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you are having a horrible shift, Dex is content to sit and grade papers for you.
tw for extremely toxic relationship dynamics & domestic violence: reader walks dex like a dog. stay tuned for my hc's about his antipsychotics
You hate your hotel.
It is 1am. The issues started at midnight, really 12:02am. You know because while printing out the folio for your walk, you thought—I can run the audit after this, but you don’t get to run the audit after printing the folio, because your night is determined not to be that easy.
Occupancy is at one hundred, you are oversold by one. You had hoped that the silver tier member wouldn’t arrive and make your life easy, but your life is never that easy because not only does he arrive, but he insists on making every step of the walk progress difficult. He doesn’t want to go to the hotel you had called ahead at and verified availability, okay. That’s fine, he’s being relatively cordial about it so you help him. He doesn’t want to put down a card for the other hotel, you are firm: if he doesn’t want to put down a card, he needs to go to the hotel that you chose.
Why couldn’t you call him? He wants to know, because you don’t have a phone number on file. He isn’t listening, you’re just glad he’s gone. He eventually agrees to tap his card, your AGM will set up direct billing in the morning. That’s not the worst part.
That would be room 410’s gnat infestation. You did not expect the sheer volume of gnats in the video that this guest is now showing you—a man who came up when you were discussing billing complications with aforementioned walk guest.
You have no rooms to move him to. This is not good, this is horrible, this is your worst shift in recent record and you’ve had to evacuate the entire hotel before. They gnats had taken over the light above the entrance door, a black swirl of movement that was merely agitated when you attempted to take the housekeeping long lint-roller to the light, walls and doors in order to try and slightly fix the issue. It did not help, at all.
He says he noticed yesterday, but didn’t report it. He wants to be put into a different hotel, you cannot do that.
You do not have raid, you have searched the hallway closet, the house person closet, the maintenance supervisors office, the back room, it is overdramatic to say you want to die, but you definitely want to smash your head against the wall until your face is imprinted.
You are finally freed from trying to fix the gnat infestation, looking at your dashboard. You feel guilty, really, you hate nights like this—stuck between impossible situations.
OOO. Out of Order. Room 201, What is this? out of 175 rooms, four floors, you have one room that could be used. You check the details, marked OOO by housekeeping supervisor based on odor, okay, you can work with that. 410 is begrudgingly sleeping in his room, he will have to be moved immediately upon the earliest check out but maybe, maybe you could just clean this room. You are trained in housekeeping, okay. You almost run to 201, skipping the slow and outdated elevator that multiple people have gotten trapped in (you refuse to be one of them.) you tuck the giant keyring into your pocket to stop the jingling as you begin to jump over multiple sets of stairs to reach the second floor, trying your best to close it softly behind you but a heavy door is going to make a noise louder than a clink when it locks as you tab your master key against the door of 201.
Once, twice, three times, “I’m opening the door.”
“I’m in here! It’s Christian.” You jump, half-thinking that you are hallucinating as you pause with the door slightly open, chain lock taunt as it stops you from opening the door any further.
Your General Manager is in an out of order room marked vacant.
“Oh. Have a good night.” You do not ask, ‘what the fuck?’ Because years of customer service experience have taught you to always keep a level tone and with met with rejection, always ‘have a good day.’, ‘thank you.’ Rather than ‘you make over six figures and can’t pay for your own fucking hotel room?’ As you walk down the stairs in a haze of confusion and annoyance—now you can’t hide in the back room and grade piles of student work, now you had to pretend to work to keep up the appearance of being busy.
By the time you’ve walked back to the front desk, Dex is there.
He is halfway towards the door leaving to the back room, a place that you have lectured him on multiple times that he can not go because he is not an employee and now, you have caught him red-handed with his hand outstretched to push the door open.
He must have paused when he heard your footsteps, as if he stood still enough you wouldn’t notice that he was once again, attempting to go into employee only areas. Tonight, you don’t really have the energy to lecture him.
You know that he knows it’s wrong, that it’s not allowed—he just doesn’t care. Dex will nod along, apologize at the correct time, but you know that next time you do not immediately show yourself when he walks in, he will do the same thing.
Sometimes you just like to lecture Dex for the thrill of game, really. It keeps him on his toes. Tonight is not that night. You know that it is useless to be disappointed, but you cannot hide it. Instead, you walk past Dex and hold open the door of the employee only area for him to hover in the entrance way, solemn as he plays when he has done something he knows is wrong, but does not particularly want to draw attention to it while simultaneously wanting you to absolve him.
You gather ungraded work, stacking it neatly and evening out any papers sticking out from the stack before tucking away your laptop, then pull out the stack of papers that will eventually be a book that you are reviewing for a colleague then hand the ungraded work to Dex. On the top of the stack is the rubric and answer key, “Please grade these for me. I need to pretend to be busy in case my GM comes out.”
Dex leans down, just slightly, he is too cute. You pat his cheek, once, twice, then trail your hand down his jaw, his neck, his chest above the loose black long sleeve and pat his forearm to get him moving.
You aren’t supposed to sit in the back, but it has never stopped you and no one has ever mentioned your habit to you.
Really, you tried to sit in the restaurant for the longest time, then tried to sit in the far corner in the dark but had scared too many guests to continue. After years of testing out new positions to hide, you had eventually given up and decided it really was best to just sit in the back—avoiding guests who had weirdly quiet footsteps seeing you with your laptop.
Dex does not argue that reading is not being busy.
He moves from the door frame, sitting on the couch in front of the TV, in direct line of the front desk though from his angle he can’t see what you’re reading.
He has the papers directly in front of him: answer key to the left, ungraded in the middle, graded to the right.
His natural state is obsessively observant, he knows that it is not you who needs to look busy, but him: the one who’s out of place, who doesn’t have a room and only visits the hotel because he hates that you work overnight.
So intensely that Dex had once sent your immediate notice to quit via email when you were sleeping, your manager had replied by asked for additional time to hire a replacement and you had lied, managed to keep that fucking job.
He had thought you’d go along with him—that’s all you had to fucking do but Dex had a fundamental misunderstanding of your character based on what he wanted to see and you had thought it was time he woke the fuck up.
You had been mad at him, but he had thought he could’ve smoothed it over. You just had to listen to him, see his point of view, how much he loved and cared for you and just wanted the best for you.
He hadn’t. Dex was used to picking fights: challenging you to see how much you’d fight for him.
That fight had been different, an entirely different game than he had meant to play. He had stepped on the field expecting baseball, but you came on with a tennis racket.
Even now, you don’t realize how close he was to killing you—he had never told you. Dex hadn’t wanted to hurt you, but you had been forcing his hand.
Why couldn't you see that Dex was just trying to protect you? Wasn't it obvious? As he was pressing all of his weight into keeping you pinned to the floor, he had completely engulfed your smaller form.
Dex was the dragon and you, his captive princess. All your fault it was, you were making him do this.
‘I’m so sorry, I’m sorry, I don’t want to hurt you.’ This could’ve all been avoided—you just had to quit. You didn’t need that shitty minimum wage job—you had Dex, you had your full-time job. People fought tooth and nail to land where you had stumbled.
It didn’t matter how little academia paid, that being a professor was more something you did out of sheer love and determination. Dex would cover everything else—he was all you needed. ‘I’m sorry, sorry, so sorry.’ Repeating something don’t make it true.
He wouldn’t forget the vibrancy of panic as he pushed your face harshly into the hardwood, grappling with you to reach your phone. It had calmed him, just a lapse that hardly lasted a second—you were never supposed to look at him like that, the deer-in-the-headlights sort of shock as if you were seeing him for the first time. In that brief pocket of time where Dex thought you might’ve hated everything you saw.
It was just enough for you to shift away from his hold, just slightly, just enough for you to twist around and pull your foot up to kick him, first blow landing against his nose, second against his jaw. It stunned him, out of the character, you were changing the script. Dex fell slightly to the side, the intent more painful than the contact.
Then you were on him, hands on his neck, face bent down and contorted into a horrific sneer, ‘You ever, fucking touch my shit again—‘ he hadn’t been able to breathe, but fuck if that hadn’t driven the point in. Dex reached up, hands digging into your wrists but didn't attempt to pry them away--just holding, if anything, keeping them in place.
‘I’ll fucking kill you.’ you were sitting on his chest, knees digging into the sides of his torso and pressing every ounce of force you had into your grip on his neck, painful, bruising and violent.
He had never been more aroused, your hands were so small in comparison to his neck. It added to the thrill, how much you wanted to hurt him, how far you were wiling to go for it.
‘You ever fucking touch me like that again?’ you used that force to lift his head and slam it violently back into the ground, ‘I’ll fucking kill you.’ You snarled, spit flying from your mouth as you did and Dex? Oh he had been right where he wanted to be—your actions were entirely unexpected, clashing violently against his idolized version of you, but he was delirious with pleasure, with adoration.
In that moment, when black dots were dancing in Dex’s vision and he was bordering on unconsciousness, he loved you and you, were perfect for him. There he was, every horrific, violent part of him parroted in your eyes.
Yet, you still managed to be good. Steadfast, a lighthouse to guide, a safe harbor to dock at. There was hope for him.
At least until you changed your passcode and didn’t give him the new one until a week later when he was crying so profusely his body was violently shuddering with his pathetic, desperate sobs as snot was dribbling down his chin after having cycled through the seven stages of grief before trying to challenge you to see if you would leave, then becoming terrified you might actually take him up on his offer before settling on desperately trying to tether you to him by insisting he would kill himself if you left him.
You had looked at him, really looked at him. Every pathetic, disgusting part of him and thought back to your own life. You had always told yourself that you would never be the angry man— it was a part of you, but not everything that you were. You would never be the person that made someone dread to come home.
There had been a deviation somewhere, a fork in the road that you had taken while Dex had remained. You could recognize the familiar patterns of his violent tendencies. Sure, he had hurt you, but his neck was still covered in vibrant bruises from when you had choked him, the ones on his face had mostly faded. In comparison, you had some sparse bruising on your ribs and torso where he had held you down but you had beat his head against the hardwood with enough rage that Dex had been laying in a pool of his own blood and a concussion.
With that, you settled on giving him your new passcode with the stipulation he would get back on his fucking antipsychotics.
Tough bargain that paid off in the end because he’s still here, with you and knows that your night hasn’t been easy, so he obediently sits and grades student papers.
Dex listens to your movement, listens to you walk in the kitchen, fiddling with the oven and then a pan. He knows what you're doing, can close his eyes and picture you with perfect clarity from the nights he had done nothing but obsessively catalogue your actions.
After ten minutes, you are behind him, leaning over his shoulder and pressing a kiss to his temple as you hold a hot chocolate in front of him.
When you move to pull away, Dex moves his head with your movement until you are pressing another kiss to his hairline. He reaches up, taking the hot chocolate from your hand resting in the space just above the ungraded papers.
out of everywhere you've woken up after a night out drinking, wakin' up in your sullen, vaguely scary neighbors apartment after too many drinks might be the worst one.
tw questionable morality
You reached towards the clipped metal of an unfamiliar bed frame, not quite registering the scene. The edges of your vision are blurry, memories past your third margarita simply flashes of movement, a firm touch guiding you, hands fumbling with keys, a chill spreading up your arms.
Everything was upside down, you were peaking through spaces between the curved metal and trying to identify what you saw within them: green cabinets, a table that looked shaky with hanging pots and utensils in the background.
Too minimalistic, too clean to be your own apartment. You were half to an explanation, almost there, groggy, still waking up and slow to register that this was your neighbors apartment. Something you only faintly recognized from when he had first moved in and you, being endlessly and abundantly curious about everything that didn’t concern you, leaned to the side to peak past him while your hands were full of sliced, carefully wrapped fruit for him.
Really, you just wanted to see what your neighbors were talking about. How mean could he be? You found he wasn’t really mean at all. He just had that sort of stern, solemn look to him—perpetually anticipating the worst. He was off-putting, definitely, a little awkward and he greeted you quietly, eyes always averted.
Your head was pounding, a consistent and aggressive force not dissimilar to the one threatening to split from your chest. You want to stand, wanted to communicate this to your legs that definitely should be, at minimum, working to stand. Then came the realization you were on your back—everything wasn’t upside, this wasn’t some demented tilt-a-whirl, you had been comfortably on your back, now you felt the bile begin to rise. You clamped your lips tightly shut, the mortification of potentially throwing up all over your too handsome neighbor’s apartment enough to make you feel the need to skip out on your lease.
You couldn’t fathom why you were here. Your stomach was clenching, the weighted blanket draped half-over your lower half was too warm, almost burning. Who used a heated blanket in the summertime? You lowered your hand, searching for the fabric to toss it off but brushed against something very, very soft and too much like hair. Your hand stiffened, the weighted blanket moved, the weighed blanket let out a soft hum then looked up at you with eyes that were horrifically clear, aware.
The scene in front of you snapped into place. You were on your back, in a shirt that was too big, too soft, most definitely not the tiny minidress that you had left in. You were unbearably sore, and this was your neighbor laying on you—whose name you still didn’t know, something, something with a ’T’? Or was it a ‘D’? A ‘B’? though Mrs. Smithers had introduced the two of twice. You had once received mail for a ‘Benjamin’ that matched his address and he had taken it, though you swore you had heard another man call him something with a ‘D’’??
You hadn’t been sure when a good time to casually ask for his name was before and now, with him situated between your spread thighs wearing only his boxers and, your eye twitched, his socks, with his arms wrapped under your legs as he used your stomach as a pillow for his head you didn’t think that casual scenario would ever appear.
You swore his muscles rippling with just his breathing.
Even in your most depraved, filthiest imagining he had never been this built. You also hadn’t anticipated the excessive scars that covered him, especially the long, jagged surgical scar that went up the length of his spine. Your face heated at the sheer extent of the reddened marks from nails you assumed to be yours, immediately looking away. You needed to focus on the task at hand: find your underwear, find any article of clothes that belonged to you.
You didn’t get a chance to, as he began to gently push the shirt that was most definitely his up, slowly, until if he had pushed up just slightly more, your pussy would’ve been exposed. “W-wa-wait!” Your hands went beside his, pushing down at the fabric.
“We’re neighbors.” You reminded.
He tilted his head, a movement too innocent for the devious quirk of his mouth—a man satisfied, smug and still annoyingly endearing.
You couldn’t remember stumbling home, you couldn’t remember running into him and more importantly, couldn’t remember why you were so sore, but in that moment, you would’ve given anything to relieve it.
“I— Make me breakfast first, at least.” His chest rumbled with laughter, the sensation vibrating against your stomach,
His studio was cast in the warmth of gentle sunlight, this was the type of moment that existed only in cheesy romcoms where your neighbor should’ve been looking up with a twinkle in his eyes, excitement should’ve been coursing through you--this should’ve been the beginning of the rest of your life.
This should’ve been a whirlwind romance waiting to happen, this was how they began, after all: the startling attractive neighbor, the one-night stand, him draped over her with a lazy smile. It was something so casual, so perfect, something so cliche, something you innately felt to be practiced.
None of that was happening. This wasn’t a romcom. You found the stillness in his eyes to be deeply unsettling. You felt yourself waiting for his mouth to split open, to stretch unnaturally into a gaping, toothy maw and for him to swallow your head whole, then bite it clean off your body.
In this moment, your neighbor was less man and more unpredictable monster. This was the man who always looked like he was having the worst day of his life, this was the stern man you waved at and watched the three second delay as he tried to remember how to be a person and move his hand in a weak wave back after your cheery ‘good morning’s.
He more thousands of red flags bundled together in the shape of a man so attractive that despite every ounce of reason within you telling you otherwise, you found your hands snaking through his short, messy blonde hair, “I like my eggs over easy, with both salt and pepper please.”
It started with a fucking software update. You were the tech-wiz, the specialist who could navigate any system with a few clicks of a mouse. He was the grizzled veteran, a legend in the field who could disassemble and reassemble a rifle blindfolded but couldn't figure out how to connect his laptop to the projector. Captain Price had assigned you to 'show him the ropes,' a phrase that now made you want to laugh hysterically.
You’d leaned over Ghost’s shoulder, your breast pressing softly against his bicep as you pointed at the screen. "So, you just right-click here, and select 'duplicate display.' See? Simple."
He’d grunted in response, a low, non-committal sound. But he hadn't been looking at the screen. He'd been staring at the curve of your neck, the way your hair fell from your loose ponytail, the sweet scent of your vanilla shampoo. You were wearing a soft, pink top that day, with a heart-shaped neckline that dipped just low enough to show the swell of your breasts. When you leaned forward to grab the mouse, the fabric gaped, offering him a brief, maddening glimpse of your lacy bra.
And that's when it happened. A hot, sharp pang of arousal, his cock stirring in his cargos, thickening and hardening with a speed that was both shocking and humiliating. He was a man who controlled every aspect of his life, his body a finely-tuned weapon. And yet, here he was, getting a raging hard-on from a glimpse of lace and the scent of vanilla, all from a girl young enough to be his daughter. He’d shifted in his seat, gritting his teeth behind the mask. "Got it," he’d rasped, his voice rougher and heavier than usual. "You can go."
You’d given him a curious look but hadn't pushed it. You just gathered your things and left, oblivious to the absolute storm you'd unleashed inside him.
That night, Simon Riley jacked off with a ferocity that scared him. He came to the thought of your plump, soft ass in those tight tactical pants, the memory of your tits, so fucking perfect, spilling from that ridiculous top. He came so hard his vision went white, and the shame that followed was a cold, bitter pill. He was twice your age, your lieutenant. He was a pervert, a dirty old man lusting after the sweet young thing on his squad. He told himself it was a one-time thing, a moment of weakness brought on by a dry spell.
He was wrong.
It became a constant, low-grade torture. Every mission, every briefing, every training exercise was a minefield. He'd watch you on the firing range, your stance perfect, your brow furrowed in concentration, and he'd imagine that young look on your face as he fucked you slow, deep, and brutal. He'd see you laughing with Johnny, your head thrown back, your throat exposed, and he'd fantasize about wrapping his hand around it, feeling your pulse flutter against his palm while he stretched you open. He tried to keep it professional, throwing up walls of gruff indifference. But he was obsessed. He started finding excuses to be near you, to catch another whiff of your perfume, to see that heart-shaped neckline. He told himself it was just to ensure your safety, that he was just being a good LT. It was a blatant lie.
You weren't any better. You'd gone back to your room that first day and pressed your thighs together, your panties damp with arousal. You'd thought about the sheer power in his body, the gravel in his voice when he said 'got it.' The guys your own age were disappointing. They were fumbling, cocky boys who thought a quick rutt was the pinnacle of pleasure. They didn't have the knowing, dominant look in Simon's eyes. They didn't have hands that could probably snap you in half but would hold you with a surprising, possessive tenderness. You started trying to get his attention, wearing your hair down, choosing softer tops, 'accidentally' dropping your pen in front of him. You craved his gaze on you, the forbidden heat of it. You wanted to know if you affected a grown, hardened killer the way he affected you.
The breaking point came during a late-night gear check. The armory was empty, the only sound the hum of the fluorescent lights. You were checking your vest, your back to him, when he approached.
"Your strap's loose," he said, his voice close to your ear, the deep rumble vibrating through your spine.
You turned, and he was right there, a towering wall of muscle and barely restrained, older need. His eyes were dark, fixed on your mouth. "I can fix it," you whispered, your heart hammering against your ribs.
He didn't move. "Let me."
His hands, so large and calloused, moved to your hips, his thumbs brushing the bare skin where your shirt had ridden up. The touch was electric. He pulled the strap tight with agonizing slowness, his knuckles intentionally dragging against the underside of your breast. Your breath hitched.
"Simon," you breathed, a question and a plea all at once.
"This is a bad idea," he growled against your lips, even as his hand slid up to palm your breast, squeezing it hard.
"The worst," you agreed, arching into his touch, your hands fumbling with his belt buckle.
The conversation that followed, between frantic kisses and discarded clothes, was the most honest you'd ever had. You told him about the immature boys, the unsatisfying encounters. He told you about the loneliness, the years of rigid discipline that had left him starved for a connection that wasn't just physical.
"I wanna be dirty with you," you confessed, your hand finally wrapping around the thick, heavy length of his cock. It was perfect—thick, so thick you could barely get your fingers wrapped around it, with a heavy, prominent vein that ran up the underside. The head was a flushed, angry red, leaking pre-cum constantly, a slick bead that you couldn't help but lean forward and lick away, savoring the salty, musky taste of him.
Simon hissed, his eyes rolling back.
"I wanna do all the things they were too scared to do."
"Fuck," he groaned, his hips thrusting into your fist. "You have no idea what you're askin' for, sweetheart."
"Show me," you demanded, dropping to your knees before him. "Show me how a real man fucks."
Si was a man of control, of discipline, but with you, that control shattered completely. He kissed you like he was starving, like he was trying to crawl down your throat. His tongue was everywhere, licking into your mouth, tasting you, demanding you taste him back. The kisses were wet, filthy, obscene. He sucked on your tongue, a groan rumbling in his chest that made your pussy clench around nothing.
