Decker Rohl

Danicka

God, they're so close. It's terrifying her every time she comes near the realization of it, every time she feels it washing around her, a stone in the middle of a river. This closeness is not something she's ever wanted, sought, felt before. She has pretended, always pretended, is good at pretending. She will only get better with time, the further she runs from this very moment. And yes: she will run. Is running, now, because of that fear it will take her almost another decade to voice:

she does not want them to see. She doesn't want them to know what has happened to her, where she comes from, what she has been through. What it did to her. The worst knowledge Danicka has in her repetoire of things carnal and dark is her own shattering, her own pain. Her greatest fear of being close to anyone else is that they will find it out and hate her for it -- or worse, love her anyway and be slowly tainted by it.

But right now they're close. Hands on one another's faces, a secret intimacy between their brows and in every kiss that they are stealing from souls they haven't met yet. Every time she kisses him or opens herself to him she feels a quick, fleeting stab of betrayal, though she can't begin to imagine who or what she is betraying. She's never felt it before. What Decker said to her is too close to the truth, too close to home: it isn't them, and they both know. It's so close, and it's so good. But it isn't them. They are not for each other.

A powerful ache goes through her when he nuzzles her, animal and familiar. It's rough, and she doesn't mind that. It's insistent, and she can almost imagine a soft keening in his throat that isn't there. A low whuffling, but that's only in her imagination. She catches her breath and looks at him as he draws back, willing him to stay away, wishing him to come back again.

There's still time. She nods, slowly, and wants to ask him to stay near her, wants to pretend that she's afraid of falling or fainting again, but she isn't. So she doesn't ask. When they slide off the bed, unfolding their limbs, she finds herself shaky in her legs but it has nothing to do with passing out; she's just been fucked til she can barely walk. Danicka exhales, touching his forearm still -- and there's something there that looks vaguely archaic, like a gentleman and his lady, but he's not gentle and she is not his.

Chivalry's not Decker's defining characteristic. Brutality is. Or maybe it's strength. Or maybe it's really solitude. He's such an insular, brooding creature. He has that rare and lonely quality: to be able to be alone even when surrounded by others. A couple months from now he'll be in New Jersey, across the water from a city so big he'll realize New Orleans was really nothing after all. A few months from now he'll be forming bonds there. A few years later he won't even remember the truth that he knows now: that he is meant to be violent, and he is meant to be alone.

He'll remember again, though.

Still: she rises, she's a little unsteady on her feet. He holds her arm until she has her footing. He turns his head to watch her go, looks at the line of her back and the curve of her hips, the shape she makes when she walks through the door to the bathroom. He hears the shower come on. Another man might be asking himself what he's doing here, where he thinks this is going, what he should do, what he could do, what.

Decker doesn't. His mind is empty; oddly still. An advantage of being Fenrir, maybe. Staunch determinists, those grey wolves of the north. The ending is inevitable and inevitably bitter: what matters, and what defines a man, is how he faces that end.

After a moment he rises up. He slides off the bed, looks aimlessly about the room a moment. TV there. Remote on the floor. Their clothes: her dress a golden pool. Window open. He turns his back to this, and he follows the girl whose name he doesn't even know. It's impossible not to be aware of him when he enters the bathroom. It's not sound, or smell, or sight. It's the impact of that earthquake of rage he carries with him, shaking through the walls, shuddering through the floor. He goes to the sink first, splashes cold water on his face, so when he steps into the shower he's already wet, dripping, leaving trails of water on his skin that are lost when the shower hits him.

They wash themselves. Or at least, he doesn't reach for her. For a while they share the same space without ever quite intersecting. They wash each other from their bodies, and when they're done

he touches her. His hand on her lower back. His eyes on hers, a grey as heavy as concrete. If she turns to him he kisses her, and he can't stand it, he can't, but he kisses her anyway. If she reaches for him --

he stops her. He puts his hand on hers, gently, cradling the blade of her hand and the articulation of her wrist.

"Wanna have ya one more time in bed," he says. And it's counterproductive; he knows it. Ruins the whole point of the shower. Even so: "Wanna have ya on me when I leave in tha mornin'."

When he doesn't follow her right away, when he lets her slip past his arm, Danicka glances back at Decker. It's just a glance; she doesn't urge him to come with her. She doesn't pull at his arm or ask him to stay close. She just looks at him, once, then lets him go and walks the rest of the way by herself. The door to the bathroom stays open, wide open in fact, and he can see her turn on the shower to warm up, then the cold water at the sink. Cupped palms bring a few slow mouthfuls of water to her mouth; something about it looks like a ritual, though in truth she's only trying to settle her body a little.

Entering the shower takes her out of his sight. The curtain's rings rattle on the bar and then settle. It's only moments before he joins her, and he's looming, enormous, seems so much bigger than he is because the rage in him is so strong it is like a whole entity unto itself. Danicka, her short hair soaked to her scalp, looks at him as he comes behind her. She hands him a second, flat bar of hotel soap, wordlessly. And they wash themselves, practical and quick, though without rushing.

Danicka does come closer, though. She moves out of the way for him to use the streaming water, and for a moment she lets herself lean against his back, her eyes closed, her body next to his. Only for a moment, though; she moves away and they rinse themselves off and she's wondering if he'll let her rest against him, she's wondering if he wants her again, because she wants him but something about this seems quiet and distant and poignant and it doesn't feel right to reach for him, or even tell him that she can't leave without having him again.

So, she moves for the curtain. She puts her hand on it, and not on him, and he touches her lower back, turning her toward him. She stares at him, that wide-eyed furtiveness, that caught look, torn between moving toward and running away, and he kisses her. A low sound echoes in her mouth at the pressure of his lips, all recognition and welcome. Her body turns to his more fully; she presses close, but he catches her up and holds himself away. And he says what he does.

Her scent, he means. He wants her on him, and she knows he means the smell of her, the physical memory. He wants her on him. Danicka's lips part to breathe in, silently, and she nods. She wants to tell him something, say something, like take me or yes or even okay, but nothing seems right. It's just the nod, then, and her hands going to his shoulders, which is when he knows what she's going to do, can feel it in the movement of her slender muscles under her soft skin. She lifts onto him, all but climbs him, and kisses his neck and his jaw and his temple, his mouth, leaving him to turn off the water and get them out of here.

She would help. But she can't wait to be near to him again.

Recognition. Welcome. These things are so dangerous. They have no place between them, these two who were almost

but not quite

for each other. Still: he kisses her. She presses close. He stops her, tells her why. She climbs him like a tree. He catches her, his hands coming under her thighs as she steps off the smooth porcelain of the shower. They are very nearly graceful in that moment, and that moment stretches, unspools into the space between their mouths, which diminishes to nothing.

Under the spray of the shower he kisses her again. He kisses her until he begins to forget why he didn't want to have her again in here, and then he draws back. The water turns off in two quick wrenches of the faucets. He takes his hand off her just long enough to do that, and to whisk back the shower curtain. She has to duck a little to get out from under the bar. He grabs a towel, throws it over her shoulders.

The air in the room is cool in comparison, but not so cold as it would have been had the window been left closed. If she shivers anyway, he puts his hand over her back, covering her as much as he can before they're at the bed. For the first time they pull back the sheets, though those sheets and those covers have long since been battered awry. He lays her down, and they're both still rather wet, but it doesn't matter. He follows her down.

This wasn't supposed to hurt, he thinks helplessly. But it does. And that

does not stop him at all.

Even his palms sliding up her thighs as she lifts herself onto him makes Danicka shiver slightly. She is bending her head, mouth to his neck, kissing him softly there and in the spot just behind his jaw, under his ear. They kiss, and her ankles cross at the small of his back. This -- the way he holds her against him as he reaches for the water and cranks it off, the way he keeps her against him as he steps them out -- was not what she was looking for tonight. Even when she walked out and offered him a beer, she wasn't thinking of something like this. Him looking at her the way he did, muttering that he wants her on him when he leaves in the morning, wants to smell her on his own skin, was not in the stars.

The way she feels when he grabs a towel and drapes it around her, sudden and unexpected and inexplicably gentle a thing to do, makes her shake. Danicka holds him that much tighter, kisses him harder, puts her hand out against the wall as though to use it to press her body and her mouth more firmly to his. They cleave together, and her kisses grow only more heated, her hands more adoring on his face and trailing over his scalp, as he carries her into the room, just a few steps to the bed.

This is the last place they expected to end up tonight. He still doesn't know how much this room cost -- might not matter any more. New Orleans is finally growing quiet outside as the night creeps closer to dawn than to midnight. This time he does not flip her eagerly on her back, roll her under him as in the truck. This time he doesn't all but throw her onto the mattress, getting inside of her as quickly and as deeply as he can in one stroke. This time he lays his hand on her back, pulls the sheets away, and lays her down.

That towel he laid over her drops first, soaking up some of the wet from her hair. She doesn't unlock her ankles from his back, and he follows her to the bed, landing on his hands or his elbows, pressed near.

No thoughts go through her head, regretful or pained or otherwise. She touches his back, smooths her hands over him, groans softly at what she feels of him. Now, like all the other times, she doesn't suggest that they grab a condom from his jeans or her little purse. She doesn't ask him to go slow or be gentle or please don't make her regret this. She arches her back, taking her cunt away from his body ever so slightly despite the invitation of that motion. Her breathing quickens, takes her lips from his for a moment, opens her eyes to his.

Not supposed to hurt. Not that it can stop them. She thinks of the way he touched her, held her by the hip, pulled her against his cock and said c'mon. She thinks of his gruff indication of the bus stop versus his truck. She thinks about his hand smoothing over her leg, his eyes tracking up her body like a touch, asking if she wanted to go again. She thinks of riding him, of his eyes when he looked down at their joined bodies, of him saying God the way he did. She thinks of the way he roared, the bed scraping the floor and hitting the wall, as he came in her a third time.

She puts both of her hands on his face and pulls him down to kiss her again, wrapping her legs around his thighs, pulling him in toward herself. And when he enters her this time, holding his cock and fitting it into her, fast or slow doesn't seem to matter. What seems to matter this time is when he is fully inside of her, her mouth falls from his as she quietly gasps for air. Her eyes are closed, her expression rapt.

"Decker..."

which is the first time she's said his name at all, much less sighed it like that, achingly,

just before her calves flex, just before she pulls him deeper, rolls her hips with the encouraged thrust, fucks him

one more time.

One more time --

one last time, he thinks.

Decker can feel it: the subtle and pervasive way the sex has changed. The first time they held each other at arm's length even as the distance between them diminished to nothing. The second time was -- unexpected. Sweet. Devastating, in a way: that first crack in the armor; the moment all the rest became unavoidable. And then the third time, when they came back here. When they ate each other alive, couldn't get enough. Went so far beyond what either of them could bear. Broke down walls that should not come down; revealed some terrible truth about themselves, even if they tried so hard not too. Went too far. Wanted more when they were done.

But he can feel this, too: an ache in this coupling. A sense of ending; a goodbye in the way she finally

sighs the name he thought she'd already forgotten.

He covers her mouth with his. Seals that name in, keeps it from seeing the light of day. Stay there: in her mouth, in her lungs. He doesn't know if he can't bear it hear his own name, or if he wants her to keep it inside her. Remember. She pulls him deeper. His shoulder flexes under her hands, or her arms; he sets his weight on his elbows. Stays close. Her eyes are closed but his are open. They've left the bathroom light on, and that one bedside lamp that was on when they got here. It's all the light he has, all the time he has, all that he can see of her, and he wants every moment.

