Ivan Press

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And unafraid.

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

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

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

"How could I not take that personally?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

just

go

away.


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

I want to do that again.

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

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

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

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

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

Except maybe Hilary, herself.


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

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

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


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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

and going at her until she comes again.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

He enjoys her company as long as it lasts.

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

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

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


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


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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Come to Lausanne with me. Right now."

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ivan said come. So she will go with him.

While she can.

[Hilary] She's never lacked in artistry. Never lacked in the appreciation of true beauty. No wonder she goes for the young, the fit, the well-formed, the wealthy. No wonder she's a cook, a dancer, a sensualist, an artist in her own right. Those blossoms in the vase in the alcove in his entryway: she understood that. The composition of it, the stark beauty of it.

The ache of it, though. The potential and peace and tenderness that comes from considering dappled sunlight. These are just out of reach for her, something she might process slowly, replicate with effort, but not instantly, instantaneously feel on her own. She cannot simply look at it, feel a warm hand slipping into her own, and say with her eyes: Yes. Me too. I know.

Yet there's something in her eyes now, as he lets her go and touches her face, whispering that he knows that's all she really wants from him, at the core of it all. Reassuring her, almost, that she does. It isn't relief in her eyes, it isn't sudden soothing of her tensions. Trust, perhaps, if he can recognize it with a kneejerk gut-wrench of denial. She believes him. Maybe, and even more treacherously, believes in in him.

Laughable. She's a faithless sort of creature, incapable of seeing gods in the night sky.

For a few minutes up top, they were quietly and simply glad. There is something there, sunken halfway into the mire of their respective madness, reflected in the shattered remnants of two very incomplete people. There is something there in the part of her that does, against all odds, form attachment. There is something there in the part of him that does, inexplicably, seek commitment. But those parts are closed away in locked cabinets, empty rooms, shuttered and shadowed and dust-ridden and terrifying when unearthed. Flashes of simple happiness are not the same as long stretches of idle pleasure. They are deep, and rare, and feel

-- to the broken, and the lost --

unnatural.

Her arm unfolds only slowly, and does not reach for him. She has not clutched at his arm, not since he grabbed her and pulled her up, as though that was in fact the precise sort of embrace that she was pleading for, grabbing at him to give her. It must be terribly draining, she thinks distantly, to be a dominant. She feeds so much from him, just as parasitic as the infant in her womb.

Feels no guilt, thinking this. Does not realize that perhaps she might feel compassion, instead, or that she could tell him: I understand if I make you tired, giving so much of yourself to me. The thought never crosses her fractured, beautiful, twisted little mind.

She does take his hand. There's a hitch right before her palm touches his, though. A moment where she might do who knows what, change the alignment of their touch, move her hand beneath his, show him that not even this can be supplication from him. Hilary pauses, a shadow of a thought crossing her expression, and then lays her hand atop his, palm to palm, cool fingers sliding over his.

"Ivan," she sighs softly, like a caress, and leans forward, kissing him on the mouth. Slow. Warm. Drenching. Tasting faintly of white wine, and herbs, and herself.

[Ivan] Ivan cannot remember the first time Hilary spoke his name. He suspects she may have kissed him long before she said his name. Possibly fucked him, allowed him inside her body, long before she allowed his name into her mouth. Likely it was never something she consciously withheld, never a bargaining chip or a tease or -- whatever else a woman like her, faithless and fickle and so fucking fine, might make a name. Likely it was simply that it never occurred to her to put a name to this creature, this beautiful young man with the hard body, the laughing eyes, that mouth, those hands, that cock.

It wasn't until something changed, and something deepened and became a little terrifying, a little exhilarating, that she started saying his name. And then, from the very start, it was always as it is now: a sigh, a caress, a submission.

Ivan.

Yes, Ivan.

His hand firms around hers after that kiss draws to a close. They leave the dishes where they are. He leads her down the stairs, and they've been this way before -- it was afternoon that time, brilliant summer daylight arcing off the water and reflecting across the ceiling when he blindfolded her and chained her to the door and hit her, spanked her, beat her until her slick was running down her thighs. Fucked her until she was screaming, and sobbing, and beyond herself; until to continue would have been quite literally criminal.

There are no chains tonight. No cuffs, no ties, no belts, nothing but his hands on her, turning her to face away from him after he closes the cabin door behind them. As though anyone else would come. As though the lone servant was not safely ensconced in the crew quarters, separated from them by the engine room and several walls. That engine is silent now, the floor only very gently shifting beneath their feet. It's quiet enough to hear fabric shift. Quiet enough to hear the teeth of her zipper part.

When her dress pools to the floor Ivan steps forward. He wraps his arms around her. His sweater is soft against her bare skin; not the faintest hint of scratchiness. His hands move over her, and when they sweep over her belly for the first time in weeks he turns his head and bites the base of her neck, as though this alone might deny the palpable rounding there, the coming weeks of isolation.

Then his hand is passing on, and down. He reaches between her legs and he starts to caress her the way he does in the shower sometimes: patient and focused and detached all at once, like she's a plaything created for his pleasure. Take pleasure in me, she said. He kisses her again, her neck, her shoulder, remembering it, before he lifts his head and whispers in her ear

that he wants her.

[Hilary] He has the truth of it, thinking back on the way she never said his name, then the way she began to say it, now the way she always does. It's been a very long time now since she ever considered giving him something then denying it to him. More often it just doesn't occur to her, and naming him when he first started fucking her was like that. What did it matter what his name was? What did it matter how he felt, when she was just going to fuck him for awhile til her husband came back and tried to get her pregnant again? What did he matter?

Until, of course, he became one of the only things that does.

She could suck the life and laughter out of him. Upsets him, turns him volatile and disturbed, drains his energy and those long, sly smirks of his that in actuality she finds quite attractive. It makes her want to bite his lips, pin him down, crawl over him, ride out her lust on him. Hard to reconcile that with how his anger and intensity make her want him to hold her down on the bed and use her, swear at her, call her a filthy little whore. Hard to explain, no matter how she tries, why she wants him so badly, why she needs what she does, how this feels when she's never, never felt anything like it before.

It all hangs on the scaffolding of the strange dominance he has for her in the bedroom, and sometimes outside of it. It depends on the way he puts his hand on her ass and tells her just a sip when she asks for a little wine, and how he tells her to go wait chained on his bed, naked, til he finishes his work and comes to her. Even earlier, when his rage flared and he was going outside to smoke and telling her to go downstairs and he'd come fuck her when he finished his cigarette, it aroused her. And she can't explain to him what it meant that she stopped him and tried to make him feel better, tried to understand why he was angry, when on some level she wanted very much to go downstairs and wait, obediently, for him to finish his smoke and come use her cunt. She doesn't have words for what that meant.

The last time she was here they parted, both thinking the other didn't want to do this anymore. But then she showed up at his apartment, exhausted, and if that brat inside her belongs by blood to House Crescent Moon and not House Unbreakable Hearth then that would be it, that would be the night, the one time when Ivan had her that it could have happened.

The first time they slept beside one another. The first time it wasn't mindbendingly rough and yet she was there, she was present. The first time he needed her in his bed, not against some wall, not in a hotel, not wherever he happened to be able to get her.

It's dark down here. There are dim lights, a warm glow here and there, but shadows fall around them when they're away from starlight and away from the brighter lights they had as they ate together. Hilary goes quietly, her coat left topside. She breathes a little more quickly when they enter his cabin. He had her things brought here. And that makes her pulse go a little faster, makes her feel... happy. Wanted.

She remembers the last time she was here, too. And what he did to her. How he made her feel then, how even after she could not take it anymore, when she was so far gone she was unable to say yes, not even quite capable of saying no, just... wrecked, in all truth, she felt a powerful release she's never gotten anywhere else.

Surely this is okay. Better than the things she reads on the internet in secret, better than the things she obsessed over as a child. Surely this is better, this is okay, to find it through another person, to find it through sex, to find it through submission. Surely, as broken as all of it is, this is better than the alternatives.

Hilary turns her head as Ivan faces her away from him, her eyes closed. Her lashes are dark against her pale cheeks as she seeks him blindly, exhaling softly as he unzips her dress and pushes it off her shoulders. She's still so slender. At this point the weight she's gaining is almost illusory, far worse in her imagining than what he feels when his hands run over her. Her skin is pale, unbroken by the strap of a bra tonight. The fabric of the dress was thick enough to not matter, the cut of it unfriendly to lingerie, so: just her fair back, the slope of her spine, the way her shoulderblades draw together slightly when he steps forward and his chest touches her.

She breathes in a little more audibly when he bites her neck. Exhales like he would say his name, but says nothing at all. The sound she makes when he touches her, fingers sliding over cotton and lace, is the first note of a whimper still hiding in her throat, her lips barely parted from it. It's almost hard to hear over the engines. Her head slowly tips back, back, farther still til it rests against him, her back arching ever so slightly.

His words make her ache. "Ivan," she all but groans, which is, in effect, saying the exact same thing.

Her ass lifts against him slightly, rubbing gently on the front of his slacks. She's still in her boots, calf-heigh suede things the color of steel with a thick, tapering black heel. Hilary squirms slightly, reaching behind her and laying her hand on the back of his head. Some part of her wants to tell him he doesn't have to abuse her tonight, he doesn't have to tie her down or chain her up or blindfold her or pin her to the bed or spank her, he doesn't have to terrify and exhaust himself in order to give her what she needs, but she doesn't know if that's entirely true, and she doesn't know if that's okay by these strange, burgeoning rules she's trying to figure out, so she says nothing at all. Her fingers push into his short hair, rubbing against his scalp.