When he had you naked, spread out for him on the armory table, the real depravity began. He loved your ass. He spanked it first, the sharp crack of his hand against your young flesh echoing in the room, leaving a red handprint that he'd later kiss better. You were writhing on the table, begging for more, for him, for anything.
Then he spread your cheeks, his breath hot against your most private place. "Simon, please," you whimpered, a mix of shame and desperate need in your voice.
He didn't answer with words. He just leaned down and licked a long, slow stripe over your tight hole. The sensation was so wrong, so intense, that you saw stars. He didn't just do it; he devoured you. His tongue was pointed and firm, pressing against the furled muscle, circling it, probing it. The sounds he made were utterly nasty—wet, lewd slurps and groans of pleasure as he ate your ass like it was his last meal.
And while he was doing that, his fingers were at your pussy, playing with your slick folds, spreading your wetness. He pushed two fingers inside you, curling them to hit that spot, all while his tongue was still working your ass. The dual stimulation was overwhelming, a mind-breaking pleasure that had you sobbing his name.
He didn't care about the mess. He didn't care about anything except making you fall apart. He talked to you while he did it, his voice a low, dirty murmur against your skin. "You like that, don't you, you dirty girl? Like an old man tongue-fuckin' your tight little arse? Gonna make you come so hard, babygirl."
And he did. Every single time. You came with a scream, your body shaking. And Simon, your perverted, perfect Simon, was right there to catch you, to hold you, and to whisper in your ear how much he loved his filthy little girl.
When he first pushed his dick inside you, it was a stretch that bordered on pain, a delicious, burning fullness that stole your breath. You had to claw at his back, your nails digging into the hard muscle as he worked himself in, inch by agonizing inch.
"Breathe, love," he groaned, his voice strained. "Just breathe. You can take it. You're gonna take all of this cock."
And you did. Because you wanted to. You needed to. Once he was fully seated, he paused, his massive body trembling with the effort of holding still. You felt it pulsing inside you, a hot, living thing, and you were already overwhelmed.
Then he started to move. He didn't fuck you fast at first. He fucked you deep. Long, slow, grinding strokes that hit so deep you swore you could feel him in your belly. He watched your face the entire time, his dark eyes cataloguing every twitch of your expression, every gasp and moan that escaped your lips.
"That's it," he praised, his voice a low, dark rumble. "Look at you, takin' my fat cock like you were made for it. Such a tight little pussy, squeezin' me so good."
He loved to make you beg. He pulled out almost completely, leaving you empty and aching, until you were a whimpering mess, your hips lifting off the surface, trying to get him back inside.
"Simon, please," you begged, tears of frustration pricking your eyes. "Please, I need it. I need your cock."
"Where do you need it, sweetheart?" he taunted, the head of his cock just nudging your entrance. "Tell me how much you want it."
"In my pussy," you sobbed, shameless. "Please, fuck my pussy with your big cock. I need you to fill me up."
That's when he slammed back into you, setting a brutal pace that had the structure around you rattling. The sounds were obscene—the wet slap of his skin against yours, your own high-pitched, youthful moans mixing with his deep, guttural grunts.
"That's my girl," he growled, his hand wrapping around your throat, not squeezing, just a possessive, grounding weight. "Ride my cock, baby. Take it all."
You did. You took everything he gave you, the pleasure so intense it bordered on pain, your whole body trembling with the force of his thrusts. He'd turned you into a trembling, begging mess, just like he wanted. He fucked you against the shelves, your legs wrapped around his waist, whispering the most depraved things in your ear.
"You like this, don't you? Like being fucked by an old pervert? God, you're so tight, so fuckin' perfect."
You were obsessed. You were addicted to the taste of him, the feel of him, the delicious wrongness of it all. You sucked his cock like it was your new religion, loving the way his hands would fist in your hair, the way he'd lose his composure, his quiet grunts turning into deep, guttural groans.
He was just as gone on you. The way you looked up at him with wide, innocent eyes as you swallowed him down, the way you screamed his name when he made you come, the way you begged for more—it was a fucking revelation. He'd never felt this desperate, this utterly consumed by someone whom he was actively corrupting.
And when he came, it was with a roar of your name. His cock jerked inside you, and you felt the hot, thick spurts of his cum painting your insides, so much of it that it started to leak out around his shaft, trickling down your thighs.
"Attagirl," he panted, his hips still moving, still fucking his cum deeper into you. "Fuck, I'm fillin' you up, baby. Gonna keep you full of me all night."
But the best part, the part that made you utterly his, was that he didn't stop. Even after he was finished, even after he had emptied himself inside you, his cock stayed hard. He kept moving, using his own cum as lube, the filthy, wet sounds getting louder, more lewd.
"Simon," you whimpered, overstimulated, your body already exhausted.
"One more," he grunted, his mouth crashing down on yours. "Gimme one more, sweetheart. I know you can. Cum on my cock again, fuck me empty, baby.”
And you did. You always did. You shattered around him again, your body a limp, sweaty, satisfied wreck. He was your LT, your pervert, your own personal drug, and you wouldn't have it any other way. You loved being his dirty little secret, the one he fucked into oblivion and then held so tenderly afterward.
It became your secret, a filthy, thrilling addiction. You'd find hidden corners of the base, steal moments between missions. He'd bend you over his desk, or you'd ride him in the front seat of his car in the darkened motor pool. The conversation flowed as freely as the sex, a mix of dark humor, shared trauma, and explicit fantasies. You'd talk about everything and nothing, your connection deepening with every dirty word and whispered confession.
One night, after a particularly grueling mission, you were both too exhausted to even make it to the bed. You lay on the floor of his quarters, a tangle of limbs and sweat-slick skin.
"I'm ruined for other men, you know," you murmured, tracing a scar on his chest. "No one's ever gonna fuck me like you do."
He let out a low, dark chuckle, pulling you closer. "Good," he rumbled, his lips brushing your temple. "Because I'm a selfish, perverted old man, and I'm never letting you go."
And in the quiet darkness, with the scent of sex and gun oil hanging in the air, you knew he was right. You were his, completely and utterly, and you wouldn't have it any other way.
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Benjamin Poindexter x fem!Reader
warning: fluff!
A/N: If Dex ever complimented me just know I’d jump on him.
You were sitting on the kitchen counter while Dex made coffee, one leg swinging against the cabinet below. The apartment was quiet except for the sound of the coffee maker and the occasional clink of a mug against the countertop. It was one of those mornings where neither of you had anywhere urgent to be.
You were halfway through scrolling on your phone when you noticed him looking at you. I mean, Dex looked at you a lot.
What was unusual was that he’d stopped what he was doing entirely. He was standing in front of the coffee machine with one hand resting on the counter, gaze fixed on you with that intense focus that made it feel like he was studying every detail at once.
You lowered your phone. “What?”
His eyes flicked briefly to your face before he answered.
“Your hair looks beautiful today.” You blinked.
“Oh.” You say and Dex nodded once, as if that settled the matter, then turned back toward the coffee maker. Meanwhile, your brain completely stopped functioning.
Because the thing was, you hadn’t done anything special. You’d barely brushed your hair this morning before leaving it down. There had been no effort involved or whatever, which somehow made the compliment worse. A few seconds passed before Dex looked back over his shoulder.
“Why are you smiling?” Immediately, your smile disappeared.
“I’m not.”
“You are.”
“I’m literally not.”
“You were.” You groaned quietly and hid your face behind your phone. From across the kitchen, Dex frowned slightly. He seemed genuinely confused by your reaction, which honestly made sense. Dex rarely gave compliments to be charming. If he noticed something, he simply said it. To him, there wasn’t anything particularly extraordinary about it.
But there was something extraordinary about it to you.
“Dex.”
“What?”
“You can’t just say stuff like that.”
His eyebrows pulled together immediately. “Like what?”
You lowered the phone enough to look at him. “Compliments.”
“But your hair does look nice.” The answer came so quickly and so sincerely that your face instantly warmed. Dex noticed this immediately. His eyes narrowed slightly as realization began to dawn on him. You could practically see the moment he connected the dots.
“Oh.”
“No.”
“You get embarrassed.”
“Dex.”
“You do.”
You pointed at him accusingly. “Don’t start.”
“I’m not doing anything.” The corner of his mouth twitched upward. Not a full smile, but close enough.
“You’re looking way too pleased with yourself right now.” He considered that for a second. Then his gaze moved over your face again, completely unbothered.
“You look pretty when you blush. My pretty Woman.” Dex immediately knew he’d won. Not because he’d meant to fluster you, not even because he’d been teasing. He simply looked at your expression afterward and realized the compliment had landed exactly the way he’d hoped.
A small smile finally appeared on his face as he stepped closer and handed you your coffee. Your cheeks were still warm. Dex looked entirely too satisfied about it.
“See?” he said quietly. You accepted the mug with a groan.
“Dex.” You warn him but his smile only widened slightly.
“Okay Okay, no need to get angry, pretty woman.” Ugh, is he trying to kill you?
On the millionth re-listen of ARIRANG, I’m once again blown away at 1) the song lineup and 2) the verses of every member as an ARMY who has been waiting for their return for literal YEARS 😭
thinking about dex using his abilities to annoy the shit out of you, like taking off his jacket when he gets home, tossing it and every single time without fail it hits you square on the face, makes him chuckle when you groan out his name in frustration
going to hand you your fancy coffee drink after picking it up for you at the counter but then he fake drops it before swiftly catching it with his other hand without spilling a single drop, he likes the way you squeal in reaction
throwing sofa pillows at you knowing that when you try to retaliate hes gonna catch them midair or dodge them completely, he thinks its the funniest thing ever, the pathetic and unsuccessful attempt to get revenge on him
telling him to go easy on you (let you win) at darts or bowling on nights out with friends, he says "sure" and then proceeds to annihilate you in front everyone, a snide smile on his face when he asks "s'everything okay?" at your pouting
trying to close the door of your room for some privacy when you need to change but right before you manage to do it dex flings and ricochets an object so it's blocking and keeping it from shutting completely
constantly telling you to "open up" because he wants to toss candies or grapes or whatever hes snacking on into your wide open mouth, the farther away you are from him the better, he sees it as a fun little challenge
while everyone else mistakes your quietness for disinterest, dex catches the tiny things - the way you lower your eyes when someone compliments you, how you linger just outside conversations before slipping away, how your voice gets softer when you’re nervous.
he secretly loves being the only person who gets to hear your real laugh. around other people it’s quiet, always hidden behind your hand, but when you’re alone with him it slips out freely. every single time it happens, he pauses for just a second, watching you with the smallest, barely noticeable smile.
“…there it is,” he murmurs.
your shyness makes you hesitant to ask for affection, which means dex learns to read you instead. he’ll notice you hovering nearby while pretending to look at something else, the tiny glances you keep stealing at him, the way your fingers fidget with your sleeves. without a word, he’ll open one arm. you shuffle over almost immediately, resting against his side. “…better?” he asks. you nod into his shoulder. “mhm.”
he finds your tendency to hide behind him endearing. crowded streets, loud environments, unfamiliar people - you’ll unconsciously drift until you’re standing just behind his shoulder. after a while, he starts shifting slightly to make room without even thinking about it.
because you’re so reserved, every little sign of affection from you means everything to him. if you reach for his hand first, if you lean your head on his shoulder without being prompted, if you quietly mumble, “I missed you,” when he comes home - it stays with him for days. he doesn’t react in the moment, but later that night he’ll pull you just a little closer while the two of you lie in bed, silently replaying those moments in his mind.
your shyness means you’re constantly apologizing for taking up space. dex hates it. every time you murmur, “sorry,” for something insignificant, he gently interrupts. “don’t apologize, you didn’t do anything wrong.” eventually he starts placing a finger beneath your chin whenever you apologize unnecessarily, making you look at him until you smile instead.
dex has spent most of his life hiding every genuine emotion he has. you wear yours all over your face without realizing it. he knows exactly when you’re excited because your eyes brighten before you even smile. he knows when you’re anxious because you start twisting your rings. he knows when you’re trying not to cry because your lips press together just a little tighter.
“I can hear you thinking.” he says.
“…how do you know?”
“because I know you.”
one of the first things dex notices is that you instinctively make yourself smaller. when a waiter accidentally gets your order wrong, you smile and say it’s fine. when someone interrupts you, you simply stop talking. it bothers him more than he’d ever admit. after watching it happen one too many times, he starts speaking before you can. “she ordered the tea, not coffee.” his voice is calm, almost detached.
you glance up at him, surprised. afterward, you mumble, "dex, you didn’t have to.”
he looks at you for a second. “I wanted to.”
he loves when you hide your face in his chest after he compliments you. at first he thinks you’re embarrassed. then he realizes you’re smiling too much to look at him. from then on, he starts whispering compliments just to feel you curl into him. “you’re beautiful.” you let out the tiniest groan, face disappearing into his jacket. he rests his chin on your head, a faint smile tugging at his lips.
there are times when your quiet nature worries him. after everything he’s experienced, silence can make his thoughts spiral. if you spend too long lost in your own head, he’ll glance over more often than he’d like to admit. “you okay?” he’ll ask. every single time you smile softly and answer, “just thinking.” only then does the tension leave his shoulders.
he never tries to change your personality. if anything, he protects it. he knows the world constantly expects louder, bolder people, but he likes that you’re soft. likes that your words are carefully chosen instead of rushed. likes that your kindness isn’t performative. one night, when you apologize for “being too quiet,” he looks at you for a long moment before gently taking your hand. his fingers intertwine with yours. “it’s one of my favorite things about you.”
you’re soft in every way he isn’t. where his voice is blunt, yours is hesitant. where his gaze is intense, yours is quick to drop. when strangers make eye contact, you smile politely. dex studies them until they look away first. the funny part is that you balance each other perfectly. people approach you because you seem approachable. they leave you alone because they eventually notice who’s standing beside you.
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“Oh?” Sukuna’s eyebrow piques. The slur of words not to be missed while you stand in front of him in the foyer. He looms over you, nonchalantly while his hands rest in his pockets.
“I told you,” you cut sharply, “I wasn’t done drinking and you just— Just dragged me out of there..”
he simply rolls his eyes, when your voice slips into a whine by the end of you sentence. “I want to go back now, or.. or..”
“you go buy me more alcohol. right now.” you order.
sigh.. the sight of his drunk girlfriend always has him figured the night has it in for him. You always drink to your heart’s content, drinking everything in sight like its water. But, cannot be tricked when it actually is water.
“nu uh.” he shakes his head slowly, “what— no yes go get it now.”
Sukuna only shakes his head again, standing his ground. Holding in the laugh thats trying to crumble the corner of his lips with the way steam is basically blowing out of your nose after huffing and puffing. “Fine. you’re so useless, I’m gonna get it myself.”
he watches you turn around, the turn being very.. off center, then you turn back around just as quickly, “careful might give yourself whiplash.”
“Shut up.” you fuse watching him smirk like this was a game but you’re absolutely serious, your brows hold in a tight curl against your forehead. “And another thing—”
he leans down, cutting you off by pressing a soft kiss to your lips. pulling back further enough to hover over your lips, “hmm?”
stunned in place, you press your index finger against his chest, “you—”
he does it again, “yes? me?”
his lips lifting into a smile, his eyes narrowing just slightly, watching a vein almost pop on the side of your head, “you- you think this is funny huh?”
you scoff, poking your tongue on the inside of your cheek. “I don’t have to listen to you.”
you turn on your heel attempting to walk out the door, caught by his grip, pulling you against him and peppering your cheek with kisses, “nu uh, where you going?”
“No! Nono—” you scream and squirm in his grasp, using your hands to push him away from burying his face into the side of yours, “Ugh! Stop it!”
“What? can’t hear you?” he holds you tighter, sticking his tongue out to lick a long stripe from your jawline to the side of your nose.
your movements stiffen immediately, eye twitching. “Ewwwww!!!”
your shriek has him hauling you up in his arms, small rough chuckles leaving him, “ooopppsss, let’s go clean you up.”
“Ryo! put me down, I still want drinks!” he ignores you, ignores the way you kick and try to pull yourself from him. Pushing the door open to your bedroom and flopping on the bed with you, throwing his leg over yours. Trapping you and kissing the other side of your face.
His grip never loosening, he waits for you to tire yourself out. When you get drunk it’s the most you say and the loudest you talk in such little time, now while you can be a bit much to deal with on a Friday night he loves it.
“Let’s see.. a kiss here..” he smooches behind your ear, “hmm.. a kiss there…”
a smooch on your temple. short of breath, your chest rises and falls, huffing and puffing as you finally begin to wind down, groaning when his hand comes up to grip your face.
Sukuna finds it the most efficient way to deal with you whenever you’re frustrated with him. To just smother you in affection, and it works
after you pass out from trying to get away from him.
♡ TW: kidnappning, captivity, cannibalism, gore, nonchalant reader, casual mention of asexuality, dark humor but leaning more toward what I'd call morbid absurdity?
♡ FEM reader
♡ AN: normal au, idk this is more comedic than what i normally write, originally a gag response to this post, put it got long...
You wake up groggy somewhere clean and classy.
The ceiling is tall, the furniture expensive—marble floors and Egyptian sheets—and none of it is any familiar whatsoever.
“Hello?” you call out, despite not seeing or hearing the hints of anyone, clutching the comforter to yourself with eyes still adjusting, blinking as you take everything in, getting more concerned as you do.
Did you get fucked up yesterday or what?
Surely not so fucked up you can’t remember booking yourself into a five-star hotel, right?
And yet, by the looks of it, you must have.
It should be more concerning, and yet, “Please, God, don’t let it be in my name,” is the prioritized thought. You’re so broke, you couldn’t even afford a fucking motel room right now, let alone whatever the fuck kind of grand suite this is.
You get up, only then noticing you’re dressed in a silk night gown—which only further distresses you with thoughts about the bill. Clothes nowhere in sight—at least not anything you can recognize as your own. But, laying on the dresser is a pretty little number, with a tiny little note on top.
“Wear me,” you read out loud. Face puzzled with a grimace, before further talking to yourself out loud, mumbling, “What the fuck Alice in Wonderland type shit is this? Did I go home with a freak?”
Confused as shit, you leave the dress where it is while looking around some more. The more you do, you start noticing things that make you start thinking this might be someone's house rather than a hotel room.
Walking into what you thought might be a bathroom, you discover a walk-in closet instead. Fully stocked with clothes. Expensive shit. Classy. And a little creepy, how it’s all solely in different shades of red. Your pajamas too, and the dress laid out. Someone must have a serious preference.
“Where the fuck am I at right now…”
Starting to freak out just a bit, you don’t try any more doors in favor of quickly finding the stairs. Soft in your step, you make your way down them warily. And on your way, you start hearing the tell-tale noise of another’s presence.
Cooking noises—pots and pans and the sound of a whirring fan. It smells good too.
You don’t think he—whoever he is—notices you. But standing with his back to you, shirtless, you sure notice him. He’s got broad shoulders and a toned back stocked with muscles, his waist snatched in a black apron. Hair dyed baby pink of all colors.
Yeah… you definitely got fucked up yesterday because who the fuck is this guy?
You decide against sticking around to find out. One-night-stands are only made weirder when they progress into the day thereafter, and you think you might just be able to make your way over to the door without being heard if you tip-toe it.
You throw it a glance from where you’re hiding around the corner. You can’t spot any shoes.
Shit, how’re you supposed to—
“Door’s locked,” the man informs over his shoulder, switching off the fan before turning around. He then walks up to the breakfast bar placed in the forefront of the kitchen, tray in hand full with a arrangement of bacon, eggs, juice and other morning classics.
He sets out two plates before sitting down.
He’s got face-tattoos—crazy ones that would be impossible not to notice. And yet, crazy as they are, they seem somewhat familiar. His hair is newly washed, hanging in curly bangs just above a pair of eyes that lean more toward the burn in auburn, but are all in all jaded as he starts eating without further acknowledging you.
“I’m sorry—” you squeak as you pop out of hiding, suddenly reminded of how you're still just standing there. “Sneaking out’s not usually my style, but–” A nervous laugh only seems appropriate as you start explaining yourself with theoretic excuses, “I must have taken something weird yesterday ‘cause I don’t remember how I got here at all. I don’t even remember going out—”
“You were on your way home from that shitty burger joint you work at,” he says, mouth full of toasted bread. “I took the liberty of burning your uniform. It was an offence to the art of cuisine.”
You’d just taken a seat on the opposite side of him, having accepted the awkward morning for what it was worth—a funny story for later, you’re sure. However, while the food is a good distraction, making your mouth water and your eyes wander, it’s not enough for you to disregard the unattended confusion left by your utter blackout of the night prior—and neither is his sloppy efforts of helping you navigate it.
“I’m sorry, what?”
He, on the other hand, seems more interested in the food, negligent when explaining, “I laid out a dress for you. I won’t force you to wear it, but you won’t be getting that retched thing you were wearing back, so you might as well—”
“Yeah, no, whatever—” you dismiss, shaking your head with a muddled expression—as if your uniform is the thing on your mind right now. “That doesn’t really explain how I got here?”
