GRACE SEQUENCE
Once Was Lost - Toils and Snares - How Sweet the Sound - Safe Thus Far - Lead Me Home
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LEAD ME HOME
--
As of the sixth month following his inexplicable escape from CIA custody, Julian Lazarey, alias Mr. Sark, has procured from various sources the following items: the last known Rambaldi artifact, missing since Arvin Sloane's last disappearance five years prior; two invaluable contact databases, one belonging to an early administrator of the largely-defunct Project Christmas and the other to a former CRF leader, the originals of which were both found by Bristow, Agent Sydney A., to be wiped clean upon her arrival; prototypes for several weapons; and several tomes suspected to contain encoded contact protocol for the recently re-established Orion Assembly.
And these, Sydney reflects as she reviews the report for the seventh time, in the office late and an easy mark for the shame and longing that slip into her lungs, are only the ones we know about.
-
His form on the other side of a silenced gun has become a familiar sight.
Whether it is her finger on the trigger or his, his eyes are the same (fathomless), his posture familiar (cocksure), his manner textbook Sark. The bland courtesy of his tone, the polish of his vowels. He's affected the suits of his youth, but the clean lines flatter him more now than before: he is no longer boyish but still dangerously lean, sinew replacing the vestiges of softness. His self-assurance is uncanny, and with every casually calculated movement he makes, her heart is wrung that much dryer.
This time it is him who has the upper hand.
"Your gun, please, Agent Bristow."
The imitation of his younger self is so precise that she sometimes imagines he is playing the part of himself, the perfect actor for the job. Whatever he is doing, it's working-- his reputation is stronger now than it ever was before. His efficiency is feared, his ruthlessness admired: his allies agree that he is single-minded in his focus but not on what that focus is. Sydney knows this because she's interrogated the few they've managed to capture herself.
She nods at her left leg, keeping her hands visible and steady. "Holster."
His laugh is mirthless as he shakes his head, then crosses the space between them, circling around the empty glass box sitting, lid askew, on the museum pedestal. She doesn't know where he's put its contents. She arrived too late, drew her weapon too slowly. He'd secured his prize even before she'd entered the room, and had his gun trained on her heart even as she'd realized who he was.
He moves behind her, and she can feel the barrel of his gun a hair's breadth from the back of her neck. She stiffens at his voice, a velvet caress she can't excise from her dreams.
"We really must cease meeting like this, Sydney."
His hand curves down the outside of her thigh until it reaches the gun, releases it into his possession.
Her voice is ice, but inside she can't stop the heat from spreading. His touch is seared into her skin. "Maybe if you stopped stealing things, we wouldn't have to."
She is expecting a chuckle, is ready to be infuriated, but he is silent, and that silence makes her nervous. She can't see his face and he isn't saying anything and for the first time since they parted ways, the night she freed him from CIA custody, she is afraid. Afraid of him. Of what he might do.
His breath is possessive on her skin. His lips brush the shell of her ear.
"Down on your knees," he whispers and, throat tight, hands behind her head, she complies, legs unsteady. She's trembling so badly she doesn't trust her own muscles to hold her. She's been so stupid, thinking there was something more. Thinking there was anything, even gratitude, keeping him from putting a bullet into her brain.
"Count to ten," he says. "Aloud."
"One," she chokes out in shame, after a stunned moment. "Two. . . ."
She is at seven when Eric arrives, gun in hand. She is still kneeling, alone in the center of the warehouse, tears tracking down her dust smudged face, and her humiliation is a hot and hungry thing inside her.
-
In the bathroom of the 747, the rest of the plane deep in mid-atlantic slumber, she pushes down her pants, splays her legs and slides her hand frantically into her underwear. Her breath is already shallow as she presses the back of her head against the mirrored glass (imagining his open mouth at the crook of her neck, forcing it back) and moans.
