𝐓𝖍𝖊 𝐒𝖚𝖓 𝐖𝖎𝖑𝖑 𝐑𝖎𝖘𝖊.

He’s thick inside you, condom-slick and stretching you open with every slow roll of your hips, the blunt head nudging deep against that tender spot that makes your cunt flutter and drip around him. Every time you lift up, the drag of his shaft pulls at your walls, slick and obscene, and he thrusts up hard to meet you like he can’t stand even a second of being anything less than buried to the hilt.

He's been quiet since the parking lot, since that man leaned too close and looked at you too long, but now he watches you with his jaw tight and his eyes dark, jealousy mixed with something softer and sadder.

His hands are rough on your bare thighs, fingers digging in as he drags you down onto him again, making you to take every inch until your clit grinds against the coarse hair at the base of his cock.

“You like that?” he asks, voice low, almost mean except for the hurt underneath it. “Him talking to you like he had a chance?”

You shake your head, breathless, fingers tangled in his hair as you roll your hips down until he fills you all over again. “No.”

Lion’s hands tighten, dragging you down until you take him deeper, the head of his cock pressing up against your cervix in a way that borders on too much. “Don’t lie to me, baby. He was smiling at you, calling you pretty, looking at you like he could do something for you.”

“He can’t,” you whisper, pressing your forehead to his. “You’re what I want.”

His hips buck up sharply, making you gasp and clutch at his shoulders. His expression cracks for a second, all that jealousy giving way to the fear he tries so hard to bury, the one that says he is too bruised, too broke, too rough around the edges to be enough for you.

You cup his face, your thumb brushing the bruise near his cheekbone. “I didn’t want him.”

“He wanted you.”

“He doesn’t matter.”

“You sure?” he murmurs, mouth brushing yours. “Because you could have somebody better than me.”

You kiss him hard before he can say anything else, rolling your hips until his head falls back against the seat, his throat working as he swallows a groan. “There isn’t better than you.”

He looks up at you like he wants to believe you so badly it hurts, like he still thinks you might come to your senses and realize he is too bruised, too broke, too much trouble to keep. 

You that look—hate it enough to start riding him harder, taking him with deep, grinding rolls of your hips that make the wet sound of your cunt swallowing his cock fill the cramped space. His mouth falls open, breath coming ragged.

“You’re what I need,” you tell him, every word shaking with the movement. “Not him. Not anybody else.”

Lion moans, low and broken. 

You plant your knees wider on the seat and ride him until the car rocks faintly beneath you, until the wet sound between your bodies fills the backseat and his breathing turns ragged. 

His hands help you, fingers splayed wide over the curve of your ass as he helps you move.

“That’s it,” he rasps. “Tell me I'm what you need.”

Your head falls forward, forehead against his, and he kisses your open mouth, swallowing the moan he drags out of you with another thrust. 

His cock jumps inside you every time you say his name, every time you tell him he’s good, he’s enough, he’s the only one you want.

“He couldn’t make me feel like this,” you whisper, grinding down slow just to feel him curse against your mouth.

His hand slides between your bodies, thumb finding your clit with a practiced pressure that makes your whole body jerk. “No, he couldn’t,” he says, voice low now. 

You clench around him hard, and his breath catches sharp in his throat.

“Shit,” he mutters, almost laughing, almost broken. “You like hearing that?”

You nod, too far gone to be embarrassed, and he rubs you harder while thrusting up into you, making every stroke hit deep.

You cling to him, riding him messy now, no rhythm left except what his hands force out of your shaking hips—slick dripping down over his balls, the condom stretched tight around the base of him as he thrusts up into you.

He keeps touching you, keeps fucking up into you, keeps placing kisses against your skin until you break apart in his lap with your face buried in his shoulder, your body pulsing around him.

Lion groans like it hurts, arms banding around you while he thrusts through it, the wet sound of your orgasm loud in the quiet car.

You’re still shaking when he follows, hips jerking up hard, his face pressed into your neck as he comes with a low, broken sound. 

He holds you down on him afterward, trembling beneath you, his hands still wrapped on your waist like he’s afraid to let go.

For a second, there’s only the sound of both of you breathing in the fogged-up dark.

Then he kisses the mark he left on your throat and whispers, quieter now, “You really mean that?”

You lift your head, still full of him, still aching, and brush your lips over his.

“You’re exactly what I need, Lion.”

His eyes close, his arms tightening around you, he kisses you, murmuring against your lips, “Say it one more time.”

You cup his face, soft where everything else has been rough, thumb stroking over the bruise again.

“You’re exactly what I need.”

© 2026 all rights reserved — flixpii.

"Ummm, can I order two brownies please?"

You nodded, clicking the food icon on the screen, and the prices immediately calculated. "Anything else?" You chirped. 

"Oh! And throw in a sugar cookie too. I know this is all bad for me—" he smiled wryly, the wrinkles around her forehead rising. "I started working out this week but I desperately need a cheat day today." 

You cracked a smile, the total of all three desserts coming up to eight dollars. "Believe me, we all need a cheat day." You cashed her out, quickly working to gather the takeout bags and a pair of tongs afterwards. 

The music on the speaker was playing a soft pop song, a new singer recently upcoming. You hummed along to the tune, placed each item safely in the bag, and returned to the counter. "Have a great day!" You exclaimed, passing her the bag, keeping your voice warm and light. 

The customer waved goodbye. 

You stood at the front, elbow resting on the counter, weight balanced on one foot. Your mind was buzzing with excitement. You listened to the next track that played, a cheesy love song from the 90s, the bass and guitar melting together like a mixing pot. 

You couldn't wait to clock out for the day. 

The bell over the front door rang, and you looked up to find your familiar co-worker walking in with a few boxes in his hands, carefully taking steps to try and not fall, or possibly drop the boxes. 

"Do you need help?" You called out, but you knew his exact answer. 

"No, I got it." He groaned. 

He wobbled towards the back, sliding between the open gap of the counter, and turned around to push the door open with his back. He disappeared, the love song ended, and he came back with a heavy sigh. 

"You know, it's okay to ask for help," you said, taking note of the way he stretched his back, arching and breathing in between like he was an old man. 

"Nah, I got it. Wasn't that heavy anyway." 

Different generations, same excuses. 

He was much younger than you, a few years gone by, but he was a very dedicated worker. You've seen coworkers come and go, a few leaving to pursue other career opportunities, others leaving because the job was a quick cash-in— but the new hire had a certain air about him that you couldn't quite place. 

His name was Walter— often corrected to Lion per his request. You asked why, the name unusual to be a nickname of sorts and he simply said that he's always been called that. You didn't press further, showed him the ropes of the job and he's been coming in since. 

A month went by, the routine was ingrained in his head, and you both worked around each other fairly smoothly. He did the heavy lifting, took out the trash, cleaned around the place when needed— and you mostly worked the front counter, bagging food and making drinks when requested. 

Every day was the same you supposed, nothing much happened at work besides a few complaints from people with too much time on their hands but today was different. 

Lion finished stretching his back, a small curse slipping from under his breath at a particular weird-sounding crack that came from his spine, and took a deep breath. 

"It feels like you're much older than me when you do that," you noted, fingers tapping at the counter." All you're missing is the grey hair, wrinkles, and a cane at your side for support," 

"And all you're missing is the hat with the spinner and a giant lollipop," he retorted. 

You laughed at his visible annoyance. His joke falling flat. He was never funny, but you liked how annoyed he got trying to go blow for blow with you. 

"I got one at home, I'll bring it tomorrow," you joked, reorganizing the takeout bags on the stand. "Actually, I think I have the giant lollipop in my car." 

He rolled his eyes. 

Besides working together, you both found some sort of enjoyment out of teasing each other whenever the time came. You don't know when it started— perhaps it's when you asked if he had any other jungle-named family members at home to lighten the mood one day. 

He frowned, you thought he was pissed and then he told you that he had one. His name was Simba, a distant cousin of his, and the jokes haven't stopped since. 

He rolled his arms around, another crack sounding from his bones. "On second thought, I feel old as shit. I might need the cane soon anyway." He walked around, standing in front of the counter, and leaned into it. "Don't get how you have so much energy today— or any days." 

"Cause, today is a surprise." After fixing the last stack, you moved on to the coffee cups. 

He raised a brow. "A surprise?" 

You paused, raising your hand, fingers twitching to pull his attention. His eyes dropped, the ring on your finger glistening under the light. 

"Right," he said slowly, nodding, and then he stopped. "I'm sorry— what does that mean?"

"It's my anniversary," You giggled, sounding like a teenage girl. "Today is the day I got married to the love of my life and I'm ecstatic." 

"Oh, that makes sense. How long again?" He asked, not entirely interested but he didn't mind small talk. 

"Two years. Isn't that something?"

"Congrats. That's longer than my parents lasted." 

"Your parents got married?"

"No, but they did break up when I was five, so that counts for something." 

"I'm sorry to hear that." Your face dropped, unsure of how to respond to that. 

He doesn't tell you much about his life, other than his older brother, whom he sees from time to time. When he saw the air change, the mood plummeting, he grabbed your attention by pushing the reorganized cups to the side. "Don't be, they didn't belong together anyway— but tell me what the plan is?"

Your face lit back up. "I think he's taking me out? I heard he was making reservations for today. I'm not picky, but I hope it's somewhere romantic." 

You've been daydreaming about this day, countless images of pretty red roses scattered all over the house. You didn't wake up to anything, finding him gone to work in the morning, but that didn't mean he didn't care.

"I bought a dress— something I don't usually buy often, but I wanted to look pretty."

"You don't need a dress to look pretty," he said, unashamed of how quickly he added to the criticism of your appearance. 

A soft chuckle escaped you, "Please, you're just saying that." 

"Trust me, a guy isn't going to be looking at the color of your dress." 

You smirked, leaning in closer. "What will they be looking at?"

"I—" the smirk on your face was so telling, he almost fell for it. "I'm not going to answer that. You might file a report on me." 

"Ouch, so close," you sighed. "Maybe next time?"

"Next time." He looked at the clock on the desk, a deep rumble puffing from his chest. "The delivery truck is coming in five, I should get ready." He left from his spot. 

You called his name, pointing towards the back. "Make sure they put the flour towards the back of the building this time. Putting it in the front was diabolical."

"Sure thing boss." He went off, exiting the building to wait for the truck to pull in. 

You clocked out early, another worker was coming in to take your shift, and you drove straight home. You thought about what style of makeup you were going to wear, what hairstyle would look best with the dress, the type of heel that would angle your feet better— things that sounded silly saying out loud, but today it all counted. 

You got home, your husband's car was parked at the front, and you felt a rush of joy. 

He's never been home this early before. 

Once you got inside, the excitement never left but your eyes did wander around. It was empty, the lights on, your husband nowhere to be seen. No decorations, no cake— nothing. You went upstairs to your shared bedroom, wondering if he had everything planned there instead. 

How dreamy would it be to open the door to a bed of roses, a few chocolates decorated around the pillows spelling out "I Love You" something you would see in a cheesy romantic movie you've watched as a child. 

You twisted the knob, hope bouncing in your chest and the darkness smacked you in the face like a brick wall. 

You stood there, mouth open, confusion bubbling up inside. You could make out the silhouette of your husband, snuggled under the covers. 

There were no balloons, no sweets to brighten the mood, and the room felt empty. The dress you bought, the bright colors dim in the darkness, was hanging on the wall. A grim reminder that you'll have to take it back now since there was no purpose for it anymore. 

You walked over to his side of the bed, tapping him awake. He groaned, a small yawn following, turning over on his side. 

"Huh?" He grumbled. 

"Hey, baby," You said softly, "Did you forget, you know. Today?" You questioned, trying to find the most plausible explanation as to why you have yet to find anything that showed how important this day was. 

"Forget what?" he sucked his teeth. 

"Y-You know, today—"

"Babe, I just got home from work. Long meeting, you know how it is."

It felt like your heart was smashed into a billion pieces. "Yeah… Right, of course. Um, I'm sorry." 

You backed away, your husband turning back over to snuggle under the sheets, and you felt the tears swell. 

You decided to go back to your car, your uniform still on, and you drove. The radio was silent, your sniffles the only sound ringing in your ears. The bakery seemed like the best place to go to. You weren't sure where to go, what to do, who to talk to— but the bakery was your safe space for now. 

You couldn't bear the thought of staying home after that. 

When you pulled up to the parking lot, the lights were still on, the familiar figure behind the glass window working. You got out of the car, wiping away your tears, trying your best to get rid of any evidence that you were bawling your eyes out the whole way. 

Lion was sweeping the floors, the radio going off. He had his back turned, but the sound of the bell ringing off alerted him. "We're closing in ten minutes," he announced, turning around and he stopped dead in his tracks. 

"Yes, I know what I said," you grumbled, reading his mind before he could say it. You headed towards the tall chairs in front of the counter. 

"What happened?" He asked, following behind you. 

You sat down at the counter, propping yourself up. "He forgot… I think? Or maybe not. I'm… I'm not sure anymore." 

Lion's face twisted, almost in disgust. 

He could see the dry tears caked on your cheeks, stains that you tried to wipe away but failed to. 

You sighed, refusing to make eye contact. "Mind if I stay until you close?" 

What a silly question to ask. 

"Yeah…Of course."

You placed your head down on the counter, the sniffles threatening to come back up again

Lion's hands twitched at his side. 

He left, going towards the back room. You heard the doors swing open and then shut. Soon enough, he came back out, taking a chair beside you. 

He used his elbow to alert you, your face turning to spot him holding two cupcakes in his hands. It was a basic vanilla cupcake, rainbow sprinkles, and a candle shoved in the middle like a mini birthday cake. 

"What…What's that?" You mumbled. 

"We can have our own celebration," he huffed, sitting a cupcake in front of you. "You've been working here for two years—" 

"Actually," you interrupted, "it's a year and four months."

"Then, let's celebrate a year and four months."

He took out a lighter from his back pocket, burning the tip of the candle for each cupcake. You watched the flame flicker, sadness slowly simmering away. 

"I…" What were you supposed to say? "Thank you?"

"No need to jump in excitement," He deadpanned.

"N-No! I'm just… at a loss for words. That's all." 

"If your husband is stupid enough to forget something as important as today, then fuck him— sorry for my language." 

You cracked a smile, "I'll let it slide, just this once. I needed to hear that." 

He gestured to the cupcake, the flames still flickering. "You should blow out the candle. Make a wish, something dealing with him falling down the stairs in the morning."

