Calden makes much the same sound Avery had moments before: that huff of air that is not quite laughter. He leaves the plates where they are. The silverware. The lights, beaming focally down on the table. He picks up his glass, and he picks up the scotch. As he leaves the dining table, he thumbs the bottom of the bottle against a light switch. Those lights shut off after all, and now the only light on the main floor are those sconces on the walls. Mood lighting more than anything else.
By the time they get downstairs, their eyes have adjusted. The windows let the moonlight in: a blue-dark landscape, the distinctions and features lost. To their right is the passageway to the guest suite; the wine cellar. To the left, glowing cerulean through a frosted glass double-door, is a small indoor pool.
The billiards table is a shadow, as are the sectional couches. There's a fireplace down here, too, sharing the same chimney as the great stone hearth a floor above. Calden's bottle thumps against a lightswitch again. A ring of small halogens come to life around the perimeter of the room.
He sets the bottle on the low coffee table. "I'll start a fire," he says. It's not a difficult task: there's a small rack of dry wood beside the hearth, doubtlessly carted in from some enormous stack somewhere. And there are gas burners in the hearth. It's practically cheating.
Avery ChaseThere are people -- men, women, kin, garou -- for whom nothing more would need to be said. That odd, unspoken spark that flew between them in the cellar before they ate was felt and ignored by both of them; it was not even enough to be conscious of the decision to dismiss it. This is something else, something they have each silently and subtly acknowledged.
Avery walks downstairs, back where the guest suite and the game room are so conveniently located. The steam has dissipated from the bathroom but the tile is still wet from where she showered earlier. Behind her, Calden picks up the scotch and turns off the lights.
Fade to black. You know what happens next.
Only: nothing is ever really that simple, is it?
She can sense him behind her when she walks downstairs, farther away than he was when he followed her up from the cellar. He can see her fair hair ahead of him, the last thing to lose any light as she sinks into shadows. She can smell him behind her, the scent of his skin and the wind outside and the elk he butchered and the scotch he drank.
Avery stops at the bottom. She looks out the windows to the landscape, which is so empty and endless that it makes her ache for something she can't name. Some nights it would feel like loss. Tonight it feels like longing, which is twin to loss but not an identical one. She feels pulse-quickened and drowsy at once, which is at least partly due to intoxication.
Turning when he comes downstairs, she notices the pool. It almost gets all of her attention, but: he's there.
She's looking at him when he turns the light on, and as the halogens increase the illumination without making it harsh, she smiles. She laughs, breathily, and lifts her glass to her mouth again, taking a mouthful of the heady liquid. She sets the glass down on the coffee table not far from the bottle. For a moment she just watches him as he starts to stack the wood, and then she unzips her black jacket and shrugs out of it, tossing it onto the sectional behind her. The white tank she wears underneath was made for her to move in. It's Y-backed, supportive, and unlike the jacket, does not conceal the coin-sized scar tucked against the lower half of her left shoulderblade.
That scar is an ugly pink blemish, tinged with violet, on otherwise perfect skin. It too, has a twin: almost identical, but hidden now. He probably doesn't see it right away, won't see it until her back is to him again, but he is a fifth-generation rancher; he will know the entry wound of a bullet when he sees one.
Avery steps out of her shoes, too, her socks, strips down to what she would be wearing if she really were headed to yoga for an evening class. She makes herself well at home, in fact, hair down and picking up her drink again for another sip before she goes to the table to start racking them up, stripes and solids. They clack together as she forms them into a tight triangle, places them on the red felt.
CaldenKneeling in front of the fireplace, Calden slides the glass doors open, sweeps back the spark curtain, and thunks several split logs onto the grate. A twist of a knob starts gas hissing into the fireplace, and a click of a lighter is all it takes for fire to leap eagerly up. Calden adjusts the gas down, leaves it on until the logs are well and truly ablaze. He leaves the doors open. And the screen.
She's racked the billiard balls by then. He comes to the table, fishing the cueball out of one of the pockets, setting it behind the line. The cues are hung against the wall: a half-dozen handsome, arrow-straight spears on a mahogany rack. He eyeballs her height from across the room, then takes down two of the longer ones.
Coming back to the table, he's behind her for a moment. He sees her scar. He sees her upper back, the wings of her scapulae. He comes up behind her, reaches around her to lean her cue against the table. And sets a small block of chalk beside it. Let's be honest: he's nearer to her than he strictly needs to be. His chest nearly brushes her back when he breathes.
