glad you waited. [ian]

Ian

The sun was down, though the hour wasn't yet so late that Washington Park was empty of visitors. There were fewer now than there had been when Kiara and Ian had arrived, and given time the place was likely to get pretty quiet, but there were still cars in the lot. Ian got there first, partly because he was running and partly because Kiara had offered to take a detour with Grace. When he arrived, he paced around the lot once, letting his heart rate slow and his muscles cool. Gradually his breathing grew less pronounced.

There were a couple of teenagers arguing a few stalls down from where he'd parked his Audi. He ignored them as he passed by, and eventually they got in their car and left. After that, he was left alone to wait. His car sat idle beneath the overhanging branches of a large oak tree near the end of the lot. Sodium light from a nearby streetlamp illuminated the pavement around him, casting speckled shadows through the leaves. Ian hopped up onto the hood of his car and lay back with his eyes closed. He didn't bother to put his earbuds back in. Instead he listened to the sounds of the park and the distant hum of engines from the road.

This is how Kiara would find him when she arrived. Like a cat lounging in the moonlight. She'd seen his car before, so she knew what to look for. But given their particular awareness and sensitivity to each other's presence, she probably wouldn't actually need to look to find him.

Kiara

Her car was parked across the lot from his. Washington Park, busier when she pulled in earlier, had left her little options for stowing her vehicle. Though it stood now quite solitary in its corner, a red blight amongst the shadows, somehow more obscure for the inky twilight and somehow, of course, of course the car that belonged to a woman like Kiara Woolfe.

It would be blood red. Some small and compact thing with stickers peeling off the back window. With dust etched into the paint, clouding the rearview windows. He's there well before her, detoured as the brunette was walking Grace to the (relative) safety of her own destination, if anywhere could be safe for any of them, being who they were. The temperature has cooled a few degrees for the sun's absence and when eventually, the Verbena closes on the parking lot, she's restored her jacket to her body, a bag slung over a shoulder, basketball caged under one arm, toted against her ribcage.
A set of keys are wound around her fingers.

If she notices Ian (which she does), she doesn't acknowledge him lounging on his car (yet) but heads to her own and unlocks the door, stows her belongings in it and shuts it again. The sound of the door slamming echoing for the near loneliness of the lot now. Occupancy dwindled down to a lone two, one with the appearance of a creature quite at his leisure and the other toying with her own.
Kiara's sneakers crunch over the earth as she approaches. She doesn't need to look for him, he's right about that, she knows the sense of him now. Has felt his pattern curled around her own, knows what he feels like under her hands. She reaches the wheel of his car, hands in her pockets, the streetlight playing over her body.

She doesn't say anything at first and when she does, it's simple. Unfussed.

"Hey."

Ian

She might not have shown. Whispered flirtations on a basketball court weren't necessarily meant to be taken as a promise. And given enough time, Ian probably would have found something else to occupy his evening. But he waited, and there was nothing impatient about his demeanor in that moment. His posture was relaxed, and were it not for the shallow rate of his breath he might have looked asleep. Both of his arms were folded beneath his head. One foot hung loose over the front of his car while the other propped itself up on the hood. His own jacket was still stashed in the back seat, unused. Given another fifteen minutes or so he might need it, but sixty degrees was still tolerable weather and he'd been running recently.

Hey.

Ian knew that Kiara was there. He'd felt her approach from halfway across the lot. But he didn't acknowledge her until she spoke. Then he opened his eyes and turned his head to regard her, blinking slowly as his eyes readjusted to the light.

"Hey."

He greeted her with this small, subtle smile, then gave a slow, fluid stretch. When he was done, he hopped down from the hood of his car and ran a hand over the back of his hair.

"Was beginning to think you might not show."

Kiara

He stretches, hops down from the hood of his car with all the sinuous grace of the cat he so resembles and she watches him, Kiara, the corner of her mouth hooking up as she does because it can't be denied it's no hardship to do exactly that. Look at him, the way he moves, the lithe grace of him.
She doesn't hide that she's watching him and there's that boldness about her that was there on the court. She holds her position, though a hand emerges to tender aside dark strands as they drift into her vision, the wind scattering leaves somewhere, playing in the fall of her hair before finding the tree branches, urging whispers and creaks from the oak above his Audi. He was beginning to think she might not show.

Her head cants a little, she leans a hip against the side of his car, sliding arms over her chest. "But you waited anyway." There's a hint of challenge there, a suggestive edge to the way she studies his face and then looks away. Her profile all dark edges and white on gray under the dull illumination of the light.

