HawksleyShe's been gone some time. Long enough for it to be painfully obvious that she's not coming back. Not long enough for Hawksley to have done anything like convince Sid to go grab some dinner as well, maybe hit a show, does she like dancing? No, they're probably still there, in fact. TheYankees-Sox game isn't even over.
You ok? Justin went to check on you. He didn't come back either.
A pause, then a second text:
You know you can just tell me if I smell bad.
SerafíneThe responses come several minutes later, closer to five minutes than ten.
A-ok. Sry! Roller derby emergency.
Whatever the fuck that means. Another minute-or-two passes before a second flurry of texts swims up from the ether.
You smell divine. Like crisp linen, privilege, sunlight and was-that-vodka?
All my favorite things.
Apologies, to Sid too, okay?
HawksleyFive minutes or so until Sera's responses blow up Hawksley's phone. Five more minutes of conversation with Sid, and somewhere in there she gets another text from Hawksley, but this one is a mass text, telling multiple people in his contacts list about how Kelsey isn't in a coma anymore.
But it's some time longer before she gets an answer back from him. Maybe long enough for him to have left the bar. Maybe long enough for the roller derby emergency to have really gotten out of hand.
That WAS vodka. Give Honey Bunches of Chokes my regards. He means Emily. Of course Emily. Emily the derby doll, Emily who also loves to dance.
And then a bit more time passes. For all he knows she's forgotten how to use her iPhone by now.
I want to see you.
SerafíneLong enough for the night to swing forward on its axis. Long enough for Orion to flee a bit further across the evening sky, chased by the scopion. And for all he knows she's forgotten how to use her iPhone by then, yes. It happens to her more often than it happens to most which, given that a blind, arthritic, 98 year old monkey could figure out how to use an iPhone says something about her ordinary and every day committment to mindlessness.
He's not there to see the reaction that text engenders in her. Two words: I want, as necessary as any others in any human tongue.
--
She is: in the backyard of that house she shares. Swinging in the hammock now, looking up at the sky. Sera can see the stars, but she sees them blindly. She does not know their names, or the heat that they produce, all that combustion, and she does not know how long it takes that light to arrive here, though she does know that just by looking up she's looking into some nameless past. And she knows what it feels like to breathe in all that light, to fill herself up with it until it comes shining through her skin.
Dan and Rick are sitting on the patio nearby. Dan has his acoustic guitar in his lap and they're noodling and Rick is smoking a joint and the smoke curls in the air. And they're arguing some finer point about vinyl and obscure second-run punk bands or maybe whether London Calling gets to be the greatest album of both the 1970s and 1980s because it was released in the UK in December 1979 and in the US in January 1980 and this conversation will likely invoke food trucks and Danish modern furniture design nevermind that nothing about: this house, or anything anywhere around Sera, seems sleek or streamlined or Danish-modern. They're having a good time, though. Rick still looks normal. Dan is wearing tight red jeans and a short-sleeve plaid cotton shirt buttoned all the way up, with a bowtie.
Dee is somewhere in the house and even though this isn't one of Sera's parties, there are other people around, because it is Saturday night. Maybe a few roller derby girls. Maybe a few musicians, pot-heads, board game aficionadoes. Neighbors, artists. Or that Guy Rick Met Last Week, whose name no one can remember, whose conversation turns entirely around (wtf?) the Denver Broncos and their prospects for the upcoming year.
--After a brief lull, the response @home arrives. And right on its heels, the invitation, to Come see me.
HawksleyTwo words, often, are all it really takes to define a person, even if it only defines them in a moment. I want, Hawksley says -- or writes, which to him is much the same. Words spoken have more resonance, he would say, and he would mean that magically as well as aurally. But words are also words, and they have their own magic just by existing.
It's notable, though he does not note this, is not thinking it, that each sign of the 12-part Western zodiac has a key phrase. It is notable, though Sera doesn't know Hawksley's birthday and probably only knows her own by hearsay and legal documents, that his sign's words are
I will,
because of course.
--
Hawksley has left the PourHouse. With or without Sid, though more likely without. With or without plans for the evening, though most likely without. It is the blessing of not needing to work, not having to think about work: there's no such thing as a 'school night' where you pack your lunch for the next day and make sure you set three alarms and put the trash by the door to take out. Sera said he smelt of privilege, and he does. She's cloaked her own scent of the same somewhat, though not completely: he recognizes her designers, or at least the touch of designer's fabrics and stitiching vs. what can be purchased at Target, and she mentioned fencing, and someone has to pay for her lifestyle and he doubts that the entire burden falls on Rick, Dee, and Dan.
No matter. He has nowhere to be tonight but with her, and nothing to do tomorrow but get up at some point and do as he likes, which is what he always does.
I want, he says, and
Come, she says, and
so he does.
--
He counts in his head the number of times he's driven up to this house. One at the start of this month, and one dropping Sera off after visiting Lydia, and one taking her home after taking her to the river and one dropping her off after she took him to the chantry, and -- he thinks that's it. All of those but one, he was driving that fucking Porsche. Which Dee thinks is a Jaguar because she can at least tell that Corvettes are sharper and longer and are always red by a rule so if it's not that, then it's a Jaguar. If Hawksley knew this he might kiss her. Dee. He likes Dee. He does not know that Dee breaks Rick's stupid normal-person heart every time she goes to bed with Sera and every time she makes out with someone like Hawksley on a couch while smoking a joint together. It would not stop him from kissing Dee.
The Porsche parks in or around or down the street or across the street from Sera's house, because houses in this area generally don't have driveways unless it's newer construction, and the car beeps a goodbye to him, see-you-later-friend! before it goes quiet, settling into a patient hibernation.