Again, helping you with your amnesia doesn’t seem to be too much of a priority to the man as he shrugs with a “There isn’t much to know.”
For all his looks, he doesn’t really have the charm to compliment them. What a shame, you think disappointedly to yourself, watching him with a wrinkle between your brows, wondering why and when chivalry died, and why on earth you’d ever choose to go home with a guy so lacking in it.
“You finished your shift and were on your way home,” he continues, and you’re glad to finally be getting somewhere. “But you never made it, because, while still in the parking lot, I knocked you out with some chloroform, put you in my trunk, and took you here.”
Yeah, that’s the point your throat closes shut.
“What?”
A shiver rushes through you and you get out of your chair. Was that a joke? What, is he a fucking comedian suddenly?
“What the fuck’s going on?!”
He doesn’t acknowledge your hysteria, still just sitting there, eating breakfast as though a woman screaming at him is just another day in his life.
“Do I have to spell it out for you? It’s easy. I kidnapped you. End of story.”
Your mouth hangs open, staring at him, but alas, with the same lack of urgency as he’d had since the beginning, he just ignores your state of shock like it’s something he can’t be bothered to deal with.
Instead, ordering you to “Now come. Sit. Eat,” as if that was more important than explaining himself. “Your system’s still full of chemicals. Gotta eat to flush ‘em out.”
Is he seriously asking you to eat breakfast?
“No drugs this time. Promise,” he adds shortly, as though you’d had the time to form the concern, while still busy trying to make sense of him offering breakfast in the first place after having confessed to kidnapping you.
The more you repeat it, the less sense it seems to make.
“And before you get any wild ideas. No, I’m not going to force myself on you either. That’s not the reason you’re here.”
Yet another thought that hadn’t had the time to cross your mind.
Just a short moment ago, you’d thought this whole thing was a drunk one-night-stand and now you’re learning that not even one part of that was true. Your brain isn’t able to keep up with the new reality, leaving you to stand there, finding little to no answers wracking your brain, making you feel at a loss like an insect trapped in a mason jar.
In the end, you’re only able to come up with reiterations of the same question, pertaining to “Then what the fuck? Why? What do you want?”
But even that seems to annoy him, only answering you with an unsympathetic “Not important for you to know,” before repeating himself, more sternly than before, “Now eat before it gets cold.”
Standing there a moment longer, your thoughts wander back to the door behind you and your shoeless feet and the possibility of you outrunning him, then remember his first comment about the locked door and how it meant you’d probably have no luck in getting out even if you could make it there first.
And then, in the midst of your train of thought regarding your next move, utterly unprompted and with seriously questionable timing given the current predicament, your stomach decides to growl.
You earn his eye-contact with that, the both of you staring at each other for a moment that ends up bordering on a while.
And in that while, you decide to table all ideas about trying to run, fight, or hide.
Sure, they’d have been more reasonable reactions, but none seemed like they’d bear any good results at the moment. And so, going against all reason, you end up doing as he had suggested. Indeed, eating would do you some good, you agree while sitting back down, fork in hand as you start piling up your plate.
While stuffing your face, you steal a look at him once or twice. He doesn’t return it—content with you eating while still equally busy stuffing his own face.
You don’t know… outside the fact that this stranger had just admitted to kidnapping you and divulged his intentions of keeping you hostage here, there’s something even odder going on. And that is that he doesn’t seem like a complete stranger at all…
Yeah… something about him is extremely familiar, but you can’t quite put your finger on it. You’re sure you haven’t met him—not face to face at least—but you can’t shake the feeling as if you’ve seen him somewhere before…
And that’s when it hits you.
“Wait… I know you!” you exclaim once it finally clicks, pointing a finger at him. “You’re that chef—the one who hosts that cooking show that makes all the contestants cry. What’s it called… Kitchen something…”
You snap your fingers, trying to trigger the memory. Whether the method is due credit or not is anyone’s guess, but in any case, you end up remembering.
“Malevolent Kitchen!”
You knew you’d seen those tattoos before. Of course! It’s honestly kind of odd it didn’t come to you any sooner. But you’ve never seen him with his hair down like that, nor were you ever a big fan of the show either.
Still, you recall the name after a few more snaps with your fingers. “Sukuna—Ryomen Sukuna. Right?”
“Correct.” He doesn’t give you more credence other than that, nor does he seem to care much that you figured it out either.
You weigh the possibility of all this being some new type of prank show, but the thought quickly proves too unikely—even when competing with the likelihood of him having kidnapped you off the streets for no good reason. But who knows? All prank shows start off with a shitty premise, after all…
You continue eating. Thinking about the show. You’re not sure if it’s still running. But you do recall hearing something about it a few years back.
There’d been a scandal or something, you think. Or no, not a scandal—more like a bad rumour. One of those stupid Tiktok trends. What was it again? You remember your friends discussing it—some saying it must have been some ploy designed by his rivals to make him run out of business, while others were certain it was actually a clever marketing trick designed to make more people check his restaurants out for themselves.
It was something stupid, and so you hadn’t given it much thought back then, but…
“Holy shit…” you announce once you remember.
True crime tiktokers—you remember now—missing girls and satanic cannibalistic shit.
“No way...” you accuse, dropping your scone onto your plate with a rattle. “Are you really a—”
Your head spins, unable to settle. And when it does, it proves only further unsettling, striking you with a sense of nausea.
“A cannibal?”
You’d hoped he’d laugh. Tell you that was crazy, then say something like you’ve just been pranked and prove to you that this really was all for some dumb reality show.
But he doesn’t.
No, he doesn’t say anything at all, like there’s no merit in even trying to deny it. Rather, he more or less confirms it, looking at you with a moderately impressed expression, like he’s surprised you figured it out so fast.
It fully dawns on you then.
“Oh God, that’s it, isn’t it?”
The sense of sickness deepens, making you look down at your plate in something akin to disgust.
And yet, while there should be a million other thoughts and regrets running though your mind, you can’t help but fret, wondering if breakfast was really going to be your final meal—a thought so depressing, it makes you throw your head back with a you-must-be-joking type of scoff, examining the ceiling above only to notice it being clinically white like in an asylum.
“Oh man, that’s just my luck,” you mutter to yourself more than anyone. “Fucking livestock.”
And then, you don’t know exactly why—it’s undefendable given everything at stake—but you snort as though it was all some big joke.
Suppose, the utter insanity of the morning had reached a summit then spilled over, staining you with it, because not before long you’re laughing, hands clutching the counter so that you don’t tip backwards while you fullheartedly cackle until you're left out right wheezing in your chair.
“Well…” you sigh after a while, with regards to the silver lining, “At least it's a nice cage.”
The man finds it odd, by the way of him, looking at you in silence, having ceased his eating with his hands kept passive beside his plate—not sure what to make of you.
You, on the other hand, reverse the roles and resume eating. Now, all but shoveling the contents on your plate into your mouth before looking up and further chirping, “Is there a jacuzzi in this place? It seems like the type of place to have a jacuzzi.”
Somewhat baffled, though not overly expressive, the man appraises you.
Then, with a pause, answers, “Upstairs.”
You push your barstool out after your final bite, cheering with the food still in your mouth “Score—” as though the reality of the situation went forgotten. “I'm gonna go check that out for a few hours.”
You’ve never been in a ritzy place like this before—it would be stupid not to reap the benefits while you still could. Given he’d just chowed down breakfast, he must not be planning on having you right this second. Besides, if he’s planning to kill and eat you, letting you use the jacuzzi is the least he could do.
You’re halfway to the staircase, when he calls out, “Just be done before dinnertime.”
You turn around and look at him at that, now with a new inquiry, “You’re cooking?”
So, is it safe to say he isn’t eating you at that point either? Maybe it’s more of a nightly thing? Suppose a thing like cannibalism would be better suited after midnight, given its satanic connotations and all, but you wouldn’t want to assume.
In any case, he nods his head, and you can’t think of anything to do but take it as another silver lining, saying, “Double score,” with a shrug before continuing on your path to the stairs.
But not before you’ve taken another step, he calls out a question, as though feeding the utter absurdity of the situation, “Any preferences?”
To which you just wave your hand, making your way to the second floor without stopping this time. “Nah, not really. ‘M not a foodie. Anything’s good!”
—
You’re in there for a while, he notes without bothering to check on you.
Even after several hours have passed by, all without a single sign of you, he decides to let you be.
He doesn’t mind being left undisturbed while cooking, but he won’t deny this type of behavior is new to him.
But perhaps it isn’t so strange. Maybe you’re just biding your time, thinking up ways of escape. A reasonable endeavor—though it won't do you any good. Try as you might, no one has ever come close.
He’ll enjoy watching your attempt nonetheless—all part of the fun.
And yet, despite expectations, you return on your own. Hair wet, skin flush, and fingers pruned as you go, looking refreshed of all things.
Not only that, but he can’t sense even a smidgen of ulterior motives in you—no fight or flight whatsoever. It’s exceedingly strange. None of his victims so far have ever approached him willingly after understanding their circumstances.
But then again, you hadn’t proved to be very normal at all so far.
You just take a seat before the decked dinner table, silently eyeing the bondage he’d typically have to use left around the chair’s arms and legs with mild curiosity, probably curious about how many had sat in the seat before you. And yet, you don’t ask him about it.
By the look on your face, it’s impossible to say if it even bothers you.
You’ve changed out of your pajamas into the dress he’d laid out. Bloodred on the darker side. Just according to the ritual. You’re certainly making things a lot easier than his previous victims. But he won’t say it’s any boring this way, at least not yet. Just for now, he’ll admit he’s even a little intrigued by you.
“Smells good,” you announce, breaking the silence, and he can’t help but further wonder over what an odd thing you’re revealing yourself to be, as he walks up and places your plate in front of you.
Usually, he’d have to threaten or force you—or the person in your place—to indulge him. You however? Not only are you willingly sitting there, you’ve already got cutlery in hand.
“Hmph,” he expresses in mild amazement, thinking, if you really weren’t going to make a fuss, he might as well just sit down as well.
It puts him out of sorts—makes him feel a little fidgety even—unable to make sense of your behavior as he is.
But then, despite looking ever ready to do so, you hold off on digging in. Instead eyeing the meat with a soft furrow between your brows as though assessing something.
It makes him halt. Thinking perhaps he was wrong—maybe he’ll have to force you after all.
Biting your lip, you look up at him through your lashes, eyeing him sheepishly for a small moment like you wanted to inquire about something, before you suddenly seem to banish the idea. Announcing with a shrug, “You know what? I’m not even gonna ask.”
You then cut yourself a piece of the steak. And after gathering a bit of everything on your fork, you proceed to put it in your mouth without any further ado.
He observes you while you swish it about on your tongue—though isn’t sure exactly what he’s looking for. He knows he’s an excellent chef, and so the idea of someone liking his food isn’t a foreign concept to him.
Still though, it’s unfamiliar to watch one of his victims enjoy themselves so much.
“Mh—mmmh!” you hum, pointing to the meat with your fork. “Okay, if this is what human tastes like, I think I might honestly get it.”
Oh, so that had been your earlier concern.
He supposes that’s not such a strange thing to suspect given you’d pieced his whole plan together so early…
Your worry is unfounded though. It’s not human meat. “It’s wagyu.” Even so, you’d eaten it despite not knowing. Forget surprised, he’s even a little impressed.
“Oh, so you don’t just eat women?” you ask then, putting another fork–full into your mouth.
He halts. “What?”
Carelessly, you continue eating while making what he hesitantly would refer to as small talk, “I thought the reports only said missing women?”
Oh, right. He chuckles.
“What’s so funny?” you ask.
This time, he’s the one to break into laughter as he finally takes his own seat opposite from you.
“Hello? What’s so funny?” you ask again.
“Wagyu isn’t a name. It’s a type of beef,” he informs.
You blink at the revealed information, then look down at your plate, a small “Oh,” leaving you, sounding almost a little disappointed. Which only further spurs his amusement with an even louder cackle, causing you to pout as you look back up, whining, “Man, shut up, I told you I wasn’t a foodie.”
Then you laugh as well, at yourself, “Well, whatever it is, it's really good!” before continuing to eat.
“It better be,” he states, beginning to eat as well. “It retails for three-hundred bucks.”
You choke then—just as expected of someone like you with seemingly no knowledge of finer foods—cutlery seizing all movement upon your plate, clutched tightly in your grip. “Excuse me, what?” Eyes wide, you gawk at him from across the table, loudly exclaiming, “That’s even crazier than being a cannibal!”
It’s entertaining to say the least. The way you eye the meat again, now with an incredulous expression, and a bit of hesitantancy—perhaps due to shame for having scarfed it down so fast without properly savoring it.
“I mean, it’s good, don’t get me wrong,” you begin saying after a moment of thoughtful silence. “But three hundred big ones, really?”
Looking up again, your eyes as big as the dinner plates, looking for answers from him as though he could somehow explain a refined palate to you.
But not before long, your stare narrows into a suspicious squint instead, cocking your head sideways with a slow shake. “Nah… you’re fucking with me again, aren’t you?” you accuse, pointing your fork at him with a grin as though you’re onto him about something. “It’s actually just—like—racoon meat or something. You didn’t actually buy beef for three franklins as feed for the livestock—that would just be plain crazy.”
He grabs the wine bottle stationed between you with a soft disapproving grunt—you really don’t know the first thing about food at all, do you? Popping the cork, he then fills your glass, explaining, “The best farmers buy the best feed. I wouldn't wanna fatten you up with anything less than what I’d put in my own mouth.”
You keep a look of disbelief on your face for a moment, mulling it over in your head. Whether you understand it or not is all the same to him. Still, it surprises him to see you grab your glass with another shrug, followed by an agreeing, “Right, when you put it like that, I guess it only makes sense.”
You really are an odd one… He’s still waiting for you to snap out of whatever false calm you’d fallen under, to watch you break down and be left as hysteric as all his prior prey had been. But nothing of the sort ever happens.
No, not at all.
Throughout the dinner you make a few more efforts at small talk, inquiring about what wagyu is amongst other things, accepting his curt answers for what meagre back-and-forth they offer. And in the end, after declaring your fullness, you straightforwardly ask him if he’s going to eat you that night or if he’s planning to save you for another day.
And after hearing him say no, you only say as much as “Right then,” with a big yawn, before further announcing, “If that’s all, I think I’ll go to bed. If that’s okay with you?”
It’s unusual for the evening to end so soon, given how much time he’d been prepared to dedicate to ensure its progression and completion. With all his prior prey, he’d have to all but forcefeed them—a process that would sometimes take up to several hours. But, given you’d cleaned your plate all on your own, he could see no reason to keep you any longer.
And so he dismisses you with a nod and a short “Sure.”
“I’m guessing the room I woke up in is still up for grabs?” you ask, being polite of all things as you carry your plate over to the sink, rinse it, and place it neatly in the dishwasher.
He doesn’t know how else to answer but return your casualness with his own. Saying, “Knock yourself out.”
You celebrate with a tiny “Nice!” before setting your sights to the stairs, then an even more peculiar exclamation of “Good night!” before finally disappearing.
Leaving him to sit there and mull in your wake. Grimacing once noticing too late how you’d hidden a few vegetables in the folds of your napkin…
—
True to his word, he doesn’t kill and eat you during the night.
The next couple of days pass just the same. You sleep alone in the same room you’d woken up in, you utilize the luxury during the day, he makes food, you eat together, and then you go back to sleep.
Strange as it is, it’s not so different from being on a vacation—or well, aside from wondering when he might decide to suddenly eat you, of course.
Still though, just the same as with vacation, the longer it lasts, the more not doing anything gets you feeling a little antsy.
Which is why, “Want any help?” you ask. Sitting by the breakfast bar, elbows propped on the counter, head resting on both palms, kicking your feet while staring at him rummage around, doing the work of five people.
He’s so wrapped up in it, you thought he didn’t notice you, but, similar to your first encounter, he keeps his back turned while addressing you as though he might have known you were there all along.
“You know how to cut an onion?” he asks.
To which you roll your eyes with a scoff, “I mean, I did work at a burger joint, so I would hope so.”
You decide to overlook his audacity and take it as an invitation, even though you’re sure he’d meant it as the opposite.
You ignore his side-eye as you relieve the onion of its coat and start cutting. Even as the man fully stops his own ministrations just to stare at you with arms crossed, you don’t bother.
In the end he doesn’t stop you, just mutters “Your technique is pitiful,” before returning to what he’d been doing—allowing you to continue despite his clear aversion.
“Man, whatever, I got paid minimum wage,” you dismiss with a laugh, finding his dourness funny. “Chopped onion’s chopped onion anyway, so don’t be a dick. And besides, that’s not what you should be worrying about.”
“Oh?” he retorts absentmindedly, without bothering to look at you.
You snicker, setting your hip to the counter, twirling the blade around with your hand while giving him a sly look. “If I were you, I’d be more worried about how I just armed the livestock with a knife.”
You’re being playful, of course, not serious. Even still, you know you’re pushing it, given the man’s your cannibalistic captor you shouldn't be goofing around with. But you can’t seem to help yourself. “I mean, how do you know I won't cut you?”
He still doesn't offer you a glance, but returns your snicker with his own. “You know what? I’d love to see you try.”
“Oh really? You have that much faith in yourself you can dodge a blade with absolute certainty?”
You’re bantering. You’re bantering with the man who plans to kill and eat you. And despite all logic, it’s fun. And, if you didn’t know any better, you’d say he’s enjoying it too, because, finally his head turns to look at you, grin on his face, and says, “Try it.”
Your smile grows wider, laughing now, “Alright, well, if you know what’s good for you, you’ll take back those nasty comments regarding my onion-chopping skills—”
You’re only barely pointing the knife in his direction as a mock threat before you’re face-first with the pristine black marble of the kitchen counter, arm bent behind your back.
“See?” his voice wreaks heat upon your ear, bent over you from the back, low and gritty, “I’ve handled all types of animals—many of ‘em far more trouble than a brat with an onion knife.”
You don’t know if he notices, but you do—the way his lower half grinds against your ass with bulge and all. Maybe he’s just big, but you swear you can feel a certain stiffness.
“Yeah? I can tell, you really know how to handle someone.”
He releases you instantly upon your comment as though the very words had burned him, even taking extra measures to back up away from you—a sudden grimace on his face as he glares at you like he’s trying to keep you at arm’s length.
“If you're trying to make yourself interesting in the hopes I'll spare you, you should save yourself the embarrassment. As I said, I’m not interested in that shit.”
You had half the nerve to tell him that he could’ve fooled you with the way he was just acting, but you decided to save it. Instead, you just chuckle with a sarcastic “Aw shucks, my masterplan,”
Still though, despite your efforts of disengaging, he stands there, a little guarded, if you were to describe it, as though not convinced you weren’t effectively trying to seduce him.
You shake your head, thinking it all ridiculous. Like, if you were actually trying to seduce him you wouldn’t lead with onions and death threats, now would you?
“Trust me, chef, I understand my circumstances,” you declare with a hand to your chest and a dull look on your face. “I might be livestock, but I'm not dumb like one. I know there’s no reality in which you decide to let me go free. I mean, you’ confessed to being a cannibal, for crying out loud—there’s no way back from that.”
You lean yourself against the kitchen island you’d been pinned against not too many seconds ago. “And I know I'm supposed to be freaking out or whatever. But honestly, freaking out’s just never been my style.”
With both hands flat against the cool marble you tip your head backwards to look up at the ceiling, once again assessing the clinical whiteness of it all, before continuing, “Besides…. in a way, I’ve always had this gut feeling that I'd end up in a situation like this, so I’ sorta came to terms with it ages ago.”
You spot the funny look he gives you in your peripheral, and you restate, “Well, not like this, of course, but you know… In trouble somehow. So, I figure I should just try to enjoy myself as much as I can before I can’t. You know?”
He doesn’t give you any sign that tells you he understands what you’re talking about, but it wasn’t as though you were expecting one either. To be honest, you don’t understand it yourself. By all accounts, you should be losing your marbles right now, and by all means, you probably are—you just never knew it would feel the same as taking a fake sick-day just to get out of work.
But anyways. “You should be happy, chef.” At least that’s what you think. “I heard fear spoils the flavor. Who knows? Maybe you’ll get your first ever taste of untainted meat.”
His unrelaxed countenance doesn’t fully change as he cocks a brow, all but interrogating you, “Thought you said you weren’t a foodie.”
You chuckle. “I just heard it somewhere, is all.” It’s funny how that’s the part he chooses to arrest you on and not any of the other shit you’d just said, but nevermind. “Anything else I can help with?”
He still looks a bit wary. But after a moment, he nods towards the dining room, with regards allowing you to, “Deck the table.”
You smile at his weirdness, wondering if he’s asexual or abstinent while answering, “Sure thing, chef.”
