Let's Make It

He turns his head to the side and down where his bicep has gone half numb under you. “H-hi,” he says.

“Hi yourself,” you say.

He can make out only the blur of your face tipped up at him. The sound of you is morning-rough, gummy at the edges, and his whole body goes at it with something brazenly pleased before his brain gets a vote.

“Um,” you add. “So—”

Dunk palms at you gently because his eyes are useless and he has to solve the room by touch. He is sprawled on his back, you nuzzled to his side, your feet somewhere around his mid-calf and one hand spread small over his ribs. The shirt has ridden up on you in the night. He feels bare thigh against his hip and has to look at the ceiling he cannot see.

“How’re ye feelin’?” he asks.

“Good,” you say. Your fingers twitch. “You?”

“Grand, but,” Duncan says, “blind.”

“Oh, right.” You twist away from him, and he keeps his arm loose enough to let you go. When you come back, he tightens. “Sorry, I took them off you," you say. "Here—”

The glasses get pushed onto his nose and the world snaps itself back together in lines and colours the names of he's no longer certain. “There ye are,” he says.

Seeing you makes him worse. More nervous, because now there are sharp edges. Your mouth looks bitten by sleep, eyes crusted a little from last night’s tears. Your hair has gone all mussed and flattened on one side, and the T-shirt collar hangs too wide on you. His T-shirt. The sight should be ordinary, because shirts are ordinary things, except Dunk has the distinct sense of having been granted back a morning that had been stolen from him once before. The first one. The one where he woke up with a body full of you and no you in the room to prove it.

Now you are here, frowning faintly with worry gathering between your brows, and he feels so lucky it borders on daft.

“You sure you’re good?” he asks.

You nod, then seem to check the answer against yourself. Your hand shifts under the cover, thighs move by a cautious inch, and your face does a small grimace.

Dunk sinks a notch. “Sore?”

“A little.”

He winces. “Ah. Shite. Was I—” Stops, then starts again, worse. “Was I too much?”

Your eyes flick up.

“I mean—” His ears begin to burn. “Too rough. Or too eager. Or—”

“Dunk.”

“—too heavy with my hands. Or just… too much of me.”

You stare at him, then soften in a way that makes him want to hide. “No. You weren’t too rough.”

He studies your face, searching for the lie out of habit. “You’d tell me?”

“Yes.”

“Properly?”

“Yes.” A pause. “I’m sore in a nice way.”

That phrase grabs him low and stays there. His hips seem to hear it first and some lazy pull starts under the ache. He shifts one shoulder against the pillow and hopes the blanket is being merciful. “In a nice way,” Dunk repeats, because he is an idiot.

You look embarrassed now, which helps nobody. “You know what I mean.”

Duncan does. He knows too well. His own body has woken all used and tender, cock sore from work, holding back and coming hard enough that some part of him may still be missing. There is a dragged-open feeling in him, though nothing of his has been entered except by wanting. He understands being glad for the ache. He understands wanting proof that something happened and stayed happened. “Aye,” he says quietly. “I know.”

Silence arrives then, thin and awkward, and lies between you with its eyes open.

“Was I too much?” you ask.

Dunk’s head turns so sharply the pillow drags at his ear. “What?”

“Last night.” You look at his collarbone rather than his face. “I was a bit… I don’t know. Mad.”

He nearly laughs from pure disbelief, except your face is too serious for that. “No.”

“You can say.”

“I am sayin’.” He reaches, then stops before the touch lands at your cheek, as if the rules have changed in the night and nobody has handed him the new sheet. “You were—” His throat tightens around several answers, all of them too large or too plain. Lovely. Wild. Good to me. Mine, some awful part supplies, and he shuts that door hard. “You were grand,” he manages. “More than.”

Your mouth pulls into something small. “Grand.”

“I’m not very articulate in the mornin’.”

You nod thoughtfully. “That explains it.”

A breath of laughter leaves him, and you answer with your own, but the question remains where both of you can see it: What now. It sits on the bed with the clothes on the floor and the cold mugs from last night and the smell of sleep and sex and clementines.

You pull the cover higher over your chest. “We should probably talk.”

“Aye,” Dunk says, though every muscle in him files a complaint.

“Because I don’t want this to get… unclear.”

He gives a small nod. His hand lies open on the mattress beside you. “Right.”

“And I don’t want you thinking you have to.”

That brings his eyes back to yours. “Have to what?”

“This.” You gesture vaguely under the duvet, toward your bodies and the rest of the wreckage. “Me. Us. Whatever this is. Because I’m, you know. Pregnant.”

Duncan takes a second with that. He hears the sense in it, but hates the sound of it. “I don’t feel made to,” he says.

“You did a bit before.”

“With the ring?”

You wince. He hates that too. “Aye,” he says before you can soften it for him. “I know. I made a bollocks of that.”

“I didn’t say—”

“You laughed.”

“Dunk.”

“No, I know why.” He looks down at the blanket. There is a loose thread near his thumb and he worries it instead of your patience. “I think I do, anyway. I was tryin’ to put the house up before we’d even checked if the ground takes a nail.”

You go quiet.

“That sounded better in my head,” he adds.

“No,” you say. “I get it.”

He risks looking at you again. “I want to help. Want to be here. That part’s true.”

“I know.”

“And the other part—” His mouth goes dry. “I liked last night. I want it. I want… you. I’m sayin’ that plain enough, aye?”

Your face changes, then closes slightly, as if plainness has still found a way to hurt. “Aye,” you say. “That’s plain.”

“But I don’t want ye thinkin’ I’m only here for that either.”

“I don’t.”

“And I’d rather it be me than some stranger,” he says, then blushes so hard it nearly makes him dizzy. “Jesus. Sorry. That came out—”

“No.” Your voice has gone quieter. “No, I understand.”

“It’s safer,” he says, grabbing for the practical rope before he drowns in the other thing. “I mean, with the baby and all. If it helps you. If you need it. Or want it. I can—” His face burns worse. “I can be that. For you.”

Your eyes stay on him. “You can be that.”

“If you want.”

"I do," you tell him. “So um… if we’re being practical.” Your jaw works once. “Is kissing allowed?”

Dunk blinks. Looks at your mouth and immediately has no right to answer anything requiring thought. “I’d like it to be.”

“Touching?”

“Aye.” His voice lowers. “If you want me touchin’.”

“I do.”

He swallows.

“What kind?” you ask, then regret shows on you in a hot flash. “Sorry. That sounded like a form.”

“It’s all right.” His hand flexes against the sheet. “The kind where ye tell me if I’ve gone wrong.”

“That’s broad.”

“I’m a broad fella.”

You laugh, and the sound loosens something in him. Then your face shifts again. “Protection?”

“Aye,” he says, too fast. “I was thinkin’—maybe we should. Or could. If ye wanted. For mess.”

Your brows pull in. He sees the mistake arrive before he knows which mistake it is.

“For mess?” you repeat.

“Aye. Just—”

“If you’re planning to keep seeing other people,” you say carefully, already moving yourself away by an inch without seeming to notice, “then yes, obviously. That would be safe. I mean, I’m not saying you can’t. We talked about it, didn’t we? So if you—”

“No.” Dunk nearly sits up. “No, no, that’s not what I meant.” You only gape at him. “Jesus, lass, that’s not what I meant.” His hand reaches this time and lands on your wrist. “I meant the actual mess. Sheets. You. Cleanin’ up after. I thought maybe it’d be easier for you.”

“Oh.”

“I told ye I’m not seein’ anyone.”

“I know.”

“I’m not.”

“Okay.”

“And I don’t want to.”

Your eyes lower to his hand around your wrist. “Okay.”

