[Danicka] It isn't long before they're back at Danicka's apartment for the second time in twenty-four hours. She never bothered tying or buttoning her trench coat as they left the billiards hall, simply leaned against him for warmth -- and closeness -- as they sat on the train from one part of town to another, and it was a short walk from train station to Kingsbury Plaza. Her hair is down, her boots tap softly on the pavement, and then thud quietly on the carpeting of the lobby.
She's quiet. She's exhausted, and he knows exactly why. Her hand was cold but warmed quickly in his coat pocket, and stays warm even as they walk to the building in which she lives.
Danicka checks her phone for the time when they exit the elevator on the 23rd floor. It's a Friday night; Paul is most likely still out, and she says so as she puts phone away and takes out her keys. "I think we're alone," she says before she opens the door, because she learned: this matters.
And it happens to be the truth, tonight. Paul is not home. The apartment is dark. There are no friends, no games playing, no music blaring. It's as quiet as it was when he dropped her off here this morning, though much darker. Danicka actually bothers, this time, to hang up her coat in the hall closet and put her cowboy boots on the rack when she's wiggled them off her feet. She runs her fingers through her hair, scritching her scalp slightly, and looks over her shoulder at Lukas as he's closing the door or removing his own coat or standing there, whatever it is.
"You hungry or anything?"
[Lukas] She's learned that this matters -- from a single incident. Lukas walked in. Paul and his friends were in. They occupied the living room. They crowded the air. Their scent was everywhere; they were loud, having fun or pretending very hard to still be having fun, and then someone made a joke that Lukas didn't like and --
What? The crack of his voice was like the single, sharp warning bark a second before attack.
-- and Danicka learned. She's intelligent; more importantly, the way she grew up, she had to learn, and learn fast, what would displease the Garou she lived with. One suspects -- one hopes -- her reasons for taking care to inform Lukas of these things stems more from protection than fear, however.
He looks at her when she says this, and he nods. They enter. He smiles a little when he sees her cowboy boots. When she looks over her shoulder he's still smiling, a faint quirk of an expression, his fingers thoughtlessly undoing the big buttons of his coat.
"I'm all right," he says quietly. "I had some pizza at the bar." He shrugs out of his coat and steps out of his shoes, leaving the former over a rack if he can see one. Otherwise he folds it over his arm, waiting until he can lay it over a couch or a chair.
Following her, his hand comes warm to the nape of her neck, kneading gently. He kisses her quickly, gently, bending to press his lips against her temple. "You?"
[Danicka] Protection of Lukas. Protection of the mortals that she either lives with or sees often. That is what gets forgotten, even by Danicka herself: she did not cry when she fell out of the tree but when Lukasek was thrashed for being party to the goading that got her up there in the first place. She did not defy Vladislav, already Changed, until he called the blue-eyed Czech boy 'pathetic' for throwing up a stomachful of candied orange kolache. She wants to keep her roommate safe from her boyfr--
-- mate.
She wants, more than that, to keep her mate protected from the brief-lived, weak-willed human beings that impinge on her existence. He'd told Vladik that controlling his rage was the first thing he learned, and he has never lost that control so completely that he's accidentally hurt Danicka or any other Kin... that she knows of. She does not want him to lose control because she didn't warn him of the presence of humans or lack thereof in the den he sometimes is invited to share with her.
Though it's not really hers. Though it's not really his. Not really theirs. Which may be why there is an Apartment Guide on the kitchen counter on top of a newspaper, right next to a green Sharpie.
Danicka is reaching back to unhook the choker from her throat when Lukas moves to her, coat over his arm. Her hands fall away as he touches the back of her neck, and her eyes close for a moment at the gentle massage. She exhales almost silently. "I'm not hungry." A beat. Her eyes open, flick over at him. "I ate before I went out."
So he doesn't worry.
[Lukas] Lukas's fingers are long and blunt, capable, strong. He massages her neck for a few moments, her necklace rolling under his fingertips, but he doesn't undo her jewelry for her. Somehow that crosses a fine line in his mind; goes from the gentle ministrations of mates to ... something closer to ownership. Possession.
"Okay," he says quietly. His hand drops from the back of her neck to her waist. He holds her against him loosely, naturally, thinking to himself what she first realized months ago:
she belongs here. he belongs here.
Aimless, his eyes scan the kitchen counter. He sees the apartment guide, laughs a little under his breath, wry. "Oh no," he says. "Are you putting up an ad because Paul's moving out too?"
[Danicka] He rarely undresses Danicka unless she asks him to, or has already begun taking her clothes off in front of him, or is kissing him, parting her legs to straddle him, pulling his hands towards her. He has never slipped earrings out of her lobes or unclasped a necklace, though he has unzipped her boots and helped draw them off her legs before. He does not, now, turn her about and undress her like a doll, removing what he will as he wants, leaving it to lie wherever. He has held a strand of pearls in his hand before, though, a piece she inherited from her mother like she will not inherit the house or the rage or anything else but her mother's eyes, her mother's features.
Without even the inch or so added by her boot-heels, Danicka is over half a foot shorter than Lukas is. She leans against his chest briefly when he holds her, glancing at the wall of windows, considering the view that made her want to move in.
"No," she says softly, a murmur, when he asks about the apartment guide. "The lease is up in January and they require 60 days' notice. I'm looking at places and deciding if I want to move out."
[Lukas] There's a very small pause, something so slight that another woman, without Danicka's insight, without Danicka's knowledge of Lukas, specifically, may have never noticed
It's there, though. And then he wraps both arms around her waist. His chest rises against her back when he inhales.
"Why?" he asks softly.
[Danicka] [Perception + Empathy: Wassat?]
Dice Rolled:[ 6 d10 ] 1, 1, 1, 2, 6, 8, 10 (Failure at target 6) Re-rolls: 1
[Danicka] [Like hell she fails.]
Dice Rolled:[ 6 d10 ] 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 8 (Success x 2 at target 7)
[Danicka] "Chci svůj vlastní doupě, kde bych mohl přinést ty," she answers, matching his volume if not his cadence, not his depth. His voice rumbles in his chest, vibrates against her back even when he speaks quietly. "Bála jsem se být sama když Martin šel do nemocnice," Danicka explains, lifting her hands to cover his wherever they fall on her, staring out those windows still.
"Ale myslím, chci mít místo, které je moje."
Her fingertips stroke over his knuckles, find the depressions between them, rub more gently there. There is more to it than that. She is holding back. Once upon a time she held so much back that it did not bear mention to note it. Once upon a time, there was no chance in hell he could have told that there was more unless Danicka wanted him to know.
So clearly, even now: she wants him to know. But even that is a change.
[Lukas] Silence; a sort of restrained quiet, where Lukas struggles between the desire to keep his big mouth shut because it's not his business, not his place, not his to say yea or nay to -- and the urge to say no, no, no, don't leave this place with its vast panes of glass and its prism-rainbows on the carpet in the mornings, its bookshelf full of his childhood, its scents of Danicka and kolache and the sex they've had, the love they've made there, and there, and there, and there.
"Už jsem si začínal myslet na toto místo jako tvůj." He finally settles on this. "Máme dobré vzpomínky tady."
His hands move under hers. He covers hers as hers cover his in tandem. They are in the kitchen. They're not watching some lovely sunset, or looking out over her million dollar view of the city. They're not enjoying an ocean or a cliffside.
They're simply enjoying one another's presence. And closeness. And warmth. Even now. Especially now.
Again, quieter: "Proč chcete odejít?"
[Danicka] And though he struggles not to voice his sharp, instinctive resistance to the idea of Danicka leaving this apartment, Danicka senses it well enough. In a way, she expected it. Expected more, even, than he shows. She can feel the tension there, though, not in his arms around her or in his words but in the air, or in her heart. She looks past the bar counter of the kitchen at the spot on the carpet where she made love to him and confessed to him that she was falling in love with him. She glances through the bending windows at the balcony where he knelt between her legs and made her come on his mouth while the wind meandered past them. She looks at the couch where she hid under a blanket because he gave her a firearm along with a book.
Danicka closes her eyes and leans back against him, holding his arms around her as though there is any chance, any at all, that he might let go and step away. Her throat pushes gently against her choker as she breathes, and she feels the ribbon slide over her skin whenever she speaks. There are earrings in her lobes tonight, little white gold hoops with intricately designed whorls and twists of gold and copper dangling from them. She breathes slowly. Deeply.
"It's never really been mine," she says quietly, in English now, as though to distance herself from the words. "I have as many painful and frightening memories here as good ones." A beat. "All the good ones are with you. All the really hard ones... you weren't here."
So he wouldn't know.
