[WLW] Countess Nicolette de Vaudrey

Half past ten, and the drawing room is full.

Twenty-odd people, which is a normal Tuesday in this house. Three of them vampires. Two fires going. The windows have been shut since eight and the room has gone thick and warm and slightly airless, which is how the Countess likes it, and which everyone else endures without comment.

She is at the far end of it. She has been at the far end all evening.

You have learned, in five weeks, that this is deliberate — that Nicolette de Vaudrey puts herself at the other end of a room and then watches what you do with the distance. Tonight she is standing at the mantel with a ledger open on the shelf beside her and two men and a solicitor's clerk around her, and she is not looking at you. Black silk. Garnet comb. The ruby ring turning slowly against her thumb. She has laughed twice all evening, both times at something said by someone else.

You are by the second fire, and you are alone, and you have been alone for forty minutes.

This is the part nobody warned you about. Not the bites. The bites are fine. The part where you are twenty years old in a dress that cost more than your father's whole year, holding a glass you have watched other people hold so you can copy them, in a room where everyone knows everyone and has for a decade, and there is no one to stand next to.

You have said four words since dinner. All four were "thank you."

And across the room, Margot Devereux has been watching you the whole time.

She comes over at a quarter to eleven, and she does it beautifully.

Ivory silk. Ash-blonde hair down her back, pinned only at one temple. The small dark mole beside her mouth that you catch yourself looking at. She is the best-dressed woman in the room after the Countess, and she knows it, and she is carrying a glass of the Countess's good burgundy, and she has clearly had two.

She stops beside you at the fire like it's an accident. Looks into the flames. Says nothing for a moment, which is somehow worse than talking.

Then she turns her head and smiles, and it is warm, and it is real, and that is the trap.

"There you are," she says. "Standing on your own like a lost glove. Come and be useful."

She puts her hand flat between your shoulder blades. Not a push. A herding. And she walks you across the room toward a cluster of three by the piano — Lord Ashcombe, red-faced, in love with the Countess, harmless; Lady Carmichael, sixty, appalling, interested in everyone; and a young man whose name you have already forgotten.

"Lady Carmichael," Margot says, and her hand is still on your back. "This is the new one."

The new one.

Lady Carmichael turns and looks at you the way you look at a piece of furniture that has been moved. Margot keeps her hand where it is, warm through the silk, and begins.

It takes eleven minutes and she never raises her voice once.

She tells them where you're from — "Whitechapel, isn't it, darling? You must forgive me if I've got it wrong" — and when you correct her, gently, she says, "There, you see. I said it wrong," and repeats it wrong again in front of them so that they hear it in her accent and not yours.

She tells them your father was a carter. She is right. She tells them your mother cried when you signed the contract. She is right about that too, which you only told Nell, which means Nell told Iris, which means Margot knows.

"She was the youngest of six," Margot says to Lady Carmichael, confidingly, and you are standing right there. "Can you imagine the mother's face. One of yours, gone to be bitten, in Mayfair."

"Disgraceful," Lady Carmichael says.

"Isn't it," says Margot, delighted, and takes a sip.

She adjusts you while she talks. This is the thing. She has her fingers on you the entire time — a knuckle under your chin to lift it, two fingers on your shoulder to turn you half an inch, a flat palm down your spine when you start to slump. It is fussing. It is also, unmistakably, handling.

At one point you say something — a whole sentence, about the fire, about how you'd never seen a house with two — and Margot waits until you've finished and then says to Lord Ashcombe, as if you hadn't, "She's finding her feet."

Then she takes your hand.

She does it casually. Reaches over, lifts your hand into the light of the fire, and turns it over, and holds it open on her own palm like a card she is reading.

"Look at that," she says.

All three of them look at that.

Your hand. Short nails. The ridge of old callus at the base of your fingers from three years of a scullery and a mangle. Knuckles gone rough with cold in the winter. It is the plainest thing in the room and it is now the centre of it.

"They'll soften up," Margot says, kindly. "You'll want to wear gloves indoors for the first year. She doesn't mind, but the guests—" a small shrug, a small smile "—the guests notice hands."

She turns your hand over once more, and presses her thumb down into the inside of your wrist, into the tendon, and keeps it there.

