It's later, and it could be hours and it very well could be days. It depends on how long the party goes on after that smoke with Pan, after that song in the kitchen. Time has more more and less meaning for Sera than it does for most people; Hawksley keeps an eye on it but time is really something other people need to concern themselves with. The passage of days, the appropriate time for meals. That's why he has Collins. Collins is his watch and calendar.
When he is in the Corona Street house, slightly buzzed but far more high, he does not think about time at all.
--
When she comes upstairs to her room next, Hawksley is lying there in those white jeans and that white belt. His socks and shoes are off, his shirt is off, and he is spread-eagle on her rumpled bedcovers, wingspan open, head tilted back, breathing in and out rhythmically as though in meditation. He senses her before he hears her, or sees her, and his eyes are opening as the door is closing.
"Maxine," he says hypnotically, and she knows he is reciting.
"back from a weekend with her boyfriend, smiles like a big cat and says that she's a conjugated verb." One of his eyebrows flicks upward, arching like a gossip's. "She's been doing the direct object with a second person pronoun named Phil, and when she walks into the room, everybody turns:"
Hawksley smiles and rolls to his side, but does not prop himself up. He rests his head on his bicep, watching her. "...some kind of light is coming from her head," he muses, as though he is seeing this right now. "Even the geraniums look curious, and the bees, if they were here, would buzz... suspiciously around her hair, looking for the door in her --"
he knows this is funny, this is too perfect: "-- corona."
Sighing, Hawksley rolls onto his back again, closing his eyes. "We're all attracted to the perfume of fermenting joy," he mutters, as though to himself. "We've all tried to start a fire, and one day maybe it will blaze up on its own."
Perhaps she has come closer, and he opens his eyes because he can smell her now, looking up at her. "In the meantime, she is the one today among us most able to bear the idea of her own beauty." His arms slide closer to his sides, and bend, and he pushes up on them, forearms flat and chest pulling a bit tighter with the motion. "And when we see it, what we do is natural."
Now is when he realizes he cannot finish in this position. He sits up all the way, drawing his knees up, heels to the bedspread, legs apart, back a strong but subtle curve as his elbows come to rest on his akimbo'd knees. "We take our burned hands out of our pockets," he whispers, looking at her, "and clap."
Which he does, softly and slowly, three times.
SerafíneThere are so many ways to get buzzed in that house and just as many ways to get high. Music still resonant from somewhere. Laughter in the garden. More people than was likely legal for a building of this size at some point in the thick of the night, silver paper drifting through the air, brightly chaotic, reflective as a light, glistening, subarctic snowfall. Still more people in the house even now than it has rooms or bedrooms or perhaps even space on surfaces appropriate for sprawling where one might lay down, as if for rest.
--
And: later. Hours or days and it hardly matters to the two of them and the party will sprawl on in some vagrant form or another for quite literally more than a week. Whenever it is is later and the house is almost as quiet as it will ever be on these days. Night stains the sky but dawn will come, and sooner than one might imagine. Sera's hair is loose and a bit tangled, the curls gone blowsy, her lipstick has more or less worn itself off her mouth, or maybe she's kissed it the fuck away. This does not stop her from giving him a crawling smile when she finds him where she knew she would - shirtless in the middle of her rumpled bed.
That smile changes when he begins to recite. She's still halfway across the room, closing the door quietly behind her, feeling it clock home, her spine against the wood, her hands behind her body, just that click, solid, precise. The latch in its groove, the mechanism tumbling home.
She breathes in. Her eyes are closed those first few phrases. She savors the sound of his voice as if it were a solid, physical, tangible thing - a caress. The heaviest sort. She is not still like this for long; and indeed soon enough there is her scent. Her shadow across the bed. Her weight depressing the mattress, her knee on the edge, and her hands, fists forward as she leans toward him.
--
He claps, three times. She breathes in sharply, her eyes quick on him and crawls forward, urging him backwards, prone, first with her eyes and then with her hands and then with her body. She has not quiet bent to kiss him, but he knows that she is going to do that, and soon.
The way she's smiling at him; no small hint of wonder in his eyes.
