why aren't we mated yet?

[Sinclair] Since moving out of the Brotherhood, Sinclair has done exactly as she meant to, exactly as she told a few people that Matter to her she would do: she has split her nights between the Loft and the Brotherhood and her own car. She's brushed her teeth and showered here and there, washed her clothes here and there, but she doesn't leave anything anywhere. Her blanket stays in her car, big and thick and bright red. There are talens in the glovebox and in the carved chest at the Loft. There's toiletries in a shiny zippered bag that's blindingly pink with a huge orange flower on it. It's warming up again, so she can wear less, so she doesn't have to dedicate as many items. She has no home. She doesn't leave traces of herself other than scent and memory anywhere she goes.

Except for one place.

There's a nightstand, and one side of the bed is generally hers, when she's there. Tampons in the under-sink cabinet, behind the extra toilet paper and spare towels. Toothbrush with a ladybug on it in the holder on the little counter. A second robe on the door's hooks, though truth be told, she usually just drip-dries. There's a 99-cent laundry basket she brought from the dollar store filling with empty cans, but it isn't a recycling container. It's a playpen for her pet elemental. She has clothes in the closet, talens in the nightstand.

Sinclair knows where the cups are in the kitchen and where Alex keeps the bandages, how long it takes the shower to heat up, how quickly he goes through eggs in a week.


She slept here every night until the wound on his side was nothing more than a dim pink mark, until it faded completely, and then she was gone for a night or two, and then she was back, and there's been a morning or two he's woken up to find her there when she wasn't before. She's doing a lot of reading; sometimes he returns from a workout and she's perusing some science textbook she got from a used bookstore, and conversation-wise there was an interesting one where she was talking about doing some experiments with Tripoli. She isn't here every night, but she knows she's welcome here.

What Alex knows is that for nearly a week, though she's been here with him and in his bed with their legs tangled and their bodies facing and her coming out of the shower naked and making omelettes with little booty-shaking dances in her underwear --

what he knows is that his girlfriend hasn't been touching him much. She doesn't run her palms over him when she slides under the covers, doesn't lower herself over him and whisper in his ear that she wants him. She hasn't been hug-tackling him or leaping into his arms. Her affections have been gentle. Ginger. Careful. It's obvious, because a lot about Sinclair is obvious, and it doesn't take a fucking genius to know when it started. Nevermind that he's healed. Nevermind that what happened at the smoothie store hasn't left any kind of physical remainder. They haven't had a lot of time together, and what time they've had has mostly been sleeping.

Sinclair's been away for a couple of nights now.


Today he comes home from the gym and his apartment feels like there's someone there. The sensation is familiar and instant and undeniable, and some clanging around in the living room tells him a half-second later that Tripoli, at least, is here. The shower turning off down the little hallway tells him that Sinclair is here, and clean. Well, that and her shoes by the door, her borrowed textbooks on the coffee table, the half-full glass of water on the kitchen counter with a faint impression of female lips on it. Sometimes she wears lipgloss.

Shh, no tellin.

[Alex] "You're here!"

Alex sounds happy. He sounds a little out of breath, too, which tells her he didn't just climb the stairs, or even jog them -- he dashed up those damn flights fullspeed. There's a gym bag lashed high on his back. And Sinclair might be clean, but Alexander smells like a workout, like a five-mile run, like sweat and health and him.

The truth is, he didn't smell like health for a while after Juiceapalooza. He smelled like blood and fear, like woundedness, like injury. Then he smelled like healing -- fast for a human, agonizingly slow for someone like Sinclair. He smelled incomplete, weakened; if they were wild things a million years ago, any predator would go after him first.

She handled him carefully at first. He didn't complain. The gashes ached dully for the days it took to heal, screaming into bright red pain if he stretched his side wrong or twisted or, god forbid, hit the wound somehow.

Then they healed. And itched madly, healing, until he resorted to putting cold wet towels over his side to keep from scratching. And then they closed entirely, and the scabs fell off, and his body was whole and healthy again, the new skin pink and tender.

And she still handled him carefully. But then, they haven't had a lot of time together. And they've spent most of it sleeping.

And he missed her.

Which is why: he sounds happy, dropping his gymbag on the floor, kicking his shoes off, grabbing Sinclair's glass of water and gulping it down. He goes over to Tripoli and leans down to look at him, rubbing his domed helmet-head the way one might pet a dog. "Hey, little guy!"

The emptied glass is set on the coffee table. He heads for the bathroom, wherever Sinclair might be, calling, "I dug my old college textbooks out of storage. Tons of physics and chemistry and shit, if you're interested."

His voice is briefly muffled -- he pulls his shirt off and flings it in the vague direction of the laundry pile in his room, then joins her in the bathroom. "Turn the water back on," he says, dropping his shorts with a grin. "I'm coming in there."

[Sinclair] Entirely unlike a pet dog, Tripoli flaps his extendable arms upward and claps his small 'hands' with their three cylindrical fingers and one cylindrical thumb on either side of Alex's wrist. As far as handshakes go, it's a bit awkward and immature, but he greets Alex right back, eeeing away as though to tell him all about the very exciting jagged edges of the empty tuna can lid, and the adventures he had combatting the evil forces of plastic that tried to sneak into the realm of Lah'on Dri'basket.

Sometimes he gets confused. But he's quite small, still. The world is very big, and terribly new, and Sinclair is always running around it and her explanations don't always translate that clearly.

"I'd like that," she's saying, in regards to the textbooks, and then he's rounding the doorway and whipping off his shirt and seeing her there with her hair dripping down her body, starting to wrap a towel around her waist. She looks up and over at him, her eyes going first -- as they have often, lately -- to his side before his face. Her mouth is quirked, uncertain. "Noo," she says, stepping to block his path. "I like it when you smell like this."

She grins a little, still lopsided and sort of nose-wrinkled, her pleasure at seeing him again, even after just a couple days, evident in her eyes. "Stay dirty."

[Alex] She steps to block him -- and he instantly wraps his arms around her, glomping her into a bearhug that ends with a kiss to her forehead.

"Pffft," he says then. "You asked for it. If you end up all messy again it's not my fault."

He kisses her again -- on the top of her nose. And again, on the lips, soft, startlingly sweet. Then his hands find their way down her back. Then he squeezes her ass gently, the sort of caress that would doubtlessly get his hand moved firmly up if they were strangers in a club.

But they're not. She's his girlfriend. So he grins, all slow and lazy, against her mouth. He whispers, "Wanna get all messy again?"

[Sinclair] His arms are warm; Chicago is warming, albeit slowly, and he just came from the gym, came from bounding up the stairs the way he does

and the way he didn't, couldn't, while he was injured. When he hugs her like that, squeezing her against him so tightly and so eagerly, she puts one arm around his shoulders and breathes the scent of him in, making a quiet oof at how he hugs her. Sinclair feels his heat and he feels hers, warm from rage and the shower and a sort of pure... life. His lips land on her forehead easily, because their height differential is almost perfect for it. And she smiles a little, endeared, but pffts right back at him.

"I asked for nothing," she disagrees, and he rebuts by kissing her nose. Sinclair narrows her eyes playfully, but Alex makes a solid argument. Kissing her the way they have a few times -- just a few, and the thought of that is a little bit painful -- since he got hurt. When he's stirred to find her crawling into his bed, or when she's managed to kiss him to say goodbye.

His hands move downward, pushing her towel past his fingers til it just falls off of her and thumps damply to the floor. Sinclair obviously doesn't put his hands back on her lower back, or onto her hips. She drips onto his arms and his hands, her hair saturated and the drops on her skin transferring to his, then drying between their stomachs. Her lips move against his, telling him more about her response to his hands and his kiss than she puts into words.

Hesitance, though, despite the fact that she's naked and warm and pressed bodily against him with his hands on her ass and her hands on his shoulders, arms around him. "You sure?"

[Alex] -- which makes Alex frown faintly, more out of perplexity than displeasure.

"Yeah. Why wouldn't I be?"

[Sinclair] A slight frown on Sinclair's part, too, her brows tugging together with open concern. "Just... are you feeling okay?"

[Alex] That makes him pause. His hands first pause, then draw back. Holding her by the waist now, he pulls back an inch or two, the frown deepening.

"Baby," he repeats quietly, "why wouldn't I be?"

[Sinclair] Three times the damage done to Alex's side could not kill Sinclair, could not -- if she used her gifts -- even slow her down. It would be gone in a week, gone in an eyeblink with the crush of her hand around a dried and painted and water-filled gourd or the touch of another wolf's gift of healing or the wrap of a bloodsoaked bandage from her Alpha around the wound. Three times that much pain, bloodshed, and tearing of muscle, just... gone, as if it had never been.

What was done to him, Sinclair would shrug off. She would not accept healing, would not waste a gourd. She'd rest for a couple of days, sleeping in the caern or the Loft in lupus. She'd stay near her packmates and she'd watch her flesh knit itself back together literally before her very eyes. She sure as hell wouldn't be struggling to climb stairs for a week. She wouldn't have to favor either side.

She took plenty of injuries before she knew she was a werewolf. Healed quickly but never thought anything of it. Still: those were bruises and broken bones and things of that nature. It wasn't fomori claws digging into her body, ripping her open. She has no concept of what that feels like to a human, or even a near-human. She doesn't understand what has happened in his body. Just:

he got hurt. He got hurt as bad as she sometimes does. And Gaia didn't bless him with near-perfect regenerative capability.

Yes: for Sinclair, Alex's healing process was agonizingly, mindrendingly slow. She wanted to tear her hair out. She had to stop herself from watching him at night, staring at the bandaged wound waiting for something to seep, or wishing she could tear it off and see if it was getting any better. For Alex, it was just another reminder that he's more badass than a human being. Even the lumps and bruises and split lips and broken noses and fuck all else that he takes in the rings and cages are gone so fast that he's heard more than a few Wolverine jokes.

He's short, after all. Heals fast. Likes to fight. Loves to win. Is an asshole.

Being asleep most of the time, he's missed how tense him being hurt made Sinclair even days after the fact. It was impossible to miss the night it happened, the way she was howling on the inside to kill something in payback and the way she was caught between needing to help him and knowing he needed her to back off. But this may be the first conscious, coherent time when he's realizing she's still caught in that place.

Or another place, kinda like it.

Her forehead furrows all tight and unhappy when he starts to pull away, taking his hands off her ass and moving his body away from hers. She glances down at his side, a flick of her pale eyes, then back to his darker ones. A minute ago he was babbling nonsensically about getting her messy when all she wanted was for him to keep smelling like this: sweaty, healthy, alive. Never cared about if she herself got filthy or not. As long as her nose could tell her what her eyes and her brain can't quite trust yet: that he's okay. That he's whole, and that he has healed.

"Just... you got hurt. And I wasn't sure if it's still... hurt. Or whatever."

Her frown deepens, and she moves forward again, back into his space, back against him. Her voice is quiet, but intense. Hungry, maybe. "Don't pull away like that."

[Alex] So he doesn't pull away. Not exactly, anyway. He shifts, though, finding her hand, pulling it firmly, unflinchingly to his side. Right over where the cuts where. Right to where even though a faint and fading reminder of the wound can be seen, a faint discoloration of the skin.

And he holds her hand there, even if her first instinct is to pull away. Even if she doesn't want to touch him where he was wounded, afraid that he was still somehow not hale, not whole, not completely mended.

He is, though. She can feel his skin smooth and unbroken again. She can feel the healed layers of muscle beneath; the hard arches of his ribs beneath her, if she presses gently against his side. And nothing she does makes him flinch or wince or draw a swift breath.

"I'm not hurt," he says, quiet and intense. "Not anymore. Okay? You don't have to tiptoe around me anymore."

[Sinclair] [perception + empathy: r j00 mad at me? :[ ]
(11:03:13 PM) Veraciteeth rolled 4 10-sided dice: 9 9 4 8

[Alex] [he's not at all mad at her, but he's very serious about this. he wants her to know he's not hurt anymore. on a deeper level, it's very important to him that she doesn't think of him as fragile/breakable/weak!]

[Sinclair] The werewolf in his bathroom is watching him intently as he moves her hand, eyes flicking between his gaze and the place where he guides her touch. Even as ferocious as her stare is, as simultaneously on edge and hungry as it is, the color remains soft as down. Perhaps that makes it more frightening to be in the same room with her, this close, pulling her sometimes-clawed hand to his recently-knit flesh. She looks lovely and gentle

and feels like a monster about to rake him open and feast on him while he's still expiring

but then she caresses his body like she does. Gingerly at first, then more smoothly, cupping her hand around his ribcage and his side. And it fits with the first impression, the visual impression, rather than what instinct tells him to be wary of. She touches him gently as though there is no other way she could, like she's not capable of the things he's very damn certain she is. Sinclair hasn't even spared Alex; she's pounded him into the pavement before, and vice versa, but the way she is with him right now, you'd never know it.