"I thought wolves usually didn't scar from getting shot," he says, and nods at the racked balls. "You wanna break?"
Avery ChaseIt will take a little time for heat to fill the room, or even begin emanating much from the fireplace. That isn't why she removes her jacket. It's cool down here, cool enough for comfortable sleeping, for fireplace use, for the wine cellar to be kept temperate for the bottles and spirits. The scotch has her heated, though, her warmth drawn to the surface. Her cheeks aren't flushed, not yet, but she isn't far off. The sound of the wood catching fire, the smell of it, fills her with an almost euphoric pleasure. Not the same as hunting, or killing, not at all, but -- like the sight of the plains out of his window, the patches of unmelted snow, the mountains to the west -- it fills her with a nameless eagerness, an sweet ache.
He's nearer than he needs to be when he brings her cue over. He doesn't need to stand behind her, and he doesn't need to reach around her. He doesn't need to be so close to touch, or so close that when he speaks she can feel his breath against her shoulder. Avery does not flinch away, or twist around to keep him from being at her back; so far neither of them have shown much aversion to being behind the other, or vice versa. She does turn her head to look at him past her shoulder. He's close, and hasn't moved away. Her pupils are dilated from the dimness and the drink, leaving them black with rims of blue turning into silver, fading into white.
"We scar when we die and our rage pulls us back," she says, her voice low in respect to his proximity, though he may already know the truth of what she says. "And we can scar before we change for the first time," she goes on, reaching to the cues between them and lifting it from where it leans. She doesn't let her eyes leave his. Gives a faint smile, almost a smirk, a half-moment before she draws away, walking to the short edge of the table, a few feet from him. "And some special few of us do both at the same time."
CaldenIt's on his tongue to ask which it was for her when she answers. Both at the same time, she says, that by-now-familiar humor of hers belying that what she says isn't really funny at all. And he doesn't smile. He's frowning when their eyes meet and hold, those sun-etched lines on his brow deepening for a moment. Then she walks away; he exhales, picks up his cue and chalks it.
"Well I'm glad you made it back," he says, and lifts the rack off the table to watch her break.
Avery ChaseNo, it isn't funny. It isn't funny to die, and it isn't fun to change, and it isn't amusing that she can't remember her own resurrection because she was frenzied at the time. They tell her she climbed a building with her claws, an enormous and slavering white thing that the sniper kept shooting at, screaming FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK until the sounds he made weren't words anymore, until he wasn't making any sounds at all anymore, because she tore pieces off of him like he was roasted quail, twisting off bones at the joints. They tell her this. She heard a Galliard describe it just like that: roasted quail, and she tittered with laughter just like everyone else at the comparison
but it isn't funny. Not really.
Avery looks over at him from where she stands now, moving the cue ball at an angle to the triangle. Her lips quirking in a dry little smirk. "You and me both, cowboy," she says, and leans over the table, elongating her spine, hooking the stick under a finger before giving the ball a solid thwack! from a smooth, firm slide of the cue. The ball whips to the edge of the racked balls, snapping them apart with clattering and thunking.
The 15 with the maroon stripe rolls into one of the corner pockets. Avery slides back up to standing, exhaling, a smile tugging at her lips. She circles the corner, picking up her glass from the coffee table on her way to finish the finger he poured into it for seconds, and picks her next angle of attack.
"I do this for fun, too," she tells him. "I may ask them to put a billiards table in my game room, too." She grins as she leans, across the table from him now, her body lowered close to the edge. "And air hockey." She shoots. She misses this time. Looks up at him. "Do you like air hockey, Mr. White?"
CaldenCowboy gets some wry humor back on his face. "Wait 'til you see my hat and boots," he promises.
Nothing in Calden's house quite crosses the line into opulence and decadence, but there's luxury aplenty. Even the billiard table fits into that category. It's full-sized, with heavy, carven legs and a slate top flatter than Kansas. The felt is still unscratched, and Avery's opening shot rolls right across.
A stripe sinks. Calden, hanging up the triangle, leans over to see what it was. "Guess I'm solids," he says.
She lines up her next shot. He retrieves his whisky from the coffee table as well, setting it on a stool to keep the table clear. The bottle is in his other hand. He refills her glass. She takes another shot, which misses, and meanwhile he's setting the bottle aside and taking off that heavy jacket he's had on since coming in off the ranch. He tosses his outerwear onto the sectional, comes back, and picks up his cue.