She is hot and swollen and slick and she's been this way since the moment he touched her, the touch of his hand on her thigh, the adrenaline from the press of the gun kicking her heart into overdrive and sharpening her senses until it was almost too much to draw breath. She could smell him-- she can almost smell him still, if she concentrates-- and she's gathering up every memory she has to conjure up his skin, his scent, but it's already fading, she already can't recall the way it felt when he opened her mouth with his and slid his tongue, thick and coaxing, along her own, and if she could just yes yes there almost oh god please yes--
She stiffens sharply, bangs her knee and cries out as she comes atop the bathroom sink. The sounds of the plane come back to life around her as the blackness clears from her eyes: the engine's hum, the occasional click of a pair of passing heels. Her breath, harsh, in the cold, empty silence.
She slips back to her seat, unnoticed, and falls into a fitful sleep.
She is learning, again, to hate him.
-
The CIA can't seem to catch him. He remains ever a step ahead, and while his apprehension always seems to be one new lead away he remains too elusive to validate the continued application of so many department resources towards his capture. Some, paranoid, suspect him of laughing at them; others, like Jack Bristow, believe he is simply being thorough. He was, after all, Irina's golden boy, and it appears that he is finally, blatantly, living up to his full potential.
They have, however, come to one unquestioned conclusion: Sydney Bristow is the only agent that, having laid eyes on him, ever makes it back alive.
-
It is a few hours past midnight in a club in east Berlin (a club that could be anywhere, its interior as anonymous as its patrons, a manic edge to its yearning to blend in with the thousand other clubs scattered across the continent in cities still embroiled in uneasy love affairs with all things American), and Sydney is dancing.
To blend in, she tells herself, but it's because he's there, and it's the only time she knows who she is anymore, in relation to him. It hurts her to remember, sometimes, but she craves it just the same.
His eyes, she imagines, are cool as they survey the room, survey the contours of her body, draped tonight in rich metallic red. Her hair is her own, coiled up on top of her head, sleek and venomless snakes. There is no need for a disguise; he's the only one here she needs to hide from and he'd know she was there no matter what wig she wore. They don't surprise each other anymore.
Her heels could kill a man, and have. She could use them now and end all of this—stab him in the heart, or through the throat. A stilletto to his temple. But she doesn't; she dances instead.
As she watches him from the corner of her eye, he answers his companion's comment with obliging laughter, leans back in his seat and takes a sip of his drink-- whiskey, she thinks. On the rocks, at any rate, and as he returns the glass to the table the cubes clink audibly. The long-range amplifier Marshall rigged for her is doing its work.
"I've got them," she murmurs into her com.
"Transmitting," Marshall replies.
"I'd heard you had retired," the other man says, the ghost of an accent blurring his vowels.
"Did you." Sark shifts his attention from the crowd to his companion, his expression communicating his opinion of the subject matter: disagreeably uninteresting. It is faintly disapproving, a warning the other man is not observant enough to heed.
"Something about America, and Derevko's eldest daughter."
A brief raise of eyebrows. "And?"
"And I do not believe I feel quite comfortable giving this item to you which I have in my possession, considering your recent . . . allegiance."
"My allegiance is, has been and shall always be to myself, and myself alone."
His tone is steely; his statement is no surprise. Her hips move numbly to the beat, the rhythmic bass a diffuse and physical backdrop to the clarity of the negotiation going on a few dozen feet away.
"Syd? Are-- are you okay?" Marshall's voice in her ear.
She lets a man she doesn't know put his hands on her hips and his body into hers. She mimes interest. It keeps her cover.
"All right, yes," the man says after tense moments in which Sydney regrets having left her gun in the van with the evening's backup, Agent Daly. "This life, it is to you the same as it is to me. Like a woman, seductive, yes? My source was of course mistaken."
Sark nods once, dismissive, before his gaze returns to the crowded club—he is being particularly cautious tonight. It is only because she is watching him so closely that she sees his jaw tighten, his eyes narrow. She is slow to realize he is staring right at her.
