The sound of the alarm was already faint in the distance. The sirens had stopped, but the team that had entered the museum had not been given insight nor instruction as to the taming of the screaming security system. Something about the night being violated by that cacophony, long after she had escaped the cavernous, looming building, made her smile. It was a rascal's smile. A mischief-maker's archetypal trademark set in the cream of her pale features and framed by a halo of her parchment-honey hair. Loki himself would have toasted that smile.

He also might have been a little daunted by the sharp way her sky-pale eyes snapped a fast, carnivorous attention. Though it reminded one of a whip-crack, a punctuation, it was reverent. It assessed. It paid its dues with efficiency and candor. But when Liv looked at you, really looked at you, it consumed you— hooked at the mouth and reeling you in. It drank from some fount of sincerity you often forgot you still protected at the core of you and returned it just a little less full. She took a sip of what the devil's drinking. Her gaze was a measured surveillance that made notes as spidery and intricate as the schematics she would scratch out in her black notebook. You were reduced to a pile of intuitive, hypervigilant anecdotes in the margins. It was as reductionist as much as it was non-judgemental. She considered herself a social constructivist, to be honest. A free-wheeling champion of entropy and inertia here to shake it up a little. And when Liv wasn't lying through her pretty, petal-shaped mouth she was completely, and utterly sincere. Devil-may-care. Just like that f**king smile. Immortally, demonically, ...charming. It made you forget the notebook. The planning. The artifice and artistry. One way or another she was getting in, and she was going to get what she wanted. Even if it was just to make you laugh— helplessly.

She was smiling like that as she closed the door behind her- silent as snowfall on a starless night. She dropped into her overly-comfortable chair, pulling her satchel into her lap and crossing her legs casually as they were thrown over the plush armrest. She was tall, lithe, and had coltish gymnast-limbs that were sculpted by the circus and the stage but she had found a better use for them. Stereotypes could be badges of honour. Or excuses. Or destiny.

She pulled the medieval book out of her bag and ran the tips of her soft, kid-leather gloves over the cover of the book. Patient— drawing the moment out like exquisite taffy made of precious, soulless time. She opened the manuscript in her lap, turning a page to inspect the first plate. It was beautiful. The vibrant colours and gold-flake danced like a portal to a dream nestled in her black silhouette in the dark. The monk had been a Master. She sighed the sigh of satisfaction— of completion and hard work paid off. It was post-coital and she fought the urge to grab a cigarette.

"Mm," she purred into her her lonely apartment.

She'd call the buyer tomorrow. Tonight, she was going to see what all the fuss was about.

She made a game of it.

Hop. Drop. Tumble. Roll. Pause.....

Leap. Twist. Hop. Crouch. Pause....

Silent as the waning light, Oliva dropped down the labyrinth of fire escapes to the alley floor. She'd left her vehicle blocks away, as she always did. She paid for the privilege with the local crime in town. They were mostly gun-runners and thugs, but she had to consult with that group of people and it didn't hurt to have connections that could move fast and frenetic if something happened. They weren't her type of people, but she could act like it. She was a social dabbler, anyway. Most of her family weren't "her type of people" but it was what it was. They were friends of friends. People she consorted with, consorted with them. They were a tool of the trade. So, they could watch her bike. At the least.

The game of leap-frog through the city skyline was made of muscle memory. It was second nature. She did not have to think. She was free to let her mind wander, and it did. She was putting together a grocery list. There was even a background song to it. It was painfully ridiculous. She wouldn't admit it, even under the threat of torture.

Would you like to swing on a star Carry moonbeams home in a jar

But, if there had been an observer, they would have seen the jaunty beat in the way she took her steps. There was an extra sway to her gait. There was a pattern to the silent patter of her feet.

And be better off than you are ...

She was smiling for the most part. At least between the pauses. When she paused, she tilted her head to the side, feline and insect-like all at once. She listened in those moments, and the internal silence that interrupted the song was complete. Olivia was careful and detail oriented ...almost to a fault. Almost, because she would never concede that there was such a thing as 'too much' careful.

However, we all become complicit and complacent in routine. Muscle memory is reptilian-simple. Sure it frees the mind to do other things. But the body and the mind get bored with routine. Grocery list, Olivia" Really"

So when his presence hits her, it winds her.

She freezes.

And a different sort of memory kicked in.

But Liv doesn't fight her instinct on this one. She indulges it, with a smirk. Ten years is a long time still. In a way, she's relieved by the inclination, the first thought that flashes through her mind.

Disappear. Use your training. Vanish. Do not engage. Don't be intrigued. Don't be stupid. Don't be sentimental. You don't give a f**k about the past. This is how even the likes of you gets killed. This isn't how this should go down. Trap. Bait.

She cursed quietly under her breath. That was her mistake. And she knew it as it spilled from her mouth. Bang, kid. You should be dead. You have a lot to learn. Enjoy that bristle of hairs on the back of your neck. Gonna die for it?

She gave a symbolic finger-flip to the world.

She was gone.



And when she dropped into the strangely similar comfortable chair of her alternate apartment, she sneered at herself for the new song that had sunk into her mind and replaced the cheesy (and ironic) classic she had been singing to herself before.

In spite of a warning voice that comes in the night and repeats —how it yells in my ear "Don't you know,little fool, you never can win..."

Makes me stop—- before I begin. "F***."

She lit a cigarette. Her first drag was quick. Angry.

"F***ing f**k."

She knew. In truth, she knew before the motion detectors went off. Debatably, she knew he was coming since they crossed paths. She realized she knew when she woke up this morning. She paused with her hand on the door handle as she wondered whether she knew in England. Before he left' Before— she snorted softly. She put on a poker face. Then she reapplied her secret, charming smile. No reason to not start this amicable. She leaned her shoulder against the door frame, and opened the door slowly, just half way, bisecting her body in the gap. Like she could titrate his presence through a funnel of access. It made her voice a little fuzzy, distant, as she fought what could only be described as a wave of dizziness. "Writ," but she still sort of purred. The silence between them hummed.

Some things never change. Her presence sensed and a glimpse at a distance were hardly...defining...in regards to what being right in front of her did. Be the flame, not the moth, Chav....he could hear his mother chide. "Olivia." he said dryly with a venom he didn't really know he could produce. It was her annoying fake smile that did him in. Warm charming Writ, all worn down in two wags of a serpents tongue. It came out like a curse word. He cleared his throat and looked beyond her pale halo for signs of any other visitors. "Bad time?"

There was no way he could know how angry it made her to realize that her nostrils flared when he said her name. That her smile went plasticine, like a shadow of fake rolled over it before it became flesh again. It was as though the reality of the rest of her all rushed in to tighten in her chest and left a husk of a girl to hold the fort for a few beats of a wild heart. Her teeth pressed together. Which was good, because the things that almost leapt out of her mouth as though he was accusing her of — "No. ....No such thing." She didn't even know her own motives for that comment, but she pushed the door open the rest of the way and pivoted on the doorframe in as close to a sweeping gesture of invitation as she could muster.

"Hm," he grunted...Motives and obviously forced pleasantries aside...that brief flash of anger...that was real. That was better...and he couldn't fight the tug that made a marionette out of his mouth. As he always did, he gave her a large berth as he crossed the threshhold. Trying as he might to fold in on himself like a dying star. Even still, the motion set the hairs on his forearm to an electrical tilt. "I didn't know you were here.." He mumbled as if that explained the whole conversation he had just had in his head about what he was doing in town. "I mean...I knew you were here..." he conceded, waving his hands towards the expanse of her apartment...once he was safe enough away from her to gesticulate, of course.

The frown was a decision. She would display it for him when he finally turned to her. The sigh was done clandestine and behind his back, silently. She turned slowly, on a heel, with artifice, as she also closed the door and put her back against it. She let it be the final boarder of 'as far away as you can stand.' She took advantage of the way she could enjoy it pressed against her because she leaned into it hard. When he started to talk, her brows slowly rose, so the frown was gone before he saw it. "What"..." A moment of almost innocent, open lucidity as she genuinely wanted to know what he was thinking. Selfishly. "I....I mean, I didn't know you were here, either. I've been —-. I looked—" No no no. Jesus. "Why are you here?"

Writ's eyes followed the words tumbling out of her mouth and retreated to the ice-blues above them as she sucked her thoughts back in to replace them with something more practical. "A job." He said simply, running his hand over the bricks he'd found as he had backed into them. "Someone is looking for those that don't want to be found." A roll of his shoulders given as an afterthought. "So I'm here....Finding what shouldn't be found." His eyebrows hitched and he tilted his head in her direction. He let the statement hang there in the gathering throng of words that seemed to be floating about in the space between them. All the unsaid things stretched like canvas. "What are YOU doing here, Liv?" He couldn't look at her when he said her name again.

She welcomed the natural turns of conversation. She welcomed the turns that were not hers. Unlike most people who just waited for their chance to speak. She began nodding slowly. Of course. A job. Then she realized she didn't know what that meant to him. Then, and only then, did the actual situation of the moment start to build itself around her. And she did realize it was her own fault. But she also felt like she had set herself up. It didn't feel fair. None of this saga felt fair. That old version of her gripped and rattled at her insides like a child prisoner. "I....have been here for.....years. In this city I mean. I don't know if I 'shouldn't' be found, but being found is ...bad luck," she purposefully didn't use the term that would come easier to both their mouths, "in my line of work. What— Do you want anything" Drink, I mean." She was trying.

Why was this so difficult' He left. He made the hardest decision for himself, for the both of them. Selfless AND selfish. So why was he so angry' The feel of fingers around his throat was used as a reminder. It wasn't her fault though. She was just as much of a pawn in this game as he was, right' He had stood there staring at her. Consternation, a neverending war that ate up his spine, played out like a scene on his face. "What?" he finally asked. "Oh. Drink." at least he caught that part. "Sure. Whatever you have is fine...look I.." he rubbed a hand at the back of his neck and his fingertips hit the raised edges of that familiar burn. "Whatever you're stealing...currently...someone knows...ok" That's all I...All I came here for." He didn't look convincing.

The grip of fingers of a former self were replaced with his. His fingers. Or what she somewhere imagined they would be like. Regardless, her chest sunk when the first syllable left his mouth. The soft black turtleneck she wore was a reasonable confidant as the utterly taboo 'caught red handed' feeling gripped her till— she pushed off the wall and nonchalantly rounded the counter that guarded her kitchen. Drink. Get a drink. She watched him in silence as she walked, breaking that stare as she turned the corner and then busied herself, overly busied herself, with locating the bottle of red wine she had been drinking. The way she eyed her glass, so near to him, was comical or La Boheme-tragic. "You.....I. Hmm." This was not a first time. She leaned on the counter, spreading a splayed set of fingers as she offset her shoulders at a drastic angle. A real, hard lean. "You're saying I'm in danger" ...you are coming here to warn me?" Reiterated. No. Just reflecting.

Light brown, a little worse for the wear, glanced down to the discarded, red stained vessel a few inches from where his fingers dangled at his side, dumbly. Stupid moth. Writ wrapped has hand around her too far glass and took the few steps required to follow her into the kitchen placing it gingerly on the counter beside her hunched form. He reached a long arm up above her and grabbed a second glass for himself, setting it next to its pair. She smelled like books. His eyes closed for the briefest three seconds. "Yes." Two steps back to press his shoulders back against safety. "I could have just snapped my picture and bailed. Collected my money. But...I don't know. I don't usually have to think about what happens to the people or things I'm hired to find."

That frown was back, but it was made of concentration as all of these things happened. Somewhere, it was attitude that kept her in place as he approached. And it was attitude that failed her as she locked herself in place and didn't move a muscle as he reached, and placed, and backed off. It afforded him his inhale. Her mind was too far away to notice. One of her stealing-songs came to her mind as the blood in her ears pounded the bass it came with. She put words to it, and then pulled herself back to reality. He smelled like home. And when she tried to place the what and where of it..was it forest? A city' A spice" No. It was none of those things. She plucked up one of the glasses with deliberate annoyance, the stem between her knuckles, and began to pour like it was an every-day occurrence for editorial and poignant silences to have subtitles in real life and not just movies. "Ok. ....Thank you. But....I have a thousand f**king questions now. Were you paid to just take pictures or to kill me" What do you even do' What do you know about me" Why didn't or how did you not know you were sent after me?" She ended her pour in a wobble as the glass was just a little too full. She put it on the counter instead of handing it to him because the world wobbled with it. She raised and gestured with her red-stained counterpart. "How freaked out should I be about this" ..Nevermind your standing here talking to me." She let her composure drop some.

He was grateful that she didn't hand it to him, but now what? He still had to go get it. There was a micro-expression of fear, like she was some sort of leper, a really...really...good-smelling leper...but a leper nonetheless. No touching. He steeled himself and forced his eyes to rest firmly on hers, approaching head on in one and a half small steps. That face. Set hard but clearly a brave show. The over-filled glass raised to his mouth, he refrained from retreat and took a sip. The voice that came struggling free from his throat was rasped and low. "Just pictures. I don't kill people. I find them. I'm an investigator..." "Not law.." he added quickly. "I know nothing about you that I didn't...already know...and haven't sought to in almost ten years.." Liar. "My client is moving a collection of works here and wanted to assess the criminal element. I have a reputation. He propositioned my services." He had been studying the fluid in his glass this entire time but brought his eyes up to hers now in that half-step away. "How am I supposed to measure the level of freaked out you should be?" Normally that would have been dripping in sarcasm, but somehow, it was painted in ache, sadness...like he SHOULD know exactly what and how she should be feeling. "But if you're concerned about whether I will say anything.." Sip. "Don't be." Pause. Panic for two seconds. "I'll say I couldn't find you...and whether you continue...will be on YOU...not me."

