Ivan Press

Hilary de Broqueville

The last time Ivan saw Hilary, it was raining: late summer, days with saturating heat and afternoons, evenings with drenching rains. She was leaving him, and it wasn't because her husband was on his way or because Ivan had sent her somewhere. He did not want her to go and she was leaving anyway. Without servants, without a phone, with only the one suitcase: leaving him, leaving him, with no promise of when he would see her again or even if.

It is possible he tries to contact her from that time to this. When Carlisle comes that very night to pick up the rest of her things -- she takes the pots and pans from the little lake house, and why shouldn't she, they were a gift -- he might be accosted, her location demanded.

It is possible he would call her, but her phone was left crushed into glass dust and cracked plastic and a snapped SIM card on the floor by Ivan's own heel.

It is also quite possible that he simply found her. By scent, by blood, by rite -- tracked her down and looked upon her, just to know where the fuck she is, if she's alive, if the Greys have come after her again, if she's safe, for she is his. She is his alone.

Does not feel like it, of late. Does not feel that she is his at all.

--

Their tickets to Novgorod go unused. Labor Day passes, or had already passed by the time she left him; what is time to either of them? What are holidays, for the leisurely rich? And the weather turns cooler.

--

One day, she is outside of his penthouse. He walks past her on his way in, perhaps. Or maybe he is called, where he is on that uppermost floor or on the North Shore, because someone who works for him sees her there. Maybe he knows; maybe he has a strand of her hair wrapped around a stone or a coin and it pulls him in her direction always, always. Maybe it comes to him in a dream from Falcon that his mate and mother of his only son is near.

It is midday. It is cool, and the wind off the lake makes the whole city brisk. Hilary sits on some low wall outside the building, dressed in slim black pants that carve her out of shadow and prove that however traditional she may be, she is not blind to fashion. Her sweater is doubly draped, a thick knit of grey cashmere. She wears no jewelry but earrings, white-gold hoops beneath her long dark hair. Which has been recently cut to just below her shoulders. Which is straight and shining. It is cloudy, but somehow that only makes the sunlight sharper. She is wearing oversized sunglasses. Sitting on the little wall beside her is her bag, made of glossy black lambskin with a pale pink exterior pocket that looks not unlike an envelope. The large charm dangling from its handle is a large black O with three smaller letters: the D, the I, the R that were missing. Her shoes are high-heeled ankle boots in black suede, but they don't advertise their designer quite as obviously.

Hilary is smoking a long, thin cigarette. It's possible that Ivan has never seen her do such a thing before. And yet it looks so right between her fingers. She isn't coughing; she isn't struggling with the unfamiliarity of it. She smokes elegantly, as she does almost everything else in her life. Even the way she sits: her legs crossed, her torso leaning forward, free arm resting on one thigh. Her fingernails are French tipped. Her lipstick is neutral, but never once marks her cigarette.

She is waiting for him.

It's been weeks.

It's been weeks and he has not tried to call her. What's the point? He smashed her phone. He has not tried to weasel, bribe, or threaten her location out of her manservant. He has not tried to look for her. He has not tried -- though some days, some nights, it was hard to resist the urge -- to track her down.

He stayed away. He kept his distance. He learned his lesson, one might say, except Ivan Press never learns his fucking lessons. He goes on with his life: his flashy, outrageous, exorbitant, shallow life. He spends more time at the penthouse than he has in months. Since springtime. Since May. People think he must have been vacationing somewhere, living the good life on the shores of the Black Sea, the Mediterranean, the Caribbean, the the South Pacific. No one dreams that he's spent the last few months living a quiet little life with his mate, his love, the mother of his only child. No one dreams that he's spent the last few months fucking her, adoring her, guarding her, keeping her,

losing her.

No one would care, anyway. They only care that he's back, and so are those mythological parties of his: the crowds, the lines, the bare shoulders, the bare legs, the orgies in the bedrooms and the illegal substances on the terrace, the noise, the music, the lights, the notoriety and prestige of saying I was there when...

--

Those tickets to Novgorod go to waste. Ivan certainly doesn't go to see his infant boy all by himself. Labor Day and there's a cookout at his penthouse; some ten-thousand-dollar-a-night chef grilling on his terrace. Later on there are fireworks, set off the deck of hired yachts way out on the lake. Bursts of color and sprays of light reflecting off the water. He watches with a redhead on one arm and a blonde on the other, and he thinks

fleetingly

of Hilary standing on the deck of his yacht, wrapped in her shawl, wrapped in his arms, her face turned up to the last fireworks of the season off the Navy Pier. She was happy that night. It's so rare that she's happy, and rarer still that he makes her happy. Most days, he counts himself lucky if he doesn't ruin her happiness.