Which is part of the problem.

Sinclair looks up at his eyes again. "Have I been tiptoeing?" she asks him. It's sincere.

[Alex] There's a sort of compact, tight solidity to his body -- as though everything about him is condensed, compressed, under pressure, taut. He feels solid beneath her hand, as though his body were muscle and bone through and through; no airspace, no lumenal spaces, nothing but matter.

It's as deceptive as her angel's face and soft eyes are. He feels tough. He is tough, so far as humans go -- he can sustain and deliver beatings most men couldn't dream of. But he's also so very fragile compared to her. There are blows she could take that would tear him open like tissue paper. There are fates she could rage back from that would leave him a rotting corpse in the earth.

There are things she could do to him, with no thought at all, that he would take months to recover from. Years. Maybe never. And that requires that he survive it in the first place.

So maybe it's not so unthinkable that Sinclair was so careful with him. That she's been afraid to touch him or roughhouse with him. That's she's remembered, painfully, just how frail this superficially tough body of his is.

Still:

they look each other in the eye. And her hand on his side is a little less wary now. And his hand over hers is just as insistent, just as firm.

"I think so," he replies quietly. "I'm not sure. We've been asleep most the time we've been together. But tonight, at least -- you've been careful with me. And you don't have to be anymore."

[Sinclair] There's nothing romantic or sentimental to the fact that the first time Sinclair saw Alex, she was attracted to him. The first time she touched him, she wanted him. Sex with him, at the most basic level, but something about the way he keeps his body said something to her in a language she understood. Strength. Strength on the outside, at least.

She can be marvelously insecure, this Fostern Galliard of the nation, lethal warrior of the sept, respected packmate, and so on, and so forth. She's been rejected a few too many times. She fears rejection, however, more than is strictly reasonable. Sinclair said some time ago there was a reason she didn't ever talk to her parents; a more discerning eye than her own -- and perhaps Alex's -- would see what she's really afraid of, there.

Right now she's not being insecure, however. She's not afraid that Alex is going to shove her away. She was displeased when he started to pull back, but not wounded by it. She's wary of that discolored flesh where he was injured, but she touches him all the same, running her hand across that body that she has quite a distinct fondness for.

And though he knows how loud she can be, how obscenely vocal, Sinclair is quiet for a little while.

"Awhile ago you told me that one of the reasons you don't really want to talk about all this," and 'this' means 'us', this means 'our quote-relationship-unquote', this means 'how we feel about each other', "was that it makes you think about the long term. And how the long term is that someone's going to die."

Not that someone's going to get hurt, he said. Die.

Her eyes are on his body, and then her eyes are on his. "I understand better, now."

What she understands remains unspoken, and perhaps it doesn't need to be said aloud. Now she gets that they weren't just talking about her, and while he may have thought that was obvious, he wasn't the one ripping his hair out wondering if she was ever going to get better, if she'd be angry if he just healed her while she was sleeping, if he could suppress his instincts long enough to not go on a rampage.

Sinclair stayed with him as much as she could while he was recovering. She sometimes made food and left it out if he was going to be up and around to eat it soon, put it in the fridge if not. She slept nearby and she watched over him and she did what she could to feel like she was actually taking care of him, when taking care of each other is already a subject as sticky as molasses.

They have at least one thing going for them: while their communication skills when it comes to what's between them are sometimes sorely lacking, however expressive they may be while writing or howling or singing or speaking to packmates or casting taunts in the ring, neither of them finds it hard to be honest. Neither of them is particularly scared of speaking their mind.

"I know this might sound a little weird," Sinclair says quietly, putting her other hand on him now, stepping closer on the fuzzy, damp bathmat on the floor, "but I'm sorry I've been so careful. Probably more than I needed to be." Her head ducks near to his, nuzzling the side of his face. "One of the reasons I'm with you is because... you're strong. And I like that."

[Alex] "Hey," softly spoken, that single syllable, as he takes his hand off hers finally because she's coming closer on her own.

He takes her hand between his hands instead, cups her face between his hot palms where he can look at her and she can look at him. And he does: look at her, that is, his eyes finding hers, his hazel eyes warm in this light, but unremarkable -- even the few shards of green and gold lost to the flatness of bathroom overhead lighting.

So much of Alexander is unremarkable, drab, plain, unmemorable by nature. Whatever his name, he was not marked for greatness. Nothing about him was meant to exceed the average by much, if at all.

He has exceeded the average, though. Wherever, however he could, he's pushed himself beyond what he was made for. Look at his diploma with its dual majors; look at what school it's from. Look at the books in his closet. Listen when he plays the drums. Look at his body; look, for that matter, at how he plays his damned Xbox. Look at how good he's gotten at his stupid games.

Sinclair calls him strong, which is a lie in one sense -- he'll never be strong compared to her. Compared even to some kinsmen more blessed by genetics than he. Sinclair calls him strong, and it's also the truth in a wholly different sense. He's strong because he strives to be. He's strong because he doesn't let himself be weak.

So: he takes her face between his hands, draws back enough to see her eyes. Hey, he says, and:

"You don't have to be sorry. But you don't have to coddle me either. I know you like that about me. What I like about you,"

which might be the first time he's said this about her -- about anything but her piercings, her body, her tits and her ass, anyway --

"What I like about you," he repeats, a gentle stress on every word, "is that you let me be strong. I like that you never treated me like something fragile and stupid that you needed to handle with kid gloves or herd into a fold or lock behind bulletproof glass."

His hands gentle, then, and he leans in to kiss her lips gently, eyes open.

"So keep doing that, okay?"

[Sinclair] Her tits, the way she moves, that fucking steel ring through her nipple that has made him moan on sight, that he can't keep his mouth or his hands off of whenever they're fucking and he sees it bouncing on her breast, tapping her flesh every time he thrusts into her. How tight she is, how eager and new even now, because when you really think about it three months of a night here and a night there hasn't exactly made her an old hand at fucking. Or lovemaking. Or whatever it is.

These are the things he likes about Sinclair, at least the things he's verbalized the most. Maybe the things he's missed in the two, two and a half weeks, whatever, since they last fucked in his bed and he last had a chance to run his hands all over her and feel her all around him, listen to her moan in his ear and smell her, taste her still on his tongue. Ostensibly, at least, that's where all of this started, after all: going in a few minutes poolside from not wanting her to wanting her, and from a one-time thing to something they both missed and looked forward to after discovering how searingly, mindbendingly hot it was.

That may be where it started, in the most surface sense. That isn't where it went, or where it is now.

Now, Sinclair does things like worry about hurting him when the Wyrm gets there first, and Alex does things like find himself texting her just to find out if she's fucking okay, if she's alive, and it bugs him that knowing she is helps him sleep at night.

It's literally impossible to reconcile this face he's holding between his hands with what she really is. Her eyes look a little forlorn, her expression a little sad, her eyes the pale, pale blue of cloud-edges or snow under moonlight. Sometimes they're so vivid in the daylight that they're reminiscent of waters in other countries that he saw while globetrotting, but right now: almost colorless, soft as air and distant as the sky.

Except sometimes they're cold and hungry, sometimes they're vicious and angry, sometimes they glint a certain way right before you think she's going to tear someone's throat out. And those 'sometimes' are more often than moments like this, when she's a little bummed out because she might have done something that hurt him, upset him, or even did him a discredit. Things like that hit Sinclair hard, which is perhaps why he tells her she doesn't really have to be sorry, and here's something else he likes about her

that has nothing to do with her amazing breasts or her tight, wet little cunt. That also isn't just the smile that lights up his face when he sees her or the way he hugs her or the crossing of their ankles as they both lounge around on the couch or the way they face one another as they sleep, arms and legs woven together and breaths mingling,

all of which tells her often enough what he likes about her, even if it couldn't be put into words if they tried.

Kid gloves and folds and bulletproof glass -- and cages -- are what make people fragile and stupid, she could say. Is about to, opening her mouth a little just before he leans across the scant inches between them to kiss her, but the breath she takes to speak turns into a sigh when he does so.

keep doing that

"I'm always gonna freak out a little when you're hurt," she says quietly, her eyes -- which flickered closed for a second -- opening to find his still watching her. "Baby, I was freaking out a little when I beat you up in the parking lot." Beat. "Though not as bad."

She's honest, at least. They weren't 'together', then, though he knew damn well that she would have fucked him even then if she thought he wanted her back. He knew she would have at least mauled his face when she pinned him to the asphalt, and not by slamming it repeatedly into the rock. But still: Alex was not her boyfriend, and her fists weren't the same as a fomor's claws. For one thing: she can control her fists.

"I just... I'm not afraid of hurting you," which is the truth, too. She closes her eyes, and leans forward til her forehead touches his. Whatever may have come after that, she doesn't say it aloud. She just breathes, and after a cycle or so of such, pulls back enough to look at him again.

She's no doctor. She's not even a capable field medic. Sinclair can barely tell the difference between first- and second-degree burns, much less how deep that wound on his side was or how much worse it looked than it really was or how long it would take a Kinfolk to heal it. When she sounds a little uncertain -- if hopeful -- it's because she is, and because his skin is still kinda off-colored, even if he didn't wince when her hand moved over his side.

Which it does again, now.

"So you're... completely healed?"

[Alex] His laughter sounds gentle, amused, when she says she's always gonna freak out a little when he's hurt. "Yeah, well," he says quietly, "same here. That's what people do. They care about people they... um. Care about."

It sounded better in his head. Wiser. He's not wise, though, and never pretended to be. She was surprised to find out he's closer to thirty than he is to twenty. Then again, he acts like a goddamn teenager sometimes: reckless, risk-taking, defiant of hierarchy and authority.

One thing's always been true, though. Alex has never shied from inevitable consequences. He told her a long time ago: when he acts stupid, he expects to get smacked. He doesn't resent just desserts. What he does resent are acts of undeserved prejudice, whether in his favor or against. That's why he doesn't want her to coddle him. That might even be part of why he acts out all the damn time. Keep people busy enough giving you what you deserve and maybe they won't waste time giving you what you don't. Something like that, anyway.

Though -- and Sinclair knows this, too -- it's just as much because that's how he is. Sometimes, Alexander is just an unapologetic asshole. Not so much to her anymore, though. And maybe less so, too, to everyone else. Not because she's made him a better person, but because he intuits, on some level, that what he does will reflect on her.

Anyway.

He looks down when she looks at him; looks at her hand so deceptively soft and gentle against his side. "Yeah," he says. "Good as new. Those scars will fade, too." He smiles at her, "Pretty soon you won't even be able to tell."

[Sinclair] What he says strikes her as a sort of absolution, or at least understanding: that's what people do. They spaz when they care about someone, and that someone gets hurt. So she doesn't have to worry so much, she doesn't have to wait so long, but... it's okay that she freaks out a little. It's okay that the sight of him injured makes her clench up with worry. It's okay that he doesn't like thinking about her getting hurt, though other than the night Marrick tore her apart, he hasn't really seen her shredded.

It doesn't happen often, so it may be some time before he does see it.

Sinclair only gets one thing out of Alex telling her that yes, he's completely healed. Yes, he's good as new. There's nothing unseen beneath the surface of his skin to tear, to rupture, to hurt him deeply. She doesn't even get words out to answer him there, about scars or about being able to tell he was ever clawed. Her hands on his body get firmer, and then she leans forward, pressing her mouth to his with a low, aching sound.

She kisses him with more want than she's shown him since the last time they were in the shower together, pressing herself against him. The air has dried her skin to cool softness, but the heat of her is coming through heartbeat by heartbeat, rising to the surface of her skin, rising like a fever. And she's touching him now without that hesitance or timidity or wariness she's been showing him for nearly two weeks, sliding one hand around to his lower back, pulling him nearer.

This is his girl. His girlfriend. The one with the appetite.

There's barely enough space between them after she starts kissing him for Sinclair to start in on his lowerwear. If it's gym shorts, basketball shorts, sweats, anything of the kind, her hand is slipping under the elastic to touch him just seconds after she gets her mouth on him, and if there's fasteners in her way, they're being all but torn open to get them out of her way, so she can

slip her hand into his pants, and touch him, and show him that she wants him, and has wanted him for so long now, and that no longer thinking she has to hold back has unleashed something in her.

