blocking is my hobby

“You won’t,” you whine.

Pope was already good at everything that involved you bare and open for him, but you needed more, and deep down, you knew he did too. He just needed a push.

“Fu—fuck,” he groans, eyes locked on yours, something shifting behind them as he considers it. “You better tell me if I do.”

You nod quickly.

“Use your words, baby.”

“Yes— yes, I will,” you moan, your back arching as he drives into you.

He watches you, hand coming up, his fingers landing against your cheek, just enough.

And that’s all it takes.

Your orgasm crashes over you instantly, your body tightening around him, eyes rolling back, nails digging into his chest.

Pope stills for a second, watching you fall apart like that (just from that) and something in him flips.

He’s mesmerized. That was all it took.

He’s going to have a field day with this.

And he does.

Still, there’s hesitation lingering, he needs to hear you, needs you to say it, to make sure you’re with him every step.

He loves the sounds you make, the way your voice shifts when he pulls your hair, the way your body reacts when he holds you in place, one hand at your throat, the other pressing against your stomach, keeping you exactly where he wants you.

“Fuck… you’re so pretty like this,” he mutters, voice low. “You like this, huh? You like when I have you like this?”

All that leaves you is a broken whimper as his pace slows.

“I asked you something.”

A sharp smack lands.

Your back arches higher, a moan slipping out as his hand presses you back down, grounding you again. His fingers come up to your face, holding you there, your cheek still stinging.

You bite your lip, barely holding back a smart comment.

“Cat got your tongue, sweetheart?”

Silence.

His expression darkens, a quiet, almost amused breath leaving him.

“Alright.”

That’s all he says.

And then you’re being thrown in the air until you’re bent over the kitchen table, your stomach against the surface, hips lifted.

His hand tangles in your hair, pulling you back just enough for your spine to press against him. You whine as he drags himself against you teasingly.

“You better answer me when I ask you a question,” he mutters, pushing you back down before finally filling you again, your voice breaking around his name.

Silence again.

“C’mon, baby,” he exhales.

Another sharp smack.

The sting making your whole body react, your orgasm already building again. And Pope had made one thing very clear he would not get you there if you were being a brat.

“You feel so good, baby,” you manage, hands flat against the cold wood.

“That’s my girl,” he murmurs, his pace picking up in response.

“Come for me,” he breathes, his hand dropping between your legs, pushing you closer to the edge. “You feel so fucking good like this… like you were made for me.”

Another smack.

“Such a dirty girl,” he adds, voice rougher now. “I can feel you gripping my cock each time… is that what you want?”

“Yes— yes, yes,” you repeat, the words falling out of you without control.

That’s all the encouragement he needs.

Each movement lines up, deliberate, consistent, pushing you further until it finally snaps

Your whole body tenses, shaking as your release hits hard, your breath breaking as he slows, riding you through it.

You collapse forward against the table, trying to catch your breath.

Pope’s hand moves to your back, steady as he leans in, his voice low against your ear.

“C’mon, baby… let’s get you cleaned up.”

His hands slide around your waist, helping you up before lifting you easily, carrying you to the bedroom without a second thought.

Aftercare wasn’t optional for him.

It never is.

You told him once he didn’t have to go through all of it, he obviously didn’t listen.

“C’mon,” he murmurs, voice softer now, completely different from before. “Easy.”

He keeps a steady hand on you as he guides you to the bathroom, not letting go. Even standing feels like too much, and he notices immediately.

“I got you,” he says quietly.

He stays close, waiting, making sure you’re alright before doing anything else. When you’re done, he’s already reaching for what he needs, movements careful, almost practiced.

“Relax,” he adds softly when you tense.

He cleans you himself, gentle, and thorough like there’s nothing else in the world that matters right now but making sure you’re okay.

Once you’re settled, he doesn’t stop there.

Back in the bedroom, he has you sit before kneeling in front of you again, his hands steady as he checks over you, like he needs to see it himself.

“Tell me if it’s too much,” he mutters, more to reassure himself than anything.

He grabs the ointment, applying it carefully, his touch light despite everything that came before.

“Don’t want you hurting tomorrow,” he adds, almost under his breath.

Only when he’s satisfied does he help you into bed, adjusting everything until you’re comfortable.

Then he climbs in behind you, pulling you into him immediately.

“You did good,” he murmurs into your hair, pressing a slow kiss there. “So good for me.”

His hand moves along your back in slow patterns, the other coming up to cradle your face, thumb brushing lightly over your cheek.

Like he needs to feel you there.

Like he needs to know you’re still with him.

“Too good to me,” he repeats quietly.

Your legs tangle together, his body almost wrapped around yours completely, holding you close in a way that feels instinctive.

His voice doesn’t stop, soft praise, quiet reassurances, the same words repeated until your breathing evens out.

His eyes would be just absolutely glued to the spot where his cock slides in and out. The sight is nearly too much for him to handle. Just the way your body looks squeezing around his length draws loud, whimpery sounds from him.

“Fuckin’ love these thighs, baby. So soft and warm for me. Can I come on them? Please?” he’d whine soooo bad. Just so needy and desperate for you. He’d do literally anything you’d ask so long as he gets to keep fucking you like this.

With your permission he comes, hot stripes shooting out onto your stomach and coating your inner thighs. 

Afterward he’d pull out and let your legs down from his shoulder so you can get into a more comfortable position, but he doesn’t plan on cleaning up the sticky mess he’s made until he can admire how you look, all disheveled and covered in him. 

He’d prop his chin between your bent knees, eyes angled down to take in the way his cum drips down your sides and onto the sheets. Occasionally, he’d twist his lips to the side to place a little kiss on your kneecap.

Once he’s satisfied with his staring, he’d use his palms to spread your knees apart and bring himself face to face with your dripping cunt

“This all for me?” he’d whisper against your skin, bringing his lips exactly where you need them, using his tongue to lap up the wetness that’s built up between your legs.

