you like me.

wolfman

Wolf leaves at half past five. Tugs on his bike boots and pulls on his bike jacket, crams on gloves and a helmet, slams out the door. It's not an angry slam. Just enters and departs like that, thoughtlessly forceful. Motorcycle engine grumbles to life outside and fades down the road. Only one of its kind in this area. Few bikes there are are custom Harleys and pricey superbikes, garage-pampered, mostly put away for the winter by now.

Wolf comes back at quarter to midnight. Keeps his word. Maybe he doesn't want her to worry, think he's dead. Maybe he just gets tired after so many hours of hunting. Either way headlights wash across the front windows. Engine dies. Footsteps up the walk, then the door thudding open.

Smells like wind. Smells like night. Smells like blood, too. Wolf stands in the entryway tugging his helmet off, massive and faceless in his gear. Then he has a face, but he still looks massive, all shoulders and arms, chest and thighs, big feet in heavy boots that he kicks off into the closet. Door slams shut, jacket ends up lopped over a dining chair. Girl's still awake, he sees. Reading on the couch.

"What. No more 80s night?"

Tosses that one-liner off on his way up the stairs. Doesn't really wait for the answer. Thumps his way into his bedroom, where his shower runs. Wolf washes the hunt off his skin.

witch

It was odd, that he told her when he'd be back. Hunts are over when they're over. Odd that he told her anything at all. Odd that he didn't just go, odd that he --

well. She thinks it odd.

The movie finishes, and she flicks through channels a while before hauling herself up. She thumps upstairs and starts dumping her dirty bedlinens over the hallway railing, watching them flutter and flump to the ground below. She hoots and laughs happily while doing so, all on her lonesome. Then she thumps back down and goes to do laundry. Snacks, while the washing is going. Eats almonds from the pantry, sitting on the kitchen island. She decidedly does not clean up the dining table or the kitchen. She cooked, dammit.

After a while she turns the television back on and watches some baking competition, which makes her hungry for sweets. She finds a half-eaten bag of caramels in her own luggage and sucks on one as she changes out the laundry, puts sheets in the dryer. While the dryer thumps she goes through Rafael's bookcase. Flicks through several books, finds nothing she wants right now, and then goes outside.

In his back yard, she smokes a cigarette. Slowly, luxuriously. She leans against the side of the house, looking up at the stars. It's cold. Her legs aren't bare but may as well be. She closes her eyes, feeling the moonlight, and puts her hand on her inner thigh. Her mind wanders and a soft tingle moves underneath her skin all the way up her body and across her scalp. Devon sighs. Puts out the cigarette, leaving yet another little scorch mark on Rafael's back stoop. Stays outside for some time after that, though, reading the stars.

She determines, after some measure, that he will come back alive and unharmed.

The dryer buzzes. And she makes the bed in the second room again, all fresh. She cracks a window to let fresh, cold air in. She brushes her teeth and gargles with purple Listerine from a travel bottle she -- admittedly -- shoplifted. Or was given. She can't recall. It's mouthwash, and its stories don't matter much to her.

Taking a book, she goes downstairs. She opens a bottle of wine, some Malbec from his cabinet. She pours it into a glass this time and carries it to the living area, setting it down without a coaster. Slips out of her boots when she thumps onto the couch with her book, which is paperback but thick, and calls itself a Complete Encyclopedia of Spirits. And by the time he comes back, there she is: curled up on the couch, reading her book, drinking his wine. She's not on her first glass.

Hears his bike. Her heart rises in her chest, lifting like it lives in a hot-air balloon. She makes herself keep reading, flips a page even, but the words aren't sinking in. She feels a little thrill when she hears him coming inside, and sets her glass aside, and her book is slipping off her lap when he comes in the door.

Up, and running, and bounding onto him again. Perhaps onto his back, this time, if he doesn't turn in time to catch her.

wolfman

Some time after the wolf leaves, his people show up. Well; the cook shows up with dinner. The driver presumably drove him. James: for all she knows that rat bastard has been skulking around the whole time.

They leave her alone. She doesn't even really see much of them. In due time, they leave again. By then her movie's over and she's examining the books on the narrow, tall shelf. Decent reads there, even though the selection is a bit sparse. Some of them look well-read, though perhaps not by the wolf. A lot of nonfiction. Biographies and histories and the like. A couple novels that fall easily under the classification of High-Brow Literature.

--

"Uff."

Wolf gives sort of a disgruntled little grunt as a flying witch lands on his back. It's half-hearted and he doesn't really mean it. Certainly doesn't push her off, at least. Which is good, because then she'd fall down the stairs and crack her head open.

Footsteps turn even more thuddy with her weight added to his. Wolf doggedly drags the both of them upstairs, wrapping his big hands under her thighs halfway up and giving in to piggybacking her. In his bedroom he stops by the lightswitch, tilting her that way until she gets the idea and flicks it on.

