loser lesbian

How does a sleeping baby manage to weigh roughly nothing and somehow also forty-five kilograms at once?

This is a question posed internally by Uncle Samuel Drake as his seven-month-old niece lies conked out on his chest.

She has been for the better part of ninety minutes; face mashed sideways into his sternum, one fist curled into the collar of his sweater, as though the grip is tethering her to whatever dreamscape babies sail through, a thin line of drool darkening the cotton. Every few minutes she does a little shuddering sigh, and each time she does it Sam stops breathing until she settles.

He's been lying half-reclined into the corner of Nathan's stupid comfortable couch, one arm a permanent brace across her back, the other switching between the TV remote and blonde wisps of hair, for long enough that the light through the window's gone from orange to navy.

He could move her. He's been told he can move her; his brother, halfway out the door with his wife and a face that hadn't looked that relaxed in weeks, had said:

"You can put her down in the crib, she'll be fine, you don't have to just -"

Sam had responded:

"Yeah, yeah, course."

And had subsequently not moved a muscle.

The TV mutters away adjacent to him, volume low, light flickering softly across the room. Not, for once, anything to do with deserts or dynasties or the cumbersome catalogue of his recent mistakes - just some BBC re-run from across the pond, a decade old at least: Hidden Killers of the Georgian Home.

Arsenic in the wallpaper, lead ground into face paint. Domestic poisons of people pottering cheerfully about houses and daily routines that were slowly wiping them out. Sam finds it oddly restful. There's something soothing about other people's catastrophes, especially the three-hundred-year-old kind that it's far too late to do anything about.

Across the room, on the little desk where Nathan does his admin and his spreadsheets and whatever other cryptic adult sorcery keeps this house upright, a small light glows: Sam's dead phone, plugged into the laptop by its umbilical cable, the recovery Nathan set running several hours back still grinding away. The photos'll still be on it even if the screen's cooked, his brother had said, ever the sentimental sibling, palm out for it. Lemme pull them off before you trash it. And Sam, who had wanted the photos with an intensity that made his palms sweat, had said: 

"Sure."

Indifferent as anything, and had then checked on the little crawling progress bar roughly nine hundred times in the past two hours.

He breathes out slow. The presenter moves on to the horrors of Regency skincare. Sam lets her take him with her, gratefully, into a world where the only thing quietly poisoning anyone is their own wig as opposed to their expertise in self-sabotage.

The documentary can only hold him so long, though. Sam was never built for sitting still - just shy of five decades and the knack has never once taken - and after a while the enforced stillness starts to itch - nothing to do with his hands but hold a sleeping baby and thumb a remote. He shifts as far as a man pinned under an infant can shift, which is barely at all, and lets his eyes wander the dim room instead - the scatter cushions, the framed photos, a lone sudoku puzzle book marooned on the coffee table, soft clutter of a life that keeps its shape even when set down for five minutes.

Restless. He's restless, and there's nowhere to put it.

He sighs, gaze drifting towards the fridge. He counts the magnets; four, five, six - Hm.

There are, he happens to know, four bottles of something Belgian and overpriced in the door of his brother's refrigerator, bought for a barbecue that got rained off shortly after he'd 'come to stay', and they have been calling to Sam in the small hours since.

God, he's thirsty.

He weighs it up, turning his head to and from the kitchen.

Cassie sighs her tiny sigh against him once more. He stops breathing, head snapping back to face her. She settles. He starts again.

He is, technically, on duty. Sole charge of a tiny person who can't stand on her own legs with total confidence, and the responsible thing would be to drink water and stay sharp and be the kind of uncle who can be trusted not to - well... not to do most of the things Sam has historically done.

He looks down at the swirl of golden hair under his chin.

"Do you think," he hums into it, very quietly, "daddy'd get mad if Uncle Sam borrowed one of his beers?"

Cassie does not weigh in. She is, to her great credit, and his relief, a heavy and committed sleeper.

"Yeah." Sam nods slowly, at her compelling case. "That's what I thought. Alright. We won't tell him."

Getting up off a couch with a sleeping child on your chest is, it turns out, a feat of engineering that would have impressed the men who built the pyramids. Sam does it in stages, concentration plugged in as if he were defusing a small bomb: Hand cupped to the back of her skull, other arm scooping under, weight transferred, abdomen engaged, knees doing the work, breath held the entire time, every motion smoothed out to nothing so the up-down of standing reaches her as a gentle swell. She frowns in her sleep. Pouty top lip suckling at the lower.

"There she is," he breathes. "C'mon. We're on a heist."

He pads through to the kitchen, baby cradled high against his shoulder, flip flops near silent on the tile, and stands in the cold blue glow of the open fridge feeling like a burglar in a house where he's been sleeping.

Which is, he supposes, accurate enough.

He gets a bottle out one-handed, nudges the door shut with his hip, and then faces the tedious problem of the bottle opener. Three and a half weeks of eating here and he still opens the wrong drawer for a spoon.

Sam starts a cautious game of cupboard roulette. Top drawer: tea towels, a pizza cutter, an alarming density of those little bag-clip things. Second drawer: food menus, batteries, a lone lemon squeezer. Third drawer -

"Where the hell's your old man keep his - " Sam mutters, leaning to peer in. " - aha."

Bottle opener. He hooks it out, levers the cap off against the lip of the counter one-handed -

The cap pings free and hits the tile with a noise that, in the hush of the house, sounds like a tray of cutlery dropped off a great height.

"Shhh-"

Her whole body startles - arms flinging wide in an infant-reflex way that never quite leaves them - and her face screws up around a held breath, the gathering, the dreadful little silence before the storm, and Sam's already going, "No - no nono, hey, hey, it's okay, that was just-"

Too late.

The wail comes. Full, outraged, and astonishingly loud for something that fits in the crook of one arm - the kind of sound that bypasses the ears and goes straight for the cerebral cortex. Sam's whole body responds before his mind does, the bounce, the sway, the desperate jiggle-walk, the murmur, "okay, okay, I know, I know, I'm - ah, shi- uh - shhh-ugar."

It is not landing. She is winding up, not down, fists balled, face gone furious red, working her way toward the big leagues - and Sam, who has talked his way out of literal life-or-death scenarios, feels something close to actual fear prick at him.

"Okay - okay - hang on-" He yanks the fridge open again one-handed, casting around with the wild eyes of a person who doesn't know which wire to cut to defuse the bomb. Milk? Does he warm milk? He doesn't know how to warm milk because he wasn't listening to his sister-in-law - he doesn't know the temperature or - oh, thank god - his eyes snag on a box of those squeezy yogurt pouch things on the second shelf, the cartoon animal on the front grinning at him, and he lunges for one.

He hip-checks the fridge shut and beelines for the nearest chair going - Nathan's desk, in the corner of the dining end - beer in one fist, pouch in the other, howling baby against his shoulder, the whole operation about as graceful as a cartoon banana peel incident.

He drops into the desk chair, plonks Cassie down on the edge of the desk, braced upright against his forearm, gets the foil lid of the pouch between his teeth, twists it off, spits it somewhere into the dark, and presents the open pouch to the furious creature in front of him as his ears ring.

And, in a marvellous turn of events, she latches on and the wail cuts out mid-note.

Blessed, ringing silence, broken only by the rhythmic, deeply committed suck of a baby with her priorities firmly back in order. After a moment her free fist uncurls from the air, resuming its hold on his sweater.

"Thank God,"; Sam breathes, sagging back into the chair.

He gets his own drink to his mouth at last - a long, grateful, hard-won pull - and on the way down he taps the neck of the bottle gently against the foil of her pouch.

"Salute, bambina."

Cassie suckles, and stares at him.

She does the unblinking intense thing that babies do, fixing him over the top of the pouch with flat, somewhat solemn attention akin to a tiny judge weighing a sentence.

"What?" Sam says. "What. What do you want? Hm?" He takes another sip under the stare and she reaches up and, with a 'bah!', pats his jaw with a small, profoundly yogurty hand.

"Ugh - yeah- thank you. Okay. Okay." He huffs, scrubbing at the smear with the back of his wrist.

"How 'bout a… A story. You want a story? That I can do. Allegedly." He queries, sucking the yogurt off of his wrist.

He shifts the beer to the hand braced behind her, frees the other up, and clears his throat - and hits, immediately, a wall. What story? What story does a person tell a baby? His entire repertoire is heists and bar fights and three or four things still under active investigation in two countries.

"Right. Let's see, uh… Once upon a time, there was a - a princess." He scrambles, "In a big old castle. Lots'a… dresses, and -"

Cassie's face crumples. The bottom lip comes out around the pouch as the opening bars of a formal complaint start up from somewhere in her chest.

"Alright, alright, scrap that, scrap the princess, jeez, tough crowd -" He bounces her gently, heading the meltdown off at the pass. "Okay. Okay. How about… pirates."

The crumple pauses.

Sam freezes mid-bounce, wincing, every muscle braced, riding out the long half-second in which it could still go either way -

"A pirate. C'mon. You gotta do me a solid here, kid, pirates is all I've got."

The crumple reverses. The lip retracts. She resumes suckling, and watches him, provisionally willing to hear the man out.

"Right." Sam rolls his shoulders like he's stepping up to a mic. "Once upon a time, there was a pirate… uh… captain."

He checks her face - she's watching him, placid, contented, no sign of the wobble - and he gives a small, pleased pout, thoroughly encouraged by his own material.

"Dead handsome. Roguish. Bit of a legend up and down the coast."

Cassie gurgles wetly around the pouch.

"Oh, you laughin'? At the captain? That's slander, that is. Actionable." He pokes her tummy; she squirms, delighted, nearly losing the pouch.

"Anyway." The word comes out - and then stalls, because, hang on. Is he actually doing this? Is he genuinely about to take the single thing that's chewed him up worst in forty-odd years of eminently chewable material and repackage it as light infantile entertainment? With voices? A bedtime bit, out of his own personal screw-up?

"The… captain's got himself a first mate. Younger fella."

He glances down. Cassie gazes back up at him, pouch going steadily, not a care in her entire tiny world - and Sam decides that her happiness outranks his heartache tonight.

"And the two of 'em have got - " he reaches over and plucks a crumpled Chinese takeaway menu off the corner of the desk, holds it up like Exhibit A, then taps it matter-of-factly against the top of Cassie's head " - a treasure map. Big red X. Buried gold nobody's clapped eyes on in a hundred years. So off they sail to go dig it up."

He sweeps the beer hand in a slow arc across an imaginary horizon. Cassie's eyes track the bottle like a metronome.

"Miles of open sea. Days of it. And then one mornin', middle of nowhere, they're hangin' over the rail, lookin' at the dolphins and the little fishies and -" he gasps, big and theatrical; her eyes blow wide to match him "- up pops… a mermaid."

She coos.

"Yeah. Exactly. Big moment." He leans in, conspiratorial. "And this mermaid knows everything, Cass. Every reef, every current, where all the old wrecks went down. Takes one look at their scrappy little map and goes - " and here Sam pitches his voice up into a wavering falsetto " - oh, that? Yeah, I know exactly where that is. You're holdin' it upside down, by the way -"

A burble.

"Mm. Cheeky. Just like that." And there she is - the ambush of her, the way she surfaces now without warning or permission, that exact upside-down, by the way sitting behind his teeth in a voice that isn't the mermaid's at all - and something bittersweet tugs at the corner of his mouth, a smile that gets halfway up and stalls. Swallow it, he tells himself, swallow it, swallow it, swallow it -

He bops Cassie on the nose to knock it loose, chasing her startled giggle like a man grabbing for a handrail just as he's about to tumble down a flight of stairs.

"So," he clears his throat, "She asks if she can tag along. Help 'em find it." The grin slips a notch. "And the captain wants to say yes - God, he wants to, you've no idea - but he's got reservations. 'Cause the sea's her whole world, right, she's safe down there, but a pirate ship? That's… Swordfights. Storms. Cannons. And the men on it - they are not nice men, peanut. The captain knows exactly what kind of men they are, on account of the fact that he's the worst one."

He stops. Takes another swig to force himself to concentrate on the task at hand.

"Reservations. That's the word. He's got 'em."

Cassie smacks the pouch against the desk. He rescues it absently and hands it back.

"But she doesn't take no for an answer, this one. So she just - swims along. Right alongside the ship's hull, day in, day out, keepin' pace, chatterin' away, pointin' 'em the right heading, and there's not a thing the captain can do about it, 'cause she is very, very smart and very, very fun to have around, and he is, frankly, nowhere near as tough as he makes out." A beat. "And the silly old pirate, he - he gets attached. Which he is absolutely not supposed to. 'Cause she's down there in the water and he's up on the deck and there's always - " he holds finger and thumb a careful inch apart in front of her, jiggling so she clocks it "always gonna be this much between 'em. He can never quite reach her. And he tells himself that's for the best."

