Ivan Press

[Hilary] The truth is,

she's not incapable of feeling attachment. Of becoming fond of someone. Of wanting to see someone again and again just because they're them and she's her and it feels good, somehow -- she thinks -- to be around them. She is not unable to understand other people entirely. She is not so broken that she cannot ever, in any way, connect.

Some charges jump through the air, flying spark to spark. But erratically, and rarely, and weakly. She is broken, shattered visibly, snapped deeply. It doesn't mean there's not still a current.


On Sunday morning she slept in, texted Ivan because he said come find me when he's gone, and later he groused at her, only half-teasingly, about how rude she'd been. She pulled away because something writhed and thrashed in her when he laid down atop her, and that doesn't happen every time there's weight on her and she doesn't think she's claustrophobic but it seemed to set off a chain reaction, failure upon failure, until it wasn't even worth trying anymore to get back to the one single time when she can let go enough that she feels a little human. That he seems to see her as a little bit human.

Hilary lies curled up in the backseat of the Maserati for a long time after hanging up on Ivan. She can't even remember the vast majority of things they said to each other, so she can't replay it all in her mind. She remembers the sex on his couch, the view, the feeling of his hand on her neck and his teeth in her skin, and she remembers the brief flicker of calm when they finished, struggling like a candle in rain to stay lit and then snuffing out with a hiss as she drew off of him, off of the couch, away, not willing to even be touched.

She remembers smiling as she fed him a dollop of dressing from her fingertip and the way he asked for more garlic, which really was more than she thought was necessary but okay, a little more garlic in the dressing. The precision of chopping, of mincing, of slicing, the beauty of those hard, sharp knives, the meditative speed of it, the muscle memory triggered by wrapping her hand around the grips as much as the smell of butter browning and the sound of water boiling. She remembers thinking of course he'll see I'm sharing something with him, how could he not see that I'm letting him in even without getting fucked first, I'm letting him cook with me, why doesn't he understand that?

She remembers wanting to lie in his bed again and be with him there, and she of course couldn't tell him that because he'd ask why, why, why, every time she speaks or moves he wants to know why, she can never just want, she can never just be, and it's exhausting what he tries to do to her, and surely he knows it, she told him she couldn't stand to be around him all afternoon and evening on his boat

and he questioned that, too. Why. Why not. Why can't you be human. Why can't you be sane. Why can't you just do what I want, why are you wrong, why are you like this.


Because, she finally said, of what I saw and don't remember seeing. Because all I remember is one day my brother was there and he was so much older and I loved him, I loved him and then he was gone and nobody ever talked to me about him again and sometimes I forget what he looked like, sometimes I forget what his name was, but he was my whole world and all the good in it and then all the good in the world had been swallowed away.

Because, she didn't say, sometimes I daydream about being cut open, throat to groin, and having everything in me taken out, organs and blood and everything but bone. Cleaned out. Sewn back up. Hollow, and not so uncomfortable in my own skin. Because, she didn't tell him, when my caretaker found my collection of dead animals in the garden she didn't say a word but buried them, and then watched me until she saw me trying to pick up another dead bird from the sidewalk and asked

why are you doing that?

And I didn't know what to say, I was only six. How do I know why I'm always bored? How should I know the answers to these questions, I can't even tell the difference between sorrow and laughter when someone has tears in their eyes. I'm seventeen and I'm talented but nobody chooses me for their performances because they say I'm passionate about dance but cold to everyone, I'm 'difficult to work with' even though I have very good manners, and how can you ask me why? I don't know. I don't know. I don't know.


Eventually she drives away. She goes to the apartment downtown and Tomas is there. Labor Day tomorrow. She spends some time with him and when she gets out of the shower later her tells her that Dion's assistant send a mass text letting pertinent people know that he had landed in Rome and would be going into the countryside. No way of communicating for some time, please send all missives to

da da da da da.

She lays back on the couch in her robe and asks her stepson if he wants dessert, and he does. He always does. Such a sweet tooth, that sweet boy, so fucking sweet, so good,

such a good boy.


