FIC: Die Sprache der Blinden 16a/?

[laguera25]

Title: Die Sprache der Blinden 16a/?

Author: laguera25

Fandom: Rammstein

Rating FRM

Pairing: Richard Kruspe/OFC

Disclaimer: Richard Z. Kruspe is a real person, with family and friends who love him. I am not one of them. I do not know him. This is a work of complete fiction, and should be read as such. No defamation is intended. For entertainment only.


Part I Part IIa Part IIb Part III Part IVa Part IVb Part V Part VIa Part VIb Part VIIa Part VIIb Part VIII Part IX Part Xa Part Xb Part XIa Part XIb Part XIIa Part XIIb Part XIIIa Part XIIIb Part XIV Part XVa Part XVb


He'd turned the revelation over in his mind as he'd sat in the tub, hidden there in the massaging jets and the concealing steam like a thief with his treasure. The hot water had kneaded his stiff muscles and returned to him the illusion of youth. For that, he'd been profoundly grateful, and he'd sighed and sunk deeper into the water and curled his toes in private pleasure. He'd sunk until the water had lapped and tickled his chin, and then he'd let his head loll against the edge of the tub.

He'd known he should go to her, should wash the grit from his skin and dry himself off and pad into the kitchen to kiss her crown and partake of her stew and her sandwich, to partake of her, but he'd been terrified that she would see the truth on his face the moment he emerged from his protective cloud of steam. He'd never been good at concealing his emotions--need, love, and desire least of all, and he'd been afraid that if she'd seen them in his eyes and writ so large upon his face, she would think him weak and sad, a manchild who took more than he could give and needed more than he possessed or could give in turn. She would see the young, lonely boy who had clung to his mother's skirts until she'd pushed him away, and who had run in his older sister's footsteps to collect scraps of castoff affection like a starving child. Unrequited love was a wondrous secret, a sweet morsel to be savored in the dark, but love declared was a knife to be sunk into unresisting flesh. Love made you vulnerable, made you a fool who let your heart slip from your mouth to rest, unprotected and hopeful and stupid, on your wrist.

Love had made him a fool so often, had made him giddy and impudent and rash with its promises of sweetness and succor and shelter. It had prompted him to pledge his heart to Caron thirty-six hours after he'd lain eyes on her in a crowded Soho nightclub and bid him leave his native land for the shores of the great, glittering city of Gotham, where light and excess and impossible wealth lived cheek to jowl with soot and shadows and the hard, flinty grey of just getting by. It had driven him to reinvent himself to better please her and escape the bruised, moody child she so often sensed beneath his scrubbed skin and spiked hair and European aplomb and cultured ennui. The bruised child she had so gleefully ridiculed when the mood took her. Love, or the desperate hope of it, had moved him to be someone else so that he would not be alone.

The hope of it had driven him to seek out Margeaux after he had come home to find Caron buried and laughing beneath a two-bit radio DJ in their bed. Their marriage had been a dying ruin by that afternoon, but the love that had spawned it had still burned feebly inside him, and so when he'd opened the bedroom door and seen her with her slender model's legs wrapped around a stranger's pasty, bobbing ass, the hurt had come like a slap from his father's savage hand, a stunned, breathless throb that had started behind his breastbone and spread into his guts and temples. It had been all-consuming, fire in his fraying veins, and before the blessed numbness of self-preservation had set in and soothed the mindless, animal pain, he'd known that he would hurt her, too, would return the favor in vicious kind just to see his wounded misery reflected in her eyes.

And so he had bedded Margeaux, her best friend, had bedded her and moved her into the home he'd shared with Caron. He'd fucked her in their bed and on their sheets, and he'd taken a grim, savage pleasure in the deed as he'd imagined Caron's humiliated fury at the thought that her best friend had usurped her life. He'd planned it as mere revenge, a simple conquest that would last but a few months before his hurt and anger were satisfied, but love had caught him unawares, had slipped in behind the lust and the manic need to feel another move against him in the middle of the night, the brush of a sleep-cool hand against his hip. He had spent years creating a place for himself in her life and a place for her in his, and before it had collapsed beneath the weight of indifference and too many unspoken hurts and too much time apart, he had thought he was home.

Then she had been gone, and with her had gone his last chance for love, or so he had thought as he'd tried to lose himself in the thronging streets of his beloved city. He'd been tired and worn thin, and he'd felt every ounce of his forty-one years, with crows' feet in the corners of his eyes and grooves in the corners of his mouth and without the narcotic euphoria of cocaine to bear him up. He'd been old and alone and used up, stripped of his glamor and just looking for a place to hide from the failures that nipped at his heels like hounds running a hare to ground. He had walked down the street that fateful September day because his feet had led him there.

He hadn't planned to love Calliope any more than he had planned to love Margeaux. He had simply wanted her, wanted to touch and taste her. He'd wanted to know if her hair smelled of autumn rain and burning leaves, and if her hand would be cool and light against the base of his cock when she sucked him off. He'd wanted to know if she cried when she came or if her mouth would open in a soundless scream while he rode her with one hand on her tit and the other tangled in her hair. He'd wanted to know if she would smile at him while they fucked, or if she would lie there, splay-legged and glassy-eyed and mewling; if she would yowl, eyes screwed shut and face grotesquely contorted. He'd wanted to know if she talked during sex, and if she would dig her nails into his back and leave stinging crescents in the flesh of his ass. Nothing else. Just the raw animal want of her.

