✿ fern ✿

When he leaves your flat after an incredibly awkward supper tacked onto what Dunk had thought was an amazing day, he realises he has none. None spare, at least. Whatever ration of interest a man gets issued in life has gone your way entirely and left the cupboard bare. He walks home with the taste of tomato sauce and embarrassment still in his mouth, thinking of how well the baby shopping had gone and how normal it had felt to stand beside you in aisles full of cots and bottles and things neither of you knew how to judge yet. Then dinner, the papers, the maths teacher, and you telling him he could ask her out as if offering him a lift to someplace he did not want to go.

For months after that heart-mangling incident, the one that brought him together with Raymun, Dunk thought falling in love again was a risk he could not afford. Given his generous nature and his inability to keep boundaries where there ought to be some, it seemed only sensible. He had been told he was smothering and that his tendency for enmeshment was fearsome, so staying alone with all those feelings appeared to be the right order of things.

Then Raymun fell in love. With his love came you, and Dunk found himself cured of all his previous resolutions. He took to liking you quickly, and to interest quicker still, because you were the prettiest thing he had ever seen and his eyes, unfortunately, worked well enough with glasses on to make that everybody’s problem. After that came wanting, and there he stayed. For two years he wanted with the low-grade stamina of someone persisting in rain because the bus must come sooner or later. Only every time he gathered enough courage to make a fool of himself, some boyfriend of yours arrived first and had to be withstood. One had a car too loud for the size of his personality. One wore scarves indoors. One called you babe in a tone that made Dunk’s fingers tighten round pint glasses. He endured them all with the pained dignity of livestock at market, and when it finally came to him and you, it went so well he ought to have known the God was setting a trap.

Now, week or so later, he sits on the courtyard bench with a chocolate the maths teacher left in his locker in one hand and a card saying thank you. coffee later? in the other, wondering why on earth he would date someone else when you are out there carrying his child.

A few nights before, he asked Raymun what he thought of it, and Raymun, being Raymun, answered by asking three questions back over the rim of his pint. D’you want to? D’you like her? D’you think she likes you? To the first two Duncan said no, to the third one, I dunno.

Raymun shrugged, offensively simple about it. “Then don’t do it.”

That might have settled the matter if the two of them had not, ten minutes later, gone from one woman to the other as if comparing sacred field notes. Raymun had Rowan’s whole little catalogue ready: how she slept now with one hand under her cheek and the other under her belly though there was barely anything to hold; how she had become adorable over food in a way that made him half mad; how she had discovered the phrase you make it best and used it to turn Raymun into a full-time kitchen servant without ever lifting her voice.

Dunk listened, smiled where he should, laughed where the story asked for it, and felt a small dull sadness open in him at every detail he could not match. He knows your appointments, your nausea, what tea you tolerate, what colour baby clothes you consider criminal. He knows the shape of your feet in black tights and the sound of your voice when illness drags gravel through it. But there are whole ordinary hours of you he has no access to. How you sleep when nobody sees. What you eat at midnight. Whether you talk to the baby yet, or think that daft, or do it only inside your head. Raymun has a life growing round Rowan, messy and domestic and full of crumbs. Dunk has updates, errands, and a longing he keeps trying to dress as good behaviour. Things improve minutely when he's useful, so that is what he focuses on.

“Are you saving that chocolate for later, or can I have it?”

Dunk looks up. Egg stands in front of him with his bag hanging off one shoulder, eyes already fixed on the bar in Dunk’s hand.

“What?”

“The chocolate,” Egg says. “If you’re not eating it.”

“Why? D’you want it?”

Egg’s face opens into a grin so quick and shameless Dunk has to snort. “Well, if it’s upsetting you.”

“Cheeky little—” Dunk mutters, but gives it over anyway.

Egg takes it, drops onto the bench beside him with all the entitlement of a landlord, and starts working at the wrapper. For a moment there is only the crisp little noise of foil and paper. Then he says, with his mouth already full, “So. Are you engaged yet?”

Dunk shuts his eyes. “Jesus Christ.”

“That means no?”

“That means mind your own business.”

Egg chews, unbothered. “You were the one asking me.”

“I did not ask you any such thing.”

“You did. You asked if she ought to be your wife.”

“I asked a general question.”

Egg gives him a flat look.

Dunk huffs and leans back against the bench. “No. We’re not engaged.” Then, too quickly, he adds, “I didn’t ask.”

Egg studies him.

Dunk frowns. “What?”

“You’re lying.”

“I am not.”

“You are.” Egg’s eyes narrow. His bald head tilts a little, and Dunk gets the dreadful sense of a crystal ball being consulted at close range. “Oh,” Egg says. Blinks once, solemn with discovery. “She said no.”

For one full second Dunk thinks he has never been so humiliated in his life, and that includes falling face-first into a mud pit during a staff sports day while children chanted his name like Romans at an execution.

Then Egg adds, “Well, no wonder if you’re flirting with Miss Darry.”

Dunk turns his head very slowly. “I’m doin’ what?”

“Flirting,” Egg says, with a tired patience more fitting for a teacher than a pupil. “With Miss Darry.”

“I am not flirtin’ with Miss Darry.”

“She gave you chocolate.”

“That’s not flirtin’.”

“And a card.”

“That’s gratitude.”

“And she smiles at you with all her teeth.”

Dunk looks down at the card again, then away, as if the thing may sprout more accusations if watched too closely. “She asked me for coffee because I helped mark first-class maths.”

Egg bites off another square of chocolate. “Adults are so bad at knowing when things are happening to them.”

“Listen here, you wee menace—”

“And if you’re having a baby with one lady, you shouldn’t be collecting chocolates from another.”

“I didn’t collect it. It was in my locker.”

“Worse then. She has access.”

Dunk gives him a look. Egg only chews, pleased with himself for about three seconds before his face goes thoughtful again. “Are you going to ask her again?”

Dunk sighs and rubs both hands over his eyes under the glasses. “I don’t know, Egg. Should I, if she said no once? I don’t think so.”

Egg thinks on that. Then his gaze slides past Dunk’s shoulder, towards the black limo nosing up by the school gate. He stuffs the chocolate into his bag with sudden efficiency. “Well,” he says, hopping down from the bench, “you’ve the ring already. You could try asking Miss Darry.”

Dunk grabs him before he can bolt. Egg yelps and laughs as Dunk tucks him under one arm like he weighs no more than a sack of potatoes.

“You little horror,” Dunk says, carrying him across the yard while Egg wriggles without any true commitment to escape. “I ought to leave you in lost property.”

“You can’t. I’m claimed.”

“Aye, unfortunately.”

By the time they reach the car, Egg is still laughing, flushed in the face and indignant in the pleased way children get when an adult has agreed to be ridiculous for them. Dunk opens the back door with his free hand and the laugh goes out of him cleanly.

Maekar Targaryen sits in the back seat, straight-spined in a dark suit, looking at Dunk as if he has been summoned for assessment and found damp. Egg goes quiet too.

He stands there with the boy still half-pinned under his arm. Then he sets him down a little too carefully. Egg smooths his jumper with injured dignity and climbs in.

“Has my boy been misbehaving?” Maekar asks.

Dunk clears his throat. “N-no. No, sir. Jus’—just tomfoolery, is all. Like kids do.”

Maekar’s eyes move from Dunk to Egg, then back again. He gives one small nod, the kind that seems to dismiss and approve in the same motion. “Good day to you, sir,” he says.

“Good day,” Dunk says, and closes the door.

The limo pulls away a moment later, black and polished and awful against the ordinary schoolyard. Dunk watches it go. In the back window Egg lifts a hand without turning round. And Duncan could swear, right before the glass takes Maekar’s face beyond seeing, that the man is smiling.

It brightens him some. Enough that he texts Miss Darry, tells her he’s too busy, and thanks her for the chocolate. Enough that measuring the spare room at your place today, putting everything into the respectable little corner he has arranged with you, feels a fraction lighter.

When he gets there he knocks twice, then a third time, and as he is about to get sweaty all over from the sort of thoughts that bloom out of inertia, he hears your tired voice on the other side of the wood.

“Yes, I’m coming, for fuck’s sake.”

The door opens to reveal you beyond cross, but the minute you see him your face does something utterly strange. It falls back into what Duncan presumes it was before: your mouth frowns with such compulsion the chin dimples under it, your eyes remoisturise, and he knows to add the prefix simply from the already wet redness of them which makes you look like you are battling conjunctivitis.

He steps into the skin of a watchful caretaker as if coming home. “Hey,” he says, reaching for your shoulders. “What’s happenin’, hm?”

“I—” You make that breathless little catch people make when they have been crying for hours. One hand goes to your forehead. “Fuck,” you whine. “It’s today. I’m so sorry. I completely forgot.” Each word comes out damper than the one before, until forgot hitches on the last syllable and a new tear beads on your lashes.

“Oh, sweetheart,” Dunk sighs.

You are always smaller than him, but today exceptionally. He notices the hunch in your neck and the slant of your knees, and is revolted by both because he knows the stance of defeat from muscle memory. He walks you backwards into your own hallway, kicks the door shut behind him, and gathers you in.

“Lassie, c’mon—” he mutters, setting a palm over the back of your head. It is large enough to shield near all of it.

Then you are crying fully. Mumbling I’m sorry and hiccuping into his shirt, clutching at his waist so hard your fingers bite through the cotton. You wipe your face into him, and Dunk aches clean through with it. He rubs your back, rocks you a little, shushes you under his breath, and prays you cannot hear how fast his heart is beating.

When you calm some, he takes your face in both hands and wipes the streaks from under your eyes with his thumbs. “What happened, girl?”

You stare at him. “N-nothing.”

Dunk huffs through a smile.

Your face crumples again, less dramatically this time, more from the nuisance of being known than from fresh misery. “I just… feel like shit,” you say. “Work’s been awful, I’m tired, my back aches, I hate that pregnancy pillow, I don’t want to eat anything I’ve got at home, my hair is greasy, and—”

You stop, swallowing hard.

“And?” he prompts, gentle.

“And I really want to have a bath,” you say, with the malady of a person confessing fraud, “but I’m afraid I won’t be able to get out of it.”

Dunk looks at you for a second. Your eyes are swollen. Your mouth is all dragged down. There is a crease from the pillow still printed faintly on one cheek, and your hair has been tied up and let down and tied again until it has given up all loyalty to shape. “Right,” he says.

You sniff. “Right?”

“Aye.” His thumbs smooth the tear tracks once more, then he lets his hands drop to your shoulders. “We can sort that,” he says. “Why didn’t ye tell me?”

“What,” you croak, “that I’m disgusting?”

“That ye needed help.”

You stare at him, stumped. His eyes are large behind the lenses, soft and kind and warm despite the blue of them, like cold winter light over the ocean. Because you being useful all the time makes everything worse, you think. “I dunno,” you tell him.

Dunk receives that with the grave patience he has for children coming down from a crying fit. “What’s first,” he asks, “food or bath?”

“Bath,” you say, then hesitate. Your eyes move over his face, suddenly unsure. “Would you?”

“Mhm. Course.”

“Won’t that be weird?”

Dunk’s mouth tugs at one corner. “No.” You give him a look. “I’ve seen ye before,” he adds.

“You were drunk.”

“I can get drunk if ye want.”

A laugh, finally. Still damp-faced and wrecked enough for it to catch in the throat. “Sod off.”

“There she is,” Dunk says. “Go change. I’ll run it.”

In the bathroom he has a mild moment of panic. Then, because he is a practical man when panic gives him something to do, he pours far too much of something foamy under the running tap. The bath clouds over quickly. Good. Grand. A civilised barrier between his eyes and certain death. He keeps the water only a few degrees above lukewarm because the app said so, and stands there with one hand under the stream knowing he is going to get clouted for it. He finds he does not mind much.

You step into the bathroom with every nerve in your body alarmed. There is nothing normal about a friend giving you a bath. There is especially nothing normal about this friend. You're being silly, you could just take a shower. When your back gives one dull throb the thought of getting even one ounce of comfort becomes stronger than reason or the entire history of social boundaries. At this point you might agree if Lyonel were the one proposing it, though you’d have to drown yourself after.

Dunk is knelt behind the back of the bath, one sleeve pushed up, arm wet with water and foam. He lifts his head when you come in. His face is already pink, but his voice stays even. “C’mon,” he says. “I won’t look.”

He spreads one arm out for you. It drips on the tile. You come closer, then stop when it comes to taking the robe off. Dunk shuts his eyes with theatrical force.

You huff. “Oh, fuck that. I’d rather have you looking than me breaking my neck over this.”

The robe loosens and peels. Slides down your back. Dunk keeps his lids low, but begrudgingly, he sees.