He looks at the gap between his finger and thumb a second too long, then drops the hand.

And an echo he's spent nigh on a month failing to evict picks its moment to re-surface: his own voice, ugly and cruel, telling her to go home. Go home. Like she was a stray he could shoo off a porch. Like she hadn't out-thought, out-worked and out-classed the pair of them since day one. He'd watched her face crumple, eyes glazing over with saddened shock of something landing harder than it was aimed - except that's the lie he tells himself, isn't it. It landed exactly where he aimed it. He'd wanted it to hurt enough to stick, and it had, and she'd stopped arguing, and at the time, he'd called that success.

Something sour turns over in his chest. He takes it out on the beer.

"You want my honest opinion, Cass?" he murmurs, eyeing up a small pool of yogurty bubbles loitering around her mouth. "The captain's an asshole." He clears his throat. "Uncle Sam's an asshole. Sorry to curse, but I'm just - layin' that out early, y'know, so you grow up with the right information. Straight from the horse's mouth, 'n' all that."

Cassie blows her biggest bubble yet. He dodges the splash zone.

"Glad you agree." He rallies, voice climbing back up, because there's a baby watching him and she wants the fun part. He scrolls the empty air, as if the next page is up there.

"Anyway. The treasure. This is the good bit -" and he's off, gesturing now with the whole free hand, the beer abandoned to the desk: an island shaped like a skull, a map that only shows itself by moonlight, a riddle scratched in a cave, a magical shell necklace, a chest that turns out to be cursed, and a sea-monster with - he leans right in and drops his voice - "forty arms," and Cassie shrieks and yanks him forward by a fistful of his sweater with surprising strength.

Sam carries gamely on, laughing at the state of his niece. "an' the mermaid, of course, knows know to tame it, 'cause she's the clever one."

Cassie delivers a long, burbling editorial.

"You're right. Total carry. The boys'd have drowned off the harbour wall day one without her -"

And right there, riding high on her own delight, Cassie throws her entire small self into a shriek of purest joy - an ear-splitting, gleeful, full-lunged scream of a noise, that makes Sam jump - and both chubby fists fly up.

Including the one holding the pouch.

Which she squeezes.

The remaining payload of strawberry yogurt exits the pouch in a coordinated arc, catching Sam squarely across one cheek and the jaw, before flinging a long glistening pink splodge across the lower half of Nathan's laptop screen.

"…thanks, sweetheart," Sam grimaces. He wipes his cheek with the back of his wrist and inspects it. "More of an apricot man, myself."

Cassie beams at him, radiant, thrilled to her marrow with her own work as she claps her hands, further dispersing little splatters of pink all over the place.

"Yeah," he finds himself licking yogurt off of his skin for the second time in the last five minutes, "you're real pleased. I can tell."

The laptop, jostled by the flailing, has woken. And there behind the smeared pink streak, the progress bar - the one he's watched crawling across several hours - has crept to a sliver from the end. Ninety-something per cent. Almost done - he's almost got his photos back.

And something in his chest does a bittersweet sort of twinge, familiar deep aching wearing gladness like a dusty cloak, and Sam scowls down at himself for it, irritated, because he'd really rather not, thanks, he was doing fine.

"…Right." He hauls himself upright, hitching Cassie onto his hip. "C'mon, disaster junior. Let's clean this up before papa revokes my visiting rights."

Fortunately for Sam, there's a tub of baby wipes on every flat surface in this house, and he's come to understand they are simply the native flora of the place. He plucks a handful from the closest pack near the kitchen sink, swipes the worst of the pink off his own face in the window's reflection - catches his own eye there for half a second, fresh out of dignity, a smear of yogurt on his jaw, a baby on his hip - and has, despite his best efforts, some feelings about it.

Because the treacherous part is that even he's able to admit that this is… nice. All of it. The baby on his hip, the warm hush of the house, nobody watching him - no one to read or be read by, nothing wanted off him but stories and a sweater to grab on to - and he feels less like a man on the run from his own reflection and more like someone who might, given a fair wind, be quietly getting his shit together. Maybe this is the life. Maybe it wouldn't be the worst thing in the world, being this. Uncle Sam. Beer thief. Teller of shitty pirate stories.

And then, right behind it, sharp as a stitch under the ribs: no. No, this isn't where he's meant to be. He misses it. He misses all of it - the heat, the hunt, the stupid ungodly hours, ruins by torchlight and documents by lamplight, coffee gone cold because he's too focused to drink it, and her. Her. Right there in the middle of every single frame of it, the way she's in the middle of everything now -

Oh, shut the fuck up, Samuel.

He hoists Cassie higher and heads back for the desk.

When they get back, the laptop's finished. The bar's gone. In its place, a folder sitting on the desktop, quietly holding the entire recovered photographic record of the last however-many years of Samuel Drake's slightly shit second-hand cell's life.

He sits and hazards a click on the folder… just to check.

Cassie gets re-perched on the edge of the desk, braced against his forearm, Sam working a fresh wipe one-handed over her sticky fists and her chin and the creases of her neck where dairy slop has somehow migrated.

"'Kay... Where were we." His attention is completely divided between his niece and the laptop screen as image thumbnails stutter in from the top. He clicks one half at random and there she is - and his thumb stalls on the trackpad for a second before he gets it going again.

"Right. The mermaid."

Cassie babbles a long, fond stream of nonsense at the screen.

"Yeah," Sam agrees, quieter. "Real pretty, huh?"

He carries on - half to the baby, half to himself - swiping slow through the roll with one hand while the other works the wipe over Cassie's fingers. Petra Palace breakfast. The scowl halfway up the 1,000 steps, green inky knuckles squeezing Scott's face into an expression of amused befuddlement. A blurry document behind glass. Her asleep on the train with a paperback collapsed on her chest. The narration thins out as he goes, the pirate captain quietly forgotten somewhere back near port… it's hard to do voices when your throat's gone tight in revolt.

"…an' then the mermaid," he tries, thumbing onto the next one - and it's the car rental place again, sunburnt cheeks, hands thrown up in a triumphant thumbs-up - "the mermaid rescues the whole - " and there he loses the thread entirely, because he's grinning down at the photo, and the sentence quietly dies where it stands.

A fat smear of drying yogurt sits square across the lower half of the screen, thankfully dragging him out of his stupor.

"…We'll make an artist outta you yet, peanut." He fishes the wipe back out, rolling up his sleeves. "Gimme a sec, we'll get her cleaned up."

It's her he means to wipe toward - but the yogurt's smeared lower across the frame, and clearing her means clearing all of it. So, in doing so, his eye snags on the other figure in the shot.

Scott. Off to the side, half-turned, caught not knowing the lens was on him. The backward glance. The smirk Sam clocked weeks ago and documented, without a second thought, as nothing but 'jealousy'.

He drags the wipe down through the drying strawberry smear, leaning in - not for Scott, not consciously, just to be sure he's got it all -

And the cloth comes away clean over the lower third of the frame, and Sam goes still.

Because it's not the smirk, nor the way his eyes are on her.

It's the pocket. The wipe's cleared the whole bottom of the shot, and there, in the side pocket of Scott's shorts where the low desert sun catches it - 

"What's…"

Sam leans in, eyes squinting.

A loop of fine gold chain, spilled half out. And just above it, pressed into the linen, a shape stamped against the fabric. Scalloped - no… petalled.

His fingers fumble for the tiny magnifying glass on the screen, zooming in and dragging the pocket to the centre of the screen.

A floral impression.

Sam knows that shape. Has watched it sit against her collarbone for weeks on end. Watched it click home into an ostentatious box in a Cornish crypt - cut for the slot. And - unbidden, unhelpful, and absolutely not the time for it - his mind's eye recalls how he's watched it closer than that.

The night she'd kept it on after he'd stripped her down to precious little else, the intricate metalwork settled in the hollow of her throat, rising and falling with her breath, catching the lamplight every time she moved. He'd pressed his mouth to the skin beside it and the metal had been cool against his lip, warm on one edge where it had lain against her, and she'd cursed right into his hair - and he'd thought, absurdly, tenderly, in the middle of everything, that it suited her. That some things simply know where they belong.

The locket.

He stops wiping. Cassie keeps up her happy commentary against his side; he doesn't pay much attention to it.

Because the funny thing - the thing that lifts the hair on his forearms - is that Scott claimed to have found that locket in a townhouse in Wiltshire. Weeks after this. Sam knows the exact moment, because Sam was on the phone for it: four hours deep into a microfilm reel with his eyes gone to sandpaper, when Scott had called in from the road.

"There's a weird little necklace thing in the mix too. Looks old. Could be junk."

Could be junk.

And yet here it is. In his pocket. In the desert. Days - weeks before a Wiltshire townhouse Scott hadn't so much as set foot in.

"…Huh." Sam says, very quietly.

Cassie babbles up at him, a long burbling question, and he answers it on autopilot;

"You see that, Cass?" - already dragging the laptop square in front of him, the wipe abandoned in a sticky pinkish ball, two clumsy fingers finding the keys.

It's probably nothing. People misremember where they picked things up. He knows that, tells himself that - except Scott had that necklace before he ever said he did, and lied about it. It feels like a strange thing to lie about.

And Sam finds he very badly wants to know what else he doesn't know.

Call it boredom. Call it three and a half weeks of nothing to point himself at but booze and sex with strangers and a total lack of self-discipline. Call it… professional curiosity, perhaps. Muscle memory, the itch derived from spending his whole life pulling threads - call it anything, in fact, except what it is, which is that he was supposed to let this go. All of it. Him. Her. The inheritance, the whole shoddy mess of it - dropped, for the greater good of all three of them, that was the deal he made with himself in a parking lot in the Great British Rain.

But.

He types up his name two-fingered, hunched, Cassie supervising with a fresh fistful of his sweater: Scott Parker.

And Scott's… there. Real enough. A digital scattering of his career: an old dig-team photo, a name buried in an acknowledgements list on a thesis, a lapsed account or two, a tagged shot from some college alumni event. Ordinary. Findable. A man with a genuine, traceable, relatively unremarkable life. Nothing that prickles.

Which, somehow, only makes the necklace revelation nestle deeper into uncomfortable territory. Because a man with a pretty traceable life and nothing to hide had still… curated a lie about a locket for no reason on God's earth that Sam can see.

So he goes at it the way he goes at everything. Sideways, dirty, from underneath, the only way he's ever found anything worth finding.

Now, Sam's grasp of the internet is loose at best, but there is one thing a hundred grim motel-room searches for things that don't want finding have taught him: the good stuff never lives on page one.

Page one is for people selling you things. The primetime slot. The deeper you scroll - past the polish, past the ads, down into the unloved sediment of online drivel - the stranger and older the results get, and strange and old is exactly where Sam works best.

"Parker, Parker, Parker."

Because his whole life, by his own endless telling, has been this - chasing, digging, hunting, scrounging for scraps and making something out of nothing - Sam ends up where these things always end up, down in the digitised guts of old regional papers nobody's opened in thirty years.

Cassie, bored of the screen's silent nonsense, rediscovers the far more compelling terrain of her uncle's face. A small hand closes around his nose. Another finds purchase on his cheek and squeezes with proprietary confidence.

"Yep - thank you - very helpful," Sam mutters, dipping and weaving without ever taking his eyes off the screen, letting her mash his features around like dough - because his attention has narrowed to a single point now, and somewhere deep in his gut, a low hum has started revving up, climbing, and he couldn't tell you why, and it will not stop.

A scan loads onscreen. Grey, blotched, the column bleeding at the edges, the date along the top: 1994. An obituaries page of a local New South Wales tabloid. Sam's eyes track down it on reflex, the dear-departeds, the in-loving-memories, strangers' grief, left, right and centre; nothing, nothing -

Christopher Parker.

Sam stops.

He leans in.

PARKER, Christopher. Lost his life overseas, August 1994, aged 34 years. A man who spent his life chasing history across the globe, and who died doing what he loved. Dearly loved husband of Carly. Adored father of Scott and Kieran. In our hearts always.

He reads it twice. Then a third time, slower.

"Doin' what he loved?"

Sam sits back in Nathan's desk chair, lets a slow breath out through his nose, and looks at the grey little box of words.

So. There it is. Scott's dad. A man who chased history round the world, exactly like his boy went on to do, dead thirty years gone, when Scott would've been - what. A kid, maybe.