—
A couple of more weeks pass just like that. You help him make dinner despite his efforts to discourage you. Other than that you continue to try and enjoy the luxuries that come with being a lamb raised for slaughter—taking long baths and watching movie marathons in the home cinema you found during your exploring of the house.
He’s gone most of the day, but not everyday. Even so, he’s busy—prepping things in the kitchen, or on the phone in his office. That, his bedroom, and the meat locker in the basement are the only three rooms with a lock in the entire house—except the outer door, of course—and the only three rooms you’ve yet to have seen the inside of.
In your sleep your mind wanders to what he keeps down there—and his bedroom for that matter. Imagining skinned bodies and heads in jars. It’s all you can do to entertain yourself after having run out of things to occupy your need for stimuli.
Today is one of those days especially, where restlessness has taken hold of you in such a way you don’t know what to do with yourself.
He comes home to find all the dining chairs mangled beyond repair, having been tossed a dozen times against the windows and walls.
“Shatterproof glass,” you state without acknowledging his arrival, lying still on the floor in the splinters. “I figured. But it was worth the try—if only to test your eye for precautions.”
He doesn’t do anything but stand there, taking in the crime scene.
“You gonna punish me?” you ask after a moment’s time.
“No,” he answers shortly.
To which you sigh, feeling as though it hadn’t been the answer you were looking for even though that doesn’t make much sense. A little miffed, you prop yourself up on your elbows to look at him, “You’re not even the least bit disappointed?”
He starts making his way to the kitchen, six grocery bags, three in each hand, saying, “It’s only natural. I’m more surprised it took you this long to try.”
You drop back down with a pout at the boring response, staring at the ceiling once more—still clinically white like you’ve been locked inside an asylum. At this point you might start believing it could be true. Mumbling, “Yeah, well, maybe I have an Icarus problem or whatever they call it…”
Another heavy sigh leaves you then. “Not gonna lie to you, chef. I'm starting to freak out a little.” You try making it sound like a warning, though you’re not sure he takes it as such. “Or maybe I'm just bored. Not sure which…”
He ignores you and you pout. And then, just a moment later, with spectacular timing as usual, your stomach decides to growl.
“Oh, really?” you question, looking down your chest to eye your stomach.
“How ‘bout that…” you scoff. “I guess trying to break windows is hungry work.”
You veer your head backwards to where your unlikely roommate stands, packing out of the grocery bags in a slow meticulous manner, like he’s taking his time to enjoy himself, thinking about all the cooking possibilities at his disposal.
Curiosity piqued, “What's for dinner?” you ask as you jump up on your feet and walk over to take your seat by the breakfast counter—it’s become your designated spot.
Standing before the fridge, he’s just finished packing the last item away when turning around and leaning against the door. Asking “What do you want?” while trying to act casual. But you can tell—he’s eager, wanting you to solve his luxury of choice for him.
But alas, it’s questions like those that you hate. And so, clutching the counter, you tilt backwards and make a show of rolling your head against your shoulders, before laying yourself dead against the marble, looking up at him, saying “Oh, come on, chef, you know I don't have the answer to that. Your kitchen might as well be a space station.”
With a sly smile, you bat your lashes at him as though saying pretty please “Decide for me?”
Since that time he’d pinned you against the counter, he’s been more guarded when it comes to your suggestive and flirty ways, standing there, straight and stiff, with only curt “Fine,” leaving him.
It’s boring, you pout to no one but yourself as he rolls up his sleeves and starts picking ingredients.
But then, ingredients in hand, still with his back turned towards you as he makes his way to the stove, he mumbles, just loud enough for it to be meant as an offer and not some joke, “If you’re bored, come help.”
You lift yourself up from your slump, burning holes in the back of his head with your stare. This would be the first time he’s ever spared you any such consideration.
You have to giggle a bit, feeling excited as you jump out of your seat and follow behind him. “The word please ain’t in your vocabulary, huh, chef?”
As though embarrassed to look at you after having requested you in such a way, he even turns his cheek when you get too close, mumbling once again, now lower and gruffer, “I ain’t heard you say thank you yet, either.”
It makes your smile grow wider. “Hmph—I guess we’re bad company.”
—
More weeks pass.
The only thing you ask of him is to rent you a movie you’d been dying to see.
Other than that, you make yourself about as high maintenance as a housecat. He just feeds you three times a day and you never complain.
Over time, you get more and more comfortable—which he hadn’t thought possible—and more and more bratty, inviting him into discussions, coaxing him into indulging you by showing interest in his cooking, spanning from acting deeply invested to fleetingly so. He can’t blame you for trying. Still, he can’t reward your efforts either.
Exercising restraint, he maintains an instrumental distance. The more familiarity you show him, the more he pulls back. After all, he mustn’t forget what you are. In the end, despite how much you act like it, you’re not his pet or partner or imaginary friend. You’re meat. He just needs to figure out what to make with you. That’s all. The only reason behind him keeping you around this long.
Admittedly, your slaughter date was supposed to be ages ago. He’s never kept another victim this long, not by a long shot. Usually, the entire ritual only lasts the weekend, with an entire week at most. Meanwhile, your stay is coming up on a whole month now…
And still, he lets another two weeks pass. And with the additional time, you’ve grown the audacity to sit and pick at his food.
“Not up to your standards?” he questions.
You’ve been unusually quiet this evening. Normally, you’d talk his ear off about this and that and everything between heaven and hell, but right now, if he were to close his eyes, he wouldn’t even know you were there with him.
During your month and a half, you’d yet to have gotten sick. Not that there was any reason for you to get sick, what with you staying safe indoors and him cooking all your meals. Really, you should be brimming with life like you would any other day.
But then again, he had noticed a change in you lately. Mere boredom had evolved into something more, something worse. Sitting there, silently, your expression isn’t only dull, but something even more hushed.
Lonely is the word that comes to mind.
“I don't mean to offend you, chef…” you mumble. “But right now I kinda just wish I had some cup noodles—or maybe a big mac or something else simple like that—anything but this gourmet stuff…”
He’s not sure what to say to that. Though many of his prior victims had refused to eat his food or even gone to such lengths as to throw up after eating it, he’s never, not once, witnessed one request junk food instead.
“I’m sorry, that was rude,” you apologize. Then, releasing a heavy sigh, you pick your gaze up, setting those pitifully downcast eyes in his direction. “When are you gonna kill me?”
Your expression is blank, and yet it has a certain presence—demanding an answer.
It wasn’t a question he was expecting to hear from you.
“Haven’t decided,” he dismisses. He doesn’t let it show, but it sends a chill down his spine. He then begins to eat without you in an attempt to shrug it off. Ignoring the way you stare at him by pretending to have his full focus on his plate, even when he can barely taste the food on his tongue.
“I think you should do it soon. Before my meat goes bad,” you add, unsatisfied with his response—or, at least, he thinks he can detect a certain sharpness in your tone he’s never heard before.
It proves more of a reason for him to keep eating—half his plate already gone while yours remain untouched. Answering you with his mouth stuffed full, “I don't know what to make of you yet.”
“Tch—aren’t you a chef?” you huff to that. He can spot your grip tighten around your utensils, wringing the silver in your grip. “Figure it out already.”
He’s not sure what this feeling is. Something weird in his gut, making the food not sit right. He’s never experienced it before, but something tells him its nervousness. What else can it be? What else would have the power to make him lose appetite as well as make it near impossible to return your glare?
“You haven’t given me anything to work with…” he argues, as though this was a simple matter. “I can’t cook if I'm not inspired.”
Even as he says it, he knows it’s all bullshit—knows it won’t satisfy the frustration he can feel emanating from you.
“Excuse me?” you bark then, voice raised even higher, even sharper, “I’m here waiting to become food, and you’re talking about inspiration?”
You scoff then, incredulously. “Last time I checked, the beef doesn’t tell the chef it wants to be a fucking burger.”
In situations like these, he’d typically resort to the restraints. You hadn’t yet given him any reason to, but still, they’ve remained around the chair’s arms and legs all this time, just waiting to be put to use.
Usually, he wouldn’t bat an eye doing it, but for some reason, with you, he’d like to avoid it.
“Eat,” he says instead, halfway as a command, but otherwise as a measure to diffuse the tension.
But efforts be damned, you won’t have it, throwing your cutlery on the clothed table with a clatter in clear demonstration. “I'm not fucking hungry. How about that?”
Another chill straightens his spine, his jaw clenched, throat tight, repeating “Eat,”
And you, challenging him, stand your ground with a sound “No.”
He throws his cutlery too, then slams both fists down on the table, making everything do a jump. “Either you eat, or I forcefeed you. Pick.”
“Fine,” you return right away, throwing your hands up in a mock gesture of surrender yet make no advancements towards your utensils or the food on your plate. Instead, you make a show of crossing your arms over your chest while slouching down in your seat like a brat, before further pushing your luck with an equally testy “What's for dessert?”
Your plate remains picked to pieces, getting colder by the second, with none of it having seen your mouth. What’s more, not only have you had enough nerve to have asked him for fast food instead, now you’re taking it further by ordering “Dessert?”
“Yeah.” Assessing your nails, you switch between having your fingers pressed into your palm to turning your hand around and stretching them out. Lips pursed before you smack then, “I've been meaning to tell you this for a while now actually, it’s criminal to have dinner without dessert.”
Swallowing thick, he finds the need to gather himself as the magnitude of unrecognizable emotions floods his body and brains, so much his eye twitches receiving them all. “Is that right?”
Meanwhile, you just cock your head to the side, continuing to push him with an assertive “Sure is.”
Teeth clenched, he takes a breath, then relays “Hate to disappoint, but I don’t make dessert,” still trying to put the argument to bed by thwarting your stubbornness.
But you remain determined. In fact, you remain downright unabashed, shooting him a pointedly snarky “What type of chef doesn’t know how to make dessert?”
Yet another chill nearly makes him shudder. Brows lowered, stating, “I know how.”
By all accounts, he’s giving you enough warnings for you to back off and apologize, but you do no such thing. “Then why don’t you?” you inveigh instead, now with a sneer no less.
“Eat,” he repeats again, as if saying for the last time.
But you refuse to let it scare you. “No!” you roar, abruptly standing up with a stomp. “In fact, fuck you! I'm done eating on death row without dessert! It’s ridiculous!”
He gets up too, with a growl no less, “Sit down.”
His fists balled up, placed with knuckles cracking against the table in clear threat you still don’t bother heeding.
You just ball your own fists and mirror his stance. “Are you deaf? I said, not without dessert.”
“That’s it.”
It’s just like the last time he put hands on you—it happens before he can think.
One second, he’s staring at you from the other side of the table, and in the next, he’s already rounded it and planted you flat against it. Though that’s not to say he didn’t have control. No, his actions are perfectly calculated despite his head being anything but—having placed you down, belly-up, just shy of the food, like you’re part of the feast.
“Don’t you get it?” he rasps, clutching your upper arms harshly enough to make you shut your mouth—but too late. With the damage already done, you needn’t push him anymore to make him blurt it out, “You’re supposed to be dessert but you’re making it fucking impossible!”
And still, it’s not the outburst you’d been waiting for.
“Excuse me?!” you gasp. “I’m making it impossible?” With a big scoff, you seem to forget how he’s got you pinned beneath him against the table with the way your hands fly up and ball his shirt in two tightknit fists. “Fuck are you on? I’ve been nothing but cooperative since the start, you asshole!”
“You’re not supposed to be, you brat!” he counters, and then with his head bowed and voice lowered into a whisper adds “I’m fucking starving beacuse of you.”
Your eyes meet his, unwavering in their pursuit, and he can’t defend calling you his victim or his prey any longer.
“Well… if you’re so fucking hungry, go on and eat me already,” you dare, a provocative curl upon your lips drawing him in. “Unless you’re too much of a pussy to try.”
—
“Well, well, well…” you croon, lying beneath his sheets, on top of his chest like it’s your rightful place. A smug look in your eyes, biting your smile, before completing your taunt, “Looks like you fell for my master plan after all.”
He sighs heavily. Hands connected just beneath the small of your back, on top of all that plump flesh he thought he’d have in his stomach, but instead ended up in his bed.
No one could have predicted these turn of events. And so, “Don't flatter yourself... We both know you never had any plan.”
You just giggle, continuing to tease him, “And still, the livestock lives on.”
Shifting, you push yourself up into a seated position, straddling him. “I mean, not to judge or anything, but…” Running your hands down his chest, he watches you admire all the little bitemarks you’d left before your eyes meet his again, as unapologetic as ever. “You’d be a real freak if you ate me after we did all that.”
Katsuki goes to your bathroom to shower after his first night over and he stands there and sifts through every one of your makeup and skincare products and takes note of what you’re running low on so he can stock them up again next time he comes back
“Were you snooping around my bathroom?” You narrow your eyes.
Katsuki scoffs. “Now why the fuck would I do that? Callin’ me a creep?”
“I have new things in there that I definitely didn’t buy,” you jab a finger into his chest.
He hums, grabbing your arm gently as he mumbles, “Well, what’s so bad about that? S’free goods.” His lips find your inner wrist, kissing along the skin delicately as he mumbles, “Always findin’ something to complain about. Should talk less.”
You pout playfully—the edges of your lips are already fighting hard to pull into a small grin. (He’s a sweet guy, you like to tell your friends when they ask you what you see in him, he notices the small things! You can’t wait to prove to them that you’re right.)
“Wanna snoop my pantry next?” You wriggle your brows, throwing your arms around his neck. His loop around your waist, and the space between you never existed. “I won’t complain if my snacks are free goods, too.”
He snorts, rolling his eyes as he leans down and nibbles on your cheek, grinning slightly to himself when you let out a small gasp and shove him away playfully. “I don’t think you want me in your pantry, sweets. M’gonna switch all that nonsense you got to the healthy stuff.”
“Then you’re banned,” you huff.
He gives you a rather smug wink—but when he’s looking through your kitchen later, you don’t say anything. And when your favorite things are there, brand new again the week after, you can’t say you’re surprised. You also can’t help the way you smile, either—foolish and lovesick coloring your lips pretty.
(He’s a sweet guy, you’ll tell your friends later, he pays good attention to everything.)
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20K words, Simon’s hair has grown out, reader wears glasses, Simon doesn’t know how to dance, smut, the fluffiest fluff, angst, size kink, Simon is huge, pee mentioned, Simon is filthy but we all knew that. Tell me if I missed any tags.
He was four years old when he stole your crayons.
Not all of them. Just the good ones. The red one. The yellow one. The bright, sunflower-gold one that you'd been saving to colour the sun in the corner of your drawing, the way all four-year-olds drew the sun — a circle in the corner, rays shooting out like a child's idea of joy.
You looked at him across the low art table in that bright little preschool room that smelled of poster paint and digestive biscuits.
He was stocky even then.
Chubby-cheeked and heavy-set. A thick, sturdy little boy who sat with his legs wide and his fat fists curled around your crayons like he'd earned them.
He wasn't even looking at you.
He was colouring something — a car, maybe, or a blob that might have been a dog — and the yellow crayon moved in big, purposeful strokes across his paper.
You did not cry.
You considered it.
Then you leaned across the table and took them back.
He looked up.
Brown eyes. Even at four, they were startling — dark and serious and far too watchful for a boy his age.
He stared at you.
You stared back.
Then he slid the gold crayon back across the table to you, said nothing, and went back to his drawing.
His name was Simon.
You would not learn that until the register was called the following morning. But you remembered his eyes before you remembered his name.
— ✦ —
He broke your glasses in Year Two.
Not on purpose — or so you believed, for most of your life, until you were old enough to accept that
Simon Riley did very few things without purpose.
He knocked into you in the corridor outside the dining hall, your plastic NHS frames hitting the linoleum floor, one arm snapping clean off at the hinge.
You stood there, the world going soft and blurry at the edges the way it always did without them, and you felt the particular, humiliating sting of being unable to see properly — the vulnerability of it, the indignity.
Simon picked up the frames. Looked at them. Looked at you.
He didn't say sorry straight away. He examined the break with the seriousness of a boy who was already, at seven, very careful about what he said and when he said it. Then, "I'll carry your bag till they're fixed."
"You broke my glasses," you told him like he didn’t know.
"I know." He nodded.
"That's not the same as fixing them."
"No," he agreed. "But it's what I've got."
He carried your bag for three days. And when your mum brought the repaired frames in on the fourth morning, he handed the bag back without ceremony, turned, and went to join his mates by the football cage. No further apology. No acknowledgement that anything had occurred between you at all.
That afternoon, you kicked over his sandcastle in the playground.
He watched you do it. Didn't say a word.
You felt better.
And somehow, after that, you were friends.
— ✦ —
He couldn't read very well. You figured this out in Year Three, during the round-robin reading in class — when the teacher went along the rows and each child read a sentence aloud.
You noticed the way Simon's jaw set and his hands went flat on the desk the closer it got to his turn. The way his eyes moved across the page, laboured and slow, tracking words like they were things to be wrestled rather than known.
He got through his sentence. Barely. His face was blank when he sat back, the particular blankness he'd already learned to wear — that carefully constructed nothing that meant everything was fine when everything was not fine at all.
You didn't say anything about it. Not then. You were eight years old, not stupid.
What you did was start reading with him at break time. You presented it as something you needed — you told him you were practising for a reading competition and needed an audience.
Simon was not fooled. He was never fooled, not really.
But he sat down with you on the bench by the library door and listened while you read, and then slowly, carefully, you handed the book to him and asked what he thought happened next, and he had to read ahead to find out.
It took most of the school year. But by the summer he was reading chapter books. He never thanked you. He did start saving you a seat on the library bench every break time, and that was the same thing.
— ✦ —
He played football and rugby.
You read on the grass bank above the field.
It became a kind of institution — the ritual of your shared proximity without shared activity. Simon on the pitch, broad and determined and already bigger than the other boys by Year Five, already moving with that particular physicality that seemed less like playing and more like declaration.
And you on the bank above, your book open, your reading glasses (a better pair now, tortoiseshell) perched on your nose, half-reading and half watching without ever quite admitting to the watching.
He always knew you were there. He didn't do anything about it. But sometimes, when he scored, he'd look up at the bank first before he looked anywhere else.
You told yourself you were only there because the grass was nice and the light was good.
You were not a good liar, even then.
— ✦ —
The boy's name was Daniel Holt and he pushed you over in the playground in Year Five because you'd refused to give him the answers to the maths homework.
You'd said no three times and the third time he pushed you and you went down hard on your palms and your knees, the concrete was unforgiving.
You were crying before you'd fully registered what had happened. Not dramatically — small, shocked, indignant tears, the kind that arrive before the pain does.
Simon was there before a teacher was. You didn't even see where he came from. One moment the playground was its ordinary mid-morning noise, and the next Daniel Holt had a split lip and Simon Riley was standing over him with blood on his knuckles and a look on his face that was completely, utterly calm.
The calm was the frightening part. Even at ten.
He got three days at home for it. He spent the first afternoon sitting on your front step, eating crisps, because he knew you'd be furious with him and wanted to face it head-on.
You were furious. You told him he was an idiot. He told you Daniel Holt had it coming. You told him violence wasn't the answer. He told you Daniel Holt wasn't going to touch you again.
He was right. Daniel Holt never came near you again.
You didn't thank him either. You went inside and made him a sandwich, and that was the same thing.
— ✦ —
Secondary school arrived like a change in weather — everything slightly larger, slightly louder, the corridors longer and noisier, the stakes somehow higher and more ambiguous all at once. You arrived with a bag so heavy your shoulder ached within the first hour: your textbooks, yes, but also the extracurricular books you carried everywhere, the extra notepad you used for non-school thoughts, the six different highlighters you colour-coded by subject.
Simon took the bag from you on the third day without asking.
"I can carry it," you told him.
"I know," he said.
He slung it over his shoulder like it weighed nothing, which for him it probably didn't. He'd grown over the summer — not just taller, though he was that, but broader, thicker through the shoulders in a way that made him look like a man playing a boy, trying the shape of it on. He wore it well, even at eleven. He wore everything like he'd already decided what he was and was simply waiting for the world to catch up.
He carried your bag when it was heavy, and it was frequently heavy. He did it without comment and without making you feel small for needing it. That was the thing about Simon — he never made you feel small. He made other people feel small, sometimes, when they deserved it. But not you. Never you.
— ✦ —
The bruises were never from rugby.
You knew by the second year of secondary.
You were not naive — you had read enough, observed enough, understood enough about the world to recognise the shape of what was happening in Simon Riley's house even though he never said a word about it.
The bruises were in the wrong places for rugby. They appeared in the wrong season. They were around his ribs and his arms and once, memorably, along his jaw, and he came to school the Monday after the jaw bruise with that face — that blank, carefully constructed nothing face — and you sat next to him at lunch and said nothing at all.
You said nothing because there was nothing you could do. You were twelve. You were a girl with a book bag and highlighter pens and absolutely no power over the man who was hurting your best friend, and knowing that — the impotence of it, the helpless, hollow ache of caring about someone you could not protect — was the first truly adult pain you ever felt.
What you could do was this: you could make sure he had somewhere to go.