She made the moment an exercise in breathing. Measured, mindful breathing. She attempted a calming 4 seconds in, 4 seconds out. She had read something about how this was something like natural breaths, or it soothed places inside because it was how we should breathe. Should breathe" What the f**k does— She had lowered her chin to watch her glass, to watch the glass. To pretend like something other than him had any portion of her attention. But instead it offered a new and furious intensity. She looked up at him. How could 'softer' also be 'intense'" They both figured that conundrum out tonight. A wisp of her ghost-honey hair bounced against her cheek, half occluding one of her ice-storm eyes. "I'm glad you don't kill people." She said, quietly. "I ...You don't know, you're right. You can't measure. It's pretty scary, though. I've had this happen before. I thought....Can I just say that when I got out I looked for you? I need you to know that. " She was going to say more, but she realized that explaining how one thing led to another would be strangely close to finger-pointing, but not for something that she had any desire to finger-point for. "—And I'm weirdly sorry that you know that I grew up to be a fucking thief. ...Whatever else you know. I don't know. " She finally drank.

Caught off guard wasn't something Writ was really used to. He should have heard it in the way she said this. She meant him. Them. Not the fact she might be in danger of getting caught...or worse. The bridge of his nose brought the inner corners of his brows into a further dip as he narrowed his eyes at her. What is she saying" I don't know...I lost track. You must look like you're sneering at her. Fix your face. All that actually ended up happening was his mouth opening slightly and going dry. The taste of wine flecked his bottom lip and he subconsciously sought it out with the tip of his tongue to bring back the moisture she'd drained right out of him. His voice couldn't break further. It was almost like static with the vibrations stuffed between syllables that were formed and born almost entirely in his chest. "You don't owe me anything, kor.." Not kom for love, kor for to fight. He swallowed hard. He hadn't used that pet name in a while...something that was supposed to infuriate her when they first met but became almost affectionate in the ghost of her memory that had haunted him in the decade since they'd parted ways.

Was that what she meant' He would have to ask. She couldn't read him. She tried, and she was studious in how her chin slowly raised to help her cold eyes stare him down. But they weren't cold, were they' Whether she was aware of what he looked like, and how it could be threatening, she had a secret: she felt like she deserved it, so she would bare it. There wasn't even a rebellious kick to buck the negative feelings off. Not a death throw nor a complaint. She let him. And then he read between her lines and it startled her because it felt like he read that secret pang that had first been suffocating, and now just transmogrified into a thrumming throb. "I....Of course I do. Don—" Don't call me that. Call me that. Her empty hand lifted to touch him, for whatever reason (to enact the sanctity of this moment"). Here was something she'd wanted to say to him since the moment she knew he was gone. Her fingers slow-curled themselves as she strangled the urge out of guilt, not prudence. Her nature wasn't made for following rules, especially ones she had nearly forgotten she believed in. The touch died because she didn't think she deserved it, or lost trust in the idea that it would be reassuring from her. "No one has ever done something.....like that, for me. I tried to make it right." Morse code syllables telegraphed her complicated morals subliminally.

Panic. Four seconds this time— if only because somewhere in a disgustingly unavoidable place inside of himself, he wanted her so badly to do it, and take the choice away from him. Like their history suggested. It was a game of sacrifice between them, back and forth, wrapped in the trappings of martyrdom' No. He hadn't accepted the possibility that it wasn't just as selfish if not moreso, than selfless. His hand flew up and delicately curled around her sleeve-protected wrist. Even through the fabric he could feel what they've been doing their best to avoid: Want. "We are in control. I decide. You decide. We aren't slaves." he groaned in an excruciating denial of the flames that singed his stupid moth wings.

She spooked and startled. The tension leapt in her and she almost dropped her glass. It sloshed and it spilled. It garnered only one flick of her gaze and she wasn't even sure why it mattered even that much. She leaned back on her heels in a graceful rock that almost became something else as well but she stopped herself. Everything seemed to gather in a lump in her throat, hardening and growing there for an awful moment. He reminded her of things she hadn't been thinking of. Not directly. Not like that. It made her...angry. Superstition. Bulls**t. Slavery. She laughed, it was hard and half a cough. "What are you talking about' I was a slave....fine— captive. Whatever. To your f**king family. They ....my parents f**king sold me, Writ." How time pushes narratives in directions, and begins to carve them in stone as they fester alone. She was softly shaking.

Was that not what they were talking about' How did he read that wrong" He blinked a few times as he released her wrist, suddenly aware and thankful for the angry heat creeping up the back of his neck. "Why do you think I f**king left, Olivia" You think I thought that was fair" To either one of us" I didn't want to be saddled with you anymore than you wanted to be saddled with me. I left my family. I'm not a hero. I didn't do it for you," the last said with a marked slap to the shoulder where the constant reminder was burned into him. Back to full names. Back to the wall...and further. He took his steps backwards and slowly aimed them for the direction of the door. He couldn't look at her anymore and cast his eyes downward with a shake of his head. "Look...I...came and did what I said I'd do. So...done. Do with it as you please. Please." He looked up briefly. "Try not to get killed." It took everything in his power to keep moving. She was shaking. He wanted to run back to her, hold her down, press her between his weight and....His eyes closed again and he stopped retreating. He just stood there for a long while. Silent...and just...still....before mustering the next thought. "Tell me you want me to leave."

He didn't read her wrong. But some wounds were magnets. He came too close to that one, and the other was driving her mad so she took the accidental bait. His presence hummed in her ears and made it hard to think straight. It was alarming but it was strangely intoxicating and it was loosening up places in her that had been locked down hard. Even her full name, thrown at her, couldn't crush the way she wanted to throw her arms around him and sob warm tears through the front of his shirt. The new mortal fear combined with old guilt and final relief from speaking words she'd needed to say to him for years. She didn't despise him. He was something of a cult hero to her. Only time and distance could have sculpted this notion of him and changed her resentment of him, his family, her parents, the first things she thought about him before they had — a beat. The light and sense left the room. The way she caught her breath quivered on the air like he had struck her. She knew. She knew it couldn't have been just for her but.....but she'd let herself wonder. Maybe hope. (F**king hope.) Maybe....He was more of a mythology to her than a man. When he turned she twisted and let the cacophony of shudders slip through her just so she could bring them to heel at their waning. She wouldn't let him see her mouth tremble. Her body was a traitor, but that was done. She'd give no more. She put her glass down like it was an armed explosive. Part of her was a woman who would have thrown it at him— if only for fear she would drop it and show how much he had upset her. But their story wasn't quite like that. "Just go," she whispered. And she said it like an accusation, it was the moral now to his new fable. Leave. There was a weight of profound loneliness and finality to the words. But she wouldn't release him from the rest.

A thousand shards of glass punctured every ounce of composure he had left...which wasn't much to begin with. It would always be like this between them, wouldn't it' Always intense. Always painful. So much so that he couldn't tell what was worse: walking away or staying. Leave. He felt it heaved at him following her last words and he watched her through a blur in his half-lidded eyes. "See you around, kor," he croaked. Maybe in another ten years... if he couldn't figure out how to finally be rid of this overwhelming need to....well...NEED her. It was so easy for her to undo him. Surely she must know that. Writ quietly backed the rest of the way out of the apartment...and with the distance that was put between them, he felt himself suck in a gasp of clean air after releasing a breath he didn't know he had been holding. His easy smile came back to him. "If you're lucky," he called with a smirk, descending the stairs and exiting the building to wander back to his little hovel of a studio.

Perhaps he'd stay a little longer. You know...just to see how things played out...and give him enough time to come up with an excuse for not delivering on what his client was paying him for.

This was a real f**king problem.

The heat of the day was finally breaking, giving way to more comfortable temperatures and more reasons to get the hell out of the house. God knows after his encounter with Liv, there was a fair bit of energy riding sadistic piggy-back on taut shoulders. Writ had spent the last thirty minutes doing his damnedest to drain a full shoulder of some disgusting off-brand whiskey while anxiously pacing like a tiger plotting his escape and the subsequent gruesome mauling of his captors. Slink, slink, swig. Chin low, eyes raised, fixed and coldly calculating. His cage" A haphazardly acquired cesspit that the landlord had dared to describe as a luxury studio apartment with a great view! ..Yeah...of a brick-walled building, ten stories taller, that he could easily stretch his lean frame across to and touch with the palm of his hand.

Time to de-escalate.

The bottom of worn soles hit the asphalt, torso easing beneath a soft grey, v-neck sweater, glad for it's lightweight but effective coverage as the cooling air closed in around him and ran downward, curling like a cat around leather-clad legs. A flick and strike of a lighter, a deep inhale, the glow of his cigarette, egged on by a coaxing breath, lit his olive complected skin with a flare as he moved. Following the beat in the air- he let it tug him towards whatever...whichever...disaster could be found first.

A stone edifice and a queue of expensive cars with lavishly, but minimally clad women spilling out of them seemed as good a place as any and he had pre-gamed hard enough to blend into a party being allowed entrance at the door, as if he had belonged there all along. An intoxicating bass thrummed beneath his feet as he wound his way through an ethereal blue lit foyer, abandoning his adopted party. Writ's eyes not so covertly slipped over the different shapes swaying in drunkenly tantric dance moves. Sex with your clothes on.., Chaya used to say. He hadn't heard his little sister's wry inflection in quite some time and the sudden voice in his head gutted him, knocking his hip into the side of a neon-ringed bar top where he stood with a perturbed and something wicked this way comes feeling plastered all over his face.

The air here suddenly felt heavy. Like Chaya's voice had drifted in on it. It was thick with history, dripping like honey in sickly sweet pulses of interspersed poison and ritual unlike any he'd felt since leaving the Strega of his camp. It was like someone had opened a long-since sealed vault in a murky back room somewhere. The hairs at the back of his neck stood up as the wave of ancient power exhaled and spilled out into the main room, gifting a still present caress to his spine in it's wake.

Red hair. Thank god for red hair.

Writ's eyes refocused and lit on a girl standing in front of him.

"Hello?" she chided, stamping a pretty little kitten-heeled foot.

She was talking to him. What's worse...it seemed like he was in the middle of answering...only he didn't remember the question or how he had planned to respond. He made a quick assessment of the situation. Two empty glasses on the bar top in front of them, one hand on a dangerously curved hip, a pouting pair of red stained lips and an aire of impatience in her little tantrum; his wallet in hand. How long had he been standing there" Writ glanced down at it his open tri-fold then back up at her, curling the corner of his mouth into a suggestive smirk. He had been about to buy her a drink.

"No," he said in a rich, baiting tone. "We're leaving." It was a hard command, far more confidently given than he felt. Something about this place was giving him all sorts of get the f**k out. Besides, the look that crawled across her pointed, angled features, pretty much guaranteed the distraction he needed.

Apparently barking an order at this girl was her particular brand of catnip.They had barely made it to the alley before she was clawing at his lower back in an attempt to yank the sweater off of him but she couldn't keep her mouth away long enough to fully complete the task. His back exposed, Red pushed him against the brick, bringing his sweater up to just beneath his chin and tugging at the fabric from behind to force his head into a loll. Writ wasn't in the mood to take the power back. Let her have her fun. He slid his eyes closed and enjoyed the cool breeze on his upturned face as one hand curled and pinned a fistful of her hair to the base of her skull and the other slowly raised the short hem of her skirt. Instead of fighting for dominance, he concentrated on the sensations beneath his fingertips and on not groaning out the wrong name as the hot breath escaping across his throat between plush, hungrily frantic kisses assaulted him.

Drip. Drip. Drop. Little late summer showers..

A pregnant drop of rain fell in a baptismal splash between his brows and rolled down the bridge of his nose. A hummed tune, sad and aching echoed in his ears. His eyes slowly opened, and before he could stop it...the name of the voice's owner fell out of his mouth. "Olivia."

"What did you ju—" the girl started in an accusatory whine.

"Shh!" Writ used his grip on her hair to hold her still, angry shushing her with an irritated growl while he craned his neck in an effort to hear something that was definitely not there. He blinked in rapid succession as if coming out of a daze and took in the current scene...his hand was clamped over the girls mouth and she was staring daggers at him; hurling a million tiny muffled shrieks into his palm.

"Sorry...sorry." Writ muttered, releasing her, dodging a smack while simultaneously adjusting her dress and stearing her with almost a shove back into the bar.

"Are you craz—" She shouted as the door closed in her face.

He was already gone before she got half of it out anyway. If he didn't feel a little bad for his behavior. or maybe wasn't aware that he was heading straight for almost certain doom...he might have found the sight of the disgruntled girl and the following spectacle of him attempting to pull his sweater back into place, sopping and sticking to him, as he ran through the streets...quite humorous.

It was raining though...and he'd be a prize idiot if he didn't at least try. Something about the rain always....worked.

Please.. he thought as he rounded the corner onto Liv's street. It was a prayer. Reverant...and he propelled it out of himself, arrow-shaped, into whatever f**ked up void this sh*t existed in. To whatever was listening.

Writ wasn't exactly sure what he was asking for in that moment but as his hand curled around the bottom rung of the 'scapes ladder and tugged, he vaguely thought it might be that she doesn't throw him the hell off.

