red.

[Danicka Musil] It's been almost a month since she's seen Lukas. Twenty-five days. Three and a half weeks. It's the longest they've gone since she moved to Chicago, since they met for the second time in SmartBar, since she told him she wanted him, since he first had her, since she confessed that she was falling in love with him, since he broke down and told her he loved her. It's been twenty-five days since they woke up, ate breakfast together in quiet tenderness, and stopped pretending that he did not have to leave.

Danicka, at least, has not commented on the irony. And she has made other comments, when they've talked. Because it could not be twenty-five days of utter silence and separation. She would have started thinking about the possibility of his death at twenty-one.

On the twelfth, she called him to tell him that she'd just interviewed a new roommate and she was probably going to go with him. 'Him' is Paul Warner, aged twenty-seven. Paul is a utility sound technician... for Oprah. Paul is also, in Danicka's words, quite possibly the gayest man I have ever met, and I had a lot of friends in Chelsea. Paul is also interested in putting up removable soundproofing panels in the north bedroom.

On the twenty-third, she called just to talk to him. Not to tell him I miss you, though it underlined every word out of her mouth. She ate grapes while she leaned on her counter and told him that she'd started re-reading The Sound and the Fury. She told him she was probably going to get a new laptop, but she hadn't done a lot of research into what she wanted, though. If allowed, she could talk to him for a solid, unbroken thirty minutes about computers.

She says she doesn't know much. She believes it: she doesn't think she knows a lot. Even when she has to stop and explain to Lukas what the hell she's talking about, she does so without the air of authority, or expertise. She says she really just guesses, most of the time. She says that she still hasn't chosen a major, and school is starting soon. She's excited. She's nervous.

Throughout the month she texts him occasionally, random things like:

Paul's moved in! Going out for drinks. Will try not to drunk dial you later.

and a few days later:

Found something nice in orange. Will show you next time. :)

and after that:

Remind me to email you my class schedule.

and later:

I keep missing you at the Bro. Left 2doz kolache in commons. Git 'em!

But most recently, she called him this morning to say:

"I'm at the Lincoln Park Zoo, at the Regenstein exhibit, and I'm absolutely fascinated by the Cinereous Vulture," and she is quite cheerful in her delivery, even blithe. "What are you doing?"

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] Not another two weeks, okay? she'd said once, long ago. It's a promise they've managed to keep up until now.

The morning he left, Lukas kissed her at the elevator and then, because she didn't have her shoes on, told her to go back inside. He told her, I'll call you and didn't specify when. The elevator doors closed behind him, and that's the last time they saw each other for nearly a month.

He called her three minutes later though, sitting in his car, the engine idling in neutral.

"I love you," he told her. She could hear him smile.

He called back the night of the twelfth. He gets her voicemail; tells it he's glad she has a good prospect for a roommate; wants to know what the soundproofing is for. If he hadn't grown so goddamn angry when he heard the truth about Martin, he might've joked that he's glad this roommate doesn't swing Danicka's way. As is, though, that subject was still too tender, at least for him. He left it be.

On the fifteenth, he called again. He sounded like he was driving. He told her he was heading out to the woods. To run, he tells her, and after the solstice, doesn't feel that he needs to explain what he means, or why.

They exchange text messages now and then. Ten minutes after she tells him to remind her, she gets the reminder: Email me your class schedule ;)

Six hours after she left two dozen kolache in the common room: Some assholes ate half the orange ones!

And one night -- 3am, the 20th -- I miss you. Já propást úst, a vaši kundu, a mimochodem vypadáte, když jste přišel.

On the twenty-second he called her. He was in his car again. It was a short conversation. He's heading out of town. He won't be back for a few days. He didn't apologize that he'll miss the two week unspoken deadline, but it was there between the lines, regret and something a little like frustration. The signal started to break up at the outskirts of town. The call ended.

On the twenty-third, they don't talk for thirty minutes. They talk about computers. She says she doesn't know much; she knows more than a little. More than a lot. He listens, interjects here and there, smiles, laughs, and then -- quite suddenly -- tells her Miláčka, I have to go. Three seconds later the line is dead air.

On the 25th he texts to tell her he's back in town.

On the 2nd of August, she calls him. It's morning, which means he's not yet awake, which means his reaction is slower, sleepy, muffled.

"...mmph," he says. "I'm ... in bed." There's a pause. "What's a cinereous vulture?" And, "How much longer are you going to be there?"

[Danicka Musil] In the two weeks between the first time they made love and the next they'd talked about an ending on the full moon, she'd fucked Martin, he'd threatened her for lying and been unable or unwilling to strike her when she did, and she'd come to the aquarium when he asked her to, took him to the W for the first time and removed her earrings as she sat on his lap, as he touched her thighs under her skirt. The request was based on the fact that she could not happily consider the thought of not having him inside her for such a long stretch of time; it was as simple as that.

It was never, is never, that simple.

At times the two of them are as self-contradictory as the poem about the two dead boys: one fine day, in the middle of the night...

... but that is all right.

She laughed when he told her to go back inside, the hallway carpeted and the elevator tiled. She kissed him quickly before he pushed the button for the lobby, to get into a cab to go back to the Polish restaurant and get his car or however he went back for it. She laughed when he called her, whispered it back: Taky tě miluju. She doesn't joke, either, about how Paul's sexuality may or may not have factored into his appeal as a roommate. It may have nothing to do with it. Maybe she doesn't want to think about Lukas's anger. Or about Martin.

Danicka was wistful when he called her on the fifteenth: I wish I was there... and not in Aurora. She's in Aurora because she met some people at a restaurant and they invited her to come to their country club and play golf with them. She would rather be running with him, though she jokes that while she sucks at golf, she looks fantastic doing it. Still. She would rather be in the woods with him.

Dork! she calls him once.

So come learn how to make them! she advised another time, and even in text the longing was impossible to miss.

No answer, on the twentieth. She was asleep. She got it when she woke up late in the morning, and that is around the time when he gets the following: Právě jsem přišel. Přemýšlel jsem o vás, o vašem kohout, o tom, jak jste sténání.

She's afraid, on the twenty-third. And the twenty-fourth. Not panic. Not constant, gut-wrenching terror. She lived with this all her young life, until the day came when someone finally confimed that yes, Laura was dead. Then, she felt something almost like relief: that she would not wonder again. That she would not worry, again, that the silent days meant death had finally won. Danicka is used to this feeling, is all. She smokes more, though, on the twenty-third and twenty-fourth. She exercises more. She tries not to think about it.

Danicka cries on the twenty-fifth. Doesn't tell him. It's been over two weeks since she's seen him.

It's the second of August, and it's not yet noon. It's late morning, a little before eleven. Danicka laughs quietly when he informs her that he's in bed, but it's vaguely apologetic. Regretful. And yet still eager, still... aching. "I'm sorry," she says softly. "I don't know why I called." Yes she does. There's a pause. "It's one of the largest birds of prey in the world, one of the heaviest, but it can fly at ridiculously high altitudes because it has a... I don't know. Especially efficient way of taking up oxygen despite low partial pressure, or something."

She's reading off a placard, bits and pieces of information. She pauses again; he can almost hear her moistening her lips. "I just got here." Another pause, a lightness to her tone: "I just thought about you. I'll let you get back to sleep, okay?"

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] She's sorry --

"Danicka, why?"

He sounds patient; he sounds bewildered. She talks about vultures; he listens. And then, when she starts to say she'll let him get back to sleep he interrupts:

"I'll see you in twenty minutes." Blankets rustle. "Just give me a bit to shower and shave. Where should I meet you?"

[Danicka Musil] She has no answer. No 'why'. Danicka exhales though, when he interrupts to tell her he'll be there. "I'll meet you at the gate," she says.

And she does. When he gets through the gates to the entry of the zoo she's waiting for him in the crowd of people who chose to come here on a beautiful Sunday morning, early afternoon. She's wearing a white sundress that ties around her neck and flutters gauzily around her mid-thighs, a pair of vivid red ballet flats, and sunglasses; she has no purse, but a plastic water bottle that's half-full in one hand. Her hair is twisted up in a clip, just a few strands loose on either side of her face and a spray of gold hair at the back of her crown.

She is one of the only people that is not going into the zoo but facing the gates. Her lips match her shoes. She bursts into a bright smile when she sees him, and doesn't pretend for a moment to not want to

run towards him.

Though she does not.

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] Lukas stands out in a crowd: the height, the rage. But then so does she -- because her hair is bright and her dress is bright and her lips are bright and because she's bright. He can see her long before the Sunday morning crowds between them part enough for him to come to her. He angles toward her, sidestepping a young mother and her son, pausing to feed his ticket to the machine.

Then he's through, and he ignores the entrance displays, the welcome centers entirely to make a beeline for Danicka. He doesn't look like a man recently tumbled out of bed. His hair is a little damp, but that is all -- his shirt is neatly pressed today, crisp and white, very faintly pinstriped in pale pink. His jeans are dark, stonewashed blue, nearly grey.

Lukas stands a moment before Danicka. They're in public, which invariably means Lukas tries harder to control himself, and his reaction to the very sight of her.

Danicka's smile finds a reflection on Lukas's face. His smile keeps growing. He reaches for her hand -- then, quite abruptly, wraps his arms around her and sweeps her up, stops barely short of swinging her around.

Those artfully loose strands of her hair fall across his cheeks when he kisses her on her candy-red mouth. Then he sets her down, leaving one arm wound around her waist as he ushers her back into the zoo.

"Want to go look at the cheetahs?"

[Danicka Musil] The moon was nearly full the last time Danicka saw him. The moon is nearly full now. His Rage cuts a swath through the people milling around the entry. While it's worth noting to say that her smile falters a bit when a few yards away a baby erupts into loud, sharp cries when Lukas passes by, it doesn't stop her from stepping forward even as other people edge away from him. It's something about the way he looks, some feral edge to his jaw or too-intent stare in his eyes. They do not wonder about Danicka; they don't follow his gaze to her but instead turn away as soon as they can.

Someone picks up the baby, and holds it against his shoulder, murmuring reassurance that lies outside of language. Danicka does not look for the source of the sound. The zoo is awash with sounds: the wind in the trees, the cries of distant birds, the shouts of primates, music from the carousel to his left, her right. She does not look away because it is just another noise, though one particularly keyed to her instincts, and because irrationally, she's afraid he might not be there if she looks away.

This is an incredibly crowded place today. It's one of the only free zoos in the country, the only free zoo in Chicago. Everyone can come here. Even werewolves.

They don't run towards each other, and he doesn't spin her around, but they do go straight to one another. He does pick her up enough that her toes barely brush the ground. She does throw her arms around him. Her heart beats fast enough she's certain he can hear it despite the din, or at the very least feel it thundering like a locomotive in her chest pressed to his.

And then he kisses her.

She kisses him back like it's the last thing she'll do before dying, the last kiss she'll ever ask for. Her brow furrows tightly, if briefly, like it did... one other time. When it ends she breathes out short and hard, a gasp in reverse, and her smile starts to come back. Danicka is trembling, albeit slightly. Her smile grows as her feet touch the ground, as she turns.

"Baby... they don't have cheetahs," she says gently, as though he'll be disappointed.

The Bronx Zoo has cheetahs, as they both very well know. Not so Lincoln Park. She starts to lead him west, towards the center of the zoo. "They have lions and leopards and jaguars, though."

But they will go north or south after seeing the big cats. Danicka does not want to take him to the far west, past the seals, to where they keep the otters and beavers and black bears.

That's also where they keep the red wolves.

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] Lukas doesn't ask why Danicka kisses him like that, or why she's trembling slightly when he sets her down. Once he might've; today, he knows well enough.

It's been almost a month. He's been away; she's been finding roommates, selecting courses, getting ready to begin her life all-but-anew. Their lives change and go on, and all along the only tenuous connection they've had has been --

a handful of phone calls. Of text messages.

And this.

So; he doesn't ask why she shakes. He doesn't ask why she kisses him like that. He doesn't hold back; he returns her kiss like there was no one around, like he might inhale some part of her, some vital essence of her, and keep her forever with him. Even after Lukas sets her down he keeps her close, holds her against his side as if to lend her some of his strength, his warmth, the solidity and near-indestructibility of his body.

"Hm," he says, when she tells him as gently as she would a child that the zoo doesn't have cheetahs. It's a thoughtful sound. "Well, I like lions and leopards and jaguars. Though I like leopards more than jaguars, even if jaguars are prettier."

And he turns to kiss the crown of her head, pressing his mouth firmly to her golden hair.

"Rád vás nejlepší ze všech. Bože, jsem stýskalo."

[Danicka Musil] Even alone with him, once, she'd had to whisper -- not even whisper -- her happiness. Before she could put into words how she felt -- or even that she felt something more than simple pleasure -- when they made love, she would tremble afterwards, overcome by how deeply being with him affected her. Now, out in public and months into a relationship where they both still only rarely admit to feeling happy and still cannot find words for what they feel when they fuck, they both restrain themselves.

And Danicka cannot make herself tell him, even in a language she doubts anyone around them knows, that she is so happy to see him she's lightheaded. She holds her hand over his where it falls on her side, and tries to tell herself every time she feels his torso expand with an intake of air that he is really there, and alive, and with her. Maybe if she tells herself this over and over, she'll calm down. But every time she thinks it, something explodes in her. Like sparks. Like fireworks.

"They also have Siberian tigers," she interjects, and then with an 'and furthermore' tone: "which are better than both leopards and jaguars."

He kisses her hair. His words make her laugh, but it's a breathy, almost uneasy sound. "To bylo hrozné," Danicka confesses, her voice aching. She's looking where they're walking, her footfalls softer than his, the soles of her flats making not a single scuffing sound because of the way she trained herself to walk a long time ago. She means the last three-odd weeks. She means missing him. She squeezes his hand under her own, as they approach the habitats of the various big cats. Danicka turns her head and looks up at him, but her eyes are hidden behind her sunglasses. "Chceš se dostat něco k jídlu jsme po dovolené?"

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] It's the ache in her voice that makes Lukas slow. He pauses. There's a cotton candy stand behind him; kids are lining up for the sweet, sugarspun confection. They hush when he nears.

To some degree, one becomes inured to the side-effects of rage. One stops caring about the bawling babies, the skittish pedestrians. One stops noticing the sudden gaps in conversation.

It's different, on the receiving end. No one ever gets inured to rage, period. No one ever forgets it's there -- though Danicka, somehow, is tolerating Lukas's better now. And neither of them pay the quiet children any mind. Neither of them care that the cotton candy man's hands are quivering.

"Chci vzít vás zpět můj malý pokoj," he says. "Chci se dostat jídlo z kuchyně a jíst za zavřenými dveřmi. Chci se schovat do svého pokoje a milovat se s vámi po celou noc."

Lukas is serious now, even solemn. He faces Danicka; only his hand remains on her waist. His eyes are fierce and pale, very steady.

"Chci tento každou noc. Nechci, abyste odešli v dopoledních hodinách."

A beat. Then he slides his arm back around her, securing her to his side. He starts walking again.

"Vím, že to není možné."

[Danicka Musil] Music chimes from the carousel. A catlike roar sounds up ahead; neither of them is schooled enough in zoology to know if it's a leopard, jaguar, tiger or lion. Danicka looks up at Lukas. His lips are faintly, lightly reddened from kissing her. She almost never wears makeup that livid, that obvious. He's seen her often enough without any at all to know that it makes almost no difference. She's excellent at doing a great deal with very little.

He knows that the clearest change is just that she looks a little younger, when she wears it right. She looks her age, in fact, when she wears it right. They're not very far apart in age, but Danicka looks closer to thirty than a woman of twenty-five should. She has premature lines at the corners of her eyes and mouth, hints that like many Kinfolk, life has asked more of her than it has of others. They're light, and there is this: it means she has smiled as much as anything else.

Though that doesn't mean the smiles were genuine. Not like the ones she gives him sometimes: the quirky, hesitant expressions of pleasure that's almost wary. Or the beaming, sudden grins that break like a sun's brightness and warmth obliterating any cloud cover.

She isn't smiling now, but she also isn't worrying over the children asking for cotton candy, the hands of the vendor, the space that grows around them whether they are walking or paused along the path. She looks up at him, her lips parted slightly and thoughtfully as he speaks. She is the only one for miles who can understand him.

And understand she does. He says hide, and she knows why. He says milovat and she knows what he means. He says closed doors, and it resonates especially with her, of all people.

"Je to možné," she corrects quietly. "Je to prostě není nejlepší nápad." And she looks away, so that she can see a tiger.

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] "I don't think it's possible to do that," Lukas amends, "and expect things to stay the way they are. For better or for worse."

A pause. He looks past her. There's a tiger there behind the bulletproof glass, beyond the vast dry moat. The predators mankind admire and dread; the stories they tell themselves, that knowledge dispels fear, that ignorance alone breeds hate. Sometimes, oftentimes, even the kin of the monsters can't stand the monsters. The ancestral memory is that strong.

The monsters, not the ones under the bed or in the dark but the ones in the bed, in the home, are that terrible.

"Most likely for worse," he adds, quiet as she. And then, somewhat ironically, he presses his mouth to her temple; a kiss, the latest in a long line he can't seem to stop bestowing even since he saw her at the entrance to the zoo.