"Who wrote that?" Sera is asking him, this remarkable light in her eyes. "How do you always know these things to say. How do you find them in your mouth when you need them. When I kiss you, will I taste them there?"
HawksleyAnd he can get high on life. Hawksley, when buzzed, can watch sounds move through the air like colors. He can see people as networks of electrical impulse. He can see the world as so much more than they think it is, and in the end he decided to come up here to this sacred place, this shrine to Sera, who did not dress up as an angel even though he said he'd pay her if she did but he would not go to church with her so he dressed up as an angel even though,
really,
the costume doesn't suit him.
--
Leaning close to him, their noses are inches apart, their eyes bright in the darkness, and when he gives his three soft claps he relents. She stalks him backward and he lowers himself, not a flop but the smooth, controlled recline of core strength. She climbs over him and his chest lifts on an inhale.
"I did," he lies, and obviously so, because he can't keep a straight face. But he gives her many answers: "Tony Hoagland. It's called 'Grammar'. I thought of it when I met you. I read a lot. Magic. I don't know."
SerafíneI did he tells her, and
"Liar," she says, her mouth spreading around the word. It is not an accusation. If there is any sting in the term, well, she kisses it out of his mouth. Her knees are on either side of his chest and her fists punch down into the pillow top on either side of his head and her hair is loose and smells like cloves and pot and Christmas and Sera, absolutely like Sera.
The kiss is slow and deliberate and she is tasting the way his mouth opens beneath her own, opens to her own. Opens.
Then she pulls away - not far, just gives him his mouth back so that he can give her those answers. He reads alot. He's fucking magic. He doesn't know if she'll taste the words on his tongue.
"I think I did taste them," she's telling him, but some of it is oblique and strange and some of it is reflective and bright and her nose glides against his and their mouths are close enough that he can feel rather than see the crescent curve of her smile. "And you do read a fucking hell of a lot.
"Do you know what I got you as a Christmas present?"
HawksleyA flicker of light in his pristine pale eyes at the word, even though he technically did just lie. An obvious lie, but still: the light flickers, and then renews, and he smirks. She kisses him, and his eyes close, his mouth slow on hers. Lazy. Savoring. They kiss for a long time. At some point his hand comes up to bury itself in her hair, his fingertips massaging her scalp.
They part just as slowly, and she tells him she thinks she tasted the poetry on his tongue. He smirks again. Her question: his answer:
"It wasn't in any of the books. What did you get me?" And here he bites her lower lip, a quick one. No reason.
SerafíneSera makes a noise that is decidedly not a wimper when he bites her lower lip. It is closer to a growl. Then she does something absurd: opening her mouth and scraping her teeth along the bearded line of his jaw. Her mouth glides over his ear and she spends quite a while nuzzling him there, her nose against the lobe, her tongue against the hollow beneath, tasting his pulse, alive to his every reaction and savoring each and every one.
Teeth scrape over the cartilage - little nips that are firm, but not cruel.
"I made you space - a whole fucking shelf - on my bookshelf. You can fill it up with whatever you want. Whenever you want. I won't even cover it up with a pile of clothes."
HawksleyConsidering that the second or third time they met she was doing things like biting his temple, Hawksley's threshold for 'that was weird, Sera' is set pretty high. She's a Cultist. He's lucky she hasn't asked him to hang from hooks on the ceiling yet, for fuck's sake. So her scraping her teeth over his lightly bearded jaw doesn't shock him. He just smiles, lazily, stoned-ly, closing his eyes as she gives him her raw, visceral sort of affection.
Time slips out of his grasp like water through his fingers. That is all right. He encircles her with his arm, helping her down to lie beside him a bit firmly, because snuggling.
She made him space on her bookshelf. He blinks his eyes open, turning to look at her, his expression inscrutable primarily because he has not quite sorted out his reaction yet. "But... I don't want anything when I come here. I come here because you're here. If I need something, I just... bring it."
Or leave.
This is the point where we marvel at how smooth he is and how good he is at accepting gifts, gestures, offers like this. Meaningful things.
SerafíneSera is still wearing that ridiculous green velvet dress. The one with the long sleeves and the rabbit fur and the deep vee and the leather lacings all the way down to her navel. She has lost somewhere during the evening the push-up bra she added to give herself the cleavage that lacings like that seem to demand. Take it off, given it away. Burned it maybe in the chiminea in the garden: who fucking knows.