[Alex] Sometimes they're just so damn energetic with each other; so voracious, so unabashedly needful. She doesn't let him finish before her mouth is on his. He doesn't miss a beat before he's all but grabbing her; before he's kissing her back, hungrily, because he's been waiting just as long as she has.

He's in shorts, Alex, because it's late May for fuck's sake, and in his world that means it's summer. Shorts weather. They're cargo shorts, though, rather thick, and they have a button and a zip-fly that she has to fumble open -- though he helps -- before she can slip her hand under his shorts, under his boxers, onto his cock. When she touches him Alexander, whose hands have pushed into her wet hair to hold her mouth to his, lets out a muffled, sharp groan.

And then he's all but slamming her back against the bathroom door, which is faintly damp with the steam of her shower. He's pushing his pants down, his boxers, letting them both drop on the bathroom floor and he's still got his socks on but that's okay. His hands tangle with hers briefly. Shamelessly, he encourages her, moves her hand on his cock a few times, their kiss breaking as he looks down, gasping, to watch her stroke him.

"Oh, that's it," he breathes. "That's it, oh my god."

And he laughs, too -- a quiet, happy sort of sound -- as he lifts his face to hers and kisses her again. This is a little slower, a little gentler, but not by much. It's deep, still. He presses her back against the door, leans into her. His hand follows hers to her wrist, her arm; back to her body when he fills his palms with her breasts, rubs and massages her, plays, as she knew he would, with her nipple ring.

"We need to fuck," he's whispering as he kisses her, again and again. "ASAP. I mean it."

[Sinclair] Sinclair's grace may be a savage, brutal thing, but it's grace nonetheless. She almost never falls, she makes literally scaling the side of a building look somewhat artistic, and there's a trust she puts in her body that takes the tension of fear out of even some of the more daring, risky things she attempts to do.

All of that is to say: there is no fumbling at Alex's clothes, not now, not when she's waited for him and when he's here and telling her it's okay, he's healed, she can't hurt him just by touching him.

And that is to say: his shorts are all but ripped open and shoved away from his body before his hand makes it down to help her. Sinclair snarls when he moves her hand, biting lightly at his lips. He doesn't have to encourage her at this point, to stroke him or to kiss him or anything else. All the same, the rhythm of it, the way she holds him -- he taught her that. Standing in that very shower she just stepped out of, her scent still on his fingers, his arms braced to either side of her, muttering in her ear to go a little faster, a little tighter, yeah, that's it, fuck.

Clothes fall down where her towel is, and Alex ridiculous in his socks, but Sinclair hasn't been paying any attention to what is or isn't on his feet since he got in the door. Which her back is against, now, giving her some leverage to lean into him, wrapping one leg around his hip, lifting herself up. Of course her hand comes off his cock, strokes his chest while he's caressing her breast, teasing his fingers around her nipple ring

which makes her shudder, and whimper a little.

She nods in rapid assent at what he says, pulling his mouth back to hers, then -- as though on second thought -- drawing him almost forcibly down to her breast, watching him with her brow furrowed tight. "Suck it, baby," she whispers, a faint and distant whine underneath her voice as she arches her back, urging his mouth to the nipple he was just toying with. "Baby, please."

[Alex] Their energy is one near-constant. The other is the genuine joy they seem to take in one another's bodies and one another's presence. He laughs often when they make love, and not out of some vicious sense of victory. He grins, he smiles. He resists her for just a second, just long enough to kiss her again, laughing against her mouth, and then

he lets her draw his head down to her breast even as he's wrapping his arms around her and under his ass to pull her up, push her up against the door, which thumps against its frame.

Then he's grinding up against her while he's sucking at her breasts, eagerly and avidly and, frankly, rather greedily, kissing and licking and sucking at one and then the other while he moans for her, growls for her low in his throat, murmurs sweet nothings -- or filthy nothings, such as it were -- as he goes at her.

And he does. Go at her, that is. With his hands squeezing her ass; with his arms tensed on either side of her, supporting her between his body and the door; with his hips flexing against hers as he grinds against her, rubs himself hard and ready against the sweet, tight little cunt he fully intends to fuck in about three seconds here -- goes at her until he's panting for her, letting her breast go with a gasp, flicks the ring with his tongue, leans up to capture her mouth again,

searingly,

while he bucks against her, grinds the shaft of his cock against her clit like maybe they could fuck just like that, get each other off just like that.

Which, given their appetite and their mutual attraction and how fucking long it's been -- they probably can.

[Sinclair] She's missed him.

It would be easy to scoff at that, given that she's been here at some point nearly every day for awhile now, that even if her stays have been brief she's at least been here. Smelled him in this place, or slept beside him and felt comforted by the fact that he's okay, even if she couldn't -- she thought -- have him. But Sinclair has missed him, and whatever it is that changed and changes between them when they have sex.

Which is stratospheric. Which is unexpected. Which is something worth missing, but it isn't even just that.

They care about each other, and neither of them were strictly looking for it. Sinclair, arguably and probably truthfully, is by nature more open to it, but she wasn't looking for someone who would be worried for her when she's in battle and she wasn't looking for someone who would be left behind if she died. Which is what Alex is. What he's become, for her. She avoided it before this, so that she wouldn't cause someone else pain just by living her life and doing her duty.

Still: this is what it is. This is what it's become. Whatever one might call it, they care about each other even when it's frightening, even when it kind of aches. And sometimes when she's alone, she thinks about the way he asked her, quiet like it was a secret, if she couldn't tell how he feels about her when he makes love to her.

Every time.

And what he feels is indescribable. Happy enough to make him laugh the way he does. Horny, yeah. Definitely that. But so much else, and none of it that can or should be put into words. So Sinclair doesn't try, and she doesn't ask, and she just lifts her other foot off the tiled floor and wraps her legs and arms around him while he grinds on her and rubs her ass and suckles her breast.

The noises she makes. Past his ear and then past the top of his head, noises he hasn't heard in what suddenly feels like forever, noises he replays in his mind when she's not around and not available and he's horny as fuck and stroking his cock, thinking about her

sucking him off

or leaning over his bed and grabbing at the sheets

and lying back, gasping and whimpering the way she does when he's going at her right at the very edge, making her breasts bounce on his hands and against his face and making her hair ripple on the pillowcase.

It wouldn't do that right now, though. It's wet. But so is she, and he can feel it because shortly after her birthday Sinclair apparently decided that Alex running for condoms was a minute and a half she didn't want to wait, or something. Or, like she's said, it's just the way it feels it should be, the way that feels right, to fuck him until he comes, and to feel him come inside her.

"Baby," she calls him, and "Alex, baby," and it's all the same thing really in the end, kissing him over and over with her hands on his face and in his hair and across his shoulders, stroking his chest, rubbing herself back against his cock. "God, baby, don't stop. Don't stop that. Fuck!"

[Alex] Alexander doesn't like to think about the possibility -- the eventuality, really -- of her death. Of his too, quite likely, given the way he lives, given the fact that he thinks running away from monsters is somehow a shameful thing to do. But he doesn't delude himself about the truth, the few times he does think about it --

and he does think about it, sometimes, in the dark of night right before he sleeps, when he thinks lazily of sex, of fucking, and then of her, and then of possibilities, eventualities, that drain his lust away and replace it with fear. And dread. And ache,

-- because it's far more likely that one of these days she'll walk out the door smiling and the next time he sees her, if they let him see her at all, she'll be cold and dead on a bier or a pyre or that great flat-topped stone in the caern that he's never seen, that represents her totem. It's far more likely that he'll outlive her, and someday she'll die, and he

will

hurt

like he's never hurt before.

So of course he doesn't like to think about that. Selfish, self-centered creature that he is: he doesn't like to think of the inevitability of pain, the fact that life sucks and then you die, as they say, and the fact that as happy as she makes him, and as happy as he is right here and now, tangled up with her in his cramped little bathroom, what happened to him two, three weeks ago likely happens to her every other night, every single night, and one of these days...

One of these days.

He doesn't think about it. He closes the door on that before it can rise up and drag him under, and he focuses, instead, on the way she's moving, the way she sounds, and the way she's holding onto him and touching him and calling him baby, calling his name, and

while he doesn't stop, per se, he does pause for a second, a moment, long enough to look down, shift her a little higher, reach down, guide himself to her.

And slide into her.

His head drops forward and he moans against her shoulder, loud and long, as he pushes into her. Then it's not his cock rubbing against her clit but his fingers; he's stroking and playing with her as he buries himself inside her and grinds against her, deep and slow, pulsing. And he lifts his head again. And she's tall enough, or he's short enough, that they're nearly the same height, and with her lifted like this he has to raise his face to hers, which he does: lifts his face to hers and finds her mouth again, drowningly, kissing her as he groans into her mouth as he fucks her.

[Sinclair] Never once in his life, and not now, does he aspire to be 'that kind' of kinfolk: the one strong enough or noble enough to be taken as a mate, to give children, to commit to raising them, to honor and be loyal to an Other they rarely see and can't really rely on to be there for them. To love, even, knowing all the while that their lifespan may very well be double or more what they can expect from the parent of their children, the person they share their bed with.

That's the ideal, at least. The perfect Kinfolk, submissive to what this life requires of them. The reality of these qualities is rarer still than their pretense; Alex doesn't even want to pretend that this is what he wants, that this is what he signed up for. Sinclair doesn't ask him for it.

She asks him for this, though. For him to be hot and close and with her. She asks him for some measure of loyalty, though she doesn't know to call it that. She asks him to let her care about him. She asks him to be patient with her, as though they can both pretend she has plenty of time to grow up and figure herself out. She asks him not to hurt her, which is laughable in a bitter, painful way.

She asks him not to stop. Maybe she meant keep doing that, keep stroking himself against her cunt til they both come, messy and wet and hard, but Sinclair hardly complains when he slow down so he can pull back, and slide himself into her. Her nails dig into his back as she moans, openthroated and with longing, with relief. Her hips roll against his body to grind her onto him harder, to take him deeper.

And by fuck, it's sometimes right there in front of him that she was a virgin a few months ago, because it's almost like the first time when it's been two weeks. It's almost like it's been months since his hands last traveled up her thighs and held her ass, pulling her onto his cock.

Sinclair is shuddering, swearing softly as her head drops to his shoulder, as he moans into hers. Maybe they're both proving something to themselves, here, fucking up against the door like this. or maybe they just couldn't any longer.

Her arms, slender enough to bely their strength, wind around his body. "Oh my god, Alex," she breathes, holding him more tightly, bucking a little when he strokes her clit. And again. Wetness slicks across his cock like it did when he started rubbing himself on her, and this girl's

his girl's

eyes close as she clings to him, rolling her hips in circles, whining and moaning into his mouth like she can't get enough. Like she never will.

[Alex] Neither of them really know what to call this between them. It's more than just a little fun, which is what he truthfully expected it to be when he looked at her in her veridian bikini next to that aquamarine pool not far from that cerulean sea. The colors inundated him that day, the color of her skin and her skimpy little swimsuit and her hair and her eyes; the heat took him under and next thing he knew he was asking her up to his room and they were barely in the door before they were,

quite frankly,

mauling each other.

And then it was over, and he figured they'd move on, maybe fuckbuddy up once in a while; but no. Then she came back, and it was still the way it was the first two, three, four times: still so playful and sweet and fun and good, and pretty soon he was opening his big mouth and out tumbled that word, mate that made her backpedal so fast that he backpedaled too, and then they were a metaphorical room away from each other, wary, hairs on end, avoiding that great four-lettered beast in the middle of the floor.

Not that, then. Not casual fuckbuddies and not mates, though she wants some measure of loyalty from him, and he's willing to give it, and she's genuinely distraught when he comes home wounded, and he's genuinely happy when he comes home and finds her here, sharing his space, living where he does.

So he calls her his girl. And she calls him -- well; Alex. Baby. And she told him once that she was falling for him, and then it was him that backpedaled from it, only to tell her later, jeopardy-style, phrased in the form of a question, that everything he feels for her

is right here.

Right in these moments when they're clinging to each other and he's fucking her and she's fucking him and the bathroom is overheating, steamed up from her shower and humid and hot from their lovemaking, and now he's moving into her a little harder, fucking her against the door, panting now, groaning in short little bursts as he moves into her, starts hammering at her.

The door's starting to rattle in earnest in its frame when, quite abruptly, he stops. His arms are sore, to be frank, and his upper back. He scoops her up, lifting her back from the door, taking a step back and pulling the door open.

