an effort to connect.

[Lukas] It's not a phone call; it's a text. He's learning. It reads, W? If she replies in the affirmative, a second text dings onto her iPhone. Rm 2110.

When Danicka arrives, however, she doesn't get a chance to ride the elevators up to the 21st floor. Lukas is waiting at the elevator bank. He looks like he's been here awhile already. He has no coat. He has no shoes. He stands barefoot amongst cool stone and brushed metal, rich textures, luxurious fixtures. His shirt is an undershirt, plain and white. His pants are drawstring slacks. Wet, his hair drips occasionally onto his shoulders. And his face

well

simply lights up when he sees her. She can see him biting the insides of his lips for a second to keep from smiling, and then he simply gives up. Gives into it. A huge smile breaks across his face as he comes forward to meet her.

[Danicka] She can't remember off the top of her head the last time they went to the W together, rather than her place, or his place, or -- now that they have it -- the den.

It was December 1st, hours before dawn, and he'd asked her not to go away, not to retreat into herself the way she sometimes does. The way she always has, when she hasn't known what else to do.

That does not stop Danicka from answering his querying W? with a confirming Y! She doesn't ask why there, why not his room at the Brotherhood. She doesn't text back that her roommate moved out when the old lease concluded and her new one began, which was just a few days ago. Nor does she ask him why on earth they're meeting anywhere but the place she calls Home now.

Danicka just heads to the W, because the last time she saw him at all was briefly in front of Shedd Aquarium over two weeks ago and she'd ditched he and his packmate on dinner, after being the one to suggest it. Which doesn't really matter now, not when he first texts her and certainly not when she replies, when she hands her keys to the W's valet and shoulders her overnight bag -- white, covered in black scrollwork -- and goes inside.

Not a drop of the light snow outside has touched her. Her hair rests dry and silky on the shoulders of her periwinkle-blue down coat, the faux-fur-trimmed hood back since she didn't need it. Her boots, a familiar knee-high pair made of slouched brown leather -- are over her jeans. She doesn't look like she just came in from the cold.

She doesn't look like she's trying not to smile, before she does, at the sight of him. All Danicka does to prepare is reach out and wrap her hand -- warm, because she wasn't outside for more than three seconds just now -- around his, as soon as he's near enough. She doesn't step in to hug him, or to silently ask to be embraced. She just smiles at him.

Beams.

"Lukáš," she says, with warmth. With recognition. Like a caress.

[Lukas] "Hi," he responds. It's the same: warm, with such unspoken intimacy. They don't hug. They don't kiss. His hand folds around hers, and his grip is simple adoration turned tactile. Beneath his shirt, his chest rises and falls. Then he turns away for a second, thumbs the elevator up button.

When he turns back, Lukas simply stands there staring at Danicka. And smiling. He suspects he looks silly; he suspects he looks starstruck. It's all right. The elevator chimes behind him, and then the doors open, and then he backs into it, pulling her with him.

They hit the button for the 21st floor. As soon as the doors close he tugs her into him, lowers his head, catches her mouth and kisses her with a sudden, searing ferocity that belies the silliness of a moment before. He wasn't starstruck after all. He was burning up from the inside out. It took every ounce of his control not to

do exactly what he's doing now.

His hands are inside her coat by the time the elevator swoops to a stop on their floor. His right hand is under her shirt. He's breathing harder than he has in weeks, weeks, and his brow presses heavily against hers for a second, two, until he hears the elevator doors opening. At that he draws back, straightening, exhaling.

The hallway is empty outside, quiet, heaters humming quietly. He takes her hand again and leads her toward their room.

"I got dinner," he says. "Do you like Moroccan?"

[Danicka] It's early enough still that they should not expect to be completely alone in the elevator for twenty-one floors of travel. But they're headed upward, and if anyone were going up right now they would have gotten in at the lobby. So as happenstance would have it:

Danicka laughs quietly at Lukas, the way he won't stop looking at her, the way he smiles while they wait for their elevator. And perhaps she knows what's coming when he does not walk into the car with her but turns and backs into it, pulls her with him, because she doesn't gasp or yelp in surprise when the doors close and suddenly she's against him.

No. She is letting her bag slide down her arm and setting it on the floor blindly, because her eyes are closing and her mouth is opening not to let out a cry of startlement but to slip her tongue into his mouth. Danicka's hand is in his hair before the bag touches the ground; her coat rustles against his shirt when she wraps her arms around his neck.

They make out like teenagers as the elevator ascends, floor by floor, rising far too fast for them to get much of anywhere. Her arms stay around him as he unzips her coat and searches inside for her, finds her torso covered in not a thick sweater but a thin brown t-shirt with a low, loose v neck. There is little underneath when his right hand slips under the soft cotton, just the satiny cup of a lace-trimmed bra.

At no point does she push his hands away. Or laugh. Or whisper that he should stop. She tips her head back when his mouth travels, exposes her neck to his lips, to his savoring tongue.

And then the doors open, he pulls back, and with what seems like ridiculous calm takes her hand to pull her out, picking up her bag from the carpet. Danicka looks somewhat dazed as he leads her out, exhales an accusatory: "You bastard, you're a tease."

Which has nothing to do with whether or not she likes Moroccan.

[Lukas] Lukas's laugh huffs out of him, breathless and incredulous. He stops in the hall and turns and pulls her to him quick and smooth, as though they were dancing, as though they were not in public

(though they are, and he's aware of that)

and then his body is against hers again, flush against hers, and he's bending to her and she can feel this truth before he ever whispers it in her ear:

"Já jsem tak tvrdě, jsem mohl broušeného skla."

And then he does laugh, and turn his face, and bite gently at her ear. It's not far to 2110. He takes his room keycard out of the single pocket sewn onto the right hip of his pants, swipes it. The lock clicks. Inside it's cooler than it is in the hall, the thermostat set a few degrees lower. Drapes are open. Lights are on. The smell of Moroccan spices and lamb is tantalizing on the air. Outside the vast window, the lake is frost-grey, frozen over for miles out.

The door shuts quietly between them, lock clicking. Lukas drops the keycard on the shelves just inside the door,

where in another room just like this he once bent her over and fucked her with his face until she came on his mouth

right before they broke up,

and the memory skates through his eyes, veers through his mind and is gone. He helps her with her coat, trying to breathe evenly.

[Danicka] He presses against her in a way he never would have before, not in public and not in a hotel, not so intentionally -- feel me. Feel what you do to me. -- and Danicka's eyes track up his face to find his gaze, her breath coming faster than normal. She has her hand on his chest. He has his hand on her lower back, his other one around the straps of her overnight bag.

She wonders if he's imagining the lingerie he felt, if he's asking himself what else is in her bag, if he's thinking about the slow, hungry way they made love just after midnight on Christmas. She is. She's aching for him, suddenly and sharply in a way she wasn't even on the ride up in the elevator, and answers him by lifting her face and kissing him

hard, bitingly, strangling a moan before it finds voice in her mouth.

They're eating at each other in an open hallway, her hips pressed to his erection, his teeth on her earlobe, her cheeks flushed with color and arousal. They're going to fuck, thinks someone who passes by via an intersecting hallway further down. Not make love, not have sex. Fuck. Hard, perhaps, and whoever it is can even picture how, writes a porno in their mind as they keep walking.

Lukas and Danicka don't seem to notice. They have to pull apart from one another out of sheer force of will, her breasts stroking against his chest through their shirts one last time before they find it in them to walk again, entering their room and their privacy. Danicka, for her part, doesn't think about what happened in a room just like this one all those months ago. She's shrugging out of her coat, dropping it on the floor next to her bag. She looks down at him between their bodies, at the curve of him pressing against his slacks.

In the next moment she's made some kind of decision, it seems. She's on her knees then, pulling his slacks and his underwear if he has any down off his hips, off his cock, dragging them past his knees so she can take him in her mouth.

Which she does.

[Lukas] It's a chain reaction. He kisses her in the elevator. She accuses him of teasing her. He pulls her to him, lets her feel him, shows her just what she's done to him, and their eyes meet, and her breath is fanning quick and moist across his face. He can see her pupils dilating.

When they kiss, it's hot and sudden as rainfall, as a hurricane. Something could be said there about their tribe. About storms, warm and cold, summer and winter. It's winter now, the dead of it, the heart of the cold, but it's warm here, and she's warm; she's warm and alive and her heart is beating in her chest, flickering like a flame; her tongue twists against his like a flame.

There's a moan strangled in her throat. There's a growl underlying the way he forgets the keycard in his pocket. The way his hands come up to press to her lower back, to grasp at the strap of her bag, and then to take her face between his so he can hold her just there, right there, as they maul each other's faces.

Force of will isn't quite enough. When she draws away he pulls her right back. Another kiss, magnetic, pulsing, passing. He lets go. They make it to the door, though his eyes are on her the whole time, fixed, hungry. He swipes the keycard entirely by touch.

It doesn't end up on the shelf after all. He reaches for it but he misses. It slaps to the floor. The door's shut by then. She's already shrugged out of her coat. He's still watching her, like a wild, starving animal, and he knows she's looking at him; he knows she can see the curve of his hard cock through his slacks, though his boxer briefs.

Which come down in the next few seconds. So rapidly that Lukas gasps -- the sudden friction, and then nothing. "Ohgod," he manages, not two words but one, and then she's on her knees and he's sinking back, thumping back against the door and his t-shirt isn't even off and her mouth

is so hot and wet around him

that the center of his existence caves in, and everything is molten heat. Lukas doesn't even feel it when his head falls back to crack against the door. His pants are soft and rumpled around his shins. The straps and arcs of muscle in his bare legs flex and twitch, and then he plants his feet more firmly, pulls up the hem of his shirt to give her room, to give her space, to give himself the view of her mouth, that mouth of hers on his cock.

[Danicka] Friction, then nothing, then a sinfully hot moisture closing around him. That's what Lukas feels. That's what he knows, and all he knows, for a few breathless seconds. He can feel Danicka's soft palm wrapped around the base of his cock, the slide of her tongue and her mouth around him, the way she does this to him like she knows what's she's doing

which she does

and always has, truthfully. The first time he lowered his body to his knees and sought to pleasure Danicka with his lips and his tongue, Lukas had no idea how to bring her to the ecstasy she ratchets him into so fucking easily. All he knew at the time was that he wanted to, that he wanted to taste her, bury himself in her in some new way. See her, clearly and straight through to the bottom, without being so distracted by his own pleasure that whatever he saw would become incomprehensible as soon as she rolled her hips and took his cock deeper into her cunt.

And Danicka knows how to make him flex involuntarily, how to make him fight with everything in him not to grab her hair and fuck her mouth, how to make him grab for purchase on anything he's leaning on or resting against to try and endure what she does to him. She knows how he'll jerk, suddenly, if she does

that

with the tip of her tongue, fast and fluttering. And she knows that he'll swallow air and choke on it, then gasp for survival when she does

that.

Danicka is still fully clothed, her coat and bag dropped and now ignored, and if he looks down he can see her face, her eyes looking back up at him, her lips turning red, the neckline of her shirt hinting at the possibility of cleavage without quite giving it over. Her hands slide off his cock and up his body then, palms warmly rolling past his hips and over his clenching abdominal muscles, the pads of her middle fingers finding his nipples under that thin cotton shirt and stroking softly.

She closes her eyes.

[Lukas] She knows

(quite frankly.)

just how to fuck him. And that changes all the rules of the all the games. Whatever overtone of subservience or degradation that might've colored this act is lost. She's on her knees, his cock in her mouth. He's the one that's wholly shipwrecked, wholly lost, his fingers gripped at the smooth surface of the hotel door, his chest rising and falling in short, abortive heaves under her hand as he

(quite frankly.)

gasps and pants for breath.

"Oh... fuck." It's a stripped-bare whisper. His eyes are rolling closed. He tips his head back again, and his free hand gropes blindly for hers, takes her hand in his, draws her touch down the twisting clenching planes of his chest, his abdomen, and then up again to the cut of his pectoral muscle.

Momentarily he lets go, just long enough to reach back and lean forward and peel his shirt off completely. Lets it fall, another article on the floor, abandoned. The door shudders slightly in its frame when he leans back. There's a lot of height there; a lot of mass and and heat and energy and rage all coiled up in the muscles and bones and connective tissue that weaves the fabric of his body. She can feel his heartbeat against the heel of her hand, and then he guides her fingers shamelessly back to his chest, back to his nipples, murmuring for her to

"Play with me, baby, that's it."

and biting back a groan behind his teeth when her mouth sucks at him like that, and her hands move over his skin like that.

Lukas is watching her again, brow furrowed with what she's doing to him, and what she's making him feel. Lips parted, teeth glinting faintly with every breath, every groan. Eyes narrowed but open, gleaming, brilliant, hot. There's nothing human in his gaze; nothing wolf either in that glittering directness; nothing but what he is: supernatural, wild, an animal.

Somehow his hands, falling to her hair, falling to cup her head, are still so gentle. So careful. He cradles her face between his hands as she sucks at him, licks him, works him past what he thinks he can bear; even when his eyes close again; even when his head falls back again and his mouth opens and he simply

tries to keep breathing when every drag of her tongue, every glide of her lips, makes his breathing shudder and catch.

"...Já musím být vevnitř tobě."

The first time he says this, it's a whisper. It's indistinct and slurred. It's lost in the rush of his breathing. So he says it again:

"Já musím být vevnitř tobě. Otoč se. Na všech čtyřech. Dovolte mi, abych si vás."

[Danicka] What made this different from the start, for both of them, was how unlike it was from all the other encounters they'd ever had. They did not know what rules to play by because neither of them realized, at the start, that they were not playing a game. Danicka is not toying with him; he is not using her. That quality of distance and disinterest could not survive for a day, for a minute, from the very first time they looked at each other. Their hands touched and the concept of casual acquaintanceship was blown into so many pieces that their only option, for awhile, was to try and keep themselves safe by pretending enmity. That could not survive, either.

Lukas moves her hand on his body for a second, maybe half a second, before her palms are stroking him of their own volition, caressing stomach and sides, molding over his pectorals. She ignores the loss of his shirt except to touch him more freely, cover him in segments at a time, adding her warmth to his insatiable heat.

She sucks him harder and he fights not to groan aloud. She runs one hand down his belly and between his legs, fondles him tenderly while her mouth moves languidly. From the way Danicka goes at him, it seems she could do this all night. Lukas would not be able to tolerate that, though. And he can not, and he does not.

Her eyes stay closed now, all her focus on the slide and stroke of her hands on his inner thighs, up his chest, fingertips teasing his nipples into hard nubs of excited, prickling flesh. Danicka moans softly, almost a whimper -- not quite -- as he pulls her hair off her face to see better, to touch her, to try and love her.

She shudders softly at the grazing of his hands over her face, the warmth of his palms to her scalp. Her eyes open slowly to his words, half-lidded and shining with color and lust... and adoration, this last so strong it seems to make her ache more than desire, more than longing. Her tongue gentles on him, gradually working up towards the head of his cock to kiss it, to suck it softly, before the heat of her pleasing him fades. Danicka's lips are an angry red, her throat working as she swallows, her breath a quiet sigh of air moving into her.

The first time they had sex, they could have made it as rough and as impersonal as possible. Her on her knees, grasping the headboard. Him behind her, slamming into her, biting her shoulder, pulling her hair. Perhaps if that had been how it was --

-- but it wasn't, and it couldn't have been. It took them weeks, months, before they would let themselves dig fingernails into each other, set their teeth in one another's flesh. It took Lukas months before he would vocalize the pleasure he felt when he was inside her. It took Danicka a very, very long time before she could open herself enough to him to be vulnerable, to say or even hint at what she really needed rather than just telling him how she wanted him to fuck her.

Which is different.

It was a long time before Danicka could bear to let herself be rough with Lukas. It was a long time before she could look at him the way she is now, as though her gaze can say what she has always been -- and still is, with everyone else -- afraid of saying:

Be gentle with me.

Go slowly with me.

See me. Know me.

Lukas tells her to turn around and get on all fours, let him take her. And Danicka slowly, slowly, with soft sucks of her mouth and full kisses of her lips, lets go of him, looks up at him, watches him for a moment. Her hands are still on his abdomen and his chest, warm and tender. She is breathing heavily now. For a moment she doesn't move, and he might think she's about to tell him she missed him and wants to see his face, tell him she's hurt that he even wants her like that, tell him any number of things that to his brain, right now, just mean No.

Danicka leans forward and flicks her tongue quickly up his cock, then pushes her hands on his thighs for leverage and jumps to her feet, twisting away and hopping delicately over her coat and bag. A second later she's darting across the room, laughing lightly all the way. Even as she runs behind the armchair near the window she's moving to hop on one foot, dislodging one boot and then all but toppling to her knees in the armchair as she reaches back to get her other boot off.

Which should be about as much time as it takes him to first: figure out what just happened

and then: disentangle himself from his own remaining clothes

as Danicka gets back up off of the char's cushion, going between chair and window -- and keeping chair between herself and her mate -- working at unfastening her jeans. Her socks are pink.

[Lukas] Lukas moans softly at that last, luxurious suck; gasps aloud at that last, almost playful flick of her tongue.

