[Trent Brumby] He's been home for a few days now, it's been almost a week since he was put in hospital in the wee hours of the morning while working on shift. It's been medications since then, antibiotics, anti-inflammatory and pain killers. Time at home had been slow, and while she had gone out he did make a trip down to the grocery store - not the first day, but the second day home. He's been cooking dinners because it's something that he can do that isn't much of an effort or a strain, and because Kora really can't cook and he didn't want to live off take-out for the next few weeks.
A few times she's caught him asleep on the sofa, where he's been spending most of his time at home, unable to do much of anything unless he was going to upset or anger her and possible re-injure himself. Television, movies, books and mind puzzles had been his company. It's kept him about as occupied as he was going to be whilst stuck indoors.
Today he'd gone out because he needed to or he was going to snap. He'd spent some time in a park, just sitting in the sun and being outside. He had watched some little kids with their mothers playing on the equipment and have a mid week picnic, and was sure that they thought him some pervert. He was one, just not in that way. He'd left shortly after, grabbed some lunch on the way home and had made it back in time to have some lamb dinner roasted and cooked, portions left for when Kora was expected back.
Then he was on the sofa, lounging on it with a pillow and the air conditioner on, almost on the verge of napping.
[Kora] Until now, she knocked every time she came to his door. She left the key to his apartment in her right hip pocket with her passport and her debit card. One key attached to a metal ring, the teeth still rough from being ground into the appropriate shape at the hardware store. He tested it the first night he had it made, just as he ought. She never did.
Not until he was stabbed. Not until he was three days in the hospital, and she wanted to spend time with him away from that forbidding space. Not until he needed clothes to wear home - as his uniform, such as it was, had been covered with his blood and scissored off his body by the paramedics and ER physicians.
The days have been baking and humid. There's this scent to the city that arises on days like these, car exhaust and garbage, sweat and the strange, quiet, vegetal rot of the lakeshore the city hugs. The air conditioner chases that scent away, bathes the apartment in cool, sharp air with a hint of metallic undertone, as if one had licked an old fashioned metal ice tray, and the taste of it lingered in the back of the throat, in the back of your mind.
That cool, sharp scent is touched with the other scents that mark his home, herbs and his bathproducts, his cologne, his blood. His blood: literally, and the antiseptic scent of the products he's meant to clean the wounds with, which carry just a hint of the hospital in them. All that beneath the lamb dinner he's put by for her when she arrives.
Later. Late. After midnight. He's drowsing on the couch when the front door opens: the city again, the heat and humidity even from the hallways of his apartment building, just a hint of it, like a ribbon uncurling. Say this: she is careful and she is quiet but she is not stealthy, no matter how deft she is. She stops just inside the foyer, though, bends over to unlace her boots, toes them off and tucks them aside next to Trent's shoes. She bends over and strips off her socks, tucking them away. This is becoming familiar, a ritual thing, every-night. It is both strange and familiar.
She is moving stiffly; just a hint of it, but he cannot sense that from where he sits on the couch. Instead, when she crosses the room and reaches the couch, she bends over the back, bends down and kisses him on the forehead, and murmurs, quietly into is drowsy mind. " - you should go to bed."
She sleeps with him, still. Wearing one of his t-shirts or button-downs for bedclothes. Sometimes it's just an hour, sometimes she's with him until morning. That's all they do: sleep. Look - see, how careful she is of him, still. Even when he tells her he's not a fragile thing. Even now - tired, blood stiffening her clothing, her hair coming loose from a thick French braid: so gentle it feels unnatural, painful.
[Trent Brumby] It's been a long day. He finds it odd that normal things make him tired now, that his body can't cope with the mundane routine that he had taken for granted. He hates that, too. Although he's feeling better each day, he's still napping at odd hours, his mind is bored and his body is coping to repair itself. That doesn't mean he has to like it, or the way his eyes had closed while waiting on Kora to get home.
The trip to the park had been good for him to get out of these walls, but it hadn't completely rid of that frustration that was building up inside of him. Maybe it was part of his blood and breeding that made him so unsettled staying indoors so much. He rarely spent time at home, always busy, always doing something.
Adding to the frustration was the fact that Kora was sleeping with him in bed, but not engaging in anything. He hadn't pushed her. He'd read the signs. But that politeness in him was beginning to turn a little sour. He had planned to say something tonight if trying to seduce her didn't work. Typically, though, it had gone later and later yet and she still wasn't home. The roast was in the fridge now so that it didn't dry out in the oven. It would have to be reheated.
His eyes opened when he felt the kiss on the brow, and he breathed in slow, gently, before exhaling it and opening his eyes wider. Shifting from where he lay, he pushed to sit up a little higher on the pillows and lifted the heel of his hand to rub at his eyes. "There's food in the fridge."
