There was a story on the evening news about a mass poisoning incident. A dozen or so college students taken from a party near South Federal to area hospitals, stable but comatose. Police were investigating and the suspect also appeared to be one of the victims. It was a passing note and rather unremarkable and the story repeated on the 11 p.m. news was rather more brief and cursory, because something else, brighter or darker or more grim or glorious, had happened in the meantime.
Sometime north of midnight, Thursday-into-Friday, an hour that would be ungodly late to anyone with anything approaching a nine to five, a schedule, the responsibilities of a commute and career, dead-end or otherwise, Hawksley receives a text -
- well, no. A flurry of texts, because Sera texts the way she speaks, sometimes, and tonight it is a stream-of-conciousness tumble that begins with:
Where are you? What are you doing?
and continues, as fast as her fingers can type, with:
We're going out tonight.
I wanna see you. Come buy me a drink.
HawksleyHawksley does not pay attention to the news. He seldom turns on the television unless he's got something specific in mind to watch, and then he watches things commercial-free and pre-recorded and they are television shows or documentaries or movies but when he needs to know something about current events, Collins usually tells him. Or he catches it at a coffee shop out of the corner of his eye. So when it comes to very-very late Thursday, Thursday-into-Friday, Hawksley has not heard a thing about poisoned college students in comas.
His phone chimes. And then chimes again. And he's starting to respond to texts 1 and 2 when the third comes in.
Hawksley exhales through his nostrils, amused. He sits down where he is, which is outside, and taps back:
Home. Exploring. Okay. Me too. Where?
SerafíneHawksley answers each and every one of her texts in a single and ever-so-efficient line. Which makes her laugh, openly in the brisk, air conditioned darkness of the back of a cab. There's a brightness to the laugh, which is open and forward and physical, framed by a crisp rising movement of her chin up and away from the screen of her phone. Sera catches a glimpse of herself, all ghostly, reflected in the window over the moving streets.
He's somewhere too.
This makes her happy, and she doesn't ask why.By the time she finishes reading his response she has mostly forgotten the questions she asked. Home and exploring tip her radar, see? These intriguing little notes but hey, where are they going? has primacy and they slip by and someone asks her if she's eaten something and she has! It was a peanut butter sandwich.Now she's ready for whiskey.Breakfast of champions since she has been awake for approximately an hour and a half.
There is a several-minute lull as the cab lurches to a half and someone pays and that is probably Sera and we - whoever we are tonight - spill out onto the sidewalk. Sera hugs Dee from behind, kisses her on the shoulder, and then unwinds her arms from her housemate to slip ahead of the group and catch a photograph of the stonewalled stairway leading down to the meadowlark with her phone.
And this is her response to where? The picture of the stairwell, the Meadowlark sign at the bottom, the chalkboard announcing jazz night! barely readable and probably the meadowlark sign barely readable but Hawksley has been in town for a month now and has opinions on everything. There's no doubt that he can identify the place, regardless of her shaky iPhone camera work.
So: that lull. Then that picture. Then,
I'm coming home with you, after. You know that, right?
It is a rhetorical question. She does not expect a reply.
HawksleyNo answer, for a while. And that's all right. Hawksley sets his phone aside and a little while later he sees he has a picture. He can't read what's on the chalk but he can recognize the sign, of course. He has sent
Be right there.
moments before, or maybe at the same time as, her next message. Hawksley, standing where he is standing and being where he is being, smirks at the message, but like most of his facial expressions there's no malice, no mockery in it. Not that she could see it anyway. She doesn't expect an answer. The one she gets is:
We'll see.
--
It takes thirty minutes before Hawksley fucking shows up, which is bullshit, because the Four Seasons is ten minutes away. Thirty minutes until Hawksley strolls down the stairs and into the tiny, jam-packed bar. It's late enough now that they won't be open much longer, because it's Denver and 2 am is the limit for most places. It's easy to get lost in the crowd here simply because the crowd is so small but so tight, but it's equally easy to find the people you're looking for.
It's very, very easy to find someone who is unlike anyone else in the bar. Someone who shines. Someone who draws everyone else to them with power, with shining, with pure charisma. Someone like Sera.
He hasn't seen her since driving her out to the chantry. When he sees her now he goes right towards her, weaving in the ground, in narrow jeans that are dust-colored and a cream-colored t-shirt with the cover of In the Night Kitchen on it. Shoes of one kind or another, keys in his pocket, wallet in a pocket but a different pocket, arms coming around her, arms turning her if he needs to turn her if she's not turning to him but why would she not turn to him and
his mouth
on her mouth,
drinking, breathing,
everything.
SerafíneDespite the hour or maybe because of the day and the hour the bar is crowded enough with People He Knows that Davie gets a half-dozen or more greetings as he weaves his way through the crowd. And down here tonight the light is golden or it seems golden, some trick of incandescence and highly polished wood, and there's noise in the air but the jazz trio that was on stage has packed it up and so there's just music over the soundsystem and that crowd-noise that starts to become its own sort of music, late at night, when everyone has had a few and a warm glow to match that golden incandescence has settled over the crowd.
Oh, she was going to surprise him, see. Soon as she felt his resonance at the edges of her wide-open senses sneak off to the ladies' room and then circle and 'surprise' him from behind but that was what now seems like a lifetime ago because the Four Seasons is ten minutes from Meadowlark and the way he drives and the way he parks it oughta be closer to six minutes thirty-seven seconds but see: that impulse (which arose with his typewritten We'll see) has played itself out and she lost the thread of it in the interim. Sneaking upstairs to the back patio for a cigarette or maybe something only slightly more illicit in libertarian-leaning Colorado and then back down and so:
when she feels his resonance at the farthest flung edge of his senses, see, Sera hums to herself and tips her head happily backwards against Dan's shoulder and murmurs happily to him, announcing the Hermetic's arrival with this quiet thread of running pleasure that has the consor bending forward to kiss the framing part of her sidecut as he drops his hand from her waist and tells her to scoot and make room so he can slide up to the bar beside rather than behind her.
See, there are things he knows, Dan.
Plus, now he's squeezed up between Sera and Jeremy (who is so hipster he plays an upright stringed bass in a jazz trio, FYI, and probably also has an In the Night Kitchen t-shirt somewhere, though it does not look so good on him as it does on Hawksley) and Sera always takes up More Space Than She Knees with her elbows and arms as soon as you let her slide in so now your author will leave Dan and Jer to their flirtation because:
Sera is at the bar in that golden light and she's all dressed in black and her hair is freshly blond and freshly high- and low-lighted in a way that swims over her spine all bright in that light and there's a mixed drink in front of her that someone ordered maybe in an effort get her off the kick of all the shots she was doing and she keeps looking over her right shoulder for him but the drink, see - the drink is delicious. Locally brewed ginger beer and fresh lime and Stranahan's which is a treat over the lingering taste of the clove she just smoked and
hey
there he is.
(Her pupils, he will discover, when he comes up for air are blown all to hell even though it's not that dark in here so it seems to be a night of polypharmacy for the Ecstatic and what looked like black-black-black from behind (black hoodie, short little black leather skirt, gridded black thigh-high stockings held up by visible garters) is actually black-black-pink because she's wearing one of her bustiers this one covered by pink silk rosebuds rather than spikes.)
Hey, she didn't even see him, just felt him through the crowd or maybe she did and he looked like a god or a falcon or a falcon-headed god and she stared open-mouthed and dark-eyed and hungry like he was a miracle or an hallucination until he was right behind her and then his mouth on hers and hers tastes like whiskey and ginger and lime and cloves and smoke and she's turning into him and he's turning her into him and her arms wind around his neck and her long fingers bury themselves in his hair and she's angling his head back and following his mouth with her own and so wholly lost in sensation that there is nothing in the world she knows except his mouth on her mouth and his body against her body and the soaring solar flare of his resonance brilliant all around her and she's pressing her body into his
with such fucking abandon,
No one has said (yet) hey! get a room! But, maybe someone should.
HawksleyIn the space of that kiss, Dan or Jeremy make a move that can't be rationalized away easily as accidental, and both of them have felt the thrilling charge of it go up their spines, igniting their viscera. The song has changed. People have gotten staring into their veins and then rapidly, drunkenly out of their systems. Other kisses have happened around them or near them. Hawksley has suffocated, drowned, died, been buried, and risen again because, as Sera knows,
he is a fucking golden god.
In that space of that kiss he has put his hand on her waist, under her hoodie. He has slid it around to her lower back and pulled her to him closer, firmer, though how one gets closer than they were in that very first instant must be magic, because it could not happen according to the laws of reality. In the time it takes for him to forget how to breathe and then, blessedly, remember again, his other hand has reached out to grip the edge of the bar, holding tight to the brass rod that is not as cold as you'd like and definitely more sticky than you would want and he is holding onto it so tightly than his knuckles have gone white, like he's caught between the effort to tear it off the bar itself and to stop himself from doing so.
--
The times they have been alone together have been strangely quiet. Strange because neither of them would be called quiet or retreating or somber. Strange because both of them either hide or translate their sanctity when engaged with other people, at least: people to whom their translations read as profanity. Few who have met Hawksley or been around Sera for any number of minutes or hours might think of how slowly he undressed her that night in her garden, how lush they were without ever touching the tequila or the neatly sliced limes. They would not expect murmured poetry of any language, much less professions hidden behind veils of obscure tongue.
This: walking into a bar, walking right up to the bar and to a certain person at the bar, pulling them around and pulling them to you and kissing them until the lack of oxygen threatens to make lungs catch fire, is much more the style one might find coming most easily to mind. Hawksley, you know? He's so bright, so intense, so unapologetic, can be so rude, is so self-interested, is kind of a bro and very cheeky and a dozen other things, but no one who has met him would be surprised at this behavior. No one who has met Sera would be surprised at this behavior. She kisses strangers because they aren't really strangers in that moment. She lives on alcohol fumes and burning herbs and limes and sometimes someone makes her skillet potatoes or puts her on a juice fast but, you know, whatever, whatever.
They are not quiet now. His heartbeat is a clamor in his ears, demanding his attention like a child. Her body is electric under his hand and against him, like embracing lightning.
--
Hawksley breathes. It's almost a gasp when he lets go and takes that first sip of air, his chest expanding with it. He blinks like he's waking and refocuses his eyes on her eyes.
Overhead, the lights flick on and off again, on and off, on and off, a nigh-universal signal that it's time to get the hell out of here. Hawksley just looks at Sera, and the spots of light reflecting in her irises on-off, on-off, on-off.
He leans forward, softer now, and kisses her again. This time it isn't bruising, isn't furious, isn't ravenous. His hand comes off the bar's edge and touches her, too. His arms fold around her waist, forearm over forearm behind her. This time he kisses her slowly. This time, he tastes her.
--
When it is over, Hawksley steps back from the bar. His arms slide away from Sera's waist. He moves his hand to her hand and laces their fingers together, and walks up out of the Meadowlark.
SerafíneThey haven't said a fucking word.
He leads her up and out of the Meadowlark. She leaves behind that lovely half-finished drink and a little black clutch, studded with crystal-eyed silver skulls, without a thought. Her senses, see, are so full of him that when they finally part, when he pulls away, slips his arms from around her waist to take her hand and she remembers how to breathe the air around them rather than the air directly from his lungs,
oh, hey
people.
- all around them, some of them still kissing. Oh, it makes her smile. Don't worry about what she leaves behind. The bartender will clean up the drink and even distracted as he will be by Jer's hands on his ass Dan will remember her bag because these things always happen, he always remembers, and it'll show up in her room and she may never even know that she left it behind.
Up the steps and out of the bar and they spill out onto the sidewalk, the dark night all around, and neither breaks the spell of silence. She's holding his hand, tight, and once they gain the street and she swings into step behind him their forearms will be entwined too, and she leans close and closer to him so that their clasped hands are firm and solid as a knot between their thighs, and the takes the lead, he knows where he left his fucking Porsche and she's just drifting beside him on a cloud of alcohol and other things humming with bright and dissolving indifference. Drifting, too, on a cloud of sensation: the solid length of his body against hers and his mouth, the hungry heat of it, the memory of both flushed and sharp beneath her skin, like an injectable drug drilled into her veins and all she wanted to to was sink herself entirely into his skin, feel herself sink into hers; all she wanted was to be as close to him as was physically possible and then,
fractionally
closer. And hey that happened. He kissed her until the bar disappeared and the ache in her lungs, the deep and physical hunger-for-air kindled and spread like a flashfire beneath her skin.
So they walk. Sera is sufficiently fucked up that time has become a little bit plastic for her and there's no particular intentionality to that except that she's half-reliving that first ravenous half-reliving the second savoring kiss and also: is here.
with him,
on the sidewalk. It's dark and the light is all smeary, which she loves, and her legs are moving, this thing called walking, which she also loves, and they are crossing a street the sweep of headlights and she gives this jerking little sweep of her head and they, there's his shoulder, which she also loves so she drips her mouth to the apex of his deltoid kisses him here, open mouth warm and soft and slow, even the needling scrape of her teeth no more than a suggestion of sharpness.
It is a lovely shoulder, and she keeps their hands clasped and forearms crossed but still walks close and closer, close enough that she can tuck her head lower, rest the curve of her cheek where he mouth had been, and her lashed gaze slides down the line of his body as they walk and she sees the boy on his t-shirt and wants to kiss him too.
So she does.
They might be in the middle of the fucking street by now she doesn't care she reaches across her body to brace or rest her left hand against his stomach, just above the beltline, and drops her cheek from his shoulder to lean down and kiss the picture of the boy on his tee shirt with such intent it can hardly be born.
HawksleyNeither of them notice her clutch left behind. Neither of them think of the little things like that; they have people to take care of their lives for them. The details, at least; the unimportant parts. What is important, to people like them?
This: feeling him a mile away, feeling him like one sees a bird against the sun, catching it just before its descent.
This: the small of her back under his hand, and the fold of his arms across her waist.
This: Sera kissing his chest, his shirt, and the way he breathes a laugh at that, even as his hand comes to the back of her head tenderly, so strange
that he is capable of tenderness at all.
--
They kiss again at his car, at the side of it, because of course he holds the door for her. His hands are cupping her cheeks and his fingers are flowing like warm rivers into her hair from beneath it, holding her mouth to his. This is the way he kisses her when he isn't trying to drink her soul. This is the way he kisses her when he is, very simply, trying to turn her on. More. This is the way he kisses her, when his mouth skims from her lips to her neck, suckling at soft thin skin over vibrant pulses of her life going on, and on. This is the way he kisses her, pressed to her, tasting alcohol on her mouth and under her tongue, tasting sweat on her skin, and he knows that taste but it feels like
so long.