[Ivan] She doesn't have to tell him he might not have to abuse her tonight. He hasn't grasped and squeezed at her flesh. He hasn't let his hand fly across her ass, or thrown her down on the bed. It's not quite gentleness, the way his hands move over her breasts, down to her cunt; but nor is it angry. Or vicious. Or violent.

If he'd gone up for that smoke, this would be a very different sort of fuck. He would have come down with his temper in control. Or at least that's how it would have looked, but it would have seethed inside him, black and tumultuous; it would have risen into something hateful when he threw her over the edge of the bed and shoved himself inside her. That's what frightened him most about those early encounters. Not the kink of it; not the light bondage or the heavy domination or the crack of his hand off her ass. Not any of that, but what was driving him. What was really driving him.

He wanted to hurt her. He said this to her more than once, but to this day he's not sure she understood what he was trying to say. That he was trying to say,

I wanted to demean you. Debase you. Punish you. I wanted to hurt you, don't you understand? I hated you.


It was different, the night at his penthouse. It was different, the last few times they fucked the first time she let him keep her all night.

It was different, the last time they were together.


His knuckles brush her back when he undoes his belt. He steps back from her, unzipping his collar, pulling his sweater over his head. Under that it's just a plain, longsleeved pullover, soft and fitted, the fabric stretching as he pulls that off, too. Then it's just him, his skin golden in lamplight, his hands deft as he undoes his pants and steps out of them.

Brilliant: that's what his coloration is by nature. In the autumn and winter he dresses in darker colors; he loses that deep golden tan of summer. But he's still fair and lovely and long-boned and lean. He still feels the same when he comes back to her, turning her around now, turning her to face him as his agile hands cup her face to his. This kiss is a little hungrier than the last, his eyes closing. He backs her against the bed, and then onto it. When she sits at the edge, he pushes his boxer briefs down, finds her hand and wraps it around his cock.

Ivan seems to lose his train of thought when she touches him like that. His head drops forward, eyes closing; lips parting to exhale. Over and over, half-mindlessly, his hands comb through her hair, smooth over her shoulders.

When his eyes open again he finds hers. Gently, coaxingly, he says, "Suck it for me. Be a good girl for me, Hilary."

[Hilary] Ivan's powers of perception are not normally extended into understanding the minds of the women he fools around with. He's not compassionate. He's not soft-hearted, easily endeared, tender. And Hilary is inexplicable, in so many ways. Even her attempts to express herself go frequently and wildly awry, and expressing herself is almost entirely an endeavor she undertakes for his sake more than her own. That she should care enough to help him understand her is strange enough; it's nearly impossible, then, to imagine she would do it well. Despite all this, there are moments when Ivan quite simply gets it. Gets her.

To this day, she doesn't understand that he hated her. That he felt sick with himself, his mind so far from his physical arousal that on multiple occasions he had to stop, repulsed by what he was doing, horrified by the way Hilary got off on it. Even now she can't quite fathom that he well and truly wanted to break her, hurt her, make her pay for ...being what she was. Doing whatever it was she was doing.

It's possible that even if she understood that's how he felt, she wouldn't understand why. She wouldn't be able to imagine feeling the same thing, when her first, instinctive reaction to Ivan telling her I want to punish you would be titillation. Want.


Things have changed. She doesn't play at dominance. She doesn't pretend to be the wicked stepmother anymore -- not with him. She tries to tell him she wants to surrender, that she's been there every time, that she longs for something with him that's different from any other human or near-human relationship she could possibly hope for. She tries to show him that this matters to her -- that he matters to her -- and that she cares, somehow, if he's happy or miserable.

And Ivan doesn't fuck her like he hates her. Sometimes he even fucks her like he understands. Like the last time, at the hotel and at his estate. He treats her like he knows what she needs, and he treats her like for some reason, he wants to give that to her. And Hilary, never asking why he's interested, why he asks so many questions, why he wants to know her and understand her and learn about her, still does not have any earthly idea what he gets out of this other than the fulfillment of his desire for her. She has no clue why Ivan bothers, beyond the mindshattering sex that he apparently can't get just like this anywhere else.

Which is okay. Which doesn't upset her. Which is why she doesn't ask: why me?


Her hands move to his bared chest when he turns her around, her dark eyes opening, looking up at him through her lashes in a way that would seem coy if she were younger. She steps closer, her foot between his, moving into him as he kisses her mouth. Hungry. Hollowing, aching, then pressing her back til her legs touch the edge of the bed. He pushes and she falls to sit, her hands on his body still, running down now to his hips.

Ivan hasn't bound her. No chains, no silk ties, nothing to lock her to the lamps or the head board or whatnot. She licks her lips as he pushes his underwear down, but doesn't touch him. Doesn't lick him. Not til he puts her hand on him, wraps her fingers slowly around his cock. Hilary's breathing is warm on his skin, as close as they are. She doesn't start to jerk him off, just holding him like that, waiting for instruction.

Or perhaps permission.

He adores her with his fingertips, or it feels like that. He pets her like a cherished animal, heat lifting off of him in the near-dark. She's looking up at him when he finally opens his eyes again, her mouth opened softly, trying to be patient. Trying to be a good little girl ...for him.

With a soft moan, barely audible, Hilary's eyes fall closed. She leans forward even as her lashes are drifting downward, her hand stroking once up his cock. Openmouthed, she rubs the head of him against her cheek, the shaft across her lips, as though teasing herself with it. Or, maybe, marking herself with his body, moaning a little louder -- shivering -- at the sensation. She kisses his head, closing her mouth to spread his precum over her lips. Her tongue flicks over him when she licks her lips, tasting it.

"Ivan," she whispers, half groaning his name, just before her mouth engulfs him in deep, wet warmth. She takes her hand off his cock as her lips travel downward, filling herself up with his flesh as much as she can, but her palm slides instead to caress his balls, cupping them gently, squeezing ever so softly. Her eyes open, looking up at him, before she withdraws her mouth, leaving him slick with her saliva.

And her eyes stay on his, as she takes him in again. And again. And again. Not too fast, building a steady rhythm that varies, here and there: a little faster. A long, slow suck all the way up to one last drenching kiss to his head. She rubs the tip of her tongue along his slit, moaning at his taste before she swallows him again.

He hasn't bound her. She touches him. Massages his upper thighs. Plays gently with his balls. Strokes his cock, when she isn't bobbing her head on him like the eager little slut she seems to want to be for him. Her hands move over his torso, fingertips circling his nipples, feathering back down to hold onto his hips when she increases her pace.

At no point does Hilary stop and -- looking up at him -- talk dirty to him. Ask him what he wants her to do to him, suggest what he could do to her. She doesn't hesitate, but she doesn't stray from what Ivan told her, either. Not right now. He told her to suck it for him. He told her to be a good girl and suck his cock, and she does so with unfaltering, unerring devotion that were it not for the way she moans at the merest flicker of a thrust or the feel of his cock jumping inside of her mouth, one might mistake her focus for a lack of eagerness or enthusiasm.

But when his hand tightens in her hair. When he pushes his hips forward a bit to fuck her mouth. When he shudders a gasp or mutters his pleasure to her, Hilary grasps at his hips, his ass, his chest, wherever she's touching him, groaning around his cock as though he had a direct line to her clit with just the sound of his voice, the motion of his body.

[Ivan] Half-light in here at best. Dim, but warm. Carves him out in arcs and streaks, highlighting off the lean lines of pectoralis and bicep, delineating the edge of the obliques where it meets the hip arch.

He doesn't let her go very fast. Even when she picks up the pace, his hands firm on her head gently. He holds her back. He makes her slow down, slow down, take it slow while his breathing grows imperceptibly heavier. A little raspier. Minutes slide by. He widens his stance by degrees. His weight shifts, centering in the hips. She's unfalteringly committed, devoted. He's almost hypnotized, his eyes low, his breath sliding between parted lips, parted teeth.

It's moments on end before he can't resist anymore; can't stop himself from tipping his head back, sighing when she sucks on him a certain way. Dragging a deep shuddering breath when she plays with him, strokes him, pauses to kiss the head of his cock. Doesn't mean he's unaffected all the time he's not moving, or groaning, or reacting. It doesn't mean his cock doesn't twitch and jump against her tongue; it doesn't mean his fingers don't twitch in her hair. It doesn't mean his eyes don't flicker and shut, his brow tightening in flashes.

"Oh, that's it," he murmurs at last. He wraps his hand behind her head. Holds her there as he thrusts against her mouth -- gently, slowly, but steadily, sliding deeper while he reaches for her hand. Finds her hand and pulls it up his body, up to the beat of his heart behind his sternum; up to his nipples, erect against her fingers. "That's so very good."

An odd mingling of cruelty and tenderness here. In the way he holds her right there with his hand gentle but firm, gentle but inescapable. In the way he feeds her his cock slowly and carefully, but pushes right against the limits of what she can take. Takes her past it. Makes her gag, makes her cough, makes her hand close involuntary on his body, before he lets go the back of her head and lets her withdraw.

He pulls her hand to his mouth, then. Kisses her palm, and each of her fingers, as though in blessing. Replaces her hand on his body and takes his hands from her entirely; lets his hands hang open and relaxed, a little ways away from his narrow hips and lean thighs, as he starts moving in earnest. Starts fucking against her mouth, moving against her the way he might move against her cunt, except he's never fucked her cunt quite this slowly and gently -- moves against her, groaning, letting his head fall back as she adores him with his mouth.

