So: a not-so-cryptic text from Serafíne still holding and an address one lazy Monday night. Evening - the heat of the day is beginning to fade, but there's still light lingering in the sky. The address takes him to a neighborhood not far from downtown, tree-lined streets and single family houses, some of which have been turned into condominiums or apartments. Others remain as they were constructed: through choice perhaps, or some quirk of zoning regulations and historic preservation statutes and family expectations.
The front yard of this particular house on this particular street was not so long ago someone's lovingly tended family garden, though this year, perhaps these past few years, it has gone to a bit to seed. The neighbors are pleased that the grass is mowed semi-regularly by one or another of the hipsters inside. The taller, heavyset girl who always wears 1950s pin-up style makeup, even to mow the grass. The skinny bearded guy who sometimes wears a fucking bowtie - yes, even while mowing the fucking grass, and rather inexpertly with that, sometimes while drinking a local IPA. The other guy who just seems ordinary against the tableau of strangers traipsing in and out of there, who fit or do not fit the neighborhood because Liz is indecisive but this is probably Cap Hill so not all that strange, when it comes down to it.
There are a couple of ash trays on the front porch but no real porch furniture other than an old wooden swing. When the bell rings someone shouts but the windows aren't open as the a/c is on and it's hard to hear and a minute-ish later the front door is opening: Dahlia in a white t-shirt from some bar in Raleigh-Durham and boxer shorts covered with skulls and her hair in curlers beneath a black bandanna.
"Hey, Davie - " a quick grin from Dee, who is talking on her iPhone, who is natively tall even in bare feet. 5'9" or 5'10". Even in t-shirt and boxers and curlers she has perfectly stained red-red lips and rich dark hair and milky skin that make her look a bit like a size 16 hipster rockabilly Snow White. Soon as the door is open she'll give him a quick half-side hug and she smells like a bakery when you're close, does Dee, this brief, delicious whiff of sweet and yeast and cinnamon and rising, as she steps aside to let him in and lifts the iPhone from her mouth to offer, "Sera said you might be by. They're out back, just go straight through the sliders in the kitchen."
The house is a lovely one, with the detritus of four twenty-something housemates sort of layered gently over the old family furniture of an old family home. So: a gorgeous mahogany coat tree and lovely hardwood floors that maaaybe need to be redone, covered with somewhat frayed Persian runner carpets, and a wild assortment of shoes littering the foyer. There may be a unicycle, but if so it would be polite not to notice.
Original art on the walls. No great names, nothing expensive, and too varied to be the work of one hand or one style so it's just the sort of collection one accumulates when one Knows People who Do Things. The hallway back from the foyer opens onto a living room but also, as Dee indicates, leads straight back to the kitchen. Which was renovated in the late 1990s or early 2000s, expanded outward from its original box into a bright inviting space with banks of windows and enough space for a central island and, beside it, a kitchen table that may be built in, around which everyone seems to gather.
There's a guy there frowning at something on a Macbook whom Hawksley has never met before. This is the normal one and he glances up as Hawksley walks through and introduces himself as "Hey man, Rick." - and beyond Rick are the sliding glass doors that open onto the back yard:
which feels even more like the front yard - someone's half-neglected garden, though it is surrounded by a stone wall and there are some half-neglected water-loving climbing roses scrambling up the stones which makes it feel like a secret garden.
Out there in the middle (it is not a large space, but this house may be sitting on one and a half or even two of the standard lots) is an old flagstone patio with a mismatched variety of patio furniture - tables and chairs - and a cabana bed. In the grass nearby: a hammock on a purple metal frame.
The scent of marijuana is kindled in the air and he will find, eventually, Serafíne reclining on the cabana bed with Dan. He's leaning back on his elbows, she's using his flank and stomach as a body pillow and although there's a bong tucked on the ground beside the bed and several pipes on one of the patio tables, they are smoking the old fashioned way. Sharing a well-rolled joint between them.
HawksleyWhen Sera came back from the bathroom, if Sera came back from the bathroom, some of the magi had dispersed, some had lingered. Hawksley was still in the Park, but he was over by the bandstand talking to the lead of the jazz band that had filled the park with rhythm last night. There was an older gentleman nearby, dressed in dark colors and long sleeves as the night began to turn cool, his black hair combed and his much lighter beard kept neatly trimmed. He looked not unlike a mortician, a strange sort of person for Hawksley to end up leaving with. Then again, Hawksley spent a good ten minutes draped against Jim and had an intent way of looking at Pan and made friends with everyone at Red Rocks, so god knows what his 'type' is.
The next day he gets a text with what passes for an invitation these days among people their age. And, shortly thereafter, he shows up in a Porsche, the color of which is called athracite brown, which resembles espresso beans dusted with silver and gold. The car is new, flashy, expensive. The man who gets out of it is young and bright and despite the obscene expense of the car, he looks a little like he belongs here. His hair is artfully yet gracelessly disheveled. His jeans are yellow, the cuffs rolled up a fold or two over a pair of dark brown shoes with thin soles and thinner laces. It's another plain white tee today, another v-necked plain white tee, another tailored v-necked plain white tee. He's not wearing that necklace today, the gold feather over his sternum. No jewelry at all. Not even a watch.
When Dee comes to the door, Hawksley is standing there with his long-fingered hands laced atop his head, elbows akimbo, looking upward, curious and open-eyed. The door opens and his eyes drop, then his grin breaks free, then his hands fall to his sides. "Dee," he says simply, by way of a return greeting, since she's on her phone. Manners, Hawksley, manners. He squeezes her in return, inhaling without even thinking. She tells him where to find the others; he gives a nod and a silent, playful snap of his jaw at her, not even letting his teeth clack together lest he interrupt her call more than he already has. Manners, Hawksley, manners, so long as you can pretend you're going to take a bite out of the girl who smells like pastry.
Hawksley takes his time. He doesn't stray, but he looks. Oh, he looks, and he notices the unicycle and he doesn't pretend he doesn't see the unicycle, but he gives it a glance and a headtip before moving on. He looks at the art and shoes and pattern on the rug and he picks up a funny-looking ceramic figurine before gently, gently setting it back down on the yellowing doily it was sitting on before. He has turned it 90 degrees, however.
When he gets to the kitchen he breathes in the last lingering light of day coming through those windows like he breathed in Dee and it makes him smile again, though a different smile than he had on his face when he saw rockabilly Snow White. It's softer somehow, more inward, more like a conversation he's having with himself about it. It takes him a second to notice -- or show that he's noticed -- Rick. The normal one, who was not at Red Rocks the other night and so Hawksley just lets their hands slap together loosely as he walks by, "Yeah, hey. Davie," and he's sliding open the door to the back, the rectangle framing him for a moment where a moment ago it gave him a dim, wavering obfuscation. He was inside and now he's outside, he was seen through a glass, darkly, and now he is a true face, a true form.
He decides he would like a bed in his back yard when he has one. It seems like a wonderful idea.
Hawksley steps down to the flagstones and slides the door closed behind him. He walks by the tables and chairs, and he even skips the hammock. He comes over to the bed, his steps even but lazy, unhurried, just the way he walked through the house. And without ceremony, he lowers himself to the grass beside the bed, his arm folded against the mattress, where he can see both Dan and Sera, close enough to inhale the smoke wafting upward from their joint. It's cool today, was cool all day and is cool tonight. Cool and wet. It's been a while since Denver has felt anything like this, like the deluge of rain that hit late last night or the moistness that lingers in the air even after a day of sunlight. It's nice. And yet all the same, Hawksley makes one feel like they're in the presence of sunshine that drenches you, dries you out, makes you a part of the desert, makes you a part of the light itself.
Did he say hey when he came out? He didn't say hey, he might have, and it doesn't matter in the end. He sits on the ground and watches Sera put the joint to her lips and watches Dan's fingers take it and watches Dan's lips when they touch the joint, too. Hawksley blinks slow, thoughtful, though when his lashes lift his eyes are as piercing as ever. Maybe they pass it to him. He takes it if they do. He tries to listen to the burn of paper and he holds the smoke and he lets it fill him, fill him before he parts his lips and exhales, all in silence,
and does it again.
The joint makes its way back to Sera's fingers, into the embrace of the cutting, sharp-toothed tattoo. "But on what?" he says mildly, out of nowhere, his voice quiet in the quiet back yard, the light breeze, the distant noise of some neighbor's windchime. He is not asking a question. He is: "Wine, poetry, or virtue, as you wish. But be drunk,"
reciting,
"And if sometimes, on the steps of a palace or the green grass of a ditch, in the mournful solitude of your room, you wake again, drunkenness already diminishing or gone, ask the wind, the wave, the star, the bird, the clock, everything that is flying, everything that is groaning, everything that is rolling, everything that is singing, everything that is speaking," and his words have taken on a rhythm, a rolling and a cadence and a thrumming of their own as he goes on, "ask what time it is and wind, wave, star, bird, clock will answer you: it is time to be drunk. So as not to be the martyred slaves of time, be drunk, be continually drunk."
Hawksley gives a long, slow blink again. The fervor of his voice, if it can be called that, mellows into something else. A summary, a dismissal, a lazy smile: "On wine, on poetry, or on virtue, as you wish."
Hawksley[dammit I forgot to correct: aNthracite brown!]
SerafíneDee favors Hawksley with a silent laugh full of straight white teeth in the frame of her perfectly stained lips. Even Sera has no idea how Dee manages to get such a perfect crimson - not too blue, not too orange - out of the assortment of pots and potions in her makeup bag, or how she manages to make it looking nearly natural, as if she were just that vivid a thing, Dee - all black and white and red. The snap of his teeth also makes her blush, and she's so pale that it creeps up from somewhere below the neckline of her old t-shirt, up the column of her neck before colonizing her cheeks with a flare of feverish color. Then Hawksley is on to other things, including the unicycle, and Dee's peering out the front door and down the steps and espying the Porsche, gleaming, brilliant, flashy, expensive, unable to stop the low whistle that comes unbidden to her mouth as she's pulling the door shut. Turning back around to check him out a bit more covertly as he checks out the things scattered down the hallway.
Soon as her phone call ends, she's back on it, texting Emily. Jesus Christ, Em, he drives a Jag or something!! because Dee, bless her, cannot tell one expensive sports car from another, and everything more expensive than a Mercedes and flashier than a BMW z4 gets categorized as either a Jag or a Ferrari.
--
In the garden, Hawksley's outline appears in the sliding glass doors, behind the wavery reflection of the cool summer's evening, the swimming blue light in the east going dark, the brighter play of colors to the west stark against whatever clouds are passing. The shadows are deeper on earth at this hour than they are in the heavens but darkness falls with such slanting slowness in the summertime that one's eyes adjust without thought.
Dan waves, his hand a pale, lazy semaphore of invitation, and sits a bit more upright then, displacing Sera's blond head to his thigh rather than his flank. She takes the displacement without complaint, and anyway Dan's free hand returns to her hair, his long, nobbly fingers drifting with thoughtless affection over the fringe of her sidecut as soon as he's finished waving.
They keep smoking, the two of them, this long-familiar rhythm between them that has the quiet presence of ritual to it, and they weren't speaking when Hawksley opened the sliding glass door, and they aren't speaking now and he doesn't say hey and his greetings from the two of them are similarly wordless. The wave from Dan and then, when Hawksley's unhurried pace has him close enough to the cabana bed that his shadow falls over her, a lazy little smile from Serafíne.
Who is, tonight, wearing denim cut-offs over thigh-high black lace stockings and a bustier of some sort that is mostly shrouded by a thin black hoodie. Sometimes, just now and then, she play with the foot of the zipper, just to hear the noise it makes as it runs along the little metal teeth.
Of course they pass the joint. The point of it is to pass the joint, right? Sera, then Dan, then Hawksley (twice, because the poor bastard is playing catch-up, though to be fair most people who smoke a joint with Serafíne are playing catch-up in one way or another) and then Sera again. She takes a smallish drag and holds it in and holds it in and holds the joint up to Dan, neat as a cigarette between her index and middle fingers. Dan waves it off this time, he's stoned enough (she never is) so she passes it back to Hawksley.
They don't need a roach clip yet but they will soon. And of course there's one in reach.
Then Hawksley's voice mild and out of nowhere, reciting and oh, Sera gives up her Dan-shaped-pillow and rolls toward the Baudelaire, until she's closer to the edge and facing Hawksley now, right hand cradling her head, elbow sharp on the mattress, her eyes shadowed, dark but without color except for the gleaming reflection of light shed by the kitchen windows behind him.
When he comes to the coda, she's mouthing the words right along with him. Hell, so's Dan, but Dan actually went to college and majored in literature and he's smiling fondly down at her, then taking a deep breath and letting his head drop back, feeling the night all 'round. As for Sera, there's this grin on her mouth, the flash of her teeth in the darkness - the surprise in her, and pleasure in that surprise, is manifest.
"Christ, Hawksley, I'm gonna sound like a broken fucking record," the grin crawls wider and her eyes are fast on him, now, fascinated, like she's expecting him to start molting or something right in front of her. " - but you really do not look the type.
"Fucking Baudelaire. Only reason I ever could come up with to learn French. Him and the other absinthe-drinkers."
HawksleyThere are so many pleasures in this house. Red lips and a blush that washes from bosom to throat, trees, overgrown things, little porcelain strangeness, nameless art, the ticking of a clock somewhere that you can't see and may in fact be hallucinating. Light in the kitchen, drying dying roses in the garden. Hawksley has a brief and mad thought that he just wants to live here, and that should be all right, shouldn't it? She has soaked into the place without meaning to, he's sure, maybe without even noticing, but there is the whiff of her when he walks through, like perfume lingering long after the woman herself has walked away. The vitality, the captivation.
The reverence, if you could call it that, with which he walks out into the garden is more for that vitality, that taste, than for her, or Dan, or this place, or anything one might be able to put their hands on. He comes out without a word, is greeted without a word,
and he opens with poetry.
--
The joint comes back to him. Two puffs again, this time, both deep and long and practiced. But she saw that at Red Rocks, too: he's no more unfamiliar with this than with the beers he brought back or the music he danced to, and danced to without reservation but with notable comfort in the rhythm, in the motion, like he was born to it. She has met him thrice, shared drugs with him twice, seen him half-naked once, and never touched him, but she knows this as quickly and as instinctively as anyone knows this about him: he is physical. Not simply tangible, touchable, real, not-a-hallucination, but physical. His resonance is framed around the body, even as it alters the body, escapes the body. He drinks and smokes and dances and kayaks and he is the one who initiated all that physicality with Jim the other night. He is someone who knows his body, who enjoys his body, who cannot be ignored in room because his body calls to mind a predator that feels at once primordial, earthly,
and alien,
and sky-borne.
