Ivan Press

[Ivan] On the way back to the harbor, Ivan and Hilary make calls. She calls who she needs to and makes what excuses she needs to. She's an excellent liar, if only because her voice is so uninflected, always so cool and polite and uninterested, that it's impossible to tell when she's making shit up and when she simply doesn't care. She arranges for her things to be brought to the airport -- not Chicago O'Hare but a small municipal airport just outside downtown -- and the amount of luggage she brings, which is quite little, really, does not reflect how long she intends to stay at all.


For all they know, they might fight on the way over. His pilot might be instructed to turn the fuck around. They might never make it to Lausanne.

For all they know, they might be there for three days. A week. A year. They might fucking elope --

except they won't. It's not a possibility. Nor is a year, a month; perhaps not even a week. Still: they'll take what time they can.


Ivan calls his people, too. He arranges for his plane -- his father's plane, if we're honest -- to be prepared. He arranges for his luggage to be taken to the airport, along with his passport. He takes a moment to select exactly which coat he wants, which scarf, which tie, and then he gets sick of it and tells Dmitri to pick whatever the hell he wants.

In-flight meals, though: he takes a moment there, choosing carefully. Nothing too spicy. Nothing too boring, too bland.

Then they're pulling into port, and someone's there to help Marya clean up the yacht and to take her home afterward, and someone's there to do all the post-sail checkups and checkdowns. As for them, this beautiful pristine not-quite-couple with their nocturnal vices and near-perversions -- they stroll off the yacht and into his Lamborghini; they drive to the airport to leave this world, or at least this continent, behind.


It's a Bombadier jet. Not a Learjet, actually, though it looks enough like one to be called one in layman's terms. A Challenger jet, to be precise: a little larger. Large enough to make the trip to Lausanne in a single uninterrupted stretch. Large enough to accommodate a living area and a dining area and an entire bedroom suite in the back, complete with two-person bed and a shower in the lavatory: a miniature home that flies.

His ubiquitous people are interfacing with her people when they arrive. They're loading on luggage: one large roller for Ivan, two smallish ones for Hilary. They're stocking the kitchen and freshening the bedsheets and running down the preflight checklist and stocking reading materials, movies, drinks.

Dmitri wants to know if he should accompany Ivan. He seems faintly surprised when Ivan declines.


The trip over is long, and in truth they likely don't spend all of it, or even most of it, interacting. Ivan makes conversation for a while. He pours himself a drink; mixes Hilary a virgin version. Sometime in the middle, he watches two or three movies on the fifty-inch flatscreen. He checks his email, checks the headlines. They have dinner, though their body clocks tell them it's only lunchtime; they race against the turning of the sun, watching day fade all too soon to night.

Blackness outside when they're crossing the Atlantic. Ivan closes the shades and stays closer to Hilary, even if she's not paying attention to him. It's only mid-evening Chicago time when he suggests that they sleep awhile. They share the lavatory, brushing their teeth, showering; they retire to bed, where he holds her in the darkness like she means something to him.


Maybe it takes a while for her to sleep. Maybe she only drowses. Or maybe she sleeps well, and deeply.


It's descent that wakes them: the queer feeling of the earth tilting in ways they are not evolutionarily equipped to understand. Ivan stirs, kissing the back of her neck gently if she faces away; her brow if she faces him. When he lifts the bedside shade, it's morning outside. They can see the lake, deep and blue, widening beneath them as they descend.

They can take their time dressing. No stewardesses to rush them off. Someone will come clean the plane, of course; someone always comes and takes care of these things. Someone will get their luggage and load it into a car, a very nice car, that someone else has procured for them. All they need do is step off the plane groomed and ready for the new day, whatever effects of transatlantic travel hidden behind stylish sunglasses, and take the keys that are handed to them.


"I was thinking," Ivan says as they're getting into their car, servants shutting the doors behind them, "we might spend a day or two in Lausanne, and then retire to Vevey for a few days."

He glances at her, perhaps gauging her response to his proposition. To the idea of a small town, quieter, where nobody knows them and nobody could possibly know them. To the idea, perhaps, of more than a day or two in Switzerland, period.

"Perhaps sail the lake," he adds lightly, "or ski the mountains."

[Hilary] Calls and excuses. He calls his people; she calls the servants that, with the exception of Estrella, grow more loyal to her than do the Durante family at large by the day. She is the one who makes sure they are paid. She is the one who makes sure they receive generous bonuses at Christmas and cards or flowers or cigars or what-have-you on their birthdays. She is the one who they see most often, the one who they now all know is pregnant with their supposed master's potential son. Even Estrella, the goddamned cow (with, Hilary might say, bigger balls and sharper horns than any bull), is being less suspicious and more gentle with Hilary these days.


The baby she's carrying is useless to her, and aggravating. It is good for one thing, at least: the staff is not so much on her back. And fucking Estrella is a little less hawklike with her. Which makes it easier to inform the staff that she's going to Switzerland for a jaunt while she's still able to travel. They all know her as a rather solitary creature who tolerates the company of others rather than seeking it out; the idea of her going across the ocean by herself is not surprising to her, but concern is expressed. Concern is dismissed. When she and Ivan pull into port, she calls the front desk, and a young man in a smart blazer brings her bags to the Lamborghini, bags that were brought and left for her by Antony, just like she told him to do.

Antony. So reliable, Antony. So given to servitude, so inclined towards ingratiating himself. Wonderful Antony.


Most of the phone calls Ivan makes, Hilary ignores. She comments that she'd like some juice on the flight. Orange and cranberry, for when they wake up. She makes no suggestions as to entertainments, isn't listening when Ivan talks to Dmitri about clothes to pack, is bored by talk of the plane, the preparations. She looks out over the water as he's calling everyone, and when they get to his car, she looks out the window. She's entered a strange space, not quite in the trance of her submission to him, not quite withdrawn into herself. It's been difficult, trying to tell Ivan things like how she feels and what she thinks and what she wants. It's been unspeakably difficult, and though she slept for nigh unto half a day out on the lake, she's fatigued. Lately, she's always a bit fatigued.


And Ivan, dear, sweet Ivan, lovely in form and inexplicably captivating in personality, bears this in mind. Somehow -- maybe he's taken plenty of trips like this -- he knows not to be all over her during the flight. She has space. They talk briefly, lightly, Hilary drawing more and more into herself. Once upon a time she refused to stay with him, even for a day, because staying with him would be exhausting to her. The fact that she's staying with him now, going overseas with him, does not indicate that she doesn't find being around someone else exhausting.

But he knows. He knows that she is a broken little doll, and he knows that she has that unfathomable well of fury inside of her. He's seen it. He knows she can't bear to be questioned, looked at, judged, picked apart nonstop. He knows that it is equally tiring to her to pretend to be Mrs. Durante as it is to be opened up and made vulnerable the way she becomes when he's with her. And still he wants to take her with him to Lausanne, and be with her, as long as they can.

Ivan leaves her be most of the flight, and though she never says a word of it and multiple times he might think she looks bored or irritated by his presence, she is grateful.

Hilary doesn't read much. She half-watches half a movie with him before ignoring that, too. She looks out the window into the darkness, the way she looks out from his lakeside balcony into the dark, the way she stares into the water at night, as though somehow she'll one day inure herself to -- or lose herself in -- the very things she is fearful of (fascinated by). She puts in earbuds and listens to music. After awhile, her eyes close. Her form relaxes in the chair she's curled up in. He has to touch her to stir her from her reverie in order to eat, and though she doesn't startle, she looks as though she was lost in a dream when she turns to look at him.

After that -- after they eat, after literally hours of interpersonal silence -- Ivan stays close to her. Asks for nothing, even her attention. Hilary, in return, looks at him more often. Says nothing, or very little. But looks at him, some, keeping her thoughts to herself.

Perhaps they should sleep awhile. She nods, and washes up with him. Goes to bed with him, as though they are something of a couple, as though they are something to each other. Hilary lets her back rest against his chest, wearing a set of silk pajamas, made up of a pink camisole and black shorts, both of them lace-edged. Once their body heat mingles, it's difficult to tell where her skin ends and the pajamas begin.

She sleeps well. Once she finds his hands under the covers and slips her hand underneath them, wriggling until his hands encircle her wrists. Once, in some symbolic and gentle way, she's bound, Hilary drifts off and sleeps not terribly deep, but well. Her hair, pulled over the front of her shoulder, smells faintly of oranges and spice.


Waking to the kiss on her neck and the earth coming up to meet them, Hilary turns slightly to look at Ivan over her shoulder. She wakes the way she always does, the way he never should have seen and now may even find familiar: her eyes dreamy and lost like a child's, penetrating and feral like an animal's. It's a relief when she blinks slowly, when she starts to remember where she is and why, and how she came to be here, and what it means to her, if she can even name all of those things when her mind is only starting to turn towards the light again.

During the time the spend getting dressed and tidied up and ready to disembark, Hilary slams the door of the lavatory and, despite the fan inside, there's no way to mistake the sound of her being sick. Something about the queer feeling of the earth tilting. Something about the juice knotting up her stomach. Something about a transatlantic flight while not quite done with her first trimester. Something -- it doesn't matter. She doesn't come out for awhile. She doesn't acknowledge feeling ill, when she does.

