Ivan Press

Ivan

It's a strange limbo they find themselves in. There are things they can't discuss, things they can't bring to light; things she won't discuss, things he can't stop thinking of. They exist in a sort of unstable equilibrium, held by forces beyond their control. The one they call love, which only manifests when they can overcome their own inherent selfishness long enough to reach one another. The one they call need, which always burns, which always cuts like a knife.

All the bonds that bind them. All the things they won't talk about.

So: all right. Last night was hard, but they won't bring it to light again. They'll leave it where it is, and they'll go sailing, and the lake is so bright and the Cielo so graceful, skimming the surface on her twin hulls, sails unfurled brilliant against the sky. They'll go sailing and she'll wear her old-Hollywood hats, he'll wear boat shoes and linen slacks, he'll wear his shirt unbuttoned, the wind streaming beneath to caress his skin. And they'll go far, far, the lake so deep and blue beneath them. They'll drop anchor; maybe go for a little swim. Have lunch on the flybridge, or in the saloon. Sun themselves on the foredeck, stretched out on the sundeck. Live like the spoiled, idle creatures they are.

And sometimes he'll look at her and wonder how she can be okay with this, how she can just bury whatever she can't cope with, or doesn't want to cope with; sometimes he'll look at her and wonder how he can be okay with this, how he can cope with her coldness, the mercilessness of her apathy. Sometimes she makes him feel so pathetic. So like a child, wailing for what he doesn't even understand.

And sometimes he'll wonder if he can bear this at all. Sometimes he'll wonder how much longer he can bear it. But then he'll wonder how he could possibly exist without her, without this, when she's woven herself subtly and insidiously into the very fabric of his life. She's everywhere now. He built her a goddamn den, he sired a cub with her, her scent is in his blood, like a poison. He knows he'll forgive her again as soon as she turns to him. As soon as she reaches for him. As soon as she shows him that yes, yes, she's happy with him, she's here with her, she's like this with him and no one else, it's him, it's Ivan who is different, and special, and unique, and singular to her. And he knows he'll be right back here again as soon as she pushes him away, as soon as she cuts him down, shows him just how pitiful, how silly he is, really, to behave the way he does. Want the things he wants.

Last night was hard. Today doesn't have to be, but it still is.

Hilary

What Ivan said was true: it's nice, having your own staff, your own people, loyal to no one but you. Carlisle, her driver, who quickly hires a crew at Hilary's whim to sail the massive yacht, who suggests to her household manager -- the woman who remains to be seen -- that perhaps they should get hire a larger staff than just three, because that is what it will take to deal with this woman and her lifestyle. Miranda, whose last name is older than several countries, including this one, says that yes, that is something they'll have to consider. In the meantime, Darya goes out onto Cielo as well, as does Carlisle, and they make themselves like silent, unseen mice, like all the rest. Like good servants.

Hilary wears one of those strapless, one-piece bathing suits that twists across her bosom. She wears large sunglasses and gold bangles. She wears a gauzy caftan that billows slightly in the breeze. She wears, yes, one of those large, classic hats, and she stays in the umbrella-given shade on the flybridge, lounging on a long and low chair as they cut across the water. She and her paramour, who lets the sun caress his skin, lays himself out in the light where she can see him, are hardly speaking to each other.

She watches him when he swims -- she certainly doesn't join him, bathing suit notwithstanding. She sips her drink and watches him flicker in the deep blue water, golden and lovely, here because he can't stand to leave her. Because she told him that no.

She didn't really want him to go, either.

But not here because he's enjoying himself. Not here because he's happy when he's with her, better when he's with her. Because, simply enough, of those burning binary stars that wheel about each other between them. Love and need, whichever one is ruling the sky at the moment. And Hilary, being what she is, doesn't know which one is which. She stays in the shade, away from the light of stars. They burn. They are far, far too bright for her.

Cold as she is, detached as she is, Hilary is no fool. She knows what she's done to him. What he's done to her. Changed her in this intricate physical way that can't ever be properly erased. Made her feel something like comfort, something like what people call home. She knows quite well how much he hates her sometimes, because she cannot give him what he wants from her. She knows what it is. She tries. It simply isn't there. Not always, at least. Not enough.

But there he is, dragging himself back up out of the water and onto the deck once more, shaking droplets from his hair. They catch the afternoon sun like diamonds, glinting as they fall. He sweeps his broad palms over his scalp, skimming water off of himself, and she catches his eyes finding her again, coming back to her again.

If she took his hand and drew him near when he returned to where she sits. If she kissed him in that way -- that way that is not seeking and curious and tender and explorative, as it was last night on the couch when her lips brushed over his brow and his cheeks -- that is an invitation, an opening of the gate, a blessing to unleash what she knows is in him...

If she pulled him close and let him dissolve all of his want and his need and his love in her, then yes. He would forgive her in an instant, it would all be forgotten, like it never happened.

And as soon as she couldn't. As soon as she grew tired or if she pulled away, if she changed her mind or if he crossed a line or asked dozens of his questions or if she grew irritated at something he did, he would be right back here. Telling her how cold she is. Asking her -- out of nowhere, it seems -- if she even still wants him. Lashing out in anger because he feels so pathetic, he feels so cut down, he feels silly, he feels like a child, and the one thing he loves in the world doesn't love him back.

Leaving her staring at him, bewildered. Not to mock him, but because she simply doesn't understand how quickly he moves from faith to fury. Because laughably, Hilary does not understand fragility. So accustomed to being broken, she does not grasp how someone -- how anyone -- would try to keep all the pieces together, hold everything in place, when everything

inevitably

shatters.

The sky is pink and they are still out on the water. Hilary has changed, back in those white slacks and a loose, short-sleeved top. She's wrapped a shawl around her shoulders, though it isn't cold. Her hat is gone, and a few strands of her hair get plucked by the breeze here and there, pulled into the air or across her cheek. She remembers, as Darya brings a tray of finger-foods and canapes up to the table between their lounge chairs,

fireworks last fall. And how she was already pregnant, not quite but almost visibly so. Ivan making sure his cook made foods that were gentle on the stomach and wouldn't ignite her heartburn. Ivan letting her sit at his feet and rest her head on his leg. She remembers fireworks like witch's hats and pumpkins lighting up the sky in a far more friendly way than the burning, burning sun.

The madness of it strikes her for a moment as she eats a small hors d'voeuvre. She is scared of the dark. She hates too much light. She is frightened of being swallowed, consumed, devoured. She dreams of peacefully sinking down into cold, dark depths that will take her very last breath away. She hates Ivan, sees him as a clinging child, constantly pawing at her, wailing for her, begging her for what she doesn't have. And: she does not want him to go. She wants very badly for him to love her like that: to let her sit at his feet, resting her head against him, while he strokes her hair and lets her know

she is good. she is good and she is loved and it is okay. it is all right that she is mad and inhuman and broken to pieces. she does not have to be whole. she is loved. she is precious.

In the middle of their silence, and the middle of the hush that falls across the hemisphere when the sun begins to set, Hilary sets down the half-eaten morsel she picked up and says -- though her eyes never leave the horizon, the skyline of the city beyond which the sun is sinking --

"I want you not to be angry with me."

As though it's last night, past midnight, and he's snapping what the fuck do you want from me. But she doesn't throw anything at him. She doesn't start screaming at him.

"You're almost always angry with me for something," she says. "So often I don't understand where it comes from. Like you're speaking in a code I haven't learned. You snap at me as though I should know better, and I don't know what I've done wrong. When you tell me it, it always seems to be things I didn't do wrong, but for not... feeling a certain way."

Hilary's brow furrows as she looks at him. "It isn't that I don't know what you want me to feel at different times. It's that I don't. And I can't. I can't... always be what you want or need me to be, even if I know.

"It doesn't mean I don't care," she says, her voice so quiet even the lapping of the water against Cielo's hull could overtake it. "It's simply that I can't. Which you know. You know that... I'm not right."

She says this with a measure of frustration. A measure of anxiety that he can hear tightening her voice. She isn't right in the head. She is just a little bit more soulless than the average person. She knows very well that she's mad. She uses the euphemisms anyway. Her eyes go away again, back towards the sky, turning from pink to purple so slowly the change is almost unnoticable until it's done. "I'm not asking you to always be patient or understanding or simpering around me sweeping up the glass," she says, her voice restablized by a few notches, but still quiet. "I just wish you wouldn't get so angry. I wish you wouldn't behave as though every time I can't give you what you need, it means you don't matter and I don't want you to stay.

"It isn't... pleasant... to think I may be happy or cold or lascivious or exhausted and still be able to be near you, precious to you... and then have you shout recriminations at me as though I've knowingly, intentionally wounded you."

There's a long pause. She exhales a quiet sigh. "I am not good, Ivan, but I am not cruel.

"Not to you. Never you."

Ivan

There are clouds on the eastern horizon now. Gathering like night made physical; lit by the westering sun. They are beautiful, and Ivan looks at them. Is looking at them when Hilary speaks. It's the first time they've spoken to each other in longer than he can easily remember, and the sound of her voice makes his head turn almost before he recognizes it as hers.

In the few days before birth, a million synapses form in a fetus's brain every second. A million memories forged every second, all of them implicit, indelibly etching the mother into the child. Every detail, every nuance, every subconscious cue of recognition fused well before that first fateful breath. There is no way Anton can ever forget his mother, even if he cannot quite remember her. Sometimes Ivan feels the same way. Like somehow, without his knowing it, the connections have formed, the ties have knotted, and he couldn't forget Hilary now if he tried. He remembers her even without realizing it.

So he looks at her when she speaks, before he even knows she's speaking. And she tells him what she tells him, and a few times his smooth brow wrinkles; once or twice he closes his eyes for a moment, pained. She's not right, she says, and he draws a breath like he might protest. Or comfort. Or -- something, something that another man might be able to do without thought. Something that would come naturally to someone else, someone whole and unselfish and right.

Oh, but that's not who they are. So time goes by, and he looks at her again, and it's only when she finishes that his eyes drop away for a moment.

When they come back to her, he rises. He gets up off his lounge chair and he crosses the small space between; he sits on the edge of hers. His skin is dry now, and his hair. He doesn't touch her. He sits with his elbows on his knees, his elegant hands loosely folded together. He thinks for a moment, and then it's a lie after all because he does touch her. Turns at the waist and covers her hand with his - tentative at first, then with firmness. Warmth. He draws her hand to his lap and folds his fingers over hers; draws her hand around his waist, if she lets him, and pulls her gently against his back.

"I know," he says softly. "I do know that, Hilary. And I know it's unfair of me ... selfish, to ask you to change what you can't. I even thought I'd come to terms with it. Come to peace with you. Last night I was just ... there was too much, and I couldn't ... "

Her hand is pressed to his body, just beneath his breastbone. She can feel his pulse there. If she can just feel his heartbeat, he thinks, maybe she'll understand. Maybe she'll understand what he's trying to tell her when words fail, the way Anton understood this is mother, the way Ivan understood

i love you

when he was inside her, and she as deep inside him as blood, as memory.

"I didn't want you to stop last night." This is all he can come up with in the end. It's not an invitation; it's not a proposition. It is what it is: a truth from a very good liar, which is hard for him to speak. His chest moves against her palm, proof of life, and then she can feel his voice before she can hear it. "I've never seen you like that before, and I wanted ... I wish I'd had the patience."

Everything he's saying to her: scraps and pieces, disjointed fragments of a truth he doesn't quite know how to tell her. And to think, she's the shattered one.

"I do try," he whispers. "And I try to remember you're trying, too. I wish I didn't fail as often as I did."

Hilary

There are, in fact, not a lot of people in this city who have watched the sun set onto the Atlantic. Hilary and Ivan have, and have done so together. It is one of the ways to make silence between two people easier to bear -- in fact, to make it almost mandatory. Ritualistic. She has stood on the deck of a boat next to him and watched the sun sink downward to the sea, and their hands at their sides have quietly, gently intertwined, only to separate moments after darkness with no other acknowledgement.

He has, also, held her tight and close and watched how her hand wrapped both protectively and pleadingly around the tiny, bootie-covered foot of their newborn son without ever admitting that she was doing it, without Ivan ever being able to bear asking her why. Why she did that. There was his child, so small and exhausted from simply breathing that Hilary couldn't bear to speak, to inflict what she was going through on his poor senses. Don't let me hurt him were the last words Anton ever heard in his mother's voice, and he was sleeping at the time. They came to him in a dream. He forgot to the point that he never really knew.

Ivan couldn't forget that if he tried. And perhaps he has.

When he gets up and crosses to her lounger, Hilary looks up furtively. She follows him with her eyes as he sits, and her legs are laid out behind his back, her hip against him. They are closer than they've been all day. Touching, as they have not touched since he woke and found her laid alongside him, draped over him, holding him the way she never does. Even if she never does because he so often ties her to the bed, and because she loves that so much, because it makes her feel so safe and so loved, and because it makes him feel like he can sleep. She won't vanish while he isn't watching. She's his. For a few hours, and because she's bound, but his.

Ivan is silent. Then not, turning and touching her, covering her hand. She turns hers at the wrist and links their fingers. It is one of the only gestures of welcome she's given him in a little less than twenty-four hours, one of the only times so far that his touch hasn't made her recoil somehow. Hilary sits up as he draws her nearer, a faint frown wrinkling her brow in confusion, but then she leans against his back, her chin on his shoulder, her arm around his stomach, her hand held in his.

And so they're close again. Suturing a gash. Closing a rift.

His words don't make much sense. He didn't want her to stop, but she knows that -- she can't imagine a man who would have wanted her to stop, to get off of him, to walk away from him as she did. He'd never seen her like that before, and she knows that -- she knows, better than anyone, how rarely she is happy. How rarely she is soft. He wanted -- but he can't say. He wishes he'd had the patience. And that, at last, she didn't know before. That he didn't ignore how she was, that he wasn't unaware, that he did care about it. He just didn't have the patience.

That, Hilary can understand. Not like. But understand, because it is what she keeps telling him, in a way.

"Silver Fangs never fail," she says after a moment, her voice smooth, almost wry. "Or at least we never apologize for it."

Cruel of her to try to insert levity into a time like this, he might think, before he remembers: she's not trying to be cruel. She's not trying to ignore how he feels, or the sunset, or how she feels herself. She's not trying to cheer him up, or smooth over the roughness by simply refusing to acknowledge them.

It's just what she is.

Her hand flexes on his chest. She turns her head on his shoulder and rests it against the roundedness there, the firm muscle that is toned against her cheek even when relaxed. It means she is looking down the line of his back, her hair falling over his arm and part of his chest. It feels good. Cool. Very soft, almost silken.

"Don't leave me," she whispers a moment later, and she's never asked him this before. She says it the way she sometimes tells him what she wants when he's already got her tied down somehow, the way she once whispered: You do it. Like she wants to pretend she isn't really saying it. Like she wants them both to pretend it is simply who he is, what he wants, whether she asks for it or not.

Ivan

Hilary has never asked this of Ivan before. To some degree, he supposes he's never thought she cared. He supposes he's always thought if he did walk away from her, and this, if he did leave her, she would simply move on to the next beautiful young thing who bends to her dark desires. Her needs. For a creature so assured and confident of his own privilege, his own wealth, Ivan is sometimes shockingly unaware of his own rareness. Shockingly unaware of how rare it is, really, to be so young, so lovely, so savage, so dark.

He knows how rare she is, though. How very precious.

It breaks his heart a little to hear her ask what she does. It breaks his heart a little to hear how she asks it, these things she wants of him -- as though she never asked at all. As though everything he gives her, he gives of his own free will. As though she needs this pretense because the alternative is too much to bear.

