ours.

[Lukas] It's Saturday afternoon, and it's been five days to the hour since they saw each other last in front of the Lakeshore W, while he walked her to her car with his own parked three rows over. It was a sunny day, then, deceptively warm, closer to March than December.

The day is cold now, literally freezing, the edges of the lake finally beginning to gather the first crystals of ice. Lukas doesn't call; he sends a text message. It reads:

6944 W. 40th St
1 hr?

--

It'll take Danicka a good 20, 30 minutes to get out to the address Lukas gave her from her glittering apartment on the riverfront. She can follow the south branch of the river almost all the way out, west by southwest, out from the city center, out past the ghettos and the inner city, out into the suburbs, out nearly to the edge of the Chicago metropolitan area. This isn't even Chicago proper anymore, but a tiny town -- village -- by the name of Stickney, lost in the Chicago sprawl.

The residences here are nothing like 520 Kingsbury. They're small, one- and two-stories, blocklike, set down in neat rows and files that smack of 1950s production-line architecture, though, for what it's worth, the lawns and foliage are reasonably well-tended, and the streets are clear of loiterers, malingerers, and junk vehicles up on concrete blocks.

A few trees line the sidewalks, some large, most small. A few ambitious houses have pools in the back. Some have children's toys out front. There are cars parked on the street, strictly utilitarian middle-class, nothing fancier than a japanese sportster or two from the mid-90s.

Danicka's slate-blue Infiniti stands out here. So does Lukas's M3, though to a far lesser degree. That vehicle is parked in front of 6944 West 40th, and Lukas is leaning against the driver's side. He's wearing durable, inexpensive jeans, a zip-up jacket, and what looks like a startlingly plain t-shirt underneath. One arm is folded across the chest, the other holding his cellphone as his thumb flicks over the keypad. When he hears the rumble of the Infiniti, rather different from the exhaust note of the occasional other cars that have passed this way, he clips his phone closed and looks up.

The house behind him is modest and, truth be told, rather oddly designed. By the mismatch of textures and materials, it's almost certainly been renovated and extended by a previous owner. The main block is pale brick, and rather tiny: a main floor on top of a half-underground basement. Lumped awkwardly onto that is a shingle-sided foyer and a second story toward the back. Some accident of design or architecture makes it look larger than it is, but the entirety of it -- add-ons or not -- is likely smaller than the interior of Danicka's apartment.

Lukas is walking toward Danicka's car before she's even parked and turned off the ignition. He pulls the driver's side door open, holding his hand out for hers as she pulls the key out of the switch. "Hey," he says, happy to see her, which is not rare; a little nervous, too, which is. When she rises out of the driver's seat, she can catch a whiff of a potpourri of chemical scents on him -- paint, grout, carpet cleaner, windex, mildew remover, 409, bleach.

Beneath that, sweat.
Beneath that, him.

He holds her hand a minute. Then the corners of his mouth flick quickly, quirkily up. He doesn't have to tell her what he means when he says --

"You wanna see it?"

[Danicka] The site of the address does not, this time, send Danicka pulling up Googlemaps on her iPhone. She knows the area around her apartment and the Brotherhood well, now. She's familiar with sidestreets all the way to the University of Chicago. Danicka has learned the city she lives in quickly, especially considering she has so little experience becoming oriented to new places. She does not see the address he sends her and think instantly of the surrounding area and guess, by that, whether he's inviting her to lunch or a drink, to some bookstore or another. Danicka looks at it and her heart rate goes up.

And maybe a minute later, Lukas receives this:

Less.

--

Truth be told, Danicka barely even sees the scenery as she drives from her apartment building out to Stickney. She takes little note of the way the residences change, of the river alongside her. For a remarkably perceptive woman she sees very little on her way out to W. 40th Street. It's midafternoon. Christmas break hasn't begun yet for Chicago's schools, children too young for school are taking their after-lunch naps, and so there's no sight or sound of children in the neighborhood. It's bitterly cold outside, but without piles and drifts of snow, so there are no stay-at-home adults out shoveling, much less tending gardens or mowing lawns. It's quiet.

She isn't looking at home numbers when she turns onto the street. She's looking for Lukas, or Lukas's car, or a telltale SOLD sign: something that will tell her where she's going without looking at painted-on, nailed-on digits. Just before she sees the black BMW in the driveway and the man leaning against it -- waiting, despite the cold -- she is struck by a thought that makes her chest cave in.

Then she sees him. And it explodes.

Danicka pulls into the double driveway beside the M3 as he's stepping away from it, turning off the ignition as he's reaching for the door handle. Which is locked. His attempt to open it makes Danicka -- a shadowy figure behind tinted glass -- tip her head back with only dimly-heard laughter. She hasn't even properly looked at the house they're parked in front of, yet. She was, after all, looking for him, or any sign of him, to tell her where he'd made their den.

She smiles at him through the glass with a pretense of primness that barely, barely helps her restrain the brightness of a real smile. And unlocks the doors. And grins at him, almost childishly. She gives him her hand when he opens her door then, wrapping it around his palm and lifting herself up onto her feet. She's dressed in a pair of slacks that appear gray only because the pattern of black and white diamonds on the fabric is on such a minute scale. They're tailored around her slender hips, flaring slightly over the top of her black ankle boots.

Lukas can see a silvery gray trench coat inside the car, tossed onto the passenger seat. Danicka is just wearing a wide-necked pink sweater, the collar adorned at one shoulder with a demure pink silk bow. Her hair is swept up in a ponytail made of loose and draping curls, the band covered by a bow of similar width and delicacy as the one embellishing her shirt.

Hey, he says, as mismatched to her as he possibly could be at the moment, dressed as he is and smelling as he is when she smells like her soap and her fabric softener and her, all of which are easier for his nose to discern than the scents on his body and clothes are for her to pick up on. Still: the cologne he's wearing is potent and abrasive, and obscures that elusive scent that she associates with waking up and finding him drowsy and warm on her pillows, under her blankets, against her skin.

She all but tackles him anyway, cashmere-covered arms thrown around his neck and slim body pressed to his. Any neighbors -- who have been looking at Lukas since he first showed his face on their street, who heard the same rumble of the Infiniti's engine that caused him to look up -- who may be looking at them right now put aside all initial estimates of the reasons for a single man buying a four-bedroom house with no roommates or family in sight. They drop all imagination they briefly held of the relationship between the well-coiffed blonde and the bimmer-driving giant of a man waiting for her in the driveway.

Despite the phase of the moon, despite the fact that he makes them nervous, at least one or two onlookers -- and there's more than one or two, there's always more when someone new moves in, in every neighborhood across the country -- feel a pang of warmth when they see the way Danicka greets Lukas. Her private happiness is, for the moment, on select display, though neither Lukas nor Danicka are aware of it. He might be jealous to know that the impression of it is just as infectious to strangers as it is to him. He might be pleased.

He might be holding her now, because she is giving him no choice. She's rather hanging off of him, all but quivering against his chest, a bright smile fixed on her face that he can't see because she's clinging so tightly to him, holding him so closely.

It takes a few moments for her to loosen her hold even a little, to start sliding away and down until her heels touch the concrete again. She lets her hands move from his shoulders to his chest, tries again to control her smile when she looks up at him. He asks what he does, an explanation neither offered nor necessary, and Danicka nods. She loses all ability to fight that smile again, lets it out and lets out an accompanying laugh. She glances, for the first time with any purpose, at the house she's parked in front of. Standing in front of. About to enter.

The first thing she says, with a tone of mild incredulity:

"...Baby, it's humongous."

[Danicka] [Random note-to-self reminder: it's been more than five days. Lawl.]

[Lukas] Drug dealer.

That was the first assumption when Lukas's new neighbor saw the For Sale sign turn into a SOLD sign, and a single man in a black BMW arrived to take possession of a bank-repossessed home designed for a family.

Small-time pimp. Illegal immigrant trafficker. Internet pornographer.

Those were the subsequent paranoid assumptions, when they saw Lukas come day after day in the early mornings, stay until late into the nights. Each time he carried something else in: paint scrapers, wallpaper peelers, carpet raisers, hammers, saws, drills, sanders. Sometimes power tools whined and roared for hours. Sometimes all was quiet, except for the occasional tap of a hammer.

Then came the cleaning supplies, the mops and brooms and brushes and rags and fifty kinds of cleaning solutions. After that, the lightbulbs, the paint and the paintrollers, the carpets. And then, in the last day or two, the UHaul pulling up. Tirelessly, the dark-haired man worked alone, apparently so family-less and friendless that he didn't even have anyone to help him move. Back and forth from curb to front door he went, and if anyone really bothered to stop and think, to look at what he was moving into the house --

an enormous, ancient sofa. A refrigerator. A TV. A goddamn queensized mattress, box spring, and frame.

-- they'd realize there was no bloody way he could possibly haul all that up one or two flights of stairs, through doorways and archways, across carpets and tile, all by himself. But they're not thinking about what he's moving in. They're thinking about who he might be, why he might be moving in, what he's going to do with that house, what it was going to do to this neighborhood, which is far from affluent but otherwise not bad, with decent home prices and a below-state-average crime rate. They're thinking he must be

some kind of criminal; some goddamn serial killer or something

when they see him walking from the garage to the main house, or when they see him standing in the yard frowning at the dead grass, pulling up the chainlink fence.

--

When the blonde in the Infiniti pulled up, they thought:

High class prostitute. And they thought: Definitely a drug dealer, if he can afford that.

When she all but flies into his arms -- when he wraps his arms around her, tight, when he holds her close to his body with such unconcealed adoration and affection, when he turns his face to her hair, her neck, and closes his eyes to enjoy the moment, they think --

-- well. They didn't know quite what to think. Why would she and who and what on earth crowd together with aw. and how sweet and young family. And of all the conjectures and horrors his neighbors conjured up over the week, unable to explain why a single man might buy a three-bedroom house, unable to explain why he terrifies them quite the way he does, no one ever, for a moment, thought:

werewolf.
animal.
mated.

--

She slides down. He sets her down. Her hands slide from his shoulders to his chest; there's something so familiar in that touch, which in and of itself says that he is hers, that she has a right to touch him like this. They turn to look at the house together, Danicka smiling, Lukas caught somewhere between nervousness and pride and uncertainty and sheer, utter happiness.

"It looks bigger from the outside," he says. "It's a weird trick of perspective or something. It's only a little over a thousand square feet. It's -- "

He realizes he's rambling. He breaks off with a quiet laugh. His arm is still around her waist; he hugs her against his side, kisses her temple suddenly, firmly.

"Come on. I want to show you."

[Danicka] Whatever the neighboring suburbanites think about Lukas, his reasons for buying this house, or the relationship he has to this slender blonde beside him, it doesn't matter. It's highly unlikely that they will ever ask to borrow a cup of sugar when most of the time they'll look over and see that the lights are off and the driveway is empty. The chances that someone will come knocking some summer evening to invite them to a block party are essentially nil. They will get used to the house being infrequently occupied by a man who scares them, by a woman who comes and goes like a ghost, as humans have been getting used to the presence of things they do not understand since the beginning of time.

And Lukas and Danicka will not care, because here they do not have to. This is not the Brotherhood, filled with Garou from multiple packs -- including his own -- and Kinfolk who each belong to Someone. This is not her apartment, which does not really belong to her and is currently shared. They will pay no fees and owe no apologies if a hole gets punched through a wall or a stain gets on the carpet; they will have only themselves to blame and have only themselves to rely on to make repairs.

The rules that Danicka lives by, the strictures that keep her so wound up in the presence of others, are disappearing as they stand in the driveway. They are not in what she considers public. No one here knows them, or anyone connected to them. No one unwanted or uninvited can come into this house without suffering severe, even lethal consequences.

She turns, standing between his side and his arm, and wraps her arms tightly around his waist again as he rambles, burying her face in his chest as the sensation of it all overwhelms her, as thoughts she dared not entertain ever before in her life fill her mind so thick and cloudy that she can't give any of them voice.

Danicka breathes in and squeezes him tightly, as tightly as her thin arms will allow, and then releases him enough to go towards the door. It means something -- or it could -- that she does not wait for him to open it. She reaches for the handle and turns it, and opens it, and peers inside with slightly widened eyes and lifted eyebrows, curious rather than wary.

"My apartment's only a little over thirteen hundred," she says, as though those three hundred and thirty-two square feet make almost no difference. Truthfully in terms of usable space it's probably true, since her vast curving living room does not have many walls that cry out for particular pieces of furniture, since the area must be used creatively or left empty -- as it mostly is, with Danicka's occupancy.

She lets out an odd, sudden giggle that is low enough to be considered a chuckle if one ignores the gleeful tremor of it, and starts up the stairs without waiting for Lukas.

A couple of seconds later, when the quiet thud of her footsteps stops, he hears from above: "You bought a couch!"