"I'll wish for more than that." You did what he said, blowing out the flame with one swoosh from your lips.

You looked back at him as he did the same, his eyebrows knitted together. You both ate the cupcake, the silence passing over. 

You chewed slowly, the night ending in a sweet flavor of vanilla icing.

"If you want," came his voice, low and rough. "I could come to your house and rough your husband up for you?"

You could see in his face that he wasn't joking, he was dead serious in fact. You thought about it, but that would only end in Lion being arrested probably. Your husband wasn't worth the trouble. 

"Perhaps next time? 

"Perhaps next time," He repeated, and you both enjoyed the company of each other while you ate the last of the cupcake. 

The road home runs bright beneath the moon, softened by the day’s rain until every step draws a quiet, sucking sound from the clay, and the man behind you keeps close enough that his breathing seems to belong to the dark itself.

He has been following since the bend past the bar, since the last of the music loosened into the night and the lamps were put out one by one, leaving only moths battering themselves stupid against the glass and a few drunken voices fading toward the fields.

He had laughed too loudly when you let him walk beside you at first, his hat pushed back from his damp forehead, one hand working at his suspenders as though he meant to remind you he was a man with money in his pocket and heat in his blood.

By the time you turned down the narrow lane toward your house, he had stopped trying to hold a proper conversation, and all that remained of him was whiskey, want, and the foolish confidence that made men so easy to lead where they ought not go.

You don't look back often enough to frighten him away. You let him hear the brush of your skirt over wet weeds and see the shape of your hand when you lift it to steady yourself along the fence.

Men like him enjoy believing a woman is almost afraid, just uncertain enough to be coaxed, just lonely enough to be convinced.

He had leaned close to you in the smoke-heavy warmth of the bar and told you your eyes could make a man forget his good sense, and you had smiled into your glass, listening while Remmick’s marks, hidden beneath the high collar of your dress, pulsed under the memory of his mouth.

The man had never noticed the bruises. He had never thought to wonder why you kept your throat covered in June, why you drank so little, why you watched the door whenever the wind shifted from the trees.

The house appears at the end of the lane with one lamp burning low behind the front curtains, yellow light pressed thin against the dark. The porch is painted haint blue along the ceiling, though no old charm has ever kept evil from crossing it, not since you opened the door months ago to a wounded stranger with mud on his boots and murder held tight behind his teeth.

Even now, you can see him in pieces when the house comes into view… Remmick braced against the jamb, one hand clamped to his side, rainwater running from his hair; Remmick watching your hands as you prepared to tend to him, hungry even while half-dead, as though he had found something more interesting than survival.

The memory is mixed with others: with his mouth at your wrist because he had taken it, not because you had offered; with his fingers locked tight around your arm while he drank just shy of too much; with his voice lowered at your ear after he recovered and stayed, still threatening, still amused, though the threats began to sound less like promises of death and more like excuses to keep you close. The first time you understood he had stopped speaking of killing you outright because he had begun thinking of keeping you.

Behind you, the man stumbles and catches himself on a fencepost, laughing under his breath as if the earth has flirted with him. “You live tucked away, don’t you?” he slurs, trying for charm and finding only hunger. “A woman ought not be out here by herself.”

You pause at the foot of the porch steps and turn enough for him to see your face in the moonlight.

The magnolia by the yard has dropped white petals into the mud, bruised brown along the edges, and the sweetness of them hangs heavy with the smell of wet grass and distant river rot. “I’m not by myself,” you say, soft as the night will allow.

He takes it as an invitation because he wants it to be one.

His smile spreads, loose and pleased, and he climbs the first step with his hand dragging along the rail, but the liquor has made his body less certain than his mind.

His boot slips on the damp board, and he goes down hard, shoulder striking the porch with a hollow thud that travels through the house.

He curses, then groans, his hat rolling toward the edge where rainwater still drips from the roof in slow, silver threads.

Then, His hand skids in the mud tracked across the boards, and you watch him from above with your key held between two fingers, letting the small brass teeth bite into your skin.

He's been waiting.

You know it as surely as you know the shape of your own bedroom in the dark, as surely as you know the places on your body his mouth will seek first when he comes in fed and shining.

He doesn't need to hunt the way he used to, not with you wandering into town in your good dress, not with your lashes lowered and your voice sweetened into something men mistake for permission.

At first, you had done it because he frightened you less when full. Then you had done it because he looked at you afterward with a devotion too ruinous to resist. Now you do it because the town is full of men who believe the world has been made for their appetite, and Remmick’s appetite, at least, loves you.

You step inside and close the door before the man can gather enough sense to call after you, and the bolt slides into place with a familiar scrape.

You remove your gloves one finger at a time and set them on the small table beneath the crucifix your mother left you, the one Remmick refuses to touch but enjoys mocking when his mood is bright.

Outside, the man’s voice rises in a confused complaint, thickened by drink and injured pride, and then the porch boards creak beneath another weight.

The first scream breaks open quick and ugly.

It tears across the yard, startling the cicadas into silence, and you stand in the hall with your hand resting against the wall while the sound climbs and twists.

The second scream comes muffled, as though a palm or a mouth has covered it, and then there's only the rough drag of boots against wood, the wet impact of a body pulled closer, the low animal sound Remmick makes when hunger takes him past manners.

A woman with any sense left would pray. A woman with less sin in her blood might shut her eyes and tremble.

You walk to your bedroom instead, loosening the pins from your hair as the house settles around the violence on the porch.

Your room is close and warm, holding the day’s heat in its plaster walls.

The lamp flame leans whenever the wind finds a crack, gilding the washstand, the iron bed, the quilt folded at the foot where Remmick had slept through noon with one arm hooked possessively over your waist.

His presence lingers even when he's outside. In the faint mineral chill along the sheets; in the dark coat thrown over the chair; in the little nick beneath your collarbone where he lost control two nights ago and spent an hour afterward kissing the wound as though apology could be given with a bloody mouth.

You remove your dress slowly, careful with the buttons though your fingers shake, and leave it over the back of the chair before drawing on your nightgown.

The cotton is thin from washing, white enough to make a sacrifice of itself, with lace at the throat that never stays innocent long.

By the time the porch falls quiet, your hair is loose.

You sit at the edge of the bed and listen to the slow dripping outside. Some of it is rainwater. Some of it is not.

Your heart beats in your throat, not with fear alone, though fear is still there, old and faithful, tucked beneath the ribs where he first planted it.

It was fear that that kept you still when he caught your wrist in that cold, merciless grip and drank until the room tilted soft at the edges. It was fear that made you listen when he laughed against your skin, blood-wet and cruel, telling you not to faint.

Somewhere along the way, with his fingers bruising your arm and his breath shuddering like a dying man’s against your pulse, fear became something more shameful than fear alone.

The shame of that should have cured you. It never did.

The knock comes soft enough to be mistaken for courtesy, and you rise and cross the hall, bare feet whispering over the boards.

Remmick doesn't need the invitation anymore, not in any clean sense, since you gave it too many nights ago with trembling lips and never found the courage to take it back, but he knocks when he has fed because he likes the ritual of your hand opening the door. He likes being received. He likes the moment your eyes find his mouth and your body betrays you before your conscience can dress itself.

When you pull the door open, he stands beneath the porch roof with blood slicking his lips, his chin, the pale line of his throat where his shirt hangs open. It's soaked into his collar and speckled one cheek, and a dark strand of hair clings to his forehead.

Behind him, the man lies half in shadow near the steps, ruined into silence, one hand still curled as though grasping after the life that has already left him.

Remmick’s eyes are brighter than the lamp behind you, red-black and drowning deep, and the smile he gives you is not gentle even though his voice is.

“There’s my girl,” he murmurs, stepping through before the door has opened fully, and his arms come around you with such sudden hunger that your back strikes the wall behind you and the breath leaves your chest.

Cold blood smears across the front of your nightgown as he presses himself to you.

His face goes to your neck at once, breathing you in with a broken sound that would be pitiful if it came from anything less dangerous. His mouth drags along your skin, wet and copper-sweet, leaving red across your throat and jaw.

You lift your hands into his hair because there is nowhere else for them to go, and because you want him close enough to stain you past saving.

He kisses you as though he means to crawl inside your mouth and sleep there until dawn.

The taste of him floods you, blood and whiskey stolen from the dead man, grave-cold tongue sliding over yours, fangs catching with enough care to make the danger worse.

He's never so affectionate as he is after feeding, when the stolen life moves through him and leaves him dazed with it, drunk on pulse and heat and the knowledge that you brought it to him.

His hands close around your waist, then slide lower, gripping through the cotton, hauling you against the hard line of him until your thighs part around one of his.

“You made him follow sweet as a lamb,” he says against your mouth, the words damp and rough, broken by another kiss before they can become a sermon. “Had him lookin' at you like he’d found supper, and all the while you were bringin' him home to me.”

You make a sound that might have been his name if his mouth had not taken it from you.

He licks over your lower lip, where his fang has grazed, and the smallest sting blooms there.

The first bead of your blood draws him still. His fingers flex hard into your hips, and his face changes with a hunger that is no longer for the body outside.

He bends to your lip with a reverence that's almost worse than violence, sucking the tiny wound until your knees loosen and your hands tighten in his hair.

The first time he tasted you, he had been shaking with fever on your kitchen floor, too weak to rise and too viscious to beg.

You had reached toward him with the basin, thinking to wash the blood from his side, and he had moved faster than any wounded thing ought to move, catching your wrist and dragging it to his mouth before you could do more than gasp. He latched onto you with a groan so intimate and hateful it haunted your sleep for weeks, drinking while his eyes stayed fixed on yours, daring you to cry out when no one was near enough to save you.

That’s when he had threatened you, with your blood still on his teeth, promising he would kill you once his strength returned if you bored him, if you ran, if you looked at him too long with pity in your face.

Yet he had not let you fall when your knees weakened. He had pulled you down beside him with a rough hand at your waist, mouth hovering near the bite he had made, and for one strange, awful second he had pressed his lips there as though admiring his own cruelty.

Even then, monstrous and half-mad, he had kissed what he hurt, not in apology, but because it belonged to him for the moment.

Now he pulls back from your lip with a shudder and looks at you as if the whole ruined night has been an offering laid at his feet. “Pretty wicked thing,” he whispers, his thumb moving over your blood-slick mouth. “The town would put you in the ground beside me if they knew how well you feed me.”

“They won’t know,” you answer, and the certainty in your voice pleases him enough that his eyes narrow with it.

“No,” he agrees, kissing your cheek, then the corner of your mouth, then the pulse fluttering under the blood he left at your throat. “They’ll look at you tomorrow and see lace, sweetness, maybe a tired smile if you’re careless. They won’t see me between your legs.”

The words go through you hot and low.

He feels the way you soften against him, the way your breath catches, and his smile presses into your skin.

His hand gathers the hem of your nightgown and drags it up over your thigh. The air touches you first, then his fingers, cold and sure as they slide between your legs and find the damp heat there.

He groans before you do. His forehead drops against yours, and for a moment both of you are caught in the narrow space between the blood outside and the bed waiting down the hall.

“All this before I’ve even laid you down,” he says, voice roughened by possession. “You waited for me wet.”

You should deny him the satisfaction, but your body has no loyalty to pride. You rock against his fingers, breath breaking when he strokes through the slickness and circles the aching place above your entrance with a slow cruelty that makes your hips chase him.

He kisses you through it, messy and open, drool slicking your chin as the pressure builds. Blood spreads from his mouth to yours until the kiss turns red.

When his fingers push inside you, two at once and deep enough to make your shoulders press back against the wall, he swallows the sound you make and gives it back with a groan of his own.

The hallway is too narrow for what he wants. He lifts you before you can fully find your balance, one arm under your thigh, the other at your back, carrying you toward the bedroom while his mouth stays fixed to your neck.

Your nightgown rides high around your hips, and your bare legs hook around him by instinct. The candle in the bedroom throws your shadows long across the wall when he pushes through the door, his and yours joined into one dark, shifting shape.

He lays you on the bed with more care than his hunger promises, his hand cradles the back of your head as you meet the pillow.

His thumb brushes your cheek, smearing blood there like rouge, and then he climbs over you half-dressed, shirt open, trousers still fastened, suspenders hanging loose from his shoulders.

You reach for him immediately, pulling at cloth and buttons, needing the cold press of his body beneath your hands. The blood on his shirt darkens your nightgown where his chest meets yours, and the lace at your throat turns red under his chin.

He mouths down your neck, lingering over old marks and making new ones beside them. He doesn't break your skin at first. He kisses, sucks, bites just shy of blood, mapping his claim in bruises that will deepen by morning.

His obsession has always worn itself prettiest on your body. He likes proof. He likes the places where you cannot wash him away.

When he reaches your breasts, he pulls the neckline of your gown down with both hands and bares you to the lamplight, his gaze turning heavy before his mouth follows.

The wet heat of his tongue closes over one nipple, and your back arches from the bed. He sucks hard, teeth grazing the tender skin, while his hand kneads the other breast with possessive impatience. Blood from his lips streaks across you in dark half-moons.

He changes sides, then changes again, unable to settle, drunk on every inch he can reach. His spit wets your skin and the cotton bunched below your breasts, and when you whimper, he lifts his eyes to you from beneath his lashes with such open hunger that you feel your cunt clench around nothing.

“You like me filthy,” he says against your breast, and there is no question in it. “You like me cominm in with blood on my face, crawlinm over you before the body’s gone cold.”

Your fingers twist in his hair. “I like you full,” you whisper, and the confession makes his mouth open wider against your skin.

He bites then, not deep enough to endanger, only enough to bring a small red bloom to the surface above your breast. The pain flashes bright, then melts into pleasure when he laps at it with a low, shaking moan. He drinks from that shallow mark as if it is more precious than the slaughter on the porch, as if your smallest wound matters more than another man’s death.

His hand slips beneath your nightgown again, fingers spreading you open, rubbing slow circles that make your thighs tremble against his sides.

By the time you get his trousers open, his composure is nearly gone.

He hisses when your hand wraps around him, thick and hard and slick at the head, and his hips press forward helplessly into your palm.

You stroke him once, twice, spreading the wetness with your thumb, and his mouth falls open against your chest.

For a creature who has lived longer than any man ought, he can still look undone by the simple fact of your hand on him.

His patience breaks when you tighten your grip and lift your hips beneath him.

He catches your wrist, pins it briefly beside your head, then kisses your palm as though apologizing for the force of it while his other hand drags your drawers down your thighs.