And in the end, what she wants of him is so little. Patience. Love, unconditional of how she behaves or how broken she is. Generosity. Understanding. Strange; but when it's put like that they seem almost normal. It's what any couple, any lover would want.

Ivan reaches back with his free hand. The muscles of his back shift against her torso, her cheek; he reaches over his shoulder, cups his hand over her head. I'm trying, he wants to say, but he's not cruel. Not to her. I'll stay, he wants to say, but he doesn't know if that's true; if it will remain true. He asks himself if he can keep this promise to her, because words have power; words weave vows. He will not lie to her now. He can't remember if he's ever lied to her.

He doesn't lie to her now:

"I won't." His hand squeezes hers for a second. Secures her arm a little tighter around his body. "I want to stay."

Hilary

There is this, too: how she feels for him. Nothing much to do with his rarity, or even her own needs.

Of course at first that's all it is, that's all it ever is with anyone, normal or mad or otherwise. He was so young and lovely and strong and cocky, so she ignored him. He sniffed after her, laid down the single card of pure lust, and so she took him. But oh, those flickers of anger licking at the air between them even at the start. When she told him to undress for her, and when he started trying to take control of her, dominate her, she could sense something else in him. So she stoked that fire, provoked it, and he unleashed all that dark, savage hunger for her. She learned there was a limit to what he could stand very quickly; he was so very shaken by what she'd awoken.

And that made him all the more appealing to her, for more than one or two trysts. That it was new to him. He was so golden and gleaming and untarnished, only just finding inside of him the side that she was most interested in. So they went on with it.

Then time and again it became clear that one or both should leave, wanted to leave even, and didn't. That was when things changed forever. That was when they started using words like 'need' as though that were really all it was. As though that was what it was, at all.

Hilary doesn't answer him. To answer him would mean admitting she said it in the first place. She lays against his shoulder, hugging her shawl around her shoulders, as he covers her head like that. It's something like stasis, for them. Back to the nearest approximation of peace they know with each other. "Let's stay on Cielo tonight," she finally whispers, when she lifts her head, meeting his eyes. Her hair is mussed, slightly.

Ivan

He turns his head as she lifts hers. Even that brief period, that brief contact, was enough to warm his already warm skin where her head lay. When she draws away, his skin feels cool -- like a physical reminder of what he already knows to be true.

He feels it when she's here. He misses her when she's gone.

So his eyes meet hers over his shoulder. Her hair is loose, and it swept over his skin; strands stray across her face, and flyaways net back from her temples. She suggests something quite rare, at least when they're in Chicago, and a little dangerous: more time with one another, when sometimes what little they have is fraught with peril and misunderstanding. He's a little afraid, this golden creature that seems to fear nothing. Another night like the last would be crushing. Unbearable.

A beat later, Ivan rests his brow to Hilary's. His eyes are still open a little ways, downcast. He rubs his face to hers very gently, very slowly, breathes like a sigh.

"All right." This too is a whisper.

Hilary

The sun sets, and tonight is nothing like the night before.

They stay where they are, twisted and twined together, her hand on his breastbone and their heads close together, while the sky gets dark and the lake gets colder. Dinner is served in the salon, sheltered but still open to the night, and they walk down to the blue, cream, and gold space to sit, and dine, and listen to the water lapping at the yacht. The twilit sky roils with dark clouds and the wind picks up, whistling across the opening to the salon. When the rain comes, it comes quickly and heavily, a blinding torrent.

Of course, throughout the yacht there are crewmen that Carlisle hired wondering when they're going to get to end this. Carlisle, on board to supervise everything, thinks again that they need their own staff. He thinks about expansions, about getting a dedicated driver and serving simply as Hilary's bodyguard himself. He thinks about talking to Miranda about all this, and how Miranda will only tell him what she told him before: we'll see. They don't know each other well yet.

Darya is on board too. She is the only one they chance to see, because she is the one who cleans up, who serves, who hovers out of sight but not earshot. Hilary is training her to leave her the fuck alone unless there's something to do. It's Darya and Carlisle and the crewmen who have to prepare the boat for the rainstorm, what little preparation there is to be done.

For their part, Hilary and Ivan recline in the salon, watching the rain hit the lake, texturizing it wildly. The world turns around them, and other people make it go. Hilary wonders if that's why they're all so mad, so detached -- they are so wealthy, so fine, so well-bred, that they hardly even interact with the world anymore. She wonders whether Ivan really is Garou. She wonders when he last had blood on his fangs. She tries to remember a time when she saw Dion after a battle. She can't think of a single instance.

And she tells herself that still: she cooks sometimes. She knows things about where the food comes from. She has never worked for a living, even when her inheritance was dwindling and her servants were dying of simple old age and Silver Fang madness. She has always been saved. She wonders what, what now, will happen when the money runs out. She wonders if there are ways to stop the money from ever running out again, and decides to ask Miranda about that. She will probably never be mated again.

In this, the Garou and the human world agree: at 34, she may as well be a shriveled crone. She is not some powersuit-wearing woman of vicious acumen or highly specialized skill, and being a trophy wife only works if you do it right -- that is, stay beautiful and fuck often, give children if he wants them or if it keeps you busy. And that is all she's been trained to become. She cannot be a dancer. She has no interest in cooking as a profession. She isn't very good at anything else. She can't think of a life other than the one she has where she could do what she likes and not have to be around people very much.

People tend to notice how damaged she is, and think she wants their intervention. Think, whether she wants it or not, that intervention is their right.

Ivan stays close after that moment on the flybridge, achingly so. And Hilary never pulls away. When he stands near her and doesn't even touch her, she barely seems to notice him. He puts his arm around her when they've eaten to feel her against his side, and she turns toward him like that as they watch the rain. He is hesitant to do more, he thinks about last night still, weighing on every thought and twisting every desire. To be close to her, to touch her and not be rejected -- he wants this to be enough for him tonight, lest they break something. Lest they snap each other in half.

And cold as she might be, Hilary knows. She doesn't like it. Doesn't like that she's reduced him to this hesitance, justified and understandable as it might be. At once she is glad that he relents for once, that he doesn't demand, doesn't push -- and regrets it, because it is unnatural to him. It is not always what he wants, but he sometimes does it for her sake, and then she wonders. She creates her own doubt.

The night gets colder and colder, til even the salon is chilly. Last night, the way she came to him on her couch and sank down onto him, kissed those soft kisses over his face, is gone. How she felt then is gone, and it might not come back again for months. For years. She doesn't know, and it can't be what they hope for, what they look for. She knows that too well -- she hopes Ivan understands.

That moment is gone. This one is now:

Hilary turns to Ivan where they lounge on the cushions of the salon's seating and her shawl slips from her arm as she puts her lips on his throat, tender and searching. His fingers take the delicate fabric and draw it back over her arm and shoulder, but his hand pauses as that kiss deepens. Hilary begins tasting his skin, drawing a fold gently between her teeth. She learned this a long time ago, this way of using her teeth and her hands that rides the edge between tender and violent.

What comes naturally to her is the violence. It is hard work, concentration, to stop short of inflicting sharp and vivid pain when she feels flesh between her teeth. She should have been born Garou. Still would not have been able to save her brother, she was so very young, but then she would have outlet for her rage, and she might have had a few more years of something like sanity. She might know how to live in this world.

But right now, this is her life: the way Ivan's breathing quickens rapidly, his hand on her arm closing as though to hold her there, but still not rough, only unconsciously tight. The way he feels when she starts unbuttoning his shirt again, stroking her hands over his chest. How he hardens to her, so fucking quickly, so readily, when he turns his head and seeks her lips, finds her accepting him, welcoming it when he groans into her mouth, when his hand moves up her side to her breast, cupping it through satin and lace, caressing it in his palm until the urge to turn her under him and fuck her is rising like it never abated, not in all this time.

She thought of drawing back, taking him down to the cabin, but in the moment, Hilary doesn't draw away. She doesn't take his hand and wordlessly lead him anywhere. She presses into him when he touches her breast, and she puts her hands on his back under his shirt. Hilary rolls onto her back for him, pulling him over her. The place where they lie is narrow and open to the lake, but the lights inside the yacht are off and

soon, so are their clothes. First her shawl slipping to the ground, and Ivan's shirt half-torn from his shoulders, tossed out of the way. Everything else, crushed under their bodies and dropped on the ground and kicked away, til all there is is Ivan's long, lean body flexing slowly, firmly, between Hilary's legs.

They make love. Strange as that may sound. He can't take his hands from her, stroking her hair back, skimming over her body. He holds her hip and pulls her up to him as he quickens his pace, panting at the feel of her. And she kisses him, kisses him over and over, drowning him in her mouth, making soft sounds that grow louder as his thrusts grow harder, as he starts keeping her in place and pounding her, the two of them sweating despite the chill in the air, clinging to each other until Hilary's eyes spark and flicker with pleasure, until Ivan's eyes close from a sheer overwhelming of his senses.

It's different. Not without comparison, even between the two of them, but it's different. She's shaken afterward, drained, as perhaps he knew she might be. She withdraws a little, as he perhaps knew she might, thought that doesn't take the sting out of it, that doesn't make him howl inside any less. She seems so tired, and though the boat is rocking with the wind and the rain is still coming down, Ivan lifts her onto his body, carries her down to the cabin where he's not sure if Dion has ever had her.

The bed is large, even given the luxury of the yacht, and the room is luxurious. The linens are clean, the covers turned down and waiting for them. They don't bother to shower.

They fuck again, which is unexpected and confusing and then: different again, too. Because this time it's unclear who instigates what, only that soon the covers are torn back and Ivan is pinning her down, fucking her hard this time, snarling in her ear as her cunt clenches down on him, telling her she's a fucking whore, god, what a wet little slut, what a horny little bitch, taking it like that, taking his cock like she's dying for it. And this time the sounds she makes aren't soft or whimpering, by the middle of it Hilary's moans are ringing through the cabin, and he likes her moans

so he fucks her that much harder, bites into her, slaps her when her back arches upward and her hips lift, when he wants her to ride up on his cock, makes her beg him for it, makes her scream.

In the shower afterward, tiny box of warm water that it is, he wraps his arms around her from behind and holds her, his face buried against her wet hair, his arms covering her, keeping her, holding her together.

They wake to find Cielo docking, late in the morning the next day. They are spared the tawdry sight of Carlisle's overpaying the crew he hired, and Carlisle's annoyance that now finding capable people will be that much more difficult because stories might go around about this yacht and its owner. It's one thing to hire on a permanent basis and have some measure of loyalty, some understanding of what they're getting themselves into, but he doesn't want to do this again. He'll put his foot down if Miranda says 'we'll see' at him again.

Darya's eyes are wide as the manservant grumbles over his coffee in the tiny space where the servants have their cabin, because he swears in some language she doesn't even recognize about the fact that they're lucky to have gotten through the night, and she doesn't know anything about shipcraft. She sips her tea and waits to hear Hilary call for her.

Hilary lies in bed tangled with Ivan, his hand locked onto her wrist even in sleep, no matter how they turn away from each other throughout the night. Hilary is waking up to find that his eyes are opening, too, and the boat is coming to shore. It's bright out, and there's no more rain. He doesn't even ask: calls Dmitri while they're getting dressed and has him send over one of his cars. He leaves Cielo before Hilary does, and she watches him from the deck walking along the pier, walking away, back to the life he leads when she's not there.

She considers what her life is when he's not there. Turns away after he's out of sight, and tells Carlisle idly that they should hire their own crew for the yacht.

Of course, madam, he says. I'll speak with Ms. Sala as soon as we return to your residence.

And I want to move, she says, then pauses, looking at the lake. No, I want to keep the apartment. I want a house, though. It's too cramped in the city.

Yes of course, madam, he says.

Hilary sends Darya away when she gets back to her apartment. Her footsteps ring out across the concrete flooring. The echo reminds her of Ivan's presence, and Anton's memory, impressions left long after the initial physical impact is gone. Like a bruise, she thinks. Very much like a bruise.

Ivan

Ivan knows better than to ask her why she's cooking. Why now, when there are donuts uneaten, coffee getting cold; why now, when they've just come back from that travesty of a nice dinner out.

He doesn't ask. He doesn't talk to her at all. He comes out of her shower smelling like the most neutral, faintly scented soaps and shampoos he could find in her bathroom; he comes out in his slacks, his belt and tie and shirt and socks and underwear folded into a haphazard pile that he leaves on one of her dining chairs.

Her dress is still on the couch when he goes to lie on it. He moves it aside so he doesn't crumple it, stuffs a pillow under his head, and sleeps with his arms folded across his chest.

He doesn't really expect to sleep as long as he does. Perhaps he thought she would wake him. He certainly doesn't think she'd find a blanket to cover him with, but then, he didn't think he would sleep long enough to get cold. When he wakes, though, it's the chill that wakes him - his skin icy on the outsides of his arms, across his shoulders. It is dark in the apartment, and he thinks maybe she's gone to bed, but his instincts tell him this is not so. He knows she's there before he sees her.

When Ivan sees his strange lover, he doesn't understand what she's doing. Sometimes it feels like he never understands her. But he rises, soundless even though his joints are stiff, his left hand aching where it tucked against his bicep too long. His eyes feel gritty. He crosses the room to her, and there's food on the counter but she hasn't touched it, it's cold now.

He's never seen her like this before. He didn't see how she paused in the manufactured darkness of his penthouse bedroom, calling his name into the emptiness. He didn't see how she simply ...stopped in the middle of Tru, when he grew angry at her

-- he always grows angry at her, it's inevitable, she's so distant and he's so capricious, and sometimes every little thing seems to mean she's pulling away from him, slashing at the ties that bind them, leaving him --

and didn't move again until he came back.

Ivan wants to touch her when he's near enough. She seems untouchable, though. He puts his hand on the counter beside hers instead, looks at the plate, looks at the bruschetta, looks at her.

"What are you doing?" he murmurs. He's sleep-foggy, voice blurred. "How long have you been ... sitting here?"

Hilary

The apartment isn't an icebox, but air conditioning circulates within on a regular basis, and as night falls and the thermostat remains unchanged and Ivan's sleeping body drops deeper into its own cycle of replenishment, it gets colder. No blanket comes to cover him while he sleeps. No one told him to sleep on the couch anyway. If he wanted a blanket he could have found a bed, after all.

Those are some of her thoughts. Hundreds of others in the two, three hours that Ivan drifted off into unconsciousness and Hilary just... let him. She doesn't hear him move but she feels him wake all the same, sensing something else moving in the dark that makes her turn her head to glance at him, then back to the bruschetta. There's no response. There's only recognition. He's coming to her, anyway.

To the question -- the second one, at least -- she makes a gesture with her hand, a flick of her wrist that may as well be a shrug. To his first question, there's no answer, because what she's doing is... sitting on a barstool, staring at cold bruschetta.

A moment passes, then another.

"When I went to culinary school," she says, her voice rough from disuse, but still not as charred as his own from sleep, "they taught us how to chop. And mince and cube and slice. Everything has to be the same size, or as close to it as you can get, did you know that?" Her head turns and her chin lifts from her hand as she looks at him, then back to the plate. "It's so it all cooks evenly, gets done at the same time. And because it looks prettier that way.

"We were to practice at home, too. None of the other students had servants or their own cooks, at least not that I know of. I practiced at home anyway. All the onions that needed slicing, all the potatoes that had to be chopped, all the garlic that needed mincing. And I chopped so. Many. Tomatoes."

She looks at the metal bowl containing the red and yellow and flecks of green she made earlier, the crusty gold of the bread. "I made bruschetta a lot. Just to practice."