Once again it's she who comes to him after the meltdown, but it's not days and even weeks later. The sun has gone down and Chicago is finally cooling off and for all she knows he's back on his boat out in the middle of Lake Michigan entertaining his friends. So she sends him a text message, and when it's gone she sets the phone on the little table on the terrace. Hilary, once Winchester, first name tucked away like a locket under her shirt, stands by the railing with her hands curled around the iron, watching Chicago's dayshift wind down and the nightshift come to life. So far up, so far away, she feels like she and the rest of them are in different worlds, on different planets, parts of different species.

Somewhere, Ivan's phone lights up and sometime later he gets the message, free of musing and free of understanding and free of tone, from whatever name he has her number under:

I'm sorry for insulting you. But you don't make it easy for me to be around you.

[Ivan] The problem, the fundamental problem on Ivan's end, is that he simply can't understand the sort of person Hilary is. He's perhaps as unused to lasting relationships as she is -- perhaps even more incapable of such bonds -- but it's only a similarity of symptom, not of cause. His causes lie in the opposite spectrum altogether: a result not of coldness, or distance, or emotional hollowness, but of something a little closer to overindulge. Inability to stop indulging.

Everything is out there for him. Everything has its price, and not a one unaffordable.

So: he makes friends easily. Surrounds himself with an ever-changing parade of people. Forms bonds easily. Moves on just as easily. Always interested, always latching on to the next thing, always a whirl of fleeting attachments, always looking for and finding something newer, better, brighter, more fascinating.

It's hard for him to understand how her mind works. How everything for her is so much more distant, as though grasped at through a thick shroud. How something in her broke because it was brutalized when she was too young; how her distance is the result of ruin, not riches. How in the end, she's not empty or utterly incapable, but simply --

fractured somehow. Detached, and perhaps adrift.


So he sees what he sees of her, and he draws his own conclusions based on his own experience. For him to behave the way she does, he would have to be utterly disinterested, utterly bored and uncaring and incapable of caring. So he makes that basic, fatal, but so frequent assumption of the young: that the world is as he is. That there can be no other way but his.

And he thinks she's not even human, except in those fleeting wrenching moments when he can see that

she is.


He's not even home when she texts him. Home is vast and empty with no servants, no friends, no lovers, and Ivan is so easily bored. Or perhaps it's just easy for him to feel lonely and want the company of others. Either way, he's elsewhere, he's at some sky-high lounge bar with some friends he just made tonight, and it's a casino, and there are women with bare skin everywhere, and there are cards in his hand. When his phone buzzes in his pocket he doesn't look at it for a while. His phone is always buzzing. Someone wants to go clubbing. Someone has tickets to a concert. Someone is going to a gallery opening and someone else wants to scuba-dive and and and ...

when he does check his phone, it's between hands and the dealer is shuffling, and Ivan is excusing himself from the game to drop down on some squareish, ultrasoft memory-foam impersonation of a couch. It's comfortable. It sucks him in, and the lighting is dim and the colors shift and he's had a few drinks. The screen of his phone lights up when he looks at it. The name is simply:

Hilary

He hesitates just a second before he opens the message up. It's an apology. He frowns as he looks at it, and then he answers. A text comes through first:

I know.

No further explanation; no indication of what, even, he's replying to. A moment later, though, her phone begins to ring. He's calling. When she picks up, she can hear ambient noise in the background, a hundred conversations between strangers at varying states of inebriation.

"I'm at the Vertigo Sky. Why don't you come out?"

[Hilary] "That sounds nausea-inducing," she informs him.

When she answered, she said little more than his name. She's still out on the terrace, but he can't tell how quiet it is because of the noise on his end. He might think her answer is dismissal. Ugh. No. Why would I want to go there? Or he might realize she's only commenting on the name: it sounds lovely and hip until you think of how vertigo actually feels.

Another person, even one with, say, Ivan's limited interest in the feelings of others, would consider her stepson and whether or not she ought to invite him along, or beg off in order to make sure he's not alone. But all the Durantes are, in their ways, solitary folk. Tomas may not care. Hilary may just not think he might be lonely if she leaves him alone.

She doesn't mention where she is or who she's with to Ivan, though. He would ask her a half dozen questions, she's sure.

"Does your earlier promise still stand?" she asks. "No more questions today?" She sounds like she's teasing. Maybe. Probably, since she doesn't wait for an answer. "I'll be there in awhile."

End of the conversation, if he lets it be.

[Ivan] She doesn't wait for an answer, but he answers anyway --

"Yes."