Too long.
--
The door is opened and he almost follows her in. No, actually, fuck it: he follows her in. Climbs after her, over her, slamming the door and grabbing a lever and the seat drops backward, not perfectly horizontal but he doesn't care. His thigh moves between hers, not yet pressing, not yet satisfying, but there. There and warm.
Granted, this is a sportscar. It is made for driving very quickly between places. For soaring. It is not made for this, whatever this is, but that's not stopping him.
SerafíneSee, her breath comes between kisses so sharply and rapidly that it is a wonder there is oxygen enough in her lungs to feed the blood flowing through them. Maybe that's why she feels so lightheaded as he presses her back against the Porsche, beside the now-open passenger's door. Other people, strangers, are slipping out of the local bars. It's Thursday-not-Friday so the street is not as crowded as it will be in twenty-four hours but still: they are not alone. And she does not care, does not see any of these strangers slipping into the lot, staring as he bends her back over the curving frame of that sleek, expensive car, his hands on her cheeks, his mouth on her mouth, her own hands trapped between their bodies, her fingers tucked into the waist of his dust-colored jeans, fumbling breathlessly as she struggles to work the metal button out of its distressed metal buttonhole.
She feels so flushed, so fevered, and he's so solid against her, so intent on her mouth that the passing fancy of the short walk, the shape of his laugh, the tender curve of his hands through her hair are all subsumed and consumed again, by this.
As soon as he drops his mouth from her own to her throat, she tips her head back, her mouth bruised and stinging, her eyes wide open to the sky. She makes this noise when he finds her pulse, brings her head abruptly forward until her forehead makes contact with his temple the bridge of her nose is sliding along his cheekbone. He is pushing her solidly enough back against the car that she is barely on the toes of her high heels and she's parting her thighs, reaching up to cradle the back of his head with one hand and braces herself against the frame of the open door with the other and god she wants to fuck him and god she wants him to fuck her and god there are stars so bright in the goddamned sky the light feels like a lance is opening her up, sternum to pelvis and she wants to kiss him back, feel the thread of his own goddamned pulse beneath her mouth but all she can manage to do is closer her teeth over the edge of his jaw and make this noise, which is essentially nothing more than a
whimper
- and then somehow she's in the Porsche.
She doesn't remember parting from him, just for him, but she's in the Porsche and there's this few-seconds where she's just sitting there like she doesn't quite know how she got there because the fact is she doesn't quite know how she got there and no matter how hot the day was the air at two a.m. is cooler than her burning skin and then something autonomic kicks in, see -
Sera takes in this long, ragged breath. Reaches up across her body to grab the seatbelt and pull it across her body but fuck it, you know what, he follows her in. Suddenly he's everywhere, over her, his thigh between her fucking thighs, slamming the door closed and finding the lever to yank back and the seatback just gives way beneath / behind her and instead of reaching for the seatbelt she's reaching for him and arching her hips upward and she just
needs
contact, pressure, heat, him, and her need is so raw, so open, so unashamed it is almost painful.
Christ.
She's breathing so hard through her open mouth, staring up at him, reaching for him, right? The unzipped hoodie has fallen away from her torso and her breasts rise and fall with every breath in that ridiculous rose-covered bustier but at least it's not goddamned spikes. But see: to clasp her hands behind his neck if he is within reach, to pull his forehead down to her own, until they're forehead to forehead, nose to nose, mouth to mouth, panting hard enough that she sometimes has to stop and swallow between each breath.
"What are you doing to me?"
- she whispers up to him, with such wonder, and such want in her voice it seems strangled out of her. And she does not just mean: whatever this is, right here and now. In the fucking Porsche, which wasn't made for this, whatever the hell it is that he's doing.
But god she wants him inside her.Christ, she wants to feel him inside her.
HawksleyAs in many cities across America, the night outside is hardly dark. Every building and every street is covered in lights. The lights stay on throughout the night and only get brighter and more multitudinous during the day, when one might think they'd be even less necessary. The sky isn't even dark; in fact, it is so bright that it's a faded black, and the moon is muted. Humankind and their lights, their fear of the dark, their love of anything that glints and shines as though they are all descended from ravens and not apes.
The interior of Hawksley's car is darker, though not by much; there are livid green and molten red points of light on his dashboard that fade the longer that the door is closed. There are streetlights gleaming but not glaring off the windshield and mirrors and finish of the paint job, but those are mostly exterior. Bits of light, here and there, play over Hawksley's back as cars drive slowly down the road they're on. People walk by; if they look they see a man on top of a woman in a very expensive car and they do not care, they are drunk and they laugh and they kiss and everything that is happening here in this singular, searing moment in time ripples outward, simultaneously drawing all things to it and closing out anyone who is not a part of it.
Between the two of them, though, in spite of all these lights, there is only a growing darkness, stifling in its heat, its rising intensity becoming almost a tangible thing against their skins.
--
Sera arches underneath him. Hawksley's hand is there in a heartbeat, under her back, behind her hips, lifting her against him, there. Yes. He groans at the contact, the sound reverberating through his lips, through his throat, deep in his chest. Thank god for smooth shocks. Thank god that when he presses her back down, bodily, the car does not shudder the way he does.
And she gasps, pants what she does to his ears, and in the growing darkness and lights that run like oil slicks around them, Hawksley laughs. It's a breath, it's gasping in its own right, but he laughs and he seals his mouth to hers and kisses her like drinking wine again, smiling through it. His arm trapped underneath her body holds her against him just as firmly, but he finds himself rationally, sanely, understandably, completely happy. He trails those kisses down her jaw and her neck, moving his thigh to press fully between her legs, rucking that scandalous skirt up farther, panting out a breath as he searches her back for the clasps of that bustier, his fingers crushing tiny, satin, inconsequential roses.
"Now?" he whispers, the words tattooed somewhere against her left clavicle, and it's a request for clarity and it's a request for permission and it's an urging as well: a driving, almost growling word underneath the veneer of politesse.
SerafíneIf he does not have his car detailed, Hawksley will find those tiny and entirely inconsequential pink satin rosebuds floating around his damned Porsche for days and days. The garment was made to be worn and admired, not crushed between lovers struggling to shed their clothes and,
well
fuck
in the passenger's seat of a tiny fucking sports car. He finds the clasps of that bustier with a seeking hand trapped between her skin and the hoodie and the luxurious houndstooth upholstery and urges her upward with the pressure of his fingers on her spine, just enough to unzip the cleverly hidden zipper and feel the sudden slack of leather beneath his hand. One or the other of them (or fucking both) peel it away in the next few seconds. Sera has her hands clasped behind Hawksley's neck, holding him as his mouth trails down her throat and at first her only response to the question he growls out against her collar bone is a delicious little whimper as her own thighs scissor shut around his and her hips move against him with this urgent little roll of their own.
By then, maybe his mouth has found her left breast, pooled over her ribcage, or no - perhaps he's still poised as her collarbone, casting her a slanting look upward in the darkness, listening, hungry for her answer. She expels this short sharp breath and draws in another, longer, the inhalation deep and sustained so that it lifts and crushes her breasts against his chest and her hands slide from the back of his neck to frame his face and drag his mouth back up to hers so that she can pant,
"Yes, Hawksley. Jesus fucking Christ. Now."
right back into his mouth, the tenor of her voice pitched between a laugh and a cry but she's smiling, smiling, actually grinning so it has to be a laugh.
"I wanna feel you, fucking inside me, so fucking much right now, I can't see straight. Though maybe that's the molly, but you make me feel so goddamned high. I can see your goddamned wings. There's not even room for them in this fucking car."
She kisses him back then, hungry and bruising and seeking and each kiss is more than half-a-bite and she lifts her hips and spine in this bright, moving, parabolic arc with each new assertion of a kiss against him, and her hands leave his face and skim down his body to find the lower hem of his t-shirt and push it up over his flanks, the ridges of his obliques, all
" - get this goddamned thing off. I wanna feel your skin on mine."
Laughing as she lifts her mouth from his to jaw, the curve of his ear. By now she has kicked off her heels and her writhing and the pressure of his body against her own have rucked up the hem of her wee leather skirt to someplace high on her hips and she's so fucking wet that he can feel it as he presses his thigh between her thighs, firm and forward against the lace boyshorts she wore beneath but she wore the most fucking complicated lingerie tonight and she breathes a laugh against his ear.
"You have a condom, right? Can you get my fucking garters?"
HawksleyIn most other situations, Hawksley would have a serious problem with this: the alcohol, the molly, the whatever-else she has in her system. And that would not be judgement or condescension, that would be simple fucking decency. On the surface he doesn't seem the type who would remember to care, would think it as good excuse as any to get laid, but as Sera knows better than most, Hawksley is deeper than that shining, blinding, burning surface.
Still, concern flickers in him, but not concern for her consent, which he has eagerly and enthusiastically and in words and deeds and everything he could want to satisfy him that yes, god yes, she wants him.
He worries for a moment that she won't remember this. He worries for a moment that not-remembering is the point, the goal, the Something she is reaching for because they are all reaching for something, in the end. He does not want her to forget, because he knows he won't. He couldn't.
Hawksley descends to her mouth somewhere in there, mid-word or mid-sentence or mid-fumble in the dark, tasting her mouth over and over and over again like he would like to drown himself in that warm sea. But he does not drown. His breathing does quicken. He does think, for a moment, that he is going to die if he doesn't come inside of her. Soon.
But he does not die.
--
This is why he does not stop there, pull back, ask her about the drugs, the drinks, how many, can she count his fingers, is she okay, will she remember this, does she know who she is with, does she want this, any of it. It is not simply that he trusts her consent right now, her want, her knowledge of herself.
It's that -- here is your secret -- he knew, for the past couple of weeks, that the gaunt, wasted creature going from juice smoothie to juice smoothie was not wholly or entirely Sera. Not the core of her, the soul, the spirit that inflames her fingertips and her mind when she performs magic. Not her voice speaking from her mouth. Sera is a wild thing, uncontrollably so, throwing her head back in the woods in the mountaintops drunken, stoned, unafraid of the drumbeats or the heartbeats. Witch, bacchante, maenad, priestess of something as old, older, than the ubiquitous sky gods.
This is her. This is a part of her. Neither lifestyle nor mistake nor addiction but manifestation.
He understands that, and he understands this, too:
that it is holy.
--
The bustier comes off, and a few tiny fabric flowers with it. Hawksley doesn't hesitate; the garment is taken and pulled out of the way and crushed between the seat and the door and it's a good thing he's lying on top of her. He doesn't hesitate in this, either: he's on her breast, his mouth humid and just a little too rough, a little too hungry, and that first hard, devouring kiss is on the edge of painful. He checks himself suddenly, lips parting from her flesh to pant, to slow. When he licks her again it's placating, soothing, a penitent in the confessional: forgive me, forgive me.
Sera may have to pull at him to get him to offer his mouth to her again. It is possible her hands twist in his hair to drag him back up, kissing him with words, all six of them meaning precisely the same thing to him at this moment, all six of them making him grind suddenly against her, pressing her into the seat, lowering his hand to her ass to hold her to him when he does it again. Every few words she says after that is punctuated by a roll, a thrust, all the demand of his body responding to hers.
Responding to her.
"You're gonna get us arrested," he mutters, when she goes for his shirt and tells him to get it off, cursing it. But he doesn't stop her. And he doesn't help her until the ruck of fabric under his arms gets unbearable and he lifts them for a moment. The street is not quite deserted but close enough that no one, not immediately, glances through the windshield to see shirtless man on shirtless woman. Though: if there were someone close enough they would hear, before they saw anything, the loud groan Hawksley lets out upon feeling her on his chest, the sound vibratory and expansive, filling the interior of the car.
She laughed. And Hawksley folds his arms around her and her shoes thump to the floorboards and he just rolls them in the seat, placing her atop them, and either she opens her legs over his lap or she stays straddling one thigh, and until he gets that lingerie off of her he won't care as much.
"Fuck," he breathes, looking at what he can of her in the dark, at the swath of skin between the zippers of her hoodie, running the palm of one hand up her middle, between her breasts, circling her shoulders, sliding up the side of her neck into her hair. His other hand is on one of her garters. He doesn't need to see to know what to do with that. Button and eye, if she's feeling vintage; a simple clasp if not. Doesn't matter. One comes loose against her skin and his other hand smooths up the back of her thigh. For a few moments, slowed by laughter and motion and the sight of her, Hawksley just stares at her, hands roaming, feeling her.
He almost misses at first, what she says to him. He's staring at the curve of her right breast next to his encompassing left hand, his lips slightly slack from the heat of that stare, his right hand's fingers tracing the edge of the boyshorts.
"What?"
Maybe she repeats herself, or maybe it just clicks.
"Fuck," Hawksley says, the invective not at all lustful or amazed or overcome this time. He thumps his head against the seat, squeezing her in his hands like it's a comfort, then thudding his head on the seat again. "Fuck, fuck my fucking life!"
Once more for good measure, muttered with passionate intensity: "Fuck."
In a sudden swing, a clenching of his core and a rising heat, he wraps his arms around her hips and lifts her, holds her leg and moves her to straddling him if she isn't already, kissing her breasts because they're there and because he can't stand not kissing her, leaving suckling little bites on her skin, grinding her down against him because he can't stand not to do that, either. He's muttering on her skin, rolling his hips up to meet her. "I forgot. Where's your purse?"
SerafíneSerafíne does know better than many, better than most that he is more than either that first blinding sunburst of resonance, and more than that first Hawksley, you don’t seem the type impression she breathed in and at Red Rocks and offered back to him, not quite dreaming-slow but slow, see, wrapped up in a fine and cloaking high one clear night in the overgrown but once-loved garden of the home she has come to inhabit so thoroughly in a handful of months that it could belong now to none other but: her. Doesn’t even see this as surface and depths see, so much as threads, as warp and as weft, and he is so finely and tightly woven and so variegated and also so lambent, so lucent that she sometimes wonders that his breath does not burn through her lungs when they are kissing and she chooses to breathe him in rather than the fucking air all around them.
