Butterfly
AUTHOR: Lucky.
DISCLAIMER: Except for the creations of the author, all characters, characterizations, situations, and locations described in this unsolicited and not-for-profit work of fiction are the property of ABC Television, Capitol Cities, Inc., Steven Bochco Productions, the many talented people who created the world of NYPD Blue, and the actors who have made that world such a lively place. The author would also like to extend her personal gratitude to Mr. Scott Cohen for his light, his vitality, his inspiration, and for being such a compelling muse. Thank you, sir.
Also, if you have a copy of Ravel's "Bolero" handy, you might want to
cue it up. The piece doesn't make nearly as much sense (especially
the convoluted 'foreplay' conversation about will and nature) if you
can't hear what they're hearing. I tried as best I could to time it
out from the moment when Posey starts up the CD player, but the song
is fifteen minutes long. By the way, just in case it matters to anyone, I'm using the London Symphony Orchestra recording.
FEEDBACK: To Lucky
His groans into her pillow started out as soft growls, stepped up to full, long grunts, finally escalating to body-vibrating howls. After fifteen minutes of this, he took his teeth out of her pillow and turned his head to pant at her.
"Where the hell did you learn this?"
Posey stopped working on Harry's back long enough to lean over him and nip at his ear, whispering. "Shh, baby... Be still."
His deep laughter bubbled through his entire being as she sat up and started on him again. "Posey, completely aside from the fact that you're perched on my ass, I couldn't move if I wanted to right now."
"And when I hit the talking muscle, the heavens will part and there will be peace."
"You're sitting on the part that I get most of my talking from, honey."
"And still you talk. Incredible." She felt him gather another breath, and moved fast enough to intercept it, smudging the words in his head into another satisfying grunt. Over the soft patter of his moans, she spoke again. "Detroit PD requires six months of EMT training before a cadet can graduate from the academy. One of the reasons I got my shield so early is because I became kind of the de facto medical expert in the squad."
"Took a shine to anatomy?" he mumbled.
"Baby, I know your body better than you do." She finally unlocked him enough to check his spine properly, registering shock at what she found in his lower back. "Harry?" Carefully, she lifted her weight from his body and onto her knees as she realized she was probably hurting him.
"Hmm?"
"How long have you been in pain?"
"Life is pain, princess," he quoted something she couldn't quite place at the moment. "Anyone who says different is selling something."
"No, I mean your back. When did you throw it out?" She worked her fingers around his spinal column, feeling the distinct shift between the spacing of the disks in his lower back.
He sighed a little, thinking, then, "A little better than a year ago when I was shuffling mail on the haul of shame."
"Why didn't you see a doctor about it?"
He shrugged as best he could flat on his stomach on the bed and replied, "It only acts up when I spend too long on my feet... or when I'm slung forward in a chair for an hour and a half by Eastern European drug runners. When it does, I... ignore it."
"So basically nobody around you knows you're having intermittent bouts of excruciating pain?"
He sighed again, harder this time. "Stop it. Just stop."
"Oh, believe me, I will. Hold still."
He moved, threatening to throw her. "I'm not gonna end up paralyzed, am I?"
"Trust me." Posey set her fingers into the uneven groove in his spine and started pressing. He gave a sharp, pained yelp and caught his breath. "Harry, just breathe. Keep breathing," she instructed, repeating the words until he was breathing raggedly in time with her voice. She pressed a little harder and his hands turned to claws along the sides of her mattress. "Little more," she soothed, "just a little more. Just wait it out."
Suddenly, the space in his spine evened out with an audible pop and Harry gave a shrill little scream followed by a quick set of bright whimpers, sinking his teeth into her pillow again. Anyone who didn't know better would think he was in pain.
Posey knew better. She smiled gently and settled herself down on his back again, covering him with her warmth, riding out his shuddering movements. When he finally quieted down, she lifted her head to whisper in his ear.
"It's fixed now."
"Do it again," he whispered back, muffled into her pillow, still panting. "I have never felt anything like that in my life."
Posey played soft little kisses over the nape of his neck, laughing a little. "I'm glad you liked it." In a quick second, her soft sounds turned to bright giggles and she was forced to clutch at him as he lifted his body with a loud, powerful growl. He came up on all fours and bucked her off onto the mattress. He came up on his knees over her, stretching and twisting, his back crackling and his body running with shivers as everything went back to the way it was supposed to be. Posey rolled up on her side, running the flat of her palm over his thigh and taking him in.