He wonders, a little, how he'll go on from here. How and where next and when he'll forget about her. He doesn't wonder very long, though. It's not worth considering. His days are stones underfoot: one at a time. And anyway,

the next time she gasps, the next time she rolls her hips, the next time her legs wrap tighter around him,

he gives himself into the moment. Stops thinking altogether.

It's the slowest they've gone all night. Too exhausted, too raw for anything more. His hands are on her body at one point. For a while in the middle he stops, he rests inside her while he kisses her neck, licks her breasts. Then her hands and her legs and her hips and her cunt are urging him on, and he responds because of course he does, and

at one point he's up on his hands, a little harder now, a little faster, but her hands pull him back down and he wraps his arms around her, pushes her hair out of her face, kisses her mouth. Swallows the sounds she makes as he fucks her so firmly, anchors her on every thrust, feels the first flickers of his orgasm rising in him then like a drumbeat, like a vibration too low to be heard, growing to encompass the entire world.

This time he hardly makes a sound when he comes. A single groan, long and low. A single ferocious thrust, riveting her to the bed, held. And then he's tearing breaths out of the air, his entire body moving with the effort; holding every breath jealously in his lungs before snatching the next.

He holds her, too. Jealously: because she is not his, and god help him but he wants her to be.

This is something else. She knows it is, even as she is swallowed by it. Danicka says his name but still does not give him her own, as though if she holds back this one thing she'll be okay, she can get up and walk away from it intact. Maybe that's so. In a year's time, in two years, she will be so hardened and so cold and so distant to things like love or even fondness that the intimation of them will draw her and yet make her recoil. She will make a man his favorite treat and follow him into the shower wearing her clothes and yet set a time limit on how long she can bear to be with him, bear to be his.

Right now she kisses Decker after he steals his own name from her lips, and you'd never think she wasn't his, couldn't be his, can't stand to be his. Her hands roam over his back, and the feel of it makes her groan though she's felt him like this over and over again. Her hips are sore from taking him, every brutal thrust or slow flex. Her cunt is tender from fucking him again and again, worn out from all her own wanting. She can't think of the last time she felt lust like this. She will not feel lust anything like this again for many years.

It isn't just lust.

She knows that.

In the dim light, the idle breeze, they fuck again. Couple. Have sex. Whatever it is. They can't call it making love or mating, it isn't either. Perhaps there's just no name for it. They come together, though. Decker gives up thought; Danicka gives up fear. She is so tired, so aching, and it isn't her body alone but everything else in her. She wants to give herself up entirely but she knows she can't... and she can't let go of that knowledge.

Near the end, though, he pauses, slows, licking her breasts like he hasn't since he first got her on his lap in the car. She sighs, extending, running her hand up the back of his neck to hold and cradle his skull. She moans soft, mutters something in one of those confusing languages he may never have even heard before. But she can't stand for him to be so still for so long; she whimpers, works her cunt on him again, squeezes him, murmurs to him in a way he can't understand, can't help but understand.

He lifts up on his arms and gives it to her. She looks up at him, matches those iron-colored eyes with her mutable ones, tells him how fast, how hard, how soon, with every breath and every flicker in those eyes. But then -- yes -- her hands are caressing up his arms, she's drawing him down, she's whimpering a moan into his mouth, gasping at the end of the kiss, muttering

oh my god

which is all he needs to go faster, to hold her so tightly, to fuck into her deeper, harder, every time.

They come together. Okay. If no other words work, if no other words encompass what they do to each other, if they can't call it making love or mating or anything remotely close, they can call it that, because

they do come together. He's so quiet this time but she feels it, god, she feels it coming over him like the surge of a wave about to rise up and crash down, break on her shores. She shudders under him, squeezes him so hard, tells him in English this time, English so he can hear her and understand:

oh god, that's it
don't stop
please don't stop
please,
Decker,
I'm coming

and each utterance gets higher, louder, more strained until the last syllable shatters with orgasm, clenches through her like a shock, wraps him in electricity and pulls him under water until everything in them is shaking, shaking, caught in a seemingly neverending current. They hold so still, paralyzed from the sheer agony of pleasure this intense. She's gasping, unable to breathe properly, unable to even scream, and she has dug her fingernails into his back, holding on for dear life, while he comes down and her goddamn pussy clenches around him again and again, unwilling to give up

her prize, and her pleasure, both of which are just... him.

Decker breathes so hard on top of her. Holds her so fucking tightly, like any second something might snatch her away and he won't even snarl, he'll just launch at it, tear it to pieces, return to cling to her again, cover her, clutch her close in his arms and teeth. Right now, when she is moaning quietly from the unbearable sensations her body is feeding back to her, Danicka does not mind. She does not want to run from that. She knows she must. Must get up, must wash up, clothe and cover herself, distance herself from him as fast as she can and pretend this never happened, forget his name,

but she doesn't. Can't, yet. He's holding her and she doesn't mind. She doesn't want him to let go.

So: some time passes. Quite a lot more of it than she would have guessed, before he laid her down atop the rather wet towel on the now-damp bedding. She squirms, feeling him inside of her still, softening, and she is in pain, yes, yes she burns and she aches. Perhaps it means something that she tells him, whispering in his ear after the shuddering and the gasping have subsided: "Decker... I'm so sore. Can you just hold me, a bit?"

He stirs at his name -- the third time, the fourth time, he's lost track how many times she's said it now. It sounds good coming from her. He never thought his name could sound good before.

Then she tells him she's hurting. And he moves, he raises his head, his brow furrows and his eyes are devastated. "'m sorry," he mutters, "I was rough on ya," but

she doesn't tell him to get off her. Doesn't tell him he's made her regret this. Regret the whole night. Regret him. She tells him: hold me. And he moves, he rolls off her and onto his back, he pulls her against him. Even that's a little rough. Or at least: fast, unconsidered, he just wants her to be close. His arm wraps around her shoulders. He's heat, heat and flame and rage and blood. He closes his eyes for a moment and opens them again. Looks at the ceiling. The dimensions of this little room, where for tonight at least they can forget, just a little bit, that there's a tomorrow. A world outside.

A little time goes by.

Then: "Where's home for ya, really?"

Third. She's said his name only three times now, but both time she's said it softly. Both times, she's said it like she knows him somehow, like they've known each other forever. She wouldn't need to say his name over and over then, would she? Because he'll hear it again. They'll fuck again. They'll fight and make up and it will be a rough, angry thing, grinding together and swearing, sweating. They'll find each other sleepily under the covers and it'll be slow, it'll be the sort of tender he didn't think existed for him in this world, the sort of tenderness he didn't know existed, period, with her gasping his name and touching him like she was just a few minutes ago, adoring and gentle.

As though anyone would ever think to be gentle with something like him. Why? Why would anyone --

Except it's one last time, that. They both know that. Dawn isn't far off and the horizon is already bleeding with color, too far down for the rest of the sky to notice. One night, she said. Morning, he said. They're going to leave, and the only question around that is who is going to get going and get gone first. It might be unbearable to go down together. They might not be able to walk away, even though

this is the day that he is going to leave New Orleans, because there will be nothing else for him here, nothing worth staying for, nothing except a dangerous and doomed urge to chase down some female into the wetlands owned by Fangs, sniff her out and have her again, take her, keep her,

fuck her quite literally senseless just like he did tonight.

Danicka licks her lips slowly, and her exhale is like a sigh. She's tired. She is worn out. She smiles achingly at his sorry, at his wrecked eyes. Her hand touches his face, her thumb smoothing over the wrinkles in his brow. "You're fine," she tells him, as something like absolution. "Even if we'd been fluffy and sweet every time," she is saying drowsily, her tone more sleepy than lazy, "it's still a lot for one night."

Her head lifts slightly and she kisses him where she's tried to massage the frown away, even though something tells her it is simply going to be etched, permanently, into his features. Her head sinks back to the pillow, covered by a towel, everything around them damp. But: he slides out of her and he rolls onto his side, and she is already following him. She rests her feet against the outside of his calf. She rests her head on his chest, his arm. He holds her. It's fast, maybe even rough, but she doesn't mind. She just exhales, closing her eyes again, relaxing beside his heat.

Time passes and he speaks. Danicka, on the verge of a sleep she wasn't seeking, opens her eyes and looks across the plane of his chest, thoughtful. Quiet. A little dark inside, like a soft shadow in a warm den.

"Why are you asking a thing like that?" she murmurs, her tone almost silenced by the pang beneath it.

Silence again. She looks across his body. The wall is decorated; papered, paneled, wainscoted, something. The furnitures are classical; they're meant to remind one of French Louisiana, of some bygone glory era that may or may not have ever existed. They romanticize the South like that too. Forget the past, the inequalities, the years of beatings and lynchings and resentments and hatred. Forget the underclasses, the blacks, the poor whites. Focus on the soft, pretty things. The chivalry of it all. The gentlemen on their plantations. The ladies in their mansions.

Decker wonders if this girl, this nameless lovely thing with her golden hair and her green eyes, only sees that side of it too. He wonders if she's ever seen blood on asphalt before tonight. If she's ever seen a trailer park before, ever smelled frying oil leaking out of a double-wide, ever saw barbecue smoke curling toward the sky. Ever smelled fish rotting on a hot summer's day, and the uneasy stench of garbage on a sticky summer's night. If she's ever seen houses tilting on their stilts over water and uncertain sandy soil; ever seen fishing boats trawling out on the gulf, and the distortion of afternoon heat over that expanse of water, and the whiteness that overtakes the whole world when it gets so hot that the ocean seems to boil into the air. Hazy white-hot sky. Shimmering white-hot sea.

Maybe. Maybe she's seen some of it. She doesn't seem sheltered, no matter how she looks. She seems ... braver than that. And more damaged. He thinks of her looking at him from the third floor and deciding to come downstairs when anyone else, anyone, would have run the other way. He still doesn't know why.

Decker closes his eyes and opens them again; a slow blink. And exhales.

"Don't know," he says quietly. "Guess I wanna learn jus' one thing 'boutcha. Other'n what it's like to fuck ya."

So far, one of the things Danicka hasn't seen is a trailer park. Or fish rotting on a summer day. Houses on stilts. Fishing boats on the gulf and not some icy bay. And she is forgetting what Decker looks like or feels like with his clothes on, or when he isn't touching her, because it seems all very, very far away right now.

She was afraid of his answer. That it would be exactly what it is: the truth, and a somewhat painful one. He wants to get to know her, he wants to know something of her. At least he didn't ask her name, but she thinks he might if she stays long enough. The smell of her is all over his body, saturating his senses, but the truth is: his scent is on her, too. And every time he breathes, he inhales it. Somewhere between the part of him that is human and the part of him that is pure monster is this animal, sniffing at her and thinking that she is his mate now, because he has taken her so many times and she has been so soft, so willing, so eager for him too.

Looping her arm around him, resting it on his chest, Danicka strokes his scalp on the right side of his head. She scritches him there, thoughtless. "I think that means I should go," Danicka tells him quietly, barely above a whisper.

The muscle beneath her cheek tenses for a second. His chest rises on a sharp breath; then: "You wanna -- "

he cuts himself off. He isn't even sure what he wants to ask. For her to stay a little longer. For her to sleep here with him, at least til daybreak. For her to call him. Write him. Come with him when he leaves. They could travel the roads together. Go somewhere together. See things. Be together.

He knows the answer is no, though. Or at least it should be. Or really he shouldn't ask at all. So he doesn't, closes his mouth, exhales the rest of that breath. Deep in its cage of rib and flesh his heart thumps, slow and hard, the impulse transducing straight to the skin.

In the end he says, "Wanna ride back?"