Ivan

It's a story. It's another piece of her past that he didn't have before. Another piece of her he didn't have before, he thinks, but that's a lie anyway. He doesn't have any of her at all, except what little she gives him sometimes. It might be argued she doesn't have much of herself left to give, regardless.

Still: it's a story, but not one that tells him anything beyond what it is. It doesn't tell him why she's here, staring at cold bruschetta. Why she made it at all. Perhaps it's a sort of meditation for her. A kind of calming ritual, the way some women take scented baths and other do yoga. He looks at the bruschetta, and he looks at her hands. Somehow, he doesn't think she made the food to eat.

"Why did you make it now?" he asks. "You clearly don't need the practice."

Hilary

Hilary just huffs, almost silent. "I'm sure once you sharpen your knives once you never need to again, then? Idiot," she tacks on, which is, coming from her, almost an endearment at the moment.

She closes her eyes. "I am cold," she says, but there's no shame in it, not even remorse. Mere acknowledgement, as though by letting him know yes, I'm aware that maybe he'll stop hurling it at her like it's supposed to hurt. Her eyes open. "It doesn't mean you're nothing to me.

"Sometimes I don't want what you want. That doesn't mean you're nothing to me, either." She turns to look at him, and there are faint circles under her eyes that weren't there before. "Stop taking every snafu as a sign of some greater schism. This is what it is." Hilary exhales, and straightens up a bit, stretching her back as though she really hasn't moved in two or more hours. "That's all I want to say about it."

Ivan

It's as though that straightening, that stretch of her back signifies something. Breaks some invisible shell around her, makes her touchable again. Ivan puts his hand on her back the way he wanted to when he first came over. It's the hand that was tucked between his arm and his side, and his palm is very warm.

"I know that," he says softly. "But sometimes it's still hard for me to remember how different you are from anyone else I've ever known. That the rules are different with you. That you're ... always here, even if I can't feel it. Other times it's just very hard to want you so badly and not be able to have you." A small pause. "But I suppose if both weren't true, if you weren't different, and if I could have you, then it wouldn't be like this between us at all."

That's the truth, and they both know it. He draws a breath.

"I apologize if I was too aggressive. If I made you feel objectified and harried. It was never my intention to ... degrade you, to treat you like a thing tonight. It was never my intention to brutalize you. I didn't want it like that either."

His hand slides up her back, whispering over the soft fabric of her sleeping clothes to her shoulder. Ivan urges her gently, very gently away from the counter, off the barstool. "Come to bed," he adds, very quiet indeed now. "It's so late."

Hilary

Hilary initially pulls away from his hand, but it's a flicker of that motion, an internal squirm for no reason she could identify enough to satisfy him -- or comfort him. She turns her head to look at him as her spine relaxes, and with a dozen other women there would be apology in her eyes, but a dozen other women wouldn't have instinctively, madly pulled away. It isn't even, it seems, the way he touches her. There's nothing lascivious or demanding about it, nothing overtly comforting or patronizing. There's nothing wrong with how he touches her, and Ivan knows it. There's nothing wrong with touching her, and Ivan knows it.

But still: she edges away for a second like she can't help it, like for one reason or another or no reason at all or everything tonight and over the past week and everything before that, she just doesn't want to be touched yet. Looks at him then, the motion recognized as involuntary, and waits to see him flip out again. Knowing, at the same time, that this time he won't.

Knowing, all the same, that it doesn't mean it won't bother him. And feeling, for all that, that Ivan can simply be bothered. That it is not her resonsibility to repair that, any more than she expects him to repair all the chaos in her that leads to these bursts of irrational instinct,

however much he might want to.

She hears him echo back to her something she vaguely remembers saying once. That she's here. She's always here, and him feeling it or not doesn't change what she is. It's become quite evident that Ivan's ability to simply accept things with her for what they are is tenuous on his best days; he's no more stable or steadfast than she is.

When he apologizes for his earlier behavior, her brow wrinkles in something like bewilderment, gentled by weariness. In the end she simply shrugs it off. She doesn't want to argue about what the Real Issue was, or if there was an issue at all, or a miscommunication, or any of that. She doesn't want to be a couple and Work Things Out. She just doesn't want to discuss it any more at all, and he can sense that withdrawal in her as well. She doesn't even have the energy right now to hate him for tonight, hate him for ruining it. She doesn't have it in her to even remember what it felt like for that half-hour or so that she was happy, plain and simply so, and wouldn't know how to mourn it if she did.

If Ivan did not withdraw his hand before when she flickered away from his touch, she seems to edge away from it again now, sliding off of the barstool to set her bare feet on the bare, cold floor. She stands there, her hands in front of her, one loosely clasping the other, and looks at his toes.

"You should ask," she says, quiet and diffident and almost childish in her territoriality, "if you can come to my bed. I never invited you."

Ivan

Coupled with that flinch away, the second one tonight, her line in the sand frustrates Ivan. Makes his temper flash again in his eyes, though it's so dark in here that perhaps she can't even see. He thinks for a moment it would have been better if he'd just left four hours ago. He wonders if she would have cooked still; if she would have sat in the dark still.

"I'm trying here, Hilary," he says, but when he speaks it's soft; it's not really a rebuke at all. They stand before each other. He asks a moment later, "Can I come to your bed?"

Hilary

The first, she just ignores. Too tired to be irritated with him, flashing anger at her every round of the bend. She, too, thinks about if he had just left four hours ago. Or, better yet, if she hadn't sent him that damn message to start. If she'd never tried to be happy and share it with him at the same time. She just looks at him during that moment instead, and does not tell him

I'm trying, too.

or any of the other things she could say in response. She simply doesn't bother. Doesn't want to argue again, doesn't care to try and resolve this. It is what it is. She doesn't expect change. Her skin crawls, all the same. She shakes her head, and bizarrely says,

"Yes,"

as she starts walking to her room.

Ivan

But he doesn't follow. He's so quiet sometimes, only this time she knows he's not padding silently after her. He simply hasn't moved. The room doesn't stir to his rage, light as it is compared to her husband's. Her first husband's, too.

He asks her a moment later, when she's already halfway across the room, "Do you want me to?"

Hilary

She stops when she realizes he isn't following, looking back at him. Just stands there until he asks his question, and she doesn't have an immediate answer. And she realizes she has to think about that. She thinks about how she would have felt if he had just asked her, without that flash of annoyance. She thinks about how she would have felt if, hours ago, he'd answered Should I stop? with a simple no, no, don't stop.

She thinks, as she's been thinking for the past minute or two, about the last and only time they slept in that bed together.

About what the answer was five minutes ago, and what it is now, and how she knows just how to keep him happy with her, what to be and how to act to make sure he is unruffled, craves her, but only to the point just before frustration, and how if she tried and wanted to try she could keep him at that edge almost indefinitely, satisfying him again and again. How she could, if she danced the right steps, never have to deal with his flashes of temper again. Has a vague idea, tonight, or vague assumptions, about which answers would breed which responses.

What she wants tonight, wanted from the moment she all but summoned him up to now, is not what he wants tonight, has wanted tonight, wants now. And that is that.

Hilary gives a small shake of her head, those curls swaying across her shoulders once, twice, swish, swish.

"No," she says, very quiet.

Ivan

"All right."

That comes after a moment, a whisper, as though the reason they slept in that bed together last time were still here; might be awakened by his parents fighting. They're always fighting, it seems. It makes him heartsore, that he keep her happy, that she couldn't see how unhappy he was.

Another question, a little later, and no louder at all:

"Should I stay?"

Ivan

[couldn't. couldn't keep her happy!]

Hilary

That, she had an answer to even before she told him no. Before she realized that no, she didn't want him to come to bed with her right now, she was sick and tired of this, she didn't want to worry about the politics of whether she let him touch her or not, if she didn't want him to hold her as she slept if he would flip the covers back and storm out or ask her what the fuck or if later on she did want to be close to him if he would be annoyed then, too, at the inconstancy, at the change, if there is anything at all she can do that won't lead to him blowing up at her. She knew that only in the last few seconds, realized it as she looked at him that she was just tired, and wanting her bed and her solitude, which she knows how to deal with.

But before that, she knew the answer to that, and was expecting him to just leave but had accepted it. Was not going to fight it. So her eyes flicker slightly with surprise that he doesn't. And that he asks. And what she can read under that, which is also

can I --

Hilary nods. "I'd like it if you did."

Ivan

Sometimes what he feels for her is physical. He can feel it tugging on his nerves - a quick flicker not unlike soreness flashing from his solar plexus and down his left arm, seizing in his palm, dissipating. The shadows on his chest shift as he takes a deep breath.

"Okay," he says. And, "Goodnight, Hilary."

Hilary

There's no line between pain and pleasure for them. Every time they try to draw one, mark a boundary so that the pain stays on one side and the pleasure and happiness stays on the other, it gets broken. Or they realize they drew the line between themselves. Hilary watches him breathe, then gives a small nod and walks to her bedroom. A moment or two later the door closes, the click almost inaudible.

There are two places for Ivan to sleep that are most obvious: the couch where he slept either, though he knows very well there are spots on it where a dash of sugar or glaze caught on the upholstery from the donuts she threw at him. There's the couch where her dress is, but that one is shorter and he'd have to move her dress. They're alone in the apartment -- he'd know if that maid she's spoken of were here, would sense the presence and the breeding and all of it, but that second room on the other side of the apartment is empty. Large, soft bed. A little writing desk. A window to let in more light than the room where Hilary sleeps, that window almost always covered. The floor is concrete, and the only rug is over in the living room. It's not even a particularly soft rug.

He has options. None of them, comparatively, are what he wants. What he's wanted since he came here: her. Since before he came here, since he had to say goodbye to her and she drove off because Dion was coming back to Chicago. All night. And here he is, standing alone in her apartment, because she doesn't want him in her bed.

Not tonight, at least. Not right now.

She just wants him near.

It's dawn. Soon burning, gleaming orange light will hit the corner of the apartment, hit the little square balcony enclosed in glass that she has. Not yet, though; the sky is merely lightening, shadows lifting. He can hear her footsteps coming towards him even if he's asleep -- soft, so soft and light against the concrete, delicate and graceful as all of her movements. Her hand, then, warm from being under the thick comforter in her cool bedroom, coming down on his shoulder, cupping around the flesh and muscle there.

When his eyes open, if they aren't already, she's there, her hair so very dark and so very wild, her eyes the same. "Come on," she whispers. "Come."

Ivan

In the end he sleeps where he's already slept: on her sofa, dusting off the bits of donut and glaze with a sock before stretching out. This time he's a little wiser. He covers himself with his coat, tucking his hands under his arms. He wonders if sleep will come at all. She's close, but she's far -- that seems cliche, and it seems so frequently true.

Ivan does sleep, though. Sooner than he thought he would, though not for very long. The sky is lightening, beginning to burn, when he wakes again. The room isn't shafted through with light yet, but it's coming. It is still midsummer, and the day will dawn hot, but it's cool here, and the air is always circulating. Her hand on his shoulder feels inordinately warm, and his eyes snap open like an animal's, stare without comprehension, with nothing but raw recognition.

Come on, she says. And he sucks an inhale, sitting up, his coat falling away from his chest. The satin liner is warm. He swings his legs off the couch and stands. Come, she says, and so he follows, moving through the early wash of light across the far wall, finding her hand with his if she'll let him.

He leaves the living room behind without a glance -- the site and nexus of that strange and bewildering night. He's not used to seeing her bedroom in the dawn. It was overcast both times he was here before, and the last time he slept here he left before the dawn. The light seems too red. He's used to the blue, and he's disoriented by this coloration; disoriented by the hour, disoriented by waking. He stands there, uncertain, his hand in hers.

Hilary

Thankfully, her room is not touched much by dawn's early light. The single window in the room is all but blacked out, as though Hilary doesn't even want the stars and the moon watching her when she sleeps. The blue glow is as pale as it was when he went through here to shower. She's wordless at the couch, her hand slipped under his coat to touch his shoulder. When he rises she takes his hand, the jacket falling and sliding off the couch to the floor. Hilary leads him all but soundlessly to her bedroom, shutting the door and walking him to the bed. She doesn't move to take off his slacks for him or to unbutton her own pajamas; Hilary simply crawls back into the bed she slept in for perhaps two hours at most and gets under the comforter again, curling up beneath it.

Ivan

What she gives him isn't much, but because it comes from she who has so little to give, it's enough. He follows her, and she gets back into bed, and he's the one to draw the comforter back up, tucking her back into the warm hollow her body made. As cold as she is, as cold and stone-hewn as she can seem, she's human after all: her body is warm, her skin is soft.

He steps out of his slacks on the other side of the bed. He gets in under the covers, and the sheets on that side are cool and smooth. The bed is unbelievably luxurious after half a night on the couch. He looks at her a moment where she lies beside him, eyes closed again most likely. He turns on his side toward her. He doesn't reach for her.

Hilary

And the truth is, if he had reached for her then, she wouldn't have resisted. But he can't see that truth, wouldn't expect that truth, and Hilary is neither expecting him to touch her nor expecting him to turn away from her. Hilary is, in fact, going back to sleep quickly and silently, as easily as if she had never woken at all. There is no telling, in fact, why she woke in the first place. Or why she came to get him. She just drops off again, the steadiness of her breathing a telltale sign that she's gone again in moments.

Now it is fifty-nine minutes after the sixth hour. At this very moment, Darya Pasternack is standing outside of Hilary's apartment door, looking at her watch. It is a plain black band with a large round face with big numbers.

Now it is seven a.m. sharp, and at this very moment, Darya Pasternack is turning the key she already put in the lock and doing so very, very quietly, twisting the handle and slipping inside as silently as she can, which is not very silently at all, but she does try, the poor dear.

There is a red gown on the couch, and a man's jacket on the floor, and donuts on the floor, and little white stains on the coffee table oh please oh please oh please no and a platter of bruschetta on the counter and scattered sugar all over the upholstery.

Darya looks at the ceiling. She sighs, and walks to the living room to start cleaning it up.

Quietly.

Ivan

They are such careless, messy people. They make messes of their own lives, and of everyone else's lives around them. They leave messes everywhere and they never clean up, of course not, there's always someone there to do it. Darya. Dmitri. Maids, servants, people whose only job it is to make sure they never have to worry about the annoying little details everyone else on the planet worries about. People. Things. Creatures.

Small wonder they don't know how to cope when they make messes of one another. Small wonder she doesn't want to discuss it, she doesn't want to work it out like a real couple; she just wants him to stop being so selfish, don't ruin it for her, just stop. Small wonder he doesn't understand her, can't understand her no matter how many times she tells him; can't see it from her point of view, can't make it work.

And yet here they are. And her girl, who's not really a girl at all, is cleaning up for them in the living room, being as quiet as she can. And they're sleeping in the bedroom, and Hilary is sinking back to sleep having brought Ivan back to sleep beside her the way she brought Anton to sleep beside her that first, last and only night. He watches her a little longer, her face or the sweep of her hair, her face or the slope of her back, whichever is facing him. Eventually, he draws the comforter up a little closer, tucks her in a little more. He lets his hand rest on the mattress close to her, as close as he can get without touching her, and he too closes his eyes.

Some time later, when Hilary wakes again, Ivan is still in her bed. He is on his back now, facing the ceiling. His eyes are open. He's been awake for some time, but then -- he slept earlier. Didn't stay up half the night cooking, and watching food cool, and --

doing whatever it is she does when she just ... stops like that. He never stops. Even when he's languid, even when he's lazy, even when he's stretched out on his yacht taking in the sun or sprawled in a low lounger on the balcony of some mediterranean city, he's alive, he's vital, he's there. He's here now, turning his head to look at her waking. He's barely touched her since she asked him if she should stop,

and he wanted to say no, don't stop, why would you even ask that, can't you see i need you,

and then she stopped.