The contact of his mouth and tongue as they work against you has you fighting the urge to squeeze your thighs together. Pope notices and pulls himself back from sucking on your clit.

“Don’t do that… want you to crush my head between them. Y’hear me?” He’d ask, leaning back in to tease your entrance with his tongue only after you clench your thighs around him.

He wouldn’t come up for air until he’s coaxed multiple orgasms out of you. He’d be content to just lay between your legs for hours indulging in the way you taste. 

Pope Cody could die with his head between your legs and he would die a very happy man.

pushing aside his search for the baggies nicki had misplaced somewhere around the house, he was now onto an entirely different mission.

pope's was usually the last room he liked to go into. it was eerily clean, with every single one of his possessions perfectly laid in its assigned spot. which was why the camera had stuck out like a sore thumb. it was an odd thing for pope to leave lying around, specially on his bedside table.

and so he picked it up.

and then he fell into a trance.

displayed on the small screen was a paused video.

you were sat back on the side of the bed, elbows digging into the plush of the mattress as you supported your weight on them, looking up at the camera with wide eyes and a tiny, pleased smile. your body was barely covered by a pink negligee falling off your shoulder and your tit peaking out. your hair had a little more volume than usual and your makeup was slightly different. you'd done yourself up for this.

with the click of a button, the enticing thumbnail began playing.

the quality was somewhat shitty, which annoyed craig a bit.

it was shot from pope's perspective, he noticed immediately. he towered over you as you sat on the bed looking up at him.

"hey, handsome," you spoke at the camera, cheeky smile on your lips.

your hands went up to pope's body, disappearing from frame but clearly beginning to paw at pope's chest off-camera.

similarly, pope's hand entered frame, cupping your cheek as you leaned into the touch. your face turned slightly to the side, mouthing at pope's palm until you caught his thumb in your mouth.

the angle of the camera raised a little, giving craig the perfect angle as you looked up at the camera, eyes wide and mouth suctioning at pope's thumb. he could pretend it wasn't his brother's.

"fuck, baby. so fuckin' perfect for me," pope interrupted.

after some moments, you finally slipped the thumb out of your mouth, licking at its length once before kissing the back of pope's hand.

with some coaxing, you laid back on the bed as pope drew himself closer, straddling your body on the bed.

"let me get a good look at you, angel."

this was followed by pope somewhat shakily panning into every inch of your body. he started with your face, planting a kiss on your lips before you showed the camera a toothy smile. his hand came out once more to caress at your cheek, trailing down to your neck, to your half-uncovered tits. there, his thumb circled your nipple through the thin fabric, drawing a sigh out of you.

below him, you squirmed and moaned for pope as his hand traced down every inch, feeling every supple inch of barely-covered skin. occasionally he'd lean down and kiss at whatever part of your body laid in front of him at that moment, making it so the camera drew too close for craig to see anything, but he could still hear that tiny intake of breath you did every time he kissed you.

"andy... want you."

"i know you do."

again, he panned out, hovering over you and showing your needy self under him. there was some silence, only filled up by some low grunts of pope's.

"do i look pretty, andy?" you giggled up at him after some moments of silence, eyes drawing below the lens every so often.

"so pretty, baby," he grunted.

craig could guess what was going on off-screen as pope watched you.

"you gonna fuck me, or what?"

a breathless chuckle could be heard off-screen, and then some unbuckling and ruffling of clothes.

"yeah, sweetheart, 'm gonna fuck you. don't you worry 'bout that."

a hand appeared, digging into your hip as pope drew himself closer. while one hand shakily held onto the camera, the other aided in turning you over and onto your hands and knees.

from behind you, pope adjusted you, pressing deep into the small of your back to get your ass further up and your arch a little deeper.

teasingly, you swayed your hips at him, smiling at him as you twisted your head to look back into the camera.

the tiny thong you had on hid absolutely nothing, much less did the negligee pope had pushed up to fully uncover your ass.

the next few scenes were a little unfortunate for craig.

they consisted of pope pulling out his dick, stroking it as he pressed it into you, circling at your clit as you mewled out his name and pushed your ass up against him.

craig was conflicted. on one hand, he didn't want to see his brother's dick, but on the other, he really wanted to see you getting fucked from behind.

with a mental coin toss, he decided to do some mental gymnastics to remove pope from the equation and solely focus on how breathless your wails sounded as soon as pope made his way inside you.

he had a perfect view of the recoil of your ass, groaning inwardly when you'd push back, when the sound of skin slapping joined in with your tiny, high-pitched moans.

sometimes pope would grip at your hair, making you sit up on your knees and pressing your back to his chest. craig couldn't really see much from this angle, but he'd hear the kissing and your muffled cries.

he wasn't sure when this was recorded, whether he'd been at home when it happened, but you'd been careless in the volume of your noises. an endless stream of sounds of pleasure left your lips as pope pounded into you.

"m-more, ffuuck, please."

"right there- fuck, don't stop—"

"andy- oh, fuck, andy!"

these were all sounds he'd grown familiar with through your relationship with pope. you were never shy in expressing yourself in the bedroom, but seeing it? and from this angle, where he could pretend it wasn't his brother who was dragging these noises out of you?

fuck, he could just-

"what are you doing in my room?"

craig felt his body go completely still. every hair in his body stood up and his muscles tensed.

he couldn't dare look behind him, to look at the source of the voice as the video continued to play in his hands.

"and what the fuck are you doing with my camera?"

slowly, craig twisted his body, camera still in his hands as he looked to find pope's erect figure standing by the door of his room.

"hey, man, i was just-"

"fuck are you doing looking at my videos of my girl?"

with a single move, pope's hand landed on a tight grip around craig's wrist, making him groan out as his fingers relaxed around the camera, letting it fall onto pope's other hand.

mutely, the sex noises could still be heard emanating from the digital camera. pope turned the volume down, not once taking his threatening eyes away from craig's guilty ones.