[Kora] "I'll get it in a bit, yeah?" she replies to him, all quiet, lingering close for a moment to breathe him in before she
straightens. Just so: like an animal. Like the beast she is underneath her skin. "I need to shower first."
When she straightens he can see that way her clothing moves around her: blood-stained, blood-stiffened. This is something she spares him, too. Strange, that. Since the night he was accosted in the street and she found him in the alley - since the night she fought her Alpha over him, this is something she spares him, perhaps unfairly. The sight of her bloodied, raw from the streets. This is what she does: she changes clothes somewhere, brings him her things in a little white laundry bag, hands it to him with a passing smile and kisses him by way of thanks.
She doesn't think about it, though. And when she looks at him, searchingly as she does now, in the particolored darkness with the televsion running, low-volumed in the room and the air conditioning bathing the space in this womb-like hum, this white noise that defines summer, she sees the sourness and the pain, the hint of frustration that linger on his features, and offers him this look that is saved from being patronizing only because of the unspoken way she feels about him; the depth of restrained anger that stains the air around her when she think of the way he looked when she first saw him, cocooned in white, with machines taped and toggled on his body, tubes worming their way into his veins.
"You went out," she observes, standing back, barefoot, her features pale in the shadows, her clothing too dark to be clearly seen. She cannot smell the sun on his skin; not anymore. But the grass on his shoes; the way they were moved in the foyer: that must she could see as she stripped off her own boots. "I bet you're tired. Go sleep, baby. I know my way around."
[Trent Brumby] Busted.
"Yeah, I did," he confesses this as the better option, but seems surprised that he tells her to go to bed, again. Pushing up, he moves slow but not as painful as he once was, cautious instead of stitches inside and out. Legs swing off the sofa, one after the other and he sits himself upright, smoothing his hands over her growing dark curls. "I didn't go far, just down the road to the park."
He looks up at her, brows raised. "I even took the car." When it's within just a few blocks of walking distance from where he lives. He's trying to tell her, show her, that he's not going against any expressed orders or trying to push any sort of boundaries. "But I needed to get out, just for awhile."
Pale eyes rake over her then, take in her clothing and the way she's standing. He looks down to her toes and back up again, and she can feel it the way the weight of it falls across her thighs and stomach, breasts and shoulders, until he's looking her in the face again. "I could wash your hair," he offers. He hopes. Right now he doesn't have much to give her.
[Kora] None of the blood is hers. Sometimes he scrubs her blood from her clothing. Sometimes it is the blood of some nameless thing. Tonight, the things all had names that she does not know. She has her right hand in her hip pocket, pulling out her few things: not even a wallet. No driver's license. Just an American passport stamped with a variety of exotic visas all more than four years old,and no re-entry stamp. A debit card, a handful of bills. Some change, a broken bit of pottery, nothing more. She empties her pockets onto the sofa table without looking. He stands up and looks he over, head-to-toe, careful at the edges of his movements, his body already rebuilding itself, reknitting the shredded muscle fibers, repairing the damage stitched closed by the trauma surgeons.
"I'm glad," she says, her eyes lingering on his features when his own return to her face from her body. " - that you got out. I know you're going house crazy. What's the saying, cabin fever? It was nice, yeah? The sun. I'll go walking with you sometime, if you want."
This is all quietly spoken. He knows her voice; the depth and the timbre, the way she shades meaning casually, carelessly. The t-shirt is stiff with blood over her torso, the jeans soaked at the knees. Her bare toes curl on the dark wood floors, pale and pristine, with a hint of peeling black polish on the nails.
He offers to wash her hair and something in her stops, seizes, between breaths. "I'd like that," she tells him, more quiet, the hint of want burring her voice is too immediate to be disguised. " - but I don't think you should. I don't want you to hurt yourself. Not while you're still healing." She read the instructions; she hated the hospital, everything about it from the scent to the lights to the cheerful efficiency of the staff, but she follows the instructions to a T.
"You could heat up dinner for me, if you want?" She offers, by way of exchange or apology. "I won't be long."
And with that, she turns and pads off down the hallway, peeling the blood-stained t-shirt away from her body, over her head as she walks toward the bathroom.
[Trent Brumby] There's protest in his eyes and in the corner of his mouth, the way his lips press slightly together and turns down at the edge, and the way the gray in his eyes darkens just a touch, with the twitch of muscle between his brows. Small things, these expressions, but there to the observant eye. It's all there seconds before she's turning away from him to go down the hallway.
"Yeah, sure," he'd answered about the dinner, even if a little belatedly.
From the living room he walked into the kitchen and fetched out the food from within the fridge. He didn't have a microwave but he did have one of those little convention ovens that had all sorts of options, including a grill that worked like a quicker, smaller version of the apartments oven. Food would be stowed in there to be heated up over the course of her shower.