He wants to say something to her. Something profound, or at least meaningful; something about last night, or what happened, or why he behaved the way he did, or -- something to make her happy again, maybe, or at least so she knows he wants her to be happy. Nothing comes to mind. Nothing at all. He just looks at her a little longer.

Then, whispering, "Will you come closer?"

Hilary

Except Ivan doesn't get that far.

When Hilary wakes it's not seven sharp, it's closer to noon. Her maid likes days like this. She is in the second bedroom at the desk, reading a book, listening to music but one earbud is out so she can hear if her mistress calls her. She is not the sort of maid Ivan has. Darya is eighteen, and cannot afford college unless or until she works very hard and saves up a great deal of money, because according to the federal government and several other organizations, the blonde-haired, blue-eyed girl with both parents living and a family history of great wealth and status does not need that much assistance, no matter how far their family's star has fallen since they left Russia.

Darya, like so many who come from madness and who are surrounded by madness, who feel it encroaching even on their own minds at times, wants to study psychology. The book she is reading is called Games People Play. The chewy protein bar she is eating is very nearly a candy bar. She lives living in this building. She likes living with Miranda in the two-bedroom apartment next door that is much smaller than the penthouse-style apartment Hilary has. She likes Carlisle, and she likes running errands in Chicago, even when they're bizarre. She doesn't mind cleaning up strange messes. She doesn't even mind Hilary very much -- the woman is not very mean, and at times has a childlike vulnerability that Darya is more afraid of than her moods.

What Darya does not like about this job are those awful black moods that Hilary gets sometimes. So far -- and it's only been a few weeks, really -- nothing's been thrown at her and her job hasn't been threatened, but the woman makes her uneasy. Something about her isn't right.

Darya turns the page in her book, trying to understand the vagaries of the human mind, wondering what extra games should be written in for the kin of wolves, the children of Falcon.

Hilary wakes around noon, and as soon as her eyes drift open, she breathes differently, and twists around under the covers, draping her arm over Ivan's chest, her leg over his thighs, using his shoulder and part of his chest as her pillow. All her dark hair spills over his bicep. She breathes against his skin now, closing her eyes again, drifting in the hazy half-sleep that presaged her movement.

Ivan

So he doesn't get so far as to ask her to come closer. She wakes, and she twists, and she rolls over and suddenly she's spilling over onto him. It's warm under her comforters -- how very Fangly, after all, to burn the air conditioner in the middle of summer just so one could sleep under thick, soft bedding -- and she's so very warm, her body sleek and her skin unbelievably soft where it touches his.

Something in him stirs fitfully toward anger. How dare she do this. Run hot and cold as she pleases, want him one way one night and another the next, give him no warning and little indication of the changes to come. What gives her the right, why does he always have to follow her lead, why is he always bending to her will --

but then he remembers. He remembers they are not the same, and sometimes he simply can't recognize what she's trying to do. He can't recognize all the ways she tries to let him in, share with him, make him happy.

He remembers, with little reason and little prologue, the way she all but begged him once: please don't be so sad. please be happy. Sometimes he wants to beg the same of her.

His chest expands, then releases. His arm secures around her slender back, anchors her to his side. He kisses her brow, and outside saner people than they are getting on with their day, have been up for hours already. In here it's still dark. The shades are drawn, the day is barred. The lighting is very faint, a deep and benthic blue.

Hilary

Maybe one day there will be another woman Ivan will realize he is invested in, and realize that she changes her mind and moods and sometimes there's no warning. That she will want him to touch her one night and recoil another, that sometimes there will be warning and explanation and he'll see it coming, he'll know Something Happened and it will all make logical sense and then

sometimes it won't. Sometimes she won't be able to tell him, or simply won't want to tell him, and maybe some woman will one day tell him he has no right to demand these things, warnings and explanations and predictions of what is happening inside of her, what she is in the trenches going through. Maybe one day there will be another woman that Ivan wants to spend more than a night or two with and he will learn that he is just the same, that his moods also change, that he also has no obligation to explain or justify himself, that all he can hope for is someone there who claims to care for him

letting him be what he is, when he is it. Letting him know this is okay and this is not okay without the sky falling and the entire tenuous hold on each other collapsing. Maybe there will be another woman one day that he cares for, and he'll begin to understand that is simply how people are. People who are not people, even. Mad people, and sane people, and all of them, each one adamant that no one needs as much patience from othrs as they do.

But then, there's no one else like Hilary.

But then, Ivan is still so young, and his life so short.

Hilary holds him in her sleep, utterly unaware of her anger, and perhaps entirely unthinking of her own whims, her own wish suddenly to be close to him, to hold him and be held by him. He puts his arm around her, the satin of her pajamas slinky and warm against his forearm, the inside of his wrist, against the pulse of his heartbeat. She is very slowly waking, drifting towards the surface slower than most people because she has no reason to rush back to waking life. Many, many reasons not to.

Her mouth opens and she licks her lips, swallowing. "I'm hungry," she says softly.

Ivan

As Hilary resurfaces, Ivan closes his eyes again. The wash of irrational anger has faded. He holds her now; he's found something a little like peace for the first time in all these long, strange hours. His arm is a steady weight across the back of her shoulders. Her pajamas warm so easily to the heat of their bodies. His thumb strokes gently, hypnotically across her shoulder and upper arm, and when she stirs to words, finally, he shifts a little. Nuzzles his jaw against her forehead.

"Me too," he replies. Neither of them speak loudly.

He has options to deal with that hunger: he can tell that maid of hers to make something. He can call in his own people. He can call some local five-star establishment and demand food to be delivered to their door. He can feed himself, feed her, in just about any way with a snap of his fingers.

What he says, though -- whispering it, almost shy with the absurdity of it: "I know how to make an omelette, if you want."

Hilary

"Oh, good for you," she murmurs with what passes for dry sarcasm when she's just woken up. But she's tender, at least physically, curled against his side as she is. She doesn't say anything else. She stares at the wall, at the edges of light around the blackout over the window. Her eyes close and open once, and he feels her eyelashes brush his chest. She doesn't mean to be cruel. She doesn't recognize this as cruelty or meanness.

But she is cruel. And she is mean. Simply because she is heartless.

Still, she's also no fool.

"You sound like you would like doing that very much," Hilary says quietly, a moment later. "Do you like cooking with me?"

Ivan

"Yes, I would."

He says this nakedly, without equivocation or hesitation. He's rarely as honest as he is now, bare in her bed, not so long-ago awoken himself.

"And yes, I do. I even like it when you snap at me to stir slower. Chop more evenly. No, the other way." There's a gentle, tender little strain of mimicry in his tone. Then it subsides, and he's a little wistful: "I like almost everything we do together."

Hilary

There's a low, dark chuckle to that. Hilary closes her eyes and her fingers curl inward a little bit atop his chest. She holds her breath a moment, then exhales it slowly over him. "Okay," she says after awhile.

Hilary stirs, and begins to draw upward, pushing herself to curve her spine, lift her upper body in gradual preparation to rise from bed. "I suppose you can handle an omelette by yourself," she also says, placing a little bit of grudging faith in him, since he can't even arrange a fruit and cheese platter without intervention, it seems. "You can ask Darya for assistance, if you need to. She's quite obedient."

Ivan

That draws a faint smirk across his mouth. Ivan pushes up in bed as well, bracing himself on his hands, flexing his shoulders upward in a tensile, static sort of stretch. "So glad to have your blessings," he says wryly.

Then he's getting out of bed, bending to pick his slacks up where he dropped them last night. "I suppose Darya doesn't know about me yet," he muses. He steps into his pants, draws them up and buttons and zips. "I won't need to justify my presence, will I?"

Hilary

"Have I ever had to justify myself to your maids?" Hilary says briskly, already settling into her regular persona as she pushes the covers down with her hands and her legs, kicking them away before twisting and putting her feet on the rug beneath her bed, thick and furry and protective of her dainty, ladylike soles. She rises, beginning to unbotton her pajama top. Her lingerie is still scattered where she dropped it last night as Ivan showered. She doesn't go pick that up, either.

Looking over her shoulder at him, she goes on unbuttoning but asks: "She is, however, the most flappable of my unflappable little staff. Try not to scare her too much."

Ivan

There's a faint, asymmetrical little smile on his face when she looks over her shoulder at him. She can see him looking at her back, looking at her body as she reveals it by degrees. He doesn't come to her, though, and he doesn't put his hands all over her. Try to take her, have her.

Ivan gives a little bow of acknowledgment and acquiescence instead. It's mocking, but not of her. Then he flips his edge of the comforter back up on the bed. Leaves the room.

Hilary can hear him outside, if she listens. Likely she doesn't. All the same, he strolls through the living room like he has a right to be there. He greets Darya the same way he greets his own servants: familiarly, but always with that subtle sense that his friendliness only goes as far as his whim.

A little later, cupboards open and shut. Ivan beats a few eggs, chops -- badly -- a small green pepper and a smaller red pepper. He sends Darya to get some sausage from the corner store. He cuts that up, too, and soon enough the smell of egg omelette is filling Hilary's apartments. It's likely this is one of the very few things he knows how to cook himself. It's entirely likely he doesn't even know how to make instant noodles. What Silver Fang would have to, anyway?

Hilary

While Ivan strolls out of the bedroom, Hilary drops her pajamas and goes to take a shower, finally, to wash the hairspray and the curls out of her hair, to wash off everything from last night, all the fingerprints, all the weariness, everything.

The contrast between the dim bedroom and the impossibly sunny living area is dazzling, shooting flares of light into Ivan's eyes. The glass is tinted enough outside to offset some of the blinding quality, but all the same, it doesn't compare to the darkness in Hilary's room lit only by a soft blue glow. He doesn't see Darya immediately, but he can see her presence clearly: the apartment is clean. Everything is as it was when he first arrived last night. The coffee carafe is even polished, the stainless steel free of fingerprints.

When he sees the maid, it's after the first real sound he makes in the kitchen, the fridge opening and closing. Then she comes out of the second room, her footsteps quick and quiet. It's evident that she expected to see Hilary and was presenting herself in case she was needed, but then she stops when she sees Ivan. She watches him only for a second or two, and then straightens her sweater and stays out of the way, only introducing herself if Ivan makes that overture. He does not, giving her only a nod, perhaps saying her name, and she remains quiet.

Goes out when he tells her to, and is back not in seven and a half minutes or anything like that, but closer to twenty. It is not a log of sausage in a plastic wrapper but a half-pound of it wrapped in butcher paper from a nearby market. She sets it on the counter when she brings it back and explains quietly: "Ms. de Broqueville prefers ...quality ingredients," with a tone and posture of apology before nodding her head to him and getting out of his way again.

And Hilary, bless her Fangly, broken, shriveled little heart, does not emerge from her bedroom until a full forty-five minutes have gone by, enough time to shower, and shower luxuriously, enough time to dry and straighten her hair, to apply the barest minimum of makeup, to dress herself in a pair of tailored white slacks and a sleeveless, rich purple blouse, a pair of gold-toned kitten heels and bangles on her wrists, rings on her fingers as though she's going out, but this is just how she looks. This is how she looked when he met her.

As though nothing at all has changed. By then the omelettes are more than done, and Ivan is still walking around in bare feet and yesterday's slacks, and Darya is out of sight, out of mind. Somehow she managed to make fresh coffee while Ivan was cooking, almost as stealthy as he is, before vanishing again. Which is itself a challenge: it's not a quarter of the size of Ivan's penthouse.

"I do really need to find a larger place," Hilary muses. "This has been nice, but something's not quite right about it." She hmms thoughtfully as she walks over to a small round table by the windows, rather than the barstools at the counter. There is a bud vase atop this little round table with flowers in it, and that wasn't there last night, either. She sits down, looking out the glass as though expecting to be served. Which, given that she has a maid, doesn't necessarily mean she expects Ivan to do so.

Ivan

Although Ivan snorts as Darya explains her tardiness -- quality ingredients, indeed -- it's probably for the best. When Hilary emerges forty-five minutes later, the omelette is still waiting in the pan, covered, and has managed to retain enough heat to be reasonably palatable. Is only very slightly scorched on the bottom, besides.

And Hilary takes a seat by the windows, waiting to be served. Her maid is in another room. Ivan doesn't bother calling the girl, who is even younger than he is, even younger than the girl he took to dinner last night, though perhaps cut from a similar cloth. A little less ambitious, though. Or perhaps she simply hasn't gotten there yet.

Never mind: he serves Hilary himself, regardless. Perhaps he likes that, in some strange way. That said, it's not much service: the omelette scooped out of the pan and folded over once, a mild cheese melting between. He cuts that in half, splits it between two plates, grabs a few napkins and a pair of forks. A carafe of whatever juice Hilary keeps in the fridge. Some cups.

This is what he brings to the window by the glass, setting each piece down with a quiet clink. She'd mused on a larger place a few moments ago. He looks out the window, then back to her.

"Dmitri worked with a very capable agent when he found the penthouse for me. If you'd like, I'll have him send your people the contact." Sitting across from her, he pours juice, filling her glass first like a gentleman. Then he hands her a fork. "Be gentle," he quips. "I'm inexperienced."

Hilary

The mild cheese is simply called 'Brick' and it is not terribly unlike cheddar, but paler and a bit softer. It melts extremely well. It was the first thing that came to Ivan's hand when he met the onslaught that is Hilary's cheese drawer. There's a bit of orange juice and a bit of cranberry juice and that was another thing Darya managed to do behind his back, setting out two glass carafes as though to hint at him what he should do without coming out and telling him what to do while still trying to do what Hilary wants her to do, which is sometimes very exacting.

Like buying sausage at the fresh market and not from a corner store, and buying lean sausage and buying sausage that's infused faintly with sage and not buying too much at once because meat, really, should be absolutely fresh, don't you think, Darya?

Hilary glances up at him when he arrives with their breakfast, two plates of omelettes with not a sprig of garnish at all and not a single thought paid to plating it attractively. She gives a small sigh of acceptance, and takes the fork when he hands it to her, eyeing the slightly scorched 'lace' on the exterior of the omelette. To her credit, she does manage to suppress whatever grimace might rise to the surface. A part of her wants to snap that this is why she wouldn't hire an inexperienced cook or go to a restaurant with an inexperienced chef, but he said to be gentle, and she knows from last night it isn't entirely a joke.

But first, Hilary stops him from pouring her glass more than half full. When he has, she fills it with the other juice. Half cranberry. Half orange. There's almost no pulp whatsoever in the latter. She lets the red and orange swirl together in the glass while she lifts her fork again and cuts off a corner for her first bite, deftly stretching the melted cheese without getting it everywhere before it snaps, and closes her mouth around the bite consideringly. Hilary chews slowly, tasting the food in its entirety, thoughtful but silent as most of her breakfasts are. When she is done she looks over the table at him, reaching for her juice glass. "Palatable," she says, and lowers her fork. "Too many peppers. At least it isn't runny." She takes another bite.

Ivan

That makes Ivan smile, suddenly and irrepressibly. It's not because he's somehow mistaken this for praise. He hears it for what it is - a critique, a review, as though this were a fine dining establishment, he a young chef, she a food critic. He smiles because - well. He likes cooking with her. Or for her, it seems. He even likes it when she scolds him.

"I'll take that into consideration next time," he says solemnly.

He picks up his own fork, then, picking a bit of sausage out of the omelette and eating it first. He drinks his juice unmixed, all orange, looking out the window as he eats. It is no longer early. It is midday, and the city is very bright, the lake beyond the buildings as blue as a jewel.