It's entirely possible Ivan knows better than to draw attention to it.


By the time they walk down the stairs off the plane, their bags taken by the people whose backs they step on, walk on, dance across, Hilary looks like... well. Mrs. Durante, cool and distant and untouchable, unreachable. And not his at all.

Except that she's in goddamned Switzerland because he said Come. Except that when she hears his voice she turns towards it before she even seems to intend to. He isn't using a particularly commanding voice, not terribly firm, but she looks for the source of the sound of something familiar the way someone reacts to the sound of their name, no matter where they are, no matter who is saying it.

"I like Lausanne," she says, mildly. Quietly. It's hard to tell how she feels -- she's still in her sunglasses. There's a pause, then, like it's somehow asking him for forgiveness for how she is, how she must be, how it must feel to him: "Ask me after a day or two."

[Ivan] They're both so mild about this. It's possible Ivan is hiding deeper emotion. It's possible Hilary feels nothing deeper at all.


"All right," he says quietly, agreeably. And they drive on.


Had Hilary come here alone as she told her household she had, she would have doubtlessly been chauffeured to her hotel here. Or perhaps to her residence, some property or other that Espiridion owned. Ivan, however, is of a younger, more agile breed. He insists on driving himself. His conveyance is, perhaps as a nod to the old world and Swiss understatement, what passes for old-guard and understated in the supercar world: a Bentley Continental, white as alpine snow.

It's not a long drive to their hotel, which is the Beau-Rivage, home away from home for any number of wealthy and important individuals throughout the years. More than one royal has visited here. One royal died here, assassinated by some frothing revolutionary, stabbed in the heart. It is entirely possible both of these Fangs are distantly, vaguely related to her and her royal lines.

They're expected when they pull up. There's no need to dally at the reception. Bellhops take their bags and valets take their car; they're led through the halls and up the elevators to their room. Their suite is the best of the best, which should surprise no one: vast, high-ceilinged rooms furnished in styles borrowed from centuries past, the baroque and the rococo, a world of white and beige and gold. Windows and doors open out onto a terrace that overlooks the deep, cold mountain lake. In truth, it's more Hilary's sort of place than Ivan's; or at least, the sort of place one expects to find a woman like Hilary, elegant and understated and with such old, intoxicating bloodlines.

A hotel representative begins to inform them of hotel amenities, offerings, local events and attractions. Ivan tips him and sends him away with hardly a glance in his direction, joining Hilary on the terrace instead. It's the first of November in Europe, mid-morning. Clouds are slowly gathering overhead. Later it will rain, misty and grey; for now, there's sun still on the waters, white sails. The Ragabash looks across the waters for a while, silent, then looks at his companion.

"Thank you for coming," he says.

[Hilary] The intimacy that evolves between the two of them when those faint strictures of dominance and submission are introduced seem unreachable to Hilary otherwise. It keeps them from seeming a 'normal' couple just as surely as the ring on her left hand keeps them from seeming a couple at all.


She took her jewelry off on the plane. Rings, earrings, necklace, bracelets. She has more in a velvet-lined case in her luggage. She brought nothing to clean them with -- that's something other people do for her. When she went to sleep with Ivan across the Atlantic she wore not a single band. When she woke up, she didn't replace the wedding ring on her left hand. Earrings, necklace, some twisting and interlocking bangles apparently made of white gold, other rings, but none on that finger where people's eyes go so quickly because of the sheer size of the pink diamond her husband gave her.

Given how cool she is, how faraway she can seem, how that intimacy they sometimes have evaporates like dew under afternoon sun, it's possible Ivan doesn't know whether to apply meaning to that or not. Maybe she just forgot. Maybe she doesn't care at all, never really does, doesn't know how --

and no one, really, could blame him on a purely rational level, for doubting her. She doubts herself, too.


Beau-Rivage is the sort of place where Hilary couldn't seem out of place no matter how modern, how new her mode of dress. It's something about her bearing, something about her breeding, that places her here. Maybe it's the Walker blood in Ivan as much as his six thousand dollar suit that makes him seem out of place in the palace, despite the fact that he can more than afford it. Of course, it could be the rage, too. But Hilary -- this is where she seems to belong. Palaces in Switzerland, terraces overlooking Lake Geneva, wrapped in a thick shawl rather than a coat for now.

She always seems to pass through rooms without seeing them, going to the balconies and terraces first. Or maybe that's just where she's expected to be, too: slender feminine figure with silken hair standing overlooking the water, waiting for something. For him, maybe. Maybe she knows that's where she's supposed to go, while he deals with bellhops and concierges and 'people'. His duty as a man, to bother with the outside world. She can deal with household staffs, naturally, the intricacies of keeping a home.

God, how old-fashioned the expectations are. How ancient. How inapplicable in this world as it is, as it is becoming. The only way the Fangs know how to be: clinging to notions that the world has long since left behind, certain that one day, one day the world will see the error of its ways and come back.


Who knows what Hilary's thinking as she looks at the lake. It's a pond compared to Lake Michigan. She doesn't look at Ivan as he comes over to her, and he doesn't say anything for awhile.

Thank you for coming is the sort of thing you say at a funeral to your guests while they're apologizing for your loss, and while you're trying not to feel quite so dead inside. It's what you say, with an entirely different expression on your face, in wedding receiving lines as you shake hand after hand after hand, as people gush about how beautiful you are. It's what you say to the people whose name you can't remember, whose relationship to you is so thin you wonder if they just came for the free drinks, who don't know you at all, who can't ever be allowed to see you.


Hearing those words from Ivan's lips makes Hilary's brows constrict slightly. She turns her head and her eyes find his there. "What?" she murmurs, as though she didn't quite hear him. Doesn't quite understand.

[Ivan] That silence between them. The way his comment, which was not at all spoken the way one speaks to a funeral guest or a wedding guest, goes spiraling out into a void. What? she murmurs, as though he were shouting at her from afar. Or not speaking her language at all.


He doesn't know what he's doing here, Ivan thinks to himself suddenly, savagely. He doesn't know what the fuck he was thinking, inviting her here on a moment's notice. Inviting her here at all. What did he expect -- some fucking roman holiday, some sudden shift in her, some opening-up, some ability to abruptly become a woman, whole and real, catalyzed by removal to a foreign land? What did he want? What is he here for?

She grew more and more distant on the plane. He knows she can't bear closeness for very long. That kind of honesty. That kind of nudity of the soul. He wasn't surprised, and even expected it. But then the car ride; and now this. He has no idea how he might spend a week with her. He has no idea how he can even spend this day with her, this day that was just beginning in Switzerland, when they've already been in one another's company for twenty-four hours. Thirty-six hours. Longer than they ever have been before.

He steps forward, rests his hands on the balustrade. His knuckles. He tries not to be angry, or despairing -- whatever this is. A moment passes and he looks at her.

"Thank you," he repeats, slower, as though he might be able to invest more meaning into these words if only he gives it more time; might be able to convince her he means it if he gives it more time -- "for coming here with me."

[Hilary] "I wanted to," she says in that same slightly lost tone, as though the way he's thanking her is like you thank someone for doing you a distasteful favor and she wants to correct him.


There's something different about him, and though she can't read people, she's strangely attuned to him, strangely keyed into those changes in his mood now. She wasn't always. She is now. Hilary watches him, her eyes flicking to his knuckles, and though a part of her demands she answer for what is surely her fault, she flicks her eyes back to Ivan's face and doesn't offer a thousand apologies for making him angry. For not being... whatever it is that would make this easier for him.

Hilary does all she can think of, which may be the wrong thing. Which might not be enough. "I like pleasing you," she tells him, the way another person might say I want to make you happy.

She looks back at the water. "I'm always told how precious I am," she says, with some dismissiveness, with some faint trace of annoyance. "You actually make me feel that way, sometimes. Sometimes even when I'm not doing something to make you happy."

Her lashes fall once, slowly, then open again. "I would have gone anywhere you wanted if you told me to come, and if it might please you. But we came to Lausanne because it was a place you thought might make me happy." Hilary is, at this point, essentially thinking aloud. The words sound distant, almost analytical, as though she's working through a newly learned formula in mathematics, breaking down the logic into pieces she can absorb one at a time.

Nothing about her faraway eyes or her soft voice indicates that what she says next is the truth. There's just a gentling to her, hard to describe, difficult to even see. The emotion she claims seems like something separate from her. "It does," Hilary says, of Lausanne and her happiness. "Even nighttime doesn't seem so dark, here."

[Ivan] It makes Ivan uncomfortable when she says I like pleasing you. It makes him uncomfortable to be reminded of the psychological power he seems to hold over her. The sexual dominance, the kink, the spanking and crying and fucking and handcuffing -- he's adapted to all that. He's come to understand it, come to terms with it. That's fine with him, because he's drawn his own boundaries. That's just something they do.


This is something else altogether. This... subservient mindset she slips so easily into, which edges so close to a sort of subjugation. Or dependency. That's what frightens him.

His eyes change, though, when she goes on. When she stops talking about what she wants him to feel; starts talking about how he makes her feel. That he makes her feel at all. There's a strange tenderness in his eyes, then, and an ache. He wants to reach out to her,

but she's so far away, still.

