pregnancy test.

Rafael

Summer's over and society's back in full swing. People are returning from their cruises, their vacations, their trips to southern Italy and southern France. So it's another dinner, it's another party, it's another charity and it's another suit and it's another speech that he's delegated to ... someone.

Someone's speaking right now. Maybe his someone. He can't even remember. He's at a back table, though that's not where his place is. They put him up front, the table of honor, next to a congressman and a state senator. He was uncomfortable there. He took an empty seat at the table closest to the kitchen, ate his steak and lobster, drank his wine.

He has his phone in his inner breast pocket, a lifeline to the rest of the world where people don't pay several thousand dollars for a seat at a table. He has a bid on something at the silent auction, which is something he never used to do, but -- it was some trinket, some shiny thing he thought girl might like. He never used to be such a fucking romantic either; makes him laugh at himself, ruefully, to think of it.

Applause and the speech is over. He looks up, hopeful, but no. Someone else taking the stage. Christ; interminable.

Devon

No one wants Rafael to get up and stand in front of people.

Stare at them. Talk to them.

They'll hear snarls, they'll see death in his eyes. Even if in truth, he would probably stammer, and not make eye contact, and glare at his notes in frustration that he has to do this at all. He's not made for it. That is what Silver Fang kinfolk are for. If he had a mate, a wife of breeding, she would do these things for him. People would admire them because they would admire her grace, her wit, his power. People would envy them.

But he does not have a mate, at least not an official one, and frankly: not one who is aware that he has designated her thus in his heart. And even if he did, there she is: she's at the back table with him, picking at her own steak -- which she asked for medium well, instead of medium rare like usual. Her hair is straightened, hanging to either side of her narrow face, her eyes ringed in dark smoky makeup as ever. Her eyes themselves are bright as ever.

She's not wearing the gold and silver dress that clings to her, plunges, the one she fucked him in during the auction at the Denver Art Museum over a year ago. Almost two? They are coming up on two years together, if one pauses to think about it. It's a long time. It's longer than either of them have ever carried on with a person. He bought her a mirror once owned by a queen, that night. He took her to the mountains after, and was afraid she would leave forever when they fought.

She's not wearing that short, short blue-grey thing she likes, and she's not wearing fishnets and slouchy Target-purchased Ugg knockoffs either. Not like she was the second or third time they met, and at first she thought he was into her, wanted to fuck her, but he seemed to really dislike her, so she didn't want to fuck him, and he stormed off and she abused his invite into a private party by putting drinks on his tab.

Not wearing that fluttery white thing he bought for her for some other gala, where they sat in back and she wanted him to donate even more, the most they would allow, because people had died. Were dying. Had lost everything.

Not wearing anything he's seen before. He doesn't want people to make fun of her. He likes when she uses his money, it seems: buys herself haircuts, hairstyling, makeup, clothes, cars here and there. She doesn't use his money that often, even now; ironic to say, when she lives rent-free down the fucking hall. Eats his food. Drinks his liquor. But then he'll ask her if she wants to go to one of these things and last time they had that conversation it seemed to bother him to think of people making fun of her wearing a dress twice in a row. So now when he invites her, she just spends his money without arguing.

Tonight she's not wearing something hyper-short, super-plunging. It's cooler at night, though not quite fully autumnal, though not quite fully chilly outside. Her dress begins in deep shades of orange, a burning sort of color, and fades into pattern, black and white and ornate at the skirt and the ends of her sleeves. It ends past her knees. She wears black ankle boots with it, with a rather high stiletto. There is a bracelet here or there, a pair of earrings, her hair smoothed to a satin finish, her lips dark.

Devon doesn't know he bid on anything. She's been distracted all night. She's been distracted, distant for several days now. She hasn't been coming to his room as much; it's been several nights since they last fucked. She almost seems depressed, but he's seen her depressed, and she doesn't eat as much and she drinks a lot and she doesn't bother much with her hair or wash her face before she sleeps.

Last night she did come to his room, crawling into his bed to sleep against his chest, holding him in warm silence. She was clean and quiet and not interested in sex. She just held him, and wanted to be held.

She isn't depressed. She's eating fine and hasn't even touched her champagne.

Rafael

Knows she's been different. Distracted and distant. Knows something's up but how do you even approach something like that? Well; someone else might just bring it up. Ask. Doesn't seem to have occurred to wolf yet -- or at least, he doesn't know how. So days go by and they don't fuck, they don't say much, he exists in the same space at her and he sometimes watches Netflix, he sometimes asks her what she wants for dinner. He sometimes goes out at night, but she knows he's not drinking or going out or looking for someone else to fuck.

She knows because he comes back sooner or later. Sometimes as little as half an hour, sometimes hours later. Sometimes he goes on foot, sometimes he drives, sometimes the blonde woman that's his alpha picks him up and drops him off, and those times there's another woman in the car, a girl really, younger than Devon even, red of hair and fiery of temper.

Comes back from those outings smelling like blood and garbage and offal and god knows what else. Comes back and goes upstairs and showers immediately, tosses his clothes right into the washing machine, turns it on. Never lets it sit. Comes back cut up and bruised sometimes, but not always. Last night there was a deep laceration on his arm when she came into his room, but they didn't talk about it, and he didn't want to talk about it. She didn't want to fuck. He didn't either, not really, except he did because he always does. Sniffs after her like a goddamn beast sometimes, before he catches himself, turns his eyes elsewhere, doesn't listen to her showering in her room thinking of her naked in the steam and the spray.

In the morning he was sitting on the sit of the bed, looking at his phone where there was a text reminding him: don't forget about the MacAfferty Foundation dinner tonight. That's when he asked her to come.

--

They're sitting in the back and he's done eating. She's finishing up. She has champagne. He had some wine. Glass is empty and he hasn't asked for a refill, hasn't been offered one. Everyone assumes he's unimportant because he's way back here, at a half-empty table where the unsold tickets were. He's fine with that.

Speaker's talking about where they're putting the funds this year. Calling out the major donors, and he's afraid they'll say his name. So he wipes his mouth and his hands, rumples the soft cloth napkin up in his hands, tosses it on his plate. Gets up and meets girl's eyes, nods her toward the exit.

Devon

Devon wants to fuck him all the time. She's said so. Early on; even recently. She groans it sometimes in his ear, whimpering as she's riding him or he's nailing her to the wall, the bed. Her fingernails dig into his skin and she tells him the truth: he's so hot to her. He's so fucking hot. Sometimes this is what she's moaning right before she comes, holding him with her arms, her legs, her body, her cunt.

Last night she came to his bed and she curled up next to him because he came home with a fucking gash down his arm and it was half healed by the time he went to bed but she ached to see it, know about it, her arm covering his body as she slept, her hand softly touching the edge of his bicep.

Come morning it was all but a memory. And she was there, sleeping in his bed, warm and scentless and fitful, and grumpy when he invited her to a benefit with no notice but acquiescent all the same. A little clingy. Stayed close, showering with him and eating breakfast with him and then taking a nap because even though she'd woken only an hour or two before, she said she felt tired. Worn out.

--

She doesn't look worn out right now. She looks gorgeous. She looks witchy, surreal. She feels his eyes on her even though she wasn't looking at him and glances over; she sees the way he notes, and her eyebrows perk, and then she looks anxious, and then she pauses blankly, and then she nods.

Her glass of champagne is full; she leaves it. She slips out with him, wherever he takes her: the back room, a bathroom, the car, the kitchen. She goes with him, because she hates speeches too. She hates being the center of attention, too.

Rafael

Anxious, that's a new one. He doesn't think he's ever seen her look anxious when he suggests ducking out of some boring dry function where you're supposed to be elegant and dignified, where the men are supposed to nod gravely and the women are supposed to smile, or gasp, or shake their heads in appropriate sympathy.

Someday someone needs to teach him how to appreciate these things. All the trouble you can get up to, all the shit that can go down if you're not stuck in the banquet hall with someone droning on and on. Or how to just turn the goddamn invite down, but graciously and generously, so that he doesn't keep wasting his time at them. Day hasn't come yet, though maybe he's starting to figure that out himself. Look at him sitting where he isn't supposed to be. Look at him sneaking out with his gorgeous, witchy girlfriend.

Not that he takes advantage of that either. Outside there's a hall, then a mezzanine, then a richly carpeted grand staircase down. There's a terrace; flutes of champagne, canapes, view of the skyline. Handful of people out there, smoking or enjoying the night; maybe avoiding the boring part of the evening. Wolf thinks about going home but then he remembers he still has an auction active, and he can't remember if he left his contact information or not.

Heads for the terrace instead. Reaches for girl's hand as he goes, not remembering to offer his arm instead. Night air's cool and he left his coat at the check. Still has his dinner jacket, which is enough.

"Been quiet," he comments. They stay away from the others. A couple curious glances their way, but no one comes over.

Devon

She'd tell him if she knew. She'd never been to a GALA before she met him and he took her to one, and she can't figure out why he keeps going. He fired the shitty staff; he got rid of the cruel stares in his own home. She knows from Christmas that he's trying; that in some way his mother's otherwise unknown legacy does matter to him, and he has no idea how to adapt it, or adapt to it. So she doesn't pester him about it. She doesn't complain. She sort of likes dressing up and being fancy sometimes. She

doesn't mind when he wants to escape. She sets her napkin atop her plate and scoots her chair back quietly and rises, slips away with her boyfriend, her hand falling into his. Effortless. Automatic, except that would imply a robotic coldness. It's more... magnetic. Their hands brush, they clasp, they touch. She is comforted.

Outside, a staircase, a mezzanine, and it's lush and palatial and this was the sort of thing left behind by lumber barons and the kings of westward expansion. There are tables of desserts and champagne and snippets of food. Devon glances at them and away; she closes her eyes for a moment and then feels a tug;

they go to the terrace instead, outside, where the night is dark and the moon is waning thin and there are only city lights and stars. She opens her eyes at that first tug to follow him, and doesn't notice if he forgets his manners. He doesn't offer his arm; she wasn't looking for it. She's not that girl. She doesn't know her manners very well, either.

--

It's cooler outside, but not cold. Her sleeves are long. She is looking at the city spread out around them, and then she looks at him when he comments.

"What do you mean?" she asks, soft.

Rafael

"I mean you've been quiet," he says, as if this is obvious, and as if saying it again would make it clearer than it was. He doesn't think to take his coat off for her, though he would if she did shiver. He did, a long time ago -- almost two years ago, when she fled from his house angry and upset and he followed.

They move off on their own. Find a little corner of the terrace that's around the bend, out of sight of the doors and the others. Someone installed a telescope here, one of those things that you see sometimes at vista points on mountain highways. No slot for quarters; you can just look.

"Last few days," he adds. "And tonight."

Devon

Didn't like when she came back, tights torn, bruise on her arm, tears running through her makeup, her shirt ripped at the shoulder. Thought someone hurt her. Wanted to kill someone for hurting her. She couldn't even process the protectiveness; she thought he was being an asshole. Pointed at her face with middle fingers, explained: drugs.

When she stormed away, he worried she would be cold. He wanted to make her come back, be warm, be safe again. Did not know how to make her feel those things so that she would stay. Didn't know yet.

Knows better now. She doesn't shiver and he doesn't offer his jacket; not quite that cold out, but it's only a matter of weeks. He doesn't go to the telescope. She doesn't, either. She is watching him, her eyes bright but somehow the expression behind them hollow.

He explains what he means. She wonders if he's hurt, but he doesn't look wounded. He isn't withdrawing, but she wonders if he would, after all this time. She's never been in a relationship this long. She's never been in a relationship, really, past some high school bullshit.

No idea what she is doing.

No idea how to interpret what he does.

Her throat moves, her mouth closing. She swallows.

Murmurs: "...I'm late."

Rafael

Didn't know what he'd thought. Maybe that she was angry for something he did that he hadn't figured out yet. Maybe that she was worried about something; her mom, what she was going to tell her, all that. Maybe he even thought for a minute that wolf back in Boston had come after her somehow. Just vague possibilities though. None of them concrete enough for him to react. Get protective, get mad.

So he just asks. And there's a telescope nearby but no one has time for stars or skylines. They're looking at each other and she tells him why, swallowing, like maybe he'll be angry.

They talked about that once. That maybe he'll be angry.

--

He's not angry now. But he is -- despite everything -- shocked. And maybe it's not the right reaction, but that's what it is: writ all over his face. He stares. He looks away, brow furrowing; put his hands on the balustrade. Thinks for a moment, braced, shoulders hulking.

Turns to look at her. "You take a test yet?"

Devon

The fact that he wasn't just Angry right off the bat shows how much has grown between them. Not everything is a threat; she's stayed all this time. She tells him she loves him. Whatever bond they have, it was enough to drag them to the same time and place, even hundreds of years out of sync with their nature, their genome.

Any other night, she'd look at the stars. She'd ask him if he knows the names of constellations; she'd tell him, if he didn't. She'd take him out somewhere into the mountains, trace them in the sky for him as they laid back on a blanket on the ground. Tell him the myths she knows; she only remembers a few.

But tonight, neither of them bother with the telescope. They are looking at each other, her eyes round and drawn and brilliant. The blue glitters at the edges of blown pupils, trying to take in all of the starlight, all of the heat he radiates.

He does not reject her. She worries he might. She worried, months ago when she said she liked the name Maeve, that he would be mad at her if she got pregnant. He said he was the one not 'wrapping his dick'. But she could tell he didn't want a baby, wasn't ready. She's not ready. She's --

"M'scared," she murmurs, in lieu of answer. Or maybe that's the answer: no, she hasn't. Because she's scared.

But not really that he'll be angry.

Rafael

Makes him reach out, that. Almost like reflex, like he doesn't even have to think about it. His big hand wraps behind her head; he pulls her toward him and kisses her hair, wraps his arm around her shoulders, hugs her against his chest where she doesn't have to look him in the eye anymore. For a while, anyway.

For a while he just holds her like that. Two of them stealing a few minutes away from the crowd. They could be anyone. Could be a young couple, enjoying each other's company. People here have no idea who she is. People here barely know who he is, and sometimes they have Thoughts about that whole affair, how and what he inherited. Probably have thoughts about her too, but at the very least no one mistakes her for some side-piece, some fling, someone he doesn't intend to keep. Blind men could see he loves her. Reserved, taciturn, scowling, terrifying as he is, he loves her.

They'd think that too, now, if they could see. But they can't. It's just them.

While later and he takes a breath. Arm loosens a little, slides down; now he has his arm around her waist. His lips burn her temple. He inhales of her, catches nothing.

"Why?" -- softly.

Devon

She doesn't flinch; Devon's not really scared of him anymore. Once she processed that he really did like her, didn't want to hurt her, didn't really like it when she flinched or shied from him, once she believed it, she didn't see any reason to be scared of him.

She remembers, without wanting to, one day in a lawn or field, a wolf nuzzling her toddler palm. She remembers, now that it is bitterly unlocked in her mind, one of those misplaced early lessons, teaching her that sometimes you don't need to be scared of the thing that could rip your throat out. She almost gave it up, it would have been a satisfactory sacrifice; she felt safe in that moment, but years later, she saw that safety for what it was: another fanciful lie. But she held on. Now she can't let go.

Devon is a Fianna and a witch, but she's practical. She's grounded, earthy, pragmatic. Rafael doesn't even like it when she's cold; Rafael wouldn't ever hurt her if he could help it. Not anymore. It makes him howl inside; she can see it in his eyes when she's sad.

Rafael is achingly, vulnerably tender, she thinks. No wonder he's so grumpy all the time. You'd have to be, with that soft a heart.

She understands that.

--

Devon looks up at him; his kiss falls on her hairline, third eye, a vulnerable spot. She is held; she leans into it. She shivers when his warmth envelopes her. Wasn't cold before, but suddenly she notices it.

Some of the people here saw her two years ago -- almost -- at the museum. Some of them remember, recognize, but Rafael has few friends and few acquaintances and invitations still do not bear her name. Not unless they're officially engaged, announcement in the paper and everything. On invitations, Devon is still designated simply as +1.

All the same. The people who go to these things are aware of her. See her. See how he dotes, follows, adores, protects. Most of them have never spoken to her.

Hell: most of them have never spoken to Rafael himself.

--

He asks the stupidest question. She stammers: "Because I'm not ready for that. But I don't want to --"

Silence.

A beat.

And her jaw shakes. An her eyes well. She tucks herself tightly against his chest. She gives a hard shiver, shake, tremble all over. She fights tears, rather than letting the damn burst.

Rafael

This time both his arms surround her. He's wearing such fine clothes tonight. No rented tux, this, ill-fitting and worn by a hundred others. This one's his, as is his shirt and his undershirt, his underwear, his socks, his cufflinks, his pocket square, his tie. All of it tailored to his body, selected by a goddamn personal stylist or something because he sure as hell wouldn't know what to buy, or where, or why, if his life depended on it.

His body still, though, beneath the crisp shirt, the thick sleek fabric of the jacket. His arms beneath the sleeves, strong around her and immensely, intensely warm.

"Let's make sure first," he says after a while. "And then if you want to keep it, or if you don't..."

He casts for the right words. Comes up only with: "I'll still be here. Either way."

Devon

Already she dislikes 'it'. It it it. 'It' could be Maeve, or... she doesn't even know. Does Rafael have a middle name? She doesn't know. She doesn't know his favorite color. She doesn't know his birthday. Fucking Christ. She can't have a baby. She can't have an it, either.