That's not… sinister, necessarily. That's just sad. That's a boy who lost his old man young and grew up to do the same dangerous thing that killed him, the way people do, salting the wound for the rest of their lives.

And maybe - Sam turns it over, wanting it to fit - maybe that's all the necklace ever was, too. Some heirloom. Some last thing of his father's he didn't fancy explaining to two acquaintances, didn't want the patronising sympathy or the hounding questions, so he tucked it into a story about a townhouse in Wiltshire to keep the whole thing light.

People do that. People lie to keep their grief to themselves. Sam would know.

Can't be anything untoward in a dead dad and a secret locket.

Can there?

He chews the inside of his lip, eyes still on the obituary.

"…What d'you reckon, peanut?" he murmurs.

Cassie, gnawing thoughtfully on his sleeve, offers no opinion.

"Yeah. Nah. Me neither."

Because 'doing what he loved' is the kind of thing you write when what he was actually doing doesn't bear writing down. Sam's read enough of those. Said enough of those, if he's honest, standing over enough holes in enough ground - he knows the performance of a tidy sentence laid gently over an untidy death; a tarpaulin laid over something you didn't want the family to see.

And the locket, and the little lie, and the boy who grew up and forged a career in the same thing that put his father in the ground - and who never once, in the better part of months of deserts and digs and beers and fist fights, so much as mentioned it -

It snags. Catches, like an oversized sleeve on a door handle, and yanks him back to reassess.

It's nothing he can put a name to yet. Nothing he could say out loud without feeling like a paranoid idiot. Just a low rumble starting up somewhere under his ribs, the one he's learned, over a tumultuous and questionably-spent life, never to ignore - the one that says look closer, look closer, you're missing something.

He shifts Cassie more securely into the crook of his arm, settles his elbows on the edge of Nathan's desk as she starts her best Chopin impression on the wood, and lets his two slowest fingers go hunting across the keys, spelling out the name that's set the whole thing buzzing.

C-H-R-I-S-T-O-P-H-E-R.

The cursor blinks, patient, in the empty white box.

And he starts to type.

P-A-R-K-E-R. Then, after a beat, the year of the obituary: 1-9-9-4 - D-E-A-T-H. Enter.

The first page is chaff - the living Christopher Parkers of the world, estate agents and rugby coaches and a chiropractor in Illinois - and Sam scrolls straight through them, down, down into the sediment, thumbing the trackpad with a knuckle while Cassie now works, frowning, at the Chinese menu.

And near the bottom, half-swallowed by a genealogy site that looks like it was built in the eighties, there's a link. Another scan. Another regional paper, the same August, and this one isn't an obituary.

It's a news piece.

The headline loads first, in tall smudged capitals across three columns:

NEW SOUTH WALES RESEARCHERS FOUND DEAD AT KASTROM MEFA'A RUINS.

Sam's eyes are already moving, fast, snatching fragments off the degraded scan the way you'd snatch things from a burning room -

…Christopher Parker, 34, an amateur antiquities enthusiast of Yamba's northern suburbs… discovered alongside Martha Anyango ------, 29, a postgraduate archaeological researcher… the pair are understood to have entered the ancient site without permit or supervision…

A young woman. Twenty-nine. A researcher. Clever, young, brought out to the desert on somebody else's watch -

He clicks open a new tab, typing in Kastrom Mefa'a, flicking back to the prior while it loads.

Something thwaps him gently across the mouth.

He blinks.

Cassie, having apparently reached the conclusion that his attention has wandered, is enthusiastically attempting to feed him the crumpled menu with a "brrrpptlfltt" of concentration. Every time he fails to open his mouth, she gives him another determined little swat with it.

"Yeah, alright."

He gently lowers the menu before she can chew a corner off it, hitches her a little higher on his hip, and turns back to the screen.

…local authorities confirmed the young woman died of a catastrophic haemorrhage; the cause of Mr Parker's injuries has not been made public… no other parties are being sought…

"Jesus…" He murmurs, clicking back to the new tab.

And there, slap bang at the top of the search results:

Umm (ar) er-Rasas (Kastrom Mefa'a), Madaba, Jordan.

Sam feels his stomach give way.

A catastrophic haemorrhage.

He can see, with a clarity that grabs his lungs and squeezes hard, her face grey under torchlight, her whole body shaking, her nose bleeding, time and time and time again - bleeding, horrific headaches, and how back in Chatham he'd carried her to the car and told himself it was the… travel, the heat, the near-death experience and the trauma of waking up beside a dead body, all, of course only worsening the original catalyst: that it was his fault for knocking her into that pool… and he never once took it back out to inspect-

A girl, just shy of thirty, a researcher, who went down into Umm ar-Rasas on Scott's father's treasure hunt and… bled… to death.

And three decades later Christopher Parker's son found himself another clever young girl, and took her to the exact same hole in the exact same ground -

And she... started feeling strange…

And… the necklace - the necklace, the thing that started this whole miserable late-night seminar - sits in the middle, sucking his attention in like a black hole, bending everything toward it. Because - run it again: if it's an important artifact, you don't lie about where it came from and then hang it round a colleague's neck for weeks. You keep it. In a box, in a safe, against your own sternum. Nobody launders a sentimental object through a fake Wiltshire townhouse just to hand it straight to the hired researcher like a party favour.

Unless the lie and the loan are a part of the same move.

He needs to call her. Now, tonight, this second - and he can't. The number lives in the brick on the end of the cable and nowhere else, least of all his head, and his phone is dead because he drowned it himself, wallowing in self-pity and fetid thoughts instead of just… checking.

And even if he conjured the number out of thin air - she wouldn't pick up. Why would she? The last thing he gave her was a horrible speech about her own good, right before she left... with him.

Oh.

Oh, shit.

The harbour, the rain, Scott jabbing a finger into his chest, and Sam's own words coming back to him: why else d'you drop the 'doctor' thing in my ear? He'd known it even then, mid-swing. Scott had been listening. Scott knew about the checkup - verbatim, early, had it ready, locked and loaded, and slid it into Sam's ear at precisely the angle guaranteed to blow the two of them apart.

He wasn't just stirring for sport. Not being a nosey prick with a penchant for drama. Aim. Scott wanted them in fragments. Wanted Sam out of the picture - needled him, wound him, handed him the grenade and stood well back - but wanted her to… stay?

It's backwards. You're running a treasure hunt, you keep the treasure hunter. The forger, the climber, the guy who's been shot at on four continents - that's the asset. The bright-eyed Masters student is the one you thank and put on a plane. Scott burned the veteran off the job to keep the girl.

Why? Why does he need her?

And then - God, and then - the other thing Scott said that morning surfaces. The thing Sam took a swing over and never once took apart:

"She found the cufflink that day instead. Again - progress."

Progress. A girl bleeding from the face out of the blue on a semi-weekly basis skips the doctor, and Scott calls it progress. Sam had heard callousness. Sam had been callous. But upon reflection, you don't call a concerning symptom progress unless the symptom is somehow part of the job.

Scott hadn't overlooked her getting worse. Scott was the only one of them paying proper attention.

Sam realises he's stopped talking out loud. Realises, too, that his arm has curled all the way around his niece, snug, like something in the room needs guarding - like he's not going to allow another precious girl slip out of safety - and there's nothing here but a laptop and a dead phone and thirty-year-old newsprint.

"Am I losin' it?" he asks Cassie, quietly. "Blink once for yes."

She stares at him with the unblinking candour of the small and sturdy.

He frowns deeper. Because there's one more thing, while the dominoes are toppling one by one. Amman. Scott barrelling into her hotel room soaked in sweat, wild-eyed, I was followed - and Sam had never seen him like that, before or since. Rattled. Properly frightened. Practically begging Sam, of all people, for reassurance. And Sam's not saying the tail wasn't real. He's got no evidence it wasn't real. What he's got is the shape of what happened after: nothing. Nobody ever showed. No second sighting, no break-in, no follow-up, not so much as a nervous glance over the shoulder - the terror of being involved in a potential chase or - God forbid, murder investigation, just evaporated over time, unmentioned, unexplained, and by the time the finds started landing in their laps; the ledger, the box, the letters, the scroll; Scott was back to wall-to-wall smirking and flirting and fucking encouraging her to do more and more, like the fear had done its job and been put away for winter.

No. Nah. That - that doesn't prove anything. He knows that. Frightened men calm down; threats fizzle; life's like that.

It just itches. Everything about the man, tonight, itches.

Sam is aware, distantly, of what all this looks like. He's watched other men do it - build mountains out of molehills because the alternative was admitting they just wanted a reason to call her. And some pathetic synapse within him puts its hand up and owns it: yeah. Maybe. Maybe he's cooking up a fantasy because fantasies give him permission to go back.

He looks up to the ceiling, huffing a breath.

Sam can't explain it. The feeling in his gut. He's not going to try tonight; the how of it is a problem for daylight, for research, for a man with more than two brain cells not currently on fire, and not in sole charge of an infant. All he knows is that every separate thing he's found tonight bends the same direction: that her, alone, with Scott, is no good thing.

A ridiculous notion. Sure.

He'll take ridiculous over wrong.

Sam is on his feet. The chair's cracked back against the wall and Cassie's clutched to his chest, startled, a small fist bunched in his collar, and the low hum under his ribs has evolved into a siren. Every instinct he owns standing straight up at once and screaming the same three words -

She's not safe.

She could be fine. That's the sane voice, somewhere at the back, ruling its objection - she could be home this very minute, dead asleep, phone on charge, a thousand miles from every type of Samuel Drake and Scott Parker and every hole in the ground they've ever loved. Could be.

But could be is a coin flip, and Sam has never once in his life let a coin land flat without looking.

Until he confirms it, she's anything but.

"Okay - okay - " He's already moving, away from the desk through the dark kitchen, Cassie jostling against his shoulder and starting to grumble, one big hand cupped to the back of her head on pure autopilot - "s'okay, peanut, s'okay, Uncle Sammy's just - " Where does Nathan keep the house phone. There's a house phone, he's seen it, a landline in this day and age, where's the damn - hallway. Hallway table. He barrels down the hall in the dark, snatches the handset off its cradle, stabs it awake with his thumb.

Dial tone. Beautiful, prehistoric dial tone.

Back to the desk, handset jammed between ear and shoulder, Cassie redistributed to one arm, two fingers already stabbing at the laptop: fox and fiddle pub bromley south east london. The results cough up half the foxes in the city - a Fox & Firkin, a Fiddler's Arms, a gastro-looking thing with the right name and none of the character - and he scrolls on a knuckle, squinting at thumbnails, until: there. Greeny-blue tiled frontage, hanging baskets gone leggy, the A-board with the chalk ghost of a hundred rewritten deals and soccer matches and happy hours. He'd started a fight at that bar. Got patched up in that cupboard. That's the one.

He does the maths on his fingers, hours leaping forward across an ocean. Late there. Last orders gone, lights coming up, some poor soul mopping, just like she was when he first encountered her in person - focus, Samuel - but somebody'll still be in, cashing up, and if there's a God at all it'll be her - and he can hear her voice and feel like the world's biggest, most fortunate idiot, and hang up, and breathe.

He dials the number off the screen. International charges be damned. It rings.

And only now - naturally, helpfully, with the line already live - does administrative panic arrive: what exactly is he going to say? Three and a half weeks of silence, an ocean of it, and his grand opening move is a phone call to her place of work at midnight like some -

The dial tone stops.

"Sorry, mate. We're closed. You can call back tomorrow." A man. Flat, tired, the clatter of glasses clinking somewhere close to him.

Not her. Sam's grip tightens on the handset. He exhales.

"Yeah - no, I know, sorry. I'm, uh, tryin' to reach one of your staff." And then he says her name. Out loud, for the first time in three and a half weeks - it comes out rougher than he means it to, like it snagged on something on the way up. "She workin' tonight?"

A pause. Long enough to hear the hum of a fridge, a chair going up on a table.

"…You taking the piss?"

Sam's stomach tips. "What? No, I - "

"Mate, she's not been in for weeks. No call, no text, nothing - number just goes straight to voicemail. I've had to cancel my holiday to cover her shifts because the boss is too tight to hire a newbie." A huff, more tired than unkind. "You find her, tell her she's got to get her arse back here. You a friend?"

Sam doesn't answer.

He can't. The phone's speaker has gone very far away and very loud all at once, his own pulse a sudden tidal wave rushing betweeen his ears - weeks, no call, no text, voicemail, and somewhere on the other side of the world a stranger is saying hello? …hello? into a phone that Sam's no longer holding to his ear so much as gripping like a guard rail on a crumbling ledge.