[Lukas] The vista the door opens on is probably reason enough in and of itself to explain the house's dismal price. Lukas has no idea who owned this house before him, nor which brilliant genius decided to slap additions onto what was once a humble little one- or two-bedroom cottage. The first thing in the door is a flight of stairs, about a half-story's worth, quite dark. There's about three feet worth of foyer, so cramped that there isn't even room for shoe shelves; to the right, a small door leads, presumably, to a basement.

Lukas is reaching automatically to flick on a light. Danicka is already starting up the stairs. He follows, closing the door behind him; she turns into the living room, which has a little more light, and new, albeit cheap carpet, and paint so fresh on the walls that it's --

"Not quite dry yet." He nods at the walls, hands in his pockets, smiling as he comes up behind her. "Don't touch it."

He did, indeed, buy a couch, and nods lightly to acknowledge that. And a coffee table. And a goddamn rocking chair, for no apparent reason. And a TV -- not a flatscreen but an old cathode-ray tube affair. All of it is secondhand, visibly so, which makes him unsure of himself though he knows better than that. He knows her better than that.

"There's a closet," he says, pointing out the obvious and, realizing it, adds, "If you want to hang your coat up." It's warm inside. He's turned the heater on, waiting for her. And he's unbuttoning his own coat as he continues, "Kitchen that way. Dining room. There's absolutely nothing in the family room and the downstairs bedroom."

Lukas laughs, self-deprecatingly.

"I thought we'd stay upstairs. When we're here, I mean." He tosses his coat over the arm of the couch.

[Danicka] Truth be told, Danicka has no idea what to do with herself until Lukas warns her that the paint on the walls is still wet. She's blocking the archway, her eyes trying to take so much in at once that she's not even blinking. There's no telling what kind of a time she'd have trying to cope if the house weren't so sparsely furnished, if Lukas had Decorated with a capital D. It's hard enough on her at the moment that she can see the kitchen through the archway across the living room and she can see the closet he indicates and the stairs and the edge of a table through another arch.

Danicka is about take her energy out on flapping her hands or bouncing in place when Lukas tells her not to touch the walls.

As though testing what he's said, or simply because she can, Danicka turns and looks at the wall beside the entry from stairs to living room and presses her left palm to the damp paint. There's such care and deliberation put into the act that there is no possible way to pretend accident. She holds her hand on the wall, a little above and to the left of the lightswitch, fingers splayed. She looks at her hand, and only then really considers what she's just done, and why, and in front of whom.

She looks over at him, her palm still stuck to the paint, and gives Lukas a benign smile. It comes close to apologetic without quite getting there, because she is not really sorry, and because she hopes he understands she doesn't mean to mar his handiwork or take something away from him. The expression is not quite an invitation, either. She pulls her hand carefully and gingerly away, trying to leave the mottled and wrinkled impression of her hand in the paint as unsmeared as possible.

Mine.

Her hand is, of course, a mess afterward. She holds it away from herself, away from her pristine clothes, taking a few more steps into the living room, slower now than she was when she came up the stairs. Her head turns and her eyes follow as she looks over the couch, the rocking chair, the coffee table and the old television and the closet door.

And all the other doors to open, archways to go through, rooms she knows are there but is having trouble choosing between when it comes to her first exploration of each.

Her chest caves in a little, suddenly, when he says family room, but her back is to him when he says it so he can't see the flicker of a pang that crosses her face. When he laughs, and speaks, she turns and looks at him over her shoulder, smiling softly. Achingly. Her gaze lasts for a few seconds, lingering on him, seeing him there in jeans and a plain t-shirt, which she's never seen him wear before.

In their living room.

Danicka doesn't answer. She nods her head in the direction of the stairs. This time, her odd little gesture is an invitation.

[Lukas] Once, a long time ago, Lukas gave Danicka a box of talens: the essences of night, of healing, of protection, and of ... sheer noise. He doesn't know how close she came to jabbing herself with one of those clever little darts. He probably doesn't ever want to know.

But if he did, he wouldn't be surprised now to see her turn and put her hand on the very wall he warned her again. It makes him blink, though -- and then it makes him laugh, a short little huff, bemused, a little amazed.

She smiles at him. His eyes flicker between wall and hand and her. And then he steps forward without a word, without further ado, and crosses his forearm over hers so he can plant his right hand beside her left, on the wet wall.

Now both their hands are messy. And both their handprints are left faint in the paint, his much larger than hers.

She wanders. Strays a little ways as though she were overwhelmed, as though there was too much too soon and she doesn't know what to look at first, where to begin; as though the smallest detail of this one room might be enough to hold her attention for now.

Here's a detail: the windows sparkle, windexed down on both sides. He must've removed the screens to do that, leaned out, possibly even removed a pane to get at the other side.

Here's another: there's dust atop the windowframe, up high and out of sight, where Lukas didn't think to clean.

The basement is underfoot. A floorboard creaks as he crosses the living room to her. He takes her hand, not caring that their hands are white with paint and faintly sticky. She's never seen him in cheap sturdy jeans and a plain t-shirt before; she saw him in expensive jeans and a cleverly rumpled buttondown the first time she saw him, and pajamas the second, but not like this. Never. They've never stood like this before, either, in their living room. At the foot of their stairs, to their upper story, where their bedroom is.

"I got some bookshelves," he tells her as they're heading upstairs. There's more light up here; fewer rooms with more windows per room; skylights in the ceiling. The walls gleam faintly, a wet sheen that will disappear to matte once the paint finishes drying. "In case you wanted to leave a book or two lying around."

[Danicka] She has no idea that there's yet another room upstairs, a smaller bedroom than the master suite that -- if they were a young couple on their way to getting married or just past it -- would seem a natural place to put a nursery. Every sunset would come through the window and drench the room in searing, sleepy light from the west. The doors to the shared bathroom could be left partly open to hear cries of need in the night, removing any consideration of a monitor.

They are not a young married couple, and Danicka is neither pregnant nor intending to be. Nor wanting to be. She is a student, currently, a woman whose love of books has been kept repressed and limited to libraries since adolescence because of one more thing her brother managed to use to traumatize her. She has one bookshelf to her name, and before buying textbooks for the previous quarter and the current one, she owned perhaps eight books. What fills that bookshelf at her apartment are the reading materials of a boy slowly growing into a monster, his name written sloppily or neatly on the insides of the covers.

They are hers only because they were his. They are hers only because he gave them to her. For safekeeping. To have something of him near her because it is not unusual for them to go a week or more without so much as a word of contact. To hold something tangible that he held. To read, lying in bed or sitting on the couch or taking the train or drinking coffee, and remember talking with him about which characters they liked, which scenes were their favorites.

Their hands stick together when he takes hers. Danicka laughs and moves her palm on his, smearing paint between them. It's tacky, half-dried and cold. Her eye for details doesn't see the dust on the windowframe. She appreciates the light coming in more than the clean glass it shines through. She is thinking, now, about the upstairs bedroom, and walking towards the stairs to go up them, still holding her lover's hand, walking gingerly and almost sideways up the narrow staircase so her clothes don't brush the painted walls.

She is hearing him. Looking at him when he talks, smiling broadly sometimes, quietly and softly at others. She makes eye contact. She listens. She just does not say anything yet, as though she simply does not have the words to offer right now. At the top of the stairs she pauses, seeing two doors, not sure of which one to take. So Danicka turns and looks up at him, questioning. It is the first pause she's taken since entering, when every other stride forward has held a certain air of possession underneath the overhwelmed delight.

Yet when they come to look at their bedroom, she hesitates. She waits for him, when she really hasn't since he set her loose to go inside and look at what he bought and prepared for her.

But the he bedroom is not hers.

[Danicka] [Fuckin typo.]

[Lukas] Lukas follows closely, and only partly because their hands are still linked. He follows her closely because he wants to stay close to her. He wants to be next to Danicka, to be near his mate as she explores their den, as she observes the rooms, the sparse furnishings, the new paint and the new carpet and the dimensions and the doorways; all the ten thousand details of their new, shared space.

When she hesitates, he nudges her gently: his body against hers, his chest bumping her back as he bends to nuzzle his jaw against her temple.

"Go on," he says softly; if she looks up and back at him, his eyes are open, and they direct her to the right door. "Je to naše."

[Danicka] Danicka has no qualms about the paint on her skin. She keeps her hand away from her body, still, trying to keep it off her clothes, but does not let go of Lukas's even when he bumps against her, nudges her affectionately and encouragingly. Danicka laughs, the sound very close to nervous, and leans towards him, biting lightly at his chest through his shirt. She wiggles her hand from his, wipes her palm on the plain tee, right down from his sternum to his abdomen, and laughs again.

She knows which door, now, though her curiosity about the second one is furious suddenly. She leaves Lukas with a swipe of pale paint down his front and uses her right hand to gingerly, slowly turn the knob of the bedroom.

The next thing he hears is a sound he has never, ever heard from Danicka. Not in childhood. Not in the past year. Not any time she's laughed, not any time she's been happy.

She lets out a shriek, as far from a cry of fear or pain as he's ever heard, the sort of squeal that one expects from adolescent girls or very young children rather than grown women who wear cashmere and drive luxury vehicles. He gets a glimpse, little more, of Danicka's profile before she goes into the room: her eyes, lit. Her smile, broad. Her cheeks: flushed.

"We have a bed!"

She runs in. By the time Lukas enters -- whether he is right behind her or lagging a bit -- she is darting towards the bed, kicking off her ankle boots and jumping onto the top of the bed.

[Lukas] "Ow," Lukas says, bitten, though the matter of fact intonation tells Danicka it didn't hurt. And that he doesn't mind.

He doesn't mind, either, when she wipes her hand on him, leaving a streak of pale paint on his shirt, nearly invisible against the white. One could read something into that, in her marking of him, in his thoughtless acceptance.

And one could read something into the way he watches her, smiling a little and a little nervous, as she goes toward the bedroom door. He hasn't, not once, asked her if she likes their den, but he's wondering. He wants to know if she likes it. He wants her to like it. It's not that he wants or needs her approbation to feel good about himself or what he did. It's not about him. He wants her approval; he wants her to like this place that he found for her, prepared for her, crafted for her. Lukas wants her to like it because that was the whole point.

He got this house for Danicka. He did this, all of it, for her.

And when she lets out a shriek, Lukas grins suddenly, though she doesn't see it. He follows her, trailing in her wake, laughing as she tumbles herself into the bed, which is the only piece of new furniture in here. Everything else is secondhand, craigslisted, garage saled. The mattress, though; the bed and its frame, its sheets, its comforter and pillows -- that's all new. It smells like nothing, yet. It'll smell like them.

"Of course," he says, standing over her at the edge of the bed now, smiling down at her. "It was the first thing I got."

He wipes his own hand on his shirt as well, and then, without a hitch, turns and flops down on his back beside Danicka, looking up at the vaulted ceiling; the ceiling fan hanging from the beam. The room's windows face the north, the south, and the east. In the mornings and middays, it would fill with sunlight.

And quietly, smiling at the ceiling, he asks her what she asked him not so very long ago:

"Jste šťastná?"

[Danicka] Danicka's stockings, invisible before under her pants and beneath her shoes, are a silvery gray. She is bouncing on top of the bedspread over the brand new mattress, giggling. Her curled ponytail is flopping behind her as she hops, hands out to either side for extra balance.

Lukas follows her, not letting himself ask her if she likes the den. If the two chairs at the dining room table make her think of eating there with him. If she likes that he got a rocking chair. If she thinks the street is nice, if the light comes here in a way that suits her. She has not told him that it's good, or that she likes it. She's said it's huge, and considering what she expected, it is enormous.

What she expected was maybe the studio apartment idea. Someplace barely bigger than a bedroom with a fridge shoved somewhere and a tiny bathroom. What she expected was just a cave, someplace private they could go and be together that was theirs and no one else's. And he has bought her a house, filled it with a few necessities of furniture -- and a few things she would have told him that they don't need for this to be right. He has put a bed in their den and covered it with soft things and put it in a well-lit room and brought her here in the dead of winter as though to say

Be safe.

Be warm.

Stay.

like the animal he is, like the animal he senses that she is. Like his mate.

The comforter is thick, winter-heavy and denting softly under her feet as she bounds up and down in excitement. As a child he never saw her jump on the beds, never on the couch. He saw her dance nervously occasionally from foot to foot, which was not quite the same. He has never seen Danicka like this, her face aglow, her hand covered in smeared and drying paint, her cheeks flushed as she jumps up and down, letting the springs of the mattress rebound her back upward.

If she were a child someone would tell her to stop, that's not good for the bed. But she's not a child. And the bed is hers. She knows instinctively that he got this for her, that though it is theirs he chose everything with an eye towards her pleasure, and Danicka does not know how to process that any more than she knew how to understand it when he regarded a closed door to her room as something he wanted to respect, even if he did not know the meaning of it.

