Mid September '16
Robert led her from the Inn. Troy at their heels. There was no saying quite how they came to be there..Only that things had changed. Everything had changed. No car. No distinct portals. It seemed that they had been outside the Dragon one moment and then..
The ink of the evening spilled away from them. They were left, half in want for breath, in a scant city. Upon first glance it didn't seem to be much but the reality was that it was an early-birth version of New Orleans. It was before the flood gates and the streets being fully built of tone. It was when a few Greek families tried to build and empire at the docks and other families were fleshed out from slavery and vice. There was the French, the African and a scattering of Greek. Robert and Roach found themselves in the alley of a tavern.
Inside an ex slave girl, mulatto, was drunk and wailing about the conditions of the world. Troy barked twice and trotted ahead, looking at them expectantly over his sloped shoulder. Robert's arm around her eased off of her shoudlers.
The girl walks alongside the man with curiosity tracing her features; a frown, as ever. A frown. He eases away like a breath and she rolls her inked arms into a broader swing; putting a touch more space between them despite the gravity and to reach into her bag for her lighter. "What kind of fucking.....?" She comes to an abrupt stop as she looks around, absorbing, reading, then looks to Robert. "Is this.... is this you and that magic you gots? Or.. we really go back...?" She turns to face Robert, as Troy trots back to wind in and out of her legs before sitting at his feet.
"I don't know." He admitted, his thumb nail catching the edge of his cigarette to give it another flick. The small amount of ash that was built up dashed off in the half-breeze. She asked him about the magic he had, which he took to mean if he was building illusions. Had he constructed this whole affair? Roach paused, looking behind himself, forward, and then to her, "It seems real. Real to me." That had been beyond him, though, constructing something real.
That gave her greater pause; the cigarette between her lips bitten down on as she continued to peer around, taking it in. "We.... we gone back in time, Robbie?" She turned away, hair like cables or glass beads, tumbling, rocking, breaking and joining down her back as she set foot deeper into the crowd. But a thought occurred, and her eyes immediately began to rove. Troy sensed, and took off through the crowd and up the stairs. "10-4." And she was off, weaving through the patrons, who eyed them oddly, some calling out. Some taunting or threatening or teasing. Troy ran up the stairs and she followed, looking back at Robert.
"It feels older," but if he was forced to be honest, he would say he wouldn't know. Robert was old, and those years spent in a gone area were more comfortable to recognize but... blurred by thin distinction. A final drag and he flicked away the last of his cigarette, setting after the direction of Troy. His hazel gaze shot over his shoulder to her as their steps moved further into the crowd.
"This city is an infection!" Katrina yelled, her cheap coal mascara running down her half baked cheeks. It was hard to avoid them on the way to the stairs, but they did.
Roach stepped out of the way of the woman screaming and continued on ahead, her pace picking up as the dog shot ahead through the dark of the hall. Prost's leaned against walls, their ragged, filthy dresses like antiques that hovered at the edges of their vision wrapped around ghosts; the women so pale, so thin. The girl swallowed in discomfort, her bearings all gone and rounded the corner as the dog took off to the right and charged ahead. "Slow down, boy. Slow down!!!" She's yelling, chasing, glancing back. Then the dog comes to a pause outside a door. 10-4. Sits staring at it; hackles raised and ears pricked. Roach catches her breath and leans over, hands on her knees. Hazel eyes on Robert. "Got that key?"
He's behind her, not quite like a shadow and more like some reinforcing tide not far off. He reached into his jacket pocket, withdrawing a key and looking down at it thoughtfully and then to her. His eyes went down towards the commons, past the pouting breasts of the whores to Katrina, who was still yelling. She said, "I will wash this city of everything." All he could think about was the hurricane. Of the bodies that rose to the surface. Of how everyone said that the black people in America didn't matter and were left to suffer and rot.
He put his arm past her, his chest almost connecting to her back as he twisted the key. Had the door always had the black X and numbers on it? He hesitated, then pushed. Troy nosed in first and trotted into the dark before they even knew what it was.
The smell hits them first. The sounds of Troy's paws pattering like distant rain ahead into darkness. But that smell. At first, it is pungent, almost fetid - decay, rotting, until it sweetens, ripens, enriches, grows more alive, more full, more voluptuous, more round. It's carnal, it's warm, it's close to the skin. It's petals; brown at their edges and curling. It's honeysuckles, after being in that wet, heavy air and their scent is all but oozing. It's sweeter still, powdered sugar and chicory coffee. It's something else, though. In that wall of scent that creeps in the darkness. Musk. Of sex. Of a woman's sex in afterglow. It makes her nose turn up, as she moves through the room, an arm out ahead. There's no light at all, even as she feels up the wall for a switch. Her eyes scanning the darkness. "Troy?" And it's impossible, but it sounds like he is far off ahead, down a storm drain; his barks echoing. She can hear water. Water running. Droplets ticking against.... something. In the dark she turns, that arm out, clutching for Robert. "Robbie? I'm here. Feel me?"
"It's raining." He says, practically colliding with her. One of his hands caught her to balance himself but his grip moved quickly, drawing her leg up from behind the knee and around him to hold him tight between her thighs in the dark. Why did he do that? Robert knew he didn't want her, not really, and though he had no idea of Grey's enormous presence in her heart, he likewise had the sense that in sober moments where their eyes met that there was a disconnect, stretching on far and forever. An eternal disconnect that forged its own sense of connection. This is the moment.
The world turns and gravity realigns. He's on top of her, the mattress is dirty and spread open, the sheets half covering it and the electric lamp burning lazy in the hot mouth of New Orleans Summer. Latched to the headboard were a hundred different voodoo dolls, all carefully pricks with colourful needles.
Smoking her cigarette in the waitress uniform was Doll, flipping through a magazine on her lap. Her legs were crossed, her cigarette held like it was a heavy burden. Her full, mulatto face turned up as she smiled, "You know what they used to call the lucky ones? High yellow." She smirked like it was a joke that was supposed to be funny and then sucked on her cigarette again. She breathed out grey, using her cigarette to point at them, "So you two gonna feck, or what? I don't have all year, boss."
"Boss?"
It's not that he's on top of her; somehow, he's suddenly half dressed, and a glance down her body says she is too. No. It's Doll's addressing him that way, that has her lifting a brow and then staring at him in confusion. She's wrapped around him, though there's been no kiss. Her hands are in his hair, already -- and when had happened? When had the darkness pulled back like a vast curtain and tumbled them onto this bed that smelled like it did as soon as they entered the room. Distantly, still, the rain falls, like a forever-sound, as eternal as the connection between them, that friendship that was not, just as they were lovers.. and not. Tangled up in Robert and Robert tangled up in her, she looks up at him. She wants the way she wanted him back at the Wyndham; eating french fries as he pressed into her pussy from behind. The way she wanted his eyes on her from the shower. She's wanting him, lusting, aching, needing, yet there's the question of how - is the heat in her belly, flowering down into her thighs, that has her legs gripping tight, is it this intense because of his heat that worked through her blood like some under the table drug or because of unfinished business on a June evening on Royal. "Guys, you don't have forever... well, one of you does. Make up your goddamn mind." She turned the page of the magazine in her lap and shook her head. "Goddamn gods and goddesses, always the same." Roach looked at the woman with a glare and then shifted against Robert; her hands in his hair moving through dark wires as she adjusts beneath his weight and presses her lips to his. At once, fire, frenzy, cinnamon and copper. The rush of him, all that was him and mounting. Her body tenses and she gasps. Flames surround the bed; licking at the ceiling. Doll arches a brow and then shakes her head again, taking a drag on the cigarette. "Fecking pyromaniacs."
"Don't worry, we're here," the door to the room opened and a crew of seemingly faceless, dark skinned people joined. It was hard to say what was odd about them, but it was more subtly represented in Doll. He was trying to concentrate, to pinpoint the strangeness of him as his hips were pushing into Roach's, wishing to peel back the remaining layers of cloth and plunge into her. What was so strange about all of them? Something about Doll bothered him, nagged at him and it was only from the corner of his eye that he noticed her skin seemed more like a sheer cloth than flesh. Her thick, African hair like untamed yarn being woven up. The crew of people having entered had black skin with seams and frighteningly white teeth. Their clothes were colorful and the pins in their skin weren't bleeding but shone from the light that was in the room. They set up movie-style cameras around the bed as if this had been movie set.
"Oh, put your back into it," one of Doll's boys said, grinning that smile of a stitched closed mouth. One of the others elbowed him, but Doll gave them an annoyed look as she turned the page. The sound of rain became louder, like it was pelting on the rooftop, threatening to wash the city away again. One of the other crew members snickered and said, "Once I saw a couple set fire to the bed. I betcha they will, I betcha they'll fuck like they've needed it all month."
Robert looked away, unavoidably back to Roach. Like they needed it all month. They didn't though, did they? They hadn't been abstaining from the flesh of others but indulging. Lizzie's mouth is on his and there's a low moan that crawls in his throat. When he feels the wanton sound in his throat it sounds like he's hungry and pleading to penetrate her. The request shifts, it becomes a command and the gentle sound of moaning in his throat becomes a growl. He remembered more than the Nola hotel, but his mind went from that smell of sex, of pussy and almost-fucking to the moment she crawled in his lap and that ribbon around her throat loosened. Why hadn't they been wrapped in each other before? It seemed stupid now that clothes, time and everything else had been in the way. He reached down, catching the button of her pants to undo it and then pulling them open. His hand glided down between the tight confines of her pants and underwear, feeling the upward, impatient grind of her thinly covered sex against his hand. The heat of her and the dampness of the cloth just at his fingertips. He pressed, feeling the soft, thin fabric and felt the details of her sex against his hand.He nudged the cloth aside, his middle finger licking at her lips, stopping at the small knob of her clit before his hand pulled away.
His mouth broke away from hers. The cameras and the lights were positively blinding. Doll and the crew all seemed like silhouette cut outs. Doll called out to them, "You gonna do this or what?"
"I don't... you don't." Robert's body weight rested against her when his hand slipped away. His arm wrapped around her just before he kissed her. It was a gentle kiss, not one threatening to open her mouth up further.
"Hey, were do you think you're g--"
They were gone, all of it. Somewhere on the streets of Nola, Robert was holding Roach against him in a long box slumped on its side. The roof of it was already darkened with rain. It patterned more heavily on top of the box. His lips pressed at the outside corner of her eye. He was still shirtless, he could still feel the crackle of flames around them. He could smell how much they wanted to feck like patchouli and cinnamon. It was a strange combination that lingered in his mouth. There was a disturbance at there feet that ended up being Troy nosing at them, whimpering once but wagging his tail when Robert stole a look down the confines of their street box to him.
