easter island and phonediving.

[Alexander] Thursday night, soon after managing to cut some guy's throat with a steak knife, Alexander spends three hours being questioned not about the actual acts of violence nor about his justification, but about everything and anything he knows about Blue Eyes. It turns out to not be a lot, and no matter how many times and how many ways they ask him, he can't tell them what his name was, or who his friends were, or what Alex was really doing, or who Alex really worked for. And he repeats, over and over and over: I have no idea what the fuck you people are talking about.

Sometime around 11pm, everyone's frustrated and tired. They clap him into a holding cell for the night. In the morning, they give his personal belongings back and turn him loose.

His phone is out of batteries by then, so he calls Sinclair from a payphone and leaves a message: Dude, I just got out of jail. Last night there was a big fight at Grant Park, three guys against me and two chicks. I think one of the guys died. They weren't 'weird' or anything, don't worry. I think they might've been the mob 'cause I just spent like 17 hours at the police station answering questions that made no sense about connections I don't know anything about. Anyway, just wanted to let you know in case you looked for me last night and couldn't find me. I'm gonna go home and catch some sleep.

After that, there's radio silence for a while. Somewhere in the middle he visits Liadan in the hospital, returning an old favor she paid him a year ago. He even brings flowers. Sure they're stolen from the room next door, but it's the thought that counts.

Now it's Saturday, which means it's fight night again. Which means he's out later than usual. Which means it's past 10pm when an unfamiliar car drops him off three blocks from where he lives and zooms off, because an unlucky punch earlier tonight has resulted in a black, swollen-shut eye, and as bad as it is to drive with no peripheral vision on one side and no depth perception, it's suicidal to do it on a motorcycle.

Which means: as he's coming up the street, whistling under his breath, he catches sight of Sinclair's El Camino. And goes over to it, planting his hands on his knees like a shortstop to peer inside. If she's sleeping, he knocks on the window.

[Sinclair] Over the phone and online they call each other Dude or man or any number of names. Occasionally they use each other's: Alex, she says, and Sinclair, he calls her, since 'Heather' hasn't made sense since she last had a cheerleading uniform on. He starts in on his story to her voicemail with Dude, though, and when Sinclair gets it she tenses automatically because he spends the entire thing telling her what happened and doesn't once say he's okay.

She deletes the message after listening to it again and doesn't call him. He might be sleeping, and he might need his rest. So she lets it be. Friday he visits his redhead-in-arms, and Saturday afternoon there's a voicemail waiting for him after his morning run:

Hey. I'm assuming you're okay, cuz you didn't say you went to the hospital or anything. Um. Silence for a few seconds. Yeah. Anyway! I just wanted to call you. I'm going to hang up now. Kaybye!

Or rather: kbai!

And a click.

Now it's Saturday night, and at ten p.m. Alex is coming across Sinclair's car parked in some nondescript lot in Cabrini-Green. The paint job gleams from a recent carwash. El Caminos did not come with the severe tinting that Sinclair has tricked hers out with. He peers and sees mostly shadows. Then the passenger side door opens and there's a swishing sound, then a spit and a splash of fluid hitting the asphalt.

"Hello, loverboy," Sinclair drawls, mock drunkenly, shoving her toothbrush back in her mouth as she rises up on the other side of the car, looking across at him over the roof. She continues brushing. Her hair is under a charcoal-gray cap, upper half clothed in an olive-green tank top and lower half in a pair of khaki shorts.

[Alexander] Alexander straightens up as the opposite door opens. He's walking home in jeans and a t-shirt, and the t-shirt is bright red, which seems to be his favorite color, and stamped with a big black pyramid. Some sort of logo, one imagines. He looks sort of battered, but she knows this isn't really a big deal for him. She knows it's Saturday night. She knows if he wasn't okay, he wouldn't have gone into the cage again.

Also, he looks blank. The good eye blinks once or twice. Then:

"Why are you brushing your teeth in your car?"

[Sinclair] They both look less than stellar at the moment. His face is mangled. Her eyes are sunken. All he has to do is look to the sky to know why: the moon is in her phase, and it's waning. She most likely feels like garbage right now. And is apparently living in her car.

She turns her head, ducks, and spits again, out of sight. When she comes back up again she's wiping her mouth with a washcloth and taking a drink from a water bottle. Ducks again, spits that out, pops up, smiles. "Aaah."

Coming around the front of the car -- she kicks the door shut -- Sinclair sits on the hood and peers over at him. She's barefoot. Her toenails are black. "I moved out of the Brotherhood." A beat. "And technically, I was brushing my teeth outside the passenger door. I can't even handle eating pistachios or sunflower seeds in my car, cuz of all the spitting involved. S'gross."

[Alexander] "Okay," he looks from car to wolf-girl to car. "Did you ... like ... break up with your pack or something?" He peers in through the windshield. "Are you living out of your car?"

[Sinclair] There's a stricken look on her face when he asks if she broke up with her pack. "No!" she says, as though this is equivalent to asking her if her dog died or if her parents kicked her out. Or worse.

Worse.

She sets the water bottle down with the washcloth, knees up and bare feet flat on the hood of her car. For a girl that can turn into a raging monster -- for a girl who, even in this form, can beat him up just as soundly as she could if she shifted -- Sinclair is hardly going to dent her car's hood. Her snake tattoo and the cuff around her ankle gleam in the moonlight, streetlight, their colors darkened by shadows.

"I just didn't want to live there anymore. I mean, I still crash there sometimes. Or at Kate's Loft. But I woke up this morning and I needed a breakfast burrito like you would not believe and there was this place Joey and I stopped at on the way into Chicago last summer that was like, oh my fucking god so I drove out there to get one and on the way back I got really tired so I pulled over and went to sleep."

[Alexander] There's another pause. Then he steps off the curb, comes around the front of the car, levers himself up. His heels hook onto the El Camino's front bumper. He rests elbows on knees and lets his hands dangle.

"Okay," again. "This is going to sound really snitty-butthurt-wussy-boyfriend, but: you moved out of the BroHo, but instead of moving in with me, you'd rather crash on couches and in cars? What the fuck, Sinclair?"

[Sinclair] It doesn't make her fly into a panic, flailing, trying to soothe whatever hurt she's caused. Sinclair wraps her arms around her legs, loose, and she stays where she is. They sit close, but there's a couple of inches for air to move between them all the same.

"I don't think that sounds snitty-butthurt-wussy-boyfriend," she says, and fights -- really hard -- not to smile as she quotes that back to him. It's funny. It's not her fault he's funny. She manages not to break into a grin, but barely. She waits a moment til the urge is completely gone before speaking again.

"Yeah," she says quietly, "I'd rather crash on couches and in cars than live in the Brotherhood, or take up a room at Kate's Loft which has a a made and an Olympic-sized private pool and pretty much every gaming console ever made in the rumpus room... or move in with you."

Gently, that, to soften it. If she can. She breathes in deep, chest and shoulders lifting before drooping again with her exhale. "I'm not keeping anything at Kate's place or the Broho anymore, but I was gonna come by tonight... or tomorrow, if it took me that long to wake up... and drop some more stuff off at your place." She presses her lips together, watching him. "I'm not just saying this to make you not mad at me or butthurt anymore or whatever, but even that much is kind of a big deal to me."

[Alexander] It's okay with him that she's amused. It's okay that even when she tries to hold it back, he can tell. It worries him a little when he sees her like this, wan and waned with the moon. He feels better when he sees her amused or laughing or happy.

He does bump her shoulder with his, though -- a sort of mute hey now.

And then he thinks about it for a while. And he says, "Well. Okay. But you know it's a standing invite, right? If you ever did wanna just move in?"

[Sinclair] When he bumps her like that, Sinclair leans over and nuzzles his shoulder with her face. It's a simple, soft swipe back and forth, passing because he's swinging back from the nudge itself. And in that instant she tells him that she's missed him since the last time she saw him, and that she wants to be close to him. Her body language is unmistakable after that: the way she turns just a bit, like her skin is awakening to the fact that he's next to her. The way she drops her shoulders and watches him more closely, the gulf between them crossed.

A small smile, at the corners of her mouth. She nods. "Yeah, I know."

Her legs lower, heels finding the front bumper and body unfolding a bit. She shivers, though it's only in the sixties, no colder. They aren't close enough to the lake for the wind to carry a chill off of it. She doesn't reach for his arm to put it around herself, though. She twists and wraps hers around his shoulders, yawning broadly with a songlike noise in the back of her throat as she does. Her breath smells minty fresh, and she's not exactly rank, but it's clear it's been a day or so since she's showered. Thank god it isn't summer.

She nuzzles him again, though, as perfectly unselfconscious as an animal who wants to jump all over you after rolling around in the mud, and opens her mouth to gently gnaw on his shoulder. "We can go back to your place now if you want. I was gonna go anyway even if you weren't there. And wait for you." She grins, licking her lips as she pulls back from his skin. "Cuz I got a key and shit."

[Alexander] When she wraps her arms around him like that, lets herself hang off his shoulders and his neck not because she's weak or needy but because she wants to be close, Alex raises a hand and folds it over her forearms where they cross. He smells clean and freshly-showered. Must've taken a shower after his fight tonight. The bruises look taken care of, too, the small cuts clean. He's hardly a mess. And he bumps her again, leaning back into her for a moment, murmuring Hey. like they just met for the first time tonight.

There's a simple, voiceless affection there. For two rather talkative people who, wonder of wonders, generally are pretty good at communication, how they feel about each other is one of the rare taboos they seem to have. The most she's said is I'm falling for you. The most he's said was --

well. That he doesn't want to name it, or talk about it, or scare himself out of it.

And: can't you feel how I feel about you when we make love?

It's not just when they make love, though. It's this, too: their casual, thoughtless affection. In the way they lean into each other and hold each other atop the long low hood of her El Camino.

"Let's do it," he says. "You drive?"

[Sinclair] It is thoughtless, and easy, this closeness she seeks and finds. Letting him see her when she feels like this was an unspoken trust, a risk taken. She let him see her at her weakest and worst, knowing it wasn't an isolated incident after a battle but something she has to deal with month after month as though in karmic repayment for the strength she gains when her moon is waxing.