He flops onto the bed and she starts to slow, not wanting to step on him, not wanting to trip on his arm and fall over. She looks down at him as her up-and-down motion steadies to stillness. Her eyes are still bright, twinkling, and a pale shade of green in this light, not quite blue yet. Her cheeks are pink. Her smile is infectiously large, and then her eyes fill with tears. She nods, several times, even as her eyes go from bright to bleary and a drop leaves her left eye, then her right.

"Já jsem. Jsem tak šťastná," she says, sinking down to her knees beside him, then to her hip, sitting with her feet tucked back to one side. She half-laughs through her tears, using her clean wrist to wipe her face even though more weeping is forthcoming. "To je opravdu pro mě těžké se zabývat!"

[Lukas] When they were children --

which suggests they grew up together. Which suggests he knew her all his life, from the time she was a little blonde girl in her father's house to the day he took her hand at SmartBar; through high school and the Sokolovs, New Orleans, New York, Chicago.

Which was not the case. They knew each other a handful of years. Three. Maybe three and a half. In that time, they met no more than a dozen times

(in the first five months of their adult acquaintance, they made love a dozen times. and then they broke up.)

all of them at her father's house with the oak tree in the back; the mighty old oak that remembers, to this day, the black-haired boy who jumped out of its boughs shouting Mr. Musil, Mr. Musil who grew up to be the black-haired Ahroun who took Danicka from that house, forever.

None of which is the point, here. The point is: in all the time they knew each other as children, which was either a long time or a very short time depending on definition and scope; in all the time he's known her as an adult, even -- he never once saw Danicka quite like this. Quite this unrestrainedly, unfearfully happy. He's never seen her jump on a bed. He's never heard her make that sound, that shriek of excitement and delight. He's never

seen her cry not because he's hurt her somehow, and not physically but emotionally, psychologically, but because he's made her happy.

Tak šťastná.

"Baby," he murmurs, and he's instantly sitting up as the first tear falls from her eye, "Danička, no, don't cry."

He reaches for her hand. Messy or not, it doesn't matter -- he takes her hand and he draws her down, pulls her into him, wraps his arms around her, tight.

[Danicka] If you get right down to it, they know very little about each other's lives. Some of the big things, many of the little things that make up their day to day existences. There are things they know lurk in the background that in Lukas's case, he willfully chooses to leave there regardless of whether he should know or whether she might need him to, telling himself -- and maybe even believing -- that she does not want to talk about it. That he used to carouse with Edward Bellamonte wouldn't even occur to her, as she hardly knows more than the Ragabash's name. That he used to draw women in clubs to him the way that Sam once drew her to him, the way that Vladislav used to get women to tolerate his rage and his cruelty...

...if she has assumed it, Danicka has never mentioned it.

Sometimes it seems that the more the learn the worse it is. Sometimes she remembers why telling the truth is best avoided, why admitting I had sex with Martin was a mistake, why even I'm happy mouthed rather than even whispered only leads to frustration between them. Sometimes she thinks of times she has opened up to him and he has said something like damaged, or gotten this aching, pained look in his eyes as though her history is intolerable to him. Hurts him.

Which, because she loves him, hurts her to think about.

Lukas has seen her happy. Quietly whispering it. Beaming to the point that her smile glows. He has seen her cry out of sheer frustration, out of exhaustion, out of hurt. He has seen her silently, tearlessly accept hurt and humiliation as though she was expecting it, as though its arrival is more comforting than frightening because then, at least then, the shoe has dropped. But he has never seen her weep from joy, tremble from it, because

it could get taken away.

She resists. Which is rare, and odd, and perhaps even uncomfortable. But she wriggles when he tries to pull her to him. "No," she protests, "your shirt has paint on it."

Of course it does. Because she put it there.

[Lukas]
Dice Rolled:[ 4 d10 ] 1, 2, 3, 5 (Botch x 1 at target 6)

[Danicka] [Well, now Lukas probably thinks that Danicka doesn't want to be held because happy as she is, she doesn't believe she deserves it. So she certainly doesn't deserve to be held, either.]

[Lukas] A flicker stitches his brow as she resists. He lets her go, his palms going to the mattress instead. When he looks away, down at the mostly-empty floor that doesn't even have so much as a rug to brighten it, his eyelashes shade the incandescent blue of his irises.

Lukas seems to think for a moment. Then he looks at her again. And very gently, he says, "Danička, tento je tvoje. To je naše."

As though she needed to hear this.

[Danicka] It could be worse. He could be thinking that she's crying because she doesn't like it. It's in the wrong part of town. It really does matter how nice it is, and a collection of craigslist-purchased furniture and appliances isn't good enough for her. He could be seeing her tears and thinking to himself that she lied, that she never wanted this at all, no matter where or how nice or if he'd bothered to paint or not, that Danicka never wanted to have anything shared between them except what they have when they're making love. That she doesn't want a den with him.

It can always be worse. Their misunderstandings have, at time, been simply epic. One had him going for the door because it sparked an argument which turned into her pushing him away as coldly as she could. They've nearly lost each other before because of legendary communicative mishaps.

Danicka is crying, and it's because she's so happy that she cannot process is, that she cannot cope with the possibility of losing this feeling, losing him, losing this. She tugs away from him because there's still-damp paint on his shirt and her sweater cost two hundred dollars and frankly, she expects him to pull her close anyway, or laugh at her, and... that is not what happens.

He almost frowns, and she feels a sharp, sudden ache, thinking she's hurt him, she's done something wrong, which -- seeing it across her face -- he reads as self-recrimination. Danicka cannot be happy not only because she is afraid but because she hasn't done anything to deserve it.

As though happiness is something that must be earned.

She stares at him through bleary vision, head tilted to the side, sniffing once. Then, a near whimper: "I know that!"

[Lukas] The thing about a misunderstanding is that it forms a sort of bifurcation in their interaction. Thereafter, she heads down one path and he another, and the gap grows wider and wider, and things make less sense, and --

It could be worse. But he's puzzled, all the same; his brow furrows, he frowns. He thinks. He says, carefully, tenderly, "Baby, I did this for you. So you'd be happy. I..."

A break, a pause, a moment, a silence.

"Danička, don't be afraid."

[Danicka] The danger in such schisms is that the farther they get from one another, the closer they get to their original attitudes. Every time she laughed, he thought she was mocking him. Every time he frowned, she thought he was going to hit her. Every time anything happened that they did not understand, each of them went on the defensive so quickly and so irrevocably that sometimes it seemed they would not come back from it. Could not. Didn't want to.

Danicka just stares at him, sniffing again, her brows pulling together. Her lips tremble as he assures her that he did this for her, that he did it so she'd be happy, and she thinks

I'm hurting him

and she thinks

He thinks I don't like it.

Because she knew, she could tell -- and it wasn't hard, given the stiffness of his demeanor and his words when they talked about it -- that he was nervous about it being nice enough. Would it be good enough for her, when she spent nine years of her life in a mansion, a penthouse, vacation homes, a plantation? Would it be nice enough when the only other home she's known was a large house with a yard in a city where such things are precious and expensive commodities? Would she like it, when her own apartment is larger, more modern, and has the view it has of the city?

So she thinks: I'm crying, and he thinks I don't think like it.

Until he tells her not to be afraid. Danicka closes her eyes and ducks her head, crying with sudden, renewed fervor, covering her face with her clean hand.

[Lukas] He only makes her cry harder.

And she's right, or at least partly so: he is hurting now. It hurts him to see her cry. Always did, though when this began he hid it better. He hid it very well. He starts to hide it now, his head turning away on instinct, because they've parted ways somehow a little before, because they're reverting to original attitudes, and

he stops. He turns back. Sudden and strong, his arm circles her shoulders. He pulls her into him, against his shoulder, against his side; he's careful to keep the drying paint on his shirt away from her, but that doesn't keep him from pressing his mouth fiercely to her temple. He thinks,

Mine.

And he thinks,

I'll protect her.

"Don't cry," he murmurs. "Danička, don't cry, love."

[Danicka] "It's just..."

she begins, and fails, sobbing into his side, trembling beside his ribs.

"I'm just..."

But this attempt at a coherence sentence fails, too. Danicka curls up when he pulls her close to him, burying her face into his shoulder or his chest. She sniffs again but there's really no need; it isn't fair that she looks lovely as she does when she cries, just as she looks fierce when she's angry and ethereal when she's afraid, brilliant even when she's smirking at the idiocy of another. But she's lovely, unfairly and unforgivably so, lacking both the sharpness of an icy beauty and the plainness of a pretty girl on the street. She catches the eyes of even those who do not find her particularly attractive.

The phrase for it is: there's just something about her.

Her slender body quivers between his arm and his side as she weeps, overcome, struggling to get a hold of herself. "Jsem dělal ne si, že bych si byl býval tento," she finally manages, choking the words out against his t-shirt. "Obávám se, že se to chystá odejít pryč."

[Lukas] There are blondes whose beauty is like winter, sharp and cold and pale, whose eyes are as brilliant as Lukas's, whose skin is white as snow, whose hair is frost and precious metals.

Danicka is not like that. Nor is her beauty the more common prettiness of a girl on the street, a girl on the beach, sun-bleached blonde, freckles and a tan. There's something about her. She catches the eyes of those who do not love her as he does; those who do not, perhaps, even like her. She catches the eyes of those who do not know her, and those who cannot explain why she makes them think of

jaro

and heather in the meadow, wildflowers amongst grass. Why her beauty seems somehow unusual and unexpected though one might say pretty slender blondes are a dime a dozen in a great city like Chicago, like New York. Why her very essence seems somehow rare and precious, something to be protected, something to be kept and warded, as though she were, in fact, unique. And singular. And irreplaceable.

Which, of course, she is. To Lukas, at least. And that's why he holds her like that, with a sort of tender ferocity, or ferocious tenderness. Which is why he closes his eyes when she says what she does, kisses her temple again, her cheekbone.

"Nenechám to jít pryč."

Which is not, ultimately, the same promise as it will not go away. Just as what he says next --

"Je to naše, a budu chránit to. Říkal jsem vám už. Budu tě milovat až do konce mého života."

-- is not the same thing as forever; is not even the same as až do konce našich životů. There's an element of stark honesty to Lukas. Even here. Even now.

[Danicka] "Not just the house," she says, wrapping a fistful of his shirt up in her painted hand, giving a shudder. "This."

She does not, and he likely doesn't think it, mean his t-shirt. But not just the house. Danicka doesn't explain what she means, but cries softly now -- gentler -- against him. At this point it seems like it's just going to come, whether it hurts or not, because there are no words anymore. There's nothing else she can do, yet. It's not unlike a child experiencing their first separation, their first loss, their first pain that will not be repaired and erased by the amnesia of infancy.

So she holds onto him, and she cries, clinging in a way she seldom -- if ever -- has.

[Lukas] He only has one more thing to say himself, softly:

"I never meant just the house." And he covers her hand with his, warm. "I meant this."

--

Then he just holds her. He doesn't try to shush her, or to stop her from crying. He holds her. Sitting on their bed, which is the first time they've ever sat on a bed that was not his, not hers, not the W hotel chain's, but theirs. In their bedroom. Under their roof: he holds her, and she clings to him, and she cries into his shoulder until the cotton of his shirt is damp with saltwater. Until his palm feels faintly numbed from stroking over her back again and again and again.

Until her hand loosens in his shirt. Until she's no longer clinging to him, but merely holding him. Until she's quieted, and her breathing is steady, and his arm gentles around her.

And then he holds her a little longer, silent, warm. Then he turns his head and kisses her brow, closing his eyes as he does.

[Danicka] The second thing they did on this bed together was laugh. Danicka, bouncing up and down in utter delight. Lukas, flopping beside her and looking up at her as she quite literally jumped for joy.

The third thing they did on this bed together was weep, and ache, and promise. It is not sadness or fear or grief that causes a drop of it, because every emotion still stems from that root of incalculable happiness, which is all the sweeter and more poignant because of the possibility that it could be lost.

Which brings us to the first, and fourth, and perpetual thing they did together, are doing together, will do together on this bed, in this room, in their den.

Danicka loves him, and Lukas loves her, and there never would have been joy without that, never would have been ache or promise without that. They hold one another on their bed long after her tears -- roughly as shortlived as her anger often is -- cease flowing. This was the first thing he bought after securing the house as his own property, as the den he prepared for his mate so he could bring her here and keep her safe and warm and protected. It's soft, and it's theirs, and they do as they probably were meant to with it when they curl up and hold one another.

After awhile, Danicka lifts her head, her eyes slightly red-ringed and her cheeks damp, a tender, almost pained smile on her lips. "Děkujeme vám" she says sweetly, the emotion as deep as her voice is quiet.

For:

the house. For holding her. For finding her. Loving her. For forgiving her. For being there. For being him. For existing, for now, which is all they have.

[Lukas] Lukas laughs quietly. It's not amusement. The root is more tenderer than that; something closer to happiness. He kisses her face: her brow, her salty cheeks, and then her lips, softly. And he repeats it back to her: the words and every meaning therein.

"Děkujeme vám."

