carnivorous.

[Danicka] It's eight o'clock on Tuesday night when Danicka contacts Lukas again. Soon? she'd asked him, plaintive, because interacting over a bookshop's coffeehouse for only a few moments before another Ahroun and a somewhat familiar Philodox entered and the dynamic between them changed utterly -- as it always does, as it always must -- had not made up for two and a half weeks of separation. Since that late morning that saw her watching him dress from bed, preparing to leave her as though the mundanity of clothing himself might make walking out of her apartment easier, they've barely had any contact. That's how it is, and how it has been for a long time now. Not from the beginning.

Ironically, in the beginning, before that icy night in February when he was seething from his pack's actions -- or lack of action -- at the moot and blood all but boiling under his birth moon, Danicka saw him regularly. In fact, it wasn't until just before and just after that night that they went more than two days without running into each other, without being at the same nightclub or meeting at the Brotherhood. It was as though after that first cataclysmic night together they realized how dangerous it was to be near each other, how distracting, how maddening, how overwhelming. It's a torturous line to walk between seeing one another so often that they can't get anything done because of the other's presence and seeing one another so rarely that nearly a month goes by and utterly breaks that first truly vulnerable attempt at a promise:

Not another two weeks.

Well, now it's been four days. Four days they can deal with. It isn't so long, between her imploring Soon? and the next time he hears from her: evening, Tuesday night, possibly before he's even gotten up for the night. She waited as long as she could bear, but she doesn't tell him that.

"I'm going out to dinner," she informs him, or his voicemail. There's the briefest of pauses, and then the edges of her words gentle slightly, soften almost imperceptibly: "I'd like it if I saw you tonight."

[Lukas] It's not his voicemail. It's Lukas, who's stepping out of a Citibank about 30 minutes after closing, who has to stifle an immediate and near-irrepressible smile when he sees whose name it is on his cell phone.

"Okay," he says. He slips his paperwork into his messenger bag, zips it. Check his watch. "Do you want me to meet you at a restaurant or pick you up after?"

The implicit assumption: she's not eating alone. The implicit statement: he doesn't mind, wouldn't mind if she told him to stay away from her friends, wouldn't mind if she told him to join them. He's at his car now, parked parallel at the curb. Reflected in the gleaming black paint, all his clothes look dark. He wore all black the night they buried Sampson, not so very long ago. They are not human, but it still seemed appropriate.

There's still a hollowness where Sampson's presence used to reside. The bonds of the Circle are tight; they can speak into one another's minds, and Sampson's mind was always abuzz, always quivering, chattering, humming like electricity. In its absence, things feel ... quieter. But Lukas is not so devastated, not nearly so torn, as he was the week Mrena died.

Things were different. Everything is different. Sampson did not die alone. He did not die half-pathetic, half a victim. There was something heroic about his death, and though Lukas is too realistic, or perhaps too cynical, to believe in heroes in capes or shining armor, he is not so realistic -- or cynical -- as to deny that Sampson used the last moments of his life to do something good, and right.

And the last words Lukas spoke to Sampson were not angry and unconsidered, inconsiderate.

And Lukas was not laid open and laid low, convinced that they're over. They're through. She loved him once, and does not anymore.

All of which is to say: his reflection does not look like a man bereft and shattered. His reflection does not, and he did not, four days ago, look like a man who's lost his brother. He opens the door of his car and sinks in. When the door shuts the background noise cuts down by half; he can hear her clearly now, his cell phone pressed to his ear.

[Danicka] What Lukas doesn't know is how often Danicka eats out. Since January she's been out so frequently that she's becoming as familiar with the city as one of its natives, earning the intimacy of its streets and local fare as she earns the confidences of those mortals lucky or unfortunate enough to chance across her path and strike over her interest like the quickly-burning matches they are.

What he doesn't know is that she always gets a table for at least two, even if she is heading out on her own. The thing is, she has rarely if ever eaten a full meal by herself. She is no more extraordinarily friendly than any other generally social person, but a combination of looks, breeding, and mystique have had more than a few people sitting down to her table unexpectedly or inviting her to their own. She inspires curiosity.

She inspires a lot of things.

Okay does not reveal even in part the depth and flavor of Lukas's reaction to hearing from her. Danicka pauses; he can almost hear the roll of liquid past her lips as she sips something. She doesn't know about Sampson. There could be arguments made on both sides on whether or not she'd care, whether or not that care would be feigned.

"I'm at a place called Zed, on North Clark, off of Superior. On the roof." A beat. "I felt like steak. If you get here soon I may even try to get you drunk and have my way with you," she says, with a droll, ironic awareness of her own brow-waggling.

[Lukas] Lukas laughs under his breath. "Right there at the restaurant? Skandální." She can hear the engine turning over and catching. "Be there in fifteen."

--

Fifteen minutes later, almost on the dot, Lukas emerges out onto the rooftop of Zed. It's the sort of space that fits Danicka the way her glistening glass tower fits her: modern, sleek, abstract, blonde wood and vast panes of glass, an open-sky arrangement of tables and seats. He looks around once, open, curious, confident, and then he finds her. It's still early; the place isn't filled to capacity yet and the sky is still light.

Summer's nearly at an end, and Lukas is taking advantage of the last of the season in off-white linen pants, a cloud-grey shirt, button-down, short-sleeved. The colors make his skin seem swarthier, his hair darker. He's a creature of winter, as much as she is one of summer.

Lukas pulls out the chair across from her. He sits beside her, though, instead of across from her. It's a little more intimate. A little closer.

"Have you already ordered?"

[Danicka] "Nebylo by to poprvé," she purrs back, in a voice that very nearly conveys the smirk she frames the words with. And it wouldn't be, given what happened at Spring back in...well, spring. She may not be talking about that.

It's nearly autumn now, the equinox looming. He thought once that as the days lengthened and the sun bore down on her she would look gold, would bear the signs of the season like an avatar of them. He knows what she is like in winter, the way her skin is paler, makes her look smaller, makes her look more fragile. Except when he knew her in winter, he called her a stone egg. Inviolate, unassailable, unedged but not quite soft.

Danicka hangs up. She drinks more wine.

--

There's firepits here, there, providing a great deal of the light that doesn't come from Chicago itself, from the nearly-full moon. Danicka is near one, lounging on a couch that is very nearly a bed to begin with. She is leaning back against a cylindrical cushion, nearly horizontal, and there is no one on the bench to either side of her. Her hair is down in waves, her eyes so dark in this light there are only occasional hints of color, and they look more tawny than green.

The dress she has on is a knee-length, quarter-sleeved affair in the sort of livid, vicious red he has seen on her at least once (dancing with Katherine, while Sam told him she was smart like it was surprising, funny like it was an afterthough, beautiful like it was everything) and perhaps another time or two since then, at most. It wraps around her body and ties at one side, the illusion of a neckline ending between her breasts. An old fashioned silver and marcasite necklace interrupts the otherwise unbroken V of flesh, matching the bracelet on her left wrist.

Her legs are crossed at the knee. And she never does that.

When Lukas comes to sit beside her, either pulling a chair up to the edge of the cushioned bench or sitting down right on the 'couch' with her, Danicka doesn't move but her eyes follow him. "Just the wine." It sits on the table, a 2005 pinot noir from Spain. There are two glasses, and the bottle is not quite half empty. One glass has a trace amount of fluid in the well above the stem. The other is pristine.

[Lukas] Lukas sits beside Danicka. He doesn't hesitate; comes around the low table and sinks down, depressing the cushion under his weight far more than it did under hers.

The Shadow Lord's height is impossible to mistake. He towers over most the men and women he meets and passes in daily life the way his noble ancestors once towered over the smallfolk. His mass, the sheer thickness of his musculature and his bones, is a little harder to discern. Lukas is careful about what he wears; he picks cuts and fabrics that keep close to the form without hugging it, that skim his body, sleeken him. He hides the strength and power of his body the way a man might conceal a firearm.

When he leans forward to pour, hers first, then his, she can see the shadow of his lats through his shirt, the broad, tapering cut of muscle from lower spine to the side of chest, upper arm.

Leaning back, Lukas hands Danicka's glass back to hers. He clinks his glass against hers, drinks while he settles against the couch, not sipping but swallowing.

"You look..."

good would be the appropriate adjective here. Or beautiful. Or lovely. But Lukas pauses, gives it thought.

"...carnivorous tonight," he decides. A thoughtful pause. He isn't even looking at her; his eyes are moving over the rooftop, glittering in the firelight and the moonlight. He doesn't have to look at her to remember what she looks like. "You look good," he says then, and turns her way. And smiles, rather crookedly, one corner of his mouth turning up.

[Danicka] She doesn't usually wear black. She doesn't drive a black car, steers away from black shoes and bags, and the rich colors she wears steer away from thoughts of shadows. A mauve dress, maybe, or a wine-colored one: that's the sort of thing she wears out, rather than a little black dress. This, however, is the sort of striking, powerful red that may have as much to do with his choice of words as the fire, as the wine, as the fact that her breeding reaches out and wraps around his thoughts. As much as she stays away from black and red as color choices for her wardrobe, Danicka is undeniably a Shadow Lord at times.

When she bows her head demurely and pretends perfect obedience, perfect emptiness.

When she lays back like this and watches him cross the roof to her, watches him pour her wine, watches his body underneath his clothes as though she's mentally slicing him to ribbons, devouring him ravenously, yet with excellent table manners.

She puts her weight on one elbow as she accepts her glass and tips it against his with a tink!, then slides into a sitting position beside him to drink. More upright now but still leaning back, she observes the restaurant's patio around them and the city beyond it, giving him her profile. They are both looking at Chicago when they are done looking at each other. Lukas turns back to her first, confirming that carnivorous also means good, as though this is surprising, coming from a werewolf.

Danicka's eyes slide his way, even though her face keeps pointing forward. A slow smile lazes its way up the corner of her mouth, and she sips her wine again. "I told you," she says mildly, "I felt like steak."

She may as well have said I know. They sip their wine. The night is quiet though the restaurant and diners around them are not. Eventually someone comes over, takes their order, scurries away quickly afterward. Only then does Danicka begin any semblance of actual conversation, however bland it may seem on the surface:

"So what have you been up to?"

[Lukas] Lukas is the werewolf here. Lukas is the one whose blood and spirit is literally and inextricably bound to the moon. Lukas is the one who carries a beast under his skin, under his well-cut, stylish, too expensive for him to properly afford clothes.

But sometimes Lukas looks at Danicka and thinks she's closer to the primal than he is. She's closer to the basic, the essential, the predatory.

And sometimes he looks at her and thinks:

mine.

He'd taken his time. Strolled across the rooftop. Sat down. Poured wine. Toasted wordlessly. Drank wine. Looked at Chicago's skyline, at its citizens, at this expensive, chic steakhouse of Danicka's. And now he's looking at her, and he keeps on looking at her, and his cool eyes follow the curl of her mouth, and the touch of her wineglass to that mouth, and the sprawl of her body.

He's turned sideways on the couch. One leg is folded up and sideways. The other stretches out. His arm is along the top, his back to the arm, and he watches her even when the waiter comes and takes his order, which he makes without looking at the menu, which means it's naturally lamb, lamb, rack of lamb, and when the waiter departs he finishes his first glass of wine.

She asks him what have you been up to and he all but interrupts:

"Potřebuji kurva ty. Co nejdříve."

A beat. Then he leans sideways to snag up the winebottle and refill his glass. And top hers off.

He does not know what brought this on. The atmosphere between them is unstable and mutable. It changes as suddenly and warninglessly as the summer weather. Sometimes she looks like a spring morning and he wants to pick her up and spin her around like a girl. She looks like a hot summer's night tonight, and though he came here with an idea of having a civilized dinner with her, perhaps of telling her what he's been up to and which of his packmates has upped and died this month, he wants to --

well. He told her what he wants. Needs. The want of it, and the need of it, built inside him like a summer storm, sudden and powerful and unquestionable.

And now he finishes pouring wine, sets it on the edge of the table. "Já jsem zaparkovaný dole."

[Danicka] Very occasionally, she thinks about what she knows of Lukas's finances, which isn't very much, and wonders if he is doing all right. Contrary to appearances and more in keeping with the years she spent taking care of her father, her brother, the only daughter of the Sokolovs, Danicka has a nurturing streak she does not always know what to do with and seldom exhibits even for those she does feel tenderly towards. The thoughts are passing, and far more rare than those mostly-internal questions as to whether or not he's still alive, still all right, still coming back to her.

Lukas does not have an apartment that costs three grand a month. He is not contributing to the financial welfare of his parents or sibling. Danicka remembers easily, when these fleeing concerns come to her, that she may have a great deal more to work with than the male at her side, but she also has more pulling at her that she can do nothing but throw money at. She remembers: she does not need to worry about him the way she would worry about a human being.

All she has to do is try to sleep when she hasn't so much as heard his voice or seen a message from him in over a week. Two weeks. Nearly three but not quite.

Though they saw each other just four days ago, there was no real intimacy to it except for their initial embrace, the way they smiled at each other when they realized they were in the same place at the same time through nothing more than luck. It has been a solid three weeks since the last time they made love. These things matter, and Danick wouldn't deny a literal counting of the days though she doesn't quite need to count them for her body and soul both to know how long

(too long)

it's been since she was with her mate. Mate. The word should stun her even now, to think of it. It never has. She lets it roll through her thoughts without trouble, without perturbation. It is what it is, and it's the truth, and for some reason the reality of that does not make her panic.

There's a great many women who would, not in shock but amusement, nearly choke on their wine at those words. There are a great many who would, in definite shock, literally sputter the pinot noir over their lips. Danicka moves her glass out of the way in order to keep him from pouring any more in it, and tipping her head back, drains it. She sets the glass down as she rises, where it becomes evident that she had nearly half a bottle before he even arrived; she moves gracefully but there's a certain looseness to it, a laziness that suggests she might be about to turn around, undo the ribbonlike ties on the left side of her waist, open her dress to drop it like a robe, and do exactly what they half-joked about earlier: have her way with him. Right there at the restaurant.

Scandalous.

Danicka does not untie her dress and straddle Lukas's lap, however. As Lukas is telling her where he parked, she catches the eye of their server, all but summons him with a loose yet imploring gesture, and tells him: "Hold the table? We'll be back soon. Maybe twenty minutes?"

The waiter flicks his eyes at Lukas, at Danicka, tries to keep his eyebrows from rising, and just nods, taking his leave. Danicka bends at the waist to pick her purse up from the bench, hair falling over her shoulders, necklace swinging forward, the marcasite glittering madly in the fire- and moonlight. "Are you coming or not?"

[Lukas] Lukas's eyes follow Danicka all the way up. She moves like she's a little drunk; he's not surprised. She was sprawled on the couch. Her legs were crossed at the knee. She never does these things; or rarely. He's capable of deductive reasoning, capable of linking the opened bottle of pinot noir and the lazy, looselimbed woman in the crimson dress. He's capable of adding two and two.

He doesn't care. Lukas does not, not for a second, think that maybe he's taking advantage of her.

She stands. She beckons the waiter over. She tells him to hold the table and Lukas makes a short, soft sound under his breath that might, expanded tenfold, be a laugh.

And then he's not laughing anymore but looking at her, fiercely, hungrily, as she leans over to pick her purse up.

It's a valid question, what she asks him. He hasn't even begun to move yet. And he doesn't until she's straightening up again, or beginning to, and even then it's simply to

reach out and catch her hand.

And holding her hand, Lukas gets up. All that height, all that breadth, all that muscle and bone and rage. The moon's nearly full. His presence beats at the brain like a headache. He closes in on her and puts his hand on her waist, over those ties, and for a moment it seems very likely indeed, very nearly inevitable, that he'll tear them open and throw her down on the low, stylish table.

Then he lets go her hand. His other hand finds its way around her waist to her back, which is marginally more acceptable in mixed company, in public. He walks her toward the exit, which is all minimalism and crystallinity, descends with her through the levels of this edifice of wood and glass, and out the front.

The first time Danicka suggested they fuck in his car, Lukas refused. He still hasn't fully explained himself to her; likely never will, since she doesn't remember. They never did fuck, or make love in his MKZ, and then the MKZ was destroyed and he switched vehicles and time passed and things happened and

now it was okay somehow. Lukas doesn't explain this, either. He leads her around the corner and there it is, compact, low, black, with the trademark glowering headlights of a BMW, which flash as he unlocks the car. He follows her around to the passenger's side. The front windows are untinted, so he opens the door and leans down and flips forward the seat and then hands her in, doesn't bother to look around the street to see if anyone else is watching before ducking his head and following her.

[Danicka] Danicka lost track of the number of times she fucked in the back seat -- hell, the front seat -- of someone's car before she graduated high school. Most often it was people from other schools, athletes on away games, friends of friends of friends that she met at parties. She had a quiet reputation at her high school, the sort of girl no one suspected of wanting to do something like hack into the school's PA system, the girl no one thought would have any interest in the broad-shouldered, narrow-minded boys in some other school's colors.

It helped that people knew her brother was a dropout, that her family was poor, that her parents weren't married. It helped explain why she excelled, why her grades soared, why she worked as hard as she did. Danicka doesn't even know that one of her teachers actually swallowed furious, frustrated tears one afternoon in the staff lounge because the Musil girl was not going to college, even a vo-tech or community school, but moving to New Orleans to babysit.

What a waste. What a fucking waste.

The truth that Danicka herself is unaware of is that she is brilliant. She would say she has a bit of a head for numbers, that she's okay with a computer. She would not say that she has an innate grasp of mathematics that is almost surreal. She would not say that she has a natural skill with hardware or a quirky and creative approach to programming. She has no basis for comparison and no experience using the potential. It comes in fits and starts. She plays. She doesn't realize how good she is, and she won't until she starts learning from people who know what they're talking about.

Ms. Northrupp would be so thrilled.

What Lukas knows about Danicka's less city-savvy and more nerdish side is limited, but he has more information than most. He doesn't know about the role-playing sessions or the LAN parties, still doesn't know why Liadan always called her V or Vyv, but by god he knows enough to make a joke about orange lingerie versus purple. He knows -- because she told him while high, while drunk -- that as far as sex goes she's had partners numbering in the hundreds. He doesn't know that once upon a time she did four rapid lines of cocaine off a glass-topped table when she was barely old enough to drink and then fucked a man who wasn't old enough to be her father, but just barely.

And Danicka doesn't remember being rejected when she wanted, openly, to climb into his lap in the MKZ and fuck him outside of some other restaurant not far from her apartment. She doesn't know enough to ask him why he didn't take full advantage of her then. She doesn't know that he did fuck some blonde in that car, a woman who took one look at the purple and black lingerie on the floorboards and had sex with him anyway, steaming up the windows and making him hate her on some level because her eyes weren't really green, her skin wasn't the same warm gold, her smell was completely fucking wrong.

There are things they don't need to know about each other. About cars, about their lives outside of each other. As long as they know what matters.

Danicka can feel his eyes on her, has felt them since she first saw him ascend to the rooftop patio. She flicks her gaze at him while she's bent over and he's still leaning back, their stares catching on one another like barbs catching on satin. A moment later she's letting him go, standing up, and he's grabbing her, his much larger hand around her slender fingers, dwarfing her there and then completely eclipsing her size when he rises to his feet. The mood of the patio keeps reacting to his presence, whether the diners realize it's all his fault or not.

She knows it's his fault, the way her reaction to the night and the city and this place changed as soon as he sat down next to her. Ordered lamb, lamb, rack of lamb. Drank red wine with her and told her not I want, not even I'd like or I can't stop thinking about but I need, like it's air, like it's sustenance.

More than anyone, she understands.

Her heart beats faster, yes, when he puts his hand on her waist. She looks up at him, motionless and staring, her eyes calm all the same. It's as if she's daring him to do it. Not to prove that she has some kind of carnal power over him, not to prove to anyone else that they could get away with it, not to prove that they're more exciting or more in love than anyone else up here, but because so very fucking little shocks her. If she were to truly dare him to tear her dress open, or even push it up, and fuck her on the couch, on the table, by the fire and under the stars and in front of all these people, it would be because some part of her would be secretly and deeply thrilled to do it. And get away with it. And enjoy, intensely, what so many would balk at.

They descend slowly, Danicka's feet careful on each step. The shifting lights outside reflect off the glass, the corners turning everything inside to a prism of neon and streetlight and busy-ness. Her shoes are as spare and as glittering as her necklace, a combination of black that seems brushed and silver that seems to be imitating diamonds, straps hugging her ankles and gemlike designs adorning the tops of her feet. Her purse is metallic black, or gray, or silver: some combination of all three. She walks beside him down the stairs, counting seconds into minutes in her head, and then follows him around the corner

to the BMW

into the back seat.

He has not closed the door behind him or even fully entered the car before she's on him, slim arms winding around his neck and mouth seeking his. As soon as she brushes their lips together her own are opening, her tongue is flicking lightly across his lower lip, and her mouth tastes thickly of wine. In the darkness broken by exterior lights and with her face so close to his he can not see, but he can sense -- he can feel -- her legs sliding apart, her dress falling past her thighs to her hips by virtue of simple gravity, he can hear her purse thump to the floorboards and he can smell her

skin

and the lack of perfume, the warmth of summer making her sweat faintly just from being outside, the soap she uses, the smoke from the fire, the fermentation of the grapes, the witch hazel in her hair, the scent of her body responding to his decision to sit next to her, tell her

I need

and that brief but yet torturously long walk down the stairs and to the car.

"Nečekejte," she whispers when their mouths break away, her lips still so close they move against his own. She loosens her hold on him enough to let him close the goddamn door, relaxes enough to let him move into the space with her, shifts her body according to where his goes, but she doesn't stop touching him, can't stop kissing him. "Nemáme moc času. Miluj mě. To mě poser, Lukáš."

[Lukas] It means something to Lukas, makes a difference to him, that Danicka takes the stairs carefully.