[Danicka Musil] "That's why it's not the best idea," she says quietly, but it's with a tone of agreement. When they argue, it seems like every other word is a misunderstanding, distracting them from the fact that they really are on the same page. Other times, in discussions like this, they seem to be of one mind. It goes unspoken. Danicka moves away, not to separate herself but to shift from trying to match her steps to his longer stride to simply holding his hand, lacing her fingers easily through his. Her bottle of water is shifted to her other hand.

She looks at the tiger -- the visible one, at least -- with a tilt of her head. Tigers are not like lions. They disguise themselves more carefully. The Siberians are even more rarely man-killers than Bengals, have been known to kill wild wolf populations in competition over prey, leaving the bodies of wolves littered about, untouched after death. The tiger looks straight at Lukas, directly, as though in consideration, then simply paces away, indifferent.

It will be different, if they go to the enclosures of natural prey animals, the herbivores or hooved creatures. The polar bear, most likely, will have a similar reaction as the tiger: acknowledgement, and little more. The tiger, at least, does not twist his ears back and twitch his tail and snarl, does not flex his claws. Other cats might, feeling more threatened. Other predators might, sensing competition. Danicka watches the tiger. The tiger walks away, and visitors follow it along the glass.

He kisses her temple. She smiles faintly, a twitch of her lips, and squeezes his hand. Danicka pulls her eyes away from the glass and looks up at him again, her gaze hidden. "Don't be sad," she urges, almost teasingly, though it goes without saying that she knows 'sad' isn't really an apt descriptor. "We're here now.

"And besides," she goes on, tugging his hand, to head towards the leopards, even though the jaguars are prettier, "some mornings I won't have to leave, or you won't have to leave. Even having the whole night is something of a luxury."

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] Lukas squeezes her hand as she tells him, don't be sad. The corners of his mouth quirk up. "Nejsem smutná," he says, gently.

He turns again toward the enclosure as Danicka begins to pull him away. This is a small zoo, without the vast tracts of space available to some of the nation's larger examples, where a lion may as well be a tawny dot on a veldt, a tiger an orange blur in the undergrowth. The big cats are bold and vivid behind the glass. A small child is pressed against the glass, nearly plastered. His nose and his fingers leave small smears behind.

Lukas catches up to Danicka in a long step or two. A luxury, she calls a whole night, which seems very true indeed when their last whole night together was nearly a month ago. He has to try hard not to kiss her again: her hair, her cheek, her mouth, her hand, something. Something to assure himself:

She's here.
She's alive.
She's real.

"I'm glad you called me," he adds. "What were you doing at the zoo?"

[Danicka Musil] Any night could bring a battle, a call, an interruption. Night is when the Wyrm is active, that is why so many werewolves are nearly nocturnal. That is why Danicka was bleary-eyed and exhausted at school on days after a full moon, when she would be up all night watching over children or helping the adults. That is why when Lukas comes to her or she goes to him and they are left alone all night to eat, to drink, to make love over and over, she is grateful... though also wary. Every moment, thinking he may have to run off, knowing it's not worth arguing with, or fighting over.

Her hand remains in his. She wanders loosely through people towards the lions, whose habitat is larger but still not large. It's an intimate zoo; people can get closer to the animals this way, but it makes for a thick crowd. "What everyone does at the zoo," she says blithely, as though this is obvious, as they round a corner. She looks along her shoulder at him, laughing slightly. "I was at home, and I thought of this silly Andrew Lloyd Weber song, and decided I wanted to come to the zoo. I have not checked yet to see if they have chimpanzees."

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] Drawn, is the word he used to describe how he felt toward her. Intrigued would have worked just as well. Fascinated.

And, when she looks at him like that, that glance over her shoulder with her eyes almost blue in the daylight, his hand held in hers as though they were children in a funhouse, lovers in a maze -- just a little enchanted. A little entranced.

"You may find this inexcusable given where I grew up," Lukas replies, "but I'm not actually that well-versed in Broadway or Mr. Webber's music."

He turns sideways to squeeze through the crowd, his broader shoulders, larger frame making passage a little more difficult for him rather than her. His rage makes things a little easier, though. He's caught up to her again, his forearm entwining with hers, his shoulder bumping hers gently.

"What song?"

[Danicka Musil] If she removed her sunglasses her eyes might be blue. How he has to hate them right now, as her eyes are sometimes the only chance he has of knowing what she's really thinking behind her smiles, which are so prettily put on and so convincing. She can lie with her eyes, even when she doesn't hide them behind shades. "As I am not a particular fan of musicals nor Webber in particular, I find it both excusable and even endearing," Danicka informs him, leading him by the hand until she finds a vantage point to observe the lions, who are popular today -- if lazy.

She moves to stand in front of him, decisively wrapping his arms around her, laying his hand over her abdomen. "It goes like... let me down easy, no big song and dance. No long faces, no long looks, no deep conversation. I know the way... we should spend that day. Take me to a zoo that's got chimpanzees. Tell me on a Sunday, please." She sings just loud enough to be heard, without any concern for the fact that she's in public, and... Danicka can sing well. It's not like a lullaby sung while she cooks, heard only distantly from another room. The song itself is wistful, a bit serious, maybe even a little tired.

Pretty. Sad.

"That's the verse that made me decide to come, at least."

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] Lukas does not seem to mind this arrangement terribly. He follows her lead, allowing her to draw his arms around her. After she's satisfied, he tightens his hold almost imperceptibly, securing her against his body.

The weather's warm; by day, quite hot. The fabric of his clothing is thin, relatively light compared to the thick-knit cottons and wools of winter. The heat of his body adds to that of the day. They won't be able to stand like this long before they overheat, but right now they're in the shade; they haven't walked far; they've been apart so damn long.

Lukas thinks to himself what a curious, fragile thing human morality is. They stand together, her back to his chest, her bottom against his groin, his upper thighs, and there's surely no overlooking that they're a couple. That they're lovers. That by night, or simply whenever they have the chance to find some privacy, the attractive -- if contrasted, if chiaroscuroed -- couple near the lions strip naked, throw down, fuck each other energetically and all-consumingly.

That is what his arms around her middle say, unmistakeably. That is what the lean of her body into his says, and the spread of his hands over her abdomen.

And for all that -- it would be indecent for his hand to drift some inches higher and cover her breasts. It would be wholly scandalous for his hand to drift some inches lower and cup her between her legs.

He's musing on this, this dichotomy between the unacknowledged fact and the boundaries of social morality, when she sings him the song she was thinking of. And as close as he is, she's no more unaware of the sudden, subtle tension in him than the humans around them are of what they are to each other. She's more aware than they are. She sees him so clearly, sees into him so deeply.

Lukas's chest rises slowly against her back. He's silent for a moment, silent until she finishes.

"That worries me," he confesses, quietly, and then bends to rest his mouth on the crown of her head, near the back. "It makes me nervous."

[Danicka Musil] She would call it silly, not fragile: human morality, that is. If they were animals like the ones in cages people would not be quite so aghast if they were to throw one another down in the middle of the path, or against a wall, or over a railing, would not try to stop them. Just because they walk upright and have opposable thumbs, just because they use tools and laugh and create works of art and so on and so forth down the list of things both poetic and scientific that separate them from those caged beasts, just because they are not strictly beasts, he cannot do as he might in the privacy of her apartment and put his hands on her breasts, touch her under her skirt, kiss and bite her until he's hard and she's moaning for him, til their backs are arching like animals'.

Danicka does not consider herself a slut or a whore, says those words are meaningless. That's because they're tied to this ridiculous morality, the demand for an illusion of monogamy for so many people when both parties in a one-night stand know better. That's because in the end it changes nothing about who she is or what she wants.

The heat of him sinking into her through their clothes reminds her suddenly and starkly of how he feels when those clothes are not in the way, when he is sitting beside her in a bath and washing her naked body, when he is holding her up against a wall, palms spread over her ass, hips grinding hard between her legs. She sings, feels him tense, and breathes in deeply.

She tips her head slightly without being able to see him, knowing through some instinctive connection or by the combination of muscles shifting and breathing moving that he is leaning forward to kiss her. She tips so that he kisses her head, not the spray of hair or the plastic clip holding it up. She makes it easier on him, and watches a thick-maned lion yawn in the heat of the August midday.

"What does?" A beat. Danicka twists in his arms, reaching up with one hand to push her sunglasses up to perch on top of her head. She blinks at him, at the sudden light, her eyes fading gradually from pale green to crystalline blue. "No..." she says, reassuring and plaintive at once, her hand falling back down to cover his. "Baby, no. Why on earth would you think I'd want to lose you?"

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] "I didn't think that," Lukas replies. He's quick to loosen his arms, quick to let her draw away or -- as it turns out -- turn to face him. Since that night in his room when she'd tried to rise and he'd kept her and she'd nearly panicked, he's been careful not to hold her when she doesn't want to be held.

There was, of course, a notable exception to that.

"I just thought ... " he trails off; it was stupid, what he thought, and wrong. He'd only thought it for a flash of a second before he knew it was stupid and wrong. "It was just a reflex," he amends. "I think you would tell me plainly even if you did want to leave me."

[Danicka Musil] The woman who sees him so clearly and so deeply that she doesn't need to lift her sunglasses -- her modern-day veil -- to do so watches him in silence for a moment after that, then her brows pull together gently. She reaches up and touches his face, instead of his hand, her thumb against his lower lip for a moment before it drags away, over his jawline and to his cheek.

She does not think very often of the time he restrained her, the time he held her in a room when she was literally trying to run away from him, his wrath, his irrational fury that kept her from being able to answer a single question, valid or otherwise. She does not think, very often, about the future that they do or do not have together.

"I missed you," she whispers. "Moc jsi mi chyběl jsem sotva mohla dýchat, když jsem tě viděla."

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] Lukas is not, by most definitions, a gentle man. He is neither of these things: not a man, and not gentle. He can be calculating, cold; he serves a greater cause, or he tells himself he does, and in that serving he can do, has done some terrible, ruthless things. The trail of blood he leaves behind him is long and dark, and he is only a Cliath, only beginning what could be a very long and savage history indeed.

Or -- alternatively -- a very short one. Glorious as a shooting star, or so the Galliards would have you believe.

But nevermind that. The point is: Lukas is not a gentle man. But there's an intense, mammalian affection between them, between he and she, when Danicka reaches up and lays her hand on his face. It's in the way he bends to her touch; the way the dark head bows, and the dark-lashed eyelids close. He sets his jaw into her palm of her hand even as her hand is sliding away over his skin. He did not have time to shave this morning after all, no matter what he said. He rushed here after all, no matter how calm and collected he looked, how groomed and ready for the day. His beard-bristle scratches her palm.

Consummately blue, his eyes open again when she whispers to him in his first language, the one he understood before all others. Czech came before English; before even the language he was rightfully born to, the snaps and growls and postures and expressions of the High Tongue. He looks at her a moment, and then his hand leaves her waist to cover hers, hold it still as he turns his face and kisses her fingertips, one by one.

"Vím. Cítil jsem se vám třesou."

His hand is warm on her face, large where it cups her cheek. Gentle as he is not, really. His kiss is the same: gentle, though he is not a gentle man. Afterward his brow leans against hers a moment. His eyes are closed and he leans against her like this, as thoughtlessly, languidly affectionate as the lions in their enclosure.

"Ach," he murmurs, "můj vzácný láska."

[Danicka Musil] And just like that, when he tells her that he felt her trembling when he held her for the first time in twenty-odd days, Danicka breathes in deeply and her hand moves on his cheek, towards nothing, away from nothing, for no reason that she can name even in her own mind. She reaches back and buries her fingers in his hair, pulling him down to kiss him again.

It's just as intense as the one at the gates, but not so chaste, not so careful, not so brief. She kisses him with almost bruising ferocity, parting her painted lips and eating at his mouth despite the fact that they're standing in front of the central, most popular animal in this zoo. She is on her tiptoes in her flats, her body pressed against his by necessity as much as to reassure herself of his solidity and existence. She holds her bottled water at her side in one hand, her hand so loose she nearly drops it.

"Jsme na odchodu," she says, when their mouths pull apart. That simple. And she steps back, and reaches up to pull her sunglasses back down, and starts walking towards the gates.

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] -- or not. He doesn't let go her hand, and when she reaches the end of that tether he pulls her right back, turns her around and catches her behind the head, kisses her again. Just as hard.

He doesn't think of the time he trapped her in a hotel room, shouting in her face. He doesn't think of the time he tried to keep her from getting up off his lap either. All that is gone, ashes.

[Danicka Musil] Danicka laughs. She gets far enough away that her armspan and his stretch between them, and then she is pulled back, though he can feel in the slack of her arm that she is neither resisting nor simply going limp. And they kiss again, attract attention again, as time slows down -- at least so far as the two of them are concerned. She is making some soft sound into his mouth, not a moan and not a sigh, teasing him from viciousness to something else, something slower, something warmer. When she presses to him, he can feel the lines of her hips and her stomach against him through the thin but damnable layers of clothes they both wear.

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] All the world around them may as well have fallen to ashes as well; ashes and silence. Lukas loses himself in that kiss, in the taste of her, in the sensation of her body against his, the recognized, remembered, familiar proportions and measures that he knows because he's run his hands over her body before they fuck, while they fuck, after they fuck; because he's kissed and nipped and licked at her torso, her twisting, lithe body.

He wants to -- even more than he wants to strip her naked and throw her up against a wall, a tree, something, and fuck her like a mindless animal -- lie beside her, stretch beside her lazy as a lion. He wants to run his hands over her body and learn her all over again. He wants to spend all day doing this, all night, watching the sun rise high and sink low, watching the moon follow the same course across the sky.

The kiss, so ferocious at its inception, chrysalises into something savage and warm as a monsoon. When they part at last his eyes are nearly black with arousal.

"Okay," he breathes. His hand drops from her cheek; he finds her hand is still his other, and he nods her toward the entrance. His smile is slow, but it's not shy. It unfurls as lazily as a magnolia, a lion stretching. He follows her, catching up in a step or two, turning sideways through the crowds, letting her ahead or pulling her after; hurrying for the entrance.

[Danicka Musil] "Did you drive?" she wants to know, before they're walking, while his hands are still unfolded over her waist, cupped at her face, and while their faces are still close enough that her question touches his lips and chin before the words even make complete sense in the air between them. Because she did; her car is waiting for her in the lot, the car she can't drive without thinking about how the warm hood of it felt under her when he pulled her thong aside and fucked her there because they couldn't wait, because she wanted to fuck him at that site and he wanted to fuck her on that car.

Either way they're walking, and she's licking her lips and tightening her grip on the bottle of water because somehow that reminds her where she is and what she's doing. Everyone looking at the lions knows. They know, just as they knew when he stood behind her and held her, that they're lovers. They know that after that kiss and this hasty exit they're going to go somewhere, anywhere, and he's going to fuck her and she's going to let him, he's going to thrust into her and she's going to scream.

The people milling around the gate don't know that, though. They just see a couple, a lovely couple wearing summery clothes that manage to compliment both his swarthy and her golden complexions, hurrying out of the zoo. Maybe they're having lunch with the the grandparents, the in-laws, or friends. They have somewhere to be.

They are in love. They won't let go of one another's hands.

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] "Yeah."

He thinks about offering to follow her. But they won't let go of one another's hands. He doesn't want to let go her hand; some irrational part of him riles at the very thought of it, snarls that it could be days, it could be weeks again, it could be fucking forever, so no, no, he was not letting her out of his sight.

"I'll drive," he adds. "And I'll bring you back here later." He glances at her. "Tomorrow." Later. Never; because he was keeping her this time. Even as he thinks it he knows it isn't true.

Still.

[Danicka Musil] This makes her laugh, when he utters this insistent yet fallacious string of words. She can almost hear the no, no, never under his words, deep in his thoughts. Her laughter is tense with the same feeling, the same fear. Because it will be all day, it will be days, weeks, it will be forever, she can't let him out of her sight. But she laughs, because

"Baby, my car will get towed."

she may have to. Danicka bites her lower lip briefly, thoughtfully, then adds: "You can bring me back later, maybe."

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] Lukas closes his eyes for a split second; he curses under his breath.

Then he lets go her hand, reaching into his pocket with the other to find his car keys. "Meet you at the Brotherhood, then?"

[Danicka Musil] Her eyebrows flick up over the rims of her sunglasses as he says that. She squeezes his hand before he can pull it away, then nods, still walking. "Do you own any ties?"

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] Lukas's eyebrows hop up a fraction of an inch. Then: "Of course." A beat later, "Are you going to try to lose me in traffic again?"

[Danicka Musil] She doesn't know for sure that the tie Sam wore on their ill-fated date came from his pack brother's closet. She guessed, though. It didn't seem like something he'd wear, not even remotely, but he'd had it on all the same. It wasn't the sort of thing Katherine would buy for Edward, either. She saw Lukas more and more, saw how he dressed, and made a leap. She knows he owns ties, she just hopes it's not that one.

"No," she says slowly, because they've reached the point where she's going this way, and he's going that way, and they're going to get into their respective cars and go to the Brotherhood, to his room, to hide in his little room and share food from the kitchen behind closed doors. "I don't want to lose you in traffic," she confirms with the barest of pauses between you and the last two words.

"Okay," Danicka says, quietly, almost thoughtfully. She smiles at him, and nods once, and heads towards her car. She moves quickly.