He quietly climbed the last section of the fire escape...and though he toyed with the idea of greeting her with another Bad time" he thought better of it and simply squatted down in the corner diagonal from her, leveling her with a solemn gaze. I'm sorry... his eyes said, mostly because he didn't feel like he derserved to defend himself yet...but also because he wasn't sure what would come out if he opened his mouth.

Somewhere in the forest, he ran, chasing laughter and the sound of four feet padding through fallen leaves.

It was the only part of dreaming he could recall before he startled awake some several hours later.

Sunlight streamed through the apartment and lit the gold of her hair into a combustion of white, shimmering flames. He was struck by the sight of her. Almost convinced she wasn't really there. Warm hazel drifted over her sprawled form reverently. Sometime in the night, they'd shifted again. He was on his back and she was laying on her stomach with her cheek pressed to the junction of his arm and shoulder. One limb trapped beneath and curled around her sleep-draped body, he raised his free hand and gently touched a fingertip to her jawline. Mine he mouthed...as if marking her in the way she'd long since marked him.

She stirred sleepily and nuzzled closer just as he started to pull away. His body tensed in his attempt to move from beneath her undetected. She grumbled incoherently- perhaps sensing his retreat and in protest, rolled onto her side. Writ took advantage of the movement and slipped his arm free coming up and away from their nest of tangled sheets with a bittersweet lopsided grin of victory. How he wanted to crawl right back in beside her. Mold his already aching body around the curve of her and push himself between the velvet crest between her thighs, clearly visible from where he stood.

His jaw clenched and he bit down on his bottom lip with a shake of his head and a dismissive, absent rub to the eagerness rising obediently to the call of his desire for her. Yeah...I know....later. He glanced down at the anatomy he was currently coaxing into submission with a hard grip...issuing assurances in his mind to it like it was a wild animal too long held captive.

Liv slept and she slept so soundly. She was wrapped in an exhaustion she had never known, born of a desire that had lain dormant for her entire life. A desire never fed. A need never acknowledged, nevermind satisfied. And sanctified in love. She slept soundly because she was filled, and whole, and safe. She had given him every part of her and he had held it in his heart and kissed her to sleep with promises she would have been too afraid to ask for.

But not in that one moment, that one terrible moment that bound them together in a way he would always see in the back of her eyes. In her gaze, now forever laden with a trust and commitment of the soul that was so much a part of her nature it had called to him from that very first instant they had met in gazes across the kompania clearing. Know me. And when she looked at him, she knew him, too. The depth and power of that link, across any expanse of light or distance...There would be times where people, just seeing how she looked at him, would stop and not dare to cross that gaze or sever the way that she beheld him.

Now it swirled and seethed, released and alive in her. And together they had made her from it. He had understood what she had asked for and his consent and his wish for her, and him, and their new family had answered her most wild -dark and deep like the forest— desires. Consecrated by him. So the sleep she slept was profound. It was limitless. Cradled in his arm she slept in blissful dreams. Dreams that would be wrapped in the scent of him as she nuzzled against him, naked and a part of sublime balance. Yes. Fate.

In those dreams they ran through the vesh. Together. A pack. The deep brown musk of their essence wrapped in the lush green of familiar woods and deep earth, black soil. Home. Low and just beneath their stomachs. Earth between their fingers. Clutched like his sable locks. Mine, the dream said. And she felt it draw along her skin like gravity — electric and connected through space. Something among nothing. No, never nothing, she struggled against the dream to connect their hearts with silver strings. To keep them close.

Silently, he moved around the room, gathering scraps of his clothing. His sweater was sticky and in disrepair but his undershirt went relatively unscathed during their escapades so he tugged that over his head- the action of which tossed his long, tangled hair into a charming, just rolled-out-of-bed vibe.

He had no idea where his boxers had disappeared to so...commando it was...in leather pants. One side of his mouth curled in careful discomfort as he adjusted himself within the confines of his clothing. A foot shoved into his boot while he procured a piece of paper and pen- continuing to work the shoe into place as he wrote: Bi kashtesko merel i yag...I've gone to gather wood for our fire...and by wood...I mean baked goods. Don't you dare move. I'll be right back. -Yours. He folded the note neatly and gently set it on the pillow next to her...fingertips fighting the impulse to stroke her awake. A flicker of a smile graced his lips and out the door he slipped.

————————- The air was cool and it nuzzled itself around his bare neck, slipping down the back of his shirt between the red grooves of freshly scratched raised skin-edges. Don't forget, the wind said. Touching all the places the ghost of Liv lingered...a welcome reminder that this was the reality now. He walked down the road with a permanent half-formed smile...like an idiot in love.

"Jackpot." He said aloud, mostly to drown out his growling stomach. His eyes had locked on the twinkling lights of a sign that flashed Patisserie at him like a wave from an old friend. The smell of dough and chocolate and coffee attacked him- it was accompanied by the pleasant lilt of a French accent that came dancing mellifluously out of the mouth of a brunette girl behind the counter.

"Que puis-je vous obtenir?" she asked.

The sound of it made him mildly homesick...only he didn't feel sad or torn about it anymore. Home was laying naked...asleep in the mess they'd made...in an apartment a few blocks away.

Writ pointed at a few items in the case. "Un de ceux-ci et deux de ceux...Oh....and a coffee...black...and a Noisette- ....wait...can pregnant women drink coffee ?" His face had suddenly gone comically perplexed.

The french girl beamed and glowed and cooed and laughed a throaty laugh. "Oh! Oh mon amie..." she gave his concerned expression a pitying pat on the back. "Oui! A little bit won't hurt..."

Writ nodded absently and let his fingers fall over the iris petals in the counter's display. I don't even know if she likes coffee...and if she does...how she takes it. He felt suddenly inadequate. Like not knowing her coffee order meant certain doom. Had he ever known anyone's coffee order"

The girl seemed to sense the storm clouds forming behind his eyes and she leaned onto the counter, mousy, pointed chin in the palm of her hand, propped up by her elbow pressed against the glass. She nodded towards the flowers. "If you touch her like that...I don't think it'll much matter what coffee you bring home."

Writ choke-laughed with a single, strangled "Hah.." and a raise of his brows. Her forwardness had been enough to snap him out of it. He retracted his hand and rubbed at the back of his neck, letting out a long, exaggerated exhale. That previously plastered half-smile crept back up to his mouth and a sharp little glint lit in his eyes as an idea crinkled their corners. She looked amused by the sudden appearance of determination. "Do you have drink carriers?" he asked.

————————-

Her fingers twitched gently and she felt the need to seek him. To touch. She reached for where she expected him to lay and found sunny warmth but not him..not his....Slowly she opened her eyes. In the morning light her pupils cringed and the ice blue of her eyes was haunting and spectral. Like she looked for him beyond sight, beyond touch.....through the veils. She blinked and brushed her palm along the sheets, tracing the impression of him until it rode up the pillow case until she found the paper. Looking for it as if she knew it was there. Her body felt his absence everywhere, especially as she woke missing him like missing pieces of herself.

...But she would carry that burden now and always. Aware of her secret wish to have him forever a part of her, inside of her.....Even more than this. Than the night before. More than their daughter in her belly, though that somehow made the ache more tender and she had no words for how that helped ...how it came close....and how full of joy that made her. Perhaps that heavy gaze of hers would just forever wish to pull him in. Spooky action at a distance. Aligned and metaphysically linked. Gravity and spin. Her nimble fingers unfolded the note and traced his penmanship adoringly. Yours. Pale blue would forever draw him up and into her, thirsty, even for echoes of him...as she read.

Her smile was soft but it was tethered to her heart, like it rose to the surface from that place— the depths of her hinted at in the corners of her supple mouth. Yes. Our fire. Our hearth. She pulled the paper to her naked chest as if she could embrace it or glean some further meaning by pressing it into her skin. But as it comforted her she slipped back into a gentle, perfect sleep. Perfect because it would end with him. ...

Finally, he made it back to the apartment. He had to put the edge of the pastry bag between his teeth, and use his pinky and ring finger...and hip"...to open the door. He nudged it the rest of the way with his foot and when he reappeared in the doorway, he was standing there holding three drink carriers, balanced precariously in his hands and wedged between the side of his chest and forearm.

Twelve different piping hot beverages. An assortment of chocolate, almond, and plain croissants, eclairs, macarons, millefeuille,and tarts. Three irises, pilfered from the display. One stupid grin.

...And it did. In half a dream she felt him nearing. Closer and closer like he was hunting for her. Her role in her dream changing and morphing, protean and just full of life and permanence. The rustling pulled her from him, to him. He caught her in a lazy, slow, sunbathed stretch. The felinity of it was accidental, a product of her proportions and her contentment and how perfectly comfortable she was now that he was there. Though the sun had slipped from her pale skin, there was always something honey and caramel about her— something joyous and inviting that glowed. She was utterly unbridled by any need to conceal any part of her from him. No secrets. Simply his. There was even the weight of that, like she would and could satisfy a part of him with a display of herself- a quintessential truth to it. The moment culminated in slowly opening eyes and such a smile— just for him. His.

He wasn't sure if it was the ruckus he'd made trying to get back through the door...or if she had already been awake...but he was glad for the sky blue eyes that peered at him from the bed he'd left them in.

"I have questions." He said, matter-of -factly.

"Questions, my love?" she murmured with a sleepy voice, waking up with every breath. "Like.....are you expecting company?" The smile changed a little, a little less heaven, a little more reality. Humor aimed at his coterie of coffee. She rolled gently onto her side, her body a sweeping violin curve in the bed they had shared.

The smile on his face tilted as he climbed in after her, dragging his hand against the brick walls as he made a slow meander towards her. "Sorry about your floor.." he chuckled...eyeballing the small little puddles and foot prints they'd left behind them. "...I mean not really.." he added with a smirk, standing in a familiar spot at the kitchen counter, nowhere near as cautious or respecting of her space as he was the first time he had visited.

There was something in Liv's disbelief or...naivety"...in regards to the weird cosmic sh*t between them that challenged him. On one hand, he didn't want to press it, but on the other, he wanted an even playing field. It's all he ever wanted really. For her to choose to play. Instead of being forced. It was a horrible cyclical mess. Something in him just kind of said F**k it. If it happened, it happened. He wasn't going to go out of his way to avoid it anymore. He placed his right hand on the counter next to her, his body at an angle with his left shoulder just behind her by about six inches as he peered over to watch her pour. It was a calculated show of bravery...to prove to himself that he could follow through with the idea.

"Eh," she chimed in. "It's my last time here, after what you told me. I have a few others. Better ones. This place is kinda meh....not my style. Just a bed and peace of mind." Explaining how it was absolutely okay that he did whatever he liked to the floor. She went back to worrying the corner of her mouth for a moment as she fumbled with the struggle of opening the bottle with a less-than-convenient bottle opener. Not like the slick expensive thing she had at her actual place.

So....it took her a moment to really contemplate his nearness. To be honest, it was his radiating body-heat that did it. His presence near her. It made her aware that she was cold, that the air conditioning was actually too high, the way that she liked it, the way she had left it in order to tolerate her long sleeves and leather pants. The way she liked hunkering down in big down comforters even in the summer. She pulled the cork out of the bottle and half turned her chin over her shoulder to look at him. Her eyelids sunk a little under lashes that went heavy. She looked from his wet sweater to his damp features. It could have been a look that asked for space, that accused him of personal boundary violations....except....the way her lips parted slowly and that deep look in her eyes....In her mind, another woman, a more experienced woman, with more experienced hands, was rolling the warmer, wet fabric of his shirt up his body. A body she imagined to have a certain soft skin and sculpted, lean harshness. The bottle slipped out of her wet hands and she scrambled to catch it. She nervously laughed. "Ha. haha. S**t."

The fumble saved him. Wet hands or nerves being the actual culprit...didn't matter...he caught a little flash of that scene that played out in her head as she looked up at him through lowered lashes. That's a little more even. That's better. He wasn't going to keep it off of his face either...so he smiled a satisfied little smile, and scooped a hand under the tumbling bottle and pressed it lightly against her open palms to balance it. The movement only bent him even closer. "I could use a towel maybe.." he said, letting the words hit against different parts of her body as he rose to his full height. "I can take care of this.." The last word coming out a little more pointed than the rest as he timed it to plucking the bottle with the corkscrew still wedged into it from her hands.

She froze as he coalesced around her. She was extra aware of the weight of her wet clothes, of the way some of her hair stuck to her throat. Of his nearness. Of his reflexes. She would have made an excuse for hers but that was absurd, she had wet hands and that was that. She should have....yes. Her empty hands curled wary fingers absently in the air in an almost comical and egregiously forlorn gesture- her hands missed something to hold. A beat. "Right." And she ducked out from under and away and gave a half-prance to the towels draped over the rung of the oven. "Here." Then, also, "Thank you." As she extended the towel to him. Then. "Oh, you, for you....riiigghhhtttt." And she immediately walked away from him towards the bathroom.

If ever there was a smile that could be classified as somehow proud and desirous at the same time, it lived on Writ's face the moment she handed him the small towel and it was accompanied by another short three-breathed laugh that stumbled out of his throat. How was she exactly the same but...not...all at once" He took the swatch of terrycloth and watched her retreat from the room. It had its purpose. He dried off his hands and finished uncorking the bottle. Reaching up, he grabbed two fresh glasses and plunked them down on the counter. Finding it a little easier to concentrate on mundane things without her tucked right beneath him, he used her absence to fill the retrieved glassware and stuck his head into her fridge, calling out before he actually got a full view of what was in it. "Are you hungry?"