Now, when her stomach is uneasy and she's even more easily fatigued than usual, Sinclair hangs off of her boyfriend and smells him, noms his shoulder. She lets him know that while she won't leave her belongings at her packmate's house or at the place she 'lived' for nearly a year, she's okay with having some clothes and toiletries and snacks that she will make him swear on his mother not to eat when she's not around that live at Alex's place.

Even if she doesn't.

She snuggles with him in dirty old Cabrini Green, sirens in the distance, and nods. "Yeaaah," she says, and after a few moments kisses his shoulder. It's sort of quick and almost shy, before she's sliding off the hood and getting into the car. There's a huge, thick, bright red comforter -- her favorite color, too, maybe -- taking up most of the passenger side that she tells him to just shove behind the seats if he wants.

Sinclair drives barefoot. It's only three blocks, after all.

[Alexander] He does that: drops his gym bag on the floor, shoves the thick comforter back behind the seats, buckles himself in. It's only three blocks to his place, but he appreciates the ride nonetheless, sitting back and chilling in her great big american boat of a car.

"I like your car," he says on the way over, musing aloud. "Maybe I oughta get one. A car, I mean, not an El Camino. For winter months, and all. I almost wiped out a few times going around corners a few times. Apparently up north it's dangerous to ride motorcycles in the winter. Whodathunk."

She's pulling up under his squat, ugly apartment tenement, then, and he's loosening the seatbelt to get back out. "Want me to help carry anything?"

[Sinclair] "You were driving around Chicago on a motorcycle?" Sinclair says to that, looking surprised and vaguely horrified. "Jesus. Someone alert the alumni association at Harvard so they can take your degree back."

Maybe he bats at her for that. Maybe she responds by snapping her jaws playfully back at him. Maybe nothing of the sort happens, and maybe there just isn't time because

they're there already. She thinks. "Ah. Um." And twists around as she's taking off her belt, looking behind the seats where stuff is piled high and disorganized. "...Possibly."

With that, Sinclair starts digging through her stuff, and piles begin to appear across the dash and the seats and Alex's lap. "Okay, blanket should stay in here. I've already got a toothbrush and stuff up there. Um. Here," and he gets a smaller, nylon gym bag handed to him. It's soft. "There's some clothes. I think they're dirty, though."

She bends over the seat, rather dirty feet on the cushion, shoving stuff out of her way, her back pressed against the roof of the vehicle. "Oh! I can leave my cereal bowl at your place."

Her cereal bowl is apparently very special. It's melamine, and it's got Snoopy on it. It looks to be roughly as old as she is. It topples onto his lap, too. "Will it weird you out if I leave talens here?" she asks, head popping up. Her cap has fallen off; her hair is askew. "Like, healing gourds?"

[Alexander] They stand there in the parking lot, sorting through her stuff like two people back from a long car trip. Leave the blanket. Leave the toothbrush. Take the gym bag of clothes -- dirty, she says, and he makes a show of mock-horror. A cereal bowl shows up too, which makes him hold it up to the ochre parking lot lights, laughing under his breath.

"Healing gourds?" he repeats. "Like those things you fixed yourself up with after the bonfire?"

[Sinclair] "Yeah, only now I know how to use them better." That's not all there is to it: Sinclair's stronger in general. She hasn't learned any greater skill in battle than she had when she came to Chicago, but her spirit is greater. Her will is harder. She knows how to heal herself quickly, rather than risking failure again and again. It depletes her, but then... she's better at recovering now, too.

She's not standing. Not quite yet. She's climbing around in her car and digging through all her Stuff, which when you get right down to it isn't very much but seems like a lot in the cab of an El Camino. Finally, though, she emerges with a canvas tote bag decorated in puff paint and fake gems, which looks like something she made at a --

yup, there's the ribbons around one handle-strap, and there's the year, and the proliferation of purple and black and white

-- cheerleading camp. It's stuffed with a few other things, and then she's clambering out of the car, shoving her feet into a pair of flipflops and pushing her hair back. "I lost my hat," she comments, but doesn't seem perturbed. She jangles her keys as she pushes down the lock and hip-bumps her door closed.

"We're using my key," she says firmly.

[Alexander] "What kind of hat?" She climbs out; he pokes his head back in, riffling through her Stuff as if he expected to see it sitting jauntily atop a pile of ... well, Stuff.

They don't find it, though, and Alex gives up after a while because bending over like that makes his black eye throb like a second heart or a migraine starting to rev up. When he straightens up he touches it gingerly, then trots to catch up to her, his gym bag and hers bouncing off his ass.

"Okay," he says, all agreeable and amused. "Do you want me to burn incense and make it all ritualistic too?"

[Sinclair] She blinks at him. Her flipflops are orange. Then Sinclair shoulders her bag and points at her head. "The one I was wearing?" She drops her hand. "It doesn't matter, it's in there somewhere."

They don't find it; Sinclair doesn't even let him look for it for more than a second. She's making sure the car is closed and then tugging on him, a flash of worry passing over her features because of how he treats his busted up eye. She climbs her hand up his arm and then puts her arm around his waist as they walk, biting his shoulder gently.

"No," she says, her voice low. "I just wanna do it. Because I can now."

[Alexander] This time, when she puts her arms around him, he loops his over her shoulders. They wander up the street like the lovers they are, and she noms his shoulder again, and he nuzzles her temple and smooches her cheekbone.

"Okay," he says again, still agreeable.

The outer door is still lockless, just as she remembers. He unwraps his arm from around her at the rows of mailboxes, though he wouldn't mind at all if she kept hers around his waist. He unlocks the little box, peers in, pulls out a lot of junk mail and one or two bills. Letterwriting is a lost art. "Humph," he grumbles, "I ordered Super Street Fighter IV like, the day it came out, got overnight shipping, and it's still not here yet."

They tromp up the stairs, then, Alexander making as much noise as two or three people as is his way. And down the dismal little hallway of this dismal little building, which is surely home to the downtrodden, the desolate, the brink-of-poverty modern world drones and the slowly-falling-to-the-wyrm. Not his problem, though. He doesn't seem to mind that his entire life is shoehorned into an apartment the size of a sardine can. He isn't there many waking hours, in reality. He spends most of his life out of the house, in gyms and on running trails, in fresh air. When he gets home, he seems happy enough to be there.

Particularly when he notices Sinclair's hair bands all colorful and cheerful in his medicine cabinet. Particularly when he notices her stuff next to his in his closet, on the shelves that serve as his dresser.

They're at his door. He stands back, shifting her stuff and his on his shoulder, waiting for her to unlock the door.

[Kora] ack! sorry!

[Sinclair] [AGAIN! *dies*]

[Sinclair] What they look like, other than lovers, is... sort of trashy. Her dirty feet and flipflops, tattoos, piercings. His blackened eye and sleeveless shirt, her hair that stays a bit crazy looking no matter how many times she fingercombs it. Her old tote bag on her arm, and the red gym bag with the white webbing straps he's holding, along with the Snoopy cereal bowl.

A short huff of laughter at the fact that his game hasn't come yet. Her arms do indeed stay around his waist while he's flipping through his mail, and she's peering around the corridor like she's never seen it before. She hasn't ever bothered to look, really. Most of the times she's been here she's been focused on touching him. On getting upstairs, as fast as possible, to try and get him on the couch or in bed so she could fuck him. Or just rub up against him. Sinclair's not picky. Sometimes, Sinclair's just horny.

On the stairs, she's deft and quick, and her flipflops slap against her soles. In the hallway she's all but bounding ahead towards his door, like he might try to get there before she does. And at his door she's jangling her keys again, warningly, at him. Her expression is horribly comical; she can't even manage to look that threatening right now.

Sinclair takes her time fitting the key into the lock, and takes great satisfaction in twisting it sharply. She grins with satisfaction as the tumblers clonk into place, her teeth savage and white when she smiles. With a flourish, she swings open his front door and then winces when it bangs on the wall. "Whoops," she says, and drops her bag on the floor, inhaling deeply.

"I smell..." sniff, sniff. "I smell...!"

Sniff, sniff.

She whips around to look at him. "Alex."

[Alexander] Whoops: "Don't worry about it." He kicks his shoes off, throws his gym bag onto the sofa, keeps hers on his shoulder. He ducks into the kitchen though -- literally, ducks sideways and is in the kitchen -- and puts her bowl in the cabinets over the counter. "Neighbors are used to noise here."

She's sniffing, meanwhile. Which makes him vaguely nervous because, truth be told, it also smells like microwave lasagna in here. And dirty laundry pile, which he'll take downstairs in the morning, along with her clothes, to wash in the laundromat in the basement.

Then she says it smells like him, and he abruptly laughs. "Can you seriously smell me even when you're, y'know... girl-formed?"

[Sinclair] It gives her disproportionate glee to see him stacking her cereal bowl, the one she's had since childhood and took to college with her, in the cabinet with his own. She goes ahead and locks the door after he goes inside and she closes it, but she doesn't bother with more than the first basic deadbolt. Right now all of his neighbors are turning over in their sleep or turning up their music, not because they fear the noise that might come along with that asshole and that girl he's fucking being in the same place

but because they're nervous. They sense something in this building, something angry, something that wishes them ill and wants them dead. Or, simply, can rip their throats out. They fear the power they feel, though they don't know its intentions.

It is stepping out of her flipflops and starting to unfasten the button and zipper of her khaki shorts. "Well. Smells like guy, for one thing. But..." she shrugs, and drops the shorts to the floor, revealing panties that aren't camo-with-pink-heart nor a blue-on-blue lace-edged thong. They're string bikinis, though, which seem to be her go-to cut, and they are paisley. Pink and blue and green and black and purple paisley.

"Yeah," she admits, stepping out of them and reaching for the hem of her tank top. "I can tell it's you. I don't think it's heightened senses or whatever, it's just... I trust my sense of smell more than most people do. So I pay more attention to it."

[Alexander] While she's locking the door, he's putting her bowl away. While she's stepping out of her flipflops and taking off her shorts, he's fishing his Brita pitcher out of the fridge and taking down some glasses for himself and for her. He glances over at her as her shorts drop, and then her tank top. His eyebrows go up.

"So is that an invitation, or are you just about to go shower?" He pops some ice into the glasses and hands her one, gulping his own down in a few swallows.