He recited with his elbow along the bed, palm against his temple. He remains there as Sera rolls off of Dan and toward him. His words keep their pace. His pupils dilate slightly, intensifying that hunter's gaze, that avian acuity. He notices her lips move. She looks surprised, and truth be told he revels a little in that, though his own reveling strikes him as unexpected. He did not know he would enjoy being surprising. So he smiles. And Christ, she says, calling him by the name he gave her that is different from the name he gave all of her friends. His eyes flick to Dan at that, but not strictly with concern, then back to her.
"Fucking Baudelaire," he says, with a tone of agreement, though it's likely both of them would be hard-pressed to explain what they're agreeing on. He inhales. He holds it. He exhales to the side.
"Jadis, si je me souviens bien, ma vie était un festin où s'ouvraient tous les cœurs, où tous les vins coulaient," is his answer to that, another recitation, though perhaps not another surprise. Another drag on the joint, another side-exhale. He passes the joint back to her, noting that it is closing in on its end. A little sad, that. A little satisfying, too.
"What type do I look like?" he asks her -- which is, really, a fair question.
SerafíneSo now they've met three times and she's not touched him, even once, and she's like that too, see - in perfect, living, livid tune with her body. Effortlessly physical, alive to all the many pleasures it brings her and welcoming all of them without concern over propriety or privacy or anything so negligible and mean as virtue. Now her eyes are on his, her attention fixed but half-lashed, not with shyness (one imagines she could never be shy, except one is often wrong), but all lazy, or perhaps she's merely blunting the view right? Diffusing his sundrenched resonance so it halos him like the corona around the setting sun after steamy summer rain.
She's settled onto her side now, her lean frame propped up by a bent elbow, right hand splayed over her close-cropped, dark fringe, long (dyed) blond curls spilling down over through her fingertips. Sees the flick of his attention to Dan and lifts her chin, following the movement of his gaze back her bearded friend. Gives one of them - Dan or Hawksley - a lopsided little grin and, assures them both,
"Dan's Cool." Her dark brows arched and for these few moments, her attention is drawn entirely away from Hawksley. "I mean, Dee and Rick are cool but Dan-he's-Cool." No resonance radiates from Dan, but see the way he leans over her, laughing, his mouth brief flash all surrounded by his gruff blond hipster-beard to kiss her familiarly on the temple, with the sort of affection that never grows old because it is always, effortlessly renewed.
"He also has shit to do," Dan informs her, wry, pushing himself upright again and sliding to the foot of the cabana bed, already finding his feet but pausing as he stands at the foot of the bed for a mind-altering, vertebrae-popping stretch. Once he's standing, the guitarist's eyes are more on Hawksley than Serafíne. "Before I go, can I get you something man?"
(Sera wants "Te-QUI-La!" and she sort of chants it but "I told you, we're out of limes - " but she doesn't fucking care and maybe he can find one, rolling around lonely in the vegetable crisper, just for her.)The joint starts to find its end during this interlude. Sera takes one last drag, uncurls her arm and leans forward and reaches past Hawksley for the roach clip. Sets him up with it right proper and leaves him to finish what remains until there's nothing but a few errants pieces of rolling paper caught in the vice of that clip.
--
"I never actually learned to speak French, though." Dan's ambling back toward the house and Sera's eyes linger on him as he goes, just over Hawksley's shoulder, but not too long. Not long at all, really before they're fixed back on the other willworker and his avian gaze and she's seguing back into their earlier conversation with a seamless sort of ease. As if she wasn't just chanting tequila mantra, the rhythm of the fine on her tongue. "Inglese, s'il vous plait."
If he does give her the translation, oh, she does that thing again. Recognizing the Rimbaud a few words into the translation and mouthing along along with the words in this deliberate way that her watching his mouth as her own matches it, word for almost-word, point for point, syllable for syllable, note for fucking note.
--When he asks her what type he looks like, she doesn't hesitate. Leans a bit forward, not shifting but slanting in his direction, more to breathe him in than anything else. Or maybe, to soak in that sense of soaring open-winged drenched by some bright and burning sun, which is even more of a miracle when evening spreads long shadows all about the garden and they themselves are both more shadow than light, just now."You look like the type from the Main Line, fucking Boat House Row," old money, Philadelphia, he'd know. "Westport. Wellesley. Great Neck. Scarsdale. Let's see. Like you rowed crew and played Lacrosse and they sent you off to Phillips Andover or Exeter, or maybe they were real fucking Anglophiles and off you went to Eton with their fucking uniforms. The vest and the top hat.
"I bet you looked great in them." Her grin here is quick and fluid and appreciative though not precisely lascivious."And now you're knocking around a few years before you go and join or start a fucking hedge fund hook back up with that girl you fucked around on when you were both at Princeton or Dartmouth and you both knew it but she'll forgive you and she looks fucking amazing in a tennis skirt."So if I had to give you a vice, it'd be cocaine, not fucking pot. 'Cos you wanna feel that zip right up your spine and you're not a fucking hippie. And if I had to give you a poet, well."I wouldn't give you a poet. If you like anything you like Hemingway and you don't really fucking like Hemingway you just know that you're supposed to. That's how you look.
"Though I'll confess," a deep, humming, blissful sort of inhalation, all-at-once. Her voice drops and her gaze both flattens and intensifies. "it's not the way you feel."
HawksleyDan is Cool. Perhaps Hawksley has met Cultists before Jim and Sera, or perhaps he's merely quick on the uptake. He glances at Dan again, and gets it. He doesn't give a nod or an Ah, he just absorbs it. Dan is Cool. And Dan is also cool, offering to get him something when he goes inside. Hawksley, sitting on the grass with one knee to the side and one knee up, has his eyes on the guitarist while he's stretching, his lips closed around the bud, pulling smoke inward. He closes his eyes a moment, gives a slow shake of his head, then exhales.
Te-QUI-La!
"Actually..." Hawksley says, and leaves it at that. Dan is cool. He'll find them a lime. Or just bring them the bottle. He hands the joint back to Sera, his eyes sliding back to her, watching as she takes that long last drag that he doesn't know is her last. She lets him finish it off. A gracious hostess, too.
His brow is furrowed and he's examining the last burning bits of the skin when she says she never really learned French. Her request for English makes him smile, quick and small. So he translates, repeating it, and she recognizes the Rimbaud, another of her absinthe-drinker poets. Or theirs. Whatever. Hawksley smiles again, keeping her eyes when she mouths the words along. So far she hasn't ducked away from the directness of those eyes of his, and he has noticed that, too, and it may very well be part of why he's here right now.
Then she describes his Type. Or the Type he looks to be. He has his hands free now, the joint ended, the smoke curling through his bloodstream and brain, obscuring some things, revealing others in vivid color. The hand that props him up from the elbow on her cabana bed pushes into his hair. He's smirking a little through most of this litany, though it's hard to call that lopsided, loose smile a smirk.
They're not smoking anymore. She isn't rolling or packing a bowl. She's telling him, in the end, that how he looks is not how he feels. And he knows that in some way this is how he Looks, too: he's heard it from people before. People who have seen him Work or who have simply caught a certain tilt to his head when he's focused on something. There is a match between how he Feels and how he Looks, then. His soul shines through his eyes and the lines of his face and touches everything he does. The only way he can hide what he is at all is by trusting in exactly the Type that Sera just described. People see what they want to see, and people want to see what they expect to see. Boat House Row, Lacrosse, Eton, Dartmouth, hedge fund, cocaine, Hemingway.
He folds his arms on the mattress, chin on his wrists, and watches her. Their faces are inches apart, both of them with those intense eyes and direct ways of looking at things.
Hawksley gives her no confirmations, but no denials, either. Instead: "And how do I feel?" He knows. Of course he knows. He wants to hear her say it.
Serafíne"You feel," of course he knows. She knows he does and yet - there's pleasure in speaking things aloud. In pulling those sensations from the ether all around them and fitting them into words, into the human mouth. Between the teeth and the tongue and the soft pallet. " - like you're up in the sky. The sun's shining, so bright I can feel it in my bones right now. Just this warmth. Just this goddamned heat."
His directness returned in spades. Close enough that she breath and fucking smell the sun on his skin, that dry-baked warmth even on a cool, humid day all clean from the passing rain. Close enough that there's just shadow between them, like a mirror, they way their fingers slip through the strands of their hair, holding their heads up at nearly the same angle.
"Like you don't even know what the fucking earth fucking looks like, maybe you've just heard rumors about it, because you never look down, because you don't fucking need to, because you're never gonna land."
Just once, her eyes drop from his to his mouth, then back to his eyes. The glance is as deliberate and as deliberative as any she makes when high, cushioned and precise and precisely pleasurable.
"Like you can just fly drenched in the sun forever. Never touch the fucking ground. That's how you feel."
Serafíne(BRB)
HawksleyHe thought it before: so many pleasures in this house. Grass and breeze and lips and words that both people feel in their bones, hear in their thoughts only to find someone else voicing them. Poetry and resonance, the virtues of wine, the sensation of flying. Forever.
Hawksley feels her look at his lips. How could he not? She wants him to. Not notice. She wants him to feel it. And he does, and when it makes him take a breath, however silent or careful that breath is, there is no hiding it from her. And no attempt to do so.
He also holds her eyes. It doesn't occur to him to try and describe her own resonance back to her, for she didn't ask, and it doesn't occur to him to reach for her right now, either. Or if it does, neither of those ideas win. What wins out, in the end, is this:
"Hamptons," he says, bicycling backward. "And the place on the Upper East Side." A smile, here, a quirk or a smirk: "Lacrosse. Golf. Definitely crew." Well of course; look at his arms. "Sailing. Riding. Swimming. If there's a WASPy sport to be tried, I've tried it. But I loved two things more than any others." Hawksley lifts his other hand, holding up one finger: "Fencing," and the second, "and ballroom-fucking-dancing."
That hand drops. He looks wry, but not self-deprecating.
"Eton was in the cards, but my mother couldn't bear for me to be so far," and when he mentions here there's a slash of a dark look undercutting the glib way he describes his history, something that is not simply pain or ache but is also vicious, is also angry, but it's deep and it's odd and it's only there in passing. "So: the Salisbury School in Connecticut, then Oxford.
"I only read the Hemingway I had to read, and I don't have much of an opinion of him one way or the other. I preferred Latin to French but found Arabic the most practically useful, particularly whenever we visited Egypt." He doesn't say who 'we' was. College friends? Family?
There's a longer pause. He is still watching her. "A teacher told me to take Italian so I could read Dante in the original. I took a poetry class instead and discovered I have absolutely no talent for writing but quite a lot when it comes to memorization and recitation."
Another pause, not as long.
"You make my heart pound."
Just that. In no greater or lesser intensity of tone than anything else he just said. He doesn't gasp after it; he doesn't seem surprised to hear himself say it. Hawksley did not let something slip out. He chose to say it, and in choosing to say it, does not appear to be choosing to also hit on her, get something, go somewher with that. It's as though he reached a point where not saying it would be a lie, in and of itself. He puts it up to the light to look at it, and like a prism, it casts that same light in a dozen directions, all of them drenched with color. And, because there is something in him that cannot help but share, he says to whoever is with him:
look.
SerafínePerception + Awareness-as-Empathy
Dice: 7 d10 TN5 (4, 4, 4, 5, 6, 8, 8) ( success x 4 )
Hawksley[There is a lot to see in that brief, brief flicker of a moment. She sees into him as deeply as Nietzsche into the Abyss, or something like that. Only with Hawksley, it's like looking into the sun. The sun, which one remembers, is constantly burning, constantly devouring, and in that burning, in that eons-old self-consumption, blessing them all with life.
Maybe it's because they are so close -- physically, at least, and in this moment. Maybe it's because he hides so very little. He doesn't even try.
That dark look actually began when he mentioned ballroom dancing, strangely enough. But then it was more like an ache, then it was as simple as nostalgia, as the pain-from-an-old-wound erupting through one's bones in a rainstorm. It means something to him. Something that even linguistics and fencing and all of it do not mean.
And of course, his mother. Who could not bear for him to be overseas when he was still a youngster. His mother who, Sera has a flash of deductive understanding, probably taught him how to dance in the first place. The anger is not for her, but it settles around her, the memory of her. Something happened there, and something happened to her, and Hawksley is still carrying a grudge about it.
Easy enough to understand. Someone hurt her, or something. But Sera doesn't see that. Sera sees beneath that, and that at the core, however much of that rage is spent on someone else, Hawksley reserves the worst of it, the darkest of it, for himself.
For what he did to her.]
SerafíneHe says Hamptons and her smile both flattens and widens, her lips seamed over her white teeth. This noise in the back of her throat, which could be the oh yes of anyone who knows the word and the place and the implication of the word and the place from popular culture, from those glossy weekly magazines with pictures of the pretty and the powerful and the moderately famous out on the strand along the Long Island sound, in those big houses surrounded by fields of beach grass and bounded by rolling and well manicured dunes, all slip-sliding pathways over the sand.
Then she settles her down onto her splayed hand. Oh, she's been leaning like this ever since he starting reciting Baudelaire to her, but now there's something about the way she tucks herself into the particular hollow her body has created in the thin outdoor mattress, and her head into the cradle of her hand, that says she'll stay just like this, right here, listening to him and watching him as long as he keeps talking.
The litany of WASPy sports, well - a quiet noise in the back of her throat after each and every one he names and a circular curl of her chin that rocks her head back and forth on the fulcrum of her hand. Of course he swam, of course he golfed. Of course he sailed. Of course he rides. She can practically see him on a fucking polo field and -
- that flash of insight is more than a flash of insight; is as clear and sure and dark and unmistakeable as any other vision she has ever seen. That makes her go still, her breath all sharp and withheld, her eyes quick on him again, not merely this unstuck and bemused and hungry sort of interest, like she was drinking him in, savoring each new revelation the way she might lay back some dark summer's night and watch the sky reveal its stars to her, one by one by one.
Not merely that, but also this: deep and shining compassion, hard as a stone in the back of her throat, so sudden it makes her breathless, calls up this ache beneath her sternum, like she's been skewered right through, or cracked wide open.