"I don't think we've gone sailing together a single time this summer," he says. "Well, no, there was that daytrip we took in Port Grimaud. But not here." He folds a piece of omelette over on itself, eats it. "Out of curiosity," this is a subject change, unapologetic, "why are you learning Russian?"

Hilary

That gives her pause. She is on her third, then fourth bite, then fifth. She did not respond to mention of finding a new penthouse, or the talk of sailing, though there's still plenty summer left to sail in. She still has her yacht. She won't be divorced for some time, after all, and the financial separation hasn't begun yet. Hilary is hungry, and eats with slow chewing but with a steady advance across her plate, making up for the ten or eleven hours since the last time she had anything to eat. A donut or two. The sort of thing most skinny women would be obsessing over, because that is the only way a woman stays as skinny as society wants her to be, that is the shameful truth, you cannot be that skinny and remain 'healthy' without being obsessive, and you cannot be that skinny and avoid obsession without merely going the route of utter and total deprivation, which is mentally less taxing.

Hilary is not obsessing. Hilary is not mortal. Hilary heals at twice the pace of a human being, and that is without supernatural aids like the one Ivan used upon her when they cut Ivan's child out of her uterus. Hilary is eating something with loads of fat in it -- red meat, egg yolks, cheese -- crafted by the hands of a man who could eat half a cow and not have much impact on his physique. Hilary has a personal trainer and a Pilates coach and if she ever feels like mixing with the plebs she can just use the gym here. Hilary isn't thinking very much about two donuts and a fatty omelette and oh my god, how many minutes on the treadmill will that be.

Ivan asks her why she's learning Russian, and Hilary pauses, and then refuses to answer. She takes another bite, her eyes on her plate.

Ivan

[EMPAFEE]

Dice: 4 d10 TN6 (2, 7, 10, 10) ( success x 3 )

Hilary

[1: THE CALL IS COMING FROM INSIDE THE HOUSE! GET OUT! GET THE HELL OUT OF THERE!

2: Also, my goodness, she's quite hungry, isn't she? Let's just have us a nice, calm breakfast at 1pm and pretend you just never asked such a silly question.

3: Twisting, writhing, black chaos-balls of rage.]

Ivan

There's no answer to that question. In truth, Ivan hadn't thought it a loaded one. There's a gingerness to this breakfast, just under the surface of their ever-so-privileged languor and polish. It wasn't a good night. It was strange, and unpleasant at times, and sometimes they very nearly melted down entirely.

So when Hilary doesn't speak, Ivan looks at her for a moment. Whatever he sees makes him decide not to pursue the matter further. He lets it drop, and then there's a silence broken only by the quiet sounds of their eating. The omelette doesn't last very long for Ivan. Soon enough he sets his fork down, wipes his mouth with the napkin and lays it over his emptied plate. Then he leans back in his chair, finishing his juice. Yawning.

It'd be easier for them both if he just went home. If they just separated for a while, came back together when their nerves weren't so raw, when they could tolerate each other better. Or perhaps not at all. He doesn't want to go home, though. And when he asked her last night, genuinely not knowing the answer, she wanted him to stay.

Hilary

There's every chance that the only reason Hilary brought Ivan to her bed at dawn was so that he wouldn't be startled awake by Darya's entrance, or put a knife to her maid's throat and cause all manner of ruckus. There's every chance that this morning she felt him there and curled close, stayed near, and for the first few seconds didn't even think about the last time they were in that bed together, or how she'd woken alone,

completely alone,

both her newborn son and his father gone across the sea as though they were never more than ghosts.

For a few seconds at least, maybe one or two, she managed to lie there with Ivan and not think about that. To think only of various mornings in various countries, waking like that and just sleeping as though they are not who and what they are, doing what they keep doing.

For now, Hilary goes on eating her breakfast and drinking her juice. As hungry as she is, and given his last question, she has no further comment on his culinary aptitude or lack thereof. He doesn't throw down his napkin or clank his dishes in annoyance that she doesn't answer him, and she appreciates that, but she doesn't say a word. She pretends, quite well, that he never asked that question at all. Her hair shines in the sunlight. She eats slower than he does, though, and she's still eating, pausing between bites, when she looks over and asks him, "Would you like to go sailing today, then?"

Ivan

There's a bit of hesitation, which he hopes she doesn't fault him for. "I don't know," he answers honestly. "I want to be with you. But last night was hard. And I don't know if you want to, or can stand to be with me.

"What do you want to do?"

Hilary

She looks over at him still, her eyes steady. "I just asked you to go sailing," she says, as though he's missed something painfully obvious. "If I couldn't stand you, I would have told you to leave last night." She puts her fork back into her omelette, going for another bite. "I almost did," she goes on, unexpectedly, "several times. But I didn't... really want you to go."

Hilary chews and swallows before looking over at him again, reaching for her juice glass. "Last night was hard," she says then, with a sort of forced levelness, as though she needs not to get too invested in thinking about that, and remain above it all, floating rather than diving. "But today doesn't have to be."

Ivan

If it's code, Ivan doesn't quite understand it. He doesn't really understand anything that's happened tonight - not the invitation, not Dion's ridiculous farce of forgiveness, not Dion's equally ridiculous convictions of sin and taint; not the fury he felt, not the reason behind his opening his mouth and saying so very much he was better off never saying at all. None of it.

He certainly doesn't understand why, watching that vivid red dress disappear into the Maybach, he flashes to that gleam in Espiridion's eyes; the way Espiridion looked at the woman who was still, if only for a little while longer, his wife and mate. Before he remembered that she tainted his son with her house's sin, of course. Before he forgot

just how good she can smell, taste,

again.

For his part, Ivan drives his barely-legal-supermodel of a sham of a date back to her place. He doesn't even bother to make the effort of pretense. He drops her at the curb of her ultraexclusive luxury condo, and he kisses her on the cheek. She doesn't particularly care; she's just glad the entire insane night is over. They make promises to call, and neither of them mean it. She doesn't look back as she disappears through the door, the glass glistening closed behind her.

His cell phone chimes as he's about to drive away. Home now. Lovely to see you again. His fingers tap impatiently, uncertainly against his thigh. Then he sends a message back.

Home in Chicago, or home in Wilmette?

Hilary

My place, comes the almost immediate and slightly easier-to-understand text message, though the margin between the two is thin. Then one right after it, perhaps as he's tapping a reply -- or considering what the hell, what the fuck:

I'm going around the corner to get some donuts. Want some?

Ivan

Were Hilary in Ivan's immediate presence, or were she a more astute woman, she would certainly read bewilderment in Ivan's silence.

Eventually, a reply:

Where?

Hilary

It takes a few more moments for Ivan to get a response, but when he does, it's explained by the sheer length -- for Hilary, it might have taken forever, since as far as he knows she doesn't even own a computer and rarely touches her phone.

Good god, Ivan, just go to my apartment. It's on West Kinzie. Mostly made of glass. Ask Dmitri for help.

Ivan

There's no reply to that. Ivan doesn't bother. He's uneasy from the events of the evening, unrestful and bristling from the hours with Dion. And now he's nettled by that text, irritated by the incomprehensibility of all the ones before it.

All of which simply says: Ivan is half-angry, stormy-browed, when he shows up at Hilary's door. But then, that's hardly anything unusual.

Hilary

Hilary has a key to Ivan's cabin by the lake, because it is in a sense hers -- the only thing they really share, other than a child they never see. He has no keys to anything of hers. So when he arrives at her building he can't simply stroll in, slip out of his shoes, and hunt her down in that glass cavern. He can go inside, of course, go up to the door, he has that much privilege even without falling back on his skills as a scout and spy. Maybe it's because he's on a list, the people in the lobby recognize him, or Hilary gave him the code for the front door, whatever.

But Ivan doesn't even get that far. He arrives at her building and is heading for the front door when he hears her call his name. She's walking around the corner from the little side-street called North Franklin, carrying a white paper bag. She's still wearing her gown, her hair still up in a crown of curls, gold and diamond comb glittering. In her other hand is a corner of her dress, holding it up from sweeping the street.

"You didn't tell me what kind you wanted," she says when she walks up to him, "so I got several. Some are gingerbread." She does not lift herself up on her toes to kiss him. There is the sense, somehow, that she'd like to.

Ivan

Truth be told, people calling his name when he's out and about is not a wholly unusual occurrence. He's known, and not merely the way people of their particular class are always known by, and to, one another. He's also known simply because he does things like throw parties in one of the most beautiful penthouses in the city for a hundred of the city's most beautiful people. And buy drinks for entire clubs. And go sailing with models, dancers, starlets.

Still. Hilary calls his name, and look how swiftly, how sharply he turns. Look how his eyes go over her, sweep her head to toe the way he didn't dare when her husband was about.

And - she has donuts in hand. He stares at the bag. And now he's not merely nettled but rather baffled, lost. His eyes come back to hers. She doesn't kiss him, but she wants to. He can tell. Or maybe he wishes she would. It doesn't matter - he puts his hand behind her neck and pulls her to him, hard, his eyes shutting hard, brow knitting ferociously as he mauls her face.

When he lets her go:

"Donuts? And why the obscure texts?"

Hilary

Hilary does not, in fact, allow this. Not standing on the sidewalk with no one standing around, not yet, not now. She doesn't do anything as dramatic as slap him, push back on his chest, or startle backwards. She simply sees that look in his eyes, that prophecy of motion in his body language, and she turns away firmly, pressing buttons beside the door to let them both in. She does not want him to kiss her right now. He gets that message clearly enough.

"The Doughnut Vault is around the corner," she tells him. "And sometimes I like donuts." The door clicks, a light turns green, and in all likelihood she only reaches to pull the door open if Ivan doesn't take the gentleman's hint and open it for her. "They weren't obscure, you were just being obtuse," she adds, which in all honesty is her forthright opinion. She lifts the corner of her skirt again, her heels tapping softly on the floor as she walks towards the elevator. Then she does the oddest thing:

looks over her shoulder at him, and smiles, looking so very pleased.

And inside, pressing the upward arrow button: "Don't I look pretty?" she laughs, and adopts a brief, mockingly coy pose as the elevator starts to swiftly ascend. "This really should be worn with gloves, but that would have been far too formal. Maybe when I go to the opera. But then I'll need a new gown. Hardly any of my old clothes fit. My breasts are ridiculous."

Ivan

There's something animal, subhuman, intrinsic about the way his eyes fix on her as she turns away. He looks at the turn of her shoulders. He looks at the line of her back. She unlocks the door and he doesn't open the door for her; it doesn't seem to occur to him. It's not until she begins to pull the door open that he reaches past her and levers it forcefully open.

And she breezes in ahead of him. She talks about donuts. One has to wonder what the donut shop's owner thought when a woman like her, dressed as she is, looking like a woman who hardly touches desserts at all, and when she does eats only hundred-dollar dollops of sweetness -- when a woman like her walked in. She says she wasn't obscure; he was obtuse. He's still wondering why the fuck she couldn't just say --

come over. i want to see you again.

When she smiles at him over her shoulder he's still looking at her with those hungry eyes of his. She asks if she looks pretty, this bizarre lover of his, and if she were ten years younger or more insecure or insane in a wholly different way than she is he might think she was fishing for compliments. His eyes flash down her body. She talks about gloves; a spark in his memory, i could wear gloves, they were talking about whips and cuffs and gagging her with the flogger's handle while he fucked her from behind.

She talks about her breasts and he reaches past her to hit the elevator button. He's very close to her, his shirtfront almost touching her back, or those ridiculous breasts of hers. He's in her space, taking her scent, and as the elevator rises he mutters:

"I need to fuck you."

Hilary

Tonight she seems so effervescent. As though she just went out and had a lovely time, as though tonight weren't warped beyond recognition. Her eyes all but sparkle, matching the brilliance of her jewelry. Maybe she feels Ivan's eyes all over her, slinking over her back and her shoulders, following her when she moves, but she doesn't seem to. It's equally possible that she doesn't notice, is ignoring it, has no idea. Few women have as much power of denial as Hilary does.

She mentions gloves. He remembers.

Hilary doesn't startle away from him when he stands too close to her, sniffing at her, breathing her. She flicks her eyes downward, then over to him, as the doors slide open again. "Soon," she whispers, and walks out into her hallway, turning right to head towards her own door.

Ivan

He almost kisses that word off her mouth. Soon, and the moue her lips form, the breath hissing between her teeth: kissed it all, sucked it all out of her, devoured it. It would have been a hard kiss, aggressive as the one he wanted to give her on the street, but

the doors open then and she slips away again. His hand closes to a loose fist, thumb swiping down the side of his finger. Then he follows her.

It takes a sort of trust for him to do this. Come here like this. Follow her like this. Her husband is still in the city. Her husband, whatever his disgust toward the outcome of her happy condition, still thinks he owns her. Might as well, by the laws of their society. For him to be here requires a certain trust that she won't fuck him over accidentally or otherwise. Except he doesn't really trust her, so maybe it's just raw outrageous daring. The same sort of thing that led him to keep right on fucking her while her husband was coming up to fetch her, to sniff her out, to track her down, to drag her back to his den and mount, himself.

Except he's not the daring sort either. He doesn't rush into the front lines. He'll never be a hero. Some might call him a coward; he'd call himself too smart for heroics. Whatever, whichever -- the point is, it's not daring that drives him to come across the city, come to her door, come to her place intending to fuck.

It's something far simpler than that. Raw and elemental. He just said it, low, almost snarling with desire:

he needs to fuck her.

Needs.

He's a step behind her all the way to her door. She starts to unlock it and he puts his hand on her, on her hip where cherry blossoms begin to cascade delicately down her thigh. He thinks of plum blossoms in the dead of winter, fucking her in the entryway of his penthouse. He thinks of fucking her over and over again, one instance after another, all the times he's had her, all the seasons, all the ways she's tasted

and smelled

and moaned for him.

His hand closes hard on her dress, crumpling it into his palm, stretching it over her hips. He presses against her from behind and he's so hard already, lowering his mouth to her shoulder and groaning as he bites at her bare skin. She sat across from him and he barely looked at her all night; didn't dare, or rather, was too smart to do so. Wasn't too smart to ask over and over what Dion intended to do with her, though, was he going to cast her aside, was he going to do something to her, was he going to abandon her already, when, when.

"Not soon," he says. They're both speaking so quietly, but it's not soft. "Now. Get out of this dress before I tear it off."

Hilary

Whatever is happening to Ivan -- within Ivan -- is only mounting as they go up to her floor, down the hall towards her front door. Mounting, and seething, ready to boil over. He reaches for her outside and she turns away. He is about to move to her again when she walks out of the elevator, and maybe he thinks she's teasing him, doing this on purpose, can't she see how much he wants to --

Hilary has her keys in her hand, a small ring of them with a gleaming gold charm dangling down from the edge. She has lifted them up slide one into the door, but before she turns it Ivan is right there, grabbing her hip, the silk crushed in his palm, the embroidery rubbing against his fingertips. Rage is licking at the walls like a fire, and she doubts he even realizes it. She can feel it, though.

Just because she never shows any fear of it doesn't mean Hilary is unaware of it. She's aware of a lot of things that could hurt her. It doesn't mean she fears them. Fear makes only about as much sense to her, sometimes, as other emotions.

She stops there, the key in the door, Ivan pulling at her dress, his cock pressing against her ass, his teeth pressing into her skin. That makes her breathe in, like she can't help it, but here is where the trance-like subspace she enters when he dominates her falters. Sometimes a certain tone of his voice or a way he touches her makes her dissolve, makes her pliant, but this is the truth that they are learning and which so many already know:

the domitor is never truly the one in control.

