Serafíne
Adult Diversion. 10 p.m.
--
That was the text Ian received sometime close to midafternoon, inviting him to Sera's next show. Adult Diversion
is a dive bar on East Colfax, not far from the Ogden. The place is in a
basement - this steep clatter of concrete stairs and iron railings
leading to a narrow concrete apron of a courtyard where folks can loiter
and smoke in fine whether or shiver and smoke in cold weather. Bouncer
standing at the door with a cauliflower ear and a gold tooth where his
canine should be and a black-painted door that opens into an impressive
little space, vaulted like a wine cellar or a speakeasy, bookshelves on
the wall where the hightops are scattered, a big, impressive bar
dominating a somewhat small space that opens into a slightly bigger
performance space in the back. This pair of pool tables and a small,
open dance floor that isn't quite big enough to get a true mosh pit
going but on Punk Rock Tuesdays (hand-written in chalk on the UPCOMING
SHOWS board) someone always tries to throw arms and elbows and maybe
even stage dive.
The crowd is exactly what you expect in a
place like this. Eclectic, varied. Bright and lively at nine or
nine-thirty, when the kitchen closes, turning somehow both bright and
darker as the alcohol really starts to flow.
They take the
stage at 10:15 or so. Play a forty-five minute set - reeling, varied,
covers to originals and originals that everyone in the crowd thinks are
covers because the people to whom they've sold songs - well. Dan knows
what the fuck he's doing when he writes a song, and sometimes even
Serafíne does too. They have such a chemistry, the tight little
foursome. Dan's a killer guitarist and Dee kinda hangs back on the bass
and lays it down and there's nothing flashy about Rick on the drums but
sometimes you wonder what it is that keeps them going, why they are so
fucking good on stage even as the lead singer herself is keeping lost
and finding threads and stopping and starting and clearly not-sober and,
if the bottle in her hand is any indication, rapidly becoming even more
not-sober. There's a fifteen minute set break in the middle when they
come back and play for another forty-five minutes or so, which is a
helluva lot more material than most unsigned, unknown, unheralded bands
can throw on stage.
Something about their presence: something
about the night or the room or the way they work. The way they know
each other, swing it and swing out and swing it, they way they know her says that maybe being: unsigned, unknown, unheralded is a goddamned choice.
But god, she's scintillating.
The light loves her sharp features, her spare frame, her long limbs.
Catching bright and hard against the fine bones and delicate arches, the
dark dark eyes. Sera does have a guitar and she plays it sometimes and
sometimes she slings it around to her back and holds onto the mic with
one hand and the neck of her bottle with the other and croons, so softly
you can hear every rasping breath.
The two songs are both covers: Lily and Parrots and then Tonight the Sky,
both by Mark Kozelak. They play up that big-ass riff and make it
louder and louder and even Sera needs her goddamned guitar to carry the
line so that Dan layer in the scintillating runs over it, but then the
vibe changes, rotates, slows and Sera gets rid of the guitar once and
for all. Picks up the bottle. Grabs the mic, just sings. Tonight the sky will open for you / Mountains and big clouds divide us in two.
Then
it is over, over for good and Sera waits for just a few seconds of the
applause that comes before she turns to slide the strap for her guitar
over her head and hands it off to Dee or Dan then jumps off the stage as
if she handn't just spent hours on her feet in five inch heels. Walks
in those things as if they didn't do a goddamned thing to hobble or
shorten her gate. Slips through the crowd like water, headed toward the
bar and probably Ian. She needs another drink.
Ian
When
Ian arrived at the bar, he was alone. There'd been a moment, maybe,
when he'd considered bringing someone else. But Emma didn't like dive
bars and Jae-shin didn't like bars in general and Elijah was already
going to be spending the weekend with him as it was. More to the point,
Ian was the sort of person who could get away with going to a concert
alone. So he did.
He didn't try to grab Sera's attention while
they played. Perhaps she noticed him, standing back by the bar with his
mouth close to the ear of some girl he'd just met. Or later, dancing in
the crowd with said same girl. Perhaps he was just another beating
heart in the room. Another force of life and will and vitality. People
tended to blend together when you were on stage, becoming this
interconnected, singular being. Ian was familiar enough with the
interplay between performer and audience. The mutual exchange of energy.
Sera,
and her band, were a revelation. Hardly a surprise, given what Ian had
seen of them before, but that made it no less of an experience. As the
hours passed, Ian drifted back and forth between the bar and the stage.