He walks up and he just goes on in, because something tells him that's right, that's the thing to do, no one will think it odd or rude and in fact knocking would be the weird thing to do here. So he goes in, scarcely rapping on the door to warn anyone on the other side to stop leaning against it before coming inside. He's in the same clothes as before, jeans-shirt-leather-cuff-leather-shoes and he mingles for a bit, but Sera can probably feel him out there, like the sun turned into a balloon and is being tossed about by the hands of children, kept in the air by their wonder.
It takes him some time. He ends up reconnecting with Emily, in that fitted chambray shirt of hers and those short-shorts and athletic knee socks. She shows off her ripped-up knee and savagely bruised elbow and Hawksley takes his share of a joint being passed as he peers at the wounds, feeling actually rather intrigued by her delight in them, her pride, her fervor that glitters around her like an ever-shifting corona. He thinks of scars created by wounds taken in honor of the gods, and he thinks of why athletics exist, and why they are entertainment for spectators, and what is sacrificed, and for what. Someone offers to get him a drink; he actually declines, and the offer is a good time as any for him to segue past the living room and couch, through the kitchen, out onto the patio where a guitar is being plucked, strummed, toyed with thoughtless and yet mindfully.
Hawksley pays his respects to Dan and Rick, which is mostly hey, man and a what's up that doesn't need an answer, before he walks over to the hammock, where everyone -- everyone -- in that house knew he would ultimately be going. He always comes here with her or for her, in the end. The deepest Sleeper among them can sense the connection.
When he gets to her, he nudges the edge of the hammock with his knee, her body weighing it down, setting it gently swinging side to side to side to side, or renewing the swing it already had going.
"Today," he begins, in that deceptively light voice that hints at the recitation that is to come, that deceptively low voice that hints at the once-removed sincerity of using someone else's words: "it was your hair again which tangled my heart, and your long legs which --"
a beat. "I'll skip that part," he says, because his eyes are indeed on her legs, which are not long because she is long but long because she is proportioned a certain way that makes them long for her, and so: long, long legs, bared to summer and his eyes, before those eyes skim back up to her face and renew:
"Do you feel a treasure house of moments and sharp sensations which we have gathered," and he is misquoting but forgive him, forgive him, he is only twenty-odd, "into which, lonely and hungry, to dip and recall?"
Hawksley's hand catches the edge of the hammock on a return-sway and holds it there, edge to the front of his thigh. He misquotes again, only by skipping over midsections and other words: "These things happen to me," he says, confession and prose in one. "It is always a birth."
SerafíneSera felt him a block away; knew when he walked into the house, felt him drifting and idling and steering between the shoals of its many pleasures. The shared joint and Emily and her brilliant, joyful savagery. When she first felt him, she closed her eyes and saw the sun, and then opened them and found the brightest stars again, cutting through the haze of the city's light pollution. They keep the backyard dark for a reason, took the bulbs out of the motion-activated security lights Dee's great-aunt had installed when she turned 80, just-in-case, that first week they moved in.
No reason to floodlight what happens out there for all the inquisitive neighbors, and -
some things are better in the dark.
And also, there are the stars.
--
They all know why he's here: that guy who was talking with two derby dolls about football, sharing that passing joint with Emily and Hawksley as they reconnected. Dee, for sure, though she cannot help the blush that flushes again from somewhere deep below her Peter Pan collar, up the column of her neck when she catches sight of him, because she remembers that night a few weeks ago, and the way his mouth moves. Even Rick, with his regularly- broken beautifully-stupid normal-person heart, whose conversation with Dan has now turned into an increasingly obscure reference war over the merits musicians you've never heard of because you are probably not as cool as these guys.
And especially Dan, who says, "Davie, man, good to see you - " back, fingers shaping out an F minor chord progression on the neck of his guitar, then lifts his chin at Rick and flattens his right hand over the strings with a quiet jangle. And says,
"C'mon man," to Rick, after the Hermetic has passed them, shifting his grip on the guitar to its neck, putting it aside on the cabana bed. Already standing up. "I've got that 45, Let me prove you wrong again."
And Rick, he snuffs the remaining third of that joint and leaves it tipped at the edge of the ashtray between the mismatched patio chairs, and gets up to follow.
--
Her eyes dropped from the stars to the sun after he opened the glass sliders, and before he closed them behind himself. Dark out here, but maybe he could feel her regard, lazy through the rope hammock's macramed knots. Or wait, no. The turn of her head was lazy, but not her regard. Her eyes are always quick on him, what else could they be?
Like Hawksley, Serafíne is wearing the same clothes she was wearing earlier, though the heels are gone, long since kicked off into a pile of similar pieces, which range from $5 faux-vintage faux-leather Target-via-Goodwill Mary Janes to those designer pieces he recognizes by their quality of nothing else: the hand of the leather, the precision of the stitching, the weight of the metal work, the gleam of the leaded crystals.
She has, however, scrubbed the make-up from her face, most of it, the dark liner and the dark shadow, and taken down her hair, see: it's spread over the pillow behind her. Bright and blond against her dark side-cut fringe.
This time, she does not know the piece he recites, and she does not mouth it along with him and watches, and listens and breathes him, sundrenched, and his second-hand words, all in and in,
and in,
and in,
and out.
Like that, too.
--
"I saw you tonight," she tells him, when he has caught and stilled the swinging hammock. She wants to reach for him. She wants to sit forward in the hammock, wrap her arm around his hip and pull him close. Or, to lean back and plant her foot against his thigh and look at him from a distance, outlined against the sky. But, for now she moves nothing other than her gaze - from his mouth to his hand, fingers wrapped in the rope, back to his own eyes. " - when I walked out on the roofdeck.
"You looked like a god.
"I felt you halfway across the city."
HawksleyIt's no surprise that Rick and Dan leave. Maybe they really just care about that argument they're having. Maybe they're a little wary of Hawksley, who hardly feels like he's actually a real person walking on earth next to them. Maybe they just want to give Davie and Sera some privacy, given that the last time he was in the back garden with her, they proved the importance of turning off those floodlights.