Your mother, who was perceptive in the quiet way that some mothers are, never asked questions when Simon turned up at the back door on a Sunday evening or a Wednesday after school.
She just set another plate.
Your house became a refuge without anyone naming it as such. Simon did his homework at your kitchen table, ate your mother's cooking, watched telly with your family, and slept on your sofa sometimes when the option was presented naturally enough that it didn't feel like charity.
— ✦ —
You got your period for the first time on a Tuesday in November, in Year Nine. In the school toilets, third period, when you were thirteen years old and the day had been entirely ordinary right up until it wasn't.
The particular cocktail of shock and pain and embarrassment and the specific existential bewilderment of being a person whose body was doing something enormous without prior adequate notice left you sitting on the closed toilet lid crying in a way you hadn't cried in years.
You got out your Nokia. That familiar brick of a phone, the keypad worn smooth at the number five. You typed Simon's number and pressed call before you'd properly decided to.
He picked up on the second ring. "Yeah."
"Simon." Your voice came out wrong. Too thin.
A beat. When he spoke again his voice had changed — quieter, more careful. "Where are you?"
"Girls' toilets. Near the science block."
"Right," he said. "Stay there."
He appeared outside the girls' toilets seven minutes later — you could hear him through the door, his voice low and flat, telling a Year Eight girl to go use the other ones — and then he was there, right there on the other side of the door, talking to you through it in that steady, even way he had when he wanted to be calm on your behalf.
"You're alright," he said. “Do you need me to go to the office?"
"No," you managed. "I need — I don't know what I need."
"I'll get you something from the vending machine," he said, that Manchester accent of his low and unhurried. "And I'll text your mum."
When you came out of the toilets twenty minutes later, looking wrung-out and clutching what the school nurse had provided, Simon was leaning against the wall. He looked at you for a moment — took you in, the way he always did, that comprehensive, assessing look — and then he stepped forward and kissed your cheek. Quick. Certain. His mouth warm and deliberate against your cheekbone.
"You're alright," he said again. He said it like a fact. Like he was making it true by saying it.
You cried a bit more, for different reasons, and he pretended not to notice.
— ✦ —
He was captain of the rugby team by Year Ten. It suited him — the leadership, the sense of purpose, the structure of it.
You went to his matches sometimes, wrapped in a scarf on the touchline, and watched him move across the pitch with that same quality you'd noticed on the primary school field: less like playing, more like declaration.
He was ferocious and focused and occasionally frightening, and the other boys deferred to him not just because he was bigger than them but because he had the kind of authority that doesn't need to be announced.
Afterwards he'd find you on the touchline, still carrying that quality — coiled, alert — and it would take him a few minutes to come back to himself. To come back to you.
"Good game," you'd say.
"Yeah," he'd say.
And then slowly, the set of his shoulders would ease, and he'd become Simon again. Your Simon. The one who stole your crayons and carried your bag and ate your mother's shepherd's pie like it was sacred.
— ✦ —
He could make you laugh. This was not a small thing.
Simon Riley was not, by general consensus, a funny person. He was serious and quiet and his face in repose looked like a man carrying a private weather system. But he had a dry, deadpan wit that he deployed rarely and precisely, and it landed, every time, like a key in a lock made specifically for it.
He knew how to make you laugh because he'd spent years learning you. The specific frequency of your humour. The things that made you dissolve into giggles rather than just smile. He deployed his wit with the same precision he deployed everything else, and the result was that when Simon Riley made you laugh — really laugh, the helpless, breathless kind — it felt like being given something he didn't give to anyone else.
Which, you would eventually understand, was accurate.
— ✦ —
His name was Ryan Marsh and he was your first kiss, in the park on a Friday evening in Year Ten, and it was fine. It was nice, even. Ryan was sweet and nervous and smelled of his older brother's aftershave and the kiss lasted approximately forty seconds.
Ryan Marsh had a broken nose the following Monday.
Simon maintained, with total conviction, that Ryan had walked into a door. Ryan, to his credit, corroborated this story completely.
You did not push the matter, partly because you had no concrete evidence and partly because some part of you — the part that read on the grass bank and watched the pitch and noticed when Simon looked up at the bank before he looked anywhere else — felt something that was not entirely uncomplicated about it.
You and Ryan Marsh did not have a second kiss. You told yourself it was because the chemistry hadn't been right.
You were getting a bit better at lying to yourself, by fourteen. But only a bit.
— ✦ —
GCSEs arrived the way all important things arrived — with more weight than you'd expected and less warning than you'd have liked.
Year Ten and Eleven were the years you restructured Simon's entire approach to studying, methodically and patiently, the same way you'd helped him learn to read, finding the approach that worked for how his mind moved.
Simon was not unintelligent.
He was, in fact, formidably sharp in ways that didn't translate easily to an exam paper: quick to read people, quick to understand systems, possessed of a spatial and strategic intelligence that you recognised and admired even as you taught him how to write it down in ways that the mark scheme would accept.
He sat with you at your kitchen table night after night — your mother quietly replenishing the tea,— and you explained things in the language that made sense to his brain rather than the language of the textbook.
He sat with you at lunch during school hours and glared at anyone who called you a nerd. The glaring was extremely effective. Simon Riley's face, by fifteen, was a significant deterrent.
His GCSE results, when they arrived, were good. Better than anyone who knew his circumstances might have expected from a boy who'd had so much working against him.
He rang you on the house phone when he opened the results envelope. He didn't say much. His voice, when he spoke, was different — something in it unguarded, the Manchester in it softer somehow, without the armour it usually carried.
"Couldn't have done it without you," he said.
"You did it," you told him firmly. "I just held the torch."
"Still needed the torch."
You smiled so hard your face ached. "Go celebrate, Simon."
"Yeah," he said. And then, quieter, "Thanks, sunshine."
— ✦ —
He was an apprentice at the butcher's on Renshaw Street after school — learning the trade with the same focused, physical competence he brought to everything else, solid and unhurried, his big hands learning new kinds of precision. You had a job at the bookshop two streets over.
On his lunch breaks you would walk over with a sandwich and a packet of crisps, and you'd sit on the low wall around the side of the shop while he ate and you talked about nothing in particular and everything in general.
He had sawdust on his boots and you'd have ink on your fingers from pricing stickers, and you'd sit in the thin afternoon light talking about books and people and where things might go from here, and it was the most ordinary, irreplaceable thing in the world.
You didn't know, then, that you were storing it up. You didn't know you were in the middle of something finite.
You were seventeen and you thought you had time.
— ✦ —
It was the eleventh of September, 2001.
You were at work when it happened — the bookshop had a small television in the back room, and you watched the footage with your hand pressed over your mouth and the world rearranging itself into a new shape around you.
Simon came to you that evening. He didn't knock — he had a spare key, had done for years — and you heard him come in and go into the kitchen and fill the kettle, the sound of him so familiar and domestic and real that something in your chest loosened a fraction.
He brought you tea. He sat on the sofa beside you and you watched the news together in silence, and at some point your head found his shoulder without either of you deciding it had.
"I'm going to join up," he said. Not asking. Telling.
You lifted your head from his shoulder. Frowned at him. "Join up what?"
"The military."
The word landed in the room and stayed there. You looked at his face — that flat, certain expression he wore when he'd already decided something — and you felt the ground shift slightly under you.
"Simon. You're seventeen."
"You can join at sixteen with parental consent," he said. Straightforward, as though he'd already looked into it. Which of course he had. "Seventeen without."
"That's—" You stopped. Started again. "You've thought about this before today."
"Yeah."
Of course he had. You could see it now, the shape of it — this was not a reaction to the footage on the television, not a hot, impulsive thing. This was something Simon had been building toward without telling you. The structure of it. The purpose. The particular kind of belonging that came from being part of something larger than yourself. You'd always known he'd go toward something like this. You'd just hoped, without ever quite admitting to the hoping, that it might be further away.
"You're not going to try to talk me out of it." Not a question.
"Would it work?"
He held your gaze. "No."
"Then no," you said. Your voice was very steady. You were proud of it. "I'm not."
He was quiet for a long moment. The television continued its awful repetition. Then his arm came around your shoulders, heavy and warm, and he pulled you in closer against his side.
You stayed like that until the tea went cold.
— ✦ —
The train station was grey and noisy with other leavings, other arrivals, other people in the middle of things.
Simon stood in front of you on the platform with his kit bag and his big, careful hands and the face he'd spent seventeen years learning to keep blank, and it occurred to you, not for the first time and not for the last, that you loved him.
That you had loved him in different quantities and different registers for most of your life. That you did not know how to say it and were not sure it would do either of you any good if you did.
So you didn't say it.
You went up on your toes and you hugged him — truly hugged him, arms around his neck, your face pressed against his jaw — and he held you back with both arms, the kit bag dropping to the platform, and he was so solid and warm and real that you memorised it.
"Don't be an idiot," you told him, muffled.
He made a sound that was almost a laugh. Almost. "Best I can do is try." The Manchester in his voice, low and warm and his.
"Simon."
"I know," he said quietly, against your temple. "I know, sunshine."
You stepped back. You held it together. He picked up his bag and he walked toward the platform and at the door of the train he turned, and looked at you standing there with your glasses and your coat and your hands pressed together in front of you, and for a second you saw something in his face that wasn't blank at all.
Then he was gone.
You cried on the way home. Proper, ugly crying, in the front seat of your mother's car, while she drove and said nothing and passed you a tissue.
You cried because you thought you might never see him again. Because the world had cracked open on a Tuesday in September and people were going toward the fracture and Simon Riley was one of them.
You cried because you never told him.
— ✦ —
He sent a birthday card every year.
They arrived with no return address and postmarks from places you'd never heard of, and sometimes they were late and sometimes they were so early you suspected he'd sent them weeks in advance in case he couldn't later.
They were always plain — Simon Riley was not a man who browsed the sentimental section — white or cream envelopes, the kind of card that was almost generic, and inside: his handwriting, which had improved vastly from the boy who'd struggled across the page in Year Three, and always the same thing. Your name at the top. Happy Birthday, sunshine. And then: S.
Just S.
Like he was still close enough that you'd know exactly who that meant. Like the initial was sufficient.
It was.
You sent his birthday gifts to a P.O. box he'd given you, wrapped carefully, the tag always: From your best friend. You didn't know if he received them all. You sent them anyway. It felt important to keep sending them — to maintain the thread, even when you couldn't see both ends of it.
— ✦ —
Thirty-four years old now.
You have no husband. You had come close, once — a man named Patrick who had been perfectly acceptable in every measurable way and who had wanted to marry you and had probably deserved someone who could give him more of herself than you could manage.
You had not been fair to Patrick. You knew that. You had been in love with someone else for most of your adult life, and even with the someone else absent and silent and possibly dead, there wasn't room for anyone else.
You have no children, though you wanted them. The timeline on that was becoming its own quiet ache, the kind you didn't prod too often.
You have a job that pays the bills and not much else — admin in an office building that smells of carpet cleaner and recycled air, the kind of work that requires enough of your brain to stop it from wandering but not enough to satisfy it.
You have an apartment that is functional and yours and that you have tried to make cozy, with books on every surface and plants that are mostly surviving and a kitchen you actually cook in.
It is not the house. It is not the house you told Simon about when you were sixteen and lying in his back garden on a summer evening, staring up at the sky.
No birthday card for five years now.
Five years of the particular, specific silence that was different from all the silences before, because the silences before had been interrupted. Annually, reliably, he had broken them.
Five years of nothing had the texture of conclusion. Of a chapter closing. And you had reached the point — slowly, painfully, with the kind of acceptance that doesn't feel like acceptance but feels like exhaustion — where you were fairly certain Simon Riley was dead.
Your heart ached for your best friend in the low, constant way of grief that has become so familiar it's almost structural.
You carried it the way you carried other things, quietly, with your spine straight.
Which is why you are sitting across from a man named — it didn't matter, it really didn't matter what his name was — on what your colleague Debbie had described as 'a perfectly nice date with a perfectly nice man' and trying to remember what it felt like to be interested in your own life.
The man sitting across from you was the complete opposite of Simon Riley.
He was trim and well-dressed and had the kind of face that was handsome in a way that required no effort to appreciate and inspired no particular feeling from you.
He had been talking for, by your reckoning, forty-seven minutes. In that time he had covered: his career (impressive, in his telling), his car (expensive, in his telling), his last holiday (exotic, in his telling), and his general philosophy on modern dating (nuanced, in his telling).
He had not asked about your job. He had not asked about your books or the one peeking out of your handbag; the one he'd glanced at and not commented on. He had not asked if your pasta was nice, which it was, actually, genuinely nice, and you'd have told him so if he'd asked. He had not asked you almost anything, come to think of it.
Simon Riley, who spoke perhaps a tenth as many words as this man, had always asked.
Simon Riley had always wanted to know. Not because it was polite. Because he actually, genuinely, in the particular way of people who care about very few things very deeply — wanted to know.
You excused yourself to use the bathroom and stood at the sink running cold water over your wrists and looking at your own reflection, and you thought: this is fine.
This is a perfectly nice evening with a perfectly nice man. This is what moving forward looks like. This is what being a person in the world, a person with a life and a future and reasonable expectations of company, looks like.
You dried your hands. You went back to the table. He had ordered himself another drink without asking if you wanted anything.
You finished your pasta and smiled at appropriate intervals and thought about Simon Riley and felt, as you so often felt, quietly furious at him for being gone.
— ✦ —
The birthday card arrived on a Thursday morning.
You almost missed it entirely — it was tucked between a pizza delivery leaflet and something from your energy supplier, the cream envelope almost camouflaged by the mundane. You shuffled through the post on autopilot and then stopped.
Your name, in handwriting you would have recognised anywhere, would have recognised in your sleep, had recognised in your bones for thirty years.
You sat down on the bottom stair. Your legs suddenly uneasy.
Your hands were not steady.
The envelope opened. The card was white. Plain. Almost generic.
Inside:
Happy Birthday, sunshine.
I'm sorry it's been so long.
I'll explain everything.
Come, if you want to.
If you can stand the sight of me.
Below that, an address. Three towns over. A postcode you didn't recognise.
And then, at the bottom, the way it had always been at the bottom: S.
You sat on the bottom stair for a very long time.
Then you got up, went to your room, and started thinking about what to wear.
— ✦ —
You plucked up the nerve to go on a Saturday.
The drive took forty minutes and you spent most of it trying to manage yourself — talking yourself through reasonable expectations (he is alive, that is enough, start there), warning yourself against things you could not control (the five years, the silence, the way your hands were doing that unsteady thing again), cataloguing everything practical (the address, the map).
The street was quiet. Semi-rural, the kind of neighbourhood that sits between things — between town and country, between the ordinary and the aspirational. The houses were spread out, set back from the road, each with its own front garden and its own character.
You parked. You looked at the address. You looked up.
And you stopped breathing.
It was a beautiful house.
Large, substantial and solid, the kind of house that had been built to last. White painted render, clean and bright in the afternoon light. A white picket fence surrounding the front garden, which was full of flowers. Roses climbing the gatepost. Lavender edging the path. Foxgloves and dahlias and great loose clusters of something purple you couldn't name from here. The kind of garden that had been planted with intention, tended with care, left to be a little wild in the best way.
A porch. And a porch swing, painted white, with a yellow cushion on it.
And flying from the corner of the roof, bright against the blue afternoon sky: the Union flag.
You sat very still in the driver's seat.
You were sixteen years old. It was a summer evening and you were lying in Simon's back garden on an old sleeping bag, looking up at the sky. He was beside you in the way he was always beside you — solid, quiet, taking up exactly the right amount of space. You'd been talking about the future the way teenagers do, in great floating hypotheticals that feel more like weather than plans.
"What kind of house?" he'd asked. He asked follow-up questions always, quietly, wanting the specifics. It was one of the things about him you loved.
And you'd described it. A big house, not ostentatious but real — space for books and for people and for a garden that did what it wanted within reason. A white fence, because you'd always liked them. A porch with somewhere to sit. A flag, because you were — despite everything — proud of where you were from.
Simon had been quiet for a long moment.
"Okay," he'd said. Just: okay.
You had thought he was humouring you.
You had not thought — you had not let yourself think — what it might mean, that he was going to do anything about it.
You got out of the car. Your legs were not entirely reliable. You held the gate and walked up the path — lavender brushing your hand where it grew close, the scent of it too perfect, almost staged — and you stopped at the foot of the porch steps.
The door opened.
He had to duck.
That was the first thing you noticed. The physical fact of him, the sheer size of him, his shoulders nearly touching the doorframe on both sides simultaneously, the automatic dip of his head as he stepped through onto the porch.
He straightened.
The afternoon light landed on him and you had to spend a moment recalibrating, because the last time you'd seen Simon Riley he had been seventeen years old with sawdust on his boots and a train ticket in his hand, and this man —
This man.
The white button-down shirt was simple, the sleeves rolled to the elbow, and from his left wrist to well past the roll of the sleeve his forearm was dark with ink — a sleeve of tattoos, intricate and considered. A whole geography of imagery that you couldn't read from here but would, you thought, take time to learn.
His right wrist carried a watch. His black slacks were fitted close enough that you could see the muscle of his thighs pulling the fabric with every shift of his weight, and his shoes — loafers, black with gold buckles, completely unexpected and somehow exactly right — were precise.
His hair. A dark sandy blonde, longer than military specification presumably allowed and slicked back from his face, which meant you could see all of it, his whole face; the angles that had sharpened from boy to man, the jaw, the set of his brow, and those eyes. Those brown eyes that had been watching you since you were four years old and had never, not once, looked at you with anything less than complete attention.
He was raking those eyes over you now. Slowly. With the same quality he'd always had — that comprehensive, unhurried assessment that somehow never felt like being measured — and his hands were in his pockets and he was standing there like that, on the porch he'd built or bought or arranged specifically around a description you'd given him at sixteen.
He looked like something out of a magazine and like Simon all at once.
You were going to murder him.
"Hi, sunshine."
His voice. Lower than you remembered, rougher, carrying all the years he'd lived since you last heard it. That Manchester accent — still there, unmistakably, that warm northern flatness underneath everything, the vowels shaped by a city, by a street, by a particular kind of upbringing that no amount of training had entirely smoothed out.
That nickname, in that voice, in that low, deliberate way he'd always said it: like you were his.
Like it was a prayer.
You opened your mouth. And you closed it. And you looked at him — this enormous, tattooed, stupidly handsome man who had stood on your mother's doorstep at twelve years old with bruises he didn't mention, who had kissed your cheek at thirteen and broken Ryan Marsh's nose at fourteen and waved goodbye from a train platform at seventeen and then sent you birthday cards from the edges of the world for a decade and then stopped for five years —
"Five years," you said. Your voice was very quiet.
Something moved in his face.
"I-,"
"I thought you were dead." You snapped cutting him off.
"I figured you would’ve."
"Simon."
"I know, sunshine." He said it the same way he'd always said things he couldn't argue with — not deflecting, not dismissing, just absorbing. The Manchester vowels in his voice like a hand on your shoulder. "I'll explain everything. I promise. All of it. Whatever you want to know."
You looked at him.
He looked at you.
The afternoon settled around the house, around the garden that was your garden in your own sixteen-year-old description, around the flag and the porch swing and the lavender and all of it, and the distance between you on the path and him on the porch steps was perhaps four feet and thirty years and five years of silence and a whole life of choosing not to say the one true thing.
"You built me the house?" you asked, whispering it. Like you were afraid to say it.
He was quiet for a moment. Then, "Bought it. Had the garden done the way you said."
"Simon." Your heart ached.
"You said lavender at the edges," he said. His voice was completely level. "You said a porch with somewhere to sit. You said you wanted to see the flag from the garden."
You pressed your hand to your mouth.
The rage was still there — it was not going anywhere quickly. The five years of it, the grief of it — but underneath it, something else. Something that had been there since you were four years old at a preschool art table, larger and quieter and more permanent than anything else you'd ever felt.
"You were sixteen," he said. As though this explained it. "You told me what you wanted. I just..." He stopped. Started again. "I wanted to be enough first. I wanted to have what you needed."
There was a long silence. A bee moved through the lavender. Somewhere a few streets away, a lawnmower hummed.
"Come inside," Simon said. "I'll make you tea. And I'll tell you everything."
You looked at him on the porch of the house he'd built you from a word, and you thought: you absolute idiot. You wonderful, impossible, infuriating man. You thought I'd stopped. You thought thirty years of this was something you could be enough for eventually, like it was a bar to clear, like there was a version of you I was waiting on instead of just —
Instead of just you. Always just you.
The lavender brushed your hand again. You walked up the steps and he looked down at you with those brown eyes that had never once left you.
"Hi, Simon," you said.
Something happened in his face. Something opened.
"Hi, sunshine," he said, his hand coming to the small of your back to guide you inside.
He made the tea.
You stood in the kitchen of a house that smelled of fresh paint and cedar and something faintly floral from the garden drifting through the open window over the sink, and you watched Simon Riley move around it like he'd always lived here — filling the kettle, finding the mugs without opening the wrong cupboard, knowing where the teabags were — and you thought: how long. How long has he been here, in this house he bought for you, learning where everything lives, waiting.