Her body writhes and squirms in anticipation and need beneath him and when his finger slips inside she gasps and bites her lip, her eyes closing with pleasure. Doll makes a commotion, light flickers off to he side and the flames climb higher, higher, going through the ceiling, warping it into a dizzying, circling hole into darkness. Then, then the bed dissolves around them and instead there is rain above, tapping against cardboard. She turns and looks at him; the burn of a kiss beside her eye and her lips inches from his. "Push the sky away." Troy is pulling at the tattered end of her jeans, tugging, tugging, and she sits up to slide from that coffin box and Robert's arms, only, as she stands, she looks down to see she's not... where she expected to be standing, and Troy is sitting by the kitchen door that leads into the Otherworld Museum. Robert has his hand out towards her and a red ribbon sits loose at her pale throat. She takes his hand. Around them, the world shifts; the sky seems to go into reverse, stealing rain and gloomy cloud and replacing it with thick layers of night time with a few pinhole stars. The air is mild and smoke rises from the man's cigarette. But that air, that mild air, it still thick with that scent of sex. Of flora. Of warm cement and steam rising.
"What?!" She looks around, frantic, before returning her eyes to him.
"What.." and then she stops. Stops asking question. Being confounded. She steps towards him and takes a seat on his lap; tattooed thighs wide, the black skirt of her dress riding up her legs. "Hades." It's a whisper, like an incantation, precious and cool on the tongue.
Troy watches on; he whines and growls and then barks three times before padding over to sit by Robert's feet in the chair.
He leaned forward, kissing that line of cloth at her neck, his lips skimming from one side of her throat to the other. She spreads, her legs opening wider like a flower unfurling, nearly bursting with the need to be pollinated. She sat so close to him that he knew she could feel him, hard under the cover of his slacks with her panties pressing against the zipper of his pants.
"It's not fair." He breathes, realizing that there was a stab of pain in his side. Still naked from the waist up. When is eyes drop the old Nephilim wound begins pouting, blood easing out from the healed up scar, working down his side and into his lap like wet, coppery pre-cum. He gripped her hips to keep her from grinding, "It's not fair to see you like this." In that place where she was a pause of potential, a budding something. A promise she couldn't keep. Part-time offered flesh. Where she was... "Persephone."
Hades was always giving her up, wasn't he?
Her hands take his face between them - every single finger like a small, smouldering coal and she presses her mouth to his, just as she had in the bed, just as she had in a hotel room. "It's never fair, that is life and death." The words come as if not her own but channeled through, with a distance and a haunt, her voice slow and soft. She frowns, conflicted as she leans away, though her hands remain. "I should go." He was and she, she was always leaving, running, hiding. Her eyes slip aside. "We... you... we.." she looks back and takes her hands away. But, despite her words, she finds she cannot leave. Not him. Not the man who holds her in his palm. She shifts, but her legs do not buckle and Troy barks at her, a sound like tearing paper. "Hades." Saying it, suddenly, she smiles. "Take me to spring." Her eyes growing darker. A red sheen to their cast. "Take me home, Hades."
She needs to be mine. She's been dancing on the outskirts, she's been flirting at the edge of sex, of consummating a condom-less, seed spill fuck into her womb. Can't take someone to a home they haven't claimed the right to.
He's pale and uncertain, so white he could be wearing a mask. Robert's eyes turned up towards the moon overhead, still full from the previous day where no shadow touches its white face. His breaths leveled, he leaned forward until her lower back touched the metal patio table behind her. The world shifted and the whole of her was lying atop one of the museum display cases. Beneath it was something short and education that Osvaldo had created about the different methods for starting fires.
Some argued that mankind gaining control of fire brought about their humanity. Their ability to cook, to survive the Winter and see at times when it was dark.
The glass made a rocking, gritty sound, threatening to break under their combined weight. Her back pressed to the gleaming glass. He reached up, gripping the edge of the case above her head with one hand while his other began undoing the belt. Why was that happening and when had this seemed like something that needed to happen? He had been so patient, wanting to unwrap her carefully but his skin felt like the temperature of his blood was uncomfortably warm when he was around her.
He's bleeding. It's only there, she sees the red running from him, drying rapidly on the white of his flesh. Her eyes move from the wound to his eyes, as she moans beneath him, as if he were already inside, as if he was already thrusting deep within her sex and they were fulfilling all that were made to do. Jimmie had known all along. Known that her fire would be known by Robert, that the man with the dogs was the man who had set fire to the past and with it incinerated all the empty spaces in between time itself as he descended below and took Elizabeth with him. And now, beneath him, below him, her dress falling away. Fire and the manipulation of it, defined humans as wholly divisible a species from the animal kingdom... Humans could influence their environment through the manifest of warmth (comfort, security) and heat (nourishment) and light (illumination) where as creatures are in turn, manipulated by the flame.... The images in the photos of fire that Osvaldo has arranged begin to change. In each, snapshots of Robert and Roach in different stages of intimate union. Tangled up in one another. In other photos, flames. Some blue, some red, some white. In others, still, the neanderthal by the fire pit in a cave, the candle in the hand of a slave girl, the pantheon illuminated with blazing spires of inferno. Roach widens her legs and clutches the back of his neck.
"Take me to spring, take me home, Hades." She reaches down to pull her panties away, when the world tips. Around them a crowd, 'Le danse de mardi gras'rising from the roaming cajun band, her back not to reinforced glass but a hard, brick wall. Robert against her, mouths inches apart, her leg wound around his leg. "Robert."
At some point the red ribbon around her throat fell away. He saw it as a glimmer of color, temporarily hanging on her chest before the quick outtake of her breath pushed it away so that it writhed and tumbled into the loud, boisterous streets of New Orleans. Men in masks that looked like they were smiling with blank eyes craned their necks, pointed and cheered them on. Wait, no, those weren't men. They were something else, masquerading at the great party as observers to it all.
"Lizzie, tell me the name of the person you love." There was no expectation that it would be his name in her mouth and that was what he needed to hear. It was all so real and not at the same time. It was her and it wasn't. Shirtless, his skin was hot under her touch. Her mouth kept igniting something strange. Where was Spring? It was in New Orleans with all the Voodoo, bright and happy faces that surged and partied more fiercely now that they idols were about to copulate against a brick wall. The streetlight nearest to them shone so much it burst with the energy of it. People laughed like it might stop their hearts. New Orleans was buzzing.
Somewhere, Doll smiled and bit her lower lip, saying in a low breathy voice, "Feck yeah."
One palm pressed against the face of the bricks beside her head, his other hand undoing his belt. It was slippery and the noise of Mardi Gras was so intense he couldn't hear his heart beating or the crackle of fire around her.
"I love Grey." The words, they come easy. But she winces. "But I belong to you, Hades. I belong to you and you belong in me." The music is a cacophany - so much brass, so much yelling, shouting, singing. Trumpets blaring. Accordion wheezing. Drumming like the crowd was all just an assembly of hearts thudding wild. "Robert.... now." She pulls aside her jeans, pulls them down, her panties with it. Confetti and beads rain down. The light explodes and shatters everywhere, not far away. Then Troy appears, barking wildly at their feet. The scene tips again and they are in 10-4 in Seattle. She's beneath him, her back arched. Remmy beside them. "Now, Robert, now." Jimmie and Doll stand beside the men with the demon from the front desk. Each of their mouths filled with shark-tooth grins. "Now, Robert. Take her to Spring." Remmy sits bolt upright in their bed, looks down and smiles past the sultry fall of her sex-sweat hair. "Are you happy, Robert?"
Troy pads into the room and noses past the three standing figures. He shifts. Not a canine, but a man. "Hello, you two." Black, all black. Hair, eyes, suit. Undertaker. Hound. Hands clasped before him and he grins broadly. "It is time."
It must have been that inevitable sense of force someone felt right before a rip tide drowned them. Desperately trying to dig your heels into the sand while also, somewhere, feeling that it had already been decided. He arched a brow to look at Remmy, that haunt of a human who was becoming more and more meaningless to him. Was he happy? All he could say to that was, "No."
"Oh, but we could make you happy," the gypsy's hand combing through his hair, moving down his back, "all men dream of two at once."
"No," His arm had to awkwardly twist behind himself to grasp her by the wrist. He shoved her then, her body wobbling awkwardly with her hurt expression before she fell to the floor, the sheet pulled taunt like the ship of a sail between them. He didn't want her, not anymore. Not even for a bout of meaningless sex when they just so happen to cross paths again.
Roach was still beneath him, naked except for her tattoos. His hand circled around her neck, the 'x' at her nape touched by his fingertips so hot it threatened to burn him, to melt and stitch his fingertips into where they belonged. What he knew was that there wasn't love, but that wasn't a requirement or even a mention to the howl of the crowds. Take her, they said, but it felt more like a kidnapping than sex. His pants were undone to her and everyone seemed to be holding handfuls of confetti, waiting for him to penetrate her, to cum inside her so that the grain of Persephone would be budding from the seeds he gave her.
"No," Robert untangled himself, sitting back on his knees in an inadvertent display of his interest pushing through his unzipped pants. He looked down at Roach sprawled open to him like a gift, like a woman who'd been sold to a man. His hazel eyes shot a look of animosity to the crowd, "It's time? The time will be when I say it is, none of you are of the office to direct me." How many times were people trying to steer him, to coax and direct him along some path he had not decided for himself. His rage stopped all the moving pieces, even Troy whose smile disappeared slowly from his face.
"Okay, boss."
It felt as though someone grabbed the end of their bed and thrust it upward in an attempt to overturn it. He fell on top of her and then his knees his the ground which was wet stone. It was because of the headboard, the footboard, that they weren't crushed. He was on his hands and knees over her, partly a tent with the bedsheet hanging off of his form. His left hand swept over the cloth until he could work it away well enough to see that they were in the alleyway of the Red Dragon Inn. The shirt and coat were lost as well as Roach's clothes, but there were still the bedsheets smelling like Seattle sex he could wrap her in like some crude toga. It seemed no matter what he did she could not stop embodying that myth.
"We should stay in September and away from the Spring." He hadn't known what it would have meant, what the immense disorientation of it all would become. New Orleans had become its own creature and the Spring it offered thirsted for just one creature to troll its streets and Robert had denied it that. How long could that continue?
It must have been that inevitable sense of force someone felt right before a rip tide drowned them. Desperately trying to dig your heels into the sand while also, somewhere, feeling that it had already been decided. He arched a brow to look at Remmy, that haunt of a human who was becoming more and more meaningless to him. Was he happy? All he could say to that was, "No."
"Oh, but we could make you happy," the gypsy's hand combing through his hair, moving down his back, "all men dream of two at once."
