Ivan Press

[Hilary] Outside of these moments when they're alone she can go on with that pretense. She can play the scorned woman all she wants, but she won't. Hilary is, at times, quite savvy: if she behaves with class, protects Dion's reputation among the elegant people she used to spend time with, he has less reason to punish her, come after her. If she behaves with class, them all knowing that she lost her baby and her husband left her, she will have their pity, and some form of their esteem, and that will be a useful thing in the future. So she will go on as she always has: so cool, so arch, so elegant, so refined.

Mrs. Durante is no more. What was her brother's last name, again? Will she go back to it?

Probably. She doesn't carry her first mate's name any longer, either.

Ivan's hand goes on stroking her breast, teasing it gently til her nipples are hard, til there's a flush across her skin. He kisses her brow, and reverent as his touch may be, there's nothing holy about her response to him. Restraint is not the same thing as sanctification.

They do, in fact, part. Eventually.

He leaves, and the door half-closes behind him.


When she exits her bedroom some time later, her hair is dried. Straightened, too, as before, glossy where it sweeps over her shoulders and back. There is a slender headband across her crown that does not quite hold all of her hair back as it is meant as decoration and not truly for practicality, a tiny thing that looks jeweled and sparkles where the light hits it. Not much light, still; it's still early afternoon, and the rain goes on. Earrings made of gold, bangles made of the same. The heels of her shoes are tall and slender and architectural, metallic against the black leather of the straps around her feet and ankles. Her dress is a little black sheath, the silhouette almost nothing more than two sweeping lines; it does not hug her form overmuch but has an avant-garde drape more hinted at than overdone. The neckline is a straight shot from shoulder to shoulder, a tiny slit cut between her clavicles.

Her overnight bag is far more colorful, but less interesting. It's from Coach.

She walks across the flooring with the clip of her heels subdued by the springy wood, and Ivan's clothes smell a little like her sex where she rubbed her wet cunt against him. Hilary smells like Chanel, and like the rosewater-tinted soap she uses in her shower, that Ivan washed her with.

Her eyebrow lifts as she hands him her bag and he tells her he was thinking about her cars, and her gifts. He doesn't realize, probably, that includes Cielo. He might. Why doesn't she keep them. Because he just told his assistant to add her as a signer. Hilary rolls her eyes, lets out a noise he's heard now for the second time today. Hilary walks past him towards the door. "You are ridiculous," she mutters, drawing it open and glancing back at him. "Get the lights, would you?"

[Ivan] God knows what Max is thinking right now, looking at the latest of any number of ridiculous tasks, demands, requests and inquiries from her employer every day. Pls add Hilary Durante as a signer to all my accounts. You may want to include her maiden name. Nothing more or less. Nevermind the fact that now Max will need to figure out Hilary Durante's maiden name; nevermind that she'll have to figure out Hilary Durante's social security number as well -- beyond all the trivialities, there's simply the what the fucking fuck factor of Ivan Press wanting to add this woman, this embarrassingly older married woman, this woman who's a dead-eyed, ice cold bitch, who had those nurses of hers calling Max with sobbing complaints twice a week at least,

as an authorized signer to accounts that summed to numbers mere mortals only dream of. Because -- she had his bastard, apparently. Either that, or because she's recovered from the c-section now and has just sucked his cock well enough to blow every last synapse in his brain.

She might be grousing to someone. Maybe I should down a shot of lidocaine and get to work myself. Or perhaps she's so used to ridiculous requests that she simply sighs and starts making phone calls.


Regardless, in Hilary's apartment, Ivan gets the lights as bid. He shoulders her bag, nevermind that it's really a woman's tote. And, following her out the door -- "Should I interpret as an agreement, then?"

[Hilary] Max is, like Dmitri, one of the few people in the world now who know that Hilary had Ivan's bastard. Dmitri knows the boy lived, fed him and changed him. There's a maid who knows. Most people know the stories they're told. It's possible that the family members in Novgorod 'know' that little Anton's mother died shortly after his birth, and in due time what they 'know' and 'remember' will be that he came to them much later, that he was older, that he had a little time in her arms and that she adored him, loved him beyound reason. Most of everyone in Chicago 'knows' that Hilary's son with her husband Dion was stillborn. Max, though, like Dmitri, knows everything.

Or close enough.

The door closes behind Ivan and Hilary turns to lock it up. This place isn't like his; there's only a few apartments on this level, but she shares the floor with humans, of all kinds. A bachelor who fancies himself to be something like Ivan occupies the other large penthouse on the opposite side of the building, the one whose floorplan almost exactly -- but not quite -- mirrors Hilary's. There's a married, childless couple in a one bedroom. There's three up-and-coming models living in a studio; the studio is in the management's name, and when they are gone, there will be new girls there. Another singleton holds another bachelor, a quieter fellow who works too much to enjoy his money but, all the same, likes the view. And so on. A few of the apartments are empty.