--

Summer draws to a close. The nights grow cool and the days are mild. The sun sets right down the east-west corridor of Chicago's streets, searing off the buildings, winking off the cars. Ivan lives just across the river from the Loop, just across Lake Shore Drive from River North proper. He lives on a priceless outcropping of land surrounded on three sides by water; at the top of a swanky, dark-glass highrise set apart by its location and luxury both. It's a modern-day castle, a post-millennial palace. It is flashy, outrageous, exorbitant,

and isolated.

There is a circular drive on one side of the building. An underground parking structure. On the lakeward side, there is a small, tree-shaded picnic area with access to the lakefront jogging trails. There, Hilary awaits him. She looks elegant, and arrogant, and untouchable; as anonymous and classic as a beautiful face glimpsed in the first-class compartment of some 19th century train.

She seems the exact opposite of what presently pulls up to the drive: a stretch limousine, so long it can barely make it around that circle, cream-white, sunroofs -- plural -- wide open, hemorrhaging music and laughter. The noise grows louder when the back door flings open long before the driver comes around to open it. A woman spills out. A girl, really; blonde, long legs and short skirt, wobbling on five-inch heels, a flute of champagne spilling over in her hand. She can't stop giggling. She's clearly, sloppily drunk, and she shrieks in delight as her escort prowls out of the limousine after her, seizes her around her waist, pretends to bite her neck. The last of her champagne splatters onto the pavement. Her friend lifts his head, grinning, turning to send the driver off, and

that is when he sees her or smells her or feels her sitting in the shade. Their eyes meet, Ivan's and Hilary's, or perhaps they do: it is impossible to tell through those sunglasses. He stares a moment. His eyes look golden in this light, golden as his hair, golden as the girl's skin. Add their ages together, Ivan and his special friend, and they'd barely be older than Hilary alone.

He murmurs something in the girl's ear. Then he releases her. She clings, manufacturing a pout; impossible to say if she's truly as silly as she acts or if she knows, if they all know, that that's what Ivan wants. From them, anyway. He unravels her arms from his neck, and meanwhile one of his people, one of Ivan's infamous Russians has stepped out of the limo's shotgun seat. Ivan's man takes Ivan's girl by the arm, gently and firmly, and leads her away into the building.

The limousine pulls away.

Then it's just Ivan, his smart shoes snapping off the pavement as he comes toward Hilary. His suit is a light gray, cut slim, a single button fastened. His shirt is pale lilac. No tie.

There's a picnic table near Hilary, but she sits on that low wall. Ivan drags a wrought-iron chair over. Puts it in front of her. A beat. Then he sits. His brow is furrowed. There isn't a trace of laughter in him now. He looks at her for a long time.

"You came back," he says. It sounds a little like a question.

Perhaps when Ivan sees Hilary, she looks elegant, arrogant, untouchable, anonymous, classical. Perhaps when a jogger passes by this is how she is seen. Perhaps everyone who passes her sees her the same way, but that

is not what she is. That is not how she looks to herself. She is dressed well, but she is bent over, resting on her legs, methodically and flatly drinking tainted air from that cigarette. She looks small, the way she sits tightly to herself, folded like she is, thin as she is. She looks wealthy and she looks alone. It is hard to tell, even for the most empathetic of passerby, if she is also lonely.

But how someone looks, how someone seems, is always to some degree a projection. And all projections are, of course, mirrors. Murky, dark mirrors with scratched surfaces, but mirrors nonetheless. People see what they want to see of someone else. Most often, without realizing it, they are looking at some version of themselves...

if only by seeing what they wish for someone else.

--

Perhaps Ivan sees her and thinks: elegant. arrogant. untouchable. anonymous. classic. beautiful.

Perhaps he sees, and she seems, and he somehow knows it is nothing more than a veil laid over her by his eyes.

It is unlikely he sees the mirror.

--

A limousine in mid-party mode is not what anyone expects to see in the middle of a weekday. People are working. People are slaving away at desks and computers and almost all of them are leased from Dell. That is why, even in a place as rich as this, there are not many people around to see that limousine with its sunroofs and music and laughter and champagne.

There is, in fact, only Hilary at the moment.

Her lips are closing softly around the filter of her cigarette as Ivan's momentary slut gets her neck not-really bitten. She breathes deep, and as he looks up, sees her, she is moving the cigarette to the side, exhaling. Smoke drifts up between her hidden gaze and his. Look, if you are careful: there are prophecies in smoke.

They are all prophecies of burning, though. They are all prophecies of endings.

--

Hilary is thirty-seven. It hardly matters. One of the seemings she is so often shrouded by is timelessness.

--

The usual kerfuffle, then: but the woman isn't escorted back into the limo to be driven to a bus station. She isn't poured into a cab; she's taken inside. Hilary does turn her head, glancing that way as one of the ubiquitous Russians takes her into Ivan's building.

Her head turns again, and Ivan is standing there, coming toward her.