He had a drink when he came in, but after that he stuck to water (partly
because he was dancing, and because the room was hot with the press of
bodies, but also because he had to be up at 5am the next day.) The girl
he ended up gravitating toward was a few years younger than him - a
college student from UCB who'd driven in for the weekend with her
friends. They talked a bit, but mostly they just enjoyed the
performance. Before she left, she gave him her number.
By the
time Sera concluded her final song, Ian was back at the bar, leaning
against the counter without bothering to inhabit a seat. He was dressed
pretty casually. Skinny jeans in raw denim and a black
t-shirt. The boots he had on were one of his older pairs. A bit scuffed
in places. Possibly splashed with spilled beer at some point in the
night. There were leather bracelets on his left wrist. Wherever his coat
was, it wasn't with him.
He met Sera's eyes as she approached
the bar, smiling in this way that seemed lit with coiled energy. His
shirt smelled like beer and pot, neither of which had come from him. The
rest of him smelled like expensive hair and skin products and some kind
of subtle cologne with woody and citrus notes.
"Are you always that fucking amazing?"
Serafíne
"Flatterer,"
Sera riposts, meeting Ian's eyes and she can meet his eyes because they
are nearly of a height with her five inch heels on. They're black,
nearly but not quite stilettoed, covered in a bristle of studs and
spikes enough that they could double as a medieval torture device. The
bottle she has in hand is whiskey, maybe a quarter of it remains, and it
sloshes around as she approaches the bar, too close because she likes
to be close.
Inhales, there, the musk of marijuana, the
spilled drinks. Inhales again the scents beneath it, and does it in a
way that would tell Ian she is - naturally - fucked up even if he hadn't
just watched her drain that bottle over the course of the night.
"Course we are," she murmurs, leaning in to brush her mouth over the apex of his cheekbone. She was
wearing a short pink dress covered in a fine print of cartoonish little
bumblebees with garters and fishnets but midway through the performance
she got too hot and peeled down the bodice of the dress to let it hang
at her waist. Beneath: this sweet little black bra with these scalloped
cups like shells or Frence madeleines, and of course her tattoos. The
ink on her bicep and forearm, the ink crawling beneath her right breast
and drifting over her right shoulder blade, tight against her ribs, and
on and on. All blackwork.
"Thank you for coming," she
continues, murmurs when they're close, and she smells like sweat and
whiskey and her eyes are little bit unfocused so maybe there's something
else in her blood, too. Smiles around the thought and lolls back a bit
and pushes the bottle aside to make room for her ass because, "I wanna
sit on the bar. Will you pick me up? And, fuck. Tell me how you know
Justin."
Ian
Ian probably (no, more than
certainly) wasn't the strongest person in the room. For all that his
physique spoke of wired and elegant athleticism, he wasn't muscular in
the way of, say, a football player. But Sera, despite her heels, was a
fairly petite creature. And Ian had... rather a lot of experience with
lifting people. Knew how to do it so he put the tension in the right
muscles. Knew how to make it look graceful, even. So when she asked him
to lift her up, he set his hands firmly on either side of her waist and
hefted her onto the counter in a smooth motion that made it look as
though he was expending less energy than he actually was.
(Thank you for coming.)
"Of
course." He let the rest of his reply hang a moment, setting his hands
on the bar on either side of Sera's legs. Leaning there, slightly in her
space but still perched far enough away that he could pull back and
give her room if she wished it.
"I met him while I was performing in Madison over Christmas."
Serafíne
Oh,
Sera is a spare thing. Sinew and sharp, fine little bones. Sometimes
she spends her days drinking and drinking and forgets to do anything so
prosaic as eating. Sometimes she fasts, perhaps even purges, because it
feels like ritual.
Someone once told her about ritual, so.
Tonight,
though, Ian lifts her up and can feel her inhale, can feel her laughter
- incipient, lateral - through her body, the promise of it in the
tension of the muscles flanking her waist. Her skin is warm, even hot,
and damp with sweat that darkens the snaking tendrils of her dyed
curls.
She smells like sweat. Sweat and whiskey and Chanel No. 5. Sweat, whiskey, Chanel No. 5 and a fast-beating heart.
This
release of tension in her toes and both shoes drop to the floor of the
bar. Ian's in her space, but she doesn't seem to object. Not now, not
yet.
"How is he?" she asks, leaning forward like she wants
to bump foreheads. Like she needs a fulcrum against which she might
sway. "Did you guys fuck?"