One seam catches, and the fabric tears with a soft, final sound that makes your breath hitch.

He smiles into your mouth when you scold him under your breath, but the smile is gone as soon as he settles between your legs and feels how slick you are against him.

“There now,” he murmurs, sliding the head of his cock through your wetness with slow, obscene pressure. “My sweet accomplice. My little saint with blood under her nails.”

You look up at him through the candlelight, at the streaks of red drying along his throat, at the softness hidden beneath the fever of his eyes, at the monster you once feared would be your death and now welcome into your bed with a dead man cooling outside the door.

“Remmick,” you say, his name leaving you as a plea and a command together.

He pushes inside you with a measured restraint that makes both of you suffer.

The stretch is deep, hot, familiar, and still it steals the air from your lungs as he fills you inch by inch.

His forehead lowers to yours; his breath, unnecessary and shaken, fans across your mouth. When he is fully seated, hips pressed tight to yours, he holds there and trembles, his fingers curling into the quilt beside your head while your body pulses around him.

Blood cools between your breasts. His cock throbs inside you. The house creaks in the damp heat. Somewhere beyond the open bedroom door, water or blood taps the porch in patient drops.

You lift your hands to his face and draw him down, kissing him with your own blood still on his tongue, and that is what unfastens the last of him.

His first thrust is slow enough to feel deliberate, dragging out until your body tries to hold him, then pressing back in with a wet, heavy roll that makes your fingers clutch at his shoulders. And by the third, he drives you into the mattress, his hips snapping into yours while the bed begins to knock against the wall.

His mouth slides from yours to your jaw and back again, smearing blood and spit over your skin, his fangs grazing whenever his control thins.

Your nightgown stays twisted around your waist, your breasts bare, your thighs spread wide around his half-clothed body.

His open shirt brushes your nipples with every thrust, the damp fabric dragging until the sensation turns sharp enough to make you cry out.

He hears it and shifts his weight, catching one nipple in his mouth while he fucks you harder, tongue circling, teeth teasing, the cold heat of him everywhere at once. His hand grips your thigh and pushes it higher against your ribs, opening you deeper for him, and the change makes you sob into the crook of his neck.

“C'mon,” he whispers, though the words shake with his own pleasure. “Let me have you. Let me feel what you saved for me.”

You're too full of him to answer properly. You give him his name again, broken softer this time, and he rewards it by grinding deep, his pelvis pressing hard against your clit until pleasure sparks through you in a bright, spreading ache. He does it again, learning the angle, cruel with how well he knows you.

Every thrust comes wet and filthy, his cock dragging through your slick cunt, his mouth working bruises into your throat, his fingers leaving marks along your thigh. The blood on him has become blood on you, red across white cotton, red in the dip of your collarbone, red at the corner of your mouth where he keeps kissing you open.

He lifts his head enough to watch you. He looks at you as though he can see the first night, the trembling basin in your hands. He looks at you as though he knows every road that led you here and loves the ruin of each one. “You were meant for this,” he says, voice low and fevered, his hips never slowing. “Meant to bring them home and lie beneath me after, sweet with guilt and wanting.”

The shame of it burns, but not enough to cool you.

Your body tightens around him, drawing a ragged groan from his throat.

He laughs once, breathless and dark, then kisses you hard before reaching between you to rub your clit with two slick fingers.

The pressure is exact, the rhythm merciless, and your pleasure gathers too quickly for dignity.

You cling to him while the room blurs at the edges, while his cock fills you and his hand works you open to the breaking point.

Your orgasm rolls through you in a long, shaking wave that leaves you gasping against his mouth

He thrusts through it, groaning when your cunt clenches around him, his forehead pressed to yours, his lips brushing yours between broken words that fall into you one by one, damp and reverent, until you cannot tell whether he is praising you for coming or for sinning so beautifully with him.

You feel the way his rhythm falters in the sudden desperation of his kisses, his hand slipping beneath your back and holding you so tightly there will be bruises shaped like his fingers by morning.

He buries his face against your neck, right over the pulse he could take if he wanted, and his fangs press there without breaking skin.

“Tell me,” he says, the demand ragged enough to sound almost wounded.

The answer is already in the way your legs lock around his hips.

He makes a sound that's closer to a growl than a moan, and his body drives into yours with a final, shuddering force.

His hips press flush as he spills deep, cock pulsing inside you while his mouth opens over your throat. He holds there with his fangs against your skin, trembling violently, restraint and hunger braided so tightly that his whole body seems to suffer for it.

The heat of him fills you in slow, messy throbs, and when he rocks shallowly through the last of it, his spend begins to leak around him, slicking your thighs, making the place where you are joined obscene beneath the lamplight.

He stays inside you after, breathing though he has no need, his body heavy and cold over yours while the blood on your skin dries tacky between you.

Your nightgown is ruined beyond saving, bunched and stained, lace torn where his fingers pulled too hard. His shirt hangs open, marked with the dead and with you. The bed smells of sex, iron, candle smoke, and the damp rot of a southern night pressing itself against the windows.

After a long while, Remmick lifts his head. His eyes have cleared some. He looks down at your mouth, your throat, your bare chest streaked with his feeding, and his expression softens into something that would make you weep if you had not already given him so much of yourself.

He kisses your lips, then the bitten place above your breast, then lower, as if blessing every mark he made.

“You’ll have to help me with the porch,” you whisper, your voice hoarse from pleasure and the weight of the night.

His mouth curves against your skin. “I always do.”

There's affection in it, terrible and domestic.

By dawn, the boards will be scrubbed with lye until no stain remains for the neighbors to puzzle over. The man’s hat will vanish into the creek. His name, whatever it was, will become a question asked in town for a week and then less often after, swallowed by heat, gossip, debt, and the ordinary cruelties of living.

You will wash your hair. Remmick will draw the curtains and hide from the sun. The two of you will lie tangled beneath clean sheets while flies gather somewhere far from the house.

For now, he slips a hand between your thighs and presses his fingers where his cum is leaking out of you, watching the mess with a devotion that makes your stomach tighten all over again.

He gathers some of it and pushes it back inside with slow, possessive care, his eyes lifting to yours as your lips part.

“My girl,” he says, almost softly.

The words should feel like a chain, and, perhaps, they are one. Yet when he kisses you again, you hold him there by the back of the neck and let the night close over the house, let the magnolia rot in the yard, let the porch wait a little longer for its washing.

Morning will come with its white heat and its lies soon enough, and when it does, you will wear a clean dress buttoned high at the throat, with Remmick’s bruises hidden beneath the collar and his sin still warm inside you.

© 2026 all rights reserved — flixpii.

He laughs against your mouth, breathless and surprised, though there’s hardly any room in him for real surprise when you’ve been looking at him like that since the final bell. Since he lifted his bruised fists under those cheap lights with sweat shining down his chest and blood drying at the corner of his mouth.

You kissed him in the hallway before Stan could finish talking, kissed him again by the ice machine, and by the time he gets you inside the room, you’re already tugging at his shirt like you’ll die if there’s one more layer between you.

“Baby,” he murmurs, voice rough from adrenaline, from shouting, from all the pain he swallowed in the ring. “I gotta shower.”

“No,” you breathe, catching his bottom lip between your teeth until he groans low in his chest.

That does something to him.

You feel it in the way his hands tighten on your waist, in the way his eyes go dark and soft all at once, like he can’t decide whether to be gentle with you or ruin you for making him feel wanted while he’s still damp with sweat, still sore and buzzing—still half-wild from the win.

He kisses you—deep, messy—with open-mouthed kisses that taste like salt and blood and victory, his hands roaming beneath your clothes with a clumsy hunger that only makes you need him worse.

He backs you toward the bed until the backs of your knees hit the mattress, then follows you down without breaking the kiss, his body heavy over yours, warm and solid and trembling faintly with leftover fight.

“You were lookin’ at me like you wanted to climb in that ring yourself,” he says, mouthing down your jaw.

“I did.”

Lion huffs a laugh, but it catches when you pull him closer by the waistband, shameless with it, needy enough that his face changes and the teasing slips.

His mouth finds your neck, and he kisses there first, sweet and hot, then harder, teeth grazing until your back arches. He leaves marks because you ask him to without words, because your fingers dig into his shoulders and your breath breaks every time he sucks another bruise into your skin.

By the time he has you turned over beneath him, your cheek pressed to the motel pillow and your body stretched out under his, he’s lost the last of his restraint.

He’s still in his fight-worn skin, still warm with sweat, still breathing like he’s trying to keep himself together, and the thought of it makes you dizzy.

Lion leans over you, one hand braced near your head while the other grips your hip, and bends low enough to kiss the corner of your mouth from behind.

“You sure?” he whispers, rough but careful.

You don’t answer with words. You just reach back, shove your own pants and panties down your thighs in one frantic tug, kicking them off one ankle so they bunch around your knee. Lion’s hand is already at his belt—quick, clumsy, the buckle clinking once before he yanks his jeans open. He doesn’t bother pushing them down past his hips. He just hooks his thumb under the waistband of his boxers, shoves them roughly beneath his balls, and pulls his flushed cock out.

You push your ass back against him in answer, and his composure breaks.

The first blunt press of his thick, heavy cock makes your breath catch into the sheets, your fingers curling tight in the blanket as your body struggles to take all of him at once. The fat, flushed-dark head leaking thick, shiny strings of precum that smear messily between your cheeks and make the stretch wetter.

He sinks in inch-by-inch, forcing you open wider than you thought you could go, the sensitive head twitching hard every time your hole clenches around it.

Lion groans like it hurts him, like the tight heat of you is punching straight through his chest and straight to the needy, desperate cock he never knows what to do with until it’s buried inside someone who wants him this bad.

He kisses your shoulder, your neck, the side of your face, messy and desperate, his mouth dragging over your skin as he eases in slow enough to make you feel every veiny inch, every pulse, every helpless spurt of fresh precum that just keeps dripping out of him the deeper he gets.

“Christ,” he breathes, voice shaking.

He’s trembling above you, trying so hard not to lose it right there, but the way his hips twitch—chasing the wet heat like he can’t help it—tells you he’s already fighting that embarrassed, needy edge that always undoes him.

You can barely answer. You only whimper his name, and that ruins him.

He starts slow because he has to, because even when he’s rough, Lion can’t stop being Lion. He watches the way you tense, listens for the little sounds you try to hide, kisses the back of your shoulder when you tremble beneath him.

But once you start pushing back, once your hips meet his and your voice turns needy, his grip tightens and the rhythm changes into something harder, deeper, less polished.

The bed creaks under you. The cheap headboard taps the wall. His body covers yours completely, hot and solid, his chest brushing your back as he leans down to kiss you again, awkward from the angle but so hungry it makes your stomach twist.

His mouth catches yours over your shoulder, all tongue and breath and broken noises, and every thrust drives the kiss messier until neither of you can keep it clean.

“You like me like this?” he pants against your mouth. “All sweaty after a fight?”

You nod helplessly, and he gives a rough little laugh that turns into a groan when you squeeze around him.

“Yeah,” he murmurs, kissing your cheek, then your jaw, then the marked-up side of your throat. “I know. Couldn’t even let me wash up first.”

“You won,” you manage, breath hitching as he rolls his hips deeper, that sensitive blunt head grinding right against that spot and making his cock twitch hard inside you.

That makes him curse under his breath. His hand slides up your body, fingers spreading over your spine, holding you down with just enough pressure to make your head go light.

He isn’t cruel with it, but he is rough now, needy, his hips snapping harder while his mouth keeps finding places to mark.

Everything turns up. The room full of skin against skin, the filthy wet sound of his cock plunging in and out of your dripping hole, breathless praise, the broken sound of your name in Lion’s mouth.

He keeps kissing you wherever he can reach, like he can’t help himself, like he needs to remind you he’s there even while he’s taking you apart. His tenderness makes the roughness worse somehow, makes every hard thrust feel intimate enough to ache. He’s leaking so much inside you now that it’s squelching obscenely with every snap of his hips, precum and your slick coating his heavy balls and dripping down your thighs in warm trails.

“You feel so good,” he says, voice wrecked. “God, baby, you feel so good.”

You reach back for him blindly, and he catches your hand, lacing his fingers through yours against the sheets.

For a moment, even with his weight over you and his hips moving hard enough to make you sob into the pillow, there’s something soft in it. Something almost shy in the way he presses his forehead to your shoulder and groans your name like he’s grateful.

Then you push back into him again, greedy and trembling, and he loses that softness to hunger.

He pins your joined hands down, kisses the side of your face, and drives into you with a rough, breathless rhythm that has you falling apart beneath him, all heat and sweat and bitten-back cries.

Lion follows you there, shaking against your back, his mouth open against your neck as he spills out praise between ragged breaths, telling you how badly he needed this—his cock pulsing hard as he floods you with warm ropes of cum, the sensitive head twitching with every spurt.

And afterward, when the room finally goes quiet except for the buzz of the old lamp and the sound of both of you trying to breathe, he stays right where he is for a minute, his lips brushing the newest mark he left on your throat.

“Still need that shower,” he mumbles.

You laugh weakly into the pillow.

Lion kisses your shoulder again, softer this time. “You comin’ with me?”

You turn your face enough for him to kiss you properly, slow and sore and sweet, and he smiles against your mouth like winning the fight was nothing compared to this.

© 2026 all rights reserved — flixpii.

You stub out a half-smoked cigarette, shaking your head for even trying. You haven’t enjoyed one for a while; the nicotine doesn’t do anything anymore. You just smoke for the warmth in your chest.  

You trace over the bubble letters and the flaky glitter glue of the card the girls had given you when you joined the band. Your sixteenth birthday was a filming day– the music video for your debut song. Bossy had talked the costume crew into getting you a longer skirt and a top with a higher neckline. 

“She’s a baby! She’s only fifteen!” she shouted, waving them away. 

“Sixteen,” you corrected her passively. 

“You’re not fifteen, Lovey?” Smarty asked.

“No, um- well, today-”

“It’s your birthday?!” Baddie shouted in surprise, shaking your shoulders. “Why didn’t you tell us?”

“Well, we’re working today,” you answered her.

“And?” Smarty laughed. “We can still celebrate.”

“Shit, we could have gotten you something!”

The videotape plays quietly on the fuzzy TV. It’s a scratchy recording of you wiping at tears while the girls serenade you.

“Happy birthday dear Lovey,” their harmonic voices buzz in the speakers– your memory plays along with it, and you recall that Smarty added a riff to make you giggle. “Happy birthday to you!”