And that is when she leans in, close, and says it quietly, just for you, under the noise of the room:

"She'll be bored of you by spring. She always is. It takes about a year to stop being interesting, and then it's just the blood." The thumb digs in. It aches. "And the blood is the only part that lasts. So don't go thinking she looks at you, darling. She doesn't look at people. She tastes them. You're a flavour. A very good one."

She smiles.

"That isn't the same as being wanted."

And across the room, the Countess has stopped mid-sentence.

She was listening to the clerk. She has stopped. The clerk has noticed. Two men have noticed. She is looking down the length of the room at the two of you by the piano — at Margot holding your wrist in front of the fire, thumb in, head bent to yours, saying something only you can hear.

She goes completely still.

Half a second. No breath, no blink. Nobody in the room catches it. Then she closes the ledger.

She crosses the floor without hurrying, and the conversation parts for her the way water does, and she stops at your shoulder, and she does not look at Margot at all.

"Lady Carmichael," she says. "You have had her for a quarter of an hour. I am reclaiming her."

"You've been at that ledger all night," Lady Carmichael says.

"Which is precisely the fault." Nicolette's hand comes out, unhurried, and closes over your wrist — over the place Margot's thumb has been, over the ache, covering it exactly — and she lifts it off Margot's palm and into her own. "Margot. Thank you. You may keep the fire warm."

Margot's smile does not move by a hair. She steps back, and lifts her glass, and says, "Of course, Madame."

And that's all. That's the whole of it. No scene, no raised voice, no one punished. Margot is simply left standing at the piano with a glass of the Countess's wine and nowhere to put her hands.

Nicolette turns you by the wrist and walks you out.

Upstairs, her door shut, she doesn't let go.

She holds your wrist in both hands in the middle of the room and turns it over, and looks at the inside where Margot had been pressing, and there is the faintest pink oval coming up in the skin — a thumbprint, four minutes old, that will be gone by morning and is somehow the most insulting mark you've ever had.

"Ah," she says.

Then she looks at your hand. Both of them. Opens them out in hers, one after the other, and looks at the callus, and the rough knuckles, for a long time, and doesn't say anything at all.

She has not fed tonight. You can see it — the flatness around her mouth, the black gone right through her eyes. She has been at the far end of a room full of warm people for four hours and held it.

She lifts your wrist to her mouth and puts her lips on the thumbprint. Not a kiss. Just pressure. Cold mouth on the ache.

"Tell me what she said to you," Nicolette says, against your skin, low, French at the edges. "The last part. The part she said quietly."

The cheval glass had been moved six weeks ago.

Nobody had been told why. Two footmen had dragged it up from the blue drawing room at dusk, cursing under their breath the whole way, and installed it against the panelling opposite the bed — a great gilt-framed thing, taller than the door, wide enough for two, angled with fussy precision until Madame Berthe had come up, looked at it, said non, and had it shifted four inches to the left. Then she had looked at it again and said voilà, and gone downstairs, and nobody had ever explained anything.

You had assumed vanity. You had assumed a woman three hundred years old and beautiful in the way of a portrait wants to be seen getting dressed.

You had not assumed this.

You are kneeling on the chaise longue she dragged across the boards for precisely this purpose — knees spread wide, both palms flat on the glass, forehead an inch from your own reflection. The glass is warm where you are, because you are alive, and cold everywhere else, because the house is not.

And in the glass there is only you.

Flushed to the collarbones. Ribbon hanging loose, one end trailing down between your breasts and the other still knotted at your throat like a leash nobody is holding. Mouth open around a breath you never finished. Thighs shining to the knee. Your own nipples hard against the black silk of your shift, which she had pushed up over your hips an hour ago and then left there, bunched, useless, because she likes the way it looks.

There is no one behind you.

That is the trick of it, and she has been enjoying it for forty minutes. Nicolette stands at your back, so close you can feel the cold coming off her the way you feel a window in January, and the glass shows none of her at all. One hand is spread flat and proprietorial across your belly, thumb stroking. The other is — two fingers, unhurried, curling — exactly where you are wettest, and has been for a while, and she has been varying the pace the way a musician varies a phrase, and you have already been brought to the edge twice and taken off it twice and she has not said a word about either.

The smell of her is all over you. Cold air, iron, dried roses. Underneath, faint and warm and alive, the blood on her breath.

Voilà. She says it against your ear. Low, unhurried, French silted under every English word like gravel in a riverbed. "You see it now. The house believes I am in it. The glass disagrees."

