new york city.

[Lukas] At 2pm EDT on the 2nd of June, Lukas is just past Albany, southbound on the 87 between the Adirondacks and New York City.

He'd taken the moonbridge in just past dawn, arriving in the Stark Falls Sept scant minutes later. There were respects to be paid to the Gatekeeper, the Grand Elder, and the Philodox who had, once upon a time, helped to shape Lukas Kvasnicka into Lukas Wyrmbreaker. After that, it was a run through the woods and over the streams to the tiny town of Sevey, where he picked up his rental car and headed south along ever-widening highways bound for the greatest city on the eastern seaboard.

The phone rings, and the radio is on, and he almost misses the call. But there's a lucky pause between tracks; his cellphone is giving its no-nonsense beep. He shifts his balance to one side to pull it out of his back pocket, flipping it open before he looks to see who it is.

Lukas is alone in the car. There's no one to see him smile.

"Hey." Danicka can hear it, though. "In New York?"

She tells him she's at her father's house. He turns down the volume on the car stereo. Then:

"I'm about an hour and a half out, unless I run into traffic." He checks the clock. "Which ... given the hour, I'm almost certain to. Do you want to meet me for dinner somewhere?"

[Danicka] She tells him...that she's at home. There's a thoughtless, significant comfort in the ease with which she calls her father's house home. But that is where they brought her when she was born. That is where she grew up. She knows every floorboard, she knows which windows stick, she knows its smells and its sounds and she knows the oak tree in the back yard. She knows the rose bushes, because she planted them when she was fourteen.

At the moment she is standing outside in the back yard underneath that oak tree, one arm up and wrapped around a low-hanging branch. She is half swinging on it, letting it take her weight as her body sways.

"I'm having dinner with my father," she explains. "It would look kind of strange to come see him for the first time in six months and then run off a few hours later." She pauses; he can hear what sounds like a deep inhale, a slow exhale. A drag off a cigarette. "I can see you after, if you want. He's usually asleep around nine."

[Lukas] "All right." There's some rustling; then the quality of his voice changes slightly as he goes to a headset, returns both hands to the wheel. Another man might plan to have dinner with his own parents now. Lukas's parents don't even know he's in the state, much less that he'll be in the city.

He imagines he'll visit some night. Maybe the night before he went back to Chicago.

"Where?"

[Danicka] "Well, what do you feel like?" she asks mildly. Either the cigarette is doing its damn job by chilling her out or she is feigning the undertone of amusement in her words. "Are you going to want to eat later with me, or just see each other?"

She pauses. "Are you staying in the city tonight? I could just come to your hotel, if you want."

No mention has been made by either party of even considering having Lukas show up at the Musil household, whether Vladislav lives there or not. It's out of the question.

[Lukas] "I'm going to eat as soon as I'm checked in," he responds. They have few false courtesies between them. He doesn't offer to wait for her and she doesn't expect him to. "I should be back in my room after 8. I'm at the W Times Square. Do you need the address?"

Someone was fast acquiring a favorite hotel chain.

[Danicka] Why should he wait when it's going to be a few more hours before she has dinner, and more on top of that before he sees her? He didn't ask her to buy him a ticket, they didn't fly here together, and all she can surmise is that he's done what all Garou she's ever known have done and used the spirit world to travel somehow. They haven't talked much about the other sept, the one where Lukas was fostered. Danicka's family is and has always been tied to the Sept of the Green. She doesn't know about his life after he Changed until the point when they met at SmartBar. She may not care.

Danicka smiles when he says that he's booked a room at the W, but she outright laughs when he asks her if she needs the address. "No," she manages to answer in between chuckles. "I'll see you there after my father gets to bed, all right? Just text me the room."

[Lukas] "Okay. Mám tě rád."

Lukas hangs up, removing the earpiece and setting it atop his phone. It takes him another hour and a half to get to the New York metro area, and by then it's it's well past 3:30pm and the evening rush is in full swing. He avoids the New Jersey turnpike, takes the Tappan Zee Bridge instead high up the peninsula, coming down through Yonkers in an attempt to beat traffic. It helps, but not too much. His first view of Manhattan is in the westering light, golden across an entire continent, dimmed through the smog of Jersey. It looks the way he remembers, towers upon towers, a city of 18 million souls cramped onto a tiny footprint of land.

Lukas takes Broadway all the way down, partly because the hotel is just off Broadway and partly because Park takes him too close to the Bronx, and he's not ready to go home yet. The buildings swallow him whole. He drives his rental Camry down the corridors of skyscrapers, past oceans of yellow cabs, and the uniquely slanting cut of Broadway meanders him slowly into the very heart of the City. I think I miss this place, he thinks, which is a strange thing to think for a Garou not of Cockroach's tribe, but it's true.

He hadn't chosen the W out of nostalgia or sentiment. He chose it because it was on Times Square, and it's a million feet tall, and as touristy as that is, Lukas wants to stand above the glitter and look down upon it. There are cities richer than New York, cleaner, more cultured, more lovely, more crowded; cities far more ancient and cities far more light-drenched, but nowhere else is there such a sense that to stand in the middle of this city, this one city above all others, is tantamount to placing one's fingers on the beating pulse of the modern world.

Or perhaps that is nostalgia. And sentiment. He grew up here, after all.

--

Lukas checks in at twenty past five. This W is brighter than the one in Chicago. The colors pop. There's a sense of energy to it, a chic, modern liveliness, where the Lakeshore W was more muted in comparison, sleeker, more elegant.

The elevators whisk him up to the 55th floor, dizzyingly fast. His ears pop on the way up, while he's texting Danicka the room number. He imagines late at night, taking a ride down would be a mildly harrowing experience if there were no stops between the 55th floor and the lobby: like a goddamn free-fall. He has the corner room facing southeast, which is going to break the fucking bank and leave him racking up credit card bills until the Q2 dividend payoffs, but that's all right. When he opens the door to his room and sees the skyscrapers marching away into Lower Manhattan and toward the East River, it's worth it.

He packed light: a single dedicated suitcase, about the size of a backpack, that he'll have to undedicate when he gets home. He tosses it into the closet, adjusts the thermostat to a cool 68 degrees, and then goes to wash the metaphorical and literal dust of the road off his face.

Sunlight is slanting toward evening by then. Lukas watches the colors change over the city for a while.

Dinner is downstairs, the first sushi joint he can find, sitting alone at the bar checking his investments on his laptop with one hand (why not? it's fucking Manhattan.) while he nabs sushi plates off bamboo boats floating by with the other. He drinks the better part of a half-liter bottle of nigori sake and gets another to go. And crispy banana rolls, on a whim, because he sees they have them. Then he pays his bill, gathers up his laptop, and heads back upstairs.

It's half past eight by then, and getting dark. He leaves the sake chilling in an ice bucket while he takes a long shower; the banana rolls, however, are left to get cold next to the TV. When he comes out of the shower he switches on the television and lets talking heads debate in the background while he goes to the window and looks out at dusk falling over New York City.

[Danicka] It's not eight when Danicka gets to Lukas's room. It's not nine. It's not nine-thirty, and it's not ten. It's ten forty-seven when his phone goes off with a text message from his -- let's just say it, shall we? -- lover.

I'm leaving now. Be there soon.

And then it's another thirty minutes before she's knocking on his hotel room door. It's well past eleven at night now, and yet when he opens the door Danicka doesn't look tired, even from traveling part of the day and re-acquainting herself with her father or whatever it is she's been up to. She has her hair up in a ponytail, but the ends aren't curled any more than their natural wave pattern creates. She's wearing jeans and a flimsy, fluttery sort of pale peach blouse, just transparent enough that the landscape of her body and breasts are hinted at, a strand of tiny pearls around her neck. Her earrings are abstract copper shapes, her heels strappy and gold-colored, her purse nothing more than a wristlet.

"I think we should get drunk and fuck in front of those windows," she says, nodding at them before she's even come inside.

[Lukas] By 10:47 Lukas is hungry again. That's the problem with sushi. You can only eat so much before all the raw fish gets cold and clammy in your stomach, and then two hours later you're starving again.

By 11:20, which is when Danicka knocks on his door, he has more food -- not $50 porterhouse from room service but a large pizza from the Sbarro's down on the square. He answers the door with a half-eaten slice in hand, his mouth full, and when Danicka walks in the windows are vast, two entire walls, and the room is vast, and the air smells like pepperoni and sausage and cheese: meat lover's pizza.

"Mmph," he says, and wipes his free hand on the seat of his lounge pants, which is all he wears, before wrapping that arm around her and lifting her up against his body.

He doesn't quite twirl her. He might drop her or whirl her into the wall. He does spin her around one eighty, though, pressing his cheek to hers where he can't kiss her. Then, depositing her on the far side, he turns to close the door and lock it. His biteful of pizza is swallowed -- at least enough to talk comprehensibly.

"What the godfuck took you so long?" He's not angry. It's hard to be angry when you're so fucking happy. He turns back around and slides his arm around her waist the way he'd wanted to that day in the Aquarium, nodding her into the room. "Want some pizza? I got you banana rolls too. And sake."

She's here, one can only surmise, to escape Sam. He's here because -- god knows why he's here. Her brother is in the city. Her father is in the city. Some traditional part of Lukas, some old-world, old-tribe, old-blood part of Lukas, must find it terribly dishonorable that he's genuinely considering getting drunk and fucking this woman in front of those windows without so much as a by-your-leave to the men of her family; the Garou of her family.

And yet, for all that: happy.

[Danicka] She looks like she is about to go out tonight. Her jeans are tight and dark, that shirt is meant to get attention and it certainly got plenty as she headed over this way. Her heels glitter, her pearls gleam, but she's not dragging Lukas out to a nightclub or a wine bar and seeing if they can score something in the middle of the week. She's actually ending her night here, and if he thinks she wore something like that blouse while having dinner with her sixty-seven year-old father he's got a completely insane perspective on what her home life became after his family found out that he was going to Change, after Vladik Changed, after he and Danicka's families stopped seeing each other entirely.

And Lukas looks like he's about to turn on a game, or an old movie, and chow down on pizza all night in a frenzy of half-naked belching, meat-eating, and laziness. She wrinkles her nose when he wraps his arm around her, that quick wipe of his hand apparently not enough to satisfy her. This shirt is silk, dammit. She doesn't dodge away from the kiss he gives her, but nor does she return it, just laughing lightly. He sets her down again, and her feet find the floor gingerly. The strap of her purse gets wiggled off her wrist and the purse itself tossed gently on the bed.

Danicka's lips curl into a smirk as she reaches up and undoes her hair, letting it fall down her back and around her shoulders. She shakes it out, running her fingers through it, and a few strands get caught on one earring. He steps forward and she steps deftly backwards from him, still smirking. "Your hands are greasy as fuck," she chastises mildly.

"I'm all right," she adds, to the offer of pizza or banana rolls. "I'll have some sake, though."

With a toss of her hair, she tilts her head and starts to remove her left earring. "Tatínek stayed up a little later to talk."

[Lukas]
Dice Rolled:[ 5 d10 ] 2, 2, 3, 4, 5 (Failure at target 6)

[Lukas]
Dice Rolled:[ 4 d10 ] 1, 3, 6, 10 (Success x 1 at target 6)

[Lukas] (SHADOW LORDS DON'T FAIL.)
Dice Rolled:[ 5 d10 ] 2, 3, 4, 9, 9 (Success x 2 at target 7)

[Lukas] There's a distance to her; or Lukas thinks there is. He can't be certain. He hasn't read her well enough. But he didn't remember her shying from him at the other W, seven hundred miles away, after he'd eaten an entire meal with his hands.

She wasn't wearing silk then, either. She wasn't wearing anything. She's wearing silk now, and pearls, and earrings, and heels, and she looks lazy and gorgeous; she looks the way she did at a nightclub, after a week of fucking men and women who were not him.

He doesn't know what to make of that, either. Or why she's two hours later than she said, which isn't a question she's really answered. He supposes he thought when she walked in that she was late because she was caught in traffic somewhere, or took the wrong train; he supposes he thought she dressed like that, well, for him.

Only, that's not quite it, is it?

Lukas follows her into the room, more subdued now, polishing off his pizza. Lukas reaches for his bath towel, wipes his hands on that this time. He had a can of sprite with his pizza; the sake cap is still sealed, and crackles in his hand when he opens it. Deftly, he turns over a pair of tumblers and fills them with cloudy sake. One of them he passes to her.

And he meets her eyes as she takes it, if she'll let him.

"What aren't you telling me?"

[Danicka] At first, Lukas has no answer. He can sense the distance to her, just barely, but doesn't understand it. He can't tell if she's angry, or if she's angry at him, or if she's sad, or if she's frightened. He can't tell if she's just tired. She's a closed book, she's a diary with an intricate lock and a cover written in Russian. He has a key now, but it's so small he sometimes forgets he has it. It's so fragile he sometimes cannot make his big hands and his overpowering Rage twist it correctly. And sometimes...it isn't fair that he should have to unlock her at all, not fair at all that she should be so closed.

All he can tell is that she's closed, that she's deftly avoiding eating when it's been nearly six hours since her last meal and that is considered an appropriate length of time to wait. It would make sense if she's hungry again, but she doesn't want pizza, or banana rolls. He can tell that something is off even though she's dressed lazy and gorgeous and gleaming, telling him she wants to fuck him in front of windows that are fifty-five stories up and have them looking out over the city.

Lords of the Summit.

Her mother was one.

Her brother is not.

She leaves her earring where it is, in the end, her hands falling. There's no answer given on where she's been, why it took her so long. Her father stayed up over two hours past his bedtime when he's scarcely able to get up the stairs by himself these days? It's possible, because he doesn't know her father. He knows that his mate threw him through a wall once, knows that he has children and grandchildren in the Czech Republic, knows that two of his children bred True, but...Lukas really knows almost nothing else about him.

Danicka takes the tumbler instead of taking off her earring. She sips, and looks at the cloudy liquid first, then at Lukas. "Emílie was there when I got home. So... Vládík knows I'm here already."

She takes another drink.

[Lukas] Vládík.

There's always someone else, Lukas thinks -- illogically, furiously. First it was Sam, Sam, always Sam, and now it's Vládík. It's not a fair thought to have. It's not true, but it doesn't stop it from happening; it doesn't stop Lukas from turning his face to the side on a low curse, zkurvysyne.

A pause. He looks down at his sake. He takes a gulp, and then sets it aside on the TV stand.

"And?"

[Danicka] [Perception + Empathy]
Dice Rolled:[ 6 d10 ] 2, 3, 4, 6, 6, 8, 10, 10, 10 (Success x 6 at target 6) Re-rolls: 3

[Danicka] "And I haven't seen him or spoken to him since Christmas, and I was hoping to have at least twenty-four hours here before I saw him again," Danicka says, and then tips the rest of her sake into her mouth. She swallows, the liquid strong enough to burn slightly, to ignite her from the inside out, to go to her head quickly. She sets the tumbler down and goes to one of the armchairs, sitting down in a way he has never seen her do before:

she sprawls, her heels akimbo and her knees closer together, her arms draped over the sides of the chair, her eyes going to the window. "At least in his case, his bullshit isn't your problem."

He's not Sam.

He's not anything like Sam.

[Lukas] He's never seen her sit like that before, like a puppet with her strings cut, strengthless, careless.

Lukas stays where he is. He's barechested; there are only two lamps on in the room. One's at the desk. The other is a floor lamp in the corner, against one wall and the east-facing pane of glass. Their light leaves deep shadows in the hollows of his body -- the flat of his breastbone between the sweeps of his pectorals; the seam where his abdominals weave together.

These shadows change when he breathes. From that she can see his breathing is quickened, heavier, angry.

"What did he -- "

say to you.
do to you.

His feet are bare and silent when he crosses the room. He stares out the window a moment with her, blindly, not seeing the glitter outside now, the shine of a million artificial points of light laid at their feet, drowning out the stars overhead. Then Lukas looks at Danicka; he thinks, absurdly, that she's the only real point of light in this whole damn city.

"Did he hurt you? What did he want?"