Hilary's shoulders tense; her body lifts slightly from where she leans on her thighs. The motion is a small one, an arrest, like a fawn hearing a crack of a twig. There is no fear in that motion, only a readiness, a preparation. It's unlikely she even notices how her body reacts.

She waited for him. Now she watches him.

He looks at her. She smokes her cigarette. She has the decency -- the etiquette, the training -- not to blow the smoke towards his face.

And when he says -- asks -- what he does, Hilary gestures with her cigarette at the door to the building.

"So how many of them are you fucking?" she asks. It is blunt, point-blank, and it is not idle curiosity or passive aggression.

See her posture: bent over, drawn in, tensing. Flinching almost.

Or don't. See her beauty instead. See those fine angles and delicate planes; see her slenderness and softness and glossy hair and manicured fingertips. See the cigarette, which he has never seen before, though he himself has been known to occasionally indulge. Not since Hilary was pregnant, come to think of it.

See the way his eyelashes flicker when she asks him that terrible, blunt question. Too controlled to himself, himself. He draws a small breath; his eyes shade briefly as he looks toward the ground, the pavement, the cracks. Back to her. He takes a moment to try to read her, understand her, but whatever he sees does not change his answer. There is this at least: he doesn't lie to her, he doesn't placate or soothe or apologize or rationalize. He doesn't even make the attempt.

"I've lost count." A small pause. He knows how this sounds; how pathetic, how filthy, how bestial and intemperate, "The first was a week after you left. She's the third since Monday."

Once upon a time they promised each other fidelity. Sort of. Professed it and confessed it to each other, at least. Tried to.

"Do you want me to send her away?"

[LET'S SEE WAT HAPPUNS DIS TIEM. originul roll = 1 succ, w/ WP.]

Dice: 4 d10 TN6 (6, 8, 8, 10) ( success x 5 ) [WP]

[Hilary is not really anything right now. That's not her concealing anything. Her affect is just really low and flat.]

And she was pregnant a month after they met. They have been intertwined since then; they will never completely be parted, even by death, because of that. Because of Anton, they are the keepers of each other's darkest secret.

Ivan has lost count of how many he's fucking. Has it been weeks? Maybe just one or two. Maybe longer. Hilary is moderately aware of the passage of time, but she hasn't kept count. And that latest one, spilling champagne on herself, is only the latest.

She sets her lips again on the cigarette as he is asking if she wants the girl to go away. She watches him, and exhales to the side a few moments later. "I wonder what your maids are doing now," she muses. "Holding her hair back while she vomits, I imagine. Cleaning her up so she won't smell of her own sick while you..." Hilary drifts a hand, and it trails smoke, "pump away at her."

Hilary taps ash off the end of her cigarette. "Why?"

[okay, at the end there she's a little raw. her voice is pretty taut!]

Ivan looks away. It's shame or it's distaste or it's both. His gaze returns to her, though. Her question, her voice, brings it back.

"I don't know."

There's something deceptively light about that. Just words, flicked out there. He watches her smoke, finds himself longing for a cigarette himself. First time in a year and change. Could attribute it to her; something about addiction, toxins. Could blame himself. It's not that he can't resist temptation. It's that he doesn't even seem to try.

"Because I got bored, I suppose." He adds this a little later. He is leaning back in that wrought-iron chair; his ankle is crossed over his knee. Sat like this when they were in Novgorod, didn't he? At that cafe with their son in his stroller, her diamonds in her hand. The ones he bought for her. The ones he wanted to string from her nipples. Adorn her like a slave, a plaything, a goddess of fecundity. He thinks a minute; grimaces.

"Because I'm shameless. Because I'm faithless. Because I'm a fucking slut. Because I tried to wait for you, because you said you weren't leaving me, only the house, but I have no patience and no honor. Because after a day and a half I convinced myself you were off fucking a string of handsome, stupid, brutish boys, and after a week I convinced myself you weren't ever coming back, and I don't think I even believed myself but it seemed like a good excuse. Because fucking them made me forget about you. Because fucking them made me remember you. Because I wanted to fuck them, and I wanted to drink too much and drive too fast and capsize my boat and fly to Barcelona and fuck every girl that opened her legs in my direction, and it really had nothing to do with you at all. Because I always want to do those things, but when you're with me I could control it, or maybe channel it into what we did together. Because I love you more than anything, but the moment you step away even that isn't enough to keep me from ... "

He doesn't even have a word for it. Adultery doesn't cover it. Infidelity, unfaithfulness, faithlessness; now that comes a little closer. But it's bigger than that. It encompasses everything: her, his son, those aborted packs of his, the sept, the tribe, the nation, the war, the world. Your great failing, she called it once, delicately and euphemistically and perhaps even a little fondly. He can't retrace his steps; doesn't know how he went from that moment to this. Only that somehow, she was involved. Not that she is to blame, no; nor that she is even the reason or the impetus or the driving force or -- any of that. It's not like that.