"i just- i was looking for my baggies and-"

"they're not in my room."

craig sighed at the interruption, "yeah, man, i noticed. i just saw the camera and i got curious, that's all."

"you got curious for," he took a moment to check the screen, "twelve minutes and fifty-five seconds?" he read off the time lapsed of the video.

craig winced.

"it's not like that, okay?"

it was pure denial, but if craig knew anything, it was that the best remedy was always to lie your way out of trouble.

pope nodded to himself, unconvinced. with one step forward, he was in craig's face, looking up to him with that same threatening expression pope reserved for anyone but you.

"i catch you looking at my girl again, i'm going to break your legs. this is your last warning, craig."

even as he towered over him, craig gulped with a nod, eyes wandering away from his. it was kind of embarrassing how easily he folded under his gaze. he knew pope would be good on his words, specially with this being his second warning.

"understand?"

"yeah- yep, got it, pope."

taking his chance, he rounded pope and practically sprinted out of the room. outside, he let out the breath he'd been holding, relieved it didn't escalate this time around.

but even then, he found himself making a mental note.

he made sure you came on his face at least three times. until your legs were jelly, brain mush, voice hoarse from begging him to stop. ‘i-i can’t’ you had whined, ‘ ‘s too much andy!’. he did it to get you into that floaty head space where you’re babbling mindlessly and lax for him.

and you’re exactly that as pope crawls up your body and settles where he belongs, above you and inbetween your legs. still, you breathlessly slur the question that he despises. “condom?”

he feigns frustration even though this is exactly what he planned. “shit— i left my wallet in craig’s car… i don’t have one.”

your response is a needy whine that morphs into a gasp when he rests his cock against your drenched folds and slowly slides back and forth. “can i just have you like this sweetheart?” pope rubs his thick length upwards, angry pink tip catching your clit with every pressing glide. you whimper through your desperate nods, nails clawing at his shoulders, fusing your knees to his ribs to stay spread for him. such a good girl, he thinks to himself.

he keeps his ruttings short. almost playfully light in order to not get you anywhere besides out of your mind from teasing. just how he wants it. when you start to wriggle beneath him, whimpering a few mindless “please please please”s, he looks down at your aching pussy to see her clench around nothing. poor baby, she needs me so bad, he tells himself.

his dick is so coated in your slick releases that pope ‘accidentally’ notches at your opening. staying in motion, he pushes in ever so slightly. your eyes shoot open in surprise “ohh- andy!” you squeal. frustration bubbles in his chest, but he doesn’t give up. because your panic simmers to pleasure and your mouth forms an ‘o’ as you moan at just his bare tip breaching your wet heat.

he buries his face into your neck to hide his satisfied grin, licking and suckling the skin how he knows you like. “jus the tip sweetheart? please?” he emphasizes his wimpy whines with an inching forward of his hips. your nails tear at the flesh on his back as you shudder. “p-promise?” you croak out in hazy compliance. his reply is strained. “ ‘course honey.”

popes promise — to him at least— goes up in flames when he slips a tiny bit further inside and is met with warm, silky tightness. fuckkk. he groans, muscles tensing and you cry out, eyes rolling back. his thrusts are shallow and unsatisfactory. after a only a few, he’s twitching in need, pathetically trying to inch deeper.

you notice, starting to whine and pant. “you cant andy! i’m not on the pill!” the words almost make pope start to piston in and out of you. the thought of coming in you until you’re swollen with his baby infiltrating his mind. that you’ll be tied to him forever and— oh yeah. that’s happening, he decides.

pope leans down to kiss you languidly. trying to tongue fuck you into submission. your pussy is rapidly fluttering around the first inch of his cock, telling him that you want this just as bad as he does. he uses his words. “you just feel so good sweetheart. need you so bad. need all of you.” a breathy moan slips from you at his praise as you return his kiss greedily.

you pull back and blink up at him with your glossy eyes and kiss bitten lips. when your legs start to wrap around him, crossing tightly at his back, he knows he’s almost home free. “okay... i- i need you too andy.”

you barely get the words out before he hastily pushes all the way inside of you. guttural noises of pleasure are ripped from you both as you clench around him so prettily and he stretches you out so perfectly. it’s searing, intimate and raw. so fucking raw.

as pope starts to thrust in and out of you eagerly, obscene slapping sounds echo throughout the room. he whimpers loudly at the warm, wet feeling of you and the noises your body makes for him.

when you shakily tell him between moans “you h-have to pull out.. okay?”

He was nursing a bourbon he’d probably make last the entire night and he was half-listening to Langdon tell some story, his leg stretched out into the aisle, and he hadn’t seen you yet. You had a second. You could have turned around and texted Dana some bullshit excuse of getting the full eight hours and walked back to the parking lot to go home to your dog and half your bed.

You never did, though. You told yourself afterward it was because the leaving would’ve told the table something. But the truer thing, the one you didn’t want to look at directly, was that an evening without Jack had started to feel like a room with the bulb burned out. You’d gotten that bad. 

“There she is,” Dana said, twisting around in the booth, already sliding to make room. “Sit. I saved you the good side. It doesn’t wobble.”

You sat, and the good side put you diagonal from Jack, close enough that his stretched-out leg was a fact you had to arrange your own legs around under the table. He hadn’t acknowledged you yet. He was letting Langdon finish; Jack always let people finish, it was something that made patients trust him and made you, toward the end, want to put a plate through the wall because he’d let you get to the bottom of sentences you’d have killed to be interrupted out of.

But you watched the back of his neck change as his shoulders went from loose to aware. When he turned, his eyes found yours like a bad number on a monitor, faster than he could’ve chosen. For half-a-second, before his face caught up, he looked so completely undefended. Then it was gone and he looked at you like you were weather he'd been told about. 

“Huh,” he breathed, picking his bourbon back up. “They let your department fraternize with the help now, or are you slumming?”

“Dana kidnapped me.” You reached over and took the lime off his rim. He’d never once in his life used it—he hated citrus in bourbon—and only got it because Marlene behind the bar had been putting it in each time. Jack had decided somewhere around your wedding that debating her on it was more than what the lime was worth. 