Which she does sometimes, nevermind that those breaths are oxygen depleted, more carbon dioxide than anything else: waste from the lungs. She doesn’t know the words or the chemistry and doesn’t understand the technical, biological reasons they make her lungs tight and her eyes burn and she thinks instead it is some sort of bio-luminescence. That is a word she knows, see: for glowing things.
And maybe she’s correct, on some level deeper than human science can ever see.
--
Does she sense his hesitation, his moment of worry – his how much has she had - where his mind snags on the thought that she might not remember this, that what she is seeking is not merely to forget but to Forget, some peak of un-knowing into which all of these experiences will dissolve into the ether, into the unbroken river of time where she is / is not all at once. She must, see, because after the bustier comes off and his mouth drops from her mouth all hungry to encompass her breast , after she throws her head back and lifts her chest in a dorsal arc that pulls her shoulders sharp against the fine upholstery, after she makes this noise that is not-a-word, just some phoneme, some building block of pre-language, just some cry. After he gives her that penitential lick Forgive me. Forgive me. leaving behind a trail of moisture and her nipple hardens further beneath the rough press of his tongue.
After all that, and before she threads her fingers through his hair and drags him back to her mouth because she wants his mouth, Sera reaches down and curves her hands around his face. Her fingers long and fine are laced around his head and neck, loose and sweet tipped around his neck and the curve of his skull, still in his golden hair. And see: her thumbs against either side of his jaw, moving in these gentle, soothing sweeps through the scruff of his beard. His mouth is still on her breast – which feels both right and revelatory and his breath is hot against her skin. Her head tips down then, chin to neck, and she looks down her body at him, the crown of his head, the lights of the dash and the glow against his tailored t-shirt, because she hasn’t gotten that off him yet, because he hasn’t muttered against her bare skin that she’s going to get them arrested, because she hasn’t muttered back to him with an eager roll of her hips and a razor grin against his ear that she doesn’t fucking care - get it off already - and says to him,
“I won’t forget.”
It is a pledge, quite nearly a promise. Hell, it is a pledge, and oh she means it but oh, she means so many goddamned things. And he can’t know quite precisely how poignant that vow is but she hardly knows, either, because his mouth is on her breast and his hand is on her ass and his thigh is between her legs and sometimes she thinks she can see his wings spreading over them, golden, molten with light, that she thinks to wonder if they have been here all night and the sun has come the fuck out all around her and also: what stars feel like when they’re being born. The words may very well mean no more to him than all the other words she’s muttering at him: but there they are, in the close darkness between them, and she cannot take them back, and they will not be unsaid.
--
He’s right, though, too. She is altered enough that her sense of their encounter is disconnected and heightened and framed in unalterably different ways for her than it is for him. Like set pieces: one minute he is on top of her and the next she is on top of him and she hardly knows how the reversal happened but: it was easy. He’s strong, and she’s far too thin and now she’s on top and she loves it and she does shift, probably with his help, the support of his hand under her ass, to straddle him fully and he’s staring at her mesmerized with his mouth just parted in a way that makes her want to: kiss him and also: kiss him while fucking him but she does not pull him away from that stare because also, she loves the heat of his gaze, the kindled flame.
So she drops her forehead to the crown of his head and her long hair spills, well, three quarters of the way around her shoulders and his own and she asks him that question and What - he says to her, What?
Her head comes up sharply as he flings his back and utters those curses which are curses and not impassioned exclamations and then that renewed coiling of heat and his arms around her hips and his mouth on her breasts and her left arm is tight around his shoulder her left hand is cradling the back of his skull and her right hand is brace on the door on the roof of the fucking Porsche for leverage as they come together as close as the strictures of their remaining clothing will allow and every time he rolls his hips up into her she –
whimpers,
see. Where’s her purse? He mutters the question into her ribs, into the tattoo of the serpent coiled beneath her breast. Into the edge of the scrawl of her serendipity maybe and her eyes are open and everything feels so bright she imagines her pupils must be pinpoints but really they’re blown the fuck open from the drugs and
“Shhh. Shhh - it’s right here – “ she mutters back, all soothing when the words make sense, reaching into / over him because they do make sense, and in this moment she comprehends very little except for the exquisite language his ridiculously beautiful body shares with her own. And he found her at the bar and turned her around that was where she was when she felt him and the golden light went all sunbending bright and she might still have a drink to finish, right? “ – on the bar.”
Oh, wait. This isn’t the bar.
“Jesus fuck I left it in the bar.”
HawksleyHe forgot to bring a condom.
She forgot her purse in the bar.
"Fuck," says Hawksley again, his voice muffled against her breastbone, and it's not clear if he's saying that because they are both such idiots or because she's on his lap and he's moving her against him still, groaning at the feel of her. Maybe both. Definitely both. His breathing is ragged and his skin is flushed and there is a fine sheen of sweat across his shoulders already from the heat building in the car from summer and sex and Sera and the sun that shines at night. His hair is a mess from her fingers going through it and his shirt is hanging off the emergency break and he's pretty sure that's her bustier under his foot and he's so hard he can't think.
So he kisses her breast again, sitting up still, opening his mouth over her right one this time, poor and neglected earlier and now sought out again. He moans low in his throat around her skin, lapping at her with his tongue, forgetting himself for another long moment but not for long because his body won't let him forget for very long how far past the line he's already gone.
"I bet Dan has it," Hawksley mutters against her sternum, working a hand down her thigh to get under that hiked-up skirt to feel her leg, to touch the edges of her panties, to shudder a little bit at the feel of her. And he is more observant than he seems because he also knows: "And I bet Dan is with that guy."
Hawksley's hand turns to a talon, fingernails blunt and short but raking all the same across the curve of her ass. "Fuck," he mutters, this time absolutely in response to just how she feels, like her skin is a revelation, which it is. He thumps his forehead softly on her breastbone, and takes a very deep breath and lifts his face up and kisses her mouth this time. It tastes like a promise, which it is, and it feels a little bit like a don't go anywhere, but he twists and basically drops her in the passenger seat, climbs over her, twists again and drops himself into the driver's seat and fuck it, he doesn't even try to be surreptitious about adjusting himself, jesus, then forces his hands onto the ignition and the wheel and with a look in his eyes she won't recognize because she wasn't on the mountaintop with him, he turns the car on and grabs the gear shift and says to the windshield:
"Put your seatbelt on. I am taking you home."
He does not mean hers.
SerafíneThey are both such fucking idiots.
Witness: she doesn't quite comprehend what's going on here and now and now and here, in the car. Does not quite get that this means that they are going to have to stop this soon. That he's going to let her go. That they have to go somewhere else and get something else because all she wants to do right now is drown herself in him. His mouth is on her breast again and she's clutching his head to her chest and her right hand is clenched in his hair and yes, it is a mess, like she's trying to sculpt it into a mohawk with sweat and whatever slowly-melting product he might use because she cannot stop touching him. Sometimes she braces herself against the ceiling or the passenger's window but mostly she braces herself against him, her left hand fitted to his sweat-slick shoulder, thumb along his clavicle, or slung around his neck elbow digging in between muscle and bone or down his spine maybe, feeling the hitch-and-crawl of his vertebrae flanked by those broad muscles framing his spine.
Her mouth is open and she's dragging her teeth along - his temple, scraping them over his ragged pulse, her own head bent over him in an aspect of prayer, her damp hair curtaining over both of them as he mutters that speculation I bet Dan has it against her sternum And I bet Dan is with that guy.
Oh, words. She remembers what they are, Sera. She has some of those things still in her body.
"I don't care." That's what she tells him, urgent and urging. Christ, his hand is on her thigh, tracing the lacy edge of her panties, one of her garters is undone and dangling and the others should be fucking off by now and he's clawing her ass, and Sera shifts her grip from his hair, settles both hands on his shoulders, she's leaning all her weight into him trying to push him backward, prone, to keep him in place because, "I don't care." she is a fucking idiot.
And she wants him so much that that want is taking up all the space in her lungs reserved for ordinary things like: air.
"Hawksley, I don't care."
Then he's kissing her and she's still murmuring I don't care into his mouth and twisting her body into his so it's easy for him to pick her up and drop her into the passenger's seat because she's going eagerly because she oh-so-clearly thinks that he's going to cover her with his body again and that is fine, just fine with her but instead -
he's not there anymore.
Sera makes this strangled noise, her attention blocky and drifting and she's just sprawled back and she reaches up to cup her right breast - the last one that had the blessing of his mouth - because he's half a foot away and she misses him already and the air all around her feels so bright and suddenly cool but scorched, somehow, full of ozone and lead and starlight and then the engine and she feels all scorched and delicious and needy and everything is magnified and everything is hyperfocused and everything is pulled to insubstantiality by her need for him and the drugs in her system and it is only that authority in his voice that has her sitting suddenly up and reaching for the seatbelt and clicking it home.
Doesn't know quite how to make the seat do its magic and return to vertical from as close to horizontal as it could get but that doesn't matter because she's sitting uprightish, the seatbelt bisecting her torso, cutting between her breasts, staring at his profile, her own mouth open, and she's more than a little mesmerized by the look in his eyes, she's a lot fucking mesmerized by the look in his eyes,
and its reflection in the windshield, pale against the punctuate sweep of the city night.
"Hurry." Once she has found him, she cannot take her eyes off him. "Please. I feel like I'm going to fall apart without your hands on me."
(Oh, Sera. You will not fall apart.)
HawksleySo:
no.
That is not what happens after all. Not after she tells him once, twice, three times and then half a dozen times that she doesn't care because right now each iteration is like a rocket hitting him cleanly in the skull and blowing his mind apart. Not after she's put her hands on his shoulders and started pushing him back, down, stay, Hawksley, stay, which makes his pupils flash wide and dark and predatory. And they are idiots. And she tells him she's going to fall apart and he believes her.
But they do turn. He does flip her over for the second time, but not to climb over into the driver's seat and not to turn on the ignition and not to inform her that he is taking her home, though he still might do all of those things
later,
slower,
calmer.
He covers her with his body again, which is fine, just fine, and more than fine, his arm under her shoulderblades and his hand up her skirt pulling something underneath it down, tangling with all that complicated lingerie which he suddenly, miraculously seems to know how to work. "Off," he mutters, when his hand has her underwear to her knees and this single syllable is meant to convey that she needs to take it from there, bending her knees or pushing something down, out of his way, their way, and surely some of what she was wearing she is still wearing. It doesn't matter.
The buckle of his belt clinks slightly against itself as he yanks it undone, and he could do this blind, is doing it blind, holding her up against him and holding her bare breasts to his bared chest and kissing her mouth like her taste contains secrets of the universe, which it fucking does.
Neither of them are altogether undressed when his hand on her lower back and his hand on himself brings them together. And if he ever had any thoughts of slow or delicate or even gentle he left them somewhere behind the bar, somewhere a week ago or two weeks ago or a lifetime ago, it seems, because this is not slow and this is not delicate but god: it is still reverent.
That sound he makes, right when she takes him, is like the sudden exhalation of a man who has just realized that the wound is fatal. His life is over. He has moments, only, left to him, and instead of last words or wisdom or prayer he just
lets that last moment go, all in one breath. Gives everything he has left, which doesn't seem like much, til you remember it's all any of us ever had.
--
Hawksley has dropped his head to her shoulder, beside her throat, holding onto her as a tremor of restraint goes through him, but this is not the restraint of concern or of distress or -- heaven forbid -- guilt. This is keeping one moment in time just as it is, vibrating in the center of the universe, the endless and eternal and ever-present Now. That moment is going to shatter and die as soon as he lets himself go to instincts older than civilization and moves in her, so he holds onto it for as long as he can, living there,
in her,
while everything around him suddenly becomes more real. Everything he forgot comes rushing back: the air on his skin, the night outside, the distant laughter of drunk people, muffled by their breathing which is in turn muffled by the silence of the car. He remembers that he's not wearing a fucking condom but right now he doesn't care, he doesn't care, he doesn't care, he knows he's a fucking idiot but he doesn't care because he's going to fall apart if he leaves her now.
His head bows. That moment, that quivering self-control, does not last long. He opens his mouth to her shoulder and sets his teeth in her lightly, lightly, to muffle a harsh, ragged groan that almost-not-quite forms the sound Oh when he lets himself
move.
A second time, then. He pants a breath out, and lifts his head, and looks at her, watching her on that third dedicated, deliberate stroke. He wants to tell her that he just wants to live here for a minute, looking at her, feeling her around him. He wants to tell her how long he's been waiting for this, but he's sincerely not sure how long it's really been. He wants to tell her to kiss him. But he has forgotten language: all three of the ones he knows.
So he kisses her, moaning into her mouth, and speaks to her firmly, worshipfully, demandingly, the only way he remembers how.
SerafíneSo,no.That doesn't happen after all. Oh, maybe she senses the sudden threat of his absence, teases it out from the branching currents of the energy gathering around them, ravels that thread, breathes it all in, feels somehow the chill from the sudden blast of the air conditioning as the car came to life beneath his hands evaporating the sweat from her half-bare skin enveloping her and justwillsit otherwise: I don't care, I don't care, I don't care. Oh, she means it. She is an idiot, but her want for him is needle-sharp and skin-piercing. And so he stays.And so he flips them a second time, drops her back to the passenger's seat, covers her first with his shadow and then with his body and as she's dropping there's this stutter-stop moment of free-fall which is both fractional, right? and fleeting and also forever and she catches her breath with a hitch and her ass hits the seat and see? she laughs, exultant, so charged, so thrilled, so inflamed and, yes, giddy with / from / by / and for him, reaching for him with all her limbs.--They never get all of their clothing off, but they manage enough of it. His hand beneath her skirt and she's kissing him and he's kissing her and then she's biting him, the meat of his shoulder, hard enough that the imprint of her teeth will linger in his skin for an hour or more if she does not suck it soothingly out. Never quite hard enough to break the skin. The button and eye garters and then her underwear around her knees and he says off like that and her arms are wrapped around his neck and she does: bend her knees, arch, shimmy, move against him until her black lace boyshorts have slipped down over her knees and calves, until she can kick them off and let them drop to the floor with the other garments he's stripped from her. With her ridiculous heels and rose-covered bustier in. Until she has enough freedom of fucking movement that she can wrap her thighs around his hips and invite him -- in her.Somehow she claws her way out of that hoodie because she wants: bare arms and bare spine and entirely bare skin against his skin and not even the cool metallic bite of the unzipped zipper between their bodies but, her skirt is still on. Pushed up over her hips and around her waist but, on. The garter belt and garters. Most of one and perhaps one-quarter of the other of her stockings. Most of his hipster, dust-colored jeans.They manage. They're in a fucking sports car, christ, on a city street at two and change in the a.m. It's probably hotter this way. Also: less-likely-to-result-in-public-indecency-charges, though not by much.