It's like this:

she was the lynchpin, the crux, the tiny and fragile and thin hook that held his bones together, if only a little while. She was the blackness itself; the void and the singularity he gathered around, all the shattered and scintillating fragments of him that gave the mirage of being whole. She held him together against the terrible centrifugal force of his own greediness, his own inconstancy. She left, if only for a little while, and he flew to pieces.

Ivan is silent for a while. He is no longer looking at her. He is looking at the lake, pristine and deep and blue.

"Don't leave me." He says it the way she does. Soft and secret, like maybe if he doesn't acknowledge his own words she'll forget he spoke them; she'll think they came from her own innermost heart. "Okay, Hilary? Come back. Stay with me."

The last time Ivan was with anyone but Hilary, she was pregnant, and she had abandoned him to go live in Mexico, hiding from the world and its raking gazes, its reaching hands. A kinswoman of their tribe fell into his lap: pretty, of course, because they are almost all pretty. Younger than Hilary, with bigger tits. A virgin. He threw it all in her face when he saw her, only to admit that it meant nothing, he despised the girl for not being Hilary. And by conscious restraint or simple happenstance, he never had anyone else.

She did. Not her husband at the time, who stopped touching her while she was pregnant and stopped touching her after she failed to produce a living child from that pregnancy. But last year's Halloween, when he held her open for a half-dozen or more of his party guests to use her. And not so very long ago at all, when she crumpled in her utter lust for that fiend Oliver Grey, who aroused her so much with his easy disdain, his golden body, his unabashed cruelty. Who aroused her, indeed, with his mere interest, when Ivan had abandoned her.

To go to Barcelona, perhaps, and at least think about fucking every girl that opened her legs in his direction. To drink too much and drive too fast and capsize his boat, because he always wants to do these things.

And he does not always want to be around her. To be fair, however, that is exactly what Hilary asked him for: sometimes, to leave her alone. To leave her be, and let her live.

--

She has be foul of mood and mind -- particularly towards Ivan -- ever since that encounter with Oliver, if we are being honest. The last one, when he came at her on the docks, smashed her head into a railing, was quite nearly on the verge of ripping her to pieces or raping her or both. There has been an edge to her that Ivan has only seen glimmers of, because he can't stick around and play house with her all the time, and she does not want him to. But ever since then, ever since that experience -- and ever since the one that followed it -- the shadows around Hilary have hidden ever-sharpening barbs.

So maybe it was Oliver, and that is why she yelled at Ivan for being mean to her on Cielo. And maybe yelling at Ivan on her yacht had something to do with the way they made love, so strangely slow and strangely steady on the flybridge, a mating well and truly unlike any they've ever had before it. And maybe that mating has as much to do with her vicious mood as Oliver,

as Anton,

as Dion,

as Dominique,

as Emmerich,

as father, as mother.

It has been a slow downward spiral for her, and then he had her followed. And then it wasn't slow anymore. It was a plummet. A freefall.

--

Listening to other people has never been Hilary's strong suit. She gets bored; she sighs. She interrupts. She rolls her eyes. Sometimes she simply walks away. Ivan is no real exception to this, and her coldness even to him -- the one she loves, the one she worships, the one who seems to make her fucked-up little life worth living -- has always been a source of twisted fascination to him. She has treated him with no less contempt than Oliver Grey, or that houseless Italian Fang who drifted through the city at one point, or any of the boys she's played with, and yet she claims to adore him above and beyond all others. Perhaps he adores her in return because of that: he can never be entirely, completely, eternally sure of her devotion, can he? Any moment her caresses might turn to claws, her murmurs of love to spitting disdain.

Maybe that's all they are to each other. Maybe that's how they hold each other together: her cruelty keeps him interested. His abuse makes her whole.

--

Anyway: she listens to him. This time, at least. Listens to all of it, and doesn't roll her eyes or scoff or interrupt or sigh. She does look away, turning her head a bit and looking at the water instead of Ivan. The sun glitters on it. In some ways, in the middle of the day at least, it still looks like summer here. Even if it doesn't feel like it.

Which reminds her of Ivan.

He whispers the last. No explanation for his behavior, certainly no apologies for it. No justifications, really, no excuses. Perhaps some shame, but that's not the same as embarrassment. That's not even the same as guilt. In the end he just steps from all that -- all his answers to her -- out into the emptiness of begging her to please, please not leave him.

Hilary's eyes flick towards him, but they are covered by darkened glass, and he can't tell. But he can see the flicker of movement, her head almost turning to him. She doesn't permit it. She has finished her cigarette. She crushes the smoldering tip into the granite she sits upon, twisting it clockwise and counter.

"I didn't leave you," she says. "I left the house."