He hangs up. Stands there in the dark with his niece, white noise crackling down the phone, and the roar of blood rising into his head.

Weeks.

What has he done?

He didn't walk away - he was walked. Scott held the door, and Sam marched through it with his stupid ideas of nobility in his damn mouth, and left her standing there, ripe for picking, and-

He takes half a second to try and convince himself that she's simply gone off with Scott to spite him. But that's bullshit. She was always so careful about cooking up the perfect excuse. Far too considerate to leave even the job she hated high and dry.

What the fuck has he done?

Numbers. He needs numbers. A voice of reason. Victor's, maybe - which one? The man changes numbers like clothes. Chloe's? She knows Scott. The address book - Elena keeps an address book, some ugly floral thing, hallway drawer - he wrenches the drawer so hard it comes off its runner, random keys, takeout menus and rubber bands cascading over his feet, Cassie now crying in earnest against his neck.

"I know, sweetheart, I know - " he breathes, bouncing her, cradling the phone in the crook of his neck, punching in the first number his fingers dredge up, eyes wild in the dark, heart going like a fist on a door. It rings once. Twice.

"C'mon," Sam whispers.

· · ─ ·✶· ─ · ·

“This is highly unprofessional,” your voice hitches between syllables, lust a hook that snags the thread of your self-control; a once tightly wound spool that now seems to unravel easily at the whims of the man currently devouring the bare skin of your neck.

“Take it up with HR,” Sam’s hands, never idle, busy themselves with their respective tasks - his left at the base of your neck beneath the curtain of your hair, a steady hold like an anchor as his right travels a gradual path. His fingers start at your knee, dancing along the slit of your dress as he starts to push the satin fabric of it up like an obstacle to be removed. 

But you grab his wrist, pausing him there between your thighs and out of reach from the place you both long for him to be. He kneads the soft flesh there like he can’t help himself, like he’d take what little he can get and savor it anyways, ever the optimist. 

“We shouldn’t.” 

He kisses his way back up to your face, efficient and measured in his attention as he leans back from you not to create any real cavern of distance, but to catch your eyes in his, to give you that wolfish smile that  you know he’s wearing before you see it for yourself. 

“When has that stopped us before?”

He’s not wrong, but you don’t tell him that, instead letting the pendulum of indecision swing somewhere between base wants and rational thought as you take in what little you can see of him in the dim lighting. 

You’re in a rather precarious position, balanced here on the edge of a spare table in some disarrayed supply room, having abandoned both the mission at hand and your propriety. The latter you have no real hope of salvaging, not if Samuel Drake is within twenty feet of you, but the former…that’s not something you’re willing to part with. 

“We still have a job to do, Sam.”  

“So?” he shrugs, and you feel him test your hold on his wrist, finding it ironclad, but smiling still like you were a lock nearly picked, “We can be quick.” 

 “I don’t want to be quick.” 

You keep your eyes on his, free hand playing with the curls at the nape of his neck, and you watch his pupils dilate just a fraction as their attention catches on your lips. 

“You’re killin’ me here,” and he does actually look stricken, starved even, like the very idea of not having you right here and now is a torture not easily beared. And he says you’re dramatic. 

“I think you’ll survive another couple hours,” you trust him enough to unwind your grip on his wrist but he doesn’t move his hand, simply keeps it there halfway up your thigh like he has no other place to be. You offer him a small consolation, a whisper of a kiss, leaning back when he tries to deepen it, “Besides, I’ll make the wait worth your while.” 

“Is that right?” 

“Scout’s honor.”

He snorts, close enough still that you can feel his breath on your face,“They give out badges for bein’ a little slut now?” 

“Asshole.”

“Tease.” 

You shove his chest hard enough that he stumbles backwards, freeing yourself from the cage of his grasp and gaining a small opportune window to hop down from the table before he can trap you again; you don’t trust yourself to resist him twice.

You do your best to undo the damage wrought by your irresponsible decisions, first straightening out the manhandled fabric of your dress to lay properly. You find your hastily discarded clutch on the floor, thrown some feet away in the heat of the moment beside an empty mop bucket, and immediately rummage through it for your pocket mirror. By the grace of some god who must have a soft spot for the lustful, the reflection that stares back at you is nearly untouched, save for a few tangles in your hair. You take a moment to give thanks to yourself for having the wherewithal to don a lip stain tonight; you’d learned that lesson the hard way. 

His gaze stays on you, fixated, begging to be returned, but you make him wait - patience is a virtue he could use a refresher on. And when you finally grant him your attention, you find him looking at you with his head cocked slightly, smug smile on his face, the one that immediately sets your skin alight. 

“What?” 

“Nothin’,” he shrugs, feigning innocence despite the look in his eye implying anything but, “Just enjoyin’ the view.” 

Your groan, throwing a loose mint in your purse at him, “Dude.”

“Oh come on, it’s a good line,” he laughs, that self-pleased rasp you’ve come to love. 

“Yeah for a made for tv movie, maybe.” 

“Trust me - the things I’m thinkin’ of when I’m lookin’ at you would not make it to TV,” he pauses, furrowing his brow in fake-thought, “Well, maybe Cinemax.” 

“Don’t make me throw another mint at you.” 

But it’s a threat ignored, one that does nothing to smother the tangible, vexing look of want in his eye, his smile like a warning you don’t know if you’ll have the strength to heed. You feel claustrophobic beneath the attention, like a target to be honed in on, and when he takes a step toward you, you immediately match his stride but backwards, your laugh a nervous chime, “Nuh-Uh. Park it, grabby.” 

“What - no kiss goodbye?”

“No nothing until we finish this job.”

He rolls his eyes, but the words do what they need to, impeding his approach. “God, you’re startin’ to sound like Victor.” 

“You say that like it’s a bad thing.” 

“Well it certainly isn’t a good thing, I’ll tell you that much.” 

You give him a pointed look, one he’s intimately familiar with, and start to head towards the exit, feeling him in tow behind you at a disconcerting distance. He pauses there at your back when you reach the door, not close enough to touch you but just enough that you can feel the heat of him, steady and maddening, and you’re tempted to elbow him in the gut as a lesson in personal boundaries. 

You can hear the low hum of a crowd even before you crack the door open, the quick sliver of sight only confirming what you already feared. “Shit; there’s people everywhere.” 

“Shame,” but he doesn’t seem even remotely concerned, and you feel him lean down, his next words spoken into the shell of your ear, “Guess we’ll have to find a way to kill the time.”

“Don’t start,” you whip around to face him, no longer trusting him to behave without your eyes on him. 

“I’m just sayin’,” he grins at you like you’re some piece in a game of his own making, perfectly placed right where he wants you, “All work and no play…” 

“I play plenty, thank you very much.”  

“Speakin’ of,” he narrows in on you with a single, calculating step, and you have nowhere to go, not with the wall at your back, finding yourself well and truly trapped in the exact position you were trying to avoid, “Remember that closet in Marseille? You didn’t seem too pressed about foolin’ around then.” 

Oh, you most definitely remember that. Your bodies between hung coats, barely concealed, one leg on his shoulder as he knelt there on the floor and made you cum twice with just his tongue; not a moment one forgets. 

“Sam -” 

And his arms are somehow on your waist again, pulling you into him as sure as the tide, and you hate the way your body folds completely to his aims like it were as inevitable as gravity, no resistance to the wandering feel of his hands. 

“Then there was that out of order bathroom in Mataró, and the random Porsche we broke into in Bristol, and the -” 

Heat crawls up your spine as you swat his chest, trying and failing miserably to gather the non-existent pieces of your restraint, “Those were all after we’d finished the job. Perv.” 

“Hey I hate to break to you, sweetheart,” his voice is a low, dangerous rumble as his lips fall to your cheek, kissing a path to your ear, “but if I'm a perv, then you’re most definitely a perv, too.” 

“Wow, that’s -” you can’t help but laugh, even as he starts to lightly trail his mouth down your neck, “you know, I don’t think a guy’s ever called me a perv to try to get in my pants before.”

He lifts his head to look down at you, eyebrows dancing suggestively, “Is it workin’?”

“You’re incorrigible, you know that?”

“I love it when you talk sweet to me.” 

And god help you, but you wind your arms around his neck as he starts to close what little space remains between the two of you, all sense be damned, when a minuscule, distant part of you picks up the lack of noise outside. The silence like a siren awakens the rational part of you long thought dead, and you turn your face before he can kiss you, unlacing your arms from his neck to peek through the door again. 

You hear him audibly sigh as he rests his head on your shoulder in defeat. 

There’s a lag in the crowd, a gift you don’t want to take for granted, so you hastily tug him through the cracked open door, only creating a gap just big enough to squeeze through, “Come on, Romeo - The coast is finally clear.”

“You know, it’s cruel to toy with a man like this.”

He’s still maintaining that same level of near non-existent distance as you carefully close the door behind you, and it’s entirely reckless, the way he’s shamelessly toying with you even now out in the open, no walls to hide behind.

“You’re a big boy; I think you can handle it,” and it’s not fair for him to be the only one that gets to torment, so you smack his still half-hard dick, smiling sweetly up at him like you’d only just given him a kiss. 

He winces, gritting his teeth as he’s rendered stagnant by an approaching group of partygoers who unknowingly steal any hopes he has for retaliation, “You’re gonna pay for that later.” 

You pretend to fix his tie, saccharine smirk still on your face, “Promise?” 

And he apes that same expression, “You’re terrible.” 

“You love it.”

“Maybe.”

You both willingly cage yourselves here for a moment, eyes locked to one another’s like a silent standoff. But you break first, sighing as you take a few slow backwards steps from him, “Well, this was fun and all, but I’m off to do some work. I recommend you do the same, Mr. Drake.” 

“Much rather do you.”

You point a warning finger, “Behave.”  

“No promises.” 

You turn your back to him, thinking yourself finally free from the clutches of depravity, when you feel, unmistakably, a hard smack to your ass. It’s loud enough that it draws the attention of a few stray attendees around you, but you don’t give him the satisfaction of turning around. You simply walk straight ahead, flushed head to toe, right ass cheek stinging, as if nothing had happened at all. 

· · ─ ·✶· ─ · ·

The snack table at this gala, much to your dismay, is a rather lacking assortment considering the tax bracket you're surrounded by. But you keep any snide comments to yourself as you eat your fourth canape, some concoction of cheese and mystery meat that’s nearly edible when accompanied with a generous swig of wine. You’re nursing your third glass, and probably should’ve stopped after the second, but who were you to turn down an 82 Lafite bordeaux? 

Somewhere off in the distance, a well-paid schmuck is parked in front of a baby grand, playing a distasteful classical rendition of a Madonna song that escapes you. Your feet tap absentmindedly to the rhythm as your eyes scan the snack table for your next victim - a tea sandwich maybe, or a chunk of brie with a nice piece of fig, or perhaps - 

“Nice of you to finally join the party,” Sully’s voice breaks through your grazing stupor, and you jump at the sudden, accusatory sound of it. 

“I was having a dress malfunction,” is the excuse your wine-rotted brain decides to clumsily spew out as you turn to him, food mumbling your words. You try to chew quickly, wiping stray puff pastry crumbs from your chest, the picture of poise and grace. 

"Couldn't've come up with a better lie, huh?” You watch his face fall to an amused scowl, crossing his arms the way he does when he’s about to haggle someone, scotch balanced on his elbow. 

“What’s that supposed to mean?” 

“You know damn well what I mean.” 

You laugh, not entirely pleased with the sound of it but it’s casual enough, “Uh, I don’t, actually. Hey, how many of those have you had, Sully?” you gesture to his drink, taking a sip of your own to rid your mouth of the stray crumbs still clinging to your teeth, “Maybe the scotch is starting to get to you.” 

“The only thing that’s gettin’ to me is you two bozos on my nerves. You’re growin’ sloppy.” 

Shit.

You can tell by the furrow in his brow that he isn’t going to drop whatever he’s got between his teeth until he’s satisfied that it’s dead, that he’s made his point. But you don’t let yourself give in that easily, foolishly clutching onto a distant possibility that maybe, just maybe, you could gnash your way out. 

“Just because I’m taking a break to enjoy the refreshments does not make me sloppy, thank you very much. And I’ll have you know I’ve been working extraneously this whole night to make sure-”

“You’re really gonna make me say it, aren’t you?”

You shrink beneath the crushing weight of pure disappointment in his eye, but hold your shaky, crumbling ground despite yourself. 

“Say what?”

