Sam :)

The first left quietly. Said he was too loud.

The second left loudly. Said he was too quiet.

The third claimed she was frightened. The fourth didn't even give him a reason. Fifth and sixth were some ugly variation of all of the above.

Sukuna stopped caring.

He did care, at one point. That's why he let his coworker convince him to join this stupid 'hybrid nature rehabilitation program' in the first place, right? Because maybe tigers were too bold. Too frightening. Too much.

Too much. That's what the last one said.

Well, if he was too much for anyone, maybe they weren't enough for him.

The agent sighed. Pinching the bridge of his nose and probably contemplating why he chose to work for a facility that boasted a 100% rehabilitation record. Guess Sukuna was about to ruin that too. As he did most things.

"Look," the man said. His shoulders slumped. "We do not typically give up on our patients, but surely you understand that we've tried everything in the book for you, right?"

Sukuna didn't reply.

"Behavioural therapy. Group counselling. Mate pairings and courses. You've chased away every volunteer and potential mate. Somehow even frightened off your therapist last month."

"She was weak."

"She was doing her job. You act like. . ."

Sukuna grunted. His claws threatening to lash out and tear up his own shirt. "What?" He knew the answer. Knew that sickening word that they all used for him. "An animal?"

The man didn't answer. Didn't have to. He sighed again and checked his clipboard. "This is your last shot for clearance."

"And if I don't pass?"

"You'll be escorted to a private facility."

Hybrids were monitored under lock and key by the state. Sukuna guessed he couldn't really blame them. They were different. Unpredictable.

Animals.

Sukuna regretted ever approaching the program in the first place. If he knew what he knew now— that he was simply built to be on his own, he would have swallowed the furball and bit his own tail. Lived out the rest of his life without the feeling of being watched.

Now, they knew he was unstable. Now, they considered him a threat. Guess his claws really were clipped.

"Thanks to your last stunt, none of the volunteers stepped up for this," the man said, flipping through his clipboard.

Sukuna huffed. "What's the point then? Just ship me off already." At least he'd get to be alone, then.

"Because miraculously, one of our assistants offered to help." The man looked up. "She's new. And your last shot." He handed over the clipboard with a small picture clipped at the top right.

That's the first time Sukuna saw you.

The second time he saw you, you smiled at him. Stupid move, really. For someone so small, so frail— so breakable.

"It's nice to meet you," he's sure you lied as you stuck out your hand. Chirpier than a bird hybrid. Bright eyed as a squirrel. Were they sure that you were human?

"Yeah. Hi." He gruffed, not reaching for your hand. It looked too gentle for him.

You dropped your arm to your side, still smiling, but softer. Before you trotted off to lug the rest of your belongings into his home.

He helped you, of course. Tiny thing like you probably would sprain her spine if she did it all by herself. Pathetic.

This was his last hope? They might as well cage him and ship him off already.

Within a week, he was sharing his space again. The few days of blissful solitude had come to an end. Now, there was a canvas in his living room. Pink body wash and products littered across his bathroom counter. Books from authors he couldn't even pronounce occupying his empty shelves.

You were sweeter than the three spoons of sugar you dumped in your strawberry tea every morning. Softer than the dinner rolls you insisted on making every Wednesday and Friday. Shy. Gentle.

Too gentle for someone like him.

In the beginning, Sukuna had watched you. Like a tiger stalked its prey. Scouring for the first sign of discomfort. A hint of fear. Even those who started off strong couldn't keep up the act for long. Not with him.

Which was what made it so odd.

You were timid, sure. But not afraid of him. Guess he'd give it some time.

Because that's simply his fate now, right? Watch a new volunteer skip into his lair and run off with their tail between their legs once he got too much. No one stayed. Not like they did with everyone else.

Others made hybrid bonding look easy. They'd join circles and find mates in the same week. Same night, even. Claiming it all as 'the right timing'. The right person.

Sukuna was a wrong person. Therefore, no right person would fit. Like an unwanted puzzle piece.

Not that he cared. He didn't need to fit in with anyone. If he was too much for any twisted jigsaw of companionship then he'd simply be the missing piece. A corner piece no one looked for. The one that made no difference to the puzzle. The one that no one needed.

He preferred being alone, anyway.

If this last ditch effort blew up in smoke, he guessed he'd have his wish. Whatever facility they'd stuff him into— at least he would be alone. It was better that way.

By himself, he didn't have to soften his tongue. By himself, he didn't have to pretend that he did not have stripes, claws and canines. Didn't have to soften himself for someone who wouldn't soften for him.

Didn't have to watch anyone leave when he became too much.

You didn't leave.

A week went by. Then two. Three, before he knew it. You rooted yourself into his floorboards like a flourishing flower and offered him the same sunny smile every morning.

"How'd you sleep, Sukuna?" You'd ask, as if you cared.

"Fine." He'd grumble from the coffee machine. The bitter stain on his tongue refused to ever let him return the question.

Why should he bother with someone who was going to sign him off anyway? Might as well show her what she was getting herself into. His poor behaviour and slacking social skills, as his therapist put it.

You never flinched. Humans sure were resilient.

But he was hybrid. And everyone knew that tigers were ruthless.

He wouldn't shroud his nature to make himself more palatable for you. For anyone, ever again.

It's odd. You actually tried.

You adapted your body clock to him. Sukuna woke up drearily early. To catch the dawn on his ears during his morning run. He supposed you started waking up shortly after him. Giving you enough time to ready breakfast for him when he stepped back through the door.

Eggs. Bacon. Any raw protein you could think of. You were unfortunately, a good cook.

"This isn't necessary," he said from the counter, but still wolfed down your perfectly fluffy scrambled eggs.

"Waking up early has its perks." You mused, sipping your tea. Probably strawberry. Or rose. He hated that he now knew your favourites.

You made his bed whenever he wasn't looking. He scolded you for it, the first few times. You insisted it was fine. That you liked cleaning up.

You tried to watch movies with him. Plopped beside him on the sofa and struck him your signature smile.

"Wanna watch something?" You asked, soft. Already dangling the remote. Sukuna couldn't help but compare the size of your hand to his.

He scoffed. "What? Some romcom?"

"Or horror." You bashed.

His instincts told him that a gentle soul like you wouldn't last ten seconds with a horror movie. Still, he indulged you. The last thing he wanted was to endure some stupid hybrid hallmark film.

A slasher flick. He didn't pay attention to the name. All he knew was that you quivered halfway through it and that stirred an urge in his gut.

Urge to what? Now that, he once again had no answers to.

It was warm. Low. The same way he felt when kids dropped their ice creams and mothers tripped in grocery stores. He couldn't name it. But he did drape his arm over the back of the couch. Not grazing your shoulders but, there.

You'd probably have nightmares tonight. Silly girl. Now he would be obligated to return the favour.

Because you did, a few nights ago. When he tossed and turned. Creased his sheets and slashed his blankets. Sukuna wasn't one to dream— but he did have nightmares.

About the darkness. About the cold. About a void that for some, unfathomable reason, unsettled him.

"It's okay, shh." Your voice reached out to him through the shadow. Light against the darkness.

"It's okay. I'm here. Wake up, please."

You were luck he hadn't broken your arm.

His grip was too tight. Claws too wretched. Not lucid enough to realise that he snatched your wrist when he had woken up.

"Get out." His voice rumbled. Eyes bloodshot and pupils tight. Sweat burned his forehead.

It must have not sounded like a threat, or maybe it was your stupid human resilience. You leaned over him. One knee on his bed and your hand ghosting his shoulder.

"You're freezing," you whispered.

He jerked from you. Rolled over onto his side and refused to allow himself to be vulnerable under your gentle gaze.

"I'm fine." He said.

You insisted. Are you sure? — Can I get you anything? — All the things that people said to catch you off guard and then left anyway.

"I said I'm fine."

His voice boomed, final. It was the first time he'd seen you flinch. He did not bother calling out for you as you shuffled out of the room. Assumed your bags would be packed by the morning. Your pink body wash nowhere to be seen on his counters and your books vanished from his shelves.

You didn't leave. Here you were, a few days later, with shaky knees and a horror movie. But insisting that you were enjoying it for his sake.

You never turned tail. Never backed down. Maybe it was more than human resilience. Maybe it was stubbornness.

That's the only thing that made sense to him. Why else hadn't you disappeared regardless of how much steam he'd blown at you? Especially when he was too much.

"Let's get one thing straight."

You had said something stupid one day in the kitchen. Something about being there for him. Some empty promise he had heard mixed and minced several different ways until it lost all meaning.

As if his mood was not sour enough.

Your back pressed into the fridge. His strong forearm shoved above your head. Sukuna's hulking body shadowed yours. Perhaps this was it. Where you finally became apart of that void that haunted his dreams.

"You and I. Are not. Compatible." His ears pinned back to his head. Tail coiled tight. Like his jaw and teeth that clenched.

Still, you held his stare. Even when it burned.

"Not a thing. Not. Possible." He spat. "So stop acting like you aren't just gonna sign me off so I can be caged up."

"I'm not—"

"I want you to."

He cut you off. Sharp as his heave as he craned closer. Close enough to smell your cherry shampoo— but not a hint of fear.

What was wrong with you?

"I want you to sign me off. So that we can stop pretending like any of this is gonna work and that I'm anything but better off alone."

The fridge rattled as he shoved himself off. He expected your knees to shake. Expected you to clamber out of the kitchen and stuff whatever you could into a suitcase for the night.

Instead, you watched him storm off. With those same, achingly gentle eyes.

Why were you so gentle?

Why did you stay?

Why did he find himself being gentler, too?

Of course, Sukuna didn't want to snap at you. You were simply the closest thing. The softest thing. His hands weren't built to cherish the tender.

Yet, tender were his hands, as they cooked for you. If you handled breakfast, it was only fair that dinner was his responsibility. Even if all he exchanged with you were grunts and gruffs, as long as you went to bed full, he was content.

Content? Odd. That wasn't a word in his vocabulary anymore.

His voice dangered tender's territory on nights you'd be out. Work, friends, whatever he never bothered listening to but for some reason found himself worrying over when the street lights switched on.

"Do you need a lift back?" He asked into the phone. Taking note to look uninterested, even if you couldn't see him.

"I should be fine, Sukuna." You chirped.

"You sure? It's almost midnight."

"I'm sure! What's the worst that could happen?"

To a sweet thing like you? A lot. More than he'd like to imagine.

Morals, he told himself. He pulled up in the middle of the morning to pick you up because of his pesky morals.

"Sorry you had to come all this way," you said as you shut the passenger door.

Sukuna considered your dress. Hated himself for it.

"What?" His tongue clicked. "Were you expecting to walk all the way back?"

"What's the worst that could—"

"A lot."

It wasn't like the other times. His voice raised, but didn't roar. His brows narrowed, but didn't glare.

The car ride was silent.

Your smile was sickening.

Cute.

He watched you closer. Not as a tiger stalked prey. Not anymore. He couldn't name this.

He refused to call it gentle.

Even when he carefully observed the way you fixed your hair every morning. How he noted which of your curves that the sun bounced odd of. The soft plush of your body and how your thighs moulded into the couch cushions, or rounded perfectly in your shorts.

Never had he been one to appreciate art— though he stood in front of your canvases and stared at your paint patterns. Swirls of green and blotches of warmth. Illustrations of nature: jungles and wild flowers.

It called to something within him. He assumed his hybrid traits. A tiger yearned for jungle, that was his home.

Home.

Sukuna didn't have a home.

He had a house. He had you. Had pink body wash on his counters and books he'd learnt the names of on his shelves. Had a warm meal every morning and a warmer bed you still insisted on making.

He had movie nights. A running partner. Someone who finally rooted her heels to the floorboards and blossomed in his walls. Stubborn as she was shy.

But not a home.

It was only a matter of time. Until he said something that finally was the thing. Until he'd wake up to your paintings missing, and your shampoo gone. He'd come home to no protein, but a sheet of paper:

I've signed you off. Good riddance.

You told him that you wouldn't, after he insisted it that night in the kitchen.

You padded to doorway of his room, picking at your sleeves with a petal-soft voice.

"All we have to do is clear you for rehabilitation," you said.

Not once did your eyes meet his.

"Then what? I can finally be alone?" He asked, incredulous.

You nodded.

It's what he wanted. What he claimed to want. So why was your agreement a sharp pang between his ribs?

That was then. He assumed your plans hadn't changed much. A silent agreement that if he behaved, you'd leave him be by the end of it all.

That's why he was gentler, he told himself.

Just trying to ensure his goals, he insisted.

For now, he would take care of you as you did him. Whether conscious or not. If it meant that when it was through, he'd get what was best for him.

Solitude.

But if solitude was what he wanted, why did he hate seeing you in others' company?

It was late. Emergency work call. He missed his afternoon cat nap and only scuffed down half of his breakfast.

The sun peeped at him from its sprawl across the horizon. Glaring into the back of his head as he stalked home. Burning him hotter. Hot.

He felt so. Fucking. Hot.

It wasn't even summer yet. Spring had only perked its preppy head. The blossoms bloomed. Their nectar tickled his nose. Couples gifted their flowers.

Sukuna hated spring.

He hoped you hadn't cooked dinner yet. That was his job. His responsibility.

But no, you were outside. Prattling to a neighbour.

All smiles and soft. Cupping your hands in front of you as you listened to the man's stories. The irritable snow leopard that lived next door. With his baby blue eyes and boyish grin.

What were you even doing outside in the first place? Didn't he tell you it was dangerous once the street lights started switching on?

Sukuna did what he did best. He watched. Looming by the telephone wire. Feeling the sun stab into his head. His spine. Feeling the heat gurgle from his gut. Splutter up his lungs. Against the back of his teeth.

That spotted fucker touched your arm.

Sukuna scathed.

Blurred colours. A muffled yelp. His claw caught on your woolly sweater as he snatched your arm.

"Sukuna—!"

Your gasp drowned in the rumble of his growl. Grated from the back of his throat. The leopard backed off. Your muscles tensed under his calloused fingers.

"Inside. Now."

He didn't wait for you to agree nor disagree. Dragging you inside and rattling the walls as the door clattered! shut.

"Su—" he lodged your voice in your throat once more. Shoved your back into the nearest thing— the same splintering door.

Was it hotter inside? Or was that the anger?

A sweat drop sweltered between his brows.

"What the hell were you doing?" As if he had any right to ask. You weren't his mate.

Mate? Of course you weren't his mate.

Then why did his teeth crave to sink into your flesh? Mark you?

His stare hazed. Blinking rapidly. Heaving. The heat blistered into his nerves. Clenched his muscles. Suffocating. It was suffocating.

"Why were you. With him. Why—" he zeroed in. Mistake. Big mistake.

Your scent.

You weren't his mate. Why the hell did you smell like it, then?

Did you always smell this good?

Your gaped at him. Hands stiff on your sides and pressed flat into the wood. Your neck craned to account for the height difference. Were you watching him this time? Was he too much?

His eyes squeezed shut.

"Sukuna," you spoke. His name didn't deserve that gentleness. It ached him deeper today.

"I think you're. . ."

Snapping open his stare, he sucked in breath. Considered your words. The phrase your lips wrapped around.

Rut.

Shit.

He shoved himself away from the door. Away from you. The fire crawled up his throat. Thunked his heart. Thrummed a deep, dark chord in his gut.

The sweat slipping down his spine in the middle of spring confirmed it. He was in rut. With a poor, persistent, pretty human in claw's reach.

"Hey— hey it's okay," you attempted, stepping forward where he stumbled back.

"Don't."

He hissed.

You preserved.

Stubborn. Stubborn, sweet thing.

"Let me help." You offered.

"No."

He tried. Tried to stumble off. Lock himself in his room. He could hump the mattress for all he cared but he wasn't so much as touching—

You took him by the wrist. Might as well have taken his soul while you were at it.

Splintered his restraint.

The door rattled again. Creaked awfully with the weight of him. On you. The thickness of the air. The heat. Your wrists fit well in his big hands. Looked like they belonged there.

You looked like you belonged here. Pinned under him.

His chest heaved. Voice jagged, throaty.

"You don't know what you're getting into." He said.

You gulped. He paid too much attention to your throat. "I did when I signed up for this."

"Do you even know what a rut is?"

"I know you can't be alone right now."

Sukuna's breath hitched.

You relaxed your hips. Let them mould into his. Their plush softness drove him wild.

Lashes hung over deep maroons. The quiet thrummed with your heart beats. His, thundering and wanting. Yours, tender yet eager.

He craned closer. Tuffs of his pink hair tickled your forehead.

"I can do awful things to you." He whispered.

Still no flinches. You never did.

Your eyes batted at him.

"Is that so bad?"

"Yes."

"Show me."

Even the kiss, burned.

Your lips really were petal-soft. Softer than he had imagined. He hated himself for imagining this in the first place.

The knot in his gut wound tight. Urging him to flush you further into the wood. Flush further into you. Patience slipped into the simmer between your mouths. Sukuna kissed you with violence. Nothing contained. Nothing hidden.

He told you that he wouldn't placate himself for you.

Abandoning your wrists, his grip sought your plush. Squeezing your thighs between his fingers gaps. Lifting you into his arms so that your heels pressed into his back. So that he could consume you. Tongues tangling and teeth tackling.

Your hands smacked at his shoulder. Breaths huffed through your nose. A desperate sound that plunged him deeper into heat.

He let you breathe. Barely.

"I can be good for you." Was what you used the privilege to gasp.

His chest rumbled. "Yeah?"

The slope of your throat was so pretty when you gulped.

Sukuna slipped a hand to your cheek. Rough. He couldn't be gentle. Not with you. Not now.

"Gonna be good for me, pretty girl?"

Eyes blown out. Jaw tight. If you said anything other than your whined little yes as his hips ground into yours, he might have lost his mind entirely.

His mouth attacked yours again. Sucking on whatever was left of your lychee lipgloss. Surely bruising your lips in the process. He didn't care. Let him mark you. Everywhere. So that stupid snow leopards didn't get the wrong idea. So that everyone knew what you were.

His.

The home blurred into vertigo colours. The floors creaked under the weight of his footsteps. Sukuna hoisted you with him. Haphazardly avoiding furniture in the stagger to his bedroom. Hands palming at whatever part of your flesh he could reach.

He almost stumbled in the hallway. Caught you against the doorway, one of your hands gripped at it while the other clutched the back of his neck. Fisted his hair between your fingers.

"Sukuna, careful." You whined.

He didn't listen. Too busy humping on your thighs that squished perfectly between his hard body and the cold door. Nurturing his bulge. Tucking its hot curve into the smooth crux of your skin.

"Said you'd be good for me." His growl rumbled on your pulse. Teeth mapping out his new territory: your velvet flesh. "So shut up and take it. Like a good girl, yeah?"

The door swung open. You must have palmed the handle. Feet fumbled in a clumsy waltz. Hands clinging for dear life. He caught you. Kept you pressed against his blazing body as he mouthed down your throat. Latched onto a tender spot. Marked you.

Sukuna handled his ruts the way he handled everything else: alone. His hand, a pillow, and a grotesque amount of tissue boxes. When last had he felt the soft touch of a partner? Held their warmth beneath him while his mind drove him wild with fire?

He was always too much. Too much to handle. Too aggressive. Too big.

But you.

You seemed to want everything.

In the way your nails curled on his shirt. In the pitiful way your neck arched to give him more access. Offering yourself up to him. A pretty deer who craved a tiger's claws in her. His maw latched to your throat.

"You're so eager," he groaned.

You whimpered, "I'm yours."

Fuck.

The mattress sunk. Creaking in retort to the callousness of his shove. Your body moulded into his sheets. Into him, as he staggered over you. Knees digging into the bed. Teeth clamped on the base of your throat.

You jerked. A gasped cry vibrating against his teeth. Palms knocking into his shoulders. To push him off?

No— to grip. Cling. To him. To your mate.

After all, you were his now, weren't you?

Bites bloomed across your neck. Over your collarbone. Down your shoulders. Your clothes threading like ribbons under Sukuna's claws. The sound of fabric tearing accentuated the rough pants and pitched whines in the humid air.

He wanted to speak. Wanted to tell you what a good girl you were being for him. Wanted to grunt into your skin about how perfect you were. Tell you that you were everything he'd been waiting for.

The words lodged in his throat. Sticky on the back of his tongue that could only muster out wet pants and deep growls as he feasted on your flesh.

Every inch of your skin revealed to him was another blessing. Your curves. The dips. The soft slopes of your body. Salivated him all the more.

Your bra never stood a chance. Clawed away. Probably ruined at the wire. He didn't care. He'd buy you a new one. Buy you whatever you wanted if you were gonna carry his cubs.

Cubs.

The word slipped into his mind with ease, and ruined it.

Pupils blown out. Lungs clenching. He made the mistake of eyeing your tummy.

Perfect, round, soft. You'd be the perfect mate. The perfect mother for his young.

The thought spurred his hands rougher. Tearing away offensive fabrics until you were laid completely bare before him. With big, doe eyes batting up at him. So pretty. So his.

From the corner of his eye he spotted your hands slipping. To cover up. Cover what was his. Your wrists were snatched in his hard grip.

"Don't," he warned. Lips assaulting yours. Stealing your breath and tonguing on your whimpers.

"Don't hide what's mine."

Your tits were softer under his tastebuds. Delicate to the harsh swirls of his tongue. So small when compared to his mouth that sought to consume, to claim.

Sweet sounds sighed from your kiss-bitten lips. Your spine curved so that you pressed back into him. Squishing your plush breasts into his face. His groan rumbled into the flesh.

So tender it was maddening. So perfect it was addicting.

Kisses, sucks, bites. He littered your tits in more claims. Feasting on your silk flesh. Fantasising about the image of them larger. Fat and swollen with milk— just as you were round with his cubs.

His cock strained thick in his pants. Flushed hot on your inner thigh. He ground into your warmth. Rutting wildly. Like the animal he always was.

Your hands delving into his hair almost broke him. Almost. He withdrew from your chest. Eyes glowing through the dark as he found your face.

"Taste so good. So sweet." A hand roughed down your side. Cupped your thigh and strung it round his waist.

"Up."

Raw strength scooped you into his palms. Flesh spilling between the gaps of his fingers as he squeezed for good measure.

Your little squeaks were so cute.

Teeth dragged on your flesh. Callous over bites sunk into your gentle flesh. He lapped on the indents of his own canines as he wrest you over him. Shoved your thighs higher. Urging you. Demanding.

"Face. Now. Fucking sit on my face."

Senseless. Each word was a growl. It's a miracle you understood him at all. Maybe you always would. That's how mates were, right?