[Sinclair] The A-shirt peels off of her upper half, arms crossing over her stomach and then lifting, stretching. Her back arches and her scars peek at him. For a moment the tattoo on the back of her neck can be seen, but then her hair is falling back down, long and, frankly, in need of washing. She's got her bra on under that, white cotton and blue lace.

Sinclair turns her head and looks over to him, her mouth quirking into a lopsided little grin. "You wanna fuck?" she asks, ignoring the water.

[Alexander] The grin he gives her is sort of similar. Lopsided, quirky, a little playful.

"Yeah." He sets his empty glass down, reaches back over his head to pull his shirt off as well, dropping it as he comes out of the tiny kitchen. "C'mere."

[Sinclair] She's on him a moment later, before he's even fully out of the kitchen. Before his shirt has hit the floor there are hands on his body, and though her approach was sudden her hands themselves stroke slowly up his ridged abdomen to his chest, and there's a mouth on his neck, suckling softly. He knows she doesn't feel her best. He knows she's a bit paler than she should be, that her freckles stand out, that her eyes are ringed in dark circles only a little less ugly than the bruise covering half his face. He knows sometimes she's nauseated and dizzy like this.

Also: last time the moon was waning in her phase and he came back to bed after his morning run she was dismissing his worry over her 'lost' pet metal elemental and pulling him down on top of her, hands quickly and eagerly pushing his shorts off his hips while she murmured for him to get a condom.

Frankly, that's how it's always been with them. With her, at least. Sinclair's hunger is a ravenous, living thing. Her sex drive was never banked or dulled or dimmed, just... controlled. Resigned to her hunger being met with abject, pissing terror. The fact that Alex can withstand her at all is something of an unexpected gift in this life, and she is savage for it, aching for it. She touches him and, in touching him, finds herself shuddering slightly.

"I do wanna shower," she mutters, starting in on his shorts, yanking at the fasteners if they exist and simply pushing them down if they're elastic. "but we can do it in the shower, right?"

[Alexander] It'd be inaccurate to say he's used to her sex drive now. There's really no way to get used to hunger like that. He is, however, ready for it. He expects it. He expects, in fact, for her to leap on him, climb onto his body, maul his face right then and there.

But she doesn't. She's on him -- and she's gentle. Her hands on his body are slow and gentle. He holds her forearms, her elbows, closing his eyes and nuzzling against the side of her face as she sucks at the thin skin of his neck. Beneath her lips, his pulse jumps.

He's not wearing shorts tonight. Well -- he is, but he's wearing jeans over them, the button and fly coming undone easily enough. As the denim sags down, she can feel the soft clean folds of his cotton boxers, which are a blue plaid pattern.

He laughs -- "Yeah. Let's go," and steps out of his pants, leaving them where they are; leaving her stuff and his where they are. They can finish unpacking later.

[Sinclair] Given enough time a person can get used to anything. A couple of months and change, when you have sex with a person maybe once a week or two if you're lucky, is not long enough or enough exposure to get used to the fact that Sinclair has to exert effort to keep herself from literally leaving long red weals down his back and flank every time he makes her come.

Not much effort, though, strangely. The closer he is to her the more it seems like that violence and viciousness that is so strong in her breaks down, leaving behind: yes.

Gentle. Slow. Soft, the way she's kissing his neck, stroking his pectorals, even if when her hands drift lower she's far less patient with his clothing. She pushes his jeans down and he steps out of them, laughing quietly at her uncertainty. Or maybe just laughing, the way he does, because he's happy. Sinclair presses against him, belly to belly, and moves to kiss him but stops short just at his lips, her breathing already rapid. Excited.

"Will you... um." She exhales, and it smells like peppermint. She looks down at him: his chest, his arms, the curve of his mouth so close to her own. Her fingers go there, touch his lower lip softly. "Will you..." and she swallows, "maybe go down on me again?"

Sinclair's eyes flick quickly then, finding his, instantly ready to gauge reaction, ready to see it if he hesitates, if he doesn't want to, if it was simply against some rules of sexual etiquette she doesn't know for her to ask her boyfriend to,

well, um,

eat her out.

[Alexander] Sometimes it's hard for him to remember that his girlfriend, the one with the appetite, is so very inexperienced in all this. That once upon a time she drove out to the desert, laid herself out in a torrential downpour on a parched, cracked land where there was no one around for miles and miles and just

got herself off, over and over again, because this was the only way she could make peace between her sexuality and her monstrosity.

That before him, there was no other.

He puts his hands on her face. He leans into her and he kisses her, full and unhesitating, right on the mouth. She still tastes a little like toothpaste, which makes him grin against her lips the way he does, not because he's laughing at her but because he's happy.

"Yeah." His hands move down; he pulls her against him, rubbing her ass. "Let's go shower. And then you should bend over and let me eat that pussy out," another kiss, this one harder, hungrier, accompanied by a more crooked grin, "until your knees buckle."

[Sinclair] He has no idea how earthshattering he was for her. How convinced she was that she was unwantable, how resigned she was to her sexuality being a private, singular thing until Rage burned it, too, out of her forever. She knows what others think of her: how even her packmates, who hear her very thoughts, can't wrap their minds around the idea of her having a boyfriend, a mate, or any of these human-seeming affections she shares so readily and so happily when she comes over to Alex's apartment or goes with him to some burger joint.

Out of nowhere, he wanted her, and he ran his hands over her and gasped when she touched him. Shockingly, he was slow and gentle when anyone would have expected him to be brash and loud and selfish. He had her again and again when he took her virginity. And then, even more unexpected than his patience with her the first time, he slept entangled with her. Wanted to take her around Rio and get her some barbecue and snap photos of her along with the sprawling, lush landscape.

Missed her, when she was gone. Even if he hadn't waited for her, because he didn't know she wanted him to, because he didn't know she was. Felt her on him again, hearing her pant that she missed having sex with him and blurting out the implication that he'd missed her, too.

Sinclair makes a small noise when he kisses her like that, pressing into it, opening her mouth to his tongue. She wraps her arms around his neck and is all but climbing onto his body as he reaches down to grab her ass, which makes her gasp a little. She rubs against him now, without hesitation, and it's only because she's rested recently that she has the self-control necessary to pull away.

"Come on," she breathes, pulling at his hand, though truth be told the hallway is so short it takes no more than a few steps to get to the bathroom door, and inside. "Jesus, there's like, no room in here," she mutters, bumping into a towel rack. Laughing, uncaring, and leaning in to kiss him again. Reaching back, her hands off him for once, to unclasp her bra.

[Alexander] Alex laughs, unoffended, as she says that there's no room in here. It's the truth. The apartment's so small that everything fits like tetris pieces -- space not used by one room filled in by another.

"When I got here," he says, helping her with her panties, i.e., yanking them down to the ground, "there was a door over there." He points at the toilet. She probably already figured this out. There are still holes on the wall where the hinges were. "It was insane, you had to like stand on the toilet to close it. So I took it out and put it in storage downstairs."

He's back on his feet, pushing his underwear down as well, grabbing his cock and giving it a casual stroke or two while he watches her get out of her bra. When it drops to the floor he grins at her goofily, then leans around her to turn on the water.

"Wanna know a secret, though?" He climbs into the tub, pulls her with him, pauses mid-story to smooch her, "I looked at bigger places. There were a couple I coulda afforded. But I liked this one. Cuz it's teeny-tiny. And cuz it has big windows facing south."

The water around their feet is warm now. He pulls the switch, shuts the shower curtain just in time, and water rains down.

[Sinclair] Thank god they're both as trim as they are, as fit. Thank god neither of them have an extra ounce of fat anywhere. Thank god that they're both dextrous and quick, and can move around in this tiny space without bumping into each other unnecessarily.

(Though they bump into each other, and rub against each other, and touch each other, like it's necessity itself.)

If it were otherwise, they'd be jostling for elbow room every other second. Frustration would rise until Sinclair snapped and Alex's head clocked against the wall, or -- more likely, though perhaps just as bad -- until Sinclair yanked herself hard and fast away from the situation to get control of herself, control of the wild thing inside her that wants room to run. Thank god they can move together the way they do. And thank god that, in the end, Sinclair gets why Alex likes the fact that it's teeny tiny.

She's dropping her bra, and a second later he's hooking his thumbs in her underwear and dragging them off her legs, which makes her breate in sharply to see him do it. Sinclair doesn't look over at the toilet or the door that used to be there; she's watching Alex, watching him as his body comes out of his clothes and his hand wraps around his cock and when he leans past her to turn on the water she shivers against his chest, the fronts of his thighs, reaching down to stroke him, too, right along with his own hand.

"God, I love your body," she mutters in his ear. Mid-story, and all that.

Naked, she steps back and over the rim of the tub, into the shower. Pulls him in after her, going mmph! into the kiss he gives her, only half-hearing what he's saying. He likes this place. Because it's tiny, and because the windows face south, and then the water slams on and pelts at them from above

and she's on her knees, putting her mouth on his cock like that's all she's been thinking about since he took off his boxers.

[Alexander] There might've been more to that story, but that's where it ends. She goes to her knees and he says "Wait, I thought you said -- " and then her mouth is on him and he's staggering back against the wall, almost fucking slipping and falling in the tub, and as if the bruises on his ribs and over his eye and the cut on his jaw weren't bad enough, he clocks his head against the tile, too, when he throws it back with a groan.

He doesn't protest, needless to say. He cups his hand gently over her head, breathing unsteadily, looking down his wet body at her mouth on his cock, at her sucking at him until he's seeing stars.

He doesn't let her get him off, though. He cups his hands over her cheekbones instead and urges her to her feet, kissing her under the spray, grinning again, and the black eye makes him look roguish, or maybe just trashy, like he'd just wandered out of a barfight, and he murmurs "My turn," against her mouth and puts her up against the wall instead.

And drops to his knees before her. And looks down at the tub, the water, back up at her:

"If I put your leg over my shoulder while I eat you out, are you going to fall on your ass?"

[Sinclair] "Mmm," is all Sinclair says to that, to his Wait, I thought --. She can't exactly stop him from smacking his head on the tile, though she almost stops.

Almost. Doesn't, though, because her eyes are closing when his hands move into her hair. She touches his sides. His chest. She runs her hands over him and moans around his cock, wanting it -- wanting him -- with sudden craving. It isn't wariness about reciprocity. It isn't 'payment', or thinking she has to get on her knees before he'll get on his. Sinclair never expected him to lay her back on the grass during Carnival and eat her out. She was openly delighted when he sat back on the couch and she sucked his cock on her birthday.