First your shoulders, tense and rolled a little towards your chest, with the muscle there pulled like a bowstring. Then your back, with a warm bare line carrying the day in every tight place. Lower, where the spine gives way to the small inward dip above your hips, and those two hollows there nearly finish him for reasons he has no language for and too much body for.

He almost manages to skip to your legs and feet. That would have been sensible despite likely to help very little. Yet, his eyes land on your arse and stay there for one harrowing second.

Familiar. Longed-for. Still heavy in his hands if he lets memory have any say in it. He remembers the spill of it into his fingers, the same backs of thighs bracketing his shoulders and the redolence of their apex, kindly facing his nose. The blush deepens on him brutally, laying siege on his neck, face, and, by the feeling of it, scalp too. He thanks the God for not making him bald, and begins to sweat.

What is worse, the angle makes you look unpregnant enough for Dunk to momentarily misplace a reason behind this circumstance. His mind supplies a string of cause and effect: if there are hands, they ought to be held; if there are thighs, they ought to be squeezed; dimples of Venus revered, neck's nape licked, spine unkinked, skin rubbed and felt, buttocks bitten or kissed or outright eaten because they seem delicious to him. Once he gets, barely, past the first involuntary wave of primal depravity, he thinks he might be able to endure it (also barely).

You turn, and he catches enough of the front for the whole experience to morph into lethal. A glimpse of a side-boob, heavy and round, is gorgeous enough for Dunk's heart to recall all the emotions shadowing tenderfoot boy-virgins. Upon leaning, the breasts pour over your ribs and he becomes highly conscious of the reasons for their swelling. His gaze drops to stomach, still mostly yours, still quiet to the eye, but not silent.

He's never put much thought into whether pregnant women are sexy or not, so to see your body and undergo the all-systems seizure is a surprise to him. It seems as if his cock is connected to the heart, that is connected to the head, that is connected to all his limbs that currently tingle. The cock, the heart, and the head agree on one matter: that he's never seen a thing more beautiful in his life and the thought that he's the one who did this to you fills him with smugness and sickening joy.

The belly disappears behind your thigh as you put one foot into the bath, and Duncan comes back to himself enough to lift both arms, hovering, ready in case you need them.

“This is tepid,” you scoff, balancing on his forearm.

Dunk squeezes his eyes shut. “It’s warm,” he says thickly, and knows when you are sat only by the sound of it. Once the water sloshes he deems everything safe enough to see again and cracks his lids open. Kneels behind you, and with some regret, notices that the only visible things now are your head, shoulders and knees.

You lean back and rest your neck on the edge of the bathtub, next to his palm. “Are you temperature-blind too?”

It’s sweet enough that he smiles. Small and murmured so softly he knows, despite complaining, that the service is working. “Ye gonna be mean to me, lass?” he asks.

A pause. “No,” you say. “Sorry.”

His hand slides to your shoulder. Swipes the hair off it. “Besides,” Duncan says, “it’s safer for the baby. The a—”

“The app said so, is it?”

“Point taken.” He blushes fiercer for it. Lets his fingers idle on the apple of the joint, then slip beneath the sheet of water. “I know ladies like to scald themselves in showers and whatnot, but it can’t be this bad, hm?”

“It’s not,” you say.

The dance is very gentle. Dunk hasn’t planned this far, so he doesn’t know how much he’s allowed or what he’s expected to do. One large worry is you saying thank you, I got this, and making him wait outside. One ardent wish is to wash your hair. He lingers on the precipice, stirring the water next to your arm, hoping his hand will decide for him once the opportunity arises.

You seem to not mind. Only ask him, “And how do you suddenly know what ladies like to do in the showers and whatnot?”

“Well believe it or not," Dunk says, "I’ve met some ladies in my life before you.”

You hum at that, then turn your head a little against the rim. “Speaking of,” you start. “How’s your maths lady?”

Dunk frowns. His hand stills. “She’s not my maths lady.”

Another beat. Then: “You know what I mean.”

He thinks about saying that he has no interest in your stupid idea of him dating, and less interest still in hearing you encourage it from the wrong side of a tub while he is trying very hard to keep himself decent. The whole thought comes up too blunt and hot for speech, so he only huffs and draws his hand from the water. “She’s still a colleague,” he says.

Internally, you go: thank fuck. Thank fuck, because despite the whole thing being engineered by your fear-ridden brain, you still wanted to win this one, and you have. For the most part, at least, because Dunk is not dating the maths teacher. Lovely. A smaller part of it belongs to your body’s new flavour of cruelty, which has led you to some humiliating places.

Hinge is not a pond where pregnant women can swim safely. Your logical mind has told you so, basic human hubris has told you so, and Rowan has told you so, then proceeded to help you construct an alluring profile anyway. If anything has announced your transition from the first to the second trimester, it is the mild hots unravelling into full-blown randiness. It has left you leering perversely at anything that has fallen victim to Lyonel’s oral fixation, rolling your hips against the moon-shaped pillow you always secretly imagine to be Duncan, and cannibalising your own lips at any of his texts that could qualify as mildly romantic. Big part of the shame is that even a simple how you? has been filed under that category as of late.

An even bigger part of the shame is the maths teacher. The unexplainable jealousy of her, and the last two weeks spent wondering less how you are going to survive it if it happens than how to prevent it. Showing up at school under petty pretext, wearing one of the belly-revealing tops did not happen only because the summer is technically still spring, and a fool’s one.

Enough became enough when your hand joined the rutting hips and the mouth left agape against plush like you were a teenage girl practising kissing on a mirror. You tried to be normal and available and modern. The app gave you freaks, cowards, lactation enthusiasts, and one man who opened with respectfully, how pregnant? The thought of each sickened you before it excited anything, while thoughts of Dunk remained persistently intrusive. Yes, of that one night, but more, too. Of his hands on you. On your feet, on your belly. Of the way his head dips so his lips can reach your shoulder every time he hugs you. Of the way he blushes at wrong moments and never backtracks from a promised thing. Of his back bared from bowing over the crib. Of his smile. His freckles. His hair in tufts, his slim nails, his shoes being enormous next to yours in the hallway, and the way he says lass like you are someone special to him.

You slide down until your head dunks under the water, just enough to wet your hair. The bath muffles the room for one blessed second, then you come back up blinking and wiping droplets from your eyes with the heel of your hand. When you reach for the shampoo, it’s not there.

The next thing you hear is a wet cough of liquid being squeezed from the bottle. “Is it all right if I do it for ye?” Dunk asks.

You try very hard not to sound giddy. “You want to wash my hair?”

“Well,” he says, practical as a hammer. “You want your hair clean, don’t ye?”

“Y-yeah.” You sit up a little, drawing your knees in until you can fold around yourself. “Sure. If you don’t mind.”

“I don’t mind, girl.” Then, Dunk lathers the shampoo between his palms and slides his fingers into your hair.

The sound you make is small. Small, but it lands in him so badly. Breathy and sweet and gone before you can catch it back. Your head eases into his hands with the whole damp weight of it, and Duncan loves it so immediately he has to look down at your crown to gather himself. Your hair clings to his fingers, slick and heavy with water, softer once the shampoo works through. It parts for him in darkening ropes. Catches between his knuckles. Holds the heat of your skin.

With strands drawn out of the way he can see the knobs of your spine and the line of bathwater teasing the tits that are flattened against your thighs. Technically, he sees nothing. Unfortunately, his imagination works like a warehouse with every shelf badly labelled and all the doors left open.

So he keeps to the work. Slow, circular movements. Fingers at your temples, careful over the sore-feeling places. Behind your ears. Back to the crown. Then, at the nape of your neck, he grows bolder. His whole palm frames it and squeezes. Not hard, only enough to feel the tension ease and give the muscle somewhere to go.

You gasp. “Oh, yes—”

Duncan smiles like an idiot. “Good?”

“Yeah. Yeah, um—” You swallow, throat clicking softly. “Sorry. Sorry for the state of me.”

“Stop that.” His hands still for a second. “There’s nothin’ wrong with your state. It’s blessed, so it is, and I don’t want to hear any more snarks about it.”

Under the correction you go quiet. Worse, you obey it. Your shoulders sink, first from exhaustion and then from something more treacherous, until your body begins accepting the hands on it as if without them it gets wounded with deficiency. The touch works down past the scalp and takes liberties elsewhere: slackens your jaw, unhooks something under the breastbone, sends a warm pulse through your hips that has no regard for context. The last person who touched you with this sort of care was also Duncan, but then it came with drink, darkness, and several hours missing from the timeline. This is worse for being clear. You know where his fingers are. You know where yours are gripping your own knees. You know the water has gone nearly still around you and your body, faithless little beast, is starting to hope he never stops.

When you’re about to lose it and start begging him, touch me, touch me, keep touching me, he stops. “Pass me the shower head, will ye?” Dunk says.

You do, blindly, while scowling at the very bottom of your soul and mourning your losses. He starts the water, tests it against his wrist first, then shields your forehead with his cupped palm and begins rinsing. Warmth floods you. Warmer than the bath, finally, as if the man has discovered mercy after all.

You tip your head back, throat bared long and vulnerable, and it does something murderous to Duncan’s blood pressure.

He takes the gift of your closed eyes to gape. At your teeth showing between parted lips, at your lashes clumping darker with damp, at the small working of your neck when you swallow. He keeps the water from your face with the seriousness of a surgical task, which means he simply has to keep touching you. His palm smooths over your temple, cheek, the slick line of hair. Then, he guides the spray lower and rinses the last of the soap from your back. Sadly, the moment when your hair gets clean arrives.

Dunk turns the shower head off. “There,” he says, voice only a little ruined. “Now for the dreaded part, hm?”

“Yeah,” you say, then swallow. “Just—please don’t laugh.”

Duncan, offended by the very thought, says, “I won’t.” He stands, and because he is occasionally capable of saintliness when directly supervised, fixes his eyes with great discipline on the far wall, the towel rail, the corner of the ceiling, anywhere that is neither tit nor arse. Then his palms slide under your armpits. “Up,” he says.

You make one small noise of protest, but he lifts, and your body goes with him as if someone has pulled a string through the top of you. For one second you are dangling more than rising, knees straightening, feet finding the bath’s floor, water sliding off you in streams. The minute you’re upright your arms cross over yourself, even though your back is to him.

You hear fabric shift. Then the bathrobe lands over your shoulders, heavy and soft, and Dunk’s hands come next, drawing it round you without fuss. A towel follows, catching the wet ends of your hair before they can drip down your spine. He pats rather than rubs, which should be funny and somehow only makes your throat feel narrow.

“Here ye are,” he says. “All in one piece.”

You clutch the robe closed at your chest. “Thank you. Maybe just help me get out?”

He nods. “Course.”

You are prepared for an arm. A forearm, specifically. Something to balance on while you step over the high side of the tub with as much grace as a pregnant woman can manage. Dunk, however, has other ideas.

He comes round to the side, bends, and starts gathering you up. You jerk a little in surprise. “What're you doing?”

He pauses, genuinely baffled, one arm already behind your back and the other slipping under your knees. “Helping?”

“Duncan.”

“C’mon,” he says. “Don’t be a wuss now.”

You put up a final symbolic fight in the form of a suffering look, and Dunk only waits it out.

“Oh, for God’s sake,” you mutter, and let him have you.

He lifts before your body has fully agreed to be lifted. Arms go from hovering to holding, and then the bathroom drops by a few inches. Your stomach dips with it. Your hands fly to his shoulders and clutch there, and you wish for him to read it as some small fear because it's a closer neighbour to dignity than the truth.

He has the weight of you settle against him with such immediate rightness that Dunk has to set his jaw against it. The way he perceives it, you weigh almost nothing and also the entire room, which is troublesome and confusing both. It is simple enough for muscle, so Dunk could carry you to the end of the street and back without thinking much of the effort. Complicated when it gains density. There is your forehead right next to his chin and he tries to be mindful of not scratching it. Where your hair presses his chest the cotton soaks, warms, and darkens. Water slides down your calf, gathers at the heel, and drops onto the floorboards with hollow taps. He walks carefully, as if the flat has become uneven on purpose.

Once he gets to the bedroom, he asks, “Where am I puttin’ ye?”

You turn your face into his shoulder. “The floor is fine.”

So he lowers you as if the floor is miles away until you come back to standing. You look up. He looks down.

The room goes oddly close around the two of you. Your hair drips because he hasn't done a very good job drying it. One cold bead runs from the end of it and lands on the back of his hand. Dunk watches it break there.

“Right,” he says, though nothing has been made right by saying it.

You still have both hands on his shoulders. Your fingers have gone slack, but persist. “Right,” you echo, softer.

He could step back. There is space behind him. There is a whole bed to put between you, a whole hallway to traverse and make you a cup of tea, a whole street to walk to his own place, whole country to run and a whole world to travel, and none of those would make Dunk feel any better.