The cotton of your panties dragged on his collarbone. Frantic eyes darted to your face as your hips locked. Unmoving.

Stubborn little human.

"What?" He husked. Scuffling to shove you over his awaiting face. "I said sit."

Your lips pressed together. Hands scrambling for the headboard. "Wait are you— are you sure? I'm—"

"—driving me mad." He hissed through clenched teeth. The throbbing in his groin pulsed the sickening heat hotter. Seared into the back of his skull. To his hands that groped your ass. To his eyes that narrowed.

"Said I wanna taste you. So get. On."

Was that too much?

Was he too much for you?

No, course not. You wanted to be his good girl. He saw it in your doe eyes batting at him. In the quiver of your lip and the tremors of your thighs. You shuffled over him. Pressing the cusp of your panties against his chin.

"Like this?" You meeked.

"Like this."

Sukuna tugged you over him. Knocking your thighs. You stumbled. Caught yourself with shaky fingers in his hair and an adorable yelp.

The musked cotton scrunched into his nose, his mouth, the rest of his hard face. Stuffing his nostrils with the sweet, intoxicating aroma. His eyes threatened to roll back.

A muffled curse rumbled into your heat. First came his tongue. Abrasive like everything else about him. Lapping on your folds. Drenching the fabric. Trying to suck in your taste through it.

Then came his teeth. Impatient. Tearing into your panties. His head wrest, violent. Claws ripping away the cloth in a feral affair.

Your sweet heat was his reward. Slicking up his face with your clit pressed into his nose.

"Fuck," his groan thrummed. Straight into your velvet. Leaking your pussy into his agitated mouth. "Knew you'd taste s'fucking sweet."

Hands slipped up your thighs. Cupped your ass. Sukuna sought to press kisses to your quivering slit— but you dangled above him. Not pressed, not sat. Hovered.

"Said. Fucking sit."

He hauled you into him. Cramped your thighs into his head. Smothered your pussy into his face. Even with his ears muffled by your plush, he heard your stunned gasp.

The weight was perfect on his head. Your hands were perfect in his hair. Pussy pretty, pulsing, perfect, on his tongue that stroked over your slit. Lathered you in saliva. All the way to your clit.

He darted the muscle. Circled on your bud. Trying to commit to a rhythm. A pattern. It scathed into the heat of his rut. The heat to take, to claim. To make you his. Finally.

Even if you hated him after this.

Even if you signed him off and he finally got what he wanted. Solitude.

Right now, all he wanted was your pussy.

Filthy squirts and sloshes squelched through the room. Brimming the hazed air together with your whines. Moans. Gasps of his name.

He always hated how gently you said it. Like it meant something. Like it ever could mean something. Hearing it broken sounded better. Shaky and whimpered as he fucked you on his tongue.

"S-Suk— kuna, ah."

Sweet. So sweet. Sweeter than he ever deserved. But Sukuna was a greedy man. So he gripped on your thighs, bit his nails into your flesh, and feasted to his heart's content.

"There ya go. C'mon, pretty girl, ride my face."

Spank! went his hand. Clamouring your ass and fisting the jiggles. Pulling you down, harder, closer— till he was suffocating. Suckling on your clit. Guiding your hips into a sinful sway.

Your hips fell into rhythm. Atta girl. Always so sweet for him. Always so obedient. Yeah, if you stayed, you'd make the perfect mate.

He hoped you stayed.

He could make you stay.

Keep you in his bed. Make a den for you. Hold you down and fuck you into his sheets day-in-and-day-out. Fill you up until your tummy grew even rounder. Softer. Until you were swollen. Until you were his.

No. Fuck. That's the rut talking.

The rut talking.

It's the rut that had him palming your ass and squeezing you into his face. The rut that had his mouth kissing, sucking, licking and laving through your creamy mess. The rut that had him fucking you on his tongue and bucking his hip into the air just as yours ground down into his face. Smearing mess all over him.

Yeah. That's the rut. But fuck, if he wasn't drunk on your pathetic moans. Your messy pussy.

Your clit spasmed under the flat of his harassing tongue. Your thighs clamped around his head. Fingers dug into his skull. Even your pain was sweet.

"Shit— kuna." Your voice croaked. Called to him as a mate should. "I'm gonna, fuck. Think 'm gonna. . . gonna—"

His eyes fluttered. Throat rasped.

"Gonna cum? Yeah? Gonna cum, hah, all over my face?"

From between the small gap of your thigh, Sukuna witnessed your face. Eyes rolled back. Jaw slack. Tits bouncing as you rode his face as if he was yours.

He was.

In this moment. In these blurred lines of his rut. Where he pictured you as his mate. Entertained the thought of wanting. Of being wanted. Of not being alone.

He was yours. Even if for a moment.

You sung his name through the haze. Tender even when he ripped you apart at the seams. Delicate even in his claws that threatened to tear into you. Mark you with scars and blood.

Your hips clumsily rocked. Once—twice—locked up in feverish tremors. Your hands bunching his hair. Clinging. Your body hunched over his. Shattering.

Sukuna rode you through an orgasm with his lips latched around your clit. Sucking harsh on its throbs. Teething on its twitches.

You splattered his face in warmth. Sweet, sickening warmth that doused him deeper into his rut's clutches.

"That's it. There you go. Fuck. Prettiest fucking pussy," he slurred into your wetness. Tongue delving between your puffy folds. Lapping up your cum. Greedy.

You toppled over him. Breaths ragged. One hand clutched in his hair and the other on the headboard.

"Wanna— wanna help. Wanna." To his surprise you pulled on his hair. Interrupting his creamy kisses on your slit.

Stares met. His hot. Yours warm. Wanting.

"Wanna make you feel good too."

How pretty you were when you quivered. Lips glossed by drool and lashes soaked with tears. It ached a deep chamber in his heart.

"Wanna be good for me?" He panted.

Your nod was doeish. As everything else about you was. His delicate girl. So fragile in his hands.

He couldn't wait to break you.

The bed creaked again. You squeaked as he hauled you down into the wrinkled sheets. On your back with his hulking weight pressing down on you. His mouth fixed to yours. Magnetic. Addicted. Letting you taste yourself on his tongue.

"That mean you gonna let me breed you too, baby?" Catching your lip between his teeth, he grunted. Pressing the swell of his cock between your legs. Staining his crotch in your slick. "Gonna let me breed this sweet pussy?"

Your response was sweet, shy, but oh so eager. A tepid nod, as your fingers slipped to his shoulders. So small. Smaller than him in every way. He took the moment to appreciate it.

You, spread and waiting for him. Your pussy, swollen and twitching. His bulge pressed on your glistening folds dwarfed you entirely.

Oh, how you'd squirm on his cock.

At last he shrugged his shirt off. Shivered when your touch feathered over his chest. He made the mistake of watching your eyes. How they mapped out scars that your fingers traced.

You didn't have to say anything. Your gaze spelt affection he wasn't ready to receive.

"Don't stare at me like that." He gruffed, kicking off his pants.

"Why not?" You asked.

"Makes me think you want me."

"I do want you, kuna."

Damn you.

Damn you and your tenderness. Damn you and that sweet nickname your sugar lips latched onto. Damn you and the way you made his cock throb hard in the strained fabric of his boxers.

He palmed your throat. Focused on your pulse. The control he held over you in the moment.

"Shut up." His hiss muffled with a kiss. Hot and open-mouthed on yours. As if he could suck the words from your tongue and swallow them into his gut that knew better.

Knew that he was better off alone. That this was only for the sake of his rut.

Bulging and angry, his tip nudged between your thighs. Soaking up your arousal. The slippery sensation of your pussy sent shivers down his spine. So wet. For him. Only him.

He let you pull away. Watching as your gaze lowered to his thick cock sandwiched between your folds. Sliding against your slit and dragging on your clit. Your wide eyes eased a chuckle from him.

"What?" He drawled. "Too big?"

"Well. . . yes."

"And every inch's gonna fucking breed you."

He pinned you back into the mattress. Flat on your back with your knees scooped into his big hands. Dwarfed you there too. He pressed them back into you so that they kissed your tits. Folding you in half and completely exposing you entirely to his hungry eyes.

Salivating. He was salivating. Your eyes were too kind for how lewd your pussy spread out for him. Leaking a string of mess. Calling for him. Wanting him.

"Keep your eyes on me, you got that?" Maroon burned into yours. Searching for hesitance. For fear. For something that could cut into this feverish rut and remind him that he didn't deserve you. But no.

You obeyed him.

You wanted him.

His cockhead slotted against your slit. Dipping in to feel the silky sin of your pussy. A deep groan rumbled from the depths of his chest. His brows furrowed. Fuck. When last had he had this?

Blunt nails dug into the backs of your thighs as he sunk in. One inch. Two inch. Three inch. Four— popping through the first tight ring of resistance. Eyes devouring yours the entire time.

He watched your face. How it scrunched up and your mouth parted. How tears clouded your eyes as he pushed past the halfway point.

He stopped.

"You good?" He huffed. Barely gentle.

Very. Gentle.

"Yeah it's— just. . . just a lot." You croaked.

"Too much?"

His face didn't falter, but his heart sure did. His grip loosening on your limbs. Ready to let you go. Free you from him.

But you shook your head. Teary eyed. Twitching smile.

"Not enough."

Hips possessed. Mind a mess. He slammed forward at those two, pretty little words. Till his tip smooched your cervix and his balls squished into your folds. Bottomed out. Filling you to the brim.

The sound you made was sin itself. A blessing. Heaven, hell, and everything in between.

"Oh fuck." You cried, head tossed back. Unable to see him gasping out the same exclaim.

Your syrupy cunt hugged around him. Tight, snug. Nursing on an underside vein and milking him around the tip. Every pulse was your heartbeat, and it devastated him.

Cussing, he pushed down onto you. His heart tugging itself towards yours. To press into your skin as his hips started rutting. Slow, eager.

"Fuck. Look at you take this cock. Like you were born for it," his words husked above you.

Your lashes fluttered. Brows knitting at the centre. He watched your tears threaten to slip as he humped on the sensitive ring that was your cervix.

His tongue clicked. Swapping out a hand on your thigh, he snatched you beneath the jaw instead. Wrenching your face to his hot one.

"Didn't I say keep your eyes on me?"

"M sorry."

"Don't apologise, just take it."

He withdrew. Halfway at first— then shoved back in. The second time was further. And further. Until his thrusts pulled to the tip and plunged back to your womb. Languid, but hard. Sure to make you feel every inch of him pressing into your pussy nerves.

You soaked up his thighs. Splashing his balls and leaking a puddle into the sheets already. The scent was intoxicating. Flared his nostrils and dizzied his head.

The mattress shook beneath the power of his thrusts. Your body bounced with it. He made sure to coil his tail tight around your waist. Held you down like a predator did prey as he fucked you open on his cock.

Pleasure built a knot in his gut. Hot, heavy. Urging his hips to snap harder and chase bruises on your jiggling ass.

Every sound was sin. Sweet. Cries, moans, a whimper than surged into a whine of his name when he removed his other hand from your thigh to instead hold them back with a steeled forearm. So that his palm could press on the bulge swelling up the base of your tummy.

"Fuuckkk," he growled. Ears pinned back to his hair. Jaw hung and canines glinting. "Look at that. See that, pretty girl? What's here?"

You hiccuped, "your— ah. Your cock!"

"Yeah? What's it doing?"

"It's—"

You couldn't answer. Slurred by moans and the delicious drive of his dick stretching you out. He watched your eyes go static.

Spank! his palm landed hot on your clit. Bulging your eyes and jerking your hips up into his frantic thrusts. He laid another. Two. Three— encouraging your pitiful whimpers.

"Asked you a fucking question. What's it doing?"

"It's— hah. B. . . Breeed—"

"Breeding you? Yeah?"

"Uhuh! Breeding. Breeding me s-so . . . s'goood."

Drool bubbled on your lips. Your hands that had tried to scramble on his shoulders and dig your mark into his flesh now fell flat on the pillow. Beside your head. Limp like the rest of your body that surrendered itself to him.

Heat surged down his spine as you clamped around him. Sucking the air from his scathing lungs. Staining his base in a thick, filthy ring of cream.

His hips rammed all the more faster. Harder. Imprinting you into his bed. Your slick. Your sweat. Your scent.

One of your weak hands slipped down. Meeking over to his larger one fixed on your stomach. Wrapping around two of his massive fingers. Or at least trying to.

It strung a deep chord in him. Thin and vulnerable. One he has thought he cut out long ago.

His half slipped over yours. Fingers laced. Pressing you against the bulge he plunged into your tummy. Holding your hand. Holding it tight.

"Sweet pussy's milking me," his grunt fanned your pulse as he swooped down. Mouthing on your neck. Searching for your pulse to feel it race beneath his lips. "Fuck. Wants my cum so bad. Wants my cubs."

"Please!" You slurred.

He swore he could do this for life.

Shoving all the way, Sukuna paused on your cervix. Sweat dripping from his hair. Cock drumming heavy. He clamped you down through your protesting whines.

"Yeah, yeah, shut it." It didn't sound harsh. Especially not with his firm squeeze on your hand.

Slipping out just enough, he watched your juices spray all over him. Mesmerising him. He worked on autopilot. Bundling you into his arms and manhandling you into a different position.

Tossing you to your side, Sukuna slotted behind you. Hips spooning your ass. One strong arm hooked around your neck, choking you on his bicep. While the other strung around your thigh. Wrenching you open for him and his massive cock, that bullied back into your cunt. Squelching your cum and sick in messy streams.

Your angelic cries resonated into his bicep. Making him squeeze it harder against your throat. Headlocking you into his greedy mouth that sucked hickies across your neck.

The angle was deeper. Filthier. Letting him feel so much more of you.

How much smaller you were than him. How you squeezed him just right. How perfect you were in his arms.

Like you belonged.

Shit. Don't go there.

Sukuna tried to drown it out. The returning thought of you. A permanent fixture in his life. Your pink body wash on his counter, that was now his. Your books on his shelves that he could read to you. You, in his living room, painting.

Painting the jungle. Painting home. Being his home.

His cock pulsed hard at the base and sweltered at the tip. The knot in his stomach wound tight. But that thought— that thought gutted him.

That you were here. That you had been here. Warm, and sweet, and soft and for the last few weeks. His.

You could be his.

"No," he wanted it to sound like a grunt. But he whimpered. Panting, heaving, mind dizzy and thrusts frantic—

Sukuna was whimpering.

Your face was pressed into his bicep. Head limp and hand still trying to hold his that clutched your thigh. Still calling his name so sweetly.

"N-No?" You breathed.

Still attuned to him even when he was fucking your brains out.

"Don't want you to leave."

Oh.

Oh.

He hadn't realised that it slipped from his lips. Hadn't realised that through his brutal thrusts— he was breaking. Lost in the burning bliss, the heat, and the warmth of what could be.

Sukuna lost his fucking mind.

"Don't wanna— fuck. Don't wanna be alone." His face fell into your neck. Arms squeezing your body into his. Trying to melt your skin into his. Tuck himself into your warm flesh and the selfish wish you gave him.

Hazed, and hot, and so heavenly yours.

Slick hair pressed into your cheek. His body collapsed onto yours. Pounding his cock up into your creamy cunt. Chasing his blazing nerves as his mouth rambled.

"Don't want you to leave. Don't. Shit. Don't leave me, please, please don't fucking leave me."

His thrusts lost rhythm. As frantic as his rushed whispers. Plunging into your cervix. Bruising your thighs. Clutching you closer. As close as he could muster. As close as it would take to keep you here forever.

"Say you won't— say you," he slurred. Eyes squeezed shut. Words melting into a clumsy splutter of curses. "Say. Say you won't. Say—"

"Won't. Won't. 'kuna I won't— hngahh. Promise!"

That single word. So raw. So true. Choked in a gasp as you tried to nudge your face closer to him.

It shattered whatever pride he had left.

"You promise?"

He croaked. Dangerously hopeful.

You nodded. Cried.

"Promise. I promise S'kuna. Breed me— please."

He should have known you'd be trouble from the moment you first smiled at him.

Heat trapped him. Seeped into every nerve and spasming muscle. Ears drooped. Tail clinging around your waist, as his arms did every inch of you.

He held your hand.

The ache in his hips nulled to the sound of your sweet voice. Tucking promises away in his heart and sealing them with attempted kisses, even when he was choking you.

He felt your orgasm shake through you. Your body locking up as you babbled his name into the humidity. And with that Sukuna finally— finally let go.

Ramming his cock up one, final time. He stilled. Deep and thrumming within you. Heat bursting from his gut and washing over him in a devastating wave of blissful carnage.

Loud and wrecked, his moan vibrated into your back. Hips rocking in small stutters as spluttering, white ropes creamed your cervix. Pouring his thick cum into every inch of your twitching cunt. Brimming you with him and his promise.

"Fucking. . . fuck. . . hah. Take it. Take all this cum in your pretty pussy." Slurs dragged up your throat, to your ear as you face limped into his arm. His voice husked, a vow.

"Just feel me breeding you full. Filling you with my cubs."

You whined, meekly rocking back into him. But he snatched your hips and pressed it down into the mattress with a soft hush.

The throbbing at his base thrummed into swelling. His knot bloomed until it lodged stiff in your cunt. Pulsing with your pathetic little twitches.

He watched your eyes widen and brows furrow. Your body locked up and a whimper strained from your swollen lips. "Mmm. That's your—"

"Mhhm. Just stay still."

Laving his tongue over one of the bites, Sukuna held you near. Savouring your warmth.

The silence finally didn't feel like a void. Even if it was heavy.

He held onto the moment. Clung to its peace as the warmth simmered into cooling sweat on your flesh.

You broke the quiet first.

"Did you mean that?"

He didn't answer you. But his hand cupped your tummy. Fingers still laced in yours as his face tucked against the back of your shoulder.

". . . Was it too much?"

He never thought his voice could ache.

You tried to shift again, and despite the lump in his throat, he clicked his tongue. Squeezed your thigh in warning. "I said stay still, didn't I?"

"You're never too much. Not for me, Sukuna."

There you went, saying his name like it meant something.

Nudging your face to his, Sukuna licked at the tears on your face. A tender act he never thought himself capable of. "Don't say shit like that."

"That I want you? Or that I love you?"

His breath hitched.

Once the knot settled, he pulled out. Hesitantly— especially with your heat still clinging to him.

"You love me?" He muttered, laying a kiss on your cheek. Then to your jaw. To your shoulder. Down your body until you were on your back.

Calloused thumbs swept your folds back. Eyeing the lewd streak of cum leaking out of you.

His eyes found yours as you spoke, tender.

"Do you want me to say it again?" One of your hands raked into his hair.

His face nudged between your thighs. His hummed approval followed the flat of his tongue. Laving up your slit. Licking away the mess and holding your thighs open amidst their intense shivers.

Even as you whined. With your eyes on the brink of tears. They were still soft for him.

"I love you."

You shouldn't.

He shouldn't.

But he still said it back.

"My mate."

Low, and grumbled, not those three words but something that spelt a deeper bond. One he finally had.

After licking you clean, Sukuna bundled you up into the sheets. Pushing himself from the bed and returning with a warm towel and a water bottle.

He cradled the back of your head as he gave you the water.

Worshipped your flesh as he wiped you down. Tracing over bruises and bites. His mark.

And when you were finally tucked into his arms. Dozing off with your head nestled on his heart that now beat for you. His tail curled around your leg and his claws soft on your curves. Sukuna understood.

That his too much was just enough for you.

© 𝒔𝒘𝒆𝒆𝒕𝒉𝒆𝒂𝒓𝒕𝒊𝒄𝒊𝒔𝒎. no plagiarism or ai training authorised. divider: @/pixopix | art cred: @/cakkezzz ( twt )

The parking garage is nearly empty. The late night shadows and overhead fluorescents are doing their usual thing- that sickly amber wash that makes everything look darker and more jaundiced, turns concrete pillars and painted lines into something out of a liminal space photograph. Your shift ended nine minutes ago. You've been sitting in this car for three of those minutes and you're no closer to leaving than you were when you got in.

You try the ignition a third time because you are a person who went to medical school, which means you are clinically incapable of accepting a result without attempting to replicate it, and the result is the same.

Silence.

The dashboard stays dark. The engine stays dead. Your car, the one last reliable thing you have left in your life has chosen today- today- of all days, to stop working.

Something behind your sternum cracks, a seam letting go, a thread that's been holding two pieces of fabric together finally giving up under the accumulated weight of seventeen hours of Park's voice in your ear, Park's corrections on your chart, Park's particular way of standing just inside your peripheral vision so that you could never fully forget he's watching. The sound he makes when you do something wrong, a small exhalation through his nose that somehow communicates more disappointment than a full sentence. The way clicks his tongue when you fumbled the angle of the retractors, not loud enough for the scrub nurse to hear, pitched just for you, intimate in its cruelty.

You get out of the car.

The concrete is gritty under your sneakers. The garage has that particular underground acoustics thing where every sound arrives twice, once directly and once as an echo off the low ceiling, so the slam of your door comes back to you a half second later, duller, like the garage is mocking you. You walk to the front of the car. You pull the hood release. You prop the hood up with the little metal arm and you stare at the engine.

You have no idea what you’re looking at.

You know this. You are aware, in a detached and increasingly unhinged way, that you possess exactly zero mechanical knowledge, that the greasy labyrinth of hoses and reservoirs and metal components in front of you might as well be quantum mechanics for all the good looking at it is going to do. But you’re looking anyway, because the alternative is standing in an empty parking garage at eleven pm and crying, and you are not going to cry. You are not. You’ve made it through seventeen hours without crying and you are not going to let a dead battery or a seized alternator or whatever the fuck is wrong be the thing that-

Your eyes are wet.

You blink. Hard. Twice. You sniff, once, sharp, and press the back of your wrist against your nose and stare at the engine and try to convince yourself that you are absolutely, categorically not falling apart in a parking garage. The fluorescent light catches the moisture on your lashes and turns it amber. A tear escapes down the side of your nose and you swipe it away with your knuckle so hard the skin stings.

Headlights bloom across the concrete behind you.

The light stretches your shadow forward, elongates it across the front of your car, and for a second you’re just annoyed; someone pulling through on their way out, someone who got to have a normal end to their shift and get in their functioning car and leave. The engine behind you is idling, smooth and low, and it doesn’t pass. It slows. It stops.

A door opens.

You don’t turn around because some self preserving corner of your brain already knows. Before the footsteps, before the particular rhythm of that walk-  unhurried, deliberate, the gait of a man who has never once rushed to be anywhere because everywhere he goes adjusts to accommodate his arrival-  you know who it is.