He sighs, shaking his head, hesitant like he was about to open a door he knew he wouldn’t be able to close, “Alright. Have it your way,” a sip of his scotch is his only moment of pause before he says, “I know you’re sleepin’ together.” 

Your eyes widen before you can stop them, and a laugh leaves your mouth that you have no real control over, a loud, anxious, off-kilter sound, and still, like the stubborn, stupid asshole you are, already knee deep in a grave you dug yourself, you keep burying, “Okay, now I’m seriously worried about you - are you coming down with a fever or something?” 

He wears a placid expression, almost patient, but in the way an experienced fighter knows to wait, to bide their time, let their opponent tire themselves out before making their first strike. And you’re not expecting his debut jaw-shattering hit when he sighs, and shakes his head, and says,  “I’ve got two words for you, kid - shower. Dubrovnik. That ringin’ a bell?”

Fuck. 

FUCK.FUCK.FUCK.FUCK.

It did, unfortunately, ring a very loud bell. Your memory, cruel as she is, decides to bombard you with flashes of the things you and Sam did to each other in that shower, depraved, borderline animalistic things that apparently, your very good friend Victor Sullivan had borne some form of witness to.

You find yourself wishing the floor would open up and swallow you whole, or a meteor would spontaneously crash through the vaulted ceilings, or a sudden on-set aneurysm would strike you down - anything to save you from this.

“How much did you hear?” 

He recoils at the question, “Nothing x-rated, if that’s what you’re askin’. I got the hell out of there before I could.” 

You let out a sigh of relief that you feel all the way down to your soul. It’s a small but welcomed reprieve, not enough to staunch the horrifying sting of mortification all together, but it’s a minuscule win you’ll take, “Why didn’t you say anything?”

“I'm sayin’ somethin’ now, aren't I? And not cause I want to, either, but you gave me no choice with you foolin’ around on the clock.” 

Another devastating blow to your dignity, falling somewhere behind your ribs,“How did you-” 

“I wasn’t born yesterday, you know. And normally I'd keep my nose out of it, but the last thing I need is for you two punks to get slapped with an indecent exposure charge while we’re in the middle of a goddamn job.” 

“Shit,” it’s a final right hook, signed, sealed, delivered straight to the marrow of you, as you look up to your friend and feel the only thing the losing side ever gets to feel - shame, regret, guilt. They cling to you like scarlet letters, stitched into your skin. “I’m so so sorry, Sully. You’re completely and totally right. I - I don’t know what I was thinking,” you weren’t, is the crux of the problem; it seems you’re incapable of it when it comes to Sam. “It won’t happen again. I promise.”

The handsome lines of his face are completely clear of any animosity as he considers you, and you wonder if you look as outwardly pathetic as you feel. You’re expecting him to dole out at least one more well-deserved hit - something about how he expected more from you or that he didn’t know you were capable of being so insanely thoughtless. Instead, his gaze softens, tone nearly gentle as he says, “Is it serious?”

You feel yourself blush at the frankness of his words, letting out the same habitual, nervous laugh with the futility of donning hole-ridden armor,“Is anything with Sam serious?” 

He shrugs, taking another sip of his scotch, eyes sharp as if he were looking for clues between your every syllable, “Maybe not. But I’ve never seen you act this way with a fella before.”

What?

You're stunned into silence, blinking, waiting for thought and speech to return to you for several long, painful seconds before you awkwardly croak out, “It’s - it’s not like that, Sully. Really. We’re just friends having fun. Nothing more.”

Your own words sound hollow even to you, but he doesn’t push, just studies you carefully for a few moments before he says, “Well -  be careful, yeah? Commitment isn’t exactly his strong suit. And I don’t want my best girl gettin’ her heart broke.”

“It’s a good thing I’m not looking for commitment then.”

“Yeah. Good thing.”

He looks at you with an expression far too close to pity for your comfort, and this elongated silence between you is only making it worse. So you finish the remnants of your wine, and pray that your brain still has some form of humor left to cut the pair of you free from the embarrassing weeds of honesty and vulnerability you’re tangled in now. 

“Well…that was certainly not on my bingo card for tonight.” 

He chuckles, all too happy to follow your detour, “Trust me, it wasn’t on mine either.”

“Don’t tell me we’re going to have The Talk next?” 

“I think we’re way past that, doll.” 

 “Way past?” you scoff, clutching your invisible pearls, “What are you trying to say exactly?”

He knocks his elbow into you, “Nothin’ you haven’t heard before.”

“Wow, okay, funny guy. Keep it up and your next trip is gonna be a one way ticket to a home.”

He barks out a laugh, “N’aw you love me too much for that.”

“Don’t be so sure, old man.” 

“Eh, I’ll push my luck.” 

“Push you right into a wheelchair, more like.”

He points a finger at you, no real malice behind his scornful tone, “Hey watch it, smart ass.”

You shrug, holding his gaze as you smile at each other, “You started it.” 

“Yeah well, serves you right for makin’ me play Mother Hen.” 

“Okay, fair enough,” you hold out your free hand, an olive branch for the taking, “Truce?”

And he grasps it without hesitation,“Truce. Now, come on - let’s go finish scopin’ this joint out.” 

“Yes. Let’s.” 

And you do. You make small talk with the other guests as you take note of all the minute details to fill in the loose ends of your blueprint back at the hotel. The number of exits. The type of locks on the windows and doors. What weapons the security guards are carrying and if they look like they know how to use them. But all the while, in the background of your mind, a constant, insistent buzzing like the hum of cicadas in the summer. 

I’ve never seen you act this way with a fella before. 

What the fuck did he mean by that? 

· ─ ·✶· ─ · ·

The solitude your hotel room offers is little comfort when you know it’s a state not long preserved. 

Sam would be here soon, surely, despite your best efforts to the contrary. There’s little one can do to impede the will of a Drake, but it didn’t stop you from trying, your method of choice a subdued strategy - the cold shoulder. Part of you had hoped it would be enough to steer him clear of you, but you know the bastard is probably just thinking you did it all to drive him crazy; it certainly wouldn’t be the first time, in his defense. 

You’d excused yourself from the debrief back in Sully’s room, your makeshift basecamp, blaming your early exit on a wine-induced headache and feeling nearly-guilty as you left them with nothing more than an apology. But you knew your absence would slow any planning, thus giving you precious time to think. And stew. And panic. And wonder if maybe coming to your room alone wasn’t so good of an idea after all. 

You’ve already abandoned your too-tight dress and too-tall heels, discarding them nearly the moment you got back to exchange them instead for bare feet and a giant t-shirt. You can’t stop filtering between a disjointed routine of sitting, standing, and pacing that at least seems to match the manic tempo of your thoughts.  

I’ve never seen you act this way with a fella before. 

Sully’s words rattle in your mind like a piece knocked loose, one you can’t seem to get righted back into place. And now that you’re alone, there’s no external impediments to stop the dam from bursting. The same way pain can come long after an injury, when the fog of adrenaline passes and the body finally gives in, you find yourself succumbing here to feelings you never took the time to give breath, that you never even knew existed. 

You force yourself to sit with it, truly, this six month old thing neither of you has bothered to give a name. No set terms to review. No real attention bestowed to what it all means, if it means anything at all. You haven’t been with anyone else. Haven’t even given that possibility a passing thought. No. The only man that occupied your mind was him. And it was a change so gradual, so insidious, that you weren’t even aware of it until now. Somewhere, somehow, beneath the cloak of impromptu hookups, the lines in your mind began to blur, and the path blindly taken strayed from casual fun into untraveled terrain you dare not begin to map out. Not now. Not when you can finally feel the extent of which he’s wormed his way into the very sinew of you, an infestation now too far gone to possibly eradicate. Maybe Sully was right. Have you ever felt this way about someone? Have you ever let yourself? 

Fuck. 

Your stomach plummets at the sound of the familiar chime of the key card, a prelude song that’s nearly pavlovian the way your body anticipates the dance that always follows. He steps through the threshold, still donned in his tux sans his tie, looking so infuriatingly handsome it makes your chest seize. 

“Hi,” a soft smile is etched into his face as he takes unhurried steps into the room. 

“Hi.” 

He clears his throat, cocking his head to the side, that playful look in his eye gleaming as he glances around like he has something to find among the bare bones furniture of a chain hotel, “Sorry to intrude, miss, but I came to investigate a noise complaint. You wouldn’t happen to know anything about that, would you?”

You try to hide a smile, already caught in the pull of his game as you squint your eyes in pretend thought, “A noise complaint? No. I haven’t heard a thing.” 

“Apparently there’s been repeated reports of - uh - incessant banging. That, and lots of loud moaning.”

“Sounds serious.” 

“It is, actually. A punishable offense, even.”

“Well I hope you find the people responsible then.” 

He twists his head around as if to take in the full expanse of your tiny room, eyebrows furrowed. You watch him as he walks over to the meager two-seated table by the far window to run a finger across the scratched vinyl, inspecting his un-dusted pads like a cheap impression of Columbo, “You do a lot of moanin’ in here, miss?” 

A small laugh slips that you manage to mask as a scoff, “I beg your pardon?”

“You heard me.”

"I'm not sure what you’re trying to insinuate, but I've never moaned a day in my life.”

You watch his lips twitch as his eyes fall to you, “Never, huh?”

“Nope,” you shake your head, lifting your nose at him in an act of haughtiness, “So I'm afraid you must have the wrong room.” 

“See, now that’s a much bigger problem,” he tsks, sighing, shaking his head like he faces a job most dire, “I’m afraid I can't leave here in good conscience until we get that little…never moaned problem a’yours all sorted.” 

“What kind of hotel is this?” 

“One that takes the satisfaction of our guests very seriously.” 

He’s wearing a dangerous smile as your eyes lock, but he doesn’t move from the table. 

You hate the way your skin hums with the urge to touch him. “And will I be charged extra for this…service?”

“Oh no. This one’s on the house,” he keeps his gaze on you as he shrugs off his suit jacket, hanging it there unceremoniously against the back of the chair, his dress shoes the next object of his attention. You don’t bother hiding the hungry way you watch him,  eyes lingering on the move of his muscles beneath his dress shirt, on the tapered shape of his waist. 

“Lucky me.”

He closes the distance between you in a few easy strides, seeming to glide against the floral-patterned carpet. You expect his hands to reach for their usual favored destinations, but instead, he frames your face with his grasp, cradling you there as you look up at him. “How’s the head?” 

“I’ll live.” 

His thumb strokes the apple of your cheek, eyes a searching spotlight on your features like he was trying to see through you. “You know, I don’t think I had a chance to tell you how beautiful you look tonight.” 

“Dude,” you shake free of his hold, trying and failing to hide the inching feel of a blush, “You can skip the whole flattery act; I’m already gonna sleep with you.” 

“It’s not an act, you brat,” his arms a lasso that wind around your waist, a firm hold unable to be broken; not that you’d want to, anyways, “I couldn’t keep my eyes off a’you. Seriously. 

“Well that’s rather concerning considering you were supposed to be keeping your eyes on the security system.”

“Hey, it’s not my fault you decided to wear a dress like that. And honestly I’m a little ticked off y’didn’t let me take it off you myself.” 

“So your lack of professionalism is my fault?”

“Eh, mostly I'd blame the girls here,” his eyes motion downwards to your cleavage, hidden now beneath your worn sleep shirt, “Violet, especially.”

“You have got to stop anthropomorphising my tits.”

“Never.”

When his lips start their descent to you, you anticipate fire, raging and explosive, but what’s given is a smoldering burn, slow and creeping and all together entirely more dangerous. His hands roam your body as his tongue slides along your bottom lip, a knock on the door of your mouth that you all too eagerly open, pride be damned. But there’s an air of patience to his touch that digs beneath your skin, a pace far too considerate for your liking. Your hands blindly reach for his belt, a catalyst to add kerosene to flame, sliding the cool leather from his pant straps, releasing it from the buckle, and nearly freeing him entirely of its restrictive hold before he stops you. You feel your heart sink, doused with the frigid water of disappointment. 

“Not so fast, sweet thing.”

“Don’t tell me you’re saving yourself for marriage?” 

He snorts, “I’m tryna take my time here, alright?”

“Rather you wouldn’t.” 

A long finger twirls the end of your hair, his other palm planted firmly on your ass, “That’s awful rich comin’ from the girl who gave me blue balls for four hours.” 

“Well I’m trying to fix that, but you’re not letting me.”

“Patience, sweetheart,” he dons a sing-songy tone, looking down at you in much the same way a cat might play with its food.   

“Like you’re one to talk.” 

He presses a chaste kick to your mouth, his next words spoken against your lips, “Don’t move.” 