It's not a long trip to his bedroom. Two, three, maybe four steps on the outside. He doesn't pull out of her that entire time; every single step he takes is a gentle impact from the heel of his foot up through his leg into his hip, and then into her; is an impact she feels more solidly than he does. Then they're in the bedroom, and he's leaning her over and they're half-climbing, half-tumbling into bed, and somewhere in the meantime he slips out of her and makes a muffled, wanting sound,

and is back inside her a second later, hands braced on either side of her, spine in-curved as he pushes into her and throws back his head and makes a wordless, ragged noise of pleasure. Or relief. Or both.

Then his hand is coming back to her body and he's holding her breast, feeling her heart thump against his hand as he comes down over her. Kisses her. She's wrapping her arms around him, or her legs, or both, and he's setting his knees to the bed, and his elbow. His mouth is making its way down her neck to her breast; he's sucking at her breast again, as hungrily as he had moments ago in the bathroom, as he starts fucking her again, fucking her in earnest this time, pounding into her in short, deep strokes that have him moaning against her tits like

he can't get enough. And never will.

[Sinclair] There was sweat on him when he came in, and Sinclair's been scenting it since the steam cleared as he opened the bathroom door and walked inside after her, reaching for her and suggesting she just get messy again. His sweat, healthy and clean and yet sort of dirty at the same time, a smell she altogether does not mind living with when she's here. A smell she does not mind transferring onto her skin when he presses against her like this, rubs himself on her like he did.

Now there's sweat on her, too, as her body temperature goes up higher and higher, as the steam in the bathroom wraps around them like her legs wrap around his waist, like his arms wrap around her to hold her up and against the door while he fucks his cock up into her, groaning and gasping as their skin starts to slick with the moisture in the air and the moisture building up from their bodies.

While he's making the door rattle, she's doing that thing she does, when he starts fucking her fast and hard like this, making that ah ah ah ah ah! sound over and over, all rhythm and excitement, just like when he has her on his lap and she's riding him like a goddamn pony. Her back is arching against the door, which isn't making holding her up any easier, but keeping her against him while he stumbles backward and grabs the handle isn't too difficult, when she topples forward a little and starts burying those noises in the side of his neck, fucking him in earnest even as he's trying to get them to a comfortably flat surface.

They slow down while he walks. Sinclair's paying enough attention that she doesn't try to fuck Alex senseless while he's trying to cross the hallway, but she moves her mouth back onto and his and moans, winding her hips slowly now, because she can't make herself stop. She can hold herself up a little, put her weight on his shoulders because him carrying her with his cock in her makes her, understandably, a little nervous. Slows her down, for a few moments at least.

But she trusts him when he lays her down, lays her out. She doesn't let go of him til she feels the sheets on her back, and even then she doesn't quite 'let go'. She loosens her arms around his neck so he can climb on after her, but his cock has slid from her pussy and it makes her gasp, makes her whimper a little and lift her head to rub her face on him, wordlessly and animalistically seeking more.

Which he gives her, pushing her thighs a little further apart to accomodate his frame and pushing into her cunt a second time with one of those wracked sounds she loves so much.

Kind of like the one he made when she was sucking his cock for the first time, and tickled the underside of it with her tongue to see what would happen. What happened was that Alex nearly lost his mind, and urged her gently to go faster, as though that would help stop him from just going over the edge and fucking her mouth on her birthday.

This isn't like her bithday. This is more like the way they went at each other back in March, slamming each other into walls on their way up here and fucking half-clothed and eager on top of the blankets, over and over again like they couldn't bring themselves to stop when it had been weeks since Carnival, since they'd had each other last.

Sinclair is riding up onto his cock as soon as he slides it into her, lifting her hips from the bed and squeezing him inside, moaning at the feeling of him in her like that, at the sight of him on top of her, at the way he holds himself up and plays with her tits and fucks her like that, picks up their pace again and makes her throw her head back, panting for it.

And that's when the torrent of filth starts from her mouth, which not so long ago at all was filled only with concern, with worry, with uncertain messages of whether or not it was okay to -- well. Do this.

"That's it... oh, god, that's it, baby, fuck that pussy. Fuck it nice and hard, just like that. Oh... oh my fucking god, give it to me. Gimme that hard cock." There's a note of keening in her voice, aroused to the point of needfulness, her hands going to his hips to encourage the roll and flex of his hips, the steady pounding thrust he's building up. She looks up at him, mouth open to gasp. And to say, well.

Shit like this.

"Turn me over, baby," Sinclair mutters, though she's still fucking him right back, barely giving him a chance to comprehend what she's saying, much less comply. "Bend me over and fuck me like your naughty little girl," punctuated with a clench around him, a hard and tight grind of her body to his.

[Alex] The noise Alex makes is equal parts gasp and laugh and curse -- a panting exhale with some insinuation of an f at the beginning. He's atop her, over her, inside her, his hands gripping his plain cotton sheets now, his teeth flickering behind his lips as what she's doing to him flashes across his face.

"Oh god I love it when you talk like that," he pants, just like that, no punctuation, no commas, no pauses: one run-on breath of words. "I love what a dirty little girl you are."

Their mouths come together again. He kisses her hard enough to press her back against the sheets, and he presses himself into her deep enough to make himself gasp, make himself groan against her lips, make his own hips buck involuntarily against hers as if to fuck her more thoroughly, to mark her, or himself, more indelibly with the pleasure of the moment.

Then he's drawing back, levering himself up; he's grabbing her, his hands ungentle with haste. He's holding her by the hips as he pulls out of her, and that rips another groan out of him, another overcome, shredded noise, but even as it's clawing its way out of him he's flipping her on her stomach, grabbing a pillow from up the bed, stuffing it under her and

and slowing, slowing just for a second, as he kneels behind her with her sweet little ass raised for him. His hands mold over her buttocks, squeeze and rub; his thumbs slide down and part the wet lips of her pussy, and she can hear him breathing as he looks at her cunt; she can hear his breath catching as he rubs his thumb over her slit.

"Oh, my god."

It's so soft, that. Then he's bending to her all at once, and his mouth is all over her, sucking at the crest of her shoulderblade, licking at the dip of her spine. His hands are all over her, reaching under her to caress her tits, play with her clit. He's all over her, eager and energetic and hungry as some small, vicious predator; not an apex beast, perhaps, but a thing that lives on hot blood and hot pursuit and his own, sharp cunning all the same.

He's panting against the side of her neck when he enters her again, fills her up and is still for barely a second before he's quite simply pounding her against the pillow and the mattress. Hammering her, going at her quick and hard and furious, reaching over her head to find her hands

and lace their fingers

and grip their hands together, white-knuckled.

[Sinclair] This is the way it is sometimes with them, not just eager and athletic and hot but raw. The energy is animal, is shameless, is just flat-out lust, like they've become nothing more than beasts rutting together, hunting down pleasure like it can feed them. Nothing about the filth that comes out of Sinclair's mouth right now makes Alex feel uncared for, nothing about the way he fucks her right now makes her feel used. They're just... horny. And that's not just okay, that's how they like it.

This is how Sinclair likes it, how she asked him without words to fuck her while they were still in Rio, when it wasn't just 'new' but her third time, period. Or fourth. If she thinks about it, Sinclair can count how many times she fucked Alex in that luxury hotel room before she finally slept, or before she finally had to leave. But she's not thinking about that, and she's not counting.

She's bending over on his bed here in grey Chicago, on her knees and elbows, her back arched and her body quite literally presented for exactly what Alex does to it. Sinclair squirms when he touches her, stroking her until she's writhing so much on the bed he has to grab her hips and pin her to the pillow just so he can get back inside of her.

When he is, when he runs his mouth and his hands all over her and starts fucking her again, Sinclair cries out from the force of his thrust, bucking back against him as if by reflex. She's up off the bed enough that his hands find their way over her flesh easily, find her piercing flicking his palm as her breasts move on his hands, brush on the sheets. She's got leverage like this to fuck him back, to bow her head and moan into the mattress, to watch his hands running up and down her torso, reaching between her thighs.

"Fuck, yes," she mutters, she gasps, and then she screams, throwing her head back and grabbing at the covers on the bed, grabbing at the pillows. So Sinclair's hands grab the bed and Alex's hands grab hers and they hold on for dear life just like that.

And Sinclair's still going, moaning aloud as he throws his hips forward again and again, their bodies making a slight slapping noise as they come together over and over. She's muttering, and she's pleading: "Oh god. Oh god. Ohmyfuckinggod. Fuck, baby, how do you make me so wet? Oh my fuck, Alex, don't stop. Don't stop!"

[Alex] This time he does laugh, and laughing, kisses her neck, kisses her jawline.

"Baby," he pants, "baby, I'm not going to stop."

His teeth catch on her earlobe. He kisses her neck again, harder this time, and he's not laughing now. He's panting, and shuddering, and his hands are holding hers and hers are grabbing at the bedding and

god, he's still fucking her just like that, with short sharp throws of his hips, again and again, pounding the daylights out of her while she moans aloud; while his panting escalates and becomes groaning, becomes short vowel sounds low in his chest on every thrust as he gets closer and closer to the edge.

"I'm not gonna stop," he's still muttering, senselessly now, "don't stop. Oh my fucking god, just like that, don't stop. Don't -- fuck. Fuck! Sinclair -- "

He hits his orgasm first. Pretty hard not to, the way he's fucking her: a headlong, reckless dash for the finish. It's been too long for him to take his time; he doesn't want to wait.

When he comes it's a cresting wave of pleasure rearing up over him and crashing down on his head. A spinning vortex of pleasure, an ocean of it, until he barely knows up from down; until the hard, fierce bucks of his hips are pure instinct, pure reflex, nothing but nerve impulses and muscle contractions while he's burying his face in the curve of her neck and

just moaning for her. Just spilling ragged, raw noises out into the small confines of his room, pushing into her over and over until his not-quite-queensized bed is creaking on its frame.

"Oh, my god."

That's the first thing out of his mouth, sighing, when he's lucid enough to speak again; when he can pant for breath again without groaning on every exhale.

"Oh, my fucking god. Oh, my sweet, dirty little girl."

[Sinclair] All this time, Alex has been laying kisses across Sinclair, wherever he could reach her. It's as though when his mind's connection to his mouth becomes tattered from ache and pleasure he still has to find expression. He returns to more primordial language, speaking from his lips to her breasts, whispering over her clavicles, exulting against her throat. When he has her turned over he goes on kissing her back and her shoulders, her jawline, catching sight of her in profile:

her head back and her eyes closed, her brow furrowed in tight little wrinkles and her lips open, letting out cry after cry as she, too, loses track of more orderly language. He can see what he's doing to her. And he can feel it underneath him, in the way she works her body back to meet his, in the way she clenches around him with unconscious, involuntary shudders of anticipation, silent prophesies of pleasure.

Considering that all of this between them keeps spinning into something frighteningly out of their control, into something deeper and more visceral, they seldom slow down once they come together. Even the first time, with the tension that he might hurt her and she might snap and tear his head off -- a disproportionate reaction if ever there was one -- it was Sinclair who asked Alex to go faster, who climbed on top of him before he could even ask if she was staying long enough to ride him, who just tonight had no trouble shoving her hand down his pants and mauling him as soon as she knew there was really no way doing so would re-injure him.

Sometimes it's slow, and soft, and he likes the way she moans in his ear then, tender and quiet and gasping. Sometimes the way they make love is the way they sleep together, which is inexplicably gentle and was always surprisingly intimate. But more often it's like this:

the only clothes they get off are the ones they already stripped out of or had to take off to get their bodies together, and

they're sweating and swearing and absolutely punishing the poor bedframe, and

it's athletic and energetic and kind of rough, because he knows she can take it, and

she knows he can, too.

Sinclair loves it like this, wanted it like this before she could even physically bear it for more than a couple of minutes right near the end, when pleasure was searing awareness of any discomfort out of her brain. She grabs at the sheets past Alex's fingers and moans wildly, lowering herself closer to the mattress as they -- well -- fuck one another's brains out. She turns her head and lays there, pressing her cries into the sheets or letting them out into the air,

and she's whimpering and keening and swirling her hips back against his body as though to bring him off that much faster, or to use him for as much fucking pleasure as she can or both

and he's just slamming himself into her, gasping, grunting when his orgasm reaches into him and threatens to detonate his heart with every dangerous grind of her ass back against him, because she's not stopping the entire time he's coming, she's quite definitely using that cock of his even as he's spending himself inside of her, folded over her and losing his mind

which in a way, is what sends Sinclair over the edge with him.

