The city breathed around them in damp exhalations – gutters choked with last week’s rain, the sour tang of spilt spirits, the faint iron-thread of blood. Neon trembled above like a dying halo, its light breaking on puddled pockmarks in the tarmac.
Ciaran was immaculate. Not merely well-dressed but curated, every line of her silhouette deliberate. The dark cut of her coat traced her elegant form. Her brassy-blonde hair, bound and disciplined, refused the vulgar humidity of the streets. Even her heels – sharp, red-bellied things – struck the pavement defiantly, making a fashion runway of filth.
Still, she breathed it in.
Not the metropolitan stench, but the tension.
It had been building all day. Not a spark but a slow, relentless tightening, as though the world itself were drawing a noose about them both. She had felt it in the silences, in the near-brush of his hand against hers, in the weight of his presence.
Desire, yes, but not the kind that begged.
The kind that is already decided.
She did not look at him when she finally spoke:
Her voice was low, almost conversational, as though she were selecting a table in some fine restaurant rather than a narrow slit of an alleyway, hemmed in by damp brick and the detritus of the city’s neglect. A place where refuse gathered, where the light did not linger.
Ciaran turned then, her gaze lifting to him at last, already certain of the shape this moment would take. There was no hesitation in her, no coyness. Only a quiet authority, as though this, too, were part of her work. As though he were something to be handled with care and with purpose.
Her hands rose to his shoulders.
She slipped his jacket from him with precision, fingers smoothing the fabric as it fell away, her touch lingering just long enough to suggest that she knew exactly what she deprived him of in its absence. The weight of it, the armour of it. For a fleeting instant, it might have seemed an act of tenderness – until she let it fall. Unapologetically, the tailored cloth lay upon the sullied ground.
Ciaran’s amber eyes did not waver from his as she stepped back, as she lowered herself to her knees. A descent chosen, not compelled. The red soles of her heels flashed briefly in the half-light, a sudden, vivid wound of colour against the grey decay.
Ciaran knelt before him, her posture composed, her spine straight as a blade.
For a moment, she simply studied him. There was something almost devotional in it, although no god would have recognised the rite. Her lips parted slightly, not in need, but in thought, as though she were considering the precise manner in which she might ruin him.
“You see,” she murmured at last, her husky voice softer now, touched with something that might have been amusement, might have been hunger. “How easily the world is set aside.”
Her gloved hand brushed, almost idly, against his wrist.
“Everything you wear,” she continued, her gaze flicking momentarily to the discarded jacket beneath them, already darkening where the damp crept in. “Everything you are out there…”
A faint tilt of her head, a shadow of a sly smile.
“It need not follow you here. It need not see what I am about to do to you.”
( from Ciaran, @apifacture )
His breath catches. It always does, around her: the trapped sound of prey, long loving the hunter, and not for the first time he marvels at the thought that anyone could make him feel like pray prey, and then marvels further at how much he relishes the sensation. He can feel her breath, as close as she kneels, the way a promise settles across a mind, washing over the growing need behind his slacks.
"Everything I am is right in front of me," he manages, that trapped breath giving way, dissolving into soft and affectionate sentiment as one hand twines his fingers among the brass-blond of her hair. He doesn't pull, or guide. He would not presume.
The city hums on beyond them. She has chosen the spot well - even the wintry gleam of a passing car's brights, hewing cold light down the alleyway, fails to catch them in its glow. There's something poetic in that, his mind supplies amid the haze of arousal and love. Too deep in the dark to be found. Too deep in one another to care.
He has always been a gentle man, to a point. But it speaks volumes that she is able to discard his coat, to still him this way just with the promise of pleasure. Anyone else who tossed that coat on the ground - bloody expensive, too, and half-as-like to be expensive again when the cleaners get ahold of it - would have found themselves subject to a sudden demonstration of gravity, at the very least.
But not Ciaran, says the prey-who-loves-the-hunter, the wolf caught firmly by the scruff of his proverbial neck and staring right at his supposed captor with the kind of affection one would usually assume required several generations of domesticating to achieve.
Ciaran - half his size and the whole of his heart - can have whatever she wants from him.
"And what are you going to do to me, then, love?" he murmurs, thick and warm.