He laughs instead, a little unsteadily, looking out over the water. "Well," he says softly, "I suppose that's what having a relationship means. Making one another happy." There's a pause. "I wouldn't really know."

More could be said, but he doesn't say it. He observes the lake another moment. Then he turns toward her, leaning his elbow on the balustrade, lean, elegant.

"Tell me about Lausanne," he says.

[Hilary] Don't, he said. Don't need me like this. And it hurt her terribly that he was so resistant to it, resistant to her. Resistant to, perhaps, giving her as much as she wants to give him. Why not, she wanted to know. Why not tell you, show you, that you give me something I can't get anywhere else? It's unfair, to her, the uncomfortable ripples that go through him because she cares about him, too.

Stupid boy.

It's possible that at some point the way he dominates her when they fuck will become just something we do to her, too, not something she needs so desperately, not something she has to have to feel human, if not to get off sexually. Maybe with the sort of work that people like them have never had to do before and have been taught is beneath them, maybe with the kind of effort normal people put into those nasty words -- relationship -- it could be something shared and not something vital.


Maybe that's why it gets her back up a little when he uses the word. Relationship. It feels so banal to her, just the sound of it. The way other people talk. And another part of her hates him for using it, and she doesn't want to admit why. So she looks at the water again, for a very long time.

They don't even have to try to look beautiful.

She's not so naive, so foolish, as to think he wants her to tell him the history of this place, the culture, the geography. He wants her to talk about her experiences here. Her memories. Maybe even how being here made her feel once, or how it makes her feel now. Hilary closes her eyes, exhales, and looks at him.

"You're a hypocrite," she says quietly, as though softening her voice is going to soften the words. "Getting so angry when I didn't want to talk about why I'm... like this. But you change the subject whenever we start to talk about what you are to me. It isn't fair."

A beat. "It's not that I don't want to talk to you about Lausanne. But if you don't want to hear that you mean something to me, I don't..." Now she struggles. She wasn't, for a minute there, but now it's hard. The words all turn to cotton stuffing in her mouth. She shakes her head. Shivers, because it's chilly outside. "I don't know what to do with you, if you want to matter to me but can't stand mattering to me. I start to open up, I talk to you, and you seem to... backpedal away again. It leaves me wracked."

[Ivan] It takes him a moment to respond, because it takes him a moment to sort it out in his own head. He sounds a little helpless as he says it:


"I need to mean something to you. I can't stand to mean everything to you."

[Hilary] "You don't," she says, her brow furrowing. "I can't even fathom why you think you might."


Hilary's throat flashes, white and fragile, as she swallows. She turns to look at him. "Let's go inside. It's cold."

[Ivan] "I don't," he replies, ignoring what she says next, caught on the hook of the moment. "I don't, except when you say things like you want to please me. Like I'm your lord and master. Hilary --

"Hilary," and his tone changes abruptly, drops, as though he hears where this is going, "I don't want to fight. I'm not pushing you away. And I wasn't backpedaling away from you when you told me I've made you feel precious. That I've brought you somewhere where you can be happy. For god's sake, I heard you. I was glad. I was answering you. It wasn't -- lip service, and it wasn't small talk. The only time I was uncomfortable at all was when you said you wanted to please me. Everything else was me. My thoughts, my feelings. All right?"


His tone didn't manage to stay level for long. He's frustrated now; he feels as misunderstood, which in turn makes him feel like a goddamn teenager, like that scowling brat of a step-son she has.

"For fuck's sake, I've flown us across an ocean so we could be together for a little while and we can't even seem to connect anymore."

[Hilary] That scowling brat of a stepson of hers, in a couple of weeks, will get up with a bleeding head wound and stab away at a fomor with his pocketknife. Sometimes the kin of Falcon make clear enough why they bear the blood of kings. The purebred, like the Durantes-Calderon siblings, would have been rulers of countries a few hundred years ago, bred and born and trained for nothing else. The Kinfolk of the Silver Fangs have been emperors in their own right throughout history, the blessed, the god-touched, the unearthly.


But by god, Tomas can be a petulant, vengeful little monster. Proud, like so many of them are proud. Determined to prove himself a man, an adult, something worthy of all the many things he craves and finds denied to him.

Hilary just stares at him while he tries, eventually in vain, to speak calmly. To express himself without snapping. She's still cold, and she's irritated that he ignored that. The profound effort it takes for her to remember that he might read it entirely wrong if she just turned around and walked inside is exhausting, and completely lost on him. Most people don't have to expend that much energy on just acting like they give a damn.

She gives a damn. It's just, for some reason, so very hard to keep that up for long. And so very hard to show it.

Perhaps for the best, she ignores that last comment he makes. The frustration in it, the near-despair. The resignation, so early in this little pleasure trip of theirs. She does have a remarkable ability to focus on one thing -- or perhaps just an inability to focus on more than one at a time.

"Well... stop," she says, ruffled, and a bit irritated. "Stop thinking that because I want to please you, or submit to you, that it means you're my entire world. That's stupid."

Hilary frowns at the lake. "You can devote yourself to something without losing yourself in it."

[Ivan] A quiet, then. They're both frowning at the lake. He's thinking, perhaps; or perhaps he's just staring and letting time pass. Impossible for Hilary to tell. She can barely read him even when he's utterly open to her, utterly defenseless.


He straightens after a moment. And he crosses that distance he alluded to -- in body, at least. He puts his hand on her shoulder, and even here and now it's warm.

"Let's go in," he says, quieter now. "We can talk there."


Their luggage still awaits them at the door when they step in from the terrace. Of course it waits; Ivan's people aren't here. Nor are Hilary's. They're alone, servantless; they shall have to make do somehow. The imposition.

Ivan shuts the door behind them, and all is quiet. Portraits stare out from the walls -- powdered and wigged ladies that seem to suggest this room, this building, this hotel, is older than it actually is. Enough light washes in from the windows that they hardly need the lamps that burn from the ceiling, the walls.


"It hurt me when you said to ask you in a day or two."

This comes quite out of nowhere, before Ivan's even turned away from the doors he's just drawn shut. He does turn then, shrugging out of his coat at last. He wasn't wearing that coat when she boarded his yacht, nor when she boarded his plane. The shirt and slacks beneath are different, too; the lean-cut vest entirely new. God only knows the effort, the manpower it takes his personal army just to keep his various modes of transportation outfitted with outfits.

"It's not that I want to go to Vevey so desperately. It's that you seemed so reluctant to even commit to more than twenty-four or forty-eight hours here. I know it's ridiculous and childish of me to have read so much into it, but there it is. I'm telling you because ... I think maybe that disappointment underlies some of the frustration I'm feeling right now. I think maybe that one stupid exchange has poisoned everything since it, and if I don't speak of it now it'll just keep eating away at every moment we have here.

"It's hard for me to keep up with you, Hilary. You speak of devotion and you speak of what I mean to you, but then the things you do leave me so cold. So uncertain."

Coat over his arm, he lowers his head for a while, frowning, struggling. After a while he looks at her again.

"Will you please come closer?"

[Hilary] At that -- the mention of devotion, of getting lost -- the conversation stills. The wind skips over the surface of Lake Geneva, creating short, choppy peaks. It moves Hilary's hair on her shoulders and makes the ends of her shawl wave to no one, and tugs lightly at the hem of Ivan's coat. Perhaps it isn't so bad that they don't speak for a little while; Hilary doesn't seem to mind. She often seems utterly inured to conversational rhythms, unable to sense them outside of a rigid structure and likely to break all the rules completely if she loses that scaffolding.


If she were angry with him, wanting to be away from him, wondering why the hell she came here at all, she might jerk her shoulder out of his grip. As it is, she simply turns to look at him, a bit curious, as though everything they were talking about has already passed by her and been forgotten. She nods; she's cold.

So they go inside.


For awhile she keeps her shawl on, even after the terrace doors are closed. She hasn't taken off her shoes yet, settled in at all. Maybe they'll go to dinner in a little while; maybe they'll go to lunch. Breakfast? Hilary doesn't quite know what time it is, or what time her body says it is, or what time it's supposed to be. The displacement makes her feel strange, but she doesn't let it bother her.

The truth is, she's with Ivan. Ivan, who doesn't want to be everything to her, who she now thinks wouldn't want to know that being with him is one of the things that helps her not be bothered by not knowing what time it is, or how she's supposed to feel. Because if it doesn't matter to him, then she doesn't need to concern herself with it. And if it matters to him, he'll tell her. On the one hand, it seems like a great deal of trust to place in a single person -- a burden of responsibility nobody should be asked to take on, to be the decisive factor in whether or not someone is happy or sad, stressed or calm.

On the other hand... well. There's a world held in the palm of that other hand, and half of it is in shadow, sleeping, impenetrable to Ivan's insight into Hilary.


She's still in her shawl, then, when Ivan speaks to her again. Out of nowhere, indeed: she blinks as she looks up and over at him. His coat rustles slightly, revealing the trim, tailored clothes she watched him put on this morning on the jet. She's wearing the heather-gray slacks with the single offset black button at the waist that she put on. However uneasy she is, it really is hard to tell even when she's naked that she's pregnant. The bump at her abdomen is subtle, seems almost natural.

