Eventually
he lifts her off that wall. He turns -- puts his back to the wall instead. And unceremoniously, rather ingloriously, Calden just sort of ... slides down to sit at the base of the wall, like his knees have given way, like he just doesn't have the strength to stay upright anymore.
And they stay there for a while. Her head on his shoulder. His head tipped back against the wall. His arms still around her, but loose now; his hands still covering her ass, her lower back, but nearly motionless now.
After quite some time he stirs, lifting his head, looking down at her. "Let me drive you to Fort Collins at least," he whispers. "Right now, if you don't want to stay the night."
Avery ChaseAvery gives a soft little yelp when he turns and slides. Even the smallest movement of his cock in her reminds her how... well, raw she is. She is sinking down with him and thinking
god, I'm going to be sore in the morning
before she remembers what she is. Before she remembers: no. no, I won't be.
So she exhales, and she curls up against him, knees and shins to the ground, her skin wet with a mix of water and sweat. He makes her an offer. From Fort Collins to Denver it's a good hour, faster if you know how to drive fast without getting killed. It's late enough at night that she could. A cab would cost her a pretty penny but she doesn't worry much about it. You forget what things cost when there really is next to no limit on the card you carry. Or the card you have back in the city, actually. She was going to run, she hunted and she filled her belly but now she thinks she can barely move.
Avery stirs, but it's several seconds later. He might think she didn't hear him. She lifts her head, her wet hair slicked back and her bone structure revealed to be all the more feral as a result. The shift in her weight as she straightens, settling herself more firmly on his cock by default, makes stars die in her eyes for a moment, explosive and consuming, before she settles again.
"You're a gentleman," she murmurs, which is one of the few compliments she's given him tonight that were not smirking and backhanded and flirtatious. She doesn't call him filthy this time, or a bastard. It's quite possible to be a bastard and a gentleman, after all, depending on which definitions you use.
She leans in, kissing him softly on his weary mouth, then
rises from him, huffing a laugh at how she's taken two showers now and is still dirty. Easy enough now to step in the shower, the water still blasting and still hot, and wash herself off one last time, or at least rinse. It takes a minute, maybe less.
Calden WhiteHe's a gentleman. Yes he is. And he laughs, softly, against that soft kiss of hers. He is weary. He's so wearing that when she rises his head arches back, he closes his eyes, he gasps quietly as she slides away. His hand follows her rising with her hips, slipping down her legs, curling gently around her ankle as she steps away.
Leaves him a heap on the floor. He would laugh at himself if he could see himself now. He does laugh at himself after a moment, while she's in the shower cleaning herself up again: he looks down at himself, the expanse of that body that he maintains with balanced nutrition and physical work and -- let's be honest now -- [i]excellent genetics.[/i] The very best.
Well. Maybe not the very best. There are, in this world, specimens like Avery Chase.
He's still on the floor when she comes out. He has at least managed not to slide down and sprawl entirely ignoble and prone, like a fur rug stripped from her latest conquest. He is still propped against the wall, and he's drawn one knee up. The other foot stretches halfway across the distance between them. When he sees her stepping out,
naked and drenched with her hair slicked back and her eyes so wild,
his heart gives this funny little flop in his chest. He murmurs, "You're an enchanting creature, Avery Chase."
And he smiles at her, lopsidedly, his eyes traveling down, down and up again. It's a nice detour. Very scenic. Eventually he has to get up, though: otherwise he's blocking the door. And he does get up, grabbing onto the edge of the counter to haul himself to his feet. There are several large, soft towels in here. He wraps one of them around his waist.
The air outside the bathroom feels cool and dry. His nipples tighten, the hairs rise on his arms. He spreads his hand over Avery's upper back as they exit the bathroom, as though to keep her warm.
Avery ChaseAvery steps out, and looks down at him. She's turned the water off now, since he seems content to go on the rest of the night with his body still smelling faintly of her own. She lifts an eyebrow at him, one hand on the wall, when he looks at her. And he tells her she's an enchanting creature.