First time she's seen his bedroom lit up unless she really has been snooping. Either way, not much new to see. Same blank walls. Same sparse furniture. Same big bed, comfortable as hell. That's where he heads, dumping her unceremoniously onto the comforters.

"Gotta shower. Shouldn't even touch me right now."

witch

Devon avoids them. She watches when they're near. She frowns at them. There's that look again. Not the withering one, but one of warning that she hasn't used with Rafael. It's a stay-away look. It's bright colors on a prey animal. It's a signal not to eat, this one is poison.

He is not there to ask her if she dislikes them. If they should stay away. Or why, if the answer is yes, she doesn't want them around.

--

What she determines from the bookshelf is that it is not Rafael's. This is a snap judgement, and possibly wrong, but she doesn't think they're his. She moves on.

--

She grabs hold of him, thighs on his waist and arms around his shoulders, clinging. Easier to do this from the front than the back, really. But he doesn't drop her. She puts her chin on his shoulder, laughing lightly as he insists on going upstairs anyway. She turns her face toward him and presses her nose beneath his earlobe for a moment. Just a moment.

Devon refuses to turn on the light. She grins, knowing what he wants, but won't. She doesn't even play dumb about it.

One way or another, he dumps her on his bed. And she flops there, in those stockings with their pattern of opaque black on sheer black. She sits up, one foot tucked under one knee, smiling at him. "Right," she says. "You smell terrible."

Which could be true. Could be teasing. She grabs hold of his hand, though, tugging him back. Tugging him toward her again.

wolfman

Frown flickers across his brow. "Devon." He's serious. "Later."

This much, though: he doesn't push her away this time. Just stands there, resisting, and waits for her to let go.

witch

She stares at him a moment. And staring, her teeth end up going on edge a bit. Her brows tug together a little. "Right," she says, letting go.

wolfman

Released, wolf starts to walk away. Pauses, though. Turns back.

"I got blood on me." Saying this isn't an act of aggression, but of explanation. "Guts. Taint, maybe. Just don't think I oughta get any of that on you." Pause. "Be back in five minutes. Okay?"

witch

At least she's not up off the bed, storming out, slamming or even firmly shutting his bedroom door. She just leans back, letting go, but: even though her body is sitting right there, her eyes are dashing away. Looking in them he can see something dashing off through the trees, rustling the underbrush in its vanishing. Gone already.

Blood, guts, taint.

She shrugs. Is quiet.

"It's my choice. I'm not that delicate."

But that can't stay, this time, for some reason. That stillness, that ease, that strength that somehow turns soft, slips from between her fingers. Her brows tug together, oddly pained. "And you like me."

wolfman

"I do."

Might be the first time he's admitted anything like that. Comes so anticlimactically: no buildup or anything. Just says it. While he's backing away toward the en-suite bathroom, no less.

"That's why I'm gonna go wash first." He flicks a light on: the bathroom one. "Five minutes," he says again.

witch

It's the wine. Why she leapt on him again, and why she's here now, looking at him like he's hurting her, or:

letting him see that it hurts, somehow. Or:

letting it hurt.

It's just the wine, tearing her guard down, which for some reason she thought might be a good thing, like it was in the way, like this would help. It just makes her feel even worse, sitting here on his bed while he resists, and says Later again and being so pitiful, so pathetic, as to show him --

Devon sighs. And says nothing, and does nothing, and he's backed himself into the bathroom by then and gone off to wash. Somehow even the admission that he does like her is a sour thing now, just another morsel of discomfort and self-pity. She lets him go.

--

Five minutes later she isn't sitting on top of his comforter. By now perhaps he's come to expect things like that. But he can hear her, if he pauses a moment. Find her, too, if he just looks outside his bedroom door. She's sitting a few steps down the stairs, hand fiddling with a post on the railing, legs tucked up. She's talking on the phone, quietly. She sounds strangely young, though there's little change in her voice. Listening, though, mostly. To someone else.

wolfman

On his end, wolf's frustrated to see her looking at him like that. Like she's hurt. Like he's hurt her. Wolf doesn't understand why she doesn't understand. Equation is simple enough for him: he's dirty, maybe tainted. Doesn't want her to be dirty, maybe tainted. So he's going to wash. It's just five minutes.

Neither of them have the words to bridge the gap. To explain properly. Soothe the hurt. They part, and they separate, and he goes into the bathroom and pulls his clothes off. Leaves them in a heap. Steps into that pristine box of a shower with its meticulously polished fixtures, its smooth sheets of stone, its flawlessly clear glass.

Water runs. He soaps and scrubs until his skin is pink. Steps out just about five minutes later to find the girl gone.

