[Alex] In California, summer begins in April. By mid-May, they're talking about taking that roadtrip they were going to take - to her parents, and then to his. They start talking about maybe making a few little detours along the way. He's never been to yellowstone. She's never crossed the Rockies, except maybe on one of those bigass interstates where you lose the whole experience. He's curious about the music in Memphis and Nashville. She wants to go see that glass-bottomed platform over the Grand Canyon.
So pretty soon the little detours turn into one bigass roadtrip. They don't spend a lot of time planning where to stay and what, exactly, to do, but they do spend quite some time on Google Maps, drawing little lines and putting down little dots. Eventually they set a plan down, at least for the first leg of the trip, San Diego to Kansas. It's a twenty-four hundred mile stretch, all told -- mainly because they plan in a jaunt all the way up to Yellowstone -- and they take it at a relaxed pace. Faster on the flats; slower when they're navigating scenery and mountain routes, stopping for the sights.
Alex says he wants to take his car. He says it like he's expecting resistance, ready to bicker gently over it. Even he knows the El Cam is born and bred for roadtrips. But there is none. Sinclair yawns -- they're getting in bed -- and says all right, as long as they stash her baby somewhere safe. So the next day he makes some calls, and it turns out one of the guys has an empty space in the garage, and ...
that's set.
It's a little bit bittersweet for Alex, packing the car to go the night before. He remembers helping Sinclair pack for her roadtrip back to her parents. When she got back, they broke up.
This is different, though. This is the two of them, together, and pretty soon the twist of melancholy blows over into anticipation. They load the pseudosporty little Elantra up, though not too much. A backpack of clothes and toiletries for Sinclair. A gym bag of the same for Alex. A little tent for two. A single, large, two-person sleeping bag, flannel-lined and cozy, and a pad to put under it. A propane stove, a small frying pan and a small pot. A picnic blanket -- not some cute little checkercloth thing but rugged, rubberbottomed, capable of fending off just about any surface or stain.
Some ramen, some canned yums, some vacuum-sealed sausage. And snacks. Lots and lots of snacks -- chips and cookies and chocolates and crackers, beef jerky, cheetos, trail mix, candy orange slices that Alex can eat by the bag if he's not careful.
(Somewhere in the middle of the deserts of Nevada, he wonders aloud if he can gum up his insides by eating too many.)
They pack a cooler, too. A big one, bigger than the one they usually take to the beach. Stock it with ice and canned soda, bottled water, energy drinks, gatorade. And they pack mp3s onto his smartphone or hers.
Sunshine and a few fluffy clouds in the sky, the day they leave. It's a Thursday, and that's fine because neither of them hold down nine to fives. It's nine thirty in the morning, which is probably still a little too early for Sinclair, but rather lazylate for Alex. She's still half-asleep when he bundles her into the car, puts their bags into the trunk, slams the lid and comes around to climb in.
Alex didn't work out that morning, and he's a bundle of energy, this tough pitbull boyfriend of hers, filling the cabin of the Elantra with electric eagerness as he backs out of their parking space and gets on the road. He chatters as they get on the 8. He loves the beginning of roadtrips. Look at that road, wide open for them. Eee, he says, mimicking -- perhaps unconsciously -- her gaffling. Said gaffling's in the backseat, clicking his hands together, pleased by the sound.
By the time they're on the 163, Sinclair has dozed off, and Alex smiles a little to himself. Puts on some music instead, quiet but not too quiet since he's sure she won't wake anyway, and drives on.
They skirt L.A. to avoid the traffic. She wakes up as they're cutting onto the 215, taking the road through the eastern rim of the Los Angeles basin. There's always traffic in L.A., he grouses. He hates L.A. If he had to pick a single end all be all reason to move back to Chicago, it'd be L.A. They grab an early lunch before they flip the mountain, though, because it's hicksville on the other side -- stop off at a chinese buffet in San Bernadino, then rejoin the 15 and go over the north L.A. mountains. Some pretty good snow up there in the winter, he mentions. They should go snowboarding if they're still here come winter.
On the other side, the road flattens out into the desert. The I-5 cuts through the central valley, but the 15 skips it altogether. Miles and miles of flat sandy waste here; the bane of westward pioneers back in the day. These days, they fly over baked pavement at eighty-five miles an hour, blasting through the Mojave. It's a hundred ten degrees outside. When they stop for gas, they switch off, Alex stretching out in the passenger's seat and taking up about twice as much space as he needs.
Sinclair drives with the windows open, wind blasting through. Tripoli eees for cover, dematerializing in a blink. The music's up high, the wind is searing hot and dry; they bellow along to the rolling stones and the killers until they're hoarse.
It's evening when they hit Sin City. Neither of them are much for gambling. They stop for the cheap lobster buffet. They take a picture in front of an Get Married By Elvis chapel. Then they blast through, past Nevada's glitzy den of iniquity, into the true Nevada deserts. After a while, they leave the 15 and cut north along the 93 -- mainly because Alex wants to see the Salt Flats west of Salt Lake City.
The first night, they find a little roadside inn just past Caliente. It's past dark, close to ten pm. They bring their bags and nothing else; they're tired from a whole day of driving. They shower the grit of the road off their skin, and Alex is talking about hitting the sack early, but then
they keep the neighbors up until half past midnight.
The first day was one of their longest stretches of driving; not much to see between San Diego and Caliente. The second: much of the same. The scrubland desert of the Mojave turns into the sandblasted deserts of Nevada turns into the pristine white salt flats of the Nevada-Utah border.
When they hit the 80 going east, it's about four in the afternoon. Mirages shimmer and waver and fade to nothing ahead of them. The road is straight as a pin, and when they turn off onto a barren little country road, there's no one around for miles. They drive off the road. They blast over the flats at a hundred ten miles an hour. They feel like test pilots. Sinclair takes a picture of Alex's ear to ear grin, driving, and then they swap places so she can have a go.
Eventually, they rejoin the road, heading past the Great Salt Lake at a more sedate pace. Another picture on the edge of the Salt Lake, Sinclair making an exaggerated grimace after pretending to taste a cupped handful of water.
They grab dinner on the go, driving through an In'n'Out and helping each other with the wrappings and the fries. As night begins to fall, they fall into a quiet, warm silence. For a long while, their hands are loosely, comfortably linked across the center divide.
As the sun sets, they wind up out of the deserts, into the mountains. The shadows grow long and cool, and they're on a smaller byway. Sinclair dozes off easily in the car, but when night falls she drinks a Monster and stays up, helping watch the road.
It's dark by the time they stop by Bear Lake; they can't see the lake at all, but they can smell it in the fresh air. They pitch their tent and they roll out their sleeping bag. They curl up together, crickets and pines all around, and they sleep.
The third day's only two hundred miles of driving, but all of it runs through scenic byways and national parks. They go slower. Slowly. They don't pack the campsite up until nearly noon, staying long enough to cook a simple breakfast of sausage and ramen and frozen veggies; to eat it under the trees, in the silence of the forest. Afterward, they go down by the lake, standing in silence for a while, listening to the water.
They share the driving, winding through the Caribou, Bridger, Grand Teton national forests, and finally up into Yellowstone. The scenery shifts and changes around them. They drive with the windows down, winding through the road; pulling off the side often for pictures, and more often just to look, and breathe, and stand together at the edge of some scenic overlook, awed into silence by the enormity of the landscape.
There are lakes and rivers along the way, forests and mountains. There's a little log-cabin diner where they have pancakes with maple syrup at two in the afternoon, and buy a bundle of firewood for the night.
By the time they get to their campsite in Yellowstone, it's only four or five in the afternoon. Enough time to see Old Faithful; enough time to see the strangely apocalyptic geothermal plains, barren and pale, so hot that visitors must walk on platforms, utterly devoid of all but the most bizarre and microscopic life.
That night, their campsite is a little more crowded. There's a family of four to one side, a group of college kids on the other. The family's making s'mores after dinner, and they're invited over. They bring some extra firewood. One of the college students has a guitar. Alex drums on the bottom of an upended water bucket, and Sinclair turns out to be a surprisingly good singer. They make music late into the night, and then,
in the darkness and privacy of their tent,
they have to be very, very quiet, smothering their gasps and moans in kisses as they make love in their bedroll.
[Alex] On the fourth day, they're not out of their tent til noon. That's okay, though; they haven't far to go, and that's part of the point. Laze around. See things. Enjoy the road. Enjoy each other.
There's more ramen a la Alex for breakfast, and then Sinclair takes the first leg of the drive. They wind through eastern Yellowstone, and then leave the main highway cutting southeast, crossing the Rockies and riding the eastern face.
The roads they've chosen are by and large the proverbial lesser-traveled ones. They get a slice of the backcountry of the areas they journey through: the little towns and their single main streets, stoplights swinging from the line. The tiny slat-boarded houses along two-lane highways. The diners locals frequent, where jukeboxes are relics from an earlier time rather than fixtures put in expressly for atmosphere. The gas stations where the pumps haven't been changed since 1970.
Which isn't to say it's all Americana fairytale. Stopping for dinner at some greasy spoon just north of Shoshoni, some potbellied asshole with a wandering eye ambles over, puts his back to Alex, and wonders aloud how far down those piercings go on that mm-MM body of Sinclair's.
It's hard to say what shuts him up faster: the hair grab and the face-to-table smash from Alex
or the flat, feral way Sinclair stares at him, as though wondering what color his insides were.
They're hustled back on the road pretty quick after that. When they get to Riverton, they find nothing but little highways and mountain prairies, nothing but one little roadside motel rather wishfully named Heavenly Inn. They get a room in the back, away from what little traffic noise there is, and their room has a little balcony.
They're somewhere in the middle of Wyoming, far, far away from city lights. The stars overhead are innumerable.
The fifth day is a long drive down tiny country highways, skirting the eastern edge of the Rockies. Two lanes, one in each direction. Blacktop flanked by prairies, and sometimes by mountains; by farmhouses, by cattle and goats and horses grazing at the fence, watching them pass with idle eyes. They rejoin the 80 at Rawlins, and Alex takes the wheel while Sinclair grabs a nap. Twenty miles later he wakes her up, excited, baby, baby, look, it's your town! and she's groggy and confused, squinting at the roadsigns until she sees it:
Welcome to Sinclair, Wyoming
Elevation 6588 ft
Population 423
A little after that, they're back in the forests, climbing as the Rockies overtake them, raise them up on the mountain's shoulders. Higher and higher they go, winding up into Colorado. Their campsite is near a lake again, and even though it's June, even though it's summer, it's cold at night. They wrap each other up when they sleep. There's frost on the ground when they wake.
Then it's a descent out of the highest peaks, into the mile-high plateau of Denver, which as far as Alex is concerned is the last stop of human civilization until, like, St. Louis. And down further, out of the mountains and into the Great Plains, where the landscape flattens out; where the mountains become hills become grasslands all over again, and the road stretches limitlessly straight into the horizon.
It's their sixth and last full day of driving before Kansas. They take turns as they have; when they're not driving, they're stretched out, lazing about, snacking on chips and chocolate. They ran out of orange slices days ago, but then Alex buys some more at a gas station. They bicker over what tunes to play. Sometimes, on the long straight stretches, Sinclair reaches over and rubs, fondly, the back of Alex's neck. Sometimes he turns and smiles at her.
Afternoon nearing evening, and they're getting close to their stopping point for the night. Alex insisted on a motel for the night; something about needing his strength to Meet Her Parents tomorrow. They see a diner by the roadside, big windows foggy after years of use, a buzzing neon sign announcing Betty's Diner and Cafe overhead. There's a motel next door. This'll do, Sinclair announces.
It's overcast and humid when they step out of the Elantra. The engine is ticking under the hood, hot after two thousand meandering miles. There's a thunderstorm on the horizon. They look a little out of place here with their California tans and their California beach gear. At least, Alex does: flipflops on his feet, orange t-shirt proclaiming Surf Taco in white letters, cargo shorts baring his shins.
They're handed menus slightly sticky from countless nights and countless customers, shown to a table in the back. Alex sits beside Sinclair rather than across from her, looking over the diner, putting his feet up on the opposite bench. The menu's propped up in front of him. He looks at the offerings: sandwiches, burgers, platters. Meat and potatoes; not much green. None, really. He decides on a chicken fried steak, hash browns on the side. Lots of gravy. He sets the menu down, and he yawns, and then
rather randomly
he leans over and kisses Sinclair on the cheek.
"This has been kinda awesome," he says.
[Sinclair] A veteran of long road trips, Sinclair knows that with enough caffeine and loud enough music, she can make a forty-hour trip in about three days. Point A
to Point B. As fast as possible. But she's never been to Yellowstone either, and she loves Alex, so they'll go to Memphis and Nashville, too. She
even promises to be his countryspeak translator if they get accosted by the hill people.
It's really Alex who spends time on Google Maps. Sinclair comes over and helps a few times, but she's making lists about what they need to take and
what they can do without, and she's making a portable playpen for Tripoli out of a old, large metal toolbox she found at a garage sale. Thinking about a
week on the road just to get to the first real 'stop', he almost warily brings up taking the Elantra instead of the Camino,
and Sinclair doesn't mind. Nor does she tense up at his wariness, thinking he fears displeasing her, fears arousing her wrath. The thought, to be
honest, doesn't even cross her mind. Just yawns and pulls back the covers, crawls over closer to him when he pulls them back over their two bodies.