“D’you need anything else?” he asks. Your eyes flick over his face, and for one mad second he thinks you might say yes.

 Yes.

Robbed of touch, you want it back. His fingers in your hair again, nails on scalp, chest to your side, no, to your chest, and sliding and heavy on you until breathing is something you get to indulge in only if you do your maths correctly and gulp once the weight eases. Touch me, hold me, crush me, anything-me, so you don't have to spend another night on a half-arsed tryst with a pillow masquerading as him.

“Hold me,” you say, because the little in- dividing sanity from its opposite has begun to look less like a prefix and more like a plank over a ravine. You could've just said no. It has two letters as well, which should make it sturdier. But the numbers let the no acquire certain overfamiliarity with the in- which would send you back under the covers to scrape his smell from the bathrobe with your teeth and pretend his mouth is at your neck instead of back at his own flat. Anything braver than hold would kick the plank clean out from under you and make the word into a whole insanity with no seam left to hide in. So you choose the hyphen. The smallest scrap. A thing with enough necessity in it to be genuine and enough restraint in it to still let you lie about what you mean.

Dunk is there before you finish thinking. Arms, whole miles of them, come round you, wrap you, then keep wrapping as if the first pass failed to convince him you are caught. It is less a hug than a gathering. He takes you in by increments and still seems to think there is more of you to collect. His body bows around the shape yours takes until his face finds the junction of your shoulder and neck. The bridge of his glasses nudges you there, cold for a second. His mouth stays open against the robe, breath soaking through.

You have to rise onto your toes from the force of it. Your heels lift. Your whole weight goes strange and borrowed, balanced between his arms and the floor, and because he is Duncan he notices and shifts one foot forward so you can lean properly. His hand spreads between your shoulder blades, then drags down your back through the bathrobe. “Ye feel good,” Dunk mutters into you. He keeps rubbing. Finds your spine and makes it look innocent, and the fact of it having to be made to look so speaks for itself. "Smell nice," he says, breathier.

“Dunk,” you say.

He answers with a sound from the chest. A hum, an almost-purr, thickened by the place his face is pressed. “Mm.”

Then he starts rocking you. Barely. Back and forth in a motion so small it could pass for soothing if your body had less imagination. His hand keeps working at you through cotton. Shoulder to waist, waist to shoulder. Makes your toes curl against the floorboards.

Insanity acquires new shape. It becomes an empty bed and sheets cold on one side and morning that holds only one person. It is having a man who knocked you up kept at an arm's length while his nose is wedged into your neck. And maybe loneliness has you both by throats, but for a second you let yourself believe he might want it too and rule that it would be saner to just… ask him.

“Would you—fuck,” you stammer. “Would you consider, uh—” Dunk moves then. Lifts his head off you and looks, making the whole art of producing speech this much harder. Under the scrutiny you manage only: “Can you stay?”

He frowns, puzzled. "Aye, course. Of course I can."

"No. I mean—" You shake your head. "Can you stay with me. Can you—oh God." Your forehead knocks his chest.

Duncan stills, then says, "Girl." He frowns some more and studies the parting of your hair. "Girl, what d’ye need?" he asks. "What d'ye need, just tell me."

"I need—I need—" you start, but fail there. Wonder if there are some other ways of speaking that Dunk would understand, because it turns out asking outright gains so much ridicule on its way out it withdraws itself from the options. Your hand finds his wrist. You put it on your hip first, which is cowardice. Swallow, and proceed: lower, until your arse fills his palm.

He goes rigid. Lets himself be put in place and nothing more. When you look up his eyes are locked somewhere between you. There's an attempt at a kiss; a poor one. You're out of toes to tip onto and out of mouth to purse so it lands off, on his jaw, and becomes something far sweeter and purer than you've had in mind.

"Ah," he says. Gives himself a moment to kickstart the grey matter of his brain and recognize the bit between the cause and effect. It's still very much improbable, but Dunk risks it. "Yer saying—" he whispers. "Ye—you want me?"

A small nod.

“Now?" he asks. His thumb wedges under your chin. "As in: right now? Ye want to—w-with m-me?”

“Yeah?” You cringe. He's stunned for way too long for this to go smoothly. “Shit, I’m sorry—”

“No,” Dunk says. He finds the side of your neck. “No, no, no, don’t be. Don’t be, please—” A gulp. “I w-would. I—yes—I—yes. God, aye, I want to.” Teeth worry his lower lip. “But uh—is it… safe?”

“Yes,” you laugh, for lack of better reactions. “Yes it is, I checked.” With that Dunk's face muddles back into bewilderment he hides very poorly. The hand on your arse tenses. “What?” you mouth.

“Ye checked?” he asks, pouting. “Why did ye check?”

A cold little fright nips through you. “Cause I’m—” you stammer, then let it out in one breath. “God. Going a bit mad here and I considered checking out Hinge but Rowan said I’d attract only creeps right about now so I read a little before I did anything.”

Duncan blinks. Behind the lenses, his lashes move in two enormous dark fans. “H-hinge? You considered Hinge?”

“Y-yes?" you say. He keeps staring. "Duncan, what is it?”

“I—nothing. I mean—nothing.” His eyes drop and grip loosens. The crossness arrives in him by parts, which is how you know it for real: first the stilling of his mouth, then the colour high on his ears, then a hard gulp moving his throat. You have seen him awkward, embarrassed, worried, wounded. This is rarer, and heavier for being held down. “I jus'—”

He sees it with ugly clarity: men with stupid names and blank faces sending you their little texts, all vapid smiles and dead-eyed compliments, asking questions they have no right to ask. Worse, he sees hands attached to them. Mouths. Their shrivelled, hopeful pricks trying to talk their way near the place some ancient, thick part of him has already marked in chalk and blood as his. It horrifies him, the thought itself and how quickly it stands up in him, ready to bite.

“Why do you look unbelievably cross about it, then?” You put your hands on his chest and beneath them his heart is racketing like a drum. It is scary to see him angry. It reminds you how much force lives in him unspent, how much of him is usually lowered on purpose. “Look, I know it’s your baby," you say carefully. "I wouldn't do anything to harm it, alright? I’m just… weird." A sigh. "I fucking hate it here sometimes.”

“W-where?” Dunk asks, hoping you don’t mean his arms.

“In this… body,” you say and Duncan almost blurts out Why? Why, I love this body. I dream of it and think about it often. I want this body to myself.

“It’s strange, and a bit gross, and I sweat a lot and if I’m not sleepy I’m just horny all the time, and I—” you hiccup. “God, I’m sorry, this must be so weird to you. I’m so sorry, please forget I said anything?”

“No,” Dunk says. “No, don’t do that. Don’t do that, I want to—” He catches you back from where you have gone loose in his hold. “I said I’d help you with anything. And I would like that.” He brings his face closer and sets his fingers to your temple. Either the pulse is in you or in him, or both of you have become terrible at keeping quiet under the skin. “What I don’t like is that you considered Hinge before coming to me. And that you say bad things about yourself,” Dunk whispers.

He thinks of courage, then. How it keeps changing shape. He has permission and still there are things lodged in him he cannot ask without sounding small. Do you want me or just anyone? Am I easier than Hinge, or harder, and you are making the effort anyway? Do you remember anything? You come tighter around him, cinching his waist. Your mouths touch and Dunk closes his eyes.

“I like this body,” he says.

His hand slides from your temple to your neck and lower, cautious until cautiousness begins to pain him. He slips his fingers between your skin and the robe near the collar. The other hand finds the knot at your belt and waits. He waits for anything. A twitch, a flinch, a word, some sign that he has gone too far and should be put down for it.

You nod. So Dunk pulls. The belt gives, and the robe loosens round you.

“It’s… hot,” he says, simpleton that he is.

The trouble is, this body has always been hot to him. He has never known how to give it a clean name. Pretty is too innocent for the places his thoughts go after the first look at you. Maddening comes nearer. Now, with you changing in front of him and the change tied back to his own curse of being a man words fail even worse. His hand sneaks beneath the fabric and finds your belly. The backs of his knuckles graze the skin there.

“It’s making a baby for us—” he says, sombre-eyed. “Yer bloody pretty, lass,” Duncan says, because despite wanting to tell you hot, sexy, toothsome, edible, challenging, ripe, built for my grip, spreadable, kissable, gorgeous, dangerous, disastrous, full, an answer to why lads lose their hands and heads, he knows damn well girls always like to be called pretty.

It works wonders. You let him wedge his hands deeper until the collar of the robe slips wide, falls off both shoulders, and by the time it lands round your feet Duncan is so hard he learns a new truth about trousers. None of them are made for him—old jeans, good jeans, jeans chosen by Raymun—all of them turn traitor under enough pressure. He grips your arms without thinking, partly for himself, partly to stop the quick frightened movement you make to cover yourself.

"Dunk—" you whine.

The unfairness of it is clear. "Aye," he says, gone strange. "Aye, sorry. Hold on."

He grabs his T-shirt by the neck and drags it over his head as boys do, glasses nearly going with it. Once his chest is bare your eyes go over him in famished little sweep and Dunk has to lick his own mouth for bracing against it. His hand goes to his belt. What should be simple, since he's undone belts for the larger part of his life without audience, becomes difficult because of the audience precisely. His thumbs are slipping, he's muttering shite twice, and finally gets it open with a jerk too harsh for the poor leather. He shoves everything down so jeans, pants and shame, the whole construction of it, go to mid-thigh before he remembers his feet and has to kick one foot free, then the other, in a small hopping mess that ought to be funny. He cannot spare enough brain to check.

In his trying to match you for nudity so the embarrassment settles in its good bones, Dunk fucks himself over. He's got no idea if he's doing it for you the same way you're doing it for him, but such is a disadvantage of being a man whose dick tells on him: plainness. It would show plain how much he wants you even without it, if only by the heaving of his chest and redness on him. Even without a raging hard-on, which tries to stand proudly but is unable for the weight of it, Duncan's sure you'd recognise the want on him. He can only hope the little kicks of muscle and dew coming from the tip count as honesty rather than greed.

"I'm trying—" he says, quiet, then reaches for you again. "I'm trying to make it even."

Your memory gets jogged instantly, and you seethe at your mind for banking such sight somewhere distant. The pieces you have of him from before arrive anew, with merits of sobriety, of your bedroom's lighting, of him being nervous as sin, somehow managing to make it look as if you are the one doing him a kindness. In the blink between standing freely and being gathered, you catch the hollows under his arms when his biceps flex, the quiver of them kept in their cage of skin, the billow of his stomach with each hard breath and the way his cock gives a small answering throb below it. His body keeps contradicting itself, undecided between muscle and softness, all of it forced into one large being. His knees point a little outward, hips cut into chewable dips, thighs are broad and furred with something too fine for the rest of him. Almost tender-looking, which is mean considering the size of them.

And God above—above. Iliac furrows bracketing his lower belly, lethal enough, sunk deep enough to make him so irrefutably man you gain understanding of why anyone ever got vulgar about those gutters and called them sex lines.

They invite it. They invite thighs to bracket them, tongues to lick down them, mouths to kiss them, fingers to fit inside the grooves, faces to rest there, arses to press back against them until his balls are flattened to buttocks. Before the gathering ends, one demented conclusion gets its claws in you: Duncan is so solid he would remain rideable under any amount of you. He'd last you until the end of this, and then some.

You go where his arms take you. Up, higher, and higher, for in this over-fervour neither of you seems interested in the limit to climbing another person. His neck gets yoked by your grip, hands find your ass, and he uses the pardon lifting grants him to clutch it until the flesh goes hard. Karma for this indulgence is instant: the weep from between your legs drags his cock, makes him groan loud and torn, and since there’s no pity in your face he knows disguising it as effort has failed.

Locked in this full-body shackle, Duncan feels sexy. Holding a woman he’s put a baby into while remaining helpless makes him feel accomplished. You’re carriable, though to say light is to rob you of the resplendent human burden he believes himself created to keep. Belly still small enough to not get crushed, you cling to him, and every press of you on his torso makes Duncan beg the powers that be to not render him a one-pump chump.

“I don’t think we’re ever even,” you say. You seem to trust his muscles despite their tremble, for one of your hands comes to caress his face. He brings himself closer to it.

His beautiful face, lips of which he bites constantly, nose of which rubs next to yours, eyes of which drill into you with their perfect hopeful blue, and you're certain it eludes Duncan what you mean, and instills some idea about you being clever.

None of you are. We're never even because you're behind with your wanting, both of you think at each other violently.

"Aye," he says. Reckons you're telling him he's the fool here, and agrees. "I've got ye though," Duncan says, voice a little ruined because he very much does not got himself. He seeks your mouth anyway. "Can I kiss ye?"