Glances back again and turns her body toward him, fingers skating over the curve of his car. Smoothing fingertips over the unblemished paintwork. "I got delayed, walking Grace home. She loves me now so I figured it was the least I could do." Her hand slides off his car, she takes a little step closer.

"I'm glad you waited." Quiet.

Ian

But you waited anyway.

"I did."

There was no trace of self-consciousness in his voice when he said that. Maybe there could have been. Maybe he seemed like the kind of man who didn't like to wait on anyone. Who didn't need to wait on anyone. But his confidence wasn't that fragile, and sometimes experiences were worth waiting for. He could be patient, when he wanted to be.

Kiara was glad he'd waited, and Ian... didn't say anything to that. But his smile returned, playing at the edges of his lips. There was a pregnant pause, silent apart from the ambient noise of the city. Then Ian stepped forward and cupped Kiara's face in one hand, his fingers playing over the outline of her cheek and jaw, and just like that the space between them closed. He leaned down and kissed her - hard enough to feel insistent, his breath a rough gust of warmth against her lips.

Kiara

He kisses her and cups her jaw, the delicate bones of it warm beneath his fingers and she's receptive almost instantly. Reaches up and wraps fingers around his wrist where he's anchoring her face near. Opens her mouth into it when his lips return and meets the hunger in it, pushes into his space and him into the side of the car while she steals the breath from his lungs the way she'd stolen her ball back on the court earlier.

The first time they'd been together he'd kissed her first, tasted her mouth with the bittersweet aftertaste of merlot still clinging to her lips. It had been a mutual exploration, of bodies, of lust, of like minded individuals, perhaps swimming against the current. Now, she's on the offensive. For all that he could map the span of her waist between his hands (maybe he has, at some point, who knew) and pull her off, Kiara pushes into his space, bites the edge of his mouth and traps him there between his car and her body.

Anyone could, in theory, walk upon them like this. Pressed together against the side of his car with their hands all over one another.

She drags her mouth away, lips kiss-stung, pupils blown and breathes, "tell me what you want," while deliberately holding herself away from him. Poised on the precipice of her lust while still attempting a maddening degree of control.

Ian
Their energies met. Crashed and broke like an ocean tide. And Kiara was not the first of the Awakened in Denver for Ian to do this with, but she was the first to turn that question back around on him. To drag her lips away and say: tell me what you want.

Perhaps everyone just assumed they didn't need to ask. Ian was a primal force. If he wanted something... well. Kiara already knew what his passions were like. They were similar creatures in this sense. But he didn't object when she pushed him against the car, just as he hadn't objected that night when she'd taken him by the shirt and led him to her room. Yes, he could have resisted. Could have pushed her away. But that wasn't what he wanted.

They kissed like two people who could have devoured each other (and maybe, in a darker moment, they could have.) Kiara bit the edge of Ian's mouth, and Ian let out a quick breath as his pulse gave an uptick. He ought to have been tired from exertion, and he was - a little. But the ache in his muscles was an afterthought compared to what he felt in his blood and on his skin. There was hunger in the back of his throat. (Strange the things that made people and monsters the same.)
Ian wet his lips. His eyes were nearly black in the reflection of the streetlamp.

"I want to drown in you."

Anyone might see them like this. Despite the dark and the quiet of the park at night. They were still in the open. This was still a public space. Maybe he didn't care.

Kiara

There's a reason she likes Washington Park. There's a reason beyond playing hoops or running, it's the same reason she liked Central Park in another city. Another reason why her coven drew her out into the suburban sprawl outside Manhattan. A creature such as she was, Kiara needed the grounding of the earth. Needed the tactile reminder of who and what and how she was.

She comes here and drowns herself in nature the way he wants to drown in her right now. Her with her dark eyes and wet mouth and feeling like she's fucking devouring him alive only to electrify his nerve endings back into sensation every time she touches him. It strikes her - or it will - that they've never told each other who they are, passing beyond names and the recognition that they were alike, that they were awake in ways other people weren't.

She says it plainly often - Verbena, descendant of the Pure Ones, the Aeduna, the Wyck ... so many ways to say the same thing - to leech out the truth. The one there in the instinctual, visceral reaction animals have toward her. The one she broadcasts in her own way. The one you can feel, sometimes, when she's near and turns her gilded, loaded smiles your way. Pagan. Witch. In the old ways as well as the new.