One could joke that they save oral for special occasions. Carnival. Her birthday. Today, which is the closest she's going to get to moving in with him for a long time, if not forever. But the truth is, she saw him touching himself, lazy and happy, and she wanted to make him groan just the way he does when he throws his head back like that.

She wanted, simply, to suck his cock. Which she does, unhurried and wet, moaning softly as she does so. She remembers what made him jerk or gasp the last time -- the first time. She touches him, and she tickles the tip of her tongue on the hypersensitive V of flesh on the underside of the tip. She makes him see stars, and when he's panting and urging her off of his cock, Sinclair smiles up at him like she's done something good, like she's pleased with herself.

Her hair isn't even completely wet. She kisses him, utterly unaware that some men might not want to kiss a girl who's just had her mouth on their dick. She arches her back to press against him, her legs parting to let him stroke between her thighs, and if it weren't for the fact that he all but pushes her to the tiled wall then she might try to mount him, slide right down on his cock and force him to find some way to hold her up, hold her on him while they fuck.

Alex gets on his knees, the spray from the showerhead beating his back, and she watches him, simultaneously uncertain and eager, and when he asks what he does she doesn't bother to laugh at him, or ask who he thinks he's talking to. She lifts up her leg and hooks it over his shoulder herself, panting softly, shoulders pressed to the wall.

"Like that?"

[Alexander] That makes him grin. His hands reach up her body, cup her breasts. He can't, of course, resist playing with her nipple ring; tugging it gently between his fingers before his hands are traveling back down her sides, wrapping around her hips to pull her forward so he can -- well, smooch her tummy.

"Yeah." He grins up at her. "Just like that."

Then he's sinking down, sitting on his heels, nudging her leg a little higher on his shoulder, a little further back. Water's cascading down his back, a warm rush. Water dampens his short hair and washes down her lower half, spatters off her knee where it hooks over his shoulder. Sometimes she's a little uncertain with him, like she's not sure what he'll like and what he'll allow, and sometimes he's even aware of what a rare thing that is: a Garou, a Glass Walker that gives enough of a damn about her kin to care about his preferences. Sometimes they're both careful with each other, but they're not, in the end, shy. Either of them.

He holds her eyes as he kisses a soft trail down her belly; as he nuzzles between her legs, and then closes his mouth over her clit. When he starts using his tongue on her, he closes his eyes. He grasps her hips firmly. He holds her right there, shoulderblades to the wall, one leg over his shoulder, as he buries his face between her thighs. It's too loud in the shower to hear what he's saying while he goes down on her, but fragments drift up past the blast of water --

something about sweet little pussy and taste so fucking good and mmmmph, yeah.

[Sinclair] He can't resist and she can't help but whimper when he does, her lips trembling with the sound even as Alex's fingertips are making that steel ring pull at her nipple. Her head tips back, and if she weren't in a quickly steaming shower -- that's one nice thing about this place, how fast the water heats up -- her skin would be covered in goosebumps. "Baby..." she whispers, and the sound of it's almost lost in the clatter of water hitting ceramic. She touches his scalp so

fucking

tenderly

it seems at odds with what they're doing to each other, what they've been doing every single time. Except: every single time, there are these random tendernesses. There's gentleness in the way she lays back for him, a sort of mutual submission and giving-over of themselves while they're fucking. Or making love. They don't label it or talk about it or try to figure it out while they're in the midst of it.

It just is. And it's okay.

No, not okay. It's good. It's so fucking good, which is what Sinclair says -- moans -- out loud when his trailing, lingering mouth finally finds its way between her legs and wraps around her clit. She gasps in shudders, ragged and tremulous, when he starts to use his tongue. "Oh, that mouth," she's whispering, "that fucking mouth."

As literal as that is, she's thinking -- as much as she's capable of thought right now -- of what he uses that mouth for. What comes out of it. What it looks like when he's kissing her, or wrapping around her nipple ring, or when he's doing this. She wasn't sure it would be okay for her to ask him to do this. Wasn't sure it wouldn't make him annoyed, like maybe it was only okay to want it when he's in the mood to give it, was pretty sure she didn't want to risk being told No.

Not because No is unacceptable. Not because No isn't okay or alright between them. Hell. The fact that he can tell her no and she'll listen is uncommon enough in Garou-Kin relationships that it matters. It's something to hold onto. It's just that she doesn't want to ask for something that she shouldn't in the first place. And she doesn't know what's okay

and nobody's thought to tell her that when you genuinely care about someone, there's not a whole lot it isn't okay to ask for. Even if the answer is No.

Sinclair gasps when he finds a certain spot with his kisses, when his tongue winds over her flesh and makes her buck her hips slightly. "Sorry," she gets out, her palms caressing his head, her eyes struggling to stay open so she can watch him. She's holding her balance without struggle, at least for most of the time, until his prophecy comes true.

Her knee buckles a bit, and she locks it suddenly to keep herself upright, and through it all she's moaning, eyes closing, head falling back, pussy starting to grind, because he's started fucking her with his mouth a little faster, a little hungrier, a little more

"Oh god... oh my fucking god, Alex, oh fuck..."

[Alexander] Right around when her knee threatens to buckle, his mouth pulls from her for just a second. He laughs against her inner thigh, whispers don't fall, and before she can answer

gets right back to what he's doing.

His hands grip her a little more firmly, though. He cups her ass and supports her like that, the muscles of his arms and shoulders locked against her weight just in case she decides to come crashing down. When she starts moaning, when she starts letting loose all sorts of blasphemies, he growls against her in response.

And he doesn't stop. If anything he goes at her a little harder, a little more hungrily, mauling her pussy with his tongue and his lips, sucking at her clit, murmuring inaudible noises against her body. She might not be able to hear what he's saying, but she can hear the tone of it, the encouragement while he fucks her with that mouth: that hot, hungry mouth.


Let's cut to the chase, then. He's trying to get her off. And of all the unpleasant things one might say or think about Alexander fucking Vaughn, one thing is rather indisputably true. He's a stubborn sonofabitch, and -- undergraduate degree standing as proof and all -- a hardworking, diligent bastard when he puts his mind to something.

All of which is to say: he's trying to get her off, which means he'll go at her patiently, relentlessly, until her gets her off, which means he'll keep fucking her with his mouth until she's grabbing at his hair or slapping her hands against the tile walls, until she's arching under the blast of his shower; until she's screaming and the neighbors are thinking goddammit, not again, and she's coming on his face, and he's groaning against her cunt and reaching down to stroke his cock like it's he who's being pleasured like this.


Afterward he's kissing her cunt gently, licking her clit now and then in playful light flicks of his tongue, nuzzling against the soft skin of her lower belly as he keeps stroking himself -- lazily now, patiently waiting.

"I like the way you taste," he murmurs, and plants a little kiss against her belly. "I like it when you come on my face."

[Sinclair] When she asked, she thought about his face between her legs, about his lips on her pussy, about the way it felt when they ran off behind the bushes and onto some grassy riverbank while fireworks went off in the distance. She didn't think about the way Alex went at her then, how he slid his fingers into her and worked at her with his mouth, fluttered his tongue against her clit until she came, wild and gasping.

She didn't think he'd make her come in the shower like this, and when she starts to buck and to grind and lose control of herself, Sinclair looks down and her torso twists as she writhes, as she tries to fuck him. She starts to protest, seeing him stroking his cock, encouraging noises vibrating against her clit,

which makes her forget what she was opening her mouth to say. She just gasps. "That's it, baby," she whispers. "That's it..."


And it is. Though it wasn't what she had expected any more than he came into the bathroom expecting her to get on her knees in the tub and put her mouth on him. She's shaking near the end, his hands holding her up and her hands going to the tile to hold herself up, her body lifting slightly so she can, frankly, fuck his mouth as her outcries get louder, and faster, and more uncontrolled. In the end she's pushing up on the toes of the foot touching the ceramic, one hand on the shower curtain about to rip it down and the other splayed over the wall, back arched and mouth open til the sound of her voice is echoing off the tile.

And coming down slow. With little bursts of pleasure that make her gasp again, and again. With shudders, and with gradual meltings like a glacier coming apart in time-lapse. She buckles, and she melts, and she lets her hands slide off tile and vinyl and find his body, his hair and his ears and neck, jawline, shoulders, while he kisses her, soft

and licks her, gentle

and nuzzles her the way he does, the way they're animals together, growling at turns.

Sinclair sinks downward with the unfathomable grace of a dancer, a gymnast, a ...killer, if you get right down to it. She moves like the predator she is, and the only reason he's safe is that some part of her recognizes him as -- if not safe, if not inferior, if not prey -- vital to her survival, somehow. She unfolds her leg and comes down to him, thighs parted and hands holding herself steady as she comes lower, lower, and lower.

Til she's on him, both of them on their knees but folded together. She has no answer for what he said to her but this: rubbing herself against him until their bodies find each other. Until he starts to push into her. Until she can kiss him, hair falling around their shoulders and finally getting wet as the water comes down, down, and down.

They can't fuck like this, both of them on their knees on this hard, hard surface. They don't have room to move the way they both know they're going to want to and they don't have the freedom to just roll around. But Sinclair doesn't start to fuck him, or ride him. She just moves their bodies together, holds him inside, and kisses him like this while their pulses bump up against each other, recognize each other, and align.

[Alexander] Two or three rings of the shower curtain have popped loose. The water sounds different now, some of it falling against vinyl, some of it missing the curtain altogether to spray out onto the tile floor.

He doesn't care. He doesn't give a flying fuck. His hands slide slowly up and down her sides as she comes down over him, and he watches her, focused, adoring, as she sinks down, down, down.

Alex's eyes flicker closed, and his teeth catch at his lower lip, as she rubs over him. As she shifts her hips and starts to take him inside, slow and steady, little by little. He pants once, unsteadily, and then abruptly surges forward and catches her mouth, kisses her hard, kisses her until she sinks down onto his lap and he's inside her and they're connected, recognizing each other, aligned.