She's been drinking. She might slip. He would catch her if she slipped, would not let her tumble down the goddamn stairs and break her head, would not allow her to be hurt or to hurt herself in his presence if he could help it. She knows that, or should. She's careful anyway. And that means something. It's something that he, in some strange and abstracted sense, appreciates.

In a far more concrete, realistic sense, he just wishes she'll just ... please, please hurry down the stairs and get in the fucking car.

And then they're breezing out the front door, and by now no one's giving them strange looks because they're not the only attractive young couple coming out of this restaurant tonight, not the only attractive young pair that's walking a little faster than necessary, with longer strides than necessary, with the man's arm around the woman's waist, with a flush in their cheeks and a gleam in their eyes. For all anyone knows, they're going on to have drinks with his friends now, or going to her friends' place, or heading home for an early night in, or...

...or they might be doing exactly this. Climbing into the back of his car, tangling together before he's even properly inside, kissing one another in a mute and starving frenzy before the door is shut.

Her arms are around his neck. He's fighting with the buttons of his shirt and he's awkward, kneeling on the floor, one foot still outside, wedged between the narrow back seat and the flipped-forward passenger's seat, and she's kissing him and his eyes are closed and his mouth is open to hers and they kiss, he abandons his shirt half-unbuttoned, he puts his hands on her and touches her body, pushes his hands heavy over her stomach, her breasts, with a minimum of finesse. Lukas is starting to groan into her mouth when Danicka pulls back and tells him what to do, and why, and he pulls his trailing foot in and slams the door shut.

Now it's quiet in here, a small closed space full of their gasping breath. She's a slender woman, but long of limb; he's over half a foot taller, far broader. They wrestle with the confines. He pulls her upright to the edge of the seat and tries to wrap her legs around him, but it doesn't work, the passenger's seat doesn't slide forward far enough, there's not enough room and her knees and her shins have nowhere to go. So his hands push her skirt up past her hips instead and he hauls her sideways, rough with impatience, lays her down lengthwise across the rear seats, her shoulders to the far side of the car wall. His shoe clunks against the near wall as he climbs onto the seat after her, one foot braced against the floor; he has to bend his head to fit; his shoulders thump against the roof and he lets out a breathless sort of laugh, bats his hands against the roof, the sidebeams of the car to feel out the space available to him.

Then he's reaching into his back pocket for his wallet, while he all but tears a condom out of it; throws the wallet onto the mesh ledge separating cabin from trunk. "Come here," he says, which is unnecessary because he's pulling her down a sliding four or six inches, lays her out under him and hoists her seatward leg over his shoulder. The button on his fly comes undone with a snap; the zipper hisses down. It's dim in the rear seat, the last light of day filtering through the windowtinting, and he fits the prophylactic on by touch, rolls it down onehanded while the other hand pulls aside whatever scrap of fabric she might wear as lingerie tonight, shucks it aside and slips beneath to caress, with a sort of deliberate, purposeful heaviness, the lips and opening of her cunt.

"Bože, ty jsi tak těsné," he gasps when his fingers push into her. "Nemohu se dočkat, až bude je v tobě." He pulls his fingers out of her. Leans, arcs over her, presses his hands to the far wall of the car, presses his hips to hers, grinds his cock against her while he tells her to, "Roztáhni nohy, dítě. Zábal tvůj nohy kolem mě a přijmout že kohout."

[Danicka] There are nights when it surprises Danicka how full the moon can be, how wrecked the world, how long he can have waited for her and yet not utterly lose control of himself when she kisses him like this, hard and devouring, as though presaging with their mouths how they're going to fuck. The first time she kissed him he very nearly went over the edge, because the moon was full and the world was pissing him off and she was so very hot and so completely naked, wrapping around him in eagerness and abandon and it was all too much. She is surprised tonight that it is not too much, even though she was not really surprised that laying her out and tying her down did not inspire some violent, brutally domineering urge in him.

He's trying to undress, though, before the door is closed. He's rucking up her skirt and pawing her dress away from her breasts while his foot is hanging out of the car and she's lying back, her breathing getting heavy as she all but pulls him in after her.

"Ježíši," she breathes when he snaps the door shut finally and pulls her forward, trying to wrap her body around his own even though there's not the space for it. Trying to find space to fuck her, room to inhabit with his size. Danicka's hands fall on his shoulders, her back arches, one shoe slips from her foot and hits the floorboard with a thump. "Člověk by si myslel jste nikdy v prdeli v autě před."

This is followed by a gasping sort of laugh, shooting out of her along with all the air in her lungs as Lukas yanks her down, pushes her to the side, lays her out as best he can so he can get on top of her. She is rapidly unbuttoning his shirt, in blind and drunken haste, her skirt falling back off her thighs completely when he pushes her leg up. This is the foot that's bare, just as warm as the rest of her against his shoulder.

His hand finds chiffon, little more than a strap of it between her legs, and he knows what these are like, he's seen things like them on her before. She wriggles away from his hand at first, as though startled, as though surprised, and then she's back, rubbing against his touch with breathy little whimpers that coincide with her hands stilling on his shirt, wrapping around tiny fistfuls of fabric and tugging on him.

"Oh," she lets out, wetness sliding over and between his fingertips even before he pushes inside. "Oh, god," she echoes, her voice harder now, when he finally does. Underneath him, Danicka squirms against the cushion of the backseat, the wrap of her dress falling to the sides as the ties loosen with all the motion, baring most of one breast, skirt opening enough that if he looks down he can see all of that thin, nearly sheer thong, but not its color. Her eyes are closing, her hands relaxing enough to let go of his shirt only then.

She opens her eyes again to look up at him as he rolls his hips and pushes against her body. There's a fleeting, flickering expression through her eyes, faster and harder to catch than the way she strokes her palms over his chest, caressing bared flesh in almost sightless memorization as well as primordial familiarity. Her touch wanders downward, her hand wraps around him, pulls him into her

just barely.

"Nejprve pomalu, lásko," she whispers, as though she wasn't just telling him they don't have much time, as though they didn't tell the waiter they'd be back in fifteen or twenty minutes. Danicka arches, tipping her head back as far as she can, throat bared and legs unfolding from seat cushions and male shoulder, re-wrapping around his waist. She does not, this time, pull him in by flexing her thighs or pushing against the small of her back with her lower legs. "Práce, kterou dovnitř chci cítit každým coulem."

A whimper, after the second of those inches.

"Tvrdá a hluboká."

[Lukas] When she laughs, when she notes it's like he's never fucked in a car before, Lukas pauses for a single stark second.

"Not in this car," he murmurs. And more to the point, "Never with you."

He's tugging her down, then. She's undoing his shirt, her fingers flying over the buttons, the woven fabric. He's reaching between her legs and when she arches, when she reacts, it's like lightning down his spine.

It's not exactly surprising that Lukas not losing his mind over her surprises Danicka. She may have a moderate-at-best estimation of her intelligence, of her ability to manipulate numbers and algorithms and the language of ones and zeros, bits and bytes, but Danicka is assuredly aware of her own beauty. It's the way she dresses, the way she walks, the way she does her hair; it's even the way she can grow so vicious to complete strangers who've offended her, and the way he's seen her effortlessly command the attention of an entire room by simply standing up.

And it's not even just that she's beautiful. Maybe in some ways that's the least of the factors. It's that she's beautiful, and sharply intelligent, and creative, and carnivorously confident, and... so fucking charismatic. No; that's not even the word.

So fucking magnetic, that he can't help but be drawn.

Lukas has long since given up trying to name all the reasons she makes him feel the way he feels, when she opens her legs for him and lies beneath him, or rises over him, or...

He's long since given up trying to figure out if it was her, if everyone reacted this way to her, or if it was something specific, something intrinsic to him, and her, and what was between them.

He's long since given up thinking of Danicka as a puzzle to be solved. As a battle to be won.

"God," again, low, stripped, when her hand closes around his cock. He's burning hot in her fingers, thick, utterly rigid. When she guides him

into her, where said he needed to be on the roof, where he said he couldn't wait to be in the car -- but only barely -- Lukas's hands curl into fists against the ledge of the rear window; he lets out a short, tattered sound, something between imploring and overcome.

"Fuck," he whispers when she tells him how, why. "Fuck, baby..."

and he leans down; he wraps his hand around the back of her neck and draws her up; they meet in the middle and he eats at her mouth, all but tears at it as he rocks his hips forward, thrusts into her,

inch
by
inch.

He makes her whimper. She makes him groan. The kiss falls apart. He raises himself over her and she wants it deep, she wants it hard, he gives it to her in one smooth long slide. He doesn't pull the stroke; follows through with a solid slam of his hips against hers, holds himself deep. There's sweat on his chest already, dimly gleaming between the opened halves of his shirt; his sides move with the speed and force of his breathing.

"Let me fuck you hard, baby." Control reduces his words to a monotone, bitten back, reined in. The shudder at the edge of his breath betrays him; the shudder that runs up his spine. "Let me pound you. God, Danička..."

Those glittering eyes close; open.

"...don't make me hold back."

[Danicka] Her eyes flick over his face when he pauses, when he says what he says, but that, like the flash of reaction earlier, passes quickly. They're all over each other again barely after the word you has left his lips, her hands on his chest and his hand on her cunt and their mouths meeting again. And again.

Truthfully, her surprise has nothing to do with how she knows others see her, how smart she is or seems, how viciously self-assured or how appealingly vacant, depending on who is looking. It's because she doesn't question whether it's her or not, doesn't ever quietly wonder to herself if other women have felt like this with him. And just as she doesn't quite know when she began falling, she doesn't remember when, exactly, she first intuited and then immediately trusted the feeling that there is something different about this, about them, that is vital, and irreplaceable, and impossible to imitate.

Put simply, he's special. And what they have is special. She leaves it at that.

"Ty jsi tak tvrdě,," she murmurs when she touches him, when she wraps her hand around him and he moans God. It's like an echo, or a continuation of his utterance. Thoughtlessly, almost curiously, she strokes him once, twice, and again, even before she lets him in, tells him to go slow, makes him swear and sweat and all but beg.

He makes her writhe, and whimper, and plead wordlessly with him into his mouth, into that kiss, her head held up by a hand part dominant and part cradling and part helpless, needful, desperate. Danicka rolls her hips to accept him, to squirm against him as he works his cock into her, sucking at his tongue and biting at his lips with her own, her teeth restrained (for now), her hands pushing his pants down farther, his shirttails out of the way. She hikes her legs up higher around his waist, her lips red and wet when he pulls back from kissing her.

And then he slams into her like that. Goes as deep as he can, as deep as she can take, so suddenly and so hard that she yelps slightly, her shoulders thudding against the far wall of the car from the force of his body on top of and inside of and against hers, against her. Her hands are on his waist, on his ribs, feeling the steady and rapid slam of his heartbeat as though it suffuses every inch of his skin now, feeling his sweat on her palms, feeling the heaviness and unexpected grace of his musculature in the swing of any motion, all of it held in check.

"Ne," she whispers, squeezing him inside her so tightly it's obvious, and deliberate, and almost cruel. "Jet pomalu, lásko."

Danicka rolls her hips up against him, fucks him while biting back another helpless cry. She starts panting softly, leaning up to him to kiss him. This time it's gentle. Like her words, softening even as the rest of her seems angled solely to drive him out of his mind. "Tak dlouho, jak to ty půjde."

[Lukas] When she bears down on him like that, the sound he makes is somewhere between laugh and groan, somewhere between a sort of wild, reckless joy and a sort of half-mad desperation.

"Fuck you." He nearly snarls it at her. She kisses him, softly, softly, his mouth opens to hers like a surrender. "Mmmph," he groans into her kiss, helplessly, and when she draws away he's snarling at her again. "Jdi do prdele, ty horké děvko. You're driving me insane."

But he doesn't pound her. He doesn't push her legs up and hammer her cunt; he doesn't roll her on her stomach and take her like an animal, from behind. Lukas plants his hands on the seat, creasing the leather beneath his weight. He pulls his fingers into fists, digs his fingers into the seat and transfers all the tension of his body, of his want, into that white-knuckled grip.

And he goes slow. He fucks her slowly, deep and hard and slow, his loins and his flanks flexing between her thighs, his cock grinding into her, his body bearing hers down into the seat, against the seat, down.

The look on his face is something so intense it's impossible to say if it's pleasure or pain. It's a sort of bent, absolute focus, his eyes on hers, his face flickering with the sensations that ricochet up his nerves every time he enters her, every time he plunges deep, every time he withdraws so slow and smooth, feels the wrap and clench of her cunt, feels the coolness of her slick on his cock, evaporating into the air. He's breathing shallowly, rapidly between his teeth, sucking air into his lungs, exhaling in sharp jolts that veer toward sound, toward grunts or moans when she squeezes him in rhythm, or winds her hips, or tightens her thighs, or--

"Ach můj kurva bože," his head drops; his hair, recently trimmed, is too short to fall forward. At this angle he's all straining shoulders, all flexed arms, all arches of strength, bows of tension that intersect and build one on the other. He's said this before; he means the sex, or the situation, or her, or the fact that she's telling him pomalu when all he wants to do is fuck her.

"...neuvěřitelné."

His hands shift. Palms to the seat now, better leverage. His pants are half pushed down, rumpling, they restrain the motion of his lower body; he shifts his foot on the floor, finds a point of balance better than the last, frees the hip joint. Swings into her smoother now, moves into her in sleek powerful arcs of motion. His rhythm matches his breathing, steady, except of course when it isn't; except when he bucks his hips sharply into hers at the end of a stroke, except when he halts mid-withdrawal and slams back into her again.

It makes him gasp as much as it might her. It makes him groan through gritted teeth, makes him bend his head to watch himself fucking her in the artificial dusk of tinted windows and backseat. His balance over her shifts; he takes one hand off the seat, runs it down her body, rubs his fingers over her belly, her clit, forks his fingers over her cunt and fucks her between the splay of his own hand, as though to better feel the reaction of her flesh, the shudder and catch and writhe and flex of her body.

"Myslím, že o tento někdy, když jsme od sebe." This has the quality of a confession, a secret deep and possibly dangerous. Lukas raises his head and his eyes seek hers, find. Flicker closed. He sucks a breath in -- so fucking good. Open. "Myslím, že o vás a je těžké spaní."

[Danicka] In answer -- to his fuck yous, his mindlessly slung and meaningless insult, his aggravated growl that he's going mad and it's her fault -- Danicka wraps her arms around his neck, but not just to hold him, not just to play with the recently trimmed hair at the back of his head. She pulls herself up slightly so that as he's fucking her (slow. hard. deep.) he's also coping with her weight half-hanging from him, holding himself up and holding her up and dealing with her kissing him over and again, moving her mouth to his neck and moaning against the thin flesh of his throat when he pushes into her

over

and again.

She says no and so he doesn't go at her like a beast. He doesn't start fucking her like an animal in rut, like a primitive, like he wants to, like his instincts tell him to. But he has before. And he's had her from behind, she's bent forward for him, rolled over, on his bed and on hers and in the woods and it's like she knows that need, that instinct, that drive. Just as she knows, right now, what this torturous slowness is doing to him.

Carnivorous, he'd called her, and

good.

Or at least, that's how he'd said she looks tonight.

Her hands go into his hair, hold on, her upper arms against his shoulders and her back arched, hardly any of her body above her waist resting against the backseat of his car. The way he fucks her, makes love to her, whatever they want to call it if it needs a name at all, makes Danicka moan. One would think that she'd worry about someone knocking on the car window, someone peeking in, someone calling the cops, someone catching her in the act. And a part of her, perhaps were she closer to the Garou and Kin who served as her handlers in a way for so long, would be worried about not getting away with it. Being shamed. Being punished.

Nothing at the moment could be further from her mind. She gives herself over, gives herself up, not just to him but to this, even though ostensibly she's in control of him somehow. He's taking her like this because she wants it like this, fucking her with hard and careful grinds of his hips rather than hammering thrusts because she told him that's what she wanted. Lukas is here tonight because she called him. He's her mate because she chose to take him as such, without even asking him or informing him.

The way he claimed her from Milo, months and months before.

And nothing could be further from her mind, at the moment, than who is in control. Danicka doesn't think much about her own power, her own control. She strives to lose it. She strives to abandon not just social mores and Garou traditions but... everything, it seems. She goes wild under him, heedless, enough so that there are times when he has been and probably should have been worried about her. Barefoot in the woods, scratches all over her arms and legs. High in the middle of Cabrini-Green, the strap of her camisole falling down. Gaia only knows what she got up to in New York City, in New Orleans, in hedonistic back alleys, where she would be right now if she were not with him, were not his.

"Fuck me," she breathes, biting his lower lip, groaning as her teeth clench down, very nearly hard enough to pierce flesh. Danicka pulls her head back, starts to let go of him because as much as he's holding her up she's holding herself onto him. She eases back down and puts her hands against the car wall, the cushions, as though to brace herself. One of her hands falls on top of his.

Her fingertips stroke his knuckles tenderly, the way she might if they were falling asleep together. Only he's fucking her now, and she's whimpering for it, her cunt trembling under his hand, around his cock. Danicka swivels her hips, gasps as his hips jerk forward in reaction to

tight

wet

so fucking good.

She looks down at their bodies, at the slam of him between her thighs, the sweat glistening on his skin, on hers, on the way her slick covers his cock, the curl of dark hair, the lines of his abdominal muscles. Danicka shudders and tips her head back, looks up at him.

"Já taky," she admits, barely even whispering the words. She raises up, kisses him hard. "Já taky."

And then, before her mouth has even come fully away from his, as she's moving in to kiss him again, she groans: "Rychleji. Prosím tě, Lukáš, kurva mě tvrději. Rychleji."

[Lukas] A shudder runs up Lukas's back when Danicka breathes fuck me like that. The muscles in his arms and his back are taut, tensed against his weight and hers when she slings herself onto his body like that, rides him while he rides her. She bites at his ear, his lip, and his throat; tears at his mouth with her kisses the way she does -- delicately, viciously -- makes him think of something predatory and carnivorous, makes him think of lean agile predators in the night, in the undergrowth.

She barely leaves him time to breathe between her kisses, much less speak. What he might've said are muffled against her hungry mouth -- a collection of low groans, wordless noises pressed into her lips, her tongue. She kisses him over and over, uses her mouth, bites and licks and kisses like her arms were only good for wrapping around his neck, like her hands were only good for grasping at his hair, his shoulders.

She sinks back down. He looks down as her hand covers his. His fingers widen, splay out, allow hers between; he barely realizes he does this, watches it happen like it's something apart from himself. Then his head bends further, and now they're both watching the joining of their bodies, the glisten of her wetness on his cock when he pulls out, the flex and bunching of his musculature when he pushes in; the parting of her thighs to accept him, the spreading of her flesh beneath his hand.

Oh god, he thinks, oh god, oh my fucking god, and he raises his head almost the same instant she does -- they meet in the middle, a wild hurricane of a kiss.

A rush of a exhale, when she parts from him. Tells him what she tells him. He takes his hands from her body, plants it solidly on the seat beneath her, arches over her on one knee, foot tense on the floor; leverages himself over her and tells her to

"Náklon tvůj boky pro mě, lásko. Naklonit je nahoru."

He's looking down again, watching her legs wrap around him, higher, the impossibly smooth skin of her inner thighs about his waist, her calves wrapping behind his ribs. The next flex of his hips takes him deeper; takes him hard and fast into her, slams him home where he holds, bucks his hips sharply against her, throws his head back.

"To je ono. Ach, Bože, jo."

Blindly, drawn by instinct or memory alone, he finds her mouth again when he lowers his head. There's no uncertainty, no searching -- his mouth locks onto hers, he kisses her furiously while he slams his cock into her again and again, short and sharp, a staccato of thrusts that jolts her body against his, sends shudders into their kiss, makes him release her mouth with a sudden groan. He sinks down on his elbows. Wraps his arms around her. Bends to her shoulder, bites at her shoulder as he picks the rhythm up.

"Mluv se mnou," he whispers in her ear; clasps her against his chest, as he starts to fuck her faster, harder; catches her earlobe in his teeth as he starts to pound her pussy. "Mluv se mnou, Danička, já chci slyšet vás."

[Danicka] They don't have much time -- like she said. Danicka is focused intently on the sensation of his cock slamming into her now, sliding faster and harder with every sinuous flex of his hips. She's thinking about the way he's breathing, the rich scent of him and the salty taste of his sweat as he moves over her, the brush of his shirt's ends against the cushions, the heaving of his chest, the sheer size of his body, the unwavering heat filling the backseat of the car.

She's saturated with lust, and little else any more sensible than that, thinking about coming with him, about the way he'll look when he feels her tighten on him in rippling waves of pleasure, the way he can barely seem to survive her orgasm. She's thinking about the way he sounds when he comes, thinking about his mouth locking down on her shoulder to stifle heavy groans of overcome enjoyment.

Naklonit je nahoru, he says, and Danicka complies, as instantly obedient as he could have once imagined she always was. He knows better, now, or at least has an inkling: just because she was never 'the one tied up', as she said, doesn't mean she was never the one tying the knots. He knows better, now, how subversively dominant she is, how pretty her strength is, how much it resembles submission.

How good her pussy feels when he's that deep, when she angles her body the way he wants her to and gives him more, gives it up, gives him that permission to fuck her harder now, faster, go at her like the mindless monster some part of him always has been. Always is.

He knows, now, how much she likes it. Danicka squirms under him, her whimpers taking on a keening edge as they live and die in her throat, as she fights to keep them from turning into outright screams. Lukas knows, from the way she runs her hands down his chest and reaches for his hips, that his pleasure has nearly nothing to do with it. She groans when she feels the roll of movement under his skin, under her palms, the amount of force going into each thrust, the shift of muscle in his flank driving him deeper.

She wraps her arms around him just over the line of her legs, kissing him with the eagerness of adolescence and the delicacy of experience, loosing sudden cries into his mouth, into his kiss, with every slamming thrust of his cock. "Don't stop," she gasps, as he's leaning down to cover and hold her, as though she's afraid he's going to come then or slow down or do anything, anything but keep fucking her like this, ferocious and desperate. "Baby, don't --"

He isn't stopping. She moans, tipping her head back and fucking back against him, legs and hands pulling him into her over and over and over...