Something kinder had slipped in not long after that first encounter, soft and languid and wondering. Not love, not then; at least, he hadn't thought so. Curiosity, perhaps, a desire to see what lay behind her wickedly-mischievous eyes and the laconic, feral sensuality of her swaying hips. It was her beauty that had snared him, her pale skin and the polished-copper fire of her hair, but it was the rest of her that had held him in thrall--her easy sex appeal and her sense of whimsy and the quickness with which she laughed and the avid intensity with which she listened. Her quiet steadiness had appealed to him after the exhausting tumult of Margeaux and the mercurial fury of Caron. She had been safe, and he had found himself anticipating the simple, warm pleasure of her company or her voice on the line.

That wasn't to say that his lust had abated; indeed, increased familiarity had only whetted his baser appetites. While his ears had listened to her voice recount an adventure of her youth or the madcap events of a faculty meeting gone off the rails, his licentious mind had pondered what she would sound like if he seized her by one fine-boned wrist, dragged her across the flimsy table that separated them, and raised her chaste teacher's skirt to sink himself between her roughly-parted thighs. Desire had smoldered, acrid, tickling smoke in the back of his throat, and sometimes, only the steadily-dwindling anchor of his cigarette had kept him in his seat. It had merely been tempered by a bewildered appreciation for the rest of her, and he'd soon discovered that he wanted to share a meal with her as much as he'd wanted to share her bed.

Love had come later, steeped in the ink of her letters, those gentle, irreverent, conspiratorial bits of herself that she'd given to him. It had been America reduced to eight-by-ten stationery, New York between his fingers, and yet he'd found honesty and a mesmerizing grace in the loops and whorls of her penstrokes. With neither breasts nor swaying hips to distract him with salacious promises of sweat-salted skin in the humid dark, he had discovered the unvarnished whole of her, the meat and gristle of the soul beneath that milky skin, and he'd found it wondrous and exhilarating. She'd brought him peace and comfort with her stubborn, indefatigable spirit, and he'd longed for more of it, more of her.

And against all reason, she had agreed to dance.

But damned if the plaintive voice inside his head hadn't been right. He had chosen the absolute worst time to slip into love's giddy, uncertain waltz again. The freewheeling euphoria of infatuation needed nothing but to feed upon itself until it was spent and naught remained but a smile and vague promises to call and rueful memories, but love required greater sustenance. It needed time and patience and memories of more than a stolen weekend in a flat and a few rounds of feverish coupling in cool silk sheets. It needed slow kisses and morning-breath kisses filmy with coffee and old toothpaste and leisurely strolls through the park on breezy autumn days. It needed interlaced fingers and shared gelatos and the comforting press of cashmere sweaters against tear-stained cheeks. It needed a reassuring embrace after a rotten day and whispered endearments sent like blessings through the bathroom door after an even rougher night. It needed tests to keep it strong in the face of adversity and tenderness to keep it sweet. It needed the constant, meticulous care of a bonsai gardener.

He could not give it. Not then, with the unfinished record looming over him like incipient failure and the endless parade of promotion and touring that would surely follow if the child of six men ever drew breath. Time would be a luxury, a remembered sweet dream that he could never quite recapture. Morning radio interviews and afternoon magazine interviews and rehearsals and warm-up gigs and the tour proper, the rumbling monolith that would require every ounce of his concentration and leave him with just enough energy to drink his way through an afterparty with a few friends and an endless stream of hangers-on and fall into a timeshare bed in an expensive hotel. The leviathan of Rammstein was waking from its deep and dreamless slumber, and it was eager to slough the weight of sleep, unfurl its wings, and fly, to spiral towards the heavens and cast its burning, benevolent shadow over the sea. There would be no time for the courtship she deserved, his cunning woodcut witch with the dancing eyes and the crown of fire. For the next few years, she would be lucky to get a harried, late-night phone call and a brief visit in a swank hotel room that smelled of dead air and cheap soap. She would have to tend a garden but recently planted and sustain it with snatches of blurry conversation in the middle of the night and impersonal gifts wrapped and mailed by a runner. It would be hard and lonely and unfair even at the best of times, and no matter how carefully he trod or how good his intentions, he would bruise her. It was the immutable, unkind nature of the beast.

And how will it be when times are not their best? the unwelcome voice of his father had prodded. How will it be when you're a week into the tour and bored and lonely and too wired too sleep, so you choose one of the naive, young groupies who flutter around you like new butterflies and take her to bed, ride her as you have so recently ridden your precious lady of the wood? How will it be when she realizes that you've been fucking as you please while she lies in her good Papist's bed and comforts herself with the pillow?

He'd shifted uncomfortably in the hot water and distracted himself from that unhappy line of thought by kneading his aching knee, which had burned like a banked coal beneath the skin. It wasn't a thought he'd much wanted to consider in the congenial privacy of his bathroom, with Calliope bustling cheerily in the nearby kitchen. He could hear the occasional clink and scrape of crockery and cutlery and the muted slap of her feet on the kitchen floor. They had been soothing sounds of quiet domesticity, and they'd done as much to relax his tense, aching muscles as the hot water sloshing and lapping at his pruning skin. He'd wanted to focus on them instead, let himself go slack and boneless in the water, but the wretched question and its attendant images had persisted.