It leaves him lingering as he listens to the water run in the bathroom. A little more time is killed as he gets out some drinks, but then, with some ultimate decision, he's shedding clothes and dumping them on the sofa before he's walking through the cool of the apartment to the steaming bathroom. There's those clean white gauze, the sort with sticky edges that covers various positions across his body, all to the one side, three of them, displaced with one high and central enough that it had grazed the inside of ribs and did damage to organs below. Most of the internal bleeding had been from there. But now they're all little neat bloodied lines, covered from the eye, and only the bruising around it shows up against his flesh.
The bathroom door opens, and he makes no show of being sneaky about it, but slips in quietly and closes it behind him. Then, he's there, a shadow against the curtain, before he steps over and into the tub to share her shower with her. There's defiance in him when she looks at him, and in the way he has the shampoo bottle in his hand, almost as bad as holding a loaded gun.
[Kora] They're a mated pair, and she has never been shy about her body around him. She doesn't shy from his gaze now. The bathroom is full of roiling steam, though the hottest blast of the water has dissipated as she exhausted the first blast from the water heater and tipped the temperature back toward the simply hot rather than the scalding. Water runs down her lean frame in long, gleaming rivulets, some tinged faintly with blood that she has mostly scrubbed off by now.
When he walks in, shadow against the curtain, he can see her shadow in turn, her face held up directly to the showerhead, letting it blast over her face and the crown of her head. A half moment later, she peels back the edge of the curtain, and glances at him, briefly meeting his gray eyes, darkened with defiance or resolve; some admixture of the two, before her attention drops to the pads of gauze taped to his abdomen.
She closes the curtain, careful not to soak the floor, and turns around on the balls of her feet to face him. The light isn’t direct in here; their bodies are all shadows and light, long and shifting except where the water courses along, following the contours, shifting to another path with a breath, some lesson in the patterns of chaos.
There she stands, holding his gaze, her hands on the back of her head, pulling water through her long hair. She has scrubbed away the blood from every other inch of her body that she can find, but it is still there, tangled in the half-raveled hanks of her French braid. This is like a challenge: the way she stands still – wet and spent, that’s clear now, too – emptied of rage, but holding his pale gaze with an unwavering directness.
And then: just this. “Okay,” she says, her voice rough and quiet, rising on her feet as if she means to kiss him; but turning away inside, offering him her back and her damp hair, the braid half-undone. There’s tension in her spine, clear even in the shadows, in her long flanks, but she tips her head back and offers herself like this to him – just her hair, so that he can scrub her clean, expiate the blood from her scalp and skin.
[Trent Brumby] He waits without word until she tells him either way. Today she gives in and he's grateful for it. The shampoo bottle is set aside and he reaches up to work out the tie in her hair, which is wrapped around his wrist, and to unlace the weave of the braid. Lifting his arms up this far doesn't bother him too much, when he's got shampoo in his hands and is washing the top of her scalp he feels a little pull in his stomach but ignores it. He's slow and takes his time, washing out her hair while being splashed by water off her body, and has rivers of it running down the length of his arms and down his armpits.
Conditioning follows the cleansing process, all of which he has kept his polite distance from her. He's not aroused, but focused on the task at hand, and doesn't push further bounds. He makes sure all those blond strands are cleaned, washed and rinsed out. All of this is done in silence until the end, where he shakes his hands off and steps a little back on the non-slip mat, to tell her: "All done."
[Kora] This is familiar now, too. The soothing rhythm of his hands in her hair, the water on her body, the absence of rage a dull ache inside her, this unfamiliar and unearthly sense of calm finds its way into her body and mind in the rare moments when she’s truly spent. She’s standing forward so that the water sluices back over the crown of her head, and returns when he tells her she’s finishes, reaching up to scrub the water from her face, to push her long fingers through the washed and conditioned strands of her hair, finds them free moving, clean, all the signs of her night’s work washed down the drawn.
“Thanks,” she tells him quietly, this space between them that is defined and familiar now, lived in – and awkward. This too.
Her dark eyes linger on his face, then drop to his abdomen, where the bandages are damp, clinging to his skin. One, the most central of the wounds – this cross-wise slanting slash through his obliques – is dark with new blood, that seeps from the wound, is dispersed in the water on his torso, and runs down his body to the bottom of the tub. This close, unclothed, he fills up her senses – his blood, the low song of promise that is his breeding, his masculine frame, healthy, well-muscled. She wants to push him against the wall and hold him there with her body until the water runs cold. She wants to -
“You’re bleeding,” she tells him, reaching out between them to press her hand against the bandage. “It’s not bad, though. I’ll change the bandage for you, yeah?” A deep, careful breath as she reaches to shut down the valve, open the shower curtain. “These won’t do you any good all wet.”