"Touch me," he whispers. "Run your hands all over me. Touch me, baby, make me come."

[Hilary] All of this -- though not from the start, and not always -- is a strange marriage of tenderness and cruelty. It's in how he holds her on the deck under stars and fireworks though they both know he won't be bothering to do so the longer her pregnancy goes on. It's in how she keeps coming back to him, ruthless in her submission, shredding his image of who he thought he was, what he thought he wanted, by letting him do whatever he likes to her.

And it's in the fact that she's never recanted what she said about hating him, how it would be a lie if she said she trusted him in the way that one might argue is necessary for what she wants from him, and how she knows he's not good for her. She isn't so far gone, so inhuman, so withdrawn, that she doesn't know that Ivan can't give her what she truly needs any more than she can give him what he does. Neither of them can make the other better -- not sick. Not insane. Not twisted.

Still, she feels something when he whispers to her, and when he uses her mouth. Hilary feels something when he kisses her fingertips and lets her move her hands on their own again, roaming over him as they were before. He may not be empathetic but by god he's perceptive, and perhaps he can sense it in the way she touches him now. There's no rush to her, no little tricks to see how fast she can get him off. She just... pleasures him. And perhaps for the first time, Ivan might actually feel like she's giving something to him, rather than taking something away.


There are things she's not allowed to do with certain men. Not with her husband, above all. He thinks highly of her, and there's a perfectionistic element to his obsession with her. Things must go a certain way. There is a script to follow. There is a pattern he needs in order for his madness not to devolve into rage. He had a wonderful mate before Hilary, even more well-bred and from his home country, and she produced two incredibly pure children for him, but they were not Garou, and now she's gone. There are things Hilary must do, and giving Dion a trueborn heir is one of them.

It doesn't really bear imagining how Hilary is in the bedroom with her husband when he's around, but from how savoringly she sucks Ivan's cock tonight it almost seems like it's something cherished, something deeply satisfying to her. Maybe it's about the way it is: the brutality, the certain sweet roughness, the gentle edge to it, but she groans softly right on the brink, right as Ivan's breathing goes utterly ragged and unstable, right before he starts to come.

She looks up at him, her eyes deceptively warm in this light, holding him in her mouth and her hand at first but then sliding away. Something of that aching slowness and out-of-place tenderness hasn't gone away, even as Hilary closes her eyes and strokes him off over her open mouth, her cheek, her breasts. It's still there, somewhat painful and somewhat surreal, when she gently takes him back in her mouth. She doesn't suck on him again, doesn't start licking him clean just yet. She holds him in her mouth as he's coming down, opening her eyes once more to find his.

[Ivan] There's a strange tenderness and attachment implicit in all this. Ironic, and unexpected: tenderness from the woman who, for all intents and purposes, is incapable of tenderness; attachment from the man who can barely stand to form such things.

Maybe that's why they don't talk about it. Maybe that's why they barely even look at each other: her eyes closed most the time he's looking down at her; his head tipped back when she finally opens her eyes and looks up at him, looks up at though to witness the moment, the very instant where he loses himself.

It's the first time Ivan has let himself go like this. Willingly; unrestrainedly. His hand is in her hair at the end; his other hand on his own body, clutching mindlessly and randomly at the back of his neck, slipsliding down his torso to grasp again at the flexing musculature of his abdomen. He groans this time, gasps, swears. He doesn't touch his own cock. He lets her do that for him, stroking him off onto her, jerking him off until he's reduced to shudders and jerks, every muscle in his body twitching as though electrocuted every time her fingers or her mouth passes over that incandescently sensitive point just behind the head of his cock.

He doesn't tell her to stop. He doesn't stop her. This is the first time he's ever felt anything like giving from her, and he takes what she gives him; survives it. At the end, when her eyes open again, he's looking down at her. He's stroking her hair, touching her face, tenderly wiping his own cum off her lips like he adores her.

"Come here," he whispers, and when she rises, wraps his arms around her. He holds her like that, close and warm and tight, his mouth bent to her shoulder, his eyes closing.

[Hilary] A few times, his hands pass over hers in their wandering grasps for sanity. Her hands are warm. Strange that she could be so fair, so fine, and her body be so warm to the touch. Strange that she could be a dancer and a cook, pursuits that are merge the physical and the cerebral so effortlessly, and that she could also be this: broken, incapable of caring much even for her own child.

But dancing is, on some level, about performance. And cooking is, even when done alone, about giving. So somehow it may make sense.

A few times, in the midst of orgasm, Ivan finds her touching him, and she doesn't grab at his hands or try to hold onto him but just goes on touching him. Her fingertips draw him out of the dark like threads being pulled into a pattern on a loom, weaving him together until he culminates in what warmth he can find in her. Warmth that, sometimes, he tries to remind himself doesn't really exist, so that maybe it won't come as so much of a shock when he loses it.

She's looking up at him at the end, and holding him softly in her mouth as he brushes his cum off her lips. Truth be told she's a mess from him, and no matter. Ivan strokes her hair like he knows how to be tender, calls her to him like he cares. Hilary withdraws slowly, licking her lips, and goes to her feet, caught between the bed and the Ragabash. No matter that she's filthy. The boat rocks where it rests in the lake, but the motion only dimly, peripherally transfers to them where they stand.

At first she lets him hold her. And then she holds him back, slipping her arms around his waist.

[Ivan] In the end it's only a few moments before Ivan stirs again. He kisses her: her shoulder; then her neck. He kisses her cheek. He kisses her mouth.

It doesn't seem to matter that she's filthy. He barely seems to notice. It doesn't keep him from deepening the kiss, from running his hands through her hair and over her shoulders as he's kissing her. It doesn't keep him from wrapping his arms around her waist and lifting her -- rather suddenly, and rather without warning -- walking with her across the small distance to his bed, where his knees and the fronts of his thighs bump against the mattress.

The bedspread is clean. The sheets are clean. That doesn't seem to matter either. He lowers her onto it; climbs up after her. His hands are on her hips, and then he's sliding her up the bed. They part briefly. He pushes her down, and it's not rough, but it is firm. His hands on her breasts, then. His hands down her body, pausing over her abdomen -- lingering there a second, a faint frown crossing his brow.

Then it's past. He looks at her face. So often they fuck with her back turned to him: over the edge of the bed, against a wall, side by side in bed. This time he doesn't turn her over. Stops her if she tries to turn over. He doesn't want to fuck her from behind for the same reason he doesn't want to tie her down tonight. He wants to see her face. He wants her arms around him.

When Ivan bends to Hilary again, he takes her nipple into his mouth. Their coupling isn't so slow now, so achingly luxurious. There's fever in the way he sucks at her, licks at her, bites so gently -- so restrainedly -- at her. He's stroking himself to hardness again, groaning against her flesh; lifting his head to find her mouth, kissing her hard enough to press her back into the mattress as he mounts her, quick now, impatient, a little savage; moves between her legs and finds her cunt and slides inside her,

all at once, all in a single stroke,

burying a groan that may or may not have been her name in her mouth.

[Hilary] It's been a long time since Hilary has taken any leading, guiding role in what they do to each other -- overtly, at least. She's often so quiet, except for her moaning -- sometimes her screaming. She isn't the one pushing him down onto beds and climbing on top of him and whimpering that she wants to ride him like a pony. But how, how easily she goes when he puts her on her knees or turns her over so he can fuck her from behind. How eagerly she makes herself his plaything. How unresistant, now, she is to the way he kisses her mouth and her body as though he could not care less that he just came all over her.

Hilary shivers as his palms run over her body, fingers separating locks of her hair, the only part of her that feels cool to his touch. She wraps her arms around his neck, now, as he lifts her up and steps forward, putting her to the mattress. It's a fine, thick thing, not what you'd remotely expect to find on a boat except that this is a vessel made for luxury above all else. They may as well be in a hotel, they may as well be in a room in one of their houses.

Except they're alone, and no one is going to come upon them without warning, and the only person to hear them or consider them is a young maid who tries very hard not to do either. Even Marya, tonight, may be noticing the lack of screams, the silence in place of the sound of Ivan's hand cracking off of Hilary's flesh, slapping her til she groans aloud in orgasm brought on by, it seems, nothing more or less than his dominance.

She doesn't immediately try to turn herself over, when Ivan lays her down and then moves her up. Hilary's up on her hands as his grip onto her hips, and she helps move herself backward. She'd lay on the pillows again on her own if he didn't push her, but he does, and it makes her shudder. Her back arches, breasts pressing into his palms.

The frown that flickers over his face when his touch strokes past her belly goes unremarked. Unnoticed, even -- she's aching because he's touching her, and aching because she wants him, and when he looks at her face she's got her head tipped back, her eyes closed, her breath staggering between her lips. Hilary hasn't asked him to start hitting her, please, just spank her a little, something. She hasn't begged him to tie her up, if he won't give her the undeserved punishments that are so erotic to her.

They went from very nearly fighting up top to, without much fanfare or leadup, coming downstairs for this. She knew as soon as he led her down that he was going to undress her and take her, and he knew as soon as he heard from her tonight that he was going to fuck her. Just a matter of when. Just a matter of how.

Though really, it's unlikely either of them expected it to be like this.