Danicka looks at a spot in the hallway now. "That is where Katherine tackled Martin to the ground. Down the hall is where she tied him up. Under my bed is where I hid." She looks at the couch. "That is where Martin laid down when he was having a heart attack." She turns her head, closes her eyes, but her face is pointed towards the intercom. "That is where I stood while Sam tried to get me to let him inside... when we both knew he could have come in anyway. Then there are the rooms where I fucked someone who is not my mate."
She blinks her eyes open, breathes in, nods towards a spot on the living room floor. Her voice has fallen so quiet he would not be able to hear her from across the room. "That is where I laid down and cried because I thought you did not want me anymore."
[Lukas] The first few events, recollected, only make Lukas frown faintly. It's not until Sam is mentioned that the Ahroun draws a short, angry breath. He tenses when she goes on: the rooms where she fucked someone who is not her mate. Bands of strain strap across his chest, his arms. He's careful not to crush her.
And she doesn't say his name. Lukas is glad of that, at least.
But it's the last that makes him abruptly exhale. That makes him bend to her, lean over and around her as though he could protect her from some blow, from the sky falling, from the weight of the past. And he kisses her smooth cheek, her jawline.
"If you want to move," and she might expect him to say you can; to give her the permission that the Nation and the Tribe says she needs.
But it's not that, "I'll help you."
[Danicka] Held more tightly, Danicka smiles as faintly as Lukas frowned at first. It's aching, it's sad, because...
That is where she told him she was falling in love with him. That is where he gave her that book. That is where she and Lee opened up the box containing a birthday gift brought by messenger. That is where he held her, shuddering in the wake of sex, and told her she was precious to him. That is where she sang a she made him breakfast. That is where she put the books tracking his childhood to adolescence. That is where she dreamt about him, thought about him, loved him.
And yet the entire place, in her heart and mind, is violated.
And yet she has lost the only home she ever knew, only to realize it was never her home, and never will be.
And yet now, suddenly, mated and having confessed that ready or not, she would be proud to bear and rear his offspring, Danicka wants a den that is hers. A place where she can bring him that is hers. A home that is not shared with Kinfolk or mortal roommate, a quiet place where she does not have to remember Garou scaring the hell out of her, or breaking her heart.
Danicka reaches up behind her and touches his head, scritches his scalp as her eyes fall closed. "Baby, that's really sweet, but I don't even do my own laundry. I'm getting a real estate agent and movers."
[Lukas] Twenty four hours ago, they were locked underground in a hellhole of a secret lab. They were facing imprisonment, experimentation, possibly death. It seems strange that the conversation tonight has not so much as touched on that subject. That instead of combing over their ordeal step by step, discussing it moment by moment, they stand here, in her apartment, in her kitchen, and talk about where she's living. Whether she'll move.
Except -- it's not strange to Lukas. At all. He sees the line clearly in his mind: from what they said to one another in those afternoon hours at the W, after they returned from New York City; to what she said to him in the belly of the beast; to now.
Mate. Pack. Den.
It makes perfect sense.
And he tips his head gently into her palm as she pushes her fingers into his thick black hair. He closes his eyes, letting out a soft exhale, on the verge of a sigh. The corners of his mouth turn up. He laughs, his eyes opening again.
"Jistě," he murmurs, wry. "How could I have ever thought otherwise."
[Danicka] "Take me to bed," she whispers, out of nowhere, out of nothing.
Except it's not.
He did not, could not stay with her last time. She hasn't felt his arms around her in bed since the last time they fell asleep in the W after coming back from their thoroughly exhausting trip to New York City. He left her here this morning so he could seek out members of the sept to tell them about the underground lair that swallowed he and his mate up. She slept for a long time, but fitfully. She ate, but not enough and not with any enjoyment. She has barely seen him lately, a handful of times in the last few months, and now he's here.
And he doesn't seem like he has to run off in a few minutes, in a few hours. Danicka has nothing more to say on the subject of moving: she hasn't decided yet, she's looking, she will let other people pack the dishes and move the furniture so that all she has to do is bring her mate in through the door and show him
see, there is the prism
and
see, this is where I put your books
and
see this is my kitchen, see this is my office, see this is my bedroom, my bed, my den, my home, my, my, mine, mine.
She takes a deep breath, sighs it out. Her hand slides out of his hair. "Please."
[Lukas] Lukas catches Danicka's hand against his cheek when it slips from his hair. His beard has had days to grow; it's rough against her skin, prickling and coarse. He kisses her palm with a sudden fervency.
Then he lifts her. He's never lifted her like this before, his arm under her knees and his arm behind her back; like a bridesgroom. Even now he doesn't, quite. He curls her torso close to his. He holds her close, and turn his face to her neck as though he might disappear into the softness of her hair, the smell of her skin.
"Let's go." His voice is no louder than his, but the timbre is different; lower and rougher.
He's careful not to smash her against the walls or the doorways as he takes her from the kitchen to the hall, the hall to the bedroom. Her door he nudges shut with his foot. The lights, he leaves off.
There's no moon tonight. What sliver there was is long since set. He sets her down on the edge of her mattress, on the side of the bed she most often occupies when they spend the night together here. When he draws back he draws his silk sweater overhead, leaving it on the ground. His undershirt follows, and then he's undoing his belt.
The first time she said I love you without saying it, they were in her living room, the city lights dim and multihued on her skin.
The first time he said I love you without saying it, they were in her bed, and he was destroyed in the aftermath of their lovemaking.
He lowers his jeans to the ground, and then his underwear. Then Lukas reaches past her to turn down the sheets, draw back the comforters. The mattress dips beneath him; does not creak. He lies down, stretches out, and then he reaches for her.
"Come here," he says softly. "Let me hold you."
[Danicka] Her reaction when he lifts her like that is brief startlement, then confusion. Danicka does not curl towards him instantly but gives him a funny look at the very first, only to be drawn closer. She breathes out. She lays her head on his shoulder for a moment, lets her eyes close, lets herself have that closeness without making a joke about the way he carries her, the fact that he carries her at all. This is all right; she does not have any particular opposition to allowing others to carry her weight. At least not Lukas. At least not tonight.
She does not wrap her arms around him, though. She tucks them in close to her chest, folds them against her sternum, stays like that until he takes her to her bedroom and her leg unfurl, her socked feet touch the floor. She does not sit on the edge of the bed but stands beside it, while Lukas begins undressing with the simplicity and speed she associates with him.
Danicka takes longer. She removes her earrings first, tipping her head to the left, then the right. There is only one nightstand in this room, only one person who would ever need a drawer or a lamp or a place to set a phone and watch and wallet in the middle of the evening. The earrings are set there in near silence, tiny hints of metal on metal on wood. Her choker is next, after a flick of a clasp and the whisper of ribbon against her skin. It's heavier when she sets it down, because of the emblem at the front.
Her belt, then, which she undoes slowly. Danicka takes her time, glancing at Lukas as he's already lowering his jeans and thinking about this bed, the words they've said to each other, the angle the moonlight takes as it enters through the windows. She pushes her jeans to the floor and steps out of them, revealing the cheeky panties she was wearing under them, low cut and trimmed in pink lace, the cotton itself a green and pink pattern. She folds like a crane, lifting her leg and reaching down to tug off one sock, then the other, tossing them over to the wall. She doesn't care where her clothes fall.
Lukas is naked and folding down the covers of her messily made -- sheets and comforter simply dragged back up and tossed over the pillow -- bed to lie down and reach for her to join him. Danicka is unbuttoning her shirt, gradually revealing the light green cotton bra underneath it.
"Be patient," she whispers, working on her shirt.
The cuffs are loose enough that she can simply shrug out of the shirt and drop it behind her when the buttons are undone. The bra hasn't been on long enough to leave red impressions on her skin where the underwire dug into her; it drops in front of her, half on top of his jeans. Danicka's hair falls forward as she crawls onto the mattress, her knees making the pillowtop dip though her weight doesn't disturb him remotely. This mattress is too expensive to allow something like that. She slides her legs under the covers and comes to lie beside him.
The fronts of their thighs touch. His arm under her neck. Little else. She faces him, and looks at him with concern furrowing her brow, and asks:
"Are you going to be all right?"
[Lukas] Lukas doesn't know if Danicka's slept since he left her early this morning. He knows she ate, though he wonders how much. He knows he's eaten adequately, even hungrily, but he hasn't slept much, and both of them are exhausted still, and she's more fragile than he.
He had thought, truthfully, to hold her. To wrap her in his arms, cradle her against his body, share his warmth, sleep all night and into the day. He undressed swiftly, efficiently, a means to an end. His clothes are in a loose pile by her bed. He's under the covers, calling her to bed, and she --
is taking off her jewelry. It's so quietly intimate, somehow, and always has been. He can't help but watch. Then her belt. Then her jeans and her panties, her lower half bared before she even starts on her upper.
Lukas swallows quietly when she tells him to be patient. And his chest rises on a long, slow inhale.