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] They part. They head to their respective cars, hers a slate-blue that reminds one faintly of a stormy sky; his, black. She moves quickly, with a light, swift gait. He drives quickly. It's not a long way to the Brotherhood, and neither of them try to lose the other. Neither of them try particularly hard to follow the other.

Gravel crunches under their tires as they pull into the lot. He parks in the alley where he usually does, where once upon a time -- wearing a tie borrowed from Lukas's closet -- Lukas's then-brother parked Lukas's car slantwise in a straight space because he couldn't wait to get Danicka upstairs and in bed. Though Danicka hopes Lukas won't produce the same tie; though Lukas wants very much not to think of that other Ahroun of the Circle that had Danicka first, the echo is there. Lukas doesn't park slantwise, but perhaps only because he's not drunk, and he used to this car. Lukas can't wait to get Danicka upstairs, and in his room, and in bed.

The difference is --

-- well. Everything else.

Lukas rises out of the driver's seat of the M3, shuts the door behind him. Clicks the locks shut as he's striding toward Danicka's car, the driver's side door of which he opens, not out of any particular chivalry but because when she rises out of it he wants to be there to catch her forearm in his palm, her hand aligned to his larger, corded wrist. He pulls her to him and he's smiling an instant before his mouth meets hers, there in the alley, there around the back of the Brotherhood where the closed kitchen door and the narrow confines between one wall and the next give them the illusion of privacy.

His bedroom window looks down into this alley. So do a number of others'. So far as illusions go, it's not even a very good one.

The back door creaks when it opens, Lukas pulling Danicka along behind him. The Brotherhood is ramping up toward lunch rush. There's a pot of quickly-disappearing stew set out for the residents, because damned if Jenny or any of the other cooks had time to deal with the appetites of werewolves right now. Lukas steals a loaf of bread, which he wraps in a cloth napkin and clamp under his elbow, and ladles out stew generously for the both of them. Handing Danicka the loaf of bread, he ushers her up the stairs, carrying the hot bowls himself.

The common room is empty. Lukas nods toward the Vaio on its desk. "Didn't that use to be your computer?" and then they're at his door, and he shifts both bowls to the same hand, precariously, to dig his keys out of his pocket. He unlocks the door and motions her in, following her. The bowls are beginning to burn, and he sets them on his nightstand rapidly, sucking a dollop of sauce off his thumb where it had spilled.

An unusual thing: his bed is unmade, his closet door open, another shirt that he had apparently started to put on and then decided against hung awkwardly on the closet doorknob. And the blinds are still shut, but he twists them open now, then lifts the whole thing up to open his window. Then he goes to his closet, reaching around to the side to pull out two coatracks full of ties hung side by side by side.

With a wry, quirking smile, "What color did you want?"

[Danicka Musil] Stew is a horrible meal for summer, especially late summer, when the temperatures in the middle of the day spike closer to ninety. Jenny makes the werewolves stew because it keeps them out of her and her staff's hair. It keeps well, it feels many, and dishes are minimal. Danicka is flushed from the heat when she steps out of the car and into Lukas's arms, because the drive wasn't long enough for the air conditioning to make any difference. Her hair is windblown because she had the windows down, her arms are hot around his shoulders, her hands sear on his neck, her mouth is melting when he kisses her. A drop of sweat rolls down between her breasts, over her solar plexas, disappearing into the lining of her dress before it can run any further.

"Used to be," she confirms, minutes later, when they've gone from alley to kitchen to common room. She's got a purse, apparently it was in her car while she traversed the zoo. It's as white as her dress, though leather, all the clasps gleaming chrome. "I got a new one."

And at his door, she's taking one of the bowls from his hand, shaking her head as he's unlocking his door, laughing quietly. A great many of the werewolves up here are still asleep, as he had been; the Brotherhood's second floor is mostly still, as though even with temperature controls in place they have to sleep to escape the sunlight and the heat that travels upward from the kitchen so many of their bedrooms are above. Everything smells like lunch and laziness.

She sets her own bowl down beside his, without spilling, and balances the bread on top of the rims. Her purse slides down her arm to rest on the floor by the bed, as she's pushing her sunglasses up and looking around his room. Danicka walks over and puts her shades on the desk, looking at him over her shoulder as he opens his closet. Her eyebrows quirk upwards, as his had when she first asked about the ties in the zoo's parking lot.

"What do you want to see around my wrists?"

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] Even from across the room Danicka can see Lukas's jaw flex. She can see the quick cast of his eyes to those aforementioned wrists; to her hands; to the hem of her brilliant white sundress that floats so prettily at mid-thigh. The fabric is light enough that when the light hits her from behind, the body beneath the dress is hinted at, but heavy enough that he can see no hint of the golden tan summer has bestowed on her.

His eyes come back to hers. He doesn't answer immediately. Instead, he turns back to his closet, the ties swinging gently from their racks. As might be expected, the patterns are all tasteful and subdued, the fore and background colors close: charcoal on black, cream on white. There are the standard dark blue and rich red ties, the conservative pinstripes for business, the somber, sheening elegance of black and white silks. Then there are the unconventional ones, skinny ties in matte black, ties in solid silver and ivory and burnished gold; ties in pale green and washed-out violet; ties in the crystalline, glacial blue of his eyes.

Of all these, it's a crimson that he chooses: no patterns, no designs, nothing but red as velvety and rich as blood. He drapes it over one shoulder like a towel, puts the rest back, and shuts his closet door. Then, passing her on the way to his bed, he lays the tie down on his desk in smooth silken coils.

"It matches the lipstick," he explains; his tone is casual, almost indifferent.

There's nothing at all indifferent about his hands going to her waist, his hands turning her until the small of her back is to the desk, her feet between his, his hands sliding up her back in search of the zipper on her dress.

"Jste velký hlad?" The question is murmured. It's genuine. "Můžete ty si jíst později?"

[Danicka Musil] Of all people, Danicka does not have to look very deeply or very carefully to tell what that question has done to Lukas. That momentary, flickering tension in his jaw is illuminated clearly by the light coming in through the newly opened windowblinds. Sometimes they do not mind the dark, feeling one another out, losing touch with their surroundings by blinding themselves to them. He left all the lights burning the first time he fucked her, as though that would keep him from falling prey to some trap, some lie he expected her to try and tell. All it did was show him the unflinching reality of what they did to each other. Neither of them could leave and say it was just the darkness and the moonlight and the softness of the bed, because the lights were on and the curtains were closed and the bed was flat and old.

Her dress has a straight neckline, two ribbonlike straps winding up over her clavicles and tying in a loose bow behind her neck. Her shoulderblades are bared, as well as a little of her back, before the dress's discreetly zipped bodice takes over where the dangling ties leave off. The claw-clip in her hair is a burnished metallic color, but unimportant; she watches him silently as he looks her over, selects a tie, and drops it on his desk. It is easy for her to turn, her hands on the edge of the flat surface, as he unnecessarily and unconvincingly explains his choice.

Danicka just quirks one of those eyebrows higher, reaching back and unfastening the clip. Her hair tumbles down her back and shoulders, neither straightened nor intentionally curled. It falls into its natural wave patterns, and strands that were twisted up before they were dry from her shower release a small rush of scent: her shampoo, with hints of witch hazel and waterlilies.

His fingertips find the thin sliver of a tab between tiny folds of fabric, the delicate zipper that can so easily be tucked out of sight. His palms run over thin embroidery, white on white, cotton thread on linen. She lifts her chin and kisses the corner of his mouth -- softly, almost virginal. Danicka whispers back: "Can you?"

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] Lukas's fingers lose their way when Danicka kisses him. They drift; they still, and he turns his face into the kiss, meets her lips slowly with his. When her kiss ends, his is just beginning, opening, his lips closing over hers even as she draws back.

His eyes open when she asks him his question back. He looks at her for a moment, and in that moment he might have forgotten his english, might be as insensate to that language as he was the very first time they met.

Then he remembers what he's doing. Decisively, he draws the zipper deftly down her back, all the way to the end. He undoes the ties behind her neck, and what gravity does not do he does, pulling her dress down past her hips, letting it fall.

The windows are open; there's air conditioning in here, thankfully, but he prefers the living air from outside, even if it is warmer. Cool and warm intermingle in the middle of the room, brushing over her newly bared skin. Sunlight doesn't quite make it into the room -- the window faces an alley, after all -- but she's golden nonetheless, her skin and her hair, tumbled loose now from that artful twist.

Pretending at patience, Lukas lingers over Danicka's body. He doesn't have to pretend his interest, or his adoration. His large hands run over her smooth skin; he watches their passage: hip and thigh, belly, sides.

Then he takes her gently by the wrist and draws her away from the desk. The tension in his palms is all the warning she gets before he lifts her, effortlessly as though she were some sort of dancer, he her partner. There's something almost choreographed in the turn of his body, the tie picked up as an afterthought. He carries her to the bed and sets her down here, her white dress abandoned on the floor near the desk, her shoes slipped off at the edge of the bed.

[Danicka Musil] They've used fewer and fewer words since getting upstairs, passing through the common room, and entering his. Instead of asking her why she was interested in his ties, he asked her which she wanted, and things devolved from there. Now there's nothing, not a glint of language between them, though they both know that is how it always ends up between them. Words are the sources of misunderstandings. Language gets in the way of sitting very still, or coming at one another sideways, or this:

coming together like opposing winds, slow and circling, like the threatening rotation of clouds overhead that dance with each other lazily on an electrically hot afternoon.

She lifts her tailbone from the edge of his desk as he pulls at her zipper, hips pressing to his for a moment. She tips her head silently to the side as he unties her dress. Danicka is pretending as well as a doll, her vivid lips together, her hair whispering its way across her bared back as the dress whispers its way down her body. She watches him, while he watches her, while he touches her.

Danicka's nipples are pale pink, gradiating to an incredible pale brown that lightens further to almost peach before dissolving entirel into the color of her breasts, which are lighter than the rest of her. They're hardened, not because of cool air or touch but because of the same reason her pupils are dilating, the same reason her breathing is picking up. If he licked her now he could taste her sweat from walking around the zoo. If he ran his tongue from naked belly to naked breasts he would find her salty and clean and warm.

Her underwear is cream-colored, lace but for a panel of satin with one of those inexplicably, uselessly tiny bows. They're low-cut, the lines of lace cutting across her ass rather than enveloping it. She has no earrings today, but a thin gold chain around her neck ending in a small, flat oval pendant with something engraved upon it.

She steps away from the desk, still silent, still obedient, but there's a countering regality to the way she steps out of her dress, steps out of the red flats, and there is also grace in the way she lifts up and leans her weight against him when he picks her up. Her hands go to his shoulders, her nails as glossy and yet colorless as they always are. She keeps her eyes on his, even when he sets her down, even as her legs slide along the sides of his body and her hands run down his chest and abdomen to his hips.

"Už jste někdy udělat toto dříve?" Danicka asks, looking up at him. Her voice is soft. Gentle. She begins unbuttoning his shirt, starting at the bottom.

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] Lukas follows Danicka onto the bed, his knees pushing his rumpled comforter aside, the mattress denting beneath his hands. He holds himself over her and between her legs, his breathing gently elevated, quiet and steady but quickened. Lukas is looking at her body, looking at the slide of her thighs over his hips and the sides of his waist; looking at the useless little adornments on her underwear whose sole and devastating purpose is to inflame, to beguile, to seduce.

He's touching the tiny little bow very gently, very lightly with his fingertips, as though it were an impossibly sensitive part of her body. That's when she says what she does, her hands reaching to unbutton his shirt, bright white with its thin, thin lines in palest pink, which offset the darkness of his hair and the swarthiness of his skin.

That's when she says what she does, and his eyes bolt to hers. His jaw tightens; he swallows quietly.

And then he confesses, quietly: "Nikdy."

Which she must have suspected, if not guessed outright. He never asked why she wanted to know if he owned ties because he assumed mundane, reasonable explanations: she wants to go someplace nice for dinner, after they romp in bed all afternoon and shower. She wants to go to a lounge bar with a dress code. She wants to take him to a goddamn wedding. If he suspected -- and perhaps he did, because Lukas is not a goddamn fool and Danicka is not a blushing virgin -- it was only for a fleeting, quickly dismissed instant.

Which is not so much because he's scandalized by the thought or thinks Danicka incapable of wanting it, asking for it, demanding it, but because; well.

He's a monster. He's easily terrifying. She can't tolerate his hand on her neck, his teeth pulling her pearls against her throat. It seems almost impossible that she could tolerate, would want, to be tied down by him, to be physically held at a disadvantage, to be fucked in restraints.

These are the thoughts that flicker behind his eyes; the doubts and the uncertainties. His hand seems very large to him, very strong indeed when he finds hers on his shirtfront, when he takes her wrist in his fingers. Gently, his fingers explore the articulations of the joint, his thumb the smoothness of the skin. He brings her hand to his mouth and kisses her palm.

"Jste si jisti?"

[Danicka Musil] [Perception + Empathy]
Dice Rolled:[ 6 d10 ] 1, 2, 3, 6, 7, 9, 10, 10 (Success x 4 at target 6) Re-rolls: 2

[Danicka Musil] So she lays back slowly -- or rather, leans back. Danicka does not lie down yet, but moves til her shoulders touch the wall of his bedroom, her legs parting just enough for one of his knees to rest on the mattress between her thighs. Her skin is the same color through the patterns in the lace as it is over her belly and arms and legs. She breathes in deeply but slowly, silently, as he toys with the bow on her panties, but doesn't stop with his shirt.

She has two buttons undone by the time he confesses that he's never, not just no. She does it blindly, watching his eyes instead, her own eclipsed with lust and darkened back towards green now that they're indoors, but gentle. Somehow, gentle. She unfastens two more buttons by the time he speaks again.

Nothing he might have thought she wanted to do with him is out of the question. Danicka makes friends everywhere. She knows geeks and she knows dry cleaners and she knows country club golfers with hipster children and she knows restaurant owners and busboys and students and investment bankers. It is what she does. None of them know who she is, not really, not beyond the persona she adopts for them. They are not true friends, not even particularly useful people to her, but they distract her. They do nice things for her. They entertain her by being entertained by her.

She goes out of her way to corrupt them. If she were to invite Lukas to a wedding on a Sunday afternoon out of nowhere it's entirely possible she would be going to frighten certain guests, or steal a particular wedding gift, or slip something into the punch or because she thinks the bridesmaids are going to beat the shit out of the waitress, who was the groom's ex-girlfriend. Or because she would want to see Lukas in a tie, at some summery human ritual that her parents never engaged in and that she never intends to engage in, and fuck in the choir balcony while they make their vows to each other.

That is to say: it's entirely possible that Danicka's been invited to a wedding today. Or next week. Hell, she was invited to a going-away party last month for someone who's going backpacking through Europe.

Danicka slides her leg up between his, gently brushing against him through his jeans. She finishes unbuttoning his shirt just in time for him to take her hand and kiss her palm, the way he does, as though her paw has been injured and his adoration can heal it. She cups her hand around his cheek, slides her other hand under his shirt and caresses his chest. She can see his doubt. And his want. She can sense the uncertainty in his question, and she can feel his heartbeat faster than normal under the wandering of her fingertips and palm.

"Ano," she says simply, without needing a moment to consider it further. She sounds sure. She looks sure. "Já vím ty," she whispers, starting to push his shirt off of one of his shoulders. Danicka draws her hand from his face and reaches for the other sleeve, drawing the light, pink-pinstriped fabric off his arms, caressing his biceps as the linen drags away to his elbows. Her gaze wanders down his neck and chest, then back up to his eyes. "To je to, co chci.

"Dím 'červený', když chci, abyste přestal. A uvidíme ťukněte na posteli, pokud si pokrytí mých úst a já potřebuju, abys přestal," she explains, speaking slowly, as though to make sure she's being clear. "I trust you not to hurt me," Danicka murmurs, with almost the same tone she used with him on the solstice, as he came after her, "když budete důvěřovat, abych byl upřímný."

She puts her hands on the mattress, turns so that she's no longer sideways on the bed, and starts to lie down, unfolding her legs from his and looking up at him. "You may want to move the bowls so they don't spill."

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] Strange that she should be so gentle when he's the one that will be tying her down to use her body. Strange, that she should speak to him as coaxingly and nurturingly and softly as one would a wounded animal, as one might a virgin, when she's telling him to tie her wrists together and to the bed, to put her under him and spread her legs and fuck her like a

whore.
or a slut.
or a slave.

Or any of the words that have no real meaning between them, because they exist within the boundaries of human morality: which Lukas thinks of as flimsy and arbitrary, which Danicka thinks of as silly.

It's not morality that holds him back but something older and deeper than that; fear, not for himself, not even for the possibility of losing that ever-precious, steadily-less-precious control of his but for her. She can see that clearly, can read him to the bottom and see that in his eyes, that uncertainty that flickers like a silver fish in the blue, the memories of her stiffening and going still, the memories, worse, of her playing the goddamn part even when the act has lost all pleasure for her.

Which is why, of course, Danicka has to speak to him like that. Gently. Encouragingly. To show him that it's all right. To not only tell him but show him that it's okay.

This is what she wants.