[Trent Brumby] Every movement he is watching her, not her body, but her face, and he takes in the way she looks at him - and the way she doesn't look at him. He can feel those differences, that awkwardness, too. She's telling him that he's bleeding and he doesn't even look down, instead, when she's reaching to turn off the water, her other hand on his stomach, he reaches out and grabs her wrist. It's loose, that grip, after the immediate curl of fingers around her arm.
"Don't." Not about the shower. It's not about that at all, more to do with the way she's fussing over his bleeding; his insignificant wounds.
It's not fair that he does this, knowing how she reacts to him. It's not fair that he's injured either, or that she's treading around him on tip toes. Nor is it fair how he steps more into her, putting her hand onto his chest, all the while looking her in the eye with his head slightly lowered, as his body begins to react to her. No longer washing her hair, he is focused on her and that heat he witnesses in fleeting flashes before she always turns from him. Now, he's partially trapping her in the shower, with his loose grip while his body invites her openly.
[Kora] They killed three children tonight. Tainted. Invested. Ridden by the worm. Three children and three mothers-of-three-children, fallen Garou. Cursed ones, she calls them, when she names them at all. There is power in words, in the naming-of-things and so she is careful of the words he would know: Black Spiral Dancers, what happens when one of Gaia's own gives in to madness.
There is a sort of care to her touch; the way her wrist flexes in his hand. The bristle he might anticipate - in her shoulders, in her spine, in the lean line of her torso - is absent. The lack of rage, perhaps. Or the way his slightly lowered head appeases the instincts of the beast inside her body, under her skin.
"I don't want to hurt you." There's subtext, there, though it is less immediate when she is like this - all hollowed out, emptied in the aftermath of battle. Her voice is rough with want or with restraint, and although his eyes are on hers, her own have dropped to her hand, on his chest and then down the length of his body, staring at him unabashedly as he reacts to her closeness.
The water runs, the valve shut half-way now, a gentle shower rather than a roar. Her skin is flushed from the shower, but he can see her arousal in the dilation of her pupils, the way her breath changes, the way she breathes deliberately, taking in the scent of his skin, in the subtle tightening of her own body, in response, the blood close to the surface. She closes the distant between them by half, her mouth open, her jaw still set, somehow. Stubbornly, "That's important to me. That I don't hurt you."
There is a flash of something at the corners of her mouth, and then she cuts a glance back up at him, all direct, absolutely smoldering. "I know how that sounds. I know you're not weak. This," her hand drops; if his is still wrapped around her wrist, she breaks the grip, or pulls his hand with hers, down over his wounds, not sparing him her touch. " - is real. I want you. I want you whole."
[Trent Brumby] "You won't hurt me." His hand drops from hers, leaving her free to touch him or not. Having accomplished what he wanted so far - small steps, he's not going to push her physically any further. A hand rests on the wall instead, steadying himself there and preventing him from reaching out and grabbing her to him. It's been torture sleeping next to her, in watching her restrain herself, its thrown him out of the rhythm of his place with her.
Keeping his voice low and his gaze on hers, he promises her: "I'll tell you if I'm too hurt."
"And if you don't want to have sex, then let me please you. I'm not a cripple. I want to do this. Let me do this. It's not going to hurt me anymore then I already am." Trent seeks to convince her with his steady, reassuring tones. He reasons with her while using carefully chosen words, something he's been rehearsing in a way, for the last day and night, when he's had to lay there and not do anything. It's made it hard to sleep, and maybe she's noticed that he lays there aroused, while trying not to be, and disappointed that's all he's doing.
"Let me take you into the bedroom." Now his hand does drift up, touches the outside of her arm rather then the intimacy of her hip, careful and cautious as he navigates her - even though she's lacking the Rage and is almost calm under that smolder in her eyes.
[Kora] I'll tell you if I'm too hurt, he says. She's close to him now, one hand on his lower abdomen, the other on his hip. His hand is against the tiled wall; they're close, but the distance is torturous. He promises her, seriously, all low and direct, and she looks up at him, direct and clear -
"On your honor?"
- her voice is almost breathless, as if that meant everything in the world. On his honor. Kora holds still, holds her breath inside her body, holds his gaze until she receives the smallest sign of assent. This is not simply a promise, but a pledge of honor. Then and only then does she step into his body, her hand wet and warm from the water as she settles her hands over his hips and rises to the balls of her feet, leaning forward as if she meant to kiss him, missing his mouth by the sparest of margins until she finds his ear.