They both think about the last time they packed a car together, though neither of them bring it up. It's there, pangs of old ache, like a healed limb that
was once broken still aches when the pressure changes. Sinclair gives him a hug when he closes the trunk, wrapping her arms around his neck, his
arms going around her waist. She squeezes him and when they slide apart, she's smiling. All the stuff they don't need frequently is in the trunk, like the
tent and sleeping bag. She doesn't have many clothes, but she's taking quite a lot of them with her solely because they won't be stopping to do
laundry til they get to her parents' house. Tripoli's playpen goes behind the driver's seat. Not much behind the passenger seat, so whoever isn't
driving can recline and nap if they want to. So a pillow, and a light blanket. And a large box crammed full of snacks to grab along with energy drinks or
water from the cooler, too.
And music, of course. Sinclair seems excited to be able to just plug into the stereo in the Hyundai, and no wonder: she's been stuck with old mixed
cassette tapes forever now. She could update the stereo system in the El Camino; she doesn't want to, though. It wouldn't be the same! she
protests, despite being so very pleased about the amenities in Alex's car. Like the comfy leather seats. Like air conditioning, fancy that.
Come Thursday morning she's yawning when Alex manages to drag her out of bed, yawning in the shower, and she doesn't bother drying her hair. She
just puts it in two mindlessly done -- yet startlingly neat and tidy and tight -- braids, throws on some shorts and a t-shirt and some slip-on Vans, and
stumbles down the stairs with her backpack over her shoulder, sunglasses on, Tripoli peeking out through the partially-open zipper of her pack. Alex
bounds; Sinclair crawls into the passenger seat and curls up almost immediately, not even pretending that she's going to wake up and Start Her Day.
This wakefulness is just an interlude, and a happy one.
She lies in the reclined passenger seat even as they're pulling out of the driveway and smiles as Alex eees -- Tripoli yells EEE! from his mini
playpen in the back seat in response, thinking he's being talked to, clapping his metal hands eagerly. They're going on a trip. Wolf-girl and loud-
noisy-make-wolf-girl-happy-male-thing and triple-e all going on a trip. Eee.
She smiles, and she listens to Alex with a few mild comments of her own, fighting off yawns. But somewhere between the 8 and the 163 she's
unconscious, her legs tucked up and the seatbelt still holding her in even though no car crash could kill her. Sobering thought, that, when some part of
him wants to get the pillow and put it under her head, get the blanket so the A/C doesn't make her get cold.
Nothing in particular wakes her later except some internal clock hitting the right moment. She yawns and stretches and he's seen this often enough by
now to tell when she's Really For Reals waking up. Her whole body stretches, back arching a foot off the seat and arms raised, legs out and muscles
quivering for a moment before she exhales a satisfied, hearty sigh and goes almost limp with relaxation. Grabs her lever and hikes her seat back up,
grinning at him and grabbing her shades again.
She's grinning even while he's bitching about L.A., happily agreeing that L.A. sucks, L.A. is the worst thing ever, L.A. makes the rest of California worse
by association, oh yes. He mentions that being a good reason to move to Chicago, though, and she's a little quiet -- not upset, not excited. Just
thoughtful for a moment. She leans over and plants a huge smooch on his cheek, hugging one arm around his waist while he drives. "I love
snowboarding," she says, but who knows what winter will bring.
She's more than ready to take her turn at driving after the Chinese buffet, but Alex is still fine and still bursting with energy, so she lets Tripoli come up
front with her and holds him so he can see out the window. She rolls it down, holds tight to him, and the gaffling clings to the edge of the car,
EEEEEEing into the wind along the 15 until Sinclair starts to worry he'll get too excited and jump out. Not that he wouldn't be okay; he'd just disperse
and rematerialize, really. But he's her pet. Her friend. And frankly, the wind is starting to make him look like his head is spinning.
They stop at some desert gas station to refuel, and when she takes the wheel she's rolling up the windows to keep the A/C going, thinking Alex might
want to nap, but he laughs. So they crank the windows down, the music up, and Tripoli sings along, unperturbed by the wind -- though he does nestle
down in his playpen in back all the same.
Sinclair insists on playing 'Money' by Pink Floyd when they drive down into Vegas. Sinclair also insists on the most ridiculous posts in front of the
chapel: in one, she makes it look like she's hanging herself. In another, she gets Alex to get down on one knee, holding her hand, and she turns her
face way, covering her mouth with her fingertips, making doe eyes and lifting one foot daintily.
In the last photo, she wants to kiss him. While she's smiling.
She drives them past that little town of Caliente and makes some sidelong remark about the heat, about how driving with the windows down has her all
sweaty. And when they get into the motel room to strip off their clothes and take a shower she mentions that she likes the way he smells. Getting out of
the shower she's saying something about how it'll be nice to sleep in a bed on a road trip instead of the car, which is what she's used to,
and something about the way she crawls onto that bed
drives home in Alex's mind all the rest of those other hints, and he jumps her. It's something between the peals of her laughter and the way he swears
when he's close to coming and the way she moans her own pleasure that keeps the people in other rooms up, but no matter. They fall asleep in a
naked tangle on top of the covers, the room's air conditioning barely enough to keep the place cool anyway, especially after a fuck like that. Especially
next to Sinclair, her skin always so very warm, so easy to melt into.
On the salt flats, Sinclair takes the wheel when it's her turn and whips the Elantra into donuts, cackling the whole time while Tripoli finally panics and
disperses. It only makes her laugh harder when she realizes that. Come back, baby, I didn't mean it! she crows out the open window, though
there's no one to hear her, though she knows Tripoli will come back on his anyway, finding her unerringly, no matter how fast they drive. She's
chugging energy drinks today even when the movement of the car makes her want to zonk. She's enjoying herself too much to sleep the whole trip
away.
At In'N'Out she gets a vanilla milkshake. The cup sits empty in the holder below the stereo as they drive in the dark later on. Alex can tell she's getting
tired and they pull over so he can drive now, but she doesn't curl up and sleep. She drinks some caffeine and stays up with him, holding his hand, and
when she thinks she can't stay awake any other way, she turns on things like Raise Your Glass and On Mercury and sings along, even dancing in her
seat as ridiculously as possible to make him laugh. To help herself stay awake. To help Alex stay alert.
When they pitch that tent and roll out that sleeping bag, the caffeine's doing nothing anymore. Sinclair crawls naked into the bag with him and falls
asleep against his shoulder almost instantly.
Somewhere in the middle of the night she wakes alone, scenting the air. She slips carefully out of the bag and out of the tent, but Alex sleeps through
the zipper. Crouched naked, she shifts into lupus, shivering with the feeling of the body changing. She hasn't shifted in two or three days now. She
aches from it, shaking her head as though her thoughts are still too human, too clinging. She stretches into her new limbs and then bolts off, kicking dirt
up from her paws. Somehow she doesn't feel tired; she doesn't know why she woke, not until she catches the scent again.
It isn't some wyrm-thing, though. It's just some prey animal, small and rather defenseless. She stalks it, harries it down, destroys it in one bite when she
finally jolts forward and grabs it in her jaws. Tears it open and devours it as though that In'N'Out stop never happened, like she doesn't even know what
a milkshake is. Licks blood off the ground and picks meat off of thin, delicate bones.
Hunts something else; does it again. Finally feels not just full but sleepy from it, her belly sated with hot blood and her spirit soothed by the hunt. She
sits out in the darkness alone for awhile, watching Luna overhead, knowing that the light glints off of her ritualized piercings. She knows she is different,
stronger than other wolves, faster, wiser. Remembering this makes her remember what makes her so different; she is Garou. She is a Glass Walker.
She has a pack, and she feels their totem in the wind and can feel her packmates' minds touching her own, though distantly. But all of those thoughts
come as she finds herself already walking back, loping along towards the campsite again.
Because what does not take thought, what it is instinct, what is true whether girl or wolf or Garou, is that she has a mate. Who is sleeping alone in the
dark. She is going back to him before the memory of his name comes back to her.
Sinclair washes quickly, in lupus, in the lake itself, before returning to him. She shakes the water off and pads up to the tent again, unzipping it near-
silently, stepping inside
in her human form again, her hair damp. She slides back into the sleeping bag with him, though now for no reason her feet and hands are dirty, and as
she curls to his side again, smelling him in her nostrils, she murmurs: "Alex..."
and is asleep.
In the morning she claps her hands over her mouth and won't let him near her til she's brushed them with some bottled water. Nevermind that she did
this before going to bed, gargled with Listerine as well. She doesn't hide that she hunted at night. She doesn't seem hungry at breakfast though, even
though it's sausage ramen and veggies and he knows she likes it; she tells him about the night before. Tells it almost like a story, quietly, leaning
against him while he eats under the trees, while she shares his meal. Human again, she realizes that in all her running, she never went very far. That
she kept their campsite in earshot. She didn't even mean to; it was instinct.
They kiss. And down by the water they kiss again, and she stands in front of him, holding his arms around her, and she thinks that maybe they could
stay out here forever, though she would never suggest it. Though she knows neither of them would be happy like that. It's a passing thought, but one
that makes her happy.
Further on, he notices that Sinclair takes pictures of him, but not of scenery. Scenery she takes in memorizing silence. Pictures are for something Alex
is doing, or something Tripoli does, or pictures of the two of them that she can show her parents later. She drives with surprising... chill-ness, often
cocking one arm on the driver's-side door, leaned back, cruising and bobbing her head to Black Rebel Motorcycle Club or whathaveyou.
Yellowstone amazes her. She's incredulous when Old Faithful goes off, yelping in excitement -- along with several young children also watching. She's
fascinated by the geothermal plains, and says in Alex's ear she really really wants to stay and run across them in lupus, it'll be like a firewalk, but all told
that's probably not the best idea. So she doesn't do it. And that night she doesn't, either, because
they're invited to an impromptu cookout. Sinclair hangs back, wary of frightening the mortals and their children, but the children are put to bed early on
and Alex's presence seems to calm the humans' reaction to her somehow. She's mostly quiet, until that kid pulls out his guitar. She starts to sing.
Alex lives with her, knows her voice, knows it's excellent. She sings all the time, sings in the car, the shower, while cooking, while doing dishes, sings
while she surfs. She's got a lovely voice with great range, and when the guitar comes out and Alex starts to add a drum, she hears a song she knows
and starts a duet with the guitarist, who soon gives up singing with her.
The family and the college kids are impressed; they start making requests. She starts telling some story as the music is winding down, the guitarist
plucking keys idly while Sinclair tells them
about a wolf leaving its den in the middle of the night to hunt around a lake, about what the animal was thinking as it looked to the moon, and how when it
came to the water that was when she saw it, and it looked right back at her, like it was suddenly a part of her.
Alex recognizes the story. The others won't be able to retell it; they'll never capture that moment again in anything but memory, or be able to convey to
someone else how close to the wild they felt for a moment there in Yellowstone. Sinclair goes back to her campsite with Alex and when they're in their
tent she's saying that was ni-- when he grabs her, pulls her close, puts his hands on her face, kisses her
all the way down to their sleeping bag. When she comes her legs are wrapped around him, her mouth pressed open to his neck, hiding her moans in
his pulse.
Come morning they use camp showers to wash up, wearing flip-flops and carrying towels and toiletries back and forth. Cook breakfast around the fire and then return the site to as natural a state as they can get it. Sinclair tells him about camping with her parents as a child, but how that tapered off as she got older because, ironically, they thought it was affecting her behavior. It was, she says, but none of them could tell at the time that she was getting close to Changing and that spending more time in the wilderness probably would have hastened it despite her repression. It was always nice, though; maybe she can go camping with her parents again sometime, she says, and it makes her happy to consider it. It'd be nice for all of us to go camping, she says, smiling.
She's not smiling miles upon miles later, past endless stretches of roads and after being woken up from a nap so they could stop and eat, when that douchebag sidles over, too drunk and too stupid to know better, and opens his fat fucking mouth. Alex snaps like a rubber band from behind him, more hot-temperered and protective than even Sinclair expects. Mostly, she's uncomfortable at a human who isn't scared of her, or is so sloppy drunk he can stand to stare at her like that. Mostly, she's annoyed at his gall.
But his head is bouncing off the table when Alex finds that he no longer has a handful of the guy's hair. Sinclair grabbed the man's wrist, yanked him forward without getting out of her seat, threw him face-first on the ground, and the next thing anyone knew, she was pulling his arm up between his shoulderblades and had her knee in his spine, snarling in his ear something no one would have heard if the room hadn't gone so dead silent:
One more inch, between teeth that looked suddenly, vaguely sharp, and this arm will never be the same.
There was no wait for a reaction, no push to make the guy cry. She simply said those words, let him go, stood up, and walked out of the diner with Alex. The point isn't how badly hurt he is from what Alex did to him. The point isn't how humiliating what Sinclair did to him was. The point left in the man's thoughts is just how much worse it could have been. His mind, triggered suddenly by terror at the flare of rage, fills in the rest. Creatively.