She loves this. She actually pretended to be human for awhile so she could have this, so she could get on the pill so that when she fucked her boyfriend she could feel him literally pounding his cum into her, so she could do as Alex was talking about at the shower and get messy, get covered in sweat and make it so by the time it's over there's no way to tell his wet from hers, no way to so much as move without getting each other utterly filthy.

She loves the way he fucks like some feral, energetic animal, and she loves the way he bellows and moans and tattoos those sounds into her skin where his lips open against her body. She loves the flex of his arms on either side of her and the flex of his hips, the way his ass tightens up and his lower back curves inward and the way he drives himself into her til it nearly hurts to fuck this hard, to be joined this closely.

So that is how Sinclair comes, raking at the edges of Alex's orgasm, dissolving underneath him, with him, both of them abusing the bed on its springs and the headboard against the wall, her hands grabbing tight at his as she writhes in time with his thrusts. Her slender little hips buck under him, and they'd hear the pillow rustling with it if only they weren't making so much noise, his moaning buried in her neck, hers scattershot around the room.

They're still moving for awhile after that, and Sinclair's making these wrecked sounds like she'd plead with him to stop torturing her if she could make herself tell him to stop sending aftershocks of pleasure through her, but she's not really sure what the fuck she'll do if he stops moving his cock in her like that. Just like that,

which is sort of what she was trying to yell while he was fucking her senseless.

Only eventually they do slow, and the bucking of her hips and the throw of his become a rhythmic roll, and then they can't even stand that anymore, and they just

collapse.

Sinclair can handle Alex's chest against her back like this. For all her strength, though, it isn't as though she's bigger than he is. In this form she's got a human male who is mostly muscle laying on her back and she snarls if he tries to move away or push himself up, even though her ribs are pushing against the mattress with every panting inhale.

Their hands are still linked, laced, though no longer white-knuckled. Sinclair's eyes are closed, her cheek to the sheets, her whimpers inconstant and random, interspersed between shattered breaths. Alex mutters to her, sighs, calls her his dirty little girl again, and Sinclair gives a shiver underneath him, squeezing his left hand with hers, as though in affirmation. She has no words. She can't even try.

But yes, she seems to be saying, sweeping her thumb across the length of his: his girl.

[Alex] Pushing himself up, rolling aside, or otherwise moving away from Sinclair right now is about the last thing on his mind. She's not so small or frail, and he's not so large and heavy, that he'd literally crush her if he stayed. Necessity aside, there's no reason he can think of to move away.

There's no reason in his mind at all, really. Nothing but the slow-settling fragments of thoughts, like debris after a detonation. Their hands are still laced. She's still whimpering beneath him now and then, and her pussy is still pulsing around him, clenching in waves.

He nuzzles her blindly. She squeezes his hand. He kisses her neck, and then her cheek, and then he finds her mouth again and though they're both still striving to catch their breath, he kisses her -- seals their mouths to one another's. His nostrils flare as he pulls in the air he needs -- their mouths gasp apart for a moment -- and then together again.

That's all there is for moments, minutes afterward. Just them, lying together, lazing about -- a slow revelry in one another's bodies and presence. Gradually pulses slow; breathing steadies out. Eventually, Alexander opens his eyes again

and rolls gently to the side

and rolls her with him, sighing as he shifts inside her. They're both sweaty now. Messy again, as he put it. He should probably change his sheets. They should definitely take a shower.

Later.

For now, his calf slides over hers; he wraps his arm around her and holds her right where she is. His eyes close and he makes some low, satisfied sound in the back of his throat. "My girl," he murmurs again, softly now, as though to imprint it somewhere. Seal it in stone.

[Sinclair] Those warm, blind nuzzles of Alex's face against her neck and her shoulder make Sinclair melt slightly, her frame relaxing with his. She exhales in a shudder of air, though her body only grows more still and languid with satiation. Her head is turning towards his, her lips seeking his, even though she pulls at his mouth again and again, trying to breathe and trying to kiss him all at once.

They tangle like that, limbs and tongues and breaths, til he moves them. Sinclair makes a low noise of agreement as she rolls with his movement, settling on her side with him, legs parting a bit then relaxing again. They shift until they find some position to be comfortable and to be unseparated, settle again, and Sinclair sighs quietly, pulling one of his pillows over so she can lay her head on it and hug it the way she does on those rare occasions when they sleep spooning rather than facing.

It becomes quite clear that she could sleep like this. Maybe won't, until he slides his cock out of her, because god knows if he stays then neither of them are really going to get any rest, but she wants to stay like this for awhile. His arms slip around her, hold her close and warm, and his silly socked feet tangle with her bare ones, with her colorfully painted toes.

Sinclair drowses, a faint smile on her face even before he murmurs what he does, though the words make it grow. She curls up against his chest, the sort of happy and satisfied girl that she only ever is when she's with him. Makes little noises, as peaceful as whalesong and hinting at humming, all songlike and soft.

No my boy in response. No my mate either, certainly. Not even my Alex.

Just, after a little while, her whispering: "We could do it again," this said as though he asked aloud, or as though she's making a suggestion, "but I'm happy to just lie here like this with you for awhile, too."

[Alex] No; there's no my boy in response. Or my Alex. And certainly not my mate. Not even my boyfriend, now that he thinks about it. He's never heard her call him my anything.

Which, one some level, he appreciates. God, but Alex is terrified of being held, being tied down, being claimed by a Garou and collared and leashed, being pressed into the sort of slavery their kind all too often practices. One some level he understands where they're coming from. They're not human; they can't live by human standards. Humans number in the billions. Garou and their kin -- they're lucky if the entirety of the Garou Nation can scrape above a hundred thousand. They have a duty to breed. The Garou have a duty to die, and the kin have a duty to serve those that serve a greater god, or cause, or force.

He knows all that. It doesn't make it any easier to swallow; not when he was born in the late 20th century, and not when he grew up listening to his teachers and peers wax poetic on personal freedom, on liberty and justice for all. Not when his is the duty to serve, and his brother's is the duty to die.

It doesn't seem fair. Any of it.

And yet -- in spite of all that: he notes this, that she never calls him mine. It doesn't bother him. Not yet, anyway. But it's an awareness in his mind all the same, something that he dwells on for a few seconds, then lets go.

He nuzzles the back of her neck. And then, carefully, he draws out of her, urges her to turn around.

"I wanna do it again," he murmurs. "But I wanna see you this time."

[Sinclair] Alex's fear of being possessed by this Garou or that other probably has a lot to do with why Sinclair never calls him mine. She's not terribly perceptive or empathetic, though that has more to do with repression of innate talents than anything else. But she's also not an idiot, and she... well. Sort of gets him. They don't go into it very deeply or very often, but that's why they're here -- together -- when six months ago such a thing was pretty much unthinkable. They do get each other, and that's rare enough that it's worth holding onto for awhile.

But the fact that Sinclair understands Alex's reticence about being claimed is only part of it. She's hesitant, too. And then there's something more primal at work, something she's wary of speaking of, especially to him: he's not hers. Not in the irrevocable, inarguable, you-can't-take-him-unless-you-beat-me sense. She hasn't challenged for him. She hasn't won him or earned him, and it's possible that Sinclair -- also raised in the 20th century, a product of the same sorts of schools and mindset -- doesn't want to challenge for him. Win him like a prize. Prove herself worthy of him like he's a crown to be laid on her head, or something.

Still, she knows: she has no right to call him hers. He is not.

Truth be told, all this business of freedom and claiming and what's fair probably has a lot to do with why he was -- maybe even still is -- selling his spunk on GW.net. Still doing his duty, that way. Breeding more warriors for a tribe that uses their Kinfolk for little else, since they work so often in human circles themselves to begin with. Impregnating female Garou, or at least supplying them with the genetic material they want to mix with their ova and shove into a nice Kinfolk surrogate.

They are Glass Walkers, after all. His jizz is probably being used in experiments even now to see if the fertility drugs that result in stories like Octo-Mom will help them repopulate their race a bit.

Sinclair, however. Sinclair is on the pill now, and before she was on the pill her boyfriend used condoms and before he was her boyfriend she was a virgin so she's not really doing her duty in that respect, anyway. She fights. She risks death. She does something for the war effort other than breeding, does things Alex and other Kinfolk can't, so nobody is snitting at her yet about not popping out a bratling or five.

All of which is sort of laughable, when you realize why she got on the pill, what instincts were telling her that it should be like this, that the male who is her boyfriend-consort-fuckbuddy-lover should come inside of her with no barrier between their bodies whatsoever. Such a thing would normally lead to exactly what the pill helps her avoid.

Alex starts to pull away, to withdraw, and Sinclair gasps softly and reaches back suddenly, putting her hand on his bare hip to stay him. "No," she mutters, turning her head around to look at him, "no, not yet." A breath or two, faster now by increments. "I meant... I want to stay like this. For a couple more minutes. Just..."

she relaxes, her hand on his hip, their bodies together, his arm around her waist or her chest or slung over her hips. She nuzzles him right back, exhaling in a sigh. "Just another minute."

As her face rubs against his, she smiles, brushing her lips on his cheek. "Then more. Til we can't move."

[Alex] It doesn't take much to convince Alexander to stay. As soon as she reaches back, he stops. And it's stopping, not freezing. He doesn't go rigid. There's no tension in it, and no tension in the way he comes closer again, his leg sliding gently along the outside of hers.

"Okay," he whispers, and his arm wraps itself more securely around her waist. They nuzzle each other like animals, like the mates they're so vociferously not, and then they settle again

on his bed, in his bedroom, with the curtains open and the window cracked open and afternoon light casting through the glass, lighting the edge of the bed. That's why he got this place, he told her once. One of the reasons, anyway, even though it was small; even though he could've probably afforded something a little bit bigger. He likes this place because it faces the south. Because it's bright all day without being burningly hot in the afternoons. Because it's small, and everything has its place, and when he's here he feels snug and secure as a forest animal in its den.

Maybe he never told her all that. But she probably understands.


It turns out they don't ever really draw apart. After a while, their drowsy closeness drifts into a sort of drowsy arousal. Their lazy nuzzling brushes their lips over one another's over and over again, and then they're kissing, and then he's raising himself on one elbow to eat at her mouth while his hand explores her breasts, explores her belly, explores all the way down between her legs where

he's growing hard again, and where he starts stroking into her again, gently this time, and slowly, while his fingers stroke her clit.

It turns out they do face each other eventually, but not the second time. The second time, they fuck just like that, grinding together on their sides, his arms around her, her hands reaching back to grasp at his hair and his hip by turns. They come just like that, gasping into each other's mouths over her shoulder, their bodies shuddering and jerking through tight, quiet orgasms

that frankly leave them hungry for more.


Midday passes to afternoon, and the sun starts to slant down from its apex. The light on the floor moves toward the closet. They move into, around, and against each other, and at one point

she's atop him, riding him with her hands on his chest and he's laughing because she said something, laughing until his eyes close with mirth and joy, laughing until she's bending down to kiss him, her hair falling around his face, and then his eyes are closed not with laughter but with what she's doing to him, and his mouth is opening to hers, and she's telling him yes, yes, that's it, yes as he holds her hips and arching his own as his brow furrows with sudden, overwhelming pleasure and

at another he's on top again, and they're sideways on the bed now, her hair spilling off the edge because he's fucked her so hard and thoroughly that they've managed to creep their way across the mattress, and pretty soon she'll have to put a hand down on the floor lest they both topple down there, but that's okay because it's sofuckinggood that neither of them want to stop, and that's how they'll come that time: hanging off the side of the bed, teetering on the edge of disaster -- or at least a good tumble to the floor -- and later, afterward, panting, he'll laugh at the ceiling and say he needs a bigger bed

(and maybe she'll say he doesn't, because neither of them can remember the last time they slept together without touching, tangling, somehow.)


They take a break for food and drink somewhere in the middle: Alexander stuffing a frozen pizza in the tiny oven; Sinclair nomming a few Twizzlers while she waits. They look out his living-room window. The city doesn't look cold anymore. There's plant life, and sunlight, and the days are long. Summer's around the corner.

They eat naked or near enough not to matter, sprawled on his couch. They watch Tripoli play in his basket of cans. Bin o' tins, Alex dubs it. They're still hungry after one pizza, because they're not all that big or hearty and because they've been expending so much energy, so Alexander sticks another in the oven, but before it's done she's crawling into his lap and he's slouching down to give her room and

then they're going at it all over again, and she's crying out as she rides him like a pony, and he's yelling so loud when he comes that their neighbor turns up the volume on his stereo in protest.