"Let's go to bed." Her head is returned away, strands of damp hair pull across her cheer. Her face is in three-quarters' profile to his, and her breasts brush against his chest with every breath. Her right hand tightens its grip on his hip, but the left slides between them, touching him with long, slow strokes. She isn't smiling. She's too hungry for him to smile, but her mouth moves in passing suggestion of the expression. "You let me do the work."
A few times she's caught him asleep on the sofa, where he's been spending most of his time at home, unable to do much of anything unless he was going to upset or anger her and possible re-injure himself. Television, movies, books and mind puzzles had been his company. It's kept him about as occupied as he was going to be whilst stuck indoors.
Today he'd gone out because he needed to or he was going to snap. He'd spent some time in a park, just sitting in the sun and being outside. He had watched some little kids with their mothers playing on the equipment and have a mid week picnic, and was sure that they thought him some pervert. He was one, just not in that way. He'd left shortly after, grabbed some lunch on the way home and had made it back in time to have some lamb dinner roasted and cooked, portions left for when Kora was expected back.
Then he was on the sofa, lounging on it with a pillow and the air conditioner on, almost on the verge of napping.
[Kora] Until now, she knocked every time she came to his door. She left the key to his apartment in her right hip pocket with her passport and her debit card. One key attached to a metal ring, the teeth still rough from being ground into the appropriate shape at the hardware store. He tested it the first night he had it made, just as he ought. She never did.
Not until he was stabbed. Not until he was three days in the hospital, and she wanted to spend time with him away from that forbidding space. Not until he needed clothes to wear home - as his uniform, such as it was, had been covered with his blood and scissored off his body by the paramedics and ER physicians.
The days have been baking and humid. There's this scent to the city that arises on days like these, car exhaust and garbage, sweat and the strange, quiet, vegetal rot of the lakeshore the city hugs. The air conditioner chases that scent away, bathes the apartment in cool, sharp air with a hint of metallic undertone, as if one had licked an old fashioned metal ice tray, and the taste of it lingered in the back of the throat, in the back of your mind.
That cool, sharp scent is touched with the other scents that mark his home, herbs and his bathproducts, his cologne, his blood. His blood: literally, and the antiseptic scent of the products he's meant to clean the wounds with, which carry just a hint of the hospital in them. All that beneath the lamb dinner he's put by for her when she arrives.
Later. Late. After midnight. He's drowsing on the couch when the front door opens: the city again, the heat and humidity even from the hallways of his apartment building, just a hint of it, like a ribbon uncurling. Say this: she is careful and she is quiet but she is not stealthy, no matter how deft she is. She stops just inside the foyer, though, bends over to unlace her boots, toes them off and tucks them aside next to Trent's shoes. She bends over and strips off her socks, tucking them away. This is becoming familiar, a ritual thing, every-night. It is both strange and familiar.
She is moving stiffly; just a hint of it, but he cannot sense that from where he sits on the couch. Instead, when she crosses the room and reaches the couch, she bends over the back, bends down and kisses him on the forehead, and murmurs, quietly into is drowsy mind. " - you should go to bed."
She sleeps with him, still. Wearing one of his t-shirts or button-downs for bedclothes. Sometimes it's just an hour, sometimes she's with him until morning. That's all they do: sleep. Look - see, how careful she is of him, still. Even when he tells her he's not a fragile thing. Even now - tired, blood stiffening her clothing, her hair coming loose from a thick French braid: so gentle it feels unnatural, painful.
[Trent Brumby] It's been a long day. He finds it odd that normal things make him tired now, that his body can't cope with the mundane routine that he had taken for granted. He hates that, too. Although he's feeling better each day, he's still napping at odd hours, his mind is bored and his body is coping to repair itself. That doesn't mean he has to like it, or the way his eyes had closed while waiting on Kora to get home.
The trip to the park had been good for him to get out of these walls, but it hadn't completely rid of that frustration that was building up inside of him. Maybe it was part of his blood and breeding that made him so unsettled staying indoors so much. He rarely spent time at home, always busy, always doing something.
Adding to the frustration was the fact that Kora was sleeping with him in bed, but not engaging in anything. He hadn't pushed her. He'd read the signs. But that politeness in him was beginning to turn a little sour. He had planned to say something tonight if trying to seduce her didn't work. Typically, though, it had gone later and later yet and she still wasn't home. The roast was in the fridge now so that it didn't dry out in the oven. It would have to be reheated.
His eyes opened when he felt the kiss on the brow, and he breathed in slow, gently, before exhaling it and opening his eyes wider. Shifting from where he lay, he pushed to sit up a little higher on the pillows and lifted the heel of his hand to rub at his eyes. "There's food in the fridge."
[Kora] "I'll get it in a bit, yeah?" she replies to him, all quiet, lingering close for a moment to breathe him in before she
straightens. Just so: like an animal. Like the beast she is underneath her skin. "I need to shower first."