For now.

Her blouse is a blue-tinted gray, slim-fitting and just this side of sheer. Over that, a short cream-colored trapeze jacket made of wool. The pendant she's wearing is a large two-dimensional rose created in nothing but outlines, each petal's edge made of sculpted silver. Platinum-encircled pearls in her earlobes. The cashmere shawl is black, though, and she drapes it over the back of one of the padded chairs -- carelessly, but without tossing it aside.

Hilary doesn't look at him the whole time he's talking. This could be evidence of what he's saying: so cold. So distant. Her expression is thoughtful, but for all he knows that's just the same blank look she adopts when she's bored and doesn't care to make a point of it by adding words to her disdain.

When he gets to the words so cold. so uncertain. she looks at him again, the ends of her hair loosely curled and cascading down her back as she sweeps them off her shoulders. Perhaps expectedly, Hilary walks over to him, her brow furrowing, but not in concern. Not five minutes go she told him his perception of her was stupid, as though it was ridiculous that he should draw the conclusions he was fearing were correct.

She puts her arms around his neck, and he can smell her perfume -- a faint trace of scent, like tracking down a particular flower through running water. She put it on the insides of her wrists when they woke up, and the scent was stronger then, in that confined space. He saw her after she put it on, holding her wrists close to her face, breathing in the perfume at full strength, her eyes closed. It made her look, for a moment, like she was praying.

"I like Lausanne," Hilary says, just like she did when he first asked her about Vevey. "I don't know if I'll want to leave in a day or two. And I don't particularly like to ski. That's all."

She only brought the two little bags, barely enough clothes for one day if you're Hilary and four days if you're someone else. He could read into that, too, could be assuming that's proof, there it is, she doesn't want to be here with him, she doesn't care, she never cared, he doesn't matter at all to her but for what he can give her. Be some kind of fucking touchstone for her, some kind of skeleton to hang herself on so she doesn't have to try to be a real person all on her own.

But Hilary doesn't know. That isn't what he told her -- she doesn't even think of all the many, many things he might mean that lead him to feel cold, and unsure, and frustrated now. What he doesn't say, she has little power to intuit.

"What do I do that makes you feel cold?" she asks, because, quite frankly, she's at a loss.

[Ivan] His arm lowers as she draws closer, his coat shifting on his arm, trailing to the floor. He wraps his other arm around her waist as hers wrap around his neck, and he bends to the turn of her neck, her shoulder.


She explains what she meant. He knew what she meant -- was mostly certain of it anyway -- but it hardly helped his immediate, emotional response: a sort of cringing, a sort of flinching inside. Like a kicked dog, he thinks at himself, angrily, and forces himself to let go of that anger again.

"You seal off again," he says quietly. "I know ... you can't help it. And maybe you don't even want to. But it's hard to hold you, to keep you here with me."

[Hilary] Sometimes when Ivan holds her, Hilary finds him locking her against his body, bending her backwards, holding her by the hair or hips or both. Not even to kiss her, not even to start some chain reaction of abuse and eroticism rolling into one. Just as though he has to feel her like that, pressed entirely to him with or without her impetus. She doesn't expect that, though, no more or less than she expects what he does right now.


It feels good. Both ways. It feels nice to have his arms sliding around her waist, rustling over the fabric of her jacket and her shirt, encircling her entirely because even now she is slender as the dancer he now knows she used to be. It feels good when he lays his face against her neck, or bites her shoulder, or smells her hair.

It doesn't occur to her, however, to show him somehow that she likes it, that it feels good. The disconnect between her enjoyment and the expression of it is almost complete, most of the time. Where some people would shiver involuntarily or smile slowly or turn to nuzzle him in return, Hilary seems quite content to simply let the good feeling stay in a small pocket of humanity deep inside of her. It isn't fear of letting it show. It isn't restraint or decorum. It isn't a choice.

Most people have to exert effort to conceal their reactions to such things. Almost all of the time, the exact opposite is true for Hilary.

Ivan says she seals off, and that even if it's natural to her, even if she can't help it, even if she doesn't want to do it, and though her first thought is that no, it's not like a seal at all, she doesn't say it. She stands there, arms around his neck and his arms around her waist and her eyes looking out the terrace doors to the lake and the Alps, and it's awhile before she says anything.

"It's not like being sealed," she says finally, which may or may not sound like it gets at what he's talking about at all. She idly strokes her fingernails across the back of his neck, like someone might stroke a cat that has found its way into their lap. "It's more like... sinking. Like I'm always very, very far underwater."

Hilary sighs softly, as though the very thought of what she's saying wears her out: "It takes so much work to swim upward. After awhile I have to let go." She pauses, thoughtful. "You help. But I know what you mean, when you say it's hard to hold me."

[Ivan] She speaks of emotion like a struggle; of life like drowning in an ocean. It takes work to swim upward, she says. He wonders how she even survives in an airless, lightless life like that, always sinking down.


And he holds her a little tighter, hand opening over her lower back, that diamond of musculature that in her dancer's body is so taut, so toned. He feels it flexing when he bends her backward sometimes, as though to force kisses onto her, make her feel it. Feel this. Feel him, somehow, as though his brilliance and beauty might light her void.

"It takes work," he echoes, "to remember that when you sink out of my grasp again, it's not because you're losing interest."

[Hilary] A soft huff of a laugh leaves her. "Hardly. Why ever put all that effort in, otherwise?"

[Ivan] A quiet laugh of his own. He stays where he is a moment longer, holding her, and perhaps this is new for him, too. Any other woman and he'd be on his way to her zipper, her bra-clasp, her panties by now. Any other woman and he'd likely have a fairly good idea of what he wants to do -- skiing or sailing or nightclubbing or fucking in the vip suite of the finest restaurant in the city; would be setting about doing it and then shipping her back home so he could go on to the next thing.


With Hilary, he's so often uncertain. Unsure. The strangest thing is sometimes he doesn't even mind. He doesn't care that he has no idea what he's doing in Switzerland; he doesn't care that he's in Lausanne and not Ibiza, or Nice, or Amsterdam, or Buenos Aires, or any number of younger, louder, flashier partytowns. He doesn't care that there's no set plan, no set termination date, no fucking exit strategy.

Just Hilary. Here, for now.

After a while he draws away, kissing her beneath the ear gently as he withdraws. "Well," he says quietly, perhaps just a touch abashed at the possible catastrophe they narrowly averted, "what do you say we unpack and then go see this city of yours? Maybe you can show me around. The last time I was here, I think I was hungover and passing through on my way to the Alps."

[Hilary] There are a few things in the world that Hilary likes without it being an effort. Without struggling to feel something, anything. She likes fireworks. She likes this town, with its little subway going up and down the hill. She likes the nearby countryside. She came here once -- once only -- when she was a teenager, and most of the time she was here she was either practicing or performing. She had caretakers who surrounded her like a phalanx whenever they traveled, who would go and shop for her at the stores if she needed or desired anything.


Ivan knows what happened to her brother. He's never heard a word about her parents. Where they are now, what happened to them, what she knows of them. She's mentioned caretakers, and being 'fond' of them, as though this is some grand emotion for her, some depth of feeling she usually doesn't reach for people.

When she talks to him she says she 'cares'. It's hard to know if that's just a word she picked up from him, and having no other words to lay upon what she does feel for him, uses it almost exclusively. Telling Ivan that he makes her feel precious is a monumental effort, a dredging up of an emotion, a naming of it, a search for the words to express it. Exhausting. He has no idea, can never quite grasp, how much it takes out of her to say these simple little things that come so much more easily to him.

Passionate, foolish young man. Flashy. Loud.

Except right now. He's calm, holding her, not searching for her skin. Over the Atlantic he could have had her. Could have taken her gently-given wrists in his hands and pinned her to the bed, yanked aside her silk pajamas and fucked her as they flew. It's literally the longest amount of time they've spent together without having sex. They've slept together twice. Slept, as shocking and scandalous as that is. And yet he's calm. He's quiet. He's just... there.

Hilary's eyes wander around the room a little, as though she's not a part of this embrace. As though she's not inclined to close her eyes and bury her face against him and settle in. Murmur her approval of his arms around her, or just sigh softly in contentment. She stands quite still, and he can't be blamed for feeling as though she's a thousand miles away when she's like this, no matter how close she feels, how well he can sense her heartbeat through her chest. One could imagine her just waiting for him to let go, to move on, to be done. And one could think: of course. She doesn't really care. Doesn't really feel anything. Is using him for his cock, using him as a diversion from the depths of her own lightless mind.

He can't be blamed for doubting. For fighting with himself to believe she gives a damn, when it's so very rare, and so very stilted, when she tries to tell him yes, yes she does.

The corners of her mouth turn up slightly when he withdraws, kissing her ear. She looks at him again, head tilted a bit. "The last time I was here, I was sixteen," she says, "and I wasn't allowed anywhere alone."

Her hand would slide down his arm to lace with his, if she thought of it. It would be nice to hold his hand, but she doesn't consider it. So when she steps back, she doesn't think to maintain physical contact, doesn't connect that it might help him, doesn't realize that sometimes, occasionally, Ivan needs her help.