Her shoulder is bared because her dress is completely knocked askew at this point, his teeth finding bare flesh, finding Danicka, finding the taste of her just as salty but so very different from his own. She writhes in his arms, against his body, as though trying to escape his mouth on her ear, his words, his hands... but not his cock, not that persistent and rough rhythm he's setting with his hips.

"Kdysi jsem sní o tom, jak váš kohout bude cítit uvnitř mě," she gasps finally, head tipped back, throat bared, breathing her words upward. "Chtěl jsem si to tak špatně. Použil jsem se dotknout mé píči každou noc myslet ty." She leans up, licking his earlobe and whispering: "Pořád tomu, když jsme jsou od sebe. Já se tak mokrý, když jsem si o Vás kurva mě.

"Chci přijmout, aby vás na W po večeři. Chci jezdit ty tak dlouho, dokud budete prosit, abych přestal."

[Lukas] There's a primality to their mating, an artless, vivid energy to the way they go at one another. They wrap around each other like plants growing together, like snakes twining, like nothing more or less than themselves, halfnaked in the backseat of his car, down the street and around the corner from the chic wood-and-glass edifice where they'll sit down to a nice bloody dinner of steak and wine later.

When they're done here.

When they're done fucking each other here, wrapping their arms around each other and biting at one another, kissing, moaning, gasping, whispering.

What she says to him nearly undoes him. He turns to her, sharply; he bites her shoulder so hard it's nearly vicious, and then he presses his tongue against her flesh between his teeth, lets out a low groan as he listens to her telling him what she used to do; what she does; what she wants to do.

Lukas rears back suddenly. He pushes his palm back over her brow, into her hair; smooths her hair back from her face and it's almost tender, it's gentle, it's careful even while he's quite simply hammering at her cunt, driving himself into her again and again with an unrestrained fervor that strips his nerves bare and leaves him raw with pleasure because it's been so fucking long; it's always so fucking long between one meeting and the next, one fuck and the next.

"Co děláte do mě?" he asks her, raggedly, even though he knows the answer:

she's consuming him. She's claiming him. She's making him hers.
Again.

And he bends to her, puts his brow to hers, cups her neck and holds her close, finds her mouth with his. Kisses her mouth. Builds. Eats at it, furiously, devours her breath out from between her lips and feeds her his groans, his gasps. "Fuck, baby," he exhales when the kiss shreds apart, "Jsem blízko."

Blindly, too abruptly to be careful, he gropes for her hands, grasps her hands in his and swings them up and away from his body, up and to the leather of the seat. He pins her like that, his hands to hers, his palms to hers, pins them both there by the hands and leaves them only their bodies, the slide and slam of their bodies together.

And pushes himself up like that. Panting for breath, he looks at her body halfexposed by her rucked-up dress; her tugged-awry dress. He looks at her body, and her cunt, and her eyes -- it's there that he's caught, captured; it's her eyes that he holds while he fucks her, furiously now, letting go her hands only at the end so she can touch him, wrap around him -- so she can

"Pojďte nahoru do mnou." He twists his head to the side, flicks sweat off his brow with his shoulder, impatiently, gasps harshly on the next stroke. "Drž se mě, lásko, já jedu přijít."

[Danicka] Danicka whimpers at that bite, shudders as he licks it, runs her hands up his back and around his sides. "Mám rád když se mě kousnout," she whispers in his ear, even as he's groaning, even as he's trying not to go over the edge at the thought of her lying in that big, soft bed of hers, hand between her legs, eyes closed and lips parted, back arching and hips writhing, coming at the thought of him, biting back the sound of his name, stifling moans in her pillow so her roommate down the hall would not hear her fucking herself night after night.

What are you doing to me?

It isn't the first time he's asked her that, or asked himself that while fucking her. If he's never said it aloud before, it doesn't seem to surprise Danicka to hear it, anyway. Sometimes it used to seem like she could read his mind, unlocking thoughts he wasn't even acknowledging to himself much less broadcasting, and maybe that's why she just moans softly as he touches her forehead like that, smooths back her hair like that. She closes her eyes briefly and runs her hands over his body, every stroke of her fingers and her palms across his chest and his ribs asking the same thing, the same damn thing, though she knows the answer, and always has:

he's fucking her. Not fucking, not using, not doing what she thought he might from the start and coming to her only for relief of the tightly coiled sexual tension between them. He's actually loyal to her, expects loyalty, kisses her like it means something, fucks her like he knows who she is. And he does, which answers all her questions except the first one: Why. She knows that Lukas sees her clearly because she lets him. She has yet to be able to explain why she has, from the very first fucking moment, tried harder to tell him the truth than she's tried with anyone else.

Because she loves him. Though if that's the reason, then she must have loved him even when he drove her home from the Brotherhood, all the way back at the start of this year. If the reason she's let him come closer to truly knowing her than she has let anyone since she was sixteen years old is that she loves him, then she's always loved him, then she was meant to love him, then some spark in her recognized him not at SmartBar but in New York, in her family's living room. Or in the common room. Or god knows. God only knows.

She doesn't care.

When he looses that gasped confession against her mouth, Danicka shivers underneath him, pressing her body as hard against his own as she can. She wriggles against the seat, searching for his hands as he searches for hers. She exhales heavily when he pins her, suddenly, bucking her hips once sharply, then again -- and again -- in rhythm. "Jo," she murmurs, taking him in as he's pounding at her, fucking him back as insistently as he's felt her do when she's on top of him, straddling him on a couch, in a bed. "Jo, lásko, dej mi to."

She looks at him again, opens her eyes again. Her words begin as a purr, descend quickly into a growl as she wraps her arms around his neck, her legs around his waist, her cunt squeezing him, her hips bucking again involuntarily, her last word snapping off her teeth: "Pojď ve mně. Pojď ve mně, ty hajzle."

[Lukas] Maybe Lukas should be concerned: Danicka's subversive submission-which-is-not; Danicka's streaks of dominance that lead her to lure him like a beast, hunt him like prey; that lead her to stand over him and straddle his face in a hotel room overlooking new york city; that lead her to snarl at him, growl at him, curse at him.

It's not proper Shadow Lord kin behavior. It's nothing like the demure, submissive kinfolk she is in public, that she was the night they met

(again)

when she looked him in the eye only long enough for him to see that her eyes were green, and to see -- some hint, some shred of an indication that the woman she then pretended to be was not who Danicka Musil really was. And who she pretended to be was never who he was interested in, anyway. And he doesn't care that she tries to dominate him because she doesn't, really; no more than he does her. This has moved beyond those borders, those descriptions. This was never quite in that realm, anyway, even though he tried, he tried so damn hard, to make it so.

So -- she snarls at him. She fucks him as insistently, as intensely as he fucks her. She wraps around him and draws him in, draws him deeper, draws him literally and figuratively to the center of her and holds him there as tells him to

come in her.

Lukas, obeying, lets out a -- sound, or a gasp, something, a torn, flayed sort of noise. He lunges across what space remains and he kisses her, finds her mouth and kisses her like he needs the kiss to live, like he needs her air to breathe. Every muscle in his body tenses; his body is rigid between her legs, against her body.

For a second he hangs in the precipice, electric with tension, all but humming with it. Then the flint strikes the steel; his nerves light up like a spiderweb set aflame, and he moans into her mouth as he comes in her cunt, spending himself furiously inside her, driving himself deeper in the short, sharp, mindless thrusts in the incandescent seconds right after that must, by now, be familiar to her.

When their mouths let one another go, he's gasping for breath in the dimness between, his eyes shut, his head bowed against hers. When he can will his lips to move again, his tongue, his vocal cords, he says it over and over again like a blasphemy, an incantation, "Ach můj bože, ach můj zasraný bože, tak sakra dobrý. Tak sakra dobrý."

[Danicka] If she wanted something from him -- other than him -- then Lukas would surely have something to be concerned about, with Danicka. The popular rumors are that she is broken by him, or was broken to begin with, that she's under his thumb, and so far no one but his own packmates have suggested that it's the other way around, that he can't see clearly because he's blinded by the sight of her, deafened by her moaning, paralyzed by her touch, drunk on the scent of her, utterly stupefied because of this goddamn woman. They've shut the fuck up about it.

But if it were true.

If Danicka sought him out because he had something to offer her, something she could not get otherwise, or if she just wanted the power, then he'd have reason to be worried about the way she pulls him against her body and demands that he fuck her, that he give it all to her, that he let go and lose himself, lose control, become completely senseless with satisfied lust.

They have no reason to be concernd, or worried, or afraid of each other. He does not want to pin her down to keep her still any more than she wants to watch him go over the edge for some ruthless purpose. Things are simplified when they are like this, and have been from the start: all that tension, all that fear, all those suspicions have always slid rapidly and inevitably away from their fingers when they've made love. There is just how hard he is for her, how wet she gets because of him, the comingled sounds of their pleasure and intertwining limbs, blended breaths.

The windows of his car are steamed.

And Danicka is coming.

When he makes that noise, when he gasps before kissing her and then moans into her mouth. When he locks up, when the swell and jerk of him makes her squirm suddenly, sharply, as though there is some almost imperceptible vibration of tension from his body to her own that sets her off. When Lukas lets go, when Danicka proves that the reason she always wanted him to was because of this surreal closeness, this suddenness of intimacy. She holds onto him, hands curled tightly around the fabric covering his back still, whimper after whimper after bright cry leaving her as her cunt clenches on him, relaxes, does it again and

again

and again and again in a ripple as violent as the immediate aftermath of a stone breaking the surface of a pool. She knows peripherally that it was not always like this, that before Lukas sex was something else altogether, that a man's orgasm meant little to nothing to her other than that he was done and this might be a good thing and this might be a disappointment but either way it was not like this, it was not enough to make her come the way she comes when he rides her like he does,

the way he does,

kissing her like he can't breathe if he doesn't.

There's something tight and hard about her orgasm, squeezing his cock relentlessly inside of her pussy as though she's milking him for everything he has to give her, wasted as it is... reproductively speaking. She cries out when he stops kissing her, rolling her hips to keep fucking his cock despite the fact that he's lowering his forehead to her brow, gasping for his breath. She's holding onto his arms now, fucking him though she's beneath him, looking at him like she's lost, like she's blinded except for his face.

Her fingernails rake down his biceps gently, more gently than she has before. Her cry becomes a whimper, her whimper becomes a gasp, her gasp shatters into a thousand panting graspings for air. Her hands uncurl, flatten on his biceps, caress their way to his shoulders.

"Krásný. Ach, bože, Lukáš, Stýskalo se mi."

[Lukas] Beautiful.
So fucking good.
Amazing.
Unbelievable.

How they strive within the meager, imperfect boundaries of language to describe just what it is that takes them over when it takes them over like this. When he comes inside her, pours himself into her, gives himself over so completely -- like she's always wanted him to and had to ask him to, repeatedly, before he finally let himself go, not because he wanted to spite her but because he didn't trust her to give it back, and because he didn't trust himself to...

not go too far. Not hurt her. Not lose his mind and tear her open and wake up to a bloody red room.

He's terrified of the thought of losing her. He is not like her. He is not kinfolk, accustomed and resigned to the thought of their Garou relatives and lovers and mates and children dying, dying, dying so soon. He is not the son of a great and glorious Garou who died when he was fourteen, or fifteen, or ... he is not used to the thought that he might lose her, and he cannot stand the thought nor more than he can verbalize what it is, exactly, to make love to Danicka.

To fuck her.
To come in her.

She told him, moments earlier, that she wanted to ride him tonight. To take him to the W, which is where they first made love, and where it first became inevitable that they were falling in love

-- both of which are arguable. Neither of which may be true. They have have been falling in love from the very first night. Or perhaps they were always in love, meant for each other, all the thousand myriad and poetic possibilities a pragmatist and a realist like Lukas does not entertain, except, of course, when he does. Maybe I can live like this forever, he thought once, in a forest, on a solstice, with her.

Digression. She told him, earlier, that she wanted to ride him until he begged her to stop. They're not at the W, and she's not riding him, but when she goes on like that, keeps on rolling her hips and working his cock even as he's shuddering against her and panting for breath, gasping for it like he can't take it anymore, like it's so good it'll implode his mind for her to go on, he thinks about begging her to stop. He's about to tell her to

stop, please stop.
or maybe to
don't stop. don't stop, baby.

when she slows, and her hands claw and then caress and the mold over his shoulders. She finds words out of the breathing silence. He shudders again, hard, to hear them. His hips buck against hers. It's involuntary; it makes him groan again, a tattered sound against closed teeth, before he sinks down on her and just holds her.

Just holds her, for the moment or three or however many they had before they have to get out of this car and go back to their dinner.

[Danicka] The only reason on earth the proprietors of this restaurant let both Danicka and Lukas walk away from their table after ordering was because she handed over her credit card when she informed the waiter they were going to be gone for a little while and back in a jiffy. If she doesn't go back, they'll just charge it. She'll pick up the card later. Danicka knows this, lying underneath Lukas in the backseat of his BMW -- and it amuses her that he's got one now, though she's still wary enough on heavy moons not to tease him about it, as most of the times she's managed to make him angry have been because she laughed at the wrong time, or over the wrong thing -- but doesn't say a word about it.

They could leave. They could straighten their clothes, get into the front seats, and just go somewhere. The Brotherhood, to that narrow bed he can't sleep in sometimes because of the thought of her, the thought of fucking her, the memory of her coming three times in succession, the memory of her laid out and tied down and moaning around his --

Or they could go to her apartment, melt into that big, soft bed of hers and fuck on it sideways, over the edge, heads at the foot of the bed or bodies nestled amidst the thick pillows. They could go to her home, and the only poignancy or sadness in their hearts would come from the fact that he can't stay there night after night with her, secure in that dark den saturated with her scent, feminine and familiar.

Or they could go to the W. And she could ride him until he begs her to stop.

Danicka is trembling slightly against the car's seats as they meld together in the aftermath, but not for the same reason she used to shake the first few times they made love. She lets her eyes fall closed as she plays with the hair at the base of his skull, fingertips as drowsy as her eyelids. She takes a deep breath, her breasts -- one covered, one bared -- moving against his chest with it before her ribs relax again. She is not trembling the way mortal women often did after fucking him, as their lust returned to a more natural state of fear of what he would do, what he clearly could do, what instinct older than memory was telling them he was going to do any second.

She is just shivering as he moves again in her. Because of the way he moves. Because of the groan torn out of him. Because he's shuddering, over and over again, as half-destroyed as he never let her see him early, early on. Because he is hers in a way she never imagined, or expected, or hoped for, or thought she wanted. Because he is hers in a way she never thought existed.

Danicka kisses his temple, his cheek, lips grazing over his skin as she plays with his hair and holds him against her like that, like she wanted to from the start and rightly assumed he would not let her, which is why she did not want him on top of her, which is why she treasures it so much now when he collapses like this, in her arms and in her cunt and against her breast, her shoulder, her neck.

"Moje," she murmurs against his earlobe, the word oddly musical off her tongue. "Moje lásko. Moje lodní důstojník." She nuzzles him, following his skin into the hair past his eyes, his brow. She breathes in the scent of him, smiles to herself as though she's discovered a secret. Her eyes stay closed. "Já hádat Zůstanu tady, dokud se pohybujete. Jste příliš velké."

[Lukas] The next breath Lukas lets out is a sort of unsteady laugh -- humor threaded through the shudders in his breathing. He's yet to open his eyes, yet to get up off of her, yet to even start supporting all of his own weight. Atop her, he's a hot, heavy mass, a solid wall of muscle and blood and rage, completely overcome.

"Měli byste zůstat tady," he says. And he moves, tips his chin up, slides his cheek along hers, the tip of his nose nuzzling her jawline, her ear; her cheekbone. He finds her mouth and he kisses her softly, lingeringly, his chest heaving against hers to pull at air suddenly no longer there as their mouths seal together.

And fall apart. He pants in her ear, lowers his brow to the cool leather seat. Another shudder steals up his spine -- as though he were cold, though that's not it. He holds her tighter, turns to kiss her neck, her exposed shoulder.

I love her, he thinks to himself. Já ji miluju. Miluji ji tolik.

And he sighs against her skin, not in disappointment or sorrow or boredom or ... anything of the sort. It's a sound of contentment, of pleasure in the moment; of a sort of bone-deep relief and recognition, as though he's found his way home after a very long journey.

"Ty měl by zůstat vpravo tady."

[Danicka] "We could stay," she whispers to him, wriggling slightly and angling her head so she can see him better. Something about her voice, about the shift of her head, indicates her desire to see his eyes. She waits until she does, or until he burrows away into the darkness and warmth of the car, of her body. Her hand doesn't still against his scalp, as lazy and rhythmic as a lullaby. Her smile has softened, and faded, disappearing in the shadows of the interior of the BMW.

"Nebo bychom mohli někam jít. Kamkoli budete chtít."

Danicka plants a soft kiss against his cheek, then turns and kisses his lips, eyes closing briefly again, tasting wine or herself or his desire on his tongue. She sighs against Lukas's mouth, into it, her inner thighs shifting against his sides as she readjusts herself underneath him. It moves him inside her, slightly, and she shivers. "Pokud zůstanete ve mně, budu já chci s tebou milovat znovu."

[Lukas] Sometimes their communication transcends words. She doesn't say it, but something about her says it nonetheless: she wants to see his eyes. The muscles in his upper back flex and tense; he raises his head. His mouth presses along her cheek, and then he opens his eyes, looks at her while her hands move through his hair.

The blue of his irises is clear and pale, nearly colorless in this light. His pupils are dilated, drinking in every bit of light he can capture. He looks at her while she speaks, while she leans up. She kisses his cheek, but he's turning his face even as she is -- their mouths meet in between and his lips catch at hers, a lingering, tapering kiss. Another.

When she shifts, Lukas moans, half-muffled -- a subdued ah-- against her mouth. His eyes stay closed another second, and then open again, slowly.

And he kisses her again, slower. Patiently. He explores her mouth, her lips. Runs his tongue over the seam of her lips and then within, opens his mouth, eats at hers with a sort of luxurious, decadent slowness, as though she were the meal they have waiting for them upstairs. His hips rock against hers. He presses himself deeper, softening inside her, melting into her as though all his bones have run molten.

"Pojďme se dojíst večeři," he says. "A pak pojďme se jdeme do ta W."

He kisses her again, firmer. Then Lukas pushes up onto his hands, lowering his head to draw himself out of her. His brow furrows -- he gasps once under his breath -- he sits back on his heels, head bent to accommodate the close quarters of the M3's joke of a rear seat. His hand pauses at her thigh briefly, and then he turns his attention to the buttons of his shirt, doing them up carefully one at a time.

[Danicka] Truthfully, she doesn't want to think about the other women, redheads like the one she saw the night they met (again, always that disclaimer: the second new meeting of their lives) or blondes like her or brunettes (which are her own unspoken preference) he may have fucked

not in this car. Or ever, really. She doesn't exactly focus on the rather obvious fact that he hasn't been fucking anyone else in the car he's only had since they realized they could not do without one another. It isn't important, really, or else simply not worth focusing on. Danicka thinks about sex with him in a cramped and leather-clad backseat, the hood of a hot car at a construction site, the stony and windy balcony of her apartment, a restaurant bathroom, a narrow dormstyle bed, a cheap motel mattress, against the window overlooking New York City

or him kneeling in front of an armchair to pull down her jeans and lick at her until she started grinding on his face

or bent over in the woods, trusting all her weight to his encircling arm, sweat and dirt mixing on their skin, their rhythm something almost tidal

or lying in front of him, his chest to her back, one heartbeat shuddering through ribs and skin and skin and ribs to match the other, hearing a whisper in her ear asking a question he shouldn't really have cared about the answer to, at the time.

And she lies with him quietly, kissing him, delirious with him every time they shift together and move together, dizzy from orgasm and still-ambient, free-floating lust. She tightens her hand in his hair as he rocks against her, their kiss slowing as he softens, her shoulders shuddering when he tries to pull away.

Tries.

Because Danicka pulls him back again, legs around his waist tightening, arms looping around him more securely, as though to hold him there rather than let him go, let him withdraw, let him start putting his clothes right again. She takes a deep breath and does not immediately force herself to relax after she holds him like this, but remains as she is, nuzzling his shoulder for a few moments. And then: then, she slides away, lets him go, and does nothing but lie back for a little while as he starts to button his shirt again.

She gives herself five seconds, full and prolonged, before she sighs to herself and reaches down, readjusting the thong he pulled and moved out of his way in his eagerness to fuck her. Her eyes flutter closed as her fingers graze across hypersensitive, moistened flesh. Danicka slides her legs away from him, turning on the backseat to start rearranging her dress. She pulls her shoulder back up. She covers her exposed breast. She re-does the ties around her waist, though the split of one side of the wrap dress and the other leaves one long, lean thigh bared for now. The fabric will fall to cover her legs again as soon as she gives it a tug or stands up.

Danicka bends and searches the floorboards in the dark for her shoe, but finds it behind Lukas, laughing quietly as she leans over and reaches around him, smiling briefly up at him as he's continuing to work on dressing himself. So many more fasteners, in his case. So much more effort. She slides her shoe on and is using the back window as a mirror to smooth her hair into something reasonable by the time Lukas gets his pants back up.

She looks over her shoulder at him. Smiles. "Chceš, abych na tebe počkat?"

[Lukas] They dress efficiently, saying nothing to each other, but it's far from the sort of cool, distant silence one might imagine Lukas dressed with in the wake of his other trysts. Before her. Before all this. There's nothing cold about him, nothing withdrawn. When she holds him fast, he's all too happy to stay. Even after, his body brushes past hers, his limbs and his torso, as he reaches around her and under her and behind himself and beneath her for shed pieces of his clothing.

She's done first. He looks up from doing up his fly as she asks him if he wants her to wait. He laughs under his breath -- he's about to say no -- and then he pauses.