--Listen, his restraint finds a mirror in her and for precisely the same fucking reasons. Sera is not passive. She is, alive, delicious, wriggling, urgent, just-as-hungry-as-he and there's this promise of movement in her whipcord body, the substrate, intraarticular tension of it in her spine beneath his hand as he brings them together, as she takes him in. And also, the tension of it, withheld.She wants to reach for him. To cup his face between her hands and tell him stop, stop, be still, just one fucking moment, let me feel you but she doesn't have to or maybe she does say that to him, somehow, some braille-of-the-body because he's there and she's there and his head is beside her throat and her own is tipped back and all she does is breathe, open-mouthed, and hold onto him with absolutely everything inside of her because,he's a miracle, he's a revelation, he's a universe-being-reborn, and she just wants to feel him, inside her.She cries out when he starts to move, and responds of course, this elliptical curl of her pelvis, which is as deliberate and as demanding as the language of his body against her own. Her eyes are shining when he looks down at her, gleaming with some complex and fractured reflection of the street lights that filter through the windows of the Porsche. And she's smiling, bright and intimate and hungry too and she looks so fucking happy ---and there's something she wants to tell him too, see. But she's also forgotten language, all its promises and all its possibilities, and she won't remember it until the movement of their bodies has unzipped her spine and fractured her sternum and there's all this bleeding light pouring into her, pouring out of her, until she has come, so hard, so transparently, so transcendently, that tears are leaking out of the edges of her eyes, and she's clinging to him like she's some sort of refugee and she has no fucking idea where he ends and she begins.After that, when her skin has sealed itself over not against but with the light and through the aftershocks and maybe he is still moving in her, fucking her so that there are these delicious little starbursts behind her eyes or maybe he comes when she comes, somehow, wills it, see? and is just holding her in the aftermath but, after, when her tongue has remembered speech, and the neural pathways in her brain are bathed in light she runs her nose beneath his jaw, lifts her mouth to his ear, nuzzles him like an animal and tells him what she wanted to tell him on that third, deliberate stroke, which is, "You fit so perfectly. You belong in me."
SerafíneSo,
no.
That doesn't happen after all. Oh, maybe she senses the sudden threat of his absence, teases it out from the branching currents of the energy gathering around them, ravels that thread, breathes it all in, feels somehow the chill from the sudden blast of the air conditioning as the car came to life beneath his hands evaporating the sweat from her half-bare skin enveloping her and just
wills
it otherwise: I don't care, I don't care, I don't care. Oh, she means it. She is an idiot, but her want for him is needle-sharp and skin-piercing. And so he stays.And so he flips them a second time, drops her back to the passenger's seat, covers her first with his shadow and then with his body and as she's dropping there's this stutter-stop moment of free-fall which is both fractional, right? and fleeting and also forever and she catches her breath with a hitch and her ass hits the seat and see? she laughs, exultant, so charged, so thrilled, so inflamed and, yes, giddy with / from / by / and for him, reaching for him with all her limbs.
--
They never get all of their clothing off, but they manage enough of it. His hand beneath her skirt and she's kissing him and he's kissing her and then she's biting him, the meat of his shoulder, hard enough that the imprint of her teeth will linger in his skin for an hour or more if she does not suck it soothingly out. Never quite hard enough to break the skin. The button and eye garters and then her underwear around her knees and he says off like that and her arms are wrapped around his neck and she does: bend her knees, arch, shimmy, move against him until her black lace boyshorts have slipped down over her knees and calves, until she can kick them off and let them drop to the floor with the other garments he's stripped from her. With her ridiculous heels and rose-covered bustier in. Until she has enough freedom of fucking movement that she can wrap her thighs around his hips and invite him -- in her.
Somehow she claws her way out of that hoodie because she wants: bare arms and bare spine and entirely bare skin against his skin and not even the cool metallic bite of the unzipped zipper between their bodies but, her skirt is still on. Pushed up over her hips and around her waist but, on. The garter belt and garters. Most of one and perhaps one-quarter of the other of her stockings. Most of his hipster, dust-colored jeans.
They manage. They're in a fucking sports car, christ, on a city street at two and change in the a.m. It's probably hotter this way. Also: less-likely-to-result-in-public-indecency-charges, though not by much.
--
Listen, his restraint finds a mirror in her and for precisely the same fucking reasons. Sera is not passive. She is, alive, delicious, wriggling, urgent, just-as-hungry-as-he and there's this promise of movement in her whipcord body, the substrate, intraarticular tension of it in her spine beneath his hand as he brings them together, as she takes him in. And also, the tension of it, withheld.
She wants to reach for him. To cup his face between her hands and tell him stop, stop, be still, just one fucking moment, let me feel you but she doesn't have to or maybe she does say that to him, somehow, some braille-of-the-body because he's there and she's there and his head is beside her throat and her own is tipped back and all she does is breathe, open-mouthed, and hold onto him with absolutely everything inside of her because,
he's a miracle, he's a revelation, he's a universe-being-reborn, and she just wants to feel him, inside her.
She cries out when he starts to move, and responds of course, this elliptical curl of her pelvis, which is as deliberate and as demanding as the language of his body against her own. Her eyes are shining when he looks down at her, gleaming with some complex and fractured reflection of the street lights that filter through the windows of the Porsche. And she's smiling, bright and intimate and hungry too and she looks so fucking happy -
--
and there's something she wants to tell him too, see. But she's also forgotten language, all its promises and all its possibilities, and she won't remember it until the movement of their bodies has unzipped her spine and fractured her sternum and there's all this bleeding light pouring into her, pouring out of her, until she has come, so hard, so transparently, so transcendently, that tears are leaking out of the edges of her eyes, and she's clinging to him like she's some sort of refugee and she has no fucking idea where he ends and she begins.
After that, when her skin has sealed itself over not against but with the light and through the aftershocks and maybe he is still moving in her, fucking her so that there are these delicious little starbursts behind her eyes or maybe he comes when she comes, somehow, wills it, see? and is just holding her in the aftermath but, after, when her tongue has remembered speech, and the neural pathways in her brain are bathed in light she runs her nose beneath his jaw, lifts her mouth to his ear, nuzzles him like an animal and tells him what she wanted to tell him on that third, deliberate stroke, which is, "You fit so perfectly. You belong in me."
HawksleyEnough.
It's not Hawksley who says it, or Serafine, or any voice either of them can hear. But he can feel it, a certainty enough to make his bones quiver, that it is enough. That it is finally, finally enough.
This is after her laughter, and the way he kisses her that nearly bites that laughter from her lips. This is after she leaves the imprint of her fine white teeth in his golden shoulder, broken curves facing each other to form a shape that is the sound of her moaning. This is after they cling to each other, not naked but nearly, sweating on each other, her inner thighs riding his hips, his hand on her lower back lifting her to meet him, until what they are doing to one another drives out smiles, and laughter, and language, and thought, and anything but an animal's demand for satisfaction.
This is after she comes and he swears, loudly, grabbing the back of the bucket seat with one hand to keep from clutching at her too tightly, too hard. This is after the clench and roll of her body makes him bury his face against her hair and her neck like if he looks at her he'll be damned,
after he decides damnation is worth it to him after all and lifts his face, looks at her, looks at her face, looks at her breast under his hand when he dares to touch her again, looks down between them at the place where their bodies seam together, and while he is looking at her she makes
this noise, which is not the only noise she's making or the only one she's ever made and it's like and unlike one he's heard before but something about the pitch of it or the vibration of it sends him over the edge there and then with the suddenness of a hammer to the skull, a punch in the gut, a lack of oxygen, something
visceral and life-altering.
Hawksley's arms wrap around her without him telling them to do so. He holds onto her and buries himself into her, against her, while an orgasm takes him and threatens to drown him. He can't tell if she's the stone he clings to in the sea-storm or the sea-storm itself, and later when his brain is functioning again he will think:
both. of course, both.
--
His skin is wet. From his sweat, and from her sweat, and just... from her. His brain is molten, primordial, the cradle of creation, the universe-being-reborn. The sides of his chest move like a heart beating with every breath he takes, though those breaths are shallow and quick at first. His forehead is against the car's seat which is under her hair which is touching his brow and the tip of his nose and moving a little every time he exhales. He has not let her go, is still holding her where she is on him, under him, around him, close.
Thoughts come back like a flash flood to a ravine after a drought: drops at first to stir the dust, then a deluge, then a shockingly quick rush through previously forgotten channels. He remembers I don't care, I don't care, I don't care, but then some internal, lingering, slow-warm spasm of hers makes him forget his name again. He pants out and forgets what he was thinking, anything he could be thinking, other than that
she is warm, and she is so veryvery close to him, and it feels good, and he's just going to stay here. As long as she lets him.
Words move against his ear. Hawksley reacts despite his body telling him enough: he mindlessly moves in her again, a firm slide that makes him gasp and shudder and want very much to do it again, even though he knows he can't stand it. It takes him a moment after that to put back the pieces of his mind he just jarred loose again and process what she said.
She could mean something very literal, and very physical, and that's silly, because her physiology is made to accept this, accept him, fit to him, not the other way around, it's not him, but
not for a moment, even one, does Hawksley think she is being literal.
--
You belong in me.
Drowsily, unresisting because he could not resist or refuse her right now if all his will bent to it, Hawksley -- eyes closed, head bowed, holding himself up and holding her to him -- just nods, one long and two quick, like a surrender. Or perhaps:
I know.
--
Sera was nuzzling him, and maybe she still does, and Hawksley gradually finds himself capable of returning the gesture. He rubs his face a little roughly against her jawbone and her neck, making a low, comforted noise as he does. He licks her neck and her ear to taste her sweat, lowering her body a bit and turning a little in the seat so he doesn't crush her, but his arm stays around her. He finds the sleeve of her hoodie and drags it up, loosely and inexpertly arranges it around their lower halves, but holds her upper half against his chest, folding his arms behind her back, hands to her shoulderblades, while
he kisses her. Like he hasn't been all night. Not rough or sudden or hungry but like that second kiss inside, slow and soft and almost nipping at her lips with his own, sipping her like nectar.
It takes
a shocking
amount of time for him to regain language. At least tonight it does. At least this time. On some level he would be perfectly content to just curl up in that cramped front seat and hold her and sleep for about seven-to-ten minutes and then see if she would like to go again. On another level, he knows he's going to get a crick in his neck and they are going to get fucking arrested.
So he nudges her under her chin with his nose, dropping a kiss on her when he feels her skin cross the path of his breath.
"Come home with me," he murmurs, rubbing her back with his hand.
SerafíneHeadlights sweep across them. Like a roadflare in the darkness, some other car turning from Larimar onto 27th Street. Bright-bright and then gone. They are just below the level of the windows, low to the ground, all those external noises muffled and dampened by the extraordinarily well put together vehicle but still: no engine, no stereo, just them, each more than half-naked but neither entirely so, sweaty, slick and intimate curled awkwardly together on the not-really horizontal passenger seat of Hawksley's Porsche.
Sera cannot quite imagine anything more perfect, right now.
The air smells of sex, and sweat, and whiskey, and everywhere he touches her even now, after - especially now, after - feels warmer for it. She's stoned, remember, and can hardly get enough of his skin. Could hardly get enough of his skin when she was sober but she is not sober and the drugs in her system cushion and magnify and isolate every sensation. His left arm beneath the curve of her right breast, where it curls beneath her ribs to hold her close and closer. The cool kiss of the zipper of her hoodie where he has draped it over their waists, across their hips. The warm flare of his hands on her shoulder blades. She wonders if he could make her grow wings, too. With the warm pressure of his hands right there on her scapulae, where they would take root and grow and begin to open. Shivering and damp and weaker than a new-born kitten's legs but -
- all that promise.
He kisses her so tenderly, drinking her in, and she returns the kiss, of course she does. Soft and lingeringsweet and she could drown in the sensation and her arms are around his neck and her hands are in his hair - yes, cradling again, just as tender and just as - oh, protective - as any gesture he has ever made to her. It is the way one holds an infant's skull, after all, fingers splayed, wrist flexed but strong. Sera opens her eyes before the kiss ends, and she's there, watching him, pupils huge and devouring-dark, almost nose-to-nose, eye-to-eye, brow-to-brow.
Then her eyes close and she tips her head back, her now-damp hair whispering in threads over the upholstery, her neck taut, the hollow between her clavicles more prominent with every breath she takes. The bridge of his nose beneath her jaw makes her bite her lip and smile. And, his warm breath, and the kiss he drops on her skin that makes her say,
"Oh, Hawksley,"
- just like that, this resonant little note of surprise braided into her tone, and the faint edge of her smile stitched into the words. She just wants to stay here forever.
Once more, the oblate flash of headlights above them, glaring over them. Running like heavy water over all the fine and shining finishes of the Porsche and even she knows that is not really possible. Not yet, now now, and hey. Sera does not want to get arrested. She might even want to give Hawksley the chance to remove all of her clothes.
She feels so goddamned good she can hardly stand it. Every square millimeter of her skin is alive.
" - of course I'll come home with you."
HawksleyAt that, he kisses her again, on the side of her neck, firm and full and pleased. And because he is a bastard he slides his hand down to her hip and grinds into her, biting back a pant of air of his own, then does the unthinkable and draws out of her, but this is not a grind or a dastardly, wicked thing; he is careful the way he is sometimes unexpectedly careful, or gentle, or steady, or patient. He kisses her again even then, kissing her face and her half-wept tears and breathing in the smell of her and squeezing her in his arms because god damn.
He drags her hoodie up. He rearranges himself and pulls up his boxer-briefs and his jeans and buckles his belt and laughs to himself, looking at the mess they've made of each other and laughing, too, out of sheer pleasure, enjoyment, easy happiness that comes to people for whom happiness is a frequently-visiting, trusted friend and not a suspicious stranger. Oh, there, look, see: he's kissing her again while he's grinning, kissing her jaw this time, because that happens to be where he reaches her first, and grabbing the handle of the door and tumbling himself out all limbs and only semi-awkward grace like of course I climb out of cars in the middle of the night after fucking my friends in them no I didn't forget my shirt I know just where it is what are you looking at.