She touches his face, his chest. Her leg brushes against him through his jeans, and she can feel him hard and aroused beneath the denim, the cotton blend of his boxer briefs. A muscle jumps in his stomach, a breath sucked in, but his eyes stay on hers, attentive, as she explains the system and the safeties to him. Lukas was a bit wild as a boy, but he was also intensely studious, capable of prolonged and focused concentration. He looked a little like this puzzling over unfamiliar English words in Frog and Toad Are Friends; he must've looked like this in class, listening to his teachers explaining verbs and conjunctions, 1066 and 1492, algebra and geometry and basic trigonometry before the Change and the War interrupted his formal education and replaced those teachers with a mentor, academics with the litany and the laws of blood and bone and thunder.

"Chápu," he murmurs when she finishes. A turn of his face to her hand; a kiss to her palm, again.

She pulls herself toward the headboard, then, and Lukas rears up on his knees, shucking his shirt off and leaving it at the foot of his rumpled bed. When it's off he leans over her rearranging body to grab the bowls, moving them but not far -- to the floor, out of immediate danger. The play of muscles under his skin is clear and flawless; the shoulder girdle and the loins tightening to bring him back onto the bed. He follows her turn, lengthwise on the bed now, straddling her thighs. There's a hesitant uncertainty that surfaces in flickers and flashes that she rarely sees in him; that she has not seen in matters of sex and lovemaking, in fact, since the night he first went to his knees before her and put his mouth on her cunt.

He's never done this before, either. And Lukas is unsure, a little nervous: not all confidence after all.

A beat of pause, barely there, and then he takes her hand in his again. Her wrist. He cradles her arm very gently -- as though her paw were injured -- winds the wider end of the tie around as though to bind a wound. Lukas starts to make a knot, but then he thinks of the tie pulling tight, thinks of the tie cutting into Danicka's wrist. He unknots it, winds the tie around a second time, and ties the knot outside the wrap of silk.

His face is blank with concentration as he does this. He watches what he's doing, and it's only when he finishes that he looks at her eyes, scanning her face for reaction.

Her other wrist, then, bound beside the first the same way. And then the two bound securely together in several figure-eight twists of the tie. He loops the narrow end around the middle, secures it, and then loops it through the cheap, rough-hewn slats of the headboard. Back and forth between her wrists and the headboard, some two or three times, before finally tying a doubleknot close to the headboard, leaving Danicka with a few inches of spare out of a sixty-inch tie. Lukas closes his hand over the last knot for a second; doesn't shake it to make sure it's set.

"Oukej?" he asks her again, a quiet check: is she okay? Is this okay?

[Danicka Musil] That is, of course, why she speaks so carefully to him, coerces him so gently: so he will know that she is not going to bite back a cry of panic if it comes, so he will know that she will not keep moving her body so sensuously with his even as she goes far, far away from him. Danicka can see the worry in his eyes, and she knows why it's there. She sees every flicker of concern in his eyes, each one sparking up against his lust, and she moves in such away, speaks in such a way, to soothe one and encourage the other.

There are philosophical musings on trust exercises and limit experiences that could be mentioned now, by either of them. Neither of them has a college degree, and certainly not in philosophy or psychology or human sexuality. Danicka has experiences that range far and wide and into areas Lukas is probably happier not knowing about. She does not bring up the past. She does not reassure him that she won't press her lips together and just fuck him even if she doesn't want to anymore. She does not call to mind times when she has gone rigid and wary, betrayed by her own trauma, which is too stubborn to keep as quiet as she might want it to.

Danicka just lies back, watching his eyes, and smiles soft at him when he comes over her, shirt dropped to the end of the bed and sunlight playing off of his swarthy skin. She reaches up while she still can, hands on his chest and neck, touching his face, caressing him as though in reverence, while the corners of her mouth curl upward and her brow furrows lightly in an expression of almost painful fondness.

"Chci tě," she whispers, as simply as she did that day on the waterfront, though this time he's permitted to see the emotion behind it, the force of desire that was present then but restrained behind the walls of what he called a stone egg. Inviolate. No longer a stone egg, yet somehow still inviolate, unassailable, unbreakable, she gets comfortable on his pillow and lets him move her hands over her head.

Still and unresisting, she waits patiently while he winds the tie around her wrists, rethinks a knot. She watches his brow furrow slightly in tought, and perhaps at another time she might compare it to a little boy figuring out a word longer than four letters when four letters, in English, was difficult enough. Now, though, she's thinking only of him, of the silk around her wrists, of the way he smells, of how achingly close his body is. Danicka breathes in deeply when he ties her to the headboard finally, blinking once up at him.

Her lips are parted. She rolls her eyes up, twisting her head to look at his handiwork, and tests the bindings. She is thoughtful about it, considering both how tight he's tied her, whether he's made it easy to slip out or if the knots are secure, whether the tie is going to pull at her uncomfortably. She doesn't say a word as she does this, then turns and looks back up at him again.

Danicka takes another deep breath and nods. "Zelený," she sighs, and then smiles, shifting her legs between his, brushing against him again. "Polib mě. Dotkni se mě, Lukáš, prosím."

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] The first time they fucked, Lukas was nothing but certainty; or wanted to be. He wanted to be cold, a stone egg himself, holding whatever all-consuming fascination, passion, inextricable infatuation he might've felt for her inside himself. He gave her orders: come here, take your clothes off, kiss me. He tried to reduce her to a thing, the bedroom to a cell, the act to something sordid and brutish, purely physical, a purging.

It was not like that, but that is not the point is. The point is he's rarely, perhaps never this uncertain. He's never hesitated to touch her, even when he did not know exactly how; he's never --

paused like this, when the knot is tied and Danicka tells him green, tells him to kiss her, touch her. He sucks a breath in when she touches him the only way she really can, now, with her body, but he remains where he is for a beat longer, one hand on the silk tie binding her to his bed; the other planted on the mattress beside her shoulder, holding him over her.

Lukas is deeply uncertain. Danicka can see that plainly. His shirt off now, his chest rises and falls visibly, his breathing as quickened by doubt as it is by arousal. She can see him all but hold his breath when she tests the knots. The inner sheath of silk is snug, but there's some give between her wrists. The last knot, affixing her wrists to the headboard, is likewise secure. He has no idea if this is 'right' or not; he looks at her, intently, to see her reaction. He searches her eyes for some hint, any hint, that this is not what she wants.

Then his hand trails the silk tie back to her wrists, back to her arm. Her skin is so smooth, so soft, that once he complimented -- bitterly -- the skill of the man who used to abuse her. He did not know the brutal truth of it then. He does not think of that now, because to think of it now would have him tearing her loose, snarling at some imagined or remembered force that might, somehow, strip her away; damage her; break her.

He doesn't think of that. He touches her skin, follows her forearm to her elbow, her elbow to her bicep. Danicka is slender, is thin; he knows the pitiful truth of that, too. His hand warm on the underside of her arm, he leans down to her, sinks down on his forearm, kisses her mouth.

Slowly -- thoroughly, patiently, tasting her as if for the first time, though the first time was nothing like this. There's a space between their bodies, there because he's unconsciously tense, unconsciously holding his torso away from his. It diminishes as he relaxes into the kiss. His chest touches hers, then his belly. Their mouths part for a second. He looks at her. Then he kisses her again, deeply now, following her arm to her torso. When he finds her breast he sighs into her mouth, the back of his hand pressed to his own chest.

His mouth trails down her neck now, past her collarbones. He drifts toward her breast, but by some whim or instinct skirts her nipple, kisses the underside of her breast, sucks at the gentle intimations of her ribs under her skin. He finds a sensitive spot on her abdomen, half-remembered by previous trips down this way -- kisses it, then touches it, pets the spot softly with his fingertips as though mystified or charmed by its existence. By now he's slid down the bed, rucking his sheets further. His thighs tangle with her shins. His chest is warm against her hip, the outside of her thigh. He nips at her waist, tucks his fingers under the elastic of her panties, draws it down, down, with the sort of slow and careful delicateness usually reserved for gifts of great worth, long-awaited presents.

"...oh," he murmurs, a sound of amazement and recognition both, when her panties are down past her hips, past her thighs, past her knees. He draws them all the way down, lets her slip her feet out of them. Like a snake, like something that moves sinuously and leglessly, he slides down the bed another few inches, another foot, and now his shoulders are level with her hips, his feet hanging lazily off the end. Warm, a little calloused, his hand moves her thigh up and over, lifts it over his shoulder.

Very gently, very carefully, as though her tied wrists have somehow rendered her infinitely more fragile, Lukas opens her legs: one over his shoulder, to other bent upward, pressed sideways. He's silent now as his fingers track inward from knee to thigh, back to the center of her; he presses the tips of his fingers against her pussy, slips them between her lips, closes his eyes and bends his mouth to the arch of her hipbone as he slides his fingers along, and over her opening. He doesn't put his mouth to her cunt, but he touches her endlessly, reverently, patiently: explores her thoroughly, strokes her, gradually winds inward, focuses, centers the pad of his thumb on her clit.

The first time he rubs that precarious, electric center -- the first time he unequivocally stimulates her -- coincides with the slide of his fingers into her. It's the first time any part of him has entered her, been inside her, in nearly a month.

This time it's not a sigh, not a murmur; it's a low moan, almost pained, which he muffles against her hip.

[Danicka Musil] Because she was going to leave him, come dawn. Because she was not capable, no matter what she said, of loyalty. Of more than just a casual fuck on a narrow bed, or up against a wall, or in the handicapped stall of a nightclub restroom. Because somehow Lukas convinced himself that she saw him as a conquest or as nothing else, because Lukas was a hypocrite, because he did not know her well enough to know that she never went after a man -- or a woman -- with the same sort of relentless determination as she felt seething and roiling inside her when she went after him.

She could have called a cab. She could have lied to him on the waterfront. She did not need to remind him of an old proverb in his native tongue about giving, offering, accepting, foolishness. She did not have to call him to her and promise or threaten to fuck him brainless. She sure as hell didn't have to suggest the idea of loyalty, even though at the time she doubted he would want something like that from her, because she was a whore, because she knew he didn't think she was capable of anything else.

Because she wasn't entirely sure if she was, either.

Danicka went after him, wanted him, more than she's wanted anyone that she can remember. She wanted him even after she'd had him, wanted him even when he nearly killed her, wanted him not because it was arousing to be desired by something more powerful than herself but because she was fascinated, impassioned, infatuated even before she knew why she was so very, very drawn to him.

She wanted him enough to tell him No. Not like that. Not with his hand on her neck and his cock bare and hard inside her. Not after they'd kissed, which broke everything, every illusion, and stripped away her ability to lie to him for at least one night. She wanted him enough to be genuinely annoyed that he did not call her, to be even more furious with herself for feeling that way, irritated that she would not just call him, disgusted by the junior-high nostalgia of it all. She wanted him enough to make the promises she knew she could keep, even if they weren't the ones he wanted to hear.

She wanted him. And she wants him. Danicka moves on the bed as he holds himself up over her, trying to encourage him though she doesn't say a word to do so. She lifts her hips and tries to touch him even as she's telling him touch me, her mouth open because she is quietly, near-silently panting. Her heart is racing, though he doesn't know it until he touches her breast, kisses her mouth and then her chest, hearing her want in the shuddering of her breath and feeling her excitement in the fluttering, hammering pace of her pulse.

The woman who he is supposed to protect for the sake of the Nation, for the sake of her absent brother, for the sake of the Tribe, bites her lower lip to keep from giggling when he pets her abdomen, but the tremoring of muscles in her torso and the way she wiggles for a moment there tell him he's made her ticklish. She writhes briefly, sighs when he relents, relaxes as he moves down her body.

Danicka does not look afraid. That which has hurt her is miles and miles away. She looks vulnerable, to be sure, especially when he slides down and unwraps her, peeling lace and satin down impossibly smooth legs. It's almost shy, the way she bends her legs and pulls her feet out of the garment, knees together for a moment, but there's no uneasiness or shame on her face. Just interest, just desire, thinly veiled by rapidly evaporating patience. Danicka parts her legs again and though naked, tied down, and far smaller than he is, she is a portrait of the difference between 'vulnerable' and 'fragile', the difference between 'naked' and 'exposed', the difference between 'restrained' and 'repressed'.

When Lukas runs his hands up her legs, finds a place to live and between them, when he trails fingertips along her body, Danicka tries to stay still as long as she can, but her hips buck while he is still inches away from touching her cunt. She whimpers, hips rolling, lips closing against an unspoken plea. The reaction, when he finally finds the warm, moist center of her, is like a jolt. Danicka's entire body shudders against the rumpled fitted sheet that smells faintly of him, her back arching. Counter-intuitively, she tries to bring her legs together, tries to clench her thighs, but the way he has her unfolded and unfurled does not allow it.

Which makes her whimper, again, softer now. Her eyes fall closed for a moment, while she endures his slow, almost curious stroking. Lukas can see her grow wet, grow slick, can watch her pussy clutch at nothing, or he can look up and see her face, see her furrowed brow and her top teeth biting into her lower lip, her eyes closed as though she's --

--screaming, suddenly, letting out a sharp cry that hitches, then descends into a moan, as she feels his fingers stop teasing and stroking and enter her. Danicka's lower lip would be red even without the lipstick; her eyes open, grasp at the ceiling, as though she's forgotten where she is. She hears his moan, an echo of hers or maybe hers was an echo of his, and kissing at the zoo or just moments ago is nothing like this, tasting his tongue or exploring his mouth is to this as a candle is to the sun, a single drumbeat to a roll of thunder, something, something more poetic than she can think of right now.

She turns her head and presses her face against her own bicep, rolling her hips again.

Moaning again.

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] On that first sharp cry Lukas's eyes snap to Danicka's face. Before that he was indeed watching her body; watching the twist and roll of her torso, the flex of her inner thighs, watching her grow wet, watching his fingers glisten with her wetness.

Not after. After that, his eyes are on her face, hungry. He devours every flicker, every nuance, every shred of expression from her face, the way a wolf might gnaw marrow from the bone; the way a lion licks flesh from the skeleton.

And he does lick her now. He does slide between her legs fully; stretch on his stomach. His thumb relinquishes that tight, implosive center. He closes his mouth over her clit instead, licks at her, sucks at her, fucks her slowly and deliberately with his fingers, and what certainty he'd lost in her binding he regains now; he remembers.

Yes, his body tells him, this is how it is.

This is what it is to fuck Danicka. To feel her cunt clutching and bearing down on him. To feel her body shudder and writhe beneath him, only -- it's not her hands holding his mouth to her, this time. It's not her fingers in his hair, encouraging or simply holding on for dear life. It's his hands on her: his free hand splaying over her stomach, holding her where she is; the first three fingers of his left hand stroking into her tight cunt. It's his mouth on her, slow and unrelenting, bringing the pleasure slow and powerful as a deepwater wave, invisible until it strikes the shore.

Lukas's eyes are closed now. His room is warmer than it was in the commons, warming from the open window and the humidity outside. His shoulder is growing slicker under her knee. He eats at her with the same singleminded intensity she must've come to expect, buries his face between her legs and goes at her as though he wanted to devour her from the inside out --

ferociously, and then, without warning: gentling.

He draws back. He's panting. Her wet is all over his face. He wipes his cheek on his shoulder, licks his lips. Slowly -- wincing, as though it pained him somehow to do this, as though it were his cock he withdraws -- he draws his fingers out of her. Starts to suck them clean, one by one. Thinks better of it halfway through the first.

Reaching out instead, now, Lukas smears that slick over the aureola of her heartward breast; catches the nipple between his hot wet fingers, rolls it gently, gently. Jemně, he reminds himself, and then plants his palms on either side of her, pushes himself up and over her in a single smooth heave. His jeans are still on. The denim is light for the season, light so far as denims go, but still thick, still canvas-coarse on her inner legs. He slides up her body and presses her caught leg up along his shoulder; wedges himself against her, his hips against hers, the hardness of his erection snug against her cunt.

He groans. It makes his eyes flicker shut when he rocks against her, rubs against her. Then they open again, fierce and blue. He finds her eyes; holding them, he bends to her like an animal to a still pool. At once he catches her breast in his mouth, and with the same deliberate, heavy slowness, sucks her taste off her nipple while he grinds against her through his jeans.

When it's just the taste of her skin on his tongue, her skin and the salt of her sweat, he raises his head. His shifts his weight to one hand, that shoulderblade pressing high, and passes his free hand from her breast to her underarm, and up along the length of her arm to her wrist. He lingers there for a moment, thoughtfully -- uncertainty glimmers again, then subsumes -- he reaches past to the headboard, grabbing hold for a second.

Then he lets go. Lifts his body away from hers, reaches down to undo his belt, his button, his zipper.

"Řekni mi, co chceš."

Undone, his belt buckle jingles faintly; the loose end lays cool against her thigh until he pushes his pants down, bunching at the knee. He reaches into his boxer briefs, pushes those down as well, down to his thighs to free his cock. Once or twice he strokes himself, overhand, his breathing changing subtly with the wildfire pleasure jolting up his spine. Then he settles back between her thighs, laying his heavy and hot over her lower belly, setting his weight back on both his hands as he watches her.

Softer now, with a sort of velvet quietness:

"Řekni mi, jak chcete, aby tento kohout."