"No," His arm had to awkwardly twist behind himself to grasp her by the wrist. He shoved her then, her body wobbling awkwardly with her hurt expression before she fell to the floor, the sheet pulled taunt like the ship of a sail between them. He didn't want her, not anymore. Not even for a bout of meaningless sex when they just so happen to cross paths again.
Roach was still beneath him, naked except for her tattoos. His hand circled around her neck, the 'x' at her nape touched by his fingertips so hot it threatened to burn him, to melt and stitch his fingertips into where they belonged. What he knew was that there wasn't love, but that wasn't a requirement or even a mention to the howl of the crowds. Take her, they said, but it felt more like a kidnapping than sex. His pants were undone to her and everyone seemed to be holding handfuls of confetti, waiting for him to penetrate her, to cum inside her so that the grain of Persephone would be budding from the seeds he gave her.
"No," Robert untangled himself, sitting back on his knees in an inadvertent display of his interest pushing through his unzipped pants. He looked down at Roach sprawled open to him like a gift, like a woman who'd been sold to a man. His hazel eyes shot a look of animosity to the crowd, "It's time? The time will be when I say it is, none of you are of the office to direct me." How many times were people trying to steer him, to coax and direct him along some path he had not decided for himself. His rage stopped all the moving pieces, even Troy whose smile disappeared slowly from his face.
"Okay, boss."
It felt as though someone grabbed the end of their bed and thrust it upward in an attempt to overturn it. He fell on top of her and then his knees his the ground which was wet stone. It was because of the headboard, the footboard, that they weren't crushed. He was on his hands and knees over her, partly a tent with the bedsheet hanging off of his form. His left hand swept over the cloth until he could work it away well enough to see that they were in the alleyway of the Red Dragon Inn. The shirt and coat were lost as well as Roach's clothes, but there were still the bedsheets smelling like Seattle sex he could wrap her in like some crude toga. It seemed no matter what he did she could not stop embodying that myth.
"We should stay in September and away from the Spring." He hadn't known what it would have meant, what the immense disorientation of it all would become. New Orleans had become its own creature and the Spring it offered thirsted for just one creature to troll its streets and Robert had denied it that. How long could that continue?
Robert's vehemence had broken the spell. It seemed that as soon as he denied the pull of the city, of the gods, the set pieces turned away, that ever threatening red velvet curtain closed and the world tipped them again, back into real time, back into their lives, and though they were torn between myth and themselves, at least, they weren't beholden to the strangling, sweet darkness that wanted to envelop them whole. Roach stood with Robert, the smells from that bed clinging to the material, to her skin and she moved against him vulnerably. He eyes tipped to him, filling with water, drowned with rising tides that wanted to pull her beneath. Her mouth parted and she gasped; not in a moan or sexual advance but to embrace him suddenly.
"Thank you, Robbie. Thank you."
For not forcing it, for not denying her choice, for choosing for them both. Now saltwater ran down his chest, not blood. Now her tears, instead of her cum. "Let's not go back to Spring.. I don't want to go back.." she sobbed into his naked skin, her arms clutching his back. How strange it was, that this be the turn of events. After everything, every twist and turn, that she be crying in Robert Brohkun's arms. "Let's go to your room." She would need to borrow one of his shirts, rifle the lost and found basket for a skirt or pants. Troy padded into the alley and up to their feet where he say. Ears pinned back and a little whine. Roach looked down rubbing away her tears. Then the dog stood and nosed in through the alley door.
They crawled away from the bed that some homeless person or animal would adopt as their own. He wondered what the demon in Seattle would make of it, or if he would just grin at them. Robert did his best to help wrap her up in the sheet before his hands dropped to his pants, zipping them up and refastening the buckle.
He wished he could have said that he got the same relief as her. Roach's eyes and mouth had been begging him, but all the while she had seemed so far away. Now she was present, there was saltwater and blood and while she was relieved he was left like a toy that had been keyed up. She didn't need to know a hundred whispers still echoed in his brain trying to convince him to take her. Reminding him of how she moaned, of all the different positions and flavors she could be.
With small hopes, he felt around his pockets for a cigarette. They were gone, somewhere in the strange taste of human magic that seemed of fleshy, like sweat. Like salt. Let's go to your room. He heard the words but then looked at her to check the pallor of her face and whether or not she might be licking her lips when she said it.
"10-4." A nod to the back alley door. A man could walk around shirtless without a problem. It was his lost shoes, the blood and their mussed hair that might indicate that all was not well and the shipwreck had only been scarcely survived. At some point he reached out to her, his hand squeezing her's but then dropping away, quickly. Robert wasn't much for reassurances but he thought she should know, even when he wasn't smiling or looking at her directly, that he was glad.
"10-4" she repeated, following after him; the sheets dragging behind her, off dirty feet, like some dead weight that threatened to shift and drag them back into a world, a truth, they both were struggling to acknowledge. The dog is already half way up the stairs by the time the pair is crossing the room, briefly hand in hand - loversfriendsloversfriends and then not, just a man and a girl crossing a room that is a page in their book. She stops by the lost and found basket to forage for a skirt or pants which she procures; a white lace mini that would simply have to do and then joins him at the stairs and moving up up up.
There was trepidation about opening that door again; lest it be the marriage bed they avoided. Lest it be the Inn in old time NOLA and Katrina threatening to squander her land. At the door and covering herself with the sheet, she looks to him. She looked small and scared, not unlike the street rat he had slept beside in that cardboard box a decade ago. And for the first time in a long time, feeling wells in her chest for the curator. For Robbie-boy. Care, trust, things that she had abused time and again in her careless, stained fingertips. Roach lingered back a little, cautionary. Troy at their feet again and waiting. But as the door parted she smelled only hotel smells. Not sex, not honeysuckle, not smoke and musk.
"Could really use a fucking cigarette." A half-smirk; she stared into the darkness and exhaled.
Once at his room, he unlocked the door, making a pause when he eyes the door of his companion. 105. The taste of something odd was there, but it wasn't the time to poke around. There would be hints and revelations on that later he was sure. The work of demons just smelled different. The door opened and he stepped inside.
It was strange to see someone who was a myth, a strange creature, have so many signs of ordinary things. Of a secondary set of his clothes laid out. Of two spent cigarette packs. His hand caught the light switch but it only turned on a lamp. Moving to the nightstand he shook the third pack that was there, hearing the cigarettes inside give a small noise. Smokes. Robert's room, sadly, carried only the scent of him. That washed up cinnamon that was coppery, even more so with red pained down his side. Holding two he lit them, drew on both to get the cherry started and then reached over the bed that was between them to hand her a bit of spark and smoke, "Just don't ash on the bed or anything."
Roach laughed, though it was a skeleton laugh - all bones and winds to howl through as she sat on the edge of the bed by his nightstand drew over the ashtray there to place it ON the bed between them so that they could share them. "I'm sorry I kissed you..I..." she drew hard again, the taste of his mouth filling hers; blood and spice. She shut her eyes a moment and laid the white lace by his change of clothes and looked around the room before resting her attention on his face. Her own carrying the dried trails of the emotion upon it. "I didn't mean. I shouldn't have done that." A quick wipe at her eyes and she reached out to the sleeve of his shirt waiting on the mattress and ran her palm down it. Casting out the creases. "Grey left me..." she swallowed away the lump in her throat. "When you... whens you asked me who I loved..." her mouth thinned as she exhaled and ashed over the tray. "I deserve its though." She shook her head and then brought the cigarette to her mouth again. "Are you happy?" Roach paused, smiled sadly. "Got what I deserve, eh." An ironic, brittle little snapped twig of a laugh. "So's I shouldn't bad about getting all nasty witchu. But I do."
"I'm not a romantic fool, I didn't believe that you were kissing me because you loved me. I knew that you wanted me to scratch an itch, but also... that you didn't." He drew on his cigarette and then moved around the bed, the cold light of the bathroom turning on. The sink water ran and the wet sloshing of a hand towel flopping in the sink came across the air with its instantly recognizable sounds. He shut off the water and returned out, hands cleaned and his side wiped free of blood. His scar looked as though it had never been bleeding.
"Don't ask me that question." The one about being happy. He was preoccupied with going through the minibar selections and, upon deciding that all the choices were awful, poured all four mini bottles into the cheap glass tumbler. He stepped back over to her, tapping the ash of his cigarette in the tray, "It's what Remmy used to ask me except that it was really a different question using those words." Robert wet his lips, standing on one foot while the bent knee of the other propped itself atop the mattress. One hand with the cigarette, the other holding a cheap drink concoction that was sure to be horrific. "I didn't know you and Grey were together. Sorry for... that." Robert hadn't even properly met the man, he was known to him largely by his name and what was said, like the story of Santa Claus, except that he had been real.
A smart ass retort at already began in her mouth and then stopped. Instead, she breathed smoke through her nose and watched him drink and smoke and lean and then looked down at the sheet around herself. "Do you love her?" Ashing the cigarette, she turned herself to face him; one leg off the bed, one on its side and bent towards herself, knee facing the tray. "I means, did you .. sort all that out? She's pretty hot, man." A little smile for the man. "Don't be sorry.. it... " she looked down. "It didn't start off in a good way... I mean.. I cheated on your for fecks sakes. No good things are born in..." she shut her eyes and sighed. "Anyways, um... do you think I could stay here? Just, now, tonight? I can't go back to the safe house tonight. I... I don't wanna be alone right now." Hazel eyes flashed wide and she reached out to take the glass from him and have a sip. "I won't touch you or nothing." She held the glass out.
"We had some... things in common that no one else in the world did. We were... grieving for the same things and for a little while it didn't feel lonely, having her there." He took a swallow of his drink, almost hid his cringe from having down so, and then shrugged his shoulders, "Humans have a way of... using demons. Conjuring us up for deals, getting us to do things for them and then cursing us once they do. It is like the junkie who blames the dealer. Now when I look at Remmy it seems odd that I ever thought of her as more than sex, as more than an arrangement. With humans, I should know better."
He could see the awkward apology in her, but he shrugged a little at it. Not to push it away and not accept it, but to say that the moment had passed. The wound had been made and the blood wiped away. Now there was only looking back over their shoulder, wishing a few other things had been said and done. "With old friends its never just sex." And maybe that was where Remmy went wrong. They quit being friends and the sex become just that. An itch to scratch. Thoughts of her had become dispassionate and distant and he felt as if everyone was at arm's length to him now.
Everyone was wanting something.
She took his glass from him. He thought to warn her about its taste except that she had seen him make it. Instead he put his cigarette to his lips, staring at her carefully as he took a drag. Then there was a swallow, taking the smoke down to his stomach, "Yeah just..." he looked over his shoulder, to the wall between him and 105. Then his head turned and he smiled at her, "Just don't wander."