Ian
How is he?
Ian
grew quiet at the question. Sera leaned forward until their foreheads
nearly touched, letting her shoes drop to the floor. Like she was
uncoiling, unwinding. Ian met her eyes for a few seconds, and there was
something unfathomable in the velvet darkness of his gaze.
Then she asked if they'd fucked, and he laughed. It was, perhaps, the obvious question, given who she was talking to.
"A
few times." He leaned down to collect her shoes, setting them neatly on
the empty barstool to his left. "And he seems to be doing fine. As far
as I can tell. He's saving up to buy some property outside of town. Said
he wants to get into organic farming." Ian said this like it was just
about the least exciting thing he could think of to do with one's life.
"I think maybe he's a little lonely. But... who isn't."
Serafíne
"I miss Justin. I miss a fucking lot of people."
This
ghost of a half-smile chases quicksilver across her mouth. Yeah she
started the night with dark dark eyes and crimson lipstick but the
lipstick is long since gone, left behind is just a faint berry-colored
stain more evident when she seams her mouth than when she smiles. And
she watches Ian lean down for her shoes and swings her legs a bit as he
rises and her half-smile deepens or sharpens into something like real
pleasure when Ian tells her that he and Justin had sex.
But her gaze dampens, banks a bit when Ian goes on, says something about organic farming and tells Sera that maybe Justin's a bit lonely and who isn't?
Her gaze hooks and her gaze hoods and something -
"You aren't lonely, are you?"
Ian
The
thing about sensation is that, when it's constant, you stop noticing
it. Like a teenage boy who can't smell the potent stench of hormones in
his bedroom, or an older woman whose joint pain is so omnipresent that
she stops realizing it's the reason she's always in a bad mood. The
thing is still there. You still experience it. But you don't think about
it anymore. It becomes the baseline.
Ian glanced at Sera's
eyes. Her lips. Watching the way her expression fell. There was
something a little sharp and a little too sleek about Ian's expression.
The way he slid past the question. The way he didn't really answer it.
"I think that, compared to most people, I'm pretty fucking privileged in that regard." There was literally an entire library of
numbers in his phone that he could dial if he wanted to get laid. Not
that he needed to ask, really. Things like that usually just happened to
him. "And anyway, I don't mind being alone."
That much, at least, was genuine.
"Are you?"
Serafíne
Perception plus awareness-as-empathy: oh are you avoiding the question?
Dice: 7 d10 TN5 (2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 9, 9) ( success x 4 )
Ian
[What, me? Not give a straight answer? Surely not.]
Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (1, 7, 7, 8, 8, 9, 10) ( success x 6 )
Serafíne
Sera
watches Ian's sharpened gaze so closely and so carefully and she
watches him with a regard that could perhaps verge on the tender, and
this time that tenderness belongs entirely to him, and no on. Searches
the nuance of expression in his face, chasing the bits that seem -
oh, elusive.
Her
eyes drop from his face. She glances away, her profile stark against
the soft, warm impression of the bar. The bustle of humanity, the haze
of the soundsystem, the bartender behind her who tests the bottle she
pushed aside before Ian lifted her up to the bar and decides that: yes,
there is still drinkable alcohol left. A shot or two or three.
And she asks if he is lonely and he deflects and his deflection is so practiced and so polished and so - something,
that it makes her feel a little bit more lonely so she cuts her eyes
away and he has a brief impression of her delicate profile, the
vulnerable column of her throat.
"Yeah." She says, then, with
a tight little cut of her shoulders in a shrug. "'Course. Maybe not
so often as you'd think, and more regularly than I'd like." This
impression of tears ghosting over the surface of her eyes. I miss
Hawksley. I miss alot of people."
A beat. Then: "What'll you do if I kiss you, now."
Ian
Ian
had to know, at least a little, that keeping someone like Sera at a
distance could be harmful. Almost even a little cruel. Or maybe he
didn't know. Maybe for him, distance meant safety. (And not only for
himself.) But he'd been more honest with other people before. Kalen.
Elijah. Kiara, even. (And what did they have in common? Was sex really
the only way to get him to act like a fucking person? Perhaps it was
just the easiest way to start.)
But then, Sera had to know, at
least a little, that trying to force someone like Ian to be vulnerable
could also be harmful. Maybe even a little cruel.
Or maybe she didn't know.