He tells her that she makes his heart pound and she shifts forward then, dropping her right hand from where it is splayed in her buzz-cut hair and tangled with her curls to lay flat on the mattress while still bracing her upright.
"I used to fence," she tells him, all quiet. It's her only confession and it is offered to him as she's reaching forward with her left hand (her nails are short and painted a dark and glittering blue tonight, the color of the sky in the last few minutes of twilight when the earliest stars have started to emerge from the sun's haze) to tuck a few errant strands of his hair behind his ear (there are no errant strands of his hair but she does this anyway) and tip his chin upward to lift his profile toward her and then she kisses him -
- on the right temple, her nose in his hair, her cheek curving in his peripheral vision, tender and savoring and slow. He said she makes his heart pound.
And Serafíne, she wants to taste his pulse.
HawksleySo there's truth, there: she wasn't far off when she described how he Looks.
And another truth: she knows how he Feels, and this is also how he Works.
But these are things that many people in this city or other cities could piece together in a handful of conversations, even people who are not as attuned to others as Sera is. The third truth, and the deepest of the three, is something she sees as though in a vision, not unlike seeing him through the glass earlier, shadowed by the interior and not yet coming into focus. She knows things she cannot know, except that she thinks to look and he doesn't think to hide them.
Hawksley's eyes are watching Serafine's eyes, and they are both named in some way for the way they appear. He is a falcon. She is -- and one must pardon the seeming of being trite, of uttering a cliche -- an angel. Only, as he knows, you wouldn't ever really want to meet an angel, would you? Whenever the god of the seraphs wanted to send a message, end a life, start a war, he sent an angel. They spend eternities in worship, singing, singing, holyholyholyistheLORDalmighty,
bearing flaming swords, with one wing dipped in blood.
There is light and beauty in horror in both of their names. And truth.
--
She sees him in her mind's eye, swimming a length in a lake. Rowing crew, the flex of muscle, the rhythm of leaning forward and back, forward and back, all men in one smooth endless loop. Playing polo, even, carrying a lacrosse stick, shaking sweat from his hair as he leaves the pitch. It is not even hard to see him dancing; she has seen him dance, though not in a ballroom and not a waltz, but this explains the careless ease he had with his body then, how thoughtlessly he guided Emily's motion with his own, because he was taught to dance according to rigid strictures and in those rigid strictures it was his duty to lead, but also to present his partner, to show her off, to adapt everything he did in order to elevate her.
She also sees pain, and guilt, and shame, and grief, and a host of other things clamoring away deep inside of his mind, fighting their own tender war where the light doesn't touch anything at all, illuminates nothing, only
devours.
And Hawksley sees this: a compassion tight in her gaze and her slender throat, as revelatory and unhidden, unbidden, as his own heedless flash. He didn't even mean to put it out there. It simply was there, and she saw it. Just as he sees this: stars in her dark eyes, more distant than his sun but formed by the same forces, and the shattering of the chakra right over her heart. He knows that one, though he is neither Cultist nor Euthanatos: love and grief, the color green, the element of air. The one that pounds. The one that adores and loses, over and over again, as transcendant as any other cycle.
For a moment he is about to draw back. She is dropping her hand and moving forward and he thinks she's going to kiss him and he almost tells her no, because she doesn't need to, that wasn't why he, he wasn't asking anything of her, but if he was going to give any of those disclaimers he would have given them before he told her that looking at her makes his center of love, grief, air pound, and it isn't as simple as lust and it isn't as simple as pain. Or maybe it is.
He gives no disclaimers. He doesn't move, and he doesn't cheat his gaze away. She used to fence, and she sees his eyes light up, sees his mouth quirk because he is about to laugh, is about to grin, is about to start chattering about something he likes and she likes it too, that's awesome, does she still have --
but.
--
But this, which is also true: she touches him for the first time and that brightness in his eyes and his expression goes instantly lax, molten rather than piercing, as the pads of her fingers stroke over the cartilage of his ear, a sensitive spot he hardly knew was quite that sensitive.
Hawksley's lips are parted, and his eyes are closed, by the time her fingers complete that circuit, touching the back of his lobe, and he is fighting valiantly the urge to shudder. Valiantly, yes, just as valiant as he is when he forces his eyes open again. This time they are fierce, are animal in the way that raptors and the ancestors of raptors are fierce, but the glance is brief as she is kissing him
-- on his goddamn temple.
He exhales a laugh as her lips press there, feeling the triphammer of his heart there. He smiles, a lax grin as easy as any other expression, as that laugh ripples in exhale from his lungs. He remains quite still for her to kiss him there, tendersavoringslow.
That's the way he kisses her neck, when he turns his head toward her. That spot behind, beneath her jawbone, right where bone becomes perfect softness. Tender, savoring, slow. Until, as the haze of marijuana encases his thoughts, he is just resting there, lips to her flesh, breathing in her scent, breathing out
...recognition.
SerafíneSerafíne is far from valiant and she does not fight against her own reaction to his mouth and his breath on her skin, at that tender place beneath her jaw. The dark fringe of her close-cropped hair framing her ear and skimming her neck. So, she shudders - faint and radial and the movement scissors most sharply through her spine, then skims through her shoulders in expanding waves that dissipate even as they widen. No concealing that, or the way it makes cheek curve against his forehead, or the way her teeth close, all firm with promise at his temple, just over the thread of his pulse she had been tasting. Her high cushions all these sensations, makes them long and languid and isolate, burnishes them up until they shine the way his resonance burnishes everything around him and she can inhale them all, hold them in and in and in the way she holds in a lungful of smoke until her chest is tight and aching while THC diffuses into her blood right along with oxygen.
She has a hand, see, with rather long fingers and short clipped nails and callouses and those fingers are stippled just behind his ear and now they are curling back, pushing through his hair, and the finest strands catch on the pads of her fingers and her palm conforms to the shape of his skull and the shape of his skull beneath conforms to the curving palm of her hand and her hand is attached to a wrist and an arm made languid and slow and elegant by her high and there's a lifting breeze that rustles through the branches of a spreading oak as old as the house itself and beyond the walls a city, moving, breathing, running, living, dying. The echo of traffic in the streets, some goddamned horn somewhere, someone's fucking car alarm, someone shouting some fucking obscenity, angry or gleeful or glad to have the lungs to shout. Someone laughing, somewhere.
She's laughing too, why does it sound so fucking distant? Because he's stoned and she's cupping the back of his head and her grip is firm. She is not strong but she is insistent and after they have been sitting there for god knows how long (truth: she and Time are old, old friends and she knows how long, if she wants to know) breathing each other in, she's laughing, pulling him backwards and herself backwards and both of them back into focus.
Then she's kissing him. On the fucking mouth this time, and the first two are these hard, driving kisses, all forward movement, all momentum, the suggestion of her teeth behind her lips more than her tongue. The third is different, isolate again, not deep but lingering as if she wanted nothing more than to feel the way his mouth moves beneath her own.
When it ends she tips her forehead forward to balance against his so they are head to head and nose to nose and not quite mouth to mouth, but oh, close. Her eyes are open now, close enough that he is made into a living Picasso of sorts, when she tells him, "Habla español." Which is a total non-sequitor except she kisses him then, one more fucking time, though this one, this last one, is not on the mouth, but lingers at the edge of the orbital bone framing his right eye.
Then she both pulls back fractionally - not far, not now, still close enough that he can smell the smoke on her breath; the alcohol from her last drink, whatever it was - and releases him, her hand slipping from his hair.
"Only because my mother spoke it to me when I was little. The only Latin I know is from the mass, and I never learned French.
"I was kicked out of Catholic school for one too many fucking infractions. Stealing the communion wine and making out with Katie O'Connor in the sacristry or the chapel, smoking there after midnight - cigarettes, we couldn't get pot - moonlight through the leaded glass windows and the shadows of the trees on the fucking stone floor.
"We were just kids. Didn't know how to do anything but neck, right? She smelled like boiled peas and bubblegum and my god the mouth she had on her. The way her freckles disappeared down her throat, beneath the starched collar of her uniform.
"I bet they just kept on going. All the way down to her fucking toes."
The sliding glass door opens, here. It's Dan, and he's barefoot in the grass, and carries a bottle of tequila by its neck, two shot glasses in the fingers of his left hand, and a bowl of lime slices. She knew he'd find one for her. Even if he had to wander next door and borrow one. Maybe Hawksley won't even hear it. Serafíne gives no sign that she does until Dan's close enough that his shadow falls over them and he sets the bottle and glasses within reach but not too close and the scent of those freshly cut limes is all acid bright in the air and then, just a flicker of her eyes. The appreciative curl of her mouth, which is not bruised, not yet, but still tastes like his.
"I've never been to Egypt," as if the interlude with Cultist-consor room service had not happened and while Dan's walking away and before he has slipped back through the sliders and closed them behind him.
"Fucking Arabic," Sera can employ the word fucking with at least two dozen different inflections, and here she's marveling over him, whatever he's carrying around behind his eyes, inside his mind.
"What are you, some kind of fucking genius or something?"
HawksleyThere is something in Hawksley's nature that calls him to that valiancy, and it goes deeper than pride, deeper than the damning trifecta of PerformProvideProtect. That is deeper even than Sera could see, even if at the same time, it's written all over his face. That face which is, for countless unspooling moments, beneath her jaw and beside her neck. He kisses her throat, but even when that kiss melts to a whisper, his lips are resting soft, soft, feeling her skin and the way his breath rebounds back to him from her. And her pulse. And her smell. And the smell of her hair, and the cascade of that hair and the fading light filtering through it to touch his skin, felt there only, since he can't see it with closed eyes.
It's by touch and feel that he knows to lift his mouth from her neck and look at her instead, but he only looks at her for a moment, eyes flicking open and across her skin, taking her in pieces: the corner of her mouth, the curve of her eyelashes, the color under her cheek,
before he's kissing her. And he does kiss her, while she's laughing, but he's not laughing. His pulse is a hard drumming in his chest, felt in his throat and the insides of his wrists and that spot on his temple, the sort of rhythm that would once call worshippers to give their sacrifices, the sort of intensity that would once presage the eruption of a volcano, the distant booming of thunder. That first kiss -- second, perhaps, or third, depending on how you're counting -- is a collision, and Hawksley's hand is somehow on her waist, rucking up the edge of that hoodie, feeling her where she reclines like a cat or a goddess on that damn cabana bed.
His hands are warm, of course they're warm, of course they're dextrous, of course the sensation is both knives and hearthstones on her skin where the tips of his fingers stroke a line up her lower back, a rather shocking counterpoint of gentility against a kiss that is all teeth and fervor. He likes the feel of her waist, right there, just above her hip, and the way it fits into his palm.
And it's Hawksley who unlocks that second kiss into the third, touching her lips with his tongue like an entreaty, like a supplicant, like he knows something about who he really is. If she lets him in, if she parts her lips, that kiss does deepen even as it lingers, and if it deepens if it lingers if she lets him in then his skin is vibrating, his nerves are singing a requiem, for his heart is about to burst. And if it does not, if she does not, then his tongue traces those lips, closed or laughing, and he takes her taste back with him, and
his skin is vibrating, his nerves are singing a requiem, for his heart is about to burst.
--
Habla español.
Brow to brow, Hawksley remembering another poet who was not French and fonder of wine than absinthe, he hears that and laughs. Like most of his grins, this one is bright and sudden and, yes, not entirely unlike the sun coming out from behind clouds, glittering and blinding and revelatory. She kisses him on that laugh, next to his eye, so he doesn't find his laughter truncated but lets it ride itself out. When it dies its peaceful, natural death, he folds his left arm under again and rests his chin on his wrist, his right hand still resting on her waist, the hem of her hoodie on the backs of his fingers, even as her hand slips from his hair.
Oh, he smiles. His heart stops trying to kill him and he listens and he smiles, smiles, while she tells him about mass and getting kicked out of Catholic school and necking with Katie O'Connor and her mouth and her freckles. All Hawksley does is listen, though his eyes do quirk a bit when she says that they were just kids, didn't know how to do anything else. His gaze, for the briefest moment there, is nothing but O RLY. But then Dan is coming out and Hawksley does hear it. He turns to look at the tall man with tattoos even though he doesn't take his hand off of Sera, still smiling, only it's a different smile than the one he's worn while listening to Sera talk.
This one is grateful, and happy, simple as that. "Hey, limes," he says, like limes are just the coolest, like it's such a nice surprise that there are limes, but he doesn't go for the bottle. His palm is stuck to the Cultist. He's quite useless, you see.
His pale eyes, which at the moment are so dilated that they look more like a solar eclipse, turn back to Sera. Who has never been to Egypt and does not speak Arabic or Latin or French and wants to know: is he a fucking genius or something.
"Or something," is Hawksley's answer, once again wry without being self-effacing. If it were otherwise, he couldn't lie to her about it even if he wanted to, and not only because he's a shitty liar. He knows himself better than most. Many of their kind do, and must, lest they lose their minds; perhaps being enlightened is an inevitable side effect of being Awakened. "Lots of people haven't been to Egypt. And lots of Egyptians haven't been to the United States." There's a beat of a pause; his eyes flick to the side as though remembering something, then come back to her. "Though a lot of them speak English."
For the first time in countless -- or at least untold -- moments, his right hand moves. He flexes it against her, feels the load-bearing muscles hidden under her skin, exhales through his nose, and then draws his hand back, folding it along with his other arm beneath his jaw. And goes on watching her, like looking at anything else would be madness.
"I was politely asked to leave Oxford," he says, with only the faintest trace of -- well, it isn't shame. More like disappointment. "I was Awakening at the time. Nothing they had to offer me could compare to that. I stopped trying, and eventually I just stopped going. I did not get kicked out of Salisbury, however. I was quite successful there." He smirks, some other memory twinkling in his eye. Or maybe that's just nostalgia again, pure and simple, covering over every year at boarding school.
His head tips. He smiles, more full than that smirk. "We just gonna trade life stories tonight? I'd say I only get more boring from there, but nothing's boring when you're interested." That smile changes, just a little, to something else. "And I think you're interested in everything."
