wants to cry at him. I gave you something and you broke it and now you...

This is not what she says. She takes a breath after he speaks and exhales it slowly. She sounds exhausted, and it can't just be because it's four in the morning. He has seen her after being out all evening and up all night, calmly putting on her earrings and casually telling him she would shower at home. He has driven her home with her smelling of his packmate's sweat.

He has also stayed up with her all night, kept her up with words and hands and body, and done what almost no one in her life has been able to do: fallen asleep beside her, her hand on his heart or his brow to her neck, breathing with her til dawn.

"Co ode mne chcete, Lukášek?"

[Lukas] This is not the first time they've had a difficult conversation across airwaves.

A thousand years ago -- hell, a hundred, fifty, thirty years ago -- this would've seemed like magic. Talking to someone across a city, a state, a nation, with no wires. Sometimes the beast side of him is still amazed, or at least put off its stride: to hear her without seeing her, to hear her without smelling her. To talk to her without any of the cues that he needs to gauge her reaction, her state of mind, her thoughts --

not that he's been terribly effective at that, anyway.

The truth is if Danicka wants to, she could lie circles around Lukas. The truth is it's luck as much as anything that he's seen through her even so often as he has. The truth is, it's because on some level, conscious or otherwise, she lets him see through her.

So maybe it's only fair that she can see through him so easily. She can read him even when he's not there to be read, and this silence is a wretched one, full of things he will not, or does not know how to, say.

At the end of it: "What do you think?"

[Danicka] "It is four..." she pauses, as though to check, "...sixteen in the morning. I am glad you're alive, and in a masochistic, agonizing way it's good to hear that you miss me, but if you can't answer that question without even having to see my face...then I don't believe you can handle anything more. And that's what this has been about: what you can handle."

[Lukas] The silence is long and hard.

Then, very low: "I want you."

[Danicka] At another hour she might try to conceal the harsh, unvoiced laugh that leaves her chest then. It's a sound that encapsulates what she said just a moment ago about agony, about masochism. It sounds pained, as though she's just been told a joke by a field medic who is trying to assure her that they won't have to cut her apart in order to keep her alive.

"That was never in debate," she finally says, rubbing her face as she exhales.

[Lukas] "What the fuck do you want me to say, Danička?"

Now he's angry. She still has no idea where he is; the Brotherhood is a good guess. His room, where they fucked, twice. Where she left her earrings, which he never did return to her. Perhaps that would've felt too fucking final, like her giving his present back to him.

That's gone now. Crumpled in a heap of scrap metal somewhere. The car's gone too, and like Danicka, he's yet to find a replacement.

"What do you want me to do?" he continues -- there was no pause between the first, and this. "Beg?"

[Danicka] "No," she says softly. "I only ever wanted you, Lukas."

[Lukas] Another silence.

"Then meet me somewhere."

[Danicka] [Correction: I only ever wanted you, Lukáš. Oy.]

[Lukas] (yeah dude, that's just cold, getting his name wrong.)

[Danicka] Sometimes, Danicka does things that are bad for her. She does things that could lead to her getting hurt. Like when that girl handed her the razor and looked over her shoulder at it waiting in Danicka's pale hands, a plea for both action and acceptance in her eyes. Like when she drank MDMA water in New Orleans and that too-beautiful man led her outside and held her against the wall and moved his mouth to her neck and if were not for Christian's eye she would be dead and if it were not for Christian's aim she would have been in worse shape than the blood-splattered and shaken state that she went home in that night.

Sometimes she does things that she knows very well are going to hurt. Not always because she feels compassion, or because she feels fear. She doesn't do it because she likes the pain. She doesn't want to feel ever again the way she felt when Lukas left her in the room at the W. She doesn't want to feel the way she did when he walked away from her again at 550 about a week ago. She doesn't want to say yes because she knows his packmate died and she should feel bad for him.

They are goddamned Shadow Lords and his packmate was as much wolf as he was. Boo. Fucking. Hoo.

She closes her eyes and breathes deeply but silently.

"Where?"

[Lukas] The longer pause comes after she speaks, but the tenser one was before. Almost immediately after she answers -- one word, Where?, not so much a question as a sort of acquiescence -- he exhales, as silently as she has.

"Wait a second." There's some clicking in the background. "There's a Best Western about five blocks up Grand from your apartment. I can be here in about fifteen."

--

The Best Western, as it turns out, is about 10 minutes by foot from 520 Kingsbury. It's 40 minutes by foot from the Brotherhood, but either he wasn't there after all, or he's not coming on two feet. In any case, 15 minutes after he hangs up -- if that -- he's there.

She isn't there for another fifteen. He waits outside. He doesn't smoke, apart from a few joints last week; otherwise he'd smoke like a chimney now, furiously, sucking down nicotine as though it had a snowball's chance in hell of ...

settling his nerves. Calming him. Christ; he was on edge; not nervous but on edge, uncertain, unstable. He doesn't smoke, so what he does is check in, and after he checks in, he goes back outside. He leans against the building and soaks the coldness of the walls in through his back. His pants are grey, a light fabric; he wears a button-down shirt over it, short-sleeved, that looks black in this light but is actually deep blue. His undershirt is grey too, a shade darker than the slacks. His hands are in his pockets and she's still a good block away when he senses her somehow, sees or hears or smells or intuits her.

Lukas straightens up. His back leaves the wall. He faces her, his head bare, the hairs on his arms standing up a little from the cold, or perhaps from something like anticipation.

She does things that are bad for her. She should not be here at all. He all but spelled it out: he wants her. He wants to fuck her, and he doesn't have the right. Not after he left her at the W; not after he left her at 550. Not after he demanded her presence because his fucking packmate died before he could make his peace with her, and he didn't want their relationship to end the same way. Not when everything he's ever been, ever, was selfish toward her. Selfish, demanding, self-centered.

She does things that are bad for her. The same could be said for him. He takes his hands out of his pockets as she comes into his immediacy. He hands her one of the two room keys, if only because he can't think of anything else to do.

"Room 1213," he says. And, "Why did you come?"

[Danicka] A Best Western. Of course. A hotel. Where they realized that it wasn't and wasn't ever going to be just fucking, where he clung to her after he came and she let him lie down behind her and keep her encircled in his arm, where he forgot English and spoke a language he doesn't know because it was the only way she had, at that point, to keep him out at all.

"I'll be there in thirty," she tells him, and hangs up before he can argue, or acknowledge...or before she can change her mind.

=========

In the shower she yawns and she thinks that this is a bad idea. She rests her forehead against the tile and takes a few deep breaths. She thinks, over and over, that all that's going to happen is that she's going to end up making love to him and her world is going to shatter. He's going to kiss her (the way he does) and he's going to gasp in her ear (the way he does) and afterwards he's going to hold her (the way he does) and then he's going to snap her in half and she's not sure if making love to him again isn't worth that.

The last time they made love was a month ago. They were in his bed, and dawn was cresting on the horizon just as it is now. She remembers it as she washes herself: his hands moving over her. His mouth touching hers, whispers exchanged, her leg drawn over his hip and her name her name her name the way he said her name over and over like it was all he had left. He held her afterward like he could protect her from the world.

Then the next morning.

Then that night outside of Mr. C's.

Then the phone call. And watching a movie on her couch, on her birthday.

Then the crash. And the way he'd held her in the shower as she tried to cope with what had happened.

The next time she'd seen him he'd left her.

=========

She shows up fifteen minutes after Lukas does. Her hair is down and straightened from being dried; she is wearing dark jeans and a pair of boots that take her three inches over her natural height. She is wearing a light v-necked sweater of dusky blue over something with gray lace over her chest. She is not carrying more than a basic, small purse; not big enough for a change of clothes. Big enough for mace, her keys and phone, things like that.

Danicka sees him and slows her steps as he moves to face her. He wants to fuck her and she knows it just by looking at him, knew it when he called her. She's always known. She stays three and a half feet from him when she stops, barely within range to take the key card he offers...because right now that may be all he can offer. Her eyes find his.

"...Because I love you," she answers, somewhat brokenly. Her voice is smoother, though, after being awake for awhile. "And you asked me to."

[Lukas] Because I love you, she says, and he draws a short breath, a sharp tattered sip, as though someone had slipped a knife between his ribs. She seeks out his eyes but he looks away. He gives her his profile, the strong bones and the swarthy complexion, dark hair; the eyes that were only barely blue, mostly pale, at this angle.

And because he asked her to. Which might be the truth for the last they met too -- five minutes outside the metro station, in front of a CVS.

He looks at her again. He has to swallow before he answers her.

"I'm still in love with you." He winces as he says this, though after, he looks at her. He folds his arms across his chest, tightly, tucking his hands under his arms -- as though he were cold, or trying to defend himself. "That hasn't changed, though god knows I've done everything I could to change it. I -- "

That's where he stops; grimacing now. A pause. His eyes trace her over. She looks good, but she's thinner than he remembers. He knows she doesn't eat well when she's stressed; nor, apparently, when her heart is broken.

"Come inside," he says, quietly. And he unfolds his arms and holds his hand out to her.

[Danicka] There had been, from the beginning, evidence that Danicka was certain he would hurt her eventually. He would lose his temper and strike out at her, and his knuckles would break her face, and he would be like every other Ahroun, every other Shadow Lord, every other Garou. She always knew that he was going to shatter her one day, it's just that...she thought it would be her body before anything else.

It's never been, for Danicka, about what Lukas could do for her. About how hot he was or how he made her come or if he made her feel protected. There was something to be said for how he made her feel when they made love but it became -- with frightening speed -- about the simple fact that she loved him, and she could not make herself stop. The fact that he walked away from her hasn't made it go away. The fact that it's been so long since she's been near him has not made it go away.

She is giving up.

Danicka's eyes, green as new spring grass right now, pale and flecked with brown, are merciless. She never turns away. She barely even blinks. And yes; she's thinner. She's not scary to look at, she isn't gaunt and there are no dark circles under her eyes, but she's lost weight. She's lost sleep. She's lost one of her only friends that she felt she could trust. And she's lost him.

He's still lost; she looks at him like she can't find him. "I am so...angry at you," she confesses, her eyes hard. Her eyes gem-like. Her eyes dry.

She does not move towards that hand. Or the door. Her voice sounds like it's a tattered flag, the only color or mark of a razed civilization left shaking in the wind.

[Lukas] Lukas doesn't look away. He doesn't flinch, though he does frown -- a brief knitting of his brow, wincelike.

"I know," he says, quiet. His hand stays where it is, offered across the gulf of space between, palm up. The nearest streetlight is yards and yards away. The light that falls across his palm is slanted; it deepens the shadows there. He may as well be holding a handful of shadow, velvety and dark.

