Ornature

[Trent Brumby] He'd finished work an hour and a half ago, but instead of going home he had swung by a take out place and grabbed himself a few boxes of Chinese food, a couple of bottles of drink and made his way to the storage unit. The last hour had been spent eating food with a plastic fork, eating mouthfuls between working on the bikes. He'd picked up some parts to replace older ones earlier that week and was in the process of fitting it back together. Some body work needed to be done with some paint work and possible a new upholstered seats wouldn't go astray.

He wiped off his hands on a rag and threw it onto his tool box. Sitting on the cold concrete, he picked up a bottle of cola and twisted off the cap to take a long drink of it. He felt like he was accomplishing something out here. Sitting by himself with a dull light on, the roller doors closed, in the middle of some storage place. It didn't matter it was a bad neighbourhood, he was used to that by now, and he had his gift stowed nearby, on top of his jacket laid across a remaining box. There's no music, no talking, just the distance sound of traffic moving through the streets.

[Kora] There's no warning before she enters. The distant sounds of the city remain the same; there's no engine, idling, no footsteps on the pothole studded asphalt, no hands on the bottle of the roller doors, no knock; she doesn't walk in from outside, from the warm spring day, where the shining sun is slowly giving way to a stormfront rolling in from the south and west, dark clouds on the horizon, the air humid, thick, that first taste of a continental summer.

He is alone in the space.
And then is he not alone in the space.

There is a subtle scent in the air, nameless and faint, the way the air sometimes promises rain with a rising musk; and there is the strange rush of displaced air, wind where there was none. Then, another body in the small space, casting long, multipartite shadows framed by the dull lights of the interior. It's dark in here, shadows in the corners, on the concrete floor, cracked and stained with engine oil, and other things.

There is always a moment of disorientation, a sort of incipient displacement parting the veil between worlds, the cobwebs of the thickened gauntlet feel physical, visceral. There is a moment when she is silent; just breathing, her eyes adjusting to the light, to the fact that there is light. To the solidity of the things in the room around her; to the silence, except for the hiss of cola in his uncapped bottle, the sound of his breathing, his scent in the space.

[Trent Brumby] Its always strange, that sudden appearance of someone in a space without warning. Eerie, too, that Garou are able to appear in the blink of an eye, suddenly there in a space of a room, or in this case a storage unit. He doesn't notice her instantly, but the creeping feeling across his neck increases until he follows his gut and glances over the unit.

A sharp intake of breath through his nose sounds his surprised alarm. He breathes it out slowly, his pulse beating quicker, until he takes in the familiar form and the way her posture his. Fabric whispers as he capped his bottle and set it down to the side. He smells of grease from his day at work, musky smells under deodorant he put on this morning, clinging to his polo shirt and his tradesmen work pants. There's still food in here, too, it smells of meat, noodles and spices.

He pushes up to stand, brushing off his hands. "Sorry, I was just working some more on the bikes."

[Kora] The figure she cuts is familiar - tall and lean and narrow-shouldered, in her dedicated clothing, the worn jeans, the scuffed black boots, the black Pixies t-shirt, fitted to her narrow torso, soft from innumerable washes except on the left side, where it is stiff with some stain. There's dirt on her boots, dried mud up to the ankles, and dark stains on the thighs, just where they would be if she had wiped her hands clean, there.

"I should have peeked," her voice is always rich and low; a certain reverberation underneath the tone where the sound waves hit the metal walls, the concrete floor. The dimness makes her loose hair merely pale; only when she turns her head to follow his movement in the space does it catch the light. " - across, before coming in. I should have knocked." Her voice is quiet; she's holding something back. She offers these words as placeholders after his apology, his sorry, which she leavens with a sharp look.

When he stands she inhales, teases out the layers of his scent, the food in the den, the closeness of the space; the older layers, too - fading, to the sharper immediacies of sunwarmed metal, stained, cool concrete now that the den is no longer inhabited.

"Hi," she says then; and, " - thank you." Both in quick succession, one and then the other. She should ask a question about the bikes. what they will fetch; what he needs to do to finish them. Whether she can help. How much longer he needs. The wolf, though, is much closer to the surface; it gleams, silverfish, across the surface of her eyes.

She inhales him again. Then says, quietly, "Come here."

[Trent Brumby] "You weren't to know." That he was here was a rare sort of thing, he popped in and out at random times to get some things done, to make progress. She wasn't to expect him here in the storage unit, it was her territory not his. Or was Kemps. He's not entirely sure on those details and hadn't asked.