Her fingers crook. You make a sound you did not authorise.

Nicolette's black silk is unlaced to the waist and pushed off her shoulders, her skirts rucked up over one hip, and she is cold the entire length of your back. Her mouth sits at the hinge of your jaw, half-open, breathing on you for no reason other than that she can. In the part of the glass where she ought to be, there is nothing but panelling and lamplight. She watches your face instead.

"You will notice," she says, "that it is a very good arrangement. You may look at yourself as much as you like, and there is nobody there to make you self-conscious."

"You're there."

"Am I." A pause, and two fingers sink to the knuckle and hold there. "The glass says no. The glass is older than me and knows more."

Her other hand comes up and settles at the base of your throat — not squeezing, just there, the weight of it, the ruby ring on the index finger cool and hard against your windpipe. She tips your chin up. Your throat goes long. Your reflection's throat goes long with it, and you watch the little movement of your own swallowing, and something about the sight of your own pulse in the glass makes you want to close your eyes.

"Look at yourself when I do it," she says. "Not for me. There is nothing to see. Look at what I am doing to you."

You look. Two fingers, working slow and deep, the wet sound of it small and obscene in a room built for echoes. Your own hips rolling forward into a hand you cannot see, then back onto it, then forward again. Your own mouth dropping open. Your own hands splayed white on the glass, fingers spread.

"Regarde-toi," she says. "Look."

"I'm looking."

"Say what you see."

"You—" Your voice cracks sideways. "Nothing. Just me."

"Just you." She sounds pleased and faintly offended at once, which is her favourite combination. "Then you are the only proof I am in this room at all. Hold that."

The hand at your throat slides up. Flattens under your jaw. Tilt. Your face, dead centre of the glass.

Her fingers do not stop.

Then she bites you.

She does it from behind, into the side of the throat — unhurried, unhurried, she has all night — and the mirror gives you the whole thing. A girl alone in front of a looking glass, head wrenched back, and two small punctures opening on her own neck with nobody's mouth to account for them.

You watch your blood well up. Fat and slow and dark, the first bead swelling at the lower puncture, holding, then breaking and running down the long slope of your throat into the hollow of your collarbone. You watch it reach your own chest and go sideways into the crease of your breast and disappear.

The sight of it is so obscene that you forget to breathe, and Nicolette, who is watching your face the whole time, notices.

Her laugh is barely a sound. "You are looking at your own neck bleeding and enjoying it. Ma petite. What did they tell you about us, in the East End. That we are cold. That we are dead." A pull, slow, three fingers' worth of blood going down her. "Nobody ever tells you the truth. That it is the best thing in London and it happens to you."

She drinks.

Not the polite evening sip she takes in front of guests, with a napkin and a maid standing by. This is the other thing — the thing that happens after midnight, in her rooms, with the doors shut. Three long pulls, her whole body gone still against your back except the working of her throat, one hand fisted in the front of your shift, and a low involuntary noise into your skin that she will deny to her grave.

Her teeth ease out. Her tongue comes flat and slow over the punctures, licking them clean, and the drag of it sends a shiver down your spine that has nothing to do with cold.

She comes off you with her mouth red.

"Tu mouilles pour rien, ma petite." Her fingers slide, slick, down over your clit and back up, spreading you. "You're dripping for nothing. For a woman the mirror doesn't know. Look at your own face. Look at what bleeding does to you."

She brings her own wrist past your shoulder — turns it, white and narrow and veined, and bites it herself, right where you can watch. Her teeth go in neat as pins.

Encore. She says it when you stop. "Again. Bois."

You drink from her wrist. You have to hold it in both hands to keep it steady and she lets you, standing there with her chin on top of your head, watching you swallow her blood in the mirror like a woman watching a painting she owns.

The taste of it is not like yours. Yours is warm and sweet and slightly metallic, like a bitten lip. Hers is cold — cold all the way down, like water from a deep well, with something underneath it like wine left in the sun. It goes into your stomach and spreads.

She lets you have it for a long time. Longer than she needs to. When she finally takes the wrist away there is blood on your chin, blood on her hand, blood drying on your neck and your collarbone and the top of your breast, and she smears her fingers through the mess on your chest and then drags them deliberately down your stomach, a long wet stripe from sternum to navel, like she is signing something.