[Danicka Musil] It's almost too much, after so long without him. She looks pained. She looks overcome. As she winds her hips in rhythm with the flex of his hand, Danicka quiets. She pants softly, the muscles in her arms tensing and relaxing in time as she writhes against his bed, against his bindings. She is not in pain, but she is certainly overwhelmed. Already, either because of the tie around her wrists or because it's been nearly a goddamn month, or for some reason he can't fathom and that maybe doesn't matter: already, she's panting and arching for him like an animal in heat, a thing he once compared her unfavorably to even if a part of him was wanting her like a goddamn dog, salivating, keening.

She does not stay quiet for long. Danicka doesn't bother to watch him. She's lost in some world of her own right now, eyes mostly closed and murmurs incoherent. On some level she must be aware of the way he moves down between her legs, must realize that he's putting himself in a position that at this point may have completely lost its connotations of submission or aura of servitude. Even as he breathes over her, prepares to pleasure her, Danicka seems more at his mercy than vice versa. Maybe it's always so, always been so, at least with her.

Maybe it's the same, when she gets on her knees for him.

He knows it is.

When Lukas puts his mouth to her cunt she screams again, cutting it off halfway by turning her head and biting her bicep, groaning as her teeth sink into her skin. She bucks her hips against his face til he holds her still, and his hand on her belly like that makes her whimper. She wants to move, she wants to grind, and most of all she wants to fuck him on a level that's descended so far beyond desire it's something of a pure physical need, as thoughtless as breathing, and as desperate as the longing for air.

"Lukáš... Ach, moje Lukáš..." is what she's saying then, her lips moving against her arm where her mouth wet it, her leg tightening over his shoulder, his shoulder sliding wet against her leg. "Ne," Danicka whimpers, when he starts to slow, when his lips and tongue soften on her, "ne, prosím nekončí..."

It is useless. She groans in protest as he draws away, taking first his lovely hot mouth and then his warm, certain fingers. She shudders, the tremors going from her jaw to her very toes, and her head slowly swivels on the pillow. Loose hairs stick to her hairline as she opens her eyes and looks at him again, watches him wipe his mouth and lick her taste off his lips...and then his finger She strains against the tie briefly, as though wanting to sit up, but gives up after little more than a breath of that tension.

"Láska, jdeš do --"

He touches her breast when she's in the middle of beginning to whisper a question, and Danicka's head falls back against the pillow with a thump. She gasps. Laid out like this, he can see every flicker of reaction, every moment when she calms, when she is more soothed by what he does than driven mad by it. And, moreover, he can see the way she spreads her legs, the way she rolls her hips even before he moves up between her thighs, fucking the air because she isn't fucking him yet. Lukas can see what she doesn't say, or at least some part of it.

He can see the way she contorts against him, the way she struggles again with the tie when he presses himself against her, rubs rough denim against her pussy. Danicka is whimpering as though she's on the verge of tears, gasps and stifled cries of something like frustration. He knows that she's lithe, knows she's athletic in bed, but she's fucking against his hips as he rocks towards her as though there's not a slip of fabric between them. And she's doing it without the leverage she gets from holding onto him or pushing against the bed. She's sweating, and when he looks down into her eyes, her pupils nearly eclipse every last shread of vivid shining green there is.

Maybe then she'd say something, but when he puts his mouth on her nipple and sucks the taste of her cunt off her skin, she is once again coherent. She swears at him in Russian, words he doesn't know but that by intonation he can tell are Not Very Nice. Danicka growls them against her teeth, set on edge behind partly closed lips. Now she's squirming under him so violently it takes the weight of him to hold her still, because she is yanking on the tie, far more fiercely than she did when she tested his knot-tying skills.

When Lukas pulls away, Danicka almost sobs. This time, though, she doesn't beg him not to stop. She breathes in with a shudder and blinks away genuine wetness in her eyes, looking down her bared and stretched out body at him. Wordless, but with bright pink underneath the tan on her cheeks and sweat sticking her hair to her forehead now, sticking to her neck, Danicka watches Lukas unfasten his belt. His jeans. Her lips tremble when he pushes them down, but she stops it by biting her lower lip as his boxer-briefs join the denim. Her brow seems like it may very well be permanently furrowed.

She's never made that sound before, half-gasp and half-whimper, at the sight of him naked and hard for her. She's never looked at him quite like that. Never watched him stroke himself with quite that much hungry intensity. Never bucked her hips against air

like a whore.
or a slut.
or a slave.

"Prosím, láska," she whispers back at him, what's left of the color in her eyes flickering with sparks of need. She is all but panting the words to him, utterly heedless of the sounds she's making, the thin walls, the napping or active Garou and Kin who might be listening to her moan every time she says 'please'.

"Prosím, potřebuju, abys kurva mě. Můžete kurva mě těžko, pokud budete chtít. Jen prosím, dej mi to."

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] It's never been quite like this before.

Which is true, in a way, of every time they're together. It's always different. They always go deeper, sink closer, become -- more to one another. Sometimes by degrees, sometimes all at once.

But it's never been quite like this before.

He's never heard her make that sound, not because he's touched her or entered her or fucked her but because she knows he's going to. He's never tied her down like this. He's never seen her writhe like that, fuck the air because she can't fuck him, rub and grind against him through his jeans as though his clothes weren't there at all.

There's a touch of amazement in his eyes. He looks at her like she's a thing of wonder, like he's never seen anything like her before

(he hasn't)

and doesn't quite know what to do with her

(he doesn't)

and like he wants to eat her alive, like he wants to cover her with his hands and his mouth and his body, consume her, make her irrevocably his. Her words flare in his eyes, like torches thrown into wells. Their eyes are animal, all pupil with a lightning rim, and hers are shocking green, and his are flame blue. She gets to her last please and he leans down suddenly, kisses her like a collision, a trainwreck, a war, pushes her back into his pillow and raises her chin with the force of his kiss, all but tears at her mouth. His hands are all over her. He rubs her skin, grasps at her sides, her waist, cradles her breasts. His hand finds it way past her neck to her jaw, her mouth -- comes between their mouths -- he breaks away, turns his face sideways gasping, splays his fingers over her mouth as his free hand fumbles in his nightstand for a goddamn condom.

Blindly. Because his mouth is on her neck now, and then on her breasts. He sucks and eats at her while ipods and cell phones clatter in his nightstand, while a book thumps against the back end of the drawer, while he comes up with a foil packet and -- as suddenly as that -- sits up, the great muscles of his back his own and only leverage until he grasps the headboard, heaves himself up, all but pounces onto her.

His knees nudge the undersides of her arms. He straddles her chest, the condom crumpled in his left hand, his right at the base of his cock. His chest gleams with sweat; light sheens and flashes off the broad sheets of his pectorals, the segmented abdominals, the rippled and overlapping definition of the musculature over his ribs. Lukas is nearly panting, his nostrils flaring on every breath.

It's a forced quiet, this. It's a forced slowness, a forced patience as he presses his cock gently down, down.

"Otevři pusu pro mě, lásko."

There's a thread of pure need in his voice, glittering like a thread of gold in iron ore. When he touches the head of his cock to her lips Lukas draws a long, slow hiss of a breath.

"Prosím."

[Danicka Musil] She seems so comfortable with this, barring the evident and vocalized impatience, frustration, and hunger. She taught him safewords, phrases for both keep going, this is okay and stop everything, immediately, and untie me. She coaxed him, reassured him, tested his knots and confirmed that this was good, that this was right, that this was okay. Danicka is given over, freely and almost eagerly, to this, despite his flickering uncertainty, and it's easy enough to guess that she's done this before.

Looking up at him, as he's looking at her like he's not entirely sure how to proceed because this is so different, because it's been so long, because she is so unlike anyone he's ever encountered before, Danicka licks her lips and arches her back, desperately trying to rub herself against his thigh, his cock, any part of him that is hard and warm. "Baby, please --" she starts to whimper again, and that's when he kisses her.

Devours her.

Danicka lets out a yelp as his mouth crushes onto hers, as his hands start pawing at her flesh, following her side, squeezing her breasts, searching underneath her to cup her ass before traveling back up her body or down her thighs. She moves into his hands, gasping against his mouth, urging him to keep going, keep doing that, keep touching her, even though any moment now she's certain he's going to bite her so hard she bleeds, and she doesn't fucking care, she doesn't care if he bruises her, just so long as he keeps touching her.

She opens her mouth when his hand moves to her jaw, her tongue slipping past her lips to flick over his fingertips. Danicka lifts her head to suck on his middle finger, moaning around it as though it's something satisfying, as though it's even close to enough. And he's grabbing a condom and sucking her neck, sucking her tits, leaving marks on her throat, kicking himself completely out of his jeans, and the bed is protesting loudly underneath them as they writhe together on top of it. The mattress thumps softly, the springs creak, the frame groans, but most of it fades underneath the sounds of Danicka's voice.

That is, until Lukas leaps on her, straddles her. She gasps and before the words are completely out of his mouth her own is opening again, richly wet from sucking on his finger. She does not shyly kiss him or flick her tongue over him but lifts her head slightly and wraps her lips around his cock, stifling a loud moan on his flesh. Her eyes close for a moment as she tries to pull him deeper, her hands flexing into fists beside the spare inches of red silk keeping her tied to the headboard.

But then she opens them. And looks at him. And gently rubs the tip of her tongue on the underside of his cock, watching his face.

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] And he's looking right back at her, of course.

The second she opens her mouth for him, the second she takes him in her mouth, Lukas has to let go his cock and put his hands, both of them, atop the same headboard he's cinched her to. He moans with her -- a lower register, a rougher, lower sound. The headboard creaks under his hands, and his knuckles are white.

When she takes him deeper his head arches back. His back pulls taut, muscles standing out. She relents. His head drops forward. He opens his eyes and

and she's looking right back at him. Of course.

And he's looking at her and he looks lost, he looks shipwrecked, he looks dazed, like he's in shock, like he's at her mercy. His lips are parted, his teeth; his brow is furrowed and he's breathing short and shallow, his eyes threaten to fall shut any second. Her tongue darts, slides. He leans forward and his forehead drops against the wall with a thump. The same with his hand, taken off the headboard, pawed blindly against the wall, fingers curling, slipping down to cup behind her head. He lifts her head gently, tenderly, cradles her head so she can suck his cock, and he gives up, he gives up, he closes his eyes and tries to remember how to breathe steadily.

For a second.
For ten.

For some stretch of time he loses grasp of entirely, slipping from his hand like her hair through his fingers. Behind his eyes is a whirlwind of sensation. The ground tilts, the wall loses its consistency. Is he upright? Is he still attached to the face of the earth? He can't trust gravity anymore, only the rhythm of her mouth, the jolts and lashes of pleasure that make him groan like he can't hold it back, like he's in pain.

"Přestan." He breathes the word out. He's almost begging. "Oh, prosím, přestaň."

He sets her down; slips his hand from under her head. Strokes her hair back and then -- touching her cheek, her face, as though somehow afraid of hurting her -- withdraws carefully from her mouth. For a second he grips the headboard with both his hands like this might help ground him somehow. Then he tears the condom wrapper open, drops it carelessly ... somewhere, unrolls the condom over himself as he's moving down the bed on his knees. He watches her the entire time, his breathing quick and deep, swift.

Now he's straddling her legs again, her thighs near her knees. He rises on his knees and reaches between them to draw her legs out and over, one and then the other, and he's as careful now as he ever was. The first leg he bends gently behind him, showing her where to wrap her leg around, where to clasp him in the curl of her leg.

The second he can't resist kissing, can't resist pulling to his face to kiss and nip at, all along the inner ankle, the calf. When his eyes turn back to hers they're limitlessly black rimmed in an electric, blazing blue: his desire twined into his rage, the fire at the core of him burning somewhere behind his eyes.

Lukas comes forward, kneels between her legs with his waist caught between her thighs. He leans over Danicka, and he catches her by the waist and -- startlingly quick, irresistibly strong -- lifts her, sets her ass atop his thighs, presses his cock firmly along the slickness of her cunt.

Nothing but want in his eyes. Nothing but want and a sort of inexplicable, unspeakable tenderness; a depthless, absolute adoration.

"Jedu do prdele tě, lásko," he tells her, softly, lovingly. His hips flex. He rubs against her and his eyes go dark. The mattress creaks beneath his hands, his shifting weight. He lowers himself over her, touches her like she's something precious, kisses her over her heartbeat, gently, gently.

And he murmurs this like a lover's secret:

"Jedu k dát že malej kundo a důkladném kurva. Jedu na používání, že napjaté píčo dobré a tvrdé."

Then he grabs her hips in hand, shifts her, adjusts her, brings her onto his cock in one smooth, swift slide. The sound he makes is almost a shout, raw and tattered. He muffles it against her shoulder. Holds himself inside her, deep and still.

When he can move again, he kisses her neck; behind her ear. He's asked her this before, but he's never whispered it to her quite like this:

"Dělat chceš mi na pokrytí vašich úst?"

[Danicka Musil] The truth of the matter that is always between them is starkly illustrated by Danicka's red-bound wrists and supine position: she is at his mercy. There are safewords, there are things she can do to indicate pain or fear, but they do not guarantee that he will listen. There are his eyes closing, his mouth open for moans as her mouth is open for his cock, but if he wanted to, Lukas could take this farther, could do anything he wants, and she would not even be able to run.

Which makes this all the more frightening, at least for him. This may be the first time she's trusted him this completely without being asked, without having to spend several long moments considering it, weighing it. Then again, every time she goes to bed with him it could be considered trust. Every day she stays in the same city as a werewolf who wants her as much as he does, it could be considered something like a surrender to whatever it is between them.

Maybe it doesn't even matter so much, at least not right now. He or they can consider the implications of trust and surrender later. He can be amazed, if he's so inclined, at how willing she was to make herself even more vulnerable than she already is with him and not just endure it, not just get through it, but visibly and vocally enjoy it.

Danicka watches him as she sucks on him, her eyes glittering when he thumps his head against the wall that faces the alley, when he grasps at the headboard and wall as though he's afraid he's going to fall. She sighs out through her nostrils when he cradles her head, closing her own eyes as she drifts into a slow, almost lazy rhythm. It is not as good as it is when she has him against a wall or on his back and does this. She can't run her hands over him, can't stroke him or tease him the way she does, but it hardly fucking matters, especially after so very, very long.

Not just twenty-five days since he last saw her, since she last fucked him. The last time she took him in her mouth was the day he left her.

It can't last. She can't keep it up and he can't bear it and so he begs her to stop. Danicka slows, perhaps obedient, but perhaps just being gentle with him, as she was before. This time, she relents, though he's asked her to stop before and she's ignored him. She opens her eyes again as he slides out, and she smiles at him with those red, wet lips.

"Lukáš..." she whispers, fondly. As though in recognition, as though waking from some dream.

She's sweating, slick with it over her breasts and belly and thighs because of the heat just like her cunt is slick and hot because of him. Danicka squirms on the bed once, adjusting her position, watching him as he gets on the condom they only rarely go without and only, it seems, when neither of them can maintain the presence of mind to give half a fuck when it feels so good to --

"Don't make me wait," she whispers at him, as he's gently moving her legs, kissing her ankle and calf, running his hands over her. "Baby, stop making me wait."

When he gives her his body, her legs instinctively or insistently tighten around him, pull at him. She strains against the red tie, which is vivid enough to conceal the friction burns it's starting to give her because of her writhing, because of her tugging, because of the way she tries to move down on the bed to rub against his cock the way she would if she were completely free to move.

She'd be on him, and he knows it, holding his shoulders and sinking down on his cock, or turning over and rubbing back against him like an animal, rolling her hips and inviting him into her like he's her mate, like he's the only appealing male for hundreds of miles, like she fucking needs it. But she can't do that. So she strains, and arches, and looks at his burning eyes in pleading.

When he gives himself over, leaning over her like that, something about the way he looks at her makes her forget about the stupid tie. Danicka's face softens, losing that tension of frustration and impatience, that inexplicable worry that he might tease her, that he'll never give her what she wants. She looks up at him differently, her eyes almost startled before that, too, is swallowed by adoration.

"Lukáš," she whispers again, and then he presses his cock against her. Then he rolls his hips and it strokes over her clit. Then his eyes go dark and he tells her -- tenderly, sweetly -- what he's going to do to her. She moans, back arched so forcefully that her breasts are thrust upward, that he barely has to bend his neck to kiss her and feel her pulse pounding underneath his lips.

He tells her

what he tells her

and Danicka lowers her body back to the bed, her arms limp now, unresisting. She parts her legs a little more, folds him closer, panting as he informs her what he's going to do. She can't even beg, now, can barely even breathe, though her mouth opens as if to say something just before he pushes into her in a single stroke, a single flex of his frighteningly powerful body. No words come out, just a small and whimpering gasp completely at odds with the force of the way their bodies move suddenly on the mattress, completely at odds with the gravity of satisfaction.

She's so tight, so unused to this, that she clenches on him immediately. And what he doesn't know is that Danicka hasn't gone twenty-five days without fucking another person since before she was able to buy her own beer. And what he doesn't know is that in the last month she's barely been able to touch herself without aching for him, missing him, as though pained by pleasure not shared with him. It hasn't stopped her from reaching between her legs in bed or in the shower and bringing herself to tight, spiraling orgasm, but it's nothing like this. It could never be anything like this.

Danicka's panting is sharper, harder, than before, as she adjusts to the feel of him inside her. She shifts her hips on the bed and wraps her legs around him differently and turns her head when he starts kissing her neck, whimpering for his mouth though she does not tell him to kiss her. She just kisses his face, his jaw, any part of him her lips can reach.