But she tells him to come over, and he does. Stepping past the bags containing food, a box of it still open with the fork sticking out, and the bottles of drink in another bag nearby, he headed over to her. "Hey, yourself," he says quietly, offering her a slow smile. Gray eyes take in her face as he reaches up to brush a hand across her hair, the other reaching for her hip.

"How are you doing?" Quietly.

[Kora] "I can look," she responds, her voice low and quiet on the heels of his you weren't to know. There's no apology in her tone; nor is there self-reproach. She tells him this evenly, her familiar voice just shaded with a certain rawness, the hoarseness of overuse, or perhaps disuse; or, the shadow of some deeper resonance underneath.

He stands up; she holds his gaze steadily as he rises, her mouth set into its most neutral curve, her eyes intent, impossibly dark except when she lifts her chin, when the light sweeps across her face, catching out the sharp line of her cheekbone, enshadowing her jaw, gleaming across the surface of her gaze. Then he looks down - an ordinary, human thing, stepping across the food left open in its little white box, the fork still buried in the spiced noodles, no longer warm enough to steam, but fragrant enough to fill the dulll space with the scent of chili and soy and sesame, looks down to ensure that he doesn't upset the box, and in that moment her gaze drops from his eyes to his torso, watching the subtle twist and sheer, the suggestion of movement, beneath his clothes as he walks.

When he reaches for her hip; when he ghosts a hand across the fine threads of her pale hair, she is still looking down at him. This close, he can see how neatly she holds herself in check, the tension in her shoulders, the stiffness in her spine as she balances the wolf riding close to the surface of her humanskin.

"I'm well," she tells him, when he is close. "I came to get some clean clothes to wear." When he is close, and her eyes close, to breathe him in again as if he were an intoxicant, something illegal, something dangerous to her sense of control. She is controlled, so much so that she steps in to his touch, but does not touch him back. She is controlled, but when she opens her eyes, cuts a look up at him through the scrim of her pale lashes, mouth open, it is the animal is looking back out at him. "While I washed these."

The wolf under her skin.

[Trent Brumby] He is solid built, more slender at the waist, but hard there. She knows this, she's seen him many times without the clothes that cover him now. Trent is perfectly comfortable in nudity at home, or anywhere else really, but that hasn't been an issue raised yet. His boots are steel capped, work things that are expected to be dirty and protects toes from heavy things that may be dropped. The pants are dark navy, like his polo shirt, the buttons undone and the collar spread wide.

"You should bring them to my house," he says of her clothes, "I'll wash them for you." It was better then her spending time in a laundromat. He had his own washer, no dryer though. He hung his clothes to air dry instead of eating up more world energy. Both hands slide across her waist to her back, pulling her slowly in against him after she has stepped nearer.

Gray eyes don't shy from the animal in her eye, instead he leans in to kiss her mouth just softly.

[Kora] He bends to kiss her, the scant few inches that mark the different in their height. She rises to meet his mouth, then - but does not kiss him back. Instead, she is breathing, breathing slowly and steadily, controlled and marked and measured, as if she were counting each breath out against the beat of her pulse. Her mouth is open and her breath is warm. There is blood on the t-shirt, a dark, stiff patch of it on the left, and soil under her nails, though the peeling black nail varnish does something to conceal their state. Her breath smells disctinctly hoppy this close, and although her clothes and hands are dirty, she has scrubbed her face clean until her skin fairly glows.

"Okay," she agrees, against his mouth. Her eyes are still open, although they are half-lashed now. She sees him piecemeal, up close. The cut of light across his jaw, the shadow of whiskers over his cheeks.

Then he pulls her closer, his hands sliding from her hips to her back as she steps into his body. Her own hands find his waist, now, just skimming the framework of his body as her mouth drops from his mouth to his throat - the invitation of the open collar, the hollow where his pulse beats under his skin; where she can taste the heat of his blood, the work of his chambered heart. Where she can throat him, if she so desires.

Her hands contract, then, gripping his waist with a sure and sudden strength. They are in the middle of the storage unit, which smells of Chinese take-out and kinsman, which smells of oil and dust and sweat. She smells of earth, and loam, and blood and beer. She pulls him hard against her, feeling the strength of his body beneath her hands. Reveling in it.

[Trent Brumby] There isn't much talking between them. Almost anytime they had come together out of the public eye, there had been touches quickly followed by kisses and raised body heat. His mouth had not long left hers when she let her lips drift across his throat. It had been a warm day, he'd sweated, she could taste the salt on the skin from it, and the dirt of the day not yet washed away. He breathes deeply, the faintest of sounds exhaled with a deep, almost soundless sigh. Content with her attention.

Hands caressed along her back, the heel of a palm rubbing along the flanked muscle to the curve of her jeans and fingers caressed softly on their way back up. He doesn't stop her from continuing to linger around his throat, showing perfect trust. It's arousing, the way she does this, breathes him in, exhaling across his skin.