The scene that happened in the bathroom would have amused him. It would have amused anybody. The second she was fully out of sight she pressed her back against a wall and pulled a pair of wringing hands to her chest. There was some hand gestures, some gesticulating motions that telegraphed a frantic inner monologue. It went on for a moment. Maybe two. When he asked her about food she piped up, "Uh....man...yes..but....I don't think there's much in there...we could order..." What the f**k Liv. Why is she even— why was he even here" He wasn't her friend. She didn't even— well, she didn't know ...she didn't know a lot. But she ....did she feel like she owed him' Like they had to catch up" Did she feel like he was — her past, her family, her blood" What' History' Was she just lonely and it was someone she'd let in the door" Well, it didn't really matter really' They were drinking wine and— and f**king what. She cursed quietly in her mother tongue as she realized she didn't have an actual bedroom to go to here. She sighed, heavily. Was she going to do this like a shy teenage girl in a locker room' Is that how she was going to— oh f**k it. She came out of the bathroom and placed the towel on the counter of the kitchen before continuing her way to the small dresser. "I'm going to— I'm sorry I don't have something for you to change into. I don't really have much here. I live on.....I live uptown."

A scrap of plastic wrap with a tiny wedge of something most likely not for eating...a stray bottle of hot sauce...a water bottle. "You aren't kidding.." he commented, turning towards her as she placed the towel on the counter.

"Yeah," she had a soft laugh for him, "I usually just.....sleep...and I guess drink....in these places." She straightened when she got her hands on the items she was going to change into.

She seemed...disjointed" Is that what he would call it"...Spooked" He eyed her curiously while she shuffled through her dresser and refrained from telling him where exactly she lived. Writ ran his tongue across the inside of his cheek and nodded slightly to himself. Making a mental note that maybe he'd overstayed his welcome. "Hey, you know...um...I'm probably...just going to get soaked ...again on my way out of here." Each fragment was punctuated with a contraction of different muscle groups as he shrugged out of his sweater. "I can just...wring this out.." He finally wrested the garment from his body and dropped it into the sink with a wet thwop. His shoulders pulled back to reach towards one another in a stretch.

She stood there, about to hug the clothes to her chest before holding them in her arms, sort of outstretched so they wouldn't soak up any of the rain that had made a home on her. "Oh, no, that's silly," and just like that she had made up her mind, and she couldn't have explained why, maybe it was a gracious hospitality, or maybe she just didn't like the sound in his voice. The sound that heralded her being left alone. She pointed over at some slatted doors at the corner of the room, the corner of the kitchen and the outer brick wall. "There's a dryer, you can throw it in there. Might be nice to put it on when it's warm later." Just a random, childish comment that was likely inspired by her own temperature variations. She really, truly, did her best to not watch the line of his shoulders. But she couldn't help it. She was reminded of the brand. She knew she would see it when he turned. She swallowed thickly, as she was reminded of the first time she had seen him.

Conflicted, he drew a staggered breath as he ran the towel over his face and down an unmarked chest with one hand. His other hand raked his fingers through his damp hair, smoothing it out of the way, only for it to fall right back into his face. "Ok.." he finally said, all dripping with uncertainty.

The towel still clutched in a ball at his stomach, he moved towards her to round the corner, pausing with a "Thanks."

She smiled at him when he gave the 'thank you.' It was a little sullen, but it was honest.

He knew she'd see it too....but oddly enough...it was the first time since coming back tonight that he even felt the familiar weight of it. No burning, no stinging, no throbbing...he'd actually forgotten all about it until just that moment. His back, unlike his chest and torso, was scarred in numerous places. Scratches and switches it looked like. Nothing traumatic...except the brand, still starkly contrasted against two shades up from pale in bold stacks of purple, red and white scars. The dead tissue had a slight shine to it as he moved under the light and made his way to the dryer. Writ closed his eyes as he passed her. As if that would stop her from seeing it...or feeling whatever it was that it would make her feel. "Wine's on the counter...when you're all cozy." It came out casual as he loaded his sweater into the indicated machine to dry. Yeah, because everything about this was totally normal.

As he passed her, she had a strange feeling like the entire world was in this room, right now, and right here. The quality of it was strange, and she tried to put her finger on what it was. She looked outside, it was still raining, but it felt so bright and naked in here. Naked and exposed. And it really wasn't about the skin-show. It was about working through whatever this was. Her fingers involuntarily flexed as the brand came into view. She realized that her hands just seemed to be drawn to him. Like they were disembodied and hell bent on touching him. The notion was silly. It also stole her reminiscing, because as she was distracted by her hands, she realized what she was holding and what her plan had been. Quickly, while he was turned away, she peeled off the black leather pants. There was a frantic, but quiet as possible, little kick at the end. She replaced them with short, terrycloth shorts.

His sweater was only part of the problem...and if she was seriously going to order food...that meant she did actually expect him to stay...one way or another. Laced boots were quickly loosened, and he stepped on the ankle of each to kick them gently free. By Liv's flailing movements, he knew exactly what she was doing. There was no amount of fight in him to stave off the smirk that formed. Flinging his sweater, undershirt and socks into the barrel of the machine.

"Thanks," just that. A thanks in the interim.

No matter when he turned around, her turtleneck proved long enough to hide anything of importance. To be honest, she really didn't have any reservations about being seen. Well, by anyone else. And she was keenly aware of that. The concept of changing was utilitarian, and a wild childhood of romping through woods and swimming in rivers had never instilled in her any issues of modesty. But there was something strange about this. She turned her back to him and traded her wet turtleneck for an oversized, but still not him-sized, t-shirt. A band logo was etched in the extra soft black fabric. She struggled to pull it over her wet hair as quickly as she could. She'd shake it out, even wring it a little onto the turtleneck when done.

Perhaps there would be some normalcy when she wasn't a wet mess. ...but she still reached over and dimmed one of the lights. She paid no mind to any implications. It was just annoying her. The place had too many white surfaces. "You know, I know exactly what kind of food to order," she thought out loud. "Will even go with the wine." When she turned she would have a smile.

Writ gave the knob a twist and pull. As the drum purred to life, he set his towel on top of the dryer and dropped both hands to his waist. One hand pulled the overhanging length of his belt free from it's loop while the other unfastened the buckle and button. He made short work of it, pooling them around his ankles and hopping once on each foot to pull them free. They weren't too bad off...and his boxers were relatively dry. He left the soft black cotton undergarment in place and laid out his pants on top of the towel, then proceeded to pat down any pooled moisture that had gathered against the leather. As if it heard her, his stomach growled loudly. "Mm.." he echoed..."Fooood.." was the following call, as if he could conjure it by will and incantation alone.

She froze like a doe in headlights. In this instance, it wasn't a change in the light, it was a series of sounds that caught her up. She swallowed thickly, dryly, wishing to at least one god and one goddess that her glass was closer. She wasn't exactly sure when she should turn. She wasn't exactly sure why he was - right, wet. She knew that, she just....expected him to bare it' (Ha") But then again, her head lolled in a consideration-nod as she narrated to herself: leather was awful to wear when wet. Right. Right.

She turned around when she heard him moving and talking and even agreeing with her. She had a smile for him, that smile was so quick to find her petal-shaped lips— so quick to spring to life, though it may have only been her that took measure of the average amount of times it was sincere vs. forced. She glimpsed the brand that warped his flesh before he wrapped it up in a layer of fluffy marshmallow comforter. She blinked slowly as a fog of memory and sensation crept in around her. She could have sworn it slunk in at the edges of her vision and just made that portion of his skin the center of her visual field. It was there that a pang of guilt lived. She wondered how long that would take to go away. Or if it ever would, all things considering.

He had moved towards her bed and grasped the comforter in one balled fist. Turning towards her, he smiled serenely and yanked the blanket right off, simultaneously wrapping it around himself like some sort of puffy druid. He waddled passed her. There. That ought to take the tension down a notch. One hand crept out from the folds of his encasing to nab his glass of wine off the counter and lift it to his lips. He took a small sip and with a good deal of effort, managed to wedge himself into a seated position on her counter. "What now?" he asked with one cocked eyebrow..."Wanna show me your yearbooks?" It was a smart*ss remark, dripping in six shades of sarcasm. A not-so-subtle code for What the f**k are we doing" ...and he hoped she could read him at least that well.

She made a motion to move towards the couch, but then he aimed for the counter, so she rerouted that direction. She reached for her glass and swallowed a liberal draft before she spoke- lubricating her mouth as well as her mind. "I have a scrap book I'm pretty proud of," she smiled in such a warm way in the dimmer light, that she had a little glow of her own. "But it's not here,” the smile fell, but only a little. It lit again with a sarcasm that was comfortable for her. "What....food do you miss the most from home?" she began with an initiative of excitement. She seemed to have a guess as to what it was. She sat on the stool next to him and waited for his reply. "Also, do you want me to turn down the AC?" she laughed a mellifluous laugh that tasted like freedom and summer pollen on an overly-pleasant spring wind through the forests of their youth. She didn't mean to, but she tossed her hair to remove a particularly light tendril from her features as if she could illustrate the effect it would have on her halo of pale hair. She tried to stop the anticipatory smiling by taking another sip, but it danced jovial and delighted in her eyes.

Huddled in his wedged seat on the counter, he let his head fall back against the bunched up fluff cradling his neck. Light brown eyes slid closed, lips turned up in one corner in response to her handed-back sass. A soft rumble caught in his throat. He inhaled deeply...like he could smell the answer she was looking for. Images pooled in his minds eye. His mother. Laughing. His siblings. Liv— always at a distance, just out of reach. Running through trees. Standing in awe at waters edge— he could still hear the shouting of fishmongers trying, and failing, to rip-off the gypsy women with their shawls and sharp tongues. He spent a lot of time in that market. Always at his mother's side. He said he went to protect her from the discrimination that could be found there...but even the hexxo knew better than to cross the Strega. If ever there was a being that didn't need protection, it was her....and in truth, he went with her because he simply liked watching her wield that power in the face of ignorance. Besides— a trip to the fish market meant stopping at his aunt's for lunch. The path his memories went down finally fell on the answer. The women would stand in the kitchen, adding the catch, fresh herbs from the hanging baskets outside the window, olive oil, little red threads of saffron, and a myriad of other aromatics, tomato, garlic, and onion into the pot like they were mixing potions in a veritable cauldron. He'd listen to them bicker back and forth about how much of each to add and when and why the other shouldn't do it the way she was doing it. Bebee Nisha and mother weren't really sisters.

His aunt was actually from another tribe entirely. Another place. She had a lot of unpopular ideas...especially regarding the Roma youth's right to choose their marriage partners— a topic that would almost always end the visit. He didn't know then that they were arguing about him....and in that reflection, the tone that sent the word "Bouillabaisse.." out of his mouth was longing, two-fold, for the familiar taste of that food, and for Nisha, who at least tried to prevent what was coming soon after those conversations. Writ's eyes opened and he tipped his chin downward so he could watch her as she perched on the stool adjacent to him and asked her next question. He smiled a little dreamily at her. Eyes still memory-drunk as they watched the words form on the lips that should have been allowed to be his choice. That were...that are...his choice.

But also not. Because could he really help it' He was glad the next question couldn't possibly invoke anything so manipulating and draining within him. "No way!" He piped up, decidedly lighter. "It's perfect in here." He opened his arms wide in gesture. "Freezing on the outside, warm as hell inside. Best of both worlds." He paused to stare at her a moment, eyes steady and radiating the warmth he had just described. Then one of Writ's legs stretched out and he slowly hooked his foot under the bottom wrung on her stool. Another pause. A slow, careful pull to drag her light, seated form towards him without toppling her or spilling her wine. "Are you cold?"

She would swear to him, and herself, later, that she could smell it. She was sure that she was inhaling the soft spices and comforting warmth right into her lungs through nostrils that flared ever so faintly. Her mouth watered. She had been right. She could not remember if she had known or if he had shared the memory with her (before or just then), but it was pleasant and intoxicating. Like the way he looked at her. Her chin tipped down and her smile tipped a little to the side as she turned away. Just a few degrees but the coyness in the face of his intensity was obvious. Something a little overwhelming. It came from nowhere and hung around. Even when she laughed. "So, the reason this apartment is here is because you can get a bouillabaisse that kinda....kinda tears your heart out. Does that work?" Eventually looking back at him more squarely and with conviction. Then she laughed quietly at him. "You—" and he pulled he closer. She adjusted her perch for the inertia and then back again like riding horseback. "You ask me like you want to share," share the blanket. Then. F**k it. "Are you flirting with me?"

His laugh was almost non-existent. It was barely formed and made mostly out of one huff of breath that sailed through his nasal passage, more of a hmph, really. He chewed his lip a little at the idea that a steaming bowl of seafood stew was headed their way and it made him want to draw her in even closer. Another reminder of home at her hands. She might need to stop doing that. He'd not tasted that familiarity in an incredibly long time...and he was just now realizing how ravenous he was for it. He stopped dragging her stool to him but left the two edges of the blanket open to her. His arms were resting against his knees, glass of wine held in one hand between them as he used the other to display the gap that housed his now dry body in emphasis to his reply. "I'm almost positive there is nothing gentlemanly about this or inviting you in to share it...So...maybe?...Is it working?"