More likely, simply, they can sense that Hawksley is a part of something that Sera is also a part of, that they are not. Only Dan has the mercy of knowing, or guessing, or having any inkling at all, of what that is.
Though even he doesn't really know. Because they don't, either.
--
Hawksley holds the edge of the hammock, and Sera does not touch him. He doesn't reach for her. There is a star behind his head that isn't bright enough, or close enough, to halo him. But she was looking at it earlier, and now it's hidden. Her words have him tip his head, and the star winks at her like it knows something she doesn't yet. Which it might.
you looked like a god
makes his eyes flicker, sharp and sudden and fierce. It banks again, just barely.
"You know," he says, and unhooks his fingers from the hammock, letting it swing away and then forward, bumping his legs, "'you looked like a god' is an awful thing to say to a man you're trying not to sleep with."
More jarringly than before, Hawksley catches the edge of the hammock. He smirks, something else glinting in those eyes, something different but still something fierce. And he holds it there against his leg and leans over her, shadows her from those stars she was staring at, his other hand pressing down on the knotted rope beside her upper body. He looks down at her from there, perhaps eight inches away, the tilt of his head undeniably avian.
"You're the one trying to feel unquenched desire."
SerafíneIt is too dark for him to see the flush that spreads beneath her skin; and we have mentioned that she is not so fair-skinned. The blond in her hair comes from peroxide and the blue in her eyes is far darker than the blue in his own, with a hint of smoke and a touch of the sky-at-twilight, which goes merely dark when cast in shadow,
which she is now, cast in his shadow, as he leans over her, and obliterates the stars from her view.
Too dark to see the flush, but he can see the way she stills as he leans close, and the way her breath quickens. Her mouth is open and she's staring up at him and she's breathing these brief, shallow breaths which stir her chest rather than her shoulders and some part of her wants to correct him, to tell him no - no - tell him of that brief vision she had of him at across the bar, Falcon-headed and golden and wrapped in all the sigils of wealth and high office,
but most of her, oh most of her, has gone from dreaming to burning in a handspan of heartbeats.
"Did you come here to make me feel that? Unquenched desire?"
"Or did you come here to make this hard for me?"
Her eyes drop from his own to his hand, wrapped up in the knotted rope. She wants to closer her teeth over his knuckles and pull him down over her and wrap him up with her thighs, but she
does not move,
except with the swing of the hammock when he sets it free. And a little bit, with the give, the residual motion from the swing, the play in the fibers when he pulls it closer.
"Harder for me. Christ."
HawksleyHunger grows sharper the longer it's denied until it reaches the plateau of human tolerance for the madness of their own sensation. If she were not allowing herself juice and the occasional smoothie, Sera would have long since adapted to her own starvation because that is what human beings do. If she were not cultivating desire but trying to transcend it, she would have, because she's a fucking Awakened, enlightened being for whom reality is merely a set of options to choose from. But she surrounds herself with the things she wants and cannot have: she goes to bars and does not drink, her friends smoke just over the way, lifting themselves on a cloud she does not permit herself to rise with. She feeds herself just enough to remember what food feels like in the belly, and in all these things she saturates herself in her longing.
He looks at her, those eyes that are blue like the sky is blue before a storm over the sea, countering his own eyes, which are the blue of the sky over the desert, cloudless and pure and endless. Her skin flushes invisibly but her breath, oh, he can hear and see and feel that shivering in the air between them and it nearly overtakes him. It draws him to her, and it is all he can do to stay right where he is, arm braced so he doesn't sink down atop her -- and atop that fuck-the-world-for-trying bustier, which probably helps his resistance a bit when he remembers it. Still: he notices her breathing quickening, and thoughtlessly, involuntarily yet without trying to stop it, Hawksley licks his lips and takes a sip of the air.
That smirk on his face grows, and if there were not concurrent fondness in his features and his eyes, it would look so cruel, the way that -- yes -- gods can be cruel, amusing themselves with mortals. But Hawksley isn't a god. Hawksley is Hawksley, and no matter what his mouth does, he cannot hide a certain uncanny tenderness in his eyes.
"No," he says, half whisper, half laugh. "I came here because I wanted to see you. And you told me to come." So simple, that. So obvious. So... pleased. Because that's what it is. Sheer, simple pleasure. Even in the midst of -- as he has put it -- unquenched desire.
Hawksley breathes in, more deeply. He nods at her, upward. "Scoot over," he says, and if she does, he proceeds to turn around and join her on the hammock, which is far less stable than the cabana bed but also, by that feature, far less dangerous at the moment. Well maybe not far.
SerafíneThe way he licks his lips and sips the air merely reinforces her desire to reach for him; she's starting to do so, really, a certain suggestion of motion in her shoulder, the flex of her fingers and curve of her hand, fingers to palm to thumb, as if she intended to bury it in his hair as his smirk widens and she breathes it in like fire, the same way she breathes in that uncanny tenderness in his eyes when she looks back at him, her head twisting on a particular axis on the striped canvas pillow behind her.
Scoot over,
he says and of course she does. What else would she do? Wriggles her ass from the deep distended center of the hammock up the parabolic slope of the right side hooking her fingers into the ropes until he settles in beside her and restabilizes the weight distribution.
"There's another pillow on the grass," she tells him as he climbs in, and he'll find it if he reaches down, tucked up against the wooden frame in which the thing is slung. Reachable to someone with a wingspan like he has. Then, warns him to "'Ware the boob armor."
With this ironic little grin that takes away very little from the way her eyes follow the motion of his body in movement, or the way the settle on him as he lays down beside her and she tucks herself against him, trying very, very hard not to -
- well no. She does think about laying down with him and it is a choice she makes, the sudden convinction of it, that she can both bear (not bear: enjoy, adore) his closeness, and allow her desire open up in her lungs until they ache.