He has nothing better to say. In the end he repeats, softer, "Come inside, Danička."

[Danicka] Sometimes...Danicka does things she knows are bad for her.

Tonight it was coming to see him, when seeing him does nothing but make her feel like she can't breathe. Tonight it is looking at his hand and knowing that if she takes it she's going to start shaking because he might let go. Tonight it is looking at him and knowing that when he loves her and she trusts him she feels strong, alive, vibrant, vicious...and knowing that when he looks at her Like That or he treats her That Way she is not just fragile but brittle. She is as weak as a trembling aspen, as tattered by his eyes as the leaves of that tree are by the slightest breeze.

Danicka reaches over and slides her hand into his. Her touch is warm. Even after walking here, her hands are warm. Soft, like she's never truly labored a day in her life even though, ironically, she is the one of them who has worked for her money. Danicka looks away from him as their hands touch, like this was a surrender and she cannot hold her head up. She cannot meet his eyes. So she goes inside with him, and she goes with him to the door of 1213.

Somewhere between street and doorway, her fingers laced through his. And her hands are shaking.

[Lukas] The moment her hand touches his, the tips of his fingers twitch. They nearly spasm against hers, as though he had received some sudden and unexpected shock.

Then he's still, absolutely still. He's looking at her face, watching her as she slides her hand into his, watching her face because when she smiles at him and laughs with him and stands in the pouring rain with him he feels as though the war isn't hopeless, their tribe isn't all shadow and blood, life isn't all duty and death; and when she looks at him as though he were nothing to her, when she pushes him away or he thinks he hears the threat of an ending in her voice

he can't breathe. He feels fragile and brittle; not a trembling aspen but a desiccated shell, a crumbled and dried husk of something once alive.

Danicka's fingers fold over his and just like that, suddenly, almost violently, his hand closes over hers. The grip is ferocious and desperate; something like the way he had drawn her resisting into his arms before the drugstore nearly a week ago. Lukas squeezes her hand so tight that a voice inside him cries out for him to let go, let go, be gentle, but he can't; he can't.

He draws a breath. It shakes. Afterward his hand can gentle on hers. Loosens; he gives her a chance to draw back, if she will.

It she doesn't, their fingers lace. And he takes her inside.

[Danicka] The room isn't much. The covers on the bed aren't sumptuous, the view isn't really of anything but the other buildings in the area, and the soap smells like soap rather than orange-honey-ginger or something like that. It's a place to crash and sleep more than luxuriate. But as they've seen time and again, it doesn't matter where they are: the first time they made love was in a place worse than this. And the last time they fucked it was in the goddamn W overlooking the lake.

His hand twitches, tightens around hers, and Danicka doesn't fight him or try to pull away...but she does tremble, as though she is equally afraid of letting go as much as she is of him letting her go. Again. She doesn't dare believe in him, or in anything she wants. She used to remember this was a good rule for life, and then he made her feel... things she is still not sure she should have felt.

The door closes behind the two of them, and the room is quiet. Even the air-conditioning isn't running now. Danicka licks her lips and holds her purse on her shoulder. She thinks that any other time they've been in a hotel room they have wanted to eat together, hold each other. They have barely been able to keep their hands off of each other. She is only here because he asked her to be, though, and she does not believe what he's said he wants.

So she walks if he leads her, and she stays silent.

[Lukas] The room isn't much. The carpet is drab. The wallpaper is plain. The lights are yellowing, and the furniture looks a touch rickety; cheap.

It's clean, though. The air conditioning is off and the roof is a little stuffy, but not frigid cold. They don't tear at each other like animals. They don't order food; they don't flop onto the bed to talk. He doesn't strip the bed bare.

He doesn't let go her hand.

She walks if he leads her, but he doesn't for some time. The door closes behind them and there they are: his keycard in his hand, the door autolocking behind them. After a moment he turns to throw the deadbolt. He feels uncertain; he's almost awkward. He doesn't know quite what to do.

He thinks of the night at 550, the way she looked, golden and pale against the dark dark walls. She unbuttoned her shirt and he was full of things he wanted to do: fuck her, leave her, shout at her, make love to her. This is the opposite. He's empty now. He can't think of a single thing to do.

After a moment he takes her into the room, past the door to the bathroom, the door to the closet, the full-length dressing mirror. He tosses his keycard beside the TV and then -- for the first time in minutes -- turns to face her.

And he stares at her.
And he watches her.

And it's possible that in their time apart she's begun to forget the exact color and clarity of his eyes: a shade as pale and fiery and crystalline as blue diamond. It's possible that were he to die, as he assuredly will someday, and soon, she'll be unable to call to mind that exact hue and resonance after a year, a month, a week. It's possible she'll never see eyes quite like his again, such coldness of color, such fire of rage -- and the way he looks at her, as though he were starving for her.

Which he is, in a way. Starving and starved, emptied out, battered down. I'm still in love with you, he'd said, but the truth is he's also, sometimes, very close to hating her.

He looks at her and he thinks: what have you done to me? And he thinks: why can't I bear to let you go?

Just let me go, he'd said, two and a half weeks ago now. But it was never really about that. It was about what he could handle, and what he could or could not bear to let go.

Lukas steps forward, slowly. One foot, then the other. He comes closer to her, and then closer, and she can smell the wind and the night on him, and then he's bending to her. His eyelids lower but do not close all the way. If she lets him, he touches his mouth to hers, very softly.

[Danicka] The strange thing about Danicka is that what makes her feel whole and complete and comfortable in her own skin is doing things that make her uncomfortable, that make her uncertain, that risk pain and trauma and disgrace. It isn't even just the rush; it's doing something she knows that Martin or her father or her brother or the Nation at large would frown at. It's doing something that she knows friends and people who think they know her would be shocked by or disgusted by. Going back to a man who made her cry, who hurt her as badly as Lukas did, would fall under that umbrella.

Danicka does what she wants. What she wants, much of the time, is bewildering even to her. But what is truly disturbing is how little effort she expends on trying to stop herself.

Tonight there are no buttons on her shirt for her to undo, no stretch of flesh to tempt him. It's beyond awkward, the way they stand there in the hall like virgins who are not sure what to do with one another now that they have the hotel room and the privacy and the time to do whatever they want to do. Lukas finally turns to her when they're past the bathroom and closet and nearer to the bed, stares at her with adoration and loathing, and Danicka looks at the surface of the covers. Her hand is still in his. Her thoughts are not here in this room.

They're in another room, and she remembers with a pang of twisted amusement the blue v-necked sweater she'd worn that night, the lack of a camisole underneath it, the way he could look down her shirt when she leaned over at Mr. C's, the way he --

Danicka turns to look at him when she senses movement, and her own eyes have a strange light in them, a light he knows. It's not the sparkle of drunkenness or the glint of anger but he's seen her eyes like this so many times before it may very well set off a spark in him and burn the empty husk he's become down to ashes and smoke. He comes closer, her purse slides from her shoulder and hits the floor, and as he bends to her she lifts her face. She lifts her hand and rests it on the back of his neck, her eyes closing and her lips parting just enough so that when he kisses her, he can feel the warmth of her breath on his mouth.

[Lukas] It was a different motel, that first time: a hole in the wall up the street from Mr. C's, where the air conditioner was a wall unit rattling as it vomited cold air into the room; where he ripped all the blankets off the bed as though he wanted their sex to be like that, pared down, stripped down, naked and ugly and vulgar, though he wanted to just have it out and leave it behind.

It wasn't awkwardness then. He was not uncertain, only controlled, and angry. It was a tug of war between hate and desire, and love was not in the picture; or if it was, it was buried, and deep.

This is not the same. This is -- uncertainty. His anger flickers through him and is gone. What have you done to me, he thinks again, but it's different this time; a little more like surrender. Her eyes are closing. Her purse thumps to the floor and he puts his free hand on her hip, and god she feels exactly the way he remembered, even something so innocuous as that.

His eyes are closing too. His head tilts to hers. He opens his mouth and they're breathing, he's drawing her breath out into his lungs. His hand is tugging ever so gently at her hip, drawing her against him as he bends to her. There's half a foot's distance between their heights, and in stockinged feet she would have to stand on her toes to reach his mouth. The next breath he draws is through his nose, sharper, and the kiss is sharpening too. His lips are moving over hers, catching the bottom, then the top; opening.

When his tongue traces the seam of her mouth, her parting lips, it's a question without words.

[Danicka] Her clothes had come off first. She'd been stripped to nothing by the time he got his coat and shirt off, and then she'd ended up wrapped around him, her cunt to his chest and her arms and legs encircling his body and her mouth oh her mouth hot and humid against his own. This isn't like that. Her purse falls but she doesn't walk away to strip her sweater off her torso. Danicka holds him where he is to kiss him, opens her mouth to him, and her tongue slips out to touch his without experiment, without hesitation.

She does not know what else to do with him, or with these feelings twisting around inside of her, so she kisses him as though she was made for it. As though they invented it, refined it, perfected it.

"Fuck me," she whispers when she pulls back from his mouth to breathe, her eyes still half-closed. "Bože, Lukáš, just fuck me."

[Lukas] Just fuck me, she says, as if she believed, as if either of them could really believe, it would just be a fuck. As if it was ever just a fuck.

This is why he wouldn't take what she offered in the bathroom of 550. This is why he couldn't, didn't even dare try to fuck her like it would just be a fuck, like it wouldn't matter what they did with one another's bodies because their emotions would never come into play. Because it's never just a fuck, and some part of him knows, starkly, absolutely, that they're standing on a sort of precipice.

He doesn't stop this time. Or leave. This is what he wanted, isn't it? What he asked for. I want you, he said.

(Chci tě.)
Just fuck me.

His mouth is still against her skin. She pulls back to breathe and he kisses her jaw, her neck, the belt of muscle there. He makes a sound against her throat when she tells him to fuck her, just fuck her; it's a shredded animal noise, a moan, as though in pain. His hands find the fastening of her jeans and he tugs so sharply that she might stumble half a step before he gets it open. Once it's open he's pushing it down, down; his hands are opening and grasping at her flesh as it's revealed to him, and then going to the hem of her sweater to pull that up and off.

[Danicka] Just, she says. Like a plea, like that is all she's willing to promise him or give him now. Loyalty hasn't been discussed. Love has been. But they haven't been loyal since he left her, since she pushed him towards the door and then tried to pull him back. What happens after this hasn't been talked about because as far as either of them are concerned there may as well be nothing after this. Or anything before it, for that matter. The things they've said, the things they know about each other and the bits that are missing, the way they have coped with being apart and the way they may intend to survive if they are apart again...

Nothing. It's all nothing.