But,
give her credit. Sera answered the question. Maybe she was the stronger
of the two, for all that she always seemed so perilously close to
breaking apart. Ian didn't react to the admission as coldly as one might
expect. Nor did he attempt to question her further. There was just this
lingering look. Softer than it had been a moment ago - sharpness
melting into something reserved and gentle.
What'll you do if I kiss you?
"You're
drunk," he said quietly. "So... not much." It wasn't a statement of
judgment, but of caution. She was not sober. He was. That was an
imbalance. "But you won't know unless you try."
Serafíne
"I
spent Christmas day alone," and her voice is low and her voice is raw
and her voice is rich and she does always seem to be falling apart. She
is is a permanent state of falling apart and somehow both her body and
her soul retain the strangest sort of integrity. This hint of
deflection because she isn't precisely looking at him so much as
some piece of the bar, some passing hint of skin. A stranger's curving
shoulder, a stranger's vulnerable through. Her own, swallowing. The
sheen of her sweat starting to dry makes her shiver and the floor seems
to very fucking far away.
"Flew back from London a few days
before and went to Kiara's party and Dan didn't know I'd be home 'til I
was and he'd already made plans to see his folks and I was like fuck it
you have to go. Home, you know?
"And I went to mass the night before but not all of it because sometimes that shit pisses me off,
and that night I went out and I picked up this guy and brought him
home. He didn't stay. Wanted to be there for presents in the morning,
had a kid brother who still believed in Santa and everyone else was gone
and the house was empty and I woke up in the predawn and it was just my
breath and it was just my heartbeat and it made me - "
A brief, quick breath.
"I
went and slept in Dan's bed. Then I had a party starting that night,
and the first person who came over was Emily and she was done with
everything Christmas except cocktails and sugar-rims and more people and
more people, and I fucked loved it, but I still missed the people who
were gone."
Sera's half-closed eyes open again here. She
hums, beneath her skin, opens her eyes and opens her legs and leans
forward - sharply, swaying in a way that seems dangerous, and yes, she's
drunk. she's probably something else as well and she kinda starts to
laugh when she feels the world upend itself and she leans forward one
more time until their brows touch.
And she kisses him: gently. Tenderly.
Open-mouthed.
Tastes like whiskey and smoke and magick, does our Sera.
Ian
And
just like that, it all spilled out. The story of what Sera did for
Christmas. And Ian always had been better at listening than he was at
speaking. He didn't know the details of her life - not really. But he
remembered these things that she told him. Used them to piece together
bare sketches in his mind.
She didn't say anything about her own family.
And
then she kissed him. She was sitting on the bar and Ian was standing
with his hands still planted on the edge of the counter by her knees.
When she opened her legs, he let his hands fall back to his sides and
stepped closer. The act was instinctive, moving into her space as she
invited him into it. Letting her gravity draw him there. Their foreheads
met. His breath was warm against her mouth. Both of them smelled like
whiskey tonight, but his was muted. Mostly washed away. His hair smelled
like a high-end salon. His clothes smelled like the bar. Two pieces of
his life, slotted together - not quite in sync. But... human.
He
kissed her back. Open and slow, controlled and surrendered at the same
time. His eyes slid shut when their lips met. When he tasted the whiskey
on her tongue. A beat later, his hand found its way into her hair,
threading into the longer strands to feel the slope of her scalp beneath
his fingers. There was a subtle press to keep her close (even if only
for a moment,) and his other hand came to rest on her hip. Pressed his
thumb just slightly into the soft tissue of her abdomen.
When he pulled away, he ran his tongue over the swell of her lower lip, as though to reclaim some of the taste he'd left there.
"I
usually spend Christmas alone. This year, I spent it with a guy who was
too nice to be with someone like me. He made me stuffed french toast
and egg nog and I let him fuck me. Then we walked in the woods for like
two hours and I tried not to think about the fact that I had my first
real kiss in those same fucking woods."
Serafíne
The bar is a great blur around them, all
that noise. The cacophony of conversations distant and near have a
watercolor uncertainty, but create a kind of music that fuses somehow
both within and beneath the beat of music pulses through the
soundsystem. Right now a cheery Saint Pepsi dance number which is a
strange little counterpoint to what passes between them. No one in the
bar who knows her will be surprised to see Sera perched on the bar
proper kissing a near-stranger. Hell, strangers aren't surprised,
either. She just feels like that kind of girl. That's how the
world bends itself around her. How she wraps herself up in it. How she
sinks her teeth into its skin.