She says it again. Draws that distinction again: leaving the house, leaving him. It must mean it still stands, then. It must mean she's still

(his?)

here and willing: willing to speak, willing to listen, willing to suffer his presence, willing to let him be privy to her own secrets, shortcomings, fatal flaws.

The sun is bright and the lake is blue. Some late-season sailors are still out on the water. Their sails so white. Their silence so complete. Ivan watches them for a moment; watches Hilary for longer.

"Do you hate me?"

She thinks about that. There's the tiniest wrinkle of her brow above her sunglasses. She has flicked the truncated cigarette butt aside, done with it. There's a metaphor there, but it's too easy and too obvious. Say only: it is discarded, and it is forgotten.

"I don't know that it matters. I hate everyone," she says, without making a joke of it. Her brow has smoothed and she says it honestly: she hates everyone, more or less, at some point or another.

It's still remarkably easy to be angry at her. In spite of everything, or perhaps because of everything, his irritation is still there, a baseline sizzle that now sparks. He wants something to drink, now. He wants vodka, he wants brandy, he wants pure fucking ethanol. He looks away yet again. He looks at those serene sails, that distance, that sky.

"Do you still love me, then?" He says it like it doesn't matter; doesn't even care. "Why did you come back, Hilary? Why today, why here, why now?"

Without even trying, she knows it matters. She knows he cares. Hilary moved out of the lakehouse and he fell apart. His life swerved into chaos. Glorious, destructive chaos. Hilary doesn't have to understand or concern herself with normal emotion -- or even what passes for normal among the Silver Fangs -- in order to understand why. He loves her. He loves her more than anything. She's the dark, collapsing center of his universe.

Hilary watches him. She wants another cigarette, but doesn't open her bag to get one out and light it up. She would answer his question but he throws a four more at her, like shots or knives, like the flurry of slaps he might land on her body one night or another.

Like many of his questions today, she ignores them.

"I never left you."

She looks down, examining her fingernails. Her hair sweeps from one shoulder, falling forward along her cheek. Something of the motion is reminiscent of descending notes on a harp.

"We've been apart longer than this."

"Yes."

She's right about that. He gives her that. He's not entirely illogical, senseless, unreasonable.

"But not like this. This was different."

"Because I was angry at you."

It's not a question. It's an agreement, in her own odd way. And perhaps there's something in that: she says was. Or maybe it's meaningless. Maybe she's still angry at him. Maybe she's always angry, always hateful, and there's not really anything else in her except for some passing desperation, some horrible need, and that's the only thing that has ever kept her near him.

"Not because I was pregnant, or because you were tired of me."

And it doesn't matter if she says that without anger in her voice, without mewling bitterness. It's there all the same: it's a backhand. He's left her before, for weeks. Not because he was angry with her or displeased, not because he simply had to go away on business. He's left her simply because he couldn't bear to be with her, loving her the way he does, entrenched as he gets, without losing his mind. That's the reason they didn't, haven't, won't get married. Her reason, at least. If he really stayed with her, he'd come to hate her. But neither of them considered the possibility that the reverse might happen.

"Let's go upstairs," Hilary finally says, instead of yes of course I love you, you idiot or I came today, here, now because I can't go on with you, is that what you want to hear? or anything of the kind. She is rising to her feet, unfolding those long black-clad legs and standing, lifting her bag by the handle and carrying it beside her hip. "I'll watch you fuck her."

She's inflamed him, infuriated him, occasionally even baffled him, but he can't remember the last time she's actually shocked him. Not even at Halloween, when she put on that little white mask and took off all her clothes. Not even a few months ago, when she came to him one night and told him what she'd done.

She shocks him now. Ivan is shocked, and it's written on his face: the flash of a blink, the way he stares at her, blank.

"What?"

Hilary, smelling faintly of cigarette smoke and overwhelming of their shared, glorious ancestry, wafts a hand towards the building where her son was conceived, where she was the centerpiece of an orgy, where Ivan broke ranks and tried to give her a sable coat in front of everyone. She hasn't been here for quite some time, she realizes.

"Let's go upstairs," she repeats, as though this will clarify, "and I will watch you fuck that sloppy piece of trash."

He can't tell if she's angry. He can't tell if this is a demand born of anger; some bizarre way to get back at him. He can't tell if this is an even more bizarre form of forgiveness. He can't tell what she's thinking, what she wants, why.

He can't tell if he's aroused by the thought, or infuriated; humiliated.

"Why?" He hasn't moved yet. He hasn't even begun to get up. He is frowning at her, and he doesn't have the benefit of sunglasses to hide behind. "Why the hell would you ask this of me?"

[LET'S SEE WAT HAPPUN NOW. originul = 2 succ]

Dice: 4 d10 TN6 (3, 5, 5, 10) ( success x 1 )

"I'm not asking you," Hilary says, perhaps too quickly, too sharply.