You sniff and blink away a tear. You reach over and press the button, turning off the TV. You keep your hand on the box, feeling the heat slowly fade against your icy touch. 

“Baby, you in here?” Remmick calls. 

You step out and close the door. He catches you in a kiss and grins. 

“Sun’s down. You hungry?” he asks, his hands squeezing your hips. 

“Very,” you reply. 

After breakfast, you head down to the studio to work. It’s been a while since you’ve put out music. It’s been a while since you’ve been out. The tour was wildly successful; you both made bank on merchandise and CD sales. The Christmas show did a lot for Remmick’s image. Suddenly he was less of a mysterious freak and more of your misunderstood rocker boy. You keep your eye on the forums and fanclubs, and the disdain for him dies out more and more every day. It’s harder to get his fans to come around to you, but you’re cautiously optimistic for the future. 

And you have nothing but the future to think about. 

You dropped a surprise single on the radio in January. Yours & Mine, a lovey-dovey melodic tune that harkened back to your old tracks without feeling too immature. A verse with a sweet reference to Jamie and the band as your family had pregnancy rumours circling you like sharks in the water. 

That line of gossip was quickly dispelled by keeping a drink in your hand all night at the Grammys. You and Remmick didn’t win– you never would– but you got to perform a more stripped back, acoustic medley of SIN/SACRAMENT. Remmick made sure you felt like a winner that night, making you cum until you scratched his face, which only made the both of you want each other more. 

You’ve been feral since December. You fuck like animals. You want him deep and raw at all times. You were able to finally push away your hopeless desires for a baby, instead giving all of that bottled-up affection to Jamie. Not expecting anything to come from fucking Remmick has made it more fun. You scratch and bite and you don’t give a fuck about marks left on either one of you. He’s yours and you’re his just as much. If the media knows, it’s even better. You want your names in everyone’s mouths. Everyone should be talking about you and him and nothing else because there’s nothing better.

In those months, Remmick could feel you digging deeper. He felt most vulnerable while tangled up under the covers with you. He could feel your claws in the hivemind scratching for information. 

It’s a dark place up there, sugar, he told you, shutting you out. Every time the door slammed in your metaphysical face, it stung. 

When he does give you little breadcrumbs about what he was before he was this, you follow them diligently.

He lets you remember what you had seen those first hours of your turning. The montage of green and grief of his history in Ireland. When you and the girls would tour in the UK, you would half-watch the news stories on TV and listen to the hushed way the girls would talk about it. You have hundreds of years of context now.

He finally lets you in. Names and dates and locations. You’re finally starting to meet him.

It only took the both of you pretending to get married. Everyone thinks you are. It started as a stunt for the music video last year. The airing on MTV combined with paparazzi photos of you in a white dress sold the idea to your fans first– it was a harder pill to swallow for his fans. You doubled down with a cutesy I do on every night of the tour. You don’t wear rings, but nothing about either of you is very traditional anyway. You don’t want to correct people. You want people to think you belong to each other. You’re one and the same, just the way it feels in the hivemind.

You miss Jamie so much it hurts. His first album is out and he’s been doing shows around the country to drum up interest in a potential tour. He’s so far away that you can hardly feel him through that bond you made when you sunk your fangs in. You can’t imagine being that far from Remmick. It’s almost been a year since you turned him, and he’s taking to it a lot better than you did. 

A tour for Jamie would be easy to fund; you and Remmick have so much money that you don’t even know what to do with it. You fill up Jamie’s pockets, even if he’s far away, and you buy lavish things for Remmick. 

You want him to live in his memories and be proud of them. You want to fill the house up with mementos of his past. You try to build a timeline of his memories with little gifts. Your first present was a vinyl pressed at the recording studio he worked at in the sixties– you bought a second copy for the producer, of course. 

You buy him old guitars and vintage synthesisers. You find weird, expensive instruments he doesn’t even know how to play. You even manage to track down a very old banjo, one that makes his eyes light up in a new way.

You’re on the floor, kicking your feet as you try to write lyrics. You watch him above you. He absently plucks at the banjo as he sits on the edge of the sofa, his legs crossed to prop it up. You love him like this. You’ve let yourself act like him, getting lost in the music like it’s a deep ocean or a thick forest. Not allowing yourself to be scared of the depth, just surrendering to it.

You see his eyes closing, feel that thick, dreamlike fog of a memory filling up the room. You let your eyes fall shut and join him.

The sounds and smells of a smoky pub flood your senses. A pack of musicians share a corner, all beautifully in time. Remmick is snugly tucked in the middle. You’d know his face anywhere, and you’ve seen him in a hundred styles. His hair is longer now and he has a full beard with especially thick sideburns. He wears a brownish vest and funny shoes. 

“‘Twas there I first met with sweet Molly Malone,” he sings.

You’re abruptly taken out of it. You pop up on your elbows. 

“When was that?” you ask him softly. 

“Hm, eighteen hundreds. Banjo was new, I was old by then,” he answers you, plucking out a scale. “You saw that one was five strings. This type though… this four string… that’s newer.”

“Oh yeah? And how new is newer, grandpa?” you tease. 

You knew he was old when you used to call him that before, but knowing his real age, he’s more like a dinosaur. 

He scoffs.

“Ninteen twenties,” he huffs with a roll of his eyes. 

You scan through the mental timeline quickly and realise what that means. 

“So you were here,” you chirp, sitting up on your knees. 

You see the uncomfortable expression on his face– the one he’s been making for months since you’ve started piecing together the timeline of his life. You never want to pry. The memories sting less when he offers them willingly.

You get up and perch next to him on the sofa.

“Play me something,” you say, squeezing his shoulder. 

“Play you what?”

“That song.”

You hesitate.

“Give it to me,” you offer in a whisper.

“Baby…”

“Just the song,” you beg him, “it doesn’t have to be the whole memory.” 

He takes a measured breath and nods for you to move forward. Your nose brushes against his. 

You feel his breath on your lips as he lets you in. You inhale the past like smoke.

You’re there, but it feels like you’re underwater. The music comes through distorted and muffled– garbled like a bad radio wire. You turn to the side glacially. It’s like you’re moving through oil. Remmick is beside you, but not your Remmick. He’s the one from the memory with the vest and the sideburns. He reaches through the barrier and sucks you into his memory, pulling you into his lap and placing the banjo on your thighs. 

The song feels like it bursts out of you. He chuckles from behind you, kissing your shoulder. A song has never been like this before. It feels like you’re pushed together by the music, like it fills any space between the two of you and creates a vacuum, pushing your heart against his. It feels like there’s no end or beginning to the hands holding the banjo, like you’re holding it together. 

All of the sudden the song feels heavier on you. The oil has returned to fill up your lungs while Molly Malone grabs your heart and pulls down.

You gasp for air and drop, seeing the studio around you. Remmick catches the banjo before it can hit the floor– so it was in your hands. He sets it off to the side.

“Shit, y’alright?” he murmurs, his face painted with concern. 

He’s so worried for you. He means it. 

You wrap your arms around his neck and kiss him, crawling into his lap again. 

“More than alright, huh?” he jokes in a low tone that makes you moan.

“Thank you,” you breathe, your lips smearing over the corner of his mouth. “I love your memories,” you profess, holding his face. “I love you, Remmick.”

“I love you too, angel.” 

You wait in the studio nervously, watching the producer listen to the demo you and Remmick made the night before.

“Intimate, but bassy. Like a heartbeat. Sexy,” Remmick explains the sound, leaning over the producer’s shoulder to the soundboard. 

When he started to let you in, you were almost jealous about his intimate past with the band members. You’ve calmed down a lot in the last year. You’re not the same girl who scratched the hell out of the keyboardist after she blasted you with the image of a mullet-wearing Remmick fucking her in the back of a beat-up truck. You’ve come to realise it’s more of a who hasn’t slept with him situation. You’re not a one bite stand like her and the producer. You feel special now. You understand how much you mean to him compared to the others. 

The producer thinks for a second.

“Um, I like it. It’s…” he hesitates.

“Be honest,” you beg him.

“Sweetie, I’m not your publicist,” he starts.

Oh shit. What will Marcia think of this?

“It’s a little… desperate?” he finally says, a slight grimace on his face. 

You take it in. The lyrics are a little over the top. 

“How can we make it sound more fuck you?” you ask him, crossing your arms. 

Remmick grins and the producer follows suit. 

“He really is rubbing off on you,” he snarks, taking the pencil from behind his ear. 

You sit in Marcia’s office, her nails tapping on the jewel case of the CD as she listens to the final product. The CD player clicks off, leaving the two of you in uncomfortable silence. 

You like the song. You’re proud of it and you think it portrays exactly what you need everyone to understand. Remmick is your everything. 

“What do you think I’m going to say?” she finally speaks. 

“It’s tone deaf and rude and glosses over all of the actual issues and after that pregnancy rumour you owe me seven bonuses,” you joke, mimicking her voice. 

She sighs and pinches her nosebridge.

“I’m sorry,” you tell her softly. “I’m sorry. Really, I am. This whole thing just… it didn’t happen the way I wanted it to and I wish he wasn’t so much, but I love him, Marcia. I love him so much I… I don’t even know what to do with myself. And we’re so close, it’s like… we live in each other’s skin. I feel like I’ve known him for a thousand years, I feel like I’ve been him,” the words pour out of you without care. 

Marcia doesn’t understand the hivemind. You hope she never will, especially not because of you. Remmick is blowing smoke out of an open window in the hall, listening to the physical cues of your body and making sure you don’t get too excited. 

“I mean, all that wedding stuff for the album last year, that wasn’t just promotional, I want to marry him,” you gush. It’s sappier than you mean to sound, but you know what you want.

Marcia knows you’re not married, but she’s been crafting a very vague narrative that you probably are. 

“Do you? Really?” she huffs sarcastically.

“I mean it, Marcia. I want to be with him forever, I want people to know that. It’s a mess, but it’s my mess,” you finish.

“Oh, believe me, it’s my mess too,” she scoffs. 

She sucks her teeth.

“But it’s a good song,” she admits. “Write up a statement. We’ll send it next week.”

She eyes you.

“Your birthday is soon.”

“Oh, yeah,” you say. You had forgotten too. 

“Got any plans for that?” she questions, clearly hoping it won’t be another fire to put out.

“Uh… not yet. I’ll let you know. Um… Marcia?”

“Hm?” 

You meet her eyes. 

“I’m gonna wear a ring. On Up Late,” you confess. “Not… because we’re engaged. Yet. I just want to make Johnny look like an idiot.”

She looks surprised. 

“Yet?” she repeats your addition.

“C’mon, Marcia. It was gonna happen eventually, I don’t know why you’re so surprised.”

You see the disappointment in her eyes when she realises you’re serious about this.

“You want this? I mean really, truly want this?” she prods in a harsh tone. 

She leans forward.

“If he’s making you do this-”

“No, Marcia! Jesus. He’s- he’s not making me do anything! I’m my own woman, I-I’m not his little… fucking… minion!”

She shrugs, her eyes glassy as she teeters on the brink of tears. 

“If that’s what you want,” she relents.

“I’ve never wanted something so bad,” you sniffle. 

You promised yourself you wouldn’t tear up in front of her. It’s hard not to under that severely maternal glare of hers.

“Well. Thanks for the warning,” she says dryly.

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t apologise to me, kiddo. I’m not the one sticking with him.”

The new single Talkin’ acts as both a profession of the singer’s love and a denial of any accusations about her boyfriend’s alleged drug habits or “cult-like” activities. 

The industrial rocker Remmick, controversial since he first blew up on the scene, has continued to be in hot water for the better part of the decade. Since 1993, there have been allegations of his band distributing narcotics as a means of recruiting young members. The band has also been very private, not revealing any personal information about members. 

Every CD of Talkin’ includes this statement: 

I hear a lot of talk, but I know that these people just do not know him the way I do. I know they see that cocky attitude and make snap judgements about his character. He is a natural born leader and I know other musicians are jealous of that. They wish they could have the same kind of trust and respect from the band and the roadies that he has. 

I love Remmick more than anyone I ever have before and I am never going to stop. 

So keep talking.

The next week you’re sitting across from Johnny Moon again, rolling the charm on your gold necklace between manicured fingers. He holds up the cover for Talkin’ and whistles.

“Wow! Just wow!” he laughs over the audience roaring.

You grin, feeling your fangs itching to slip down. 

“You look great. How are you?” Johnny asks. 

“I’m better than better,” you purr, pushing up your sunglasses. 

“Yeah? You looked a little queasy last time,” he jokes.

“Can you blame me for being a little nervous? You’re too cute.” 

He chuckles and you see a blush on his cheeks. 

“Tell us about this song,” he starts.

“You all saw what I had to say, right?” you ask, addressing the obscured people around you. 

They clap and cheer. 

“We love you!”

“Shut up, I love you too,” you respond, blowing a kiss. 

“Whoa, whoa. What’s that?” Johnny asks, reaching for your hand.

“Oh, this?” you laugh, showing the sparkling engagement ring. 

“You snuck up on me,” he chuckles, his teeth clenched.

He’s actually mad. It’s pretty cute. That was your intention. You wanted to stir the pot and get people confused. You might be the first celebrity to pull off two stunt marriages to the same man. 

“Till death do we part,” you tease in a singsong voice.

You see him nod his head away to the PA holding the cue cards and run his hand through his hair to calm down.

“I thought you were married already,” he counters with a tense smile.

“No, so there are these things called music videos, and they usually do a little story in them…” you make fun of him, the audience laughing. 

“So you’re really not backing down?” Johnny asks. “Even with everything that’s been said about him? All the rumours and-”

“Why should I? It’s complete lies or people who don’t like the way he talks. Newsflash! He’s a rockstar! He’s not a goddamn politician!” you shout to the audience, throwing your arms up.

“You love him?” he asks like he doesn’t believe you.

“I love him so much. I’m stupid about him. And I’m so happy because… we’re going to be together for the rest of our lives. For forever,” you announce, tapping your nail on his desk.

You can hear talking upstairs as you autograph a few vinyls and CDs for the next event you and Remmick are having. Your stomach turns slightly remembering your last time “meeting fans.” The nausea just turns into heartache when you think about Jamie’s sweet face.  

You set down your pen and sigh, heading up the stairs. 

“Don’t let her see that,” you hear Remmick say from around the corner. 

“Her better not be me,” you joke, grinning at him.

He takes your hand and tugs you to him, kissing your temple. You see the bassist holding a magazine and your smile drops. 

“A new review?” you ask, trying to steel yourself. 