With a huff of exhaled laughter, she rolls her eyes and steps neatly over his lap, unbothered by his eyes tracking all over her as he does so. She grabs another towel, a fresh and dry one, as she does, walking out into the bedroom. God: she's used three of his nice fluffy yellow guest towels now. And a set of his sheets. And plates and knives and scotch glasses and so on. She's left him a mess.
Enchanting, he says.
Eventually he gets up. Drags himself to his feet. Wraps a towel around himself and finds her out there, a few steps ahead, laying his arm over her back. She glances at him, the towel in her hands drying as much water from her hair as she can, and gives him a small smile. "Mr. White," she murmurs, as though chastising, but she never finishes the thought. She lays her hand on his hand. She draws away, gently, smiling still, and starts to get dressed.
Calden WhiteWell; to complete the cataloguing of what exactly Avery has availed herself off while under Calden's roof: she has also helped herself to Calden, himself. Four times. Not that he's complaining. Not that he wasn't offering. Not that it wasn't mutual, every moment.
But when he puts his hand over her back, she says his name. She puts her hand on his. And she steps away from him, and though she's smiling, though she's gentle, he understands without needing to be told
that she's drawing a line.
He picks his book up as she's getting dressed. It's a collection of short stories by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. He returns it to the shelf, and returning, picks the trailing edge of the comforter off the ground and flicks it back onto the bed. She has her yoga pants on by then. She has her tank top on. He is still wearing a towel. Doesn't seem to plan to dress, either. He sits on the edge of the bed while she finishes dressing, watching her.
Calden White[FIVE. FIVE TIMES. good god.]
Calden White[ahem. DLP.]
Avery ChaseAll night he's been telling her to make herself at home, accept his hospitality, stay the night, come back, let me drive you. She drifts toward and away from that line, accepting some things, denying others, compromising. Like now: she compromises to let him drive her, at least to Fort Collins, because she thinks he understands it does not mean what a lesser man might think it means.
Avery follows him with her eyes when he puts away the book. She pulls her tank top on, adjusting the interior shelf with its elastic under her breasts. It isn't much, but it's good enough when she needs something uncomplicated and dedicated. She does not put her panties back on. She slides into her yoga pants, looking at him walking around in a towel, her cunt still achining a little.
Returning to herself, she reflects on just...everything they did. The mindlessness of it. The drunken, lucious rush to completion every time. The way they couldn't keep their hands or mouths off of each other. So she's staring at him, in tank top and yoga pants when he turns, and he walks over, sitting on the bed. She doesn't put on her jacket.
The tank top hides the scar in front. Not the one in back. He saw it every time his mouth descended to her breasts, every time he rubbed his bristled face against her there. It didn't bother him, or make him frown or worry or fret. It didn't bother her. Sometimes,
when she isn't in front of a mirror,
she can't even remember it's there. She doesn't remember surviving it, after all. It was just there one day, when she woke up, when everything was different and nothing she'd planned up to that point mattered anymore. None of it. No one even talked about that scar.
Avery half-smiles at him, drawing her black jacket on, leaving it unzipped. "Are you going to drive me wearing that?" she asks, eyebrow lifted. "My chaffeurs usually dress more conservatively."
Calden White"Oh."
She can see from his face that he hadn't understood you're a gentleman was a form of polite acceptance so rarefied it wasn't even spoken aloud anymore. And now he's a little embarrassed, almost jumping to his feet -- worried that she might think he didn't really want to drive her. That he was just being polite, himself.
He does want to drive her. It's the courteous thing to do, the hospitable thing to do. He has his own reasons too, and they are more compelling than even the ancient tradition of hospitality his entire bloodline believes so fiercely in. He's quick to pull that towel off his hips, tossing it to the middle of the bed where he'd rumpled his clothes in preparation for the wash.
Those jeans get recycled out. Now that they're both clean, he can smell the faint odor of cattle and horseflesh and pastureland and dirt and motor oil and smoke and scotch and
all the rest of that on his pants as he shakes them out. He doesn't put his boxers back on either; goes commando, stepping into his jeans, buttoning them. Without underwear, without a belt, his denims ride several inches below his navel, and just below his obliques.