You know the way you know a headache is about to become a migraine. The way you know a patient is about to code before the monitors catch up. A full body premonition, cellular and certain.

Park’s footsteps stop somewhere behind your left shoulder.

You keep staring at the engine. Your vision has gone blurry, half tears, half exhaustion, half the flat refusal of your eyes to focus on anything that isn’t a pillow. You can feel him behind, the shift in pressure and temperature that changes the quality of the air against the back of your neck.

He doesn’t say anything for five seconds. You count them.

Then he leans past you.

His arm enters your field of vision from the left and he reaches into the engine compartment with the casualness of a man who reaches into open body cavities for a living and finds a car engine charmingly simple by comparison. His shoulder is close enough to yours that you can feel the warmth radiating off him through his clothes. 

You catch it then, his cologne, or whatever it is, something clean and warm and slightly woody that cuts through the garage smell of concrete and motor oil and settles into the space between your throat and your chest with an specificity that makes you want to bite down on something.

He smells good. Offensively, inappropriately good. And you hate him for it with a purity that borders on religious, that causes you to jerk back, take several steps away with your arms crossed over your chest and your teeth clenched so tight your jaw is clicking. 

He doesn’t let you get very far before. “Come here.”

He says it without looking up from the engine compartment, one hand braced on the frame, the other buried somewhere in the tangle of hoses and cables, and he says come here like he’s calling a dog that pissed on the carpet. 

You don’t move.

“I said come here. I’m not going to say it again.”

You move and he grabs your wrist, fingers closing around delicate bones, and pulls you forward until you’re standing beside him with your hip against the bumper and your face approximately eighteen inches from an engine block you couldn’t identify at gunpoint.

“Look.” He positions your hand over a cable terminal crusted with greenish white buildup. Presses your fingers down onto the corroded metal and holds them there. “Feel that?”

You feel it. Gritty. Calcified. Wrong.

“That’s neglect.” He says it close to your ear. Not whispering. Just close. “Months of it.”

He lets that sit for a second. His thumb shifts against the inside of your wrist, a small, almost idle adjustment that drags across your pulse point and there’s absolutely no way he doesn’t feel how fast it’s going.

“When did you buy this car?”

“Two years ago.”

“Two years.” He drops your wrist like he lost interest in holding it, and straightens up. Pulls a cloth from somewhere- his back pocket, his jacket, the fucking ether- and wipes his hands with slow, methodical attention, finger by finger, knuckle by knuckle, while you stand there with engine grease on your palm and the residual ghost pressure of his grip still pulsing around your wrist bones. “And you’ve never once popped the hood. Not once. You’re telling me you’ll spend six hours memorizing the branches of the brachial plexus but you can’t spend five minutes making sure the thing that keeps you alive on the highway actually works.”

He’s not looking at you. He’s looking at his own hands as he cleans them, like they’re the only thing worth his tim,  has all the time in the world and you are not a factor in how he spends it.

“I mean, it’s almost impressive.” He glances at you. Just a flick of his eyes, there and gone. “The commitment to not giving a shit. You’re consistent, I’ll give you that.”

“That’s not- ”

“Your positive cable’s loose. Terminals are shot.” He’s still cleaning his hands. Still not looking at you. “The whole system’s been dying for weeks and you just- what? Turned the key every morning and assumed it would keep working because it always had?” He folds the cloth. Tucks it in his pocket. “That’s not optimism. That’s not even denial. That’s just being stupid about the things you depend on.”

The word stupid lands different coming from him. Not like an insult. A fact. Like a lab value being read off the chart, something they can’t be interpreted in any other way, just is, and always will be. 

“You’re smart in the OR. I’ve seen it.” He says flatly, without investment, a concession that costs him nothing. “You’ve got good hands when they’re not shaking. Good instincts when you’re not choking on them. But then you do this- ” He nods at the engine. “And I have to wonder if the OR version of you is the anomaly and this is the baseline.”

He lets that hang.

“Get in the car.”

“What?”

“My car.” He says, an instruction, not an offer, delivered with the expectation of immediate compliance.

“I can call a- “

“It’s eleven at night, you’re not calling a tow from a parking garage, and you’re not sleeping in your car. Get in.”

“But-”

He’s already walking away. He doesn’t wait, doesn’t look back. Just walks to his car- a dark Lexus that looks like it costs more than your annual salary- and gets into the driver’s side and sits there with the engine running and the passenger door unlocked and the absolute unshakeable certainty that you will follow. 

You follow. 

The inside of his car smells like him. That’s the first thing you register as you pull the door shut, the contained, ambient version of whatever you caught leaning over the engine, multiplied and warmed by the closed space. 

You put on your seatbelt. You stare straight ahead. You give him your address in a voice that comes out smaller than you intended and you feel him register that, feel the quality of his silence change as he files it away. 

He pulls out of the garage. 

He doesn’t speak.

You wait for it- braced- shoulders locked, breath held, every nerve ending oriented toward him. You’ve spent enough time in his proximity to know how he operates: silence first, then the observation, then the correction, delivered with the flat, unhurried precision of a man who learned a long time ago that volume is unnecessary when accuracy will do. You know it’s coming. You sit in the passenger seat with your hands in your lap and your spine so straight your lower back is already aching and you wait.

A minute passes.

Two.

The streetlights strobe across the windshield in rhythmic amber intervals. The road noise fills the car, a low, constant hiss of tires on asphalt, the faint vibration of the chassis transmitting through the seat into your femurs, your pelvis, the base of your spine. The heater is on. You can feel it against your shins, a warm current that smells like clean filters and leather conditioner.

Three minutes.

He’s not going to say anything.

The realization doesn’t bring relief. It brings something worse, a vacuum. The silence that Park deploys in the OR when a resident has made an error significant enough that commentary would be redundant. The silence that says I’m not going to dignify this with a response. The silence that forces you to sit inside your own failure without the scaffolding of his criticism to push against, without even the dignity of being yelled at, because yelling would mean he cared enough to raise his voice and Park does not care enough to raise his voice. Park has never cared enough to raise his voice. He saves his volume for the things that matter and you, apparently, do not meet the threshold.

Your throat is doing something. Tightening. The muscles along the anterior triangle contracting in a slow, involuntary squeeze that you recognize as the precursor to crying and you clench your jaw against it so hard you feel your masseter pop. You are not going to cry in this car. You are not going to give him the satisfaction of watching you cry in his car with his cologne in your lungs and his silence pressing against you from every direction like something with weight.

You stare at the dashboard. The blue numbers of the clock. The GPS display showing your route- a clean, illuminated line from the hospital to your house, nineteen minutes, no traffic, as though the journey is simple, as though the distance between where you are and where you’re going can be measured in miles.

“The tibial plateau.”

His voice enters the silence without disturbing it. No change in his posture, no preliminary breath. Just the words, arriving with the same flat, unremarkable cadence he uses to call out hardware sizes mid-procedure.

“You hesitated.”

That’s it. That’s all he says. He doesn’t elaborate. He doesn’t explain which moment, which hesitation, which specific fraction of a second he’s referring to. He doesn’t need to. You know. He knows you know. The sentence is a key inserted into a lock you’ve been trying not to look at all day, and it turns with a click you can feel in your back teeth.

The silence returns.

It’s worse now. It has a shape. The two words gave it a frame and now the quiet is no longer empty, it’s full- full of every specific thing he could have said and chose not to, every elaboration he’s withholding, every detail of your performance that he catalogued and filed and is currently letting you imagine instead of stating outright. Your brain fills the silence the way fluid fills an enclosed space, expanding into every available cavity until the pressure builds against the walls.

You think about the tibial plateau. You think about the oscillating saw in your hand and the way your fingers tightened on the grip a half second before you made the cut and that half second is what he’s talking about. That imperceptible pause. That flicker of uncertainty between intention and execution. Anyone else would have missed it. The scrub nurse didn’t see it. The anesthesiologist didn’t see it. But Park was standing across the table with his hands resting on the sterile drape and his eyes on your hands and he saw it, he felt the hesitation, stored it, and now he’s taken it out of storage and placed it between you in the car like an exhibit.

Your eyes are burning.

“And the hardware count.”

Four more words. Still no elaboration. 

Flat, observational, a statement of fact that requires no emotional emphasis because the gravity is inherent. He keeps his eyes on the road.

You know what he’s referring to. The post-op notes. Six screws documented instead of eight. A discrepancy in the record that could follow the patient to every subsequent surgery, every future scan. He caught it. He corrected it. He didn’t report it.

He’s telling you now, in this car, in the dark, with nineteen minutes of road between you and your house, and the telling is worse than a formal write up because a formal write up would have structure. A formal write up would have a process: documentation, a meeting, a remediation plan, something to do with the failure. This has nothing. This is Park dropping two facts into the silence and letting you drown in the space around them.

Your left hand is trembling. You flatten it against your thigh and hold it there, pressing the tremor into the muscle, willing the vibration to disperse through the fascia and the quadricep and the femur beneath it. Your dominant hand. Your operating hand. The one that held the saw. The one that miscounted the screws. The one that’s been shaking on and off since hour six of a seventeen hour day and you’ve been hiding it by keeping it busy, keeping it occupied with tasks and tools and the physical business of the job so that nobody- so that he- wouldn’t see.

“You should have asked for a break during the reconstruction.”

You close your eyes.

“Your hand was fatiguing by hour four. You compensated by overtightening your grip on the retractor, which changed the angle.” A pause. “You knew the tremor was developing and you chose to hide it rather than ask for relief because you were more concerned with how it would look than with how it would affect the surgical field.”

That’s the most he’s said at once. Three sentences. They land in your chest like hardware being placed in sequence- tap, tap, tap-  each one seated precisely, each one load bearing, the cumulative construct designed to hold a specific weight.

Silence again.

The thing that’s happening in your chest is not something you can name with language. It’s too large and too formless and it keeps changing shape, contracting into something hot and dense behind your sternum and then expanding outward into your ribs, your clavicles, the soft tissue of your throat where the tightness has progressed from uncomfortable to actively painful. You swallow against it. Your throat clicks. The sound is audible in the quiet car and you hate it, hate the way your body keeps betraying you in small acoustic ways, producing evidence of its own distress for him to collect.

You think: say something back.

You think: defend yourself.

You think: tell him he’s wrong, tell him the hesitation was clinical judgment not fear, tell him the hardware count was a transcription error not negligence, tell him the tremor was fatigue not incompetence, tell him he doesn’t get to sit there in his seventy-two-thousand-dollar car smelling like that and sounding like that and dismantling you with seven sentences spread across ten minutes of silence-

You don’t say any of it.

You don’t say any of it because your throat is closed and your eyes are wet and your hands are shaking and everything he said is true. Not approximately true. Not partially true. Not true-with-caveats-you-could-argue-if-you-had-the-energy. True. Completely, specifically, documentably true, and the fact of its truth is sitting on your chest like a sternum retractor, cranking you open one inch at a time.

A tear escapes. It tracks down the side of your nose and catches at the corner of your mouth and you taste salt and you don’t wipe it away because wiping it away would require moving your hand and moving your hand would require admitting that you’re crying and you are not admitting that you’re crying. You are sitting in this car looking straight ahead and the moisture on your face is condensation, it’s a physiological response to dry air, it’s anything other than what it is.

Park doesn’t look at you.

He knows. You know he knows. The quality of his silence has shifted again- it’s softer now, or not softer, that’s not the right word, it’s attentive. The silence of a man who is aware that something is happening beside him and has decided to let it happen. To let you sit in it. To not offer a tissue or a word or even the small mercy of turning up the radio. He just drives, steady and unhurried, and the road unspools, and you cry without sound in the passenger seat of his car while he navigates the route to your house.

You wait for the rest. The elaboration. The lecture.

It doesn’t come. Instead, after a long moment, he says something worse.

“You know what’s funny?”

You don’t answer.

“You’re actually not bad.”

The sentence lands wrong. It lands wrong because it sounds, for one disorienting half second, like a compliment, and your starved, exhausted brain almost reaches for it before the rest of him catches up- the tone, the timing, the particular way he says not bad. A minimum. A floor. The lowest possible bar of acceptability, offered with the cadence of praise so your body responds to it like praise while your brain is still trying to decode that it isn’t.

“You’ve got a feel for the work. I’ve seen you read a fracture pattern faster than most of my third years. Your spatial reasoning’s above average. Your hands- ” He pauses. You feel the pause in your sternum. “When your hands are right, they’re right.”

He’s building something. You can feel it assembling in real time, each sentence another load bearing element, and you don’t know what the structure is yet but you know it has a weight it hasn’t distributed.

“That’s what makes it hard to watch, actually.”

There it is.

“Watching someone who could be good just… ” He makes a sound. Not a sigh. Something smaller. Something almost like amusement, which is so much worse than disappointment that your vision blurs. “It’s like watching someone with perfect pitch sing off key on purpose. You want to fix it. But you can’t want it more than they do.”

He turns onto your street.

“And I’m starting to think you don’t want it at all. I think you want to want it. I think you like the idea of being good. But when it actually costs you something, when it means admitting the tremor, asking for the break, counting the fucking screws, you’d rather protect your ego than protect your patient. And that’s- ”

He pulls into your driveway.

The engine idles. The blue dashboard light hums. Your house is dark. The porch light is off because you forgot to set the timer this morning, because this morning happened to a different person in a different version of your life.

“That’s not a skill problem. I can fix a skill problem.” He’s looking straight ahead. Blue lit profile. One hand on the wheel. “That’s a you problem. And I can’t fix you.”

I can’t fix you.

Four words that shouldn’t feel like anything. Four words that are, technically, a statement of professional boundaries, an acknowledgment that his role has limits, that your development is ultimately your own responsibility. That’s what they are on paper. That is not what they are in this car at eleven pm with salt drying on your face and his cologne in your lungs.

I can’t fix you means you’re broken. It means I looked, and what I found isn’t worth the effort. It means he assessed you the way he did with the engine and the prognosis is: not salvageable. Not worth the parts.

You should get out. You should open the door and walk inside and lock it behind you and shower and sleep and come back tomorrow and be better, be sharper, be the version of yourself that doesn’t hesitate on the approach and doesn’t miscount hardware and doesn’t sit in a man’s car at eleven pm leaking tears onto her own scrub top.

Your hand is on the seatbelt release.

“The hesitation,” Park says.

You stop.

He’s looking straight ahead. His profile is blue lit, jaw set, one hand resting on the steering wheel at twelve o’clock. His index finger taps the leather once, a single, idle percussion that might mean nothing and might mean everything.

“It’s going to get someone killed.”

Six words. Delivered without emphasis, without cruelty, without any of the sharp edges that have characterized everything else he’s said today. That’s what makes them worse. The previous comments were barbed, they were designed to cut and they cut and the cutting was something you could be angry about, something you could push against, something that gave the pain a direction.

This is different. Neutral. Factual. Almost gentle in its certainty.

It’s going to get someone killed.

Not it might. Not it could. Going to. Future tense. Inevitable. A definitive, not a warning.

You sit there with your hand on the seatbelt and the salt drying on your upper lip and you feel the sentence settle into the shape of your self concept like a fracture propagating, a slow, branching failure that spreads outward from the point of impact into every adjacent structure until the whole system is compromised.

He doesn’t say anything else.

He just sits there. Engine idling. Blue light. One hand on the wheel. And the silence after the sentence is the worst silence of the night because there’s nothing left to wait for. He’s said the thing. The final thing. The thing that all the other things were building toward- the corroded terminals, the loose cable, the tremor, the miscount- all of it was scaffolding for this, the load bearing statement at the center of the construct, and now that it’s in place the scaffolding falls away and you’re left sitting in the bare, terrible clarity of what he actually thinks.

He thinks you’re going to kill someone.

He thinks it with the same certainty that he had when he looked at your engine and found the problem in four seconds. He looked at you the same way. He looked at your hands the same way. He’s been looking at you for months, confirming what he already suspected, and tonight- the car, the drive, the prognosis- tonight was the consultation where he tells you the findings.

Your seatbelt is still buckled. Your hand is still on the release. Your body is doing something that doesn’t align with the plan your brain is trying to execute, which is: unbuckle, open door, leave. Simple. 

Three steps. Motor planning so basic a first year anatomy student could diagram the neural pathway. But the signal is getting lost somewhere between your prefrontal cortex and your extremities, scrambled by the interference of everything else your body is processing- the smell of his cologne in the warm car, the blue light on his hands, the tear track tightening on your cheek, the ache in your trapezius, the tremor in your dominant hand, the sound of his breathing.

His breathing.

You’re listening to him breathe. You’ve been listening to him breathe for the entire drive, you realize, a low, even rhythm that hasn’t changed once, that maintained the same rate and depth through every cruel observation and every silence and every tear you failed to hide. His respiratory rate is probably twelve. Maybe fourteen. Resting. Resting. He’s been resting this entire time. His nervous system has been in parasympathetic mode for the entirety of this drive, calm and regulated, while yours has been in full sympathetic cascade- tachycardic, diaphoretic, pupils dilated, hands trembling- and the asymmetry of it, the sheer physiological unfairness of it, lights something in the back of your skull that isn’t sadness and isn’t defeat.

It’s rage.

Not the sharp, vocal, defensible kind. Not the kind that generates arguments and rebuttals and righteous indignation.

Something lower. Something that lives in the body, not the mind. Something that has nothing to do with what he said and everything to do with the way he’s sitting there, breathing his twelve fucking breaths a minute, resting his hand on his thigh, occupying his leather seat with the boneless ease of a man who has never once lost sleep over the things he’s said to someone while you sit fourteen inches away vibrating at a frequency that might actually be damaging your soft tissue.

You want to hit him.

The thought arrives without preamble. You want to hit him in his calm, blue lit face. You want to put your fist into the hinge of his jaw and feel the impact travel back up your metacarpals and into your wrist and you want him to feel something, anything, any disruption at all in the flat, metronomic equilibrium of his goddamn resting heart rate.

You don’t hit him.

You look at him.

You turn your head and you look at him and he must feel the weight of it because he turns too, slow, unhurried, and his eyes find yours in the blue dark of the car and they’re steady. Completely steady. No tension in his eyes, no furrow in his corrugator, nothing in his expression that suggests he’s experiencing any version of the catastrophic internal event currently leveling every structure in your chest. He’s just looking at you. The way he looks at the surgical field. The way he looks at a fracture pattern on a film. Assessing. Reading. Processing the data without any visible emotional response to the findings.

But there’s something else. Something you almost miss because it’s buried so deep in his face that you’d need to be exactly this close, exactly this wrecked, exactly this far past the boundary of professional distance to catch it.

His gaze drops.

To your mouth.

It’s fast. A quarter second. Maybe less. And then it’s back, steady and clinical and blank, but you saw it and the seeing rewires something in your brain so fast you feel it as a physical lurch, a tilt in the axis of the car, the sudden sickening recalibration of a system that just received information it doesn’t know how to process.

He looked at your mouth.

He has spent the last twenty minutes telling you that you’re negligent and broken and dangerous and going to kill someone and he just looked at your mouth.

And the thing that breaks you isn’t the cruelty. It isn’t the silence, or the criticism, or I can’t fix you, or it’s going to get someone killed. It’s the quarter second glance. It’s the knowledge that somewhere inside of this man who has spent seventeen hours making you feel like the smallest, most incompetent person in the building, there is a circuit that looked at your mouth. That the same eyes that catalogued your hesitation and your tremor and your miscounted screws also, in the same sitting, looked at your mouth. And he thought you wouldn’t catch it. And you did. And now you’re both sitting in the knowledge of it and the air in the car has changed entirely.

And something about the way he can sit here in the aftermath of everything he’s said and look at you with the same detached focus, cracks the last load bearing wall in whatever structure was keeping you upright.

Your body, which has been running on cortisol and adrenaline and seventeen hours of accumulated fight-or-flight with no outlet, moves without conscious thought. Your hand comes off the seatbelt release and goes to the back of his neck and your fingers close in the short hair above his collar and you pull, and your mouth finds his in the dark, and it’s not a kiss so much as a loss of structural integrity. Catastrophic failure at the point of highest stress. The break you saw coming but couldn’t prevent because the forces were already in motion before you understood what they were.

He doesn’t flinch.

That’s the last thing you register before everything goes: he doesn’t flinch, doesn’t pull away, doesn’t stiffen. His mouth is warm and the sound he makes against your mouth is quiet and short and so unsurprised it makes your blood run sideways.

He was waiting for this.

The knowledge doesn’t stop you. It should. It should be the thing that makes you pull back, that trips the wire between mistake and trap, but his mouth is already moving against yours and your brain has been demoted to a purely observational role, a bystander taking notes while your body runs the operation.

You kiss him like you’re trying to hurt him. Teeth and pressure and the graceless, artless force of someone who doesn’t know what they’re doing and doesn’t care, and for a second- a long, terrible second- he lets you. He sits there and he takes it, your mouth on his, your hand fisted in his collar, your breath coming in sharp little pulls through your nose, and he doesn’t move. Doesn’t reciprocate. Doesn’t push you away. Just absorbs it, and the passivity of it is so much worse than rejection that you feel your eyes sting behind your closed lids.

Then his hand moves.

It goes to the back of your neck, fingers closing around the nape and gripping, thumb pressing into the tendon beside your spine, the rest of his hand spanning the width of your neck, and he holds you there. Holds you mid kiss, mid breath, mid everything, and the grip says stop. Not stop kissing him. Just… stop. Stop thrashing. Stop fighting. Stop moving.

You stop.

He pulls you back. Just enough to break the contact. An inch of cold air between your mouth and his, and you can feel the heat of his breath against your wet lower lip and you can see his eyes, close enough to make out the individual fibers of his iris contracting in the low light, and he’s looking at you with something that makes your animal brain go very, very still.

He doesn’t say anything.

He just looks. And the quality of the looking is- you don’t have language for it. Something pre-verbal, pre-civilized, something that belongs in a context where the lighting is firelight instead of dashboard glow and the power dynamic is measured in muscle mass and jaw strength rather than titles and institutional hierarchy. 

He looks at you like he’s deciding where to bite down.

His grip on your neck tightens. Fractionally. A compression you feel in your molars.

Then he kisses you.

And it’s different. Everything about it is different. Where yours was frantic and desperate and searching, his is slow. His mouth moves against yours with a patience that feels predatory, that feels like the unhurried gait of something that doesn’t need to chase because it already has what it was after, and his hand on your neck isn’t holding you still anymore, it’s steering. 