"Jo." In the dimness, his eyes glitter and spark. He smiles; it's a smile only she's ever seen in this city. "Would you mind?"

In any case, Lukas is nearly done. The zipper hisses shut, then the button, and then he rakes his fingers through his hair, straightens his collar, and reaches forward to push the door open. Getting out of the backseat is even more awkward than getting in, and Lukas chooses to back out, unfolding his height from a bent-double crouch before reaching in to hand Danicka back out.

Effortless. That's what their masks of social graces can be. They're a damn attractive couple, even if his cheeks are flushed and her mouth is raw from kissing, even if their eyes are bright from the rush. They look like the beautiful people, thought they're not actually; neither of them were raised in great privilege or wealth, though one was born so and the other currently is so. Neither of them, more importantly, are anything close to human when the superficial is stripped away, when they're laid down to the flesh and bone. They're much closer to animals. They're something untamed and dangerous.

Carnivorous.

Once, on a street in winter, Lukas put his hand on Danicka's elbow and she rearranged their hands firmly, put hers through his arm. He doesn't offer her his arm now. He takes her hand, shuts the car door, and beeps the alarm.

[Danicka] One more sign of the change between them, or the change in each of them related to what is between them, is that she even waits long enough to ask. That she is not just kissing his cheek and telling him she'll be back up at the table when he's ready. That she stays here in the dark, humid backseat long enough to see that smile. She turns her head to the side as though to hide it, a habit older than her relationship with him, but she smiles, too. And it's a smile that is different from the ones she displays with calculated thoughtlessness, seeming to appear

...effortless. It helps that her hair really is that thick, that it falls naturally into those waves even if she accentuates it with product. It helps that her legs are long and her body is lean, that she's been walking in heels so long now she doesn't stumble even when drunk, that her eyes have a certain gleam to them even when the light isn't hitting them. It's the one thing she's never been able to really hide, from those careful enough to see it: Danicka rarely looks like there's something she's thinking but not saying, but her eyes often say more than anyone can hear.

She waits for him, sitting upright in the backseat as he fingercombs his hair and then taking his hand as he helps her out, back into the night. It's brighter out here, thanks to moon and city lights, and her hand slides easily into his own as they walk back around the corner, back through the door, back up the stairs past pane after pane of glass, step after step of pale wood.

Halfway up she squeezes his hand, which is the last acknowledgement made of making love to him back there, where they discarded the careful smiles and the appropriate postures and the ploys of civility and became themselves, briefly but utterly. Walking upstairs with her is something like walking into a masquerade. He knows who is under the mask, and knows he's the only one who does.

"Ooh," she says as they approach their table, next to that low cushioned bench, "they brought my salad."

[Lukas] Danicka's eyes speak for her sometimes. Clouded, secret, hazel and green in the glimmering tea lights of the restaurant here. Flashing vicious green when she's angry. Jewel-bright, just as vicious, but different, when she's

crouched atop him like a goddamn panther, naked and lean and long; her hair swinging in his face and her eyes locked on his, her body riding his on and on and on until he throws his head back and closes his eyes and gives himself over.

Maybe that's why Danicka used to never hold Lukas's eyes for long. It wasn't submission -- though it might've been the pretense thereof -- and it certainly wasn't bashfulness. Her eyes speak for her. Looking him in the eye would have been a form of letting him in. Was a form of letting him in, that first night, that first, mindbending time.

Maybe that's why he knew from the very start: this woman is more than she seems to be.

But now they're back up on the rooftop of Zed, and she's pleased to see her salad, and he looks at the table and wonders aloud where his soup is, and there aren't chairs to pull out here, but he still waits until she's seated herself to take his. It's thoughtless.

It would be good manners to sit up straight, to await his food politely, to give his fellow diners the courtesy of his good behavior. It would be good manners for her to wait for his food to arrive before she begins to eat. Lukas doesn't care; he sprawls on the couch, sprawls with his knees apart and his back almost entirely pressed to the seat, and only his shoulderblades and head and neck propped against the back cushion. He tells her to get started. He watches people pass their table, his eyes glimmering as they follow this man, that woman, this waiter, that.

His arm stretches across the cushion behind her. There's a sort of protectiveness in the gesture, and something of claim too -- as quietly eloquent as a French defense.

[Danicka] He knew from the beginning that it wasn't all about submission, that at least some part of it was an act. A lovely act, an alluring act that at least seemed unconscious, which made it all the more appealing: the way she'd meet his eyes for a flicker, for a moment, then drop them away without turning her head or looking at the floor to escape him. Danicka never just bowed her neck and hid her face from him, but she held so much back from the start that he, somehow, saw there had to be more when the vast majority of people -- not even just Garou -- were quite happy thinking there was not.

She remembers very clearly dropping item after item of clothing, stripping down to nothing in front of him though there was still an uncanny grace to it. She remembers him watching her, remembers keeping her back to him not as a display of false modesty nor offering some proof that she wasn't frightened of him when she knew better than to be so bold. Danicka kept her back to Lukas as she started to undress that night to avoid looking like she was blatantly putting on a show. She kept her back to him as her sweater fell to the floor because she both hated and loved the feel of him, all Rage and seeming loathing, as hot against her back as a bonfire.

And then he told her to look at him. And she did. And he came to her, or called her to him, and that part she doesn't remember quite so vividly as the first sight of his flesh, the first hints of him bared to her, imagined but not touched, fantasized over without evidence or context, the first time she saw the scar across his midsection. She doesn't recall how they went from standing several feet apart to standing within a few inches of each other, but she remembers the first time they touched

without the thin mask of civility that infused their handshake and introduction,

without the undercurrent of resistance and frustration and suspicion that tensed both their bodies when he grabbed her at the waterfront.

She remembers that in the way she remembers dozens of other moments when the balance of her world shifted, however seemingly subtly at the time, and began an inevitable slide. Danicka remembers kissing him like her life depended on it, partly because she cannot remember the last time she wanted to kiss anyone that badly, to the point where desire verged very fucking close to

need.

Lukas's soup comes in time. Danicka's salad is still cold, his soup is hot when it's set down a minute or two later by their waiter, and while he sprawls behind her she ignores good manners and idly eats a portion of her salad, which has apples in it. And pecans, roasted and spiced. Her backside barely touches his arm, the way he lounges back with it out and the way she sits up to eat, and there's obvious ease with each other that is not borne out of long familarity but an animal, elemental comfort.

"You never answered my question," she says mildly, after flicking a bit of water from the lettuce off her lower lip with a rapid, delicate swipe of her tongue.

[Lukas] A minute or two is all it takes for Lukas to sink deeper and deeper into a sort of absolute, replete languor. His head tips back against the seat. His breathing is slow and even. There's no conversation between them; this is fine. There's an elemental comfort instead, as though they have known each other all their lives; or as though they have recently known each other as completely as two individuals possibly could.

The former is not really true. The latter might be.

Lukas lifts his head, looks up when his soup arrives but stays where he is. He watches the waiter set it down, smiles a thanks, eyes the steam rising off the bowl while Danicka folds lettuce over an apple-slice, spears it with her fork. This place is lit by open-air fireplaces and tealights, gas lamps that, in winter, double as heating. The light gives even his swarthy complexion a golden hue -- makes her shimmer and sheen as though her veins truly beat with molten gold, or sunshine. He watches her eat, watches her casual, graceful, not-quite-impeccable table manners.

Then Lukas lays his head back again, closing his eyes for a moment. She mentions a question -- he opens his eyes again. "Hm?" An absent moment. "What was the question, láska?"

[Danicka] Impeccable table manners would make others uncomfortable in the face of near-perfection. And she is too careful for that. Excellence attracts as much attention as divergence. Being better than the wrong person invites recrimination, resentment, punishment. The night she stood up and yanked as many eyes on her as she could with the way she moved her shoulders back and the way she suddenly owned the room was, for her, nearly inexplicable behavior considering she was in a room of Garou and Kinfolk. She did it for Lee, though, who she hasn't spoken to or heard from since the redhead moved out of her apartment.

Danicka glances back from him, half-smiles at his relaxation, his looseness, the way he looks like he's already well-fed, well-satisfied. There are too many diners up here for the two of them to attract more than passing glances, though those few do linger slightly. Lukas makes people nervous. Danicka makes people wonder. People focus on their meals, not whether or not the young couple near the fire just came back from fucking.

"I asked how you've been. A vy jste říkal, že máš do prdele mě."

She turns her head again and leans forward for another bite, adding: "Which makes me wonder, now, if things have been rough."

[Lukas] A series of emotions, expressions. First, when she reminds him, a sort of dawning comprehension -- oh, right. -- that would've been more self-deprecating if he'd wanted to bother with the pretense. Then a smile steals a march on that, spreads slow and warm over his mouth, a little private, a little secretive, as though they shared an inside joke along with a language unintelligible to most the population of the united states.

That fades, too. His eyebrows draw together faintly. He looks at her a moment. Then, exhaling, unstrainedly, Lukas sits up and dips his spoon into his soup.

"Musel jsem na tebe seru kvůli tomu jak jsi vypadal a voněl, Danička." If his voice were flatter, he'd sound angry. If the words were slower, he'd sound tired. It's neither: it's level, quiet; something he says for her alone, intimate even without the shield of language. "Protože jsem chtěl. Bylo nebylo ... stres úlevu."

A pause. He leans down to sip at his soup.

"Sampson zemřel před několika dny. Vyzývavě a statečně. Stýská se mi po něm, ale já ničeho nelituji. Nemyslím si, že to udělal jeden."

A short pause; perhaps not quite enough to invite commentary.

"A já jsem náročná pro Fostern brzo."

[Danicka] It's at the words stres úlevu that Danicka sets down her fork, but it was the sound of her name that she stopped eating. She twists at the waist on the couch, one leg sliding up onto the cushion, the wrap of her dress parting slightly but not unfolding the way it did for him in the backseat of his car. She looks at him, follows him as he sits up and begins to eat even as she's pausing. He stops talking to take a mouthful of the soup -- which is laden with vegetables in the beef stock, intriguingly flavored, still light because the nights are still warm even in September -- and Danicka interjects quietly:

"That isn't what I meant."

She turns back towards the table, resuming her earlier position, but she doesn't pick up her fork. She lifts her wineglass and sips that instead. There's no hitch, no choke or sputter, when he informs her that the Silent Strider he was packed with for Gaia knows how long died. She has no comment. She also offers no comfort, no lie such as I'm sorry to hear that, no aimless question of whether or not he's all right when he just told her how he is. Danicka makes no pretense, at least with Lukas, of having much investment or attachment to things simply because he does. Or might.

It's the last thing he says that does give her pause, when she's leaning forward to set her wineglass down. He tells her what is going on: a death in his pack, arguably more important to him than family, than even his Tribe, than almost anything

(almost)

and his intention to challenge for rank, and while another woman might point out that there, that proves it, he needed to fuck her because something was wrong, that was never what Danicka thought to begin with. She has not offered to tell him what she did mean by it, but the half-full glass pauses in midair before she simply continues on and sets it on the table before them. Danicka picks up her fork again.

Her pulse is suddenly, unexpectedly so fast that she does not say anything for a moment or two.

"Blahopřejeme," she finally murmurs, picking up another bite of her salad. She sounds almost detached.

[Lukas]
Dice Rolled:[ 4 d10 ] 4, 4, 8, 8 (Success x 2 at target 6)

[Lukas]
Dice Rolled:[ 4 d10 ] 1, 2, 3, 9 (Failure at target 6)

[Lukas] (SHADOW LORDS DON'T FAIL.)
Dice Rolled:[ 4 d10 ] 1, 2, 2, 7 (Failure at target 7)

[Danicka] [APPARENTLY THEY DO.]

[Lukas] After her quiet interjection, there's a pause. Lukas looks at her, studies her, reads her, looks away. When he nods, the firelight glints off the highlights in his hair -- scattered, a curl here and a lock there.

"Okay," he says simply.

The rest of it, then. And when he's finished, and she's finished, she's eating again and he's not. He's still looking at her, still studying her, still trying to read her -- it's like reading a blank wall this time. She sounds detached. She looks ... blank. Passive. Pretty and emptyheaded; a lovely fertile ornament for any male of the Shadow Lord tribe.

Lukas looks down at his soup. He stirs it with his spoon, and then he sets his spoon down.

"Look at me, Danička."

Softly, that. And if and when she does, he studies her again. Finds himself scratching at the same smooth wall, impenetrable.

So; he asks.

"What are you thinking?"

[Danicka] There was a time when he wouldn't have bothered to ask before assuming that how she seemed was how she was, or that how she seemed was covering something awful rather than feelings too strong for her to feel safe expressing. She's a liar. He knows it, even though she so rarely lies to him, now. She still hides, though, still conceals by force of habit so strong it's become second nature. He sees her lie to everyone else and they don't even blink, they can't tell. Many people would wonder, at that, if they were being fooled, too.

For reasons they both know and don't like to think about, he asks instead this time. He can tell she's mildly aggravated, with him, with herself, at still unresolved misunderstanding about what she thought of it -- of him -- when he so abruptly needed to have her that she asked if there was something going on. They don't delve into that, at least not yet. Danicka takes a bite of her salad, the lettuce and apple slice crunching against her tidy white teeth behind her closed lips, still close enough to him that they're almost touching but focusing more on eating at the moment.

She doesn't look at him until she's done chewing and has swallowed, has exchanged fork for wineglass again. If he's watchful -- and he is, he's staring -- he can see her take a small breath before she turns to him, as though drawing a veil over her cheeks.

The irony is, they both know damned well what it means for him to achieve a high enough rank that it will not be obviously and bluntly dishonorable to do as she asked, to do as he has once before and challenge for her. Only this isn't the duty of guardianship in a city far from her blood relatives. This is challenging for her from someone who shares her lineage, who has known her since her birth, who can always come for her or send for her if he wishes and take her away if he wants.

Give her to someone else.

"What do you think?" Danicka whispers, her eyes a little soft, not sad but still aching. Which isn't fair; he's asking because he doesn't know, that much is obvious. But as it was months ago, the phrase, this question, seems to be saying

yes, you do.

[Lukas] Ten minutes ago, in the backseat of his car, they didn't say much. What they did say was impossible to misunderstand: purely concrete, physical demands, requests, pleas. Do this. Touch that. Fuck me this way. Don't stop.

Now they're anything but direct. He can't see into her. She answers his question with a question. He stares at her for another second, and then he looks away. Picks up his wineglass -- forgotten, the wine in it oxidizing in the night air. Lukas sips, then sets it down.

This isn't a direct answer, either. But it is an answer of sorts: "Když vyhraju svoje zařazení, půjdu do New Yorku vidět svého bratra."

His eyes are so keen on hers, searching, scanning, reading. The chips of bluer blue in the pale catch the light and throw it back; make his eyes glitter like a hawk's. But between the two of them, she's the one that always sees deeper.

A hesitation; then: "Pokud si přesto chcete, abych."

[Danicka] Eating their first course has become a gesture, as empty and perfunctory as their masks of social graces, their unimpeccable but more than sufficient manners, and their lies of being human, being civilized, being tamed by anything less than each other. Lukas stirs his soup, barely sips at it. Danicka picks at her salad, augments her already present inebriation with ladylike not-quite-mouthfuls of wine. And they talk about a profound and not easily revoked change that has nothing to do with rings or vows or, necessarily, love in public as though its meaning is even in the same galaxy as the world of the diners around them.

Now would probably be a good time for Danicka to promptly, earnestly reassure her lover that yes, she wants him. No, she hasn't changed her mind. Of course he should go, when is he leaving, how can she help. But Lukas was not, is not, looking for help, much less reassurance. At least it doesn't seem so to her, not in the way he voices that disclaimer which would be nothing of import to most Shadow Lords but is everything to him

because it is her.

Danicka does not nearly drop her wine and fall over herself in a rush to tell him what some part of him has to want, even need, to hear from her before he does something like this. There's risk involved, though he has no idea how much or how little or what concerns are warranted. Vladislav is very nearly an unknown, a stranger, an enigma that is as far from his own context and experience as Danicka once was. A stone egg. A hidden knife.

She takes a breath and puts everything down, then leans over and kisses his cheek. It's almost chaste, as much as anything between the two of them could be. Her lips flutter against his skin when she breathes, and when she speaks, whispering close to his ear without quite breaking contact with him. He can feel her eyelashes scrape his cheek as she closes her eyes.

"My mate," she says in that soft secret of a voice, her body almost leaning against his arm.

[Lukas] They say things to each other without saying them. What she says to him means almost nothing at all to humans; means absolutely nothing yet in the absolute eyes of Garou law; means everything to them.

His eyes close as well. They nestle together for a moment, and then he turns toward her, nuzzles her mouth, her cheek, until he finds his way to her lips and kisses her softly.

"Ano," he says. It's at once an affirmation, a recognition, and a reciprocation. He kisses her again, his mouth pulling gently closed over hers, as though to seal a promise with their lips.

[Danicka] What a question, she could have said. What a stupid thing to say. If she still wants him. If she were easily angered -- and while Danicka most certainly has a temper, it is triggered by little and burns itself out quickly -- she might be angry now, as he might be if their positions were reversed. But in some way anger (his, hers) would hide an ache, a deep tenderness of concern.

Ne, she might have said, too, putting a hand on his leg or his arm or his face, Nemyslete si, že. Neříkej to.

Instead, Danicka moves so their faces touch more intimately than their bodies, a nearness that is visibly and undeniably savage. The way birds cover each other with their wings, wind their necks together and hide their beaks in one another's feathers. The way lions and tigers will rub their faces together, whiskers twitching. The way wolves press their heads close, one snout over the other, eyes closing.

Four of the five senses are received solely through the head. This close together they block some of their own awareness, trust in the other's alertness. They trust that being overwhelmed by sensing the other will not leave them wholly vulnerable, that they are going to be guarded somehow. Adults do not move together like this often unless they are with a child, or with a mate, and it is not entirely public behavior. It belongs in the home. The nest. The den.

Danicka kisses his cheek, and Lukas nuzzles her, kisses her mouth in a way that is not openly lascivious but also siren-sings the fact that they are lovers. She lifts her hand to his face, cups her palm around his jaw, and ignores the footsteps she senses nearby, the smell of their dinner arriving, the plates being set down on the table. It's an example of how much things have changed since he first met her. Once upon a time, she would have made sure that everyone who saw her here tonight walked away with a good impression, or at very least the impression she wanted them to have.

Now she doesn't care. Her heart is still hammering and she can taste soup and lust and wine on Lukas's tongue, and she doesn't care, she doesn't care, she doesn't care.

When the kiss parts, and her eyes open, Danicka keeps her hand on his face. She vaguely remembers him biting her shoulder as he fucked her downstairs, stifling some of his groans and letting others go as if it didn't matter, as though there was nothing to hide or maybe just no one to hear. She kisses him a third time, as soft as that first one he laid on her mouth.

"Milování s tebou, je... uklidňující. Pomáhá mi to pamatovat sám. Nemyslím si, že je to samé jako při používání vás jako stres úlevu." She smiles gently, her eyes warmed by firelight, pupils dilated in the dimness, her irises just bands of shifting color. "To je všechno, co jsem měl v úmyslu."

Her thumb sweeps across his cheek, and she lets her hand fall away. "Would you rather I stay in Chicago while you're gone?" she asks, starting to turn back to the table.

There is no question, at least on her end, about whether or not he will succeed in his challenge for rank. Or maybe she just doesn't think about it. Or understand it. Her knowledge of the Nation and its laws and its unwritten statutes seems comprehensive, but she is still Kinfolk, and if there were anyone to have gotten a thing or two wrong in the teacher, it would be Laura Dvorak and Vladislav Musil.

[Lukas] Danicka speaks as though there's no doubt that Lukas will pass his Fostern challenge. Maybe it's because she doesn't understand the nature of such things. Maybe it's because the two Garou of her close acquaintance were very likely the type that never once failed a rank challenge.

Or maybe it's just that she knows him. Knows Lukas wouldn't challenge without being very certain, certain to a fault, that he would pass.

She explains to him what she meant, instead. His eyes open when she does; the way he looks at her softens with understanding. He raises his hand to her face in return, touches her cheek as she touches his. There's nothing lascivious about the way they touch each other, kiss one another. There's no question that they're lovers. It's in the way they touch each other, kiss one another.

And then Danicka asks him if she should stay in Chicago, and Lukas frowns faintly.

"I want you with me," he says softly, without hesitation. And then he does hesitate, palming her cheek, stroking his fingers back through her hair. "But maybe it'd be better if you stayed in Chicago."

He doesn't explain it. He has any number of reasons, and he doesn't explain any of them.
Maybe she can guess.

[Danicka] Though between the two of them there have been far too many moments of doubt, far too many hesitations and long days of wondering if they would see each other again, if they wanted to, what would become of them when they finally admitted that they could not bear being apart and came together again. There is no doubt in this, though: why challenge, if you are not almost certain you will win?

Shadow Lords don't fail. They would sooner die.

Danicka ignores their meal. Lukas ignores their meal. They look at each other, they stay close to each other, they touch each other. They feed on the intimacy between them above all other things, before anything else. They are at least partly satisfied by it.

She takes a breath. Lets it out. Tips her head to the side and retains that small, soft smile that almost looks sad because she doesn't try to make it look like anything, and her features are so relaxed he can see the faint lines that make her look older than twenty-five. One can imagine how the lives of Kinfolk, the life of this particular Kinfolk, ages them prematurely even as it gives them a certain regenerative edge. One can imagine what her father, in his sixties, actually looks like or how old he really feels. Danicka looks like she's nearly thirty, in the right lights and with the right smiles and without all the trappings meant to hide things like age and truth.

"I suppose it could also depend on whether or not you're planning on contacting him before you go to New York. If you are, then he may want me to come. If you aren't, he'll have more questions if I come with you."