He forgoes his undershirt, too, buttoning that red-checked flannel over bare skin. "I'm sorry," he says, "I thought you were saying no." And then the buttons are buttoned and he's ... a little rumpled, but reasonably presentable for a late-late-night drive to Fort Collins. He'll grab his jacket out of the game room as they head out.
"Do you want ... coffee, some water, something before you go?"
Avery ChaseIf there is one concern Avery never had, and certainly does not have now, it is that Calden might not want to spend more time with her. He might not want to follow through on his offers, might have just been trying to be polite. Men who fuck like that don't do so out of politeness, and men who offer rides out of politeness generally do not call her enchanting while actually looking enchanted.
She smiles at the way he -- well -- hops to, and that smile fades a little when he whips off the towel, because her eyes are drawn inextricably all over his body, which is attractive enough when half-covered by a towel. Utterly naked she thinks she might drop to her knees and suck him off again, but
Avery is more restrained than Calden is. At least right now. She huffs out a laugh at herself and looks away as he pulls on his jeans. It isn't out of politeness. It isn't because she's pretending to be demure. It's because she thinks she might rip them off and try to rub herself off on him even if she can't bear to let him inside again. Fresh arousal makes her ache again, and her cheeks are flushed -- though not with embarrassment -- when he speaks again and she looks at him once more.
"The error in clarity is mine," she says softly, walking out into the game room ahead of him to go find her shoes and slip them on again. "As for refreshment, a little water would be lovely on the way."
Calden WhiteThere's a flush under the golden tone of her skin. Don't think he doesn't see. He does see, and he knows why, and the truth is it'd be so easy for him to drop those jeans again and drag her back to bed but
she has better self control than he does. Thank god one of them does, or they might literally fuck themselves into a coma. He might, anyway. She walks out -- he laughs under his breath, following. There's that heavy jacket, dark suede and a shearling lining, very cowboy. It smells like the cold, and the wind, and like him. He pulls it on, his frame flat-out imposing now, bulked out like that. As they head for the stairs he asks her, half-smiling, "Sure you don't want to take home a bottle of wine?"
Whether she does or not, they eventually make it up to the great room. He stops by the kitchen -- that gorgeous kitchen with its stainless steel and its black glass and its semicircle of a breakfast bar -- and gets two bottles of water from the fridge. Well then; he apparently is the sort of drink bottled water after all. At least occasionally. When it's convenient. He passes her one, cold against her palm, and then grabs his keys and his cell phone off the all-in-one whiteboard/keyhanger on the wall.
She didn't enter through the front door, and she doesn't leave that way either. His cars are parked in the back, which only makes sense because the back, really, is where all the action is. It's where his land spreads out under the pitch-black sky, silvered by a waxing moon. Somewhere out there his herd is sleeping. His cousins, too, out in the ranch hands' cabin or -- in Jimmy's unfortunate case -- in a tent, near the afflicted cow. Over in the barn are his horses, some of his cattle dogs; the barn cats. She could smell them all, coming in on four paws. She can't smell them now in this form.
There are stairs on the side of the deck, taking them back down to the ground. He doesn't take her to the newish Silverado, though. They walk a little farther this time, all the way out to a garage built as a lean-to against the barn. The door is manual, and he heaves it up with a grunt, revealing two other Silverados, each about a decade older than the last. Can't say he's not faithful to his chosen brands.
He unlocks the door of the newer one -- it's about a 2000 model, if she keeps track of these things -- and gives her a hand up. Then he circles around and climbs into the driver's seat. Ten years ago, this ranch wasn't doing as well as it is now. The truck is bare-bones: no leather seats, no multidisc MP3/CD player, and only a cramped bench in the back. The engine turns over noisily, catching after quite some time. He clearly hasn't driven this one for a while.