"Ty jsi tak úžasná," he murmurs.
Readily, even eagerly, his hands reach for her as she climbs into bed. He touches her waist, lays his arm out to pillow her neck. Their thighs brush together. He looks at her face, looks at the furrow to her brow, looks at her eyes.
And frowns too, ever so faintly. "Why wouldn't I be, baby?"
[Danicka] It helps, and it's meaningful, that even though he worries that she may not have eaten enough, he does not question her. He doesn't ask her what she ate, when, how much, is she lying to him, is she still hungry, tell me, tell me, tell me. Danicka knows he has to be wondering, has to be worrying. He is always worrying, with certain exceptions. There are times when instinct and savagery take over and a human's thought to past and future and possibility abandons him, leaving only the here, the now, the most immediate moments before and after, the most brutal fears and physical desires.
Survival. Pleasure. Satisfaction.
Her panties are left on, never pushed away with her jeans or peeled off before the buttons of her shirt are undone. For awhile the hem of her shirt obscures half of them, in fact, before it's gone. She has no scars on her belly, on her back, on her shoulders. She's untouched from their ordeal. Wasn't. Even. Bruised. It's something of a miracle that though she was shot at, tackled, drugged, attacked by a goddamned thing in a black cowl, she remained utterly untouched. And yet: there she is, her nipples soft and pink and her skin smooth and her body unhurt.
The hands she finds coming for her seem wanting if not lascivious, longing if not craving. She moves into his arms with an ease of familiarity they now have a right to but no excuse for: even now, they do not see each other even on a weekly basis. They survive anyway. What they have survives. Even the mostly-monogamous seahorse cannot claim that sort of out-of-sight loyalty.
"Because of everything that happened," she whispers back, looking across the pillows at him. "And because you don't want me to move."
[Lukas] "It's not that," he replies. He's as quiet as she is. It's doubtful either of them worry about waking the neighbors, or her roommate who isn't home. They're quiet out of respect for the night itself; the silence of a hushed city, of the space hundreds of feet above the pavement.
Lukas's hand strokes Danicka's hair back from her cheek, back over her shoulders, back behind her ear.
"I want you to feel safe," he whispers. "I want you to have a home that's all your own. If this place is violated for you, then you should move. I want you to move.
"I'll miss it, that's all."
[Danicka] She looks away from his eyes for a brief second when he says the word violated, then back to him. Her lips are together, her brow is furrowed, but not from anger. Still worry. Still concern. They stay quiet for the sake of their own privacy, their own secrecy even when there is no one watching or listening.
And he touches her. Constantly, repetitively, over and over, he touches her where and how he can. She notices.
"Don't," Danicka whispers. "Don't miss it. It's not... it's not as good as what could be."
[Lukas] Lukas thinks about this for a while. Then, abrupt as a starburst, he smiles. It spreads slow and sure over his mouth. It lights his eyes, gives a transient warmth to the clear, crystalline blue.
"Věřím vám."
He leans toward her, moves across that small space to kiss her brow, gently. When he draws back his smile has dimmed some degrees. His thumb traces her cheekbone.
"Lituju, že jsem nemohl chránit ty."
He could mean what happened in the subterranean laboratory. He could mean what happened on the roof. He could mean what happened here, in her home, over and over while he was too damn busy pretending not to care. A shadow on his brow, now. His foot slides under the covers; his calf crosses over hers, as though to ward her retroactively.
[Danicka] "Don't," she whispers again, half echo and half song. Danicka is still looking at him when he draws back from kissing her, her eyes open and searching for his in the dark, even though what little light the city gives off his behind him and not nearly enough to reflect off his irises. "Don't do that, either."
She leans forward and kisses him, his mouth this time, soft and brief enough to be chaste if it were not her lips pressing to his, caressing his, as sensual and as luxurious as nearly every kiss she's ever given him. It lasts only a couple of seconds before she pulls away, touches his face the way he touches hers, her palm against his rough cheek.
"That's not what I've ever wanted from you. That's not what this is about."
This. Them. All of it.
"To není důvod, proč jste tady."
She kisses him again, moves closer. Here, she says. Her bed. Her den. Her arms. Her life. His.
Earth.
"Stop saying that."
[Lukas] The first kiss, Lukas's eyes close like he can't help it. He leans into her, like he can't help it. His mouth moves on hers and his jaw shifts under her hand and his fingers curve around the back of her neck, into her hair.
Between the first and the second, she says something that makes a sudden light course through his eyes, like a car on a midnight highway. He's drawing a breath to -- say something, acknowledge, or perhaps merely to breathe, when she kisses him again.
This time his eyes do not close. The lids fall a fraction. The pupils widen. The kiss is brief but lingering, and his arms fold around her.
There's no denying the protectiveness in the way he holds her. But this is different, somehow: the way he protects her like this, in her bed, in her arms; the way he promised they would protect each other at the W a week ago. It's not the same as the sort of protection he thinks of when he apologizes for not having protected her. That he thinks of when he wants to hunt her brother down and make him pay. That he thinks of when he starts to think of her not as his mate, not as his love, but as something closer to his kin. His possession.
Lukas wants very badly to avoid that. He knows where that leads; he's heard it from Danicka, seen it in his own life, in the faces of dozens of kinfolk he's battered unapologetically, dispassionately, because they did not conform to his cold logic. He's seen it in her brother, all surface charm and cracked soul.
When their lips part his eyelids lift. He studies her in the half-dark, his hands touching her gently, repetitively, over and over. As though to memorize. As though to refamiliarize. As though to worship, the same ritual motions, again and again.
"Myslím, že rozumím."
[Danicka] Even now, exhausted as they both are, they move together under the covers as though they're physically, magnetically drawn. Danicka's slim leg slips between Lukas's thighs the second time they kiss, the time where he wraps his arms around her and pulls her closer to his body as though...
...exactly. As though she can't help it.
Danicka's eyes are closed the second time she kisses him, and she misses his epiphany, the moment of understanding so like the one he had at the W when she told him the crux of the problem in New York City. You weren't mine, she'd said, and he hadn't been acting like it. That's not what this is about, she says now, and he understands. Or thinks he does.
She pulls back, lips still parted, eyes opening, and she believes him.
He touches her in the dark, and knows her.
It seems for a moment she's going to say something, answer him somehow, but she doesn't. Danicka reaches up and catches the hand touching her cheek and draws it to her mouth. She kisses his fingertips. She draws one digit after the other into her mouth, giving index to third fingers a slow, soft caress of her lips and tongue.
[Lukas] As close as they are, she can feel the rising of his pulse. The quickened beat of his heart in his chest echoed in all the major arteries of his body: at the throat, at the groin, the inside of the bicep, deep in the meat of the thigh.
His arm flexes under her neck. He pulls her closer yet, and then he rolls her gently onto her back, their legs tangling, shifting, sliding, rearranging. His ring finger leaves her mouth as he's slipping between her legs, his bare body against hers; nothing but her panties between. Trailing from her mouth to her cheek, her neck, the bed, his fingertips leave a faint meandering line of moisture.
There's no discussion. No inquiry, no permission sought or asked or exchanged. They move together organically, gradually, the muscles in Lukas's back pulling into slow flexion and slow release, rearranging as he moves over her.
His weight, he carries on his elbows. He's careful not to crush her; less careful with the slow, purposeful grind of his body between her thighs, his hardening cock against the scrap of fabric that covers her still. Mouths meet again, lazy and silent, warm as the summer rain they have left far, far behind them now. The wind outside her vast windows is cold. Stand too near the glass and they'll feel the chill seeping through, except they're nowhere near the glass. Where they are there's nothing but slow-blooming heat.
The kiss parts. His mouth to her neck now, to the beat of her pulse. He shifts over her, weight to one arm, one shoulder rising. His touch is heavy and sure. He caresses her body, that slender torso and that soft skin, those soft breasts, small enough to fit easily in the rough warm palm of his hand. He squeezes gently, gently, and moves on. His thumb traces the bottom arc of her ribcage. Down, then, swiveling on the heel of his hand, his fingers pushing past the waistline of her panties.
His eyes are so intent on hers, so clear; such focus; and then he loses it when he finds her; his brow stitches and he exhales a short, sharp breath when his fingertips glide between her lips, slip and slide over the opening of her cunt.
This kiss is different from the last: more sudden, a dip of the head and their mouths catching on one another's, deepening, opening out.
[Danicka] [WP -5]
Dice Rolled:[ 1 d10 ] 7 (Success x 1 at target 6)
[Danicka] He can hear and feel her breathing get faster when he runs his hand down her body, when he moves his own over hers. Permission isn't sought -- isn't even really needed, not in the sense of waiting, asking, and receiving an answer. Words aren't exchanged, even when Danicka rolls onto her back. Her heart is hammering in her chest suddenly, not solely from desire, but her pulse is a raging flutter against the insides of her wrists, in the cage of her ribs.