In the car afterward Sinclair is pretty quiet. Quiet enough that Alex asks later if she's okay. "Yeah," she says, and it sounds reasonably true. "That was just really gross."
Then they make fun of the asshole for a mile or two. She never once tells him that he should have let her handle it. Never dismisses his reaction as bravado. Because the point also isn't that Sinclair is stronger than Alex is, that she doesn't need him to protect her or defend her honor. It never has been the point. The truth is, though Alex may not know this and may not realize it now and Sinclair may never find a way to tell him, she appreciates that there's one person in the world who treats her like, well
his girl. No matter how much more than that she is.
"Let's howl," she says at the Heavenly Inn, standing on the balcony. And howls, in homid, til Alex joins her.
They do bicker on the road a few times. Like when he wakes her up once for some reason or another and she bites his head off and they drive in sullen, angry silence for miles until one or the other bursts out with a torrent of words that mingle frustration and apology all muddled together. It isn't much of a fight, really. They butted heads at Yellowstone when she made some comment about ramen for breakfast and he ruffled, but that wasn't much of an explosion, either; they were both still afterglowing somewhat from the night before, and as soon as she realized how he'd taken it she was crushed, asking him not to be mad, and she looked so worried it actually made him laugh, and they got over it.
When he wakes her up because they're in Wyoming and he just saw a town with her name, she doesn't bite his head off. She is, however, very confused, and then Alex pulls over and they take a picture by the sign, Sinclair faking a shocked face in front of it. She's asleep in the car again in a matter of seconds, though. It probably didn't help that she wore pajama pants in the car that day.
She's yawning constantly in Colorado from the elevation. "What the hell," she keeps saying, the air thin and dry, even by the lake. "What the hell, man." He comments that she's been to Colorado before, though, for snowboarding with her parents during that visit before they broke up. She breezes this off with a claim that when you're having fun you don't notice that you can't breathe. Silly Alex, you'd think with his big Harvard brain he'd know that.
Tripoli, who came back some time ago but got bored by the trip and spends most of his time in the umbra, agrees with a muttered eeeee.
They talked a long time ago about not driving into Wichita in the middle of the night. Alex wants to be fresh and well-rested. Sinclair doesn't want her parents to stay up all night waiting. She called them before they left San Diego to tell them they were heading out and they'd be there in about a week, has texted them a few times here and there, sent that pic of the Sinclair, Wyoming sign, but it means something completely different to them: that's their family name, not their daughter's name.
So they're reaching their stopping point and she's on the phone with them again, letting them know they're actually pulling into a hotel right now, we'll see you tomorrow, love you too. Bye.
She's smiling at him after that, pleased. And, to be honest, excited about him Meeting Her Parents. "They can't wait," she tells him. "They're marinating some steaks for tomorrow night." The mention of which makes the fare at Betty's seem far less enticing, but as hungry as they are by then, just about anything will suffice.
Out of the car, she stretches broadly, cracking her neck, rolling her shoulders. She's in shorts again, shorts and a tank top and some beaded hemp bracelet on her wrist. The tank top bares her upper arms and all their modifications; the viper on her thigh is only partly obscured by the hem of her shorts, which don't go down as far as Alex's. Her hair is up in two braids, Sinclair's basic roadtrip hairstyle. The blue has long since faded. She smiles at the stormy sky, glancing up at the dark clouds as though sharing an in-joke with them.
Alex has to remind her to put on some shoes before they go inside, which makes her laugh and clamber back in the car to search the floorboards for her flipflops. She's hopping into them, holding onto his arm for balance as they head inside.
And sit together. And go over the menu, and end up ordering the same thing. Only Sinclair wants mashed potatoes, easy on the gravy. They tell their waitress, and their menus flop down, and suddenly she's getting a peck on her cheek, and she's laughing gently at what he says. "I kinda noticed," she tells him, amused. Kisses his cheek back.
"That thing you said about needing your strength," she mentions a little bit later. "You're not, like, seriously worried about meeting them, are you? Nervous or whatever?"
[Sinclair] [ARGH]
[Sinclair] A veteran of long road trips, Sinclair knows that with enough caffeine and loud enough music, she can make a forty-hour trip in about three days. Point A to Point B. As fast as possible. But she's never been to Yellowstone either, and she loves Alex, so they'll go to Memphis and Nashville, too. She even promises to be his countryspeak translator if they get accosted by the hill people.
It's really Alex who spends time on Google Maps. Sinclair comes over and helps a few times, but she's making lists about what they need to take and what they can do without, and she's making a portable playpen for Tripoli out of a old, large metal toolbox she found at a garage sale. Thinking about a week on the road just to get to the first real 'stop', he almost warily brings up taking the Elantra instead of the Camino,
and Sinclair doesn't mind. Nor does she tense up at his wariness, thinking he fears displeasing her, fears arousing her wrath. The thought, to be honest, doesn't even cross her mind. Just yawns and pulls back the covers, crawls over closer to him when he pulls them back over their two bodies.
They both think about the last time they packed a car together, though neither of them bring it up. It's there, pangs of old ache, like a healed limb that was once broken still aches when the pressure changes. Sinclair gives him a hug when he closes the trunk, wrapping her arms around his neck, his arms going around her waist. She squeezes him and when they slide apart, she's smiling. All the stuff they don't need frequently is in the trunk, like the tent and sleeping bag. She doesn't have many clothes, but she's taking quite a lot of them with her solely because they won't be stopping to do laundry til they get to her parents' house. Tripoli's playpen goes behind the driver's seat. Not much behind the passenger seat, so whoever isn't driving can recline and nap if they want to. So a pillow, and a light blanket. And a large box crammed full of snacks to grab along with energy drinks or water from the cooler, too.
And music, of course. Sinclair seems excited to be able to just plug into the stereo in the Hyundai, and no wonder: she's been stuck with old mixed cassette tapes forever now. She could update the stereo system in the El Camino; she doesn't want to, though. It wouldn't be the same! she protests, despite being so very pleased about the amenities in Alex's car. Like the comfy leather seats. Like air conditioning, fancy that.
Come Thursday morning she's yawning when Alex manages to drag her out of bed, yawning in the shower, and she doesn't bother drying her hair. She just puts it in two mindlessly done -- yet startlingly neat and tidy and tight -- braids, throws on some shorts and a t-shirt and some slip-on Vans, and stumbles down the stairs with her backpack over her shoulder, sunglasses on, Tripoli peeking out through the partially-open zipper of her pack. Alex bounds; Sinclair crawls into the passenger seat and curls up almost immediately, not even pretending that she's going to wake up and Start Her Day. This wakefulness is just an interlude, and a happy one.
She lies in the reclined passenger seat even as they're pulling out of the driveway and smiles as Alex eees -- Tripoli yells EEE! from his mini playpen in the back seat in response, thinking he's being talked to, clapping his metal hands eagerly. They're going on a trip. Wolf-girl and loud-noisy-make-wolf-girl-happy-male-thing and triple-e all going on a trip. Eee.
She smiles, and she listens to Alex with a few mild comments of her own, fighting off yawns. But somewhere between the 8 and the 163 she's unconscious, her legs tucked up and the seatbelt still holding her in even though no car crash could kill her. Sobering thought, that, when some part of him wants to get the pillow and put it under her head, get the blanket so the A/C doesn't make her get cold.
Nothing in particular wakes her later except some internal clock hitting the right moment. She yawns and stretches and he's seen this often enough by now to tell when she's Really For Reals waking up. Her whole body stretches, back arching a foot off the seat and arms raised, legs out and muscles quivering for a moment before she exhales a satisfied, hearty sigh and goes almost limp with relaxation. Grabs her lever and hikes her seat back up, grinning at him and grabbing her shades again.
She's grinning even while he's bitching about L.A., happily agreeing that L.A. sucks, L.A. is the worst thing ever, L.A. makes the rest of California worse by association, oh yes. He mentions that being a good reason to move to Chicago, though, and she's a little quiet -- not upset, not excited. Just thoughtful for a moment. She leans over and plants a huge smooch on his cheek, hugging one arm around his waist while he drives. "I love snowboarding," she says, but who knows what winter will bring.
She's more than ready to take her turn at driving after the Chinese buffet, but Alex is still fine and still bursting with energy, so she lets Tripoli come up front with her and holds him so he can see out the window. She rolls it down, holds tight to him, and the gaffling clings to the edge of the car, EEEEEEing into the wind along the 15 until Sinclair starts to worry he'll get too excited and jump out. Not that he wouldn't be okay; he'd just disperse and rematerialize, really. But he's her pet. Her friend. And frankly, the wind is starting to make him look like his head is spinning.
They stop at some desert gas station to refuel, and when she takes the wheel she's rolling up the windows to keep the A/C going, thinking Alex might want to nap, but he laughs. So they crank the windows down, the music up, and Tripoli sings along, unperturbed by the wind -- though he does nestle down in his playpen in back all the same.
Sinclair insists on playing 'Money' by Pink Floyd when they drive down into Vegas. Sinclair also insists on the most ridiculous posts in front of the chapel: in one, she makes it look like she's hanging herself. In another, she gets Alex to get down on one knee, holding her hand, and she turns her face way, covering her mouth with her fingertips, making doe eyes and lifting one foot daintily.
In the last photo, she wants to kiss him. While she's smiling.
She drives them past that little town of Caliente and makes some sidelong remark about the heat, about how driving with the windows down has her all sweaty. And when they get into the motel room to strip off their clothes and take a shower she mentions that she likes the way he smells. Getting out of the shower she's saying something about how it'll be nice to sleep in a bed on a road trip instead of the car, which is what she's used to,
and something about the way she crawls onto that bed
drives home in Alex's mind all the rest of those other hints, and he jumps her. It's something between the peals of her laughter and the way he swears when he's close to coming and the way she moans her own pleasure that keeps the people in other rooms up, but no matter. They fall asleep in a naked tangle on top of the covers, the room's air conditioning barely enough to keep the place cool anyway, especially after a fuck like that. Especially next to Sinclair, her skin always so very warm, so easy to melt into.
On the salt flats, Sinclair takes the wheel when it's her turn and whips the Elantra into donuts, cackling the whole time while Tripoli finally panics and disperses. It only makes her laugh harder when she realizes that. Come back, baby, I didn't mean it! she crows out the open window, though there's no one to hear her, though she knows Tripoli will come back on his anyway, finding her unerringly, no matter how fast they drive. She's chugging energy drinks today even when the movement of the car makes her want to zonk. She's enjoying herself too much to sleep the whole trip away.
At In'N'Out she gets a vanilla milkshake. The cup sits empty in the holder below the stereo as they drive in the dark later on. Alex can tell she's getting tired and they pull over so he can drive now, but she doesn't curl up and sleep. She drinks some caffeine and stays up with him, holding his hand, and when she thinks she can't stay awake any other way, she turns on things like Raise Your Glass and On Mercury and sings along, even dancing in her seat as ridiculously as possible to make him laugh. To help herself stay awake. To help Alex stay alert.
When they pitch that tent and roll out that sleeping bag, the caffeine's doing nothing anymore. Sinclair crawls naked into the bag with him and falls asleep against his shoulder almost instantly.
Somewhere in the middle of the night she wakes alone, scenting the air. She slips carefully out of the bag and out of the tent, but Alex sleeps through the zipper. Crouched naked, she shifts into lupus, shivering with the feeling of the body changing. She hasn't shifted in two or three days now. She aches from it, shaking her head as though her thoughts are still too human, too clinging. She stretches into her new limbs and then bolts off, kicking dirt up from her paws. Somehow she doesn't feel tired; she doesn't know why she woke, not until she catches the scent again.
It isn't some wyrm-thing, though. It's just some prey animal, small and rather defenseless. She stalks it, harries it down, destroys it in one bite when she finally jolts forward and grabs it in her jaws. Tears it open and devours it as though that In'N'Out stop never happened, like she doesn't even know what a milkshake is. Licks blood off the ground and picks meat off of thin, delicate bones.
Hunts something else; does it again. Finally feels not just full but sleepy from it, her belly sated with hot blood and her spirit soothed by the hunt. She sits out in the darkness alone for awhile, watching Luna overhead, knowing that the light glints off of her ritualized piercings. She knows she is different, stronger than other wolves, faster, wiser. Remembering this makes her remember what makes her so different; she is Garou. She is a Glass Walker. She has a pack, and she feels their totem in the wind and can feel her packmates' minds touching her own, though distantly. But all of those thoughts come as she finds herself already walking back, loping along towards the campsite again.
Because what does not take thought, what it is instinct, what is true whether girl or wolf or Garou, is that she has a mate. Who is sleeping alone in the dark. She is going back to him before the memory of his name comes back to her.
Sinclair washes quickly, in lupus, in the lake itself, before returning to him. She shakes the water off and pads up to the tent again, unzipping it near-silently, stepping inside
in her human form again, her hair damp. She slides back into the sleeping bag with him, though now for no reason her feet and hands are dirty, and as she curls to his side again, smelling him in her nostrils, she murmurs: "Alex..."
and is asleep.