She moans when he suckles at her breast, quivering as his lips and tongue and teeth play with her. "Baby," she's whispering, putting her fingers in his hair, her thighs open to either side of him, waiting for him, inviting him,

and then he answers, lifting his head and locking a kiss to her mouth, filling her up with his cock. Ivan feels Hilary arch under him, slide herself onto him even as he's pushing himself into her. He hears her whimpering, feels her rolling her hips, starting to fuck him as soon as he's there, right there, with her.

Hilary puts her legs around him. She wraps her arms around him. And it's possible it's been so long since he had her and her arms weren't bound that he doesn't even remember how it feels. The truth is, Hilary doesn't remember if she's ever held him like this while he's fucked her, and she grabs at his back, answering his stifled exclamations with a moan of her own.

"Ivan," she gasps, when their mouths part finally, as their bodies find whatever rhythm they can against the bed. "Ivan, baby, fuck me. Baby, please, fuck me."

[Ivan] That they would end up in bed sometime tonight was a foregone conclusion. It was so obvious, so inevitable, that for a while he was angry again when he thought that was all she was here for. That she was simply pretending a little better now, or that she was simply a little more patient now. That she didn't want him after all. Just his cock. Just his body. Just what he does to her, when she pushes him far enough.

It's impossible to say why he fucked her so many times from behind; so few times like this, face to face. Maybe it was the primality of it. Maybe it was the disconnection. Maybe it was just convenience. Maybe it was easier for him to hurt her when he didn't have to see her face.

This much is true and certain, though: he would not have wanted to fuck her like this when he thought he didn't matter to her. Not merely face to face with her, but like this: so close, entwined, kissing, her hands pulling at his back. Fuck me, she gasps, and she calls him baby, calls him Ivan the way she says it. He cuts her off, his mouth on hers, not because he doesn't want to hear it but because he can't bear not kissing her anymore. He swallows the last thing she says, that last fuck me devoured along with whatever sound she might make when he starts fucking her, fucks her harder, wraps his arm under her shoulder and clasps her to his chest and fucks her.

He finds her hand, then. Grasps her by the wrist and pins her right arm to the bed as though he thinks she still needs this; or as though he needs this now. His grip is relentless. He holds her down even as she holds on to him; holds her down even as he's kissing her, burying himself inside her, rocking her on the bed with the depth and force of his thrusts. He holds her down, and then he's not holding her down after all; his fingers are entwining with hers and he's simply holding her hand, holding on to her, the tips of his fingers dragging on the bedspread as though to hold on, hold on to something, keep ahold.


Ivan doesn't want her to leave him. This is a realization painful and sudden as a thunderbolt. He doesn't want her to take herself away from him. He doesn't want her to grow large, grow ungainly, grow undesirable, grow until she's ashamed of herself and secludes herself away for weeks or months.

He wants her like this. Just like this, pale and pristine and right here, right here every time, his every time.


His hand tightens on hers. He bows his brow to her lips, grasps her hip and pulls her up against him. He fucks her harder. He's groaning now, unashamed, loosing grunts and moans and gasps against her body.

Few words have escaped him all night, and he doesn't seem to have any more to add now. What he wants from her, how he wants it -- it's all in the subtext, in the way his hands pull at her, in the sounds he makes when she moves beneath him a certain way, drags her nails over him a certain way, moans a certain way.

[Hilary] The truth is -- and she convinces herself that when he's in his right mind, when he's not infuriated with her, Ivan must know it to be the truth -- Hilary could get the sex elsewhere. The lean, muscular young body. The hard cock. She could find someone else who wouldn't need to be pushed so much to pin her down and fuck her brains out. She could find someone she could push a little farther, who wouldn't stop when he began to scare himself.

She tells herself, when she lets herself be more honest with him, that he has to know this. He's not a fool. He has to know that she wants him, after all.

Though the other truth is: this may be the first time she's made him feel that way.

That last fuck me dissolves into a loud moan into his mouth as he kisses her. Her long, limber legs wrap all that much higher and tighter around his waist, her calves stroking his flank when their rocking on the bed turns to -- well. What she asked for. Ivan fucking her, holding her against him while he does it.

Right now he's not calling her his whore. He's not telling her what a good little girl she is, taking that big hard cock of his right after sucking it like the hungry cockslut she is. Ivan's not saying much of anything at all beyond this gasp, that groan. On some level it feels to her like something's missing, and the thought flickers through her mind that she's done something wrong, that it's because of the goddamn baby, he already doesn't want her like he did, she's become dull and repulsive to him.

But then a long-fingered hand caressing its way up her arm suddenly wraps around her wrist and pins it down to the sumptuous pillows underneath her. Hilary shudders, and her thoughts and her worries shake apart like diamond dust caught by a wind. She keeps her other arm wrapped close around him, her hand curled over his shoulder, her gasps turning to whimpers in his ear. His name, over and over, all but in rhythm with the way her cunt clenches down onto his cock.

Even when he shifts his hand and laces his fingers through hers there's enough dominance to it, enough command, that it strikes some new chord in her, a different key than the aching wish to give him pleasure, to make him happy. Ivan holds onto her hand and grasps at the bed through her fingers as though he has to find something to hold onto, and Hilary wraps her hand back around his, fingers in the valleys between his knuckles.

She doesn't know what it means, and she is rapidly losing the ability to think about it at all, much less coherently. It means something, though, that she holds onto his hand as he's holding on for dear life, and then he moves like he's just been struck with lightning. Hilary's lips are parted over his brow when he bows to her like that, a gasp moving into his hairline when he grabs her hip and starts to fuck her like he does. Like he always does. Like he's never fucked her before.

Fine, manicured fingernails dig into his back when he starts to really pound her pussy, fucking her into the bed like he's pursuing some quarry, hunting down some sort of delicious, warm-blooded prey. Hilary tips her head back and moans, lips leaving his forehead, her long, lean body pressed up against his as though she needs to feel as much of his flesh touching hers as possible. She fucks him back this time, meeting him in thrust after thrust, sweat scenting the back of her neck, the undersides of her breasts, the insides of her thighs.

Her hand, tightly holding his, somehow remains gentle.

[Ivan] The last time Hilary was here, she wasn't even coherent by the end. By the last half, even. She was out of her mind, out of this world, and it's possible she doesn't even know how she was screaming. How she must have sounded to those young maids that move so soundlessly in and out of Ivan's privileged sphere. Hilary barely notices the servants; she probably doesn't know, wouldn't care, whether or not the single maid tonight was present last time. Neither of them care if Marya can hear them. Neither of them care if she's tensed and waiting for the slapping, the hitting, the screaming, the sobbing to start. Neither of them care if she's surprised when it doesn't.

Neither of them even notice these things anymore. The world may as well have shrunk down to a pinpoint. This room. This bed. This distance between their bodies, which is almost negligible: this movement, him into her, their hands linked, her limbs wrapped all around him as he bows to her and bows over her and pounds her the way he always does,

and in a way he never has before.


So far as their sexual escapades go, this encounter is relatively brief. He doesn't stop in the middle to pull out, to make her suck him clean before shoving his cock back into her. He doesn't turn her over, tie her up, move her from one locale to another, throw her over this surface, against that.

He holds her. He holds onto her. His eyes are closed as they're both moaning, both lost, and her scent and her body is all there is. He stays with her, and she's fucked him often enough now that she knows how he moves when he's getting close. How he braces himself on his elbows and hammers her, swift, short, straight strokes, grunting and panting against her skin. She understands the language of his body: what it means when he grasps at her so mercilessly, when he pulls her against him.

He bites her once, hard, just before he comes. When he comes, though, he's open-mouthed, groaning openly against her. He pounds her against the bed. Holds her there, pins her there, his hips grinding against hers in sharp, hard jerks as he comes into her. There are no words. There are only sounds, wracked and raw, as his hand laced through hers grips for purchase on the bedspread, the sheets.


It's some time before he regains any coherency at all. Some time before his groans turn to gasps, to panting. Some time before the short, heavy strokes of his hips turn into something deliberate, slower, sliding in and out of her as though to draw out the very last of his pleasure.

He's whispering to her then, moving into her, moving out of her, fucking her slow and careful, shuddering from overstimulation -- whispering that's it, whispering that's it. that's good. you're so fucking good.

[Hilary] The last time Hilary was with Ivan, he fucked her over and over and over again. He tied her up and saw into her when she didn't even want to part her legs without his hands on her, without his direction, his dominance. Dominance that is, in the end, a savage exaggeration of reality. She calls it play, when they both know it's nothing like a game. The last time she was with him, Ivan played along without deviation, without question, because he finally understood.

Even after they were washed and clothed he kept up the act, opening his hand over her ass and letting her have some of his wine, ordering for her at dinner, keeping her body close so that he could move her where he lived, taking her to his estate and telling her what she was to do while she waited for him to come find her. And Hilary, not so much a shell of a human being as the shattered fragments of one, finally felt safe.

Wrecked, overcome, incoherent, sleeping half a day with him just to recover: felt cared for. Even if she doesn't know how to tell him that's what it is. That's what she comes here for. Why it's him.


Only now Ivan's not lashing her to the bed. He hasn't struck her, not a single time. He hasn't even been particularly rough with her: no slamming of her body down on the mattress, no pressing her up against the wall, no bending her backward while he kisses her. Just the way he fucks her tonight, the lake gone still and quiet all around them in the wake of those fireworks earlier. Hilary's not shaking apart, sobbing underneath him, but holding him, kissing him when their mouths can manage to converge through their gasping.