And then she says she'll be there in a while. He doesn't bother to tell her that there's a dress code here, that everyone looks sharp. She never looks dowdy. Even if she were capable of it, she wouldn't be the sort of Fang she is if she didn't know what to wear to an establishment like this.

So, instead: "I'll see you soon."


The Vertigo lounge, as it turns out, is situated atop the Dana hotel. The decor is muted, warm wood and dark colors; curving furniture; bright lights over the game tables stacked with chips and cards and dice. Here and there, large, round globes of light hover like so many artificial moons: suspended from the ceiling, embedded in the furnishings.

The view is fantastic, but in all honesty, not as good as the one from Ivan's living room.

All the waitresses are in black. The clientele is a little more varied, but cocktail dresses and blazers are the norm. Ivan is perhaps the most dressed-down fellow there. They let him in anyway. It's possible he does it on purpose, just to see what he can get away with. His look borders on grunge: grey, grey, blue and grey. Jeans so distressed they look caked in mud; a slim-fitting waistcoat in some dusty shade of grey over a faded blue-grey shirt lightly checked in black. His sleeves are rolled up. He looks wide-shouldered, slim-waisted; he's smoking, and it's entirely likely he's already told the management to simply put the fine on his tab.

It should surprise no one that he's a good player. He's a good reader of men; he's an unparalleled liar. The stack of chips in front of him is high. He sits facing the entryway, though, and this may be purposeful. When Hilary appears, his eyes flick up from his cards to make eye contact.

Then down again. Ivan ashes his cigarette -- it's one of those clove cigarettes again, almost nauseatingly strong. Then he tosses a few more chips on the table. It doesn't look like a high-stakes game. Most of his fellow players look like off-duty corporate drones, office boys, geeks and yuppies and MBAs a little more cautious with their money in this uncertain financial climate. As far as Ivan is concerned, they're playing for pennies. He makes some comment to the table that raises a few eyebrows, then rises from it mid-hand to cross the room to Hilary.

[Hilary] When Hilary does arrive, everyone knows it. She doesn't come in with an entourage, as Ivan often does, surrounded by friends and hangers-on and servants as devoted as personal slaves. But she arrives downstairs in a long, gleaming Maybach driven by a young man who was hired partly on the basis of his ethnicity. His name is Antony. Guess where his family is from. He's in a sharp, formal chaffeur's uniform, black hat down to black leather driving gloves. The collar is a bit on the modern side, the tie long and skinny, but these are details only the person who picked them out likely cares about.

When he pulls up to the entrance of the Dana, Antony hops out of the car and walks smartly around the front to open the back door. She's not the only person who's arrived in style. She's the only gorgeous, purebred kin of Falcon that's arrived tonight, in style or otherwise. Even the mortals who can't sense that spiritual touch on her notice her because of it, all the same. They notice her because she's tall and leggy and aging better than any of them have a hope to. They notice her because she's rich and sensual and there's something right on the edge between warm and sexual in that smile of hers as she exits the car and says something nobody can hear to her chaffeur.

After Hilary gets out of the car, nobody remembers what happens to it. Or to the man driving it. They're watching her silhouette, they're focused on the cut of her shoes' thin strap around her ankle, they're dizzied every time she takes a step and that slit in her skirt appears, showing a daring glimpse of that creamy thigh and almost, if she'd take her steps a little wider, almost --

By the time Hilary walks through the lobby and enters the elevator nobody who saw her can remember what color her dress is.


The door opens again and it's like the wave of attention from downstairs has followed her up here, ripples out from her as she walks out onto the floor with its discreetly bold (possible, yes) patterning. She walks through the room lit by false moonlight in a dress so tight that without that slit up her thigh it's likely she would scarcely be able to walk in it, in heels best described as lethal, a neckline that lends to the illusion of breasts that are warm, soft handfuls to any man in here who might imagine tugging that bodice down and touching her.

She carries a small clutch, her hair down in thick waves, her lips some dark color offset by the paleness of her skin. There's not a drop of jewelry on her hands or wrists or throat. Her earrings are small, unnoticable things. It isn't the flash or the wealth that brings her all the attention she gets. It's her. And it takes a moment for Ivan to notice

her dress is a deep, dark blue, and made of some fabric that, when hit just right by the light, reminisces of twilight. Or the moments just before sunrise, all colors contained in that endless indigo.