Hawksley circles the car, and he thumps down in the driver's seat when he gets back into it, panting out a breath and tipping his head back against the headrest, surprised at how quickly the brief jaunt into the night air cooled off his skin. He lowers his chin after a few moments communing with the ceiling and twists his neck around, looks at Sera beside him. Looks at her. His eyes run from her mid-thigh to the curve of her ear and the bridge of her nose and down her lips and then down all the rest of her, all the way to her feet.
And he breathes out, mostly through his nostrils, shaking his head because:
"God damn."
A half-second later, like he said nothing at all, he asks her if she's ready and if she's ready he's ready and not for the first time she gets to feel how he drives that thing, though she has yet to feel how he drives it when he is in a fucking hurry because she's in a bar and that means she's drinking and if she's drinking that means her fast is over and if her fast is over that means,
well.
We've seen what that means.
--
Hawksley does not drive Sera downtown. Hawksley drives Sera in a path that winds at first, south-west and then north-west and then curving along Park Avenue which becomes 23rd which loops around and then hops onto I-25, which takes then down through the heart of the most densely-populated parts of the city like a river of asphalt and concrete. Off on University and south, south, until if she's been here long enough she knows he's taking her into the land of country clubs and golf courses and entire neighborhoods enmeshed with the country clubs and golf courses.
The road he takes her onto from there is called Sunset.
The estate he takes her to is ...well. It's an estate. And it's very dark outside, because in this neighborhood there's very few street lamps and very few lights on in any of the houses. Most of those houses can't even be seen, because they are at the ends of winding, tree-lined driveways that circle stone fountains and are barred by wrought-iron gates. The not-far-away golf course is difficult to see, is just rolling shadows in the night. Hawksley drives slowly here, partly because it is law and partly because of the low visibility and partly because some of the people who live here have horses, for god's sake, and you never know when someone is going to fail to repair their fence.
He pulls in through a gate and drives over a long, curving path beneath trees. Somewhere in there they reach a garage, which is detached from the hulking, tree-surrounded shadow of a house she can't entirely make out, and the door is still open and the Porsche pulls inside low and slow and quiet. When he turns it off and the interior lights dim to nothingness, it is almost entirely pitch dark. They can hear each other breathing.
In the breathing dark, his voice says:
"I want you again."
SerafíneNo matter how beautiful his body, how perfectly tapered is his swimmer's torso, how well and precisely and thoroughly muscled are his rower's arms, Sera never quiet looks at him the way he looks at her after he has finished communing with the ceiling had the night air bright and cool on his skin and turned to look at her, to survey her, to take her in just as she is, almost entirely undone. She has managed to pull the hoodie back on, probably, and shimmy the hem of her skirt down over her ass, but she hasn't bothered with her stockings and garters and doesn't until sometime later, mid-drive. Still, he looks at her like that and breathes out those words and shakes his head and his gaze is almost heavy enough to qualify as a hand on her skin and well,
her eyes flash dark and she sits up straight and manages this time to right the passenger's seat and pull her seatbelt over her body, between her breasts, framed by the open boxy frame of her undone zipper.
There's a promise somewhere in all that movement.
She thinks its only going to be a ten minute ride.
--
But he does not drive her downtown. Sometime during the drive she does reach down not for her underwear but her stockings. Rolls them up and arches her hips to tug them the last few inches up her thighs and to fasten the garters to them again, front and back.
And she's been here in Denver a while, long enough that she should understand that he is taking her to golf-course and horse-stables and country-club territory but does not much drive but it hardly matters because: he is bringing her to an estate in a neighborhood of estates on a street called Sunset and he's driving slowly enough that she can see the shadows of - if not the other estates then at least their huge iron gates and stone walls and all the accoutrements of wealth and then he turns into one of them and there: the shadowy bulk of a house she cannot quite make out, the open garage door, the trees overhead, their shadows disrupting her shifting view of the darkling sky overhead.
Her forehead is tucked against the passenger's window, which is cool enough that her hot breath fogs the glass and then the half-seen shadow of the half-seen estate disappears as he eases the Porsche into the garage,
and turns off the engine,
and tells her, I want you again.
Too dark for him to see the sudden flash of her smile, would be all white teeth. Too dark for him to see her hand as she tucks it down between her seat and the console between them but it is so quiet he can hear every whisper of movement in her body, down to the faint clink of the foot of the undone zipper against its teeth and assuredly the distinct click as Sera undoes her seatbelt and shifts herself upright and climbs over the console to straddle him, nevermind that there's a hell of a lot less real estate on the driver's side and they are squeezed between his upright seat and the wheel proper. Her knees on either side of his hips.
She can find his mouth in the darkness. Of course she can.
And as she kisses him firmly, invitingly, challengingly, she grinds her hips into his, achingly slow.
She wants him, too.
"Again and again and again," is what she sighs into his mouth and she means it, too.
Because of course she does.
HawksleyNo, it's not a ten minute ride. It isn't quite thirty, as it should be, but it's far longer than ten. And somewhere in there she tugs up her stockings and his eyes flick over, watching as she buttons them again, but he has to look away because otherwise he will veer off the road and they'll never get out of the car. Yes, his gaze is almost tangible tonight. It's never been before but right now, tonight, after all that, he doesn't have to lay a hand on her to touch her.
They get to his house. Collins finally found them a house, which explains why earlier when she asked where he was he said Home and when she asked what he was doing he said Exploring. That house is a mansion, full stop. It is not a McMansion, it is not a cookie-cutter, it is the sort of place that may very well have things like servant's passages. It is enormous, at least two vaulted floors and an attic that may qualify as a third, and possibly a basement. In the dark, it seems built from the shadows themselves, its angles and edges impossible to make out but its size obvious.
She can't know that when Collins brought him here to see it, Hawksley threw a fit.
--
"You do remember there's two of us, yes? Two. Not seven. Not twelve. Two.""I recall, sir.""WHAT THE FUCK DO WE NEED THAT MUCH SPACE FOR."
--
Somewhere on the ride over, Hawksley opened the moon roof above them, and it self-closed when he turned off the car, cutting off the cool breeze that ruffled their hair as he drove them here. They are, once again, encased in dark silence. He tells her the truth as he knows it. She becomes the truth, clicking off her seatbelt and crawling onto him so suddenly that his breath shoots in through his mouth and his hands go to her thighs and are halfway up to her hips when she starts grinding on him.
In the dark she can't see but can feel his head go back, feel and hear his breath come out raggedly as she's squirming on his lap. She kisses that breath off of him, capturing it in her throat like a stolen soul, and his hands all but claw up her back when he leans over her, presses to her, eating at her mouth with his kiss.
The horn blares, loud and sudden enough to make him jump, loud enough to make him swear
"JESUS Christ --!" against her lower lip.
Hawksley pants, and lowers his brow to her clavicles, squeezing her and massaging her in his hands like he can't quite stop checking to see if she's still real. "Jesus Christ," he says again, quieter, panting. "At least let me get out of the car first this time."
'Let'. As if she 'let' him -- well. She did, in a way. And neither of them are quite talking about that. He's not asking her if she's on birth control, he's just hoping/believing she is. He's not asking her just... how safe her sex usually is, not because how the fuck do you ask someone that, but because he wants to trust that she is not stupid, she is not callous, she would not be careless with him. And that's all well and good, all this trust and belief and faith in someone you've known for a month who seems as intrinsic to yourself as though you were born on the same day and played together on the same picnic blankets, but let's be honest: they should be fucking talking about some things.
Like that time he came back from a mountain and told her he'd been scrying, and some part of her had a mind to yell at him. They didn't talk about that, and it never came up.
Or they could talk about that time she kicked him and it was very clear that he did not take kindly to that. They haven't talked about that at all, either.
Maybe they should even be talking about her fast and his questioning of it and what was really behind that and why he was trying to derail her and whether that was really what he was doing and if so, what the fuck, Hawksley. But maybe they don't need to talk about any of that. Or maybe they just don't want to, or he forgets and she chooses to forget or no one wants to ruin anything: the moment, the feeling, the want, the closeness, the strange but evident Something between them that made that brilliant apprentice think:
they must go everywhere together.
--
Where were we?
We were getting out of the car.
--
Hawksley does. He leaves his shirt and they probably leave her bustier and the torn-off rosettes and her underwear and he's careful when he helps her out before him, makes sure she's steady on her feet before he climbs out after her, rising up to his full height and closing the door. Every sound is sharp and stark in the silence of this neighborhood: no sirens, no cars driving by, not even dogs barking in the middle of the night to disturb anyone's sense of serenity.
Strange, that a person like Hawksley would be here. So upper-crust. So swank. So stuffy. He could buy a penthouse downtown or two or three floors of a condominium if he liked, one would think. Live in the middle of everything, very high in the air, where he can see in four directions forever and forever and forever. But here he is, in an old house with old trees, the opposite of modernity or flash or swagger and emblematic of old money, old ideals, old status.
Then again, it sounds like Collins was the one who found it and bought it.
Hawksley is holding her hand, walking with her towards the front of the house. He doesn't think to give her a tour or tell her about the guest house around the side/back where Collins will live. He doesn't even take out a key to open the front door; it is waiting for him when he pushes it inward and takes Sera with him into darkness lit only by moon and starlight coming in through windows. The shadows are velvet. He grins in the dark, but surely she can sense it. He breathes out a laugh.
The house smells like dust and newness all at once. It smells like silence and emptiness and sounds like echoes and secrecy. It feels like a labyrinth, winding and dark and surprising, and no wonder he was exploring this place.
They are in the vestibule. Bodily he turns to her, before they have even reached the arch into the foyer -- they are different things, the vestibule and the foyer -- and takes her waist in his hands, stepping to her, into her, against her, kissing her again, which now he has to bend to her to do. It is a slow, deepening kiss, lighter and less violent than many before it, not quite so soft as those in the immediate aftermath.
"I don't even know if I have a bed yet," he laughs against her mouth. "I didn't get that far before you texted me."
SerafíneThe horn startles her too, has her spine going all straight and its her ass that set it off but it is blaring so loud and magnified because they are in the garage rather than outside and all that dark empty space around them just ricochets with sound and the shock of tension in her body see, has her all stiff through the spine and shoulders and then his brow against her bone, his hands on her body, his voice in the back of her mind massaging the tension out of her.
At least let me get out of the car first this time, he instructs or maybe pleads and she tips her head backwards and laughs and then bends forward and kisses him on the forehead, precisely in the center, and there is so much that they should be talking about but oh especially that and half-a-dozen other things that came before but they don't talk about those things and mostly Sera hardly remembers them once they've gone or no, that's not it at all - it has something to do with emotional currents, the surge and roll of them how very subject she is to their gathering energy and sudden undertow, perhaps.
--
His shirt and her bustier and her underwear and her heels are all left behind and Sera leaves them behind without a second thought. Which should not surprise given that she left behind her clutch at the Meadowlark which contained no more than a half-dozen things, but things that should perhaps not be left to behind to be reviewed, picked through, stolen or - for fuck's sake - reported somehow: a vial of powder-blue molly, a pack cigarettes, several joints tucked in with the smokes, a lighter, cash, condoms, and her fucking ID.
They climb out of the car and she's in not-quite-bare (they are stocking-covered) feet on the concrete floor of the garage. He holding her hand and it feels so right to her, to have her fingers laced with his, to be joined to him in such a very simple and straightforward and quite nearly chaste way. There are callouses on her hand and a certain strength in her fingers that is not true physical strength but something else, some tenacity, right? Some clinging-to-life.
--
Surrounded by all that house, barefoot, in her unzipped hoodie and her still mostly rucked up skit and her garter belt and stockings - all that space, all that strange and labyrinthine promise - and she ranges a bit as they enter into the vestibule, half turning in a near-spinning arc and the promise of movement in her body that he felt beneath him and over him and knew already instinctively is there again: she loves her body, loves to move it, loves to feel it move. But she never lets go of his hand and she looks up in the darkness and the dust and the gloom and breathes in deeply and the place feels old and new all at once and she laughs,
amazed and bemused and delighted each in turn.
"It's like fucking Hogwarts," she tells him, that delight shimmying through her voice. Because of course she thinks that.
Then: foyer into vestibule and he turns into her and bends to kiss her and he has to bend quite a ways to kiss her without her heels but she rises too, to her tip-toes, lilting her head back to her long hair spills down her spine, reaching for him and reaching for him and reaching for him the way supplicants always do for the sky gods and -
she curls one hand behind his neck and one hand around his waist and fits herself to him, easy and confident and sure.
"We don't need a bed," she assures him. "We can do it in the grass. Against a wall. On a bearskin rug in front of the fire. There's gotta be a bearskin rug, right? Christ, Hawksley, this place feels like a mystery novel waiting to happen."
HawksleySet down this: that Hawksley does feel a twinge, somewhere deep inside, when he realizes Sera is walking on stockinged feet. The ground is not the most forgiving, the drive outside the garage hard and there are certainly bits of rock here and there. He stays close to her, but that is only partly, dimly related to that twinge. Some of it is just that he wants to stay close to her. Neither is quite the same as wanting to protect her, shield her, guard her from all harm.
Some piece of his soul is, in fact, a shield. But not that sort.
Hawksley is coherent enough to thumb a button to close the garage as they leave it, and the noise of it is murmur-quiet, modernized, luxurious despite the antiquated feeling of the rest of the estate. His hand slips easily into hers, the contact thoughtless
if not meaningless.
--
Sera ranges and Hawksley goes with her. He does not hang back or pull her back and he does not let her slip away but enters the same exploratory wind with her, but the way he moves and the way he turns his hand in her hand to keep contact without twisting wrists has a practiced elegance to it, but then she knows this about him: he loved to dance. Loves? Ballroom. Fucking ballroom dancing.
Of course he is light on his feet, easy with the way he circles her, winds back to her with their arms out and then down to the their sides, til he lets their fronts touch just a little again and looks down at her.
He is smiling. She can make that much out, even in the dark. Hogwarts. So of course he's kissing her, half-lifting her against his body to make it happen, his hand on her back pressing til she arches, til she's flush and full and warm against him except those cold zipper-lines. It is not hard to feel him through his jeans, ready again, ready still, whatever it is; this is what she does to him. This is what she's been doing to him for some time. So his mouth goes to her neck, and she says grass-wall-bearskin and he laughs through the place where his teeth graze her flesh.