[Danicka] She laughs too, in echo, and nuzzles her head up under his jawline, her eyes closing and her hand pulling away from his shirt. Danicka sits back, wiping her eyes with her right wrist, looking at her hand and shaking her head, laughing again.

"God, we should wash." Her head lifts and turns, eyes scanning over til she looks past him and sees the door. "Is that the bathroom?"

[Lukas] Sometimes their affection is not quite human. When she nuzzles his jawline. When he wraps his arm around her before they sleep, so protective, as though to ward her from threats not merely imagined but seen, real, out there, known.

They draw apart; he's a little reluctant. He looks over his shoulder, then back at her. "Yeah." And he grins, getting up off the bed, holding his hand out to her again. "Come on. I'll show you the rest of it."

[Danicka] Her legs unfold, her stockinged feet sliding to the carpet, which is deliciously new through the silk and tickling, caressing her soles. Danicka gives him her painted hand, stands up off the edge of the now-rumpled bed with its thick winter bedding and the novel springiness of newness.

"Baby," she says, waiting for him to take the first step before walking with him to the bathroom, where she fully intends on washing her hands as clean as possible before going further in the tour, "it really is... a lot of space."

Danicka sounds wary. Oddly.

[Lukas] None of the doorhinges squeak. Lukas is nothing if not thorough -- in matters he can immediately see and think of, anyway. He's not a professional housecleaner; he's not even a housewife. He didn't think, for example, of the dust over the windowframes. He did think of oiling the hinges and the windowpanes; of changing out the carpet and repainting the walls.

And he thought of polishing the mirror in the bathroom, too. The cabinets look freshly varnished. The faucet on the sink is brand new. The shower curtain is unused. These were all necessary repairs. This house cost less than ten thousand dollars, and there was a good reason for that.

"I know," he says, and he sounds as oddly apologetic as she sounds wary. "I wanted something smaller. Just ... something big enough for the two of us. But all the one- and two-bedrooms I looked at were more expensive. Or in really, really bad parts of town."

When she's done washing her hands, he steps up and washes his. The mirror reflects him, thick shoulders foreshortened as he leans down, arms corded in muscle. In his plain workclothes, he somehow seems more imposing, more powerful than he does in his usual, subtly sharp attire.

There are only two towels on the rack, both of them big bathtowels. He dries his hand on one, then opens the door to the adjoining, much smaller bedroom, which contains nothing but a desk and an empty bookshelf. His laptop is sitting on the desk. The windows face north and west; there's no fan in this room.

"We can keep most of the rooms closed," he adds. "It's just us. We don't need so much space."

[Danicka] There is so much more here than she expected. The bed not only bought but covered in linens, neatly made til she started jumping on it. The furniture here and there. The towels already on the rack. The shower curtain hung. It is hardly so decorated or filled that she pangs slightly, wishing she could have done some of that with him, chosen pieces herself. Most of what she has seen is barren, empty, the beginnings of something like a home.

Truth be told, Danicka is not terribly invested in nesting. It took her months to buy a desk. Her living room has precisely two pieces of furniture in it, her balcony empty. She got barstools because one day it occurred to her to do so, but the apartment at Kingsbury Plaza remains mostly undecorated, mostly empty. There is nothing on the walls. The only furniture present is furniture she uses almost every day. One of the only things that is purely ornamental is that shallow plate in the bathroom with its candles and its polished stones.

In fact, it may be the only thing.

Danicka waits for the water to warm and spends quite a bit of time scrubbing the paint off her hand. It's an imperfect job but enough that only a few flecks remain. She does not know what the house looked like before. It doesn't matter. She looks at him as he speaks, as she's scrubbing, and her expression gentles when he mentions bad parts of town.

Because he wanted her to be safe. Because he wanted their den to be safe.

She pats her hands dry, watching his reflection as he washes up his hands rather than looking at him directly. She does not explain why she was wary, nor ask why he was apologetic. They both know that he did not buy a three-bedroom house with a basement because he planned to bring her here, mate with her, and gradually get her to leave her apartment and her autonomy behind in order to bear and raise his cubs. Lukas, sometimes even more than Danicka, seems shaken by the thought that she could become pregnant.

Which would mean he would have to leave her alone, near the end of her term, when the sort of stress his very presence invites could be a danger to her, to the baby. Which would mean he would have to stay away from her during the child's infancy, that their already rare meetings could become once-a-season. Even having him in the house, unseen, would be a disturbance to something so small. So fragile. It would mean losing her slowly, more and more, with the only hope of coming back into her life on a regular basis being the hope that he survives past a child's first five or six years of life. It would be like tearing a limb off by stretching it first, and pulling

and pulling

until they ripped apart.

Danicka drifts into the next room, thinking not of nurseries but of what on earth they're going to do with these rooms other than shut the vents and close the windows and leave them empty. She looks at the desk and the bookshelf and smiles. "God," she murmurs, "it'll be quieter than a library next time finals come around."

[Lukas] It's almost ridiculous, how happy Lukas gets when Danicka mentions -- offhandedly -- that their spare bedroom would be quieter than a library the next time finals roll around. When she alludes to the possibility of coming here not just to see him, not just to be with him briefly for a day or a night, but to make some use of all this space. To make it hers. That's important to him, too, though he'll never open his mouth and tell her he wouldn't mind if she brought a rug the next time she came here; if she brought a throw for the couch; if she brought whatever she wanted to because

this place is hers. It's their.

Standing in the doorway to the bathroom, his shoulder against the jamb, Lukas smiles. He can't help it; he grins until the dimples in his cheeks show. Then he straightens up, following her, taking her hand, tugging her gently toward the door back to the hall.

He doesn't want to fill this house with children. He doesn't want to move her in little by little, permanently. He doesn't want her to become pregnant, to give birth, to have a cub that she will have to rear essentially alone, because he won't be able to come near it without terrifying it. He doesn't want to lose her to his offspring, and he doesn't want her to lose what is, ultimately, the first independent life she's ever had.

But he does want to show her the den he made for her. And he wants her to like it, to be happy with it and in it, to be safe when she walks down the street toward it, to be warm and comfortable when she's here. As rare, as infrequent as that might be.

"Let me show you the rest," he says. Their hands are clean now, but when he lifts hers to kiss her palm, he can smell paint faintly on her skin. It makes him laugh. He smells like paint, too; like bleach and detergent and soap and cleaning solution and, beneath all that, like himself.

[Danicka] Of course she'll come here alone. It's winter, for one thing. The pipes need to have water flowing through them, the heat needs to be on, the house has to have some appearance of occupancy for security's sake. It's quiet and it's peaceful and sooner or later they will make the sheets smell like them and she can come here and bury her face in the linens with her eyes closed and remember him lying there. Maybe one day he'll come by and find that she's brought furniture, playthings, painted the spare room downstairs with great big splotches of color, Gaia only knows what she'll do.

Because she can. Because this place can be freedom for her. Wild. Hers, untouchable by the will of others, and that is what he wants, and that is why he got it.

Danicka walks around the second room, paces the walls and looks at the shelves on the bookcase and then turns to look at him. She smiles back at him, and walks to him, offering him her hand. Which he takes. And kisses. And laughs against, his breath warm on her palm. Danicka breathes in deeply at that, and

throws her arms around his neck suddenly, half-jumping in order to do so, clinging to him in the tightest hug she is capable of

with her very slender arms.

[Lukas] Danicka does not have to jump very hard. Lukas can't think of a single time she's embraced him, or kissed him, that he hasn't welcomed and met halfway. This is no exception. As she throws her arms around him, he wraps his around her; lifts her until her toes barely touch the ground. Pressed as close as this, his body is hard and very warm, as though he burns a few degrees hotter than a human would. He bends his head to her, his face to the turn of her shoulder, and he closes his eyes.

"Moje láska."

There's something almost ritualistic about the way he murmurs that. As though he were naming her, and by naming her, making her indelibly so. His lips on her neck are soft, so soft, a gentle kiss that precedes the careful way he lets her slide back to the carpeted floor.

There's a moment when his arms are still around her, and her feet are on solid ground, and they're still close. There's a moment when it would be sensible for him to let her go, to take her downstairs, to show her the rest of the house -- the rest of their den -- as he said he would.

Then that thought falls from his mind like the last leaf of autumn. Lukas leans down instead; his eyes close. His brow rests against hers; then his nose alongside hers.

Then his lips, touching hers. Then his mouth, parting gently to hers, as his hands open over her waist, hold her between his palms

like something precious. Like she's his.

[Danicka] Even in heels -- and she kicked those off, left them tumbled on the carpet at the foot of the bed -- Danicka does not come farther than a certain point against Lukas's shoulders. He is enormously tall, frighteningly broad, and it takes absolutely nothing for him to all but envelope her when they embrace. He likes it: being able to cover her, wrap around her, protect her, guard her utterly.

Danicka doesn't, always, feel the same way. Lukas can't think of a time she's reached out to him that he hasn't reached back, pulled her closer, opened completely, but neither of them would have any trouble thinking of times when she has resisted, tensed, or even put her hands on him to indicate no or don't.

It's possible that they should ache because she does not always feel safe with him. It's possible that this is just one more thing they have to live with, accept, because it would be insane if Danicka pretended that he has never scared her, that there are not nights when his rage is so high or her reserves so drained that she can neither tolerate his touch nor bear to have him out of sight. It would be a pretty, gentle, kindhearted lie, but those are the ones they seem to avoid most stringently.

When the balance of physical strength and social resources between two people is this grossly tipped, there is no chance for the smaller and weaker one to force their will on the other. The burden of kindness and control is, primarily, on whoever is larger, whoever has the backing of the Nation, whoever has the power.

Unless that power is sacrificed to something else -- to love, perhaps -- in order to gain something often more elusive and just as precious.

The amount of trust Danicka shows in Lukas every time she resists, every time she says wait or no, is overwhelming. It is deeper than please, means more than sorry, when she tells him to stop as though she has any belief at all that he might listen. She trusts, against everything she learned as a child and everything their tribe appears to hold true, because he does listen. Because he aches when she cries, whether it's from joy or sorrow. Because he did this, all this, with only one goal in mind, and that goal had nothing to do with strength. Or power. Or enforcing his will on another.

To make her happy. Not to make her a broodmare. Not to subjugate her. Not to dominate or control. Nothing more complex or agenda-driven than this: to make Danicka happy.

She does not try to keep her toes on the ground, doesn't stretch her legs back to keep contact with the ground. Danicka hangs off of him freely, her shoulders and arms unstretched because of how firmly he holds her around the middle, her face pressed into his chest, a smile on her lips. It doesn't last long enough, before he's letting her back down and he's lifting his head and they're looking at each other, but not letting go. Her hands rest on his chest. In stockinged feet she is nearly a foot shorter than he is. She is still smiling.

When he kisses her instead of taking her downstairs to show her the house. Danicka does not stop smiling when she tilts her face up and he leans over and lets their brows and then their faces touch. She closes her eyes, though, breathing in and sighing almost noiselessy to exhale. She feels his breath before their mouths make contact and is turning her face gently to welcome the kiss, to give it back.

"I love you," she whispers against his lips, parting only to breathe, only to say this, "and I really like the house. And this may be a weird request, but can we just go into our room again and lie in our bed?"

Can we. As though he'll say no.

[Lukas] When Lukas smiles, his mouth moves against hers. She knows him well enough that she can imagine it in her mind's eye: the slow spread of the expression, the way the corners curl first and then lift; the way his lips widen and curve.

He smiles quietly, in that small space between them. And then he kisses her again, very softly.

"It's not weird," he says. Of course not. He's an animal. They're both animals, primal and instinctual, and though humans put a lot of stock in the size and magnificence of their houses, how high the ceilings and how vast the view, an animal ultimately seeks solace in his den. Seeks a small, enclosed, warm space, defensible and defended, hidden away from the eyes of outsiders, safe.

He likes that she likes the house he got her and prepared for her. He even likes that he was able to get a place with three bedrooms, a bath and a half, a family room, a dining room, a living room and a kitchen and a basement. Privately, secretly, he's proud that it's larger than he thought he would be able to afford, and in a safe, secure part of town, even if it's half an hour out of the city's center. He's proud that with his spare money he was able to furnish it -- albeitly sparsely -- and make it livable. But ultimately, Lukas understands that this is their den, and when you're in your den

you curl up somewhere warm and soft with your mate

and lie quietly together.

"Come on." He finds her hand again. They don't go out into the hallway after all. They go back through the two doors through the bathroom, closing them as they pass through one by one. He lets go her hand at the edge of the bed, reaching out to turn down the bedspread before reaching behind his shoulders and tugging his shirt off.

Then his plain, paintsplattered twenty-dollar jeans. Then his socks and underclothes, which are not boxer briefs in navy or maroon or charcoal with some designer's name across the waistband -- but simply rumpled boxers, white cotton.

Lukas slides between the sheets first. He holds them open for Danicka, welcoming her against his body as she gets into bed with him.

