If she could pull down all the mortared brick and concrete in her mind the creature that rages there would still be powerless to save her from the black water and its black monster. It could warn her though, and might turn her aside from this path and send her towards safety. Whether it actually would is another matter, the dark thing had not been so different from tonight’s Eszka. It too might have craved Stillwater. For different reasons.

There are walls though, closed and so strong and fast that only cold whispers, like echos in a tomb, escape only to go unheard. She is beyond heeding even a shout from the shore at this point, beyond yielding to any power.

Agnieszka lets herself be drawn, coaxed slowly into deeper water that breaks over the dip in her short back. It’s not so much of a following, but a pressing. As he pulls she pushes, returning caress for caress and forging further, asking for more with each breath and lingering touch. The painted woman leans into the pinch and pressure of his teeth, drags her own against the too smooth skin of his black shoulder. Her need for more is as loud as the crash of the dark waves, behind them, beyond them, against them.

She picks his words out of the din, and in her fog a dark, languid smile drifts across her lips, which linger inches from his midnight pelt. Sultry laughter that matches that twist of her lips in character meanders up from her chest because he is not the first to ask her such a question. It is a knowing without knowing, another lover’s words come out of her dreams. Ghosts repeating through all her numbered days, echoing on and on the words that proceed the fall of her gossamer gowns to stone floors, or into black seas, as again and again through her lives she bares her breast for one dark man who could tear her throat out. She has been here before and she will be here again. The laughter is not her only reply. She slides along his oil-slick side, lips roaming first along his withers and then tracing her way down the slope of his back.

There is danger here and she does not comprehend to what degree. He might turn the surf red with her blood, but not before she takes a corner of him for herself.

In a perfect world she would have woken as he dragged her into the black sea. Not from the lust--because is lives like fire beneath her skin as he pulls her beneath the waves--but from the void of memory. In another reality the dark thing would have screamed out of it’s prison with a rage and violence so potent that she could have shaken the monster like loose and flung him back onto the beach for good measure.

But this is not a story where Agniezka wakes, or draws on the well of power that is the vast sea.

Panic comes first. Her lavender eyes are full of the serpentine strike and then her nose and eyes are stinging with cold saltwater. She kicks, twists, pulling against the tension of his teeth planted in her skin but he seals her against him so that she can only kick out toward the emptiness and shudder as muscle, bone and tendon struggles to break her free.

Far below the surface he releases her throat, caresses her. The touch is vile, but her treacherous body would still sway into his if it had the power. Agnieszka throws her head back and he whispers her name into the water, deep and rough, baring flesh to his caress even as she struggles. She knows that if she tried to speak or scream her voice would be a strangled melody without substance but here beneath the waves his baritone is lush and she recognizes that he is a creature aquatic in a way she had not understood before.

She moans and shivers, the meager contents of her lungs escaping slowly from her pink rimmed nostrils. Eszka araches her neck away from him but she is stuck fast, and every moment she recognizes the symptoms of being in his thrall. A sensation of surrender trying to sneak into her limbs. She fights through this, fueled by base memory, dilated eyes training on his reflective predatory ones.

Desire and rage show in her face, fear too.
She is a stupid girl who has tried to fuck danger itself.
The dark thing agrees.