Tilting your head where he wants it, adjusting the angle, his thumb pressing under your jaw until your chin lifts and your throat is exposed and the sound that comes out of you is something you’ll hear in your own head for weeks.

Your fingers scramble against his shoulders. Your nails catch the fabric of his scrub top and drag and you feel the muscle underneath shift in response, a twitch, a contraction, involuntary and brief, and that one small proof that his body is responding makes you desperate in a way you don’t recognize.

You need to be closer. The thought is incoherent and absolute. There’s a center console between you and fourteen inches of dead space and it’s intolerable, physically intolerable, your body rejecting the distance, urgently, violently, without higher input.

You pull back. Fumble the seatbelt. The buckle snaps free. You get one knee on the console and your hand on the headrest behind him and you’re climbing, graceless, desperate, your shin banging the gear shift, your elbow catching the rearview mirror, and the logistics are terrible and you don’t care. You don’t care because his hands have dropped to his sides and he’s not helping you, he’s just watching, his head tipped back against the headrest, his eyes half lidded, tracking your clumsy, frantic movements in the space with something that isn’t amusement and isn’t patience.

It’s hunger.

Controlled, banked, hunger behind glass.

Your knee finds the seat beside his thigh. Then the other one. You settle into his lap and the steering wheel cuts into your lower back and his thighs are solid beneath yours and you’re breathing too hard, chest heaving, hands shaking where they grip his shoulders, and he’s… still.

Completely still.

Looking up at you. His hands at his sides. His jaw set. The only thing moving is his chest, rising and falling with breaths that are marginally faster than they were ten minutes ago, and you fixate on that the way a drowning person fixates on a piece of floating debris.

You wait for him to touch you.

He doesn’t.

The seconds stretch. Three. Five. Seven. You’re sitting in his lap and his hands are resting on the seat on either side of his thighs and he’s looking up at you with that banked, glass walled hunger and he is not touching you. 

He is making you sit in it, in the wanting, in the desperation, in the raw, humiliating fact that you just climbed into your attending’s lap in a driveway and he’s giving you nothing back.

Your hips shift. You can’t help it. A restless, involuntary roll that presses your cunt into his cock, and you feel his abdomen tighten beneath you, a hard, sudden contraction that he controls almost immediately but not before you feel it, not before you register the proof that his body is doing things his face won’t admit to.

His jaw tightens. You see it. The masseter flexing, the tendon standing out below his ear.

Then finally- finally- his hands move.

They don’t go where you expect. They go to your hips. Both of them. Settling over the bones with a grip that is immediately, unambiguously possessive, not exploratory, not tentative, not the careful hands of a man testing boundaries. He grips you like you’re his. Like you’ve always been his. Like the last four months of corrections and cruelty and silence were just the long, patient process of wearing you down to this, to the moment where you’d put yourself in his hands because you had nowhere else to go.

His thumbs dig into the hollows inside your hip bones. The pressure is just on the edge of pain, right at the threshold where sensation tips from one thing into another, and you gasp and his hands tighten in response and you realize with a full body lurch that the sound you made didn’t concern him. It fed him.

He pulls you forward. Down. A controlled, forceful drag that seats you flush against his him, and the contact makes your vision white out at the edges and one of his hands goes from your hip to your hair and he's gripping it, pulling it, fingers twisted strands at the crown of your head, yanking, exposing your throat, and the sound he makes rewires something fundamental in your nervous system.

His mouth finds your neck, teeth grazing the tendon that runs from your ear to your clavicle, a slow, dragging pressure that leaves a trail of heat in its wake, and then he bites down, hard enough to make you jolt, to make your fingers tighten on his shoulders, to make your hips roll forward again in a motion that is completely involuntary and that he responds to by pulling you into his clothed cock harder, fingers digging into the meat of your hips with a strength that’s going to leave marks. 

You know it’s going to leave marks. You know because his hands are surgeon’s hands, hands that crack bones into alignment and drive hardware through cortical shell, and they are currently clamped onto your body like he’s setting a fracture and the thing he’s reducing is you.

He doesn’t let go of the bite. He holds it. His jaw flexing against your throat, his breath hot against your pulse point, and you can feel your own heartbeat hammering against his teeth and he can feel it too; you know he can feel it, your pulse trapped between his mouth and your skin, and he stays there. Counting it, maybe. Tasting it.

Your hands are moving without thought. Down his chest, pulling at the fabric, trying to find skin and not finding it fast enough. You’re making sounds- small, fractured, desperate things that you’ve lost the ability to be embarrassed about because embarrassment requires a functioning prefrontal cortex and yours left the building sometime around the moment you smelled the cologne on him in the parking garage.

He releases the bite. His tongue passes over the indentation once, flat and slow and then his mouth is at your ear and his breathing is different now. Ragged at the edges. Fraying. The composure that he’s worn like a second skin all day is coming apart in increments you can measure by the roughness of each exhale and the tightening of his grip.

“You should eat more,” he says and his hands slide under your scrub top, palms flat against your bare skin and the heat of them is obscene, radiating a constant steady warmth that seeps into your tissue, spreading outwards from the points of contact and into the muscles beneath. His hands slide up your sides, palms dragging over abdominal muscles, calluses catching against your skin, and his thumbs find the ridges of bone, thumbs tracing your ribs, counting them. “I can feel every one of these.”

It’s not tender. It’s not concern. It’s inventory. He’s cataloguing what’s his and finding it insufficient and the disapproval is so tangled up with the want that you can’t separate them, can’t tell where the criticism ends and the desire begins because in him they’re the same thing. The same impulse. He wants you and he’s angry about the state of what he wants, angry when something he’s claimed isn’t being maintained to his standard.

His hands stop. Bracketing your ribcage, fingers splayed across your back, thumbs resting in the shallow valley between bones. The heat of his palms is sinking through your intercostal now, settling into the spaces between your ribs like something poured, and you can feel your own lungs expanding against his hand with every breath, pushing into the warmth, your body leaning into him without your permission because its been so long since anyone touched you with this much sustained focused heat.

His hands drop to the hem of your scrub top. He pulls it up, bunching the fabric at your ribs, exposing your waist, your stomach, the line of your hip bones above the drawstring of your scrub pants until your shirt is pulled above your head and dropped somewhere to the side. The air in the car hits your bare skin and you shiver and he flattens his palms against your stomach.

“Someone needs to feed you,” he mutters. His thumbs press into the soft tissue below your navel. “Make sure you actually sleep.” His hands drag down, hooking into the waistband pads of his fingers against your lower abdomen, the weight of his grip tilting your pelvis toward him. “You’re a goddamn mess.”

You are. You are a goddamn mess. You are shaking and crying and half undressed in your attending’s lap in a parked car and his hands are on your bare skin and his teeth marks are throbbing on your neck and every word out of his mouth is an insult wrapped in something that sounds, horribly, like a promise.

A promise that he’s going to fix what you can’t fix. That he’s already decided. That this- the car, the drive, the cruelty, the bite, his hands inside your waistband- this is just the intake assessment. The preliminary exam. The first step in a treatment plan that he’s been designing for months, one that ends with you exactly where he wants you, which is right here. Underneath his hands. Dependent on his attention. Unable to function without the particular combination of damage and repair that only he provides.

You should be terrified.

His hands tighten. He pulls you into him again, harder, and your breath leaves your body in a rush and your forehead drops to his shoulder and your teeth find the muscle where his neck meets his trapezius and you bite down because it’s the only language your body has left.

He groans. The sound travels through his chest cavity into yours, a vibration you feel in your sternum, and his hand slides up your spine and fists in your hair again and pulls, arching your neck back, exposing your throat, and he looks at you, looks up at you from below, his lips parted, his breathing finally, irrevocably wrecked, and the expression on his face is the most honest thing you’ve ever seen from him.

It’s not the mask. It’s not the bored superiority. It’s not the carefully metered cruelty he portions out across an operating day.

It’s greed.

Simple, uncut, undisguised. The face of a man who found something he wants and is currently in the process of closing his hand around it and he does not intend to open that hand again.

“Come here,” he says, for the second time tonight, and this time it means something completely different and exactly the same.

You come, your body answering the order the way it answers every order he’s ever given- before thought, before shame, before the part of your brain that still pretends it has dignity can raise an objection, and you lean in, mouth crashing against his.

You hate yourself for it. You hate the speed of it, the automaticity, the way your knees dig harder into the leather on either side of his thighs and your mouth finds his again. You hate that you’re shaking and he’s not. You hate that your hands are fisted into his collar and pulling and desperate and his are still, idle, unbothered, a man being kissed by someone while he decides whether or not to kiss back. 

He tracks you. Every tremor of your lower lip, every frantic slide of your tongue against his, every wet graceless sound you make when his teeth catch your bottom lip and tug. Controlled. Proprietary. Taking this in like he takes in everything, filing it, noting it, adding it to whatever mental inventory he maintains of all the ways you embarrass yourself in front of him. 

You pull back. Your chest is heaving. His isn’t.

“Fuck you,” you say.

It comes out wrecked. Shaking. Nothing close to the strength you want it to be. He looks at you flatly, unimpressed. 

He hooks two fingers into the drawstring of your scrub pants and pulls. One motion. The knot gives. The pants slide down your thighs and you should stop this. You should stop this right now. You should climb off his lap and open the door and walk into your house and lock it behind him and never look at him again. You know this. The knowledge is clean and certain and completely irrelevant to what your body is actually doing, which is lifting one knee, then the other, kicking cotton of your ankles, while your hand stays fisted in his collar like letting go would kill you. 

His hand goes behind your back. One flick of his thumb and the bra releases and the straps slide down your shoulders and you feel the air hit your skin and the humiliation is so acute it tastes metallic, like biting down on foil, like blood from a split lip. 

He doesn’t even look. 

He lets the fabric fall and his palms settle over your breasts and his thumbs brush across nipples already tight from the cold and the adrenaline and he does it with absent focus, like this is a step in a sequence, like your body is a series of tasks to be completed on the way to something else. 

“You’re an asshole,” you whisper. Your voice cracks. “You know that? You’re a completely fucking-”

His hand slides down your stomach. Hooks into the waistband of your underwear. Drags. The fabric catches on your thighs, resists, then gives away with a tear. 

“- asshole.”

“Yeah,” he says. That’s it. Yeah. One syllable. Bored. His eyes haven’t changed. His breathing hasn’t changed. You are sitting in his lap in nothing but the blue dashboard light, stripped and shaking, every flaw and rib and tremor illuminated, and his pulse is resting. 

You want to claw his face off.

You want to rake your nails down his cheeks until he bleeds, until something in his expression breaks, until he shows you one single shred of evidence that this is affecting him even a fraction as much as it’s affecting you. But he’s still dressed beneath you- scrub top, scrub pants- and the obscene imbalance of naked and clothed, wrecked and composed, is doing something to the power dynamic that you feel in the base of your skull like a boot on your neck. 

One hand leaves your hip. You hear the shift of fabric, the elastic drag of a waistband, and then he’s there, cock pressing against the inside of your thigh, hard and hot. He wraps his hand around himself and strokes once, slow, lazy, and you watch the muscle in his jaw flex and that’s it. That’s all he gives you. One flex of one muscle while you’re sitting naked in his lap with tears drying on your face and your whole body vibrating like a plucked string. 

Then he lines the head of his cock up, blunt insistent pressure of him against the entrance to your cunt, and your body- your traitorous, mutinous, shame soaked body- is already wet. Has been wet. Has been wet since the you smelled his cologne in the parking garage, maybe earlier, maybe since the OR, maybe since the moment you were first introduced to him as your attending and the knowledge of that is so humiliating you actually close your eyes against it, squeeze them shut like a child who thinks not seeing makes them invisible. 

“Sit.” A command. Like he’s speaking to a dog, like you’re a dog, like you’re a misbehaving mutt caught doing something you shouldn’t and he’s issuing a command to correct. Sit, heel, lay down, roll over-

Don’t, you think. 

You sink. 

The stretch is immediate. Obscene. A slow, relentless parting that you feel in your cunt, your thighs, your abdomen, your teeth, and you hate every inch of it and the contradiction is going to break you in half. He fills your cunt the way he takes up any space around him- completely, unapologetically, without any interest in whether you were ready to accommodate him or not. 

Your hands fly to his biceps. Nails through fabric into muscle. And for one heartbeat you sit there, trembling, adjusting, feeling the way you body has to restructure around him, and your eyes are open now and burning and you’re looking directly at his face and his expression is…

Calm. 

He looks calm. His dick is buried inside of you to the hilt and his face is the face of a man sitting in traffic. Waiting for the light to change. Reading a notification on his phone. And you want to scream, wrap your hands around his throat and squeeze until something in those steady, half lidded eyes shows you that he’s here, that he’s present, that this is costing him anything at all. 

His hands find your hips again. Thumbs pressing bruises into bone. And then he moves you. 

Up. Down. Controlled. Like you’re nothing more than a doll, an instrument, something he can use and play until he’s had his fill, and that pisses you off.

You start to move on your own and the first roll of your hips without his guidance is yours, angry and hard, grinding down onto him with a force that’s closer to violence than fucking, and you watch his face for the flinch, for the flutter of his eyes, for his lips to part open, for any crack, any goddamn indication that you’re getting to him. 

His eyes lower. Barely. The faintest contraction around the corner of his eyes. 

That’s it. That’s all you get. 

His hands tighten and he takes back control of the rhythm, pulling you down on his cock hard, forcing the depth, and the sound that rips out of you is something between a sob and a moan and you hate it, hate the wet broken sound, hate that he heard it, hate that his expression doesn’t change when he hears it. 

“This is what you’re good at.”

The words are like a slap and you feel them behind your eyes, in your lungs, in the slick slide where your body is betraying you again, again, again.

“Fuck you- “

“Not the tibial plateau.” His hips drive up. “Not the hardware count.” Again. “Not even remembering to get your fucking car serviced.” His hands drag you down so hard onto his cock that your clit grinds against the base of him and your vision whites out and your mouth falls open with a sound you can’t control, high pitched and needy. “This. This is the only thing I’ve never seen you hesitate on.”

“I hate you- “ Your voice splinters with another thrust, that grinds his cock against the spot that has your nails digging into his shoulders hard enough to break skin through fabric. “I hate you, you fucking-”

“I know,” he says. Quiet. Unbothered. Like you just told him the weather. And then he rolls his hips up into you with a hard grind that makes your spine arch and your head fall back and the I hate you dissolves into a whimper you’ll never forgive yourself for. 

“Look at you,” His breathing hasn't changed. Twelve per minute. Resting. While yours comes ragged and sobbing, chest heaving, your whole body shaking on top of his. “Seventeen hours of your hands shaking. Seventeen hours of being unable to hold a retractor steady. But you can ride cock like this. Perfect rhythm. No tremor. No hesitation.” He pulls you into another downstroke, meets you with his hips, punches the breath from your lungs. “Maybe this is what I should have had you doing all along instead of letting you pretend you’re a surgeon.”

You hit him. 

Your palm connects with his face, an open handed strike that lands hard enough to make a sound in the car, and he doesn’t flinch, doesn’t tense, just absorbs it the way he absorbs everything, and his hands on your hips don’t even stutter. 

He smiles. 

Not wide. Not warm. A thin, asymmetric thing, one corner of his mouth pulling up in the blue dark, and it’s the first genuine expression you’ve seen on his face and it’s the worst thing you’ve ever looked at. Because the smile says he liked that. The smile says do it again. The smile says he has been waiting, patiently, methodically, for the entire duration of the encounter, for you to hit him, and now that you have he can file it alongside every other piece of evidence that you are exactly as out of control as he’s always suspected. 

“There she is.” His thumb slides between your bodies. Finds your clit. Circles it in a way that makes your spine lock and your teeth clench. “There’s the good girl I knew was buried under all that incompetence.”

“Don’t call me- “ Your voice breaks, hips moving faster not, frantic, beyond your control. “Don’t you dare-”

“Come on.” His thumb presses harder. His other hand drags you down into the next thrust. “Show me the one thing you’re actually competent at.”

“I fucking hate you- “

“You keep saying that.” His mouth is close to your ear. His breathing is finally, finally different- rougher, a fraction faster, the composure fraying at the thinnest edges- but his voice is still steady. Still controlled. Still the voice of a man who is winning and knows it. “And yet here you are.”

And yet here you are. 

The truth of those words- the bare, unarguable, catastrophic truth of them- hits harder than anything else he’s said all day. Here you are. In his lap. In his car. In his hands. Naked and shaking and full of him and crying and still moving, still rolling your hips into his, still chasing the orgasm that’s building in your lower abdomen, because he told you to and because you want to and because the wanting and the hate have fused into something singular and molten that you couldn’t separate even if you had the higher brain function to try. 

The car is rocking on its suspension. The windows are opaque. Sweat slides down the valley of your spine. Your breasts move with every thrust and his eyes track them and the shame of being watched makes something tighten in your lower belly and you hate that too, hate the wiring of your own body, hate that humiliation and arousal are using the same neural pathways and you can’t tell where one stops and the other starts. 

“This is what you’re good at,” he says again. Quieter now. Almost fond. And the fondness is worse than the cruelty because the cruelty you can fight but the fondness seeps in and finds the soft tissue and stays. “Not saving lives. Not pretending to be a doctor. Just this. Just taking what I give you until you forget you ever had anything else to fuck up.”

“Shut up.” You’re crying openly now. Tears and sweat and the sounds coming out of your mouth are wet and broken and you can’t stop them and you can’t stop moving. “Shut the fuck up-”

“Make me.”

Two words. And they’re not said like a challenge. They’re said like a dare, and underneath the dare is something that sounds terrifyingly like affection, the way someone would talk to a small animal that keeps trying to bite them, amused and patient and completely unthreatened. 

Your orgasm is building. You feel it in every trembling muscle, the quiver in your inner thighs, the tightening low in your abdomen, the involuntary clenching of your body around his cock that makes his breath hitch for one unguarded second before he smooths it over. 

You’re close. You’re so close it’s blurring the edges of your rage, softening the anger into something needier, something that wants to collapse forward against his chest and be held and the wanting of that- the wanting to be held by the man who’s been destroying you- is the most humiliating thing that’s happened all night and that is a competitive field. 

His grip adjusts. His thumb digs in deeper. His pace doesn’t falter. 

His mouth finds your ear. 

“Don’t you dare come until I tell you you’ve earned it.” His thumb circles your clit and the contradiction- don’t come while his hands do everything to guarantee you will- is so perfectly, characteristically cruel that a laugh rips out of you, unhinged and wet and bordering on hysterical. “You don’t get to be good at anything unless I say so.”

And you keep bouncing, because he told you to. 

Because somewhere between the parking garage and the engine and the drive and the months of him taking you apart and breaking you down like you were a failed construct, you stopped being a person who makes her own decisions and became a person who waits for his. 

You hate him.

You don’t stop. 

***

The hospital smells the same. 

That’s what gets you. The absolute, insulting sameness. You walk through the door at six thirty and the air hits your face with its standard cocktail of antiseptic and recycled ventilation and floor wax and the distant, perpetual ghost of coffee, and it is exactly, precisely, atomically the same as it was yesterday morning when you walked in as a person who had not yet detonated her entire life ion the front seat of a Lexus. 

Your neck hurts. 

Not the muscular ache of a bad night’s sleep, though there’s that too- you slept maybe ninety minutes, in twenty three minute increments, each one interrupted by the sensation of waking up inside a body that still smelled like him despite the shower. The shower that was too hot. The shower where you stood with your forehead against the tile and your hands flat on the wall and mentally assessed the damage- bruise on your left knee, bruises on your hips in the shape of his fingerprints, raw patch on your lower back from the steering wheel, and the bite. The bite on your neck, which you examined in the bathroom mirror, reddish purple, visible above the collar of a scrub top. Visible above the collar of anything you own. 

You’re wearing a turtleneck under your scrubs. In September. 

You keep your head down. Badge clipped. Hair pulled back so tight your scalp aches. You walk with a posture that says normal day, regular morning, nothing to report, and you’re almost to the locker room when another resident steps into the hallway and says, “Admin wants you.”

Every drop of blood in your body goes cold. You stare at him. 

“Underwood’s office.” He says. “Now.”

You don’t ask why. You don’t ask why because your body already knows. Your body already knows before he opened his mouth, maybe before, maybe the moment you walked through the doors and the air tasted the same and the hallway looked the same and nothing was different except everything was different. 

The walk takes ninety seconds. You count your footsteps because counting is something your brain can do while the rest of it shuts down. 

You see him through the open door. 

Park is in the left chair. One ankle crossed over the opposite knee. He’s holding a coffee, steam curling from the lip, which means its fresh, which means he stopped on his way here, which means he budgeted time into his morning for this.

He doesn’t look up when you walk in. 

Gloria Underwood is standing beside her desk. She’s holding a manilla folder. It’s thick. Too thick for something assembled this morning. Too thick for a single incident. The thickness of it does something to the air in your lungs, displaces it, compresses it, makes the next breath feel like trying to inflate against a weight. 

Gloria’s face is arranged in the express you’ve seen administrators use when they’re about to change the trajectory of a person’s life. Controlled. A mask of professional compassion that has been practiced in mirrors and refined in meetings and has nothing to do with whether the person wearing it actually feels anything at all. 

“Please sit down.”

You sit. The chair is identical to his. Your elbow is inches from his elbow and you can smell him, smell the coffee, and the soap, and the cologne, and your body responds with a full system lurch of sense memory so violent you have to press your fingernails into your palms to stay in the chair. 

“A formal complaint has been filed,” Gloria says, opening the folder. Turns to a page that’s already been flagged with a colored tab, pre-marked, pre-organized, the administrative infrastructure of a process that was set in motion before you arrived. “Regarding conduct of sexual nature directed at Dr. Brendon Park by a subordinate member of the surgical team.”

Directed at. 

The preposition enters your ear and detonates. 

Directed at Dr. Park. Not by Dr. Park. Not between you and Dr. Park. At him. By you. 

“Dr. Park has reported that over the course of several months, he has been subjected to escalating patterns of inappropriate attention from an intern under his direct supervision.” Gloria’s eyes move across the page but she’s not reading. She memorized this. “Including persistent attempts to initiate physical proximity, repeated instances of unprofessional fixation during surgical procedures, and recently, an incident of unsolicited sexual contact initiated in his vehicle after he offered professional assistance with a mechanical issue in the hospital parking garage.”

Persistent attempts to initiate physical proximity. 

That’s- standing near him. In the OR. Where he assigned you to stand. 

Unprofessional fixation during surgical procedures. 

That’s- watching him operate. When you were assisting. 

Unsolicited sexual contact.