So no, he will not be thinking as he tears open her jeans -- she doesn't stumble, she doesn't even falter but pushes towards his hands, his hands finding the edge of a cotton thong -- and pulls her sweater up that the abdomen he bares has housed two sparks of life, both gone now. One way or another, he doesn't know and he hasn't asked and how dare he when she doesn't remember telilng him? His fingertips and his palms find her flesh, feel the flex and twist of muscle beneath her fair skin.

Danicka's boots are only as high as her ankles. It takes no effort at all for her to be out of them. It takes more effort for her to wrap both arms around his neck and step back, moving onto the edge of the bed and laying back, pulling him over her as he's tugging her sweater off. Her camisole is gray cotton and gray lace. Her panties are black for once and he's never seen that before on her, but he may very well not be looking because she's kissing him again.

Just fuck her. Just fuck her. Nothing else, her body says as she works her legs out of her jeans. Don't love me, her gasping tells him, while her hands reach for the waist of his jeans. Danicka doesn't tell him she wants him, or needs him inside of her, and she leaves the fact that she loves him downstairs and out on the street and does her best to forget that it's true when she eats at his mouth without restraint. Surely it doesn't matter whether she would give him everything -- if she thought he could handle it -- when she pushes her hand into his undone jeans and under his boxer-briefs and touches him. Surely if he'll just fuck her, it just...

...won't matter anymore.

[Lukas] There's a suddenness to this -- a crashing down around his ears like a waterfall on his head. He was kissing her, wasn't he? Softly. Questioningly. And then her mouth was open and he was plundering it and then --

She pulls him down on the bed. He catches himself with his hands just in time to avoid falling on her narrow frame and fragile bones. She moves up on the bed or he moves her up; he's pulling her sweater off, and then her camisole somehow floats off her body as well, shears off like a pod stripped from a ripe seed. It's all so sudden. His head is swimming. He hasn't kissed her in, god, two weeks and change; he hadn't thought he ever would again. He didn't even think he wanted to until the night Mrena died, and

and she's kicking her jeans off before reaching for his, and his hands are stroking from her thigh to shoulder, passing over her hips and cupping over her breasts along the way. She undoes the fastenings on his denims as he's bending his mouth to her skin, and reaches her hand in his eyes shut of their own accord, and the muscles of his face pull taut with pleasure and want and anticipation. He stops for a stark instant, drops his brow against her collarbone. She can feel him panting against her. She touches him then, strokes him as expertly as he knows she can, and all of a sudden his hand comes off her body and grasps hers by the wrist, removes her touch from him.

"Danička, počkejte."

He whispers this not like a secret but like a tattered supplication; a request for a stay of execution. It's the same; it's not the same.

Lukas lifts his head. His eyes are all black; rimmed in blue. She can read him like a book. There's want there. That was never in question. There's something else, too; closer to pain.

"Je to, co chcete? Je to opravdu, jak si budete přát?"

[Danicka] The bed underneath them sinks and rebounds with their weight, jostling them enough to break their kiss but only for a moment, before Danicka at least is craning her neck upward to devour his lips and feast on his tongue. She shakes her hair back as he strips her camisole from her chest, kisses him again. And again. Somehow she knows that if she takes him far enough he won't be able to stop and she can just let go. Of this. Of him. If she pushes him hard enough, he'll take her, drive into her and it won't be making love. They can just fuck in this motel room like they should have fucked the first time, and avoided all the rest.

It's sudden, and it's wrong, and she can't claim that she doesn't care. She also cannot pretend that she knows, for a second, what she is doing with herself. There's no plan here, no intention to hurt him. She does not want to let him in. She does not want to stop touching him. She cannot stop kissing him.

His hands, hot as hearthstones, slide up and over her skin, caress her like he does this every night. He touches her as though he made her, as though he knows the curve of her breasts and the lines of her torso as intimately as a creative god. Danicka finds him wanting and her breath hitches with longing, then again with something entirely different as his brow rests against her chest. She wants, suddenly and painfully, to wrap her arms around him and just hold him there. The urge to comfort him, if that is what it is, is so overwhelming it is almost need.

But he does not want comfort. He wants her hand moved, and she opens her eyes and relaxes her wrist and hand in his grip. Danicka's breathing is elevated when he finds her eyes. And her face is, for a few moments, unreadable. There's a line between her eyebrows and a tension in her kiss-colored lips, her teeth just barely on edge. She doesn't answer for awhile, and then exhales a breath he likely couldn't even tell she was holding.

"Ne," she whispers, "ale to je to, co mohu zvládnout."

[Lukas] Seconds go by and Lukas is just watching her, his flickering between hers. At this range, in this light, the blue -- what little there is -- is nearly colorless. It's clear as ice, as glass.

She exhales and her chest moves beneath him. Her words are a wisp of sound between them. He grows aware of her body all but bared, her scrap of underwear, stark black against her fair skin.

His left hand is still splayed over her body. She's thinner than he remembers. He can feel her ribs beneath her skin; she's shaved off some of what precious little flesh she has, and now it feels like he could pick her up with one hand, like he could close his hand hard and crush her.

He lets go her wrist. For a second he winces. A wince pulls at his face, makes his forehead furrow and his mouth twist. His right hand opens over her side as well. He takes her body between his hands, and then he wraps his arms around her suddenly, under the arch of her back, and he presses his face to the center of her chest, holds her to him, inhales her.

God, I've missed you, he thinks. I've missed you. I've missed you.

This is not what he says. He says nothing for some time; there's only the sound of him breathing, faster than he strictly needs to, audibly, harshly.

And then he raises his head. What he says is: "To není to, co chci, ale uvidíme, že ji dám vám, pokud budete chtít."

[Danicka] It's getting warmer outside, day by day. Sunnier. Danicka -- jobless, layabout, lazy Danicka -- spends her days sleeping in, going out onto the sundeck of Kingsbury Plaza, and goes out all night to dance, to drink, to tempt people who, as of late, she has not been going home with. Her skin is still fair because she does not stay outside for hours and hours at a time, but is steadily and noticably darkening. It's more golden than pink, not the sort of flesh that will turn brown with too much. It sets off her skin, turns on her eyes.

This is the season she said she wanted, when he'd asked her if she could have anything...anything at all. She has it now, and she does not look happy. She did not seem happy or satisfied when he saw her last, the night Mrena died. She did not look happy or even stable when he saw her at 550. She was not happy, when he left her at the W. She had been naked, and broken, and empty.

Now she is naked, and thin, and her cheeks are flushed with activity and lust and god knows what else. She flinches slightly when he wraps her in his arms, tenses the way she did when he held her in front of the pharmacy, closing her eyes to hide the pain in them...pain he wouldn't see even if she kept them open. Because he is holding her like this, burying his face against her. She tenses, and then she shivers, as though to force relaxation.

Her eyes stay closed as he lifts his head to look at her. They slide open when he speaks. The way she looks at him, you'd think that he'd betrayed her horribly somehow by saying it. By stopping. By daring to ask her what she really wants.

"What do want, Lukáš?" she says, her voice on the edge between ache and anger.

[Danicka] [Correction: What do YOU want. Yeah...]

[Lukas] What do you want from me? she'd asked earlier. What do you want? she asks now, and it frustrates him suddenly -- not the question, perhaps, but the answer. His right hand balls into a fist and a spike of tension wracks through the entirety of his body; he pounds his fist into the mattress beside her hard enough to rattle the headboard at the other end of the bed.

"I want you!"

This is nearly a shout. Pressed together as they are, his chest to her stomach, she can feel the force of his words, the way his chest cavity constricts on itself to force the breath out.

A beat. Then he lowers his brow to her again, gently, with something like resignation. Her heart beats beneath her breastbone, beneath his forehead.

He tries again, quieter: "I want you. All of you. I want what we had. I want you smiling at me in the rain. I want more than what we had. I want you to stop pushing me away, and I want to stop pushing you away. I want ... trust between us."

Strange; between them, cunt, whore, slut, bitch, fuck -- these don't even raise an eyebrow, but trust is nearly toxic. It hangs in the air like the foulest of curses. He dispels it when he lifts his head, and his eyes burn into hers.

"I know I don't have the right to ask for any of this anymore. So I'll take what you want to give. I'll give you what you want from me. So why don't you just tell me, Danička, what do you want from me? Should I just fuck you? Would that make you happy?"

[Danicka] When Lukas slams his fist into the mattress, the woman beneath him flinches, her eyes flickering closed and she takes in a sudden, truncated breath that she refuses to exhale for a spasming second. The moon is waning, and thank god for that, but he is still Garou. He is still an Ahroun. And what trust she had for him -- little as he saw of it, little as he may have realized it -- is fragile now, as easily shattered as glass, as her bones, as the look in her eyes when they open again.

There have been times when he's come to rest on her and found her pliant and warm and welcoming, pulling him into her arms as though he has only ever belonged right there with her. Now she remains tense and drawn into herself, as though the moment of him resting his brow to her chest cannot be believed in and will not last. He will take that fist and smash it into her ribs, bite through her collarbone, snap her neck by pulling on her hair, if she makes him angry.

It takes time for Danicka to exhale, and open her eyes, and hear him. She is inscrutable when he lifts up again and looks into her eyes as though he could read them, as though he was ever able to see into her so easily except when she was arching her back and crying his name and letting him see everything, everything she was and felt for him.

Would it make her happy, he asks, if he just fucked her?

Danicka's brow furrows; the lines deepen. "...I wanted to give you everything," she whispers, like a secret. "What if you leave me again?"

You take everything.

[Lukas] They take the position of lovers, of two people in love with one another: lying together on a bed, she mostly naked, he getting there. They take these positions but they are not lovers. If they fucked right now, they'd merely be two people who fuck one another; whether they do or not, they're close to opponents, close to enemies in some sort of symbiotic war where every pound of flesh stripped from one echoes itself in the other.

They're discussing terms, in a way. Of accord, or surrender; or perhaps, of war. She wants to know what if, and he turns his face aside, grimaces. He wants to get up. He doesn't want to get up. He never wants another iota of space between them. He wants to open his mouth and put his tongue to her skin, his teeth. He wants to eat her alive. Hold her inside him, precious, safe.

It's spring now. She's turning golden. He wonders if he tasted that on her tongue, on her breast. He wonders if he'd taste it in her cunt, the heat of the approaching summer molten on his tongue. He wonders what the fuck he's wondering, angry at himself.

"How am I supposed to answer a question like that?" he asks her. He's hushed; he sounds half-furious. "If I promised never to leave you again, it's a promise that'll take a lifetime to keep. It'll mean nothing until the end."

Slowly, his right hand uncurls. It returns to her body, his fingers curving around the curvature of her ribs; his thumb just below the lower arc of her breast. Her frame is long but narrow. She can't even break a fucking coffee mug reliably, but tearing himself from her broke his fucking heart.