Should've just told him when they weren't at a party and she wasn't going to tell him at all and he doesn't ask but it's been three weeks.

It's very late. She thought it was just hormones being weird. But nothing. It's been building and here she is and it's erupting and that's why she's crying. She doesn't want to make it a real thing, so she doesn't tell him not call it an it. Neither of them say the word abortion. Neither of them do, but they both refer to it, obliquely, and she cries when she does, and he flinches away from it at the end.

Devon feels like an idiot, and she feels defensive, and she's tired all the time, and this is why she thinks it is not lateness.

It's Maeve, or someone. Rafael's-Middle-Name or something.

She feels so strange and not-herself that she can't imagine being anything less than two people occupying the same general space. Even if one of those people is barely more than a clump of cells and nonsense. She can't imagine. But Rafael says they should be sure, and she sniffs, nodding, trying not to cry, holding onto him. Her arms are around his waist -- when did that happen?

"Can we just go?" she asks. Her eyes close against his shirt, which will bear marks of her mascara against the crisp white. "Like. To a drugstore."

Rafael

"Yeah." He's forgotten about the auction. Forgot he made a bid. Maybe in a few days or a couple weeks a package will show up on the front step of his townhouse and he'll remember. Or just be confused.

Doesn't matter now. Arm's still around her -- heavy over her shoulders now, pulling her against his side. "Yeah," he says again. "Let's get out of here."

--

Inside then. Down that sweeping staircase. Girl's mascara's running a bit; people think they had a fight. Think he started it, made her cry, of course he did. Brute like him. They feel bad for her. They don't understand why she's still leaving with him.

Coat check has his coat ready for him when he gets there. Valet's getting his car by the time he's out on the curb, and even two years later he's unused to this sort of service, unused to the deference.

Used to the fear, though. The gut-deep, instinctive dislike. Valet's fingers never touch his, taking the tip. Valet does hold door open for girl, though. Shuts it after she's in, hem of her dress safely away from the edge.

Car sinks a little on its shocks as wolf gets in. Just his unostentatious daily car; not chauffeured, nothing fancy. As he pulls away from the curb he takes his phone out of his pocket, hands it to girl to find their way to the nearest Walgreens. Some pair they're going to make, both of them in eveningwear. Girl recently crying. Buying pregnancy tests.

Devon

They depart the gala, this one, the way they depart so many: before it's over and without anyone trying to stop them, but with eyes on them. Devon stays close to Rafael, clearly has been crying, but no one saw him hit her, grab her, so what would they do? She's never shown up to one of these things with bruises, but they still assume it can't be a healthy relationship. He's such a... prick.

So they think. They've never talked to him. They don't know, as Devon does, that he's only partly a prick.

--

Down to the car, then. She doesn't even really register the valet, sadly, when she gets in. She doesn't have to be reminded to buckle in; she's not that distracted. But when he pulls away, handing her his phone, he has to explain why, what he expects her to do, because she just looks at him funny when she takes it in her hands.

Then she finds a Walgreens. Not the one on 16th, in the midst of that chaos, not when he's driving. One closer to home. And she looks sick as they head that way, and she looks like she's going to burst into tears when it's time to go in.

Rafael

He parks. Not right up front but a row or two away. Lights are on in the parking lot, pale ones that wash out the colors. Engine dies. Wolf glances at girl.

"Wait here for me," he decides. Leaves the keys in the ignition and starts to get out.

Devon

Normally she might argue, or at least -- pragmatically -- ask him if he knows what he's even looking for. She might flinch, or feel stupid, or wipe her eyes and insist on going on. She hates that she's such a mess right now. But that doesn't mean she is not, in fact, a mess right now.

He says to wait for him. That is when she starts crying, but quietly, just a couple of drops sliding out, which she mops up with a kleenex from a packet she put in his glovebox one time. Sniffs. Even flips down the visor while he's gone to check her face. It's not a trainwreck. She wipes at her smudged mascara a bit. She pulls herself together, goddammit.

And she is pulled together when he comes back. Apprehensive to the point of terror, but trying very hard to buckle down on it. Stares at the bag he has with him. Small bag. The slender blue and pink box inside.

Rafael

Takes him a long time. He has no experience with this sort of thing, and no one asks him if he's finding what he's looking for. No one wants to approach him. He ends up having to ask -- corners some poor pharmacy tech, gets pointed to the right aisle.

Cashier checks him out without meeting his eyes. No one wants to think too deeply on any of this. He gets the device, he gets a bag. He gets a receipt. Doors whisk open and there he is, big and broadshouldered, coming across the parking lot with that inelegant stride.

Gets back in the car. He puts the bag on the ground, doesn't get her to hold it. Turns the key and they're off again, heading home.

Devon

Right next to the condoms. Right next to the lube. Not far from the tampons. There are such things as ovulation tests. People still abuse themselves with douches, too, apparently. The whole aisle has a consistent theme, and right now, it's hard not to be profoundly aware of it. Uncomfortably aware of it.

Devon takes a breath before he gets in. Looks at him when he does. He doesn't say a word to her, and she flinches inwardly, looking down at her lap. Not at the bag anymore. She remains silent while he drives.

Rafael

Wolf doesn't realize his silence might be taken hard. Thinks there just isn't much to say. She might be pregnant. They don't know if she's pregnant. They're about to find out if she's pregnant. No additional commentary needed.

He drives. It's not far now. He takes the local streets. At a red light, he glances over at her. She's so quiet too. She looks so good to him, even now, at this juncture, when he really should be thinking about something other than how good she looks even if her mascara is smudged-then-fixed; even if she's nervous and anxious and uncertain.

He reaches over, waiting at that light. Finds her hand and holds it, squeezing.

--

Home, and garage door rumbles up. Headlights sweep a shoe rack, a cabinet, the door into the house. Engine noise reverberates off the walls and then dies. Wolf picks up the rustling cheap bag with its little life-altering test stick, gets out.

At the door, he pushes it open and lets her go in ahead of him. Garage door comes back down, the noise fading away as the door shuts behind them. He starts undoing his tie and his cufflinks, the bag looped around his wrist.

"Upstairs?"

Devon

She's so quiet, too. She's looking at her knees and she looks withdrawn, her eyebrows tugged together, giving her pale features a slightly pinched look. She might be pregnant. She doesn't know if she's pregnant. She wants to be a mom. She is not ready to be a mom. She doesn't want to have an abortion. She doesn't want to carry a baby to term and give it away, especially when one of its parents is a fucking werewolf. She feels very sick. She wraps her slim arms around her midsection, nausea rising. Which could mean she's pregnant. Which could mean she's about to have a panic attack. Or both.

Her hand is cold when he reaches over and touches it at the light. She jumps, actually, startled, like she'd forgotten he was there. Looks at him, and her face crumples a little, and she wants to climb over and curl up in his lap, but

that isn't safe,

and the light is turning green.

--

They pull into the garage, holding hands, and then he lets her go. Picks up the bag, perhaps unaware that the little box has two little life-altering -- potentially life-altering -- sticks in it, just to be safe. He probably doesn't even know if they're the mid-stream variety or the kind that come with a little cup, and wouldn't have known to ask Devon if she had a preference, and Devon would not have known, because Devon has never taken a pregnancy test before.

Note, though: they are the mid-stream kind. Most are, these days.

--

Devon is trembling when they get out of the car, go inside. Devon's curious now about the test kit, keeps looking at the bag, and then she shakes her head. She holds out her hand for the bag. And when he gives it to her, she goes straight to the downstairs half-bath. It's one of those few places in his home where they haven't fucked, and it's a very impersonal spot that is rarely used except when they're drinking downstairs in front of Netflix and need to piss. It's not a place where he has held her. It is not a place where she's whispered to him to be tender with her body. It's not a place where she told him for the first time that she loved him.

Of course she'd tell him something like that on a bathroom floor. Fucking Fianna.

The door clicks shut behind her, and she is in there alone for several long minutes. Longer than it takes to pee, but barely as long as it takes to read a set of folded paper instructions and wiggle one's skirt up, underwear down. But he does hear her flush, hears her washing her hands. And then he sees her come out again; might see a test stik resting in precarious balance on the edge of the sink, on top of some folded toilet paper, waiting.

She is looking at him and she gives him a small shrug. "Says to wait three minutes."

Devon

[STIK :D]

Rafael

[STIK :D]

Rafael

Doesn't want to go upstairs. Holds her hand out. He stares for a second, then understands. Hands over the bag.

Watches her go into the bathroom. Skinny thing. Can't even imagine her pregnant. Having a baby. Being a mother. That'd make her mum a grandmother. That'd make him a father. He can't imagine.

Door shuts and he folds his arms across his chest, tight and tense. He wants to pace but doesn't. When she comes back out it feels like it's been ages; he thinks he might have grown rust, moss. He unfolds his arms and looks at her and thinks she might tell him an answer, but she doesn't. She tells him they have to wait.

He exhales shortly, something like a laugh with all the humor let out of it. "Come here," he says, though, and when she does -- if -- he pulls her into his arms. Wraps his arms around her so she's clasped against that expensive white shirt of his, his heart beating hard under it.

Devon

She can't imagine herself as a mum, either. Not yet. Not now. One day. Far future. Years and years from now. Maybe then. But right now it's unthinkable. Rafael as a father is unthinkable. She hasn't even thought of her mother yet. Or her extended family. She hadn't let herself yet, but now she thinks about Brian and Sheila and their utter delight, how Sheila might steal him --

'it' is a 'him' now, randomly and briefly --

and cuddle him and feed him and burp him and change his very very very tiny diapers. Knit little mittens and booties so he doesn't scratch himself with his tiny, thin finger- and toe-nails. Brian carrying him around in one arm, mindlessly paternal while cooking or cleaning up or what-have-you. It would not be hard for her to imagine Brian and Sheila being like parents. They helped raise her. They help raise all the babies.

Easier to imagine them with a baby than her with one. Or Rafael.

--

He looks tense. He looks very still; mountainous. She shrinks, and stands where she is, and then he unfolds, and exhales and asks her to come and she doesn't really come, she sort of hesitates in that general direction til he closes the distance and wraps her up. She shudders as she leans against him, soaking up his warmth, sighing, closing her eyes. She doesn't hug him back; she keeps her arms wrapped close to her body. But she leans into his embrace, inhaling and exhaling slowly a few times. Until she says:

"Please talk to me,"

very quietly. Very small.

Rafael

Doesn't know what to say. Not unusual, that, except this time it matters more. Wolf knows he has to say something. Brow furrows; she can't see it, but she knows him well enough by now. Can probably even imagine it. Of course he'd frown. Of course he's thinking, and thinking hard.

"Been thinking of you as my mate," is what he comes up with.

Which, in the grand scheme of things, might not be helpful at all. Might even make things worse.

Devon

Always so bad at this. Never knows what to say. Never knows what she wants. His thoughts are like a slow-moving river at times, meandering peacefully, at odds with how the rest of him races, pulses, snaps. When she asks him to speak, to talk to her, to tell her what those thoughts are, it's a hard gift to give: the waters never last long when they're being carried in cupped palms. They trickle down his wrists, leaving him perhaps with only a few river-rocks, or sand, or droplets to offer her, and it never really seems enough. But he has no other way to carry the water.

He's a wolf. They don't use buckets.

He thinks. He thinks very hard, and a few seconds feels like hours. She is waiting for a timer to go off, but it doesn't yet.

What he ends up telling her is not just a river rock or some sand. It's... that. It's more. It means everything, and when Devon becomes still, it seems to mean more than everything. She pauses, and then she shifts, and her arms slide, rustling against his shirt. She draws back just enough to lift her head and look at him, her eyebrows wrinkled together in a confused little frown. Not an unhappy one, just a confused one. And as her eyes meet his, it may dawn on him that given her expression, this everything, more-than-everything thought might not mean anything at all to her.

Devon blinks once, processing. "All right..." she says, slow but not dragging. "So, the wolf version of girlfriend?"

Rafael

He holds on, unwilling to let her draw away -- unwilling to have to meet her eyes. His try to flick aside under that heavy beetled brow. He grunts.

"Bit more than that," he says, defensively.

Devon

She doesn't draw too far, then -- her arms have stayed around him, but she has to wiggle a bit to look at him, whether he's wanting to permit it or not. She sees him try to look away and right now, she could just about kill him for shying like that.

So Devon kicks him. Right in the shoe. His are fine, well-shined leather. Hers are high-heeled boots with slightly pointed toes and cost roughly twice as much as his.

All on his card, of course.

"More how?" she wants to know. Demands to know.

Rafael

"Christ," he's disgruntled -- and kicked. His arms have dropped, even if she's still hanging on to him. He doesn't meet her eyes. Just stands there awkwardly, grumpy, being hugged. "Haven't you watched nature documentaries? Wolves mate for life."

Devon

His arms have dropped. Drop her. Devon unwinds hers when that happens. She steps back from him.

He asks her about nature documentaries. Says something gargantuan. Something which, for her, borders on incomprehensible right now. He may as well be speaking Greek.

But she just stays where she is. And after a silent moment, puts up her hands slightly Her words would be -- are -- passive aggressive, but the tone is one of retreat. Her eyes are wounded. "You know what's just lovely? When I'm scared, and don't know what's going on, and I need you, that's when you push me away."

She goes back into the bathroom. The half-bath. The little powder room with the fancy but underutilized hand soap and the Good Towels. Closes the door behind her.

Rafael

Such a quick retreat -- he doesn't even have time. Not enough time to react, not enough time for that amorphous, instinctive river of thoughts to make its way into words.

By the time he surfaces with a few, she's already shut the door. He says it anyway, following, raising his voice through the door: "Didn't push you away. Just ... thought you were making fun of me. Or dragging it out on purpose."

Devon

From inside the tiny bathroom, barely big enough for a sink and a toilet and a mirror and a small wastebasket, Devon says back: "I wasn't. And you did."

She's quiet a moment, but just so. It's quieter at first: "Why do you always think I'm going to humiliate you?"

Slightly more audible, a moment later, more defensive: "I'm the one putting it out there. Needing you. Trying to --"

Connect with you. Love you. Be close to you. Understand you. Could be any of the above. All of the above. She doesn't have the words.

Rafael

It's a fair question. And he gives it fair consideration. Stands outside that door -- puts his hand on the wood. Feels a little closer to her like that, as if his molecules and hers might move in tandem somehow through that barrier.

"Guess I'm just not used to having a girlfriend. Or mate." It's the best he can come up with. "I mean. Someone who's gonna have my back. By default."

Devon

She never thinks he's left. Maybe that's because she can hear him out there, or sense his presence somehow. Or maybe she doesn't think he'd leave her right now, even as big of a dumbass prick as he sometimes is. Not when she's in the middle of a pregnancy test. Not when she's told him twice in one night that she's scared. Scared, scared.

"It's not default," she mutters back, almost inaudible. "It's because I love you."

Another beat of a pause. Her voice raises.

"And it's been two years and I might be pregnant with your stupid baby so you're going to have to start trusting me," she snaps.

Rafael

Not default.

Because she loves him.

He's quiet to that. And then she snaps at him, clearly audible, though she can't hear the soft huff he gives to that.

Can hear the doorknob rattle though. "Let me in," he says.

Devon

"It's not locked, Rafa," she says, where 'Rafa' sounds like 'dumbass'. But maybe he knows that already; the doorknob rattles and turns in his hand, cracking open, and there it is: EPT stick with its magical digital screen, the urinated-upon part neatly capped, and Devon's phone sitting on the other edge of the sink next to the soap, counting down the seconds.

Devon is on the floor, her back to the wall, her knees drawn up. There isn't really room to sit next to her. There's room to sit across from her. Or he can sit on the toilet lid.

She looks up at him. Looks unraveled. Tortured, a little. "Three minutes is just no time at all," she says, uncertain of what she means.

It's forever.

It's such a little thing.

Could be everything.

Rafael

Door opens. Bathroom fills with his presence; walls seem tighter, lights seem brighter. He closes the door behind him and it's just the two of them in that little enclosed space.

He looks at her sitting on the floor. He looks at the little test stick. Something of a sigh as he picks it up, and then -- physics notwithstanding -- he wedges himself in beside her anyway, the two of them jammed together.

Just a few seconds left on the clock. He holds the stick, the screen turned away so they can't see it yet.

"Whatever this says," he says quietly, "it's not gonna change how I feel. About you. Okay?"

Devon

For some reason, he closes the door. The room closes in, feels more private. Feels smaller with him in it, but safer. Warmer. Devon doesn't mind. He does make her feel safer. Has for a long time. She hasn't been scared of him in a long, long time now.

Does not remember how seeing him, once, gave her such a feeling of security that she considered it an adequate sacrifice to what passes for a god. A depth of feeling that rushed over her, so rich as to be sacred. Holy.

Rafael picks up the test strip. Devon tenses, her shoulders almost flinching. She wants to tell him not to look, it isn't ready yet, the timer hasn't gone off, don't. Don't show her. Don't tell her before it's time. But he doesn't. He wedges, and shoves her slightly, and she's disgruntled and finally just sighs. Scoots over his thigh, sits between his legs, his chest to her back.

He has the stick turned so they can't see the screen. The timer hasn't gone off yet. She closes her eyes, tucking herself close to him. Turns her head so that her temple is against his shirt, her hands folded on top of her knees.

Then he says the stupidest, most inane thing. She huffs a breath out, shaking her head against him a little.