Then she takes your face in her bloody hand and kisses you.

Her mouth is still full of your blood. It comes into the kiss, iron and salt and that faint sweetness that is only ever you, and she does it slow, turning it into something worse than a kiss — a taste, an appraisal, a statement of ownership — and she keeps it going until you whimper into it, because she likes that, because it is the sound she has been engineering since the moment you walked into her drawing room with your cheap shoes and your forty competitors and your neck.

"Là." She pulls back an inch. Her accent has thickened. The articles are going, one by one, the way they always do when she stops managing herself. "There. Now you know what you are. You taste like that all the time and you never knew it. Every dinner party. Every carriage. Every hour you sat in this house not knowing you were the best thing in it."

Her hand returns between your legs. Two fingers, then three, and she takes her time opening you up — thumb rolling slow and heavy on your clit, other hand back at your throat, keeping your face up and forward and honest in the glass.

"You want it. Say it."

"I want it."

"Doucement." She drags it out until it aches. "You want what."

Her fingers slide out of you. And then she is pushing into you.

The first inch is a shock every time — she is cold, and your body clenches and then gives in, and then she is deeper, and deeper, one hand braced flat on the glass beside your wrist and the other at your hip pulling you back onto her in one long, bottomless, patient stroke until her hips meet yours and stop.

The mirror gives you the best lie in London. A girl being fucked by nothing. A girl taking something invisible and taking it well, mouth open, tits pressed to cold glass, ribbon swinging loose at her throat, blood drying in rust-brown streaks down her neck, her belly and her thigh.

Nicolette makes a low noise in her chest when she bottoms out. Something she doesn't mean to make. Then she draws back almost all the way — you feel the drag of it, every ridge — and sinks home again, slow, and starts. She fucks like she feeds. Unhurried. Thorough. With notes.

Her hand comes off the glass and settles at your throat again, thumb and forefinger either side of your windpipe, keeping your chin up so you cannot look anywhere but at yourself. She does not squeeze. She just holds you there, arranged, correct, the way a hand holds a book open.

"Look at the empty air," she murmurs against your ear. "Look at it and tell me it is not better. A woman who does not show in the mirror and does not tire and does not stop when she has had enough." A pause. A deeper stroke, deliberate. "Who does not stop when you have had enough, either."

She doesn't.

She takes you through it once slow, letting you feel every inch of the drag, the cold of her, the way her hips slap quietly against your arse and the chaise creaks under it. Then faster, with two fingers down on your clit and her teeth in your shoulder, and you watch your own reflection start to come apart — face going slack, eyes unfocusing, mouth saying things in a voice you don't recognise.

Then a third time, when you are already past sense and starting to slur your words, and she pins your hip flat with one hand and uses you, quick and hard and ruthless, and the glass rattles in its frame.

Somewhere in the middle of it she bites the inside of your hip. A low, hidden place — the kind of place a bath would show. Then the ribs, just under the swell of your breast. Then back to the throat, reopening the punctures with her tongue first so the blood comes easy, so it comes wet.

"Ne bouge pas," she says when your legs start to shake. "You may come when it takes you."

It takes you hard.

You come with your forehead against the glass and your bound wrist pulling at the ribbon and your free hand clawing at gilt, and she keeps going straight through it, ruthless, bottoming out again and again, until the pleasure goes jagged and oversensitive,.and you're making small broken noises into your own reflection.

The door does not latch. It is the billiard room off the hall at Larchmont — Nicolette's own Surrey house, her own house, four hours from London and full of rain — and the door has not latched properly since the seventies, and nobody has ever had it seen to, and so the noise of the house party comes straight in over the top of everything: the fire, the rain on the windows, the low mutter of the shooting party in the drawing room, the snooker balls rolling somewhere under your back.

You are on the billiard table.

On your back on the green baize, which is cool, and smells of chalk, and has had your shoulders dragged across it far enough to leave a shine. One stocking off. One on. The rack knocked askew somewhere above your head. And you are being eaten alive by two women who are talking over your stomach as though you are furniture.

"—she flushes," Lady Venetia Villiers is saying, from between your thighs, in a drawl you could bottle and sell to Americans. "Down. All the way down. Look at that, Vaudrey. Mine go pink at the chest and stop. This one goes pink in the thighs."