She leaves raking red marks across his shoulderblade. She's never marked him before. She likely isn't conscious of the fact that she's doing it now, even as her hand curls against him, digging those finely manicured nails into his skin. She's conscious of his name leaving her lips, though, conscious of the way he's making her feel, the way he's bringing her close not to two, three orgasms over and over but this one singular moment of pleasure that doesn't seem created to destroy her.

Hilary puts her hand on his face when she feels him tensing, sees his arms shift in the way they hold her and hold the bed. She kisses him again, opening her mouth to Ivan's as his hips roll into a faster, harder pace. All those times she seemed too far gone to even really be there with him, all those times it seemed like he was a warm body and a hard cock to get her off, all those times he fucked her thinking she wasn't really there at all --

she was, in fact, paying attention. She knows what his body is telling her. She knows that he's going to come soon, and a hard shiver goes all the way through her at the mere knowledge. His mouth opens, teeth set into her shoulder or her neck or wherever, and Hilary makes a half-wracked, half-relieved sound.


Somewhere on Krasota, perhaps Marya hears Ivan groaning like that, hears Hilary all but sob, and isn't surprised. Doesn't know, regardless of what she hears or imagines she hears, what is really going on.


It's that bite that sets her off, though by that point Ivan may only peripherally feel what's happening to his lover. Her hand clasps his tighter, her cunt squeezing his cock and her whole torso tightening up with orgasm. She doesn't start fucking him back faster and faster or slapping him or screaming, but she moans in the half light, her fingers sliding past his cheek and into his hair. The first time she fucked him she murmured, walking naked or near enough over to his bared body, about how he could come inside of her, and she loved how he reacted to that.

She loves how he does it now, the way he loses himself, the way they aren't letting go. Hilary is is incandescent underneath him, taut and tight and arching, writhing, her legs sliding over him as though she's lost control of her own movements. The sounds she's making are tremulous and overcome, as she rides out of her pleasure against him. He's coming down, coming back into himself, and she's whimpering softly in answer to the whispers he gives her. Hilary's face is turned to one side against the pillows, her eyes closed and her cheeks flushed, sweat glistening on her skin. Their hips roll together, aftershocks of her orgasm rippling through her body and into his with every slow, mind-altering slide.

[Ivan] Gradually the last of those slides of his body into hers, by turns shuddering and smooth, taper down to nothing. He's still then, resting. They're both such long, lean, lovely creatures: like a pair of jungle cats. Serpents. Something of the sort. Hilary's husband would crush her if he lay atop her like this. He would have to roll aside. It's likely even Ivan would have to roll aside sooner or later.

But not yet. For now he stays, eyes closed, his mouth drifting to hers. He kisses her slowly now. There's a luxury in it, an enjoyment that seems rare in the moments afterward when she's shattered and he's either incoherent or tortured.

The only movement now is the gentle, faint swaying of the yacht. It's large enough not to stir to every little wavelet; small enough that it still rides the current instead of cutting through it. Moments go by, Ivan's harsh pants turning to something quieter, lower, and then finally silent.

He shifts then. Moves off her, sliding to the side. Their lower halves are still entwined. He looks at her across the newly opened distance. Sweat gleams on his body. It adheres her hair to her skin, and it's only when he moves to brush it aside that he realizes their hands are still linked. He draws them up between their faces, opening his fingers, shifting, wrapping his hand around hers and bringing it to his mouth.

Like he did at the beginning of all this, he kisses her fingertips now. Then he wraps her hand back into his palm and presses it to his breastbone, his heartbeat to her knuckles.

[Hilary] It takes effort for Hilary to remember what came before this. Despite the fact that she can tell they're on his yacht and even though some part of her recalls watching the fireworks while wrapped in warmth, she can't quite remember how they moved from those moments on deck to this. To now. She looks upward, the low ceiling visible only because there are a few lamps and because the room is small enough that the edges aren't swathed in shadow, and she closes her eyes. She stops trying to remember how they got there, or why it matters.

To some degree, and for reasons she's blind to, she's slightly uncomfortable. Nervous, really. In the back of her mind there's a creeping dread usually burnt away by the anger deep inside her. It isn't overwhelming. It's enough to make her kiss him slowly, and even a bit uncertainly, as the euphoria of her orgasm gives way to realizing that the structure of her reality, the rage and the distance, is gone. Without that scaffolding, the pit yawns underneath her, and this time she's not sure what's holding her up, what's keeping her here, what's letting her stay. She's not sure if she wants to stay.

She knows she doesn't want to leave.

Hilary shivers slightly, not from the cold, and watches Ivan moving their hands. She looks vaguely like she doesn't recognize her own hand, even with its rings, its little white-gold-ensconced emeralds, the platinum band and the pink diamond. The lamplight catches one earring, flashes light because of the way she breathes, then it blinks out of existence a second later.

Her dark eyes track to his face after he kisses those fingertips, following his gaze instead of his mouth. A few beats of his heart go by, then she murmurs,

"Ivan?"

not to get his attention, but like she's asking if he's still there, making sure he hasn't left her, though she can feel him inside her and atop her. Though she can see him clearly, smell him, still taste him on her tongue, still sense his weight holding her like gravity.

[Ivan] By the time Hilary speaks, Ivan's eyes have closed again. He could probably sleep like this -- uncovered, filthy, naked and tangled up on the bed.

He doesn't sleep, though. She says his name like a question, and his eyes flicker open. Shadowed beneath that brow of his, at once noble and surprisingly heavy, they're dark; the color is indeterminate. He looks at her for a moment, his eyes a little dazed, a little dreamy, as though he hasn't quite come back together yet. Sometimes he wonders if this is how Hilary always feels. So shattered; so disconnected. Worse than this, really. He's fragments of consciousness drifting in a haze of pleasure. So often, she's just fragments of self drifting in a void of ... what?

Rage, maybe. Or nothingness.

His thumb moves over her knuckles. "Я здесь," he whispers. He knows she doesn't understand Russian, but it's all right. She'll understand the tone, he thinks. He'll understand the words beneath the words: that he's here. He's with her. He understands, at least in some part.

[Ivan] On the way down from the flybridge, Ivan folds the blanket haphazardly over his arm. He catches up with her as she's descending the narrow staircase. Even on a yacht of this size, space is always an issue, and things like stairwells and closets are the first to suffer downsizing. In the dark, with surfaces wet from lakespray and earlier rain, it could be a treacherous trip for creatures less self-possessed and graceful than they.

Ivan has seen her move with thoughtless, unconscious grace. He does understand, intuitively, why it bothers her that she'll lose that grace soon. Become large and heavy and round and waddling. That much, he gets.

He catches up with her at the stern of the yacht, and there he tosses the blanket over his shoulder and reaches for her hand. It's a short trip to the sliding doors and into the saloon. When the doors shut behind them, the sound of the lake and the water fades. The engines are off now. All is quiet, except the occasional splash from a larger wave outside; the occasional groan as the currents tug on the anchor.

Whether or not she's left her coat on all this time in part because of her swelling belly, Hilary seems to hesitate not at all when she takes it off. Ivan's eyes follow her, neither avoiding nor fixing on her abdomen. The blanket is tossed on the sofa. He takes her coat from her, though, and folds it over one of the dining chairs.

On the flybridge, Ivan had considered - briefly - asking if she wanted to eat. If she'd prefer to retire to the bedroom instead. If she'd rather fuck. He didn't ask her, in the end: he remembered, instead, how she said I'll sleep where you tell me to. How she leaned against his thigh and seemed comforted by this. How she said, over and over again, Yes, Ivan, and seemed happier, more whole, more secure, with every repetition.

So there was no inquiry as to her preference. It's assumed. He pulls out a chair for her. There are two plates set out for them, one at each end of the table: a formal dinner. He moves one closer to the other; sets her at one end, lays his own platter at her right hand. It's a light meal, served cold -- chilled and sliced roast beef paired with green beans, herbed summer squash, cherry tomatoes: a light, summery meal, almost more a salad than an entree. It's harder to get heartburn off a meal like this. Perhaps that's deliberate, too.

Ivan pours himself a glass of chilled white wine; Hilary, half a glass. Then he sits.

"We never did manage to make it to Ibiza," he says lightly. "Let me make it up to you. Let's go somewhere else."

[Hilary] A few weeks is the kindest possible estimate. A few months is more accurate. Hilary's already beginning to show, at least enough to make her uncomfortable. She's already feeling different. Strange, inside, as though her body is even more disconnected from her self than usual. Inhabited. Taken. Possessed, not because she gave it over in the surrender that brings her so much inner peace, but because she's sacrificing it to -- not the War -- but to the desire to be left alone for another few years, left to live her life.

She's made other sacrifices. She's told other lies, endured other humiliations. She didn't know how repulsive this one would feel, though. She regrets it, and yet: Hilary has no other appealing option. What else would she do, run away? So she submits, not knowing that this domitor will be kind to her, not knowing that she will be cared for in the aftermath, not knowing that while she submits, she is made glorious somehow. Not feeling, in this surrender, that she is --

whatever it is, that she feels with him.

Ivan has asked her very few questions about her preferences. It's like tossing rocks into water when he does, even things like would she like another coat, does she want a blanket. Simple, easy questions about her own comfort cause ripples of unease, however mild they are. He notices that she seems more secure, happier even, when he makes these decisions. When he takes these questions out of her hands. It's quite childish, if one thinks about it, how much more preferable she finds it to have no control over her own movements and destiny. Quite bizarre. Wholly unhealthy.