"You did look a god," she informs him once he has settled, and her voice is low and rich and resonant and that resonance opens up through her body, thrums beneath her skin as she hums around it. "You had the head of a falcon, and your skin was gold and you all covered in ornament.
A pause, this breath out as she remembers the way he took of one of his fucking tailored white V-necks in her garden not long ago. The movement of his arms, the sweep of them, like wings. "Some kind of inhuman, spectacular skygod. Just for a moment.
"Then you were Hawksley again."
--
Sera's quiet, then. Though a bit later, she tells him, still quiet. "Do you know, I have a present for you. Upstairs.
"Remind me, later."
HawksleyOh, he reaches for the pillow. And not just so he doesn't decide to tell her to take off her top and let him use her breasts as a pillow, because that thought occurs to him long before the mention of the actual, upholstered cushion. It's also because Hawksley secretly, deeply, loves the smell of grass and wet earth and rain and all the mess of it. He always has. He loves this yard and he remembers the way it smelled after a few rainy afternoons when it was sunset. He might have fallen instantly, achingly in love with Justin tonight had the man shown up in his work clothes, all muddy and green-stained, with dirt under his fingernails and the smell of growing things filling Hawksley's nostrils.
Also he doesn't want to get a crick in his neck. So -- and he does this after he's sat down with her, you know -- he uses his foot on the ground to steady them and twists back around, reaching under them, setting them swinging because he's tall, he's muscular, he's broad-shouldered, let'sgetdowntoit he's large, particularly compared to Sera, and his weight has a certain effect on the physics of the hammock. They swing. He grabs the pillow on its way back and grins like he just won a prize.
Plops it under his head, settles in as the swinging wobbles and then starts to rediscover its rhythm, and breathes in the smell, looking at Sera beside him and smiling. She's tucked against him and that touches him: she didn't have to. It won't be easy for her to. But she does, and it makes him happy. Simply, quietly happy. Most times, to most people, he seems so far away. He seems untouchable, unreachable; how could a thing that can brush over clouds on a whim ever come close enough to feel real?
He hovers down by her, listening to her voice, not quite touching the earth but coming
about as close as he ever gets.
--
Hawksley listens, the smile fading from his eyes and his face to something more solid, more serious, than someone of his nature should ever carry inside. It's like a stone at the bottom of a lake, . She tells him again that he looked like a god, and what god, exactly. Not human. Skygod. Precursor to Christ, inspiration of angels.
"I'm always Hawksley," he murmurs, because right now, it is the only thing he trusts himself to say.
And he is quiet, too.
--
God, he wants to nuzzle her. Bury his face beneath her ear and under her hair and just... rub his face on her, rub her scent onto him. He wants to lick her triangle and hold his hand on her stomach, mutter to her to take that thing off so he can touch her.
He does not do these things. He lays beside her on his back, drowsing. The vodka is merely a memory now. The weed is filtering into his thoughts, a comfortable and thin haze, because he did not smoke much at all.
"I like presents," he says, the murmur a smile in and of itself, his grin lopsided. He has his eyes closed. They open on her again. "What is it? Crazy charmed doses of psychoactive drugs? A fuck-the-world-for-trying leather jacket to match your fuck-the-world-for-trying bustier? A cookie?"
SerafíneSera isn't looking at the stars anymore, not even when her eyes are open. He can drowse, the few hits he took from that communal joint drifting over the surface of his mind, the membrane pleasant but thin rather than heavy as a baffle, muddied and muzzling. She's beside him; hungry and sober and hungry and they're still swinging, though the arc of motion and speed have both lessened, and if she were to drowse right now, slip briefly into dream-sleep they would be the half-waking sort that would make her body ache when she surfaced to something more like consciousness.
So: wakeful, with a view of the house and garden over his chest and profile, and the view, which moves the way waves move in a contained space, she tells him she has a present and he smiles down, delighted and she lifts her chin to return that glance, her own eyes gleaming with reflections shed from the back windows.
Laughs, openly and bodily when he calls her garment a fuck-the-world-for-trying bustier, the sort that curls through her and sends a few unpleasant reminds of those spikes onto - his flank or his arm. That laughter deepens and spreads into her shoulders when he proposes a cookie as his final guess, so much so that she leans up and nips his shoulder, playful and corrective at the self-same time.
"No, Hawksley," the hint of admonition in her tone is entirely playful, full of something wry and a little bit raw, "I bought you a book."
Serafíne[Empathy reading: He has the impression that this is twofold. On the surface, her desire, her want is so present inside her right now that it rubs her raw and makes her ache. It's more than lust. Mere lust wouldn't make her lungs burn like that.
But, he's looking into her more specifically in that moment and in that moment she's basking in his joie-de-vivre, partaking in it in that visceral way she has, which is to say pretty entirely, so delighted in him and so affectionate. And that contrasts with a shadow-in-her for which he has no real specific context, except that it is close to the surface of her skin tonight. In the back of her throat and behind her sober eyes.
The sort of thing, he might imagine, that she usually drowns, easily, in something-and-everything. ]
Hawksleykai @ 12:20PM[Perception + Awarempathy]Roll: 5 d10 TN6 (1, 1, 3, 4, 4) ( fail ) VALID
kai @ 12:20PM[No I don't think so]Roll: 5 d10 TN7 (3, 5, 6, 6, 9) ( success x 1 ) VALID
Samael @ 12:23PMWitnessed!
[Specifically looking at "full of something wry and a little bit raw'". Raaaw?]
Hawksley[that goes before the reading, obvs!]
HawksleyFor trying to what, one might ask. But Sera doesn't, and Hawksley doesn't, and he makes her laugh and this makes him grin, and all her gleaming-eyes and in-the-moment smiles make him want to put his hand on her face and kiss her, more soft than hungry, more delighted than needful, laughing against her mouth, but
of course he doesn't. Boundaries, Hawksley. Respect for the will and work of another will-worker. Of course, of course. He is a little bit stoned and he surprises himself with his own happiness sometimes. So he does not put his hand on her face and kiss her mouth or put his hand on her belly and kiss her neck or do anything but lay there with her, watching her, thoughtful. His eyes close slowly, and it becomes evident even in the dark -- because even in the dark he seems sun-touched -- that his eyelashes are a dark, burnished gold.