"I don't need," he tells her, and means it. "I want."
The bed. He means:
"I want you in my bed," words hitting her skin even as he very well is lifting her, muttering something, which is
"Put your legs around me,"
before her back is against one of those walls she just mentioned, his torso between her thighs, one hand reaching down to get that buckle, that zipper, those jeans out of the way. Again.
Need. Want.
Will.
SerafíneThat grace. Oh, she remembers it. There's this frisson of awareness wrapped up in her body as she drifts away and he follows like that, and neither of them let go of their clasped hands and it is unspoken and natural, so natural that once she recognizes that it feels so right she hardly notices it beyond that. The way they hold on.
But see: she remembers, the first night they met at Red Rocks, the way he felt soaring all above her, so bright against the fucking sky. The way he slipped into the mingled crowd of Sera's friends and Jim's friends and half the goddamned roller derby team, handing out his calling cards, telling them all that he was going to have a part as soon as he settled in. The way he danced with Honey Bunches of Chokes, Emily, close but never too close. Never presumptuous enough, invasive enough to put a hand on her low back.
And the explanation for all that grace and skill a few nights later: ballroom dancing.
Sera knows this; remembers it suddenly though not strangely when she slips away without losing her grasp on his hand and he comes with her, circles her, winds back to her. Her breath catches a bit at the subtle formality embedded in the movement, and maybe she looks at him, straight and full, when they are as far apart as they are like to be all night, which is less than the length of their arms, joined by their clasped hands, and remembers the way he tucked himself at the edge of her cabana bed, and confessed,
you make my heart pound.
--
And then they're in the foyer and he's smiling and kissing her and she says Hogwarts and she means it, the place feels strange and alive and removed all around her and she thinks Hogwarts which is lovely and enchanting and Kylemore but she thinks neither of them for long because he is kissing her, half lifting her, pulling her close to him and she's arching for him, into him, yearning upwards and biting off a gasp as his mouth slides to her neck and his teeth scrape her skin.
Oh the way she arches then, with a prominent curve of her dorsal spine and lifts her breasts forward against his bare chest, pushes both out from the frame of the zipper lines. She makes this noise when she feels him hard again, or hard already, or just fucking hard through his jeans and that noise is eager invitation and half-a-laugh, both at once.
And she still has one hand behind his head and one at his waist, her thumb tucked into the hard defined line of his obliques, her fingers on his lower back and -
christ
Sera breathes out this short hard breath as he lifts her, as the words I want you in my bed stain her skin like a tattoo. Of course she wraps her legs around him, and reaches up to wrap both arms around his neck. Of course she arcs her hips hungrily into his torso, pressing her shoulderblades backwards as he drives her into one of those goddamned walls.
"Maybe your bed's in the Room of Requirement," she tells him, with a gasp that is eager and hungry and wanting and wanton. He has pushed her up high enough that he can reach to undo his belt, his zipper, his buckle, his jeans, his fucking boxer briefs, all these barriers between his cock and her ever-so-willing body. Her head is tucked against his now. Her mouth moves against his cheek and her breath is hot against his ear. She's more than a bit breathless, right now.
"Call it and you can have me there.
"After you have me here."
Something about the way she breathes, the way she bites those words into his skin, suggests that she is already more than a little undone.
HawksleyIn a sense, both Sera and Hawksley went to Hogwarts. Mundane, gender-segregated, at times entirely oppressive versions of Hogwarts, but they both were schooled away from home. But when it comes to magical education, Hawksley comes from the very tradition to whom jokes about Harry Potter would be the height of offense; he was chosen by his mentor. He was brought up slowly, carefully, methodically through long-established means of Awakening a new mage. He knows endless symbols for the four corners, the four elements, the five elements, the periodic table of elements, the basic and advanced alchemical elements, the circle to call a spirit and the circle to ward off a demon and the names of angels and the properties of gemstones and how to read tarot spreads and what it meant when a particular witch gifted him with a particular sort of dagger in a particular sort of sheath and why, at that moment, the most appropriate thing to do was to
put her up against a wall,
just like he does now.
--
Only not just like this at all, for Sera is not a witch and not that sort of witch by any means, and she gave him a book of lost poems and instead of fucking her, he left. This is not then, just as it is not really Hogwarts and not Kylemore and just a house, a home, a place for him to eat and sleep and study and yell at Collins and hold enormous parties, which he totally will.
A place for him to bring her back to, drawing her into the darkness of it and letting her feel the solidity of stone behind her back, somehow tangible through all the intervening layers of construction that end in some sort of elegant wallpaper that brushes the back of her shoulders
while Hawksley, for the second time tonight, is only getting as much clothing as strictly necessary out of their way.
--
He has her high enough on the wall that he can lick her breasts, which was part of the point of getting her up here to begin with. Let's be honest about that: she has small breasts that Hawksley devours like fine pastries, which always seem to be petite in presentation. His arms are wrapped around her, at least one of them, because his other hand wants to feel what his mouth feels, taste by touch as he tastes with tongue. He is groaning, low and resonant in his throat, a sound that is both the human lost in the woods and the animal stalking, waiting to lunge.
Lunging, in fact, right now.
He sucks harder when she speaks, pushes harder against her, which is somehow an answer. Of course it is. There's a clank of his belt opening, the rush of a zipper, the rustle of clothing. And then -- oh, he knows how to be careful. Careful, if not painstakingly so. Careful, if not wary; her back does not slide down the wallpaper because he eases her onto him, urges her to lean forward against him, lower her chin as her body slides down on his, give her his mouth, yes, yes, that, there, so he can kiss her. His entire body reacts when he kisses her, jerking in response, his breath panting through his lips.
"Jesus, Sera," he lets out, shakily, like she's just said something obscene in front of toddlers, like she's just flashed her lingerie at everyone in the park, like he can't believe she just did that, and all of this because she is just as she is, and because he can't think straight, and because he does not know how she is doing this to him. Or how he could have not seen it coming.
It is a gentle step from there, fitting himself to her and fitting himself inside of her, stepping into her again, resting her back against the wall again, bowing his head to her shoulder and her chest and grunting into her skin when she sinks down on him. He braces one hand on the wall, and holds one arm close under her and around her to keep her up but urge her on. It isn't that he doesn't think she'll fuck him back, standing or reclining or whatever else; the last thing he expects her to be is passive. It's almost as though he just wants her to know not to hold back. He doesn't want her to hold back, slow down, be careful, even though he knows he looks like his mind is caving in.
Which it is. It's just that the caving-in is precisely, exactly, what he wants.
--
They weren't exactly patient in the Porsche.
They aren't exactly patient now. But it's a little less mindless, at least for Hawksley. He maintains, through this, the memory of his own name. It makes it...
better. He is so solidly, entirely himself when he fucks her this time, every time he kisses her, every time he flexes his hips or grinds into her, lifting her up and holding her there so thoughtlessly that she may wonder if she can feel some magic in the air, if he has turned off gravity, if her hair is going to start rising, floating above her as though she's sinking down in clear, breathable water.
Hawksley certainly feels like gravity is turned off. But then it comes back with a line of fire lit up his spine, all-consuming and all-obliterating. He feels Sera firm and unbearably warm against him and his arms tighten around her in response, as though he thinks, now that gravity is back she might fall,
or else he just doesn't have anything else to hold onto right now.
There is a taut, quivering moment when he is very, very still in her, his breath caught, his heart pounding, his mind reeling. And then descending moments from that: exhaling heavily, panting, moving in her again, and again, tearing down the walls of his own sanity every. single. time. no matter how slow it is, no matter how much he thinks okay, okay, this time he'll stop, he'll fucking stop fucking her, but jesus she feels so good, and
"Jesus," he is breathing out, a helpless-sounding groan catching in his throat on an Isweartogodjustonemore thrust, "you feel so good."
And he is slowing, closing his eyes, making himself stop before he makes himself pass out, leaning heavily into her, holding her between his body and the wall, trying to catch his breath.
SerafíneHell, they are wearing more clothes now than when they fucked in the Porsche. Sera still has her hoodie on. First they were exploring and then the foyer from the vestibule and then he swung her out and in so goddamned elegantly and then he was kissing her, or she was kissing him: they were kissing and she was arching into him and now -
He covers one of her breasts with his mouth and the other is distorted by the hungry press of his hand and she's so high up in such a strange and solid place, and maybe she can feel the stone or just knows that it is there, underneath, bedrock. An old house with high ceilings shrouded in shadow and a dark and hulking shape she could never quite make out as they pulled in the drive. Up a winding road whose name she did not see and does not know but, it will make her breathe out a sharp and clear of course the first time she hears it.
Sunset Drive.
It will make her sigh with pleasure. Fucking hell, she'll say, of course.He has her up high enough that she's taller than he is, that she's looking down on him and the dark foyer spread out beneath her and that makes her so fucking giddy. She always wants to take up so much space, always seems to inhabit more space than she ever really requires, wears those goddamned heels and now she is both high and high. By whatever moon- and star- light makes it through the windows, the blinds, the drawn dark curtains, she's looking down on him, between them, elbows on his shoulders, hair swinging forward, her hands laced together to cup the back of his skull, and he's devouring her and her hips and spine move her, undulant and seeking, again him.Her weight shifts forward against him as his hand drops from her breast to the buckle of his belt. The shadow of movement beneath her thighs, the promise inherent in the blind movement of his hand, well, she tips her head back, bites her lower lip as she savors the pleasure of it, then bends forward again, bracing herself against his shoulders as she rains kisses over his temple, his cheek, his ear. Oh I want you, she's telling him, as he undoes his zipper, pushes down his boxer briefs, pulls himself free. Hurry,
hurry.
But the truth is she loves everything. That coiling anticipation deep in her belly, the want that wraps around her spine like a snake, the way his low moans get swallowed up by the space all around them, the way her own cries - which are still largely wordless, though sometimes, sometimes seem to shift themselves into the phonemes of his name - are sharper, and echo back to them over their heads. Everything: down to the way he breathes out her name, half-a-curse, Jesus, Sera, which has her laughing again with an absurd and squirming delight -
- as he takes her weight onto him, urges her lower, and she leans into him, onto him, lowering her mouth to his, and first he kisses the laughter from her mouth and then he kisses the breath from her lungs and then something shifts, right? some safety valve, as his grip on her body shifts, as he guides himself into her, as she sinks down onto him.
Oh, there.
Her eyes flash open. She takes him in at such close range, pupils huge in the darkness and he drives her back against the wall shifts his grip on her to both brace himself and support her weight and she's watching him, close up, during those first few thrusts her nose against his nose and her brow against his brow and no, she doesn't hold back, she wouldn't, he knows that, but still he urges her own, and she, she takes him the way the ocean takes the shore.
Again, and again, and again.
When does gravity shift - she can hardly tell but he's holding her up and thrusting into her firm and solid and she fucks him back with a breathless sort of fervor that feels like hunger and looks like prayer and she's not afraid of falling except - up, see? so she wraps herself around him again to anchor herself, to hold on, and she is so fucked up and she can't stop and somewhere in the middle of all this she looks up at the ceiling which is lost in shadows and wonders what would happen if she let go -
- but oh god she's so close in that moment and he does something god knows what and her gaze drops like a stone and her hands flex against his skull and she bites him because she is at the absolute edge and she just wants to stay there stay there stay there eyes wide open, at the very edge until:
This time it is a riptide. This time: undertow, some strange and fractured current dragging her under the waves and smothering the breath from her lungs and then flaying them apart, she's breathing water, she's breathing that fire ziplining up his spine. She's flying or something and thinks she can stay there forever and then it just pulls her under and she's breaking apart in his arms. And he's breaking apart inside her. Against that goddamned wall.
--
When Sera comes back to herself - she just wraps her arms around him as firmly and as thoroughly as she has wrapped her legs around him. Rests her chin on his shoulder, her mouth against his neck, tasting his pulse, her eyes open but unseeing and each lingering thrust makes her body feel like vapor and her legs feel like water and her mind feel like something - essential or elemental, just being formed.
She welcomes his weight as he leans so heavily into her, still holding her against the wall. And he can feel that welcome, which is palpable and physical, something in the way her arms curve around him, something in the way she cups the back of his skull with her right hand, brings his head to her shoulder, and just embraces him, holding on so thoroughly. Absolutely still, because her thighs are trembling and she's genuinely not sure she can stand - or that she can stand another thrust.
She does not know the names of the angels or the names of the elements or the shape of the circle to banish dread or welcome it. She does not know the particular frequencies of the music of the spheres or the celestial bodies and the only thing she would ever do with tarot cards is play a very, very strange game of old maid.But she knows this: all of it, so very well.
He tells her that Jesus she feels so good. What does she tell him back?
"You make my body feel like a map of light."
Her voice is low. Her mouth is lodged beneath his ear and she kisses him there and does so gently, tenderly. Smiles against his skin, her lips slipping from that hollow to follows the line of a nameless tendon down his neck, tasting his sweat all the way. Then lifts her head up, until she can rest the bridge of her nose against his cheekbone.
Murmurs to him, "Be careful when you let me down. What you've done to me, I'm not sure I remember how to stand."
HawksleyHawksley cannot move right now. He rests against her, leaning into her and leaning her to the wall, panting for whatever air he can get. His pants are around his ankles. He tries not to think of her stockings rubbing on his skin where her legs wrap around him because it just turns him on again, and it's not that he doesn't want to fuck her again. It's not that he doesn't intend to fuck her again. It's that he would at least like to get all of her clothes off before the next round. He unabashedly loves her body, all those tattoos, the way she moves, the way she feels. So: he's made a decision. He'll cleave to it.
Even if right now, all he wants to do is sink down to the floor, lean against the wall, and tell her to ride him. Just fucking... use him.
That is not what he does. He leans into her and she touches him, kisses his ear and his neck, murmurs something to him that sounds like poetry. His eyelashes flicker a bit. Up close they look like soot dusted over gold, but his eyes never entirely open. Hawksley exhales slowly, long and deep, to hear it. Instantly, though, he thinks of stars in the night sky. Maps of light. Sera's body. And his soul may often take the form of a sky god, but there are sky goddesses, too, and they are
just like that.
--
Hawksley nods to her, loose and obedient and drowsed, when she tells him to be careful. Of course he will be careful. Of course he won't let her fall down if she doesn't know how to stand anymore, he's a gentleman. But he stays for a while, sliding his hands down, tracing her torso out of darkness, then wrapping around her waist.