SerafíneMaybe there's no counting the kisses. Whatever was precise in her was not in him and he catches her open mouthed, laughing, and the vibration of that laughter continues even after he has captured her mouth with his own, and then he feels (or perhaps does not feel; maybe he only feels the thundering beat of his heart and the electric surge of his nerve endings all bright and jangled beneath his skin) her mouth stilling into a smile against his, and when he deepens the kiss she opens her mouth to his because of course she does, because he's asking her to, because the only pleasures she denies herself are the pleasures she deliberately forestalls for the greater pleasure she will receive when she savors them, having waited. And when he's right there, wanting, supplicant, well, he finds her there, just as hungry, perhaps even hungrier, than he. And so, she tightens her grip on the back of his skull and -
- inhales him, like one of her fucking drugs.
--
That brief flash of O RLY quirking his gaze has her laughing again, bright as sin, but not the way he is bright. Not the way any of the rest of them are bright; because what's bright in her is intense but flickering, is distant, is scintillating, is seen through a darkness she does not conceal, but simply and wholly refuses to acknowledge until it threatens to swallow her (all over again). Blood has flushed beneath her skin but she's not fucking blushing. It's his closeness, the heat of his mouth on hers, and the way his hand fits the curve of her waist, rough and warm and fine all at once.
So beneath that laugh is a NO RLY because right, she had hands too and hours to while away in that fucking moonlight in that stone chapel in the woods which was god knows where, except even beneath that is a yes rly because she does not have a Salisbury full of successes of all sorts, and she does not have an Oxford, beginning or end, and Katie O'Connor was the last ordinary thing she has to share with him or anyone but share it she fucking does and she was, indeed -
- so very, very young, then.
All of that in a tightly laced and layered moment, which curls into the next like paper flame. Because - hey limes the scent bright and sweet in the evening air and his hand on her flank, rising and falling, just, with every breath she takes, and his pale eyes with those blown pupils fixed on her and his voice all wry. He flexes his hand and beneath her skin, those load-bearing muscles contract with this deliciously anticipatory tension and he's lifting his hand and he's folding that arm beneath the other and she regrets the loss but enjoys the picture, see, he paints there, both arms folded beneath his chin, the way he has to lean forward, just so, the way the background lights spike all around his head, not like a halo, more like a fucking crown.
--
We just gonna trade life stories tonight?
"Mmm - " her response, quiet and low. Contemplative, but only just, as if he had asked her to choose where they were going to eat, at the steakhouse or the tapas joint. The gastropub or the creperie. Her eyes cut away from him, to the table with the tequila and the limes and she inclines her chin, her sharp little profile in that direction. " - no. I think that also you're going to grab that bottle of Dulce Vida. That bowl of limes, and you're gonna climb up here with me, and we're gonna do a shot.
"Or two. Or three." Of that one hundred proof tequila she's serving tonight.
"Dan didn't bring us any fucking salt, but he knows I can get by with the salt from your skin." Here she takes in a deep breath, holds it like she can get high (higher) from the night air, and exhales, leaning forward, lifting her right arm from where it has been braced flat against the mattress to cup her chin in the palm of her hand, and just fucking grin at him. Her lashes seem damp but that's just the angle of her repose, and the curve of her mouth is warm and wry.
"I think I'll take off some of your clothes.
"And I think I'll let you take off some of mine. And you're going to tell me about some of those fucking successes at the fucking Salisbury school. I'm going to tell you about the guy who does the chainsaw carvings, and what it's like to trip, at dusk, sitting on some ridge, looking over some fucking field, music in the distance, right? Fireflies coming out below you, and the stars coming out above. What it feels like to be on fire when someone's hands are on you, but I think you know that already.
"Or maybe you'll just breathe that in when I fucking kiss you again. Because I am interested in everything." And so, she thinks, is he.
"Hawksley," and she leans closer, chin still in the cradle of her palm, though her grip on it is now aslant, her head canted in the opposite direction, her fingertips higher on her cheek. And her voice is quiet, and sounds so nearly girl-sharing-secrets prim, except for the way her mouth crawls all around it, this shining smile gleaming in her eyes. "I'm probably going to fuck you tonight.
"Though, unless Dan left us a toy surprise hidden beneath that bowl of limes, we're going to have to go inside for that. And right now I don't wanna get up."
HawksleySomehow these kisses are violent, vivid things in his mind but he knows they are happening slowly. He knows he is asking her, soft and wanton, open, open and he knows she is laughing, smiling, happy but he also feels something dark and ravenous in that opening, and the strange thing is how it isn't strange at all for these things to exist not just in peace but in harmony, each fulfilling the other, circling the other, moon and sun, monsoon and drought, humor and rage, hunger and satisfaction.
There is very little sweetness in it but there is something else, and very well: he was not looking for sweetness when he came here. Here: to Denver. Here: to her.
Hawksley's eyes are a thing of wonder. And they seem all the more skyborne when they are dilated like this, like he truly is the raptor he resembles, he's not a man at all, he's a shapeshifter, he was never meant to walk on earth except he was so curious about this rumor of land that he begged his mother Sanctified Life and his father Undying Death to let him see, let him walk, let him touch something other than wind and fire. She feels him when she closes her eyes, even more when she opens them, and the setting sun does cast him in a corona, a crown, of the light he favors.
She will remember: he is human. Something about his mother, something about lacrosse and fencing and dancing, and perhaps she will remember she doesn't know him at all.
Hawksley touches his thumb to her lower lip, briefly, briefly, before they draw completely apart, in between his hand leaving her side and folding under his chin. He seems to study her then, all of her, though he does not look and perhaps cannot see as deeply as she does. If she listens closely, if she settles under that touch, she can feel his pulse even through the pad of that thumb, steady but quick, fervently, ferociously alive.
--
When she indicates it, his eyes skip instantly to the bottle. What else can he do? He's the sort of man who looks at something when it catches his eye, unabashed by his interest or his curiosity. They flick back to her just as easily, just as quickly. He is going to get the tequila, she is going to lick salt from his skin, he is going to get on the cabana bed with her, she is going to bare his flesh and let him bare hers and they will, perhaps, trade life stories.
Hawkley's mouth opens when she mentions tripping on a ridge looking over a field and fireflies and dusk and she realizes the truth of the matter: he knows already. Maybe, he thinks,
he will tell her a thing or two she doesn't know. Not about him. Just... things.
But his lips close and he smiles instead as she tells him her plans, or her ideas, and they are such plans, such ideas. She says his name and by god, he believes it when they say there's power in that,
note he has not called her by her name,as though he hasn't the right,
because when she says his name his heart starts hammering again, running again, running for his life. He kisses her then, instantly, his hand on the back of her skull the way hers was on him a moment ago. This time there is no entreaty, only depth, only the breathing in of her, of it, of everything, that she mentioned a few words back. When that kiss ends there is no brow-touching, no softness, only him tipping his head back, looking at the sky a moment as though he just did a line, as though the atmosphere has opened up. He looks up, and his thumb moves over that short-shorne fringe and his eyes come down again.
She says what she does. He huffs a laugh, or a smile, because there is so little sound to it. "We'll see," he says, quiet, though his voice is low and resonant on its own. As though it isn't a foregone conclusion. As though nothing is. Then again, he's not the Seer. It's possible she knows something he doesn't. So: we'll see, he says, because the truth is, that is not why he came here.
--
Hawksley breathes in and draws away. His hands leave her and leave the cabana bed and he rises up, but he doesn't need to push his hand down on the mattress to get himself up. He is quite tall, with long arms that every.fucking.person he meets calls his wingspan and those long arms fold and take the hem of his t-shirt and draw it up, crossing, uncrossing. He drops it on the grass, fifty-dollar-thing that it is, because it's summer and what the hell.
He doesn't crawl up on the cabana bed just yet. He looks at her when he stands, after his arms have dropped back to his sides, after his shirt has dropped to the ground.
They do not know each other at all. And he regards her for a long time, a long stare that is neither lustful nor blank, neither studious nor disinterested. Something lights in his eyes, something else, something not to do with tequila or lust but something intimately to do with you make my heart pound, as though he only just now realizes:
why.
--
She has not had to get up. He looks at her, and he looks at her like that, and then he sits on the edge of the bed, right beside her, right hip to her left side, unless she has risen, unless she has turned. He is rather aware of the sink of the high into his mind, veiling his very thoughts, opening him in ways that it usually takes hours of reading or chanting to get to. Without thinking, he brings his long-fingered hand to rest on her back, through the hoodie and the bustier, and he says the first thing that comes to mind, which is honest, because it is him, and because of course it is.
"I want you to tell me anything. I don't care if you're naked or if I'm naked or if I'm inside you when you say it. Tell me about the guy who does the chainsaw carvings or that field and that high and that music. Tell me about Katie or tell me about magic or tell me about when you decided to start wearing your hair like this or how you met these people you live with. Tell me anything."
His hand has traveled up her back and he is cupping her face then, her jaw in his palm, his eyes intent. And his thumb, with that pulse, sweeping her cheekbone.
"I didn't come here because I want to fuck you," he says, quieter than the rest, because he says it with revelation, with understanding, and because it is true, and
the truth does deserve some amount of reverence.
Even so, he bends to her, he lowers his mouth to her, he kisses her softly at her temple, her cheek, her chin, the corner of her mouth, that curve under her eye, until he realizes he is kissing her over and over and over and draws back, drawing a breath, slowing his exhale. He doesn't let his eyes refocus; he closes him, his hand still on her face, his brow resting to hers again.
Hawksley[FML.]
SerafíneHawksley[COME ON]
Serafínefixed?
SerafíneShe will remember that he is human. Not just the mother and the lacrosse and the dancing and the way he danced with Emily that night, at Red Rocks, after they'd smoked, while they were drinking, as the sunset and stars flooded the sky overhead and the crowd was one lovely thing, all in time together and also timeless, drowning in living, amplified sound. She's never seen him row, but she'll remember that he did; not merely the rhythm of the crew, the men in their long straight line, shoulders working in these ellipses of motion, the long oars streaming as they emerge from the dark water, set on fire by the sun overhead. The catch and the extraction as the coxswain counts out the beats and the they breathe all like a unit, individual cells in rippling motion in a larger organism, while from a distance from the goddamned shore the boat moves with this magic sort of speed, effortlessly skimming over the glittering water.
She's never seen him on the water, but she can see him in her mind's eye. She didn't see him on the water last night, emerging from the lake, returning his rented kayak. Just saw him after: shirtless, his arms around Jim's shoulders, his chin on his forearms, like they were old, old friends.
And fucking hell, maybe they are. Maybe they were. Maybe they always have been.
Even when he's burning, even when he's haloed, even when - you see - she says his name and he leans forward and grips the back of her skull and pulls her up to him and kisses her like that, all depth and hunger, consuming and being consumed in equal measure - because she is not soft and she is not yielding and she does not apologize for her own appetites, for the space she wants to take up in this fucking world -
- even when he throws back his head like there's that burn in his nostrils and the back of his throat and he can feel the emergent brightness in his veins after he's just done a line, even in that moment, when he's profiled against a sky full of dying light after the rain, in a fucking overgrown garden in the middle of a city at the edge of the high plains where they are also so much closer to the sky that ordinary mortals come up from the lowlands might feel breathless, just a bit, from something as ordinary as walking up a hill. Even then: she remembers.
Because he's human and he's warm and he's close and when he rested his thumb in the center of her crawling mouth she smiled and did so suddenly and bit the meat of it. Not because she wanted to turn him on but because she wanted to feel her teeth close over his skin. Because she felt his pulse then and breathes in his breath when he kisses her and because when he kisses her breathless and senseless it opens her up the way she does him when she says his name and the night both recedes and quickens because she can hear his fucking heart even when he's not touching her. Could hear it in those moments halfway across the garden -
- because he's human. Because human beings are all on fire.
(And if they're not, well, they fucking should be.)
--
So he stands up and he takes off his shirt and he's so tall and he has those arms, that wingspan. He'd look like a vulture if he swam the fly, she thinks, dark goggles obscuring his eyes that propulsive movement in and out of the water, that wingspan, and he's watching her and she's watching him -
- and they do not know each other at all.
She stays on the cabana bed her mouth bruised now from kissing him, and her hair is disheveled from his hand but her hair is always disheveled and her torso is incurved, the hoodie unzipped but still concealing more than it reveals of her body, teeth of the zipper cold against her bare stomach. Shifts her position ever so slightly, to lean back on her elbows and watch him watching her. Watching him, watching her, this endless recursive loop.
--
We'll see, he said to her plan for the evening. Her prediction, maybe her fucking prophecy - he does not know. She is a Seer and she's high and she could be, right now, sliding back the seconds to feel the way he kissed her or pushing her Sight forward to see where they end up, in five minutes, in an hour, in the morning.
Except she isn't. She's right here and she's right now and she likes provisional things as much as she likes actual things as much as she likes every-fucking-thing and he gets a heart-stopping flash of a smile when he tells her that. Like she gets it, see, but she doesn't think of it like that, the way he does because they are very different creatures and she may not even fuck boys who come over here to fuck her but -
We'll see.
Oh, she likes that. He can read it in her mouth as she mouths the words back to him. Just the way she mouthed Baudelaire and Rimbaud back to him, those absinthe-poets. Those fucking men who disappeared into sensation. Who are dead, whom she can still fucking inhale from the page.
--
Before he sits on the edge of the bed - probably when he starts to move after that long, long study of her - she half-sits up, just enough to peel herself out of the hoodie. The bustier is a halter-style, leaves her torso bare from her ribs to the waist of her cut-offs and she has tattoos on her torso as well as her arms. The one beneath her right breast, over her right ribs, tucked between her arm and her body is still mostly covered by leather but there's another - just script, one long word - down the side of her left ribs, ending just above the incurve of her waist.
So he has the knobs of her spine beneath his fingers; and then leather, and then her face, and then he's kissing her like that, all over, over and over again, like her skin was a kind of braille he could read with his mouth. Then his brow is against her forehead and his eyes are closed and he's so, so close she can feel his heart beating in her ears and -
she smiles. He can feel that, he does not have to see. The curve of her cheek against his. Somewhere in the middle of all this she laid back on the bed and her arms came up around him, forearms on his shoulders, her fine fingers laced behind his neck. Holding on or holding him down or just holding him.
Just being here.
--
"There are some things I don't remember, but I remember meeting Dee."
It is the reverence in his voice that inspires her revelation, and as revelations go it is small enough and easy enough to paper over. She drinks until she pukes and layers substances until she's flying and the world has transformed itself all around her. If the sun came up to her and looked at her she'd look right back at it, all open-eyed and that is why she gets into trouble.