In the morning she claps her hands over her mouth and won't let him near her til she's brushed them with some bottled water. Nevermind that she did this before going to bed, gargled with Listerine as well. She doesn't hide that she hunted at night. She doesn't seem hungry at breakfast though, even though it's sausage ramen and veggies and he knows she likes it; she tells him about the night before. Tells it almost like a story, quietly, leaning against him while he eats under the trees, while she shares his meal. Human again, she realizes that in all her running, she never went very far. That she kept their campsite in earshot. She didn't even mean to; it was instinct.
They kiss. And down by the water they kiss again, and she stands in front of him, holding his arms around her, and she thinks that maybe they could stay out here forever, though she would never suggest it. Though she knows neither of them would be happy like that. It's a passing thought, but one that makes her happy.
Further on, he notices that Sinclair takes pictures of him, but not of scenery. Scenery she takes in memorizing silence. Pictures are for something Alex is doing, or something Tripoli does, or pictures of the two of them that she can show her parents later. She drives with surprising... chill-ness, often cocking one arm on the driver's-side door, leaned back, cruising and bobbing her head to Black Rebel Motorcycle Club or whathaveyou.
Yellowstone amazes her. She's incredulous when Old Faithful goes off, yelping in excitement -- along with several young children also watching. She's fascinated by the geothermal plains, and says in Alex's ear she really really wants to stay and run across them in lupus, it'll be like a firewalk, but all told that's probably not the best idea. So she doesn't do it. And that night she doesn't, either, because
they're invited to an impromptu cookout. Sinclair hangs back, wary of frightening the mortals and their children, but the children are put to bed early on and Alex's presence seems to calm the humans' reaction to her somehow. She's mostly quiet, until that kid pulls out his guitar. She starts to sing. Alex lives with her, knows her voice, knows it's excellent. She sings all the time, sings in the car, the shower, while cooking, while doing dishes, sings while she surfs. She's got a lovely voice with great range, and when the guitar comes out and Alex starts to add a drum, she hears a song she knows and starts a duet with the guitarist, who soon gives up singing with her.
The family and the college kids are impressed; they start making requests. She starts telling some story as the music is winding down, the guitarist plucking keys idly while Sinclair tells them
about a wolf leaving its den in the middle of the night to hunt around a lake, about what the animal was thinking as it looked to the moon, and how when it came to the water that was when she saw it, and it looked right back at her, like it was suddenly a part of her.
Alex recognizes the story. The others won't be able to retell it; they'll never capture that moment again in anything but memory, or be able to convey to someone else how close to the wild they felt for a moment there in Yellowstone. Sinclair goes back to her campsite with Alex and when they're in their tent she's saying that was ni-- when he grabs her, pulls her close, puts his hands on her face, kisses her
all the way down to their sleeping bag. When she comes her legs are wrapped around him, her mouth pressed open to his neck, hiding her moans in his pulse.
Come morning they use camp showers to wash up, wearing flip-flops and carrying towels and toiletries back and forth. Cook breakfast around the fire and then return the site to as natural a state as they can get it. Sinclair tells him about camping with her parents as a child, but how that tapered off as she got older because, ironically, they thought it was affecting her behavior. It was, she says, but none of them could tell at the time that she was getting close to Changing and that spending more time in the wilderness probably would have hastened it despite her repression. It was always nice, though; maybe she can go camping with her parents again sometime, she says, and it makes her happy to consider it. It'd be nice for all of us to go camping, she says, smiling.
She's not smiling miles upon miles later, past endless stretches of roads and after being woken up from a nap so they could stop and eat, when that douchebag sidles over, too drunk and too stupid to know better, and opens his fat fucking mouth. Alex snaps like a rubber band from behind him, more hot-temperered and protective than even Sinclair expects. Mostly, she's uncomfortable at a human who isn't scared of her, or is so sloppy drunk he can stand to stare at her like that. Mostly, she's annoyed at his gall.
But his head is bouncing off the table when Alex finds that he no longer has a handful of the guy's hair. Sinclair grabbed the man's wrist, yanked him forward without getting out of her seat, threw him face-first on the ground, and the next thing anyone knew, she was pulling his arm up between his shoulderblades and had her knee in his spine, snarling in his ear something no one would have heard if the room hadn't gone so dead silent:
One more inch, between teeth that looked suddenly, vaguely sharp, and this arm will never be the same.
There was no wait for a reaction, no push to make the guy cry. She simply said those words, let him go, stood up, and walked out of the diner with Alex. The point isn't how badly hurt he is from what Alex did to him. The point isn't how humiliating what Sinclair did to him was. The point left in the man's thoughts is just how much worse it could have been. His mind, triggered suddenly by terror at the flare of rage, fills in the rest. Creatively.
In the car afterward Sinclair is pretty quiet. Quiet enough that Alex asks later if she's okay. "Yeah," she says, and it sounds reasonably true. "That was just really gross."
Then they make fun of the asshole for a mile or two. She never once tells him that he should have let her handle it. Never dismisses his reaction as bravado. Because the point also isn't that Sinclair is stronger than Alex is, that she doesn't need him to protect her or defend her honor. It never has been the point. The truth is, though Alex may not know this and may not realize it now and Sinclair may never find a way to tell him, she appreciates that there's one person in the world who treats her like, well
his girl. No matter how much more than that she is.
"Let's howl," she says at the Heavenly Inn, standing on the balcony. And howls, in homid, til Alex joins her.
They do bicker on the road a few times. Like when he wakes her up once for some reason or another and she bites his head off and they drive in sullen, angry silence for miles until one or the other bursts out with a torrent of words that mingle frustration and apology all muddled together. It isn't much of a fight, really. They butted heads at Yellowstone when she made some comment about ramen for breakfast and he ruffled, but that wasn't much of an explosion, either; they were both still afterglowing somewhat from the night before, and as soon as she realized how he'd taken it she was crushed, asking him not to be mad, and she looked so worried it actually made him laugh, and they got over it.
When he wakes her up because they're in Wyoming and he just saw a town with her name, she doesn't bite his head off. She is, however, very confused, and then Alex pulls over and they take a picture by the sign, Sinclair faking a shocked face in front of it. She's asleep in the car again in a matter of seconds, though. It probably didn't help that she wore pajama pants in the car that day.
She's yawning constantly in Colorado from the elevation. "What the hell," she keeps saying, the air thin and dry, even by the lake. "What the hell, man." He comments that she's been to Colorado before, though, for snowboarding with her parents during that visit before they broke up. She breezes this off with a claim that when you're having fun you don't notice that you can't breathe. Silly Alex, you'd think with his big Harvard brain he'd know that.
Tripoli, who came back some time ago but got bored by the trip and spends most of his time in the umbra, agrees with a muttered eeeee.
They talked a long time ago about not driving into Wichita in the middle of the night. Alex wants to be fresh and well-rested. Sinclair doesn't want her parents to stay up all night waiting. She called them before they left San Diego to tell them they were heading out and they'd be there in about a week, has texted them a few times here and there, sent that pic of the Sinclair, Wyoming sign, but it means something completely different to them: that's their family name, not their daughter's name.
So they're reaching their stopping point and she's on the phone with them again, letting them know they're actually pulling into a hotel right now, we'll see you tomorrow, love you too. Bye.
She's smiling at him after that, pleased. And, to be honest, excited about him Meeting Her Parents. "They can't wait," she tells him. "They're marinating some steaks for tomorrow night." The mention of which makes the fare at Betty's seem far less enticing, but as hungry as they are by then, just about anything will suffice.
Out of the car, she stretches broadly, cracking her neck, rolling her shoulders. She's in shorts again, shorts and a tank top and some beaded hemp bracelet on her wrist. The tank top bares her upper arms and all their modifications; the viper on her thigh is only partly obscured by the hem of her shorts, which don't go down as far as Alex's. Her hair is up in two braids, Sinclair's basic roadtrip hairstyle. The blue has long since faded. She smiles at the stormy sky, glancing up at the dark clouds as though sharing an in-joke with them.
Alex has to remind her to put on some shoes before they go inside, which makes her laugh and clamber back in the car to search the floorboards for her flipflops. She's hopping into them, holding onto his arm for balance as they head inside.
And sit together. And go over the menu, and end up ordering the same thing. Only Sinclair wants mashed potatoes, easy on the gravy. They tell their waitress, and their menus flop down, and suddenly she's getting a peck on her cheek, and she's laughing gently at what he says. "I kinda noticed," she tells him, amused. Kisses his cheek back.
"That thing you said about needing your strength," she mentions a little bit later. "You're not, like, seriously worried about meeting them, are you? Nervous or whatever?"
[Alex] "I am a little," Alex admits. "They are your parents."
The waitress comes by. They hand their oft-used menus back in and Alex stretches out, opening his arms along the back of the padded diner booth. His hands curl into fists. He flexes for a moment, stretching out joints and muscles stiffened by a day -- six days -- of driving. The landscape outside the windows is foreign to him. Sunset across vast, vast plains: shadows stretching for what seems like miles. The grasslands reminds him a little of the mountains flanking the central valley, only there are no mountains. Just flatness, here to the horizon. And the clouds piled above are mindboggling huge, enormous supercells stacked miles and miles high.
After a while, he looks away from the window, at Sinclair. They're next to each other, so he has to turn to do this: shifts in his seat a little, tilts his body toward her. His coke arrives, along with whatever drink she might have ordered. He takes a slurp.
"I've never done this before either. I mean, 'met the parents', y'know? Especially since... I dunno, I'm under the impression that this is kinda the part where we tell them this is for real."
He likes that phrase: this is for real. It seems to sum up everything he wants to say without those annoying sissy little words like we love each other! and we wanna get mawwied! and ... all that. It's at once less sentimental, more visceral. For real. Present, material, tangible permanence. Reality.
"I'm not sure," he adds, "if I should tell your father my intentions are honorable and then ask formally for your hand, or what." A pause. "Maybe I should have packed a tie."
[Sinclair] Somehow that pleases her. She smiles, a mixture of amusement and warmth in the curve of her mouth, and watching him stretch, thinks of how nice it will be to sleep and wake up and not drive for a day. Not drive anywhere. Walk, maybe. Or just stay in. Truth be told, she doesn't feel it as much as he does. Not because she slept so much; because of what she is. Even the ache and soreness when he took her virginity didn't last very long.
She almost wants to warn him that it's only going to get flatter as they get into Kansas, but after Wyoming, he hopefully will be used to it by the time they hit her old neighborhood, which is just acres of emptiness dotted with houses and parks where trees have been planted to break up the monotony. He thought California skies were big. In Kansas it seems like the world is nothing but sky, and they're just on a disk floating through it.
That's what she's thinking of, though, while he's looking out the window, too. But when Alex turns back around he expands his earlier answer, she's still smiling, and it only fades a little when he says the words this is for real. Not from displeasure, but from the seriousness of it. It doesn't make her smile goofily, because it's true what he's saying. She understands, too, why he couches how he feels and what this is in that phrasing because the rest feels sissy to him. Truth be told, 'this is for real' has no viscerality to her, not instinctively, and less because she can sense some of the avoidance of sentimentality in him that always used to make her think... well.
Not that he wasn't for real. That he didn't love her. As simple as that.
Her head tips to the side a bit as he goes on, mentions her father, intentions, formality, maybe a tie. She thinks for a moment and then shrugs. As much as she gets now how Alex's brain works and how, sometimes, she just has to be patient, she doesn't really know how this works, either. "I think... if I were human, then that'd be kinda what he'd expect. Or something. Not like spruce up and request the honor of my hand or whatever, but he'd probably want to be talked to." A pause. "But I'm not. And I think we're all still sort of figuring this out. I mean, I only changed four years ago. And I spent three of those years refusing to go anywhere near them."
[Alex] He forgets that, truth be told. It's not like Alexander spends all that much time with his parents himself, but -- it seems like he's kept in closer touch with his family, at least. He calls them, emails them. Talks to his brother all the time, through one medium or another. It's hard for him to remember that once, Sinclair didn't see her parents -- refused to -- for three years. That those years ended not so very long ago.
"Have you visited them?" he asks. "After the last time, I mean." There's a small pause; long enough for a sip of coke. Long enough for him to consider whether or not he wants to say this, and decide he does. "I guess I'm also just a bit nervous because ... well.
"Last time you visited them, you mentioned they wanted to meet me. And I was cool with that. But then we broke up. And it's not even like I expect your dad to punch me when he sees me or your mom to marinate my steak with ... rancid milk or something. It's mostly that I almost feel like I should have some sort of explanation. Or proof that shit like that won't happen again. Or that they can trust me with you.
"Even though you're twenty-three years old," he adds, the corner of his mouth curling just a little, "and you can do what you want."
[Sinclair] The fact that Sinclair as a person is so young never escapes Alex's mind. The fact that she's so young as a Garou though, that does. Few even know it; she doesn't talk often about how she thought she was human for almost five times as long as she's been Warcry, Galliard of the Nation, now-Fostern, near-Adren. It was a Big Deal when she decided to go visit her parents. It's a Big Deal that she's bringing someone else from the Nation home to them, at only twenty-three, when her dad used to say she wasn't allowed to date til she was twenty-five and he was only half joking about that.
"Yeah, back at Christmas," she answers, "I went and visited them and some of my cousins. That's when Will --" the cousin whose attack led her to moving back to San Diego to begin with, "-- and his family found out I was Garou. That they're Kin, albeit distantly. My aunt is doing pretty well, all told, considering she doesn't have a blood relation."