That damn smile. Both of them. The one he drew out and the one he drew with his mouth. She couldn't hide this one, she just tilted it down at her phone which she plucked off the counter. A few swipes, a swish sound and "Done. Think you can put up with me for 45 minutes" That's at least how long it takes to get here. And....hmm. Were you going for gentlemanly' Are you inviting me into your marshmallow cocoon?" She reached over, picked up her glass, and picked up his from his hand. Nonchalant, like it was nothing. So close, but less close than he offered, right' How was a girl supposed to get a hold on a message. "Cmon. Couch. ....I think it's working. I....I " She paused and looked at him. "I don't know what I want right now. I don't ever have people over, Writ. But I really just don't want you to leave. Is that weird" It feels weird but I know that's what I feel. ...I just know I trust you. How could I not' That's where I am....and....You are strangely charming. Even with lip-prints on your neck." She lifted her chin and indicated his suspicious activity before absconding with the wineglasses and bottle (a juggler's touch) to drop herself over on the couch expectantly.

When olive toned skin blushes, it creeps like a vine and appears in hot ruddy patches in places that the blood rushes and goes sallow in the places it leaves. As if his neck knew it had been caught red han-...er...red lipped, the flush immediately dispersed from his collar bone, flooded upward and crashed to a halt just below his jaw line. A hand flew to the spot to rub at it with a quickness that would have suggested he'd just realized he was on fire. "Oh...erm..." Throat clear, dismount, follow like a puppy to where she relocated. As confident as he may have felt a moment ago, he'd been easily and comically disarmed...somehow the feat terrified and exhilarated him, simultaneously. "I was trying t-.." What was he going to tell her" I was so pent up from being next to you for the first time in forever that I needed to bang my way out of the cloud of confusion and desire" He doubted very much that that would be a wise direction to go in, so instead...his train of thought jumped tracks. "...to offer...my marshmallow cocoon, yes...if you were cold." Ahem. Not a very suave change of course, but...there it was. He almost shrugged at himself. "And yeah...I think I could put up with you for a lot longer than 45 minutes, Kor. And...I don't want to leave either." The term of endearment always involuntarily brought a smile-smirk to the surface. It was a button he was fond of pressing...the rest of his statement's honesty sent another rush of warmth, this time through his stomach. Writ stretched lazily, the lines of his body going rigid with the physical manipulation of lean muscle. The effect brought his arms up in a V, pulling his torso taut as he stretched the comforter out like a curtain behind him.

When he finally collapsed onto the couch next to her, he swung the blanket about to his side, carefully positioning the layer of fluff between them. Some of that old familiar caution creeping back in through the crack of doubt she'd left open. Uncertainty on her part, always did that. "I told you something I missed about home...Is there anything you can think of...I mean...I know the situation wasn't...um...but there has to be something or someone you miss" Trivial or otherwise."

She laughed quietly during most of the flush and the beginnings of his commentary. It was a strangely composed and self-possessed sort of laugh. A laugh of someone much more experienced in this realm of kiss and tell. As he spoke she sprinkled most of the laugh over her own glass which was lazily cradled in her hand. But her icy eyes were back on him as quick as a whip when he used the pet name. It didn't cause a movement in her head, or a turn of her features, she was already facing him, but it was a blinking open of half down-turned eyes. It was something of a statement in and of itself. She wouldn't have been able to explain why his playful smile made her mirror it, but it did. "Well, hey, look at that. We agree on something." And the smile unfurled to be something more genuine and more sunny. Then she pursed her lips and looked thoughtful, "Hmm," she began, "well...." She reached over and picked up the top corner of the comforter that was between them. She shimmied a little on the comforter to pull her knee up between them and turn her body towards him. She took the corner of the blanket towards him as she was speaking, "I miss how it.....felt. I think that's the best way to explain it," and if he let her, or didn't spook, she began to use the blanket to rub away the red stains on his skin. (If he didn't, then she would stop and watch him as she continued.) "I miss running around the woods and....I think I'm an out-doors person. Other than that....I mean....a lot of things. I guess a whole lot of things, as I think about it." She frowned softly, "I dunno, I guess I just have thoughts of home all locked up in a box inside me since it's not an option. Sorry. I just couldn't— mm...I didn't want to keep looking at those."

He let her. It meant her being closer. Second by second that was a harder to refuse situation. Writ's eyes slinked shut as she dabbed at his neck and he listened to her voice— it crashed against his skin like waves and made him feel like the atoms that made him into what and who he was shift apart, leaving gaps for her to fill. "It's nice to be able to say something out loud that someone else actually understands." His voice was thick as his eyes crept open, searching her face for that familiarity. "You never went back?"

That sense of reaching for him, again. As if she herself radiated off her skin like shimmering warmth and specifically wanted to flood into those very spaces. As though she could creep in between his breaths or flood through his veins. She had a sense that it started when he closed his eyes, like he enjoyed the sensation of her touch. She strangely imagined what that would be like, the soft comforter on her throat petting away nothing at all. "You mean...what I said" You know what I mean?" Unfocused eyes focused on him when he looked at her. Her actions slowed but continued. "No. Why ...how ....I ....I don't really think that was an option. I just didn't even consider it. And I guess I kinda like what I do. ...whatever that means about me." Finally finished, she let the comforter slowly rest on his shoulder, her hand atop it, paused, unused, not thought about.

"Mm." he murmured drowsily. Whether an agreement, a concession, or an unbidden instinctual response to her actions remained to be determined. "Home is home. It's in your bones somehow. " He paused to study the skeletal structure of the hand resting on his shoulder. "No matter how awful, or...incredible...it was...it's always going to be your foundation. You can layer all sorts of stuff on top of it...which to the outside world will come to know as who you are, but people that share the same fundamental, at your core, pieces of you...there's an understanding to be found there that's hard to come by." There was a sort of painful expression in his eyes, in the way his jaw clenched before he tipped it closer to her hand. A no-contact sweep of his chin slowly passing over her fingers.

She didn't know what to do with her hand. So she left it there. And it greedily soaked up the nearness. His warmth and his attention were.....were fine. Just fine. She was painfully aware that she had absolutely no schema for this. Not a man on her couch. But their history on her couch, sitting there conversing. "No one back home cares about who or where or what I am. I don't even think they understand me. I mean....I think I'd be more mad about what they did if they did. " She frowned, but it was reflective, and not at him. She let her arm sink, taking her hand in a guarded stroke down his arm above the blanket. "You are all that I have of home......" She wanted to add an 'i guess' but, it wasn't a guess. It was a realization, though.

Writ felt his mouth open- a passage by which to let out some of this full-bodied need disperse in a warm breath. His eyes followed her movement and every curve and thread of muscle in his arm practically vibrated with constriction. God damn it. The line about home hit him square in the chest and he swallowed hard. After a moment of internal debate, he choked out a slightly strangled "Can you just.." while he writhed beneath her hand. He pulled the blanket up and away from him, gesturing that he was going to wrap her in it completely with a quirk of a brow to ask her permission.

It was too much. Really it was just too much. There was only so much will power one can have when fantasies walk away with reality. Her particular fantasy had been holding him. More accurately, being held by him. She had this urge to curl up her knees and body and just fold in on him in a wrap of arms that looped ad infinitum. She didn't know how to get there. But it was partly due to the fact that she mostly didn't know how she would let go of him. She didn't know if she would want to, and she did not know what she would say to him after she did. Earlier, she had wanted to sob against him, to just cry and cry until it was gone and she was bled clean of whatever was in there festering. Maybe what let him go would know what to say to him after. ....Regardless. That was just her thoughts. When he laid down his own hand, the suit of cards, the fortune of them....the similarity ...well....It was all just invitation. It was almost childish how she did it, perhaps painful how it came in a rush.....Liv just...coalesced with him, sneaking in under the blanket and wrapping her arms around him, snaking them behind his back and locking his ribs in her arms and crushing her cheek against his chest. It was an embrace. A hard one. A tight one. And a part of her would never leave that moment. Her body shook in a tremble like she had gone freezing cold. Yet, her experience of that first touch was quite the opposite. Unconsciously, she pressed and dragged the hard line of her cheekbone against his collarbones, nuzzling him in an animalistic way.

Beneath, a parted mouth smeared the plush planes of her lips, leaving a warm trail of wet that would shimmer like a comet tail that exploded in an utterly subconscious kiss of his skin. When her mouth closed in that kiss, it just opened again with a hungry sigh .....and slow inhale. Closing her lips against him was a warm, wet drag of the inner plane of her lower lip. Home. Drunk on his skin. She felt as though something inside of her wanted to pour all over him slow and sticky like honey.

He didn't really have time to deflect her move or even complain to himself that he was merely going to swaddle her up to remove the temptation to drag the electricity humming in his veins across her bare skin. She made the choice for him...and for f**ks sake...he was not unhappy about it...at all. The breath that fell from his lips as her kiss made contact had a weight behind it. A guttural reflex no longer than a single syllable- like she'd pushed all the air straight out of him in one fell swoop. The rise and fall of his chest became exaggerated with the strain that was coursing through him...and at the third, like he'd been counting, he pulled her chin up with one hand and brought his mouth down to towards hers. He hovered there for a moment. The tip of his nose grazing against her cheek while his thumb gently pressed down on her plush bottom lip, separating it from its perfect counterpart. "What did you do?" he asked in a barely audible rasp. His free arm wrapping tight and warm around her- hoping that when her trembling met his own, they'd solidify together and find refuge.

When he touched her face, the eyes that he made contact with were dazed. Drunk. She had no need to see his skin so close (her soul saw it just fine) but his features she wanted. She forced her harsh blue gaze into submission and it drank him in. She let her warm breath spill over his thumb, let her lower lip slack just a little so he could see teeth. See the soft, wet pink of her insides as though they could create symbolism together. Sacrificial offerings to the crazy tribal tune of their trembling touch— communicating through a DNA deep resonance. The touch of his nose sent sensations to her heart, a curling spiral of want permeating her like cream in the black of coffee. A small, isolated storm and then it became everything. Diffusion of lust. "What I f**king wanted," she said. The most tender, and quiet threat. Like an addict. Like an epithet tossed at him from an ache in the soul that would have nothing else but him. She moved her chin, she slipped to the side, quick and instinctual, making his thumb slick her skin as she closed the distance between mouths. The crush of lips was a parted, messy thing.....just for the sake of it. Because there was something wholly libidinous between them. Among all the rest, that was there. And it made her raise her hands, scooting closer, encroaching on him as she slid both palms against the side of his neck and held him by fingers at the nape. She fused them together, almost like displaying him reverently — a sacred fount for her mouth to savage.

Something in his chest broke open. The tight want and need of her after all those years that had sat like a lead weight in the space between his throat and proverbial heart disintegrated beneath Liv's worshiping ministrations. Images of well worn forest paths being ran down, wildflowers, and the sound of laughter that manifested like the embodiment of the Sun, flashed in little adoring flickers in his mind, coating his skin in goosebumps. Writ groaned into her mouth. Teeth scraped against her as he kissed her, taking her bottom lip between his before nudging hers apart further with fervent tongue and devotion. The kiss grew hungry. He'd been starving for her....and now home was right here. Right in the curl of his lap. His hands moved from her face to tangle his fingers into her still damp hair— bare and sculpted forearms of vein and sinew anchoring her small frame against him with the gentle press of where they rested on her shoulders. His body rose to meet her because even this close, wasn't close enough.

She had lived in flashes of memories of him whenever he was near. A part of her resented him for the lure and draw he had for her from the very first time she had seen him. Something in her had chosen him before they had tried to force her to accept. But that wasn't the way to do it. Not for Liv. They should have known better. So there was a peculiar rope of contempt that wound her up when he was around. That rope frayed and snapped all at once. His skin danced with the fantastical freedom of her nature, now refined but still wild. So she wanted to consume it with her very presence. He drew her up and closer, she relished the creep and weight of his arms, his fingers in her hair ...but she resisted. She resisted because she was a planner and she was hyper aware of her own physical form. It's what she did, afterall. Every inch her body took was perfectly measured in her mind, and she had to adjust the mechanics of her limbs to slip knees on either side of his hips- to properly crawl in his lap. Somehow keeping her chest against him, beating softly with little pants nearly in time with her heart, as it slither-slipped against his own chest. One hand slid down the stem of his neck to knead and pet the flat plane of his chest, just to slide back up and over it again to hold his throat at the base. Here she could anchor herself, push and pull. She would do both as she aligned them with a little rock of her hips forward so her stomach pressed against him but her shoulders bowed her head down.

Though at a height and angle of control, there was abandon and submission in the way she let her lips part for his tongue. She licked him with a soft feminine sound, a quiet plea, as a lock of her hair fell against his features and then was followed by a sheaf of honey tresses that would hide half his face like even some of the gods weren't able to watch the orchestrations of their ill spent years playing at fate. She pushed her thumb into the swell of his throat to push him back so she could take her turn in his mouth with a tongue that wanted to find the place that groan had come from. Relentless. Her other hand finally took a grip of his hair and tugged its own request. She came on like a wave and that current heralded a storm. A storm that manifested in a long limbed girl, barely wrapped in soft sleeping clothes that, for a moment, had to have her way with how things went because she felt like she had been waiting longer than she could remember and the world and everyone else had had their way with her for far too long. This moment was hers. Theirs.