What she thinks he's going to ask is if she wants to go another round. One more -- no, one more. Again. And though she's tired, and she's sore, and all she wants to do right now is sleep here, wake here, sink into his warmth and stay here, Danicka knows that she would say yes. But that isn't the question he's asking. He's thinking of things that can't be , except:

he could fight them all off. All of them. Anyone who came after her or came after him for poaching kin. He could crack their necks and rip out their bellies. But to tell the truth, that sort of savage passion is best saved for one's true mate and she

is not it, and he

is not meant to kill and die for her. He has a more jealous fate already.

It doesn't matter. He never finishes the question. Decker doesn't ask her to love him again, or stay, or run away with him. He doesn't even ask her name again, or if she'll write to him if he ever settles down someplace for awhile. He just exhales through his nostrils, and Danicka listens to his heartbeat. It sounds separate from him somehow, one more muscle tuned solely to carnage, only resting now, waiting in a warm red darkness for its time to roar. To explode.

She touches his chest so softly then, laying her hand over it. His heartbeat doesn't call to her. It doesn't recognize her, stir to her, as though it knows far better than Decker what he is supposed to do. She doesn't hear her name in its thumping, and this reminds her of that aching, almost-but-not feeling she had even back in his truck, terrifying as it was. She needs that reminder right now.

The bed rustles softly as she lifts her head up, but it isn't to get up and leave. She leans over him, the strands of her wet hair falling across her cheeks but never touching him -- though a drop of cool water hits his temple and rolls downward like a tear -- and kisses his mouth. Rising from it, because it is only a soft, brief thing, she looks him in the eye, something she already knows she should not do. She'll only learn that lesson more firmly as she grows older. Garou, particularly full moons, cannot be trusted not to take it as a challenge. They might beat her to death if she dares.

But she looks at him. What he wants to know of her, she'll take away from him, but he has that at least. Her eyes on his, her scent all over his body and in his truck, the sight and sound of her in the middle of orgasm seared into his memory.

"It's okay," she whispers, her fingertips tracing his scalp above his ear and back down, following the curve. "I could use the time alone."

To think, she adds silently to herself. Or to mourn, another part of her answers.

To think. To mourn. No difference for him, right now. He can't even think of what comes next. The sight of her dressing. Putting clothes on over that golden body of hers. Brushing her hair, touching up her makeup. Walking out that door; the finality of that thump, the sound of her walking away that he'll have to will himself not to listen to. He can't think of all that; it's breaking the heart he wasn't quite aware he had.

"Don't," he says. His lips move; it's hardly voiced at all. "Don't go yet. Stay a l'il longer."

What has she reduced him to.

But that isn't what Danicka is thinking. Maybe another wolf, maybe another modi, maybe any other Fenrir, maybe any battle-hardened creature that has never known a mate or anything close to it but only a warm body, something to make cubs in, something to make food fit for the homid form, something familiar but hardly loved because rage leaves so, so little room for anything else.

Maybe to the kind of wolf Decker may yet become one day, that's all it is. The shadow lord female breaking down a warrior in one night just by opening her legs and whispering his name in his ear while he mounts her. To what end -- maybe to distract him so some enemy of his, some cousin of hers, can tear him open on the battlefield. Break his heart, break his spirit, break him down so he will be easier to beat.

That isn't what he thinks of her. At least, not right now. Not yet, maybe not ever. And that isn't what she's doing to him. She kisses him again, kisses the second don't off his mouth to forestall the other words, to stop him from asking in the first place.

"I can't," she whispers back against his, her lips barely a centimeter from his. "I can't." Her brow falls, touches his. She is trying to breathe normally. Finally she does lift her head, looks at him, and says:

"I would try to love you, but I don't know how." It is the most open she has been with him, the most broken-down, the most vulnerable no matter how many times he's all but held her in his teeth while he fucked her. "I don't," she echoes, like a ghost of herself.

Some part of him is howling now. Won't howl like this again for years. May not ever howl like this again. When all is said and done he's still so young. He's already cynical, already hardened, but he's seen so little. He still thinks New Orleans is a big city. He still thinks it'll never get better than this, except

he might be right, there.

He puts his hand on the side of her face when her brow touches his. He wraps that hand around, cups the back of her neck. He wants to keep her there, wants to kiss her, wants to remind her that a moment ago she was almost asleep, she wanted him to hold her, she was doing all that and he had to go and ask that stupid question. Let's go back, he wants to say. Let's just rewind and erase and do that again.

Knows better, though. Some things are irrevocable. You can't put a face back together after you've broken it. You can't put a moment back together, either.

He lets her go. She lifts her head. His eyes are solemn in the half-light; he needs to protect himself. And so he does. He keeps his mouth shut this time. His hand touches her a little longer, and then drops away.

"Yeah okay," he murmurs. "I git it."

The last thing he should want her to feel in the face of that is gratitude, but she is thankful. Thankful for that gruffness, that hardness to him, and that his hand falls away from her. There will come a day, and a person, whose distance will make her wail inside, keening, whose absence will send her into a self-destructive spiral of trying to forget, trying to make him like everyone else, trying to get over it. When he is gone and she doesn't hear from him for more than a few days, she will not be able to stop herself from walking in a fog, feeling numb, trying to remember that he would not want her to be so dead inside. There's going to be a man who protects himself for the longest time from her, and she

will not be able to stand it.

But this isn't him. He withdraws, holding his mouth closed, and he lets go of her, and all -- no, not all, but most of what she feels is gratitude that he is releasing her. Danicka exhales a sigh and gives his brow a quick, firm kiss, then pulls away before she changes her mind. Before he asks her again to stay. She sweeps away, a lithe, too-skinny thing in pale gold, and here's another surprise she's hiding -- she opens her little purse from the ground where she dropped it and out comes a pair of underwear. Held open, stepped into, and there's something intoxicatingly graceful about how quickly, how unabashedly she gets dressed again. Her dress, to be blunt, smells a little like sex as she pulls that on, too.

She's going to sneak into the plantation right at dawn and shower. She won't sleep. It won't be a seamless lie but it will be close enough. She doesn't know that one of them, already, waits up for her to make sure she gets home safely. He won't sleep, either. He'll know she's a liar and will eventually love her anyway and she

won't have any idea how to love him back. She won't even try. She won't even want to.

Especially after this.

In moments, in mere seconds really, Danicka is fastening up the hooks on the front of her dress. She is not looking at him, fondly or otherwise. What could she say, words or eyes? There's nothing. You can't put a moment back together.

Left alone on the bed, Decker watches. For a while he lays there; watches as she produces fresh underwear out of her purse, watches as she steps into it. Maybe he should be angry. She's so well prepared. If it hadn't been him, would it have been someone else? Maybe he should be jealous, but he doesn't have a right. Maybe he can be optimistic instead: if it had been someone else, it wouldn't have been like this.

Truth is he doesn't think of any of that. He watches her; he's hollow inside. He sits up when she reaches for her dress. He scuffs his rough palm over those bristles he calls hair. She's letting the hem of her dress cascade down to her thighs when he reaches for the comforters with thoughtless fingers, drags them over his groin. Some vague attempt at modesty, that. It suits him ill. He's an animal; he shouldn't fear nakedness. But then, it's not physical nudity he fears. It's not that, that he wants protection again.

There are six clasps on her dress. He remembers her guiding his hand there, telling him. He remember counting them instinctively in his mind. One, two, three. Four, five. Six.

"Hey," he says; it's a soft sort of call. Says it before she can turn to walk out. Doesn't matter if she looks at him or not now; he says it anyway: " 'm glad we had this much."

She took them off before she went downstairs. A hundred years ago at that party; that's what happened after he held that twenty up to her and she saw a glimpse of him under his hood.

Decker doesn't know that. He won't ever. She honestly won't even remember that ten years from now, or five. But it's a detail: she was wearing them, and then he offered her a cut of the spoils, and the next thing they knew she was downstairs offering him a beer and the breeze was coiling up her skirt against her cunt, no matter what else she said or did.

They don't talk. She gets dressed, far too quickly, and when he moves she does glance over at him but only for a second. She's a predator, too, all humans are. Not all of them have Garou blood in their veins, though, pure and thundering. But he isn't coming for her. She doesn't meet his eyes while he covers himself. One, two, three. Four, five. Six.

Danicka walks across the room to where she left her shoes when she got up from the bed to go shower. They're at the door of the bathroom, because she went from getting nailed on that bed still wearing them to passing out to holding the doorjamb while she unstrapped them. She does it again: holds the edge of the doorframe, stepping into her shoes, lifting them one at a time to clasp them around her ankles. She turns afterward, her back to him and her face to the mirror. She can see him, vaguely, behind her on the bed. Her fingers comb through her hair, arrange it a little so that as it dries completely it won't look like an utter wreck. Danicka lets her eyes travel to his foot sticking out past the blankets, his hand resting atop them where they cover his cock.

It's time to go. And she has no idea how to leave. So when she turns, it is slow and a little uncertain. He sees her and he calls to her, quiet though. Danicka's eyes come up quick, track to him instantly, somewhere between hopeful and dreading the sound of his voice again. She exhales, looking at him; already trapped there. Encased in stone.

He's glad. This much. At least there's that. And she closes her mouth after that long exhaled breath and licks her lips. She nods. But she doesn't say anything, which is cruel and life-ruining and heartbreaking. Her bag, little thing that it is, is hanging from her wrist. She turns to go, and now she's going quickly, or at least briskly, to get out before she goes back to the bed and climbs onto it and into his arms and lets him pull her clothes off again, right off like she didn't just put them on, and keep her here until the police end up knocking on the door.

Slender gold hand touches cold steel handle. She pauses, and looks past her shoulder, but not all the way over at him. He can see her profile. "My name's Dani ka," she tells him, the last syllable a slur of warmth and he probably couldn't spell her name if he tried all night to figure it out, but he has the sound of it.

"I'm glad, too," she adds in a rush, so quick it might seem insincere if he didn't know, if he hadn't been inside her, seen the way she looked when she came around him, seen the way she looked at him when she said she would try, she would, if only she knew how. The door handle twists, and she opens it enough to slip out, little more. She does it as fast as she can. She does not look at him again. And outside the room, she walks as fast as she can to the stairs without running.

She doesn't see his reaction to her name. She's not looking; she doesn't want to see. She gives him this much, a name and a confession, and then she flees the crime scene where she broke his heart, killed his innocence.

Only that's not true. He only has a little innocence left. Most of it was stripped away by the years that came before; his own harrowing and miserable little history. What remains is gasping, wheezing, frail, but -- if anything she's helped him keep it. She's given him something, just enough, that he can take that part of himself and fold it away. Hide it, but protect it also. Keep it somewhere so deep inside that no one, not even the men and women he will call packmates, not even the woman he will call mate, will know about it.

No one will ever know. No one will know he has a little bit of innocence left. No one will know once upon a time there was a shadow lord, and she was almost.

Her name is Danicka. He has no talent with his tongue. He has good ears, though. He'll remember that name; he'll never say it out loud because he can't. But he'll remember it, every syllable, every sound. The way it sounded coming off her tongue. The way his name sounded, coming off her tongue.

The door doesn't thump shut after all. It clicks softly. Then he is alone. He can hear her through the doors, but he does as he promised himself. He doesn't listen. Dawn is beginning to touch the sky, and he knows he's leaving New Orleans today. Later. When he lays back down he can still smell her on the sheets, and the things they did to each other. He's not quite sure if it's a comfort or a torture. It doesn't matter; he's not coming back here. Not this hotel, not this neighborhood, not this city.