She's been made.
He's been watching for her all along, she suspects, but now he has seen her. Now he is certain she is there.
"Excuse me," she hears him tell his companion, and she checks her exits. Through the kitchen, into the back alley, is her best bet. She gives up subterfuge and breaks into a run.
Sark grabs her arm just inside the kitchen door, manhandles her out into the back through souschefs who pretend they do not notice. She reviews the circumstances as she stumbles over the doorjamb. Marshall will be sending backup; Daly will turn the narrow corner any moment with the van. She only has to keep him distracted until then.
She snipes at him, trying to shake his grip. "If you wanted a dance, you should have just asked me."
"I won't allow anything to jeopardize this, Sydney," he says. The night air is cool on her face, her arms, the exposed length of her legs. "Not even you."
She is bare inches away from him, his hand still fixed around her forearm, twisting it between them. She steels herself, looks flat into his eyes. She says, "Get your hands the fuck off of me."
He laughs. But she is free of his grasp, he's taken a step back. His gun is in his hands and she thinks that if she can just . . . .
He lifts the gun, takes aim and fires; the bullet tears through her and she staggers back, drops to her knees. The searing heat is already beginning to resolve into real pain, and she gasps, staring at him. She has to get away away from him, she's not safe here, unarmed, shoulder out of commission, starting to feel dizzy-- but he's putting his gun back into the holster and stepping past her.
"You look lovely, by the way," he tells her as he steps inside, and it's the last thing she hears before the alleyway goes black.
-
She wakes in the hospital sixteen hours later.
"Did we get him?" is the first thing she says, barely surfaced from sedation, even as she grasps for full consciousness.
"You need to rest," a nurse tells her, trying to coax her back down but Sydney ignores her, focusing instead on the single agent, impassive, standing at her window. A guard. Courtesy of her father?
"Mr. Sark is not in custody," the agent answers.
She curses, flops weakly back in frustration. The pain as she falls back onto the bed is excruciating.
The nurse checks her stitches, finds them still intact. "The shot was clean," she offers as she tapes fresh gauze into place with brisk professionalism, practiced ease. "It could have been much worse. You're a very lucky young lady."
Lucky.
Sydney turns her head, stares dully out the window.
"Thanks," she says.
-
She has been back in the office for a month the morning she comes in to find the message light on her voicemail blinking.
"My office," the director's voice greets her when she presses play.
She tucks her purse into the desk drawer and, brows drawn tight, walks down the hall. He's on the phone when she ducks her head inside but waves her in and concludes his call. His expression as he watches her take a seat is calculating, that much she can tell, but past that she cannot read it.
"You wanted to see me?" she prods him.
He pulls a disc player from his drawer, places it in the center of his ruthlessly uncluttered desk. The case is clear, and there is a disk, unmarked, inside. "We received this disk at Langley yesterday morning. Langley sent it to me." He taps the top as the disk begins to spin. "Listen."
The voice on the recording is Sark.
"I am prepared to make an exchange," Sark says, no preamble, speaking plainly. "I will deliver to the CIA the following items . . . ." His list includes every item they know to be in his possession, plus several others. "For my trouble, I expect to receive a full pardon and a monthly stipend of ten thousand dollars for my ongoing assistance and cooperation."
Sydney glances at the director—they need those databases, and the G62 prototype—but he only shakes his head.
"I would ask for more, only I am aware the United States government could not otherwise afford me." There is a pause. "I will expect your answer by 5 PM Pacific time on Friday in the form of a hundred thousand dollar advance wired to Swiss National, account 0067725. Upon receiving confirmation of the deposit, I will turn myself in to Agent Sydney Bristow, and Ms. Bristow alone, in front of Veeraswamy at 5:30. If Agent Bristow declines, the deal is off."