Hilary will be buying them soon enough, or leasing them, to house her servants. More than likely she will manage it so that the two or three apartments nearest her are taken up by her servants; she will hold a quarter or third of the penthouse floor in her name. She will share none of her walls but with her own staff, and with the sky.

She walks towards the elevator, Ivan trailing behind her carrying her bag. "No," she informs him. "I need your money less than I need three cars, Ivan. If you want to lavish it on me, do what other men do and just give me whatever it is you want me to have."

She presses a button, and it lights up a soft green.

[Ivan] "I just did," he points out. The floor beneath their feet drops, and they go with it: a gentle, swift descent. Though it's not heavy, he sets the bag between his feet as they ride down. "It's not about need, Hilary. I want you to have it."

And a shrug, as though to say: simple as that.

[Hilary] Not a hundred floors, or fifty, or even thirty, but they go down, down, down. Hilary has impeccable posture, even when she puts her hand on her hip and watches the lights flicker above the doors, watches the numbers count backwards as though they're about to pass into a drugged sleep.

"I won't be kept by you," she says quietly, but it's after several moments. "You may buy me any little trinkets you want, take me wherever in the world pleases you, but I don't want your accounts. I'm not your business partner or your wife or anything at all that justifies such an arrangement, and I won't be. So tell your pet dyke nevermind."

[Ivan] "Now that's odd," he comments lightly. There's something in that tone that speaks of a rising anger, of things he already regrets saying before he's even said. God, but he doesn't want to fight with her again. Not now, not so soon, not when they're both stretched thin as paper. And for all that, he can't seem to stop his own mouth.

They're passing the eighth floor. Almost there. He turns toward her to elaborate on what he finds so bizarre.

"You don't mind being quite literally kept if you're someone's mate or wife. You have no compunctions whatsoever about taking full advantage of gifts you've paid for with your cunt. Yet you won't share an account with someone you're actually choosing to fuck -- never mind that dipping into that account or not would be entirely your choice.

"Inexplicable." And he picks her bag up. The elevator is slowing as it reaches the lobby.

[Hilary] His anger -- indeed, any anger at all between them -- is usually like flint hitting steel. It leads to conflagrations, explosions, destruction. They pick each other's weakest spots at those times, attack each other where they are most vulnerable. Or: even just where they might be vulnerable. It's a dangerous thing when one of them gets angry, because it seldom stays one-sided. Even when it does, that usually only serves to make the initial party more furious in their loneliness.

Their disconnection.

Hilary is still watching the numbers when Ivan turns to her, unable to stop his own mouth from running. She seems to be ignoring him as he all but calls her a whore because -- ironically -- she doesn't want to be a signer on his accounts.

When he's done, and picking up her bag, she does look over at him, vaguely amused. Perhaps a little sad. "One would think you'd be used to it by now," she says to him, almost gently, and passes her hand along the back of his as the elevator stops, and the doors slide open, and she starts to walk forward.

[Ivan] Loneliness and disconnection, oddly, is something he's never more keenly aware of than when he's with Hilary.

Not always, no. Sometimes -- usually when they've finished destroying each other, when they're lying in the ash-white aftermath trying to put the pieces back together -- sometimes he feels close to her. Sometimes he's even happy. Content, in a way that's deeper and more complex than the careless, carefree way he enjoys the rest of his glittering life. Yet even that turns against him when it's like this: when she feels a thousand miles away and sinking farther out of reach with every passing moment.

Ultimately, Ivan doesn't know how to connect with Hilary. He doesn't know how to keep her with him. He has a few tricks now, a few things that sometimes work, but --

when she touches his hand, he grabs hers. The strength of his grip is almost punishing. He holds on to her and pulls her back and the security guard in the lobby gives them a startled glance as the elevator doors slide shut again,

and he pulls her to him, hard enough that they collide, wrapping his arm around her to hold her there.

"I need to feel like you're mine somehow," he says, muffled against her neck, her hair. He can't bear to say this looking at her face; is afraid all he'll see there is disgust, or incomprehension, or that sad little smile of hers. Doesn't know what would be worst. "I'm glad you're not his anymore, but you never were. I need to know you're mine, and I need to ... take care of you. And I don't know any other way."

[Hilary] She's the mother of his child. She may very well be his first love.

He hauls her back to him by that glancing touch and the doors slide closed a moment later all over again, the elevator still for a brief moment. Hilary has taken a quick breath in as he presses her to his body, holds her there with his voice touching her neck with humid warmth. Mine, he says, and the word and the way he grabbed her, the way he keeps her, makes her a little wet. She doesn't push her ass against the front of his slacks, though. She stands very still, taller than she was when he had her in the hallway, taller because those heels of hers are vicious.

Slowly, she turns her head a bit to him, hardly able to see his face. Dark strands of her hair half-veil his face. "I am yours," she whispers, with a trace of hesitation in it. Dark eyes search for lighter ones, the mottled color of his irises not reflecting for a moment how pure his blood is. "And you do," Hilary adds, just as quietly. "You give me what I need, Ivan. Like no one else."