There isn't much, on her end, to unpack. Still, they hang things up, and surprisingly, they do just fine. At least Hilary does. She tells him what she remembers of Lausanne -- it's the San Francisco of Switzerland, to hear what she says. It's beautiful, but he could see that easily enough driving here. It has a history of welcoming intellectual and cultural diversity, though what Hilary says is that it's full of oddballs and artists and students and rollerbladers. The car will do them only a little good, she remembers that much -- most of the city worth exploring is pedestrian-only.

The imposition.


Truth be told, though, they don't sightsee much. Hilary gets tired. It's cold outside, and even wrapped in her coat and scarf and staying close to Ivan she gets chilled. There's sightseeing to do but when one gets right down to it, that isn't really Ivan's scene, and it's dull to Hilary -- something she does because someone else wants to, something she does because it's there and there's nothing better to do.

Sometimes there are beautiful things, and she wants to see them, as though she really is somewhere deep and dark and cold all the time, and it's a way of looking up and seeing a spot of light rippling against the surface of her world. Beauty that asks nothing, that does nothing, that cannot be touched but gleams, all the same, in a way that touches her.

No one here stares at them, wondering if they're together. It's assumed. Maybe because they walk closely. Maybe because she has no wedding ring on her finger and they certainly don't look like they're wedded, whatever else. Maybe because none of them could care less about the age difference between them. It's likely neither of them even notice. They get by very well indeed. French is spoken here by almost everyone, and Hilary is fluent. She orders some clothes from a shop -- the tailor at the hotel can do any alterations, really. She tries nothing on.


They're on the Place de la Palud before sunset, people walking on the rim of the Fontaine de la Justice. The hour chimes and mechanical figures emerge from the wall behind the fountain to twirl, to dance. Hilary, who has grown a little more pale over the last half hour or so, who looks a bit more detached than normal, turns to the fairhaired young man who would likely call his people and get the plane ready and take her somewhere warmer this very night if it pleased him --

if he thought it would please her

-- and lays her head on his shoulder, seeking his hand with her own lightly gloved one. "I don't think I can be gone more than a couple of weeks," she says quietly, "but you know I'll go with you wherever you like."

[Ivan] They're not exactly the touristy type. They don't wear loud shirts, they don't talk loudly. They don't click pictures of everything they see, rushing from hotspot to hotspot.


For the most part, they stroll. They wander. They walk down the lakeshore until it gets too cold, and then they veer inland through winding pedestrian paths; cobblestone trails that date back at least a century or two. The last time she was here, Hilary tells Ivan, she was a teenager. She was younger than he is now. He was ... maybe four years old, and not yet wholly aware of the extraordinary privilege he has been born into. They walk closely, occasionally hold hands like young lovers in paris, though this is not paris, and Hilary is not a young girl, and there's a certain cool formality to her even here, even now. Besides, while no one questions that they're together, no one could possibly mistake Ivan for anything but a decade or more younger than the woman he escorts. Perhaps they're more understanding about such things here.

They see a sign for a cafe on a winding alley. They have lunch and coffee there. Hilary is fluent in French. Ivan doesn't speak French at all, so he tells Hilary what he wants, and she translates. It doesn't matter that he can't read the menu; he orders with the assumption that what he wants is what he will get. If told otherwise, it's entirely likely he will seem vaguely surprised before reordering.

Then there's a detour by some little avenues of boutiques where Hilary buys some clothes for the coming days. Ivan browses the ties and finds one he likes. On their way past a theatre, Ivan stops, pointing out a sign: some modern dance matinee, not the Nutcracker, thank god.

Evening comes early. It's nearly winter. It's midnorthern europe. Even on the Place de la Plaud: fountains, tourists walking the rim, lovers on the far side, kissing veiling by the spray.

Ivan doesn't face the fountain; he's looking at the western sky, turning colors in the sunset. Hilary's slender hand slips into his own. He's not wearing gloves; the leather of hers is fine enough, thin enough, that it may as well not be there. A couple weeks, she murmurs.

A couple of weeks was more than he expected. A couple of weeks was more than he hoped for. He turns and kisses her temple.

"I know now," he says.

[Hilary] If they were a regular couple, or if Hilary felt she needed to keep up some kind of pretense, she'd buy him gifts. She'd carry on a conversation. It would be exhausting, really, but she'd do it if only it would keep him from hassling her. And sometimes, true, she does feel pressure to behave like she's a real person when she's with Ivan. He gets so frustrated. He gets so upset with her. She asks herself if it might not be easier to just... pretend.


Too late now, anyway. He knows better. He knows what's underneath all that. He knows when she's herself, and he knows when she's acting what other people think is normal, her Self is far, far away. He knows what she's like when she's at her most open, her most vulnerable.

And her happiest. Though ironically, one of her happiest moments with him was when she was ordering him around the kitchen, snapping at him not to stir the risotto so fast. No glorious smiles, then, but a comfort in her own skin that is otherwise so incredibly difficult for her to achieve. That afternoon, and fireworks over the lake. A green witch's hat exploding in the midst of the stars. Smiling up at them, with his arms around her.

Now, there's this. She's tired and she's far away but she tells him she can be gone so much longer than he expected, so much longer than he could have hoped for, and it seems to please him. It makes her happy, to please him. And that is why she doesn't pretend.

For a few moments, Hilary stands with him, hand laced to his, head on his shoulder. She watches the water hit the fountain, rippling and dancing. In a few weeks -- or less -- they'll turn it off. It will be still and empty for most of winter, a haunted sculpture lacking its more ephemeral partner. Its soul.

"Can we go back now?" she asks softly, after a little while. "I'm so tired."

[Ivan] So tired, she says.


He reaches out to her gently at that, tracing the backs of his fingers down her cheek. "I wondered," he says, and this too is quiet. "You're pale. I didn't want to say anything to embarrass you.

"Let's go back."

They don't walk all the way back. They don't even walk so far as they had, coming here. They walk to the nearest vehicular street, and there Ivan hails a taxi for himself and Hilary.

On the way back, they drive along the lake. The driver speaks French and German and some broken English. Unless Hilary strikes up a conversation -- unlikely at best -- Ivan pays him no mind. He looks over the lake, the sun setting to the south and the west. He has his arm around Hilary, as though to keep her safe, or keep her warm, or simply keep her close.

Back at the hotel, he orders dinner while she rests, speaking quietly into a phone that looks like something out of the 19th century. He calls la Grappe d'Or. He pays until they agree to deliver. He orders light foods, un-upsetting; enough of it and enough of a variety that she can eat her fill of what she likes. Hilary's 'fill' is a scant amount, anyway.

Afterward, waiting for their special delivery, Ivan strips out of his coat and vest, undoes his cuffs, tosses his belt over one of the dining chairs and steps out of his shoes. Last, his tie unknotted and whipped over the chair beside his belt; his new tie tossed beside it. Entirely more casual now, relaxed as if this were his own home -- or more probably, his parents' home -- he joins Hilary on the couches, stretching out crosswise to her with his feet on the coffee table. If she lays her head in his lap, his fingers stir through her hair.

"Let's stay in Lausanne," he says. "We'll just lounge about. Go shopping or go to a museum or catch a symphony if we feel like it. Lay about the hotel if we don't. When you need some time on your own you could always go to the spa, or send me out on a shopping errand.

"If you get tired of Lausanne, we can go fifteen miles down the road to Vevey. Quiet little village. I had a school friend whose eccentric aunt had an estate there. She got divorced, though, and last I heard they sold the place and split the sum."

[Hilary] In the eyes of the people around them, that Hilary is older than Ivan is just as obvious as the fact that she is his lover. Fingers entwined, her head on his shoulder, the backs of his knuckles stroking across her cheek as though he's marveling at the texture and warmth of her: it all signals to the people of Lausanne that whoever these lovely, wealthy people are, they are connected somehow. Strange that anyone looking at them now would sense that attachment instantly, when the two lovely, wealthy people themselves feel it so rarely.


She lifts her head a bit when he says he didn't want to embarrass her. It's hard to read her expression, but it can be surmised that it is simply a vague confusion, as though she can't imagine -- something. Getting embarrassed by that. Ivan noticing that she was tired without her saying so. Being pale. Being pale somehow getting concluded as a signal of her weariness. Ivan holding back. What surprises her is impossible to know, but the expression in her eyes is fleeting at best, unperturbed, and trifling.

In the back of the taxi cab, she sits to one side and Ivan gets in after her, sitting in the middle. She doesn't expect that either, but is also not surprised by it. His arm comes around her and she seems to relent, to relax a bit, leaning into him, closing her eyes. He makes her feel precious.

There is so much more to it than that.


In the hotel room, she sleeps. Quickly, almost instantly, she drops into a nap as soon as she slips under a light blanket. She doesn't even hear Ivan on the telephone nearby, is useless if he wants to ask her what she likes, what might be too rich, what causes her heartburn and what she can eat unscathed, and what might make her feel ill. So: a variety. So: waiting on the phone for awhile to find someone who speaks passable English. So: seeing her sleep, immune to the sound of his conversations, breathing steadily. So: doing the sort of thing Dmitri and the rest of the staff must do a dozen, a hundred times a day just to keep anything and everything he could possibly desire close at hand.