She touches his chest when he moves over her, between her legs, as steady and inevitable as things like sunsets and last breaths. She feels him growing firm, hot, pressing against her, and this time when she closes her eyes to kiss him she arches her back slightly, her mouth a melting luxury on his. She moans softly, oblivious to the presence of oncoming winter outside, feeling only the omnipresent heat rising in her, washing over her from him.
Danicka knows he wants her. She always knows.
Her first intake of breath after the kiss parts is ragged, uneasy, as though she's trying not to... speak. Or shudder. Or something. He moves his hand towards her panties and she inhales sharply. He can see the flare in her eyes as his fingertips trace the lace, the pang that reads as resistance though he can't tell to what, or why. She doesn't stop him. She bends her back and presses her breasts against him, hands curling on his chest, moving to his shouldesr, as his fingers find her. She shivers.
[Lukas] Lukas, nuzzling Danicka's neck, her ear, the strap of tendon that runs from it to her collarbone, does not so much see that flash of resistance as he feels it. He doesn't so much see her uneasiness as he senses it in the way she responds to him. Because she does respond, but --
it's not the same, somehow. It's different, this sort of raggedness to her breathing. That quickness to her heartbeat.
He draws back. His shoulders are vast over her, a shifting complexity of interweaving muscle and bone. Short and quick, but still quiet, he breathes what air is available to him between her skin and his, his need and his want and his restraint.
"Co je to?" he asks her. His voice is still soft, still quiet. It's only a little unsteady at the edges.
[Danicka] As though rejecting something -- his question, him, her own resistance, something -- Danicka just shakes her head in response, trembles again. "Jen unavená," she explains, and runs her hands up his shoulders, over his neck, into his hair. She meets his eyes, breathing heavily still, aching as she speaks. "Chci tě. Jen ... jen unavená."
One lock of his hair gets pushed off his brow. "A ty jsi mohutný a ... Bojím se jít spát." She shudders -- again, as though fighting off a constant shaking that keeps escaping in greater intervals. "Mám pocit, jsem nemůže dýchat."
[Lukas] Danicka speaks, hesitatingly, as though finding her way through an uncertain mire of words. Lukas's brow knits deeper and deeper as she goes on; not anger but something closer to worry.
Then he pushes himself up on his hands. Rolls off of her and to the side, stretching out alongside her. His bedward arm folds to pillow his head; the other hand remains loosely on her side, her waist, his thumb sweeping her skin as though to maintain some level of physical contact, tactile communication.
There's a thin sheen of sweat at his hairline. His breathing and his pulse are still quickened, heavier.
"Is it my rage?" He speaks so quietly she feels the vibration of the lower timbres through the mattress more than she hears them. "Do you need me to stay farther away from you tonight?"
[Danicka] He can -- she's seen him -- take down bloodsuckers with fangs and tentacles without breaking a sweat, without quivering. He can -- she imagines -- do more than that in seconds without gasping for air. In the time it takes for him to get her undressed and make her heart speed up from nothing more than kissing, he can destroy the things that might threaten her, threaten him, his pack, the sept. Be standing bloody and triumphant over them, without having to catch his breath.
Rolling Danicka onto her back and moving his body between her legs makes him sweat, makes him pant, and she notices. She has no comparison in her own life, battles or athletics or high ritual, to make quite that stark of a contrast. What he does to her as opposed to what anything else can do.
But she does breathe in deeply as he moves off of her, as though she was indeed claustrophobic underneath him, as though he wasn't holding himself up on his elbows but was indeed crushing her, as though the shadow of him was added weight, added reality. Danicka looks at the ceiling, then over at him, trembling as though she's cold, only she's hot to the touch. It's like she has a fever, and her eyes gleam from it.
"I want you near," she says, unabashedly plaintive. "I want to make love to you, but --"
That sentence could end any number of ways, offering reasons having to do with his rage, with what happened to them, with the fact that she hasn't heard from her fatehr since they left New York City, with the fact that she can't get the smell of a fired gun out of her nostrils, with the fact that she remembers how torturous it was to be unable to let him close enough to touch but similarly unable to let him more than a few feet away.
"Don't go," Danicka whispers, though she's shaking.
[Lukas] It would be a lie to say Lukas is able to go seamlessly from watching Danicka undress, watching Danicka slide under the covers, kissing Danicka, touching Danicka, covering Danicka and pressing between her thighs, to this. It would be a lie to say he's unaffected, that he can calm himself instantly, that some part of him is not howling with want. His very body betrays him: the beat of his heart, the elevation of his breathing, the sweat on his brow.
His hand tightens minutely on her waist. He closes his eyes for a beat, turning his face against the pillow as though burying it there will bury his desire as well.
Then he opens his eyes. Draws his hand back to himself. A deep breath expands his chest, cools his nostrils and his throat. He swallows, and then he brings his hands up. They cover his face. Scrub for a moment, then push back into his hair, tousling it into some hint, some reminder of the loose curls he had as a boy.
They drop again. The gesture could be exasperated; he's careful to make it not so.
"I'm not going," he reassures her, a whisper for a whisper. "I'm staying right here, unless you need me to be farther away."
[Danicka] Another male would -- other males have -- either not noticed that something was wrong or ignored it when they did, because in some minds you can excuse it. After all. He's warm and naked in her bed, and she asked him to be there. Invited him. Told him to take her to bed and undressed slowly, almost methodically, in front of him and with the citylight from the windows arguing with shadows, outlining her in the dark. She crawled into bed and slid her thigh between his thighs, let their bodies touch, kissed him, sucked his fingers into her mouth, moaned when his mouth came down over hers.
It could, perhaps, be excusable if he chose to ignore a ripple of tension as it went through her, for the sake of his hardening cock or his quickening heartbeat or the fact that he hasn't made love to her since they got back from New York City and that was once, twice, that wasn't enough when it had been a fucking month since he'd touched her. It's not enough. It's never going to be enough.
She feels an ache low and dark in her body, hot and moist and heavy. She thinks about the way his hand felt moving down over her and the fact that this, exactly, is what she fantasizes about when he's not here with her: his mouth on her mouth, his hand covering her breast, his fingers finding her waiting for him, getting more and more ready for him. Lukas is not alone. She fights a flinch when he takes his hand away, watches him as he tries to get himself centered and feels a rush of guilt for it.
Yet she doesn't reach for him.
"Baby," Danicka murmurs, uncertain, "I don't want to stop." And the second time, for each: "I want you. I want to make love to you."
She moves onto her side, propping herself up on her elbow, and then puts her own hand on his chest, finally, frowning in something between hurt and consternation. Or maybe just exhaustion and confusion. Or maybe a dozen things, all of which have the same simple expression: a furrow to her brow, a wrinkle across her forehead. Her hand slides across his chest, looks under or over the covers for his.
"Go slow," she whispers, pulling his hand back towards her, to her breast, to her waist, to anywhere she can get him to touch her. If he lets her: to her stomach, to the waistband of her panties. "But don't stop."
[Lukas] Lukas's eyes follow Danicka's hand as it crosses the gulf of space between. Her fingertips touch his chest, stirring the dusting of dark hair there; and then her palm presses against his hot skin. She doesn't have to look for his hand after all. It covers hers, gently, and then his breathing hitches minutely faster as she takes his hand and draws it to her body.
His face blanks with concentration and restraint. Her breast is soft under his palm, her skin unbelievably smooth. He doesn't think, not now, of why she's so unblemished, why her skin is flawless. The pad of his thumb strokes over her nipple; he watches as the aureola tightens on itself.
Downward, her hand guides his. He moves closer, raising himself carefully on his elbow. He bends to her, his dark head against her skin, which is paling again now as summer departs the sky. Slowly, carefully now, his fingertips stray beneath the waistband of her panties. He pulls them down, one side at a time, working them down her thighs while his mouth catches her breast.
And licks her, gently. And closes over her nipple, tenderly. He sucks at her in warm, gradual pulses, lazily, adoringly, savoringly.
Rather than rolling her on her back this time, Lukas stays where he is. Side by side, they move together, the covers rustling faintly over the sheets, their skin. Her panties he leaves at her knees when he can't reach any further. Rough and warm, his palm smooths its way up the inside of her thigh, back to the juncture of her thighs, back to the wetness between her legs.
His mouth releases her nipple. He nuzzles her breasts, rubs his nose and his mouth, his cheek, against her skin. "Let me touch you," he coaxes. "Open your legs, baby, let me touch it."
[Danicka] Twice he's mentioned moving farther away, perhaps remembering the night she could neither bear his touch nor tolerate his absence, the two of them caught in the push and pull of his rage, her will. And not a single time has she told him she does not want to make love to him tonight, that maybe if he could just hold her she'd be okay, or maybe he could sleep on the floor. Or the couch. Instead, she pulls him to her, despite his rage, despite her will, despite the fact that when he moved over her and she trembled it was not entirely with desire.