[Hilary] She's the mother of his child. She may very well be his first love.

He hauls her back to him by that glancing touch and the doors slide closed a moment later all over again, the elevator still for a brief moment. Hilary has taken a quick breath in as he presses her to his body, his head bowed so his voice touches her neck with humid warmth. She almost recoils from him at the way he holds her, something about it imploring, needful, the kind of clinging that Ivan himself rejects when he fears it might come from her.

Mine, he says, and her eyes close, her figure tense in the circle his arm makes around her body. She stands very still, taller than she was when he had her in the hallway, taller because those heels of hers are vicious.

Slowly, she turns her head a bit to him, hardly able to see his face. Dark strands of her hair half-veil his face. "I am yours," she whispers next to his ear, with a trace of hesitation in it. A trace of rejection, too, despite the words themselves, as though she's telling him not I'm yours but let go. "And you do," Hilary adds, just as quietly. "You give me what I need, Ivan."

[Ivan] There was a time -- before he grew to understand Hilary a little better, before he knew not to do that -- that he used to ask her question after question. Pry at her. Demand answers. Why are you like this. Why do you act like this. Why are you such a soulless bitch, Hilary?

They'd leave her worn thin, those questions. Scraped threadbare, scoured raw. Exhausted.


He feels exhausted right now. Or if not exhausted -- then at least raw, and threadbare, and thin; too blasted to feel anything but pain. Hear anything but the rejection, the resistance, the tension in her.

He knows what he sounds like right now, saying need me, need me when the truth is he'd run screaming if she actually did need him. If she ever showed him that in a moment outside of their most intense, soulburning sex. He knows what he sounds like; he knows what he's doing; he knows he's behaving exactly like those idiot boys she must have destroyed by the dozen. He loathes it in himself. He can't help it.

What he said was the truth, as far as he can see it: she belonged to Dion, but she was never really his. She's not even that much anymore. She's been turned loose. She doesn't think she'll be mated off again, which means she's anchorless now, and in some way -- for the first time in a very long time, or perhaps in her entire life -- she belongs to herself.

Which means if she doesn't need him, if she isn't attached to him the way he's grown so desperately attached to her --

why, then, she could just leave. And that would be it.


Those are the things he can't say to her. They sound stupid, and he's made enough of a fool of himself already. The way he behaves sometimes -- groveling in front of another pack's totem shrine, rolling over if an Ahroun threatens him, fucking emptyheaded girls two or three at a time -- he can seem utterly shameless. Like he has no pride, no dignity at all. But there's a difference; there are things he does by choice, because he simply doesn't care how he looks or what people think or how easily everyone around him is gulled, hoodwinked, fooled.

And then there are those things he has no control over. Those humiliations, he feels sharp and stark as any Fang. As any young man, hotheaded and full of his own worth. Those humiliations, he can't bear.


That's what this feels like, when he grabs her and clings to her and asks her to please, please tell him she's his: humiliation. And when she

-- does her best, really, tries to give him what he needs, only her best isn't quite enough because all he hears now is her discomfort, her rejection --

hesitates, and stiffens, and tells him what he wants to hear while her body tells him let go, humiliation boils over into anger. It's the sort of black rage that seethes in the core of her; the sort of black rage that so rarely touches him. It does more than touch him now. It sinks its claws into him, and he wants to grab her by the hair and dash her face into the wall; beat her against it again and again and again.

He can see it so vividly in his mind that he has to grab her by the shoulders and simply push her away, shove her back before it happens.

"Don't placate me." It's a foreign sound: that low, silky snarl. "You're the last person I need to tell me what I want to hear."

[Hilary] Give her this: Hilary's real nos are unequivocable and unmistakable. And Ivan has learned, quickly and well, to heed them. Don't ask her question after question until she's so scraped raw she shakes apart from the core. Don't remind her about the child, her baby, their son. Don't, don't, just don't.

She has no such boundaries in place with him, not that she knows of. There hasn't been a point where she's pushed him so far, too far, that she's learned to never, ever do it again. Hilary is utterly unafraid of him, and it's possible she doesn't realize she could hurt him.

Though the words she chooses are gentle and reassuring, Ivan can sense the tension in her body, the rejection of him for being so clingy, so boyish, so needy. He fears, though he can't say it to her, that nothing is holding her in Chicago, nothing is keeping her within his reach, she can do anything, go anywhere, have whatever life she might like. She's had two mates and produced no children -- the one potential heir she couldn't even keep alive to his first breath. She's in her mid-thirties, which in their tribe may as well be a dried-up old crone. She comes from a House that doesn't even exist anymore because of its own sickness and corruption, or so the story goes. Hilary is, now, about as free as a Silver Fang kinswoman could be.

And she doesn't need him, if she has her own money. If no one is threatening to kill her. If she's not pregnant and in need of care. If she doesn't love him, which she's probably incapable of anyway. If there's nothing he can offer her that she can't get elsewhere.