"You brought her here to fuck her," and she assumes he hasn't already or the girl wouldn't be here, she'd be tired, worn, boring now. "You had her taken upstairs so you could fuck her. Seeing me here didn't change the fact that you're bored. Shameless, faithless, honorless. Seeing me didn't change that you want to fuck her and a hundred others like her."

Hilary has moved towards him, with those three words nailing down the things he most lacks. Small steps, slow ones. There wasn't much distance between them to begin with, and her shadow falls to one side of him. It covers part of his foot.

"You're a fucking slut," she echoes back to him. "And when you saw me out here, you wanted to make sure you still had at least one pussy to use in case you couldn't get me to stay with you."

She is staring at him. "I never left you." Somehow it sounds like she says released there, not left. "So if you brought that here to fuck, if you've fucked everything you could since the last time you saw me, if that's what you want, then I'm going to watch you do it."

[it's sort of both! she's angry at him but it's not overwhelming; there may be something else underneath it that's bigger. she's sort of daring him but there's an element of it that is more... calling his bluff.]

For a long second Ivan is still as a statue. Eyes bright as a hawk's. He stares. He pins her with his eyes, and if only she were more cautious, less bold, more sane, she would know to look away.

Then all at once he rises. It fluid; it is sudden. He uncrosses his leg and his feet are flat on the pavement and he is up, up and out of his seat, he is inches away and suddenly taller, suddenly and coldly seething, in her face.

"I am everything you say, but I am not your whore. If that's what you really want, if you really want to go upstairs with me and watch me fuck that giggling little girl into the ground, then I'll do it. For you. To make you happy. But if you're demanding this of me because you're angry, or because you want to degrade me, or because you're looking for a reason to hate me a little bit more, then fuck you. I won't do it."

"It's what you want," she says quietly. She doesn't back down; of course she doesn't back down. She would have to have a sense of self-preservation. "Or you would have had her taken away as soon as you saw me. You would have never brought her back here. You wouldn't have found so many excuses to toss the very thought of me aside.

"If what I wanted mattered to you, she wouldn't even be here. You wouldn't have --"

Hilary stops there. She breathes out through her nostrils. She takes another breath, inhaling and exhaling through her lips this time. Bright pink spots have appeared on those porcelain cheeks, her shoulders drawing inward, her body tightening, condensing, collapsing. "So don't tell me you'll do it to make me happy. This doesn't make me happy."

She seems to crumple on herself, and she takes him with her. Of course she takes him with her: she's the center of his universe, the gravity that holds him together. His shoulders draw together too. He folds his arms across his chest; bows his head and his neck and even that unbent, unbroken back. His anger deflates into misery. They stand like that a while, together-but-not, facing, not touching.

"I'm sorry," he says softly; it is a whisper. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry. This isn't what I want. It's just what I reach for when I can't have what I want, and I'm sorry. I have no excuse. It's just...

"It's how I am, Hilary." The words taste bitter. "I'm not... I'm not right, either. And this time it was different, when we were apart." He's skipped back, like a needle jumping tracks. A train jumping tracks. "It was different because this was the first time I felt like I needed you more than you needed me."

One moment she is moving her shadow over him, telling him that she never left him, and if he's going to do these terrible things, then she is going to watch. Because she never let him go. The next she is folding in on herself, endlessly, not diminishing nor shrinking but tightening up so completely that she becomes a singularity, a universe unto herself, as small as she can become.

One moment he is in her face, snarling, ready to overpower her, telling her fuck you, all pride and sorely tested rage. And the next he is falling with her, falling apart beside her, curling forward as though to protect the softest part of himself, as any animal would.

He is sorry,

sorry

sorry.

Hilary is staring at him still. She is holding her bag at her side; she is smelling of cigarettes. Her mouth tastes like ashes. And for all her faith in him, her fervent belief, her hopeless subjugation to his perfect will, you would think that when he says it's just how he is, she would scoff. Or perhaps be shocked. She would be disgusted by his little ploy for clemency.

But he is not right. And he admits it like that for the first time. He's always smirked before. There was never any shame in his madness, only a flippant dismissal of it, even if he called it by its proper name. Hilary understands those words, though, that soft euphemism. He knows she isn't right, and she demands his gentleness for it, his forgiveness, his understanding. He knows she isn't normal. He knows she's cracked in half, all that could have been good in her spilling out only to evaporate from existence.

Her mouth is turned down, her brow furrowed. She will never feel other people's pain as her own, only feel a strange discomfort to be in the presence of such pain. Normally she calls it boredom and escapes. Yet right now, facing his confession -- bitter as it is -- that this is how he is, that this is what he is, that he cannot help it for he, too, is not right, she does understand.

And she is quiet, for a time.