"Of course it isn't. I'm not scared of that."

Anymore.

--

Devon reaches up, and over, and takes his free arm. She wraps it around herself, the inside of his forearm to her clavicles, holds herself like that against him, like she's buckling herself in. Keeps her hands wrapped around his arm. He's like the restraints on a roller coaster. Like he'll keep her contained, safe, alive,

even if the world turns upside down.

Her phone chimes. Just the normal sound for the timer alarm. Deet deet deet. Deet deet deet. Deet deet deet. He feels her breathe in, whole body, can almost feel her open her eyes. Turn a bit, away from his chest.

With one hand on his forearm, holding his arm around her where it is, Devon lets go with her other hand. Reaches over to his free hand, her fingertips cool on his skin. She turns his hand, turns the test stick over, looks apprehensively at the little screen, no more complicated than that of a basic calculator.

PREGNANT,

it says, in tall, narrow letters, and

NOT

just before it, slightly dimmer, but still quite clear.

Not pregnant.

Not.

--

Her chest caves in. She's not sure if it is sorrow or relief. Some mixture of both. Some crushing, bewildering mix of both. A heavy exhale leaves her, which must be whatever part of her spirit she had kept locked up in the cage of waiting. Not three minutes.

"But I'm three weeks late," Devon says softly, staring at the test. "Three weeks."

Rafael

Not.

Wolf exhales -- quick and quiet. Test stick still held between his hands. Probably doesn't realize one end's been peed on, or maybe he does and he just trusts the cap. They both stare at it, and girl's chest caves in, and wolf feels ...

relieved. Let's be honest: there is that. But more, too. Something harder to define; like catching a wisp of something in your teeth only to lose it. He stares another few seconds. Then she speaks, so softly, and his head turns.

He tosses the stick into the wastebasket. Nice stuff in his house; even the garbage cans are tasteful. Powdered steel lined with a smooth liner, bought just for that purpose. You'd never catch his maid lining his trash bins with walmart bags.

He puts his arm around her. Pulls her against his side. Strange that he's comforting her again; weren't they supposed to be happy? Glad that the disaster passed them over?

"Take you to the doctor tomorrow," he says. "Be sure. Get checked up."

Devon

Hard to tell what she's feeling right now. Confusion is writ most clearly across her face, but with her back against his chest and her hips hedged in by his thighs, he can't see what's on her face. All he can hear is the bewilderment, blended with disturbance, fear. He can't tell if she is sad, he can't tell if she is relieved, just that she is lost.

Lost and vulnerable, and all too aware of it.

There it goes, the stick and the tissues it was resting on before. The liner rustles. Devon cannot believe it is discarded so easily, that monolithic thing that had caused her such anxiety. Not hope, though; she hadn't been hoping. Not really. Perhaps not at all, to be truthful.

"All right," she murmurs. "Do we just go to the hospital and ask?"

Rafael

"I think ... maybe urgent care?"

How would he know?

Devon

Devon nods. This makes sense to her. She doesn't have an OB/GYN. She doesn't have a primary care doctor. She doesn't really do anything but go to Planned Parenthood occasionally if she needs to renew a prescription for birth control. So they decide to go to urgent care.

"All right," she says, after that nod, after quite a long pause.

Then there's another. She doesn't know what to say after that. Not for a while. And when she does, it's just:

"I feel so weird."

Rafael

They're still in their Nice Clothes, unless she's changed. He certainly hasn't. Still wearing his tux. Still wearing his shiny shoes. Still wearing his nice watch and his cufflinks. Stripped off his tie, has it in his pocket.

They're sitting on the floor of a bathroom they rarely use. There's a pregnancy test in the trash. It was negative.

"Yeah," he agrees after a while. He's quiet; doesn't know what to say. Tries, though: "Thought I'd just be glad. And I am. But for a second, I also... wished it wasn't."

Sentence has gaping holes. Missing adjectives, participles, sense. Maybe she can make sense of it anyway.

Devon

Thought he would be. And he is. Devon doesn't tense in his arms or flinch from the words. Some of that chest-caving-in feeling she had was relief, after all. Massive, profound, overwhelming, avalanche relief. But it isn't there anymore. It's replaced with her own series of words that are missing context, except neither of them seem to misunderstand each other right now.

"Me, too," she says, with a touch of ache in her voice. "But... I thought it would be." Not negative. Positive. Words are missing. "I don't know what's going on. Now I have to go see a doctor. And what if the test was wrong? Or there's something wrong with me?"

She says 'me' like there is so much more to it than that, like 'me' is bigger than she can quite cope with, all of a sudden. Like her self is an other-thing, a thing she has to protect and isn't sure she can. She means her uterus. Her ovaries. Her body. There's no telling. She doesn't have a scent, after all. She moves things with her mind, after all. She was taken to another plane of existence for months on end, after all. Devon quavers, in voice and body. She wonders how she'll be able to sleep tonight. Can't even get smashed on whiskey, because what if the test was wrong?

Devon curls a little in his arms, against his chest, between his legs, on the bathroom fucking floor.

"Want you to tell me what it means when you... think of me as your mate," she says quietly. Eventually, it feels like, but there wasn't that long of a pause. She hasn't forgotten. She hasn't forgotten for life. "Not like a nature documentary. Or wolves. What it means to you."

Rafael

Silence, for a long time. Maybe until she thinks he's doing it again, he's just refusing to talk, he's just being stubborn and silent and ... stuck, like he's lost the powers of speech or maybe never mastered them at all.

Latter is probably true. Acquired the skills of speech, yes. Mastered -- never. So he's silent, and he's tense, and she can feel that tension thrumming through his arms, the tight muscles of his chest.

Abruptly he draws breath. Starts moving. "Let's go for a walk," he says. "Get outside at least. Don't want to talk about this in the goddamn bathroom."

Devon

This time, Devon doesn't mind his silence. Waits through it. She's asking something big, she thinks. Something hard for him to put into words. Even if the words are there, they don't usually feel right to him. Feels awkward. Makes him anxious, makes him angry, makes him feel like... everything he's saying is empty, and saying it will be wrong somehow, ruin something between them. She doesn't feel that way, but she thinks she understands how and why he does. Tries not to take it personally right now. Tries not to let it hurt her.

Doesn't think he's being stubborn. She asked him to trust her. She thinks he heard that, absorbed it, once he realized he wasn't making her feel trusted. Wasn't showing her he trusts her. Something. She has noticed that he tries to take seriously how he makes her feel. Tries to do better, even if makes him feel awkward. And stuck.

So she waits. She holds his hand somewhere. Fingers lace with his. She looks at her high-heeled black suede boots against the pristine tile floor. Feels his tension but can't absorb any more tension than she already has on her own. So she just lets it be, as best she can.

He breathes in, shifts. His chest pushes her forward a bit, and she scoots aside, lets him get up first so he can help her to her feet. She rises with him, hands in his hands, points out:

"First told you I loved you on a bathroom floor."

Not that she's arguing. Not that she doesn't want to go outside. Just thinks it's funny. Weird. The sort of thing they'd do.

At the front door, she steps out of her boots. She has on a thin pair of socks under them, and scoots her feet into her shitty, worn-out, grey and stained Converse. They clash horribly with her dress. She puts her hand back in his hand to go outside with him.

Rafael

Grunts in response to that point. It's true. She did. Still: he wants to get out of the bathroom. This one, anyway, the one they never really use except to dash in and out while they're watching Netflix on the couch.

She gets in shitty Converses. He misses, suddenly, the ripped leggings and holey sweaters she usually wears with them. Her hand fits into his.

End up going into the yard. They live in peri-urban 'burbs. Hardly made sense to go for a walk; wasn't like they were going to end up in some scenic spot, some mountain peak or some secluded clearing.

So. The yard. Where it's cool now at night. Where their view of the sky is marred by the surrounding houses, and shaded by that tree he fucked her under, once, not giving a single damn who saw. He doesn't face her, outside. He looks at the stars. He looks at the neighbor's house with its lit-up windows. He stares off frowning, looking at nothing at all, cataloging his own thoughts.

"Just feels right when we're together," he says. Starts in media res the way he so often does, as though he expected her to have some sort of window into his mind and his thoughts. "Hard to imagine not being with you. Don't want to. Imagine, or be. So." He looks at her, frowning, and shrugs. "Guess it means I think we belong together. And to each other."

It's incomplete, and he knows it. It's inexact. It's ... too small, not enough. But it's the best he can do, and dissatisfied, he leaves it there.

Devon

They go outside. Truth be told, they spend most of their time together indoors. Fucking. Sleeping. Eating. Curled up in his armchair watching movies. She spends time in her room. She hasn't gotten a replacement job for the one at Hooked yet. He has the same job he's always had, which is no job at all except for the one that could get him killed one day. Will get him killed one day.

But Devon likes being outside with him. Walking. Swimming up at his big house. Fucking under a tree on a hot summer day. Holding his hand as they walk through the woods, leading a mass of women away from a Puritan village. She likes it when they can both see the moon. She likes when they can be alone in the dark and there are stars and a sort of stillness that is full of motion and light and sound, all muffled by the darkness.

So they go out to the back yard, where they can be alone and where there is grass. They don't go far. Devon shivers a little and tucks herself closer to him. Her dress is long-sleeved, but the fabric is thin, clings to her form, really makes her tits look great, though that's really the last thing on anyone's mind right now.

He doesn't face her and it hurts a little, like how he wouldn't look at her when he told her what he did inside, or how he dropped his arms and avoided her gaze, like he couldn't bear it. She feels it sting and tries to understand: she can't always look at people when she's laying herself out there, either. Even him.

But then he does. When he says he doesn't want to imagine being without her. Doesn't want to be without her. Avoids even thinking about it, hurts to think about it, burns. At least when he says he thinks they belong with each other, and to each other, he's looking at her. Devon looks back at him, and she wants to hold his hand if he's let go of hers somewhere in there. She keeps her hand there, warm and linked, either way.

Finally asks, quietly: "That why you're sad when I'm not here?"

Rafael

"I'm not sad," he says defensively, as though she'd accused him of some dire weakness. She hasn't, though. And they're still holding hands. Have been, even when he looked away from her. "Just miss you."

Exhales, then, a little like a sigh. And takes a step closer. He does let go of her hand now, but only to shrug out of his coat. This time he doesn't even offer it to her; just drops it around her shoulders.

"Was pretty happy when you moved back in," he adds. Says it like a confession -- as though she hadn't guessed long ago. "Like having you close."

Devon

Almost makes her angry, his defensiveness. His... boyness about it. God forbid anyone think he's sad when someone he loves is gone. God forbid the someone he loves know anything about his feelings. She doesn't have it in her to rise to being angry with him for it right now, though. Doesn't have it in her to swoon, either. To be touched, and heartsick with love, and overwhelmed with pure understanding for all the things he struggles so much to even allude to, cannot begin to fully explain.

Devon's eyebrows tug together softly. She looks out at the yard. Feels him let go of her hand but doesn't stir, or flash eyes at him. She closes her eyes as she hears him rustling out of his coat, exhales quietly as the silken lining slides over her sleeves, the heavy weave coming to rest on her shoulders. It engulfs her; she's quite petite, compared to him. It's warm because it's heavy, and warm because it was against his skin, and truthfully he probably doesn't mind being a little more exposed to the night air. Her eyes open and she looks out at the yard, thinking.

Maybe they hold hands again. She doesn't reach for his hand, but that's partly because she is putting her arms in his sleeves, and his sleeves are quite long on her. Easier to keep it from sliding off, that way, without having to hold it. But maybe, once it's settled, he takes her hand again. But perhaps he doesn't, because sometimes he doesn't think to do these things. He does them or he doesn't. Thought doesn't always enter into it.

"Know you don't like to talk," she says after a while. They keep their voices quiet; there is no need to disturb the night with harsh edges at their words, firm stops. "Especially about how you feel. Know it seems like I'm always trying to make you do it anyway. And we always seem to fight about it." Her brow contracts: "Always feels like you're mad at me for it, at least. Pull away just when I'm trying to get closer to you.

"Just that I don't... sense what you feel. Never knew you felt this way. You don't like to show me. I think you think you do show me. But it doesn't -- I don't ..."

Devon's thoughts sputter and fade. She leaves them there for now, for a moment, her brow wrinkled, trying to find the thread again.

"I love you so much," she says again, finding that thread easiest, clearest, strongest. "Know you love me, too." She hurts, saying this, but says it anyway, because she must: "But sometimes I feel so lonely when I'm with you. Like you want me to stay on the other side of some wall where I can't really get at you to hurt you, but I'm still supposed to feel close somehow. And I can't. Don't think anyone can."

She should know. Most people are required to stay on the other side of a similar wall, for her.

Rafael

Doesn't think to take her hand again.

Doesn't think of a lot of things like that. Taking her hand. Telling her -- more often, and when they're not actively fucking or nearly dying or in danger of never seeing each other again -- that he loves her. Talking to her, telling him the things that hide in his heart. Showing her.

Does look at her, though. Does frown to hear what she says. There's a silence.

"Didn't know that," he says quietly. "That you feel lonely with me. That's ... makes me sad."

Devon

That's something. She notices, and her eyes do flick at him again. When he says that word, which made him jerk away just a minute ago. Devon takes in a shallow breath, her lips opening. "I don't always," she tells him, tenderness and ache sliding and weaving into her voice. "But sometimes," she adds, quieter, because it's still true. True, and important, and she needed to say it, and she needed him to hear it. And she doesn't want to shy from it now, just because it makes him sad.

She's sad about it, too. Avoiding making him sad with her isn't going to make matters any better.

"I was trying to get close to you, when I asked if you feeling like I'm your mate is why you're sad when I'm gone. Felt like you jerked away from me when you insisted you're not sad." She sighs, a little. "Feels like getting my hand snapped at when I'm trying to pet you.

"That's all I want, babe," Devon murmurs. "To be close. I know you love me and want me with you and I know you don't want me to be sad or lonely. I know that," she repeats, more insistent, wants him to know she does trust his love for her. Does believe in it, despite that wall she described. Knows he's right on the other side.

That's why it's so torturous, being kept out.

"Just hurts," she whispers. "Getting snapped at or pushed away or all of that. I know you're not used to this. I know you don't want to let me hurt you. I know how that feels. But I I love you more than I'm scared of being hurt by you."

Rafael

Shakes his head a couple times. Hard to tell what he's negating, and to be sure, he has a hard time naming it himself. Takes him a few mute moments before he has a handle on it: "Don't think you're going to hurt me. Don't really think that, if I stop and look at it.

"Just go to it sometimes if I'm taken by surprise. Like a reflex. Know you love me, though. Know you're not out to hurt me or take me down. Anything like that."

Couple seconds of pause. Then he says it again, to emphasize it: "I know that."

Devon

She wants to tell him she knows, but the truth is, she needed to hear him say that. How she described it... is how it feels. When he jerks. When he flinches from her, in a way. So she doesn't lie to comfort, to assuage. She just takes what he says, lets it be between them for a moment before she answers.

"Need you to get ahead of that reflex, babe," she finally murmurs. "Know it's instinct. But I need you to try."

A beat of a pause. "Harder."

Rafael

That brings a glance, furrow-browed, but it's not angry. Something different. Furtive, almost, like an animal cornered. He grimaces a little.

"I know," he says at last. Which isn't sufficient. So: "I will."

Devon

[empafee! what that grimace!]

Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (1, 4, 4, 5, 10, 10, 10) ( success x 3 )

Rafael

[It's in part defensive; he feels pushed, cornered. It's also in part ... ashamed, almost, as though he knows she's right: he does have to work harder to suppress that reflex.]

Devon

She's the one to initiate hand-holding again. Not resentfully, ruefully. Not with resignation or depression. She looks at him, the way he seems to flinch again, the way he grimaces, the way he frowns, the flicker of something like guilt in his eyes that she wonders if he would rather hide. And he says he knows. He says he will. Try harder.

And she reaches over to him, just her fingertips visible past the edge of his coat cuffs. They touch his hand, more with invitation than a firm grasp.

"So...is not wanting to be without me why you're sad when I'm not with you?"

Not just that, though.

"Do you feel lonely when I'm not around, or just wishing I was back again? Do you miss me if I'm just out of the house or is it only when I'm gone for a long time, or live somewhere else? How do you feel when I come back? Does it bother you that I want to keep my own room? Does it hurt when I don't come to sleep with you? Do you wish you could come down the hall but aren't sure if you're welcome?"

But there's more, and it's clear by now she's not expecting answers to all these, immediate and perfect. At this point, she's just telling him all the things she doesn't know about how he feels for her. What he thinks. Where he's coming from. All the things he doesn't share, or show, or say.

"When did you start feeling like this? When did you start thinking of me like your mate? Did you like me before we started fucking, or later?"

Maybe this one, she expects an answer to, because she stops there:

"Does this mean you want me to stay with you forever, however long that is?"

Rafael

Truth is he's almost angry at that first question. That she's going back to it. That she's asking it, because it feels like an object lesson. No -- that's not quite right. This is: he feels like it's an object lesson. He feels that way because, once again, he goes to that out of reflex; the automatic and cynical assumption that ... how was it he put it once?

The assumption that everyone's out to take something from you. Something that's yours, or something of value, or some shred of your pride. That's the assumption he's always lived under. It's kept him alive, kept him tough, kept him on top in a life that wasn't always so luxurious and secure as it is now. Even now, in his heart of hearts, he holds on to that cynicism. He believes -- rightly, perhaps -- that it protects him.