Like her, he leans down to the table, legs braced fore-and-aft, bridging hand steady. A flick of his wrist cracks the cue into the ball, the ball into the solid, the solid into a pocket with a satisfying thunk.
"Easy shot," he self-deprecates. "And I love air hockey." He shifts sideways a couple steps, takes another shot. That one sinks too. Now he's starting to look smug, circling the table, eyes scanning for the next angle; flicking up to her as he passes her. "Are you inviting me over?"
He leans down next to her. This shot misses. He clicks his tongue against his molars as he straightens.
Avery Chase"You'll have to show me sometime," she tosses back when he gives her that promise. She smirks over at him from her side of the table, rolling her now-empty glass between her fingertips a but. She's looking at him when his back is turned to hang up the rack; looking at him when he turns back around. "Guess so," she adds.
He comes over and gives her a refill. He shrugs out of his jacket, tosses it not far from her own on the couch. She waits, at least after she shoots, and then she watches him shoot from the rim of that glass. She notices the smug look as he sinks the second shot, holding her ground where she stands. He crosses past her as she shifts her weight from one leg to the other, brushing her shoulder on his arm. Her turn follows his path.
"I'm not sure," she informs him, only after he's missed. "I'll have to check the thickness of the walls first."
Stepping over into the space he occupied a moment ago, as the ball bounces off a rim and rolls gently back towards a place not far from where it began, Avery holds her glass out to him. "Be a dear and hold this for me?" she asks.
Calden WhiteCalden laughs - a sudden, unchecked sound that fills the more enclosed spaces of the game room. Well; enclosed compared to the great room above, anyway. "Miss Chase," he says, leaning on his cue, "if you keep going on about the thickness of the walls I'm gonna think you've got wicked ideas in your head."
She holds out his glass. He takes it from her holding it at diaphragm-level while she shoots. He doesn't give ground this time, either. When she straightens up, he's the one pulling his eyes up to her face. He doesn't flush. His eyes are level, aware, knowing, smiling.
"Did you make that shot? I wasn't paying attention."
Avery ChaseHer eyes give a roll. "I'm not the one who pointed out how thick your walls were, Mr. White," she tells him, apparently having decided upon a moniker for him. His first name does, after all, seem so very personal. She's only just met him.
She hands him her glass, her fingers on the rim so he can take it by the base or the sides. So then she turns. She bends. She angles herself so the butt of the cute does not slam into his stomach when she shoots, but a moment later he's saying he wasn't paying attention.
"In that case," she says, archly and smoothly, "I did."
Calden White"Please, it's just Calden. I share 'Mr. White' with probably a hundred cousins or more."
Her glass is cupped in his palm when she turns to him again. His smile tweaks into a smirk, and he holds it out at her.
"What sort of Philodox are you?" And he hefts his cue up, catching it smoothly near the base to take his shot,
which sinks,
and then misses. He's across the table from her, picking up his scotch from the barstool, taking a sip that's really more like a swallow. He feels the alcohol now, a slow lazy fuzziness in his periphery. Too languid to move, he leans his weight on the cue, watching her prowl about.
Avery Chase"I wouldn't dream of imposing on your given name," she says, aghast but faking it. "I shall just have to call you Mr. White, then point at you whenever I visit your vast family reunions. Which should be easy, as you're quite tall."
She takes her glass back and takes a drink immediately, exhaling past the taste of smoke in her mouth. Her eyes close, roll, open again to look at him. "I am a drunken Philodox at the moment," she tells him,
as he takes his shot,
"who actually knows the rules of pool. That was my shot, you fiend." She laughs, and it resounds as it did in the great room, only it comes back sooner, wraps around them closer. She watches him circle the table to the other side, smirking at him under the dim halogens, against the crackling of the fire.
"I'm bored already with this game," she confesses, or -- more accurately -- informs him. "You should have Scrabble. I'll get you a board. Are you sure you don't want a new bull?"
Calden White"I don't want a new bull," he says, smiling at her across the table. "I'll take the Scrabble board if it's one or the other."
He straightens. The game half-played, the red felt and the colorful billiard balls all aglow under the low-hanging lights, he slides his cue back onto the rack and confiscates the chalk off the edge of the table.
