What Caroline thinks is the beginning of a long lull period of action in her life is cut short by a certain dark-haired Mikaelson when he breaks the frame of her front door by kicking the handle in. The crack is so loud that she leaps out of her bed and dashes from her room.
"You're not invited," she yells, both appalled and perplexed that he's actually standing in her house, where nobody but her mom can give vampires the permission to enter. Permission that Kol isn't supposed to have.
But that should be the least of her worries right now.
Caroline backs up as quickly as he strides toward her, the toxic rage radiating from him. She knows that he's pissed when it shows up on his skin, red to the end of his ears.
"Tell me," he snaps, speeding up as she leaps over her couch for cover, "what the fuck were you thinking when you stabbed me in the back?" Kol's violent kick sends a vase and the table it once stood on flying.
With a sudden crash, Caroline watches the sofa flip before her very eyes. "Stop wrecking my house!" she protests angrily. "Stop-"
His hand wraps around her slender neck, pinning her against the wall. "Tell me why I shouldn't just rip your head from your shoulders."
"You deserved it," she chokes out unapologetically, fingers clawing at his forearm. She doesn't need the breath all that much, but having her windpipe crushed isn't exactly a pleasant experience either. "You lied to me and," she gasps the rest of her reply hoarsely, "you'd miss me."
Kol's jaw clenches. He can clench all he wants. Caroline's not going to take anything back.
She swings her leg up in a desperate attempt to somehow catch him in an armbar with the full weight of her body, but instead ends up scissored around his waist.
Well... As long as he doesn't end up on top.
They scramble on the floor in a mess of limbs; Caroline is flailing wildly and Kol's on his side, trying desperately to gain the upper hand. Eventually, he stops pushing back and simply resigns to having both her hands press his into the scratched up carpet on either side of his head.
He isn't smiling, but doesn't look as livid as he did before.
"You are so twisted," she narrows her eyes at him. "What's so hard about doing things the normal way?"
"There's nothing normal about either of us. Besides, it's boring."
Caroline picks herself of off him and folds her arms. "You're just afraid of being ordinary."
He rises to his feet.
"It's been you against the world for so long that you don't know how much of a total basket case you're being. Nobody's asking you to prove anything." And still, it annoys her so much that the volatility of his dysfunction is somewhat interesting. "Ever just go with the flow? Take it easy? Or has it always been 'terrorize a romantic prospect until she surrenders'? Things don't have to be so out there."
Kol shakes his head and lets out a bitter chuckle. "I'm not going to hold your hand and prance around in your comfort zone like one of your highschool boyfriends. But since you want to be trapped in your own little Danielle Steele universe," he opens his arms in a defiant taunt, "let's do it your way, and put ourselves through an eternity of misery and falsehood. I know what you really want, and need, because I see the signs, and have the same desires, and it doesn't look anything like the fucking new age romance novel you just described."
Now, Caroline's never wanted to hit someone in the mouth this hard before. But the reasons behind it are divergent - he just likened her opinion to the bottom-dwelling scraps of a literary genre; conversely, the inkling of denial she's felt since the start of this conversation is exacerbated by the fact that he's not completely off the mark about it. She doesn't like being wrong.
"Fine," she says, in a world where fine rarely ever is what it really means, "I like my comfort zone. But I'm not stuck." She flattens her palm against his chest, feeling a very slow, faint lifting and waning underneath, as if to prove some defiance or courage on her part. She should be used to the near-still, steady pumping of a person not quite dead, but she isn't.
It only occurs to her how much he affects her when she pulls her hand away and presses it into her abdomen to stop herself from looking like she was caught up in a moment.
But then he gazes. It's somewhere between protest and curiosity, a fine balance of suspicion and willingness. Ever so quietly and turning the air around them into a heavy vapour of long, pulling tension, Caroline once again lifts her arm to slip a hand under wrinkled leather.
Ignition.
She strips Kol of his jacket, immediately wanting to feel him. Feel him through his clothes. Feel his breath lick up her neck and between her thighs. She wants to feel the madness overtake her, his twisted darkness creep into her soul. Caroline leans in to capture his mouth with her own, aching for him to do more than just hesitate at her kiss - she doesn't blame him, considering what had happened the last time he went in for one.
His resistance melts away against the teasing press of her lips, slow and easy kisses that coax the stifled noise he's kept inside himself all this while. It's almost as if he'd been telling himself not to concede, but he's failing miserably as his arms begin to curve around her back and her waist, and parts her lips with the nudge of his tongue.
That's when Caroline says yes through her moan, and Kol gives in to her completely.
Without delay, his fingers trace to the front of her jeans to pop the placket button and tug the zipper down. The tips go searching, dipping low into her panties and finding slick heat that causes her to grasp his hair that much tighter.
Yes, she pants into the corner of his mouth. As he pushes a finger into her depths, all she can think is yes, and how she wants more of him, how bizarre it is for her to want to spread her legs wider, how this is going to end terribly for the both of them, because he's a mental case, and she's about to be a mental case, and her world is just splitting at the seams at not knowing what's going to happen after.
She'll worry about it when they get there.
