Ivan Press

[Hilary] Perhaps they could sleep like this. Her skin is tacky from his cum, her sweat, his. She shifts her hips on the bed underneath Ivan, feeling him inside her, and breathes out slowly. Hilary doesn't want to sleep like this. Uncertain, filthy. Warm, close. She closes her eyes when he speaks a language she doesn't know, not entirely sure if he's saying he's with her or asking her what's wrong. She bows her head towards him, turning her face to his cheek.

No words are coming to her mind. No explanations, and no questions. She's faltering, floating, and she doesn't know how to reach out. She doesn't know how to ask him to help her, now, after the fact and after that moment of searing incandescence. So she turns her face to his as though to hide, or as though she's seeking something as blindly as a child might, as though her hands don't yet work.

Those hands caress his back, his shoulders, his neck up into his hair. "Is this the last time I can see you?" she whispers finally, because it is one of the only things she can think of, and because she is honestly wondering, and because all at once she knows she doesn't know how she'll feel about either answer.

[Ivan] A bit of a disconnect here, in truth. Ivan isn't uneasy. He isn't uncertain. He's quiet now, spent, satiated, satisfied. He feels warm and close to Hilary. He feels --

well. Good. Which is rare, in truth, when the two of them meet.

Then she speaks. And his eyes open again. His brow furrows; he brings his hand to her face. His thumb strokes the arch of her cheekbone. It's slow; it's thoughtful. Some time passes before he answers her.

"I want to see you again. As long as you want to see me, I want to see you." A pause; and then a crueler truth. "But I might not want to bed you later. You shouldn't take it personally."

[Hilary] She knows that disconnect all too well. The languor in her body, the warmth, the sense of rightness and care and familiarity that is at once the cure and the cause of her creeping dread. That sense of quietude, of satisfaction, that for some reason terrifies her this time. It's never been like this before.

There's been two ways about it: the way she fucks when she's detached, when she goes through the motions and gets off and essentially uses him, so distant she may as well be giving him a pity fuck. And then there's the way it has been so many other times, when he ties her up or bends her over, when he bites her and slaps her until her ass is pink, when he fucks her so hard he feels like a savage, when in the aftermath she seems so peaceful, so calm. So human.

And unafraid.

It's never been like this, though. Somewhere in between. Present but not tranced, here but not blissful. She has a hold of herself but oh, she's afraid she'll drop herself, and she doesn't know quite where she'll fall. The urge to retreat is all but overpowering; the fact that Ivan is still so close to her right now is simultaneously prolonging the torture of uncertainty and keeping her from running back to the comfort of inhumanity. Monstrosity, even.

She shivers, and kisses him thoughtlessly, her lips over his face. It's a strange reaction; it's not a reaction at all so much as a sort of flailing, a grasping at anything that might anchor her, ground her, help her. There is no way he can understand what this feels like. There's no way she can explain to him why it is the way it is. He feels good, and perhaps concerned for her because it's becoming clearer by the moment that something's off. Hilary feels good, and doesn't know what to do with it.

Somehow she manages to stop herself from saying that if he's not going to fuck her there's no point. Somehow she manages not to descend, to spiral downwards instantly into her own rage, pulling that anger up like a twister pulls up everything it touches. She huffs a laugh, through those trailing kisses over his jawline.

"How could I not take that personally?"

Then, sudden, her hands tighten where they rest on him: in his hair, on his back. Her legs wrap more closely around him. "Don't leave. Please don't. Please don't be angry. Don't leave."

[Ivan] That sudden kiss is on him like a storm. He has only time to react, to reciprocate; not to understand. When it's over she wants to know how she can not take that personally, laughing ruefully all the while, and he hasn't thought of what to say yet when she's on him again. Like a storm. Like a whirlwind of emotion, one flashing to the next.

Ironically, he was never about to leave her. It's her sudden grasping, her sudden needfulness, that makes him more uncomfortable than anything else. Ivan's hand comes up to squeeze gently at her bicep, smooth down her back.

"I'm not angry," he says. "I'm not leaving. Please don't ... please don't need me like this."

A moment or two. He answers her, then: "The baby isn't you. It's not you that I might find ... less attractive." A pause. "I know that isn't much comfort."

[Hilary] She relents. As sudden as she held to him, Hilary loosens. Her legs unwrap from him a bit, her arms unwinding, her fingers loosening. She takes her face away from his. There's distance between them now, though it's measured in centimeters.