The pizza's a little burnt after that, but still edible. And they're worn out now, lazy and replete and quiet. They eat and they shower while the dishwasher does its work. Then they lay about, Alexander in a pair of old boxers, Sinclair in whatever she might've dug out of Alex's closet. They're on the couch. Her legs are across his lap. They're just quiet now, calm in one another's presence. The sun is slipping down the west. The city outside is all reds and oranges. Old brick, cracked asphalt. His glorious neighborhood, which against all logic he's growing fond of. It has character. It's his home.


"Hey."

This, softly, when the sun's all but gone. They can't see the sunset from here, but they can see its effects on the city, in the light. His hand moves on her leg, strokes warm over her shin. When he looks at her, his forehead is faintly furrowed.

"Why aren't we mated?"

It seems to be a genuine question.

[Sinclair] They make love three, four more times after that. It's like the first time, when they started to lose count, when one round of fucking blended into the next, all of it melting together under the searing sun down in Brazil, where it is finally cooling off even as Chicago is warming up.

They've missed each other. As much as Sinclair has been around, sleeping with Alex in his bed and trying to lend him some strength or protect him like that, the truth is that it's been a long time since they've just gone at it like that, a sea storm hitting land and not slowing down for a second. Sinclair has missed him, has missed relaxing into his arms afterward and has missed slowly building back into fucking later on.

So that is what they do.

They snuggle, frankly. Sinclair twists around after awhile and holds his arms around her body and breathes in time with him, and as her hands fall away from his, his touch slides onto her breasts, cupping around them, caressing slowly. Her eyes are fluttering open around the same time he feels her getting wet around him all over again, feels the heat rise in her body and off her flesh. She's watching him as he props himself up, looking him in the eyes until his hand travels slowly down her belly to her cunt, stroking over her lips gentler, more tenderly than he did when she first bent over for him.

Then her eyes close, and her mouth opens to pant so quietly it's almost subvocal. It grows louder when he starts to fuck her like that, long slow strokes of his cock back into her, long slow strokes he can watch when he looks down between their bodies, long slow strokes that go deeper when Sinclair moves back against him, arching her back against his chest when she starts to moan like she does,

oh and oh, Alex and oh, oh... oh, baby, yes

all in whispers, even when she comes, reaching back to grab his hip because she can't grab onto anything else without wanting to turn herself over and make him fuck her on all fours again.

That's how and why they end up like they do, with Sinclair sliding her pussy off of his cock and whimpering as she turns around, crawling immediately back over him, openly if quietly pleading for him to get back inside her, baby please, I need you inside me, just like that

as she sinks down on his cock. He hasn't even had a chance to relax yet, his cock hasn't softened yet, he's still panting when she wraps herself around him like that and it makes him throw his head back, muttering oh fuck. fuck, you horny girl while his hands flex on her hips, not sure if he wants to urge her to ride or stop her from moving til he puts his brain back together again.

But Sinclair waits. She seems pacified by his cock filling her again, and waits patiently, clenching slowly, til he's breathing normally again and looking up at her, and she asks him

are you okay? can you take a little more?

which makes him think of that afternoon in Rio, and looking down at her cheeks all pink from arousal and her hair damp from the shower and her lips parted so she could gasp every time he pushed a little more into her

so he laughs at the memory, and it becomes laughter of sheer happiness, laughter that tickles her mouth when she bends over and kisses him, sinking into that kiss the way she sank onto his body, like she could immerse herself in the sound of it. That kiss, his laughter, shred apart at the first long roll of her hips.

Sinclair rides him slowly, the third time. She stays close to his body, grinding sweet and slow on him, watching the way he reacts to every swivel of her hips, every slide of her pussy, every word out of her mouth asking him if he likes that, if that's what he wanted so bad, if he missed that pussy

until the sound of the shit she's saying and the way she starts fucking him faster, bouncing on his cock, telling him yes over and over again, the way she rides out a hard, explosive little orgasm makes him grab at her body to hold her there while he pumps himself up into her, muttering filth right back at her about how fucking hot it is, how fucking good, how fucking wet, jesus, fuck, fuck --

You'd think after that they'd slow down.

You'd think the next time would be tender.

But the next time, it's Alex laying her out under him, holding her arms to the bed, reaching between her legs to play with her and watch her buck against his hand, and she's senseless while he asks her if she wants it again. She's writhing when he takes his cock in hand and strokes it against her, asking her if she fucking needs it now, if that's what she wants so fucking much,

til she says she does, til she begs please, til she flat-out moans fuck me, please and he can't take it anymore, either, letting go of himself and letting himself go as he buries his cock in her

again.

It's sort of cute when she grabs at the nightstand, the sheets, at his shoulders, crying out that she's gonna fall, and actually sounding concerned about them cracking their skulls on the floor. Which has him laughing again, rearing back to grab her hips and drag her back on the bed, only to leap on her again, pushing her thigh up. This time is just as fast and rough as the first, the bed protesting just as loudly, the people on it coming just as hard, yelling their pleasure til they just... fall apart.

Of course

they're still sideways, and her hair is flopped over one end and their feet are hanging off the other, and they're so sweaty and it's so hot in this room now even with the window open that neither of them can even resist when they slide apart. Alex slips out of her with a pant from him and a whimper from her, and he rolls onto his back, staring upward, his head hanging down the side of the bed.

He needs a bigger one, he says, and then his girl is rolling to her side, curling up against his, working her away between his body and his bicep, slinging her arm over his chest in a lazy drape.

"No," she sighs, still catching her breath. "No, I like being close."

As though what she likes, when it comes to the bed he has in his own damn home, makes that much of a difference.


Later on, she finds some paperclips and shakes them out into Tripoli's bin o' tins and shows him how to unbend and re-bend them into new shapes while Alex is making 'dinner'. She lounges around naked, having cleaned up a little before leaving the bedroom but not bothered with clothes. She crawls over Alex's lap to grab another -- the last -- slice of pizza, her lean back and the curve of her ass all but on display, breasts not quite brushing his thighs, and when she hears him take in a breath she turns her head to look at him over her shoulder for a moment.

A long moment.

Clang! goes Tripoli in his basket.

"You make me so wet," sighs Sinclair, crawling forward and laying out over him, back arched, ass lifting, thighs parting as though to show him the truth of what she says, to invite him to tilt his head and watch every little pulsing, slick reaction of her cunt as he runs his hands over her body.

That one last slice of pizza goes cold, and the second one he tossed in the oven gets a little burnt, but it's been almost two weeks since they last had sex. And the last time they had sex he ate her out in the shower and they fucked in his bed and that was it, that was all, and every fucking time he's with her it's like she wants him half a dozen times or something before she can really relax, so it's been forever and a day since they last had this much time together to just...fuck.

On his couch. Just like this. With her bent over his lap at first, writhing while he touches her, bucking when he slides his fingers into her and tells her what a nice, tight little pussy that is. Truth be told, the way Sinclair is moaning at that point makes the clanging in the bin go quiet as Tripoli gets as far away from this wet, fleshy nonsense as the spirit world can take him. And the way she's moving on top of Alex, she'd be happy if he just put her facedown on the cushions and took her hard and fast all over again, but his cock is hard and demanding attention

and he's stroking it when she finally gets back on her knees and he takes his fingers out of her, greedily sucking the taste of her off them, watching her as she spreads her legs over him. That wet hand rolls her nipple between fingertips a moment later, and this time

this time, Sinclair takes his cock in her hand and rubs it on herself until she's got her head thrown back and he's got his head bowed to watch her. She damn near makes herself come on him like that, but he's telling her fuck, baby, put that pussy on me which always seems to drive her a little nuts

because she loves the shit he says to her, too. Loves the way he talks dirty to her, loves all this business of good little girl or dirty little girl, loves hearing what filth his reptile brain churns up when he's plowing into her. So she doesn't get herself off on his cock, just rubbing it on her pussy til she loses her mind. No, Sinclair guides him inside of her, and they've recovered enough by now from the first few rounds that they can tolerate it. But it's still raw. It's still almost too hot to bear. It's still energetic, and fun, and her body is a singular arc of electric tension when her orgasm hits her. Alex runs his hands up her torso and across her breasts, playing with her nipple ring, making her throw back her head and let out moan after moan after moan to match the last slow, rolling grinds of her hips.


His room is drenched with the smell of sex. His living room isn't much better by the time they're done. Sinclair stays on his lap for awhile, her arms wrapped around him, her legs motionless to either side of him. She has to call on every ounce of her will to make herself get up, and she does so slowly, watching his face as his cock slips out of her, her hands resting on his shoulders for leverage that she doesn't need. She just wants to go on touching him.

Sinclair lays back on the couch after that, head on one of the ugly pillows, and though the oven's been beeping for awhile now Alex just follows, laying over her and with her for a few moments, a few minutes. They kiss, lazily and loosely, lips brushing over each other, breaths mingling. At one point, Sinclair touches his face with incalculable gentleness, stroking fingertips back over his cheekbone, murmuring wordless affections.

Naked, messy, and -- yes -- quiet, they eat a few more slices of pizza until almost every need they have is sated. They drag themselves up and off the couch to go shower, and Sinclair's legs are actually a little coltish for a step or two, if he notices, just like they were when they rolled out of bed to go eat. It's endearing. It's sort of hot, because he knows how they got like that. It isn't unlike looking at her, sweaty and pink-cheeked and whimpering under him, and knowing what he's done to her, that she's wrecked like that because of what they've done, how they've fucked.

She steadies, and is laughing and playful and affectionate in the shower, kissing him in the spray, arms slung loosely around his neck, nuzzling his chest and shoulders while soap rinses off her back and arms. And it's sweet and fun and... just... good. Even this. Even just taking a shower together, in this tiny and cramped bathroom in this tiny and cramped apartment, which he likes because it is snug and warm and good as a den, which she likes because it is his.

He bought a robe for her. That's what Sinclair chooses to put on after she's clean -- again. She's finger-combed her wet hair a little but it's still forming damp, silky little dreadlocks as they go back to the living room to curl up on the couch. Her legs are over his lap, the folds of the robe parted, but she's sitting right beside his hips, her head near his shoulder, and his hands on her shins, stroking her legs as day finally sighs towards night, and darkness, and rest.

Hey.

"Mmm?" says she, drowsing on him like this. He has to twist a little to look at her. There's a faint whirring from the basket; Tripoli came back sometime while they were showering, but now he's... sleeping, it seems like, buried amongst empty cans and warped paperclips and a shield made out of a can of Coke which is temporarily being used as a blanket.

Sinclair is looking over there when Alex looks at her, but something in the air makes her lift her head from his shoulder just enough to look back at him, or tilt it back enough to meet his gaze.

Why aren't we mated?


There are a lot of answers to that. Do you want to be? comes to mind. Or perhaps: Because I haven't challenged for you yet. Maybe I'm not ready. I don't think you are, either. There are sarcastic versions of all of these. There are even more where those come from. There's varying levels of truth to all of them, and Sinclair sincerely isn't sure what those levels are. She knows the stark, absolute truth of some others:

Because I'm scared of leaving you behind.

Because I don't even know if you love me.

Because a mate means cubs and claiming and it feels like putting you away into a safe box where no one can touch you.

Because if I take you as my mate, then that's it. I'll never have or take another. There's no higher or deeper relationship than that for me, no matter how human I used to be.

And above all in Sinclair's mind:

Because I don't know if that's what you want.


What she says, though, after a breathless second and few others with nothing but breathing, is just that first response, the one that came soonest and most truthfully to her thoughts and now makes it quietly and -- let's be honest, here -- vulnerably out of her lips:

"Do you want to be?"

[Alex] It's been hours since they've been out of physical contact for more than a few seconds. As close as they are now, as attuned as they are to one another, surely she can feel the pause that her question gives him. Alexander, who's usually the embodiment of perpetual motion, isn't merely lazy and lounging about now. He's still, motionless for a few seconds as he thinks.

"I ... don't know," he confesses finally, and quietly.

As though afraid she'll draw away now, or fold herself into herself to protect that soft part of her that she hides behind black eyeliner and vicious grins, he wraps his arm around her shoulders, pulls her against him, kisses her hair. Then he's warm against her back, or her side if she's turned to face him: solid and dense, sturdy.