Hilary turns her head. Her cheek brushes his hair where he's bent over her, biting her. His breath is hot where it curls across the faintly damp spot his mouth left when he tells her roughly no, not soon, now. Now.

She says nothing for a moment. Nor does she turn the key in the lock and take him inside with a little laugh, tease him until he wants to thrash her to bruises, nor does she nod her assent, invite his hands shredding the gown off of her. She's silent a moment, and then she whispers, so much like the way she said Soon -- that is, soft and perhaps a little hesitant:

"I feel...happy," she says, stumbling over the word because it's unfamiliar, and because she's not entirely certain of her right to use it. And this is ungentle, because there is no gentle way to say it without being at least partly dishonest, and because it is strange to her to be so honest to begin with: "And you're ruining it."

Her eyes lift to his, try to find his. Her hand is still on her key, and likely his erection is still pressed to her body, his hand still on her. She doesn't look angry. She doesn't look anything but faintly, dimly sad. Perhaps afraid -- so she does know that emotion -- of his reaction. "I want to be with you tonight. Don't... reduce it to this."

Belatedly, wary of angering him further, wary that he'll only doubt her, or something, or get overly sentimental -- which would be worse, to her -- or misunderstand, or something, but belatedly nonetheless: "Please, Ivan."

Ivan

The domitor is never the one in control.

There are times when Ivan plays the role so well. When he's got Hilary bound and gagged, blindfolded and strung up; when he's pinned her and mounted her and fucked her while calling her horrible, hair-raising names, but even then, even when he seems to hold all the power and Hilary none at all, the truth is -

she has the power to say no. And he'll stop. And in the end, there is no truer control than that.

Stop, she says now, if not quite in words. Please, she says, you're ruining it - and that glittering, dangerous hunger goes out of Ivan's eyes, is replaced by something closer to pain. It's ironic; he was always the one who complained that she made it all about sex. Strange, that she's the one who asks him now to not reduce it to such.

In the end, Ivan doesn't let her go; he wraps his arms closer around her, pulls her against him, kissing whatever part of her body he can reach.

"How can you be happy?" he whispers.

Hilary

In the end, everything he does is for her. The way he fucks her over and over again until she's crying and shaking from overstimulation -- that's for her benefit, her pleasure, her peace of mind. The names he calls her, the way he hits her, the way he ties her down so he can use her all night -- that's because it makes her feel safe, it makes her feel happy, or as close to happy as she gets. He does it all to make her happy. He is apologetic when he can't go any further. He is exhausted from trying to please her.

So it's very strange right now to see her, smiling and effervescent, talking about how pretty she is, getting donuts at half past midnight, smiling at him and flirting, but mostly just existing. And smiling. Smiling for no reason at all.

How. How can she be happy.

Ivan relents. And she knew he would, because a part of her knows that he really is hers far more than she is his, and that is what works about this, that is what they both hate and both crave about this, though neither would ever really say it. It exists wordlessly, like most other things about them. Exists wordlessly because it just can't be put into words in the first place.

Hilary is held, then. She can still feel his hardness, feels him kissing her all over like even with what she said he can't help himself. She gives mercy; tilts her head so he can kiss her neck and feel her warmth and her pulse there. But a moment later she moves gently away, turning the key in the lock to let them in. "I just am," she tells him, which is not the evasion it would be from many women, but the simple truth. She could as easily say: I don't know, and I don't care.

"Come in," she tells him, as the door is being pushed open. "Come inside, and have a donut with me."

Ivan

The laugh Ivan gives is a little lost, a little helpless. His hand slides off her hip as she steps forward. Then he follows her in, letting the door shut behind them.

"I'm not fond of donuts," he says. "But if you have coffee, I'll take a cup."

Stepping out of his shoes, then. Slipping out of his coat, which he hangs over the nearest surface. He undoes his tie as he steps into the living room he's entered once and only once before, when they brought Anton here from the hospital. The thought makes him frown, makes him turn back to her.

"You look beautiful," he tells her, at last answering her. "I would have told you earlier, but I think Dion would have thrown me off the roof." A pause. "And I love your tits. Forgive the French."

Hilary

Helpless. What is there he can do about that? Interrogate her? Rake her over the coals? Strip her raw and take away the one thing he claims to want for her, the one thing he should want for her, rather than from her? No. So -- helpless -- he laughs, and lets her go, and follows her.

The bag of donuts gets set on the counter. "You'll have a donut with coffee or nothing at all," she says primly, perhaps serious, but the chances are equal that she's only making a joke. Hilary's seriousness is sometimes just as ludicrous as other people's humor, but god help you if you don't take her seriously. She sets her keys down as well, and the apartment is silent but not dark. The lights from Chicago are thrown through the glass that surrounds them, muted and filtered but bright nonetheless, casting long and velvety shadows.

Hilary, knowing how badly he wants to fuck her -- now, now, not soon, now, I need -- reaches to her side and undoes the long, hidden zipper to her gown as she walks over to the living room that Ivan wants to ignore. She slips it down and carefully, respecting the silk and the embroidery and the finery of it all, drapes the dress across the couch cushions. Underneath she's wearing a black half-slip and bustier. Her previously hidden heels are livid red satin, the soles black and shiny. She steps out of those, but does not remove anything else, walking over to the kitchen.

To make coffee, of course. And she reaches into the back and picks out a gingerbread donut, sticking it in her mouth as she walks to the grinder on the countertop and presses a button. Top of the line, of course -- there are grounds inside left there the last time the burr grinder was used, and water comes in through a thin and well-hidden pipe and the coffee begins brewing instantly, everything self-measuring and fancy and requiring very little effort on her part. Hilary is a cook, not a coffee snob.

Somewhere in there, Ivan tells her she looks beautiful, that Dion would have killed him if he'd said so, and that he loves her tits. Pardon his French. At that, Hilary looks over at him, bites through her donut, and smirks at him as she chews, daintier than she was when she held a donut in her teeth and walked around the kitchen. Having chewed and swallowed, she answers:

"Si c'est le mieux que vous pouvez faire, votre français est terrible." It's rather cheerful, all told, and still smirking at him. She takes another bite of her donut and gives a small twirl through the long galley of the kitchen. "Et mes seins t'aime aussi, Ivan. Vous me fesser aussi dur que vous le souhaitez. Mais vous êtes toujours très gentil avec mes seins."

While she says all this, the smell of coffee is filling the kitchen. She is cupping her hand over her right breast at et mes seins t'aime aussi and bending over a bit to display her cleavage, hopping back up and turning to give herself a little spank on the rear at fesser aussi dur que vous and stroking her fingers over the curves of her decolletage at gentil avec mes seins.

She winks, and takes another bite of her donut.

Ivan

And it occurs to Ivan - now that he isn't fixating solely on the way she looks, the way she smells, how very much not his she is, how very badly he needs her - that it's vanishingly rare to see Hilary happy. Not viciously pleased, not smirkingly amused, but happy. And it twists in him and swells in him at once, this realization and the emotion that accompanies it, because - yes - he wants this for her. And of all the things he could buy her, get her, give her, this is the one thing he's so rarely been able to bring her.

Not never, though. So perhaps that counts for something.

He smiles as she does. And as she tells him to learn French. "Will you learn Russian?" he barters, watching her press a button and start the long, complicated, fully automated process of brewing coffee.

Ivan

[DLP! DAMMIT!]

None of the sounds coming from Hilary's mouth mean a thing to Ivan. It was like this in Port Grimaud, too, and Paris - she spoke, he let his mind wander. As though she really were the cougar, paying her young lover's way, arranging the details, pampering him. It was like this, only in Port Grimaud she usually wasn't wearing goddamn lingerie, and in Paris she usually wasn't touching herself, displaying herself.

He watches her from across the room. He hasn't followed her to the kitchen; leans instead against the back of her couch. His eyes are dark with desire. They follow her hands. Follow her body. His hand strays - he touches himself through his slacks thoughtlessly, almost absently.

And he shakes his head, a breath of a laugh escaping. "I don't understand," he says.

Hilary

"You started it," she chides him, as far as the 'French' is concerned, as she takes out two plain and simple mugs, both of them the color of port. And over there he sits down on the couch that isn't currently holding her gown, strokes himself mindlessly while he watches her. "You ought to learn, anyway."

She does not offer to translate anything she just said. She stops, mercifully, stroking her breasts or cupping them in a flirtatious little dance around the kitchen, but that doesn't change anything. He still wants her, so badly. She's still dressed in lingerie, her hair still up, her jewelry still on, a bit of sugar on her lip that she licks off while she finds a gold-edged tray and arranges upon it a sugar bowl with tiny spoon, a little metal pitcher that she fills with heavy cream from the refrigerator, the two mugs. She smiles at her handiwork as she does all these unnecessary things, as pleased by them as by the donuts.

Ivan

And it occurs to Ivan - now that he isn't fixating solely on the way she looks, the way she smells, how very much not his she is, how very badly he needs her - that it's vanishingly rare to see Hilary happy. Not viciously pleased, not smirkingly amused, but happy. And it twists in him and swells in him at once, this realization and the emotion that accompanies it, because - yes - he wants this for her. And of all the things he could buy her, get her, give her, this is the one thing he's so rarely been able to bring her.

Not never, though. So perhaps that counts for something.

He smiles as she does. And as she tells him to learn French. "Will you learn Russian?" he barters, watching her press a button and start the long, complicated, fully automated process of brewing coffee.

Hilary

It had to have been important that she asked him to recognize how she felt, to let it be, to preserve it at the cost of satisfying himself. Even Hilary is aware of how rare this is. Maybe she doesn't assign the word 'precious', but she knows it will be a few hours, maybe less, before something grabs hold of her ankle and drags her back down. Right now, though, she's ever so light. She is walking on air, laughing, smirking and twinkling, and enjoying herself.

And perhaps it was important, too, that knowing how easily he could ruin it all, and how often he shows up at her door in a black mood, snarling and clawing until he fucks all his anger and his need into her and relents, she wanted him to come over. Be with her. Have a donut.

She glances at him at the question, and then glances at the ceiling. She thinks, setting a plate on the tray and stacking a few more donuts onto it, then says -- very slowly, very haltingly, recited like a child repeats back their lesson to an ancient tutor: "Я все... еще учусь... русский язык."

It's not hard to see her saying this to a native speaker, to tell them to slow down, to write something out, to get a translator. And the truth is, her accent is... nonexistent. This is a woman who mastered French and Spanish and never considered learning the language so closely associated with House Crescent Moon. Compared to the grace and fluidity of her French, this sounds clunky, childish, and stilted.

Also: unexpected.

Ivan

So unexpected is the Russian -- from someone who Ivan would have expected to ugh at the very thought of learning the language -- that Ivan's mouth flickers into a reflexive, startled smile.

"I'm impressed," he says. "I didn't think you spoke any Russian at all."

Then he switches. Slides into the heavy diphthonged vowels and sharp, tongue-caught consonants of the Russian language, faster and more fluently than she could possibly follow. He must know that. He doesn't apologize for it. He doesn't move; doesn't pantomime; sits relaxed and princely on her couch, his eyes on hers when he speaks. A more perceptive woman might read so much into his regard; his tone. A more astute woman might read want and ache and something very like wistfulness in the way he speaks to her then. Hilary: it's always hard to say what she sees, if she sees anything at all.

And when he's finished, that smile again -- not the surprised one, but a quieter one than the ones that usually grace his handsome, well-bred face; one a bit akin to the smile he shared with her a moment ago, when she was so pleased by ... well. Whatever it is that pleased her tonight.

"Is the coffee ready yet?" he asks.

[Ivan says, "I wanted you the moment I saw you. There's never been anyone like you, before you. There could have been a hundred other women on your yacht that day and you would have still stood alone. You're utterly incomparable. Peerless. I don't think I ever told you. I don't think you'd understand."]

Hilary

"I'm learning," she says crisply, laying two folded napkins from a drawer into the tray along with everything else -- the cream, the sugar, the mugs, saucers, donuts, spoons. It's all quite elegant, chocolate brown and creamy white, accents of gold here and there. "Darya was hired particularly for that purpose, atop her other duties."

Her ears perk as Ivan begins speaking his family's language, and she flicks her eyes over at him. He doesn't intend for her to understand, and she doesn't. Maybe the hint of a syllable that sounds like something else, but beyond a few basic phrases -- I am still learning the Russian language, for example, or A pleasure to meet you, and of course плеасе and вы тханк -- Hilary is still learning at the level of a toddler. Vowel sounds. Alphabet. Her own son will speak it better than she can in a year or two.

She returns her attention to her work, though, because Ivan is speaking Russian, and she hasn't the faintest idea. He's not dancing around flirting with her, or stroking his cock and beckoning her over. He sounds urgent, but that could just be the way Russian is, like the way French always sounds so romantic and Spanish always sounds so passionate. Or maybe that's cultural bias. She glances at him as he finishes, returns to English.

"Oui," she says, lifting the stainless steel carafe from the warmer and setting it on the tray, giving a sharp twist to the lid to seal the liquid inside. Lifting it, she carries it to the coffee table

where they set Anton's carrier,

and sets it down. Her dress glimmers on the loveseat at a right angle to the couch Ivan chose. But she doesn't pour coffee for them, or insist again that he at least try a donut. Hilary turns to Ivan and kneels over his lap, the lace edge of her slip brushing his slacks over his thighs. She doesn't sink down, leaving -- as he may realize in a moment -- room for his hands between their bodies. The city lights hit the gemstones in the comb in her hair, strike off of her hair itself, gleam in its shine. Her hands are gentle on his shoulders, just above his pectoral muscles.

"Take it out for me," she whispers.

Ivan

The scent of coffee is already rich in the air when Hilary brings the little tray with its napkins and cream and sugar, mugs and saucers and spoons. It's all very elegant; more, perhaps, than donuts deserve, but there it is. And Ivan's eyes are on her as she comes over, on her as she bends to set the tray down, on her as she kneels over him

and makes him draw a sip of air in

as her hands come to his shoulders. For such a fine, sleek thing, Ivan is surprisingly heavy-boned: those shoulders are broad, sheathed in supple musculature, and his hands are long-fingered when they come to her waist.

But only for a moment. She makes a request, which is so like the one she made the very first time he took her or she took him or they took each other to that hotel on the north shore, which is odd because that's what he was talking about, that's what he spoke of when he spoke without intending for her to ever understand what he said.

He touches her breast. He wraps his hands gently around her wrists, lifts her hands and kisses each one. Then he sets her hands back where they are and reaches down, his knuckles brushing her thighs as he undoes his belt, undoes his pants, pushes the soft material of his boxerbriefs down to take his cock out. All this time, all his superficial indolence, and he's still so hard for her; so aroused that he gasps when he passes his hand up the length of the shaft.

Hilary

Even the damn donuts are artfully stacked, and this one is gingerbread and that one is glazed and this one is white and dark chocolate iced and this one is plain, soft. They're all rather small, not the enormous things bought at grocery stores but small-batch, hand-made around the corner. He doesn't want them. She's informed him he can't have coffee unless he also has donuts with her. As though this matters, is important somehow, have a donut with me.

Or:

Come home with me. Sit on my couch and have coffee and donuts. Pretend it was you and I out tonight. That we got in the same car and came home. That we got a whim for donuts at nearly one in the morning. That we took them home in our formal wear, your tie undone and me a little drunk still. Pretend that you're staying, and that you belong here, and stop trying to kiss me outside, because it reminds me that you can't, and it reminds me that I'm pretending. Pretend we're happy. Pretend this is real. Make me feel real. Let me feel real.

Eat a goddamn donut.