When Ivan sits down, having stripped away the more rigorous bindings of his clothing, the displacement and shift in weight is enough for Hilary to stir. The sleep was not long enough to be deep; there is still some light. She breathes in and looks at him, lifting her head. A little shifting then, Ivan scooting over and Hilary moving down on the couch until

there they are, with her head against his thigh and his long fingers weaving through the long, silken, cool strands of her hair. It's hypnotic to touch her like this. It's hypnotic to be touched like this, and Hilary tries not to fully wake up, hoping to prolong that odd intoxication.

He says let's. And he says we'll. He knows she appreciates this, or at very least: knows that it helps. No questioning, no probing, no trying to figure out what she wants when most of the time she truthfully doesn't know until the urge hits her what she wants. Other than him. Other than this. Other than whatever bizarre master and servant relationship they're building, filling in the cracks in that foundation with what is -- perhaps -- what passes for genuine caring among their kind. He just tells her, and while she knows quite well that if she dissented it's highly likely he would try to alter plans to please her --

when you need

send me out

if you get tired

-- Hilary likes that he just decides. That in the midst of all those decisions, those mild and loose plans, there is room for her to get away from him. From everyone. That in the middle of sometimes fearing that he doesn't matter at all to her, he makes room for the vast part of her that cannot stand for anyone to matter as much as he does.

"My family had a castle somewhere in the Ardenne," she murmurs, still only half-awake, and apparently agreeing by her silence with everything previous the mention of the friend's-eccentric-aunt's-estate, "a very long time ago."

There's a pause. She yawns softly. "I suppose I'm part Belgian," she adds, musing.

[Ivan] His fingers continue to stir idly, dreamily through her hair. There's a flatscreen TV in the corner of the room. It doesn't fit. It looks like something from another century altogether, jammed ever-so-inappropriately into place. Ivan stares in its direction but neither turns it on nor, really, even notices its presence.


"I'm Russian, through and through." His tone is musing as well. "By blood, anyway. I was born in New York, as was my father and his father before him. But my family has always been particular about maintaining their Russian bloodlines. It's ironic, really. We've married Russian Fangs, Russian Glass Walkers, Russian Get of Fenris, Russian Shadow Lords. But all Russians, all the time. We're a racist lot, just like a good Fang ought to be. Only, not about the right thing.

"And then the real irony is, as soon as we've pulled another fullblooded, hundred-percent-Russian into the family, we change their last names so no one will ever know. Easier to fit in at the country club, and all." A pause. "My father usually goes by Cyril. Our family name is Priselkov."

He combs his fingers through her hair, then, his blunt, well-trimmed nails scritching gently over her scalp.

"I suppose you don't really care about the naming and marrying conventions of my family, either," he adds, wry. "Dinner might take a while. I ordered an ample amount, and the restaurant doesn't usually deliver. Do you want me to draw you a bath so you can go straight to bed after dinner?"

[Hilary] They haven't turned on the television since they got here. It's possible they won't for the duration of their stay. When bored, they find people to fuck, people to torment, people to use. Hilary used to take pills, lock her doors and get on the internet to find things no one should want to look at, think about, fixate on. She would cook if there were anyone to cook for, or if it didn't appall Dion to be told by his servants of his wife's culinary escapades. She would cook if there was even one person to enjoy it. To share it with.


She ties up her hair and goes upstairs to the dance studio that, thanks to the size of the estate, will never be turned into a nursery. If she and Ivan get bored there are nightclubs, ballets, plays to see. There's the bed, and it's hard to imagine either of them being opposed to fucking out of simple boredom. It's possible Ivan might turn it on as background noise, or to the music channels, but really: it just seems so garish, in a place like this, that its presence is almost offensive.

They talk, for now, about ...nothing. His school friend's aunt. The castle Hilary has never seen, and isn't even sure still exists. His family. And not surprisingly, Ivan talks more freely than she does. That's because she's half-asleep in his lap. That's because such things just come more easily to him.

"My maiden name is Winchester," she muses, closing her eyes again as his fingers stroke her hair. No long history, there -- truth be told she knows very little about her ancestry, strange Fang that she is. There was a servant for those things, and then a servant to tell her to be quiet, to not learn, to not know, to take on the history and heritage of her mate. Mates. Husbands. Become one of them, dissolve herself and the scandals of Austere Howl into the new glory her children might bring to another house.

Maybe once upon a time her family name was Evrard or Verstraeten or Fontaine, Descamps or Collignon, maybe Van den Bossche or De Clercq. Maybe once upon a time, her family was not just a scattered remnant of a broken house but a line that was ever so careful about its records, its marriages, its deep ancestry in a single culture. No more.

Winchester, she was. Once upon a time. Thoroughly English, solid name, that.

He supposes she doesn't care. Hilary's eyes drift open again. Perhaps he can sense it; perhaps he can see her in the reflection of the television screen. Going on, he talks of dinner, of a bath. Hilary is warm and breathing in his lap, and it's hard to think of any of the times she's been so cold-seeming. So distant.

"A bath would be lovely," she says quietly, and turns her head on his lap, looking up at him now. Then, instead of Join me?, she asks him:

"Will you bathe me?"

[Ivan] Ivan's head tips faintly, as though perplexed. "Of course," he says, as though this were a foregone conclusion. As though he'd always intended to.


When he rises, he gives her his hand. The bathroom adjoins the bedchamber. The tub is enormous and deep, equipped with nozzles and jets, a veritable jacuzzi in the privacy of their own suite. Ivan turns on the tap and adjusts the temperature, then returns to help Hilary out of her clothes as the tub fills. No; that's not quite accurate. It's not that she needs the help; not that she cannot undress herself. It's that he wants to undress her, as though as her energy wanes her submissiveness grows.

So: layer upon layer, drawn off her body. Even in midsummer, on the flybridge of the Cielo, Hilary Durante was so very fair. Here, her skin bears comparison to ivory, alabaster, milk. He kisses her as he undresses her. He can't seem to help this any more than he can help breathing. His mouth touches her neck, her shoulder, her spine, the dip of her navel. The inside of her knee. When she's naked he helps her into the bath, following her a moment later.

His shirt is still on. His slacks. He doesn't seem to mind, sinking in behind her. He washes her the way he always does, after he fucks her sore: only he hasn't fucked her; at least not recently. His hands move over her back, rubbing and kneading. He draws her back against his chest, his knees folded to either side of her hips, as he washes her abdomen, her breasts, her arms, her fingers.

When his hand finds her pussy, it seems almost incidental. The way he touches her is nothing if not deliberate, though: slow and sure and unyielding, stroking her higher and higher until she's arching in his arms. Until she's writhing. Until she's crying out, twisting, coming with his hand between her legs and his arm around her ribs, holding her fast while he bends to kiss the moans right out of her mouth.

Afterward, he has her lift her legs out of the water, one and then the other. He washes all down her thighs, her shins, the arch of her foot, her toes. He washes that new slickness from her cunt, too, his hands gentle but methodical now, objective.

And then -- finally -- he undresses. He leaves his sopping clothes on the floor for someone else to deal with. Hotel housekeeping, one imagines. He lays back, drawing her to rest against him. Holding her. Cradling her. Precious, she said. Precious is what he makes her feel she is. Precious is what she is. To the tribe. To him.

He kisses her temple after a while.

And after a longer while, he reaches between her thighs again. When he starts playing with her this time, it's so gentle; almost thoughtless.

[Hilary] The tub stands in the center of the bathroom, lifted slightly like an altar to which he leads her. She is taking off her jewelry while he is testing the water. Hot enough to steam, not hot enough to scald. There's no sound of the metal pieces touching the marble surface, no sound at all; Hilary lays earrings and bangles and rings in the case she brought with her, setting them down against satin-covered velvet in caressing silence.


She sees him through the mirror when he comes to her, their eyes meeting for a moment, and then she closes hers, exhaling a soft sigh just before his deft hands reach around and begin unbuttoning the tailored little jacket she has on. It goes slowly, and for most of it Hilary helps only by moving her arms this way, shrugging her shoulders, keeping her hands out of his way as Ivan reaches down and undoes button, clasp, and zipper of her slacks. She lets him undress her as though she's a doll, only lifting her arms up over her head as he draws her blouse off her body.

It's not even a revealing, a surprise, an unwrapping: he watched her get dressed today when they woke up on the plane. He knows what lingerie she has on, that coffee-and-cream-colored set that vanished as she drew her clothes on over it. Two 'mornings', now, since the fireworks, two mornings he's watched her get dressed after having her sleep beside him. It's unthinkable.

And she's so worn out. Not as drained as she was that day she showed up at his penthouse begging for reprieve from her husband, as though somehow being with Ivan was at least less exhausting than being with Dion. Less pretense to keep up. Less repression of what she really wants.

Which is this: even the subtle dominance of Ivan keeping his half-undone clothing on as he strips her bare and lays kisses under her breasts, against her hip, down her thigh. The faint, gentle way the power between them ebbs and flows, shifting back and forth like a lever on the tip of a fulcrum. His clothes grant him freedom from the vulnerability she has in nudity; the fact that he doesn't even bother to undress before following her implies a certain animalism in his nature, a certain irresistability in hers.