His question makes her pause, even as her cunt is squeezing him. It's involuntary, the way her body quivers, the way she spasms long before orgasm. "Můžete," she murmurs, leaving it open. The word sounds almost shy, though her eyes are filled with nothing but that same gentleness, that uncompromising -- maybe uncompromised -- trust, that blatant and unhesitating adoration.

"I want to fuck you," Danicka tells him, gently, if such words could ever be gentle... which they have proven, over and over now, that they can. "I want you to fuck me." It's an echo, from a night long gone now, the beginning of something neither of them thought would last past a night but have since realized they cannot do without.

She kisses his cheek softly, and slowly, slowly rolls her hips under him. "Chci tě."

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] You can is not you should or I think you'd better. You can is not enough to make him bring his hand up over that wonderful red mouth of hers, those lips and that tongue, those white animal teeth that she's flashed at him before as though she were not smaller, weaker, frailer, so fucking easily broken.

She's not broken. She hasn't been broken yet; hurt, and badly, wounded, beaten, battered, but --

not broken.

Lukas shifts over her. The reflexive clutching of her cunt makes him gasp. He presses deeper. Their bodies flex together mindlessly -- it's out of his control. His hand comes off her hip. He shifts his weight, gives her room, some room to move, to breathe, braces his elbows on either side of her torso.

And he doesn't cover her mouth. Either because he trusts her not to scream too loudly, or because he simply doesn't give a fuck anymore. He doesn't cover her mouth except with his, a kiss like a war, like power lines tangling in the rain, like

itself. Nothing more or less. Nothing else.

When it parts he brings his hand to her face. He strokes her hair back. It's all so tender. He touches her like she's far more breakable than she is, like she's as precious as she is. He traces her hair from her brow with the tip of his little finger, tucks it back, lifts it from her neck and spreads it over his pillow. As deep inside her as he is, as close as he is, he can feel every nuance, every movement of her body, every breath. Warm and rough, his hand cups her cheek. He looks at her a long time.

"Tolik tě miluji," he tells her. It's unnecessary. If she can't read it from his eyes, his face, the way he touches her, she can't read him at all.

And he kisses her again, softer.

"Tolik tě miluji."

The mattress dips under his hands. He pushes himself up. Hard and slick, he draws out of her, pulls out of her tight, clenching cunt. He's nearly left her body when his back arches and the muscles low in his spine flex hard. He slides into her and his head falls forward, his shoulders rounding, his hands twisting into the sheets. God, he gasps on the last, spiraling grind. Catches his breath. Does it again, faster.

"God," and it might be a curse, or he might actually be praying now, not to some amorphous god that does not exist but to her, or this, or what's between them -- "Nenechejte mi bolelo tě, lásko."

His rhythm builds precipitously. Lukas is beyond patience, beyond the ability to take it slow. He's fucking her hard and fast within seconds, slamming into her within a dozen strokes. His hand grasps at her waist, then her hip; then he lifts her leg over his shoulder, hugs it against his chest as though this were an anchor, a lifeline back out of a labyrinth. Presses it against his chest as he leans over her, braces himself over her and fucks her, panting for breath now, looking down to watch himself pound into her, looking up to watch her face, her red mouth, the red tie around her wrists, her eyes; green.

[Danicka Musil] They never talked about 'yellow'. With red and green in his vocabulary as more than colors, as analogies from roadway to bedroom, it would not take Lukas more than a second or two to figure out what the hell it means if Danicka were to utter the one-word equivalent of slow down, which is a safeword precisely because it is so incongruous with what else she might say thoughtlessly during sex.

What is safe, with them, has changed gradually over time. It's safe now, as long as the moon isn't completely full, for her to laugh at him and with him. It's safe to scratch her nails down his back or bite his shoulder, his neck, his arm, rather than his pillow or her own lip. This looks like insanity, to tell him to tie her to his bed when the moon is so goddamn full that she knows the moot must be just a day or two away.

He just told her that he was going to fuck her. Use her. And he said it in one of the softest, gentlest voices he's ever used with her.

When they kiss she remembers that she's tied down, because she tries to put her arms around him and can't. The tie tightens on the headboard, and around her wrists, and she moans softly -- plaintively -- into his mouth. They move slowly together at first, tenderly, Danicka aching to hold him and Lukas sweetly moving her hair out from under her sweat-dampened neck, tracing strands off her forehead, telling her he loves her.

So much.

"Vím, že ty dělat," she whispers, kissing him back. "Vím."

These are the last few moments of tenderness, of quietude, as though one or the other of them is going off to war. His lips leave hers, his chest leaves her as he lifts himself over her, and Danicka is lifting her leg and wrapping it over his shoulder before he has a chance to do it himself, watching him with nothing short of blatant and vengeful lust in her eyes that by their very color say

Ano.

Více.

Nekončí.

Nedrží zpátky.

She doesn't say any of it aloud. Not yet. She gasps sharply, loudly, when he slides out of her only to slam back home again, his back flexing and the muscles in his shoulder bunching and relaxing under her leg. Danicka squirms against him as best she can but if he pulls away she can't pull him back and she can't move to meet him. She moves her other leg outward, opens for him, whimpers when he thrusts himself deeper and prays or pleads not to hurt her, begs her not to let him, as though she could stop him.

Which she can. With a word.

Red.

That's not what she says. She opens her mouth, dark recesses and straight white teeth ringed in glossy red, and whimpers as the man -- who is not a man -- on top of her starts not just rocking into her or making slow, grinding love to her but fucks her against his mattress like a rutting beast, like the animal that he used to try and fool himself, fool her, that he wasn't.

Though he is. And always has been.

Danicka moans and arches her spine, tips her head back, writhes under him like she always does, like he knows she will when he drives into her and touches her like that, fucks her like this, stops holding back. Please, he'd said once, don't expect me to go slowly. Or be patient. Or something like that. They hadn't fucked in so long then, and it wasn't nearly as long as it's been now, and she doesn't expect him to go slowly, or be patient, or pretend that... well. Pretend anything.

Her eyes open. She looks between them, too, is watching his hips and his cock and the seam of their bodies where the light from the window hits them. Her cunt clenches around him suddenly, a reaction to a thought he can't fathom because she doesn't voice it, the thought of what he said at the zoo, the thought of the long lazy summer afternoon ahead of them, the way he'll fuck her the second time, the way she'll fuck him when she gets on top and bounces on his lap with the eagerness and delight of someone utterly free from the constrictions of the social mores others would place on her.

Danicka squeals suddenly, wrapping her other leg around his waist and pulling him deeper. She laughs, but it hitches on a gasp as he slams his cock into her and trails off into a halting, shivering whimper: "Mějte zasranej mě. Like that. Just like that. Udělej mi přijde, lásko."

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] Words are spiraling away from him now. Her legs wind around him, an embrace far more intimate than the ones she can give him at a zoo, a cafe, on the sidewalk in front of a restaurant named after the one thing, the first thing she wanted lying on a hotel bed after they'd made love.

Again.

Making love again: fucking again, like animals, like the not-human creatures they are, wild and savage. His torso is tangled in her legs and he's hammering into her, and her body is alive and electric, reactive, clenching and clutching around him as she thinks of what was said and what's being done and what will be done, later, later, on this long lazy summer afternoon with the heat-haze coming off the lake and the windows open, and their lunch cooling on the ground beside the bed that's

groaning and creaking with the force of his thrusts, with the powerful unrestrained movement of his body into hers, again and again, while she pulls at the restraints and wraps around him and pulls him deep, so deep that she laughs and gasps and he growls like an animal, drops his head and catches her mouth when she says make me come.

Kissing her; fucking her. He pounds her now, unarguably, unflaggingly. He leans over her on one elbow, tips her hips against his with his hand, and slams his cock into her hard enough to make her shudder, to make him gasp, to make her whimper, to make him turn his face from hers and bite into her shoulder as he grinds, winds his hips against hers.

"Tak kurva dobrý." He snarls it against her flesh; may not even realize he speaks it aloud. "Tak kurva dobrý."

Then it's his fists in the pillow on either side of her head. It's his body rising above hers, all hard strength and lean speed, the flexing organic muscle groups in the tapering torso, in the planted arms. He's watching her face, his face taut with strain, almost ferocious, almost furious. His hair sticks to his brow. His waist is slick between her thighs, hot. Lukas doesn't relent, doesn't slow. He fucks her hard and fast, no tricks, no games, no words, nothing but a focused, resolved, singleminded drive toward a very discrete goal.

Udělej mi přijde.

[Danicka Musil] It may be undeniable in public that they're lovers, whether they sit demurely across from one another at a restaurant with white tablecloths and fresh flowers or whether they stand comfortably in front of the lion enclosure at the Lincoln Park Zoo, but almost no one would imagine the way it is between them, even people who know them. Even people who have fucked them would not guess that she would lose herself so completely, that he would growl and snarl and go at her like he does. It's because it's never been like this with anyone else, never could be like this with anyone else.

She's not going to take another male into the woods and draw him into an almost ritualistic coupling and discover that it is no more or less savage in the dirt and leaves than it is when they're in one of the nicest hotels in Chicago, or in this tiny ten-by-twelve room or if they're on a stone and metal balcony feeling the wind come up from the city. He is not going to kiss some other woman he might fuck, not going to stay in their beds all night, not moan in their ears that it's

so fucking good

or growl as he bites into their shoulders. Most other women would scream and bolt, or whimper quietly and not in pleasure. Danicka moans as that snarl rolls out of him, bucking her hips back against his thrusts as he bites her. Sweaty and slick, they turn into a tangle of limbs and flexion with no comparison in the animal kingdom because there is something singular and unique about the way it looks, the way it feels, the whole goddamn purpose of human or near-human fucking. Which is why she keeps swiveling her hips like that, grinding a hard circle on his cock as he

"Fuck my pussy," she seethes in his ear, biting his lobe when his head begins to turn. "Harder, baby... don't you dare stop fucking that cunt."

And he doesn't. And he wouldn't. Danicka looks up at him as he pushes his body up over hers again and shudders, lifting her hips to fuck back up against him. She looks down, quickly, watching the sweat gleam on his abdominal muscles, on his hips. She watches his cock, wet and glistening, slide faster in and out of her. And then she snaps her gaze to his face again, licks her lips.

"Touch my clit, baby?" she manages, each word hitching as he pounds himself into her. "Please? Prosím, lásko, hrát se mé tělo."

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] Lukas's eyes glitter.

Like chips of ice -- no; nothing like that. It's not cold, the light in his eyes. It's all heat. His eyes glitter like an electrical fire down a wire, like tracer-bullets in the night, like war and destruction, like rage. Their eyes roam, and then they snap back, pull together like opposing magnets. He stares at her like he doesn't understand her. He stares at her like he understands everything about her, every last thing, when he

shifts his weight to one arm, reaches down with his free hand, drags his palm heavy over her shoulder, over her chest -- stops to hold her breast in his hand, to hold onto her while he fucks her, to hold her and feel the force of his thrusts rocking her body, her very bones.

"Miluju, když říkáš prosím."

He slows, just for a second. Slows, grinds hard, grinds deep, swings his hips against hers with a sort of deliberate, fluid rhythm. There's a drop of sweat sliding down a lock of his hair, balancing at the tip. He snaps his head, flicks it away, to the side, lost. And suddenly he grins at her, shows his teeth like a predator.

"Miluju, když mi řeknete, jak to kurva ty."

Continuing on. He moves his hand from her breast to her ribs, to her stomach, down. He finds her clit with an unerring accuracy, with no hesitation, like a shark to blood. Bold, he lays his thumb against it and presses, circles, rubs her while he fucks her.

And he's fucking her again, as hard and fast as he was, recklessly. His chest is heaving to catch what breath he can, every muscle in his body tense and churning and straining; his cock is slamming into her as though she were

(a whore/a slut/a slave)

exactly what she is: Danicka, his mate, the woman he loves, his, his, his.

[Danicka Musil] Lukas's eyes are liars. He looks at her like he doesn't know her, like he doesn't understand her, like he doesn't know what to do with her, when everything else betrays him completely: he knows who she is, knows that she is what people call a whore, or a slut, or a bitch even though those words mean nothing to her. He knows that she's Danicka, that she's his love, and he knows she loves him even if she doesn't tell him things like

I would die for you

though that, as much as his fierce need to protect her, is the truth. He shouted what she is at his packmate, his former alpha, his first alpha's sister: mine. Over and over, mine. my. my. mine. He knows what she is, he knows it in his bones, and when she fits into his hands and folds her legs around him and welcomes him into her body like this -- hell, when she so much as kisses him, or looks over her shoulder at him a certain way -- he knows what to do with her. He knows where he's supposed to be.

And Danicka doesn't even think about it, doesn't question it, looks at him with recognition, adoration, something that would be worship if she had to prostrate herself in order to reach him. She makes the noises she does in part because she cannot help it, cannot stop herself from panting, can't bite back the truncated and impassioned cries he elicits with every savage roll of his hips. She also does it because she knows what it does to him. She likes the way he shudders when she moans like this, she likes the way he growls and bites her when she swears at him or gasps because his cock has slid just right

ilke that, just like that

into her pussy.

Danicka lifts her head as he speaks to her, as he fucks her slower. She groans low, the sound resonating in her throat, her body moving to his now out of sheer instinct. "Please..." she purrs, the word sinuous and serpentine on her tongue, her eyes dragging his gaze as deep into her as his cock, "please...prosím, lásko. Kurva mě jako kur-- oh, fuck!"

The curse whips out of her in a shout when he rubs her clit, her head slamming back on his pillow. It's enough to make her buck her hips, violently the first time, then insistently, the motions of her body as riddled with mood and communication as the moans coming from her throat. Her body is saying, in rhythm, in rotation, in its own wordless organic chant: fuck me. fuck me. fuck me.

"Baby," she gasps, the words tumbling out one after another as fast and thick as individual drops in a waterfall, "babypleasestopIcan't--"

But 'stop' isn't 'red'.

Danicka doesn't even finish telling him what she can't. She screams, and she arches, because he's fucking her again, pounding her cunt like she told him to, like he promised to. Another woman might yell harder now, or faster, as though he could pour any more force into what he's doing to her. Another woman might tell him now to untie her, stop torturing her, let her hold him, let her on top, something. This woman cries out, over and over, following the rhythm of her lover's thrusts. She may be waking his neighbors. She may not care.

"Don't stop!" she moans, imploring him with eyes, contradicting words from mere seconds ago. Her words begin to descend from begging to growling, as her hips both receive him and grind back against him. "Lásko, nekončí! Udělej mi přijde... Dej mi, že kohout. Dej mi, že velký, krásný kohout."

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] The walls are thin. The mattress is thin. The bedframe is creaking. The headboard is slamming.

They don't appear to care.

They're beyond caring -- or at least, Lukas certainly is. The way he looks at her is -- indescribable, really: something caught between fascination and obsession and ferocity and surrender. Needful; perhaps that's the best word for it: like he needs this, like he needs her, like he needs her eyes on his and her cunt squeezing him and her words rolling one into the other, her voice crying out like that, the strain in her body, the tension.

There was a time when he wasn't even aware that such a thing as this, as this unnameable thing they have between them that they call love, existed. He wasn't aware that anyone could ever need it. Couldn't even grasp the concept. Now he wonders how he ever lived like that, when she has become as necessary as air.

Like being born a second time, he thinks indistinctly. Like not knowing what air is, before; like not being able to live without air, after.

The thought slips away from him. The next hard grind of her hips snaps him mercilessly back to the moment. When she slips into the first language he ever knew Lukas drops his head with a low, wracked groan. It ends in something like words --

"Nemůžu."

-- though what he can or cannot do he never specifies. He doesn't need to. Lukas gives her clit one last circling rub, which is all he can manage now, and then lets his hand slip off. That's what he means: he can't. He can't see to her pleasure anymore; he can't keep one hand on her body anymore; he can't hold back anymore.

His knuckles into the mattress, then, his weight on his hands. He bears down on her, presses her thighs apart and his weight into her, watches himself fucking her, slamming into her. Teeth clenched, he's panting hard on every furious thrust, and a growl is starting to build on the end of every exhale.

Then his hands are on her again, but there's no thought behind this; he's simply grasping at her body, using her with his hand now as well as his cock, moving his palm and his fingers over her to feel her, take her in, claim, keep. His hands move all over her torso, up her arm, down her body. One clenches around the knot between her hands; the other grasps her hips, pulls her onto his cock to meet every drive of his body into hers. He fucks her unambiguously, selfishly now, using her like he said he would, driving into her with a singleminded fervor; holds her like this, stretched between his hands; holds himself over her like this, holds her eyes, holds her until he can't anymore.

Even at the last he doesn't come down over her. Doesn't collapse into her as though drawn by some gravity; doesn't sink his teeth into her flesh. He holds himself where he is, and her where she is. He keeps the distance between them so their eyes don't blur, so she can see everything she does to him, every last searing second of it. She can see the clench of his entire body, the muscles standing out against the skin, the force transduced through his entire frame to bring his cock ramming into her, filling her.

Pleasure is all that's left on his face when he comes, drawing him taut, furrowing his brow, intense enough to be almost indistinguishable from anguish, or pain. His eyes are furious, fierce, flaring and

closing as his caught breath releases on a stripped, raw groan that catches, that shreds apart, that snarls into a moan when he draws back and slams himself home again, hard.