Show, don't tell, your lips go. They flatten to his first. Wet, firm, already enough to make some working part of Duncan’s brain step off the ledge. Then you open and hum into him, and he goes near stupid with it. His breathing turns loud through his nose. The hands under your ass squeeze, then knead, because that is the only remedy for the overwhelming urge to grab your face and take more of your mouth than he’s been given.

Thankfully, you grant it. Deepen the kiss yourself, wedge your tongue inside and bring one hand to his throat to hold him there. The squeeze is light, but brands him anyway. His head swells with all the yearning things, all the I want you, yes, you are wanted like this, yes, your body is safe with me, yes, I can hold it, yes, kiss me, kiss me, kiss me, because he loves it when you kiss him. He loves your hands on him. God, Dunk is so fucked already that his mouth breaks from yours only enough to say, “I meant it.”

You just hum back, busy licking at his teeth.

“I do like this body,” he says. “Wasn’t sayin’ it to keep ye sweet. I like it fierce.” Then, he starts rocking you against him. Small at first, and less so when your grip tightens round his neck. His hands spread you, part you at the cheeks until his fingers brush the slick edges of your pussy. You keep kissing him. Keep taking his mouth as if the hand between your thighs is only another thing you have decided to allow.

You’re wet. He goes so mad with it his grip adjusts. The head of his cock finds the slick and slips through it, messy and blunt and enough to make him drag his mouth open under yours. “I want to fuck ye so badly,” he says, leaving himself there for you to take what you need from him. “Want you to fuck me back, girl,” Duncan says, and in the same second, he breaches.

You take. Seize and clench and grab so hard your jaw sets itself, and from the back of your throat crawls a dry click that bounces off Duncan’s uneven enamel. Then “F-fuck,” comes out of you and disintegrates into a grunt once more of him gets inside you. It’s rupturous, rapturous, poetic and honest. Fucking great, is what it is, to have your whining and moping and complaining answered with the ardent keenness of a man who acts like he owes you his life for keeping a baby you want anyway. A private crumb of you finds it in itself to admit that you want it because it’s his.

"You're so—" you say, mouth dry. "Strong."

He smiles, so sweetly. Like you've done him some kindness. You could say pretty. Handsome, lovely, good, but the way he holds you brings strong to your mind first.

"Ye good then?" he asks, grinning. Sinking. There's more of him, and more, and you keep waiting for your buttocks to meet his hips but the meeting is getting postponed by endless inches.

"Yeah," you tell him.

Good is a mild descriptor. The spread burns deliciously. Melts into a deep ache with warmth at its rim your body recognises as something it's owed, and by rights. Feet cold from the strain of thighs cinching his waist, you get struck by the contrast of temperatures. His hips, hot to the bone, twitch once, as if begging for more sense than he has given them, and you encourage that craving with a brush of thumb on his throat. "Keep going," you say. "Just… don't drop me."

Never. He'd rather take a cramp to the calf, a bowie to the ribs, a bat to the kneecap, a deconstruction to the troth, a nail to the head and hail to the thief than rid himself of the holy parsimony raging in his muscles from not driving into you outright. He gets you on the whole of himself slowly, gently, and once he's all safe and sound within your splendid womb, Duncan whispers, "I'd never."

In his head lives a fantasy that converts him from being a last resort into a yearner who's finally wanted after weeks of expressing bravery through adept courtship. He's taken you to a date during which you've let him get the chair for you and call the waiter. Then your hand has brushed his on the menu and the foolhardy Duncan has closed his palm around your fingers, and you let him do that too. You've smiled at him with lips smeared glossy, set his arm round your shoulders on the way home and climbed onto your toes so he could kiss you.

He's kissed you plenty. You've been teasing, flirting and taunting him beyond what's legal. The pinnacle of it happens in your bedroom where, with its lights dimmed, Duncan acquires a skill to his fingers, otherwise absent. He undoes the button of your trousers, wedges flat palms under the fabric and slides all your layers down by the power of thumbs cleverly hooked over the waistbands. Comes back up, groping your thighs and arse, and finds the clasp of your bra that's for once his ally. His hands don't shake. The lace peels off your tits. There are dents in the skin where it has held you against gravity and he learns that when breasts become honest about their weight and lower onto ribcage is one of his favourite sights.

He lifts you to show you how strong he is, how reliable. To see if you'd let him, too. You wrap yourself around him, cinch his belly and neck with your limbs. With his cock exposed to elements he keeps kissing you and rocking you against his hips until the first contact is made. The tip parts your lips and you gasp. Nerve endings hone themselves to receive pleasure only. He quells the resistance, burrows himself fully, and his brain loses capacity of telling fantasy from reality. He's stuck in the former, where he is confident and worthy.

You moan, full-mouthed. Duncan smiles, and coos, "Biiiig stretch." Then, he realises he has said it out loud, and the whole brave idiot in his head drops dead.

"I—" he stammers. Doesn't get to finish because there's a small snort against his lips, then laughter, and your whole irriguous insides start quaking with it, making him clench his jaw. "Luv," he grits, squeezing your arse.

"Since when are you so smug?" you ask. Kiss him for it like he's done something right. "I like it," you tell him. "C'mon Dunk. I can take it."

You like it on him too much. The borrowed shape of nerve and whole posture stolen from a man with better practice sits on Duncan as if it has been waiting for him to grow into it. It straightens something in him and squares him. Gives his mouth a sharper line and makes his arms look less accidental, less apologetic, more like boons he has finally decided to use.

For you. On you. Because you asked.

That thought bubbles foul and honeyed in your head. Your need, somehow, has overthrown his usual inadequacy. It has dragged him upright by the scruff and put him where you have privately wanted him for longer than is reasonable to admit: proud, useful, pleased with himself for pleasing you. A small, dangerous idea puts down a root somewhere tender. That maybe, if the whole thing had not come at you backwards and sideways, you might have made each other better on purpose.

You jerk on him with your hips, impatient and clumsy. Duncan huffs a laugh against your mouth, startled into himself again. “Aye,” he says, abashed. “Aye, I’ve got ye.”

Then, he moves. The first lift makes your thighs seize round him. The first descent makes the breath go blunt in your chest. He does it slowly because he is trying to be good, and because you are wrapped round him in a way that leaves no margin for errors. Hands under your buttocks with fingers sunk deep and heels of them taking the weight where your body spills. He works you on him with the plain problem-solving force of moving something heavy and dear and alive, and every inch down feels discovered twice: once by the body and once by the greedy mind that knows whose body this is.

A body that gets filled. Emptied. Filled again.

His cock muscles in with its girth so ample you can tell which veins of him pulse hardest. It leaves you hollow for a beat, then comes back so surely your belly coils, coaxing tight wheezes of air out of you. Each time he lowers you, your clit slaps against the hair below his navel. The scratch blooms as little bright injury you start anticipating. You know the rhythm by the third time. By the fourth, your hips are trying to meet it and the whole diaphragm of pelvis flexes to keep him. By the fifth, your nails have found his neck.

It is complicated only if you let thought get involved. You are held up by his strength, dependent on it, opened and moved because he can do that to you and because you told him to. Your feet cannot find purchase, your balance belongs to him, and still the power of it sits in your own throat. You could stop him with a word. You could break him with praise. You could make him harder by saying his name the right way, and there is an equality in it you've never managed to find by standing level with anyone. A strange fairness made out of mismatched sizes and opposite hungers.

On another level it is dead simple. Duncan is strong enough to lift you and kind enough to listen. You are wet enough to take him and mean enough, now, to enjoy what it does to his face.

Your hand tightens enough for your thumb to press the bob of his throat when the pleasure finds its proper shape. Between your legs first, then higher, into your chest, under the tongue, behind the eyes. “There,” you tell him. “Right there. Oh, fuck, Duncan—”

His whole expression changes, but he keeps it at there. Holds the found angle with severe compliance, lifting and lowering you through the same strip of bliss until the repetition makes you go doll-like. Fucked so well you’re certain your face drains of every hint that intelligence lives anywhere within it, so you hide it in his. You press your nose into his cheek so hard you can feel the solid outline of his teeth through skin. His glasses prod your forehead. Both mouths just hang open since kissing has become too skilled an activity for either of you. Instead, you breathe loud, ugly breaths into him, like you’re the one doing the lifting.

Duncan watches you from too close. His eyes go blurry behind the lenses. “Good?” he mumbles, raspy.

Silly man, you think. Yes, good, yes, keep going, yes, until rather than speaking your body just shows him how good. Your calves lock themselves at the small of his back so fiercely he has nowhere to go but deeper. The first cramp takes you there, then the next, each one making your cunt grip him in greedy shocks until your breath turns useless against his face.

It is liquid succour poured over bone and bruise, if the bruise were months of being devastatingly unfucked while Duncan keeps being his best self in your orbit. In the tightness your body shapes you can feel him throbbing, worse and better for being held there. His arms close round your waist and keep you, while the orgasm spends its havoc through you. Eyes roll back in your skull. Your head fills with cotton, warm and sodden, and the room dims as if set a few feet underwater. In it, you register him moving.

Duncan’s thighs are on fire. He has no idea how he hasn’t spilled yet (given that he's just witnessed your eyes doing the thing, and at last in the right context), and he worries briefly that something in him has gone broken. He takes three stumbling steps backwards until his calves strike the edge of the bed. So he sits. You quiver on him, and he stays there stunned, holding you through the last of it. When it’s over he falls onto his back with you clutched to his chest, still hard inside you.

For a moment he thinks perhaps that was it. That the body can be fooled by mercy if the wanting is severe enough. Everything in him has pulled tight, gone blind, endured the full sweet punishment of you coming around him, and surely after such a thing a man ought to be empty and softened. Released from service. None of that, though. His occupation is to lie there with his cock still buried and aching, too hard for comfort, lit by some phantom ending that never arrived. When you shift on him the smallest amount, the sting runs from root to tip, raw in its brightness, making his stomach ripple.

“It’s good,” you tell him, voice loose. “God, you’re good.”

Dunk shuts his eyes.

There is praise, and then there is whatever that does to him. It gets deep into bloodstream and starts moving in his veins. Then you start moving too, and Duncan knows for sure he has not come yet.

You push off his chest. Bestraddled, he watches the ascent diligently: your tits hang heavier when you’re bowed and settle once your back straightens. There, they shift slightly outward. The weight of them travels until skin draws fine and taut from sternum to collarbone. The upper slopes lift with your breath, but the undersides lower and stay there. Flesh touches flesh with a softness so plain and human Duncan’s mouth fills with spit.

His hand goes because it must. It reaches and fits under one breast with the strange exactness of a thing made to house him without asking. He wedges the span from thumb to forefinger into the crease. Your tit settles over his knuckles, warm and fuller than memory, and beneath the heel of his palm your heart beats hard enough to rival his.

Light catches you so that he can tell the change. His fingers find your stomach with their backs, just grazing, and the skin there is soft in a way that puts daft images in his head, small impossible creatures made of satin and warm milk and whatever else men with sex-drunk brains invent when faced with a woman.

Then, his whole hand covers your belly, and that is much worse. Worse in the sense of too much lack landing in his grip. He spans an area so vast all sensible parts of his mind get blown out. Under that touch, your hips roll. Duncan sucks in a stinging breath, then grits, "What're ye doing, girl?"

You cover his palm with yours, and bring the other back to his throat. Curled fingers, clever fingers, hold him where pulse does its best to tightrope between excitement and peril. Then, you clench, slow and mean enough for his heart to stop completely for one whole second. “Making you come,” you say, though for Duncan it's more like making you die. “I want to see your face when you do and remember it this time.”

He chokes a little, tries to cover it with a groan and it all comes out mixed and mangled into some shape of your name Dunk's never said out loud. His hips rise because he becomes an overeager boy who loses the battle to greed. "Christ, f-fu—" he says, then bends his knees under you to help you solve a problem that is his cock begging for friction. It gives you something better to use, and God help him, you use it. Rock down, grind forward, take the part of him he has been trying so hard to keep courteous and turn it into a tool for his wreckage.

The deconstruction of Duncan begins at the points of him that carry profound sense for the predicament he's in: the head of his cock, raging with heat; the ridge under it, rubbed raw with your slick; the tight forlorn pull in his balls every time your hips drag back and make his body expect relief, then deny it with a new descent. Duncan crumbles by fractions. First a sound, then a twitch. Then the last of his good posture. His hands fumble, find your waist, lose it, and finally pull.

You fall forward over him and catch yourself with one palm beside his head, saving his throat from the full weight of you, though the loss grieves him instantly. He would have taken it, happily, dumbly, with his windpipe dented and gratitude leaking out his ears. Instead he grips your arse and the broad of your hips where God, in a rare moment of sense, has granted you handles Duncan can delude himself into thinking are there for his enjoyment.