Caroline pushes Kol's arm away, and it's clothes off from here, tossed denim and cotton and whatever that separates her skin from his. He makes her lean back on the floor and pushes her knees apart, hands kneading their way up her thighs.
He knows she's watching. The way he looks up at her as his thumb sweeps over the crease of her thigh is dark and devilish, and when Caroline finally feels his tongue drag from bottom up, she throws her head back and enjoys every second of him kissing her there.
Good god. Finally using his mouth for something other than being a smartass.
With each curl of his tongue her body is buzzing; her legs are starting to draw closer together in response to his fevered lapping. But he won't let her escape. Instead, his hands keep her spread and open and she has no choice but to be subject to whatever he wants to make her body feel - shy, worshipped, needing. Things that, perhaps, she had caught a glimpse of during past interactions, but were no more than fleeting indulgences of the imagination.
At the end of it, he has her cupping her own breast and biting her lip as he draws out her climax with a devoted attentiveness to her clit and his fingers thick inside of her.
Caroline twists and rocks against his face, noisy in her uncontrolled appreciation as he drags the digits from her slowly. He only growls.
Rising to his knees, she sees that he's absolutely hard - he's not going to wait. Kol hooks his arms under her legs and drags her still shivering body closer to him, carpet grazing her back. Wasting no time, he guides himself into her in an agonizingly slow glide that tears the moan from her throat.
He holds his breath the entire time. She only realises this at how heavy his sigh is when he's buried to the hilt, chest pressed to hers. "Don't," he tells her when he sees her eyes fall shut. "I want you to look at me."
She complies reluctantly, focused on his face. Kol clenches his jaw, glancing down at her lips and as if satisfied, he draws his hips back and meets with hers again. Then she sees it, the pleasure forming on his face, his mouth opening, closing, every time he gets the angle perfect and rubs the end of his cock against the most tender of her spots.
You watch me, I watch you.
The longer she sets her sights on him, the hotter her body feels. Her back is so raw, and her nails are scratching the fibres out of the carpet as her desire mounts with each greedy thrust. Every time she breaks her gaze from him, he rolls his hips a little deeper into her.
She can't look at him. When she does, he reads her, and when he reads her, he starts to get a sense of knowing. Then it's less of fucking and becomes more of... something else.
It's Caroline's fault for opening the floodgates. She wanted him. He warned her, and she didn't listen. Now she's caught, her voice rising and her cunt aching around him, connecting on levels far more unfamiliar to her than she expected.
"I wanna come," she gasps, the tail end of her confession turning into a pleading sound.
Kol groans at the honesty of it. "Then come," he says, moving faster, helping her peak with her body clinging to him like her life depended on it.
"I want it," she bites down on her lip, this time referring to him, and he seems to understand it from her eyes. "I want it, I want it, Iwantit."
She goes on encouraging with the most shameless of noises, but it's only until she says, I want you that he jerks and lowers his face to her shoulder where he whispers back the same thing. The shudder that rocks his body rips through her own. Kol groans again, deep in his chest, hips still pressing even after his release.
Then she feels it, his fingertips finding her clit. Caroline's thighs squeeze together to pause his body's movement, but there's only so much she can stop. "Shit," she bucks, mind rocketing to high heaven. With blunt teeth he grazes the bit of her neck that sends the memories charging through her bloodstream – where teeth had been fangs, and a nip had been a hard bite. She thinks of the blood, the smell of it, the taste of it, recalling the pain, and she swears so vehemently in his ear when the pleasure cracks that it eases a coarse laugh from him.
"Control that dirty mouth," he breathes. From the looks of it, he's enjoying getting his hand wet, keeping his palm on her until she stops shaking.
For a while, they stay locked in their bared-bodied embrace, reveling in the sweat and smell and starkness of it. "We can't go back from this."
She's thinking aloud, weighing her options and finding that none of them are simple. It's the obvious thing to say, but it needs to be heard.
Kol's hand wanders, moving up her waist and over her breast in a slow, easy slide, like he's trying to soothe her. "Do you want to?"
She waits for the answer, but it never arrives in her head. What is she to think? He compelled her cousin to get to her. She should've gotten a dagger somewhere and put an end to him, but she responded with sex instead. All because he told her that he wanted her. Or it just could've been how he wore his shirt.
Maybe she's the mad one all this while.
"I don't think you can stay away," he adds, not at all trying to make a spectacle of it. "Nor will I. It only takes a taste to start drowning in it."
She would know.
Kol brushes his lips against her ear, "You let go of yourself." She feels his hand settle in the centre of her chest, solid, comforting. "Your body goes so hot and the sweat breaks on your skin... It can make an addict out of anyone."
She pulls away, barely managing to slide out of his needy touch. "Curb it," she says, surveying the disaster that is her living room with a sigh. "I've got a lot of housecleaning to do."
No retort. Caroline dresses, catching from the corner of her eye his look of befuddlement. It's not quite enough to make her smile, but after a long pause, she sees him getting up to lend a hand in setting the couch right.
The sight of his bare ass the whole time while they clean up is what secretly lifts the edges of her mouth.