And you listen. Even as he steps away from you. Even as he plops down at the foot of the bed, making himself comfortable, leaning back against his forearms as you stand there, waiting, waiting, waiting, like the loyal dog you are. 

He’s dripping in a smugness so heavy you’re surprised the bed doesn’t collapse beneath the weight of it, “Undress for me.” 

You feel your whole body blush as you bark out a laugh “What?” 

He shrugs, “You said you’d make it worth my while.” 

“Yeah, I meant more in the way of a blowjob, not a strip tease.” 

“I don’t need a whole show - I just wanna watch you take your t-shirt off.” 

You glare at him, hating the sure way he looks at you as if he already knows you’ll do it, like this whole exchange was merely for your benefit, to let you think you have any say in the matter, “Seriously?”

“Yes, seriously. Would it kill you to indulge me?”

“It might.”

“Well, in the event of your death, I’ll accept full legal responsibility - how’s that?”

“Wow. Soooo romantic, Samuel.”

“Just shut up and take the shirt off.”

A pointed pause hangs between you as you both wait for the inevitable break of your will, that weak, malleable muscle nearly atrophied at this point, useless in the face of him. 

“Fine. But only since you asked so nicely.” 

Your compliance is malicious; the one act of power you have left lies in trying to make your undressing as unappealing as possible. You awkwardly shove an arm out of the sleeve and tug it forcefully over your head, cotton chaffing against your hair, strands alive with static as you throw the shirt somewhere off in the corner. 

He looks about as pleased as if you’d given him a whole burlesque routine, and you’re tempted to throw the nearest object at his stupid, ego-swollen, infuriatingly hot head. 

You hold your arms out expectantly, but don’t move otherwise, “Happy?”

“Elated,” and he looks every bit of it, “Now give me a spin.”

“Oh go fuck yourself,” but you smile, the pair of you laughing like this was all some sort of private joke - you nearly naked and him fully clothed, this habitual cadence of power between the pair of you, or lack there of, in your case.  

“I’m tryin’ to fuck you actually but you’re insistin’ on bein’ difficult.” 

“Me? You’re the one making me play Simon Says.”

“I thought you liked it when I tell you what to do?” 

Shit. He’s got you there. You’d do just about anything if it was him on the other end of an ask; you try not to linger on the gravity of what that means.

His lips curve sideways with a knowing grin, “Nothin’ to say to that, huh?”

“Shut up,” and with gritted teeth, you spin for him, feeling about as helpless as a porcelain figure in a music box, doomed to perform when opened. 

“See? Was that really so hard?”

“I hate you.” 

The fond look in his eye makes you want to jump out the window. 

He ticks his head to the side like a call to be answered, “C’mere.” 

And you do. No distance between you now as you stand in front of him, not quite towering over him, but it’s enough to give you the illusion of an advantage. He wastes no time in smothering his head between your breasts, perfectly placed in front of him like they were for little else.

“God, I missed you two,” he kneads, and squeezes, and nips, and kisses through the thin mesh fabric of your bra with the ferocity of a man reunited with his other half. 

You roll your eyes, “Stop talking to my boobs.” 

“Stop interrupting us.” 

Your hands lace through his hair as his lips start to wander, down to the bare skin of your stomach, where he traverses across you like following a favored path, taking his time in his journey. His hands are gentle against the planes of your body, sweeping against the surface of you, wakeless, calm, You close your eyes to the feel of it, trying and failing miserably to enjoy the quiet attention, but it’s all too sweet and soft and intimate, like salt in a wound you’re trying to soothe, the thoughts in your mind growing louder. You can’t take a minute more of this, every affectionate press of palm and lip a nail in a coffin. You need escape from this sepulcher, need him to remind you of the place you’ve uprooted yourself from, back into the soil of friends with casual benefits. No strings like nooses to choke on. 

You tug his hair hard enough to get him to look at you, “Can I get on my knees for you now?” 

His eyes, pretty even in the lackluster lighting, search your face. You watch him struggle with himself, donning a concerning bit of hesitation and care that you've never seen him wear before; you hate the look of it on him. And then his hands are sliding up your thigh, and he’s marveling up at you in a way that makes your blood start to curdle, and you really just want to die at this point, “Not yet. I wanna kiss you properly first.” 

When he pulls you into his lap, it feels like a death sentence. But it’s easy to ignore your approaching demise with his lips on yours, and his tongue in your mouth, and his practiced hands undoing the strap of your bra. You follow his lead, working at the buttons on his shirt, unconsciously grinding down on the hard shape of him you can already feel through his trousers. He groans into your mouth and you swallow as if the sound could be consumed, hands shakily pushing the sleeves of his shirt down his arms, no barrier now between the skin of your chests. 

You let yourself be tugged along by the current of desire, losing yourself to the blur of the rapids - the bruising feel of his mouth on your tits, teeth and tongue against your nipples, staking his claim on you. You still have remnants of bruises there, and on the inside of your thighs, hidden places for him to carve his initials into your skin. 

Your mouth falls to his neck, and your own lips set to blooming purple against his flock of birds, relishing in the way he hums, the vibration of it like plucking just the right string. His hands knead at the flesh of your ass, hips jerking upwards into yours, a clothed dance between your bodies, of empty friction that only spurs you further. 

“Alright,” you hear him say, resigned, feel it against your skin as you lick your way to his earlobe, pinning the soft flesh of it between your teeth, “You can put that pretty mouth a’yours to work now.” 

You smile against him, “Don’t have to tell me twice,” and gleefully slide down his body to take your rightful spot on your knees. You work together to pull his pants and boxers down, letting them pool around his ankles as his cock springs free. The head of him is already leaking, the unripe fruit of your labor there in the pearlescent hue; you feel your mouth water at the sight of him, red and engorged and looking every bit as needy as you feel. 

You kiss your way up his knee to his inner thigh, and he watches you with bated breath as you let your tongue indulgently slide along the handsome vein that sprawls from his balls to his cockhead, drinking in every detail on his face as you do - the pained furrow of brow, the tight clench of his jaw, the desperate look in his eye. You think about torturing him a little, but the thought of waiting even a second more without him in your mouth is too much to bear; this is, after all, every bit as much for you as it is for him. 

“Be a doll and hold my hair back, will you?” 

“At your service,” he gathers your hair as you finally guide the weeping head of his dick into your mouth, taking him slowly, inch by painstaking inch. You hear him curse above you, a string of jesus, fuck me, christ, stomach shuddering with stunted breaths as your fist pumps the thick base of him, never quite able to fit the full length of him in your mouth, the well-endowed bastard. You don’t bother hiding your moans as he fills you, your twisting hand moving in sync with the bobbing of your head, tongue swirling along the shape of him. He collides with the back of your throat, and you gag, clenching your thighs together as you make him do it again, and again, and again. 

“Jesus Christ,” your eyes flit up to him, flush blooming across his stubbled cheeks, and the word pretty comes to mind at the sight, “Y’have no idea how good you look gaggin’ on me like this.” 

You moan, eagerly waiting for the inevitable that always comes with you on your knees. When the gentle hold of your hair will turn into a rough grasp like a leash pulled taught, when his hips will start to thrust with no regard for the way you drool and choke on him, your throat nothing but a means to an end. When he finally gives you what you desperately need. But, devastatingly, that moment never comes. 

You try to push his own hand down on the back of your head as a gentle nudge towards your desired territory but he doesn’t take the bait. “Stop that.” 

You pop off of him, trail of saliva a lingering link between you and his cock as your hand still pumps him, “You’re being so gentle.”

“And - fuck -”, you grant him a particularly hard squeeze, “What about it?”

“Dont be.” 

“Are you tellin’ or askin’?”

“Does it matter?” 

“It might.”

You pout your lips, “Please?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because I shit - ” your thumb purposefully rubs the head of his dick, lingering there, squeezing and twisting like you could coax the answer you wanted out of him with just your hand alone, “Cause I said so.” 

“But I want you to.” 

He takes hold of your wrist, moving your hand off him, and you can’t help but sigh in frustration, “Can I be frank?”

“Rather you be Sam.” 

“Really?”

“You kind of walked right into that one.” 

“Look, wise ass - I - ” he stops himself, and if you didn’t know him better, you’d say he almost looks…shy? but Samuel Drake was not shy. Certainly not when it comes to matters of coitus. He takes a breath, and smiles down at you like he’s about to ask you for a favor you might decline, “I just wanna make love to you like a normal person tonight, alright? We can save that other shit for another time.” 

Fuck. 

He really couldn’t have said a more terrible string of words. They stick to the inside of your guts like thorns, puncturing, and digging, and tearing. And you despise the soft way he looks down at you like his rock hard dick isn’t mere inches from your face. 

“I’m quite partial to that other shit,” you lean your head against the inside of his knee, pouting your lips still as you look up to him with batting lashes; a routine that’s gotten your way more than once before, and maybe, could gain your favor once again. 

“Well, me too,” he lets his knuckles graze against your face, “But it wouldn’t hurt to switch things up a bit, would it?” 

It hurts very acutely, actually, that he would ask this of you tonight, of all nights. You don’t bother mentioning that to him, though.  “Does that mean manhandling’s off the table?” 

He smirks, “I can throw you around a little bit.”

“And how do we feel about light choking?”

“Fine. Light chokin’s fine. I’ll even pitch in a couple’a spanks - that sound acceptable to you?” 

You press a kiss to his knee, “How very generous.” 

“Do we have a deal?” 

You pretend to consider his offer, letting him wait as your eyes drift to the ceiling, wanting nothing more than to tell him no despite being entirely incapable of it, “I suppose I can live with that.”

“Good,” your chin’s in his hand, his thumb stroking along the shape of it as he ticks his head to the side like a sign to be followed, “Now get up here. It’s my turn.” 

So you oblige his request, the way you always do,  following the pull of his hands that guide you upwards. You’re expecting him to tug you into his lap, but instead, he stands too, and you can see him trying to hide a glint of mischief in the curve of his lips as his grasp falls to your hips. 

You narrow your eyes at him, “What are you -” 

You’re roughly thrown over his shoulder before you can finish your sentence, a laugh escaping you that sounds unrecognizable to your ears - high-pitched and giddy and nauseatingly fond. 

“Are you crazy?” 

“Hey, you’re the one that said you wanted to be manhandled -  I’m just givin’ you what you asked for.” 

“This wasn’t exactly what I had in mind,” it’s not a terrible view, though, from your vantage point. You’re nearly face to face with the bare curve of his ass, more supple than it has any right to be; a favored part of him he always pretends not to understand why you’re partial to. You can also see the pool of his pants at his ankles still, shackles around his feet that only allow him to awkwardly shuffle as he tries to turn himself around, inch by inch.

“Beggars don’t get to be cho-Oh shit,” you watch his foot snag on his pants, body lurching forward as he trips, catching himself clumsily on the end of bed. Your head collides against his back with an audible thunk.

“Ow. Jesus. Walk much?” 

He laughs, a sound so genuine and sheepish you find yourself doing the same. He plops you down properly on the bed, body bouncing atop the cheap springs as it adjusts to your weight. “Sorry. Really thought I had that.” 

“Quite the feat of grace there, Samuel.” 

“At least y’could never say the sex was boring, right?” He uses the bed to balance himself, making quick work of removing his pants and socks. You soak in the unimpeded view of his body, the strong, weathered planes of muscle that you think Rodin might’ve loved to put to marble. Or, at the very least, Playboy would have a very enticing centerfold on their hands.  

He crawls over you, stopping short of being nose to nose, head in line with your tits instead, and not nearly as close as you want him to be, “Now, I’m going to go down on you, and you’re going to like it. Capiche?” 

Your lips twitch, offering him your best two finger salute, “I’ll try my best to soldier through it.”

“Good girl.” 

He kisses his way down your body, not dawdling on any part of you, dragging your underwear down with him as he takes the spot you were just in, knelt there piously on the carpet like a man about to pray. He pins your legs open against the bed like a bug with its wigs in a frame, on display for his own personal viewing.

“Jesus,” you watch him swallow at the sight of you, and feel heat swarm every inch of your skin, “All this just for me?” His eyes flit up to you as he kisses your inner thighs, stubble against skin like sand. 

“Don’t let it go to your head.” 

“Kinda hard not to when you’re this fuckin’ wet.” 

He runs a finger through your slick to enunciate his point, and your whole body jolts like you were simply a button to be pressed. Your eyes slam shut, senses beginning to fog you as your mind hones in on the beating ache between your thighs.  