She thought about telling him that. Right at the end there, drilling it home, making him understand that she does need something from him. That, in fact, she needs something from him that she can't get somewhere else. It is not in her to tell him that even if she can, she doesn't want to. Doesn't want to leave him. She's held by him and thinks: I told him I need him. Want him. And still, this. She's held by him and says: yours. It doesn't match up. And the animal with his arms around her scents what isn't said.

The elevator is motionless, the doors closed. She thinks he's going to slam her agains the wall again, but he doesn't. He just shoves her away, stiffarms her in a fit of rage. Her expression hasn't changed; he can see her face now and it's that strangely youthful look in her eyes, childlike with confusion more than blankness, but even the confusion isn't tinted with surprise.

Hilary is quiet for a few moments before she speaks again, staring at him.

"If that's what I was doing," she says gradually, "would I have argued with you about the accounts?" Another moment, and she makes no motion towards him, or away. Then, quieter, though even so it's hard to sense emotion in the words: "Are you so determined to believe you mean nothing to me?"

[Ivan] Another woman -- the sort of woman ordained by society -- would react differently. With terror, perhaps, or at least fear. Or perhaps with compassion: rushing to comfort, to nurture, to make it better.

She's not that sort of woman. She's an aberration, an abomination in the eyes of human and garou society both. An unnatural thing all but incapable of emotion, who can't even keep a baby alive. That's the lie they tell, anyway, and in some way --

don't let me hurt him, okay?

-- it's the stark, bitter truth.

She doesn't come toward him. She stands very still; she's not afraid, but she's confused. She watches him, and she counters with irrefutable logic: why would I have argued with you about the account? And he looks away from her, a high flush in his lean cheeks now, the strap of muscle there taut.

Back, when she continues. His eyes blaze at her: that sort of shifting, wolfish gold-green that can look tawny in some light. It looks tawny now, all but yellow, feral, animal. The animal part of him finds her unnatural too sometimes. So cold, so remote. What life or heat in her so far buried,

except when he's buried inside her.

"It's just hard," he says finally, an admittance, "to believe otherwise. Sometimes -- when I'm fucking you, when I'm brutalizing you, when I'm taking care of you after I've brutalized you -- I can feel it. That I mean something. That what I'm doing means something. That you get something out of it, and it's something you need. But it's hard for me to believe that you wouldn't get the exact same thing out of someone else young and pretty and cruel treating you the exact same way."

[Hilary] They've been through this before. Three weeks ago when he brought her back to Chicago -- sent his jet, his best man, his money all to fetch her back -- he kept saying how hard it was for him to believe, how hard she made it to believe.

So Hilary just stares at him as he says it, his eyes wolfish on her all too mortal face. She can see he's embarrassed, and she can see that he's conflicted, but he's been like this since everything started. She asked him once if he was always this morose, and he laughed bitterly because the truth was, he wasn't. Never was, until her.

For awhile she doesn't have an answer to that this time. The question has worn thin; she doesn't know what else she can do or say to convince him. She doesn't quite know that it's her responsibility to convince him.

In the end, she just gives a slow shake of her head. "Giving me access to your money won't make you feel better," she says, still stuck on that, and why not? That's where this started. It's hard for her to make a leap away from that concrete basis for this bizarre argument, so she clings to it, comes back to it, trying to make him make sense again.

Unless that's what he thinks he can give her that someone else young and pretty and cruel can't: vast, vast pools of liquid cash. Hilary tips her head a bit. The elevator begins to rise, summoned this gray and damp afternoon by someone else up above.

"Besides," she says, just as soft, still unresisting, "as soon as you believe you mean something to me, you'll run for the hills."

[Ivan] "Goddammit," Ivan spits as the elevator moves again -- punches a random lower floor, two or three -- turns back. "Is that what this is about, then? Keep pushing me away so I'll keep chasing you?"

It's not. Even he knows that. But he isn't logical right now, doesn't want to be; is angry all over again, doesn't want to be angry, can't help it, wants to drag her somewhere and

fuck her, mark her, claim her all over again. It twists in his stomach, sickening, how closely anger and arousal entwine in him now.

[Hilary] It's illogical, and untrue, and he knows it, and Hilary obviously does -- rolling her eyes when he blurts it out anyway. She doesn't even seem inclined to dignify it with a reply. Finally, though, she untangles herself from him, if he lets her. Soon enough they're heading towards the eleventh floor, where someone will get on to go down to the lobby. She supposes they'll have to get out this time -- silly, to just ride up and down all afternoon.

She exhales. "No," dignifying it after all. "And I don't think I'm pushing you away at all, you numbskull."

[Ivan] They don't ride all the way to the 11th floor after all. The doors open on the third, and it's there that Ivan steps out, scoffing under his breath at the epithet. So far as Hilary's insults go, that one was rather mild. It's hard to argue with someone who shows almost no interest in perpetrating such an argument, and Ivan feels his anger simmering into a sort of frustrated dead end.