"In Raleigh. There were these two guys, both gay right? They weren't a couple but they'd been roommates for so long they acted like one, old marrieds. Darrell and Chris. Darrell was this burly guy, not really big or tall but still solid somehow, with fucking red hair and a red mustache and they lived in this white frame house and he was older, maybe even late 30s, but still going to school and working at UNC, and the house had like two bedrooms and a kitchen and front room and a living room, old fashioned, high ceilings. They painted the fucking hardwood floors purple.
"Darrell was - is a badass. He just takes care of people. He was from the hills and he had this drawl, this twang and everyone called him Mawmaw and if you were really fucked up he'd bring you home and put you to bed and make you skillet potatoes in the morning and make sure you were soberish before sending you back out into the world again. Maybe even smoke a morning bowl with you to ease that sick, sliding feeling of coming down from whatever you were coming down from.
"They always threw a party, every summer, called the White Trash Bash. They had these toilets - old toilets - on their porch they used as planters. Filled the bowl and the tank with dirt and planted, daisies, I don't fucking know, in the soil.
"I mean they always had parties but this was their big one. They'd have like a fucking art show of student work in their front yard. Had these frames they'd bring out and this handmade stage in the sideyard and anybody could show their work, right? And anybody could get up there and play. They filled these giant fucking kiddie pools with jello so you could challenge someone to jello-wrestling or just fucking dance in it -
"And Dee and Rick were in this band. I mean, I think this was their only gig then, right? Their first time and their lead was kind of a shit and she hadn't been playing long and wasn't great and she was like, shrinking away from the front of the stage, like she didn't want people to really notice her - "
A huff, wry with the memory -
"But the way she held the bass in her hands."
- then a sharp, living breath, because even in retrospect, even flattened into words that come out of her fucking mouth, that moment, whatever it was, was magical and magickal and Sera fell a little bit in love.
And maybe they're still close, brow to brow, but it was a long story and maybe he's pulled back to watch her speak. No matter, her arms are rather long for all her slight stature and she'll stretch them to their limits to keep her fingers laced lightly behind his neck the whole time she's telling him this story.
The whole damn time.
If her eyes have been closed, they're open now. And if they've been open for the last few beats or bars of her story, they're quick on him.
And she smiles.
And what she says is, "Your turn."
And what she means is, "Hawksley, tell me why you came here tonight."
HawksleyThey sit like that together, like a sculpture, for what is (or what seems like and therefore is) a long time. He turns his left side and his back to the house and the world, left leg hanging mostly off the bed, right thigh against her left thigh, knee to hip and hip to knee. He is shirtless; she is slipping the hoodie off and for a moment he thinks of telling her no, telling her to leave it on, but take the halter off instead and leaving the hoodie on, but Hawksley so very rarely tells anyone what to do, even if he should like it if they did. It certainly isn't because of his shy, retiring personality. And in the end, in a different way, one shedding is as pleasing as the other.
They make a loop with eyes and mouths and hands with legs and feet facing opposite directions and sharply different and yet almost equally lovely bodies arranged in a fashion that would look quite nice if they were made of marble, instead of fire. It looks quite nice as fire, all the same.
His hand tracks down her body and he is kissing her, kissing her, kissing her as she smiles at him and links her fingers behind him. He feels her bared forearms on his bared shoulders and breathes her in and feels an inexplicable, overwhelming tenderness.
Well: not so inexplicable. Not really. But he doesn't voice it, and he doesn't try to explain it.
--
They do part, a little, and as he's drawing back -- doing his best not to dislodge her -- Hawksley's keen eyes find hints of ink and quite shamelessly he's putting his hands on her sides, right on her lowermost ribs, turning her this way, turning his head that way to read the script down her left side. His hand palms over the word as though sweeping it into his mind by touch as much as sight, and his other hand is touching the hem of her bustier, thoughtfully, thinking of tugging leather aside to read that there, too, but he refrains. Or more accurately: he waits.
He lifts his eyes to hers and maybe he wants to say something about that word, or ask something, but again: he waits. He is remarkably patient, and he knows that about himself, even if it does not feel like sainthood to him, even if he does not understand appending the word longsuffering when he doesn't suffer for it, and when it is not really the same thing. Enduring and waiting are cousins, not twins.
So, waiting, he listens, which is another thing he knows is remarkable about him and knows that he is good at and is unafraid to know about himself. Well: he is almost remarkable, because good listeners do not interrupt and he interrupted her earlier -- hey, limes -- just as he interrupts her now, smiling: "I like Dee."
That's it, though. He does catch her mention of not remembering, but she's not the first Cultist he's met or not the first amnesiac or it's none of his business, or, more and most likely: that is not the point of this story. Meeting Dee is the point of this story, and Hawksley is still touching her even if he has pulled back to watch her speak. He draws back further and further as she goes on, but without losing that contact. His body tips backward and his hands shift on her sides, pulling her with him if she'll go, falling, falling til his head hits the throw pillows adorning the cabana bed. He lays back, shirtless and yellow-clad and sunset-clad, and if he has any tattoos she hasn't found them yet, if he has any scars but those she saw in his heart she hasn't seen them yet, and he drifts on the last lingering licks of sunlight, held against the earth by any place where his body touches her body.
Hawksley folds one arm behind his head, his other hand on her side, close to the small of her back without quite covering it, which just seems as though it's the most natural place in the world for his hand to be. He did mention ballroom-fucking-dancing, though, so perhaps for him, it is the most natural place in the world for his hand to be.
Raleigh-Darrell-Chris and the White Trash Bash, and Dee and Rick, who he met inside and also likes, on the outset, because he's very curious about Rick and for Hawksley, appreciation and curiosity are difficult to tell apart and may, in fact, not be different at all. That means he is also curious about Dee, and Sera is talking about Dee.
Sera breathes and even before that breath sharpens Hawksley knows, intimately, the feeling she's describing -- or not describing. Alluding to. Feeling. Remembering. His hand flexes on her skin again, in answer to that breath, a silent
yes
a silent
i know.
It's not enough, because it's never enough, and the questions are on his lips like a schoolchild at storytime: and then what happened? What were the first words they spoke, did she wear her hair and her lips like that when they met, is she a better bass player now.
Hawksley lets the questions go. He tucks them under his tongue and they melt and re-enter his bloodstream, and he smiles at her. It's not the lazy, lopsided grin, it's not a smirk, it's not chagrined. It's a side-smile, a thoughtful and pleased and happy and easy smile covering over an ache. A different one. One that has no anger to it.
"Because I want to know you," he says, his voice low and steady and purposeful, and the words come as easily as the smile, come as easily as his eye contact. "You made my heart pound when I first felt you," this is the word he chooses instead of 'met', instead of 'saw'.
"The second time, I just wanted to look at you or listen to you, for as long as I could, and I didn't know or care why."
His hand moves on her side, stirring like a sparrow at sunrise, then settles again. It strokes up her spine, fingertips tracing that soft valley as far as they can go. He doesn't take his eyes off of hers.
"And then I came here, and I got out of my car, and I felt a tightness in my chest though I didn't question it or follow it. I could feel you in the house, the taste of you in the walls and air and the people who live here with you, and my heart began to pound again, and... tighten." A pause; he searches her eyes for the word he really wants, finds it somewhere in there: "Coalesce."
A deep inhale, opening his chest, which does not seem tightened or aching at all right now. "Then I saw you, and it leapt." He isn't speaking poetry; he repeats it, though, his brows furrowed together as he speaks: "It leapt in my chest."
Hawksley shakes his head a little. "I came here tonight to be close to you." Then he huffs a small laugh, the corners of his lips quirking, and she can see and hear both wonder and revelation and surrender and amusement and one small hint of self-deprecation in that sound and in that smile. "And now that I am, I want to stay."
He inhales again deeply, holds it a moment, then exhales. Shrugs, surrenders to the truth as he has very little choice but to do: "I want to know you."
SerafíneSerendipity.
That is the word written in script in black ink on her left flank, ribs to waist. Sera turns when he turns her and curves her left arm forward and twists her body at the waist and hips to give him all the access he wishes to the ink and she's smiling and when he runs his hands over her skin there are her ribs, promininent beneath her flesh, the long muscles wrapping her torso. Short as she is her body still feels long and lean and boyish under his hands. There is nothing remotely shy about her; so easy under his touch and she moves in concert with him, laughing when his hands are on her ribs because, you see -
- she's fucking ticklish there.
There's something like abandon to that laughter but also listen to how she swallows it, suddenly and wholly, when his hand is on the hem of her bustier, over the trace of ink visible below and he thinks and he refrains or rather he waits and he knows from the way her breath stops, just so, from the way her eyes drop to his hand, then flash upward in a sidelong arc to his countenance, oh, he knows that he will not have to wait long.
That she likes his hands on her body.
He leans back and back and back until he is supine on the mattress, the pillows behind him, one arm folded beneath his head, and he is looking at the sky now, through the frame of the roof. The slats over the bed like a wooden arbor. There's a canvas shield to protect the mattress but it is pulled back, it is always pulled back, because the point of a bed in your back fucking yard is to lay back and see the stars.
The mattress is still a bit damp from the rain. Smells like the rain, a bit, when he leans back like that, but the fabric is all-weather and sheds more than it absorbs and the damp is more a memory than the fact-of-a-thing.
He leans back and pulls her with him and so of course she goes, because of course she does, and tells him the story from above rather than below, half sprawled across his body, her chin sharp on his chest, one of her arms flung, not precisely negligently, across his lower ribs, her fingertips moving in a sliding, thoughtless pattern over his skin.
I like Dee.
- he interrupts, and this pleases her, so, so much that she drops her mouth to his clavicle. Kisses him there, then closes her teeth so gently over skin and over bone. This is her house - inserted mid-tale, right after his interruption. He likes Dee. - it was in the family. So: Dee came here and Rick came here after they graduated college, and Sera and Dan followed, like wayward satellites, like free fucking radicals. Because it was time to Be someplace else. And Dee is why Serafíne is here, in Denver. And here, tonight, under this particular sky. And here, with him.
With his long-fingered hand close to the small of her back, flexing his sudden, immediate yes of understanding, awareness, acknowledgment of that particular feeling: of enchantment or revelation, of quickening. Of the world laid bare.
He has questions but he swallows them; lets them melt.
She, oh she, pulls herself up his body, this columnar movement of her torso with a little push from her knees, her stockinged feet finding purchase on the mattress, or maybe on his fucking yellow jeans. Braces an forearm across his chest to lift herself up higher, spine curving sharply beneath his hand as she moves, and bends down, to kiss his mouth as those questions dissolve on his tongue. Or perhaps, to taste that ache in his smile.
Then he is telling her a story, and his story is about her. His story is less than a week old and she knows where it begins because she felt him too and linked hands with Jim and pulled him up the steps after her, after that feeling, refusing to let him go, even when the press of other bodies tried to pull them apart.
He is telling her a story and she lifts her mouth from his mouth and his eyes are on her and she fucking meets them, as naturally and entirely as he meets hers. His irises are pale with blue pupils and hers are merely dark, all enshadowed, the color lost, blue blending into the black pupils as she looks down at him. Finds his gaze on hers, and watches him watching her, and holds them, and holds them, and holds them. Sera looks away just once, the first time he says the word heart. And then she merely tucks her chin and cuts a lashed glance down the line of his body, shifts her bracing arm so that the palm of her right hand is fitted over the fist of his heart.
He tells her that he came here to be close to her, and he does it with wonder and revelation, and he does it because he cannot lie, because he has to surrender to whatever truth is inside him, and she absorbs all of this with shining eyes, and a half-bitten smile. Not compassion, something else akin to it: a sort of absorption - each of those vibrant notes finding living resonance somewhere in her body. A sort of physical reverence that inspires such restraint in her that she just smiles down at him, then lifts her chin and cuts her eyes away.
Stares off into the dark shadows around the cabana, the way evening folds itself into night, and she's in profile and she's smiling in profile, her mouth tucked into a private curve that is internal, not withdrawn exactly, but cupped in her heart.
Then she's rolling away from him, turning to sit up, her back to him. Which seems cruel, perhaps, the sudden absence of her weight and her warmth, the night air on her skin, like withdrawal or refusal, though it is no such thing. She reaches up, wraps her left hand through her tangled curls and pulls them forward over her left shoulder, leans forward, and the now convex curve fo her spine is interrupted only by the three inch frame of black leather of her bustier.
"Unzip." Maybe he doesn't hear her at first or maybe he does or maybe it just doesn't register but: unzip. The bustier is held together by a short silver zipper, midline on her spine.
"I hadn't seen Jim for weeks, that night last week. I'd just found him, down in the crowd. He was heading down the steps to disappear into the wall of sound, right? and I felt him from the parking lot and found him on the steps and then I felt you, so fucking high." She tells him this with her back turned to him, while she's looking off into darkness. "I needed to feel that, that night. I wish he'd been able to feel it, too. But I'm so fucking glad you were there."
Hawksley[Awareness-as-Empathy. I wanna see if I get the same # of succ. For the record: I got 2 the first time around.]
Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (2, 3, 4, 5, 8) ( success x 1 )
Hawksley[pfft]
Serafíne[Sera's a bit like one of those old What You See Is What You Get web editors, except they leave all these hidden elements littered over the html, right?
So: she's just happy, right now. She's just fucking enjoying him, vibing on him, with him. Loves the feeling of a heart pounding and the way she connects with him when he says that is more about him and less about her. Like Dee or the roller derby girls or nearly anyone hearing you make my heart pound more than once would be all about the you and Sera's more about the heart pounding. The way that it pounds, the fact that it pounds, makes her want to eat him up. She just quickens to it, her heart beats faster. She's more than a bit fascinated right now, enchanted because he seems so fucking much like her, because he GETS THINGS, and looks and even feels so different than she does.
There's a more specific sort of shadow around her when he tells her that he wants to know her, or maybe it is wry, rather than shadowed, because she's kind of regularly a mess. And thinks that she should warn him, but doesn't want to, right now. Maybe because every single time she does every single thing she does she thinks: this time it'll last forever.
--
And finally especially when she tells him that she needed to feel that, and even when she says that she hadn't seen Jim for weeks: that was a Things Were Bad and I'm Not Thinking About That Anymore. So, intimation of the recent troubles that still sort of linger but yeah, she doesn't dwell.]