“Havin’ my dick in your mouth gets you goin’ that much, huh?” You can hear the smile in his voice, the way the words ooze out of him like honey. 

Your aptitude for any real banter is squandered by the inching feel of his mouth. “Maybe,” is the uneventful response you eventually manage, entirely unconvincing as another sharp inhale has your ribs surging upwards. You clench around nothing, swallowing a whine as he nips at the crease of your thigh. 

Blind to the world behind your pinched-shut eyes, every movement feels heightened - your legs now propped on his shoulders, his breath against your core, hovering over the place he belongs. Your hips arch upwards instinctively, desperate to close that last bit of space between his mouth and your cunt. But he makes no other move, and after a few agonizing seconds of suspension, you wearily open your eyes to look down at him, bracketed there between your legs.

He’s smiling at you in that tortuous way, a prelude to taunting, “Tell me what you want, beautiful.” 

“You know what I want,” you hate the whiny, undone sound of your voice. 

“Yeah but I wanna hear you say it,” a teasing hand sidles up to your breast, and you lean into the touch, feeling on the brink of insanity, wondering if denial suffered long enough could turn a person mad.  

“Sam, please.”  

“Please what? You’re gonna have to use your words here, sweetheart,” he toys with your nipple, pinching it between his slender fingers. 

“Just fuck - put your mouth on me. Please.”  

“Atta girl.”

And he answers your yearning prayers when his mouth dives into your cunt like you’re oxygen in his breath-starved lungs. He works you open as if your body’s a machine of his own design, knows the way to drag his tongue along the seam of you, back and forth like a switch to toggle, the way to close his lips around your clit and suck, soft first, then harder, and harder, until your hands curl into his hair and your body starts to tremble beneath him like a geyser near to bursting. You feel him moan against you, the low hum of it stifled beneath the sound of your wanton cries and the obscene noises of his ravenous mouth against your dripping cunt. 

You grind your hips up into him, craving more, needing more. He seems to read you like a book, pages of you spread there open as he slides a finger into you down to the knuckle and curves it in that way that has your spine mimicking that same crescent shape. 

“Enjoyin’ yourself?” his middle finger quickly joins his pointer, your cunt practically swallowing the digits whole with an audibly wet smack that you’d feel more embarrassed about if you possessed enough brain power to feel anything but lustful hunger. 

His eyes are steady on you, an anchor in the swell of it all. When you meet his gaze, you can see a sheen of your slick across his face, catching in the light, and your cunt closes around his fingers like a vice. 

He smirks, “I’ll take that as a yes.” 

“Sam,” your voice is a broken rasp, a plea. You’re so goddamn close. So, So, So Close that the edges of your body have blurred, fingers, and toes, and limbs all shapeless numb, nothings - all you can focus on is the feel of his fingers inside you, the throbbing need that every movement of him spurs forwards, growing and growing and growing to this insurmountable weight that makes your entire body feel like a branch beneath a boot, taught and on the brink of snapping. 

“Yes?” His thumb starts to rub tight circles against your clit, and like a cue to act your thighs start to tremble around him. 

“I - Fu-please. I’m -” you try your hardest to speak, but your body and mind fail you.  

You’re surprised to hear no snark out of him, no comment about a sex-induced stutter or an order for you to use your words. Instead, he mercifully latches his mouth onto you, tongue taking the place of his thumb, fingers still arched in you as they slide in and out of your soaked cunt. 

You reach for his hand, the one grasped to your hips, placing your fingers between his, and it’s the last thing you feel, his hand squeezing back, holding you in place, before you cum. 

His name rips through your lungs as you cry out, writhing, heaving, shuddering, your release flooding molten through you. And you feel anything but sated as the high ebbs down, as his tongue and fingers guide you, your first orgasm nothing but an impetus to a climbing desperation, a starving, hankering, insistent need for more.  

The moment your legs fall free from his shoulders, you press up from the bed and take his face in your hands. Your lips and tongue hungry against his own, tasting yourself among the amalgam of spit.  

“Need you,” is all you can manage to say, but it’s enough. 

He smiles, sweeping a stray hair of yours behind your ear, “How do y’want me?” 

And you need to regain some crumbling semblance of control so you say, with no hesitation, as if there were no other way to take him, “On your back.” 

His smile grows wider, eyes nearly swallowed whole by his lust-blown pupils, “Yes ma’am.” 

You’re a mess of tangled limbs as he climbs up onto the bed, mouths never straying for too long, hands clinging to the fevered skin of one another like life rafts. At least with him here on his back it’s easier to lie to yourself on whose hands hold the wheel of command. 

His eyes fall to where your trembling hand guides his twitching cock up to your swollen cunt, zoning in on the sight like something not to be missed. You watch his jaw go slack as you slowly push your hips down on him, never quite used to the aching stretch of taking him, the way he seems to fill you past the brink, spilling over into places untouched. 

You fuck yourself on him slow and languid, watching the traveling path of his attention, back and forth between the sight of his dick disappearing into the shape of you and the lazy bounce of your tits. 

His hands fall to your hips, rocking them needily like your unhurried pace was starting to get to him,“You’re so -,” you clench around him, relishing the way his whole body tightens beneath you, “fuck.”

“I’m so fuck?” You smile, saccharine, watching his chord of restraint snap beneath your taunt. You feel his grip on you tighten, feel him tent his knees upwards for purchase as he starts to buck up into you in earnest, every snap of his hips a point proven.

Your eyes roll back as your head follows that same backwards path, body folding beneath his demands, already gone, already his; so much for being in control. 

“Nothin’ smart to say now, huh?”

Oh, you want to reply, really you do, but the bruising feel of being entirely at his disposal blinds out any words.

“Such a big mouth on you but the second my cock or my tongue or my fingers are in you, you go all quiet.” 

You smile, “Can’t -  fuck - help - it,” gasping and moaning between syllables. 

You feel his hand collide with your ass, one a testing slap and the next a sure, hard spank, your skin stinging in the aftermath. “Could watch you take me like this all day.”

You moan, capabilities to do much else abandoning you as you lose yourself to the plowing feel of his cock. 

He lifts his fingers to your mouth, and smiles to watch you open it without a word spoken, “That pretty little cunt a’yours - always so good for me.”

You grip his wrist as you suck, your eyes magnetized to one another, unmoving. 

“So fuckin’ tight.” 

He tugs his fingers from your lips and moves them to your clit, matching the tracing tempo of his hands with the thrust of his hips. 

“OhGod - Sam -” your body strains beneath the attention, every swipe of his fingers, every pistoning move of his cock, a step taken, upwards, towards the place you’ll hope he’ll follow. 

His free hand squeezes your hip like a gentle reminder as he grins up at you, “Can’t believe I get to have you all to myself.” 

The words an arrow to your chest, a bullseye straight through the center of you. You feel yourself clench around him as you sob, nearly incoherent, “Don’t want - shit. Anyone else. Just you,” and you say it before you can stop yourself, regurgitated from a pried-open depth. 

Why did you say that? Why did you say that? Why did you say that? 

Embarrassment surges side by side with your approaching peak, that flood of aching pressure building where your bodies meet. He doesn’t reply, not with words, but his fingers speed up on your clit, and his jaw clenches, and his cock seems to glide deeper and deeper into the wet heat of your cunt. 

“Fuck - Sam - I’m -” 

“Give it to me,” he nods his head as he watches you, pride like a light in his eyes, smiling in that boyish way that makes him look far younger than he has any right to, “Come on, baby.  Lemme feel you.”

You brace against his shapely pecs for purchase like carven handholds as you climb, up and up and up, body trembling. You think you hear him talking, stray words of praise like buzzing background noise as you reach a crest so high you feel taken by altitude sickness, dizzy and breathless. You whine as he fuck you through it, hands steady against your hips as he drives his cock into you, milking every last shudder of your cunt, every shake, every whimper. 

You’re boneless and nearly thoughtless on the gradual descent when he rises to kiss you, one hand cradling the back of your neck like he knew you needed the support, the other tracing circles down your back. 

“You good?”

You nod emphatically, but you don’t mean it.  You’re anything but good. But you can’t possibly focus on the ramifications of that now, not when he’s still inside you, with his eyes speared through you, when your body still craves him like a necessity deprived. 

“You need a minute or -” 

“No,” the pure desperation in your voice makes you want to tear your own skin apart, but you simply kiss him instead, tangling your tongue with his, giving yourself the next best thing when you say,  “Use me.” 

He kisses you hard, all teeth and tongue, like words alone aren’t enough. He moves your bodies with the fluidity of water, flipping you onto your back where you lay there against the squeaking mattress, letting him do with you as he pleases. And what he pleases to do is lift your legs, pressing them together as he kneels there at the base of your body. Both ankles are thrown over his right shoulder like a sash as he starts to press the head of his cock into you, smiling like the sight of you below him is a prize hard one. 

You both groan when he buries himself to the hilt, a slow, aching filling that makes you feel near to bursting as you clench around him. 

“Fuck,” he laughs like he can’t believe his luck,  “Wish I could be inside you like this all day.” 

He moves his hips in sedated undulations like he’s savoring the tight feel of you, dragging out every movement, “Bet you’d like that, wouldn’t you?” 

You can only nod as you whine pathetically, the snug press of your legs applying just the right amount of friction on your clit that makes speech impossible. 

“Like for me to have my way with you? Make you mine?” 

You let out a sound halfway between a sob and a moan, “YessShit. Plea-Sam-” hands white knuckling the sheets as you try to compose yourself, say your next words with a modicum of articulation. Your chest aches with the effort as you hold his gaze, “Ruin me.” 

He breathes your name like a prayer, and the sound of it goes right to your cunt as his hips start to snap against the back of your thighs, cock driving in and out of you at a maddening pace. The bed squeals in protest below you, headboard a rhythmic thump against the back wall. 

He kisses the inside of your ankle, one, two, three times, letting one of his hands fall from your legs to your stomach, your breasts, kneading at any bit of you he can reach. His traveling fingers eventually find their way to your throat, wrapping easily around you and gifting you with a hardy squeeze that punctures your vision with stars. But even through the haze of pleasure, even in the most ideal position you’re in now, your mind catches on the earlier thought spoken aloud. 

Don’t want anyone else. Just you. 

You’d said it. And it had sprung forth from a deeply earnest place like it was always there, buried in some dark cavern, thriving still without light. The words are a pin pulled from a grenade, an action not able to be undone, and it’s here that it hits you like a dam burst through, here with his cock buried in you and his eyes on yours and the reverent feel of his hand on the column of your throat- 

You love him.

Oh my god. 

You love him. You love him. You love him. 

 You loved him when he broke his finger riding that electric scooter, and you loved him when he pickpocketed a 20 out of some drunk asshole’s wallet to buy you gelato, and you loved him that time you had to spend a night in a cave after one too many wrong turns, when the pair of you had spewed enough vitriol at each other to chew through steel and still, he offered - no, insisted -  you take his coat to ward off the cold. You loved him on the nights sleep evaded you both, when you spent the hours watching M*A*S*H re-runs on crackling screens of motel televisions, loved him that time you both got too high and rock-paper-scissored for who’d have to grab the pizza, and he ended up braving the door for you anyways, even though you were the one that lost. 

You love Samuel Fucking Drake 

And the realization feels like an irreparable fracture, trapping you in a juxtaposition of carnal bliss and a pain so profound you wonder if you’ll break in two at the force of it, split into unequal halves below him. You shut your eyes tight, not able to do much else in the way of escape. 

He moans your name, the possessive hand on your throat squeezing ever so slightly, “Look at me, sweetheart.” 

But all executive function has abandoned you. Your  capabilities amounting only to a pathetic moan as you writhe beneath him, nails digging into the skin of his wrist. 

“I - fuck - Wanna look at you when I cum.” 

You want to cry. Or combust. Or cease to exist all together. It takes every living part of you to do as you're told, to open your eyes, and your ribs start to splinter, brittle and sun-bleached beneath the burning look of open affection on his face. 

“There’s my girl,” he smiles down at you with that cocky, genuine grin, and you clench hard around his throbbing dick at the sight of it alone. You’re already nearing another peak, somehow, beyond all sense, broken, unbound. And you know he can feel it by the greedy glint in his eye. 

He unfurls one of your legs with care, like peeling back a fragile petal, balancing it there on his hip, your left still propped on his shoulder as he caves in towards you. You feel the burning stretch in your thigh first as he bends you in half, chest against chest as he hits a spot so deep inside you you feel it in your lungs. Your hands instinctively reach up to cradle his face, fingers lacing into his hair as if that could steady you. You’re beyond saving, though, too far gone to be anywhere but irrevocably and utterly at his disposal. 

