[Danny] [Santiago Durante]
“She’s like a fuckin’ ping pong ball,” Rafael says, hiking a thumb in her direction. Again, Santiago just laughs, as his brother sets about answering the two questions that have absolutely nothing to do with each other.
“Fuckin’ fever came out of nowhere, she feeling better now.” A beat. “She oughta be, she fuckin’ laughed her ass off when I about broke my maldito cuello tripping over her Barbies this morning. Who leaves Barbies laying on the stairs, man?”
“Seven-year-olds,” Santiago replies. The microwave sings, and the plate is summarily pulled out and handed over, a fork and knife following not long after.
“She never gonna leave if you keep that up.”
It’s said in jest, a teasing grin plastered on his face, and a yawn follows not long after.
“Go to bed, Rafi.”
“Go to bed, Rafi. I’m going to bed. Don’t wake my daughter up or I’ll fuckin’ kill both of you.”
With that, he turns around and heads back upstairs. Santiago shakes his head, then goes about wrapping up the pork chops and sticking them back in the refrigerator.
[Danny Jones]
She just grins, and shrugs. It’s true, she knows it, and revels in it a bit too. She takes the plate with a softer edge to her smile. “Thanks, baby.”
Then she looks at Rafael again. “Least it wasn’t legos. My boys back home? Legos all over the fuckin place – get one of them in the instep in the middle of the night an’ ya limpin for a fuckin week. An’ don’t even get me started on fuckin power rangers an’ all theys parts…”
“Ain’t never leavin.” she agrees, as she bites into the lamb with a soft moan of appreciation. “Never..” the last said with her mouth full, of course.
[Santiago Durante] A soft smile comes across the young man’s face in the show of appreciation for Mama Isabel’s cooking. With Danny distracted by the lamb chops, Santiago takes the bowl of gazpacho off her hands and spoons a few bites into his mouth. Keeping this family fed is no easy task, not with Rafael going for long stretches without meals, not with Santiago still growing, not with Brodie showing up even more unannounced than Danny does, yet Isabel knows how to make a meal stretch. Lord knows how much meat had already been devoured, how big the pot of soup had been.
Santiago props himself up against the wall opposite the counter Danny has claimed, and for a time there is silence while the two eat. On Santiago’s end, anyway. Compared to his brother, he’s a mute. In the same room as Danny and Rafael, or Brodie and Rafael, he scarcely stands a chance.
[Danny] She gives up the bowl without a fight, working on worrying the meat from the bone with vicious bites only to melt into delight as it crosses her tongue. She’s thoroughly distracted and her feet swing a little as she forgoes the knife and fork for natures utensils instead. Fingers before forks, and what not, and as she’s sitting on the counter, clearly manners are not a priority at the moment.
She pauses and grabs her slurpee to take a swig, and catches Santiago watching her. She arches a brow slightly, setting the cup down and running the back of her hand under lower lip to catch stray juices with a little grin. “Wha?”
Course, that doesn’t stop her from taking another bite.
[Santiago Durante] His own eyebrows dance up and down once, eschewing a normal conventional shrug, and he returns her gaze with a questioning counter-inquiry. There’s a sly, caught grin on his closed lips, and Santiago slops another bite of soup into his mouth before tossing his own response back.
“I didn’t say anything.”
[Danny] She points the chopbone at him with an arched brow. “No… but you was lookin at me…. like maybe I got a nipple showin or something…” she grins at him and makes a show of checking her tank top to make sure that isn’t the case, before looking up at him again, suspiciously..
“or like you gonna try n steal my lambchop… Now, if its the first, ain’t nothin wrong with that.. but if its the second, well then ya gotta fight on ya hands….”
[Santiago Durante] There comes a self-conscious little exhalation of laughter, another one of those facial shrugs, and now Santiagio thinks to drop his eyes from the girl to concentrate on swirling his spoon around what’s left of the soup, scraping down small threads from where they have sloshed along the sides of the bowl. When he looks back up again it is at her eyes, but only briefly. Mellow though she is, this one has been trained well and fully to not stare into the eyes of the Trueborn, not unless he wants to get asked just what she has just asked, “What?”
“I wasn’t looking at you,” he says, defensive in the weakest of ways, as if he had been caught picking his nose or something equally embarrassing.
[Danny] He looks down, even though she’s mellow, and that makes her a tiny bit sorry that she asked, even if she didn’t mean anything other then curiosity by it.