The kiss ends and Sera
breathes out half-a-laugh and gasps in another breath. She's smiling.
The world is spinning, and she likes the way it runs around the axis of
her body. Likes the way it sets her loose. Likes this too: her shadow
over Ian's face, the twist of his fingers through her damp curls, the
warmth of his hand on her hip. She stays close, brow to brow if he
allows it, because moving now might break whatever spell has been worked
around them and one of her hands comes up to his face, fingers stippled
on his jaw, thumb against his cheekbone. Wrinkles her nose like she
might just give him Eskimo kisses.
But no, "What the fuck - " she's laughing, all on an exhale, whiskey on her breath, " - gets stuffed into toast. Turkey? French toast. Snails and brie?" Then a moment where she's inhaling, slantwise, reflective.
Inhale, inhale. Consider: and realize that - no - she's not going to puke. That makes her smile, too.
"Why
didn't you wanna think about your first real kiss?" Kisses him then,
again. Nothing close to chaste, but not so lingering. "I like to think
about mine."
Ian
This is the trouble with
memories. Seemingly innocuous details get all twisted up with the things
that break your heart. Sera laughed at the notion of stuffed french
toast, which made Ian grin because he'd been skeptical of it too at the
time. Their foreheads were close, touching so that she could splay her
hand along his jaw. He left his own hand on her hip, but released the
hold he had on her hair so that he could run the tips of his fingers
down past the curve of her throat - this light, exploring gesture that
traced the pattern of her pulse.
"Strawberries, actually."
Sera wrinkled her nose, which was... fucking adorable.
Then
she asked him why he didn't want to think about his first real kiss.
Ian seemed perfectly content to let their lips meet again - to fall into
that second kiss rather than contemplate an answer. But Sera didn't
linger.
Ian pulled back slightly. Let his hands come to rest
on the bar again. He lifted his eyes to meet hers. To actually look at
her. To take in the way the light in the bar made her eyes shine.
"Sometimes
good memories hurt more than the bad ones." He breathed out softly; let
some of the heaviness settle in his shoulders. "What was yours like?"
Serafíne
Sera's
eyes are a dark, dark blue, framed by these rather straight brows and
dark make-up. The pupils are ever-so-slightly engorged. Light-hungry
in the dark bar, perhaps, or maybe she's on something more than just the
whiskey he watched her down tonight.
Maybe she's always on something.
And there's this shutter-stop moment when Ian pulls back, settles his hands on the bar and looks at her - really looks
at her - and her focus is interval, not quite caught up with his
outward shift and she both looks and feels like she's floating, as if
there were nothing beneath her ass or her hands and she was going to
either fall or take flight.
"Katie O'Connor. She had freckles everywhere."
Still smiling, Sera, and shining with it, though it is a very different
sort of smile than one might expect - internal, integral and yeah -
okay - maybe a little bit sad. Doesn't alcohol make everyone maudlin,
though? "Everywhere I got to see, anyway. Nighttime, and we snuck off
to the chapel. In the sacristy - these big leaded glass windows.
Almost all the other ones were stained glass, but these were clear and
the full moon shining through the dark woods outside cast these shadows
that were long and strange and made it feel kinda like we were
submerged, you know? Underwater.
"What about you?"
Ian
The
ghost of a smile traced its way over Ian's features while he listened
to Sera talk about her first kiss. (About Katie O'Connor and her
freckles.) That smile melted away when she rebounded the question back
to him, and for a long moment it seemed as though he might not answer.
"Naomi Alvarado. She was on the track team, but I didn't know that so I let her goad me into a race. She won. Barely."
There was a flicker of something in his voice there. And edge of some
old, forgotten warmth. "Anyway, we'd been hanging out a lot since both
of us were in this play together, and things were getting... you know.
How it is when you're fifteen and you meet someone you really like. So
we were lying in the grass just trying to breath and she looked...
perfect."
That small admission made his voice go still for a
moment, and he glanced over Sera's shoulder. Behind her, rows of glass
bottles decorated the wall, reflecting a slippery sheen of muted ambient
light.
"I should have kissed her then. But I was being a
stupid kid about it, so I didn't. I kissed her later when we were
walking through the woods and ended up by this little creek. After she
told me she wanted to be a musician and I found out we had the same
favorite song. It wasn't actually my first kiss. But... it was the first
one that scared me, and the first one that turned me on. So... it's the
first one that mattered."
That wasn't true, precisely. But people place different kinds of emphasis on different kinds of milestones.