He can't help but follow her. Can't help but kiss her as her skin is bared by his hands. Can't help himself, even as he moves and manipulates her arms, feeling her quiet passivity in the suppleness of her motions in response to him. Every answer her body gives him is yes

as though

she can't help but give him whatever he wants.

It's been ages, it seems, since he fucked her last. Touched her the way he touches her now, parting the lips of her pussy. And it's never begun like this, with him washing her skin and rubbing her back until she relaxes against his chest. That's how it ends. That's how he heals her from what he does to her; that's how he says without uttering a word that she's precious, that he's not really just using her, that she's a not a whore no matter how hard or selfishly he fucks her. That he cares for her.

But now it's how it begins. His fingertip stroking her clit, and her legs opening slightly for him, then wider, as her back begins to arch. Hilary trembling slightly, the hot water in the bathtub lapping against the sides with the way she moves. It's a long time, really. It's not the same as when he ties her down and fucks her from behind, when she comes in literal seconds from the intensity and the brutality of it all, from the things he's snarling in her ear as he takes what he likes from her.

This isn't brutal, or cruel, no matter how objectively, how selfishly he plays with her til she comes. It takes more time. It takes patience. He has to hold her down though, at the end, hold her by the upper arm or around the ribs like he does just to keep her still, to keep her from getting away from him as he strokes her orgasm out of her.

The sounds Hilary makes resound off the walls, the marble floor, the mirrors, until Ivan seals his lips against hers and drinks them out of her mouth.


She's trembling for awhile after that, her cheeks and her skin flushed from the heat and from the sex. Her body is slick with steam, with sweat, her hair sticking to her neck and shoulders in the sort of elegant curls one finds in wrought-iron gates and blackwork embroidery. Her hand is cupped over his knee as though to hold onto something anchoring, while he cleans her off and helps her come back down. It's not until she's breathing a little more normally that he exticates himself from where she rests on him and peels off his saturated clothes.

Hilary comes to him so easily now, turning her face against his chest, kissing his shoulder and his arm, her eyes closed as though she can't bear to keep them open any longer. She's molten against him, which is really no different than the rest of the day, the way she would lean on his shoulder or lie on his lap. Like she's his. As though no matter how distant she is or how much a part of her resents the presence of other beings in this universe she's inhabiting, no matter whose baby that is inside her, no matter who put the ring on her finger most recently, she belongs right here. To him, as much as with him.

Even if it isn't true. Even if all those things do matter, and very much.


It's a shuddering little gasp she gives when he touches her again, and there's no hesitation between that shiver and what she does next. Hilary turns in his arms, the sort of active, almost resistant behavior he so rarely sees from her, and she puts her hands on his chest, opening her eyes and climbing atop him, spreading her legs over his hips. She meets his eyes, water dripping from her breasts and her elbows and her chin, and they both know the restaurant he ordered their meal from will be in no particular hurry to grant them this bizarre but lucrative delivery.

Hilary leans forward and kisses him in a way that seems demure. Soft. Hesitant, even a little uncertain. Her hand on his cock is more sure, blindly but easily guiding him to her cunt. Hilary doesn't sink down on him, doesn't lead him into her. But she moves against him as they kiss, the head of his cock sliding against her pussy. But penetrating her, pulling her down onto him -- Hilary leaves that to Ivan.

[Ivan] Hilary finds him hard already beneath the surface of the water, ready, arching into the palm of her hand when she wraps her fingers around him. There's a half-caught gasp, barely preceding that near-reflexive flex of his hips. Then he's leaning back against the sloped side of the tub, pulling her down, his fingers tangling with hers when she brings him to the opening of her cunt.


His mouth leaves her when she rubs him against her. Ivan bends to her then, eyes closed, panting a warm breath over her collarbones before he dips to catch her breast in his mouth. His arms wrap around her hard enough to arch her back, to pin her against him: he kisses her, sucks at her, bites gently at her before lifting his head to hers again.

This time the driving force behind the kiss is Ivan. There's nothing demure or soft or hesitant about it. His hand replaces hers, or perhaps only joins hers, on his cock. A moment later he's guiding himself into her, groaning into her mouth, setting his hands on her hips and drawing her down,

and down, until their bodies meet.

His skin is slick with soap where her arms wrap, where her hands lay. She's still slick from that first orgasm, a wetness that's wholly unlike that of water. He pauses for a breath, kisses her again, and then starts to move her.

Their bodies are defined by the bathwater. Its warmth erases clear boundaries; its viscosity slows their motion. The strokes are short. He stays deep within her, grinding against her in slow pulses, his mouth on hers more often than not; on her skin otherwise, pressing kisses against her neck, her shoulder.

[Hilary] It isn't always like this. It's almost never like this.


Hilary can't remember ever getting on top of Ivan because she chose to and not because he put her there. It feels strange to her, the way that having sex with him aboard the Krasota felt strange that first time the other night. But she said then she wanted to do it again, even if it frightened her. She chose it now, sinking down on Ivan's lap and guiding him to her, telling him without words that she wants him, and she wants him like this.

There are people who never imagine in their fondest dreams making love to the one they adore in a place like this, overlooking Lake Geneva and the Alps, purchasing the suite at the last minute for an indefinite period without batting an eyelash, without considering the cost. The idea that these two, lovers in the sense that they fuck each other but not love each other, come here to explore their twisted little sexuality and pursue their exponentially unwholesome affair, is a bit appalling.

They kiss like they're lovers, though. Like there's something good in all of this, even if they both doubt it to be true. He's rough with her, on the border of what would unnerve and disturb most women he has sex with. But it calms her. It makes her feel more normal, being pressed against his body and her back forcibly arched, her hips drawn down so he can fill her with his cock. She tips her head back, eyes closing, as he takes her. The force of motion is all Ivan, pulling her down onto him. She flows onto him like the water around him, and tips her head down when her thighs touch his lap.

A gasp strokes the inner curvature of his ear, the harbinger of her lips drawing across the flesh, whispering a prophecy of her mouth opening over his earlobe, sucking on it, biting, dragging her teeth over the skin. He moves her, and she moans, pliant and warm in his arms the way she always is, the way he knows she will be. For him, at least. Always for him.


What they do can't be called making love. Neither of them have experienced the sort of silly infatuation that warrants using the term. They fuck. They have sex. And it's like this, those hard, deep grinds of their hips together underwater turning to something faster, a little rougher. Maybe Ivan gasps half-uttered encouragements to her, maybe he palms his hand over her ass and holds her right there while he gives her a series of rapid, pounding thrusts when she's right on the verge of screaming, clinging to his shoulders and moaning past the crown of his head, crying out his name, or yes, or nothing coherent at all. Maybe he kisses her, swallowing her screams when they roll on their sides with bruising speed, water sloshing out of the side of the tub. Maybe he holds her cradled to him, safe from the porcelain, as he hammers his cock into her, snarls in her ear, fucks his orgasm out into her like it's the sole purpose, the main reason, he brought her here.

Even if that's not the truth, either.


They bathe again, or at least begin to. Lazily, luxuriously, stretching out their hours together as the bath drains and refills. He bites at her ear, her jawline, rubs his face against her and breathes in her scent, and Hilary tries to remember what planet she's on as she warms herself in his arms. Clean, fresh, hot water rises, surrounding them, and it hasn't stopped flowing when there's someone at the door, bringing them their feast.

Stay here, he tells her, and one would think that if she's the submissive, the servant, she would be the one pampering him. Answering the door, declining the offered turndown service, filling the bath, washing him in the tub, all these things he does for her. One would misunderstand: it isn't, has never been, about servitude. It has never been about getting from a lover the sort of behavior one could get from a hired servant, of which they both have plenty.

Ivan orders foods that won't pain her, and the sort of variety he expects his own staff to make sure he has at his leisure at all times. He washes her in the bath and rubs knots out of her muscles. He leaves her to soak while he brings dinner to her, taking care of her like some cherished thing, some kind of precious pet. And Hilary -- submissive, warped Hilary, who needs to please him like she needs to breathe -- takes it as her due. The paradox goes unremarked. They, at least, understand.


Dinner isn't taken at the dining table in the salon but on the coffee table, the two of them lounging on the floor and couch naked and in robes. They move with drowsy slowness and touch each other thoughtlessly, often, like primitives or beasts in the middle of this sumptuous room. Hilary eats lightly. She lies on the couch only half-covered by the soft white robe he wrapped her in as she rose from the bath, and at one point she eats a canape while Ivan bends his head over her, kissing her navel, kissing her hip, stroking the outsides of her legs with his palms as his kisses travel over her mons, her inner thigh. She opens her legs then, the canape dropping half-eaten to the floor behind the couch, and

she writhes, arching, til he puts his hand on her and pushes her back down to the cushions, presses her legs further apart while he has his fill of her, eats at her until she's screaming again, til she's coming for him. Her thighs tremble to either side of his face as he breathes her in, licking the last of her slick up with his tongue. Ivan goes on kissing her for some time even though every flick of his tongue makes her whimper.