[Danicka] She knows he's angry. Of course he's angry. Sam's renewed eagerness to Make Things Right with her has her running a few states over to go back home, to go back to a state where she knows so many people it actually is difficult to go out and not run into someone. To go back to a place where her brother lives, where her mother died, where she will be asked every night to play, where there is gardening to be done because her father and her sister-in-law cannot take care of the rose bushes the way she did, where she is afraid that she will wake up to the sound of her father falling down the stairs.

There's no place on earth she could go where Lukas will not be angry, where that anger will be directed solely in directions away from her family, from people around her. She damn well knows; her mother loved her father. She loved him so much that he learned never to get angry at anyone, because Night Warder might kill them. She loved him so much that she isolated him, terribly, because she wanted to protect him from the world and he wanted to protect the world from her. Danicka knows a thing or two about what it is like, loving someone whose anger is as deep as their marrow and as omnipresent as their breathing.

She looks out at the city. She's seen this view before. She decides not to mention it to Lukas.

His eyes are on her, and she feels them, but she watches the city shine instead, her hand curled at her face, the backs of her fingers to her chin and lips. "He's coming over for breakfast tomorrow. I haven't seen him yet." She pauses, closes her eyes, cracks her neck, then opens her eyes again as her head returns to the anatomical position. "Most likely he'll just ask me a lot of uncomfortable questions and insinuate that I should move back here, and find a mate, and have the children that his wife isn't.

"It won't be anything new."

[Lukas] There are two armchairs in this room. After a moment Lukas casts about him, spots the other, drags it up behind him and sinks into it.

The endtable between the chairs is small and square, glass-topped. There are magazines arranged artfully on it. A guidebook to NYC. The hotel information in a leatherbound binder. And the city outside, spread before them, silent at this height, through this glass.

She flew into New York City. She's seen this view before.
He can fly. He's seen this view from the other side of the velvet curtain.

Their worlds barely intersect. She cannot survive in his. She has no Gnosis to keep herself alive in the spirit world. She doesn't have the equipment, or the resilience, to survive his wars. His protection would suffocate her. It's probably best she doesn't know where Lukas went after hanging up with her Monday afternoon.

"Do you want to go back to Chicago?" He means it. "Tonight."

[Danicka] Now she takes her eyes off the city, not thinking about the last time she was in this hotel, or any of the times she was in this hotel, or the time she slapped the face of a man who was inside her because he said God, I wish I could buy you, which was in a room not so very much unlike this one. He spoke with an accent she couldn't place; she never saw him again, but that can be said for any one of hundreds of men, of women.

She's thinking, inexplicably, that she never wants to come to this hotel again unless it's with Lukas. She's thinking, far more logically, of how much it's going to hurt to leave him tonight to sneak back home. She's gotten used to sleeping with him after they make love, used to waking up halfway through the night or day and taking him again. She's gotten used to falling asleep with his warmth beside her, with the cadence of his breathing in her ears, with the smell of their mingled sweat and fluids all around her.

It's incredible that she's used to any of this, when their nights together are so few and far between. But on those occasions when she does see him... it's suddenly become painful to think of having to leave, where once upon a time it was so natural.

Once upon a time, before the first time with him. It stung, even then, to get up and leave.

Her head turns, and she looks at him in silence for a few seconds, thinking all this. It makes her eyebrows pull together slightly, this pang of anticipated loss. Her hand falls across the arm of the chair, and she shakes her head. "Not really. I miss my father, Lukášek. I miss this city." She pauses there, then decides to go ahead and add: "He's been my brother for twenty-five years, baby," she says softly. "I can cope with breakfast. I know what he wants to hear."

[Lukas] The truth is, it hasn't occurred to Lukas yet that Danicka will not be there when he wakes up. She says the words, breakfast and my brother and home; she said things about leaving after her father was asleep as though she were 16 years old and he's a boy from school tossing pebbles at her window, but they haven't connected together in his mind. They're stars in the sky. They haven't fused into avenues of thought, a glittering grid of clarity.

I miss this city, she says, and he looks out at it. And he doesn't understand how she can miss it when she was a prisoner in her own home, and then a prisoner of the Sokolovs -- and at the same time he understands it perfectly.

It's alive and vibrant and glamorous and disreputable and raw as no other city in this hemisphere; on this earth. How could she not? Lukas misses it too.

Danicka goes on. He looks at her again. His eyes are pale; lamplight doesn't quite bring out the blue. They're colorless, like ice. He's not hungry anymore. He looks at her and then he holds his hand out; he's about to tell her to come here when he remembers:

If you want to hold me, then hold me.

Lukas's hand turns palm-down again. A moment later he grips the arms of his chair, a second before he gets up. There's not a lot of space between. He comes over to her chair and, after a beat, crouches in front of her. Rolls his knees to the carpet and kneels. He watches his hands cover her wrists, rubbing up the long and slender bones of her forearms. When his palms close over her elbows he nudges her knees apart, moves between them. His heat is as palpable as his body, as solid and unshakable as the torso between her knees, and then between her thighs as he wraps his arms around her and lifts her back from the chair, draws her into him.

He holds her like that for a while, kneeling before her armchair. His arms fold around her and he closes his eyes. When they open again he kisses her neck, and her earring catches briefly between his mouth and her skin.

Lukas draws back enough to see her face. His hands bracket her waist. "Take your earrings off," he says, soft.

[Danicka] In his mind, Lukas looks at Danicka's childhood home and sees a house of horrors. He thinks of some imagined penthouse where the Sokolovs held her and sees a prison. He looks at her and, sometimes, still thinks: damaged, prisoner, vulnerable. The truth is more complicated, usually. Danicka's lies work so well because they're usually very simple, and fit well with what people would like to believe. They support theses that people already wish were true.

The truth is that for months now she has missed her home, missed the rug on the living room floor and missed the pictures of her half-sisters on top of the piano. She has missed cooking for and with her father. She has missed familiar haunts, familiar faces, as much pressure as they always put on her. She could not explain to him in a thousand years how she could miss, in a way, even her brother. She never really talks about the Sokolovs, and when she does, her language hints at being held back, at being held captive, and not at how in some ways they saved her, even without meaning to.

Danicka is a liar. So much so she doesn't even realize, half the time, how much she withholds.

She looks at his hand when he extends it, then at him, but as he's getting up, she's shifting her posture in the chair. Her knees are still together but she sits up a bit, moving her arms forward, and when he kneels, she leans forward. Lukas touches her arms, runs his palms over the sheer, gauze-thin silk, and she smiles fondly at him, moving her legs apart when he nudges them. She reacts to him patiently, responds to him slowly even though she would gladly move to him, part her legs for him, hold him, without ever being physically or verbally urged to do so.

It unfolds, that way, slow and tender, as he moves between her knees and as he wraps his arms around her and as she slides her arms around his neck. She brings him closer, stroking his hair as he closes his eyes. Her chest moves against him as she breathes. She smells like soap and comfort. Her eyelids fall closed as his mouth moves on her neck, as her earring swings from her earlobe, jostled by his lips. Danicka lets him go without reluctance, knowing he is not pulling away completely, and opens her eyes again.

She does not obey, at least not immediately. She moves her hands to his face and cups his jaw, his cheeks, in her palms. "I'm so happy you came," she murmurs, and kisses his mouth. It's slow at first, soft at first, then deepens. Just as it hits that crest where she must either move away or dissolve into kissing him, Danicka takes a breath and pulls her lips from his, slides her hands away.

And tips her head to the side, removing her left earring.

[Lukas] Lukas has not told Danicka yet how he loves it when she takes his face in her hands and kisses him. He will not be telling her tonight either, because before the thought fully forms it shears apart. They kiss each other before the vast windows and the glittering view, slowly, softly, deepeningly.

He doesn't mind that she doesn't obey. This isn't about obedience. His eyes are slow to open when she draws back; his lips are still parted, wet, and his breath slides audibly between them.

When he opens his eyes she's taking off her left earring, the coppery adornment bright against her deft fingers. His hands smooth up her sides, and then go to the tail of her shirt. He starts to unbutton her shirt, and though his hands are larger than hers, there's a deftness here too. He slides the buttons through the holes, one after another, and as her skin is revealed he bends to her, his hair dark against her shirt; his skin dark against hers.

"Lean back," he whispers. Then his mouth is on her stomach, kissing her skin, following the parting of her shirt up her torso.

[Danicka] There are a lot of things that Lukas loves about Danicka that she does not know, because he has not told her. But then, she hasn't told him that she loves his singleminded approach to so many things, that she loves how sometimes he is agile and controlled and other times he is more likely to tear at her clothes with his teeth and fingers than carefully unbutton a garment. She loves the way his hair feels between her fingers, and doesn't mention this as she strokes it, leaning back in the armchair.

Her stomach is flat, paler than her arms but not by much. The buttons come free easily, the holes loose, and she looks to the side, looks out the windows, as though to remind herself where she is before she looks back at him, dropping the first earring on the flat arm of the chair she's in. She tips her head the other way as she sprawls backwards from her lover, removing the right earing and setting it beside its partner.

Partner is a word she can't quite reconcile as a label for Lukas. They're not equals, in more ways than one. They haven't promised any help to one another, haven't said that they will support each other and stand beside one another, and so on and so forth. In fact, he's thrown her under the bus before and freely admitted it. He's chosen pack before her, and she's chosen secrecy and privacy over him in the past, and if they are supposed to be completely open with one another as lovers, they are failing miserably.

She strokes his hair. Again, again: she watches his mouth touch her skin and breathes in, as much from the sight of him as anything else. She takes a deep breath, and sighs: "Chystáš se milovat se mnou?"

[Lukas] His eyes are a flash of pale when he looks up at her. Lukas doesn't take his mouth from her flesh. He murmurs it against her skin:

"Ano."

And then her shirt is falling completely open, and there's nothing underneath it, and he never had any doubt because when she walked in the light was at her back and he could see the shape of her right through the sheerness of her shirt.

All the same Lukas sighs to see it, a sound half-torn. She's so happy he came to New York City. She said it like she missed him in the week and a half they were apart, no contact, not even a message, not even a text. He missed her too, and he doesn't say it, but she knows it from the way he holds her body between his hands, rubs his hands over her; the way his hands grasp at her here and there, then slip behind her back to bend her up against his mouth.

The last time she removed her earrings like this, one at a time, while his mouth was on her skin, she had to tell him to slow down, first. To stop going at her like a beast. The last time they saw each other, he went at her like a beast, and neither of them told the other to slow down. He tried, at one point, to suggest that they be gentle. That fell apart in minutes and they fucked each other in something like a frenzy.

She doesn't have to tell him to go slow this time. He takes his goddamn time, as though she were something unexpected, a precious gift that he intends to unwrap and enjoy, and enjoy every moment of enjoying. Seconds slip by while he bends his attention to her breast, utterly; singlemindedly. He kisses her flesh, licks at her; sucks at her until her nipples are hard and contracted on themselves, erect against his fluttering tongue.

He looks at her then. He looks at Danicka without taking his mouth from her and the edges of his mouth flicker suddenly up; he grins at her.

And kisses her breastbone. And a moment later he's pulling at the fastenings of her jeans, and his eyes are closed again, and he's panting against her skin as he tugs those expensive denims open, his patience lessening now -- he pants against her skin, harshly, when he reaches his hand into her pants and under her panties.

[Danicka] The word unfurls in a warm breath over her skin, curling across her like a breeze far warmer than the ones that come off the lake in Chicago. Hearing it from his lips makes Danicka shiver slightly, her spine arching against the empty air between her back and the cushions of the armchair. Her shirt hangs open off her shoulders, her pearls askew, her earrings forgotten. She reaches her arms up over her head and drapes them over the back of the chair, watching Lukas. Danicka does almost nothing whatsoever but lean back for him, lay herself out for him, as though she is a feast...and knows it...and does not care.

They are in a city they both know, a city where they are both known, and yet miles away from a city where they are technically writing the next chapter of their lives. Coming back here is like flipping back in a photo album, only she isn't explaining on my nights off I would dance, and I would fuck, and I love this city and its crowds because I could get lost in them, and no one knew me, and no one cared what I did or with whom. Only he isn't telling her about the shift from New York City to his fosterage upstate. They aren't telling stories.

They are not in love with each other's stories.

Danicka missed him, and her eyes close as his mouth moves to her breast, closes around one nipple. She arches again for him, breathing in deeply, sighing out in a shudder. They go slow, or Lukas does, because Danicka is doing nothing more than allowing him to adore her like this. She does not see that flashing, sharp grin of hunger because her lips are parting to breathe in air and exhale lust, sighing with want.

His hands are at her jeans a second later, tearing the button out of its slit and drawing down the short zipper, his warm hand slinking past the parted teeth only to find that there's no thong, no lace, no satin guarding her. There is nothing under her jeans but her, just as there is nothing under her blouse but her. She breathes in sharply when his fingers find her, the first traces of wetness transferring from her body to his skin, and opens her eyes. "Jak?"

[Lukas] "Fuck..."

The curse isn't a curse at all. It's a sort of prayer. He's praying every time he's with her like this. They're worshiping one another, and making of their love something like worship. One could be oversentimental and say they're worshiping the life Gaia gave them, or the beauty of the world, or ...

It's nothing like that. Nothing so concrete, so defined. They're simply existing in the moment, so thoroughly, so completely that the very act of existence becomes a rumination; a praying.

Never mind. The point is. Lukas finds nothing under her jeans, nothing there at all except her, just as there was nothing under her shirt but her skin. She did dress for him. She went home for the first time in months, perhaps longer, and she talked to her father, who she missed, and her sister-in-law, who she may or may not have missed, but was nevertheless a sort of bad tiding because her sister-in-law would never dare flout the will of her brother, and now her brother knows, and wants to see her in the morning, and

there are something like six or seven hours between now and when she needs to get up, get dressed, get cleaned up and go home. In six or seven hours she'll leave him like she did the first night, and she'll ride the subway home: the many and changing lines of the New York subway, with its laconic, blase passengers starting dully out the windows, and in the whole car, the whole damn train, she'll be the brightest point of light, the center of the goddamn world.

That's what he's thinking when he finds her naked and growing wet under his hand. That's what he's thinking when he takes her unkissed nipple into his mouth and sucks at her, fiercely now, while his fingers part her flesh and slip inside her, and then she's breathing in, and it's sharp, and perhaps she's arching, and his free hand explores the taut expanse of her belly, and then goes to tear her jeans off her from the back.

He tears her jeans down. Leaves them in a pool at the ground. His mouth leaves her flesh at last and his hand leaves her too. He takes her hips and slides her back into the chair a few inches, wraps his hands under her knees and lifts them over the arms of the chair. He opens her legs and he curses again to see her, prays again, whispers it:

"Oh ... fuck, Danička."

How, she wants to know. How is he going to love her. His eyes flash up at her, blue as gas flames, bright and hot as gas flames. His hands slip under her lower back, her ass. He lifts her hips and tilts them, and a moment before he puts his mouth to her he murmurs a question for a question.

"Jak chceš, abych tě miluju?"

And then his mouth is on her. His eyes are closing and his mouth is on her, his tongue is circling her clit and tracing down to her cunt; his mouth is opening and he's pushing his tongue into her. Lukas never used to moan, or snarl, or make any sound at all. He used to bite it back as though it would cost him his tongue or his life to voice his desire. He's still quiet; he'll always be. But the taste of her, and the heat of her, and the wetness he finds in her makes him groan aloud. He presses the sound into her, tilts his chin and eats at her cunt.

The lights of the room are skimming off his back from behind, glancing off his hair from the front; the city is a sprawl of glittering lights to Danicka's right, and the east river is a dark border between Manhattan and the eastern boroughs before her. This is not their city anymore. This is an interlude, an intermission from what their lives are now.

[Danicka] Please, he'd said once, seeing her for the first time in too long and finding her wearing nothing but the lingerie he'd given her for her birthday, please don't expect me to go slowly.

But he had, in a way. They had not even made it past the entryway to the hotel room but he had not ripped his pants down and bent her over and fucked her as soon as he could push her thong out of the way. They had not laid one inside the other that night at all, in fact, her legs had never gone around him and he had not felt her coming on his cock, he had not had her whole and complete around him. He'd fucked other women and she'd fucked other men and women before they had that again, before they had each other, before he stopped thinking about the past or future and she did her best not to be afraid of the inevitable:

his leaving.