"You are drooling on my table."

"It is a billiard table, it is for men to spill things on—"

"It is mine—"

"It is your house, Vaudrey, which makes it worse, which makes you worse—"

Venetia laughs. She has a laugh like a shot going off in a cellar — sudden, loud, unbecoming, magnificent — and a presence that fills a room simply by standing in it, and she has not stopped moving her fingers inside you for the entire conversation.

That is the thing about her. Her hands never idle. She is the warmest creature that has ever touched you — not warm like a person, warm like someone just in from a ride, flushed and golden and thrumming, wet heather in her hair, a cheroot going out in the ashtray, a hunting crop hooked through her belt.

Nicolette is on the other side of the table, sitting on the rail, one boot on the floor, entirely dressed, cold as a drained bath, and she has been in a black temper for eleven minutes.

Eleven minutes ago, she allowed this.

Eleven minutes ago, in her own drawing room, in front of thirty guests and her own staff and Lord Ashcombe — who had come four hours down from London purely to sit near her — Lady Venetia Villiers had walked over and said, to the entire room:

"Vaudrey. Be generous. Just the smallest taste. Look at that throat. It is indecent. It is practically a dare."

And every vampire in the room had turned to see what la belle Vaudrey would do, because this is the oldest argument in Surrey, and it has been running since 1762, and the last time it ran, in 1798, Villiers walked off with one of Nicolette's bloodmaids and made her a housekeeper and Nicolette has never once said so out loud.

So Nicolette had smiled with the left side of her mouth and said once.

And known exactly what she was doing.

She had known for eleven seconds. That is how long it took her to regret it.

Because Venetia had not simply bitten you. Venetia had taken your chin in one hand, turned your head, made a low mm of genuine surprise, and bitten you on the right side of the throat — the side Nicolette never uses, out of sheer spite — and then made a longer, deeper noise into your skin, and held on.

The room had heard it. Thirty people. The fire had seemed to go quiet.

And when she came off you, wiping her lip with the back of her wrist, punctures beading red, she had looked at Nicolette with perfect sincerity and said, "Oh, my love."

And Nicolette had said "yes, thank you," in a voice like a closing door, taken you by the wrist, and marched you straight out of her own drawing room and in here.

Where it has been going on ever since.

"I want to know how she tastes warm," Venetia says now. To Nicolette. Over your belly. She has not addressed one full sentence to you all evening. "It is unfair. You have had her warm for months. I have had her for a mouthful in a room full of people."

"You had her for three mouthfuls. Do not lie to me, Villiers, you held on."

"I held on out of politeness."

"You held on for eleven seconds and then moaned like a widow at a wedding."

"Do you know what she tastes of?" Venetia lifts her head and looks at Nicolette properly. Her eyes are flat pale gold — enormous, warm, shameless. "Do you know? Cinnamon. Underneath. Nobody tastes of cinnamon. It is unheard of, it is a gift, and you have been keeping it in a house—"

"I am aware of what she tastes of."

"—and not telling anybody, you greedy French—"

The hand in you twists. Your hips come off the baize.

Both of them glance down. Both of them look pleased.

Then Nicolette's hand comes out and takes your jaw, hard, tilting your face to hers. She has not touched you properly since the drawing room. She has been sitting on that rail with her arms folded like a magistrate.

"Look at you," she says. "On a table. In my own house. With another woman's fingers in you and another woman's teeth in your neck. Do you know what has happened to you tonight, or shall I explain it slowly."

"The said «she» is not another woman," says Venetia, "she is a better—"

"Doucement." Nicolette's thumb moves over your cheekbone. She does not look away from you. "Answer me."

You answer. It comes out wrong.

"Louder."

"Bien." Then she lets go of your jaw, sits back, and looks at Venetia with an expression you have learned to fear. "You want to know how she tastes warm. Then taste her warm."

Venetia does not need telling twice.

She comes up the table in one shove — coat off now, hair properly down, cravat loose — and puts her mouth on your throat and bites again, straight into the punctures she made before and it hurts, making you arch off the baize, and she drinks.

Warm. She wanted warm. She gets it.

Her hand never leaves you. The whole time she drinks she keeps two fingers working, unhurried, and Nicolette sits on the rail and watches the two of you like a woman auditing a ledger.

"There she is," Venetia mutters into your neck. "There she is. Good girl. That's it."