So he pulls her down to lie beside him because snuggling and her spine arches against his hand as he does so but she goes; of course she does. Drops her mouth his shoulder and the laces are starting to come undone and her dark eyes are now slanting across the hard planes of his torso. Her right hand follows, down the solid slabs over muscle flanking his ribs, over the hard plane of his stomach, thoughtful, savoring, seeking.
"See, I thought maybe sometimes you come over here. We fuck or we get high and we fall asleep. Or hell, maybe you're just here - " that thought she doesn't really finish, "and maybe you wake up in the middle of the night and want to read one of those books that would drive me mad and hey, there they are. But fuck it, you don't have to put anything on it. I could just fill it up with my stuff. That fucking angel costume you were going to pay me to wear. To church, On Christmas.
"It'd still be yours."
HawksleyShe will not be wearing it long. Hawksley's hand that is not wrapped around her back is already toying with the lacings, even as he is failing to graciously and humbly accept this generous offering. It's a loaded gift, though. And of all the things playing through his eyes and she sees every one of them, most likely, it's the wariness that is starting to surface most overtly. The way he rolls a leather lace between thumb and forefinger is only somewhat lascivious and is in other parts a bit anxious.
Granted, they are coming undone, and his eyes skate down her body to look, of course he looks, and that numbs his anxiety a bit. Breasts, after all. He thinks of her in Vegas, topless and swimming and gorgeous. He thinks that when he is with her he hates winter all the more, it's a ridiculous season, they're supposed to never be out of the sunlight. He wants to cup her tit in his mouth and suck for a good long while. Until summer. Until spring, at very least.
And she touches him, appreciating his chest and the fact that it is bare, and she explains that maybe when he stays he could just have a book here and then, perhaps, he would not leave to go get it and read in his own house instead. Which he has done before.
He breathes in. He doesn't have to put anything on it, and it would still be his, and oddly, this does comfort him. He drops the laces and puts both arms around her now, closing his eyes, just holding her. And he's done that before too, especially when she was so weak. Especially when she was recovering. He stayed. Sometimes he did bring books here, he remembers, and he would read in bed while she slept her strength back, stroking her hair and telling her shh. shut up, Sera, I'm reading when she would struggle in sleep or briefly stir, uncertain of where she was, afraid she was in a hospital, but
nope. Bed smelled like her and Hawksley was scritching her scalp and telling her to be quiet so he could study whatever-the-fuck and it was decidedly not pristine or anything like a hospital, and she would sleep again.
She got him a shelf. She acts like she got it and there's no receipt, so it's his, whether he uses it or likes it or not. And he is comforted the way she would be comforted, when his shushing reminded her that she wasn't trapped anywhere at all, just... sleeping next to Hawksley. Who was not sleeping, but picking apart the universe to learn its secrets.
--
He exhales, and lowers his brow to hers. "I'm sorry I'm such a fucking douchebag," he says quietly. "Thank you," he adds, and kisses her brow.
SerafíneSera would disagree with Hawksley about winter. Winter is a perfectly reasonable season. It gives her the excuse to wear green velvet elf costumes trimmed with white rabbit fur matched with patent leather belts and patent leather boots, and leather laces down to her navel. It gives him the chance to take all of these things off her body.
They are not, however, talking about seasons they would keep and those they would discard.
Her eyes are on him; neither particularly sharp nor especially piercing, but quick as they so often are. As in, to the. And she sees the way the sight of her breasts numbs that rising anxiety - a bit - and worms her right shoulder in a way that pulls the bodice of the dress open, so that not even a shred of fabric obscures his sight line, offering him a better - perhaps more comforting - view. Something about her posture - the arch of her spine, the rotation of her shoulder - means that her breasts strain against the laces. Well, that's lovely too.