"You know... for what it's worth.. I did really want you. And likes, not for, nothing, no gain? I..." she took another drag and then stubbed the cigarette. "I didn't want anything from you besides sex. I never wanted to hurt you and I sure as hells never meant to drag you into the mire. But.. I did.. and... we are heres, and I..." she wiped at her eyes again and sighed. "I wouldn't... I wouldn't wants no one else to hold that contract but you. And, what happened back there tonight, today, whatever fucking time we just... tumbled the fuck through.." she reached up to drag a few tendrils from her face, over her the crown of her head. "That shows me that for once, I was right about something. Wrong about a lot Robbie, but you..." she met his eyes and smiled. "You didn't cave in and throw me to the dogs. Every one else has." She rose then, pulling the sheets around her like some vagrant gown, lowered her eyes and began to shuffle over to the bathroom.
"I'll try not wander. Might want to like, put a chair against the door though."
He wanted to tell her that he was tired of being used up for sex, but that wasn't her fault. He was echoing the problems he had over the years and she, being the most recent, was getting the blame for all. There would have been plenty who would have rolled their eyes at his little "problem." What man thought it was a problem for a woman to use him for a good bit of 'stress relief'? The contract nagged at him, he could tell she didn't feel it. She spoke of him so softly while a voice in the back of his head told him to yank away the thin sheets and take exactly what he wanted. The thoughts became lewd, pervasive and he dropped his gaze as though he feared his eyes would be like a television screen, broadcasting to her the sex his mind imagined. She was impervious, though, freed of those trappings and speaking with the softest, sweetest sincerity that he had heard since her arrival.
"Lizzie, it's better that you not trust me about this." Not cave and throw her to a dogs. With Troy, the toss wasn't too far and she didn't know that voices were nested in his head in a maddening way. It was slightly cruel that he was in need of a friend with benefits and that the best option for that was the one he needed to avoid. His eyes went to the door when she mentioned propping a chair to it. It reminded him, instead, to lock it. Once he had he moved, tugging out a pair of pajamas that looked rather modern, for him. Cotton wove pants in a plaid pattern of grey and blacks. The fabric was worn soft and smooth. While she was in the bathroom he lay himself out on the bed, mindful to not spill the ash tray but largely staring up at the ceiling. This sleeping next to her business was fun. Why didn't he just say no?
In the bathroom, ice cold water washed tears and New Orleans from her face. it wouldn't last long, maybe moments, that feeling of sobriety from the heady effects of the contract, heartbreak and stress would wind their way back through her. In the mirror, she stared at her face. Mascara trails down past piercings. Her eyes cold, detached, but behind that, she saw her own fear. She saw Persephone. She blinked the after-image away, the other self, the goddess, the sacrifice, the myth and then stepped back out to cross the room. "New pj's huh? Laydeeeez looooove hot pj's dontchaknow." Something about him laying there made her laugh and shake her head as she reached for his shirt on the bed and traded it for the sheet. It was light blue and hung low on her thighs. Then she crawled onto the bed and rolled over to face him on her side with a hand taking up the tray and guiding it away over her and to the nightstand where it belonged. "Why shouldn'ts I trust you?"
An ashen brow crooked a little as a hand tucked up beneath the pillow, staring at his profile. The dark wire curls. Memories of the Wyndham. It made her frown but just the same, a hand reached out between them and stopped short in the air; black nails folded instead into her own palm and hit the quilt. "You don'ts scare me."
"Maybe you dids before, like, the other night -- but... we was just in Spring and..." she smiled. Really smiled. "You didn't let yourself be forced."
"I was told I looked like I was stealing nightwear from the nursing homes so I upgraded." This was a lot more modern than the matching button up shirt and pants that he'd been wearing. All it lacked was a pipe and slippers, really.
"One foot is always in Spring," He looked at her, his head not turning so his gaze dropped to the corners of his eyes. She seemed like a person to him then, that she was there and not putting on a smoke screen to entice him. She bore none of her brazen affectations or tough girl exterior to ward him off. More like a young, little girl than a woman trying for things. He wished she hadn't removed the tray, it felt like when children draw lines in the sand to warn each other of what part of the territory belonged to who. This is my side. That is your's.
"I can break, Lizzie. I'm not as immutable as gravity." That was his warning, gentle as he could put it for her. He looked back up at the ceiling as if never having seen her hand drift and stop at the line drawn down the middle of the bed, "I'm old. I'm having to change a lot to keep up."
The blonde chuckled into her pillow at his talk of needing an upgrade and it warmed her in a way he hadn't before. Together, they had always been strained, their interactions mostly robotic, awkward, inherently muted by some shared sense of disconnect. But his joking with her, making fun of his self, in his dry, off-kilter way, brought a newfound appreciation for Robert, one that had been absent in the midst of every other element in the ill made alchemy between them. Her hand withdrew, to join the other propped beneath the rest of her head on the pillow and she listened to him speak some more. "I won't try nothing. I promise. I would totally pinky swear and everything but I also promised I wouldn't touch you ors nothing." She looked down the bed at their feet. Something occuring to her there.
"What happened to your truck? Don't seen in parked out front? You get something else? That mid century crisis kicking in or sommin?" Dreads spilled along her arm, on the bed. Most white, except at the roots, where regrowth was working through, and some a darker blonde beneath. They were better than the dreads he had first known her to have but still knots and ropes to and of the past, the city, to Spring. A glance at them, she thought about cutting them away. Like severing a noose. But they had grown with her, all the years, and felt like a part of her, as much as a personality or a taste in music. Then thoughts moved, from the truck and hair and to his face again, watchful, watching, curious. Her features softened from their oft stony regard and given a guileless, fervent interest in what he had to say, as if seeing him anew. Like a hand down a sleeve sliding away the creases. His shirt, that shirt, as misshapen against her narrow frame as the seattle sheets on the floor. The sleeves almost covering her small hands completely and wrapping her in him, without his need to reach out in turn and feel hand against hand. The presence of cinnamon, of copper, lingering in the material, enveloping her in him regardless of whether they wished it to be so, or not.
"Pinky swears don't hold up in court, anyway." Delivered in all seriousness. No demons ever made a pact with a person using the almighty pinky swear.
"Trucks aren't forever. She kept having issues and when Helena came to see me, we left it behind. I exchanged the truck for Troy, I suppose." Robert had apparently opted to sever his old ropes instead of retain them. A new vehicle would be needed, but he hadn't decided on what just yet. The post to have his totes mailed to him at this room meant they would arrive in few days, where the trappings and reminders, the other nooses, still lingered about his neck.
Slowly, something began to peak out of his forehead. His skin there separated and it seemed as if two teeth were pushing out of his head. They were as large as a pinky, pushing and curling upward. His skin tone dropped to a reddish blush and then he looked at her, half smiling, "You're staring. Is that what you're hoping to see?" In a blink, the playful little illusion of the devil in storybooks image disappeared. It was just him, looking mostly fleshy, mostly human. The scent of him never having wavered. There was only one give in his motions, in the cut smile and dry humor that suggested a chink in the armor. From the moment that clothes were first manufactured for the genders was born the undeniable sexiness of what a woman looked like when she was loosely draped in a man's shirt. They were smoking after sex cigarettes and she was dressed in that after sex garb that covered her while also, because of the excess fabric, lent his gaze too many details.
The ceiling was a good place to start. He reached over to the nightstand, taking up his drink. The hand holding the cigarette drew back so he could sit up on one elbow to take a drink. "If you don't sleep soon I'll be forced to read you a bed time story. I hear that demonic ones are rarely soothing."
"Boy picked up a sense of humor and a new wardobe while he was away. Inneresting." She smirked, Roach more than Lizzie, before the expression wavered and she caught the heat in his eyes, the one that was all man, not demon, and then, then there were horns, there was magic, and she thought not only of the power of illusion, for what it hid and what it revealed, but that her ideals for safety were perhaps precarious in anyone's hands, including his, though sex, or a lack of it, were neither a bother or a threat. But his regard, however brief, insists that her eyes leave his face and wander down the bed again for a beat as she sat up a little onto her elbow to ask for the drink with an outstretched hand. "I don't sleep well so's.. I tend to take a while. But if you needs to sleep.. don't have to wait up for me to pass out. I will, soons enough."
"I knows you asked me not to continue with what I asked earlier but..." she bent a knee and shifted, reaching out to draw the quilt up and over herself, "you seem different. you definitely smile alots more."
And for that, she smiled too. More fully. Teeth, an incline of her head to the side. "You gots a good smile Robert. Maybe time to live a little, eh?" A lazy regard as she observed him.
A greater degree of happiness had come to him with the death of Timothy Reaux, but it had not been immediate. At first there was the disbelief that it was over, that it was done with, followed by the sense that all things needed to end in blood. He had felt himself isolated and alone, failing to build those friendships and the old life he likely idolized.
It was upon leaving, upon saying farewell to her, to Helena, to Saila and the momentary embrace of Salome that he realized he had forged those connections. There were friendships. His folly had been in assuming that new friends would fall into the slots his old one had. That there would be a new Sybil, a new Chris and Jared. These were new friends and of a slightly more precarious nature, but they were themselves and not replacements. He had done better than he had given himself credit for.
The situation was still not entirely what he wanted. With the Black Ram becoming ashes and the truck left behind, Robert felt he could start to appreciate the people who had come into his life as what they were instead of being unsatisfactory stand-ins for his loss. For that reason, he could smile and his humor was permitted to be softer, a little more plump. Beyond all of that, and in the part she was not seeing, Robert was more preoccupied with himself these days. With what he wanted, what he permitted and what he thought would happen next.
"Sometimes I do." He contract had a way of draining it out of him. In the quiet moment with her, it all seemed so benign, nearly unbelievable that it had seemed near impossible to not give in to the encouragement. When she smiled and its a show of her teeth he reached over, scritching her head in between the roots of her dreadlocks with a smile, "I don't really sleep much. Maybe an hour or two here or there."
Sipping from the drink she put the glass back on the nightstand and slid back down beneath the covers with a poke of a barbelled tongue at the knuckle dust to her crown. Beyond that, she kept her word. Not even motioning to shove him in turn or return the gesture to the dark of his head. There was a breath or two as she observed him again, more deeply. "Got another century to catch up on sleep if you wants, I s'pose. Hey uh.. if I scream in the night, don'ts be alarmed. Been having some... some heavy dreams. Just in case, yo. Don't worry. Might not.. maybe I'll sleep like a baby. But it don't come to me much."
Her legs bent, still on her side, she brought them closer to herself beneath the blanket and closed her eyes. "Or just stick a pillow over my head. That oughta do it." A peek at him; only her nose and eyes visible over the deep blue of the cover as she stared at him like a child up to no good.