She doesn't make eye contact when Ivan flicks his eyes up from his cards. She's looking around. Presumably, she's looking for him. She notices him when he walks over to her, and suddenly the two of them are the center of the room, the hot swirling point of a singularity, with all their mad perfection.

Hilary looks him over with open appraisal, meaningless because it is just a Look, it is an affectation, and she is not making any real judgement after all. She's not even really looking at him. But to all eyes, even his, she's giving him a once-over as though to decide if he's worth her time.

"And what exactly would you have me do here?" she asks him, by way of Hello. "Sit on your lap and blow on your dice?"

[Ivan] There's a ripple of stillness following Hilary. Conversations left hanging; eyes following her. From curb, to lobby, to elevator, to lounge: a wash of silence. It's not her jewels. It's not even what she's wearing, except in that it accentuates what she is. Who she is. How she looks.

And -- let's be honest, now -- she looks good. This is no tittering ingenue, no airheaded early-twenties starved swan. The ring she's not wearing would have told the world she's taken; even without it, they can sense experience. Sensuality. Warmth, imagined or otherwise.

This is the woman Ivan fucked, earlier. And then fought with. And somewhere in the middle, cooked with. And then was nearly slapped by.

This is the woman he goes to meet now, and somehow it's easier like this: in public, where both of them are wearing masks. Where they play their roles, and he isn't tempted to ask why. Why. Why are you like this. Why. She looks at him like she's appraising him. He looks at her -- walks to her -- speaks to her -- like he thinks he has a chance. Like he knows he has a chance.

She asks if he expects her to blow on his dice. He laughs: sudden and bold, white teeth, fearless.

"Of course not," he says. "I'm sure the others wouldn't mind if you joined our game. Or we can have a drink and take off. I'll just forfeit my chips. It's bad manners to leave while you're winning, and all."

[Hilary] Fucked twice, if he's honest.

They're safe here from that: fucking and honesty, both. He's not driven to try and break her down so he can see inside her and she's not tempted to do so. No whys. He promised. She expects him to break it.

Hilary's weight is on one leg, her hip curved out, her chin up a little. "I'm wretched at poker," she says dryly. "I play nothing but pure chance, and there's no such thing. I'm going to the bar."

Which she does, turning and heading that way. "You can finish your game, if you like," she adds, without looking back at him.

[Ivan] Earlier, Ivan berated Hilary -- only half-jokingly -- about hauling him off his yacht. As though it weren't his choice to leave. As though he hadn't told her to come find him as soon as her husband was gone.

Perhaps it means something that this time, he willingly leaves his poker game. He goes back to the table, but only long enough make his excuses and to see to it that the dealer distributes his chips amongst the rest. Faces light up. How universally well-liked Ivan is is only partly on account of his charisma. The rest is something akin to social bribery.

Regardless, he joins her at the bar soon after. He still has his cognac. He grazed on sushi earlier. Lean and long, he slides easily onto the barstool beside hers, his back to the bartop, facing the lounge.

"Thanks for coming out," he says. It sounds offhand -- then he looks at her. He's serious.

[Hilary] By the time Ivan arrives at the bar Hilary is drinking something bright red and only slightly viscous. She sips from a pair of tiny stirring straws, leaving her painted lips unmarred. As he sits with her, she turns her eyes on him but not her body.

The glass goes back to its coaster, cubes of ice clinking together inside. She looks like she has nothing to say to that, which is perhaps why she doesn't. Eventually Hilary looks away from him again, picking up her drink and sipping from the straws again. She sets it back down, looking at the liquid and the flowing patterns it makes against the inside of the glass.

"That wretch Christian told his little girlfriend he fucked me," she says, sounding irritable. "I expect any day now he'll go running to the elder to prostrate himself in hopes that she can alleviate his guilt by punishing him for it. Nevermind what havoc that wreaks on my own life."

She drinks again. "They don't teach young men discretion anymore," she complains. Glances past her white shoulder at him thoughtfully. "You had good instruction. You're lucky."

[Ivan] Another man -- one who's already professed his interest, professed the pain that causes him to think of this woman growing tired of him -- would doubtlessly be angry now. Some part of Ivan wonders, if only for a second or two, if this was some sort of pop quiz. Some test to see if he'll keep his promise, or if he'll explode into a rage of whys now.