It's neither here or there really, but it's a discussion to come at some point. It's the calm after the storm, perhaps and not for right now. Not for when she's pressing him into the car and he's staring at her like he is. She wants to hear him say it, say something, that much is plain.
She's very close to him when he does say it and he can sense the smile as much as feel it when she presses their mouths back together and says, "You can, you know," in a private whisper and then takes his hand and pulls it to her chest, under her shirt, over her heart. The warmth of her skin. The rapid staccato of her heart beating just under the surface.

"Go as deep as you want."

Ian

[Forces 2, coincidental, diff 5, needs 2 successes]
Dice: 2 d10 TN5 (1, 7) ( success x 2 ) [WP]

Ian

[And Life 1, diff 4 -1 (practiced)]
Dice: 2 d10 TN3 (2, 8) ( success x 1 )

Ian

[oh come on]
Dice: 2 d10 TN4 (4, 9) ( success x 2 )

Ian

Kiara pressed his hand over her heart, and Ian closed his eyes as he felt the beat of it beneath his hand. They'd never spoken about their Traditions (or lack thereof.) There were a lot of things they'd never spoken about. Ian himself laid no claim to any organization (or perhaps more accurately, no organization could lay claim to him,) but certainly he had things that he believed. There were a great many things that Kiara didn't know about him, including the fact that they'd both lived in New York. But there were also things she did know that some others did not. People like Grace or Sera, who'd spoken to Ian on many occasions but had not seen the depth of his response to another person's heartbeat. Did not know how much that simple thing could deconstruct all of the carefully erected walls around his soul.

And it was willful, that letting go. It was a release. (Maybe they both needed it.)

Ian closed his eyes and felt the beat of Kiara's heart beneath his palm. And then he leaned back and looked up through the branches of the tree. At the sky. At the stars. The light beside them hummed with electric current. He gave a quick, stuttered breath and closed his other hand into a hard fist - until the nails dug half-moon shapes into his palm. And the light above them exploded into a shower of sparks that rained down onto the pavement.
Then it went dark.

Ian pressed his hands to Kiara's waist as he kissed her, flipping their positions so that he could press her back against the hood of the car. And unless she objected, he'd help lift her weight onto it, so that he could press his hips between her legs and roll his pelvis in this slow, fluid motion. Their athletic clothes were fairly thin, and didn't leave much to the imagination. When he kissed her again, he pressed his hand back over her heart and listened to the rhythm of her blood. Focused on it. Until the details of her pattern grew more acute. Until he could feel her pulse even when he wasn't touching her.

He pulled his shirt off and dropped it on the ground. The air didn't feel cold anymore.

Kiara

She knows the way it feels to give over to that sensation.

It's primal, base and instinctual and there isn't any finer example of what it means to be alive than to press your palm against someone's chest and feel their heart raging against the idea that it could ever stop, that the body could cease to be, grow cold, no longer pulse with blood and sweat and everything in between. Ian feels Kiara there, under her skin, beyond the sinew and bone. Feels her, the pulse of her pattern, the threads that connect her to everything. The strength, the desire, every frenzied beat like a synapse, firing and crackling to life only to die before renewing itself.

She gives him that, holds his hand there and breathes out jaggedly when he flips her, the motion stealing her breath. The streetlight shatters, sparks reflecting in the windows of his car before they die and she curls a leg around his waist when he presses into her, rolls his pelvis against hers and he can feel that, too. Her arousal, the sharp noise she makes when he does it. He pulls his shirt off, she unzips her jacket, throws it into the darkness blindly.

Sits up, slides down the hood of his car to shed clothing. Shirt, bra. Shakes her hair out of her eyes and lays back like an offering to be made. For the fact she's half naked on top of a car in a public parking lot Kiara displays a startling lack of hesitation. But then, it's nearly pitch black without the streetlight. The only illumination coming from the moon and the vague impression of another light across the lot, casting dull sallow light across the square of gravel.
She pulls him closer.

Her skin cast in starker contrast for the lights being out, she wraps an arm around his neck, grabs his other hand and guides it back toward her body, whispers against his ear.
"Put your hands on me."

Ian

She didn't need to ask (demand, really,) but he liked that she did. And the moment her skin was bare in the moonlight he could not help but touch her. His hands found her waist again, thumbs pressing into her stomach as he slid his palms slowly up the length of her torso, over the dips and ridges of her ribcage until he reached the swell of her breasts. And he bent down to kiss the base of her throat, an almost disarmingly delicate thing - this soft press of open lips and warm breath. He could feel her nipples beneath his palms and rolled his hands back over them slowly.