But not from her. Because she was never out to get him in the first place. And he does know that. If he didn't, he couldn't love her. She couldn't be his mate. He couldn't have told her he does, because he doesn't lie to her.

So: the anger flares. And he tamps it down. And anyway, she's asking more questions, a dizzying string of them, too many for him to even hope to answer. He starts to, drawing breath, but they go on and on and -- after a while he thinks maybe she doesn't want answers after all. She just wants to show him ... something; some truth that doesn't readily come to him. All the things she doesn't know, maybe. All the opacities in their relationship.

One last one, though. Where she stops. And he assumes, because he lacks any other point of reference, that she wants an answer.

So he gives her one:

"Yeah."

Devon

Yeah. That's what it means: he wants her to stay. Which she knew. But it's that last word that matters. It's the biggest, scariest word, but she doesn't find it scary. That alone is a revelation: even when it's all she's wanted in the world (all she thought she wanted), Devon has been scared of forevers. She's wanted him to promise not to leave her, abandon her, make her love him and then leave her bereft and bewildered, and at the same time she's been scared of being kept, contained, and confined.

Looks at him, his hand in hers now, his hand taking hers when she offers it. Truth be told, she didn't really think he'd ignore the offering of touch. Reject it.

Looks at him, and now she doesn't feel that panic. That fear of forever, of being held, of being kept. Not sure when that changed. Not sure if it matters when it changed, or why.

"I wanna stay with you, too."

Rafael

Some wayward, small part of his mind had been endeared when she offered her hand like that, fingertip peeking out from the cuff of his coat. Too large on her, too broad and too long and too heavy, but she still looks good in it. Looks good even though her shoes don't match her dress and her dress doesn't match the hour or the mood. He always thinks she looks good. Just adores her over and all, really.

His hand grips a little firmer. And he smiles a little, because of course he does. Just said she wanted to stay, didn't she? Moved back in, didn't she? Lives down the hall now and her clothes are all over the place and the room is a mess, and this makes him happy because it's proof that she's there.

"Good," he says. "So let's stay."

And then, because it's one of the only questions he can still remember: "Doesn't bother me that you live down the hall. I like it."

Devon

She clings to that: him telling her, offering her something. How he thinks. How he feels.

"Why?"

Rafael

Looks almost baffled for a second, like he's never considered that before. And he hasn't. Does it now for the first time, poking and prodding at the concept, sniffing at it.

"Because... it feels like you still have your own place. So I can go visit you. But it's close. So I don't have to go far. Or even put on shoes. And there's no roommate. And if you're with me, it's not because you have no choice, like we're always in the same space anyway. You do have a choice. So if you come to me, that's a ... it's an active thing. A decision."

Beat. "Should put in a firepit," he says, offhand and off-topic. "Be nicer to talk around a fire."

Devon

Come to me, he says, and these are the words that stick with her, hook in her, pull her closer to him. She understands. She feels what he means, instead of just hearing the words and understanding them. That it isn't just habit between them, even now. That it isn't just automatic, or by default. That it's active, it's a choice, it's because she wants to be with him and sometimes she doesn't, and it's okay when she doesn't because that makes it mean something more when she does.

"You know you can come to me too," she whispers, ignoring the firepit comment, even though she agrees with it. "Can ask me how I feel and what I think, too." Gives a small shrug, at that, like it's a confession; she knows what it is to be uncomfortable with these admissions, these vulnerabilities -- no matter how small. No matter how she trusts him. "Just... if you care."

Rafael

Eyebrows flick together, even so slightly. Microexpression, there and gone. He takes a step closer, though. Closes that distance to nearly nothing.

"You think I don't?"

Devon

"Not... in a cruel way."

Which is a way of saying yes, a bit. Sort of. No: not that. But yes: this.

"Not like you know I feel something but it doesn't matter to you. More like... it doesn't occur to you to ask. To wonder. Maybe you don't," she admits. Maybe he isn't curious about the thoughts she doesn't share. Maybe it just never enters his thoughts. It doesn't mean there coldness or cruelty or lack of love behind it.

"But... yes, a little. Sometimes if I tell you what I think or feel anyway, you seem bothered by it. Annoyed with me."

Rafael

Saw a video once. Discovery channel or something on youtube, maybe. Someone had a 55-gal oil barrel. Solid steel. Sealed up tight, then attached to an industrial air pump. Started sucking out the air and just like magic, barrel collapsed in on itself. No warning, no visible reason. Just crumpled like some invisible giant had picked it up and squeezed.

Feels a little like that now. His heart. Like it crumples in on itself in his chest. He puts a hand on her face, aching. "Care what you're thinking and feeling," he says. " 'Course I care, Devon."

Devon

Devon wasn't expecting that touch. She startles under it, slightly. A vibration, nothing more. Doesn't pull away from him. Looks up at him. Looks in his eyes and sees that somehow, for some reason she can't fathom, all the air seems to have gone out of him. He looks like he's been pierced through, solid silver through something vital.

She has to explain. That she knows he loves her, that he wants her forever, that she makes him happy. But this has been the gap between them since the beginning: the knowing and the feeling. The struggle between hoping for something to the point of ache, or being comforted by its presence. This has been at the core of her inability to fully relax into their relationship, for close to two years. Perhaps his, too, despite the depth of his feeling for her, the profundity of what she means to him: they don't always say what they really feel. What they really think. They don't always react very well when the other does.

When she answers him, it isn't a refusal, or a rejection, of what he says. She isn't negating him, not arguing. She believes him. But she has to explain why even this far in, this feeling has persisted. This distance.

"Don't always show it," she whispers, her cheek still touching his fingertips, his palm.

"I'm not mad," Devon goes on, tears filling her eyes for no other reason than that she sees he's in pain, that she hurt him, that he aches and it's because of what she said. "Not trying to make you feel bad. I just don't want to go on with this... wall thing. Between us. Want to be close to you. Want to feel it more than I do."

Rafael

Hard to say if he understands the tears in her eyes. If he knows it's ironically because she sees she's hurt him, sees he's hurting. Perhaps all he sees is that she's hurting, too. Perhaps that's enough. He lets her fingers slip from his, but only to put both his hands on her face, behind her head, cradle her in his big paws like he's about to kiss her.

He doesn't, though. They're talking. It's a struggle for him, always is, but this time he pushes through it. "How?" he wants to know, and it's such a stupid question that he flails around for something to tack to it. "Just ... by talking to you?"

Devon

Well, shit. He's supposed to know.

But of course he doesn't. If he had known she felt so separated from him, not just wishing he'd talk to her more but truly feeling walled out of his life, and if he knew how to bridge that gap, they would not be standing out here right now, this night, having this conversation. There would not be these tears in her eyes and he would not feel like his chest just caved in.

And if she knew what, exactly, he should do, and how, she might have told him earlier. It might be easier. She could laugh, if she weren't already a wreck from the last three weeks and the last few hours and the last few minutes of conversation. She could laugh at how bad they both are at this, how fumbling and blind their grasping is.

Doesn't laugh, though. Because she is a wreck. She is worn thin from worry and uncertainty and the idea of having to wait even longer to know what is going on with her body has her stretched and scraped from within, not quite hollowed out but certainly not solid, not cohesive, not herself. She leans into him, stepping forward and tucking herself against his chest, her clearest way of asking him to just fucking hold her. Now. Please. Thank you. She curls a little.

"Maybe. I think so. But... not just when I ask. Not just when I make you." She's quiet a moment, admits: "I don't know. But if you're going to try harder not to protect yourself from me, I'll try harder to tell you what I need when I need it."

Rafael

They always were better at the physical. No hesitation at all when she steps into him. No hesitation at all when his arms fold around her. She feels more fragile than she is; always has. Even through his fine, thick jacket, he can feel the shape of her; narrow shoulders and long limbs.

Easier when they're touching like this. Easier when he doesn't have to look her in the eye, see the tears in the blue. His hold tightens. He has her against his chest, against his heartbeat. Folds over her, closing his eyes.

"Okay," he murmurs. "It's a start."

Rafael

He's still better at the physical. No hesitation at all when she steps into him. No hesitation at all when his arms fold around her. She feels more fragile than she is; always has. Even through his fine, thick jacket, he can feel the shape of her, narrow shoulders, long limbs.

Easier for him when they're touching like this. Easier when he doesn't have to string words together, doesn't have to try to make sense while she's watching him, trying to understand what he can barely express. His hold tightens. He holds her against his heartbeat, folding over her, closing his eyes.

"Still no good at talking," he says, quietly -- like a warning; like an apology. "But maybe... you can tell me how to show you, sometimes. Instead of saying something to you."

Devon

Always seemed a bit cool to everyone, growing up. Aloof. Quiet. Awkward. Maybe a little mean. She was not popular even among outcasts, whether in Boston or in London -- especially in London. There were racist shitheads in both places who ranged from awkward to hateful once they saw past her pale skin and freckles and realized her mother was an immigrant, and a brown-skinned one at that. Devon withdrew. Devon curled up beside her mum on the couch to watch television or old movies.

Didn't even start going out to clubs or the like til she was back in the States, and then all the shitheads her age called her a townie, and not nicely. She didn't understand half of what they were arguing about when they were drinking, and when she understood the other half, they wouldn't listen to a thing she said because she didn't have a full course load at the university backing up her understanding. They didn't like it when she Got It better than she did, either. They treated her like she was stupid; she's not stupid.

Never had a real boyfriend before. Not one who actually liked her and called her again -- in a manner of speaking -- or loved her. Never had a relationship like this before. Definitely not one that lasted more than a few weeks, a month or two. She does not know where she is going with this, much less how to get there. She does, at least, finally know how it feels to be around someone so quiet, so taciturn, so hard to read, that it's easy to feel like they're mad at you all the time, or don't like you at all, or don't want you around.

Hard for her to imagine a mind that is quiet, and instinctive, and does not process into words and often not even into action beyond the intense and reactive and immediate. Her mind is not like his. Her mind is layers upon layers of thought, filled with books she has read and movies she's seen and those conversations she drank through because no one wanted her to talk. She tried talking to her mum sometimes about all the things she thinks but her mum was always simply astounded, did not want to argue, did not have anything more she could teach Devon about these things she was learning on her own. And that does not even touch all the things that she was learning to understand that she could not talk to her mum about at all: werewolves. Witchcraft.

Brian and Sheila are more like Rafa than she is, she thinks. They act more than they talk. But they're expressive all the same, all hugs and laughter and gifts and hospitality.

But she is more like Rafa than they are, too. She is quiet and withdrawn and does not like most people and is smarter than she is given credit for and she is not afraid of the dark, either. She is afraid, profoundly so, of being abandoned, of being hurt in some vital, vulnerable way she has spent her life protecting from everyone but a few precious blood-kin, and now this one precious heaven-knows-what-he-is.

It is easier for him to hug her, and easier for him perhaps not to look at her eyes, so full and rich and brilliant and racing with thoughts that even at her most verbose she doesn't come close to sharing properly because she doesn't know how. Eyes that are filled, too, with tears, which he cannot even begin to deal with other than feeling pain over them, and perhaps hiding from them a bit. Devon does understand it: sometimes, most times, he doesn't know what to say. He doesn't know what to do. He loves her, but he is

nothing human.

Truth is, she is more fragile than he is. Not solely in a physical way: she can go so long without sleep, she can drink so much without passing out, she can walk for miles and miles through mountains and woods and deserts without complaint. She transcends human limitations in other ways, too, ones he has seen firsthand, ones that are perilously strong with the right combination of rest and preparation... or strong emotion, bursts of furious will. But she is fragile. She is so easily hurt. And she stopped flipping him off a long time ago when he hurts her or makes her think he's going to, but she still storms off to get away from it. Did so not that long ago, this very evening.

Devon does understand wanting to hide from this. It's so much bigger than either of them. It feels like such a grave responsibility.

"I know," she says, quietly, to his first words. Adds, or corrects: "I understand."

She does. Aches, because she doesn't know the way out of it any better than he does. But she does understand.

He goes on. Devon huffs a laugh against his chest, her hand lifting slightly to touch his side, her fingers curling into the fabric of his crisp white tuxedo shirt. It's a rueful little sound, followed by a rueful sentence, but it isn't bitter. It isn't angry or cold. It's just honest:

"If I figure out ways you can show me what you're thinking and how you feel without using words, I will let you know."

Rafael

He likes it when she touches him. Not just her hand in his, or her fingers in his hair -- but her palm against his side, her hand on his chest. The sort of contact that marks them as lovers because of their implicit, casual intimacy; the sort of way mere friends or acquaintances or even casual, careless fucks would never touch each other.

Her fingers curl into his shirt. He likes that too, strangely: likes that little reminder, maybe, that he is in the shape of a man, that he is clothed in finery, that he is a wolf descended from royal blood. That's not something he often cares about or even likes, but here and now he does.

"Okay," he says, quiet. "Fair 'nough."

And it is. She doesn't promise anything. There's nothing she can promise. He doesn't really promise anything concrete either: never again will I, always and forever shall I. None of that. All they give each other is stark, poignant truth: they'll try. They're do what they can.

--

He doesn't really know what she was like growing up. She's told him flickers and flashes, but he's often misunderstood, left her feeling alone and angry. He doesn't know that she was quiet and isolated and unknowable. Disliked. Bullied. Well; perhaps he does know. She told him once, didn't she? He just has a hard time picturing it: he sees her refracted through the lens of his own love. In his mind's eye, she is impossibly fascinating. He cannot quite believe that it is not so for everyone else. That her peers singled her out, whispered about her, mocked her, didn't want to be her friend. That their parents, even, had things to say about the strange girl with the foreign mother and no father.

Truth is they have a little in common, there. They both grew up on the outskirts of whatever social circles they might've had, and it had something to do with the circumstances of their birth. Their lack of one or both parents. Their lack of roots, a clear and longstanding connection to the communities they grew up in.

Or maybe it runs deeper than that. Maybe the humans, herd animals that they were, instinctively sensed their different-ness and drew away from it. That she was biethnic, that he was a foster kid -- these were the superficial reasons for their isolation, but perhaps at the end of the day, it boiled down to something far more primitive.

She is a witch. He is a wolf. They are quite different from the ordinary human beings that inhabit the world, and in that difference lay danger, threat.

--

He lifts his head after a while. Looks up at the sky, the clear stars. Bends again to kiss the top of her head, and then he nudges her toward the door, the house, the warmth.

" 's go back in," he says. "Been standing out here long enough."

Devon

Fair enough, he says, and she thinks a moment, holding him, and adds: "Doesn't mean you never do," softly, whispered against his chest. "Know you love me."

Doesn't have to tell him but I need more. Doesn't tell him it isn't enough. He knows that. It's been the whole curl of the conversation: how could she even know what he meant when he said he thinks of her as his mate? She doesn't know his thoughts. She only has allusions to his heart. She needs more. It isn't enough, or they wouldn't have found this sadness between them. He knows. She doesn't need to say it again.

Did need to tell him that it isn't that his gestures are empty, his love entirely invisible. Needed to tell him that she knows. She does feel loved.

--

Devon's arms are around his middle, and his coat and his arms are around her, keeping her warm. She strokes his back idly, just to feel the shirt against his skin, his skin through the shirt, his heat coming through. He holds her and perhaps he toys with her hair or perhaps he just keeps her wrapped up, firm and solid and immobile. Eventually, though, he kisses her. She feels it and it makes her ache, it makes her heart leap upwards. She hugs him tighter.

They do not mention it, but perhaps they both feel a flicker of awareness: his silent show of tenderness, protection, adoration. Her silent reception of it, acknowledgement of it, response to it. Acceptance of it.

He nudges. Doesn't quite let go of her, just angles himself that way. She huffs softly. "It's not cold." And it ... mostly isn't. It's chilly now, autumn falling most obviously when the sun goes down and the seldom-felt wind picks up. But she doesn't feel cold, and she holds him a little tighter. "Stay a while," she whispers.

Adds, a moment later, like she's thinking ahead: "Should build that firepit."

Rafael

He does know that, too.

Knows she loves him. Knows she knows he loves her. Knows she needs more than that, sometimes. Knows it's not enough, sometimes, for her just to know.

Must be like burning a flame in a vacuum, he thinks. Just the fuel isn't enough. You need something else. Need air. Need to be able to breathe.

--

So he stays, laughing a little -- a sound rumbling around somewhere deep in his chest. And he wraps his arms around her a little tighter. And they stand there, in the darkness, in the yard, under a sky fast turning toward winter.

"Yeah," he agrees. "Maybe put a bigger one in the mountain house. Not much room here."

Devon

"Don't you have thirty fireplaces inside at that house?" she asks, laughing a little.

Rafael

"Yeah," he argues, "but zero outside."

Devon

Devon, in response, licks him once, quick, through his shirt. On his chest. Bites him through it, to follow, but gently. Her hands flex possessively where they rest on his shirt for a moment, a tantalizing and surprising sensation after -- what? over two weeks? -- so much time since the last time she came into his room, folded back his covers, slipped in beside him and let him pull her little pajamas off.

Her hands relax. She holds him a little longer. She finds her breath falling into rhythm with his. She feels his heartbeat echo in her chest, surrounding her own. And the breeze lifts at her hair a bit, makes it flick at the air, levitates what it can lift of her. She hugs him tighter.