“What do you need?” you ask, breathy and gorgeous above him, cheeks shining, forehead damp, mouth all used-looking from him and still asking.

Dunk looks up at you and has to search himself for speech. Most of him is gone already. What remains has no pride worth naming. “Use me,” he murmurs, and pours all the devotion he has for you into the miserable little shape of it. His fingers dig in. “Use me, girl.” Under your sharpening eyes, he grasps at the fortitude built badly enough it cannot hold one form for long, and adds, smaller, "And kiss me."

You blink. Lower yourself and take his upper lip between yours, suck it softly, then give him a sweet, taunting nibble that has his hips punching up. The flesh pulls, stretches, slips free redder, and you smile against it in a way that makes him want to confess to crimes he has not yet committed.

Your arms wind round his neck. It opens him up under you, throat bared, and you go there with filthy acumen. Lick a long wet path over the pulse and tendon, up where his skin goes tender under the jaw, then to the shell of his ear. Your breath arrives first. Hot, broken, full of effort. “Talk to me,” you whisper. “Tell me how you feel.”

For an answer, Dunk moans. He means to do better, he does. But you are panting now, rutting down on him fast enough that the bedframe remembers the both of you, fingers threaded in his hair, hips working him with that half-desperate rhythm he ought to be ashamed of loving. Your cunt keeps taking him and taking him, and there is no clean thought left in him. Only this. Only breath.

When you lift your head, something in his face changes. "Dunk?" He only blinks too many times. “Do you want to stop?” you ask.

His head shakes. “N-no,” he says, near bitten. Swallows, tries again, hand sliding to your thigh to keep you from reading him wrong. “No, lass. Just—slow. I wanna—” His eyes squeeze shut with some useless heat behind them before he finds something at least adjacent to what should be said. “I wanna feel ye proper," he murmurs. "You’re… you’re so kind on me.”

It quakes you some. He's trying to prolong it, the sweetheart, you think. So your body quiets for him first, then alters. You exchange the speed for depth and give him fat, thorough rolls. Let the planes of his hips take the whole weight of your arse, just as you've wanted. His balls flatten under your buttocks on every downstroke, cock throbs madly in your womb.

“Oh—” he breathes, and sounds scattered enough to make your stomach tighten. “Oh, that’s—aye. Aye, there. Fuck, right here. Like that.”

You bend close and kiss him again, softer, with the same hunger spread over it like a tearing sheet. He kisses back badly. Too open, too wet, too much air-gulping getting in the way. When you sweep his face, Duncan’s lids are glistening, lashes clumped in little dark points behind the crooked glasses, so undone he looks like a weeping saint with a bad eye.

His stomach swells into yours with fast, shallow gasps. One palm leaves your hip and comes to the back of your neck. He holds you there, foreheads touching, mouth close enough that every word is partly yours before it is finished.

“Feels—” He stops, teeth flashing over his lip. “God, ye feel amazin’. So warm. So—ah—so good round me. I can feel ye everywhere. In my back. In my bloody teeth," he says, then catches your cheeks dimpling. "Don’t laugh.”

You do laugh, very softly, and kiss the corner of his mouth for it.

Dunk groans. “Cruel woman.” His hand tightens on your nape, thumb rubbing without rhythm. “No, no, keep—please, keep doin’ that. You’re gonna have me. You’re—ah, Christ—you’re pullin’ it out of me.”

You slow further, vicious with pity, and he near sobs.

“That’s it,” you whisper. “Let me see.”

His eyes open to yours. Blue, glassy, embarrassed beyond measure and unable to hide any of it. He tries to speak again, because you asked him to, because he would try to move a mountain if you took his face in your hands and said please, for me?

“I’m close,” he says. Then shakes his head, helpless with the size of the understatement. “No, I’m—luv, I’m right there. Don’t stop. Don’t—” His mouth opens under yours, breath breaking up. “Please. Please, I’m gonna c-come.”

Heat spreads like conflagration through Duncan’s bones, and all of his muscles go ablaze with it too. He feels the rupture of the tightening coil and breaks into an out-of-tune chant of yes, yes, yes, while you milk him and let his hips stammer.

It starts low, in the drag of his balls drawing up so hard it borders pain, then strikes the root of his cock with a shock that makes his whole frame buck under you. “Ah—fuck, fuck, lass—” he chokes, then loses even that much sense when the first spill leaves him.

His hands clamp down on you. There's no pulling anymore, only holding on while his body empties itself in heavy, helpless pulses. Each one makes him flinch. Each one makes his cock throb so hard inside you he can feel it answer against the grip of your cunt, the seed pushed out and held there, nowhere to go, nowhere he wants it to go. His hips keep trying, little rhythmless, aborted jerks, and he finds only a crude animal wish to stay buried until the last of him is wrung out.

“Good girl,” he hears himself say, or thinks he does. Dug out and cracked, roughening on the way from between his ribs. “Oh, God—my best girl. Take it. Please, take it. I’m—ah—I’m sorry, I—”

He has no idea what he is apologising for. For coming. For wanting. His eyes squeeze shut, then open again because you asked to see him and some part of him remembers even while the rest of him is being dismantled.

The next pulse makes his chest cave around a breath that sounds ugly and comes with its edges wet. He comes again, or keeps coming, he cannot tell. The pleasure has stopped behaving like pleasure and started acting like something with teeth, something that bites deep enough to find the softest parts of him and shake them.

His soul goes with it. That is the stupidest possible way to understand it, and still the only one Duncan has. It leaves him in shudders, in spend, in the long broken noise he makes when you stay there and take all of him without flinching. For one blown-out second he feels loved so plainly his eyes sting, and he cannot tell whether the tears threatening him are from release or from mourning the fleeting fallacy of his malleable boy-heart.

You see it. The exact place where his strength gives up its post. His face goes open underneath you. The blush is everywhere now, ears to throat to the broad rise of his chest. His glasses sit crooked with their lenses misted, and behind them his eyes shine stunned. His mouth, the beautiful foolish thing, keeps parting as if speech might come back if he only makes room for it, but all that gets out is breath and your name in pieces.

Last time you missed this. Or lost it to drink, to darkness, to the mind’s rotten habit of keeping the wrong souvenirs. Stupid, you think, with an ache so sudden it has no time to dress itself up. Stupid, stupid girl. Because Duncan in rapture is worth remembering with pious accuracy. The cut of his jaw slackened by pleasure. The hard male brutality of his size made defenceless by what your body has done to him. The little crease between his brows. The way his face looks too large for innocence and somehow full of it anyway.

And God, the way he comes. Thick, hot throbs, intimate enough to make you tighten again in little aftershocks. His cock kicks and spends, kicks and spends, with deep-gathering warmth that spreads in a slow, private heaviness. You hold still over him and let it happen. Let him put himself there, in you, with the same earnest violence he brings to everything he cannot say properly.

Dunk makes another sound when he feels you clench. Almost a whimper, though he would hate the word if he had enough brain left to object. His hand slides from your neck to the back of your head, looking for a place to rest. His fingers tangle clumsily in your damp hair.

“Lass,” he says, wrecked. Then softer, because the fierce part of it has passed away and left him with only the unbearably tender aftermath. “Jesus. Lass.”

"Duncan," you say, framing his cheeks. They are warm. "Sweetheart, you alright?" You brush the locks darkened with sweat off his forehead and feel a staggering urge to cradle him.

Duncan's very much not alright. He's shattered into a million pieces, but there is a sober part of him that knows he shouldn't cling. He should tell you, or better yet, carry you to the bathroom and let you tend to your business there, because the app said so. "A-aye," he breathes. "You ought to—" A thick swallow. "I'll help you to the—"

“No,” you say. “Stay a moment. C’mere. Sweet boy, come here, let me hold you.”

“But—”

“Nothing will happen if we stay here for two minutes. I’ll go, just—”

You settle over him, careful where the small swell of your stomach rests against his. Duncan lets you because resistance, in that moment, would require bones in places where he has none. He's not crying, maybe, or not enough to call it that, but his eyes look sore. You swipe beneath one with your thumb. Then the other. He looks away.

“Oh, don’t,” you murmur.

His jaw shifts under your palm. The shame of being scrutinised after the body has made a holy spectacle of itself is sitting plain on him, right there in the colour blotching his neck. You coax his face back anyway, gentle under the chin, and make him meet you. “Thank you,” you say.

Duncan blinks. “For what?”

“For that.” Your thumb makes a small pass over his cheek. “For listening.”

He cannot answer. Something in him tries and only finds the raw place where all the words have been burned out. You spare him the effort by lowering your face to his. Cheek to cheek first, then brow against temple, your mouth near enough his ear that your breathing goes into him. Slow. Deep. A little unsteady. He feels the ribs move around it. It wakes him up some.

His hand remembers it's alive and slides down your back. Over the borrowed heat of skin, down the knobs and shallow dips he now knows in one kind of dark and one kind of light. “You feelin’ better?” he asks.

You nod. Then make a small pleased sound, too close to a purr for Duncan’s remaining sanity. “Mm. Much.” His palm stops low and stays there. “Can you stay tonight?” you ask.

How about forever, Duncan thinks, with such dreadful ease his heart will need some proper scolding later. Aye, forever, if you asked it plain and did not laugh after. What he says is, “Aye.”

“Okay.”

Then you lift yourself off him with a small groan, and Duncan begins to loose you. The loss is horrible in its own right. His cock slips free, tired and overused and sad about leaving you, and he feels what follows: too much of himself spilling warm across his lower belly, dragging over skin and hair. He blushes so hard it ought to count as a second fever. He lies there softening, wet and creamed over, betrayed by what has been done and how much of it there is.

You look down only a second before your eyes flick back to his face. Duncan opens his mouth. “Don’t,” you say, faintly amused and too kind about it. “Don’t even start.”

You climb off the bed on unsteady legs. He means to sit up. Means to help. Means to stop lying there like an offering left out by mistake. But then you bend, gather his T-shirt from the floor and pull it over your head, and Duncan dulls.

It drops over you wrong and right. Too broad in the shoulders, too long on the thigh, collar slipping enough to show one side of your neck. His shirt. On you. With your hair messy and your legs bare and his come still leaking between them, no doubt, though he does not let his eyes go there because he has suffered enough for one evening and also possibly has not.

You disappear toward the bathroom. He remains in post-little-death rigor mortis with one hand frozen over his stomach because he has no idea whether touching anything makes the situation better or worse. The ceiling receives the full force of his stare.

When you come back you have a towel, wet wipes, and a glass of water. You kneel beside him, and the mattress wobbles under the new weight. Duncan grunts.

“Hey,” you say. “It’s all right.”

“It’s—” He swallows. “I can do that.”

“You gave me a whole bath. Least I can do.”

“That’s different.”

“How?”

He has no answer that doesn’t sound foolish, filthy, or too soft in the middle. You open the packet and pull out a wipe. The first touch is cold below his navel and makes his stomach suck itself in.

“Sorry,” you murmur.

“S’all right.”

You wipe his lower belly first. Your other hand steadies him at the hip, thumb resting in the hollow there as if it has any business knowing him. Duncan watches your face because watching your hand will kill him.

Then your fingers close round his cock to move him aside, and his breathing goes funny.

You pause. “All right?”

“A-aye,” he says.

You give him a look, then continue. Lift him with a care so simple it becomes unbearable, wipe along the softened length, the tender head, and the mess gathered at the base. His cock gives one poor twitch in your hand, more memory than ambition, and Duncan shuts his eyes because surely God has limits and he has found them.

“Dunk,” you say.

“I’m not doin’ anythin’.”

“No, I can see that.”

Your hand moves lower. Wipes his balls. Clinical, it should be clinical. It has the shape of nursing and the heat of being claimed in a way he has no defence against. He lies there, fists balled by his sides, while you clean him up as if his body is allowed to be inconvenient in your presence. As if the mess of him deserves tending.

“What’re ye doing?” he asks, helplessly.

You glance up. “Cleaning you.”

“Aye, I know that.”

“Then why ask?”

Because I don’t know what to do with being looked after, he thinks. Because if you keep touching me after, I’ll begin thinking after belongs to me too.

He says nothing. You spare him again.

Once the wipes are set aside, you pat him dry with the towel. Softer than necessary. He feels the careful press along his belly, the inside of one thigh, the last damp place near his groin. Then you toss the towel away, pass him the glass of water, and wait until he drinks.

“Yer so bossy,” he mutters into the rim.

“Correct.”

That gets a small laugh out of him, almost soundless. He drinks, hands the glass back, and you put it on the floor before lying down beside him. “Hi,” you say.

Dunk turns his head on the pillow. “Hi.”