"Leaving you was a mistake." All the hurricanes of words in his head, and this is the best he can come up with. "I should've never ... "

It's as far as he can get. He cups her breast in his hand; closes his eyes and sucks her nipple fiercely, furiously into his mouth.

[Danicka] One day, they'd both known from the beginning, he would hurt her, and it would change everything. They had thought it would be a hand across her face, maybe around her throat, or her body hitting the floor. Disciplined or not, intended or not, Lukas would hurt her and something unnamed and vital between them would break. But they both thought that it would be physical...at least, Danicka had. Lukas had expected, ironically, for her to leave him. Cheat on him. Fuck a roomful of men at once, because she's a whore, go to bed with a married couple, because she's a slut. She would be the one to leave him behind, and this fear, this very possibility that was never one, is what he could not cope with.

Her legs are, at least, not wrapped around his waist the way they are when he is buried inside of her. He has not pulled her panties aside and he is still almost completely clothed, but if it were not for the vicious tension between them right now they would look like people who are about to fall asleep together, or about to strip down completely and ...not fuck, but something entirely different.

"I wasn't asking you to promise," Danicka says, sounding tired, when he says it would mean nothing. Yet she doesn't explain what she was asking, what she meant. She feels his hand on her and her breathing stays quick, her ribs expanding against his palm. Looking at him hurts; she can't look away.

For reasons she can't fathom -- whether because the words are too much or the reality is too much or because she is right there, warm and nearly naked and laid out as if in offering -- Lukas suddenly cuts himself off and pulls her breast into his mouth. Danicka gasps at the abruptness of it as much as the sensation, her fingers sliding into his hair. She holds him there for a moment, her eyes closing tightly and her head falling back. Her spine arches slightly underneath him, her entire body pressing up against his, begging for contact.

"Take off your clothes," she breathes out, the demand ragged. "Prosím, Lukáš, chci tě. Let me have you."

[Lukas] Lukas makes some sort of sound -- it may have been intended as some kind of acquiescence, something like [i]okay; all right[i] -- but it's muffled against her breast, against her flesh.

Then he's taking his hands off her and going for the buttons of his shirt, which is a blue shades and shades darker than his eyes, and her hands are pushing his pants down past his hips; his boxer briefs after that. His weight is briefly upon her as he twists out of the shirt, strips out of his undershirt. His breath shudders in his throat when she touches his body: his chest or his sides, his hips, his cock.

It takes a matter of seconds to get his clothes off. The covers have not yet been turned down. The counterpane is some synthetic material, polyester or acrylic or something; it's vaguely scratchy to the touch. He grabs her by the hips and moves her up the bed, kicks his pants all the way off. Then Lukas pushes himself up on his knees and finds his wallet in the back pocket of his jeans by touch. Opens it by touch. Finds the condom packet by touch; tears it open by touch.

He's watching her through all this. He's staring at her, and his brow is furrowed, and his eyes are keen as lasers. He's staring at her as though to remember her, or to compare her to his memories, or --

The intensity in the air is electric. He's hurt her. It changed everything. He doesn't know what they're doing here, not really. He doesn't know where it's going from here. What there was of trust is broken, shredded, pieces. She pushed him away and he decided enough was enough; and then he decided no, it wasn't enough, it couldn't be enough, and now here they are again, and she's bare on a hotel bed and he's staring at her eyes while he rolls the condom on; he's staring at her when he leans forward to pull her panties off; and then he's staring at what's between her legs when he rubs his fingertips over her cunt, and this is the first time, the first time in more time than he can easily remember right now that he's felt her wetness on his hand.

"Oh, God," he breathes; his eyelids flicker as though he'd like to close his eyes, but his brow remains furrowed, darkens more, if anything. What do you want, they've asked each other, over and over; I want you, they've said to each other, over and over. It means everything and it tells them nothing.

But this still feels the same: her wet cunt slippery against his fingertips; the hot entrance to her body. He comes down over her, holds himself up with one forearm braced on the mattress. There's an inch or two of space between their torsos, diminishing and increasing as they breathe. He takes himself in his slicked hand, looking down to guide himself to her, watching where they'll join until he begins to penetrate her, because then he watches her face instead, and her eyes if they're open, with such concentration, such focus, that he's almost certainly trying to read her.

[Lukas]

[Danicka] They are undressed faster even than the first night, faster than some nights when they had not seen each other for a week, touched each other for ten days; Danicka helps Lukas with his buttons, kissing his jaw and the side of his neck. As he's shrugging out of it she is pushing his pants away from his hips, gasping at the feeling of his thighs on her palms. Words come to mind, rise in her body like heatwaves coming off of pavement, but she doesn't voice how much she has missed the feel of his body, how until now she thought she'd forgotten.

She has had many, many men in between that night at the W and this pre-sunrise meeting. She has had women. She has given herself over to the temptations of the flesh and taken drugs that wreck her while passing through a physiology like Lukas's making almost no difference. Or at least...this is what she was up to during the week that she did not see him, when they were both destroying themselves in the wake of how they destroyed each other.

Since that night she has not touched anyone else. So his body feels new and strange and incredible under her hands and against her own skin; his body feels equisitely familiar, known and adored and painfully missed. Danicka pulls him against her as soon as his clothes are off, kissing him over and over, her mouth slowing against his as though this is what she wants, as though making love is greater than Just Fucking, but that is because when she kisses him she forgets who she is. She forgets the last time they fought. She forgets how long it's been since they've seen one another, had one another, loved one another.

But whenever their lips part he's watching her, thoughtful and a little lost, staring through her and into her. She looks back at him and, to stop him from seeing her the way he does, kisses his lips again. She lifts her hips so he can peel away her panties and opens her legs to wrap one of them fully around his waist. She moans into his mouth when he touches her, when his lips part to groan to a god they both know isn't there. Danicka's head falls back. They're not quite at the pillows, they're lying in the middle of the bed with their clothes draped over the edge, her leg and her arms around him, her fingernails stroking his back with gentle, slow savagery, a soft threat of how she will clutch at him later, hold onto him later.

Her eyes are closed while he explores her with his hand, strokes fingertips across the place he remembers, the warmth he cares about, the wetness telling him yes, yes, yes because Danicka won't speak to him, isn't even looking at him until his hand leaves her. She turns her head, eyes opening slowly -- the room is dim but soon enough dawn will be turning the sky outside violent, and blue, and it will slap harshly against the lamplight in this room that neither of them bothered to douse -- and looks up at him in a way she hasn't since...

...it's possible he can't remember the last time she looked this open, this real, this...

his.

Danicka cannot look at him long. She closes her eyes again and lifts her head, running her hands up his back and over his shoulders. She takes his face in hand and rolls her hips gently, tightens her leg around him to pull him deeper. The sensation makes her shudder against his chest, and this may very well be the moment when he realizes what is so different from the first time. She told him then she would not lie on her back willingly for him. The first time they did they were unquestionably making love; it was as undeniable as the phase of the moon outside.

She slides her other leg around his waist, holding him to her and breathing out across his cheek: "Oh...Lukáš...."

[Lukas] This is the one constant in their tattered, tumultuous excuse for a relationship.

The first of May was far from the first time they've argued or fought. It's far from the first time he's voiced uncertainty that they could last, that they could -- he could -- handle it. It wasn't even the first time one of them tried to leave the other. Looking back, their history is written in smoke and blood, a record of a war. Sometimes it seems the one thing tying them together no matter what else, no matter what, was --

well. This.

She rolls her hips. Gently. She tightens her leg around him and she pulls him deeper. Watch his eyes fall closed, his lips part: a silent sigh, ah or god or some open-voweled word like that, unvoiced. The muscles at the small of his back tighten; the ones in his lower abdomen. He pushes into her as she draws him in, and then all at once his spine gives up its convex bend, arches the other way. He presses against her, and he shifts over her. His weight settles in the cradle of her thighs. He holds himself inside her, as deep as he can, as though he might be able to seal every last divide they had. His forearms brace against the mattress; his hands open over her shoulderblades.

Like this, he lifts her toward him. They press together and she's hot, she's hot and wet and as good as he remembers; better. He's fucked more blondes than he can remember, and in these last few weeks he's fucked at least a handful more; he's looked for green-eyed blondes with or without even realizing it, and he's never, ever found her.

Until 550. Until she stood in the middle of the dance floor and drew him to her as surely as he's drawn countless hapless women to him. It was as irresistible as that; as undeniable, as primal an attraction as that.

She's whispering his name past his cheek, into his ear. It makes his eyes open -- he sees a wasteland of counterpane and sheet, valleys and fissures made of fabric, hillocks made of polyester faux-down. He closes his eyes again.

"Jsem tak zamilovaná do tebe." He sounds anguished. It sounds like a confession. "Tolik tě miluji."

He turns his face to her neck and he kisses her throat, the angle of her jaw. He presses her chest closer to his even as he begins to move inside her, slowly, not quite gently, long heavy strokes that drive him into her with a sort of desperate, mute intensity.

His mouth is tracing a path to the corner of her lips now; he's moving over her, his palm hot on her shoulderblade, her shoulder, her neck. He shifts his right hand to her face, pressing her back and turning her face to his, turning his face to hers. He finds her mouth with his, blindly. The kiss is a sort of mutual annihilation. It burns his mind clean.

[Danicka] Even in the beginning she freely admitted that what kept her coming to him was the sex. Even when everything else seemed too fucked up for words, she would seek him out even when he angered her, even when he'd hurt her, even when she was frightened of him...all because of how he can make her feel when they're like this. When they are like this, limbs unwinding and bodies melding and merging together, she feels something she can't remember feeling before, at least not this consistently, not this reliably, with anyone else.

Danicka does not feel alone when Lukas is making love to her, and it doesn't matter if he has her bent over the edge of the bed or if it's more like this moment, a slow side of his cock into her pussy and a gentle rocking of their hips against one another. It does not make any difference if they are in a shithole motel or a mid-range one like this or one like the Omni, the W, the Affinia. It does not matter if they are in his narrow bed at the Brotherhood or if he is allowed into her bed -- not knowing how rare that is, how special he has been to her, not seeming to be able to grasp the full weight of being her first love, her only love -- because what matters is this:

he moves into her, eliminates the last of the illusory distance between them, and moans in penitent pain words that she has been sobbing to hear for days over the last two weeks. She aches because she wants it to be true. She aches because she believes him. She hurts, because she knows that in the end it may make...no...difference.