Because she doesn't want to stop. She doesn't want him to stop. Or stay away. Or rein in his longing and hold her quietly while he waits for his erection to go away, while he waits for the smell and feel of her to not send him into shuddering, clutching want. She doesn't want him to stop touching her.
Her room is velvety with darkness right now, what little light enters only augmenting the soft, blurred edges of everything, the lack of color, the starkness of anything seen close-up. She feels like she can see the individual hairs on his chest more clearly than in daylight. She can discern the edges of his irises and the borders of his fingertips with perfect clarity. She could draw or sculpt his lips from memory after seeing them like this.
The sheets whisper prophesies as he moves towards her again, onto his side, and Danicka -- who shivered when he stroked her nipple, who shuddered when he began to suck on it -- shifts here and there, wriggles, pushes her panties down with her knees and her toes until they're lost somewhere well past her own and her lover's feet. She rolls her hips forward as his touch runs up her thighs, rubbing herself against the side of his hand.
He gets to Let me -- before she parts her legs like he's about to ask her to, before she lifts one and drapes it over his waist. He gets to let me touch it before she reaches down between their half-covered bodies and takes his cock in her hand, and then she leans forward and kisses moan or gasp out of his mouth, her arm and hand twisted to stroke him.
"Fuck...you're so hard," she says when she lets his lips go, her eyes half-closed, her words curling warm and humid across his cheek.
[Lukas] Every light is off in here. It's the city's glow that lights them, that gives them enough to see one another by. The edges of his irises. The shape of his mouth. The lightness of her nipples. The gleam of her hair, and her eyes.
His reply is nonverbal, a low moan that winds its way from the pit of his stomach. On his side like this, it's not possible to thrust with the same force and fervor as he might when he's atop her, standing at the edge of the bed, kneeling on the mattress. It's not that alone that gentles his movements. Patience keeps the flex and relax of his hips slow; he strokes his cock into her hand slowly, easily, and all the while his fingers are nudging between the lips of her pussy, caressing her, touching her until she grows wet and swollen, and her slick is slipping between his fingertips.
Unerringly, with a melting, slow, drenching passion, his mouth finds her breasts again. He lavishes attention on the other nipple this time, drawing it into his mouth, caressing with his tongue, never once using his teeth.
Back in April, before she was truly his, before he tried to leave her, before she tried to leave him -- before a lot of things -- she lay back on his narrow bed once and reached her hands over her head. To turn off his clip-on lamp. To raise her breasts to his mouth. She told him slowly, then. And gently. She had been impatient with his impatience; and then she wasn't, guiding his mouth on her breasts as she had once, months before that, guided it on her cunt.
Danicka is Lukas's first girlfriend. First love. First mate. He did not come to her an innocent, totally unversed in sex and fucking. He came to her quite experienced in many ways; jaded, even, in the business and biology of sex. Despite that, sometimes it's obvious that he's never cared for anyone quite this way before. Sometimes she's had to tell him: not this way. This way. And sometimes,
now,
she can almost see how he's listened; learned; remembered how to love her.
His mouth leaves her breast and he raises his head, catches her mouth; kisses her while he slides his fingers into her. One. Then two. He strokes them in gently, presses them in to the palm, lays his thumb against her clit. He's touching her more firmly now, encouragingly, his mouth wandering over hers, grazingly, then deeper. He doesn't stop.
[Danicka] As if he's ever cared enough, before, to slow down. To be gentle. To promise to be careful, to pull back when he sees his rage making the female he's with quiver with fear and not lust. As if he's ever cared enough, before, to be willing to lie on his side with his arm around a girl, stroking her clit and sliding his fingers into her until she comes, without then pinning her down and fucking her brains out to get himself off.
He's her first Garou boyfriend. That was her first confession, given drunkenly. He's her first boyfriend, period, she later admitted -- or relationship, for that matter, given that the 'boy' part is not, for Danicka, imperative. He's her first love, the first and only person she's wanted to see happy above all things, the first and only person she's been willing to sacrifice her own comfort or happiness for, a willingness made more precious by the fact that she trusts he is one of the last people who would ever ask her to sacrifice either.
Who looks like he is ready to kill something when she tells him she's hungry, just to feed her.
Who has swallowed his pride, more than once, to save her from some heartache or another.
Who has made her come, again and again, as though just to watch her.
Lukas can't thrust rhythmically and fervently on his side, so Danicka strokes him with torturous slowness, curled towards him as he curls towards her, their hands and arms tangled to let them get at each other, their mouths loosing panting breaths and seeking one another's flesh. She could give him more, give it to him faster, roll him onto his back and watch him come for her, watch him clutch at the sheets and moan as though he's aching as much from pleasure as from the longing to be inside her and not watching her hand mvoe on him.
But Danicka is selfish in ways that Lukas is not. She wants to come, and she wants to come first, and she wants to come more than once. She wants him to touch her slowly, and be gentle, and she wants him to stay just as hard as he is now, hot and touchable, lavishing attention on her body until each kiss borders on worship. She wants Lukas. She has always wanted him. She realizes now: she wanted to fuck him, she wanted to make love to him, she wanted to make him hers, she wanted to abandon reason itself while coming with him, and know he was just as far gone from civility and sense as she was.
She wanted him to push her legs apart and lick her the way he did the first time, the way he does now without needing so much guidance. She wanted him to slide his fingers into her and look at her as though the feeling of her cunt squeezing his digits inside were something just as intense as but wholly different from filling her with his cock. She wanted this, always this, an she wants it now more than she ever thought she could.
Which is saying something: in January, in February, her desire for him bordered on need.
Danicka fucks his hand. Simply, unapologetically, she gasps when he moves one, two fingers into her pussy. Unabashedly, she rolls her hips and squirms while he rubs her clit, loosing whimpers and gasps into the air while her hand slows on his cock from sheer distraction. She moans when his mouth wanders, kisses him harder, tightens her leg around him to pull his hips closer.
"Baby," she whispers, ducking her head to lick his throat, her palm smearing precum up his cock, her body jerking slightly as he fingers her, "baby, dovolte mi sát na to. Jen trochu. Dovolte mi, aby to dobré pro vás."
[Lukas] The first time they fucked, Lukas barely made a sound, barely said a word, as if this would prevent Danicka from knowing just how badly he wanted her, just how good it was for him. As if her knowing this would somehow weaken his position, crumble his foundation, send him down in rubble and flames.
It was weeks before he let himself so much as groan; months before he let himself speak to her. Even now, the truth is Lukas will never be terribly verbose. When she strokes him -- slowly, slowly -- his breath catches and hitches, shudders into an exhale. When she tells him what she wants to do to him, and for him, he opens his eyes, a faint groan caught somewhere in his throat.
"Okay," he whispers. "Okay." His fingers slip out of her. He catches her face between his hands, suddenly but briefly, pressing an abruptly ravenous kiss to her mouth.
Letting go, then. Blankets rustle, rumpling here, straightening there. Lukas rolls on his back and pushes them away half-impatiently, peeling fabric back and baring his body as he sinks down. The air in her room is pleasantly cool. It wicks sweat from his body and his hands are all over her, pushing into her hair and running down her back as she finds her way down his body.
"Pojď sem," he murmurs. His hands urge, pull at her, lift and move and rearrange her over him until she's straddling his face. "Sedni si na můj obličej. Dovolte mi chuť ty."
He's lying, though. Because as soon as her mouth is on his cock his head falls back; he lets out a sighing groan, somewhere between utter relief and unbearable pleasure. Wordlessly encouraging, his hand runs up and down her back while the other grips her hip as though gravity were dropping away from him, and her body was the only anchor he had left.
[Danicka] Even before she got on top of him and moved over his lap the first time, Danicka spoke more than Lukas did. Offered more. Broke silences not out of nervousness but out of a certain natural irreverence, a refusal to cling to the pride of not being the one to open up first. He knew how she wanted it that night, where, what mattered to her, but only because she told him. In reverse, Danicka had to guess. She had to feel what was there underneath his silence and his coldness, trusting the edge of his voice when he told her to stop sucking his cock or the look in his eyes when he confessed that he wanted to fuck her, that he wanted her to fuck him, more than the harshness of his hand on her wrist or the way he snapped at her about the phase of the moon, about the games he always worried she was playing.
And yet she let him look her in the eyes when she came, fought for it even when she wanted to arch her back and squirm and scream. She put her hands on his shoulders and bore down on him, gasped, but didn't call his name. That was held back, for longer than perhaps she should have, as though by naming him while he was inside her then it might create some sort of claim between them, some kind of esoteric ownership she was not sure she wanted, or could handle, or was even capable of without destroying him.