Alex goes on, and tells her he's a little nervous. And he explains why. And Sinclair aches inside; the memory twists at her, and the fact that it's the source of some of his nerves does, too. She puts her hand on his leg under the overhang of the table, and keeps it there, neither massaging nor patting. Just keeping in contact.
"My dad wouldn't do that," she says after a little bit, her voice slow. "He's... this calm, softspoken sort of person, at heart. He stomps around and glowers and snarls at his students and stares them down if they show up to class late, but seriously, I can count on one hand the number of times he raised his voice at me. And all those times, frankly, I probaby deserved to get bounced off a wall."
She nestles a little closer to him on the bench. "My mom, yeah, okay, you might have to watch out for her. She takes absolutely no shit and -- I forgot to tell you this, but she doesn't tolerate swearing. I think cuz you're a guest you'll get a polite warning before she tells you that you're excused." A beat. "But if she starts telling you to donate to the swear jar, I think that means you're in and she considers you a long-term fixture."
Sinclair doesn't say 'family'. But that might, in fact, be what it means.
"When I saw them at Christmas they didn't ask about you," she goes on, a little quieter. "I think even when I told them we'd broken up they... could tell I wasn't really okay. But they left it alone. They seemed kinda... wary, I guess, when I told them that we'd gotten back together when I moved out here. I know they don't want me to get hurt like that again." She furrows her brow slightly, thinking, then shakes her head, meeting his eyes. "Honestly? I wouldn't bring it up, or try to explain anything. Or prove anything. They don't know you at all. I think they're kinda nervous about that, too. And the best thing to do is for all of you to just chill out and get to know each other.
"They're actually very patient people, baby," Sinclair tells him after a moment, her voice softening with tenderness for both her parents and him. "And nobody has to win anybody over in a weekend." Her hand squeezes his leg a bit. "It's not like it's the only time you'll ever spend with them."
She smiles.
[Alex] Oddly, or perhaps not so oddly, it's the last part that reassures him most. That this won't be the only weekend, ever. That there's a good chance, an excellent one really, that he'll be considered a long-term fixture. He is a long-term fixture.
This is for real.
His hand drops below the table as well, covers hers. His thigh is a solid slab of muscle. The same could be said of all of him, really: solid, compacted, a veritable ball of muscle bounding from one high-energy state to another. One wonders if, when he learned about high-energy electrons and the sort in freshman physics, he felt a certain kinship.
"I'll cut down on the f-bombs," he promises, "but other than that, I'll just try to be myself."
Their conversation breaks for a moment. A place like this, the service is quick -- not because they're snappy about it, really, but because they're so used to making these things that things go quick. Plus, in all likelihood, they've got breaded chicken-fried steaks ready to drop in the deep fryer and vats of premade gravy waiting in the back. Sinclair's plate looks like a heart attack on ceramic, but Alex's, if it's possible, looks worse. Even his potatoes are deep-fried. He grabs a ketchup bottle and dumps ketchup on the taters, then picks up a fork.
"What do your folks do, anyway? I don't think I ever asked. Your dad's a teacher?"
[Sinclair] "Yeah," she says, when he mentions f-bombs, "cuz those cost a whole dollar."
Even she grins at that, picking up her Dr. Pepper and taking a sip through the straw. She stays close to him, keeps her hand on his leg, until the waitress comes back and sets their plates down, giving Alex a twangy pardon mah reach when she leans over to put Sinclair's plate in front of her. Sinclair sits right up, eagerly eyeing her potatoes. She isn't going to spend much time reassuring him. In the end, Alex's acceptance is enough: they don't have to rush anything. He doesn't have to be a different person or explain or prove himself.
And she knows Alex well enough by now that she knows how easy it is for him to see every moment of his life as a demand to prove himself. For all she knows, maybe it helps that these people he's going to meet aren't veteran kinfolk, they're separated by large gaps from most of the Nation and all the angst and pressure that goes with it. For all she knows, maybe they'll all be such good friends she'll be the one who feels left out.
Sinclair brushes that thought aside; it's there, and it's real, but right now, she can't think of a good reason to dwell on something like that.
"Oh," she says, cutting into her CFS. "My dad's a professor of mechanical engineering at Wichita State. He's been there since forever. I think they're grooming him to chair the department," she tells Alex, not without pride. "And my mom is an illustrator. She does a lot of children's books but she's worked with people who make textiles and stuff, too. I think after she had me she didn't work for awhile, but ...sometime when I was a kid I remembered her getting back into it and turning the extra room into her studio, and since then she's had pretty steady work."
She lifts a bite towards her mouth. "So yes, they are basically awesome."
[Alex] "Heh," Alex says, stuffing his mouth with a bite of hash browns before he even starts sawing at his CFS, "maybe we can bond over physics."
He might only be half-kidding about that. His mouth is even fuller than before a moment later -- a chunk of chicken fried steak has joined the hash browns. "Why do they call this steak," he wonders aloud, "when it's basically deep fried hamburger patty? And," slurping coke, attacking his meal with the same enthusiasm and gusto he'd attack, well, another human being, "do your parents know what I do for a living?"
And if they do, "Are they like... okay with it?"
[Sinclair] "Well, he's a big reader, too," she says, apparently lest her daddy get pigeonholed. "Though I think mostly he's into current events and politics and stuff. He doesn't get rabid, though; one of his best friends is this journalism professor, and they'll sit and debate shit forever, but the funny part is that they both take both sides, switching whenever it seems like they're about to agree. It's maddening."
She eats while he talks, realizing she's hungrier than she thought. She eats this food so much differently than she eats something she's hunted; it's relished, but there's something almost mechanical about it, as though not killing her own meat drains much of the flavor, much of the color. Alex, never seeing her after a successful hunt, has no way of knowing the difference: Sinclair eats heartily, like she always does.
"Mm," she hums affirmatively, to both questions. "They asked that last summer when I went home and told them about you, along with about ten thousand other questions. They asked your name and how old you were and what your family was like and if you were kin, too, and they asked what you do and where you go to school. So I said Alex, twenty-eight, because you were twenty-eight then, and I said I didn't know much about your parents but you had a twin brother who was like me only obviously older and higher ranked, and yes that meant you were kin, too. Thennn I told them that you do a bunch of freelance writing but you, ah, box for fun and profit. And went to Harvard."
She stuffs a bite of mashed potatoes in her mouth. "They asked a lot of other stuff, too, mostly about us."
Sinclair isn't looking at him for a little while there, only partly because she's eating. She finishes chewing though, and then looks over at him, a faint sadness in her eyes. "It's kinda tough thinking about it," she says, and looks at her plate again. "Cuz when I came back from that visit and told you that you should come with me next time, the next morning you said something about maybe spending Thanksgiving at my parents' place, and... we weren't still together then. We weren't even still together for the eclipse. And I still can't think about all that without wanting to cry."
She blinks a few times, and reaches for her DP. "It just... all went badly so quickly. And we were so happy. Sometimes it still just makes me sad."
[Alex] It makes Alex grin a little, crookedly and just a little smug, when she says she mentioned his alma mater. Mentioned he does freelance writing -- which he did, then, though these days he spends more time with his team and less on the laptop -- and mentioned that he boxed for fun and profit. "Guess that sounds less shocking than 'my boyfriend's into MMA and beats the shit out of people to pay the rent'," he quips,
but then he realizes she's a little sad, thinking about all that; thinking about the plans they made and didn't make good on, thinking about the eclipse they were going to see. Total eclipse of the sun, in Easter Island. It would've been really special, and they were going to share it, but then... it all went badly so quickly.
He throws his arm around her rather suddenly, giving her a squeeze -- all but squishing her against his solid side. "It's okay," he says. He can't kiss her, so he rubs his cheekbone against the top of her head instead, gently. "We're okay now. We don't need to dwell on the past, but ... we don't need to be afraid of it either, all right?"
[Sinclair] Last June, when Sinclair went to visit her parents, the questions they asked about Alex were really all just building up to the ones about he and Sinclair. It's possible that she and he are more concerned about what they think of his profession or his school or painting his life in a good light than her parents could be; they know he doesn't have to Provide For their daughter, not really. New kin they are, but they know this much: even without Changing, they're pretty sure they wouldn't have to worry too much about Heather getting knocked around by some guy with a temper. Not that they understand entirely just how strong she is, not yet; they just know how they raised her. They know she wouldn't put up with someone like that.
But they do know how young she is. They know how she's been since she was a baby, since before she was born. They know what helps calm her down and what riles her up. They know when to avoid riling her up and when to tell her to Sit. Down. They aren't perfect parents, but they're nice. They're normal. They love her, and she received all their love for all her life.
Alex glomps her, put frankly, and squeezes her. Her brow wrinkles a bit, and she tips her head away so that when she nods halfheartedily it doesn't headbutt him. "I know that," she says, enough effort in her tone to indicate that she doesn't want to sound impatient. "Bringing up that I'm sad isn't dwelling on it," she goes on, twisting her fork between her fingertips. "It's better than sitting and pretending it doesn't still hurt to remember."
She's quiet a moment, and he can hear how much she tried not to sound defensive, to snap, to let any emotion -- any at all -- blow out into full-form frustration. And then fury. "Maybe you could just let me know that yeah, it is sad. You don't have to... rush to get it off the table so I don't go into some doomspiral of sadness, either," Sinclair adds quietly. "I know we're okay now." She looks over at him. "Okay? It might just take me a minute to shake it."
All that -- all her effort not to erupt into uncontrollable emotions, all her restraint, all her burgeoning maturity, her request for a more patient response, for reciprocity, all of that -- is punctuated gently by Sinclair leaning against him, laying her head on his shoulder for a moment. "At least until the food coma sets in."
[Alexander] What Sinclair asks for, really, is patience. And Alex, of all people, doesn't exactly excel at this. She knows this: the way he bounds out of bed in the mornings, goes about his business, does this now and that then and it's all so regimented, so prompt. Even when he plays the Xbox he has no patience for delay. She's seen him yelling at fellow players for taking too damn long, for not figuring out a puzzle quick enough, for being such nubs, god. She's seen him literally jump in his seat in frustration when his teammates fail to follow him into the breach quick enough and leave his avatar facedown in a pool of blood.
She knows this too, though. He tries, with her. He tries, these days. A work in progress: that's what he calls himself, and them. Their relationship. She asks for a little time and he --
well. He lays his head against hers for a moment, then reaches with his fork to nab a bit of her mashed potatoes, nudging his own hashbrowns toward her in the process.
"Okay," he says quietly. "I can do that."
[Sinclair] They've had fights to that effect in the past. Blowouts that flared up and then quickly burned out when they realized how close they were going to come to disintegrating if they didn't rein themselves in. She's snapped at him before to just let her be ______, for fuck's sake, and usually these near-snarls have had tears coming hot on their heels. And the more time she spends trying not to dissolve into a doomspiral, the easier it gets for him not to panic that any emotion is going to lead them to the bitter end all over again.
Remembering something sad doesn't have to mean losing herself in it. And he doesn't have to rush to make her forget, doesn't have to pull her out of some imaginary fire. They can relax.
Which is, if one is honest, not the easiest thing for either of them to do under even a modicum of stress.
She sits close to him in the diner and smiles when he offers her food, taking a bite of his hash browns and then shaking her head. Tells him this is how she can tell he's not from the 'real' south or the midwest, because doesn't he know it's a sin to eat anything but mashed taters with chicken fried steak? He can hear her twang coming back and teases her gently about it, calls her a farm girl and she corrects him that she's never set foot on a farm, and he smiles and says, instead,
my country girl,
affecting a bit of his own twanging drawl. The way her cheeks faintly color at that makes him grin, because this is the one triumph over her that she never minds, that is more shared warmth than victory and defeat: Alex can make her blush in a heartbeat, turn her smile shy and happy and sweet with just the way he looks at her, or the way he calls her
baby
when he leans over and murmurs it in her ear, nuzzling against her jawline.
They're both worn out from a week of driving, drowsy from full bellies, when they pay their waitress and leave her a generous tip. They've had waitstaff who ignore their table whenever it isn't strictly necessary to pay attention, waiters and hostesses who scoot far, far from Sinclair as soon as she's seated. It's nice not to have to ask to get their drinks refilled, though; Betty or Betsy or Bessy or whatever her name is seems too stuck in the routine of her job to even notice that Sinclair's presence makes one's skin crawl up and run away.
They hold hands when they leave the booth, and stopping by the car just to grab those essentials-bags they have, walk across to the motel and get their room key, go upstairs, down the open walkway, into the thin door of the thin-walled room. Sinclair sets Tripoli's toolbox -- which is currently empty, the gaffling off somewhere playing with fire spirits or the like -- in the corner near the A/C unit, then grabs a dial and cranks it up a bit to chill the room off. It isn't that late, but they already discussed at dinner taking a semi-early night so they're both fully rested and relaxed tomorrow.
As she's stepping out of her shoes and about to tug off her shirt, her phone goes off. She pulls it out, lighting up the screen and cocking a small half-smile at the message. "Mom," she informs him, "wants to know if there's anything in particular you like to eat or drink that she should have around the house, cuz she's going to the store in the morning."