--
They're facing each other now; brow to brow, and her eyes are open so that her view of him is strange and piecemeal, like a Picasso painting - immediate, intense, but out of focus. They are close enough just then that her lashes brush against his lower lip as he lifts his mouth to plant that kiss on her forehead. She has lowered her gaze, her eyes all half-lashed - not in shyness or modesty, but from a quiet, abiding pleasure - in him, in his immediacy, in the fact of him, his solid body and booze-tinged breath and the way his scent, and hers, and maybe even a half-dozen strangers' cling to his skin - so deeply and immediately and entirely felt that that that quiet, abiding pleasure feels immodest, brazen. Strangely obscene.
"Liar," she tells him, then, "you're not a fucking douchebag," and even if he cannot see her mouth just then, he can sense her smile from the curve of her cheek, the supple shift of tension in her temple as her mouth curves wider. Her voice is quiet and there's something playful there, yes, when she says liar, the way her tongue shapes the word so very precisely, but the stillness feels real and solid and deep. "You're a Hawksley."
Because he's not a fucking douchebag.
And he is very much a Hawksley.
Briefly and firmly and even fiercely, Sera leans her brow into the pressure of that kiss. Then she's pulling back; not to break contact but to make it: eye contact. Sera finds Hawksley's eyes and she holds them.
"It wasn't meant as an anchor." The depth of that eye contact is remarkable. She means every goddamned word. "I don't want you to do anything but soar."
HawksleyEven "liar" is a pretty word in Sera's mouth, less so "douchebag" though not by a wide margin. Hawksley pays attention to her breasts, and the laces loosening over them, and he's far from oblivious so he knows she's reacting to him, like she gets that yes, tits make everything in the world a bit easier to deal with. He already knows he's a coward and that he will most likely remain a coward, at least in certain things, but oh well: there are still boobs.
And he brings his hand up and covers one of her breasts with his broad palm, elegant fingers, closing his eyes for a moment as he very simply holds her, weighs her breast in his hand, breathes out as through laces or air or green velvet, he feels her nipple hardening to the touch. Yes. That's lovely, too.
She draws back and so his eyes open to see where she is going. His hand does not move -- not away, at least. He considers the shortness of her hemline and the pleasing hint of her derriere it affords, decides he wants to get a better look at what she is or may not be wearing beneath it, wants to get his mouth on that bit of flesh on the back of her leg where ass becomes thigh, and he is steadily arousing himself with her nearness and her body pressed up against his and, of course, his hand on her breast.
Her eyes, though.
Damn.
Not an anchor, she says, and he is briefly tugged from thinking about her in ways both carnal and obscene and only sacred if you're Sera, and his lips twitch in a smile. "Thank you, Sera," he says, rather than apologizing again. His hand smooths up her chest, her clavicles, the side of her neck, into her hair, rubbing his fingertips on her scalp, like she's a cat or something. Or dog. Or a Sera.
"My gifts for you are way more materialistic," he quips.
SerafíneEven her bedroom is decorated, lights framing the windows framing the garden view and they are on and unobtrusive but cast a rather charming and reflective glow over the whole of the scene.
And our Serafíne, she smiles. Curls her head back into the pressure of his fingertips on her scalp, his hand twined through her hair just precisely like a cat or a Sera. Her body follows, first the shoulders, then a fine, spreading, quite nearly architectural arch that spreads through her spine as she lays back on the bed, her half-lashed eyes are occluded with fixed on his as she just - wordlessly offers herself to him. Or the universe. Either, both.
Hard to imagine the shadows that overlaid her; that still sometimes overlay her when she smiles at him like that, quietly simmering and wanton and willing and delighted by his presence in her bed. By his existence in the multiverse. By the shadow of desire in his eyes. By the way his heart pounds. She wants to eat him the fuck up.
"Was it drugs?" Sera is tossing back, still pressing her head into the curve of his hand. Twisting her shoulders, curving her spine, wriggling her goddamned hips. Because she wants to. Because her body feels the way it feels, which is delicious, entirely delicious right now. The movement rucks up the sawtooth hemline of that absurd little dress and lo, Hawksley discovers that - if she started the evening wearing some sort of underwear, well, it did not last the night. She's wearing nothing beneath that dress. "Did you get me drugs? I'll let you feed them to me, one by one. Like grapes. Each one a new surprise.
"Maybe while we fuck."