But right now, all that aside, she comes to him and touches him. She gets on his lap with the coffee and donuts behind her, the city behind him, and runs those precious hands of hers over his shirt, rustling it against his skin and her palms. She flickers a smile as he touches her, seeing the way he looks at her now, halfway between relieved and aching, and how he doesn't even waste time with surprise or asking her why, why now, what game is this, how dare she. She leans forward and lays soft little kisses over his brow and his temple as he puts his hand over the satin panel that covers her breast. She's not noticably more slender than the last time he had her, but she's been steadily trimming herself back down ever since the first of May, ruthlessly shedding what she doesn't want to remember.

Not all the time, at least.

She kisses his face; he kisses her wrists and hands as softly, perhaps achingly. And her hands go back to his shoulders, stroke over them, slide to his collar and begin unbuttoning him carefully. Ivan's hands displace the edge of her slip, but he doesn't bother to lift his hips and push his slacks down very far at all, jostling her atop him. He takes it out, just like she asked, and pants a breath out when he touches it.

Hilary has his shirt half undone when she pauses, looking down at his cock, at his hands over his cock, whispers: "Keep touching it," her voice trancelike, mesmerized. "Stroke it for me."

She asks him for this. As though she doesn't know that he'll give her anything, do anything, anything she asks, anything she wants. As though she's never seen him like this before. As though he's never let her have his cock, at all.

Ivan

There's something aching and soft about this. The way they kiss each other. The way they touch each other. The softness of her voice and the hitch in his breath as he does as she says. Obeys her, one might say. Which is odd, because Hilary is -- was -- so averse to anything even remotely echoing of dominance. Only ever used it at the beginning, when she didn't know him, didn't know how he would react, didn't know how to push him into giving her what she wanted from him.

Something's changed since then. Something changed the first time they fucked in the cabin. Something changed in Mexico. Something changed in Lausanne, and in his penthouse the night they made Anton, and when he fucked her tied down to his bed at the lake and then stood up to leave her, cruelly, only to find himself unable to. Only to find himself coming back to her, gathering her up, holding her until she stopped trembling.

She asked him why, after. He didn't know how to answer her.

And it goes on from there. He could trace it back and back, the root of this strange and crushing attachment. And in the end the truth is what he's already given her, though not in a language she could understand. You are incomparable. He didn't think she would understand this, but she does; she understands because she told him, once,

There's no one else like me.

Ivan sets a rhythm, slow and firm. She can hear the shiver in his breath; the whisper of skin and fabric, his shirt brushing against his body where it's loosened, his hand sliding over his cock. After a moment his free hand leaves his body and finds hers. He puts his hand over her thigh as though he needs this contact, this connection, more than he needs the stimulation of his own hand. More than he needs the release of orgasm. He lifts his mouth to hers, searching; finds her somewhere in the midst of her breath, her lips, her hair falling over his face. The kiss is slow, and it is deep.

Hilary

Try as they might -- and they have tried, both of them -- to hold themselves back from any further entanglement with each other, they have felt what's between them changing in drastic lurches, in panics, in sudden collapses. There's no telling how long this will last, if something is changing between them right now, if any of this will matter in the long run, or if this is as fleeting as so many other moments they've had. Moments like the ones where he sees into her, so deeply into her, and knows her for a few seconds.

Moments where she knows herself. For a few seconds.

Hilary just watches at first, holding herself up over his body after she finishes unbuttoning and parting his shirt off of his chest. She doesn't seem to react to his hand finding her thigh, holding onto her. Ivan lifts his mouth to kiss her and she ignores him, pulling away a bit so she can keep watching, looking down at his cock and not at his face, not into his eyes.

"Don't stop," she whispers, as though she's waiting, as though she's feeling his pleasure mount even as it crawls up his own spine. "Keep going."

Ivan

Denied again, Ivan makes a sound somewhere between frustration and ache; throws his head back to thump against the couch. "God damn it, Hilary," he says between his teeth, his hand moving to grasp at her hip briefly; open over her stomach. Then it falls back to himself, smooths down the bared plane of his lower abdomen, tension and pleasure setting definition into otherwise sleek, smooth muscle. He doesn't stop stroking himself off as his free hand slides past his groin, grips at his own inner thigh for a moment before cupping over his balls. He leans his head back against the couch, eyes closing.

The domitor is never truly in control, and by the same token, the domitor is never truly the one taking. He's always the one giving, and he gives her this, too. He gives her what she wants, and tonight, right now, she seems to want this. A show. To watch him touching himself, stroking himself, getting himself off

for her.

The rise and fall of his chest is sharp and fast between the parted flaps of his shirt. His tie is askew, undone, long strips winding loosely over each bicep, one end flapping against his side as he jerks himself off. His eyes stay closed. There's a certain vulnerability in this: being under her without being inside her, being watched by her without watching her, putting himself on display, giving himself over into some of the most mindblowing, debilitating sensations a man could know. His jaw is clenched. His nostrils flare on every inhale -- he makes a quiet, bitten-back sound that he can't quite stop, a stifled, short moan as he brings himself inexorably closer to the brink.

Hilary

God damn it, he says, but he doesn't mean it, and she doesn't laugh. She doesn't even acknowledge that he's swearing, that he's panting. He's been wanting to fuck her since he saw her on the street. Fuck her, likely hard, to own her again after that awful rooftop dinner with Dion. It doesn't even matter that she's wearing that male's jewelry, those human-seeming gemstones of claiming. Right now he's with her, and Dion is not. He's touching her thigh, and Dion is not.

Ivan's breathing is ragged now, panting, his eyes closed instead of staring at her, watching her watching him, He's starting to lose himself in this. He's starting to lose control, barely able to bite back his moans, his gasps, lost in whatever fantasy his mind is playing him to accompany the sensation of his palms stroking his cock, stroking his balls.

Hilary tips her head a bit as she watches him. And when he makes that little, half-stifled noise, she lets out a soft little sigh and lifts up her slip a bit, moving closer to him. Before Ivan quite knows what's happening his hand is hitting her cunt on every stroke, probably hard enough to hurt, but she's seeking out the tip of his cock without using her hands, smiling down at his body while she strokes her clit against the head. Strokes her slit over him. And, bringing him to her opening, begins working herself down on him. Slowly.

Ivan

Not on every stroke. The side of his knuckles strike her once, he feels it, he feels her and his eyes fly open. They look a little wild. He doesn't look human like this; he looks beautiful and he looks sleek and he looks like Ivan fucking Press, but Ivan fucking Press is not human and right now she can see it so clearly.

His breath exhales in a rush. He's panting, he's so hard, so aroused that when she strokes against him he jumps, a single concerted clench of every muscle in his body. The back of his head hits the top of her couch again and he gives a single harsh shout of pleasure, or perhaps just overstimulation. Then she's working herself down and he's raising his head, he's watching for a split instant before his hands leave his cock and

it doesn't seem to matter that she's this elegant thing, this lovely creature with her hair still swept up, her lingerie demure and electrifying all at once. He puts his hands on her face, he pulls her down to him and he kisses her hard enough to cut his lip on her teeth but he doesn't care; he groans into her mouth as she takes him into her body.

Hilary

Ivan forces a kiss on her, bites it out on her mouth where she hasn't allowed him to touch her all night, and Hilary

stops. She maddeningly, unbelievably stops sliding herself down onto him, holding him half inside of her pussy, which is slick and wet and so very fucking tight around him, while he groans into her mouth and cuts his lip and she waits for him to fucking let her go. When he does her eyes are dark, and her hands are still on his shoulders, and she's staring at him.

"I didn't want to yet," she says, before he can kiss her again, before he can demand to know why she keeps rejecting him. She isn't glaring at him, her brow is unwrinkled, but she looks a bit shaken, like now she's hanging on to something and the hold is more tenuous. She doesn't want to be angry right now. She truly doesn't. She just wants... this. And 'this' is stalled, driving him to a place where he can barely control what he wants, where he can't think, he can't likely even answer her, while she tries to find her way back to where she was when he wasn't pulling, grabbing, snarling, demanding, biting, kissing her when she doesn't want to kiss

not yet, not like that, not the way he keeps trying to maul her face, perhaps not at all right now,

with no more explanation for that want than for her happiness. But she's still halted, so much more in control of herself than he's ever seen her when they've started fucking, and she's watching him. "Should I stop?"

Ivan

He doesn't just groan into her mouth - he curses outright, shouts it, Fuck!

She stares at him, eyes dark. Waiting. He thumps his head against the couch, grasps at the cushions with his fingers. Closes his eyes and breathes, breathes, opens his eyes again.

"What the fuck, Hilary," he spits, and he's somewhere between frustrated and needful, anger licking at the edges. "What the fuck do you want from me?"

Hilary

Which seems to answer that for her. She rises off of him immediately, merciless as she can be only because her heart really is fractured into hundred of pieces of charred, floating debris in some distant, cold darkness. Her slip falls over her legs and she steps away, not to demurely pour coffee and eat another donut but to step away from him, those traces of happiness long gone now, a frown destroying the purity of her expression, darkened by anger.

"I asked nothing of you but for you to come be with me tonight," she snaps. "And outside you try to grab me like you just did. In the elevator it's 'I need' and standing like a beast over me. In my hallway, no, 'not soon, now'," she reminds him, looking at him directly now, her voice coming dangerously close to mocking him, but it's anger that doesn't allow for that much forethought, not gentleness, "grabbing my dress and biting me and telling me you're going to tear it off. Grabbing my head like that and making me kiss you, kissing me like that, because it's what you want, because over and over tonight it's what you want, what you 'need', what you like, now, now, now."

She picks up a donut and throws it at his chest. It's the nearest thing, the easiest to grab. She'd as likely have hurled the mug, or the creamer pitcher, splattering the fluid everywhere, but the donut is what ends up in her hand. "When tonight did you get the impression I wanted you to grab me and crush me and kiss me like that? And how many times did I turn away when you tried? When did I show you I wanted you to be rough with me or use me like that, and how many times did I touch you softly or ask you to stop?

"How dare you snap about what I want from you?" she says, livid now, her cheeks spotted with bright pink against the alabaster.

Ivan

Like that, what remains of the mood tears in half. He comes off the couch in one motion. They could be ridiculous. She has sugary residue on her hand from throwing the donut. He has cream on his chest. She's livid in her lingerie. He's got his pants down, his cock out, his shirt askew on his body.

They're not ridiculous. They're goddamn Silver Fangs. They're mad and they're selfish and they're never, ever at peace, but they're beautiful even like this. And Ivan yanks his pants back up, fastens himself away as his temper flies out of his grasp.

"What I want?" he parrots back at her. "When is it ever about what I want, Hilary? When is it ever not about what you want, what you need, what I'll do for you because I think it might make you happy, or at least halfway human for a moment?" His volume is steadily rising; he's shouting at her now. "Do you understand what need means? Do you know what it's like to never know what you want or how you want it? Do you know what it's like to watch you get in a goddamn car with that pompous jackass of a husband you've got and wonder if he's going to sample what's his one more time before getting rid of you however he means to be rid of you?

"Do you know what it's like to wonder who the fuck else you're spreading your legs for when you're not with me? Do you know -- "

he cuts off on that, sharply. His mouth is a cruel line he swipes the back of his hand across. Then he lowers his head and starts buttoning his shirt, wordless.

Hilary

Ivan gets as far as his half-mad imagining of Dion wanting to sample what's his, and Hilary all but roars over him: "He tried!"

And he's never heard her voice like that, never. At her worst, right in that entrance hallway, when he threw their son in her face and her hold on sanity snapped in half for a few seconds, she shrieked and howled but it didn't sound like that. There's so much... power in her voice for a moment, so much wrath it's reminiscent of a true roar, the sound of an Ahroun hitting the battlefield, the sound of eons of ancestors behind her who are as cast to the four winds as the fragments of her own soul are.

There's so much more to that, though, than what she says. An Adren Galliard who had been a Fostern Philodox before he renounced, a man who in his lifetime could very well have become an Elder if he had just stayed to the path given him at birth, the man who is alternately obsessed with Hilary -- even hatefully obsessed -- and cut off more from human emotion than she is.

She's his wife and mate. She lives apart from him because she failed to birth him a child. And he tried. Tonight. Literal minutes before Ivan arrived, seconds before she sent that first bewildering message. Yet here she is. Dion failed somehow, or gave up, or Hilary stopped him, or --

well, he doesn't know, because that isn't what she says. She just shouts at him, and it hangs in the air as it is, all alone.

Ivan

That stops him. Cuts him off like a knife through the larynx. He'd know; he's done it. There's a jagged, ragged silence, emotions flashing across his face too fast for anyone, let alone Hilary, to read. Somewhere in there is shock; somewhere, anger. Somewhere, regret, sudden and devastating. His breath leaves in a rush, and he stops trying to put his clothes back on; he stops trying to

leave. He always tries to leave when things go awry. Small wonder she doesn't trust him, doesn't trust him to stay - no matter what else he says, no matter how he claims to love her, care about her, hold her precious, he doesn't know how to stay.

But he stays now. He's still for a moment, gut-punched, those expressions chasing each other across the noble palette of his face. That face he inherited from his ancestors the same way he inherited his wealth - none of it his own doing, none of it his own work. Blessed, privileged boy; stupid, selfish boy. He drops back down on the couch then. He puts his head in his hands, closes his eyes.

He wants to ask her again: how can you be happy?

He asks her instead: "What happened?"

Hilary

To that -- to his drop to the couch, head in his hands -- Hilary brutally, ruthlessly gives an audible scoff and a roll of her eyes. "God good, Ivan," she says to him for the second time tonight, "if it had mattered that much, don't you think that would have been the first thing I told you?"

She does not try to pick anything up. She does get a napkin from the tray and begins wiping off her hand, her face like a storm during the daylight, shadowed and yet cut through with brightness at the same time. "He was pawing and mauling at me in the car, and said he wanted to come up and have me in this little nest of mine. So I batted my eyelashes and simpered and pawed back at him and fluttered that maybe we could make a new baby and he'd forgive me."

Hilary drops the napkin on the coffee table; it slides, and hits the floor. She doesn't bother picking that up, either. Her eyes pin Ivan again. "After he'd escorted me to the door and driven away, I was feeling rather delightful, and I thought it would be nice to spend an evening with you, maybe laze around like we do when we're out of the country or at the lake, have a little fuck, and maybe you could even stay here for the night and startle poor Darya in the morning."

She's still standing. "Now, to answer your earlier question, it is almost never about what you want, and you rankle and thrash over that almost every moment I spend with you. Since you claim to want me to be happy so often it's like a Catholic crossing himself, and since you were such a mess from the moment you arrived, I did endeavor to be clear with you about how I felt, and how I wished the evening to proceed in order to preserve that bit of delight. If you will expend yourself enough to think of how regularly I attempt to tell and show you what I want, and how I want it, and what will please me, even when you balk or grow frustrated with your confusion, you may happen upon the realization that on occasion, your anger and displeasure is not due to some teasing obfuscation or inability to communicate on my part, but your own spoiled, rotten little person not getting what he wants, when he wants it, exactly how he wants it."

There's a brief pause there. "Now it would be unfair of me to call you selfish without admitting that this isn't a flaw you carry alone. I'm not angry because you chewed at my face or wanted me right away. I'm not even angry that once again, you snap whenever I ask you to stop being so demanding of me when I'm resistant. I'm angry because you act as though this is all so new. As though you've never once been asked to back off when I tell you to stop pushing. As though this isn't something you've promised to do better at again and again and again."