That’s-

The room is doing something. The walls aren’t moving but the space between them is contracting, the air thickening, the fluorescent light taking on a quality that feels granular, particulate, like you’re trying to see through something that’s settling between you and the rest of the room. 

“The complaint has been supported by documented observations,” Gloria continues. She turns another page. Another colored tab. “Dr. Park has provided a written timeline of concerning behavior, including specific dates and incidents.”

A timeline. 

He kept a timeline. He’s been keeping a timeline. Every shift, every surgery, every moment you stood too close or looked too long or held your breath- he was writing it down. Dating it. Building a file. Constructing a narrative in which every single thing your body did in his presence was evidence of you pursuing him, and the evidence is in Gloria Underwood’s hands right now, and it’s thick, and it has colored tabs, and it’s been here since before you walked in the door. 

“Given the nature of the supervisory relationship and the severity of the allegations, you are being placed on immediate administrative suspension pending investigation, effective as of this meeting.”

You open your mouth.

Nothing comes out. 

You try again and what emerges is a sound that isn’t a word, is a breath, a fragment, the beginning of that’s not what happened that stalls in your larynx before your larynx has done the math that your brain hasn’t finished yet. 

The math is:

He is a senior attending. Board certified orthopedic surgeon. Ten years at this hospital. Published. Respected. The kind of name that appears on department letterheads and in the acknowledgment section of textbook chapters. He has a reputation. He has colleagues. He has a record, spotless and long and documented in the same filing system that is currently absorbing this complaint. 

You are an intern. Four months in. No publications, no tenure, no institutional weight. You have a shaking hand and miscounted screws and a performance record that he has been personally authoring for your entire rotation. 

Who is Gloria going to believe?

Who is anyone going to believe?

The intern who can’t hold a retractor steady? The one who freezes on approaches and forgets to count hardware and cries in parking garages? The one who ended up naked in her attending’s car at midnight? 

Or the attending who has spent months carefully, meticulously, documentably expressing concern about a subordinate’s fixation. 

“During the suspension period,” Gloria is saying. “You are not to enter clinical areas, access patient records, or make contact with Dr. Park directly or through intermediaries.”

You turn your head. 

Park is looking at Gloria. He’s been looking at Gloria the entire time. Sitting in the chair with his coffee and his crossed ankle, and his face arranged in an expression of restrained concern; brows drawn, mouth set, carefully composed like a man navigating a difficult situation with professionalism and grace. He looks like someone this is being done to. He looks like a man who tried his best with a troubled intern and is now dealing with the unfortunate consequences of his own generosity. 

He is sitting in this chair, hours after his teeth were in your neck and his cock inside you and his hands on your hips dragging you down onto him while he told you that riding him was the only thing you were competent at and he looks troubled. 

Something happens behind your face. Not tears. Something past tears, something drier and more dangerous. A sensation like the moment before something snaps, the last frame of structural integrity, the instant where the material is still holding its shape but the forces have already exceeded its capacity and the failure is inevitable, just not yet visible. 

“Do you have anything to add,” Gloria asks you. 

You're still looking at Park. 

He turns his head. Finally. Slowly. Meets your eyes for the first time since you walked in. 

His face is still wearing the mask. The concern, the gravity, the restrained compassion of the Wronged-Mentor. It’s flawless. Every muscle recruited, every micro expression calibrated, the kind of performance that could only be produced by someone who’s been rehearsing it for a very long time. 

But his eyes.

In the space behind the performance, in the deep architecture of his gaze, where the mask doesn’t quite reach, there’s something looking back at you that makes your blood crystallize in your veins. 

It’s not guilt. It’s not satisfaction. It’s not even cruelty.

It’s patience.

The bottomless, immovable patience of a man who built something and is now watching it work. 

He holds your gaze for two seconds. Then he turns back to Gloria and picks up his coffee and drinks and the meeting continues, and the folder stays open, and your badge is collected, and you walk out of the hospital at seven forty one am wearing a turtleneck in September and it’s sunny outside and the sky is very blue and you don’t remember driving home.

(And Park watches you leave, coffee in hand. You look very small. Smaller than you looked in scrubs, which is saying a lot, because you already looked like a stiff breeze would snap you in half-

(And the first part is done. Solved. He doesn’t have to watch you bite your lip when you concentrate anymore, doesn’t have to correct the angle of your hands and pretend the contact is clinical. Doesn’t have to stand behind you during a procedure and smell your shampoo and keep his hands professional while he vividly imagines what he’d do to you if the room was empty- 

(Four months of that. Four months of keeping his hands on the instruments instead of on your waist, of watching your throat move when you swallow and thinking about his teeth there, of memorizing the exact pitch of your voice when you’re nervous because he wanted to know what it would sound like under him, or fucking his fist to the memory of the little punched out breath you made when you startled coming out of the supply closet, imagining you making that sound with his fist in your hair and his cock grinding against your cervix-

(And you’ll spiral. That’s fine. That’s the design. You’ll go home and fall apart and burn through the anger hot and fast the way you burn through everything, and then the anger will run out and what’s left will be the silence. No OR. No corrections. No one watching. No one who knows you hold your breath when you’re nervous or that your left hand shakes first or that you haven’t been eating enough or sleeping enough or taking care of yourself the way someone should be taking care of you. The way he would, if you’d stop being so fucking difficult about it-

(Give it three weeks. Maybe four. You’ll reach for your phone. You won’t call, not yet. But the intervals between looking at his name and putting the phone down will shrink every time until eventually you just stop putting it down. And he’ll answer when he’s ready, and you’ll be crying, and he’ll listen the way he always listens to you you- completely- because that’s the drug and he’s the only supply you’ve got left. 

(Pavlov’s dog with a prettier face. He spent four months ringing the bell- every correction a tap, every silence a withhold, every rare scrape of approval timed to land when you were most desperate for it- and now that the bell is gone and you’re salivating into nothing, confused and aching and reaching for the only hand that ever fed you even though it’s the same hand that kept you starving-

(He’ll feed you. Get your weight back up. Move you into his place once you can’t make rent. He’ll frame it as practical. You’ll be grateful. And in six months you’ll be standing in his kitchen in his T-shirt and you’ll look up when he walks in with that open, searching expression- the same one you used to give him across the operating table- checking his face for what he wants you to do next, his pretty obedient wife, trained so fucking well-

Metal jaws clamped down with brutal force, yanking you off balance. You crumpled to the forest floor with a sharp cry, the bear trap’s teeth biting deep into your calf. Pain radiated like fire, hot and unrelenting, as blood welled up, soaking your pant leg. 

Your tail thrashed in panic, ears flattening against your skull. You clawed at the dirt, trying to pull free, but the trap held fast, chains rattling against a buried stake. 

Tears blurred your vision, sobs escaping in ragged bursts: trapped; alone. The forest seemed to close in, indifferent to your plight.

Hours passed – or was it minutes? The sun dipped lower, casting long shadows that danced mockingly around you. 

Your leg throbbed, the bleeding slowing to a sticky ooze, but weakness crept in, sapping your strength. You tugged weakly at the trap again, whimpering as fresh pain lanced through you. 

That’s when you heard it: heavy footsteps, deliberate and unhurried, crunching through the underbrush.

He emerged from the trees like a shadow given form: Ryomen Sukuna, though you didn’t know his name yet. 

Broad-shouldered and towering, his frame filled the space between the trunks. His pink hair caught the fading light, spiked and wild, and his face bore tattoos that twisted across his skin. 

Crimson eyes scanned the area with predatory sharpness. He wore simple clothes: a black shirt stretched taut over his muscled chest, pants tucked into boots caked with mud. 

A hunter, you realized with a jolt, the rifle slung over his shoulder confirming it. 

His gaze locked onto you, and for a moment, the world stilled. Those eyes narrowed, assessing. You froze, ears pinning back, tail curling tight against your body. 

He was enormous, intimidating, his presence radiating a quiet menace that made your heart hammer. He stepped closer, boots thudding softly, and you shrank back, the trap’s chain jerking your leg painfully.

“What the hell…” He grumbled, voice low and gravelly, more to himself than you. 

Crouching a safe distance away, he placed his elbows on his knees, studying the trap. His eyes flicked to your face, then to your ears and tail, noting the hybrid traits without surprise. The forest was full of strays like you.

You whimpered, trying to scoot away, but the pain shot up your leg, forcing a gasp from your lips. Blood trickled anew, staining the leaves beneath you. 

“P-Please,” you whispered, voice trembling, “help…?”

Sukuna’s jaw tightened. He reached out slowly, gloved hands – rough from years of handling traps and rifles – testing the mechanism. 

The trap was one of his, set for bears that wandered too close to his territory. He hadn’t expected this. 

With a grunt, he pried the jaws open, the metal groaning in protest. You yanked your leg free the instant it gave, scrambling back on hands and knees, ignoring the fire in your muscles.

Freedom hit like a rush, but it was short-lived. 

Your injured leg buckled immediately, sending you sprawling. Blood smeared across the dirt as you tried to stand, leaning on a tree for support. 

Panic surged: you had to run. He was too big, too dangerous. Hunters like him didn’t take kindly to intruders, hybrid or not. Your ears flicked wildly, catching his steady breathing behind you.

You bolted – or tried to. The first step was agony, your calf screaming as you limped forward, tail streaming behind like a flag of distress. 

You made it ten paces, maybe fifteen, before your vision swam and your knee gave out. You collapsed against a fallen log, clutching your leg, sobs wracking your body. The forest spun, the pain too much, the blood loss making your head light.

Footsteps again, closer this time. Sukuna stood over you, arms crossed, his shadow engulfing you. He debated it then –  you could see it in the furrow of his brow, the way his eyes traced your trembling form. 

Leave her, a voice in his head probably said. She’s not your problem. The woods were cruel; strays didn’t last long. 

But something held him – maybe the way your ears drooped in defeat, or the blood pooling beneath you. With a heavy sigh, he shook his head. 

“Idiot,” he grunted, though whether to you or himself, you couldn’t tell.

Before you could protest, strong arms scooped you up, one under your knees, the other around your back. 

You stiffened, ears flattening, a startled yelp escaping as he lifted you effortlessly. His body was warm, solid, the scent of pine and earth clinging to him. 

“Don’t squirm.” He commanded flatly, voice devoid of warmth but not cruelty. “You’ll bleed out faster.”

You went limp in his hold, too weak to fight, your tail brushing against his arm. 

The walk to his cabin was a blur of jostling motion and throbbing pain, the forest fading into twilight. His log cabin loomed ahead, sturdy and isolated, smoke curling from the chimney. He kicked the door open with his boot and carried you inside, the warmth of a fire greeting you like an embrace.

The interior was sparse: wooden walls lined with shelves of jars and tools, a stone hearth crackling with flames, a worn couch and table. 

He set you down on the couch gently – surprisingly so for his size – propping your leg on a stool. You watched him warily, ears twitching, as he fetched a first-aid kit from a cabinet. His movements were efficient, no wasted energy.

He knelt before you, gloved hands peeling back your torn pant leg to expose the wound. It was ugly: deep punctures, torn flesh, but not broken bone. 

You winced as he cleaned it with antiseptic, the sting making tears well up. He worked in silence, his focus intense, those four eyes flicking between the injury and your face to gauge your pain.

“Hurts.” You whimpered, more to fill the quiet than anything.

“Yeah, no shit.” He replied curtly, wrapping the bandage tight. No more words. 

He stood, towering over you again, and pointed to a door. “Bedroom’s that way. Rest.” 

You nodded, hobbling to the small room with its simple bed and quilt. Exhaustion claimed you instantly, the pain a dull roar as sleep pulled you under.

The first week blurred into a rhythm of silence and necessity. Your leg healed slowly, the wound scabbing over under Sukuna’s reluctant care. 

He changed the bandages daily, his large hands surprisingly deft, but he never lingered. Meals appeared on the table: stew from rabbit or vegetables he’d grown in his garden, bread baked in his oven. You’d eat while he sat across, staring into the fire or sharpening a knife, the scrape of metal the only sound.

Awkwardness hung thick in the air. You’d catch him watching you sometimes, those crimson eyes giving him an unnerving depth, like he saw more than you wanted. Your ears would perk at his approach, tail flicking nervously, and you’d avert your gaze, focusing on the window where the woods pressed close.

One evening, as rain pattered against the roof, you sat by the fire, leg propped up, sketching idly on a scrap of paper he’d left out: simple lines of trees and your lost herd. 

Ryomen entered from outside, shaking water from his hair, his shirt clinging damply to his broad chest. He glanced at your drawing, pausing.

“You draw.” He noted, not a question.

You nodded, ears twitching. "A little, but I’m not any good. Helps... pass time."

He grunted, hanging his coat. "That yer herd?"

“Yeah… I lost them.” You whispered, tail drooping against your back.

Silence again. He poked at the fire, sparks flying. “Woods eat loners.”

You swallowed, the words hitting too close. “I know.”

He didn’t press, just ladled stew into bowls and handed you one. You ate in quiet companionship, the rain a soothing backdrop. His presence was a wall – impenetrable, but not hostile. 

Subtly, you noticed things: the way his shoulders relaxed slightly when you didn’t flinch at his nearness, how he’d leave extra blankets when nights grew cold.

By the second week, you could hobble around the cabin unaided, testing your leg on short walks to the door. 

The forest called to you, but fear kept you inside: fear of the wild, and oddly, of leaving this strange sanctuary.

Sukuna watched from afar, his debates internal now. Why keep her? But he did, fetching herbs from the woods to brew tea for your lingering ache.

One afternoon, sunlight filtering through the windows, you found him outside chopping wood. 

The axe rose and fell with rhythmic power, muscles flexing under his shirt, sweat glistening on his tattooed skin. You lingered in the doorway, ears perked, mesmerized by the controlled strength.

He noticed, pausing mid-swing. “Leg better?”

“Yeah,” you admitted softly, stepping out gingerly. The air was crisp, pine-scented. “Thanks... for everything.”

He wiped his brow, eyes meeting yours. “Don’t mention it.”

You smiled faintly, tail swishing. “What’s it like? Living here alone.”

A shrug. “Quiet. Suits me.” He resumed chopping, but slower, as if inviting the conversation. “You? Herd’s loud, right?”

"Comforting," you admitted, leaning against the porch rail. “But yeah, noisy. Miss it sometimes.”

He nodded once, axe embedding in the block. The silence returned, comfortable now, laced with unspoken understanding. You stayed there, watching him work, the slow thaw between you beginning to crack the ice.

Days stretched into the third week. Your leg strengthened, scabs slowly fading to pink lines. 

Interactions grew in tiny increments: a shared glance over breakfast, where he’d push the salt your way without asking; evenings by the fire, where you’d read an old book from his shelf while he whittled wood into shapes: abstract, fierce things that mirrored his character.

One night, thunder rumbled outside, echoing your long-ago storm. You woke sweating, ears flat, tail tucked, the dream of separation vivid. A creak in the hall: Sukuna, checking on you as he sometimes did silently.

“Bad dream?” He said from the doorway, voice rough with sleep.

You sat up, nodding. “Something like that. Just– got reminded of the herd again is all.”

He hesitated, then entered, sitting on the edge of the bed. His weight dipped the mattress, but he kept space between you. “You’re not alone now.”

The words hung, simple but weighted. Your ears lifted slightly, fluffy tail twitching. “I know.”

He stayed until your breathing evened, his presence a quiet anchor. No more words, but the gesture spoke volumes.

As the weeks waned, the awkwardness softened into something tentative, unspoken. 

You’d help with small tasks: stirring pots while he hunted, your tail brushing his leg accidentally, sending a jolt through both of you. He’d grunt apologies, but his eyes lingered longer, tracing the curve of your ears, the sway of your hips as you moved.

One crisp morning, you stood at the window, gazing at the woods. Freedom beckoned, but so did the man behind you, his footsteps approaching.

“Thinking of leaving?” he asked, voice low.

You turned, meeting his gaze. "Maybe. But... not yet."

A rare smirk tugged at his lips, tattoos shifting. "Good."

The crisp mornings gave way to warmer days, the forest awakening with a subtle shift in the air. Leaves unfurled brighter greens, and the underbrush hummed with the stirrings of life. 

You felt it too – a restlessness deep in your core, a warmth that bloomed unbidden as heat season edged closer. Your body, attuned to the rhythms of nature like the rest of your kind, began to respond. 

It started faintly: a flush creeping up your neck when you caught sight of Sukuna across the room, your doe ears twitching more frequently, your tail flicking in short, agitated bursts. 

You shifted in your seat during meals, crossing and uncrossing your legs, the wooden chair creaking under the subtle movements.

Sukuna noticed, though he gave no sign of it at first. 

As a human, his senses weren’t sharpened like yours, but the cabin was small, the air thick with shared space. Your scent – earthy and sweet, like wildflowers crushed underfoot – grew stronger each day, weaving through the smells of woodsmoke and stewed meat.

It lingered on the blankets you’d borrowed, clung to the air when you passed him in the narrow hallway. He caught it one evening while sharpening his knife by the fire, the blade gliding smoothly over the whetstone. 

You sat nearby, mending a tear in your sweater, your fingers fumbling slightly as another wave of heat flushed your cheeks.

He paused, the scrape of metal halting for a beat longer than usual. His eyes flicked toward you, then away, jaw clenching subtly. 

The scent hit him fuller now, stirring something primal he shoved down deep. He resumed sharpening, the rhythm faster, more deliberate, as if to drown out the distraction. 

“Pass the salt.” He began gruffly when you both reached for the bowl at dinner, his hand brushing yours briefly. 

The contact sent a spark through you, making your tail curl tight against your thigh. You pulled back quickly, ears flattening, a soft pink tinting your skin.

“Sorry.” You squeaked, voice barely audible above the crackle of the fire. 

You shifted again, tucking your legs beneath you on the couch, the movement drawing his gaze for a split second before he looked back to his plate. He grunted in response, forking into his venison without another word. 

The silence stretched, heavier now, laced with an undercurrent neither of you acknowledged. 

You could feel his awareness, the way his broad shoulders tensed when you stood to clear the table, your hips swaying just a fraction more than necessary as the warmth pooled low in your belly.

Nights grew warmer, the quilt too heavy some evenings. You tossed in the small bedroom, ears perked to the sounds of the cabin settling – the creak of floorboards as Sukuna moved about, the distant hoot of an owl outside. 

Your scent intensified with the rising temperature, seeping under the door like an invitation you hadn’t meant to send. He lay in his own room, staring at the rafters, the air thick with it. 

Human or not, it affected him: a tightening in his chest, a heat of his own that he ignored by focusing on the hunt planned for dawn. 

He rolled over, groaning into the pillow, willing sleep to come.

By midweek, the signs were impossible to miss. 

You found yourself lingering near him more, drawn by an instinct you couldn’t name. 

While he chopped wood outside, you watched from the porch, your flush deepening as sweat traced lines down his tattooed arms, his shirt clinging to the broad expanse of his back. 

Your tail swished restlessly, and you shifted your weight from one foot to the other, the ache in your leg long forgotten but replaced by this new, insistent pull. 

He glanced up once, axe pausing mid-air, his nostrils flaring almost imperceptibly. The scent wrapped around him, sweet and insistent, making his grip tighten on the handle.

“Need something?” He asked, voice rougher than usual, eyes locking onto yours – all four piercing, unreadable.

You shook your head, ears drooping slightly as you stepped back inside, the door clicking shut behind you. Heart pounding, you pressed a hand to your warm cheek, wondering if he could hear the rapid beat from outside. 

He swung the axe harder after that, embedding it deep into the block with each strike, the physical exertion a barrier against the growing tension.

Afternoons brought small tasks that amplified the awkwardness. 

You helped sort herbs he’d gathered – drying them on racks by the window – your fingers brushing his as you passed bundles. 

Each time, you flushed, shifting away with a quiet apology, your tail flicking against his leg once by accident. He froze for a heartbeat, the contact electric, your scent blooming sharper in the confined space. 

“Watch it.” He warned, not harshly, but stepping back to give you room. His movements grew more deliberate, putting distance between you under the guise of efficiency.

Yet he didn’t send you away. Meals remained shared, silences filled with the subtle dance of avoidance. 

One evening, as twilight painted the cabin in soft oranges, you sat by the fire, knees drawn up, trying to read but finding the words blurring. The heat simmered under your skin, making you shift restlessly, the couch cushions sighing under you. 

Sukuna entered from the porch, carrying a pail of water, his frame filling the doorway. Water dripped from his hands, and he set the pail down with a thud, the sound echoing your quickened breath.

He caught the scent again, stronger now, mingling with the damp earth on his clothes. It pulled at him, testing his resolve, but he crossed to the kitchen, back turned, pouring the water into a pot with unnecessary focus. 

You watched his shoulders, the way they rose and fell with controlled breaths, and felt your own flush spread, ears twitching forward. It was obvious, you knew – your shifting, the way your eyes lingered – but so was his effort to remain unaffected, the subtle clench of his fists at his sides.

“Cold out there?” You questioned softly, breaking the quiet, your voice laced with the warmth you couldn’t hide.

He glanced over his shoulder, eyes narrowing slightly. “Not really.” A pause, then he added, “you warm enough?”

The question hung, double-edged, and you nodded too quickly, tail curling around your ankle. “Yeah. Fine.”

He turned back to the stove, stirring whatever simmered there, the spoon clinking rhythmically. Neither pushed further, the tension coiling tighter in the unspoken space between you. 

Heat season loomed, promising more, but for now, it simmered in glances and silences, building like the fire before you.

The days blurred into a pattern of restraint. You’d catch yourself staring when he whittled by the window, the knife carving precise lines into the wood, his large hands steady despite the undercurrent. 

Your scent filled the cabin more each morning, greeting him upon waking, and he’d open the windows wider, letting the breeze carry it away – or so he told himself. 

But it followed him into the woods during hunts, a ghost that made his steps heavier, his focus sharper on the prey to distract from the pull back home.

One afternoon, rain returned, soft and steady, drumming on the roof. You paced the living room subtly, unable to sit still, the flush permanent now on your skin. 

Sukuna returned soaked, shaking off his coat in the entryway, water pooling at his boots. The fresh rain mixed with your scent, creating something headier, and he paused, inhaling deeply before schooling his expression.

“Wet out.” He pointed out flatly, hanging the coat and avoiding your eyes as he toed off his boots.

You nodded, shifting from foot to foot near the fire. “Smells like it.”

Your ears perked at his approach, tail swishing once before you stilled it. He moved to the hearth, adding logs with efficient motions, his arm brushing close enough that you felt the heat radiating from him. 