You bit it and set the rind into his napkin where it went, where it had always gone. 

His eyes tracked you as you did it without any comment. The better half of five years of the lime and he’d never once said anything, only bought you the garnish on his own drink. 

“How was your floor?” you asked.

“Slow.” He turned the glass a quarter-turn on the table, an old tell, the thing his hands did when he was trying very hard to keep his words scarce. “Knock on something.” 

“But I like watching you suffer,” you drawled. 

He huffed at that. “I know.”

That was it. He was good at letting things sit, it was the worst of his habits, the way he could absorb a thing you said and just hold it instead of returning it. Half your sentences to him used to end in a silence you'd eventually have to fill yourself. You'd forgotten how much work it was. You'd forgotten you used to do all the talking and call it conversation.

“You got Kevin this week?” Dana asked from beside you. 

Jack, without a beat of hesitation, said, “She’s got Kilo this week.”

Javadi, the new and curious med student in the ER, looked between both of you with furrowed brows. “Sorry. Kevin or Kilo? Is that—are those two dogs?”

“One dog,” you said.

“Yup. One dog,” Jack agreed.

“Then why—” Javadi started.

“His name’s Kilo,” Jack said.

“No, his name’s Kevin.”

Javadi’s head went between you as though she was watching a tennis match. The table laughed because they’d heard this a hundred times and it never stopped being funny to them; the divorced two doing their oldest bit, the one argument that had outlived the marriage that spawned it.

“His papers say Kilo,” Jack said in Javadi’s direction.

Robby, who’d been completely invested in his own drink, said, “And your papers say divorced.”

“And we very much are, thank you,” you said, picking it up before the laugh had finished.

Jack stayed silent then. Robby, he’d have something for. But this was you saying it, easy and completely certain in front of everyone. The leg that had been stretched into your space this entire night drew back slowly, a small retreat nobody at the table except you could’ve felt. He turned the glass a quarter-turn. 

You’d done it on purpose. You’d felt the whole night immediately tilting into the warm dangerous fiction of it and you’d reached for the one sentence that would shut it, and you’d swung it at the only person who’d actually feel the blade. 

The facts of your divorce were no concern to anyone but the two of you at the table, but you could feel Jack flinch inwardly by the announcement that blanketed it all; that you now lived in separate homes, that the dog was scheduled like a custody hearing; that the word ‘we’ had a tense and it was past. None of it was news. He’d signed the same papers you had in the same flat conference room, with the same pen the mediator kept clicking until you'd wanted to scream. He knew the facts better than anyone. And still you'd watched him wince when you said it out loud.

He'd built a whole life on the difference between a thing being true and a thing being spoken; it was how he ran a trauma bay, how he told a family the worst news in the world in a voice that never broke, how he'd ended your marriage without ever once saying the words that would've made it real, just withdrawing by degrees until you were the one who had to say them for him. He'd made you do that too. He made you do all the saying. And now you'd said this, and he was sitting there absorbing it the way he absorbed everything, quietly, like he'd decided long ago that taking it without a sound was the least of what he had coming.

“Just fucking do it, Jack.”

And he did—finally, finally—push into you with a single long stroke that dragged a sound out of both of you, his coming out through his teeth, and yours into the pillow. His forehead came down between your shoulder blades. He stayed there for a second, breathing, one hand splayed wide over your hip and the other braced into the mattress beside your hips. His weight settled onto the left leg the way it always settled, a decision his body stopped having to make years ago. You could feel him shaking with the effort of not moving yet, of dragging it out, because he always did this, he always made you ask twice. 

“Christ,” he breathed into your spine. “You feel—” he started, and let the words die as his teeth gently pressed into the bone at the top of your shoulder. It was then he started to move.

He fucked like he did everything else with his hands; he was methodical, attentive, and so devastingly present. He went in believing there was always a correct rhythm, and he intended to find it just to ruin you with it. He’d learned by repetition until it stopped requiring thought, until he could play you without looking, and the worst part—the one you’d never say out loud—was that it worked. It always worked. He knew the exact angle that made you stop being a person with opinions about him. 

That long stroke dragged slow on the way out and snapped deep on the way back in, and your whole body misfired around him whether you’d given it permission to or not.

His palm slid up from your hip to flatten between your shoulder blades and pressed, folding you down into the mattress, taking the choice out of your spine. And the new angle had you gasping into the sheets because he’d done it on purpose; he always did everything on purpose, and now he was hitting that place that made your fingers curl and your thighs shake and a thin embarrassing whine climb out you that you’d have died before making it sober. 

Jack felt the exact second your control went and he leaned into it, hips grinding deep and unhurried, holding you right there on the edge of too-much like he was reading everything under your skin. 

“That’s it,” he drawled out, his voice low and even, the bastard, like he had all night, like he wasn’t already wrecked behind the voice. “Yeah, I’ve got you.” And he did. He had you exactly where he wanted you and you let him, because no one had ever taken you apart this precisely, this patiently, like your falling apart was the only thing on his list and he intended to do it right.

The dog tags swung forward and dragged close across your back when he leaned over you, then warm when they settled against your skin, and you thought—stupidly, with the part of your brain that should’ve been offline—that you used to fall asleep listening to that chain shift when he breathed. You thought there had been a version of this where afterward he stayed. You shoved that thought down. You arched your back into him instead and he made a punched-out noise, low in his chest, his grip going tight on you to leave the marks.

“Slow down,” he muttered more to himself than you, but he didn’t. His hips stuttered out of their careful rhythm because this was the one place his composure failed; it was the one place where the sealed-up, gallows humor, watching-you-over-the-glass version of him came apart at the seams. 

You’d figured this out over the months. This was the only place Jack was honest. He’d never say the things across a table, in daylight, with his clothes on. But here, with his cock buried inside of you and his composure shot, the truth leaked out of him in fragments he wouldn’t be accountable for later. 