((With thanks to the ever wonderful writer of Robert Brohkun))
Robert led her from the Inn. Troy at their heels. There was no saying quite how they came to be there..Only that things had changed. Everything had changed. No car. No distinct portals. It seemed that they had been outside the Dragon one moment and then..
The ink of the evening spilled away from them. They were left, half in want for breath, in a scant city. Upon first glance it didn't seem to be much but the reality was that it was an early-birth version of New Orleans. It was before the flood gates and the streets being fully built of tone. It was when a few Greek families tried to build and empire at the docks and other families were fleshed out from slavery and vice. There was the French, the African and a scattering of Greek. Robert and Roach found themselves in the alley of a tavern.
Inside an ex slave girl, mulatto, was drunk and wailing about the conditions of the world. Troy barked twice and trotted ahead, looking at them expectantly over his sloped shoulder. Robert's arm around her eased off of her shoudlers.
The girl walks alongside the man with curiosity tracing her features; a frown, as ever. A frown. He eases away like a breath and she rolls her inked arms into a broader swing; putting a touch more space between them despite the gravity and to reach into her bag for her lighter. "What kind of fucking.....?" She comes to an abrupt stop as she looks around, absorbing, reading, then looks to Robert. "Is this.... is this you and that magic you gots? Or.. we really go back...?" She turns to face Robert, as Troy trots back to wind in and out of her legs before sitting at his feet.
"I don't know." He admitted, his thumb nail catching the edge of his cigarette to give it another flick. The small amount of ash that was built up dashed off in the half-breeze. She asked him about the magic he had, which he took to mean if he was building illusions. Had he constructed this whole affair? Roach paused, looking behind himself, forward, and then to her, "It seems real. Real to me." That had been beyond him, though, constructing something real.
That gave her greater pause; the cigarette between her lips bitten down on as she continued to peer around, taking it in. "We.... we gone back in time, Robbie?" She turned away, hair like cables or glass beads, tumbling, rocking, breaking and joining down her back as she set foot deeper into the crowd. But a thought occurred, and her eyes immediately began to rove. Troy sensed, and took off through the crowd and up the stairs. "10-4." And she was off, weaving through the patrons, who eyed them oddly, some calling out. Some taunting or threatening or teasing. Troy ran up the stairs and she followed, looking back at Robert.
"It feels older," but if he was forced to be honest, he would say he wouldn't know. Robert was old, and those years spent in a gone area were more comfortable to recognize but... blurred by thin distinction. A final drag and he flicked away the last of his cigarette, setting after the direction of Troy. His hazel gaze shot over his shoulder to her as their steps moved further into the crowd.
"This city is an infection!" Katrina yelled, her cheap coal mascara running down her half baked cheeks. It was hard to avoid them on the way to the stairs, but they did.
Roach stepped out of the way of the woman screaming and continued on ahead, her pace picking up as the dog shot ahead through the dark of the hall. Prost's leaned against walls, their ragged, filthy dresses like antiques that hovered at the edges of their vision wrapped around ghosts; the women so pale, so thin. The girl swallowed in discomfort, her bearings all gone and rounded the corner as the dog took off to the right and charged ahead. "Slow down, boy. Slow down!!!" She's yelling, chasing, glancing back. Then the dog comes to a pause outside a door. 10-4. Sits staring at it; hackles raised and ears pricked. Roach catches her breath and leans over, hands on her knees. Hazel eyes on Robert. "Got that key?"
He's behind her, not quite like a shadow and more like some reinforcing tide not far off. He reached into his jacket pocket, withdrawing a key and looking down at it thoughtfully and then to her. His eyes went down towards the commons, past the pouting breasts of the whores to Katrina, who was still yelling. She said, "I will wash this city of everything." All he could think about was the hurricane. Of the bodies that rose to the surface. Of how everyone said that the black people in America didn't matter and were left to suffer and rot.
He put his arm past her, his chest almost connecting to her back as he twisted the key. Had the door always had the black X and numbers on it? He hesitated, then pushed. Troy nosed in first and trotted into the dark before they even knew what it was.
The smell hits them first. The sounds of Troy's paws pattering like distant rain ahead into darkness. But that smell. At first, it is pungent, almost fetid - decay, rotting, until it sweetens, ripens, enriches, grows more alive, more full, more voluptuous, more round. It's carnal, it's warm, it's close to the skin. It's petals; brown at their edges and curling. It's honeysuckles, after being in that wet, heavy air and their scent is all but oozing. It's sweeter still, powdered sugar and chicory coffee. It's something else, though. In that wall of scent that creeps in the darkness. Musk. Of sex. Of a woman's sex in afterglow. It makes her nose turn up, as she moves through the room, an arm out ahead. There's no light at all, even as she feels up the wall for a switch. Her eyes scanning the darkness. "Troy?" And it's impossible, but it sounds like he is far off ahead, down a storm drain; his barks echoing. She can hear water. Water running. Droplets ticking against.... something. In the dark she turns, that arm out, clutching for Robert. "Robbie? I'm here. Feel me?"
"It's raining." He says, practically colliding with her. One of his hands caught her to balance himself but his grip moved quickly, drawing her leg up from behind the knee and around him to hold him tight between her thighs in the dark. Why did he do that? Robert knew he didn't want her, not really, and though he had no idea of Grey's enormous presence in her heart, he likewise had the sense that in sober moments where their eyes met that there was a disconnect, stretching on far and forever. An eternal disconnect that forged its own sense of connection. This is the moment.
The world turns and gravity realigns. He's on top of her, the mattress is dirty and spread open, the sheets half covering it and the electric lamp burning lazy in the hot mouth of New Orleans Summer. Latched to the headboard were a hundred different voodoo dolls, all carefully pricks with colourful needles.
Smoking her cigarette in the waitress uniform was Doll, flipping through a magazine on her lap. Her legs were crossed, her cigarette held like it was a heavy burden. Her full, mulatto face turned up as she smiled, "You know what they used to call the lucky ones? High yellow." She smirked like it was a joke that was supposed to be funny and then sucked on her cigarette again. She breathed out grey, using her cigarette to point at them, "So you two gonna feck, or what? I don't have all year, boss."
"Boss?"
It's not that he's on top of her; somehow, he's suddenly half dressed, and a glance down her body says she is too. No. It's Doll's addressing him that way, that has her lifting a brow and then staring at him in confusion. She's wrapped around him, though there's been no kiss. Her hands are in his hair, already -- and when had happened? When had the darkness pulled back like a vast curtain and tumbled them onto this bed that smelled like it did as soon as they entered the room. Distantly, still, the rain falls, like a forever-sound, as eternal as the connection between them, that friendship that was not, just as they were lovers.. and not. Tangled up in Robert and Robert tangled up in her, she looks up at him. She wants the way she wanted him back at the Wyndham; eating french fries as he pressed into her pussy from behind. The way she wanted his eyes on her from the shower. She's wanting him, lusting, aching, needing, yet there's the question of how - is the heat in her belly, flowering down into her thighs, that has her legs gripping tight, is it this intense because of his heat that worked through her blood like some under the table drug or because of unfinished business on a June evening on Royal. "Guys, you don't have forever... well, one of you does. Make up your goddamn mind." She turned the page of the magazine in her lap and shook her head. "Goddamn gods and goddesses, always the same." Roach looked at the woman with a glare and then shifted against Robert; her hands in his hair moving through dark wires as she adjusts beneath his weight and presses her lips to his. At once, fire, frenzy, cinnamon and copper. The rush of him, all that was him and mounting. Her body tenses and she gasps. Flames surround the bed; licking at the ceiling. Doll arches a brow and then shakes her head again, taking a drag on the cigarette. "Fecking pyromaniacs."
"Don't worry, we're here," the door to the room opened and a crew of seemingly faceless, dark skinned people joined. It was hard to say what was odd about them, but it was more subtly represented in Doll. He was trying to concentrate, to pinpoint the strangeness of him as his hips were pushing into Roach's, wishing to peel back the remaining layers of cloth and plunge into her. What was so strange about all of them? Something about Doll bothered him, nagged at him and it was only from the corner of his eye that he noticed her skin seemed more like a sheer cloth than flesh. Her thick, African hair like untamed yarn being woven up. The crew of people having entered had black skin with seams and frighteningly white teeth. Their clothes were colorful and the pins in their skin weren't bleeding but shone from the light that was in the room. They set up movie-style cameras around the bed as if this had been movie set.
"Oh, put your back into it," one of Doll's boys said, grinning that smile of a stitched closed mouth. One of the others elbowed him, but Doll gave them an annoyed look as she turned the page. The sound of rain became louder, like it was pelting on the rooftop, threatening to wash the city away again. One of the other crew members snickered and said, "Once I saw a couple set fire to the bed. I betcha they will, I betcha they'll fuck like they've needed it all month."
Robert looked away, unavoidably back to Roach. Like they needed it all month. They didn't though, did they? They hadn't been abstaining from the flesh of others but indulging. Lizzie's mouth is on his and there's a low moan that crawls in his throat. When he feels the wanton sound in his throat it sounds like he's hungry and pleading to penetrate her. The request shifts, it becomes a command and the gentle sound of moaning in his throat becomes a growl. He remembered more than the Nola hotel, but his mind went from that smell of sex, of pussy and almost-fucking to the moment she crawled in his lap and that ribbon around her throat loosened. Why hadn't they been wrapped in each other before? It seemed stupid now that clothes, time and everything else had been in the way. He reached down, catching the button of her pants to undo it and then pulling them open. His hand glided down between the tight confines of her pants and underwear, feeling the upward, impatient grind of her thinly covered sex against his hand. The heat of her and the dampness of the cloth just at his fingertips. He pressed, feeling the soft, thin fabric and felt the details of her sex against his hand.He nudged the cloth aside, his middle finger licking at her lips, stopping at the small knob of her clit before his hand pulled away.
His mouth broke away from hers. The cameras and the lights were positively blinding. Doll and the crew all seemed like silhouette cut outs. Doll called out to them, "You gonna do this or what?"
"I don't... you don't." Robert's body weight rested against her when his hand slipped away. His arm wrapped around her just before he kissed her. It was a gentle kiss, not one threatening to open her mouth up further.
"Hey, were do you think you're g--"
They were gone, all of it. Somewhere on the streets of Nola, Robert was holding Roach against him in a long box slumped on its side. The roof of it was already darkened with rain. It patterned more heavily on top of the box. His lips pressed at the outside corner of her eye. He was still shirtless, he could still feel the crackle of flames around them. He could smell how much they wanted to feck like patchouli and cinnamon. It was a strange combination that lingered in his mouth. There was a disturbance at there feet that ended up being Troy nosing at them, whimpering once but wagging his tail when Robert stole a look down the confines of their street box to him.