It's little things like this, hints at how well she knows her brother, whom she almost never talks about. Tries not to think about. But there are signals, intermittent but bright, that there is very likely no one on earth who knows as much about Vladislav as Danicka. Who knows him as deeply, more than even he realizes. Better, most certainly, than his own packmates. One has to wonder if Vladislav knows Danicka with equal clarity.

She offers Lukas very little insight. But she brings it up: whether Lukas is expected or not makes a difference in whether or not she should go. Ultimately, however:

(and she sighs this more than speaks it)

"I'll probably go, unless you ask me not to."

[Lukas] As pale and blue as his eyes are, Lukas's eyelashes are as thick and dark as his hair. When his eyes close, they seal against his cheek, a brush-border that entirely hides the cold clarity of his irises.

A strap of muscle pulls taut in his cheek when he swallows.

Then he opens his eyes. They're drawn apart by now, but not very far. Neither of them have really returned to their meals. He finds her eyes unerringly, steadily.

"I just don't want you within his reach," he says, "in case I fail."

[Danicka] "You worry too much," she says, and it's gentle, but it's also dismissive. It's also true, though only if you have the same measure of how much is 'too much' as the speaker.

Danicka tips her head to the side, watching him closely. "I told you. He'd give me to you in a heartbeat."

She doesn't say the rest, the obvious, the things he already knows: that being in Chicago does not keep Danicka from being out of her brother's reach. The man is an Adren Theurge. Even Lukas can use a Cliath Theurge to reach his Kin, those met and those unknown, with a weakling spirit meant only to convey a message. Danicka and Vladik are connected by blood and memory, and Gaia only knows what else. She's always within his reach.

But she doesn't point it out. She doesn't need to.

[Lukas] She has told him that. Many times, in fact. He doesn't believe her. It's not so much that he believes she would try to fool him, that she's lying to him for some ulterior motive he can only guess at.

It's that he cannot believe something like that. To Lukas, Danicka is precious. Beloved. Priceless. He can no more comprehend how anyone would gladly give her up than he can comprehend an elder sibling that would not protect the younger; a Garou that would not protect his kin.

Which, in the end, is still something he expects Vladislav to do. Protect Danicka. Hold her. Keep her. Refuse to relinquish her.

"I asked my family about your brother," he says suddenly, "several months ago. I -- "

Lukas pauses; he can't explain why he did this. He doesn't know why he did it, himself; months ago, before he'd even properly realized he couldn't stand to be without her, before the thought of mate and mine was even properly in his mind.

"He didn't sound like someone who relinquishes what is his easily," he finishes. "And when it comes to you, Danička, I can't afford not to worry."

[Danicka] And yet he knows. He knows that the Garou in Danicka's family had a very different definition of what it means to protect one's Kin. He knows that Vladislav destroyed her books because she rebelled once, or because he disliked something she did, or because she said the wrong thing at the wrong time. He knows that Vladislav beat her bloody and senseless so many times throughout her life that she can't be healed by Mother's Touch without associating it with those instances. He knows that her elder sibling very well could have destroyed her, broken her on a level beyond the physical, and yet here she is with him, whole and...

perfektni.

Or something like it.

So Lukas expects -- because even knowing what he does, the truth is so unthinkable -- that Vladislav won't want to let her go. That he'll want to keep her, whether to keep power over her or gain power over him or something. He won't give her up easily. He won't give her away.

At least he's honest. He had his family look into things, as it were. Danicka could get angry at this point. She tips her head to the side and the innocence of the gesture may be chilling, since her anger so seldom comes across in flashes of open wrath. But she doesn't even frown, at least not in fury. Her eyebrows draw together after a moment, for a moment.

"Worry if you need to," she says, which is not so much permissiveness as acknowledging that, at least, is not something she'll argue with him overmuch about it. He needs to worry. She needed a time limit. They must do certain things, for reasons the other can't always fathom or agree with. But it's necessary.

Danicka is not finished. She's halfway through the breath, exhaling it with a rather careful: "...but a large part, if not the majority, of anything your family -- or anyone in the Nation -- might know about my brother is, very likely, an image I helped construct and maintain." A beat.

"I know him." She says this, and not the obvious and related truth, because she's said it before. Lukas never knew, does not know, never could or will know Night Warder or Heals by Pain. They are Shadow Lords. Their Kinfolk are many things, including, as Danicka put it to Liadan once: secret-keepers.

[Lukas] Lukas pauses for a beat.

Some part of him wants to do this the right way. The traditional way. The proper way. Which is to say -- some part of him wants to do this without any assistance, all on his own. He wants to win her for himself, by himself. He wants that challenge, that victory, the alpha male's rush at winning the right to mate by his own strength and cunning..

And another part of him, deeply practical, wants simply to keep her. Wants simply her, at all cost, for as long as this can possibly last.

(Forever and ever? she asked him once. Is that what you want?)

The answer may as well be yes. The answer may as well be: that's impossible.

Regardless, it's a war inside him; the part of him that wants to do this alone, the part of him that wants to ask her, she who knows Vladislav better, perhaps, than anyone else alive, everything she could possibly tell him about her brother. Everything she could possibly tell him to help him win her.

Though when it comes down to it, perhaps all he really needs to know is:

I know him.
and
He'd give me to you in a heartbeat.

So Lukas is silent, and thinking, and he's not looking at Danicka now but instead at his hands, the hard arches of the knuckles, the articulation of the joints, the tendons in the back and the veins that snake over them; the length and capability of the fingers.

At length he raises his head again, looks directly at this woman who calls him her mate.

"Are you certain of that? Jste si jistá, že on by vzdát se vám nahoru tak lehce?"

[Danicka] What is right, traditional and proper among his kind -- their kind, in a way -- is not what the world considers right and good. There are a great many Americans who could understand, on the other hand, Lukas's desire to do this without help. Danicka herself senses it, knows it has nothing to do with her gender or the fact that she can't shift or the fact that she's not a bound packmate. She understands a thing or two about needing self-sufficiency. She made a point, whether it was called for or not:

she worked for every dime she has.

More than that, though, she understands it on a level that has less do with laws and individuality and more to do with the way he's been with her when he's finally let himself go. The way he was with her, and the way she was with him, the night of the summer solstice. Danicka understands that he's an animal. She thinks of it when she looks at the moon. When she thinks about the upcoming equinox. When she looks into his eyes, or the slope of his shoulders and back when he's standing up from her bed to get dressed, or when she thinks of him sitting in men's clothes, lounging in a club, driving his car, looking for all intents and purposes to be mortal, to be human.

He likes her masks. He likes seeing through them.

And she thinks: Yes. Yes, I know what you mean.

As Lukas looks at his hands, Danicka reaches over and strokes the hair above his ear, fingernails running through the shorn strands behind his temples, following the line of the curling, folding cartillage. She does it again. And again. She pauses when he turns to look at her, and then resumes the steady, hypnotic gesture.

"Think of where you come from. What you've done. Who you are."

Her hand scritches his scalp once, then withdraws back to her lap. She starts to turn towards their meal, leaning over and tearing a bit of lamb from his plate with her fingertips, tearing at the meat with a deftness both delicate and savage and pulling it to her mouth. Danicka never would have done this six months ago. Maybe not even three. But in the woods they thought the same thing: they could stay there

(forever).

He could hunt for them, feed them. Keep her warm at night. Keep her safe. Keep her.

She pauses, chewing the bite of lamb and looking at his plate instead of him as she thinks. It's long enough for him to say something, but very likely nothing he has to say will change the fact that she adds after swallowing: "The only males who have ever wanted me were either not born true, were of the wrong blood, or withdrew their interest when they found out about my... weakness."

She shrugs. There's no self-deprecation in the words, or regret. She calls it weakness because whether it was her fault or not, it is a sensitive spot that can prove a danger to the Garou around her, or at least a point of uselessness. It's a crack, and one that can be exploited. Danicka knows it, and the fact that this is one more reason why she is twenty-five, attractive, well-bred, financially stable, fertile and yet still unclaimed does not seem to bother her one iota.

Why should it?

She is with Lukas now.

[Lukas] There's something primally soothing -- something elementally comforting -- about Danicka's fingers tracing through Lukas's hair. As she strokes her fingertips through again and again, his eyelids relax; his shoulders.

The hair there is still faintly damp. Recently shorn, he's lost most of the curl his hair gains when it's of sufficient length, or when it's wet. Recently damp, he's regained some of it -- at the back of his neck; at the hairline.

He turns to her to speak. She stops and he, speaking, nudges his head gently against her hand, the way an animal might when it's seeking attention.

She resumes. He exhales faintly under his breath, and when she draws away he catches her hand in his, kisses her palm. All this, every part of this, has been alongside their more conventional, human conversation, their words and their sentences, their speech-patterns. It's a second, instinctual form of language, and when it's the two of them, it becomes no less important -- perhaps more so -- than the other.

Though Danicka's attention settles on Lukas's dinner, the Ahroun's stays where it is. It's only when she finishes that he looks away. She's torn a shred of lamb off the bone. Lukas ordered his meat medium-rare; it's only the scorched surface that she can easily rip away. No matter. Lukas picks up his knife and fork. This is a steakhouse, and their cutlery is expensive and sharp. Quickly, efficiently, expertly, he parts the rack between the ribs, slicing it into eight and eight separate wedges.

And then he picks the plate up, settles it on the couch between them. Turns toward her fully, drawing one knee up onto the seat sideways. And, picking up a rib, resumes.

"When do you want to go to New York, then?"

[Danicka] Were it not for the shared meal -- and the way they share the meal with a plate between them and fingers and knives being used rather than forks -- and that nuzzling encouragement he gives to her idle stroking, the turn of their conversation could seem almost businesslike. He goes from concern to asking her when they should go, as though working out travel plans for a vacation when not long ago they were touching on a historically highly sensitive topic. Danicka licks her thumb and her fingertips lightly, somehow managing to make it seem polite, then picks up her own plate.

This place designs their presentations carefully. Though Lukas ordered a rack of lamb, it was still plated elegantly, trendily, with slices of citrus and lemongrass clinging to the nearing end of the summer season. Danicka's gotten Atlantic salmon, and pale beads of fat linger on the surface of the flaky red flesh, speckled with pepper and surrounded by half-moons of lemon. She uses a fork, since picking up the fish in both hands and gnawing at it isn't exactly an appealing option. She shifts on the couch as she removes her first bite from the rest of the filet, moving so that the side of her thigh aligns with, presses against his shin. Contact.

Ever, always: touch. Even if nothing else is working: touch.

"Orientation is on the twenty-first," she says thoughtfully after chewing -- slowly -- and swallowing the salmon. "Registration is on the twenty-third. And classes begin on the twenty-ninth." She looks at her plate, rather than at him or around the restaurant, and peels another bite off the filet. "So either before then, or some weekend. I won't have a break until Thanksgiving."

Danicka turns and looks at him. "I know it isn't necessary, but if he asks... would you mind seeing my father?" Not 'meeting'. Technically, he's already met Miloslav Musil. He just happened to be a child at the time, Danicka's temporary and rare playmate and not an Ahroun trying to take her from her brother.

[Lukas] They're sitting close enough to one another that her thigh can align to his shin. That her hand can trail idly through his hair. That there's barely room to fit a plate in the triangle of space between the back cushion, his leg and her thigh; that she must hold her plate or else set it on her lap, because there's no more room between them.

And he watches her eat -- an idle, thoughtless, fond sort of regard. He should probably eat his lamb with knife and fork. Should slice the meat from the delicate, curving bone, part it into small pieces, eat politely. He doesn't. Lukas eats like the predator he is: with his hands, picking the meat up one rib at a time and tearing, ripping, sucking it off the bone.

His left hand only, though. Because his right hand he saves for unfurling across the space between; for touching her cheek and her hair, gently, when she says she won't have a break until thanksgiving.

"Am I going to miss you?" he asks, gently kidding; serious beneath it. And, when she asks, "I'd love to see your father again."

He means it. His memories of Mr. Musil are even vaguer and fainter than his memories of Mr. Musil's daughter; an old, old man, it seemed to him then, back when men and women their age now seemed like such adults, such grown-ups, such impossibly old and matured creatures. As old as a grandfather, Mr. Musil had seemed, smelling faintly of wood and wood polish, quiet and methodical and rather kind, never quite with the sort of sudden temper or impatience that Jaroslav Kvasnička -- otherwise a taciturn, reticent man -- could sometimes exhibit.

More than once, playing cards with Marjeta and Miloslav, when Lukas and his sister tore by at a hundred miles an hour, Jaroslav was known to whip his head around and bellow with startling volume:

Lukášek, Anežka, pro lásku boží, zpomalit!

And nearly every visit, at the end, when Lukas and Anezka were still upstairs, or out back, or on the rug with the prism-cast rainbows pretending if they could just pretend not to hear their father they would be allowed to stay another hour, another thirty minutes, another ten minutes:

Lukášek, Anežka, nyní znamená TEĎ.

One imagines if Jaroslav had been mated to a Garou, or if he had known his son would grow up to be a Garou, he might've learned the sort of unflappable patience Miloslav appeared to so perfectly embody.

[Danicka] Sometimes he kisses her the way he eats his food, turning his head one way or the other, feasting more than worshipping -- though in Danicka's eyes the two are occasionally inextricable from one another. Yet he never really eats his food the way he kisses her, never quite the same attention, the same devouring necessity -- though physically he needs to eat, and does not need to kiss her.

Her hands remain clean but both are busy when Lukas moves to touch her face and brush back long blonde strands. It's hard to tell which is softer as his fingers run across both her skin and her hair, which is silkier. Her skin is warm, her hair cool. Her skin changes color based on her emotion, flushed when she's angry or when she's coming with him, tan or pale according to season.

Is he going to miss her? She looks over at him, smiles gently, but then she nods. It's amused, but more tender than anything else. She's going to be busier. She's going to be less freely available. She's going to be an epic ball of stress come finals week, and she doesn't even know it yet. He goes on and mentions her father, who was indeed nearly fifty when Danicka was barely of school age, when Lukas's parents were perhaps in their thirties. He is nearing seventy now, and not all of his seeming patience and quietude these days is because of caution.

Miloslav was kind. He never raised his voice, never at Lukas and his sister, never to Danicka. He was always there when the skinny blonde child went bolting behind him to hide because the snap of Jaroslav's shout made her hurtle to the verge of panicked tears. The children were too young to recognize someone who expects to be hit. Lukas's mother and father simply knew: her mother was an Ahroun who insisted on living with the family, even if she was never there when they visited. Miloslav had rough hands that moved slowly and a low voice that swelled and descended with calm. The closest he ever got to shouting was a certain flattening of his voice, a hardening that Lukas -- that none of the visiting family -- ever heard.

Danicka never really needed to be yelled at. She was very obedient. She liked to run with Lukas and Anezka, though she couldn't keep up for long. She liked to lie on her back on the living room rug and lift her hands up, play with the rainbows that would hit her hand as the sun set. She liked sitting on the grass outside and only sat on the porch steps when she was hugging her arms around her body and staring wide-eyed as the Kvasnicka children hung upside down from the oak tree's branches, as though she could keep them from falling and cracking their skulls if she stared hard enough.

She would lift her feet up, too. They would compare the lengths of their legs, soles pointed at the ceiling, each set of legs clad in bluejeans or in summer shorts or a Band-Aid here or a patch there and their socks inside out and dirty and Danicka's with lace sometimes, and Anezka and Lukas inevitably starting to kick each other and Danicka scrambling away to crawl on the couch where she could see them wrestle from a safe vantage point.

It was a long time ago. She smiles and there's no telling if she remembers Miloslav introducing himself to Lukas as though the five year old were a man, offering his impossibly larger hand to shake. There's no way of telling if she remembers all the times he tried to get her to be nicer to Anezka, or warned her that Vladislav would be Changing soon and they would not be able to have friends come over so much, or if she is thinking, now, of growing up without him when he was not so very far away, when they were living and developing in the same city but may as well have been in different worlds.

She puts her fork down on her plate and licks her lips with a careful swipe of her tongue, then leans over and kisses his temple with closed lips. Drawing back, she smiles to herself, and doesn't explain why. She just takes another bite.

[Lukas] It's in the little things, the gestures like these, that it becomes so starkly, undeniably clear that they're neither of them human. That they're lovers.

When Danicka's lips press to Lukas's temple, his eyes -- glitteringly, coldly, wildly blue as the sky ten thousand feet up -- close. He turns his head and he presses into the kiss as thoughtlessly, as easily, as naturally as he'd turned into her touch, earlier.

She doesn't explain it. He doesn't ask her to. He understands it, intuitively, if not explicitly. He understands, too, why her brother might ask him to meet with her father; why this might matter to Danicka; why all of this, any of this, matters to either of them.

Before she quite draws back, he reaches up with his clean hand, wraps it gently and firmly behind her neck, holds her where she is. He turns his head and kisses her mouth once, gently. Nuzzles her for a second. Lets go.

His eyes reopen. She eats her salmon, he his lamb. His plate is placed deliberately where she can eat off of it. He doesn't mind sharing with her; he doesn't even mind that she took that first bite. Danicka may or may not have seen him share food with his pack, the brothers and sisters of his soul. She may or may not remember that even then, he always took the first bite, save when there was an Alpha to cede to.

It's different with her. He doesn't mind. He wouldn't mind if she ate it all, left nothing for him. He wouldn't mind giving that up to her, or anything else she might want, or ask for, or need. He's thought, however briefly or insanely, about living with her in the wild. About hunting for her, keeping her warm, keeping her safe, keeping her. What he hasn't thought about, but what's equally true, is that he would give up the last meat off the kill for her, the last heat of his body. He would protect her, and keep her, at all cost.

Because: she's his mate. Sometimes he's not sure when that became incontrovertible truth; when he recognized her as such. When he began to fall in love. Sometimes he comes to the same conclusion that's flickered through her mind, ephemeral as a firefly: the night of the solstice. The night she pulled him over her for the first time. The night they met in the Brotherhood, when she was following his then-brother into the spare room. The night they met at SmartBar.

The first time they met at all, children in her father's house, where they would later tear around, climb trees, play on the rug, color, read, where he and his sister would jostle and shout and fight, where she would watch them and realize, however indistinctly, that not all children are as quiet and obedient and easily terrified as she was. That her childhood was not the only sort there was.

Nevermind -- that was a long time ago. Here, now, they're eating their dinners, they're sitting under the sky on a rooftop in the middle of Chicago, talking about her father and her brother and her and him. And his mind has made wide circles through one subject or another; returns, again, to the first --

"I'll call you when I pass the challenge, then. I'll likely head to New York the morning after, or maybe the day after that. Should we meet there like last time?"

[Danicka] She is not expecting him to kiss her. Not now that they've started eating, that there are juices from meat and fish on their lips, that they are pretending better and better as time goes by that they did not just wreck one another in the backseat of a car parked alongside the street. But Danicka kisses him back, unaware of and so clearly not correcting his assumption that Vladislav might be the one asking Lukas to see Miloslav.

If Lukas understood Vladislav better, or knew more about Danicka's home life and the way the dynamic shifted when Laura died, he would not even consider it a possibility. He, after all, still respects his own father. Stiff as their interactions may be, strained as their relationship may seem, the bonds of affection among the Kvasnickas are worlds apart from the connections in the Musil family. Though perhaps all he really needs to understand is that in a family of two Garou and two Kinfolk, each pair a set of parent and child, chances are she is closer to her father than even he can tell.

She sighs softly when he nuzzles her. Her eyes are still closed for a moment. They open their eyes within a second of one another, turning back to their meals. She's never seen him share food with anyone. She's never asked if she could take a bite. This, like so many other things, remains unspoken. Neither of them know or can tell the other when it became okay, just as neither of them know or can tell the other this is when I fell in love with you or this is when I knew.

No matter. No matter that she has dreams about being naked and eating what he's brought her, no matter that in those dreams he's wolf or man and never anything in-between, warped, twisted into an amalgamation of bodies, filling her with terror rather than warmth. No matter that she has begun, after months of resisting exactly this, to feel something like safe with him. 'Something' like safe, because she is not sure this is what 'safe' feels like. She is not sure she knows what that is.

Lukas has heard her say that he has no idea what all he has given her, what all he gives. From the beginning: that not all children were like her, not all families were like hers. For now: that not all Ahrouns are like Night Warder, that not all Shadow Lords are like Heals by Pain, that not all Garou are like Mjollnir's Heart, that love is something entirely different than what she always thought, that sometimes it's possible to have a werewolf at her back and not feel afraid.

When he passes the challenge. The corner of her mouth tightens with a smile as her lips close over a bite of salmon. She chews, turning to look at him, and her eyes glitter slightly. With her it's less starlight, less cold, more like fish flickering just out of sight under the surface of water, hinting at movement, hinting at life. "I'll go on the full moon," she says. "I'll wait for you there."

[Lukas] "All right," he agrees, quietly. And, as though to seal a deal: "On the full."

They settle into their meals, then. He eats lamb, and some of the potatoes, almost none of the vegetables. He tries a piece of her fish, peeling it off with his fingers much as she'd taken lamb off his plate with hers. Conversation turns to other, lighter matters. He mentions a book he'd read, that he thinks she might like. He asks if she wants to borrow it. He asks if she's finally set down her schedule for fall.

He tells her someone got her old Vaio infected with a virus at the Brotherhood. He tried to clean it up but it's still all fubared. He wants to know if there's anything else he might try before he just reformats the whole damn thing.

He says this lamb is really fucking good. He says he thinks the first time he ever had lamb, at least in the united stated, might have been at her house.

And it goes on, like that. Casual; warm. Close to one another, their legs touching, and when he's finished eating he stays where he is, leaves everything where it is, leans his head on his fist and his elbow on the back of the couch and keeps his eyes on her, looks at her endlessly, fondly, while they talk about lamb and computer viruses and college courses and ...

It wasn't always like this. They have love between them now, to be certain, but that's been the case for longer than they've cared to admit. The difference is trust. That's something almost rarer than love, almost more precious. There was a time when he loved her without trusting her. It was a world away. It was torturous, because every time he thought it might be the last time, and not because he would die or she would be hauled back to New York City by her brother, but because he thought she might simply lose interest. Move on. Fuck someone else; love someone else.