Then, really before he can react or respond, a new light in her eyes. Which looks almost precisely like one of those metaphorical lightbulbs going off over her head: just so. Her expression changes, she catches her lower lip with her teeth and smiles all around it and there's this bright spark in her dark gaze and she's all in sudden motion. Shifting - bouncing up, really - to settle on her knees by his hips.
"You got me this," leaning into him and over him, Sera reaches down to find and cup his erection through his jeans, quite the way he held her breast. That sort of mindfulness, that awareness of his reaction to her. She gives him a bit of a squeeze, her hooded eyes never leaving his through perhaps his have left hers as she tells him, "It's just what I wanted." Voice rough with desire. Her heart beating the way it beats, so fucking strong. "I might have to take my time unwrapping it, though."
And she leans over him, plants her open mouth below his navel, above the waistband of his white jeans, her tongue rough on his skin. She's still holding him, too, through his jeans, like she's never going to let him go.
"Make Christmas last."
HawksleyIt's been easier, after that first/last time, when he held her on his lap while he played Scrabble with Dee, and how he had nothing to offer her but his mouth when she was done telling him about the Hydra, and how that was enough. It feels easier, less fragile, when his hand slides into her hair now, when she leans into him, and against him. And that ease is so treacherous, in its way.
"Not drugs," he teases her, a grin flashing across his face. He looks like he just caught the prey he's been chasing all morning. He looks like he's returned to some high branch after diving to pluck some silvery-flashing thing from a river. His fingertip strokes her jawline from earlobe to chin. "That would be like giving ice to an Eskimo, Sera."
But her eyes are lighting up, and she is -- quite frankly -- putting her hand on his junk. He huffs a laugh, his own eyes flickering in response, as he rolls onto his back beside her. He wouldn't dream of denying her access. He just reclines, eyes closing, opening again only to fixate more firmly on her, trail over her. She squeezes; he breathes in sharply, pressing himself into her hand. "That's mine," he exhales, grabbing her wrist, but not to push her away. To keep her there. His tongue slips out over his lips, unabashed. His eyes flutter closed, then open again, like he doesn't want to take his eyes off of her,
because he doesn't.
"Don't st--" he's saying, when she bends over him. She isn't, though. She's kissing him, soft lips to bare skin, rough tongue on the hard ridges of his abdominals. She's still touching him. Hawksley has it in mind, briefly, to tell her that no, that's not her present, but he'd be happy to share with her for a while, but he's not got the processing power to determine if this is cheesy as fuck or not and she is rapidly removing what little mindfulness he has. He looks at her, eyes burning now, no longer flickering or sparking but gleaming with that molten core of heat that he has.
"Come here," he tells her.
SerafíneShe seems so solid right now, Sera. Immediate and tangible and physical, exactly the way a Sera should be. The arc of movement as she leans into his touch; the glimpse of her teeth when she laughs, lightning-quick and open mouthed, at his quip about ice and Eskimos. The warm flush of a well-fed buzz glowing beneath her skin, making itself felt particularly at the end ranges of her motion, where she can almost feel her skin bleeding into the molecules or what the fuck ever - the atoms and smaller, and smaller, and smaller still - of everything all around them, and the everything all around them bleeding right back into her. The glow of desire in her eyes, when she manages to focus them on him, is merely and simply wanton. All consuming, torrential desperation seems so very far away.
--
Sera seems to like that joke about the ice and Eskimos. She laughs more than it perhaps warrants, opens her mouth like she's tasting his words in the air and would throw something on the border of mad and inane right back at him and insist that drugs would be a perfect present (because darling, she would very much like some) except her hand and soon her mouth are otherwise occupied.
He lays claim to his junk (that's mine) which she is quite boldly exploring and she hums, not a skeptical hum just a quiet, rather sweet hum of acknowledgment, which sharpens into a hungry, rather fierce little laugh as he grabs her wrist. Something about the gesture makes her breath catch in the back of her throat. That, too, he can feel, because her mouth is on his stomach now, open.
And, you know, lovely the way she's bent over him, her long hair spilling over his solid, rippling core, that silly goddamned dress she is wearing half-off her now, the laces loosened so far that the plunging neckline has opened enough to bare one lovely shoulder and one point five lovely breasts, which brush against his flank and hip as she moves.