Ivan's right, though. It isn't much comfort. It isn't less painful, somehow, to know that the thing she hates has one more strike against it. One more thing it's taking away. One more thing it's ruining for her.

And really, when you strip Hilary down to the things she needs, the things she actually wants, she's not wearing diamonds and silk. She isn't driving a Jaguar or Maserati. She isn't staying at Trump Tower or lounging on the deck of a yacht named for the paradise she was supposedly sent from. It's possible she might just be holding her hand over someone else's, guiding them in pouring cream into a sauce, letting herself be mesmerized by the slow swirl of white into saffron. It's possible that she's just moving, all elongated limbs and swanlike curves to each pose, and nobody's analyzing, nobody's asking questions, they're just watching.

Or maybe she's alone, and there's no blame there, no pleasure, only beauty. Beauty and solitude.


When one gets right down to it, she doesn't know how to do this. Whatever it is he wants from her. Not without it turning to this: her devouring, all-encompassing need. Her consuming anger. She doesn't know how to hold herself together, and Ivan can't keep gathering up the pieces, can't keep them close enough for her to fill in the gaps. His grasp isn't big enough for that. No one's is. No one's should have to be.

Hilary kisses him softly now, her hand on his cheek. She opens her eyes, and looks at him. Eyes not so much like a sun-dappled forest floor now, more mutable, darker. Hers never change color. Light rarely touches them.

"My body is how you get to me," she says, potentially not knowing just how true that is of her, how true it is of almost everyone, no matter how cerebral or disconnected they may be, how distant they may feel. "Let's not talk about it anymore. I'd like to shower."

[Ivan] This time he's the one reaching out to her. He's the one holding on to her. Pulling her back. Drawing her back, even if she never started turning away.

And it's okay like that. He can handle that. He can handle needing someone else. It's the other way around that terrifies him.

"The baby isn't your body, either. It's separate. It's another person." A parasite, Hilary might think. A parasite, Ivan might think. Neither of them say it aloud, though. "When it's gone from you, you'll still be here. Right here.

"And until then," he adds, quieter, "I'll find another way to get to you."

[Hilary] As of yet, Hilary hadn't begun to push herself up on her elbows, push him away, try to extricate herself from his body and his bed so she could go use his shower and his towels. The intimation of motion was there, the beginning of muscular tension beneath the less tangible tension in her. But it never finds expression those long, lovely limbs of hers. She glitters even in the dark when she moves, when her head turns or she shifts slightly, covered in the jewels and precious metals that he likes to see on her, as though that accentuates that she doesn't belong to him even as he makes her his.

It doesn't disturb her, really, to be needed. The fact that the thing inside her -- parasite -- needs her does not upset or unnerve her as much as annoy her on a peripheral, thoughtful level. It needs her to eat more. Take these pills. Rest. Fine, fine.

It doesn't disturb her at all for Ivan to reach out, to hold her to him, to keep her near. That, she's okay with. That feels almost natural. To respond to that sense of need from him, the way she responds when he holds her down, when he pulls her body onto his, when he does things to her that to anyone else would look like brutality, like usage, like cruelty. It isn't even about feeling needed. It's about something else entirely, something that makes her what she is, even if she can't quite put into words yet what she is for him. Or what she would like to be.

At very least, he tells her the truth. It's ugly, a far cry from the pretty lies he tells so many others. And Hilary knows it to be the truth. Ivan says the baby and she stirs, as though mentioning it, calling it out, naming it even that much makes her uncomfortable. But what he says, she knows is true: it isn't her, no matter how much it changes her.

Her eyes look up at him. It's hard to tell how much faith she has in what he says about finding some other way. Not just to find her, but to bring her together enough to bring her to himself. To have her.

Hilary kisses him again. Over and over again, tonight, because she can't help herself right now, and because she doesn't know what else to do right now, and because he's there, and because she wants to. "Okay," she whispers, and her hand leaves his face finally, slowly. It's the closest she can come right now to the trust she places in him after he ties her up and abuses her. "Okay, Ivan."