Like a slut. Or a cat in heat. Or any of the hundred unkind names he's called her in his head, all while trying to convince himself he doesn't love her, couldn't ever trust her, can't.

Sometimes Lukas thinks about those first months, those first weeks, the things he did to her and to himself and to them to push her away, hold her away. The things he did to keep himself safe, when all the while what he was really doing was flaying them both to the bone. He thinks about it and it hurts; it makes him fold on himself. He doesn't like to think of it often, but when he does it's with mingled pain and grief and something like shame.

One night, not too long ago, she told him all the things she wished she'd never done, or done differently. He never gave her a similar litany, but he has one under his skin, in his bones.

Sometimes she can see that, too. It's in the way he looks at her once in a while -- as though she were something more precious than he deserves.

Then they're done with the meal, and they're done with their wine, and their plates are cleared away and they're offered the dessert menu and Lukas is interested in the tiramisu again, but he wants it to go. And when that comes, boxed up, they pay, one or the other; they've never seemed to care much whom or how, and then he gets up. If she has a coat he holds it for her while she slips into it. Otherwise, he takes the boxed tiramisu in one hand, holds his other out for hers.

Descending the blonde-wood stairs into the modernist dining room with its sleek open spaces and its near-cubist styling, Lukas looks back at Danicka, smiling.

"Where do you want to go?" he asks her. She's told him once already. He asks anyway.

[Danicka] The fact that Danicka says she'll wait for him even before he challenges means she's going whether he succeeds. Or it means she has no doubt that he will. They set it, and set it aside, and Danicka eats his vegetables off his plate when she's finished with her salmon, commenting idly that most aphrodisiacs are fruits and vegetables. She shares her own food with the same freedom he shows with his lamb, though there's perhaps less weight given to that: one would expect her not to snap her jaws at him for eating off her plate, one would expect her to go with anything he likes, one would think she would deny him nothing out of fear for her life and well-being.

The truth is quite different. The very fact that he knows she would deny him if she wanted to eat that bite, or refuse to go downstairs and fuck him if she didn't want to, or make him receive her on top of him when he wants to get her on all fours, is why every single act of tenderness and openness is so precious. It is why, though they look almost normal on this rooftop, this behavior would be so out of place among their own kind.

She knows what classes she wants to take but it depends on if they're open.

She'll come by in the next few days to look at the Vaio.

She tells him if he likes the lamb he should've tried the green beans. She says it with a small smile. She's amused.

Finished eating, she leans back as she was when he first came upstairs, nearly horizontal, only this time she aligns herself to him, twists her body slightly. Any closer and they would be curled up as though on a bed, Danicka listening to him speak and hearing the rumble of his voice inside his chest under her ear. For her, trust and love were inextricably twined from the beginning, each one terrifying because of the other, each one something she struggled to resist and surrender to at turns, but they were never separable. She trusts him because she can love him. She loves him because she can trust him.

They both feel shame at times. And guilt. They put it away when they can. There feels sometimes like there is no time for it. Which is probably why they don't struggle over who pays -- Danicka does, this time, though in her mind it's because she asked him to come here, she would have simply had dinner alone if he could not have come.

And that, too, has changed: once, she would have thought he simply wouldn't come, even if he could, for whatever damn fool reason he had. To not submit to her. To not go when called buy a mere Kin. To make it seem like he wasn't falling in love with her. To keep her away. Now, though, she knows that if he can, he will come. If he should not, he will probably still come.

She slides her hand into his as they walk downstairs, thinking of that and transferring some measure of her own trust, or reassurance, from her palm to his. Danicka looks at him, smiles, then returns her attention to their descent, taking care on the steps in heels and with wine still lurking in her bloodstream. "Honestly?" she says softly, a word she almost never uses, "I don't care."

[Lukas] Lukas thinks for a moment. At the bottom of the stairs he pauses, turns to her as she comes down the last step, descends from eye level to below.

She's so fucking beautiful. They're so fucking beautiful together, the male dark, the female golden, and in her heels she's the perfect height, the ideal, the top of her head about level with his mouth, his nose.

When he looks at her, he doesn't see ideal, though. He doesn't even necessarily see her blonde hair, which reminds him of gold brocade when it's spread over her sheets; or her green eyes, which he looked and looked for that week they were apart. He doesn't see that her skin is smooth and her features are beautiful, though he does see her beauty. He sees it through a different lens, a bone-deep understanding, a recognition:

moje. moje láska.

Once, he said to her: you're so beautiful to me. And Danicka dislikes it, perhaps hates it when people tell her she's beautiful (as if that were all that mattered), but that wasn't what Lukas was telling her, after all.

To me. The words matter, as much as 'you' mattered when she said I came here to fuck you; as much as 'my' mattered when she said my love.

But he doesn't tell her she's beautiful to him. He doesn't tell her -- any of the things he might think when he looks at her, really.

He says, "I'll take you to the W if you still want to go." Pause. "But I like waking up in your bed."

[Danicka] The week they were apart he searched for green eyes like hers, finding only imitations and accidents from the light. She ran from black hair, from ice-blue eyes, but if the body was right she would close her eyes and groan as her hips rolled, one hand sliding down over pectorals and ribs and then jerking away upon finding smooth skin where there should have been a vicious scar. She ran from anything that reminded her of him, when it was already too late, when even the shape of clouds would make her think of him.

She dislikes being reminded that she's beautiful, but she knows. She has heard it as though it's all that matters, or at least the most important. She's also been reminded, over and over, of what that did to her stock. Beautiful kinswoman, beautiful children. It's rare to see a well-bred Kin -- or Garou -- who is not also lovely, handsome, physically manifesting a purity that's half blood and half spirit. There are other reasons that she's never even hinted at. Won't, if she can avoid it. She reaches out with her free hand and touches his face, lifting it up and smiling at him.

"I like it, too." Her hand caresses once, falls away. "Do you want to meet me there? My car's around the corner."

[Lukas] It's busier down here. Waiters weave between tables. Diners walk upstairs in the wake of their greeters; diners come downstairs a little more intoxicated, a little less restrained, leaning on one another and laughing. There's activity all around, light all around, and here, here, Lukas does not lean into Danicka's touch quite the same way, quite so thoughtlessly and primally.

His eyes do close for a second, though. All that clarity, all the blue, shuttered away for the space of a long blink. A closure.

And a reopening. He smiles again. "Yeah." He takes a step back and all at once their distance before, which had not been obscene in the slightest, which had not been inappropriate, seems in retrospect unmistakeably intimate. "I'll see you there."

--

They part at the entrance. He doesn't race her this time. Only raced her the once. What he's never told her -- but what she can guess, what she must know -- is how that excited him. Aroused him. Turned him the fuck on, just like chasing her through the woods on solstice night turned him on.

Just like pursuing her in the dead of winter, wanting her and pursuing her and telling himself he doesn't, he isn't, he wasn't -- intrigued him, compelled him, drew him all the more to her.

The beemer pulls up a few minutes after the infiniti. And Lukas goes to the intercom, if Danicka's already gone up.

[Danicka] There's a roof over them now, a shield between the two of them and the sky, which somehow makes a difference. She can't think of a time they've been more careless, more animal, than they were on the night of the solstice. It's striking for her to realize that it was nearly three months ago. She watches his eyes fall closed and her heart beats a little faster, and she stifles a sigh, and their hands slip apart. Danicka nods to him, saying nothing because there is nothing really to say. She walks with him to the doors, and they go separate directions, each to their cars, his still smelling faintly of sex, hers gleaming and pristine.

Perhaps he sees her on the road. Perhaps he remembers the impromptu race she instigated the night they went to the club with Lee and Madoc and Andrew and Gina, and how though he has speed and reaction time that definitely outclasses her own, they still kept pace with one another, they still slid into the parking lot within seconds of one another, they still both exited their cars bright-eyed with excitement. They both reacted with sharp lust to the sense of a hunt, the playful competition.

Danicka drives with extra care tonight, though, and it's very likely that Lukas gets there before she does. She goes down into the parking structure of Kingsbury Plaza and takes the elevator to the lobby to get out and let him in. He'll see her coming through the great glass doors. The doorman vaguely recognizes him by now, associates him with the blonde resident who has, on occasion, sat outside with him at five in the morning with coffee and muffins from the corner bakery. He does not like Lukas. None of the door guards are any fonder of his presence than they were of Sam's, the one time the Fenrir showed up. But it's highly unlikely Lukas even notices the stiffness of the doorman's posture when he walks towards the doors.

The woman in the red dress pushing open the door to let him in is smiling at him, beaming almost, showing an open delight that not so long ago she would have hid even here. There are still places where she'd hide how happy she is to see him, how happy she is to have him back when it's only been a few minutes. Zed isn't that far from her place, but she greets him as though he's been gone for a week, throwing her arms around his neck when he steps into the lobby, smiling into his shoulder, standing on her toes.

[Lukas] There's something to be said for his height, his surreal strength. Danicka all but throws herself into his arms and Lukas sweeps her up effortlessly in the curl of his right arm, half-carries her the first few steps into the lobby and the elevator bank before setting her down again. Then again, it's possible that even were Lukas six inches shorter, fifty pounds weaker, he'd still sweep her up the same way because he's just. that. happy to see her.

"Baby," he calls her, at once a naming and a greeting.

Even though it's been ten minutes. Even though they've already fucked in his car, and shared their meal, and talked to each other about the sort of commitment, the sort of goddamn lifelong commitment, that human lovers would be in awe of.

That that was the dinner conversation tonight barely pings on Lukas's consciousness. It's momentous, and yet -- not that momentous. He doesn't wonder why. He already knows.

I made you my mate the night of the solstice.

It was simple as that.

Anyway: the elevator banks, now. And his arm stays around her waist, holding her against his side. His face is upturned to the light over the door; there's something faintly eager in his expression, the sort of pleasant anticipation of children and animals. Men, human men, don't wait for elevators like this. They're bothered by the delay, aggravated by the wasted time; they concentrate on the inconvenience of the wait and forget to be pleased by the arrival.

Lukas is pleased by the arrival of the elevator which will take him upstairs and into Danicka's home. He'll be more pleased when he's in her home and he's already pleased that he's standing beside her, but when the bell chimes and the light glows he takes a breath, and when the doors open he kisses her hair and then follows her in.

In the elevator car he stands behind her, wraps both hands on the rail and slouches down, bends to kiss her shoulder as the numbers flick by, is nuzzling her neck and the golden strands of her hair when the ground drops gently beneath their feet and they arrive. Straightening, he slips his hand into hers as he follows her out of the elevator. Something occurs to him -- this time he asks ahead of time.

"Do you think Paul's home?"

[Danicka] There had been no conversation the night of the bonfire. Danicka arrived and didn't so much as call Lukas to find where he was in the throng of Kinfolk and Garou out in the field. She snapped at his packmate and suffered the conversation of another Silver Fang. She was dressed in a simple summer dress, had come from some ritual with others of like mind and spirituality, but she'd told Lukas nothing about the sort of rites humans and Kin use to try and reach the world that is so close to him, so accessible to him, that it's easy for him to look down his nose at the attempts of mortals. She did not tell him that she had decided he was hers, and she was his, and they would be so until one of them died.

Truth be told, knowing Danicka, she probably didn't decide until she stepped into the woods and felt the earth under her bared feet. On the other hand, maybe she'd decided sometime at the rite, looking up at the black spot in the sky where the moon should be, thinking it was time to go to him, and going. Knowing Danicka, it's hard to even see her choosing him in something as clear-cut as a conscious decision. It is like his rank challenge will be, in a few days' time: speaking it aloud just makes it official, is a formality. The truth is already there, mentioned or not.

He is her mate. And she knows when they sealed it, though she doesn't know when it really happened.

Danicka nuzzles the side of his chest while they wait for the elevator, ignoring the numbers lighting up in descent. She holds his arm around her waist and makes a slight humming sound, musical and yet thoughtless. They step inside, she presses the button for the twenty-third floor, and then steps back against him, smiling as he nuzzles her shoulder and neck, kisses what little exposed flesh he can find as though remember now how she smells, how she tastes, though the knowledge can never truly be that far from him.

As they step out of the box again, Lukas's warm hand merging with her own, Danicka blinks thoughtfully at the question. "He was when I left," she answers, "but he's probably in bed. He works pretty early in the morning, usually gets home late. Honestly, I usually only see him on weekends."

She takes her hand out of his and reaches into her purse to get her key out. "Though I've also noticed he sleeps like a fucking rock. I apologized once for coming in at four a.m. and blasting music in the living room because I was apparently too drunk to remember I have a roommate, and he said he hadn't even noticed."

The door opens.

[Lukas] Lukas laughs aloud. "That's terrible," he says, because it is. "I would've thrown a pillow at you," he adds, because he would have.

The door opens. Lukas draws an unconscious breath, as though to prepare himself for a room full of humans, strangers, interlopers, trespassers. He reaches instinctively for a mask that, as it turns out, he doesn't really need.

The apartment is quiet. Most of it is dark. Lukas didn't wear a coat, so he takes his shoes off instead -- not out of politeness, though the difference may not be immediately obvious, but out of comfort. Ease.

"Can I ask you something?" he says, shifting his shoes aside with the side of his foot. Then he raises his head and looks at her. "Why did you want to go to the W earlier?"

[Danicka] "Well at least I wasn't high that time," she says glibly, stepping into her apartment and holding the door open for him. And it amuses her, though she doesn't say it aloud, that he would've thrown a pillow at her. She knows he would have. And then she would've laughed. And he would've kissed her. And likely they would have ended up not fighting, not grousing over the noise in the middle of the night, but making love on the floor or against the wall instead.

It's possible that Danicka could get away with murder, as far as Lukas is concerned. And maybe that's true. And if it is, maybe it's true because she does not push quite as hard as she might, does not push for the sake of pushing, does not want or need to establish some sort of power base in the relationship in order to make herself feel safe or secure.

The apartment is cleaner, with Paul living here. He, unlike Martin or Liadan, is vocal about his displeasure when the kitchen is left a mess. He is willing to help pay for the cleaning service if Danicka will just call them to come more than twice a month. He takes better care of his things than she does. He is, heaven forbid, something of a good influence on her. She slips out of her heels at the door, and there's a notable change there, too: a shoe rack against the wall, where she does not put her shoes. She bends and picks them up instead, hooking her index and middle fingers around the heels of her pumps.

It's a sight better than the multiple pairs of shoes that used to litter the entryway, all knocked askew and mixed up.

She glances over her shoulder at him, lifting a brow when he asks if he can ask her something. The lights from the city give her face a half-shadowed, half-colored look, like the reflection of a pool of water at the mouth of a cave. Paul wanted to get curtains for the vast curving windows. It's the only thing she's vetoed since he moved in.

One corner of her mouth turns up in a soft, small smile that often looks sad, even when it's anything but. It's just... tender.

"Because lately... when I think about it, I'm finally able to remember something other than the last two times we went there. And I miss it." She walks further into the apartment as soon as the front door is locked, heading not for her room but the kitchen. She isn't bothering to murmur, or whisper, or keep her voice down. They may as well be alone, even if they both know they aren't. "I like... running away with you."

[Lukas] Danicka can see from the way the corners of Lukas's mouth turn up -- the way the smile spreads from that subtle beginning like something flowering, or unfurling, or rising -- that he loves what she just said; loves that she said it; loves that she meant it; loves her.

He doesn't smile like this for other people. Not even for his packmates, though for a long time the smiles he gave them were hundred times more genuine than the ones he gave her. No; that's not true. The first night at the SmartBar, he gave her a polite, lipservice smile. After that, for a very long time, he didn't smile at her at all. He pretended he hated her. This was easier than admitting he wanted her.

But he smiles at her now. It grows, slow and warm, and then he comes toward her, and she can see before he even touches her that he's going to

lift her up just like this. Wrap his arms around her and lift her up, as easily and gently as if this were choreographed, and he was meant to lift her right here and right now, destined to, as if it were written in the stars.

He lays her back against the wall. With the shoes neatly racked, there's less to stumble and trip over, less to kick aside. He moves into her and settles against her, between her legs, wrapped in her arms. He still smells faintly of her, and she of him, when he turns his face to her neck and kisses her there.

Then the line of her jaw.

Then her lower lip, luxuriously.

[Danicka] It was far easier to snap at her and stalk upstairs than to grab her, bite a kiss hard onto her mouth, and lay her out on the table or pin her against the wall just to have her. It was far easier to shut her out than risk a schism in his pack. It was easier to glare at her than let her, let anyone, see the way she lit him up. And for Danicka, the easy thing to do was to ignore anything but lust, anything but desire, when she thought of him. She pared it down to that in her own mind and pursued its satisfaction almost relentlessly, thinking that if she could just fuck him, taste him, come on him, she'd lose all interest.

Except that unlike Sam, her interest in him was never about satisfying a curiosity or trying something new or simply poking around in the feelings and pursuits of some young, earnest thing to see what happened. Danicka may deny this up one street and down the other til the day she dies, but that was a great portion of her night with the Fenrir. She never cared for him. She did not even fake her orgasm when he rolled her under him for the sake of his ego but because she was afraid he might lose his temper if she didn't. She did not think of him any time that he was not directly in front of her, and she did not even focus much of her attention on him when he was.

Lukas, she dreamt about. She thought about while smoking on the balcony, walking down the street, touching herself in bed, washing herself in the shower, baking kolace, looking at the moon, talking to her father, dancing on weekends. Lukas, she could not stop thinking about, wanting, all but panting for. She did exactly as she told him tonight and came at the thought of him fucking her, long before either of them admitted that they wanted each other.

The night they met at SmartBar she took Gabriella home and then went to her own apartment and while she was moaning into her pillow she thought of him, without meaning to, without necessarily wanting to, and her left hand had clenched around the sheets, her spine arching.

And she can't remember the first time she smiled at him. Smiled around him, smiled near him, smiled to him the way she smiled to everyone. But the first time she smiled because he made her happy, because she was almost afraid to let herself feel happy, she can't remember. She doesn't think it matters when it happened that it was okay to let that guard down, let any guard down, and oftentimes if she tries to think of feeling safe with him and when that started to happen, she thinks of

feeling him behind her on his bed, his knee parting her thighs, his hand between her legs, his breath against her neck, her shoulder, her ear, as he pushed down her panties and pushed up her shirt and made her come without so much as rubbing himself against her, even as hard as he was, or

the first time she laid back and told him to come here, welcomed him on top of her when she'd once said that she would not do so willingly, after she'd called out his name when she never had no matter how many times she heard her own on his lips, when she looked at the moon nearing fullness and he knew without a word why it troubled her, murmured only don't worry, don't worry about that, or

his kiss on her shoulder, his whispered question about whether or not she was cold when all night he'd hardly said a word, when up until at least the moment she finally took him inside her he'd acted like this was a businesslike fuck, something to get out of the way, something to push her down and away with, except then he clung to her when he came and she trembled as she stroked his hair and he wanted to keep her warm, even if he wouldn't let himself ask to keep her safe, keep her there, keep her...

happy.

Danicka drops her purse and drops her shoes when he takes that first step towards her and her hands go onto his shoulders when he finally puts his hands on her. She lifts herself onto him as he lifts her up, and smiling, she wraps her legs around his waist and her arms around his shoulders and kisses him. He's nuzzling and kissing her neck, jawline, but Danicka sighs and tilts her head, seals her lips against his not quite so luxuriously, not quite so patiently, as his kisses are. She closes her eyes and puts her hand in his hair, holds him there, and dissolves into the darkness of the night and the apartment and the velvet, warm, moist darkness of their mouths meeting.

"Bože," she purrs when they stop, either to breathe or to shift their bodies against each other, "ty mě tak horké." Danicka shivers, kisses his mouth again, then his neck, whispers in his ear: "Kam chceš mě? Jak se chcete do prdele mě?"

[Lukas] All the lamps are off.

The city is the only light they have, dim, varied, multicolored, glistening in her eyes, washing across her skin. The light leaves velvet shadows on the dark side of her face; in the hollows of her body.

When they stop kissing he stays close, and the kiss has grown from that first, lazy tasting. Has deepened, and become hungrier, a little more eager. His mouth pulled at hers at the end, opening to hers, his tongue meeting hers.

And now: now he's breathing softly into the space between, but quicker. And it's dark. And his eyes are still closed, closed while her mouth seals his, while her mouth strays down to his neck, to his ear.

Then they open. She can feel the effect of her words; a shiver quakes through him.

--

She could've asked him a simpler set of questions. Do you want me. Do you want to fuck me. She doesn't have to. Danicka would have to be a fool to wonder that; would have to be deeply insecure, would have to hang her self-worth on his opinion, to genuinely need to know. And she's not a fool. Or insecure. Or anything but what she is tonight, and every other night:

lazy. gorgeous. wild.
(carnivorous.)

She knows he wants her. He doesn't hide it. Hasn't for a while. He's wanted her since some indistinct point, some hazy point in time between sitting down at SmartBar and calling Gabriella a brat and saying good-morning to her in his car, in front of her glass tower of a building, an hour after she finished fucking his packmate in the room next to his.

That very first night at SmartBar, he asked her a question -- it was not the sort of question he normally asks kinswoman of his tribe; not the sort of door he wants to open even in jest, not the sort of possibility he wants to introduce even in passing. He didn't know what he was thinking then; must've at the time blamed it on the liquor or the fact that he was off-duty, or attributed it to what he so firmly told himself was dislike, distrust, disgust, but what he asked her was:

You didn't just proposition me, did you?

Or in other words:

Do you want me? Do you want to fuck me?

She'd read him before she answered. He saw it, though it only took her a second. She read him, but she did not read him as deeply or completely as she subsequently would -- so deeply and completely and unavoidably that he began to think he could hide nothing from her, that everything he was was clear as glass to her -- but not that first night.