And then she's up, and then she's gone, and he's still where he is, leaning against the door with one hand on the wood for support; then other forgotten, half-open on his thigh. He looks like a wrecked man, like she's pulled all the strength from his muscles, all the bones from his flesh; he's lost and dazed where he stands, soft lounge pants around his ankles and hair still wet from his shower.

Cock still wet from her mouth.

Jumping slightly, too, beating with his pulse, until he takes hold of himself half-absently. He's panting, his sides and chest moving like the bellows they are, pulling air into his lungs and expelling it again. He watches her take off her boots, and then her jeans. When she starts to push them down her hips he tips his head back and closes his eyes, stroking himself mindlessly for a moment.

Then he's looking at her again. "What's the matter?" A year ago, he would've asked her: what sort of game is this? "Why are you all the way over there?"

[Danicka] This makes her laugh. Softly, not quite as playfully as a moment ago. She's wiggling out of her jeans, and he can see her panties peeking out from under the hem of her long t-shirt, how hot pink the lace is. He can tell at a glance what sort they are, hip-hugging and running across the cheeks of her ass in a teasing, flirting cut. He can see the freckle on the back of her thigh he knows will always be there, the hint of white and pink stripes that make up the cotton that the lace is accenting.

And he can see that his mate is undressing, that she's making herself naked, and in his mind's eye he can likely see her spreading her legs for him, all signals to his reptile brain that it's time to mate, it's time to mount her, she's ready for him, she'll accept him.

She reaches up then, stepping out of her jeans, and pushes her hand into her hair, catching her breath a little, looking at him with something between longing and confusion and worry, as though she and this expression on her face are at the center of a triangle, the apex of a pyramid. No single word can describe the way she looks at him. No single word ever can, really.

"I'm ...playing," Danicka says finally. A bit wary. A bit embarrassed. A bit disappointed.

[Lukas] The swift, deep pulls of breath are slowing now; leveling out. His ardor cools; her playfulness fades. He swallows once, quietly, and a furrow appears on his brow. It's another moment before he makes up his mind and says it:

"Stýskalo se mi. Chci, abys mi blízcí. Chci se krýt ty."

At her distance the blue of his eyes is hard to see; they're mostly just pale, just clear, just brilliant. He looks at her, his eyes sliding down her body, pausing at her panties, her ankles.

"To proto jsem požádal, abys šel na všechny čtyřky pro mě. Chcete-li být blízko vás, a na ... chránit ty. Ne aby vás anonymní."

[Danicka] She looks... young. Not just because of the playfulness of a moment ago but because she's standing there in panties and a t-shirt, in socks that slouch around her ankles. Danicka is all long legs and small breasts and hints of bright color to offset the neutrality of her brown top; she looks lovely. And she looks at him, his hand still on his cock though no longer sliding mindlessly, needfully up and down the length of it.

Her head tips to the side, loose long hairs falling across her cheek and brushing her shoulder. And she murmurs: "I know." Gently. Reassuringly, in a way, another way of saying: I didn't think that.

Danicka steps around the armchair completely now and over to the edge of the wide, large bed, climbing onto it and crawling to the center, sitting on her heels there. She dents the bedspread, doesn't quite manage to weigh down the mattress by much. "Come be close to me," she says, still quiet, no longer trying to comfort or reassure by tone alone. Or at all, really. Just: come.

Be close.

Come to me.

...when she has come at least halfway, herself. Whether he does or not, she peels off her t-shirt, revealing a small bra underneath that is in the same white and hot-pink stripes and lace that her panties are made of. She doesn't remove either of those as she drops the shirt to the carpeting off the edge of the bed, keeps her socks on, smiles a little at him.

Maybe it's sad. Or something like sadness.

"You remember... how you used to never make any noise when you were with me, or look me in the eye, like you didn't want me to know how it made you feel." She calls him on it. Outright, straightforwardly, but as gently as possible, says what she never has aloud before. "And how I wouldn't let you on top of me if we were facing, because I knew you wouldn't let me hold you the way I'd want to, if we did."

Danicka leans forward, gives the smallest of shivers. "Stýskalo se mi, Lukáš," she says, with an ache to the words and to his name, above all. "I like it... when you cover me like that. And I like how it feels. But I can't hold you like that, or see you. A já jsem tě neviděl tak dlouho."

[Lukas] The frown fades as Danicka speaks. His brow clears; clarity dawns in his eyes.

And ache, when she says come be close. When she reminds him how he used to hold himself away from her. How he tried so hard to just fuck her that first night; and failing that, held himself back the only way he knew how. Kept his mouth shut. Silenced his voice, his words, his groans. Did not look her in the eye,

not at first.

"That wasn't just you," he says quietly, as though it made a difference now, as though it made it better somehow. "That was ... everyone." A pause; then an admission. "But it was more important with you. Keeping that distance, I mean. Because you were so different.

"Because it was so ... intenzivní. Tak ostrý, tak bezprostřední, tak důležité, hned od samého začátku."

Lukas stands, now. He doesn't bother pulling his pants back up. He steps out of them, flicking off a light or two as he comes across the room. Their dinner is waiting on the small coffee table by the armchair. She's waiting on the bed.

The mattress dips as he climbs onto it, one knee and then the other, sliding across the bedspread, coming over her. His arms brace to either side of her. He doesn't pause at armsreach, or half that, or even a few inches away. Lukas moves right into Danicka, heavily, unhesitatingly, nuzzling against her, rubbing his cheek over hers, kissing the corner of her mouth.

"Lie back for me," he murmurs. Kisses her again; firmer, her mouth now, a long, pulling thing. Inhaling, exhaling. "Držet mnou."

[Danicka] "It makes no difference," Danicka says softly, but rather seriously, "whether it was just with me or with everyone. It wouldn't be any better, or any worse, if it were otherwise." She doesn't realize she's echoing what he may in fact be thinking: that it might not make a difference, that it might make it better. And what she tells him is that... it simply doesn't matter to her whether that was regular behavior or not, or a direct reaction to her. She doesn't wonder. She never did.

In a bizarre way, Danicka is very humble. Or maybe she just doesn't need to be told that she's special to him, that she was always different than the others. She knows. She seems to understand, at least, as he climbs out of his clothes and crosses the room and climbs onto the bed. She breathes in then, her own arousal -- which, in all this time, has still not reached the fever pitch his own was at the moment the elevator doors closed -- and welcomes his weight and his wearmth against her, knowing his hunger and yet not retreating from it. Or resisting it.

She puts her hand gently on his bicep as he nuzzles her, kisses her. Her own mouth is gentler than his, a little wetter, less... aching, really. Less full of desire that keeps threatening to obliterate itself in screaming need. Her hand strokes up his arm, down again, a grazing and lazy touch. Affectionate, too, and this more than anything else. She doesn't lie back immediately though, part her legs and pull him down to wrap him up in her limbs and her kisses. She nuzzles him back, touches his waist.

"I've looked forward to seeing you so much," Danicka whispers, longingly. "I've missed you. And... I miss making love to you and I miss holding you and I miss just lying in bed talking to you. I don't..."

She swallows heavily, as he's kissing her neck, as he's listening to her, touching her, making their bodies as close as can be when she's sitting on her knees and he's braced on either side of her like he is. Her eyes close, and she exhales.

"I don't like it when I see you for the first time in weeks and you say barely a few words to me before you're mauling me in the elevator or the shower. It doesn't mean I didn't miss you. It doesn't mean I don't want you." A pause. Her eyes haven't opened. She's grimacing slightly, though, her brow furrowed. "It means I try to give you what you want because I don't want you to feel toyed with, or rejected, or ...think I'm bored with you."

Danicka pulls her head back, but just enough so that she can see him clearly, opening her eyes and looking at him with wary concern, as though expecting anger. Or hurt, which would be worse. "I'd be happy just to be with you."

[Lukas] Perhaps she's right to feel mauled. He's all over her. His mouth is all over her mouth, her cheek, her neck. His hands are coming up off the bed -- the muscles in his back tightening in counterpoint to his weight -- to smooth over her smooth skin, to push up her ribs and mold over her breasts. Her bra whispers under his palms. Her breasts seem small and dainty in his large hands; the entirety of her body, slender and breakable under his.

She's pale now. It's winter. He remembers her like this the first time, the first few times, before jaro and the kiss of the sun turned her golden.

And he's straddling her thighs where she sits on her heels; he's close to her, as close as they can get in this position, his cock brushing her abdomen as he kisses her, sucks at her skin, nips at her flesh, and

then she says I don't like it.

And he stops. His eyes open. His mouth is at the base of her neck, at the juncture of her collarbones. He's panting quietly, but his hands have gone still. Lukas listens, and a muscle flashes in his jaw, and then all at once he sits back; plants one hand on the mattress and drops down, flops down, flips on his back and closes his eyes, one hand over his face.

"Christ," he mutters.

He is frustrated. It flares up suddenly, born out of thwarted want and sidetracked longing and -- it's beyond his control; he can't tamp it down. She can see it clearly in his face, in the way he breathes, in the tightness of his joints. If he's hurt, that's somewhere beneath the frustration, which is foremost right now. His other hand comes up as well; he rubs his face, then drops them both to the covers.

"I wish you'd told me sooner than this."

[Danicka] Which is what he always does: pulling himself away, covering his face, breathing, getting a hold of himself.

And this is how she always feels, which distracts her from looking any deeper than what is evident and unhidden and written across every single line of him, echoing in every breath.

For a little while, because of how that feels, she does not say anything at all. When she does speak, it's very quiet, and only: "I know.

"I'm sorry."

[Lukas] Lukas is silent for a long time then. He stares at the ceiling. He raises a hand to his face again, not to cover it but to splay over his brow, to knead his temples lightly.

The cords in his forearm shift and flex. His chest rises and falls with each breath, slowing, settling.

When he speaks again, it's soft; almost hesitant. "Sometimes it feels as though when we ... make love, it's always on your terms. Where. How. When. You rarely seem to hesitate to shut me down or walk away if things are not as you want it.

"It's not that I want you to just give me what I want. I never wanted that. I never want you to have to bear me. There are things I've done, or tried to do, that I should have never considered. Yet more often than not those were the times you didn't walk away. Those were the times you simply drew into yourself.

"The times you've shut me down instead ... sometimes it seems almost frivolous, Danička. As though I have to get it just right, just the way you want it, regardless of what I want."

Now he's the one that looks worried, his eyes still on the ceiling, his brow furrowed. A pause; then he looks at her.

"Am I hurting you?"

[Danicka] "Ano."

There's control in that whispered pair of syllables, and restraint. Danicka is kneeling on the bed throughout everything he says, her hands now on her knees, her shoulders and arms close to her body. She doesn't seem to realize it. She certainly doesn't seem to notice that it makes her look smaller, even if it doesn't quite make her look afraid. Her underwear is ridiculously cheerful, almost circuslike, brightly colored and --

frivolous,

really. She doesn't wince or flinch or look away when he says things that strike her, because she is just looking at the bedspread anyway, at the seam where his thigh meets the blankets. He says what he says, and then he looks at her, and she's just staring downward, her features and her eyes visible but rather blank. A little strained.

"Those are horrible things to say," she murmurs, shaking her head a little. "Because there's absolutely no way to ...fix it, if that's what you think. If that's really how you feel." Her eyes flick up, then, to him.

"If I say no, or wait, or not like this -- you get frustrated. If I make love to you a way I don't want to, when I don't want to, when it doesn't feel right to me or when I don't like what you're doing -- you can always tell, and you're upset with me for trying to pretend." Her brows are drawn tightly together, and for once it's easy enough to describe in a single word what the feeling is. It's hurt, just like he asked. Just like she said.

"You want me to tell you earlier. And I'm sorry I didn't. I was ...just trying." To be with him. To be close to him the way he wanted right away, to respond to him as quickly as he was responding to her. Which is nothing more than what she already said, a few moments ago. "But what would you have done -- how would you have felt -- if I had told you no, or wait, or not here, or not like this, when you took hold of me in the elevator?"

The way she says it, her own opinion is clear enough: she doesn't think it would be much different. Maybe not as intense. But no different.

"What do you want, Lukáš? For me to show up when you want, when you have time for me, fuck you as though I walk around on the verge of orgasm all day, and maybe if we don't eat ourselves stupid and fall asleep and not talk again for another month I get to spend a little time with you just... being with you? Do you want me to learn to lie better so you can't tell if I'm caught off guard or just not as into it as you are? Do you want me to simply not come to you unless I'm ready, on sight of you, to fuck you?"

[Lukas] The more they speak to each other, the more they frown until finally -- suddenly -- Lukas's hand comes up. His palm cups her cheek, if she'll let him. His thumb rubs over the center of her forehead, between her eyebrows, as though he could smooth the expression away. As though he could as easily smooth the hurt away.

"I don't know what I want," he says softly, a confession. "If I knew this would be easier."

A pause; his heartbeat still fast in his chest, loud in his ears. He can hear it: thump-thump-thump-thump, a pattern that beats out the life in his veins, the strength in his body, the want in his chest, even now, because she's almost naked, because her underwear is saucy and bright and...

frivolous.

Early on, there were many occasions where he suspected her of being just so. Frivolous. Careless. Playing with him and his packmates, his heart, his want for her that was so strong it was nearly an obsession. He doubted she could be serious. He doubted she could love, or that she could love him. He doubted she was anything but selfish, and dangerous, and

he realizes that in a way, he just accused her of that all over again.

"I want you to lie down," he says then, quiet. "Close to me. Please."

He waits to see if she will or not. Whether she will or she won't, he goes on, "I want you to tell me if I'm hurting you somehow. Physically or emotionally. I want to know so I can stop. I don't want you to try to bear it.

"I miss you when we're apart. When I see you again I want to be as close to you as possible. But if you need time, I can be patient. I just wish you'd told me sooner.

"But if I'm not hurting you, if I'm not making you feel ... degraded, or depersonalized, or unloved, I want you to be a little patient with me. We won't always want the same thing. I've almost always accommodated what you've wanted because I don't want you to ever feel forced or coerced. I think early on, that was necessary. But we've been together a year, Danička. I want you to trust me. I want you to trust that even if what I want is not the same as what you want, I would never want to hurt or degrade you. I want you to trust me and ... to give me a little leeway.

"I don't want you to grit your teeth and have to bear me. But I do want you to give me a little patience and consideration." He looks at her; searches for her eyes; searches her face for some meaning, some reaction. "Do you understand?"

[Danicka] He says things that hurt, and so does she, and the worst thing is: they're both being honest.

Danicka listens, hearing him out as she heard out Theron at a late coffee the other day, as she heard out Katherine, and one of them is a stranger and the other is about as close to an enemy as Danicka has in this city. Neither of them are her friends. Neither are even close to a lover. Or a mate. They are nothing similar to what Lukas is to her.

She lets him touch her, and it does not seem like an allowance, a concession; she moves her face into his palm the way he so often does with her, turning her cheek and rubbing it against his hand, eyes closing for a moment, lashes so much paler than his old, almost a true golden, infringing on the territory claimed by his hand.

They flick open again when he tells her he wants to lie down. Lukas hasn't gotten to the word come, has barely finished down, when her body slides across the scant inches to be against his, her arms coming around his waist. She lays her head down on his chest and crosses her leg over his, unmercifully and unhesitatingly closing all but the most intimate distance between them.

She listens to everything he has to say, her left hand on his solar plexus, and when he's done, she answers. Quietly, as though they're alone in a room but not a house, as though the people in neighboring rooms might be able to hear them whispering together in the dark.

"I was never afraid of feeling -- or being -- degraded. I felt a little taken for granted."

His mate is murmuring, lips brushing his flesh, breath not quite matching but complementing his own. "I wanted to be close to you the moment I saw you, but sometimes you move so fast, and you're all over me, and I'm so scared you'll be hurt -- or angry -- if I tell you I just want to talk to you, or hold you, or look at you for awhile. As though to you that will be... less, somehow."

Her head turns so she can look up at him, because he's looking for her, and there's little to say in her expression other than sincerity. Warmth. A bit of an ache. "I missed you so much. I wasn't trying to toy with you, or make you jump through hoops or anything like that. I just wanted to be close to you, and that was the way you wanted to be close, so..."

Danicka trails off. She doesn't seem like she knows where the end of that sentence was going. She turns her head back down, and holds him more tightly, sighing.

[Lukas] When Danicka lies down, Lukas's arm folds around her shoulders. He draws her against his side, against his ribs and hip, close. Her leg crossing his is covered with his free hand, as though in this way they could be secured together, held just like this, just where they belong.

He's still hard. Not so ferociously aroused as he was a few moments ago at the door, when she was loving him with her mouth and he wanted to just be

inside her,

but still aroused nonetheless. A baseline level of want; a sort of unavoidable, unslaked need that her nearness only exacerbates. He ignores it, though, turning his mouth to her hair, holding her, his mate, against his body.

"It's not less to me," he replies, quiet too. "I'll give you more time in the future. I'll try to hold back. I'm sorry if you've felt mauled or assaulted. You should never hesitate to stop me if you do.

"It wasn't that that I was talking about. I meant other times, when we're already making love. Sometimes it's just ... " a breath out, a laugh, half-embarrassed: the topic, the details, the fact that they speak it aloud, the fact that he minds at all. "It's when we shift positions or something trivial like that. If it's not what you want, sometimes you get so frustrated. I want a little more patience then."