Being destroyed. Being owned. Which makes it all the more ironic that eventually she claimed him so utterly, and asked him to take her so completely. The woman he once thought was incapable of anything but a good lay, incapable of loyalty, may as well have asked him to be hers in the fashion of mortals. Imploring. Hoping. And always, ever, offering more than a hard fuck in a motel room.
Danicka clutches at him when he withdraws his hand from her as though she can't bear it. She does not flinch from her own wetness on her face, moving instead into his cupped hands and moaning against his mouth. Her leg wrapped around him flexes, pulling them close enough that for a moment his cock slides against her cunt, enough that for a moment when she rocks her hips closer it seems she's simply going to take him now, but then she relaxes. He rolls on his back. She moves away to wait, and when he tries to pull her hips towards his face she makes
the strangest sound
and resists, as wordless as an animal. The sound is a nasal yet growling negation as she pulls from his hands, as though she's a child or a savage who has forgotten how to speak any of her first languages. She flashes her eyes at him, lips parted, and moves perpendicular to him, bending over his lap and not taking him in her mouth but rubbing her face over his cock, nuzzling him, arching her back and moving forward, rubbing her breasts on it. Her eyes close as her head falls back. It's not teasing. It's not torture.
Not intentionally, at least.
It takes Danicka a few seconds to remember why she's here, what she said, what she wants. She drops her head again, hair falling on either side of her face, and groans as she slides her lips down onto him, tongue flicking his flesh almost hungrily.
[Lukas] That was one exception in his early reserve; one flaw in his armor. He called her by name, over and over, long before he said anything remotely kind to her. He spoke her name when they kissed that first time, a moment after he called her a whore; as though to name her more truly. He spoke her name again when he asked her to
otevřeno pro mě.
There are theories, that language is what separates man from animal. There are myths, that the first and highest duty of man was to Name, and by naming, make things permanent, invariant, set. He named her, that first night. She named him, much later.
And then there's the flash of her eyes to him, the sound she makes: something animal about it, as though she were the half-beast here and not him, as though she's the predator and the one that can slip her skin, and he's prey, or meat, or something she's marking by rubbing herself all over it the way a wolf spreads her scent.
Or maybe he's the one marking her. He's the one she's allowing to mark her, and by doing so, claim her. She's rubbing him all over her: her face, her her mouth, her breasts. The mattress shifts suddenly as he pushes himself up on his elbows, one hand burying itself in her hair, pushing back that blonde, those strands, cool and silken, tumbling in waves and coils over his hands, through his fingers.
"Baby," he's hushed, almost gasping, "baby, what are you waiting for?"
And then --
" -- ah,"
when she opens her mouth and takes him inside, that wetness, that heat; making his head fall back, making him drop down on his back again, so heavily and suddenly that the mattress jounces. His spine arches, hip-centered, one long thrust against her mouth; as gently and slowly as he can before he lowers himself again.
His stillness is born of pure tension, muscles flexed, joints locked, fingertips moving over and over through her hair, mindless patterns and whorls, circles, as he lifts his head to watch her only to drop it back again, sighing.
[Danicka] Already she's wet for him, from him, her face and her body traced with moisture here and there, and there's a flush of arousal to her skin that will only get more and more prominent as winter comes on and her skin loses summer's warmth in color if not to the touch.
He can remember that. She was so warm, in February, in that air conditioned room, her legs and her arms wrapping around him and her mouth so hot on his and all of her, every inch, so reminiscent of home, of familiarity, of belonging. Ages before they ever said it, before she ever told him his place was right there with her, there was that feeling. Maybe he chalked it up to her breeding. Maybe she chalked it up to the madness she once lived by. They both know better now, whatever they thought then.
She doesn't talk now, couldn't if she wanted to, doesn't want to try. She sucks him slowly, luxuriously, as though she's forgotten where she is, what else there is. Her hands move over him, one on his cock, one running over his abdomen, his chest, up an down his side. When Lukas does this for her he likes to look up at her, watch her lose her mind, feels as though he can, for once, see clear through her. When Danicka does it she loses herself, eyes closed and moans loosed here and there, vibrating through the surface of his skin.
Saliva mixes with precum. She licks him, sucks harder at the tip, digs her fingernails into one of his pectoral muscles briefly. As soon as he's fallen back, as soon as he's relented from that slow thrust, as soon as he's still, she pleasures him in earnest, and he can count on one hand still the number of times she's done this to him, for him. Almost every time, he's had to ask her to stop, stop, please stop, and sometimes she's ignored him. This time he does not have to tell her to stop. This time she gives one last long draw of her mouth up his cock before she releases him, taking him in her hand instead
and turning around
and swinging her leg over his body
and guiding him inside of her, slowly now, her hair falling down her back, her body hardly illuminated by anything. She moves over him like a shadow, or a ghost, and takes him in bit by bit with gradual, heavy swings of her hips.
[Lukas] Beneath her hand, the muscles overlying his ribcage, or strapping chest to hip, or pulling from sternum to shoulder joint -- they're all hard, bunched, shivering ever so faintly under her fingertips. When her nails dig briefly into his chest Lukas groans aloud, the muscle tightening suddenly under her hand before it relaxes again, and his hand is covering hers, and he guides her fingers to his nipple.
They don't say anything more. She sucks on him, slowly, slowly, and he doesn't try to guide her. He doesn't try to stop her. He doesn't try to do anything at all except survive this, his eyes closed, his head back and his throat bared, his breath coming in unsteady arrhythmic sighs and bursts, slipping between his parted teeth.
It's not until she stops that Lukas lifts his head again. His eyes are dazed; his eyes are fever-bright. Not a word passes between them, but his eyes stay on her, follow her every movement. His awareness etches her out of the darkness, carves her into refulgence, makes her as brilliant in his mind as a shooting star as she
turns around
and straddles him
and guides him inside. Her hair sways against her back like a flag. Is it longer now than it was in winter? He can't tell. He can't remember anything except this moment, this, the swing of her hair, the swing of her body, the shifting shadows in the dip of her spine and the feel of her hips beneath his hands as she comes down over him, stroke by stroke.
She can hear him breathing behind her, short, heavy pants every time her pussy comes down on him. His hands on her back spread warmth over her skin, up to her shoulderblades and then down again. He rubs her ass, grips at her hips; spreads her ass to look at her cunt swallowing him up, taking his cock in, and the bed is shuddering again from the force of his head falling back.
"Oh god." This isn't even a groan; it's a moan, soft and tattered. "Oh, my god."
Then he's buried inside, and she's holding him inside. His body moves under her; he's fumbling to shove pillows under his head, under his shoulders, propping himself on an incline to see better. The cadence and timbre of his breathing is different. He's closed his mouth and clenched his teeth as though this might help him
(survive this)
keep his head cool, or at least cool enough to think, to hold onto her, to hold onto himself. "Stop, baby." It takes effort to say this. It takes effort to pull his hands from her hips, to put them under her thighs, to urge her up, up. "Baby, stop. Dovolte mi získat si kondom."
[Danicka] Less than twenty-four hours ago, they were underground as surely as if they'd been buried. Killed, mourned, vanished. They know what happened at the caern now, they know about the vhujunka even if it hasn't been named as such. They know who was trying to kidnap Betcha Can't Hit That now. They know where Wyrmbreaker and his mate were for something like twenty hours. Since emerging from the elevator to the surface of the woods, Danicka has eaten little, slept fitfully, won a game of pool, admitted to her mate that she can't live in a shared den anymore and may be leaving this one.
She has also admitted, in the past twenty-four hours, that though she's not ready to be a mother, she would be proud to have his children. His cubs. Little ones, she'd called them, not babies or pups or offspring. The term was like an endearment to the future, or a possible future, even tinged as it was with fear of the situation they were in at the time as much as fear of the possibility. But she was not expressing wanting to have those children, or wanting to get pregnant. Far from it. Strangely, it sounded like willingness. Like she wasn't before, wouldn't have been, even if she were to take a test one day and find it positive.
It's a small difference. Maybe not one he picked up on.
No matter, right now.
She only looks at him once before her back is turned, her mouth wet and her throat moving as she swallows, lifting her hand to wipe the corner of her lips with the back of her wrist. And then he can't see her face. He can only feel her on him, see her back, and yes her hair is longer but it doesn't quite get past her shoulderblades, hasn't in the ten or so months since they met as adults. She keeps it the same general length, neither the cropped bob it was after her mother's death nor the waist-length chaos it was while Night Warder was alive.
Danicka is tight around him, slim above him. She's getting stronger than she was at first. Maybe it's going to the gym instead of taking long walks, now that the weather is getting colder. Maybe it's learning to cope with the recoil of a firearm at the firing range. Maybe it's simply building her endurance, her ability to cope, which was always more important to Danicka than force. She's more inclined to be the immovable object than the unstoppable force, but she's really, ultimately, not that either. There's flexibility in the wind of her hips on him, the arch of her spine, the stretch of her legs parting over his thighs.