Because if she had, she would have seen beyond that he didn't want one answer or another from her. He didn't particularly care, or seem to care, what it was.

She would have seen that he expected her to be cowed. To say no. She would have seen that had she said yes, he had no idea what he would have said. Or done.

She would have seen, if she looked very deep indeed, past the layers he revealed even to himself, that had she said yes, he might have -- would have -- wanted to leave the club with her.

Water under the bridge, now. No sense in following that possibility out past its various branchings and forks. It's a reality so alternate from what happened that there's no telling where they would have ended up, or how. There's every chance that it would have gone nowhere; that neither would have been sufficiently inebriated or rude as to leave Gabbie behind. There's every chance that it would've been a one night stand in truth, impersonal and casual, pleasant, forgettable --

but he doesn't believe that.

There's every chance where wouldn't have mattered. Or how. Or when. There's every chance it would have been the same, the very same, and he would have clutched at her afterward and thought to himself,

what have you done to me. what have you done.

--

He's clutching at her now. At least -- his hand has opened over her back. Is gripping at the skin and sleek muscle that sheaths her spine, her ribs, through the slipperysoft material of her dress. Her mouth is at his ear, so his turns to her neck. He nips at her skin, bites at her shoulder where he can taste her skin.

"Přímo tady," he whispers. "Jen stejně jako tento."

It's not logical. He doesn't care.

[Danicka] Nothing between them has ever been logical. Even when on the surface it made sense, even when looking back they can understand why they did what they did, why they said what they said, there's little application of logic. For Lukas, it's jarring. For Danicka, it's a way of life. Something being logical almost makes her more wary of it, as though by being directed by anything but instinct is untrustworthy somehow. Of all the things she has been frightened of, of all the things about this that have troubled her, the lack of sense in it all has never been one of them.

He's hot between her legs, through layers of clothing that are still thin for late summer, all hard muscle and shattering strength, and Danicka openly, wantonly rubs herself against him, her dress rucked up around her thighs and and in the way still despite how easily it's removed or pushed aside. She is breathing a trifle faster than he is, a little more unsteady, a little louder. She asks him where, asks him how, and he shudders. She doesn't think about the first time they met, or the second time, or the first time she knew she wanted him, or the first time he fucked her.

She thinks about how he's going to fuck her now. Right now. Right here. Just like this. She leans forward and kisses him again, harder than before, reaching down with one hand to pull at the tie of her dress. When she speaks again it's all but a snarl, a purr, a whisper with jagged edges: "Pomoz mi. Chci, abychom oba nazí."

[Lukas] Even before she says it -- help me -- his hands are moving over her. Impossible to say it's he's looking for the fastening to her dress or he's just touching her to touch her, but then his fingers find the tie, find hers; tangle; he pulls at the tie too, much more impatiently, strips it open, whips the sashes apart. He plunges his hand under the fabric, and this is what he didn't have in the car, earlier, this unadulterated access to her skin, her body.

The promise thereof, anyway. She says what she does, all but hissing it against his mouth, and he takes his hands off her, but it's only to grab his shirt by the collar. He flexes his hips into hers, pins her against her wall, holds her up by friction and the force of his body alone. Impatience makes him careless. He tears at the buttons of the shirt, gets them undone, doesn't lose a single one by some miracle, whips it off behind him. Now his shoulders are bare, his chest, the scar on his stomach, the smooth skin of his back. He doesn't wear undershirts in the summer.

The last of her tie is coming undone, too. Lukas grabs her dress and peels it off her shoulders. He bites back a groan, aware of her roommate even if she says she blasted her damn stereo at 4am without waking him; bites back a groan because there's just enough light to see her skin, her body, the curvature, the contours. He puts his hands on her breasts and covers them and leans up into her mouth and

grinds against her, rocks his hips against hers like they were naked already, like he was thrusting his cock into her cunt and not against it, not through layers of clothes.

His hands fall down her sides. He finds her dress where it's pooled around her hips. Grasps it. He's still kissing her when he pulls, tugs, yanks it up past her thighs and past her hips, up until suddenly it slips free of where it's caught between her body and his. She's that much closer -- he muffles a sound against her mouth -- and then their mouths tear free of one another and he pulls the dress up over her head, flings it to the floor.

And now she's all but naked, and he's rearing back to smooth his hands over her stomach, up her ribcage, over her breasts. "Fuck," he breathes; his palms cup her breasts, squeeze gently, reverse. He drags his fingers down, down to her waist, where he finds the elastic of her panties, starts to tear at them. "Get these off. Get them off, baby. I want to touch you."

[Danicka] Come winter, which is still far enough away to not even be real to them, they will have layer upon layer of intervening, interfering clothing to peel off in order to get to one another. If he had kissed her that day on the waterfront there's every chance she would have kissed him back, and there's every chance neither of them would have wanted to let go, and they might have ended up in a hotel that afternoon.

And she would have taken her hat from her hair and unwound his scarf from his neck

and they would have peeled off gloves like second skins, awoken their fingertips and palms with warm breaths and rubbing,

and she would have wanted to lay on her side facing him then, with daylight outside and him moving between her legs.

She would have wanted to see him watching her, watching their bodies slide together and apart and together again, would have pulled his hand to her hip, to her breast, told him to run his hands all over her. Though she wouldn't have needed to. She never needs to tell him touch me, though she does, and she hardly needs to tell him that she wants something they didn't have and couldn't have in the car.

The very first time, they stripped down to absolutely nothing. On the solstice, they bared themselves completely. There's a difference, somehow, between fucking while she has her dress rucked up or stockings on her legs or lingerie covering her body like sexual warpaint, and fucking like she says she wants to now, with nothing between them but air, and precious little of that.

The dress unfolds from her like a robe falling off, sticks between her shoulderblades and the wall for a moment before she arches her back and it cascades down to the floor in a puddle of red turned near-black by the light and lack of light. She runs her hands up his chest as soon as it's bared, helps him push away his shirt, gasps softly in sudden and wrenching desire at the feel of him.

"Bože, ty jsi tak horké," she breathes, kissing his face, kissing his mouth, his neck, groaning the words onto his lips as her hands mold the sentiment over his flesh, paint him in touch: "Jste tak kurva horko."

She bites at his lower lip, lightly, squirms closer as he thrusts against her, rides back against him as though -- as though yes, -- they're already fucking, his hips are already slamming into hers, his cock is already deep inside her. She whimpers, and does not bite it back as he stifles his groan. If Paul wakes up to the sound of them making love in the hallway it'll be because of the impact against the wall, or Danicka all but squealing as she winds her hips against Lukas's body.

Her panties barely exist where they cling to her hips in thin straps, some whisper-worth fabric that sips between his fingers and stretches as he tugs at them, peels off of her like it was never there to begin with. She puts her hands on his shoulders to brace herself and presses her shoulders against the wall and all but climbs on top of him as they both work the thong -- which he still can't see any more clearly than he could in the car, there's not really any more light here and now than he had there and then -- off her legs, drop it in a coiled twist down between his feet. She's wrapped around him again, then, ankles crossing over the small of his back, one hand on the back of his neck and the other splayed across the right side of his chest.

Danicka is wet when he touches her, hot against his fingertips, a strained moan leaving her mouth when he finds her clit and circles it, strokes it, so much as brushes against it. The hand on the back of his neck tightens, moves up into his hair and holds on. She rides his hand, and his torso, the swiveling of her hips as demanding as it is inviting.

"Baby, take off your pants," she gasps. "Just get them down and fuck me. Please."

She kisses him, hard, groaning around his tongue when she finds it and sucks, shuddering against his exploring fingers. She pulls back to gasp, to breathe, to fold her body over his chest and moan against his shoulder as she rocks her hips against him: "Prosím tě, lásko, potřebuji kurva ty."

[Lukas] They're almost drunk on one another. There's something at once loose and furious about this; about his hands roving all over her, aimlessly; about his fingers finding what's between her legs and at once gaining surety, direction, motion.

He fucks her with his hand and they're writhing against one another like animals, like serpents, she grabs his hair and their mouths crush together again and again. The space between is humid with their sighs and gasps and moans. "Okay," he pants when she tells him to get his pants down and fuck her, "okay," except all he manages to do is undo his fly and push down his jeans, his boxer briefs too; lets them sag down to his ankles. He doesn't fuck her -- yet -- because she won't let go of his hair, kisses him again, makes him snarl into her mouth and buck his hips against the back of his own hand, grinding his fingers up against her clit, her cunt.

Then they're gasping apart. He's turning his mouth against her shoulder. He's pushing his fingers into her and the feel of her is --

"So fucking tight." It's a gasp. "Oh, my god, you're so fucking wet."

-- and then he pulls out of her, he leaves a smear of her slick on her hip as he grabs her and unwinds her from him and pushes her back against the wall and holds her with the strength of his arms, the strength of his hands, as he bows against her like a beast and sucks at her mouth, her neck, down.

He sets her down. "Kondomy?" is the single-worded, tattered question, and she tells him they're in her bag, of course they're in her bag, this is fucking Danicka, and he pushes her against the wall again and all but mauls her face, holds her to the wall by the shoulders and sucks at her breasts, drops to his knees and

grasps her hips in his hand while the other fumbles for, and then within her bag. He presses her hips to the wall like he wants to pin her there, pin her up and spread her out and devour her, and the last at least is possible when he tells her to

"Roztáhni nohy. Seru na můj obličej."

while he's finding the condoms in her bag, getting a packet out crumpled in his palm. He pushes his mouth against her cunt as he's tearing the condom wrapper open; eats at her ferociously, ravenously, growling into her flesh as he takes himself in hand and strokes it, hard and fast, spreads the precum over his cock before rolling the prophylactic on.

A little longer he licks, nuzzles, sucks at her cunt. He's still stroking his cock, slower now, making it last, eats her out and touches himself and then all at once he's sitting back on his heels, holding her by the hip still, holding her still while he lets go his cock and reaches up to push his fingers into her, down to the knuckles.

The feel of her makes him groan softly.

His thumb finds her clit. He looks up at her. She's arched and naked, the lights of the city bouncing off the sweat on her skin; he's kneeling and naked, the lights of the city glimmering in his eyes.

"Takové horké píči. Tak kurva horké a mokrý." It's barely more than a murmur; filthy, reverent. He rubs her; he slides his fingers out, and in again. "Řekni mi je to moje."

His cock jumps of its own accord, like a living thing. He leans forward and tilts her hips gently forward and sucks on her clit lingeringly; lovingly. When he looks up at her again his eyes are all pupil, fierce and hungry.

"Řekni mi, jste moji."

[Danicka] Early on there were moments when he said Do this and Danicka did not, when he said Look at me and she looked only momentarily at his eyes before dropping her gaze again, when he warned her not to lie and she lied to his face and he could not make her sorry for it, as he'd promised. Though he knows now she is, even if she wasn't then: sorry, that is. She is sorry for all the things that kept him from trusting her, all the things she did that pushed him away more subtly but just as surely as the things he did to hold her at arm's length.

Once, he told her her though she should suck his cock. His head back, throat bared, luxuriating in her hand on him and her mouth on his ear and neck, perhaps remembering her lips wrapped around him in that barren motel room til he told her Enough,

though it never was, and never quite is,

and she had walked away from him. And he had ended up on his knees, making her arch her back (like this) and bury her fingers in his hair (like this) and moan his name, (like)

"Lukáš..."

(it's the only word she has left.)

She can feel and hear him get his pants down, she knows he can have her now, she rolls her hips and slithers her hand between them to touch his cock, to run her palm over it, gasping into his mouth at the combination of silky skin, hot moisture and firmnes she feels. Their arms tangle, their tongues, her limbs still wrapped around him to hold herself up as much as hold him close.

They can't stop kissing. In between question and answer about condoms, she pulls at his lips with her own, moans against his mouth. In between gasps of how hot, how tight, how wet, English and Czech mingling in their own throats and in the air between them, Danicka lets out a sharp cry at some motion of his fingers, some circling rub of his thumb. She won't stay still, no matter that she should be sated from food and wine and fucking in his car. She writhes between him and the wall and fucks his hand, fucks his abdominal muscles, fucks his thigh, while he's sucking on her breasts and teasing her nipples with his tongue into wet, pink peaks and her bare feet are touching the lush carpet, setting down in silence underneath her panting.

Lukas doesn't even finish his sentence before her hands are in his hair, pulling his head forward. Danicka tips her head back, her skull thumping lightly against the wall, the hum of the refrigerator on the other side of the wall she's leaning on. She grinds her cunt against his mouth and groans, unaware of what he's doing to himself, not even aware of the rip of the foil packet, the rhythm of his hand on his cock. She just rides his tongue, holding his head where she wants it. And the irony is, the paradox of this, is that as dominant as it seems for her to do this to him, using his face and squirming against him, telling him

"There... right... there, oh god, Lukáš!"

she's obeying him, spreading her legs and fucking his face like he told her to, like he said to without a trace of a request in the words.

But she looks down and he's touching himself, growling around her flesh and sending miniscule, rapid vibrations through her that make her cry out so loudly there's a genuine risk Paul might hear it and think not that his roommate is dancing in the living room but being attacked. Her hair hangs on either side of her face now as she watches Lukas on his knees, between her legs, the strands half-shadowing her face from the light.

"God, you look so hot... on your knees..." Danicka gasps, tips her head back again and closes her eyes like she can't stand the sight anymore, like it's too much. "Keep going. Keep going, baby, lízat to pro mě..."

So of course he stops. And he rocks back, pulling his head from her grasping hands and sliding his fingers back into her, fucking her with his hand again, watching her with gleaming eyes and a wet mouth. Danicka's head falls forward, her eyes open, her shoulderblades leaving the wall as she folds forward, this time trying to stifle her groan as though she knows that last outcry was too much, too loud, too needful. Her mouth opens wide, though, but soundless, when he starts to rub her clit again.

"Oh, fuck..." she whimpers, underwriting his purring, decadent worship. "Oh, fuck."

Her eyes close again as he keeps going, keeps going, as her pussy clenches on his fingers when they slide into her, clings as he draws them out, as wetness moves between his knuckles, onto his palm, saturates his skin. "Oukej," she breathes, opening her eyes to look down at him as he's starting to move her hips, "je to moje."

Lukas's lips wrap around her clit and Danicka yells an

"Ah!"

that is echoed by softer but faster versions of itself, a rhythm of pleasured, gasping little moans that follow the stroke of his tongue, the slide of his fingers. She holds to his hair, plants one hand on his shoulder, all but folds over him, fighting to keep her eyes open and failing, failing.

"Jsem tvoje!" she gasps, as though relenting now, begging for mercy now, biting her lower lip and whimpering, holding to him and wriggling, moving her hips as though it's not his hand or his mouth but his cock, his whole body, fucking her. "Já jsem tvůj, má lásko."

With a ragged gasp, Danicka opens her eyes and puts both hands on his shoulders, pushes him away, lifts her hips away, slips off of him only to sink down onto him, her body brushing against his mouth, his chest, her pussy brushing over his abdomen, her hand moving between them again, again, wrapping around him as she straddles him where he kneels on the floor. She kisses him again, soul-drenching, licking and sucking her taste off his lips and his tongue, holding him at the opening of her cunt and rubbing, slowly, back and forth, rubbing him against her clit, groaning into his mouth.

"Moje," she breathes between kisses, her hand still wrapped hot and tender around him, moving him against her but not, yet, inside her. "Oh, mine."

[Danicka] [Once, he told her HE THOUGHT... fucking typos]

[Lukas] Lukas's hands, which had been so firm, had been so merciless, gentle near-instantly as Danicka pushes at his shoulders. His fingers slip out of her. He watches her intently, his focus absolute and pure as an animal's, as she comes down over him.

Sinks down over him.
Slides down over him.

His hands welcome her. His hands leave smears and streaks of wetness on her calves; her thighs; her ass. He pulls her against him, grinds her pussy against the hard ridged musculature of his abdomen even as she's rubbing there herself, and when he turns his face up,

when they kiss like that,

he sighs into her mouth. She sucks her taste off his mouth. He holds her by the hips, gently now, the insistence and snarling hunger subsumed; feasts on her mouth and stays still for her, holds still while she reaches for him and takes him in hand, uses his cock like it's a toy, like it's her plaything, like it's hers to rub, slide, grind over her wet cunt.

Lukas is sitting back on his heels, his hands gripping harder on her hips now. He doesn't pull her down. He doesn't make her go faster, or slower, or take him inside, or ...

Right where he is is where he stays. But his breath washes in short, quick pants over her mouth. It catches for a second when she groans into his mouth. It stops altogether when she slides him so close, so close to that tight wet opening to her body. And then it slides out in a thin, caught groan at the back of his throat, and his mouth slides from hers. He leans his head back and draws a breath out of the air above them.

This is the first time his hands urge her hips downward. "Ne víc. Nenuťte mě čekat." He lowers his head, catches her mouth, pullingly. "Baby..."

[Danicka] They talked about the W, they talked about her bed, they never said a word about the hallway. Considering that they could not make it to her bedroom and that where and how was here, like this, he's now exercising patience and she's taking her time, kissing his mouth like it belongs to her, teasing him with her hand and her body like he really is there for no other reason than to wait for her. Danicka can smell herself on him, can taste herself on her lips now as she wraps her free arm around his shoulders, exhaling warm rushes of air over his jawline every time she pauses to breathe.

And it goes on for barely a minute, barely more than a double cupped handful of seconds, but by the end of those droplets of time they're both panting, Lukas holding onto her hips tight from both restraint and desire, Danicka squirming against his cock, resisting herself more than him, resisting giving in...

...in a far more physical, literal fashion than they both resisted giving in at the beginning of all this.

He catches a groan before it leaves him completely, stifles it the way Danicka has barely bothered to stifle her own cries since coming into the apartment. She opens her mouth over his, shares his breath, licks his lips and his jaw as he tips his head back. Her mouth closes again over his throat as it's bared, tongue lapping once over his Adam's apple, lips pressing a burning tattoo against the thin flesh. She pulls skin into her mouth, sucks, feels him pull at her hips. Hears him call her

Baby

like that, like he does, the way it feels like they've been doing forever when she knows it hasn't been, when she can't remember the first time, when it doesn't matter.

Danicka kisses the word out of his mouth, kisses a moan into him, tilting her hips and rolling them once. She takes him inside of her in a single slide, sinking down on him with slow suddenness, her hand clenching on his shoulder, her breath catching in her throat, her voice silenced so she can hear the way he breathes in, the way he moans, the way he shudders under her and within her.

[Lukas] Lukas has almost come to expect it, the sound she makes when she takes him all in a single sinking slide like that. The hard moan, or the sharp whimper, or the ragged gasp that bursts out of her. Her silence is something new, unexpected -- or it would be, if he were in a state of mind to consider it.

But he's not.

He's kneeling in the hallway of her vast and beautiful apartment, and he's holding onto her hips, and she's sliding down on him and he throws his head back and stifles a single, sharp groan behind closed teeth, closed lips. His chest strains for breath, pushes against hers in three quick heaves, and then he lowers his head, slowly, slowly, nuzzles along her face until he finds her mouth.

And kisses her.
And kisses her.
And lifts her hips in his hands --

draws her up along his hard cock, pulls her up until her cunt clenches at the very head of it. Holds her there, poised, quivering, and then ... slowly, sighing against her mouth, lowers her again. He nips at her lips when she seats herself on his lap, takes him all in. The kisses changes. Deepens a little. His hands urge her: do it again.

And again.

And then he's rising to stand on his knees, and tipping her back against the wall, and his mouth follows hers and he presses her against the wall with his chest against hers, his hips between hers, rocking into her, slow, steady, one stroke after another. He's panting softly now, trying to keep quiet, holding her hips to drag her against him, to angle her hips and rub her clit over the shaft of his cock as he swings into her over and over.

Their clothes are tangled and strewn around them. His shoes too. He pulls back far enough to see her face, her eyes. He looks down to watch her hands move over his body; to watch his cock move into her, shuddering from the sight of it or the feel of her or the sounds she's making or...

all of it, really.

[Danicka] That's what she wants to hear: that hard groan he tries to hold back, that intense pull for air, that soft rumble of his breath as he searches for her mouth blindly, finding it by memory and trust and scent and taste. Danicka relaxes, goes almost limp as he moves her on his cock. She has her hands on his ribs, up his chest, stroking her palms along invisible pathways on his skin, touching him the way she always touches him, as though she's never felt his body under her hands before, as though she is struck by something like wonder at how he feels.

Ultimately she can try as hard as she can to quiet her own reactions so she can hear his, see his, feel him responding to the way her body warmly engulfs his own, but Danicka is at least momentarily caught up in a tense, shivering moment of pleasure when he first thrusts into her. The hallway is a small area in a large apartment, and there isn't much room between his feet on the floor and the opposite wall, the one Danicka's facing. The light from the city reaches them, but everything else is dark, and if they're perfectly quiet they can hear the hum of appliances here and there, they can hear the quietude of the sound-insulated habitat.

But they're not being perfectly quiet. Danicka is panting while they kiss, and Lukas is sighing, drawing her up his cock, pulling her down again, flexing into her as she stretches around him again, holds him in, pulls him deeper with a bodily instinct that goes beyond thought or even desire. Her body does not know what the hell the condom is for, that it's there to keep instinct from becoming reality, that the urge to mate is going to go nowhere. Her body doesn't know, and Danicka doesn't care. She knows only that if he keeps doing that, if he rocking into her, if he keeps moving his hips forward between her thighs and

(oh, unbelievable)

rubbing his cock against her clit like that she's going to come on him again, she's going to come sooner than she would if he hadn't fondled her, licked her, sucked her, buried his face between her legs and eaten her pussy, looking at her and talking to her like he did.

She is not trying quite so hard to keep quiet. She rides against him now, sliding her cunt up his cock until they're almost, almost separated and then working herself back down in gradual increments, slow and hard circles made with her hips to draw him back in

and deeper this time.