“Ain’t nothin’,” Remmick waves it away. “Let’s talk birthday.”

“No, I don’t want to. Give me that,” you snap, taking the magazine. 

Your eyes find the review. You read the section quickly but carefully, taking in the negative energy and letting it curl around you. 

Inauthentic. 

Embarrassing. 

Irresponsible. 

You don’t realise your claws are growing until they puncture the paper, piercing through the image of the single’s cover above the words. You tear the magazine apart, leaving it in shreds on the floor. 

“Inauthentic?” you hiss, tears pricking at your eyes. “How do they know?!” you shout, throwing your hands up. 

“Baby-”

“Th-they don’t know what we are,” you snarl, storming away from him. “They don’t know what we can do! Everybody thinks I’m fucking brainwashed, they don’t know I’m better than them!”

You’re not sure if you mean these things or if you’re just angry. It feels good to be so strong. It feels great to not get tired, to not sweat or get short of breath. You know you’re not a porcelain doll. You know you have your own thoughts, even if Remmick has shared enough of his to fill up half your mind.

Your mindless hands find the things in your home you know you cherish. A crystal candlestick shatters when it hits the hardwood. A picture frame flies off of the shelf. The Kids’ Choice Award for 2*Sweet flies toward Remmick, who catches it before it can hit the bassist. 

“Fuck these people! Fuck them! They don’t know anything about us! They’re nothing!”

Your claws dig into a pillow, feathers puffing out and covering the den. Your hand goes right through your new flat screen TV. 

You stop in the corner. 

Your old guitar. The one you used to sing hymns on the road. Before 2*Sweet or pop music, before you even knew who Remmick was. When your father would turn off the radio if he couldn’t find the praise station. When your mother would pluck you off the swingset and chide you for dirtying up your Mary Janes. 

The past smacks you out of your rage and Remmick sees you deflate. He’s wanted to ask about the guitar before, but it had such heavy energy that he thought it wasn’t smart.

You turn with tears in your eyes.

“Oh my God,” you whisper, seeing the path of destruction.  

You run to the picture frame first, picking it up. You brush away the glass and delicately lift the photo. You and the girls before your first show of the tour. 

The frame is cracked and the glass is everywhere. You spent a day after the tour decorating the four corners of the frame with little beads or charms in each of your signature colours. Now your sisters are scattered around the room. 

“C-can you help- help me find them?” you beg Remmick pathetically.

He’s never seen you like this. You’re like a little girl, on your knees and picking up beads with no care for all the broken glass around you. 

The bassist leaves quietly. 

Remmick kneels down and helps you pick up each one. You sweep up the glass and he holds the dustpan. You vacuum the feathers and he empties the bag. He carries the television to the dumpster and puts the stupid orange blimp back in its place. 

He cleans up the shredded magazine.

He embraces you when the tears come back. He leads you to your room and lets you hide in his chest. 

“I don’t want a birthday party,” you admit to him in a whisper. “I just wanna be with you.” 

“We can do that.” 

The night has been all about you. You woke up to breakfast in bed– one of the blood bags Remmick keeps for special occasions or emergencies, whichever comes first. You snuggled for an hour watching TV until Remmick decided to give you your first present, three orgasms from his fingers and tongue. You scratched a whole new language into his back before he left you drooling. You had a shower together, even if half of it was spent with him fucking you against the tiles. 

Your first real present was a new piano. You covered his face in kisses for it. You spent some time testing it out and playing hits from your collective discographies, along with other favourites.

The next was a new car, which you both took out on an evening drive around Los Angeles. 

Now you’re just sitting in the kitchen swapping industry stories, laughing and moving cake around your plates with forks. It doesn’t taste like anything, but at least it looked pretty. 

You glance at the clock. 10:37. Goddamn it. You promised Jamie you’d call. You stand up and cross to the phone, dialing the number of the hotel and tapping your fuzzy slipper on the kitchen floor as it rings. You give his room number and your name.

“Right away, miss. Let me connect the call.”

It makes another clicking noise and you hear laughter and clinking glass. Music plays in the background. 

Jamie answers, slurring your name out. You hear the door shut and the music muffles.

“Hey! Oh, I thought y’like, forgot,” he chirps. You can hear his smile. “Happy Birthday!” 

“Thanks, Jamie. How is everything?” you ask.

“S’awesome! Thank you so much, this hotel’s way too fancy.”

“Aw, well, you’re welcome, J,” you laugh at his drunk honesty.

“‘N I made the guys promise t’clean up, don’worry. Seattle is the shit, I fuckin’ love these grunge boys. Fuck, they’re so hot.”

You hear what you can assume is him clapping a hand over his own mouth.

“Oh, fuck. Oh no, I’m sorry,” he giggles. “You don’need to know that.”

“You’re being careful, right? Just because you’re… like this doesn’t mean-”

“Super careful. Super, yeah.”

“And, y’know, I want you to be careful with the drinking and the drugs and everything-”

“Mom, seriously, m’being so careful-” 

Remmick watches your face change. He worries for a moment. Did something happen? Is Jamie hurt? 

“O-okay,” you manage to say. “I trust you.”

“Thanks.”

You hear talking behind him.

“Fifteen, Jimmy!”

“Jamie,” he corrects them. “Thanks. Hey, I gotta go for my show.”

“Okay,” you almost sniffle. “Break a leg.” 

“I miss you,” he adds softly. 

“I miss you too,” you breathe out, blinking back tears. 

“Bye.” 

“Bye, Jamie.” 

You hang up the phone and press your lips together, trying not to cry.

Mom. He called you Mom. He was intoxicated and he probably didn’t mean it, but deep down he thinks of you that way. Your baby.

Your baby who is drunk somewhere in Seattle surrounded by grungy punk rockers.

Remmick’s hand smoothes over your bare shoulder, kissing the long healed scar of your bite

“I bet he’s havin’ fun,” he chuckles.

You nod tensely.

“Baby,” he coos. “What’s the matter?” 

“I just miss him so much,” you whimper, hugging him tightly.

He laughs at you– not mean, just lovingly– and kisses your cheek.

“He’ll be back soon. And he’ll be fine.” 

“I know,” you respond in a small voice.

He pats your back. You listen to him take in a breath like he’s going to say something. He pulls back slightly.

“Do you wanna maybe… see another one?” he offers cautiously. He can’t bring himself to say memory, so he just taps his temple. 

“Really?” you ask, sniffling. 

He holds your face and smiles at you. His red eyes glint in the flickery kitchen light– you need to get it fixed, but you’ve been too busy. 

“We can go back, calm down a little bit?” he starts to explain the offer. 

“How far back?”

“Hundred-something. Not too bad,” he murmurs, his thumb rubbing over your cheek. 

“Not too bad. You’re so old,” you tease. 

“C’mon, birthday girl.” 

You move to your room, holding each other, snuggled in bed.

Suddenly you’re sitting on the floor in a corner. Your knees press against a wooden cot. This is a look you haven’t seen. His face is shaved, unlike your scruffy Remmick. He pulls off his brimmed cap and runs his hand over the short cropped cut. He shrugs off his thick coat and you spy his suspenders– you love him in suspenders. He pulls them off and unbuttons his shirt. 

Quiet, dark, musky. It smells like bodies and sweat, but it’s not a club. The air is full of the thick smoke of something you can’t place. 

You can’t speak, but you don’t have to with him. The knowledge wafts into your head with the smoke. Opium den, 1915. His face is dirty. His eyes are tired and sad, but so much more human. This is decades before you were even born. He was still ancient, but something about him was younger. He didn’t have the confidence he has now. 

You’re too busy looking around the room to catch him heating the pipe and inhaling deeply– but you feel it with him. You thought you were just observing this memory, but he reaches out and grabs your wrist, tugging you to him. It feels like a warm blanket wraps around you both. The tension in your shoulders morphs into liquid as you sink into his chest. 

You stay like that for a while, hardly feeling the wood beneath you. You breathe in time with one another with no regard for the smoke. You touch the thick fabric of his shirt and rub it between your fingers. 

It changes in your hand, turning back into Remmick’s worn Woodstock ‘94 shirt. The comforting feeling fades fast, replaced by want. It’s not the hyped-up horny that you feel from coke, but a deep, throbbing need for him. You crawl between his legs and pull down his soft flannel pyjama pants. You kiss his thigh and wrap your hand around his cock, stroking him lightly until he’s hard in your hand. 

“Baby,” he breathes, his head falling softly back onto the pillow. 

You kiss the tip and take him in your mouth, sucking on the head as you squeeze and jerk the base. His hand grabs your hair– lightly, he seems like he’s still a little dreamy. It was his memory after all. He doesn’t pull, just uses the grip to keep himself grounded while you work your hand over the length. 

“Get up here, get up here,” he begs. “C’mon, princess. Need’a feel you so bad,” he encourages you. 

You walk on your knees, pushing down your shorts and kicking them away.

“That’s it, yeah, baby, siddown,” he groans, feeling your wet cunt hug his cock as you sink down. He twitches inside of you and winces.

Your ass hits his thighs and you both moan. Sex is different now. The hivemind makes it better. Everything is felt by the both of you. If you hone in enough, you can even switch places and he gets to ride you. 

You just want to feel him now, planting your hands on his chest and lifting your hips. Your nails dig into his skin and his claws slice into your hips. Your lifting and rocking quickly turns into bouncing, letting him hit that spot that always gets you teary. His hips buck and your nails drag down, making ten little cuts on him. You gasp and cry out when his claws grow and pierce further into your skin, anchoring him to you.

“Good girl,” he purrs, moving with you, rolling up into you. “You’re my fuckin’ star, my angel… never been anythin’ like you, never will.”

Your blood runs faster than his, so he can take his hand away and lick the blood from his fingers. A gush of your wetness coats him, making your bouncing that much more fluid. 

“Fuck, Rem,” you whine.

He sits up, moving his hand from your hip to your shoulder– the spot where he bit you all those months ago– and his claws latch again. You’re so close.

Like you live in his skin. 

His claws retract and he rubs your clit in devastating circles. Your drool rolls down the column of your throat and he licks it up. He spits on his hand and returns to your clit, then ducks his head down to suck on your nipple. 

“My girl. My star,” he moans. “B-baby, I’m gonna cum-”

“Wait, wait, Remmick… wait… let me feel it, let me in-”

You’re in a rough straw bed covered in a wool blanket, the warmth of a fire filling the room. You breathe in woody smoke and breathe out sex. His hair is long– you reach to grab it and pull. 

“I lived here with my wife,” he whispers. 

You push him back down– half angry and half desperate. Why would he show you this? Why would he bring you here, now, with everything you’ve been doing in the past weeks? Your devotion rewarded by getting to fuck in the bed of some dead Irish girl?

“I’m your wife!” you sob into his mouth. “I’m your wife, you’re mine, I love you!” you wail, slicing him across the chest.

“Fuck! Yes!” 

You both scream as you cum, your vision and the memory whiting out. You shake and cry and he holds you through it. 

When you gasp for air and open your eyes, it’s just your bedroom. 

“Happy Birthday,” he laughs weakly. 

“Marry me,” you sob breathlessly. “Marry me, marry me, please.” You don’t care how pathetic it sounds. “Please, I just wanna be yours, I want everyone to know. Please…”

“Of course I will. Of course, princess. Anythin’ you want.” 

You wake up the next afternoon and stretch your arms. You’re still so full of blood and booze from last night. If you were still human you’d make yourself some kind of hangover cure, but today you just tidy up the mess you left behind. You see a message on your answering machine and press it. You pick up the cake to move it to the fridge. 

A hushed voice starts. 

“Okay… ready? One, two-”

“Happy Birthday!” a child’s voice shouts. 

Laughter rings out and you freeze.

“Happy Birffay Auntie Lovey!” another child says. 

“Alright, go find Daddy. Hi, my love,” Bossy– Noelle coos. “Just wanted to wish you a happy birthday. And my littlest- it’s his, too! Can you believe that? I guess you know it, I sent you that card. You’ve been ‘round my side of the pond and not said hello, so I expect your bum in a seat at my dinner table next time. I’ve been missing you, love. Give us a ring. Happy Birthday.”

“You down there?” Remmick calls as the answering machine clicks. 

The cake falls from your hands and hits the floor. 

The forest lay over him in pieces—branches crossing the moon, wet moss beneath his shoulder, your cloak pulled over his bare body with more care than abandonment had any right to leave behind.

He could feel the place where your teeth had opened him, though when he touched it, the skin seemed already closed, tender and wrong under his fingers, as if the wound had been persuaded to lie.

The night sounded too near with water moving somewhere beyond the hollow, not loudly, only with a patience that made each small shift of it seem deliberate. The ferns stirred as a bird unsettled itself in sleep.

His own breath came slowly, and even that felt like something borrowed from a man who had not yet understood he was gone.

You were gone.

He knew that before his hand searched the moss beside him, before his fingers found the crushed flowers and the cold impression where your body had been. He knew by the shape of the air.

The forest had held its breath around you and now breathed again, relieved or grieving, he could not tell.

In the first confusion of waking, Remmick thought you might have stepped away only to gather water, or to watch the path, or to do some other small merciful thing that would explain the absence without making it final.

His mind reached for kindness with a stubbornness that would have humiliated him if he had been less frightened.

You would come back, he thought, because you had covered him. You would come back because no creature capable of placing a cloak over his shoulders could be wholly cruel.

Then the memory shifted beneath him, and the cloak became your hand, and your hand became the first night, and the first night became the deer.

She had moved through the grass like a thought he was not meant to follow, pale at the edges where moonlight caught her flank.

His eyes had tracked the careful lift of her legs, the turn of her narrow head, the soft pulse of her throat.

A song had been leaving him, quiet and low, though he remembered it now as something older than his own voice, something the earth had used him to say.

Perhaps there had been no song. Perhaps there had only been the shape of one in his mouth, because whenever he tried to remember clearly, the notes slipped away and left behind the image of you beneath the hawthorn.

You had stood there with white petals in your hair, though he could not remember whether the tree had been blooming or whether his mind had placed the flowers there afterward to make you seem less like hunger.

Your cloak was dark and your face was calm.

The deer fled, and Remmick, who had always trusted animals more than signs from men, should have understood her leaving as a warning.

You had said something to him then.

He remembered the movement of your mouth better than the words.

His mind supplied sweetness where fear had once been, softening the edges until the moment seemed almost gentle.

You had not frightened him, he told himself. You had only looked at him as though the lonely part of him had finally stepped into view. Yet beneath that version, another one moved uneasily.