And discomfiting, for him, to have that sort of weight. Responsibility for himself, blanketed by responsibility for another person, when he can barely stomach accountability for this car being crashed, that starved swan's broken heart, whatever.

But Hilary, for her part, may not notice. Or may not care. She sheds her jacket, which he takes, and then he pulls out the chair at one end of the table. She sits without comment, lets him scoot her in, and then he moves his chair to her right. Hilary says nothing as he pours himself a glass of wine, gives her half. When he seats himself, her brows are drawn together. He mentions Ibiza. Distractedly, she responds:

"I forgot all about Ibiza. Maybe somewhere cold and corrupt, could we switch places?"

One sentence flows into the other without hitch, with only a sudden change of tone, as though that was what she wanted to say at the start but first she had to answer, had to reply. Now she's looking at him, though.

[Ivan] That switch in topic is so rapid Ivan barely even notices until he realizes her sentence no longer computes. Then there's a pause, a hitch that should have been in her sentence, before he understands and looks at her.

"Seats?" A pause. He stands. "Of course."

So they switch, and he moves their plates, and he scoots her in again, and he sits where she was. Head of the table. He doesn't have to ask why; he gets it. She doesn't want even that much; even that hint of authority or power that is really more politeness than truth. Sitting back, Ivan shakes out his dinner napkin and lays it back in his lap, then completes the switch by handing her her wineglass for his own.

"You had no problem directing me around the kitchen," he says. It's not a question. It's hardly even a mention; she can answer, or she can simply ignore.

[Hilary] So they switch seats. Plates and glasses moved, bodies moved. They repeat what they did just a moment ago, til Hilary's at his right hand and Ivan is settling in at the head of the table. Not hard to imagine her sitting at the head of the table at a dinner, or when she's eating alone, or any number of other times. Not hard to imagine her looking perfectly at ease there, even feeling like it is her right. Like she should be there. Refusing to give it up to another.

And he comments on that: she had no trouble ordering him around the kitchen. Dominant, then, a ruler, and seeming perfectly at ease in her own skin with that role. Hilary smooths her napkin over her lap and looks over her plate thoughtfully, turning it a bit so that the summer squash is nearest to her.

"I've read a bit," she says, picking up her fork, "about how odd it is that so many submissives actually can be quite dominant, firm, and defensive outside of... those situations." She puts the fork into the squash, lifting a bite's worth of it. "I like cooking. It's... not quite how I feel when I'm with you. But it's something like that." Her brows draw together a bit as she lifts the fork to her mouth. "In myself, I suppose."

[Ivan] A faint smile flits over Ivan's mouth, quick and unbidden. It's a little wistful. It makes him a little wistful to think of Hilary looking things up on the internet, in libraries: trying to define herself, trying to understand herself. It makes him wistful, in truth, to think of her outside of the times he sees her. To consider her not simply as cool-eyed, bejeweled Mrs. Durante, who sometimes shows up to be fucked senseless. To think of her as a complete person with her own life, with hours and hours of her own time.

"I've heard submissives tend to define their own boundaries too," he says. Perhaps this is how he's learning to talk to her: with mild statements that she can choose to respond to or not. Without questions. Without demands, prying, scraping at her until she's raw. "And implement kill switches. Safewords."

[Hilary] He's right, at least. He isn't asking her if she wants to define her own boundaries. He doesn't throw a barrage of questions at her: do you want this? Is that what you'd like? Is that what we should do? He doesn't aggravate her with these things, lower himself in her eyes by chasing after her like all those schoolboys. Do you want, do you want, do you want. What do you want? What should I do? Who do you need me to be?

(I don't know, I don't know, leave me alone, I don't know.)

It's easier to just converse like this, without feeling that anything's being taken from her, demanded of her. Just... talking. Simple. Easy. Calm. And shared, really.

"I wonder more if you would need that more than I have," she muses, taking another bite of squash.

[Ivan] Ivan's table manners are casually impeccable. He's light and deft with his utensils, expertly cutting his sliced steak into even smaller mouthfuls, which he folds around cherry tomatoes, squash, green beans. There's a faint, fruity tang to everything. It's a meal for a summer's night, in truth: but then, sailing is a summer affair.

His eyes flick toward Hilary briefly. He laughs a little. "It'd only serve to ease my conscience," he says. "I don't think it'd actually keep you any safer at all. I don't think," he adds, setting his knife down briefly to reach for his wineglass, "we've strayed anywhere close to your boundaries yet."

A pause.

"Am I wrong?"

[Hilary] There are few intersections between Hilary's upbringing and Ivan's in terms of priorities and styling. But there are those few, and table manners is one of them. They do this thoughtlessly, after so much practice and drilling that it's second nature. No consideration given to which fork to use, no hesitation over the pace conversation takes when it tries to weave in between bites of delicious -- but not too spicy, not too burdensome -- fare.

Hilary is savoring some of the squash still, but she's going for a bite of green beans as Ivan is speaking. First, to taste each dish on its own. Then, to pair them, each to each, tasting how they complement one another. To enjoy quietly, to explore the meal as she eats it: this is how she always sits down to dine, taking her time with it, as though driven not by hunger but by appreciation, as one peruses a gallery.

"I've never feared for my safety with you," she says eventually. "You wouldn't risk truly damaging me, if nothing else. I flatter myself by thinking perhaps it's more than that." She pauses here, and dips the end of a green bean into her squash. "Though I suppose in the end it doesn't matter."

[Ivan] A quick stitch across his brow. He doesn't pick up his knife again, but instead sets his glass down, his fingers moving restlessly against themselves. Ivan doesn't look at Hilary as he says this, as though this were some sort of shameful confession -- these words he must have parroted, and oh so convincingly, to god only knows how many starved swans across the years.

"It's more than that," he says quietly. "I don't want to hurt you. I care about you, for better or worse."

At the end his eyes flick to hers, but only momentarily. A glance, as though to underline the words, seal the deal. Then he picks his knife up again and cuts some beans in two. He doesn't eat the way Hilary does, exploring flavors, complexities. He enjoys good food; that much is clear. Knows the difference between fine cuisine and lesser foods. But he would never pause, and savor, and wander from one portion to the next like a connoisseur in a gallery.

"At any rate," rather firmly, he steers the conversation back to its origin, "we haven't decided yet. Somewhere cold and corrupt, you said. Are you hinting that you want to go to Russia?"

[Hilary] She doesn't fight him, as perhaps he knew she would not. Hilary doesn't push for him to expound on that admission. She doesn't look at him as he's saying it, as though it genuinely does not matter in the end whether he truly cares for her or if it just isn't worth the risk to hurt her. If hurting her upsets him, as it seemed to when she asked for it, though they had very different things in mind when the word passed between them.

Hilary looks at him, only, when she senses his eyes have come back, are looking at her. She lets hers flick over, as well. Momentary, yes. Like a handshake without touch: okay.

"A horrendous idea," she says, with a huff of laughter. "Crawling with the tribe. I loathe the cold, but I can't exactly go cavorting around a beach for a time." She spears a bite of beef with her fork. "Perhaps Switzerland. The west, near the lake."

[Ivan] He returns her huff of laughter with a brief exhale of his own. "It's not the tribe you have to watch out for anymore in the Rodina. These days it's the Glass Walkers and the Shadow Lords and the goddamn Bone Gnawers that run the show. In the cities, anyway."

There isn't much concern in his voice. One might imagine any number of Silver Fangs would descend into deep and dire conversations at the very mention of losing power. One might imagine any number of Fangs would never, ever admit that their old imperial power over one of the Tribe's oldest holdings has long since waned in the face of communism, democracy and good old capitalism.

Neither of them seem the sort to care much, though. Ivan's attachment to his ancestral home seems to come largely in the form of a fondness for caviar and vodka and Russian-imported supermodels and ballerinas. He spears another piece of squash, pairs it with a tomato, and then washes it down with a mouthful of light, fruity wine.

"Switzerland it is, then," he says. "Montreux, perhaps? Or Lausanne? Not Geneva, for god's sake; nothing but chocolate and tourists and diplomatic neutrality."

[Hilary] His own House held rule there for so long, yet he speaks as glibly of it as he speaks of anything to do with the Nation, pack, all that silliness. He would have made a fine prince in the old days, rolling over in bed some morning, too lazy to bother being a grand hero today. He is the sort of Garou so many Fangs have become, losing power inch by inch as they are realized to be hardly as god-touched as they once appeared, gloriously pristine and beautiful.

And Hilary. Hilary's family is only distantly, anciently related to Russia. The House is gone now. The remnants are like her: adopted by others, scattered, sometimes even unsure about where they come from, the lists of ancestors they once memorized. They forget. They corrupt themselves on the inside. They fall.

Like, perhaps, they will all fall in time.

"Lausanne," Hilary says, with a wistfulness to her voice that doesn't quite cross the boundary into a sigh. She smiles faintly, reaching for her wine for the first time. "Yes, Lausanne."

[Ivan] Ivan's immediate response isn't vocal. It's simply a quirking of the eyebrows at that tone in her voice: an unspoken query as he leans back in his seat.

The last of his meal is left to languish on the plate: a tomato. Two cubes of squash. A single green bean, perfectly blanched to that precise point where crispness begins to give way to softness. Ivan brings his wine with him, though, rocking the liquid to and fro in his glass, his wrist set at the edge of his armrest.

