V

He had himself shielded in a dark corner of the pub upstairs, so much so that I nearly didn't notice or recognize him. But his eyes rolled up toward me just as I walked toward waiting friends. They would wait, and if they saw him understand. With the drums shaking the floor from the stage below, I wove unsteady steps to his table. Offering my hand across it, I grinned, licking lips still blood red and sweet from chocolate-dipped strawberry Beltane kisses. He took it. The look he gave me had something of a diabolical hunger to it, and his touch seared every sense and inch of me. Pulling himself up along the length of me, he hissed in my ear "I know you." A laugh escaped from deep in my throat and caught in black waves of his hair. As I snaked my hand around the nape of his neck, he pulled my other arm behind me, forcing me into his jacket. To fight back, I bit his lower lip and shifted my hips to tease. His low growl of a laugh brushed my shoulder as I spun to release myself and pull him downstairs.

With his hat angled low over green fire opal eyes, he quickly followed. In a crowd painted green, blue, red, and all earthly colors, we disappeared. I already had streaks of white across my cheeks, and I could tell at least a drummer and some chaos had found him earlier in the night. Picking up the changing rhythm the drummers beat, I found one of his legs between mine, his hands gripping my waist. The curl of tattoos up one arm held me as we shook, and swayed, and pounded the floor with our feet. In brief flashes, I could make out the look on his face - mischievous, incendiary, and so beautiful I coughed for air. When I could breathe again, I drew myself down his legs, climbed back up at his hips with hands on tense, tender skin. We moved with murderous, measured intent, as a serpent uncoils. I put my hand at his back, and a shiver sent his eyes wide open. We both knew it then - all the lovers, and the waking and sleeping dreams wound up here. Held true.

"Let's go home," I said. He nodded. Throwing my cloak around me, I walked him out through my city's early morning. The Castle, the cobblestones, the doors whispering of centuries gone down behind, all greeted us with still-cutting, cold stars and thick mist. At the top of the Mound, he kissed me. A burn like whiskey spread through me, his lips a smoky, full, savage heat. Never had a kiss so consumed and eaten at me, a lick of flame that burned away all else. He met my hunger, and thirst, with a taste that stirred desires in the deepest of me. With dawn breaking over Edinburgh, I could feel the fog swallowing us whole, knit so closely I thought I might melt.

At last I couldn't take it, and turned my teeth to gnaw slightly at his collarbone. With the light spilling over Leith, we still had a train ride to get him to my flat. The shock and fit of it all took over me in waves, and with the scent of his shoulders clearing my head of all else, I shook to keep from burning up. I finally had home, here. I could bend and weave anything with him, in this place.

Neither of us would later recall how we made it down to Waverley Station - fair bit of lust-led sleepwalking, I suppose. On the earliest train, I kept us invisible, handled the tickets and the talking. An unspoken language had formed so fast, and already I could read even the most mundane messages in the curl of a lip or deepening shade in his eyes. I spoke for us.

Linlithgow greeted us in silence and anticipation as we followed worn cobblestones to my flat. The silence ended at my door. Taking him by the collar, I pulled him to me with such force I rent his t-shirt in half. Again the throaty laugh of the gods themselves came at me, a self-satisfied grin lighting him ear to ear. Teasing around the tattoos on his chest with my tongue, he groaned and threw me back, catching the tie to my shirt. I took some unwrapping - three turns of kimono ribbons gave him enough to undo and bind me to him all at once. With a simple swift push he pinned me to the wall. The force snapped a chopstick in my hair, and I flung the other into the front room. He took my throat in one guitar-calloused hand and bit just below my ear. His other hand then pulled my hair down loose, a cascade over my neck and his. Splaying my fingers down his hips, I pried open the studs of his belt, my wrists still tethered to him with shirt ribbons. He cradled my head in his hands as I kissed over the arrow his stomach made, one side and the other. With so much of him covered in ink, I could read every twinge of pleasure in his muscles.

"Carissima mia, ti conosco, anche," I traced in his left hip with my lips. He moaned a reply in Saami. I took that for a good sign, and kept at it. For a few seconds, he let me. And then in a swift, lithe series of movements, I was over his shoulder, in the bedroom, and flung on pillows. He leaned in to bite my side, a free hand completely unwrapping me from my shirt.

"Such good dreams, and they were nothing to this," he sighed, arcing back, his head cocked to the side, the devil in his smile and his hands. His movements toward me were feline, and I responded by pulling his unruly hair to kiss him so hard he rolled down onto me. My tongue tasted the spice at his lips, tears in the corners of my eyes as months of waiting broke on me.

"I know; I waited too," I breathed in his ear. I was sure if I turned round, I would see Desire herself in my corner chair, smiling at the want and fire in the room. He caught his breath then, and with it released the pain of what had felt too long a wait for us both. Smooth strong arms reached for my hair, his fingers moving it from the pool at my neck to lay it all out behind me. My curls and tears now to his satisfaction, he keened "so I'm not waiting anymore."

