big loser lover

Bathroom breaks? He came too — no matter how tired he was, he'd stand in the doorway, blocking the harsh hallway light from your eyes while you went, already grabbing onto your hand when you were done.

"It's not like I haven't seen anything before Maus"

You'd stopped questioning it around day three. This was just Konig now. Or maybe this had always been Konig, and ten months apart had simply stripped away whatever thin restraint used to keep it in check.

Mornings were the worst offender, if you could even call it that. You'd wake up most days already pinned — one heavy arm slung over your waist, sometimes a leg hooked over yours for good measure, a genuine miracle you didn't suffocate in the middle of the night with all 200lbs of him on top of you.

Getting up to make coffee had become a small negotiation every single time. You'd try to slide free an inch at a time, and without even opening his eyes he'd tighten his grip and make a low, sleep-rough sound of protest, like your absence had personally offended him before he was even fully conscious.

Working from home hadn't gotten any easier, either. You'd set up at the kitchen table with your laptop, and within twenty minutes he'd wander in "just to get water" and end up parked in the chair beside you, one hand resting on your thigh, occasionally reading your screen over your shoulder and asking mild, unhelpful questions about your spreadsheet just to have an excuse to keep talking to you. More than once you'd looked down mid-typing to find he'd simply pulled your chair — with you still in it — an inch closer to his.

Even small errands had become two-person jobs. Taking the bins out. Checking the mail. He didn't say anything about it, just appeared at your elbow, falling into step, like your house had a gravitational pull he couldn't resist standing inside of. Your friends had started joking that you two shared a single nervous system.

You didn't mind it. If anything, it had become the new normal so completely that you barely registered it as anything worth commenting on — the way you don't notice your own heartbeat until someone points it out. He was just close. That was simply how Konig existed in a room with you in it.

The stares started the moment you actually left the house together.

You didn't really clock it at first — you were too busy laughing at something he'd said, tucked into his side as he steered you both down the cereal aisle with one broad hand resting warm against your hip. It wasn't until you glanced up mid-laugh that you noticed the couple by the yogurt fridge who'd stopped their own conversation entirely to watch the two of you pass, the woman leaning in to whisper something to her partner behind her hand.

You didn't think much of it. People looked at Konig everywhere you went — he was hard not to look at, all six-foot-ten of him ducking under doorframes and folding himself into chairs that weren't built with him in mind. You'd gotten used to being the shorter half of a pair that turned heads.

A toddler in a shopping cart nearly fell out of his seat pointing at Konig like he'd spotted a cartoon character come to life, loudly informing his mother that there was "a giant, Mama, a real giant," while she tried, and failed, to hush him. Konig, entirely unbothered, gave the kid a small nod on your way past, which only seemed to delight him further.

It was in the next aisle that a man — friendly, harmless, clearly just being polite — reached past you both for the same bag of coffee, smiled, and said something easy like "after you," nodding at you with the kind of casual warmth strangers exchange in grocery stores every day.

Konig didn't say anything. He didn't have to. You felt him go very still beside you, felt the hand at your hip settle into something firmer, more deliberate, and watched the man's easy smile falter under the sheer, unblinking weight of Konig's stare — the kind of look that made grown men reconsider their life choices in real time. The stranger mumbled something that might have been "sorry", practically tripping over his own feet in retreat.

"He was being nice," you said, biting back a laugh, tugging Konig's sleeve to get his attention back on you instead of the man's retreating back.

"I know," Konig said, entirely unrepentant, eyes finally dropping back down to you, softening instantly the way they only ever did for you. "I did not like it."

"You didn't like a man saying 'after you.'"

"I did not like a man looking at what is mine."

You should have found that ridiculous. Mildly concerning, even, said so plainly and without a flicker of irony. Instead you just felt something warm settle low in your chest, and let him tuck you back against his side without argument, because you'd long since stopped being able to tell the difference between Konig being sweet and Konig being a little unhinged about you — they'd started to feel like the same thing.