Tomorrow they will need to go to a doctor, or urgent care, or something. They will have to find out if she is, in fact, pregnant. With his baby. Or, if not: what is wrong with her. Why her clock is broken. For tonight they are no longer at a stupid gala-auction-fundraiser-party-wankfest. She's in her comfortable shoes and her slinky dress, and he's still in his gleaming black shoes and the other markers of his station in at least one of two realms.

Finally, she kisses his chest again, though his tuxedo shirt.

"Love you," she whispers, so low it's more felt than heard, like her breath moves his shirt back against his skin.

Rafael

Bitten, the wolf exhales -- quick, surprised huff of breath. His hand skims up her back. Fingers in her hair -- closing for a moment, then releasing.

"Too," he murmurs.

Devon

Well, there's that.

The last time his hand was in her hair like that, he was kissing her. And he was inside of her. And he was fucking her, her leg over his arm, sweat sliding between her back and the wall. Devon closes her eyes when he touches her hair like that, and she exhales, too, sighing slowly.

She presses herself closer to him. "Want you tonight," she whispers.

Rafael

Now he draws a breath.

And then he turns without quite stepping away -- arm around her, heading back inside. Glass door slides open and it's warm inside. His hand's on her back and it's warm, too, even through the thick layers of that borrowed jacket. He heads for the stairs.

"Missed you last couple weeks," he mutters.

Devon

If it were warm, she thinks he might fuck her outside again. Hell: if they started kissing out here, if they started touching each other out here, she thinks he might anyway. Wrap himself around her, press himself against her, pull her down to the grass with him, even in the current weather. He could keep her warm. He could make her sweat.

But he puts his hand on her back, arm around her, to move her inside. Slides the door open. Devon smirks soft to herself, that small smile she has sometimes. She steps away from his hand. Steps out of her sneakers, wiggles out of her little socks she wore with her boots earlier. She just walks forward, shrugging out of his tuxedo jacket and dropping it on the floor as she walks.

Doesn't answer him. Doesn't need to.

Rafael

Truth is, might not have occurred to him at all to just fuck outdoors. Only happened the once here, and that was because he looked out the window and saw her sunning herself in that tiny bikini. Creativity never was his strong suit. She said she wanted him. His uncreative brain filled in the rest: in the house, in the bedroom, in the bed.

Tells her he missed her, though. Maybe he's trying to do what he said he would. Trying to connect, trying to tell her how he feels. Maybe it's not so considered as that: he missed her, tells her so. She doesn't answer, anyway. Doesn't need to. Drops his coat on the smooth floor, kicks off her shoes and socks. Absurdly, he remember folding her clothes and putting them in front of her door that first time. He just didn't know what else to do.

Doesn't pick up the clothes now. Leaves them where they are, and since they're heading bedward, he starts undoing his clothes too. Slides the cufflinks from the cuffs. Slips the buttons from the holes. Takes off his shirt as he's following her up the stairs; his undershirt when he gets to the top.

Devon

His brain is linear. He relies on memory, on experience. People have hurt him whenever he's let down his guard for a moment before: he expects it still. He has been mocked ruthlessly, derided, dismissed: he expects them to always do so. The first and second and so many other times they fucked, it was naked, and he was on top of her, and so that is almost always how he thinks to fuck her. Maybe 'thinks' is the wrong word, though.

Devon walks ahead of him on the stairs, as she has so many times. He is not herding her now, not nudging her along, pushing her as quickly as he can to the bedroom. She doesn't keep undressing as she goes, just walks up to the landing,

turns right. Walks down the hall towards her bedroom. The door is closed, as it usually is. She takes the handle in her palm, gives it a silent twist, and pushes it open. The door yawns open, a dark box of strange angles, those sharp points growing more obtuse as the door swings inward. It's dark, and the curtains inside are pulled over the window to block out the unnatural light of the streetlamps. It smells of everything around Devon, but not of Devon herself. Botanicals. A few of his shirts, one of his hoodies. Places she's been, written across the soles of her shoes. Essential oils, unfamiliar herbs. Witch hazel, bergamot, some sort of mint somewhere.

Floor is covered in her shit. Mostly clothes she leaves where they fall. A backpack, some books. His foot slides on an open magazine for a second. Devon doesn't turn on any lights, none, til she gets over near her bed, which is slightly smaller than his as her room is slightly smaller than his. There's a soft but quick grasping for something on the nightstand, a mechanical roll and flick, and then light flares into being. She opens the door of a small lantern -- she got it at Ikea -- and lights the small pillar candle inside. It is white, and wax has melted over the edges of the cup meant only for a tealight, really. Not that she cares. This gives more light.

The lighter in her hand extinguishes when she lets up her thumb, and she sets it beside the lantern. She sits on the edge of the unmade bed and looks over at him.

Stares at him for a moment.

Pats the mattress beside her.

Rafael

Been a long time since he's been in her room. He hesitates at the door, but only a second. Knows he's invited. Follows her in. Shuts the door and then it's dark, and he almost slips on a damn magazine, and huffs a laugh --

"Such a mess."

-- which is true. Her room is a mess. It's always a mess, and he loves her for it.

A mechanical scratch. Then a flame. Then candlelight, which the wolf blinks in though it isn't bright. Just unexpected. Charming. And oddly reminiscent. Makes him think of that long-ago time, that seaside village. No electricity there. Just lanterns, lamps, torches in the night.

He's already lost his shirt and undershirt. Stands there barechested, looking at her. She looks bewitching by candlelight. Shadows move and shift across his body, his face, as he goes to her. Sits on the mattress beside her, edges of his mouth turning up.

Devon

Been a long time, indeed. No reason to go in here at all when she didn't live with him. No reason to go in here when she was gone, for months. And before she moved out to go be with that friend of hers with the loft, they only came in here once together. Only had sex in this bed once.

He makes a comment about the mess. She smirks to herself in the dark, doesn't answer him. She doesn't know he loves her for the mess. She hears it in his voice, though. The fondness. The strange appreciation for the vagaries of her behavior, the odd little things that prove to him who she is. Or what she's like.

She can hear that he likes her.

Devon still has on earrings, and a bracelet that gleams and shimmers on her wrist over the fabric of her sleeve. The places where her dress fades from orange to black meld with the shadows. He sits, and he smiles, and she thinks for a moment how innocent that is of him, how sweet, how if she were a wicked thing in the forest, he would be too easily led, too easily lured, back to whatever den she might have built for herself in the woods.

She regards him for a moment, that smile of his that seems so open, so easy. She leans forward, her lips touching his lips before anything else. She kisses him, close-mouthed at first, almost chaste, but that doesn't last more than a heartbeat. Her lips part. She closes her eyes, sighing against his mouth, his jawline, kissing him more fully. Only a few moments into that does her hand come to rest on his skin, her fingertips light on his chest. His skin is searing.

Rafael

If she were a wicked thing in the forest, she would have ensnared him effortlessly. He would've never escaped. They'd still be living there now: the witch and her enthralled wolf, legends out of some dark primordium.

She's not a wicked thing in the forest, though. She is a witch, and she can sometimes be wicked, but at least there's this: she doesn't live in the forest. She lives in the mountains, with him, and there's no evil in her soul. He loves her quite utterly, but she's never -- not once -- taken advantage of this. She's always protected his heart. Does it because,

after all,

she loves him.

That first kiss is love. Every kiss is love, but he feels it so profoundly in that first one. That close-mouth contact of their lips, and his eyes closing to it. A moment later she sighs, opens; he touches her jawline and she touches his chest. His skin is burning hot, always is, as though what lived inside him wasn't flesh and blood but fire and lightning. He wraps his arms around her and pulls her atop, straddling his lap as they sit on the edge of the guest bed that has become her bed.

He's taking her dress by the handfuls now. He pulls it up by the handfuls, drawing it up over her knees, her thighs. It's such a pretty thing, its colors echoing the autumn; and perhaps also halloween, which surely is her favorite holiday of all. Now he has it up to her hips, and he puts his hands under -- the fabric soft on his wrists, her skin soft to his palms.

They're still kissing. Slowly, and deeply. His attention is split: the touch of her mouth and the touch of her body, the taste of her, the sound of her sighing breath. He doesn't try to hold on to any of it -- lets it all wash through him, a river of sensation.

Devon

She shivers under his touch. That first one, grazing and light across her jaw. Devon trembles in answer to his fingertips, holding her breath slightly, as though it were the first time he ever expressed tenderness, the first time he ever revealed desire for her. Her hand flexes on his chest, flattens, palm smoothing across his skin. She inhales sharply through her mouth at the feel of him, exhales in a warm rush that curls over his face. His arms wrap around her, large arms, warm arms, and she shakes a little.

There is a problem: skirt goes past her knees. Skirt hugs her hips, her thighs, does not easily let him pull her straddling. His hands push up the hem as he's pulling her closer, then. Hand finds her calf, moves upward. Fabric is grasped, clutched in a broad fist, pulled up until her knees part. Devon helps then, the spread of her legs as she turns to face him pushing the skirt further upward. The bracelet on her wrist catches candlelight as she swings herself onto him, climbs onto him as he's drawing her nearer.

One of those soft, skinny arms around his neck. Her other small, slender hand on his side, sliding up his body as he's pushing that dress higher and further up her skin. Bares her narrow hips, returns his palms to her skin. Feels her underwear, thin and soft and currently invisible, because he can't look at her, because Devon is kissing him. Long, thirsty kisses, drinking air and love from his mouth.

She doesn't seem overeager to strip off all their clothes as fast as possible. She doesn't seem frantic about this at all. Just hungry. Just driving, wanting, at once purposeful and mindless about it. Touches him with no apparent aim but to touch him, to feel him, and to cause him to feel something close to what she does when his hands are on her. Kisses him only to kiss him, and because she cannot stop kissing him.

Devon sinks closer to him on his lap, moves her hips slowly against him, her thighs holding him as best as her slight body can.

Rafael

He's not in a hurry either. Just ... thirsty for her, all the same, his hands ungentle on her body, spreading open and gripping, sliding heavy and firm over her skin.

When she moves against him he sinks back. He pulls her dress to her waist, and then he reaches under it to slide his thumbs under her panties. Starts working them down. Not quite slowly, but at least: deliberately. Without rush. Without tearing, grasping, yanking. This is patience for him. This is as patient as he gets when he's undressing his lover.

Gets that scrap of fabric down past the curve of her ass. Rubs his palms over her skin, then, falling back out of that kiss. Looks at her, lying back on her bed with its luxurious comforter, its linens that magically get changed every few days.

"Take your dress off," he whispers.

Devon

That's all right. That's perfectly all right: his heavy hands, the way his grip pulls at her, the barely-banked ferocity of it. She kisses him a little harder, a little wetter, makes some little noise in his mouth as her hands are roaming over his upper body, luxuriating in him.

She is panting, now, however softly.

It's less all right when he falls away from her kiss. She doesn't follow him down when he lays back, sideways on her bed, his legs hanging off. She laughs at him, scooted forward onto the bulge of his erection pressing against his expensive black slacks. Correction: tuxedo pants. She bites her lower lip and rubs against him again, more gently but somehow more deliberately, feeling him slide between her lips, separated from her by that wisp of fabric between her legs.

Devon licks her lips. He's pushing her panties down, but of course she's straddling them. He bares her ass just enough to touch it, rub his hands on her, and she follows the pattern of that touch with the way she rides him, slowly, watching him.

One thinks she might be contrary. Say no. Say you do it. She often does, and not strictly because she enjoys being undressed by him. Sometimes she just likes to say no for the sake of it, for the enjoyment of his consternation and the amusement of his determination that usually follows. But tonight she doesn't say no. She takes her hands from his midsection where they fell when he leaned back. She tugs the bracelet she's been wearing off, dropping it not carefully on the nightstand but just... wherever on the floor. It falls glittering into shadows, and glitters no more.

There's a zipper behind her neck. She folds her arms back and draws it down, careful and slow, as to not snag the fabric. But after that, she has only to reach down, and grasp those handfuls he tugged up her legs, and then she pulls. Draws it higher and higher, her body stretching upward, her back arching, and then, just like magic, it's off. Her hair falls free around her shoulders again, bare shoulders, and that pretty dress is just a coil of fabric that meets the same fate as the bracelet before it. Earrings still glint in her earlobes: five earrings, maybe six, all told. They're uneven, all those little holes. She usually wears nothing more interesting in them than some cheap studs of colorful plastic balls or dots. Maybe she was more creative with her earring choices when she was younger. Maybe she got five or six holes in her head for a reason, or maybe she wanted to wear more than one thing at a time.

Anyway, right now: there are glinty, shiny things against her skin, gleaming through her dark hair whenever it moves.

Her bra is some seamless, flesh-colored thing, so that it wouldn't make a mark or bump under that slinky dress. She doesn't take it off. For once it actually matches her panties, pushed down just enough over his lap that he can see the first few small, dark curls just above her cunt. She leans over him then, just a bit, her hair sliding from her shoulders, forward, though not close enough to graze his chest. Her hands are there, though not roaming, possessive, warm. Lazy. Light.

"It's off," she murmurs.

Rafael

Sparks fly down his pupils when she rubs against him. His eyes are on her mouth. Her teeth catching her lip. Her tongue flicking across.

She takes off her dress. For once, she does what he asks. And maybe she misses it because there's a dress coming up over her face -- but maybe she doesn't; maybe she sees the look on his face, the way his eyebrows constrict and his lips part. He exhales; it's a shred away from a groan.

His hands are there, covering her tits. She's still wearing her bra. She's half-wearing her panties, because she's straddling him and he couldn't get it down very far. He reaches around and undoes her bra. Does this himself instead of asking her to because he wants to. It's a pleasure in and of itself.

It goes the way of the bracelet, and the dress. Tossed off the edge of the bed to join the rest of the unholy mess on the ground. He can't get his hands back on her breasts fast enough. Spreads those fingers open and envelopes her as thoroughly as he can.

Huffs a laugh. "Yeah," he agrees. She leans down. His hands find their way back to her ass. Squeeze. "Now take those panties off."

Devon

Should be something tender and slow and soft and sweet and aching tonight, shouldn't it? Shouldn't maybe she cry? Shouldn't he bury his face in her hair and whisper I love you, I love you to reassure her? Isn't that where they should be after the test, the questions, the discussion outside, the revelation of what she really means to him?

If it should be, they don't seem to know it. Consider it.

She takes off her dress and he's filling his hands with her breasts right away, like that was the whole point. Rubs them, lifts them in his hands, slides his palms around to unhook the stupid thing covering them. It slides off easily once loosened, dropping down her arms. She takes her hands off of him to slip it the rest of the way off and toss it aside, thoughtless of how it arcs or where it lands.

Devon moves on him again. Maybe she missed the way he looked earlier, but she doesn't know if sparks fly again, if he groans. She circles her hips atop him, giving him just the slightest grind. He can't feel it through his slacks -- can't feel how her panties are growing wet, how hot she is. But she does, and it makes every slide against him silkier.

He's playing with her tits again. Then her ass. Rubs his hands all over her, squeezes her, and the corner of her mouth gives a delicate upward curl in a soft smirk. "So fucking bossy tonight," she murmurs, grinding on him a little harder on that third word, fourth syllable.

Rafael

"Nah," he disagrees this time, and he's smiling at her again, lazily this time, crookedly. "Just can't get them off myself. Since you won't stop rubbing on my cock."

No one gave them the memo. No one told them it's supposed to be tender and slow and soft and sweet and aching. No one told them that's how you make love after abstaining for weeks; after all the stress and pressure and uncertainty; in the face of that looming question that still hangs over them. No one told them, and now look: they're smiling like conspirators, they're whispering to each other, they're

playful, almost, in a way they rarely are.

Smile fades a little though. And he leans up, kisses her. Kisses that little smirk of hers.

"Take them off," he repeats, softer. "And then get up here and put that pussy on my mouth, okay?"

Devon

"Sure you can," she teases him, when he claims he can't get her panties off by himself, but he's not finished: can't get them off because she won't stop rubbing on his cock. Something about that word on his tongue makes her pant softly, her eyes limpid. She moves a little faster, making this small, pleased sound.

Leans over him and kisses him. She's on her way and he meets her there, holding himself halfway between her body and the bed with that taut, fierce strength in his core. She finally moans for him, into his mouth, wrapping her arms around him. It doesn't last long enough. He tells her to take them off again. Tells her why. The things he says inflame her. She pants again, trembling against him, and -- perhaps surprisingly -- she gives a little shake of her head. Kisses him again, richly, deeply.

"Want you to fuck me," she whispers, still half kissing him. "I want to feel you inside me."

Rafael

His body is hard beneath hers; flexed to bring his mouth to hers. It takes strength and it takes resilience, but he's in no hurry to lie back. They share that kiss. It's a luxurious thing.

And when it's finished he relaxes; sprawls warm and massive in her bed, which is not a small bed. Still seems dwarfed when the two of them share it. Which is rarely. He so often defaults to taking her to his room. Fucking her in his bed.

Likes that. It's a primitive thing: something about claim and mateship, things that they talked about a little tonight, but incompletely. He doesn't really have words for it, and if he tried it might sound terrible and strange to her.

Beside the point, anyway. He likes this too. Being in her messy room, kissing her on her bed. Her dress off. His shirt off. Her bra off. His pants still on, but: his dick hard, her cunt wet, and she won't stop rubbing on him.