Whether he dies or they break up or Vladislav drags her back to New York City by the hair because he's found someone willing to take a Veiled and aging mate because she comes from a fertile line and she's beautiful, she's nurturing, she's adept at things like cooking and cleaning and getting bloodstains out of carpets and she even plays a goddamn instrument. Look, she's so well-trained. Look, she's so lovely. Look, she's thin but she'll have your children, she'll raise them and they'll be strong. By god, they'll be strong just like you and beautiful just like her. They will be goddamned Shadow Lords. Look at her. Look. She's yours.

Inevitably, someone or something will take Lukas from her, but none of these thoughts hurt her. The only one that hurts is the thought of him leaving her again, leaving her to believe that he does not love her and maybe never did. That one hurts so much she can't breathe.

She can't breathe, and it's not because she's thinking of losing him. She arches her back as though his lips are conducting electricity straight from his heart into her skin, her hands grasping the back of the chair when he slides a finger into her. She's not that wet, not yet, and she presses her lips together hard to hold back a harsh whimper. Lukas sucks at her fiercely, fingers her mercilessly, and she squirms sharply against him, enough so that his finger slips out, enough so that he has to struggle with her to get her jeans down. Her shoes are still on; he can't yank her jeans off into a puddle on the floor so he pushes them to her ankles.

Danicka does, however, let him push her knees apart, her fingernails raking up the upholstery on the back of the armchair.

He asks her, his voice low, how she wants him to love her, and Danicka doesn't answer because he doesn't, apparently, need one. He's decided. He moves his hands on her, leaves a faint trail of slick against her ass with the finger that was inside of her just moments ago. She leans her head back and her eyes are closed and she pushes her hips towards his face when he moves his mouth to her cunt as though she has no intention but to lay here and let him pleasure her, no plan but to relax and take what she wants from him, take what he is willing to give, reciprocity be damned.

Lukas licks her, kisses her and tastes her as deeply as he can. Danicka hisses a breath out between her teeth, grinding against his face, and bucks her hips slightly. "Více," she all but snarls, demanding and wanton despite the phase of the moon outside. She means more of this. She means more of him. She means more than this. She means

More. Goddammit, Lukáš, more.

[Lukas] There's something ...

... wanton about this. About the way she sprawls in the armchair waiting to be pleasured; waiting to be feasted on. As though she were the garou and he the kin. As though she were the dominant partner in this, when they aren't really partners at all, or as though she were not afraid of him, nor the heavy swell of the moon outside.

She rolls her hips against him. Slightly. He grabs her by the hips and grinds her on his face, fucking grinds her hard and mercilessly against his face, his tongue against her cunt, his nose against her clit; he rubs his face against her sex as though he meant to roll in her fucking scent, cover himself in it like a wolf following a bitch in heat. More, she says, and that's what this means: Více. More.

"Nedrží zpátky." His voice is low; it's a growl. He turns his face to the side and he nips at the inside of her thigh, briefly but not gently. "Seru na můj obličej," he tells her. "To mě poser," and then his mouth is where it was, and he's eating at her cunt, pleasuring her with his mouth with a singular, ferocious focus.

There's something wild about this.

[Danicka] [Paws! Folded ones!]

[Danicka] Her clothes hang off of her shoulders, off of her ankles. Her heels tauten her calves. Lukas can feel every shift and flex of muscle under the skin when she moves on the armchair, half-bared and writhing. The wantonness of her sprawl, the way she holds onto the chair and not to him, offsets the exchange of power, the illusions of dominance and control, the stereotypes associated with kneeling like a penitent, the image of being laid out like a sacrifice. Were it not for the moon, for the Rage, any ghost in the room who sees them might believe they are mortal lovers, lovers who have known one another longer than they have.

He feels dangerous and yet she closes her eyes. She opens herself up to him, her hands refusing to guide him, and as lazy and gorgeous and wild and ready to fuck as she looks, there's also implicit trust in the way Danicka spreads her legs and opens her mouth and lets out a gasping whimper of his name. There's trust in how she lets him move her, pulling her against his face, licking her and smelling her and eating at her cunt.

More.

His teeth bite her thigh; she snarls at him, or simply snarls. The muscles in her thighs tighten, wanting to close on his head, but she forces herself to relax again, taking a deep lungful of air and opening her eyes, looking down at him. Her arms snake off the back of the chair, long cool fingers going into his hair. Lukas is moving back to pleasure her again and she's pulling his head there, and the next time her eyes close and her head tips backward, she doesn't hold back. She grinds against him, groaning. Her ankles are held together by those tight jeans she was wearing, but her knees are spread as wide as she can get them, her hands pulling him further between her legs.

She doesn't have any words but his name now. So that's what she says: again, and again, and again.

[Lukas] Lukas doesn't stop.

And he doesn't let up. Not when her fingers go into his hair. Not when she opens her eyes and watches him. Not when her fingers tighten on the back of his head and push his face into her. Not when she snarls and not when the long muscles in her thighs flex; not when she forces herself to relax; not when what he's doing to her causes them to tense again, causes flickers of reaction to run through her.

He doesn't falter. If anything he goes at her harder; hungrier now, shifting forward on his knees until he's closer, wrapping his arms around the base of her thighs to shift the angle of her sprawl. He ramps it up, tongue and lips, mouth, moving his head, putting his neck into it. He eats at her until she says his name, gasps it again and again and again, and then abruptly, without warning, he pulls back, twisting his head out of her grasp if need be.

"Here," it's a rush of a word. He yanks at the cuffs of her skinny jeans, plants her heel against his chest and tugs at her denims until they come forcibly off, shoes notwithstanding. Then it's the other one, the same treatment, and it's only twenty or thirty seconds of fumbling and tugging but it seems like fucking forever, and then her jeans are pooling into his lap and he tossing them aside, reaching down to shove his own drawstring pants down. He hisses between his teeth when the fabric brushes the sensitive head of his cock, grabs himself in hand and strokes it a few times, roughly, hard enough to make himself buck against his own hand.

And then his hands are back on her, rough in their impatience. And now it's not just her wetness he leaves on her but his own. He grabs her by the hips and drags her forward to the very edge of the armchair, drags her forward until she's all but lying on her back, her head propped against the back of the chair, and he tells her to "Dejte si nohy na můj ramenou."

[Danicka] [WP // +1 (Ten Fucking Days)]
Dice Rolled:[ 5 d10 ] 4, 5, 6, 10, 10 (Success x 2 at target 7)

[Lukas] (i kan tear jeenz?)
Dice Rolled:[ 4 d10 ] 2, 2, 6, 6 (Success x 2 at target 6)

[Danicka] It has to seem like fucking forever, getting those tight jeans off when the cuffs hug her ankles so tightly. There's no way they're coming off past her heels, not if Lukas intends to leave those shoes on her. Which she could have expected. She doubts he'll want those pearls off her neck. She thought about a thong, thought about the way he reacts when he pulls mere threads of fabric aside to get at her, but wanted to see what would come over him when he peeled her jeans down and slipped his hand inside and felt nothing but her flesh, nothing but curls, nothing but moisture and warmth.

Danicka is coming to know him. She knew more about him in a glance and a handshake than he learned in weeks; he knows more about her now than anyone outside of her immediate family. She knows what he likes when they're fucking better than she knows any other triva about him; he knows she will not drive the point of her heel into his chest when he plants her foot there, yanking and pulling at her jeans until

RIIIP

he just tears the denim around one ankle, then the other. His fingers claw up the legs, dragging the stiff fabric off her body and away from her feet. Her toes are painted in some clear gloss, her feet and ankles wrapped in straps of gold leather. Danicka sits up as he's pushing his pants down, shrugging out of the sheer blouse she wore -- yes, for him -- tonight, dropping it on the armchair behind her.

For an outfit that probably cost a few hundred dollars all told, it's receiving thoroughly disrespectful treatment. Silk is getting crumpled, jeans are getting torn, and Danicka is watching Lukas like he's prey. One hand grasps the arm of the chair. One hand holds onto his hair as soon as her shirt is completely off. She watches him stroke himself and her breathing quickens, her nipples hard and attentive.

"Keep doing tha--" she starts to say, low and sighing, but then he touches her again instead and her head falls back, her hips rocking towards him, her back arching. She's sitting up now, almost but not quite losing her balance when he pulls her forward, and she very nearly slides off the chair and onto him, her hair tumbling down her back. Danicka steels herself, grits her teeth, and then slowly lowers herself back down, laying on the seat of the armchair and putting her left foot on his right shoulder. Her heel digs into his skin.

She reaches between her legs and tangles her fingers with his, stroking herself as he does, gasping at the added stimulation. A moment later, her right foot moves to his left shoulder.

[Danicka] [Triva? TRIVIA.]

[Lukas] Lukas is not the only predator here.

Their lovemaking ... fucking, whatever -- it's a little like a war. Or perhaps it's a little like hunting. When Danicka dresses herself, she knows damn well what she's doing. She knows before he knows that if she wears these shoes with those jeans, he'll try to tear the jeans off without touching the shoes. He'll do this because he'll want to fuck her with her strappy fuck-me heels on. She knows before he knows that if she wears a sheer blouse and no bra he'll see it the moment she walks in and think about her body even before he's properly thinking about her body.

She doesn't know for certain how he'll react to finding nothing but Danicka under Danicka's jeans, but she can guess. She's probably not wrong.

It's something like hunting. Staking out the prey. Learning its habits and how it thinks. Equipping oneself: sexual warpaint, isn't that what she thought? Preparation and planning. Deliberate action towards an end: a fucking Shadow Lord after all.

So. Of course he leaves the heels on. And of course he tears her fucking jeans, though at least they're not tatters when he throws them aside. And she wants him to keep doing that but he wants to keep eating her cunt, and she nearly slides onto his lap in a ribbon of long legs and lean body and sex, but she catches herself and she lowers herself back and she does as he says, or asks, and he's moving over her again.

Like a hunter closing the distance. Like a predator lowering itself to the prey.

He's moving over her and his hands press her thighs up and back; his shoulders press her feet, and consequently her knees, up and back. She's laid out on the armchair and he's opening her up and spreading her out, tilting her hips up and back until she's offering herself up like a sacrifice, like a feast.

Lukas catches her fingers first when he bends to her. He catches them between his teeth like an animal, as though he'd forgotten the use of his opposeable thumbs. Her fingers are slipping into his mouth and his tongue winds between her digits; he bites the fork of thumb and forefinger. He sucks her fingers clean before he follows them back to her flesh, licks and sucks at her cunt, fucks her with his face.

And he holds her legs open, his arms wound around her thighs, his hands open on the insides of her knees, pressing them apart. He eats at her mercilessly, slowly but ravenously, and Danicka's had literally hundreds of lovers, and amongst them are men and women far more adept at this than Lukas is or will ever be, but perhaps few were quite so attentive to her reactions, nor quite so willing to learn, nor quite so willing -- eager, perhaps -- to please her. Perhaps she never expected this of him at the start. He never expected it of himself; never thought himself capable of it, or even remotely willing. He doesn't question it now.

[Danicka] It occurs to her, when he puts his palms on the insides of her knees and holds them apart, that he's not going to stop until she comes. It occurs to her, when he bites at her fingers and licks them clean so that the tip of his tongue flicks her cunt in between her digits, that Lukas isn't going to stop until she's screaming. And the thought sends a shiver up and down her spine, makes her hips squirm against his face, makes her cry out softly and wordlessly. Her eyes on him were predatory a moment ago, hungry and demanding.

And then she laid back. She opened her legs and pulled him between them, gave herself over to this, if not to him. She surrenders to what's between them, if not to him. In a couple of days he'll be back in Chicago. In a couple of days she'll have seen her brother for the first time since Christmas. In a couple of days the packmate that drove her to leave Chicago just to get a break will not be a packmate anymore. By the end of the week she'll be back in Chicago. Lukas's message will get to her and knowing he's that far away will twist in her like a knife.

It won't be fear. She won't know what to call it, but she'll book a flight back for Saturday all the same. Her father will rail at her for extravagance, and she will kiss his cheek. He will relent, because even more than his son, she belongs to him. His hand will cover her left cheek. She'll touch the backs of his gnarled knuckles and tell him It's alright, kissing him again, this time on the brow.

But that is days from now. Lukas is not gone, not going, but fucking her with his lips and tongue as though he is, yes, hunting something. He eats her out as though making her come is his religion, is the only system of faith that he can subscribe to, is the only thing that matters. She didn't bring a change of clothes, will go home in torn jeans and will not care. Just as long as he doesn't stop. Just as long as he makes love to her tonight, she doesn't care.

"Fucker," she gasps, her voice falling to a whimper, her hands tightening in his hair. "Oh, fuck, Lukáš...god, baby..."

She swears at him, but there's tenderness to it. She grinds against his mouth and bucks her hips against the seat cushion but there's gentleness to it. She fucks his goddamn face just like he told her to, doesn't hold back just like he told her to, fucks him just like he told her to, but there's dominance in her surrender. Of him, only him, because she can no longer control herself.

"Baby..." Danicka whimpers, pleading. And she's said this before: "Prosím ... Chci tě uvnitř mě."

[Lukas] "Brzo, lásko."

He barely takes his mouth from her to say this. The lower registers of his voice vibrate into her flesh. His eyes open; he's looking up her body from under his eyebrows, which are straight and dark, and his forehead is furrowed with the upward glance, and his mouth is open on her and hot, and hungry, and she's right.

He's not going to stop until she comes. He's not going to stop until she's screaming. He goes at her with redoubled fervor; he wants to make her words fall to shreds in her mouth. Her fingers are still tangling with his mouth. He takes her by the wrist, gently, moves her hand aside. Replaces his hand on her thigh. Holds her open. Catches her clit between his lips and shakes his head, sharply, like an animal shaking prey to stun or kill it, before he's moving down to tilt his head against her body and eat at her cunt again, fuck her pussy with his tongue.

"Brzo," he promises her, and he leans over her, pushes her legs higher, opens her wider. The tilt of his head gives her a view of the left side of his face; the sharp, angular cheekbone, the brilliant eye that burns her way before he closes it again, turns all his attention, all his focus to what he's doing.

She loves his focus. She's never told him that; perhaps never will. She doesn't even know how far and how deep his focus extends; how sometimes he can bend his will to one thing and one alone, and never let up until it's finished. She's never seen him plan. She's never seen him execute. She's never seen him in battle, but she has seen him like this, the whole of his will brought to bear on her. Soon, he tells her, and what he might as well tell her is --

-- well. What he tells her now, turning his mouth from her sex to nip at her thigh again, gentler this time.

"Chci, abyste trochu počkat." His tongue against her thigh. His tongue tracing down, and back to her cunt, and his mouth closing over her flesh again. He's almost vicious in his focus, which is absolute. "Chci, abys přišel."

He's never said this to her before. He's never done this to her before, quite. This is new, too; as new as the marks she left on him the last time they fucked. Once he would've thought it another chink in the armor. He doesn't think that way anymore, or perhaps he doesn't care. He loses parts of himself every time. He loses track of them, loses hold of them, gives himself over.

She gives it back.

He gives her this: focus and fire, his mouth, his savagery, his worship. The lines blur; it's hard to say where the axis of dominance lies, or who is prey; it's hard to say if these terms even matter anymore. If her hand is still in his hair he takes his hand off her thigh for a moment to close his fingers over hers, as if in affirmation, and his mouth never stops on her, never stops, even when his fingers join his tongue now, slipping inside her, fucking her, building a rhythm so steep and sharp that he doesn't even have to tell her he wants her to:

"Come for me."

But he tells her anyway. He tells her anyway, drawing his fingers slick and wet out of her at the end, at the very last, to wrap again around her thighs, to hold her legs firmly apart as he says, repeats it into her flesh:

"I want you to come for me."

before his mouth is on her again, pitilessly now, focused, to take her over the edge and past the line, on and on and on.

[Danicka] Brzo.

She whimpers, and dissolves.