And then she does the thing.

She unties your ribbon.

Two fingers, one pull, unhurried — the red silk loosening and sliding off your throat while her mouth is still fastened to you — and Nicolette comes off the rail like a shot.

"Excuse me."

"What?" Venetia does not lift her head. Her voice is muffled and wet. "It was in the way."

"It is never in the way, it sits at the throat, it is below the throat—"

"It was in the way of me."

"It is mine to untie. Mine. She has been in my house five months and you have untied it once—"

"She is not a portrait, Vaudrey, you do not get to be the only one who—"

"You have bitten her twice and untied her once. At this rate you will have fucked her by Tuesday—"

At which point Venetia lifts her head, blood on her chin, blood on her teeth, and says:

"Am I allowed?"

And the room goes quiet. Even the party, faintly, seems to go quiet.

Because that is the question. Everybody in this house tonight knows it. A bite is a bite. A bite can be argued — a mouthful, a courtesy, a napkin, nothing has technically happened.

But the other thing. The other thing is the rule with its coat off.

Venetia wipes her mouth with the back of her wrist and looks at Nicolette with cheerful, ancient malice. Two hundred and twenty-seven years of it, and a boundary wall, and a housekeeper in 1798.

"Say yes," she says. "Say yes, and I will not bite her again tonight, and you may have her back whole."

"That is blackmail."

"It is bargaining. I am English."

Nicolette taps her ruby ring against her thumb. Once. Twice. You watch her decide, and you know the shape of it before she says it, because it is the shape of every decision she makes: she says yes because saying no looks like fear, and then she spends the rest of the night punishing you for it.

"Fine."

Venetia does not gloat. She simply turns to you and gives you her whole attention for the first time all evening — and it is heavy, that attention, warm and enormous and utterly shameless — and she says, kindly, quietly, just for you:

"There. You see? She is generous. She is a princess." A beat. "Do not tell her I said that."

Then she hooks an arm under your knee, drags you down the table until your hips are at the edge of it, spreads you open with both hands, and looks at you — properly, openly, at the flushed bitten wreck of you — and says:

"Vaudrey. Come and look at what you have been keeping in a house."

"I know what I have been keeping."

"Come and look."

And Nicolette comes. Of course she does. She cannot help it. She slides off the rail and comes round and stands at your head, looking down at you upside down, and takes your skull in both hands — cradling it off the green baize — so that your throat goes long and your mouth falls open and you are staring straight up into her face while Venetia settles between your thighs.

"Regarde-moi," Nicolette says. "Not her. Me."

Then Venetia pushes into you.

It is nothing like Nicolette. Nicolette is cold and slow and considered, like being read to. Venetia is warm and thick and gives you all of it at once, no ceremony, one long shove until her hips slap the underside of your thighs — and it punches a sound out of you that the drawing room must have heard.

"Ah," says Venetia, delighted. "Ah, yes. There it is. She is tight, Vaudrey, are you feeding her properly—"

"She is fucking perfect, shut up—"

"She is tight and she is hot and she is bleeding," Venetia says, moving now, slow deep rolls that grind you into the baize, "and she tastes of cinnamon, and she is marked — look, somebody has marked her five times, that is excessive, that is a brag—"

"Six," says Nicolette. "There are six."

Venetia laughs so hard she has to slow down.

Then Nicolette moves — one hand sliding down from your jaw to your throat, flat and proprietary, thumb pressed over the fresh punctures so every stroke sends a small bright flare of pain up into your skull. Her other hand comes down between your legs, onto your clit, and starts to work out of time with Venetia's hips — so the two of them are moving against each other through you, and neither of them is going to adjust.

Between them, they have made you into an argument.

And they keep talking. Over you. Around you. Into your hair.

"Slower," Nicolette says. "You are rushing her."

"I am not rushing her, she is enjoying it—"

"You are rushing her. Look at her."

"I am looking at her—"

"Slower, Villiers."

And Venetia, who has never obeyed anyone, slows down. Deliberately. Grinding, patient, mean — then she leans over you, all that heather and rain and tobacco, and bites you a third time, low, in the soft place under the collarbone, and drinks while she fucks you, and Nicolette's hand tightens at your throat.

You are going to come. You can feel it coming, stupid and fast, and both of them can feel it, and neither of them is going to let you get there easily.