Loathsome as the voice was to him, it had had a point. Touring offered myriad temptations, and try as he might, he wouldn't be able to resist them for long. Sooner or later, the need to fill the empty space inside a charmless hotel room would trump his devotion and he would succumb, would reach for a woman with a welcoming smile and eager lips. He would take no joy in it, this selfish treachery; it would be an autonomic act of grim necessity, one that would keep him going until the plane touched down in the next city and the next night's work. It would be little more than assisted masturbation, as loveless as rutting into a sex doll and scarcely more satisfying.

He'd believed in monogamy once upon a time as a lofty ideal to which men should aspire, though he'd never been very successful in its practice. He'd meant it when he'd pledged fidelity to Caron on that bluff in Montauck, meant it with the unwavering certainty of a child, and for a while, when times had been good and love had been unchallenged by adversity, he had held to his promise. Even after his dalliance with coke had become a bloody, raw-nosed addiction, he had tried, but then Caron had grown angry and impatient with his mood swings and his imperfection and thrown herself into the Soho night scene, left him to the predations of loneliness and confusion and the familiar shade of abandonment, and he had faltered. The Mutter tour had only made things worse, and as the long stretches of separation had carved fault lines into their marriage, he'd fucked groupies for spite. muffling Caron's increasingly-strident criticisms with their cries.

He'd abandoned monogamy for a lost cause, then, and foresworn marriage as an archaic ritual in which he had no interest. He'd been very frank with subsequent paramours about his proclivities, had sat them down soon after the first bedding and discussed the subject over wine. Those who couldn't handle the facts of touring life were given the chance to bow out before too much heart was invested, and those who chose to stay were offered assurances to make things as painless as possible. He'd had such a discussion with Margeaux, and he'd intended to have one with Calliope as soon as they'd settled into the flat, but Christmas bonhomie and the holiday whirlwind had engulfed him, and there had been little time for grave discussions of their nascent sexual dynamic.

That didn't stop you from fucking her every chance you got, now, did it? his father had leered.

No, it hadn't, and he'd shifted in the tub, suddenly filled with with guilt. The hour had grown late, indeed. Calliope was no starry-eyed maiden with a head full of impossible dreams, but even hard-bitten pragmatists could be hurt. She had yet to declare her love for him, to cry out while he rode her beneath the tangled sheets and her clasping heels dug purple crescents into his ass, but there had been no doubt that she cared for him. Her fondness had been evident in her laughing eyes and her enthusiastic greeting and the protective tenderness in which she often enveloped him. She loved to wrap her arms around him and sway to the music in her head and heart and laugh into the fabric of his sweaters or stretch her neck and balance on her tiny toes and pass her merry laughter into his mouth like smoke. She'd enjoyed him and their time together, and she had trusted him with her fragile nakedness and the helpless vulnerability of need and desire. He had seen her spread and open and had even caught a fleeting glimpse of her shamed surprise at the virulence of her want as she'd risen and writhed beneath him with a gabble of words on her pleading lips. If it was not yet lovemaking, then neither was it the harmless rutting of a one-night stand. It had weight, and weight could crush if it were handled carelessly.

He could hurt her now. Just how much, he hadn't known, but it had worried him. Calliope wasn't a soppy romantic who thought love existed in every sinuous roll of hip and every wet-mouthed kiss, but she was a Roman Catholic, or had been one, at least, and despite her professed worldliness, some roots ran deep. Even if she had left the Church and its doctrine behind, its dogma had a habit of embedding itself into the soul and becoming part of its fabric, as vital to survival as blood or air. Calliope might well believe in reproductive freedom and unprotected sex, but she might also believe in monogamy, in sex as a sacrament when love was involved, and oh, Christ, what would he do then?

He had hissed through clenched teeth and slopped water onto his face. The bathroom door had been ajar, and through the soporific haze of steam, he had caught flashes of white skin and red hair and heard her humming with tuneless contentment. Happiness, which had been sorely lacking in this cold bachelor's flat, and he'd wondered how long it would last once she learned that he wanted to bed other women. How quickly would the warmth in her eyes and lips fade, the fondness harden into wounded contempt?

You wouldn't be in this mess if you hadn't been too busy getting your rocks off, Caron had pointed out smugly, and he'd smothered the unbecoming urge to throttle her.

He'd still been unsettled by the time he'd emerged from the bathroom on a cloud of steam and aftershave, wrapped in a thick, black terrycloth bathrobe. He'd padded into the kitchen on bare feet and slipped into a chair at the kitchen table, where he'd watched Calliope as she'd wiped breadcrumbs from the counter with a wadded dishtowel. An errant copper curl had hung in her face, and it had swayed as she'd moved the towel in ever-widening circles. He'd watched the hurried orbit of her arm around the countertop and the languid, equine stretch of her spine as she worked, and his tongue had prickled and throbbed with the need for a cigarette.

Calliope had turned her head to look at him, and the muscles of her shoulder had bunched and flexed as she'd continued to clean the counter. "Ha!" she'd barked, and grinned at him.

"What?" Mystified and warily amused.