Off came my pants in one quick sweep I'd never seen before. He grabbed my hips to tip me to one side, then face down in sheets the color of blood. His hands got the hook at my skirt, but his teeth tugged the zipper down slowly. I squirmed at being teased, and he smacked my backside. I blushed deeper at this, and tried to turn over to strip and punish him. On first attempt I discovered his hand at the base of my spine, gently blocking my protest. "Uh-unh," he chuckled through teeth still gritted at my back. "Do you want me to come back there and tear your clothes off? Do I have to kick your ass?" I threatened.

"Yes please," he mock-begged me in return, letting go of the zipper, now undone at last.

"Done," I swore, and set to work removing his pants in retaliation. My fingers hooked his waistband as I spun around and peeled him out of them. They found themselves in a far corner of the room as I finally pinned him to the foot of the bed, triumphant. The charge of all his skin under me, new, to be explored, had me in near-bacchic ecstasy. My hands found him something more than willing, pressing playfully against me.

"Well, kick my ass," he laughed.

"Right then," I nodded. One of my hands slid up his wrist to hold it, the other easing him barely into me. My knees along his ribs, I rocked my hips back and forced a gasp from both of us. I thought I might cum then from the fit of it, but scrambled for the rubbers in my bedside table.

"I don't think this is the first time you'll have had your ass kicked," I smiled and held him teasingly in my hand. I leaned in to lick the tip of him, brush it with a fingertip, and slowly tug the rubber down on him. Turning to brace on his legs, I pulled him back in where every part of me wanted him. He smelled of myrrh, sweat, and cedar, every bit of skin responding to my touch. We found matched rhythm in a heartbeat. I confess I feared spontaneous combustion when we both neared the climax of new lovers. His chest I felt for with my hands, and the moan I heard rise from it pushed me over into a startled, roaring ecstasy. The shudder and sound that shook him just after let me know I wasn't alone in feeling deeply, happily spent. A shaft of sun fell into the other end of my sheets just as we did, crawling slowly, laughing, up the bed.

Before sleep had me down completely, I slid into the crook of his arm, anxious to lay my hand along the racing pulse now slowing with mine. I fought heavy sleep until my eyes dimmed and closed on the dark ravished Finn tangled in my sheets. I refused to wake up having merely dreamt all this.

Waking briefly a bit later to the sound of violent thunder, I studied his face for some moments. Relaxed and unguarded were the looks falling across him. I got the urge to trace a paintbrush or my quill along his features, to capture somehow the palest skin, and shocking black of his hair. The lips I had studied, a slight predatory curl to them even unconscious. Profane and sacred poems pass those lips. And then, the lashes flickering slightly along his eyes, I gently toned his name. I feared breaking the spell, but I needed to make sure it was real.

"Tala," I whispered, tracing his jaw with one hand. "Mm," he groaned, though his lips pursed to a smile when he met my eyes. Without giving me a chance to respond, he kissed me deeply, taking me in as I'd seen him take drink, as I'd seen him take fire.

"I'm still here. Go to sleep." He rolled his eyes and pulled the covers over his head. "I don't have to return you any time soon?" "No. Yours." He shook his head into my pillow with a slight rustling sound. I bit the nape of his neck then, gently, and he squeezed my thigh. Reassured, I slept.

When I woke up, the mid-afternoon sun lit the room. He sat smoking in a chair he'd pulled to the bed, and let his tapping feet fall when he noticed me moving. "Sorry. I needed one and couldn't find your key," he said apologetically.

How could I explain that anything from his lips was sexy as hell, even the smoke I'd seen bring pain and death? I even liked the taste of it on him, but I had to admit that I hated anything that might take him from me. I'd just found him then, though, relegating that discussion to a future that set my mind reeling.

My turn came to respond "mm." I did concede, out loud, that he had a point about the key. The small box of raspberry dark chocolates (from Queen of Scots, I knew this) that had appeared on the bedside table also helped calm any possible fight I'd have had in me at the smoke.

Though still hazy from sleep, I found everything in me heightened around him. He had come into my dreams with a name less than a year ago, though I'd known him far longer as a nameless equal. The person I desired most and matched, anam cara. With him sitting in my room stubbing out his cigarette sheepishly, I knew what to do next. Feed him. And lure him back to bed. My Sicilian blood counted for a good bit of something in both rooms.

Pulling the remnants of his shirt around me, I led him into the kitchen. Put the kettle to boil. So very often we'd danced around each other before this, and I'd wondered what we'd say in the same room. The absence of abject terror I'd felt in other love affairs and momentous occasions I took as a wondrous sign. Our understanding held, strengthened by the catalytic sex and connection. I laughed aloud at the constant contact, like small licks of fire, as I tracked down breakfast, always skin on skin with the wonder and play of children around their hearts' desires. With him wrapped loosely in a bedsheet, distracting me mercilessly as I cooked, I thanked the gods I possessed cupboards full of things to drizzle down him later. As I determined to camp with him that night under the candles and tomes of Burns, Virgil, witchcraft, and all of my loves, I realized I had a flat that held everything I'd have ever known to want.