She pulls her lower lip into a little pout then and even bats her lashes – for all he’s looking down. “Oooooh. what if I took my shirt off…” that pout slides into a little wicked grin then, as she finishes up the meat on her plate and sets it aside. She takes another drink of her slurpee, then crosses her arms in front of her. Fingers slide under the edge of the tanktop, and she starts to lift it – as if it were a real threat…
“I mean, I thought I cleaned up kinda good. I even took a shower… yesterday… i think. yeah – yesterday!” a bare swatch of skin along her belly, as she tugs that shirt ever higher, ever so slowly…
[Santiago Durante] The whispering of fabric against skin, tugged up by thin hands, couples together with her words to draw his gaze up once again. Santiago’s eyes fall shut with the force of his snorted out laughter, and he holds up a hand to cease any further revealing of flesh.
“Mama’s gonna be home any minute, you don’t want her getting an eyeful. I’d never hear the end of it.” Santiago laughs at something internal, then shakes his head and explains himself: “Mama caught Rafi and Veronica going at it in the pantry at the house in Tulsa a couple of years ago. She reamed him out for weeks.”
[Danny] He laughs, and she grins and nods, letting her shirt fall again. “Rafi? The same one who covers his ears anytime I even suggest you n me up to mischief?” She snorts a huff of laughter before she presses her hands against the counter by her hips. She flexes her hips, and pushes with her hands, vaulting off the counter with a smooth movement that brings her close to Santiago again. She lifts her head to press a soft kiss under his jaw.
“An I was jus’ teasin ya. You kin stare all ya like. Makes a girl feel appreciated. Even if it’s cuz she’s got lamb stuck in her teeth..” She pulls away again with a grin, and takes up her plate, moving to the sink where she washes it thoroughly and quickly, and the silverware too though she didn’t really use them. She sets them in the drainer and then turns again, drying her hands on a handy towel.
[Santiago Durante] “The same one who covers his ears anytime I even suggest you n me up to mischief?”
“Oh, yeah. Him and Veronica were like teenagers, man, it’d have made you want to cover your ears.”
And then she is propelling herself off the counter, bestowing him with a small kiss along the line of his jaw. He makes a small noise of gratitude, moves slightly to watch her clean up after herself.
For a nineteen-year-old… hell, for a Durante (Danny hasn’t met Julieta, hasn’t met Augusto, hasn’t met Marisol… she has no idea the full extent of the vulgarity and shamelessness this family is capable of, God help Isabel)… he’s rather polite, rather thoughtful. There could have been any number of suggestive comments made when she asked if a nipple were showing, when she gives him full rights to leer. Hell, there is a considerable lack of touching, groping, fondling from him.
The worst he can come up with is a sighing “Well, if you insist” followed by a slow lap of eyes up and down her body in profile.
[Danny] She flushes, even if she expect something of the sort, even as she adds a little wiggle for him to give him something to enjoy. Not that he wasn’t enjoying it anyway, but it’s the thought that counts right?
“Well, hard to believe it, but I can be shy… as ya damn well know. Ya Durante boys bring out the wicked in me..” and it certainly doesn’t sound like she’s complaining at all, at all. She finishes drying her hands, and then starts to pose. To Vogue, even, as he looks – then she pauses mid-pose…
“So, see anything you like?”
[Santiago Durante] In favor of more pleasurable activity, what’s left in the Tupperware bowl (which is not much, the boy made short work of its contents) is set aside, leaving his hands free to wander. Only one of them takes up the offer, going to a shoulder first, a finger working its way under the left strap of her tank top.
“Yeah,” he says with a slow smile, reaching up to brush fingers along a brow free of hair. “How about you?”
[Danny] That blush heightens a bit, spilling across her skin as he comes close and touches her. She’d probably clean up the tupperware bowl and spoon too, if not for the fact that he’s come closer, and he’s touching her, and he’s smiling that slow smile at her again…
…the same slow smile that got to her that first night. The one that promises his undivided attention for however long she wants it, needs it – for all the time he has. It’s the same touch, a soft brush across her brow, that causes her eyes to close slightly, a soft moan sliding free low in her throat. Its the smallest, simple things that remind her of why she keeps coming back…
And its not just the food – clearly.
She lifts her hands to rest at his waist, fingers working to pull up his shirt and allow hungry fingers to find his skin. “Oh, yes… I dare say I have…” she could say ‘more soup’ or something like that, and that teasing, mischief filled smile suggests she might… but she doesn’t at all.
[Santiago Durante] Once again, the threat of an intruding mother still his hands, leads his to do likewise to hers, his strong fingers wrapping themselves about her wrists and gently pulling them from their hunting ground. Santiago leans down the several inches between his mouth and hers, parting her lips with his own, his kiss firm and certain, hungry in a way that was not meant for food. That kiss ends too soon, yanked away just as soon as she could begin to melt into it, and then he is turning to the sink, quickly rinsing out the soup bowl and running a sponge through it.