Her body writhes and squirms in anticipation and need beneath him and when his finger slips inside she gasps and bites her lip, her eyes closing with pleasure. Doll makes a commotion, light flickers off to he side and the flames climb higher, higher, going through the ceiling, warping it into a dizzying, circling hole into darkness. Then, then the bed dissolves around them and instead there is rain above, tapping against cardboard. She turns and looks at him; the burn of a kiss beside her eye and her lips inches from his. "Push the sky away." Troy is pulling at the tattered end of her jeans, tugging, tugging, and she sits up to slide from that coffin box and Robert's arms, only, as she stands, she looks down to see she's not... where she expected to be standing, and Troy is sitting by the kitchen door that leads into the Otherworld Museum. Robert has his hand out towards her and a red ribbon sits loose at her pale throat. She takes his hand. Around them, the world shifts; the sky seems to go into reverse, stealing rain and gloomy cloud and replacing it with thick layers of night time with a few pinhole stars. The air is mild and smoke rises from the man's cigarette. But that air, that mild air, it still thick with that scent of sex. Of flora. Of warm cement and steam rising.
"What?!" She looks around, frantic, before returning her eyes to him.
"What.." and then she stops. Stops asking question. Being confounded. She steps towards him and takes a seat on his lap; tattooed thighs wide, the black skirt of her dress riding up her legs. "Hades." It's a whisper, like an incantation, precious and cool on the tongue.
Troy watches on; he whines and growls and then barks three times before padding over to sit by Robert's feet in the chair.
He leaned forward, kissing that line of cloth at her neck, his lips skimming from one side of her throat to the other. She spreads, her legs opening wider like a flower unfurling, nearly bursting with the need to be pollinated. She sat so close to him that he knew she could feel him, hard under the cover of his slacks with her panties pressing against the zipper of his pants.
"It's not fair." He breathes, realizing that there was a stab of pain in his side. Still naked from the waist up. When is eyes drop the old Nephilim wound begins pouting, blood easing out from the healed up scar, working down his side and into his lap like wet, coppery pre-cum. He gripped her hips to keep her from grinding, "It's not fair to see you like this." In that place where she was a pause of potential, a budding something. A promise she couldn't keep. Part-time offered flesh. Where she was... "Persephone."
Hades was always giving her up, wasn't he?
Her hands take his face between them - every single finger like a small, smouldering coal and she presses her mouth to his, just as she had in the bed, just as she had in a hotel room. "It's never fair, that is life and death." The words come as if not her own but channeled through, with a distance and a haunt, her voice slow and soft. She frowns, conflicted as she leans away, though her hands remain. "I should go." He was and she, she was always leaving, running, hiding. Her eyes slip aside. "We... you... we.." she looks back and takes her hands away. But, despite her words, she finds she cannot leave. Not him. Not the man who holds her in his palm. She shifts, but her legs do not buckle and Troy barks at her, a sound like tearing paper. "Hades." Saying it, suddenly, she smiles. "Take me to spring." Her eyes growing darker. A red sheen to their cast. "Take me home, Hades."
She needs to be mine. She's been dancing on the outskirts, she's been flirting at the edge of sex, of consummating a condom-less, seed spill fuck into her womb. Can't take someone to a home they haven't claimed the right to.
He's pale and uncertain, so white he could be wearing a mask. Robert's eyes turned up towards the moon overhead, still full from the previous day where no shadow touches its white face. His breaths leveled, he leaned forward until her lower back touched the metal patio table behind her. The world shifted and the whole of her was lying atop one of the museum display cases. Beneath it was something short and education that Osvaldo had created about the different methods for starting fires.
Some argued that mankind gaining control of fire brought about their humanity. Their ability to cook, to survive the Winter and see at times when it was dark.
The glass made a rocking, gritty sound, threatening to break under their combined weight. Her back pressed to the gleaming glass. He reached up, gripping the edge of the case above her head with one hand while his other began undoing the belt. Why was that happening and when had this seemed like something that needed to happen? He had been so patient, wanting to unwrap her carefully but his skin felt like the temperature of his blood was uncomfortably warm when he was around her.
He's bleeding. It's only there, she sees the red running from him, drying rapidly on the white of his flesh. Her eyes move from the wound to his eyes, as she moans beneath him, as if he were already inside, as if he was already thrusting deep within her sex and they were fulfilling all that were made to do. Jimmie had known all along. Known that her fire would be known by Robert, that the man with the dogs was the man who had set fire to the past and with it incinerated all the empty spaces in between time itself as he descended below and took Elizabeth with him. And now, beneath him, below him, her dress falling away. Fire and the manipulation of it, defined humans as wholly divisible a species from the animal kingdom... Humans could influence their environment through the manifest of warmth (comfort, security) and heat (nourishment) and light (illumination) where as creatures are in turn, manipulated by the flame.... The images in the photos of fire that Osvaldo has arranged begin to change. In each, snapshots of Robert and Roach in different stages of intimate union. Tangled up in one another. In other photos, flames. Some blue, some red, some white. In others, still, the neanderthal by the fire pit in a cave, the candle in the hand of a slave girl, the pantheon illuminated with blazing spires of inferno. Roach widens her legs and clutches the back of his neck.
"Take me to spring, take me home, Hades." She reaches down to pull her panties away, when the world tips. Around them a crowd, 'Le danse de mardi gras'rising from the roaming cajun band, her back not to reinforced glass but a hard, brick wall. Robert against her, mouths inches apart, her leg wound around his leg. "Robert."
At some point the red ribbon around her throat fell away. He saw it as a glimmer of color, temporarily hanging on her chest before the quick outtake of her breath pushed it away so that it writhed and tumbled into the loud, boisterous streets of New Orleans. Men in masks that looked like they were smiling with blank eyes craned their necks, pointed and cheered them on. Wait, no, those weren't men. They were something else, masquerading at the great party as observers to it all.
"Lizzie, tell me the name of the person you love." There was no expectation that it would be his name in her mouth and that was what he needed to hear. It was all so real and not at the same time. It was her and it wasn't. Shirtless, his skin was hot under her touch. Her mouth kept igniting something strange. Where was Spring? It was in New Orleans with all the Voodoo, bright and happy faces that surged and partied more fiercely now that they idols were about to copulate against a brick wall. The streetlight nearest to them shone so much it burst with the energy of it. People laughed like it might stop their hearts. New Orleans was buzzing.
Somewhere, Doll smiled and bit her lower lip, saying in a low breathy voice, "Feck yeah."
One palm pressed against the face of the bricks beside her head, his other hand undoing his belt. It was slippery and the noise of Mardi Gras was so intense he couldn't hear his heart beating or the crackle of fire around her.
"I love Grey." The words, they come easy. But she winces. "But I belong to you, Hades. I belong to you and you belong in me." The music is a cacophany - so much brass, so much yelling, shouting, singing. Trumpets blaring. Accordion wheezing. Drumming like the crowd was all just an assembly of hearts thudding wild. "Robert.... now." She pulls aside her jeans, pulls them down, her panties with it. Confetti and beads rain down. The light explodes and shatters everywhere, not far away. Then Troy appears, barking wildly at their feet. The scene tips again and they are in 10-4 in Seattle. She's beneath him, her back arched. Remmy beside them. "Now, Robert, now." Jimmie and Doll stand beside the men with the demon from the front desk. Each of their mouths filled with shark-tooth grins. "Now, Robert. Take her to Spring." Remmy sits bolt upright in their bed, looks down and smiles past the sultry fall of her sex-sweat hair. "Are you happy, Robert?"
Troy pads into the room and noses past the three standing figures. He shifts. Not a canine, but a man. "Hello, you two." Black, all black. Hair, eyes, suit. Undertaker. Hound. Hands clasped before him and he grins broadly. "It is time."
It must have been that inevitable sense of force someone felt right before a rip tide drowned them. Desperately trying to dig your heels into the sand while also, somewhere, feeling that it had already been decided. He arched a brow to look at Remmy, that haunt of a human who was becoming more and more meaningless to him. Was he happy? All he could say to that was, "No."
"Oh, but we could make you happy," the gypsy's hand combing through his hair, moving down his back, "all men dream of two at once."
"No," His arm had to awkwardly twist behind himself to grasp her by the wrist. He shoved her then, her body wobbling awkwardly with her hurt expression before she fell to the floor, the sheet pulled taunt like the ship of a sail between them. He didn't want her, not anymore. Not even for a bout of meaningless sex when they just so happen to cross paths again.
Roach was still beneath him, naked except for her tattoos. His hand circled around her neck, the 'x' at her nape touched by his fingertips so hot it threatened to burn him, to melt and stitch his fingertips into where they belonged. What he knew was that there wasn't love, but that wasn't a requirement or even a mention to the howl of the crowds. Take her, they said, but it felt more like a kidnapping than sex. His pants were undone to her and everyone seemed to be holding handfuls of confetti, waiting for him to penetrate her, to cum inside her so that the grain of Persephone would be budding from the seeds he gave her.
"No," Robert untangled himself, sitting back on his knees in an inadvertent display of his interest pushing through his unzipped pants. He looked down at Roach sprawled open to him like a gift, like a woman who'd been sold to a man. His hazel eyes shot a look of animosity to the crowd, "It's time? The time will be when I say it is, none of you are of the office to direct me." How many times were people trying to steer him, to coax and direct him along some path he had not decided for himself. His rage stopped all the moving pieces, even Troy whose smile disappeared slowly from his face.
"Okay, boss."
It felt as though someone grabbed the end of their bed and thrust it upward in an attempt to overturn it. He fell on top of her and then his knees his the ground which was wet stone. It was because of the headboard, the footboard, that they weren't crushed. He was on his hands and knees over her, partly a tent with the bedsheet hanging off of his form. His left hand swept over the cloth until he could work it away well enough to see that they were in the alleyway of the Red Dragon Inn. The shirt and coat were lost as well as Roach's clothes, but there were still the bedsheets smelling like Seattle sex he could wrap her in like some crude toga. It seemed no matter what he did she could not stop embodying that myth.
"We should stay in September and away from the Spring." He hadn't known what it would have meant, what the immense disorientation of it all would become. New Orleans had become its own creature and the Spring it offered thirsted for just one creature to troll its streets and Robert had denied it that. How long could that continue?
It must have been that inevitable sense of force someone felt right before a rip tide drowned them. Desperately trying to dig your heels into the sand while also, somewhere, feeling that it had already been decided. He arched a brow to look at Remmy, that haunt of a human who was becoming more and more meaningless to him. Was he happy? All he could say to that was, "No."
"Oh, but we could make you happy," the gypsy's hand combing through his hair, moving down his back, "all men dream of two at once."