Then it's his brow to hers, and his lips parted, his breath warm and humid and elevated, shuddering a little. Water beats down. Water swirls around their knees, their feet, as they kneel together on the floor of his bathtub like this is some sort of holy communion, some sort of ritual, until after a while he lifts his head and nuzzles against her, finds her mouth, kisses her.

It gains depth and passion, that kiss, like a snowball rolling downhill. Like the nucleus of a star orbiting through the heart of a nebula. His hands come up, delve into her hair as the shower drenches her. His hands sweep down the tangles of her hair and to the back of her head, and his hands nudge her head back, tilt her head back until he can kiss her throat, bite at her neck, taste her skin.

They can't fuck like this. But she holds him inside her anyway, and he stays inside her, and ... he draws away just a little, just enough to murmur, "Stand up, baby. Stand up and let me fuck you."

[Sinclair] Honest truth comes from Sinclair with an edge of brutality. And most of the time, what she has to say can't be seen or said by others. She is not a storyteller and song-giver of the Nation, but she is a Galliard, and she is the memory of a hundred lives when hers is only twenty-two years long. When her life as a Galliard is only three years old.

The honest truth is that as they come together like this, his cock sliding hard and welcome into her pussy and their bodies holding onto each other as the water covers them in wet, wet warmth, there are words on her lips and the tip of her tongue that she doesn't dare speak aloud, no matter how true they are. She does not want to frighten him, and perhaps that's a greater gentleness than all the restraint of her hands (claws) and mouth (fangs) combined.

It would be hard for most people to compare Alex to a hare, but in some way, Sinclair can, sometimes. He'll bolt so easily, if she startles him.

It would be hard for most people to compare Alex to a deer, but in some way, Sinclair can, sometimes. He goes so very still, when she frightens him.

It would be hard for most people to compare Alex to a wolf, a lion, a predator himself, because he is 'short' for a North American male and he's loud and he's not a hunter but he's sure as fuck a fighter, but Sinclair knows that in his veins there's an animal that howls right back to hers, wanting and filled with bone-deep recognition. It vibrates in her when she's with him, this answering call, female to male, no matter what the phase of the moon.

Sinclair, Brutal Revelation, does not so much as whisper the truth to Alex when she wraps her arms around him and kisses him the way she does, his cock as deep in her as it has ever been and their bodies joined as close as they have ever been. She moves herself on him while her eyes close and her mouth seals to his. She rises up, and slowly comes back down, and she -- who has more freedom of movement in this case -- starts to ride him.

They can't fuck like this. The tub is too hard on his knees, he's been on them too long.

And that stops her. That's what gets her to slow down after fucking Alex in the shower like this for several unfurling, protracted seconds that spin out longer than time has measured them. That's what gets her to pull back, panting softly, and start to slide herself off of him. "Take me to bed," she says, as he's slipping from her cunt. Her hair is dripping and her body is dripping and she hasn't scrubbed at her hair or skin with shampoo or soap but she's animal enough that simply getting under the water for a few minutes is more than enough to satisfy her.

Her eyes are intent on him, a clear and eternal blue that is dangerous to look into for very long (lest you fall), as she stands up and tries to bring him up with her. "Take me to your bed."

[Alexander] They can't fuck like this -- but they do, if only for a while, if only for a few mindshattering lifts and falls of her hips on him. Alexander tilts his head back as she rides him, and water falls on the crown of his head, and sluices down his face, and washes down his neck and over his chest. He takes his hands off her then, gives her the freedom of movement to ride him even if the bathtub is hard and his knees are starting to ache; grips the side of the tub with one hand, the built-in soap dish with the other, and tries to remember how to

just keep breathing.

Then she slows. Then she stops. Then she's rising up on her knees, and then to her feet, and when he slips out of her his eyes open and he looks up at her, wild predatory Sinclair, and he's so aroused that every beat of his heart is echoed in his cock, that his cheeks are flushed with heat and sex, that he doesn't hesitate before climbing to his feet and kissing her mouth.

The shower curtain whisks back. He turns the water off. The bathroom floor is wet; he'll have to get a new curtain at some point, or else tack it to the wall or something. Who cares, anyway. He throws the bathroom door open, and it's cooler outside, but that's okay because his rushing blood keeps him warm, and it's a short, short trip into his bedroom with the curtains closed and the lights off and the bed still rumpled from when he rolled out of it in the morning.

They're kissing, turning around each other like snakes. His hands are all over her, but mostly fondling her breasts, squeezing her ass. The backs of his knees hit his mattress. He drops down, pushes himself back onto the mattress, pulls her down over him, brings her astride him as he sinks back on his elbows. "Okay," he breathes, or pants -- a senseless sort of urging or encouragement, "come on."

[Sinclair] She's there with him, and for a few moments even when he's not inside of her anymore it's hard to imagine what it was like when she wasn't against him like this, what it was like to expect to come home and fall into bed alone. Maybe jerking off, thinking about those soft, pretty lips wrapped around his cock or that lean, athletic body laid out by a sparkling pool in some nearly-nonexistent bikini or the noises, fuck, those sounds she makes sometimes when he's giving it to her and she's loving it, begging him for it, arching her back and showing him with every twist of her body how he can make her feel.

She's there with him, every step from shower to floor to hallway to bedroom awash in gibbous-moon light, and neither of them bothered to grab a towel so when they fall asleep it will be on damp sheets. That's a good trick for summer, really, when it gets so unbearably hot that it seems there's no possible relief. Maybe they'll do this again: shower, and without drying off, fall into bed together

with her body rising up and legs parting as he sits down so heavily, pulling her with him.

But she's already there, hands on the back of his neck and the back of his head, holding his head back so she can kiss him again, climbing onto the bed and onto his body while he moves his hands over her. She whimpers. She makes those noises when he touches her ass and her breasts, filling his palms with soft, heavy flesh and listening to the way it makes her gasp, the way it makes her tremble.

He could do a lot worse, he said in Rio, when he admitted that there was a label he could bear to live under with her. It's true: he could do worse than a female werewolf like this, who fights to control herself when he goes still with fear, who holds back sometimes because she doesn't want to startle him away, who can accept it when he says No, who would have accepted it if the answer had never, ever been Yes

and just been his friend.

Alex could do worse than this girl, a few -- okay, half a dozen -- years younger than him, who wants him with such hunger that it seems insatiable, who is so capable of the most extreme acts of violence without ever needing to change her shape. She's blessed, somehow. Maybe some bloodline of hers goes back to the most warlike of tribes. Maybe she's making up for lost time, all the years she spent in repression and terror, now unleashed. Maybe it's just her totem, or her ferocious focus on what she wants, or the fact that she's been a driven young woman since she was a driven young girl.

She would protect him when he couldn't protect himself. She would let him fight for himself when he could. She would -- and does -- seek the cradle of his arms sometimes, as though he's the stronger, because in some ways,

(in the ways that matter to someone like Sinclair)

he is.

She kisses him with something like adoration, like devotion, like need, like


Sinclair gasps softly when she comes down on him again, this time reaching between their bodies and just putting him inside, just... taking hold of him and sliding him into her, wet and feverishly hot. Droplets of cooling water roll down her spine. There are scars under his hands, and a line of poetry under his fingers when his hand falls to her hip. She's marked herself in a hundred ways and there's nothing on her that bespeaks possession or belonging to anyone, anything but herself.

Yet she takes him inside of herself, a penetration wholly different than that of metal through her ears or arm. She takes him in her arms, and into her cunt, and feels his heart slamming against her palm with every beat.

She does not name this, or label it, when she starts to fold over him as he slides into her. She just gasps, and -- finding his eyes with hers, the drops of water that fall from her hair to hit his chest matching the cadence of their breathing and their heartbeats -- begins to make love to him.

[Alexander] There's something warm and lush about this, something quiet and needful even as it's grasping, and panting, and hungry. Alex's head falls back as Sinclair takes him inside her again, sinking down on him as he lets a quiet, quiet moan slide past his lips. Then he's raising his head, arching up toward her as she's putting her hands on his head, on his face, raising him to her mouth so they can kiss, gaspingly, just like that.

Then he's falling back, and she's climbing over him, and she's starting to ride him with her hands on his chest and his hands on her hips, poetry and scarification under his fingers, the telltale marks of her life that she wrote onto herself under his touch. She's a Galliard, after all. She records. She remembers. Even her own stories: filed away on GW.net, a huge and objective chronicle of the last days of their people. Date, time. Event.

It's different when she records things on her body. That's where the art is. That's where she employs symbolism, esoteric names and patterns; that's where the story is beneath the surface, reserved for those few privy to it.

Like him. Sometimes it surprises him now that she told him so much in Rio. These names. Those markings. That bar through her bicep, that ring through her nipple

which he catches now in his mouth, sucking at her with a silent, desperate ferocity, tugging that ring gently between his teeth, gasping as he lets his head fall back again

when her hips come down on his

and her cunt sheaths his cock so perfectly in heat and wetness.

Now his eyes are closed, and he's holding her by the hips, and she's leaning over him like an animal, like herself, riding him on and on and on, a little faster now. Now he's panting gently with every downstroke of her body, and his hands are moving over her ass, squeezing at her, sliding, and he's murmuring that's it, that's it, oh yes and there's no denying that they're making love, that they're mating like animals, because there's much of him that's like a hare, quick to run; much of him that's like a deer, quick to freeze; much of him that's like her, quick to fight, quick to turn vicious, quick and brave and brutal.

He laughed in someone's face tonight when they hit him so hard his eye swelled shut in minutes. He laughed, vicious and vindictive, when he took them down to the ground and pounded their face in until the ref had to get in his face and shout at him to knock it off, go to his corner so he could give the count.

He doesn't laugh now, with his girlfriend riding his body, and even though he's bruised and battered and rather exhausted this feels good, and right, and somehow necessary

which is a frightening thing.


Then they're going faster. Then they're fucking harder, and she's grinding down on his body and driving breath out of him every time, and their faces are close together and they're still kissing, still nipping and nuzzling at each other, and his hands are on hers now, gripping hers where they rest on his chest, holding onto her while she rides him like that

until he's panting for her, until he's groaning under her as he kisses her, until his knees are bending up from the bed and his feet are planting so he can fuck back against her, up against her downstroke.

"Harder," he mutters against her mouth. "Make me come, baby."