You sat at the kitchen table. It was a good table, heavy oak, the kind built to last and you ran your thumb along the grain of it and tried to arrange your feelings into some kind of order and failed.
Simon set the mug in front of you. Milk in last, the way you'd always taken it, which he knew because he'd made you approximately four thousand cups of tea over the course of your lives. He sat down across from you, his own mug between his big hands, and looked at you.
You looked back.
The kitchen light was warm and it caught the angles of his face. The jaw, the brow, the slight crook in his nose that was new, or newer, the result of something you didn't know about and weren't sure you wanted to.
He was watching you with that particular quality of attention he'd always had. Complete. Patient. Like you were the only thing in the room worth looking at.
"You're not wearing your glasses," he said.
You blinked. Of all the things. "No."
"Contacts?"
"For about ten years now, yes."
He was quiet for a moment, studying your face with that same unhurried attention, "I missed them."
"You missed my glasses?" You say with the deadpan tone you'd perfected over the years.
"Tortoiseshell ones," he said. "Used to push them up your nose when you were concentrating." He took a gulp of his tea, Adam's apple bobbing when he swallowed.
You stared at him. Eighteen years. Eighteen years of distance and war and God knows what else, and he missed your glasses. "Simon."
"Just saying."
"You are unbelievable." You scoff.
"The contacts suit you," he said, and the corner of his mouth moved — barely, almost nothing, but you'd spent your whole life reading that face and you caught it. "Everything suits you. But I liked the glasses."
"Stop it." You snap.
"Stop what?"
"Whatever that is," you said, and you pointed at his face, at the not-there-almost-smile, at the quality of his voice when he said everything suits you, at all of it. "You don't get to do that. You've been — Simon, you've been gone. You've been gone for eighteen years and for five of them, I thought you were dead." Your voice stayed steady, which surprised you. You'd expected it to crack on that. "So you don't get to walk out onto your porch looking like — like that — and tell me you missed my glasses and flirt at me like no time has passed."
He listened without interrupting. He always had — it was one of the things about him, the way he gave you the whole space of what you were saying before he entered it.
"You're right," he nodded.
"I know I'm right." Your spine straightened.
"I owe you an explanation."
"You owe me considerably more than that, Simon Riley, but yes. An explanation would be a start."
He wrapped both hands around his mug again and looked at you across the table and there was something in his face that was not the blank-nothing face, was not the armour he'd worn since he was twelve years old but something that was quieter and more exposed and a great deal more frightening because of it.
"Not here," he said.
You frowned. "What?"
"I don't want to do it like this. Sat in a kitchen." He glanced around the room briefly, as though orienting himself. "Come to dinner with me tomorrow night."
"What I—"
"The Grill on Merton Street."
You went very still.
The Grill on Merton Street. You hadn't been in years — not since you'd moved away from the area, not since things had shifted and the rituals of your old life had quietly been replaced by other things.
But you knew it. You knew every table in it. The way the light came through the front windows on a Sunday, the smell of it — roasted meat and old wood and the particular warmth of a place that had been feeding families for decades.
Your mother had loved it. Your father used to order the same thing every time and be pleased about it every time, and you and Simon had sat across from each other in the corner booth with the sticky laminated menus and kicked each other under the table and laughed.
"That's still open?" you managed.
"Had a look earlier this week," he said. "Still there. New owners but the same building. Same corner booth."
You looked at him. He looked at you. Outside, through the open window, a late bird was making itself known in the lavender.
"Fine," you said. "Dinner. Tomorrow. And you're going to tell me everything." you struck at him with a serious face.
"Everything," he agreed.
"I mean it, Simon. All of it."
"I know you do."
You drank your tea. It was exactly right. The temperature, the strength, the milk ratio and you hated him a little bit for that. For the fact that he still knew, that across seventeen years and God knows how many miles he still knew exactly how you took your tea, and he'd made it correctly on the first attempt without asking, and you were absolutely not going to cry about that.
You were not.
— ✦ —
You dressed carefully.
Not because you were trying to impress him.
You told yourself this firmly, standing in front of your wardrobe in the room you'd taken in the local B&B — you'd booked a night, not knowing how long this might take, not knowing what state you'd be in for the drive home afterwards — and you told yourself that you were simply dressing appropriately for a dinner at a decent restaurant.
That was all.
That was the entirety of it.
The dress was deep green. Fitted through the waist, falling to just below the knee, with a neckline that was elegant rather than dramatic.
You'd bought it for a work event two years ago and it had lived in your wardrobe since, waiting for an occasion that felt worth it. You put your hair up — not elaborately, just neatly, the kind of arrangement that looked effortless and had taken twenty minutes — and you wore the small gold earrings that had been your grandmother's. Low heels. The good handbag. A slick of red on your mouth that you almost wiped off twice before deciding to leave it.
You were not trying to impress him.
You were absolutely trying to impress him.
He was waiting outside The Grill when your taxi pulled up, standing on the pavement with his hands in his pockets. The air around him relaxed and easy. An anchored stillness, like a man who'd learned to wait and had made peace with it. He has the same dark slacks as yesterday, same loafers with the gold buckles, but the shirt tonight was black.
A deep, clean black that made his shoulders look approximately the width of a doorway, which was in fact an accurate assessment — and he'd left the top button undone. His hair was the same: pushed back, dark sandy blonde curling at the nape of his neck and catching the amber of the streetlights.
He saw you get out of the taxi.
He went very still. Completely, suddenly, entirely present in a way that landed on you like a hand against your sternum. Under your heartbeat.
You crossed the pavement toward him and his eyes moved over you — slowly, comprehensively, that same rake of attention he'd given you yesterday on the porch steps, only this time there was nothing restrained about what it did to your pulse.
He eyed you the same way he used to look at the extra cuts of slow roasted beef your mother added to his plate every time he joined you for a Sunday roast after church.
"Hi," you said.
"Hi, sunshine." His voice was low. The rough Manchester sending tingles down your spine.
He opened the door for you.
The Grill smelled exactly the same.
Roasted meat and warmed bread and old wood and something faintly of candle wax. It hit you the moment you stepped through the door and you had to stand still for just a second, just one second, to absorb the weight of it.
Your father's coat on the hook by the door. Your mother's reading glasses going into her bag as the menus arrived. Simon across from you, fourteen and fifteen and sixteen, his big hands wrapped around a Coke glass, his eyes on you under that careful brow.
The layout had shifted slightly — new owners, as Simon had said — but the bones of it were the same. The dark wood panelling. The low warm lighting. The tables set with proper linen and actual candles in glass holders. And in the back left corner was the booth.
Simon's hand was at the small of your back as the host led you through. A light touch, barely there, the kind of thing that could be merely courteous and was absolutely not merely courteous.
You said nothing about it.
You were almost at the booth when a voice said, "Well. I don't believe it."
You turned.
Margaret and Gerald Howarth.
Margaret had been your mother's friend since before you were born — a small, bright-eyed woman who had somehow barely aged in two decades. Her silver hair cut the same way it had always been, her husband a large, genial man beside her with a napkin already tucked into his collar. They'd been eating here since before you were born too, you suspected. Some people were simply woven into the furniture of a place.
"Margaret," you said, and you felt a genuine, warm rush of it. Of being seen by someone who had known you as a child, who had watched you grow up, who carried that particular knowledge of you that only people of a certain generation can hold. She was already rising halfway from her seat, her hand extended, and you took it and she covered it with her other one, the way she always had.
"We heard you were back in the area," she said — which was interesting, since you'd only arrived yesterday, but news apparently still moved at its old speed around here. Her bright eyes moved to Simon, and something in them softened with recognition and surprise in equal measure. "And Simon Riley. My goodness."
"Mrs Howarth." Simon's voice was respectful, quieter than usual, and you noticed — because you noticed everything about him — that he straightened fractionally. Not stiffly. Just the particular adjustment of a man in the presence of someone he'd known when he was young and unguarded.
"Look at the size of you," Gerald said, not unkindly, staring up at Simon with the frank appreciation of one large man for another. "What are they feeding you?"
"Gerald," Margaret scolded mildly.
"It's a compliment." He shrugged.
Simon almost smiled. "Good to see you, Mr Howarth."
Margaret was looking between the two of you with the expression of a woman who had been quietly observing people her entire life and drawing accurate conclusions from very little evidence. "Are you together?" she asked, with the particular directness that came with age and with having known you since you were in a pushchair.
"We're having dinner," you said carefully.
Margaret's expression said, quite clearly, that she had heard this and had also heard everything it was not saying. "Well," she said, patting your hand once more before releasing it, "it's lovely to see you both. You always did belong together, the pair of you. I said that to your mother once, do you know. I said those two—"
"It was lovely seeing you, Margaret," you said, with great warmth and only mild desperation.
She laughed, a bright, pleased sound and settled back into her seat.
As you turned to follow the host the rest of the way to the booth, you were almost certain you heard Gerald say, to his wife, "told you" in a tone of quiet marital satisfaction.
Simon was very carefully not reacting to any of this. You were very carefully not looking at him.
You saw two others you knew before you reached the booth.
Kim Ashworth, who had been in your form in Year Ten and who looked essentially the same as she had in school except that she had a baby on her hip and a husband trailing behind her with a changing bag.
She stopped mid-step when she saw you, did a small, delighted double take, said oh my God twice, and then looked at Simon in a way that was extremely uncomplicated in its appreciation before remembering the husband with the changing bag. There were promises exchanged to catch up properly, phone numbers that would probably not be used, genuine warmth on both sides.
And then at the bar, perched on a stool with a whisky, Dave Pearce — who had played alongside Simon on the secondary school rugby team and who greeted him with the particular vocabulary of men who knew each other at fifteen and have not changed as much as they think.
There was a brief, loud exchange that involved at least one shoulder-clap that could have knocked a smaller man sideways, and then Dave shook your hand too and told Simon he was punching. Which Simon received without expression and you tried your hardest not to laugh, biting your lip.
Finally the corner booth. You slid in. Simon folded himself into the seat across from you, the table scaled to ordinary human beings and therefore slightly absurd against the size of him, his knees bracketing it, his shoulders blocking the view of the room behind him entirely.
The menus came.
They were not laminated anymore — proper printed card, changed seasonally, the kind that meant the new owners had ambitions. But the roast was still on. The proper Sunday roast, the one your father used to order when you could afford to.
"Same corner," Simon said quietly.
"Same corner," you agreed.
He was looking at you across the table the way he used to look at you across this table, except that now his face was older and larger and had been to places that had clearly asked things of it. The look was different in its texture. Deeper, maybe. Older in the same way he was older. Like it had more weight behind it from all the years of being carried.
"You said everything," you reminded him. "All of it."
"I know."
"So." You gestured for him to start.
He set his menu down. Looked at you. And then he started talking.
He told it the way he told everything — without embellishment, without drama, in the flat, precise language of a man who had learned to communicate facts and trusted the facts to carry the weight without decoration.
He'd gone in at seventeen and he'd been good at it. Not surprising. He was built for the structure of it, for the clarity of having a purpose and a unit and a chain of things that made sense.
He'd moved up fast — faster than he let on in the cards he'd sent you, which had been careful, he explained, deliberately careful, because the more you knew the more you might worry. Which, you pointed out, had not been his decision to make. He didn't argue with that.
Task Force 141 came later. Years later, after deployments that he summarised in a sentence each and you understood enough from his face to know that each sentence was doing the work of much longer things.
He was a lieutenant now. He said it the way he said most things about himself, flatly, without vanity, presented as information. He had certain freedoms now that he hadn't had before, certain ability to make choices about where he went and when and what he did with the things the years had given him.
You both ordered your food.
"And the five years?" you asked, sipping your cocktail the waitress had brought over.
He was quiet for a moment, he stared at his San Miguel pint, the condensation sliding down the glass. Your food had arrived at some point during the waiting, while Simon collected his thoughts.
He picked up his fork and then set it down again.
"There was a man," Simon said.
Something about the way he said it made you put your fork down too.
"He ran drugs. Major operation, international — I won't go into all of it." He said this without flinching, looking at you steadily, not softening it. You'd always appreciated that about him — the way he treated your intelligence as a given. "After I escaped him, he decided to make it personal. He went after the people I—" He stopped. Chose the word carefully. "The people I was connected to."
The candle in the glass holder between you threw warm, unsteady light across his face.
"He killed them," Simon said. "My brother. Tommy's family." A pause that cost him something; you could see it cost him. "My Mother."
The restaurant continued around you — the murmur of other tables, the clink of cutlery, someone laughing softly near the bar — and you sat very still.
"Oh Simon," you whispered, you could feel the way your face formed the sympathy.
"I'm alright." He said it the way he'd always said it, the Manchester flat and absolute. The way that meant; don't make it bigger than I can hold right now. You knew that voice. You honoured it.
"He knew about you," Simon said and you froze. "That was the other thing. He'd done his research." His jaw shifted slightly. "As long as he was alive, you weren't safe. If I'd contacted you, properly contacted you, kept the thread going the way I wanted to, it would have given him a cleaner line. A more reliable way to reach me."
You understood the logic of it. You understood it clearly and immediately in the part of your brain that processed information. The other part — the part that had sat on the bottom stair with a birthday card after five years of silence, the part that had thought past tense — that part was going to take considerably longer.
"So you cut me off," you said. Not as an accusation. As a fact, laid down. You were starting to understand the shape of it.
"To keep you safe. Yes."
"Without telling me why." You sighed but you knew you were being unreasonable, but you hoped he would let you for a little longer.
"If I'd told you why, you'd have known there was a threat. And you'd have—" He stopped. The corner of his mouth moved, something that was not quite a smile and not quite not one. "You'd have done something about it. Gone looking. Made noise."
"I would not have—" You stopped, because you would have. You absolutely would have. You'd spent thirty years being completely unable to sit on the sidelines where Simon Riley was concerned, and the knowledge that someone was threatening him would have made you entirely unreasonable. "That's—" you huffed.
"Yeah," he said.
"You could have found a way—"
"There wasn't one. Not one that was safe." His voice was very level. "I went through every option, love. I promise you. Every one."
The word arrived quietly, without ceremony.
Love.
He'd never called you that — not in thirty years, not in all the time and all the familiarity of what you were to each other. He said it the way he said everything that mattered: without preamble, without dressing it up, laid down like the fact it was.
"And now?" you asked. Your voice was quite steady. Steadier than you felt.
"He's dead." No elaboration. None needed. The flat Manchester vowels carrying the weight of it cleanly, without mess. "And you're safe. And I—" He looked at you across the table, across the candle and the white linen. "I bought the house," he said. "I've spent a while making it what it is. Making if perfect. I saved up for years. The 141 pays well when you get to a certain level and I wasn't spending it on anything else."
"For years," you repeated, feeling a shiver rack up your spine and your toes go numb.
"Since I was about twenty." He said this without apparent embarrassment, as though it were the most natural thing in the world to spend fifteen years saving money to buy a woman a house from a description she'd given you at sixteen years old. "Took a while to find the right one that wasn’t too far from your parents. The lavender took three growing seasons to look like it did when you pulled up."
Three growing seasons.
He had planted the lavender three years ago. He had stood in a garden three towns from where you lived and planted lavender along a path because a sixteen-year-old girl had mentioned it lying on her back in his garden thirty years ago, and he had tended it for three years, and he had waited.
"Simon Riley," you said.
"It's got room for your books Sunshine, built the shelves myself." His lips quirked up at the corners at your flabbergasted expression.
"You are the most—" You stopped. Started again. "Do you have any idea what the past five years have felt like? Do you have any idea what I—" Your voice did the thing you'd been preventing it from doing, cracked at the edge of the sentence like a plate under too much weight. You stopped. Pressed your lips together. "I grieved you. I sat in my flat and I genuinely, actually grieved you and decided you were dead. I had — Simon, I had a plan for getting through it. I was managing it."
"I know."
"Don't say I know." you snapped sounding more like a bratty child than angry.
"I'm sorry." And this was different. This was not the automatic I know, the absorbing of your anger. This was something he said the way he said very few things — carefully, with full weight behind it. His eyes on yours across the table. "I'm sorry for the five years. I'm sorry I couldn't find another way. I'm sorry you were on your own with it." A pause. "I'm sorry it took me this long to have something worth coming back with."
"The house is not—" You stopped. "You didn't need to buy me a house, Simon. I didn't need—"
"I needed to," he said. Simply. "I needed to know I was coming back with something real. Something that wasn't just me turning up with nothing after all that time, asking you to — to accept—" He moved his hand across the table, and his fingers stopped just short of yours. Not touching. Close. "Asking you to take me as I was. I needed it to be enough. I needed there to be something I could give you that was—"
"Simon." Your voice was very quiet.
"I know it's not—"
"Simon." You turned your hand over on the table. Just that. The small, deliberate movement of turning your palm up.
He looked at it. Then he looked at you. Then, slowly, he put his hand in yours — his enormous, careful, tattooed hand. Not quite the one that had carried your bag through every corridor of secondary school and pulled you up off the pavement after Daniel Holt and held you on the platform at the train station, but this one now and his fingers closed around yours and he held on.
"I only ever wanted you," you said softly.
"Sunshine-"
"You were always worth it," you cut him off. And then, because it was time — because it had been time for approximately thirty years and you were done waiting for the right moment when the right moment had repeatedly failed to arrive — "You were always enough. You were always the thing I was — Simon, you have always been the only one I wanted. Exactly as you are."
He was very still.
"I didn't tell you on the platform," you said. "I should have. I've thought about it every day since."
"So have I," he said.
The candle between you flickered in some movement of air from the kitchen, and in the warm unsteady light his face was open in a way you had waited thirty years to see. His hand was warm and sure around yours, and from the other side of the restaurant you were almost certain you heard Margaret Howarth say something to Gerald in a satisfied undertone.
"You planted the lavender," you grinned.
"Three years ago." He finally smiles back at you, it was crooked and uneven and you loved it.
"You are," you said carefully, "the most ridiculous man I have ever known." You shook your head still grinning.
"Missed you too, sunshine," he smirked.
Dinner ended the way the best dinners end — not with a definitive conclusion but with a gradual, reluctant unwinding, the kind where both people keep finding one more thing to say, one more thread to pull, because the alternative is standing up and the evening becoming past tense.
You ordered dessert.
Neither of you particularly wanted it but you both ordered it, and you both knew why, and neither of you said so. The chocolate brownie was very good. Simon ate his methodically, the way he ate everything, and at one point looked up and caught you watching him and said nothing.
The candle between you had burned down to a stub by the time the bill came.
He paid. You protested on principle. He gave you a look that had not changed at all since he was fourteen years old — flat, certain, faintly amused — and handed the card to the waiter without further discussion.
"That's not—" you started.
"Next time," he said.
Next time. You let it sit there between you, warm and presumptuous and everything you wanted.
Outside, the evening had cooled.
The last of the summer still holding in the air, the kind of September evening that felt like a concession, like the year wasn't ready to be done.
The street was quiet for a Saturday, just a few couples moving between the restaurants and a group of lads outside the pub further down having a smoke. The amber of the streetlights made everything look like something worth remembering.
Simon stood beside you on the pavement, close enough that his arm brushed yours when he turned to look down the street, and you were very aware of the warmth of him and the black shirt and the lavender you couldn't smell from here but could somehow still feel in your hands.
"Walk with me a bit," he said. Not a question, not quite. He'd always done that — phrased invitations as though the outcome were already agreed, as though he simply assumed you'd say yes because you almost always did.
"Alright."
He fell into step beside you, and for a little while you just walked — past the wine bar with its fairy lights, past the old library that had become a gin distillery at some point in the last decade, past the post office that had been there since before either of you were born. You talked about small things. Easy things. The kind of conversation that runs alongside the real one underneath.
Then he stopped.
You stopped too.
Simon looked down at you. His hands were in his pockets. That brown gaze of his moved over your face in the way it had been moving over your face all evening — like he was cataloguing it, like he was making up for lost time in the looking.
"Dance with me," he said.
You blinked. "What?"
He tilted his head, "Come dancing with me."
You stared at him.
Simon Riley, who had sat against the wall at every school disco you'd ever attended, arms folded, watching everyone else with the expression of a man conducting a private risk assessment.
Simon Riley, who you had never, in thirty years of knowing him, seen voluntarily approach a dance floor.
"You don't dance," you said.
"No," he agreed. "But you do."
The simplicity of it landed somewhere very central.
You do.
As though that were reason enough. As though your enjoyment of a thing were sufficient justification for him to walk into it without hesitation.
Which, you supposed, when it came to Simon, it always had been.
"Alright," you said, for the second time in ten minutes.
His hand found the small of your back again, that same light, deliberate touch from inside the restaurant and he guided you down the street.
Simon said you weren't far, when you heard it.
The particular sound of a Domino's box. The slight crinkle of a carrier bag. And then your mother's voice, carrying across the quiet street in the way it always had — warm and clear and entirely without volume control.