"Very Hugh Hefner," she'd replied, and huffed plosive laughter.

"God, I hope not. The man is eighty." He'd folded his hands to keep them from flying to his face in search of jowls, wattles, and wrinkles.

"And still pulling pussy like a goddamned cat rancher."

"Are you saying you'd sleep with Hugh Hefner?"

She'd snorted and given the counter an emphatic thwap with the towel. "I have more love for myself than to whittle a gnarled old root like that. He might be urbane and more articulate than the average lech, but he's a lech all the same, screwing brainless young women with more tits than sense."

"I doubt he has to twist their arms," he'd countered.

"The only arm he twists is his own when he reaches for his Amex Black."

"The women he beds aren't starving waifs without a choice from some third-world slum. They have the choice to refuse."

"Why do that when you can get a Cartier diamond for twenty minutes on your knees?"

"He isn't the first man to wish he could have his choice of beautiful, young women. It's encoded in our DNA to want the healthiest, most attractive mates. He's just one of the few men who possesses the resources to make the fantasy a reality."

She'd stopped scrubbing the counter and stood with a grimace. "In other words, you would if you could." She'd sidled to the sink and shaken the towel over it, and crumbs had fallen into the basin like scree.

He'd shrugged. "I have done," he'd admitted carefully. "Some women are drawn to fame. They offered themselves freely, and I indulged. No one was hurt, and both of us got what we needed."

She'd turned, then, and leaned against the counter. "So, sex is nothing more than a commodity?" Her movements had been loose as she'd straightened the wrinkled towel and folded it into a neat square, but her eyes had been sharp.

Be careful you don't step on a landmine, Kruspe. "It can be," he'd allowed, "but not always. Should someone turn down the possibility of fantastic sex even though they know there will be no happy morning after?"

She'd rolled her eyes. "If someone has the chance to polish the old knob with some lovely young bit of crumpet, and the other person is willing, then hats off to Larry. I've gone to bed with men because they made my horny a time or two, and I don't regret it, but there's a difference between people having a mutually-satisfying experience and a cosseted old perv treating empty-headed women like onan cups." She'd thrown up her hands. "I can't explain it," she'd said. "There's just something about him that raises my hackles. He swans about like some pickled potentate with three buxom concubines on his withered arms, and there's just such a smug air of entitlement about him that I want to punt him in the nethers and watch his teeth shoot out of his mouth like ad hoc ordinance." She'd dropped her hands, and the square of folded towel had hung from her fingers like a flag of surrender.

"And you think I'm like Hugh Hefner?"

She'd recoiled. "Christ, no! God. If I'd thought you were a sexist pig who got his jollies treating women like blowup dolls, I wouldn't have wasted a minute of my time, let alone slept with you. If you were like him, you would've tried to stick your dick in my mouth the second I opened it." She'd gently set the towel on the counter and closed the distance between them. "Give yourself some credit, eh, Kruspe?" she'd said, and gently stroked his temple. Then, before he could reply, "Do you take spicy mustard on your sandwich? I found some in the fridge."

"That would be wonderful, thank you," he'd answered.

It hadn't take her long to assemble the sandwiches and dole out the stew. and soon, they'd been seated at the small table, legs crossed at the ankles and toes grazing beneath the table. The plush fabric of her mouse slippers had tickled his bare toes, and he'd wiggled them companionably. She'd smiled softly around her spoon and dealt his shin a playful nudge.

"How was the trip?" she'd asked, and dipped a slice of French bread into the stew.

He'd sighed and rolled his shoulders to rid them of lingering tension. "Very nice, but skiing is a sport of younger men."

"That bad?" She'd taken a bite of stew-soaked bread.

"I don't remember it being that exhausting."

She'd scoffed and hurriedly fisted her hand in front of her mouth to block a fine spray of crumbs. "I'm guessing your daughter ran you ragged?"

He'd chuckled fondly. "She always has. I just used to be better at keeping up." He'd taken a bite of his sandwich and wiped the corner of his mouth. "You enjoyed Munich? Aside from your failure to get the recipe for Reisbrei?"

"Are you mocking me, Kruspe?" she'd demanded, but her eyes had been shining, and she'd gently stroked his shin with her slippered feet.

He'd set down his sandwich and raised his hands in surrender. "I wouldn't dream of it."

"Mmm. You underestimate me. I'll get that recipe."

He'd snorted. "Typical American stubbornness."

"Now, now, Richard, don't be coy; call it what you're really thinking."

"Which is?"

A sardonic smile. "Arrogance." She'd taken a bite of her own sandwich, and the crisp crunch of the lettuce had sounded like the severing of a limb.

"That's not the word that sprang to mind," he'd said diplomatically.

She'd studied him from behind her sandwich with cool, feline awareness. "Oh? What word was on the tip of your tongue, then?"

He'd thought for a moment, and a sly grin had spread across her face. "Ambition," he'd said at last. "Yes."

"Uh huh. Besides," she'd said, and set her sandwich down with persnickety care. "I didn't go there just to steal the secret to amazing Reisbrei. It was also a reconnaissance mission just in case I land that Munich fellowship I applied for."

"Have you heard anything?"

"No, and I doubt I will until after the holidays." She'd picked up her spoon and scooped a hunk of beef from her stew. "If I do, I doubt it will be good news."