"I wouldn't mind. I told you that back in Rio, but I guess I didn't tell you why." A flicker of a wince, "'Cause my reasons aren't too noble. A mate who actually respects me and my choices, who sees me as a person instead of a possession or a thing -- I could do a lot worse than that. If I wait around until someone else comes along and takes a shine to the nonexistent cubs I could potentially father, I probably would do a lot worse than that. But..."

And now he's quiet again, his hold on her as firm as it was. He keeps her close. He keeps her close because he's not done, but what he has left to say is paradoxically harder to say than telling a werewolf all his rather cold, selfish calculations was.

"But that's not fair to you," he adds softly. "And somewhere along the way I actually started to care about whether or not I was being fair to you. Somewhere along the way ... this got really good. Good enough that I'm starting to think about holding on to it for its own sake. Not for the sake of my future or my quality of life or whatever."

Another pause. If she hasn't pulled away by now, his thumb strokes her shoulder idly, thoughtlessly. Over the corona of her hair, the sunset is down to its last embers outside. Purples and blues. A ring of gold at the horizon, glimpsed through the buildings. There seems to be something else, some conclusion or something he could state, but nothing comes to mind. He leaves it at that.

[Sinclair] Time was, Sinclair would speak without thinking. She barely had the impulse control to keep her rage in check, and sometimes she didn't even care to do that much. Even now, when her temper flares up there's precious few who warrant an extension of her willpower to keep calm. Alex is one of those. For his sake, or for the sake of what this is and is becoming, she breathes, she counts, she does whatever people do to clear their vision and stop seeing everything in black and white splashed with blood red.

Now she also thinks before saying the first thing to come to mind. That doesn't mean that the first thing to come to her mind isn't what ends up being the most true, the most right, the thing she most wants to say in a given moment. Such as now, asking him -- when he brings up mateship, when he asks her why -- if that's something he wants, and not just something he's asking about academically. Knowing the difference guides everything else she has to say.

He's asking academically. Sort of. But not entirely.

They're warm together, like this. Warm from their shower and their food and so many rounds of fucking that Sinclair is quite content to just curl up and recover. She sits sideways on the couch, legs over his lap, scootched forward so that she can lean on his side. Simply put, there's little of her that isn't touching him one way or another. And at no point does she pull away. And at no point does he feel what he's wary of feeling: that presaging of motion, that hint in her musculature that she's about to draw back.

Sinclair stays right where she is, as relaxed as she has been since slipping into that robe -- which she never bothered to tie around her waist, in point of fact -- and coming over here to sit with him. She seems thoughtful, and his fears turn out unrealized: she leans into his arm and into his kiss on her hair, and the fact that he doesn't really know if he wants that doesn't seem to bother her.

At all.

"I get that," Sinclair says quietly, while he's rubbing her shoulder and looking past her hair at the window, then at her face, because she's lifted it off his body enough so that they can face each other clearly. "All of it, really. I think I understood that even back in Rio."

And still she'd recoiled from it. Then, at least. But then, he was surprising her, and she was -- as he'd put it once -- a virgin afterglowing from her first fuck. Not to mention, some part of her did know what he meant when he said he could do worse.

That, as motive for mateship, is understandable to her. And also appalling.

Sinclair leans forward again, stretching out her neck to nuzzle the side of his face, cutting under his jaw to rub against him with the same sort of forceful closeness of an animal who has claimed your lap and your home as their own -- even if she hasn't quite gone that far. Consciously. She lays a kiss on his neck as she gentles again.

"I can tell you I don't really think about having cubs with you," she says quietly, her hand laying on the middle of his torso, thumb sweeping his solar plexus. "I like this as it is."

Then, something she almost said before and didn't: "I've thought about going to Aaron," Sinclair confesses, and now she's the one worried he's going to withdraw, afraid he'll pull away from her now. Oddly enough, she uses his twin's human name, the one the two of them grew up with, and not the one she knows him by most readily: Nightfall's Edge. "But I don't really want to... challenge him for you."

Her brow is furrowed, if he looks. Because that's not entirely true. Instinct and conscious desire are two different things sometimes, and in this case, what primal longing she has to fight and win and have and keep and protect is going up against what she wants this to be, how she wants him to feel. And what Sinclair wants him to feel is... good. Happy. Secure. Wanted. Strong.

She turns to look at him again. "Look... I meant what I just said. I really am happy with this as it is now. Maybe we can just tell each other if we want something to change." Her expression softens, brow smoothing a bit. She half-smiles, small but lopsided. Sweet, if a little uncertain. "But I like knowing you kind of want to hold onto it."

What some would like to think is unnecessay to say aloud, what some would tell themselves they've said implicitly already, what Sinclair chooses to make explicit nonetheless: "I do, too."

[Alex] Oddly, when she speaks of challenging his brother for him, Alex's brow furrows with something more like pain than disgruntlement or wounded pride. He's quiet for a while after that, listening to her.

When she smiles like that, his frown fades a little. He closes his eyes and nuzzles her briefly but firmly: the way she'd nuzzled him, unashamedly, animalistically.

It gentles; he rests his head against hers, his eyes opening again.

"It's weird. I don't mind the thought of being mated to you, but the thought of anyone challenging my brother for me makes me balk. It's not even that it's another reminder of who he is and who I am. Not entirely, anyway. It's that ... then we'd really be separated for good. My brother and me."

He breathes, holds her, closes his eyes.

"I'm not ready for that," he says; there's a decision in his voice now, even though they'd already decided it between them. "But I want to hold onto this. There's no kinda about that."

[Sinclair] [i r empatheeing j00!]
(12:36:05 AM) Veraciteeth rolled 4 10-sided dice: 5 7 10 9

[Sinclair] Growing up an only child, Sinclair was the sole focus of her parents' affection and attention. What pressure was put on her to excel saw no other outlet. She had standing dates with each parent for one-on-one activities. When she was little those started out as ways for her parents to give each other a break, and as she got older they became time she had to talk to them about what she needed or wanted to. For a period of time when she was a teenager they were all but punishments, a set-aside time for lectures or expressions of concern that only made her more sullen.

As far as childhoods go, Sinclair's was pretty damn good. Not perfect -- no one's is. But she was loved, and wanted, and even as her Rage started to grow her parents tried everything they could think of to cope with it and help her cope, too, even though not a one of them had any idea what was causing her terrifying bursts of temper or her bewildering moments of distraction, as though she was hearing something call to her from across an invisible wall. They were doing their best. They still are, to tell the truth.

What's missing from the picture are siblings. She's the oldest and the youngest child in her family. She doesn't get what the fuck middle-borns' problem is. There was no one else to blame mishaps on, and no one to torment or tease her at home. If she was in a quiet mood, the house was quiet. If she was tearing ass down the street on her bicycle, she didn't have to wait up for anyone smaller than her. She did not have someone else with her parents' eyes or mouth or attitudes to compare and contrast herself with.

Her family is comprised of two people she hasn't seen in a few years, rarely talks to, and is separate from in the ways that children are always separate from their parents. The level of shared experience and intimate knowledge that comes with brothers and sisters is not there for her. There is good and bad to that.

One of the bad: she doesn't understand, intuitively and instantly, that flash of pain across her boyfriend's face. It's only after she thinks about it, watching him as he holds her and nuzzles her and talks to her, that she gets it. And she does get it... as much as she can, though underneath the gristle and toughness she's as tender-hearted and empathetic a person as you'll ever find in the nation. Sinclair slips her hand past his chest, wraps her arm around him, and holds him.

She told him she didn't want to challenge Aaron for him. She didn't say: I don't want to take you away from him. But that's the truth, too. They are not one of the eldest, most traditional tribes. She sincerely doubts Aaron gives a shit if some Fostern Galliard in Chicago falls for his twin like a stone into water, and she's pretty damn sure he doesn't want to have a clue that his brother is fucking that Fostern Galliard into senseless, filthy exclamations all afternoon.

"That's one thing I don't like about how most of the Nation works," she says, putting it out there quite simply, bluntly calling out her entire culture for its flaws. "I don't want to separate you from your family. From your brother. I don't..." A beat. She closes her mouth to think it out, then: "I understand the need for it. The heirarchy, the laws, all of it. We aren't just humans that change into wolves. There're wolves that change into humans, too. There are monsters who wear other skins for awhile. We cannot function according to one set of standards or the other; we have to make up our own.

"I want to be with you. I want to hold onto you." And what she didn't say much, much earlier, standing naked in the bathroom and talking about not being afraid of hurting him: "I don't want to lose you.

"But personally, I don't need to force someone else to relinquish their 'official claim' over you in order to be with you. Or make this real or valid. I don't... feel like I need to take you, to have you."

Sinclair lifts her eyes to his. "I know this might sound kind of dumb or whatever," she says softly, "but one of the reasons I don't want to 'challenge' for you is that I'd... rather you go to him and tell him. If you want to be mine. You know." Her hand wiggles against his side as though she's waving something away. "Ever."

[Alex] Theirs is not a tribe that's known for traditional viewpoints and rituals of mateship. On top of that, it goes without saying that Alexander isn't the sort of kin that sits around dreaming of the day some Garou would find him worthy of siring her cubs. He's not even the sort of kin that sits around in dread of that day or -- perhaps worst of all -- simply expecting and accepting it as the inevitable purpose of life.

Sure, he's realistic enough and intelligent enough to understand that it's possible, perhaps even likely, that one day some Garou would come along and, yes, find him worthy of siring her cubs. Or some Garou would come along and introduce him to her cousin, who was waiting to bear cubs. Or any of the vast number of situations that end with him impregnating someone associated with the loose organization of man-beasts they called the Garou Nation. He's realistic about that, but he doesn't hope for it, or dream of it, or wait expectantly for it.

Even so, it says something about just how long his association with werewolves is and just what most werewolves expect of their kin, that when Sinclair suggests that maybe he could go talk to Aaron if he ever wanted to be hers, his reaction is instantaneously and unmistakeably surprise. And, quickly on the tail of that, a sort of quiet pleasure.

"Yeah?" He thinks about this a moment, imagines it, pictures calling Aaron up one day and saying...

Well. He doesn't know what he'd say. But he likes that idea better than the idea of her going to his brother and saying, I challenge you for your kin. I'm here to take him away from you, forever. This way, there's some sense of connection preserved. It's a little closer to calling your brother up and saying so remember that girl I've been seeing? and inviting him to be your best man. It's a little more like a union, a joining of bloodlines and families, than of an irrevocable change of allegiance. Or ownership.

"Maybe I will someday," he adds quietly. And, "He does sort of know about you, I think. I mean, we didn't talk about it much, but he is on my facebook."

Where the pictures of random Brazilian babes have been quietly shuffled away into some archive folder or other. Where the pictures now are of his new apartment (comments: LOL! so small!!!), and him grinning and sweaty and bloody, post-fight, with some amateur title belt over his shoulder, and a sunrise over the lake, and some random seagull (caption: bastard stole my sandwich!), and

those pictures they took on her birthday, sitting on this couch.

[Sinclair] That Sinclair, of all Garou, could not only want something considered typically human and normal and mundane but actually find it more natural than the heirachy of monster-wolves is surprising. But it's also understandable. For eighteen, nineteen years that's all she was: human. An increasingly angry, unstable human whose athleticism barely disguised her need for violence, but a human nonetheless. One with a midwestern accent that went to hell after three months in southern california, one who discovered beach volleyball and surfing long before she discovered her supernatural abilities.

But yeah, it's a little like that, this desire of hers to not be the one going to his brother and all but demanding him, or asking for the chance to challenge for him. Even if he's not 'hers' by law and tradition, it has no bearing on them being together or not. She likes that. And she likes the way that Alex responds when he hears this idea she's kept utterly mum about for the past several weeks, so she smiles, too.

For all she knows, Aaron's response to something like that would be less than pleased. But truth be told, Sinclair's not overly concerned with how Aaron feels about it. That matters. That's important. But Alex looks sort of relieved and surprised but happy, and it warms her from the inside out. So she hugs him. Tightly. Smiling.

"Oh, I know," she says. "He's on mine, too. You must've missed the 'Heather Sinclair and Aaron Vaughn are now friends' or whatever message on your feed." She kisses his right pectoral. "I got a ping on GW.net after you put up those pictures and changed your relationship status. So since he was searching my profile and public archives, I decided to friend him. It was my 'chill, bray, s'all good' gesture."

[Alex] About a day after Alex's relationship status changed, he got a private message from Aaron that read, simply:

O_O!!!

-- which made him laugh aloud. It wasn't unexpected or unjustified, though. It's very likely that Alexander's status has never been anything but Single up until then, no matter how many vapid hot chicks showed up in various snapshots. So he shot a message back to his brother, and got one back, and after a few more back and forths Aaron knew that Sinclair was a Galliard of their tribe.