HawksleyHe wants to laugh, from joy, from soaring as high as he does all of the time whether he's stoned or not. Because when she turns her face away, smiling privately in profile, his brow furrowing for a moment as he watches her, he sees something in her he didn't before, and it is simultaneously what he expected and what he didn't and it's so perfect, and she doesn't see it yet, and he wants to take her face in his hands and kiss her while he's laughing, oh, doesn't she see?
--
Before that: Sera lays down with him, half on him, next to him, and perhaps human beings were just made to fit together like this or certain people find it more naturally than others: Hawksley's arm falls easily around her, his hand resting on her lower back. Her chin is sharp too his chest; he smiles at that, too.
Not a word was said about her tattoo. He just looked from it to her eyes, smiling at her laughter, the ticklish gasp that she swallowed when his hand grazed the edge of her bustier. It makes his heart stop briefly, makes his eyes darken with something deep and something hungry. Not a word, though, not a question. They lay together under the stars on a mattress that only feels more comfortable for its dampness in the warmth of early July. He holds his hand on her back. She runs her hand along his side and feels his breathing change slightly to match the pattern of her touch.
Somewhere in there, she kisses him. Hawksley lifts his chin into that kiss, instantly, as though answering a summons. He kisses her more fully even than before, his hand flattening on her back to hold her there, to press her against him. It's the first time she's feeling this: how firm his body is, how unyielding, how ferociously alive when their points of contact are more than hand or mouth but everything, everything. He said his heart pounds, but that was only part of the truth: that heart reaches every end of him. When it pounds, he feels it in his fingertips, in his lips, in the tips of his toes. When Sera lays out against him and with him, she can feel it too, as bodily drenching as the sunlight.
--
Another point in time, which is fluid and flowing and not like a river at all, and not like a fire, either: Sera sitting up and something crying out loud and primal inside of him, more sudden than he would have guessed he could react to any such thing, but just as instinctively released. The cry is loosed inside of him, and it echoes as it ripples outward, and everything left in the absence is silence.
The way she pulls her hair off of her back, over her shoulder, makes his heart stop. Hawksley has followed her, his hand refusing to leave her skin, but he is only half sitting up at time; when she pulls her hair away he knows what she wants, he knows what she's going to ask him for, or tell him to do, so he sits up completely, like there's a string tied between their chests: she came down when he laid back, he rises when she sits up.
Unzip.
His heart doesn't stop at that. He breathes in, no more quickly or unnaturally than any other, though perhaps a bit deeper than before. His hand moves naturally, smoothly up her back, but this isn't a ticklish, light touch. This is heavy, seeking pressure up her spine, til he gets to the bustier and just slides his hand up under it, pulling it momentarily tight and he knows he is because it straps his hand down between leather and skin with the zipper against his knuckles, but he doesn't apologize or pull back. No, he looks at her, because she's speaking again, telling him about that night at Red Rocks and Jim and he can feel her Not Talking about Bad Things but he can also feel her saying
I needed to feel that and so fucking glad.
But what he saw when she looked away into the dark with that private smile and what he sees now and hears now means he doesn't beam at that, he doesn't break into a grin of pleasure to hear something like that. Because he should, see? The way he's looking at her tonight, the way he came here tonight, is damn near worshipful. You'd think he would be so happy, so excited, to hear her say something like that to him.
But. But he saw her for a moment, and it didn't frustrate or confuse him. He thinks of the first time she saw Dee, and the first time Hawksley saw Sera, and the first time he saw Kate, even the first time he saw Dan, and the first time Sera felt him out there, at the top of the amphitheater, soaring, soaring, a shape against the sun that should have been dark against the sun but was bright because, really,
he is part of the sun.
--
Remember: cupping his hands on her cheeks and drawing her face close and kissing her mouth, laughing, laughing, because he knew and did not know, because she thinks:
this time it'll last forever.
Remember: it has not happened yet, it may not happen, and forever is no more real than Yesterday or Tomorrow and it has already happened, it is happening now, it will always be happening.
--
Hawksley Rothschild, whose other names are very long and somewhat incomprehensible to most and intentionally so, is a little bit in love with her. He draws his hand down again, out from the bustier, sliding down her back to the topmost edge of her shorts, and traces that imaginary boundary with one fingertip, thoughtfully looking down at all of her.
His eyes close. He leans forward and that hand skims around her hip, wraps around her, touches her stomach instead, covers her there, where they -- like all mammals -- are so soft, so vulnerable. His hand is large, his fingers long, and though neither of them are pale, he is made of gold a couple of shades darker, contrasting beautifully with her own skin. He's close enough now, his arm encircling her, that it doesn't take more than a gentle tip of his head forward to kiss her there, oh,
another tattoo. And a shape he loves. Hawksley smiles and kisses her triangle, then rests his brow there, behind her ear.
Quietly: "Do you know why birds fly?"
She may have imagined him saying that, though. That quiet. Or it's something he's going to say to her one day, later, or
something he said to her in another life.
--
So: he pinches the tab of the zipper between thumb and the crook of his forefinger, the metal warmed by her flesh. His other hand is still on her middle, not quite protective and not quite invasive but close, unguardedly intimate.
So: this is a halter style, yes? And he opens the piece around her neck with his teeth or he draws it up over her head and off her hair and lets it drop wherever.
So: ravenously, suddenly, he wants her more than he thought was possible. He takes a breath because he needs to right then, and he isn't even looking at her yet. But his hand on her stomach pulls her back, closer, and he's moving around on that mattress to get her closer to him, against him, and his mouth is lowering to her neck and kissing her, sucking skin in between his teeth, a kiss that is half bite, all hunger.
They haven't even touched the tequila. They haven't even touched the bowl of limes.
Hawksley's chest and abdomen are warm against her back, his arm warm where it wraps around her. She's tall compared to most women and several inches shorter than he is all the same, and she feels slight and he imagines she forgets to eat until she's hungover and someone is making her skillet potatoes or she's stirring eggs in a pan and wondering how she got there.
His eyes open and he is still ravenous at her neck, and he's breathing in raggedly, taking his mouth off of her. Hawksley looks down at her body then, past the curve of her shoulder, taking the sight of her in like a drug. He feels so high: actual drugs, his own soul, and her, her, of course her.
The desire is there to cover her breasts with his hands and feel her, hold her, press himself against her and die a little inside. The desire is there to draw her back to the mattress and lay her out and fucking eat her alive. The desire is there to pour tequila in her navel and lick it out. Maybe he will.
Hawksley lifts his head, lifts his eyes, and looks at her. He takes his hand off of her middle and puts his palms on her face, turning her toward him, his thumbs light on her cheeks, his hands faint on her jawline. When he kisses her he isn't laughing, but,
he got what he came here for. He understands. And it makes him elated and it makes him ache, but
he understands that, too.
--
Hands leave her face, skim quickly down her body, become firm on her hips again. Sitting on the edge of the cabana bed with his feet on the grass, Hawksley lifts her and turns her and puts her on top of him, her thighs to either side of him, knees denting the mattress. Oh, he's still kissing her, panting into it.
He has neglected to find out what that tattoo below her breast says or is. He has neglected to answer her, except with touch, except with this:
his mouth on her mouth, and his body beneath her body, and one hand holding her lower back,
again,
and the other reaching up, opening under her hair.
SerafíneHawksley[*HANGS HEAD IN SHAME*]
SerafíneDo you know why birds fly?
Did he ask her that? Did he, perhaps, trace the question into her skin; push it into her lungs with his mouth against hers. Did he write it into her vulnerable belly with his warm hands wrapped around her. Maybe it was from another life; from tomorrow or the day after, right? Time's just another sort of lie she slips into and out of as easily as a silverfish darts through clear waters. Maybe he said it to her before; maybe she knew him in that part of her life that is dark, lights out, everything missing except for staccato flashes of sense-memory. A hand on her shoulder, the curve of a woman's smile. The view from a half-latticed window open to the street. Though she doesn't know what the view was and only remembers the way traffic sounds in the rain and the insistent blare of a car horn and the smell of onion gravy cooking in the rendered fat from round sausages, in an old skillet, cast iron and she does not push beyond these fragments that float sometimes, unbidden to the surface and dissolve again in the back of her mind. The past and the perhaps, the yes, now and the never-will-be.
Sera sits up so, so suddenly straight when his hand finds the base of her spine and starts climbing the column of her vertebrae, all the bright nerves bundled inside, protected by soft discs and hard articulations of bone. All those bright nerves: they're singing. Then: his hand beneath the band of her leather bustier. If she bought that at the thrift store where the cut-offs and ripped fishnets old t-shirts come from, it was the luckiest find ever because it fits her like a glove and then his hand is beneath the back and her shoulders arch and press back and inward, just fucking inviting the tension, the constriction, the sensation and and she gives him this look over the curve of her shoulder then, never quite meeting his eyes but - her smile has the edge of a freshly honed razor and there's the promise just of movement in her body. The tension of it in the long muscles flanking her spine, the promise of it in the muscles framing the core of her body, the way she breathes when his hand settles over her stomach, as if she is just -
- so very aware of him.
So he finds the small black triangle and kisses it (and he loves triangles) and is this when the question comes? Did he ask it? She has no fucking idea and she doesn't care. His teeth are at her neck and there's all this movement. He pulls her back and into him so that her spine is against his chest and his arms and he saw the way she tucked herself all familiar on the arm of the priest because she soaks up physical contact the way he soaks up the fucking sun. The way, high, she wandered around the circle bestowing hey, hugs before running off to fucking pee and he caught her eye and she looked back at him and he was shirtless and he is ripped and golden and god knows what she saw and god knows what she was thinking because she does not think, not much, not really.
She makes such noises when his mouth is on her throat, not quiet so much as constricted and she curses once (something like Christ), the first time his teeth close on her skin and she does have hands but they're nearly useless in this position, they just follow the curve of his arms around her body. (And, see: this whole time the promise of movement in her body, in her shoulders, this idea of torsion, and he has the idea that if his grip on her body eased even fractionally, if his mouth left her skin and his breath did not replace it, she would twist herself all around like a fucking eel and close her hands around his shoulders and push him back and press him down to the mattress, straddling his waist, smiling, all triumphant, because, hey. He is not the only hungry one.)
She'd tell him, because they have fucking wings or maybe because they can't do anything else, or even they eat insects I don't fucking know but -
then, his hands on her face rather than her body. Thumbs on her cheeks, gentle. It's like emerging from a sundrenched sea. Like learning to breathe again. There's the pounding beat of her own heart (and his) loud in her ears and her lungs are full and she's all liquid promise right now. And this: and she turns back into him, blind and seeking, and she breathes in when he breathes out. They haven't taken a shot yet. His mouth tastes like pot and ache and something ill-defined and indefinable. There's a point here where she just pulls back and looks at him. Down a bit because of the way he's holding her upright, because of the way she twists her spine and arcs it backwards, and then it's easy for him to slide his hands to her hips, to pick her the fuck up and settle her over him as he sits upright at the edge of the bed.
And Sera, knees bent deeply, thighs flat against her calves, is leaning forward into his kiss and into his body and into him as his hands spread - across her lower back, again, and beneath her hair, now. Thighs tight against his hips, small breasts compressed against his chest, but lifting every time she sucks in another deep breath of the cool night air. She moves with every renewal of the kiss, reaching up to twist her right hand in his hair and bend his head backwards and her left hand, see, finds some purchase between them, flat over his pectoral muscle, fingers curving into the meat of his shoulder. There's pressure behind it, in the flat of her palm, pressure in the she pulls his head back, the way she leans into him. Like yeah, she's going to lay him back and have him beneath her and her mouth and her hands and her hips and her hair if he gives in or maybe she just wants this movement, oppositional and fierce, and just once, just once in the midst of all this does she break off from his mouth, and she's not laughing anymore because she's too hungry but she laughs now, like someone emerging from a long dark corridor into a room full of stars and she's just remembering, see, that question.
She breathes in like she's offering her breasts to his mouth, and she says to him:
"I don't fucking know. Tell me why birds fly."
SerafínePer + Awareness as empathy - will I get 6 successes this time?
Dice: 7 d10 TN5 (2, 3, 4, 5, 5, 8, 10) ( success x 4 )
Hawksley[The fucking dice have puppy love for this woman. Jesus.]
[Everything else about Hawksley is obvious right now: his arousal, his desire (which is not the same thing), the intensity of it. There's not a scrap of self-consciousness to be found, no worrying or internal hand-wringing about whether X is okay, whether Y will get him smacked or scolded, no shame or concern for the neighbors or even her housemates coming out. Even the vague swimmings of protectiveness -- his hand on her belly or the way he encircled her, what-have-you -- is something heedless and thoughtless and borne from his nature and not a response to her, either her size or her gender or their location. He wants her. He admitted that freely: he came here because he wants her, and it isn't quite fucking her and it's not just the pounding of her heart but something whole and entire: he wants to be here, right here, and it hardly even matters to him what they do or what is said so long as he's here.
And that's why he laughs when he glances into her and sees her focus on his heart pounding, the fact that his heart is pounding, the fascination and the enchantment that really isn't about her hearing 'you make my heart pound' and feeling all a-twitter or flattered or endeared by it, that isn't really about her at all and is only somewhat about him. He laughs, and he aches, and he's elated and he kisses her like that because he's not here for himself, either. He even had to struggle a bit to answer her when she asked him why he came; it took him all that time to even realize that he didn't come over because he was hoping to fuck her, and he's still not entirely sure how to quantify this or describe it or if there are, in fact, discrete words or quantifiers that apply.
He is elated to be here, and truthfully she can see that he is elated to be at all, and he's enjoying her and he's with her and she feels goddamn amazing and he could probably just roll around on the cabana bed or the grass and drink tequila or smoke another joint or look at the stars and talk about random disconnected memories and feel just as happy and connected and never lose that edge of desire even if it wasn't satisfied -- and, in a way, feel satisfied all the same. He's laughing because he also sees that she sort of wants to warn him that knowing her is hard, she's almost never sober she's usually a mess she may be one of those people who doesn't even always know herself and like that's going to stop her, hah.
Hawksley doesn't intend right now to ask her about Bad Things that she's Not Thinking About; he gets that, too. She had to look rather deep before, after all, to see that shadow of his own from earlier. Even Hawksley wasn't entirely aware of its presence, though Sera was.