Once upon a time she wouldn't let him inside her without a condom. Slapped him on the shoulder at the W in Times Square because he pulled her down onto his cock without one. And now she rides him like this, doesn't stop when he gasps for her to. It would be a lie if she said she really doesn't know what this is doing to him, what he wants, how mindblowing it is, starting and then stopping and then having her suck on him and now this oh god now this...
Danicka rolls her hips in a long circle, twists her head to look at him over her shoulder. "No," she whispers, and bears down on him. "Fuck me."
[Lukas] Every muscle between his shoulders and his knees bunches when Danicka rolls her hips like that. She can feel it beneath her where she rides on him; between her knees where she straddles him. Lukas has to bite back a groan, but he can't stop the shutting of his eyes, the furrowing of his brow, the parting of his lips.
That's what she sees when she looks at him over her shoulder: the way his face changes, the way his face pulls with pleasure, and the way the lines of his body are stark and defined even in this half-dark.
"Danička," he tries again, "nechci riskovat, že tě ztratím."
And the truth is, Lukas isn't trying very hard. If he truly wanted her off of him, Danicka's opinion in the matter wouldn't matter much at all. He could pick her up with one arm. He could push her off with one hand. He could get up, get out, leave --
but that is the very last thing he wants.
Lukas wants to stay. Right here. In her bed. In her pussy. He wants her cunt on him, hot and wet and all for him; he wants her just like this, no latex, no barriers, nothing but the most basic imperatives and instincts; nothing but the two of them, making love in what is not quite her den in Danicka's mind, but perhaps is in Lukas's.
It's a selfish want. It's a stupid want, in the long run, even were he concerned only for himself. Lukas, consummate worrier, planner, strategist that he is, understands this. Lukas, consummately instinct-driven, an animal and her mate, does not give a fuck. The compromise is somewhere between. He asks her to stop. He begs her to stop so he can get a contraceptive. He holds on to the fraying ends of his control and
he hopes to god she doesn't stop.
[Danicka] Months ago she would have watched him right now to determine what he really wanted, set it up against what she really wants, determined which need was greater, which path gave her more security, more safety. And now Danicka doesn't look quite so deeply at him, at least not for the same reason: to avoid getting hurt. To keep from being punished. She watches him as she rides him, twisted and balanced precariously on his lap, his hands on her thighs and her ass actually keeping her more steady than unsettled.
As though curious about his reaction, she swivels on him again, sees if she can get him to release that held-back groan, breathes more heavily herself as his cock rubs against her clit. Danicka reaches down even as he's gasping or whispering or moaning that he can't risk losing her, lets out a harsh exhale that sounds almost surprised as she starts to touch herself. Her cunt clenches suddenly, quivers around him. She bounces slightly, takes him deeper.
She has known for years that it's better to double up on birth control. Be safe. Take care of herself. If she really doesn't want to get pregnant then she needs to make sure she takes that little pill and she needs to carry condoms and make sure that she doesn't let Lukas come inside her unless they're in the middle of the woods and he's lost his wallet and she doesn't have her purse and they absolutely have to fuck, right the fuck away. She knows that her bloodline is ridiculously fertile, that even her half-sister whose health pales in comparison to Danicka's has borne six children, two of them Garou.
Danicka does not know that if she let herself truly just settle down and breed with Lukas like she would have if they lived fifty, a hundred years ago, she would potentially give birth to a pack's worth of full-blooded children, not a single one of which could bear to see their father every day. Then again, Danicka doesn't see him every day. Danicka sees him about as frequently as his cubs might, were they to exist.
She is thinking about that, though, because he's making her, and she doesn't want to. She wants his cock inside of her like this, just like this, and she wants him to come inside of her, and she wants him to stay in her bed and she wants to smell him as he holds her and she wants his arms around her waist, his head on her breasts while he catches his breath and she wants, she wants, she wants so much she can't think straight.
Danicka is a wild thing, and does not mind being unable to think. She does not give a fuck, and there is no strategically minded part of her to tell her stop, to worry, to plan. She feels her mate tense beneath her and starts to ride him faster, leaning forward to put her hand on the bed, her other hand between her legs, touching him, touching herself. She does not so much ignore him as decide not to listen.
And fucks him.
[Lukas] As though entangled in some fundamental way, Lukas pants out nearly in unison with Danicka. When she touches herself. When she clenches down on him. When she takes him deeper like that, and makes stars go off behind his eyelids.
"Fuck," he whispers -- the harsh fricative, the breathed vowel, the last consonant aspirated, barely even there. Danicka has decided to stop thinking. Danicka is riding him now, faster, and Danicka has decided not to listen, not to let him think anymore. She leans forward for balance. His hands press upward on her thighs for a moment, as though he might actually push her up and off, as though he might actually make her stop, stop, stop and get a goddamn condom.
And then all at once they move. They go to her hips. He takes her by the hips and he pulls her down on him, down against the sudden, upward throw of his hips that marks the end of his resistance. This time he does groan aloud, as though the sound were driven out of him by the wall of pleasure that slams through him.
"To mě poser." He might be echoing her. He might be saying what was on his mind from the start, from the moment she took his slick cock in hand and guided it to the opening of her cunt. "Bože, to je ono. Jen kurva mě, lásko."
His hands on her hips aren't pulling at her anymore, aren't doing anything but feeling her move, feeling the pull and slide of her lower back. Over and over his palms smooth over her back, pushing up and pulling down, following the shifting muscles beneath her impossibly soft skin; tracing the arches of her shoulderblades. When he can't reach anymore she can feel him shifting again, pushing the palms of his hands against the mattress and rising beneath her, bearing her up on his body, sliding back to sit a little more upright, and now he can reach farther, and now he can reach between her legs and
their fingers tangle between her thighs; his fingers push past hers and find her clit. "Tam jste," he breathes. She comes down again. He groans behind closed lips; starts to stroke, starts to rub, wants to make her bear down on him, wants to make her clench down on him while she bounces on his cock.
[Danicka] This is what she told him to do. Danicka told him to fuck her, refused to stop or get off of him, and rolled her hips again and again instead, started playing with her clit, started bouncing on his lap like she's simply going to use him regardless of the risk. He capitulates, totally, into fucking her then. Thrusts up into her, moves back on the bed, sits up so he can touch her.
Reaching back, Danicka grabs his other hand and pulls it around her to her breast, gasping as two sets of fingers, one thick and rough, one slender and soft, caress her cunt and slide over his cock as they move together.
"Fuck, yes," she gasps, the muscles in her back curling and snaking above him, her ass rubbing back against him as she grinds now, squirms atop him before lifting up to start fucking him harder.
Faster.
Danicka abandons her clit a moment later, leaves it to Lukas, whimpers as she starts bouncing again, riding him at a gallop, every breath a gasp for air and a cry of pleasure. They can hear the front door open while she's in the middle of
"Oh, god, Lukáš, you're --"
and switches, effortlessly and instantly, as the door closes behind Paul,
"-- tak zatraceně těžké. Cítíte se tak kurva dobrý."
Though given the tone of her voice, the volume of her moaning, it would not be hard for anyone to guess what sort of things she's saying to her lover in there, loud enough that it leaks out into the hallway. Danicka ignores the fact that her roommate is home and doesn't stop fucking back against Lukas, a sheen of sweat growing on her skin, her hair sticking to her here and there, her flesh glistening slightly.
"To je ono, miláčku. Prdele mě s že velký kohout," she gasps, turning her head to look at him again, feeling the heat off his chest against her back, feeling his hands spreading over her breast, her pussy, wandering over her body. "To mě poser." Her voice falling to a whisper, a shiver of words in the air: "Make me come for you."
[Lukas] Everywhere. His hands are all over her. One stays where it is, fingering her clit with a sort of relentless persistence, slipping and sliding in the wetness that every roll of her hips, every drive of his cock pushes out of her. The other is simply everywhere, rubbing up her ribcage and cupping her breast, caressing one and then the other and then the first again, squeezing gently, tugging at the nipples, moving on. His touch wanders her shoulders, slips down her back, that beautiful slender back with its sleek, toned muscles, with its straight, narrow spine, and the fall of her hair swinging against it all, sticking where her sweat has made her wet, bouncing and rolling
as she bounces and rolls on him, driving him the fuck out of his mind. Lukas is panting now, his breathing heavy and steady and harsh behind her. Heat bakes off of him. Sweat slips down his temple, gathers in the hollow of his throat, the flat of his breastbone between the bunched and flexing muscles of his chest. He watches her ride him, tries to hold in his mind the pleasure of it, and the feel of her, and the way she smells and the way she moves, the way she looks, the sounds in her bedroom and how the air fills with their sighs and their voices --
all of it --
too much, far more than a mind can gather all at once. So he lets it go. He lets it filter through his consciousness, ricochet through his synapses, touch off lines of pleasure and arousal in him; he lets it all light him up and she's pounding herself on him now but somehow in his mind it's still
slow.
like a dream, and then the front door opens.