Her words broke any restraint remaining. What I f**king wanted.. It was the only thing that she could have possibly said to unmake him. Tear down the walls of martyrdom and sacrifice. The Good Ruler. Succumbing to desire instead of duty...and yet here they were. Full circle. Warm hands slid beneath the hem of her shirt, pressing the pads of his fingers into the base of her spine. "Say it again.." he demanded against her parted mouth, buckling beneath the twist of her winding...wounding...hips. His hands crept further along her back until his forearms were resting flat against her in a possessive embrace. His mind went quiet and he searched for her. Finding that all too familiar wave that flowed between their separate consciousness. Could she feel that too' Did she hear him' Claiming her. Decisively. Palms moved flat against her skin, drifting downward again to pray at the altar of her ribs. They swept higher. His thumbs gently grazed the first outer curve of her breasts. The sensation unbridled a breath abated kiss- turning him predatory in the curve of his mouth on hers, reservations admonished by tongue and fever. "This is your choice. Tell me."

She felt him fall. My ancient kingdom came crashing down without you, baby child the lyrics not necessarily in her mind nor on her tongue, but keening and making music in the razed earth of her insides. Her back flexed and elongated under his hands. Every cell of this girl responded to him. Bathed in the idea that it would be, that it could be, touched by him. She supplicated by degrees before his hands, so even without a land of his own, she made a land of herself as he traversed her skin. His. She felt him envelop her in a dark, rich heat that was him. Searching. Coveting. Claiming. Averring. And that felt so good. It was home to be his. He crept into her and she was drunk on Want as well as Wanted. She licked at his mouth, at his words. At his request. "I f**king want you—" centuries passed. Particularly in the breath that held and exploded in between— her form set to a quiet, staccato panting as he exposed her to a desire she had never known without him. And never explored with him. "— of course I f**king want you." Like the alternate truth was impossible. Had never existed. And her entire body told him. The way she rolled her weight closer, a graceful undulation that played with the landscape of her skin that he surveyed before making her tremble as he touched such soft, secret curves. Her hands slid up his throat like she would grab his jaw....Her heart thundered in her chest and she glowed with its radiant warmth. "Of course it's my choice. I— Please," her mouth smeared down his chin and she leaned down and up and in, begging gently at the curve of his chin and pulling that soft mouth up to his lips just to do it again "Please." I want you to, it was hot in her mouth, it was wet in the kiss. A kiss she would only break to pull the soft, loose shirt from her body. It went up and over her mane of light blonde that rained softly from the neck of the clothing as it was pulled away. Her hair shook like sunlight and framed her as angelic for a moment before she crushed her mouth against him again. She pressed all of her against him— pinning his hands and his words against her like she could not tolerate distance. Not from him. Not right now— as though she had waited lifetimes to feel his heat, his skin, this close. She exhaled a secret sound of prurient joy. He was so simply and purely revelled that she sighed it into his mouth.

The skin she pressed against him, her kiss, the weight of her words in his mouth, moved against his tongue and teeth like prayers- alms to the less fortunate. Not for lack of contact but lack of depth. Lack of the shape of her that fit so perfectly straddled in his lap and twisted around the dull beat of a long-since wasted heart. His arms tensed around her— the last Please she dripped against his chin, like the promise of forever lived in that single syllable, was answered with a small, swift, and decisive movement. Cradling her back, Writ hefted, turned, and rolled their tangled forms until she was planted firmly between himself and the couch. The musculature of his shoulders, neck and arms carved small divots and valleys into his flesh as he moved- Stalking above her with one hand resting in the cushions for support while he extended himself downward, free hand curling fingertips into the waistband of her shorts while his mouth acquainted itself with the newly uncovered curve of her hip. Alabaster. Perfect porcelain- so unlike the olive hues currently pressed against it, was achingly beautiful. He was vaguely aware of the hypnotic effect her swaying, rocking, and coiling had on him. The intoxication that watching the beginning of unbidden response, still soft and mildly controlled, made him swallow hard and his fingers dig into the couch a little deeper. Varied lines, both curved and straight, of the body that has owned him for as long as he'd been aware of it's existence, was currently trapped beneath him like quarry. He wanted to hear it again. "One more time.." he murmured, letting his breath sweep across the expanse of sensitive skin between her navel and the tightly clutched fabric of her shorts in his fist.

That sigh continued, like it could be endless. A theme she was beginning to understand as she plumbed the depths of her own self to achieve some understanding of how badly she wanted this man. As he moved them, as he traded places, as he took height and the high ground she pushed her hands into his hair— revelling in the soft tangles of it as it slid between her fingers. Something plush and smooth and feral about even his hair, perhaps she could smell him. His scent drifting over her and into her like she was some predatory creature playing a game of hunt a hunter. Her back softly arched under his hands, and her legs found a loose hold around him, where it was comfortable, where he fit, where they could keep him close if he threatened to move away. Eventually one of her hands slipped down his neck, held his shoulder, clung to muscle and skin. So dangerously close to the brand behind his shoulder blade but not wandering over the crest of his frame. She murmured a soft feminine sound as his breath fell across her skin. Like he was unraveling her from the inside out. Skin that he set to trembling moments before— she would be hard pressed to remember exactly when. "Please, please, Writ," she turned her hips one way and then the other, scooting down against the couch like her body knew what angles to offer. Instincts. All instincts, "f**k, I have wanted this....—..you...from the day I first saw you I just..." i just wasn't ready. Not like that "please." Talk about it after. After....She could come so close to commanding even as her entire form was a precipitous offer waiting— just on him. Pale and mostly naked but still wild as the night, the dark pupils of her eyes were so large, they deepened that penetrating blue that swam somehow like sea now instead of sky.

His forearm pulled taut- the fabric curled in his hand whined softly at his grip. The want— hers...his...was brutal in the way it washed over him like the convergence of freezing and scalding water, taking parts of his soul in the violence of it's undertow only to bring them back to him, somehow fuller, in a painfully rhythmic wave. He felt his breath go out of him and his chest tighten as he closed his eyes to savor the slow pull that peeled the last piece of clothing from her body. The pads of his fingers dug gently into her thighs, palms smoothing the fabric down the long length of those stealthy, nimble limbs. A faint, barely-there trace of hands to the back of her knees and down along the seams of her calves. It was a languid, indulgent move, until he threw the garment across the room once it was wrested from her. He looked down at her. Mine. his stare said- carving his name across the length of her naked body in a gaze. He let out a breath he might have been holding this entire time and righted himself. In the tail end of his exhale, he cupped the back of her right thigh and lifted it straight upward until her leg rested flat against his torso. If he bent...if he pressed his shoulders in a little more....it'd lift her just enough to curl her legs, bent at the knee, to drape them onto his back...He paused though letting his head turn to drag a kiss along the inside of her leg. Another hot breath clinging to her skin. The palm of his other hand traced a similar path down the core of her, from her sternum, along the flat of her stomach, further still, tortuously slow in pace, while he watched the wild expression flood her eyes.

The waves of their want washed back and forth on dark, spectral tides. There was amplification in their resonance. There was validation in the way they looked at each other. All at once she had words for what she wanted and yet only a desire to show him. Show him in the way she sighed as he stripped the soft clothing off her body. The brush of his fingertips opened her like she was made of doors she didn't know or understand. But he had keys to each of them. Unlocking the labyrinth of her as soon as he found the corridors of sensation that she didn't know were there. She opened for him. Opened under his eyes, and his hands. Opened in the way she let him lift her legs. Her lips parted as her eyes drank the word behind his stare. She wanted to inhale it. To feel it crawl into her in every way and she wanted it to burn on her skin in the soft, throbbing of desire that turned from something shadowy and lurking to something that ached. She smiled softly, absently, still so painfully Liv as he threw her clothes. But here she bloomed, a little squirm in the arch of her back as she lifted herself, just a little, into his hand that swept over her skin like warm sunlight. There was a drunkenness to her eyes, how they glistened and took on depths that could have been tricks of the light. But he was right. The wilderness inside of her crept in. Slithered in from the walls she tried to keep it beyond. The wildling child she had been became an unbridled and untamed woman beneath his hands. "God," she cursed softly, lifting one of her hands to reach for him. For the back of his neck, for his hair, for his chin, for his shoulder, for his upper arm, for his forearm....whatever, one and all. She would touch all of him that she could, "you're still so far away," like she was writing their mythology in her mind. Painting her desire in terms that might be more palatable. Maybe she just wanted to put her mouth on him. Maybe she wanted him inside her. Likely it was all of the above. Everything. No matter what, it was a confession. Though the rest of her had already given her up like a weak-willed accomplice that fluttered like the soft tendons of her inner-thighs. "F**k me, Writ." We'll figure it out later, Writ. I have so much more to say. But it's ok. Want. F**k. Want.

Adrift in the correlation, the silent dance, of their need, he labored to find his breath, nearly drowned in the wake of fate and deprivation. Like it was making up for lost time. A vendetta. A cosmic chastising of I told you so's wracked and gripped at his body like Liv's seeking hands. you're still so far away...She said. In response, he'd caught one of her blindly reaching limbs around the wrist and brought it up above the honey spun halo of her hair, pinning it against the arm rest of the couch. He sank down against her, slowly forcing her legs apart with the width of his torso and warming her once sun-kissed skin with the weight of all the things that hadn't changed. His lips drew themselves along the finely carved shape of her chin with small gusts of breath in between the languid stroll of his kiss- small reminders that this was far from casual for him, almost a tremor against her flesh everywhere they connected, skin on skin. Writ groaned softly into the curve of her neck— and just as quickly as the sound made it's way out from the very center of everything he's ever f**king wanted...he froze. Those words. Her words. Hit his ribcage with a sickening crunch. He could feel the sweet intoxication that had enveloped them start to spin and disperse, like waking from a dream. Liv's voice echoed against Vai's in his mind. F**k me, Writ. He involuntarily gave his head a little shake and pulled back to look down at her. Mouth a painful inch away from hers. Brows furrowed. Troubled. Like he couldn't find what the feeling was. "This isn't that." he said, resolutely- with a swallow that defied the quiet certainty in his voice. His lips parted and the next words that had lined up on his tongue were headed off by a loud knock.

She was not unaware of the narrative they were re-writing. Somewhere in her she felt like she had destroyed years of their lives at the whim of a spoiled child. There was guilt, and there was a soft fear that she would be discovered considering regret. It was so confusing. So she just let him wash over her. She wanted the moment. This moment. But this was not a moment she knew, it was a moment she thought she did, or could convince herself that she did. He was a current that could persuade her to be herself, in a place she didn't even know herself. He almost kissed away the soft, humming fear. A fear of discovery. A fear of innocence. These things thundered in her chest as he held her hand above her, replacing the uncanny need to touch with another need - to be touched. As he came closer she sighed, the tangle of their sounds making the air pregnant and warm with the soft cadence of desire. She tilted her head to the side, ever so faintly, letting him wander the angle of her jaw and kiss the moment into that warm perfection. Her eyes dared to drift closed, her other arm encircled him, her legs drew him close and closer. She pulled herself against him to feel the crush of his warmth that she had imagined a hundred times and then.....she felt it like a slow scoop of her insides with bony fingers. Like they wrapped around her heart and pulled her breath back through her veins as something awful closed its fist.

She closed that horrible distance to kiss his hovering mouth a f**king need that would have rendered her mute if she did not take it. Catching him with her eyes as they opened and she skipped like a record and then pleaded with her soul — let my heart free, Writ, don't ...not like....See me. "I— I ..I know...I didn't...I couldn't say I lo— I..." was it panic" Or was it desperation at being caught playing with facades. Afraid. He had seen right through her, the part of her that was wary enough to feign nonchalance and — was it the lipstic stains" The guilt' The fear of him figuring her out' The knock pounded in her chest. She had to finish, the words stumbled out of her mouth. "I didn't mean it like that. I mean....I do...want...." and while part of her wanted to run, to turn away, the impulsive creature was best at following her wants, not her fears. She hugged him with her free arm and her legs and she buried her face in the side of his neck as though she could hide from him and comfort him at the same time. The compulsion was more than she could understand. Perhaps there were other things to do first. "I don't even want you to get up to get that, Writ. I can't even —" she sighed, it was strikingly laden with ....regret' With an aching desire to not let him go.....it said nothing of sex. It was from the heart. "...I'm sorry." I'm sorry for just f**king that all up.

The way she curved inward on herself had a way of pulling two very conflicting responses out of him. The first made him ache for her. Made him want to wrap her in his arms and tuck her safely against him. Protect. We protect the things we love.. Chaya. Her voice piping up for the second time in two days. Had it really only been two days"! Ghosts of the last few things she'd said to him before he left and the retorts he knew his sister would have for him. The second response was to bare Liv. Uncover her. Completely. Arms pinned and outstretched. Naked. Unable to shield herself in any way. Open her. Expose her. Give him the passage he so desperately wanted. The idea prowled in his chest like a starving predator. All lust, and love. Need and want. Greed. To his surprise...A third...new reaction...cropped up in the humor to be found in being on the cusp of ecstacy with the literal girl of his dreams, naked and writhing, and begging to be f**ked beneath him...and then the dinner bell...followed by the mortified and unjustly adorable way she apologized into his neck. Keeping up with the unpredictable gait of things, the third option won...It broke out of him in a barely audible, and rueful chuckle. He nuzzled the side of his smiling face into her hair. "Either you let me go...or I'm bringing you, naked, with me."