[Danicka] At some point another Danicka will, whether with Lukas or on her own, go explore the rest of their house. The basement, concrete floor swept clean and secondhand washer and dryer hooked up and ready to go. The kitchen, opening and closing cupboards and fiddling with the controls of the stove and making a mental list of the sorts of items she should probably keep in the den so they can feed themselves when they're here. The downstairs bedroom, the family room that will never have any family other than the two of them, the dining room with its

one table

and two chairs.

Alone or with Lukas, she'll learn as many nooks and crannies of this house as she once knew of her mother's house, of she knows now of her apartment. She'll learn it like she learned the small space of his bedroom, as though Danicka expects to be in the dark, be blinded, have to find her way by memory one day. She'll know how to avoid the creaky spots, skip the step that squeaks -- or step on it deliberately -- and one day she'll look over the windowframes and get a cloth to wipe the dust off, never thinking of Lukas failing to clean them because she herself wouldn't have thought to. And won't, until the day she's standing on the couch to look out the window, following a squirrel with her eyes or something.

Which is the sort of thing she would do as a child, up on a kitchen chair to look out the window over the sink while her father cooked, watching squirrels or birds. Standing on her bed and pressing her face and hands to the glass of her bedroom window to try and find their nests in the branches of the enormous oak. Which is the sort of thing she would never do, and has no reason to do, at either the Brotherhood or Kingsbury Plaza,

where there are no trees, and they have no yards.

They move back through the bathroom they just came from, doors closing just as firmly as the one between hallway and bedroom. Lukas immediately starts to undress once he's removed his hand from hers, but it takes longer for Danicka. She actually pauses in the bathroom, turning on the warm water they just used and washing her face. She does this slowly, bent over the sink slightly while Lukas is turning down the bedspread and removing his work clothes, rubbing circles of hand soap onto her skin when she would never, ever use hand soap on her face at home.,

She pats her face dry and Lukas is already naked now, moving into the bed as she hangs the towel up again and leaves the bathroom, closes the door. She reaches back to undo her ponytail, taking the ribbon out of her hair and winding it about two fingers as curled hair with an awkward wave from where it was bound falls around her shoulders. She goes to the bookshelf to set the ribbon and hairband down, smiling over at him for a moment as though amused by some secret thought.

There are buttons beneath the ribbon her shirt, at the shoulder. She undoes them, slips it off over her head, gently folds the sweater and lays it on a shelf. Her bra is simple white cotton, but she leaves it on for now while she undoes the mostly decorative waistband button of her slacks, the hidden one on the inside, the tiny and carefully concealed zipper. The slacks, too, are folded and laid on the shelf, leaving her in pale, seamless underwear and a pair of knee-high silk silver stockings. Danicka moves to the edge of the bed to sit and take them off, drops them on the floor near her shoes. Her back is to him, broken by the band of her bra

and then her arms folding back, undoing the clasp. Her back curves and her shoulders draw forward as she removes her bra, which she neither folds up nor drops but tosses across the room, over towards the door of the closet she never looked at. Danicka is grinning when she twists around and looks at him over her shoulder again, beaming as though she's just done something to be proud of.

The turn of her head and shoulders is followed by her spine, then her hips, then her knees, as she twists completely and moves up onto the bed further. She crawls towards him in her panties in a few long drags of her knees over the comforter, scrunching up when she gets to the pillows, drawing her legs forward. Danicka slips her legs underneath the covers he now holds up for her, and they slide against his legs when she comes closer, tangle with his, smooth against hairy.

Then their hips touch. Then their stomachs. Then her breasts to his chest, her shoulder tucked under his bicep, her cheek settling against the pillow.

She is not lying on her own, but his. They are that close.

Danicka kisses his jawline, tenderly. And then grins. And then laughs, softly, but with a vibrating sort of uncontained, uncontrollable delight.

[Lukas] You belong here, she said to him long before she ever said zamilovávám se do tebe, long before he ever said já jsem zamilovaný s vámi, long before either of them ever said miluji tě or simply

I love you.

Because it's the truth. And it's been the truth since before either of them would admit it, since the night he guided her hands to his belt and she wrapped herself around him instead, threw herself upon him and climbed into his kiss. He belongs here. She belongs here. They belong together, just like this, fitting like puzzle pieces, like complements.

Her skin is almost surreally smooth and soft. She's thin and slender and narrow compared to him, and the circle of his arm easily encompasses her with room to spare. He nuzzles her face gently as she moves close. She kisses his jawline and he tips his head up and to the side, giving her room, leaning into the touch.

She laughs. He grins back. He kisses the tip of her noses, silly now. Then he draws her a little closer, comfortably, settling together between the new sheets, on the new mattress, under the new comforter, atop the new pillows.

Pillow.

"How long can you stay here?" he asks, quietly.

[Danicka] "I don't have any classes today," she answers instantly, whispering the words to match the softness of his tone.

Her knee presses between his lower thighs, above his knees. Her smile fades in its due time and then returns, brilliantly bright, when he grins and kisses her nose. She has her left hand on his waist, underneath the covers, her palm lightly stroking the skin between his ribs and his hipbone. Her right arm is tucked between them, and if she moved it just so, the back of her hand, the backs of her fingers, would graze his lower abdomen.

She moves it just so, slowly drawing a faint line with her knuckles across his skin. The gesture is idle, thoughtless -- or is light enough to be. "What about you?"

[Lukas] "I have all day," he replies, and then he draws in a slow breath. His eyes close briefly. Reopen: the pupils larger, black in a field of palest, clearest blue. A smile sketches across his lips, there, then fading slow and natural. "I've got all night."

Lukas shifts, then. He rises up on one elbow, leans over Danicka. He rolls her gently onto her back, their legs intertwining, their bodies sliding together, pressing together, and then apart against as his back curves over her.

His mouth maps her skin: from the delicate, yet incongruously sharp angles of her jawline

to her collarbones

to the center of her chest, her breastbone, beneath which beats her heart. He lingers there, lips to warm skin, inhaling the smell of her, the scent that has only begun to sink into these sheets, this bed, this house that is theirs. His arms sliding around her bend her spine gently up into him. Lukas turns his head to the side, closes his eyes, and presses his ear to her heart for a moment, as though to listen to the vital rhythms of her body, and whatsoever they may be telling him.

It's a few seconds, perhaps as much as half a minute or more, before he moves again. And then his cheek slides rough and beard-bristled over her soft skin. Turns. He closes his lips over her nipple so gently, so unhesitatingly that it seems almost incidental. Almost accidental.

Far more deliberate, the stroke of his tongue; the circling of the tip around and around until her flesh tightens on itself and her nipple hardens. Then he sucks at her breast, patiently, eyes closed still, as though he could worship here for the rest of the day.

The rest of the night.

Forever and ever.

[Danicka] It means something when she resists him. It means something when she doesn't. It means the same thing, in the end.

When Lukas rolls her onto her back, looming over her, the daylight coming through the windows hits him almost shadowlessly. Danicka lays easily on her back for him, her hair spreading over the pillowcase and under her shoulders. She looks up at him as he comes over her, parts her legs enough for one of his. She lifts her hips eversoslightly to meet him when his hard thigh brushes, then pushes, against her cunt. Her breath turns out to be held for a moment, because at that contact she exhales finally, a long sigh of recognition.

Before the month is out she will wonder, looking at him across a distance of a few feet, if what she's just said is going to shatter every shred of trust he has in her, if he will never believe her again when she says

I am in love with you.

I love you.

Miluji tě.

And for someone who knows how devastating Garou anger can be, how irrevocable the damage they can do is even when they don't mean the things they say and can't control the things they do, Danicka will look at him as his chest seems to cave in and think that she's done something monstrous. But at the time it won't entirely make sense, as their misunderstandings and disagreements and open arguments never do. They have to be mad, when they argue. They have to be out of their minds to say the things they do, and risk what they have.

Which is this, sometimes: the way she opens for him, has always opened for him even before he could recognize it, lips parting to breathe as he lays firm, searing kisses across her body. Her quickened breathing gentles a bit when he simply rests against her, listening to her heartbeat. Danicka put her hands on him when he started kissing her, fingertips light against his biceps and then trailing upward to trace the muscles in his shoulders, the curve of his back. She arches into his hands when he pulls her up and close to him, smiling softly at how he lays his head on her chest.

She strokes his hair for those few seconds, for half a minute, for a minute, long enough for her spiking arousal to slow a bit and melt into utter tenderness for him. She looks at the top of his head, the thick black hair, the strands that curve because if they were allowed to get a big longer they would curl. She looks at the line of his ear and reflects on its perfection, like a naturalist might meditate on the chambers of a nautilus, the twist of a conch shell.

"I love you," she whispers, just before he starts to move, turning his head and

drenching her in slowly spreading, warming sensuality. She moans softly when he lips close, before his tongue even slips from his mouth and laps gently at her. Danicka takes her hands from his hair and runs them down the back of his neck, over his shoulderblades, massages down his back as far as she can read. She closes her eyes, groaning as her heartbeat seems to descend through her entire body, melting her bones, making her cunt pulse with longing.

"Oh god," she murmurs, aching, her hips rolling against his thigh again, cotton stroking over his skin.

[Lukas] Danicka is not alone in her melting tenderness. Sometimes he feels so deeply for her he can hardly stand it. Can hardly contain the emotion that falls through him like rain, like the first, warm, drenching deluge of summer.

It's tenderness that inspires and guides his mouth on her skin. It's nothing but tenderness, the way he licks at her, sucks at her, lets go her nipple to kiss the curve of her breast, the dip of her solar plexus, the subtle curvature of her ribs and her ribcage.

She's moaning beneath him, softly, encouragingly. He can feel the sound vibrating in her chest. His arms are around her and he's atop her, covering her; it amazes him sometimes how slight she is, how slender -- how warm, how alive.

Descending, he's found her navel, and he kisses her just over it
and just below it.

Then his fingers curve under the line of her panties. He draws them down, down amidst clean sheets and fresh comforters, down the smooth length of her legs, under the hard expanse of his torso, down past the ends of her toes, and off.

His mouth again, then: kissing her belly, nipping softly at the ridge of her hip, pressing to the impossibly soft skin of her lower abdomen, between the crests of her hip girdle. She knows he's going to put his mouth on her before he's even close; she knows because of the way he kisses her, hungrily, and the way he breathes, and the way he shifts and presses her thighs apart, raises her knees, lays her open for him in the soft cave of the blankets and the sheets, and

kisses her clit, finally, as softly as he'd kissed her breast, and her mouth. Nuzzles his face against her cunt -- a sort of pulsing, drenching intensity, tender and patient and thorough.

"Mmph," he murmurs against her, looking up the rising arch of her body, finding her eyes and holding them for a second while he

sucks at her, a transient and electric focus of attention, passing on already, relenting. His eyes close as he turns his face to the side, nips at her inner thigh, turns back. He buries his face against her pussy again.

[Danicka] Sometimes, he said once, he thinks about this when they're apart and it keeps him from sleeping.

Sometimes, she said once, she counts the days from the last time they've made love and she aches for it.

Sometimes they can't stand this. How much they love. How well her hand fits into the hollow of his when he wraps his arm around her and covers it, holds it between his palm and the mattress.

Danicka's breathing is getting faster again, while he's lying on top of her and kissing her. She lifts her hips when he hooks his fingers into her underwear, helps him get them off of her. They're lost somewhere in the linens then, forgotten, inconsequential for all that they cost. She squirms gently while he's kissing his way to her cunt, the heat of his mouth intensifying against her. Lukas doesn't have to nudge her legs apart after all; she opens them, knees bending slightly, her fingers going into his hair.

"Kiss it," she whispers, just before he does, looking down at him. Her teeth find her lower lip, her hips tilt towards his mouth, his face. "Ach, lásko --" her fingers tightening in his hair as he looks at her, sucks on her pussy with feverish longing. Wet slides on his lips, tangs on his tongue. "Oh, my god," she groans again, putting her head back, grinding against his mouth now, a slow mimicry of the way she moves when he's fucking her with his cock.

[Lukas] Lukas says nothing. He pants out as Danicka groans -- singular, harsh, a fanning of hot breath across her wetness, across her cunt, before he's on her again, his mouth is on her again and his eyes are closed, his attention is focused down to a sliver, down to a pinpoint, down to the

sudden wetness of her cunt, the taste of her on his tongue, the movement of her hips and the movement of her flesh and the way she moves when he flicks his tongue against her clit

and again, and again.

Abruptly he raises his head. Like a sea creature breaching onto land, he presses his palms to the mattress and surges up that distance on her body; comes up to meet her mouth with his, her slick still on his lips, on his face. He kisses her for a moment, absolute, ravaging, and when they burst apart he's panting; he's diving again, sliding down to

grasp her hips in his hands, firmly, and raise her to his face, raise her like a feast, raise her and hold her right there, squirming in his hands, as he tastes her again.

Slowly. For all the ferocity of his kiss: slowly, surely, with a sort of growing confidence that he did not have the first time he did this for her.