"But you have to take a bottle of wine home, then. That's the deal."
Avery Chase"It's everything you like," she says, and there's an earnestness there that isn't -- or isn't simply -- this coy, parrying flirtation of theirs. He puts away his cue stick. She still holds hers, and her drink, watching him.
"The Syrah?" she asks him, and knocks back the last of the scotch, though she's already drunk. She leaves the glass on the edge of the table. "One would think you would want to send me home with a nice, dry white, surprising in its tartness."
Calden White"Nah. I like words that string together to tell a good story. If you have to get me something, get me a book you liked."
He laughs again. He comes over to her, swiping her empty glass from the table to refill it again. Only he doesn't go refill it; not yet. He stays there, closer to her again, though all night they've danced between a few yards and a few inches of space. Once, she brushed against him, and his eyes gleamed when she drew away.
"Nice, dry, white and a little tart -- is that how you see yourself? Don't sell yourself so short. I've got a Sangiovese somewhere that suits you better."
Avery ChaseA slow, sly smirk spreads across her lips. She doesn't take the glass. "I was talking about you, Mr. White."
Calden White"Ouch. Point for you, Avery Chase. Though I'll console myself with the knowledge that you want to take me home."
Avery Chase"You may," she says graciously, still holding her pool cue and tipping her head a bit to one side in noble concession. "But," she goes on, taking the glass finally from his hand, though he has not filled it yet. Her eyes flick from his hand where she takes her cup, its sides laced with the legs of scotch, back to meet his own gaze.
"You brought me home first."
Calden WhiteAnd he kisses her.
Avery ChaseAnd she slaps him.
Calden WhiteFirst, for the curious-minded:
Calden kisses with the fire of a thousand suns. Or at least: like a man who knows how. Who's had practice, though perhaps not excessive practice. This house, after all, smells like him and his father and his ranch hands and his deputy friend and, occasionally, a visiting brother or two. Not of women. Still; there's confidence there, a surety in the way his head dips as she's finishing her sentence. In the the way his mouth touches hers -- firm, unafraid, lips parted from the start.
And the start, of course, is all there is. Because then she slaps him. Startlement more than anything snaps his head to the side. He pants a half-laugh of amazement. He doesn't cover his cheek in shock. He looks at the pattern of billiard balls for a moment as though some universal truth might be divined there, and then he turns back. There's a faint, incorrigible spark of laughter in his eyes.
"I do apologize," he says. "I've clearly misread the situation."
Avery ChaseThat kiss, however skillful, does not last long. He's there suddenly, all meat and bones and his lips tasting dimly of the scotch they've been going back and forth on. Even more faint is the scent and taste of meat that she knew more intimately than any human has since humans came out of caves. She remembers that taste. That scent. She remembers it as clearly as she remembers him butchering it. Cooking it. As clearly as she remembers watching his body move underneath his clothes as he walked, or as he got down dishes, or as he leaned over to strike the cue ball.
She slaps him anyway, as heedless as his kiss, because she is startled and because she remembers that he brought her home when she was a blood-stained wolf, not a blonde-haired woman. She slaps him because he's Fianna and because she's an animal and because some part of her insists that this is hardly the time, Mr. White. She slaps him because something about it strikes her as comical and bizarre and she can't help it: the moon is waxing, and with every inch that silver overtakes shadow in the sky, her thoughts race that much quicker.
Avery is no untouched virgin. He knows that from the slap, if nothing else. He knows it from the way that, just before the slap,
she kisses him back, languid and heated and on the verge of biting,
before her palm bites his cheek.
He almost laughs. He sort-of apologizes. She laughs. She doesn't half-laugh or huff air, she just... laughs.
clearly misread th--
Her hand is in his hair then, the glass set on the felt where it doesn't belong, her arm encircling his shoulder, his neck, her palm to the back of his head, drawing him down and nearer again. This time she kisses him, and her body comes a step closer to press fully against his own. Her cue goes clattering to the floor. And: it pulls a bit on his hair, on his skin, when she grabs with her free hand at the edge of the pool table -- still laden with stripes and solids -- and levers herself up to sit on that edge. Their mouths break only for a moment,
unless of course he slaps her back,
but when she sits on the edge of the table, just to reach him better, her mouth is opening. Her hands are coming to cup his face, fingers touching his hair, drinking from his mouth like a fountain that might give her youth, or satisfaction, or sanity.