Time stopped and waited for him. She waited for him. She couldn't bare to be misunderstood or to misrepresent herself again. She knew it wouldn't happen, she knew. But she let him find the next move. Whatever it may be. Not really a girl to let someone lead, it was a bit strange to drown there. To hide herself in the crook of his neck and to hide in such plane sight and such nearness. She listened to the way they breathed. She still could barely restrain herself from sinking in and floating away to just the sensation of his body as it breathed against her. Because she was there, with him, in a strange, adorable lust. "Bring me with you," she said, like a whimsical, girlish request. "I want to know what that feels like," to be picked up by him. Everything that meant, everything that felt like, she wanted that, too. She also wanted another moment. Another several. She smiled against his skin and kissed him, plush but pressing, full of apology and her signature abandon. She started a trail of them, they were almost rough and clumsy but they slowly became more wet, more of an inner lip,...until it melted into a slow lick of his skin. Still so connected to the overwhelming want of him, she could match this tone, too.

It wasn't difficult to rope him back in. The horrifying ache that cursed at him for stopping was momentarily sated in the curl of her tongue. His smile tilted, good humor marred slightly by less than good natured thoughts. He coiled one arm around her back and waist, pulling her up as he rose. It was an effortless maneuver to tuck her against him. Puzzle pieces. Locked and sealed together by limb and desire. His arm strategically draped across her bare ass to cover her with a shred of modesty as he moved towards the door, slow, strong, and steady, kissing her shoulder, throat, temple with each measured stride.

She cooed quietly as he began to move. She sucked the soft skin of his neck into her mouth as he pulled her from the couch. All of her tightening around him. Clinging. Clutching. She snuggled herself into an adornment around him. As he draped his arm she nuzzled closer, by the hips, through her legs. She was somewhat unaware of the impractical nature of her nakedness, but she was completely aware of what it felt like to have his skin against her. There was something a little claiming about it. But with its own healthy measure of being claimed as she maneuvered her kisses through the ebb and flow of those he cast upon her. She rolled her features, accommodating his mouth as it pressed to her surfaces. She felt safe under his mouth. She committed each touch to memory. Sacred memory. Something sweet and simple and adoring about them, even in the moment of nakedness and lost-lust, or the illusion of it.

The banging rang out again. "Just a minute.." Writ barked, following up the command with a soft thud as Liv's back hit the wall on the other side of the closed door. She had a little laugh for the way the wall made her chest cast a hollow breath. It wasn't rough, but it was steady and tangible and very real.

He just needed more. So he took it. He pressed his mouth against hers, shielding her body between his and the wall and wrenched the door open forcefully with a frustrated hand. Not bothering to pull his lips away, he glared beyond her, like a warning animal over a fresh kill, at the very confused delivery driver. Mine.

When he kissed her it was like granting her wish. He had just been too far. She wanted to kiss him. So she did. And it was hungry. Liv kissed him with a parted mouth, and with her tongue. She tilted her features to the side away from the open door, aware of what he was doing and allowing for him to at least make that eye contact. If only she had known. Her hands crept up to cradle the underside of his jaw.

"Eh..." was the only thing the kid managed to get out before the food was snatched and the door was shut promptly in his face.

Shen the door closed she could turn his features back towards her. Affording only so much practicality. Mine. The kiss would only die for words, for the expectancy that something else should happen.

The exertion of doing...nothing...was exhausting in it's exercised effort to not throw the food down and do exactly what she'd asked for and it caught in his chest with a rasp when he spoke. "Are you hungry?"

There was a brief moment of her caught lower lip in her teeth as she leaned back against the wall. She lifted her chin and had to laugh a little. It was a deeper laugh than her usual. Something prowling at the back of her throat and her mind. "Yes, Writ. I'm hungry," for what was left to his imagination for a moment. She licked her lips slowly before she settled her gaze back upon him. And those sky-blue eyes regarded him like they never really had before. There was a soft happiness haunting their corners, even as they seemed to drink all of his features in with their heavy stare into his eyes. "Will you stay' Tonight. Whatever else happens, will you just stay after" I don't want to be ...I want you to stay." Cautious words, like picking stepping stones through a mire of hidden things that cling to the skin. "Even if we yell at each other again?"

There was a flutter in her. And she wondered how much she believed him. But the weight of that worry had not eclipsed her ability to just feel it. She softly prayed it never would. Softly hoped that she never fought this war that she could see in him. It would take her a long while to understand the weight of his burden. She wanted to lift it from him but she wanted it to disappear, not merely be transferred. She smiled at him, she smiled at him and she pet and pulled and played with his hair like they were teenagers, post dose, experiencing a rush of dopamine that lit like electricity in their scalp. She wanted to please him with the things they, only they, could do. So she turned and she let his quiet, half drunk questions lure her in. She kissed his mouth gently, it was led by a nuzzle of the tip of her nose and a taste stolen from him by her tongue tip. A spritely kiss. An amuse-bouche, a starter. "Just....you, Writ. I want to learn you. I want to put you on and see us, and this, and me, and you through you. ...like some messy, perverted tangle of—" she gently shook her head and kissed his mouth again. Speaking nonsense she hid it in just that want to kiss him again.

There was a pleasant buzz from her living beneath his skin. When she nuzzled, he countered, a perfect push and pull. It radiated from the nape of his neck, into his hair, into her hands, to the tip of her tongue she sampled him with, back into his mouth, into his lips that pressed against the soft space between her chin and throat, threading through her in a coiling slither until the next connection of their skin where it would transfer back and bring him her pleasure to experience as well. Like it was doing exactly what she asked. Like she willed it into existence. She wanted to try him on. Feel this, know this, see this through him...and that snake-like current was doing just that. "Mm..Can we be a messy, perverted tangle...over there?" he gestured to the bed he'd pulled the covers from earlier with an errant tip of his head in it's general direction. "I think your couch knife is stabbing me in the ass." His eyes had drifted closed...an almost peaceful expression washing away all lines of worry that had formed during non-dinner. Almost peaceful in that a dimple creased into his right cheek that smacked of teenage ulterior motives.

She was vaguely aware of what it might feel like to be a drug addict. To put needle to vein. To push a plunger. Just this was made of skin and intention, the soft tangles of his hair and his mouth. She felt something animalistic rise up in her, but it was sleek and hungry. And it reacted to everything he did— the way he brushed her skin, the way he breathed. Reactionary to a point where she could react to that gently pulsing greed. She hummed a soft thought as he spoke, "I— I was describing feelings not actual— sure." And then she laughed, it was gently musical. She leaned forward and fished her hand underneath him unceremoniously. Sure enough, she pulled out the butterfly knife and held it up as a reward— but it not before she actually squeezed the curve of his ass through his boxers. The sole final guardsman of their modesty before they had taken a few steps back. She wasn't sure what she wanted, or where he was. But she smiled at him and leaned in and kissed that dimple like it asked her to, and she even tasted it with the tip of her tongue like she could mark it as hers. For a brief moment, she wondered if anyone else had done that before.

"I totally was also...referring to feelings." One eye cracked open to watch the reaction on her face. His arms instinctively raised to guard himself from a potential smack. The other eye shooting up to join it's counterpart when she squeezed and fished the knife out from beneath him. "Oh thank god.." he remarked running his own hand down his backside with a slight rub. He propped himself up on his elbows- the angle made the muscles on his stomach contract and he started to say something else when she stuck her tongue into his dimple. By the way he laughed and pressed into the gesture of her tonguing his cheek and the subsequent transfer of her own saliva from his skin back to her jawline with a swipe of his head...it was likely a brand new experience. "Taste good?" the sudden levity that playing created in him was remarkable. It reminded him of much simpler times. Before her. Because everything had been complicated after that point. He felt a little remorseful for a second that he never got to share that part of himself with her due to the complexity of their situation...and whether they had both surrendered and this is what was able to come from it...or it was another fateful ploy to urge them together, he reveled in it...and would stay in that lightness for as long as he could.

She laughed with a similar measure of levity. Only briefly questioning the rollercoaster of feelings that had transpired. But she felt lighter. And she also knew why. She had said a hundred things to him, and though she wasn't certain how much of it had stuck, she had a feeling that he would think about this afterwards. And that he would appreciate portions of this later that he didn't now. Or things that got swept aside for more pressing impressions. "Uh huh," she had a judgemental but effervescent tone. And that affirmation was for his clarification. She was pleased, even a little happy in the wake of his laugh. Their wordless conversation was comfortable. And yes, spoke of different times. "I think I can taste your boyish charm," she pursed her lips, rolling him over her tongue. "A few bad intentions, bi-lacho, mmm....vaida, vesh....yes. I approve," she smiled at him as she lolled her head and made a nuzzle of his features, his neck and his shoulder. Eventually she tossed her mane of pale hair, and somehow she made the motion bleed into another. She climbed into his lap again, making him rearrange to accommodate her and not listening to his request in the slightest. She looped arms around the back of his neck and pressed her brow to his forehead. There was a moment of quiet, but it was without gravity. So much so that eventually she flicked her tongue to lick the tip of his nose. And she did it for him because she just laughed softly and waited to see his reaction. "Many types of feelings, Writ. Many."

"No good?" he scoffed..."I'm plenty good. I don't know what you're talking about...or who has been telling you these lies." He smirked and crinkled his nose up at the lick, not so subtly dodging the bad intentions assessment. He maneuvered with her seamlessly. The saddle of his lap was custom made for her and the way his body responded to her proximity immediately made it clear how it felt about things. Her crown to his eased that lustful response into something more gentle. Something softer. Peace. Love. The easy kind that warmed you instead of crushing you. "Wha—" began his protest, one that quickly died in the crook of her arm as he rubbed his now lick-slicked nose against his sweater her small frame was swimming in. He resurfaced from the soft grey material and watched her intently. Her eyes...her mouth moving...her eyes again. The stress on her last word flipped yet another switch. Many feelings indeed. Hands slid beneath the sweater and pressed her to him as close as possible. His mouth went to her neck...a kiss pressed hot into her skin between each word. "Tell me. One. Just one."

Her laughter was like sewing sound to the comfort of their mingling forms. "You, these are just things I see myself. You can't hide from me, Writ," she twisted that into something just a little dangerous, but she still laughed softly. Convivial in their games of possession, playing for keeps. Just like the way she pet his hair, gentle, reassuring, but also luxurious in how she mingled her fingers among the locks. She swam in him, poured him in touch and scent and taste around every plane she could offer. She drifted away a moment as he nuzzled against her, and as her fingers sifted through the brown tangles. Her body received his hands in a deepening arch of her back, her long, lean torso curving forward to press against him and let her skin beg for more...but her hips in his lap just pivoted and pressed. She was lost in between a desire to give and a desire to take.

She liked the way his fingers felt on her skin. She watched him and started sifting through words, but found it hard to settle upon just one, "when you touch me.....sometimes it feels like a wave of electricity fans out from your fingertips, like a dull pulse of hypersensitivity, I feel like you leave the pattern of your fingertips on my flushed, tender skin, and that heat feels like all of my cells drank electric-whisky, and it's washing through them, licking up my body and lighting up pieces of me that react to fire, sometimes ice, and then that...." she was reaching behind her to take one of his hands, to thread their fingers together as she pulled it around her petal-soft side and up her stomach, "just doubles and exponentially expands to burn and heat my veins, my soul," she was pulling his hand higher, over her ribs, "finding places, pink places," she turned her chin, leaning down to hover her mouth above his, "that bloom...and harden...and ache in ways that my mind just," she spread her fingers, which spread his, and she fed him the soft undercurve of one of her breasts so she could lead him to the hard, tingling flesh of her nipple that nearly painfully reacted to him and herself, the more she kept talking. "...converts into this—" she brushed her mouth against him, exhaling against his lips, "haunting of my skin, and tumbling thoughts that wander over pictures of you that come in flashes— how you look in the sunlight, or in this apartment, right now, a moment from now— ...but whisky-warm, thought-drunk. That's one. That's one of the feelings that distracts me. ...but that's just your fingertips, when it's your mouth..or your lips.." she didn't so much as sigh as ...change. Her skin flickered and tensed. No words. Because it was there on her neck where he had kissed her and she didn't even know the woman who wanted more of that.

His lips parted, eyes glazing over and darkening with a wild dilation. This was beyond thought-drunk. Her words entered through his pores, flooding him with a chemical high that people die chasing. It ignited nerve endings all over his body. He could see each thing she described...feel them under his hands, his fingertips, through his blood, the meat of him. And in his bones. They pulsed with the rhythm of her. The light shift of her hips. The music of her motion, of her voice, her breath. Exhale. Open those hazel eyes that threatened to close, keep them on her. Keep breathing. Keep time. His hand left bare on her breast gently lifted and pressed and kneaded her flesh in the cup formed by his palm and those electric fingertips. He kissed her. Hard. Tongue snaking in like that exquisite current, massaging, entangling in slow coils against her own before taking a small wedge of her bottom lip between his teeth. He groaned into her mouth before moving his kiss in a slow sweep down her chin, throat and the center of the V cutout in the sweater that he had used his free hand to pull from her shoulder. His mouth found where his hand had left little white marks from indentation on her flesh and he ran the velvet pad of his tongue, rounded and gentle, across the swell of her nipple in a languid lap. He blew gently on the saliva that left it cold and slick watching it react beneath the cool breeze of breath. His hips retracted slightly. Shifted. Made room for the uncomfortable strain that his boxers kept under wraps. "Liv." he breathed against that beautiful curve tucked possessively in his hand. "Keep talking."