[Danicka] There's no way she can't know what this is doing to him. Her underwear doesn't look like it's meant to do nothing more than entice but it's also not made for pure comfort. Even the things she owns that are just colorful cotton are meant to be seen, meant to be traced with fingertips and looked at, peeled off, played with. Danicka would be the first to say that lingerie, even simple lingerie, is a toy. It's an unspoken game, an acquiescent pact of arousal and allure.

The warm meeting place of her legs is pressed against his hip, her inner thigh lying smooth and warm across his legs, the curve of one breast resting close to his ribs, her heartbeat thumping through it.

"Not assaulted," she says quietly. "I didn't do anything I didn't want to, it was just... rushed. I don't want you to hold back." Danicka closes her eyes, wincing slightly at the difficulty of all this, frustrated by it. "It's not that I'm frustrated or impatient, Lukáš. I'm not even sure what you're referring to."

[Lukas] His turn to wince; a closing of his eyes, a flicker of frustration, embarrassment.

"I know you weren't frustrated when I was going too fast, Danička. I'm not talking about that. I know you don't want me to go so fast and I'm okay with that. That's finished. Now I'm talking about --

"Look. At the door, I asked you to get on the floor. It wasn't how you wanted it, so you fled across the room. Once, a while ago, we were making love and you wanted me over you, close. When I tried to straighten up you were almost angry. Then there have been times when I've shifted once too often and you were frustrated with me. I'm talking about incidents like that."

A pause. His thumb traces an idle half-circle on her thigh. Inhale; exhale.

"It's nothing that would make me stop loving you, Danička. But I can't read your mind. And what you want is not always what I want. When it's just a matter of preference and when we're at odds, I want you to not ... give in to frustration immediately."

[Danicka] His frustration isn't solitary. Danicka shifts against his side, draws her leg a bit so that it covers his left thigh but not his right, her foot cradled somewhere between his shins. She turns a bit but does not withdraw, her arm looser around him but her hand still on his body, exhaling a silenced sigh of her own struggle at how this conversation is going. How it has been going. The fact that they're having it at all.

He goes on and then -- then she sits up, looking at him in frustration and hurt that are quickly turning towards anger. Or at very least, irritation. "I didn't flee from you, Lukáš, I didn't do it because I was frustrated or impatient, and I had a damn right to be on the other occasion you reference because I kept telling you exactly what I wanted and you kept pulling away. That wasn't a case of me not communicating, so don't bring it up months after the fact. It isn't fair to me to pull that. It's also not fair to decide I ran away from you because I didn't want what you wanted, rather than taking what I said as what I meant: I was playing."

[Lukas] So he sits up too, swiftly, instantly angry as well.

"Can we not bog ourselves down in every little detail? I'm not talking about the specifics. I don't give a damn about the specifics. You didn't know what I meant; I gave you examples. But I'm talking about a general trend, Danička.

"When you want it a certain way, I oblige you, and even if it's not exactly as I wanted it, I enjoy it. When I want it a certain way and you don't -- you shut me down.

"Example: you wanted me close that day. You told me that's what you wanted. Fine. I wanted to pull away. I wanted to see you. I wanted you like that, and that's what I was telling you. But you got angry. So I gave in.

"And that's a trend. I've not said a word about it until now because I don't want you to feel obligated or coerced -- but I want you to meet me in the middle, Danička. I don't always want to be the one giving in to your preferences."

He's finished -- a hard end to the sentence, his breathing quickened, angry. A beat; then, "Fuck, this is a ridiculous argument."

[Danicka] She's off the bed -- or moving for it -- when he gets to I oblige you, the first snap of her temper. Not always -- there are times when Danicka simply loses it -- but usually, that's what happens first: the attempt to withdraw, to get out of arm's reach either for her own sake or so she won't lash out stupidly, which is what happens when she completely loses hold of her anger. Her jaw is flexing with it, teeth together behind her lips, as he goes on talking, and yet

there's nowhere for her to go. She can't throw her clothes back on, can't go to the bathroom door and slam it, can't or won't let herself leave, nor tell him to just shut up, will not throw things again, will not strike out at him,

ends up doing the only thing left if she wants to have any chance at keeping him, which is stand there, trying to breathe, containing what his words make her feel because any expression of it feels like the wrong choice.

[Lukas] So she's silent.

So he's silent. And he's sitting on the bed still, more or less in the center, his knees drawn up now and his arms over them, and the frustration in the air is palpable, tangible, is thick enough to carve with a knife.

Lukas's chest rises and falls. He raises a hand, drags it back through his hair. Last traces of moisture still there, cool on his fingers as it evaporates.

Finally: "Are you silent because you don't agree with a thing I've said, or because you've stopped listening, or... what, Danička?"

[Danicka] "I'm silent so I won't bite your head off," Danicka says quietly. Several moments have passed and her words are still taut with anger. The fact that he asked at all, however, seems to have given her some kind of leave, in her own mind at least. She goes over to the armchair and sits down in it. The descent to the cushions is graceful, but when she gets there she sprawls, looking out the window.

For awhile. And Lukas doesn't berate her for her silence, which surprises her, and it makes her angry at herself and sad overall that this surprises her. And he doesn't leave, which she's grateful for, and she wishes she weren't still so grateful to just not be left when they argue, and it makes her angry all over again because of something else she remembers he said.

Which only matters because all these emotions flick through her eyes as she stares out through the glass, the darkness of the room and the brightness of the city making her reflection visible, but only barely -- wraithlike, cold, half-gone. She has her elbow on one arm of the chair, her hand loose, the back of it grazing her cheek. Her breathing is elevated at the start, from sheer anger. If the moon were fuller in the sky than it is now, she wouldn't have stayed. She wouldn't have risked her temper setting his off like flint striking steel. She would have left.

And she hates knowing that doing so would have chipped away even more at what they have.

And she hates knowing that doing so would be the only way to keep what was left, chipped and dented or not.

It takes time for Danicka to calm down, time that in a conversation is forever: fifteen seconds is a long time, longer than most people ever waits for anyone else to talk. Two minutes is ultimately a goddamn eternity, and feels more like ten. It's two, though, and it's two minutes that she spends getting her breathing under control, and letting go as much as possible of the bursts of anger and hurt that keep welling up as though her temper is loathe to let go of its stranglehold on the conversation.

She exhales after awhile, slowly, which may be his first signal that she's had a moment. A minute. Two minutes. She turns her head, her hand curling into a fist so that it can support her temple.

"I feel ambushed," she says quietly, and compared to the last words out of her mouth, these are almost gentle. "I'm not talking about when I got here, or what happened when we first got in. I'm talking about... this conversation. How suddenly we're talking about a 'general trend', how I thought we were just not matching up tonight because it's been so long and now I find out you've been frustrated and unsatisfied with something about me for... god knows how long."

Even when she gets to the end there, when she could sound exasperated, when her hand could be flying out in a gesture of dismissal or aggravation, she sounds calmer than before. If worn out. If resigned to the fact that her first night back with her mate since Christmas has already been a wreck and all they can do now is salvage what they can from it. Which she is: worn out. Resigned. And disappointed.

"I feel like you're pinning all the blame on me, too," she goes on, just as quietly. But it's hard to leave out some of the tension she still feels, impossible to keep her emotions from coloring her words completely: You oblige me -- 'give in' -- regardless of what you want. I pettily demand my preference without care for how you feel. You enjoy making love to me no matter what. I reject you if I don't get things exactly, perfectly as I want, so clearly I must not enjoy making love to you very much."

Danicka drops her hand, looks over at him. "Is that what you're saying?" This is firm. Strong. And then faltering, falling quieter: "Is that how you feel?"

[Lukas] In that silence, Lukas has moved slowly to the edge of the bed. Two minutes is an eternity in a conversation. In a fight. It's too long to sit motionless; it's too long not to

swing his legs off the mattress. Plant his feet on the floor. Lean over. Put his head in his hands.

The arc of his back is clean and perfect. Unscarred. He's unashamed of his nudity; of his erection that's only now starting to relent; of the fact that he's hiding his face because this conversation hurts, and the things he's said hurt to say and hurt to hear, and in the end he isn't even sure what new brand of weakness this is for him to complain about the way they make love.

For him to confess that he feels as though he's given into her wants over and over, for fear that she'll feel... forced. Raped.

When she speaks, he lifts his head, looks at her. He says nothing. It's a long time before she finally looks over at him, and when she does, he's frowning faintly; wincing a little. When she asks him how he feels,

he looks away at the carpet.

And then he gets up. The blinds are open and there are enough lights on inside that perhaps he should worry about modesty -- but for fuck's sake, they're twenty-one stories up. He comes over to her armchair. To her. After a moment he kneels by her chair. There's hesitation in the way he reaches out: to take the hand she's dropped from her face. To look at it in his, and then wrap it in his fingers.

"Miluji tě. To je, jak se cítím."

He sinks back on his heels, then. Even in winter his skin is darker than hers; nearly tan. It sets off the color of his eyes, which are incandescently pale.

"I think... I have ambushed you unfairly. I think I should have said this sooner. I've explained why I haven't, but it was no excuse. I think if I hadn't waited so long, it wouldn't have come out sounding so much like blame.

"I don't think you're selfish, Danička. I think I've never given you any signal or any chance to act differently, and so I have no right to blame you for acting as you did. I do want things to change, but ...

"I'm not blaming you. I'm sorry if I did."

[Danicka] They rarely worry about modesty, either of them. He cupped her breast at a Polish restaurant on the outskirts of town; she fucked him on the hood of her car that night, their naked bodies tangling against the paint job under the lights around a construction site. Privacy, though: privacy is different, and they guard theirs with a devotion outclassed only by the effort they put into working through these arguments, because they cannot bear to lose each other the way they did once, when a single misunderstanding blossomed into a disintegrating explosion of fear, resentment, and anger.

And hurt.

She's tense when he comes over, not out of fear but just... expecting it to get worse. Every time they've spoken to each other tonight it seems to have made it all worse. She's thinking he'll say something that will set her off, she's thinking she said something wrong and he's misunderstood again. She's thinking this may not be a night they can rescue, that maybe they should just give up and eat their cold Moroccan and go to sleep just to avoid fighting again. It isn't what she wants.

And it isn't what happens. Lukas gets on his knees, which makes her tense, too, because of all this talk of giving in to her, essentially subjugating himself to her wishes. She grimaces faintly, telling herself he's just getting on eye level so she doesn't have to look up at him, but there's wariness there now that simply did not exist before.

Because before, she thought he was doing what he wanted to because he wanted to.

Danicka's hand is cooler than his by a degree or two at most, barely even that. He can see, dressed -- undressed -- as she is, the fact that though she lacks muscle tone in her slender arms and in her thighs, his female sees the inside of a gym regularly. She eats well, he knows that, usually small portions and usually rather healthy. Frankly put, the heaviest and fattiest food she eats is usually in his presence. Her body curves softly, but underneath the smooth skin there's evidence of strength that's only grown in the time he's known her, a resilience that no one looking at her would assume she possesses.

He's fucked her three, four times in an evening before and she hasn't flagged or begged off. She's climbed through ventilation shafts, fired her gun and some bizarre device at Bad Bad People, survived a shotgun wound and car wreck, gone throughout the twelfth century without a break to rest or recover from one moment to the next only to end by shoving a blade into a warformed Garou.

Lukas knows how tough she is. Even if she doesn't.

"A part of me really wants to tell you all the times I've gone along with what you've wanted, even if it wasn't my preference, just because I wanted to be with you and make you happy," she says quietly, like a confession. "And a part of me wants to tell you how even asking you to stop or do something different or showing you that I'm frustrated is ...not easy for me, and that I thought knowing the truth of how I feel was something you wanted more than anything else."

Her brow furrows, her voice barely audible, her expression a wince. "I'm... so hurt that you implied that... that I won't enjoy making love to you if it isn't my way, utterly, and all the time time. Or that I would feel degraded or used with you." She frowns. Sadly. "I never have. I... sometimes hold my tongue or try to do what I think you want because I've been afraid of losing you. But not because I was afraid you'd hurt me, or force me."

[Lukas] A year ago Lukas was, essentially, a selfish creature. He was devoted to his pack, fiercely so. He loved them, and the unity they both represented and embodied. He loved his family, his parents and his sister. But ultimately, he could not imagine a situation where hurt and damage to another person could possibly hurt him more than the same to himself.

And now: he flinches when she speaks of wanting to make him happy. When she speaks of what she thought he wanted. When she says,

I'm so hurt.

And, for no reason he can even understand, when she says she was not afraid that he would hurt her, or force her.

"I'm sorry I implied that," Lukas says. "I don't believe that. And I do want to know the truth of how you feel. Always. I want to know you. I'm not asking you to hide it if what we're doing isn't ... what you wanted, exactly. I'm asking you to let me know. But I'm also asking you to ... give it a chance. Give me a chance?"

[Danicka] The ache that comes over Danicka's expression then is an echo of what, perhaps, is making him flinch. It hurts to hear him say it over and over: give me a chance. It hurts because of how hard it was for him -- and she knows it was hard, even if strictly speaking five minutes ago the fact that it was difficult for Lukas wasn't the first thing on her mind -- to voice any of this to begin with. It hurts to see him flinching

because hurt and damage to him hurts her more than the same to herself.

Her hand moves, the one he isn't holding, and she twists in the chair to bring herself closer to him. Danicka touches his face, her brow tightly furrowed with concern and with apology. She leans over and kisses him, his brow first and then his cheek. The softness of her lips offsets the pressure of each kiss, the firmness of them.

"I never knew you felt I wasn't," she explains, though he knows this already, as well as said it himself a moment ago. Apologized for the fact that she didn't know.

There's a brief pause after that. She's said she's sorry already, or she might say it again. And again. And again, until earlier she felt that repetition of it would do nothing more than break her down to try and salve some breakage between them, heal some minute rift. Danicka does not say it again. What she does say is this -- and the irony is that when she doesn't mean it and doesn't care, it's so easy for her to say the right words, to tell people what the want to hear; when she means it, she flounders, unsure if the similarity in delivery and content makes it a lie or if somehow he'll be able to read her genuine intent:

"I'll try to tell you sooner, if I feel rushed or pushed." Her thumb sweeps his cheek. "And I'll do what I can to ...be more flexible with you, without being afraid you'll stop caring how I feel."

She shifts in the chair, sitting up and removing her hand from him as she does so, then standing up and offering him both her hands. "Lukášek," she murmured, watching him, "when it's been awhile, I want to be able to see you. I like... watching you. I like being able to kiss you when I come without having to twist my neck around. I like being able to hold you."

If he's given her his hands, she brings them closer to her, places them on her hips so that his fingertips cross the line of her panties, bisect the lace. Her voice falls to a lower whisper. "It doesn't mean I don't like bending over for you. Or that I only want to fuck you in bed, under the covers, lights off, once a month, now that we're an old married couple." Her lips curve at one corner, wry, and her hands go to his still-damp hair. "I've just never had anything like this before, and ...I never used to care about looking at whoever I was fucking, but I love ...watching your eyes when you first push into me, or seeing the way your mouth opens when you're about to groan. I love seeing the way you look at me when you haven't had me in a long time."

[Lukas] There are subtle signs that both of them are Shadow Lords, though right now -- here, ensconced in their anonymous hotel room, in no one's company but one another's -- one might be hard pressed to identify any of the stereotypes of the tribe.

She is not white with fear, bearing his presence. He is not using her, abusing her, before he returns to his plots and his machinations and his powergrab and his glory.

She does, however, do more than tell him what she will do in the future. She does more than give him empty promises. She fulfills the promise almost as soon as it is made: by telling him, gently and frankly, what she feels. What she wants.

And he listens. Eyes clear, attention focused. Hearing her.

"Chápu," he says softly. And of course he gives her his hands. Stands when she does, balance flawless, body strong. His eyes drop when she guides his hands to her hips, his lashes shading the clear blue of his eyes. Then his gaze is back to hers, watching, listening, even as he turns his head into her hand, into the stroke of her fingers through his hair.

He has to draw a slow breath, then. Her fingers combing through his hair sends pinpricks of sensation over his scalp, down his neck. He reminds himself the way he used to once, all the time:

Slowly. Gently.

And he says again, "Chápu."

[Danicka] "Darling," she whispers, a word she's said perhaps once, if that, outside of his native language, "I don't want you to hold back."

[Lukas] And that's all it takes.

His hands firm on her hips. She's so slender and slight that sometimes when he holds her, and she folds her arms between them and draws her shoulders in, he encircles her entirely. Even now, even with her life as safe as he can make it without stifling her, providing her with weapons and talismans, with a den that's theirs and theirs alone, with freedom from her brother

(and utter isolation from her father. there's that, too.)

she's still a little thinner than she should be. Sometimes when she sleeps the comforters slip down and he can see the line of her back, that shallow dip of spine, the wings of her shoulderblades a little clearer than they should be. Sometimes he covers her with his hand, as though he could protect her flesh with his own.