“Missed this,” he got out, ragged, his mouth at the back of your neck now, words pressed into your hairline like he could bury them in there. “Missed you, fuck. You’ve got no idea, sweetheart, the things I—” 

“Don’t.” You didn’t want it. You wanted it so badly your chest ached and that was exactly why you didn’t want it, because you knew what it was worth in the morning, which was nothing, which was a text about whether you’d remembered to walk Kevin. “Jack. Don’t talk. You can’t—” You let out a gasp as he pressed his hips completely flush against yours, chasing you to the hilt, as if he could physically expel the words out of you. “Can’t fuck me into being with you again.”

You felt him falter at the words, just for a beat, the rhythm catching like you’d reached back and put a hand flat on his sternum. He slowed, dragged himself almost all the way out and held there, trembling, his whole weight coming down over your back so his mouth was now at your ear and you could feel everything against the shell of it.

“I know,” he said, words ragged. “I know I can’t. Doesn’t mean I can’t try.”

His hand moved around the dip of your waist, and he pulled out of you slow, the loss making you bite down on a sound. Then he was rolling you, one palm flat and insistent on your hip, turning you under him onto your back like it was the easiest thing in the world.

“No—” You got an arm up, forearm against your own eyes, because you knew what he wanted, and you weren’t going to give it to him. The face, the looking. From behind, you could keep it what it was; turned over, you’d have to be there for it. “Jack, leave it. I don’t—”

“Hey.” He held your wrist, thumb working into the soft inside of it where your pulse was going stupid. “C’mon. Move the arm.”

“No.”

“You won’t even—” He let out a low laugh, disbelieving, almost wounded. “You’ll let me do every other thing but you won’t even look at me?”

“That’s different.”

“Yeah.” He went quiet for a moment, and his hand slid up the inside of your thigh, holding you open, patient as anything. He knew exactly what the looking was and exactly why you were hiding from it, and he was going to wait you out. “I know it is. Move the arm anyway.”

He braced over you on his arm, the other hand drawing slow idle circles high on your thigh, his cock notched against you and not pushing in, just there, the threat and promise of him, while he looked down at the arm over your face. You could feel him watching.

So you did move the arm, mostly just to spite him by giving him exactly what he wanted. His face was right there—jaw tight, eyes gone dark and fixed on you like you were the only lit thing in the room—and the second you met it, the slight smugness melted clean down the middle and there was just the wanting underneath, naked and his.

“Thank god,” he breathed before pushing back into you. His eyes tracked your face scrunch up at the familiar—too familiar—pleasure like he’d been starving for exactly this. His hand left your jaw and found your knee, hooking it up higher over his hip. He’d always known your left hip sat wrong, that this was the angle that didn’t ache after; the same way you knew, without ever being told, to take the weight off his right side, the two of you arranging yourselves around each other the way you always had. “Knew you were in there somewhere.”

“Don’t get sentimental, Jack” you said, breathless. “You’ll pull something.”

He huffed a laugh against your jaw. Your hand had gone to his left shoulder and you pressed your thumb into the knot that always sat under the blade after a long shift, working it slow while he moved in you. He groaned low and helpless at the unexpected mercy of it.

“Mouthy,” he managed to say. “Even now.”

“You’re so—so insufferable.”

His mouth found the corner of yours and his hand slid up your ribs so his thumb could catch the underside of your breast exactly where he knew; your back came up off the mattress for him. “You married me anyway. What’s that say about you?”

You got your fingers to his hair and scratched once at the base of his skull, the thing that used to put him to sleep in under five minutes, something you’d done about a thousand times in a bed you no longer shared. You watched his eyes go briefly unfocused with how much his body remembered it meant being safe. You hated that you’d done it. 

The easy heat in him went somewhere graver, and his hand came up to cover yours where it rested in his hair. He pinned it there, keeping the touch on him, like he couldn’t bear for you to take it back.

“Why’d you—” His hips stuttered. “Why’d you have to go, huh?”

“Don’t,” you said quickly, and your hand came out of his hair—you made it come down, fighting the pin of his fingers—and you planted your palm against his chest to put an inch back between the two of you. “Don’t talk. Just—shut up. Jack, shut up and—”

He took in a breath, lips still parted like he wanted to talk. You’d expected it. Jack was fabulous at saying everything important while inside you or when he was halfway asleep.

“Yeah.” He nodded shakily. “Yeah. Okay.”

He got an arm under the small of your back and hauled you up into him, and the next stroke was just deep and selfish, like he’d stopped trying to make his point and now was only trying to get somewhere. The slow ruinous tenderness burned off into something with no thought left in it, and your body surged up to meet it—God—yes, this, you could do, this didn’t ask you for anything you’d sworn off. This was just the white-hot animal fact of him and you could be all the way in without losing a single thing. 

“There,” he ground out, forehead dropped to yours, both of you breathing into the same inch of air. “There—fuck—there you go.”

Your mind went black. That was the mercy of getting it like this; the part of you that counted the times he’d said your name, that totted up what the morning had cost, went quiet, drowned clean in the simple overwhelming good of him. You grabbed at his back and pulled him in past where there was room and made a strangled noise.

His hand found yours where it was fisted in the sheet and laced through it, knuckles white, pinning it down beside your head—needing the anchor—and you gripped back just as hard. The bed was loud. Neither of you cared. You'd gone past the place where you could have stopped even if the smarter version of you had walked in and ordered it, both of you just chasing the finish now with a kind of grim mutual desperation, like if you got it done fast enough you wouldn't have to deal with what it was.

“Close,” you breathed. “Jack, I’m close—” 

“I know. C’mon, let me feel it—” His hand let go of yours and dropped between you, fingers finding you without a second of searching, the muscle-memory of you deathly absolute. “Been thinking about this all night.” 

He worked you up to the edge with his face buried in your throat and his hips snapping. The whole thing finally cresting into something neither of you could've talked through if you'd tried.