As they roll up the dirt path to the real road, they pass Calden's house, silent and mostly dark. Avery sees, for the first time, the front of it -- the stone and wood facade, the strong alpine lines. Then he turns onto the road. It's a long drive to Fort Collins, rather boring, and all of it on lonely, arrow-straight two-lane country roads. As they get underway, Calden shifts, pulling his phone out, unlocking it and handing it to her.
"I believe you promised me your number," he says, smirking.
Avery ChaseAvery waits outside while he gets water, gets keys. She said no to the bottle of wine on the way up, or rather: laughed lightly and told him she believed he'd been quite hospitable enough for several bottles of wine, which is perhaps another way of saying that she is more entertained as a guest by fucking rather than drinking. Outside the kitchen she closes her arms in front of herself and lets the night air cool her off. She looks out over his land, and at the sky, and at the silhouettes of mountains to her left.
Some parts of this land still feel like they were only recently tamed. Five generations isn't so long, really, in the length of human history. She may not smell the cattle from here, not in any way but a distant hint of it, but she can almost see the shadows of elder peoples crossing through the grass, can almost feel the thudding of bison's steps across the plains. The weight of eons rests on her here, and it makes her feel blessed. It makes her feel burdened. It makes her feel --
and this feeling has only been nurtured and intensified by the last few hours of sex with Calden
-- protective.
She turns when he comes out and smiles at him, taking the water he brings. She thanks him quietly, twisting the cap off and drinking as they descend the steps and walk out towards the garage. There's an element of absurdity to all this: the reality of the world outside of his game room and guest room where she could. Not. Stop. Fucking him. The grunt a she opens the door, which is a very cowboy thing of him to do. The gentlemanly air as he gives her his hand so she can lever herself up into the truck.
Truth is she could get it fine without that. Every human-born Garou or Kin was, at least in part, shares ancestry with primates. They can all damn well climb. He does it because she is a lady and he treats her like a lady. It's absurdism. It's surreal. She is smiling about it as she settles into the seat.
They are quiet on the way. She turns and twists to look at his house, and then she turns and watches the headlights on the dark road ahead. When Calden hands his phone over she doesn't notice it at first, and is mid-sip of the water, then she laughs.
"Oh, you," she says, taking his phone and tapping in her number. It's a 303 number, already changed from whatever it used to be, wherever she used to be. She enters her name as simply as she gave it: Avery Chase. She doesn't take a picture; it's dark, and the flash would look very strange, and her hair is wet. She briefly considers taking a picture of her cleavage and thinks better of it.
She hands the phone back over.
"There you are, Mr. White," she says, smiling.
Calden WhiteCalden would not have protested a picture of her cleavage. However, she doesn't do it, and he doesn't know it crossed her mind, and -- soon enough the phone is back in his hand. He hits call immediately, though god only knows where her phone is at the moment. Wherever it is, it gets the call. It records his number.
"And now you have mine," he says, even though they've already agreed: she won't use it. At least for now.
The headlights are yellowing a bit with age. They sweep over the ever-changing, never-changing surface of the road. The broken yellow line that indicates passing is allowed -- just in case someone got stuck behind a tractor or something. The wisps of fog now and then as they cross a ditch or a creek or a stream. Very distantly, and very occasionally: the shape of other manmade structures in the distance, houses and barns and tractors and water towers.
The length of the drive somehow serves the underline Calden's isolation. How far he and his small, odd family really live from the rest of the world, even if he makes those biweekly trips to civilization. How far removed he is, really, from even the tempo and the pace of modern life. The computers, the office jobs, the deadlines, the phone calls, the traffic jams, the emails.
"Some of the Fianna downstate are throwing a party for Beltane," he says quietly, a while later. "Kin and Garou only. I'll probably show my face. Bring my dad and my cousins. I can send you the address and the date if you're interested. No expectations or obligations, of course."
Avery ChaseHer phone is, like her ID and her credit cards and her keys and everything else,
lying on a desk in a hotel somewhere. There it vibrates, stirring on the tabletop, the screen coming alive and flashing with an unknown number in the 970 code -- which, to be fair, covers more land in the state than any other area code.