Nevermind. The point is: she's slender, and slight, and it takes almost no effort to lift her as he does. If she folds her legs around him, he lets her go carefully, reaches around to undo her bra and guide it off. It falls to the floor like the rest of their clothing, long ago. Either way, his face turns up to hers. He kisses her like that, standing in the lamplight between the armchair and the bed, tenderly; then deepening.

Three steps backward and the backs of his thighs hit the bed. He turns and sets her down. Straightening, his fingers find the edges of her panties and draw them down, down the smooth length of her leg, past her toes, off.

Then she's naked, and he's looking down at her, and the light is at his back, cresting over his shoulders and around his sides, and his face is shadowed, but she can see the look on it anyway, the way his lips part on a slow inhale, the way he looks at her, somewhere between worshipful hunger and stark reverence, as the last scrap of her clothing drops from his hand. Lukas comes down over her, this woman, his mate, moving her up the bed with his hands, his knees indenting the mattress as he crawls over her and

takes her in his arms and settles over her. Lays over her, heavy and warm, his lean hips in the cradle of her thighs, his chest against hers, held up from crushing her by his elbows on the counterpane. He pauses a while; not because earlier he was going too fast, and not because he's afraid she wants him to hold back even when she told him not to, but because

they were fighting. They were on edge, and it was all falling apart, and it was going from bad to worse to worse, and he was afraid.

There it is, then. He says it again in his mind, tastes the words and rolls them over, accepts them: he was afraid.

Lukas turns his face into the curve of Danicka's neck. He kisses her, softly, shifts over her, presses more firmly between her thighs. Sighs, like he's found something long since lost, and precious. Kisses her again.

"Stýskalo se mi," he says. He means more than the weeks that have gone by since he last saw her.

[Danicka] She's put on weight. Minutely, and yet it's been such a long time since he's seen her, held her like this that to Lukas can tell almost as immediately as his attention is no longer caught by conversation. It's a slight thickening to her arms and legs, a smoothing over her back, a faintly increased swell to her breasts and to her ass. Danicka is still slender, and perhaps will never entirely fill out her frame simply because her body never had the prepartion in infancy to do so, but when his fingertips run down the length of her spine, it is not quite as bumpy a ride as it used to be,

It's in part due to the well-hidden strength he knows is there, partly just Danicka's ability to take care of herself even when she's stressed or unhappy increasing, as well as periods of stress or unhappiness decreasing in frequency, if not perhaps intensity. And that has nothing to do with how often she's attacked by creatures of the Wyrm or how often she realizes that if she does not get out of bed and run to the garage rightfuckingnow she's going to miss her first class. It has something to do with the den, with having her apartment to herself now, with the decision a few weeks ago to create the Coalition. It has to do with a sense of self-worth and inner strength that is growing exponentially. It has, also, to do with the mere knowledge and presence of Lukas in her life, which is like a secondary heartbeat in the back of her mind. The knowledge of him is so deeply buried into her that his existence -- and the meaning of his existence to her -- is impossible to let go of, forget, lose.

Which is perhaps why even at the worst moments of argument, Danicka was maybe not as frightened as Lukas was that such a thing would happen. Not unafraid, not unconcerned, but simply... unable to entirely wrap her mind around the concept of losing him.

She has no idea the conversation he had with his packmate Theron recently that touched on the meeting she'd had with the Theurge, or what Lukas had told him in terms of advice about women, about mates, about kinfolk. Katherine had been there too, hearing every word and -- it's possible -- taking it to heart, herself. Danicka did not tell Theron this, did not give him details of her relationship with Lukas and certainly did not try to give him much advice about how to deal with kinswomen, but he was right: she and Lukas are, somehow, different. They are, despite everything, able to carve love and loyalty and understanding out of natures and backgrounds that do not make it easy.

Ever.

They are not perfect, and never will be, nor have they ever been. Their first night together was filled with so many hits and misses, their first conversations so fraught with interpersonal peril, that it is no surprise that to this day they still find themselves unable to match up completely, always, without fail or misstep. If that were what their relationship depended on, they would be doomed. Everyone's would be. It is worth it to them, for innumerable reasons.

One is this: the way they flow together when he lifts her. The way her legs wrap around him as though that is their home. The way she tips her weight forward to hold to him, balance on him while he reaches behind her and undoes a pair of hook and eye clasps that send her brastraps sliding down her shoulders. The soft cups drop, uncovering her breasts, and her shoulders hunch close to her body as Lukas grasps the center, her arms folding as he draws it off completely, drops it to the floor.

Then her arms are wrapping around him, too, her hair falling around their faces to conceal their kiss like a veil keeping it sacred from the sin of sight. Danicka's eyes, at least, are closed when their mouths meet, her mouth warm, and her kiss slow

and times like this are how they know that not everything is lost, that not everything is argument and strife, fear and anger. Ultimately much of what they have, have always had, is just like this. Beyond what he wants, or what she wants, and simply what happens to them when they're together again. They could talk more about it. Maybe not seeing one another for weeks on end makes them forget that they trust each other. Maybe the fact that the last time they saw each other it was brief, and they didn't touch, and Danicka left angry and Lukas didn't know: maybe in some sick, perverse way they needed to fight, if only to break down whatever walls might have been built up between them by time and variety of experience over the weeks.

That may not be the case. It hardly matters. What's happening now is that they're moving together now without difficulty, without strain, without disconnect. He turns; she slides down his body to sit on the edge of the bed and puts her hands on his waist, leaning forward to kiss his stomach, to trail her lips over the skin beside his navel. Lukas takes hold of her panties and she leans back on the bed, on her elbows, lifting her hips to aid him. Her breath catches as she watches him remove that last article of clothing between them, her knees together at first as he drops them.

They do part, though, spreading for him as he leans over her, putting his hands under her back to help her move backward. She lies back, hair loose over the pillows, looking up at him and running her hands up his chest to his shoulders, over them, caressing his shoulderblades when he moves to lie atop her. Danicka's legs are akimbo on either side of his hips, welcoming. Warm. She holds him where he is, arms loose but hands oddly firm against his flesh, moving in slow circles.

For a brief moment the rising lust that unfurled and reached for them both goes quiet, stops snarling for more. Lukas buries his face against her and she makes a small, soft noise of recognition. Then a gasp, suddenly, when he pushes himself against her, the meeting of his cock and her cunt unavoidable like this, the pressure of it setting her to aching. Her hands tighten on him.

"Oh, love," she murmurs, that same ache filling her name for him. There's an edge to it: lust. Longing. They kiss and she meets his mouth with more intensity than their last, moans very softly at the end. "Make love to me," she whispers in his ear when they part, arching her back to press herself more against him. "Miluj mě, Lukáš."

[Lukas] There are two of them making love here. He's no more immune to the pleasure, the pressure, the grind of their bodies together than she is. The sudden gasp that bursts from her throat has its echo in a low groan from his, muffled against her mouth.

"Okay," he murmurs - panting already. Again. Hard again, thick and rigid against the wet slickness between her legs. "Okay, baby."

But he doesn't. Not immediately, anyway. It's been so long. And she's had her opportunity to revel in his body: the way she adored him at the door, the way she licked and sucked at him until he was half-mad; the way she fucked him with her mouth. He wants this. He wants

just this: to be over her, covering her, to be grinding slow and heavy against her, his cock sliding over her pussy again and again until they were both wet, were both messy, were both

moaning for it, groaning and cursing for it, while his hands cover her body and mold over her ribs, the lean coils of muscle in her stomach, the softness of her breasts. "Come here," he breathes, as though she could do anything to bring herself closer -- and then he wraps his hands under her back and lifts her, bends her to his mouth.

The way he sucks at her breasts then is sheer hunger. Is focused, unadulterated intensity. The whole of his universe has collapsed down to a singularity: down to the singular feel of her nipple in his mouth; her cunt against his cock.

He could be inside her in a second. All he has to do is shift his hips just so; adjust the angle of her; push. The thought of that drives him over some edge he wasn't aware of until it's past -- and then he's biting at her nipples with his lips, one and then the other, tugging gently, sucking hard enough

that when he lifts his head suddenly her flesh must feel raw, suddenly devoid of sensation. Kiss me, he wants to say, but the words don't make it out. That's all right. The look in his eyes speaks for him. He cups her behind the neck and brings her forward, brings her into him, kisses her mouth

with such unexpected, melting tenderness

while he takes hold of her hips with his other hand and holds her still, holds her down, holds her right there for his cock as he slides slowly, unfalteringly into her.

The sound he makes is caught in her mouth. It's at once hungry and overcome, a long low noise in his throat. When their mouths part he's wholly within, deep inside her, filling her full, holding himself still.

It's as though this were the only word he has left - "Okay?"

[Danicka] Once, he and she argued because of all the people that came into this relationship with her. He didn't know at the time that the Theurge who had beaten her so much that self-protection was a habit was her own brother, five years older and the leader of her household. He didn't know at the time that Night Warder, who he could not have imagined from all the stories being gentle or warm, had insisted on raising her own children. He didn't know about her connection to Martin, didn't know exactly why she disliked Kate so greatly, did not understand why when she was with him she did not seem to be with him, alone.

Except, in his own words, when they were like this. There's never been the spectre of another person then, neither in her mind nor his. They know each other like this in a way that shocked them at first, and sink into each other with a totality of surrender that terrified them so badly they almost gave it up.

There's very little to say after Lukas first pants out the affirmatives he whispers and moves himself against her. Danicka squirms underneath him with that slow, gentle writhe that doesn't hint at a desire for escape but for a simple inability to keep still as he rubs over her. She doesn't whimper plaintively at him, just arches and swivels her hips to get his cock harder against her, press it more firmly to her, as close as they can possibly be without Lukas giving himself over completely.

"Gently," she whimpers, when his mouth starts to pull and at her nipples, unaware of the thought that just skimmed the surface of his thoughts, the realization that all he has to do is shift, and thrust, and he'll be engulfed in her.

Danicka's hand moves into his hair, not to control the motion of his head as he sucks at her but to hold him there, vaguely recalling a time when she'd be hoping right now that he would remember to put on a condom so she wouldn't have to make him stop. He moves to her other breast and she groans softly, remembering now when she started hoping that he would just give it to her, be with her, fill her, claim her. She looks dazed when he lifts his head, her cheeks flushed with color and a sheen of sweat glittering on her skin in the dim light of the city and the moon coming through the window.

Dazed or not, she doesn't seem confused by the way he lifts her head. She wraps her arms around him and leans into him, moaning into his mouth even before he chooses that moment to enter her. It's been a long time, and she shudders as he fills her, relieved that he's finally inside of her, relieved that he went slowly, trembling slightly at the sensation and the reality of how he feels, and

what that means. To her. To them.

She's gasping softly, panting, when he takes his mouth from hers and asks his question, which isn't. In answer, almost all Danicka can do is groan, and roll her hips.

Not all: "Fuck me," she whimpers pleadingly, their lower halves grinding, her hands pressed to his chest. Danicka's hips squirm again, slow and firm and aching. "Fuck me, baby."

[Lukas] She goes from love me to fuck me, but it makes little enough difference to Lukas. They're just words, and words are the source of all misunderstanding, and there's no misunderstanding here.

Not now. Not like this. When he's inside her, even from the beginning, there was the incredible -- disquieting -- sense that he could see her clearly, right through to the bottom. There was the sense that when they're like this, they're naked in a way that mere nudity does not account for. That every last barrier, every shred of deceit and armor has been cast aside, broken down, melted away.

Here I am, says the movement of his body into hers. Says the clasp of her legs around his waist, and the push of his hands into her hair, and the meeting of their mouths, over and over. Here I am. Do with me as you will. Take everything.

And give it back again.

Which is, perhaps, why a disagreement over the very way they make love disconcerts him so. Frightens him so. And, in a way, embarrasses him so. Now that it's past; now that it's done and he's here and she's here and her hands are on his body, are pressed to the bunching muscles of his chest, the straining cords of strength in his back and his arms; now that he's inside her and she's all around him and taking him in

just like that,

it seems almost ludicrous to him. Almost absurd, that he could argue about something like this, which is, and has always been, the single unutterably perfect thing in their relationship.

He's moving into her harder now, but steadily, without haste. He's moving into her in great flexions that begin at the base of his spine, in the pit of his stomach, and roll upward. His hands move over her face, pushing her hair back, stroking over her shoulders and down over her chest, her back, as though he might absorb the feel of her more wholly, feel her more totally. When his hand covers her breast he can feel her heartbeat thrumming against the base of his hand. He kisses her mouth, her neck, the soft skin between her breasts, over the bone. He plants kiss after kiss there, as though to kiss her very pulse, her heart, before the feel of her is too much and he simply opens his mouth to her, pants against her skin as he

fucks her. Fucks her with his elbows planted wide, his head bent over her. Fucks her with his attention focused and mindless, surging into her, sliding out, strong, deep strokes that roll one into the next into the next.

[Danicka] One thing she hasn't said aloud, but is -- especially tonight -- glad of is that for them, there's never seemed to be enough of a difference between 'fucking' and 'making love' to be worth mentioning. Danicka remembers sitting in his car outside the Shedd the first time she called it lovemaking, remembers the way he turned his head suddenly and sharply to look at her but did not mock the phrasing, did not

most importantly

deny the truth of it. They are, however, just words. They have never fucked, or screwed, or simply used one another without concern for the pleasure they were giving as much as taking. Even when he's had her tied to his bed, body stretched out and presented for his enjoyment, there was no sense that he was stripping her of anything, no feeling of degradation or brutality. Even when he's had her against a hotel room door, moving into her so roughly that he had, in fact, hurt her, there was no thought that it was because he didn't care.

Conversely: she tells him to make love to her, love her, then fuck her, calling him by his name because she knows him by the smell of his sweat and the lines and curves of his body under her hands, and there is no thought in Lukas's mind now that Danicka wants him to just fuck her. It's possible that even if -- for some insane reason -- she asked him to pin her down and literally treat her like a whore, like someone meaningless and forgettable, he would not be able to.

Because she isn't. And they aren't.

They run their hands over each other in memorization, into hair and over shoulders, holding one another by the arms, kissing each other's mouths and necks. Lukas palms her breast and kisses her heartbeat; Danicka croses her ankles finally over his lower back, opens her legs more to him, holding him right where he is.

Over her. Covering her. Protecting her, in a way, with himself rather than from himself. There's a difference. They both know that he has to do both, that if she were merely human she would not be as appealing a target for the things he was created to fight: so he has to protect her, because he can, and because she cannot entirely protect herself. The more bittersweet side of it is the way he has to keep himself from being with her when his rage is high and his control low, the way she cannot bear to be near him sometimes even after he has spent himself guarding her because her own will is so exhausted by the ordeal.

Because I can make her happy. Because I want to keep her safe. Because I would never, ever hurt her willingly, deliberately, and maliciously.

Because I would protect her as well as my imperfections and fallibilities allow. From her enemies, and mine, and from myself.

Because I am protecting her as we speak...

His mate whimpers under him, wanting him, quietly and plaintively crying out for him with that gentler, lighter voice that is such a fine counterpoint to his own deep one. Moving between his chest and the sheets with that smaller, softer body that is such a perfect complement to the hardness and shape of his own. They are moving far beyond words, and far beyond thought, outside of the realms of her autonomy and his self-discipline and her independence and his well-cultivated restraint.

They don't matter anymore. She is his female, hot and strong and wrapped all around him while he drives into her over and over again. He is her male, keeping her safe and warm and fed and feeding her sexual appetite with his thrusts as though to make up for the time he has to spend away from her, from their bed, their den

which tonight happens to be a hotel room, which doesn't matter either.

She clenches around him, moaning now, her hands sliding down his back to his flank to urge him faster, to tell him with her gasps to fuck her harder, to give it to her, because all she can say to him now is

"Baby..."

in that voice that, the first time he heard it around that word, set his reaction to her on fire. She sounds needful, and she smells like sweat, and arousal, and the promise and potential of a healthy mate, and like home, and like Danicka,

like his.

[Lukas] This room is full of their sighs. This bed is full of their mingled warmth; the heat of their bodies moving energetically, fiercely together.

It's freezing cold outside, though. The curtains are still open. The night sky is black, pierced with a million stars, a handful of which can be seen even in the city lights. The lake beyond the shore is frost-white, rime-grey, iced over beneath the moon.

If they lived a hundred years ago, or a thousand -- if they lived in the sort of time that Danicka has, briefly, visited, the walls would not keep the cold out. Central heating would not exist. They would have a fire to cook by, to remain warm by, and when it burned down in the night all they would have is one another.

Which, ironically, is more than they have now. When he wakes in the night, it's more often than not without her. She does not live with him because she needs her independence; because she cannot withstand his rage like that; because if she did, he would slowly and inexorably and involuntarily reduce her to the sort of fearful silence and unspeaking submission that marks so very many of the kin of Thunder.

These are things he knows by intuitive and by deduction. These are things she knows by hard experience. These are the reasons they do not sleep in the same bed night after night. These are the reasons their shared den, far from the city, far from other garou, far from prying eyes, is silent and cold more often than not.

And for all that, when she says

Baby...

like that, the want of impossible things is fierce and bright in his chest. He remembers the first time she said it, bent over her bed in her apartment, which was one of the first times he saw the inside of her bedroom; it was also one of the first times he went to his knees for her and pleasured her with his mouth and made her grind against his face.