Danicka arches against him, keeping their bellies and chests aligned and pressed together. She tilts her head back to give his mouth room to move on her throat and her her face, her breathing coming faster but not quite reaching the sharp, rapid gasps she looses when she's getting close to coming. He knows her every movement by now, knows the sounds she makes when she's on the verge of orgasm, can tell when she wants it faster and harder even before she begs for it aloud, sometimes. That's coming. That's on the horizon, waiting for him to go on fucking her until she loses all sense of herself.

Which is why what he said was true: it's never just fucking.

"Nepřestávejte, moje láska," she whispers in his ear, gasping the words as he rolls his hips and pushes deeper into her body, deeper where he cannot be found or abandoned or left behind. "Nepřestávejte milovat mě.

"Potřebuji tě," Danicka murmurs against his lips, before she loses herself in the kiss, thrusting her body against him harder. She squeezes him inside of her, shuddering as their tongues dance between their lips. "Potřebuji tě," she purrs again, sharper this time, as though to make sure her heard her, to make sure he knows, to make sure he doesn't...stop.

[Lukas] He has nothing to say to that, any of that. He has no words left. They've been burnt to ash. Everything inside him has burnt to ash: the blasted shambles of his self; the memories and the misgivings, what happened in the last two and a half desolated weeks.

It would be easy to say that he's here because Mrena died, because his packmate died and he needs comfort. It would be easy to say that, and it is true that some part of this was catalyzed by that -- that if Mrena had not died, he would never have called her the night after they parted so bitterly before the dawn

and he doesn't know how she spent those grey hours from the time he left her to the time she returned home. He doesn't know that she walked the streets for hours in her clubbing clothes too thin for that sort of weather, in her clubbing shoes too high-heeled and uncomfortable for that sort of wear. He doesn't know she didn't want to go home, either, not because there were too many eyes and too many questions but because there was no one there, no one at all.

Has she ever told him that when she's with him she doesn't feel alone? She's told him that when he's there she feels stronger, which is both more and less than what she hasn't told him

but the point is, if Mrena had never died he would've never called her, but he would've found her again somewhere, and somehow. He might've called her another time. He might've seen her in another club, or just in a fucking grocery store somewhere, in a bookstore, in a cafe, at the Park, on the Mile, going on with her life. Perhaps they would have ended up here anyway, at some point, somehow.

He's not here because he's in mourning for Mrena. He's not here because he needs human contact to remind himself he's alive. He's here because

-- potřebuji tě --

some part of him began to die the night he left her. Because tearing her out of him opened a wound that wouldn't regenerate, wouldn't close, wouldn't heal, and he's been bleeding out ever since. Because he is grieving, but not really for Mrena, whose soul would reincarnate, but for what was between them, that is not, and might not be again.

In the end this may make no difference.

Still: this is where they are. This is where he is, inside her. They are concentric. He holds her in his arms, covers her with his body. She holds him in return, inside the embrace of her legs and her arms, inside her body. They move together, rocking on the bed, thrusting against each other, rolling, two not-quite-humans reduced to waveforms. They lose themselves in the kiss -- is his hand still on her face? is that his breath soughing in his chest? -- and he loses all sense of his boundaries. He doesn't open his eyes. They've sealed together; there's no line left, between them.

So he opens his eyes again. He finds her beneath him, and her eyes are open to his. It's possible he can't remember the last time he saw her this open to him; that's possible but it's not true, because he does remember, and it was a goddamn month ago or more; it was the night he had her again in his bed at the Brotherhood, and

(he told her the W was his favorite hotel, but the truth is his favorite place of all is in her bed; in her.)

that was the night they told each other for the first time that they loved each other, loved each other. The next time they met they broke up. The words are so simple; they seem so juvenile. High school chatter. Junior high gossip. Only; listen to them, devoid of connotation, because there are no words more appropriate, more fitting: broke up. Broken; shattered; pieces.

Twelve nights is all they ever had. This is the thirteenth. It's amazing that he knows her so well now, knows the sounds she makes hwen she's on the verge of orgasm, can tell when she wants it faster and harder even before she begs for it aloud, sometimes. He looks down at her and her eyes are open, a green that can be utterly crystalline, razor-sharp; that can be pale blue; that can be secret and opaque as plant life. His hand is on her face after all. He strokes back her hair and he kisses her; he holds his mouth to hers as he shifts his weight over her, pushes himself up a little to give himself leverage, and now he's gasping into her mouth, panting against her throat. He raises his chin and he kisses her again.

"Blíž," he says, only he's raising himself on his hands, so perhaps he means the wrap of her legs, the way she pulls him into her. Their torsos part. He looks at her breasts moving when she breathes, when she arches her back. He dips his head -- this is sheer impulse -- he tugs at her nipples with his lips, licks them, sucks her breast into his mouth while he fucks her. Then he's over her again, and he's going a little harder, a little faster; her hair ripples against the counterpane. He doesn't think of wind over ripe grain, or spun gold. He thinks of gold-threaded silk brocade, that sort of luster, that sort of weight and drape, that sort of complexity and resonance in the light. He thinks of her.

"Blíž," again, "držte mi zpřísňovaly."

[Danicka] Up until the moment he entered her, Danicka thought she could do this some other way: fuck him, and not make love to him. Kiss him and not mean it. Lay on her back and wrap him in her arms and legs and not want to hold him, hold onto him. She has never told him that when he is inside of her, or simply and warmly holding her, she does not feel alone in this world. The closest she has come to this is admitting that when Martin was in the hospital and preparing to leave the city she was miserable because, as she'd said then

I'm alone.

She cannot tell him that she doesn't understand herself most of the time, doesn't try to reconcile herself to herself because she knows she can't. She can't explain that she doesn't know why she's here, she doesn't know what to do with herself. She has only drunkenly and wearily admitted

I don't know who I am.

And it isn't that when she is with him she is given an identity that is missing. It isn't that when she is with him she feels an otherwise missing sense of self-worth. It isn't that Lukas gives her back to herself in some way, or creates something in her out of nothing. But despite the fact that making love to him feels like chaos, and falling, and burning out the remnants of a city and destroying everything, that very chaos and annihilation gives her a clarity she has never found before. Everything gets stripped away -- Tribe, moon, family, past -- until there is nothing left but her, nothing left but him, nothing left but the two of the together.

She is nothing more than herself, and yet in that dark obliteration of all other things, she is not alone, and if this is not a miracle then she doesn't believe in anything. Not the spirits, not Gaia, nothing, nothing, nothing else can be true.

Don't stop, she pleads. I need you, she cries softly in his ear, and she may as well be telling him Don't let go, as though they are holding one another's hands to alleviate some of the terror that comes with oblivion.

Their eyes open, his hand introduces itself to her cheek, and she draws in a tremulous breath, shifting with him on the bedspread. They find a rhythm as natural as tides, as the moon's waning, as though they have known one another for longer than a few months, as though the nights or afternoons they've spent together number more than a dozen, as though this is familiar as some find their homes. As though they are home. Danicka remembers thinking she could fuck him, she could have him one last time and undo a wrong, a lack, that was left behind because of how their adoration of one another crashed into a wall. She remembers believing this but is quickly forgetting. The thoughts are fading so fast.

And leaving nothing but ash, and then smoke, and then only his breath moving across her skin, his lips moving against her mouth. This is what she wants, more than his cock inside her or his hands on her or some orgasm lurking on the horizon. This emptiness, this clarity, this untouched and untouchable closeness with him. As she is thinking that, she feels him moving a little harder, feels his body lifting away from her breasts and stomach as he kisses her, and she gasps when his lips leave hers. She is thinking

Closer

and he says

Blíž

and Danicka's body shudders underneath him. She tightens her legs around his waist, her ankles sliding one over the other, and her eyes -- falling closed briefly as she shivered -- open again to his. Her hands slide over his shoulders to the back of his neck, then into his hair, as though to hold him where he is so he doesn't go any farther away. He does not. He licks and sucks at her breasts and follows the tension in her thighs with his body, pushing deeper.

"Ano," she moans softly, arching her back not only to meet the flex of his hips but in a sort of physical agreement: yes. Closer.

"Prosím, Lukáš," Danicka gasps, pulling his mouth down to hers even as she lifts her head to kiss him again, to kiss him as deeply as he is fucking her, completing them like a ring. A sharp shudder goes through her again, as though shocked by an electric current, and one of her hands moves firm and flat down his back, stops in the middle, and curls until her nails just barely press into his skin. "Oh god," she moans against his mouth, eating at his tongue and lips as though she could devour him slowly like this, pull him even further into her. "Mám tolik stýskalo."

[Lukas] "Je to v pořádku."

This is what he says when she pushes her hand down his back, past the sweeps and sheets of muscle to where the columns of strength flanking his spine surface, lie close to the skin, flex and pull beneath her fingers. This is what he says when she presses her nails, just barely, into his skin, because it's okay for her to dig into her, just like it was okay for her to fuck his face.

"Je to v pořádku."

This is what he says when she says I need you in that tone, a moan muffled against his mouth, which moves against hers. His lips mould the words but his breath barely carries them -- they're a shadow atop his soughing breath, his escalating vital rhythms, pulse and respiration. It's okay: that's what he says to her, and what he said to her a long time ago, when they looked out the window, saw the moon, saw the probable end.

It's okay.

It's okay for her to miss him; for her to need him; for him to feel the same. It's okay, even if this doesn't extend past the night, the dawn, this fuck. It's okay if she wants to get up and leave after this. It's okay if she wants to fuck a roomful of men, or a married couple, or ...

He doesn't care anymore. He doesn't care, as long as she holds him now. That fortress is a wreck as well, a burnt out husk, obliterated. They hold each other in their obliteration. He holds himself over her and she tightens her legs around him and he gasps and she shivers -- they kiss -- she shudders and he thrusts into her hard, and there's a circularity in this, a circuit, as though they don't need to speak anymore to be understood; as though they don't even need to understand one another to react to one another.

When she lets his mouth go he looks at her as though she were wholly new to him, as though he's never been here before; as though he recognizes her nonetheless, and has never been anywhere else but here, with her. He has no words now, but she can read the threads of pleasure lacerating through him: can see them in the way his eyes flicker, sometimes shut, can hear them in the gasps he pulls sometimes, can feel them in the shivers that creep up his spine, and the way he dips his head to her to catch her mouth again, or bite at her shoulder.

His brow is to her shoulder, after. He looks down the rolling length of her body. He watches himself fucking her -- making love to her -- he can't believe he ever thought ...

he doesn't know what he thought. It was wrong.