Bedroom door busts open like he's about to charge down the hall to find her. But then he realizes: she's sitting on the steps. He's wearing a towel. He tucks it tighter around his waist and goes to her, the steps vibrating behind her and then under her. Wolf sits down, all wet hair and damp skin and heat. Girl's talking on the phone in a language he doesn't understand, though maybe it's the language she was using when she cussed him out that one time. He could tell she was cussing him out even if he couldn't understand it.

Wolf just sits next to her, saying nothing. Waiting for her to get off the phone, come upstairs.

Come to bed, maybe.

witch

There are Garou out there who do not know what to make of her when they encounter her. To sense what she is in their bones, to feel her purity flickering in their minds like images and memories but to be unable to place her by scent. There was a blind metis once who thought her a manifest ghost, nearly attacked her til he was restrained. He was beaten ferociously for it by his packmates. Perhaps they were just looking for an excuse, though. Metis, after all. They certainly weren't doing it to defend her; she preferred the howling of the blind omega to the looks they gave her, the suspicion in their eyes, the unspoken questions. Plenty have thought that her scentlessness covered a taint too spectacular to be sensed, too deep to be recognizable, or so strong that it had to mask itself.

Rafael hasn't mentioned it at all. She's wondered if it has anything to do with some of his moments of distrust and sheer cruelty. Doesn't wonder that anymore though. He hasn't said a word but she's felt him seeking her out, rubbing his face against her trying to find her, inhaling the air around her as though her scent were merely elusive, and not missing. Even then, he didn't say anything about it. He didn't shove her away, growling, convinced that she was some evil thing, something not living, not breathing, not real, not a part of their people. He dragged her down, instead. He fucked her. Let her into his bed.

And keeps pushing her away when she's at her happiest to see him, her most eager to be close to him. Keeps saying Later, which crawls under her skin with barbs and hooks of displeasure and affront. And that think about it thing downstairs. What was that?

--

Out on the stairs, she's speaking in that language she used to cuss him out. She sounds like a girl, when normally she does not, no matter what he calls her in his mind. She's futzing with the railing still, picking at it with a nail anxiously or idly or mindlessly while she talks on the phone.

She doesn't glance up when the door opens so forcefully, but her spine tenses. She takes a breath, and says something on the phone.

He comes over, and walks down and sits beside her. She does glance at him then. He can hear the voice on the other end, speaking the same language: rich, warm, female, older. Speaks faster than Devon does. Speaks so earnestly. Perhaps not being able to understand the words makes it that much easier to hear the adoration underlining them. The protectiveness. The embracing love. The encouragement. Perhaps.

Devon answers the person on the phone, but she's looking at him. She turns her eyes away, and then she leans against him, even if his side is damp, resting her head on his shoulder or his arm. Murmurs something else over the phone. He can hear the wrapping-up, the closing, the softness of it. She glances away at the last moments of the conversation, as though they are private, or at least: do not include him. She smiles a little, achingly, when she says goodbye. He wouldn't have heard tenderness in her voice, not before this. He does hear it now, when she says Tchau, mãe. Tenha um bom dia.

Taking the phone away from her ear, she taps the button to turn off the call. She sets her phone on her lap and looks up and over at him.

"My mum," she says quietly, though he hasn't asked. "It's morning, there." So far away, wherever 'there' is. Is silent a moment, looking at him like that. Like she wants, or knows she should, say a half-dozen things, but she resists all of them. Just sighs a little, and leans up, and kisses him on the cheek. "This isn't revenge either, all right?" she says softly, her mouth still close to his face, her brow to his temple.

Which does not make much sense, until she gets up, holding her phone in one hand, and turning to go upstairs. To bed. But not his.

wolfman

Girl's talking to her mom. Wolf knows that even before she tells him. Can tell by the tone of her voice, private and familiar. Can guess by the sound of the other voice on the line, female, older, loving.

Wolf wonders how he knows. Not like he ever had anything like that himself. Maybe he's learned by osmosis. Maybe it's wishful thinking.

Girl finishes the call. Thumbs the call button and puts the phone down. Her mum, she says. It's a puzzle piece, fits with the bloody hell. Just like tchau, mãe fits with the foreign obscenities she unleashed on him a while back. Wolf takes the puzzle-pieces, puts them away for later.

"I know," he says. Not I figured or I guessed: he knew. Morning over there, she says, and in his mind he pictures the other side of the Atlantic. England, maybe? Somewhere on the continent? He closes his eyes for a moment. Her brow to his temple. Her lips to his cheek.

Then she gets up, puts sense to her explanation. Wolf watches her go. Stands only when she's halfway down the hall.

"Night, Devon," he says. Seems like he's said that a lot lately. His bare feet on the steps. His bare feet on the carpeted hallway, and then padding into his room.