In that one, your eyes had gone first to his throat. In that one, the deer had not merely fled, but fled from you. In that one, Remmick had already known enough to be afraid and had mistaken the fear for wonder because wonder was easier to forgive.

He turned onto his back and looked through the branches, and the memory broke open further.

You beside the stream, where rain had swollen the water brown. You at the field’s edge, half-hidden in the low growth beyond the wall. You on the chapel road while others kept their heads lowered and their voices careful, because too many unfamiliar men had begun listening for old things they could condemn.

Remmick could not place the days in order.

They had blurred even before tonight, each meeting folded into the next by his wanting.

He remembered your hands before he remembered your face.

Your fingers closing around his wrist when he cut himself. Your thumb passing over his pulse as though reading a secret there. Your mouth lowering to his split knuckle with such tenderness that he had nearly thanked you before shame silenced him.

His mind kept choosing tenderness first, and that was how it made you bearable

You had tasted him that day.

He knew that.

He knew the brief, cool drag of your tongue over his skin had not been an accident of healing, no matter how softly you had held his hand.

The hunger in your face had been plain enough that even his foolishness should have named it. But when he remembered it now, the hunger came wrapped in sorrow.

He could not stop giving you reasons.

Perhaps you had been starving. Perhaps you had meant to warn him. Perhaps you had touched his blood and seen all the ends waiting for him, the rope implied in lowered voices, the thin mercy of leaving before anyone could make an example of him.

His mind offered one excuse after another, laying them at your feet like gifts, though some bitter new part of him knew excuses were only another way of kneeling.

The town had worried. He remembered with sudden, aching clarity.

His father speaking less and working harder, as if labor could nail the world shut around his son. Old women pressing charms into his palm and calling them nothing. Men lowering their voices when strangers passed, because it was no longer only land being measured and renamed, but memory itself.

Remmick’s gift had been one more old thing people tried to shelter by hiding it, and he had resented them for that hiding until the fear in their faces taught him what love could look like when cornered.

Had you known that? Of course you had, he thought, and then hated himself for how quickly admiration returned.

You had known without being told—you were ancient in that way, or perhaps he only needed you to be ancient so your cruelty would feel less ordinary.

You had looked at the fear gathering around him and called it by its true name. You had not flinched from the ugly shape of it.

When you promised him the woods, the dark, the place beyond men’s reach, he had heard salvation in your voice, though now, lying alone under your cloak, he wondered whether salvation and appetite had always sounded alike when spoken by your mouth.

The forest had been darker than he remembered—or lighter, his mind could not decide.

It returned the path to him in fragments, your hand holding his, the wet pull of bracken against his legs, the ring of pale mushrooms he did not step around because you guided him through it as if old rules bent for you.

He remembered thinking that you were good then. Not safe—never safe—but good in some secret, terrible fashion, as if goodness could exist outside mercy.

He had felt chosen, and even now, changed and abandoned, some part of him still warmed around the humiliation of that feeling.

You had brought him to the hollow, though in memory it seemed the hollow had risen to meet you.

The moss was already crushed, or perhaps that was only because he woke on it later.

White petals lay scattered where no tree grew.

The moon touched your face and made you look grieved before grief had any cause to appear.

He wanted to believe you had been sorry from the beginning. He wanted it badly enough that the memory obeyed him.

You kissed him, and whatever steadiness he had gathered from fear loosened so completely that the memory never returned to him in one honest shape again.

Now, when he tried to remember, your mouth had been tender. And when he thought deeper, it had been greedy from the beginning, your teeth catching at his lip, your tongue slipping past his shame while your hands worked at the ties of his clothes with the patience of someone unwrapping an offering.

He could not decide which version was truer.

Maybe both were, and perhaps that was what made you so impossible to hate cleanly.

You had touched him with care while wanting to ruin him, and Remmick’s mind, still foolishly devoted even after the wound, kept trying to call the care mercy.

The moss had been cold beneath his knees when you drew him down, though he remembered your body more vividly than the ground.

Your dress had opened by your hands or his, he was not certain, because memory blurred wherever desire had been too strong to bear.

He remembered skin shining under the moon, the fall of your hair, the cool press of your thighs parting around him, and the way your eyes stayed on his face as if every small tremor in him pleased you.

He had touched you clumsily at first, almost reverently, his hands moving over your breasts, your waist, the softness between your thighs after you guided him there.

When his fingers found you wet, he had made a sound against your mouth, startled by the proof of your wanting, and you had kissed him harder for it, letting him feel the slick heat on his own fingertips as if teaching him that even a creature like you could open for him.

He remembered your hand closing around his cock with awful clarity. The firm wrap of your fingers, the slow stroke, the drag of your thumb over the leaking tip until his hips jerked forward before he could stop them.

Shame had burned through him, but you seemed to savor that too—the pretty disgrace of him learning pleasure so openly.

You murmured praise against his mouth, telling him how sweetly he gave himself away, how hard he had gotten for you, how badly he wanted what he was still too innocent to ask for without trembling.

The words should have frightened him, maybe, but fear had already begun to fold itself into lust.

He thrust into your hand with his forehead pressed near yours, breathing roughly, trying not to spill too soon while your palm moved slick and steady over him.

When you brought him between your thighs, his memory turned feverish.

He remembered the swollen head of his cock dragging through your wetness, remembered how you guided him back and forth until both of you were slick with it, his breath breaking each time he nudged against the entrance of your body.

You watched him watch himself there, watched his face change as the last soft barrier between wanting and taking began to thin. Then you angled your hips and drew him in.

The first push into you had nearly undone him.

Your cunt took him slowly, warm around every inch, and Remmick shook so hard he had to brace himself above you.

He remembered whispering your name, though later he wondered whether he had only thought it, whether the forest had supplied the sound because it pitied him.

You held his face while he sank deeper, your thumbs gentle at his cheeks while your body clenched around him with a hunger that made the gentleness obscene.

He had never known anything could feel so complete and so dangerous at once.

The pleasure rose through him with a force that bordered on pain, and when he was fully inside you, buried to the root, he had gone still with his mouth open against yours, breathing as if he had crossed into a country from which no man returned unchanged.

You let him learn the rhythm by suffering through his restraint until restraint failed.

His first thrusts were careful, almost apologetic, but you wrapped your legs around his hips and pulled him deeper, taking that softness from him with a low, pleased sound that seemed to enter the marrow of him.

After that, he moved harder.

The wet slap of your bodies joined the hush of the hollow, and each thrust dragged him through the slick heat of you until his thoughts lost their edges.

He remembered your nails down his back, your mouth at his jaw, your voice low and velvet-dark as you told him he filled you well, that he was beautiful like this, that he belonged nowhere so truly as he belonged inside you.

Mine, you had said, or maybe he only wished you had said it.

No, he remembered the word too clearly for it to be mercy invented afterward.

You had called him yours, and he had answered with his body before he could hide how badly he wanted the claim.

You rolled him beneath you, or he pulled you there; the memory shifted whenever he reached for certainty.

What remained was the sight of you above him, straddling his hips, your hands on his chest while you sank down onto him with a slow, cruel fullness that made his hands clutch at your thighs.

His head tipped back into the moss as his voice broke.

You rode him as though the night itself had given you the right, lifting and taking him deep again, grinding down until he could feel you everywhere.

He had tried to watch your face, but his eyes kept dropping to where your bodies joined, to the glistening mess of him disappearing inside you, to the way your body accepted him again and again as if this were a vow written in flesh rather than a farewell dressed in tenderness.

The memory became filthier the longer he lived with it, because longing had a way of returning with its hands dirty.

He remembered the sound of you growing wetter around him, remembered the way the length of him dragged through you with every rough upward thrust, remembered your breath catching when he struck deeper and your body tightened as if unwilling to release him.

His hands moved over you without grace, squeezing your hips, your breasts, your waist, learning greed from the creature who had brought him there.

You bent to kiss him, and he opened for it, moaning into your mouth while you moved on him with increasing hunger.

When your teeth grazed his throat, his whole body clenched.

He had known enough to be afraid. He had wanted enough to bare his neck anyway.

That was the part he could never forgive himself for, though later, delirious with your blood and his own, he would forgive you for worse.

You didn't bite him then; you only let your teeth rest at the pulse while riding him harder, your mouth wet against his skin, your hips working him until pleasure turned frantic.

Remmick bucked up into you with no dignity left, his fingers digging into your flesh, his breath coming in broken, pleading sounds that embarrassed him even in memory.

He came because you would not let him look away from what you had made of him. He came with your name in his mouth, spilling deep inside you while his body shook beneath yours, while you kept moving just long enough to wring the last helpless tremors from him.

The pleasure left him open and humiliated and grateful, and you gathered him against you afterward as if you had not been the one to strip him so completely of himself.

Afterward, he had lain against you with his body still weak, his skin damp with mist and sweat, his face turned into the hollow of your throat.

Your hand moved through his hair, and the tenderness of it hurt more than roughness would have.

He had been used, though not carelessly. Claimed, though not kept. Loved, perhaps, in some crooked way that could not survive daylight.

His mind kept trying to make the memory clean by calling it a wedding, but if it had been a wedding, then it had been one made without witness except the trees, without blessing except blood, without promise except the one you meant to break.

“I cannot keep you near me,” you said at last.

He lifted his head from you slowly, still warm from your body, still softened by the closeness he had mistaken for safety.

Understanding reached him in pieces, and each piece seemed to take something from his face as it arrived. “Then why did you bring me here?” he asked, his voice roughened by kissing and grief. “Why take me like that, if you meant to leave me?”

You did not answer quickly enough for the silence to be kind.

He remembered staring at you and wanting to hate the sorrow in your eyes, because sorrow made your selfishness harder to bear.

You looked as though leaving him wounded you too, and some desperate part of him clung to that because it meant he had mattered, even if he had not mattered enough.

You kissed his forehead, and the tenderness of it made him close his eyes against his will.

That kiss had felt like blessing and betrayal in the same breath, and Remmick hated the way his body quieted beneath it, hated that even then he wanted to be soothed by the creature who had led him to grief.

He tried to draw away from you, though memory could not decide how far he got.

Maybe he sat apart in the moss with his tunic gathered uselessly against him. Maybe he only turned his face. Maybe resistance had been so brief that his mind lengthened it afterward out of pity.

What remained certain was your hand at his shoulder and his weakness in answering it.

You drew him back, and he went, bitter already, ashamed already, needing the lie of your arms more than the truth of his pride.

Your mouth returned to his throat.

This time, the tenderness did not hide what was coming.

His body knew before his thoughts did, going tense in your arms, but you held him with one hand at the back of his head and the other spread between his shoulders.

When your teeth sank in, pain flashed through him so violently that his hands seized in your cloak.

Your mouth sealed to the wound.

His blood entered you in hot pulls, and the horror of it mingled with an intimacy so deep it confused him.

He felt himself weakening against you, felt his body become heavy and obedient while you drank what made him mortal.

He tried to speak, but the words broke apart.

Your name. A plea. A sound that might have been forgiveness arriving too early because he could not bear the thought of dying angry with you.

Then you opened your own skin above your breast and brought his mouth to the wound.

He resisted at first, he thinks.

His head turned weakly aside, some final human instinct recoiling from the dark blood welling against your skin, but your fingers threaded through his hair and your voice lowered into something almost maternal, almost holy, almost too cruel to survive remembering.

You told him softly that it would save him. You told him he would not hang. You told him the dark would hurt only a little longer.

Whether those were the exact words, Remmick never knew, because by then death had loosened the world around him and his mind had begun turning you into whatever it needed you to be.

He drank.

Your blood filled his mouth, bitter and sweet, thick with cold flowers, iron, and old earth after rain.

It slid down his throat and opened something in him that should have remained closed.

He clutched at you as the change began, his body shuddering so hard that you had to hold him upright against your breast.

In the delirium, with your blood black on his tongue and his own life leaving its old shape behind, he kept whispering that he forgave you.

The words came again and again, broken against your skin, half-sobbed, half-prayed, as if saying them could make what you had done merciful. “I forgive you,” he murmured into the wound, his mouth smeared dark, his voice failing around the sweetness and the horror of it. “I forgive you. I accept it.”

Perhaps he meant the bite. Perhaps he meant your leaving, though you had not yet left. Perhaps he meant the whole of you, selfish and sorrowful, cruel and tender, the creature who had made a grave of his first love and still held him as if he were precious.

He repeated it until the words no longer sounded like language, until they became another song dragged out of him by blood and grief. “I accept it,” he whispered, trembling in your arms while the forest blurred around you. “I forgive you. I accept it.”

And because his mind was no honest witness where you were concerned, he remembered you weeping.

Maybe you had. Maybe the wetness on his face had been dew from the trees or his own tears or blood cooling on his skin.

Yet whenever he returned to that moment, he saw your face bent over him with grief shining in your eyes, and he hated himself for needing that grief to be real.

It softened nothing. It changed nothing.

Now the forest watched him differently.

Remmick pulled your cloak tighter over his body.

He hated you in a thin, newborn way, not yet strong enough to stand alone.

Beneath it, love moved with the old confidence of something that had lived in him longer than sense.

He wanted you back. He wanted you punished. He wanted to find you and ask whether you had looked back after leaving, whether you had paused among the trees, whether your hands had shaken, whether the place where he had rested against you had felt colder when he was no longer there.

He wanted proof that your selfishness had cost you something.

The thought shamed him.

The shame comforted him because it was human.

A deer moved somewhere beyond the hollow, soft-footed through fern and mist.

Remmick turned his head toward the sound.

The song rose in him by instinct, altered now, lower than before, threaded with a hunger that was not only music.

For a moment, he let it gather at the back of his throat, and memory placed the first deer before him again, her moonlit eye wise with fear, her body already preparing to flee.

He closed his mouth before the sound could call her nearer.

Under your cloak, with your blood remaking him and your absence hardening beside him, Remmick lay still in the dark and tried to decide whether you had saved him, damned him, or loved him in the only way a monster like you knew how.

The longer he searched the memory, the more it changed for you, softening your mouth, brightening your sorrow, making a mercy of every selfish thing you had done.

That was how he understood the worst of it.

You had not only altered his body.

You had left yourself inside his mind, and even bitterness had to pass through love before it could reach you.

divider from @/ferretmilkshakezzz

You’ve been home from uni for a little over three weeks, long enough for the house to fall into a familiar rhythm again, though nothing about Remmick’s presence in it feels familiar in any harmless way. 