There certainly were plenty of words to describe men who looked strong, but none of them seemed to fit Harry very well. Compared to him, they were clunky, sounding like the dragging clomp of a child in his father's shoes. Harry, on the other hand, put Posey in a mind of the strutting power of the big cats and the brilliant sprint of a hunted fox.
He flipped as he fell back onto the bed, landing on his back, folding an arm beneath his head and turning a little on the pillow to smile at her. She just smiled back, tracing her fingertips over his arm and waiting for whatever he intended to do next. His laughter warmed up from a trickle to a shout and he grabbed her arm, first pulling her up on top of him, then rolling her beneath him. "Get over here."
She giggled, putting her hands up to tease the flop of black hair that came down to frame his face. "Okay. Now what?"
He dropped his head, scattering little bites over her throat as he murmured to her. "You can't even begin to imagine what you've bought yourself, here."
Posey kicked out at him, giggling. "Detective Denby, you don't even know me!"
He snarled playfully, sinking his teeth into her throat, making her shrill. "Don't 'Detective Denby' me. Know you? I intend to be you."
She continued kicking and laughing and pressing at him until he was thrown from his center and released her. He pulled up, reaching for her, but she moved quickly, skittering away and facing him down from the opposite end of the bed. He brought himself up, braced on his hands and knees, speaking in a dangerous calm.
"Come back here."
She met him with his own fire.
"Come get me."
Her words seemed to burn into his body and his eyes fell shut for a moment. On the other side of his eyelids, the light evaporated. When he opened his eyes again, the room was dark, the apartment outside the door he could barely make out was dark, and Posey was nowhere in sight. He glanced around for a moment with a wicked grin, letting his eyes get used to the dim streetlight haze that now filled the apartment. When he could see a little more of what he was looking at, he called out to her in a quiet voice.
"Marco..."
A small, feminine giggle from somewhere outside the bedroom, then, "Polo," followed by a silent scattering of footsteps. Harry's grin became an outright leer and he pulled himself off the bed and into the bedroom doorway.
From a place just beyond the kitchenette, he heard a plastic snap, a metallic click, and a few electronic beeps. Then her voice came again.
"Fifteen minutes, Detective. You think you can do it?"
He gathered his breath to answer, puzzled by the time limit, then he heard it. Two faint bass notes. And again. Then a sinewy stretch of soft clarinet wound through the apartment and he understood.
Bolero... He gave a groaning sigh as the hinges in his knees rattled threateningly. "I see they also require a course in advanced erotic torture for cadets in Detroit."
"No, that comes later," she replied lightly. Her voice was almost too quiet for him to tell, but he could have sworn that she was moving
"Mariposa?"
"Yes?"
Harry turned in the direction of the sound and found himself facing the breakfast nook. "Do you have any idea what I'm going to do to you when I find you?"
"Who says you're going to find me? You think you're the only one with a badge here?" she teased him, her voice moving into the dark living room now.
"I found you once, Posey. I can do it again as many times as you want me to." Harry found, with some surprise, that it was very hard to keep his voice quiet over the sound of his body whispering at him from inside.
"I think just the once will do, Harry."
Harry grinned for a second, then, "What if I give up?"
"You? Don't make me laugh."
"No," he replied, stepping out of the bedroom doorway and into the dark between the kitchen and the living room. "I'm gonna make you scream."
"Not from over there you won't."
He turned his head again, zeroing in on her voice. She can see me, so in theory... He thought he caught a glimpse of pale pressed up against the shadow on the far end of the window. As soon as he started moving, it melted into nothingness. If she can see me, she'll know how to get away. Damn... Harry shook his head, rethinking his strategy.
"There's always been something exciting about this, hasn't there?" Her voice filled the room, leaving him searching the dark for her form.
"Exciting about what, love?"
"Hunting. Being hunted. The primal dance." The tension in her voice became clearer as she spoke over the slowly rising music. "Every living creature on Earth is either one or the other. To take one from the other, to end the dance and everything else, it can't be done. It shouldn't be done. Isn't this what we are?"
Harry took a steadying breath, moving carefully. "Of course. But implicit in the word 'dance' is the idea of a willing partner, is it not?"
"Of course."
"Then the question becomes, is the hunt the product of the hunter's drive, or merely a ritual of submission for the hunted?"