[Danicka] "No, don't stop," she whimpers,

demands,

lifting up her hips when he takes his mouth from her as though she's going to follow the feel of his tongue, the heat of his mouth which is so much more wanted than the air in the room touching her pussy, cooling the moisture-covered skin. But her hips meet his body when he rises up over her, and her head tilts and her mouth opens to take his tongue in her mouth, sucking the taste of her cunt off of him. She holds his head still, fingers still bured in his hair, head rising off the pillow to kiss him harder, moaning.

Her left leg is lifting up, wrapping around his waist -- or trying to -- when he pulls back again, lips parted to breathe, and the sight of him like that makes her let him go, makes her let him slide back down to fuck her with his mouth. She doesn't lose time, doesn't try to restrain herself. Danicka bucks gently when he starts to eat at her again, laying on her back the way she was the first time he parted her legs and did this.

She gives him less advice, now, corrects him less, does not need to reach down as much to guide his fingers where she wants them, but that does not mean she's silent. Danicka knows instinctively that because he did not slide into her just a moment ago he wants her to come on his face. Or she thinks so. Or she isn't thinking, at all, beyond the pulsing, throbbing arousal that has her rubbing her cunt on his mouth to try and relieve that ache.

"Baby," she says,

whimpers,

"faster, now, please. Lap at it. Fuck me."

[Lukas] Lukas's only reply: wordless, a low sound in his throat, something like a growl. His eyes flash open for a second. Shadowed under the covers, the color is richer, a more saturated blue, a thin rim of it fire-bright around pupils of deep black.

Their eyes meet like a war. Or a storm. Or like what it is, no more or less. He holds her eyes as he does as she says, laps at that hot cunt, flicks the tip of his tongue against her opening, over and over, quick now, flickering-fluttering, pausing occasionally to push his face against her and

rub against her, shamelessly, covering his mouth and his chin and the tip of his nose in her slick. Then his shoulders shift against her thighs. He raises himself on his elbows, leaning over her now, a man and his lover, an animal and his meal: closes his eyes again, puts his mouth to her clit, sucks at her, opens his mouth, fucks her with his tongue, faster, unwavering.

Because -- she's right. He wants her to come on his face.

He wants her to come the way she does, wildly, thoughtlessly, arching in his bed, which is her bed, which is their bed. He wants her like that, her hands in his hair and her cunt rubbing against his mouth, demanding; her mind gone, body electric, surrendering.

[Danicka] There was a time when he wanted this at least in part because when she came like that, separate from him, while he was still in control of some measure of his faculties, he felt that he could finally see her as clearly as she always seemed to see him. It wasn't necessarily about winning, about competing, but about being in her. Seeing her,

with perfect fucking clarity

right through to the bottom.

Which was something he never had at the beginning, couldn't guess at or hope for, had no chance at. Danicka, as hard as she has ever worked to obfuscate herself, still does not know just how difficult it is for Lukas sometimes to feel as though he has any insight into her at all. And yet: there are two chairs at the dining room table downstairs, and this is perfect, because she will never entertain here.

The people she goes to school with, the people she will eventually work with, will very likely never know she has a house. Garou and spirits will only know that this is Lukas's territory if he marks it in the umbra, if he sets up warnings against anyone so much as considering stepping foot on that property or interfereing with his mate, with his den. Kinfolk will not be told. This is not a safehouse, not an emergency contact should anyone need to find one of them. This is their den.

He buries his face in her pussy, licks at her, laps at her faster the way she begged him to, and Danicka starts fucking his face in earnest, grabbing the pillow behind her head with one hand, grabbing the sheets beside her hip with the other, bucking her hips in his grasp. There are times when he must feel he can see her clearly, know her utterly, because it's so obvious that she's lost all care for how she looks, how she seems, what he thinks, what consequences there might be

if she turns her head to the side and gasps for every breath,

if she moans loud enough to carry,

or if she has a goddamn werewolf between her thighs, eating her pussy out with frenzied hunger.

"Lukáš," she's crying out, the way she does when he makes love to her, the way she does especially when he does this, the way she half-moaned, half-whimpered his name the first time he did this at the W, the way she does when she's close, when her body is starting to quiver in anticipation of its own release.

And then it hits her, sudden and soon, hard, making her turn her head to the other side and bite her bicep, screaming into her own flesh. She lets go a second later as though remembering she doesn't have to stifle her cries here -- or else simply not being able to anymore -- and arches her back, wetness flowing out of her, onto his lips, over his chin. She screams a second time as he laps at her pussy again,

and her intermittent whimpers sound like begging, like pleading for mercy

before his lips close on her clit to suck, this time more gently, and she thrashes, screaming again, fucking him back with thoughtless, careless, overwhelmed responsiveness. Every nerve ending is on fire; when she starts to come down again, she's still quivering, and when he nuzzles her, licks her again, so much as breathes against her or shifts his weight on his elbows, she shivers. Her hips jerk.

She closes her eyes, still clinging to the sheets and the pillow, a fine sheen of sweat on her breasts and her belly and her face and her arms, trembling with lingering arousal.

[Danicka] [Interfering has 2 e's. FYI.]

[Lukas] There will be no markings in the umbra.

There will be no glyphs writ bold, no trophies or boundaries, no claims or boasts or warnings or ... anything at all, really. There will simply be scent, his, hers, and all the claim and threat implicit in that.

He only bought two chairs for the dining table. Two and only two, because his pack will never come here. The Garou Nation will never come here. There's room enough for four to be seated in the living room, but that's only because the rocking chair was a whim, and the sofa -- well. He can imagine stretching out with her on the sofa, watching old movies that they already know the plots to, and his frame would never fit on a loveseat.

There's room to entertain in the family room; there's room for guests in the downstairs bedroom. Both are empty. They'll find some use for it, or maybe they won't. Maybe she'll cover the walls of the empty room in color. Maybe he'll sip coffee some cold wintry morning, looking out over the yard from the family room window. It doesn't matter. Those rooms are not for guests, and not for strangers, and not even for friends.

This is their den. It is private. It is safe. And he will protect that utter savagery, utter brutality, if he has to.

That much, if anyone know anything about him at all, should be obvious.

And Danicka does know him. More than anyone else in this city, and possibly more than anyone else in his life -- more than his parents, pushed consciously from his life since he Change; more than his sister, distant in Los Angeles, careful now of what she tells him and what she doesn't even if she doesn't admit to it; more than his pack, even, who sometimes literally shares his mind, and more than the Philodox who taught him -- Danicka knows him.

She knows that he bought this house and made it a den for her. She knows that he keeps it secret not to hide her away from the world, not to lock her away in a proverbial ivory tower, but so that she would feel safe here. Perhaps she even knows now that to hurt her intentionally, deliberately, is the last thing he wants to do. Perhaps she knows he wants to protect her, to keep her, to love her.

Which makes what they'll say to each other nine days hence all the more painful.

And,

which makes the sort of ferocity he goes at her with almost startling. But then, they never were bound by strictures of what's expected; what's allowable. Restraint, for them, has never been about conformity to social norms. When they hesitated, it was out of self-preservation. When they gave in, and when they give in, it's sudden, total, mindless, unashamed:

her moaning, her writhing, the toss of her head to the side, the baring of her body, the arching of her spine, the grinding of her cunt against his face, on and on, while

he eats at her, devours her alive, opens his mouth to her and laps, licks, sucks at her without faltering, without slowing, without anything remotely close to mercy as her pleasure slams through her and makes her scream, makes her make noises that sound like begging, makes her shudder and twist and

say his name, just like that.

When she's finished, when she lies quiet and overcome and trembling, Lukas slows; he relents at last. He kisses her again, close-mouthed now, a warm press of his lips to her cunt. Again, to her clit, just firm enough to make her quiver.

And then, suddenly, he turns his face to her thigh again, bites: a solid grip of his teeth, at once tender and ferocious, unafraid.

An inhale. Then an exhale. Then he releases her. He comes up over her, slower this time, deliberate now, sliding over her with her sweat slick between their bodies, her slick glistening on his face. Their mouths meet. The kiss is deep, pulling. He presses himself between her legs, against her wet cunt. Back arched, hands planted, he grinds against her just like that, an unequivocal slide of his cock

so fucking hard

over the slippery wetness between her legs. He lets her feel him, gives her time to feel the heat, the hardness, the length and breadth of him, before he moves again. A little faster this time, sliding over her, saying nothing, panting now. And then again: coming down over her on his elbows now, his weight shifting a little to his knees, giving himself the balance and leverage to roll his hips against hers, a simulacrum, a promise of the way he wants to fuck her.

His eyes are heavylidded; all pupil. She can see the way pleasure flares in them at every slide of his cock. And the way they don't close, not entirely, when he lowers his head and catches her mouth again. He groans into her kiss, softly, and when it comes apart his cheek slides past hers; his brow indents the pillow by her head.

"Take me inside," he murmurs. "Now, baby. Don't make me wait."

[Danicka] Any werewolf who knows Wyrmbreaker -- or knows of him, has heard stories of him -- and recognizes his scent around this place will hesitate before crossing the property's borders. Unless, that is, they are an utter fool. Any werewolf who knows or thinks they know anything about the Shadow Lords will see this slender blonde woman touched by their breeding and smelling faintly like a strong alpha male of the tribe will guess, easily, that she is not up for grabs, that she is being kept, that very likely she belongs body and soul to one of Thunder's children.

They may make their mistakes on who Lukas and Danicka are, what they are like, but any Garou with half a mind will follow the Litany, and leave this place alone. That's to say nothing of spirits, though, of enemies, of others.

Danicka doesn't think about it. She knows vaguely of wards and of watchers, but she is not going to ask Lukas what he is going to do to protect this place for her, to make it safe. She may not even think of the necessity, or of the possibility of danger coming here. She will think about this house later and think about the two chairs at the dining table, the rocking chair whose presence makes her laugh to herself, the thought of him behind her on the couch, heads on pillows propped against the armrest, falling asleep there as daylight drifts to nightfall and the television flickers and shines in front of them.

Now her shoulders don't tense when he is behind her. She doesn't wait for the blow that never comes. She believes him when he says that it hurts him to hurt her, when he says that he does not want this or that. She trusts him.

But trust is harder to perfect than love. And whereas one she's never felt, whereas one is so new to her that she enters into with with the wide-eyed delight of a child, the other has been betrayed

over, and over

by those who should have held her trust as something sacred.

Lukas is between her legs, bowed over her, pressed against her, and though he is in a position most would consider submissive to some degree, there's no trace of dominance or power exchange between them. If anything, Danicka is the surrendered, the overcome, the conquered. She catches her breath slowly, her legs lazily open around his shoulders, and her hands uncurl from the sheets and one comes down, strokes his hair back as he kisses her.

When he bites her, it's hard enough to leave a faint impression, not quite just a set of his teeth against her flesh but a bite, firm and lingering. Danicka does not yelp or twitch. She reacts to it with a sort of mindblowing serenity, touching his hair and looking down at him. There's a shift, there, from her overwhelmed, hypersensitive, wellfucked vulnerability and his self-control, his restraint, the fact that he was the one who brought her to that point. He is the savage then, the mindless, and she accepting it, observing it without attempt to soothe or tame.

He does not hurt her. She waits for him to come to her, and when he does lift himself up and sees her face he'll know she was waiting, know that when he sinks down against her she'll hold him. Danicka closes her eyes to kiss him, keeps her legs open as he rubs himself against her, sighs over his lips the first time

and shudders the second. She is not squirming again yet, but when she opens her eyes the color in them is searingly, vividly green as he brushes against flesh so tortured that the feel of him is almost intolerable. She lets her hands slide to his biceps, holding onto him while he moves over her, closes her eyes again when he kisses her. She's lazy now, sated, gasping when he strokes against her like that but her fiendish ache for completion is satisfied.

Danicka runs her legs up the outsides of his thighs, rubs her calves against the backs of his legs, turns her head and nuzzles him as he rests against the pillow under her head. "Dělat ty chtít mě do --" she starts to whisper, to ask, but then she simply presses her lips to him, just under his earlobe, and moans softly with her mouth closed there as he slides over her again.

Whatever it was she was asking if he wanted, she doesn't seem to need an answer. She holds him in her arm, slipping her other hand down between their chests, past the hard ridges of his abdomen and the soft, smooth flat and swell of her own. Nuzzling him again, Danicka wraps her hand around the base of his cock, gently, as though she's as afraid of hurting him accidentally as he is of hurting her --

if not moreso.

She runs her fingers down the length of him, tracing him with her fingertips, before guiding him to her pussy and easing him into her just a little, just to start. "Teď, lásko," she echoes, putting her hand on his hip and guiding them to roll, to push in deeper.

[Lukas] But he pauses.

Her hand on his cock makes his eyes close, finally. The feel of her taking him in makes his lips part, and his breath escape slowly. Arousal is pouring through him, flooding molten from his center of gravity, lighting up a webwork of nerves beneath his skin. Her hand on his hip, pulling him forward, makes him roll into her thoughtlessly, helplessly, just for a second

before he pauses.