Go bend over the bed, he tells her, when he's done with her, long before her breathing has returned to normal. His cock is hard as he stands; he seems to ignore it, ripping a sliver of beef off the bone and eating it, sucking the juices off his thumb, just as he ignores Hilary's gasping when she gets to her feet, her quivering legs as she walks to the bed. But he hears the rustle of the robe as it slips off her shoulders, as it falls down her back to the carpet. Maybe he even watches; Hilary's back is turned, and she doesn't know. She stands at the foot of the bed and leans forward until her forearms rest against the covers, her legs together. For now.

If there are manacles in his luggage somewhere, she doesn't know about it. There are gold robes tying back brocade curtains here and there. He has his silk ties. But this time, at least, he doesn't hold her down. Hilary cannot hear his footsteps when he approaches the bed. She has no warning, the first time he slaps his hand across her ass. The second comes not even a breath later. He spanks her until she's pink, until some point of satiation is reached in himself, until the moans she's letting out come to a frequency he can't resist.

She's whimpering, all but crying, as his fingertips stroke her reddened buttocks, as his palms touch her in soft, soothing strokes. The next time he spanks her he's fucking her, forcing her legs apart and entering her in one hard, sudden push. He's saying things to her they'll both forget, come morning. His hand is striking her ass when she hesitates too long to answer his demands, when she moans wordlessly instead of telling him his is the only cock she wants, that it's what she needs. He spanks her when he wants her to fuck him back harder. Faster. You can do better than that.

And when he wants to. When, perhaps, he can't help himself.

Leaning over her at the end. Covering her. Covering her hands with his, kissing her shoulder, gasping in her ear as it all becomes too much, too fucking much, until the only thing left to do is be close, and be deep inside of her, and forget everything, everything else, that exists.


They sleep without bonds. Under the thick, multi-layered comforters and covers it gets warm, then hot. Hilary doesn't sleep as close to him as she did on the plane, as she does when he ties her up. She lays out and her hair is combed and dry now and the pink on her ass is fading now but it might still leave bruises, but she smiled when he was done fucking her like that. She put his hand on her ass and she smiled, closing her eyes with contentment and pleasure, rubbing her face into the hollow between his neck and shoulder.

Said, without saying,

yours.


In the morning, it's cold. His nipples are hard with it; the chill is what wakes him, far earlier than he might like. The covers are stripped off of the upper half of his body and it's because Hilary moved in her sleep. She has her head on his stomach, her arm draped over his hip, her breath tickling the thin line of hair from navel to groin. The sun is rising, giving the room a surreal, harsh sort of light where it comes in through the cracks of the curtains.

Every day might be like yesterday.

Every morning might be just like this.

[Ivan] It's almost paradoxical: the reality of all the ways they fuck and the way each appears. The way each is supposed to be. Sometimes the most giving of acts are the ones where he takes the most from her; uses her as a plaything, a doll. When he lays her out like that. When he eats her out like that, devouring her like she's part of the thousand-dollar dinner he just ordered for the two of them; taking his fill of her as though even her orgasm is something that belongs to him, now.


And sometimes the most brutal things he can do to her are also the moments where he gives the most. When he ties her down. When he strikes her with his palm. When he rails her over the edge of the bed not because he's angry with her, not because he wants to punish her for being so cold, being so untouchable, being such a fucking slut that doesn't belong to him but will use him for his cock anyway --

not because of any of that, any of the reasons he used to hate her in the frenzied midst of their fucking in the past, but because

he knows what she needs, and he knows what she's taught him to want. And he gives it to her. He gives it to them both.


In the morning, he wakes to find her lying on him, and even that has a subtext of submission in it. Her head on his stomach. Her arms wrapped around him. Like he's stronger than her, like he's something she can depend on, can lean on, can go to for protection from -- what?

The pretense, maybe. The dreadful, exhausting pretense of normalcy she must face every single day, because as cracked as Hilary is she still has a basic core of self-preservation. She knows what she has to be not to survive, but to live in style to which she has become accustomed, on which she has become dependent, like a flower in a hothouse.

The way she lies on him almost implies a sort of dependency, too. The societal roles they might as well have been preassigned from birth: the soft, vulnerable kinswoman leaning on the virile, strong garou.

Except he's not that sort of Garou. Her husband is: broad and dark and husky and dignified. Not Ivan, who is lean and golden, whose skin is soft and smooth and almost hairless except for the faintest gold dusting on the forearms, the calves, that line from navel to groin. Whose musculature is only barely defined beneath his skin. Who could go days without shaving and only barely accrue a beard. Who seems primarily renowned for his ability to be silent, and his ability to lie, and his ability to get laid by a rather dazzling array of emptyheaded lovelies.

He's not at all the sort of Garou -- or man -- that one would expect a woman like her to need like this. He's not at all the sort of creature one would expect to fuck her the way he does. To treat her the way he does.

Which is to say: so dominantly.

Which is also to say: so tenderly.

He is tender with her, though. He tries not to wake her as he shifts her: moves her up the bed a little, pulling the covers with her. If she wakes anyway, he kisses her brow. He tucks them both back in. He closes his eyes again, and a few more hours slide by, and his body is at a loss as to what time it really is, but that doesn't matter because...

he's happy here, caught out of space and time with Hilary; here for the next week or two, pretending their realities at home do not really exist.


That's what this is, ultimately. Escapism. Elaborate, expensive escapism. When they go back she'll still be pregnant. She'll be more pregnant than she was two weeks ago when they left. She'll still be mated to another Garou. He'll still be uncapable of really devoting himself to her, or to anyone, the way that -- say -- her mate is. He'll still find her increasingly unattractive as she swells, even if he tries not to. Even if he wants to see her anyway, or thinks he does; even if he thinks there's a possibility for their interactions, their caring

-- because terrifyingly enough, that is what this is --

to find a root in something other than their physical connection, when in all likelihood she won't even let him see her like that. Will refuse to be seen in another few months. Weeks. Days.


Days is all they have. But there's no hurry. That's the true luxury: to have this time together, unmeasured, without worrying about when she has to be back home, when her husband might come looking for her, when they'll get sick of each other. Time is precious; time to waste, most precious of all.

So: they have their fill of that. They loiter half their days in bed. They wander around the city in the afternoons and the early evenings, straying through narrow pedestrian streets, up the slopes. They explore casually, avoiding tourist areas because even with all their riches and jewels they didn't have to worry about getting lost, getting mugged, getting into a bad part of town. They have coffee to get out of the rain; they go to galleries, playhouses; they fuck in a private box at the symphony.

He talks during their time together. About jetskiing on the lake. About his school friends and that one time they sailed from Paris to Casablanca. About a book he read. A show he saw. He laughs that the lead actress's greatest feat of acting is in convincing the world she's stupid. He tells her about the first time he saw an airshow, and that one day he'd like to learn to fly. Air, sea and land, he adds, and laughs again.

When they run out of clothes they shop. When they're hungry they dine. They pass a yacht rental one day and they go out on the lake; they sail across the lake to France and they don't come back for days. They don't go to Vevey after all; they go to some other tiny town on the lakeshore, some little place called Meillerie where they speak French almost exclusively; where a half-dozen switchback roads encompasses the entire town; where everything looks charmingly sunfaded, a little old, becomingly worn. They stay there for a handful of days. They have a little room that hangs over the lake. He smokes local cigarettes out on the balcony, looking down at the waters washing below them. When the quarters become too close and she needs time alone, she wanders the town; or he goes down to the shore. He makes friends with the innkeeper. He buys a little bracelet made of polished stones, and of all the things he could give her, all the untold possibilities his wealth gives him, this is the first and -- so far -- only gift he has ever given Hilary, this woman who is -- by all estimations -- his mistress. His paramour.

They talk about maybe making a jaunt down to southern France, down to Italy, but in the end they come back to Lausanne. They're not students, after all, taking advantage of what might be their one and only trip to Europe in their whole lives. It's a foregone conclusion that they can come here anytime they want,

though perhaps not with one another.

And they fuck. Often. In Lausanne; in Meillerie. Athletically. Savagely, brutally sometimes, pinning her down and pounding her; rough enough that her screams might alarm their neighbors. Lazily, too: taking their time in the afternoons, tying her down and teasing her, giving it to her slow, achingly slow, making her work for it, making her beg for it, taking his time with her until she nearly sobs from anticipation.

And -- differently, sometimes. In the darkness, at night, when the vast chambers of their hotel suite seem a little more like those terrifying halls and corridors of her childhood. It's different, then. Sometimes he fucks her gently then, and sometimes hard, but: differently.

Lovingly, they might say, were they not who they are.


It won't go on forever. It can't. Two weeks is not a long time, in the grand scheme of things. Eventually their fortnight will come to a close, and Chicago will call them back. Eventually they'll have to pack their things -- so much more than what they set out with -- and they'll drive to the airport where a veritable army of servants will wait to help them with their things, their luggage, their plane, their every minute need. And so their lives, their glamorous, glorious lives, will take them back, and so much will be left uncertain, left up in the air, left unresolved, but they don't think of any of that.

Right now, here, at the beginning of their first full day in Lausanne, they think of nothing more than the present, as though the present is all there is.

As though every day might be like yesterday,

and every morning just like this.