And moan like that. And whimper that word, that endearment, like that.

Lukas can't have that, though. He can't have Danicka every night, every day, not merely to fuck in bed but to see over the dinner table, to talk to, to sprawl with on the couch or on the floor in blankets; to be with, to love. What he has instead are these encounters, these searing points of lust and passion strewn amongst a collection of days.

Which might explain why he goes at her with such unswerving hunger. Which might explain why he kissed her in the elevator; and why he loves her like this, now, without holding back.

When her hands slide down his back to pull him into her, Lukas pushes up on his hands. He looks down their bodies; he's always loved to watch. To watch the movement of her body, the rolling of her hips into his, the straining of the far slenderer musculature of her limbs and her torso. To watch the way she takes him in, again and again; the way his cock moves into her; the way her back arches when he angles the thrust like that, and the way her mouth opens to moan when he grinds into her like that.

His chest sheened with sweat, a rivulet of it down the center of his body, in the dip between the symmetrical sheafs of muscle. The veins at the crest of his biceps stand out. There's very little gentle about this now. He gives it to her, gives himself to her, fucks her hard and unflaggingly, head bent, shoulders tensed, hands twisted into the bedspread

until his breathing is hard and not quite steady; swift harsh pulls of inhales and sharp exhales that verge on groans; until his heart is hammering in his chest and his cock into hammering into her and a bead of sweat is rolling down his forehead to hang off the tip of his nose and

he snaps his head to the side. Flicks free a drop of sweat from the tip of his nose. Looks at her, then. Finds her eyes with his. Solid and uncompromising, the connection of their eyes, the way they lock gazes, the way he looks at her and lets her see just how fucking good she feels. Lets her see just how much he wants her, and just how long he's waited for this, and just how what she does to him when he's inside her and she's open to him, giving it up to him, taking him into her and fucking him right back the way she does.

"Jdu přijít."

It's the first thing he's said for ... longer than he can remember right now. He can barely remember the last heartbeat. Every moment sears the one before it, flashes white-hot into his mind, burns the rest into dust. The look on his face is beyond pleasure; passion, in every sense of the word. Overcome; the verge of a wince. He closes his eyes; his teeth flash in a quick grimace; he fucks her harder.

Open again.

"Fuck -- baby, pusu mi. Pojď sem a pusu mě."

[Danicka] Some time ago -- she can't remember how long -- Danicka began to break from the heavy, slow grind of her cunt onto his cock. She knows she started to hold onto his arms when he pushed up on his hands, and some time after that he felt the first involuntary buck of her hips. She loves it when he does this, when he holds himself up over her and watches her face and the movement of her breasts and the slide of his cock into her.

And she loves it when he bends over her and holds her, burying his face against her neck or shoulder, stifling grunts and groans of pleasure into her skin as his hips start to hammer between her thighs.

And she loves it when he gasps like that, sharp and almost shocked by his own arousal, telling her that he's going to come, telling her what being with her has done to him.

She loves it when he gets behind her or rolls her onto her stomach and fucks with her deliberate, devilish winding of his lower half, pushing into her and moving against her ass until she's quite literally screaming into the pillows of whatever bed they occupy at the time. She loves it when he lays back and watches her on top of him like he's receiving a gift, his hand on her hip to help keep her steady, and keep her close, when she starts riding him faster and harder than before. She loves the murmurs of raw lust that leave his mouth when they're making love, the heady encouragements, the sudden moans that make his head fall forward or back like he can't fucking cope anymore. She loves the counterintuitive and almost unbelievable helplessness he seems reduced to when she puts her mouth on him, loves knowing he's losing his mind because of her, loves being able to watch from outside of that pleasure as Lukas fights not to lose hold of every scrap of sanity and self-control he has in him

and he has a lot of that in him.

It's always been an interesting aspect of their relationship, how Lukas is -- for all that he's a shapeshifter, a literal beast, a monster too savage to hide under the bed -- is the more restrained, disciplined, and civilized of the two. Danicka, for all her masks of social graces, for all her ability to pull off the ideals of etiquette and human grace, is... a wild, feral little thing, and she all but claws the same out of Lukas when she's with him, bears down on his cock and bites into his shoulder and rakes her fingernails over his flank until he stops biting back the growls that rise up in him when he pushes himself deeper into her,

harder,

just like that.

They're both sweating against even the coolness of the air in this room, turning it warm, turning it hot despite the bitterness of winter outside. There are times when they kiss and it's summer, it's golden again, it's sweltering in their bed from the humidity of their mouths' meeting. Danicka bucks again and again now, her hands all over his damn body, caressing every inch of him she can touch as though she's searching blindly for some softness, or seeking some spot stronger than the last, or maybe

wanting to feel him fucking her in every last muscle of his body.

She's shaking with lust while sweat is literally rolling off of him, her throat letting out moan after moan, each one truncated by how quickly it's followed by the next. Her voice is raising in pitch the more he goes at her, her eyes falling closed here and there simply because of how overcome she is, back arching just as as uncontrollably as the unstoppable thrust of her hips, the clench of her pussy around him.

It takes effort for Danicka to open her eyes at this point, to look up at him like this. She has one arm thrown back along the pillows, grasping at the edge of the mattress even as she holds onto him with her other hand. With a hard groan at his words, she reaches up, taking her hand off his shoulder and moving it into his hair, grabbing him there and pulling his head down as she lifts her own slightly from the pillows, burning a kiss into his mouth. As soon as their lips are sealing and their tongues sliding together, Danicka takes her hand off his scalp and puts it on his hip, feeling every single thrust that takes him into her.

"To je ono," she gasps, as their kiss tears apart with their panting, her words disintegrating into a whimper. "Dej mi to." Even saying the words seems to make her shudder, make her arch her back and tip her head, the sudden tightening of her cunt around him the only reciprocated warning he gets. It seems she comes almost because of the thought of his own impending orgasm as much as the mere sensation of fucking him, and she doesn't wait to tell him to do it faster, give her more, because she's holding onto him and all but screaming a new echo of those earlier cries of need and longing, screaming what she withheld from him so long:

"Lukáš!"

[Lukas] Every inch of him is in motion. Every stretch of skin her hands run over is taut with strain, tight with muscle, churning, roiling. He pants into her kiss, moves against her hands pressed to his chest, then to his sides, then to his back -- pants when their kiss parts, moves into her cunt.

That's it, she says, and he exhales a rush of a groan. Give it to me, she says, and he comes down over her with almost unimpeded swiftness, all but collapses onto his elbows. His torso is all heat and motion, and his hands are pulling at her hip, pulling her up onto him even as she pulls him into her; their forearms are crisscrossed and their hands are grasping, needful; the muscles of his lower back and flank are clenching with every reckless thrust.

"Jo," he's panting; a sort of mindless, thoughtless encouragement, his eyes fierce and hot, glazed with pleasure. "Jo. To je ono. To je to, co chci. Pojď v můj kohout, lásko. Pojď--"

Their mouths, meeting again. Whatever he wanted to say, it's lost, buried in the tangled language of their tongues, their bodies, their hands grasping hungrily at one another's flesh. Her free hand is slung over the mattress, gripping the pillow or, when that proves too mobile, the edge of the bed. His is running up her arm, burying in her hair. Her orgasm mounts so suddenly in counterpoint to his. He's dazzled; he's pulled in, lost.

And she's screaming his name and he's muffling it with his mouth, stifling a mounting series of groans against her lips, her tongue. He's hammering at her, pounding between her legs, pounding into her clenching cunt over and over and over and

when he comes, his mouth tears from hers. He turns his head to the side and fastens his teeth on the underside of her arm; bites the quivering slender muscle of her tricep and holds on, grips with his teeth like an animal, moans and snarls against her skin while he pistons against her,

mindlessly,

his mind a bombed out wasteland seared by pleasure, empty, devoid of thought. It's never so clear as this, as now, when he's riding the last of his orgasm out; when he's panting and shuddering against her as he fucks his cum into her -- it's never so clear as this that her mate, her love, her Lukášek is not human and will never be. All that is human, all his careful pretense of civility and humanity, is gone. Blasted away by the sheer force and intensity of what's between them. Scattered like fine grey ash on the wind, revealing the bare, hard bones beneath, the scaffold of his existence, the ferocity and virility and savagery at his core that gives him his drive, his ambition, his protectiveness, his passion.

When Lukas can bear to let go again, he unclenches his teeth with deliberate slowness. Licks the skin he'd seized with such mindless ferocity. Kisses it tenderly, as though he could erase the imprint of his teeth, then turns his face, eyes closed, to hers.

Rests his brow to hers. Settles between her thighs, almost motionless now except for the heavy, raw panting of his breath; the occasional, slow flex of his hips between her thighs. The knots and columns of muscles in his back loosen. The sheets and slabs relax. He lays against her, molten, melted.

"Ach můj Bože." It's faint, scarcely more than a whisper. "Ach, můj Bože, Danička."

[Danicka] As soon as Lukas folds over her like that, falls over and into her in a rush, Danicka's arm is around his shoulders again, holding him there. The force of his thrusts is taking her up on the mattress, arching her over the pillows, tilting her hips as they bounce on the bed underneath him. She's not even properly moaning anymore so much as just... crying out, strained and begging open vowels that suggest

Ach můj Bože

without ever reaching the consonants, the harsh slur of their language, the actual words. Her hand slips on his shoulderblade over sweat, over movement, and she grabs at him more insistently, another shriek edging her exclamations in answer to the gasping, urging words coming out of his mouth that may as well be

yes... yes... oh my fucking god, yes

which is what starts to come out of hers.

Danicka moans and winds her hips in a hard circle as her orgasm takes her, writhing up against him like she's going to take him, take everything, pull him in and never let him go, not even when he gives her all he has. She loses those sounds in his mouth as he kisses her, overtakes her completely. Then all he has is her body wrapped around him, her pussy spasm and clutching at his cock as he starts to twitch inside of her, as his groans reach a feverish resonance.

Her eyes roll back when that kiss parts, then close. She tips her head back over the pillow beneath her neck, sliding her legs higher up on his sides, delirious now, abandoned to it. There's a strangled cry that isn't quite shock or pain or pleasure or anything other than pure, wild reaction when he bites her there on her arm, a sensitive and soft spot on her body. Her muscles tense against his teeth and she rides up against him, fucks him back with an almost aggressive intensity now.

Danicka's groans are softer than Lukas's. Shorter. Turning, gradually, into gasps as her orgasm starts to let her down again, as Lukas fills her cunt with heat, sears away her sanity with his cock and his teeth and his voice and his sweat making him slippery and familiar on top of her. She's still shuddering with aftershocks of pleasure when he unlocks his jaw and lets go of her, licks her. Her fair skin is an angry red where he bit her, the impressions deep, the likelihood of a bruise certain.

Her head is turned on the pillow, eyes closed, hair sticking to her scalp and her brow and her cheek in thin, saturated tendrils. She's gasping against her bicep, feeling the brush of his mouth and cheek even as he's kissing her arm. Danicka blindly responds to the presence of his head coming to her own. She doesn't move, panting for air now, but after a few seconds of resting together her hand manages to flutter upwards to touch his head.

She strokes his sweat-and-shower-dampened hair, twirls it around her fingertips lazily and haphazardly because her hands are shaking. She's forgotten quite how to make them work the way she's used to, so she just strokes his hair aimlessly and arhythmically. Danicka's brow furrows and her lips part -- she licks them -- when he flexes again, a soft sigh hinting at a moan when he does it again.

"God," she breathes, "you're so good."

[Lukas] It's that sigh of a moan that makes him shiver. The involuntary pulsing of her cunt around him that makes shudders slip down his spine. Makes his breathing stagger. Makes his lips part and his breath hitch; makes him kiss her mouth with more hunger than he can bear to feel right now.

"Mmm," he agrees: a rumble in his chest that never quite makes it past his lips. Lukas nuzzles her, rubs his face against hers, kisses her lips, her jawline.

And, exhaling, opens his eyes. Slowly. The room is sideways: a desert landscape of rumpled sheets; an arctic expanse of carpet. Mountain ranges, the armchairs. Outer space, the world outside.

Wind lashes freezing rain against the window. It's unseasonably warm this year. It should be snow. It should be a fucking blizzard outside, while they make their own sweltering summer in here.

His hand lets go her thigh. It passes heavily up her side, slips between their bodies to cup her breast. "Oh," he sighs, as though he's found something previously unknown and unguessed-at; something incredible. He lifts his head, then; shifts his weight to one elbow. His spine curves as he curls to her, bends to her without shifting his hips, as though that contact, that link is too precious to give up.

Lazily, and patiently now, he licks her nipple. Teases it erect again, and sucks. Loves her breast the way he loves her, endlessly, warmly, luxuriously, as though they had all the time in the world

when really, they both know nothing could be farther from the truth.

Her nipple slips from his mouth. He comes over her again, wrapping his arms around her, sealing her against his body. She's utterly enveloped, utterly covered. He holds her like that, quiet now, eyes closed.

[Danicka] So: they laze together, as the pulses and internal flexing of their bodies slows. The room grows cool to their skins again, wicking away their sweat now that they're not producing steadily increasing heat. If this were centuries ago, and they were burying themselves under heaps of furs after lovemaking, all that warmth would be trapped beneath those coverings, and they would survive the winter. Come autumn there would be a cub, one they would have to wrap around together in its first months of life night after night, praying it would survive its first winter, too.

It is a wonder sometimes that the human race ever got this far, with how brutal the earth can be. It is a wonder that any kinfolk of any tribe could ever be beaten down to weakness and submission, when the demands of their connections to the garou require them to be stronger than any human.

Danicka drowses underneath Lukas through his renewed exploration of her. She closes her eyes as though she's going to sleep when he rubs their faces together and kisses her, nuzzles him back with less energy but no less affection. She smiles lazily as he finds her breast and cups it, makes a low mmm sound when he moves. She lets him, lays back and resituates her head on the pillow and watches as he slowly, lingeringly licks her. Her hand stays in his hair, stroking it back with more attention now, less trembling.

Danicka's thigh slides down his side a bit, her ankles uncrossing and her legs unfolding and her toes tucking alongside either of his calves to stay warm. She smiles more tenderly as he lets go her breast, and both of her arms wrap around him when he comes back to lie over her. She is covered... but her legs frame his lower half. Her arms hold him to her chest. He softens inside her; Danicka kisses his temple.

A part of her wants to assure him now that she does like it, that she enjoys making love to him regardless of position, no matter how hard or how desperately they fuck. She wants to tell him that, unequivocably, she loves him and loves being with him, that his body and his lust please her, that there is nothing about their passion that she finds lacking, or even improvable.

Danicka also does not want to reference the earlier argument, nor think of it, certainly not when he's warm and whole inside of her, not when he's holding her like this and allowing her to hold him. She remains quiet, hoping he knows, and silently adoring with her fingertips the smooth dip on his back that indicates his spine.

So: "I love you," she murmurs instead, smiling gently at the sound of the words as they leave her. "I really... " a sigh, "just love you so much."

So: she nuzzles him, holds him more tightly. And if he lifts his head, she smiles at him. If he doesn't, she waits a little while longer, simply holds him a little while longer, until they have to start shifting around, until they pull apart skin stuck by sweat, until she arches to stretch her back and makes a lower, longer

"Mmm," rumble in her throat.

Danicka grins lazily, sated. "You remember when I first came to Chicago, and I couldn't go out for coffee without being accosted by one of your packmates? Or you?" She laughs softly.

[Lukas] Some part of Lukas must know what it is they're not saying now. That she likes the love they make, regardless of how it's made. That he loves loving her; always did. Always does. Regardless of if it's interrupted, or if they're not quite in tune, or if they have to stop because he forgot the goddamn condom again, or because he's going too fast for her, or...

Most of Lukas, however, knows only that right now, right here, in this infinite series of passing instants: he's happy. Lazy, and happy, and he adores her so utterly that when she murmurs her love for him, his heart thumps hard in his chest and his ribs threaten to cave in.

They move against one another organically, like animals, nuzzling shamelessly and thoughtlessly together. He doesn't lift his head, but he smiles anyway, and she can feel it against her skin. She can feel the way his mouth explores the slope of her shoulder, and his hand the softness of her skin, the delicate crest of her shoulderblade.

He covers her utterly. And she envelopes him utterly.

It's right, like that.

When they start coming apart, finally, he rolls onto his side. Her legs slip down his sides, tangle around his. He pulls a pillow out from under the sheets and stuffs it under his head, his arm folded back on itself beneath it.

Free hand drapes over her side. Sweat between them, cooling. He touches her body in slow smooth sweeps, brushing heat and moisture from her body, touching her. His eyes follow this, lazily: the gentle dip of her flesh under his touch. The smooth swell of her breast. The dip at the waist, the gentle expanse of her belly

where no cub grows, not now; not ever.

His eyes flicker to her when she speaks. And she grins, and the edge of his mouth turns up. "Ano," he replies softly. "And then you called me to Mr. C's. And then Mrena was there anyway."

[Danicka] That makes her laugh, lightly. Danicka's rolled with him, curled against his chest and keeping one long leg around him as they move onto their sides. Most of the separation is between their chests, their faces, so they can look at one another. Danicka has one hand under her pillow, one on his waist, but keeps their lower halves as entangled and pressed together as she can. She shivers slightly, ignores it, as cool air touches her back.