Your mother moves around the kitchen with the radio playing low, humming while she rinses vegetables and talks about grilling later, and Remmick keeps himself out on the covered porch where the sun cannot quite get to him.

There’s always been something wrong with the way bright light bothers him, something about the glare that makes him squint and retreat into shade with his sunglasses low on his nose and a beer sweating in his hand. 

From where he sits, he has a perfect view of the yard, the pool, the lounge chair, and you.

His beer runs empty sometime after your mother disappears back inside to check on the food, and you notice it before he says a word.

The can hangs loose between his fingers, condensation dripping down to the porch boards, his gaze still fixed somewhere near the pool even though you know he is watching you from the corner of his eye.

You push yourself up from the lounge chair and cross the patio barefoot, letting the heat of the stone bite at your soles as you pass him without asking what he wants.

When you come back out, you don’t hand it to him right away.

You hook your nail beneath the tab and crack it open yourself, the sharp hiss cutting through the air. Foam gathers at the lip, and before it can spill over, you lift the can to your mouth and take a small sip.

It’s bitter and cold on your tongue, not really what you want, but Remmick’s eyes drop to your mouth so quickly that it is worth it.

You swallow, wipe a bead of beer from your lower lip with your thumb, and only then hold it out to him.

“Thought you might need another,” you say, sweet as anything.

Remmick takes the can from you slowly. “You always this helpful?”

You smile and turn away before he can see too much of it. “Only when I feel like it.”

You had chosen the red bikini because you knew exactly what it did to him. 

Therems no innocence in it, not with how little the top covers and how the bottoms keep riding up whenever you move, the thin fabric slipping between your cheeks.

The first time you stepped outside, towel tucked under one arm and sunglasses pushed into your hair, Remmick’s conversation with your mother had gone quiet for half a second too long. 

Your mother had not noticed, too busy fussing with a pitcher of sweet tea through the open sliding door, but you had.

You caught the pause, the slight lift of his chin, the slow drag of his eyes down your body before he forced them away and took a long pull from his beer.

And that was all the encouragement you needed. 

You spread your towel across the lounge chair with unnecessary care, bending at the waist instead of crouching, letting the bikini top gape just enough that you felt the warm brush of air against your tits. You stretched out beneath the sun with one knee bent, then rolled onto your stomach after a few minutes, propping yourself on your elbows while the bottoms rode higher. 

Every motion became performance because his attention made you bold.

You fixed your towel; you adjusted the tie at your hip; you reached behind yourself to tug at the fabric, only to let it snap back into place a little worse than before. 

Each time, Remmick stayed silent…

By the time you rise to go run back inside for a drink, your skin is glossy with sun and sweat, and you know without looking that he’s watching the swing of your hips. 

You pass close enough to his chair that your thigh nearly brushes his knee, and the scent of him reaches you through the summer air… beer, smoke, soap.

His fingers drift toward your hip as you pass, slow enough that you could let him catch you, but you slip away at the last second and glance back over your shoulder with a smile that’s too sweet to be believed.

“Need something?” you ask, voice light.

Remmick’s jaw tightens, and his gaze flicks once toward the kitchen before settling back on you. “You know what you’re doing.”

You only smile wider and slide through the door, leaving him with the view of your ass as the red fabric disappears inside.

When you come back a minute later, you have a cherry popsicle in your hand. 

You settle on the porch step beside his chair as though you have simply chosen the nearest bit of shade, knees drawn loosely together. 

The popsicle’s already beginning to melt in the heat, red syrup gathering along the edge of your fingers, and you bring it to your mouth with all the patience in the world. 

You lick up the side first, slow and flat-tongued, tasting sugar and artificial cherry while your eyes drift toward the yard as if Remmick is not sitting so close that you can feel the tension coming off him. Then you wrap your lips around the tip and suck, letting your mouth hollow around it, letting the wet little sound linger between you.

His hand flexes around the beer can.

You do it again, slower.

“Careful,” he mutters, so low that your mother wouldn’t hear him even if she stepped out onto the porch.

You turn your head slightly, popsicle still between your lips, and blink at him with open, false innocence. “Careful with what?”

Remmick’s eyes drop to your mouth, sunglasses gone now, pushed up into his hair, and without them there’s nowhere for his hunger to hide. 

He looks tired from fighting it, annoyed with you for knowing that, and unbearably handsome with the porch shade cutting sharp along his cheekbones. He lowers the beer can, his thumb rubbing slowly through the condensation as his stare drags over your lips, your chin, the thin red line of syrup that’s escaped and started down your skin.

“You’re gonna get yourself in trouble,” he says.

You swallow around nothing, then take the popsicle from your mouth and lick the drip before it can reach your chin. “Maybe I’m bored.”

His laugh doest sound amused. “That what this is? You bored?”

“Maybe.” You lean your shoulder more firmly against him, close enough to feel the heat of him through his shorts. “Maybe you’re just easy.”

The look he gives you makes your pulse kick, though he does nothing, and somehow that’s worse than if he grabbed you outright.

His eyes move over your face with a slow, punishing focus, as if he is deciding which part of your attitude he wants to break first.

Then the corner of his mouth lifts just slightly.

“You been acting like a spoiled thing since breakfast,” he says, voice quiet enough to stay private. “Bending over in that suit, looking back every time you know I’m watching. Now you’re sittin’ here with that in your mouth, makin’ a mess on purpose.”

Your thighs press together, but you keep your expression sweet. “It’s hot outside.”

“It’s about to be hotter inside if you keep it up.”

You glance down and see the thick shape of him straining against his shorts, half-hidden beneath the loose fall of fabric, though not nearly well enough.

The sight makes your stomach dip. 

Yesterday, you let him corner you in the laundry room while your mother was out getting groceries, let his hands skim your waist and dip under the hem of your shirt before you slipped away laughing at the last second. 

Two nights before that, you knelt for him on the rug beside your bed, taking his cock into your mouth with your fingers twisted in his shirt while he kept one hand braced against the mattress, hips thrusting up into the warmth, and tried not to make too much noise. 

Later, alone under your covers, you touched yourself until your wrist ached, replaying the sound of him losing control, the rough praise he tried to swallow, the way he looked at you afterward.

You drag the popsicle over your tongue again, slower this time, and Remmick’s hand moves.

His fingers find the back of your neck beneath your hair, resting there with enough pressure to make a warning out of the touch.

“You got something real nasty coming the second I get you inside,” he murmurs.

Heat pulses between your legs, slick and immediate. You tip your head back just enough to look at him through your lashes. “What, Daddy’s mad?”

It’s not the first time you’ve called him that, but it still does something to him every time, especially here, with your mother moving somewhere behind the kitchen wall and his beer sweating onto the porch boards and you sitting at his knee in a bikini that barely covers anything. 

His hand slides lower, thumb brushing the side of your throat in a touch that feels almost tender until his mouth moves closer to your ear.

“You keep saying it like that,” he says, “and I’m gonna make you say it with tears in your eyes.”

Your breath catches, and the sound gives you away.

He reaches for your ass, palm sliding over the curve of it, but you slap his hand away with a sharp little laugh and rise before he can catch you. “Pervert.”

For a second, he looks almost still enough to be calm. Then his tongue presses against the inside of his cheek, his gaze dropping to where your bikini bottoms have ridden up again. “Yeah,” he says softly, “keep laughing.”

You should stop there, but stopping would mean admitting he’s gotten to you, and you have spent too many days enjoying the game to fold just because he finally sounds dangerous. 

So you make him wait. 

You stretch out beneath the sun again, roll onto your stomach, let your legs part just enough to make him shift in his chair, then rise to dip your feet in the pool and glance back at him each time you feel his eyes burn across your skin. You tease from a distance because distance makes you brave. You bend over to look for sunscreen in your bag. You let syrup from the last of the popsicle stain your lips and smile when he stares. 

The afternoon stretches long and gold, the heat softening at the edges only when the sun begins to sink behind the trees, but Remmick’s patience does not soften with it. If anything, he grows quieter as the day goes on, and the quiet has your pulse fluttering with a nervousness you refuse to show.

Inside, the house smells like chlorine, warm skin, cut tomatoes, and something salty your mother has started on the stove. She’s put out a tray of hamburgers and salads for later, moving between the counter and the fridge while she talks about a coworker who called in sick and a neighbor who borrowed a serving bowl and never returned it. 

You sit at the kitchen table across from Remmick, damp hair sticking slightly to the back of your neck, one of his old shirts thrown over your bikini because your mother told you not to drip on the floor. The thin cotton clings to the wet fabric beneath, and every time Remmick looks at you, you remember exactly how little separates his gaze from your skin.

Your mother pours herself a glass of wine and leans against the counter, still talking. “I’m gonna shower before I eat. Don’t let the buns sit out too long, alright? And don’t pick at everything before I get back.”

You nod quickly, too quickly, and Remmick leans back in his chair with his beer to his lips, watching you over the rim of it.

Your mother pauses in the doorway. “You two want anything before I go?” She glances to you first before turning to Remmick. “Baby?”

“No, I’m alright. Go take your shower, we’ll be here when you’re done,” Remmick answers, polite as anything, and the smoothness of it makes your toes curl under the table.

The second her footsteps fade down the hall, the whole kitchen seems to hold its breath.

Water pipes groan somewhere behind the walls. A door shuts. 

You look at Remmick, and he looks back with all the patience gone from his face.

The chair scrapes the tile from how fast you stand.

You only make it halfway to the guest bathroom before his hand catches the back of the shirt and pulls you in against him. 

A breathless laugh escapes you, more panic than humor, but he crowds you forward with his body, his mouth close to your ear while his hand slips around your waist and presses low on your stomach.

“Runnin’ now?” he murmurs. “You weren’t shy outside.”

“Remmick,” you whisper, glancing toward the hallway.

“That ain’t what you called me on the porch.”

He pushes you into the bathroom and kicks the door shut behind him. 

Before you can turn fully around, Remmick has you backed against the sink, one hand at your jaw and the other bunching the damp shirt up over your ribs.

“You had a lot to say when you were out there showing off,” he says, thumb pressing lightly at the corner of your mouth. “Where’d all that mouth go?”

You try to answer, but his grip makes the words come out soft and useless. “I was just teasing.”

“Just teasin’,” he repeats, dragging the phrase out as if it offends him. 

His eyes lower to your chest as he hooks two fingers under the bikini top and tugs until the cups shift, baring one breast, then the other.

The air hits your nipples and makes them tighten into stiff peaks, and Remmick’s expression changes with open satisfaction. “That what you call it when you spend all afternoon trying to make me hard while your mama’s ten feet away?”

You swallow, cheeks burning. “You could’ve looked somewhere else.”

His mouth curves enough to make you wet. “I did. Then you bent over again.”

The laugh that leaves you is thin, unsteady, and it breaks when he leans in to bite gently at the underside of your jaw.

His stubble scrapes your skin. His teeth press without quite hurting, and his hand slides down to your hip, fingers spreading over the damp red fabric that has tormented him all afternoon. 

When he touches you there, he feels how soaked you already are, the bikini bottoms clinging slick and hot to your swollen cunt. His fingers still for a second, then press harder, rubbing the wet fabric right against your dripping slit until your knees nearly dip.

“Look at that,” he murmurs against your neck. “All this attitude, and you’re already messy for me.”

You try to turn your face away, embarrassed by how wet you are, but he keeps your jaw in his hand and forces you to look at him.

“I’m sorry.” Your breath trembles, though your hips move into his hand.

Remmick gives a soft, breathless laugh and lifts his head to look at you. “Too late for sorry now, girl.”

He reaches behind you and turns the sink on just enough for the faucet to run, giving the room another layer of noise. Then he turns you around with a firm hand at your waist, bending you over the counter until your palms land on either side of the basin and your tits press against the cool porcelain.

The mirror catches your face, flushed and wide-eyed, lips parted around shallow breaths. Remmick stands behind you, broad and sun-warmed, hair slightly damp at his temples, his expression sharpened by everything you’ve done to him. 

He looks at your reflection, not your body first, but your face, watching embarrassment spread across it as he drags the shirt up your back and shoves the bikini bottoms down just far enough to expose you. They catch around your thighs, tight and indecent, while he nudges your feet wider with his.

“There she is,” he says, voice dropping. “There’s my spoiled girl that wants me to fuck the attitude outta her,” he breathes.

You grip the sink. “Remmick…”

“Huh?” His hand comes down on your ass hard enough to leave a sting and sharp enough that your breath breaks. “You worried now?”

“Remmick—”

Another smack lands lower this time, followed by his palm smoothing over the heat he has left behind. “Try again.”

The correction makes your eyes flutter.

You look at him in the mirror, pride and need tangling so tightly in your chest that you can barely breathe through either one. “Daddy,” you whisper.

His expression changes, hunger pulling tight across his face. “Better.”

He unzips his shorts behind you, the sound small under the running faucet and distant shower, but it still makes your whole body tense in anticipation. 

When he frees himself, heavy and hard in his hand, he doesn’t push in right away.

He makes you watch his face in the mirror while he rubs the thick, flushed head of his cock through your wet folds, dragging it slowly from your swollen clit up to your entrance, gathering slick until both of you are glistening. 

The first touch makes you whimper, the second makes you push back on instinct, needy enough to forget yourself, and he clicks his tongue.

“Now you wanna be eager,” he mutters. “Out there, you kept moving away every time I touched you.”

“You were on the porch.”

“And you were in my face,” he says, pressing against you just enough to make your body clench around nothing. “Lickin’ that damn thing, looking at me like you wanted me to drag you inside by your hair.”

Your face burns hotter because some part of you has wanted exactly that. 

Remmick must see the truth of it in your reflection, because his mouth brushes your shoulder in a kiss that feels almost affectionate before his teeth graze the same spot.

“You get so embarrassed when I say it plain,” he murmurs.

“Please,” you breathe, the word slipping out before you can dress it up as anything else.

He stills. “Please what?”

You press your forehead closer to the mirror, eyes half-lidded, voice trembling under the weight of his stare. “Please fuck me.”

His reflection in the mirrors shows you that it pleases him; in the way his mouth curves and his eyes darken. 

He drags the head of his cock through your slick again, then higher, pressing right against your tight little asshole and circling until your whole body tenses, the flutter of panicked want moving through you before you can hide it. 

Remmick laughs low, gives one more firm nudge, then pulls back.

“Maybe next time,” he promises, voice dripping with filthy intent.

Your stomach flips at the words, cunt throbbing harder, and he sees that—sees everything when he has you like this, bent over and bare for him, all your teasing turned into wet need and shaky knees. 