“Mama’s gonna be home any minute,” he repeats, swallowing back any hint of breathlessness that might have been in place after that smoldering show of yearning he had just given up. That bowl is quickly dispensed of, turned upside down on the drainer beside the plate and silverware, and the spoon follows not long after.
That done, he places a hand in the small of her back, a motion meant to lead. On the way out of the kitchen he grabs up his slurpee, takes a cooling gulp slowed down by the negligible diameter of the straw. A floorboard squeaks overhead, and he sighs. Rafi’s still up.
After a moment’s consideration, that is deemed unimportant.
[Danny] He grabs her hands, and stills their search, even if she could easily overpower his grip, she doesn’t. She wouldn’t. And soon she forgets all about the possibility because his lips are on hers and his hunger calls to her own….
just as he pulls away again, and a softly frustrated growl works through her lips – which are, thankfully, smiling. “Someday…” she says, catching the breath that he stole from her… “I’ma have a place of my own…” a promise, that is – that it won’t involve a box in an alley, or Mama’s and brothers and nieces and family that will still their hands when they want to wander, that will cause them to hesitate just…that…much.
He finishes cleaning up, and his hand finds the small of her back. She succumbs to that lead with a smile up at him, even as she laughs softly at the squeaking floorboard. “Don’t worry, I’ll letcha know when you get too loud..” Because HE is the loud one, naturally…
[Santiago Durante] A full-throated chuckle, gripped by amusement, and his hand drifts up along her spine to grip a slim shoulder, the meat of his fingers the only real padding between bones.
“What would I do without you, Danny?”
Up the stairs, creaking with the weight of ascending bodies, Santiago attempts to land his footfalls towards the outer edge of each board to minimize the sound. This house is thin-walled, a dropped object on the porch sounding through to the furthest bedroom. Sound carries, voice carry, and it is a very, very good thing that the sleepers in this house do so soundly.
Another creak of floorboards off to the right, sounding Rafael’s climbing into bed with his daughter. Why he doesn’t sleep in his own room does not seem at first obvious. Santiago doesn’t begrudge him this. He hates sleeping by himself, too, and he has never shared a bed with someone he thought himself incapable of living without. That he has someone to sleep beside, to hold, to whisper too in the dead of night, in the early waking hours, is a blessing he does not take for granted when he thinks about the situation in a broader context.
Right now, he is very grateful to have Danny following him to his little room with the bed pushed into a corner and clothes strewn absolutely everywhere, a little path kicked through the jeans and the socks. He is grateful, and he is quiet about it. His hands communicate what his mouth, his modesty, does not.
[Danny] “Be eternally bored..” comes the murmured reply as they make their way up the stairs. She does pause, however – as she has a promise to keep. She slips into Carolina’s room once Rafi is curled up around her, and crouches in front of the sleeping little girl. A soft kiss to her brow as she smooths those curls, before she leans further and kisses Rafi’s cheek too. She doesn’t say anything – but slips out as quietly as she had entered. She had promised, and she never breaks once she doesn’t have too, especially to little girls. And Rafi was additional witness that she had done so.
She doesn’t take long, and the little side trip does nothing to tamper the desire that thrums under her skin, that begs for attention as they tiptoe through the hall and into the comfortably messy room. She helps kick through that path, her boots soon adding to the general mayhem. From the moment the door to his room closes – no, from the moment she called, he has had the majority of her attention. When his door closes, though, it is different, for now he has all of her attention, as if every cell of her being is attuned to his, intertwined in the very air between them – that soon disappears until they occupy the same space. It is not long before there is nothing that separates them, there is nothing but skin to skin, touch mirrored by touch, breath shared, and stolen again.
There is now, and in this moment there is forever. Fingers, hands, lips communicate what neither of them would say, what neither of them would bring to light. It’s not important, the truth of words, for there is more truth in a single kiss then either of their languages could communicate…
It is hours later that they note with soft breathless laughter – that both of them can be quiet when it is necessary. That Rafi and Carolina sleep peacefully still confirms it.
For all the little things that feel like home, perhaps it is a single thing that brings it to the fore. She hadn’t grabbed her pack, leaving it downstairs to prove to a certain little girl that she did indeed stay for breakfast. A certain little girl that will wake them early for breakfast with a cannonball to the middle of the small bed, where she will be greeted with tickles and laughter, and yelling for her to get out and learn to knock already.
And to give them another hour before breakfast – an hour well used to break a different sort of fast… (…hours are like days, days are like weeks… making up for lost time is forever important…)
[Santiago Durante] ((YAY FIN))