--

"Ya... ne mogu zhit'..." she whispers, and struggles, her brow furrowing as she searches for a word: "vne vas, Ivan."

The old pronunciation. The ancient way of saying his name. She takes a breath, exhales it.

"And if I could, I would not wish to."

[translateable russian: Я не могу жить вне вас .]

In an instant he comes to her, closer than he's dared to for -- what? Weeks. Months? Longer than he can remember, and longer than he can bear. He puts his hands on her face. He is not one of her stupid, arrogant, brutish boys; he does not have big stupid hands that smash and bruise. His fingers are long and lean and his strength, what there is of it, is wiry and lithe and sinewy, sinuous. In spite of all that, desperation and quiet, airless sort of passion makes him strong. His hands on her face are almost too forceful. He puts his brow to hers and runs his hands back, back through her hair, back through those recently-cut, glossy, merciless strands. Sometimes he thinks she wears her hair like this, straight, simply to be cruel. Sometimes he thinks that likely she doesn't even care enough to notice his preference, one way or the other.

Sometimes he almost forgets she cares. She loves. She needs. She is capable of these things, somewhere in that lightless and suffocating sarcophagus that once housed a heart,

a soul,

a whole, unshattered person.

Ivan wraps his arms around her now, gradually, as the furious silent stroking of his hands abates and gentles. He wraps his arms around her and though he is not large and brutish and stupid -- though he is arrogant -- he encircles her entirely. The circle of his arms spans her from side to side and front to back. He kisses her temple, her cheekbone. He bends to her shoulder and to her neck, where a little while ago he was pretend-biting that ridiculous drunken slut of his. He holds Hilary now, very tightly, and closes his eyes. Says nothing at all.

--

Upstairs, the situation is delicate and awkward. Ivan's ubiquitous, indispensable serving staff has seen that woman downstairs, smoking a cigarette in glamourous sunglasses, because of course she looks glamourous to them, icy and glamourous and very fucking French today, darling. They've seen her and so they've taken Ivan's ridiculous drunken slut upstairs; they've put a glass of ice water in her hand and showed her to the library, which is a calculated move. The library is not the great room, where proper upstanding guests might await their erstwhile host. The library is tucked away in the back of the penthouse. The library is just down a flight of stairs from Ivan's bedroom, where he might decide to -- how did he put it? -- fuck her into the ground. The library is not his bedroom, not even close, and does not carry the connotation of a deal done.

And that ridiculous drunken slut, who is indeed very drunk, and whom society may indeed term a slut, is in fact intelligent enough not to be entirely ridiculous. She has eyes. She could see. She saw the way Ivan stopped when he saw Hilary, grew still, forgot entirely about everyone and everything else. She saw, drunk as she is, willing as she was to tumble into bed with Ivan --

and for what? for notoriety, for prestige, for the infamy of bedding one of the city's preeminent bachelors? for secondary gains, for ulterior motives, for the strings and the ins and the connections and the doors she imagines him capable of opening; for those gifts and favors discreetly doled out by Dmitri or by Max in order to sweeten the deal, cushion the blow, prevent Ivan's former lovers from coming back with drama and tears and paternity suits and

god, he never even thinks of these things. Even the thought of thinking of these things gives him headaches. Bores him, bores him, bores him to tears. He lives his life; he breaks things. He pays other people to pick up the pieces. Except for Hilary, it seems. He breaks her, too. But he stays. He tries to put her back together again. When Hilary leaves,

she breaks him.

--

The girl upstairs finishes her ice water. A slice of lemon and a few crushed shards of ice skim the bottom of the glass. She stands up, she tugs her skirt down, she collects her little clutch and her dignity. She does not look at Ivan's pretty, demure little maids, and she does not look at gaunt-cheeked Dmitri as he bows to her. She pushes the button on the elevator and, while she waits, dials for a cab.

--

Downstairs, Ivan has already forgotten about her. He is still holding Hilary, who is arguably the one and only thing he cares about in the entire fucking world, though even that didn't prevent him from betraying her. He is holding her, and presently he opens his eyes, he kisses her shoulder, he lifts his head so he can speak into her ear:

"Let's get out of here. I don't want to go upstairs. Show me where you live. Let's go somewhere."

[jove you are so racist]

Not months, not that long. But longer than he can remember: certainly. The privileged and the luxurious live lives of leisure; they do not mind the passing of time the way that workaday people do. Longer than he can bear: absolutely. She kept him at arm's length or farther for some time before she left. She's been getting further away from him every day since she jilted Edmund Grey. Funny, that, since it was supposed to ensure her nearness. Her moving into the lakehouse was supposed to keep her safe, and keep her close to him.

Which is, of course, why she left.