"What you think and what I feel are frequently at odds," he mutters. "And believe me, I hate feeling like this. Acting like this."

He holds the elevator door for her. "Let's take the stairs," he says.

[Hilary] The argument makes no sense to her. And, coming from Hilary, an insult like numbskull is almost an endearment -- an affectionate nickname of the sort he's never heard from her lips and likely never will. Lover, sweetie, honey, much less something as loaded as mine. Earlier, she told the truth, at least as far as she sees it: the moment Ivan begins to believe that she does care for him, he'll run.

He asked her if she was trying to push him away, and she almost wanted to tell him no, no she's not. He's just holding himself at arm's length and convincing himself it's her doing.

Hilary stays in the elevator a moment, then follows him, her heels tapping far louder on the hallway floors than they do in her apartment. She pauses to pick her bag up again and carry it out with her, but she doesn't hand it back to him unless he reaches for it; she sometimes treats him that way, but he's not her servant.

They walk in silence for awhile towards the stairwell. At the door there, Hilary pauses, and looking at the floor, seems caught as though she saw something, or lost a contact. Hesitates, and settles back on her feet, turning to look at him. "It's the same for me, you know," she says quietly, but even then her voice echoes against the concrete in the stairwell. "What you think of me and how I actually am. How I feel. I get so tired of having this argument over and over. I don't like it. I wouldn't perpetuate it just to keep you on a hook."

She pauses there, looking at her pedicured toes peeking through those gorgeous shoes of hers. She likes looking at her feet. She's been staring at her toes a great deal over the past two weeks.

"I like gifts," she says. "I don't mind if they come from someone giving them because he's fucking me. I don't mind 'paying for them with my cunt'. At least there's an exchange there, and then it's over. I give what I give, I get what I get, and then it's mine. It's... a vault, and not a stream that could go dry at any moment, at your pleasure. And when I'm married, the money I use is legally mine anyway, whether I work or fuck for it or not. He has to divorce me to cut it off. What you want... I don't like it. It doesn't feel right. It's insulting. And you pitching a fit over it won't make it feel right to me. And me giving in won't make you feel the way you do when you give me what I really do want from you."

Hilary finally glances at him again, standing there in the threshhold still. "Are we done with this?" she asks then, looking wearied.

[Ivan] Ivan does, in fact, take the bag from her after a few steps. He shoulders it and strides toward the stairwell that few of the building's residents ever use -- pushes it open, turns his back to it to hold it, and notices she's stopped walking.

She's looking at her toes. As he watches her, puzzled, she looks at him and speaks.

His head is cocked a little. Puzzlement over her pausing, and then listening. She tells him more than she has for hours, more than she usually ever does; he takes in every word, soaks it up like a desert to rain. A stream that could dry up at a moment's notice: that resonates with him, makes a sort of intuitive sense that she can all but see. He feels like that so often with her: as though her affection, her presence in both the literal and the figurative sense, her words, everything about her -- were a sort of stream that could run dry without notice.

That's not how she feels. That's not how she is from her own, private perspective -- but that's the tragedy and the dilemma of any interpersonal relationship, ever. What she thinks and feels is not what he thinks and feels, and vice versa.


For what it's worth, he listens; he takes it in, every word. And for what it's worth, she explains herself. She explains why she rejects his money. She explains that this is not a rejection of him, and it's sad that she has to do that, sad that he doesn't instinctively see the distinction. She explains that she's tired of this argument and he riles a little at that, because even that sounds like rejection,

tired of this, tired of you,

but it passes.

The way you feel, she says finally, perhaps one of the few times she shows any recognition, any astuteness whatsoever in that recognition, of his inner life -- not merely happy or sad but the how and the why -- when you give me what I really do want from you.

He's silent for a while. Then he holds his hand out to her.

"I'm tired of this argument too," he says quietly. "And tired of feeling this way. I am trying to get past it, Hilary. I'm just not ... used to needing something. Needing it." A brief pause. Then, wry, "It's rather an unpleasant sensation, all told.

"Anyway. We're done. Come on."

[Hilary] That satisfies her; Ivan says they're done, so they're done with this now, and she can stop this scraping of her inner self, stop making herself raw.

It's hard for her to see when he understands her. She doesn't worry about feeling understood. She doesn't share so many of his concerns and fears. Her bursts of needing to be reassured that she's cared for are so rare that he may have seen it once or twice in all this time. Ivan exhausts her. Ivan is, too, that hand reaching into the mist that can guide her back to herself, and he doesn't let go even when she's there, and he realizes what she is. In fact, that's when he's his most attentive, his most adoring, his warmest. Makes her believe, for those few flickering seconds when it's tolerable to her, that what she is can be loved at all.

Walking to the stairs, she thinks that maybe when they get back to his place, they should fuck properly. Not all gentle and pretty like in the hallway, or soft and tender like it was in Mexico, but the way they both really want it. She can't remember the last time Ivan shackled her to a bed and nailed her, slapped her as he pounded her cunt, raked her with his teeth, stretched her out and teased her, really... gave it to her. She can't remember the last time when the gentleness he shows her afterward was actually necessary, and she misses it, and she thinks right now that maybe if they just got back to what they both really want, they'll be more okay.