You went over first, the peak tearing through you with your nails dug into his back and your spine bowed clean off the mattress. He fucked you through every second of it, hips ramming, dragging it up past the point you could stand. And right at the end of yours his rhythm broke and went erratic, deep and grinding and graceless, and you felt the exact moment it caught him.

His arms hooked tighter under the small of your back and hauled you up into him so there was nowhere for him to go but deeper, like the thought of any distance between the two of you right now was a thing he couldn’t tolerate. Your legs wrapped around the backs of his thighs anyway, your heel pressed into the base of his spine.

“Gonna—” His voice came out shredded, into your throat. “Sweetheart, I’m gonna—fuck—”

With a low broken sound, his whole weight crushed down and his hips gave those last helpless grinding pushes, burying himself to the hilt, spilling into you with his face shoved into your neck and his hand fisted in your hair. He continued moving even then, small, greedy rolls of his hips, working himself deeper through the aftershocks, wringing every second out. 

“God.” He shuddered out the word against your pulse, hips still flush, seated as deep as he could get. His arms came around you completely—there wasn’t any inch he wasn’t holding—and he stayed there long after he finished, unwilling to give up the last of it. Greedy even now, especially now. Jack would take every second he was handed and a few he wasn’t.

His heart slammed against your ribs. His breath dragged itself slowly back down. For a moment, you let him have it. You let him stay heavy on and inside you, and you stared at the ceiling. 

After a minute—because that’s all you could grant him, a mere sixty seconds—you put your palm flat on his chest, over the spot where the dog tags had settled cold against his skin, and you pushed.

He came up on his forearms and he looked down at you. That was the hundredth mistake of the night, letting him be that close to your face with the lights of the street coming through the blinds in stripes across him. He looked at you the way he looked at you in the one place he ever did, like you were something he'd been allowed to hold and was already being asked to set back down, and the wanting in it was so total and so useless that you had to look at his collarbone instead.

Then his fingers came up to your chin, tilting your head up gently to meet his eyes again. “I wish you weren’t so cruel to me in front of people.” he said, voice coming out so rough. 

You knew exactly which part of the night he was talking about. He’d carried it the whole way here—through the parking lot, through the drive, through all of this, your body still humming with him—and he’d held onto it the entire time, only to let it out now because now was the only time he could.

“It’s not cruel if it’s true,” you said. “Nobody thought it was cruel.”

“No, nobody thought anything.” He caressed your jaw just slightly, and you stilled under the grazing touch. “I still felt it.” 

Maybe it was the hour, or the drinks still thinning in you, or just the unbearable fact of him looking at you. Regardless of what it was, the lid you kept on the old thing slipped, and you didn't get it back down in time.

“Don’t talk to me about cruelty, Jack,” you said quietly, holding his eyes even though you could feel your own burn. You could do it for once, because he was the one that looked like he needed a collarbone to fix his gaze on. “It was your cruelty that did this.”

His thumb stopped at your jaw. And then, instead of the stillness you’d expected, his hand slid back into your hair and his arm came around you and he pulled you in, the whole weight of him bearing down. His face went into your neck. 

You froze under him, suddenly hating him all over again for making this harder and harder each time.

“Go home,,” you said, and it came out lower than you’d wanted it to.

He let out a shaky breath against your skin. “I’d like to stay with you for one night. If you asked.” 

Your hands came up to his shoulders. You gently pushed. “I’m asking you to go.”

He came up off you slow, by degrees, and the cold rushed into every place he’d just been. He never argued; he only gave you offers where with the condition of you having to ask welded into them. He sat up on the edge of the bed with his back to you and reached for his shirt off the floor.

People at the hospital had a word for you and it was ‘difficult.’ You’d made peace with it years ago. What you didn’t have a word for was the tired. You’d been tired before; this had a different grain to it, bone-level and sitting-behind-your eyes. Twice this week the floor had gone soft and far away when you stood up too fast. You’d put a hand on the counter and waited it out and told no one.

You hadn't eaten, either. The granola bar was still in your bag. So when you stood up from the workstation to walk the corrected units down yourself, the room didn't gray at the edges this time. It dropped. The whole thing tilted bright then dim, your hand reached for the counter and missed it by an inch, and the next clear thing was the floor being closer than it should be and a hand hard around your arm.

“Okay—I’ve got you. Sit.” Dana, you recognized. Of course it was Dana; she had a sixth sense for the exact second a person stopped standing upright. She steered you down to a chair before you’d finished falling. “Head down. Between the knees. You’ve told a hundred people to do this—do it.”

“I’m fine,” you said, voice coming out depleted. “I just got up too—”

“Yeah, you’ve been getting up fast a couple times this week.” " Her hand was on the back of your neck, two fingers at your pulse, and she wasn't looking at your face, she was looking at her watch, counting, and the professionalism of it—the way she'd switched you from colleague to patient without asking your permission—made something cold go through you. “When’d you eat, hon?”

“I ate.”

“When?” When you stayed silent, she said, “That’s what I thought.”

She straightened up and you heard her turn. “Hey! Somebody grab Robby. No, he’s not—just grab him.” She turned back to you, and gentler than you wanted, in a way that told you exactly how bad you looked, she said, “We’re gonna put you in a room. Don’t make a face. We’re gonna put you in a room, run some fluids, check a couple things. If it’s nothing—thank god—then it’s nothing, and you can be insufferable about it for weeks. But you went down, sweetheart, and I’m not arguing with you about it.”

You wanted to argue; you wanted to refuse the chair and go back to work instead of occupying a bed at work. But you were so tired. You were tired, and some animal part of you had already known that for two weeks and had been waiting, with a patience that frightened you, for someone to make you stop.

So you let Dana walk you to the room. You let her pull the curtain. You sat on the edge of the gurney in a department you'd worked in for over a decade and let a colleague put a line in your arm, and you stared at the corner of the blood pressure cuff and did not let yourself think the one thought that had started, very quietly, somewhere underneath the tired, to assemble itself, and would not finish assembling until Robby came in twenty minutes later with your labs and a look on his face you couldn't read, and asked you, carefully, like a man stepping onto ice, when your last period was.