"You sound familiar with the city."

[Hilary] There's no evasion from her, no coy or coquettish dancing about the subject. She doesn't refuse him what he seems to want to know. She simply eats her meal, mostly the vegetables, just a few bites of the beef. Hilary remains sitting straight, her spine an elegant stretch behind her, an almost architectural arc.

She shakes her head. "I competed in the Prix de Lausanne when I was sixteen. I barely left the hotel or the Théâtre de Beaulieu while I was there, but... I remember the time I was there fondly."

[Ivan] "You know," he sounds pleased to have been right about this one little thing, this guess, "I thought you might have danced. It's something about the way you stand."

For his part, Ivan does not, in fact, sit straight. He rocks his chair back on its hind legs, swaying gently on that fulcrum: the very picture of the overindulged young playboy, at ease in his own overindulgent domain. A sip of wine, and then he leans forward to snag that last cherry tomato after all, tossing it into his mouth.

"So how does one get from dancing at sixteen to rather talented cooking? I always thought ballet and food were mutually exclusive."

[Hilary] She lifts an eyebrow at his tone of voice, at the evident pleasure and -- somewhat -- subdued pride at having guessed. "A regular Sherlock Holmes," she says, without more than the faintest trace of sarcasm to her light tone.

It's odd how calm they're being. This easy, casual conversation they're having over dinner, after fireworks. It's not yet ten o'clock; early, still, when you have nowhere to be in the morning. Her things are downstairs, Marya's turned down at least one bed. There's no talk of tying her up or forcing her to her knees. One might think there's no way to go from this -- calm, pleasant, even peaceful -- to the sort of violent way that they fuck. There's no guarantee of that, either.

So far it seems that she missed him. She wanted to be near him again. And it doesn't matter what theyv'e done in the intervening two weeks, doesn't matter how many of his models and ballerinas and socialites he's fucked, doesn't matter what wickedness she's been up to since the last time he saw her. They don't even ask. Maybe they're afraid of breaking the peace. But maybe it just doesn't matter.

"After you've spent twelve hours straight in a studio, you can discuss your opinions on proper nutrition for ballerinas with me," she says mildly, and takes another bite of beef. It's a little while before she swallows, a little while before says: "I've always liked cooking. I didn't attend culinary school til my twenties, though."

[Ivan] "It's hardly my opinion," he replies, smirking lightly. "More an observation. Anyway, you're hardly the picture of a glutton yourself.

"I hadn't realized," he goes on. "That you'd gone to culinary school, I mean. Most Silver Fangs would have been shocked. A purebred daughter of the tribe in a kitchen or on a stage for all to gawk at: scandalous."

He drains his wine, sets the glass down, pours another. "Not that I'm trying to pay you an underhanded insult. I'm hardly one to talk about propriety. My great-grandfather fucked a Glass Walker kin. Filthy rich family. Made their fortune in coal and rail, but not a speck of pure blood in the entire tree. Saved my family, though. That's where all this," he waves a hand around, "came from, if you trace it back far enough."

His fingers tap the side of his glass, and then he takes another sip. "I should tell Matthieu that story sometime. See how many colors he turns."

[Hilary] Her eyes flick at him when he smirks, says what he says about her own image. She doesn't say anything, and returns her attention to her meal as he comments on culinary school. Since he's finished eating -- or close enough -- he talks, more than a few words, a couple quick sentences. And Hilary works quietly through her dinner. She hasn't had more than the one sip of wine yet, but has taken a few drinks from her water glass instead. Small bites. Just a few more.

His plate is almost empty, if not cleaned completely. She's not picked at her meal like a bird -- hardly -- but there's still plenty of food on her plate. She looks at him as he lifts his second glass towards his mouth. There's a blankness to her eyes, almost like boredom. Or weariness. Or distance.

And in her voice, effort that sounds the way a trembling, straining arm looks when it lifts something right at the edge of what the musculature can bear. "I...didn't like that. The little aside about how I look, how fat I am or am not." There's a pause, watching him almost warily, but also a time to think. "I never had an eating disorder when I was dancing rigorously. I knew girls who did. People called me beautiful til they found out I danced, and then they started whispering. My caretakers watched me constantly. I ate alone whenever I could, just so I could eat without commentary."

Hilary looks at her plate again for a moment, thoughtful now. Like a muscle being stretched, and strengthened, what she just said got easier and more exhausting with every word. She reflects on that, and goes for another bite of beef, touching it to a morsel of squash. "I attended very fine, very exclusive schools. It was thought preferable to mingling with a less specialized, artistic array of mortals in a university. I thought it was very nice." That, a trifle defensive. Not scandalous. Nice. "I was taught most Silver Fangs would like their Kinfolk to be graceful. Talented. To know the difference between mediocrity and perfection."

She doesn't eat the bite though, looking over at Ivan again. "I'm sorry," she says this with a sort of ruffled intensity, as though she assumes he won't believe it, but that he must. "It's very difficult for me to pretend interest in your family history, where your wealth came from. It's here now." A beat. "I know I shouldn't be bored. I just... could not care less, really, for propriety or purity. I think it's all quite meaningless."

Hilary looks at her plate, and the bite she's about to take. "I don't remember who Matthieu is." And eats it, her shoulders dropping slightly as though she's letting down some heavy weight she's been carrying too long.

[Ivan] It was a bizarre, disjointed thing she just let spill forth, like some malformed creation birthed from a jumble of conflicts, jagged thoughts that she's never had any practice voicing at all before. Ivan listens, or tries to, though it makes his eyebrows flick together when she says she didn't like that. When she talks about her youth, dancing, beauty, eating.

She's letting him in. He understands this. It doesn't make it any easier to see what he sees now that he can look a little ways into her. It doesn't make it any easier to hear that she couldn't care less about the little anecdotes he's been telling her; the conversation he's trying to have with her.

The silence between them is suddenly stiff. Perhaps Hilary can sense that; most likely not. After a moment he sets his wineglass down with a decisive little click, gets to his feet.

"I'm going for a smoke," he says. "You should stay inside. Cold out there, and anyway you wouldn't want the little brat to slide out with brain damage."

There's another beat of pause; then, callously, "If you're so bored with all this, why don't you go ahead and go belowdecks. You know where my cabin is. Make yourself at home. I'll be down to fuck you after I've had my cigarette."

[Hilary] "Ivan," she says, as he's standing up, preparing to walk out -- have that cigarette, calm down, perhaps. Or work his frustration, or whatever it is, into something else. Something he can use when he fucks her.

She's half-turned in her chair, looking up at him, her brows together. She's no empath, no caregiver, but she'd have to be a simpleton not to notice the change in his manner. The tension. For once her own guards were down long before he laid a hand on her; vulnerable, yes. But also open. As much as she can be, maybe.

"That isn't what I meant," she says quietly, then: "or even what I said. I'm not bored with all this."

[Ivan] "Then what," he wheels before he's a step past her, and they're much closer now: two fractured individuals on a yacht, miles and miles of open water from anyone else at all other than one quiet maid who would never interfere anyway. The word is bitten off. He takes a breath before he continues, "What did you mean?"

[Hilary] True to form, Hilary doesn't even flinch. She doesn't jerk back, wary of his anger, unnerved by his wrath. She sits still, the sort of person one could imagine just looking calmly at someone who really is on the verge of striking her. It's perhaps lucky there's no way in hell she would ever enter the Armed Forces: no drill sergeant would know what to do with her. With that cold expression, those implacable eyes.

It's hard to tell, dark as they are, what's behind them. It's maddening to try.

Hilary takes a few seconds to think, though, about what she meant. About what he said as he stood, ready to leave her behind so he could go outside and just get away from her for a few minutes. Which she doesn't want: that rejection, that refusal. Maybe she'd say anything to get him to not deny her like that, push her away like he might if she doesn't act the right way. And maybe it's true, what he said: that isn't what she meant.

"I don't know what to say, when you talk of what most Silver Fangs think. I don't know if I'm supposed to care, or if it means that you do. I have no stories of my own ancestors to say back to you after you tell one. I don't think it's... strange, or wrong, that your great-so-and-so fucked a Glass Walker, and I don't see the significance of your family's wealth coming from them instead of the Fangs. I'm not..." she struggles, here, and it looks very much like frustration, or the edges of it. "I'm not bored with you. Or by being with you like this."

Hilary frowns. "I didn't know what to say," she repeats, as though to underline it, make him understand it. "Nothing that wasn't just witty banter or bland socializing. I was just trying to be... real."

She reaches out, grasping his forearm, if he doesn't jerk out of reach. "Ivan, I am not here just to get you to fuck me. I'm not."

[Ivan] Ivan doesn't jerk away. The possibility is there -- a minute twitch in the long lean muscles and tendons of his forearm. When motion comes, though, it's the opposite of jerking away. His hand locks around her wrist. His grip is hard, almost punishing; his face abruptly dark with strain and tension.

"I was just making conversation," he says, low. "And it doesn't always have to be significant or noteworthy. It's all right if our conversations are shallow or pointless sometimes, if your replies are nothing but witty banter. It's all right if you just want to change the subject and talk about something else. There's no right answer, nothing specific that I want to hear from you. I just want to see that you have even a passing interest in who I am, where I come from, where I'm going.

"I need to know you're interested in me." His mouth twists: self-disgust, anger. "I need to know my interest in you is returned. That I'm not just something you can use to make yourself ... whole."