He carries her bag downstairs, and Hilary grazes her hand along the railing, walking with him a few floors. She's tired out from this, and from fucking earlier, and she's annoyed suddenly to realize it. She's not used to this little activity wearing her out when she's not ...well. Pregnant.

"We shouldn't be too obvious in public still," Hilary murmurs as they head for the doors. "People have seen me out with you while I was married. And I'm not divorced yet; we haven't even filed. If I cavort around town with you, everyone will think I'm an adultress. I'll lose any and all esteem and influence I have in this city."

Don't hold my hand. Don't kiss me on the sidewalk. Don't put your hand into my dress when we go to the ballet.

All that, followed by a soft: "Do you have toys we can play with, still?"

[Ivan] Again, that wry huff of laughter. "I think the phrase you're looking for," he says, "is everyone will know you're an adulteress. Perhaps we should sew you a scarlet A and be done with it."

He doesn't mean it, of course. If nothing else, Ivan can be counted on to understand and respect a certain necessity for discretion. It's in the etiquette of an illicit affair, after all. Perhaps in the end it's for her sake. Her reputation. Her neck, if Dion proves to be the vengeful -- or at least proud -- type after all. And if not for hers, then surely for his own: again, necksaving.

He looks at her as she asks him about his toys, though. His regard lingers a moment. And even though she just asked him not to, asked him for a little discretion, he turns to her, one step below her, pulls her forward and pulls that neckline of her dress down, pulls the cup of her bra aside, wraps his arm around her waist and bends her backward with the force of his embrace,

all to put his mouth to her nipple. To suck at her: sudden and ferocious, mmphing against her flesh as though this, this one thing above all else, makes the strife and tribulation of the past hour or so all right. Worth it.

Maybe she's right after all. Maybe if they just fuck, let the darkness inside to them out to play for a while, they'll be all right afterward.

When he lets her go, her nipple is hard; the skin around it flushed from suction. He kisses her mouth as he straightens, tugging her clothing back into place, casting a critical eye over her. Mustn't give the game away, after all. Mustn't make anyone suspect -- or at least mustn't give anyone proof -- that the demure, elegant ex-Mrs. Durante is an adulteress.

"I do," he answers her, then. And he takes her by the hand to lead her the rest of the way down to the ground floor, releasing her hand before he pulls the door to the lobby open.

[Ivan] Again, that wry huff of laughter. "I think the phrase you're looking for," he says, "is everyone will know you're an adulteress. Perhaps we should sew you a scarlet A and be done with it."

He doesn't mean it, of course. If nothing else, Ivan can be counted on to understand and respect a certain necessity for discretion. It's in the etiquette of an illicit affair, after all. Perhaps in the end it's for her sake. Her reputation. Her neck, if Dion proves to be the vengeful -- or at least proud -- type after all. And if not for hers, then surely for his own: again, necksaving.

He looks at her as she asks him about his toys, though. His regard lingers a moment. And even though she just asked him not to, asked him for a little discretion, he turns to her, one step below her, pulls her forward and whips the zipper of her dress halfway down her back, pulls the neckline away from her collarbones, pulls the cup of her bra aside, wraps his arm around her waist and bends her backward with the force of his embrace,

all to put his mouth to her nipple. To suck at her: sudden and ferocious, mmphing against her flesh as though this, this one thing above all else, makes the strife and tribulation of the past hour or so all right. Worth it.

Maybe she's right after all. Maybe if they just fuck, let the darkness inside to them out to play for a while, they'll be all right afterward.

When he lets her go, her nipple is hard; the skin around it flushed from suction. He kisses her mouth as he straightens, tugging her clothing back into place, zipping her back up by touch. When he's done, she's almost presentable again: he, casting a critical eye over her, can ascertain that much. Mustn't give the game away, after all. Mustn't make anyone suspect -- or at least mustn't give anyone proof -- that the demure, elegant ex-Mrs. Durante is an adulteress.

"I do," he answers her, then. And he takes her by the hand to lead her the rest of the way down to the ground floor, releasing her hand before he pulls the door to the lobby open.

[Hilary] Hilary gives a small roll of her eyes at his joke, his correction, his ever-so-cleverness. She's briefly angry with him, for every moment of his vulnerability, for his openness that turns so quickly to anger, and how at the merest hint of it on her side he's suddenly confident again, cocky again, enough to tease her and walk with a strut, mock her choice of words.

Sometimes she gets a little angry with him and what flickers through her mind is raw violence, digging her fingernails into his smirking face and opening it up, looking at all the mottled, purplish red just under those delicate layers of golden skin.