Avery shakes her head at him. "You think you're clever," she tells him, smirkingly.
They drive on. Well: Calden drives. Avery is a quiet passenger, unbothered by the proximity to someone who so recently had his clothes off and his body pressed to hers, now doing her a completely different service. She watches the landscape pass by in darkness, mostly unseen but for vague shapes in the distance. She doesn't think about Calden's separation from the world. Self-involved it may be, but she thinks about the house that's being redecorated and made hers, and she thinks about finding a smaller place for those nights when it's safer or just saner to stay away from her kinfolk, maybe something downtown. She thinks about property out closer to the caern, and how that might be a good idea. It isn't that the caern is so far from the city (it's closer than Calden's place by a long shot), it's just that it would be nice to tromp home from the revel and there be a home close by.
He speaks, and her head swivels toward him to listen. Like an animal. Truthfully: like any creature who can hear. Not looking toward the source of a sound is something that has to be learned, something to train in over time.
"Beltane," she says, and laughs. "How Fianna." It isn't an insult; at least, it isn't meant as one. She just seems amused, and turns her head again. "Of course," she says, and gives it some thought. "A lovely invitation, and thank you for it. I shall have to check my calendar."
Calden White"It really is, isn't it." Fianna, that is. Calden doesn't seem even remotely insulted. He laughs too, and for a moment their laughter mingles in the slowly warming truck cab. "My tribe does love an excuse to party and debauch."
They drive on. After a while he makes a right and now they're heading west on a small state highway as straight and featureless and narrow as the smaller road they've just left. Their eyes have adjusted to the dark. The Rockies are dark, jagged shadows against a deep blue bowl of a sky. A quiet settles between them; Calden is comfortable in it, though he does yawn occasionally. After a while he cracks his bottle of water open and drinks thirstily. And a little after that, he turns down the heat a little, leans the seat back a bit. Settles in for the hour-long drive.
Somewhere in the middle he tells her a story. He tells her about growing up on his father's ranch, which was his grandfather's ranch, and his great-grandfather's, and his great-great-grandfather's. He tells her about playing outside on those long summer nights, him and his three big brothers, his one little brother. And their cousins, the ones that their aunts and uncles and even more distant relatives sent to them for a week or a month in the summer; the baseball diamond they scuffed into the dirt, the trees they climbed, the nights they spent out on the range, camping under the stars, listening to the lowing and the breathing of the cattle nearby.
He is a Fianna, after all. He paints a picture in a few simple words. Tells a story evocatively, if unembellishedly. He speaks of his home with undisguised love.
They're still miles and miles away when the lights of Fort Collins become visible in the night. The clock on the dashboard reads 3:43am when they cross the interstate 25, and now that endless country highway has become Mulberry Street. This town's dominated by Colorado State and its various satellite campuses.
Calden isn't quite sure where to drop her off. He has little experience with this sort of thing: the torrential sex, the drive to a drop-off spot where she can call herself a cab or sidestep and run or ... call her chauffeur, maybe. A gas station seems so sordid. A mall seems a little unsafe, even if he knows she's a goddamn werewolf, and a police station, while safe, just seems bizarre.
He ends up pulling into an all-night McDonald's parking lot. And he hands her his phone, in case she wants to call some sort of ride.
"I could just drive you the rest of the way," he says.
Avery Chase"Oh?" she feints. "I hadn't noticed."
About partying. About debauchery. She looks at him as she teases him, and smiles. She has finished her water in small but frequent sips, holding the bottle against one leg though it's empty.
As he drives and tells her about his life, it's hard to tell how Avery reacts, or if she does at all. The interior of the car is dark. She is looking at him, and listening to him, hearing the love he talks about his life with, hearing the simplicity of it all. Nothing he tells her is life-altering. He has a big family -- well, he's a Fianna. He climbed trees and they played baseball and slept outdoors and did things that have passed into nostalgic memory for most of the country.