Hilary makes a dismissive gesture, as though tossing something back over her shoulder or batting away a fly. "And to answer your other question, I don't want anything from you right now. Stay or go as you please. I am annoyed now, and in no mood to stand here bickering all night over the same goddamn argument we always have."

Ivan

It's mindblowing that she's so fucking calm now. Or if not calm, then at least articulate. At least able to express herself coherently, in paragraph upon paragraph, when his mind is clawed to shreds. Somewhere in the middle of that, somewhere between your own, spoiled, rotten little person and unfair to call you selfish, somewhere in there he says:

"Stop."

And his eyes are still shut, as though he can't even bear the sight of her right now, as though she were a medusa petrifying in her beauty and wrath -- but his brow is furrowing hard now, pulling into tight creases as he says it again, "Stop. Stop. Hilary, just stop it."

Hilary

She doesn't hear that first 'stop', or she ignores it, or she revels in it because this is the word she tried to give him gently over and over:

Soon

I'm happy

-- which he ignored, and look at him now, look at him. It would be nice to say that Hilary is too kind for that, that Ivan is different enough and special enough that where he is concerned all of her warped senses realign and make sense and she can be gentle, yes, she doesn't take pleasure in suffering, no, she's human, she's something. It would be nice, but that isn't how things are. A part of her smirks on the inside and gloats, revels in his misery like she's a predator and it is hot, steaming blood trickling down her throat, yes.

But it would be far too awful to say that that is all she is. That there aren't other parts, just as broken, that are confused, that are horrified, that are shaken and even parts that are hurt, because doesn't he understand, couldn't he tell, she just wanted to be sweet to him for once. Have coffee and lounge around the apartment and eat donuts. Tease each other. Make love, like that's a thing, like that's a real thing they could do, that anyone could do, and didn't he have any idea that she was doing that for him, that she wasn't willing to give up her brief delight for the kind of raw, rough, dominating sex he wanted but still, still.

He was so hard. And touching himself, wanting her so badly. And why couldn't he see that that was part of why she came to him on the couch? What is wrong with him. Why is he so stupid.

So it all circles back around and around to anger, every emotion she tries to feel. Every drop of hurt, every ounce of confusion at how they ended up like this, and it comes back to that endless, bottomless wrath that breaks apart everything else. Sometimes she thinks she might even love him, and love Anton, and that she could really do it, she could go visit the baby and hold him and play with him and they'd all be so happy wouldn't they

except. That turns back into anger, too. And she sees things in her mind she'd rather not see, things she can't say to anyone, least of all Ivan, he wouldn't understand, and he probably wouldn't forgive her for those fantasies either, and then

she's angry at him again, for failing her. For never understanding her. For reminding her, for all his closeness, how goddamn alone she really is.

It's the second and third times he says it, Stop, very close together, that she stops. The words I'm not even angry that -- fall dead on her lips, and she looks at him in vague bewilderment, a little lost because her oration was cut off. She blinks, staring at him. She doesn't ask 'what' or 'what's wrong' or lambast him. But she does stop.

Ivan

And that's the crux of it, isn't it. That for all the times she can seem almost human, all the times she's almost a real woman, almost a whole person, all the times she's almost warm and almost tender and almost close to him, almost knows what love is and how to share it with another living thing, all the times she's almost almost almost something --

for all that, she's not. She's irreparably broken. They both are, and she's had so much more damage to break under. She's had so many more years to shatter over and again, to fall away from what light there once was. And now sometimes a little bit of her can drift together, long enough to fool him into thinking maybe, maybe he can love a thing like her and not be ruined by her. Not be dashed to pieces the way she destroys everything else that comes into her orbit. Maybe he can be with her. Maybe he can help her hold herself together.

But it's so exhausting for her, and she can't keep it up, and in the end the only constants are her anger and her incomprehension. He suspects she never quite understands why the people around her break so very easily.

"You're cold, Hilary," he says at last. Softly. "Sometimes I think I see warmth in you. Sometimes I think you almost care for me. Once I even believed you loved me. But it's all gone in an instant and then nothing matters to you. Nothing touches you, and you break everything around you.

"I can't ... do this. I can't go to dinner with you and the insane thing that owns you; I can't watch him stake his claim on you with every word out of his mouth and then pretend it never happened. And if it's not him it's someone else, there's always someone; it'll never be me. Even if there's no one else, I can't keep ahold of you. You always drift away and then you're so...

"...cold."

A pause. Quieter still, then:

"You don't even see the difference between want and need. And I'm sorry if I was too aggressive for you, I'm sorry if I ruined your happy little night. I wanted to be happy for your sake. I'm not. I'm fucking miserable. I needed you close to me. I needed you with me. I needed you, and all you saw was selfishness."

Hilary

So she's standing there, in her black bustier and her black half-slip, her hair more disheveled than it was before, her cheeks more flushed, her head tipped a bit to the side. She stares at him until he manages to speak, and some women would flinch, pull away, walk away, cry, lash out. But 'cold' doesn't surprise her or bother her. He says it again and again, all amounting to the same thing in the end, and the only time she even seems to react is when he says he once even believed she loved him. Her brow almost furrows.

As he goes on she looks out the window instead of at him, her head turned and her eyes watching the glass. For a moment she imagines snow falling outside, and wonders what that will look like, come winter. Won't it be lovely.

Ivan tells her what she is, and sums up their relationship one way, when she knows that in an hour he might sum it up another way. It's never really mattered. It doesn't really matter now, either. But at the end, she turns to look at him when he says he wanted to be happy for her sake, and he wasn't, he was fucking miserable. "I --" she almost interrupts again, but he's still talking, so she presses her lips hard together and waits.

"I didn't ask you to try and be happy," she says, her voice low. "I just wanted you to be here with me, miserable or not. But," she says, shrugging one shoulder, "that clearly that wasn't going to be enough unless you were grabbing my throat and mounting me. I'm sorry I wanted to be close to you in a different way for once," she apologizes, crisp and vengeful, coolly and remorselessly passive agressive. "So will you be swearing that we're just ruining each other and that there's nothing to me, and nothing to us, before you stalk out the door? Or would you like coffee first?"

Ivan

"You don't even know," and this is sudden, snapped, his head coming up in a viciously smooth arc - despair to anger in the blink of an eye, "what I wanted. You shut me down before I could show you. So don't fucking assume I wanted to brutalize you."

A beat. Then he relents a notch -

"And no. I'm not pretending there's nothing between us. There's something there. I just don't know what it is to you." It's not much of a relenting; his anger mounts again. "So why don't you tell me, Hilary. What the hell is there to us, that you can stand there and rip me to shreds? What do you feel for me? What am I to you?"

Hilary

"I told you," she says, her voice a little too level, which to him makes it heartless, "at the lake."

Ivan

"Tell me again," and god, they can be vicious to each other; neither of them will give a single inch, "because I don't believe you anymore."

Hilary

Her head tips. "You won't believe me if I say it again and again. You don't believe me having heard it before and believing it once. And we end up going in circles all over again." She's still a moment, then she turns away. "You know what I am. What I can be and what I can't be. And regardless, you paint me according to whatever you feel at the time. Tonight you've decided I'm heartless, and cold, and 'ripping you to shreds'. I don't see that there's anything I can do to change that other than becoming whatever you want right now and hoping I fake it well enough to fool you."

Hilary is at the tray, bending now to lift it again. "I was happy. I wanted you to be here with me while I was happy. That's all. That's what you are to me. But now I'm not happy, and I'm sick of this argument again and again, and I don't care if you stay or leave anymore."

Ivan

She doesn't quite get around to lifting the tray. She bends; she reaches for it and he reaches for her. His hand catches her wrist. That grip is sudden, and then it gentles. His fingers slide down to hers. He's not looking at her; he's looking at her hand in his, and she's right about one thing, she's right about how fucking changeable he is, how inconstant, how quickly he changes his mind.

Perhaps they're both guilty of inconstancy. Neither of them can hold on to who they are for long.

"I don't want to go," he says, low. "I want to stay. Let's not argue anymore, okay? Let's not talk anymore. We can talk later if you want to and I'll try to explain; we can try to sort this out. But just ... come here, for now. All right?"

Hilary

What she expects is for Ivan to get up and leave at that. Because, after all, isn't that just the crux of it: she says she started out feeling one way and wanted him here, now she feels another way and doesn't care. That isn't what Ivan does, and he reaches for her hand instead. Hilary flinches away, dropping one edge of the tray. Cream sloshes across a napkin, a donut rolls to the ground, the sugar bowl jostles but -- surprisingly -- doesn't tip. The coffee carafe is too heavy to care much what happens.

Normally she likes it when he does what he's been doing all night, but there have been other times, times before now, when Hilary has been repulsed by the same treatment. And Ivan says he never knows what to do, and all is well and good if it's what she wants, but if she resists it's like the world just fell apart and he's so angry, so frustrated, wanting to know what the hell she wants from him, as though she's just slapped him across the face by stiffening or drawing away.

Small wonder she wasn't entirely sure, during that brief discussion that got close to the topic of safe words without ever quite getting to it, that pulling away from Ivan would be very useful to them. He doesn't like it when she resists him, as though she wouldn't resist him unless she hated him, unless she didn't care for him at all. She wouldn't say this, not that unless it were dire, unless she loathed him for not reading her mind. And Hilary, even were she far more sane, would not be able to comprehend this in him.

She flinches away, and expects the sky to crack in half again. Or maybe he was berated enough, maybe he's worried enough about losing her forever that he'll relent, maybe instead of raging he'll tuck his tail, because it's rare that she sees the middle ground between the two, particularly in any son of Falcon.

Hilary looks at him, unafraid, though she is waiting for what he'll do. She doesn't stop him from holding her hand, or touching her fingers, but that first reach, that first grip -- she flinched.

"You can stay here," she says to him when he's done, as though he were asking her permission to not be cast out. "But I want to walk away from you," she goes on, her voice quiet but not soft, "if you can just...live with it for a minute. Because I don't want to be that close to you."

There's a beat. "For now."

Ivan

She drops the corner of the tray closest to him. He lets her go as though scalded. His silence is tense, but she's not afraid. She asks for not very much at all. She asks for a little time, and he, for once, relents.

"Okay," he says quietly. And after moment of thought, "If you don't mind, I'll take a shower."

Hilary

There are nights when she thinks of dancing with him. Not just the evening out across the Atlantic when she rested her hands on him, one on his shoulder and one cradled in his palm, as they waltzed across a floor half-full of people far older than either of them. Every arch of her body was lovely that night, even the bend of her wrist, the lengthening of her neck as he spun her out, not a trace of it reckless or uncontrolled. He could see, for the first time, what it means to be over-precise, to be too perfect as a dancer, to be marked down in competitions for a lack of passion or freedom in the movement.

But she thinks of dancing with him to strings, to music that aches, choreographing as she goes, and in this imagining he knows all of the steps. It's an idle thing to think about, dancing with him. He's very graceful, himself. Dion isn't, not in the same way. Nor was her first mate, who remains nameless, though he was better than Dion and had been taught from youth how to dance properly with a woman.

Hilary does think of him sometimes. More often than she used to. She wonders about the what-ifs that stem from the first: if he had not died. She would likely still be his mate, and nannies would be raising their children, and she would go on riding her horse across his estate, hiring and firing cooks on a monthly basis. She wonders if she would cheat on him. She never did when she was with him, but they were out in the middle of nowhere. She wonders, though, if she would have gone to find some fine young bucks to pleasure her. She wonders if she would have needed to. She thinks about dancing with him, too. His face and Ivan's face warp together and apart. Sometimes Ivan looks like her brother, and sometimes all this does is lead her thoughts to Anton, who was so very small and who evolution determined should look like his father at birth, only more like his mother as he grew past that first, security-defining instant of paternal recognition.

Hilary shakes her head: she doesn't mind. She picks up the tray again and deposits it in the kitchen, but does nothing else with it. She doesn't even go to check and see if the cream spilled on the carpet. There are donuts on the couch and floor. She doesn't even empty the coffee carafe. What Hilary does is walk away from Ivan, and when he gets up to cross the bare floors and enter her bedroom to go shower in her bathroom, she lets her mind wander.

Her bedroom is unchanged. The bed is made, everything is pristine white. The light overhead is not off; it rarely is. It is a dim, pale blue. Her bathroom is equally tidy, makeup and hair products tucked away neatly here and there, a robe hanging on a hook beside the shower, fresh towels rolled into baskets ready for use. The water comes on and it's already hot.

In the kitchen, Hilary reaches up and slides her comb out of her hair. It skitters on the countertop where she tosses it, careless despite its cost. She undoes the pins that keep her hair done up and lets it all fall, a chaos of dark curls that smell of her shampoo and of hairspray, shortened by the iron to dust her shoulders. She shakes it out, runs her fingers over her scalp here and there to loosen it, to relax where the hair pulled at her skin to achieve that Look. She leaves the pins with the comb, and after a moment or two of leaning against the counter, she walks to her bedroom.

Hilary hears the shower running but doesn't walk that way. She enters her closet, unclasping and dropping her bustier, dropping her slip. Ivan can't see her from where he is; she can't see him. She doesn't look. What she does is open a small drawer in her dresser to take out a pair of cotton panties that are, all the same, sinfully soft. She steps into them, draws them up, closes the drawer and opens another one.

When she walks back out into the apartment proper and then to the kitchen, Hilary is wearing a pair of dark blue satin shorts trimmed in lighter blue. Her top matches it, a short-sleeved button-up that has an extra fold of lining inside so not even the thread from the buttons' fixtures rubs against her precious skin. She should shower. Rinse off the night, and Dion, and wash her hair, and clean her face of makeup. Maybe later. She twists all those messy curls into a bun, and a particularly wild-looking one, and pins it in place with the same pins that were there earlier.

Hilary washes her hands. She lifts her apron -- plain, and black -- from its hook inside the door of the pantry, and loops it over her neck, ties it around her waist. Out comes the tomatoes, the board, the knife. It's a very nice knife, and she knows the last time it was sharpened, and what she has cut with it since then. She knows her knives as well as Ivan knows his own. Perhaps better; he doesn't have to eat what he cuts.

When Ivan leaves the shower and then leaves her bedroom, Hilary is chopping small yellow tomatoes to the same small cubes as the bowl of chopped red tomatoes already done. She works quickly, and glances up only briefly when she notices him out of the corner of her eye. Her attention goes back to her chopping. There's something mindlessly meditative about it, something incredibly familiar to her.

Ivan crosses to the couch as she's mixing different-colored tomatoes together, sits down as she's putting used utensils and dishes into the sink to wait for her maid. A new board, a new knife, the open and close of the fridge, and soon the smell of basil fills the kitchen, the apartment, his nostrils. He falls asleep to the steady thunk of her knife, and his half-asleep thoughts add the scent of garlic to the basil, the tomatoes. Then: bread, toasting. It's a half-gone loaf of ciabatta, but Ivan doesn't know that, and it likely doesn't matter.

When he wakes, it's a long time later. It's deep into the night -- three am or four, his body tells him, those senses that also tell him how to find north, how to find

her.

It's very dark. Hilary has turned off all of the lights now, and only the city gives some illumination to the interior of the apartment. She's sitting on one of the barstools at the long kitchen island. There's a round black platter in front of her with six bias-cut slices of bruschetta arranged like petals of a flower around a central bowl -- which is pewter, from the look of things, or brushed steel -- filled with tomatoes and basil. The handle of a small spoon is sticking out of the bowl. It's been long enough now that the oven is cool again, the bread is cold. Hilary is sitting there in her short pajamas, her hair undone again, one arm flat on the counter and the other cocked, her chin resting against the heel of her hand.

Her eyes close and open in a slow blink, but she doesn't move. She doesn't know he's awake now.