"No," His arm had to awkwardly twist behind himself to grasp her by the wrist. He shoved her then, her body wobbling awkwardly with her hurt expression before she fell to the floor, the sheet pulled taunt like the ship of a sail between them. He didn't want her, not anymore. Not even for a bout of meaningless sex when they just so happen to cross paths again.
Roach was still beneath him, naked except for her tattoos. His hand circled around her neck, the 'x' at her nape touched by his fingertips so hot it threatened to burn him, to melt and stitch his fingertips into where they belonged. What he knew was that there wasn't love, but that wasn't a requirement or even a mention to the howl of the crowds. Take her, they said, but it felt more like a kidnapping than sex. His pants were undone to her and everyone seemed to be holding handfuls of confetti, waiting for him to penetrate her, to cum inside her so that the grain of Persephone would be budding from the seeds he gave her.
"No," Robert untangled himself, sitting back on his knees in an inadvertent display of his interest pushing through his unzipped pants. He looked down at Roach sprawled open to him like a gift, like a woman who'd been sold to a man. His hazel eyes shot a look of animosity to the crowd, "It's time? The time will be when I say it is, none of you are of the office to direct me." How many times were people trying to steer him, to coax and direct him along some path he had not decided for himself. His rage stopped all the moving pieces, even Troy whose smile disappeared slowly from his face.
"Okay, boss."
It felt as though someone grabbed the end of their bed and thrust it upward in an attempt to overturn it. He fell on top of her and then his knees his the ground which was wet stone. It was because of the headboard, the footboard, that they weren't crushed. He was on his hands and knees over her, partly a tent with the bedsheet hanging off of his form. His left hand swept over the cloth until he could work it away well enough to see that they were in the alleyway of the Red Dragon Inn. The shirt and coat were lost as well as Roach's clothes, but there were still the bedsheets smelling like Seattle sex he could wrap her in like some crude toga. It seemed no matter what he did she could not stop embodying that myth.
"We should stay in September and away from the Spring." He hadn't known what it would have meant, what the immense disorientation of it all would become. New Orleans had become its own creature and the Spring it offered thirsted for just one creature to troll its streets and Robert had denied it that. How long could that continue?
Robert's vehemence had broken the spell. It seemed that as soon as he denied the pull of the city, of the gods, the set pieces turned away, that ever threatening red velvet curtain closed and the world tipped them again, back into real time, back into their lives, and though they were torn between myth and themselves, at least, they weren't beholden to the strangling, sweet darkness that wanted to envelop them whole. Roach stood with Robert, the smells from that bed clinging to the material, to her skin and she moved against him vulnerably. He eyes tipped to him, filling with water, drowned with rising tides that wanted to pull her beneath. Her mouth parted and she gasped; not in a moan or sexual advance but to embrace him suddenly.
"Thank you, Robbie. Thank you."
For not forcing it, for not denying her choice, for choosing for them both. Now saltwater ran down his chest, not blood. Now her tears, instead of her cum. "Let's not go back to Spring.. I don't want to go back.." she sobbed into his naked skin, her arms clutching his back. How strange it was, that this be the turn of events. After everything, every twist and turn, that she be crying in Robert Brohkun's arms. "Let's go to your room." She would need to borrow one of his shirts, rifle the lost and found basket for a skirt or pants. Troy padded into the alley and up to their feet where he say. Ears pinned back and a little whine. Roach looked down rubbing away her tears. Then the dog stood and nosed in through the alley door.
They crawled away from the bed that some homeless person or animal would adopt as their own. He wondered what the demon in Seattle would make of it, or if he would just grin at them. Robert did his best to help wrap her up in the sheet before his hands dropped to his pants, zipping them up and refastening the buckle.
He wished he could have said that he got the same relief as her. Roach's eyes and mouth had been begging him, but all the while she had seemed so far away. Now she was present, there was saltwater and blood and while she was relieved he was left like a toy that had been keyed up. She didn't need to know a hundred whispers still echoed in his brain trying to convince him to take her. Reminding him of how she moaned, of all the different positions and flavors she could be.
With small hopes, he felt around his pockets for a cigarette. They were gone, somewhere in the strange taste of human magic that seemed of fleshy, like sweat. Like salt. Let's go to your room. He heard the words but then looked at her to check the pallor of her face and whether or not she might be licking her lips when she said it.
"10-4." A nod to the back alley door. A man could walk around shirtless without a problem. It was his lost shoes, the blood and their mussed hair that might indicate that all was not well and the shipwreck had only been scarcely survived. At some point he reached out to her, his hand squeezing her's but then dropping away, quickly. Robert wasn't much for reassurances but he thought she should know, even when he wasn't smiling or looking at her directly, that he was glad.
"10-4" she repeated, following after him; the sheets dragging behind her, off dirty feet, like some dead weight that threatened to shift and drag them back into a world, a truth, they both were struggling to acknowledge. The dog is already half way up the stairs by the time the pair is crossing the room, briefly hand in hand - loversfriendsloversfriends and then not, just a man and a girl crossing a room that is a page in their book. She stops by the lost and found basket to forage for a skirt or pants which she procures; a white lace mini that would simply have to do and then joins him at the stairs and moving up up up.
There was trepidation about opening that door again; lest it be the marriage bed they avoided. Lest it be the Inn in old time NOLA and Katrina threatening to squander her land. At the door and covering herself with the sheet, she looks to him. She looked small and scared, not unlike the street rat he had slept beside in that cardboard box a decade ago. And for the first time in a long time, feeling wells in her chest for the curator. For Robbie-boy. Care, trust, things that she had abused time and again in her careless, stained fingertips. Roach lingered back a little, cautionary. Troy at their feet again and waiting. But as the door parted she smelled only hotel smells. Not sex, not honeysuckle, not smoke and musk.
"Could really use a fucking cigarette." A half-smirk; she stared into the darkness and exhaled.
Once at his room, he unlocked the door, making a pause when he eyes the door of his companion. 105. The taste of something odd was there, but it wasn't the time to poke around. There would be hints and revelations on that later he was sure. The work of demons just smelled different. The door opened and he stepped inside.
It was strange to see someone who was a myth, a strange creature, have so many signs of ordinary things. Of a secondary set of his clothes laid out. Of two spent cigarette packs. His hand caught the light switch but it only turned on a lamp. Moving to the nightstand he shook the third pack that was there, hearing the cigarettes inside give a small noise. Smokes. Robert's room, sadly, carried only the scent of him. That washed up cinnamon that was coppery, even more so with red pained down his side. Holding two he lit them, drew on both to get the cherry started and then reached over the bed that was between them to hand her a bit of spark and smoke, "Just don't ash on the bed or anything."
Roach laughed, though it was a skeleton laugh - all bones and winds to howl through as she sat on the edge of the bed by his nightstand drew over the ashtray there to place it ON the bed between them so that they could share them. "I'm sorry I kissed you..I..." she drew hard again, the taste of his mouth filling hers; blood and spice. She shut her eyes a moment and laid the white lace by his change of clothes and looked around the room before resting her attention on his face. Her own carrying the dried trails of the emotion upon it. "I didn't mean. I shouldn't have done that." A quick wipe at her eyes and she reached out to the sleeve of his shirt waiting on the mattress and ran her palm down it. Casting out the creases. "Grey left me..." she swallowed away the lump in her throat. "When you... whens you asked me who I loved..." her mouth thinned as she exhaled and ashed over the tray. "I deserve its though." She shook her head and then brought the cigarette to her mouth again. "Are you happy?" Roach paused, smiled sadly. "Got what I deserve, eh." An ironic, brittle little snapped twig of a laugh. "So's I shouldn't bad about getting all nasty witchu. But I do."
"I'm not a romantic fool, I didn't believe that you were kissing me because you loved me. I knew that you wanted me to scratch an itch, but also... that you didn't." He drew on his cigarette and then moved around the bed, the cold light of the bathroom turning on. The sink water ran and the wet sloshing of a hand towel flopping in the sink came across the air with its instantly recognizable sounds. He shut off the water and returned out, hands cleaned and his side wiped free of blood. His scar looked as though it had never been bleeding.
"Don't ask me that question." The one about being happy. He was preoccupied with going through the minibar selections and, upon deciding that all the choices were awful, poured all four mini bottles into the cheap glass tumbler. He stepped back over to her, tapping the ash of his cigarette in the tray, "It's what Remmy used to ask me except that it was really a different question using those words." Robert wet his lips, standing on one foot while the bent knee of the other propped itself atop the mattress. One hand with the cigarette, the other holding a cheap drink concoction that was sure to be horrific. "I didn't know you and Grey were together. Sorry for... that." Robert hadn't even properly met the man, he was known to him largely by his name and what was said, like the story of Santa Claus, except that he had been real.
A smart ass retort at already began in her mouth and then stopped. Instead, she breathed smoke through her nose and watched him drink and smoke and lean and then looked down at the sheet around herself. "Do you love her?" Ashing the cigarette, she turned herself to face him; one leg off the bed, one on its side and bent towards herself, knee facing the tray. "I means, did you .. sort all that out? She's pretty hot, man." A little smile for the man. "Don't be sorry.. it... " she looked down. "It didn't start off in a good way... I mean.. I cheated on your for fecks sakes. No good things are born in..." she shut her eyes and sighed. "Anyways, um... do you think I could stay here? Just, now, tonight? I can't go back to the safe house tonight. I... I don't wanna be alone right now." Hazel eyes flashed wide and she reached out to take the glass from him and have a sip. "I won't touch you or nothing." She held the glass out.
"We had some... things in common that no one else in the world did. We were... grieving for the same things and for a little while it didn't feel lonely, having her there." He took a swallow of his drink, almost hid his cringe from having down so, and then shrugged his shoulders, "Humans have a way of... using demons. Conjuring us up for deals, getting us to do things for them and then cursing us once they do. It is like the junkie who blames the dealer. Now when I look at Remmy it seems odd that I ever thought of her as more than sex, as more than an arrangement. With humans, I should know better."
He could see the awkward apology in her, but he shrugged a little at it. Not to push it away and not accept it, but to say that the moment had passed. The wound had been made and the blood wiped away. Now there was only looking back over their shoulder, wishing a few other things had been said and done. "With old friends its never just sex." And maybe that was where Remmy went wrong. They quit being friends and the sex become just that. An itch to scratch. Thoughts of her had become dispassionate and distant and he felt as if everyone was at arm's length to him now.
Everyone was wanting something.
She took his glass from him. He thought to warn her about its taste except that she had seen him make it. Instead he put his cigarette to his lips, staring at her carefully as he took a drag. Then there was a swallow, taking the smoke down to his stomach, "Yeah just..." he looked over his shoulder, to the wall between him and 105. Then his head turned and he smiled at her, "Just don't wander."