Her head leans against the back of the passenger seat. She,
perhaps a bit embarassingly,
dozes off while he's talking about those long summer nights, when the heat of day instantly chills to a tolerable temperature as soon as the sun goes down. She drifts to sleep in his car as it moves through the darkness, her breathing becoming steady and quiet. He doesn't wake her. They reach Fort Collins, or the outskirts of it at least, and the dinky McDonald's out there. It's the stopping of the car that makes Avery stir.
She opens her eyes, breathing in, and looks away, and looks at him, and blinks. It's an hour still to Denver. He gives her his phone and tells her he could drive her the rest of the way.
"No," she says, almost immediately but not in a rush, one of the few times all night she has outright, directly denied him anything. Warm air pushes out of her mouth, and she smiles. "It's bad enough that you'll be getting as little sleep as you are already," she informs him, dialing a number she's already had cause to use. She gets the cross streets they're on from Calden before she hits 'Call'. "It's ridiculous that there's no transit between these two cities," Avery mutters as she puts his phone to her ear, shaking her head.
She tells them: yes, she knows what time it is. Yes, just one passenger. Yes, she is aware of the fare. She expects them very soon.
Hanging up, Avery hands it back. There's an awkward moment. Avery thinks it over a moment, then says: "If it's quite all right with you, I would prefer to wait here with you then go inside."
There's a beat.
"I have a slight weakness for their french fries, and then I'm disgusted with myself afterward. It's tawdry, I know."
Calden WhiteTruthfully, the awkwardness exists on Avery's end only. Calden has already killed the engine; he's taking another sip of his water, which is not empty yet, as he settles in to wait with her for the cab. There wasn't ever, for a moment, the notion that he would kick her out on the curb and drive away. Not in his actions, not in his mind.
So he glances at her, a little surprised, when she asks to stay. "Yeah," he says, as immediately as she'd turned down his offer to drive her the rest of the way. "Of course. Miss Chase, if you'd tried to go wait outside, I'd have protested. Vigorously."
And then he laughs -- "And here I was about to suggest we go through the drive-thru and get some junk food to snack on while your cab gets here. But it's good to know even the royalty has a slight weakness for McDonald's fries."
Avery ChaseShe laughs. Openly laughs. Her hair is drying, looking a little disheveled, but she runs her fingers through it and smiles at him as her laughter dwindles. Her eyes, even in the darkness, sparkle. There's just something in them, bright and reflective, taking what little light they can get and amplifying it.
The empty bottle in her own hands clatters softly, plastic-thumpingly, to the floor of the cab when she lets it slip and crawls across the front seats to curl upon his lap, legs to one side, back against the inside of the driver's door,
and hands on his chest and under his coat and mouth on his own.
Calden WhiteThat earns her another "Miss Avery," all mock-shocked and mock-prim and mock-everything, because
the moment she loosens her seatbelt and crawls over the center divide he's all but scooping her up, helping her move and turn and settle there, sideways across his lap. Her hands slide under his coat. He raises his chin and kisses her, meets that kiss of hers, his arm behind her back and his other hand on her waist,
under her tank top,
on those magnificent fucking tits. Again. Under her shirt, his knuckles pressing against the soft fabric, his wrist caught under that supportive band of elastic that serves as a bra. He muffles a moan against her mouth as he gets his hands on her again, tears his mouth away -- presses it to her neck, mutters something that sounds vaguely like
don't know how I'm gonna survive til next weekend without these tits
and then laughing, laughing as he kisses her again. They're not going to go for round six, he's promising himself. Not here, not in a McDonald's parking lot for god's sake -- how tawdry! -- and certainly not with her taxicab on the way.
Avery ChaseHe's amenable as ever. No hesitation, no withholding, nothing but a quick tease before her mouth cuts off anything more. It takes some work for him to get his hand under the tank top and under the built-in bra because the elastic is very tight -- it has to be -- and when he works it up over his wrist to touch her breast, those breasts are still held quite close to her chest and the elastic is tugging on her skin and she's laughing and breaking her mouth from his for a moment to mutter-whisper:
stop that
as she pushes his hand down like a virgin, still laughing, which is when he says he's not sure how he's going to get by without these tits, which only makes her laugh more. "Oh, god," she exhales, terribly amused. Still pushes his hand down. Re-adjusts her tank while getting his mouth on her own again, then takes his hand and welcomes it back, above the fabric.