He lines up again, this time at your soaked entrance, and pushes in slow, stretching your pussy lips wide around the blunt head, feeding you inch after thick inch until your walls grip every veiny ridge and you’re white-knuckling the sink edge.

“There you go,” he mutters, watching your face in the mirror. “That’s what you spent all day asking for.”

The stretch is thick and immediate, your body slick enough to take him but still overwhelmed by the size of him, every inch forcing you open while your fingers curl against the porcelain and a low, broken moan slips from your throat.

Remmick watches your face the entire time, jaw slackening slightly as your mouth falls open and your eyes water.

“Mm,” he breathes, hips pressing forward another inch. “That’s what all that teasing was for, huh? You fuckin’ tease. Wanted me so bad you couldn’t act right.”

You try to answer, but he sinks deeper, and the words dissolve into a broken sound.

He feeds himself into you with patience, letting you feel everything, the heat of him, the drag, the fullness that makes your thighs shake. When he finally bottoms out, balls flush against your clit, he stays there and bends over you, one forearm braced beside your hand on the counter.

“You feel that?” he whispers, mouth at your ear. “All the way in, baby. That’s what you were asking for.”

Your eyes slip shut, tears gathering from the stretch and the pressure. “Yes.”

“Yes what?”

“Yes, Daddy.”

His groan is soft, almost unwilling, and then he pulls back and snaps his hips forward hard enough to jolt you against the sink.

You choke on a gasp, but his hand comes up quickly, palm covering your mouth while his other arm wraps around your waist to hold you in place.

“Quiet,” he says against your temple. “Unless you want your mama asking why you’re moaning with her boyfriend in here.”

The threat makes your cunt clench around him. 

His eyes meet yours in the mirror, dark with triumph. He starts fucking you then, not slow anymore, not gentle enough to let you pretend this is only another stolen touch. His hips drive into you in deep, rushed strokes, each one rocking you into the counter while the faucet runs and the shower hisses upstairs. 

The room fills with the wet, filthy smack of his hips against your ass, the loud, sloppy squelch of your cunt taking every thick inch of his cock, his breathing rough at your ear and your muffled cries trapped beneath his hand.

He knows exactly how to angle himself, how to hit the place inside you that makes your legs threaten to give out, how to keep you pinned open.

“You spent all day acting like a brat. Now look at you,” he mutters, voice fraying as he thrusts into you, bending over you so his chest presses hot to your back, lips brushing your tear-streaked cheeks in mocking little kisses. “Gonna cry for me, baby?”

You whimper against his palm, tears spilling over now, hot tracks down your cheeks that embarrass you as much as they thrill you. 

Remmick’s gaze flicks to them in the mirror, and something pleased and possessive moves across his face. He uncovers your mouth only to grip your jaw instead, forcing your chin up so you have to look at yourself.

“Look at you,” he says, softer now, mean threaded through praise. “We both know you’re just gonna do it all over again tomorrow, aren’t you? So you gotta learn the lesson now.”

“I can’t,” you whisper, though your hips push back into him in helpless little movements.

“You can.” His mouth brushes your cheek. “You’re gonna take it. You made me wait all afternoon, didn’t you? You can take a little more.”

The words loosen your pride, melt the last of your performance, and leave you trembling beneath him with your cheek near the mirror and your body taking every thrust he gives. 

When his hand slips between your thighs and finds your clit, your whole spine arches. He rubs you in tight, firm circles, still driving into you from behind, and the combination makes your breath scatter.

“Please,” you gasp, too loud.

His hand returns to your mouth at once, and his hips never slow. “You wanna get caught that bad?”

You shake your head quickly, but your body betrays you again, clenching hard around him while your eyes roll half-shut.

“No?” he murmurs. “Then keep that mouth quiet for me.”

You nod against his palm, crying harder now from the pressure building too fast, too deep, too much after an entire afternoon of teasing yourself with the thought of him.

“Please, I’m gonna—” Your words break off on a mewl.

“I know,” he says, stubble scraping against your cheek as he nods. “I can feel it. Poor baby’s not so mouthy now, is she?”

He rubs your clit faster, his cock dragging heavy through your cunt, and when your orgasm hits, it takes you with a helpless, silent sob. 

Your body locks around him, thighs shaking, nails scraping uselessly against the sink while Remmick holds you up and fucks you through it, the wet sounds of your pulsing pussy growing even louder around his thrusting cock.

“There you go,” he whispers.

You’re still pulsing around him when the shower shuts off, and both of you freeze for half a second. 

Then Remmick’s hand tightens on your hip, and he buries a groan against your shoulder, his restraint snapping under the risk. He fucks you harder, shorter strokes now, chasing his release while you tremble oversensitive around him. 

You bite down on your own wrist to stay quiet, tears still wet on your cheeks, and he watches the motion in the mirror as if it might finish him all on its own.

“Fuck,” he breathes, low and ragged. “That’s it. Hold still. Let me have it.”

His hips drive deep once, twice, then press flush as he comes inside you with a thick, shuddering groan that he barely manages to swallow. 

You feel every pulse of him, hot and deep, your body milking him while footsteps sound faintly upstairs.

He stays there for one dangerous second too long, forehead dropping to your shoulder, breath shaking against your skin. Then he pulls out slowly, and the sudden emptiness makes you wince. 

Warmth spills down your inner thigh almost at once, and Remmick watches it with a dazed, hungry look before tugging your bikini bottoms back into place, trapping the mess against you.

Your reflection looks wrecked—lips swollen, eyes wet, chest still heaving.

Remmick turns off the faucet, then catches your chin and kisses you, stealing the little sound you make before it can become anything louder. When he steps back, he tucks himself back into his briefs, zipping himself up.

From the upstairs hallway, your mother calls, “You two still in the kitchen?”

Remmick’s eyes stay on you. “Yeah,” he answers, voice almost normal. “She was looking for a towel.”

Your mouth falls open slightly at how easy the lie comes, and he gives you a warning look that makes your thighs squeeze together.

“Found one,” you call, voice thin but steady enough to pass.

Your mother says something about the burgers getting cold, her footsteps moving away, and only then does Remmick turn the sink on and wet his thumb, wiping under your eyes just enough to make you presentable without erasing all the evidence. “Fix your face, baby,” he murmurs, mouth nearly touching yours. “And don’t walk too fast.”

The rest of the evening stretches around the secret in a haze.

You sit at the table with your mother and Remmick, eating too little, nodding when spoken to, hyper aware of the damp heat between your thighs and the places where his hands have gripped you. 

Remmick plays polite beautifully; he passes your mother the mustard, asks about her morning shift, laughs at one of her stories with that easy, low charm that makes her smile without knowing he has just had you bent over the bathroom sink while her shower ran. 

Every so often, his knee brushes yours under the table, or his eyes find you over the rim of his glass, and your body answers with a pulse so strong you have to shift in your chair.

Then your mother’s called in not long after dinner.

The hospital has some emergency, the sort that makes her sigh while tying her shoes and mutter about being too old to keep running out at night. 

Remmick walks her to the door, kisses her cheek, tells her to drive safe, and stands on the porch until her car disappears down the road. 

You watch from the hallway, clean from a shower that hasn’t managed to rinse him out of your head. 

When he comes back inside, the house seems larger around the two of you, every room gone quiet except for the ceiling fan and the faint buzz of insects against the screens.

He doesn’t come to you, because maybe he thinks one stolen, rushed, filthy mistake is enough for the day, or maybe he likes making you wait as punishment. 

He goes to your mother’s room, changes into boxers, and leaves the door partly open like a dare. 

You stay in your room for almost an hour, pretending to scroll on your phone while the memory of him keeps sliding through you: his hand over your mouth, his voice at your ear, the way he said baby—the term of endearment your mother called him—when you were shaking around him. Your thighs still ache. Your skin feels too sensitive under your nightshirt. 

You try to ignore it until your own restlessness turns unbearable, until your fingers slip beneath the hem and find yourself wet again.

That’s what finally makes you get up.

The hallway is dark except for the warm bar of light from the bathroom nightlight. 

Remmick’s asleep when you reach the bedroom, or close enough to it, sprawled on his back with one arm tucked behind his head and the sheet low over his hips. Moonlight and porch light cut soft lines across his chest, showing the rise and fall of his breathing, the dark hair trailing beneath the waistband of his boxers, the relaxed heaviness of him in sleep. 

He looks less mean like this, younger almost, though there is nothing harmless in the memory of his hands.

You crawl onto the mattress carefully, and it dips under your weight. 

Remmick stirs but doesn’t wake fully until your mouth touches the line of his jaw. His lashes lift, eyes unfocused for a moment, then sharpen as you kiss along his stubble, soft and open-mouthed, tasting soap and salt on his skin.

“What’re you doing?” he rasps, voice rough with sleep.

You kiss the corner of his mouth. “Couldn’t sleep.”

His hand finds your waist beneath the nightshirt. “That so?”

You nod, though your hand has already slid down his stomach, fingers tracing the waistband of his boxers. 

He lets out a quiet breath, watching through half-lidded eyes as you move lower. 

The sheet shifts around you when you slip beneath it, the space under the covers warm and close, filled with the scent of him.

You tug his boxers down just enough to free him, already half-hard, heavy against his lower stomach. He twitches when your fingers wrap around the thick base, and the low, pleased sound he makes goes straight to your cunt.

“Still needy?” he murmurs from above the sheet.

You press a kiss to the swollen head of his cock instead of answering, lips brushing the sensitive skin before your tongue follows, licking slow and filthy over the slit to taste the first salt-warm bead of him.

He hardens fast in your grip, thickening until the veiny shaft fills your palm completely, the flushed tip already leaking more for you.

A soft groan leaves him, his fingers sliding behind your neck under the covers.

“Girl,” he breathes. “... been trouble all day.”

You smile against him, then take him between your lips. Slowly at first, just the head, letting your tongue swirl the way it did around the popsicle on the porch, letting him feel the echo of what started all this. 

Remmick’s hips shift, his hand holding onto the nape of your neck, and he lets you make a mess of him.

You suck him deeper, your lips stretching wide around his girth, spit gathering quick and slick as you work him with eager, wet pulls of your mouth.

The slurping sounds fill the dark room under the sheet—loud, messy—and it makes your face burn as if anyone else could hear.

You love him like this—breathing harder because of your tongue, his thighs tensing when you take him too deep and swallow around him.

Your eyes water from the stretch, but you keep going, moaning softly around his cock when his fingers tighten on you. The vibration makes him groan again, louder this time, and he quickly presses his mouth shut as if remembering the empty house still has neighbors close enough for sound to carry through thin summer walls.

“Baby,” he warns, though his voice has no real warning left in it. “You keep doing that, I’m not gonna last.”

You pull back just enough to kiss down the slick length of him, then lick back up with slow devotion, taking the head into your mouth again and sucking until his hips jerk. 

His hand guides you then, setting a rhythm that makes your jaw ache and your thighs press together beneath the covers. His fingers tighten on your nape, holding you right where he wants you, and then he starts fucking up into your mouth in short, greedy thrusts. 

You gag around the thick length when he pushes too deep, throat tightening hard around the swollen tip, the sudden squeeze pulling a ragged groan from his chest.

He pants above you, breath coming faster, hips rolling again so the head nudges against the back of your throat and your eyes water instantly.

Remmick watches the shape of your head bobbing beneath the sheet like it’s the only thing in the world worth staying awake for, his groans turning into low, broken pants that he tries to swallow down.

“That’s my girl,” he whispers, voice rough and full of sleep-warmed hunger. “Knew you were done being a little brat.”

You hum around him, and his breath catches hard. He fucks into your mouth a little faster, hand firm on your nape, using you just enough to make your throat spasm and squeeze around him again and again.

The wet, choking sounds growing louder as your spit coats every thick inch until his cock is glistening and your chin is soaked. His thighs tense under your palms, muscles jumping each time your throat tightens and milks the head.

He comes with his grip tight on your neck, hips lifting once, twice, burying himself deep as he spills hot and thick across your tongue and straight down your throat.

You swallow him eagerly, throat working around every heavy pulse while his body goes tense beneath you, then softens all at once, a final shaky groan rattling out of him.

Even after he’s done, you keep your mouth on him, gentle now, licking him clean with slow strokes of your tongue that make his hand tremble against the back of your head.

You suckle softly at the sensitive tip until he twitches one last time, then finally pull off with a wet pop, lips shiny and swollen.

When you finally crawl back up beside him, he catches you by the jaw and kisses you. 

He tastes himself on your tongue and groans softly into your mouth, pulling you close until your bare legs tangle with his under the sheet.

Outside, the night presses hot against the windows, cicadas still screaming from the trees as the fan turns lazy circles overhead.

Remmick’s thumb moves over your cheek in a slow, absent stroke, and when you tuck yourself against his side, he lets you, his arm heavy around your waist.

“You’re gonna start up again tomorrow, aren’t you?” he murmurs.

You smile against his chest, too pleased with yourself to lie well. “Maybe.”

His hand slides lower, resting over your hip. “Then I guess I’ll have to teach you again.” 

Then he leans in closer to your ear. You assume he’s going to say what he’d plan to do, how’d he plan to get get you alone again. Instead, his voice drops to that low, gravel-rough drawl and his lips part on words that make your eyes widen.

“Dirty slut, fuckin’ your mama’s boyfriend and then crawlin’ in here ‘cause you couldn’t settle without a taste of daddy’s cock. You should be ashamed of yourself.”

Shame rushes hot through your chest at the words, burning up your neck and flooding your face until you feel stripped bare in a whole new way, but anger twists right alongside it—sharp and sudden, at him for saying it out loud, at yourself for how badly your body still aches for him even now. 

You shift like you might pull away, ready to slide out of the bed and disappear back down the hall. But Remmick’s fingers close tight around your wrist, stopping you cold. 

He tugs you right back down against his chest, voice low. “C’mere,” he murmurs, urging your mouth to his.

You resist at first, turning your face just enough that his lips catch the corner of yours instead, a small, stubborn sound of protest slipping out even as heat coils tighter in your belly. 

He doesn’t let you go, thumb stroking slow over your pulse until you finally give in, mouth softening, parting under the insistent press of his.

The second your lips meet—soft and hesitant at first, then melting open—his free hand lowers, sliding down your side and slipping just beneath the waistband of your shorts, brushing warm skin and the damp edge of your panties with a stroke that makes your breath hitch against his mouth.

And from the way those fingers linger, tracing lazy circles right where you’re already wet, his lesson for tomorrow might not even wait that long.