Calden WhiteCalden does not slap her back.
He does kiss her back, though. She kisses him in the middle of his sentence and he lets those last few syllables drop the way she lets the pool cue drop. You're not supposed to handle them that way, that warps the wood, just like you're not supposed to put a glass on the felt either because it flattens the pile. Ask him if he cares. He doesn't.
Her hands are in his hair, which is thick and dense and coarsely silken; she pulls his mouth to hers again. He meets her eagerly, hotly, tasting of meat and smoke and scotch and himself. There's something earthy and vital about him; solid, rough, warm, sturdy. She's not a frail flower of a woman, but her arm barely manage to encircle the breadth of his shoulders. She levers herself up and finds his arms wrapping behind her back, hoisting her aloft, their mouths part, he laughs too -- a low sound -- and sets her on the edge of the pool table.
And her hands cup his face. Beard-bristle scrapes her palms; scrapes her chin, too, if we're honest, and her cheeks when his mouth wanders from hers to discover a trail to her ear.
They are not tearing at each other anymore. They are not ripping into each other or mauling each other. There's a sort of deep, lazy heat to this. It's not quite patience, but it is enjoyment. His teeth graze her earlobe and he makes this sound low in his chest, this rumble that's nearly a purr, or a growl. He has one big hand against the felt, his forearm against her waist. He has the other on her back, and it presses her closer, presses her near until she's flush against him as much as their colliding legs will allow; unless, of course, by now she's already wrapped her legs around him. Really, Miss Chase. How forward..
Avery ChaseHer legs are around him, and his arms around her. There are no more thrusts and parries of words between them. He doesn't press her down on the felt, as she would surely be assaulted soon after by billiard balls knocking into her arms and hips and his hands. She does not grip his red-checked shirt in her hands and turn him over, climb onto him, eat him alive.
She kisses him, hot and ager and pulling at him, tearing at him, coming quite close to biting his lips as he kisses her back. He goes more slowly, his hand broad on her back, his torso coming to press firm between her legs, his mouth seeking her earlobe, his beard or the beginnings of one scraping that skin that seems so delicate and so soft.
Avery was not going to kiss him. When she thought of fucking him, at least the first three or five or seven times, she decided she would not kiss him. Pretty Woman rules. Whores and Johns. Fancy ladies and cowboys, however you choose to frame it. She was not going to, and she has forgotten that and will not regret it later. Just as she will not regret permitting him to slow things between them, not patient but langorous. Just as she will not regret her legs wrapping around him, pulling him closer to her.
Avery kisses like a lover. Not like someone skilled or practiced or familiar with the ways you learn a new person's mouth and taste and pleasure. She kisses with a dizzying intimacy, her hands on his face and her back arching, breasts touching his chest through Lycra, through flannel. She kisses like he is inside of her already, or being drawn there. Her ankles cross behind his back, as thoughtless as anything else she's done tonight.
Calden WhiteCalden was not going to kiss her either. Calden hadn't even thought of fucking her; not exactly, anyway, and not explicitly -- not until of course he was, until that imagine of the red felted table and the lights and her clothes coming off and her blonde hair tumbling down and her golden skin sleek in the fire's glow
and all of that ran through his head all at once like a herd of elk. But before that: no, he wasn't even really thinking of it. He's not the sort of guy that looks at every woman with sex in mind. And he was not going to kiss her,
until of course he was.
And now they're kissing like lovers. They're slowing it down and there's something bottomlessly intimate about this, just as these lowered ceilings are intimate, just as their half-finished game of pool was intimate, just as it was intimate every time he filled her drink and every time she repartee'd. Her legs slide past his hips. Her ankles lock behind his back. He's shockingly close to her, muscle and bone and heat under sturdy denim, sturdy flannel. His hands are sliding up her back, his fingertips brushing the tips of her hair, and then --
then he's running them down again, following the arch of her spine, wrapping under her ass and lifting her from the table. His mouth parts from hers. The lamps are at her back. Her hair shadows her face; shadows him as well.
"Do you want to go upstairs?" he whispers. There it is again: that faint, quirking curl to his mouth.
Avery Chase"No," she breathes, going easily into his hands, body levered against his chest. She kisses him, drenchingly, and perhaps her mouth is a little loose from scotch, her skin a little too heated. She starts to unbutton his shirt, mindlessly and blindly dextrous, panting softly: "Here."
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