Room 447 was stuffy and dark. He hadn't bothered to open the drapes to the white Los Angeles sun. It seemed appropriate, somehow, that this time they would be in the dark.

She walked into the room in front of him, and he closed the door behind him and locked the deadbolt, but not without putting out the Do Not Disturb sign. It didn't look as though the maids had been there yet- the bed was unmade, the glass from the bathroom was still on the bedside table with several swallows of water left in it.

She put a hand on the TV to steady herself and stepped out of her heels again. They were the Blahnik slingbacks he'd seen her wearing a few days ago. Classic, conservative, and still somehow outrageously sexy with her heel bare like that.

She turned back to him and stood there, looking up at him. She was a good four inches shorter than him without her shoes.

"Sydney," he started to say, but she shook her head.

"Don't," she sounded like she might cry. He looked at her and placed her ring on top of the television, near where her hand had been.

"Don't call me by my name, like you know me," her whisper trembled. "I don't even know who I am."

He might've felt sympathy for her, if he wasn't already beyond feeling anything besides overwhelming desire to have her fuck him senseless. They could talk about the higher philosophy of their business another time.

He sank onto the edge of the bed in front of her, and she straddled him with her skirt hiked up to mid-thigh, her palms on the sides of his face. She bent her mouth to his, and an instant after their lips met, she slipped her tongue into his mouth, past his front teeth. Like she was tasting him more than really kissing him. They hadn't kissed hardly at all the first time. She tasted faintly like coffee with milk, he decided, and ran his hand up her back, under her shirt. He'd pulled her blouse out of the waistband of her skirt, when she'd climbed into his lap, and he fumbled with the clasp of her bra. So unsuave, he thought.

She pulled back from their kiss and started unbuttoning his shirt. His left shoulder was a little different shape that his right, from where it had been broken.

He wondered when the violence was going to start, though he was plenty aroused without it. He would let her take the lead. He didn't think she'd deliberately seduced him to kill him, though it was a distinct possibility. She seemed to be a bit unhinged by his stunt with her rings.

This is must be what madness is like, she thought as he pulled her shirt off and they lay back on the bed, her entire body stretched on top of his. She was naked from the waist up, and he was unzipping her skirt as quickly as he could.

She lay perfectly still, almost unable to move. He ran his palms up, over the sides of her waist, his thumbs grazing the outside edges of her breasts where they lay, mashed against his chest. He slid his fingertips down the groove of her spine, raising a shiver where his fingers had just been, and into the open top of her skirt, where he'd unzipped it. He slipped his fingers into the top of her pantyhose- black ones, with the seam up the back- and she shuddered as his first two fingers stroked the impossibly soft skin at the top of the cleft of her buttocks, around where her spine ended.

She whimpered a little and wondered why it was so desperate between them, when the same gesture from any number of other lovers would've earned them her boredom. Somehow she was less confident this time, than she'd been before; before she'd had a purpose, she'd thought. But this. This was just proof of her madness and depravity, she thought.

He rolled them over then, so that he was on top of her, and bent his head to her chest. He hadn't shaved, the stubble on his chin and cheek scraped the tender skin of her breast as he licked the very tip of her nipple where it jutted up from the peak of her tit. He looked her in the eye when he tested the same spot with his front teeth, squeezing it very gently and swirling the tip of his tongue around it.

She closed her eyes; she couldn't stand to meet his gaze or she would just come right there, lying under him, without even getting his pants off.

He sensed that perhaps he needed to hurry up, when she'd closed her eyes as he was tugging at her nipple with his teeth. He didn't think of himself as a particularly considerate fuck, but it would be a shame to let her pent up desire for him go to waste.

He rolled away from her for a second and shucked his shirt- it was already unbuttoned, anyway, and as he took off his pants and boxers in one move, she shimmied out of her skirt next to him. Before he could roll back over her, though, she straddled him, taking his stiff cock in the circle between her thumb and her forefinger and stroking him. This time, he was the one to close his eyes from her scorching gaze; she was totally unapologetic, and that made him want her even more.

He placed a hand on her thigh without opening his eyes, and pulled her gently towards his hips with his other hand at her waist.

She didn't hesitate for a second. Holding him still, she slid down onto him, achingly slow, so as not to cause them to come.

He opened one eye and noticed her eyes were closed. She was, in a word, breathtaking. Her ponytail was coming loose, a few long clumps from around her face had already worked their way loose and were hanging over her collarbones and brushing the tops of her breasts. The bite bruises he'd left on her stomach last week were fading to a green-yellow color, and he placed his palm over them to cover them. She placed her long fingers over his without opening her eyes. What was she thinking, behind her closed eyelids? He could see the tiny blue and purple veins around her eyes, so delicate. Her eyes were bruised, between her lower lids and her cheekbones, dark circles under her eyes, like she'd been crying.