[Sinclair] She's a violent, vicious girl and she's a savage, wild animal. Who climbed onto him and sank down onto him, who took him inside of her in the shower just to be closer to him, who takes him inside herself now for the same reason, and for pleasure. And who leans over him, her belly and breasts sliding over his torso, to take one of his nipples in her mouth while she rides him. Slowly, at first. Lush, yes. Warm and gasping, her hips rolling under his hands in the dark until the intimation of movement is as surreal as the movement itself.

Not a lot of people understand what it means to a creature like Sinclair to mark herself the way she does. Why it had to be scarification and not another tattoo, that symbolic healing of the spiritual wound of not only being born a girl to this world as it is but the wound of being born a monster more frightening to humanity than its own powers of cruelty and destruction. Why the tattoo on her ankle does not commemorate Alex but everything about both that day in his room and the night in the garden, why it had to be stars and palms together around the words.

Some girlfriends would be disgusted, frustrated, insecure about the names on his arm, as dismissive as he was. Sinclair knows a bit better. Foolish a choice as it was, it was enough to get him to permanently mark himself. And he will die with those names on his body, with those memories as well as the decision to finish it off with just a name he liked. Sinclair would never ask him to cover it, or remove it with lasers. Sinclair, in her way -- lover of his flesh, and more subtly its protector -- loves those markings, too.

She gasps, throwing her head back when he sucks on her breast, her body writhing atop his and her hips moving that much faster, riding him faster, taking him without verbalization of more. more. more. more. Alex mutters, murmurs. Sinclair just gasps, just whimpers as he touches her ass, grinds herself down on him to rub his cock over her clit, to take as much pleasure in him as she's giving with every. Single. Stroke.

His girlfriend. That's what she is. Who leaves her stuff here when she won't leave it anywhere else but the one place on earth she can call entirely her own: that damn car. Who sleeps in his bed when she's never slept in a bed with any other man or male -- not like that. Not like the way they do. Crashing in a heap on a huge mattress on the floor with a bunch of other Garou after a fight doesn't exactly count. And that's another thing that sets him apart as First and Only, but she hasn't ever mentioned that it was strange and new to her to sleep the way they did in Rio, their legs tangled and their bodies close

or the way they sleep here sometimes, facing like that. Or turning over in sleep til one or the other is Big Spoon, arms draping and breaths steady, slow, content.

Sinclair knows she could simply remove everything from her car and put it all in this teeny tiny apartment one day, sleep here nearly every night though maybe not every night, and that Alex would not only be okay with it, he'd be happy about it. She doesn't quite know how to process that. It isn't even that it's new, or that it's scary to her. She just doesn't know where to begin.

What she knows is the way he's moving under her now, fucking her right back, his head against the rumpled bedspread and his mouth open to mutter at her the way he does, kiss her like they do. She kisses him harder when he says it, Harder, moaning into his throat, stroking herself off against his cock like he's a fucking toy, like he's hers, like she can't help herself

which she can't.

Make me come, he says, when their mouths gasp away from each other, and she moans, eyes falling closed, hands going from his body to the bed to grasp the covers and the sheets while she starts just pounding herself on him, every bounce of her hips making her cry out. It's almost as though she was just waiting for it, waiting for permission or for the hint that he wanted it like this, was ready for her, needed to fucking have it. She tosses her hair off her shoulder and rides him in earnest now, pulling up and back and putting her hands on his chest, watching him. He slides a little deeper. Sinclair grabs his hand, suddenly, and brings it between her legs, but she doesn't just guide him there and let go.

Their fingers tangle against her pussy, splay and slide where wetness slicks out of her on every grind of her body onto his. She holds his hand there, strokes his fingers against her clit, and starts to go

harder. And faster. And then harder, it seems, only she's not moving differently, it's her cunt clenching down on him, squeezing him. He can all but feel the electric impulses of pleasure going through her where she holds his fingers against her pussy. He can feel the first spasms of orgasm when they hit her, when she starts to arch like a jackknife above him, the bed literally slapping against the wall and rocking on its frame with what they're doing to each other now.

Sinclair doesn't swear. Doesn't find words for what she's feeling now. She comes, and she moans, and she cries for him, but it's not his name or words or anything, anything he can find in the languages he knows. Just her, savage and wild atop him. With him.

[Alexander] There's some silent ferocity in the way they fuck tonight.

Which is not to say they're being quiet, because they're not, really. True, they're not jabbering at each other, not talking and calling each other good little girl, fucking bastard, any of the names they might use. But they are moaning, crying out, groaning, snarling. His head keeps pushing back against the pillows as he arches against her. He keeps letting loose amorphous, wracked noises as she rides down on him, or circles her hips a certain way, or bears down on him.

But -- a silent ferocity there, nonetheless. Between their bodies, between their breaths, between the sounds tumbling savage from their lips: a focus, a connection, a burning intensity

there, in the way she grasps his hand and pulls it between her legs. There, in the way he fondles her, heavily, almost roughly. There, in his eyes holding hers and now he is talking to her, now he's muttering filth to her, meaningless whispers and murmurs, flashes of his teeth bared in grimaces of pleasure as she rides him like a motherfucking pony

until she's jackknifing over him to kiss him, and he's tilting his head back to accept that kiss, to take it and turn it around and return it, to bite that kiss into her as she's pounding herself on him and he's all but mauling his fingers over her cunt, his mouth opening now to gasp, to groan, to tell her yeah, that's it, oh my god, I'm going to come, you're gonna make me come, yeah, yeah -- !


He grabs her hip with his free hand when he comes. He pulls her down on him, hard, almost brutal, arches his hips against her in the same instant, drives himself deep, fills her full of cock, fucks her full of cum.

It's all darkness and pleasure and tension, their faces close to each other, their bodies flexed against each other, their mouths close but not kissing, open, gasping, spilling sounds into the air. They're electrically still for instants, moments, ages before they start to move again, furiously and incoherently now, grinding and bucking against each other, shattering each other, shattered.

At some point his hand leaves her clit. He slings that arm around her neck, around her shoulders -- a hard, hot bar of flesh and bone across her back, clinching her against him. He holds her right there as he keeps grinding into her, making noises like he was coming apart at the seams; holds her right there as he fucks her through the last of his orgasm and hers, holds her until he can't move anymore.

Then he sprawls flat on the bed beneath her, collapsing into relaxation, his head falling back, his arms falling to either side; laying himself out for her, eyes closed, overcome.

[Sinclair] In Rio de Janeiro, with a creek nearby and Carnival exploding in color and noise in the distance, Alex did exactly what he does now -- thrust up into her, groaning, while pulling her down onto his body -- and she yelped, she told him to stop, she pulled herself off of his body because he was hurting her. A week or so before that, the first time she road him (the second time she had sex), there was a moment when he started to do the same thing and she told him no, she whimpered and squirmed away, and he went slower after that, he didn't pull her down like that.

Truth be told, Sinclair's ready for it now. On her birthday when she got on his lap and fucked him with her skirt on he arched his back and pounded his cock up into her, hands on her hips and grinding her down on him. She didn't yelp that time, or pull away, or shove him back because he was causing her pain in the midst of his pleasure. She doesn't beg him to stop, now. Her eyes roll back. She lays over him and holds him and moans against him while he comes in the wake of her own orgasm, riding out the last of her pleasure even as his hands tighten their grip on her hips.

"Oh, fuck, Alex, I love it when you come in me," is the best she gets out, her mouth moving against his cheek, her sweat and his making them slippery against each other. She pants, trembling from it, and buries her face against his neck. He moves his hand and she exhales heavily, relaxes with a sigh as he puts her in his arms, holds her like he does. Now they rock. Now they start to slow. "Don't let go," she whispers, as his arms are sliding away. "Baby," so soft, that, "baby, don't let go."

[Alexander] Alexander's response is an indistinct, blurry murmur. His arms don't fall away after all, though. They stay wrapped loosely around her lower back, looped over the in-curve of her spine. His head turns, a blind, languid seeking. He nuzzles her face, her cheek, finds her mouth and kisses her softly.

"Mmm," he says. Breathes in, and out.

Some time goes by, and then some more. His eyes open. He turns and looks at the open door, through which he can see a sliver of the bathroom, a patch of hallway wall. The lights are still on in the bathroom and the entryway. He thinks they should at least close the bedroom door before they zonk. He thinks maybe he'd like to open the windows a bit tonight, because it's spring now and the air is warming.

Blankets rustle as he shifts, tucking one hand behind his back. The other traces idly over her back, her skin smooth, her scars textured.

"You ever been to Easter Island?" he murmurs, quiet.

[Sinclair] In between soft pants for breath, in between nuzzles of her face against his chest and shoulder, Sinclair huffs out a quiet laugh: "That is like... the most random..."

She laughs again, quietly, laying on top of him with her arms around him, her legs straddling his lap, his cock still deep inside of her. "They don't hold cheerleading competitions there," she quips, and grins to herself. To his chest.

[Alexander] He laughs a little as she calls it random, his chest moving under her cheek. "There's going to be a total solar eclipse there this summer," he says by way of explanation. "Around July 11th."

A few more breaths of silence, his hand moving slowly, gently over her back: gentle now as though to make up for the intensity of their lovemaking, the ferocious way he held her against him, pushed into her, came into her.

"I've never been to Easter Island before. I've seen a total eclipse of the sun, but only once. Day turned to night. Twilight with the sun in the sky. It's ... a trip. And to see that on Easter Island, with all those ancient stone carvings, and the ocean, and ...

"I think it'd be pretty amazing. And not something that's likely to happen again in our lifetimes." A pause. "Do you want to go with me?"

[Sinclair] The woman on top of him -- who is not a woman, yet who is so unquestionably female that she seems to redefine the fucking word -- becomes still as he talks. She is leisurely and sated on top of him, which means he's safe. He's fucked her into this lazy relaxation. It'll get safer in summer, too, when it's so fucking hot outside that after making love to her Sinclair might just want to lay loose and easy on the covers and not move for awhile, rather than moaning in his ear and telling him she wants more.

In any case: right now Alex is safe from the monster she is. She's sleepy and satisfied, warm and affectionate. Nevermind how quickly that can turn to rage, how rapidly that particular instinct can kick in. Right now Sinclair doesn't fear that. She isn't afraid of anything. She's just... here. And it feels good to have him under her, and inside her, and stroking her back the way he is.