"Submission is not a ritual." Her voice crept behind him, turning him around in the middle of the darkened room.
"So... the hunted doesn't want to be caught, and therefore becomes an unwilling partner. Then how can we dance?"
"The idea of ritual contains a synthesis. The act of predation, the act of falling prey, these are not creations of the mind. We dance to the music of our nature."
"If submission is your nature, why force the hunt?"
She laughed low and he would have sworn with everything in him that her fingertips brushed the small of his back, raising the flesh on his arms.
"The hunt is your nature, Harry."
"The nature of man is will." He said the words with conviction enough, having believed them all his life, but their steady ring was overshadowed by his intense visions of tossing her into one of her own leather chairs and bathing her body with his tongue. Her voice came again, shaking him incessantly.
"As the nature of god is will. But you're forgetting something."
"That being?"
"The fact that we're animals is not academic. The hunt is not a product of will. Nature would never leave anything as precious as survival to anything so weak as human rationality."
"And that would be your theory on human mating in a nutshell?"
"Among other things. You know the saying 'Where the flesh is weak, the will is strong'?"
"Yes."
"When it comes to games of love, the opposite is true. Will produces chance and chaos. Only nature makes love."
"There are people who would say that only god creates love."
"I didn't say 'create'. I said 'make'. There's a difference." The difference she referred to prickled down the backs of his thighs in an odd, compelling sort of way as her voice circled him again. "And the people who would say that love is of god would also say that nature is of god."
"Where are you going with this?"
"What if..." Her voice came close behind him, making him shiver convulsively at the very thought that she might come up to whisper it in his ear. "What if the will of god is the nature of man? What if all of this... this dance... is what we are?"
"Then my rational mind is simply a figment of my imagination? That's a paradox."
"You think too much."
He couldn't stop the growl that crept into his voice. "You know, I'm not one for being teased like this, Posey."
Several seconds of contemplative silence met his statement, then she spoke. "Then why are you still looking for me? Don't you already know?" Her words found a center in him, wrapped in music and dark. "This isn't a mental exercise, Harry. I'm not asking you to talk me into a wall and take me with the force of your intellect." He could feel the words, the brilliant dictionary of carefully crafted words in his mind, fade away into dark as she continued. "As long as you only think you can know me, you never will. Implicit in the dance is the partnership, but I didn't ask you to dance...
"I told you to come get me."
She's beaten me at my own game. She looked right through me and saw exactly what she had to do to hook me. She knows I can't stop playing now. The idea of being completely understood was more comforting than he thought it was going to be. He began the hunt in earnest. The rich clarinet, with the flute and drum as his counterpoint, drew pictures in Harry's head of all hunts, by all men, and his muscles began to tighten and snap with the drive of the melody as he tracked around the room. She'd pulled down every layer, every shell, every higher purpose and plan he'd ever had, and left him as only a man. An animal. A predator. He could smell her, feel the rhythm of her breathing in the flow of the air around him. This plan, this purpose...
This is my function. The realization that he was not doing something he was trained to do, or something he was told to do, but something he was created to do, designed to do, lit him up. It tickled his soul, and burned him with his own desire. His nostrils flared as he began to pant with excitement, as captured by his prey as she would ever be by him.
"I do know," he growled, almost unaware that he was talking, his pupils dilated with the darkness and his own pique. The music was rising, enveloping, filling his consciousness, and still he listened past it for... anything. Any movement, any sound to tell him where to go. Suddenly, a slender flash of something out of its place caught his eye, spinning him in a snap, pressing him into a burst of movement.
The bright rush of satisfaction in his head caught him completely by surprise as he pinned her stomach against the wall. This is how it feels to hunt, he thought fleetingly, bringing a hand up to brush her hair away from her neck and taste his victory. He wanted to talk, to tell her, but the sounds that came out of him were no more words than the sounds he brought from her. She drove him beneath words, filled him beyond words, and every inch of his flesh clamored to touch her.
He let up on her just enough to slide his hands over her breasts, using the power of his body against her back to press them into his palms. She arched up, tossing her own crooning song over the music filling the apartment and laying her head back against his shoulder, reaching up to run her hands into his hair. The way she moved against him, the feel of her nails stroking his scalp, and the softness in his hands ran together and pooled in his belly like molten silver, its surface shimmering in concentric time to the ever- impending rhythm of the music.