You ran into a friend from your pilates class near the registers, who hugged you tight and then had to visibly recalibrate her whole posture to greet Konig, who had one hand resting easily on your shoulder the entire conversation, thumb absently tracing small circles against your collarbone like it was the most natural thing in the world to be doing mid-conversation about someone else's dog. He didn't say much. He rarely did around your friends — just watched, quiet and unreadable, tracking the conversation as if he were cataloguing every word for later, every laugh you gave her that wasn't for him.

"You two are disgustingly cute," she said, half amused, half something else you didn't quite clock — the same look she'd give a very large dog that hadn't technically done anything wrong but was still standing a little too close to her drink. "Does he always just — stand like that? Attached?"

"Like what?" you asked, genuinely unsure what she meant, glancing up at Konig, who only raised an eyebrow back at you like he was equally baffled by the question — though his hand, you noticed, had drifted from your shoulder to loop loosely around your waist sometime in the last thirty seconds, without either of you clocking exactly when.

"Nothing," she laughed, a little too quickly, shaking her head. "Never mind. You two have fun."

You didn't think about it again until you were back in the car, Konig's hand resting on your knee at every red light like it belonged there, and you found yourself smiling at the memory instead of puzzling over it. People said things like that sometimes. You'd stopped taking it as anything but a compliment.

That evening, curled into his side on the couch with his chin propped on top of your head, you brought it up anyway, mostly just making conversation.

"Do you think we're clingy?" you asked, tracing idle patterns against his forearm where it was wrapped loosely around you.

He considered the question with the same seriousness he gave everything, like it deserved real thought rather than a quick answer.

"I think," he said slowly, "that I spent ten months unable to touch you. I think I am making up for lost time."

"That's not really an answer."

"It is the only one I have." He pressed a kiss to the crown of your head, unhurried, like he had nowhere else in the world he needed to be. "If it bothers you, I will stop."

"I didn't say it bothered me."

"I know," he said, and you could hear the smile in it even without looking up at him. "That is why I am not stopping."

You laughed, swatting lightly at his chest, and he caught your hand there instead, pressing it flat against him so you could feel the steady, unhurried thump of his heartbeat under your palm — a small, quiet reminder that he was here, solid and warm and entirely yours, however much space he insisted on taking up doing it.

"You were a menace at the store, you know," you added, half-teasing. "That poor man just wanted his coffee."

"He can find a different coffee."

"Konig."

"I mean it," he said, entirely serious, and you felt more than heard the low rumble of it against your back. "I do not share well. I did not, before. I am worse now."

"Worse how?"

"Before, I would notice another man look at you and think, that is unfortunate for him." His arms tightened fractionally, an absent, instinctive thing, like your closeness was something he checked the way other people checked a lock on a door.

"Now I think about it for the rest of the day. I think about it in the shower. I do not love this about myself. I have decided I do not care."

You should have found that a little alarming. You did find it a little alarming, somewhere beneath the warmth spreading through your chest — and yet you couldn't quite summon the will to mind it, not with his heartbeat steady under your palm and his chin tucked against your head like you were the only thing in the room worth anchoring to.

Other people got the unsettling stare, the silence, the sheer immovable wall of him standing between them and whatever he'd decided was his to guard. You just got this — impossibly gentle, faintly unhinged in a way that only ever pointed inward, toward you, like every intimidating inch of him existed for the sole purpose of being your very large, very devoted, slightly feral teddy bear.

"Ten months," he said again, quieter now, almost to himself. "I am allowed to be a little insufferable about it."

"A little," you agreed, tucking yourself impossibly closer despite there being no real room left to close. "Just a little."

He hummed, pleased, arms tightening around you the way they had every single day since he'd come home — and you let him, because somewhere in the last week it had simply stopped feeling like something to let him do, and started feeling like the way things were always supposed to be.

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