Her eyes drift closed and open again. She makes a small humming noise. He tells her he's only seen one once. There's only been one total eclipse of the sun visible from the country the live in during either of their lifetimes, and it was when Sinclair was three years old. Even Alex was just a boy, a grade schooler who probably learned how to make one of those boxes with a pinhole in it.

There will be others in their expected lifetimes, visible over places like Australia, the North Pole, Indonesia, places so far away they're hard to conceptualize for someone like Sinclair. In the summer, seven years from now, there will be a total solar eclipse visible above the area of the country where Sinclair was born. Her parents will go to see it. She might be in the ground by then.

"I'd like to try," she says, somewhat carefully, as his fingers hook around locks of hair and drag them slowly off her shoulderblades. It's far. Farther even than Rio de Janeiro, and out in the middle of the fucking ocean. She doesn't even know if there are werewolves there. Which means:

"I can't really go on a boat or a plane," she goes on quietly. "Even if I can control myself and not just..."

Snap. Slaughter. Because of the coughing or the kid kicking her chair or the people or the enclosed space or any number of things that might set her off.

Sinclair exhales slowly, rubbing her cheek a little on his chest. "It'd be bad for people." The humans. The creatures that most wolves don't give a flying fuck about. The creatures they are here to save, in a way, rather than destroy. The creatures, the animals, that the Glass Walkers have always been tied to, somehow, by choice and duty. "I don't know if there's any way I can get there in the spirit world."

It makes her sad. He can hear it in her voice, all but feel it in her skin. "I'd really like that," she says quietly. "I just don't know if it's even possible. I'd have to find out if there's a caern there, or a moonbridge. Even if I could figure out a way to take a boat or plane, it'd take too long, if my pack needed me I couldn't --"

Sinclair stops dead. She doesn't speak for a second, then lifts up her hand and literally smacks it over her face. "Oh my god I am so retarded."

[Sinclair] [Correction! "when Sinclair was six years old"]

[Alexander] [no three!!]

[Sinclair] [FIEN.]

[Alexander] The total solar eclipse Alexander saw was not the one of their childhood, too far south to blot out the sun completely for them. His one brush with totality was in the summer before his junior year at Harvard, and he traveled all the way to southern Africa, to fucking volatile Angola, to chase it down.

Because he was young and reckless. Because his choice of major wasn't completely random, and because he does, in fact, love phenomena of the sky and of space. Because it was June 21st, and watching the sun disappear at midday on the summer solstice of 2001 seemed special. Unrepeatable. Something he will not see again in his lifetime.

Alexander has murky memories of that first, long-ago eclipse too, though. He remembers being outside during a special recess called for the event, of painstakingly punching pinholes in box lids to make an eclipse viewer, of being warned over and over and over again not to look up at the sun itself.

He remembers looking anyway, just a quick glimpse stolen at the sun, the dark crescent that the moon took out of it.

It's strange for him to think, now, that Sinclair may have seen that eclipse too. That she would have been three years old, not even a child then, and certainly not a monster: a toddler, tiny, fragile, held in her father's hands or her mother's arms, as unaware and uncomprehending of the cosmic phenomena she was witnessing as an animal.

He listens, now, as she says she'd like to try, which sounds like I probably can't. That makes him ache in a way he's not familiar with. It makes his brow furrow and his hand stop on her back, then rub with more deliberation, something like unspoken comfort. He listens to her tell him that she can't fly there or sail there; that she doesn't know how she'd get there in the spirit world, which is how she got to Rio de Janeiro.

By running. Thousands of miles. Just to see him.

Then she breaks off. And facepalms. And he looks at her in surprise, raising his head off the pillow. "Wait, what?" he says.

[Sinclair] Sinclair is laughing into her palm. Laughing a little at first, but it grows. God, how it grows, as that comment on her own mental faculties turns into open hilarity. She is shaking from it, which moves his cock in her, which makes her laugh harder, literally giggling into his chest and then tossing her head back to let out broad peals of laughter.

When it fades, as all such bursts have to, her eyes are damp from hilarity. All the while, Alex has had little choice but to lie there with her and wait til she calms down enough to figure out what the fuck. Either that or flip her on her back and fuck her til she gasps instead of laughs. Or tickle her til she starts shrieking and slapping at his hands. Okay, so he has choices. Options.

In the end, though, Sinclair does calm down on her own and sucks in a heady breath, chuckling softer now. She drapes her arms over him and nuzzles his nose. Rubs hers on his. Grins. "All I gotta do is call you." She kisses him quick. "And all you gotta do is pick up. And I'll be there."

[Alexander] "Wait, what?" he says again, lifting his head off the pillow entirely to try to find her eyes.

And she laughs, and laughs and laughs, a rising crescendo of hilarity. "What?" He's starting to laugh, too. He doesn't get the joke, but he laughs anyway because her laughter is happy, because she's happy, because that makes him happy. "What is it? What are you laughing about? What -- "

and he does flip her over. Not to fuck her all over again, but just to flip her on her back and climb over her, to pin her playfully, to nuzzle noses together like eskimos and smooch her, and laugh quietly himself.

"What," he urges again, softly, smiling, "is so funny?"

She stops laughing, then. She wraps her arms around him, and she kisses his smile, and he returns it -- a quick, glancing kiss.

And then he's confused. And then amazed. She can see it dawning: the furrow of his brow, first, then its clearing. "What -- really? Is this like some spirit trick?"

[Sinclair] She does, actually, wrap her arms around him. They loop around his neck lightly, deceptively slender, and her hands play with what there is of his hair, which isn't very long. Dawning incredulity washes over his face as they kiss, and as they snuggle rather playfully against the bedclothes. She grins at him and nods a couple of times, quick and short. Pulls him down to kiss him again.

Not so quick. Not short.

"Yeah," she says quietly. "It's a gift called phone diving. It's risky, but... not really any more risky than crossing the gauntlet." This may or may not be a lie. This may or may not be ignorance, arrogance, any number of things seen in the young and reckless. This may be the bald truth.

Her hand strokes the back of his neck. "I call you, and when you pick I can come through." Her smile is quieter now, and so is her voice. "I can go anywhere."

[Alexander] Alex lets out a short laugh. "That is so cool. We gotta test this sometime. Did you just get it or something? Aw, man, I coulda taken you to Tokyo. You'd love Tokyo. Or hate it, I don't know which."

[Sinclair] That makes her laugh again. Happily, though with more weight and resonance than before, because now she realizes just how much this means. That she can go to Tokyo, or Sidney. She can go to Easter Island and watch the total solar eclipse with Alex, out in the middle of the ocean, and if her packmates call her she can get back to them quickly. And, when the Wyrm is defeated, go back to her --

boyfriend.

Sinclair kisses him softly, smiling as her laughter fades again. She grins up at him, her hair spread across his pillows. It still needs to be washed properly, truth be told. Later. "I just learned it," she says. "But I don't know; I might like Tokyo. And Kyoto."

[Alexander] "This is awesome." He's genuinely excited; any more excitement and he'd be bouncing in place. "I'm seriously going to just start traveling places and phoning you. And then you can just zoom through and ... wow, that's so awesome."

And, a smooch -- "Where do you want to go first?"

[Sinclair] He's never seen her laugh so much. Not even on her birthday. And Sinclair... well that's one difference between them: she doesn't laugh when she wins. She doesn't laugh when she turns someone's face to body to pulp. She doesn't feel good about it. She doesn't feel bad, either. It just is: it's what must be done. She feels amazing when she hunts prey down and can eat it, but that's not the same thing as a hunt for the Wyrm. That's not food; that's duty. That's not sustenance; that's War.

Sinclair takes no joy or sorrow in duty, nor in War. She takes no joy in violence, though there's a certain satisfaction of nameless need in it for her. There's an outlet there that she can appreciate, but it's not the same thing as the ego-boosting delight that has Alex jumping up on the fences of a cage after a match and yowling at the screaming audience as beer bottles burst against the wire, the metal, the floor, the walls.

He's never seen her laugh so much just because she was happy, but she laughs again now as he jostles with her on bed, pleased -- nay, gleeful -- at the prospect of being able to have Sinclair with him in Tokyo. Australia. Anywhere he wants to go, anything he wants to show her.

She kisses him ravenously, suddenly, mid-laugh, holding his face. Is laughing again, when she lets it end. Grinning, she pulls him down to hug him tightly. "I don't know. I'm pretty happy where I am, right now."

[Alexander] Alexander, on the other hand, definitely takes joy in war. Or -- not war, but winning. In victory, in triumph, in stomping someone else down so he can get a leg up. Alexander's a posterchild for evolution at its more brutal, even if in all truth, evolution shafted him pretty hard.

All that makes it all the more unusual, then, and all the more surprising, that he's gentle with her. And affectionate. And genuinely fond of her. That he's never gone around bragging that Sinclair's name is carved on his bedpost now; that he didn't hurt her the first time they made love, and didn't ever intend to hurt her, physically or otherwise.

She grabs him and pulls him down to kiss him again. He laughs, kissing her, owing quietly when their heads bonk together and her forehead knocks into his bruise. He doesn't really mean it. His career, such as it is, makes him tougher than your average mortal.

"I'll surprise you, then," he says. "Someday I'm just gonna call you and you'll pop through and we'll be somewhere totally cool."

[Sinclair] "And if I show up in Aspen or something wearing a bikini, you will buy me a parka," she says firmly, kissing him again, grinning again, and then

rolling him onto his back.

She's smiling when she lifts up, hands on his chest, lifting her hips til he slides out of her. Truth be told, and bluntly so, it's a wet sound and a wet feeling and she ...well. Sinclair likes it. She leans over him, nuzzling his neck before kissing it hotly, rubbing herself on him briefly before she starts to climb off, and climb out of bed. But not entirely. She doesn't want to leave him. She stays in physical contact, even if it's just a hand on him, her hips resting beside his thigh.

That hand trails up to his face. She doesn't touch his bruise, even tenderly. She tips her head to the side. "You know I want to heal you when I see you like this," she says, a touch on the quiet side, without expectation or push. "And I know you don't want me to. Or I don't think you do, but... my kneejerk response is... everything in me falling all over itself wanting to make it better. And if I can't make it better, make you feel better."

[Alexander] "I'll already have a parka ready," he corrects.