"Fuck," he gasps behind her. She doesn't even miss a beat. She snaps from one language to the next and she's moaning loud enough to be heard from the hallway and even if she weren't he does when she turns to look at him; it's the look in her eyes, the gleam of the green that makes him drop his head back and groan. She whispers what she does and he leans back, he shifts his balance to his shoulders, to his feet, flexes his body off the bed and
fucks her now, suddenly and unequivocally, when all along he's been merely content to be ridden. His body's slamming up into hers, his cock hammering into her again and again and again as his free hand pushes her up a little higher on her knees, straddling him, receiving him, taking that cock as he pounds it up into her, while his hand plays with her clit, on and on and on, not stopping even if she does come for him, not stopping even if she's falling apart, not stopping even if
that goddamn roommate of hers who shares this den, with the godawful timing and the godawful sense of humor, hears every last thing that happens in this room.
Some spark lights off in him. An entire nerve-net goes up in flames, from the base of his spine all the way to the tips of his fingers, the ends of his toes. He goes rigid. He snarls,
"Oh -- bože!"
and it's the sort of sound he'd bite into her shoulder, or muffle against her neck, but she's too far, and he releases it into the air, and in the next second Lukas grabs Danicka's hips in both his hands, pulls her hard against his hips, pulls her hard onto his cock, four, five times, each slam of their bodies together driving a rush of a breath that's very nearly a grunt out of him.
In the end he has just enough left in him to remember to hold it in, to bite it back; to groan, and gasp, and pant his pleasure against clenched teeth, closed lips. When his orgasm lets him go, the rigid arch of Lukas's spine relents all at once. He comes down on the bed hard enough to make the mattress shudder; tilts his head back, closes his eyes, and lets himself fight for the breath that seems to have escaped him utterly.
[Danicka] "That's it," she gasps as Lukas tugs on her nipples, strokes her clit, caresses her wherever he can reach, forgetting that Paul can hear her, or assuming he's retreated to his room, or not caring, "oh fuck, baby, that's it."
And she is pounding herself down on him, fucking herself on his cock as hard as he's ever given it to her when he's been on top, enfolded in her legs, her hands clawing at his back while he thrusts deeper into her cunt. She realizes: she likes it when he's on her like that, likes the way he looks when he's fucking her, likes the feel of his body simultaneously covering and filling her, likes the warmth, likes the closeness, likes the force and savagery of it.
But she likes it when he's behind her, bending her over the bed or bowing over her back, his breath harsh in her ear and his hands on her hips pulling her back against him, onto his cock.
And she likes it when he's under her, gasping and flexing to try and fuck her harder, the way he looks against her pillows and sheets as he fights to keep from roaring out his pleasure, as he tries to endure what the feel of her does to him. She likes the way he gasps, the way he watches her on him, the way he loses himself, the way she feels when sweat sticks their skin together. She loves it.
"Baby, stop," she pleads, when he's rubbing her, when he's playing with her relentlessly, when she's shivering on top of him, when her cunt is clenching on his cock as a result. "Baby, please, baby, I--
"Ah!"
It's a scream, nearly, when she folds forward, grinding down on him, swirling her hips on him hard only to bounce three, four times on his lap, gasping and screaming that single breathy vowel sound again and again, nearly screaming when she begs
"Lukáš, přestaň, to je moc!"
But he doesn't stop, not when she comes, not when she pleads with him for mercy, not when she's literally screaming because she can't take anymore, not when he knows that there is no way in hell Paul isn't hearing this, the way she shrieks and Lukas snarls, the way he swears and groans, the way he grunts like an animal, the way she whimpers as though she's in pain, the way they fuck each other.
When it's over, when the rigidity of their arms and legs and torsos has given way to melting relaxation, when Lukas has filled her and Danicka has felt her blood pressure change so suddenly that it leaves her dizzy, when he falls apart on the mattress and she sways, leans forward. One of his legs is bent slightly; she wraps her hand around his thigh and urges him to bend his knee further, wraps herself around his leg, leans on it as though he's far more solid than the bed, than the floor, than anything. She rests her head on the hard, bony surface of his knee. She closes her eyes and pants for air.
She trembles. And not from fear.
[Lukas] They fuck like the animals they are, shameless and furious, filling the air with shrieks and snarls.
They mate like the lovers they are, absolutely, unrestrainedly, throwing themselves out and laying themselves bare for one another.
They give over everything. They get it back.
And now in the aftermath, he's fallen back amongst the pillows and the blankets, his hands relaxing from her hips to fall to either side, spread open like wings. His skin is hot; he's burning up, and his sweat lifting from his body leaves coolness down the midline of his torso, at his hairline. His hair is damp, curled at the temples and over the ears, at the back of the neck.
She's leaning forward, and trembling, and she's urged him to bend his leg up and give her something to rest against. She's leaning on his leg and wrapped around his muscular thigh, his long shin, her brow to his kneecap.
A strange sort of communion, this. No words now; no sounds but their breathing, slowing, slowing.
Shadows and city lights murmur on the ceiling when Lukas opens his eyes. He looks down, which is to say, he looks toward his feet, past the rising and falling plain of his chest, to the rise of her back. Their bodies, conjoined, form a sort of landscape of warmth and solidity. He lifts his hand from the bed; it feels heavy, not wholly his own. He touches her and remembers his boundaries, the expanse of his own skin.
Her back is a map that his fingers read. Slowly, almost soothingly, his hand rubs up and down her spine. Then he takes her by the shoulder, gently, urges her to let go his leg, to sit up, to lie back, to unfold her legs and rearrange her body and lie down over him, aligned.
It's a gradual turn. He rolls onto his side, bringing her with him. Their legs tangle and weave. His arm encircles her. He kisses her shoulder, her neck. He seeks her mouth, and if she gives it to him, they share a kiss over her shoulder, slow now, sweet again.
When it parts he lays his head down. Warm and solid, his chest expands against her back as he breathes in. And out. And closes his eyes.
[Danicka] A lot of times, Danicka doesn't tell him out loud what is working, what isn't, what she likes, what she doesn't. She guides his hands, she moans this way or that, she resists the way he pulls at her or surrenders, and he learns by touch rather than lecture how to love her. She learns by instinct what it is he needs, what it is he really wants from her, which is what he's always wanted:
her. Her love. Her loyalty. To hold. To keep. To simply, underneath everything else, be near her.
She cools off faster, is exposed more fully to air than he is, does not burn with rage the way he does. She takes longer to catch her breath. She keeps her eyes closed to block out the spinning, heavy darkness of the room until it slows down, until it stops pressing on her, until she can breathe. When it does, she feels Lukas starting to move her, and she makes another noise of resistance, more whimper than snarl this time, and refuses to lie back on top of him, back to chest. It's happened more than once that she's resisted that, or pulled away soon after, seeking something more comfortable for her, more stable, where her shoulderblades are not balanced on his pectorals or her back awkwardly arched.
But she does come to him. Always, inevitably, yet not quite helplessly, she does move down beside him. It means letting go of his leg, and it means drawing herself off of him, which is torture, yet only makes her come closer faster to reconnect what's been lost. Danicka gasps as he slips out of her, shudders at the loss, and turns around, crawling over her expansive and soft-topped bed back to his chest, laying her head on his shoulder and her breasts against his body and her legs tangled with his, covering him.
Her hair spreads over his arm.
Danicka says nothing. She rolls with him when he does, only she's facing him instead of curling against his body. She tucks her arms in close between their chests for warmth, and sighs against his neck. His nuzzling and kissing of her wherever he can reach leads her to tipping her head back, eyes closed, blindly seeking his mouth, or offering her own. She kisses him as best she can while this tattered, this far gone, which is to say:
sweetly. Slowly. Tenderly.
Her feet move. They wriggle, and brush his ankles, and finally find their way to slide underneath his feet. Which leaves her half-covered, enfolded, held against his heat, both of them sweaty, sticky, smelling of each other. Her eyes close as they lay down, her forehead ducked towards his collarbone, his head on her pillows.
"We should shower," she whispers, idle as a yawn.
But she doesn't get up. She hears his heartbeat in her temples, against the backs of her wrists, and eases her head down onto his bicep. If he opens his eyes, he can watch her fall asleep as quickly as though she was never really awake today to begin with; everything since he left her at the front door has been a dream. Everything before that was a nightmare. Sleeping with him, like this, is reality. She's sure of it. She believes in it. She trusts in it.
And him.
celebration.
9 years ago