[Hilary] A part of her wants to slap him. And it isn't a pretending part, a role she could play. The bejeweled wife, the offended woman of good breeding and high society and little patience, all that. It's the monstrous part of her, hyper-tuned to any intimation of blame and ready to retaliate viciously, violently, overwhelmingly. Claw his eyes out. Scratch her nails down his cheeks, slap him til his face is red and raw. A part of her reacts to him the way it reacts to everything else: with pure, senseless, irrational rage.

The rage that seems soothed by one thing, and one thing only: transformation back into pain, release through catharsis.

No one can ever say Hilary hasn't learned control, in the thirty-odd years she's been around. Control may have been one fo the first things she learned, like some Ahrouns. It does take control to repress as much as she does. It takes impulse control to stop herself from doing Very Bad Things. It takes control to keep herself out of some of the worse trouble she could get into.

Hilary breathes in sharply, though it isn't in fear, when Ivan grasps her wrist like that. She doesn't go limp, she doesn't try to pull away, she doesn't grab him tighter. She accepts it, as though she can prove something to him by even a submission this brief, this disconnected from anything else. Not that she's strong, not that she's tough, not that she can take it. Something else, entirely, that she is still searching for the words to describe.

She knows, because he's told her clearly, that he hates how she makes him feel. Sometimes. All the time. She doesn't know which. But she does know what it is: that he could want her so badly, that he could be so interested in her, fascinated by her, and bore her to distraction in return. She knows, becaue he's told her, that he's disgusted with this very desire of his, this need to matter to her.

"I'm sorry," Hilary says finally, and it may sound false as it is because she has nothing to follow it up with. Hard enough to apologize, impossible and tiring to try and explain what exactly she's sorry for, why she's sorry, what about it warranted apology. She assumes he knows. He's the one that's upset, after all. For what it's worth, and it may not be worth very much, she says it with all the sincerity she can put into her words. Difficult, even that, because the reason she didn't win the top prizes at the Prix de Lausanne was that she lacked sensitivity, if not creativity, in interpreting the music. Self-expression is not her strong suit. Never will be.

Who would want, after all, to learn to express a Self like hers?

"You're not... a thing," she says quietly. "I am interested in who you are. It's just... you aren't your great-grandfather. And you aren't your wealth." She pulls at his sleeve, as though to urge him closer. "You were scared of fireworks, when you were little."

As though by remembering this, she can prove something to him. Something.

[Ivan] Moments go by; hyper-stillness in the Ragabash, every muscle tensed. He doesn't look at her. He looks at their hands, his own lean and long, narrow across the knuckles but with such remarkable dexterity and reach. A sculptor's hands! cooed some bimbo at some party once, stroking between the ridges of his knuckles while he tried to stave off boredom by betting against himself how much of his cock she'd be able to swallow later. He's angry now, and he knows it: his thoughts dark, verging on hateful. He looks at Hilary's hand. She's grasping at his sleeve, and there's something pleading and mute about the gesture, like a blind, helpless thing grasping for sustenance it has no words for. It twists in his heart. It churns in his stomach.

He tugs at her suddenly. Sharply. He drags her to her feet and if she hadn't been a dancer, hadn't been good enough to go to Lausanne when she was sixteen, wasn't her, she might have stumbled getting up. Fallen against him. He pulls her against him anyway and locks his arm around her, bends her wrist back behind her back and locks it there while he pushes his hand over her cheek and into her hair and forces her head back to kiss her hard, hard.

When that storm passes he seems to quiet a little. He rests his brow against hers and his hand gentles in her hair, but he still has her arm behind her back and he still has her pressed against him, close enough that they can feel one another's pulsebeats.

Gently now, he strokes her hair back. When he speaks, he tries to speak gently, too.

"I wasn't insulting you," he says, "when I talked about food and dancers. It was a joke. I liked it when we cooked together. I like watching you at dinner. There's something graceful about you. Lovely.

"I thought you were angry, or hurt, and you were trying to get back at me. I thought you were reminding me, yet again, how little any of this matters to you."

A longer pause. His hand stills on her face, and his eyes close. When he kisses her again it's firm; some bitterness beneath the surface like arsenic in honey.

"I'm ... scared of not mattering to you," he whispers. "I don't want to matter to you. I don't want that responsibility. But I'm scared of not mattering."

[Hilary] There's a difference between Hilary's intellectual understanding of Ivan's inner conflict concerning... all this, and the emotional understanding of being able to empathize with it. His feelings for her. Her feelings for him. Need. Want. Rage. Whatever it is they do to each other, whatever it is they each get from it. It isn't that he's lying to her or deceitful about it. It isn't that she can't grasp the simplicity of his complex. Sympathizing with it, though. Following the jumps in his emotions, the pulse of his affect, is... dizzying. It exhausts her. Bewilders her. Frustrates her.

Hilary has no concept of why Ivan is so angry. Why he looks at her with mingled ache and revulsion and wrath. Why it all culminates the way it does, with him pulling her to her feet and against his body. But she rises with it, lifts as though pulled by strings from heaven and not Ivan's strength, the motion as effortless as the afternoon he had her standing up on a hotel mattress in high heels, lifting her foot to his shoulder so he could kiss his way up her inner thigh.

When he didn't know what she was. When her little plays at dominance seemed like the behavior of a cougar, friend-of-the-mother, school-chum's-wicked-aunt. When with the suddeness of falling off a cliff, she made him want a darker, angrier sex than he'd ever so much as fantasized about.

Hilary is almost eye to eye with him as he bends her arm back. She breathes in, but it's not a gasp. He grabs her head and pushes her back with his kiss, as though he could bend her, break her with that. She presses into him, eyes closing, on the verge of a moan she never voices. She isn't swaying, though, when he relents. When he seems soothed. Hilary's eyes flicker open as he rests their brows together, and she closes them again, running her nose along the side of his face, a gentle nuzzle while his hand is stroking her hair.

All with her arm locked back, all with her held against him like a prisoner. As though this is natural. As though this makes sense because it feels right.

To her, at least.

She listens, watching him now, her head slightly canted to the side. She stares at him, seeming almost blank. Even when he kisses her, there's a certain emptiness to her, accepting and even grateful, but unruffled. Once he might have taken that stare for boredom. Maybe even still. But when she answers, perhaps he knows better. Remembers.

"I know you were joking, Ivan," Hilary says with a bit too much patience, despite the fact that physically she's in a surrendered, unresistant position. "I didn't think you were insulting me. I just didn't like it."

As for the rest: he liked cooking with her. He likes watching her, her impeccable manners, her grace, her unconscious prettiness in everything she does. But Hilary has nothing to say to that, no answer. Perhaps she thinks these things unimportant, or obvious. Perhaps they are simply beyond her to respond to. Perhaps it just isn't necessary.

"You were wrong," she tells him, without the gentleness he works so hard to put in his own tone. She barely hears it. She's wearing thin. She's wearying, period. "I wasn't trying to remind you of anything. It doesn't even make sense to think I'd try to make you think none of this matters to me."

There's a pause there, as she stares at him, their faces so close. She quiets, as though his whispering was a cue that she has to follow. Or needs to follow, having so few internal ones of her own. "You aren't responsible for me," she says, quite possibly misunderstanding him completely. No demand that he get over it, figure out what he wants, which is both (and neither). "But you do matter to me." Simple, that. Whether he likes it or not. He can't have her here and pretend it isn't true, in any case.

She breathes in deeply, exhales. "What I want from you, I don't want from anyone else. But what I want from you is not the entirety of my existence. Moreover, what I want from you, I'm only now discovering myself. You're only torturing yourself thinking about mattering, not mattering, responsibility. Just... take pleasure in me."

Hilary stills for a moment, shifting slightly against him. Her dark eyes remain on his multi-hued ones, which remind her of sun dappled across fallen leaves on still-green grass, a thought so vivid it's inseparable now from the memory of his eyes on her.

"I know how low it must sound, Ivan, but I do want to please you."

[Ivan] For so much of the time Hilary is speaking, Ivan's eyes are closed. His brow rests against hers. He listens, and now and then his jaw flexes, and now and then his thumb strokes her caught arm, the tender flesh of her inner wrist.

It's not until the last, when she says Take pleasure in me, that his eyes open again. And they are as they are, and as she sees them: green dappled with hazel, with gold, with smoky traces of grey and blue. It would be strange for him to know that she thinks of the forest floor when she looks at his eyes -- as though her lack of empathy, her lack of connection and her fragmentary emotional life should have rendered her insensate to beauty and nature as well.

"I know," he whispers. And, "I do. I do take pleasure in you."

He lets go her arm at last. Puts both his hands on her face, but gently now, cradling her cheeks, her jaw, her neck. He doesn't like these flicker-fast flashes into anger, into insecurity and rage. He was happy, earlier. Glad to be watching the fireworks with her. Glad she was here, even if she was right to worry that her swelling abdomen might soon make her unattractive, undesirable to him. Even if she was right to want to hide herself away soon. For weeks. For months.

He will miss her in that time. He has not said it, might never, but he will. He would. Even if seeing her swollen and gravid would disgust him, would revolt him, would make him wonder what became of her long slim body and that smooth, lovely slope of her stomach; even if the thought that that thing growing inside her was most likely not his, could not be his even if it is his, belonged to another man, was one more reminder that she belongs to another wolf. Even if all that were true,

he would still miss her.


After a while, Ivan draws away. The remains of their dinner still on the table; wine still in the bottle. He looks at it, observes it without care, and then holds his hand out for hers.