Danicka touches herself as he licks her, moving her hand with a singleminded focus that he would find familiar even though she's so rarely done this in front of him, so rarely done it where he could see it. Her intensity is familiar because it is so very, very much like his own. She has never used her intelligence to plan a battle or execute an attack, at least not in terms of fists or claws or blood.

He moves her hand away, and she cries out in frustrated protest.

Her fingernails rake across the arm of the chair she's in. She fucks his face like he's a whore, like he's an escort hired for this exact purpose, like he's a kept man who is never going to age enough to turn old or wrinkled or gray. She writhes in ruthless demanding as he gives her promises of soon, baby, soon, but she doesn't beg again. Not another please leaves her lip. Just instinctive, nonverbal cries of longing and pleasure and want.

Lukas tells her wants her to come.

Danicka bucks her hips against him as though to say Ano.

The last time they fucked was over a week and a half ago. Danicka hasn't touched herself in that time, for whatever reason, hasn't called him late at night to gasp into his ear that he needs to come get into her bed and give it to her. She hasn't had a goddamn orgasm since the last time he touched her, and he is doing far, far more than simply touching her now. He's destroying her, laying her open, laying her to waste, taking everything.

He gives it back.

And she bites a word out of the air that makes no sound, her fingers tangling with his hair and with his hand and one of her feet slipping on his shoulder, the sharp heel of her shoe scraping down his back, as she comes. As she reaches one arm back and grabs a hold of the back of the chair, her spine arching like a drawn bow, her hips rubbing against his mouth, his tongue picking up moisture and quivering and his ears picking up her escalating screams.

The pearls bounce once on her neck as she shudders, roll over her skin as she trembles.

[Danicka]
Dice Rolled:[ 2 d10 ] 7, 8 (Success x 2 at target 6)

[Lukas] It wrecks him to see her like this.

It's complete fucking decimation. He's the one on his knees; but he's the one kneeling over her and eating at her like she's prey, like she's his; but he's the one falling to pieces when she comes undone. It doesn't make any sense. It doesn't make any fucking sense at all, but when she arches like that, claws at the back of the armchair and arches into a crescent, arches like something wild and untamed and utterly mindless --

Lukas snarls against her, and doesn't stop.

He doesn't stop. He lets her have it, his mouth on her, even when her foot slips loose and her heel gouges down his back, hard enough to make him gasp fuck!, hard enough that a second later there's blood welling from the tear. He takes her through her orgasm the way he always does, as if he wanted to make it good for her, as if he wanted to make it last, make it go on, make her go out of her mind -- except it's not really that, is it; it's not that at all, because what it really is is that he wants to see her like this for as long as she can possibly stand it.

He wants to see her destroyed, laid open, laid to waste, taken.

And then she's shuddering, and the pearls are shivering on her skin, and she's fucking golden in the lamplight, and he's wishing he hadn't asked her to take her earrings off because he wants to fuck her with all her jewelry on, and her heels, and nothing else. His mouth is gentling against her clenching cunt, and he gives her a single, long, lazy lick, from the bottom of her pussy to the hood of her clitoris.

There's something animal about that, too: like a jungle cat bathing its mate.

Then he's unentangling his arms from her legs. At the end he'd rolled her so far that her weight as at the center of her back, and her hips were almost off the seat, and he was nearly leaning over her to eat at her. He lets her down now, but there's nothing gentle about it. He's letting her down and taking her by the hips and picking her up again; he's pulling her slip-sliding from the armchair, and she's still coming down from it when he sits back on his heels and tumbles her down to straddle his lap.

Her back is slippery with sweat. His fingers are slippery with her. Brzo, he said, and he'd meant it. He takes himself in hand, slaps her flank gently with his free hand.

"Up."

It's a command, but loving; there's as much gentleness in this as in the filthy names she calls him sometimes. When she rises up on her knees he looks down, but he's really finding her cunt by touch. He's searching her, rubs the head of his cock between her legs slowly, testingly, and then teasingly, and the feel of her makes him pant against her skin, makes him say, "Tak zkurvený horko," as if this were even in dispute anymore.

He's raising his head again now to lay sucking kisses against the underside of her breast, and then the curvature of her ribs. His free hand grips at her waist, her hip. He takes her nipple in his mouth, slow, but he sucks hard, and he doesn't let go. She's gotten him so wet by now that there's almost no friction when he rubs against her; almost no friction when he quits fucking around, finally, finds the opening of her cunt and starts pulling her down on his cock.

[Danicka] [Yeaaah.]
Dice Rolled:[ 5 d10 ] 2, 2, 6, 8, 9 (Success x 2 at target 8)

[Danicka] "Lukáš!"

There's no one to hear them, or at least the walls are thick enough to keep anyone from caring whose name she's screaming in here. They are slick from sweat and blood and sex. She writhes in the chair and the perspiration on her back rubs her scent into the upholstery. Danicka has no idea that she's made him bleed -- again -- yet, and she could not honestly claim to care right now, with him licking her like an animal, sucking at her flesh even as she's trying to survive an orgasm so intense that she can't stop moving even when she's at her peak, even when she thinks she's going to shatter from the force of it.

He'll heal. She'll live. Her foot stops, blood on the leather, that leg hooked over his shoulder as he goes on suckling at her cunt, as though he's feeding on her, feasting on her. He wants to watch her, and when he opens his eyes what he sees is the light of the moon and the lights of the city changing color on her stomach, glinting off the glistening sweat her flesh is wearing, turning the milky pearls to blue and pink and orange where they rest against her collarbone.

The next thing she knows, her eyes are opening and the ceiling is sliding away overhead. She flows towards him, unhooking her legs from his upper body like she was made for this, sitting up and putting her hands on his shoulders -- she notices now that he's bleeding, gets it on her fingertips, breathes in sharply but doesn't say a word because then he's got her on his lap and he's spanking her like he did in another W once. She sets her teeth on edge, hissing in a breath, and immediately begins rubbing herself against his cock.

She's sensitive enough that it almost hurts. Danicka does it anyway, blood on her fingertips and sweat all over her body, hips lifting obediently so he can stroke her. She lets out a cry and tightens her hands on his shoulders. ""Jemně, lásko!" she pleads, shuddering as he strokes her pussy again, as though she has any room to talk about gentleness now, with that slice in his back. "Jemně...!"

And she loses it, the words and the insistence, as he moves his cock against her, as he breathes out his assessment of her body, of her cunt, of their sex. Danicka bucks against him, bowing her head. Her hair falls to one side, a curtain between her profile and the windows, brushing against his chest. She whimpers at his mouth on her breast, as though she wants to tell him Gently, baby again, but can't find the words in any language. He slips inside her and Danicka lets out a sound of profound, aching relief, only to stop suddenly, her thighs tensing and her eyes opening.

"Lukáš,"

she says, sharply, slapping her hand on his shoulder -- the uninjured one. "Lukášek, ne."

[Lukas] Gently, she tells him, and this might be the first time he hasn't quite listened.

He slows. That much is true. The stroke of his cock against her becomes something deliberate and studied, something slow. But it's no gentler, and her hands are tightening on his shoulders, and there's a twist of sharp-bright pain from the one she'd cut open on her heel, and he doesn't care. He doesn't care because he's bringing her down now, his hand on her hip at once holding her back and pulling her down, and she's letting out such a sound that he can't help but open his mouth against her, gasp against her breast, close his mouth and suck at her again, not gently. Hard.

And then -- "Lukášek, ne.

The first night they were together, he was inside her when she told him to stop, please stop. Which he did, though he hadn't been happy about it: he was stunned, shocked, and then angry, wondering what the fuck sort of game she was playing now.

He's not angry right now. He's not wondering at her games right now. But he's stunned all the same when Danicka's smooth downward glide suddenly arrests. When her hand strikes his shoulder sharply, as though in chastisement, or to catch his attention. His eyes open and he lets go her breast and he wants to know "Co to blejes, Danič--" when it hits him; he figures it the fuck out.

Lukas groans aloud. He drops his brow to the lee of her shoulder and he groans, and it's a wordless sort of curse. For a moment his hand stays where it is at her hip, fighting between pulling her down and pushing her up. He closes his eyes and tries to control himself, strives for control, clutches and claws and fights for it for seconds on end.

Then he tips his chin up. Kisses her shoulder suddenly, and fiercely. A second later he takes her hips in both hands and -- carefully now -- raises her up. When he slips out of her he gasps aloud, and then turns his face up to kiss her mouth.

Gently. Gently.

"You're going to kill me," he murmurs, and when he laughs it's more pain than humor. "God. Side zipper on my bag. Běž, dítě. Rychle."

He sits back on his heels when she gets to her feet. He takes himself in hand again almost without thought, stroking it as he watches her cross the room until watching her becomes a sort of madness, and he turns toward the glistening city instead.

There are still two lights on in here, and the curtains are all open. He can see himself faintly reflected, and her as well: a ghostly image of the room projected over hundreds of feet of black airspace. He hardly recognizes the man kneeling on the ground in front of an armchair with his cock slick and hard in his hand, his hair pushed awry by his lover's fingers, his face wet from her cunt. He likes to think of himself as a civilized, controlled thing, but the creature in reflection has never heard of such a thing; is a naked savage, a wild thing in rut. Lukas wonders why he's not more disturbed by the notion.

[Lukas] (oh right -- 1 WP.)

[Danicka] It's a struggle for Danicka to stop herself from pushing down on Lukas's cock and riding him there on the floor. She doesn't want anything else in the moment, doesn't want to bend over or lay back. She wants to pull him deeper inside of her and lean over his shoulder, hold onto him while her hips move, bite into his skin not to muffle her moans but to feel his flesh between her teeth. She wants, simply and without complication, to fuck him.

She wants him to fuck her.

But if it's a struggle for her to stop, it's a goddamn war for him to not pull her down and moan Please, let me stay in her ear the way he did last time, the last time they fucked, the last time she made him bleed, the last time they could barely control themselves. He is almost shaking with the effort of not giving into his instinct, which is to draw her onto him, which is to thrust into her, which is to take her. Claim her. Make her his.

With a groan he bows his head to her and fights his war, and she shudders, her cunt clenching from before, from now, from anticipation, only making it harder for him to do what he finally does and pull her away. Danicka doesn't fight him, any of that time. She doesn't fight to get free of his hands, even though if she did he would probably let her go without hurting her. She waits for him to get there on his own, in his own way, and when he kisses her she has to tilt her head back, exposing her throat as his lips fall on her shoulder.

He gasps when he leaves her. She gasps, small and short and high-pitched, a quick intake of air when they're separated again.

Danicka uses his shoulders as leverage to get herself up, a tiny spot of blood hitting the carpet from her left heel, and she swats his shoulder again when he claims that she is going to kill him. As though he would be the one carrying a goddamn child, as though he is the one who would be sent away, as though he has not already said

No

even after he said

A part of me wants that very much.

Danicka breathes in deeply and walks slowly, carefully over to his bag. She walks carefully because she's in heels that make her just a couple of inches under six feet. She walks slowly because her thighs are trembling from her orgasm, because her body remembers the feel of him inside her and is jealous to have it back. He told her to go quickly: she can't. She bends at the waist to unzip his back, which is probably when he turns away, unable to watch her anymore.

A condom hits him in the arm, tossed as she is walking back to him. Danicka steps over his thighs and stands in front of him, in between his body and the armchair, reaching down to touch his hair, watching him unwrap and unroll the prophylactic. She traces her thumb over his moist lower lip, then takes her other foot and steps completely over his lap, walking a few steps to the windows, her back to the room, her back to him.

[Lukas] Lukas starts like a whipped stallion when the condom hits him in the arm. He was trying so fucking hard not to focus on the images in the glass; trying so fucking hard to look beyond them, to see the city, that it took all his attention.

He looks down. The packet is on the carpet. He picks it up and she's stepping over him in her goddamn four inch heels, one of them marked with his blood, and there's something so dominant about her, such a fucking alpha female, that he snarls and leans up to grab her behind the knees, to bite the side of her hip. The foil packet is crushed against her leg. It'd be the easiest thing in the world for him to tug her sharply now, to bring her down on her knees, and then onto his cock.

She pushes her hand into his hair. He tips his head back. She touches his lip, doesn't get a chance to trace it -- his mouth opens and he closes his teeth over her thumb, gently; then his lips. He sucks on her finger a moment. She steps over him and away, and he sinks on his back with something like a sigh of surrender.

Fucking christ, he thinks, and rips the packet open at last. He gets the condom on by touch, turning his head to watch her go. She stops at the windows, the vast panes of glass from wall to wall. He smooths the condom down and then sits up, gets to his feet.

They're not talking now. There doesn't seem any room or reason. Any necessity. He comes up behind her and his hands curve over her hips. He draws her back against him, and there's nothing subtle about this, nothing slow. He pulls her back so hard they collide, his chest to her back, and he's like a solid living wall behind her, a sheet of strength and heat.

Lukas bends to her shoulder again. He kisses her, and his teeth scrape her skin. He rubs his erection in the cleft of her ass, rubs her back against him, his hands greedy on her skin now, wrapping around to push up the expanse of her belly, cover her breasts. He squeezes her gently and then his hands are falling, falling, one wrapping around her middle, the other pushing between her legs. He nudges her feet apart and his fingertips find her clit; when he rubs her he presses his hips against hers, presses her forward hard enough to push her cheek against the glass.

It's cool. It's nearly cold, this high off the ground. She can feel the vibrations in it: the wind raking off the rivers, off the Atlantic.

There's a rail at the edge of the window. It's probably to give hotel guests something to lean on while taking in the view they paid for. It gives Danicka something to grab onto while Lukas bears her into the window, kisses her shoulder and her neck blindly, and then he's found the string of pearls around her neck, and they click between his teeth when he bites onto them.

It muffles his words a little. Blurs then. He murmurs, tilting her hips back with his hands, "Jedu do prdele vy teď, rozumíš?"

[Danicka] In these heels, she's far closer to his height than she ever could be completely naked, stripped down to bare feet and bared throat. In these heels, her foot slipping causes serious damage to his back, but almost no damage is ever really serious for him. Danicka knows. She knows how fast they heel, how hard it is to hurt them, how pointless it is to try. And she feels a pang, thinking for a moment that this is the second time she's drawn blood, thinking that he's important, he matters to her, and she keeps opening him up, but every time she looks at him all she sees is animal lust and creeping need and all other thoughts are obliterated.

When she is standing over him and he is holding onto her, biting her, touching her, she rocks her hips forward and rubs her cunt lightly against his face, breathing in deeply. Her body is slowly getting less sensitive, more tolerant of touch, but every time they make contact it's like a bolt of lightning going through her, turning her from sea-crushed earth to glass, as hard and gleaming as it is fragile. When he bites her, she shudders, breathes in, walks away as he unrolls the condom.

Danicka can see him coming up behind her, watches his face emerge from the light shadows in the glass, approaching like a ghost. When his hands find her he's anything but a wraith. He is hot and solid and rough, and her legs are spreading apart before he ever gets a chance to nudge them, before he even gets a chance to slam her body back against his own. Danicka gasps, but it's a laughing sound, breathy and pleased, a little vicious.

A little afraid.

A little deceptive.

His hands are all over her, breasts and belly and cunt. His arm is around her and she sinks back against him, momentarily and strangely comforted by being held in that circle. She rubs herself against his cock again, like a female in heat, like the animal he his, like the beast he knows she is underneath that golden skin and the pearls and the high-rise apartment and all the rest of it. Her back arches, her hands going to the rail they're leaning on, her brow touching the cold glass first before her face rolls to the side. She looks at him out of the periphery of her vision.

Danicka nods to him. But she doesn't wait this time, doesn't tell him she wants him inside her. One of her hands drops between her legs, reaches for him, finds his cock, and guides him into her pussy. As soon as he begins to slide into her she pushes back away from the window, letting out a heavy and helpless groan.

[Lukas] (wut wuz that laff 4?)
Dice Rolled:[ 4 d10 ] 1, 6, 8, 9 (Success x 2 at target 6)

[Lukas] No waiting this time. No delays, and almost no words. She reaches for him. Her heels raise her to within half a foot of his height; gives additional length to her already long legs. When she grasps him between her legs he gasps in her ear, and when she guides him into her

his teeth part, his mouth opens. Her pearls lie forgotten across his lower teeth, caught behind the canines that seem just a little longer and sharper than a human's would be; though perhaps that's only because she knows what he is, and what he is not.