When it gets right down to it, it's very simple: he came here to be with her. And there is a self-forgetting in that, which he is deeply familiar with, when one is in the presence of something sought, something fascinating, like looking into the sun. He's happy because even in this he's finding -- expectedly and unexpectedly -- that they are attuned to the same pulse. He's aching because there is something a bit sad about the self-forgetting, about being so enchanted with something that comes from without that it fills you entirely, emptying out those things that come from within, even if what you are filled with is joy and life and wonder.
But of course someone who feels constantly like he's flying, who nonetheless knows that even things that fly have to come back to earth sometimes, well: he would understand that defiant belief that this time, this time it can last forever.]
SerafíneDo you know why birds fly?
Did he ask her that? Did he, perhaps, trace the question into her skin; push it into her lungs with his mouth against hers. Did he write it into her vulnerable belly with his warm hands wrapped around her. Maybe it was from another life; from tomorrow or the day after, right? Time's just another sort of lie she slips into and out of as easily as a silverfish darts through clear waters. Maybe he said it to her before; maybe she knew him in that part of her life that is dark, lights out, everything missing except for staccato flashes of sense-memory. A hand on her shoulder, the curve of a woman's smile. The view from a half-latticed window open to the street. Though she doesn't know what the view was and only remembers the way traffic sounds in the rain and the insistent blare of a car horn and the smell of onion gravy cooking in the rendered fat from round sausages, in an old skillet, cast iron and she does not push beyond these fragments that float sometimes, unbidden to the surface and dissolve again in the back of her mind. The past and the perhaps, the yes, now and the never-will-be.
Sera sits up so, so suddenly straight when his hand finds the base of her spine and starts climbing the column of her vertebrae, all the bright nerves bundled inside, protected by soft discs and hard articulations of bone. All those bright nerves: they're singing. Then: his hand beneath the band of her leather bustier. If she bought that at the thrift store where the cut-offs and ripped fishnets old t-shirts come from, it was the luckiest find ever because it fits her like a glove and then his hand is beneath the back and her shoulders arch and press back and inward, just fucking inviting the tension, the constriction, the sensation and and she gives him this look over the curve of her shoulder then, never quite meeting his eyes but - her smile has the edge of a freshly honed razor and there's the promise just of movement in her body. The tension of it in the long muscles flanking her spine, the promise of it in the muscles framing the core of her body, the way she breathes when his hand settles over her stomach, as if she is just -
- so very aware of him.
So he finds the small black triangle and kisses it (and he loves triangles) and is this when the question comes? Did he ask it? She has no fucking idea and she doesn't care. His teeth are at her neck and there's all this movement. He pulls her back and into him so that her spine is against his chest and his arms and he saw the way she tucked herself all familiar on the arm of the priest because she soaks up physical contact the way he soaks up the fucking sun. The way, high, she wandered around the circle bestowing hey, hugs before running off to fucking pee and he caught her eye and she looked back at him and he was shirtless and he is ripped and golden and god knows what she saw and god knows what she was thinking because she does not think, not much, not really.
She makes such noises when his mouth is on her throat, not quiet so much as constricted and she curses once (something like Christ), the first time his teeth close on her skin and she does have hands but they're nearly useless in this position, they just follow the curve of his arms around her body. (And, see: this whole time the promise of movement in her body, in her shoulders, this idea of torsion, and he has the idea that if his grip on her body eased even fractionally, if his mouth left her skin and his breath did not replace it, she would twist herself all around like a fucking eel and close her hands around his shoulders and push him back and press him down to the mattress, straddling his waist, smiling, all triumphant, because, hey. He is not the only hungry one.)
She'd tell him, because they have fucking wings or maybe because they can't do anything else, or even they eat insects I don't fucking know but -
then, his hands on her face rather than her body. Thumbs on her cheeks, gentle. It's like emerging from a sundrenched sea. Like learning to breathe again. There's the pounding beat of her own heart (and his) loud in her ears and her lungs are full and she's all liquid promise right now. And this: and she turns back into him, blind and seeking, and she breathes in when he breathes out. They haven't taken a shot yet. His mouth tastes like pot and ache and something ill-defined and indefinable. There's a point here where she just pulls back and looks at him. Down a bit because of the way he's holding her upright, because of the way she twists her spine and arcs it backwards, and then it's easy for him to slide his hands to her hips, to pick her the fuck up and settle her over him as he sits upright at the edge of the bed.
And Sera, knees bent deeply, thighs flat against her calves, is leaning forward into his kiss and into his body and into him as his hands spread - across her lower back, again, and beneath her hair, now. Thighs tight against his hips, small breasts compressed against his chest, but lifting every time she sucks in another deep breath of the cool night air. She moves with every renewal of the kiss, reaching up to twist her right hand in his hair and bend his head backwards and her left hand, see, finds some purchase between them, flat over his pectoral muscle, fingers curving into the meat of his shoulder. There's pressure behind it, in the flat of her palm, pressure in the she pulls his head back, the way she leans into him. Like yeah, she's going to lay him back and have him beneath her and her mouth and her hands and her hips and her hair if he gives in or maybe she just wants this movement, oppositional and fierce, and just once, just once in the midst of all this does she break off from his mouth, and she's not laughing anymore because she's too hungry but she laughs now, like someone emerging from a long dark corridor into a room full of stars and she's just remembering, see, that question.
She breathes in like she's offering her breasts to his mouth, and she says to him:
"I don't fucking know. Tell me why birds fly."
HawksleyThere is another tatto beside her breast; Hawksley has not been able to make it out yet. The sun is fallen from the sky, and the night encroaches slow and cool and crepuscular rays converge toward the sun as it sinks between the peaks of the not-so-distant mountains. He will look at it in a little while, and perhaps it will make him smile just like Serendipity and her triangle and the sharkscissors on her hand have made him smile. Perhaps he will be just one more person tracing the inked-out lines of each tattoo with his tongue, but it's unlikely any of them were as studious or perfectionistic as Hawksley would intend to be.
That is: were he intending to do anything of the sort just now. He kisses her like that and he moves her onto his body there and though unlike Sera he is almost always thinking he is not thinking much anymore at the moment. He kisses her as though he expects to die if he stops, his hand on her hip or her lower back touching half bare skin and half denim and no matter, because that hand is insistent in the way it pulls her hard against his lap, the way it holds her there to urge her, wordlessly but clearly enough: grind on me. just fucking grind.
They are far enough past that moment of stillness, that gentleness of his palms on her face and his eyes on her eyes, that it seems like a dream now. They are far enough past the moment when she just looked at him, opened him up with her eyes, pulled apart his ribs, exposed the depths of him without him noticing and without meaning to see so deep, that he barely remembers her eyes making contact with his. It was only moments ago. All the same, he has forgotten it.
The feeling of her like that, there, her breasts on his body and her body on his lap, quite drives all other thought from his mind. If you asked him his name right now, he would tell you, because his name is the key that unlocks his soul, but it would be a miracle if he could tell you anything else. Not, at least, so long as she's making those sounds, god, the ones she let loose when he was sucking on her neck, the sounds that set him off like a spark on a line of gunpowder, a line sprinkled from his brain to the base of his spine, sounds that make his viscera light up. There's a shudder that goes through him when her hand grabs his hair and pulls his head back, kissing him still, and his mouth drags from hers for a moment, exhaling raggedly past her jaw.
A moment. Before he's kissing her again, more forcefully this time, leaning right back into her, pulling her right back against him with her hand caught between her breast and his chest, her nails digging into that firm sweep of muscle that tucks into his shoulder. He thinks, if you can call it thought, that he's going to rip her fucking shorts in half to get them off of her. Instead she laughs, and his eyes open at the sound of it, dazed for a moment and then finding hers.
Sera breathes in like she's offering her breasts to him. She says she doesn't know: tell me.
But the word know was barely out of her mouth before he was on her, the flat of his tongue on the underside of her left breast, a long lick that is no less rough for its slowness. When his tongue touches her nipple he moans, the first sound he's made that is not quickened breath or speech, and it is a loud, aching sound of craving and relief. That sound reverberates against her flesh as his mouth closes around her, his head bowed to her. His hand on her body still holds her there, yes, but it's lifted to her mid-back to support the arch that his leaning into her, his feasting on her, curves her into. With no more thought than was given to the last thing he did, or the thing before that, Hawksley has taken his hand from her hair and let it travel loosely, mindlessly down her neck and shoulder to cover her other breast with his palm, and when he feels her in his hand and in his mouth he groans again, delirious.
Enough. He suckles at her, ravenous and groaning, and then almost abruptly he rises, and it's a good thing she's slight, it's a good thing he's strong, and it's also a good thing he's rather well-practiced in lifting women up off the ground, but it's also a good thing that he's not going very far. She may think he means to just carry her inside, blindly stumbling along in an unfamiliar location, somehow remembering that she mentioned a toy surprise and he's hardly an idiot, he knows what the hell she was talking about, but
Hawksley does not carry her away from the cabana bed and towards the sliding glass into the house, does not carry her half-naked past Rick though he suspects it would not be a new sight to poor normal-looking Rick, and besides that Rick is a grown-ass man and he can talk to his housemate about boundaries if he needs to and that is hardly Hawksley's concern or problem, but
he lifts her against his body, panting another jagged, uneven breath against her, then turns, and all but drops her back on the cabana bed, but
he's not quite dropping her because he's also falling to his knees on the grass beside the bed, and he does not give a fuck if she's laying back or sitting up, he is getting those shorts off of her, now. It is the only thing worth taking his mouth off of her for. It's the only thing work taking his hands off of her for: to yank open the button or zipper or whateverthefuck and start pulling them down, off her hips,
"Lift up," if she's not, and perhaps even if she is, staring at her navel and the softness beneath her navel like he's about to eat her alive.
Which, in fact, he is.
--
He will tell her why birds fly later.
SerafíneThere's a tattoo beneath and surrounding her right breast and he'll see it when he drops her back to the cabana bed and she rucks up her hips and arches her back and gives his fumbling hands some competition in the race for the button-and-zipper of her cut-offs, tucking her thumbs beneath the well-worn waistband of the old denim to slide them familiarly down her body, clearing the prominence of her hip-bones with an undulant motion, then downward.
Which comes after: Hawksley pulling her onto his lap right there and kissing her like that and she's kissing him back and (yes) grinding into him without much help from his hand on her back except she likes the warmth of it and likes the weight of it and likes the way his fingers are splayed across the waistband of her short-ass cut-off denims. And she's holding his head back and kissing him and pushing him backwards and, you see, she wants to push him down too. Trace every muscle in his torso with her mouth and take off those fucking ridiculous fucking endearing yellow jeans and -
- then she laughs and their mouths are part and she's asking him some question she'll forgot by the time his mouth closes over her nipple and remember, later, when he tells her the answer and in that first moment she dips her head toward him, all tender, because in that moment, his mouth is so fucking close to her heart that she imagines she can feel the ragged warmth of his breath inside the cage of her chest and her hair spills forward over her left shoulder but then he's bending her backwards, with all that manipulative grace, hand spread between her shoulder blades to keep her upright and on him and he makes that noise, the first noise like that she's heard from him and it makes her breath come harder and she allows her head to fall backwards and her hair is sweeping down her spine and she's holding the back of his head tautly enough that her rather blunt nails are digging into his scalp through the short twist of his blond hair and she wants to laugh again not laughter precisely but some fucking noise but there's not enough oxygen in her lungs.
A fucking lurch as he picks her up, then. Her legs wrap around his waist and her arms around his shoulders and she's turning her head into his her mouth into his cheek her teeth seeking the edge of his ear but there's a bunching of her hamstrings beneath his hands as he starts to move because she does think he's going to just try to carry her inside and he's bound to trip on the fucking flagstones and how will he open the fucking door and she's indulging him, holding on to him, but stretching to gain her feet when he turns around and drops her on the bed.
And upright until he falls to his knees and reaches for her cut-offs and in all this exertion one of her thigh-highs has slipped from thigh to knee and looks vaguely ridiculous but she neither sees nor cares. There's a woomph as she falls back to the bed and now her eyes are open and she's looking at the sky and her breasts are small enough that they spread and almost vanish when she's on her back like that, pooled against her ribs though if he looks up he can seem them moving with every breath she takes. And the tattoo framing the right one looks like branches or maybe a nest or knotwork but no: he will discover now or soon or someday, it is a coiled serpent. Or perhaps it is a coil of serpents, like the Gorgons' hair.
Lift up he tells her and of course she fucking does. Fights with him - or no, it's not a fight, just a competition of manual dexterity to see who the hell is faster - for the button-and-zipper and pushes down the waistband until he can drag the shorts down her her thighs and pull them off her fucking legs. Thank god she was barefoot. Imagine trying to get a pair of her ridiculous boots off her right now. Beneath, she's wearing a pair of black cotton hipsters covered in multicolored fucking polka dots and these come off as easily and as eagerly.
Maybe she trims or waxes her bikini line, maybe, but she doesn't have a Brazilian and Hawksley, she's not a natural blonde.
HawksleyFumbling or fighting or otherwise, the core of truth comes to this: they cannot get her naked fast enough. And it delights him, it well and truly would make him laugh if he didn't feel like he was about to die, to see that eagerness in her, that abandon. But Hawksley can't spare his breath for laughter, or his energy for a smile, for anything but this:
for suckling on her breast, with that long sweep of hair veiling him from view as he holds her near, dear, feeling her heart thudding against the flat of his tongue or the curve of his lower lip,
for lifting her, and she can feel in him a moment of tension as the instinct to let her go and let her run or fly or float off into the night wars with his own demand to keep her against him, and she can tell which wins because when her legs start to shift as though she's going to get herself down he quite heedlessly grabs her ass and holds her right there, noIdon'tthinkso,
and for kneeling to her, undressing her without the poetry or slowness but still with reverence, still with its own form of ravaged sanctity. His lips are red from arousal, from kissing her, her neck and her breast are red from his mouth and god, the mere sight of that. He does want to cover her then, and he thinks about it, he thinks about letting her take off those ridiculousendearingfuckingyellow jeans and he absolutely thinks about what she will feel like when they are both naked, but he kneels instead.
Hawksley, it turns out, does not fumble: the cutoffs are unfastened, his fingers hook under their waistband and under the second waistband -- which answers that question, he thinks offhand -- and drags it all off, wholesale. He'll admire her underwear another time. He'll peel them off with his teeth on some other occasion, or he'll simply forsake one pleasure for another, because even now he does not think much of what will come after, after this night or even after this moment. This moment, this pleasure, is what he wants. And what he chooses.