Well, she probably had been, he thought, which is kind of indirectly your fault. But he wouldn't take the blame for whatever had happened between her and Vaughn; last week was just a progression of something that had been roiling under the surface of their relationship for a long time, he had decided. Because he certainly hadn't made her do anything she wasn't already intent on doing.

Schaden ist die schönste Freude, he thought.

She couldn't bear to look at him, once he was inside her. She didn't want to see him watching her; she knew he was looking at her, and it made her skin prickle with delight, to be admired. She felt him place his hand over her womb, over the bruises he'd made there last week, and she put her hand over his to keep it there. It was the closest to holding hands like normal people that they had come.

Without opening her eyes, she grabbed his other hand on her thigh, and moved it around the small of her back. She bent over him then, her forehead on his chest, their hands still on her stomach. She came as he pulled her tight to him with the arm he had around her back, pressing himself into her just a tiny bit more, an imaginary bit since she was already full of his cock.

She opened her mouth like she might cry out, or scream, but no sound came out. She felt her stomach convulse under his hand and he came then too, with a noise that would've been a laugh except it was silent.

She stretched one leg out behind her, feeling her knee pop as she did, and the muscles in her thigh tremble. They stayed like that for a long time, her sitting on him in a half-splits, just breathing.

Hours later, they lay exhausted under the sheets. Just the sheet, not the comforter. It was too warm for that in room 447.

Sark snuck a sideways look at her, where she lay on her side facing away from him. There was a big scratch down one side of her back, and little rug burn on the top of her buttocks from where they'd fallen onto the carpet. His own back still stung where she had raked her nails over his middle back, not just a light scrape- he was definitely missing some skin.

The room was a wreck, he noticed, lifting his head a little. After their initial, quietly brutal coupling, they'd come back to themselves and had joined countless more times in rough, bruising foreplay that lead inevitably to rough, bruising intercourse. He had lost count how many times, maybe 7? He smiled to himself.

He'd thought she'd finally fallen asleep, but then she leaned over to the clock radio and turned on some FM station. It was halfway through a song, a slow, spacey piano number.

Come on, oh my star is fading

And I see no chance of release

And I know I'm dead on the surface

But I am screaming underneath

She rolled onto her back and he noticed the bruise forming on her cheekbone, under her left eye. He hadn't meant to slap her quite that hard. He hadn't actually slapped her, more like flicked her with his fingers open, when she had bitten his lip hard enough to draw blood.

And time is on your side

It's on your side now

Not pushing you down

And all around, no

It's no cause for concern 1

She rolled onto her right side and they stared at each other. He raised up on his bum shoulder and leaned over her face, pressed his lips to the bruised spot.

"Ow," she said softly, "That's going to be a deep one there."

She rolled his lower lip out with her thumb to see the cut her teeth had made. "Ouch," she giggled, "Sorry about that."

He shrugged. "I would've stopped you if I hadn't liked it."

Her eyes glittered a little with a smile. She was… incorrigible. He suspected, if she hadn't been so eager to get out of his house in England, that it might've come to this.

"Sydney," he said, suddenly quite serious, "Where will you go when you leave here?"

She sighed heavily. She wouldn't meet his eyes. "Sark, I…" her voice trembled with something, maybe it was emotion, he didn't know. "I don't know how to do this."

"What?" he asked. She obviously did know how to do something, which namely was fuck him silly for the last 4 hours.

"I…" she rolled onto her back, "I don't know where Vaughn is. I didn't go to work today. I can't stay here, that's crazy. I don't have your intel, I don't know where my dad is. I don't know if Vaughn's talked to him."

She pulled the sheet up suddenly, covering her beautiful tits. Pity.

"What am I gonna do now," she said, and now her voice really did sound like she might start crying.

"Sydney!" he snapped. "I don't… need you. I don't need you for any of the things that people think they need other people for. I admire you, your skill as an operative. We're obviously compatible physically—" he waved his hand around at the general disarray of room. "But I beg you, don't mistake it for love. I don't need love from you. I know that's not what I'm supposed to say, but it's true."

"No, I know." She agreed in an instant. He was relieved. He wasn't lying, not about this. He loved her way, but not her. Loved the little bits and pieces of her aliases, even the ones she didn't know she used, like The Cheating Wife. There was no single her to him, or for anyone, to love.

"Honestly," he shook his head, "I don't know what that is, to actually love another person. I never have," he admitted. "I suppose if there were anyone I might love, it might be your mother, but aside from Irina, there is no one."

"The only thing I've learned to count on," he concluded, "Is not to count on anything. Or anyone."

She nodded silently, and then he understood what she'd meant in the restaurant, about how some people have those bonds to other people. Like Vaughn. Maybe like Lauren had needed Vaughn. Like Sydney had once needed Danny. But those people were not him. Or her anymore, as far as he could tell.

Songs:

1 "Amsterdam." A Rush of Blood to the Head, Coldplay.

German. " Schaden ist die schönste Freude" means something like, Suffering is the greatest/nicest pleasure.