Work Text:
The grinder whines for eleven seconds, reducing a Rwanda Nyamasheke to powder. A single-origin, its beans, grown in volcanic soil at eighteen hundred meters, produce a cup that, even roasted dark, stains the tongue with overripe cherry and dark chocolate. Hakan finds the taste to be a bit overwhelming but will never complain: the tongue of the woman who craves it shall never be denied what he makes with great skill and care.
He spoons the grounds into a copper cezve slender as a piccolo, adds water cold enough to make the metal sweat, and stirs once with a silver demitasse spoon his mother had stolen from a sultan. The flame beneath catches with a gasp.
Through the open doorway to their half-bath, Aviva is standing before the fogged mirror in a slip of peach silk, dabbing something viscous onto her cheekbones with the pads of her ring fingers. Tap tap tap. Essence, serum, an occlusive layer that seals the moisture in and makes her face gleam like the inside of a shell. She bends toward her reflection, pursing her lips, and Hakan senses the descent of his canines half a millimeter before he wills them back. Morning wood, for his kind, is not a metaphor.
The cezve mutters. Hakan lifts it off the heat just as the foam threatens to summit, divides the köpük between two cups, then returns the pot to the flame. The second boil brings the sludge up slow, a dark tide. The third boil he lets nearly spill before snatching it away. Turkish coffee does not respect hesitation.
Aviva floats into the kitchen trailing a scent that hooks him at the base of the skull—rice water fermented to a milky sweetness, the candied-bitter kiss of neroli, and beneath those, an undeniable aroma that belongs only to the dip of her collarbone at quarter to seven in the morning. Her hair, unbound, swings heavy as a bell rope. Her clavicles hold shadows deep enough to hide a thumb. Hakan sets her cup on a saucer painted with pentacles and places beside it a single square of dark chocolate studded with candied ginger.
She lifts her cup and drinks immediately—too hot for a human tongue, but Aviva has long since stopped being a useful benchmark for human tolerances. The liquid scalds her mouth and she exhales through her teeth. Hakan can't help tracking the small muscle flexing along her jaw. The heat hits her palate and her pulse kicks up in answer, a drumroll only he can hear, the autonomic anticipation of teeth where there is only coffee. She lowers the cup and her gaze catches his above the rim, steady and unblinking.
"You're not drinking," she remarks.
Hakan has no intention of lifting his own cup, at least not at this very moment. "My appetite for coffee is rather lacking this morning."
"Don't."
"Don't what."
"Don't turn a cup of coffee into foreplay. It's not even seven yet."
Hakan stands; the chair scrapes back. He crosses the kitchen in two strides and brackets Aviva against the counter, his hands on either side of her hips gripping the marble lip. Aviva does not startle. She tilts her chin upward to accommodate their height difference; the column of her throat lengthens in turn.
"You haven't eaten breakfast," Hakan whispers. His mouth is so close to her skin, his head spins at the thoughts that are rising—thoughts of what he yearns to do. To take.
"I'm holding out for a better offer."
"You'll need your strength, my love."
"Then offer something worth my strength."
A pause. Her carotid drums against the silence. Hakan's fangs ache with the nearness of her.
"Thirty seconds," he says, "then you finish your chocolate, and I do the dishes."
"Twenty seconds. And you're doing the dishes today and tomorrow. Aaand you give me another chocolate."
He laughs, a dry sound scraped from a throat that has forgotten how to produce any other kind, and lowers his mouth to the seam where her jaw meets her throat. Her skin gives under the pressure of his lips before his teeth even breach the surface. Then the puncture arrives: two neat points, a sharp bright note of pain that Aviva receives with a sharper inhale and then a long, slow sigh, her free hand rising to cradle the back of his skull.
His favorite meal, beyond the iron-sweetness of her blood, tastes of burnt honey and her beloved coffee. Two years of exclusive access has sharpened his palate to her fluctuations. On days she cries, her blood runs saltier and thinner, a quick bright wine. When she laughs, a giddy effervescence fizzes against his teeth like champagne bubbles popping on the tongue. When she has napped in the afternoon, her blood turns slow and drowsy and so saturated with sugar Hakan can almost hear his own long-dead pulse attempt an answering beat.
Aviva has not yet cried today. She has not laughed, either. She is somewhere in the temperate middle, and her blood is just as balanced. It is warm and pleasant, humming with the breakfast she has not yet eaten and the deal she strikes twice a week, a deal he will always honor faithfully.