"There's some food left over." His voice is quiet, low in his throat.

[Kora] "I can smell it," she replies, her voice low, her mouth against his throat. She felt his words before he spoke them, vibrating through his vocal cords, thrumming through his body. "The food," she continues, lifting her mouth to the underside of his jaw, her voice so low and direct tonight, every word concrete and functional. " - like I smell you."

Her eyes are open then; she is looking up at him, leaning in and pushing his chin back with her the bridge of her nose when necessary to expose more of his neck and throat to her mouth. The edge of her smile is evident at the corners of her mouth, and her eyes shine with the promise of it.

"I'm hungry," she admits, confesses. It's not a double-entendre. She's hungry. She's ravenous. Her body is eating itself to regenerate itself and the scent of cooked meat suffusing the air is as much an intoxicant to her in this moment as his skin is. " - and I want to fuck." She lifts her mouth from his throat to his lips them, meeting his gray eyes with a direct and level look, her mouth hooked at the rightmost corner, that half-smile, the girl, the woman, the self ghosting around the edges of the beast.

The city sounds are arrayed outside; a distant horn, the roar of traffic. In here, just heartbeats. "Eat first, yeah?" Her eyes darken. " - then we can fuck, longer. I won't," laughing, low, little more than a huff of hot air against his skkin, "die of hunger half-way through." She kisses him once, hard on the mouth, deep and hungry, then lets him go entirely, turning away from him, heading toward the food, bending over to search through the boxes and find the meat - not the rice, not the noodles, not the vegetables, the meat.

[Trent Brumby] Tilting his head back with the nudge of her nose, he had closed his eyes completely as he concentrated only on the feel of her against him, anticipating where her mouth was traveling next. It makes his pulse leap and bound, becoming steadily excited.

She could feel his laugh, quiet and rich, when she tells him exactly what she wants to do, unashamed, bold and brass about it. He likes it. Really likes it; enough to make hormones flood and blood surge, so that when she kisses him, he kisses back with eager attention.

Then she's stepping away, leaving him to stumble one step and bite off a groan as his hands fall limp to his sides. He mourns her departure as she searches for food, closing his eyes and getting his libido under control again. Hands sweep through his hair after his five second stare at the ceiling, and he turns to walk over and clean up some of the tools, wiping them down with a rag.

"I think I might be insulted if you were to do that," he says on her dying of hunger midway through sex.

[Kora] While Trent composes himself, Kora finds a box full of chicken and mushrooms, glistening in some sort of plum sauce. The light is low enough that the bites of chicken and mushroom are nearly indistinguisable, but she identifies it by scent and weight; the way it sets her mouth watering. She picks it up, pushes open the four little flaps, snags the fork he had been using to fish noodles from his own box, and takes her bounty - her prize - her kill - to the side of the narrow space, leaning back against the mini-fridge still surrounded by milk-crates like shelves, empty now except for the cheap appliances - the hot plate, the coffee pot, the heater - and salvaged kitchenware she labeled as "keep."

Leaning there, half-seated, half-standing, her tall frame a long, defined curve that pivots around the fulcrum of her hips, Kora digs into the chicken with a appetite most women would conceal if they felt it at all. She's hungry, she's ravenous, and she's eating like that, too - spearing and downing the chicken, fishing the meat out from the vegetables thoughtlessly - working the plastic fork through the paper container.

"Yeah, well - " she laughs, briefly, quickly filling her mouth with another bite, though the laughter lingers in the structure of her shoulders, in the tension of her spine, the way her abdominal muscles contract, lifting her diaphragm, the physical promise of laughter rather than its audible counterpart. " - you could see it as a compliment. That I'd rather have sex with you than feed myself. I can think of worse ways to die, anyway."

The words aren't as grim as they sound. She watches him while he works, her eyes hooded, dark - she watches him steadily, minutely, surely, rarely looking down at the food in the container in her hand.

[Trent Brumby] Chuckling quietly, his mouth curled with a light formed grin as he considered that option. She'd rather have sex with him then eat, thinks of it as a good way to die, and it really does stoke his ego. There's approval there, in the slight nodding motion of his head and the pleased-with-himself smile that's half hidden under the gruff on his face.

Each tool is wiped down by the dirty rag in his hand, and he stoops rather then crouches, picking up one after the other and arranging them back into the tool kit that's spread opened with each piece having its own little compartment; not unlike fitting pieces into a jigsaw puzzle. "These bikes are almost done," best not continue to think on sex, if they want to make it somewhere other then the storage unit or the car, "I'm going to get some bodywork done and fit some new seats. Then all they need is a thorough clean after a spray, and we're good to sell them."