"Why not?" He'd taken another bite of stew and dabbed at his mouth with his crumpled napkin.

She'd sighed and stirred her cooling stew with the tip of her spoon. "My run-in with the councilman's daughter is bound to pay nasty little dividends. If I'm living in a dreamworld, then the councilman might actually support my decision to teach his precious darling a lesson in the consequences of poor decisions, but it's far more likely that I'm in for a cold dose of reality the second I get back to New York. If I'm lucky, I'll only have to lick Miss Muffet's boots and let her sit the exam at her leisure. If Daddy is a vindictive bastard, I'll either be teaching ENG1102 for the rest of my sad career or looking for a new job."

"That's a rather pessimistic view."

"Try realistic. Education is the first to get cut when the economy tanks. A private university like NYU can weather cuts a little better because they're less reliant on federal grants and can pass costs on to the students, but even they have limits, and if you're going to depend on wealthy alumni to make up for budgetary shortfalls, you can't afford to piss them off. They've turned up their noses at Uncle Sam's handouts, but their hands are so far down the pants of the Wall Street aristocracy that the jizz hits their wrists when the handjob's over. If I've threatened the purse strings, then they won't hesitate to use my bones to appease the gods."

"Couldn't you go elsewhere?"

"It depends. If I turned tail and left before they fired me, then I might land another position elsewhere, but the pay would be abysmal, and there's no guarantee that my new position would survive the next round of cuts. Which are inevitable, by the way." She'd paused to dunk a hunk of bread into her stew and take a bite. She'd chewed thoughtfully. "The next time the Army needs a new tank or ten thousand Kevlar vests, another five thousand teachers will get axed. The ones who survive will get a pay cut and a pat on the ass, and the buckling system will churn out another class of under-educated, over-coddled drones who only want a hot meal, a good fuck, and another season of American Idol.

"Even if I wanted to quit, where would I go? The plum jobs at the state schools are tenured positions, and if I quit an assistant professor's position, it will look like I can't hack it or I'm running from something, and NYU won't exactly break its esteemed neck disabusing potential employers of those notions. Quitting would mean starting over again, and I don't relish the thought of trading in my closet of an office for the strangling confines of a T.A. cubicle shared by four people, three of whom are still listening to music that could remove skin and regaling each other with drunken sexcapades. My office is small, dank, and pitiful, but it's mine. I earned it with too many years of ruining my eyesight on endless pages of incomprehensible drivel and listening to too many petulant, pathetic excuses.

"Even if I hadn't invested it with blood, sweat, and dyspeptic horror, there's the loyalty factor. My parents are alumni, and we all went there. Well, almost all of us. Ciaran was never much for school. It was an ordeal to drag him, sulking and stropping, through high school. We were legacies, the lot of us. We got by on scholarship money and night jobs and ate more rice and ramen than was healthy, and every second weekend, we went home for a decent bed and a meal with nutritional value. It might be a mess of bureaucracy and ass-kissing, but it's a familiar mess, and vaguely comforting, like home fries and gravy on Sunday morning or your brothers squabbling and wrestling in the living room while your father tries to read the paper. Even shit tastes better when it's your own, I guess."

"Speaking of your family, how are they?"

"Okay, I guess." She'd shrugged and hunched over her half-empty bowl. "I Skyped with my sisters on Christmas Eve and talked to my parents on Christmas Day. It's strange, seeing your family squashed into a computer screen. Like watching a bad made-for-TV movie." She'd grimaced and stirred the congealing remains of her stew. "At least the laptop has a volume control. My nieces and nephews are ginger-headed howler monkeys in pants."

He'd been torn between the urge to laugh and the impulse to apologize, but neither had seemed appropriate, and so he'd slid his hand across the table and rested it on the spar of her wrist.

"Don't look so bruised," she'd chided gently. "I miss them, but I knew the Christmas I was choosing when I agreed to come to Berlin. How can I complain when I got genuine marzipan out of the deal?"

She'd meant it as light jest, but it had stung. It had reminded him too much of Caron's arsenic-and-honey barbs when she'd exhausted her anger and resorted to weary passive aggression. He'd withdrawn his hand and pushed back his chair with a ponderous scrape, and then he'd risen and shuffled to the safety of the counter, where he'd rummaged in the pockets of his jeans for the crumpled pack of cigarettes he'd kept there.

No fool, his Calliope who had not been his then, and she had sensed his sudden shift in mood. She'd set down her spoon and wiped her mouth, and then she'd placed her palms on the edge of the table as though to push back her own chair. A meek squeak from the chair, and then she'd stopped. "Have I said something?" she'd asked.

He'd shaken his head and reached up to turn on the hood fan over the stove. He'd been bone-tired, and he hadn't known how to explain that he'd heard the whisper of restless spirits in her voice. "It's fine," he'd said. His fingers had found the switch, and the fan had roared into sudden, asthmatic life.

"Ah." She'd pursed her lips in helpless consternation and fiddled ineffectually with her spoon. She'd turned the handle from flat to edge and back again, and the shallow bowl of the spoon proper had splattered cold stew over the bowl's sides. She'd watched him retrieve a cigarette from the squashed pack, light it, and then take a drag, and when the released smoke had clouded his eyes, she'd dipped her head and taken a desperate bite of cold stew.