He exhales heavily, and when the breath has bottomed out and his lungs are empty, he draws out of her, then gasps for the air he's let go of. His hands are under her thighs, holding her up, and then he's letting her down gently, slowly, shocked at how short she is like he didn't already know this, looking down at her and trying to find angles of her face in the shadows. His hands are heavy, searching on her, pushing her hair back, drawing her forward and up so he can kiss her again, deep and devouring and like --
-- like nothing has changed. He is stunned, somewhere veiled in the back of his mind. This feels like the most natural coupling he's ever had. This does not feel like the first (or second, if one gets technical) time he's had sex with someone. It feels like now is Now, and has always been Now, and there has never been a Now, in this life or others, that he was not her consort.
Hawksley frames that thought, then puts it on a shelf in a box that is carved out of cherry wood and given clasps and hinges of bright gold. He will open it later, and think about what he finds inside. For now, he is kissing Sera, and the congress of that is no less intense than the congress just before it.
--
His hand trails down her arm, finds her hand, takes it, lifts it to his lips to kiss the back, the thin skin covering the delicate bones, the branching veins. Sera already knows where he is taking her when he steps back, and she knows from the rustle and noise that he has nudged and stepped out of his shoes and kicked off what remains of his clothing. She knows that for the first time tonight, Hawksley is naked as the first men.
"There's a step," he murmurs, at the first one. Steps that she may see, tomorrow, cascade from the second floor and curve around a corner only to widen and widen and take up about a fourth of the foyer like a rising dais. He walks slowly, though she can likely feel whenever his hand lifts, taking him up another step, another, and then they are evenly spaced, turning into a corridor that takes them up to the second floor of what is no less than his mansion.
Up those stairs, if Sera looks to her right, she can see the upper portion of some large, dual-level room, though none of its contents. But it is better lit than anywhere they've been since coming inside, if only because the rear of the house in that enormous room has three floor-to-ceiling windows, uncurtained as of yet, illuminating stretches of parquet flooring in silver-white, illuminating their faces, turning them monochromatic and metallic as the moon always seems to do.
He is holding her hand at the top of the stairs, looking past the railing and arches into that enormous room that seems utterly purposeless unless one knows Hawksley
as Sera knows Hawksley.
He doesn't offer her a tour. He just looks from the open air of that room, the enormous paned glass across from them, and smiles at her, one half of his face in white light, one half in shadow. The smile is one of the softest, quietest expressions she's ever seen on his face.
"This way," he whispers, respecting the sanctity of the darkness and the peace, and walks with her around, past a number of doors, one of which he murmurs to her: "I'm going to turn that into a secret passage," which he totally fucking is, and finally to one that he opens, leading them into an empty room the size of a bedroom. There is no bedroom there, because it is not Hawksley's bedroom. He opens another door, and is still not turning on any lights,
and finally, finally, they are in his bedroom, which is unreasonably large and has two tall windows and a recessed ceiling and though other portions of the house have boxes and furniture waiting to be arranged, this room is not being currently used for storage. There is a bed across the room from them, set between the windows, and it is large and heavy and palatial and made up in fine linens and other than that, it's hard to see.
But if she looks at Hawksley there, he is smiling to see it, and that is not hard to see.
SerafíneSera has indeed forgotten how to stand and it though it lasts only a moment he is a gentleman and gentleman enough to support her as she reminds her thighs how to do something other than wrap themselves around his body. She's still feeling a little bit weak-kneed and biting her lip and glancing off all aslant with the thought of it. Some shadow among the shadows or just something else, holding him in profile, feeling the brilliance of his presence, the way he distorts the shadows as he reaches for face again and pulls her up and -
oh, she remembers this. Hums against his mouth and wraps her arms around his neck and presses her body into his with a deep and abiding sigh. She makes a noise in the darkness as he kisses the back of her hand, tips her head aslant to bump - his shoulder, or his shoulder blade, or his bicep. This minute, animal nuzzle of affection. And of course she can hear the rustle in the darkness as he steps out of his clothes and and she still has her damned skirt on bunched around her waist, and her stockings and her hoodie and she thinks about shedding some part of them them because she can hear and not-quite-see but feel when he is completely naked but also, she does not so much think as decide that he should take off her stockings and garters and garter belt. Push the hoodie from her shoulders, or pull it perhaps, from behind her, to reveal the line of her spine, and then trace each articulation of her vertebrae with his mouth and tongue.
--
So they walk through the darkened - the darkened mansion - holding hands. He leads her up the steps and she follows and she knows where to climb and where to walk by the way his shadow and hand move ahead of her.
That enormous room, that smile, those extraordinary windows and his face half in shadow: she's looking up at him and her eyes are dark, mostly pupil he knows, and there's the gleam of sweat on her skin and her hair is damp with it, tangled and curling back down her spine, and she steps into him again, tightening her grip on his hand when the smile curves his mouth. Her eyes are fast on him, fixed. There's that whole room, those enormous windows, the dark drifting view of the estate beyond bathed in moonlight, wrapped in shadow. All those secret spaces but in the wake of that quiet smile, he is the only thing she wants to see.
So, so - doors upon doors turning into doors, shrouded and dark and filled with boxes, with furniture covered in sheets and dustcovers. One will be a secret passage -
[" - except now I know about it," Sera laughs, needles really, nudging deliberately into him once more and this time nipping the back of his left shoulder. "I think I'm going to have sex with you in every room of this place, someday. Including your damned secret passage.
"And also wherever it goes."]
- and others will be other things and this is not a tour, they are just walking naked and half-naked, respectively, corridor after branching corridor, past rooms that are waiting to be filled, until that palatial bed, that unreasonably large room. Those tall windows and the bed heavy between them and Hawksley beside her naked and smiling.
Sera half-circles to stand in front of him, still holding his hand though her grip has changed with the change in her position and she's reaching for the other hand as she comes to face him. Her back is to the bed, and she's inching backwards, aware of the space all around her, aware of him, watching him with this focused intensity as she draws him back to that palatial bed. Holding both of his hands and inviting him after her like it was hers all along.
"So, Hawksley - are you going to undress me properly this time?"
HawksleyThe truth is, he could kiss her until darkness fuzzed the edges of his perception and took him under as surely as -- yes -- the sea taking the shore, Sera taking him, the earth taking the sky, the sky taking every gaze that hazards to turn up and become lost in it. He could kiss her softly and slowly and whisper to her in between touches of their lips and kiss her deeply like he does downstairs and kiss her with bites, with grins, laughing into her mouth, losing sight of her as she shades him from the sun, as she becomes shadow outlined by light. He could kiss her forever, like his life's work.
This is also the truth: Hawksley has felt something like this before. That willingness to lose himself, that surrender to desire that is very near supplication, that forgetfulness of all other things. He recognizes it and stands in the gap, in the tension, between trusting it with all his heart and remembering what happened the last time he trusted it with all of anything.
A memory comes back, standing at the top of the stairs looking at the great room, of slowly dancing in such a room with someone whose grace exceeded his, whose skill triumphed over his in every way, and trying to come to terms with failure that he thought, at the time, was utter. He had no idea how much worse it could become, how much bigger the mistakes could be. His thumb strokes over Sera's knuckles as he stands there, coming down from orgasm, feeling lightheaded, feeling lost, and it is not really in him to pull himself back down to earth but he does. He does anyway.
--
Of course you do, he whispers back to her ribbing, her nipping at him, as though of course he'd tell Sera about the secret passage, of course he'd tell her, it's not even a question.
But she goes on. Including your damned secret passage. She can hear him exhale at the thought, part laughed, mostly breathed, as he runs his hands down her sides, urges her onward. Bites her back, bending to set his teeth in her shoulder with a soft sound that is rattling, rough, like a growl.
It is a growl.
--
As before, his arm extends, lets her circle him, again like a dance, and his smile darkens and slows but does not abate. He looks her over, that line of metal teeth on either side of her torso, running between her breasts, the line of black around her waist and her hips, the darkness of her legs where they are concealed, the fairness where her thighs are revealed. His eyes refocus a little on the spot where her thighs touch, their blueness shadowed by darkness and by renewed lust at the memory of every time he has touched her, kissed her there, felt her enveloping him. He feels himself growing hard again and steps towards her,
then into her, swiftly enough that she would stumble if there weren't a bed hitting her in the ass, taking her softly as he leans over her, bending her back. One hand is under her thigh then, lifting her feet from the ground, touching her perilously close to the button of her garter, his teeth catching her earlobe.
"Maybe I want to leave your stockings on," he mutters in that ear, flicking his tongue over the spot he just bit, the spot that he was ungentle enough with to leave it stinging slightly. All the same, regardless of what he says, he has -- frankly -- torn the strap from the button, coming quite close to actually ripping fabric, thread, tearing the button right off to go skittering across the floor until it falls off the rug beneath the bed and hits the hardwood.
"Maybe I want you to undress yourself while I watch," and he says this, too, even though he's already pressed to her, the ridges of his torso warm between her legs, his breath flinching when he feels her, still wet or wet again, and the muscles in his abdomen tightening for a moment in response.
But: there is something to say about two swift, eager rounds in the car and the hall. Hawksley pushes himself up on his hands over her, grinning at her, and with two flicks of his wrist flips aside the lapels of her hoodie. He doesn't lower his mouth to her again, though perhaps he'd like to. He covers her left breast with his right palm, weighing her in his hand, but he's looking at her eyes.
Just for a moment. He runs his hand down her torso again, and steps back, taking her skirt in his hands. Maybe he finds a zipper, or a clasp, or maybe he just tugs. Pulls it down from her waist and her narrow hips and tells her
lift up
in a whisper, not for the first time, pulling it down her body and off, dropping it to the floor in a crumple of leather. And he does take off her garter belt, unbuttoning it from her stockings and tugging it off and down as well. He pauses midway, after her skirt and garter are on the floor and she's there in a hoodie open over her breasts and a pair of stockings no longer held up by anything but the slight bend in her knees. And Hawksley just stops, standing there for a moment, caught. It's not the first time he stops just to look at her.
He lifts a hand and rubs it over the lower half of his face, lets it fall to his chest, lets it trail down to her knee, to the bed under her knee. The mattress hardly even dips when he presses his own knee on it, leaning over her. His arm under her lifts her and, in a motion, pulls her up the bed with him, under him. He leans back then, kneeling, his hand on her back urging her to sit up, his other hand reaching around to pull at the back of her hoodie to get it off, tossing it aside. That hand on her back has risen up to the back of her neck, rests there without quite holding on while he kisses her.
"I want you to ride me," he whispers, his lips moving on hers for a moment before they seal again. At least one doesn't have to guess, with Hawksley.
SerafínePerception + Awareness-as-empathy
Dice: 7 d10 TN5 (1, 1, 3, 3, 4, 4, 10) ( success x 1 )
SerafínePerception + Awareness-as-empathy +1 difficulty.
Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (3, 4, 4, 4, 4, 6, 7) ( success x 2 )
Hawksley[The first time Sera glances at him during that moment at the top of the stairs all she sees is a bit of wistfulness, maybe some nostalgia.
The second time, however, as she glances deeper, watches him more carefully, she sees traces of something like she saw in her garden: flashes of memory flickering across his mind. Whatever he's thinking of, it aches a little, and it's from something not here-and-now. It's not entirely unlike looking at a mage of her own tradition who is looking backwards in time.]
SerafíneMaybe it's the moonlight in the room. Maybe it's the sudden flood of all of this sensation after the denial of her fast. Maybe it's the surreality of the night, or the lack of solid food or the angle of the shadows, but at the top of the stairs, overlooking that vast room, his thumb moving thoughtlessly (?) over her hand, Sera looks at Hawksley, and then looks deeper, and sees no more than the present ache of the past. The echo of it tattooed over his skin. She glides closer. That's all she can do: slip closer and wrap her forearm around his where their hands are already clasped. It is not an invitation to ignore old aches, or a demand for anything like attention or confession or return-from-memory. It is merely an assertion of her presence. This quiet, oddly steady, rather shining little I'm here, as he comes back to earth.
And then the moment passes. Gets pulled into and under another, and another one after that.
Except: much, much later tonight. After he stalked her into the bed and upended her there. After he has stripped in some cases and torn in others her remaining clothing from her body. After he has set his teeth into her earlobe and bitten hard enough to sting if only just, and after he has soothed her skin with his tongue. After that -
- after he has pressed his torso between her thighs and felt her wet sex earlier and wet again from her anticipation, her want, her desire, her visceral response to the sudden solidity of his torso between her legs and weighed her left breast in his right hand and felt the solid, rapid beat of her heart beneath both breast and ribs, after he has muttered things to her that made her arch her body against him and laugh and flash her teeth and reach for his head and twist her fingers rather firmly through his hair and after she has pulled him down to her mouth as if she intended to make a meal of him
(because she does intend to make a meal of him),
and he has pushed her up the bed or crawled up and drawn her with it and he's kneeling before her and she's sitting and is, yes, quite as thoroughly naked as he, at last. She leans into him then, into the kiss and into his mouth and is reaching for him, shifting her position on the bed, drawing her knees beneath her so that she can kneel and grab his shoulders and push him both to-the-side and down-down-down and then: crawl over him, up him, until she's straddling his torso, his waist, leaning down over him, her hair falling in a sweeping half-curtain, still damp with sweat but thick enough to shut out most of the light from the windows and cover him with shadow when she bends low and kisses him, this deep and invasive kiss that ends with half-a-bite and renews itself with the second half of that fucking bite, and tells him, quite clearly and directly,
"I want your mouth on my mouth, or my breasts while I ride you. And your hands on me, everywhere."
One more biting kiss, and this is not a seal but an opening act, a promise-of-more as she straightens and rises higher on her thighs and slides back, just grinding rather mindlessly against him until she rises higher again and takes him in hand and guides him into her, with an almost
mindblowing
languor. And starts to ride him, each stroke slow and deliberate, but building in intensity, clenching him in the beginning with that same deliberation, and later because she cannot do anything but hold the fuck on to him inside her until the universe opens her up and swallows her whole again.
She did mean it about his mouth and his hands. As she starts to fuck him she reaches for him if he's not rising to meet her because she wants him close, she wants him fucking close, wants him touching her everywhere she can be touched and she, in turn, holds on to him. At first it is merely hungry, her grasp, but later there's this grasping sort of need that builds and builds and builds until she
hits some note. And indeed, her skin dissolves. The universe scours through her, electric and bright and liquid. The stars and the space between the stars. His mouth on her breast, her hand in his hair: all one. All scored with light.