Hilary's not the best of liars, really. Ivan likes to fancy her so, but his image of her and the reality sometimes simply don't match up. He doesn't know her very well; she doesn't see the necessity of him knowing her at all. But if there is one lie she knows how to tell, and how to tell without even thinking, it's the lie that she doesn't think about things like cutting faces open, what it feels like to hold dead things. If he knew half of the things that go through her mind --


don't let me hurt him.


She just rolls her eyes. And then, not quite as soft as she would have said it had he not gotten his swagger back a bit, she asks him about toys. Lighter in tone, less invested. A moment later, he's on her, instead of walking out the stairwell door to the lobby. She puts her hands on his shoulders as though to push him away, but in the end she just holds on so he doesn't knock her down off of those terribly high heels of hers. Ivan hears her exhale when he unzips her dress to yank it down. It might be a sigh of resignation, but it sounds equally like a sigh of pleasure, and he's suckling at her breast,

like he did upstairs in the entryway to her apartment, eating at her body like he's been starved for it. This time she's less reactive, less hungry herself, her emotions as mercurial as his, it seems. But still: her nipple hardens in his mouth, her eyes closing, but her hands are pushing at his shoulders near the end, pushing him back before he has the time to finish on his own and tug her clothes back up. Hilary gives him a firm, tidy little shove away from her chest and pulls her bra back into place herself, turns her back to him.

"Zip," she says tightly, before that critical, assessing little glance he might have given her, and though her face is turned from him he can almost hear the teeth in the word.

[Ivan] It's strange, and infuriating -- that they fit so well, clicked so well, worked so well together when he came into her apartment and she tempted him in that slip and they fucked like ravenous, screaming things two feet from her front door.

And since then, since that one moment of twisting, furious excess, it's been miss after miss after miss. They just can't seem to connect. He doesn't know how she can act like nothing's happened. She wants to know what he means. He tells her; she screams like nothing human. He hushes her, shushes her, tries to put her back together,

and then he's afraid she's fragile and breakable. And when she proves she isn't -- he's afraid she's not, she doesn't need him, she might just leave him. She calls him a fool for it. He burns his anger out and he settles into something like calm, wry and half-bitter calm, but

she reads it as cockiness and grows angry herself. She starts closing up even as he catches on fire for her. He's all over her. He wants her but it reads like arrogance to her, like something inconvenient and mildly annoying. She sighs; it doesn't sound anything like pleasure to him, and by the time she shoves him away he's already pulling away, straightening up, his eyes glittering again.

Zip. He stares at her back, and the anger in him burns to life, freezes to ice. He takes hold of the zipper and slides it swiftly back up.

"On second thought," he says lightly, "I think perhaps we should postpone our plans for another day. We clearly can't stand each other right now."

[Hilary] Just like that she's put back together again, presentable again. This time the anger goes cold, and she turns around as his fingers are letting go of the tab on her dress. Her bag is sitting right there again, full of clothes and a few incidentals for three days. She could stretch it to four, more if she goes shopping. Which she'll have to, if he wants to go anywhere nice; she wouldn't bunch up a gown and toss it in an overnight bag, now would she?

They're surrounded by concrete. Hard, cold, manufactured, poured. And he turns to ice, lightening his voice and suggesting -- as he always does, at one point or another, when he's angry, when things aren't going as he'd like -- that they just abandon each other.

So she shakes her head at him. "And you're the one that fears being cast off at any second if I get bored," she says, and bends her knees, picks up her bag, and turns to walk up the stairs.

[Ivan] "I'm not bored, Hilary."

He cuts in almost before she finishes picking up her bag. Whether she walks up those stairs or not -- where is she headed? he wonders. up all thirty-some-odd flights on foot? surely not. perhaps just to the next landing, where she'll catch the next elevator up --

whether she walks up or not, he continues, "I'm angry. I'm frustrated. You keep asking me what I want from you; well, I finally have an answer for you. I want you. No more, no less. I just want you to ... stay with me. But most the time I don't even know who you are, much less how to hold on to you. It's exhausting. Trying to make you happy, trying to keep you with me, trying not to make you so ... angry and hateful. Trying to just be with you, the way you taught me. But you never want the same thing twice; never react the same way twice. It's impossible to keep up with you. And every time it always comes down to one thing, one infallible excuse: you tell me I can't possibly want you near me for long anyway, and so you never stay close.

"Hilary...

"Just come back. Please, just come back. Please stop walking away or pushing me away or making me feel like such a goddamn needy, greedy child. Please just -- "

He sounds so wracked he should have his hands on his head, pulling at his hair, raking at his face, scrubbing at his eyes and his ears and every other sensory organ on his body. But he doesn't. His hands are at his sides; but for the way he's speaking to her, he looks so calm, so collected: the Silver Fang in the stairwell, composed and sleek.

And anyway, his voice falls to a hush:

"Just come back, okay?"

[Hilary] The woman who gets wet when he slams her against a wall and moans when he bites her nipple may, in fact, intend on walking up nearly thirty flights of stairs in four-inch stillettos. It's possible that, occasionally, she doesn't mind inflicting her own pain on herself, though of course it's vastly preferable to have Ivan there, sexualizing every pang.