She did hear him, though: next weekend. Every other week must mean next week in this rotation. She grinds softly on his lap, sideways as she is, both of them commando under their pants. And she simply... makes out with him. She doesn't go for round six. She doesn't urge his clothes off or whisper in his ear to just give it to her one more time. She kisses him. For minutes on end, getting a little wet and more than likely feeling him grow a little hard underneath her, stroking her fingers through his hair and over his body and purring when his hands grope her ass, fondle her tits even through her clothes.
The parking lot lights up with a new car and she pulls up for air, looks around. It's not a cab; someone actually wants to eat there. Avery ignores it and goes back to Calden's mouth, and kisses him until they're all but panting for it, which is the second time lights stream over the lot. This time when she lifts her head, it's the cab. Her cheeks are flushed and his hair is mussed and their lips are red. Her nipples are hard as rocks, pressing through multiple layers of fabric.
She exhales. It isn't quite a sigh. It isn't too far off from one either.
Avery gives him another kiss, soft and full and brief. She says the most cliche thing either of them could, right now:
"Call me,"
and then she's leaving. She's slipping out of the cab of the truck before she can change her mind, and she isn't going to look back, not until she's in the back seat of the taxi cab, and she certainly isn't going to wave.
Calden WhiteWise of her, really, to nip that one in the bud. Because if he'd gotten his hand on her then he'd have wanted his mouth on her, and if he'd gotten his mouth on her then, then he'd have wanted to pull her into that cramped backseat for round six.
That doesn't happen. She pushes his hand down. He laughs, hushed in the darkness, amused; happy. And then he kisses her again, and this time
he goes a little slower. They kiss each other lingeringly, on and on and on, their mouths rediscovering one another's anew. It's nice, in a way. It's nice to just kiss like this, to not escalate, to focus on this one thing and experience it through and through, the same way they'd experienced trading oral. And sex. And oral. And sex. And sex.
The first time those headlights rake across them, Calden twists his head around. Avery looks too. They see that it's not her cab, it's just some hungry person at 4am. So they go back to each other, their hands on each other, their bodies rubbing and sliding and grinding together until she's a little wet and he's more than a little hard and they're starting to pant, they're starting to touch each other inexactly, heavily, wantingly.
Lights again. This time Calden doesn't even notice. She pulls away and he just kisses her neck, kisses her jawline, looks for her mouth, and this
is when she exhales that not-quite-sigh. He pauses, turns to look. "Shit," he says, genuinely disappointed, and so she kisses him. And he kisses her. And she tells him to call her.
She gets out his side of the truck. He's resisting the urge to adjust himself in his pants because he doesn't want the cabbie to think she was doing him in here or something. He doesn't want the cabbie to think she's some sort of whore. Not that the cabbie matters in the long run, or even the short run, but --
he is a gentleman.
"I will," he promises, as she's stepping back. His eyes flick past her at the taxi, then back to her. "See you," he adds as she shuts the door on him, and that's the image she takes away with her: Calden White disheveled and heated in the driver's seat of the second-oldest of his three trucks; slouched down a little in the seat, his weight centered at the hip, his jeans doing a pretty good job, though not a perfect one, of hiding what those fifteen surreal minutes of making out have done to him.
And the image he takes away with him: Avery Chase, walking away, not looking back, not waving. Her hair golden, her skin golden, her very presence seeming to pull motes of light in from every source -- the wan sodium lighting of the lot, the pale fluorescence from the McDonald's -- pulling it in and transforming it, making it as luminous as she is.
The taxicab's door closes. A little later, it pulls away. And Calden tips his head back against the headrest, blows out a breath.
A moment later, he turns around and drives home.
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