And again.

It's almost too much. His mind's coming apart. He thinks of the night she rode him in this bed, fucked him past his point of tolerance -- he hardly recognizes the panting, shredded, wordless sounds he makes as he moves inside her, fucks her, slows, stops at last.

Lukas is pulling great ragged breaths out of the air now. The great muscles on his back and his shoulders, his arms and his flanks are beginning to quiver. He holds himself up another second, and then lowers. It's a controlled collapse. He sinks onto her and his brow presses to the pillow and he grinds into her slowly, gaspingly, torturing himself with the exquisite, unbearable sensation of her tightness, her wetness, her friction and the heat of her cunt in those hypersensitive seconds just after orgasm.

"...můj bože," he manages. His hand slides off her hip, takes a handful of his sheets. His other fumbles at the knots, manages to undo the one securing her wrists to the bedpost, grasps blindly at her fingers, her hand, the sheets.

Silence for a while, his slowing breath.

"Ach můj bože."

[Danicka Musil] The first time they fucked in this bedroom of his, he rather cleverly wedged a pillow between the headboard and the wall, staying true to what he'd said: he wouldn't flaunt this before his packmates. She knew then he meant Sam in particular. She understood then some of why it was important to him. She felt a spasm of belated, brief, and quickly dismissed guilt over fucking Sam in the room next to Lukas's, even though at the time she didn't know Lukas lived in Room Two. At the time, she didn't belong to him, barely even realized that she wanted him, but still. A little while later she was torn between admiration and annoyance, at how he so vehemently didn't want to rub in anyone's faces that he had her, that he'd won, that she was his.

A little while after that, she saw flashing in his eyes a far more instinctive, bestial desire: for everyone in range to hear her screaming for him, moaning as he fucked her, to know that he was having her, that he was the one she wanted, that she'd picked him, that she was his.

And now, simply, neither of them care. Danicka isn't even aware anymore that they're in the Brotherhood, that this is the place she used to want to fuck him partly because he forbade it, resisted it, because it was bad, because they shouldnt. So many things are changing, chief among them her constant desire to push this boundary or another. It isn't gone, not by a longshot, but it's altering. Hardly because she's settling, or that being with someone -- monogamous and loyal, words that used to trouble her to no end and occasionally still do -- has sedated her, but because the need for it is different, now. Getting away with it is no longer as strong a motivation because Lukas, after all this time, has yet to strike her. He has yet to punish her for lying, or for disappointing him.

Oh, he's yelled. He's gotten very angry. But Danicka is not frightened of being yelled at, and his anger has yet to lead him to hurt her.

Once upon a time, he did not know of or did not believe in or simply never thought of love, while Danicka knew of it and saw it in others and rejected not only what was given to her but the idea that she could return it. For her it has always been like standing alone on a porch while the party goes on inside, smoking a cigarette and communing with starlight while the clock strikes midnight and lovers kiss and hope rings anew. For her, it has been like watching a surrealist play, other people loving, falling in and out, going mad, while she remains the only living person with any clarity.

What she would not give up, now, to stay mad. To escape, forever, that illusion of understanding and perfection that comes with standing outside in the cold, making love to an inanimate but satisfying drug, watching the light and laughter of people who have not known the kind of horror she has. It hardly even seems like madness anymore. She doesn't know what to call it, other than love, though it seems a pitiful word for what she feels, what she knows so intrinsically it seems to have forever been a part of her bones, her marrow, etched on every goddamn cell

that she loves him. That she cannot stop loving him any more than she can will her heart to stop beating. That she needs him, and she likes needing him, and she loves that he fucks her like this, that he moans that way in her ear when his hands lose control, when he slams into her because instinct and desire have completely overridden everything else. She knows, every time she breathes, every time he makes her gasp, that the wisest thing she's ever done in her life is tell him plainly, even though he had to drag it out of her:

Chci tě.

Sometimes he holds back. Sometimes it's because he needs to see her come, to watch her back and go spiraling, screaming into her orgasm, feel it all around him as he goes on fucking her. At least for a long time in the beginning it was because he could not bear to let go with her, he could not handle the thought of what he might do to her, what she was doing to him, what happened whenever they came together. Now, though.

Now.

"Now," she cries out, as he clutches at the mattress, the sheets, growling as he drives his cock hard into her again and again and again. "Now, Lukáš, baby, give it to me."

Her orgasm builds slower, comes on with a sort of gradual unfolding, but Danicka whimpers when she feels it starting, whimpers because she knows what this is, she knows that it isn't going to be a single mindblowing explosion that overtakes her for a few seconds and then gently lets her back down to earth. But Lukas can't know. He never sees it coming when her orgasms go on and on, wrecking her as she rides him or writhes under him, and right now he likely can't recognize the way her pleasure spikes, builds, at least not until she bucks against him the way she does, arches her back, whimpers suddenly.

It's when he is grabbing a hold of that knot between her wrists and holding her hips so that he can pin her down and fuck her senseless, at least that's when it begins. Danicka begins panting, rapid and ragged, each breath a quiet cry as the air shoots back into her. She looks up at him in silent pleading, her mouth held open by unvoiced, unvoicable pleasure and her eyes locked onto his, brow furrowed as though she's trying to say something to him, something of dire importance, like

what are you doing to me?

They both know the answer, though there aren't words for it.

His eyes close when he comes, just before he comes, and Danicka lets her head fall back onto his pillow, surrounded by her hair. She lets herself get lost in the orgasm building in her, unfurling like a lotus, rolling on and on as her sweat-slicked thighs accept his last desperate thrusts into the molten center of her body, where he belongs, where she needs him. Everything else that doesn't work or doesn't make sense gets stripped down, bringing nothing but the clarity she thought she had when she believed she was unloving, unlovable, set apart.

"Miluji tě," she whimpers, squirming under him. Danicka's hips lift, her leg over his shoulder and her leg around his waist tightening, keeping him where he is as he sinks into her. "Tolik tě miluji..." she says, but the words trail off into a gasp as the wave breaks, hits her, takes her under again. She fucks up against him even as he's enduring the last spasms of his own pleasure, biting back a cry that sounds more like pain than enjoyment but a cry he's heard so often now he knows it. He's moving in her still as she comes, growing slow and still as it lets her go, as she turns her head to one side and gasps for air.

And then her cunt clenches on him again, and Danicka makes a sound like she's on the verge of tears. Lukas grinds his hips into hers just as she is struck by a second eruption, this one less of a roiling sea and more of a series of tight, clutching demands on her last reserves of control.

"Oh god," whimpers his lover, his love, his mate, her sweat-slippery body sliding against his chest and abdomen, muscles in her stomach and thighs jumping and twitching. "Oh god, oh god..."

Danicka thrashes her head to the other side as it goes on. Her hands flex into fists, into claws, grab at the headboard, grab at his hands even as he's trying to untie her, and it isn't until she has the heat of something alive to hold onto that she stops grasping and just holds on for dear life. Her hips jerk, her cunt bearing down on his cock, demanding more... and truthfully, she's lost all coherence. She can't tell him to stop, can't say red, can't beg him not to move, not to stimulate her any more than this. All she can do is gasp, and cry out, and let her body move the way it wants to, milking every last drop of pleasure from fucking Lukas that she can.

When it's over -- and god help him if he flashes to the last time she came like this under him, over and over, one orgasm rolling into the other, her body stretched out beneath his and sweaty from the heat of his, the heat of sex...

When it's over, Danicka is barely moving. Her legs tremble, her pussy quivering around him, the entire lower half of her body shaking softly. She is free to pull her arms down but she doesn't, her hands still holding tightly to his though her arms are utterly limp. Her eyes are closed, her lips quaking gently with the last lingering whispering whimpers left to her. Her chest rises and falls in rhythm, not quite breathing but still panting, still pulling at air that she can't hold for long before she has to exhale it again.

"Nedovolte jít," she whispers, shuddering. "Zůstaňte uvnitř mě. Zůstaň se mnou." As though underlining the words, she clenches around him then, involuntary but insistent, holding him right where he is. She shivers again. "Ach můj bože... prosím nechoďte."

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] The last time it was like this --

(it was never like this.)

-- the last time they were in his bed and in his room, the last time she came over and over beneath him as if she couldn't stop, as if some valve had broken, some failsafe had failed, as if her pleasure had run rampant on her ... she looked at him afterward while they were still trembling with the aftereffects of what they had done to one another and she told him:

I can't do this.

And perhaps when she goes spiraling, crying out into her orgasm he help but think of that. Maybe that's why he grabs onto her like that, holds her between his hands and against the bed, fucks her like that, like he might be able to ... hold her, somehow. Make her permanent. Make her a reality, a concrete, tangible thing, by fucking her hard enough, by pinning her to his bed, by staking some sort of primordial claim on her. He fucks her like he wants to dominate her, like he wants to control and claim her, like he wants to overcome her and

and in the end, of course, he's the one that's overcome, the one that's lost and surrendered and grasping at the rumpled silk tie between her wrists, at the sheets askew atop his mattress, at her hands. He's the one holding on for dear life, eyes closed, groaning and gasping in her ear as she turns from one orgasm into the next, as she continues to writhe and grind and roll against him, demanding of his body literally more than he can bear to give.

He can't handle it. Neither of them can handle it anymore, and if they had the breath for it they might beg another another to stop, stop, red, stop. But they don't; can't. They fuck each other mindlessly, both his will and hers overruled by the simple demands of the body, squirming and flexing one against the other to the very limits of their orgasms while they clutch at one another's hands as though this, alone, might save them from drowning in pleasure.

When it's over:

When it's over her legs are shaking slightly; her lips are trembling; her pussy is quivering and clenching on him, and every clench makes him exhale so sharply that he might've been shot, might've been stabbed, run through, killed. His fingers feel strengthless, skill-less. He fumbles at the knots abstractedly, unable to decipher how they might be untied, finds her fingers again instead, holds on.

That's when she says Nedovolte jít, and maybe he's not the only one thinking of the last time she came like this, here. But nedovolte jít is a lifetime away from I can't do this, and it makes Lukas sigh shudderingly, makes him turn blindly to her and kiss her neck.

"Já nepůjdu nikam," he says. "Já ne opustím tě."

His fingers tighten around hers. He stays where he is another moment, his face turned to her neck, his body curved over hers. Then, with the slowness of a dream, Lukas rolls onto his side, lets her leg slip from his shoulder to wrap around his hip. He reaches up with both hands now, opening his eyes, undoes the knots between her hands while he catches the last of his breath.

[Danicka Musil] That's all it takes, to allow Danicka to finally take a deep breath. Lukas speaks in a vibratory murmur against her throat, a reassurance that sane and clothed and unshattered she would not need, and her eyelids flicker closed as she exhales the lungfuls of air she just drew in. It comes out in a sigh, and the fact that he does not withdraw from her keeps her from whimpering in protest when he rolls to one side. Instead, Danicka just slowly opens her eyes again, smiling loosely at him as he begins to untie her, fumbling slightly as though his fingers have lost their coherence as much as the rest of him.

It's been a very long time since April, since she tried and failed to end something because he would not or could not let go, would not or could not trust her, would not or could not do a thousand things that she needed from him in order to stop feeling like she was dangling her heart over the side of a cliff. Danicka barely even remembers it, because the memories are so firmly eclipsed by ones that came nearly a month later, like the image of him walking out with purple and black lingerie crushed in his hand.

The image of him crossing the dancefloor and fighting against her even as he was drawn to her, came to her, could not quite break apart from her though in the end he did, again, walk away.

The image of him standing outside of a CVS at the top of a subway station because he wanted to see her, had to see her, needed just five fucking minutes even if all she did was scream at him, anything, because he still didn't know what had killed Mrena.

Who never did a portrait of Danicka, as she had wanted to.

The way he looked when he told her he was giving up. Giving in. Making love to her in some mid-range hotel as though they could sear away everything else that had happened, both of them thinking it impossible, and finding that it wasn't. Finding, instead, that nothing about the way it was between them had changed, which only managed to cast more light on how it was the first time. Every time. Now.

Danicka relaxes as the silk tie unwinds from her. She wiggles her arms and hands as the knots come undone, and as the restraint falls away, slipping down between mattress and frame, Lukas can -- if he looks -- see faint, barely-there friction burns on her wrists. Danicka doesn't seem to notice them, even if he does. She just sighs the way she does sometimes when she steps out of her heels or he removes her bra -- when she wears one. She carefully lowers her arms and wraps them around him, turning towards his chest to lay her head on his shoulder.

"I've never done that before," she whispers, like a confession. Then a pause, a moment of thought, and extra clarity: "Been the one tied down, I mean."

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] The way Lukas looks at Danicka unfolds in stages, like an opening

(lotus.)

flower. First it's his eyes on her wrists, tracking immediately to the faint welts on her skin where the pull of her hands against her bindings had chafed her. His eyebrows draw together and he lets the ends of the red silk tie -- twisted and wrinkled now almost beyond recognition -- fall to the mattress. His hands are as gentle as they were when he first tied her down, but perhaps a little less sure now. The tips of his fingers quiver faintly as he traces the marks; his palm, however, is as warm and solid as it was when it wraps around her wrists.

It's not quite apology in his eyes, then, though it's something of the same family. His free arm slips under her cheek, her neck; his hand covers her back and draws her nearer as he cradles her caught hand to his chest. She lays her head on his shoulder. He kisses the inside of her wrist, gently, before he lets her go, and she wraps her arms around him.

His hand finds her cheek instead. He strokes her hair back slowly, rhythmically, a half-reflexive caress. They lay together then, quietly, and his brow slowly smooths, and his breathing quiets, and his eyes stay on her face, fond, sated.

When she confesses what she does, his eyes change again: a flicker of sudden alertness, of awareness, of realization that he was not the only one for whom never was the answer. A moment later his eyebrows draw together and upward again; the expression is nearly pained. He looks at her like she's honored him with a gift, like she's given him something immeasurably precious that he may or may not deserve: like she's given him the right to roll her on her bed and make love to her

(which she has)

like she's given him a beloved book of poetry, one of the few volumes she's dared to own ever since her brother destroyed all the books she had

(which she will).

He touches her face, her hair. He tips his chin up and kisses her brow, then rests his own against that exact spot; exhales gently, nearly a sigh.

He murmurs, "Někdy mám strach nemám zasluhovat vás."

[Danicka Musil] Those trembling touches on Danicka's wrists make her suck in a sharp breath, not quite a gasp. She flinches away, because now she can. The heat of his hands making her aware, where she wasn't before, that the skin is reddened and raw. Likely when she winces he stops, likely he doesn't even kiss her wrists. But sensitive or not, it doesn't stop her from wrapping her arms around him. She rubs her face against his chest, his shoulder, in answer to his silent communication of not-quite-apology. It is not quite forgiveness, but it's in the same family.

And he touches her. Not the insane, overpowered fucking from mere moments ago but the softer points of contact that exist only outside of the public eye, because they are so far outside of what the public eye wants to see in a Shadow Lord, a Shadow Lord kinswoman. The Ahroun gently stroking her cheek, the kinswoman unflinching against him. Almost everything about their relationship is outside the realm of what the tribe sees as acceptable and what the rest of the Nation could comprehend coming from their ilk.

Her eyes drift closed again as she lays there on his shoulder, uttering her confession, which is almost like a gift because it is an unasked-for truth. Those are rare, from her. They are becoming less so. Danicka, burrowed against him rather than looking at him, doesn't see the way his tender, satisfied expression changes, the way his eyes flicker with sudden intensity.

She feels it, though. It moves through his whole body, through the air around them. Pressed as close to him as she is, one leg still wrapped around him and their bodies still fitted together like puzzle pieces. She feels it in him, and turns her face upward finally to see him, as he's looking at her in something like pain, like torment, like aching reverence. Danick does not know what to do with it. Her own expression is colored by the near-drunk brightness of her eyes, the pink under her tan, the way her hair still sticks to her brow and cheeks, but she looks almost serene, because she does not know how else to look at him right now, how to cope with the way he looks at her.

The placid mask falls away when he touches it, like fingertips over some ancient relic causing it to dissolve into dust. Danicka exhales silently, or close enough, her breath a whisper. She turns her face to follow his touch with her mouth, kissing fingertips that were, earlier, inside her. She looks at him again, blinking once, as he kisses her brow.

As he puts his face close to hers as though they can speak like that, without saying a word.

But words he has. And they make her blink. "Ale ... proč?" she aks, the words dropping from her mouth in separate purrs. She pulls her head back from his so she can see him, so she can find his eyes. Her brow furrows slightly, too prettily, unfairly and untouchably lovely when flushed and sweaty. Her goddamn lipstick hasn't even smeared. She looks, momentarily, younger than she is rather than several years older, given youth by way of confusion. "Onen je blbost, Lukášek."

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] Surely once he would've grown angry at such words. Since when do Shadow Lords... he might've said: since when do Shadow Lords take such disrespect from their kin. Since when do Shadow Lord kin insult their betters like that.

It would be nice to say Lukas is not like other Shadow Lords; that he doesn't mark the difference so sharply between Garou and kin, Lord and servant. Nice, but simply not true. This is the Garou that beat a kinswoman black and blue, impersonally, for disobedience. This is the Garou that shoved a kinsman's face into a toilet, impersonally, for disrespect.