Your mouth twitches. You look exhausted now that the urgency has left you. Washed-out and pleased and sick still, all mixed together unfairly. The T-shirt has rucked up at your hip. He fixes his eyes on your face.

“I can see you thinking,” you say.

“Aye,” Dunk says. “I’m thinkin’.”

He is thinking so much it has become a crowd. Whether this changes things. Whether you wanted him or only relief with a familiar face. Whether he is allowed to be happy. Whether you will regret it by morning. Whether he should apologise for some part of it and which part first. Whether asking to kiss your stomach now would ruin his life quicker than staying quiet. Whether you know his shirt on you has done damage no compensation can mend.

Before any of it reaches his tongue, you shuffle closer and nuzzle into him. Your nose presses under his jaw. One arm comes over his chest. “We can talk in the morning, hm?”

Duncan looks at the ceiling again. Breathes in. Breathes out. Lets his hand come up and settle over your back, where it has apparently always wanted to live.

“Aye,” he says. “Morning.”

Perhaps it would hurt less to desire if you could fill that hole every once in a while. If you could wet your tongue with the taste of satisfaction, of a want fulfilled, of the opportunity to say to someone, “Oh, look what I got” or “Look at what all my work has amounted to.”

That’s never been the case though, has it? Never been lucky enough for a wish to come true. You work like a dog for the barest scraps of what you know you’re worth (what you know and what every day seems less and less true).

Vacations that you never had enough money to take, jobs that never came to fruition, mistakes that couldn’t be undone, memories that you could never remake, friendships that grew apart or that never materialized altogether. 

It’s not all doom and gloom. You have a good job and a decent network of friends and acquaintances, parties you attend on occasion and warm nights at home curled up in bed. You have a roof over your head. There's more than enough in your life to be grateful for.

But the wanting never goes away. That, you have in spades. That, you have in heaps and bounds. That multiplies itself tenfold. 

And it happens that way with your heart too.

There’s a coffee shop down the street from your office with a decent amount of seating and an app to order your drink ahead of time, and every day at around two, you order your coffee ahead of time and walk over to pick it up, rain or shine. 

It’s always busy to some degree when you walk in, a handful of people waiting by the counter and a short line at the register snaking around the merchandise display. The whirr of the coffee grinder hums in the background, just a touch louder than the music, always filling the café with the rich, pleasing scent of freshly ground coffee.

The same chairs are always filled by the same people. Plenty of them you’ve even grown to recognize over time—students bent over thick textbooks, elderly men creasing newspapers in ink-stained hands, and laptop screens glowing with blank Word documents, scarcely a sentence added in the time it took to order and finish their coffee.

You recognize most of the takeaway regulars as well.

They’re harder to remember at first. Quick to come and quick to go. Hard to commit their faces to memory. But some give you no choice—some boisterously loud or ostentatious in dress, eye-catching enough to hook you like a fish, drag your attention down river with them. 

Then, to him. 

He, like you, comes in every day around two for his afternoon coffee. He, unlike you, comes striding in full-chested, confidence nipping at his heels, no world-weariness weighing him down. 

Hard not to notice him. Of course you notice him. He takes up space like a living sun, all bright smiles and radiant energy, handsome in the way that, when men are, they draw people in like moths. You feel no better than a moth sometimes, particularly in his presence. 

Tea-coloured eyes. What you notice at first is that there’s a beautiful man waiting for his coffee next to you, a tall man with the sculpted physique of an athlete, all long limbs and broad shoulders tapering into a lean frame, and what you notice next are those tea-coloured eyes, honeying under the sun. 

You stare so long that you only realize how dry your eyes have gone when the door swings shut behind him. 

It’s no wonder then, that you latch onto his presence like so, a little flutter in your chest on your way to the coffee shop every time after that first time, hoping that you’ll cross paths again. 

And you do. Cross paths again, that is. Only a few times those first couple of weeks, and then seemingly all the time, the two of you always in at the same time. 

That isn’t unusual. There are plenty of other familiar faces picking up their afternoon coffees at the same time as you, people that you recognize at the mobile ordering station and laptop stickers that you’ve come to memorize, the same people sitting at the same seats. People like routine; you’re no different. Neither is he. 

It comes over you like an ague, a desperate, eager thing, quiet enough at first when you’ve only seen him in bits and pieces, not studied him at length yet, but it—

It grows.

It grows like a vine in your chest, weaving around your heart and squeezing until you can feel it with every beat. 

You don’t entirely blame yourself. How could you? You swear you’ve never seen anyone even half as good-looking as him—broad-shouldered and lean, perfect smile, perfect teeth. Haircut always fresh, his edges neat. He squints with the force of his smile, always effusive with his gratitude and praise, so earnest in his kindness that it makes your teeth ache. 

He’s objectively a handsome man. Perhaps the handsomest man you’ve ever seen. What else could you do but go a bit crazy? 

Want may not be a strong enough word for what you’re experiencing. It’s more of a torsion of the soul. A desperate, yearning ache that both releases and constricts when he walks into the café to order his coffee. 

You don’t know what to do with yourself when he doesn’t show up at the same time as you. Your schedules are so in sync that you’ve grown to expect him, fattened and spoiled by the timeliness of his presence. But he doesn’t owe it to you to show up, and there are days when he doesn’t, held up for some reason, or maybe simply not in the mood for a coffee.

You practically drag your feet on the walk back to the office, a sorry sight. Pathetically despondent. You hardly know what to do with yourself the rest of the afternoon, oscillating between dejection and self-reproach. It’s pathetic that the mere absence of your crush would reduce you to such a state, hardly able to concentrate on your work because the stranger that you’ve become infatuated with wasn’t at the coffee shop where you see him for a total of twenty seconds every other day. 

Forgive yourself though. Nothing you’ve ever wanted has come without pain.

What you don’t expect is for him to finally notice you. 

It happens on a day when you cross paths rather than arriving at the same time, him leaving the coffee shop as you’re about to enter. Your heart skips a beat when you look up and see him staring down at you, both of you taken by surprise when you go to pull the door open and he’s already pushing on the other side. 

“Traffic jam,” he laughs when you both lean left and then right at the same time, trying to let the other go around. “Here, I’ve got you.”

He extends an arm to hold the door wide open and angles his body to let you pass through. You thank him as you pass, your heart pounding against your ribs. His gaze follows you as you step inside, and you nearly jump when his voice calls a farewell after you, leaving through the same door.

You stand near the doorway for far too long, other customers coming in and going around you, cutting you annoyed looks on their way to the cash. Your drink must already be waiting for you on the counter and still you can’t move. It takes someone actually stumbling into you to jolt you back into the present. 

That wasn’t part of the plan. It’s thrilling, initially, a rush so overwhelming, so kaleidoscopic, that you ride it all the way back to the office and all the way home, replaying the memory again and again in your head until even you start to tire of belabouring it. 

And still you roll around in bed that night thinking about it, heart racing even hours after your short little conversation, picturing it over again in your mind—the crinkle of the corners of his eyes, the smile nearly pulling across his face, all white teeth and soft, supple lips. 

The only problem is—

Now he knows who you are.

You don’t expect him to remember you after such a quick encounter. He’s not the one that’s been pining these past few weeks. He’s not the one that’s been beating himself up for crushing on a stranger. 

But he does remember you. And not only does he remember you, but he looks for you the next time he’s in. 

It’s one of those days when you get there first, coffee already ordered and paid for by the time he walks in, in dark trousers and a quarter-zip today, and filling them both out nicely, the sweater clinging to the muscles of his arms. You expect him to head straight for the cash like he normally does, blessedly and lamentably unaware of your presence.

Instead, your breath hitches when his eyes drift across the café and settle on you, a spark of recognition glinting in them.

His gaze immobilizes you, stronger than any paralytic. It’s what holds you in place as he approaches, the distance between you halved in an instant, and then fully collapsed, the gorgeous man in front of you doing what Zeno’s Achilles never could. 

“Hey stranger, no dance today, huh?” he asks, clearly addressing you.  

You don’t know what to say. This is your worst case scenario, your category five emergency. In the weeks you’ve spent crushing on him from afar, you hadn’t considered the possibility of him ever noticing you in return. 

“Sorry?” you croak.

He gestures with his thumb towards the door. “From the other day, remember?”

You don’t know how you’ll make it through this interaction without making a fool of yourself. “Right. Haha. I guess the dance floor’s closed today.”

You could throw up on the spot. Of all the abysmal conversation rejoinders there have ever been in the history of humanity, the one you just offered must rank comfortably near the top.

For whatever reason though, whether divine intervention or something more dastardly, he chuckles, amused. He seems to like talking to you. Seems to like you even. That only becomes clearer when he approaches you the next day, and then the day after that, and then every day when you stop by at two p.m. for your afternoon coffee, your coffees now handed out together by the barista, as if you had ordered them that way. 

The small talk alone almost makes you consider switching to a different coffee shop. It’s too much pressure. You feel sick with anxiety at the thought of him figuring you out. 

And he will figure you out. You haven’t exactly played it subtle. 

Then he gets your number. Somehow. And your name too, pried so easily from you that you don’t even notice, like freeing a pearl from a clam; barely a flick of his wrist and you offer it up without a second thought, embarrassingly malleable. 

You get his too. Kyle Garrick. He spells it for you as he watches you save his number into your phone from over your shoulder, so close to you that your fingers fumble with the keypad, mistyping it almost four times before getting it right.  

Kyle doesn’t seem to care that you can barely seem to string together a sentence in front of him. If anything, it seems to endear him to you.  

His attraction makes itself apparent in tender words and a new penchant for touch, a hand always reaching out for you. 

At first, it’s nothing more than the casual brush of his fingers against yours as he picks up your coffee from the bar and passes it to you, no different than a handshake or a high five. Ostensibly perfunctory. But that too changes over time. A fleeting touch becomes a hand at the small of your back as he guides you to a table for a quick chat before heading back to work, fingers squeezing your shoulder when he laughs at a joke you didn’t realize you made, and quick hugs that grow a little longer each time.

Maybe. Or maybe you’re imagining it. 

“So when are you gonna let me take you out for real?” 

That snaps you out of the daydream, reality crashing down with such force that it leaves your ears ringing. His words leave you dumbfounded, gaping up at him in that stupid way that you can’t seem to suppress. 

“For real?” you repeat.

“On a date,” Kyle clarifies, as if the word alone weren’t enough to wreck you. 

“Oh.” 

You tell him yes because the word no evaporates from your vocabulary. By the time it returns, he’s already gone, disappearing into the world (likely an office building around the corner from yours, but it might as well be Timbuktu). 

This isn’t what was supposed to happen. You were supposed to pine in agony until you died. 

It’s everything you ever wanted, and yet, you couldn’t want it less in the moment, terrified for some reason that you can’t quite articulate. You count down the days with growing apprehension, jitters giving way to a full-body sweat. 

You’ll break it off at a later date. That thought comforts you to a point. At some point, there will be a moment for you to bail entirely. 

The problem is the longer you say nothing, the harder it is to say anything at all. Already guilt stays your tongue when all you want to do is tell him that you can’t do this anymore. You need to leave—go anywhere else, run home and lock the door behind you, never go back to the coffee shop again.

But there’s a text in your phone telling you the time and place, and every time you look at it, it leaves you feeling off-kilter. Sea legs without leaving dry land. 

What is it about you that you feel the need to run as soon as you get too close? What about this isn’t what you want? Do you even know what you want?

Of course you know what you want. You want love and affection. 

But having is not wanting. Wanting is safe. It’s the having that’s dangerous. 

You contemplate cancelling on him about a dozen times until suddenly it’s too late, the man in question standing in the lobby of your building to pick you up. He must know someone in the building because he’s deep in conversation when you spot him, his head turning to meet yours at the same time, as if even in conversation, he wouldn’t allow himself to be distracted enough to miss you. Your heart squeezes when he wraps it up in the same breath, crossing the lobby to meet you. 

Dinner is a restaurant in a different part of town, one you’ve seldom spent time in before, trendy in the way that would unnerve you were it not for the abrupt realization that to everyone else, this is simply a familiar part of town. 

To some, the restaurant must be familiar as well. There might even be regulars. To you however, the small, dimly lit room with the booths on one side and the chairs lining the bar at the other, an eclectic assortment of framed photos and decorative porcelain plates on the wall beside you, is lovely, uncharted territory. 

Over dinner, Kyle peppers you with question after question until your head spins, each answer that leaves your lips betraying some nervous tendency towards clandestinity. You have to keep some things to yourself. You have to keep some things private.

You have to shut your mouth before you—

“A long time,” you reply without thinking, the whole world blowing open when you admit it. You hadn't even consciously registered the question before answering. When was your last date? 

Kyle doesn’t seem phased by it though, warm smile somehow warmer than the blood boiling under your skin. “I must be one lucky man then.”