He breathes in deeply as he opens his eyes again, just as slowly, staring at her.
She bought him a book, and his smile is a slow spreading aching tender thing. He doesn't have to tell her that he loves books. Or that he is rather indiscriminate about this love, or that sometimes his love manifests in yelling about something or throwing it across the room or waking Collins up in the middle of the night to find him the next volume. He doesn't have to tell her that she doesn't need to get him anything, partly because he likes getting things. And at the moment he is quite unembarrassed to be getting anything at all from Sera.
Yet: he was looking at her closely just now, even with that smile, and his eyes flickered with his stare. He does, in fact, lift his hand and reach over and put it on her face. He knows that may be torturous, but knows it is cowardly not to. Or maybe he just doesn't think of it, or care anymore. His fingers cup around her jaw, his thumb still on her cheek.
Hawksley frowns.
"You okay?" he asks, like he might if they were both stoned or drunk and he was making sure she wasn't about to have a seizure or something.
Or: like he is only a little stoned, and she is stone-cold sober, and he is making sure she isn't about to pull the halves of herself apart like taffy, caught between denial and indulgence, remembering and forgetting, darkness and light.
SerafíneAs soon as he touches her, as soon as his hand cups around her jaw, her eyes fill with tears, are suddenly swimming with them. The reaction is instantaneous and there's nothing she can do to hide it and she's not ever been any more inclined to hide her tears than she has been to hide her joy, when it fills her. It makes her vision go all wavy, her view of him, his thoughtful frown, his watchful gaze becomes a watercolor, becomes the view through the wavy glass of an old rainspattered window in a cloudy day, at the moment the sun comes out from behind the clouds.
Sera smiles this tight smile, her mouth flat around it, her body curled now on her flank and almost on her stomach so that she can look at him as he looks at her. This tight, almost exquisitely calibrated smile, although like the tears: the smile comes naturally. There is no art in it. Neither is there any particular artifice.
"'Course I am." He asks the question like they are both fucked up and he's checking in with her: are you gonna puke, are you gonna fall, is that your brain melting out of your eyes. And she answers him like that too, see: like they are tripping and their hearts are tight with it and the edges of the garden have become high stone walls and there's something new and unspeakable in the sky and her spine is scissoring open, see, emitting such light, and the world might crack open like an the sun's the yoke and - of course I am, because no matter how painful it is, she wouldn't miss that opening sky, that scissoring spine, not for anything in the world.
"I can do magic now. Right now." Her voice is hushed and burnished and bright and dark all-at-once. This is so beautiful and so painful and she is leaning into both and she has no fucking idea why it is so painful or why her heart aches: just that it does, even as it beats, even as it pounds. And all these things are beneath her skin, and they are so finely and exquisitely calibrated that one bleeds into the other until there is no difference.
"Just from this. I can sink into your pulse. I can feel the sparking of nerves beneath your skin. I can watch the explosion of - what the fuck are they? Synapses. I can feel them. Sometimes they're like heat lightning, sometimes they're just like fireworks against the dome of the sky."
"Just from this."
There is such wonder in her voice; and such illuminated, scraping pain.
"I'm so happy you came over. I'm so glad you're here.
"But I think, maybe you should go soon. Come upstairs and get your book."
Despite her words, she makes no move to go.
HawksleyAck.
That flashes in Hawksley's eyes, not too deep. So he's enlightened, so he's ahead of the curve, so he plays at being a dudebro without being a douche, bro. It still hits a deep, raw nerve inside of him when her eyes fill with tears. The desire to kiss her becomes something like desperation. He can fix this. He can make it better. Stop crying, please stop crying. The intellectual understanding of what it means to cry, and what it doesn't, has no bearing on that instinct.
That instinct which, for a moment, has him moving closer to her, hand still on her face, breathing in a sip of air as though he's about to drop himself into the ocean and see how far, how deep he can go, how long he can live without air or light.
Hawksley arrests the movement, but he does not retreat from the forward momentum. They lie on their sides on the hammock, which jostles and swings with even the slightestly motion of their bodies. He faces her, he touches her, and the want in him to bring her closer is turning his bones to iron, his tendons to stone. It takes will to stop himself, and will he has, but his biceps are tensed with that restraint, his core tight with it.
The breath he took in preparation to descend is exhaled, slowly, and mingles with her words, as whispered as a confession.
As the words grow, expanding to encompass his pulse, his nerves, his mind, and all the light that is everything, everything in him, Hawksley lowers his hand from her cheek. He does not touch her neck, her shoulder, does not reach for her side or lower back; he moves his hand lightly, lightly under her hand, palm to palm, and lifts it. Light as a feather, stiff as a board is how he touches her there, fragile as glass, fingertips to fingertips, as his eyes hold hers. Hawksley's hand rises under hers like a lifting wind under wings, and his fingertips twist, turn, til the heels of their hands meet. Til the mounts of Jupiter, Saturn, Mercury and the sun all touch delicately between their hands. He does not press to cleave their flesh together, but holds that touch so tenuously that soon,
he can feel her heart beating through her fingertips.
"I don't want to go," he says quietly, and despite its dim volume, it is no less resonant, it has no less depth.
"I do want you to take me upstairs."
SerafíneHer eyes are filled with tears; so, she cannot see that flare of responsive pain, the raw nerve, the desperate need to fix this need in his eyes. But Sera never really needs to see, not when she can feel. And she feels: that deep, raw nerve, that moving instinct inside him.
The restraint he requires for her.
The restraint he invokes for her.