A shiver ran through you, not from cold, and you stepped aside, cheeks burning.

He didn’t comment, just stoked the flames higher, the warmth chasing the chill but amplifying your own. Dinner passed in near-silence, forks scraping plates, your leg bouncing under the table until you caught his glance and forced it still. 

Obvious wants hung in the air: yours in the flush and fidgets, his in the way he lingered at the table after, eyes tracing the fire instead of you.

As night fell, the rain a lullaby, you retreated to your room, the door a flimsy barrier. Your scent permeated everything now, a silent confession. 

Sukuna sat up later, alone by the dying embers, rubbing a hand over his face. Unaffected? Hardly. But he wouldn’t act – not yet. 

Heat season arrived without mercy, your body igniting from the inside out. 

You didn’t fully understand it – clueless to the full implications, your deer instincts overriding any sense of propriety. The cabin felt smaller, the air thicker, and every brush of fabric against your skin sent sparks racing through you. 

You paced the living room in nothing but one of Sukuna’s oversized shirts, the hem skimming your thighs, your scut wagging erratically behind you. Your ears flicked at every sound, and a persistent ache throbbed between your legs, making you shift your hips without thinking.

Sukuna watched from the kitchen, his eyes narrowing as you bent over to pick up a fallen book, the shirt riding up to expose the curve of your ass. Your scent flooded the space, heady and intoxicating, pulling at him like a tether. 

You straightened, oblivious, and stretched your arms overhead, the motion arching your back and pressing your breasts against the thin fabric. Nipples hardened visibly, and you let out a soft, unwitting whimper, rubbing your thighs together as you moved to the couch. 

He gripped the edge of the counter, knuckles whitening, forcing his gaze away. 

“Gonna cut wood.” He decided, voice gravelly, grabbing his axe and stalking out the door before the temptation grew any stronger.

Alone, the heat clawed deeper. You tried to distract yourself, but your body betrayed you: fingers trailing absently over your collarbone, down to the hem of the shirt, lifting it slightly as you sat on the floor by the fire. Legs parted just enough to ease the pressure, you rocked subtly, a flush painting your cheeks rosy. 

It wasn’t deliberate; you just needed relief from the fire building inside. When that failed, you wandered, drawn to his room by the familiar scent of him on the sheets. 

Climbing onto his bed, you buried your face in his pillow, inhaling deeply. The ache intensified, and before you knew it, your hips ground down against the soft mound of fabric, a desperate friction that made your tail flag up.

Tears pricked your eyes as the motion brought fleeting sparks of pleasure, but it wasn’t enough. You humped the pillow pathetically, soft sobs escaping as your body wept for more. Clueless to how vulnerable you looked – shirt hiked up, ass in the air, ears flattened in frustration – you kept moving, chasing the elusive release.

Outside, the axe bit into wood with rhythmic thuds, each swing a release for Sukuna’s pent-up tension. Sweat beaded on his brow, his muscles flexing under inked skin, but your scent clung to him even here, a ghost in the breeze. 

He worked longer than needed, trying to outrun the pull, but eventually, the pile of logs satisfied him enough to head back. The cabin door creaked open to silence: no soft footsteps, no shifting on the couch. 

“Sweetheart? Where are you?” He called, voice echoing off the walls. No answer. Frowning, he checked the kitchen, the porch, then pushed open his bedroom door.

There you were, on his bed, hips rolling against the pillow in desperate, uneven thrusts. Tears streaked your face, your doe ears trembling, tail flicking in distress. 

The sight hit him like a punch – your flushed skin, the way your pussy glistened with arousal, lips parted on quiet mewls. His cock twitched hard in his pants, blood rushing south as he stood frozen in the doorway.

“Kuna… mmh!” Your voice came out small, broken, as you lifted your head, eyes glassy with need. You didn’t stop moving, hips grinding down instinctively, but shame flickered in your gaze. “Help... please? It h– hurts…”

He crossed the room in two strides, the door clicking shut behind him. Towering over you, his broad frame cast a shadow, vermillion eyes dark with hunger. 

“Fuck, angel…” He growled low, sitting on the bed’s edge and pulling you up by your arms. 

You whimpered at the manhandling, body pliant in his grip. “W-Wait—”

“I’ve been holding back for weeks. Watching you tease without even knowing it, and that damn scent everywhere…”

His hands cupped your face, thumbs brushing away tears, and he kissed you then: gentle at first, lips soft against yours, tongue coaxing your mouth open. You melted into it, mewling softly, your hands clutching his shirt as the ache pulsed hotter. 

He broke away, breathing ragged. “Gonna take care of you, sweetheart. But tell me if it’s too much.”

You nodded frantically, pleading with your eyes, and he eased you back onto the bed, stripping the shirt from your body. Naked now, you shivered under his gaze, but the heat made you bold – legs parting slightly, inviting him without words. 

He shed his clothes quickly, his thick cock springing free, veined and heavy, tip already leaking. Your eyes widened, clueless innocence mixing with raw want, and you reached for him tentatively.

“Gentle, pretty thing.” He murmured, praise lacing his voice as he settled between your thighs. 

His large frame loomed over you, the warmth of his body contrasting the cool sheets beneath. One hand stroked your hair, fingers tangling gently in the soft strands near your deer-like ears, which twitched at the touch. 

You felt exposed, your hybrid tail flicking nervously against the mattress, but his presence grounded you, making your core ache with need.

He didn’t rush to claim you fully. Instead, his free hand trailed down your side, tracing the curve of your hip, then dipping lower to your inner thigh. 

“So ready f’me, aren’t you?.” Sukuna said, his voice a low rumble that sent shivers through your spine. 

His fingers brushed against your slick folds, and you gasped, hips bucking instinctively toward the contact. “Mmf!” He chuckled softly, the sound dark and approving. “Easy, pretty. Don’t wanna hurt you yet..”

His thumb parted your pussy lips gently, exposing your clit to the air, and you whimpered, your antlers scraping lightly against the pillow as you tilted your head back. He watched your reactions closely, his crimson eyes intense, drinking in every quiver and soft sound you made.

“Tell me what you want.” He commanded, his tone firm but laced with that teasing edge that made your heart race.

“T-Touch me... please.” You breathed, your voice trembling with anticipation. 

Your hands clutched at the sheets, nails digging in as his finger circled your entrance, gathering your wetness. He pressed one thick digit inside slowly, the intrusion stretching you just enough to make you moan. 

It was nothing like his cock, but the sensation was electric, your walls clenching around him immediately.

“Like that?” Sukuna asked, his lips curving into a smirk as he crooked his finger, brushing against that sensitive spot inside you. 

You nodded, a whine escaping your throat, your tail thrashing side to side. He added a second finger, scissoring them carefully to open you up, his movements deliberate and unhurried. 

The stretch burned faintly, but it melted into pleasure as he began to pump them in and out, his thumb finding your clit and rubbing firm circles over it.

Your breath hitched, legs spreading wider to give him better access. “S-Sukuna... it feels... ah!” 

The words dissolved into a cry as he increased the pace, his fingers thrusting deeper, curling with each withdrawal to hit that bundle of nerves again and again. Wet sounds filled the room, obscene and intoxicating, your arousal coating his hand. 

He leaned down, his breath hot against your ear, nipping at the soft fur there. “You’re soaking my fingers, pretty girl. So tight and perfect for me.”

You arched into his touch, your breasts heaving with each ragged breath. His other hand left your side to cup one, thumb flicking over your nipple, pinching just hard enough to make you yelp. 

The double sensations overwhelmed you: his fingers fucking into your pussy, stretching and filling you, while his mouth descended to your neck, sucking a mark into the sensitive skin where your pulse fluttered wildly. 

“More... gimme– gimme more,” you begged, your voice breaking, hips grinding against his hand shamelessly.

He obliged, adding a third finger, the fullness making your eyes roll back. 

“Greedy little thing, aren’t you?” He growled approvingly, his fingers pistoning faster now, the heel of his palm grinding against your clit with every thrust. 

You could feel the pressure building, a coil tightening low in your belly, your deer ears flattening against your head as pleasure bordered on too much. Tears pricked at the corners of your eyes, not from pain but from the intensity, your body trembling under him.

“P-Please..!” You

“That’s it, let go for me.” Sukuna urged, his voice husky as he watched your face contort in ecstasy. 

He twisted his fingers inside you, rubbing relentlessly against your g-spot, while his thumb pressed harder on your swollen clit. The combination shattered you – your walls clamped down on his fingers, pulsing as the orgasm crashed over you like a wave.

“Mmh– Ryo!” You cried out, body convulsing, thighs quaking around his wrist as slick gushed over his hand, soaking the sheets beneath.

He didn’t stop immediately, drawing out your release with slow, gentle strokes until you whimpered from oversensitivity, your tail curling around his arm in a weak attempt to pull him closer. 

“Good girl,” he praised, withdrawing his fingers with a wet pop, bringing them to his lips to taste you. His eyes locked on yours, dark with promise.

He flipped you suddenly, manhandling you onto your hands and knees with effortless strength, your body pliant under his touch. You scrambled to steady yourself on the mattress, palms sinking into the soft fabric, knees spreading wider as your tail lifted instinctively, baring yourself completely to him. 

The cool air kissed your dripping folds, a brief respite before he positioned himself behind you, the head of his cock teasing your entrance. 

“You want it rough, pretty thing? Begging like that.” His voice was a gravelly command, laced with amusement and hunger.

Before you could respond, his hand came down on your ass – a light slap that stung just enough to make you yelp, the impact sending a ripple through your flesh. Heat bloomed across your skin, mingling with the ache between your legs. 

Then he thrust back in from behind, the new angle allowing him to sink even deeper, his cock spearing into you with a force that knocked the breath from your lungs. 

“Oh! Kuna… so– so big!” You sobbed in pleasure, the stretch more intense now, every inch of him pressing against your sensitive spots as he bottomed out.

Your arms trembled, threatening to give out as you pushed back against him, desperate to feel him everywhere. The slap had left your ass tingling, a warm contrast to the cool sheets, and you arched your back further, presenting yourself like the submissive hybrid you were. 

Ears flattening completely, you let out a string of moans, each one higher pitched as the pressure built anew. His hand moved to your antlers, tugging them firmly to guide your head up, forcing you to arch more, your neck straining in the best way.

“Hah, fuck, crying for my cock, hm? Such a good girl, taking it all.” Sukuna’s praise washed over you like liquid fire, igniting your emotions – pride in pleasing him, a deep-seated need to submit, to be his. 

He kept the pull steady, not painful but insistent, making you feel owned as he rutted into you. Each thrust was deliberate, pulling almost all the way out before slamming back in, the drag of his veined length against your walls making obscene squelching noises. 

Your pussy fluttered around him, juices coating his shaft and dripping down your thighs, the physical sensations overwhelming: the burn in your muscles from holding the position, the slap of his hips against your reddened ass, the way his cock throbbed inside you, hot and unyielding.

You rocked back to meet him, your tail brushing loosely against his thigh in an instinctive gesture of affection amid the roughness. The orgasm you’d felt building earlier surged closer now, coiling tight in your core, your clit throbbing untouched but stimulated by the indirect pressure of his invasions.

Sukuna’s breaths grew ragged, his hand on your hip sliding forward to press against your lower belly, feeling the bulge of his own cock moving inside you. 

“Shit, you’re tight... milking me so good.” He muttered, his voice strained with his own rising pleasure. He released your hair momentarily to deliver another light slap to your other cheek, the sound sharp in the room, making you clench harder around him. 

The duplicity – pain and pleasure – pushed you closer, your sobs turning into keening cries as the tension wound unbearably tight.

He tugged your antlers again, gentler this time, but enough to keep your gaze forward. His thrusts lost a bit of their rhythm, becoming erratic as he chased his release, but he didn’t let up on the depth, each one punching the air from your lungs. 

You felt him everywhere: the heat of his body over yours, the possessive hold, the way his cock pulsed with impending climax. 

Emotionally, it was intoxicating; you were his, completely, and the thought alone made your walls spasm.

“Gonna fill you up, angel. Pump you full until you’re bred, carrying my scent forever.” 

The words made you whine, clenching harder, and you came again: shaking, tears streaming as waves crashed over you. “Ah! I’m gonna– cumming!”

He chuckled, voice strained. “Fuck, listen to you. So desperate for my cum. Nghh– an’ you’re shy now? After slutting out on my—haah—bed?”

You hid your face in the pillow, flushing deeper, but your hips ground back, asking for more without words. He pulled out briefly, flipping you onto your back once more, hooking your legs over his shoulders. 

The position folded you, letting him drive in deep, balls slapping against your ass with each rough pound. His eyes – the prettiest, deepest red – locked on yours, wild and possessive. “Don’t hide, sweetheart. Want you looking at me when you cum again.”

Pleasure dumbed your mind, thoughts scattering into nothing but him – his cock stretching you, his grunts, the pull on your hair as he leaned down to capture your lips. 

You came a third time, crying out his name, body convulsing as he chased his own release. 

“That’s my girl.” He praised, thrusting erratically. “Milk me dry, pretty thing. Gonna breed this pussy.”

With a final, deep shove, he buried himself and came – hot spurts flooding you, his groan rumbling through his chest. You felt every pulse, the warmth spreading, and it triggered one last, shuddering orgasm from you, tears of pure bliss soaking the sheets. 

He collapsed gently atop you, still inside, peppering your face with soft kisses. “Good job, angel. Took me so well.”

You panted, cockdrunk haze settling, shying into his neck with a whimper. 

He chuckled tiredly, stroking your back. “Heat’s not over yet, sweetheart.”

a/n: I COOKED I COOKED SO HARD

dividers by @/uzmacchiato!

The parking garage is nearly empty. The late night shadows and overhead fluorescents are doing their usual thing- that sickly amber wash that makes everything look darker and more jaundiced, turns concrete pillars and painted lines into something out of a liminal space photograph. Your shift ended nine minutes ago. You've been sitting in this car for three of those minutes and you're no closer to leaving than you were when you got in.

You try the ignition a third time because you are a person who went to medical school, which means you are clinically incapable of accepting a result without attempting to replicate it, and the result is the same.

Silence.

The dashboard stays dark. The engine stays dead. Your car, the one last reliable thing you have left in your life has chosen today- today- of all days, to stop working.

Something behind your sternum cracks, a seam letting go, a thread that's been holding two pieces of fabric together finally giving up under the accumulated weight of seventeen hours of Park's voice in your ear, Park's corrections on your chart, Park's particular way of standing just inside your peripheral vision so that you could never fully forget he's watching. The sound he makes when you do something wrong, a small exhalation through his nose that somehow communicates more disappointment than a full sentence. The way clicks his tongue when you fumbled the angle of the retractors, not loud enough for the scrub nurse to hear, pitched just for you, intimate in its cruelty.

You get out of the car.

The concrete is gritty under your sneakers. The garage has that particular underground acoustics thing where every sound arrives twice, once directly and once as an echo off the low ceiling, so the slam of your door comes back to you a half second later, duller, like the garage is mocking you. You walk to the front of the car. You pull the hood release. You prop the hood up with the little metal arm and you stare at the engine.

You have no idea what you’re looking at.

You know this. You are aware, in a detached and increasingly unhinged way, that you possess exactly zero mechanical knowledge, that the greasy labyrinth of hoses and reservoirs and metal components in front of you might as well be quantum mechanics for all the good looking at it is going to do. But you’re looking anyway, because the alternative is standing in an empty parking garage at eleven pm and crying, and you are not going to cry. You are not. You’ve made it through seventeen hours without crying and you are not going to let a dead battery or a seized alternator or whatever the fuck is wrong be the thing that-

Your eyes are wet.

You blink. Hard. Twice. You sniff, once, sharp, and press the back of your wrist against your nose and stare at the engine and try to convince yourself that you are absolutely, categorically not falling apart in a parking garage. The fluorescent light catches the moisture on your lashes and turns it amber. A tear escapes down the side of your nose and you swipe it away with your knuckle so hard the skin stings.

Headlights bloom across the concrete behind you.

The light stretches your shadow forward, elongates it across the front of your car, and for a second you’re just annoyed; someone pulling through on their way out, someone who got to have a normal end to their shift and get in their functioning car and leave. The engine behind you is idling, smooth and low, and it doesn’t pass. It slows. It stops.

A door opens.

You don’t turn around because some self preserving corner of your brain already knows. Before the footsteps, before the particular rhythm of that walk-  unhurried, deliberate, the gait of a man who has never once rushed to be anywhere because everywhere he goes adjusts to accommodate his arrival-  you know who it is.

You know the way you know a headache is about to become a migraine. The way you know a patient is about to code before the monitors catch up. A full body premonition, cellular and certain.

Park’s footsteps stop somewhere behind your left shoulder.

You keep staring at the engine. Your vision has gone blurry, half tears, half exhaustion, half the flat refusal of your eyes to focus on anything that isn’t a pillow. You can feel him behind, the shift in pressure and temperature that changes the quality of the air against the back of your neck.

He doesn’t say anything for five seconds. You count them.

Then he leans past you.

His arm enters your field of vision from the left and he reaches into the engine compartment with the casualness of a man who reaches into open body cavities for a living and finds a car engine charmingly simple by comparison. His shoulder is close enough to yours that you can feel the warmth radiating off him through his clothes. 

You catch it then, his cologne, or whatever it is, something clean and warm and slightly woody that cuts through the garage smell of concrete and motor oil and settles into the space between your throat and your chest with an specificity that makes you want to bite down on something.

He smells good. Offensively, inappropriately good. And you hate him for it with a purity that borders on religious, that causes you to jerk back, take several steps away with your arms crossed over your chest and your teeth clenched so tight your jaw is clicking. 

He doesn’t let you get very far before. “Come here.”

He says it without looking up from the engine compartment, one hand braced on the frame, the other buried somewhere in the tangle of hoses and cables, and he says come here like he’s calling a dog that pissed on the carpet. 

You don’t move.

“I said come here. I’m not going to say it again.”

You move and he grabs your wrist, fingers closing around delicate bones, and pulls you forward until you’re standing beside him with your hip against the bumper and your face approximately eighteen inches from an engine block you couldn’t identify at gunpoint.

“Look.” He positions your hand over a cable terminal crusted with greenish white buildup. Presses your fingers down onto the corroded metal and holds them there. “Feel that?”

You feel it. Gritty. Calcified. Wrong.

“That’s neglect.” He says it close to your ear. Not whispering. Just close. “Months of it.”

He lets that sit for a second. His thumb shifts against the inside of your wrist, a small, almost idle adjustment that drags across your pulse point and there’s absolutely no way he doesn’t feel how fast it’s going.

“When did you buy this car?”

“Two years ago.”

“Two years.” He drops your wrist like he lost interest in holding it, and straightens up. Pulls a cloth from somewhere- his back pocket, his jacket, the fucking ether- and wipes his hands with slow, methodical attention, finger by finger, knuckle by knuckle, while you stand there with engine grease on your palm and the residual ghost pressure of his grip still pulsing around your wrist bones. “And you’ve never once popped the hood. Not once. You’re telling me you’ll spend six hours memorizing the branches of the brachial plexus but you can’t spend five minutes making sure the thing that keeps you alive on the highway actually works.”

He’s not looking at you. He’s looking at his own hands as he cleans them, like they’re the only thing worth his tim,  has all the time in the world and you are not a factor in how he spends it.

“I mean, it’s almost impressive.” He glances at you. Just a flick of his eyes, there and gone. “The commitment to not giving a shit. You’re consistent, I’ll give you that.”

“That’s not- ”

“Your positive cable’s loose. Terminals are shot.” He’s still cleaning his hands. Still not looking at you. “The whole system’s been dying for weeks and you just- what? Turned the key every morning and assumed it would keep working because it always had?” He folds the cloth. Tucks it in his pocket. “That’s not optimism. That’s not even denial. That’s just being stupid about the things you depend on.”

The word stupid lands different coming from him. Not like an insult. A fact. Like a lab value being read off the chart, something they can’t be interpreted in any other way, just is, and always will be. 

“You’re smart in the OR. I’ve seen it.” He says flatly, without investment, a concession that costs him nothing. “You’ve got good hands when they’re not shaking. Good instincts when you’re not choking on them. But then you do this- ” He nods at the engine. “And I have to wonder if the OR version of you is the anomaly and this is the baseline.”

He lets that hang.

“Get in the car.”

“What?”

“My car.” He says, an instruction, not an offer, delivered with the expectation of immediate compliance.

“I can call a- “

“It’s eleven at night, you’re not calling a tow from a parking garage, and you’re not sleeping in your car. Get in.”

“But-”

He’s already walking away. He doesn’t wait, doesn’t look back. Just walks to his car- a dark Lexus that looks like it costs more than your annual salary- and gets into the driver’s side and sits there with the engine running and the passenger door unlocked and the absolute unshakeable certainty that you will follow. 

You follow. 

The inside of his car smells like him. That’s the first thing you register as you pull the door shut, the contained, ambient version of whatever you caught leaning over the engine, multiplied and warmed by the closed space. 

You put on your seatbelt. You stare straight ahead. You give him your address in a voice that comes out smaller than you intended and you feel him register that, feel the quality of his silence change as he files it away. 

He pulls out of the garage. 

He doesn’t speak.

You wait for it- braced- shoulders locked, breath held, every nerve ending oriented toward him. You’ve spent enough time in his proximity to know how he operates: silence first, then the observation, then the correction, delivered with the flat, unhurried precision of a man who learned a long time ago that volume is unnecessary when accuracy will do. You know it’s coming. You sit in the passenger seat with your hands in your lap and your spine so straight your lower back is already aching and you wait.

A minute passes.

Two.

The streetlights strobe across the windshield in rhythmic amber intervals. The road noise fills the car, a low, constant hiss of tires on asphalt, the faint vibration of the chassis transmitting through the seat into your femurs, your pelvis, the base of your spine. The heater is on. You can feel it against your shins, a warm current that smells like clean filters and leather conditioner.

Three minutes.

He’s not going to say anything.

The realization doesn’t bring relief. It brings something worse, a vacuum. The silence that Park deploys in the OR when a resident has made an error significant enough that commentary would be redundant. The silence that says I’m not going to dignify this with a response. The silence that forces you to sit inside your own failure without the scaffolding of his criticism to push against, without even the dignity of being yelled at, because yelling would mean he cared enough to raise his voice and Park does not care enough to raise his voice. Park has never cared enough to raise his voice. He saves his volume for the things that matter and you, apparently, do not meet the threshold.