He sweet talks you into agreeing to a drink after dinner, probably sensing the nervous animal in you, the fear about to take flight. 

You assume he means a drink at a bar until you’re standing in the kitchen of your apartment, Kyle standing behind the island with a bottle of wine in one hand, uncorking it with practiced ease. When it pops out, you flinch. 

What a strange thing, to lose time like that. You lose it again after he pours you both a glass, coming to on the couch with his arm around your shoulders, pinned between him and the side of the couch. 

He turned the television on, you notice distantly, staring at it through your glass, red wine sloshing from side to side. It’s not a program either of you would care to pay much attention to, possibly by design. 

“Do you have, um…any plans tomorrow?” you ask, swallowing when he drags his fingers over the bare skin of your upper arm. 

“Nope,” he answers, playing with the sleeve of your shirt now. 

You can hear it coming from a mile away. He makes it too obvious with his fingers trailing over your skin and the heat of his gaze searing into the side of your face.

The sky outside your window is black, the moon only a sliver of its usual brilliance, but your living room is bright, turning the window into a mirror reflecting the two of you, the picture of a couple in repose. 

You watch his reflection lean over yours in the window, his lips grazing your double’s ears, your breath catching when his touch yours as well. “If I give you an inch, you’re going to run a mile, aren’t you?” he murmurs. 

There’s a lump in your throat when you swallow. “No,” you lie.

He must see right through you though. Must see the creature inside you about to succumb to its instincts. 

He must be good at chess, you think to yourself, staring down at him with a stupid look on your face as he lowers himself to lie flat on the bed between your legs, spreading your thighs wide enough to wedge his shoulders between them. Any game of strategy. 

If you never give your opponent a moment to breathe, they can’t gather themselves enough to retreat. 

That thought crumbles to dust when he makes you watch him lick the first stripe up the seam of your pussy, crudely spreading your lips with his tongue. Nothing more substantial materializes after that. 

He eats pussy like he hasn’t had enough to eat. Lips and tongue and hollowed cheeks when he sucks your clit into his mouth and your back nearly arches right off the bed, twisted into such a complex shape that you almost don’t know how to unravel yourself. Fingers grasping at his head, his ears; rasping over the coils of his hair, fingers committing the texture to memory. 

Your thighs tremble and squeeze, pried open again and again every time you try to shut him out. The muscles in his arms barely even bulge with the effort it takes to keep your thighs spread. 

You are wound up in ways that would be a challenge to anyone, but Kyle doesn’t seem to care. He just holds you down and forces you to come on his tongue, rolling it over your clit until you actually start crying. Big, belting caterwauls. His poor baby, he croons. 

When have you been someone’s ‘poor baby’? Someone’s darling, sweetheart, honey, that’s it, I’ve got you, that felt good, didn’t it? God, you’re so pretty, I can’t believe you let me—

He flicks his tongue over your sensitive clit and you yelp, reaching down to slide your hand between his mouth and your swollen sex only for him to lace your fingers together and pull your hand to the side and lick it again. 

“It’s still sensitive,” you complain, and he lifts a brow, unmoved by your bellyaching. 

“So what, you got twitchy little orgasm legs, that means I’m not allowed to lick your pussy anymore?”

“No,” you hiss, embarrassment warming the blood already pooled under your cheeks. 

Warm hands rest on either side of your face as he eases his cock in for the first time, holding your gaze in place as sinks in to the root. All you can do is squeeze your eyes shut. 

They don’t stay shut for long. He pries them open without words, without touch, every ounce of his ardor poured into you and lifting your own to the surface. 

Sweat drips from his forehead onto yours. The sweat makes his hands slip up and down your face with the force of his thrusts, fingers tugging on your lips and pulling them apart, sliding over your gums and teeth.

“You are the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen,” Kyle pants, sweat dripping off his forehead and onto yours, eyes darker than you’ve ever seen them, glassy and feverish.

“Don’t—don’t say that,” you gasp.

He dips his head down to press his forehead against yours. “You can’t tell me that. You can’t tell me what to do.”

Whatever this is, it’s nothing like anything you’ve experienced before. Proper lovemaking. Real kisses with passion, with fervor, with delight; the messiness contained between you, in the sweat rolling down your back and soaking into the sheets, the saliva dripping from his mouth into yours, the squelch of his shaft splitting you over and over, never giving you a second to catch your breath. 

Coming a second, no, third time is painful, like a thing wrested unwillingly from you, and you fall back on the bed windburned. Kyle follows you down, hips bucking into yours faster and faster, his own end nearly on his heels. 

He comes with a grunt, without warning; a sudden surge of heat and warmth, his fingers biting into your cheeks where he holds your face in his hands, his lip curling up into a snarl that you swear you can almost hear, and—

You expect it to be over after that. For him to roll out of bed and pull on his pants, maybe give you a courtesy kiss for a job well done before leaving you to stew in the mire of another rejection, the small win eclipsed by the enormity of losing him. 

What you don’t expect is for him to lay down beside you and pull you into him. Kyle laughs softly when he notices your stiffness, jostling you slightly in an attempt to coax you into relaxing.

“That’s right, baby,” he chuckles a touch breathlessly, pressing a kiss to the bridge of your nose before relaxing back down. “I’m not going anywhere.”

Coffee the next day is different than usual. Early for one, the sun still a syrupy morning gold, not yet the starchy afternoon white, and in a different location than usual, the coffee machine on your kitchen counter hissing through its second cup of the day. 

Kyle maneuvers around your apartment too naturally, a stark contrast to the way you scurry from the bedroom to the bathroom like a stowaway. He’s entirely at home in your space though, helping himself to coffee and breakfast, only glancing at you for permission, the slightest cock of his head and arch of his brow, and you fold under the pressure instantly. 

When you try to skirt around him, he wraps an arm around your waist and pulls you into his side, the touch of his lips against your chest shocking you still, electrical impulses still skittering under your skin. 

“I can feel your heart racing,” Kyle teases, caramel-smooth voice sending a low vibration through your chest.

And why shouldn’t he? Your heart is racing after all. “I’m nervous.”

“I know you are, baby,” he murmurs. “This is hard for you, isn’t it?”

It is. A few too many years on your own have turned you to stone, the slightest touch almost too much to handle. You’ve long learned to expect anything you touch to shock you. 

“Want me to make this easier on you?” he asks gently. You’re not sure what he means by that, but you have an inkling. 

And wouldn’t it be nice to not have to worry? To not have to second guess what you really want or what you should do? 

You nod. 

“Okay, honey. Then you don’t have to do it. No telling me to go away. I’ve got it from here.” 

When Kyle takes your phone from your hand, you don’t stop him, even typing in your password for him when he turns it towards you, watching over his shoulder as he shares your location with his phone. 

You exhale shakily, the tightness in your shoulders easing. There he goes with that oyster shucker again, opening you up. 

So be it. What use is there in protecting something that’s already his? 

There is a physical pain deep in his chest. An ache, a festering bruise beneath the bone of his sternum as he stands in the middle of the street, his fists balled at his sides.

He doesn’t know how you’ve done it, but you’ve managed to lose him. You’ve managed to slip into the shadows and disappear, and he can’t find you.

It feels partly like a failure. When he turned onto the street he was sure you’d be running down, you weren’t there, and it was like a punch to the chest. You’re gone, and now his heart hammers wildly against his ribs as he sucks in a calming breath. His mind is running a million miles an hour, but he can’t help the small smile that graces his lips beneath his mask. You’ve escaped him. Perhaps he should give himself credit, considering he’s the one who taught you these tactical evasion skills.

When the humming in his brain eases—your face now at the forefront of his mind—he stretches out his arms, pops the tension from his elbows and shoulders, then saunters up the street. Your apartment is up ahead, but he knows you wouldn’t be dumb enough to hide from him there. You’re a smart girl.

Dex pauses outside your building, eyes scanning the dark alleyway to the left, then the line of shrubbery to the right.

“What’s with the mask?”

Dex slowly turns his head, finding a man staggering out of the alley. He leans against the brickwork, face pale and almost ghostly in the overhead street light. He gestures to Dex with a dirty hand, fingers strangling the neck of a nondescript liquor bottle as he hiccups out his sentence. Dex cocks his head as the man flips the jagged cap from the bottle with his thumb, and Dex watches it hit the sidewalk and roll towards him. It settles by his feet as the man takes a noisy swig.

“Oh, are you one of those vigilantes Fisk’s always jerking off over?” The man slurs, and Dex would’ve smiled beneath the mask, humoured, if he didn’t have more pressing matters. The man shakes his head, looking at Dex. “If you’re looking for someone, I saw a pretty broad take the fire escape up this building.”

Now Dex smiles to himself. Smart girl.

He bends and plucks the bottle cap from the ground, running his thumb across the rugged edge of the tin-plated steel. He takes a step forward, rolling the cap between his fingers, his shoulders hulking as he moves, but he doesn’t get far before the man is slurring out again, leaning against the brick wall for support.

“Runnin’ ‘round in a tight fuckin’ skirt, too. Fuck,” the man says, and Dex freezes. 

He’s bathed in shadow now, the man a few paces behind him. The fire escape is just a few yards ahead of him and he could almost smell the lingering trail of your perfume. But he doesn’t move. He can’t move. The man’s words clatter around his skull like a ricocheting bullet, and a wasp-like humming returns to his brain. Slowly, he turns, and the man laughs all wet and sickly.

“I mean, if you’re not after her,” the man slurs, gesturing to the fire escape. “I s’pose I could follow—”

Dex whips his arm back and forth so fast that the action is dissolved by shadow. He throws the bottle cap with such force it whistles through the air, then slices straight between the drunken man’s eyes in a spray of blood. The man’s head snaps back, head cracking against the brick wall, before he slumps and hits the ground. The bottle clatters to the ground and rolls from his lax fingers, spinning out onto the pavement with a trail of beer following.

Dex huffs, then turns and heads straight for the fire escape, leaving the man dead in the mouth of the alley, a bottle cap embedded so deep in the front of his skull Dex was sure it had disappeared into his brain. He’d be disappointed if it hadn’t.

He takes the stairs three at a time, careful to tread carefully. The metal doesn’t creak despite his muscled weight, and he creeps towards the roof like a prowling cat. He passes dark windows, knowing you wouldn’t take the chance. He knows you’ll be hiding somewhere on the roof. His angel is smart, but she won’t have flown far.

Silently, he clambers onto the roof. City lights glitter around him, but the shadows are thick here. Boxy electrical units and crumbling chimneys make for some kinds of hiding spots, but he knows you better than that. Knows you would’ve hidden yourself away in the furthest, darkest corner with a victorious smile on your face.

He stalks across the roof slowly, humming quietly to himself. He unsheaths one of his knives and twirls it through his fingers as he rounds a stack of electricity boxes and finds you hunkered in the corner, eyes scanning the city street below. You don’t turn, and that makes Dex chuckle—the sound you finally hear, whipping around to find your boyfriend staring right at you.

“Dex!” You yelp, and you make a movement to the side as if you were going to take off running.

But Dex doesn’t let you. He throws his knife and it slices through the air mere inches in front of your face, forcing you to throw yourself back as it lodges into the brickwork behind you. And that’s when Dex lunges forward: wrapping his arms around your waist and forcing you down onto the cool floor, hands and knees finding dried leaves and crumbling mortar.

You wriggle desperately, trying to drag yourself out of his grasp. But he pins you to the ground, chest tight against your back, his pelvis heavy on the swell of your arse. Whining, you reach a hand back in a poor attempt to push him away. But he grabs your wrist and pins your arm to your side, making you squeal.

A muscled arm curls around your neck, a gloved hand pressing firm to your mouth and muffling your noise. You cry out again as he presses you deeper against the floor, masked face coming to rest right beside your ear.

“Trying to run, angel?” He coos, releasing your arm so he could anchor himself over you. He leans on his forearm, his bicep straining beneath the material of his navy suit. “You were so close, weren’t you?”

You whine against his hand, and he chuckles in your ear, knowing he was asking you questions you couldn’t answer. You continue writhing beneath him, but that just morphs his chuckles into groans as he ruts his hips against your arse. The thick, muscled mass of his stomach and chest is warm against your back, and you find yourself growing hot beneath your clothes, your pussy fluttering tight under the cotton of your underwear.

“Thought you had a chance, didn’t you?” Dex utters, rubbing his face against the side of yours. You close your eyes and whimper, feeling him inhale beneath his mask, the heat of his mouth under the material like a burning brand at the curve of your jaw. He hums, fingers squeezing your cheek. “That’s a bit dumb, baby. You could’ve made it to the Catskills and I still would’ve found you.”