Because: she was so satisfied, a moment ago. Because she was not squirming, and because she was shuddering, overwhelmed, at the slide of his flesh over hers. Because she seems sated, and completed, and quiet; and because she started to speak, and stopped.

Perhaps he thinks momentarily of the last time they fucked, not in the bed but in the shower where he crowded her to the wall and slammed into her, too hard, too fast, too soon. Lukas stops now, his chest rising and fallng with short breaths, the broad muscle-sheets of his back tense, the columns of strength at his lumbar spine quivering ever so slightly with the strain of holding back. He pants out, a short gasp, almost voiced, before he's drawing back a little, raising his head, turning to kiss her neck, her cheek, and at last, her mouth.

"Musím chci, abys ...?"

[Danicka] [paws!]

[Lukas] [folded ones!]

[Danicka] The push of his cock into her when he rolls his hips like that is a smooth but truncated slide. The difference between rubbing against her cunt, her slick smearing onto his flesh with every thrust, and this -- surrounded even partly by her heat, her wetness, being squeezed as she quivers slightly around him, still coming down from her orgasm -- is mindblowing. Danicka's pressure on his hip doesn't let up even when he pauses, holding himself up and back.

Her palm smooths around to his ass, her legs opening a little wider as she quite simply tries to keep taking him, invites him to fuck her without secondary agenda or selfconsciousness. But he is looking down at her, panting with want, vibrating with restraint, and Danicka holds his eyes, her own expression aching

and then confused

and then concerned.

All of which fly away when he starts to pull back and she groans, her cunt spasming gently once as he tries to withdraw and lays kisses over her neck and face, still tasting sharply of her pussy, of her orgasm. Danicka moans over his lips, into his mouth, pants softly. She laughs at his question, quietly, and moves her hands to his face, lifting her head from the pillow to kiss him. It's deep. It's hard. It's as sensual as any kiss she's ever given him, opening his mouth to her attention with a mixture of inquiry and demand.

"What I just did," she murmurs when she lets him go, rolling her hips underneath him, kissing him a second time, softly, on the corner of his mouth. She lays her head back down, her smile making her eyes twinkle faintly. "This," she goes on, moving her hand back down between their bodies again to touch his cock, to stroke the length of it he hasn't yet buried in her, to ease him inside further.

"I figured it'd be all right if I just did it," Danicka explains, through quickened breaths, pants for air that are getting heavier again. "Do you want me to really ask next time?" She pulls him in, removes her hand, puts it on his back to hold him over her and leans up to kiss him again. Harder. Just like her words, teasing and fierce and supplicating and hungry all at once, half-whispered, half-snarled as she fucks back up against him. "Chceš, abych se vás zeptat, jestli moci můžu dotknout tvůj kohout? Chceš, abych se vás zeptal, jestli můžu to dát do mé píči?"

[Lukas] Lukas has trouble holding her eyes when she touches him like that, and moves like that, and tightens around him like that. When she kisses him the first time, his eyes shut; he leans down as she leans up; they meet in the middle, fiercely, as though the roll of their bodies together weren't as slow, and lazy, and felt as it is.

She answer him in english. He looks at her like he's forgotten the language; like he's forgotten every language except that of the body, the one she speaks to him when she

touches him like that
moves like that
tightens like that.

Flickers of expression run over his face: a furrowing of his brow, there and gone, when she eases him in. A shutting of his eyes, opening again, when she strokes him. Parting lips. A panted breath -- an instant before they kiss again, a third time, harder than the second, hungry as the first.

"Ne," the word escapes as a breath. He's answering her. And then he isn't, "Don't stop. Don't stop, baby." He's holding still for her, holding himself over her and letting her move beneath him, move up onto him, until of course he isn't.

Until he's catching her mouth on his, glancing and sealing, parting to breath, catching again. Until he's moving into her, solid and sure, every slide into her impacting deliberately, felt in the brush of her breasts against his chest, in the recoil through her slender body, in the flickering and sparking of their kiss.

"To mě poser záda," he says -- somewhere between command and supplication; neither, "stejně jako to."

[Danicka] She really did just want to come into bed and lie down with him. Hold him. Listen to his heart beating underneath her head, resting on his chest. She wanted to feel his naked skin against her own and know that they were unequivocably safe here, alone here. She wanted to be with him in a place untouched by arguments, by tears, by feelings of betrayal, by loss. Danicka has no illusions that they will never fight here, that every moment will be held within a careful bubble of bliss. She does not want to argue with him, anger him, be afraid of him here, but nor does she want either of them to be

restrained

when they're in their den. Walking on eggshells, wary of displeasing the other, afraid to speak their minds.

But it is nice, for now, to be within the walls of their house -- on their street, the thought that had her smiling and aching at once when she turned to drive onto it -- and have no memories here beyond the last delighted, tender half hour or so.

Then she saw him undressed, climbing into their bed. Felt his hands on her hips when she joined him, felt their legs slide together. And then he asked her how long she could stay, and he looked at her like that, with a sort of controlled and half-shielded affection and desire

which she loves. Because of the control, because of the shield, because he restrains even the full expression of adoration and longing until they have the time for it. Because this is another way he tries to protect her, to not push her, these quiet offerings of himself with neither fear or rejection or threat of retribution lingering in his eyes. Because she cannot quite bear to look at him when he puts his hands on her like that and lowers his voice to that tone and lets her know

without saying it

that he wants her so badly he can hardly think. That he wants so much to be close to her that his arms ache to hold her.

She loves that she can look at him and see it all.

She loves the way he lets go now, the way he used to never do. The way he moans, the way he has to close his eyes now -- or the way he lets himself. She loves the fact that he talks to her now the way he always kissed her, always fucked her, holding nothing back. She loves the sound of him when he starts begging her not to stop, when she can see that he's still fighting not to

do what he does next, which is slam sure and slow into her.

Danicka groans, arching her back, but he catches that sound in his mouth, kissing her as he starts to flex his hips again and again, fucking her with a deliberate certainty now, the sheets hanging from his hips, tugging down the backs of his legs and the front of her shins. She puts both her hands on his back now, holding him where he is, feeling the rhythm of tension in his upper body. She uses him, uses her hands on him like that, to do just what he says, lifting her hips and bearing down on his cock.

"That's it," she whimpers, gasps, whatever the fuck, "that's it. Fuck my pussy, baby. Dej mi to. Vyplňte mě s tím, lásko."

[Lukas] The truth is, Lukas hadn't come to bed expecting anything but to hold Danicka, either. He hadn't wanted anything but that: to hold her in a house that was theirs, in a room that was theirs, in a bed that was theirs. He wanted to feel her skin against his. Her warmth added to his. Her body held in the hollow of his the way he holds her, close, his arm wrapped around and her heartbeat beneath the heel of his hand. He wanted this not because they've never held one another like that before but because they've never held one another like that here, in a home that belonged to them, that was indubitably theirs, and private, and safe.

Where we are doesn't matter, Danicka said to him once. This is the first time an exception has risen: it matters here because here is theirs.

But then he slid into bed, and she went to wash her face. And the act was so familiar, so secure, so achingly recognized in his bones -- as though he's always had a den with her, as though night after night he's seen her wash her face at that sink, through that door, before coming to bed -- that for a moment it was hard to breathe.

And then: the warmth, the love, the desire, because Danicka is his mate, and she was coming to bed, and it didn't matter that the sun hadn't even set because she was taking off her clothes, and her shoulderblades were winging against her skin as she undid the clasp of her bra, and she was turning to him and they were coming together, brushing together, tangling thoughtlessly and easily together, and

when he asked her how long she could stay,

her knuckles brushed the skin beneath his navel when she answered.

She could read his want in his eyes, then, a slow flare of it licking past the restraint and the shield. She can read the want in his eyes, now, refulgent, afire, as their bodies move in time, as her hands pull at his back, ride the flexing muscles there that churn and roll to bring him into her

slow and slow

again and again

while tatters of words fall from her lips, which he catches on his tongue when he kisses her; while he comes down over her and stays close to her, their bodies pressing together and coming together, joining. His eyes are closed now, his forehead against hers, close enough to kiss now and again when he can summon the will, the presence of mind; close enough that their mouths brush when he breathes, that their lips brush when he murmurs senseless encouragements --

"Jo," and "To je ono," and "Fuck, yes."

-- while he moves into her with a sort of lazy, unhurried deliberation. As though they had all afternoon. As though they had all night. As though, as much as he wanted her, as desperately as he needed to be inside her just like this, he wants to take his time

and hold the moment

and love her.

[Danicka] This place will always be the exception. It will matter when they're here, rather than at a hotel or his room or her apartment. It will make a difference to Danicka to be in this bed rather than the one she bought when she moved to Chicago, before she met him and before she found out from her father that once upon a time, she and the Kvasnicka children fell asleep in a pile on the couch while the grown-ups played cards in the kitchen. It will make a difference to Lukas to bring his mate here and know that she feels safe, that she does not have to hide anything here, that this makes her happy.

And it will make a difference to fall asleep here together, to wake up with the sun coming in the window their bed faces, to have the peace and quiet and no sounds but the neighborhood, the cars driving down their street, the children who live in neighboring houses leaving to go to bus stops. Very likely, come tomorrow morning -- whatever happens between now and then -- Danicka will wake first, wake to the sunrise as she used to, and lie in the circle of Lukas's arms listening.

Just listening.

To his breathing. To the morning. To the quiet.

And she will fall back asleep there, warm and held, this location and this man separated in her mind from the memories of utter trauma visited upon her in other houses, by other Garou. It will feel familiar nonetheless, right, as though this is how it should be, how it always should have been, how she wants it to be with them.

Every night.

And every day.

Truth be told, Danicka expected Lukas to come down over her as soon as she pulled him inside and find his home as deep in her as he could go. She expected him to start slamming into her after that moment's careful pause, expected him to fuck her hard now, fast, nailing her to the bed and groaning, growling against her neck and shoulder. She would not have minded. She would not have whimpered in pain, this time, because it would not have been such an abrupt shift after such a long wait. But that's not what Lukas does.

He does press down upon her, and there was a time when the sheer breadth of his shoulders and the weight of him, the heat that makes his skin almost feverish to the touch, would have been almost more than she could bear. There was a time when she couldn't imagine nurturing something like that, holding him, being permitted to. Now she welcomes him, kisses softly those meandering affirmations right out of his mouth as he moans them, when he breathes out

Yes

and

Ano

and

Fuck... jo... fuck...

while he rolls his hips and sends himself flexing into her, filling her just like she told him to, while she begins to whimper all over again, her hands tensing until her fingernails grab at his flesh, until her cunt clenches around his cock just like it did before, just like it did against nothing while he was licking her.

"Don't stop," Danicka says with a shudder, all but crying it out. "Baby, make me come again."

[Lukas] The sound of Danicka whimpering, the shudders that run through her voice, at once sets him afire -- and makes him abruptly, inexplicably tender. He shifts over her. His hands touch her shoulder, her breast; mold to her face. He holds her face gently between his hands as he kisses her mouth again, kisses that last word off her lips, kisses her until he's smiling against her mouth. She can feel him smiling against her mouth, and see him smiling down at her when he draws back and

laughs, quietly, out of sheer happiness, utter adoration.

There's a catch in it, every time he pushes into her. The way she feels; the way she moves on him, and against him, and around him is off the fucking charts. The laugh trails off. He lowers himself to her again. Their mouths meet over and over, pulled back to one another as though by magnetism, by gravity, by the first and fundamental forces of nature.

This is different from the sort of love they usually make -- savage, primal, fucking each other as though they couldn't hold back, couldn't get enough, couldn't be satisfied with anything less than ferocity and absoluteness -- especially when it's the first time they've loved each other in so long. This is more akin to the way they make love late in the night, or early in the morning; the last time before sleep. It's lazy, and slow, and deliberate, and felt, every stroke sliding in firmly, their bodies close, their faces touching.

When she started to cry out he'd laughed, softly, but that's gone now, lost to the passing moments. Now there's only a sort of silent, bonedeep intensity, and he's moving over her, moving into her, loving her slow and solid and

on and on

and now Lukas is shuddering on every thrust, gasping into the space between. His back is damp with sweat under her hands. His eyes are open now, though his brow is still to hers. He's looking down the shadows between their bodies, watching himself moving into her, watching her receiving him, watching her thighs clench around his waist and his cock sliding wet into her, again and again, a little harder now, just as deliberate a rhythm.

His orgasm isn't far. She can tell. It's in the way he breathes, the way he pants. It's in the clenching of the muscles low in his back, and in his hands turning from her face to clutch at the sheets, bearing down there so he doesn't clutch at her, doesn't slam into her, doesn't hurt her. It's how he raises himself higher on his elbows, moves into her with purpose and effort, concertedly, finding her eyes, holding them as pleasure flickers and flares and novas in his eyes, makes his brow furrow, makes him gasp --

"Baby, jsem blízko."