He sleeps a few hours. Maid banging on the door wakes him. Management wants him out of here; his rage has the neighbors complaining. The maid doesn't relish the task. He yells for her to come back later and she's glad to go away, but he's awake then, his eyes gritty, his body sore. Nothing a shift wouldn't take care of, but -- he doesn't. He wants to carry that with him too. It's a memory, etched into his bones.

At the sink he rinses his mouth, splashes water on his face. No more. He gets dressed in last night's clothes, and that smells like her too, smells like them, smells like sex. He finds those two little keycards and later in the lobby he drops them on the front desk without a word. People move out of his way wherever he goes. He's starving, he's exhausted, he's stripped bare: they recognize it. Feel his wildness, his danger, his strain in their marrow.

When he's gone the Lafayette feels a little smaller, a little dimmer. When she left, his life felt much the same way.

Danicka

Neither of them are meant to stay here for long. He has a war he will end up fighting, a pack to find and lose, a woman to love and drift away from when the universe lays its heavy hand on him and reminds him that this is not what he is for. Not in this lifetime. Perhaps not in any. Perhaps death is his only intersection with the mate of his soul, the other nebulous, not-human not-wolf spirit that is made of the same ephemera as his own. Perhaps it's only in the homelands that they ever find each other. Perhaps his own death, over and over again through the ages, is the price he pays for that reunion.

And Danicka is not meant to be with him, be his, live like this. Her soul is already bound, tied by a thin red string from heart to heart. She will know her mate when they find each other. Nothing, not even themselves, will keep them from one another.

Here and now, though, there is something else. And it's good. It's unlike anything before it and, truth be told, it is unlike anything that will come after it. She doesn't know if she'll remember him forever. She has no tokens; she will not drive this truck around for years. All she has is his name, which she may forget. But everything else, she'll remember. Even if she lets so many other people's faces and bodies and the memories of how they made her feel slip through her fingers, she will find this one hard to completely let go of.

She will remember it, in a brief flash, when she climbs onto another Ahroun she will meet, when she decides she wants painfully to kiss him, not because he's kissed her first or because she thinks she has to or because he's too stupid to realize she doesn't want it. She'll meet him in the air, his mouth eating at hers, and find something there that she was looking for tonight. She'll realize then, for the first time, what she was looking for, what she gave up on ever finding, what she has discovered. It will pull a wracked, agonized sound from her as she recognizes him, and understands what it means.

He will nearly frenzy as that recognition, that understanding, surges through him, too. He will tell her she should go.

And she will stay.

They want to go again. Minutes, merely, after the first time. She still aches from it, a sweet, hot pain that rakes pleasure through her when Decker comes back down with her. He's hard already again. They're eighteen years old; of course he's already hard again, wanting again, and it's easier for him to push into her this time. When he first follows her back down to the seat she is touching his head and his neck, kissing his mouth with the end of that low, soft yeah she answered him with. It slips apart. His hips are already flexing, slow and strong, to move into her. She tenses ever so briefly when he kisses her neck, but it falls apart in a shudder that goes all the way through her.

It's so much slower this time, and she didn't expect that, yet somehow suddenly isn't surprised by it. Her hand rubs aimlessly at the back of his neck, the slope of his skull, fingertips massaging his scalp, at least for awhile. They're going slow. He's kissing her neck and she's all but purring under him with soft little moans behind her lips, winding her hips as the muscles in his back roll and bunch and flow with every thrust. He strokes into her, hits a certain spot, makes her let out a gasp, makes her stare up at him when he rises onto his arms, her eyes heavy-lidded with lust. Her gaze is almost predatory, though

not quite.

His eyes close and she communicates to him through her hands and thighs. He can hear her breathing quicken as a bit of cool air from the cracked window rolls over his back. She arches, riding up on him, taking him deeper with a groan, and he knows what to do. He answers: faster now, harder, that's it, that's what this female is asking for now, and he knows he's right because when he folds over her again and starts giving her that firm, heady fuck, she clenches on him and starts giving him those whimpers, just like before. She holds onto the door like before, not just to have something to grab onto but to use it as leverage while she fucks him back. God, he says, fuck, yes, and she's the one who's quiet now, wordless, just panting, moaning when he does it just like that.

She doesn't think he would have balked at fucking atop his truck hood, or in the bed, or on the ground. She's pretty sure the more raw, the more filthy, the more brutal, the better. But somehow they end up doing this instead. He has his arms between her and the uncomfortable vinyl, the broken springs. She leans up to kiss him again, even though she knows she's not going to find what she's really looking for, but she still finds... something... there. So she kisses him, arms wrapped around him, and he shudders, moaning into her mouth as his hands move onto her hips, her thighs, lifting her on him, fucking her faster, firmer now, each thrust a heavy drive of his cock into her.

This time: she comes moaning, writhing, her hips working achingly on him, wringing her orgasm out of him. This time, he shudders over her, pushing her back down, grinding into her, panting, sweating, his mouth on her shoulder though he's not daring to take her in his teeth,

mark her as his mate,

when she isn't.

Danicka is shaking afterward, from sheer exertion, her skin wet with sweat. Her thighs are slipping against his flank, though she holds onto him anyway. She doesn't swear or curse anything this time; she just tries raggedly to breathe, feeling dizzy again. It's been a long time since she ate. It's been beer and a single hit off Decker's joint and nothing else for god knows how many hours at this point. She keeps her eyes closed because the interior of his truck is swirling around her. She holds onto him, anchoring herself right there, waiting for the shudders to stop going through her. She thinks, as destroyed as she is, that she still wants more, even though the mere thought of it makes her quiver, makes her feel like she's going to faint.

Gradually, her cunt stops clenching on him. His cock stops throbbing and starts to soften, but he's still within her. He doesn't pull out and move away, though. Not as quick this time. That frightens her a little, and it hurts too, and she can't speak as to why. She just shivers, though she can't possibly be cold when she's hot to the touch. He draws up on his elbows but even then he doesn't leave her just yet, and she has her eyes closed, her head tilted back and a bit to the side, still trying to catch her breath. That short, razor-sliced hair is stuck to her cheeks and the nape her neck with sweat, turned dark from moisture.

A shadow passes over her eyelids. She senses him coming closer, feels the heat of him, the rage, hears the creak of the vinyl. She doesn't open her eyes. He... kisses her again, nothing ravenous or murderous about it this time. It's almost soft. That's partly because it doesn't last very long. She feels something she can't name when he kisses her like that and so her lips brush over his, gentle but not inviting a deeper connection. Instead, she nuzzles him. Her face rubs against the side of his, openly animal, as though she can see him like this even with her eyes closed, know him like this even if she can't bear to kiss him again. Not right now. Not like this, when he's still buried inside of her and she's trying to understand why and trying to remember her name.

Her thighs tremble around him, then relax, and she lets her legs unwind slowly from him. Her head thumps lightly on the seat. She is still breathing harder than usual, and it takes awhile for her to be willing to open her eyes, looking up at him. Gray eyes. She thinks she noticed that before but not quite so starkly. She looks at him, and her own eyes are lighter for a moment, murky still but flecked with amber and gold among the varying shades of green. She looks so serious for a moment, but never once does she dare to try and voice what she's thinking, how she's feeling.

She comes up with this instead, and though she knows it's a bad idea it only makes her want it more:

"I wanna keep fucking you," she whispers. "And if you take me to a hotel I'll pay, and we can get some food with that twenty, and get high and fuck til sunup." Her breath coils lightly against his jawline. "I have to shower before I go back to th --" she pauses there, and her sentence hitches just so, "-- home, anyway."

Decker never knew it could be like this. He never knew he could be like this. Capable of something more than brutality. Capable of something more than violence. Capable of something like gentleness, tenderness; capable of feeling like this.

And he doesn't know -- will not know, not in this life and perhaps not in any -- how much better it could be. Years from now there will be another blonde, another lean, lovely creature with a beauty that could slice him open, and his soul might awaken again to wonder,

is it you?

and it may be and it may not be but either which way he won't allow himself to find out. Because she is forbidden -- though that didn't stop him tonight -- and because by then he will have found another -- though that only stops him because he allows it to -- and because, most fundamentally, he is not built for this. He is quite literally not made for this. He is, on some deepdown level, afraid of this. What it has done to him. What it could do to him. He is made for war. For violence and for brutality. It is in every line of his body. Every heavy arch of bone, every thick cord of muscle. War could never destroy him, but anything else could break him so easily.

I am the war, he said once -- will say, one day. It is such an arrogant thing to say, but then it's not arrogance if it's the truth, and the truth is always, in the end, such a cold and bitter thing.

He kisses her. She nuzzles him. He understands this, too, and will not try to kiss her again.

A little later they look at each other silently. The vicious thug that battered another man's face to hamburger doesn't seem to be here right now. The demanding, seductive bitch that pushed him back and told him don't you dare doesn't seem to be either. They are very close to the surface; they are very close to seeing one another clearly, far too clearly.

She has a very bad idea. His brow flickers -- not quite a frown before it's gone. He's more astute than he looks. He knows in that one sentence, that one half-spoken word, that she's not really from around here either. This isn't home for her.

He lowers his face to hers, rubs his rough jaw over her temple. And maybe there's something more than viciousness and savagery in him after all, something like generosity, because he tells her this, gives her this in return:

" 'm leavin' N'awlins come mornin'. Don't think ya'll see me again."

That makes him a little sad as he says it. Relieved too, though. He grips the seat under her to get purchase, pushes himself up. Her dress is lying atop his clothes, so he hands that to her before threading his ankles back into his jeans.

"Kin split the bill fer tha room though," he adds. It's agreement of a sort, complicity in her very bad idea. Lifts his hips, slides the pants on, buttons them, "Give you a ride back when we's done. Here. Switch places."

And they do, his hands on her waist helping her over him. He starts the engine while she finishes doing up her dress. His shirt's on the floor still, and he doesn't seem to care if she steps on it. The old truck lurches and wobbles through its first gear, churns laboriously up the slope and back onto the road.

They kiss, though barely and softly. She nuzzles him, rougher and in a way just as intimate. Decker, rolling this suggestion over in his mind, nuzzles her back. She closes her eyes with it, feeling a hothouse flower unfurl in the middle of her chest. Yes, she thinks absently, this is something of what it should be like.

The thought is gone again, forgotten, before she can do anything with it. She runs from it, and so her eyes are open when he speaks. He's leaving tomorrow morning -- he doesn't say why, it sounds like it was always planned like that -- and she just nods. She whispers, forgivingly: "That's okay."

His arms move and she can see every muscle in him, divine the future by his body, and so as he is pushing himself up and away and out of her, she is taking a deep breath, exhaling, propping herself up on her elbows, sliding back away from him. She's still watching him, wondering about his answer. He hands her dress to her and she huffs a laugh; she hardly wants to put it on, but she does, pulling it quickly over her head and down, suddenly dressed again, doing up the clasps one two three fourfivesix. She's still sweaty. She still looks...well.

Freshly and thoroughly well-fucked.

But she feels odd, suddenly, in clothes, and doesn't like it, and yet at the same time she's grateful to have that boundary, those coverings. She flicks her eyes at him saying they can split the bill, and that's an answer. She doesn't care, honestly, who pays for what. She looks down his form, watching him fastening up his pants. Her eyes draw back slowly to his face. She doesn't answer that offer. Doesn't even nod.

Lifted, she weighs almost nothing. She sits back on the passenger side, suddenly starkly aware of how few words they've even said to each other outside of sex, and even within sex. She searches for her shoes while he starts up the truck, leaning over, strapping them onto her ankles, her short hair tucked just barely behind her ears, staying there only because she's still sweaty.