[Alexander] It's a dingy little inn -- not a motel 6 but some local establishment, though more or less of the same ilk. Worn carpet. Drab brown curtains. Bars of soap so harsh it'll pretty much scour the top layer or two of skin right off. Horrendous coffee in little pouches; a single armchair under an old lamp. Questionably clean comforters -- but clean sheets, at least. A soft bed. Privacy and warm and shelter from the dark; all they really need, in the end.
Truth be told, Alex likes these little motels. He likes them the way he likes his shoebox apartments. They make him feel holed up, secure, a little like an animal in a burrow peering out at the winter snow. Not that he knows all that much about winter snow -- or, for that matter, animals in burrows.
He's sitting in the armchair, though, peeling his shoes and socks off while Sinclair checks her message from mom. He grins when she informs him who it is -- "Your folks text you? They really are Walkers," and then wider when she informs him of the message.
"Aw," he says, laughing, "Midwestern hospitality. Is Kansas considered the Midwest? It is, right? 'Cause it's not like... South or anything. Anyway," and he tosses his worn socks into his laundry bag, because Alex is, in fact, rather neat. Even his gym bag is carefully packed to maximize utility -- pants rolled up at one end, shirts folded into little squares on the other. Underwear and socks in the middle. A separate bag for dirty clothes. "Tell your mom anything's cool. Steak sounds awesome. I guess if she really wants to get something for us, apple juice would be good. Maybe we can help make mashed potatoes or something."
[Sinclair] "Pfft," Sinclair says, when he equates texting with Walkerdom. "They just live in the twenty-first century," as though most people who are nearing sixty have no trouble using text messages. Nevermind that website, whenparentstext or whatever it is. Her parents aren't morons.
She swypes out something and then sets the phone down on one of the nightstands flanking the queen size bed - larger than what they have at home by a bit, though truth be told they won't take up much more space than they ever do - and goes back to undressing.
Her shorts drop to the ground, and her Doors t-shirt, and in short order she's reaching back to unhook her light-blue bra and slide it off her arms, looking over at Alex. "Did you want to shower first or just get in bed and fuck my brains out?"
[Alexander] Alex's eyes get a little lazy watching Sinclair strip down. In the lamplight her body is rather lovely, all told: toned and lean and tanned with summer. Plus six days of driving, camping, picture-taking, the occasional hike. She suggests shower, or bed; he slants a glance toward said bed, then back to her.
"Sheets are all clean and we're all groddy," he reasons. "And it doesn't make sense to get clean just to get messy again. So."
On that note, he peels his own shirt off. Tosses it aside, and then plants his feet and arches his hips to get his shorts off too; his boxers with them. Sinclair's Silver Fang packmate would have a conniption. That armchair! The surface! GERMS! The grin turns crooked, and he beckons her with both hands like the cocky prizefighter he is.
"Come and get some, baby."
[Sinclair] The attraction has always been there on a purely physical level. Sinclair's always loved his hard, fit body. He's always noticed those tits of hers, the sleek extension of a bare leg. But her inexperience shows in little, subtle ways: she doesn't undress thinking of him watching her, of how he might react to the hemline of her shirt lifting up and baring her back, exposing her flat stomach. She undresses with nothing more than the thought of getting naked, to get in the shower or get in bed, forgetting briefly that, well
she's sexy.
When she asks him if he just wants to fuck her brains out, she's not really kidding, either. She isn't thinking much about the act yet, though. Thinking about staying at her family's house the next few nights, of having one last night alone, of their last chance to be noisy. It's almost practical, mechanical, Walkerish.
She glances over at him, cocking a brow at his reasoning, standing there in a pair of little pink panties and nothing else, her bra and shorts and shirt and everything else on the ground. She watches him take off his shirt, and that's when the light in her eyes changes. Sinclair forgets sometimes that Alex wants her body, too -- he saw her naked plenty of times before he ever seemed to want her, and first impressions may indeed linger long past their usefulness -- but she's always wanted his.
If she thinks about it, the first time she wanted to press herself against him and bite his shoulder and grind herself to orgasm
was the first time she saw him.
She walks over to him when he's stripped himself naked, cocky grin as always. He's not really a master of seduction, and she wouldn't feel as safe or herself with him if he were, but Alex has never needed to seduce Sinclair. She's coming closer even before he's beckoned her, eyes a little more feral, and
without quite understanding that she's sexy, that she can be sexy, that Alex might find her anywhere near as alluring as she finds him,
puts her knee on the seat cushion by his thigh and puts her hands on his shoulders, lowering herself down on his lap, panties and all. Watches him as she does so, palms running over his chest and arms thoughtlessly,
innocent in a way. And not understanding -- any more than she understands that she really is a fine piece of ass -- how unnerving that innocence can be.
[Alexander] Alexander is no master of seduction. In fact, he doesn't even think he's a master of seduction, but even so he thinks he's about ten times better than he is. All of which goes to say: he's lucky she likes him, lucky she likes his arrogance -- lucky she knows his arrogance is playful when it's directed at her -- because any other woman might be tempted to slap that smirk off his face right about now.
She doesn't. She comes toward him, and she's innocent and feral at once, the light in her eyes unabashedly wanting, and vulnerable because of it. She sinks down on his lap. His arms fold around her, loosely, comfortably, and he smiles up at her.
"Now how," and in truth, there's a tenderness in his teasing, a gentleness that underlies the superficial banter, "am I supposed to fuck your brains out if you don't take your panties off?"
She doesn't really get a chance to answer. He straightens up, wrapping his hot hard arms around her body, pressing his chest to hers as he kisses her mouth.
[Sinclair] On some level Sinclair knows that Alex is, well... a prick. He can be such an asshole. That he hasn't got a very good history of respecting or being kind to anyone he's taken to bed. But that line of thought usually begins with him saying that he didn't want to sleep with her because he couldn't think of a single woman he'd gotten out of bed with still respecting,
and it ends with her thinking that every time he makes her dissolve into those helpless little noises she makes when she comes, he only seems happier. He wakes up and smiles at her, or grins, and he doesn't treat her like shit.
And on some other level, Sinclair realizes that not being treated like shit should not be some kind of height to reach for. That she deserves more. That, in fact, Alex gives her more, and does so because she's damn well worth it. But that's so hard to remember sometimes. Hard to tell someone like Alex, who is still so driven by his own insecurities -- and in a very different way than she is. Hard to tell someone like Alex, who probably could still understand better than anyone how hard it can be to forget the things that pang at you.
The truth is: he's lucky she likes him, and his arrogance, and he's lucky she understands him even a little, but Sinclair never remembers that. She thinks she's the lucky one, because he picked her. Because he's nice to her. Because he doesn't expect her to be so many things that she simply can't be.
Feral yet innocent, wanting but vulnerable, she comes to him and gets as close to him as she can. He teases her about her panties and she would blush if it was really lack of foresight that led to her leaving her underwear on; it wasn't.
Sinclair leans in to kiss him before Alex straightens up, wrapping one hand around the back of his neck to hold him there as their mouths meet, as she opens her lips and tastes him. Her other hand runs down his arm to his wrist, gently removes his hand from her back and puts it on her hip, tucking his thumb under the waistband of her panties.
"I like it when you undress me," she whispers, letting her lips leave his for a moment, for these few breathed words, before she presses to him again.
[Alexander] Some of that cockiness, that smirking arrogance, bleeds away into intensity as Sinclair draws his hands around and down. What's left behind is franker. More honest. Naked want; raw desire. Affection.
Love.
His thumb hooks easily, instinctively into her waistband. He draws a slow breath between their mouths, and then seals that kiss again, slow.
"Mmm," he murmurs into it. "I like it too." And he smiles, and it's not his cocky smirk; it's different, it's hers alone. He kisses her again, again, more fervently now, his hands smoothing down her sides, nudging her panties down until they can go no further. That's when he puts his hands on her hips; raises her up on her knees, and then to her feet.
"Get up, baby," he whispers. "Let me take these down."
[Sinclair] A small sound escapes Sinclair's throat when he kisses her that second time. His palms slide over her ass, warm and searching, the elastic on her panties hugging his wrists and then riding down her skin, catching around her thighs. The sensation of it, so very close to naked yet not quite there yet, makes her move close to him, shivering a little with want. When he lifts her hips up he can feel the resistance, the way she starts to move back down on him as though he's already inside of her, she's already riding him.
So another small noise, there, a more plaintive one, when he eases her off his lap and to her feet. It doesn't last, and she has enough of her senses after a flicker of aroused bewilderment to stand up, and step back. For a moment it looks like Sinclair just going to whip them off and step out of them, jump on him again, but then something changes. She smiles at him, and steps close between his knees, waiting for him to take them down her legs.
Which he does, tugging that scrap of soft pink down past one vicious tattoo, baring a more poetic one on her hip. She steps out of them, the fabric stroking that last cuff of ink around her ankle that recalls a few nights here and there in Brazil. Her hands are on his shoulders, in his hair, though they both know she doesn't need to use him for balance. Truth be told, Sinclair doesn't need to use Alex for anything, doesn't need to lean on him, doesn't need him to take care of her.
But oh, how good it makes her feel when he does. When she can relax, and find him holding her.
Over on the table her phone chimes quietly again, maybe some other text, but they both ignore it. Her hair is still in two braids, several loose strands hanging around her face. Sinclair comes back to his lap, knees to either side of him, and kisses him. It's slow, and deep, pushing his head back slightly, though not from sudden force.
Her hands roam across his body -- and though she doesn't say it this time, she's said it before, told him how seeing him, how touching him, makes her all but start panting with desire, how much she loves feeling his hard, well-kept body against her own. That kiss goes on longer than any other so far, less rushed or hushed or needful than many they've shared on this trip, while Sinclair lets her touch stray down his ridged abdominal muscles, lets her hand find his cock, lets her fingers trace its length a few times before she pulls their bodies closer and rubs herself against him. Slick, hot wetness slides across his cock, but what Sinclair moans against his jawline when their mouths do slide apart is a strained, wanting:
god, you're so hard.
[Alexander] Something of Sinclair's inexperience shows in her uncertainty when he moves her away from him. Something of that deepseated, painfully vulnerable -- and so unexpected -- self-loathing of hers perhaps also begins to nudge to the surface, but it never gets there. She steps close to him, and smiles, and lets him take down that last pink scrap of clothing for her.
He bends to draw it down to the floor. Bare, they're both toned, lean people; neither of them particularly tall, both of them almost unstoppably athletic. His bare feet frame hers, bonier and larger; his shins are on either side of hers, the long bones there strengthened by years of training and scarring; used as much as weapons as his fists and forearms, his forehead, his elbows and knees. They come together and she slides back onto his lap and as she rubs on him he gasps into her mouth; she mutters about his hard body, his hard cock, and he laughs low and pleased, as though flattered by this
frankly true
assessment she gives. He wraps his arms around her, then. He kisses under her jawline. He nips at her neck, and then rests his cheek for a moment, just a moment, against her shoulder. Comfortable and warm - a little respite, a moment of rest
before he's raising his head to kiss her again, more ferociously now. His hand comes around, tangles briefly with hers; then he takes himself in hand and urges her up on her knees a little, up enough to nudge the head of his cock against her pussy, slap it gently there, find her slit and press into her. "That's it," he whispers, meaningless; rather gentle and boundlessly adoring tonight, "there's my sweet little girl."
[Sinclair] They've had achingly slow sex before. Playful, sweaty sex. Athletic, almost competitive sex, Alex seeing how fast he can bring her off or how long he can build it up, Sinclair learning this way to move to make him grab onto her or the sheets and bellow. She doesn't tease him often, and this, too, is only her inexperience
and the fact that she's young, and horny, and an animal:
she never really thinks of herself as the wanted, longed-for party in this. Teasing Alex, turning herself into an object of lust, even being subtle about her own desire, never enters her mind. She sees him. She wants him. She lets him know, and if he wants to, they have sex. He sees her, he wants her, and whether he's playful or cocksure or whatever else, he always finds her willing. Eager. But there's still something askew in her mind, as much as she is beginning to understand it, and as much as she works at it now: it's easy for Sinclair to fall into thinking that she's lucky somehow when Alex wants to fuck her. As though luck had anything to do with it.
That uncertainty was not so much insecurity though, but a moment of restraint. Restraint is, for her, difficult enough; telling herself he's not going to vanish, he isn't going to change his mind, she doesn't have to jump on him and hold onto him before he realizes he doesn't actually want her. So she smiled instead, let him draw her panties down,
relaxed
and came back to him, slower after that. Not because she needs to go slow. Not because that makes it more poignant or more meaningful; because -- though Sinclair herself might not realize it -- she can seduce him.
Touching each other, nestled together on that ratty old armchair, they share a moment. Just a moment, Alex laying against her shoulder and Sinclair nuzzling against his brow, his temple, smelling his hair. Her mouth is soft and her lips are parted when he raises his head to kiss her again, and he can feel her breath coil warm and gentle across his lips before their mouths meet again. Her hand just strokes him, slow and easy and -- truth be told -- practiced. Familiar with his cock, finding the sensitive spots that make it jump, that make him groan. She doesn't give him feathery, hesitant touches anymore. She knows him know. She knows what he likes.