She pushes back. She groans. He throws his head back and her pearls pull against her neck, jerk against his teeth. He drops the string and turns his mouth to her hair instead, kisses the ripples and waves of gold. His nips at her ear, sucks at her earlobe, and this is why he told her to remove her earrings earlier; this, and the fact that he loves to watch her take them down, because it's so fucking intimate, and so fucking ... familiar, somehow.

As though they'd known each other longer than they have. As though they've been a part of one another's lives for years, when they're not really a part of one another's lives at all.

Lukas hasn't seen her in ten days. They haven't talked on the phone. They haven't texted. They haven't written emails. Yesterday was the first he heard from her, and that was because she was fleeing Chicago because his packmate was hounding her; and because, perhaps, she simply missed the city laid out before them now. Missed her family. Missed this.

His hips are flush against her ass now. He fills her, and he's still, and his mouth moves on her neck, the line of her jaw; he finds her mouth where her face is turned, cheek to the glass, and he eats at her mouth the way he'd eaten at her cunt, and at her breasts. His eyes open as they're kissing. The lights of the city are faint on his face; they're so high up. His eyes are gleaming, all pupil. He kisses her slowly, and deeply, and as he's kissing her he draws himself out of her, his hand moving slowly, purposefully on her clit as he does so.

He leaves her body almost completely. Their contact is whittled down to the most tenuous, the slightest of connections by the time his eyes close, and his mouth opens to hers, and he starts pushing into her again.

Faster this time. He fills her in one stroke, panting into her mouth. His mouth moves on hers; words, something like words. "...tak, kurva dobrý," he murmurs, and out again, and into her again. "Bohu, že kundo je tak dobrý."

And a third time. And this time Lukas's hand grips firmer at Danicka's hip, and he turns his mouth to her shoulder. He bites into her shoulder as he starts fucking her in earnest now, his stomach flexing against her back as he thrusts into her, his feet planting firmer to give himself the leverage to fuck her.

[Danicka] All this night, Danicka has -- for once -- been the less verbal of the two of them, shifting her hips or letting out a cry rather than speaking at length. She hasn't been utterly silent but a number of occasions have passed by where she could have spoken, where she might have spoken on another night, and tonight all she does is cry out. Tonight she reaches for him and pulls him into her, moaning against the glass when she feels the last of the damnable distance between their bodies ceasing to exist.

The second time Lukas frightens her, she doesn't give a small laugh to hide it. The pearls around her neck tighten on her throat and she gasps audibly, a hard shudder that is not even remotely like lust going through her. She tightens her hands on the railing, and then moves one of those hands to the arm encircling her waist, covering it, holding it there, but there's something off about the gesture. It's more like the way she touched his hair the first night when she whispered softly, gently, for him to stop. It's not like the looser, more freely given tenderness he's become accustomed to from her.

She relaxes when he lets go, but there's no denying or erasing the sheer rigidity he felt in her body for a second or two, the physical lockdown that took her away from him for a moment, took her out of this room, out of whatever it is they have with one another. Love. Lust. Connection. Passion. His mouth is in her hair, on her ear, and she breathes out, easing back against him, but the calm is careful. She doesn't melt into his arms and against his chest again. She closes her eyes and piece by piece, tries not to be afraid, hates herself for being afraid, bites her tongue.

[Lukas] Lukas has gotten better at reading her. He never was obtuse, but he's gotten more perceptive, and he knows her better. He's learned her secret language, or she's let him see below the surface, and sometimes he doesn't even have to try anymore to understand what's going on.

He doesn't even have to look at her, to look into her, to feel her tensing. He can feel it in the way her spine locks; in the way her arms tense. He can feel it spiking through her when her pearls pull taut between his teeth and her neck, and it halts him.

Lukas has felt this rigidity in her before -- the last time they were in his room together at the Brotherhood. He fucked her from behind and then collapsed into his chair. She tried to get up. He stopped her, and she was frightened; she was perhaps terrified because he's a monster, and she's not, she's frail and fragile and her skin is soft and so easily torn, and the sort of scratch down his back that would fade in five seconds if he took another form would remain on her back for days, if not weeks.

Sometimes she's so damn wild, and wanton, and vicious that he forgets this. He forgets that she's not near-invincible as he is. He forgets that she's soft and sometimes easily frightened; that she cries when she's hurt and hides when she's terrified. He forgets she's not even particularly strongwilled amongst kin and Garou. Sometimes she's almost craven. Sometimes he forgets this and she goes rigid with terror, and all he can do is --

-- stop. Stop himself, check his impulses, halt his urge to just fuck her, just bend her over and fuck her, use her; treat her like a whore or a thing; behave not merely like a beast, but like a monster.

He stops this. He reins himself in; he stops. He stops fucking her. He doesn't get around to kissing her. He stops caressing her. He's still flush against her back, and he's still inside her, but he's motionless now, his arm wrapped around her to keep her close even when he knows he should let her go, give her space. His breath is humid and hot across her shoulder. He turns and bows his brow to her shoulder, rests there a moment.

Then Lukas draws his hand from between her legs. He draws himself out of her, as gently as he can. He loosens his arm around her, too, and he braces his hands on the railing instead. When he raises his head he kisses her shoulder, softly.

"Je mi to líto, Danička," he murmurs. "Já se omlouvám já vás děsí. Nebyl jsem přemýšlel."

His breathing is quickened, unsteady. It's a raggedness just at the edges of his words. His heart is pounding against her back. He can't hide this, no more than he can hide that he's aroused, that his cock is hard, that he desperately wants to fuck her. But he doesn't move, and he doesn't push her. He doesn't force her to endure him.

That would be an irrevocable ending, too. As bad as striking her. Worse.

"Dělat potřebujete, aby mě viděl?" he asks her quietly. "Nebo dělat budete potřebovat, abych přestal?"

[Danicka] He's never been obtuse but by god he tried, at the beginning, not to see what he was seeing. She's always seen right through him but by god he tried, he tried so hard, to hide what he was feeling, to pretend his teeth hadn't been gritting as she fucked Sam, to pretend that he didn't want her, or that he only wanted to use her, or that what they did to each other in that motel room wasn't lovemaking. She pretended that she hated him for awhile. That she didn't care that she was cruising for a fuck five days later. That she wasn't thinking about him at night.

She still thinks about him at night. She throws her arm over a pillow or slides her hand down between her legs or reaches for a vibrator and bites her lip as she comes. She looks at the moonlight through the window and watches it wax, watches it wane. Tomorrow night she will sleep in her own bed in her own room in her own house and look at the oak tree's branches scraping the glass as the wind moves them, and she will think about what it would be like to have him behind her, holding her, his brow against the back of her neck and his heat suffusing her skin.

Right now, Lukas is behind her, remembering that she is not as strong as he is, not by a long shot, and never will be. He is remembering that if he breaks her, she stays broken. If he scares her, it is because she knows too well what he's capable of even though she has never seen him in his war form, has never seen him in any form but this except for a split-second in glabro. She's never seen him destroy something with his bare hands. He's only bruised her once, and that was on accident, and she had not asked him to stop. Sometimes she's so very strong, and he forgets, and then she gasps like that and he remembers: alpha female or not, she's not a beast. She's not Garou. She's not a monster.

He is.

She didn't ask him to stop this time, either, or to pull out of her like he does, but she is instantly more relaxed when he shifts his body away slightly. Danicka breathes out slowly, as though she was holding all the air in the world in her lungs, and she is glad, silently but deeply, that he doesn't completely leave her. He stays against her, close enough that she can feel his heat and his cock and his arms braced on either side of her. It's like the night she was shot: she could not tolerate him being too close, but could not bear to have him too far away. It is, in a way, always like that with them.

Her lover's lips press to her shoulder even as she's trying to adjust to the feeling of him no longer filling her. She shudders slightly as he murmurs, this time not out of horror, certainly not out of revulsion. Just a shiver, sudden and complete, that has her gripping the railing tighter. Her back arches slightly, her ass slides against him, against his cock, makes her breathe in sharply.

"Nech mě vidět tě, lásko. Potřebuju vědět, že jsi to ty," she whispers, tilting her head back until she rests it against his shoulder. Her eyes are closed for a moment, her throat bared, her back arched, her breasts lifting and falling as she quite literally pants for air. "Potřebuji tě vidět... while you fuck me tonight."

[Lukas] A moment, stillness. They lean into each other like this, her head against his shoulder, his mouth against hers. Their eyes are closed. She bares her neck to him and he kisses her, as softly as he can right now, which isn't very softly at all. His mouth presses to her pulsepoint.

Then he straightens up. He turns her around, his hands at her waist. The city's at her back now. Its colors fall on him, dim and multihued where the lamplight doesn't reach. He lifts her on his body, a single smooth rise. Her hair falls about her face, and then past his cheeks, his jaw, as he turns his face up to hers.

He kisses her like that, standing at the window. The kiss is slow, deepening. Her hair moves over his face, a lock slipping past his brow to fall past his ear. They don't lean on anything but one another. His arms are tensed against her weight, a band of flexion stretching across his shoulders and chest. Lukas waits for her legs to wind around his waist, and then he lowers her, lets her slide down his body.

It wouldn't take much for him to be inside her again. He lets her slip past, though. He lets her cunt slip slowly, slowly down the shaft of his erection, and the kiss is falling apart now, spinning into tattered breaths and quick-drawn sips. Taking her hips in hand, he rocks her against him, rubs her over her until his mouth drifts past hers, and his head bows to her shoulder, and he groans softly, almost inaudibly, against her skin.

And kisses her again. Her collarbone this time: the narrow arch of bone under her skin. And then the strip of muscle in her neck. And then the angle of her jaw.

"Jste připraveni na me znovu?" It's a whisper, barely given voice.

[Danicka] Perhaps it's strange that she can lean back on him like she does so soon after a moment of sheer terror. Maybe not. It was not him, not really. It would be unfair to blame his Rage, to try and say that it is a completely separate entity, or an illness. Danicka is almost never running from him, from Lukášek, from the one she loves. She is scared because instinct tells her to be frightened. She's known this fear longer. It has almost never broken her trust. It goes deeper than love, and he cannot be held accountable for that any more than she can.

Danicka turns easily in his hands, lifts her legs to wrap around him as deftly and as smoothly as if they belong there. As though she belongs here, and it does not matter -- it makes no difference -- if it's the W in Times Square or a Best Western in Chicago or a car or her bed or the Brotherhood, because it's true: she belongs here, so long as 'here' is with him, so long as 'here' is where he is.

She kisses him, cupping his face in her hands and smoothing her fingers to the back of his neck, up the line of his skull into his hair. She kisses him like she knows him better than four months have earned her. She kisses him like there was no long break between the time they spent together as children and the time they have spent together as adults. She kisses him as though to tell him the secret she hasn't voiced: that she wishes she'd known him all that time, that she wishes they had been friends before he Changed, that she wishes in a sentimental and almost girlish way to have fallen in love with him when they were both too young to know any better.

They know better now, and sometimes that aches. Sometimes that shatters them.

As Lukas moves her against his body, against his cock, she breathes in, her lips losing his for a moment to gasp, her weight tipped forward onto his body, into his arms. A moment later she's kissing him again, recapturing his mouth. Her lips are soft, so soft, as though she's never kissed before. Her tongue slips into his mouth like she's not sure how he's going to taste. She kisses him until he can't bear it anymore, and moves his head to her shoulder, releasing that thin and wanting moan.

"Ano," she whispers back, fingers running through his hair, lips moving against his temple. She kisses him there, then his cheek, then seeks his mouth, murmuring breath to breath: "Značka lásku ke mně."

[Lukas] Danicka doesn't have to seek his mouth for long. Her fingers combing through his hair raises his face to hers. Her kiss falls along the cresting bones of his face: temple to cheek, and then to his mouth. His mouth opens to hers and his head tips back as he lifts her on his body again, lifts her up and adjusts the angle of her hips.

When he brings her down again, it's as slow as before; more careful. He controls her descent as he penetrates her, his arms iron-hard with strain, his hands open over her ass.

There isn't a single quiver in his grip on her. His knees don't give way. He doesn't stagger at the pleasure of it. Lukas is a perfect illusion of control, except he's not: except he's gasping against her mouth. Except his heart is pounding in his chest. Except a shiver steals up his spine, pulling at the long weight-bearing muscles in his back and releasing again. Except when she's taken all of him he has to pause a moment, his brow pressed to hers, his eyes closed. He has to take a moment to remind himself:

Jemně. Jemně.

It's only when he feels her thighs tightening around him, feels her starting to move herself that Lukas shifts his grip on her. He lifts her hips again, as slow and deliberate a stroke as the first; lifts her on his body, lifts her off his cock until his mouth loses hers and finds her neck instead, finds, again, over and over, the pulse there.

He kisses it as though it means something; as though it means the same thing he means when he puts his hand on her chest, fits his hand beneath her left breast and feels her heart beating against his palm. He kisses her pulse as though to affirm that she's alive, and here, with him.

And down again. Faster this time, driving his breath from him in a rush; flickering tension through his arms and into his fingers, which squeeze her ass.

When he lifts her a third time it's faster still, and she doesn't go so far before he's bringing her down again; pulls her down, grinds her down this time, flexes his hips against hers when their bodies meet.

And again, a fourth time, a little more forceful; a little more intense. He's leaning her back against the glass, letting her shoulderblades rest against the glass, cantilevering her against him. A breath of space opens between them, enough that he can open his eyes and see her; enough that he can lace his hands behind the small of her back and form a cradle for her. He's not moving her upon him anymore. He's moving into her now. He kisses her with his eyes open, and then closing, and kissing her, rocks his hips into hers, slow but heavy, each stroke deliberate. The kiss is the same.

[Danicka] They flow towards one another like they're magnetized, like they're shore and tide, like sun and blossom, clouds covering and uncovering the moon. The glass behind Danicka is cold and Lukas is on fire, Rage and lust burning up his heart and his core until it bleeds out to his skin and singes her fingertips where she touches him. They kiss as he moves her, and she moves as he holds her, and they come together with aching slowness until their hips meet, until their bodies melt together, and Danicka tips her head back away from his kiss to breathe towards the ceiling. As if she's praying. As if they're worshipping.

She holds him to her shoulder, to her chest, allowed to tremble where he does not, allowed to give a full shudder when he is finally inside her again even though he keeps himself so in control, so careful. He's gasping against her throat and her body is quivering on his, her hips bucking slightly and somewhat dangerously, communicating in a language that is neither English nor Czech: thrust. take it. take me.

And he disobeys. But since when do Shadow Lords bow to the whims of their kin?

A few times, finally, Lukas moves Danicka on his cock, the shaft sliding against her clit, the length of him filling her and drawing out again, in again, out again. She moans, her head falling forward, her fingers tightening in his hair as they slowly, slowly, slowly ride one another. She is opening her mouth to whisper in his ear: lean me back so I can fuck you, put me against the window, oh baby let me fuck you just before he does, just before he steps forward and her shoulders touch the glass that is icy cold at night and this high up. She doesn't startle.

She does shiver, but not from the cold. Danicka writhes on him, her gasps hitting a sharp, helpless pitch. She swivels her hips in a grinding circle as he leans into her, the glass giving her leverage to fuck him. One of her hands leaves his back and blindly discovers the railing. She grips it and uses what little strength there is in her arms to move against him, legs tightening to pull him deeper. Her other hand is still in his hair. Her fingertips are massaging his scalp when he kisses her, when she kisses him, when they kiss, when they come together like some force is and has always been dragging them inexorably towards each other, towards this, towards now.

That is how they kiss. That is how they always kiss.

Danicka lets him move slowly for a few more strokes, rocks with him, grinds every few thrusts, gasps when he pushes deeper than before, and then she leans forward and wraps herself around him, both arms winding about his shoulders and her legs crossed at the ankles and her head bowing to his shoulder. She groans then, pulling him in tighter with her limbs, half-snarling against his throat:

"Těžší."