“Are you?”

“No.” Your answer comes quickly enough to calm some ugly thing in him. Then, quieter: “I’m obviously not seeing anyone either.”

“Good,” he says, then hears himself. “I mean—”

“It is good,” you say.

There is another silence. Different this time. Warmer and more dangerous.

“For what it’s worth,” you add, staring somewhere near his shoulder, “I don’t mind the mess.”

Dunk’s body takes the sentence disgracefully. He feels himself stir under the blanket with enough interest to make his soul sigh and leave him to it. You notice. Of course you notice. Your mouth parts by a fraction.

He shuts his eyes. “Sorry.”

“Don’t be.”

“I’m tryin’ to have a serious conversation.”

“You can be hard during it. Multitasking.”

He laughs, boyish and powerless. You smile properly then, and for one small stretch of morning the thing between you becomes almost simple. Almost.

Because you are still looking at him with that carefulness. Because he is still holding back half the sentence in his mouth. Because both of you are making a shape around the same missing word and pretending the shape itself will do.

“So,” you say. “We keep it… between us?”

“Aye.”

“When I need it.”

“When you want it,” he corrects, then looks startled by his own nerve.

Your face softens. “When I want it,” you say.

“And if you don’t, ye say.”

“Yes.”

“And if I do something wrong—”

“I’ll say.”

“And if I get too—”

“Dunk,” you say, then put your hand on his chest. “You’re allowed to want things too.”

He lies very still under that, because the sentence has teeth. After a moment, he covers your hand with his. “Right,” he says, though it comes out clipped.

You nod, as if that has settled anything. Then you look down at your own body under his shirt, at your knees under the cover, at his hand on yours. “So this is very mature of us.”

“Aye,” he says. “Terribly.”

“Awful.”

“Near bureaucratic.”

It gets you. You press your face into his arm to hide the laugh, and Duncan lets himself turn into it, nose brushing your hair. Biscuits. Sleep. Skin. A trace of him, too, caught in cotton and warmth. His chest goes very full.

“Tea?” he asks after a while, because he has to put the feeling somewhere.

“Tea,” you agree. Then, smaller, before he can move: “And maybe stay here for another minute.”

Dunk closes his eyes. “Aye,” he says. “One minute.”

One minute becomes two, then God knows how many, because Dunk shifts, huffs softly through his nose, and fishes your hand out from under the duvet. He starts cautiously. Thumb over your knuckles. A rub at the side of one nail. The rough pad of his finger traces the crease where yours bends, nervous enough to make the whole thing feel less like idling and more like inquiry. How much of this is he allowed, when it is neither useful nor filthy. How long until one of you names it and ruins the little shelter it has made.

Then he opens his own hand beside yours and rests you against it.

The comparison is so unfair you nearly laugh. Your fingertips only reach the middle knuckles of his, and his palm sits beneath yours with room left over, warm and scored with small lines that look deeper for belonging to someone who does practical things badly and often.

“You’ve such small hands, lass,” he says.

“No I don’t.” Your voice wobbles at the edges, which is horrible of it. “You’ve giant paws.”

He smiles, but only barely, as if too much face might startle the permission away. His thumb slips into the hollow of your palm and tickles there once, then again, slower. You curl a little round it. He watches that happen with a dazed, soft sort of attention that makes you feel discovered in the worst place.

You roll closer. His arm tightens under you, then stills. For a second he goes careful all over. “How d’ye get anything done with such tiny hands, hm?” he murmurs.

Instead of answering, your other hand creeps from under the duvet and lands on his thigh. The muscle under it jumps. “I think you know how much I can get done with such tiny hands,” you say.

Dunk hiccups. Then, to his obvious horror, giggles. He clears his throat so hard it becomes a cough. “You’re a wee menace.”

“Mhm.” You close his hand around yours, then let him have it. “Go make that tea.”

It all works. Sort of. His feet touch the floor, and Duncan realises he's got exactly one T-shirt in here that's currently occupied, and worse, that he's naked and half-hard.

He contemplates options but one where he asks you to hand that shirt over doesn't even make it to the waiting list. He decides that if you could climb into a bath in front of him he can show some courage too.

So. Dunk mans up, or tries to. His feet touch the floor and he pushes himself upright to stand. He keeps his back to you and crosses to where his boxers have been abandoned on the floor. Crouching for them is a mistake in several directions, but he gets them hooked in his fingers, steps in and drags them up minding to sort his dick in there so that it doesn't look like it's screaming I'm needy first thing in the morning.

When he turns back, you have your face aimed very carefully at the window. Your mouth has gone into a put-upon, thoughtful pout, as if the curtains have presented you with some riveting theory. Dunk looks at you for half a second, then smiles. “Aye,” he says. “Very respectful.”

Your eyes flick to him and away again. “I’m looking at the light.”

“Course ye are.”

A grin. “What?”

“Mm.” He pushes the glasses up his nose with one finger, and lets himself enjoy the fact that you have to hide your face under the blanket. “I’ll be right back.”

You only hum to that. Wait for his footsteps to hush once he reaches the kitchen and allow yourself a little squeal into the pillow.

The girlishness he manages to drag out of you by existing near a kettle is ignominious. You are not sure he knows he spent half the night with his face pressed into the bend of your neck, humming and purring sweet little unconscious things like stay and smell nice whenever you shifted too far from the furnace of his chest. Then morning comes and he stands there abashed over a perfectly ordinary tent under the covers, as though your own body would not have betrayed you just as plainly if God had granted women the same crude signage.

All of it lays another brick in the awful construction of Duncan’s sexiness, which is strong and, frankly, a little lethal because he has no earthly notion of it. He is shy until pining gets the better of him. Needy enough that the shyness cannot survive long. Once something is given, he handles it with care. Listens. Anticipates. Looks for the place where your body has begun to ask once your mouth starts failing. It should make him less dangerous, that kindness. Somehow it makes him worse.

When he got up, you had taken to ogling his gorgeous round arse with such immediate appetite you forgot, for half a second, that both of you are here through necessity, accident, and one long chain of poor judgement. The rules are useful. Emotionally fraudulent, maybe, but useful all the same. They let you believe you are protecting the two of you from the version of intimacy that grows thorns later and cuts as resentment. They let you take what mirrors the thing you want while keeping a cloth over the contaminated parts.

Still, Dunk is right. This is better than strangers. If it stays inside this out-of-time pocket pregnancy has made for you, perhaps it is survivable. Perhaps it is even sensible. You remain close. You have somebody to lean on. Dunk misses less, you explain to yourself, staring at the pale scratch of sunlight on the floorboards. The two of you can practise easing into the strange family-shaped arrangement that will be waiting once your body finishes one labour and the rest of your life begins another.

You sit up in the bed and look towards the window. A husk hangs from the sill on a translucent thread, gutted clean by whatever abandoned it. It's split down the back, papery and crumbling, and the thing that has rearranged itself in it has cut its way out and flown off without your eyes on it.

Duncan comes back with two steaming cups and a mean reminder of how broad his chest is. He sits at the foot of the bed and turns the cup in his hand so that you can take it by the ear. "I've put toasts on, too," he says.

You nod with your mouth hidden into the rim. "I'll give you your shirt back in a minute," you say, seeing how he curls into himself. It's a large pity, large enough to rival him, for you'd love to just keep him around like this. "I have uh… spare towels and toothbrushes in the bathroom. If you want to, I mean—"

"I thought," Dunk starts. "It's Saturday. I thought we could still sort out the nursery. If you want."

"Really?" you say. "That'd be great. Yeah, I would love that. The room's ready, we just need to put things in it."