She squirms, gently, at the moisture, stickiness, warmth, sweat between them. She doesn't move away, but moves closer, and looks amused more than aghast to discover this. "Really? God," she chuckles, "that's kind of horrible."

If Mrena were still alive she'd ask if the Theurge saw them leave together, if she knew that her pack's Beta fucked the daylights out of his kinswoman that night, the same woman he'd tried for the sake of the pack to ignore, even despise.

For the sake of Sam, because Sam had decided to fuck her, first. Because Sam decided he loved her and that she'd crushed him. Because Sam made a hundred decisions that threatened to tear them apart, and this was intolerable to Lukas.

But no more intolerable than never... having this. Touching her. Keeping her as his, when from the start he never thought such a thing was possible.

Mrena's dead though. Danicka doesn't ask anything about her, lets the conversation about the teenaged girl pass on to other names, to the very point she brought it up for. "Theron asked me to coffee the other day," she tells him. "And then Katherine asked me out to lunch." There's a beat, her voice so soft it almost purrs, her amusement dim but still present. "At least I'm getting phone calls and invitations now, instead of surprise visits."

[Lukas] Lukas bursts into surprised laughter -- a brief, quiet flare of it. "We really are growing up," he says, though perhaps this makes little sense to Danicka. "We've learned manners."

She doesn't know that they changed totems. That the change was made after it was decided that the shining, visionary idealism of the Talons no longer fit them. That they had come down from the clouds, that they were grounded now, like lightning to the earth.

There's a lot Danicka doesn't know about Lukas. As well as she knows him, knows him, knows him, they barely speak of their lives outside one another. Outside of -- ironically -- the things no one else knows about them. As though that alone takes up so much of their scant time that they have no time for anything else.

It's something he wants to change. That realization is on him as abruptly and wholly as ... well. Lightning striking the earth. His hand opens over her side, covers her skin against the settling coolness of the room.

Serious then, and perhaps a touch worried -- "What did they want?"

[Danicka] The motion of his hand spreading like that is indescribably but instantly and certainly protective. Danicka senses it, and moves into it, holds him in the fold of her leg as though to reassure him. She's here, after all, and the only mark on her is the bite on the underside of her upper left arm. That will heal in a day, if that. Not as fast as it would heal for Lukas. But fast. Devilishly, suspiciously fast. She's okay, the way she holds him seems to say. She's safe. If she were angry or upset about talking about this --

-- well. It's Danicka. They might not be talking about it. She might not have brought it up. It's hard not to distrust her like this, after how long they've spent where she never told him anything about her life, anything bad that might have happened. It was even some time before she told him that when her brother threw her out, he set down rules for her father that precluded the phone calls she and he used to engage in every week. Danicka is not sure how afraid of Vladislav her father is. She was never sure how afraid of her mother he might have been.

Lukas is not alone, when he feels lost because there is so much he doesn't know about someone he loves. Danicka would understand that feeling. But he's also not alone in realizing, as time goes on, that the desire to know more about what goes on in their day to day lives is growing. The first flicker of it, or the strongest flicker of it, was a series of videos he made for her because of all the time they spend apart, videos she has watched over and over again since Christmas Eve.

There is this, though: she fears knowing more, growing closer. The wish that they could be together more, be a part of one another's lives more, is so overpowering even now that she aches when she thinks of how much they give up in order to be together at all. Once upon a time, he didn't believe he could keep her and she didn't believe she could want him and ultimately it boiled down to not believing they could trust each other, not with something as precious and irreplaceable as their own hearts. If she knows more about him, if she becomes even more inextricably bound to him, won't the accompanying ache become an agony of wishing for something impossible?

She curls closer to him, answers: "Theron wanted advice on girls, essentially. Katherine wanted to just... talk. Without you there."

[Lukas] So much of their communication happens thoughtlessly, subtly. It's in the protection of his hand; and in the way she wraps him closer in the hook of her leg. They move closer, as though to assure one another:

We're here. We're okay.

At the start, they were afraid to open to one another even a little. They were afraid to let the other know too much, even though on his part, Lukas hunted almost incessantly for more. More knowledge. More information. An indication, any indication, of her intentions.

It's different now. It's different, at least, for him. He wants her to know. He made her a series of videos, one a night, to make up for lost time. He's still making them. Sometime after the end of the month Danicka will receive another USB stick full of clips; and at the end of February, another. It'll go on until they can see enough of one another not to need it -- or until one of them dies. One outcome is far more likely than the other.

He listens, though. The corner of his mouth turns up when she mentions Theron wanted advice on girls. "He's infatuated with Lonna Larson," he explains, in case she didn't already know. And then, more seriously, "He wanted to know if there was any chance for Garou and kin to be happy together."

Katherine: he just nods. A moment or so of thought. Then, "Did it help?"

[Danicka] "I know," she says, half-wry and half-amused, gently caressing his torso, reveling slightly in the always surprising softness of his skin covering all that hard muscle. A flicker of arousal goes through her, and she nuzzles his chest, his neck, kissing one clavicle before drawing back again, meeting his eyes again. "He talks a great deal. And makes a great deal of assumptions. I think I made him nervous."

She rolls slightly, moves onto her back. Danicka lies there with him, separated from him now and thinking of the mess they are making and will make of this hotel room. It doesn't matter. She looks at the ceiling, her shoulder to his chest, her hip to his stomach, and then looks at him. "I mostly told him to just talk to you about it. She's not a Shadow Lord. It's different from how it was with us, if only because of that. And I really don't know him or Lonna well enough to be giving them advice on anything." A beat. "I think in his mind I'm practiced at being a girlfriend or knowledgeable about being a mate, and neither of those things is true."

Breathing in deeply, she reaches across her belly to find his hand, to draw it over and around her if he has not already done this, snuggling -- for that is all it can be called -- closer. It's partly to maintain warmth and contact, and partly offset any viciousness he might otherwise read in what she says next: "It did. It was nice to speak my mind to her without getting lectured afterward, too."

[Lukas] Lukas's skin is surprisingly soft. He has none of the coarseness that would normally result from a quarter-century of living; that would result from washing with harsh soaps and cheap shampoos; that would come from exposing his skin to sun and wind. His body repairs itself almost as fast as any damage could be done. It's often hard to tell the age of a Garou. They grow up fast; they grow old slowly, and most die well before they're truly old.

His hair is soft, too, silky and thick, but each individual strand thin. Even the coarser hairs on his body -- on his chest and forearms, his legs, trailing down from his navel -- bends easily beneath her touch. Beneath her hand and her face, his body is unarguably alive, dynamic, swelling with breath, shifting, stirring. Even the arch of bone she kisses moves when he breathes, sucking in a slow, controlled breath.

His eyes open again as she draws back. They'd closed. She rolls on her back and his hand that had opened across her waist shifts now, smooths up and down her torso, cups her breast. Cups the curve of her ribs just beneath her breast.

He lies on his side beside her. His greater height translates into greater length; gives him room to curve around and over her. As she'd nuzzled his chest, he nuzzles her face now, his mouth grazing the delicate arches of bone at temple and cheek.

There's a pause as she says nice to speak my mind without getting lectured; then he resumes. Kisses her cheek. Draws a breath. Exhales it.

"Theron is young and idealistic," he says quietly, "and I think he wants very much to like and respect you. I suspect like and respect go hand in hand with wisdom for him. So I suspect he wanted advice from you as much because he thinks you're knowledgeable on the subject as it is because he wants you to be knowledgeable.

"As for Katherine: I'm glad. And I think I should leave it at that, without attempting to guide or influence in any way, because ... well. That never helped in the past."

A pause. His hand moves slightly, the thumb sweeping her skin.

"Tell me more. Tell me things about your life, love."

[Danicka] Her body should be covered in scars. Her skeleton should bear the remainders of dozens of breakages. She should favor her left leg, her right shoulder should come dislocated with startling ease, she should be brain damaged. Danicka should be as outwardly broken as Lukas once thought her to be inwardly damaged. She's been near to death as many times as some Garou, without a mark to show for it, without hint at what was done to her other than habits and compulsions borne out of long, hard experience with the wolves of Grandfather Thunder.

She's soft, instead. There are wrinkles at the corners of her mouth from smiling, frowning, talking, laughing. There are hints at crow's feet that will appear far sooner than they would even on a mortal. Quickly healing and easily healed or no, Danicka has lived a hard life. She is twenty-five, and she looks five years older. Maybe more. Most of that age lives in her face; her body is smooth, youthful, graceful. Her ankles are slender, her wrists slim, her fingers long and delicate. Her legs are shapely and her breasts are small and firm enough that it's more rare that he sees her in a bra than out of one, and even then it's usually just for the sake of the allure created by her lingerie.

Which is on the floor, now, brightly striped and lace-edged and forgotten. She wore it because she knew she was coming to see him, and because she wanted him to see it. She wanted him to take it off of her. She wanted him to see her out of her jeans and her t-shirt and, even before she was naked, see her as beautiful. Want her. Danicka knows it isn't necessary. She does it anyway.

A soft smile flickers over her lips when he nuzzles her, kissing her cheek. She's grateful, briefly, for his silence even though she notes the moment of pause. Her head turns towards him and she kisses his lips soft,

Thank you

before he speaks.

What he says amuses her, and she smirks gently, nodding in agreement as far as Theron is concerned. He wants Lukas and Danicka to have a certain relationship, so he saw it. Just as he wanted to see Anezka and their dalliance as something permanent. Just as he wants to see Lonna as a potential mate, now, too.

As for Katherine.

Danicka reaches up and touches his cheek, her thumb mimicing the movement of his on her body. "Thank you," she murmurs, with a sort of aching tendernessy that borders on apology, because what he says is true. What she said was, too: she told Katherine her behavior was insane, was unconscionable, resisted her and disagreed with her and said things to her without bowing, scraping, or even saying please.

And she was glad, when they finished lunched and parted ways, that there was no looming loved one to tell her that she had behaved riskily, to tell her to be more careful, to apologize on her behalf. Danicka feels a measure of guilt for thinking it, but it's actually rather paltry compared to her relief at his decision not to get involved.

She moves closer. "What do you want to know about?" she asks, sounding more curious than dismissive.

[Lukas] "Anything."

They speak so softly now, ensconced in their quietude, as though volume itself was a means of protection. As if he could --

and he can't. It's not possible, because he is not human; because he was created for one purpose only, is bound from birth until death to one god, bound more strongly than any clergyman or monk ever was; bound not only by vow and devotion, but by absolute necessity.

He has to fight the war. He has to, because there's no one else. And because if he doesn't, then everything he loves, everything he cares for, will turn to ash. It's the same thing all over again. They love by not loving. They stay together by being apart.

-- as if he could protect this moment, this togetherness, by their silence. And their nearness. And the soft words that pass between them, unheard by any other.

"Whatever you want to tell me. Or whatever you want to ask." A pause. He bends to her, kisses her breastbone, kisses her heartbeat. Props his head up on his hand, then, his fingers curled into a fist, knuckles against his temple. A faint flicker of a smile, "Tell me what on earth you meant when you said you gave a trapdoor boon to a little boy in the 12th century."

[Danicka] "You remember that, huh?" she murmurs with a lazy smile, amused and tender and -- reaching up, her hand still on his cheek, touching his face as he props himself over her. It slides down and away after awhile, and she lets the backs of her knuckles brush his chest, trail through the dusting of dark hairs there. She likes to curl up against him, breathing in the scent of him that gets trapped in those hairs, feeling them move as she breathes. It is not something she's ever really enjoyed before.

Danicka doesn't curl right now, though. She lies where she is, bending one leg and keeping the other stretched out, then reaches to one side and grabs the topmost edge of the bedspread, yanking and tugging it down and pulling it over her, wrapping herself up in it, covering his arm and hand with the comforter as well. She grows cold more easily than he does, and the heat is turned low, kicking on only when the room gets to sixty-five or below. Danicka endures the cold rather well, considering her thinness especially, but this --

-- this is an expression of weakness, almost, of vulnerability. She knew a long time ago that to reveal that she was cold would instill some sharply protective instinct in him, knew it even that first night. Danicka did so much, early on, to keep from seeming to Lukas as vulnerable as she really was. Even when she started to genuinely care for him, she held back from showing him that she might need him. Especially then, because she did not want him to end up feeling manipulated by her intuitive understanding of his instincts.

Even Laura and Vladislav, in their ways -- however warped by rage and the war, by abuse and by power given to too young a boy -- could not help but be ferociously protective of their kin. They still are. Twisted as that instinct is, it's still strong. It's still nigh unto undeniable.

"I was walking through Grant Park one night," she says quietly, "and the next thing I knew, I was waking up in the rain from a vision of the future, and one of the past. I was on a hill..."

The story of what happened unfolds for him then as his mate curls up in the comforter provided by the W. She describes for Lukas the vision of Cristobal's birth, and the vision of his descendant leading the agents of the Wyrm in the destruction of the earth, the razing of Gaia. The details she focuses on are mostly about the boy himself, the terror in his eyes when he burst out of the earth after swallowing the talen Lukas made. She glosses through most of that first battle, tells him she stayed near the back and kept another talen on hand for herself.

She says this without shame: she would have hid. She would have run, and saved herself if she had to.

Danicka doesn't talk much about Imogen or Kemp, mostly unknown to her. She doesn't tell him that some of Lee's actions through the whole mess made her boggle, and she leaves out the fact that for the most part she and Katherine ignored each other even as they were literally fighting alongside each other. She tells him about the peasantry a few years later being convinced that Kate was a princess, and even laughs about it. She's more serious when she says she told Cristobal about finding a pack, finding Garou he could trust and be trusted by and not letting anything happen to them.

She tells him about that last, fateful meeting on the hillside while he was on his Rite of Passage. Names pass by. Exact details of who did what, when, pass through her mind without being voiced. But she remembers that Cristobal's uncertainty was a livid, lashing thing even then. She tells him what Lee said then, what Lonna said, what she finally told him.

And then Danicka says she isn't entirely sure what she was thinking when she swallowed the nightshade and snuck behind the corrupted Silver Fang to stab him in the back with what amounted to a pinprick for the crinos. Her hands are shaking when she so much as starts to talk about it, and she balls them into fists against her chest under the blanket, swallowing.

"...I hugged him, and said goodbye, and then we blacked out again. I don't know if the others did, but I saw a vision then of the same end as before, only this time the Garou with the birthmark -- or scar -- like Cristobal's took down the Spirals' leader. I woke up and went home, after that. I wanted to see you, but I was exhausted."

The smallest of frowns, sad.

[Lukas] "It's hard to forget something like that," he replies, wry. His smile grows as hers does, as slow as hers, as lazy. Her hand touches his face. His eyes close; he turns into her touch. Kisses her palm. Then her hand is falling away, and he's covering it with his, and the back of her hand is to his heartbeat.

Until she draws the covers over herself, anyway -- inside-out, but that doesn't matter. He reaches out to help her, tucking her in, sinking down on his shoulder again, sliding his arm under her neck to gather her closer. And warmer. And nearer, and safer.

She tells him a story, then; one so incredible that he might scoff at it if he did not know there's an Athro of the tribe somewhere in the Pyrenees who bears the mark Danicka speaks of.

And -- if it weren't Danicka telling him this. Telling him the story plainly, without exaggeration or drama, simply, from beginning to end.

So he listens, and sometimes his arm tightens around her. Sometimes his breathing grows shallower. Sometimes he laughs quietly. And toward the end, when her hands start to shake, he covers them with his. Draws them from her chest to his, presses them against his breastbone as though to warm them.

"There's a Spanish Athro," he says, "that wears the mark you saw on the boy. I've never met her, but the Galliards say her forefathers bore it too." A faint huff, "I should read the Silver Record someday and see if there's a mention of a blonde Manhattanite in the 12th century."

[Danicka] Again, what he says makes her laugh. There could have been another argument, when she told him about her meeting with Katherine -- and when she said what she said, when she said with as little rancor as possible what she feels when in reality she knew very well it could upset him no matter how gentle her tone -- but there was not. They might have argued when she told him the details of what happened in the twelfth century, about some of the rather insane things she did then

such as firing on tainted Kinfolk,

slapping a boy across the face,

or attacking a corrupted Garou with nothing more than a hunting knife.

But they haven't. They've laughed about how he couldn't forget her mentioning putting young Cristobal in the ground with a trapdoor boon in the past, or what sort of damage had to be done for her to willingly give up a bloody bandage to Dr. Slaughter. And now she's laughing at the idea of a blonde Manhattanite showing up in the Silver Record, while right now she is not in the twelfth century but wrapped warm within an expensive comforter on an expensive bed in an expensive room in an expensive hotel,

cradled by her mate, who has listened to a very long story like something out of fantasy. Or an episode of Dr. Who. Then again, he himself is a creature out of fantasy, often imitated poorly in cinema.

Her hands lay gently against his chest, warmed by the core of heat in his body, feeling the thumping of one of the most vital organs in his body beneath her palms. She laughs, and then she smiles, and then Danicka says quietly: "That makes me happy. That his descendants are still alive, and uncorrupted." There's not sentimentality in that, not until she adds: "He was a very brave boy."