“Gimme another one.”

“I -”, you try to speak but find your tongue caught by the measured thrust of his hips, that calculated rhythm of electric heat, bolting outwards from your sopping wet, swollen cunt to every corner of your body. It’s pure torture, it’s flawless ecstasy. You moan, somehow still coherent enough to feel shame at the wanton sound of it, “I can’t.” 

“I wasn’t askin’.”

His eyes and yours a string knotted together, inseparable, part of you wanting nothing more than to sever it for just a moment of reprieve and the other needing the opposite, craving the sick euphoria you feel to be looked at this way. Consumed. Taken. Used. The angle gives him a catastrophic advantage, grinding against your clit with every move of his hips,  and of course he did it on purpose; he’s never satisfied until you’re a mess. Neither of you are.  

“Sammy, I -” 

The words claw at the base of your throat. 

I love you. I love you. I love you. 

But you abate them with your last dying ounce of self-preservation, even as his cock drains the rest of sentient thought from you. 

“Go on,” he gives you a kiss, sloppy and pleading,  “Let go for me.” 

And it’s the only words your body needs to hear, spine arching into him like a wishbone tugged taught, nails digging for purchase into the freckled skin of his shoulder, as you drown beneath the white-hot pleasure that rips through you, through muscles, through bones, through veins, to the unnamable metaphysical parts of you. The strings of your body remain in the hands of him, room encompassed with the symphony of his machinations - the messy entwinement of your bodies, the cries from your lungs that harmonize with his own guttural whimpers that pierce right through you. You can feel him panting into your open mouth, but you’ve long since shut your eyes, tears pricking at the edges from an elongated crescendo still clinging to your every pore, not yet fading. 

You understand, in this moment, why the French call it a little death, as you feel a piece of yourself die, destroying itself, imploding and bursting. It’s too much. It’s not enough. You need more. You need less. You need him to cum. His hips start to stutter, and he says your name in that desperate, wrung-out way that you know means he’s nearly there. You can’t open your eyes, can’t do much else but lie there as he takes you, feeling the lines between pleasure and pain start to blur as you beg, desperate and wrung-out yourself “PleasePleasePlease,” your hand sliding down his sweat-damp back to grip the firm muscle of his ass. 

He thrusts one, two, three more devastating times before he spills himself inside you, a noise so sweet pulled from his throat that you wish you could drink, let cling to the inside of your teeth like syrup. Neither of you dare to move for what feels like ages. You swear your hearts beat concurrently, two parts of the same whole, sharing an unspoken agreement of brief coalescence. He leans up only slightly to let your leg fall to the bed before he collapses into the crook of your neck, fitting there like a piece in its proper place. 

Your breaths rise and fall together, entangled, hard to tell where one of you ends and the other begins. 

“I’m not crushin’ you, am I?”

You smile at the lazy, muffled sound of his voice despite feeling on the verge of tears, rasping out a “No,” as you give the crown of his head a clumsy kiss. 

Your fingers play with the curled ends of his hair as you lie there, staring up at the water-stained stuccoed ceiling in much the same way one might look to the open sky for help. But there’s no answers among its ecru hue, no guidance given as the rosy high begins to fade, and you plummet down, down, down, back to the belly of the beast you’ve let yourself be swallowed by. 

You love Samuel Drake. And you wonder if it’s supposed to feel like a curse, a cross unwillingly beared, or if maybe, it’s just the unrequitedness that gives it that shape. 

Either way, it's a burden you won’t share with him, you decide, here in the aftermath of passion. It wouldn’t be fair, would it, to want him to carry this thing he never asked for, these feelings that never should’ve been that now, much to your dismay, very much are. After all that’s been taken from him, he’s owed fluidity, deserving of nothing but unbounded freedom, but this? This would undoubtedly be a clipping of his wings. You're his for now, but a day will come when that won’t be the truth, when his legs for new adventures need to be stretched, and you’ll be a chapter finished; you’re sure of that. Commitment isn’t his strong suit, as Sully said, and why should it be? You can live with the bitter inevitability of an ending, especially when the inbetween is so sweet, especially if it’s for him. That’s what love is all about, isn’t it? Suffering. Beautiful, divine, suffering. 

You feel him stir and unravel your hands from his hair as he lifts himself up, severing that final chord of connection when he pulls out of you fully. The sudden emptiness is nearly painful, your body tangibly pouting at the loss as if separated from a part of itself. 

He props himself up on an elbow beside you, body flush against your side. You feel the heat of his gaze on you but can’t bring yourself to move your attention from the ceiling, as if the traces of your thoughts would be written there on your face for him to see in bold print - I LOVE YOU. I KNOW YOU DON’T FEEL THE SAME. I’M SORRY.  You just need a few more moments to neatly pack this all up, fold and stash and bury in a place where even you can forget about it for a while, but then his hand swipes your cheek, guiding your face to him, and you’re caught red handed, sins entirely out in the open. You hate the worried furrow of his brow, that heavy crease that sits between them. You want to press your thumb to his skin and rub it out of his handsome face but don’t. 

“Where are you right now?” 

You blanch at the question, feeling more naked than humanly possible, but you manage to laugh, “What do you mean? I’m in bed with you, weirdo.” 

“Physically, maybe. But your head’s definitely somewhere else.” 

You swallow, those three syllables an unmovable lump, an embedded choking hazard wonder how long it’ll take to pass. The open, patient way he looks at you makes your stomach churn, but you smile at him, letting your fingers brush against his forearm in what you hope is a reassuring pattern, “Look, I just got fucked within an inch of my life, okay? My mental faculties need some time to catch up.” 

He snorts, but you can tell he doesn’t believe you, not fully. You need to escape the glaring floodlight of his attention before he can find something in the open pit of your being, so you turn towards him, not giving him a moment more to search as you kiss your way across his face. Lips press against his cheeks, the crooked bridge of his nose, his chin, the cut beneath his eye. You lean your weight into him, his body eventually acquiescing to your silent request, lying there on his back as your mouth moves to his neck, then his chest where you end your fevered escape journey to lie your head against him. You feel a strange rush of something akin to adrenaline, a capture narrowly avoided, as you lay there, throwing your leg over his. His arms wind around you, one hand settling in your hair and the other against your forearm, his thumb swiping metronomic on your skin. 

You listen to the steady drum of his heart, fingers idly running through his chest hair as you close your eyes to the grounding sound. Every measured beat seems to tamper your panic, your thoughts just as repetitive. 

You can do this. You can do this. You can do this.  

You're well versed in duplicity after all, it being a non-negotiable trait for someone in your career. And two things can always be true at once - you love him, yes, but not only romantically. You loved him as a friend first; it’s where it all started, the seed that gave way to the overgrowing weeds. And it’s where it all can end, too. If you starve something of oxygen for long enough, surely death will follow, like a lie told enough times can become truth. 

You can do this. You can do this. You can do this. 

He croons out your name, lilting it as a question, and you can tell by the inquisitive note in his tone that he’s unsatisfied with your escape act. 

You offer him a hum, feeling the tepid balance in the seconds of silence, scales in his own mind tipping.  

“You think it’s too late to order room service? I'm starvin’.” 

You laugh, relief flooding through you, and risk tilting your head to look at him, regretting it the second your eyes meet. 

God, you are so fucked. 

“Worth a shot.”

He shoots you wink as he leans to the left towards the chipping side table, pulling you with him to clumsily reach for the phone one-handed. He stretches the power chord to its limit as he places it beside him, trails of curled tangled wires like tentacles spread on the sheets. He’s got the receiver nestled between his shoulder and cheek as his one free hand does the dialing, his other still playing with your hair. 

You’ve tilted yourself so you can watch him, your hands a cushion for your chin as you stay propped on his chest. His skin is flushed, cheeks dusted in pink, hair rustled, faint bruises already painted near the flock of birds where your mouth paid him extra attention, looking handsome in a quiet, effortless way that makes your chest ache. 

You watch the bob of his adam’s apple when he swallows and clears his throat, eyes drifting to the blank screen of the TV as the dial tone sounds, “Yeah, hi - is it possible to still get room service?”

You hear the garbling mumble of a response on the other line, before he says, “Alright just - just gimme one second. 

He flips the phone down into the skin of his shoulder, looking to you expectantly, “They got a burger, grilled cheese, and some kinda chicken wing thing - any a’that sound good to you?” 

“Chicken wing thing?”

“Don’t sass me right now, woman. Are you hungry or what?”

You pause, debating on whether or not you feel like sassing him anyways, before smiling, “Honestly, a grilled cheese would be amazing.” 

“Ask and ye shall receive.”

He puts the phone to his mouth again, but his attention stays attached to you, and only you, eyes hooked to your own, “Hi, yeah, sorry ‘bout that. My uh-,” he pauses for what you can only assume is for dramatic effect, eyebrows raising suggestively with the cadence of his voice, “Lover here will take the grilled cheese.”

“Oh my g-,” before you can properly bemoan his terrible choice of words, his hand’s a gag over your mouth, rendering you speechless. 

“And I can get a couple pickles on the side with that? They’re her favorite.”  

He’s wearing that bastardly, self-satisfied grin that drives you mad in a myriad of ways, the one that makes it nearly impossible to decide if you want to slap it off him or shove your tongue down his throat. You choose to ignore the fact that he’d remembered your taste in snack food though, instead focusing your attention on licking his palm like a rabid dog to try and encourage him to free you. But he’s unperturbed, paying you no mind, and you can’t let him win this easily. 

“And I’m gonna do the AH-jesus,” you pinch his nipple between your fingers, letting your nail dig into the pink nub just the slightest bit, just enough to prove your point. You watch his expression molt between pain and annoyance, and then settle on something that nearly resembles a dare. His hand never leaves your mouth, and now, smirking, he balances the phone between his ear and his shoulder, snatching your wrist in the vice of his grip, both of his hands now occupied with keeping you still. 

“I’m gonna do the burger. No, no, cheddar’s fine. And uh - what d’you guys have for dessert?”

You struggle half-heartedly, smiling beneath his palm. His voice never strays from nonchalance as if he isn’t 

keeping a woman hostage right here in bed, “Can I get two a’those? Yeah, no, that’s everything. Alright. Thank you.” 

He frees you only when the other end goes quiet, phone dropping to the bed with a soft thunk. “Was the nipple pinch really necessary?”

He wipes his wet palm on your shoulder, clicking the receiver back in its worn, peach-colored place.  

“Was calling me lover?” 

“Hey, it’s accurate isn’t it?” 

You roll your eyes, pressing up from his chest to kneel at his side, arms outstretched above your head as you try to work out a knot in your back. You pretend not to notice the way his eyes fall to your tits. Predictable. “I guess.” 

“You guess? What -  you got someone else’s cum drippin’ outta you?” You forget how fast he can be when he needs to, but it’s a lesson you re-learn now, long, lean limbs put to quick work when he flips you down onto your back. He climbs on top of you, a predator capturing its prey, bracing his arms on either side of your head. 

You hate the girlish, love-sick giggle you let out, hoping you can mask it with a grotesque, scrunched up scowl, “Eww. Dude.” 

“Didn’t you hear you complain’ earlier.”

“Must you be so crass?”

“You love it.”

Yes. Yes, you really do. It’s a reminder you wish you could be spared, but your mind does the opposite, sinking its teeth into all the other countless pieces you love that comprise the sum of him. The drumming dance of his fingers when he’s jonesing for a cigarette. The way he hums under his breath when he’s lost himself to the minuteia of a mundane task. The contented noises he makes, involuntary and endearingly honest, nearly every time he eats, like he still can’t quite believe he gets to have nice things. The way the sun brings out the green-gold flecks in his eyes, and that high-pitched laugh you always try your hardest to summon, and the easy way he makes you feel safe just by being near you. But you don’t tell him of these things best kept. Instead you say, “What’d you get for dessert?”

“You’ll just have to wait and see.”

“How mysterious.” 

His eyes roam across you, nomadic in their attention, before he finally finds his way back to your gaze. He lowers his face to you, voice a conspiratory whisper as if the pair of you have a secret to keep, “Wanna make out until the food comes?” 

His words summon a smile to your face, fingers slowly tracing the faded outline of his star tattoo as you nod up at him, deeming speech unnecessary. 

He plants a kiss to the bridge of your nose first before his mouth takes its rightful place on yours, lips and tongue in languid tandem. You let his hands wander where they please, pried open and willing, let him take what he wants, give what he can, as you try to desperately smother your damning epiphany, to pretend these are the kinds of intimacies all friends share. Nothing more than that.