The director stabs at the controls, and the message cuts abruptly. "I don't like it," he tells her stormily as he stands, hands still clenched around the edge of his desk. "I don't like him telling us what to do. I especially don't like the goddamn smug way he has of assuming our cooperation. Your agreement is the only factor in this particular equation he acts like he isn't 100 percent sure of."
"I'll do it," she says.
"You'll . . . . Agent Bristow," the director cautions, disbelief coloring his words, "think about this. Sark may be looking for revenge."
She knows that. "I'll do it."
-
The air is dry and frigid and she can see her breath in the light from the street lamp as she waits on the sidewalk on Regent Street. Her skin is flushed with cold; her nose is pink and raw. Sark, so far, has not appeared.
"The money just finished transferring, Syd," Marshall told her forty-five minutes ago. "So . . . that's it, I guess. You ready?"
"I'm fine, Marshall."
"Because I know it's been rough between you guys, with him living with you before and you, well, I mean, you're really good, Syd, I thought for sure you were in love with him, you know, before you and Jack found all that out about him tapping into your Agency account and all, but of course then we found out how you were only pretending from the beginning so you could find out what he was up to, so anyway I could see how maybe--"
"Going radio silent, Marshall."
"But--"
And then it was just her and the last of the sunlight, long gone now, and the deserted street, and all her trepidation.
She's sure he isn't coming, that he has pulled one over on them once again, when he's there, materializing out of the dark, long wool coat a swirl around his knees and the street light glancing off his close cropped hair. He takes off his gloves in a perfunctory fashion, and tucks them into his inside coat pocket. "Sydney," he says to her.
"Julian," she answers.
A grim smile ghosts across his face. "We should eat," he says, impeccably courteous, "while we wait for your CIA superiors to verify the authenticity of the first database."
This first exchange, the money for the larger of the databases, is a token of good faith. When the pardon agreement is signed, he will give them the locations of the rest. Then their business, his and hers, will be completed. She'll be free of him and he . . . . She doesn't know what he will be.
She studies him, and he lets her. "All right," she says finally, and allows him to open the door for her to pass into the heated interior of the restaurant. Immediately, her nose begins to run; he hands her a hankerchief. Neither of them speak.
They are seated near the back. The interior lights are warm and low, yellow, and he orders for them both. Tea for him-- Chinese, expensive, as expensive as his wine. Coffee for her. Curry over rice for them both. He remembers that she prefers the red. He likes yellow.
"Thank you for coming," he tells her after her coffee and his hot water have arrived and she is hunched over her drink, both hands cupped around the mug as she inhales the steam and tries to thaw the frozen weight inside her chest.
He accepts the strainer, tea leaves nestled inside, and dismisses the waiter. She doesn't look at him; she watches his fingers instead, elegant, precise, as they arrange the strainer over the cup, lift the small silver tea pot and let the hot water wash over the suspended metal sphere. She suspects it is the ritual of this that appeals to him as much as the taste of the tea itself. He likes rituals; he is a creature of particular habit. She never had been, before him.
"I didn't have much of a choice," she replies, raising her eyes finally to his. His gaze is solemn.
"No," he says, managing somehow to sound genuinely regretful, "you didn't. I wish I could have given you one, but I wasn't sure you would be willing to hear what I had to say otherwise."
She stares at him. She'd thought nothing he did could surprise her anymore. "You aren't trying to tell me you did all this just to get me to meet you at a restaurant."
"That is precisely what I am trying to tell you, Sydney."
She shakes her head.
He leans forward, clasped hands on the table, perfectly centered between his fork and knife. "Sydney," he says clearly, "I love you."
"You used me to steal classified government data."
"Yes."
"And you don't see how those two things are incompatible." He regards her solemnly, sips his tea, and she makes a frustrated sound. "Why did you do it?"
"Surely the answer to that is obvious."
"Why don't you go ahead and enlighten me anyway." He hesitates and she pushes, anger sparking now that the ground is familiar, tinder on dry grass. "You brought me here to talk? Talk."
He purses his lips. "Your father was monitoring my actions from the moment I first entered your apartment."