Your throat is doing something. Tightening. The muscles along the anterior triangle contracting in a slow, involuntary squeeze that you recognize as the precursor to crying and you clench your jaw against it so hard you feel your masseter pop. You are not going to cry in this car. You are not going to give him the satisfaction of watching you cry in his car with his cologne in your lungs and his silence pressing against you from every direction like something with weight.

You stare at the dashboard. The blue numbers of the clock. The GPS display showing your route- a clean, illuminated line from the hospital to your house, nineteen minutes, no traffic, as though the journey is simple, as though the distance between where you are and where you’re going can be measured in miles.

“The tibial plateau.”

His voice enters the silence without disturbing it. No change in his posture, no preliminary breath. Just the words, arriving with the same flat, unremarkable cadence he uses to call out hardware sizes mid-procedure.

“You hesitated.”

That’s it. That’s all he says. He doesn’t elaborate. He doesn’t explain which moment, which hesitation, which specific fraction of a second he’s referring to. He doesn’t need to. You know. He knows you know. The sentence is a key inserted into a lock you’ve been trying not to look at all day, and it turns with a click you can feel in your back teeth.

The silence returns.

It’s worse now. It has a shape. The two words gave it a frame and now the quiet is no longer empty, it’s full- full of every specific thing he could have said and chose not to, every elaboration he’s withholding, every detail of your performance that he catalogued and filed and is currently letting you imagine instead of stating outright. Your brain fills the silence the way fluid fills an enclosed space, expanding into every available cavity until the pressure builds against the walls.

You think about the tibial plateau. You think about the oscillating saw in your hand and the way your fingers tightened on the grip a half second before you made the cut and that half second is what he’s talking about. That imperceptible pause. That flicker of uncertainty between intention and execution. Anyone else would have missed it. The scrub nurse didn’t see it. The anesthesiologist didn’t see it. But Park was standing across the table with his hands resting on the sterile drape and his eyes on your hands and he saw it, he felt the hesitation, stored it, and now he’s taken it out of storage and placed it between you in the car like an exhibit.

Your eyes are burning.

“And the hardware count.”

Four more words. Still no elaboration. 

Flat, observational, a statement of fact that requires no emotional emphasis because the gravity is inherent. He keeps his eyes on the road.

You know what he’s referring to. The post-op notes. Six screws documented instead of eight. A discrepancy in the record that could follow the patient to every subsequent surgery, every future scan. He caught it. He corrected it. He didn’t report it.

He’s telling you now, in this car, in the dark, with nineteen minutes of road between you and your house, and the telling is worse than a formal write up because a formal write up would have structure. A formal write up would have a process: documentation, a meeting, a remediation plan, something to do with the failure. This has nothing. This is Park dropping two facts into the silence and letting you drown in the space around them.

Your left hand is trembling. You flatten it against your thigh and hold it there, pressing the tremor into the muscle, willing the vibration to disperse through the fascia and the quadricep and the femur beneath it. Your dominant hand. Your operating hand. The one that held the saw. The one that miscounted the screws. The one that’s been shaking on and off since hour six of a seventeen hour day and you’ve been hiding it by keeping it busy, keeping it occupied with tasks and tools and the physical business of the job so that nobody- so that he- wouldn’t see.

“You should have asked for a break during the reconstruction.”

You close your eyes.

“Your hand was fatiguing by hour four. You compensated by overtightening your grip on the retractor, which changed the angle.” A pause. “You knew the tremor was developing and you chose to hide it rather than ask for relief because you were more concerned with how it would look than with how it would affect the surgical field.”

That’s the most he’s said at once. Three sentences. They land in your chest like hardware being placed in sequence- tap, tap, tap-  each one seated precisely, each one load bearing, the cumulative construct designed to hold a specific weight.

Silence again.

The thing that’s happening in your chest is not something you can name with language. It’s too large and too formless and it keeps changing shape, contracting into something hot and dense behind your sternum and then expanding outward into your ribs, your clavicles, the soft tissue of your throat where the tightness has progressed from uncomfortable to actively painful. You swallow against it. Your throat clicks. The sound is audible in the quiet car and you hate it, hate the way your body keeps betraying you in small acoustic ways, producing evidence of its own distress for him to collect.

You think: say something back.

You think: defend yourself.

You think: tell him he’s wrong, tell him the hesitation was clinical judgment not fear, tell him the hardware count was a transcription error not negligence, tell him the tremor was fatigue not incompetence, tell him he doesn’t get to sit there in his seventy-two-thousand-dollar car smelling like that and sounding like that and dismantling you with seven sentences spread across ten minutes of silence-

You don’t say any of it.

You don’t say any of it because your throat is closed and your eyes are wet and your hands are shaking and everything he said is true. Not approximately true. Not partially true. Not true-with-caveats-you-could-argue-if-you-had-the-energy. True. Completely, specifically, documentably true, and the fact of its truth is sitting on your chest like a sternum retractor, cranking you open one inch at a time.

A tear escapes. It tracks down the side of your nose and catches at the corner of your mouth and you taste salt and you don’t wipe it away because wiping it away would require moving your hand and moving your hand would require admitting that you’re crying and you are not admitting that you’re crying. You are sitting in this car looking straight ahead and the moisture on your face is condensation, it’s a physiological response to dry air, it’s anything other than what it is.

Park doesn’t look at you.

He knows. You know he knows. The quality of his silence has shifted again- it’s softer now, or not softer, that’s not the right word, it’s attentive. The silence of a man who is aware that something is happening beside him and has decided to let it happen. To let you sit in it. To not offer a tissue or a word or even the small mercy of turning up the radio. He just drives, steady and unhurried, and the road unspools, and you cry without sound in the passenger seat of his car while he navigates the route to your house.

You wait for the rest. The elaboration. The lecture.

It doesn’t come. Instead, after a long moment, he says something worse.

“You know what’s funny?”

You don’t answer.

“You’re actually not bad.”

The sentence lands wrong. It lands wrong because it sounds, for one disorienting half second, like a compliment, and your starved, exhausted brain almost reaches for it before the rest of him catches up- the tone, the timing, the particular way he says not bad. A minimum. A floor. The lowest possible bar of acceptability, offered with the cadence of praise so your body responds to it like praise while your brain is still trying to decode that it isn’t.

“You’ve got a feel for the work. I’ve seen you read a fracture pattern faster than most of my third years. Your spatial reasoning’s above average. Your hands- ” He pauses. You feel the pause in your sternum. “When your hands are right, they’re right.”

He’s building something. You can feel it assembling in real time, each sentence another load bearing element, and you don’t know what the structure is yet but you know it has a weight it hasn’t distributed.

“That’s what makes it hard to watch, actually.”

There it is.

“Watching someone who could be good just… ” He makes a sound. Not a sigh. Something smaller. Something almost like amusement, which is so much worse than disappointment that your vision blurs. “It’s like watching someone with perfect pitch sing off key on purpose. You want to fix it. But you can’t want it more than they do.”

He turns onto your street.

“And I’m starting to think you don’t want it at all. I think you want to want it. I think you like the idea of being good. But when it actually costs you something, when it means admitting the tremor, asking for the break, counting the fucking screws, you’d rather protect your ego than protect your patient. And that’s- ”

He pulls into your driveway.

The engine idles. The blue dashboard light hums. Your house is dark. The porch light is off because you forgot to set the timer this morning, because this morning happened to a different person in a different version of your life.

“That’s not a skill problem. I can fix a skill problem.” He’s looking straight ahead. Blue lit profile. One hand on the wheel. “That’s a you problem. And I can’t fix you.”

I can’t fix you.

Four words that shouldn’t feel like anything. Four words that are, technically, a statement of professional boundaries, an acknowledgment that his role has limits, that your development is ultimately your own responsibility. That’s what they are on paper. That is not what they are in this car at eleven pm with salt drying on your face and his cologne in your lungs.

I can’t fix you means you’re broken. It means I looked, and what I found isn’t worth the effort. It means he assessed you the way he did with the engine and the prognosis is: not salvageable. Not worth the parts.

You should get out. You should open the door and walk inside and lock it behind you and shower and sleep and come back tomorrow and be better, be sharper, be the version of yourself that doesn’t hesitate on the approach and doesn’t miscount hardware and doesn’t sit in a man’s car at eleven pm leaking tears onto her own scrub top.

Your hand is on the seatbelt release.

“The hesitation,” Park says.

You stop.

He’s looking straight ahead. His profile is blue lit, jaw set, one hand resting on the steering wheel at twelve o’clock. His index finger taps the leather once, a single, idle percussion that might mean nothing and might mean everything.

“It’s going to get someone killed.”

Six words. Delivered without emphasis, without cruelty, without any of the sharp edges that have characterized everything else he’s said today. That’s what makes them worse. The previous comments were barbed, they were designed to cut and they cut and the cutting was something you could be angry about, something you could push against, something that gave the pain a direction.

This is different. Neutral. Factual. Almost gentle in its certainty.

It’s going to get someone killed.

Not it might. Not it could. Going to. Future tense. Inevitable. A definitive, not a warning.

You sit there with your hand on the seatbelt and the salt drying on your upper lip and you feel the sentence settle into the shape of your self concept like a fracture propagating, a slow, branching failure that spreads outward from the point of impact into every adjacent structure until the whole system is compromised.

He doesn’t say anything else.

He just sits there. Engine idling. Blue light. One hand on the wheel. And the silence after the sentence is the worst silence of the night because there’s nothing left to wait for. He’s said the thing. The final thing. The thing that all the other things were building toward- the corroded terminals, the loose cable, the tremor, the miscount- all of it was scaffolding for this, the load bearing statement at the center of the construct, and now that it’s in place the scaffolding falls away and you’re left sitting in the bare, terrible clarity of what he actually thinks.

He thinks you’re going to kill someone.

He thinks it with the same certainty that he had when he looked at your engine and found the problem in four seconds. He looked at you the same way. He looked at your hands the same way. He’s been looking at you for months, confirming what he already suspected, and tonight- the car, the drive, the prognosis- tonight was the consultation where he tells you the findings.

Your seatbelt is still buckled. Your hand is still on the release. Your body is doing something that doesn’t align with the plan your brain is trying to execute, which is: unbuckle, open door, leave. Simple. 

Three steps. Motor planning so basic a first year anatomy student could diagram the neural pathway. But the signal is getting lost somewhere between your prefrontal cortex and your extremities, scrambled by the interference of everything else your body is processing- the smell of his cologne in the warm car, the blue light on his hands, the tear track tightening on your cheek, the ache in your trapezius, the tremor in your dominant hand, the sound of his breathing.

His breathing.

You’re listening to him breathe. You’ve been listening to him breathe for the entire drive, you realize, a low, even rhythm that hasn’t changed once, that maintained the same rate and depth through every cruel observation and every silence and every tear you failed to hide. His respiratory rate is probably twelve. Maybe fourteen. Resting. Resting. He’s been resting this entire time. His nervous system has been in parasympathetic mode for the entirety of this drive, calm and regulated, while yours has been in full sympathetic cascade- tachycardic, diaphoretic, pupils dilated, hands trembling- and the asymmetry of it, the sheer physiological unfairness of it, lights something in the back of your skull that isn’t sadness and isn’t defeat.

It’s rage.

Not the sharp, vocal, defensible kind. Not the kind that generates arguments and rebuttals and righteous indignation.

Something lower. Something that lives in the body, not the mind. Something that has nothing to do with what he said and everything to do with the way he’s sitting there, breathing his twelve fucking breaths a minute, resting his hand on his thigh, occupying his leather seat with the boneless ease of a man who has never once lost sleep over the things he’s said to someone while you sit fourteen inches away vibrating at a frequency that might actually be damaging your soft tissue.

You want to hit him.

The thought arrives without preamble. You want to hit him in his calm, blue lit face. You want to put your fist into the hinge of his jaw and feel the impact travel back up your metacarpals and into your wrist and you want him to feel something, anything, any disruption at all in the flat, metronomic equilibrium of his goddamn resting heart rate.

You don’t hit him.

You look at him.

You turn your head and you look at him and he must feel the weight of it because he turns too, slow, unhurried, and his eyes find yours in the blue dark of the car and they’re steady. Completely steady. No tension in his eyes, no furrow in his corrugator, nothing in his expression that suggests he’s experiencing any version of the catastrophic internal event currently leveling every structure in your chest. He’s just looking at you. The way he looks at the surgical field. The way he looks at a fracture pattern on a film. Assessing. Reading. Processing the data without any visible emotional response to the findings.

But there’s something else. Something you almost miss because it’s buried so deep in his face that you’d need to be exactly this close, exactly this wrecked, exactly this far past the boundary of professional distance to catch it.

His gaze drops.

To your mouth.

It’s fast. A quarter second. Maybe less. And then it’s back, steady and clinical and blank, but you saw it and the seeing rewires something in your brain so fast you feel it as a physical lurch, a tilt in the axis of the car, the sudden sickening recalibration of a system that just received information it doesn’t know how to process.

He looked at your mouth.

He has spent the last twenty minutes telling you that you’re negligent and broken and dangerous and going to kill someone and he just looked at your mouth.

And the thing that breaks you isn’t the cruelty. It isn’t the silence, or the criticism, or I can’t fix you, or it’s going to get someone killed. It’s the quarter second glance. It’s the knowledge that somewhere inside of this man who has spent seventeen hours making you feel like the smallest, most incompetent person in the building, there is a circuit that looked at your mouth. That the same eyes that catalogued your hesitation and your tremor and your miscounted screws also, in the same sitting, looked at your mouth. And he thought you wouldn’t catch it. And you did. And now you’re both sitting in the knowledge of it and the air in the car has changed entirely.

And something about the way he can sit here in the aftermath of everything he’s said and look at you with the same detached focus, cracks the last load bearing wall in whatever structure was keeping you upright.

Your body, which has been running on cortisol and adrenaline and seventeen hours of accumulated fight-or-flight with no outlet, moves without conscious thought. Your hand comes off the seatbelt release and goes to the back of his neck and your fingers close in the short hair above his collar and you pull, and your mouth finds his in the dark, and it’s not a kiss so much as a loss of structural integrity. Catastrophic failure at the point of highest stress. The break you saw coming but couldn’t prevent because the forces were already in motion before you understood what they were.

He doesn’t flinch.

That’s the last thing you register before everything goes: he doesn’t flinch, doesn’t pull away, doesn’t stiffen. His mouth is warm and the sound he makes against your mouth is quiet and short and so unsurprised it makes your blood run sideways.

He was waiting for this.

The knowledge doesn’t stop you. It should. It should be the thing that makes you pull back, that trips the wire between mistake and trap, but his mouth is already moving against yours and your brain has been demoted to a purely observational role, a bystander taking notes while your body runs the operation.

You kiss him like you’re trying to hurt him. Teeth and pressure and the graceless, artless force of someone who doesn’t know what they’re doing and doesn’t care, and for a second- a long, terrible second- he lets you. He sits there and he takes it, your mouth on his, your hand fisted in his collar, your breath coming in sharp little pulls through your nose, and he doesn’t move. Doesn’t reciprocate. Doesn’t push you away. Just absorbs it, and the passivity of it is so much worse than rejection that you feel your eyes sting behind your closed lids.

Then his hand moves.

It goes to the back of your neck, fingers closing around the nape and gripping, thumb pressing into the tendon beside your spine, the rest of his hand spanning the width of your neck, and he holds you there. Holds you mid kiss, mid breath, mid everything, and the grip says stop. Not stop kissing him. Just… stop. Stop thrashing. Stop fighting. Stop moving.

You stop.

He pulls you back. Just enough to break the contact. An inch of cold air between your mouth and his, and you can feel the heat of his breath against your wet lower lip and you can see his eyes, close enough to make out the individual fibers of his iris contracting in the low light, and he’s looking at you with something that makes your animal brain go very, very still.

He doesn’t say anything.

He just looks. And the quality of the looking is- you don’t have language for it. Something pre-verbal, pre-civilized, something that belongs in a context where the lighting is firelight instead of dashboard glow and the power dynamic is measured in muscle mass and jaw strength rather than titles and institutional hierarchy. 

He looks at you like he’s deciding where to bite down.

His grip on your neck tightens. Fractionally. A compression you feel in your molars.

Then he kisses you.

And it’s different. Everything about it is different. Where yours was frantic and desperate and searching, his is slow. His mouth moves against yours with a patience that feels predatory, that feels like the unhurried gait of something that doesn’t need to chase because it already has what it was after, and his hand on your neck isn’t holding you still anymore, it’s steering. 

Tilting your head where he wants it, adjusting the angle, his thumb pressing under your jaw until your chin lifts and your throat is exposed and the sound that comes out of you is something you’ll hear in your own head for weeks.

Your fingers scramble against his shoulders. Your nails catch the fabric of his scrub top and drag and you feel the muscle underneath shift in response, a twitch, a contraction, involuntary and brief, and that one small proof that his body is responding makes you desperate in a way you don’t recognize.

You need to be closer. The thought is incoherent and absolute. There’s a center console between you and fourteen inches of dead space and it’s intolerable, physically intolerable, your body rejecting the distance, urgently, violently, without higher input.

You pull back. Fumble the seatbelt. The buckle snaps free. You get one knee on the console and your hand on the headrest behind him and you’re climbing, graceless, desperate, your shin banging the gear shift, your elbow catching the rearview mirror, and the logistics are terrible and you don’t care. You don’t care because his hands have dropped to his sides and he’s not helping you, he’s just watching, his head tipped back against the headrest, his eyes half lidded, tracking your clumsy, frantic movements in the space with something that isn’t amusement and isn’t patience.

It’s hunger.

Controlled, banked, hunger behind glass.

Your knee finds the seat beside his thigh. Then the other one. You settle into his lap and the steering wheel cuts into your lower back and his thighs are solid beneath yours and you’re breathing too hard, chest heaving, hands shaking where they grip his shoulders, and he’s… still.

Completely still.

Looking up at you. His hands at his sides. His jaw set. The only thing moving is his chest, rising and falling with breaths that are marginally faster than they were ten minutes ago, and you fixate on that the way a drowning person fixates on a piece of floating debris.

You wait for him to touch you.

He doesn’t.

The seconds stretch. Three. Five. Seven. You’re sitting in his lap and his hands are resting on the seat on either side of his thighs and he’s looking up at you with that banked, glass walled hunger and he is not touching you. 

He is making you sit in it, in the wanting, in the desperation, in the raw, humiliating fact that you just climbed into your attending’s lap in a driveway and he’s giving you nothing back.

Your hips shift. You can’t help it. A restless, involuntary roll that presses your cunt into his cock, and you feel his abdomen tighten beneath you, a hard, sudden contraction that he controls almost immediately but not before you feel it, not before you register the proof that his body is doing things his face won’t admit to.

His jaw tightens. You see it. The masseter flexing, the tendon standing out below his ear.

Then finally- finally- his hands move.

They don’t go where you expect. They go to your hips. Both of them. Settling over the bones with a grip that is immediately, unambiguously possessive, not exploratory, not tentative, not the careful hands of a man testing boundaries. He grips you like you’re his. Like you’ve always been his. Like the last four months of corrections and cruelty and silence were just the long, patient process of wearing you down to this, to the moment where you’d put yourself in his hands because you had nowhere else to go.

His thumbs dig into the hollows inside your hip bones. The pressure is just on the edge of pain, right at the threshold where sensation tips from one thing into another, and you gasp and his hands tighten in response and you realize with a full body lurch that the sound you made didn’t concern him. It fed him.

He pulls you forward. Down. A controlled, forceful drag that seats you flush against his him, and the contact makes your vision white out at the edges and one of his hands goes from your hip to your hair and he's gripping it, pulling it, fingers twisted strands at the crown of your head, yanking, exposing your throat, and the sound he makes rewires something fundamental in your nervous system.

His mouth finds your neck, teeth grazing the tendon that runs from your ear to your clavicle, a slow, dragging pressure that leaves a trail of heat in its wake, and then he bites down, hard enough to make you jolt, to make your fingers tighten on his shoulders, to make your hips roll forward again in a motion that is completely involuntary and that he responds to by pulling you into his clothed cock harder, fingers digging into the meat of your hips with a strength that’s going to leave marks. 

You know it’s going to leave marks. You know because his hands are surgeon’s hands, hands that crack bones into alignment and drive hardware through cortical shell, and they are currently clamped onto your body like he’s setting a fracture and the thing he’s reducing is you.

He doesn’t let go of the bite. He holds it. His jaw flexing against your throat, his breath hot against your pulse point, and you can feel your own heartbeat hammering against his teeth and he can feel it too; you know he can feel it, your pulse trapped between his mouth and your skin, and he stays there. Counting it, maybe. Tasting it.

Your hands are moving without thought. Down his chest, pulling at the fabric, trying to find skin and not finding it fast enough. You’re making sounds- small, fractured, desperate things that you’ve lost the ability to be embarrassed about because embarrassment requires a functioning prefrontal cortex and yours left the building sometime around the moment you smelled the cologne on him in the parking garage.

He releases the bite. His tongue passes over the indentation once, flat and slow and then his mouth is at your ear and his breathing is different now. Ragged at the edges. Fraying. The composure that he’s worn like a second skin all day is coming apart in increments you can measure by the roughness of each exhale and the tightening of his grip.

“You should eat more,” he says and his hands slide under your scrub top, palms flat against your bare skin and the heat of them is obscene, radiating a constant steady warmth that seeps into your tissue, spreading outwards from the points of contact and into the muscles beneath. His hands slide up your sides, palms dragging over abdominal muscles, calluses catching against your skin, and his thumbs find the ridges of bone, thumbs tracing your ribs, counting them. “I can feel every one of these.”

It’s not tender. It’s not concern. It’s inventory. He’s cataloguing what’s his and finding it insufficient and the disapproval is so tangled up with the want that you can’t separate them, can’t tell where the criticism ends and the desire begins because in him they’re the same thing. The same impulse. He wants you and he’s angry about the state of what he wants, angry when something he’s claimed isn’t being maintained to his standard.

His hands stop. Bracketing your ribcage, fingers splayed across your back, thumbs resting in the shallow valley between bones. The heat of his palms is sinking through your intercostal now, settling into the spaces between your ribs like something poured, and you can feel your own lungs expanding against his hand with every breath, pushing into the warmth, your body leaning into him without your permission because its been so long since anyone touched you with this much sustained focused heat.

His hands drop to the hem of your scrub top. He pulls it up, bunching the fabric at your ribs, exposing your waist, your stomach, the line of your hip bones above the drawstring of your scrub pants until your shirt is pulled above your head and dropped somewhere to the side. The air in the car hits your bare skin and you shiver and he flattens his palms against your stomach.