So that's what she does. Kissing him, jerking him off between her own legs, rubbing him on her pussy til he's wet and hot with her own arousal. Til his hand joins hers, a mutter and a touch urging her up. She gasps from his mouth, looking down at his hand, looking at it wrapped around his cock. She moans softly, her brow furrowed as though in deep concentration, and then he presses against her slit and her eyes close. A loud groan leaves her throat as her head tips back, her hips rolling down to start sinking her onto him,
inch by inch.
Lowering her head, Sinclair looks at his eyes, hands on his shoulders, working herself gradually onto him. It's so different from the way it used to be; her slowness isn't necessity, isn't the threat of pain. She goes slow to feel him, nice and hard, and to let him feel her.
[Alexander] Not so much time has passed, really, since the first time they went up to a hotel room together and stripped bare and laid each other out. It was summer -- summer in Brazil, anyway -- sun casting through the windows, a warm beach breeze stirring the curtains. The hotel was five-star, a palace built in the lap of luxury.
This hotel barely warrants a single star. It's not even really a hotel. It's a motel, and it's literally a world away from Copacabana Palace. What's between them, now, may as well be a world away from that first giddy fuck, too. She's not so inexperienced now. He's not so wary; he's not so -- well. Uncommitted.
The painful truth is Alex's behavior probably contributed as much to Sinclair's uncertainty as anything else. He found her by the pool, sunning herself in a ridiculously hot little bikini; he took her upstairs to his room, he took her virginity, and when she came back a week later they fucked again in gardens that felt as old and wild as eden. And then, when they were done,
he admitted -- without even seeming to realize this would bother her at all -- that he'd slept with other women in that one week they were apart. He seemed bewildered -- terrified -- when she was upset. When she was so upset she ran.
Small wonder it took her so long to even begin to believe he was, as he puts it, for real. Small wonder she thought for so long that maybe she was just a novel experience for him. A sweet little piece of tail, nothing more or less. And the truth is, maybe she was, at first. But even when things changed, it was so, so hard for her to see it. Believe it.
Things change. What's between them changed. How they make love changes, too. He's grown up a little; so has she. It's not that he's made a woman of her or anything ridiculous as that, but
she knows what he likes now. And perhaps more importantly, she knows what she likes. She straddles him and touches him and when she takes him inside her she has the patience and the confidence to go slowly. To not grasp and chase after pleasure like maybe, maybe if she didn't it would just slip away from her and he'd come to his senses and realize and --
she holds onto his shoulders and works him into her in slow, gradual rocks. He holds onto her hips as her head tips back; he's leaning back into the armchair, breathing slow and deep, his eyes moving over her body and down to where they're joined; up to her eyes as she rides him. When she's taken him completely into her, he tips his head back as well. He sighs out a breath, and then -- eyes closed, blindly -- he seeks out her mouth, kisses her slowly, endlessly, while his hands urge her to move. Quicker, now.
[Sinclair] She was so nervous in Rio de Janeiro. He didn't know her, didn't see -- any more than Sinclair did at the time -- that wound in her that the Change had left behind. Maybe she did sense even then that he was just having fun, was waiting from the start for him to hurt her somehow. Even when he was holding her face and kissing her like he was drinking her in, even when he brought her hand to touch him, to feel how fucking hard he was then, some part of her was whispering that maybe it wasn't a pity fuck, but he couldn't be that into her. He'd never wanted her before then, actively seemed to resist even friendship with her, and she couldn't think of anything that might have changed. She was so nervous, so ready to have the rug pulled out from under her,
so when he told her in the gardens -- because she asked, let's remember that -- that she didn't mean nearly as much to him as he did to her, she was hurt. Being ready to be hurt didn't make it easier. Knowing beforehand that it was a whim for him didn't make it less painful. If anything, all it did was make her angry at herself. Angry at herself for being trusting, for being hopeful, for golden and elusive traits that life teaches us to call flaws, to name as stupidity, naivete, and blindness.
Months later, after hurt turned into a new relationship and that relationship started to get closer and more tender and that tenderness kept falling down because the scaffolding it was built on was never strong enough, the one thing Sinclair could never quite kick herself for was giving herself completely. Even if that isn't what she was getting back at the start. Even if that gift didn't seem very much wanted. Even if such wholeheartedness seemed to discomfit him. She never told herself that it was wrong or stupid of her to have given all.
It's who she is.
Just as, to some degree, it's who Alex is to talk about being for real more than he talks about being in love with you. To tense slightly, even if its only internally, at the feeling of being captive -- to the point that he can't let himself be captivated. Or just doesn't. To buck anything that might be a yoke.
Sinclair doesn't doubt anymore that Alex loves her. His adoration comes softly, silently, sometimes so much so that if she doesn't catch a certain look in his eyes she might miss it when it's there. He gives her a tight squeeze, a hard kiss, something physical and forceful and intense, he laughs and he bounds around and jumps into bed with her
but it's when he's looking at her and watching her body, or tipping his head back to feel her on him, sighing, seeking some melting kiss instead, that he never says a word about how he feels about her. It's there, shy as a phantom, and she's afraid that if she calls to it, tries to touch it, it will run from her. Even if Alex doesn't. It isn't his affection or his delight with her or his lust or his love or his presence that she's afraid of losing.
She just doesn't want to spook him away from showing it. From being thought soft, or sentimental, or sappy, or silly -- or feeling that way himself when, in the end, he doesn't have to worry about that any more than Sinclair needs to worry about overwhelming him with the simple and wholehearted fact that
she loves him.
So: they kiss, making love with sweat still dried on their skin from the diner's overworked air conditioning. They've been kissing so long she can't taste anything in his mouth but him. Sinclair, who loves to be covered and fucked firmly and heatedly so very much, who turns her head to the side on her pillow and lets out soft moans as he holds himself up over her, who is never happier than she is when he wraps his arms around her,
rides him like this was her idea, and he's hers, and she knows exactly how much pleasure she's giving him. Knows how much he likes it when she moves her hips in a circle like that, grinds down on him. Kisses him like she's with him, wherever he is. Puts her hands on his where they hold her hips and draws one up to her breast, nudges his thumb across her hardened, steel-pierced nipple.
"Oh, yeah," she breathes out against his lips when she feels it, shuddering on his cock. Riding a little faster now, just so that when she slows down again,
he'll moan.
[Alexander] Shy isn't quite a word that comes to mind when one thinks of Alexander Vaughn, and yet there's truth to it. It's in the odd, almost evasive little turns of phrase he uses. He's for real. They have something good. He thinks she's tops. She's his girl. These, instead of more definite, traditional phrases: love, relationship, adore, mate. He's not the sort to look soulfully into her eyes and tell her how he feels about her. He's never taken her on a romantic dinner date; never brought her roses or chocolates or any of the things you're Supposed To Do.
But he lights up when he comes home from his morning run and finds her awake. The first time he sees her on any given day or night, his whole face changes. When she comes home from a trip, or a hunt, he -- without ever quite fussing, or even going far out of the ordinary -- stays a little closer to her. Hangs out, and chills, and does his thing ... but remains just a little bit nearer than he usually would.
And sometimes for no good reason he'll toss down his Xbox controller or his drumsticks and come over to where she's tappitytapping out her latest report on GWNet and glomp her. Sometimes he comes home in the evenings and in with the rest of the groceries -- a bizarre mix of ultrahealthy beach-state-gym-rat fare and utterly unhealthy, sodium-laden ramen-type food -- along with all that'll be something she likes, that she's never had to tell him she likes. Sometimes he goes a long ways out of his way to pick up those frozen peanut butter cup things Kate used to stash in the back of her fridge. Sometimes, for no better reason than he'll come over to glomp her, he'll come home with a cupcake or two, stick a candle in it, hand it to her and tell her
Happy awesome day!
or
Happy pwnage day!
or
Happy you're-hot day!
When they make love, he kisses her like he can't get enough of her. He sucks on her tits and catches that sexy little ring between his teeth and moans against her body and sometimes it drives him out of his mind; she can tell because sometimes he just can't seem to take it anymore and flips her on her back and pounds her, or
sometimes he'll pour himself all over her like he's trying to kiss every part of her at once, groaning and putting his hands all over her when he inevitably fails, or
sometimes he'll chase her all over their shoebox apartment, knocking over drum kits and sending Tripoli's toys skittering all over the floor, corner her and catch her and glomp her into bed and eat her pussy out for what feels like hours, and
he almost never says it; almost never comes out and says I love you or I'm in love with you or you mean the world to me, but she doesn't doubt it anymore. It's in the language of his actions, and the look in his eyes.
Like the look in his eyes right now, when she goes a little faster. His head tips back and he presses his shoulderblades against the armchair, braces his feet, starts bucking under her to match her rhythm, fuck her back. When she moves a certain way, his head thumps back against the armchair and he laughs out a gasp, only to raise his head and kiss her again, harder.
When she slows down, he moans like she knew he would. His head hits the armchair again, and he tells her to go a little faster, baby, work that sweet little pussy on him; ride him until she comes.
"I wanna watch you come," he says, barely more than a breath, but continuous: a low, running commentary about what she's doing, what he wants, whatever flashes through his mind. It's like where most people need to think to talk, Alex is the opposite: he needs to think to shut up, and when he's past a certain point, when she trips him into a certain state, it's like the half-formed impulses are in his brain simply start short circuiting out his mouth. "Yeah, baby, that's it, I wanna see you come on that hard cock. I wanna see your pretty little tits bouncing while you come.
"Fuck, yeah, that's it, faster, yes, wonder if I'm gonna make your legs shake this time, are you gonna blow my fuckin mind? Are you? Fuck, you dirty little -- oh. Come here. Oh, fuck, come here and kiss me while you ride me. C'mere and make me come."
[Sinclair] There have been other men -- even other kinsmen. The way Detective John mooned over the memory of a couple of barely-legal girls sometimes made Sinclair wish she'd managed to hand him over to the Wyrm, but he's the type to give himself entirely to whatever he was feeling at the time. She could understand that, at least. And Derek -- another cop, which makes her wonder what the hell a bit -- stared at her the way he did, made transparent double entendres, and she always had that feeling that if he had been a Walker and she'd given him the time of day, he would have
taken her on a romantic dinner date. Somewhere nice, where she'd stick out like a sore thumb, where she'd want to dress up and resent dressing up at the same time. Somewhere that the waitstaff would treat her like crap no matter how polite she was, just because they weren't used to anything like her, just because they were scared. He'd bring her something overblown like a Single Red Rose, or even worse, a single pink one, and then explain The Language of Flowers to her and how this symbolizes da da da da da. She could see him being the sort to give her chocolates on Valentine's Day. In a heart-shaped box and all.
Sinclair's insecurities have nothing to do with her body, with her face. She looks in the mirror and she knows she's pretty. She was a goddamn cheerleader, and a good one, a fit one. There were boys who, starting in about sixth grade, paid attention to her and followed her around. Middle school boys who seemed shy as hell til that first kiss and then starved, ravenous, crazed and thrilled that boobs. I'm touching real boobs. Oh my god. High school boys, who had learned to be aloof, to be cocky,
and who, by then, had heard about the girl who bit Donny Schmidt when they were making out last year. That girl who got into a physical fight with another girl at Cheer Eclipse over the summer.
And a couple of Bad Boys, who heard about her and were intrigued more than unnerved, who weren't very nice to her but at least they'd show some kind of interest, who hated her later on because as badass as they were, as tough as they could be, as athletic, she seemed... stronger. And she scared them sometimes, and they couldn't explain why.
There was that boy she fell asleep next to at a party when she was 17, who told all of his friends -- who told their girlfriends and sisters, who told their brothers and boyfriends, until everyone knew -- that she'd had some kind of freaky nightmare and nearly broke his arm when he woke her up to tell her to be quiet, and
I swear to god her eyes turned red.
Men at college who didn't know any rumors about this girl. She was athletic and gorgeous and had her own car and was fun to hang out with, but damned if she didn't always look tired. Damned if she didn't always seem angry. Damned if she didn't seem like she didn't know what to do with her hands if they took her on a Real Date, or where to look, or why she was there.
There have been other men. Who have tried to make her a girl you take to romantic dinners, or who have made her a pariah. Who tried to get to know her when she didn't know herself. That Sinclair has any idea what she wants from a relationship at all is a product of effort on her part, patience on Alex's. Sometimes it seems she just knows she wants something and is coming up with anything that might be an answer, anything he can do or she can do that will soothe these strange aches of hers.
A lot of times she just wants what she had the other night: to come back to some makeshift den, her feet dirty and her hair damp and blood in her stomach, and wrap her naked body around her mate's naked body. Keep him warm. Feel him breathing. Hear his heart thudding in his chest, low and faraway like distant thunder, some primitive proof of faith.
But she didn't know that until the other night.
Alex makes her laugh. Low, and breathy, and truth be told that doesn't happen when they're fucking very often -- Alex laughs. Alex chuckles, happy, overcome, however he laughs. Sinclair often is too overwhelmed, too lost, and isn't thinking terms of happy or sad, amused or dejected. Her whole body is on fire and she's just trying to survive. But she laughs now, when he moans and when he tells her to go faster again, ride him, he wants to see her.