[Lukas] "Oh--"

It's not a word. It's not even really a sound. A gasp, perhaps; a breath, harsh, as she wraps herself around him, winds her limbs around him and pulls him into her. What distance there was closes. Her mouth is to his throat, and it's possible he's never let another woman do this before her. It's possible that it was never anything conscious, never a matter of the animal in him not wanting another's teeth so close to his carotid. It's possible that it was simply how it always was.

Until now.

He doesn't give it any thought. It's the last thing on his mind, except that it's her mouth on his skin, and her hands on his body, and her legs tightening around his waist, and her wetness, her warmth, her tightness on his cock.

Těžší, she tells him, and it's very nearly a demand. Of all the things they think of and about one another, that they love of and about one another, this is one more he's never told her:

That he loves it when she snarls at him like that. That he loves it when she eats at his mouth, claws at his back, squeezes him between her thighs and rides him. He's never told her this, might never get around to it. It doesn't matter. She can tell, because when she snarls like that he exhales a half-voiced gasp like this, and then his hand leaves her for just a second to grasp the railing beside hers.

Then it's back on her. His hands are back on her, holding her hips, and he's leaning her into the glass, bearing her against it, and it's cold against her back, and the heat of her body leaves a rim of fog around her. His shoulders press into hers; his chest to hers, the hairs on his body coarse against her smooth skin, and he turns his face to her shoulder and bites at her again, as gently as he can, with a sort of helplessness, as though he cannot help but bite her, cannot help but scrape her skin with his teeth, grip her flesh between his jaws.

He can't help this either: the way he starts fucking her, harder -- faster, too, though not recklessly so, yet. Heavier, as she'd asked, solid, unrelenting thrusts of his body into hers, taking it, taking her, taking what she offers up with no hesitation and no uncertainty.

Lukas lets go her shoulder, then, and looks down the seam of their bodies. He watches himself fucking her, groaning to see the spread of her legs, the slickness of his cock as he flashes out of her, plunges back in -- groaning to see the flickers of reaction in her thighs, the strips of muscle that pull taut, that quiver now and then; the rise and fall of her breasts as she breathes. He watches himself fucking her until he can't watch anymore, and then he raises his head and seeks out her mouth and kisses her

(the way they always kiss)

devouringly, endlessly, and kissing her, takes her up another notch. Harder now, and faster, rocking into her with an unequivocal hunger. His mouth parts from hers. He whispers to her, raggedly:

"Oh, Danička -- tak dobře."

[Danicka] Every time, they show each other intense and very nearly unquestioning trust. As far back as the first time, Lukas laid himself out naked and let her on top of him, and she let him hold her from behind even though she stayed awake, and though they did not stay together, they let down their respective guards for a short time only to slam those walls back up again the next time they saw each other. She lied to him, he dragged her outside, they found that they couldn't keep up the acts and so Danicka snapped at him and Lukas let her go and now, and now, and now they cannot let go.

They've tried.

Danicka folds over him and around him, pulls him into her as though they cannot become close enough, as though she is going to tattoo him into her skin, burn him into her flesh, strengthen her bones with his Rage and it would not be wrong, it would not be out of place, if he was reminded for a moment of the conversation they had the last time they were together:

their children would be worthy. He can feel it when he's inside of her, the draw of her breeding, the way it rakes down his consciousness and demands his protection, his closeness. When he wants her it isn't her bloodline or their children he's longing for; it would draw her to him if there was no other attraction, it would pull at him from across the city, across the country, as long as he remembered her particular scent.

That scent is in his nostrils, that trust is in his mind, that closeness is making Danicka arch her back and push her hips down on him, whimpering plaintively in his ear More, more, baby, more as he fucks her.

There is so much they don't know about one another, things they should know or things they love about each other, because they haven't ever opened up and spoken of it. But Danicka knows that he loves it when she rakes her nails down his back, loves it when she bites him, loves the way she growls. She loves that she is not afraid to do this, loves the way he responds like a storm, like a hurricane wrecking everything in its path to get from sea to shore, to touch the earth in spring and leave everything blasted, wasted, annihilated. Everything but her. Everything but the two of them, wrapped around each other like this.

She knows. He gasps, and holds onto the railing, and thrusts his hips to push himself deeper into her, and Danicka knows. He fucks her harder, and she knows that he understands more than the word out of her mouth, knows the nuance of the way her flesh locks down on him, holds onto him, works on him. She knows what her body is doing to him as intimately, as instinctively, as she feels what he is doing to her.

To her body.

To her.

They no longer ask themselves or each other what the fuck, what the fuck are you doing to me, what have you done. They know, now. She will always blame him for this: he made her love him. She doesn't know how, doesn't want to ask him how he did this without making her feel as though her hand or heart were forced, but she holds him accountable for it all the same. You made me love you.

You changed me.

Lukas pulls back enough to look down between them, and Danicka watches him, letting out a breathy chuckle to see him staring at his cock, at her cunt taking him. She bears down on him then, to see him react, to hear him groan, to push him until he can't bear it anymore. She squirms on him until he kisses her the way he does, as though to force her to stop doing this to him, as though to beg for mercy, as though to ...kiss her. So good, he says, and she tilts her head back, puts her other hand on the railing, and fucks him in earnest. Her small breasts bounce slightly as she rides him, the muscles in her arms quivering, the feel of him inside her maddening.

"Don't stop," she gasps, in English this time, all but hissing the words. "Don't fucking stop, you bastard."

[Lukas] Don't stop, she gasps to him, as though there was ever a danger he would. Don't fucking stop.

Words are escaping him now. His answer is not verbal. Her head falls back and her throat is bared to him. She does this so thoughtlessly, as thoughtlessly as he does. He bends to her and he kisses her neck and it's not enough so he licks the belt of muscle there, nips at her skin with his teeth. She's propping herself against the rail with both hands and god knows Danicka doesn't have much in the way of strength, and a little under twenty years ago those thin arms of hers wouldn't hold her in a tree and she came crashing down and Anezka clapped her hands over her mouth in wide-eyed horror and he ran yelling into the house knowing he'd get thrashed for it, but it's not twenty years ago anymore. She's not a child anymore and neither is he, and they haven't known each other in the meantime. They didn't grow up together, no matter what she might wish, no matter what he might feel. They didn't even remember each other when they met again at SmartBar, Gabriella sitting between them, Danicka a little more restrained and protective that time than he's ever seen her at a bar or a club, since.

She's a little like this when she's alone, out on the town. There's something a little bit wild about her; there's a sort of languid ferocity about her. He could see flickers of the lazy gorgeous slut she was at the 550 in the way she laid herself back in the armchair and let him devour her whole. He can see flickers of the woman she was in the bathroom, unbuttoning the three buttons of her shirt while she asked him

Do you want me?

and he nearly had to close his eyes and turn away to keep from saying

Yes. Yes. God yes; please.

He can see flickers of that but he suspects the truth is closer to the skin when she's like this. When her skin is bare and her teeth are bared and she's grabbing at his shoulders, or his back, slicing him open, clutching a rail to give herself the leverage to fuck him, fuck her under her own power, how little of it there may be in those thin arms of hers; and he's come full-circle, the snake of his thoughts biting its own tail; he's thinking of her thin body and her paltry strength and how she's

fucking him as hard as he's fucking her, holding herself up so she can fuck him until her breasts bounce and her body rolls and her thighs strain on either side of his ribs, and the room fills with their gasping and their panting.

Lukas grabs her under her ass, hefts her suddenly higher. Changes the angle suddenly, slides suddenly deeper, hits her so sudden and deep that he gasps promiňte! against her shoulder. He lifts her against him until he can bend his mouth to her breasts, opening his mouth and letting her flesh rebound against his tongue before he closes his mouth over her nipple, bites at her with his lips, looses a subaudible snarl against her skin before letting her go and lunging up to kiss her mouth instead -- hard.

Hard enough to drive her back against the glass. Her hair presses against the cold pane; her shoulderblades, the backs of her arms. He leans into her and kisses her, and fucks her, presses her to the glass with his body and fucks her hard enough to make the rail shudder beneath her hands; to make the glass flex outward slightly.

When his mouth falls from hers again he gasps for air, gasps because of what she's doing to him, multiplies the roll of her hips with the pull of his hands, meets it with the drive of his hips. There's sweat running down the dip of his spine; sweat on her body beneath his hands; sweat where she grips him with her legs and it makes their bodies slick against one another, and it's probably best, probably safest that she holds some of her own weight against the rail, but all the same Lukas kisses her again, eats at her mouth as hungrily and unrestrainedly he fucks her cunt, and then tells her:

"Podržte na mě, lásko."

He tells her:

"Nebudu vám dovolit pokles."

[Danicka] Lazy. Gorgeous. Fierce. His.

And god, fragile. He can feel her breakable, breakable bones against him, the shift of muscle so incredibly different from his own. It isn't that Danicka is out of shape, not by a long shot, but being fit is not the same as being strong. Her strength goes deeper than muscle, is more diffuse than bone. He recognizes it now in the same way he must have as a child, the way he must have when she told him their first night together what she would and would not allow. It has nothing to do with how much weight she can lift or bear up with her arms.

But he sees it, recognizes it, and fucks her all the harder because he feels it calling to him as much as her blood calls on him to protect her. Something else, spirit and upbringing and god knows what else, very nearly demands them to test each other. Something separate entirely from tribe, from blood, from species or gender, compels them to let down those guards, clear those tests, and simply let each other Be.

Because they want each other. (Yes, yes, god yes, please yes.) Because they need this, because this makes all the rest -- not just the fighting and the misunderstandings and the searing madness of love but the issues with pack and family and War and life -- worth it. Because no matter how many times they come together, how many nights they have, it might be last. It always, always, might be the last time they see each other, no matter what city they're in.

Might be the last time he tastes her breasts like this, feels her nipples under his lapping tongue, sucks on her and mingles his saliva with her sweat. Might be the last time he feels her cunt clenching around him like that, feels her hips squirming hard and wanton so she can get more of his cock, so she can rub herself against his shaft before she lets go of the railing with her right hand and reaches down, stroking herself with her fingertips. Might be the last time he sees that, might be the last time he hears her make that sound, might be the last time she shudders like she's struck by a bolt of lightning and might be the last time her heart thunders, racing in her chest, as she starts gasping

"Yeah...yeah...oh fuck, yeah...Lukáš, baby, fuck..."

like it is the last time, like it's the end of time, like it's all she has left.

And Lukas, called to like that, goes so deep into her that she looses a sudden, sharp scream, her fingernails digging into him and apology flying out of his lips.

"My god, Lukáš!"

And that flying out of hers.

Faster, then, the rhythm of her cunt and the pace of his hips hitching, speeding up, matching again. Danicka goes on touching herself, biting back a whimper until it turns into something like a squeal. She opens her eyes as he pulls his mouth away from kissing her, away from swallowing those sounds she makes so helplessly. Her cheeks are flushed, her eyes shining, her lips parted and red. She licks them, and then licks his, as she takes her other hand from the railing and wraps her arm around his shoulders.

"Věřím vám," she gasps, and kisses him again, his lips moist from her tongue. Her next words are half-groaned, half-sighed, as her hips grind her pussy down harder on his cock: "Jedu přijde brzy. Mějte zasranej mě. Ach můj bože, mějte zasranej mě...!"

[Lukas] Sometimes --

Every time, it feels like it could be the last time. No, that wasn't even it. Every time, it very well could be the last time. He's an Ahroun. He's a Garou, amongst the last of a dying race. His war spans the goddamn universe and his side is most definitely losing. Every time he walks away from her, that could be it. He could be ambushed by six spirals and a nexus crawler around the next corner. The goddamn ground could open up and swallow him.

Every time she walks away from him, that could be it. She could be sucked dry by a vampire. She could be turned into a goddamn vampire herself. She could be hit by a bus, run over by a truck; she could be mugged and killed; she could be dragged back to New York City by the hair and mated off to someone else.

None of these possibilities frighten him. He doesn't think about them. He doesn't worry about it, because if he did he'd never stop worrying, because it's fucking ridiculous to worry about all the what-ifs and maybes; because in the end, the one thing that frightens him, hurts him, is the same thing that hurts her:

The fear that one day she might walk away of her own accord, for no better reason than that she doesn't love him anymore, and maybe never did.

The fear that she might take, and take, and take everything -- give none of it back -- leave him with nothing.

Only; he doesn't think about this as often anymore, either. He doesn't think about it at all. He used to think about it. He thought about it all the damn time, told her he didn't think he could hold her, or keep her, or whatever the fuck that meant; told her he didn't trust her; told her he didn't believe she would give it back. He told her these things and pushed her away and pushed her out and drew the line, and when he was done he crumbled like a house of cards.

She's so fragile. She's so breakable, and so weak, and so flimsy. Even in this form his strength to hers is a mountain to a stone; a blade of grass. In another he could snap her like a twig. He could break her. But her strength goes deeper than muscle, is more diffuse than bone, and he recognizes it in her because after he fell apart and came undone and came back to her and told her

Please.
and told her
I was wrong.
and told her
I believe you.

it was nothing but her, nothing but her arms and her lips and her body, her acceptance -- her, Danicka -- that put the pieces back together again.

So; it feels like it could be the last time. It could always be the last time. She fucks him like it could be the last time, gasps his name to him, screams like that, digs her fingernails into his back like that, because it could be the last time, and there's no point in holding back; nothing but regrets down that path.

So; they kiss like that, and they fuck like that, and she tells him she believes him, and whatever he might've said is lost in her kiss. She holds onto him and he bears her against the glass and their mouths are sealing together, pulling together and moving and sliding apart to gasp, only to find one another again. She tells him she's close -- a shudder wracks his body and he gasps against her mouth -- her hand is caught between them, her knuckles pressing against the taut plane of his lower abdomen as she strokes herself, as he moves into her again and again and again.

"Zvedněte tvůj nohou vyšší." It's barely coherent. They're barely words, a breath, a scrap of sound borne on a gasp. All of Lukas's strength has fled to his hands on her body, his arms holding her up; his body moving into hers, his cock pounding her cunt. There's nothing left for thought, nothing left for words. "Dovolte mi kurva tě."

She lifts her legs, wraps them higher around his ribs or she doesn't. He's tilting her hips and slamming into her either way, giving it to her hard, giving her everything he has, unambiguously. His lips seize hers; his teeth scrape her lip, and then he kisses her, his mouth opening on hers as though he meant to bite her moans from her tongue, meant to eat her whole.

He can't remember what it was like not to want Danicka like this. Not to be on the verge of madness for her. Not to be driven insane by the way she feels, the way she fucks; not to go at her like this, like a wild thing, like their ten days apart was a goddamn eternity. He can't remember any of that, and he doesn't care, and when his mouth leaves hers he bites into her shoulder again, the same compulsiveness, the same necessity.

"Přijít, lásko." It's a ragged whisper in her ear, and then he bites her again, stops a wordless groan against her skin. "Přál bych si, aby jste došli. Přijít, lásko. Potřebuji se na vás přijde pro mě."

[Danicka] She remembers the last time she saw her mother, before they came to her and told her that Night Warder was dead. She remembers where she was when she was told, remembers what she said in response. Danicka knows, ironically, how fragile a Garou's life is. She knows, intimately, the fragility of her own. She's felt it slowly drain out of her. She has felt it all go black. She has lost count of which bones have broken, which near-death experiences she thinks were real and which were just hallucinations.

Danicka loves him. She holds onto him now to tell him that, kisses him to tell him that, cries out his name over and over and fucks his cock like she's going to die if he stops now. Her eyes meet his for a few short seconds, vivid and hungry, her lips apart so she can breathe, panting into the room lit only by lamps and the city's multicolored glow. He believes her. She believes him.

I trust you.

He will not drop her. She will not walk away from him. He drives himself into her relentlessly and she fucks him back, receives him, accepts him even though he's a goddamn animal. Because he'd a goddamn animal. Or simply, as if something like this could ever be that simple, because she loves him. Danicka kisses him, hard this time, sucking breath out of his throat, sucking her taste of his tongue, little shudders of pleasure going through her faster and faster, rippling up her body. Her legs wrap tighter around him, hold him, keep him, whatever the fuck that means or whatever the fuck they're capable of together.