“Someone needs to feed you,” he mutters. His thumbs press into the soft tissue below your navel. “Make sure you actually sleep.” His hands drag down, hooking into the waistband pads of his fingers against your lower abdomen, the weight of his grip tilting your pelvis toward him. “You’re a goddamn mess.”

You are. You are a goddamn mess. You are shaking and crying and half undressed in your attending’s lap in a parked car and his hands are on your bare skin and his teeth marks are throbbing on your neck and every word out of his mouth is an insult wrapped in something that sounds, horribly, like a promise.

A promise that he’s going to fix what you can’t fix. That he’s already decided. That this- the car, the drive, the cruelty, the bite, his hands inside your waistband- this is just the intake assessment. The preliminary exam. The first step in a treatment plan that he’s been designing for months, one that ends with you exactly where he wants you, which is right here. Underneath his hands. Dependent on his attention. Unable to function without the particular combination of damage and repair that only he provides.

You should be terrified.

His hands tighten. He pulls you into him again, harder, and your breath leaves your body in a rush and your forehead drops to his shoulder and your teeth find the muscle where his neck meets his trapezius and you bite down because it’s the only language your body has left.

He groans. The sound travels through his chest cavity into yours, a vibration you feel in your sternum, and his hand slides up your spine and fists in your hair again and pulls, arching your neck back, exposing your throat, and he looks at you, looks up at you from below, his lips parted, his breathing finally, irrevocably wrecked, and the expression on his face is the most honest thing you’ve ever seen from him.

It’s not the mask. It’s not the bored superiority. It’s not the carefully metered cruelty he portions out across an operating day.

It’s greed.

Simple, uncut, undisguised. The face of a man who found something he wants and is currently in the process of closing his hand around it and he does not intend to open that hand again.

“Come here,” he says, for the second time tonight, and this time it means something completely different and exactly the same.

You come, your body answering the order the way it answers every order he’s ever given- before thought, before shame, before the part of your brain that still pretends it has dignity can raise an objection, and you lean in, mouth crashing against his.

You hate yourself for it. You hate the speed of it, the automaticity, the way your knees dig harder into the leather on either side of his thighs and your mouth finds his again. You hate that you’re shaking and he’s not. You hate that your hands are fisted into his collar and pulling and desperate and his are still, idle, unbothered, a man being kissed by someone while he decides whether or not to kiss back. 

He tracks you. Every tremor of your lower lip, every frantic slide of your tongue against his, every wet graceless sound you make when his teeth catch your bottom lip and tug. Controlled. Proprietary. Taking this in like he takes in everything, filing it, noting it, adding it to whatever mental inventory he maintains of all the ways you embarrass yourself in front of him. 

You pull back. Your chest is heaving. His isn’t.

“Fuck you,” you say.

It comes out wrecked. Shaking. Nothing close to the strength you want it to be. He looks at you flatly, unimpressed. 

He hooks two fingers into the drawstring of your scrub pants and pulls. One motion. The knot gives. The pants slide down your thighs and you should stop this. You should stop this right now. You should climb off his lap and open the door and walk into your house and lock it behind him and never look at him again. You know this. The knowledge is clean and certain and completely irrelevant to what your body is actually doing, which is lifting one knee, then the other, kicking cotton of your ankles, while your hand stays fisted in his collar like letting go would kill you. 

His hand goes behind your back. One flick of his thumb and the bra releases and the straps slide down your shoulders and you feel the air hit your skin and the humiliation is so acute it tastes metallic, like biting down on foil, like blood from a split lip. 

He doesn’t even look. 

He lets the fabric fall and his palms settle over your breasts and his thumbs brush across nipples already tight from the cold and the adrenaline and he does it with absent focus, like this is a step in a sequence, like your body is a series of tasks to be completed on the way to something else. 

“You’re an asshole,” you whisper. Your voice cracks. “You know that? You’re a completely fucking-”

His hand slides down your stomach. Hooks into the waistband of your underwear. Drags. The fabric catches on your thighs, resists, then gives away with a tear. 

“- asshole.”

“Yeah,” he says. That’s it. Yeah. One syllable. Bored. His eyes haven’t changed. His breathing hasn’t changed. You are sitting in his lap in nothing but the blue dashboard light, stripped and shaking, every flaw and rib and tremor illuminated, and his pulse is resting. 

You want to claw his face off.

You want to rake your nails down his cheeks until he bleeds, until something in his expression breaks, until he shows you one single shred of evidence that this is affecting him even a fraction as much as it’s affecting you. But he’s still dressed beneath you- scrub top, scrub pants- and the obscene imbalance of naked and clothed, wrecked and composed, is doing something to the power dynamic that you feel in the base of your skull like a boot on your neck. 

One hand leaves your hip. You hear the shift of fabric, the elastic drag of a waistband, and then he’s there, cock pressing against the inside of your thigh, hard and hot. He wraps his hand around himself and strokes once, slow, lazy, and you watch the muscle in his jaw flex and that’s it. That’s all he gives you. One flex of one muscle while you’re sitting naked in his lap with tears drying on your face and your whole body vibrating like a plucked string. 

Then he lines the head of his cock up, blunt insistent pressure of him against the entrance to your cunt, and your body- your traitorous, mutinous, shame soaked body- is already wet. Has been wet. Has been wet since the you smelled his cologne in the parking garage, maybe earlier, maybe since the OR, maybe since the moment you were first introduced to him as your attending and the knowledge of that is so humiliating you actually close your eyes against it, squeeze them shut like a child who thinks not seeing makes them invisible. 

“Sit.” A command. Like he’s speaking to a dog, like you’re a dog, like you’re a misbehaving mutt caught doing something you shouldn’t and he’s issuing a command to correct. Sit, heel, lay down, roll over-

Don’t, you think. 

You sink. 

The stretch is immediate. Obscene. A slow, relentless parting that you feel in your cunt, your thighs, your abdomen, your teeth, and you hate every inch of it and the contradiction is going to break you in half. He fills your cunt the way he takes up any space around him- completely, unapologetically, without any interest in whether you were ready to accommodate him or not. 

Your hands fly to his biceps. Nails through fabric into muscle. And for one heartbeat you sit there, trembling, adjusting, feeling the way you body has to restructure around him, and your eyes are open now and burning and you’re looking directly at his face and his expression is…

Calm. 

He looks calm. His dick is buried inside of you to the hilt and his face is the face of a man sitting in traffic. Waiting for the light to change. Reading a notification on his phone. And you want to scream, wrap your hands around his throat and squeeze until something in those steady, half lidded eyes shows you that he’s here, that he’s present, that this is costing him anything at all. 

His hands find your hips again. Thumbs pressing bruises into bone. And then he moves you. 

Up. Down. Controlled. Like you’re nothing more than a doll, an instrument, something he can use and play until he’s had his fill, and that pisses you off.

You start to move on your own and the first roll of your hips without his guidance is yours, angry and hard, grinding down onto him with a force that’s closer to violence than fucking, and you watch his face for the flinch, for the flutter of his eyes, for his lips to part open, for any crack, any goddamn indication that you’re getting to him. 

His eyes lower. Barely. The faintest contraction around the corner of his eyes. 

That’s it. That’s all you get. 

His hands tighten and he takes back control of the rhythm, pulling you down on his cock hard, forcing the depth, and the sound that rips out of you is something between a sob and a moan and you hate it, hate the wet broken sound, hate that he heard it, hate that his expression doesn’t change when he hears it. 

“This is what you’re good at.”

The words are like a slap and you feel them behind your eyes, in your lungs, in the slick slide where your body is betraying you again, again, again.

“Fuck you- “

“Not the tibial plateau.” His hips drive up. “Not the hardware count.” Again. “Not even remembering to get your fucking car serviced.” His hands drag you down so hard onto his cock that your clit grinds against the base of him and your vision whites out and your mouth falls open with a sound you can’t control, high pitched and needy. “This. This is the only thing I’ve never seen you hesitate on.”

“I hate you- “ Your voice splinters with another thrust, that grinds his cock against the spot that has your nails digging into his shoulders hard enough to break skin through fabric. “I hate you, you fucking-”

“I know,” he says. Quiet. Unbothered. Like you just told him the weather. And then he rolls his hips up into you with a hard grind that makes your spine arch and your head fall back and the I hate you dissolves into a whimper you’ll never forgive yourself for. 

“Look at you,” His breathing hasn't changed. Twelve per minute. Resting. While yours comes ragged and sobbing, chest heaving, your whole body shaking on top of his. “Seventeen hours of your hands shaking. Seventeen hours of being unable to hold a retractor steady. But you can ride cock like this. Perfect rhythm. No tremor. No hesitation.” He pulls you into another downstroke, meets you with his hips, punches the breath from your lungs. “Maybe this is what I should have had you doing all along instead of letting you pretend you’re a surgeon.”

You hit him. 

Your palm connects with his face, an open handed strike that lands hard enough to make a sound in the car, and he doesn’t flinch, doesn’t tense, just absorbs it the way he absorbs everything, and his hands on your hips don’t even stutter. 

He smiles. 

Not wide. Not warm. A thin, asymmetric thing, one corner of his mouth pulling up in the blue dark, and it’s the first genuine expression you’ve seen on his face and it’s the worst thing you’ve ever looked at. Because the smile says he liked that. The smile says do it again. The smile says he has been waiting, patiently, methodically, for the entire duration of the encounter, for you to hit him, and now that you have he can file it alongside every other piece of evidence that you are exactly as out of control as he’s always suspected. 

“There she is.” His thumb slides between your bodies. Finds your clit. Circles it in a way that makes your spine lock and your teeth clench. “There’s the good girl I knew was buried under all that incompetence.”

“Don’t call me- “ Your voice breaks, hips moving faster not, frantic, beyond your control. “Don’t you dare-”

“Come on.” His thumb presses harder. His other hand drags you down into the next thrust. “Show me the one thing you’re actually competent at.”

“I fucking hate you- “

“You keep saying that.” His mouth is close to your ear. His breathing is finally, finally different- rougher, a fraction faster, the composure fraying at the thinnest edges- but his voice is still steady. Still controlled. Still the voice of a man who is winning and knows it. “And yet here you are.”

And yet here you are. 

The truth of those words- the bare, unarguable, catastrophic truth of them- hits harder than anything else he’s said all day. Here you are. In his lap. In his car. In his hands. Naked and shaking and full of him and crying and still moving, still rolling your hips into his, still chasing the orgasm that’s building in your lower abdomen, because he told you to and because you want to and because the wanting and the hate have fused into something singular and molten that you couldn’t separate even if you had the higher brain function to try. 

The car is rocking on its suspension. The windows are opaque. Sweat slides down the valley of your spine. Your breasts move with every thrust and his eyes track them and the shame of being watched makes something tighten in your lower belly and you hate that too, hate the wiring of your own body, hate that humiliation and arousal are using the same neural pathways and you can’t tell where one stops and the other starts. 

“This is what you’re good at,” he says again. Quieter now. Almost fond. And the fondness is worse than the cruelty because the cruelty you can fight but the fondness seeps in and finds the soft tissue and stays. “Not saving lives. Not pretending to be a doctor. Just this. Just taking what I give you until you forget you ever had anything else to fuck up.”

“Shut up.” You’re crying openly now. Tears and sweat and the sounds coming out of your mouth are wet and broken and you can’t stop them and you can’t stop moving. “Shut the fuck up-”

“Make me.”

Two words. And they’re not said like a challenge. They’re said like a dare, and underneath the dare is something that sounds terrifyingly like affection, the way someone would talk to a small animal that keeps trying to bite them, amused and patient and completely unthreatened. 

Your orgasm is building. You feel it in every trembling muscle, the quiver in your inner thighs, the tightening low in your abdomen, the involuntary clenching of your body around his cock that makes his breath hitch for one unguarded second before he smooths it over. 

You’re close. You’re so close it’s blurring the edges of your rage, softening the anger into something needier, something that wants to collapse forward against his chest and be held and the wanting of that- the wanting to be held by the man who’s been destroying you- is the most humiliating thing that’s happened all night and that is a competitive field. 

His grip adjusts. His thumb digs in deeper. His pace doesn’t falter. 

His mouth finds your ear. 

“Don’t you dare come until I tell you you’ve earned it.” His thumb circles your clit and the contradiction- don’t come while his hands do everything to guarantee you will- is so perfectly, characteristically cruel that a laugh rips out of you, unhinged and wet and bordering on hysterical. “You don’t get to be good at anything unless I say so.”

And you keep bouncing, because he told you to. 

Because somewhere between the parking garage and the engine and the drive and the months of him taking you apart and breaking you down like you were a failed construct, you stopped being a person who makes her own decisions and became a person who waits for his. 

You hate him.

You don’t stop. 

***

The hospital smells the same. 

That’s what gets you. The absolute, insulting sameness. You walk through the door at six thirty and the air hits your face with its standard cocktail of antiseptic and recycled ventilation and floor wax and the distant, perpetual ghost of coffee, and it is exactly, precisely, atomically the same as it was yesterday morning when you walked in as a person who had not yet detonated her entire life ion the front seat of a Lexus. 

Your neck hurts. 

Not the muscular ache of a bad night’s sleep, though there’s that too- you slept maybe ninety minutes, in twenty three minute increments, each one interrupted by the sensation of waking up inside a body that still smelled like him despite the shower. The shower that was too hot. The shower where you stood with your forehead against the tile and your hands flat on the wall and mentally assessed the damage- bruise on your left knee, bruises on your hips in the shape of his fingerprints, raw patch on your lower back from the steering wheel, and the bite. The bite on your neck, which you examined in the bathroom mirror, reddish purple, visible above the collar of a scrub top. Visible above the collar of anything you own. 

You’re wearing a turtleneck under your scrubs. In September. 

You keep your head down. Badge clipped. Hair pulled back so tight your scalp aches. You walk with a posture that says normal day, regular morning, nothing to report, and you’re almost to the locker room when another resident steps into the hallway and says, “Admin wants you.”

Every drop of blood in your body goes cold. You stare at him. 

“Underwood’s office.” He says. “Now.”

You don’t ask why. You don’t ask why because your body already knows. Your body already knows before he opened his mouth, maybe before, maybe the moment you walked through the doors and the air tasted the same and the hallway looked the same and nothing was different except everything was different. 

The walk takes ninety seconds. You count your footsteps because counting is something your brain can do while the rest of it shuts down. 

You see him through the open door. 

Park is in the left chair. One ankle crossed over the opposite knee. He’s holding a coffee, steam curling from the lip, which means its fresh, which means he stopped on his way here, which means he budgeted time into his morning for this.

He doesn’t look up when you walk in. 

Gloria Underwood is standing beside her desk. She’s holding a manilla folder. It’s thick. Too thick for something assembled this morning. Too thick for a single incident. The thickness of it does something to the air in your lungs, displaces it, compresses it, makes the next breath feel like trying to inflate against a weight. 

Gloria’s face is arranged in the express you’ve seen administrators use when they’re about to change the trajectory of a person’s life. Controlled. A mask of professional compassion that has been practiced in mirrors and refined in meetings and has nothing to do with whether the person wearing it actually feels anything at all. 

“Please sit down.”

You sit. The chair is identical to his. Your elbow is inches from his elbow and you can smell him, smell the coffee, and the soap, and the cologne, and your body responds with a full system lurch of sense memory so violent you have to press your fingernails into your palms to stay in the chair. 

“A formal complaint has been filed,” Gloria says, opening the folder. Turns to a page that’s already been flagged with a colored tab, pre-marked, pre-organized, the administrative infrastructure of a process that was set in motion before you arrived. “Regarding conduct of sexual nature directed at Dr. Brendon Park by a subordinate member of the surgical team.”

Directed at. 

The preposition enters your ear and detonates. 

Directed at Dr. Park. Not by Dr. Park. Not between you and Dr. Park. At him. By you. 

“Dr. Park has reported that over the course of several months, he has been subjected to escalating patterns of inappropriate attention from an intern under his direct supervision.” Gloria’s eyes move across the page but she’s not reading. She memorized this. “Including persistent attempts to initiate physical proximity, repeated instances of unprofessional fixation during surgical procedures, and recently, an incident of unsolicited sexual contact initiated in his vehicle after he offered professional assistance with a mechanical issue in the hospital parking garage.”

Persistent attempts to initiate physical proximity. 

That’s- standing near him. In the OR. Where he assigned you to stand. 

Unprofessional fixation during surgical procedures. 

That’s- watching him operate. When you were assisting. 

Unsolicited sexual contact.

That’s-

The room is doing something. The walls aren’t moving but the space between them is contracting, the air thickening, the fluorescent light taking on a quality that feels granular, particulate, like you’re trying to see through something that’s settling between you and the rest of the room. 

“The complaint has been supported by documented observations,” Gloria continues. She turns another page. Another colored tab. “Dr. Park has provided a written timeline of concerning behavior, including specific dates and incidents.”

A timeline. 

He kept a timeline. He’s been keeping a timeline. Every shift, every surgery, every moment you stood too close or looked too long or held your breath- he was writing it down. Dating it. Building a file. Constructing a narrative in which every single thing your body did in his presence was evidence of you pursuing him, and the evidence is in Gloria Underwood’s hands right now, and it’s thick, and it has colored tabs, and it’s been here since before you walked in the door. 

“Given the nature of the supervisory relationship and the severity of the allegations, you are being placed on immediate administrative suspension pending investigation, effective as of this meeting.”

You open your mouth.

Nothing comes out. 

You try again and what emerges is a sound that isn’t a word, is a breath, a fragment, the beginning of that’s not what happened that stalls in your larynx before your larynx has done the math that your brain hasn’t finished yet. 

The math is:

He is a senior attending. Board certified orthopedic surgeon. Ten years at this hospital. Published. Respected. The kind of name that appears on department letterheads and in the acknowledgment section of textbook chapters. He has a reputation. He has colleagues. He has a record, spotless and long and documented in the same filing system that is currently absorbing this complaint. 

You are an intern. Four months in. No publications, no tenure, no institutional weight. You have a shaking hand and miscounted screws and a performance record that he has been personally authoring for your entire rotation. 

Who is Gloria going to believe?

Who is anyone going to believe?

The intern who can’t hold a retractor steady? The one who freezes on approaches and forgets to count hardware and cries in parking garages? The one who ended up naked in her attending’s car at midnight? 

Or the attending who has spent months carefully, meticulously, documentably expressing concern about a subordinate’s fixation. 

“During the suspension period,” Gloria is saying. “You are not to enter clinical areas, access patient records, or make contact with Dr. Park directly or through intermediaries.”

You turn your head. 

Park is looking at Gloria. He’s been looking at Gloria the entire time. Sitting in the chair with his coffee and his crossed ankle, and his face arranged in an expression of restrained concern; brows drawn, mouth set, carefully composed like a man navigating a difficult situation with professionalism and grace. He looks like someone this is being done to. He looks like a man who tried his best with a troubled intern and is now dealing with the unfortunate consequences of his own generosity. 

He is sitting in this chair, hours after his teeth were in your neck and his cock inside you and his hands on your hips dragging you down onto him while he told you that riding him was the only thing you were competent at and he looks troubled. 

Something happens behind your face. Not tears. Something past tears, something drier and more dangerous. A sensation like the moment before something snaps, the last frame of structural integrity, the instant where the material is still holding its shape but the forces have already exceeded its capacity and the failure is inevitable, just not yet visible. 

“Do you have anything to add,” Gloria asks you. 

You're still looking at Park. 

He turns his head. Finally. Slowly. Meets your eyes for the first time since you walked in. 

His face is still wearing the mask. The concern, the gravity, the restrained compassion of the Wronged-Mentor. It’s flawless. Every muscle recruited, every micro expression calibrated, the kind of performance that could only be produced by someone who’s been rehearsing it for a very long time. 

But his eyes.

In the space behind the performance, in the deep architecture of his gaze, where the mask doesn’t quite reach, there’s something looking back at you that makes your blood crystallize in your veins. 

It’s not guilt. It’s not satisfaction. It’s not even cruelty.

It’s patience.

The bottomless, immovable patience of a man who built something and is now watching it work. 

He holds your gaze for two seconds. Then he turns back to Gloria and picks up his coffee and drinks and the meeting continues, and the folder stays open, and your badge is collected, and you walk out of the hospital at seven forty one am wearing a turtleneck in September and it’s sunny outside and the sky is very blue and you don’t remember driving home.

(And Park watches you leave, coffee in hand. You look very small. Smaller than you looked in scrubs, which is saying a lot, because you already looked like a stiff breeze would snap you in half-

(And the first part is done. Solved. He doesn’t have to watch you bite your lip when you concentrate anymore, doesn’t have to correct the angle of your hands and pretend the contact is clinical. Doesn’t have to stand behind you during a procedure and smell your shampoo and keep his hands professional while he vividly imagines what he’d do to you if the room was empty- 

(Four months of that. Four months of keeping his hands on the instruments instead of on your waist, of watching your throat move when you swallow and thinking about his teeth there, of memorizing the exact pitch of your voice when you’re nervous because he wanted to know what it would sound like under him, or fucking his fist to the memory of the little punched out breath you made when you startled coming out of the supply closet, imagining you making that sound with his fist in your hair and his cock grinding against your cervix-

(And you’ll spiral. That’s fine. That’s the design. You’ll go home and fall apart and burn through the anger hot and fast the way you burn through everything, and then the anger will run out and what’s left will be the silence. No OR. No corrections. No one watching. No one who knows you hold your breath when you’re nervous or that your left hand shakes first or that you haven’t been eating enough or sleeping enough or taking care of yourself the way someone should be taking care of you. The way he would, if you’d stop being so fucking difficult about it-

(Give it three weeks. Maybe four. You’ll reach for your phone. You won’t call, not yet. But the intervals between looking at his name and putting the phone down will shrink every time until eventually you just stop putting it down. And he’ll answer when he’s ready, and you’ll be crying, and he’ll listen the way he always listens to you you- completely- because that’s the drug and he’s the only supply you’ve got left. 

(Pavlov’s dog with a prettier face. He spent four months ringing the bell- every correction a tap, every silence a withhold, every rare scrape of approval timed to land when you were most desperate for it- and now that the bell is gone and you’re salivating into nothing, confused and aching and reaching for the only hand that ever fed you even though it’s the same hand that kept you starving-

(He’ll feed you. Get your weight back up. Move you into his place once you can’t make rent. He’ll frame it as practical. You’ll be grateful. And in six months you’ll be standing in his kitchen in his T-shirt and you’ll look up when he walks in with that open, searching expression- the same one you used to give him across the operating table- checking his face for what he wants you to do next, his pretty obedient wife, trained so fucking well-