A day or so after that, Sinclair gets a ping on GWNet: a Nightfall's Edge down in Miami was looking her up. Birth name: Aaron Cameron Vaughn.

So she friends him on Facebook. Which is her way of saying it's cool, man, and also, perhaps, her way of saying that she knew he was looking her up -- that she was clever and quick enough to figure out how to set up alerts like that -- and that she had nothing to hide from him.

If she looks him up in return, it seems he has little to hide, either. He's a midrange Fostern, not fresh to the job but not terribly close to Adren, either. He's not the Alpha of his pack, but he's been with that same pack for years now, its resident lawman and level head. He's known to be a Random Interrupt, active in the teaching and fostering of cubs; he's overseen more than a dozen Rites of Passages, including one that was bombed by his rather unpleasant brother. His deedname is an obscure reference back to some virus he coded and unleashed during his own Passage, blacking out the security grid of an entire vampire coven prior to the Sept's raid.

He's part of the Sept of the Vizcaya which, like Maelstrom, is an urban sept, its population on the young side, and largely Glass Walkers and their many and myriad allies. A few years back Vizcaya had a bit of trouble with the local nightlife -- that was the war Aaron RoPed in the middle of -- but these days that front is relatively quiet, and there are some rumors of the Sept getting in bed with the Rokea, of all things. Most people dismiss that as fable and bullshit.

Maybe they exchanged a quick conversation or two on facebook. Or on GWNet. It was likely nothing deeper than pleasantries, maybe an e-businesscard sent across with all relevant introduction-type information enclosed. Sinclair didn't ask to challenge. Aaron -- and this might tell her something about the sort of Philodox, Walker and Garou he is -- didn't immediately demand details, intentions, honorable challenge.

He did ask her about the Wyrmtaint incident, though. And if she directs him to her reports, she gets another ping about a day later as he accesses the records -- hers and her Grand Elder's both. After that, there's a brief thank-you note, and not much else since


Alexander doesn't know about most of that. If he noticed Aaron Vaughn and Heather Sinclair were now friends!, he didn't pay it much mind. It makes him vaguely happy that his brother and his girlfriend are facebook friends, though, and he tells her so.

"When I go home for Thanksgiving this year," he adds, "maybe you can come meet my folks or something."

[Sinclair] The details of Sinclair's brief and professional exchange with Aaron go undiscussed, but that's about how it went. Alex changed his status, Aaron gave him bug eyes, Alex told him about this wheat-blonde girl with tan-hidden freckles and a pink shirt with a cupcake on it. That was what happened between the twins.

What happened between the Garou was less familiar, obviously, and began a little more subtly. The alerts that tell Sinclair when she's being searched only went into place after she killed Strikes With Valor. And, true to her second name, the public reports of the incident are unflinchingly honest. Blame is not withheld. Responsibility is laid heavily on all who could possibly be held accountable. It is cross-referenced to other reports, including a writeup of her punishment rite and applicable photographs of the glyph-covered stone. Current contact information is given for Truth's Meridian, Wyrmbreaker, and Laughs in the Face of Death: her judge, her Alpha, the last living witness to that night. Lights Out's information simply says: Deceased.

Truth be told, the organization of Sinclair's files on GW.net is staggering. Click on Truth's Meridian and it brings up every file that mentions her name. One could surf her files and waste more time there than on Wikipedia, and get more accurate information. This is the girl who brushes her teeth outside the door of her car and sometimes sleeps in that car, but when it comes to what she puts out in the world that other Walkers see...

her writing is crisp. Her file structures are pristine. Her archives are rich and easy to navigate.

In any case, however, she does take a look at Aaron's profile. No deeper than that, really. What's going on at Vizcaya is skimmed but not delved into; she only needs to know the context he's living in if she plans to ever go see him. Which, as it turns out, she doesn't really want to do. Especially not now that she knows it makes Alex comfortable and happy to think of being able to go to his brother himself.

you know that girl?

Aaron knows a thing or two about that girl, now. A simple message came back when he accepted her friend request. It made her heart thump harder and faster, but she did what she would do if he were any other -yuf of her tribe, and not her boyfriend's Litany-abiding Guardian, etcetera: she wrote him a brief summary of the incidents, linked him to the applicable files, and

that was one of those times when she wasn't around Alex for a few days. When she was wondering if Aaron was going to tell her to stay the hell away from his brother. But that didn't happen, and then she earned her rank, and she hasn't thought much about Aaron til now.

Of course, Aaron is not parents. That's a whole other kettle of stew.

What he says makes her expression tug slightly, aching. She squeezes him again, then settles to his side, quieting. "Maybe," she says.

[Alex] He shifts a little -- enough to look at her and see her clearly.

"You don't sound sure," he replies, just as quietly.

[Sinclair] Her eyebrows go up a little, face turning to see his right back. "No, it's not that," she says, as though he came up with a reason for her supposed uncertainty, as though she has to make sure he knows he's misunderstanding her motives, when all he really did was state an observation. "It just made me think of my parents, is all."

Sinclair pauses a moment there, then confirms: "I wouldn't mind meeting them. Or Aaron. In person and all." There's confidence, there. She's of equal rank to his brother, now. She's not worried about anyone's opinions on her piercings and her tattoos. She's not afraid of disapproval. She means precisely what she says: she wouldn't mind. And:

"Though how the hell are you going to roast a turkey in Miami? Isn't it like... perpetually ninety degrees there?"

[Alex] "Nah. It's like seventies in November," he says, totally serious. "If it's hot out we turn the A/C on and then we roast that motherfucker." There's a pause. "I don't know if Aaron'd be there. But sometimes my parents invite some of the local kin over. And the younger cubs. The ones the Sept's fostering from out of state. Exchange cubs," he says, and laughs at his own joke.

"Anyway," he adds, "I think they'd be glad to have you."

The truth is, his parents -- if they went for thanksgiving, if they're still together then, if she's even alive then, though that's too painful a thought to dwell on -- will probably be a little freaked out by the tattooed, scarred, pierced little wildling their elder son brings home. They're both kin, his folks, and their one Garou son is a spectacularly even-keeled Philodox whose rage hasn't risen a bit in all the years he's been Garou. Compared to him, Sinclair is a firebrand. A torch of rage and predator's instinct.

They won't see the side of her that he does sometimes. When she's zonked out and asleep for hour after hour after hour, sometimes mumbling in her sleep about something so adorably inane that he keeps thinking about recording her and playing her back to herself. When she sees him after a long time apart and her eyes just light up. When they're together and he knows without a doubt that Sinclair actually cares about what he thinks, what he feels. That she actually cares.

[Sinclair] That strikes her as funny: seventies in late November. Turning the AC on to roast a turkey in the oven. Sinclair laughs, but it fades when he mentions Aaron might not be there. That other kin might be. Other kin. The cubs would be one thing; hell, having a Galliard at the table might make keeping said Exchange Cubs in line that much easier.

When you get right down to it, Sinclair's a scary bitch.

Though that means if cubs in the midst of fostering would be intimidated by the Fostern child of Perun, the local Kinfolk and Alex's parents might go, as she (and Aaron) would put it:

O_O

When she came to Rio for Carnival, some poor mortal said or did the wrong thing in the throng, and she slammed him to concrete and snarled in his face. She has yet to have any Glass Walker underlings in Chicago to treat similarly. There's no reason to assume that she would be anything but the polite, careful guest of a pair of Kin, parents of a Philodox of the tribe, parents of this-guy-she-is-really-into-but-totally-not-challenging-for-don't-worry.

There's that, and there's also the fact that every mark on her body can be hidden. She has no qualms about most of them being on display, but there are three that are rarely seen: the ring through her nipple, the scars on her back, and the lines on her hip. Alex knows what all of them are for, what they mean. But she could wear her hair down, wear sleeves that cover her biceps, long pants, and so on.

Then she would just be this wildling, scaring them by her mere presence, and those pale blue eyes looking out at them from a face that belongs next door, not on a monster. Just a few too many earrings. That's all. Nothing strange there.

But more likely, with weather in the seventies or hotter, Sinclair wouldn't dress in such a way that anyone would think she had anything to hide. It goes against what she is. It goes against why she's marked herself in all these ways to begin with. Hell. The bar in her left arm is there solely to freak out people who are freaked out by such things. The man who inked the planetary symbol into the back of her neck had a piece of scarification across his chest that made it look like he'd had heart surgery. Urban Primitives are not the sort to mark themselves as a shameful, secret thing.

They will see her as she is. But not all that she is.

Though they might see something that parents often see in their children, that their children never imagine their parents could understand. The surprising calm that exists between their active, prizefighting son and this... thing at the dinner table. Their wavelength of understanding, as imperfect as it is, but there nonetheless. The respect she shows him, and them. Not to mention the automatic rising to her feet to help set the table or do the dishes

which is when she might have to explain herself by merely saying: I'm from Kansas.

Alex's parents might never meet Sinclair in person. It's true that she might be dead by Thanksgiving. It's true that the way things are, she'll be lucky to live til this supposed trip to Easter Island, which Alex has to plan ahead for. He has to buy tickets, make arrangements for where to stay, all that. He has to prepare for it, all the while knowing that there is every chance she might not make it with him. Hell. They might even just break up between now and November, because while they both want to hold onto this, they both know that doesn't mean they'll be able to.

Sinclair breathes quietly with him Now, because all of that is Then. She holds him with her arm across his chest and her legs across his lap and her pet elemental snoozing and whirring away in the basket across the way. She doesn't say anything for awhile, until a softly laughing:

"My body is so remembering you right now."

[Alex] As a matter of fact, Alexander has already started looking into Easter Island. He's not the only adventurous psycho who wants to watch a total eclipse near some of the most mysterious homunculi in the world. There are probably internet forums devoted to Easter Island July 2010. Mailing lists setting up hiking trips and new-age-solar-deity worships. Facebook groups hooking up for the cause. Chances are Alexander would've been on every last one of them, or at least the ones he didn't find absurd, if it weren't for the fact that he's not going by himself.

He's going with Sinclair. His girl.

So he's not looking for strangers to hang out with. He's looking for airfare, and he's looking at inns and campgrounds, rental jeeps and rental bikes; he's looking at maps of the island which in its entirety is about ten miles by five. Tiny.

He's thinking about where they might get a good view of the sky without getting crowded by other tourists. He's thinking about Sinclair there with him, and all the while what he's doing his best not to think about is how far in the future July 11th really is, for someone like her. And how many things could go wrong between now and then.

There's a lot going right, too, though. They're warm and comfortable together, and the weather's finally turning summery, and with the window open they can hear the sounds of the city as day cools to night. She laughs that her body is remembering his, and he laughs too, and smooches her cheek, and kneads his hand all along her spine, nape of neck to small of back.

"Are you sticking around tonight?"

[Sinclair] Airfare for one. A room for two. He'll arrive with luggage for two, but he'll arrive alone.

That is, if between early May and early July nothing happens to Sinclair, nothing happens with the war, nothing happens in the Hive, nothing happens in her pack, nothing happens, period, that would keep her from diving through a phone call to be with him.

Strangely enough, she knows that if he went alone, he wouldn't be alone there. Even on his vacation in Rio he was drawn to socializing with total strangers, whether they were ones he just danced with or fucked or people he decided to go on hikes with. If Sinclair thought about it, she'd think that yeah, Alex wouldn't be alone on Easter Island, one way or another.

At the same time, she knows another side of him, the one that would like to contemplate the astronomical event without too much distraction, the one that wants to view it with her. She sees Alex in a way no one in this city, at least, sees him: the guy that is boisterously and openly happy to see her. The guy that is curled up on the couch with her right now, rubbing her back and ...well.

Cuddling.

Sinclair laughs at his question, leaning into his slow, idle massage. She arches her back a little, wiggling closer, and exhales a quivering mmm against his chest. "Yeah," she confirms, like this is a given, like she can't imagine leaving him now.

Which she can't.

And if she thinks about the fact that other than the last couple of nights, she's been here more often than she's been anywhere else, or if she thinks about how she never leaves her belongings anywhere but here, or if she thinks about how Alex kissing her shoulders and neck after they come, when they're wrecked and gasping and sweaty, feels like the most right and natural and heartbreaking and wonderful thing she's ever felt, it might make her hesitate to go on claiming that she doesn't live with him, that this isn't her home, too.

"Yeah, I'm staying," Sinclair murmurs, holding Alex

and not thinking about any of that.