[Ivan] If she were anyone else, he wouldn't tell her these hard, cold truths. He'd tell her those pretty lies he's so very, very good at telling. No baby, of course you'll see me again. Yes baby, I still want you. Yes baby, of course I love you. Yes baby, I'll always want you. No baby, you don't look fat. No baby, it doesn't disgust me. And revolt me. And upset me. That you're carrying another man's child. He'd tell her that, if she were anyone else. And they'd fall asleep here and in the morning he'd take her back to the harbor and

he'd just stop returning her calls. And stop letting her in if she came to see him. And pretend he didn't know her if she saw him at a party.

And most girls get the message at that point, but if she didn't, if she pushed the subject, he'd set his personal assistant on her with smiles and gifts and ego-crushing counsel; he'd set his lawyer on her with court orders and injunctions; he'd set Dmitri or Evgeny or someone, one of his many People, on her to explain to her just how the world works when your resources may as well be infinite. How nobody cares if you mistreated some girl; how almost any blemish can go away with enough money; how, on the converse, doors could very well start closing for that unfortunate girl, how things could start going wrong, how she could lose jobs and friends and respect if she didn't get the picture and

just

go

away.


They are not good people. Hilary has ruined god knows how many young lives, including that of a fetus. Ivan has broken god knows how many hearts -- not with malice or with spite, but with the simple carelessness of a young man who grew up with far too much privilege and far too few boundaries, far too few genuine human attachments, far too few responsibilities.

Yet here they lie, together, and he doesn't lie to her. He tells her the truth, and because he's not a good person they're not pleasant truths. But he tells her, and he connects with her as much as she can, or he can bear to.

She looks at him. And she kisses him. And it's so hard to read her, her eyes so black and her demeanor so cool, so complete, so fractured. Okay, Ivan, she says, and her hand leaves his face.

His hand comes to hers. And he kisses her again, softly.

"We don't have to talk about it anymore. We can go shower."

[Hilary] There's a young man living in a brilliantly clever loft in downtown Chicago who can barely be called a man of any kind at all. He's only sixteen. He's too young to be living mostly on his own. He's got something of an Oedipal complex with his stepmother, one he can find a sort of twisted fulfillment in, and he doesn't know that she's pregnant yet, and it is going to drive him insane when he finds out.

There's a young woman in Paris who thought her family's pristine honor could remain intact after her mother was removed. She thought that she could make sure her father and brother were alright, with Estrella's help. She thought everything was going to be fine, that she and her brother were pure enough, beautiful enough, to carry on the family name. She seethes in France now, as this chocho blanco ruins. Everything. They had.

There's a man in Rome these days, or umbral offshoots thereof, who may one day find out that his bride is not so lovely, so innocent, so perfect for him. No matter which end of his pendulum swing of madness he's at, it will send him over the edge. He renounced his auspice as a Philodox after what he did to his first mate. Gaia only knows what he would do if he returned to the States to see his third child and found a pale-skinned, green-eyed baby in the basinet by his wife's hospital bed. Gaia only knows what he would do if he found out the mother of his child had his child by sheer luck, given her promiscuity.

Somewhere -- maybe the South, maybe California -- is an Ahroun of the tribe whose mind snaps in half and turns all his memories to mist and shadow whenever he cannot cope with what has happened, or what he has done. He has thrown himself into danger so many times he's covered in scars now, covered in the remnants of his near-death. The reason for that is that he is an Ahroun. Another reason is this goddamn woman, and what she took from him, and how she did it.

A leggy dancer with owlish glasses whose nonexistent self-esteem was further drilled into the ground by the repeated, smiling insults from Mrs. Durante. Lovely, lovely Mrs. Durante and her careful, sweet clawing at a younger woman's sense of self. The poor thing didn't know what it was like to be filled with anger until she met Hilary. Her odd little life was shaping up to be cute and quirky and dreamy and dramatic and then this woman stepped into her life and showed her just how silly and small she really is.

Oddly shaped and barely present in reality is the baby. No one knows it yet. Male, female. Mad as the rest of the family or perhaps a little saner. Doomed to die in the War or conscripted to breed for it, if the world lasts that long. It's going to come into the world on a schedule, sedated by drugs in its mother's system, not even forced to endure the initial struggle most human begins go through just to take their first breath. Mother will be this distant, beautiful figure, perhaps occasionally entertained by the child, more often foisting it onto an army of nannies and caretakers, and it will never know why its elder brother and sister hate it, never know why it has always been alone.

Hilary is not a good person. She knows it. She looks at the lives she's ruined and feels... nothing. She looks at all she has and thinks of losing it and feels... nothing.

