Allison woke up to a familiar heart beating against her back. She breathed in deep, enjoying the warm press of skin on skin and the weight wrapped around her. Often, she and Isaac would roll away from each other in the night, too used to sleeping in isolation to stay together. Allison would never admit it, but she loved it when they woke up still tangled up in each other.
"Morning." Isaac's voice rumbled against her back.
Allison twisted so that she was lying over his chest, her head resting against his pectorals, and trailed her nails down his ribs. He shivered. "Were you watching me sleep?" she asked, infusing her voice with amusement as her eyes glittered at him.
Isaac raised his eyebrows. "If it just so happened that I woke up a little bit before you, I would've seen you drool all over the pillow. Which, gross, by the way."
Allison scoffed. "You totally were. Creep."
Isaac changed tactics, and kissed her. It was deep and languid and laid-back as they kissed with practised familiarity, kissing almost as easy as breathing for them, easier even.
With a last hot kiss, Isaac pulled back. She felt him smile.
"Not bad," Isaac surmised, his eyes crinkling. "I'd give it a five out of ten."
Allison laughed and tugged his mouth back to hers, falling back into the push and pull between them as they kissed, longer this time.
"Tell me a story," Allison said impulsively, her turn to break away.
Isaac shifted slightly beneath her. "What, are we twelve now?" he asked, sounding amused.
Allison ignored the familiar spike of anger that jump-started her pulse. "I want you to tell me a story," she repeated in a level voice, her fingers tight around his arm.
They were tangled up in the sheets, arms and legs twisted in an undistinguishable knot, the sun just barely rising above the horizon. Isaac said nothing for a long while, his face impassive, and Allison listened to the steady thump of his heartbeat in his chest.
"There once lived a nightingale," he began softly, "who lived near a university. One day she overheard one of the students crying, and learnt that his professor's daughter would not dance with him until he was able to give her a red rose. The nightingale visited all of the rose-trees in the garden, until one told her that there is a way to produce such a rose, but only if the nightingale was prepared to sacrifice her life. Seeing the student's pain, the nightingale accepted. She sang the sweetest song all night with her heart pressing into a thorn, her blood staining the rose a beautiful, deep red, and thus gave her life so that the student might find happiness. In the morning, the student came and took the rose to his beloved. Only, she still would not dance with him, because another man had sent her beautiful jewels and of course, 'everybody knows that jewels cost far more than flowers.' The student threw the rose into the gutter and returned to his studies, and decided to never believe in true love again."
Allison was quiet. "That," she said eventually, "was the saddest story I have ever heard."
He smiled. "My mother used to tell it to me."
She tilted her head up to look at him, surprised by his confession. "My mom never told me stories." Allison offered in return, uncertainty creeping into her voice. Telling stories, talking about their parents – this kind of thing wasn't exactly what she and Isaac did.
As if sensing her thoughts, Isaac leant his head down and pressed a soft kiss to the side of her temple. Allison twisted, her mouth searching for his. He didn't let it; instead he slid a hand up to rest against her neck as he pressed a series of chaste, gentle kisses along both cheeks, along her nose, across the curve of her chin and jaw. She tried to change the pace, to send them both hurtling into the black, but Isaac rolled them so that she was pinned in place. "You drive me crazy, do you know that?" he murmured in between kisses, his breath hot against her skin. "Like, all the time."
Allison strained upwards, but he remained firm. "Especially when you frown, just a little, with your forehead wrinkling just like that – I just want to kiss those lines away, and then kiss lower, and lower." she whimpered as he did just that, maddeningly soft and slow. "Or I'll see you putting your hair up, and all I can think of is biting my way down your neck." His teeth closed, ever so gently, around the soft skin in the hollow of her throat.
"Isaac," she hissed, pushing up again. He ignored her.
"When you wear little vests in gym and your collar bones are just begging for my mouth," he breathed, dragging his lips over each one. "And then a strap falls off of your shoulder, and I could just pull the whole thing off with my teeth, inch by inch, until you were bare for me." Allison didn't know when but at some point she had given up struggling and sunk boneless into the mattress, eyes over-wide as Isaac worked over every last inch of her.
"And you just have to be in every single one of my lessons, so instead of history or physics I'm imagining you spread out on a desk, pulling off your clothes piece by piece until all I can see is your skin." His hands trailed up her sides and down her arms, trusting her to stay pliant now.
An indescribable heat was simmering to a boil inside of her. "Isaac," Allison whispered brokenly as he kissed slowly, torturously along each rib. "Please, Isaac."
"And that dress," Isaac moaned, resting his forehead against her stomach as his breaths ghosted lower. "Do you have any idea what that dress did to me?"
"Show me," Allison managed to gasp, her hands reaching down to cup his face and tilt it up so that they could share a white-hot electric look. "Show me what it did to you. Please."
Isaac stared at her, his gaze almost searching, before a smile tugged ever so lightly at the corner of his mouth. "As you wish," he murmured.
He left a languid row of kisses down her stomach, deviating to bite down on each of her hipbones, a constant flow of filthy, filthy words falling from his mouth. Allison had never found dirty talk all that attractive before. It either made her feel uncomfortable or just made her laugh. But somehow Isaac managed to make it work, his voice deep and rumbling and dripping honey as he made suggestions that made her stomach twist up in knots of anticipation. He lavished attention on her thighs, licking and biting his way along each swathe of pale skin, and she was writhing beneath him from just the barest of touches. Every nerve felt like it was on fire.