And then, suddenly, she doesn't remember ever being anywhere but here, experiencing anything other than his cock inside of her. Danicka's back arches, and Lukas's teeth go into her shoulder, and she screams wordlessly and harshly for him. The movement of her body is so hard, so very near violent, that she rocks against him, away from the glass, bucking her hips and riding him with almost no support but that obscene strength of his. Her body folds over his, one hand going to the back of his neck, her head bowing to his neck, his shoulder, as she rides out her orgasm against him. At the very last her hand leaves her cunt, her arm wraps around him, just fucking his cock and trying not to hurt him again with those goddamn heals.

Her skin has a pearlescent sheen from sweat. Her pearls roll against her skin, press against him where they touch. Her mouth opens against his neck, and her gasps shudder into whimpers at their ends.

[Lukas] Later, when Lukas opens his eyes again, he doesn't know where he is. He sees the lights blurred outside and he's not sure where he is, when he is, what city, what planet. He could be out in deep space. He could be looking at galaxies and stars. He could be underwater and upside down, the lights of the surface glittering up at him through a hundred meters of darkness.

When Lukas opens his eyes again, all he knows is:

Danička.

--

Who is not his by the laws of man or beast. Who is not his wife, or his mate, or even properly his kin. He's her guardian. In Chicago. That's all he ever claimed, all he ever fought for, all he ever wanted.

(That last is not true.)

But they're not in Chicago; they're in New York City, and here he has no more claim to her than he has to the moon. She's not his, and may never truly be his, except -- that she is. Right now. When she wraps around him so tight like that, when she kisses him like that, when she comes on him and all around him and trusts him to hold her, trusts him not to drop her, trusts him not to let her fall or let her go, she's his.

The knowledge is fierce as a flame, searing the beating chambers of his heart:

Moje.

It beats in his blood and clutches through his muscles like the pleasure clawing its way up his back:

Moje.

She rides him through her orgasm. She clutches at him with one hand, and then, at the last, with the both; clings to him with both hands as though the world were about to end in fire and ash, in a rain of death; as though by holding on to him she might somehow ward off some impossibility, or stem the flood, or hold back the tide; except the tide has her, her orgasm has her and won't let go, and her scream is harsh and meaningless and she rides him and he bears her against the glass and he can't tell the difference between them anymore, and

when his orgasm hits, his fingers dig into her hips. He drives his cock into her, sinks his teeth into her, comes into her, forgets himself and gasps out a sound against her skin, a ragged groan that he wouldn't recognize it himself if he heard it.

--

She's still whimpering into his skin when he begins to come back to himself. He can feel her arms around him, her legs; her cunt clenching and pulsing around him; her mouth moving against his neck as she pants. He finds himself gripping her with hands and teeth as though to keep her; claim her; make her his. He loosens his grip with an effort and lays his cheek to her shoulder, kisses her neck, kisses the hollow beneath her ear; kisses her hair.

He opens his eyes and he could be anywhere at all. He could be on another planet. He could be a million light years away. He could be underwater, in the ocean. He thinks:

Danička.

And he thinks:

Moje.

And he closes his eyes again, and holds her.

[Danicka] She can't stay here. Danicka knows this, even though she is wrapped so tight around him that she senses no boundary between her flesh and his, even though their sweat is so mingled that they will smell indistinguishably of one another until they shower. They will need to shower; Danicka has a trip home to make. She has to mend her jeans and scrub blood off of her heel. She has a few hours she will sleep, and then when the sun is glittering at her through the windows and casting rainbows on the rug in the living room, she will make brunch with her father. Later on she'll see her elder brother for the first time since Christmas.

He will ask questions she doesn't want to answer. She will tell him lies. He will look at her like he knows the truth. She will, most likely, not tell him what he wants to hear, and she may suffer for it. But she can't stay here. She has no way to explain or justify her absence to her father or Emilie or Vladik unless she tells them that she was with someone, and no way to make it all right unless she tells them that she was with a Shadow Lord Ahroun that not only wants to claim her as his mate but will have her pregnant within the year.

So she can't stay here, and she hates it, and the thought of leaving him is, right now, as painful as the thought of tearing a limb away. So she doesn't think about it. She holds him close to her, trusts him not to let her go, even though she's made him bleed again and made him cry out like that and made him so weak that for awhile he didn't think he could bear to be with her.

Danicka gasps for air when it's over, her chest heaving for breath, her fingers finding his hair and stroking the sweat-tightened curls at the back of his neck with her fingertips. She closes her eyes and feels him, in her and around her, kissing her, until she stills. Until he stills, and holds her, and she breathes out one finally steadied breath:

"I don't want to go."

[Lukas] The last time they were together, Lukas said he would have to send Danicka away if she were pregnant with his child. If she bore his child. And she folded into him, drew closer and curled against him, as if the very thought was anathema to her. As if she had to physically hold him tighter lest some force tore her from him.

This is the same. She doesn't want to go, she says, and that word, go, make his hands tighten on her again. It makes his eyes open, and he recognizes what he looks at now: not stars, not the light of the surface, but the city spread below him; artificial starlight glistening amber and white and green and red.

Go, she said, and it makes him wrap his arms around her suddenly, fiercely, sliding his forearms between her back and the glass, flexing her spine to lift her upon his body as she'd lifted herself, right before she came. He balances her on him, holds her against him, squeezes her tight in his arms as though he might ward off her leaving.

Lukas has not, until now, considered the possibility that she won't stay with him tonight. He can't remember the last time they didn't stay together, at least sleep together, in the same bed, since the very beginning.

Even the day he told her I don't believe you at the downtown inn, the day after the moot when she left him just after sunset because they fought, he'd slept; she'd slept behind him, her arm wrapped around him.

A part of him wants to beg her not to go. To stay with him until the dawn, until noon, until whenever the fuck they were exhausted and worn out and pliant and strengthless, invertebrate shadows of themselves, covered in one another's scent and sweat. He wants to ask her to stay and fuck him while the stars turn over New York City; he wants her to sprawl in bed with him and tell him about growing up in the same house her father still lives in, and how she learned to make koláče, and if she ever learned how to climb trees better than she did at age whatever-and-a-half, and if there was ever anything, anything at all, good about her childhood.

Because there must have been. Because there's light in her, and sometimes she burns so bright he can barely stand to look at her.

And he wants her to fuck him again as the sun rises over East River, casts in through the east-facing window of this corner room; washes across the armchair where he ate her out, the floor where he lay half-dazed after she stood over him in her four-inch heels and ground her cunt against his face; washes across the bed where she will not sleep with him tonight. He wants to make love while the night gives way to day, while business travelers went to their meetings and conferences and symposia and gatherings, and Times Square fills with tourists, and cabs run the veins of the city and subways carry commuters to their destinations.

He wants her to stay.

These things pass through Luka's mind, filter through and away. He turns his mouth to her neck and kisses her again, and then draws back, not far -- enough to look up and see her face as she rides upon his body.

"When do you have to go?" he asks her, quietly.

[Danicka] If he asked her now if she wanted to go back to Chicago, tonight, to go with him and go back to that other city, this time she would say yes. She would cling to him even tighter than she does now, her face buried in his skin, and tell him to take her back just so she doesn't have to leave him. Just so she can go to bed with him and stay there. Neither of them talk about this much, this ache when they say goodnight or good morning and part ways, but it's there, and it's wrenching. Somewhere along the line staying became less painful than leaving.

Now, though, leaving is almost unthinkable. Danicka breathes in and out against his neck, her chest moves in and out against his chest, and Lukas tightens his grasp on her as though time itself would steal her away. No other mate, no pregnancy, no dawn on the horizon, no brother or roommate or anything should take her from this moment, take her from him. Danicka shifts on him, breathes in sharply at the way his cock moves in her, and her fingers go still in his hair...then rub the back of his neck fondly.

She wants to stay. She wants to take off her shoes and go to bed with him and make love again, arching her back under him and grabbing for the sheets so she won't claw his back open again. She wants to lie there in the tangled, sweaty covers as he lies on his side and talk to him quietly as though there is anyone to wake up. She would like to turn the tables on him and ask him to tell him anything, anything at all, that he remembers about the time they were together as children, even if these memories are as thin and vague as a party, a tree, a little girl with skinned knees and palms not crying because, well, it was just pain.

Danicka wants to tell him about New Orleans. The good parts. She wants to tell him the ways she is not damaged, the ways that she was saved, the things and the people and the moments that made it possible for her to survive with her identity intact, with her soul still on fire. She wants him to know that she's not broken completely, not just because he has faith in it but because he knows these stories, because he can look in her eyes and see something other than scars.

And if he asked, she would tell him that she is probably a better tree-climber now than he ever was. That her favorite flowers are magnolias, that she is not afraid of ghosts, that she had a teacher in tenth grade who told her laughingly that he would hunt her down if she didn't go to college. He hasn't hunted her down, but Danicka is going to college. She's not afraid of vampires, either. Which is a funny thing, because she's more frightened of her own kind than she is of something dead and hungry.

She wants to stay with him, and in the morning leave New York City and go back to a life she's building that is finally her own.

Danicka sighs softly against him as he kisses her, sighs when he moves back, and doesn't move her hand off of the back of his neck. She opens her eyes slowly and looks into his blue ones, aching for their color, for their shadowed brightness, for him. "Not yet," she answers, and kisses his mouth. "Take me to bed, I don't have to leave you yet."

[Lukas] Once -- what seems like a long time ago -- they spoke to one another about trust. They did not trust one another.

They've never said otherwise. They've never actually said it: I trust you. Because this alone amidst everything else is a tenuous, uncertain thing. They spoke of loyalty and love and faith long before they spoke of trust.

They still don't speak of trust, but there's trust there. She trusts him to hold her and not let her fall. She trusts him to fuck her as hard as he does, here and in the W Lakeshore, in the shower, in that bed. He trusts her at his back, with her hand on the back of his neck where a well-placed blow could dislocated his neck, sever his brainstem.

He trusts her enough to give her a gun. He trusts her not to use it on him; he trusts her not to use it foolishly and get herself killed.

She trusts him enough to want to stay, even without his asking her.

Lukas looks at her as her eyes open. His eyes close when she kisses his mouth, and his lips part to hers. His tongue touches hers, gently. It's almost tentative. He shifts her on his body again, exhaling into her mouth when he moves inside her. He's not ready to leave her yet, even when he turns from the window and crosses the room to the bed. When he finally slips out of her he sighs, and a ripple of reaction runs up his back.

The sheets here are the same as they are in Chicago: some surreal thread-count, smooth and cool, the very texture of it expensive. He pulls back the bedding and bends to set her down. Her legs unwind from around him and he catches her left foot in the cradle of his hand, raises it until he can kiss the inside of her ankle.

Their sake is forgotten. So are the banana rolls, and the pizza. He props her shoe against himself again, the hard rippled expanse of his stomach this time, and undoes the clasps and straps.

One and then the other shoe thumps to the floor. There are lightswitches at the nightstand, just like Chicago, and he turns out the two remaining lamps in the room, crawls into bed after her. The blue of his eyes are wholly lost now; the city outside, the clouds overhead, close at their height -- they're all so bright. He climbs over her and settles behind her, wraps his arm around her middle and looks out the windows.

"Will you tell me how it goes with your brother?" It's a genuine question, a yes-or-no. He imagines the answer will be no.

[Danicka] They are somewhat backwards. They made love before they knew what they were doing with each other. The sex worked, without a hitch, when every time she saw him she usually ended up feeling hurt and angry. They were connecting on a physical level she later compared to prayer before he knew that her name is Daniela, that her birth certificate is in some way a memorial to a man long since dead, who was somehow important to his son-in-law. He called her 'love' before she called him 'mine'. She fed him, and he protected her, and they are not mates.

They may never be.

Danicka is carried to the bed, and though she sighs heavily when he moves out of her body, she doesn't go of him or shudder again. She lays back on the thick bedspread, looking up at him, pearls askew, strands of hair sticking to her face and her cheeks flushed. She smiles at him as he takes of first one shoe and then the other, her lips lazily happy. She laughs when he kisses her ankle, not so ticklish that she kicks but enough that she giggles slightly. Her leg slides over his shoulder briefly, as he takes off the right shoe to follow.

She scoots up the bed as he turns off lamps and lightswitches, sits up halfway and unclasps her pearls, setting them on the nightstand. They belonged to her grandmother. Her mother gave them to her when she was thirteen. Danicka lies back again, watches him get into bed with her, and half-smiles -- softer, now -- as he moves in behind her. Danicka lets him hold her like that, laying her head on the pillows, until he asks his question. Then she turns, rolling over in bed and under his arm, to face him. Their legs tangle.

Her foot slips in between his.

"...Do you want me to call you after he leaves?"

[Lukas] Her necklace never makes it to the nightstand. He holds his hand out and, if she hand them over, lets the string pool in his palm. The pearls are faintly warm against his skin, rolling and clicking gently one against another, milky-white in this light, the opalescence lost to darkness. Even after he's climbed into bed with her they remain in his hand. When he puts his arm over her the beads roll against her stomach.

"Sometimes I wish I could afford better gifts than books for you," he says. The topic is sudden; his words are not. Then she turns, and he smiles at her. His topmost foot moves when hers slides between; his shin rubs over hers, slowly. "I know it's a stupid, human notion."

He rises up on one elbow to reach over her. Her pearls fall to the nightstand. He sinks back down, the mattress dipping more for his weight than it ever would for hers. His arm finds its place over her side again, his hand draping across her back.

Then, at last, he returns to the previous subject. He considers a moment, and then he nods, simply.

[Danicka] So the pearls, rather than coiling on the nightstand's flat, glossy surface, go into Lukas's palm. Danicka gives them over easily, an extension of trust even though with anyone else she might do the same thing and seem just as easy about it. There is a difference, with her, between trust and resignation. With anyone else, she would have to tell herself it doesn't matter if they break the strand, or if they lose them, because it's better than being defiant and being struck for it, being 'found out' as willful and bad and broken. With Lukas, she lets them slide into his hand.

Danicka doesn't tell him, as she does this, where they came from or why they matter to her, what significance they have. They could just be a strand of pearls she bought for herself in this city a few years ago. They could be a gift from someone who liked the way she sucked cock and wanted to see her again. They could be as unimportant as her jeans, as meaningless to her when broken. He knows they're real; he felt them grate on his teeth.

And then he says, out of nowhere, that he wishes he could afford 'better' gifts. Danicka blinks at the words, her expression mild but a little confused even though he smiles at her. A stupid, human notion. She brings up her left hand and touches his face, but her fingers slide away when he moves over her to put the pearls down. Danicka smiles at him gently when he returns to her. She curls into his body. He nods.

That matter is settled. Danicka will call him tomorrow just before lunchtime and tell him: I'm alright. Just tired. But she will not tell him every question her brother asked, or tell him every glance that came over his eyes, which are blue like their father's while hers are green like their mother's. She will not tell him that he reminded her, again, of how strongly she resembles Night Warder. Laura.

But when he speaks of her in the home they grew up in, he will call her Mat.

"What would be better than books, Lukáš?"

[Lukas] When she speaks to him like that, patiently, as though guiding him to a foregone conclusion, Lukas can believe she was a governess for most of her adult life thus far. There was a time he would've read a patronizing note into her tone and bristled at it; he might have asked her what right she thought she, a kinfolk, had to try to school him.

Lukas doesn't mind so much anymore. It makes him smile again, the corners of his mouth tugging up. His fingertips trace the dip of her spine, gently, gently. He thinks of her gasping that as he rubbed his cock over her: jemně! It makes his breathing hitch briefly faster, and a slow clench of desire unfurls through his lower abdomen.

Then he dips his chin to kiss her forehead. She's curled into him, fitting against her as though she belonged right where she is. His hand flattens again her back. He exhales.

"Nothing. Nevermind, láska. It's a silly, momentary thing. I don't dwell on it."