"Grand." His cup finds yours and they clink.

You smile into your tea. Get up. At the wardrobe you open one door and disappear half behind it, bare legs visible below the wood. “We could probably do the same thing at yours,” you say from in there. “Sometime later. When you feel like it. A nursery, I mean, or a corner?”

Dunk nods before he remembers you cannot see him. The thought lands strangely. It reminds him painfully that the arrangement will be divided into two households. That, inevitably, you will come to his flat and set your feet on the floor and, to Duncan, symbolically, it means things getting crossed off. Your voice reaches him. “Dunk?”

He blinks. “A-aye. Yeah. We ought to do that.”

You come out in cotton shorts and a T-shirt still large on you, though much smaller than his, and kneel beside him on the mattress. “Here,” you say, passing him back his one. Then, after a beat, softer: “You can stay over here as much as you want when the baby is born, you know that, right? I just thought it’d be good for you to have things at your place too.”

Dunk takes the shirt from you. “I know,” he says, though his throat has gone a bit narrow with it. He hands you his cup and ducks into the cotton to get sucker-punched by his private version of tangerine dream. The whole thing is warm from you. Smells of sleep and your skin and the sweet rot of whatever lotion has survived the night. It settles over his shoulders as if it has learned him from inside your body and came back altered. He has to sit still for a second with his head only half through the neck-hole, sightless and enormous, before he can finish pulling it down.

When his face reappears, you are looking at him with your mouth tucked in. “What?” he asks.

“Nothing.”

“That’s not a nothin' face.”

“It is.” You reach over and tug the hem straight for him, fingers brushing his stomach through cotton. “You looked very heroic, fighting your own shirt.”

“Mm, a hard battle,” he says, grave as he can manage.

He listens to your laughter with focus meant for the speech of people wiser than him. Finishes his tea and waits for you to finish yours. Then, you show him around the bathroom while Duncan pretends he doesn't know where things are and nods thoughtfully at every stop of the tour. Once it's wrapped, he quells an urge to kiss your forehead and maybe slap your ass lightly. He showers with the soap he's used that one time before, then joins you in the kitchen for breakfast.

First, Dunk snorts at the disparity of plates. Yours holds one sad toast while his overflows with bread, eggs and sausages. When he shots you a questioning look you only shrug and send a don't judge me face in his direction. So Duncan sits. Eats. Tries to not think much about hands that made it for him.

In this mundane moment, Dunk’s memory manages to dim all the girls he has ever smothered into hurting him. Compared to what he feels now, those loves seem skinny. Starved at the ribs. This one is embryonic but ever-growing, blind and hungry and insisting on itself without any shame.

He watches you nibble at the bread’s crust and chase every bite with a sip of tea. One leg perched on the seat of the chair, you do not look at him, only scroll through emails on your phone with your mouth set flatter by the second. He sees how it fleeces the morning bliss off you, bit by bit. Then decides to take the role you keep offering. Someone who has a say in it. Someone who can want things.

“Have ye thought about takin’ leave already?” he asks.

“Hm?” You lift your head. “Oh, yeah, I just…” Your gaze drops back to the phone, then away from it. “I don’t know what I’d be doing with the time, you know?”

Dunk considers that a minute. Wipes his greasy mouth, cringes a little, then rests an arm across the table, ruling halfway through the movement to leave you untouched after all. His fist closes instead.

“We could… I dunno.” He takes a sip of coffee. “We could figure that out. Together, I mean. I’ll have more time soon.”

“Oh?” you say. “Right. School’s ending.”

“Mhm. Few weeks.” Dunk nods. “I’ll still have summer coaching and the activity programme with the kids, but it’s not full-time. We could prepare a bit better. Meet Ray and Red. Maybe you could…”

“What?”

“Come to a game,” he says, quieter. “Meet Egg. If ye want.”

You go still for long enough that Dunk regrets it. Then, you put your phone face down and rest your palm over his fist. It loosens under you. His fingers thread through yours.

“That sounds good,” you tell him. “I probably could use some time off.”

Dunk nods.

You look down at your joined hands, then back at him. “You ready for the nursery?”

Dunk sweeps the room with vacant eyes. “Aye,” he says. “Think so.”

The nursery has been waiting with its door closed. He doesn't know when the painting was done, nor does he ask by whom, because each possible version delivers a small resentment. Had it been you alone, Dunk would scold you for not seeking help. Had it been anyone else, he'd be wounded about not being the first choice. When the door opens, both of you lean on the frame as if bare walls might turn and ask what exactly you think you are doing here. There are boxes stacked by the skirting board, a rolled rug, cot in the exact middle, a changing table flat-packed in a carton with arrows pointing which side is up for some reason. A lamp shaped like a moon. Three soft baskets that smell of new rope and shop dust.

You tell him the changing table should go under the shelf. Dunk measures the wall again though it's been measured twice already, then lifts the table as if it has no weight and puts it exactly where you point. “There?” he asks.

“A little left.”

He shifts it a little left.

“No, your left.”

Dunk's mouth quirks. “That was my left.”

“Your other left, then.”

He gives you a look over his shoulder, wounded by female sense of directions, and you laugh hard enough that he smiles fully. The room eases by one small notch.

After that, the two of you become very serious about things that are very serious only to new parents. Which drawer gets the vests. Whether nappies should live closer to the wipes or closer to the little bin with its impressive system of odour containment. Dunk folds three tiny sleepsuits. You unfold one, refold it worse, and he says nothing, only fixes it when he thinks you are looking elsewhere.

“I saw that,” you say.

“I didn’t do anythin’.”

“You think I can’t fold baby clothes.”

“I think,” Dunk says, eyes on the drawer, “there’s a chance the baby will want its legs in the leg bits.”

You stare at him.

His mouth twitches. “That’s all.”

A muslin hits his head. He catches it without looking, which is so irritatingly impressive you have to turn away and busy yourself with the baskets.

Slowly, the space stops looking like storage and begins to acquire intent. Sheet goes on round the mattress. The little blanket folds over the rail. The lamp finds the corner. Books line up on the low shelf, bright spines and silly animals and one about a tractor Dunk claims is important because children ought to have options. You put the first packet of nappies in place, then stand there with your hand still on it. “Yeah,” you say, to no one.

Dunk looks up from where he is kneeling by a drawer. “What?”

“No, just. Yes. This looks… fine.”

“Aye.” He follows your gaze, then nods too hard. “Yeah. It does. Looks nice.”

There's a hollow, mouth-biting silence after that. Nice is a stupid little word for a room that now contains future. It's too small to express the enormity of the folded clothes that wait for a body neither of you has held yet. Nice is what's said because the real thing is a cutthroat.

Dunk gets up. You both stand in the middle of it with your foreheads set into brave shapes. “This is nice,” you say again, worse this time.

“Aye,” Dunk says. “I like it.”

You glance at him, and his face destroys you. His eyes are red-rimmed behind the lenses, magnified into bareness. Nothing held back on him. Duncan is a pretty crier because nearly none of him frowns. He just sweats tears out of those baby-blues until they adorn his lashes and drop onto cheeks. There's no attempt at hiding, only a fist at the ready to wipe the excess had it blurred his vision.

A complete opposite of you. Mouth slicing itself into a lopsided crescent from the force of trying to keep it inside, then plain ugly sobbing. It erupts from bawling eyes to a painful choke on the back of a mouth. Then snot comes thick and unstoppable, smears the upper lip with salt, and all of you becomes shiny in a way that would cake up any powder.

“Why are you crying?” he asks, voice breaking.

“I’m not crying,” you say, immediately crying. “You’re crying.”

His mouth twitches, then fails. “Am I?”