Don't st- he's starting to tell her, except she isn't stopping, who the fuck thinks that Sera would stop anything like this once she's started. Still, it makes her smile. She lifts her mouth from the hard, flat plane of his stomach to his cock. The outline of it through his jeans. Starts kissing him, open-mouthed, her tongue a warm, solid pressure, between the soft heat of her lips, right through the rough denim.
And she's started unbuckling his white belt and she's doing it one-handed because she's stroking him with the other and so that rather clumsy work is the counterpoint to the slow, deliberative movement of her mouth, until he tells her to
come here,
and she looks up, then, her mouth still open over his hard cock, which is still confined in his white jeans, and finds his eyes all molten on her, which is something she finds very hard to resist.
Sera considers, briefly, just fucking ignoring him and undressing him slowly and sucking him off exactly the way she intends to do right now, but there is that liquid heat in his eyes, which always stops her heart, and then restarts it, just a little bit faster.
So she lifts her mouth from his cock and drops it back to his abdomen and gives him a very deliberate kiss and opens her mouth and starts climbing her way back up his body, scraping her teeth over his rather remarkably well-cut muscles, breathing out warm and humid to sooth any roughness as she moves. And she leaves her hand where it was, though she's now stroking him, with a casual though double-stepped rhythm, smile that is more felt than seen widening whenever he takes in another one of those sharp breaths. Biting him sometimes, for emphasis, when he exhales.
Leaves her hand where it was as long as she can but he's fucking taller than she is and there is only so far that she fulfill both requests.
"Don't stop," she is telling him, when she's close. Close enough to rest her chin on his shoulder, or maybe even hover her mouth over his. "Come here. Silly boy, I don't have your wingspan. I can't do both."
Hawksley"God, you're so high," he tells her when she's laughing way too much at that rather dumb Eskimo joke, but her stupid laughter makes him laugh too, even if it's not as much. He smiles at her, teasing her face with his fingertips for a bit before they are doing other things, thinking other things, and he is not smiling but staring at her, fixed on her, telling her to come here, only to find that she is now kissing him, licking him through the heavy but soft white denim.
Still, he tells her to come here. He knows what she's thinking, though he's never been much of one for the study of the sphere that would let him know for sure. He knows because he's seen that look in her eyes before, right before she pulled down his swimsuit and ate him alive in a covered cabana in Vegas. He knows because he knows her, like this. And in other ways.
Sera comes there. Bites and kisses her way up his body the way she does, the way she is given to, and skin and velvet both slide over him and make him breath in, because of course she's still stroking him, stroking him until she's not, and accusing him of forgetting that actually, she is quite tiny. He huffs a laugh and doesn't answer. His hands come up from her body, of course they were on her body, running over her sides and her shoulders and over the velvet and slipping under it. Now they come up to her neck, her face, cupping her jaw in his hands to draw her mouth to his.
That's all he wanted. It wasn't too much to ask, was it?
He has a feeling nothing is too much to ask of her, and this suspicion wraps like a hand around his viscera, around the column of his spine, tightening until he cannot move.
--
But he kisses her, deeply and consumingly, pulling her nearer until his arms are folding behind her and he is sinking back in her bed, panting against her mouth, until he is reaching down between them and his knuckles brush her and the feel of her wetness makes him shudder but does not dissuade him from his belt, front button, zipper, undressing blindly while he kisses her.
"Just like this," he mutters to her mouth, and so it is just like that. The white jeans and he's wearing fucking golden underwear are pushed down, the rich green velvet doesn't need to be pushed up because it is already so short, and that is all. This time he doesn't ask her if she's sure, he doesn't stop, he doesn't hesitate unless she stops him, asks him if he's sure, hesitates. The few guests who are still conscious can hear them outside the door, hear their breathing, their panting, the little cries Sera is letting out, the soft worshipful swearing Hawksley exhales as she moves on him.
They roll near the end, and people outside the door and down the stairs can hear them a little under the music that is playing, always playing in this house somewhere, hear the way she reacts, the sound she makes every time he thrusts, but for all her kitschy surroundings this is a fine bed and the springs don't creak even if the headboard thuds a bit, rhythmic against the wall. Hawksley pushes himself up on his arms, watching her beneath him, that same fixed, piercing, hungry look in his eyes.