Seconds, minutes slip by. And he closes his eyes again, and his shoulders flex. He lifts himself up. He can't stop kissing her, and here's another: he catches her mouth as he pushes himself up over her, his hunger sharpening. He pulls her breath into his lungs, inhales it as if he could inhale her into him. His hand opens over her hip. He tilts her hips against his to accept him deeper; replants his hand to support his weight; never breaks the kiss except to ask,

"Dobře?"

breathlessly, because he's moving into her that much faster now, fucking her harder as the fabric of his control runs thin and begins to unravel at the edges. He never had any problem with that before. He never lost his mind before her, or even after her. He never kissed the women he fucked, not like this. He never ate them out, he never laughed with them, he never ... loved them. That's the sum of it, the answer to every equation.

[Danicka] When Lukas moves over her like that, lifting himself up and moving her hips like that, all Danicka can do in answer to his half-whispered question is nod her head. Je to v pořádku. And it is. If he loses his mind while he's inside of her or bites into her shoulder to leave a tattoo of his teeth in her skin. If he kisses her so hard that she cannot help but moan into it, or if he simply gives it to her faster now, harder now, deeper. She nods, and her hand loosens on his back.

Watching him, Danicka runs her fingernails around his side, traces his ribs, runs her hand up to cover his heart. She feels it beating -- thundering -- in his chest, feels his pulse hit her fingertips and run into her own longing and her own vital signs until she goes back to forgetting that there was every any separation between them. It may as well be the first time. It may as well be every time. They have always been making love. They have never been anything but this, anything but together, and she glad to forget the rest.

Her breathing is quiet but faster, sweat beginning to shine on her skin. She accepts him into her body over and over again, quakes with longing, and moves her left hand to his right bicep. Danicka's head tips back. If it is too much for her she doesn't indicate it; if it is not enough

(never enough)

she doesn't start crying out Oh god Lukáš you bastard fuck me harder. He can see the effect he has on her when he thrusts, the taut tremors that run up her body from her thighs and hips all the way to her shoulders, all the way to her gasping little cries that have lost all semblance of coherence. He can feel what he's doing to her in the clenching of her body around his, the heat between them, the sweat, the way her left hand seems to be pulling him closer even while her right hand would appear to anyone else to be in a position of pushing him away.

But she isn't. She holds him now, holds onto him as though for dear life, the whole time he is fucking her, making love to her, giving it to her, having sex with her, with her, with her. She needs him. She missed him so much that she thinks if this ends she will die with it, if she never feels him like this again, if they can't ever be one like this she's not sure she won't be losing something vital

something necessary

and it's been god knows how many minutes, surely not that long but it feels like forever, when that thought hits her and she suddenly gasps, finding his eyes, crying out his name.

"Lukáš," she pleads, writhing against the bedspread, against his flesh, "Lukáš, I'm going to come --!" but it is not much warning, if it is even that, because a split second, a lightning flash later, her fingernails dig into his bicep and her other hand flexes on his chest and her entire body becomes rigid with what looks like -- feels like -- overwhelming, murderous pleasure.

She barely, only barely, keeps her eyes on him, as though that is as much what she needs as him, even when the only thing she is left capable of saying is

"Oh god...Lukáš..."

[Lukas] There's a suddenness to this: a breaking storm, a meteorite dropping on his head. It's not a gradual inevitable build but a spark of a thought that he can have no awareness of, and then a half-second's worth of warning, less, not even enough time for him to process any of this before Danicka is arching, is running rigid, is digging her nails in and clasping him with her thighs. She outstrips him utterly; he's nowhere close to an orgasm, but that's okay, it's okay because

(this is Danička)

and he's glad, he's -- happy, is that even the word? he's happy and he's rended, he's crucified -- to watch her come for him. Around him. Beneath him. Against him.

"Oh god," it's a whisper, watching her; and he is watching her as she watches him, keeps her eyes on him; he's watching her with a stark attentiveness and moving with her and fucking her. Her orgasm is sudden as summer rain, tearing through her, and all he can do is catch her hand in his, against his chest and his heartbeat. "Fuck, Danička, that's it, yes."

If she ever told him what it was that ran through her head the instant before she lost herself -- if she ever told him what it was, exactly, that ran through her head the last time they fucked right before she came over and over and over, he might not understand it, quite. It doesn't make sense, that thinking of loss, thinking of losing him, losing this would make her come like this.

It doesn't make sense, but it makes perfect sense, and if she ever told him any of this he would understand it, just as he understands why he felt he had to leave her because he wanted her too much; just as he understands why this time, this time after they've ended it and walked away and given up, this time that might well be nothing but the first and the last one-night-stand they'll ever have, this time of all the times they have been here, not in this room or this hotel but here in one another's arms, has been so ...

poignant. Devastating. Unguarded.

Lukas is a logical creature. There's nothing logical about what's happening and what's happened between them. It's like geometry in a hyperbolic space: the laws of straight lines are suspended, logic is twisted; she thinks of the end and explodes into orgasm; he thinks there could be nothing after this, and pours everything he has into it.

Everything he has, in the end, is pitifully simple. All he can do now is hold her hand, fuck her body, watch her, watch her.

Oh god, Lukáš, she says, when it's over, and she's slowing, and he's slowing. He's coming down over her; holds himself deep inside her. Their hands are trapped between their bodies, her palm against his breastbone, his knuckles pressing between her breasts. He kisses her, her breath shuddering between them, and he says, "Já jsem tady."

It wouldn't surprise him if she pulled herself off his cock and left now. It wouldn't surprise him, though it would hurt him, if the next time he saw her -- at a club, at the bookstore, at the grocer's, at a cafe -- she was with another man, or another woman; if she left him now and moved back to new york, new orleans; if she moved to fucking south africa, and he never saw her again. Nothing would surprise him now, though plenty would hurt him, but that's okay, too.

It's all right. That's all he has left, too: pitifully simple, a sort of surrender.

He closes his eyes and he stills inside her and he presses his brow to hers and whispers, "Já jsem pořád tady, Danička."

[Danicka] When she comes, she comes so suddenly, so sharply, that the look on her face is very close to pain. The way she clings to Lukas is desperation in physical form, as though if he stops now or lets her go now she won't come back from this orgasm at all. She'll get lost in it, she'll forget everything she ever knew, and she's not even sure she'll care. They have had no time at all to really talk, to figure out what the hell they're doing or what either of them really want or whether they can trust each other for anything past a one-night stand, or an occasional fuck when one or both of them needs to be reminded why the hell they bother with the War, or with Life.

And I've become accustomed to this.

One month after the first time they fucked, Lukas had confessed in gasps in between kisses that he did not know what he would have done if Danicka had met him at the door in that periwinkle dress and told him that after that night it was over, she couldn't bear to be with him anymore. He had told her that there would have been pieces, and she -- who sometimes looks at him in a glance and knows thoughts he hasn't even acknowledged having yet -- did not understand what the hell he meant by that. As though if this ended, she would not be broken into a thousand shards of herself and left without glue or twine or anything to put her heart back together again.

It's become...necessary. And if you tear what's necessary from a man, there's bound to be pieces to pick up in the aftermath.

But, oh, how well she understands now. In a single crystallizing instant of pleasure she realizes what the man she didn't call her boyfriend or lover or anything at the time was talking about. Because it broke her, when she left his room at the Brotherhood and went into a tailspin because she thought it was over, he would not forgive her for walking away, he would never love her the way she was realizing that she loved him, he would not want her anymore. The relief she'd felt when that was not the case was overwhelming, so much so that she trembled slightly right before falling asleep in his arms on her birthday, in her bed.

She had not thought that it could get worse than that, not in matters as transient and unimportant as love and affection and sex. Surely a broken heart couldn't be something anyone with any real strength could suffer from. It was so...weak. And she does not think Lukas is weak. She never has. Even when he was a child she had her head slammed into a wall for defending him, had a pillow put on her lap and a fist hammered against her thighs until bright purple bruises blossomed on her skin because she insisted that he was not pathetic.

And it doesn't really matter now, it was so long ago she's forgotten what it feels like to be hit through a feather pillow and she'd thought she would never forget that, but she would do it again. Spineless as she is amongst the Garou she is a pillar of will amongst most mortals, and viciously protective of those she comes to consider 'hers' in some way. She snapped at Lukas for what he did to and said about Martin. She would have all but clawed at Liadan for referring to Lukas as a psychopath. He may not yet see it, because she herself has buried it so very fucking deep, but Danicka was never born to be the submissive, demure Kinswoman she has been trained to be. The core of her is too strong, her instinct too vibrant.

She is protective, territorial, loyal, and passionate. And he is hers.

Somehow.

She arches beneath his body, holding him inside her, feeling his heart as he moves in her and murmurs encouragements to her. Danicka squirms, letting out plaintive little moans and gasping his name Lukáš...oh Lukáš...oh my god... into the air. Her orgasm rolls through her in wave after wave, as though physically she is making up for lost time with him, as though she hasn't come in weeks, as though it's never been like this

(it hasn't)

and never will be again.

It takes time for her climax to let her go, for that furious spark to dim in her eyes, for her gasping to slow down to a point where there's no fear she's going to hyperventilate. She keeps her eyes on Lukas's, not sure what she expects but for him to keep rocking like that, keep holding her like this. His heart hasn't slowed in the slightest. And then he kisses her, and her eyes close, and she moans again. Her eyes are still closed when he tells her the same thing she murmured to him the first time he came inside her.

She exhales, her breath slow and soft against his cheek, and her eyes slide open again to find his gaze. And it's there, as he says. He's there. It's a moment, just a split second, before his lashes lower and his brow touches hers. They speak that way, faces together, bodies melded, as she tries to remember how to breathe and he holds himself back from thrusting as hard and as fast as he had built up to just before she went over the edge. Her fingers have relaxed and her nails no longer dig into his skin, but she holds onto him still.

"Pobyt," she whispers, or sighs, as though letting go. She is trembling in his arms, against his body, around him. "Nechodím, moje láska. Pobyt, této doby." Danicka gives a shudder, pressing her chest to his, tilting her head back to bare her neck, tightening her legs around him. "A nekončí. Chci víc. Chci tě."

She is still sensitive enough that the first time she rolls her hips it makes her gasp aloud, almost whimpering in a sort of shattered, devastated pleasure, but yet she still fucks up against him, pulls him deeper, moans in his ear: "Ach bože, lásko, já tě potřebují."

[Lukas] Danicka was never born to be submissive. She was never born to be demure. It's arguable she was never born to be the pampered, emptyheaded, kept woman she plays so well.

And god, but she does play the part well. Her six hundred dollar shoes, her two thousand dollar bags, her translucent camisoles that she seems to wear once, her hiphugging jeans that he's peeled off her time and again to reveal

(fucking perfection)

expensive lingerie in some pulseracing color or cut or style or material or other. Her silence when they're in public, with another Garou near; her downcast eyes; the way she speaks when spoken to; the way she says thank you, the way she says please. Her fucking pretty submission, her fucking beautiful vacuosity -- sometime he wishes, he wishes he could be satisfied with this, that he could just claim her and fuck her and breed children out of her and go on with his fucking life, but

she was never born to be submissive, or demure, or tamed. Look at the way she responds; look at the way she digs her nails into him. Look at the way she moves and rolls and gasps and -- look at her eyes.