Now he comes close and touches her face, roughly, but she doesn't resist this. She stands there, almost passively, while Ivan rests their heads together like the animal he is but forgets how to be at times. Her eyes close while he touches her hair, musses it, paws and pets at her hopelessly before he pulls her to his chest. Hilary, perhaps not surprisingly, doesn't wrap her arms around him and hug him in return. A hug is a thing that is given to you or done to you, and she has not really been taught how to share it without it being an act. These things that come naturally to all children are stunted in her.

So she is held, and she is kissed and stroked and kept very close indeed, and she permits it, which is itself terribly soft and terribly tender in comparison to the past several weeks.

--

It's entirely possible that the girl upstairs was going to fuck Ivan just to fuck him. Just because he is attractive and because she wanted to. Because sex is fun and being drunk in midday is fun and because the sex would feel good even without fame or motive or networking or presents. It's possible that even now that it's obvious he's not coming upstairs she's annoyed and drunk but not vindictive, as she wouldn't necessarily be vindictive after being dropped. It's possible that the sex, no matter how decadent or rough or good or bad it might have been, would have just been sex, picked up and then discarded as easily by her as by Ivan.

These things do happen.

But she does leave. She gives up, dignity regathered or never really discarded to begin with, and calls herself a cab. It's nice these days, not having to make sure you carry cash for cab fare anymore. They take cards, or withdraw from the connection to your Google account as you're whisked away by some Uber driver. If she does it right she can even get the hell out of here without having to see Ivan and whoever-that-is outside. And she won't ever have to know.

And she won't be used, shredded, humiliated, in the middle of whatever game those two end up playing with each other.

She is lucky.

--

"No," Hilary says, quite firmly, and for her there is little ground between firm and sharp, sharp and enraged. It would snap, but it falls like a hammer instead. No. "I'm not showing you where I'm living."

She is still, standing there with her bag at her side and her body effortlessly, thoughtlessly graceful. Her brow is furrowed. Her hair is mussed, thanks to Ivan. She doesn't attempt to fix it; she is not terribly fussy, all told, unless they're in a kitchen.

"Let's..."

Hilary exhales. This is hard. She is not practiced.

"Let's get... coffee."

Her chin lifts; and she looks at him through her sunglasses, her tone and her face wearing a mixture of diffidence and defiance.

No and the moment nearly shatters. Ivan's anger flares again; such a fickle, feckless, entitled thing. To dare to be angry now. To have the audacity, except of course he does.

His jaw flashes tighter. He lets go and then there is space enough between that she can look at him. He is close enough, and the day bright enough, that she can see the shadow of her cheek through the sunglasses. Her orbit; the delicate bones. Her eyelashes. She's gorgeous, a blind man could see that, but there's a brutality to her. She carves a line into the sand, and he feels it like it were his flesh.

She is not finished, though. She tries: coffee, she suggests, and it is a touch ridiculous. Ivan makes some small sound, like a laugh freeze-dried. "Coffee," he repeats softly. For a moment this could go any which way. That could be the set-up for some lashing, vicious comment. He might laugh at her, throw it in her face. He might --

but he doesn't. Maybe he sees it for the bridge that it is, thin and swaying though it may be. He lowers his head and he thinks about it and then he nods, once and then a few more times.

"There's a place not far from here. Did you drive?"

He doesn't dare. Ivan knows what it is to forgive, to relent, to be merciful. Ivan's love for her outweighs, at times, his own selfishness. It is rare to the point of vanishing that the same can be said of Hilary. He doesn't dare laugh at her, make snide commentary of her attempt to make an offering.

Right now, it's possible he knows that she would just walk away from him. Again. What a shame, what a disgust, to be slave to such a woman. To need her at all, when her need for him is so inconstant.

--

"I drove," she says quietly. "I can... meet you there."

This is how people talk. Normally, simply, easily. It does not come easily to her.

"It's called Dollop, on Ohio. Take your time."

And then Ivan says the unimaginable:

"I'm going to walk."

--

And so he does. He walks, wearing that sleek suit that no one would ever mistake for businesswear; waiting at the stoplights like the plebes, breathing petroleum byproducts amongst the masses. Suffering the roar of traffic and the press of the crowd, the sun, the wind, what heat there is left of summer.

It takes him about ten minutes. Fifteen on the outside. He'd told Hilary not to rush, but in truth, with traffic, with parking -- even of the valet sort -- it likely takes her as long, if not longer. She finds him awaiting her outside the sleek little cafe, his jacket slung over his shoulder, his tie tucked between the buttons of his shirt to prevent its flapping about.

He looks cool; refreshed. Doesn't look like he's been slogging along the streets like the peasantry at all. Now he's wearing sunglasses too, faintly retro ones that sit well on his narrow nose, lean face. He doesn't smile when he sees her, but -- god, there is a reaction, isn't there? Something about the way he stands, something about the way he breathes.

As though he hadn't just parted from her, he slips his arm around her waist when she comes near. He kisses her temple again.