It's only a second. Two. She's not like that. Hilary Durante is many things, but she is not, in the end, a passive-aggressive little manipulator.

At any rate, Ivan isn't angry. Or jealous. Or even particularly surprised to hear that she bedded Christian. He laughs, and then he says -- unhelpfully -- "What did you expect? He can't even buy cigarettes, and he's got a bad case of puppy love. Who's the girlfriend?"

[Hilary] She sighs as he laughs, unoffended. "I thought I made it very clear to him that secrecy was of utmost importance!" she says, waving a hand. "If I find out I'm pregnant I should tell him it's his just to punish the little shit."

Hilary takes a long drink, then gives Ivan a raised eyebrow. "Who do you think? Your little duckling. He's infatuated. She called me some time ago just to tell me he'd told her, and to tell me she 'likes him' and to 'be careful'." Her eyes roll as she takes another drink. "Gaia below, why don't they fuck and get it over with?"

[Ivan] This time, Ivan does bat an eyelash. He blinks, and then he laughs aloud. "She's hardly the pristine little paragon of virtue herself," he says.

"Don't worry. If he goes to Katherine about it, I doubt she'll run to your husband. She has to see that she has absolutely nothing to gain and everything to lose. Why would she want to tell an Adren that her own packmate trespassed on his territory right under her nose?"

[Hilary] "Considering the way she's constantly fantasizing about me when I'm talking to her, I thought as much," is Hilary's reply to that. Well, at least she's not so dense she can't see infatuation when it's there. Maybe it's the way Cordelia siiighs all the time. Or the way she blushes. Or the way she calls Hilary lovely, lovely. The way that Christian's adoration of Cordelia is about as obvious as Cordelia's ambivalence in return.

"Fuck my husband's retaliation, it's trouble and hassle I don't need or want." She's scowling now, and drinks again. Turns to look at Ivan. "So I take it you had the duckling, finally? How did it taste? Savory?"

[Ivan] Ivan lifts his glass of cognac, looking down through its bottom for a moment before raising it; sipping. "I wouldn't be so blithe about Dion," he says; he doesn't bother to try to pronounce it correctly. "He looked ready to kill the night he almost caught us together, and he had only suspicion and paranoia to go off."

He huffs a laugh, then, setting his glass back down. "Not that it's your business," he says, "but no, I haven't, actually. Rather like Miss Alexander, talk of feelings and attachments came up. Meanwhile, all the while she's juggling her own little plateful." His sigh is melodramatic. "Women. Such hypocrites. Present company excluded, of course."

[Hilary] "He'd still be here if he were still able to tolerate his own obsession," Hilary says flatly. "He wouldn't dare let himself get angry enough to do anything to me when I might be pregnant, or might become so, and at very worst would divorce me and shove me off on another. And if he goes after Christian, well."

She takes a drink. "I did tell him to be discreet."


Her legs uncross as she turns on her barstool, recross when she's facing Ivan's profile, going on to talk of women and feelings and hypocrisy. "Miss Alexander?" she says, confused, then: "Oh, Erika. The wounded pigeon with all the scars. Of course."

Of course she would categorize people like that. Dismissively, coldly, cruelly. So what if the Adren goes after the sub-Cliath? So what if jealous blood is spilled for no reason but someone attempting to be honorable? She's safe. She won't be harmed. She's too valuable. Nothing bad will ever happen to her again. She'll be taken care of.

Hilary offers her glass for a toast. "Men. Emotional wrecks. Present company excluded, of course."

Perhaps.

[Ivan] "You speak like frenzy is a choice," Ivan says lightly, but leaves it at that.

Wounded pigeon, she goes on. His lips quirk. Little falcon. Wounded pigeon. Starved swan. Duckling. Rooster. The woman clearly sees the world as an aviary, he thinks, and lifts his glass to her ironic toast. "At least the switchover happens after the fuck," he counters, his glass tapping against Hilary's lightly. "In my case, I never even get that far before emotions crop up. Maybe I should play both teams."

On that note, he drains his cognac, sets the glass down.

"Well. Shall we have another round? Or should we go someplace for nice, unattached, emotionless fuckery?"

The way they're dressed -- the way she's dressed -- and the way they comport themselves, hold themselves: they make the things they say to each other shocking. Downright fucking scandalous.