"You know... for what it's worth.. I did really want you. And likes, not for, nothing, no gain? I..." she took another drag and then stubbed the cigarette. "I didn't want anything from you besides sex. I never wanted to hurt you and I sure as hells never meant to drag you into the mire. But.. I did.. and... we are heres, and I..." she wiped at her eyes again and sighed. "I wouldn't... I wouldn't wants no one else to hold that contract but you. And, what happened back there tonight, today, whatever fucking time we just... tumbled the fuck through.." she reached up to drag a few tendrils from her face, over her the crown of her head. "That shows me that for once, I was right about something. Wrong about a lot Robbie, but you..." she met his eyes and smiled. "You didn't cave in and throw me to the dogs. Every one else has." She rose then, pulling the sheets around her like some vagrant gown, lowered her eyes and began to shuffle over to the bathroom.
"I'll try not wander. Might want to like, put a chair against the door though."
He wanted to tell her that he was tired of being used up for sex, but that wasn't her fault. He was echoing the problems he had over the years and she, being the most recent, was getting the blame for all. There would have been plenty who would have rolled their eyes at his little "problem." What man thought it was a problem for a woman to use him for a good bit of 'stress relief'? The contract nagged at him, he could tell she didn't feel it. She spoke of him so softly while a voice in the back of his head told him to yank away the thin sheets and take exactly what he wanted. The thoughts became lewd, pervasive and he dropped his gaze as though he feared his eyes would be like a television screen, broadcasting to her the sex his mind imagined. She was impervious, though, freed of those trappings and speaking with the softest, sweetest sincerity that he had heard since her arrival.
"Lizzie, it's better that you not trust me about this." Not cave and throw her to a dogs. With Troy, the toss wasn't too far and she didn't know that voices were nested in his head in a maddening way. It was slightly cruel that he was in need of a friend with benefits and that the best option for that was the one he needed to avoid. His eyes went to the door when she mentioned propping a chair to it. It reminded him, instead, to lock it. Once he had he moved, tugging out a pair of pajamas that looked rather modern, for him. Cotton wove pants in a plaid pattern of grey and blacks. The fabric was worn soft and smooth. While she was in the bathroom he lay himself out on the bed, mindful to not spill the ash tray but largely staring up at the ceiling. This sleeping next to her business was fun. Why didn't he just say no?
In the bathroom, ice cold water washed tears and New Orleans from her face. it wouldn't last long, maybe moments, that feeling of sobriety from the heady effects of the contract, heartbreak and stress would wind their way back through her. In the mirror, she stared at her face. Mascara trails down past piercings. Her eyes cold, detached, but behind that, she saw her own fear. She saw Persephone. She blinked the after-image away, the other self, the goddess, the sacrifice, the myth and then stepped back out to cross the room. "New pj's huh? Laydeeeez looooove hot pj's dontchaknow." Something about him laying there made her laugh and shake her head as she reached for his shirt on the bed and traded it for the sheet. It was light blue and hung low on her thighs. Then she crawled onto the bed and rolled over to face him on her side with a hand taking up the tray and guiding it away over her and to the nightstand where it belonged. "Why shouldn'ts I trust you?"
An ashen brow crooked a little as a hand tucked up beneath the pillow, staring at his profile. The dark wire curls. Memories of the Wyndham. It made her frown but just the same, a hand reached out between them and stopped short in the air; black nails folded instead into her own palm and hit the quilt. "You don'ts scare me."
"Maybe you dids before, like, the other night -- but... we was just in Spring and..." she smiled. Really smiled. "You didn't let yourself be forced."
"I was told I looked like I was stealing nightwear from the nursing homes so I upgraded." This was a lot more modern than the matching button up shirt and pants that he'd been wearing. All it lacked was a pipe and slippers, really.
"One foot is always in Spring," He looked at her, his head not turning so his gaze dropped to the corners of his eyes. She seemed like a person to him then, that she was there and not putting on a smoke screen to entice him. She bore none of her brazen affectations or tough girl exterior to ward him off. More like a young, little girl than a woman trying for things. He wished she hadn't removed the tray, it felt like when children draw lines in the sand to warn each other of what part of the territory belonged to who. This is my side. That is your's.
"I can break, Lizzie. I'm not as immutable as gravity." That was his warning, gentle as he could put it for her. He looked back up at the ceiling as if never having seen her hand drift and stop at the line drawn down the middle of the bed, "I'm old. I'm having to change a lot to keep up."
The blonde chuckled into her pillow at his talk of needing an upgrade and it warmed her in a way he hadn't before. Together, they had always been strained, their interactions mostly robotic, awkward, inherently muted by some shared sense of disconnect. But his joking with her, making fun of his self, in his dry, off-kilter way, brought a newfound appreciation for Robert, one that had been absent in the midst of every other element in the ill made alchemy between them. Her hand withdrew, to join the other propped beneath the rest of her head on the pillow and she listened to him speak some more. "I won't try nothing. I promise. I would totally pinky swear and everything but I also promised I wouldn't touch you ors nothing." She looked down the bed at their feet. Something occuring to her there.
"What happened to your truck? Don't seen in parked out front? You get something else? That mid century crisis kicking in or sommin?" Dreads spilled along her arm, on the bed. Most white, except at the roots, where regrowth was working through, and some a darker blonde beneath. They were better than the dreads he had first known her to have but still knots and ropes to and of the past, the city, to Spring. A glance at them, she thought about cutting them away. Like severing a noose. But they had grown with her, all the years, and felt like a part of her, as much as a personality or a taste in music. Then thoughts moved, from the truck and hair and to his face again, watchful, watching, curious. Her features softened from their oft stony regard and given a guileless, fervent interest in what he had to say, as if seeing him anew. Like a hand down a sleeve sliding away the creases. His shirt, that shirt, as misshapen against her narrow frame as the seattle sheets on the floor. The sleeves almost covering her small hands completely and wrapping her in him, without his need to reach out in turn and feel hand against hand. The presence of cinnamon, of copper, lingering in the material, enveloping her in him regardless of whether they wished it to be so, or not.
"Pinky swears don't hold up in court, anyway." Delivered in all seriousness. No demons ever made a pact with a person using the almighty pinky swear.
"Trucks aren't forever. She kept having issues and when Helena came to see me, we left it behind. I exchanged the truck for Troy, I suppose." Robert had apparently opted to sever his old ropes instead of retain them. A new vehicle would be needed, but he hadn't decided on what just yet. The post to have his totes mailed to him at this room meant they would arrive in few days, where the trappings and reminders, the other nooses, still lingered about his neck.
Slowly, something began to peak out of his forehead. His skin there separated and it seemed as if two teeth were pushing out of his head. They were as large as a pinky, pushing and curling upward. His skin tone dropped to a reddish blush and then he looked at her, half smiling, "You're staring. Is that what you're hoping to see?" In a blink, the playful little illusion of the devil in storybooks image disappeared. It was just him, looking mostly fleshy, mostly human. The scent of him never having wavered. There was only one give in his motions, in the cut smile and dry humor that suggested a chink in the armor. From the moment that clothes were first manufactured for the genders was born the undeniable sexiness of what a woman looked like when she was loosely draped in a man's shirt. They were smoking after sex cigarettes and she was dressed in that after sex garb that covered her while also, because of the excess fabric, lent his gaze too many details.
The ceiling was a good place to start. He reached over to the nightstand, taking up his drink. The hand holding the cigarette drew back so he could sit up on one elbow to take a drink. "If you don't sleep soon I'll be forced to read you a bed time story. I hear that demonic ones are rarely soothing."
"Boy picked up a sense of humor and a new wardobe while he was away. Inneresting." She smirked, Roach more than Lizzie, before the expression wavered and she caught the heat in his eyes, the one that was all man, not demon, and then, then there were horns, there was magic, and she thought not only of the power of illusion, for what it hid and what it revealed, but that her ideals for safety were perhaps precarious in anyone's hands, including his, though sex, or a lack of it, were neither a bother or a threat. But his regard, however brief, insists that her eyes leave his face and wander down the bed again for a beat as she sat up a little onto her elbow to ask for the drink with an outstretched hand. "I don't sleep well so's.. I tend to take a while. But if you needs to sleep.. don't have to wait up for me to pass out. I will, soons enough."
"I knows you asked me not to continue with what I asked earlier but..." she bent a knee and shifted, reaching out to draw the quilt up and over herself, "you seem different. you definitely smile alots more."
And for that, she smiled too. More fully. Teeth, an incline of her head to the side. "You gots a good smile Robert. Maybe time to live a little, eh?" A lazy regard as she observed him.
A greater degree of happiness had come to him with the death of Timothy Reaux, but it had not been immediate. At first there was the disbelief that it was over, that it was done with, followed by the sense that all things needed to end in blood. He had felt himself isolated and alone, failing to build those friendships and the old life he likely idolized.
It was upon leaving, upon saying farewell to her, to Helena, to Saila and the momentary embrace of Salome that he realized he had forged those connections. There were friendships. His folly had been in assuming that new friends would fall into the slots his old one had. That there would be a new Sybil, a new Chris and Jared. These were new friends and of a slightly more precarious nature, but they were themselves and not replacements. He had done better than he had given himself credit for.
The situation was still not entirely what he wanted. With the Black Ram becoming ashes and the truck left behind, Robert felt he could start to appreciate the people who had come into his life as what they were instead of being unsatisfactory stand-ins for his loss. For that reason, he could smile and his humor was permitted to be softer, a little more plump. Beyond all of that, and in the part she was not seeing, Robert was more preoccupied with himself these days. With what he wanted, what he permitted and what he thought would happen next.
"Sometimes I do." He contract had a way of draining it out of him. In the quiet moment with her, it all seemed so benign, nearly unbelievable that it had seemed near impossible to not give in to the encouragement. When she smiled and its a show of her teeth he reached over, scritching her head in between the roots of her dreadlocks with a smile, "I don't really sleep much. Maybe an hour or two here or there."
Sipping from the drink she put the glass back on the nightstand and slid back down beneath the covers with a poke of a barbelled tongue at the knuckle dust to her crown. Beyond that, she kept her word. Not even motioning to shove him in turn or return the gesture to the dark of his head. There was a breath or two as she observed him again, more deeply. "Got another century to catch up on sleep if you wants, I s'pose. Hey uh.. if I scream in the night, don'ts be alarmed. Been having some... some heavy dreams. Just in case, yo. Don't worry. Might not.. maybe I'll sleep like a baby. But it don't come to me much."
Her legs bent, still on her side, she brought them closer to herself beneath the blanket and closed her eyes. "Or just stick a pillow over my head. That oughta do it." A peek at him; only her nose and eyes visible over the deep blue of the cover as she stared at him like a child up to no good.
((With thanks to the ever wonderful writer of Robert Brohkun))