A responsible person would say at this point: we should go somewhere. Somewhere safe. Somewhere private. But Ian was not a responsible person. (At least, not in that respect.)

Soon his lips found their way down to where his hands were, and he rolled his tongue over one of her nipples, glancing up to watch her reaction before he closed his eyes and breathed in the scent of her skin. One of his hands slipped down past the waistline of her pants and pressed between her legs. Found the warmth there beneath her clothes and traced over it.

His senses were full of Kiara's heartbeat. The pulse and rhythm of it. The way it changed when he touched her or when her breathing shifted. He didn't want to pull away, but he did, briefly. Long enough to help her out of the rest of her clothes. He could have been more careful - gone around instead of pulling them off. But he wanted to see her stretched out like that, naked and beautiful on the hood of his car in the shadows and the moonlight.

He kissed the skin beneath her ankle bone, tracing the tips of his fingers up over her calf. Then he kissed the inside of her thigh. Once. Twice. The second time he bit down lightly. If her fingers were not already in his hair, he would reach out to take her hand and put it there. Asking without asking.
He'd promised her something back on the basketball court. And he had ever intention of fulfilling that promise. Wanted it, just as he'd wanted it the first night they'd spent together. But there was something about the way they were doing it now that made it just that much more fucking perfect. He moaned when his lips found her. When his tongue pressed into wet heat and slid up over her clit. Everything about Kiara was alive in that moment, and it was so very easy to lose himself in it. (To drown, as he'd said he wanted to do.)

Kiara

Perhaps its the fact that she worships the elements, the Gods and Goddesses of the Earth, the divinity in Nature itself that writhing naked under the moon is not such a ridiculous prospect. Perhaps the voyeur in her rejoices in it, the pagan in her certainly does. This is old magic, energy raised by bodies joining together. She'd told Sera as much the other night, hand open on the table, palm upward in a gesture of supplication.

Energy, we're made up of it, we invoke it every day of our lives. Every thought, every word ... it's breathing, running, laughing ... sex. Just another kind of it. Another conduit for connection, for raising consciousness to the next level. Kiara revels in the way he touches her, spine arching slightly off the hood of his car when he sets to mouthing his way down her body, when he slides his palms over her ribcage (feeling the rise and contraction of her breathing), the slope of her chest, fingers grazing her breasts; nipples. He looks up the length of her body at one point to gauge her reaction and finds her eyes open, watching him with rapt focus as he makes himself a devotee, a worshipper at the altar.

Her head cants back, eyes slide shut when his mouth moves between her legs. He guides her fingers to his hair and blunt fingernails bite into his scalp, tugging and (to some degree) guiding him right where she wants him. He had made a promise, after all. He can easily drown in her responses, though. She gives herself so wholly, Kiara, to the act of pleasure; attaining it, harboring it there, right on the cusp that its impossible not to feel entirely surrounded by, swallowed by it.

The heat of her skin, the pulse of her pattern. The way she cages him close to her body with the supple strength of her legs. He keeps his promise to her and she lets him hear it when she comes. Head thrown back, brows knit together as if in consternation, teeth sinking down into her lower lip at some point hard enough to draw blood (and that's an offering too, of its own sort).

Ian

In the moment, Ian didn't think about the fact that making noise was probably a bad idea. Not when the sounds Kiara made felt like velvet crawling up his skin. Her hands were in his hair, knotting strands of it around her fingers as her body grew taught and tense beneath him. Ian sucked in a breath when he felt her come (felt it in more ways than one,) and the sensation was dizzying and electric.
He didn't stop until she released her hold on him. At which point he leaned over and kissed the edge of her collarbone. Then her jaw. Then her lips.

"You're fucking beautiful like this."

She was always beautiful. He'd said as much before. But this time his voice held a note of quiet reverence to it.

He didn't actually have a condom on him, so he had to pull away to open the car. There was always at least a few in the glove compartment, and he found one now, tearing open the wrapper as he shut the door and came back around to where Kiara was resting on the hood. They still hadn't been caught, and Ian was pressing their luck considerably, but that was the thing about being Awake. You got used to being able to do things that most people couldn't get away with.

Later, just after they'd finished, someone would walk by. And Ian would send a mental impulse just in time to keep the two of them from being seen. Probably they'd laugh about it.

But for the moment, there was just the two of them beneath the stars, surrounded by life and open air. And as Ian pushed into Kiara, he curved his spine and kissed her and moaned against her lips. And for a while he didn't think about anything else.