--
It's unthinkable that he would stop now. But he does. Hawksley, knees wet on wet grass, pulls her cutoffs and those polka-dot hipsters off almost roughly, grabs them when they pass her knees and drops them on the ground, but that's where he stops. He exhales, heavily, shakily, as though someone in his mind is saying
get a hold of yourself, old sport.
That breath is warmer than the summer night, and more humid than any night in this place. She feels it curl against her upper thighs, between them, just before she feels his fingers on the tops of her stockings, wherever they've fallen to. He eases them down, careful, because he knows how easily these tear and he doesn't think she would mind or care if he tore her stockings but he doesn't want to. Not right now. Not tonight. What he wants, he creates. What he wants, right now, is what he sees a few moments later, when he pushes himself up with one hand to either side of her hips on the mattress and just
looks at her. His hair is disheveled, and unlike hers it isn't always. The top of the cabana bed frames him in her sight, his head and his face and his bare shoulders and those keen eyes of his. He looks at her, skin and ink and eyes and breath moving in and out of her, and she catches -- just barely -- the way he closes his eyes when he lowers his head down and kisses her mouth.
It isn't bruising. It isn't even all that deep. But it's slow. And it's sweet.
And it takes effort for him to draw himself away from it. No, not away: down. For his mouth is on her chin then, and her clavicle, and he's not exactly taking his damn time but he's not in a hurry, either. He lingers, a second or two longer, when he kisses the breast he so rudely neglected earlier, giving it a gentle lick on the underside before continuing on his way.
He kisses her navel and thinks, suddenly though not randomly, of a time when he was nineteen and he had the bizarre urge to kiss the navel of a graven goddess, he had the insane vision that she would somehow be warm and alive and tender to him if he had dared it, and he had not dared it, but he had touched the polished-smooth obsidian with his palm and felt a quick, mad stab of grief to find her cold. Right now, though she's not a goddess and she's not the first woman he has kissed or touched since that odd night in that faraway tomb, he feels an equally quick and perhaps equally mad rush of gratitude that Sera is as Sera is: alive, and warm, and breathing under his lips.
Hawksley lets that go. His hands trail his face, following the lines of her body in the growing dark, but the touch is not a tracing, fragile thing. It is as though he's molding her out of the night air itself, but, sadly, he leaves that work unfinished, for there are more vital needs at hand. Like urging her legs over his shoulders, and pulling her by the hips to the edge, the edge, the very edge, drawing her near so he can kiss her, as slow and soft and longing and sweet as he kissed her mouth. For the second time, he groans aloud because of the taste of her, because of the way she feels. One of his hands is on the cabana bed beside her ribs; it clenches, grabbing for purchase as though he's the one being pleasured here. The other is on the back of her thigh, carefully, gently nudging her further open, kissing her more deeply, licking her with what is rather clearly barely restrained hunger.
He groans something, somewhere in there, the words muttered against her flesh, each consonant a punctuation of air, oh god, mother of fuck,
which almost has the same cadence as the beginning to another prayer to the mother of another god,
before he goes back for more, rapidly losing any remaining restraint, rapidly losing anything but an almost worshipful focus, rapidly
just
losing his mind.
SerafíneSera is sprawled back on the bed, even her head it tipped further backwards, and her mouth is open and her eyes are closed and if her eyes were open now she would be staring through the wooden slats at the late evening sky. Nearly night, the deep darkness in the east and the failing threads of light from the west but: her eyes are closed. She's naked and he's kneeling at the edge of the bed and she feels his breath on her skin and then - and then, his hands, so carefully rolling down her stockings. The left has rolled down to her knee, the right is still held up on her thigh and he is so very, very precise. Because he does not want to rip them. Because he creates the world he wants to see.
Fuck, she rips them on purpose. Buys them new and brings them home and tears a hole in the fucking lace as a sartorial choice.
That's when she lifts herself up, not high, just enough to brace herself on her elbows, watching him from beneath lashed eyes, his hands on her thighs, at her knees -
Christ. The way he kisses her. The way he follows the lines and curves of her body with his hands and his mouth; the warmth of his breath against her skin in sharp and almost iridescent contrast to the cool night air all around them. Sometimes her right hand curls through his hair, peeling his (rarely) disheveled locks back, feeling the way they slip through her hand. Sometimes she arches her spine, lifts her ninth rib, say, or her left hipbone to his hand or his mouth as he finds his way back down and her breath comes more sharply and more deliberately and then he's between her thighs, pulling her until her hips are right at the edge of the bed and her legs are over his shoulders and his mouth is on her and he's muttering a curse like a prayer or a prayer like a curse into her body. Her hands are fists at her sides, fingernails digging into her palms and her breath comes ragged and now it's not the noises she's making but the way she's moving her body, arching her hips into his mouth, her spine like a whip, and he has to hold her thighs open with his hands because of the way she tries to pull him into her and her shoulders curving backward as her breathing becomes more and more ragged and -
- he has no idea how the universe opens for her, when she comes. The way the sensation spikes through her body and scissors her open and she is all nerve endings and light and she is all one with everything, it's a fucking cliche but she can feel everything living, all around her inside her except she doesn't have insides anymore. Sometimes when she comes she cries.
Never even knows why.
Always thinks, Serafíne, maybe this time it'll last forever.
And for all she fucking knows, maybe some day it will.
Hawksley
This is probably not the first time that a young man has gone down on a young woman in a backyard in Capitol Hill. It can't be. It may not even be the first time it's happened in that house. But it's early enough in the evening that far off in the distance they can still hear kids and pre-adolescents at parks and outside their own homes, and it's a good thing that her fences are high and her housemates are chill. Even so, if any of them glance through a window or out the sliding doors to see what she and the Porsche-driving man in the yellow pants are up to now, it has to be a rare enough sight to warrant a blush from Dee or an eyeroll from Rick or god knows what from Dan.
Put crudely, put as bluntly and unashamedly as possible, Sera simply fucks Hawksley's face. And just as bluntly, just as unashamedly, though less obviously crude, Hawksley adores it. Adores her for it. He is not shy about putting his broad palms on her inner thighs and quite frankly telling her eager legs no when they try to close on his head. But she knew as soon as he kissed her the first time that he's no innocent to this, he's not new, he's not wary, and he doesn't kiss her like she's another woman, maybe the only other woman he's done this with, nothing of the sort. Here is another hint: she tries so hard to get closer to him, to get him closer, to draw him in, and Hawksley merely drags his hand back down from the mattress and, if she wants him inside of her, if wants to hold, to tighten, to clench down,
he can give her that, too.
--
Sera sees everything when she comes. The whole of creation leans down to her, laughing and smiling and cupping her face in its hands, kissing her, saying welcome, welcome. She is made of stars and mud, she is wind and flame. But then: everything is. And she is everything, and everything is her, and there is no delineation.
Hawksley has his own kind of transcendance. He is not a tantric lover, not by a longshot, but there is something joyful in this sort of intense, dedicated focus. In all forms of truth, he has forgotten where he is. He does not remember Dee or Rick or Dan or his car or the neighborhood or nightfall. He is hardly aware they are even outside. There is Sera, and there is this, and when he feels her coming he thinks, yet again, that his heart will burst. He puts his free hand on her hip, as though to hold onto her when she arches like that, cries out the way she does, or perhaps to lift her up.
He keeps his fingers inside of her until her spine relaxes. He stops licking at her, he stops kissing her, but he stays where he is, all warm breath and solidity, until he hears one long, ragged exhale that tells him something is changing, shifting, that the universe is re-forming inside of her and outside of her, at once. Gently, then, slowly, he withdraws. He kisses her inner thigh, and yes his mouth is wet and he doesn't give a fuck and he doubts she will squirm away, but he kisses her there, warm and soft and maybe he also draws the back of his hand over his mouth and maybe he also rubs his other hand on his discarded t-shirt but he
isn't crawling up over her. He's not shedding those ridiculous and colorful jeans and groaning at her neck and begging her, and he's not picking her up and telling her inside. now. He does rise to his feet, slowly, because even though he is young his knees are a little sort and a little grass-stained but no matter. He is sweating. From arousal, from the heat, from her body that close to his body. He is looking down at her with glittering eyes and something between savage hunger and outright adoration.
Yes, okay? He's hard. He's quite fucking hard and he's quite fucking turned on and looking at her right now with that flush under her skin tone and the taste of her on his mouth is not fucking helping any of those things, but Hawksley just ...lays out next to her, on his side, his head on his bicep, his hand coming to rest on the hip opposite his own body, his long arm covering her crosswise.
Serafíne
Sera's still flat on her back, feeling the universe recede from her eyes and ears and nose and mouth and lungs, Self all contained, all covered over again with skin and blood and bones. With breasts and hips and a body she loves and loves to move and loves to run and loves to fuck and be fucked and get fucked up while she's tangled all up inside it, and this delicious not-quite-lassitude is settling into in her limbs.
When he stands up; when he looks down at her, her eyes are half-closed and her mouth is open and she's breathing like each one is a revelation. Serafíne bites her lower lip and smiles this lazy smile up at him, but something about the lack of focus, something about the loll of her neck tells him that she's not really seeing him, not quite yet.
Not until he lays down beside her, the warmth of his sweaty frame against her flank.
Part of her wants him to do - well, something, right? Crawl over her and produce a magic fucking condom from his magic fucking wallet in those magick fucking grass-stained yellow jeans. Toss her his t-shirt so she can pull it over her head and dart through the stairs, leading him up to her bedroom, something, but
another part of her is would be perfectly happy, perfectly content never to move again. When he stretches himself out beside her she lifts her right hand across her body, mirroring the sweep of his arm across her hip, and tucks her forefinger beneath his chin. Sweeping her thumb so fucking gently across his jaw, the corner of his mouth.
Then she lifts her neck, turns herself into him just enough to find his mouth with her own. And kisses him quite sweetly, tasting herself on his tongue.
She does not have to say to him that was amazing.
Everything about her tells him that it was.
She just says his name, "Hawksley," with a certain delicacy right into the quiet kiss. Right into his mouth.
Hawksley
Sera Sera Sera Sera Serafine Serafíne Seraserasera. It's going through his mind and it makes him smile and it makes him remember something and he sets that remembrance aside. He kisses her when she kisses him, and that makes him smile to the side of the kiss. Lovely. He gives her that taste, shares it with her as though it's Communion wine, communal wine, a hit from something he's letting melt in his mouth so she can share that high.
And she says his name into his mouth. He shudders like it's a summons: it is not his given name, it is not his oldest name, it is not his truest name, but it is his name. He moves into the sound of it and the source of it, his hand growing firmer on her hip as he leans into her. Not, interestingly, into the kiss. That he leaves delicate, soft, light and sweet. He draws back from her, their eyes inches apart, thinking
and then saying
the most insane thing, and yet he feels so settled by it and in it, he feels so certain of it, and could never explain it.
"I should go," he murmurs, which is the sort of thing a man says when he's made a mistake, when he's really stepped in it this time, when he wants to run away but he's too much of a coward to just admit that he's running away. But Hawksley hasn't, as far as he can tell, made a mistake. He strokes his thumb across her hipbone, and the gesture is as intimate as any between old lovers, and then he huffs a laugh at himself, at his own madness, and it grows to a grin and he thinks
he has not been this happy in a long time.
So he kisses her, firm and laughing and sweet, seals it with a softer kiss on her jawline, squeezing her for a moment.
Serafíne
And Sera, Sera starts laughing - laughter like a ribbon, laughter like a river rolling clear and warm over smooth-worn stones. Bright as a fucking bell.
She can feel his happiness. Feel it in her toes and in the synovial fluid in her joints, feel it in the cartilage of her ear and feel it in her furthestmost left eyelash. Feel it like a warm promise in her spine, all burning-bright. All sun-drenched and soaring. All phosphorescent glare.
"You should," she agrees, the words humming quietly in the back of her throat. This fucking smile on her face just lingering as he pulls back from that last kiss, appends another one, softer on her jawline.
"But not quite yet. Wait until the sun's gone from the sky."
Hawksley
She gets it. Somehow she gets it and does not think him mad, or she does and she likes that, too. Hawksley just laughs with her, then sets his brow on her brow. And this, too, makes him smile. He murmurs something to her, something incomprehensible to her, something he does not dare even translate for her. It comes in a whisper all the same, like he's not even quite saying it to her. But: his hand is sliding up her body and touching her face, fingertips on cheek, eyes to eyes.
"Ant alhqyqh mn alqdm ela alhajb," he says, though most of those sounds cannot be Romanized, though the letters do not exist in any alphabet they share. He would kiss her again, but he rests his brow to hers and leaves it there. His hand traces down her face, skims her neck, comes to rest on her breast, cupping it in his palm, feeling her heart thudding against the base of his hand. He does not apologize for hiding this, whatever it is he says, in plain sight.
But not yet. She says this, and he does not answer it except with that inexplaible utterance, but he does not leave. It seems to make sense: he will leave when the sun is gone. Just like that night at Red Rocks, and that day at City Park, and tonight. The sun is always there, even when it cannot be seen, but there is a sort of grace and sense to Hawksley departing only when the last light of day has left the sky. He stays where he is, his lust subsumed by or into something else, with his arm over her and his legs beside her legs and their faces together.
Already, it's growing colder. And he reaches past her, grabbing her discarded hoodie, and drags it over to cover her a bit more, then lays his head back down on his own arm.
He looks at her as it gets darker. And darker. And darker still, turning their skin new colors, changing her hair, changing his. The world does not become monochrome, not quite, but it shades itself in subtlety, the day departing with a lingering glance over its shoulder as though to say follow, follow. And the moon, thin as a knife, rotating into view over them. Hawksley looks from Sera for the first time in a long time, and he looks at that sliver of brightness.
The look in his eyes bridegroom to beloved. As though he knows her. It is gone again, when he turns his head and looks at Sera again.
Hawksley does not say a word then. He shifts over her, covers her with his body, and kisses her. It does not linger, but it seals, as though he is hiding something inside of her mouth, a coin under her tongue, a secret in her breath. And then his hands brace, and he pushes himself up, and he remembers his t-shirt, holding it at his side. His back is no less a display of physical focus, the drive to perfection, than his front. When he walks away, he goes around the side of the house and through the gate instead of through the sliders, the kitchen, the living room, the front porch.
--
He opens the moon roof on his drive to... wherever it is he's going. She follows him all the way.
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