"And?"
"And he would have continued to do so until he found something."
"Lucky for him you made it so easy."
"If I wanted to stay with you, I needed something to bargain with. Sydney, it wouldn't have mattered what I did."
"It mattered to me."
Her phone jangles. Eyes still warily on him, she slides it from her purse, holds it to her ear.
"What?" she says into the receiver.
Her father, sounding even more stiff than usual: "The database checks out."
"Thanks." She closes the phone, puts it back into her lap, and stands. She's lost her appetite anyway.
"Well?" Sark asks. He looks up at her, tone once again faintly mocking. "Will I be seeing you at the office?"
-
He never sees the inside of the office. Even the CIA is not that foolish. But he and his seemingly endless knowledge of the intelligence world are tapped often, and Sydney Bristow is the agent most often chosen to do the tapping. "He's less difficult with you," she's told, and she scowls, because she knows he's done this on purpose.
Seeing him is an ache in her chest, like something lodged tight between her ribs so that with each breath she takes it feels as if the bone might break. Her movements are accordingly ginger. She keeps her face blank.
"Mr. Sark," she begins on this most recent visit, formal, trying to feel professional while sitting in the front room of his executive hotel suite ("Temporary," he told her, calmly, on her initial visit) as he hands her a glass of spring water and sits, barefoot, in cotton slacks and a casual but still perfectly fitted short-sleeved gray-blue shirt. It reminds her of Sunday mornings in her bed, his hair badly ruffled, his laugh warm like honey and his eyes wry as he glanced at her over the mattress and the morning papers spread across the covers, and these are not things she wishes to remember, not anymore.
"Yes, Agent Bristow?" he returns aimiably, and it is suspicious that he is being so cooperative, that he doesn't force her into the familiarity he is capable of evoking from her with merely his tone of voice. He has on every earlier visit. Perhaps he's given up on it, realized that it will not get him anywhere he wants to go. The thought concens her, because it only means he is trying another tack.
"We need everything you know about Konstantin Egorov," she tells him stiffly, and wishes she hadn't seen the tiny, amused smile he tries to conceal, the one that says he knows why she can't relax, and he's enjoying it. The fate of hundreds, maybe thousands, of people is at stake, and she is worried that he's laughing at her.
"Old friend of your mother. Not as close as he chose to believe. Irina allowed him to live because his contacts were excellent, and because he was charming." He smiles reflexively. "Irina has always had a fondness for charming people."
She grits her teeth. "And now?"
"He is the new head of Ukrainian intelligence."
"Is he working for Russia?"
"Not that I have heard. And I would doubt it. He doesn't have the temperment." He regards her evenly. "How is your shoulder?" he asks seriously.
"You shot me," she tells him flatly. "How do you think it is?"
He smiles. "You hit me with an ice pick once."
"That was before we—" She breaks off abruptly, before she says something she will regret, something that will encourage him.
But it's too late. He's never needed much encouragement, just his usual arrogant trust in the accuracy of his own beliefs. He places his glass on the table to his left and uncrosses his legs. His eyes are predatory.
He leans forward, resting his elbows on his thighs and clasping his hands. "Is that what's troubling you, Sydney? That I could do something like that, put a bullet through your exquisite flesh, after having been with you? After telling you I loved you?"
She chooses honesty, because if she chose anything else, he would know. "Among other things."
"I knew you would survive it. And that I couldn't tell you, yet, what I was doing there. You wouldn't have believed me."
"I still don't."
"Don't you?" He smiles again, but more grimly. "If that were true, you wouldn't be here. You see, I believe that you do. And that you want to forgive me. And that if you did so, you don't believe you could live with yourself."
"If you know me so well," she hisses, "you should have known what this would do to me."
"Perhaps I did," he says, and it is less an admission than a challenge, somehow, but she cannot figure out what that challenge is. When she's silent, he prompts, "You'll want to know why I did it, then."