The power of his Will and the tension framing his athletic body against her own are answered in kind. God, they are so laughably wrapped up in each other in a fucking hammock, just the damned physics of it pushing them together as they face each other and the thing swings as they move, as he tenses, as she reacts, as he finds and lifts her hand, just touching, not grasping, no -
- a handful of tears spill onto her cheeks, just enough to make them damp. Mostly she does manage to blink them away, to smile that taut smile until they dissipate and just swim on the surface of her irises. And they stay like that, hands together, but only just, while he feels her heart beating so goddamned fast through her fingertips and she, she can feel the arcing brilliance of all the light in his goddamned body sketched against the darkness like the aurora borealis.
But, spilled or not the tears make her sinuses stream just enough that Sera has to sniff once or twice and there's the resonant power of his voice and the way it goes all fucking through her right now and so she clasps their joined hands, for just a moment, and for leverage to scoot herself up and forward until she can kiss him -
- oh, on his goddamned shoulder, just there, beneath the cut of his clavicle, "Come upstairs with me," she instructs him, quiet, her breath warm against his skin, her voice all vibrant with his presence, "and get your book."
And though this time she does not tell him she thinks he should leave neither does she invite him to stay and there is no elegant way to climb out of a rope hammock, not really, not when you're laying in there alone, and especially not when you are leaning into / against another human being and there's a fuck-the-world-for-trying bustier that might actually injure someone to worry about but hell:
she doesn't care if she looks like a fool and she sort of boosts herself with / on him and tumbles out and offers him a hand - not that he needs it - sort of shaking her head side-to-side to abate the moisture in her eyes and hey, she holds onto his hand because this is becoming a habit.
So she takes him upstairs. By way of the kitchen and the dining room and the living room, by way of the remaining guests: two in the kitchen, which is mostly dark now. The rest in a loose circle in the living room, where another joint is being passed around and smoke drifts in the room like fog through a copse of trees. The last of the night, maybe. Sera waves it off; Dee holds it up to Hawksley, holding her breath in, deep, deep, and she's so stoned, Dee, she forgets to blush at the sight of him, and Sera doesn't let go of his hand, he can take the joint with the other one, but she does bend over the back of the couch (which is: beautifully framed and upholstered in tufted green velveteen that's become frayed over the years on the arms and piping around the cushions) and plant a very tender kiss on the crown of Dee's head.
Then she leads him up the stairs.
There's a stained glass window on the landing. A spiderplant hanging from the high ceiling. Two framed portraits of Amelia Earhart in a short leather trenchcoat and a man's shirt and tie in black and white.
At the top: an open hallway, and the door to her room.
HawksleyTheir fingers slide past one another and fold, lengths between lengths, as Sera clasps his hand, and as she finds that strength and that fervor met in kind. In some time from now, a young woman with incredible eyes will look at them and think oh: they must go everywhere together. They are so alike. But that woman is new, very new, and has no idea that this bond has formed in the space of not-even-a-month.
She has no idea that Cultists form these bonds, which feel deep, which often are deep, which are life-altering for some, sometimes in the space of a moment. They do not do magic by numbers or rote but by tapping into a moment, a pulse, a shared existential experience of the universe, and in that moment, in that pulse, they and you truly are one.
She has no idea that Hermetics, in general, consider that sort of thing paltry, low magic, not even really an extension of the will, not even really Work. Nor does she understand, just yet, that Hawksley is unlike most other Hermetics she could meet, or that his connection to Sera has no name, and -- for him -- is not simply about opening himself to Lakashim.
Or that he doesn't really know if that's what it is for Sera. Or not.
--
She holds his hand and kisses his chest and he breathes in sharp and shallow sudden, closing his eyes for a moment as he waits for the blown-up world to resettle around him, back into familiar shapes. It only takes a second, after all, for the universe to re-assert itself. His eyes open again and they carry that ferocity again, that look that from now on will probably never enter his gaze without Sera remembering that night that she saw him and he did not look like a man but a god, and not a god who deigns to wear a purely human form.
Oh, she's telling him to come upstairs with her and Hawksley is holding her hand, quite tight, moving closer to her on the web of ropes beneath them, looking as though he is going to roll her onto her back and put his mouth on her throat, fuck this fasting, she moves to get up and he exhales that earlier breath, which was not quite as shallow as it seemed.
Hawksley rolls onto his own back instead as Sera is climbing out of the swinging, jolting hammock. He raises his hand to his face, his free hand, because Sera is holding his other one, and runs his palm down from brow to chin. He mutters something in not-English. She tugs on his arm and he goes, of course he goes, swinging upward, feet to earth and heart to heaven and hand to seraph.
--
It's only when he's inside with her that he wonders if her guests, her friends, her housemates know that she's fasting. Surely they have to; the not-eating, the not-smoking, the not-drinking, the not-fucking is hard to ignore, especially with someone who is getting skinnier and skinnier each day from it. He wonders if Dan will make her skillet potatoes when this is all over. He wonders if Collins knows how to make skillet potatoes and if they're the same as what Sera is talking about. It sounds like something a Southerner would eat, and that delights Hawksley a bit.
Hawksley doesn't take the joint in the living room, either. Sera kisses Dee's head. Hawksley, on a whim, rests his free hand on Dee's hair when she does, tucking a lock of it behind her ear.
Entirely possible that some of these friends or guests think they know exactly what Sera is taking Hawksley upstairs for, and are proud of themselves for being too cool and bohemian to take much notice or care. Hell. Some of them may actually be too cool and bohemian to notice or care. He doesn't think too much about it, but it does pass through his mind as they pass through the room and go up the stairs. His heart is pounding and
at her door he leans over, standing behind her though their hands are still linked, and kisses the back of her neck, the back or the side, the slope of throat to shoulder, and his mouth opens and he isn't thinking but his teeth set in her skin there, lightly, lightly, scraping over flesh as though he might be able to taste her with his breath instead of his tongue.