And that sounds fond. As fond as she sounds when she talks about her memories of Lukas as a young, wild kid running rampant through her house and her backyard, simultaneously thrilling and terrifying her with just how noisy and how happy and how normal he seemed, as though any moment something Bad would happen and all that would be broken. Taken away from him.

Danicka leans forward and kisses his sternum, smiling even as her lips are stil pressed there, tickled by his chest chairs. "It is more likely there would be mention of a blonde Philodox descended from Navarre tearing the spine out of a Spiral during Cristobal's Rite of Passage," she says, with traces of wry amusement.

But her head pulls back then and she smiles up at him, turning so they both lie on their sides, facing one another. She puts her arm around his waist, breathes in deep. "I have missed you," she whispers, "so much."

[Lukas] "I'm glad you met him." Pause. "And helped him when he needed it. Though ... god." A quiet laugh, "That's an amazing story."

Lukas shifts slightly on the bed as she turns to face him. They shift, they rearrange, they come together again, arms over one another, entwined. He lifts his head and reaches over her and turns off some of the lights in the room, buttons clicking on the bedside console. He leaves the one near the armchair on, casting dim light over them where they lay.

He doesn't answer that he's missed her too. She knows that. What he says instead --

"Edward's back. Katherine's brother, who was our Alpha when we were in Boston." A pause. "Katherine expanded her pool after Sinclair and I nagged her for weeks. It's humongous now.

"There's a new cub in the Sept. I don't think this Sept has ever had cubs before. The Caern is too young, and there's no kin village. No one's had cubs old enough to First yet, and those who have had cubs at all have sent them elsewhere to be raised and Fostered.

"There's a new Fang too. He's an unbelievable prick and the drama never ends when it comes to him."

-- what he says instead is, quite simply, a slice of what she's missed. The concerns and occurrences of his daily life away from her, away from their bubble of existence where it's them, and just them.

"And I'm thinking of learning a new Rite," he continues. "It's one that'll let me awaken spirits. I was thinking of binding spirits to the den to watch over it, but now I think maybe I should just wake the ones that are already there. I can't talk to them the way a Theurge can, but if we take good care of their physical forms, I can't imagine that they won't be inclined to help us if necessary."

His hand is warm on her face, stroking back her hair.

"Only if you want me to, though," he adds, quieter. "Only if you don't mind."

[Danicka] Rightfully, Lukas takes Danicka's repeated admission of how badly she missed him while they were apart as something of an invitation. He draws her nearer, darkens the room further, until they see each other only by the dimmest glows and the most reassuring contact. Their legs nudge together, then tangle, and every time Danicka breathes in she can smell their sweat, their lovemaking, that incomprehensibly specific scent that is Lukas himself.

Head resting on the pillow, one arm underneath it, she listens. Edward's back, and she has little reaction to this: she knew when they all arrived in Chicago that the young man she'd known of but never really met in New York City was their Alpha. She'd watched him with Katherine and suspects to this day his affection for her is more than a little warped. An eyebrow quirks at the mention of the pool being expanded; she doesn't ask who Sinclair is. A packmate, most likely.

A new cub. That makes her eyebrows twitch upward together this time, then draw together as she hears him out. No kin village: she knew that much. No cubs old enough to change, no Nanna or Den Father assigned to watch over those who will change from childhood onward. It's odd to her, when she grew up around a sept large enough that each tribe had ways of dealing with such things, large and strong enough that almost no cubs had to be sent away for whatever reason.

She smirks at the mention of Fons, though the name doesn't come up. "A Fang, a drama-inducing prick? Perish the thought, love," she murmurs, drenched with sarcasm.

Her hand trails along his side, rubs at his lower back. Danicka touches him but idly as he talks, rather lazily, but a few times her fingers drift down the lines of his torso, graze his hip, brush towards the middle of his abdomen. Right now it's thoughtless. Right now it seems like it takes more conscious effort to stop herself from reaching between his legs than it does to go there directly. Once, when he's lowering his voice and watching her eyes in preparation for this other idea of his, she actually blinks as her hand moves down his thigh and gently repositions it on his waist.

So she can listen.

The idea makes her so immediately nervous that he can feel her tense slightly against him, which tells Lukas clearly enough that Danicka at least understands very well what he's talking about. She doesn't look lost or confused at the idea of spirit awakening, or at the idea of using spirits in an area to guard something special. What's in her eyes isn't fear or rejection of the concept; if he looks at her closely it seems she's thinking about it, mulling it over.

That tension, though, that unmistakable undercurrent of unease: if she isn't trying to hide it, it's possible it runs so deep she isn't aware she's showing it to begin with. But then, he knows what her brother did to her books because she made him angry once. It hadn't been meant to rightfully discipline her or teach her anything. They were acts meant to hurt and terrify

and remind her which of them had the power, as though she would ever forget it.

"What kind of spirits?" Danicka finally asks him, sliding her arm more fully around him and shifting closer on the bed.

[Lukas] In truth, the first time the idea of binding spirits to their den or awakening them had occurred to Lukas, it had not immediately occurred to him to consult with Danicka. This was not because her input mattered little to him -- that could never be true -- but simply because in Lukas's experience, spirits are by and large allies. Some are to be respected, and others useful, but ultimately his experience with the incorporeal creatures of Gaia is limited, and mostly benign.

He never had a brother who used them to terrify him. He never even had the exposure to the more eldritch, unpredictable, outright malicious creatures that a Theurge would have encountered in his fosterhood.

What Lukas has instead, though, is a good memory and a quick mind. He has a memory of the way Danicka had sobbed once -- in New York City, and in grief -- over what her brother had done to her books with the aid of spirits. He has the intelligence to extrapolate other situations, other usages of spirits, other ways Vladik might have twisted his particular might in order to hurt. And terrify.

He's not surprised, then, that she does not agree immediately. He's a little surprised that she seems as willing to consider it as she is. When she shifts closer, so does he, until the space between them is negligible and his chest brushes hers every time he breathes.

"I don't know yet," he replies softly. "I was thinking of awakening the glass in the downstairs windows. Glass spirits are watchful and alert. In a pinch, a glass spirit can shatter its corporeal form and blind an enemy. I thought of the fire elementals in the furnace as well, but they'll definitely want their fire lit at all times, and that would be unbearable in the summer. So maybe the electricity elementals in some of the lights instead. They're more predictable; less likely to burn down the house. I thought we might put up a fountain somewhere too. One of those silly desktop zen things. Water heals and cleanses.

"I remember you wanted a garden when spring comes. I thought we could plant and wake an oak, too."

[Danicka] Perhaps not surprisingly, Danicka winces slightly when Lukas mentions glass spirits causing windows to shatter. It may be best not to ask himself whether it's merely the idea of glass shards shooting into eyes and tender flesh or if she's remembering something. It passes. She doesn't voice argument, though she does nod when he mentions fire elementals being... demanding, wanting constant heat, constant fuel. They're not the best idea, and Danicka agrees.

"I like those silly desktop zen things," she says archly, and smiles. But he's never seen one at her apartment. And she hasn't brought one, so far as he knows, to the den.

Healing and cleansing she can appreciate.

The mention of an oak, however, makes her grow still for a moment. She looks vaguely, faintly pained, as though the idea of it makes her ache. The idea of a garden, for one: though it's true, she wants one. Flowers. Vegetables. Berries. The idea of an oak, though.

"The tree at my house was awakened," she says quietly. "I think it always was. I mean..." not always, "even before my brother Changed."

There's a longer pause, after that.

"He used to listen to it, even when we were very young. That's why I didn't ever climb it." Until Lukas and his sister came by and did so. She doesn't sound wary, or afraid: "When I got a little older, I ...sort of listened to it, too. Because I knew it didn't hate me."

He gets the impression, easily enough, that these are things she has never told anyone before, but not things she has never allowed herself to think before. They sound like long-held beliefs: the tree spoke to her, somehow, and she learned to listen when she stopped being afraid of it, stopped believing that its affiliation with Vladislav might have twisted and warped it against her.

[Lukas] "Your oak remembers me."

Lukas can't easily say why he tells her this as a means of comfort; he can't easily draw in his mind the association that leads from this to what he's trying to say to her. Which is: it's all right. And perhaps, It's all right to miss the oak, and your father's house.

And, "It remembers the day you fell out of its boughs. I don't think it would remember if it hated you. It's hard to twist an oak."

He touches her gently, warmly. Strokes her hair back over and over, which eventually becomes simply a gesture of affection, of intimacy; a physical demonstration of adoration.

A few moments of quiet. Then he adds, "I loved that oak tree in your backyard. A few months ago my pack dissolved its allegiance to the Talons of Horus and reformed under Perun, who is of thunder and war and eagle and oak.

"It just felt ... right."

Lukas's hand stills on her face, opening to cover her cheek, her neck. He kisses her softly, all heat and slowness, and when they melt apart he says close enough that his breath fans her skin.

"We don't have to plant an oak, láska."

[Danicka] That doesn't surprise her. That the oak would remember a Garou, or a purely bred Garou, or one who disturbed its branches a few times in childhood. For reasons inexplicable, Danicka is also not surprised that it remembered the day she fell, breaking nothing, doing no more than bruising her knees and getting the wind knocked out of her. Or then: maybe she's shocked, and both surprise and the lack thereof register the same on her carefully trained features.

"I know," she says simply, when he assures her that he doesn't think the tree would remember if it hated her. But also: I know it's all right.

The rest she simply listens to, tucking her toes underneath his legs down below the covers. The names of spirits pass by: she doesn't know of the first, she knows the original Czechoslovakian mythology surrounding the second. Her eyes dance with recognition when he mentions Perun, then shade themselves as her eyes close.

Because he's kissing her. Slowly, drenchingly, dipping his tongue into her mouth like a finger into a jar of honey, and she breathes in shallowly.

Underneath the blanket, she lifts her leg and slides it up the outside of his thigh, hooks it around his hipbone. She's bared to the cool air from the knee down then, and his mouth is dragging away from hers. "Why wouldn't I want to?" Danicka queries, tilting her head to kiss his neck instead now.

Her question, laced lightly with bewilderment, is not entirely genuine. She knows, from his tone of it's all right before, from words intended as comfort or confirmation, and from what he just said to her, why Lukas is doing it. How he worries for her, how he aches to make her happy, make her feel safe. Danicka understands as well as he does, maybe even better. She presses her lips gently against his throat, brushes them back and forth on his skin in two nuzzling passes, uttering her question in a tone more firm than irritated, more assuring than truly curious.

I'm okay.

[Lukas] Her leg is bared when it slides over his hip -- but only momentarily. Lukas reaches back and folds the other side over the blanket over himself and over her. He makes a cocoon of the comforter, and his arm returns to its place over her side, around her waist.

He doesn't answer the question; it wasn't really a question at all, but a form of reassurance. Instead, Lukas's eyes close briefly as Danicka kisses his neck. He breathes slowly.

And then he turns on his back, shifting gently and gradually, pulling her over him. Both hands free now, he strokes her hair back, runs his hands over her shoulders and down her sides.

"Na jaře, pak." His touch comes to a stop at her hips, thumbs riding that crest of bone. "S tvůj květinami."

[Danicka] They're wrapped up together now, not in furs or in piles of blankets but just one king-sized comforter that is, crudely put, rich with the smell of the two of them already. She laughs softly as he covers her and himself up like that, because of how it echoes the conversation, the idle but near-constant worry inside of Lukas.

She may never know what he said to Theron, and neither needs to nor will be missing much if she doesn't. But he said it: sometimes, in order to keep from stifling her, he cannot protect her as perfectly as he wants to. He cannot guard her as completely as his instincts tell him to, because it would destroy what they have, even if it could not quite destroy Danicka.

It's hard to imagine anything breaking her utterly, after everything she has already come through intact.

Her leg shifts as he rolls, sliding back down so it doesn't become trapped uncomfortably under him. Now Danicka is wrapped around him, folded over him, and the temptation to simply lay her head on his chest and drowse is strong. She does not, however. She slides down his body instead, til her head is almost covered by the blanket, and kisses his chest. And then his nipple. Her lips brush it over and over until it hardens, only to be washed by the humidity of her breathing.

"Budete mě zase šukat?" she murmurs, and licks him once, lightly.

[Lukas] The truth is, they've both been working toward this eventuality. Her hand has idled its way down his torso, turning aside only at the last moment. His has drifted over her side, down her back. She's kissed his chest, his collarbone, his body. He's kissed her mouth so deeply that he could taste her for moments afterward.

Still, when she doesn't answer, when her mouth drifts down his body to kiss his chest

(he draws a slow, slow breath)

and wrap around his nipple

(he exhales it, raggedly, and sucks another in)

his chest rises against her in a single, sharp inhale. Lukas's eyes fall closed, and his head, raised to watch her progress, falls back with a thump. A moment later his lips part. He exhales a small sound, a soft groan, an oh. that furrows his brows.

His hands under the covers: moving over her back, rubbing over her ass, squeezing gently. The warmth of her mouth is hypnotic. He can't seem to bring himself to say anything while she's licking at him; nuzzling at him.

When she pauses, his eyes open. Then his hands firm on her hips; he pulls her up his body.

"Pojď sem. Jezdit na mě."

[Danicka] It's as though they're making up for lost time, or making up for the argument, or simply... being together. Reveling in it, saturating their senses in it. In each other. They cannot have this every night, not even in winter, not even when the air is cold and the lakes try to freeze and every goddamn instinct in Lukas's being is telling him to build his den, make it warm, and keep his mate there so she can survive with him until the thaw. They can't have this every night, not even when school is stressing her out and she misses her family and every time she crawls into bed alone her very bones seem to be screaming for her mate, her match, her male.

So now that they are together, and the night seems to be permitting them to spend it with one another -- without Lukas being called away to the War, to his pack, to something -- they stroke each other slowly, wrap around each other by gradual increments. She has focused, during moments here and there, on the feel of him held in her leg. She has traced the muscles in his side, felt the expansion of his ribs with his breathing. Danicka is intensely attentive. Her senses as well as her heart are tender to the touch, and pick up on a great deal more than most people's.

His senses are heightened by nature alone.

Danicka moans softly around his nipple, a quiet and yet strained noise of want, finding him hardening where her legs part over him. She rubs gently against him, almost searchingly, her hips rolling under his hands. Her eyes are closed while she licks him, moves her mouth to his other nipple and wraps her lips around it, sucks with slow sweetness. Her ardor, slowly building since her hand first started traveling on him, hits her with a fervent immediacy, and her cunt leaves warm and slickness on his cock, now hard and pressing against her.

The movement of her hips gets more insistent, stroking herself over and over on his body, her mouth growing hotter and more demanding on his chest until Lukas pulls her up. There's no pause, no break for him to find his wits, no chance where she's not assaulting him. Danicka is starting to moan, less gently now, less quiet. She lets him move her, rushing up his chest to lock her lips on his neck, sucking and kissing him there hungrily.

"Dej to ve mně, Lukáš," she whimpers beneath his ear, her hands on his chest, on the bed, holding herself over him while her body squirms.

[Lukas] The makeshift cocoon he's made of their bedcovers slipslides off Danicka's shoulders as she rises over him. It falls to either side, baring them to the coolness of the room; baring her to what light remains, to his sight, to the hunger in his eyes.

His hands stroke up her sides, long sweeping caresses up the span of her waist, the arch of her ribcage. Her breasts are small and shapely, fitting the palms of his hands. He breathes a little harder when he touches her there, fondles her gently, holds her in his hands.

And she's rubbing herself over him the whole time, moving and winding her hips, grinding against him until his head is arching back against the bed; until he's groaning between his teeth and she's made him as wet as she is, covered him with her slick.

His hands on her hips, suddenly. He holds her steady. He pulls her down. He grinds her against him, absolutely, unwaveringly, exhales a sharp, half-voiced pant. Swats her, then; spanks her gently with his fingers.

"Up a little, baby," he breathes, and when she lifts her hips, reaches between them to take his hard cock in hand. Blindly he finds the opening of her cunt, finds her by touch and by familiarity, finds her ready and hot, finds her opening to him, parting tight and wet around the head of his cock.

"God, yeah." His fingertips leave a smear of wetness on her hip. He pulls her down on him, slow, gradual, lifting his head to watch her take him in. "Pomalu. To je ono, lásko. To je to tak kurva dobrý."

A kiss -- slow, pulling, pausing to pant into her mouth before he kisses her again.

"Pomalu," he whispers against her mouth. She's sinking down on his lap; taking him in inch by inch until he's buried in her. He holds her there for a second, holds her still and firm, holds her on his cock while her pussy clenches and shudders around him, keeps her there and keeps his eyes on hers, holds them both caught on that edged moment until he groans, harshly, and turns to bite at her shoulder.

"Ride me. Jízda můj kohout. Tvrdý."

[Danicka] A long, narrow V of flesh appears on Danicka's back as the edges of the comforter split. She arches once, rubs herself harder, and it falls further off her arms, widening the V and revealing her scapulae. She whimpers against his shoulder and her hips writhe back against his grinding pull, and the blanket rustles away almost completely, even their legs only half-tangled now.