"Oh honey! We thought - oh!"
"Oh fuck," you cursed.
You said it very quietly. Not quietly enough. Simon chuckled under his breath.
Your parents were coming along the pavement from the direction of the only car park around here — your father in his weekend coat, your mother in the blue one she'd had for fifteen years. A Domino's pizza box balanced in her arms and a carrier bag hanging from your father's hand.
Movie night. Of course. They still did it every other Saturday, had done since you were small, and of course they would do it tonight of all the Saturday nights in the entire calendar.
Your mother's face when she saw you was pure, unguarded delight — the face she always made when she encountered you unexpectedly, as though each time were still a pleasant surprise. Then her gaze moved, naturally and automatically, to the man standing beside you with his hand at the small of your back.
The delight didn't disappear. It did something more complicated.
"Oh honey," she said again, but differently this time. Softer. Her voice going somewhere else entirely. "Simon?"
The Domino's box dipped. Your father caught it with the reflexes of a man who had been catching things your mother nearly dropped for forty years.
Simon had gone still beside you. Not that controlled, present stillness he had, the one that wasn't tension but something adjacent to it. He was looking at your mother with an expression you couldn't fully read from the side, but you could see the line of his jaw, and it was careful.
"Mrs—" he started.
"Don't you Mrs me," your mother said. Her voice was not angry. That was the thing — you'd prepared yourself, in the split second between seeing them and now, for anger, or for the brisk, self-protective coolness she used sometimes when she'd been frightened. But it wasn't that. It was something that had tears in it, which was considerably worse to witness.
She handed the pizza box to your father without looking at him — he took it with the silent competence of long practice — and she crossed the pavement in four short steps and she put her arms around Simon Riley.
He was so much larger than her. He had always been larger than her, even at fifteen when he'd eaten her shepherd's pie at the kitchen table and been careful to seem like it was casual and not like he was starving. Even when she gave him seconds and he looked like he would beg for thirds.
But now it was almost absurd, the smallness of her against the width of him, and he stood there for just a fraction of a second — that fraction where you could see him recalibrating, receiving something he hadn't prepared for — and then his arms came around her and he held on.
Your mother was crying. Small, quiet sounds, the kind she made when she was trying not to. Her face was pressed against his chest and her hands gripped the back of his black shirt and she said, muffled and with great feeling, "You absolute boy."
Simon said nothing. His eyes, over the top of your mother's head, found yours.
You had to look away. The street was very interesting. The lamppost in particular.
You bit into your lip.
Your father appeared at your shoulder.
He was a quiet man, always had been. The kind of steady, observant presence that took things in without making a production of the taking in. He stood beside you with the pizza box over one arm and the carrier bag in the other hand and watched his wife hold the boy who had eaten at their table for a decade, and he said, very quietly, to you,
"Well. He's not dead then."
"No Dad," you managed. "He's not dead."
"Good," your father said.
As though this settled it. As though the entirety of the past five years of your grief and his, because he had grieved Simon too in his quiet way, in the way of a man who doesn't say things aloud but feels them thoroughly. He looked at Simon over the top of your mother's head and gave him a single, deliberate nod. The kind that meant; we'll talk. The kind that meant; I have things to say to you. The kind that also, underneath both of those, meant; I'm so glad son.
Simon received the nod with equal gravity, which was exactly right.
Your mother finally pulled back. She held Simon by the arms — or tried to, her hands not quite making it around the circumference of them — and looked up at him with red eyes and the particular expression of a woman who has a great deal to say and is choosing, for now, not to say most of it.
"You'll come for dinner," she said. Not a question. The same tone she'd used on him at fifteen and apparently intended to continue using indefinitely. "Sunday. Proper dinner. Not a restaurant. Mine."
"Yes," Simon said. Immediately. Without hesitation.
"Good." She released his arms and reached up and patted his cheek once, firmly, the way you might with someone who had done something frustrating and beloved in equal measure.
Then she turned to you, and her expression did something complicated and warm and knowing, and she didn't say any of the things she was clearly thinking, which you appreciated deeply.
What she said instead was: "Don't stay out too late. You're thirty-five, not seventeen."
"Mum." You scolded.
"I'm just saying." She shrugged.
"We're going dancing," you told her, with the energy of someone redirecting a conversation through sheer momentum.
Your mother looked at Simon. Simon looked at your mother. Something passed between them that was private and thirty years old and not yours to have.
"Of course you are," she said.
Your father passed the Domino's box back to your mother, and said, "Right then. We'll leave you to it." He looked at Simon one more time. "Sunday," he confirmed.
"Sunday," Simon said.
Your parents moved off down the pavement.
Your mother looked back once — just once — and her face when she did was the face you'd seen her wear at your primary school nativity and at your GCSE results and on the morning you'd gone to university; the particular face of a woman watching her child be happy and feeling the full, complicated, loving weight of it.
Then she turned back to your father and said something you couldn't hear, and his hand found her shoulder as they walked, and they rounded the corner and were gone.
You stood on the pavement in the September evening and breathed.
Beside you, Simon was also very carefully just standing there.
"She cried on me," he said, after a moment.
"Yes."
"Didn't expect that."
You turned to look at him. He was looking at the corner your parents had turned, and his face had the quality it sometimes had when something had reached him — not visibly, not dramatically, just in that particular stillness that meant something had got through.
"She cried about you," you told him. "When you stopped writing. Three years ago — there were several times, actually, but three years ago was the worst. She held me in her kitchen and we both—" You stopped. Managed the next part carefully. "She loves you too, Simon. She always did. You were at our table every other night for years."
He was quiet for a moment. Something moved in his jaw. "I know," he said. And this time the I know was different from all the other times he'd said it tonight — heavier, and private.
"You agreed to Sunday dinner," you giggled.
"Of course I agreed to Sunday dinner," he said knowing full well he would have been stupid not to and gotten an earful from your mother.
Simon offered you his hand.
Not at the small of your back this time. His hand, palm up, in the space between you. Old-fashioned and deliberate.
You put yours in it.
"Come on then," he said. "Let's go dancing."
There was, as it turned out, only one place to go dancing in this town on a Saturday night if you meant actual dancing — the kind with a proper floor and music with a real structure to it.
It was not a club.
It was not a bar with a cleared space near the speaker.
It was the old church hall on Callow Street, which had been hosting the Saturday Evening Social Dance since before either of you were born, and which Simon seemed to know about with the specificity of a man who had done his research.
"A dance hall," you said, standing outside it. Through the tall, thin windows the warm light was visible, and the sound — strings, a proper band, something with a waltz rhythm that made the windows hum faintly. "You're taking me to a dance hall."
"Only place with a floor."
"Simon, this is a — there will be pensioners in there." you said quietly.
"There'll be a dance floor," he looked down at you. "And you said yes." he shrugged but looked smug.
He pushed the door open and held it, and because you had in fact said yes, and because the music through the door sounded genuinely lovely, and because you were still holding his hand from the pavement, you went in.
The church hall smelled of floor polish and tea. Fairy lights were strung along the rafters — someone's addition, not the original fixtures, and they made the whole space amber and soft.
Round tables lined the edges, most of them occupied by couples in their sixties and seventies and eighties, a few younger faces dotted among them, everyone dressed with the particular care of people who still believed an evening out was worth dressing for.
On the small stage at the far end, a four-piece band was working through something in three-four time with the ease of musicians who had played together for years.
And at the edge of the floor, clipboard in hand, wearing the same expression of organised authority she'd worn every PE lesson for fifteen years was Mrs Valerie Croft.
She was smaller than you remembered. Or perhaps you were simply larger.
She'd retired at some point — the hair was fully silver now rather than streaked — but the posture was identical: spine straight, chin up, the bearing of a woman who had spent decades telling teenagers to stand properly and had eventually simply become the embodiment of the instruction.
She looked up from her clipboard as you approached and her eyes moved from you to Simon, and to her credit, she didn't miss a step.
"Well," she tilted her chin up to meet his eyes, "Riley."
"Miss," Simon said. Which was technically incorrect given that she had a ring on her finger and had for as long as you'd known her, but you suspected it was because he'd called her Miss in secondary school the way you had. "Mrs Croft. Sorry. We were passing and— " He paused, which was unlike him. "Is there any chance we could crash it?"
Mrs Croft looked at him. She looked at you. She looked at your joined hands with the expression of a woman who had supervised enough teenagers to recognise a development when she saw one.
"Can you behave yourselves?" she asked.
"Yes," you said nodding.
Simon said nothing.
Mrs Croft made a sound that was not quite a laugh but was adjacent to one. "Floor's open," she said. "Don't knock anyone over." And she turned back to her clipboard.
The first dance was not elegant.
Simon was, as he had always been and had openly admitted, not a dancer.
He was a man built for other kinds of movement — purposeful, directed, the kind that had somewhere to go. Dancing required a different relationship with your body, a willingness to be present in it without agenda, and that was not naturally his.
But he was trying. And Simon Riley trying at something he wasn't good at with complete, unhesitating commitment was one of your favourite things in the world.
He held you correctly — one hand at your waist, the other holding yours at the right height — because he had clearly looked this up at some point, which you were choosing not to think about too hard. His footwork was careful. Deliberate. Slightly behind the beat in the way of someone counting silently.
"You're counting," you told him trying your hardest not to laugh.
"Shut up."
"Simon, I can see your lips moving." you snorted.
"I said shut up."
You were laughing now. Properly, helplessly, the kind that came up from somewhere real — and he looked down at you with that face, that flat, long-suffering, completely fond face, and something in his eyes that was warm in a way that had nothing to do with patience and everything to do with the fact that your laugh had always been, apparently, one of his favourite sounds.
"You're doing fine," you told him, once you'd recovered.
"I'm doing terribly," he answered. "Keep going."
By the second dance, he was better.
By the third, he had found something. Some adjustment in the way he held you, the way his hand settled more fully at your waist, drawing you closer so the movement between you became less about individual steps and more about one shared thing. He was a quick study. He always had been, once he'd decided something was worth doing.
You became aware, gradually, of the room watching.
Not intrusively. Not all at once. But in the soft, peripheral way of a room full of people who have been in love for decades and recognise the particular weather of it when it walks through the door.
An older couple near the stage — she in pale blue, he in a suit that had been good once and was still cared for — had stopped talking to watch you.
A woman at one of the corner tables had her chin in her hand.
Mrs Croft, by the door, was very deliberately looking at her clipboard and failing to look only at her clipboard.
You didn't mind. You were too busy watching Simon watch you.
The band changed tempo at half past nine.
The waltz gave way to something with a different shape entirely — something that moved from the hips rather than the feet, a rhythm that was slower in its pulse and considerably less innocent in its intention.
A rumba.
You looked up at Simon.
He looked down at you.
"I don't know this one," he said.
"I'll show you." you breathed.
You took his hand and placed it lower at your waist, right above the curve of your ass. Deliberately watching his face when you did it, watching the shift in his expression, the way something in his eyes went very still and very focused. "Hip to hip," you told him. "Slower than you think. Let the music pull you."
He followed your lead with an attention that was frankly overwhelming in its completeness.
Simon Riley giving you his full, undivided, physical focus was not a small thing. He was so large and so present and he moved with you rather than against you, adjusting with every shift of your weight, and somewhere in the second minute of the song the counting stopped and something else replaced it.
He drew you closer. His hand at your hip pulled you in until there was no space left between you, until you could feel the warmth of him through the green of your dress and you were very aware of every point of contact, of the music and of the room full of people who had gone very quiet.
Then he turned you.
It was not technically correct. It was not what the dance required. But he turned you in a single, smooth movement that his body had decided on and yours simply followed, because that was what it did with him.
And then he dipped you.
The room tilted. His arm was across your back, solid and immovable, and you were suspended in the amber light with the music around you and your hand at his shoulder.
He lowered you — slowly, with complete control, no hesitation in the hold and then his face was close, very close, and his nose grazed the line of your throat making your breath hitch.
A slow, deliberate graze. The warmth of his breath against your pulse point. You felt it in places that had nothing to do with dancing, between your legs throbbing.
His hand — the one at your hip — slid down, just slightly, just enough, finding the outside of your thigh where the fabric of your dress lay, and he hooked your leg, slowly, around his hip. His fingers at the back of your thigh. Holding you there. His nose still at your throat.
The music resolved. Somewhere behind you, someone started clapping.
He brought you upright. Smoothly, slowly, until you were standing again and his hand was still at the back of your thigh. Your leg still around his hip and your faces were very close. Your heart was conducting itself in a way that had absolutely nothing to do with exertion.
You were panting. Slightly. Just slightly.
He was not panting. He was looking down at you with the almost-smile, the one that had always been rarer than gold and twice as valuable — and his eyes were warm and very dark and entirely, completely satisfied with themselves.
"You looked that up as well," you managed.
"No," he said.
"Simon—"
"That one," he said, "I just wanted to do."
From the table by the stage, the woman in pale blue was applauding with great enthusiasm. Her husband had two fingers in his mouth and was whistling.
Mrs Croft had given up entirely on the clipboard.
The taxi back was not a long ride.
It felt longer than it was, and shorter than you wanted.
You sat beside him in the back seat with his thigh against yours and the city moving past the windows and neither of you speaking. The silence had a texture to it that was thick and warm and anticipatory in a way that made the air feel heavy in your lungs.
His hand was on your knee. Just resting there, heavy and warm, the way he did everything — with complete, unapologetic certainty.
You did not move it.
The house appeared at the end of the lane with its white fence and its dark windows and the lavender silver in the moonlight.
You were out of the taxi before it had fully stopped and you were aware how eager this appeared and you didn't care.
Simon paid the driver and caught up with you in three strides because his legs were considerably longer than yours and always had been.
He got to the door first. Key in hand.
The door opened.
And you did not wait for him to step through it.
You took him by the front of his shirt, that black shirt, warm from his body, the fabric bunching in your fists and you lips were suddenly on his.
You walked him backwards through the doorway and you felt the moment his back met the wall just inside and you were already kissing him before he'd fully registered the sequence of events.
Your mouth on his. Your hands in the front of his shirt. Thirty years of it finding its way out all at once, without ceremony, without preamble, without any of the careful management you had been applying to yourself since you were four years old at a preschool art table.
He kissed you back.
He kissed you back the way he did everything — thoroughly, completely, with his full attention and no apparent interest in doing anything else ever again.
His hands came to your face, big and careful, tilting your jaw, and for a moment you were simply inside the realness of him and the warmth of him and the fact that he was here and alive and kissing you in the hallway of the house he'd bought for you.
He pulled back.
"Easy, sunshine," he said against your lips. Low. A little breathless, which you would be privately triumphant about later. The corner of his mouth pulled up in that crooked smile.
You became aware, in the slightly dazed way of someone returning from somewhere, that your hands were still in his shirt and his hands were still on your face and you were standing approximately two inches apart in his hallway.
You also became aware, in the refocusing of your vision, of his mouth.
Of the scar on his upper lip.
You didn't know how you hadn't noticed it before — through dinner, through the dancing, through all of it.
Perhaps you had simply not been this close before. Or perhaps you had been looking at so many things that you hadn't been looking at everything.
It was small, a thin pale line bisecting the left side of his upper lip, old enough to have faded to silver, the kind of scar that had been there for years and had been lived with so thoroughly that the face had absorbed it.
You lifted your thumb and touched it, gently. "How'd you get this?"
He went very still, alert and present and reading you.
You kissed it. Softly. Just that.
Something moved in his throat.
His hands shifted from your face to your waist, warm and settled, and he began to move you gently — backwards, one steady step at a time — turning you both away from the wall and deeper into the hallway. His foot found the door behind him and pushed it closed with a quiet, final click.
"If I tell you about that one," he said, his voice low and even above your head as he guided you past the entrance and toward the stairs, "I'll have to tell you about the rest."
He looked down at you as he said it, that look, the one that said you were the most interesting thing he had ever encountered. The one that made you feel simultaneously seen and slightly undone — and his expression had in it something that was fond and amused and entirely, devastatingly warm.
You kicked your heels off at the bottom of the stairs. They went somewhere behind you. You didn't look.
Your bag went next, dropped against the banister.
"The rest?" you repeated. Your voice came out slightly smaller than you intended. Your eyes, entirely without your permission, moved down the front of him — the black shirt, the breadth of his shoulders, his torso, his thick thighs, all of him — and back up again. Slowly.
He watched you do it. He said nothing.
You swallowed. "Tell me then."
His hand at your waist steered you up the first step, and then the second, and the stairs curved slightly toward the landing above, and at the top of the stairs he pushed open the door to a bedroom.
The room was large and furnished.
A bed, properly large, the kind that accommodated a man his size without complaint. Low lamps on either side casting the same amber warmth as the hall below. Dark wood floors, a window looking out toward the garden, the curtain shifting slightly in a crack of night air.
He kissed you, just inside the door you kissed him back and his hands were at your hips.
Then he pulled back with a groan. Both of you breathing slightly harder than was strictly accounted for by climbing one flight of stairs.
"I want to, sunshine," he said. His voice was very low. Restrained. His hands still on your body, holding you there, his thumbs moving in a small slow motion against the fabric of your dress that was doing nothing to help you think clearly. "I do. But I need to hear it from you first. Your permission. Clear words. I don't want to misunderstand you."
You opened your mouth.
And then your eyes moved, over his shoulder, to the dresser.
A skull mask looked back at you.
You closed your mouth. You looked at it. The mask, white and stark and precise but somehow both alien and completely, recognisably his. The balaclava beside it, folded neatly. And tactical gloves — enormous, black, reinforced, approximately the size of your head.
"That yours?" you asked.
Simon turned his head, following your gaze. He looked at the dresser, then back at you. "Yeah."
"What is it?"
"What I wear on missions."
"Oh," you said.
And then your brain did something entirely beyond your authority. It constructed, with great speed and considerable detail, an image: Simon, broad and enormous, in black tactical gear. Gloved hands. That mask. Hovering over you.
You swallowed.
The image did not leave. It simply settled in, warm and vivid and decidedly unhelpful.
"Sunshine."
His hand came to your face — his big, warm, ungloved hand, his actual hand, the one you knew — his thumb sweeping gently under your eye, bringing you back into the room and the amber lamplight and the present moment.
"Hmm?" you managed meeting his gaze.
His eyes moved over your face with the same comprehensive attention he always gave you.
"Your permission, love," he said. Quiet. Certain.
"Oh." You blinked. "Yes. Yes, you have it. Always."
The almost-smile. "Not for everything I want to do to you." His thumb was still moving, very gently, under your eye. "I'll ask. Multiple times."
You stared at him. "Multiple—"
"Times," he confirmed. His voice was entirely level. His eyes were not.
You pushed his shoulder and your cheeks burned.
He caught your hand as you pushed it and laughed, a low, real, full sound, the kind that you had spent most of your life engineering because it was so rare and so completely, unreasonably good.
You laughed too, properly, the helpless kind, and his forehead came down to rest against yours and you were both laughing in the amber light of his bedroom with the skull mask on the dresser and the lavender outside the window and thirty years behind you and everything in front.
The laughing settled.
Not all at once — it unwound gradually, the way laughter does when it's the real kind, leaving something warm and loose in its place.
His forehead was still against yours. His hands had moved from your face to your waist, both of them now, holding you the way he'd held you on the dance floor — with that complete, unhurried certainty, like you were something he'd been waiting to hold properly for a very long time and intended to do it right.
The amber light of the lamps lay across everything. Through the gap in the curtain, you could see the edge of the garden — the pale shapes of flowers, the dark of the lawn.
"Tell me about the rest," you said quietly.
He pulled back just enough to look at you. "The scars?"
"You said if you told me about the one on your lip you'd have to tell me about the rest." You reached up and touched the scar again — that thin, silver line — with the pad of your thumb. "So tell me about the rest."
He looked at you for a long moment. Then he reached up and began, without ceremony, to unbutton his shirt.
You were very still.
He did it the way he did everything — without drama, without performance, button by button from the collar down, and when he shrugged it from his shoulders and set it aside you understood, in a way you hadn't before, what eighteen years of that life had written on him.
He was enormous.
You'd known that in the abstract — had known it from the doorframe and the dance floor and the way rooms seemed to reorganise themselves around him — but this was different.
This was the specific, undeniable reality of his shoulders, the breadth of his chest, the muscle of his arms that carried the tattoo sleeve on the left, the ink wrapping from wrist to shoulder in dark, intricate patterns that in this light you still couldn't fully read but wanted to.
And the scars.
There were more than you'd expected.
Each one a different shape and age and story, written into the topography of him in pale and silver lines. A long one along his left ribs. Something older, fainter, across the top of his right shoulder. A circular scar below his collarbone on the left side that your medical knowledge was sufficient to identify and that made your chest constrict briefly and completely before you put that particular knowledge away for now.
He was watching your face as you looked. Careful. Giving you the time of it.
You stepped forward. You placed your hand flat against his sternum — his heart under your palm, steady and real — and you felt him exhale.
"The lip," you said.