"All right. Fine. Why?"
His gaze is direct. "I know how much I love you, Sydney Bristow. Enough to give up everything I am, to do what I was meant for. You are more important to me than my upbringing, than my training, than everything I have done with my life since the moment I first picked up a gun; I made that decision when I approached you two Decembers ago and you locked me in that hideous belowground cell.
"What I do not know is how much you love me. When you let me be taken, that morning in your apartment . . . I doubted you. But then . . . ."
Then she arranged his escape. She relives the moment they stood across from each other, her breathing shallow, her eyes desperate, his face a cool, implacable mask, almost every night-- it is the night she tried to let him go. Why didn't you say something? she wants to scream.
"You've already betrayed your country for me. You sacrificed your morals for my freedom. Would it take so very much more to--"
She interrupts him, voice cold. "If I wanted to be with you, I could. You're not an enemy of the United States government anymore."
He shakes his head. "My legitimacy, such as it is, is circumstantial," he says. "It's not what matters to you. I broke faith with you, I see that now. The data I took from your files . . . I can only swear to you I took it only for my own protection. And the things I did, these past months . . . . I can't promise I will never again make a judgment call you won't approve of, but I can promise you that this is what I want. You, Sydney, are what I want, and I will not do anything to jeopardize that, not again."
It would be so easy to believe him. It's what she wants to do.
"Sydney," he says, as if his life depends upon her response, "please."
It is the sudden desperation in his voice-- so uncharacteristic, so shocking-- that shatters the blockage in her chest, and instead of the dull ache to which she has become accustomed, all there is is pain, everywhere, sharp, insistent, blinding. But she can breathe again, and she takes huge gasping gulps, choking on it, feeling as if she were suffocating and now . . . now all there is, is air. He's beside her, suddenly, on his knees on the carpet beside her chair; she pushes him away, rips her coat and purse from the side table and reaches the door before he can lift himself gracefully back to his feet.
She loves him so much, the cold-blooded, murdering bastard.
At a less expensive hotel, the door would have slammed shut appropriately behind her. Instead it only snicks closed, the sound muffled by the plushness of the carpet.
-
"Did you get the intel?" Weiss asks her as she stalks past him into the CIA offices. What she wants to do is punch something; instead she's delivering Sark's take on underground intelligence politics.
She ignores him, and he catches her by the arm. "Whoa, Syd, are you-- Did he do something?"
Yes, she thinks. He used me. He loves me.
His reasons shouldn't matter.
She shakes her head, and reluctantly Weiss releases her.
"You know, if you need to talk--"
"Eric," she snaps, suddenly furious, "not now."
He holds up his hands. "Got it."
-
That night she can't sleep. She lays on her side with her head on the pillow and her knees drawn up and her eyes open. She is remembering what it was like when he slept there beside her; she feels the memory of his body curl around her own, silent and sure, and the tears slide across the bridge of her nose and wet the fabric of the pillow case
-
At 3 AM, she knocks on his door
"I have some terms of my own," she says when he answers. Her arms are folded, her back stiff. "No more manipulating me. You want to know how I feel about you, you ask me. No more playing games with government secrets."
She means it. She wants to be with him, but it can't be the way it has been, she can't keep confusing her professional life with her personal one.
"Fair enough," he replies, and steps back, swinging the door open to admit her.
She grabs him by the shirt and kisses him.
She barely registers the bodyguards slipping out the door behind her as Sark pulls her further into the suite, fumbling at her pants, her name on his lips a supplication that almost doesn't sound like Sark at all.
"I was so afraid," he murmurs, urging her down onto the couch they had both chosen against that afternoon, "you wouldn't want me anymore."
"Are you crazy?" she manages as he kisses her hungrily under her chin and she tilts her head back, closes her eyes and wants to cry with joy.
"Apparently." He nudges his cheek against her breast, braces himself on one hand and uses the other to lift her shirt, licks the bare nipple. "Visiting in the middle of the night without your undergarments. Naughty girl."