Then they roll. She swings atop again, like day turning to night, night to day. He lays back, elbows on the mattress, hands loosely bracketing her body, her shoulders, and smiles up at her. She lets him slide out of her, and his eyes close for a second; he breathes, and lies still for her, lifting his chin to let her nuzzle him like the animal she is.

Then her hand is on his face. And his eyes are opening, and he covers her hand with his, his expression quieter now, tender.

"I only don't want you to because I don't need to be healed," he says quietly. "I went into that cage asking for this. And it'll be gone in a couple days, max. If I was really hurt, baby, or if I got beat up by something I couldn't handle, I'd let you help me." A small pause. "Which... is actually pretty new to me."

[Sinclair] Something about that strikes her as incrediblye tender, and it shows even in the way she's rolling him over, moving him under her body, covering him for a moment to kiss his cheek, kiss his neck, his jaw. That he would be ready for her. Waiting. Eager enough to see her that he'd have something to meet her needs. It doesn't make the animal in her rebel. It doesn't make the girl in her, stronger than average, ruffle. It makes the animal in her feel... well.

If there were words for it, she would say: you will make sure I am warm and clothed. I will make sure you are safe, and I will hunt you food and bring it back and we will be okay. you will be prepared to receive me, when the earth itself is not.

This is some of what she is thinking when she sits on the bed he's lying on, touching his face, her thumb resting against his chin as he speaks. Her head is tilted. She listens. "I know," she says, when he mentions going into the cage asking for it. She gets that, in a strange way. There's something about the pain. The visceral reponse of her body to brutality. The knowledge that she's stronger than the pain or injury is, and that it will go away long before her pride does.

She strokes her hand on his face, smiling lopsidedly. "It doesn't bother me much," she says, as though just to make sure that's out there and heard. "It's just like... you see someone cold and you want to give them a blanket. Or see them sleepy and want to get them a place to lie down. Or give 'em some food when they're hungry."

The way Sinclair says this, she sounds like she believes this is how everyone feels. All the time. Her hand starts to slide away from his face. "I'm not wracked with worry for you. I just want to... " a shrug of one shoulder. "I don't know." A smile, braver than she is about saying this aloud for the first time, perhaps to anyone. "Take care of you."

[Alexander] Alex's hand drifts from his own face up to hers. Now they mirror each other, each with a hand on the other's face. He thinks about it for a little while.

"You can heal it if you really want to," he says quietly. "If you really need to take care of me, it's okay. I just don't want you to exhaust yourself defending me from imaginary dangers and hurts when I really am capable of taking care of myself, most times."

There's a little pause. He leans up a little, kisses her. Again and again, they kiss, as though to make contact, as though they were simple creatures of the earth who communicate through touch.

"And I think you know that," he adds.

[Sinclair] [incrediblye?!]

[Sinclair] That makes her brow furrow a moment. She's tired, now. The afterglow of making love has faded enough that the ache in her joints and the fatigue of her muscles is setting in. She kisses him back, though, albeit a bit distractedly, because she's thinking through what she wants to say about that. Her hand touches his chest, now, as his lips leave hers. Sinclair turns, their faces close together again. They do this often: stay like this, faces close enough that it's hard to see each other. They see each other with touch, with breaths, with intimations, more than their eyes.

"I just finished telling you," she says quietly, "that it doesn't bother me that badly." Her thumb sweeps over his sternum, so slowly. "I definitely didn't say I need to take care of you. I said I want to."

There's a few seconds where she doesn't say anything at all, but the way she's looking at his shoulder in the dim light as she touches him tells him she's not done talking yet. "Look, it's hard for me to admit even that much. I feel kind of patronized now, though, y'know? Like... duh, Alex, I know you can take care of yourself. I wouldn't like you if you needed me to rush in and save you or something."

She turns a bit more, not away from him but towards him, as though she's not actually going to get up out of the bed and go do whatever it was she had in mind when she first slid away from him but climb back in. Pull up the covers. Go to sleep.

"The way you talk about it, letting me be there for you and worry about you or take care of you is like you're doing me a favor or something. And I don't think of it like that when you take care of me even though I can take care of myself, so it's just... I don't know. I'm not flailing over here with some nurturing instinct that needs to coddle you from 'imaginary dangers and hurts', for fuck's sake. I don't like it sounding like that's how you're seeing it."

[Alexander] "Whoa," he pushes himself up on his elbows, frowning now at what seems like a sudden shift in her mood, "hang on. I never meant to patronize you. I was just trying to take care of you.

"I wasn't sure if you needed to take care of me or not. I guess I read you wrong when you said you wanted to. And all I meant was, I don't hate the idea of you healing me. I don't need it, but it wouldn't piss me off, either. I just -- don't want you to exhaust yourself unnecessarily, y'know? 'Cause I know healing and stuff costs you something.

"That's all."

[Sinclair] Costs you something.

She looks at him, shoulders rounding and chest caving in a little. "Baby... that, of all things, isn't something I want you to try and protect me from or... take care of me like that. Sometimes I need to exhaust myself. And I know better than to do it over black eyes."

Sinclair turns, getting on her hands and knees, and crawls back over to him, straddling him again, like even that brief respite from this much closeness was too long. "I'm not mad or whatever. I just don't want you to see me like a delicate hothouse flower or something."

She touches his face again. And again. She shakes her head. "That wasn't something I needed you to take care of me about. Me worrying about you, even a little. I'm okay with that. It doesn't hurt. I need --"

A pause, and a whisper, if he isn't already: Touch me.

Then: "Mostly I just need to know you're not gonna break my heart," she confesses, in a murmur, like a secret. "And I get less scared of that every time I see you. You do take care of me. The way I need you to. All I wanna do is take care of you when you do need it."

A half-smile. "Doesn't mean it doesn't make me ache when your face is four different colors."

[Alexander] She doesn't have to say it. Almost as soon as she climbs over him, his hands are back on her, smoothing over her hips, drifting up and down her sides.

A shift in his face, when she says I need to know you're not gonna break my heart. It's almost surreal, the amount of vulnerability she shows him: Sinclair, who as a Cliath was the equal or better of most Ahrouns in the Caern; who as a Fostern, protected now by a gift her pet elemental taught her, is quite possibly one of the Sept's deadliest fighters.

"I'm not going to break your heart," he says quietly. "You're my girl. I'm not gonna do that."

His hands urge her to come down, come closer, to rest on him again the way she was, earlier. He's not so tall, so powerfully built that her weight is nothing to him. They're a scant three inches apart in height. What he has over her in mass is largely a result of working out, of building muscle mass onto a bone frame that isn't even particularly large or husky. If Sinclair ever met his brother, she'd see that Aaron Vaughn is slender, almost thin. Still. He doesn't complain when she lies atop him. He likes it: her warmth, her closeness, the unexpected innocence in the way she stays close to him.

"And," he adds, smiling a little too, now, "there's no way my face is four different colors. Three at most."

[Sinclair] The farthest apart they've been since he climbed into her El Camino was a few feet, when Alex went into the kitchen to get some ice water and Sinclair stood in his entryway and stripped down to her underwear. The distance between them could be measured in inches at most since he came to her then. Like nearly every other time they've had sex, especially since Sinclair told him just to fuck her without a condom, he's stayed inside her for a long time afterward, their lower halves melded and their breaths mingling, hands touching faces and chests in lingering, surprisingly gentle caresses.

It's hard to know if anyone would be shocked at the way they treat each other or not. The fact that when they're alone together they let their guards down as much as they do suggests that neither of them cares. Their understanding is mutual, and unspoken, though as of yet untested: this is private, what they have, and likely would not alter their behavior in front of others. It isn't that Sinclair wants to keep him a secret. It isn't that she wants him to remain in some boxed off corner of her life that doesn't touch any other areas. She likes seeing pictures of them together on his Facebook page. She likes that his relationship status has changed.

But she would not, could not be this vulnerable around other Garou. She cannot let them see all that she is willing to show Alex. And she understands, to some degree at least, what he shows to her that is... set apart.

She kisses him, softly, leaning over him when he calls her his girl. He doesn't have to urge her down to him, doesn't have to encourage verbally or physically the way her arms slide around him, under him. She keeps her hands warm under his shoulderblades, her hands that are only ever cool when her moon is waning. A lot of her weight is still on her knees to either side of his body. She tucks her toes underneath his thighs, warming them like she warms her hands on his body. This is one of the few times he can feel like he is capable of protecting her physically.

Sinclair. Warcry. One of the deadliest fighters in her pack. One of the deadliest in the sept. She shows this kind of vulnerability to her packmates -- and even then, primarily just to the two she trusts most. But she doesn't ask them to keep her warm when the moon's caprice makes her circulation sluggish and imbalanced. She doesn't murmur hold me, the way she does now, even as Alex's arms are coming around her.

"Would you believe I counted while you were tonguing my pussy?" she murmurs, a bit drowsily now. The idea is patently ridiculous. If it makes him laugh, she grins as his chest is shaking. She holds him, and he holds her.


Maybe they get up and eat something; he had a fight tonight after all, and her metabolism is terrifying. Maybe he makes frozen chicken nuggets and some mashed potatoes and calls himself such a good cook again, repulsed when Sinclair dips her nuggets in ranch dressing, scoffing when she reminds him she's from the midwest, and they put ranch dressing on everything.

Or maybe they take a shower. A real one, with soap this time, and Sinclair coming out smelling like a real girl, and smelling sort of like him, too, because it's not like she totes a bunch of fancy toiletries around with her. And puts her hair in two braids because she doesn't want to wait for them to dry, and once she's got a pair of his boxers on and one of her own t-shirts she suggests they play some Xbox if he's not too tired, or watch an episode or two of Family Guy til they start getting sleepy on the couch.

Maybe they just stay like this, entwined, until Alex realizes that his girl has fallen asleep on top of him, her heartbeat and her breathing leveling out to steady, quiet evenness. He knows she won't wake when he moves her off of him, though

he moves her gently anyway.

And he knows she won't wake even when she stirs a bit, murmuring in her sleep, her hand twitching in his direction before unconsciousness stills it again. He knows she won't wake when he tugs the covers out from under her legs and draws them up and over her, up and over himself. Maybe that's all there is to it, this time: making love, making confessions, and making a place to sleep together.