SerafíneThe kiss on the crown of Dee's head earns Sera a dilatated look from her housemate, concern and affection all mingled together. Dan knows this for something-like-ritual but the rest of them see it as no more than a mad and potentially dangerous whim and Dee has started to wonder if Sera, who does not talk about her past except in fairy-tale snippets of strange and disjointed anecdotes, has struggled with anorexia in the past. Is struggling with it now. Though she hasn't gotten to the point of thinking the name of the disorder in her head, the concern, the what-do-I-do-now, is there, framed in her own body and mind and memory.
Oh, and Hawksley, that gentle pressure of his hand, the light touch as he tucks her dark curls behind her ear, that earns him the blush she seemed too stoned to summon up when came back into the house. It seeps up the column of her neck, right through the shell of her ear and she gives him this glance, which would be arch on another woman, and is simply peripheral on Dee. It catches the corner of his mouth, the cut of his shadow across the spine of the velveteen couch.
The mood in the room shifts as they go. They bend reality around them even without Work, even without Will, warp it into something stranger, darker, warming, more malleable just by their presence in the room.
--
Upstairs, Christ. She says that Sera, aloud, the curse a sharp but otherwise virtually soundless hiss of a breath, "Christ," when he bends over her and settles his mouth on her neck, his teeth on her throat. Oh, her spine goes rigid. Oh, the work it requires for her to resist the desire to sink back into his and pulls his arms around her and turn persistently into him with the door just open and her bed a few treacherous steps away and fuck this fast indeed.
Her heartbeat just surges and she grits her teeth and tightens her grip on his clasped hand until the pads of her fingers are digging painfully into the spaces between his extensor tendons and she is: not strong, and weaker now with the fast but god, can she hold the fuck on to him.
In the end, she does tip her head back into him, but not really in surrender. The same instinct that had him pulling his free hand over his face and muttering something in not-English, is inherent in this gesture. She sort-of-laughs and it's not a laugh and it's all hoarse and Jesus Christ and you have no idea what's happening in my body now and why the fuck did I bring you up here.
"See," still hoarse and maybe a bit strangled by now with that bite of a curse still wrapped in her voice. " - this is why you have to go.
"Oh my fuck. I won't be able to sleep tonight if I have to constantly steel myself against the need to climb onto you or pull you down over me."
Okay, okay. Sera lets go of Hawksley's hand then and pulls away from him and opens the door (which is wooden and has one of those old-fashioned crystal knobs and creaks a little bit when it swings) and there's a light left on and faint light from the windows and the swimming impression of a view of the garden through the windows, and the city beyond, smeared and wavy as the glass is old as the bones beneath the house.
There is a certain degree of Sera-sized chaos inside: the impression of a unmade bed, King-sized close to the windows, scattered with the sort of embroidered and tapestried pillow cases you find at head shops or music festivals that you absolutely know will smell permanently of both patchouli-and-weed; a big armchair-sized and armchair-shaped pile of clothes-and-stuff beneath the windows. Bookcases and an electric guitar with a broken string propped up against one of the bookcases and a big dresser and a small closet which appears to be bleeding shoes onto the worn hardwoods and a mismatched vanity covered in stuff and another closed door and on a spare stretch of wall a stack of canvases and frames that haven't made it to a permanent home and somewhere, somewhere, somewhere, a hunk of wood from an ash tree killed by invasive insects chainsawed down to a three-foot-tall though rather-thin froggish thing. That is a thing she has.
There are too many places to look all-at-once and it is hard not to look at her when she's in the room but Jesus Christ, Hawksley, she's three-four-five feet away picking her way through the litter of stuff, not self-conscious, never self-conscious but so conscious of him that it makes her shiver, physically, up and down her spine, in delayed reaction oh and hey,
she's talking while she searches through the chaos for his goddamned book, too fast, and all disjointed so that the story sounds like a trip, has all the logic of a hallucination or a dream.
"So like, I met this táltos named Táltos in this bookstore and he was like: bet you my left asscheek and I was all: whole ass or nothing, bud, and anyway I found this all the way on the bottom shelf, like out of order and everything and - "
If he gets far enough into the room and turns around he may discover that the back of her bedroom door is absolutely covered with photographs, snapshots, even fucking hipster fucking Polaroids of faces she's known and people she's met and places she's loved and bars she's ruined and nights she can't forget and will never remember. If he gets far enough into the room and turns around: which may not happen tonight -
because she doesn't really have to search for the present. She knows exactly where it is (on the windowsill) and picks it up and walks back to him and holds it out to him (at arm's length, because: she's human, she's hungry, he is making her ache with desire) and it is a very small, rather old, rather thin volume entitled only
Poésies
Aimé Foinpré
"I saw it," this quick movement of her mouth, this direct look. Her eyes are dark, her pupils are huge. " - and thought of you."
HawksleyEven with his teeth on her skin, Hawksley can smile. And he does, a flashing grin that she can feel but not see, when she informs him that this is why he has to go. This: because if he stays, it seems to go without saying between the two of them that he would stay in her bed. Because if he stays, and if he stays in her bed, she won't sleep. And she needs sleep, doesn't she? She's not fasting from sleep.
Hawksley makes a low noise, a rumble or a growl, reaching for her with his free hand. His palm intends to cup around her lowermost ribs, spread over her side, her stomach, skim upward over her breast, he doesn't fucking know yet because he hasn't gotten past the intention just to touch her. No, he has no idea what's happening her body now. He wants to feel it anyway. He wants to find out.
Then he gets stabbed in his goddamn hand.
He forgot about the spikes.
"Jesus!" he swears, pulling his hand back in a shot from her torso, his head back from her shoulder. It isn't bad. The spikes aren't meant to break skin at a glance, aren't razor-sharp despite how they gleam. He's laughing, breathing the laughter out, but it's enough to keep him from, well -- walking inside and shutting the door behind them and fuck her fast and fuck the ritual and fuck everything, he's going to kiss her and he's going to urge her to that bed, down on it, and she wouldn't want him to stop then, he can feel it in his bones.