Danicka kisses him with her hands on his face, her palms on his jaw, moaning as he moves her back against the wall, unaware of where her body is other than against his, unaware of where they are other than together, caring about absolutely nothing, at the moment, beyond the pressure and heat of his cock inside her. She doesn't cry out now, doesn't whimper, but gasps, oh she breathes like that, quivers when he rocks into her a certain way, rubs against her pussy like that, makes that noise or gives that shudder.

"Miluju, když se budete dívat takhle," she murmurs, watching him watching their bodies come together. She exhales sharply, leans forward, captures his mouth and kisses him devouringly, grinding down on his lap as she slides him home again. "Mluv se mnou. Řekni mi, jak moc milujete kurva mě."

[Lukas] "Miluji kurva vás."

There's no hesitation. There was a time when Lukas was concerned about dominance. About the axes of power between them and where they lay. About who was getting the better of whom; about what games she may or may not be playing; about not ending up like Sam, strung up, flayed open, torn apart.

Only: he knows that story better now.
Only: he's not concerned about shit like that, now.

And it doesn't matter that when he told her to tell him it was his, her cunt was his, she said: it's mine. It doesn't matter that she stood over him so fucking dominant and ground her pussy on his face ... just like he told her to. It doesn't matter that she tells him, doesn't ask or beg or request but commands him to tell her:

"Mám rád kurva vaše kunda."

And it's ragged, barely more than a whisper. And he's got her up against her wall, her hips and her thighs in his rough warm hands, and he's fucking her -- fucking her in long, hard strokes, sliding his cock steady and heavy into her, drawing out, doing it again. He's fucking her and every so often he slams in a little harder, a little rougher, grinds his hips into hers, makes her gasp.

And he says:
"Mám rád, že mokré, těsný malý píči."

And he says:
"Miluju, jak se cítíte. Jedete mě z mé mysli. Kurva, baby ... Miluju, jak ty hajzle mě."

And it's another kiss he tears into her. He's drunk on her. He can't bear to pull himself away from her, is pressed to her hip and abdomen and chest, is kissing her mouth over and over, slowly, drunkenly, while he flexes and thrusts and grinds between her thighs. He's holding onto her and moving into her and the feel of her is opening his mind up, laying it open and exposing the underlying the circuits, the parts of his brain that aren't so fucking civilized, aren't all plans and plots and strategies and calculations.

He recognizes her there, in the dark and primitive bowels of his mind. He recognizes her ferocity, her dominance, the startling strength in her. He recognizes the way she fucks him and he recognizes her hands in his hair, her cunt on his cock: he recognizes that she's his, his and wholly his, his and only his, and he recognizes that

he belongs here.
(with her)
and nowhere else.

"To mě poser." He shifts her hips. He drives into her, deeper, slow and hard, pins her to the wall with the weight of his body; the thrust of his cock. "Seru na mě dobrý. Udělej mě přijde v že horké kunda z vás."

[Danicka] Just like she told him to. Just like she wants. Danicka kisses him hard after the first three words leave his mouth, moans some echo of them back into his body. She rides him a little harder when he tells her again, tells her more, and the sweat slicks between them skin, makes her slide against him. And it doesn't matter which one of them burns with Rage and which one with mere temper, or which one supposedly holds the claim on the other. The only person nearby is Paul and he's not Kin. He's not Garou. He doesn't know that she's not supposed to lay claim like this over an Ahroun of the tribe.

Up against the wall again, she wraps her legs around him and sighs at the feeling of his ass clenching, her heels brushing over his skin, her hands running over his back, over his shoulders. She kisses him again, and again, as though she can't stop, as though she has no other way to respond to the things he says to her, the things she demanded he say, the things she knows are true even if he doesn't so much as gasp.

"Lukáš!" she whimpers, when he stops there, slows and grinds hard into her. She bears down on him, squeezing him inside as her head falls back, her throat bared with no more hesitation than he's ever openly shown her when he's exposed his own.

And deep in the recesses of their minds, or their spirits, down to the marrow of their bones, the individual cells carrying oxygen through their veins, they know what hasn't been accepted by anyone else, what isn't spoken aloud outside of whispered secrets in the dark, in bed, under the stars: he is hers, as profoundly and inevitably as she's become his. She who thought she was too irreparably damaged to ever feel something as supposedly pure as love now quite inexplicably seems, and feels, as though she was made to be right where she is, joined wherever their skins touch, joined where their bodies lock together, joined with him closer than she has ever been with another.

She would know him if she were blind. If sound were torn away from her, if her sense of touch dimmed to almost nothing, if her already feeble sense of smell could no longer recognize his scent she would know him by spirit, she would know the cadence of his footsteps when he got nearer, she would know him by the way he kisses her, and she would feel

safe

and she would know it was all right, just like this.

Danicka says nothing else. She rolls her hips hard against him, bucks against him though she can barely move between his chest and his arms and the wall and the surrounding heat of him against the flat coldness of the wall behind her. She puts her hands on his face and seals their mouths together as though to save his life, covers her moans finally by pouring them into his body, sweats against his chest and his forearms, turns slippery and electric where he holds her. Faster, now.

Harder.

[Lukas] That recognition -- that sense that even if every other sense were stripped from him, or her, that even if they were reduced to nothing at all, nothing but the most basic, most ephemeral intuition of their bodies, or spirits, or...

even then, they would still recognize one another. He would still recognize her.

And it's always been like that. That recognition has been a constant since the very start, the very beginning, the very first time they stood in a cheap, sordid motel room and he told her to strip him bare and she looked into his eyes and decided she would do what she did and climb him like the tree she couldn't climb so many years before, climb him like that and wrap herself around him and kiss him like that, like she recognized him, and has always recognized him; like he's looked for her, and has always looked for her; like they knew each other, and already loved each other.

Just like that.

Just like this.

It's not just a fuck. It never was. Their bodies are growing slick. They're growing hungrier for one another. They fuck with greater force; they move into one another. She takes his face between her hands like she has a right to him, kisses him like she's pouring herself into him, and he turns his mouth up to hers and returns it like he always did, always does; takes her thighs in his hands and pulls them higher, opens her wider, fucks her harder now, harder, while they grasp at one another and cling to each other and

his arms come around her. He holds her close to his chest, seals her torso to his. It's tender. The kiss, too: deep and plunging, like falling into limitless space, but as tender as the pounding of his cock into her is rough, and merciless, and unrestrained. He holds her like she's something rare. Kisses her like she's something precious.

Fucks her like she's his.

She can feel his breath running ragged. The push of his chest against hers, wilder now with every sharp breath. The sweat that slicks his skin, runs down the furrow of his back. She can hear him panting in her ear, something like a grunt, or a growl underlying every powerful thrust of his body into hers; can feel him holding back on the groans he wants to loose, and the way he presses his mouth suddenly to her shoulder, tears his mouth from hers and opens it suddenly to gasp and bite against her shoulder as his eyes close, as his hands close and pull her close, close. The feel of her, and what she's doing to him -- it rises, like hot air, like heated matter, like debris after a bomb-blast. It spins out of his control, tears open his back and exposes his nerves, leaves him at once defenseless and charged and

and she's so good; she's so fucking good that

a sudden, panting groan bursts out of him. "Bože," he hasn't said a thing for ... some unnamed time, but this tears out of him now, scathed raw, "bože, láska, Danička--!"

He grabs her hips. He holds her hips steady. He holds her still. Without warning, without preamble, without so much as another word beyond a blasphemy, a definition, and her name, he starts to fuck her with a wild, savage fury, slamming into her over and over and over as his teeth fasten on her flesh, hold her fixed between mouth and hand and cock, hold her and fuck her as though he wanted to make her come, or make himself come, or make the sky fall down, or make the world burn.

[Danicka] Out of nowhere, out of the darkness, her name, and the name of God, so close together it could mean something. She shudders in response to it, in answer, as he devolves from something still half-civil into this, as he always does, as he did even the first night right before he came in her the first time, right before he clutched at her and tried to understand what had happened to him, what she'd done. She craves this, relishes it, drives herself closer to him and harder on him only to very nearly pull away only to come back only to draw this from him, push him to this.

He is an animal. And all the times he held that back, or pretended it wasn't so, worried that it would hurt her, worried that it would give her some kind of power over him, he forgot that she was, too. He didn't know, before. He knows now. He's had her bent over in the woods, he's felt her squirming like something vividly and passionately, desperately alive underneath him, he's laid back and found her riding him like he's been conquered, like she's surrended, like it was always meant to be just like that, from the beginning of creation. And he's thought of her as a fox. And now he knows. Now he knows who she is.

And what.

"Moje," Danicka whimpers, like this is his name, when he slams into her harder like that, thrusts so hard her shoulderblades hit the wall, fucks her so hard that the wall behind her shudders, fucks her like the first time in the W, holding her up and holding her to him at once. "Stejně jako to. Udržujte kurva mě. Ach bože, stejně jako to!"

She looks down between them, her head to one side, his face to her shoulder and her eyes searching the dark ravenously for the sight of him, for the visual proof of what she feels him doing, the way she feels him. He fucks her like she belongs to him. She feels her breasts against his chest, feels his heartbeat shuddering against her ribs as though they really are melting together, feels the end of summer melting them, dissolving them, thinks to herself that she wishes he'd forgotten this time, like he used to forget in his eagerness to be inside her, wonders if she asked if he could stop now,

doesn't want him to stop now.

She closes her eyes, lets her head fall back, goes all but limp as he pounds into her again, again, wildly now, jarring against the rhythm of her panting. She flails one hand slightly at his back, grasps skin, groans into the air. The way he holds onto her, grinds into her, makes her shudder suddenly. The way he bites into her makes her cry out, not in pain, close enough but by god by now he knows the difference, he can hear it and if he couldn't hear her he could feel the way she clenches on him in a ripple, a wave of reaction through her body from cunt to the tips of her fingers and the lock of her legs around him.

"Baby..." Danicka moans, half-whimpered, half-pleading, "oh god, baby, I'm gonna come...!"

A second before her back arches, which is not much warning, which is not much time to prepare himself to feel her like that, suddenly rigid in his arms, her spine elongating, her breasts and belly pressing to him as her head falls back farther, as she cries out to the ceiling, as she clutches him between her thighs and clenches around his cock so tightly it's almost violent. She shakes, even as she's caught in it, her fingernails raking him between his scapulae, her other hand grasping at his arm, at his shoulder, struggling to find some way to hold onto him when she's trembling too hard to hold a grip on anything

like gravity,

like time.

He's seen her like this before, coming with almost no sound, with ah! dying in her throat, with oh my god turning into little more than a gasp, with her lips parted and her eyes closed and something like a silent scream resonating like a scent in the air. She pulls him closer, suddenly, as though in the highest, sharpest moment of her orgasm she seeks to pull him with her, pull him into her, and not lose him, and not let go.

[Lukas] It's almost desperate, the way she clutches at him at the end. The way her entire body seems to bear down, squeeze down, hold him: her arms, her legs, her caught and soundless cry, her cunt.

It's as though -- even a single shred of space between them would annihilate them. It's as though if they did not seal to one another like this,

jen stejně jako tento,

they would simply tear apart, disintegrate, end.

But this is not an ending. It's something more like a beginning; the beginning of all things, the moment of creation, the impossibly white-hot instant that unfurled the very fabric of the universe. Or: it's like exactly what it is, which is itself, which is her body riding down on his, her body closing around his, her body shuddering and shaking out of control, out of control, while her head falls back and her arms clutch him suddenly and ferociously close.

She pulls him into her as though her pleasure has undone her. Has simply unzipped some crucial tie at the center of her, and now she's falling to pieces, and if she could only hold him close enough, or hard enough, she could keep herself from

flying apart.

Or maybe that's not her at all. Maybe that's how it is for him. And Lukas has seen her come like this before. He's seen her implode on herself like this before, but that doesn't change what she does to him. It doesn't change that the sight of it, the feel of it, the sound of it lances right through him, pierces the pleasure centers of his brain and his spine and every last nervebundle of his body, tears him to shreds, makes him grab at her, clutch at her, fuck her like it's the last thing he'll ever do.

"Danička -- " he begins; whatever he meant to tell her, there's no time left.

His teeth clamp into her shoulder. His hands are iron on her hips. He drags her against him and it's harsh, it's nearly brutal; his back bows into a great arc of strength that drives his hips up into hers, plants his cock deep, deep, where he holds himself, and holds her, while he comes into her with a mindemptying, worldending momentum.

No words now. Just a hard, rasping groan at the cusp of it, muffled on her skin.

And another, and another -- an echo of the bucking of his hips, the slide and friction and jump and pulse of his cock inside her.

And it's almost desperate, the way he holds her. It's almost desperate, the way he shudders every last furious and thoughtless thrust into her, the way his hands grapple at her hips, drag her against him, pull her against him as though he couldn't possibly be close enough, deep enough, near enough.

It's very close to desperate, the way his breath shakes and trembles against her shoulder. He pries his fingers from her hips, and his arms go around her. He folds her against his body, holds her, is still holding her even after he relents; even after he sinks down on his heels and brings her with him, gathers her into his lap, holds her with his face bent to her shoulder, his arms wrapped around her until her slender shoulders, her narrow back, all but disappear into him.

[Danicka] Nothing is almost anymore between them. There's desperation as though this is the last time, or the only time, and there's a certainty that the world is ending even as it's beginning, that this can't last even as they both believe that in a few days' time he's going to be named Fostern and soon after that her brother will give her to him in a heartbeat and then it will not be a secret, anymore, the fact that she belongs to him. It will still be precious, and held between them in confidence, that he belongs to her just as surely.

Which is how someone like Danicka would want it. Someone who has withheld love for anything if only to protect it from being destroyed, being taken from her. Someone who has hidden affection or pleasure so that it would not be trespassed upon. Someone for whom so many things have been secrets, are still secrets. Lukas trusts her. More than he ever thought he could, more than she ever thought he would, and Danicka gives him less and less cause to doubt the words from her mouth, the sins of ommission she still commits and does not ask forgiveness for.

They make love in a certainty they don't really have, knowing each other by intuition and instinct and yet not knowing so many things that they might claim don't matter, or don't anymore. May never matter. May change everything.

They fuck like it's the last thing they'll ever do. They come like it's the culmination not of lovemaking but their very lives, the whole goddamn point, their reason for being and their reason for finding each other in Chicago fifteen years after the last time they saw each other in New York.

Danicka slides her hand up the back of his neck and her fingers into his hair. She gasps for him as he comes, as he joins her while she's still quivering, throbbing and twitching inside her while she's still clenching in tight, rolling waves. She holds him to her neck, to her shoulder, keeps him close, and keeps him safe, flashing through their night together so far and the way he said

I need

and the way she echoed it back to him later, thinking about the way he wondered aloud if she still wanted him, not just the way she wanted him the first night when they tried to make it about sex, physical lust, desire, getting it the fuck over with but wanting him the way she did when she lured him into the woods on the solstice, rode him and received him and mated with him.

She thinks of the fact that this is it. This is an ending. A beginning. This is cataclysmic, and she almost laughs at the tail end of it, because it does not feel like a cataclysm. It feels natural. It feels like looking back at something already done, already passed, already complete. She sinks down on him as he thrusts up into her, holds his head to her shoulder as his arms enfold her, as his body wraps around hers. Her hair sticks to her face and neck and back with sweat and she sighs, wraps her arms around him, too, lays her head against his,

closes her eyes.

A shudder goes through her after a moment. It is not the same as the trembling he once felt in her. It is an echo, though.

[Lukas] Need, he said earlier, knowing already what he was going to do in a few days' time, and what he was going to do a few days after that.

Can't afford not to worry, he said when they talked about her, and her brother, and claim, and all the many and myriad complexities that ran alongside these things.

He may as well have said: I can't help worrying. I can't help running through the possibilities over and over and over because if I see all the moves, if I play every possibility through to the end, then maybe I can avoid the ones that end in...

him and her, apart.

Which is unthinkable to him. The very glimmer of the thought makes him wrap his arms tighter around her, pull her against his body and hold her there while she shudders, while a quake passes through her like an afterthought, an aftershock of what they just did to one another.

He cannot imagine not having this. Once upon a time, he could not imagine having this. He could not imagine being in love; could not imagine loving her, of all people. He could not imagine it even as it was sneaking up on him, even as it was dragging him under, closing over his head, submerging him, drowning him.

And now, drowned, submerged, a thousand leagues from the surface, he can no longer remember what it was to breathe the air above. He can no longer remember what it was like not to love her. She's become as necessary to him as blood, as bone, as breath. She's become so necessary that he cannot bear to let her go.

Even now. Even like this.

So -- they remain there, nearly motionless, catching their breaths, holding one another. They're wrapped one another the other, one against the other, and their heads are bent to one another's shoulders, nestled together; their bodies know no space between.

Breathing. Just breathing.

At length Lukas moves. His balance shifts. Slowly, carefully, motion as lazy and liquid as a dream, he turns his shoulder to the wall. His back. He sinks down and brings her with him, sits now at the foot of the wall with her held close and precious in his arms, on his lap, on his cock softening inside her.

His head thuds faintly against the wall as he tips it back. And he pulls a breath out of the air, lets it out slow.

[Danicka] They came here instead of going to a hotel because he told her that he liked waking up in her bed. So there was never any guarantee or stated intention to make love in her bed, just to wake up it in at some point, and he has not had that since before Sampson died, since before he decided it was time to go to an elder Ahroun and demand recognition. He has lost another packmate, another member of a family closer than the one that truly shares his blood.

She called him that exactly once: the brother of her blood. A term of respect for a member of her brother and her mother's tribe, a recognition of what he was likely to be for her in this city, long before he ever challenged for guardianship of her. The title never left her lips again. She used his name only rarely, perhaps once if at all, until the near-full-moon when it first occurred to her that she could lose him, and she realized what that would do to her.

And she realized that it would be her own fault. That it would not be death or duty that took him but distrust, or her own limitations, or her own inability to let him into her arms, into a part of her he once that was walled-off, inviolate, unassailable. Danicka called his name, then, when he surrendered to her in some way and discovered that she was laid out and exposed like she never had been before, found her opening to him in a way unexpected.

It was not the first time Danicka called to him and he came. Perhaps, though, it was the first time she showed him she knew who she was calling, and the first time he knew where he was going.

They turn together, his back rolling to the wall, and Danicka moves effortlessly with him, trusting his strength without question as she has since, really, the very first night. She never hesitates to give him her weight, to rest against him, to lean into him. She does so now, folding her body forward and laying her head against his shoulder, closing her eyes for awhile. There's no thought, now, no fear of loss, no consideration even of keeping. The idea of separation of any kind is so very, very far from her that she does not even need to resist it, does not have to reject it, does not have to be wary of it.

This sort of trust is world-shaking. And this sort of trust is a tender whisper, so fragile that it cannot even be remarked upon.

Time passes, and after a little of it, Danicka yawns softly, shifts her head on his shoulder, realizes she will fall asleep on him just like this if she doesn't do something. So she puts her hands on his chest and she lifts her head, brings her face around, opens her eyes to his. Facing this direction the light hits her face more fully, turns her skin pale-dark with shadow and illusions of color. Her eyes reflect everything, pull in as much as they can through wide, wide pupils. She looks into his, those thing glittering rings of brilliant blue around broad circles of mammalian black, and she kisses him softly, still tasting like her own arousal.

"Jste první člověk, já mít kdy opravdu chtěl v mé posteli," she whispers, lifting a hand and running her fingertips, fingernails, through the hair above one of his ears, though there's nothing to tuck back. "A vy jste jediný, co jsem jeden kdy pozvána."

Danicka makes no move to get up off of him. His pants are still around his ankles, though they're otherwise bare. She kisses him again, softer this time, if that's even possible. "Ty patříš tam."

Drawing back, she looks at his eyes again, her fingertips tracing his jawline, her hands caressing his face and his scalp in the dark with aching tenderness. "Pojď se mnou?"

[Lukas] Lukas's eyes do not close when Danicka kisses him the first time. The lids droop faintly, but they remain open, and attentive, and fixed on her face. They remain open, and clear, and she can see the sensations that flicker through him when her mouth touches his.

Can see the enjoyment, of course. Can see the softening, too, of something deep inside him -- a melting, like steel running liquid. That's what the love of an Ahroun, this particular Ahroun, this man-wolf, is like: molten steel, ferocious and hot and fluid and all-pervasive.

His lips part for hers. He kisses her softly, softly, his breath sliding between his teeth. When it's over he blinks once, slow as an animal, and what she says makes his eyes change, makes him look at her that way he does when he's not sure what he's done to deserve her. Whether he deserves her at all.

He puts his hands on her face. Takes her face between his hands and kisses her, softly, even as she's kissing him.

This time his eyes close.

When they open again he says nothing to her question. He only nods, moving beneath her fingers that trace the features of his face as though to memorize them. As though to draw them. As though to carve them anew from the ether, to create him in the darkness through touch and contact and reciprocation.

A moment later he moves, shifting beneath her until he has his feet beneath him. Rising, swaying only once to compensate for her weight, her balance. It's slow, and smooth. There's never a sense he might drop her.

He holds her on his body, lifted from the floor, and he turns his face up to her again. There, in the hallway that smells like their lovemaking, that's drenched only in the distant and glittering lights of the city, he kisses her yet again. A third time. A hundredth time. More than he can remember, or imagine.

They go to bed. He takes her to bed and she turns down the sheets and climbs in and then he crawls in beside her and even that, even that moment of separation when one and then the other enters, is enough to make him reach for her with a longing, with a hungriness, as though they haven't touched in ...

weeks.
years.

He draws her into him. Their legs tangle. He traces her hair back from her face and they face each other, breathing quietly. No more words tonight. Nothing but the quiet, absolute certainty of belonging, of claim, of moje.

His fingertips trace her face after they descend from her hair. Then his hand covers her shoulder. Then his arm slips around her, and he draws her against his chest, but it's he who closes his eyes then, he who sighs as though finding comfort, safety, familiarity, home.

I belong here, he thinks. It's the second-to-last thought before sleep overtakes him.

The last is: Danička.