When she straightens he can see that way her clothing moves around her: blood-stained, blood-stiffened. This is something she spares him, too. Strange, that. Since the night he was accosted in the street and she found him in the alley - since the night she fought her Alpha over him, this is something she spares him, perhaps unfairly. The sight of her bloodied, raw from the streets. This is what she does: she changes clothes somewhere, brings him her things in a little white laundry bag, hands it to him with a passing smile and kisses him by way of thanks.
She doesn't think about it, though. And when she looks at him, searchingly as she does now, in the particolored darkness with the televsion running, low-volumed in the room and the air conditioning bathing the space in this womb-like hum, this white noise that defines summer, she sees the sourness and the pain, the hint of frustration that linger on his features, and offers him this look that is saved from being patronizing only because of the unspoken way she feels about him; the depth of restrained anger that stains the air around her when she think of the way he looked when she first saw him, cocooned in white, with machines taped and toggled on his body, tubes worming their way into his veins.
"You went out," she observes, standing back, barefoot, her features pale in the shadows, her clothing too dark to be clearly seen. She cannot smell the sun on his skin; not anymore. But the grass on his shoes; the way they were moved in the foyer: that must she could see as she stripped off her own boots. "I bet you're tired. Go sleep, baby. I know my way around."
[Trent Brumby] Busted.
"Yeah, I did," he confesses this as the better option, but seems surprised that he tells her to go to bed, again. Pushing up, he moves slow but not as painful as he once was, cautious instead of stitches inside and out. Legs swing off the sofa, one after the other and he sits himself upright, smoothing his hands over her growing dark curls. "I didn't go far, just down the road to the park."
He looks up at her, brows raised. "I even took the car." When it's within just a few blocks of walking distance from where he lives. He's trying to tell her, show her, that he's not going against any expressed orders or trying to push any sort of boundaries. "But I needed to get out, just for awhile."
Pale eyes rake over her then, take in her clothing and the way she's standing. He looks down to her toes and back up again, and she can feel it the way the weight of it falls across her thighs and stomach, breasts and shoulders, until he's looking her in the face again. "I could wash your hair," he offers. He hopes. Right now he doesn't have much to give her.
[Kora] None of the blood is hers. Sometimes he scrubs her blood from her clothing. Sometimes it is the blood of some nameless thing. Tonight, the things all had names that she does not know. She has her right hand in her hip pocket, pulling out her few things: not even a wallet. No driver's license. Just an American passport stamped with a variety of exotic visas all more than four years old,and no re-entry stamp. A debit card, a handful of bills. Some change, a broken bit of pottery, nothing more. She empties her pockets onto the sofa table without looking. He stands up and looks he over, head-to-toe, careful at the edges of his movements, his body already rebuilding itself, reknitting the shredded muscle fibers, repairing the damage stitched closed by the trauma surgeons.
"I'm glad," she says, her eyes lingering on his features when his own return to her face from her body. " - that you got out. I know you're going house crazy. What's the saying, cabin fever? It was nice, yeah? The sun. I'll go walking with you sometime, if you want."
This is all quietly spoken. He knows her voice; the depth and the timbre, the way she shades meaning casually, carelessly. The t-shirt is stiff with blood over her torso, the jeans soaked at the knees. Her bare toes curl on the dark wood floors, pale and pristine, with a hint of peeling black polish on the nails.
He offers to wash her hair and something in her stops, seizes, between breaths. "I'd like that," she tells him, more quiet, the hint of want burring her voice is too immediate to be disguised. " - but I don't think you should. I don't want you to hurt yourself. Not while you're still healing." She read the instructions; she hated the hospital, everything about it from the scent to the lights to the cheerful efficiency of the staff, but she follows the instructions to a T.
"You could heat up dinner for me, if you want?" She offers, by way of exchange or apology. "I won't be long."
And with that, she turns and pads off down the hallway, peeling the blood-stained t-shirt away from her body, over her head as she walks toward the bathroom.
[Trent Brumby] There's protest in his eyes and in the corner of his mouth, the way his lips press slightly together and turns down at the edge, and the way the gray in his eyes darkens just a touch, with the twitch of muscle between his brows. Small things, these expressions, but there to the observant eye. It's all there seconds before she's turning away from him to go down the hallway.
"Yeah, sure," he'd answered about the dinner, even if a little belatedly.
From the living room he walked into the kitchen and fetched out the food from within the fridge. He didn't have a microwave but he did have one of those little convention ovens that had all sorts of options, including a grill that worked like a quicker, smaller version of the apartments oven. Food would be stowed in there to be heated up over the course of her shower.