Her passion is like a storm. It's close to fury. He can't look away from her until it's over, spent and burnt out, until they're holding onto each other like children in a thunderstorm, like survivors after the apocalypse. They hold on to each other and she was never meant to be submissive, but she lies beneath him; she was never meant to be tamed, but she's let him inch closer, little by little; she's let him break her; she's let him back into her arms again.

Into her body again.
Into her, again.

They're not moving now. She's holding him. He's trying his best to hold back, to not fuck her like an animal so soon after her orgasm, so soon after he broke her heart. He's the one trying to catch his breath, and then she says what she says. It makes him shudder. She pulls him closer, her legs tighten around him -- zpřísňovaly, blíž -- and he makes a sound like she were rending him open slowly, a stifled, bitten-back moan, and her head has fallen back, and her lips brush past his brow and he lowers his mouth to her neck, biting at her like he could eat her whole; sucking at her flesh; kissing the sweat from her skin.

And then she moves against him. She rolls her hips and takes him deeper; she takes him farther; that's all it takes. All of a sudden he can't hold back anymore. His gasp could be hers, it comes so soon after hers, and as she's telling him she needs him he's rearing up over her, locking his elbows and holding himself over her. He's fucking her now, fucking her like he'd never stopped at all.

It's a ruthless, reckless rhythm. His head drops. He watches his body drive into hers again and again. He watches her body move to his, under his and against his. He watches her and he sees the sheen of sweat on her stomach, on her breasts. He sees the shape of her, the life in her, the way she moves -- he can smell the life in her, her blood, and what was it Sampson said? Always, your very spirit would tell you to protect her, to keep her safe, to hold her

close. He's close: the first flickers of his climax are clutching at him with hungry hands. There's no room for finesse here -- no room for patience, no room for anything but a headlong hurtle into annihilation.

When his orgasm hits it's unreal; it's more than he can take. His body may as well be carved from a single ingot of steel. His shoulders are massive, locked; his arms may as well be pillars. He drives into her one last time and she misses the way his eyes squeeze briefly shut, she misses it because his head is still down, is lowered like a horned animal ready to charge, but then he forces his eyes open, he raises his head, he looks at her as he bucks against her, involuntarily, his hips flush to hers, grinding sharply into her as his pleasure tears through him.

He's not even breathing. The look on his face is sheer intensity. It's almost fury. His eyes are black -- the blue may as well be a dream, may as well be molten and afire, metal superheated to incandescence. He bends to her at the very end of it, eats at her mouth with his eyes open and fierce. He's panting now, his sides, his chest heaving; he draws out of her a distance and slams back in, groans aloud into her mouth. He does it again and he can hardly stand it, he can't stand it, it tears him apart. So he does it again, before his eyes close at last, and now the kiss is something different; gentling.

He's not annihilated after all. He's still here. She's still here. They're still here, born anew out of the ashes. The past doesn't seem to matter. The future doesn't exist yet. They're held in the passing moments, perfect, whole again.

Joints unlock. He lowers himself to her, takes her face between his hands. He's kissing her over and over again. He doesn't want to stop kissing her, because then she might speak, or he might; she might say

Jsem na odchodu ty.

and he might just fucking cease to exist.

[Danicka] Existing after making love to Lukas is like the afterlife.

Danicka does not -- and would not -- open her mouth and tell him that she loses all sense of time and space when he is inside of her. She loves poetry, loves the books he gave her that she did not give back to him, but she is not a poet or a writer herself. She could not bring herself to say aloud something so true that speaking it makes it meaningless: when they are together like this, she knows herself and understands her life in a way she never can, otherwise. It is like dying, and upon reaching some post-death mystery, she can look down at her existence and see, with perfect and elusive clarity, everything she needs to know.

And with the peace of the grave, it does not bother her to have not always known, to have made the mistakes she did or forgotten the things that mattered. It is all right, everything is all right, from where she is, when where she is happens to be is intertwined with him.

Já tady patří.

I belong here.

Afterwards there's no hundred-dollar meals, no six-hundred dollar shoes, no lingerie to inflame him again or be shoved into his hands, dropped on the floor, lost in a crash. Afterwards she has no real savagery left, only a line of poetry

(elemental comfort)

and Lukas's sweat rolling down his abdomen to drop onto her belly, which may never swell with his children or anyone else's, because god only knows what happened the last two times. Afterwards she catches her breath, her skin flushed underneath its tan, her lips parted and her pupils dilated and the mark of his teeth and the shape of his mouth on her neck. Before he ever saw her like this he saw her in a cafe and saw the imprint of someone else's biting kiss on her collarbone, a faint bruise of lust that was not his, that marked her and mocked him: not yours.

He's marked her neck. He's holding her in his arms as she holds him in her legs even a minute, two minutes afterward. Their sweat mingles, their bloodlines prove their purity by scent, he looks into her eyes and sees the source of that call to his very spirit telling him

Protect.

Keep.

Hold.

And Lukas does not know if she really is his. He cannot just fuck her and leave her, he cannot just breed her and move on with his life, he does not seem to know what the hell he wants if not her, but he does not look deeply into her and gain some cosmic reassurance that it will always be like this. She will always love him, she will never hurt him, she will forever be as much his as she is in this moment, lifting her hand to gently, tenderly push a curling lock of jet-black hair off his sweating forehead.

Because, in this moment, she is. She has his moans tattooed on her tongue, flavoring her breath, echoing like whispers in her ears. She has his body still filling hers, the fire where they meet not quite fading yet, burning her skin and melting her from the inside out. She has his hands holding her near, his lips caressing her like he has never been anything but her lover, and for a very long time afterward, she has his heartbeat against her palm, which has not moved, and does not move.

Danicka does not stop kissing him, or try to speak to him, until she feels his hammering, slamming pulse slow down to a tempo she recognizes like her own. She does not stop kissing him until her own heartbeat is steady again, until they are not gasping for air anymore. And she lays her head back, and looks at him like he was lost and just now given back to her, and she says

"I'm sorry I pushed you away."

Saying it has an almost painful effect on her. She shivers slightly, as though cold, and yet she soldiers on, like one would hunch their shoulders and wrap their arms and push through the gale of a blizzard.

"I'm sorry I ever treated you like you didn't matter."

Her eyes are a deep, earthy green now, like the grass growing in the parks now, like the summer-saturated leaves on trees no longer pale and shy with their own newness. She looks up into his more crystalline, sometimes oceanic and sometimes burning-starlight blue ones and thinks about a hundred things that she cannot say, could never take back, is afraid of having thrown back in her face. Her eyebrows tug together tightly for a split second, but she tries to soothe them with the very words that, in their aching honesty, were the cause of the flicker of pain in the first place:

"Jste natolik drahé, aby mě."

[Lukas] It's painful for her to say what she does. It's painful for him to hear it, too, and as soon as I'm sorry is past her lips his eyes are opening; he's resisting the urge to shake his head, to tell her she has nothing to apologize for. He bites it back. He doesn't say it because he understands better than anyone that sometimes, the apology is as much for the penitent as the injured.

He doesn't say it because, on some level, he needs to hear this, too. Not that she's sorry, but what's implied, and what she's been telling him over and over again as they moved together:

You matter. I need you.

which is, in the end, only what he's been all too starkly aware of since the night he walked out of the W with her lingerie crumpled in his fist.

Drahé, she says, and his eyes shut again; they squeeze shut, his brow furrows, and so he misses the echoing tug of her eyebrows, the same flash of pain on her face. Love shouldn't hurt, some idiot human sentimentalist said once. Lukas doesn't know what sort of love he was talking about, because sometimes he can't imagine love not hurting. He can't imagine it possible for a mortal shell to hold such incandescent emotions without singeing a little, searing a little, burning down a little from the inside out.

Lukas gathers her to him. His arms wrap around her and he crushes her up against him, turns his mouth to her neck, kisses her once, fiercely. These words are hushed but stark, raw at the edges:

"Pobyt o noci. Prosím, zůstaň se mnou dnes večer."

[Danicka] Those apologies have been rattling around in her mind for so long now she has lost count of the days. She heard them in the beat of songs at clubs, heard them in the background buzz of computers going all around her, heard them in her heartbeat whenever she was fucking, getting fucked, making some poor girl smother herself with a pillow so her boyfriend wouldn't hear her orgasm. He'd asked her why she was doing this, why she pretended he didn't matter, and the best she could come up with was that she didn't like feeling weak.

God, what a pale, pathetic excuse for turning her back on him. Holding him at arm's length, kicking him in the shins, pulling his hair so that he would leave her alone and not mention her brother, not tell her the truth, when the truth is that she doesn't ever tell him anything real until she can't help herself anymore. How childish, to hate your own weakness and frailty so much that you turn around and destroy everything around you, everything you see that could, with a little work, be beautiful.

He is precious to her, beautiful to her, so dear that he has to know -- and she has to tell him -- that never for a moment should he believe the lies even when she's the one telling them. Never, ever believe the distant glance or the dismissive words, please believe the moments like this, with outnumber and hopefully outweigh the rest, where she is kissing his mouth as though to share their souls and telling him she is sorry, ultimately, for what she is capable of doing, what she has done, to hurt him.

And he kisses the mark he made on her throat. And she wraps her arms around him suddenly, too, tight and clinging and desperate, shivering at the intensity of him still inside her.

"Nechci odejítm," Danicka assures him, all the words coming in a rush, a breath, a breeze.

[Lukas] If he could stay here forever, he just might.

But of course he can't. He can't even stay for long. He'll crush her with his weight. He'll suffocate her with his rage. The sun will rise and she'll want to leave, or he will, or ... there are a million reasons why this cannot last, and in spite of all of them, he's content, he's determined not to let go. Not yet.

Another minute, he thinks. Another ten seconds.
Drahé, he thinks; and then, a word that he has far less right to: Moje.

Only -- she's not anymore. He broke that promise first, for all that he thought she would, for all that he thought, or feared, or convinced himself that her fidelity wouldn't last a month, a week, a day. He broke that promise and she hasn't renewed it, and he wouldn't ask her to, because he doesn't care about that anymore; doesn't care right now, didn't care when he called her here.

She could've fucked a room full of men for all he cared. She could've fucked her way through the city. She could be the whore of babylon and that would hurt him, it would tear him apart to know and to watch, but it wouldn't have made a difference. It would not have made him want or love her less.