"Yes, Duncan," you wail. "Visibly."

Duncan steps in as if called by it. The room does a strange thing to a private wound in him. Bursts open the scar tissue that's grown round abandonment. Tends it, cleans it, stitches the evened edges and kisses it better. Small things do that to people. He feels welcome to walk barefoot on the fluffy rug and flick the carousel of geese into a stroll. There's a family for him somewhere in here, and you are a third of it. He doesn't know what kind of wrong has its fingers around your throat, but steps in all the same, because it doesn't really matter.

He gathers you against his chest and the two of you stand there leaking stupidly into each other. “Lass,” he murmurs, palm at the back of your head. “Hey. C’mere.”

“I’m here,” you say into his shirt, which now carries an imprint of your face like it's a fucking Veil of Veronica. “I’m very clearly here.”

“I know.”

“Why’re you crying?” you ask again.

His hand stills, then moves again. "Happy," he lies. “Jus' happy."

You pull back. “Don’t do that.”

“Do what?”

“Lie badly.”

Dunk's face works. For one flicker you think he might tell you something. Something old. Then he only cups your face in both hands and wipes beneath your eyes with his thumbs. His own are worse. Damn tender and unfair in their size. “And you?” he asks. “Why’re you cryin’?”

You try to answer like a normal woman with control over her organs. The effect is half-strangled, half-mangled through teeth and comes out jittery. “I’m—" you hiccup, "scared I… I won’t be… a good mum.”

He stares at you, genuinely baffled. "Sweetheart," he says, as if it's all dead simple. "You'll be an incredible mam."

Laughter comes abrupt and deranged, hitting the surface of his lenses in wet little spots. Duncan says it like the matter has been already inspected and passed. It makes the idea briefly possible. "You don't know that," you tell him.

“I do.”

“You don’t.”

“I do,” he says again, with the same conviction he's used to persuade you municipal swamp is green. He brings your hand to his mouth and kisses your knuckles. Then knuckles of the other one. Then the hollow of it while your fingers brush his nose. Then your wrist, where the pulse knocks and knocks. "I do know."

“Dunk—”

A kiss on the forehead cuts you off. Long and determined. It makes you gasp and you hope that Dunk will read the gasping as one of the necessary phases for calming down. You clutch the shirt on his stomach, then, with no better plan than needing less fabric between you, you push your palms underneath it. Touch the life of his ribs. His muscles jerk.

“I only trust you,” you say, staring at the damp hollow at the base of his throat, “because you’ll be a great dad.”

He does that thing in the face that heralds the slackening of the whole body. Galvanised within himself to push past the layers of fear, Duncan bends and kisses you deep enough to make the both of you stumble. His hands frame your face, then neck, then shoulders, undecided. "Girl, what are you doin'—" he mutters into it. "What're you doin' to me?"

Loving you, you think, unbidden. You mumble a thing that has a shape of his name but doesn't survive the journey from throat to mouth. Set your fingers on his back and try to pull him closer.

He hums and starts walking. Stops kissing, but stays mouth to mouth. His thumbs and forefingers cuff round your elbows, twitching. There are heavy nasal breaths and working throats and between one swallow and the next Duncan stares at you through those damp, heifer-like lashes as if the answer might be printed somewhere on your face.

"Where's this goin'?" he asks.

"To the—" you stammer. "To bed. If you want."

His whole chest sinks on the exhale. "Thank God," puffs out of him.

Then—arms. A strongman’s foreplay begins with Duncan’s palms finding your arse like it’s signposted. He gets you up with a grunt that nurtures relief where effort should be, and your body remembers the route with alarming ease. It's the third time now. Three times out of three, you have failed to get yourself to bed under your own power where Duncan is concerned. The thought brings another one behind it, bad and quick-footed: perhaps this is simply what he does with women. Perhaps all that size has made a habit of carrying girls through doorways and making them feel singular for the length of one corridor.

You shut that down with both legs round his waist and both hands at his neck, because thinking has done very little for you lately besides invent pain. This belongs to me, you tell yourself, with no court of appeal available. The lift, the hands, the breath punched out of him when you settle against his stomach. Him. All of it yours for as long as he keeps walking.

He kisses you through it. The shape of him between your thighs, already interested, makes a hard bid against you. In the bedroom he lowers you to the mattress with care so anxious it turns clumsy at the last inch. Your back bounces, and he follows you down halfway before catching himself on both arms. There, he hovers, huge, open-mouthed, and trembles for it, and you know damn well it is not from the weight on his shoulders because you tremble too while holding nothing.

Your fingers hook in the hem of his shirt and lift. Dunk straightens enough to help you; yields his arms and head so you can drag it off him. On the other side of cotton he's a mess with his glasses endearingly askew. "There," you say, placing a palm on his cheek.

He huffs, embarassed, scrunches his eyes and smiles with a tongue pushed against the backs of his teeth. Then his hands find your shorts. He searches first, gets your nod, and that is all it takes. The waistband drags down your hips by the work of patient fingers, resists where you're sunken into the bed so you lift, and you could swear he breathes out a little yes.

Around nudity, you tense. Duncan sees it. "There," he says and bends to press his mouth to your stomach.

In current circumstances it is such a strange place to be kissed right before sex that you laugh like an idiot, and ugly too—phlegmy and cracked and wet in a way that you're certain is not attractive. But Duncan looks up with his eyes gone red for entirely different reasons than five minutes ago. "You said kissin's alright," he says.

"I did."

“So—” His palm smooths down your thigh to the knee, broad and calloused like low-grain sandpaper. He gets under the joint and makes it bend, lifts until the leg opens from the hip and leaves you spread in a way that has both of you breathing through the nose. Mouth set judiciously where your belly swells from the pubic bone, he mutters, “—I’m kissin’.”

His body starts moving like communicating vessels: one crawling thing follows another. Crawling palm kickstarts lips. “Still kissin’,” Duncan says, and lies, because now he’s licking. He has his tongue set broad across your navel, travelling upwards until it meets the border of your shirt’s hem.

That invites his other hand to lift it. He bunches the cotton above your tits and continues the kissin’ between your breasts. His hips creep up too, first to your mid-thighs, then level with yours, and the weight of him releases some tension from your loins. He’s wide enough to keep you open by his presence alone, so the hand at the hinge of your knee remains soft. Thumb brushing the side of it. Small. Careful. Damning.

Your palm and finds his hair. Fingers apart, you comb through the roots, then become meaner with the pulling once his stubble brushes your nipple. “Dunk,” you say. “Come here.”

He does, badly. Too much of him for grace, he comes there fast and heavy. Hooks your leg around his hip and presses his clothed, warm cock to your cunt. “Shite,” he hisses when you tug the hairs at his nape. He looks at you, and when you think there will be more kissin’, he stays frozen, just gaping.

“Don’t look like that,” you say.

“Like what?”

“Like I’ve done something to you.”

His eyes drop, then lift. “Haven’t ye?”

He seems a bit shocked by his own answer, so to save him from it you reach for his face and pull him down. Allow yourself the wet and neatless pass of tongue through his mouth. Your leg tightens round him because your body is quick to throw invitation now the brain is ridden with persistent fuck it. Fuck me instead.

Duncan’s hand goes down between you and gets stupid with the practicalities. He could have thought this through better. Could have undressed properly, could have come to bed with some sort of sequence in mind, but details of lovemaking keep leaving him the second your mouth opens under his. He only wants to be close. The rest is laces, waistbands, cloth, mortal hindrance. He shoves at his boxers one-handed, gets them low enough to make use of himself, and winces when the cotton scrapes the head of his cock.

Then, skin meets skin and a sigh falls out of him in one long, shattered piece.