It leaves him lingering as he listens to the water run in the bathroom. A little more time is killed as he gets out some drinks, but then, with some ultimate decision, he's shedding clothes and dumping them on the sofa before he's walking through the cool of the apartment to the steaming bathroom. There's those clean white gauze, the sort with sticky edges that covers various positions across his body, all to the one side, three of them, displaced with one high and central enough that it had grazed the inside of ribs and did damage to organs below. Most of the internal bleeding had been from there. But now they're all little neat bloodied lines, covered from the eye, and only the bruising around it shows up against his flesh.
The bathroom door opens, and he makes no show of being sneaky about it, but slips in quietly and closes it behind him. Then, he's there, a shadow against the curtain, before he steps over and into the tub to share her shower with her. There's defiance in him when she looks at him, and in the way he has the shampoo bottle in his hand, almost as bad as holding a loaded gun.
[Kora] They're a mated pair, and she has never been shy about her body around him. She doesn't shy from his gaze now. The bathroom is full of roiling steam, though the hottest blast of the water has dissipated as she exhausted the first blast from the water heater and tipped the temperature back toward the simply hot rather than the scalding. Water runs down her lean frame in long, gleaming rivulets, some tinged faintly with blood that she has mostly scrubbed off by now.
When he walks in, shadow against the curtain, he can see her shadow in turn, her face held up directly to the showerhead, letting it blast over her face and the crown of her head. A half moment later, she peels back the edge of the curtain, and glances at him, briefly meeting his gray eyes, darkened with defiance or resolve; some admixture of the two, before her attention drops to the pads of gauze taped to his abdomen.
She closes the curtain, careful not to soak the floor, and turns around on the balls of her feet to face him. The light isn’t direct in here; their bodies are all shadows and light, long and shifting except where the water courses along, following the contours, shifting to another path with a breath, some lesson in the patterns of chaos.
There she stands, holding his gaze, her hands on the back of her head, pulling water through her long hair. She has scrubbed away the blood from every other inch of her body that she can find, but it is still there, tangled in the half-raveled hanks of her French braid. This is like a challenge: the way she stands still – wet and spent, that’s clear now, too – emptied of rage, but holding his pale gaze with an unwavering directness.
And then: just this. “Okay,” she says, her voice rough and quiet, rising on her feet as if she means to kiss him; but turning away inside, offering him her back and her damp hair, the braid half-undone. There’s tension in her spine, clear even in the shadows, in her long flanks, but she tips her head back and offers herself like this to him – just her hair, so that he can scrub her clean, expiate the blood from her scalp and skin.
[Trent Brumby] He waits without word until she tells him either way. Today she gives in and he's grateful for it. The shampoo bottle is set aside and he reaches up to work out the tie in her hair, which is wrapped around his wrist, and to unlace the weave of the braid. Lifting his arms up this far doesn't bother him too much, when he's got shampoo in his hands and is washing the top of her scalp he feels a little pull in his stomach but ignores it. He's slow and takes his time, washing out her hair while being splashed by water off her body, and has rivers of it running down the length of his arms and down his armpits.
Conditioning follows the cleansing process, all of which he has kept his polite distance from her. He's not aroused, but focused on the task at hand, and doesn't push further bounds. He makes sure all those blond strands are cleaned, washed and rinsed out. All of this is done in silence until the end, where he shakes his hands off and steps a little back on the non-slip mat, to tell her: "All done."
[Kora] This is familiar now, too. The soothing rhythm of his hands in her hair, the water on her body, the absence of rage a dull ache inside her, this unfamiliar and unearthly sense of calm finds its way into her body and mind in the rare moments when she’s truly spent. She’s standing forward so that the water sluices back over the crown of her head, and returns when he tells her she’s finishes, reaching up to scrub the water from her face, to push her long fingers through the washed and conditioned strands of her hair, finds them free moving, clean, all the signs of her night’s work washed down the drawn.
“Thanks,” she tells him quietly, this space between them that is defined and familiar now, lived in – and awkward. This too.
Her dark eyes linger on his face, then drop to his abdomen, where the bandages are damp, clinging to his skin. One, the most central of the wounds – this cross-wise slanting slash through his obliques – is dark with new blood, that seeps from the wound, is dispersed in the water on his torso, and runs down his body to the bottom of the tub. This close, unclothed, he fills up her senses – his blood, the low song of promise that is his breeding, his masculine frame, healthy, well-muscled. She wants to push him against the wall and hold him there with her body until the water runs cold. She wants to -
“You’re bleeding,” she tells him, reaching out between them to press her hand against the bandage. “It’s not bad, though. I’ll change the bandage for you, yeah?” A deep, careful breath as she reaches to shut down the valve, open the shower curtain. “These won’t do you any good all wet.”