Tonight, anyway. Tomorrow? That's too far away for him to think of. He doesn't know what happens from here on out, and before he fell into her, came into her, he thought he would ask her afterward: what happens now?

The question is no longer on his mind. It's been stripped out of his bones; everything he is has been stripped away and replaced with some part of her.

Lukas stirs at last. He shifts his weight off her, rolls half to the side. Their lower bodies are still tangled. He makes no move to disentangle, nor to get under the covers, nor even to grab a pillow from the head of the bed. He pillows his head on his arm instead, opens his eyes and looks at her across this slight distance. His free arm drapes across her still. After a moment it moves; he caresses her shoulder, her breast. His thumb brushes over her nipple gently, over and over, thoughtfully.

He doesn't ask her where they go from here. He tells her this instead, laying the words out gently like stones onto a primitive chessboard:

"Potřebuji tě. Nemám žádné podmínky doleva. Vezmu si to, co jste mi může dát, a dát co chcete."

And he never meant to say any of this. Up until ten minutes ago, perhaps ten seconds ago, he meant to ask her where they were going from here. He meant to talk terms and conditions; he meant to bargain, to hedge, to haggle.

These are not terms and conditions. This is unconditional surrender. It's total fucking capitulation. He looks at his hand on her breast as he speaks -- the way her breathing lifts and lowers his hand, the way her flesh fits his palm. He looks at this and thinks: I cannot live without this. And that's enough.

The edge of his mouth turns up at the very last. There's no mirth in his eyes when they flick back to hers.

"I guess I've already said that," he finishes, quietly.

[Danicka] Edward Bellamonte is deposed. Katherine Bellamonte is dethroned. Dylan's light has dimmed if not died, Katerina is gone, Caleb is so new he is barely known. Mrena's eyes are shut. Sam proposes marriage rather than mating to a woman who does not love him and could not accept him even if she did. The Unbroken Circle was never a chain. There are no weak links, only a perfect ring gradually twisted, scorched at intervals, stretched out of shape until it can contain nothing, keep out nothing, hold no one. The only leader they have left is Lukas, and he is running out of options, running out of directions, watching the carefully laid plans fall apart at the seams, unraveling into nothing.

He cannot stay here forever. He cannot come into Danicka's bed and hold her every night, his brow against the back of her neck and his arm around her making a stronger circle than the one his pack seems to form now. He cannot trust that his Rage won't break something around her, or in her, if he suffocates himself in her den -- her apartment, that's the mortal word -- of glass and steel and humanity. He cannot promise that he won't crush her one day, hurt her. And he cannot believe, idealistic cynic that he is, that he can remain this content forever.

But another minute, he can have to keep. Another ten seconds are already his, and then ten more, and ten more, and her breath moves her chest under his hand, tickles his ears, shows itself to his eyes in the expansion and relaxation of her ribcage.

What has she been telling him, over and over?

Stay. Do not go, my love. Stay, this time.

I need you.

Precious.

I do not want to leave.

Yet he looks at her and thinks a version of what he thought the first time, almost every time, that she laid on her back and welcomed him into her arms: he does not deserve this. He cannot call her Mine the way he wants to, because he walked away from her, or because she is not really submitting to him or because he cannot truly own her or because he won't ask her to renew a promise that she didn't break. So he does not ask her to be his, to tell him where they can go from here. There is no opening of negotiations, of terms, of statutes they must both follow.

And Danicka, who is not one for terms and statutes, who looks askance at rules, who may very well be drawn to breaking promises as though her very life depended on that lack of confinement...Danicka certainly does not lay things out on the table and tell him what he must and must not do. What leashes he must wear, what hoops he must jump through, what vastness she demands and what paltry offerings she is willing to give in return. She could take his Potřebuji tě and twist it back on him like a knife to his throat. Take every acre. Give no quarter.

They are Shadow Lords.

She turns her head as he moves off of her, follows him with her eyes, holds onto his gaze even as her arms are slipping away from around him. There's reluctance there, an ache at letting him be apart from her, even a little. She rolls slightly on the mattress, staying close to him: a flower to sun, a blossom to light, something like that.

"I told you," she whispers. "I want all of you."

Všechno.

Her hand comes up, moves to his face. "But I'll give it back."

[Lukas] Lukas said once, in anger, that he doesn't understand her at all. Danicka could not accept this, and with reason. Sometimes they understand each other perfectly. Sometimes he can look at her and see right through her. Sometimes she looks at him and she sees right through him, clear to the bottom.

And then sometimes Lukas is right. They don't understand one another. He speaks of giving her whatever she wants, taking whatever she'll give him. He speaks without speaking of her fidelity, or lack thereof; he gives her his blessing, more or less, to fuck other men, other women, to love other men and women. He doesn't demand loyalty, which is all well and good, which seems very selfless and openminded until one realizes that the truth is:

Even now, he does not expect loyalty from her. He does not know that she's capable of loyalty. He thinks her loyalty may have been born of fear, or some weird honor, or --

It doesn't matter what he thinks. He's wrong.

And it's heartbreaking, because in return, she doesn't ask him for every acre. She doesn't strip him of all he has, make him crawl, make him beg. All she does is ... yearn toward him. Come a little closer. His hand finds its place over her shoulder. Je ti zima? -- he doesn't ask her this tonight. He simply covers her shoulder with his hand, and all she asks him for, all she asks for, is the only thing, the same thing, she's ever asked him for.

You.
Všechno
All of you.

Her hand comes to his face. Her forearm crosses under his. Their legs cross one another's. They're entwined atop this bed, almost as close as they could be, but the nearness is fragile as spun glass. It could so easily fly asunder again, and he doesn't know, he doesn't think he can survive it twice.

But I'll give it back, she tells him. And Lukas doesn't say Vím, because he doesn't know this; not yet. What he says is something he's never said to her before:

"Věřím vám."

They look at each other. Then he's drawing her to him again. He's waited long enough: he doesn't say it again, but it's true. His hand comes to her face. His mouth opens when he kisses her, and the angle of his jaw, the hinge of it, shifts under her smoother palm.

[Danicka] [Perception + Empathy]

[Danicka] [Oh, you want a clever roll tag, do you? FINE. I WILL GIVE YOU A FUCKING CLEVER ROLL TAG. BEND THE FUCK OVER.]

[Danicka] She has only told him I know a fraction of the times she has thought it. She has only thought it a fraction of the times that it has been true. Now is one of those times that she does not say it, does not think it, but the longer she looks into his eyes the more real what he said becomes.

It is a fragile, intricate thing, faith is. Trust can be built up, can be broken, can be based on evidence and affection. Faith requires more of the person exhibiting it. You can only hold it. When it's gone you sometimes cannot even remember it was ever there, how you ever held in your hands something so infinitely, breathlessly delicate. It is a little like trying to see your own soul.

Danicka can no more promise Lukas her loyalty than he can promise not to leave her. Truth be told, it is -- as he said -- a promise that would take a lifetime to keep. In death, or in the afterlife, they can look at one another and say: All right. You were loyal. I believe you now. or All right. You did not leave me. I believe you now.

It would mean nothing in the end...because he will be dead.

Because she will be.

All they have is faith. Not quite trust, or even belief, but things such as her hand over his heart. Or his head bent to her chest, her face lifted up to the sky, their bodies writhing in primal pleasure while their minds are elevated by other positions of prayer. Making love to him, she'd said, is a little like prayer. Her hands in his hair, or his laughter in her ears, or watching a thunderstorm through glass while he fucks her against the wall, or walking in the rain with their fingers laced: these are their only articles of faith, their only justifications for belief.

Lukas turns to her, and their limbs and bodies and gazes and words weave together tighter and with more refinement than silk, more fragility. Danicka hears his words and in his eyes she sees clearly through him, as though he is water cupped in her palms, brought to her lips to kiss the surface...or drink, taking into herself not just everything he offers but everything he is. She hardly dares breathe as she watches him in those spun-out seconds afterwards, and there is no goddamned negotiation or haggling after this. The terms are very simple:

Everything.

They do not sign in blood. He kisses her before she speaks again, starts to move towards her with renewed want -- and not surprisingly; before this pre-dawn morning the last time he was inside of her was a month ago. Like that last time, she lays naked in bed with him and neither pushes him onto his back or rolls onto her own but aligns her body to his, belly to belly, perfection to scars. Like the second time they made love in that crappy motel room in Cabrini, she moves into his kiss and slides her leg up the side of his body, wrapping around his hip.

She kisses him searingly, promising him her secrets with her lips and her tongue and the whimper she lets out when he slides into her again. She gives him more than she is ready to give, more than she feels safe giving, which makes it perfect, and terrifying, and whole. She cries out his name when she comes, arching in his arms, trembling against his chest, keeping him sure and warm and deep inside of him for as long as they can both bear the joining. Her hands rest on his shoulders, her mouth opens in gasps, but it's his eyes she returns to, every time, when the last violent currents of lust and pleasure stop shaking her to the core.

I love you, she says in two languages, her voice and her eyes overcome by joy so unexpected it hurts to try and contain it in her weak body, in her insubstantial words. Tolik tě miluji, Lukáš.

In the end, when they sleep, she does so half-draped over him, listening to his heart beating steadily under her ear, feeling the lift and fall of his breathing under her encircling arm. She stays with him all night. She does not get up to shower when the sun comes up. They sleep for six hours before he wakes to the slide of her thighs over his hips, her mouth tracing a path up his neck to his earlobe, her voice whispering in his ear that

Chci tě. Dobře?

When she takes him inside of her then she moves slowly at first, though the sun is up and brilliant and shining on her through the cracks between the closed curtains. The room is all dusty shadow and merciless light when she rides him then, the world around them filled with people having lunch and checking out of their rooms but Danicka just balances herself with her palms on his chest, gasping out encouragements, gasping out requests for more, more,

Dej mi to.

It's faster, for awhile. Her inner thighs are hot around him, her breasts hot in his hands, her spine elongating as she bends over him to capture his mouth, both of them smelling like sex and sweat and each other in a way they haven't in a goddamn month...until she comes, writhing atop him like a goddess, like an oracle in ecstatic communion, like an animal. When she comes she can't even scream, can't even whimper, can barely make a sound other than a stifled, strangled cry of release. After that...after Lukas joins her, his hips thrusting upward or his hands clenching on her skin or a groan dying in his own throat...after that, she slows again. They slow. They kiss. They sleep through most of the day.

She is still there when the sun sets again, her body wrapped in a blanket and wrapped in him. It's rare -- incredibly so -- that he wakes before her. But he does this time, late on Sunday, just a few hours short of exactly one week since avenging and then conversing with his fallen Alpha. Danicka's eyes are closed but she is breathing, alive and warm and filled with a slow, drowsy heartbeat.

And she is his.

His.