This is the Garou that will in a few days threaten -- promise -- to lock Agnessa away if she doesn't behave herself. Impersonally. This is the Garou that stood up at a moot and outlined, in detail, procedures for interactions with his kin; that which is his. This is the Garou that casually and thoughtlessly invaded the privacy of his kin to deliver to them a message of what they owe to him, and what he will give to them ... if time and the War allows.

It's not that Lukas is different. It's that Danicka is different for him.

And it's that he's different for her. For all he knows, all she's ever known of Ahrouns, of Shadow Lords, came from her mother, her brother; the likes of Sam.

Lukas doesn't grow angry. He doesn't laugh, either. He looks at her seriously, solemnly; his frown deepens a little, though not out of confusion or anger.

"I suppose what I really mean is, I'm afraid I'm not as good as you think." A pause; then a subtle correction: "I'm afraid you think I'm better than I am."

His eyes fall to her mouth. He touches her lip with his thumb, rubs the pad of that digit along her bright red mouth thoughtfully. When his eyes come back to hers, he seems to have found words.

"You used to be so sure I would hurt you one day. I was angry because it was such an assumption; you were assuming I would not be able to control myself with you, and you were assuming I wouldn't make an exception for you when I'd made so many already.

"Now," he doesn't touch her wrists this time, but he does take her hand; the direction of his eyes and his thoughts is clear, "you seem to trust that I won't hurt you. And I don't know if I can control myself with you."

[Danicka Musil] One night, she laughed because he flicked open the lid of a box of pastries as though he was compelled to look at them before dealing with anything else: walking outside, talking to her, anything. It had struck Danicka as adorable. Endearing. Familiar. He had advanced on her so angry, so fast, that she'd gone pale and silent in a split second. It was awhile before she laughed around him again, much less laughed because of him.

Now there's no amusement in her tone, at his expense or otherwise. She is drowsy, as sated as a lioness after feeding, and yet there's a sickening twist to why she tells him that his concern is 'stupid': how could anyone be thinking about deserving her or not?

Her.

She gives off an aura of confidence sometimes that is a credit to her city of origin, and it is not completely a mask, but it is a face she can accentuate or subdue at will. It does not come from nowhere, but neither does her facade of meek submissiveness. Both -- the head-bowing deference as well as the fierce self-assurance -- exist in her, each for their own reason, even if their coexistence is at odds. Consistency, she said once... and he knows the rest. He's echoed it back to her.

Which is all to say: she is genuinely bewildered that he would think something like that, in part because she does not think often about deserving him or not, and in part because she has difficulty imagining someone worrying about it where she's concerned.

Instead of instant, complete reassurance, Danicka listens to him and is silent for awhile. She kisses his thumb carelessly as it passes by, an afterthought of affection as natural as the way her hands move over his back, lazy and contented. She does not tell him any of the immediate messages of dismissal or comfort that another woman might, just as she had no intention of telling him -- some time ago, and in this bed -- that it didn't matter if he won the challenge or not so long as he did his best. Danicka does not excuse weakness. She deals with it differently in others than Lukas, but she does not

(pat pat, there there)

make allowances or exceptions for it.

Her hand laces with his, fingers intertwining with as much ease as their lower halves, and with just as much intimacy. She looks at his hand, at his much larger fingers and harder knuckles interspersed between her own smaller, more elegant ones. After a span of some silence, Danicka's green, gold-flecked eyes drift back to his, surreal in their color's purity. "Love is easier than trust, because it can make you think you should trust someone you shouldn't," she says quietly, but doesn't expound. She leaves this opinion, or perhaps profound truth, where it is.

There's another pulse of silence, hard to measure because their heartbeats are still in the process of slowing.

"I didn't do this to prove anything," she says quietly, then before he can respond: "and I don't think that's what you're saying. But you of all people should know I don't trust thoughtlessly, or emotionally, or... easily."

Danicka gently slides her hand out from his, reaching over to stroke his hair back over one ear, the bright pink of her wrists flickering in his peripheral vision though her eyes stay locked on his. "I don't trust you because I think you are perfect, though I do think you're better than all others I've met." She says this with some irony, not only because he is aware of some of the Garou she's met but because they both know this, at least, is partly a product of the blindness of love, infatuation, adoration. "I don't trust you because I think you will never hurt me, or because I believe your control is impeccable when I know better than anyone that that's impossible."

Leaning forward, she kisses him -- not his brow, not his cheek, but warmly on his lips, neither a peck nor a passionate tangle of their mouths. Her fingers slow and still on his hair, then drop back to find his hand once more. "I trust you enough to believe that it won't be malicious. Or intentional." A beat. "Or a pattern. I trust you enough to forgive you if you frighten me, or anger me, or hurt me."

Which he knows already. Because she already has.

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] She's right to go on without pausing. The moment she says I didn't do this to prove anything, Lukas draws a breath to answer, or protest.

But she goes on. And he falls silent. And then he laughs, a soundless, humorless huff of an exhale.

She doesn't trust thoughtlessly, or emotionally, or easily. He knows that all too well. He doesn't either; she knows this. For all their superficial differences, she so warm and nurturing and friendly -- though so much of that is a mask -- and he so distant, formal, and solemn, they have this in common. They're fiercely self-protective. They guard themselves jealously.

For all that --

For all that, right now, he could so easily lose himself in her. He could so easily sink into the sensation of her fingers in his hair, or on his back. He could so easily unravel into her warmth, her nearness, her thigh over his hip and her body still welcoming his.

He could so easily lose himself in the very sound of her voice; the cadence of her breath. He could forget what she's saying and concentrate only on her presence -- what she says without words, and without misunderstanding.

She's his.
He's hers.

Simple and complicated as that.

Which might be why he doesn't close his eyes when she kisses him. It would be too easy to let go if he did. His eyelids lower, but they don't quite seal -- shadowed, faceted, blue as flames, his eyes stay on her, hold hers while she kisses him slow and warm as an equatorial current.

He misses the ocean. When he's apart from her, he misses her.

She draws back: he misses her already. And he smiles, but it looks like a wince; almost unconsciously, he finds himself wrapping his arm around her, drawing her a little closer.

"That brings me full circle," he says quietly, wryly, "right back to doubting whether or not I deserve your trust." A pause. "Or you."

They are near enough that she can feel him breathing. His vital rhythms are slow and quiet now, evened out. She can sense his carefulness even before he speaks. It's in the movement of his fingers through her hair, down her slender back. It's in the stilling of his fingers in hers, holding gently on.

And it's in the subtle movement of his body toward hers, his lean hip shifting beneath her thigh, as if to seal them closer to prevent her drawing away. Leaving.

"Vím, že nejste perfektní." Lukas slips back into Czech. It's easier somehow. "A vím, že jste strach, že by vás mohla nevratně poškozený. Ale pro mě, jste jsou ... "

It takes him a while to find the right word this time. Perfect isn't right. Beautiful, too shallow a connotation. Wonderful, amazing, too worshipful; too pedestaled.

In the end:

"Drahocenný."

Lukas's chest rises with a short, abortive inhale. He releases it.

"V hodnotě více než všechno, co jsem mohl dát.

[Danicka Musil] They know each other well enough by now for Danicka to know that she has to barrel over that drawn breath, finish her thought, confirm for him that she doesn't think he believes she was trying to prove her devotion by letting him tie her wrists together and her wrists to the bed. So she does, and he stills. He listens. They touch one another's hair, faces, kiss so slowly and softly that there's a genuine threat of forgetting that they're having a conversation. They are close in a way now that neither ever thought they could be with another person, much less each other.

Especially each other. He is not just Garou, he is a Shadow Lord. He is not just a Shadow Lord, he is an Ahroun. He is the definition she has had from birth for words like fear, pain and horror. And he's known from early on, from almost the first moment, that there is so much under the surface that only a fool would trust her. Even the pronunciation of her name he had to pull from her, know without being told. And even then, he knew it wasn't her real name. Everything about her has been half-hidden.

Except in moments like this, or moments like the ones just before this, when she is tender towards him or when she is clutching at him in the throes of orgasm. There are some brief moments when he can see her, when she lets him see her, and it's never been like this with anyone else, not for Danicka. She has never lost control as much as she did with him even the first night, never given as much over, never been quite so open.

Otevřeno pro mě.

And she had.

And she does.

What he says, wry and soft, makes her smile. Her lips don't part but she looks fondly back at him, the smile fading slowly through his pause, through the last two words tacked on in English. He can't see it, not clearly, but she aches suddenly, wants to hold him with an urge to nurture and comfort that is implacably strong as well as starkly unfamiliar. Danicka takes a deep breath that coincides with the way he pulls their bodies even closer together, fuses them once more. The room smells faintly of the stew they brought up, but she isn't thinking about it.

She's thinking about what he says as he slips back into the language she was so delighted, upon their very first meeting, to realize that he spoke. There were precious few other children who she could draw into her confidence that way, at least not children she would see more than once or twice. There was no one she could share her father's old children's books with. Danicka had been delighted, though she never showed it, even to have Anezka there, albeit infrequently. Even at seven and eight she kept certain things close, kept them hidden, but she had still been so much more willing to let others in.

Danicka hasn't, and probably will not, tell him how angry she was -- at the Kvasnickas, at her own family, at the world -- when one child's growing Rage and another son's First Change took away that much more laughter and noise and energy from her life. It would only make him sad, or worse, he might laugh, or he might try to explain things then and now when it's utterly unnecessary just to try and show her that he understands, and Danicka can only bear one of those, and cannot risk the other two.

What he says draws her brows together at one word, and he could guess before it left his lips that it might make her frown like this, soft and brief and tight. He finishes. And she rests her forehead against his, sighing softly. What she says, she says almost tiredly. Because it seems so obvious. Because it seems like something so basically true as to be mundane, held in the contempt of familiarity, like the richness of dirt, the way water is wet, the fact that the sun rises and sets no matter what deeds are done in or out of its light.

"Ty podceňujete, co jste mi dal."

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] Lukas draws a quiet breath. His hand opens large and certain over the back of her head, cupping her forehead to his. He does close his eyes now: allows himself to sink, if only for the moment, into the familiarity and the intimacy of this, her, of lying here like this with her.

"Chápu," he murmurs. What he means is he understands intuitively, from his own standpoint. It's the same there.

A few moments slip by. His breathing is so quiet and even that he might be asleep, but his fingers move slowly, aimlessly, lazily through the roots of her hair. He stays close to her, the warmth and laziness of the summer's early afternoon saturating him, soaking into his bones. He thinks fleetingly of the sycamores in the woods, making love to her in the morning light, thinking they could, and perhaps should, abandon civilization all together and live like red talons, like animals.

There's a mindless comfort in lying with her like this. He thinks of what he thought the first night he saw her in his bed:

I could get used to this.
I am getting used to this.

He thinks, I don't want this to end.

Clarity, even now, when his eyes reopen onto hers. The pupils contract in the light; the fine threads and flecks in irises, blue on pale blue, shift and resolve. "Jak dlouho tu zůstanete se mnou?" he asks her.

[Danicka Musil] Even now, she doesn't make him a promise she can't keep. She doesn't tell him a pretty lie, or the words he might want to hear. Danicka curls with him on his bed, the stew they brought up cooling in a patch of diffuse sunlight on the floor, arms and legs and bodies tangled so closely they blur together. Her lighter, more golden tan blends easily enough with his swarthier skin tone, like sand solidifying into earth as it runs from the the shoreline. Their eyes are different kinds of oceans. When they close their eyes they are not light and dark or male and female or Garou and Kin but breathing, as rhythmic as the tide, as the flow and retreat of water against land.

What had he said? Hide behind closed doors. Eat with her, nourish one another on whatever food they could find as well as feasting on each other's presence. Make love all afternoon in his tiny room. And through it all was the unspoken wish: hold her. Keep her. Stay. But there'd been no suggested point of termination, no point of her getting up from his bed and pulling on her dress again to take herself home. Danicka had not told him she had somewhere to be later, had not told him no.

Couldn't have told him no, at that point. It's been nearly a month, and she knows that as soon as she lets go of him it will be four days, or a week, or another month. It might be the last time.

Her feet rub against the tops of his, tuck under his soles. She's not ready to make love again, not ready to allow him to leave her body even if he'll come right back to it. She is not ready to let go of him. Danicka watches him murmur his question and just leans forward, nuzzling the side of his face and neck in open, animalistic comfort. She does not answer in promises of Always or Forever, which each of them is too cynical to accept. She just whispers in his ear:

"Jak dlouho, jak budu moct."

[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] Is that what you want? she asked him once. Forever and ever?

And the truth is, Lukas hadn't really answered. He told her no, he knows forever and ever is impossible. He told her knows there's a thousand reasons why that would never work, could never be. He told her he never expected forever and ever; he told her he understands perfectly each and every one of the thousand reasons why the answer should be no.

The answer isn't no. The answer is How long can you stay?
The answer is I miss you.
It's I don't want you to go.

Which isn't quite yes, either, just like this is not quite a mateship; not quite a relationship of boyfriend and girlfriend. They are not quite only Garou and Kin, or light and dark, or male and female, protector and protected, warder and warded, guardian and treasure.

The lines blur. The blacks and the whites, the easy lines and absolute judgments taught to him by a Philodox of Thunder and the waning moon -- they blur when it comes to Danicka.

Everything blurs. But she's absolute clarity.

--

It doesn't matter how long they lie there in each other's arms, quite literally bathed in one another's presence. It could be minutes; it could be an hour. Cars pass on the street. The back door bangs open and shut, and then simply opens. They can hear the kitchen staff, the residents coming in and out. Someone plays a guitar. Someone plays the drums. Someone goes up onto the roof, their footsteps briefly passing overhead.

Lukas sleeps, or drowses, their lower bodies entangled, his arm loose and heavy over her waist, his hand open over her back.

Eventually he wakes. The stew is cold but unspilt. He's hungry now, ravenous, and he twists around to pick up the bowls and pass them to her, one by one. He eats sprawled on his side like a Roman; jokes that she should be sitting up properly; tugs her back down if she starts to, though he doesn't think he will. When he's finished with his food he's thirsty, and gets up to get bottles of water out of his closet, tossing her one.

Lukas stands naked in the middle of the room as he gulps water down, the warmth of the day spilling through the open window, mingling with the coolness of the processed air. He looks out the window at his fabulous alley view, opens his window a little wider, leans against the frame as the breeze slips over his skin.

When the bottle is empty he tosses it into the trash, comes back to bed. He's smiling when he scoops her up, lifts her, turns his face to hers and kisses her. The kiss burns the smile from his face. He sits down on the side of his bed, and his cell phone and ipod clatter in his nightstand as he reaches for his condoms.

And so it goes; not half a dozen times but more than once, making love through the afternoon, drowsing like lions on the savanna between bouts, stretched out lazy and languid on his tiny bed that barely fits the two of them.

The quality of the light changes, warms as the day does. He sleeps less as the afternoon slants toward evening. He spends minutes on end simply touching her body, lying on his side beside her while his fingers move over her skin. He asks her what her fall schedule is, and what classes she's taking. He tells her how he was taken out of school after eighth grade, and how the rest of his academic education came out of books, scraped together between training, rituals, battles, wars. He tells her he liked calculus; hated history, and how now he can't remember how to do an integral but he remembers more about human history than he thought possible.

He tells her he loves her skin, its softness, its glow. He bends to her skin and kisses her belly, downward; turns until he's all but antiparallel to her, parts her legs over his torso, presses his mouth to her.

Evening, night.

Dinner isn't downstairs in the Brotherhood's kitchen. Dinner, after they shower and dress, is a block away at the lake's edge, in a little burger joint that smells like cigarettes and grease. He was always wary of parading her around in front of his pack; she always knew it was because of Sam. It's not the same now. This is something else: not shame or unwillingness to cause a scene, unwillingness to press on a bruise; this is a penchant for privacy, a certain possessiveness.

She's his.

It's dark afterward, but warm. The weather is wet. The lake laps at the shore. He takes the long way home, her hand in his, saying nothing, and as they near the Brotherhood he hesitates.

He wants to know if she's spending the night. She wants to know if he is. The answer to both, as it turns out, is yes.

Lukas realizes as they climb the staircase back to the second floor that this will be the longest they've spent in one another's presence. He wonders if that makes up for the absence, the longest they've spent apart since the beginning; the second one.

He doesn't mention this to her. He just pulls her against him when his room door closes behind them, holds her there a long time.

Later, stretched out in his narrow bed, he asks -- almost hesitantly, as though worried she might take offense -- if she minds that he reads a while. This is a first, too; apart from cooking ham and egg sandwiches in the morning, he's never been anything but wholly focused on her when he's in her presence.

He's never allowed her into a slice of his private life, his personal time, either.

The book turns out to be Crime and Punishment. Lukas asks if she's read the original, mentions he first read this the year of his fosterage. Then he settles into the book. Pages turn, fifty or a hundred or more in steady, unhurried regularity. If she's asleep by the time he sets it aside, he's careful to turn the light out without waking her. For all that, he turns to her after he sheds the last of his clothing. It's almost unavoidable that he should touch her then, wrap his arms around her and wake her and love her all over again.

In the morning, she wakes between his body and the wall, her back to his chest and his arms around her, held instinctively in the single safest spot he could create in this room; in the world.