She pushes him back a little, but he's already pressed into the chair, and she grinds down on his cock a little harder, watching sparks go off in his eyes. Comets.
happy I read a comet article day! it was once. And she said: you know, the comets was the last team I was on at cheer eclipse. senior co-ed level five.
Which led to a Youtube search. Which led to some more recent competition videos. Which led to Sinclair bursting out at about three minutes in: oh what the fuck! that was SO not legal, you can't flip right over people like that!
And a couple of days ago at a rest stop with a rather nice little park to one side, they stopped and laid out on a blanket to be outside of the car for awhile, and Sinclair did several back handsprings, a backflip, and laid herself out in a split. Arms up, bright and shining smile, until he clapped and whistled.
"I know you do, baby," she murmurs to him, giving him a little bounce, still holding his hand on her breast so he can feel that soft slap of skin against his palm as she moves. "I know you want me to go fast but I'm just gonna go nice... and slow..." she purrs, working herself harder on him, no faster, "til you can't stand it anymore."
She does kiss him, though. Wraps her arms around his neck and kisses him, moaning into his mouth. Holding back that plaintive note that threatens to creep in, just as he can feel her restraining herself from riding him into a frenzy. Her mouth gasps away from his. "Oh, that's it, baby," she tells him, pressed to his chest now, holding onto the chair behind him as she moves herself up his cock, down again. "Fuck that little pussy. Show me you want it."
[Alexander] The truth is, as close as they've become and as close as they're becoming, so much of Sinclair's life is still a mystery to Alex.
He's only beginning to understand that once upon a time she was a teenaged girl like any other teenaged girl, and she was young and curious about boys and wanted to date, wanted to fool around, wanted to make out and Explore Each Other's Bodies and all the other things teenagers want to do; and like any other teenaged girl, was desperately afraid of rejection. Of being left out. Of being the freak, the weirdo, the creep that no one liked.
He doesn't know about Donnie. He doesn't know about the middle school boys or the high school boys, or the rumors, or the way the other kids avoided her. He doesn't know just how many people before him were afraid of her,
though he does remember being afraid of her himself. The difference, one supposes, is that he was just too stubborn to heed his fear. So he pushed through it instead.
And found her.
Show me you want it, she says, and a sudden flare burns through his eyes -- a comet, a shooting star. His hands come up to her face, and into her hair; he cups her mouth to his and kisses her hard, wraps his arms around her, holds her tight against his chest.
"I want it," he mutters in her ear. He arches off the chair; lifts his hips and starts fucking her back in long, hard thrusts; letting her set the pace but meeting her stroke for stroke. "Oh, fuck, I want it."
He doesn't know about John Thornton either, or Thornton's barely-legal girls. He doesn't know about Derek; he doesn't know about these guys that would, in all likelihood, want to wine and dine a woman, even a woman who was really an animal under the skin; who would want to take someone like Sinclair and treat her to a nice dinner, pink roses, love and devotion, all that shit. And in the end, the cause and effect of all that romance, all the useless little gestures,
is really fear of the beast. Is really just an attempt to take a Garou and make of her a girl. A harmless, cute, sweet little girl.
Sinclair's not. She can be sweet; she can be so caring. They have such fun together sometimes, and they're so tender together sometimes. But she's an animal, through and through -- you can see it now; just look in her eyes, look at the way she moves, the way the thoughts move behind her eyes. She likes the way he smells. She hunts in the darkness, tears things to pieces, stays close to her mate sleeping in the dark. She is not harmless. She is not a little girl, and
he doesn't treat her like that. He doesn't treat her like he wants her to be one.
So. They started fucking on armchair. Then she says show me and he all but snarls at her, as though he's an animal himself, and the truth is:
he is, at least in part. The same blood in her is also in him. They're bound by a tribe, as thinblooded as that tribe is; they're the survivors, the hard-shelled, the sleek things unchanged in their ever-changingness, their ever-adaptability, for a thousand millennia or more. They're quick and strong and tenacious, and they'll survive even when the lawyers are dead. Their stamina seems bottomless, and he raises his hips off the chair and he fucks her, returns her stroke for stroke, and when even that isn't enough
he gets up, staggering a little under their twisting, shifting weight -- kisses her blindly in the center of the room and then drops her on the bed, crawls over her.
They start on the armchair; they end in the bed: grasping at the bedspread by the handfuls, forgetting that the walls are thin and the comforter questionably clean; forgetting where they are and what happens tomorrow; forgetting all but that they're together, joined together, coming together, coming.
Their neighbor bangs on the wall a few times. Or maybe more than a few times, but Alex only notices the last couple. And Alex, for once, doesn't have the strength or the presence of mind to holler something rude back. He just makes a vague, incoherent noise -- half moan, half laugh, half grumble -- and bites Sinclair's shoulder gently.
oh my god, he says. oh my fucking god.
And -- brow to her shoulder, face buried against her skin, still buried inside her -- he starts to laugh. Low, happy, warm. Raising his head after a while and kissing her, laughter diminishing to a smile; kissing that smile into her mouth as though to pass that warmth, that joy, into her.
[Sinclair] If much of Sinclair's life -- who she used to be, where she comes from, how she got this way -- is a mystery to Alex, he might be shocked to find out how little she knows in return. So many Galliards, not knowing him at all, would have started by asking him (essentially) for his whole timeline, looking for his story in his history. Sinclair might tell him what she does know is what matters most to her: who he is now, what's inside. The story that no one else would be able to fill in the gaps of, except by long intimacy. That's the story she wants to remember. The rest is details.
That doesn't mean she isn't interested, or curious, or that it wouldn't warm her considerably to listen to him. But it doesn't tell her much more than what is actually vital for her to know: that he is fit and smart and resourceful, that he is her mate, that he knows her, and that he loves her more than he ever feared her. That he's here, right now, and he's hers, and he wants her back.
Sinclair groans at the way he reacts to her words, a sharp and hitching moan sent into his mouth when he lifts his hips and thereby her body off the armchair, fucking himself harder into her. Deeper, as though to stay. She presses her hand to his chest, feels his heart pounding through the thick muscle there, and her cunt clenches all around him. Slides on his cock, riding harder now. Faster.
When their mouths part, if only so they can pant for air, she's holding onto him, watching his eyes. Her own have turned stormy, like some thunderhead looming on the horizon of a bright summer day, the edges of those tender blue eyes shadowed by lust. By instinct. She's coming closer in herself to some searing peak between what is human and what is animal and what is Something Else Entirely, knowing only that her mate is close, and that soon he'll come, and fill her, and
perhaps that's one more reason why she likes it when he mounts her, especially at the end, covering her and pounding himself into her, roaring the way he does,
reminding her that he's an animal, too.
And that is what he does. Fucks her in the armchair, gets her riding him faster with that oh, fuck, with that i want it. She moans again, bears down on him again, when he starts to lift her, solely because she unabashedly enjoys his strength, his audacity, his sheer gall at doing what he likes with her. Because she likes feeling the prophecy of motion in that hard, tightly coiled body of his when he's this close to her, when their sweat is mingling on their chests and their bellies. She kisses him, hard, in those two steps between chair and bed.
Gasps, when he drops her on the bedspread, and a grin flashes thoughtlessly over her face, a hint of laughter that is mostly just breath. Her legs fold around him when he comes down to her, holding him close while he finds her pussy and pushes into her again, grabs the bedspreads and starts fucking her like that. Alex holds onto the bed. Sinclair holds onto him, fingers in his hair, splayed over his back, sliding down to his flank and moaning to feel the swing of his hips with every thrust. "Oh, god," is all she can say then, but it shudders apart,
momentarily helpless. Momentarily not animal or girl or near-Fostern but just a woman verging on orgasm, her cries turning into nothing more than trembling whimpers, bright little gasps.
Which, as weak as they sound, begin to grow louder again. She holds onto him, lifts her shoulders up with one elbow beneath her and fucks him back, putting her brow to his when she starts to pound herself on him, under him, opening her legs a little to take him deeper,
and just as abruptly, those undulating sounds she makes cut off entirely, her mouth opening with a truncated gasp and staying there when her orgasm takes her, winding up her entire body and arching her back for him. Her legs close tight around him to keep him there, her hand flexes against the back of his neck. She stretches out, working her pussy on him, til that first pulse hits and she starts all but screaming, moaning his name, spilling out a dozen incoherent pleas and demands, while fireworks go off underneath her skin,
so close to him he can feel each burst of heat.
It's a little later. (It's another world.) Her head is rolled to one side, her eyes closed and her body limp against the covers. She breathes in silent mouthfuls of air, exhales long and slow and almost sighed. All she can feel at first is this breathing. Then she feels her body, awash in all those lovely hormones that result in a feeling not-inaccurately called a glow. Her summersun-tanned skin has a warm sheen to it, like something molten and slow-moving, which she is right now.
Then she feels Alex inside of her, and atop her. Feels his weight, and his hips still pressed firmly between her thighs, his cock very slowly softening in her pussy. Feels it jump every now and again, feels the way he shudders at the slightest movement. Like when she shifts her hips on the bedspread, getting an iota more comfortable. When she's aware of him, when she begins to remember everything, she starts to rub her fingers against his scalp, right there where her hand already is at the base of his skull, pushing gently upward.
oh my god, he's saying. oh my fucking god.
"Mmm," she agrees, and whoever was pounding on the wall has stopped by now. Alex moans, laughs, grumbles, whatever it is, and shifts over her, biting her shoulder. She smiles, eyes still closed, stuck to him with sweat and cum and adoration, and could stay that way forever.
But Alex moves a little. Not enough to make her give out a whimper of protest, nothing like that. He lifts his head and she turns hers, opening her eyes to look at him, smiling at him. Her eyes have lost that hunter's edge now, look like skies that go on forever, clouds that move so slowly you can't tell. She's smiling when he kisses her, and she goes slowly with it, tasting him again, melting into him again.
"Just stay here," she whispers to him a little later, when he's resting on her shoulder again, laying on her breasts, shifted a bit to the side so he doesn't smoosh her ribs. It's well before the consideration of moving has been brought up, silently or otherwise. "Let's just stay here and go to sleep like this and not move til morning. We can shower then. It's good," she tells him, as though this last bit is the summation of everything: the sex, the place, the plan she's laid out, his body, hers, their bodies joined together.
Her arms slide around him, holding him close, but gently. She nuzzles herself into the crook of his neck and shoulder, sniffing his sweat, rubbing it on herself with no thought, none whatsoever, towards what is clean or what is human, what mind remind him that she's a beast. Sinclair isn't afraid of Alex remembering that anymore. She thinks about that night by Bear Lake, and sharing her heat with him til they were both a little sweaty in the sleeping bag come morning. Thinks about sleeping filthy and happy and warm together.
Does not fear him pushing away from her. Does not fear anything.
[Alexander] Between the two of them, Alex is by far the more human. That goes without saying. They're both animals, but different sorts entirely: she's the kind that hunts in forests, that changes her skin, that relishes the taste of blood, and will tell him, sometimes, of what it's like to be in that shape. To feel the coolness of the earth at night, the wet leaves under her paws, to be able to know the world through smell and sound alone, to be wild and driven by nothing but urgent, immediate need.
He's a little different. He's a human animal. A rare breed, really, a pack animal, living by darwinian law rather than strict social mores. The strong rise; the weak crumble. No patience for altruism, no patience for charity. Not for those who won't fight for themselves, anyway, though he will aid a brother, a cousin, a tribesman. Long before he started up this safehouse business, long before this 'light work' business, he would have given his right hand for his brother. Long before he ever looked at Sinclair with anything more than wariness, he went out of his way to help her. Even he couldn't explain that instinctive, evolutionarily-imprinted drive to do so.
It was simply there. Long before he recognized her as such, his instincts knew her for what she was: kindred to his spirit. Kin to his blood.
She has eyes like the kansas sky, he thinks. Stormy and endless by turns. He thought the skies were big in California, in the central valley, on the mesas of the south, on the lip of the ocean pacific. That was before he came here.
They're piled together now, sticky and -- frankly -- rather gross after a day of driving, a bout of athletic sex. The air conditioner rattles and groans and doesn't work very well. The room feels humid and warm. She's so hot beneath him, around him, her limbs holding him as his hold her, and
she asks him to just stay.
To be completely truthful, that discipline of his that has him up at 6 every morning, asleep at 10 every night, that has him showering at the start of the day and after every workout, brushing his teeth for a solid three to five minutes every night -- that has him taking care of himself, treating his body like the finely honed tool he's made it -- balks a little at the proposition. He stirs a little, thinking about it. The animal in him wins out; he turns his face to her body, bites her again, gently, and then settles with a quiet sigh.
"Okay," he says, muffled. "We'll just sleep in a pile-o-gross."
Tension is draining out of him. He's not tall, and not even so broad as some; he simply doesn't have the genetics to be a brick shithouse. What he does have, he's carved into raw muscle and bone. He's not large, but he's dense -- heavy atop her when he relaxes like that, and it's probably good that he's shifted a little to the side.
"They have a breakfast buffet six thirty to nine thirty," he adds, blurrier and blurrier. "Good reviews on Yelp, I checked while you were in the bathroom earlier. We should try to get up for ... "
and he's out.
come find me
13 years ago