He throws a glance over. "They'll be practically new. Reconditioned." Nodding, once. "You will get a good price for them."

[Kora] He throws a glance back over at her, where she leans, eating, her lips glistening with plum sauce now, two bites of chicken speared on the plastic take-out fork she has been employing with a sort of brutal efficiency, to spear the bites of chicken and split the mushrooms, letting the the latter drift down to the bottom.

Her body craves protein, solid and strong, to finish reknitting the finest fibers of muscle underneath her skin, to feed the beast repairing itself. The knot of her hair is loosened, and falls like a dull cloud in the shadows that lap the edges of the space, haloing her face without catching the light thrown by the handful of lamps, by the directional light he'd used for the finer work.

She watches him the whole time; as he gathers and wipes down his tools, the movement of his thumb over the dirty rag over the tools, the hard lines of his body as he works, both appreciative and proprietary - territorial - until he tugs her attention back to the bikes, sitting there the whole time.

Thus, when he looks back at her, she's not looking at him but at the dark shadow of the bikes in the room, still, silent, the possibility of movement built not into the shape of the struts and frame, but in the engine he took apart, rebuilt, reconditioned. In that moment, the surge of her grief, of her fury, is so raw and immediate that she crushes the paper box of chinese food in her grip, wants to rend something, wants to kill, wants to -

- sauce drips wetly from the bottom of the paper container, plashes dark against the thigh of her worn jeans, mingling with the other stains. in the darkness, it could be blood.

It takes effort for her to master herself; obviously, physical effort for her to look back at him, her eyes raw, dark with the surge of remembered loss. She makes the effort, though.

"Thank you," she says, quiet then. Breathing, slow and steady and sure. " - for doing this. It means alot to me." There's a moment when she is still, poised, fork in hand. Then - breathe out. Breathe in. Breathe again. " - honoring the dead. Remembering the past. That's - that's my job, yeah? In the Nation."

[Trent Brumby] He watches the way her face changes and her body tenses, how she all but crushes the box in her hand and spills sweet sauce all over the place. His gaze flits back up from her thigh to her hand, then further up to watch her face and search it. He gives her time to come back to herself, to breathe, and finally speak. "I know," he says quietly - well, suspected. Their talks, his promises that he makes for her - to remember. It added up to him the last time they had lay, breathing heavy from their coupling in the bed, and she told him what was on her mind before diving back into the flesh again.

Dropping the rag onto the tools, he left where he was standing by the bikes and made his way directly towards her, less slowly then he had before. Once there, he reached for her hand, the one with the food, seeking to take the box from her hand, watching her eyes all the while. It was set aside, on one of the crates, while he still held her other hand, her wrist gently. "It's okay Kora," he tells her quietly, "it's okay to let it out."

The bottom of his polo shirt is lifted with his free hand and he uses it to wipe her palm clean of sticky sauce, dropping his gaze from her face to her hand, cleaning it off as best as he can given the materials at hand. When most is off, he raises it to lick the web between two fingers and offered a small smile in the eyes as he does so.

[Kora] "I let it out - " she says her voice quiet in that moment, but rough with the edge of her frayed control. " - then I see the moon, and it comes back." She's not complaining. Her voice is far from plaintitive. This is the fact: of who she is; of who he's sleeping with.

He is close again, close enough that his scent insinuates itself underneath and around the scent of the Chinese food, the sweet, sticky sauce she has spilled over her hands and thighs, which congeals at the breakpoints in the collapsed little box. He takes the box away and sets it aside; she drops the now-empty fork back into it as he puts it aside. The outer tines are splinted, blunt and broken from the force she used to spear her meal.

The bony structure of her wrist is delicate, obscured by the bracelets she always wears - a half-dozen, more or less, on each arm, some dark, some worn, some frayed with wear over time. Underneath, largely hidden over her pulse, two small inked tattoos, all angular, a handful of hard edged lines.

When he lifts the edge of his shirt to white at the sticky mess on her right hand, she reaches out with the left, plants her palm underneath, over his bare skin, runs her thumb over the ridges and declivities of his abdominal muscles, the familiar trail of groomed hair on his stomach. Her breath hitches as he licks at the webbing between her fingers, and the touch sliding at over his stomach becomes a grip at his waist.

"Sometimes," she says, her chin lifted, her face in three-quarters profile, the edge of her throat clear, the tendons in her neck taut; the tendons in her wrist, too, beneath his gentle grip. "Sometimes I'm the master of it. Sometimes," her voice is low; she is balanced between the two possibilities, the tension evident as the wolf in her. " - it masters me."