Allison whined as he found a particularly sensitive spot at the back of her knees she hadn't even known existed. She thought she was going to burst. "Isaac—ah, please." She felt him smile as he let his lips brush over the most sensitive part of her, before cruelly pulling away. Allison thought she might have actually growled at him.
"You're always impatient." Isaac murmured, moving up her body again. She arched up into him as he settled in close. "I'm going to fuck you Allison, I'm going to fuck you until you see stars and you can't remember your own name, you can be rest assured of that. But you have to be patient. Can you do that for me?"
Allison couldn't quite answer for a moment, because he'd rolled his hips up against hers at just the right moment so that a jolt of delicious friction had shuddered through her and rendered her speechless. "No," she gasped. "Yes. I mean- Isaac."
One of his hands had slipped down without her noticing, and was pressing short, precise circles of friction against her with the tip of two fingers. She sank into the mattress, barely able to move her hands up to cling to his shoulders as he teased. You're a bastard, you're an actual bastard, she thought, unable to actually say it through the haze that fogged her mind, and not even sure if she could even speak at all anymore.
"Patience," he whispered, running a hand through her hair.
She let out a sharp cry as he slid into her suddenly, deep and slow and without warning. Her hips bucked up, frantic at the new sensation, but he pinned her down with the flat of his other hand and moved almost as torturously slow as before, rolling his hips so each thrust was deeper than before. It was too much, too much, her mind screamed, and at the same time not nearly enough. Allison was lost in pure sensation.
Isaac shifted, moving so he could pull one of her long, pale legs up around his waist. The new angle hit some part of her that sent a fresh wave of white-hot heat coursing through her body.
Weak as she felt, she wrapped her other leg around Isaac's waist and arched her back so she was pressed up against him, just enough to hit that spot again and again. "Isaac." Allison managed, so softly she doubted he would have heard it without his enhanced hearing. "Isaac."
Isaac made an utterly breathless and inarticulate sound, raw and overexposed, and finally, finally, let go. They drove towards each other in a frenzy until Allison came with a sound like a scream, or a shout, but lacking enough breath for quite either so that it ended up all harsh and cracked. She bit down hard on the muscle where Isaac's neck and shoulder met, and saw white as he shuddered through his own climax and collapsed.
They lay there for a few minutes, catching their breaths, before Isaac had the strength to properly pull out. They lingered further, close and hot, breathing each other in.
Allison watched Isaac's chest shudder up and down with each breath. Allison's eyelids fluttered but she kept watching, unsure of what to do next even as Isaac closed his eyes. Something had changed between them, she was sure of it, something indefinable and impossible and heavy in between the space where their breaths mingled, but she didn't want to break the perfect silence and ruin it.
She shifted, uneasy, but stopped when Isaac's eyes snapped open again.
Tense, Allison waited. Isaac's face remained empty, smooth and impassive as a mask. Allison swallowed, her throat tight, and turned to stare up at the ceiling. Nothing had changed.
A feather-light touch made her look back. Isaac had traced the curved of Allison's nose with a shaking finger, his lips thin with an unexpressed emotion. Allison stared into Isaac's eyes, wordlessly willing him to do something, anything, to show that this wasn't a part of their game. Not this time.
Isaac let out a shaky breath and leaned forward, pressing a small kiss just beside Allison's mouth.
Isaac dropped Allison off the street over from her apartment; explaining to her dad why she had turned up dressed up and dishevelled in the Alpha's car wasn't worth the hassle, and somehow it felt more fun that way. Clandestine, even.
As luck would have it, Chris wasn't even at home; a note on the fridge explained he'd been called in for a meeting, and he hoped she'd had a good time at Lydia's. Allison folded it up and put it in the recycling, before sending the aforementioned redhead a text to see if she was doing anything that afternoon.
Lydia rang her almost instantly. "Are you finally going to tell me what the hell is going on with you?" she demanded.
"I—yeah. Uh, yes."
"Good. I'll be there in five."
The line went dead, and Allison was left with dial tone and a fog of thoughts she couldn't even begin to start figuring out.
Isaac headed straight over to Derek's after he'd dropped Allison off. A little reluctantly, he parked the Camaro and headed up to the loft, pushing the keys through the letter box and muttering, "Brooding. Definitely brooding," under his breath when he heard Peter laugh.
His plan to find somewhere else to stay had failed spectacularly (and anyway, Mrs. M made a killer lasagne, had he mentioned that?) but he didn't really want to go back to Scott's just yet. Allison still hung on his skin. He walked instead, aimless, not really sure where he was going and content to simply wander wherever his feet decided to take him. Sometime, he wasn't really sure when, it started to rain, a gentle haze that whispered lightly down his face. He kept walking. His breath misted in the rain, swirling like smoke through the wet air, but the cold didn't bother him.
Eventually, however, he realised he should probably head back before the McCalls started to really question where he was. He'd left his phone in Derek's car he realised, but decided it could wait until later. The battery was long dead anyway.
Isaac was halfway up the path when the front door flew open.
"Where the hell have you been?" Scott demanded, openly worried. "I've been calling and calling."
"I've left my phone somewhere, I was out on the reserve… are you okay?" Scott was pale, his usually bronze face unnaturally white, and he was leaning quite heavily against the doorframe. Isaac stepped forward, concerned. "Scott?"
Scott swallowed thickly and said something. Isaac didn't know what it was – it didn't make sense. "What? I don't…"
The other boy met his confused look sombrely, looking impossibly, unbearably sad.
"Derek is dead, Isaac."
It didn't make sense.