He fits his fist round the base to guide himself. Thumb pressed just under the head, he squeezes until the dew pearls out, slick and clear, then drags it through you. Slow first, because he deludes himself that slow might save him. The crown parts the wet seam of you bluntly, slides up, catches over your clit, and comes back down to nudge at the entrance with no entering done. Your whole body gives a small, greedy twitch to that. His does worse.

“Christ,” he says into your mouth.

Again. A little firmer. His cock learns the route by the fractions: clit, slit, soft clutch of the opening, back up through the mess he has made wetter by being in it. He mixes himself with your sweet sap until the slide acquires sound. The tender parts of you speak through glimmer and greed, while his answer is held in the wrist, in the rippling stomach, and the balls drawn tight enough to feel like someone's holding them.

You bite his lower lip because you cannot think of a sentence worth the effort. He groans, and that makes more of him leak into his own hand. It gets spread back through you on the next pass. There is something near argumentative in it, the way he keeps refusing to give you the thing both of you are braced for. Your hips keep lifting to steal it from him. His knuckles brush your pussy lips each time he works himself down. The heel of his palm grazes the damp hair. He shudders as if the contact keeps running up his spine and knocking something loose behind the eyes.

“Duncan,” you breathe.

“Aye,” he says, uselessly. “Aye, I know.”

He does know. Knows, because your fingers seem dead set on claiming some of his hair for themselves with how viscously you tug. There's a flex to your thigh, hips canting restlessly once the tip of his cock presses where it ought to go but slides away. The tenderest parts of the both of you keep quarrelling, negotiating, resolving, while the faces are busy enduring the wait. Duncan watches yours as if watching a match held to paper.

"Come on," you say, looping both arms round his neck. "Dunk, please."

"But, luv—" he strains, resting his forehead to your mouth. But you're so tight, Dunk wants to say. He laughs, and thank God, you read it as I'm on it. While what Duncan means is I'm sorry for this. Sorry for putting you here. Sorry for liking you so much I forgot to pull out. Sorry for every inch of me and the exact opposite too. "Okay," he says. "Okay."

His hips adjust to stop lying about themselves, and he breaches you slowly. You take him in laborious, exerting shards that make his spine empty of sense. Warmth closes around his length stern as a stubborn mouth and his own puffs out air so suddenly his cheeks swell with it.

He's halfway through when you whine from the bottom of your furious body and cant up for more. "Aye," he says. "Aye, I'm here."

Another inch. The grip is so snug and living the whole of his chest becomes devoted to the passage. His brain too, and his hands, and skin that reddens under your touch and Duncan wonders if scalps can bruise from hair being gripped too ardently. He sinks the last of himself, and when his lower belly meet you, Duncan stops breathing. His body arrives late to the place his heart has been making a fool of itself over for weeks. "There," he says. "There ye are."

You relax around the fullness. Yes, this is right. Your eyes scan him, and find that the lens nearest you is fogged at the edge. And suddenly, you want him bearer, just to see him plain. So you reach for the glasses, and ask, "Can I take those off?"

Dunk huffs a breath. The movement shifts him inside you by some wicked measure and both of you pretend to endure it normally.

"I won't see a thing," he says.

"I know." You slide the glasses off and set them somewhere safe by your pillow. Without them, his face changes. Equally handsome, but transmuted into another kind of comeliness. He's less goofy, more exposed. Somehow more mature and vulnerable. His eyes lose their hard outline, start searching badly and wrinkling where he tries to squint. You cup his jaw and bring him down until his ear is at your mouth. "How about you just listen to me?" you whisper.

The twitch inside you is immediate. "Oh?" you say. Duncan only breathes out a fragmented chuckle. You stroke his cheek with your thumb. "You like that?"

His throat works, excruciatingly thorough, to swallow that gulp down. His hips slip again, then stop, as if there is someone outside of him scolding the misbehaving parts. "Girl," he pleads.

"You do." Your mouth brushes the shell of his ear and his whole back sets until some hard-working vertebrae clicks. "That's good to know."

He pulls back enough to sweep your face and finds, possibly, the shape of your smile. His eyes narrow, poor useless things, and he looks set up by the natural order of things. “You’re very pleased with yourself,” he says.

"A bit."

"Aye, well." He swallows again. His voice has gone thick where he's meant for it to be firm. "Mind yourself then."

You bring him back down. Dunk comes willingly, like he always does when something's been asked of him. His mouth opens against your neck as if that's a grounding thing to do, and he thrusts carefully, deep enough to make your leg flex against his side. The pressure against his ribs is warm, the hand at his nape warmer, and the lips next to his ear border torrid.

"You feel so good," you tell him.

He groans, surrendering the baritone to a higher pitch. "Jesus—"

"So good, Dunk."

"Don't say it like that."

"Like what?"

"As if—" He takes another breath and moves through it. Cock drags slow and proper, particular enough for you to feel the whole thick length of him leaving and coming back. "As if you know."

"I do know."

You might not be an expert on how to execute the part after winning men that makes them brave enough to tell you all the things you yearn to hear (I love you, I love you, I love you), but this—this, you know. You know where they are softhearted. You know how to find this part. Despite what your mother said, it is not wicked. It's listening for key words that quieten their voices, and looking where eyes ought to be set. Dunk seems to be good at this too, because he reads the cues with surprising proficiency. Whether by guess or wisdom, it eludes you, but he manages to be there when you need a hug, a good word, a joke, a shoulder, or now, a fuck. What kind of fuck, he understands quickly too. You don’t yet pass judgement on the intention behind it: if he means to stay for long, or if he has simply recognised the means to an end. The version in which this is just the way he has sex, unperformed and therefore wholly aligned with you, doesn’t even make it to your head.

And Dunk is softhearted in many places. He’s unbearably tender when it comes to tending bodies, as if each part of you deserves kindness. It’s only natural to conclude he’d like that back, in one form or another. He reacts to praise as though it puts ground under his feet. Keeps finding ways to be useful, offering himself in small practical pieces, as if saying notice me, notice me, I am here, without understanding at all that it is impossible to not notice him. If someone in his past failed to see the easiness to love him that he comes with, they were either dumb or cruel in the throat. The only thing in him that halts the loving is the fearful nature of frail hearts. You recognise that like you are both made of similar clay, even if you cannot put a finger on the exact place where it hurts. In cases such as Duncan and yourself, bravery arrives in steps. Valour blooms rather than surges, so you give him a small brick for the lifeblood to keep building. Praise him for the way he is. Just this.

"I do know," you tell him. "You're so patient with me. So careful. I like that."

It costs him some. The hand under your knee pulses, fingers pressing, loosening, pressing again. His stomach jumps against yours, fills with a deep breath, then corrects itself to not flatten you.

"See?" you coo. Pour the sweetness straight into his ear canal so the only thing received by cochlea is that he is being good. "I love how heavy you are. How well you fill me. Fuck, Duncan—" He hits you just right, on the right there. You tighten, and keep muttering, "You're so good to me. So fucking good to me, my good boy."

"Ah—f-fuck—" he snaps, shocked and half-pained.

"Duncan."

He makes the mistake of lifting his head when you say his name. Blind as he is, he still finds your mouth. Kisses you hard, then badly, then breaks to inhale. His hair has fallen over his forehead. Without the glasses he looks dismantled in a more private way, as if you have caught him between skins. "Say it again," he mumbles.

You blink. "What?"

His ears turn crimson. He keeps thrusting. Stays deep, because that's when your body keeps rewarding his with blissful little clenches. Discipline fleets him, and Duncan forgets altogether how to keep himself in reins. It feels too good. Brushes the cords too accurately. "What you said," he rasps.