For the most part, she stays close to him. She rubs her breasts and her face against his body, kisses his clavicles, licks his throat, finds his nipple again and sucks softly on it with a groan. Her hands press to the mattress to hold herself up somewhat, and his sneak between them to caress her. The motion of Danicka's hips has started to mimic fucking, and her breasts bounce softly against his touch, her hardened nipples brushing his palms.

Long, thick blonde hair falls over her cheeks, brushes his chest as they grind together. Danicka lets out a cry, her head tipping backwards and her eyes closing in an expression that would look pained if she weren't... moaning for it, moving back against him while he holds her in place. She doesn't jump or start when he spanks her but bucks her hips slightly, whimpering. Eyes that are suddenly a vivid, rich version of their color open again, find him.

Her hands move to his chest as she lifts up her hips obediently, expectantly, though a moment later she's shuddering and quivering as his fingertips and his cock slide against her clit, against her cunt, search for her and stroke her. "Oh," she moans, soft, her voice wavering on the single syllable, descending into a quiet groan -- and then silence, a gasp caught in her throat -- as Lukas guides her onto him, as she rocks her hips carefully to take him in.

Pomalu.

Deeper.

Danicka gasps, finally, when she settles on his lap, feeling him filling her, feeling herself tighten involuntarily, instinctively around him. "Oh, god," she breathes, folded over him and fighting the urge -- for a moment, at least -- to just fuck him, to press her hands on his chest and ride him, use him, take him.

Then Lukas speaks again, after biting into her as though to stifle whatever other desires he might have -- flipping her on her back and pounding her, maybe, or bucking uncontrollably to slam himself up into her again and again, or --

and Danicka surrenders. She groans aloud, her shoulder nipped this time, unbruised. Her body lifts up over him, the roll and shift of her weight on top of Lukas pushing him even deeper. Her eyes are half-lidded, drowsy with arousal, her hands running down his chest and over his abdominal muscles.

"Miluju tvůj tělo. Věděli jste, že to?" she murmurs, stroking her palms back upward again. Her hips, at the same time, slide her upward on his cock, slow and winding in hard circles. "Miluji pohled na věc. Miluji ho dotýkat to."

Danicka grinds back down then, suddenly and rather mercilessly. Tvrdý.

"I love fucking it," she all but snarls, and does it again. This time, faster.

[Lukas] The sudden, merciless grind of her cunt down on him makes Lukas throw his head back, makes him let out a short, ragged grunt of pleasure.

"...fuck." The fricative caught between his teeth, hissed; the sharp consonant at the end a spike of sound. He holds her by the hips, doesn't guide her, feels her moving; feels her hips winding on his, gyring, rocking up, coming down.

"Ano."

He could be answering anything. He could be answering the movement of her body, the way it feels when she pounds herself down like that; the way it feels when she pulls up, gripping at his cock, lets him slide out and out and almost free before she --

"Vím. Oh, fuck, Danička, do it again."

-- comes down on him again and makes his back arch, makes him thrust his hips mindlessly, thoughtlessly up to meet her.

[Danicka] Sometimes when Lukas moans like that -- lets loose a groan, pleads or snarls for her to fuck him, to do it again -- it reminds her of how even that first night she could tell he was biting back such things. There were times when he'd close his eyes or grab a hold of her more tightly, and there was that aching moment right after the first time he slid into her and wasn't stopped, wasn't pushed away, when she held him inside her and held her body close to him

and he needed a minute

so he didn't lose his mind.

When Lukas says fuck like that, over and again, Danicka rises up his cock again, all but purring his name now, as though she's soothing him. Her hands caress his chest, thumbs stroking his nipples. She bucks her hips, shorter and harder, three times, a controlled bouncing, and leans over suddenly to capture his mouth in a kiss. There's already sweat down her spine again, under her breasts.

She lifts up after kissing him, a deep and searching exploration of his mouth, and opens her eyes. Faster, he's said. Do it again. She does it again, faster. But she doesn't stop. Danicka starts to fuck him in earnest now, riding him while his hands grip her hips and travel around to rub her ass every so often, making her shudder.

"That's it," she gasps, half-whimpering as her pace becomes something wickedly, hungrily, unapologetically repetitive. "To je ono, lásko. Být dobré i pro mě. Dovolte mi, kurva, že se vám líbí že."

[Lukas] It's true. He used to hold back. He used to clamp his teeth down, hold his fucking breath, so he wouldn't moan when he fucked her. So he wouldn't groan and gasp and grunt in her ear when he came in her cunt. So he wouldn't

betray himself, somehow. Betray how much he needed what was between them. Wanted this. Loved her, and what she did to him.

He doesn't hold back now. He'll never be noisy, or even loud. But he groans now when she moves like that, and when her hands stroke his skin, when her thumbs play with his nipples.

When she leans down to kiss him, the muscles in his abdomen contract sharply under her hands. He leans up and meets her halfway, ferociously, his hands coming up to hold her face right there as the bottom drops out of the kiss. As it deepens. As they fall into one another, and then part, and then kiss again, a second hard, hungrier.

Then she's lifting up. Then he's falling back. Then his hands are on her ass, holding her as she fucks him, and his eyes are dazed and glazed with pleasure, are watching her with a sort of helpless, ravenous light. "Come on," he pants. "That's it. Come on. Kurva mě. Jízda můj kohout. Rychleji."

When his hand meets her ass again, it's a glancing hit, sharper this time.

"Come on. Fuck me."

[Danicka] Before each other, both Danicka and Lukas had certain things they would and would not do with the people they had sex with.

He did not have sex with people he was likely to see again. He avoided fucking his own kinswomen, even the ones that all but offered themselves up on a platter, his honor keeping him from using them like that and his practicality keeping him from dramatic entanglements. He did not kiss them, holding their faces to his, not because he made some rule to stick to but because he never really desired to. He did not kiss them because he couldn't help it.

Danicka did not have sex with people who knew her family, or the sept, or could track her to it. Danicka did not fuck Garou, even the ones that quite literally sniffed around her skirt and suggested they could talk to her brother... at least not until she came to Chicago and got curious. She did not kiss them unless she had to, unless they kissed her first, unless she wanted them to just shut up. She didn't kiss them because she needed to.

Neither of them had ever really made love before that night in the motel a few block from Mr. C's. It took them weeks to even recognize it as such, even longer to admit it. At the time, Lukas didn't know how rarely Danicka would be willing to kiss a lover, how she would avoid eye contact. He didn't know she used the language of their blood and ancestors as a way to hold herself back, hide herself in plain sight. All he knew was her riding him, his back propped against the head board, his hips rocking up against hers, her cunt winding down slowly, hard,

over

and over again,

until she lost the ability to form words, clinging to his shoulders and resting her forehead against his as she came, because he'd closed his eyes. He knew the feel of her well enough, knew the warmth of the woman he'd wanted since the second he saw her, surrounding him as he lost himself inside her. And then he knew her trembling while he clung to her, while she leaned into his arms and rested against his chest and reached out from her quivering to comfort and reassure him.

Which is not something she did even in childhood. Which is not something he ever needed from her as a child, did not entirely need from her that night, does not ever really need. Which only makes it more precious.

They are making love tonight, knowingly and unequivocably, holding nothing back. They kiss, over and over, and they kiss now as Danicka leans over her lover and presses her lips to his, swallows the sounds he's making, the goading, the swearing and cursing urging for more, more, yes. She bites his lower lip after she parts the kiss to gasp, drags her teeth over it while grinding her cunt down on him. They have not gotten much more gentle with each other than they ever were, and she is not now.

She can't stroke his body any longer. She holds herself up over him and reaches between her legs, spreads her fingers to feel him sliding into her, pulling out, filling her again. She strokes herself, gasps sharply. Danicka is folded over her mate now, fucking him

rychleji

rychleji

every breath edged with unvoiced screams, half-whimpers. Her hair sways on either side of her face, brushes his chest, her mouth opening as she rides, releasing only the most strangled and undone of cries. She doesn't say it, but he can feel it when she clenches around him on the upstroke, feel it in the way she's fucking him now like she's claimed him, taken him: she's getting close.

[Lukas] It's not necessity that dictates worth. Want and need are rarely the same thing.

Except when they're here. Like this. Except when desire and necessity twist together, fuse, into a single sharp spire of hunger, the wheel on which all their restraint, all their reasons for subterfuge and deceit and masks and control, is broken.

They're not even speaking anymore. They're kissing, moaning into each other's mouths. She's biting his lip and he's snarling against her mouth, and his hands are pulling her firmly down on his cock as his hips arch, and she's reaching down to touch herself and that first stroke of her fingers makes her jackknife over him like somewhere a spring-loaded tripwire has broken.

He kisses her open mouth. His groans are a lower, rougher counterpoint to the whimpering gasps she's loosing across his lips, against his cheek. She's getting close and he's reaching down between their bodies; he's displacing her hand and reaching between her legs to finger her, to fondle her, to play with her clit as he brings her hand, in turn, to his mouth

where he sucks on her fingers, hungrily, moaning at the taste of her, his breath a hot moist panting against her palm as he fucks her, fucks her, fucks her to the point and precipice of her orgasm

and loses himself, suddenly, in his own. It hits him like a thunderbolt, like a sneaker wave rising out of nothing to consume the world. Lukas's head snaps back; his spine arches; his hips lift off the bed and his face pulls with pleasure. It takes immense will not to bear down on her fragile fingers, though he hasn't the presence of mind, now, to lick and suck at her digits. Doesn't have the presence of mind to do anything but grab her by the hip, pull her down on his cock, hold her right there on the rigid arch of his body as he comes into her.

Loses himself in her.

One, two, a handful, a dozen ragged breaths caught out of the air. His groans are muffled on her fingers, harsh and raw, open vowels. Toward the end the hard arch of his back relents. He comes back down, literally, spasms of contraction wracking down the axis of his body, pulling chest and abdomen into sudden and tight definition, bucking his cock into her in quick, hard, irregular pistonings. He licks and kisses her palm when he can think again. He can't taste her on her fingers anymore; it's just the salty tang of her sweat, now, and the undefinable taste that is her.

[Danicka] They've stayed close. Earlier, when he lifted her and laid her down and crawled over her, covered her while her legs folded around him. Before this, when they wrapped themselves in the comforter and stroked one another slowly, talking quietly while their skins remembered each other. Now, with Danicka bent over him rather than upright. The moments when she's been separated from his embrace have been few and brief and filled with the wandering of her touch all over his chest and arms. They have replaced words with kisses, and discussion with...

this. Always this, in the end, which came at them and caught them unawares even when they thought they knew what they were getting into at the beginning. His cock in her pussy, covered in her wet, her inner thighs slick with sweat, spreading over him. Her fingers in his mouth, his tongue dragging all over them to taste the cunt he's fucking, the woman he's making love to.

Which makes her moan, as he licks between her fingers and flicks his tongue over her palm and then sucks each one, sucks the first two, moaning around her digits as his hips buck harder, and harder, driving him into her. Danicka jerks on top of him, shudders. Her movements slow yet intensify then, each stroke of her body and his hand an explosive, spiraling thing. She puts her free hand on his chest, letting out sharp, gasping cries now one

after the other

and each one ratching upwards in pitch and fervor. The headboard, even the headboard of this heavy and expensive bed, is thudding slightly against the wall. Whoever is on the other side of them can hear, even through the walls thick as they are, how close the woman in that bed is getting to screaming, wondering aloud what he's doing to her to make her sound like that

other than the obvious.

She all but squeals then, grinding down onto his cock a split second before he's pulling her hips down, throwing his hips up as the waves of their orgasms collide so closely together it's impossible to say who set who off. That high, overcome sound disintegrates in the air as Danicka lifts up over him, rides him so hard now it seems like everything leading up to it was gentle by comparison. She groans, so rough it's nearly a growl, and swivels her hips over and over again on him while he's fucking his cum into her, their bodies rolling ruthlessly and animalistically together.

Danicka whimpers when he starts to relax again, her own orgasm going on several seconds after Lukas has started to lower his body back to the bed. She fucks him faster again, achingly, using those mindless thrusts of his as he comes down for her pleasure, moaning low and hard when it finally starts to taper off. Bending to him completely again, she withdraws her hand gently from his mouth and pants for air, wrapping her arms around his torso. Danicka lays her forehead to his chest, to his heartbeat, and shudders whenever her cunt quivers around him.

[Lukas] It's too much.

She must know that. There was a night, early on, when she rode him in his bed at the Brotherhood. When she fucked him after his orgasm, rode his cock while it was still hard, still oversensitive, still so raw from fucking that every slide of her hips made him see

(eternity.)

stars. It's like that now -- when she rides out the last of her orgasm on him, when she fucks him even after he's begun to relax

and slams him into pleasure again, so sharp and intense that the harsh, rough panting of his breath shudders into raw, gasping groans that sound almost pained. "Ah--" he gasps, and his hands clap to her hips as though he might hold her still, make her stop, make her stop that, please.

Only, he doesn't. It's just a second. Then he lets go, grasps handfuls of the rumpled bedcovers instead, thumps the back of his head against the mattress once, twice, when she moves on him. Throws his head back and lets out a long, straining groan, finally, when she stops; when she settles; when she lets him rest.

His arms fold around her shoulders a little later. He holds her there.

Catches his breath.

"Oh, fuck."

[Danicka] It's too much, but there's so much more. Danicka writhes atop him for the last few seconds of her orgasm, wrecking him, but it's nothing compared to what she did to him that night in his bed at the Brotherhood. She pays little mind to his aching groans, to his gasping, except to be further aroused by them, bucking her hips as she rides herself out on his cock, and Lukas doesn't stop her. Danicka settles again then, panting, holding him, being held after awhile.

The skin starts to cool so quickly it's a wonder. They were so hot. They were sweating, drenching themselves in it, skin flushing with color from pure heat, and now the air is wicking it all away, and Danicka whimpers soft on Lukas's chest.

They've said so much tonight: arguments, endearments, things that are not secrets but were once never even touched on. And there's more: she wants to tell him about the Coalition (and she will, she promises herself). She wants to tell him that she's glad he told her that his pack changed totems, that these things matter to her, that she's not a fool about the existence and importance of spirits and totems. She wants him to know that though she will never have the intrinsic empathy for such things of a Garou who can actually cross over and speak to the spirits, she does understand a little. More than any mortal, better than most Kin. She wants to tell him that if he'd chased her across the room instead of asking her why she ran over there, she would have fucked him in the armchair, facing the windows and overlooking the lake, watching their wraithlike reflections with him moving behind her, biting at her shoulder.

Later. All of it, later. Another night, maybe, another day. The moon outside is waxing and yet not full. The air outside is cold but not as cold as it will be in a matter of days. Danicka is warm, still, a hot and languid weight on top of his body, and Lukas is the warm solidity underneath her. She breathes across his skin, closing her eyes, swallowing once.

Her hands gentle on his sides, stroke him tenderly. He got Moroccan. She likes it. They both do, but it's cold by now, and it hasn't been touched. Maybe later they'll heat it up in the little microwave in the room, or eat it cold, drinking wine that's been opened for the better part of three hours now. Or maybe they'll fall asleep

just like this,

just like before, wrapping up in the comforter without bothering to get under the sheets. She'll sleep curled up on one side, with Lukas behind her the way he always is when he has a chance to be, his shins crossing her legs to keep her feet warm. His arm over her, around her, holding her to his chest and feeling her heart beating against the palm that cups over her breast. She'll feel him breathing against the back of her neck, and fall asleep to the sound of it.

At some point in the night, though, they'll turn. Maybe to get under the sheets, maybe to wake up and eat food they ignored earlier. And Danicka will be getting up to go wash her face or re-cork the wine, only to find her hand caught and her body pulled back against his. This time when they make love, it will be different. Rougher. Wordless, almost utterly. He'll pull her onto his lap and his cock will harden between her legs again, but she won't ride him like before. When he puts her under him and she bends her body forward, arms wrapped around a pillow and ass lifted, spine angled to meet him, they'll fuck not like a pair of lovers who have not done so for literally almost a month

but like animals. Like mates. Like something other than human, which is what they are.

They can turn an thousand-dollar mattress with thousand-thread count sheets into a bed no more refined than the one they found in the woods, once, made of mud and moss and earth. With her noises, low groans of pleasure mixing with the snarls coming from the beast behind her, his hands on her hips, on her ass, his eyes on her pussy receiving his cock. It'll be utterly dark in the room then, nothing but the moonlight and the citylight washing over them through the window. He'll fuck her harder then, bending over her and growling in her ear how she feels to him, growling her name like it's a replacement for every swear word, every profession of god. She'll be unable to do anything but moan aloud in respond because she's coming, she's grabbing onto the pillow with her hands and biting into it to stifle her screaming, just as he bites her shoulder to stifle the sound that threatens to claw its way out of him when he comes into her again.

They do not shower afterwards. He does not slide out of her for a long time. Strangely, when they sleep again, she crawls under the covers behind him and holds him like she did

the very first time they came here.

Danicka tucks her feet under his calves to keep them warm. She wraps her arm over him, around him, holding him to her smaller body. Her right hand covers his chest, his heartbeat thumps steady and strong against it. He will feel her breathing where her head is nestled against his back, and fall asleep again to the sound of it.