He put his head alongside hers with a low growl and nipped at her ear, feeling her reaction as surely and intensely as if it were his own. His body begged him to pull her tighter against it and he slid his hands down, his fingers digging into the hollows of her hips as he pressed her to the wall again. Her arms came from around him, sliding down the wall and reaching back again. He gasped, moaning as her nails bit into his backside, drawing in the heat from her body. As he ran his hands over her again, he realized that she was wet, sweating and trembling with desire. He slicked his tongue from the hollow of her collarbone to her ear, tasting salt, feeling her shiver, filled with her ready scent.
"I want you." Before the words had even ground their way from his throat, she pressed back into him again, and his mind spun with the paradox of being at once the master and the slave. In the complete offering of herself, she'd left him no choice but to do exactly as she'd told him to. This was her desire, her wish, her command. And he wanted it. He ripped himself away from her long enough to grab her arm and spin her to face him, pressing her back against the wall with a devouring kiss. She held his mouth like a promise, circling the tip of his tongue, lifting the hairs at the nape of his neck with a slither of tingling.
By now, the volume of the song had reached an obscene level for the hour of night, but neither one of the listeners could hear it anymore, locked into one another's bodies, one another's sounds and sighs. He put his hands anywhere on her that he could reach, feeling her ebb and flow in response, hearing his name and answering it with his body. She wrapped her arms around him, clawing his shoulders and pulling at him, running her body along the length of his as she kissed him, wanting more, wanting to be closer. Her arms snaked down from his shoulders and around his waist and he felt her fingertips flutter over the small of his back. He put his head up and groaned, pressing her into the wall hard enough to hear it flex behind her. She touched him again and fire shot up his spine, licking his body with bright blue flame, pulsing through his mind with every drumbeat, every flicker of her tongue at his throat. He barely felt his strength as he slid his hands under her and lifted. He held her with the force of his body, digging his hands into her rump, into her thighs, as she wrapped her legs around his waist.
She screamed aloud as he threw himself into her, rolling her head forward to sink her teeth into his neck, gripping his hair to pull his head up, exposing his throat to her mouth. He snapped back at her, baring his teeth, racing with exquisite sensation, raising a hand to cup her head, forcing her into his kiss. Each hard, vibrating kick of the kettledrum moved his body as surely as if it were a physical presence and every movement shook him harder than the last. He buried himself in the hollow of her shoulder, at once panting and barely breathing, only knowing that to stop was to die, to end the dance... and everything. The song came up to another crescendo, filling him with the delicious agony of urgency.
He ran his hand across her mouth, feeling her tongue slide between his fingers, feeling the vibrations of her moans as she sang for him. Somewhere, the rational mind she had disproven the existence of just minutes before spoke and he understood. Turning her head gently with the flat of his palm, he touched her ear with his mouth and whispered it to her.
"Scheherezade..."
She shuddered around him and began to pulse into his movements as he pressed wet, demanding kisses over her neck and shoulder. The way she reacted to his mouth, to his body, made him curl his toes into the carpet and fling the tattered remains of his propriety into orbit. He wanted every part of her, wanted to touch her, taste her. He could smell the blood that raced through her throat and feel her heels slide over his slick flesh as he moved. He put his hand up into her damp hair and pulled her head back, feeling her teeth graze the sensitive skin on the inside of his wrist. His body went hot, reeling with the sensation of her, her smell, her arousal.
He hunted again. She had been his prey, but this was his prize.
He lapped at her throat, his head spinning with her warmth and the steady movements of her body against his. As often as he gave himself, she accepted him. He pulled his head up, watching dawn and ecstasy break over her face, feeling her gather his hair into her hands. She threatened him off his balance with her thrashing, pulling at him as if she could take no more.
He slicked his hand down her body again, lingering to tease her nipple into a wine red peak, then cupped her backside firmly, holding her still. Carefully, keeping time with the music she had chosen for him, he ran his length into her body, feeling her clutch and pull around him. She let out a strained squeal, letting her head fall forward onto his shoulder. He could feel her trembling, pressing against her captivity, but he rebuked her with his mouth, nipping at her when she tried to move out of his pace.
"You won't tell me how to play with my spoils," he hissed hotly, impaling her with rough strokes. She screamed at him for it. His own body screamed at him for it, but he was intent only on one thing. Watching her, feeling her writhe in his arms, hearing his name ring from the walls as everything about her told him who he was. She raked her nails across his shoulders and he cried out, shuddering as he felt the rhythm itself take hold of his movements, putting him deeper into her than he'd ever known he could be. They were one, connected, in concert. He could feel what he did to her body, to her soul. He sought her mouth with his, breathing with her, being with her.