"That you're good to me?"

He shuts his eyes.

Oh. So that is where it lives.

You pull him closer with the heel of your foot and start speaking into his lips. "You're good to me," you say, slower. "You're good at this. Perfect at this. You make me feel—oh—" You have to stop there, because the next stroke takes the end of the sentence and folds it under your tongue.

Dunk hears enough. Perhaps more than enough. His face comes down beside yours and he starts fucking you with his mouth at your cheek, breathing there, taking the praise like punches he intends to keep as bruises.

"You're beautiful," you whisper. "You know that?"

"N-no." He shakes his head.

"Yes." Your fingers push into his hair. "You are. So handsome. You're so pretty like this."

"Girl," he wheezes. "Girl, I can't—"

"You can." You kiss the corner of his mouth. "You can take it."

You break some working piece in him. He gives one fuller push, then another, and a sound, too open, too surprised, leaves him. His whole body locks above you. "Shite, I—" he gasps. "Shite, wait—"

It takes him too early. You afflict him, his ears and nose and neck with those delicate touches that make the roots of Dunk's hair buzz. With your voice, so fucking loving, it makes his brain melt and threaten to leak. It's all too much. He comes, hideous for trying to withhold it, strong for you being the cause of it, and shivers violently through his every giant muscle. His cock kicks deep with each wrung out spill, face drops to your shoulder, then whole of him follows the drowning to fold around you. The noise he makes there is loud enough to shame him later, if you let it.

You do nothing except hold him. For several seconds Duncan doesn't speak. He focuses on breathing instead and maybe not turning to ash under the blaze of shame. Not one, but a title of few-pumps-chump has finally been handed to him with a shitty confetti and a stale flute of cheap champagne. He stays seated inside you and trembling through the last of it. When he tries to lift himself, his arms disagree.

"I'm sorry," he says, hoarse. “I didn’t mean to—” His pelvis shifts by accident and he winces, oversensitive and still hard enough to make the smallest movement count. “Fuck.”

"Dunk." You press your mouth to his temple. Smooth the hair off his forehead. "Don't be. There's nothing to be sorry for, hm?"

"But you didn't—" he huffs, sounding furious with himself and deeply far away.

A smile, or so he thinks. "I'm okay," you say.

"You didn't finish."

"No," you say. His brows knit. It makes him look so abysmally disappointed that for a beat you consider scraping that and lying.

He lies back down, nuzzling his face to your neck. "Then talk to me," he says.

Your stomach does an unbecoming, joyous little flip. "What?"

“Talk to me,” he says again, quieter. His voice has rawed its own edges, embarrassed and determined both. “Please. I can stay. Jus'—tell me things.”

You smirk. “What things?”

Duncan scowls. “Cruel woman.”

Your hand starts playing with his hair again. Scratching at the scalp, pulling gently. “You want me to praise you back into fucking me?”

Dunk’s eyes close. “Aye,” he says. “If you’re offerin’.”

What moves through you borders unkind. You hook both legs along his sides, cross them on his arse and turn your face to his ear. "So listen," you say.

He's so obedient his entire body slackens as if hearing is achieved through epidermis. For a while, he does just that. Listens with his lashes lowered since sight has become a luxury, and useless to him anyway. He's just touch and sound.

"You're so hot like this," you whisper. His fingers twitch on your shoulder. "You are. All fucked out and sorry for yourself." Against your neck his lips move and draw the shape of Christ. You brush the sweaty curl at his temple. "Your cock feels so good inside me," you say, softer, because it's a less generic truth. "See? You came and I'm still full of you."

Dunk makes a sound rid of consonants. His face turns an inch, mouth opening at your throat because it needs to be put somewhere to not grow loud. You feel him pulse once, tired and sore, and then another thing starts under it. A tiny return. Thickening that makes you rethink your approach on I can take you once again.

“I like it,” you tell him. “The mess you make. I like knowing it’s there.”

“Lass—”

“Makes me feel special.”

That one hurts him. Pleases him too, which may be the hurt of it. He gives the smallest aborted press, an insidious tremor of a body that wants to eat more than it can hold, but it drags through you slickly enough that both of you go quiet. He hisses through his teeth. The overburden of senses has him by the nerves. You can feel it as an argument within the muscles. Pleasure with a hot little blade tucked inside it.

You slide your palm down his back. Sweat has pooled at the dip of his spine and over his shoulders. “I like how big you are,” you say. “How you spread me open just by being there.”

Duncan shudders. His cock gives another slow, disbelieving throb.

“Oh,” you coo. “There he is.”

“Mean,” he mutters, but stays exactly where he is with his ear offered. He wants the cruelty by handful. Wants it ladled warm into the hollow places. Wants to be destroyed by kindness because kindness is the thing he has least defence against.

“You like it?” you ask. He nods once. “Can you tell me with words?”

A pause. His throat works against your skin. “A-aye.”

“Good.”

His whole body rises to that, a rough tightening from shoulders to arse. He moves by mistake, a shallow slip in and out, and the noise bursts from him with such pained sweetness your fingers tense in his hair.

“Careful,” you murmur, though care has begun to look like a strange medicine.

There's a laugh, short and bitten. “Tryin’,” Dunk says.

He always does, which might be a thing that turns you more sombre. “I know you are,” you say and get taken off-guard by how lovesick you sound. You plant a kiss at the place behind his ear. “That’s what I like.”

Duncan goes still again. Listening so hard his body seems to have turned all its chambers towards you. “I like your shoulders,” you say, and let your hand prove it. Sweep over one broad slope, then the other. “I like your sweet face. Especially when you’re inside me.” At that, his breath leaves him in pieces.

There is more. There is a daft, impossible amount more. It crowds up on your tongue in unsayable particulars. I like that your front teeth face inward a little and seem slightly too large for the civil architecture of your mouth. I like the freckle on your left cheek. I like that your left eye crinkles more than the right when you laugh. I like your feet. I like the soft of your stomach. I like your voice in the morning and what you feel like in bed beside me. I like. I like, I like, I like—

You spare him and do not spare him at all. “You’re so pretty, Duncan.”

His hips jerk again. There. No use pretending that one missed. Inside his head the answers to each of your praises start piling up. I like your sweet face too. He bites the thought down and tastes your skin instead. I like your shoulders too. I like your hands. I like them in my hair. I like your laugh when it turns to cackle. I like when you cook and get cross at the pan. I like when you go snotty while crying. I like your tits. I like your arse. I like your thighs. I like the weight of you. I like waking up with one of your hairs stuck to my mouth. I—

“F-fuck,” Duncan hisses through an involuntary back-stabbing twitch.

It's slippery. Lovely. He moves through his own spent and feels the sting prickle from the tip of his cock to the base of his spine like thousands of insects' wings fluttering between layers of skin. His mouth goes so wide the jaw clicks, hand finds your hip, grips, releases, then grips again with a gentleness that comes out more desperate than on purpose.

“Too much?” you ask.

He shakes his head. “N-no.”

In a quick assessment Duncan realises he is fully hard again. Worse than before, somehow. His cock feels harder than it has any right to, bigger too for the swell of deliciously tormented tissue. Blood fills him so utterly he gets light-headed with it and has one fleeting, cowardly thought that maybe men go soft after disgracing themselves for a reason and ought to leave their luck alone. Because this feels stolen. Forbidden in how sweetly it spreads through him. He is bathed in himself and your slick, trembling with it, and still some jurisdiction of the hips returns to him. Enough to roll them into you heavily and whisper, "Keep talkin'. Keep talkin' to me, sweetheart. Please."