She fears that what she's said or done might anger Ivan enough to withdraw from her, grow angry with her, leave her alone with this hole in herself he's somehow made her look at, and she panics.


Their lips meet again and again. She's soft and warm and she's stained with the scent of him. Her body proves right now that he took pleasure in her, that she made him feel good. Really good. Hilary doesn't push him up and away so she can get up and wash all of that off of her. She takes a deep breath, and waits for him to move before she does.

It's possible that it's some time before Ivan actually does. And that's okay, too. Hilary makes no sound when he slides out of her, watching him drowsily as he rolls over or stands up. But whichever it is, her hand comes to find his as she's sitting up, her fingers grazing over his fingers, then wrapping around them.

"The last time I asked you this you kicked me out," she whispers, looking at their fingers, hers so much fairer than his, "but it really isn't the only reason I wanted to see you." There's a pause, her fingertips stroking his knuckles, feeling how smooth they are compared to the knuckles of any other man of his age, any other person. "I want to do that again."

Do that, she says, as her eyes turn up to his. Do that, as though she's a participant. Not I want you to fuck me again. Not I want you to use me. I want you to take pleasure in me.

I want to do that again.

"And maybe if I get scared you can just tie up one wrist. Or my ankle. Or something."

[Ivan] There's something wrong about this. Twisted. There are people who practice bondage and domination as a lifestyle, as a pastime. Then there's Hilary, who seems to need it on a basic, intrinsic level. For whom that sort of treatment, that sort of -- abuse, really -- seems to trigger a sort of release. A sort of relief. A shelter from the everlasting storm of her own rage and fear.

When she was very young, something that mattered to her, mattered deeply, was taken away. Maybe that singular event broke her. Drove a rift into her that widened and widened until it finally fractured her. Maybe it was something else entirely; maybe she was simply born like this the way some people are born without arms. Without legs. Without conscience.

It doesn't matter how this came to be. What matters is that she's like this. She doesn't know how to change. Sometimes, when she's with Ivan, she can see how the pieces fit. She can hold herself together, if only for a while. He can help her come together.

He can't hold her together indefinitely, though. No one has that sort of strength.

Except maybe Hilary, herself.


For what it's worth, he doesn't seem disgusted. He doesn't turn away from her, revolted at the thought of needing to tie her down to allay her fears. He looks -- like he aches, suddenly. That smooth, clear brow of his furrows a little. Those fine knuckles, smooth, almost delicate, move under her fingers. His hand turns over, takes hers.

And then he shifts his grip. Grips her wrist instead, taking and keeping ahold of her. He pulls her hand to his mouth and he kisses her fingers: pulls them into his mouth, licks her fingers like he could draw some essential knowledge from the very taste of her.

"I know," he says quietly. "And I will."


They shower. She's been here before, but she was alone; they were fighting by this time, the last time she was here. He was angry at her, angry at what she makes him want, what she makes him do; angry that all she seemed to want was this. His body. His dick.

She's not alone this time. He's with her. The head is enormous by ship standards. Two sinks. A toilet. A fucking bidet. A shower, spacious, glass-walled. Plenty of lights in here; none of that darkness she feared as a child. Perhaps she wouldn't be afraid like this anyway, with Ivan with her, hot water raining down. His hands on her body, stroking her, massaging her the way he does after he works her over.

After a while, after he's cleaned himself and cleaned her, washed the sweat and the cum and the day off her skin, shampooed her hair and massaged her scalp with tender attention to detail --

after all that, he wraps his arms around her and pulls her back against him. Draws her to recline against his chest as he leans against the shower wall. There they stand for a long, long time, lingering under the shower spray.


When they finally step out of the shower, they're boneless with warmth and relaxation. He offers her a new toothbrush; toothpaste; washcloths from the cabinets near the sinks. Everything in the head is rich dark wood or gleaming glass or polished stone or satin metal; everything is clean and smooth and beautiful. Even the lighting is careful and tasteful: nothing garish, nothing glaring or stark. Bright, focal, warm, brilliant. It sets them off against the darker surroundings. It makes her reflection fucking beautiful, and once or twice she catches him looking at her, studying her with some mixture of regret and want.