--
Later,
see? After all that, perhaps even after he is asleep, if sleep takes him before her, she will remember the note and the moment and the moment in the garden too; and the moonlight will be in the memory and the ache and the rustle of the wind through the drying, dying leaves of a water-loving rose. They will all drift together.
And she will kiss his temple and smooth his hair that does not require smoothing. Then tuck herself beneath or into or around him, and wonder, a bit, and ache, a bit, and hold him close.
What else can she do.
Hawksley
Hawksley rolls to his back easy on that vast, princely bed of his. Of course he does: this is what he asked for and what he wanted -- wants. His hands are following her, up her legs and around her back and pulling her even closer to kiss him even when she's drawn to it herself. Those hands are on her hips, urging her down on him while she's leaning over him, his patience quickly evaporating. Yes, every time she brushes against him or he catches the scent of her hair or her lips or her teeth make contact.
His chin lifts to give his mouth over to her. Their tongues are together, warm and heedless and unafraid, shameless, and he growls softly. She wants him to kiss her, to kiss her breasts, touch her, and he laughs low and dark and panting, because what does she think he's going to be doing, but that dry laugh tatters apart seconds later when Sera begins to just grind like that on him. Hawksley swears, a violent and harsh sound, his head falling back, his body tensing beneath hers. His hands tighten on her hips, holding her right fucking there, a moan escaping his throat as he lifts himself up, sliding against her, swearing again.
And then: she starts to work herself down on him. Hawksley cannot help but watch her then, and his hands are not exactly everywhere but one is staying at her hip, guiding her, longing for her to hurry, longing for her to slow down, just longing, longing, while he covers her breast and her heartbeat with his hand once more. If she looks at his eyes, they are glazed with lust then. He looks high. He is always high, in a sense, but this is different; this is a drug. She is a drug that he is becoming swiftly, swiftly addicted to. "Fuck," he whispers, like that is the name of a diety. It's when she has taken him completely that his head falls back again, eyes closed, lips open,
gravity dissolving around him yet again.
Oh, but he touches her. Even when he cannot bear to look at her, his hands are on her stomach, feeling the deep roll and clench of muscles at her core as she rides him. He frames her breasts in his hands and senses the trip-hammer of her pulse against the heel of his hand before his palms are molding over her, around her, sculpting, tracing the shape of her nipples out of the dark until he feels them neat and hard and tender between his fingertips. Some pitch in her voice, some note she strikes with her gasping makes him open his eyes after a time, when he can bear it, and then he is drawn up to her, leaning against the headboard and ample pillows, his hand spreading between the wings of her scapulae, drawing her forward, opening his mouth over one of those delicate, delicious nipples. The taste of her makes him lift his hips, driving himself into her, dragging a grunt out of him while he sucks on her.
Sera wraps herself all around him, thighs and arms, breasts to his mouth, hands in his hair, her body and voice and the unbearable heat she meets him with. His arms wrap around her as though he can feel the cracks that are running through her, the light entering her and growing only brighter within her shadow, threatening to blow her apart. He cannot bear to let that happen; she cannot bear to stop it. Hawksley leaves her breast wet from his mouth when he lifts his lips to her, pulls her to kiss him, tightens his hand in her hair. By then his feet have gone flat on the bedspread, his knees bent, his free hand holding her onto him while he fucks himself up into her, panting but kissing her anyway, even though he can't breathe.
It is all he can do to hold on. And when he feels her tip towards him, crying out in his room, holding onto him, clutching at him in a hungry way he feels he has always known, then
he lets go.
--
Coming into Sera is escaping time. To say that his mind is blown seems paltry compared to how he actually feels when his orgasm takes hold of him and drags him under. His mind feels shattered apart, his body in pieces, everything disconnected and spread across the stars like the gods have decided to turn him into a constellation. With every single panted, shallow breath that comes after he starts to put himself back together, recovering the sensation of having arms, legs, a body, eyes, coherent thought. It is a long time before he can open his eyes again, and even then he is very far gone from the plane that most of them know most intimately.
He finds himself lying there on his back, sweat cooling rapidly on his skin, his arms wrapped so tight around a lean, sinuous, very warm body and the presence of that body and that existence within that body makes his cock throb, his eyes falling closed again while he tries to survive even that burst of sensation. Hawksley is certain of two things then: that if he fucks her again tonight he will surely die,
and if she moves on him again, he will not be able to resist.
His chest moves heavily with each breath beneath hers, his heartbeat thudding through his ribcage against her breast, pounding. His arms are folded over her back. Her hair is spread out over his shoulder, his upper arm, surprisingly cool where everything else is heat and sweat. Hawksley buries his face against her neck, panting against her collarbone, feeling drowsy and silent. His legs extend again, his body finally relaxing. He does not notice when his own arms grow slack mere seconds later, or when his head grows heavy or when his breath evens out in steady, mindless pulls and exhales, but Sera surely will.
Of course he sleeps.
And of course he wakes minutes later, not when she tucks herself around him but when she draws herself off of him. His eyes flicker open, watching her, his arms too sleepy to react and tighten and wait, where are you going but his eyes are certainly doing that but
she's not going anywhere, anyway. She is curling up with him and he doesn't have the energy left to get them under the covers and they are both hot and sticky and it's summer anyway and the house is not icebox-cool the way it would be if it were built a hundred years later than it was but it isn't hot in here either. It's comfortable, at least like this. Ish. But he grabs something at the foot of the bed with a toe and drags it up and grabs it by the hand and loosely, sloppily covers them with the light throw blanket that was folded there. Beneath it, Hawksley turns on his side, rolling towards her, draping an arm over her as though they sleep like this every night, have been sleeping like this every night for years ordecadesorlifetimes. He drops back into sleep without thought or word, perhaps because he did not entirely wake to begin with.
--
Sera learns these things, before she leaves Hawksley's bed and house and returns to the rest of her fast-breaking, her life, everything else:
Hawksley sleeps very late. Early-mid afternoon late. Even when the sun is pouring mercilessly into the room he only sleeps on, and on, and no one disturbs him because there is no one to disturb him but Collins and Collins likely gets most of his own work and living done in these hours when his unemployed, filthy-rich boss is unconscious in the morning and midday hours with the woman he brought home with him last night.
She learns, too, that in daylight the grand house is even more grand, even unadorned and just-moved-into. The room he looked over is a damned ballroom, and there is work to be done on this grand old house but it is suitable for his class and station, would be even more suitable if he lived in the time when it was first built. His ensuite is already renovated considerably and there are multiple showerheads and new tiling and that if she permits, Hawksley happily showers with her and is fucking handsy in there but it's sort of playful and jovial and
if she has stuck around that long she learns that he does not shave himself, which is odd since his beard is tidy and his neck is cleanshaven and so on. She learns that Collins is an excellent old-world servant who anticipates needs before he gets shouted at, and there is a little kit on the bathroom counter that is quite obviously for the lady of deodorant and a toothbrush and a few other necessities and a bathrobe that is smaller than Hawksley's bathrobe, and Collins must also be really fucking tolerant or very well paid or something because her shoes and her bustier are waiting for her in the sitting room to Hawksley's bedroom, the little lost pink rosettes sewn neatly back on, the patent on the shoes shined, the metal polished, and it's unlikely that even Dan does shit like that even though he is Sera's Collins.
Sera learns that breakfast is taken in that sitting room at a circular table with two chairs beside a window, and breakfast for Hawksley includes an egg white veggie omelette and whole-wheat toast and a chopped assortment of summer fruits and breakfast for Sera includes skillet potatoes and sausage and eggs and is basically eat, eat, you're so thin on a plate, which might tell her something about Collins, too. She learns that Hawksley drinks milk and orange juice at breakfast but no tea or coffee and that he will keep working his feet underneath the soles of her feet under the table if she lets him.
That Hawksley will of course drive her home. That the car does not smell like sex or sweat or any of that when they get into it. That he almost can't stop kissing her when he drops her off at her house, muttering to her that he'll call her again soon, they're going to have a party, that he can't wait to see her again.
--
She does not learn that despite how effortless it all seemed, Collins almost had no idea what to do when Hawksley brought a woman home.
She does not learn that Hawksley sees a barber for a hot shave where he lays back and lets someone else drag a straight razor over his throat, trim his hair, and give him a neck rub.
She does not learn that some large portion of his day is actually spent working out like he's a fucking athlete, or that he spends as much time honing his body as he spends in depth of study.
She doesn't learn that when he first gets back to his house he just sits in the car, staring at nothing, thinking about her.
And a few other things.
--
A little time goes by and she gets a text telling her that he won't be throwing a party after all. Not for his birthday, not for Grace's Awakening -- not yet.
Have to go home. Not sure when I'll be back. Tell Grace I'm sorry if you see her.
A moment later:
FML I'm an idiot. I have her number. I'll tell her sorry myself.
And another moment later, he taps out: I can't stop fucking thinking about you. And then deletes it, erasing each letter then holding it down and erasing it word by word.
It is two weeks before he tells her, in another text:
I'm back in town.
And it is a few days after that before he sees her again. In the middle of the night. Sitting on a bench with Justin stitching up a bite in her arm, crying, covered in the blood of a priest.
Serafíne
There are things that Hawklsey may learn as well: that Sera sleeps like a stone, deep and thorough, and cannot be roused until she wakes on her own with anything short of almost-painful stimulus. That she calls Collins Mister Collins and thanks him both prettily and profanely for the most ordinary things. ("This is fucking incredible. You are a fucking genius, Mr. Collins.") Like toothbrushes, and potatoes panfried southern style, with peppers and onions, probably in the fat rendered from that eat eat you're too thin sausage that does not make it onto Hawksley's athlete-in-training plate. That she still has what would seem a bourgeois fascination with either his evident wealth or perhaps just the way he wears it, so fucking openly, so thoroughly, so thoughtlessly, marveling over everything she sees: the shower with multiple showerheads and the house-in-sunlight and view of the grounds and the taking of breakfast in the sitting room and the quiet efficiency of Mister Collins, sometimes with a rather charming and genuine sort of wonder, sometimes with an edgy, ironic grin and a bemused, "You are so filthy fucking rich." As if she cannot quite believe it or does not know exactly how she ended up here even if it is precisely where she was meant to be.
Even as he knows: that clutch she left behind in the Meadowlark and that bustier he peeled off her in his Porsche were both couture pieces. Pricey and custom made. Even as he knows: her name, and the ping of familiar resonance it has because yes, someone in his family doubtless knows some gossip about someone in her family and some of it is salacious and if it isn't they will make it more so though it never really rises to the intensity of that poor woman.
He learns that Dan was indeed with that guy because between the time he drops Sera off and the time he texts her to tell her that all those planned parties are off, FML, she has informed him that oh his speculation was correct:
You were right! DAN + JEr ftw.
Which apparently pleases her, immensely:
eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee.
--
He leaves town, and she is disappointed (:() but understanding (k hope things are okay ) and does not always text in whole sentences, or with capital letters, or with actual ordinary words. Though sometimes she does.
And she leaves town, too. Which he knows from a mass text a couple of days after, which appears to have gone to every damn person in her phone, or at least the entire roller derby team plus hangers on, most of whom are in his phone, too.
Sry guys first world tour SAYING NO TO ALL THINGS 4 two weeks we play a bowling alley 2night.
--
8/8/13
The first photo is focused on the dessert, which is a blueberry pie, a whole one in a glass pie plate, on a formica counter or table-top, edged in chrome. There is an impression of a bit of red leatherette upholstery beyond that but mostly the bulk of a body out-of-focus, the pale smear of an arm moving as the picture was shot.
The pie is festooned with candles. The little ones that belong on birthday cakes, sunk through the beautifully finished lattice crust and into the delicious blueberry ooze below. There were not enough candles in the birthday candle pack so they have been augmented by others: two tea-lights, one fat round pillar candle, and two of those fat little emergency tapers, one of which has been stuck into a giant slice of diner-style layer cake, which is chocolate, because it has to be, just in case he does not like blueberry pie. Or maybe because someone ordered a slice of fucking cake. So, the photo is ablaze with little lights and were he to take the time to blow up the picture and count them, one by one by one by one, he would find the number correct: twenty-five.
The second photo is pulled back from the pie-and-cake. Shows: pie-and-cake on a table, the gleam of a window looking out onto a not-quite-dark-yet parking lot full of motorcycles and tractor trailers and walls like quilted chrome. And: Sera sitting on Dan's lap in a diner booth, and Dan is looking away - not out the window but toward the aisle - and that's his tattooed arm around Sera's shoulders and Dee is laughing open-mouthed and Rick is leaning over the back of the booth, looking down at Dee, and someone else is clearly taking the picture, and Sera, oh Sera, is looking right at the camera, grinning and flashing a fucking shark-scissors peace sign. That goddamned blueberry pie and single-piece of chocolate cake are just blazing in front of them.
Out of focus beside them, someone walking by. Polyester and orthopedic shoes: a waitress in one of those cheap roadside ones where truckers stop for coffee and pie and salisbury steak.
The third photo is an action shot, all of them blowing out the candles on his behalf, though Rick looks a bit sheepish and Sera looks fucking high and they are super lucky they did not set anything on fire.
The fourth photo comes a bit later. Rick is out of the frame and may now have taken over duties as Sera's official iPhone photographer but see: the blueberry pie, half-eaten and clearly consumed directly from its pie plate because why bother with plates who needs plates. Blueberry stained forks, one just lolling in the pie, and that slice of cake beside them half-eaten, and the three of them Dan and Dee and Sera still squeezed into the booth-space made for two people sharing the desserts and the candles are blown-out and upended and someone's digging directly into the blueberry pie and he knows it is Sera by her tattoos.
The photos come in a series, 7 mountain time, 9-or-so eastern.
Later, so close to midnight - and his midnight, not hers - it seems that she has split the seconds the way scientists split the atom to set fire to the sky, a final text:
Happy day. I'm glad you were born.
--
And then, two weeks after he left he tells her, in another text:
I'm back in town.
And it is a few days after that before he sees her again. In the middle of the night. Sitting on a bench with Justin stitching up a bite in her arm, crying, covered in the blood of a priest.
No comments:
Post a Comment