"There's a place on Saint Charles called the Lafayette," she murmurs, and he can't hear her over the truck's engine, so she repeats it louder. "Take me there."

There's still a bit of condensation on the glass. He scrubs the windshield off with the side of his fist as they get underway. Rolls his window down entirely, cocks his elbow up on the frame once he hits cruising gear. There are only four gears total on a transmission this old; it's nothing like the new cars, the one with their six close-ratio gears and their high-revving engines, all that. He looks almost stereotypically, all-american-ly trashy: white, blond, barechested, in an ancient truck. If she's keeping a mental scrapbook of her conquests, she can file this one under Trailer Trash, southern variety.

He doesn't think she's keeping a mental scrapbook, though. She doesn't seem the type. He's not either, despite how he came on to her. If it could even be called coming on to her. There wasn't even a one-liner, christ.

"What?" he says, first time she says it. Then she repeats it and he just nods, even though he's thinking to himself that the Lafayette sounds fuckin' expensive. Take me there, she said, and for some reason that makes him look at her. For just a second he wishes he could keep her.

He doesn't talk on the way over either. He doesn't share that once upon a time he wanted to drive eighteen-wheelers. He doesn't tell her he only decided to leave New Orleans half an hour ago, after the first time she made him come like that. He doesn't tell her why he was walking down that street he was walking down when she tipped that bottle over the edge; he doesn't ask her what she was doing there, either, or if she planned on going home with someone tonight. Or at least to a motel.

She knows his name, and very little else about him. He doesn't even have that. They do know each other in the most intimate way possible, though. So there's that.

The lights of New Orleans rise up, swallow them. It's the biggest city Decker's been to so far, but that's not saying much because before this there was Biloxi, and before Biloxi was that asscrack of a Sept up in deep country 'Bama, and before that was Mobile's trashy outskirts for the entirety of his life. He's still a little dazzled every time he sees New Orleans. Canal Street. Bourbon Street. French Quarter, Garden District, Central City. The lights, the neon, the jazz, the moon, the river, the swamps, the heat, the cemeteries. He can't even imagine what New York City is like right now, or Chicago, or all the places he's yet to go.

He finds his way to the Lafayette. If he's uncertain of himself it shows only in the way his hands keep gripping the steering wheel, even after he's parked and leaned forward to get a look at the building. It's not until she starts trying to get out that he remembers, and remembering, cranks the window up, hops out of the cab, circles around. Effort in the form of stark muscles, a twitch of lip: he gets that uncooperative passenger-side door open, and while she gets out he reaches in to grab his hoodie, which he pulls on like a shirt. The shirt itself stays on the floorboards. While she's walking into the lobby he lags behind a couple steps, thumbing through the money in his wallet to see if he had enough.

They're quite a couple standing at reception. There's no doubt whatsoever in anyone's mind that these two barely-legals are here to fuck each other's brains out. No other explanation for their lack of luggage, their lack of reservations, the way the both of them frankly look like they've been through a round or two already. The only question that remains is why the fuck a nice girl like her, or at least a pretty, well-dressed girl like her is with someone like him. He looks a little familiar somehow; they try to remember if they've seen his face on a wanted poster or something.

Decker, shirtless, rubbing his bare arm over the interior of the windshield to smear the steam away, makes Danicka laugh softly for no reason. It's a breathless sound, hidden behind her fingers, and her eyes seem to twinkle slightly. It reminds her of all this, and she is not so much aghast at herself as delighted by the reminder. She leans against the passenger side door, rolling down the window with heavy cranks, then tips her head out, letting the breeze dry her short hair. She looks so lazy, so replete.

She doesn't talk, either. The silence is not so much comfortable or companionable as simply... independent. He stays with his thoughts. She inhabits hers, or lack thereof. The truth is, she's not thinking about him, or wondering about him. She's curious but it's sated. She knows something of him now. She is starting to want that shower, and want a hot meal, so her thoughts wander, but she think that, at least a little bit, she knows him now.

The most they could ever be is vague friends, but she thinks that would be awkward. They could try something else and she knows it won't work. She thinks in due time she'd hate him, and he'd hate her. She wonders where she got so much precognition that she thinks she knows anything at all. Her eyes close. She smells the night air as they head back towards New Orleans proper.

"Oh!" she says, suddenly, and tells him to stop for burgers. They're cheap. Drive-through. Trailer trash, southern variety, with a girl in gold beside him. She wasn't kidding about being hungry: red meat, carbohydrates, fat -- she digs in before they even leave the drive-through; other than that 'oh' and telling him what she wants so he can order at the speaker, her only words to Decker are to ask him if he wants his now,

that is,

if he hasn't already reached in the bag and started eating.

The Layfayette looks more expensive than it is. The rooms have lavish upholstery and colorful wallpaper and four-poster beds, sitting areas with plush chairs, wetbars, televisions. Surely he sees it and thinks about dragging her ass to a Red Roof Inn or Super 8, what the hell is she thinking, but he doesn't. He seems uncertain and she knows that but she simplifies it down to the cost. She doesn't ask him if he's okay. The city is only just beginning to wind down; it's summer. People are drifting into the hotel, back to their rooms.

Danicka is slower to get out of the the truck when Decker parks it. She rolls up the window with less ease and pulls on the handles, but it's stuck from the inside and she slams her full weight -- such as it is -- against it. Decker gets there and opens it instead. She looks at him, a foot above him on the height of the truck, and informs him: "I think I bruised my shoulder."

She hops down, purse slung over her wrist, and tugs her skirt down a little. The dress is filthy; she wonders a little why she didn't make him wear a condom just for practicality even if she's on the pill, even if there's nothing he can give to her or get from her. She knows that; still, she wonders why she went through with it. All she can come up with is: I wanted him so badly, and she is a little uncomfortable with the words themselves.

Her heels clip on the lobby floor; his boots land like the footsteps of a beast, slow and heavy and deliberate. He's slightly behind her, and she doesn't glance back at him. She isn't afraid he's going to slip out of here, run, leave her. She can't even imagine him doing something like that. He looms over the counter when they get to reception, even if he isn't a giant, and the sweat is still drying on them. They glisten with it. Her hair is short enough that its tousling looks intentional, but he's obviously not wearing a shirt under his hoodie. A few people look at him, stare at him, at her, and a couple of them whisper when they think they're out of earshot.

Danicka hands over a card and receives two in return. She palms them, turning away from the counter and offering no explanation to Decker, though he had his wallet and though he said he'd pay His Share or something. She wonders, as they walk toward the stairs -- it's not the most handicapped-friendly hotel in the city -- if she imagined the strange, heartbroken closeness in the truck, if they've broken something, if this is a really stupid idea, but

she wants to shower. Maybe needs to. And when she thinks of showering she thinks of him with her, naked with her again, bending over her on the bed, and she remembers sharply why they're here.

On the way back into town she hangs her head out the window. He's an asshole so some line about how she looks like a hound-dog comes to mind, but then he doesn't say it after all. She doesn't look anything like a dog. She looks wild, and lazy. She looks like summer the way he remembers them, a shimmering heat over a flat gulf of mexico, waters so clear and pale you could walk out a mile and only be waist-deep. She feels like home, he realizes, but it's not his home. Still makes him think of it, though.

They get burgers. They start eating in the car, Decker holding his one-handed, spilling little bits of lettuce when he has to reach down to shift gears. Red meat, carbs, fat. Dripping ketchup onto his bare skin. Licking sauce off his knuckles. There's an odd, animal sensuality to the way he eats; he enjoys every bite.

She bangs her shoulder trying to get out. He frowns at her through the glass. She says she bruised her shoulder and he glances at that shoulder instantly, brow furrowing all over again. Wants to put his hand over her skin, wants to cover her shoulder with his palm, but in the end he just shrugs.

" 's whatcha git," he says. He doesn't know how close this comes to her favorite-thing-ever to say to Lizzy.

Later on in the lobby people whisper when they think they're out of earshot, but they're not. Decker has freakishly good ears. He didn't just hear the bottle break, way back at the beginning of all this. He heard the scuff of her shoes coming back down, heard the tiny ping! of her toe against the bottle that sent it whipping down in the first place. He hears the whispers, too, and one of them makes him stop in his tracks, makes him turn and pin the whisperer with a stare like a force of nature. Like a crack of thunder. Oh, there's silence then. He makes people wonder if they're going to die tonight.

Another girl might put her arm around his bicep and pull him onward, baby let's go, baby don't. Danicka probably doesn't, and anyway, when the whispering goes silent Decker holds that stare another five heartbeats or six, and then he turns himself. It's a heavy, shoulder-led motion. He looks dangerous, coiled and caged, and he is. They disappear into the stairwell...

...and come out on the third floor, where the carpet is old but clean, at least, and thick. They walk to the door. She paid for this room, and somewhere in the back of his head he's trying to figure out how he can pay her back without making it seem like he's paying for the sex. She doesn't care who pays, but he does. He doesn't want to take advantage. He sure as hell doesn't want to be kept.

He waits for her to slide her keycard through. He looks at it intently, and maybe she figures out he's never seen or used such a thing before. How is that even possible? It's 2002. When the door clicks open he reaches over her to push it wide, follows her in. They have a couple burgers left and he sets the bag down somewhere, looking around the room as he does so, kicking his boots off and pulling his hoodie over his head. Drops it over one of those old-fashioned-looking chairs. He wouldn't know style and century if his life depended on it.

Maybe she heads for the shower. He whisks the curtains open, opens a window to the street, lets the night in. Then he drops onto a corner of the bed and turns the TV on. It's not that he wants to watch anything. It's habit; this is just what you do when you get someplace that looks vaguely like a home. Some made-for-TV movie plays. He watches her instead.

Not a hound-dog. Maybe a bitch in heat, the way she came at him, came down over him, licked his cock and then sat atop it, fucked it, sweating and moaning over him like he was doing something horrible to her, putting her through some unspeakable torment. Shameless. Wanton. She's not like any Shadow Lord he's ever smelled before.

Danicka still doesn't know -- and doesn't guess at -- his tribe. She knows his moon like it's in her own blood, though. She knew that as soon as she walked out the front doors and he named her for what she is. It explained his eyes. The pulse around him, the red corona. Ahroun. Full Moon. She doesn't care about his tribe right now. She thinks it can only complicate matters if she knows, make her think more about what she's doing, who might find out, what will happen to her then.

She doesn't want to think about it. She wants to be lazy, reckless, wild. She wants to fuck him senseless, fuck him til he can't bear to move. She wants him to fuck her back, fuck her brains out, turn her into lust itself -- til they are paragons, til they are gods.

A dollop of ketchup hits his skin. She watches it and doesn't think about offering him a napkin. She doesn't think about leaning over and licking it off just to feel the ridges of his abdomen against her tongue. She thinks: it looks like blood.

Her shoulder isn't bruised. He looks at it, frowning as though in deep thought. She wants to think it's an angry frown but she can tell it isn't. What she sees in that furrowed brow is ...concern, almost. Protectiveness. The sort of thing that, given enough time and enough rage, would make him not cover her body with his own but tear the door from its hinges, shred the metal with his claws, hurt the thing that hurt her in an absolute frenzy. It chills her a little, seeing that look in his eyes, as fleeting as it is.

Decker shrugs. Tells her that's what she gits. She huffs a laugh again, breathily. "Prick," she calls him as she hops down, and there's a strange amusement and fondness in it, as though she's... pleased.

In the lobby, his presence reminds these late-night partiers, these whisperers, anyone staring at her that she is ignoring, of the truth all those artists tried to paint into reality:

remember that you must die.