They're clean when they leave the bathroom, go back to bed. Ivan strips the soiled bedspread off, leaves it on the floor for someone else to deal with. He turns down the lights, leaves only a faint glow from the bathroom, the door mostly shut. He closes the shades, sealing out the blackness outside. This would be the time to turn down the covers and go to bed, wrap each other up tenderly and sleep, but --

this is when he comes to her. She feels him before he touches her: his warmth, his very nearness, even the ever-so-weak flicker of his rage potent and palpable in darkness. He touches her: runs his hands over her arms, down her sides; between her fingers. He touches her like he's drawing her from the night itself, and eventually he turns her to face him. Moves her. Presses her to the bed, and then down on it.

When he comes down over her, he's rougher than he was last time. There's a deliberate force in the way he pushes her thighs apart. She can feel his breath on her inner thigh, and then his mouth is on her. His hands on her hips hold her down, hold her still, as he eats his fill of her. Eats at her until she's writhing. Eats at her until she's crying out, screaming, going at her until she comes,

and going at her until she comes again.

Kiss me, he tells her as he moves over her. Taste that sweet cunt. Taste how much you want me.

No invectives tonight. No dirty little sluts or fucking filthy whores. He fucks her so very hard, though: hard because she needs it like this, and hard because he needs it like this too. He fucks her athletically, savagely in the darkness, coupling with her in the black night the way their ancestors did a hundred, a thousand, ten thousand years ago. Toward the end he rises up, stands beside the bed, pulls her onto him and holds her there, hips lifted from the bed: holds her there and makes her take it, receive it, receive him as he fucks out his orgasm into her.

Afterward he's braced over her, panting in the darkness, lowering his brow to rest against hers, roll against hers, kisses her in the darkness.

The next time, he takes her from behind. The first time all night. Even this is different: both of them on all fours, mating like animals, the male covering the female. Rough. Hard.

The next time, slower. On their stomachs on the bed, pressed together and gasping. He grips her wrists at the end. Pins them to the bed over her head as he comes inside her, groaning her name into her ear, groaning that it's so good, it's so good, it's so fucking good.

The last time, face to face, side by side. Her one arm wrapped around him; her other held to the small of her back the way he'd held her earlier, over the remains of their dinner. His head bowed, his mouth to the hollow of her neck. He's at his limits. At the edge of his capability. At the end, when he comes into her again, the sounds he makes are wracked and ragged, wrecked.

Afterward, he can barely move. He falls asleep right there, just like that, and barely stirs until morning.


It's nearly noon when they finally rouse themselves from bed. The maid set breakfast out hours ago; put it away when it became apparent no one was going to eat it. Now lunch is laid out, and the sun is brilliant across the cold lake. Not a trace left of those fireworks last night, the last of the season. Perhaps there was a symbolism in that, but Ivan doesn't worry about it now. He has lunch with Hilary out in the cockpit, at the stern of the yacht. They chat lightly; inconsequential things. Mostly, he looks at her, or over the lake.

He enjoys her company as long as it lasts.

[Hilary] It may be the first time she's said anything aloud about fear. Not about being afraid of the dark as a little girl, not about being concerned about what might happen if Dion finds out she's cheated on him over and over and over again, not to mention cheated on him repeatedly with this one tribesman, this one young man who seems to captivate her. It may be the first time she's connected aloud how being bound, held down, and dominated alleviates that fear. Protects her from it.

She used to be scared of being swallowed by the dark. It doesn't bother her, though, to be caught by the wrists in someone else's strength. At least then there's something left over. At least then she isn't just... gone.

He will, Ivan says, like it's a promise. She kisses him, softly, after he kisses her hand and her fingers, licking her skin like an animal. It's a strangely tender kiss, though truth be told all of Hilary's tenderness is strange. Even then he can likely feel that uneasiness in her still, not so strong as it was. Fading, but there all the same. Maybe always there, a sort of vibratory surrender to whatever gravity keeps the pieces of her self anywhere near one another.


After awhile in the shower, Hilary turns around, her small breasts to his sculpted chest. She wraps her arms around his waist rather than tucking them in between his body and her own. She drowses against his chest, not because she's sleepy, but because, for a few minutes at least, she's still.


Once, finding his eyes on her in the mirror, Hilary gives him a faint smile. It's not much: a slight upturning at the corners of her fine lips, the sort of half-saddened, half-encouraging expression that makes her so hard to read. Even the way she smiled on the deck as fireworks burst above them was a little like this: a little faraway, a little tinged with ache. Another pair of people with intimate knowledge of one another, and she might reach over and touch his hand now. Squeeze it. Tell him without words... whatever it is she thinks he needs to hear. Whatever it is she thinks she wants to say.

