She thinks to herself that there just hadn't been a need for a threatening of any sort. That he'd gone above and beyond the call of that Presidential patched duty. He's killing her so meticulously slowly anyhow, regardless of the threat. Because she can't seem to stop letting him into her house, into her bedroom, in her mouth and between her legs. And it's cutting off the supply of oxygen to her lungs, her brain, her heart and nowadays her fingertips are tingled by a lack of circulation.

"Filip, don't." He traps up still against her spine, paused in the way he's curled up the back of her as she starts the coffee maker.

He's surprised that she'd shut him down so suddenly without a fight or slap because she's not given him a single sign that anything's out of order. "Don't what?"

"Don't leave yet."

At least that's all she says.

Because in her head she's afraid it came out more along the lines of 'Please kill me. You're the last thing I want to see. Ever, ever.'.

He's finishing his shifting around her, closing her up into his sturdiness, "Not goin' anywhere yet."

She rests her choked lungs in that assertion, letting her body fall into the way he's keeping her stood up even though she should just give up and lay down already. And he accepts the shift with his jaw high along the side of her head and his hands grip into the fabric of the t-shirt she's wearing. She lifts her hands again, surrender. Wipes white-flagged against his forearms and turns her head into the brush of his stubbled jaw, nodding as he kisses sweetness against her.

He always has the unforeseen capability of impossible softness.

But she reminds herself that the very best of tacticians generally have the gentlest touch.

So she lets him touch with any strength he wants, and he slides his right hand into her underwear, cupping there so that his hand is so full strong against cotton and her. Ally lifts her face into the smell of her own soap and perfume and self on his skin and it's such an erotic mingling to her that she's more than wet enough for the slide of his fingers. The sound he makes in his throat as he crowds himself around her and braces her to the sink - fingers already driven up inside her – it's like he's finally found a place to rest.

It's that sound that makes her think maybe they could still both be forgiven.

He works slowly against her clit, the other hand rising under her shirt to find her breasts and she lets him graze over them, laying back into the curve he's made around her as she keeps breathing him in. The turn of his head is sharp, that same groaning in his throat again as he kisses her closer to coming. And she knows it won't take all that long because he's stubbornly attentive and he'll force her as fast or slow, far or near, as he likes. And, sometimes, he likes to make her break so fast that he has her spinning. His tongue knows how to make her moan just as easily as his fingers do and while he's driving her his other hand drags out of her shirt just to fist into her hair and she's completely lost. He doubles the force, the speed, the kiss.

She can feel his smiling on her lips when she rattles a moan, letting him arch her entire body by the pull of her hair as he lifts his head to watch her crash and burn.

Dead and gone, baby. Eyes-shut. Last breath. Kiss of death.

He's the inevitable end of her.

But, hell, at least she knows it in advance.

He leaves her still damp, shaken up and shattered against the counter. He leaves the room to gather his things after wiping a kiss through her hair and his fingers against her ribs, on her shirt. Once again she can't breathe again because… because she's let him temporarily end her and she hadn't the will or means to tell him not to do so.

Maybe what's worse, she hadn't wanted anything different from the day.

But it's all right. It's all just all right.

Because she's spent twenty odd years finding the right kind of man to kill her in just the right kind of way. Spent two decades plus, looking for a murderer with his slow-slow-slow-me-down hands and a kiss that makes it okay to die in just this exact way. Instead of with a botched bullet to the abdomen and a tricked out boy who doesn't quite yet realize what he's done before he runs. Leaving her with her own blood on her own shaking hands. But this man, who kills with a kindness he damn well can't afford to place anywhere but inside her. He's the one with the knives, the unbroken sharpness, and the scars to prove this is exactly his place in her life.

Twisting the knife, digging it deeper every single day.

Kissing her while it finds a dark and damp little home between her ribs.

"What's wrong?" he breathes back to her like he's already cautious in her stillness and his eyes say that he is, warily gliding over her like predator-on-prey. She's completely unaware as to which one of them is the predator, and which is the jittered prey.

"Nothing." She shakes her head sharply, shakily reaching for a mug from the shelf and knowing that by the very deflection in her tone – she's the one getting stalked. "You want coffee?"

"I do. I very much do." She can hear the leather rising on him as she fills the cup and then she slides her eyes shut temporarily against it, "But I gotta go, love."

"Coming back?" Ally lifts the cup to her lips, giving her mouth something to do in drinking as she turns so that it doesn't try to find his.

Those same hands are just as soft on leather as they were on her and in a way it makes her jaw lift in a sort of unexplainable pride as he speaks, "Am I?"

She's mortified by the realization that she's perfectly willing to die today.

If that means he comes back to stay.

"You are."

"Then I am." He lifts his keys instead of kissing her goodbye but the hesitant pause he makes before driving his knuckles into her table and pushing off has the same pressure as a silent prayer.

"Be safe."

It always sounds like 'I love you' to both of them.

And she always counts the lengthening pause he makes in space and time after she's gone and said it again.

"Y'always say that like I'm walkin' into a war." His voice is trying to console her because he's confused, unsure as to what just happened and where it went so sadly quiet when he'd meant the morning to be sweet, "I'm just goin' t'Church, Althea."

The Church of the Unholiest of God-Damned Saints.

She wonders if maybe she should get herself to church as the door sounds an echo through the house and the strike up of the bike follows shortly after.

Maybe a priest or some other penitent man can forgive her for this suicide… because she's damn sure God just won't.