"Kandahar. 2004. Caught the stock of a rifle." He said it the same way he'd told you everything tonight — flat, factual, trusting the fact to carry the weight. "Bit through my lip. Wasn't pretty for a while."
You moved your hand from his sternum to his ribs. Found the long scar there, traced it gently with your fingertips.
"That one."
"Knife. 2009. I moved the wrong way and the other man moved the right way." The shadow of something in his face that was not quite humour and not quite not. "Lesson learned."
Your hand moved to his shoulder. The older, fainter scar.
"Before the military," he said, before you asked. His voice changed, just fractionally. Flatter. Doing more work to stay level. "Not a mission."
You understood. You didn't ask further. You pressed your lips to it instead — gently, just that, your mouth against the old pale mark — and you felt the breath go out of him in a way that was different from all the others. Slower. Deeper.
"Sunshine," he said. Very quietly.
"The one below your collarbone," you said.
A pause. "That one's not a story for tonight."
You tilted your head back to look up at him. "Is it a story for eventually?"
His eyes on yours. Something in them that was considering, assessing, "Yeah," he said. "Eventually."
"Alright," you said. You meant it. You had waited thirty years; you could wait for the story of one scar.
His hand moved to your face. That same gesture from the hallway — his thumb at your cheek, slow and deliberate and he tilted your chin up and kissed you. Not urgently this time. Slowly. Deeply.
His hands found the zip at the side of your dress — careful, unhurried — and he looked at you, a clear question in it, and you nodded, and his hands were very steady and very gentle. Your dress went the way of your heels and your bag, somewhere behind you, unmissed.
He looked at you the way he had looked at you on the porch yesterday, and outside The Grill tonight, and across the restaurant table, and on the dance floor — with that complete, comprehensive attention.
Only now there was nothing restrained about what was in it. It was simply there, open and certain, and it was thirty years of something finally being allowed to be exactly what it was.
"Hi," you said. Which was absurd. Which made him laugh again, low and real.
"Hi, sunshine," he said. His hands at your waist. His forehead dropping to yours.
“Si I need to-“ you breathed in deep, “I um,” he pulled his head away from yours, looking into your eyes with those brilliant brown ones of his.
“What is it Sunshine?” He asked, his finger under your chin tilting your head up.
“I’m, I’ve never-“ you sigh, “I’ve told you so many things, I can’t believe I can’t even say this to you.”
“Do we need to slow down?” He asked, his voice softening.
“No. It’s not that. I mean I’m not a virgin if that’s what you’re thinking I just, no guy has ever-“ you sigh again, your eyes dropping from his.
Simon is quiet. He waits, the way he always waits — giving you the whole space of it, not rushing you toward the end of the sentence.
“Made it good,” you finally say, to his chest. “For me. It’s always just, fine. Maybe sometimes I get close but then it’s over. Not that there’s been loads of guys, maybe three.”
A beat.
You make yourself look up at him.
Something changes in his face.
You see the flare of it.
Anger.
Not toward you — you feel that immediately, the anger isn't at you, it moves through him and settles somewhere else entirely. His jaw shifts. His eyes, for just a moment, go somewhere dark and quiet.
"Every one of them," he says. Low. More to himself than to you.
"Simon—"
"Had you," he says. "And didn't—" He stops. The jaw again. His eyes squeeze shut. "Didn't pay attention."
"It's not—"
"It is." His eyes open. He looks at you, his hands moving to your hips, both of them, settling there with a weight that feels like anchoring, like he needs the contact as much as you do. The darkness has settled now, controlled, underneath everything else.
"And I wasn't here." Something moves through his expression — not guilt exactly, but something adjacent to it, something private and old. "Should've been your first, sunshine. Should've been there to—"
He stops himself. His forehead drops to yours.
"I've waited years for this," he says quietly. "I'm not rushing it. And I'm going to pay attention."
“Pay attention?” You ask breathless.
“To every sigh,” he kissed your cheek, “whimper and moan.” His lips moved down to your jaw. “To the way your hips move, the way your back arches, the way you’ll writhe under me, how I’ve imaged it every time I’ve gotten off for the last two decades.” He whispered the last bit into your ear, teeth tugging on your earlobe.
You gasp, “Simon.” Your cheeks burn.
“Oh don’t tell me you never thought about it.” He grins pulling back to look down at you.
You look at the floor sheepishly cause of course you have. Of course you’ve cum the hardest you ever have in your life only when thinking about Simon fucking you.
"Oh you have." He smirked titling his head.
“Shut up.” You push his shoulder and he laughs.
His hands leave your hips and then you're moving, his arms around you, and the edge of the bed meets the back of your knees.
Then his massive paws are in your hair and his lips are on your neck as your back meets the sheets. His weight heavy and solid on you. You could tell he was holding himself up so he didn’t squish you.
He leaned back on his heels, kneeling between your legs. You sighed in satisfaction when his fingers ran over your bare skin. His blunt nails scratching softly where your pelvic bone sits.
"So beautiful Sunshine," He grabs your hips and squeezes, "Fill my hands with you finally." Simon groans. A noise you've been picturing in your head. This and everything else that happens this evening, you truly believe, will be one of those times when reality is better than anything you have imagined.
Simon's brown eyes have always been intense, but right now the way he's looking down at you it's like he is someone else entirely. His eyes almost black with how much they have darkened.
"Simon." You tangle your fingers with his.
"Can I?" He asks. His hand, the one not in yours, trailing down your thigh and stopping on your mound. You clench around nothing when he pushes down, just a little bit of pressure that you feel in your clit and makes your hips buck.
You don't miss the way his lips do the almost smile thing. You nod furiously but he shakes his head.
"Need your words love." He raises a brow.
"Yes, yes Simon touch me." You breathe out, your chest feeling tight when he nods, moving his hand down to cup your cunt over your underwear.
And maybe its because you haven't had sex in three years, maybe its because you are touch starved or maybe its simply because its Simon, but your back arches and your moan is down right pornographic with a simple touch over your underwear.
"So responsive." He mumbles, his thumb rubbing circles over your clit through the fabric. "Get your tits out for me Sunshine, wanna see em." he grunts feeling your underwear getting wet.
Shakily you reach behind your back and unclip your bra. "Been thinking about them for years. What they look like, how they'll bounce when I fuck you." He groans as you pull the straps down your arms and fling the bra on the floor.
His eyes are on your chest, he doesn't blink. Then as if his system has rebooted, he blows air out of his cheeks and whistles low. "Fuck lovie, so pretty. You're a dream." Simon leans forward and wraps his lips around your breast, his tongue swirling around the nipple as his thumb continues circling your clit.
You moan, fingers tugging at his hair.
He comes off your breast with a pop making you whine and push at his shoulder. He grins pressing his thumb firmer against you, while sliding his other hand over your leg, index finger tracing over the small scar on you leg from when you fell off your bike after Simon broke your training wheels.
There was something comforting about this. Simon wasn't someone you had to explain yourself to, he already knew every version of you, he was simply adding this one to his list. This version, open and honest and begging the man you'd known for thirty years to make you cum on his fingers.
This didn't feel like a hook up, not like other guys have, but it felt like two people who have been each other's home for years and they're finally admitting it.
"Kiss me Simon." You're not even sure if what you said made sense with how much you were panting. But he leaned down to graze his lips along yours. Teasing and soft, despite the fast past he'd started to set with his thumb.
"Stop teasing." You huffed.
"Its my favourite pastime." He grinned hooking his fingers in your underwear, pulling them down and moving with them to settle between your legs.
You gasp, when his tongue slides from your asshole to your clit. "Simon!" His dark eyes are locked on yours as he swirls the tip of his his tongue around your entrance. Your toes curl, your head falling back onto the soft bed sheets.
A few occasions, you could count on one hand, had a guy you were with eaten you out and it was good but fuck, it didn't feel like this.
You felt like you were burning all over with each swipe of his tongue, each dip inside your entrance, each pattern he begins to circle over your clit.
He was learning you.
Simon groans against you, his breath hot, it made you dizzy. You feel everything, its too much to quick and your hips start to buck against his mouth.
Simon clearly had no intention of slowing down or stopping as he slides his arms around your thighs and splays his hands over the tops of them locking you in place.
It feels like fire, like molten lava pooling low in your abdomen the harder his tongue presses against you.
You don’t even recognise the sounds coming out of you, it’s as if every movement pulls a new one from you.
His thumb replaces his tongue and he rubs the bump in small circles until you can barely breathe. “Sound so pretty,” he murmurs just as your back arches and you moan loudly into the night air.
He is still speaking but you can’t hear anything he is saying, it’s all blurring together the way your vision is blurring. His thumb slides from your clit down until it’s pushing its way inside you. Your hips jerk away but his other hand is quick to hold you in place.
“No running.” Simon growls.
You cry out when his tongue comes back to torture you, lapping at you like he’s never had a drink and you're fresh water. Soon enough the rhythm he’s built has your hips rolling forward seeking more of whatever he has to give you.
Your hand reaches for his arm and squeezes hard the exact moment your vision turns white and your body shakes, dissolving into pleasure. It's like lightning pulsing through you. He works your through your orgasm, wringing every last wave of pleasure from you before he moves to your lips, kissing you.
“Did so good Sunshine. I’ve got you.” His arms wrap around you, your nipples grazing against the hair on his chest, that alone has you whimpering.
"Need more, want you inside me Simon. Please." You look into his eyes, your shyness gone with your orgasm.
"Okay Sunshine." Simon chuckles, the sound vibrating against you.
He pulls back and gets off the bed before he starts to unbuckle his belt. He pushes his black slacks down along with his underwear, his large, and he was so fucking big, cock already hard.
"Always wondered what you'd be like in bed," He tilts his head with a smirk, "If you'd like being in control. Or if you'd prefer me to lead," He knelt on the bed again, and oh my god Simon Riley, your best friend of thirty years and the love of your life was crawling up the bed towards you until his cock was flush with your entrance. "If you'd be needy and beg. Or if you'd bark orders at me." He slapped the head of his cock against your clit. "If you'd be loud or quiet."
"If you'd let me do whatever I wanted to you," his head titled back, eyes shut, "Fuck Sunshine, the things I've imagined doing to you," He looks down at you with the most intense gaze, pining you there on the bed, "Would you let me lovie? Do whatever I want to you?" He asks, pearly whites peaking out to sink into his bottom lip.
"Like what?" Your breath is so unsteady, so hitched and uneven you feel your cheeks heat even more than they have done at his words.
He grins, "Like what?" He chuckles pushing the head of his cock against your entrance, not in, but resting against it, "Wanna fuck you so hard you can't walk. Make love to you slow and so deep you'll feel me everywhere. Bend you over every surface in this house and make you cry on my cock-"
"Simon!" You gasp.
"Can I Sunshine?" He groans pushing in a little more and your eyes sting with tears at the stretch.
"Yes! Please yes!" He pushes in slowly. One of his hands coming next to you on the bed and the other gripping your hip. He keeps sliding in further, so slowly until its sheathed inside you.
Simon does not move. You can see the restraint within the way his teeth are gritted, his brows furrowed, sweat forming on his forehead.
“Fuck you feel amazing wrapped around me, so tight.” He groans.
You don’t have any words and even if you did, you doubt you would be able to say them. You have never felt so…full. So filled to the brim and unable to get a reprieve from it.
“M’gonna move, gotta move Sunshine,” Simon growls and the fullness disappears for a second before he’s pushing himself back in.
“Fuck you feel so good Si.” You shudder and stars appear in your vision when he moves forward and takes your legs with him folding you in half.
Simon Riley has you in fucking mating press and didn't even break the slow rhythm he's building. He continues this push and pull movement until it begins to flow, each movement begins where the other ends. The pattern making you sob, “Don’t stop!”
You can't function and its only now that you understand the phrase 'being fucked dumb', rocking your hips, trying desperately to keep up with each thrust, back arched so beautifully.
Simon lets his hand slip and curve around your jaw without thinking about it, "Taking me so well Sunshine." The feral look in his eyes sends a shiver up your spine.
"Too big." You sobbed, your hands grabbing at his large biceps as he thrusts harder. He could feel every ridge and curve of your sopping cunt.
"You can take it." He encouraged you, biting at your neck leaving marks in his wake and looking so damn happy whilst doing it.
You continued to moan and whimper, tears of pleasure falling down your face while Simon's huge body hovered over you. Protecting you from the outside world, in here, it was just you and him.
"Si..oh!" you cried out feeling him hit that rough spot inside your weeping, swollen cunt.
"There it is." He didn't mean to grin like a obsessed man in such an intimate moment but he couldn't help himself. He never can with you. Each thrust hits the one place no man ever seems to be able to find but Simon seemingly found with ease. A spot that makes a tightening begin like a coil, being wound with every drive of his hips.
Your sinful noises morph into higher pitched breathy little screams.
"I know lovie, I know." He cooed, holding you closer. His sweat glazed skin meeting yours as his large veiny hand slips under your head, his other arm curling around your waist.
You move your hips and he groans vulgar into the air, his hand gripping your hair and pulling your head back, a little to the side before he attacks your neck all messy. Smearing his lips across your throat, you don’t even recognise the sound that leaves your mouth.
He pulls away, his dark eyes flit to your squelching pussy, the noise attracting his attention pupils dilating, honing in on the way your cunt sucks his cock back in. He couldn’t pull away even if he wanted to and fuck he doesn’t, he wants nothing more than to stay in your pretty pussy forever.
“Simonfuckyespleaserighttheredontstop!” All the words and moans blend together until your mumbling nonsense trying your hardest to keep conscious, it’s difficult with the way he’s fucking into you so deliciously it’s making you delirious in the best way.
His big body towering over yours, big hands gripping you almost bruisingly. His thick muscular hairy thighs press against your skin compellingly, the sight before you, it's irresistible. All you have to do is look down to see his massive cock sliding in and out of you, a ring of white collecting at the base.
It's too much seeing him like this, feeling the sweet pleasure burn through you and yet Simon moves one of his hands off your head and presses a thumb to your swollen, aching clit.
You're done for.
You sob, so fucking loud you swear everyone in the world can hear it, hot tears flow down your cheeks staining them.
"That's it." The words wash over you with your orgasm, it swirls around you, clings to you, and pushes you down down down the rabbit hole of pleasure. Oversensitivity sets in making you whine at his touch, but you can't stop yourself from wanting more.
Your hips buck into his touch eliciting a dirty chuckle from him.
As Simon picks up his thrusts, he comes to the conclusion that he loves you like this, wants to see it everyday. You're so drunk, so delirious and he loves it. Loves the far away look in your eyes right before they roll back into your skull.
He shoves his face into your neck groaning, "Gonna cum Sunshine, need to. Where?" his thrusts pick up again, as if that were even possible.
"Cum inside me Simon, fill me up." You cry out.
Simon must have been right there as he cums the second you finish your sentence. Hot thick robes of cum pushing deep inside you. He rubs your clit faster and another smaller orgasm zips through you leaving you whimpering.
He stays in you, holding you until he goes soft. He moves your legs so they don't cramp. "Did so well for me Sunshine. I love you so much." He looks into your eyes as more tears spill down your cheeks.
"I love you Simon." you bring your fingers into his hair, pulling him closer to kiss you. The contrast between the way he just destroyed your guts and is now kissing you so softly, is astounding.
He is careful when he picks you up and walks into the ensuite bathroom to the right, flicking the light on and placing you on the toilet. "Gotta pee sunshine, don't want you getting you a uti." He says and you're so tired you don't even have the energy to be embarrassed.
Your eyes as still closed as you pee. Your hand moves to find the toilet paper but a warm flannel is being pressed against you, Simon's other hand on your knee to keep them open. You whine and push his hand away, "Simon that's icky." You frown at him opening your eyes to see him looking at you with a frown of his own.
"Nothing about you is icky Sunshine. I'm clearing up my mess, now move your hand." You do as told and it occurs to you, through your tired haze, while Simon gently wipes you clean that he must be used to clearing up mess with the job he does.
"All done. Want a shower or straight to sleep?" He asks.
"Sleep." You yawn making him smile at you.
He carries you back to the bed, lifting the duvet and settling you both underneath it.
The particular quality of afterwards settles in the room.
The warmth of it, the specific silence, the way the world outside the window continues to exist and you become aware of it again in layers. The sound of the garden. The distant sound of a car somewhere. The sound of him breathing.
You were lying with your head on his chest. His arm around you, heavy and warm. His heartbeat under your ear, steady and unhurried, the same heart that had been beating beside you in one form or another for thirty years.
His hand moved. Slowly, idly, up and down your back.
You watched the lamplight glow on the beside table. You thought about the lavender. You thought about the train station in 2001, and the birthday cards, and the bottom stair with the cream envelope, and Margaret Howarth saying you always did belong together with the satisfied certainty of someone who had known it before either of you did.
"Simon," you said.
"Yeah."
"You planted lavender for three years."
"You mentioned that already."
"I'm still processing it."
A low sound in his chest that was the rumble of a laugh contained. "Take your time Sunshine."
You propped yourself up and looked at him. His face in the lamplight — older, marked, those brown eyes that had been watching you since you were four years old, now watching you from a pillow in the house he'd bought you.
His expression was open in the way it had been open on the porch and at the restaurant table and in the dance hall, the way it had been open perhaps three times in thirty years before tonight and was now, apparently, simply his face when he looked at you.
You loved him so much.
You had loved him in different quantities and different registers for most of your life and now you loved him in this one too, this new one, and it was the same love and completely different and you thought you would be discovering its dimensions for a considerable amount of time.
"You should have told me," you said. "Years ago. Before the train."
"Yeah," he said. No argument.
"I would have said it back then too."
Something moved in his face. "I know," he said. And then, quieter, "I wasn't ready then. Wasn't enough yet."
"Simon—"
"I know what you're going to say."
"You were always—"
"I know," he said. "I believe you. Now." His hand came up to your face, tucking a strand of hair back, his thumb at your cheekbone. "Took me a while to get there. But I'm here."
"You're here," you agreed smiling.
"And you're here." his hand tangled itself in your hair.
"I'm here." you giggled.
He looked at you for a long moment. Then, "Stay with me."
Not a question, not quite — more like a hope said aloud. The rarest thing from him. He had carried so much silently for so long, and this one small thing cost him something, and you could see it, and you loved him for it.
"It's my house," you said cheeky and bright.
He blinked. Then that laugh again — the real one, the rare one — and your heart did what it always did when you earned it, that particular, irreplaceable lurch.
"Yeah Sunshine," he said. "It is."
You lay back down against his chest. His arm came around you. His heartbeat under your ear.
Outside, the lavender moved. The Union flag was still on the roof. The porch swing sat in the dark with its yellow cushion, waiting for morning.
"Sunshine," he said. Into your hair.
"Hmm."
"I love you."
You pressed your lips to his chest, above his heart.
"I love you too," you said. "I've loved you since you were that chubby four-year-old who stole my crayons."
A long pause.
"Chubby," he repeated.
"Stocky," you amended, grinning into his chest. "You were very stocky."
"I was four."
"You were a very solid four year old."
His arm tightened around you — not painfully, just firmly, the way of a man making a point through the medium of holding — and you laughed again, helplessly, into the warmth of him.
He made that sound, that low rumbling laugh that lived in his chest, and the lamp burned warm and low and outside the lavender moved in the dark.
Simon Riley.
Who stole your crayons at four and broke your glasses at seven and learned to read because of you and carried your bag through every corridor of secondary school and punched a boy for pushing you over and kissed your cheek in a toilet corridor and sat beside you through every lunch and glared at anyone who called you a nerd and came round to your kitchen table for years and went to war at seventeen and sent you cards from the edges of the world and planted lavender for three years and bought you the house you described at sixteen and came home.
dex leans down, one hand holding your jaw to tilt it up. large palms cupping your cheeks with pressure. he doesn’t let you look away.“eyes on me," he growls. your body feels overwhelmingly full - each thrust sending waves of pleasure through you as he keeps pounding into that perfect spot. your lips part on a shaky moan - high-pitched and helpless as the pleasure crashes through you.
your eyes roll back for just a second before his voice snaps you back to reality. “be a good girl n' don't make me repeat myself,” he demands as you try to speak but another moan slips out. dex suddenly pushes into you harder, changing the angle completely. tears prickle at the corners of your eyes from how full you feel - how much sensation is flooding every nerve.
finally, your eyes, still glassy from tears and overwhelming pleasure, lock onto his. they’re hazy, unfocused as you force yourself to hold his gaze like your life depends on it. you don’t dare blink too long. don’t even consider glancing down or away because the moment your eyes start to drift, he notices instantly - his expression flickers with mild disapproval.
tears start sliding free at the overstimulation, the fullness is unbearable in the best way possible. dex's dark eyes are full of hunger and danger. the eye contact alone sends shivers down your spine. your body tenses suddenly - every muscle locking as the climax rips through you like lightning. a loud, unrestrained moan tears from your throat, raw and unfiltered. you stay locked onto him with pupils dilated, lips slightly parted from uneven breathing.
"atta girl… that’s it."
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