That isn't what Hilary does, though. It doesn't occur to her to try and relieve whatever regret she sees in Ivan's eyes for a moment. She would not deny him a moment of comfort, now, if he asked for it. If he could tell her how to give it to him. But beyond the recognition of desire in the way he looks at her, beyond thinking that all right, okay, soon they'll be in bed again and he'll have her again and he'll feel good again, no part of Hilary knows how to take his gaze. Except to smile like that, the way she does.


In the darkness of his cabin she's moving to him when he turns around to find her with his hands and his senses awakened in the almost lightless environment. He leaves a light on -- he said he would, did it anyway even though she said she wasn't a little girl anymore -- and Hilary sheds the robe she donned after their shower, letting it slip from her shoulders and ripple down her body to the floor. Her arms wrap around him, her fingers parting locks of his damp hair, her breathing quickening.

The bed comes out of nowhere behind her, the floor with its scattered clothes and bedcovers tilting away. Hilary starts to wrap her legs around him, her arms, searching for his mouth with hers, but there's more deliberate force in the way he touches her now. She senses that the way she senses nothing else, as though all the empathy she might have in the world is tuned to this and nothing else. There's the faintest flicker of... something, in her. Not resistance. Not resignation. Perhaps the only word for it is surprise, but she can't possibly be surprised. It passes before it can even be thusly named.

Her legs part for him, her hands going into his hair yet again, and ...they fuck. Over and over again, their kisses going hard and his hands going tight on her, her whimpers turning to screams when he drives her close to the edge. There's no point in counting how often Hilary comes for him, how many times her hands grasp at the sheets, how many times her back arches like a drawn bow, how many times she all but wails her pleasure into the air. It isn't like it was the first time. Truthfully, it isn't how it's ever been, in a way.

For awhile it seems like there's no end in the pleasure. He has her sobbing from overstimulation by the end, gasping and shuddering and weeping as he holds her arms down and grinds his cock into her pussy from behind, muttering in her ear. She comes so hard that time, in long, deep waves that seem to go on forever. It almost feels like it doesn't stop when he takes her for the last time, when Hilary's so far gone she can't even say his name properly. One orgasm rolls into the other, til she's a trembling wreck, just as much of a mess as she was before he took her to the shower and cleaned her. Held her.

As has happened before, Hilary doesn't sleep until he does. It's as if she can't, or won't let herself. She curls against him, buries herself against him because she's untied this time and she can. So when Ivan wakes, hours upon hours later, Hilary is tucked in close next to him. She isn't draped all over him, she hasn't turned over. At some point their bodies slid apart but she's still there, waking only when he stirs her, touches her, says her name.

Her eyes look ageless whenever she wakes. A thousand years old. Or just four. Displaced in time, in space. In being.


They're both quiet over that light lunch. Words come for the sake of politeness. Getting out of bed took a little time: Hilary bathing herself, preparing herself for the day, the sort of outfit she'd wear to go out for a morning tour around the lake with a friend she is most certainly not fucking. Tailored slacks with a slightly looser waist than what she used to have. A loose, sky-blue top with long sleeves, embroidered at the hems in cream and silver. She wraps a blanket around herself to eat, instead of getting her coat.

Even the afternoons are frigid, now, especially out over the water. Her hair is long and straightened and much as it was last night, but clean now. It looks like silk, and it shines when the sunlight hits it. She takes a few pills before she eats. He knows what they are; that was something she gave him, without even thinking of it as a gift.

Quiet, though. Other than those inconsequential phrases, a few turns of conversation. He looks at her, mostly. Hilary looks at the water a great deal. They haven't headed back to shore yet; there's no one to drive, of course. Perhaps he can sense something off. Perhaps he can chalk it up to the fact that they both know where this is going, how they might not endure it, but in any case, it may very well be when Ivan is excusing himself to go start up the yacht and pull anchor and go back to Chicago -- or it might be as he's getting his second mimosa -- that Hilary speaks some of what's occupying her distant, water-searching thoughts.