Tells him what she wants. It's what he wants too. He has to lick his lips before he can answer, but when he does he just says it again:

"Take your panties off, then."

And reaches down, too. His knuckles brush her thighs. Brush that scrap of fabric he keeps talking about, too. He undoes his belt, and the clasp on those fancy trousers, and the hidden button, and the zipper. He pushes his shorts down, gets his cock out, strokes off while he waits for her to -- well. Get her panties off.

Devon

She almost can't stand it. She keeps touching him, feeling needful now that she's voiced what she really wants. As much as she loves it when he kisses her there, licks her, lays her out and pleasures her, tonight she wants him -- needs him -- harder than that. Needs to feel him, whole and firm and hot, inside her and all around her. She holds him because of that, kisses him the way she does because of that. She rides him, even through their clothes, panting softly in between touches of her mouth on his, the taste of his tongue.

He's told her three, four times now to take her panties off. She squirms on top of him, sweat beginning to build and bead on her back, her breasts, all over her skin. She feels him reaching down, thinks he might touch her, finger her, get her off like that since she's not obeying him, and her entire body shivers. But he's getting his belt undone, he's undoing his pants. She has to move off of his cock a bit to let him, and she doesn't want that.

Rafael will feel her hesitate to move away; feels her fight him, fight to keep rubbing herself off on his cock, before her brain asserts logic: he can't fuck her if she doesn't let him get his cock out. She can't fuck him if he stays clothed. She whimpers a little, leaning over him, folding over him entirely. Her breasts press to his bare chest. She reaches down between their bodies, too, lifting her hips, sliding his cock in between her legs, though not inside of her. She lays on top of him, rubbing her pussy on top of his cock now, rubbing him between her thighs, holding him there. At least she's no longer straddling him. She just doesn't bother with her panties, because that would be one more step between his cock and her pussy.

"Like it --" she gasps, finally feeling him on her skin, finally letting him feel how wet he's made her, but the words fall apart. She pants, licking her lips so she can correct: "Don't mind it... when you're bossy."

Bites her lip against a groan, squirming on him like that, whimpering a little.

Rafael

That's not where that goes. He'd tell her that, except...

pussy. Hers, specifically. Rubbing on him through a thin layer of lingerie, which -- he notices this -- still hasn't been taken off. And meanwhile she's telling him she likes it, no, she doesn't mind it, which doesn't quite seem like what she's trying to get across, but he isn't trying too hard to keep tabs.

Just lets her have her way with him. For a while, anyway. Watches her face, her mouth, her eyes. When she closes them he leans up to her. Kisses her hard. A moment later he flips. It's a quick maneuver, rather athletic. She hits the bed and the springs bounce audibly. Now he's on top again, working her legs apart, pulling her panties aside since she won't take them the fuck off.

"Ready for it?" he mutters, which isn't the most romantic thing ever uttered to a woman in bed, and probably not even the most romantic thing he's managed to dredge up for her. But it's what he's got right now, and it does represent a crude sort of chivalry, a base form of communication, or at the very least: the impetus not to hurt her, or damage her, or make her feel like a slab of meat.

Devon

She was going to ride him. She was going to invite him to her room, to her bed, and she was going to make him undress for her, pleasure her, show her his cock, and then she was thinking about maybe licking it for him, taking him in her mouth, looking up at him to see his eyes flicker and close at the slide of her tongue. She had plans to drag him down to her den and climb on top of him, fuck him in such a way that he would know he belonged to her, that he's hers, body and mind and soul. Sear herself into his skin, so that he'd never, ever forget how much she loves him.

That... is not even slightly how this has gone. And that's all right. It's more than all right.

She doesn't mind it.

She likes it.

--

His cock is against her pussy. He can feel her wet sliding against him, perhaps feel the edge of her panties on the other side, but the most compelling sensation is elsewhere. She's so soft. And it's so slick right now, so hot, her lust mingling with her sweat until she's slippery against him. He wisely does not argue with her about where his cock goes. It goes wherever she pleases, after all. She'd even say so, if he dared to argue. She knows he likes pleasing her.

She knows because every time she tells him he hasn't, she watches him try. And try, and try, and fix it, and do better. Always. And without having to be told over and over. He loves to please her, and pleasure her, and he doesn't want to do otherwise. And this is one of the ways he shows her that he loves her. Adores her, even.

Some part of Devon is moderately aware of this. Some part of her mind drifts over that realization, that crystallization of understanding, and she wants to tell him she does get it, she recognizes how much he loves her, how much she means to him, but right now

her brain isn't working. Not entirely. Not firing on all cylinders. Because his cock is right there, throbbing a little against her clit, and she thinks she's going to die. How can she even consider fucking him right now? She'll stop breathing.

The next thing she knows she's on her back, and she gasps, which at least means she gets a burst of oxygen. She looks up at him, and for a moment her eyes are searing, fierce, inhuman things, and then they flicker. She whimpers, dizzily, the panties that are stretched from mid-thigh to mid-thigh pushed a little lower down, or aside, or something. He's going to fuck her, she thinks, and he's muttering

ready for it? and

right about now she thinks she's never heard anything so goddamn erotic in her whole fucking life.

"Tear them," she whimpers, a note of pleading entering her tone, making her sound like she's begging. "Turn me over. I don't care." She wants to tell him fuck me, fuck me, fuck me but can't get the words out. They are there in the way she squirms, and how her back arches, and how she whimpers the words, and how her nipples stand on end, as eager for him as she is.

Rafael

"Not gonna tear the only fucking matching panties you have," he mutters,

which is completely fucking inane, or possibly insane, but: it's what he's got. Right now. Which isn't much. She's not the only one rapidly losing words, losing speech, losing that entire faculty that marks them as higher mammals, something a little more coherent than your average beast.

Which he feels like. A fucking beast. He has no idea she had plans for him, was going to lay him out and suck him off, was going to climb on top and ride him until he had no doubt that he was hers. He would've been just fine with that turn of events. Would've been just fine fucking her like that, grabbing her hips and her tits and maybe the headboard for leverage while he hammered into her; would've been just fine being her personal fucktoy tonight and every night. She can keep him on retainer for all he cares.

Not how it worked out, though. So little works out as they plan. He got bossy, or maybe just repetitive: he really wanted those goddamn panties off

(and they're still half on)

and she lost her train of thought and now, now he's on top and grunting something about being ready and she looks like he just spilled erotic gold from his silver tongue. She arches her back and her nipples are right the fuck there so of course he puts his mouth on her tits, sucks at those lovely things, growls against this point of contact the way he does when words have entirely left him.

Is still sucking at them when he grabs her by the waist and starts turning her over. Has to let go sooner or later -- lets her nipple pop out of his mouth, bites at her side, kisses her shoulderblades. They so rarely fuck like this. He can't remember the last time, actually. He pushes up on hands and knees. He grabs her by the hips, pulls her up too, strips those panties down at last, down down down to where they don't matter anymore. He'd shove her up the bed and bury his face in her cunt if she didn't tell him not to earlier, but she did, so: he doesn't.

Takes his cock in hand instead. Slaps it against the cleft of her ass, the slick of her cunt; thick heavy thing, weighty. "Grab that pillow," he says, possibly meaning to tell her to put it under her hips or maybe to bite it, who the fuck knows -- he never gets around to it. His chest is against her back. Shoves his cock into her like that, and truth is: it's rough. He doesn't have the patience anymore. Or the presence of mind.

Does have the presence of mind for this, though -- to pause. To take a moment, panting, his breath hot on the side of her face, arms planted like pillars on either side of her. He kisses her face where he can reach it. There's a flexion in his body, an echo of that movement that brought him up to kiss her earlier; pushes his cock into her this time, his body tight against hers.

"You okay?"

And, if she is:

"Gonna touch you while I fuck you. Okay?"

Devon

Devon has no idea what he's talking about. Matching panties? Matched to what? She doesn't ask. He mutters that he's not going to tear them and she doesn't know why or what he means but she laughs a little, breathily, arching her back to get closer to him. No idea that she could drag him in here and fuck him every night if she liked, any way she liked. Use him. Keep him on retainer, because sometimes she still thinks she asks too much of him. Demands too much. She wants to be gentle with him. Treat him with kindness. Tenderness.

Love. Because that is what he is, to her.

Love.

--

Her cheeks are flushed, her eyes bright. She barely sees it before he ducks his head, puts his mouth on her breasts, sucks at her, licks. She moans aloud, and loudly: she reaches up to the headboard herself, to the upper edge of the mattress, holding on while he pleases her yet another way.

Lets go when he turns her over, and now she really thinks she's going to pass out. She cannot remember the last time he did this for her, to her. She can remember two years ago, early on, fucking her from behind in some hotel room before she left for Boston. Surely there have been other times. She stops trying to remember, because he's biting her, kissing her, dragging her over the bed, and shoving her panties down.

Devon is already grabbing the fucking pillow, Rafael.

She doesn't think to push it under her hips. Truth be told, she's not that experienced. Hasn't occurred to her to angle her hips, help her back, doesn't... know. He tells her to grab it and she can't breathe. She whimpers, nearly on the verge of collapse from sheer arousal. He's spanking her -- spanking her! -- with his cock. She's never --

it's as new as someone licking her pussy to orgasm. She writhes, crying out, wanting to beg, but she never gets around to the words. Rafael is panting over her, animal, hot, and then he's fucking shoving his cock into her and she cries out at the suddenness, but it's not an unhappy sound. She grabs the pillow harder, one palm flying to the headboard for leverage as his thrust shoves her body forward. She groans, pushing back against him, and he's paused and she hasn't noticed. He's kissing her and she cannot really respond, reply, because she's squirming on his cock, getting used to him by moving on him. He thrusts. She cries out again.

you okay?

The words filter through, and are tender, no matter how rough his voice. She loves him so much. Nods, quickly.

"Love you," she says, by way of answer, and there's something otherwise unspeakable in it, something very soft indeed, despite the fact that he's got her facedown on her bed, his cock pulsing in her pussy.

He says he's going to touch her.

Devon whimpers. She nods again. Her voice is small, overcome: "Oh, god. Oh, fuck."

Rafael

Way she sounds sets something off in him. Makes him molten, crazy. He bites at her ear. She's so fucking overcome already. And truth be told there's a certain jolt to his ego from it. In some primitive, immature way he wants to beat his chest about it: barely put his cock in her and she's already melting down. He knows it's not that, though. Not so simple as that anyway. There's more to it. How long it's been, sure, and how long they teased each other before getting down to it. But more than that, still.

Has something to do with the raw and naked words they exchanged outside. Has something to do with the rare playfulness between them in the moments before. Has something to do with the fact that he's fucking talking to her, too: using his goddamn words for once, imperfect as crude as they are.

So she's whimpering. And clutching that pillow. And holding on to the headboard, which he might've done too if she'd been the one to get on top and bounce on his dick. And she's trembling and overcome and he, too, is overcome -- not just with that crude pride but with tenderness and a ferocious sort of protectiveness.

Growls with it. Wraps his arms around her, possessing and sheltering at once, which means he can't hold himself up, which means he bears both of them down a bit -- except he's also making good on his promise. Sliding his dominant hand down her body and between her legs, levering her hips up

so he can fuck her,

but also so he can touch her. Like he said he would. So there it is, then, his fingers on her clit -- searching her out and stroking her, rubbing her, doing his level best to make it good for her while he -- put simply -- starts fucking her. Giving it to her hard and heavy, because even now he hardly ever knows any other way; snarling in her ear while he fucks her.

"Love you," he manages -- lower, jagged, a rough echo of what she'd told him moments before. And, "Love that cunt. So fucking good."

Devon

She wouldn't really mind it. At least not right now. At least not tonight, maybe, or lately. She wouldn't mind if he smirked, if he looked proud and -- quite literally -- cocksure, while he fucked her. But she can't see him. All she can do is feel the way he covers her, wraps around her, fucks her like a beast, which is just how she wants it tonight. Didn't think she did, didn't know she did, but here they are, and here he is, and this is who he is, and she adores it.

Yes, she's melting down. He's barely put his cock in her. It's been so long. They teased each other for so long.

And he is using his words. His filthy, crude words. His voice. His plans for her. The things he wants her to do, tells her to do.

Her legs spread a little wider for him. He fucks her a little harder, reaches down to stroke her clit. This is when she figures something out, by instinct more than logic: pushes the pillow she's clutching downward, under her hips, gives them both something to work against. She whines a little, wiggles under him for comfort and then for pleasure. He finds some sweet spot, some rhythm, and she squeals softly and bucks against his cock, against his hand. He can't pull her hair and touch her pussy and hold himself up all at once so she doesn't ask him to pull her hair again, but she would. Oh, she would.

Gasps when he tells her he loves her cunt. She clutches at the sheets under her, face turned against the mattress, and one could say she's taking it -- and she is -- but it's somehow more than that. It's likely neither of them could put into words what she gives back.

Perhaps words, at least in part. oh god, oh fuck again, and again, until they're just vowels and gasps, groans for more. Her cheek is pressed against the bed. She cries out for him on every thrust, every grind, wanting to tell him again that she loves him so much, it hurts to love this much, she's sorry she gets so scared, she loves him. But at the same time she just wants to tell him harder. She wants to tell him more. She wants to tell him she loves his fucking cock.

What makes it out of her mouth are just open-mouthed cries, wordless pleas. After a few panting, gasping breaths:

"Oh, fuck -- oh my god, please. Please. Fuck me. Give it to me. Oh, god --"

Devon

And she dissolves again.

Rafael

Some of it gets lost in translation. She doesn't really get the finer points out; the details that address their relationship, its novelty and newness, how terrifyingly unfamiliar this territory is for her. How if he doesn't tell her, and he doesn't show her, she can't realistically be expected to understand what he's thinking or how he's feeling or what he feels when he thinks about her. And how she does love him, and does know he loves her, and does believe and trust that. It's just -- not quite enough, sometimes.

All of which are good points. But it's fine. One can forgive her for not making them right now. She's occupied.

She's rather busy getting fucked. She's rather busy fucking him, grinding back against him as he hammers her; she's rather busy grabbing at the mattress and moaning into the bed; she's rather busy trying to tell him to fuck her. Like he might stop if she didn't.

Truth is he's fucking her so enthusiastically they're rumpling the sheets. They skid a couple inches toward the headboard. He wants to kiss her mouth so he uncinches his arm from around her; he paws back her hair where it's fallen messy over her face. He kisses her while she's moaning, so he kisses the moan too, muffles it, which fucking turns him on too.

She dissolves again. He bites her shoulder the way he nearly always seems to. He reaches down and pulls her legs wider apart, touches her rather mercilessly, rubs her clit in double-time to this stroke of his cock. Muttering something in her ear now, sounds like wanna see you come, or maybe love to see you come, and it could be one or the other because both are true.

Devon

They had the talk about their relationship. About how if he's going to go around thinking of her as his mate, his one true, his only, his forever, then he's got to maybe, you know, talk to her sometimes and let her know this sort of adoration exists in him, bleeds from him, is wrapped around her oblivious little heart to try and keep it safe as best he can. They had that talk. Neither of them is a poet. Neither of them knows how to ask for what they want or need without being rough about it, harsh, and sometimes Devon won't say anything at all for fear that it will make him mad or sad or not love her anymore, and sometimes he won't tell her what words he can think of because it will sound so strange, and he doesn't want her to recoil, retreat, reject.

Neither of them has the words to say I have been so wounded. Please: be patient. Please: be careful. It will heal, but slowly.

But they've had the talk that they are able to have, each of them. They have done and given their best tonight, each of them. It was enough to get their arms around each other again when she's been so cagey for so many days, weeks. Enough to help her spine relax. Enough for this.

Which isn't so unusual: this is what she wanted when she came back from that strange, forgotten season. This is what she wanted in the woods under threat of being burnt at the stake. This is what she wanted even that first night, when he had acted like such a prick and scared the shit out of her and then she finally grasped why he was always so weird with her, and glad that she wasn't alone, and

so on.

Devon sometimes needs this. To renew something in herself that has been drained, to give her strength that she's lost. And she's lost so much of it, in her self-imposed silence over the past several weeks. She's felt so tired, and so alone, and the burden has been heavy. Sometimes, and tonight is one of those times, she does not simply want him. She needs him, needs this, needs what is between them, because it wakes her up again. It makes her feel like herself. It makes her feel alive.

Though right now, fucking enthusiastically and athletically on a queen-size not-guest bed, one wouldn't expect her to feel anything but potently, glowingly alive.

Good thing they're not in her godparents' creaky house, or her mother's small apartment. She's moaning loudly when he doesn't muffle it with his kisses, tearing her lips away so he can't do that; she likes to hear herself, she needs to breathe and barely can. She bites another of the pillows that she's grabbed onto, groaning as he quickens his pace, rubbing away at her clit. After two years he knows what he's doing, he has figured out what is too rough, too fast, where the wrong spot is. But more than that; he's figured out when to flick lightly at her, when to tease her, how to make her buck and scream when he really puts his mind to it.

Which, to be fair: he seldom does, because he seldom can.

But she's mewling after a while, squirming under him, crying out these rhythmic, helpless little things. Can't even feel him biting her, somehow. She can just hear him snarling what seem like words, which turn her on so much she can't handle it, can't cope. This goes on perhaps longer than she thinks she can survive, which only means that when it hits, it's going to be that much more intense, that much more overwhelming.