He'd badly wanted to put her at ease, but it had been easier to draw in smoke than to spit out words, and so he'd smoked in silence, tilting his head back and blowing the smoke toward the hood fan to keep it away from her. When no words had come to break the awkward silence, she had shifted in her chair and cleared her throat and studied the gloppy contents of her bowl. She'd alternated between stirring it and taking dainty nibbles from the edge of her spoon, a spooked doe stretching to crop the sweet grasses at the edge of a meadow. The wary grace of an animal who scents ozone and cordite on the wind, and he'd wondered just how tense and unhappy the days and months after her unexpected brother's birth had been.

Not abused, he'd thought as soothing, bitter smoke had filled his lungs. She doesn't flinch at a raised hand or a sudden noise, and she doesn't quail at a raised voice. Not beaten, and not belittled, either; she's too strong for that, too sunny and convinced of her rightness and of the world's ultimate goodness. But she's heard angry shouts in the night and endured stony silences in the morning, and she's learned to walk in the spaces between them.

Neither of them had spoken. He'd smoked his cigarette and taken solace in the languid ritual of it, and she'd slurped cold stew and scraped the side of her bowl with her spoon. When all he could taste was the cloying astringence of filter paper and the baked-pavement grittiness of burnt tobacco, he'd removed the butt from his lips and snuffed it with a practiced twist of his thumb and forefinger. He'd stubbed them out against counters and walls in the early days of his cherished disgusting habit, when he'd still been wont to cough and sputter and hold the cigarette inexpertly between two smooth fingers. He still did most of the time; it was polite custom. But the calluses he'd developed by dint of playing until the skin of his fingertips had broken and bled upon the strings had made him impervious to the ember's dying bite, and so, when he was bored or restless, he would pinch the glowing tip between his fingertips and feel it die, the soft exhalation and hiss of a snuffed flame.

It had been a stupid and pedestrian form of magic, the only one he could manage at that moment, and once the life between his fingers had pulsed and sputtered and died, he'd let it roll into his palm and carried it to the sink, where he'd run it beneath the tap to extinguish the last hope of a sudden rekindling in the bottom of the garbage can. He'd tossed the soggy butt into the trash, and then he'd pushed his hands beneath the tap and let lukewarm water wash over them.

He'd dried them on the towel she'd left on the counter and then he'd turned off the tap and moved to stand behind her. She'd tensed at his approach, and the spoon had hovered uncertainly before her parted lips. He'd reached out and traced a finger over her nape, and he'd felt her tremble beneath his fingertip, little more than a ripple of warm skin.

His hand had snaked around her neck to cup her throat, and he'd felt it bob as she'd swallowed, light and brief as the brush of a feather against his palm. He'd opened his hand and lowered it until his fingertips had disappeared beneath the fabric of her blouse, and then he'd splayed his hand until they had rested just above the swell of her left breast. He could feel her heartbeat beneath the skin, strong and steady. Warmth. Life. The lulling comfort of rhythm. He'd stretched his fingers and relished the easy tension of the movement. Blood had rushed into his fingers, and his palm had filled with a pleasant ache. He'd pressed his palm more firmly against her chest and closed his eyes, had imagined he could hear the rush of her blood in his ears.

"It really is fine, Calliope, he'd murmured, eyes still closed as her heartbeat had pulsed beneath his hand. "I am sorry that this holiday has been so...unsatisfying for you."

An undignified splutter, a jingling clatter, and then she had surged and twisted beneath his hand. The yielding, sweet flesh of a breast had been replaced by the less forgiving flesh of her side and the hard curve of her ribcage. When he'd opened his eyes, she'd been staring at him with such an expression of furious incredulity that he'd been tempted to retreat.

"What in the screaming blue hell are you talking about?" she'd demanded.

He'd blinked and smothered the urge to fidget. "You should not have been left alone during Christmas."

This statement had done nothing to assuage her befuddlement. Indeed, it had only increased. Her brow had knitted in thunderous confusion, and she'd twisted even further in her chair. "What were you supposed to do? Teleport? Make like Solomon and slice yourself in two to satisfy both of us?"

He had retreated, then, discomfited. He'd withdrawn his hand and quietly mourned the loss of her warmth, and then he'd reclaimed his seat at the table. "I wanted you to have a wonderful time."

"And I did."

"Alone? You should have more than the memory of marzipan to show for this holiday."

Her mouth had worked. "I-wh-you can't be serious," she'd managed. "Do you really not believe I know how to put on big girl panties?"

He'd opened his mouth to reply, but before he could, she'd continued. "And even if they'd followed my socks into the dryer void, what makes you think marzipan is all I'm getting from this?"

"You said-"

"It was a joke. One I thought would make you happy."

He'd taken a deep breath and collected his spinning, fragile thoughts. "There are many ghosts here, Calliope, and not all of them are in this flat." He'd shifted, unsure of how much to reveal of either his weaknesses or his failed marriage. "I am not a perfect man by any stretch of the imagination. I've made many mistakes, some of them terrible, and a few that were perhaps unforgivable. But...too many times, I've thought an argument resolved or a minor sin forgiven, only to have it thrown in my face later."