[Danicka] The question was genuine. Most of the time, they are. Most of the time, she has no answer in mind with him, if only because as clearly as she's seen through him for so long, his perspective on the world sometimes still goes a direction she doesn't expect. Danicka is proud, but rarely arrogant: she knows him, but she cannot read his mind. And she wants to know what he would like to buy for her, what he wishes he could afford, what -- even in passing -- he thinks would be better than what he has given her, when what he has given her has made him happy.

At very least, he doesn't misread her curiosity as patronization this time. The tone of patient guiding is in his imagination, is a voice she would use with a child, or with Sam Modine, or someone else too obtuse to realize they were being condescended to. Not Lukas. Not when she isn't vividly, viciously angry at him. Not when she knows that he will lose his temper, not when she knows he doesn't deserve it. Not when it's him, her love, her man, hers.

The thing she wants to protect himselve is rarely injury or offense. She wants to keep him safe from herself, above all.

His fingertips trace her back. He wants her, and if she sees a flicker of this in his eyes or his smile, she keeps silent about it. Her leg does not, yet wrap around him. She doesn't tell him that she's sore. She isn't hurt. This will fade, in minutes and moments, and she'll want him again. At least once more, before she has to leave him. And she does...eventually...have to leave him.

She lifts an eyebrow at him, quirking it upwards in a rather dubious expression. And then her brow falls, and pulls towards its partner. "Do you not want me to ask you about what you think, or why? It doesn't mean I'm worried or upset.

"I just want to know you."

[Lukas] Lukas says nothing for a moment. His hand moves from her back to her face. He pushes her hair back, threads his fingers into the blonde; follows it past her shoulders and down her back. His hand ends up where it began, draped over her side, spread over her back, warm.

They are facing one another now, her face no longer curled against his throat. His free arm is tucked under his head, and under his pillow. They face each other as though they will sleep together here and wake when the sun is already high over Manhattan.

"I don't really understand it myself," he says then, choosing to answer her question by answering it. "It's not because I think you're ... high-maintenance, or that you expect expensive gifts. I know how you grew up; I know you're not a kept woman, and not a goddamn Silver Fang. I know you earned every penny you have. I know material wealth has no more to do with worth than my bloodlines makes me a hero. I know having no wealth did not make my parents any less honorable or noble."

This time it's his thumb that sweeps her skin. He thinks to himself that her skin is so soft. He can't see the color of her eyes in this light. His heel wraps behind her calf, and he draws her leg farther over his; draws her minutely closer.

Lukas is silent for a long time. There's a faint furrow to his brow. He thinks, sifts through his thoughts, puts them together.

"Still," he continues, quieter, "sometimes I wish I had the means to cut a check and buy you a strand of pearls worth more than a luxury car and not think anything of it. I suppose it's because I think you're worth it." Pause. "You're worth everything."

[Danicka] [Willpower]
Dice Rolled:[ 5 d10 ] 1, 1, 1, 3, 9 (Failure at target 6)

[Danicka] And she doesn't comfort him, or stroke his hair and tell him it's all right that he can't buy her pearls and diamonds and whatever else. She doesn't kiss his forehead as though he was expression some profound worry or deep ache in his heart. Danicka listens, with practice and with ease, as he speaks, just as she lays there languid and accepting when he runs his fingers through his hand, his hands down her body. She reacts to his touch even more openly than his words, arching her back or shifting her hips or tilting her head back. He moves strands off her face that are stuck there by sweat; she smiles softly to herself. For him.

Her eyes open again when her head tilts back so she can face him. All she wants is to sleep here and then in the morning take a cab to the airport. Fuck her suitcase back at the house, she could say, but she can't dismiss her father so easily. She misses him. And she will pay for it she runs from her brother.

Lukas knows she doesn't expect material gifts, doesn't demand gold watches or look for the keys to a Lexus on her birthday. He knows she's not a whore, that her time with Fangs was as a trusted servant and not a friend or an equal. He knows that wealth, or the lack thereof, has nothing to do with worth. He just wants to give her things, anything, and not have to consider the cost, the obstacle, the price that has to be paid in order to do something lovely, even if that something seems outwardly pointless.

Danicka does stroke his hair, and her leg moves closer, and she kiss his lower lip thoughtfully. Slowly. Draws back and meets his eyes.

"We had books when I was a child," she says. "But most of the were in Czech, or were things like... a Bible, or manuals, or cookbooks. Practical things." Her fingertips trace lazy, hypnotic whorls on his scalp. "When I was in middle school, I started getting more of my own. I was getting interested in poetry, and more fiction, and some books about computers and things. Usually if I got a little money, however that happened, I'd get books. There wasn't much else I wanted. I didn't have a bookshelf, so I just kept them wherever...the windowsill, the nightstand, over on the desk."

She didn't spend her pocket money, in pre-adolescence and her teenage years, on clothes. Makeup. Whatever else a girl who became a woman like Danicka could be easily thought to have been interested in. Magazines.

Consideringly, she goes on: "Sometime just before my mother died, I made Vládík mad somehow -- I don't even remember what it was -- and..." Danicka's face falls. She frowns deeply, her mouth in a frown so unpretty it looks odd on her.

Danicka fights crying this time, her eyes closing. And she fails. She didn't start this story sad, but the sudden remembering overcomes her. She feels wretched, crying over this, a hurt ten years gone, and sniffs, but it does no good. She reaches up and covers her eyes with her right hand, her left still in his hair, her head ducked as she tries to get control of herself, regain her composure.

But she's weeping.

Over books. Whatever happened to them.

[Lukas] Danicka hates crying. She has never said this to him, but he'd have to be a simpleton not to realize it. She hates crying and she hates what she perceives to be her own weakness, and he can understand this because they're Shadow Lords.

Perhaps because of that, or perhaps simply because Lukas can be a callous bastard, can hide the part of himself that cared for her, and cared about her very nearly from the start, he rarely comforts her when she cries. He rarely even touches her, or goes to her, or holds her.

She cried in her kitchen once because she was miserable and he railed at her, and then began to leave her. He didn't come a step closer then. She cried in the parking lot of the Shedd and he watched her, cold as stone. The last time they met, she wept silently in the elevator. He stared at the numbers and pretended he did not notice, or did not care.

She's crying again now. She's never told him she hates crying. He's never told her it tears him open when she cries; makes him ache; makes some piece of him twist and bleed.

Lukas doesn't draw away this time. He doesn't stare at her; he doesn't ignore her. His hand moves up her back, opens over her shoulderblades. He pulls her toward him, moves toward her, closes the distance. His free arm shifts from under his pillow to slide under her neck and around her shoulders.

Gently, slowly, he gathers her to him. He curls her into him, presses her face to his skin. He does this with absolutely no idea of how she will react; if she will push him away; if she'll shout at him because she thinks she's being coddled, or pandered to, or condescended to.

And he says nothing.

[Danicka] Lukas has the truth of it: she hates this. She hates the trembling, the moisture in her sinus cavities, the hunch of her own shoulders. She hates the way people she hates try to comfort her, or try to address problems when they don't even know what's wrong. She hates the feeling of being weak, and she hates knowing that so many of the things that make her cry are meaningless. Like just being tired, as though that is anything to weep about. Like something that happened so long ago it doesn't matter anymore.

Except if that's true, there's no explanation for why she's bringing it up now. Or why she tried to. Danicka can't even finish her story because she's crying, tears coursing past her hands as Lukas pulls her closer. This brother of hers, nineteen when she was fourteen and a Cliath of the Nation, is going to eat koláče tomorrow that she bakes early in the morning. His wife will butter his bread for him. He will look at his sister more than he looks at her.

Danicka is prettier than her sister-in-law.

For whatever reason, Lukas has rarely if ever tried to comfort Danicka when she's upset, but he does so now. He pulls her close and she doesn't resist, doesn't fight him, though she also does not cry any harder because of the overwhelming weight of being even momentarily understood or accepted. She just cries the way she needs to cry, which isn't for very long, or very hard, or very much. And rubs at her eyes, trying to scrape away the tears with the heels of her hand. Her head, in the end, rests against his shoulder. It was just a minute or two of crying.

Just a minute. Just another minute.

"He did something to the books so that whenever I picked one up it...fell apart. Some of them disintegrated, some of them combusted. One shocked me and then all the pages went black. One of them melted. Most of them just turned to ash, though. Every goddamn book I owned."

Danicka closes her eyes, stops looking at Lukas's flesh, and her back relaxes under his hands as she sighs. "It was so...petty."

[Lukas] Lukas doesn't know that Danicka would've literally squealed in delight if he'd handed her Sharp Teeth that night instead of a box containing a handgun. Apart from one conversation in a hotel room where they discussed little princes and foxes and taming, they don't discuss books. Not the few she has on her shelf; not the many he has stashed away wherever the hell he stashes them, because every few nights he's reading a new one on the couch at the Brotherhood.

He didn't know what books were to her. He bought her two books because one made him think of her and he wanted her to know without having to say it that he thought of her when she wasn't around; the other, because he liked it himself.

He didn't know. She didn't tell him. She tells him now. He knows now, and it's another piece of her she gives to him, something that he tucks away and keeps.

When her back relaxes, its painful self-protective hunch easing, his arms loosen a little around her. He smooths his palm down her spine; up again. Her head rests against his shoulder. He kisses her hair.

There's a quiet before he speaks again. It's something like hesitation.

"I think all the books I read as a child are in a box somewhere in my parents' house," he says eventually, and quietly. "They're just gathering dust. If you want, I can bring them to Chicago and you can have them." A pause; then, self-deprecating, "They're mostly children's fiction, I think. Maybe some young-adult. One or two classics."

He realizes he's qualifying it; scrambling to protect himself somehow. He realizes it's not necessary, and stops.

[Danicka] [WP: Lukas, you ass.]
Dice Rolled:[ 5 d10 ] 2, 7, 7, 8, 9 (Success x 4 at target 7)

[Danicka] One morning Lukas woke up in Danicka's bedroom, tangled in her sheets and smelling her all around him, and discovered that she has no desk, no chair, no bookshelf. Just closets, which he didn't go through, and a nightstand with a mere handful of books on it. There were no pictures on the walls to tell him anything about her that he didn't already know. He knows that unless they're in storage somewhere, she doesn't exactly have a library. He didn't buy her two books because he knew they would make her happy; he bought her books for other reasons: I was thinking about you or I liked this.

Lukas had no hints, until now really, that Danicka does and always has loved to read. The rest of the story isn't as necessary: that she didn't keep books at home after that, that she went to the library less in case Vladislav got angry enough to hurt the books or the people there. She doesn't explain that working for the Sokolovs she kept her personal effects to a minimum in their home, and that down in New Orleans she didn't acquire anything it would be difficult to pack but spent a great deal of time sitting in the plantation mansion's library.

She doesn't tell him all this partly because they are just trailing thoughts, scattered and split ends of a story that explains something simple: she adores books, she loves reading, and she has no books because the one time in her life she tried to gather and collect them, they were taken from her because her brother was in a foul mood and could talk to spirits.

She calms down against him, wiping her eyes and laying down beside him, wrapped in his arm and curled against his chest. It's easy, thoughtless comfort, their way of belonging with each other like this. There is no questioning it, at least not tonight, at least not in Danicka's case. She breathes deeply.

And then Lukas has to go and kiss her hair, and tell her -- after a hitch -- that she can have his books. Danicka's hands reach up instantly to cover her face again, as though she expects to break down into uncontrollable sobs. She does not. She just takes a sharp breath, and sniffs, and then exhales a sort of brief, quivering sigh. It sounds almost surprised...that she doesn't cry again.

Her arms wrap around his neck, and she presses herself against him, squeezing him in wordless gratitude.

[Lukas] It's not her gratitude he wants. To some degree, her gratitude is sudden to him; a little bit overwhelming. She wraps her arms around his neck and he tightens his arms around her back. They press together. He thinks to himself: I belong here.

He thinks to himself that he didn't say this, or offer it, because he wanted her gratitude. He did it for the same reason he eats her out until she's writhing; for the same reason he called her and asked her to meet him in front of Spring; for the same reason his heart clenched on itself like a fist when she came into his room that night and made him so happy he spun her around before he kissed her.

He did it because he loves to see her happy. He wants to make her happy. That's still very new to Lukas. He doesn't know quite what to do with it.

So he doesn't do, or say anything. There's a quiet after that: an easy, thoughtless comfort. He doesn't kiss her, and he doesn't roll her on her back, though he does roll on his back and bring her with him. They lie in the darkness, entangled, and he looks at the ceiling; the dimensions of the room. The City is so bright outside that he can see the details of this room even with no lights on. By the end of the week it would have become rather familiar to him, but he'll still stand at the window for minutes on end looking down at the traffic, the people, the pulse and the light of modern civilization down on Times Square.

Time passes. He asks her at one point when she has to go. She tells him 3:30am. He unfurls an arm and sets the clock radio alarm, just in case.

Time passes. He dozes, but only for a few minutes. They don't have all night. They have a handful of hours, and they were too precious to waste asleep. When he wakes he tells her without her having to ask that he'll probably spend some time walking the streets of New York over the next few days. He'll spend at least one full day at the sept where he spent his fosterage. He'll visit his parents, not only because he has to get his books but because he misses them.

He tells her that he misses this city sometimes. He tells her, laughingly, that even if she had never told him she was from New York City he would've guessed. It's in the quick clip of her step. It's in her fearlessness of strangers, but also a certain instinctive wariness upon meeting them. It's in the way she stands in a subway.

Silence again. Time passes. Perhaps she dozes this time; or perhaps she doesn't. Eventually one or the other shifts, stirs. She moves atop him by common consensus; by osmosis; as natural and effortless a progression as the tide coming in to shore.

The lights of the city are dim and kaleidoscopic on her face, on her skin. Lukas's hands seem large and dark against her body when he takes her by the waist, runs his hands up her ribs to cup her breasts. When sweat begins to slick her skin the glow of the city scatters and dapples over her. He brings her down to him, her hair falling in soft waves over his face. He closes his eyes rather than brushing the strands aside, and he finds her mouth blindly in the more complete darkness behind his eyelids.

He gasps against her mouth when he comes, his hands pulling and clasping at her back, her hips. His body bucks and shudders beneath hers. He opens his eyes at the end and looks at her as though he were lost; as though she were the thread to the labyrinth, the light of the surface, a hundred meters underwater.

It's nearly 3am then. He holds her in the not-quite-darkness and feels her heart beating in her thin body. He thinks of her refusal of food earlier; he thinks of her brother at brunch tomorrow, and how little she's slept tonight. He holds her because he doesn't want to let her go back to that. He doesn't want to let her go.

Do you want to go back to Chicago? he wants to ask. Tonight. Now.

He doesn't ask. She doesn't really want to; neither does he. They've missed this city. She misses her father and he misses his parents. She has time she means to spend with her father. He has books he means to collect.

3:15am and she gets up. He lets her go, watching her as she sits up, swings her feet off the bed. The last time she left him after loving him was the first time. He lay where he was that time and watched her and pretended he didn't want to ask her to stay; didn't ask her to stay only because he swore he wouldn't do that, he wouldn't beg her to stay just to watch her leave him.

This time, Lukas sits up too. He turns one of the bedside lamps on, and while she starts to dress in the clothes she arrived in he goes to the armchair and retrieves her earrings; her blouse. While she buttons her buttons and straps on her shoes he steps into his lounge pants, tugs his undershirt on. He eats a slice of pizza and offers her a banana roll. When she's ready to go he grabs the hotel keycards and takes the elevator down with her.

He was right. This late, with no one else sharing the cab or stopping it on the way down, the elevator drops like a stone. It's like a goddamn free fall, unnervingly fast, 55 stories shooting by in a span of seconds. He gives her one of the two hotel keycards in the elevator, and he doesn't have to tell her:

Come see me anytime. Unlock the door, let yourself in. Love me until I see eternity.

In the lobby, he wants to call her a cab. She hates cabs. He walks her to the subway station instead, which isn't far because they're in Times Square, and Times Square is still lit up and alive even at 3:30am, because this city never sleeps. Standing with her at the top of the subway steps reminds him of standing in front of CVS the night Mrena died. He kisses her here, too, but it's gentler, sweet.

It's not until she's out of sight down the steps that he turns and goes back to his hotel, his room, his bed that still smells like her.