You’d seen him tell a people about death with more steadiness than he was managing right now, standing at the foot of your gurney with a tablet he wasn't looking at, asking you about your cycle like the answer was already on the screen and he was just giving you the courtesy of arriving at it yourself.

“Why?” you asked flatly.

“Just humor me. Tell me.”

You told him and he had no reaction, and that was how you knew. Robby’s face had gone completely neutral.

“Okay,” he said, setting the tablet down. “Your labs came back. Everything’s—the anemia’s mild. That’s the lightheadedness and not-eating. We’ll sort that out.” He paused, took a breath in, and the cold thing that had gone through you on the floor came back and sat down in your chest and stayed. “Your hCG’s elevated.”

You felt your body run cold then.

“That’s the pregnancy hormone,” he said gently. He was a teacher before anything, and that reflex was still on, even with you.

“I know what hCG is, Robby,” you said, the words coming out sharp, voice cracking the last word in half. You saw him nod sharply as he decided to ignore it. “I—I know what it is.”

“It’s early,” he said. “Numbers are consistent with early, which means you’ve got time. That’s what I’m saying. You’ve got time to think about whatever you need to think about.” He was being so careful. “I didn’t put it into anything yet. I wanted to talk to you first.”

Early. You’ve got time. 

He picked the tablet up—done being a doctor about it now, the official part handled—and leaned a hip against the counter, and his voice changed, going off-duty.

“Hey,” he said. “Congratulations.”

You nodded, your mind already distant. 

“You gonna tell Jack?”

Your mind sharpened. For a second, you genuinely didn’t understand the sentence. Your brain refused it wholly, turned it over to look for the trick. There was no way Robby knew—there was no way anybody knew—because you’d been so careful, the whole thing happened in the dark precisely so it wouldn’t seep into the light, so nobody could say a sentence like that. Your stomach dropped through the gurney.

“Huh?” 

Robby looked at you, then shrugged. “I just figured, because you two still talk. He’d want to know. Big life thing.” Then, he added softer, misreading your face completely, “I guess it’s really over between the two of you then?”

You felt your breath hitch in your throat. That was what people would think when it got out, that the door has finally shut. They’d think you were getting clear, a baby with somebody new means the Jack-of-it-all was finally done, mercifully done. That you’d moved on and met someone, that you were building a thing past the divorce you survived. This was supposed to be proof of it. The sad civilized arrangement nobody named, ended at last by a life you were starting without him.

Robby had it exactly backwards and he had no way to know it. It was the furthest thing from over. It was likely the most permanent thing that had ever happened to you, and it had Jack’s name and only Jack’s name. The thing Robby believed to be your way out was the thing that could mean there’d never be a way out. Not anymore, if you chose to have this child. Not ever. You’d be tied to Jack Abbot. A year and a half of getting clear by inches.

You realized Robby was still standing there and that he’d asked you something. He was waiting for an answer you didn’t have the throat for.

“Can you give me a minute?” Your voice came out hoarse. “Just—a minute. Please. And don’t put it into anything yet. Just—don’t let anyone know.”

Robby nodded, probably thinking you needed a beat to let the good news settle, to feel something private and large before the world got its hands on it. “Course. I’ll hold the room, keep people out. Take your time.” 

His hand found your shoulder on the way past, squeezing, and then the curtain rings scraped along the rod and he was gone. 

It all came up at once, fast and without warning. Your hand was flat on the edge of the gurney and you watched it shake, and you made it stop. You could always make your hands stop. What you couldn’t do was make the rest of it stop. The rest of it was the thought you wouldn't think of, thinking itself anyway, and the worst part was the voice it came in, your own, flat, professional, the one you used to walk a frightened patient through their options without ever letting it shake. You could end it. It's early. Numbers consistent with early. You knew exactly how early early was. You knew the window, the way you knew the shelf life of a unit of platelets down to the day. You knew how clean it was, how legal, how completely nobody's business but your own. There was a door. Right now, there was still a door.

There was a door. There was, right now, still a door; it was the realest door, the one that actually led all the way out that would let you walk back into the life where you got clear of Jack Abbot for good and never had to share a child or a custody calendar or a name with him. He would give you Kevin, you knew that. Over would mean over, for good, where in five years you’d be a woman the hospital remembered being married once, to the ER’s night shift attending, you know the one.

You could take that door. It was yours to take. Nobody even had to know. 

You sat in the small bright room and made yourself look directly at the door and waited to feel the relief of it, yet it didn’t come. What came instead, rising up under the grief like a second tide, worse than the first, was a thing you had no word for and no right to and could not, would not, look at straight on, was that it was Jack’s.

You wished you could see it as a curse, and somewhere in the last thirty seconds it had turned over in you and come up as something else; a small, traitorous, and warm thing. It was the exact warmth that had locked your ankles around him, the same warmth that had opened the door for him every night. A piece of him you could get to keep, that no amount of divorce could put back in its box. The one version of forever you two were going to get. And a part of you, a part you despised with everything you had, wanted it. More than the baby in the abstract. His, specifically and unforgivably. 

You put your hand over your mouth as you felt it all come up, and you cried—the real way, the way you hadn’t since the lawyer’s office. You cried a cry that came up from the root and shook you apart, alone, in a place where you worked, with only a curtain covering you. 

You couldn’t have heard the shift change happen on the other side of the curtain. The hospital had kept turning around your little curtained box, that somewhere out there it had ticked over into evening and the day people were handing the floor to the night people. You hadn’t heard any of it. 

You hadn’t heard Dana catch him at the board, and she would have—you know she would have tried—put a hand flat on his chest the second she saw which way he was moving. You only heard the curtain rings scrape against the rod. 