His mouth catches hers. The force of the kiss tilts her chin up, her head back. He eats at her mouth for a single, untamed second, releases to pant --

" -- fuck,"

as though this were a sort of warning, the sort of caution she gives him sometimes when the world's on fire and the sky's falling and

his hands, curling into the sheets, wrinkling the fresh bedlinens; his teeth grazing her neck, gently, then fixing in her shoulder, firmly -- the last few thrusts, three or four, are wholly different from the slow, meditative deliberation of all this, all this; the last one are fierce, nearly savage, plunging deep, every inch, every ounce of his strength, every last shred of him given over to this act, this moment.

Then his body runs rigid against hers, arced against her hands. Lukas groans when he comes, a rough, wordless sound from the pit of his stomach, muffled against her skin. His left hand flies to her brow, her hair -- he barely realizes it. He touches her, holds her, holds her there to receive him as he fucks into her again and again in the immediate, incandescent aftermath, gasping and groaning in her ear, unable to bear it, unable to stop.

[Danicka] Lukas runs his hands over her. It's what he did earlier with his mouth, letting his lips find their way down her body, letting his fingers tug her panties down and off and away. His palm on her breast now has the same effect, his kiss, his tender hunger: she shudders, eyes falling closed for a few seconds while she gasps, while he holds her face and smiles against her

as though delighted by the pleasure he's bringing her, by the obviousness of how she's enjoying him, or simply as though

being here with her -- in her -- in their home, making love to her like this, is the happiest he's been in a very long time.

Danicka is moaning, though, her legs wrapping around him, folding him in closer and tighter as he slowly, firmly pumps his cock into her. She forces her hands to unfurl, refuses to claw at him, gasps instead and holds onto her mate. Over and over again she gasps don't stop, don't stop, right there, just like that and whimpers ohbabydon'tstopineedit in between the kisses he's giving her, underneath the soft, breathy laughter that's leaving him. She moans as though the achinging slowness of this is killing her, breaking her down gradually, dismantling every wall, draining her of any want or will to keep control, keep quiet, keep coherent.

And when he's shuddering every time he thrusts into her, Danicka is arching her back and grabbing a hold of his hip again, pulling him harder into her pussy. Her mouth is open, panting, her eyes closed, only the occasional groan of need and pleasure leaving her throat. Only the occasional

oh god... oh god...oh my god, Lukáš...

released in sharp, gasping whimpers that hitch as she lets them go. He watches her, watches himself fucking her, and she feels him, feels him between her legs and filling her until she's biting her lower lip, quietly screaming with inexplicable restraint. She squeezes him inside harder, inevitably and unintentionally, her cunt spasming around his cock. Again and again. Until she's begging:

"Harder. Faster, Lukáš, please," which unfurls into a ragged whimper and a few tight, spiraling squirms of her hips. "To je ono. To je ono, lásko, kurva mě. Kurva mě, ach můj bože!"

It's a scream, sharp and shuddering, when he pushes himself into her again, hard and deliberate. She tilts her head back, blind to the way he's looking at her because her eyes are so tightly closed

until they're not. Until she opens them, because he's taking his hands off her face and breasts and grabbing the bed, pushing himself up to fuck her a little harder, fuck her a little more firmly. Her eyes open and look up at him, both of Danicka's hands moving to his biceps. She's still crying out, coming tight and wet all around him, under him, squeezing his cock in quick, quivering little clenches. She can't stop it. She can't beg him to stop now, to wait, to give her a moment to breathe, because she's barely able to do anything now but survive her own orgasm.

Her mouth is still open when he kisses her, as though she had more to say, further encouragements for him to fuck her, come in her, give it to her. He pants into her mouth and she just groans in response, putting one hand up on the back of his head to hold him there, their lips sealed even as he lets out that fuck, even as he seems to warn her of his impending completion.

Danicka lets him go so she can breathe, and so he can bite. It's as if she knew he would want to, maybe even need to, because she half-guides his face to her shoulder and breathes heavily underneath him, breasts brushing his chest as he sets his teeth in her skin. He pounds into her then and she cries out, suddenly clings to him, fucks him back again.

"Stejně jako to, Lukáš," she murmurs as he's groaning, thrusting, filling her and touching her and losing himself in her all at once. She kisses the curve of his ear and then squirms when he hits her faster, holds her in place as his cock slides again and again over her clit. She makes a noise, unexpected, and her entire body shudders underneath his.

[Lukas] So he gentles. He relents at that sound she makes, because he knows she can't take it this soon after; he knows she's too sensitive, this soft-skinned, weak-limbed female of his, who so rarely asks for or needs his protection; whom he'd protect, nonetheless.

The slide of his cock into her slows, lightens, gradually comes to a stop. He stays inside. Wants to stay inside her, right there, just a little longer. Indefinitely longer. His right hand unclenches from the sheets, gradually. Then he moves, his hands sliding under her, his arms wrapping around. Lukas presses her up against him, clasping her close to his body, close against him, close.

And he tries to catch his breath. Softly now, his mouth presses to her shoulder, to her neck. He kisses her very gently, keeps his brow to the pillow beneath her and his eyes closed. She can hear him panting in her ear, can feel his pulse hammering through his chest and into hers. Can feel him moving inside her still, sometimes flexing his hips to push a little deeper; sometimes simply jerking and twitching inside her, as though his body hadn't quite let go of its rush yet.

There's sweat in the furrow of his spine. He's heavy and warm over her, indubitably alive, burning and vivid with life. Apart from his breathing, though, Lukas doesn't move at all. He stays right where he is, saying nothing, doing nothing, breathing with her as the moments go by

and his blood slows
and his breathing evens out.

"Pojďme prostě zůstat v posteli," he says at last, and he sounds drowsy now though she knows a single slow bout of lovemaking couldn't have worn him out. It's not that, then. He's not worn out. He's just ... content. Happy. Safe, and like any animal, sleepy. He turns toward her. Warm, his lips press to the slender tendon of her neck, very tenderly.

"Budeme řád pizzu a já půjdu dolů, pro to. Můžeme se sprchovým koutem a vrať se sem a ... jen zůstaňte."

[Danicka] Neither of them can have been awake very long now. It's daylight; it's morning, still, and these days Danicka keeps to a rather regular schedule because of classes, because she no longer has a roommate who is a coke addict or a roommate who needs half the sleep of a normal person. Even Lukas, who normally is asleep at this hour, whose schedule has him stalking the city at night and sleeping around dawn, did not look to her like he'd been awake past the time when he should have slept when she drove up. She assumed, getting out of her car, that he had not been up for very long.

But they are going to sleep. She knows it like she knows the location of her bones, the rhythm of her heart. She knows it like he must know that she can take so much more than this, that given thirty seconds, ninety seconds, she would pull him against her again and tell him to move, urge him to thrust again. Danicka has so, so rarely asked him to stop, though that very act is something that so vividly marks the memory of their first night together.

Not like this, she could have said, stroking his hair back just as she did then. Or I want you to make love to me, which she did, which he had, but which she could not say and he could not have borne hearing.

It's hard to tell the difference between pleasure and torment at times. It's nearly impossible to tell when pleasure has become so extreme it's become almost painful. Lukas, perhaps still concerned about the last time or maybe just protective because they're in their den, hears the noise she makes and thinks

small. soft. fragile.

careful, careful.

So he gentles. So he slows. So he holds her closer, the swell of her breasts pressing against his chest every time she breathes and the smoothness of her belly aligning to his a half-second later, pulling away when she exhales. Danicka feels lazy, feels sleepy, feels so overwhelmed there are nearly tears in her eyes that she would not be able to explain any better now than she could before. Her legs stay around him, her arms, until after awhile she starts to loosen her grasp on him.

Her elbows slide down, her arms cradled by his own. Her legs unwrap, unfold, one mostly straightening and the other -- still bent -- cocked slightly outward. Her foot rubs against his calf.

Danicka relaxes against the mattress, never once imagining him shopping for it, testing different ones, comparing them to her bed in his mind, trying to find something that she would be comfortable on because it isn't as though he cares, he who sleeps on that thin piece of shit mattress in the Brotherhood, he who has curled up and slept on the floor before so that she could feel safe enough, calm enough, to sleep in his bed. She closes her eyes and turns her head as he occasionally throbs and pushes inside her, nuzzling his temple. She never once thinks about whatever care was taken when he bought these pillows, when he ran his hand over pillowcases and sheet sets to choose then by touch. She doesn't know, really, if he just grabbed whatever was on the shelf or if he tried to find the softest possible or if he just chose them based on how her hair might look spread over the cloth.

Danicka just holds him, her body warm and molten under him, around him, her skin flushed with fading pink. Her eyes open slowly, close again with just as little hurry. She listens to him, accepts his kiss and his words, and contemplates her desire to sleep against her desire to make love again. Her hand trails up his back, regardless of sweat, and she scritches his scalp meditatively, half-smiling at him in the daylit bedroom.

"Možná později," she murmurs, about pizza, about eating. "Nechci se pohybovat na chvíli."

Her eyes drift closed and stay that way for several seconds this time. She goes on stroking his hair, playing with the soft, short ones at the base of his scalp, and sighs her breath out as they lie there. She does not want to answer his words about staying, because she does not want to think about the possibility of leaving, which lives underneath the question. She does not want to ask him

Why? Why would I think I about leaving? Why wouldn't I stay?

Where else would I go

when I could be here

with you?

[Lukas] There is no reason in the world for them to leave right now.

There is absolutely no reason why she would think about leaving; why he would do anything but stay. She doesn't have class today. He doesn't have a battle to fight. Her classmates are not calling her out to dance. His packmates don't even know this place exists.

There's nothing in the world that would call them away from each other right now.

The truth is, though, that won't and can't last. This is something he knew, standing in the mattress store pressing on various beds with his hands, lying down flat to test them, taking his time and taking care even when the store attendants looked at him warily, fearfully, tried not to look him in the eye, tried not to stay near him for long. This is something that was always in the back of his mind, picking out pillows and bedding and sheets that were -- although plain -- of inordinately high quality compared to the meagerness of the rest of the house, because he knew this might be the place they spent the majority of their time together; because he wanted her to sleep well, and sleep deeply, when she slept in his arms here.

When, because: this isn't forever. This isn't every night. This will be one night a week if they're lucky; more likely, one night in two, three, four. She'll have class. He'll have the war. Beyond that, he has a pack he needs to stay near, a tribe to lead, a Sept, a Nation. Beyond that, she has a life she's building for herself; the first time in all her life she's been able to say that. And no matter what they might think now,

nestled together in the soft bed with the soft sheets, their bodies resonating with the intensity and totality of their lovemaking,

they both know that if he were to crowd into her life completely, if he were to tell her to give up her own apartment and move in here, live here, cook his meals and clean his floors and submit to his rage, his presence, his nearness every single day and night, it would be intolerable. It would poison their love, slowly and surely.

Still; he would be lying if he said he didn't want just that. If he didn't want the impossible. If he didn't want every night. So when Danicka says she doesn't want to move for a while, Lukas makes some muffled, vague sound of assent and agreement. He nuzzles her neck gently. He thinks to himself:

Mohl bych tu zůstat navždy.

Then, with a sigh, he turns onto his side. The mattress shifts and dips under his weight as it shifts. He turns her with him, carefully, leaving her one leg wrapped gently around him, leaving their bodies joined.

They share a pillow again. They're that close. His forearm rests easily on the dip of her waist, his hand trailing light over her back. Lukas's eyes have opened. He's smiling without realizing it, a slight, fond curve of the corners of his mouth. Looking at Danicka across the space between, he doesn't say anything. He isn't looking for anything. He isn't thinking that they'll sleep soon; that they'll wake up starving around midnight and order pizza from one of the late-night places. He isn't thinking about how he'll get it from the delivery man and they'll eat it at the dining room table, around which is arranged two and only two chairs. He isn't thinking about the inexpensive new plates and silverware in the kitchen cupboards and drawers, nor about washing the dishes afterward with Danicka close by, drying them as he hands them to her.

He isn't thinking about making love again after that, sprawling in bed and fucking, laughing, showering, tumbling back into the sheets clean and dry and warm; sleeping again until morning.

Lukas isn't thinking about any of that. He's barely thinking at all. He merely watches her, contentedly, drowsily, his pale clear eyes blinking now and then, slowly.

Every blink, his eyelids close a little quicker; rise a little slower.

Every breath, the inhale is a little slower, the exhale a little quieter.

Eventually, his arm around her tightens infinitesimally. Closer he moves, and closer he draws her, into the circle of his arm, against his chest. When he kisses her, it's so soft and sleepy as to be barely more than a touch of their mouths together. When it parts, his eyes stay closed, and the slow meaningless tracery of his fingers over her back gradually slows to nothing.

Sleep comes: so effortlessly, so soundlessly, that it's hard to say for certain when wakefulness finally lifts completely away.