[Hilary] Frenzy, Ivan says, the word glib off his silver tongue, and Hilary gives a half-roll of her eyes, waving her hand at the word in the air as though to sweep it off the conversational table. Bothersome thing.

She must be mad. But he knew that already.

"I think I'm just luckier than you are," she says. "I haven't bothered fucking women for a long time now." She drinks after their toast, but doesn't knock it back to finish it. There's ice in that glass. So she sips from those straws. "I pity the girl that thinks you're a good match for a devoted lover, though," she muses, as he's finishing off his cognac.

Ivan suggests a choice between more drinks and more sex. She turns her head and looks at him again, not answering for a moment. She seems to be considering something. Maybe just the choice. Her mouth lowers to the straws again, wrapping around them. The fluid level hits nothing but red-tinted ice, and she sets the glass down on the coaster once more, still watching him.

"I suppose we could try."

[Ivan] Perhaps that should offend him. They're the last of a dying race, after all. It's their duty to breed. Continue the line. And so on, and so forth. Ivan merely shrugs, though. Smooth-motioned, fluid, graceful creature. Inhuman. That much is evident, always -- even with such little rage, even with such clever trappings and disguises.

"Me too," he says, and stands. "I suppose you drove here? Do you want to follow me, or ride with me?"

[Hilary] Odd thing she is, married and mated woman, talking so blithely about giving her husband a child to get him to leave her alone, to manipulate him into letting her get away with things. For her to talk of Ivan's insuitability as a devoted lover is somewhat laughable, and he would not be in the wrong to point this little logical flaw out to Hilary. But perhaps when the pot calls the kettle black it's more a case of the pot understanding the kettle faster, and better, than everyone who tries to tell him he's some other color.

They try to paint him pink and lilac, from the sound of it. Or at least a mysterious and sexy shade of red.

These two are bullshitting themselves if they make unattached and emotionless into the same thing when they know very well they're not. Either way it's bad news. They're good for no one, and that doesn't make them good for each other. But here they are. They've finished their drinks and Hilary got all dressed up to come out tonight but she doesn't seem all that attached to the idea of staying out and playing a few games of cards. She's got little to no ability to read other people; poker is not her game.

She watches him stand and offers him her hand so he can be a gentleman and help her off her stool. Hilary does this as thoughtlessly as he probably takes it, playing the part, filling the role out like he wears all those expensive suits of his. Her dress reveals her leg again, her heels accentuate them, her bodice flashing the curves of her small breasts without making it seem like she's trying too hard. It makes her look curvier than she is, makes her look elegant and almost

almost

accessible. Touchable. Reachable. It's like the way a carnivorous plant will wear the bright colors and soft look of a flower, pretending to be a safe place to land.

"I came in the Maybach," she tells him, not that he knows she came to the Silver Fang moot in the same fashion, or that this means she was chaffeured. "Antony will pick me up where I tell him to. When I tell him to."

A step closer, her fingers stroking between his a moment, her body held an inch or two from touching his. Her voice is softer now, for discretion. For privacy. "Maybe you'll let me suck your cock this time," she murmurs, trying not to sound hopeful, as though she's a child suggesting maybe maybe maybe we could go get ice cream.

[Ivan] Of course Ivan offers his hand. He plays that role like he wears his clothes, and while what he's wearing isn't a silk suit tonight, isn't sleek and dark and cut so beautifully to his sleek golden body, that doesn't make it any less expensive. Or any less tailored. Or any less sharp on him.

God, they look good. Indisputably beautiful people, both of them, in both the literal and the figurative sense. There's something to be said for pairing classic elegance with cutting-edge urban style; the twenty-first century version of those old russian novels. Experience and vitality; the venerable and the new. Or something like that.

She comes closer to him, and this is a little bit daring, a little bit dangerous. Her friends are not here tonight, and this is more a socialite's scene than proper old money, and Ivan Press has not, at least, opened the night by buying everyone poker chips. Still. It's a public place. She's a married woman, a decade or so older than him. She's standing far too close, and the way he looks at her is far, far over some invisible line, and

then he kisses, just like that, leaning across the breach. It's not a slow kiss, and not a long one, but it's firm: right on the mouth, his eyes open.

"Maybe," he says, and -- like a gentleman -- offers his arm.