Danicka does touch his arm. He's still staring at...whoever. His nostrils have a flare to them. She doesn't call him baby and she doesn't pull him away. The interior of his hoodie's sleeve touches his skin with the pressure of her hand, and whenever he turns around again, she's looking at him. There isn't curiosity in her eyes then, or worry, or anything like that; she only seems to understand.

She seems to say: fuck them.

Up the stairs they go, elegant and winding at first in the lobby itself and then narrowing, branching off. They come to the third floor, and her steps are straight and familiar. The keycard in the door goes in, lights up, comes out. Decker stares. Danicka doesn't ask. He swings the door wide as though he takes up more space than the room can bear, so he is opening up that passageway to allow anything hiding inside to run, run before he settles in.

Four walls, even if most of those are shared with other people, is very different from the cab of a hulking Ford. There's a window overlooking that bright city that shocks him so; the curtains are spread open and wide as soon as Decker touches them, but they're on the third floor they are not so far from the street. She was on the third floor when he met her, staring down at him, and even from up there she could see his face.

He crosses the room. She stands near the middle of it. And:

Danicka strips. She gets out of her dress almost as soon as the door is closed, unhooking the front and peeling it off, dropping it to the side. She's still wearing her heels, the black straps cutting across her ankles. She is in front of that window, naked as she was when she undressed for him and he started jerking off at the sight of her. Running her hand through her hair, she thinks idly that she'd like to see that again.

It makes her touch herself. Standing there not too far from the window, while he's dropping onto the edge of the bed with its rather nice, soft linens, turning on the television, the hand that isn't sliding down from her hair to the back of her neck is slipping between her legs, rubbing at herself. She makes a soft sound, a low gasp, a release of tension in her voice that unfolds, returns, becomes a sigh.

Her hand smooths down her inner thigh, and she opens her eyes, looking over at him like she had forgotten he was there. She hadn't. She couldn't.

Small and red, her tongue slips over her lips. "Your cum dried on my inner thighs," she says, and she is telling him something or describing it to him. She walks over to him. "I feel filthy."

Saying that, she lowers herself onto his lap, the lines of the bed too far back to hold her knees and so all of her weight rests on his body, forces him to hold her up or pull her closer, drag her against him. There's a drugged look in her eyes. What she doesn't have to tell him is that as fucked and filthy as she is, she likes it. She likes it because of the sex. She likes it because of the filth, the wrongness, the fact that she should be disgusted and tired and probably getting out of here, but she isn't.

So. He doesn't turn the TV on after all. He opens the window and he picks the remote up from the little end table under that window. Turns around. Truth is he knows she's naked even before he turns. He could hear her taking her dress up. Still has to see for himself, though, and when he sees

he lets that remote slip from his hand, lets it thump to the floor. It doesn't matter.

He sits on the bed. They've both stripped down. He just has a little more left to go. He starts on it without thinking, grabbing his belt and pulling it tight to loosen the catch; letting it slip apart with a dim clank. He wears a lot of metal. His boots have steel toes. His belt, which is cheap canvas and not leather at all, has a steel buckle. His wallet has a chain. No metal in his body though. No braces on his teeth, no rings in his ears or his nose or his eyebrows or his cock. Nothing but flesh and bone and blood, hard and perfect.

He opens his pants, he pushes his boxers down and he gets his cock out without a word. She's touching herself and he wants to die. He could die tonight and be okay with that, he thinks. He could walk out of here tomorrow and die a warrior's death and

that would be just fine.

His mouth is on her body before she lowers herself to his lap. Is on her when she tells him what a mess he's made of her: sucking at the soft skin just beneath her diaphragm, is biting so dangerously, so very gently, at the tips of her breasts. She sinks down on his lap and he has to stop stroking his cock. He grabs her without an ounce of hesitation, his big hands covering her ass, his biceps flexing to haul her a sliding six inches forward to slam against him. His body feels like a brick wall. His cock feels like a bar of iron, caught between her thighs, his stomach. He forgets that he wasn't going to try to kiss her again; he kisses her furiously, burningly, silently.

One could make a slack-jawed yokel joke. Southern boy in a sort-of fancy hotel with a certainly fancy girl that he's not supposed to talk to, much less fuck til they're both sweat-drenched. And even if he fucks her, he's not supposed to look down his cock going into her and swear fuck, yes. He's not supposed to do things like hold her by the hair while she bobs over his lap, sucking him deep, wet and tight like he's never had before. If he fucks a girl like this, it's supposed to be slow and sweet and empty, hollowed out from all the tenderness they try to put into it. Dropping the remote from a limp hand when he sees her naked, tearing his belt open, yanking his pants down, getting his cock out to jerk it off while he looks at her -- one could say something about that.

Danicka says something about that. She felt her heart beating faster when he went for his belt, hoping to see him stroke it again like before. She stays just past his arm's reach for a moment too long then, and this is really the first time she sees -- notices -- the scar. It was there before but they were in the dark. He has no other scars. He has no piercings, no tattoos. Nor does she, but for tiny dots of holes in her ears where tonight, at least, she's not wearing earrings. Maybe she took them off at that party. Maybe they're in that little bag of hers. Anyway: the holes are there but the jewelry isn't. They are both... perfect.

"That's it," she whispers, and he could die tomorrow. Touching himself, stroking it, holding it in his grip, and she encourages him, her eyes heavy and dark and staring. Hungry. He could die tomorrow and she'd never see him again anyway. But he won't die. He won't die for a very long time. Maybe never. Maybe not til the end of the world, the end of all of them.

Gaia is not so merciful as to let him die tomorrow.

That holding-back, that tease of her body so near, doesn't last long. An eyeblink, because any longer and he'll lunge at her, she can feel it. He'll bear her down to the floor and have her there if she teases him. She lies to herself, says: I don't want that, though the truth is that she wouldn't mind. She'd understand.

Regardless: she comes to him, sinks onto him, and he grabs at her anyway, sucks at her, uses his teeth. Danicka shudders at the feel of them scraping over her breast. Moans come so easily to her now, he elicits them so quickly, when he holds her by her ass and pulls her hard against him. Air rushes out of her lips. She looks at him, belly to his belly, breasts to his chest now, her skin ignited again. For a moment she's motionless, and then she's rubbing herself a little -- just a little -- against his cock where it's trapped between them. He kisses her, and really: she doesn't mind. Just not then, that moment when he was lingering inside of her, looking at her like he was, after the second time when it was... different. She couldn't bear it then.

Danicka realizes what they are both wary of, dancing around and away from: they could break each other's hearts. Would have to, eventually. And she has never had her heart broken by anyone but her own family, her own mother, who betrayed her in so many ways: by trying to care for her when she couldn't, by failing to protect her from her own rage, by dying, how dare she do a thing like that.

Danicka's heart has never been broken. But he could do it. She knows this when he kisses her again, and she can't stop kissing him anyway. Instead she kisses him harder, eats at his mouth, pressing him backward with it. How dare he.

It's quite sudden, gasping, when she breaks that kiss, rearing back from it, her hand holding the back of his neck. Their mouths are wet.

"Put me on the bed," she says, her voice so quiet and so iron-hard, so full of demand that it has to be need. "Fuck me from behind."

Decker's heart has never been broken. Despite the history, the damage, the trauma, the past - it has never been broken. It will never be broken. Not by finding the woman he will love for years of his life and remain true to for even longer. Not by losing that woman. Not by the splintering of his pack. Not by feeling every last one of his packmates fall away from him to die alone in the night. But that's a tragedy all its own: to have a heart so hardened, so armored, that it does not remember how to break.

He isn't aware of that tragedy yet. He isn't aware of so much, yet. But he is aware of this, with a stark simplicity that transcends painfulness: he is meant to be alone. That is something he will forget for a time. And then remember again.

It's quite sudden, when they come together. It's quite sudden when he eats at her mouth, and she presses him down. His back hits the bedspread. He loses track of gravity. He is about to turn her under him when she pulls back. He looks at her, panting, and it takes a moment for her words to penetrate.

Then they hit. And he turns her after all. She thumps down on the bed. The mattress springs recoil. He's between her legs, grinding ruthlessly against her, but only once before he's pushing up on hands and knees, grasping her in his hands, flipping her yet again. Two complete revolutions in about as many seconds. Their senses whirl and blur. His mouth is all over her, he kisses her back, licks the line of her spine, she can hear him growling and it's a hungry sound, hungry. His fingers drag down her sides like he's forgotten she's already naked, but she is, there's nothing to pull off, he's kicking his pants off the end of the bed and grabbing her by the waist, keeps grabbing her, moving her, positioning her like something to be used and pounded and fucked for his pleasure but that's not it, that's not it at all. He just has no time and no room for anything more refined right now. He doesn't know how.

He shoves her up the bed. The sheets wrinkle ahead of her knees, and then more ahead of his as he follows her. He has her on all fours, he comes down over her, he's so hot for her, he can't wait. Over her shoulder she can see his teeth bare, his eyes squeeze shut, but maybe she's not watching at all because

he's pushing into her, slamming into her, it's fast and rather brutal. His brow drops to the crest of her shoulder. Maybe he should apologize, but all he can manage is a groan, a noise. He needed to be inside of her. Needed it.

Reaches past her then. Rips the comforters down from the pillows, drags those pillows out, throws them under her and pushes her down with a hand at the small of her back. The shift makes him slip out of her, and that's not okay, he can't stand it, he follows her and finds her again, fits himself to her, fills her up. The mattress dips under his fists where they plant on either side of her ribs. He's already panting when he starts to fuck her, and he fucks her so firmly, so unapologetically, grinding her against the pillows and the mattress on every thrust, grunting, watching the collision of their bodies.

I didn't ask what you wanted

don't you dare

take me there

put me on the bed

fuck me from behind

All night she's been ordering him around. He barely even speaks to her but she gives him orders. And one day the very thought of bowing his neck to anyone will make him bare his teeth and dominate just for the sake of dominating -- maybe that day is now, even, but she doesn't know. She can't tell. He gave up what he wanted, gave in to what she wanted. He laid back under her. He took her to the Lafayette. He is

putting her on the bed, all but throwing her down on it, and then flipping her over to

fuck her from behind.

It isn't about power. It isn't about her being able to exert control over him despite how strong he is by comparison. It truthfully isn't. She was wary at first, laughed darkly to soften words and actions that might get her arm broken. Now she is simply direct: she tells him what she wants because he cannot, or will not, intuit it on his own. She tells him what to do because she already knows that he wants her, that he perhaps even needs to fuck her again, right now, just like they needed to before,

and before that.

Danicka is firm, and direct, because there is no reason left to her to sugar-coat it. He's not sweet. He'll never be sweet even if occasionally he can manage a moment or two here or there of tenderness. She doesn't want him to be sweet. She wants him to sear into her body a memory of this night, bruise her soul if he has to, so that she never forgets. She wants him to wreck her. Leave her in ruins.

Here, however, is the aching, agonizing part: she also very simply wants to have sex with him again. And again. The rest of her life is waiting once she leaves, and she doesn't want to go back to it carrying a memory like this, vivid as fire, deep as an etching on her very bones. She wants to stay here.

The weight of him pushes her down, anchors her to the moment. It drives a gasp out of her where being thrown on the bed did not; this is what she asked for. Laid on her back, her legs begin to open for him -- she'd take him like that again if he didn't turn her over, she doesn't care now. But he does. He's a savage shadow over her, though they turned on no lights but the single lamp on the table that is always on. The city outside. It's dim in here. It darkens him, makes him frightening, and she can't think of anything but getting him inside of her, being filled with that darkness, that rage, taking it, being set alight by it.