She should have known better. Who wasn't she believing" Him' Her" For every surge of sensation he dipped down into, she reached in after and took the same dive. But whether it was up, or down, it didn't matter. It was deeper. It was more of him around her. Her fingers loosened their tangle with his as his hand caught fire with her words. Took a dark sentience. But she did not leave him. Just loosened. Eventually her fingers drizzled down the back of his hand and loosely held his wrist. Just so she could feel the way her wild, deep breaths moved his hand - up and down, molded to her flesh and bone. Those breaths caught and held as he kissed her, and a soft pant escaped between their smeared-against mouths, lacing that infinitely hungry way they crushed together with more sensations made of them. A quiet sound, like a whimper, shared her desire from her mouth to his as she pushed forward like she could chase his tongue with hers because...because....because she wanted it back. Didn't want it to stop. She crooned quietly as he made her lift her chin, extend her neck, feel him...."God. Writ. Like liquid, rolling flame, your breath and the way you breathe against my skin," her body shifted in his lap, closer, nuzzling against him, against secret gestures and aches that...if she rolled her shoulder to let the sweater shift, she rolled her sigh to press the angle of her hip against him. His hands, god, his hands. A want for a want, "you creep under my skin, Writ. Like a hot blade, so soft, and aiming for deep parts of me. Sometimes I feel that when you look at me, like you are looking for what I am made of, and it feels like your mouth wants to pull it from my skin, draw the sense of me into your mouth, and in my mouth you look, finding it on my tongue.....Mm." she caught her breath because it quivered as her skin reacted to the lick of his tongue, the pearl of her nipple going tight. She felt half mad in the way he invaded her in nearly every way "god — I f**king ...I want you so much it hurts, like you can pierce me with your tongue, too, and ride through my ribs to my heart, but the heat just spirals out and shatters into darker things, things with gravity and weight that unfurl through me like waves of inky want and I," how she rolled her hips into him, unintentional, illustrating how far through her he could go...."you find every part of me, and I want you to fill every part of me. I ...can barely explain how perfectly full and yet empty you make me realize I am as you make me writhe and burn under my skin for you."

"You don't have to. I can feel it too." his voice was low, graveled with an aching desire and he pressed it against her sternum, that smooth porcelain space between her breasts."F**k.." he groaned, eyes squeezing shut...If she could feel what he was feeling there was a mushroom cloud rising from the core of him, threatening to obliterate every boundary he had ever put in place. It swelled- filling up every gap, every chink. It hovered in an echo on his skin with a tremble and shudder before exploding off of him and into the air around them.

"I know," like a soft prayer as her chin lowered and she spoke from within the confines of her honey hair. "But I....it's like a trance....it just moves through me, from you, through me, to you, like through my mouth I..." still unable to let go of the comet tail of that state, of that incantation. "You possess me, I want you to. I want to know the me and the you that I...I..." Her skin bore the heat of him, though the dark things churned through her veins, the heat of him felt like it flushed her pink. There was a transformation into a woman that demanded him.

A warm swirl of need and desperation. His arms tightened around her and he stood. "I can't..." he panted..."I need you."

Her limbs clung to him as he rose with her, and she pressed the side of her mouth against his cheek, near his ear. "I need you, too," she spoke from the center of her, the voice of hers was black velvet, thick and rich with want.

The surface of his skin that had radiated that basking cloud grew cold and freckled in goosebumps. "To taste you. To feel what you feel like from the inside."

She shivered and had a soft pant, undeniably approval of the words he said. Yes. Yes.....she needed him to fill and flood the places that keened for him, it made so much sense there was almost a moment where she was afraid of it being over before it began. "I want you to ....to ...I want to feel this run through us, I—-" it was that same request, just purred at him differently.

Writ moved with her wrapped around him the short distance to the bed and pressed his knees down onto the mattress- peeled her arms from around his neck to lay her flat on her back in the very center. Those poor...poor shorts. He glanced down at them and ripped them from her hips- definitely not as gentle as the first time he had removed them that night. "Ov yilo isi?" Permission. He needed her permission.

As he laid her down and stripped the soft fabric from her, she arched her back, squirming her assistance but she leaned up and curled her delicate fingers in his waist and pulled the clothing down over his hips even before she dragged her parted lips against his question, "Yes, Writ, yes. With everything I am, and was, and will be, I want this. I want you," the girl softly burned, a pulsing ache that with each wave hoped to find him closer. Hoped to strip him more naked. Hoped to pull him inside. Her wilderness called for him. Begged. Like all her body knew was how to miss him. How much she had missed him.

Palms and fingertips gliding across her skin gently parted her legs once they were free of her clothing. Thumbs pressed lightly into the small indentations where straight-aways met curves. He hooked his arms around her legs and pulled her closer as he bowed himself, slowly lowering his body onto hers. His weight and warmth held partially on the hands he moved to press into the mattress on either side of her. His lips crested hers. Kissing the words from her mouth like they were sustenance. Breaking only for quiet demands. "Put your hands on me." he said, in that unobtrusively commanding way of him. His hips barely pressed up and against hers, embossing greedily swelling flesh to the soft wet heat between her legs- he wouldn't enter her yet. He wanted to feed her the experience with just a gentle introduction of simple skin to skin contact.

Her eyelids felt heavy as his fingertips spread over her skin. It felt like she was being drawn into a dark undertow that asked her softly, with susurrous syllables to ....give. Give. Even while promising that she would be taking. And taking everything. Perhaps it was strange how natural it came to her. As he had said....How she reacted. How her hips moved, how she shifted. Her knees bent as she dragged her inner thighs up his body, creating a cradle of her. He barely had to ask because she could barely withstand the small distances between them — her hands lifted, pressing up his ribs, his chest, one gliding up his neck and into his hair. She pulled his mouth into her, twining her fingers in his hair. It was a little rough, but her fetish for holding him was already deep rooted. And she was aware at how it felt to have the echoes of touch run down the back of the neck, flooding out into other places. She wrapped the back of his leg with one of hers, nuzzling their hips together. It would have been more wanton if the sigh she had was less coated in a thick, comfortable bliss that she licked into his mouth. Her other hand swam up the surface of his back, pressing her fingertips into his flesh. Covetous and clinging. Her words were deep and hungry, with a greed for experience and knowledge that he may have been prescient of as a youth, but he experienced now. "Feel me, too, Writ. It's not just me who hasn't done this before..." and like a natural spell crafter, she bit his lower lip with her teeth, and curled her fingers in his hair so he felt the dark thunder of her roll through him.

"Fu—....mmf." That bite almost crippled him. His eyes squeezed shut and he shifted, moving his bracing to one forearm just above her shoulder, his hand sweeping into her hairline at the back of her neck, the scoop of his palm sealing against her like he was jealous of the pillow beneath it- he had to become the barrier between them...and he tugged reflexively with a sharp, brief exhale. He swallowed hard and when he opened his eyes to look down at her his brow raised slightly and an almost amused smile ghosted his lips. "Oh...is that how it is?" The hand that wasn't cradling her head culled her slender side in a slightly rougher sweep. Possessive. It raised the soft sweater fabric up over her breasts and when it neared her neck he simply said "Lift." The look in his eyes slightly darker. Like she prodded a wild animal.

The lips that separated from his were tilted, slightly. It wasn't just a smile. And the reaction for the way he caught his words was the simple catch of her lower lip in her white teeth. The gesture captured and kept a quiet, maybe even just a little dangerous, coo at the back of her throat as he caught her up. It was intimate in how it all watched him. How it reacted and revelled in him and drank his tiniest responses with a simple gratification. Somehow their playfulness met in the middle and made a bit of a game of this. A pleasure game. "Mmhmm," she said between a smile that touched her eyes when she saw the look on his features. Though it waned some when he made her release him, letting him go had never been a plan, even if just to remove her clothes. Which, she did. She let him. She obeyed. But her arms never settled further than the back of his neck, and she pulled him down against her. "Put your hands on me," she said with an upward tilted glare through her pale lashes before she ducked in to lick the side of his throat like more of an animal than a girl.

His shoulders coated with a crackle of cold electricity that ran down his arms and forced his hand to obey her mirrored command. The arch of it leapt from his fingertips along the side of her face when he put his mouth back to hers, hand continuing on to trail down her jaw and throat, collarbone, the torturous elevation that landed his palm hot against the still aching swell of her nipples. A warm groan and nuzzle when it reluctantly left to continue to her ribs. Her side...Hip....Thigh...where it would finally break inward — palm up...because that's how we touch wild things. His hips lifted far enough away from her to allow the pads of his fingers passage between them. His thumb stroked downward once against —-, coaxing it to reveal itself. Lids heavy but eyes open to watch her react to every sensation...was curious but also certain. Confident. You like this. I know you do. Show me.

She closed her eyes when he touched her. Supplicant. Content. So very grateful for the way he wove this moment, this experience. Her mouth parted as they kissed. Her gently savage tongue licked his lips, their insides, his teeth, looking to be let in. But to be let in just long enough to share the way she extended and enjoyed the feel of his hand as it moved down her body. Her kiss slid unattended to the side, to his cheek, leaving a warm inhale of rewarded distraction along his skin. Her breath was a landscape of hills and valleys, crests and choruses created by his hands. Every inhale reactionary, every exhale exhaultant. Behind him her hands slid their soft weight in ways that traced the lines of his bones and his muscles. Her fingertips prayed at the altar of him in a way that sought to define him, in this moment, as hers. Even as she shivered as he excited pink parts just to leave them for others. In the deep recesses of her consciousness her body had muscle memories carried through generations. Animals. Like the way her legs parted further and her hips rolled her vulnerable into his hand. She caught a moan in her mouth out of reservation, a moment of eye contact before she let it pour out and let her eyes close in an ecstasy that pleased but ached. And ached deeply within her. With a feral grace she pulled his hair to expose his neck where her kisses were messy and subsumed his skin into her mouth like he had woken a hunger in her that could only be appeased by the way he tasted. Her feminine voice ran layers of tones as she pressed ripples of lust into his throat with her soft lips. A leaden pulse of desire sunk into his neck through their emotive connection, and this desire had the piercing, fanged heat of something new —in all the powerful implications that had. Mine. Yours. Here. Now. Yes.

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Liv was a tangle of honey hair, caramel skin and cappuccino-foam sheets. She was a vision of liquid silk, sweet and creamy on the tongue. It must have been hard to leave her that way. She hugged a braided coil of the covers as it wound across her stomach, down between her legs and curled to a cue around a calf. It was more like a declaration than a question mark. Though it had a hint of both.

She murmured to herself as she slowly woke. The kiss of a dream was soft and cloying on her mouth. He must have starred in it because her hand slithered across the bed to find him before she was even awake- instinct. Expectation. She rolled, exposing the warm violin curve of her hip to the air, like she was painting in dream-adagio silhouettes. When she didn't find him, or his warmth, with her hand she finally roused. Her eyes were a clarion call in comparison to the susurrus sepia of the vague, nascent morning. The ice blue of her eyes winked open and a wicked game of excitement and disappointment played upon her features. They warred there for a moment before they shattered in the sunbeam of her smile — transformed into exuberance.

She inhaled like a gathering storm. Elation was alive and ebullient on her skin —and how it danced. There was nearly a scramble as she sat up. Briefly, she clutched the coil of sheet against her and then realized this was a silly affectation. She reached for the box as she crossed her coltish limbs. She pulled the card from its placement and pulled it to her, reverently stroking a fingertip over the paper before opening it. As she did she brought it to her nose and smelled it. She had always enjoyed the scent of parchment....but she was also scandalously in love with the nature of scent and how it lingered in her cells when it was related to him. She read the note with reverence— steady, like pouring syrup. She let every syllable lap at and envelop her.

Her smile was almost chaotic, it was so hard to reign in. In the morning sunlight she bit her lip and cooed such a sound of delight it made the apples of her cheeks lackluster in comparison. She inhaled, catching her breath in childish anticipation. She pulled the ribbon slowly, like it was a piece of lingerie and a perfect evening had just started. She even undid the paper with loving ceremony— every aspect savored. There was a hitch to her breathing as she pushed her fingers inside, and the inhale had a delicate tremulo that remained long past its time and its due.

First she pulled from the box the hair piece. She held it in her palms like an artifact she just lifted from its case, coveted and cherished and long-hunted, before placing it upon the white sheets. The shoes she also stroked, similarly. Picking them up in the sunlight and letting them sparkle and make light of her heart. She laughed quietly, and under her breath she wound his name — an affectionate assignation with her tongue.

It took both her hands to steady the anticipation for what else was in the box. She smoothed her palms over paper and peeled it away. There was something a little naughty in the simple, youthful greed that glittered in her gaze as she exposed the dress with apportioned flirtation. Perhaps a portent of things to come. This revelation was mirrored then by a long, slow sweep of her hands over the fabric of the dress before she even lifted it out of the box. She caressed the beading, she fondled the sheer fabric with unbridled curiosity and adoration. The deep way she breathed made her chest rise and fall in sonorous tempo, so similar to the morning thunder of her pulse.

She lifted the dress carefully out of its trappings. As it rose it unfolded and painted a picture of her— a ghostly dance partner. Her smile shivered and she could nearly not contain herself. With a graceful sweep of her arm behind the waist of it, she hugged the silhouette to her naked chest, and flopped back onto the bed with a soft, giddy sound. She was a girl in a dream, lost in the clouds, a halo of sun-spun hair. Alone, but never alone— not with the way she held him in her mind's eye and ached in her heart— Writ, it said. Over, and over, and over again.