Serafíne
Hi Ian, what are your feels?
Dice: 7 d10 TN5 (3, 3, 4, 4, 5, 9, 9) ( success x 4 ) [WP]
Ian
[Let's see, can we get, like, a middling amount of successes? Diff 8 because reasons.]
Dice: 7 d10 TN8 (1, 4, 5, 5, 8, 9, 9, 10, 10) ( success x 5 ) Re-rolls: 2
Ian
[IAN WHY]
Serafíne
Even
with her drowning eyes, Sera is watching Ian so closely in those
moments. Her breath is withheld and her body relaxed, spare shoulders
rounded forward, goosebumps rising here and there as her sweat
evaporates, chilling her bare skin. One of her bra straps has started
to ride its way down the curve of her arm but the other remains solidly
fixed, bisecting the bitewing of her left clavicle. Each breath she
takes is a lesson in tension and movement - the concave hollow at the
base of her throat, the flicker of her dark lashes against the curve of
her flushed cheek. The way she closes her mouth, inhales, opens it, and
breathes out again.
Somewhere in the middle of Ian's
storytelling Sera has matched both arms around his neck. Her elbows or
maybe her forearms rest on his shoulders, her fingers are laced behind,
thumbs drifting vaguely through the dark fringe of his hair.
And Sera's smiling, and she makes this noise like yeah, she totally knows what it is like when you're fifteen and you meet someone you really like,
and hell, she probably does know. Can absorb it through the pores of
her skin if someone's giving her enough energy, though somehow - that
isn't what is happening here.
That makes her mouth quirk.
And it makes her ache and it makes her a little bit sad and it makes her
a little bit something else, she doesn't quite know what, she doesn't
always names things.
Doesn't feel the need to.
Maybe, she thinks, it changes them.
It doesn't matter. She's so drunk that her eyes are bleary and unfocused, and shining, shining. Brighter than before.
"Hey Ian?"
Ian
Sometimes
he wasn't even aware of it - the way he starved people out. Gave them
truth without emotion. Or emotion without the truth to give it meaning.
(He was like that with so many things - as though he could only bear to
be so open. As though intimacy was a heavy thing that could only be
carried in pieces.) Sera was smiling because she knew - of course she
did - what it was like to be a teenager falling in love. But Ian's smile
did not quite manage to take hold. They were in a bar and the music
was... not right. Not what he would have chosen to underscore the story
he was telling.
It came out too easily. Too ordinary. And
somehow that felt like a betrayal. (Of Naomi, and of everything that had
come after.) But if it hadn't - if he'd told it differently - it may
not have come out at all.
He let the moment be what it was.
Let Sera fold her arms around his shoulders. And inevitably she said his
name and he met her eyes again.
"Yeah?"
Serafíne
"You
should kiss me again." Sera is leaning forward again and maybe she's
swaying a bit. Maybe having her arms around his shoulders steadies
her. This time they are not precisely brow to brow. The bridge of her
nose against his cheekbone, her mouth edging toward his ear. Her voice
is quiet and a little bit raw. She was singing - sometimes screaming -
up on that stage for the better part of two hours, so if there is a
sandpaper edge to her voice, well. There's a perfectly ordinary
explanation written into the history of the night.
"Maybe a lot? I like to make out." A short breath out. It sounds like a laugh, and hell, maybe it is.
Or maybe she has her own mysteries, too.
"Then I think you should go."
Ian
Human lives were messy things. Somehow they always seemed messier in bars.
But
here - see? They were talking. And the space between them was so small.
And whatever he felt, Ian's body was warm and alive and his heart was
strong enough - vital enough - to keep him there. To keep him grounded
in space. To keep him hungry for things like the taste of whiskey on
Sera's lips. Sera's skin had the salt-tang scent of sweat and Ian leaned
his face into it - brushed his nose up the side of her neck to nuzzle
behind her ear and just fucking breath her in. The pheromones and body chemistry that made up her pattern.
You should kiss me again.
His
answer was to do exactly that. And this time it was less an act of
measured sensuality than it was an immediate drive to be closer to
another human being. And he pressed himself into her space - between her
legs until his hips bumped against the bar - when his mouth opened
against hers.
He kept kissing her until either she wished to
pull away or the passage of time drew to a point where he was forced to
do so (lest poor Elijah be left stranded alone on a mountain the next
day.) Then he settled his tab with the bartender and left to find his
way back to his apartment.