And then it does hit, like a bolt of lightning, seeming to illuminate the whole room. Devon goes tense, clutching at the bed, clutching at him, smacking his hand like she needs him to stop, stop, fuck, she can't -- but she can't tell him what she can't, she isn't even aware she's speaking. She goes taut, overcome, and then shudders apart, burying her face in a pillow with something like a sob, bucking against him hard once, twice, three times. Squirming again. He never knows what is coming next but she keeps moving, sometimes jerkily, sometimes with smooth writhes of her lower half, whatever will give her the sensation she needs right then.

Wants, really.

Now she's just being selfish.

Rafael

She can't.

Keeps telling him that. Maybe not even in words; maybe just in action. Grabbing at his body, clutching at his hand. Smacking him, even, which might make him laugh later to think about but

not now. Right now, he's fucking driven. He fucks her, driven, driving her against that pillow and against that mattress, stroking into her smooth and hard, biting at her skin, rubbing at her clit. When she's on the edge -- when she's going off -- god, he knows it, he's known her long enough to recognize it, he's greedy for it, laughs darkly and groaningly against her shoulder.

Keeps fucking her. Of course he does. Keeps touching her. Of course he does. Even when she's grabbing at his hand, her palm slapping off his knuckles, he keeps it going -- mutters in her ear, only; words matched to the way he's fucking her. Stroke for stroke, breath for breath.

"You're okay," he tells her. And, "Yeah you can. You can."

She -- doesn't even quite moan, coming. She sobs into that pillow. And he takes his hand from her clit, finally, as she's shuddering apart. He'd suck her slick from his fingertips if he had the presence of mind for it but he doesn't. He shifts over her instead, his weight on her, his arms wrapping around her. He bears her to the bed while she's still writhing, jerking; he starts fucking her again, hard and fast, snarling in her ear as he chases his own orgasm.

Devon

Devon is undone. She's squirming and bucking and sweating, and he's muttering to her, panting in her ear, and she's never heard him talk this much during sex and she thinks it's going to kill her. She fucking loves it. Loves him. Loves how it feels to hold his hand when she comes, since she can't look him in the eyes.

She comes, and she comes very hard, and it keeps crashing over in wave after wave. She can't stand being touched anymore and might scream, but he stops, he lets go of her, and she survives a little longer. She gasps when he holds onto her, closing her eyes as he fucks her a little more, harder now. She has to grab at the bed, bite the pillow against another sob, another scream, her body shaking under his. She's trembling when he comes. She's shaking like she has a fever, panting, and truth be told there is a moment when all she wants in the world is for him to get off of her, roll away, let the cool air touch her skin, she's so hot she feels dizzy, but she

doesn't pull away. Wouldn't pull away, right now, when he's in her like this, when he needs her like this. She holds onto his hand.

Rafael

She holds his hand.

He grips her hand.

Truth is he nearly crushes her hand in his grasp -- grips it so hard, grips the sheets through her hand. Grips her in his teeth like he always does, coming; roars muffled against that anchor; fucks that orgasm into her like he's trying to nail her to the bed.

Afterward, his hand loosens a little. Still covers hers. He still covers her, too: great nexus of heat that he is. Does roll to the side a little, if only because he needs to breathe too. Strokes her hair and her back aimlessly, lazily, as he picks up some pieces of himself. Puts them back together.

--

A little while goes by and then he stirs. Moves a little closer again, half atop her. Kisses and nips at the outside of her shoulder. This too is aimless and lazy.

"You gonna be mad if I tell you you're a good fuck?" he murmurs, blurry.

Devon

And then they flop. He rolls off, at least mostly. She scoots over to free her skin a bit. He paws at her mindlessly, helplessly almost, pulling her hair off her back. She sighs when he does that, the sensation of cool air on overheated skin almost as good as the sex itself. Moves hairs that are stuck to her temples from sweat. It feels nice. She thinks he's taking care of her; perhaps he is, and doesn't know it. Just wants to touch her. Pet her, stroke her, because that is what makes him feel loved, too.

--

Devon, however, cannot move for a while. Her hips are still bent over a pillow. She has her eyes closed, her head turned on the bed, the candlelight on the nightstand flickering over her features, but she's closer to that nightstand and he rolled onto the other side, so the back of her head is to him. She's catching her breath, waiting for her heart rate to slow, when he moves closer again. Her temperature has dropped enough that this isn't torture; she sighs instead with familiarity, and turns her head, shaking her hair off, rubbing her face on the sheets until it's out of her face.

Opens those brilliant eyes of hers, the lanturn behind her creating a small halo around her dark hair, looking at him. He says she's a good fuck. Asks her if she'll be mad.

"Why would that make me mad?" she murmurs back, fuzzily. It's a sincere question. She doesn't wait for him to answer; she's lifting her hips, shifting, tugging the pillow out from under her and tossing it away, corner of the bed, because it's... well. Damp. She rearranges the pillow under her head, gets a little more comfortable.

Devon

[LANTERN. NOT LANTURN. *HAS SHAMED ANCESTORS BUT NOT DOGGEE ANCESTURS WHO UNNASTAN*]

Rafael

"Don't want you to think I'm just in it for the fucking," he says, smiling, because even as he says it he hears how stupid it sounds. Rubs his face on her shoulder. "Never mind."

Hand's still wandering, stroking. He lifts a few last strands of hair out of her face, delicate. And then much less delicately: he draws knuckles down her back. Palms her ass again, which -- come to think of it -- is how this all began.

"Think we'd be okay," he whispers. "Even if you are pregnant tomorrow."

Devon

She laughs at him. When he says that stupid stupid thing. Rubs his face on her. She's laughing at him, fondly, breathlessly, her cheeks still red, her skin still sweaty, her eyes still a little glassy. He's touching her and touching her. He's being so gentle, like all the ferocity has temporarily been abated, calmed, soothed somehow. Or relaxed. She doesn't know what word she wants. She lets the thought go, looking at his face, which is also sweaty, pink, glassy. She likes how he looks. He's very handsome. His jawline goes on for days and days, could cut glass. His lips are full and sensual and she wants to bite them.

Touches them, instead. Touches him like he touches her: softly, idly, her fingertips careful on his lips. His jaw. He moves closer, arm over her, touching her spine, caressing her ass. Devon smiles at him, her eyes tender for once, and sharp, and knowing,

as ever.

He reminds her she might be pregnant. And it doesn't upset her, send her reeling. Maybe she just needed to be close to him. Feel close to him. Maybe right now she's so chock full of endorphins she can't consider anxiety. She huffs a laugh. "Well if I wasn't, I probably fucking am now."

It's a weird sort of joke, but it's all she can do tonight. She can't handle any more stress. It's a sort of reverse gallows humor.

Leaning forward, she kisses him gently, her lips catching at his instead of biting at them. "You're really dumb," she whispers, full of love. Softness. "Didn't think you'd leave me. Or be mad at me. We'd be okay. Whatever it is." She's quiet a moment. There is the other thought, somehow deeper and even scarier than potential motherhood, darker for it: whatever it is. Even if something is wrong with her. "We'll be okay. Won't we?"

Rafael

You'd think he'd get grumpy. Withdraw. Growl something about not funny. But he's only mortal, and he's chock full of endorphins too, and ... they're so close right now. He feels closer to her than he can ever remember, though surely that's just his dazed mind exaggerating the moment.

Still. Hard to argue that it was different tonight. He's never talked so much; not without being urged, anyway, and not without regretting it afterward. He's never tried so hard, so consistently, to stay in the moment. With her. Connected.

He doesn't withdraw. He laughs, quiet and hushed. Opens his fingers and rubs his palm over her skin.

"Was thinking," he admits, amused, "you'd think we'd have been smart enough to use a condom this time."

And she kisses him. And his hand on her arm turns into his arm over her waist, his hand on her side. Narrow, graceful body. Fragile-but-not. Skinny thing. He doesn't say that aloud anymore because she doesn't like it, and he can't blame her; it's a crude, stupid thing to say, but it's the closest thing he has to what he actually means, and thinks.

They're a little more serious after that kiss. She's very beautiful. Her eyes are the stuff of legends. Her smile haunts his dreams.

"Yeah," he answers, soft but sure. " 'Course we will."

Devon

He's only mortal. He's only her big, dumb male, and all she means is that he fucked her soundly, gave it to her good if we're being crude, and as he once said on a rocky beach before she was taken from him for a full season: he's the one not wrapping his dick.

Devon moves a little closer, now that the air conditioning has wicked sweat from her flesh, rapidly cooling her. She feels cold now, wants to be closer to him, wants to turn to face him, to be held only so near that they can still watch each other from pillow to pillow.

She just smirks a little at his reply, amused as well. Shrugs. Says nothing more about it: none of the obvious. She's pregnant or she's not. They kiss. He holds her. He doesn't call her skinny thing, and she doesn't know what he ever meant by that, what he really thinks, because he is still finding his way to any words at all. It would be dumb to expect all of them, all at once, and each one perfect.

In his mind there are no words for her eyes being legends, her smile haunting his dreams. There's only the way his heart beats in time to the legend. There's only the dreams themselves.

Devon strokes the back of her knuckles along his jaw, wordless. Remembers something curious, blurts it out: "Why didn't you want to tear my underwear off?"

Rafael

From the first time they fucked, he's kept her warm when she was cold. Hell; before that too. When he chased her out on the street. When she was leaving, because she was so angry at him, didn't understand why he was such a jerk to her. He took his coat off for her, which was something he'd only seen done in old movies up until then. It wasn't quite an act of chivalry. It was an act of...

Well. Love, maybe. Protectiveness and care and regard, surely.

She moves a little closer now. And his arm is heavy and warm over her, and his body is like a furnace. There's just enough space between them for her hands, her knuckles on his jaw, her forearms touching his chest.

He closes his eyes, stroked like that. Feels good in some deep, elemental way. Which is why -- when she blurts that question -- his eyes snap open again. He blurts something back: a laugh.

"What?" He thinks a beat. "Because it matched your bra. And you never match. Figure if I tore it you'd never match again."

Devon

She stares at him a moment, partly because: she had no idea he noticed things like her bra and panties. And then she laughs a little, her hand turning, her palm touching his face. "You care if it matches?" she asks, bewildered, but trying to understand. She's not laughing to mock him. She hopes he knows.

Rafael

Almost by instinct, he kisses her palm as she touches his face. "Don't care if they don't match," he clarifies. "Just not gonna wreck the only pair that does."

Devon

Now she's only more curious. Her palm is kissed; she runs that kiss over his cheek, into his hair, her fingers parting the dark, dark strands. Devon has no idea that Silver Fangs are supposed to be Nordic paragons, all blonde hair and piercing blue eyes and broad shoulders. Devon has no idea that Silver Fangs are all supposed to mad, mad things, that her beloved might one day spiral off into insanity. She only knows that he is beautiful, and he is bestial, and she sees something in him that is precious and tender and worth protecting. She only knows that she loves him, and he makes her feel safe.

She kisses him again, her hand in his hair. It's soft. All her kisses have been soft, since he fucked her senseless.

"I don't care," she assures him. "You can always buy me new panties if you rip a pair off," she adds, not meaning to turn herself on again,

but there it is, deep inside of her, a flicker. It doesn't show yet. Not even in her voice.

Rafael

The wolf's erstwhile mother was, in fact, of Nordic stock -- or at the least, north european. She was indeed blue-eyed, broad shouldered, strong jawed; carried herself like a king. It was she that gave him his pitch-dark hair, though, her own being the same. He did not know this for certain until he saw her portrait hanging in what used to be her home, her territory.

He did suspect. His father's hair, from what he remembers, was a lighter, warmer brown. And his eyes are his own. Some amalgamation of genes underlaid his mother's blue, his father's hazel.

His wolfsblood is his own too. Some wild spirit passed down through the ages, inhabiting body after body, life after life. Meeting the witch's more than once -- sometimes only glancingly, achingly, and sometimes for a little longer. He doesn't know for sure, though. For all he knows, this is the first life where they have spent so much time together, fallen so deeply in love. For all he knows, it may be the last, the only.

--

It is a strange and sorrowful thought, but it is one that swims only dimly under the surface of his consciousness. It entwines with the uncertainty and the fear: is she pregnant? or is she sick? Mostly, though, he is thinking of her matching lingerie. He is thinking of tearing it off, and though her rekindled arousal doesn't show on her face, or her voice, he senses it all the same.

Or maybe he just senses his own. Kindles his own fires, lights his own blaze. He is looking at her mouth now. He is looking at her body, his hand finding its way across her side. He touches her breast gently, with care and reverence. He is stroking her nipple with his thumb when he kisses her again, softly.

"I'll buy you new panties if I rip a pair off," he promises.

And, "Want to fuck you again."

Devon

It's like he can sense it. Maybe he can fucking smell it, even when she has no fucking scent. Maybe he knows when she wants it by some look in her eyes, some edge in her voice that she can't even hear herself. But somehow he always seems to know, even before she murmurs aloud that she wants him. She loves that, though: how he tells her. How he comes to her, covers her, shows her.

In all her wanderings in his house in the mountains, she's never seen that portrait of his mother. She hasn't asked. She avoids it as she would avoid a wound, a raw bleeding thing,

but that is because her own father, her own Garou parentage, is in fact a raw, bleeding wound on her heart.

Still.

--

Doesn't think about past lives, though. She's an elementalist, not a spiritist. The rocks and water and wind, the flame and green growing things, body and blood, the crackle of lightning: this is her magic. If there are gods and spirits who speak through these things, she doesn't know their names or their language. Only their power. Only the strength and surprising quirks they have. For all she knows, she'll turn into mud when she dies. And that is all right. Maybe she'll be a tree, or a mountain, or a small puddle that lives for a day until it evaporates under the sunlight. There is no evidence that this sort of life is any less valid or important than the sort of life she is living now.

Looking into his eyes.

Contemplating the possibility that there is something growing inside of her because of him.

--

His hand turns, smooths over her skin. He lifts her breast in his palm and feels her breathe in at the sensation, her tit moving in his hand. Her nipple hardens gently, gradually under his thumbprint. He leans over and kisses her and she's ready for it, her lips parting, and he tells her he'll buy her more. He suggests, merely, that he might rip her clothes off, literally, and she makes

the smallest sound.

That's all the answer he gets.

Rafael

All the answer he gets, and all the answer he needs. He leans up on an elbow. Leans over her, beastlike, an animal lapping from a pond. Maybe in some previous life she was a puddle, but in this life she is a witch.

He can still turn her to liquid, though. When he touches her a certain way. When he brings her breast to his lips, covers her nipple with his mouth. It's a slow, lazy thing, the love he lavishes on her tits. The way he rolls atop her, too, sliding between her legs -- the flexing musculature of his abdomen against her cunt. He left her wet and now she's wet again, and maybe he knew that. Maybe he can tell, even when she smells of nothing, even when she says nothing, shows nothing, hardly even recognizes her own wanting.

This time he pushes up over her, so she can watch him loving her. He enters her with his arms braced, the knotted muscles of arm and shoulder tremoring ever so slightly at the feel of it. Exhales a groan. Puts his weight on one hand, then; puts his other hand on her body. Holds her breast, tenderly but firmly, unapologetically, unabashedly. Feels her heart beating against the heel of his hand. Feels her tit bouncing against his palm, deliciously, while he fucks her all over again.

Devon

Told her some time ago that he could fuck her all night. She all but made him hold to that promise. Had him fucking her in bed, had him laid out for her to ride, had him pin her to the wall and pull her hair back while he fucked her. She still gets turned on when she thinks of it. She gets turned on when she thinks of him saying those words.

Melts a little, sighing, when he leans over her, drawing her breast into his mouth, running his tongue over her skin. She rolls, half-falling, onto her back, arching her back a little. She's so distracted she barely even notices the way he places himself between her legs, covers her body. His cock does stroke against her, though, slides over her thigh, and she shivers.

She grins. She smiles, hands drawing him up, closer, to kiss her. Maybe they should stop. Put on a fucking condom this time. Maybe, maybe.

Devon laughs softly, a hitch and a gasp in the center of it, which dissolves into a sigh when he touches her more fully: hands down her sides, hands parting her legs, cupping her tits. She all but purrs when he moves; she thought earlier that she needs to get around to telling him some very small things like how when she's coming very hard it helps if he's still for a few seconds, if he just carries her through it and lets her have it. She thought about telling him that it means a lot to her when he holds her hand when they aren't looking at each other during sex. She forgot to mention all of it, because they got to talking about him ripping her panties off and she got to feeling warm again, and then he was licking her breasts and she was biting her lip and now he's flexing into her with that soft grunt he so often lets out, that near-groan, near-gasping sound she loves so much.

Has forgotten to tell him that, too.

She arches when he pushes his cock into her this time, whimpers softly and needfully the deeper he goes. This time they face each other. He gets on top of her and the truth is they do it like this most of the time because they like it like this. He makes her feel safe; she makes him feel wanted, needed, welcome. Devon reaches for him while he fucks her, leans up to kiss him, but she doesn't try to pull him down.

Sort of likes it when he holds himself up like that, watching her, letting her see him.

--

This time they don't talk as much. That's it or Oh, fuck but little else. She holds tight to his arms when she comes, writhing a little til he grinds harder into her, pins her down. She swears, scorching his ears a little bit, when he gives it to her. Moans something about that good fucking cock while she's squirming in the midst of her orgasm. Has her hands on his lower back, his ass, when he's fucking her harder, faster after that, her nails scraping lightly up the curve of his ass when he's right on the edge of coming inside of her. She rides him a little then, while he's lost, when he's still, her teeth in her lower lip. She's enjoying this.