"I was in a hurry."
She ducks her head to let him lift the shirt from her completely, her hips flush against his, one of his legs pressed between her thighs, and is mometarily thrown when he freezes. But then he lays his fingertips, ever so softly, on the still-pink puckered scar on her shoulder-- neatly overlying the one she received from her mother's gun-- and she understands.
"Sydney," he breathes, and buries his face in her hair. "Oh, Sydney, Sydney."
The pain that laces his voice pulls in her stomach, floods her with heat, and her hips arch of their own accord. "Touch me, please, Sark--"
His hands are hot against her bare skin as she pulls his mouth up to hers. Everything she'd forgotten comes rushing back-- his weight on top of her, the taste of his tongue, the texture of his hair between her fingers-- and tears prick her eyes. When they are both naked she knows she doesn't want to be anything else with him; the last few months feel like a dream, unreal, a few bare, hazy moments away from being banished from memory.
He slides his hands up her thighs as she parts her legs for him, and his breath stutters in his chest. Lifting her hips, he presses into her, slides inexorably inwards until the front of his hips, the flat plane of his belly, are tight against her own and she can feel the length of him secure inside her. She squeezes him, smiles full out, and as his mouth curves back at her he begins to move. She wraps her outside leg around his waist and closes her eyes.
"I missed you," she says to him, lacing her fingers with his, and he groans: something unearthly, vital, as if the sound is ripped from him against his will. He sounds helpless, and she likes it.
"Sydney, fuck--"
He thrusts once, and again, and, tight inside her, he lets go.
-
His sweat covers her skin as he struggles to catch his breath on top of her, chest expanding against her own, and as her own breath slows she thinks that she has never felt so at peace.
"We'll have breakfast sent up shortly," he promises, words muffled by her neck. "Just as soon as I regain the feeling in my legs."
She laughs, twining her fingers through his hair, body loose and sated. Somewhere in the bedroom, a clock ticks; light is beginning to filter in through the window, but for the first time in months she is content to let the sun rise.
"I like your bed," she murmurs, stretching her body underneath his and smiling at the way his responds.
"I'm feeling rather warmly towards it myself, at the moment." Propping himself up on one elbow, he brushes her hair away from her forehead and then lowers his mouth to hers. The kiss is slow, and lush, and full of promise, and when she opens her eyes again he is looking down at her seriously. "It is not, however, mine."
"It's not." She studies him and his too earnest face.
"No. In fact, I'm in the market for a new one." He pauses. "I was quite fond of yours, actually."
She supresses a grin, trying to match his matter-of-fact tone. "You want my bed?"
"It would be difficult to get out of your bedroom, I'm afraid. Best leave it where it is."
"I appreciate that." Shaking her head, she turns over so she can smile without ruining the game. His arm comes around her and pulls her back into him, so his body is curled around her own.
He kisses her behind her ear, fingers sliding along her bare stomach. "It's better that I use it there, don't you think?"
She can't count the number of times he coaxed her to climax since she showed up at his door, but she's heating again anyway. It takes all her self-control to keep her voice steady. "You're not kicking me out of my apartment."
He sounds insulted. "Of course not. I was thinking you could use it as well. And that perhaps there might still be room in your dresser for a few of my things-- since I'd be sleeping there anyway. It would be the most efficient solution."
Efficient solution. Right. "What about the suite?" Sydney asks.
His voice seduces her, a low purr against her ear: "I told you it was temporary."
"I think we can arrange something," she answers. Her heart, she thinks, might break from joy.
"Excellent." He squeezes her, voice suddenly cheery, before releasing her to roll off of the bed. "I'll call down for some breafast, and then we'll be off. Might as well get a move on soon as we've eaten. My things won't move themselves, you know."
After breakfast, she thinks as she turns over to watch the long lean line of his back as he dials, we're going home.
She can't stop smiling.