Ivan, she says, for his attention, and when he looks at her:

"It was different, last night, the first time," she says quietly. It's almost prudish, how they talk about their fucking after the fact. It's as though when it was nothing, when it was mutual usage in hotel rooms at the very start, they could talk quite vulgarly about it. It may not be proof alone that something has changed, this alteration in how Hilary, at least, speaks of it to him, but she seems almost shy to bring up what they do now, how deep it goes, how stripped-down and opened it makes her. She sounds almost uncertain, as though she's waiting for him to quirk a brow at her --

I don't know what you're talking about, darling

-- but when no denial is forthcoming, when he doesn't immediately shut down that line of thought, Hilary goes on. She struggles, as this is always a struggle for her, but she's been thinking about it. She's taken some time. She tries, very hard, not to say it the wrong way. "I liked it, like that." A beat. "I always like how you fuck me, but... that was different. It frightened me, but I wanted to do it again. Like that."

Like, perhaps she means, with their bodies so close. With their hands linked. With their mouths unable to stop meeting in kiss after kiss. With their fucking altered, inexplicably, to something she wasn't asking him -- begging him -- to do to her but something she was doing with him, something they were doing to each other, something... connected. Not rough, not violent, not even dominating. Different. Like that.

Hilary pauses again. "I suppose I just wanted you to know that if you wanted to, you could fuck me like that again." Fuck me, she says, though that isn't what she means at all. It's as though that's the only way she knows how to talk about sex: something done, one person to another. Maybe. Who even knows. "Even if it frightens me," she finishes quietly.

[Ivan] Strange, but she almost never says his name like that. Just his name, Ivan, not because she's angry or because she's submitting but because -- she wants his attention. She wants to name him so he can be aware of her.

And he is. Instantly, quietly, immediately. He looks at her, and his brows don't quirk, but his eyes do change when she says what she does. She's right, of course. It was different. The first time was unlike any other time, ever; the rest of the night, though he never struck her, though he did not brutalize her, was not the same. All those times were a little more like the way it used to be.

The way he thoughts, or thinks, she still needs it to be, because anything more would frighten her, rattle her, make her feel unwanted.

That isn't the case. He sees that now. So he's there, stilled, his body side-on to her and so fit, so lean in his well-cut slacks, his sweater -- a different one now, a deep royal purple that verges on black, that makes him look princely. He thinks a moment. He turns back.

"I didn't realize," he says quietly. "I thought you didn't like it that way. I thought it made you feel unwanted, or ill at ease, or ... "

There he trails off. A small silence. Waterbirds arc overhead -- the last of the season, their brethren long since fled to warmer climes. Briefly, instinctively, the Silver Fang's eyes follow them, and in that moment he is an animal. A predator, eyes drawn to movement.

And then they come back to her. He takes a short sip of air. Then,

"Come to Lausanne with me. Right now."

[Hilary] Perhaps some part of her should respond to that animalism in his features and in his movement. Sense it and resonate with it, understand it. She should be part animal, kin to wolves, but most of the time Hilary can barely manage to be a real being, much less tap into her true nature. She should recognize what he is and care for him in part because of it. But the truth is, the fact that he's Garou means almost nothing to her.

"It used to --" Hilary pauses there, then just shakes her head a little and says it. "Bore me." There's another beat, and a wrinkle of her brow. "Or... I don't know." She looks at him, aching somehow, wishing she could explain it to him, make sense of it herself. "It does make me feel strange, and uneasy, and I didn't like it before, but I did last night. I felt... with you."

Close to you, she means, but doesn't know if it's possible to say those words without sounding half-hearted. Cheesy. Like a liar.

She quiets, then, watching him, and is about to ask him if he'd like to stay out a little longer, but then he asks her -- no. He says come. He says right now, and there's a flicker of light in her eyes that she would recognize as animal if she could see it. She might even realize the part of herself that is, in truth, animal, if she could see her own eyes.

There's too long of a silence, then, before she nods. "I'll call the house and have my driver deliver my passport to the docks."

There's no submission in that, no yes, Ivan that she could have said. And there's no concern suddenly for discretion, for what people will say. There are very few people she answers to, in the end. There is nothing she needs that she cannot get in Lausanne, one way or another. There is very little in the world that is forbidden to them, with their wealth and their beauty and their ever-present privilege. Truthfully there will be more in the bag Antony brings than just her passport, but Hilary seems unperturbed by the spontaneity of it all.

Ivan said come. So she will go with him.

While she can.