[Trent Brumby] Every movement he is watching her, not her body, but her face, and he takes in the way she looks at him - and the way she doesn't look at him. He can feel those differences, that awkwardness, too. She's telling him that he's bleeding and he doesn't even look down, instead, when she's reaching to turn off the water, her other hand on his stomach, he reaches out and grabs her wrist. It's loose, that grip, after the immediate curl of fingers around her arm.
"Don't." Not about the shower. It's not about that at all, more to do with the way she's fussing over his bleeding; his insignificant wounds.
It's not fair that he does this, knowing how she reacts to him. It's not fair that he's injured either, or that she's treading around him on tip toes. Nor is it fair how he steps more into her, putting her hand onto his chest, all the while looking her in the eye with his head slightly lowered, as his body begins to react to her. No longer washing her hair, he is focused on her and that heat he witnesses in fleeting flashes before she always turns from him. Now, he's partially trapping her in the shower, with his loose grip while his body invites her openly.
[Kora] They killed three children tonight. Tainted. Invested. Ridden by the worm. Three children and three mothers-of-three-children, fallen Garou. Cursed ones, she calls them, when she names them at all. There is power in words, in the naming-of-things and so she is careful of the words he would know: Black Spiral Dancers, what happens when one of Gaia's own gives in to madness.
There is a sort of care to her touch; the way her wrist flexes in his hand. The bristle he might anticipate - in her shoulders, in her spine, in the lean line of her torso - is absent. The lack of rage, perhaps. Or the way his slightly lowered head appeases the instincts of the beast inside her body, under her skin.
"I don't want to hurt you." There's subtext, there, though it is less immediate when she is like this - all hollowed out, emptied in the aftermath of battle. Her voice is rough with want or with restraint, and although his eyes are on hers, her own have dropped to her hand, on his chest and then down the length of his body, staring at him unabashedly as he reacts to her closeness.
The water runs, the valve shut half-way now, a gentle shower rather than a roar. Her skin is flushed from the shower, but he can see her arousal in the dilation of her pupils, the way her breath changes, the way she breathes deliberately, taking in the scent of his skin, in the subtle tightening of her own body, in response, the blood close to the surface. She closes the distant between them by half, her mouth open, her jaw still set, somehow. Stubbornly, "That's important to me. That I don't hurt you."
There is a flash of something at the corners of her mouth, and then she cuts a glance back up at him, all direct, absolutely smoldering. "I know how that sounds. I know you're not weak. This," her hand drops; if his is still wrapped around her wrist, she breaks the grip, or pulls his hand with hers, down over his wounds, not sparing him her touch. " - is real. I want you. I want you whole."
[Trent Brumby] "You won't hurt me." His hand drops from hers, leaving her free to touch him or not. Having accomplished what he wanted so far - small steps, he's not going to push her physically any further. A hand rests on the wall instead, steadying himself there and preventing him from reaching out and grabbing her to him. It's been torture sleeping next to her, in watching her restrain herself, its thrown him out of the rhythm of his place with her.
Keeping his voice low and his gaze on hers, he promises her: "I'll tell you if I'm too hurt."
"And if you don't want to have sex, then let me please you. I'm not a cripple. I want to do this. Let me do this. It's not going to hurt me anymore then I already am." Trent seeks to convince her with his steady, reassuring tones. He reasons with her while using carefully chosen words, something he's been rehearsing in a way, for the last day and night, when he's had to lay there and not do anything. It's made it hard to sleep, and maybe she's noticed that he lays there aroused, while trying not to be, and disappointed that's all he's doing.
"Let me take you into the bedroom." Now his hand does drift up, touches the outside of her arm rather then the intimacy of her hip, careful and cautious as he navigates her - even though she's lacking the Rage and is almost calm under that smolder in her eyes.
[Kora] I'll tell you if I'm too hurt, he says. She's close to him now, one hand on his lower abdomen, the other on his hip. His hand is against the tiled wall; they're close, but the distance is torturous. He promises her, seriously, all low and direct, and she looks up at him, direct and clear -
"On your honor?"
- her voice is almost breathless, as if that meant everything in the world. On his honor. Kora holds still, holds her breath inside her body, holds his gaze until she receives the smallest sign of assent. This is not simply a promise, but a pledge of honor. Then and only then does she step into his body, her hand wet and warm from the water as she settles her hands over his hips and rises to the balls of her feet, leaning forward as if she meant to kiss him, missing his mouth by the sparest of margins until she finds his ear.
"Let's go to bed." Her head is returned away, strands of damp hair pull across her cheer. Her face is in three-quarters' profile to his, and her breasts brush against his chest with every breath. Her right hand tightens its grip on his hip, but the left slides between them, touching him with long, slow strokes. She isn't smiling. She's too hungry for him to smile, but her mouth moves in passing suggestion of the expression. "You let me do the work."
Post a Comment