You looked up—ruined, mid-breath, your hand still pressed over your own mouth with your face holding an expression no one had ever seen you do. And there was Jack with one hand still fisted in the curtain he'd thrown back, stopped dead in the gap of it.

He’d come in braced, almost with the same register he came in when there was a level 1 trauma, except this one was a case of lightheadedness. His sleeves were shoved to his elbow, jaw already set, and he’d walked in expecting to find blood or something else equal to that, a thing he’d be able to clean up and fix. He had a hand half-raised for it, and it stayed there, hovering, for it had nothing to fix. 

You knew his face better than your own; there’d never once been a thing he could’ve kept from you, not even when it felt like he was hardly your husband, especially then. You watched the readiness dissipate off of Jack’s face, watched the doctor leave him by degrees until what was left standing was just Jack. 

Just Jack had no protocol for this; there was nothing he’d been taught to do with his face when you were crying because you didn’t cry.

He of all people knew so. He’d sat at a conference table with you while a mediator clicked a pen and you signed your name with a hand that was too steady. He’d carried his own boxes down to the truck while you watched from the upstairs window, dry-eyed, because tears would have made it all real and you refused—out of spite, out of the last thing you had—to make it real where he could see. 

His mouth opened, and his throat worked around words, any word. When he finally spoke, it was just your name, and it came out cracked down the middle, like a plea and a prayer. 

He had no idea. It made you sob slightly louder than you would’ve liked, the realization that he was standing there gutted with fear for you, scared past the edge of himself, and he did not know. Jack could not have known that he was the answer, that you were the answer. If he’d asked you what had happened, the whole truth would have been his name and your own; it would have been the thing you’d done together in the dark a couple dozen times and called nothing. 

“I hate you,” you said, because the only thing you’d been capable of doing was throwing up a wall, driving him out with your own two hands. And it didn’t work, because the words had come out between sobs, wet and wrong, the cruelty falling apart on the way out. 

He didn’t argue it. He never argued the ones he thought were true. He just took it the same way he’d taken every other blow you’d ever landed, without ever lifting a hand to stop it, as though he’d decided a long time ago this was the least of what he had coming.

Still, something moved through him when the words hit, a flinch, a wince that started behind his eyes and pulled his whole face down with it. 

He came the rest of the way to you anyway, and your hand came up between you—far from a hit, there was nothing left in your arm to make one, just the heel of your palm landing against his chest, more sob turned outward than strike. It pushed against nothing. Jack didn’t even rock with it. And then your fingers were curling into the fabric over his sternum instead, gripping when you’d wanted to shove, the same failure of your hands as two weeks ago; pushing him away and hauling him in, your body unable to decide which.

“You—” Another blow, glancing off his chest. “Why did we have—”

“Okay.” He let you continue, letting the first ones land, face stricken and bewildered as he absorbed the blows for a crime he couldn’t name. “Okay. Okay, hey—”

You drew back, and when your hand closed in again, his own came up and closed around your wrist. You could’ve pulled free—he’d left you room for it—but you let him keep holding it there against his chest where you’d been striking him.

“What happened,” he said, words coming out quietly, not even a question. “Whatever it is. Talk to me. What happened?”

He started to move into you, closing the space between you by inches, his other hand coming up to your face, your shoulder, somewhere, anywhere, his whole self trying to fold into your orbit the way it always had. “Just tell me,” he said, closer now, voice dropped lower, into a register it stayed it when it was only the two of you. “Let me—”

“No.” You twisted your wrist in his hand and turned your face away from the one coming toward it. “You can’t just—I won’t let you—”

His forehead had dropped down to hover over your temple, the warmth of him crowding into every place you’d been trying to wall off. “I’m not. I’m not doing anything. I’m just here—let me be here.”

Here. He’d said the word so softly, with so much surety, like it was a small thing to ask, like it had been a place he’d ever once been. The wall you'd been holding with both hands didn't come down so much as it went out from under you, the way the floor had two weeks ago, all at once and without your permission.

You stopped twisting away. You felt him feel the fight going out of your wrist under his fingers and felt the new alertness move through him.

“You want to be here,” you said into his chest, where your fists were still knotted in his shirt, the words coming out muffled aimed at the fabric. Then, through a disbelieving laugh devoid of any humor, you said, “You want to be here?”

“Yeah,” he breathed out. “Yeah. I’m here.”

“Fucking—” The laugh that tore out of you was anything but one. “Congratulations, then.” Your forehead pressed down hard against his sternum, your eyes squeezed shut, because you couldn’t say it and knew you were going to anyway. At least you wouldn’t have to watch. “Fuck—You’re gonna be a father.”

Everything that had been moving stopped all at once; the hand at your jaw, the thumb that had been working slow along your wrist, the whole restless warmth of him trying to fold into you went motionless. For a second, he didn’t even breathe.

You forced yourself to look up. You wanted, somewhere mean and small and ten years old, to see it touch Jack. You wanted to finally watch something get all the way through. 

You got it, and it was worse than you’d let yourself imagine.

The first thing that fell of was the part that told you he was ready to fix this, fix you. It fell clean off, his brows furrowing in worry, a tell that looked too tiny for something this large. 

For a second—less than that, before he could pull the reins on it—something that had no business being there moved under the fear. You knew it because you’d felt the exact same thing only a few minutes ago, alone, the warm traitorous thing rising up under the grief. It was there, on his face—unguarded, naked, wanting—and you watched him catch it. You watched his whole face wilt as he understood, in real time, that he wasn't allowed to feel it, that the wanting was obscene standing next to your wreckage, and you watched him put it away. He got it back behind the wall fast, the way he got everything back behind the wall.

Only his hands gave him up. The one at your jaw had started to shake.

He let out a choked sound, like he was trying to lift the words out of his chest but they kept getting stuck halfway. 

“You’re—” He stopped himself and swallowed, not being able to get the back half of a sentence out of his own throat. “We’re—?”

“Yeah.”

His fingers around your wrist pulled it closer to his chest, as if he could press it through his body and into wherever the words wouldn’t come from.