It arrives so raw you nearly lose your nerve. Nearly. With the shift inside, your body, faithless and bright, remembers what it was promised. "You're doing so well, Duncan. You're so good. Look at me, darling."

He goes where your palm orders his chin and looks vaguely at where your face should be. It's blurry and he's not certain a case would be different if he had his glasses on. "I want ye to feel good, lassie. I want to be good for you. Oh, fuck—"

Your chest tightens like a hand closing round glass. You smooth your thumb under his eye, where he is hot and damp. “You are,” you tell him. "Kiss me."

He lowers his mouth to yours and lets them meet with too much gratitude, open lips driven by poor coordination. The kiss makes him move into a shallow glide. He is filling out properly, impossible and worried inside you, honed through the overbright ache because praise stomps on every other version of comfort and laughs at it.

"There you are," you say. "Oh fuck, there you are. Right there—"

"Yeah?" Dunk says. Starts pulling back farther, enough to make you protest the loss. When he slides in again both of you feel the second life of him. He brushes the rawest depths. The mess you claim to like so much gets pumped back in with a sound so wet and filthy the burn in Duncan's ears begins to feel cold.

"Yes—" you moan. Clench around him as if welcoming the insult. "God, you're so good—"

He whimpers. Quiet and punched out. Buries his face into your shoulder immediately after as if a noise so vulnerable doesn't have the right to exist in his body.

The sound spills across your chest and bleeds into your fingers. “Oh, Dunk.”

“Don’t make a thing of it.”

“I’m making several things of it.”

“Lass.”

“You sound beautiful,” you tell him, with a face so soft it could kill him.

His whole body flinches. “Jesus, woman.”

“You do.” You pull at his hair until his face comes back where you want it. “You sound beautiful when you want me.”

Duncan stares in your general direction, eyes narrowed and wet, lips parted around breaths he has forgotten to ration. Then his hips move again, and again, each stroke careful out of necessity, each one less careful because you keep rewarding him for it.

I like when you want me too, he thinks, frantic with it. I like when you need me. I love—

He squeezes his lids shut. Whole cliff edge waits under one syllable.

You kiss him before he can fall off it and murmur, “Good boy,” against his mouth.

The last of the strategy leaks off with the sweat at Dunk's temple. He thrusts deeper, shakes harder with the cost of it, and your back arches clean off the bed. Pleasure opens low and hot, fed by the weight of him, the broken sounds, the knowledge that you have put your mouth to some hidden hinge in him and made it swing wide.

“Again,” he says, barely there.

You smile against his lips. “My good boy.”

His cock jumps inside you so hard you gasp. He hears that too. Even without sight, he is learning you by damage and reward. He finds the rhythm by your sounds and keeps his face so close your words have nowhere to go except to him.

“Perfect,” you whisper. “I'm so close, Dunk. Keep fucking me like this. God, you're lovely—” A groan, then another careful stroke. Your thumbs brush under his lower lashes in a sweet little I'm here, I'm here with you. It's not really fair to be able to see his face opened so cleanly while he can't see yours, but the partial anonymity pours some courage down your throat. "I don't know who taught you to be ashamed of wanting," you say, "but they were wrong."

Duncan whines out your name. Torn and bruised by his teeth. The sound of it said like that tips you. You cradle his head to your neck and come with your mouth full of his hair. It seizes you crude and complete, legs and arms locking so hard he has nothing left to do but stay buried and take what your body milks out of him. “My good boy,” you whisper through it. “Duncan, my good boy—”

Good boy. Good boy is what Dunk has always wanted to be, and has tried to be, and still nobody has told him so. Good boy said with conviction by both your mouth and body is what lures him into following you into his second orgasm. He comes again, and worse for it. Loud this time, and costly. His whole body fights itself over where to put the force of it, lower stomach clenching, calf near mangled from the effort of keeping his weight off you. His voice breaks somewhere above his own size. “Ah—Christ, girl—ah, fuck—” Then he spends another load inside you, bathing his cock hot, while your cunt keeps pulling at him in ruthless aftershocks as if it has claimed him now and wants payment.

You keep him trapped by every limb you have. Keep him there while he shudders, while his hips give their last helpless stammers into yours, while his breath falls apart against your throat. It feels brutal for how close it is. For how much of yourselves you have both put into the other without saying the sensible things first.

When it passes, Duncan stays braced over you, trembling. His mouth works near your skin. “Y-you—you—” he stammers. “You make such a mess of me.” He blinks, then palms the mattress for his glasses. Finds them and manages to slide them on one-handed, though not entirely well for they sit on his nose crooked. But at least he can see you again. And Jesus fucking Christ—

The love is no longer embryonic. It has managed to gestate into some sort of Leviathan in the span of one fuck. He looks at what he's done to you and cannot believe his eyes. All of you looks warm. Face melted of every wrinkle it could produce, you lay below him blissed and gorgeous and Dunk feels as if he's going to need to step out from his own skin if he doesn't thank you. For this. For listening. For seeing him and guiding him when he's blind.

"God, girl, what was that?" he says. "What've you done to me?"

You regain the ability to frown. Your brows knit, worried, and you perch yourself higher on one elbow. "Are you not well?" you ask, brushing his cheek. "Have I—"

"No." Then, Duncan laughs. Not because he's happy, though he is, and not because anything is being particularly funny. His body chooses laughter for him. He puts his palm to your jaw and touches your lower lip. Presses on it, stretches it, and it's so glossy it slips away. "Yer not real," he says. "Yer an impossible girl."

A smile splits you, weird and uncanny. It lacks the eyes. Confused, you whisper, "Duncan?"

He answers the sound of his name with his mouth. Poorly at first. A little startled, a little overbrave, a kiss dragged from some place in him still smoking. He catches your lower lip, lets it go, comes back for the corner, then the whole of you, and the further he gets from the post-nut clarity, the more careful he becomes. His hand settles at your neck with a tenderness that feels borrowed from later life.

You let him. Let the kiss calm into something with breathing in it. When he pulls back, his forehead stays close to yours. “How d’you know me so well?” he asks, almost accusing.

Your eyes soften. “I could ask you the same,” you say.

If you did, you'd hear that I love ye, and it cannot be right of you. Duncan goes still above you. “Aye,” he says, though it barely counts as speech.

You brush your thumb over the corner of his mouth. “What?”

“I’ve never had it like that in my life,” he says, blushing fiercely. “I don’t know what it means, or if it has to mean anythin’, but I just—shite, I’m sorry, I jus'—”

“Me too,” you say. He blinks. You nod, because he looks like he needs the second strike of it. “Me too. I wasn’t lying about anything.”

“Thank you,” Dunk says. It is the first thing he can find that is small enough to fit his mouth. Then he shifts, and the small thing gets ruined. “Ah—shite.”

He tries to pull out carefully. Careful does not save either of you. The slip of him leaving is uncomfortable and cold. He hisses. You hiss too, then both sounds turn into sheepish laughter. Dunk sits back on his heels with hands hovering over you as if there is still a correct place to put them and he has not found it yet. "S-sorry," he says.

“Stop apologising for having a dick, okay?”

That makes him look at you in scandalised silence, which is worth the ache. He groans, and looks down since your face is a bit too much. His hands find your knees. He closes your legs gently and rocks them once as if settling something very important and badly made.

You sigh, loose and thready, and your whole lower body goes into a tired little tremor.

“There,” he says. His gaze catches lower. Sticks. “Shite,” he says. “I’ve, uh—”

“What?”

Instead of answering, Duncan leans in and, with the same care, straightens your legs leaving them slightly parted. The air finds you. You make a protesting noise, but he is already lowering himself between your thighs, ungainly and tender about it, until his cheek settles in the crook of one leg and one huge hand smooths over your navel.