Being her.
Her body, the timbre of her voice in his mouth, everything changed, as if a charge were being built between them. Her moans were steady and low as her hands kneaded his shoulders in harmony with his movements. He ripped his mouth away from hers, pressing her head to the side with his jaw, flickering his tongue over her ear as he moaned, whispering to her.
"Show me. Tell me what I do to you. Tell me what we are..." She went rigid in his arms, her breath catching high in her throat and staying there, listening only to his voice, his body.
His will.
"Tell me you love me."
Suddenly, her nails dug into his neck and she bloomed right there in his arms. He lifted his head to look into her bliss, to see her soul flash like lightning amidst the thunder around them, feeling her delicate wings open for him and flutter around his sex. He could see her pleasure, feel it, hear it as it filled his body with the echoes of his own love. Then again, as she screamed and swirled around him. He pounded through it, forced, driven, straining and crying her name over the crashing euphony that sang his soul.
It was everything he ever wanted. He could barely draw breath, spiraling down to a white-hot, infinite point of pure, demanding need. He could feel the lash of her hair over his face and neck, spurring him, driving him out of his head and into her body. If it were still his to be, he would have been awestruck at this power. All he knew was her voice ringing in his ears. All he could tell her were the shattering, hard, high-pitched gasps that ripped from him with every breath, every thrust. All he could show her was what he could do, what he had to do.
What she made him do.
Mindlessly, he whimpered to her, his voice breaking as he nipped at her ear.
"I can't... oh, god... please... please..." His words were gone again, tearing apart into bright, animal frustration.
From somewhere outside him, he felt his prey, his mistress, taste him, flickering her tongue over his ear, nibbling at him, making him shriek, then fall silent, locked in the moment before ultimation. Before absolution.
A tickling whisper came from the only place he would ever call his again.
"I love you."
His body exploded into nova and he howled from the center of everything he'd ever been, into the center of her spirit, held to her body by sheer force of will and the sudden, spinning pull of the star borne between them. He lost himself, wrapped in her body, in her promise. His entire being coursed and reeled. Being loved by her was like being loved by the ocean, and he had been an island. He had always been an island, rocky and forbidding, jagged and sharp and alone.
But she had always been the ocean... and she had always been there.
His revelation was met with silence. A beautiful silence, whole and complete, and the thought lingered in peace, standing alone in his mind, shining like the solitary moon that had pulled her to his shore again, as it always had.
As he held her, locked in motionless time, he felt a trickle down his back, then another. She was wound around him, her mouth pressed to his shoulder, trembling with exhaustion and taut with the force of her embrace.
Weeping.
He held her still, reluctant to leave her body, wanting everything to stay just as it was. It was all he could want... all he could do.
Her breathing started to pick up and catch and he knew she was about to start sobbing. Just as the first sound came, he soothed her, blowing little shushes into her damp hair and across her flushed skin. He released her, shivering a little as he fell away from her body, setting her carefully onto her feet. Her legs, weak and wobbling, refused to bear her weight. With what was left of his own strength, Harry lifted her again, cradling her against his chest, and took her back to bed.
He set her down, and himself next to her, feeling her curl up inside him. He pressed a kiss to the top of her head and circled her with his body. She gathered a breath, then let it out slowly, then gathered another, hesitating.
"What?" he whispered. "Tell me."
"I knew it was you."
His brow crossed in quiet confusion. "What was me?"
She turned her head up, meeting his gaze with shimmering eyes. "Everything. I knew it was you. It was always you."
It was as if her little whisper had reached into his soul and pulled him out, and for the first time in his life, he was speechless. It was always you... He stroked her face, touched her tears, knowing... being known. Finally, he said the only thing he could think of, the only thing that came into his mind and ran over and over like the water.
"We are."
Posey smiled into his eyes for a moment, then curled back into his body with a sniffle. He gathered her a little closer, feeling her breathing start to flow still and deep, feeling his own sated being relax and settle around her, seeing streaks of impossibility begin to run like foxfire through his mind's eye. In the last moment, as he fell into the colors of his own subconscious, her last whisper of breath before sleep fell on his chest and slipped into his heart.
"Yes... we are."
Continued in Part 9.