Arching, then, as he drags her to him, kisses her body, licks her spine. A shiver goes sharply up through her, and she still smells like his fuck from earlier. Dangerous thoughts, that, but it's true: she smells like she's been fucked, she smells like him, and fresh arousal, and she thinks he's going to bite her shoulder, bear her down like an animal, mount her now, and for the first time all night she wants him to, she wants that. The words 'fuck me' don't leave her mouth again though. She just arching her back and lifting her ass into his hands as they run down her sides, panting.

She's on all fours, arms braced, legs open, the first time he drives into her, and it's fast and rather brutal but he's fucked her twice tonight already, she's wet already, she takes it. She gasps, though, buckling, almost falling to her elbows -- but she holds herself up. He groans, brow to her shoulderblade like a knight being blessed by a sword. Maybe neither of them can bear it right now but she pushes back against him anyway, lets out a yell from it. It isn't a shriek or a yelp or a groan even -- it's a yell, a shout.

Why -- or how -- he can think of putting cushions under her body right now, she isn't going to ask. She doesn't want to know if he cares about her comfort right now, she doesn't want to hear that he doesn't care, either. She doesn't tell him she's grateful, or that a pulse of tenderness goes through her from her heart straight to her cunt, tightening around him. That's when he slips out, and that's when she shrieks -- it's protest, ending in a moan of pleading.

So he comes back. Just as hard, just as rough, fucking her even before they can get right situated. She is laid out under him like that, the back of her neck bare to his teeth and his eyes, whichever is more dangerous. Right now she doesn't even try to hold herself up; she holds onto the comforters, moaning into them, taking it, taking him, as though all that matters now is that he strip her down, fuck her raw, break her to pieces until there's nothing left but the spirit, unshielded.

He doesn't come down over her. Doesn't cover her. Whatever that flicker in the parking lot, that moment where she hurt herself against his door and made his brow darken, it's gone. He doesn't protect her; she doesn't need protection. She wants -- needs, perhaps -- to fuck. So does he.

Head bent. Arms braced. Body taut: there's a symmetry in this, a symmetry to his body over hers, a symmetry to their bodies. They are perfect. They are so intensely physical tonight. He is always so intensely physical, rooted in flesh, powered by strength. Being in this room with him is like being in a cage with a tiger, a flame, the incandescent soul of glory itself.

No tenderness left now. No startling, dangerous flickers of gentleness. No arms slipping under her to cradle her even as he fucks her. No hand caressing her breast, no fingers sliding over her clit. No kiss over the shoulder. No moment where he wants to kiss her and she needs to not kiss him back, she needs to hold that part of herself sacrosanct. No moment where he understands that as instinctively and wordlessly as he understands why he has not seized her in his teeth.

Just this. Just fucking, raw and dirty and rough and low. Just his fists braced against the bed. Just the unstoppable momentum of his entire body. His knees pushing her thighs apart. The hard span of his pelvis impacting her ass. His cock inside her, always inside her, plunging deep and drawing back and driving deep again, dragging flesh and igniting nerves but never leaving her, never giving a moment's respite; that rapid escalation, that dizzying rise until he's reckless, mindless, plowing, pounding, penetrating, fucking her.

This is how he's wanted it all night. Which is not to say he didn't want it the other ways, because he did. She ordered him around; he relented. He relented because he saw in his mind's eye the flashes and glints of what she wanted, the images infected him, he wanted her to put her mouth on him. Wanted her to put her cunt on him, ride him, ride him, wanted her to pull him over her and whimper past his ear. He wanted that tenderness, even, wanted it though he didn't understand it, but

this is the image that seared him from the moment he saw her on that third-floor balcony,

from the moment she stepped out on the porch behind him,

talked to him about leaving with him. Why did she do that? Why would she do that? Why, if not because

she wanted this too.

And she smells like him now. He can smell it, can all but see it in the way she moves under him, the way her hands clutch the comforters, twist the sheets. She smells like his sweat, his cum, like he's fucked her over and over and over tonight, and that's a dangerous thing because he recognizes her like this. It's a dangerous thing because this, too, is a form of intoxication. Addictive. He wants it. Again; more. He wants to leave her with a memory of this, remember this, remember me, remember because

he's leaving in the morning and they won't see each other again,

he's dying tomorrow or twenty years from tomorrow and they won't see each other again,

they won't see each other again but he'll remember her in his bones. He will. He'll remember this moment, and the ones that came before. He'll remember how she feels, how there seems to be a blood-red line between her mouth and her spine and her cunt, how sometimes a cry from her throat transduces to a quiver in her body, a twist of her back to a clench of her cunt, how soft her skin is when he opens his hand over her back, how the bones and muscles of her shoulder resist his grip when he clamps his hand on her, finally, holds her there, holds her down, keeps her there,

keeps her his, his, his for just a little longer.

Soon enough she's screaming. Not those single incandescent sounds she would make when she came in his truck, gripping the handle bar, gripping his back with her hand. Their neighbors in other rooms are hearing a racket in here -- the bed thudding on the wall, the woman wailing, screaming, swearing at whatever meaty young thing she's got giving it to her like that. Her voice is hitching on those brutal thrusts of his, nothing but some pornographic vowel sound leaving her every. single. time.

They could have done this in the truck. Ostensibly she came here because she wanted to be able to shower before going back -- not to home, but to work. They could have stayed under the bridge and fucked just like this, maybe with Decker standing outside, with Danicka bent over the edge of the seat, his body exposed, jeans around his calves, pounding some unseen girl within. They could have. Later she'll understand that she brought him here, wanted to bring him here, because of some rash and dangerous desire to be close to him when she doesn't want to be close to him she just wants to fuck him she doesn't want him, he's not allowed to want her either, not like that, not forever, not his.

Yet here they are. And he's pounding her, fucking hard and fast and rough on that neat but ample bed, because they can't stop themselves. They can't stop.

He's senseless. She's lost her mind. This is what they were going to do at first: come out to his truck at that corner with the bus stop, have a quick and dirty fuck just like this one and then she'd wobble to the bus stop, maybe hate herself for letting him do that to her when if she should hate anyone it's him, then he'd drive away and maybe he'd stay in Nawlins awhile longer because it wouldn't mean anything. It's different now, and they still came back to it. Only she doesn't hate it, doesn't hate him for doing it: she's not even able to fuck him back against his strength but her pussy is slick, wet enough to drip on his thighs as he slams into her, and she just

takes it. And it makes her scream.

Like this is dangerous. They should not have done it. It's fast and brutal and almost impersonal, the way he's fucking her like he's wanted to all night, the way she's surrendering so entirely to it. But looking at her bare back he can see whatever he likes, he can feel the throbbing temptation to hold her in his teeth and stay there on her, in her, fucking his cum into her until cubs come in spring -- the timing is right for that, even. And only feeling him, feeling his strength and his heat and his rage like a fire licking at her back, she can't see his face and he can be anyone, he can be everything she never thought of wanting.

It's intoxicating. They keep coming back for more, inhaling it into their lungs, drinking it to their bellies, injecting it right into their hearts til every pulse of blood through them is filled with it. She's begging him not to stop now, panting, her arm squirmed down her body to rub her clit, massage it while he fucks her, fucks her like he does. He wants to force his way into her until she can't forget him. She reaches behind her, her hand to the back of his head, holding him down and close and near, moaning, but she never says his name. Maybe she's forgotten it already, though

she hasn't forgotten him. May never. Can't.

He's holding her down and she's holding him to her and she's wailing, bucking her hips, getting away from him, running down her orgasm, working it out of him, because even now, it's as though that's what he's here for. To fuck her. To fuck her like this. To make her come. To make her scream.

He sees her reaching between her legs. Stimulating herself. It sears heat right down the center of him, splitting him like a blade. He wants to say something. Urge her on. Can't, can't find the words; can't do anything but this one thing, uncreative, unfinessed, but so very fucking energetic:

fuck her. Fuck her just like this.

And she's so fucking wet. She leaves him so wet, has him dripping with her slick; he's dripping with his own sweat, a drop slides down his nose and splashes off her back and she's reaching back for him, her hand is looking for him and so

he does bend to her after all, he fits his cheek to her hand like an animal, heavy, nuzzling, she reaches behind and he lets her grab him behind the neck. He presses his nose to the wet razored strands of her hair. He leans his forehead against the back of her head, presses his lips to her neck, opens his mouth to the nape of her neck, and she's not the only one making noise here. They're a discordant chorus, they sound so fucking dirty, the very sound of her turns him on. She's the hottest piece of ass he's ever had. She's so much more than that; it shames him in some strange way to have thought of her like that for even a second, even when he didn't let it get past the boundaries of his own, low, uneducated mind, because what she really is

is almost. Is so close. Is close enough if he just stays in New Orleans, if he stays right here, if he stays in this room, if he stays inside her forever.

Which is why he can't. Not his, her blood whispers to him, and one day she'll hate him for it, she'll hate him because her fate leads elsewhere and if he stands in her way one day she'll want to cut him down for it. He might hate her for it too. Or he might simply

grow cold.

He is nothing like cold right now. He is all heat, all hardness, he could be anyone, he could be everything she never thought of wanting, but he's not. He is an eighteen-year-old Modi from some godforsaken little shithole of a town and he ain't seen nothin yet, he really hasn't, but even so he knows, he knows, he will never see this again.

So: make it last. Make it worth it. Don't make me regret this, she said, and he doesn't know about her but he doesn't. He doesn't regret a fucking thing. His hand is a vise on her shoulder, her hand is furious between her legs, he's fucking her so hard that he can hear it on her voice, she's running down her orgasm and he can hear that, too, on her voice. Her nails dig into the back of his neck. Her cunt is clenching on him, is starting to pulse in that secret filthy code of their bodies, as she closes in on that elusive prey, and he

can't take it anymore.

His teeth scrape her shoulder, then snap shut on themselves. He presses his face to the center of her back, pushes his forehead right between her shoulderblades and grabs her in both hands, bears her down like that, bellows against her back. She's not his. He sounds frustrated. He sounds beside himself. A howling madman. He looses such a barrage onto her then, hammers her until the headboard leaves a mark on the wall, until the lampshades rattle in their sockets. He can't tell where the separation between their bodies lies. He weighs her down with his body and his scent and his heat around her, inside her, everywhere. She suffuses every sense he has. The entire world has collapsed down to the junction of their bodies.

And somewhere in the midst of that his orgasm comes around like a freight train on rails, like a right hook out of a blind spot, like a toaster dropped into a bathtub. He can't stop, it's too much, but he can't stop, he's yelling his throat raw, burying it against her spine, coming inside her. Stains her, marks her, makes her

filthy.

This time he's touched some limit. Reached it and breached it. This time he's trembling when it's over. This time he's shuddering every time her cunt squeezes him; this time he can't go on.

He rolls to the side, he brings her onto her side. The pillows he'd put under her are wrinkled, rumpled. Wet. His hand is heavy on her hip. His cock is heavy inside her, heavy, hot, softening, he can't go on, but

then his hand is heavy on her lower abdomen, and his fingers are searching for her clit; he's rubbing his face against her back and he thinks he's going to die if he goes on, but

he's touching her again. The feel of her is driving a stake of lust through his heart. No, he has his metaphors wrong. He's a wolf, and she's silver; she's gold; she's molten gold in his arms and he'd pay any price to have her, if only for the night. He says the first thing he's said in what feels like hours, years:

"I cain't git enough of you."

He bites her. Softly, softly. His teeth grip her shoulder a moment and release.

"C'mon," he urges her. Softly. Softly. His forearm is an insistent pressure against her hip, and he flexes into her again.