But he stabs himself on her bustier and is laughing, shaking his head, exhaling a hard breath. He's lightheaded, though not dizzy. He puts the mound of his hand to his mouth to suck briefly and comfortingly on the pink mark there, but he seems to enjoy it, so there's that. They enter her room.
--
Which is a treasure chest. He wants to go through everything. Hawksley is not the tidiest person, Sera knows that from his hotel room, but he also has someone coming in occasionally to make sure that things are in order. He also went to boarding school, and it was an all-boy's boarding school, and it's a rare all-boy's boarding school even in this day and age that does not inflict some vaguely military-themed order and organization on the young men in attendance. Essentially, Hawksley knows how to make a bed and clean up after himself, even if he generally doesn't choose to and doesn't need to because he has a Collins. But there's a cleanness to him, a smoothness, that suggests he might not ever live quite like this.
He sniffs. He looks around. He wants to poke about but there's not really any time for that. Partly because, stabbed hand or no, he spies the zipper to Sera's fuck-the-world-for-trying corset along her back and his eyes are keen on it, watching it glint and watching the tab tap against the leather for too long of a moment. He wonders to himself if she'd like him behind her. He blinks slowly, consideringly,
hey a frog-thing.
Hawksley blinks again and stays near the door. She's babbling about something regarding some guy's left asscheek. He is as absolutely shameless about standing there with a neglected erection as he is about anything else. As he is about staring at her as she moves, staring at her as she comes back, a naked, heedless hunger in his eyes.
No wonder when she comes back, she holds the book out at arm's length. His eyes look like wall clouds, heavy and low and dark, turning on conflict of heat and cold rather than mere gravity. Hawksley's look is ravenous and about to break, so like casting a steak at a guard dog, she thrusts a book at him. He doesn't look at it for a moment, then slowly, slowly, his eyes drop to investigate. His hand comes up, takes the book, and he gets this little thoughtful line between his eyebrows as he peers at it.
And then he turns it over, looking at the back, though there is nothing there. He turns it over again, and then opens it at random, carefully, carefully carefully like someone used to handling very old things and why not, he said something about Egypt. He reads a line and breathes in, deep, holds it a moment, then slowly exhales. It's like he's smoking something, but no; nothing here to smoke right now. Just this.
When his eyes come back up to hers its quick as freefall, feels sharply sudden.
"Thank you," he tells her, for: thinking of him. For the book. And holding the thin volume in one hand, he reaches out his other and takes hers and draws it swiftly, smoothly upward, bowing his head over it and kissing her between the knuckles of her first two fingers. No polite thing, this; his lips are warm and full there, press there and linger, his eyes closing with this firm, ferocious gesture. He sips the air when he releases her, lowering her hand before releasing it, opening his eyes to her once more.
--
An impasse.
--
"I'm going to go."
Not: I should and certainly not I want. Just: I am. I will.
His eyebrows lift. "See you again soon?"
SerafíneThat shamelessness is something they share so thoroughly it must be etched into their skin, tattooed into their bones. Like the privilege that he wears so openly and thoroughly he never sees the skin of it laid over himself, which she masks in her way but cannot ever conceal. At least, not from his avian gaze.
So it is something else entirely that has her standing there as he presses his mouth between her first and second knuckles, with her eyes averted from him, cut sharply stage right and focused on the worn edge of her cluttered vanity and the strange shadow of her reflection in the furthermost of the triptych mirrors above it.
The kiss is not courtly. It is so warmly intimate that she remembers the heat of his breath and the pressure of his mouth between her thighs in vivid, immediate, visceral detail. And when he lets her hand go, well, she snatches it back with the same speed and energy he displayed when he caught the heel of his palm on those spikes on her bustier. Not because she's wounded, no, but because if she does not pull her hand back, it'll fall to his waist and be joined by its mate and she will undo his belt if he is wearing a fucking belt and then the button tab on his khakis with a hungry and thorough efficiency and then he will no longer be
so woefully neglected.
--
Oh, impasse.
If she knew about things like oppositional forces and magnetic fields and if she were able to think about anything in these spare moments except how to keep breathing and how much she wants him and how the pressure of his mouth on her hand lingers after he has released her and she has pulled back and the care and exacting thoroughness with which he handles that book and opens it to examine and inhale a single page and the care and the thoroughness with which he will explore her, fucking inhale her page by page, and the memory of the heat of his chest against her spine, well: she might think the word polarity.
It might be on her tongue.
But something else is on her tongue and its the memory of his mouth and she cannot find her way around it to tell him to go or to stay, to wish him good night or good morning so it is lucky for both of them that he wills the break in their fucking stalemate. See: he says, "I'm going to go."
And she says, nothing.
Oh, but her gaze finally spikes back to his with the question, and by then he's taken a step or two backwards and she's taken a step or two forwards and she's bringing her hand to her mouth without thinking and reaching for the door to hold it like a shield wall between them.
He says, "See you again soon?"
And this time she has to answer and her eyes find and spark on his and her mouth curls,
"Oh, very soon."
The edge of her smile is wry as she leans bodily into the door, beginning to push it closed behind him. And the last he sees of her that night is Sera closing her teeth over her second knuckle just above where he kissed her. Tongue touching her skin where his mouth lingered.
The door shuts with a solid click and the upstairs hall is dark and the scent of marijuana curls up the stairwell from downstairs and someone made a joke and someone is laughing but it is that quiet laughter fills a room and from the low places up and left alone in her room Sera turns around, her shoulderblades cutting back sharp against the layers of photographs tacked and taped and glued and papered to the door. Palms flat against the door, her whole body leaning into it like she has to hold him out or herself in.
As he turns to head downstairs, this thud thud as she slams her head back against the door. Jesus Christ she should not have invited him up to her room.