She'd boggled at him in silence for several moments, and then she'd heaved a sigh and scrubbed her disbelieving face with her palms. "Richard Kruspe, do I look like a shrinking violet incapable of speaking her mind or a duplicitous vixen biding her time until she collects enough petty hurts to hurl into your face like shrapnel at the earliest convenience?" Her voice had been calm, but her eyes had glinted with the promise of indignation.

"A shrinking violet? Hardly." He'd leaned back in his chair and studied her. "No, meine Hexe, you are ivy, a climbing vine, strong and tenacious."

"But?"

"But small hurts have a way of accumulating until they can no longer be endured."

"Death by a thousand cuts," she'd supplied.

"Exactly." He'd steepled his fingers before his chin. "You are no shrinking violet, but you are...a diplomat, and this relationship is new," he'd said carefully.

Her eyes had narrowed, and she'd picked up her spoon and idly twirled it in the hardening muck of her stew. "In other words, you think I'm going to blow smoke up your ass to secure my position, and once I do, I'll unload every bit of emotional ordinance on you the second we have a fight." Blunt and dispassionate, though he'd sensed a prickle of hurt beneath her calm exterior.

Oh, Kruspe, I think you've stepped in it now, Caron had gloated inside his head, and taken an exultant drag on a cigarette he had very much wished he could share.

"It's happened before." He'd suddenly felt very exposed in his bathrobe and bare feet, and he'd cinched the robe's belt more tightly around his waist. He'd begun to tap a nervous staccato on the table.

She'd lowered her spoon to the lip of her bowl, pushed the latter away from her, and slowly folded her arms across the table. "Have I done anything to make you think I'm luring you into an ambush?"

"Absolutely not." And that's why I'm afraid. It's too calm, too sweet. It doesn't hurt, and if I get comfortable with this, then it's going to blow up in my face.

She'd shifted, and fabric mice had nibbled his toes in remonstrance. "I know this isn't your first dance, and it's certainly not mine, but I won't be held responsible for other people's sins. I've played that game before, and it's exhausting."

"You've never been wary after a bad relationship?" he'd countered

"Of course I have. Bad relationships are how we figure out just who we want. I've gone on enough boring, lonely dates with self-absorbed stockbrokers too in love with their Blackberries to know I don't want a Wall Street prince. And if a guy spends more time staring at my tits than at my mouth, the date ends. But I'm not going to summarily judge a guy with a soul patch just because the last guy with a soul patch was a douchebag. It's not fair."

"I'm not judging you," he'd insisted. He'd curled his tapping hand into a fist and rapped the table, and his other hand had scrubbed at his nape. "But people are on their best behavior in the early stages of the game, and they're inclined to keep quiet about things that bother them until a small annoyance has festered and spread into a larger issue. I just-I'm likely going to be gone for long stretches of time once the record is finished and the promotion and touring starts, and I don't want to be telling you I miss you from Moscow and have you remind me of the Christmas I left you alone in Berlin."

Typical Richard, Caron had cackled gleefully. You fall in love and sabotage it before it starts by lobbing an insecurity grenade into her unsuspecting face. Bravo. She'd offered him a feline grin and stretched languidly atop a four-poster bed outfitted in satin sheets.

Calliope had picked up her bowl and plate of half-eaten sandwich and risen without a word. She'd slid the sandwich into the trash and placed the dishes in the sink, and then she'd retrieved the electric kettle from a cupboard and filled it with water. He'd watched her, mouth gone dry and fingers twitchy with adrenaline, and willed her to speak, but she'd only set the kettle on the stove and ignited the burner and opened another cupboard, from which she'd retrieved a tin of tea.

"Would you like a cup of cocoa or coffee?"

Only if it comes with three fingers of brandy. "No, thank you."

She'd returned to the table and sat down. "I haven't the foggiest idea how this dating a successful musician gig works-," she'd admitted. "-but I know goddamned good and well how I work. I might not tell you that the shirt you're wearing looks like my grandmother's couch, or that your cigarettes smell like burning newsprint, and I might surreptitiously crack a window after cabbage night, but I'm not going to jerk you around and tell you that something's over when it isn't. If I say it's done for me, then it's done. If you hurt me, then I'm going to say so. I might not do it in public or emphasize the point with a champagne bottle to the head, but I will tell you, and not three months later. I'm not some virtuous Victorian waif who suffers nobly for the greater good, and demure passivity isn't my style. The sex is good--really, really, really good--but not so good that I'm just going to close my mouth and open my legs." A flicker of contempt, and she'd idly scratched her forearm with light, airy rakes of her nails.

"So you're not disappointed at the holiday?"

"I missed you. It was lonely and boring, and I wish it had been livelier, but neither one of us wanted me there, and there was no point in forcing a square peg into an invisible hole. We don't even know if I fit into your life yet, let alone where, and both of us would have been miserable trying to pretend we weren't. Family is family, and I'm a grown woman who knows what that means." She'd smiled. "For an atheist, you carry a lot of self-inflicted guilt." She'd risen once more and padded to the stove to loom over the kettle.

"Besides," she'd said as the kettle had begun to whine, "My family spent most of the time pumping me for information about you." She'd waited until the air had filled with a petulant toddler's cry, and then she'd lifted the kettle off the stove, set it aside, and turned off the burner.

"Do I want to know?"