It's been an hour or so now of this. She was so blithe, and he was so angry. She was so avoidant, and then she was screaming at the top of her lungs. He was so disturbed, and she was suddenly so compliant.

For a little while, they were tender with each other, and neither of them balked. They were uncertain, and gentle, and the only way Hilary gets closer to loving someone is by getting them as far from her as possible so she doesn't break them. It lasted just a short time, with Ivan washing her and Hilary holding him as they showered, both of them passingly thinking of pleasuring each other under those dual streams of hot water.

Then the woman who came out of the bedroom was distant, cold, put-together, and the man who pleaded with her while he was inside of her to understand that he couldn't take care of her, he couldn't, was doing the only thing he could to try and make sure she was taken care of without losing her freedom. It was, perhaps, an attempt at trying to love her, though even Ivan might have trouble seeing it that way. And it was rejected. And it caused a fight.

One elevator ride later and they're lashing out again, shoving each other away again. And pulling each other back, over and over, every time.


For what it's worth, she doesn't keep walking up the stairs when he says her name. She sighs, because she didn't say he was bored. She said he was the one worrying about her getting -- but he's still talking, and she tells the Ivan in her head nevermind. Hilary looks back down at him, her feet on separate steps, her calves elegantly tightened, her manicured hand holding the rail. Not unusually, her face is hard to read. So often it looks like she's just waiting for him to stop talking.

It's unfair to expect her to know how to do this. Talk about these things. Express her emotions, and talk about his, and be patient with herself and with him and deal with all of it. It takes an emotional maturity she doesn't have. It also takes more sanity than she has to spare to be a reasonable voice in the midst of all this. The laughable thing is, the same could be said of Ivan. Any time either of them actually manages to talk sensibly or calmly, naming things they feel and working through them with something other than sex, wine, pills, or violence, it's something of a minor miracle.

needy, greedy child

Something inhuman flashes in her eyes, thrashing like agony for a moment.

She could slap him. Except she's tried before and he always stops her, can grab her wrists and whip her around and pin her against his body and suddenly she'll want him instead, want him to slide his cock between her legs, fuck her thighs and tease her cunt, and she won't want to slap him anymore anyway. Even if he does say go away, come back.

"I'm not," she says wearily, her shoulders rounding, her brow furrowing. She's the one that sounds like a child, petulant and frustrated, denying that she broke her toy, denying that she said a bad word, she's not bad, she's not. "You got mad and told me you couldn't stand me. I'm not pushing you away. You told me to go away." Her eyebrows are tugged tight together. "I want to stay with you. But every time I act funny you think I don't."

Turning, she sets her bag down, and nevermind that she's wearing a several-hundred-dollar dress, she all but flops down on the step to sit, her knees together and her ankles apart, heels out, toes in. The little Coach charm attached to the handle of her overnight bag clanks once against the edge of the step. Tucked against her own lap slightly, Hilary looks over at him, frowning.

"I don't make that excuse," she argues. "That I go away because you don't want me. You're making that up. I told you ages and ages ago I didn't even want to spend the days with you and spend nights with you because it was so tiring to be with anyone that much, to act ..." human "...like anything." She's riled, but she's not walking away, and she's not screaming at him. She's just dismantling. "But I do all that now. Because you want me around you. Because you hate it when I go away. Because I... need you. And I want to be with you.'

Her mouth is tight a moment; she looks away. "It doesn't mean it's any easier, though. Sometimes I'm angry and hateful and exhausted and I can't be with you the way you want. And you want it all the time." Her hands come up, cover her face, but she doesn't push them into her hair. Her hair is so nicely done. A moment later she drops them away, anyhow.

"I know you just want me." Her voice is smaller than before. "I want to be with you. Even if sometimes your arm is around me and I'm not all there."

[Ivan] There's a long pause.

More truth today than either of them is used to. Ivan because he's a liar. Hilary because these truths live so far beneath her face, like dark, grotesque undersea creatures far beneath the calm moonlit surface.

Exhausting, they tell each other. It's possible they don't even hear how they mirror each other. Tiring. Can't, can't, can't give you what you want.

She's sitting on the steps, all but flopping down that she's really so tired she can't even bring herself to move anymore. He watches her, and he listens, and when everything else has fallen away he moves toward her. Come back, he told her, over and over, please just come back, okay, please. In the end they meet somewhere in the middle. He sits down beside her, instinctively drawing up the legs of his trousers an inch to give them the slack to bend at the knee.

There's a pause, and then -- if she lets him -- he puts his hand on her back. He puts his arm around her and draws her against his side, against his shoulder and his chest. He still smells faintly of her, because she met him at the door in her lingerie, because he was angry

and afraid

and it turned to lust as all strong emotion seems to with them, and he pinned her to the wall and she rubbed against him through his pants and then he was inside her.

He kisses her temple. He urges her gently to rise again.

"Let's go," he says. "Let's just go home, okay?"