“Don’t get any ideas,” you warn him. “I’m still very much untouchable.”

“I—I know.” His voice grows rougher, muffled near your skin. “Me too. I jus’—”

He moves his mouth close and kisses you. There. Low, over skin, without asking anything more from your nerves. His cum is seeping out. Your slit is filled white and wet enough that his spent drips lower, down the swell of buttock and onto the sheet. The sight ought to shame him, probably. Instead, it quiets something in his bones and wakes something worse.

“Relax,” he murmurs. “Just a kiss, lass.”

You try, though relaxation has become a complicated act. His breath warms where everything is swollen and used. He only rests his mouth in small presses, nose close enough to take in the scents bleeding over each other. The newness of it makes him oddly proud. Animal-proud. Kind of proud that probably only another beast would understand.

Duncan ought to leave it there. He knows this from the very recent, first-hand education in what happens when a body is pushed past what it can politely take, and he has no wish to be cruel with you. Still, curiosity implores him. He lets his tongue out only a little and touches you near the entrance, where the trickle has thinned enough to seem less like a dare. Just the tip of it. Just once.

The concoction meets him badly alloyed, both of you discoverable in it. He is salt and water, almost insipid were he to perform alone. You are richer. Sharper. Creamy in the way he remembers from the drunken night that got the two of you here, with that same wild edge underneath. Together it is stranger than either of you apart. Overwhelming, but with a door in it.

He licks again. Small and careful. More reverential than useful, though he would sooner bite off his own tongue than call it that. If romance is a place, Duncan thinks, it is here. Then, he stops thinking much at all. Your fingers find his hair after a moment. You comb once through it and leave your hand there, too tired to do anything finer. When your thigh starts twitching from the weight of his head, he lifts it and looks up at you. “Go shower?” he offers, hoarse. “I’ll change the sheets.”

You stare at him, a little stricken, than let him embrace the weirdness with dignity. Nod. His hands are there to help you when you try to rise and get off the bed. He pulls his T-shirt over you, though only the head, forgetting to put arms into their respectable holes.

"The sheets are—" You start pointing and it's only a finger vaguely poking under cotton.

"I know," Dunk says. "Go, go."

While you're gone, he does things automatically and with his head elsewhere. A man who is a friend and a co-parent and a willing, but ultimately rejected fiance, can only extend his stay this long. Even though for a moment Duncan has felt like an actual lover, there is no argument in him that would sound appropriate aloud. He looks at the dirty sheet in his palms and here he can no longer tell which part of the stain belongs to him, and which to you.

He's stood with a pillowcase half-fixed when you return. Sleepy-looking and warm from the shower, you come closer. Help him with one decisive shake and throw the pillow onto the bed. Then, you crane your head up, and tell him, "Stay? If you want."

Duncan sighs. Bends to kiss your forehead, and says, "Aye." You breathe out too, and the air dilutes int something more chewable. "I'll be right back," he says.

It feels natural to the point of danger. Cuddling in the morning, breakfast together. Setting up a room. Having a mild breakdown over it, which reforges itself into emotions too messy to be talked over so they lead to sex instead. The sex is mind-blowing and leaves Duncan both full and hollow. You take shower first, he goes second. He knows where the sheets are and where the towels are. He knows to wipe his feet before stepping onto the tiles, otherwise you huff so loudly he can hear you across the flat. You gave him a toothbrush. His cock feels a bit scraped, balls empty, but both things are pleasant and sit agreeably on the hips. He walks down the corridor to the bedroom and hears the telly muttering. He can tell exactly which episode of Sapphire & Steel is playing, because he's seen it many times. He cannot remember the plot of it properly, but it's the one with people disappearing into the photographs. In the bedroom you've passed out on your side of the bed, curled, with one arm invading beyond the middle, and the other wedged under your chin. He has his side of the bed. He sits, puts your hand on his thigh, watches the episode and remembers one afternoon when he watched it with Rafe. When the show ends, he turns the telly down and lowers himself so his face is level with your belly.

He's nervous. There's a human inside the size of an avocado, and when Duncan thinks of an avocado in his palm it all seems improbable to him. He's got no idea if the baby can hear him, but feels it is seemly to introduce oneself. "Hello in there," he whispers, quiet to not wake you. "I am your da. We'll meet in uh—" He takes out his hand and counts the remaining time. "In five months," Dunk says.

It all feels very silly but very necessary. He pulls air in through his nose and continues, softer, as if low volume is the thing that might make it less strange. “I, uh… I’ve read babies like when ye sing to them. So I’m gonna—jus' quiet. We won’t wake your mam. She’s asleep.”

There is no answer from above. Only your thick breathing and the small shift of your knee. Dunk takes that as permission. He adjusts himself with one arm folded under his head and legs hanging off the mattress from the knees down. His eyes rest on a place where the child is doing its secret dark work. Then, he clears his throat, feels foolish, and starts with a hum so low it near stays in his chest entirely.

"I wish I was on yonder hill," Duncan croons, half-swallowed for shyness. “‘Tis there I’d sit and cry my fill, until every tear would turn a mill.” He shuts his lids. It's not really a lullaby, but it's the first thing that comes to his mind. The old language feels borrowed and worn smooth enough by other mouths for him to express something Dunk doesn't understand yet.

“Is go dté tú, mo mhuirnín slán… Siúil, siúil, siúil a rúin… Siúil go socair agus siúil go ciúin…"

And may you go, my darling safely. Walk, walk, walk on, oh love. Walk steadily and walk softly.

His voice deepens where it warms. It starts coming quieter, and somehow fuller, and your eyes open somewhere inside the dark of sleep. Unmoving. The room has gone that thin afternoon hush where a body can pretend it is still dreaming if it keeps still enough. Dunk does not know you are listening. That makes it worse. Better. One of those.

There's a hand resting near you, shy of touching until he forgets himself and lets two fingers settle on the cotton. The pressure is almost nothing, but you feel it.

“Siúil go doras agus éalaigh liom,” he sings. The line makes a door appear in your head. An escape. Come away with me. Elope with me, without him having to say anything modern enough to frighten either of you.

When he sings that part he misremembers Gaeilge briefly and lets the thing be just sound, for the true matter and its recipient are, for now, only wishful thinking.

The last blessing comes. “Is go dté tú, mo mhuirnín slán.”

You keep your eyes half shut. Watch him through the blur of your lashes.

“I’ll sell my rock, I’ll sell my reel,” he goes on. “I’ll sell my only spinning wheel to buy my love a sword of steel.” His thumb moves against your shirt. You doubt he notices, or that he understands what his own voice is doing. Making vows out of other people’s grief, putting shape round something he has no courage to hold up in daylight yet. Love, maybe, dressed as a folk song so it can walk past both of you unsearched.

Your throat tightens. Stupidly, completely.

“Is go dté tú, mo mhuirnín slán.”

He hums the chorus this time more than sings it. The Irish turns soft in his mouth, almost sleepy.

“Siúil, siúil, siúil a rúin…”

You let your eyes close before he can catch them open. Let him have the kindness of being unseen. Let yourself have the worse kindness of hearing him.

“Siúil go socair agus siúil go ciúin…”

His fingers spread a little wider over your shirt.

“Siúil go doras agus éalaigh liom…”

By the last line, his voice has thinned to nothing much. A murmur. A breath laid carefully where his hand is.

“Is go dté tú, mo mhuirnín slán.”

For a while after, he only hums. Then even that fades. His hand grows heavy on you, and you know he's fallen asleep. You let out the long-trapped gasp, and with it, a tear falls down your cheek.