"It was pretty harmless." She'd plucked a mug from the pegboard mounted on the backsplash behind the sink. "'Are you having a good time, how is Germany, has he taken you to the Berlin Philharmonic? Has he offered you ecstasy or tried to interest you in a coke-fueled orgy?'"

"God."

"You'll have to forgive my mother. The only experience she has with music made after Grace Slick got bombed and took a header off a Hamburg concert stage after reminding the audience just who won the war is what she sees on Behind the Music specials." She'd cocked her head. "She also wanted to know if you had such an interest in phalluses because of an underlying interest in fertility rites or because you're just men enamored of the fact."

"What?" He'd emitted an incredulous bark of laughter.

She'd shrugged as she'd spooned an alarming amount of sugar into the mug and reached for the tea tin. "The result of more injudicious Googling, I suspect. She was banging on about those silver pants of yours and a custard-spewing dildo. I told her I didn't know anything about it." Tea had followed the sugar, and she had reached for the kettle.

"I take it she wasn't a fan."

Another shrug as she'd poured boiling water into the mug. "She's a Classics professor. She's used to unconventional displays of sexuality and celebrations of masculinity and femininity. I think it's her way of asking if you're kinky. I'm more interested in the custard-spewing dildo."

He coughed and arranged the bathrobe more tightly around himself. "It was for a song of ours called 'Bueck Dich."

An appreciative snort from Calliope. "Lovely."

"It was a bit of provocative fun. Till stuffed a dildo into his pants and hooked it to a pump that sprayed water or custard onto the crowd. After he simulated sex with Flake-" Another snort from Calliope. "-he'd pretend to ejaculate over the crowd. We thought it was raunchy art, but the American authorities in Worcester, Massachusetts, disagreed and arrested Till and Flake on obscenity charges."

"Oh, I bet Flake was popular on the old cellblock."

"They confiscated his glasses and refused him a blanket and put him in a holding cell with angry gang members and loud drunks. He's blind without his glasses. If Till hadn't been with him, it could have ended badly."

"So what did happen?"

"The management paid bail and the fine levied for the obscenity charge, and we left, but it left a bad taste in Flake's mouth, and he has no great love for America or its politics."

"Well, if his first brush with its bureaucracy was from a drunk tank in the heart of Puritan country, I can hardly blame him."

"We appealed the fine on the grounds of artistic expression, but it was denied. Ended up costing us far more than if we'd just paid the damn fine."

"Why stage a performance like that in stuffy Worcester, Massachusetts in the first place?" She'd poured another splash of hot water into her mug and carried it to the table.

"We took your country's stated belief in the right to free expression at face value. Our mistake."

She'd sat, careful not to slosh the contents of the mug. "Touche," she'd said, and blown the steam from the surface of her tea. "Hypocrisy seems to be yet another of our favorite national pastimes. When prudery meets free expression, prudery wins more often than not."

"I hope your mother isn't disappointed that it wasn't a fertility rite."

"She's an academic. She'd argue it was, that it was the masculine subconscious coming out to play."

"I thought she taught mythology."

"She does, but teachers dabble, you know. Minds never quite shut off. It's why I find myself doing crossword puzzles in the middle of the night or doing sudoku on the toilet." She'd blinked and taken a sip of tea. "Sorry. I guess that wasn't information you needed."

"No, but it makes me wonder just what you'd say if I got you drunk."

She'd groaned. "Probably like my dotty Aunt Lorna. She asked if you were cut, by the way."

"As in fit?"

"As in circumcised." She'd blushed a most fetching rose and hidden behind her steaming mug.

"Oh."

"I told you she was dotty. She kept going on about this Swiss guy she bedded in 1970. Far more detail than I wanted or needed. Anyway, I'd be a dreadful drunk. I tried it twice in college. The first time, I had three beers and a shot and ended up sobbing on the sidewalk behind the club with puke on my shoes and caked in my hair. The puke in my hair was mine; the gack on my shoes, I'm still not sure. The second time, I apparently convinced myself I was a ballerina and ended up doing wobbly pirouettes around the bar until I bumped a table full of beer and upset them all. First and only time I've been booted out of an establishment. I don't remember it, but I do remember the ensuing hangover, and the shame and three hours yakking into a tub that reeked of Comet was enough to show me the error of my ways. After that, I swore that two beers or glasses of wine was my limit. I've stuck to it for the most part. So if you insist on getting me plastered, promise me you won't let me lose my dignity on the floor somewhere." She'd been smiling, but her eyes had been oddly bruised.

He'd reached out and clasped her hand. "Of course, Calliope. You would always be safe with me." He'd brought her hand to his lips and brushed them across her knuckles.

Her smile had brightened, become real. "I know. Besides, it's the least you can do after I shielded yours from my nosy, lecherous aunt."

"I am forever in your debt."

"Be careful, Kruspe. I might just have to collect," she'd replied, and waggled her eyebrows saucily at him.

And just like that, he'd been at ease again, wrapped in the warmth of home. "I look forward to it."

"Oh, I bet you do." Soft and full of lazy seduction. He'd considered hauling her across the table and into a possessive kiss, but his limbs had been too heavy with comfort and bruised fatigue, and even if they hadn't been, Calliope had torn his tentative plan to tatters by standing suddenly.

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