As though he might not know, with the way she whined and whimpered and bucked against him a minute ago.

In the aftermath her long legs are folded around him and her arms are sliding around him as he sinks over her, teeth loosening on her shoulder, chest heaving. She holds him, panting close to his jaw, while her heart rate tries yet again to return to baseline.

Probably a dozen things she could say right now. Talk about having his babies or him fathering her babies. Talk about fears of what might be going on with her, physically. Talk of sex, and what she likes, and what he likes. Telling him she likes it when he says things to her like he did, how much it turns her on when he's with her like that, how it feels like something private and secret that no one else ever gets to be a part of and that's part of why it matters to her, and part of why it makes her feel close.

But fuck it.

Right now, with her legs going slack, her muscles relaxing, her smile so loose and calm and blissful, just...

fuck it.

"Love you," she says, sprawling slightly, unable to keep her arms around him anymore, letting them fall, drape, relent and relax. Her legs still hold him. She drags one arm up, with so much effort, and strokes his hair a little, tucking it behind his ear. "Love fucking you." Laughs to herself, grinning underneath him. "You're such a good fuck,"

squeezing him inside of her, purposeful and a little merciless, on the word good.

Rafael

Sooner or later he almost always comes down to her when they're fucking like this. Almost always covers her and wraps her up, surrounds her, suffuses her, all but swallows her up.

Not this time though. This time -- for whatever reason -- he stays where he is. Maybe he knows she likes to watch him sometimes. Likes to watch him fucking her; likes to see him putting a little effort into his orgasm, and hers. Most nights it's dark, but tonight she lit a candle, and so by candleight she can see him: the velvet-dark shadows on the far side of his shoulder, past the crest of his bicep, around the side of his chest, in the midline where the mirrored halves of his musculature meet. The flash of light off the dampness at his temple, too, and the trickle of sweat down his side. The various textures and details of his body: a flashing eye, a gleam of tooth, a nipple, a navel, an expanse of taut skin. All of it in synchrony. All of it under tension. All of it moving, kinetic, escalating, and never unmoved or removed. She knows he loves fucking her because she can see it, the raw enjoyment that quickens the rhythms of heart and breath, that has him sweating, working, chasing down the next moment and the next.

Something almost avaricious about the way she comes this time. Something about her hands on his body, grabbing his ass, pulling him into her. His fists are planted on the bed by then, his wrists sinewy, hard as steel cables. He fucks her just the way she shows him. He growls when she moans, when she praises him for his good fucking cock, and that growl is something primitive and satisfied and possessive.

He watches her come. Mutters that's right, that's it while she squirms on his cock, rides it out on him.

A little later on, he comes for her. Comes braced up over her the way he rarely is, eyes shut and teeth bared, snarling silent and breath-caught as the crest of it rises up. She runs her nails over his skin and that seems to set him off; his eyes fly open and lock with hers and by then it's shuddering through him, and he can't manage a single word but he groans through it anyway, fucking it into her until he can't anymore, grinding the last of that orgasm out until he can't do that anymore, either.

Sinks down, then, at last. Her arms and legs fold around him. His breath is an elusive thing that he just can't catch. Even now he's still moving into her, now and again, as though this time he really can't seem to get enough, really can't bring himself to stop.

But he does. And her legs relax. And his body grows heavier. And she's happy, and laughing, and calling him a good fuck and the irony doesn't escape him. He laughs too, muffled, exhausted, indistinct.

Shudders, when she squeezes him like that. Moans aloud.

But laughs.

Devon

They sleep in her bed, in her room. It's smaller but not by so much that he has to crowd her. He does anyway, more or less: holds her from behind, both of them briefly showered and still quite naked, his big palm covering one of her tits semi-unconsciously. Maybe, nose near her head, he dreams he can smell her hair.

Devon has disjointed dreams that jitter at the edges with anxiety and uncertainty and a strange haze of guilt that descends and lifts at random. Nothing she sees in her dreams has anything overtly to do with babies. Doctors, yes. Wolves staring at her. Rafael is upset and she's not sure what kind of upset it is and she is afraid it will be grief, afraid it will be anger, afraid it will be rejection, but she never quite sees where the jangling of her nerves against his suspected emotions goes.

She dreams, at her deepest, of being a virgin, once upon a time. She dreams of being very young, so young she didn't even know what periods were. For a while, she inhabits that. A while later, she is someone watching her own innocence as a separate being. She is very old, then. She is far, far past the age when anyone might think she could bear fruit. She dreams of fruit. She dreams of apple seeds, little whispers of poison in each one, scattered on cold ground. On stone.

It is not the first time Devon wakes from a dream unsettled, with a hard knot in the pit of her stomach. She hopes for a moment it's cramps, but she knows it isn't, and there's no relief of blood when she goes to the bathroom.

--

There isn't much of a wait. They aren't far enough into cold and flu season. It's still early enough in the day, not even the lunch hour, that the waiting room isn't terribly full. Devon ended up saying she wanted to go to Planned Parenthood, so that is where they go. It's not like Colorado Springs here, and this clinic has limitations: no one is protesting outside, no clinic escorts are wearing vests to shelter women as they walk inside. It's a neighborhood, really, just south of Colfax, and the little building is small and brick and unassuming.

Even with Rafael there, hulking and with eyes that seem to sear and stare and a mouth that seems, to humans, on the verge of baring teeth, it's calm. Ish. The admin behind the counter looks up and assesses the situation, makes assumptions, reminds himself not to make assumptions because that's unprofessional and goes against the mission of the organization, and Devon signs in.

Devon, who woke before Rafael did and called beforehand to make sure she could see someone today. Devon, acting very quiet today but not withdrawn. She keeps holding his hand. Fills out paperwork on a clipboard but holds his hand while she ticks of boxes and fills in lines.

She gets up to give it back to the guy behind the counter, goes back to sit with Rafael, and waits.

There is a cutaway image of a cervix on a placard on a table, with an actual IUD affixed to it to show what it looks like and where it fits. There are a lot of pamphlets in English and Spanish about STIs. There are pamphlets about abusive relationships. Devon doesn't read anything, not even a magazine. She rests her head on Rafael's shoulder, holding his hand, and after a while, she goes behind a door and Rafael isn't invited to join her and she's gone.

Seems like a really, really long time, but surely it isn't. It's just that there's more intake. And there's giving a few drops of blood from her fingertip. And then there's peeing in a cup. And there's some other stuff once she gets to talking with the NP. And then she comes out again, a short woman with curly auburn hair just behind her, and then it's time to go.

Because, as Devon explains, apparently they have to send stuff to a lab. Three minutes at home. Three days now.

She starts crying in the car, hands on her face, because she's frustrated. It's not even stress at that point, or fear. I just want to know what's going on.

She gets over it quickly enough, sniffing and wiping her eyes and shaking her head, no, she's all right. She is. It's just weird.

--

So then it is a few more days. She spends the nights that follow those days in her own bed, but each evening she takes his hand and wants him to go with her. Or he goes hunting, and when he gets home and she's asleep already there's a text on his phone saying come sleep with me tonight?

And then it's a few days later and she does get a phone call. Maybe he is there. Maybe he's asleep, nocturnal thing that he is. So it's a while before she sees him, and

he comes home, or downstairs, and

she is in the kitchen, sitting on a barstool at the island, eating buttery, crispy, golden fried skillet potatoes,

her legs swinging down, in tall striped socks, her ass covered by pale purple boyshort panties with white piping, braless, in a black tank top,

and she is drinking whiskey straight from the bottle.

Rafael

Last time wolf was in a doctor's office was years ago. Probably before he was a teenager. Definitely before he was a wolf. Some murky past; some overworked pediatrician's low-cost clinic, probably, for a rare cold or maybe a scrape, a fall, a sprained ankle. Can't remember face of the doctor that treated him. Can't remember if he got a day off from school or what.

Nothing since. Been so long that he doesn't really remember this. Sitting in the uncomfortable chairs, looking at the pawed-over magazines. No one harasses them on the way in. It's possible he doesn't even really know that's a thing, that assholes harass women on their way to getting necessary healthcare because god forbid one of them need an abortion. No one bothers them in the waiting room, either, where neither of them read. She leans on his shoulder. He leans his head back against the wall.

Soon enough they take her back. And he watches her goes, eyes moving, head turning, like he might not see her again.

--

Soon enough she comes back. And they go home. And she cries in the car, and then pulls herself together, and then it's three days where they live in a sort of strange limbo where they pretend life is going on.

He sleeps in her bed every night. It's a strange turnaround, his bed untouched and cool, hers crowded and warm.

--

He is asleep when the call comes. He smells potatoes when he wakes, and this is new. She doesn't cook often. She certainly hasn't cooked much the last month. He knows she's cooking because it smells different from what his cook usually makes; everyone has their own style. His footsteps thud upstairs -- across the hall and into his own bathroom where the water runs and the toilet flushes. Then down the stairs.

Somewhere along the way he's pulled on lounge pants. He's not wearing underwear. He looks at her with surprise, and then he comes up beside her and pulls out a chair.

"Not pregnant?"

Devon

So his dick is swinging around inside of his lounge pants, and she can absolutely see it when she looks over. Her eyes even flick down at it, only half conscious, before she nods lazily at him. She's eating the potatoes right out of the cast-iron skillet she cooked them in, a trivet under her 'plate'. She eats another bite, nods, drinks another swig from the bottle.

"Not pregnant," she answers, sort of... flat. Somewhat drunk.

Rafael

He looks at her potatoes. He looks at her whiskey. He holds his hand out, presumably for the bottle.

"You okay?"

Devon

She pushes the bottle over easily enough, without tipping it. So not that drunk. That would be frighteningly, dangerously drunk for Devon: once she's there, she may as well go to the hospital, because she's clearly gone and poisoned herself. It takes that much to make her truly slosh around.

Shrugs her thin shoulders, hunched over her potatoes. "Sort of." Takes a bite, mumbles: "Said I'm still young. Interruptions to my cycle aren't necessarily signs that something's wrong. Said to give it another few weeks and if I don't start then I can go get other tests. Said at that point I should talk to a fertility specialist."

She reaches for the bottle again. "Just really hate not knowing."

Rafael

Takes a swig from the bottle. Sets it down. Looks at the label. It's probably something from the liquor cabinet. He has another sip, smaller, before he passes it back.

"Want me to just take you to a Theurge?" he asks. "Just... have them heal you, fix whatever might be wrong?"

Devon

Her face seems to wrinkle. Her brow folds, her eyebrows tug, her eyes wince, her mouth tightens at the corners. She doesn't seem to want to consider this option. She doesn't make her face do that because she wants to get that point across, she just... does it. Kind of drunk. Kind of lazy about what shows and what doesn't. She takes a drink. It's not a huge swig, at least.

"Not really," she answers, even though it's obvious. "Don't even know if anything is really wrong. Doesn't feel right. But just don't know."

Rafael

Wolf doesn't push. Just shrugs a little, then steals a bit of potato from her skillet.

"You ever want me to, just tell me. All right?"

Devon

Devon pretends like she's going to stab him with her fork, but it's a pretense, a game: she's nowhere close. She waggles it at his hand threateningly, that's all. "All right," she says, dismissively, and it's hard to know if she hears him or not, or takes it seriously or not, or would ever want to go see a Theurge. A stranger.

She's fine with strangers, as long as they stay strange. Don't really know her. Don't know who she is or what she's about. Don't know anything of how she feels or what is inside of her.

"How are you with all this?" she wants to know, eating her potatoes. There is no meat this time. She felt lazy.

Rafael

He huffs a little as she pretends to threaten him. Might have been a time he would've snapped at her, gotten angry. Now he just not-laughs.

Then grows quiet. Then thinks.

Looks over at her. "I worry," he admits. "Don't want something to be wrong. Don't want you to be sick."

Devon

Not like she didn't know he was concerned. Not like he's telling her some grand revelation. Not like it's huge news that he wouldn't want her to be sick, wouldn't want something to be wrong. But that's not why she really asked, and that isn't why he dredges the words up, says them aloud, even though surely all this must be obvious.

He says more than he might have otherwise, a week or two weeks ago. Might have just grunted, shrugged, said he was fine. Might have left it at a rough Worried. Even the slight difference between that and I worry matters: tells her something different about him. About what he feels for her.

Devon leans over and instead of scoffing or saying obviously or just sighing that she doesn't want to be sick either, she presses her arm on his arm. Hard not to fall off chairs, but she leans on him anyway. And then after a minute, puts down her fork, because she's eaten a lot of potatoes and she has had a lot of whiskey. She wraps both her arms around his bicep.

She's quiet for a while. Takes time to form the thoughts, and then more time to form the words:

"Maybe we just pretend nothing is wrong for now. Don't feel sick. And I'm... tired." She sighs it, and then after saying it, seems to confirm it: "I'm just really tired."

Rafael

Always warms him when she hugs his bicep like that. Like maybe his arm alone was so massive and mighty that she had to hug it with both arms. Or like maybe she drew some warmth, some comfort from him.

She leans on him. He eats a few more bites of potatoes, taking over her fork without a whit of disgust because -- really -- they swap plenty of fluids.

Frowns when she says she's tired. "You need to rest?"

Devon

Shakes her head a little against his arm. "Mean... mean I'm tired of being stuck in this. Don't want to stay stuck in it for another month."

At the moment, she mentions: "Am kinda drunk right now, though."

Fucking revelatory.

Rafael

"Oh." Barely more than a grunt, really. Still relaxes a little. Eats some more. "Okay. Yeah. Let's just deal with it if it comes."

And, a moment later, smirks.

"Really? Didn't notice."

Devon

Her head pillowed on his bicep, she watches him eat with her fork, his other hand. Neither of them goes on drinking the whiskey. She sighs softly, but it sounds more... relieved, than anything else. Calmer. Safer.

"Seemed the thing to do," she explains, trying to sound breezy, which doesn't work when she sounds... drunk.

Rafael

"Fucking Fianna," he says. It's fond. And, as though he's decided to at least make an effort to join her, he takes another sip from the bottle.

Caps it, though. And pushes it aside.

"Should get you a job. Give you something else to think about."

Devon

She purses her lips and rolls them together at him, sputtering dismissively. She hugs his arm a bit more, rearranges herself. When he puts down the bottle she just up and starts climbing from one barstool to another, heedless of the possible tipover she could cause, climbing into his lap. She's careful not to knee him in the groin, even if she is drunk. She decides it's easiest to straddle him, so she does, and since she's in underwear and he's in lounge pants, she -- wiggles a little, thoughtful, and then decides:

"Can feel your cock."

Just a minor observation. She settles, though, arms around him, resting lazily on his shoulder, her legs draped to either side of him. She realizes he spoke earlier and she didn't answer him before climbing onto his body.

"I liked my job," she mentions, a little sadly. "Mostly. Don't blame them for not wanting to hire me back, though." She remains draped, lazy, leaning on his chest. "I'll think about it. Somewhere else."

Rafael

He's mid-bite when she decides to move over. Barely manages to get that forkful in before he has to put the utensil down, put his arms around the girl crawling drunkenly into his lap.

"Forgot to put on boxers," he says, which is a lie because he didn't forget. Just decided not to. She settles. His arm loosens, stays lazy around her waist.

"Sorry you lost your job," he adds. Hadn't occurred to him to say that til now. Didn't know she was sad about it either, til now.

Devon

Of course he puts down his fork. Of course he doesn't stiffen and push her away, like he would have two years ago. Of course he wraps his arms around her and holds her close so she doesn't slip and fall, because he's not so wary anymore of her maybe guessing that he cares about her. Likes her, even. Perhaps even loves her and wants nothing more than to have her close like this, held safe, kept warm.

He holds her. He says he's sorry. Hadn't occurred to him to say, but then: it's not like she was all that forthcoming about her sadness over it. She shrugs a little. "Liked when you'd visit. Give you muffins. Colfax is interesting, too. It's all right. It was just a job making coffee and heating up shitty vegan bread for people on their laptops. Better than Starbucks or something, though."

Devon nuzzles his shoulder. "Wanna watch a movie?"

Rafael

"Those muffins were the fucking best," he says. Epitome of sensitivity there. Then he gives her a squeeze. On the ass. "Yeah. Go pick something out. I'm gonna finish your potatoes."

Devon

"Because I didn't give you the shitty vegan ones," she retorts, and then he squeezes her ass. She wriggles. On his cock. She slides off then, unwinding her arms, undraping her legs, stepping to the floor and taking her fork back for a moment, for one more bite. She gives it back. "You should bring my ice cream," Devon also tells him, sauntering lazily into the living room, leaving him to eat her food and find out that she keeps a pint of raspberry-white-chocolate ice cream hidden in his freezer.

She stands in the living room with the remote, flicking through Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, all the various options he has, because he is such a fancy man. She eventually settles not on some old romantic movie, but on The Addams Family. And when he joins her, hopefully carrying her ice cream and a spoon, she curls up next to him in his big chair, dragging a blanket over them, opening her pint and trying -- beginning to try -- not to think anymore about what might be wrong.

Nothing might be wrong.

Certainly at the moment nothing is wrong. Not with Rafael holding her, and ice cream, and the singlemost loving and healthy adult romantic relationship in all of modern media being portrayed on the screen.

Nothing, right this moment, is wrong.