He grinds himself against your arse and you moan into his palm. You feel the hard lines of him rutting against you, cool air on the backs of your thighs as your skirt rides up, up, and over the curve of your backside. You moan again as he gives another heavy jerk against you, the tight fabric of your skirt rolling up even further, exposing the flimsy cotton of your underwear.

Dex groans in your ear, his entire body shuddering above you. “Oh, my sweet girl, m’gonna fuckin’ ruin you.”

You blink lazily, looking around the roof. It’s dark and empty, and you can hear the bustling streets of New York echoing in the air around you. The seclusion of it all has you moaning into his palm again, the print of his hard cock heavy against you.

The palm on your mouth presses tighter and the backs of your lips press hard against your teeth. You whimper, heart leaping into your throat, as Dex grumbles low in your ear, “M’gonna take my hand away. You’re gonna be a good girl, and you’re gonna be quiet, yeah?”

You nod desperately, clit aching as he gently grinds himself against you. The roof of your building is bitingly cold and way too hard against your chest and stomach, but you don’t care—you take it like he wants you to, laying still while he removes his hand from your mouth and gives you a firm pat on the cheek. You feel your entire body heat up, a sticky warmth quick to pool in your belly as his hand drags down your side and finds the clasp of his belt. You hear it clink, and the sound has you fighting off a moan, your teeth sinking into your lip to trap the sound in your throat.

Dex chuckles as he sits up a little, still pressing you into the ground, but enough for him to unbuckle the belt of his suit and undo the zip. “Bet you’re fuckin’ soaked, huh, baby? Pussy makin’ a mess of these pretty panties?”

His hand leaves his belt as he speaks. With the mass of his thighs, he nudges your legs apart. You can’t help the quiet mewl that leaves you as cool air hits the gusset of your underwear, and you know how wet you are based on the bite of the breeze against your puffy clit. You wriggle, but his other hand pins you down.

You hear another clinking sound, before you feel something firm against your covered folds. It’s heavy and almost metallic in nature, and you suck in a gasp when you realise it’s the hilt of one of his knives. You freeze, body alight with heat, and Dex chuckles, pressing the base of his knife against you and parting your folds beneath the wet cotton.

“Y’think she’ll take this like she takes my cock?” He utters, dragging the base of his knife’s handle up your folds before pressing it to your hole. Your pussy flutters, drooling out as you whimper, pressing your cheek to the cement to ground yourself. He chuckles again, before drawing the knife’s grip up even more until it rests against your arsehole. “And what about her? I could stretch her out nice and good if you ask me nicely, angel.”

You squirm beneath him, a moan lifting from your throat before you could stop it. It’s soft, not too loud, but it makes Dex tut anyway. Quickly, he sits back and takes your underwear between his fingers, pulling it away from your slick folds so he could slice through the material with the blade of his knife. The fabric snaps away from you, and you find yourself moaning again as the cool night air kisses up against your cunt.

Then, his knife is back on your pussy—without the barrier this time, spreading your folds and tracing a series of heavy lines up and down your slit. You whimper when the end nudges your clit, then circles it like he would with his finger, before pressing down with just enough pressure to make you arch against him. You whisper his name, and he groans in response, sliding the knife back down and tapping it against your hole.

“So wet,” Dex marvels and he watches as he slowly brings his knife an inch or so away from your cunt. A string of slick webs between you, and it makes his cock twitch in his briefs. He grunts, pushing the handle back against your hole and this time, letting it sink in even further. It breaches inwards, and you suck him in so well that another groan rips from his chest. It’s primal, his eyes flashing as he pants behind his mask. “Yeah, fuckin’ hell, baby. She’s gonna take it like my cock.”

You breathe around a moan as he sinks the knife in deeper. Pressure forms deep in your pelvis, a heat festering in your belly as your pussy contracts around the intrusion but lets him in anyway. Something prickles down your spine as you realise you’re drooling around the hilt, slick dribbling as he pushes in, then brings it out by an inch or two, then pushes back in again.

“Dex,” you whimper, body shaking. The knot in your pelvis tightens when he bottoms the knife out inside you, hole dangerously close to the blade. But you trust him—you trust him with your life as his gloved hand clutches the blade, eyes watching your pussy take it. You whimper again when you realise he isn’t moving. “Dex, baby—”

“No,” he hisses out simply, pulling the handle out.

It leaves you completely, and you mewl, arching in an attempt to chase it. Dex grunts, smacking the base of the handle against your cunt, making you sob out and collapse forward. He pushes back in then, eyes darting from where he splits your pussy open to where you whimper into the crook of your arm.

“You thought you could get away from me. You thought you could hide,” Dex says, and they’re more statements than rhetorical questions. He fucks the handle of his knife into you again and again, your cunt glistening wet and loud where he drags it in and out of you. He holds you against the ground as he continues. “I had to kill a man to get to you, baby. What if he had found you first, huh? What if you did lose me?”

Your entire body stiffens, eyes shooting open. You try to look over your shoulder at him, but Dex knows exactly where to aim, thrusting the base of the handle right up against that gummy spot inside you that has you collapsing back onto the ground. 

You whimper around a poorly formed Dex!, before you finally manage to spit some of your sentence out: “What did you—?”

“I took care of it,” Dex growls, his arm speeding up as he rucks the knife into you again and again. His cock is painfully hard in his briefs, but he holds off, watching the way your pussy drools around his knife, your entire body shaking as he hits that perfect spot every single time. He nods to himself, mind flitting briefly to the man slumped dead in the alley. “I took care of it, angel. I took care of you.”

A sick thrill runs through you. You should be scared, but you aren’t. “Dex…”

“I did, I did,” Dex breathes out, slightly muffled behind his mask. “I did, baby. I’ll always take care of you.”

Your body is on fire. The pressure in your pelvis, the heat in your belly, swells inside you. You shake against the ground, the hard, metallic handle of his knife hitting your g-spot each time and it’s leaving you dizzy with your approaching orgasm. You can almost taste it building in the back of your throat, and all you can manage to squeak out is a meek oh, Dex! before the heat ignites and you’re coming around the knife.

Dex groans. “There she goes, that’s it, good girl.”

He fucks you through it with deep, rolling thrusts of his arm. The muscles contract beneath the tight sleeve as he moves, and his eyes never leave the way your cunt clenches around it, slick glistening against the handle. You shudder one last time, hips twitching, before you still as the fire of your orgasm reduces to smoke, and you lie pliant against the cool floor.

Slowly, Dex pulls the knife from you. You whimper, feeling your pussy flutter around nothing while Dex slides the knife back into his belt without even wiping it down. Eyelids fluttering, you lie in wait, listening to him shuck his pants down with a well restrained groan.

The hot press of his tip against your folds snaps your eyes open.

“Shh, baby, easy,” he mutters when you cry out. He fists himself, dragging the head of his cock through your folds, smearing your slick. He quickly finds your hole and pushes against it, not quite driving in. He rests there, pre-cum beading from his slit and smearing across your hole. “God, I’ve missed her.”

He thrusts in then. It’s unceremonious and sudden and you don’t even have the time to moan before he’s buried to the hilt. Your breath is stolen from you, and you gasp into the skin of your forearm as Dex moans, the sound loud in the silence around you. He falls back over you now, holding himself up, his chest and stomach melding to your back. You manage a little whimper as he nestles inside you, splitting your pussy apart around the thick of him.

He adjusts himself, grinding his hips against your arse. The movement means you can feel every little ridge sliding against your walls, the weight of his balls resting near your swollen clit. You whimper again, and he coos to match it, tutting you quietly as he slowly drags himself out of you.

“Bet that feels good, doesn’t it?” Dex whispers, masked face right beside your ear. He holds himself over you, shoulders hulking, suit stretched tight over his back as he rests the tip of his cock inside you. He pushes back in, the fabric of his pants bunched down around his thighs, rubbing against your legs. “It always feels good.”

You moan. “Dex, fuck.”

“Uh-uh, what did I say?” Dex mutters at your ear, hovering over you now as he fucks you. His hips slap against your arse where you’re pinned to the ground, pronebone and completely crushed beneath his mass. “Gotta be quiet. Wouldn’t want anyone comin’ up here, would we? I’d have to kill ‘em, baby.”

You whine. “Dex, no—”

“Yes,” he whines, mocking you with a smile split wide beneath his mask. “So keep those noises just for me.”

The thick of his cock splits your pussy apart, the stretch always rendering you breathless. He ruts in quickly, desperately, and the tip slams against that perfect spot inside you every single time. He’s on target every single time. You shouldn’t expect anything less from Bullseye.

You gnaw at your lower lip as you bury your face into your forearm, holding back your sobs of pleasure as heat starts simmering inside you again. That familiar pressure treks down the column of your spine too, and you whimper when it settles low in your belly, fanning across your womb.

Not that you know it, but Dex is much the same. His heart knocks wildly against his ribs as if he were still chasing you—he thinks, in some ways, he still is—and the buzzing in his brain is completely gone. All he’s thinking of is you, and all he wants is you. You’re all he needs, and no one will ever keep you from him.

“You’re mine, angel,” he whispers suddenly. One of his arms snakes around your throat again, pulling your face from your arm and pinning your head up. You gasp as he locks you into a chokehold, his grip gentle but firm. As he thrusts, one of his hands shifts to push part of his mask up, just revealing his mouth. He kisses your cheek. “You can’t run from me.”

He forces your head to the side so he can kiss you.

He kisses you, and you struggle to meet his intensity with the way he fucks you. You’re pliant in his arms, little whimpers melding against his lips as his tongue licks across yours and he slides his mouth forward. You swap spit and pant into each other’s space, and it’s barely even a kiss, but Dex loves it. He kisses the corner of your mouth as he groans, hips pumping, bicep tight on your throat.

“You were made for me,” he whispers, dragging his mouth across your warm cheek. He licks the salt from your skin, skims his teeth across your cheekbone. He noses along your pulse next, head dipping to plant wet kisses below your ear and along the back of your jaw. “My perfect girl.”

There will never be an I love you from Dex. What you have is not the love you see in movies, or in romance books. He is possessive and obsessive and so violently jealous that he’d rather rip the world apart before letting you go—and you know that. You know that, and you still can’t help but love him right back.

“Dex, please,” you whimper as he buries his face in your neck. The pressure in your lower belly is too much. Beneath your clothes, you’re tacky with sweat, and your thighs shake where he presses into you.

He knows you’re close. He probably knew before you even did.

“Let me feel you,” he says, thrusting, maintaining a deep, even rhythm. He listens to the way you moan and yowl beneath him, trying so hard to be quiet. He can feel the sounds vibrate in your throat where he sucks and bites at the skin. “I wanna feel you come, baby. You can do that for me, yeah? Just be a good girl and come all over my cock. Let me have it.”

Dex draws the line of your orgasm right in front of you, and your body practically flings you across it. Your entire body seizes up, trembling as the pressure in your belly fissures then shatters. You come hard around him, pussy clenching tight around the thick of his cock, and you moan his name loud enough that it echoes. He doesn’t seem to mind, and neither do you, as he fucks you through it, panting into your neck as his hips move. Heat flushes through your body as you shake beneath him, and you can’t help the whimpers that interrupt your moans when he starts rambling in your ear.

“That’s a good girl, that’s a good girl. Fuck, my best girl,” he utters, grunting and groaning in such a way that your clit aches with the heaviness of your heartbeat. He growls next, hips stuttering. “M’gonna fill this fuckin’ pussy, baby.”

He does. Groaning your name, quiet and bordering on a whine, Dex pushes his hips right up against your arse, cock knocking up against the plug of your cervix, and spills. He fills you, hips grinding, rolling, trying desperately to cling onto some kind of control, but he’s completely lost it. He pants around a pained whine as he comes, nosing your thrumming pulse. Thick and warm and so, so full.

When he finishes, his cock jerking and balls tightening with one last thrust, he eases down onto you. You whine as he smothers your body beneath his, trapping you beneath his mass. He shushes you, one of his hands pulling his mask off so his sweat-slick forehead can rest against your shoulder while he catches his breath.

His spine aches, but he ignores it. The muscles in his shoulders and back ripple when he rolls onto his side. He spins you then, his softening cock falling free of your pussy as he pulls you to him, one big hand immediately finding the fat of your arse to palm.

You both listen to the distant wail of sirens as you settle into the shadows.

You shiver, and Dex holds you tighter. So tight, you wonder if he’s afraid you’ll try to run again.

“I like it when you catch me,” you whisper, lifting your head to press a small kiss to his jaw. “Don’t like being without you.”

Dex smiles to himself, a deep rumble—almost a purr—vibrating through his chest as he shifts his head to catch your lips with his. He kisses you deeply as the sound of sirens get louder and louder and the world seems to light up blue around him.

———

i was like "nah i'm not posting it". biggest lie of 2026! but yeah i'm def not posting it on other platforms, this is staying here