Until they close.
Until he goes very still, shoulders trembling from strain, his hips shuddering as he does not so much lose himself as finds something entirely new outside of himself.
It lasts for a moment, as it does. And only that moment before it lets him go again, before gravity reasserts itself, before he slides into her again, again, as though trying to recapture it or trying to slow that fall but this is not a magic he has and perhaps not really a magic he wants. He kisses her neck when he comes down over her, weight on his forearms because, really, she seems so fucking fragile to him. He kisses her neck and nuzzles under her hair and mutters something about her triangle and tells her, again, though she doesn't know it is Again:
'ana ' sef. 'ana ' sef, serafíne.
And kisses her, and kisses her, until he cannot move anymore.
SerafíneHawksley tells Sera things in languages she does not know. He tells her Again and she does not know it is again and she does not have anything close to words herself now, not anymore. Not after he tells her to come here because he just wants to kiss her, because it wasn't really so much to ask, because -
yes Hawksley
- nothing is ever too much to ask.
And she is so fucking high. She laughs at that moderately terrible joke far too much and is delighted in the weight of his hands on her body and gets lost in hte map of his skin on her travels back up his body from his belt to his mouth because there are places that require exploration, because she did not know that that fit there, because she's stoned and so pleased with him, and wriggles with a deep and satisfying sigh as he diverts her from her intended course and takes her along another rather equally delightful path.
There are not many words after that. He undresses himself while kissing her and she herself does not require any undressing and she won't see his golden fucking underwear until some later time, but of course she will be immoderately pleased by it, whether or not she is high. He mutters something into her mouth them and she hardly understands it, just nods her agreement back to him, her hands cupping his skull, her mouth on his or close to it, holding the fuck on to him as she takes him, with nothing close to hesitation.
--
They roll, and his eyes are open and he's looking down at her and her eyes are mostly open in those moments, but unseeing because she is just so close to all the many things she cannot name, and they're leaking tears that smear down her cheeks in salt-laden little trails, but she can't help that, can she? Can't help it anymore than she can help any of the rest of it. The way she cries and the way she comes and the way she wraps herself up in him and around him as he kisses her, and kisses her, and kisses her, all the oxygen from her lungs.
'ana 'sef. 'ana 'sef, serafíne. he tells her, and she has no fucking idea what he's saying, but that hardly even begins to matter.
He cannot move anymore. She wraps her long, lean arms around him, elbows bent all akimbo, and pulls him down and down, onto her, over her.
And tells him, quite simply, "I know."
HawksleyWell, he is a coward and he insists he's not a liar just because he says something in a language that he knows she can't understand. It's not his fault she chose to learn Spanish instead of Egyptian Arabic. She made her bed and she can lie in it.
He can lie in it, and does, and has often, and he does not know that she hasn't been sleeping around or that she was going to kiss Pan beneath the mistletoe and he doesn't have the faintest idea that she has such a crush on the priest, all he knows is that Pan looked at her with almost paternal affection and that Sera looked at him the way, well, the way Hawksley sees her look at almost everything in the universe, with boundless and incredible love.
ah
He ends up kicking off what is left of his clothing. This is later: he also peels off the rest of that little elfin dress and doesn't ask about her other Awakened guests, where they are or were. He knows he is sleeping here. Entitled little fuck that he is; he doesn't even question it. So he makes her naked and he makes himself naked and sighs and licks, softly, at the tears on her temples and cheeks, daubing them wet and tender off her skin like a large and lazy cat, like a lion or something, but he's not a lion.
He's a hawk. He's an eagle.
He doesn't really know why he kisses and cleans the tears off her face like that, but he does, thinks he can, since this is the woman who bites his bones, scrapes her teeth over his pulse. He can do these things, she can, and he can stay here tonight, and forget about London -- Jesus, forget about London -- and Paris, too. And all his lies of omission, which are many, because they are the only lies he knows he can get away with.
And he is a selfish, cowardly man.
--
"No you don't," he whispers, falling to one side in the dark, curving his face to her neck, covering her with his arm, mutering softly: "You don't know anything,"
which they both know is a lie.
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