Dice: 2 d10 TN6 (5, 7) ( success x 1 )

Dice: 2 d10 TN7 (1, 3) ( botch x 1 )

People next door bang on the wall. The one that is being damaged by the four-poster they're abusing. A fist thuds repeatedly on the wall, a voice yells angrily but incoherently, and Danicka is still just moaning, moaning, clutching at the bedding under her and begging Decker in some language he doesn't know to please, please, please don't stop fucking her, she's going to come. There's no reason not to speak in English. There's just... no reason left in her, at all. She hears the thudding and the yelling and it all seems to flow together, one big cacophany of meaningless noise that just represents the world around them, spinning its wheels into neverending wars, while she

and he

fuck each other like they've devolved.

That bucking of her hips is a furious, rapid thing now, her hand working her pussy into heat she can barely stand anymore. She's whining, swearing viciously, starting to squirm and then -- oh, then -- her mouth just opens, her hand clutching tight and painful at him where she holds him, she's coming, and he knows just what she does, how she rides it out, how her cunt clenches on him just like that because he's made her come three times tonight already, fucked her more times in the past couple of hours -- at most -- than either of them saw coming, because once was already beyond the pale of their imaginations.

Decker tries to bite his shoulder and ends up just raking them down her skin, which only makes her shudder. "Oh, my god," she groans, but she's still coming, it's still pulsing through her, hitting her heart like an electric shock on every wave. He is roaring, driving into her with the sound, breaking her heart with it, throwing himself against her like a wave crashing into stones. The feet of the bed scrape, once, an inch from where they have always indented the carpet. The sound of him makes her toss her head back, turn, seeking his mouth, kissing him, devouring his mouth in an open, gasping kiss that isn't even very good but right now it's everything, it's fucking everything she has.

His body seems to be moving of its own accord then, pumping cum into her, fucking it deep, while he grips her body and holds her down and gives it to her, gives up everything, dies tonight,

instead of tomorrow.

Danicka screams again. It wakes his mind up, has to, because the sound is jarringly different. His hand is helplessly, exhaustedly touching her, playing her pussy as though if he touches her right she'll get wet again, let him fuck her again, yes, please, this, more.

And she shrieks, writhing suddenly. They've gone still. He rolled over, pulled her close against him, held her near and she was just shaking, sweating, unable to catch her breath, unable to stop trembling. His hand teases her and she grabs at something, anything, whether it's the bed or his arms or her own body, crying out in agony. Not because he's biting her the way he does, halfway, wanting so fucking badly to lock her in his teeth and hold onto her,

but because she can't bear it. She can't go on. She twists away from him, too exhausted and too weak now to get far, but she bucks away from him and that only moves him inside of her, makes her groan, makes her shudder to pieces. "Oh god," she's quivering, and --

don't mistake this for fear. It isn't sudden fear that makes her squirm and shriek-sob the way she does. It isn't panic. It isn't even, truthfully, real pain. It's just too much. She is raw now, flayed open on more planes than just the physical, and he is touching her, scraping his teeth over her shoulder like a mate would, muttering that he can't get enough of her, and that turns her on, by god it makes her want to fuck him again, but the throb of arousal that goes through her at the thought also hurts her, makes her dizzy, makes her swoon even though she's lying in his arms.

-- he's holding her there, pushing into her, and she nearly melts. She's wet. Her body, traitor, fucking traitor, is wet and willing though right now she feels made up of cords of braided pleasure and pain. C'mon. She moans, and there are tears in her eyes. His hand on her clit. His voice in her ear. She doesn't want to stop. She should have stopped after the truck. Gone home, or the closest thing she has to it here. She should have let herself go, shower, be exhausted, pass out on her bed in that mansion and forget herself.

Instead she's here, and coming down from an almost agonizing orgasm for the fourth time tonight, the roughest sex tonight, with someone whose very existence shreds her nerves raw and bloody like all the tainted hearts his claws have met or will meet. And Danicka... is melting, is wet, is reacting to the way he touches her with a shriek and reacting to his voice in her ear with lust and reacting to the way he pushes into her one more time

by letting out a huff of a sigh, her head feeling like it's suddenly ice cold on the inside, and dropping onto his arm. All of her is limp. She breathes easier, suddenly, now that she's unconscious.

What she experiences:

First that sudden coolness, as though the inside of her skull has abruptly and gloriously iced over. Then the world blurring to a pinpoint, winking out. A dreamless nothing, which of course feels like nothing, doesn't feel like time passing at all -- and then the next thing she knows she's looking up into eyes the exact color of an Atlantic hurricane. There's a face around those eyes, and maybe she recognizes him and maybe she doesn't, and behind that face

is the ceiling. Oh. She's on her back. She's laid out, and the meaty young thing that put her in this predicament in the first place is on his knees on the mattress beside her, bent over her with his hand on her breastbone, as though he might have been feeling for a pulse. Or breathing.

What she misses:

How graceful she was, really, passing out. Some hard limit was reached, some escape valve burst open, and her wracked mind escaped into the dark bombshelter trenches of her subconscious. What's left behind is a body suddenly left to its own devices. Do as thou wilt, sayeth her brain, and what she does is

drop her head to her lover's arm,
drop her arms and her legs limb to the bedspread,
open her fingers,

relax.

His reaction is instantaneous, and the opposite of relaxed. He coils on himself: drawing out of her in a heartbeat, springing agilely to all fours. He's never more like an animal than in these seconds: crouching over her, toes flexed into the bed, weight on his fingertips, bending to her, sniffing her, nuzzling his brow against her neck with a low, distressed sound, putting his ear to her chest to hear her heartbeat. She's okay. She's alive. He lets his knees touch the bed, settles his weight on his heels. Waits, vigilant and on edge, his knuckles against his thigh. His hand on her body.

He looks oddly guileless when she finds him bending over her. His eyes wide open; mouth a tense line. He almost looks scared, but it passes when he sees awareness come back to her eyes. He exhales. He touches her face, a very gentle thing, a brush of his fingers before that hand drops back to his thigh.

"I shouldn'a pushed," he says quietly. " 'm sorry."

Her eyes open and they are so much lighter than before. No dark, verdant green now but pale as sea grass, bits of burnished gold swimming among the reeds. She looks up at him and startles; he can't blame her for that, can he? She's confused, she's slow to come around, but she startles at the sight of him looming over her like that. A long exhale exits her and she closes her eyes again, but she isn't unconscious. She thinks maybe he'll worry; she opens her eyes and asks him:

"What happened?"

So he tells her, perhaps, that she konked out, and she asks him how long, and he perhaps thinks forever and perhaps tells her a number of seconds, but she exhales slowly, looking weakened, still pale. He apologizes for the stupidest thing.

Danicka is -- and has been -- holding his hand against her breastbone. As soon as she noticed it there, she laid her own palm over it as though in sleep. Her heart is surprisingly fast, even now, but it is evening out. He looked so vigilant when she first came to. He looked so intense. She doesn't tell him that's never happened to her before, but maybe it's obvious, since she had to ask what happened.

He shouldn't have pushed, he says. Danicka stares at him for a moment, processing the words more slowly. That hand of hers on top of his smooths to his thick, iron-braided wrist and holds there, til she can feel his pulse too.

"I think..." she says quietly, "I fainted because you turned me on." Her hand squeezes; moves up his arm a little. "I can't get enough of you, either."

Which suddenly, when he isn't inside of her anymore and they aren't fucking, he isn't sweating behind her, trying to tease her pussy into accepting a solid hammering all over again, is just about the most heartbreaking thing she could have said. Danicka's mouth is dry. She swallows, or tries, and then starts to -- again, trying, which is not the same thing as instantly succeeding -- sit up. "I'm going to get a drink of water," she explains, her voice still kept low, despite all their wailing, hollering, roaring of moments before. "Do you want some?"

It's heartbreaking. She knows it. She feels it. She sees it too, when his eyebrows draw together, when that line that's already etching its way between his eyebrows deepens. Decker's never going to develop smile lines -- but frown lines, sure. Those are already making inroads.

She breaks eye contact. She sits up. He puts his hand out, doesn't touch her but puts his hand out anyway. Just in case. Just in case she faints again. Just in case she wants to touch him. Something. Even he's not sure why.

"We might have somethin' good here."

He doesn't answer her question at all. He's says this, low and musing, held too firmly in check to be allowed to ache. He scuffs his knuckles atop his thigh, just a random little gesture, means nothing. Then he raises his eyes to hers. That habitual sun-squint of his is back, but this time it looks a little like a wince.

"But I don't think it's fer us." That's not quite it. He thinks about it. Tries again, "It's not ... us. You feel that too?"

The trouble is, she doesn't realize what she sounds like until the words are already hanging in midair between them. Then Danicka hears herself, feels an ache, can't get his eyes to stop burning through her mind, and she wants so badly suddenly to forget him. She wants to run away. Internally, she recoils. She really does need a sip of water, perhaps a warm but not too hot shower -- lest her blood pressure ride another rollercoaster -- and some time to rest before,

it seems inevitable now,

she falls back into his arms, kisses him like she told him she doesn't like and like he promised himself they wouldn't anymore, and proves that no: they can't get enough of each other. Of this. Whatever it is, however doomed it may be. Danicka runs from what she just said, and what she sees in his eyes and feels in his hand atop her chest, but he won't let her.

Instead, Decker moves his hand as though to give her something to grab if she swoons again. That makes her breath catch -- and she does take his arm, holding it as though she needs it to steady herself, when she doesn't. He tells her they might have something good and she glances at him, then down. She isn't looking at him when he looks at her then, almost wincing. She doesn't allow herself to react. She just stares at the fine, soft white hairs on his forearms, bleached by the sun against summer-darkened skin.

A long silence unrolls, a ball of yarn tumbling across the floor til it is nothing but a looping and endless line. Danicka inhales slowly, and holds it a moment, then looks at him, a sidelong glance. There's a furtive pain in her eyes, a shying-away. "I don't --" she whispers helplessly, then stops. Doesn't want to talk about it. Doesn't know or understand what he's saying. Can't bear to open that up, look at it, try to make sense of it. Find words for it.

Her throat moves as she swallows, then sighs.

Her eyes fall closed.

She moves over to him, half-reclining, half on her knees, and touches his face. Kisses him like that, wanting him even now, or at least wanting that addictive hint as to what her soul is capable of when it speaks to another, body to body, breath to breath. And it is addictive... because it isn't nourishing. It isn't them. He's right. But she can't bear to hear it, and more: she is afraid of saying it, for some reason.

The kiss slows after awhile. Drags away even slower. She rests her brow to his, her hand still covering his cheek, feeling the scuff there, the hardness of his jaw. "We both knew this was one night," she whispers to him. A reminder. An epitaph.

This kiss breaks obliquely over him. He's still kneeling on the bed; she's sat up, is a little past him now, moves back. He turns his head and their brows touch. She kisses him, her hand delicate on his face -- or perhaps not delicate at all but warm, brave, as though she cannot be hurt by this when they both know that's anything but the truth.

He raises his hand too. He covers her hand, and then he turns his neck a little further, opens his mouth. The kiss opens up. Unfurls. He breathes against her. It begins to fold, and then it drags apart.

They remain close a little longer. His eyes open for a little while, but close again when she writes the line that will end their story when morning comes. It doesn't seem to matter that there are still hours remaining; that it seems inevitable that she will wash, and rest, and come back to him again because

she can't get enough of him, either.

"Yeah," he replies - his breath caught, the word short and hoarse. He nuzzles against her face suddenly, but momentarily. Then draws back altogether, looking at her now, frank and open, resigned, unafraid.

" 's git a drink," he says. "Take a shower. Still time 'fore mornin'."